Web Of Deceit: Britain's Real Foreign Policy
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There was one other reason given for going to war: to preserve NATO’s ‘credibility’. Blair said the day before launching the bombing that ‘to walk away now would … destroy NATO’s credibility’. Robin Cook said that ‘I think its [NATO’s] credibility would have been undermined if we had failed to act in this case.’19
NATO leaders had long searched for a new mission for the organisation after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and NATO’s fiftieth anniversary was due on 23–5 April 1999. As war raged in Kosovo, Blair delivered a speech in Chicago outlining some principles of ‘humanitarian intervention’, that he termed a ‘doctrine of the international community’. The speech was widely praised as showing our leader’s commitment to the highest values, while NATO forces were committing violations of international law in Kosovo, after having launched an illegal war. In reality, the speech was a justification for the war. British and US leaders have always delivered fancy speeches when they are about to pulverise enemies; George Bush’s ‘new world order’ speech, for example, was delivered to justify the onslaught to ‘liberate’ Kuwait in 1991. In the Chicago speech, Blair explained the meaning of ‘credibility’:
One of the reasons why it is now so important to win the conflict is to ensure that others do not make the same mistake in the future. That in itself will be a major step to ensuring that the next decade and the next century will not be as difficult as the past. If NATO fails in Kosovo, the next dictator to be threatened with military force may well not believe our resolve to carry the threat through.20
This is frightening stuff. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, Blair is acting like a mafia don. When a shopkeeper fails to pay protection money the goons despatched do not simply take the money, they leave him a broken wreck, so that others will get the message.21 The head of the Outlaw State is in my view here delivering a similar message to those threatening the bosses of world order.
International law and war crimes
The war supposedly fought to defend humanitarian values was done in plain violation of international law. Robin Cook said that ‘the legal basis for our action is that the international community states do have the right to use force in the case of overwhelming humanitarian necessity’. In fact, express authorisation by the UN Security Council is needed to launch military action. The war also violated the NATO treaty, Article 5 of which says that force can be used only in self-defence.
Britain also prevented consideration of the case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Yugoslavia brought proceedings against several NATO members, including Britain, to the ICJ in April 1999. Whitehall chose not to contest the substantive issue and argued the procedural point that Yugoslavia had accepted the court’s compulsory jurisdiction too late for Britain to be required to deal with Yugoslavia’s complaint. The Foreign Affairs Committee concludes that ‘the decision to rely on a technicality to prevent the International Court from deciding the issue does suggest a concern that the judgement would not have been favourable’.22
NATO was guilty of numerous violations of international law in the bombing. This is now (and pretty much then, as well) conveniently forgotten as we move on to other targets in defence of civilised values.
Five hundred Yugoslav civilians are known to have died in ninety separate attacks, according to Human Rights Watch. It established sixty-two of the targets in those ninety incidents. In nine of these sixty-two, civilian deaths ‘were a result of attacks on non-military targets that Human Rights Watch believes were illegitimate’. These included the headquarters of Serb Radio and Television (RTS) in Belgrade, a heating plant and ‘seven bridges that were neither on major transportation routes nor had other military functions’. Human Rights Watch concluded that NATO violated international humanitarian law since it:
conducted air attacks using cluster bombs near populated areas; attacked targets of questionable military legitimacy, including Serb Radio and Television, heating plants and bridges; did not take adequate precautions in warning civilians of attacks; took insufficient precautions identifying the presence of civilians when attacking convoys and mobile targets; and caused excessive civilian casualties by not taking sufficient measures to verify that military targets did not have concentrations of civilians.23
Amnesty International said in its report one year after the bombings that ‘NATO forces violated the laws of war leading to cases of unlawful killings of civilians.’ The bombing of the headquarters of RTS, which left sixteen civilians dead, ‘was a deliberate attack on a civilian object and as such constitutes a war crime’. ‘In various attacks … NATO forces failed to suspend their attack after it was evident that they had struck civilians.’ However, ‘no proper investigation appears to have been conducted by NATO or its member states into these incidents’.24
Throughout the bombing, NATO expressly targeted Milosevic and other elected government officials for assassination. On 22 April 1999, a NATO airstrike demolished Milosevic’s residence, with four bombs striking the living room, dining room and bedroom. When asked during a television interview if this attack indicated that Milosevic was a target, former Pentagon official Ronald Hatchett replied ‘certainly he was … there’s no question about the fact that that was what we were trying to do in striking that house’.25
The prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTFY), Carla del Ponte, has refused to accept that NATO deliberately targeted civilians in the campaign. But Amnesty held to its view that the attack on the RTS was a war crime. The ICTFY declined to investigate possible violations because ‘either the law is not sufficiently clear or investigations are unlikely to result in the acquisition of sufficient evidence to substantiate charges against the high level accused or against lower accused [sic] for particularly heinous offences’. In other words, the tribunal was not expecting NATO to provide such evidence.
The ICTFY report also noted that if the attack on RTS ‘was justified by reference to its propaganda purpose alone, its legality might well be questioned’ – but this was exactly the explanation given to Amnesty by NATO. British ministers have consistently defended the attack on the radio and television station as a ‘legitimate military target’.26
Various groups of lawyers have compiled dossiers against NATO leaders. One group, led by Professor Michael Mandel, sent to the Tribunal a dossier accusing NATO of ‘grave violations of international humanitarian law’ including ‘wilful killing’. It noted an estimated $100 billion damage and the destruction of, or serious damage to, dozens of bridges, railways and railway stations, major roads, airports, including civilian airports, hospitals and health care centres, television transmitters, medieval monasteries and religious shrines, hundreds of schools, thousands of dwellings and civilian industrial and agricultural facilities.27
The Tribunal’s refusal even to investigate NATO actions shows how in reality it is a political tool of NATO (that is, the US and Britain). The Tribunal is funded by the US and its allies and staffed with their approval, and depends on them for their information and support. Comparable crimes have received completely different treatment by the Tribunal: for example, Serb leader Milan Martic was indicted for launching a rocket cluster-bomb attack on military targets in Zagreb in 1995; but NATO’s cluster bomb raid on Nis in May 1999, far from any military target, has simply been ignored. After persistently trying to make the case to the Tribunal for investigating NATO war crimes, Mandel eventually gave up when it became clear ‘that the tribunal was a hoax’.28
There was massive bombing of civilian infrastructure. Human Rights Watch noted that:
We are concerned that NATO bombed the civilian infrastructure not because it was making a significant contribution to the Yugoslav military effort but because its destruction would squeeze Serb civilians to put pressure on Milosevic to withdraw from Kosovo.
Such military force against civilians is a clear violation of international law.29
Two weeks into the NATO campaign a group of Yugoslav NGOs made an appeal to
stop the bombing. They noted that ‘for two weeks now the most powerful military, political and economic countries in the world have been killing people and destroying military and civilian facilities’. The NGOs said they had fought against ‘every war-mongering and nationalistic policy, and for the respect of human rights, and particularly against the repression of Kosovo Albanians’, insisting on the restoration of autonomy for Kosovo. ‘Throughout this period’, they noted, ‘Serb and Albanian civil society groups were the only ones to retain contacts and cooperation. The NATO intervention has destroyed everything that has been achieved so far and the very survival of the civic society in Serbia.’
Similarly, the director of the Belgrade Centre for Human Rights and a former Vice Chair of the Human Rights Committee, Professor Vojin Simitrijevic, wrote that:
The air strikes erased in one night the results of ten years of hard work of groups of courageous people in the non-governmental organisations and in the democratic opposition, who have not tried to ‘topple’ anyone but to develop the institutions of civil society, to promote liberal and civil values, to teach non-violent conflict resolution … The Kosovo problem will remain unresolved and the future of democracy and human rights in Serbia uncertain for many years.30
NATO forces have also left a deadly legacy of thousands of unexploded shells. Human Rights Watch notes that ‘the use of cluster bombs raises questions of humanitarian law’ and that they are dispersed over a large area ‘creating a grave lingering danger for the noncombatant civilian population’. The ‘high dud rate of cluster bomb sub-munitions turns these weapons effectively into anti-personnel landmines that do not distinguish between combatants and noncombatants, detonate on contact, and may lie undisturbed for years after a conflict has ended until someone happens upon one’. Because of their appearance, ‘children are particularly drawn to the volatile live remnants’.31
Half of all British bombs dropped were cluster bombs – 531 of them. The White House quietly restricted the US use of cluster bombs after civilian deaths in the city of Nis on 7 May, for which it blamed a technical fault. But Britain continued to use them, arguing that the technical fault didn’t apply to its own cluster bombs. During the war, between ninety and 150 civilians were killed by these bombs, according to Human Rights Watch.32
The Ministry of Defence admits to a failure rate of 5 per cent for the 147 bomblets in each bomb, but the real figure may be at least double that. According to the Defence Committee, this means that the RAF left between 4,000 and 10,000 unexploded bomblets on the ground in Kosovo. Another 151 people were killed or injured by unexploded bomblets within a year of the end of the bombing.33
NATO was in search of a pretext to start the campaign against Milosevic. In the negotiations in Rambouillet, outside Paris, in March, NATO needed to present Milosevic as totally unwilling to pursue a diplomatic outcome to the crisis. The Yugoslavs were consequently presented with a plan that was impossible to accept. The Rambouillet text drawn up by NATO called for military occupation and political control of Kosovo by NATO and effective military occupation of the rest of the Former Yugoslavia at NATO’s will. Appendix B noted that ‘NATO shall enjoy, together with their vehicles, vessels, aircraft and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the FRY including associated airspace and territorial waters.’
The former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia later said that ‘the insistence of allowing access to all of Yugoslavia by NATO forces … guaranteed a Serbian rejection’. A senior US administration official told the media at Rambouillet that ‘we intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing and that’s what they are going to get.’34
The Foreign Affairs Committee concludes that:
One interpretation of the oral evidence given to us by FCO officials is that they never really believed that Milosevic would sign at Rambouillet, but that … ‘we had to go through a process’, presumably with the aim of promoting unity among the international community in favour of military action by showing that Milosevic was unwilling to negotiate … Unless Milosevic could be blamed for the collapse of the talks, it would be difficult to justify the use of force against him.35
There may have been a chance to secure a diplomatic solution. The Serbian National Assembly responded to the US/NATO ultimatum on 23 March. It rejected the demand for NATO military occupation but called for negotiations leading ‘towards the reaching of a political agreement on a wide-ranging autonomy for Kosovo … with the securing of a full equality of all citizens and ethnic communities’. This possible opening was ignored by NATO and barely reported in the media.36
During the war, US and British leaders managed to ignore or deflect all potential peace deals except those purely on their terms. On 14 April, for example, Germany proposed a six-point peace plan that was consistent with ‘NATO’s’ demands on Milosevic. The plan called for the withdrawal of Yugoslav forces from Kosovo alongside a twenty-four-hour pause in the bombing. This plan was immediately rejected by the US and Britain, who insisted that Milosevic withdraw before a bombing pause. The press reported that ‘the US and Britain are unwilling to stop the bombing temporarily because it might prove hard to restart’.37 With the rejection of the German plan, and also moves by France to present other plans, it was clear that the ‘NATO’ demands were those of the US, backed by Britain.
On 22 April following talks between Milosevic and Russian Foreign Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, the latter announced that Milosevic had agreed to an ‘international presence in Kosovo under United Nations auspices’ if NATO stopped the bombing. He reiterated the Serbian National Assembly proposals of 23 March.38 These diplomatic openings were also ignored by NATO and the bombing continued.
On 3 June, the Kosovo peace accord was signed. The US/NATO abandoned their demands for full military occupation and substantial political control of Kosovo. The Rambouillet wording that has been interpreted as calling for a referendum on independence for Kosovo was also missing. Serbia agreed to an ‘international security presence with substantial NATO participation’. Kosovo was to be under the control of the UN Security Council. The outcome of 3 June suggests that diplomatic initiatives could have been pursued on 23 March.39 The deal that concluded the bombing campaign was in many ways better for Yugoslavia than that offered to Milosevic at Rambouillet and also better than that demanded by NATO during the campaign. There was no requirement, for example, to permit NATO transit rights through Serbia.
With the bombing campaign over, what happened to the immense humanitarian impulses that had supposedly motivated Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and others to act in March 1999? The answer is evident. By late 2000 more than 210,000 ethnic Serbs had been forced to flee Kosovo, most of them in the first few weeks of the NATO troop deployments as agreed in the peace accord. According to British government sources, this figure was three times greater than the number of refugees outside Kosovo before the bombing, which supposedly promoted NATO’s ‘humanitarian’ intervention. This was more ‘ethnic cleansing’, in percentage terms the ‘largest in the Balkan wars’, according to Jan Oberg, Norwegian director of the Transnational Foundation for Peace. Around 1,000 Serbs and Roma were murdered or went missing after mid-June under ‘ethnic cleansing’ by the Kosovan Liberation Army (KLA). This time, however, these abuses elicited no calls for action to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe and no grandstanding speeches. The media were not required to offer their support, so also remained largely quiet.
In this case, massive human rights abuses took place under the very noses of NATO troops. ‘Immediately following NATO’s arrival in Kosovo, there was widespread and systematic burning and looting of homes belonging to Serbs, Roma and other minorities’, Human Rights Watch noted. It said that ‘the international community is partially to blame for the postwar violence’ with the UN and NATO failing ‘to take decisive action from the outset to curb the forced displacement and killings’. The most significant reason for this ‘is the lack of political
will. Senior NATO and UN officials know that persons linked to the former KLA … are implicated in violence and in criminal activities, but they have chosen not to confront them’. Human Rights Watch noted a ‘culture of impunity’ in the province. ‘It took almost a year before international officials’ including NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson ‘were finally willing to concede that attacks against minorities in Kosovo were systematic in nature’.40
In this case, no bombing campaign was required to act in defence of human rights; with thousands of forces on the ground, simple arrest procedures would have been largely sufficient. If, that is, there had been the slightest interest in protecting human rights in Kosovo. The simple conclusion is that defending human rights was never the motive for the war against Yugoslavia. It is a truism to state – and the rest of this book provides further evidence – that ‘human rights’ is simply a convenient pretext to be deployed to promote policies to achieve other objectives.
Motives imagined and real
The media performed a critical role by taking British/NATO rhetoric largely at face value. The war was portrayed as good versus evil, civilisation versus barbarity, and every newspaper except the Independent on Sunday took a pro-war line. Some individual commentators opposed the bombing. But overall the mainstream media revealed themselves once again in war as more a part of the campaign than independent commentators. In particular, there was almost no questioning, let alone ridiculing, of the notion that Britain was fighting for human rights. Virtually the only serious issue debated was whether air power alone could achieve the highly moral objectives assumed by our leaders, or whether the ground troops were also needed.