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

[Anthony Fenton]

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

Nato's 'good war' in Kosovo degraded international law

Mon, Mar 23, 2009

OPINION: Nato’s military action against Slobodan Milosevic is often  
held up as a triumph of justice over legality. But was it right? asks  
AIDAN HEHIR .

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 PR  
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 10 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