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Posted on 09/07/2001 9:13:31 AM PDT by Pericles

The perils of intervention

British troops in Macedonia are being recklessly used to internationalise a Balkan civil war

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Friday September 7, 2001

The Guardian

Our great Balkan adventure continues, but all does not go well. On Monday the defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, was at the British base near Skopje, where our mission to pacify Macedonia follows our attempts to pacify Bosnia and Kosovo, and tried to put a good face on things.

In theory, British troops are meant to be there for a short, sharp task, and then to pull out after 30 days. But, says Mr Hoon breezily, "It is much too early to be talking about what might be the outcome of the present operation."

He added that "we'll be looking at other countries to play the kind of part we played", and then flew on to Vienna to try to persuade the Organisation for Security and Cooperation to provide monitors to take over from our troops. If reports so far are true, he'll be lucky if he succeeds.

For all the weapons garnered and the inching towards a new constitution, everyone concerned fears - or maybe even assumes - that fighting will break out again between Macedonians and Albanians as soon as outside forces withdraw. And behind Mr Hoon's optimistic words, diplomats privately admit that western governments are in disarray.

It's easy to mock the government for its folie de grandeur and even megalomania. But it would be more constructive to ask how we got here. At least there is no pretence that Macedonia is anything other than a civil conflict, though that raises the question why we should intervene there at all. The traditional principle of diplomacy is to keep out of civil wars until one side has established its supremacy.

Even when intervention is tempting because of apparently clear-cut right and wrong, there is a danger that the outside world will project its own concerns. That happened with the most famous civil war of the last century. Most historians would now agree that the Spanish civil war, far from being a microcosm of the larger conflicts which came to engulf it, had its origins in uniquely Spanish political and social conditions.

Over the last decade, as Yugoslavia bloodily fell apart, the temptation hasn't been projection so much as angry partisanship, with the original clamour for intervention in Bosnia amplified by the claim that this wasn't a civil war but an international war of aggression by Serbia against a sovereign country.

That claim had to be based on the decision of outside powers to recognise the sovereignty first of Slovenia and Croatia and then of Bosnia before the nationality problems in those territories had been resolved.

Looking back - not that hindsight is really required - this might seem one of the crazier acts of statecraft of modern times. A German government, itself egged on by Serb-hating columnists in the German press (notably the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which great newspaper has a lot to answer for in this matter), insisted on recognition, and then imposed this on its European partners at Maastricht.

To say that doesn't exonerate the murderous Milosevic and his colleagues. But the EU plainly exacerbated the problem by trying to internationalise a domestic disaster.

In all this there was an echo of another conflict 30 years before. In passing, I must ask a question which has puzzled me for years, and which friends on the left might like to answer. Why did my generation, who were such cooing Vietnam doves in the 1960s, become such squawking Balkan hawks in the 1990s? What made this stranger was the actual parallels between the two cases.

In the 1960s, the American bellicose faction claimed that it was an international war of aggression by North Vietnam, while opponents of American intervention argued plausibly that it was really a civil war which the Vietnamese should be left to resolve themselves. Thirty years later, some of the very people who had once asked LBJ how many kids he'd killed today were screaming in the tones of Curtis LeMay for Serbia to be bombed back into the Stone Age.

A saner view in either case is that a war which begins as a civil war remains one in essence, whatever its technical aspect. Another parallel makes the point almost better. The terrible war between northern and southern US states from 1861-65 was known then, and has been known since, as the American civil war, which is what it was, legally and morally.

If the British government had recognised the sovereignty of the Confederate South - and there were plenty of politicians in London who wanted to do that in 1862 - then it would have taken on the appearance of an international war, and one, what's more, in which Lincoln's Union would have looked like the aggressor. But it would still have been morally a civil war.

It was also fought with fratricidal brutality and appalling loss of life. Civil wars all too often are. To say that may sound heartless, but to suppose that we can interpose ourselves in every such conflict is simply neurotic.

Geoff Hoon is right about one thing: It's much too early to be talking about the outcome of our intervention in Macedonia and elsewhere in the Balkans, except that history suggests it will very likely be unforeseen and unintended.

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