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Clinton Bombs Again
How the Air Strikes Destroyed Democratic Movements In Kosovo, Serbia, And
Montenegro
by
Jason Vest
(The Village Voice april 7 - 13, 1999)
Washington— Bill Clinton isn't the first chief executive in U.S. history to
curtail democracy and human rights abroad ostensibly in the name of
protecting them. He is, however, rapidly distinguishing himself in this
regard. Not that the Clinton administration can be held entirely
responsible for perpetrating the latest round of international lunacy, this
time in the Balkans. Congress, as it did twice last year, has chosen not to
exercise its constitutionally required duty to declare hostilities, thus
allowing Clinton's dogs of war (Down, Sandy! Down, Madeline!) to run wild
again. Not that this politico-military charge at a windmill is devoid of
noble intent.
However, among the many problems with this crusade is that, much as the
average American no doubt is opposed to repression and annihilation, they
are part and parcel of U.S. foreign policy— as the Clinton administration's
Balkan approach continues to show. It's appalling enough that bombing a
country in the name of halting depredation (and instead, engendering it)
takes place against a historical backdrop of support for such repressive
regimes as Turkey and Indonesia, which pursue their own policies of ethnic
cleansing. But even more revolting was watching Clinton slyly revise
history while trying to strike a morally imperative chord ("We must apply
the same lessons in Kosovo before what happened in Bosnia happens there
too") without— surprise— taking any real responsibility for the
machinations and calculations, deliberate and errant, that have have led to
this debacle.
But, then, Clinton has always been more inclined to say the right thing
rather than do it. In regard to Bosnia, as Mark Danner astutely pointed out
in a 1997 New York Review of Books essay, Clinton's articulated policy
("The U.S. should always seek an opportunity to stand up against— at least
speak out against— inhumanity") was "one consisting solely of words [that]
brought moral credit [and] carried no risk," and that helped pave the way
to the Serbs' massacre of thousands at Srebenica. Rather like Bosnia— in
which Clinton blamed European allies for undermining the "lift and strike"
approach and made the case that his administration honestly tried, while
the problem partially resolved itself through mass murders and expulsions—
so too, perhaps, with Kosovo.
The Clinton administration has shown itself to be adroit in the use of that
old tool of statecraft, "signaling," to provoke ethnic purges rather than
preventing them through proactive diplomacy. In 1995, for example, Croatian
forces (trained by exU.S. military personnel with the tacit blessing of
the Pentagon) were giddy when, on the verge of undertaking a campaign for
lebensraum against Serbs in Krajina, President Franjo Tudjman was informed
that the U.S. was merely "concerned" about the buildup of Croat troops. In
short order, at least 170,000 Serbs were driven from their homes or killed.
While France, Russia, and Great Britain condemned the offensive, Clinton
praised it, saying he was "hopeful Croatia's offensive will turn out to be
something that will give us an avenue to a quick diplomatic solution."
"In essence, the U.S. gave diplomatic cover to the Croatians for this
action," says Hussein Ibish, a foreign policy analyst at the American-Arab
Anti-Discrimination Committee. "It prevented any UN condemnation of what
happened, and it certainly never registered any dismay."
Last year, when U.S. special envoy Robert Gelbard visited the Balkans, he
publicly vilified the Kosovo Liberation Army, saying, "I know a terrorist
when I see one, and these men are terrorists." In Washington foreign policy
circles, some regard this statement as the beginning of a chain reaction
that resulted in the current situation, rife with the death of both human
beings and democratic movements.
When Gelbard spoke, the KLA was a fairly marginal force, seen by many in
both Belgrade and Washington as a diplomatic irritant. Belgrade interpreted
Gelbard's comments as approval to act against the KLA with impunity, which,
in practice, meant the massacre of nearly 100 people (mostly women and
children) in Kosovo's Benitsar enclave.
Until that point, the KLA had not enjoyed broad support. In fact, for most
of the past decade, the primary method of ethnic Albanian resistance to
Serbian hegemony was a focused political movement utilizing civil
disobedience and negotiation. "Even though the Serbs set up what amounted
to an apartheid system in Kosovo after it lost its autonomy, rather than
arm, the Kosovars began and sustained a nonviolent struggle to achieve
their goals," says Michael Beer, director of Nonviolence International.
"They held referendums and organized a parallel government. They even had
their own form of taxation. A handful of us with chump change did the best
we could to try to provide resources to support this movement, but what we
had was paltry."
According to Beer, what was lacking was international recognition."If the
U.S. had chosen to spend one cruise missile's worth of money on the
Kosovars' efforts, and lent them moral support, we could have done a lot
with that," Beer says. Unfortunately, he adds, waging proactive peace isn't
as sexy as massive military action. By not taking the Kosovars' nonviolent
struggle seriously, and by giving the Serbs a green light to massacre in
the name of anti-KLA operations, the U.S. helped radicalize many Kosovars
who had previously inclined toward nonviolence and didn't necessarily share
the KLA's stated goal, which is not merely independence from Kosovo but the
establishment of a new, pan-Albanian federation that would encompass
Kosovo, Albania, and parts of Macedonia and Montenegro— not exactly
stabilizing goals for the Balkans.
Of course, Kosovan democracy hasn't been the only victim of the recent
hostilities. Largely ignored has been the virtual collapse of the fledgling
republican movement in Montenegro. Despite its technical status as part of
the Yugoslav federation that includes Serbia, Montenegro elected a
pro-Western, anti-Milosevic government in 1998, and its president, Milo
Djukanovic, has made no secret of his contempt for Belgrade's actions in
Kosovo. To date, Montenegro has enjoyed a tenuous autonomy from Belgrade.
However, rather than leave the few Serb military installations in
Montenegro alone, U.S.-led NATO forces have bombed them— an action that
Zorica Maric of the Montenegrin Trade Mission in Washington says has put
the Djukanovic government in serious jeopardy. "NATO is failing to
distinguish between democratic Montenegro and Serbia with regard to
Kosovo," she says, explaining that with each day the bombing continues, the
likelihood grows that Milosevic will use it as an excuse to depose the
government of Montenegro— or treat it as a "traitorous" province, much the
way Serbia has Kosovo.
Perhaps far worse for Balkan democracy is the situation in Serbia, where
the bombings have shattered that country's progressive movement. As Vojin
Dimitrijevic, director of the Belgrade Centre for Human Rights, put it in
an Internet dispatch, "In one night, the NATO air strikes have wiped out 10
years of hard work of groups of courageous people in the non-governmental
sector and democratic opposition. We have not tried to overthrow anyone,
but we have tried to develop the institutions of civil society, to promote
liberal and civic values, to teach nonviolent conflict resolution. . . . In
the prevailing atmosphere of war, anti-democratic forces are increasingly
losing their inhibitions. Meanwhile, clumsy foreign attempts to 'assist'
democracy and respect for human rights in Serbia with vague promises of
money merely expose the non-governmental sector to accusations that it is a
fifth column."
At a forum in Washington last week hosted by the Institute for Policy
Studies, a member of the liberal Serb organization Women in Black was so
overcome that she dressed down the assembled panelists, even though they
were all fundamentally in agreement. "My friends have been working for
democracy in Serbia, and now, we're lining up behind Milosevic. Did the
Clinton administration think my people would be saying 'hurrah'?" she
fumed. "Bill Clinton has done more for Milosevic than Milosevic could have
done for himself."
Indeed, as a Southerner, Clinton might have seen some parallels between the
Confederates and the Serbs. As Civil War authority Shelby Foote has noted,
when the poorly supplied, outgunned rebels were captured by the Yankees and
asked why they were fighting, the standard response was, "Because you're
down here." Writing to an American journalist last week, a Belgrade
University professor explained the rallying around Milosevic in much the
same terms: "In this moment we have only one solution. We must protect our
country," he wrote. "We do not have another one." But Clinton's historical
myopia is par for the course. As Julianne Smith, a senior analyst at the
British American Security Information Council, notes, "Saying bombing
enough will get Milosevic back to the table is false— look at the recent
history in Iraq, where it clearly hasn't been effective. And as for saying
bombing is a protective tool, nothing could be further from the truth. And
the assumption that the KLA will stop fighting if the Serb military is
degraded is false. There is no evidence that they'll stop and say, 'Fine,
we're content with autonomy.' And very little concern is being given to
Russia."
To most here in Washington, the initial Russian reaction elicited little
concern. As one Republican congressional staffer gleefully put it, "This is
our chance to show the world just how little the Russians matter anymore."
According to Bill Hartung, international arms expert for the World Policy
Institute, this view— embraced to varying degrees among both Republicans
and administration officials— is shortsighted. "For a certain strain of
unreconstructed Cold Warrior, it's very emotionally satisfying to kick the
Russians when they're down, but a weak Russia simply doesn't serve our
interests— we really should want a good relationship with the country that
has the largest and least secure nuclear stockpile," he says. "They could
deep-six START II and slow down the Nunn-Lugar [cooperative nuclear
disarmament] stuff. And the easiest thing to do is start reviving some of
their relationships with countries the Pentagon is nervous about."
At the start of this week, the answer to the big question that is pertinent
to both Russia and NATO— whether ground troops would be deployed— remained
unlear. However, even though the Independent's Robert Fisk noted two weeks
ago that the Kaiser's policy ("the Balkans are not worth the bones of a
Pomeranian grenadier") has been adopted to the letter by NATO, Clinton, in
a speech in Norfolk, Virginia, seemed to signal an impending shift. Not
only has NATO demanded what it previously had not— that the Serbs pull out
and allow the Kosovars to return sans a negotiated peace agreement— but,
according to Clinton, the formal objective has changed from degrading
Serbian capabilities to the restoration of ethnic Albanians to Kosovo.
This obviously is going to be difficult to accomplish without ground
forces. However, unlike the Gulf War— fought on desert plains against
apathetic conscripts— NATO forces will be in mountainous regions that lend
themselves to guerrilla warfare, facing zealously united soldiers and
paramilitaries. Perhaps sustained bombings will soften them up. But
recalling the actions of the Serbs who left Sarajevo in 1995— they dug up
their own dead and lugged the corpses over refugee trails rather than let
them remain interred in Muslim-occupied land— it seems unlikely that a
protracted ground war in Serbia and Kosovo will reflect the relative ease
of reclaiming Kuwait. One has to wonder, in light of all this, just how
festive NATO's upcoming 50th birthday party will be.
Research: Wayne Madsen and Ginger Otis
Tell us what you think. editor@villagevoice.com
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