By Robert Fisk
The Independent
So we’ve won the war, have we? That’s what we are now being told by our leaders. Messrs Clinton, Blair, Cook and all the rest are telling us that Nato may shortly achieve its aim of returning 750,000 refugees to their homes, of installing a Nato-Russian force in Kosovo and ensuring the withdrawal of Serb police and troops. Nato, after its failure to crush a country of 10 million people in fewer than 70 days, can now walk tall again. All the Albanians who trekked over the frontiers of Macedonia and Albania are going to head home under “our” protection.
The BBC and CNN have gone along with this scenario – just as their cameras will be there to record the emotional return of the people of Kosovo to Pristina, Prizren, Pec and the other scorched towns. All that will be missing is the truth: that we never went to war for the return of refugees. We went to war for a peace agreement accepted by the Kosovo Albanians but rejected by the Serbs – an agreement that Nato’s leaders have themselves now rejected in their desperation to finish the air bombardment on Serbia. For the price of peace for Nato is the erasure of the most crucial paragraph in the Paris peace agreeement – the “final settlement” promised to the Kosovo Albanians after three years of autonomy that would almost certainly have led to independence.
Incredibly, we have allowed our leaders to bend the historical record, to twist the truth out of all recognition so that Nato’s “victory” will be the return of an army of refugees who were not even refugees when we began this wretched war. And we are on the point of betraying the Kosovo Albanians whom we persuaded to sign up for peace in Paris with a promise that the “will of the people” (90 per cent of them Albanians) would be respected in 2002 with almost certain independence.
We cannot expect the BBC or CNN to rewind the film for us but we can nevertheless spool back through the last three months of history to remind ourselves of why we went to war. In their campaign of “ethnic cleansing”, the Serbs had by the early spring committed a series of massacres. The world was outraged by what appeared to be a repeat – if on a smaller scale – of the Bosnian war. And we in the West still had a score to settle with Slobodan Milosevic over that terrible conflict.
In Paris, the Kosovo Albanians were cajoled into signing the American-scripted “peace”. Madeleine Albright cosied up to her “friend” Hashim Thaci, the KLA man known as “The Snake” who was then the guerrilla army’s leading officer. In the end, General Wesley Clarke – the very same general who has been busy bombing Serbia’s barracks, army, air force, railways, oil refineries, water treatment plants, bridges, hospitals and housing estates – was brought in to remonstrate with Mr Thaci. The Kosovo Albanians would obtain their freedom, they were told, because – under the terms of the Paris agreement – an international meeting on Kosovo would be held in three years’ time “to determine a mechanism for a final settlement for Kosovo, on the basis of the will of the people, opinions of the relevant authorities”. Since only 10 per cent of “the people” were Serbs, the KLA knew what that meant.
Then the war began. And within weeks, the biblical exodus of the Kosovo Albanians was upon us, driven from their homes by the Serbs the moment Nato commenced its bombardment of Serbia. Mr Blair was to tell us that the refugee situation would have been “far worse” had Nato not gone into action – a suggestion he mercifully forgot once half the Kosovo nation had poured over the international frontier. In fact, Nato had every reason to know what would happen if it went to war with Serbia; on 18 March, General Nebojsa Pavkovic said in Belgrade that “settling scores with the terrorists [sic] still in Kosovo doesn’t pose any problem and that’s what we’ll do if our country is attacked from the air or the ground.”
Once the tragedy of the Kosovo Albanians was before our eyes, General Clarke announced that their exodus was “entirely predictable”. He hadn’t shared that information with us, of course, when the war had begun. And from that moment, the return of the refugees was adopted as the principal purpose of Nato’s war. Nato troops would not enter Kosovo to “protect” the people – they would enter in order to ensure their safe return from an exile which the war itself had brought about. And the promises about the “will of the people” were forgotten. Independence for the Kosovars was no longer mentioned.
The “peace” that Mr Milosevic has now accepted is not the peace of Rambouillet or of Paris. Nato will send in the troops and force the Serb army out. But it is no longer offering a “mechanism” to respect the “will of the people”. The Albanians will go back to an international protectorate that contains no formula for independence. The KLA will be “demilitarised”.
And in a world where crystal balls are always broken, I venture to make a prediction about Kosovo which I sincerely hope will prove wrong: that in the days before Nato’s troops arrive in Kosovo, the KLA’s new commander – the infamous Agim Cecu who, as a Croatian army general, “ethnically cleansed” 170,000 Serb civilians from Krajina – will “cleanse” the remaining Serbs from Kosovo. That the KLA will refuse to be “demilitarised”. That in a few months’ time – at most a year – Nato’s enemies will be the KLA, who will be raging against the West for abandoning their hopes of independence. Then we shall remember how we thought we had won the war.
© The Independent 19992) What Is the Point of Nato?
An Atlantic Alliance That Has Brought Us to This Catastrophe Should Be Wound Up
By Robert Fisk
The Independent, May 13, 1999
How much longer do we have to endure the folly of Nato’s war in the Balkans? In just 50 days, the Atlantic alliance has failed in everything it set out to do. It has failed to protect the Kosovo Albanians from Serbian war crimes. It has failed to cow Slobodan Milosevic. It has failed to force the withdrawal of Serb troops from Kosovo. It has broken international law in attacking a sovereign state without seeking a UN mandate. It has killed hundreds of innocent Serb civilians – in our name, of course – while being too cowardly to risk a single Nato life in defence of the poor and the weak for whom it meretriciously claimed to be fighting. Nato’s war cannot even be regarded as a mistake – it is a criminal act.
It is, of course, now part of the mantra of all criticism of Nato that we must mention Serb wickedness in Kosovo. So here we go. Yes, dreadful, wicked deeds – atrocities would not be a strong enough word for it – have gone on in Kosovo: mass executions, rape, dispossession, “ethnic cleansing”, the murder of intellectuals. Some of Nato’s propaganda programme has done more to cover up such villainy than disclose it. And, as we all know, the dozens of Kosovo Albanians massacred on the road to Prizren were slaughtered by Nato – not by the Serbs as Nato originally claimed. But I have seen with my own eyes – travelling under the Nato bombardment – the house-burning in Kosovo and the hundreds of Albanians awaiting dispossession in their villages.
But back to the subject – and perhaps my first question should be put a little more boldly. Not: “How much longer do we have to endure this stupid, hopeless, cowardly war?” but: “How much longer do we have to endure Nato? How soon can this vicious American-run organisation be deconstructed and politically ‘degraded’, its pontificating generals put back in their boxes with their mortuary language of ‘in-theatre assets’ and ‘collateral damage'”?
And how soon will our own compassionate, socialist liberal leaders realise that they are not fighting a replay of the Second World War nor striking a blow for a new value-rich millennium? In Middle East wars, I’ve always known when a side was losing – it came when its leaders started to complain that journalists were not being fair to their titanic struggle for freedom/ democracy/human rights/sovereignty/ soul. And on Monday, Tony Blair started the whining. After 50 days of television coverage soaked in Nato propaganda, after weeks of Nato officials being questioned by sheep-like journalists, our Prime Minister announces the press is ignoring the plight of the Kosovo Albanians.
The fact that this is a lie is not important. It is the nature of the lie. Anyone, it seems, who doesn’t subscribe to Europe’s denunciations of Fascism or who raises an eyebrow when – in an act of utter folly – the Prime Minister makes unguaranteed promises that the Kosovo Albanians will all go home, is now off-side, biased – or worthy of one of Downing Street’s preposterous “health warnings” because they allegedly spend more time weeping for dead Serbs than the numerically greater number of dead Albanians (the assumption also being, of course, that it is less physically painful to be torn apart by a Nato cluster bomb than by a Serb rocket-propelled grenade).
President Clinton – who will in due course pull the rug from under Mr Blair – tells the Kosovo Albanians that they have the “right to return”. Not the Palestinian refugees of Lebanon, of course. They do not have such a right. Nor the Kurds dispossessed by our Nato ally, Turkey. Nor the Armenians driven from their land by the Turks in the world’s first holocaust (there being only one holocaust which Messers Clinton and Blair are interested in invoking just now). Mr Blair’s childish response to this argument is important. Just because wrongs have been done in the past doesn’t mean we have to stand idly by now. But the terrible corollary of this dangerous argument is this: that the Palestinians, the Armenians, the Rwandans or anyone else cannot expect our compassion. They are “the past”. They are finished.
But what is all this nonsense about Nato standing for democracy? It happily allowed Greece to remain a member when its ruthless colonels staged a coup d’etat which imprisoned and murdered intellectuals. Nato had no objection to the oppression of Salazar and Caetano – who were at the same time busy annihilating “liberation” movements almost identical to the Kosovo Liberation Army. Indeed, the only time when Nato proposed to suspend Portugal’s membership – I was there at the time and remember this vividly – was when the country staged a revolution and declared itself a democracy.
Is it therefore so surprising that Nato now turns out to be so brutal? It attacks television stations and kills Serb journalists – part of Milosevic’s propaganda machine, a “legitimate target”, shrieks Clare Short.
And what about the Chinese embassy? Did the CIA really use an old map? Or did the CIA believe that – because Mira Markovic (the wife of the Yugoslav President) had such close relations with the Chinese government that both she and President Slobodan Milosevic might be sleeping in the Chinese embassy. Nato, remember, had already targeted the Milosevic residence in an attempt to assassinate him. It had already – according to one disturbing report – tried to lure the Serb minister of information to the Serb television headquarters just before it was destroyed.
So why not the Chinese embassy? Would Nato do anything so desperate? Well, Nato is desperate. It is losing the war, it is destroying itself.
As for General Wesley Clark, the man who thought he could change history by winning a war without ground troops, we have only to recall his infantile statement of last month about President Milosevic. “We are winning and he is losing – and he knows it,” General Clark told us.
He did not explain why Mr Milosevic would need to be told such a thing if he knew it. Nor did he recall that he had once accepted from General Ratko Mladic – the Bosnian Serb military leader whose men were destroying the Muslims of Sarajevo – a gift of an engraved pistol. Nor, of course, did General Clark remind us that General Mladic and his colleague Radovan Karadjic remain free in Bosnia – which is under the firm control of Nato troops.
Nor are we going to be given the good news which this war portends for General Clark’s most loyal allies, the arms manufacturers of our proud democracies. Boeing hit a 52-week high last week with stock trading at just under $44 (#27) British Aerospace share prices have gained a 43 per cent increase since Nato’s bombardment commenced. The British government said on Tuesday that “military operations” were costing #37m “excluding munitions”. Now why, I wonder, did this figure exclude munitions?
All of which makes me wonder, too, if this disastrous war isn’t going to be the end of Nato. I hope so. As a citizen of a new, modern Europe, I don’t want my continent led by the third-rate generals and two-bit under-secretaries who have been ranting on our television screens for the past 50 days. I don’t want Europe to be “protected” any longer by the US. If that means the end of the Atlantic alliance, so be it.
Because an Atlantic alliance that has brought us to this catastrophe should be wound up. Until it is, Europe will never – ever – take responsibility for itself or for the dictators who threaten our society. Until then, Europe will never lay its own lives on the line for its own people – which is what the Kosovo Albanians need. Until Nato is dead, there will never be a real European defence force. And until Nato is dead, there will be no need to seek the international mandate from the United Nations which “humanitarian action” needs.
And the UN, ultimately, is the only institution the poor and the sick and the raped and the dispossessed can rely on. Nato troops are not going to die for Kosovo. So what is the point of Nato?
© The Independent 1999
