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An anniversary that went almost entirely unnoticed in the US press this week marked a war that sought to legitimize humanitarian military intervention in the modern world. Ten years ago on Tuesday, forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or NATO, began a 78-day bombing campaign targeted the Balkan nation, known as the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, in the name of humanitarian intervention. Then Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was accused of carrying out a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing, a term that became popular as a result, against ethnic Albanians. The NATO bombing campaign resulted in 2000 deaths, the displacement of a million people, and a breaking up of the entire country into Serbia, Montenegro, and the state of Kosovo. Kosovo was administered by NATO and the UN until a year ago when it declared independence. The Serbian government, which remains defiant over Kosovo, marked the 10th anniversary of the war by sounding air raid sirens, and observing a moment of silence in classrooms. A thousand nationalist youth gathered in the Serbian capital of Belgrade demanding weapons; twenty four were arrested. Meanwhile, members of the Balkan diaspora, identifying themselves as anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist activists of diverse backgrounds, released a strongly-worded statement criticizing the war and its devastating aftermath.

GUEST: Tamara Vukov, Global Balkans Network

Read the statement on the 10th anniversary of the Kosovo war by the Global Balkans Network here: http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/gbn240309.html

Rough Transcript:

Sonali Kolhatkar: In just a moment, we’ll speak with one of the members of the Global Balkans Network that put out the statement, but first, I want to play an excerpt of the speech that President Bill Clinton on March 24, 1999 gave to the U.S. audience on primetime television justifying the NATO war to American audiences:

Bill Clinton: My fellow Americans, today our armed forces joined our NATO allies and airstrikes against Serbian forces responsible for the brutality in Kosovo. We have acted with resolve for several reasons. We act to protect thousands of innocent people in Kosovo from a mounting military offensive. We act to prevent a wider war. To diffuse a powder keg at the heart of Europe that has exploded twice before in this century with catastrophic results. And we act to stand united with our allies for peace. By acting now, we are upholding our values, protecting our interests, and advancing the cause of peace. For years, Kosovo struggled peacefully to get their rights back. When President Milosevic sent his troops and police to crush them, the struggle grew violent. Last fall our diplomacy backed by the threat of force from our NATO alliance, stopped the fighting for a while. And rescued tens of thousands of people from freezing and starvation in the hills where they had fled to save their lives. As the Kosovars were saying Yes to Peace, Serbia stationed 40,000 troops in and around Kosovo in preparation for a major offensive and in clear violation of the commitments they had made. Now they’ve started moving from village to village. Shelling civilians and torturing their houses. We’ve seen innocent people taken from their homes, forced to kneel in the dirt and sprayed with bullets. Kosovo men dragged from their families. Fathers and sons together, lined up and shot in cold blood. This is not war in the traditional sense. It is an attack by tanks and artillery on a largely defenseless people whose leaders already have agreed to peace. Ending this tragedy is a moral imperative. It is also important to America’s national interest.

SK: Former U.S. President Bill Clinton justifying the U.S. NATO war to American audiences on March 24, 1999, ten years ago, this past Tuesday. Joining me on the line right now from Paris is Tamara Vukov, with the Global Balkans Network, welcome to Uprising Tamara.

Tamara Vukov: Hi, thank you, Sonali.

SK: Can you respond to President Clinton’s logic, that it was morally imperative for the U.S. and NATO to bomb Yugoslavia because of Milosevic’s treatment of ethnic Albanians.
TV: Reflecting back on the logic ten years later, I think there was a way in which Clinton really did try to dramatize in a certain sense the plight of the Albanian people. And in the Global Balkans Network, we do not deny and we do not support the actions of Milosevic or the Yugoslav army in Kosovo at that time. But I think the record has shown since then that in fact the diplomatic negotiations that the U.S. was a key player in at Rambouillet, was actually not played out to the full extent of the possible diplomacy that could have been used. In fact, the U.S. actually included clauses within the Rambouillet agreement that were absolutely unacceptable to any sitting, sovereign state. For example, allowing access to NATO troops, the entire territory of what was then the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. So in fact the U.S. did not actually play the peace keeping role that it portrays itself as having done and I think that this was an important point in launching a sort of logic of humanitarian intervention that we have seen used elsewhere that we may see used again. Because I think it’s more of a democratic, U.S. strategy. We had several years of a Republican Administration where there was a very different kind of justification for U.S. Imperialism, but I think the logic of humanitarian intervention is something that the Democrats really crafted and many of those people are once again in the administration.

SK: Well, Tamara, what was the immediate human toll of this seventy eight day bombing campaign, given this humanitarian intervention excuse?

TV: Right, well, again, statistics, I find always leave a lot of things out. A generally agreed upon number is approximately over two thousand civilians of all nationalities who were killed with cluster bombs, cruise missiles, obviously there was radiation, graphite bombs, all kinds of weapons that were used. In addition, the intervention, unlike what Clinton states in his address, had the effect of actually escalating the conflict between the U.S. army and the Kosovo Liberation Army and so that also generated additional victims of perhaps 4,000 or more people. So, again, the effects of this humanitarian logic are very different from what one would hope that a humanitarian politics would actually be about, which would be about diffusing conflict and actually trying to mediate in a way that would do the least harm, and this certainly was not the case.

SK: What about those people displaced, I mentioned about a million and of course, these numbers as you’ve said, it’s hard to really accurately measure the human toll, but at least a million people were displaced, where are they now?

TV: Well, there was a wave of displacement, of course of Kosovo Albanians at the time the intervention took place, of maybe 700,000 people and they were able to return. But what happened and under the watch of NATO once NATO came in and KFOR, the Kosovo Productions Force of the UN, came in of June, 1999, a wave of displacement of both Serb and of Roma and other ethnic minorities, Ashkawi(SP?), Egyptian as well, began under the nose of NATO and was completely allowed to happen. I’ve spoken to many people who’ve experienced this kind of displacement and they said that often the KFOR troops would leave the same day and they would get attacked and displaced. So for many people, it seems quite coordinated. And there’s about 250,000 people who are then displaced and live today as eternally displaced people in Serbia. Their fate is very difficult. Many of them were given temporary housing, in 1999, by international organizations. And most of them are still in them today. And I would really like to underline that I think the plight of the Roma and Ashkawi people who are displaced in particularly dramatic in a sense. Many of them were given shipping containers, if not make shift housing, and these were people who had apartments and jobs and lost all these things when they were displaced. And many of them still live in them today in extremely appalling conditions. No heating. No water. And so on. I think we say in our statement, these are really the erased of this whole conflict and what’s happened with international politics since. They’ve been pretty much forgotten. Their prospects for local integration, there are efforts for that, but they are quite difficult, given the local strain on the local economy as it is…

SK: I want to talk about that strain on the local economy. In the statement that you mentioned, you talk about the new liberal transition of Yugoslavia’s various successors states, what has that transition been like, how have people been coping?

TV: Well, it actually precedes the break up of Yugoslavia. And I think as a network we are also trying to make the point that these things are not disconnected. A program of shock therapy was introduced in Yugoslavia in 1990 the same day as in Poland, which now Naomi Klein talks about in the Shock Doctrine. This had very dramatic effects at the time. It was under the counsel of Geoffrey Sachs, in fact. At the time, Branko Horvat another economist, made the point that people were living under conditions that were in terms of the drop in gross domestic product and living standards, worse than the Great Depression. So this has a long history and is not unrelated to the ways in which nationalism did arise in the region and it really has only got worse. I was recently there in October, and I actually spoke with some Neo Liberal economists who are actually more rabid than some of the Neo Liberal economists in the U.S. who made the point that, for example the entire banking system was liquidated in 2002, and there were no bailouts for banks in the region. So mostly it’s now foreign banks. There’s the whole process of privatization, for example, in Serbia and Montenegro which I know the best, since 2000 has been very brutally implemented and has led to massive unemployment and impoverishment. So it’s been a very difficult process.

SK: Tamara, you talked about Nationalism. How strong are Nationalists elements in Serbia and Montenegro today. I can imagine there is a serious feeling of resentment over the war, ten years ago, over the newly independent state of Kosovo, and nationalist elements were protesting on the streets on Tuesday. Can you describe for our listeners what their politics are, what their goals and aims are, and who they are?

TV: Yeah, I would say, from what I understand, the protest on Tuesday, there are organized right wing groups, groups like ABROZ (SP?), and elements linked to the radical party of Serbia who did play a role in anti-NATO protests on Tuesday that are troubling. Their politics are something that we at the network very much oppose. And I think that’s part of the challenge on the ground at the Balkans is how to articulate a different kind of politics that rejects both Nationalism and a Neo liberalism, sort of a pro-Neo liberalism that’s been imposed there. And it’s a very difficult turkey thing to do on the ground and part of the problem is that often the anti-nationalists elements are very pro-neoliberal. Often certain NGO’s and groups play a very specific role in articulating a certain anti-nationalists politics that in a sense reinforces a really ugly circle between the nationalists and pro-neoliberal elements in society. So we are really trying to find a way, a grass roots way to build an opposition to both.

SK: Tamara, let’s talk a little bit about Kosovo itself. The state of Kosovo declared an independence last year after nine years of being administered by the United Nations and NATO and some elites in the US and NATO would say that was a successful culmination of the 1999 campaign. What is happening on the ground in Kosovo today? How independent is it and what is the state of people’s lives?

TV: The question of Independence is somewhat deceptive. There has been a form of declaration of independence yet, if you look at what the structures are, and this is true for elsewhere in the Balkans as well, the role of the UNMIK which is the new UN administration that’s taken over from the UN mission in Kosovo, plays a very interesting role and can veto any policies that the government does try to introduce. So the structure is not autonomous in the sense that it’s presented to be. Just as the office in Bosnia the office of the high representative plays a very intraventionary role in local politics. As elsewhere Yugoslavia the elites that are in power are far from ideal rulers. They are often mixed up with military and organized criminal elements and most things are run by a local economy. Unemployment is over 50%. And, in particular, minorities in the enclave, and again I would mention Roma as well as Serb, minorities are living in enclaves where they often can’t leave. This is an issue that the EU is formally trying to sort out with the Kosovo government, but on the ground, I was there last summer, and you have communities where people have not been to Pristina, they have not left their enclave in ten years because of fear. The situation is quite dire on the ground and I would say economically as well for the Kosovo/Albanian populations.

SK: So Tamara, economic devastation, political devastation, human rights are not being properly observed, people are poor and starving, this devastation ten years after this 78 day bombing campaign was supposed to be the result of a so-called humanitarian intervention, ten years later, why do you think the U.S. and NATO did what they did? Some might say to justify these humanitarian interventionist ideals, but perhaps also to apply those shock doctrine type economic models to Yugoslavia, formally socialist state. What do you think?

TV: Yeah, I do think that’s part of it. Yugoslavia was probably an important testing ground for a lot of these neo-liberal economic policies and the results have been quite devastating. I think there is also a sense of the US and via NATO in this case and certain European Union countries having their own economic interests. There’s been quite a bit of foreign investment. U.S. Steel bought up the Steel factory, that was bombed, often under quite questionable privatization processes, as well, and I think it’s also been inserting certain fears of influence. For instance, you have Camp Bondsteel in the South of Kosovo. That’s one of the largest U.S. army bases in the region. And there are also some rather unclear activities that go on. I don’t think it’s that different from U.S. policies elsewhere, but it’s taken its own form in the region.

Special Thanks to Celina for transcribing this interview.