[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Nato's 'good war' in Kosovo degraded international law

[Bill Totten]

Nato's military action against Slobodan Milosevic is often held up as a
triumph of justice over legality. But was it right?

by Aidan Hehir

Irish Times (March 23 2009)


TEN YEARS ago today Nato, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation,
launched Operation Allied Force against the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia. Nato claimed to be undertaking a humanitarian intervention,
accusing Slobodan Milosevic's regime of a campaign of aggression and
forced displacement against the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, Serbia's
southern province. Military action was a "moral imperative", according
to then US president Bill Clinton.

The campaign itself was a success; it lasted just 78 days, Nato did not
suffer a single casualty and at its conclusion Nato personnel were
literally welcomed with open arms by the Kosovo Albanians. Milosevic's
power was fatally undermined and within two years he had been toppled
and sent to The Hague to stand trial for war crimes.

In many ways Operation Allied Force has come to be nostalgically
remembered as the zenith of a better era. In 1999 "The Third Way" and
"Ethical Foreign Policy" were terms which provoked hope rather than
cynicism and Nato's actions appeared to affirm the power of people to
force their governments to "do something" in the face of humanitarian
tragedy abroad.

The then fresh-faced Tony Blair was regarded at worst as a naive
"do-gooder" while Clinton's reputation for circumspection in foreign
affairs has been retrospectively heightened by the eight years of war
and international divisiveness which characterised George W Bush's
administration; Clinton's "good war" in Kosovo has been regularly
contrasted with Bush's "bad war" in Iraq.

Operation Allied Force was a spectacle of force the ordinarily cautious
and sceptical could proudly support; this was not a war fought for
interests or revenge, it was, according to Blair, "a war fought for
values". Milosevic was the archetypal Balkan bad guy, the Kosovo
Albanians clear victims and Kosovo had no oil or major strategic value.

It was the war the liberal left could, and indeed did, support while the
anti-war movement failed to mobilise beyond the political margins.
Mainstream media coverage, albeit periodically nervous, was favourable
throughout, aided to a significant extent by Nato's polished Public
Relations machine and the verbal dexterity of its chief spokesman Jamie
Shea.

Lacking Security Council authorisation, Nato's campaign was illegal but
this was deemed of minor importance and a function of an anachronistic
legal framework which privileged states rather than the people who lived
within them. Nato's actions were described as "illegal but legitimate"
and evidence of a new dispensation among Western states to alter the
norms governing the use of force.

Human rights, long rendered impotent by the restrictions of
international law and the narrow national interests of the powerful few,
were now, it seemed, finally to be realised. Supporters of Nato's
intervention, emboldened by righteous victory, loudly heralded ever more
exuberant predictions of the coming era. We were entering, according to
Geoffrey Robertson QC, "the age of enforcement". Everything, it seemed,
was possible now that power had been harnessed by justice. Events since,
however, have not evolved according to this optimistic analysis.

It is a matter of some irony that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was
decried as a violation of international law by many of the same
commentators who enthusiastically welcomed Nato's "illegal but
legitimate" intervention just four years earlier.

The coalition which prosecuted the pointedly named "Operation Iraqi
Freedom" explicitly drew parallels between their "liberation" of Iraq
and the intervention in Kosovo. Supporters of Operation Allied Force
were left to express wounded surprise at the commandeering of their
humanitarian arguments. It would be an exaggeration to claim that Nato's
intervention directly led to the invasion of Iraq but equally it is
disingenuous to disavow any correlation; legal systems do not thrive
when their most powerful subjects subvert their seminal prescriptions
and it is not surprising that the "illegal but legitimate" argument
advanced by Nato in 1999 has contributed to the unprecedented
contemporary crisis of confidence in the UN framework.

What of the "age of enforcement"? The international response to the
violence in Darfur from 2003 on - far worse than that which occurred in
Kosovo - suggests that Western states have not undergone a conversion to
an ethical foreign policy.

The high-publicity international campaign calling for intervention in
Darfur and the massive anti-war protests against the invasion of Iraq
suggest that in contrast to the analysis widely proffered at the time of
Nato's intervention, public opinion has a limited influence on the
foreign policy of even liberal Western states. Operation Allied Force
has not led to any substantive reform of international law in favour of
human rights apart from a nebulous commitment to a "responsibility to
protect" at the 2005 World Summit. States in the developing world,
fearful of neo-colonialism, have been to the fore in opposing legal
reform but so too have Western states reluctant to subject themselves to
international scrutiny or accept any commitment to intervene.

Kosovo itself has had a difficult ten years; though initially greeted as
liberators the UN and Nato were soon accused of obstructing Kosovo's
independence leading to the March 2004 riots when Albanians vented their
fury at the international administration. Kosovo remains deeply divided,
violent and economically underdeveloped and while the Kosovo Assembly
declared independence in February 2008, Kosovo enjoys few of the
traditional trappings of statehood, not least political autonomy.

Righteous, albeit illegal, vengeance has been a common narrative of
popular culture. Frustrated by laws which appear to protect oppressors,
heroes from Batman to countless John Wayne cowboys have "done the right
thing" in defiance of "the rules". We have come to venerate many
political actors who have similarly subverted the law in the name of
morality.

Yet, history shows that the rejection of law in favour of morality
carries enormous danger and echoes of vigilantism. Those who have
orchestrated or supported the forcible subversion of one set of
ostensibly immoral laws in favour of the pursuit of "justice" have often
found that in the process they have unleashed forces beyond their control.

The excesses of the Bush administration and Blair's later zealotry owed
much to Nato's actions in 1999 and as we assess the current predicament
of international politics, and especially the increasingly impotent and
sidelined UN system, the role of Operation Allied Force in the
degradation of international law must be acknowledged.

_____

Aidan Hehir is a senior lecturer in international relations at the
centre for the study of democracy at the University of Westminster

(c) 2009 The Irish Times

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/0323/1224243268695.html


TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this
essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/