Remember Kosovo

Soren Jessen-Petersen, the new United Nations-appointed chief who takes charge of Kosovo next month, faces a huge challenge in keeping the peace in the troubled province.

Some western diplomats count Kosovo as a success of international intervention. So does John Kerry, who will be the US Democratic presidential candidate. He has contrasted the multilateral engagement in Kosovo, launched in 1999 when Democrats ran the White House, with the swamp that is Iraq.

The Nato-led campaign did force Slobodan Milosevic, former Yugoslav president, out of Kosovo and end the persecution of the ethnic Albanian majority. The UN protectorate, backed by Nato-led troops, restrained the ethnic Albanians from expelling the remaining Serbs.It is dangerously premature to see Kosovo as a multilateralist triumph. In March, the biggest bout of inter-ethnic violence since 1999 was a reminder that Kosovo is unfinished business. As a report this week by Human Rights Watch says, more than 50,000 Albanians took part in riots in which 19 people were killed and 4,100 driven from their homes. The incident shattered the morale of Unmik, the UN administration in Kosovo.

Mr Jessen-Petersen's immediate priority will be to ensure the security forces, troops and police are learning the lessons of March. Extra riot-control equipment and training have been ordered. But there is more to be done to improve co-ordination, especially among the national contingents that form the Nato-led military force. The events of March revealed the damaging role of national "caveats" - operational questions that are referred back to national capitals, even in the heat of battle. If Nato cannot address this issue more effectively in Kosovo, how can it function well in more hostile places such as Afghanistan?

Unmik's new chief must restore political trust with the Albanian and Serb communities. A key test will be parliamentary elections in October. Having staged two elections, Unmik has a good record on which to build. The trickiest part will be persuading the reluctant Serbs to participate, as they did before, despite the March violence.

However, the future of Kosovo rests not with Mr Jessen-Petersen but with the UN. The tensions running through Kosovo come largely from the unresolved issue of its final status, compounded by organised crime and soaring unemployment. The Albanians want nothing less than independence. The Serbs still see Kosovo as part of Serbia, as it legally remains under UN Security Council resolution 1244.

The UN has proposed mid-2005 for final status talks, as long as Kosovo makes progress in protecting human rights, including minority rights. Despite the March riots, it must stick to this timetable. Despite other pressing problems, the US and the EU must keep Kosovo on their agenda. Delay will increase Albanian impatience, Serb insecurity and the instability of the Balkans as a whole.

I always bring that war up with liberals because it is so obvious that Kosovo wasn't a threat to the USA, Kosovo was months of bombing infrastructure and innocent women and children died(didn't hear the cries from the 'anti-war' crowd on that one, did we?), it didn't have UN approval, it wasn't a country invading another-the mass graves don't even come close to what we've found in Iraq, and you could really say it is a quagmire with no exit strategy-didn't Clinton say we'd be out by Christmas? How many yrs. later now? Where was the exit strategy? He found Kosovo to be more a threat than Bin Laden obviously.

From Of Paradise and Power, by Robert Kagan, pp. 48, 49.

General Clark and his colleages complained that the laborious effort to preserve consensus within the alliance hampered the fighting of the war and delayed its conclusion. Before the war, Clark later insisted, "we could not present a clear and unambiguous warning to Milosevic," partly because many European countries would not threaten action without a mandate from the UN Security Council - what Clark in typically American fashion, called Europe's "legal issues." For the Americans, these "legal issues" were "obstacles to properly preparing and planning" for the war.*
During the fighting, Clark and his American colleagues were exasperated by the need constantly to find compromise between American military doctrine and what Clark called the "European approach."**
"It was always the American who pushed for escalation to new, more sensitive targets...and always some of the Allies who expressed doubts and reservations." In Clarks view, "We paid a price in operational effectiveness by having to constrain the nature of the operation to fit within the political and legal concerns of the NATO member nations"***

* Clark, Waging Modern War, pp. 420, 421.
** Ibid., p. 449.
*** Ibid., p. 426.

-----------------------------------------------------------

Our Illegal War - April 26, 1999 - "It is a remarkable spectacle to see the Clinton Administration and NATO taking over from the Soviet Union the role of sponsoring "wars of national liberation." More remarkable still, and even more unsettling, is the fact that the beneficiary in the case of Kosovo — the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) — is a collection of Maoist drug-peddlers and terrorists who have been armed by Iran and provided with training and support by Saudi terrorist financier Osama bin Ladin, who is the world’s most notorious sponsor of international terrorism. When Bill Clinton, in an earlier crime against the Constitution, unilaterally launched missile strikes on Afghanistan and Sudan, he claimed that his target was the terrorist network operated by bin Ladin. However, in Kosovo, Bill Clinton has committed America’s military might to the support of bin Ladin’s Balkan allies, and the policy of the Clinton Administration seeks the creation of a Balkan outpost for bin Ladin’s terrorist network."

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.