A pattern of aggression: Yugoslavia and Milosevic

Iraq was not the first illegal US-led attack on a sovereign state in recent times. The precedent was set in 1999 in Yugoslavia writes Kate Hudson

The legality of the war against Iraq remains the focus of intense debate - as is the challenge it poses to the post-second-world-war order, based on the inviolability of sovereign states. That challenge, however, is not a new one. The precursor is without doubt Nato's 1999 attack on Yugoslavia, also carried out without UN support. Look again at how the US and its allies behaved then, and the pattern is unmistakable. Yugoslavia was a sovereign state with internationally recognised borders; an unsolicited intervention in its internal affairs was excluded by international law. The US-led onslaught was therefore justified as a humanitarian war - a concept that most international lawyers regarded as having no legal standing (the Commons foreign affairs select committee described it as of "dubious legality"). The attack was also outside Nato's own remit as a defensive organisation - its mission statement was later rewritten to allow for such actions.

In Yugoslavia, as in Iraq, the ultimate goal of the aggressor nations was regime change. In Iraq, the justification for aggression was the possession of weapons of mass destruction; in Yugoslavia, it was the prevention of a humanitarian crisis and genocide in Kosovo. In both cases, the evidence for such accusations has been lacking: but while this is now widely accepted in relation to Iraq, the same is not true of Yugoslavia.

In retrospect, it has become ever clearer that the justification for war was the result of a calculated provocation - and manipulation of the legitimate grievances of the Kosovan Albanians - in an already tense situation within the Yugoslav republic of Serbia. The constitutional status of Kosovo had been long contested and the case for greater Kosovan Albanian self-government had been peacefully championed by the Kosovan politician, Ibrahim Rugova.

In 1996, however, the marginal secessionist group, the Kosovo Liberation Army, stepped up its violent campaign for Kosovan independence and launched a series of assassinations of policemen and civilians in Kosovo, targeting not only Serbs, but also Albanians who did not support the KLA. The Yugoslav government branded the KLA a terrorist organisation - a description also used by US officials. As late as the beginning of 1998, Robert Gelbard, US special envoy to Bosnia, declared: "The UCK (KLA) is without any question a terrorist group."

KLA attacks drew an increasingly heavy military response from Yugoslav government forces and in the summer of 1998 a concerted offensive against KLA strongholds began. In contrast to its earlier position, the US administration now threatened to bomb Yugoslavia unless the government withdrew its forces from the province, verified by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The US was now clearly determined to remove Milosevic, who was obstructing Yugoslavia's integration into the western institutional and economic framework.

Agreement was reached in October 1998 and 1,000 OSCE observers went to Kosovo to oversee the withdrawal of government troops. But the KLA used the pullback to renew armed attacks. In January 1999 an alleged massacre of 45 Kosovan Albanians by Yugoslav government forces took place at Racak. Both at the time and subsequently, evidence has been contradictory and fiercely contested as to whether the Racak victims were civilians or KLA fighters and whether they died in a firefight or close-range shootings.

Nevertheless, Racak was seized on by the US to justify acceleration towards war. In early 1999, the OSCE reported that "the current security environment in Kosovo is characterised by the disproportionate use of force by the Yugoslav authorities in response to persistent attacks and provocations by the Kosovan Albanian paramilitaries." But when the Rambouillet talks convened in February 1999, the KLA was accorded the status of national leader. The Rambouillet text, proposed by the then US secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, included a wide range of freedoms and immunities for Nato forces within Yugoslavia that amounted to an effective occupation. Even the former US secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, described it as "a provocation, an excuse to start bombing". The Yugoslavs refused to sign, so bombing began on March 24 1999.

Despite claims by western leaders that Yugoslav forces were conducting "genocide" against the Kosovan Albanians, reports of mass killings and atrocities - such as the supposed concealment of 700 murdered Kosovan Albanians in the Trepca mines - were often later admitted to be wrong. Atrocities certainly were carried out by both Serb and KLA forces. But investigative teams did not find evidence of the scale of dead or missing claimed at the time, responsibility for which was attributed to the Yugoslavs. The damage inflicted by US and British bombing, meanwhile, was considerable, including civilian casualties estimated at between 1,000 and 5,000 deaths. Nato forces also used depleted uranium weapons - linked to cancers and birth defects - while Nato bombers destroyed swathes of Serbia's economic and social infrastructure.

Far from solving a humanitarian crisis, the 79-day bombardment triggered the flight of hundreds of thousands of Kosovans. Half a million Kosovan Albanians who had supposedly been internally displaced turned out not to have been, and of the 800,000 who had sought refuge or been forced into neighbouring countries, the UNHCR estimated that 765,000 had already returned to Kosovo by August of the same year. A more long-lasting result, however, was that half the Kosovan Serb population - approximately 100,000 - left Kosovo or was driven out.

So was the war worth it? Notwithstanding the Nato-UN protectorate established in Kosovo, the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia was no longer under threat - the Kosovans did not achieve their independence. Nor has western support for the KLA been mirrored in Kosovan voting patterns: the party of Rugova, who never backed the violent path, received a convincing majority in the elections in 2001.

Meanwhile, violence dogs the surviving minority communities, and in spite of the presence of 40,000 K-For troops and a UN police force, the Serb and other minorities (such as Roma) have continued to be forced out. More than 200,000 are now estimated to have left. In the short term, support for Milosevic actually increased as a result of the war, and the regime was only changed through a combination of economic sanctions, elections and heavy western intervention. Such interference in a country's internal politics does not generally lead to a stable and peaceful society, as evidenced by the recent assassination of Serbian prime minister Zoran Djindjic, the most pro-western politician in the country.

As in Yugoslavia, so in Iraq: illegal aggression justified by spin and fabrication enables might to prevail and deals a terrible blow to the framework of international law. As in Yugoslavia, so in Iraq, people's wellbeing comes a poor second-best to the interests of the world's self-appointed moral and economic arbiters.

For the thousandth time, WMD wre not the only reason for going into Iraq. Saddam's public, well known, non-secret, material support of terrorist organizations, combined with UN complicity in Saddam breaking international law in the form of thumbing his nose at 18 UN Resolutions are factors purposely ignored by those who wish to gain political power and/or those who had a serious financial stake in Saddam's continued tyrrany.

As for the QUESTION of WMD, the Kay report gives clear evidence of a bioweapon program in Iraq under the noses of UN weapons inspectors.

As for Kosovo, I pretty much agree with the author. Because I've studied terrorism for so many years and formed a clear picture of the interrelationships between various organized terrorism rings, I knew then we were walking into tragedy and enabling terrorists - and laid out the reasons over and over again.

Well, this is still wrong on Iraq. But it's encouraging if the liberal press is starting to wake on Yugoslavia.

Clinton's war was totally illegal, immoral, and to top it all off was fought on the wrong side. In a strange kind of way, that made it more acceptable in the eyes of liberals. It was clearly against our own interests; therefore it must have been right. That was their "logic" at work.

There were other differences too. Clinton bombed and killed almost exclusively civilian targets, many of them deliberately. Bush directed a war that was EXTREMELY careful not to hit bystanders or civilians, even at the cost of taking more allied losses.

It's doubtful that the left ever will admit any of this, but at least this article is a start.

Clinton bombed and killed almost exclusively civilian targets, many of them deliberately.

I keep shoving this back down your throat, and you keep vomiting it back up on as many threads as you can.

I just had this discussion with Destro, so are you going to own up to looking for American pilots who were involved in Allied Force being prosecuted for non-extant war crimes as well as he is?

I've asked you this question before, so just consider this another opportunity for you to punk out when the consequences of your position are brought to your attention.

CNN was warned?

How's about we told the Serbian government that we were going to disrupt their propaganda program by taking out the building and they sacrificed low level employees in the building rather than evacuating it.

There was a trial in Serbia where the relatives of the dead workers sued Dragoljub Milanovic, the RTS director and he was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment for failing to pass along the warning to the employees killed in the raid - how unsurprising you are unaware of it.

Meanwhile, you're continuing to describe the actions of our pilots and crewmembers who took part in attacks which resulted in collateral damage as war crimes.

What about attacks that resulted in Iraqi or Afghani civilian deaths? Are you all bent out of shape about them, or is there a double standard at work in your little noggin?

Whether or not the head of the TV station was responsible is still controverted. The following is an extract from a web page posted by Reporters Without Borders early in 2003. What it seems to indicate is that Milanovic was entangled in the assassination of Djindjic, which was essentially a political quarrel. He has also been accused of not moving the personnel out, but even these advocates don't seem to see this as more than a possibility. They note that the relatives of the dead victims also blame NATO, which, however, denies their right to sue.

I would add that I do not accuse ordinary members of our military of being war criminals. They have a duty to obey orders unless it is clear that they are illegal and immoral, and that is a very difficult decision for a serving member of the military to make, in spite of what was said at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials.

I do consider clinton, Clark, Cohen, Allbright, and other top political leaders to be war criminals. The extract I have mentioned follows:

Dragoljub Milanovic, the former chief of Serbian radio and TV (RTS), was arrested on 2 April as part of the enquiry into the assassination of prime minister Zoran Djindjic. The government said he had been "in hiding with the help of members of the Zemun gang," an underworld group suspected of murdering Djindjic. Milanovic was sentenced to 10 years in prison on 21 June last year for not evacuating the RTS building during NATO bombing in 1999, thereby allowing 16 employees to be killed. He did not turn up at Belgrade prison to start his jail term.

21.06.2002 - Former head of Serbian radio and TV jailed for 10 years

Reporters Without Borders expressed satisfaction today at the 10-year prison sentence passed on the former head of Serbian radio and TV (RTS), Dragoljub Milanovic, for being responsible for the death of 16 of his employees killed in the 1999 NATO bombing of the station's offices.

Judge Radmila Dragicevic-Bicic said he had "not obeyed the order to evacuate the station's staff to temporary offices" and that he "knew the building could be a bombing target and that people would be killed." A legal enquiry was opened last 12 February in Belgrade to find out if Milanovic had been told NATO would bomb the building.

Reporters Without Borders hopes NATO will now investigate its own responsibility in the 23 April 1999 air strike during the offensive against Federal Yugoslavia during the Kosovo war.

The organisation published a report on 22 November 2000 of its own enquiry entitled "Serbian broadcasting : Chronicle of martyrdom foretold , in which it accused the heads of RTS of deliberately keeping their staff in the dark about the imminent bombing.

At the same time, the families of the victims took their case to the European Court of Human Rights and sued NATO's 17 member-states who are also signatories of the European Convention on Human Rights (Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Turkey and the United Kingdom).

The Court rejected their suit on 19 December last year, saying Federal Yugoslavia was not under the jurisdiction of the sued states and that the Convention did not apply to extra-territorial actions by the 41 Council of Europe member-states that ratified it.

Wrong answer - what about "not obeyed the order to evacuate the station's staff to temporary offices" did you not understand? The fact that he was being protected by the Zemun gang is irrelevant to his actions in 1999.

As to what servicemembers know and do in regards to illegal orders, I take it that you've never served, so I'll tell you that you are attempting to tell someone who has about something you know absolutely nothing about. The pilots involved in Allied Force knew what targets they were hitting, especially the ones who were using PGMs to drop bridges in Serbia. You cannot call what they did a war crime without accusing the pilots themselves of being war criminals.

You've staked your position out, so be a man about it and either quit equivocating or admit your error.

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