A Problem From Hell

by Samantha Power

  Ron Haviv-VII

  Kosovo Albanians forced out of their homes prepare to bury a five-week-old infant who died of exposure in the mountains of Kosovo, Fall 1998.

  Senior officials in the Clinton administration were revolted and enraged. Madeleine Albright, the longtime crusader for intervention, had succeeded Christopher as secretary of state. She and the rest of the Clinton team remembered Srebrenica, were still coming to grips with guilt over the Rwanda genocide, and were looking to make amends. They feared that Racak was just the beginning of a campaign of mini-Srebrenicas. Indeed, a rumor circulated that the Serb forces’ motto of the day was, “A massacre a day helps keep NATO away.” U.S. officials were accompanied by far more aggressive European diplomats than they had known in the mid-1990s. Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and his foreign minister, Robin Cook, were intent on stopping Milosevic. In February 1999 the United States and its European allies convened a conference at the French château of Rambouillet, outside Paris, and presented a take-it-or-leave-it proposal. Belgrade was required to remove most of its troops from Kosovo, grant significant autonomy to the Albanians, and allow 25,000 armed peacekeepers (4,000 of them American) to be deployed in Serbia. If the Serbs refused, NATO would bomb. The Serbs were accustomed to hollow NATO threats. They were not about to surrender control over a province of great historical and symbolic importance. Serb negotiators refused even to entertain the deal.

  Beginning on March 24, 1999, NATO jets under the command of General Clark, supreme allied commander for Europe, began bombing Serbia. Allied leaders said they would continue bombing until Milosevic accepted the autonomy compromise. It was the first time in history that the United States or its European allies had intervened to head off a potential genocide.9

  Response

  Values and Interests

  The NATO action was not purely humanitarian. Serbia’s atrocities had of course provoked NATO action, but Operation Allied Force would probably not have been launched without the perceived threat to more traditional U.S. interests. However real the human suffering of Albanians, the threat to American credibility was also a crucial factor in convincing President Clinton to take action. In a sequence reminiscent of the summer of 1995 in Bosnia, the intensification of Serb violence and the now redundant, duplicitous antics of Milosevic had begun making Clinton, his cabinet, and indeed NATO, which was often invoked in American threats, look silly. It had become humiliating for the alliance to try and fail to deter Serbia, a country of 11 million, which lay within sneezing distance of Hungary, one of NATO’s newest members. Western leaders were again, to use Clinton’s phrase, “getting creamed.”

  In addition, after a decade of unrest and with the ascent of the KLA in Kosovo, it was clear that the problem—for Albanians, but also for the United States and Europe—would not go away. Ongoing Serb-Albanian fighting seemed likely to destabilize the fragile ethnic balance in neighboring Macedonia, which was one-quarter Albanian and could not endure the arrival of more Albanians displaced from Kosovo. The Serb crackdown was imperiling the fragile peace in Bosnia, which by then the United States had spent more than $10 billion supporting. Washington was not anxious to see its neighborhood investment squandered. Perhaps most significant, after six years in office, the Clinton administration had built up an institutional memory of its dealings with this particular regime. Because Milosevic was a “repeat offender” and had run circles around the allies hundreds of times the previous decade, U.S. diplomats broke from their traditional tendency to see peace “just around the corner.” In short, when NATO began bombing, the Clinton administration was acting with its head as well as its heart.

  President Clinton spoke from the Oval Office the night the NATO air campaign began. This time he was the one to invoke the Holocaust. “What if someone had listened to Winston Churchill and stood up to Adolf Hitler earlier?” the president asked. “Just imagine if leaders back then had acted wisely and early enough, how many lives could have been saved, how many Americans would not have had to die?”10 Clinton adopted the tactics of so many earlier advocates of intervention inside and outside the U.S. government who had been dismissed as soft and emotional.

  But Clinton believed he had to demonstrate the peril to American interests as well. “Do our interests in Kosovo justify the dangers to our armed forces?” he asked. “I thought long and hard about that question. I am convinced that the dangers of acting are far outweighed by the dangers of not acting—dangers to defenseless people and to our national interests.” Serb-Albanian fighting could drag U.S. allies in the region into a wider conflict. “We have an interest in avoiding an even crueler and costlier war,” he said. “Our children need and deserve a peaceful, stable free Europe.” The Holocaust, American self-interest, and European stability—Clinton needed and pleaded them all. American public support was essential to what was mostly an American war.11 The president also assured constituents that the war would not become another Vietnam or Somalia. “I do not intend to put our troops in Kosovo to fight a war,” Clinton said.12 NATO would have to win the war from the air.

  From the moment NATO began bombing, Serbian regular military units teamed up with police and militia to do something unprecedented and unexpected: They expelled virtually the entire Albanian population at gunpoint. In a carefully coordinated campaign, armed Serbs launched Operation Horseshoe. Practiced at ethnic cleansing from their days in Bosnia, Yugoslav National Army units surrounded Kosovo towns and villages and used massive artillery barrages to frighten the local inhabitants into flight. In many areas the Serb police separated the women, children, and old men from the men of fighting age. The Serbs executed some of the men in order to eliminate resistance and to demonstrate the costs of remaining in Kosovo. They systematically shredded the Albanians’ identification papers, birth certificates, and property deeds, and they looted everything in sight. The Serbs crammed whole families into railroad cars and forced others to walk. The villagers trudged along in silence, refusing to look back as their homes were set ablaze. The Serbs who did the dirty work carried long knives and automatic weapons. Some donned red berets. Many wore woolen ski masks, as if the existence of the UN war crimes tribunal had made them conscious for the first time that they might later be identified and punished. But the Serb gunmen’s new attention to covering up their role in war crimes did not make them shy from committing them.

  All told, Milosevic’s forces drove more than 1.3 million Kosovars from their homes, some 740,000 of whom flooded into neighboring Macedonia and Albania. It was the largest, boldest single act of ethnic cleansing of the decade, and it occurred while the United States and its allies were intervening to prevent further atrocity.

  Because refugees crossed the border quickly, their stories were quickly relayed around the world. If refugees from previous horrors needed weeks or even years to gain the trust of Western reporters, the hardened correspondents in Kosovo had finally learned after nearly a decade of Balkan atrocities to shift the burden of proof to the alleged perpetrators. Better to trust the unconfirmable and later be proven wrong than the reverse. Christiane Amanpour of CNN was one of many veteran reporters of the Bosnian carnage who reappeared in the Balkans to cover the single largest European exodus in a half century. One Albanian, Mehmet Krashnishi, told her a typical story. He said that the day after the NATO operation began, Serb troops arrived and separated the men from the women: “To the women they said, ‘You may go to the border,’ and they put us men in the two big rooms. They said, ‘Now NATO can save you,’ and then they started to shoot. And when they finished shooting us they covered us with straw and corn and set it on fire. We were one hundred and twelve people. I survived with one other man.” Like so many survivors, Krashnishi had played dead and fled when the Serbs went to find more fuel for their pyre. He bore burns on his face, and his hands were wrapped in thick white bandages.13

  The NATO jets had little success deterring the Serbs’ cleansing operation. They flew at 15,000 feet so as to elude feisty Ser
bian air defenses. Pilots were no match for paramilitaries. Weather and visibility were poor early on, impeding NATO’s use of laser-guided missiles. Serb troops built fake bridges, camouflaged precious equipment, and used decoys such as inflatable rubber tanks to lure NATO into wasting expensive cruise missiles. One senior U.S. aviator, Brigadier General Daniel Leaf, who flew his first combat missions under fire in his F-16, recalled the feeling of helplessness that NATO pilots experienced: “I could actually see them burning houses. It was extraordinary and horrifying.”14 Serb forces lay low, mingling with the ethnic Albanian population they were terrorizing in order to deter NATO air attacks. There was no telling whether the Serbs would ever give in to NATO demands or whether the fragile allied coalition could be held together to sustain support for NATO’s first major mission.

  The decision to bomb Serbia marked a radically assertive break from past American responses to atrocity. Still, the intervention replicated many of the familiar patterns. The United States and its allies again fought the “last war,” expecting the Serbs to respond to NATO bombing in Kosovo the way they had to NATO bombing in 1995 in Bosnia. Western officials and Albanian victims again engaged in wishful thinking, failing to imagine evil and presuming rational actors, even as they demonized Milosevic as a Balkan Hitler. NATO again carried out its intervention subject to the very constraint that had precluded intervention of any kind in Bosnia and Rwanda: fear of U.S. casualties. And although the bombing campaign paid sizable dividends for the majority of ethnic Albanians, its execution and aftermath have been used to confirm the futility, perversity, and jeopardy of acting to stop atrocity. The positive results of the intervention have received far less attention.

  Fighting the Last War—Wishful Thinking

  The NATO intervention was initially executed casually. NATO enjoyed 35-to-1 superiority in military manpower over Serbia and a 300-to-1 edge in defense spending.15 Senior U.S. officials believed that if they simply sent Serbian president Milosevic a signal of allied seriousness, he would scamper to the negotiating table, pen in hand. In 1995 Milosevic had given in to allied demands over Bosnia after a two-week burst of NATO bombing. Remembering the Serbs’ paltry resistance and quick concessions, Pentagon officials and Clinton cabinet members predicted NATO would need to bomb for a week at most.

  Another assumption colored NATO thinking. Since Milosevic had signed away parts of Bosnia so blithely at Dayton in 1995, policymakers had begun speaking of the Serbian leader as a rational actor whose primary interest lay not in creating Greater Serbia but in tending to “Greater Slobo.” On this theory the Serbian president would have been happy to sacrifice Serbs in Kosovo, as he had Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia, if it enabled him to keep power (perhaps by bringing about an easing in international economic sanctions), but he needed the cover of NATO bombing to do so. Thus, most Western observers expected that a light batch of bombing would be all that was needed. NATO launched its intervention with just one-third of the planes eventually dispatched.

  In addition to failing to foresee sustained Serb resistance, the allied planners failed to predict that Milosevic would respond to bombing by retaliating so violently and audaciously against the Albanian population in Kosovo. Here again administration officials were not alone. Members of Congress, human rights monitors, and journalists, too, miscalculated. Incredibly, of the 120 Kosovo-related questions asked by reporters at State Department briefings in the three days preceding the bombing, only one concerned the fate of the Kosovar Albanians. Of the nineteen op-eds and editorials in the Washington Post and New York Times in the two weeks before the bombing, the possibility of a bloody crackdown inside Kosovo was mentioned in just three one-line references.16

  The omens of bad things to come were certainly present. It was public knowledge that Kosovo was part of Serbia and that some 40,000 Serb army, police, and paramilitary troops backed by 300 tanks occupied it. Nebojsa Pavkovic, commander of Yugoslavia’s Third Army Corps, was quoted in the Washington Post a few days before NATO intervened: “If attacked from outside, Yugoslavia will deal with the remaining terrorists in Kosovo.” “Terrorists,” as had been established in Bosnia, was official parlance for all men (armed and unarmed) above the age of sixteen. Still, few Western observers leaped to the conclusion that if bombed, Milosevic would rid Kosovo of its entire Albanian population. They again fell prey to likening the circumstances on the ground in Kosovo to those in Bosnia. In fact the two situations bore little but the neighborhood in common. In Kosovo the Albanians were trapped under Serbia’s control. KLA rebels held scattered hillsides, but Serbian regular soldiers and police controlled all of Kosovo’s towns and main roads. By contrast, by the time NATO began its massive bombing campaign in Bosnia in 1995, virtually no Croats or Muslims were left in Serb-held territory. They had already been expelled. Thus, the Serbs could not respond to NATO’s late-summer 1995 bombing by killing or deporting them. The country was ethnically tidy in a way that Kosovo was not (yet).

  NATO planners were also unable to imagine gratuitous evil on the scale Milosevic had planned. Notwithstanding the perpetration of hundreds of thousands of crimes by Serbs under his control in Bosnia, U.S. officials and citizens still strained to believe that Milosevic would himself order a systematic campaign of destruction. In the American psyche, serial killers remained bug-eyed like Charles Manson or prone to leave their bloody paw prints at the scene of the crime like the late Serbian paramilitary warlord Zeljko “Arkan” Raznjatovic. They simply did not look—or talk—like Slobodan Milosevic, a man who dined out on his charms and maintained a deceptive distance from his crime scenes. At the Dayton peace talks in November 1995, with his sense of humor and charisma, Milosevic had endeared himself to many. He quickly learned the first names of the waitresses at Packy’s Sports Bar, a frequent hangout. He sang “Tenderly” with the pianist at the local officer’s club.17 And U.S. negotiators deemed him “brilliant” and “sophisticated,” adjectives they did not apply to his Muslim and Croat counterparts. Modern-day mass murderers come well disguised. As Clinton’s first-term National Security Adviser Lake notes, “There are very few Genghis Khans around who like to play polo with the heads of their enemies.”

  During the NATO bombing campaign, Milosevic kept up appearances, playing to the Western gallery. On April 30, 1999, in an interview with Arnaud de Borchgrave of United Press International, he denied that his forces were torching Albanian villages. “Individual houses, yes,” Milosevic said. “But not whole villages as we saw on TV in Vietnam, when American forces torched villages suspected of hiding Viet Cong.” He criticized the Rambouillet peace conference, quoting a man he admired. “Henry Kissinger has said Rambouillet was a mechanism for the permanent creation of problems and confrontation,” Milosevic said. “President Clinton should have listened to this wise geopolitical expert rather than some of his own less knowledgeable advisers.”18

  If anybody should have been able to see through Milosevic’s disguise it was General Clark, who directed the NATO operation. From his time at the Dayton peace talks, Clark was well acquainted with the spuriousness of Milosevic’s charm, the prevalence of his lies, and the hardness of his heart. Milosevic had even taunted Clark that he would need just five days to deport all of Kosovo’s Albanians.19 Still, even General Clark’s team calculated that the bombing would achieve its aims quickly and the Serbs would expel no more than 200,000 Albanians.

  The imminent victims of Milosevic’s mercurial wrath also misjudged. The Kosovo Albanian leadership had been urging bombing for months, and U.S. officials assumed they knew what they were doing. Baton Haxiu, an editor at the independent Kosovo daily newspaper Koha Ditore (“Daily Times”), wore a T-shirt with a logo that captured the Albanian mood: a Nike swoosh and the motto, “NATO AIR—JUST DO IT.” Blerim Shala, editor of the weekly news magazine Zeri (“Voice”) and a member of the Kosovo delegation at Rambouillet, returned to his homeland from France aware of the risks that lay ahead. “You must understand that the value of individual life in Kosovo b
efore the bombing was zero. The Serbs were the owners of our lives,” he says. “When you reach that bottom line, you don’t care about the consequences. . . . In the mind of ordinary Albanians, it was better to die than to live under Serbia.” Given the choice, virtually every Albanian in Kosovo would have preferred to take his or her chances with NATO bombing over business as usual under Milosevic. One of the few New York Times editorials that mentioned the possibility of Serb retaliation against Albanians appeared on March 24, the day NATO began its attack; it noted “that is the risk the Albanians are willing to take.”20

  The Constraint: “No Casualties”

  At the start of the air war, the allies’ political and military planners hoped that the Serb leadership would quickly agree to grant autonomy to Kosovo’s 2 million ethnic Albanians. But when the bombing gave the Serbs a pretext to intensify their killings and expulsions, General Clark attempted to shift Washington’s focus away from simply avoiding NATO casualties and to defeating the Serbs and reversing their cleansing operation. Clark tried to accelerate the NATO operation, to plan for a ground invasion, and to deploy Apache helicopters that could fly far closer to the ground and target Serb paramilitaries. But he was rebuffed. NATO was thus almost useless at inhibiting the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, which was why it had intervened in the first place. “You can’t stop human rights violations from a distance,” German general Klaus Naumann, former chairman of NATO’s military committee, later said. “You must be ready to commit ground troops, or the whole thing is a sham.”21 Critics chided Clinton’s “no-ground-troops” mantra, saying that the refusal to risk U.S. soldiers amounted to a new principle of “combatant immunity.” Clark argued that it impeded NATO’s effectiveness and endangered the lives of Serbian and Albanian civilians.