NATO
Versus Serbia - (PART 5)
by Gary
Leupp
In that same
month of March 1999, NATO (including its three new members) began
bombing the Serbian capital of Belgrade, the first time since World
War II that a European capital was subjected to bombardment. The
official reason was that Serbian state forces had been abusing the
Albanians of Kosovo province; diplomacy had failed; and NATO
intervention was needed to put things right. This rationale was
accompanied by grossly exaggerated reports of Serbian security
forces’ killings of Kosovars, supposedly amounting to “genocide.”
This was
largely nonsense. The U.S. had demanded at the conference in
Rambouillet, France, that Serbia withdraw its forces from Kosovo and
restore autonomy to the province. Serbian president Slobodan
Milosevic had agreed. But the U.S. also demanded that Belgrade accept
NATO forces throughout the entire territory of Yugoslavia—something
no leader of a sovereign state could accept. Belgrade refused, backed
by Russia.
A “senior
State Department official” (likely U.S. Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright) boasted to reporters that at Rambouillet “we
intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. . . . The
Serbs needed a little bombing to see reason.” Henry Kissinger
(no peacenik) told the press in June: “The Rambouillet text,
which called on Serbia to admit NATO troops throughout Yugoslavia,
was a provocation, and excuse to start bombing. Rambouillet is not a
document that an angelic Serb could have accepted. It was a terrible
diplomatic document that should never have been presented in that
form.”
The U.S. had
obtained UN approval for the NATO strikes on Bosnia-Herzegovina four
years before. But it did not seek it this time, or try to organize a
UN force to address the Kosovo problem. In effect, it insisted that
NATO be recognized as the representative of “the international
community.”
It was
outrageous. Still, U.S. public opinion was largely persuaded that
the Serbs had failed to negotiate peace in good faith and so deserved
the bombing cheered on by the press, in particular CNN’s
“senior international correspondent,” Christiane Amanpour, a
State Department insider who kept telling her viewers, “Milosevic
continues to thumb his nose at the international community”—because
he’d refused a bullying NATO ultimatum that even Kissinger
identified as a provocation!
After the
mass slaughter of Kosovars became a reality (as NATO bombs began to
fall on Kosovo), and after two and a half months of bombing focused
on Belgrade, a Russian-brokered deal ended the fighting. Belgrade was
able to avoid the NATO occupation that it had earlier refused. (In
other words, NATO had achieved nothing that the Serbs hadn’t
already conceded in Rambouillet!)
As the
ceasefire went into effect on June 21, a column of about 30 armored
vehicles carrying 250 Russian troops moved from peacekeeping duties
in Bosnia to establish control over Kosovo’s Pristina Airport.
(Just a little reminder that Russia, too, had a role to play in the
region.)
This took
U.S. NATO commander Wesley Clark by surprise. He ordered that British
and French paratroopers be flown in to seize the airport but the
British General Sir Mike Jackson wisely balked. “I’m not going
to have my soldiers start World War III,” he declared.
I think it
likely this dramatic last minute gesture at the airport was urged by
the up-and-coming Vladimir Putin, a Yeltsin advisor soon to be
appointed vice-president and then Yeltsin’s successor beginning in
December 1999. Putin was to prove a much more strident foe of NATO
expansion than his embarrassing predecessor.
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