Kosovo crisis: What lessons have Europeans learned?

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): As the dust settles and the spotlight moves elsewhere, the Kosovo war seems to be over. But it is going to be with us for a long time.

The Serbian problem is as dangerous as ever, and nobody knows how or even if the Serbs are going to get out of the hole they have dug for themselves. The military implications of a war that was fought and won solely from the air, with zero casualties on the winning side, will keep strategists arguing (and defense producers eating well) for a long time to come. And then there is the biggest result of the war: the shift in international law.

The new rule was most provocatively proclaimed by British Prime Minister Tony Blair in a speech in Chicago at the height of the war: "We cannot turn our backs on conflicts and the violation of human rights within other countries if we want to be secure." He tactfully failed to mention that acting on this doctrine would contravene the United Nations Charter, but he knew exactly what he was doing.

What North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) did in attacking Serbia last March over its human rights abuses in Kosovo was simply illegal, in terms of international law as it was then generally understood. Article Two of the UN Charter, signed in 1945, is very clear: no country or group of countries shall resort to the use of force against another sovereign state, save in self-defense, except under the authority of the United Nations. Serbia was slaughtering Muslim Kosovars, but it wasn't attacking its neighbors.

Now, however, a UN Security Council resolution has authorized a peacekeeping force made up mainly of the same NATO countries that launched the attack, to enforce a settlement achieved as the result of their attack.

In effect, the United Nations has created a precedent that changes the law. From now on, at least in theory, it will be legal to use force against a country that is merely slaughtering its own people, even if it presents no threat to its neighbors.

You only have to think of all the Iraqs and Rwandas and Burmas (Myanmars) in the world to realize what a staggering task it would be to enforce this new rule everywhere, all the time. And you only have to know a little about human nature to realize how easy it would be for an aggressor to pervert this new rule in order to justify using armed force against perfectly innocent neighboring countries.

But the cat is out of the bag for good: this is a precedent that won't go away. So the best strategy for the UN (and the world) is to acknowledge that there has been a great change, and to bring it within the ambit of accepted UN rules and procedures as fast as possible -- which won't be very fast, since it will, among other things, require a lot of work on key issues like who has a veto on the Security Council and when and how they can wield it.

But this is not a bad change, nor is it a radical departure from the intentions of those who set up the United Nations system after the World War II.

The UN Charter of 1945, with its guarantee of absolute sovereignty for every country and its prohibition of intervention, was designed to minimize the danger of international war. But in 1948 the very same countries signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which sets uniform standards for human rights in every country, and the Genocide Convention, which actually requires the signatories to intervene in the internal affairs of countries that start massacring their own citizens.

These are completely contradictory rules. How can a country promised absolute sovereignty under the Charter then face intervention under the Genocide Convention? During the long Cold War, the fear of a nuclear conflagration kept sovereignty to the fore and human rights considerations in the background, but even then the human rights strand of international law was acknowledged in treaties like the Helsinki Accords (which ended up undermining Soviet control over Eastern Europe).

Now, with no threat of nuclear war, and with democratic nations sharing the same basic values in a majority at the United Nations, the emphasis has shifted. It has, in fact, been shifting for some time.

Events like the creation of the International Tribunals for Rwanda and for the former Yugoslavia in the mid-1990s were significant straws in the wind. Last year's treaty setting up an International Criminal Court, followed in short order by Britain's arrest of former Chilean head of state Gen. Augusto Pinochet on charges of human rights abuse, were full-grown trees blowing past. And (at the risk of beating an analogy to death) NATO's attack on Serbia last March was an entire forest dropping out of the sky.

So here we are, and what do we do about our new rule? Do we find ourselves fighting endless wars all over the world to save other ethnic minorities from other brutes like Slobodan Milosevic? If we do, will the new technologies of aerial bombardment produced by the firm of Stealth, Cruise & Cluster keep the cost of enforcement acceptably low for the enforcers? Just how high a price will democratic states pay to defend their values elsewhere in the world -- and can they be trusted to keep national self-interest out of their calculations?

Nobody knows. But five years from now, we all will.