Making War to Keep Peace (37 page)

As in 1992, this expression of concern from Europe or from any nation did not prevent or deter Milošević from continuing his military campaign against the ethnic Albanian population. Having lost Bosnia, he merely redirected his focus of nationalist passions on Kosovo, which became central to his hold on power.

Government propaganda, a favorite MiloÅ¡ević tool, and the Serb media inflamed the situation, and the Serb security forces took ever more violent action. In February 1998, Yugoslav forces (claiming to rid Kosovo of terrorists) attacked the Drenica region using helicopters and armored vehicles. According to Amnesty International, however, “Between 28 February and 1 March the Serbian police killed 26 ethnic Albanians in the villages of Likosane and Cirez. There was evidence that many of these were unlawfully killed.”
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A subsequent Amnesty International report indicated that the deteriorating security situation in Drenica had led to “hundreds of civilian deaths, many apparently a result of deliberate or indiscriminate attacks” and that the “attacks on civilians have been part of
the reason why more than fifty thousand people have fled their homes.”
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These attacks further inflamed an already volatile situation.

Although targeting civilians had long been a policy of the MiloÅ¡ević government, the brutality of the massacre at Drenica upped the level of violence and captured the attention of foreign policy officials in the U.S. government and elsewhere. At a meeting in Rome with Italian foreign minister Lamberto Dini on March 7, 1998, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright addressed the “explosive and worrisome situation in Kosovo.”
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She had dealt with MiloÅ¡ević before—after five years of work on Bosnia as the U.S. ambassador to the UN, she believed that his actions were moral outrages and feared that MiloÅ¡ević could seriously destabilize the region. Moreover, her personal experience of escaping Nazi-occupied Europe left her ideologically opposed to appeasing dictators, for she had direct experience of the deadly consequences when ambitious leaders resort to coercion and violence to achieve their goals unchecked. She knew that MiloÅ¡ević understood only decisive action, and she remained committed to her word that the United States was “not going to stand by and watch the Serbian authorities do in Kosovo what they can no longer get away with doing in Bosnia.”
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Albright was determined to take serious measures to punish the Belgrade government.

But the division among the allies persisted after years of war in the Balkans, and they had only deepened despite the Dayton Peace Accord. One who shared many of Albright's views was General Wesley Clark, who had been NATO's Supreme Allied Commander in Europe (SACEUR) since 1997. Clark's appointment was controversial within the military; his views were more hawkish than those of many in the Pentagon—including Clinton's second-term secretary of defense, William Cohen, and the service chiefs, who were reluctant to engage militarily in Kosovo. But Clark had experience with Bosnia: having dealt with Milošević in Bosnia and Croatia, and attended the Dayton negotiations, he was aware of Milošević's penchant for violence.

When Clark attended an inspection of U.S. troops stationed in Macedonia in March 1998, Macedonian president Kiro Gilgorov
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warned him that there would be trouble in Kosovo. MiloÅ¡ević, he said, “likes to use military force. And, though he might say he would negotiate, he does this to complicate situations, so he can seek advantages for
himself. In the end, he respects only the threat of military force.”
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Clark's own experience in Bosnia told him that Gilgorov was right.

President Clinton agreed with Secretary Albright that something would have to be done about Kosovo, and he encouraged her personally to take charge of the situation. She later wrote: “I concluded that we should not be content to follow the consensus on Kosovo, which was going nowhere. The NSC [National Security Council] and Pentagon did not desire to become involved in another war in the Balkans. We warned MiloÅ¡ević repeatedly not to launch a war…. On March 19, we met with the President to review our options. Several of us felt that if we did not confront MiloÅ¡ević now we would have to confront him later.”
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Clinton agreed, saying, “In dealing with aggressors in the Balkans, hesitation is a license to kill.”
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On their own initiative, Albright and Clark met with the Contact Group on Yugoslavia in London on March 9, 1998.
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The Contact Group gave MiloÅ¡ević ten days to deescalate the conflict, demanding that he agree to political negotiations with ethnic Albanians in Kosovo led by Rugova. The group demanded that he remove the Serb special police from Kosovo and that the Yugoslav government grant full access to the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights. Albright emphasized the need for “action, not rhetoric” as “the only effective way to deal with this kind of violence.”
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Diplomatic Attempts to Check
Milošević

Albright's work through the Contact Group resulted in a UN resolution on March 31, 1998, imposing an arms embargo on Yugoslavia.
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Security Council Resolution 1160 stated that “failure to make constructive progress toward the peaceful resolution of the situation in Kosovo would lead to the consideration of additional measures” by the UN.
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The resolution did not specify what these measures might be; the very fact of mentioning enforcement, however, signaled that the Security Council no longer considered Kosovo a purely internal Yugoslavian matter. Yugoslavia's ambassador to the UN, Vladislav Jovanovic, denounced the resolution as “an unprecedented interference in internal affairs.”
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The
Russian and Chinese delegates joined in, stating that interference in a country's internal matters “might have wider negative implications.”
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But the denouncements and outrage in New York and the UN resolution had little effect on the situation in Kosovo. Violence pressed forward. Masked Serb forces entered villages and terrorized civilians—killing some, forcing others to leave, separating families, and confiscating property. Many in the targeted villages were marched to train stations and packed onto trains headed toward the Macedonian border.
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In response to pressure from Western Europe and the United States, Milošević held a referendum in April 1998 in which the Serbian people voted against foreigners meddling in their affairs. Empowered by the 95 percent vote of confidence, he stepped up military operations and ethnic cleansing throughout Kosovo.
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The United States responded by pushing for new sanctions, but again the Europeans were not willing to take a tough stand against Serbia. Finally, the United States said it was “prepared to abandon the Contact Group…if the group balks at imposing new sanctions on the Belgrade government when it meets in Rome.”
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The United Kingdom backed the U.S. position, and in the spring of 1998 the Contact Group agreed to freeze Serb and Yugoslav assets and warned that it might block all foreign investment if Milošević did not agree to mediation and to talks with Rugova.
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A month later, the Contact Group imposed an investment ban on Yugoslavia, and the U.S. government sent Richard Holbrooke to Belgrade for the first round of talks.
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To show his personal determination to stop the violence, Clinton visited Kosovo, met with Rugova, and pledged U.S. aid. He asked Rugova to continue negotiations with MiloÅ¡ević, and promised that the disaster of Bosnia “should not be repeated and will not be repeated.”
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His support, and Holbrooke's negotiating skill, led to a U.S.-brokered meeting between Rugova and Milošević on May 27, 1998. But despite this achievement, the refugees continued to pour out of Kosovo. By the end of May, an estimated three hundred people had been killed since the start of Yugoslav operation in February. In addition, approximately twelve thousand refugees had fled into Albania.
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Milošević refused to stop the violence, and Rugova broke off the talks.

At the NATO ministerial meeting in Luxemburg on May 28, chaired
by British foreign secretary Robin Cook, the Balkans dominated the agenda. Clark and the German general Klaus Naumann, the head of NATO's Military Committee, reported to the group on the situation. The Germans and the British agreed with the United States that something had to be done about Kosovo. Klaus Kinkel, German foreign minister, said that “a clear red line must be drawn.”
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Cook pledged that a “modern Europe will not tolerate the full might of an army being used against civilian centers.”
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In June, after another month of violence, Britain's new prime minister, Tony Blair, declared: “[T]he only question that matters is whether you are prepared to use force. And we have to be.”
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NATO would have to get tough with Milošević. Among all the NATO members, however, only the United States, the United Kingdom, and perhaps Germany were prepared to use airpower at this point, and only Great Britain was prepared to use ground troops.

The Ineffective Threat of the Use of Force

In June 1998, columns of Serbian tanks entered Kosovo; they turned Kosovar villages into dust and rubble, and killed more than 250 people.
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Another five to ten thousand refugees poured into Albania, causing a humanitarian crisis in that nation. Albanian premier Fatos Nano warned that the refugee crisis threatened to destabilize the region.
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In July, the Yugoslav army and Serb police launched a major offensive against the KLA, comparable to the ethnic cleansing carried out earlier in Bosnia. More than two thousand civilians were killed, two hundred villages destroyed, and three hundred thousand civilians displaced.

Faced with this new aggression, the Clinton administration began to consider war options. Convinced that putting ground troops into combat in Yugoslavia would be unpopular among Americans, Clinton flatly ruled out this option. Pentagon officials also had serious concerns about sending American troops into the hostile regions of Serbia.
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At the same time, they did not believe that the war could be won from the air. As is often the case, some in the U.S. government believed that a political rather than a military solution was required. The administration did not lack congressional support to send troops into Kosovo, but no one wanted to do it. Speaking about the use of force in general, Benjamin
Gilman (R-NY), chairman of the House International Relations Committee, observed that “such solutions do not eliminate the underlying problem…. They promise to drag on indefinitely, at high cost to our own nation.”
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However, the atrocities committed by the Serb forces in the summer of 1998 made war against Serbia seem inevitable.

Although Clark initially lacked Pentagon backing for the use of force, he had the support of General Naumann and NATO's Military Committee, which consisted of the top military officers of all member countries and was responsible for advising the North Atlantic Council (NAC) on military matters. On June 11, the NATO defense ministers met in Brussels to consider the use of air strikes and NATO's role in solving the conflict. The United States and Britain were ready to back up their diplomatic efforts with force, as was NATO secretary-general Javier Solana, who had supported Clark's views from the beginning. “MiloÅ¡ević has gone beyond the limits of tolerable behavior,” Solana acknowledged, “and…we are showing that we are willing to back up international diplomacy with military means.”
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In May 1998, the United States sent Christopher Hill, ambassador to Macedonia, to join Holbrooke in negotiations with MiloÅ¡ević in Belgrade. MiloÅ¡ević agreed to end the violence in Kosovo, promised that “no repressive action will be taken against the civilian population,”
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and agreed to meet with Rugova. But soon this new agreement, too, was tossed away. Milošević knew that the NATO members did not all agree on the use of force, and he dug in his heels.

On June 16, 1998, NATO staged an air exercise called Operation Determined Falcon to show Milošević what he was facing. About one hundred NATO aircraft took off from their bases, flew through Albania to the Serbian border, and then flew east in Albanian and Macedonian airspace.
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The Kosovars rejoiced at the sound of the engines, and the Serbs heard them, too.

The Europeans, notably the French, remained determined to find a diplomatic solution. France called for an international plan to restore autonomy to Kosovo and hinted that it would be willing to support military intervention. But it still maintained that “a mandate from the UN Security Council would be needed before NATO could go into action in
Kosovo.”
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French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine said, “[The] use of force could provoke exactly the opposite of the desired result.”
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Russia and China remained large obstacles to any use of force; they opposed taking an aggressive stand against Yugoslavia or “any action that would penalize Yugoslavia.”
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The differences between American and European attitudes on how to deal with the humanitarian crisis renewed the strain on U.S.-European relations that had developed in the early 1990s over Bosnia. The European leaders' indecision made it impossible for the United States to negotiate effectively with MiloÅ¡ević. The Germans complained that “there seems to be very little willingness [on the part of the Americans] to treat the Europeans on an equal footing.”
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But the European diplomats were passive, and it fell to the United States to lead the initiative to find a solution in Kosovo. Holbrooke knew that the Europeans had accomplished little since the days of Bosnia, and he recognized that they were “not going to have a common security policy for the foreseeable future. We have done our best to keep them involved,” he said.
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Holbrooke believed that his successful Bosnian strategy—calling for Serbian compliance with the UN and other confidence-building measures—would work again in Kosovo, and Albright agreed.