by Kofi Annan
In my own reports to the Security Council, I pointed with increased urgency to the escalating violence and placed responsibility squarely on the Yugoslav authorities for the killings gaining in pace. On October 4, I described what was happening as a “campaign of terror and violence.” Reflecting the widening chasm between Belgrade and the international community, I received a letter later that day from the Yugoslav foreign minister, whose first sentence stated that “Peace prevails in Kosovo” and that “full freedom of movement had been ensured.” When I called Miloševic a few days later to urge acceptance of the UN’s demands, he repeated this claim and said that over the past two weeks, there had been “no conflict in Kosovo.” He added for good measure that “the problems are only with the Albanians.”
That same week, I spoke with British foreign secretary Robin Cook, who drew his own parallels to the worst acts of ethnic violence in the Bosnian war. We agreed, on the basis of our common experience with Miloševic, that he would likely respond only to force. I reminded Cook that Miloševic was an expert in creating a “mirage” of cooperation when the reality was one of applying brute force as long as he was able to get away with it.
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As most of us feared and expected, the Kosovo Verification Mission increasingly became a powerless witness to an escalating Serbian campaign, which culminated in mid-January with the massacre of some forty-five men, women, and children at the village of Racak. In the following two months, as the violence and fighting intensified, new attempts to negotiate a settlement continued with talks in Rambouillet, France. There the Kosovars were persuaded to sign an agreement on substantial autonomy within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The Serbs, however, refused to sign, bent on maintaining their pattern of aggression and miscalculation until the very end.
Throughout the crisis, I had maintained a very close relationship with Javier Solana, the cerebral and shrewd Spanish NATO secretary-general who combined a deep aversion to war with his own determination, as a proud European, not to allow Miloševic to make a mockery of the continent’s commitment to peace and human rights once again. In a call on March 17, we spoke of how no one seemed to be getting through to Miloševic—not his Russian allies nor Holbrooke, with whom he had negotiated an end to the war in Bosnia.
It was clear that the moment of truth had arrived when the OSCE observers were ordered to leave Kosovo. On the evening of March 23, Solana called me again to say that Holbrooke would be returning from Belgrade to the NATO headquarters in Brussels with “very bad news.” He told me that he would be transferring the authority to launch a military operation to the Supreme Allied Commander Europe imminently, meaning that military action by NATO would soon begin. With Russian opposition to any resolution mandating the use of force, this meant NATO would be breaking with the will of the Security Council. But something had to be done, and we discussed our shared view of how out of touch with reality Miloševic seemed—and that once again this was leading to war in the Balkans.
The next morning, on March 24, I received a call from Madeleine Albright, who wanted to emphasize that NATO had had no choice but to act. Albright spoke in that tone that I had come to expect from her by then: though a friend and ally, she had never quite understood that although the United States had supported my candidacy for secretary-general, I had to maintain an independent dedication to the principles of the Charter and be seen to be responsive to the wishes of all member states of the United Nations.
I told her that I’d be issuing a statement in response to the NATO military action speaking of the failure of the Serbs to comply with the demands of the international community, while emphasizing that it would have been “preferable” if the action had been authorized by the Council. When I said that I would be indicating that the Council should always be involved with the decision by states to use force, she replied bluntly: “We don’t agree.” I thought her State Department lawyers may have thought differently on this matter, but recalled her response to a similar legal point made by Robin Cook, the UK foreign secretary: “Get yourself some new lawyers” had been her retort. In ending our call, she acknowledged, nonetheless, that “you are Secretary-General of the United Nations, and I am the Secretary of State of the United States—that’s life. But if we had put this to a Security Council vote, the Russians would have vetoed it, and people would have continued to die.” I left my response unspoken, but I agreed.
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Later that day, NATO began a campaign of air strikes to drive the Serbian forces from Kosovo and bring an end to their campaign of killings and mass expulsion of the civilian population of the province. I saw this as a tragedy—as is every resort to war. Those who believe otherwise have seen nothing of its consequences. But I also knew that a greater evil would have been to allow the unfettered rampage of Serbian forces in Kosovo.
What made the situation more complicated for me was the fact that I was secretary-general of the United Nations at a time when NATO had taken this action without seeking Security Council authorization. The Charter of the United Nations is clear: except in cases of self-defense, the use of force must be authorized by the Council in order to be in conformity with international law. What was equally clear to me, however, was that Miloševic had left the international community with no other option, and that none of the international community’s claims to never allowing another Bosnia would be credible if he was permitted to continue his campaign of cleansing against yet another Balkan people.
Throughout the Kosovo crisis, with no United Nations peacekeeping or diplomatic presence on the ground, I had focused my efforts on ensuring that the challenge before the international community was understood as clearly as possible. If we were to avoid a conflict, Miloševic would have to understand that this time the United Nations would recognize his wars as the wanton acts of aggression that they were—and that he had no option but to agree to the demands of the international community. Now that NATO had acted to enforce those demands, the debate among my advisors returned to the surface.
The Department of Political Affairs drew up a statement for me that focused on the Security Council’s primary responsibility for the maintenance of peace and security, emphasizing my regret at the use of force without the Council’s authorization. Aides in my office reacted strongly to this draft. They argued that it would be a betrayal of all that I had said in the preceding months about the need to hold Miloševic accountable—and about placing the United Nations on the side of civilians under siege from their own government—if I were now to merely lament the enforcement action. In conformity with my instructions, they amended the draft and began the statement instead by assigning responsibility for the recourse to military force to the Yugoslav authorities:
Throughout the last year, I have appealed on many occasions to the Yugoslav authorities and the Kosovar Albanians to seek peace over war, compromise over conflict. I deeply regret that, despite all the efforts made by the international community, the Yugoslav authorities have persisted in their rejection of a political settlement, which would have halted the bloodshed in Kosovo and secured an equitable peace for the population there. It is indeed tragic that diplomacy has failed, but there are times when the use of force may be legitimate in the pursuit of peace.
The statement then concluded with a call for the Security Council to be involved in any decision to resort to the use of force. As secretary-general, I had to affirm this principal—fundamental as it was to nothing less than international order—even at a time when, in anomalous circumstances, it was being set aside out of moral necessity. As Kieran Prendergast, my senior political advisor and head of the Department of Political Affairs, argued: “If you won’t stand up for the Charter, who will?”
The day after the bombing began, the New York Times headline read: “The Secretary-General offers implicit endorsement of raids”—much to the relief of the NATO countries, and to the consternation of the Russians. But whil
e there was no choice in my mind of the need to resort to force, I had in my response to the bombing also emphasized to NATO countries the value, and legal requirement, of a Security Council authorization that made this situation a stark exception. It was an uneasy—and in many ways unsatisfactory—compromise, but it reflected the reality of an international system whose balance of priorities required a broader shift if the United Nations was to be an organization that truly served those whose human rights were under threat.
In this debate the dilemmas facing the United Nations in the cause of intervention were laid bare. I had to chart a course that combined a clear defense of the primacy of the Security Council in matters of peace and security, with an equally clear recognition that the UN was never intended as a pacifist organization and that there were times when force was not only necessary but legitimate. Rwanda and Bosnia had taught us this essential fact.
Two weeks later, at the opening of the annual United Nations Human Rights Commission meeting in Geneva, I began to set out the parameters of what I called an “evolving international norm” against the violent repression of minorities that must take precedence over concerns of state sovereignty. “Even though we are an organization of member states,” I concluded, “the rights and ideals the United Nations exists to protect are those of peoples.”
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On the ground in Kosovo, however, the military intervention was having nothing like the impact that NATO commanders had hoped or expected. When it began, Solana told me that it would be a matter of three or four days of bombing and then it would be over. Miloševic, however, had his own ideas. In his own diabolical manner, he had clearly prepared for this moment, and intensified his campaign of repression and expulsion. By March 24, 1999, UNHCR estimated that more than 250,000 Albanians had been forced from their homes within Kosovo and another 200,000 had sought refuge in neighboring countries. Over the next three months, nearly a million Kosovars joined this throng of refugees.
In early April, faced with the escalating humanitarian disaster, I decided that the United Nations needed to enter the diplomatic game more actively. NATO and the United States had taken upon themselves the responsibility of enforcing the wider demands of the international community, and the United States in particular made little secret of its desire to keep the UN—and me—out of the day-to-day management of the conflict.
On April 9, I issued a call to the Yugoslav authorities to halt all offensive operations and withdraw from Kosovo, in return for which NATO should suspend its bombing campaign. From increasingly nervous European leaders such as Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder, I received positive responses, but from Albright and Clinton, some hesitation about my intervention. I then spent the next six weeks in intense consultations with all the active parties, in order to reinvigorate the diplomatic track and bring the Russians back into the fold in order to apply the necessary pressure on Miloševic.
From the outset, Secretary Albright was opposed to my active role, and even more so to my decision to appoint two UN mediators: Eduard Kukan of Slovakia and Carl Bildt of Sweden. Her resistance led to one of those drawn-out diplomatic merry-go-rounds that ended where we began, with valuable time lost in the process and with the humanitarian situation deteriorating by the hour. In the middle of a set of intense, almost hourly negotiations with Albright, former Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, Chirac, and other European leaders, I received a call from Henry Kissinger. He was concerned about the impact on the United States’ standing of the bombing of Serbia, and he was incredulous as to the administration’s opposition to my intention to appoint Bildt, rating him by far the strongest of the candidates under consideration. He then offered to make his own appeal to the White House, which I accepted. Ending our call, he quoted Bismarck’s adage: “Woe to the statesman whose arguments for entering a war are not as convincing at its end as they were at the beginning” and added that “although I am a Republican, we have to save the administration’s face.” Otherwise, “it would undermine the U.S. position around the world.”
Albright then shifted the game by asking me to appoint the Finnish leader Martti Ahtisaari as a UN envoy to work with the Russian envoy Chernomyrdin. While I was not opposed to a role for my friend Ahtisaari, I was concerned about the confusion that this would create on the envoy front. On the other hand, the Russians had indicated that Ahtisaari’s participation might win Yugoslav agreement to a deal. I then received a call from Strobe Talbott, the U.S. deputy secretary of state, who said that Washington had changed its mind on Bildt, something I suspect had a great deal to do with Kissinger’s intervention.
On May 9, Javier Solana called me to say that the situation had turned into a “nightmare.” A NATO air strike had hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, enraging Beijing and deepening doubts in Europe and around the world about the value of the bombing campaign. Albright called to ask me to speak to the Chinese and tell them that it “would have been insane for the U.S. to bomb the Chinese embassy deliberately.” Bildt soon confirmed the U.S. fears about his outspokenness by asking publicly what would have happened if the Chinese had bombed a U.S. embassy. However legitimate his question, this was not a way for us to play a constructive role in ending the war. Our efforts could not be part of a diversion from the real causes of the war—a diversion that would only serve Miloševic’s purposes and delay his capitulation. Five days later, I told Bildt: “Neither you nor Kukan will go to Belgrade. And I will not ask for a halt to the bombing.”
With the military campaign nearing the end of its second month, I used the opportunity of a speech on the centennial of the 1899 Peace Conference in The Hague on May 18 to take the argument for intervention one step further. I called the world’s attention to the dilemmas of statecraft provoked by the NATO action taken without Security Council authorization. I warned that unless the Security Council was restored to its preeminent position as the sole source of legitimacy on the use of force, we would be on “a dangerous path to anarchy.” But equally important, I stressed that unless the Security Council could unite around the aim of confronting massive human rights violations and crimes against humanity on the scale of Kosovo, it would betray the very ideals that inspired the founding of the United Nations.
From The Hague I traveled to Macedonia and Albania to see for myself the humanitarian consequences of the ongoing war, and to visit the refugee camps that now were holding some two hundred thousand refugees. With the roar of jets and thuds of bombing raids in the background, I made my way to Kosovo. As we approached the border posts, I saw what looked like an endless line of refugees coming down the road—men and women of all ages, children carrying their few belongings. Nane and I spoke with a ten-year-old boy who was crying helplessly and sat with a one-hundred-year-old woman who kept questioning, “Why is this happening to us, why is this happening to us?” She then looked at me and asked me if this was the way her life would end. Miloševic had, once again, acted with utter contempt for the lives and dignity of a civilian population in the former Yugoslavia, and with the bombing unable to move him to compromise, at that moment it seemed difficult to offer the woman any genuine hope. The inherent limits to what force alone can achieve were reflected in both the turmoil around us and in the wrenching desperation in the woman’s eyes.
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But hope again resurfaced. A few days later, on May 22, the War Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia indicted Slobodan Miloševic for crimes against humanity. Then, finally, after a seventy-eight-day bombing campaign, on June 3, Miloševic met with Chernomyrdin and Ahtisaari and—to their great surprise—abruptly agreed to the demands of the international community. A week later, the Security Council voted 14-0, with only one abstention, to authorize the presence of an international military force, led by NATO, and a civilian mission, led by the UN, in order to provide an interim administration for the territory. The Serbian campaign was halted, Miloševic now had the prospect of being held to accoun
t by a court of law, and the people of Kosovo were secured safe passage to their homes and given the opportunity to rebuild a society with international support.
In the conclusion to the report that I had previously commissioned on the fall of Srebrenica, I urged the international community to heed the cardinal lesson of Srebrenica; namely, that “a deliberate and systematic attempt to terrorize, expel or murder an entire people must be met decisively with all necessary means, and with the political will to carry the policy through to its logical conclusion.” In the Kosovo conflict, the international community resolved to apply that lesson—however belatedly and imperfectly. The NATO intervention had presented a profound challenge to those in the international community that remained dedicated to the principle of military action under international law but increasingly refused to accept the right of governments to abuse the human rights of their citizens under the cover of sovereign immunity. At the very least the international community had proved it was now willing to stop this in the Balkans, where, in Bosnia, the UN, the United States, and Europe had previously been unwilling to halt a savage war of ethnic hatred in the early 1990s. A high price had been paid by the people of Kosovo for the world’s dithering, but the rapidity and determination of the response, at least, had changed.
TO SAVE A NATION: EAST TIMOR
Dili, the tiny, destitute, and isolated capital of East Timor, could not be further removed from the great cities of Europe where the fate of the people of Kosovo was being determined in the spring and summer of 1999. Whereas the Balkan wars of the early 1990s had provided the international community with an intimate familiarity with ethnic differences exploited with ruthless efficiency, it was almost entirely ignorant of the suffering of the East Timorese, who were caught in an orphaned conflict at the edges of one of Asia’s largest and most powerful countries, Indonesia.
