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Kosovo Was a Disaster - Just as Cook Was Warned

Foreign Affairs Editorial Opinion (Published)
Source: Daily Telegraph (UK)
Published: 2/10/00
Posted on 02/10/2000 12:27:24 PST by Antiwar Republican

Kosovo was a disaster - just as Cook was warned Politics

The great thing about the Kosovo war, the point that every schoolboy will remember, is that we won. Oh yes we jolly well did. In spite of all the cynics and the sneerers, as Alastair Campbell might put it, in spite of all the carping from the sidelines about the strategy, we kept on going with our brilliant policy of bombing. We bombed and bombed and bombed for three months, from a height of 15,000ft.

We dropped 23,614 air munitions, and destroyed 372 Serb factories. We killed about 500 Serb civilians and about 560 members of the Serb police force and army in Kosovo, and, as the Sun almost certainly put it at some stage in the conflict, it damn well serb-ed them right. At the end of it, a sheepish-looking Slobodan Milosevic was obliged to go on his state-run television station and wave the white flag. Our great war leader Tony Blair was hailed by returning Albanians with cries of To-nee, To-nee.

Britain was much praised for the bellicosity of the Prime Minister's rhetoric, even if this country contributed only four per cent of the military effort, next to the 90 per cent supplied by the Pentagon. Blair achieved his objectives as verblessly set out in the House of Commons: "Milosevic's troops out, our troops in, the refugees back home." It may have been bloody. It may have been tough. It may seem a little curious, in retrospect, that the refugee crisis, when more than a million Albanians were expelled from Kosovo, actually occurred after the beginning of the air strikes. But never mind. We won because we had to win. Because victory was the only exit. Because Nato's credibility was at stake. Because Milosevic had to be put back in his box.

And for most people that will be enough and, after apathetically contemplating this glad fact, that we won and he lost, they will pass over the present anniversary of the Rambouillet talks with magnificent indifference. But there are some zealots who still take an interest in the Kosovo conflict, and they may try, over the next few weeks, to make themselves heard above the din of big stories, like Sophie's fox fur hat. There are those, like Robin Cook and Tony Blair and Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright, who believe this war represented a beautiful innovation in foreign policy. Shorn of vulgar accretions such as national self-interest, or even strategic purpose, this was the first exclusively moral war.

It was fought for purely humanitarian reasons (even if, ahem, the first and most important effect of the air strikes was to precipitate a humanitarian disaster of biblical proportions). It was the first assertion of the New World Order, in which liberal values could be imposed in spite of such figments as international law or national sovereignty; like the EU's ostracism of Austria. Then there is another group of people who take an interest in the anniversary, people who believe, like me, that the Kosovo war was a cataclysmic cock-up, and who believe it is an amazing tribute to the manipulative skills of the Blair government that Cook and Albright are not this week being burnt in effigy across the civilised world for their grotesque bungling.

What did the war really achieve, at a cost of £800 million for weapons alone? Let us return to Tony's three objectives. We certainly got "his troops out". The Third Army and the hated MUP policemen, in their purple pyjamas, have returned to Serbia, where they remain strikingly loyal to Milosevic. They are present in such numbers - you see rocket launchers trundling absently down Belgrade streets - that the Serb opposition has an extra excuse for behaving like limp spaghetti and leaving Slobo in power. As it happens, the withdrawal of the army so terrified the Serbs and other non-Albanians in Kosovo that 265,000 of them also fled, some of them being killed by the advancing Albanians in requital for earlier Serb terror, and some 80 Orthodox churches being destroyed by the KLA, also in revenge.

Blair was also right to say that we have got "our troops in". In fact, we have got many thousands of them there for the foreseeable future, policing a new Ulster where the language is (more) unintelligible to the squaddies. They are finding it very difficult to stop ethnic killings in places such as Kosovska Mitrovica, which are now taking place at a higher rate than before the bombing began. They are discovering what we had been told all along; that the KLA are a bunch of thugs, masterminding, among other things, a white slave trade via Italy to the brothels of Brussels. One Nato soldier has already been accused of rape of an underage girl, and there is evidence that some troops are already being dragged into the KLA's criminal syndicates.

And Blair has been wholly vindicated in pledging to get the "refugees back home". Except, of course, that many of the million have returned to ruined homes, destroyed while Nato was bombing and the Serbs could get on with their pogroms with no fear of any interference on the ground. There are also a number of Albanians - anything between 2,000 and 10,000 - who will not be returning home, because they are dead, killed by the Serbs during the same period.

How did this disaster occur? Through straightforward diplomatic error by Cook and Albright. When British diplomats in Belgrade saw the text of the Rambouillet agreement, with its proviso that Nato troops should be allowed throughout Serbia, they were amazed. They knew that Milosevic could not accept it. When they heard that air strikes were threatened, they advised against, since they did not believe that Milosevic would fold after a few days. They could not see the logic of withdrawing the monitors from Kosovo just as the air strikes began. Their advice went unheeded. Above all, they warned that there would be the purges by the Serbs. In the words of one Western source: "It was both predictable and predicted. I know of a lot of reporting on both the British and the Western side that warned against it."

Yes, there was previous brutality by Serbs against Albanians, which was a legitimate subject of international complaint. But after all that bombing, and all those casualties, we seem merely to have switched one tyranny for another, with our own soldiers now permanently caught in the crossfire. We have caused an exodus of Serbs, gipsies and others, at least some of whom may have been entirely innocent. Above all, we have left Milosevic in power, entrenched by Serb resentment at Nato. If Western politicians try to extract any kind of credit from this outcome, they should be pelted with copies of the Rambouillet accord.

Boris Johnson is editor of The Spectator