History of the Present

by Timothy Garton Ash

  CHRONOLOGY

  1999

  11 MARCH. Oskar Lafontaine resigns as German finance minister and leader of the SPD.

  12 MARCH. Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic formally join NATO at a ceremony in Independence, Missouri.

  15 MARCH. KOSOVO peace talks resume in Paris rather than Rambouillet.

  16 MARCH. The whole European Commission under Jacques Santer resigns after a damning independent report on its corruption and mismanagement.

  19 MARCH. Kosovo peace talks in Paris end with Kosovar Albanian delegation signing but Serb side refusing to sign the agreement.

  2 3 MARCH. NATO gives order to bomb Serbian military targets after special envoy Richard Holbrooke fails to persuade Slobodan Milošević to accept the Rambouillet agreement.

  23-25 MARCH. At an informal summit in Berlin, EU leaders agree to nominate former Italian prime minister Romano Prodi as president of the European Commission and discuss the outlines of a budget for 2000 to 2006.

  24 MARCH. NATO bombing campaign (“Operation Allied Force”) begins against targets in Kosovo, Serbia, and Montenegro, the first time in its fifty-year history that NATO has attacked a sovereign state. Serbian forces conduct a campaign of terror and “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo that results in the flight of some one million Kosovar Albanians.

  14 APRIL. Misdirected NATO bombing attack kills more than fifty refugees in a convoy.

  19 APRIL. The German Bundestag meets for the first time in the restored Reichstag building in Berlin.

  23-25 APRIL. NATO’s fiftieth-anniversary summit in Washington is dominated by the Kosovo war.

  6 MAY. Elections to new parliamentary assemblies in Scotland and Wales. The G8 (the G7 countries plus Russia) agree on general principles for ending the Kosovo war.

  7 MAY. NATO bombs the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, by mistake.

  21 MAY The Clinton administration suggests increasing the size of the proposed Kosovo peacekeeping force to fifty thousand.

  WAR OVER KOSOVO

  “I’LL TELL YOU THE TRUTH,” SAYS THE KOSOVAR NEWSPAPER EDITOR. “They really don’t know.” We are sitting in Tetovo, Macedonia, in the Café Arbi, where the exiled intellectuals of Priština meet the world. They in this comment are not the intellectuals but the KLA commanders still in Kosovo, to whom Baton Haxhiu talks daily by satellite phone. Besieged on their hilltops, they can see a burning village here, a Serb patrol there, a tank at a crossroads, but they have no overall picture. Yet a large proportion of NATO’s bombing targets in Kosovo come from this same source: from the KLA commanders, via satellite phone. So they is also NATO.

  We ordinary mortals imagine that NATO, with its almost godlike technology, its satellite cameras that can see an ant at ten thousand miles, its secret special forces reportedly deployed inside Kosovo, must really know. Then they bomb the Chinese embassy. Of course, we can piece together, from thousands of individual stories, a picture of the terror that has probably driven more than a million Kosovars from their homes since the bombing started. But we don’t know what is happening on the ground right now. We don’t know the combat readiness, fuel and ammunition supplies, communications, and morale of the Serb forces.

  Similarly, we have numerous excellent reports from Belgrade. I talk by phone and e-mail to friends and acquaintances there. We know what they are saying. But we don’t know what is really happening inside the Milošević regime: between the military, the police, the business kleptocracy, and, not least, him and his wife. And even they don’t know what is going to happen next.

  War, like love, changes everything. The beginning of wisdom is to realize that, behind those confident pronouncements of our generals, prime ministers, and presidents, nobody knows. Still, there are a few things that can be said after two months of this war about its causes, its course, and even its consequences.

  1

  The long-term origins lie in a struggle that dates back at least 120 years, to the time of the Congress of Berlin and the League of Prizren—a struggle between Serbs and Albanians for control of this European Palestine. This is probably its last, decisive battle. Now, as then, outside powers will decide who wins.

  The medium-term origins lie in a decade of appeasement by the West of an evil postcommunist politician who has exploited Serbian nationalism to bring power and riches to himself and his family. As they end, the 1990s remind us of Auden’s “low, dishonest decade”— the 1930s. Milošević is not Hitler, but the basic pattern of appeasement is comparable: The longer you wait, the higher the price. Hitler should have been stopped when he remilitarized the Rhine-land in 1936; Milošević, at the siege of Vukovar in 1991.

  There are many Neville Chamberlains in this story. One is certainly William Jefferson Clinton. Washington’s fierce rhetoric has been accompanied by feeble deeds. In the Balkans, Clinton has inverted Theodore Roosevelt: He speaks loudly and carries a small stick.

  As a European, I prefer to dwell on the beam in our own eye rather than the mote in our transatlantic brother’s. After all, this is a conflict in Europe. The Kosovo war supports an argument I have made throughout the decade: The leaders of Western Europe set the wrong priorities at the end of the cold war. Instead of seizing the chances and recognizing the dangers that arose from the end of communism in half of Europe, they concentrated on perfecting the integration of the western half. They put Maastricht before Sarajevo. Now we are paying the price.

  The immediate origins of the war lie in a major miscalculation by the leaders of the West. They took too literally Clausewitz’s famous saying that war is the continuation of politics by other means. Misled by the Bosnian precedent, they thought they could bomb Milošević into accepting a version of the Rambouillet deal for Kosovo. Some of those leaders expected a tough military and police action by Milošević against the KLA and supporting civilians, in response to bombing. None expected the scale, speed, and brutality of what he did.

  Of course, it’s easy to be wise after the event. The only people I know who actually forecast this horror are politicians from former Yugoslavia. Last September, I remarked to President Milan Kučan of Slovenia, “but surely Milošević can’t ‘ethnically cleanse’ 1.8 million people?” He looked at me quizzically and replied, “You don’t know Milošević.” Early last year, President Kiro Gligorov of Macedonia called for a “corridor” to bring large numbers of Kosovar Albanian refugees through his country to Albania. Now, in Skopje, I asked him why he had seen this coming. The shrewd old man looked at me and shrugged, as if to say, “Wasn’t it obvious?”

  Well, it was not obvious to us who live in a more normal world. I, too, did not anticipate it. But what we can fairly hold against NATO is that it did not plan for this contingency. After all, that’s what a political-military alliance is meant to do: plan for contingencies, even remote ones. Since then, the action has patently gone wrong. Let me be clear. I more than accept the end. I believe it had become imperative to threaten force so as to get a new dispensation for Kosovo. When the threat failed, NATO was fully justified to use force in and over Kosovo. But the means chosen have compromised the end. To conduct the campaign entirely from the air, and that mainly at fifteen thousand feet; to conduct it increasingly by bombing civilian infrastructure in Serbia proper—bridges, roads, railways, factories, the TV station—rather than destroying Serb forces in Kosovo; this has been disastrous.

  Why have we chosen the means of an aerial war against Serbia proper? First, we were not prepared for any other sort of war, and hardly even for this one. Second, it turns out that with all our godlike technology, we can’t find Serb tanks hiding in garages, let alone paramilitaries who stop over in a different Albanian house every night; so Milošević has been winning in Kosovo itself. Third, the president of the United States is not prepared to risk a single casualty in this conflict and will not even send a significant number of ground troops to neighboring countries to increase the pressure on Milošević, let alone actually use them. Clinton’s emotional comment on the three capture
d U.S. soldiers—“We look after our own people”—unintentionally says it all. So the bombers fly at fifteen thousand feet, and, inevitably, their bombs sometimes hit the very civilians they are meant to be saving.

  2

  The list of disastrous consequences is long. First and foremost, most of the Albanians who live in Kosovo have been kicked out of their homes; many have lost everything; young women have been raped, men killed. It is wrong to call this a holocaust, but it is, together with the events in Bosnia, the most terrible single thing to have happened in Europe in fifty years. It is wholly comparable with Hitler’s and Stalin’s forced deportations of whole ethnic groups—Poles, Estonians, Crimean Tartars—and with the postwar expulsions of the Germans from Eastern Europe.

  On a plane to Skopje, Blerim Shala, a member of the Kosovar delegation at Rambouillet, tells me about his own perilous trek to Macedonia: Ordinary Serb soldiers shared their hunks of bread with the Albanians and even promised to protect them from the marauding paramilitaries. Then he starts explaining the topography of deportation, as whole cities were transported to different frontiers. “Priština went to Macedonia,” he says. “Prizren went to Albania.” Incredible sentences. As if one said, “Washington went to Mexico” or “Paris went to Spain.”

  Moreover, this was precipitated by NATO’s bombing. Certainly, Milošević had driven something like three hundred thousand Kosovars out of their homes the year before. Clearly, what is apparently called “Operation Horseshoe” had been planned in advance. But elementary logic indicates that we cannot know what would have happened if we had not started bombing. What we do know is that the Serb action escalated dramatically as soon as the air campaign began.

  Standing in front of his tent (sixteen people sleeping in a space the size of an average living room) at the Stenkovec 2 refugee camp in Macedonia, Jusuf Mustafa, a once prosperous building contractor, told me how he and his family had gone out onto the balcony of their home to applaud the first NATO bombs. Within fifteen minutes, the Serbs started throwing grenades into their neighborhood. A few days later, the whole family was driven out at gunpoint. His story stands for many. This is not to say that NATO was wrong to bomb. It is to say that the West now has a direct responsibility for getting these people back to their homes.

  With the mass expulsion, Milošević almost certainly intended—I say “almost certainly,” for who knows what really goes through that poisoned mind?—to spread havoc by destabilizing the neighboring countries. NATO fights with bombs; he uses civilians. He has very nearly succeeded. Albania, already in a state of near anarchy, has been swamped by close to half a million dispossessed compatriots. Montenegro, a country of some 600,000 people hosting more than 60,000 Kosovar expellees, struggles bravely to keep its half independence from Serbia. And I saw firsthand what the war has done to Macedonia.

  This small, poor country of just two million people has been shaken to its foundations. Its economy is in shock, since 20 percent of its exports went to Serbia and more depended on trade routes through Serbia. Meanwhile, it has—slowly, reluctantly, often with low-level police brutality—taken in more than 230,000 expellees. It’s as if the United States had to take in thirty million Mexicans.

  Albanians already made up roughly a quarter of Macedonia’s population. Suddenly, they are more than a third. Throughout the 1990s, the country has been plagued by ethnic tensions between the Albanians and the Slav Macedonian majority. In the mainly Albanian city of Tetovo, where many of the expellees are living with local families, I found an explosive situation. An acquaintance told me that Slav Macedonians have even received anonymous threatening telephone calls: “Get out of here, it’s our city now, and NATO is behind us.” Then, back in Skopje, a Kosovar refugee said that she was leaving because she had received threatening phone calls from Macedonians.

  The political leaders of the Macedonian Albanians have so far displayed great restraint. “Milošević’s aim is to destabilize Macedonia,” Arbën Xhaferi of the Albanian Democratic Party explained, “so my priority is not to allow him to succeed.” And President Gligorov insisted that his country is struggling to remain what is effectively the only functioning multiethnic state in former Yugoslavia. He emphasized that there is no significant history of ethnic conflict between Macedonians and Albanians, unlike between Serbs and Albanians. “If our forefathers were able to live together,” he said, “why shouldn’t we be able to?” But already there have been several nasty confrontations between Macedonian police and Albanian expellees. One big incident—perhaps an attempted breakout from a camp met by police shooting—and the tensions between Albanians and Macedonians could explode. So the reality behind that anodyne phrase “regional stability” is another Balkan country on the verge of collapse.

  Meanwhile, in Serbia itself the NATO campaign has shot the legs out from under the small democratic opposition. These are the people I mostly talk or e-mail to, and they are in despair. It may not be true that the whole country has united behind Milošević, nor are they proud of what Serbia has done in Kosovo. Yet even the most pro-Western among them are furious at the bombing and the nations behind it—that is, us. These attitudes can change again after the war is over, especially if Milošević is defeated and seen to be defeated in Kosovo and only in Kosovo. But for now, this has been another calamitous effect.

  Oh yes, and then NATO managed to infuriate one fifth of the world’s population, who had nothing at all to do with the conflict, by bombing their embassy.

  This is the balance sheet two months into the war. This is how NATO has celebrated its fiftieth anniversary.

  3

  How do we get out of this bloody mess? What is the minimum political objective upon which we must insist? The minimum is an international protectorate for the whole of Kosovo, to which the majority of those who have been expelled will both wish and feel safe to return. With each week that passes, the difficulty of achieving this increases.

  The auspices for this protectorate should be those of the United Nations. To achieve that, you need the assent of two seriously offended permanent members of the security council, Russia and China. The conditions to which they would agree might not be those under which the majority of Kosovars would actually return. On the ground, a large international force would be needed to protect those returning. If Serbia proper were not defeated militarily and Milošević not replaced by someone more reasonable, then our troops would have to secure Kosovo’s external security against a revanchist Serbia as well as its internal security against any remaining Serb soldiers, police, paramilitaries, and simply armed civilians. The Rambouillet agreement envisaged an implementation force of 28,000 troops. On 21 May, President Clinton proposed a NATO ground-force presence in neighboring countries of 50,000. Partly, of course, this is a (long overdue) threat of invasion, to put pressure on Milošević. But it is probably also a realistic estimate of the numbers that would now be needed, initially at least, to implement any new agreement.

  Again and again, I asked the expellees in the camps what they would need in order to return. Their answers could be summed up in a single phrase: “no Serbs with guns.” But if the Serbs are disarmed, what about the KLA, to whose colors young Kosovars in exile are now flocking? The KLA would surely flood back as the Serbs retreated, firing their Kalashnikovs in the air, as they did after the cease-fire agreement last October. And they would terrorize any remaining Serbs. If the place is to be halfway peaceful, the international force would need to make a stab at disarming them. But decommissioning a guerrilla army is a very difficult task, as we have seen in Northern Ireland.

  Then, who would maintain law and order? A whole new police force would have to be created from scratch. Someone would have to train it. NATO soldiers say that is not a job they are either equipped or ready to do. Meanwhile, many people have no homes to go back to and no crops or cattle to see them through the winter. So a massive effort would be needed, first by the UNHCR, to put roofs over their heads and to feed them, then by governments
and charities, probably coordinated by the EU, to reconstruct the infrastructure destroyed by Serb forces and by NATO bombs. “Kosovo is lost for me,” one articulate exile exclaimed, “the place is just destroyed; it will take twenty years to rebuild it.” Even if Milošević is defeated, we will still face the enemy called Despair.

  To vanquish despair, the Kosovars will need their own political leadership. We talk all the time about the international framework. In the acronymic jungle of planning for peace, the OSCE is assigned the role now curiously called “nation building”: supervising elections, building up democratic institutions, and so on. But what about the people whose homeland this is supposed to be? One voice that has been singularly missing over the last two months is that of Kosovo itself. We have heard the refugees and, as Hillary Clinton mawkishly put it, feel their pain. But the Kosovars have featured only as victims—as objects rather than subjects of history.

  The trouble is that their political leadership is hopelessly divided. There is the pacifist president, Ibrahim Rugova, widely discredited by appearing on Serb television with Milošević while his people were being rounded up and killed. There’s the “prime minister in exile,” Bujar Bukoshi, who controls the money collected from Kosovo Albanians living in the West. There are the KLA commanders besieged in mountain pockets across Kosovo, and KLA leaders squabbling in Albania. Finally, there are the liberal intellectuals of Priština, now to be found at the Café Arbi in Tetovo, desperately looking for their new Havel or Mandela.