NATO wages ethical war in Kosovo

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): Czech President Vaclav Havel is the right sort of hero for our time. He spent years as a political prisoner for resisting Communist tyranny, but didn't forget either his friends or his principles after it ended. He's an ex-chain smoker living with a second wife and on borrowed time (he nearly died twice in the past two years).

He is also "a poet, a dreamer, and a statesman," as Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien put it when introducing Havel to Parliament in Ottawa recently. A handy man to have around in a tight moral corner, in other words, and Havel delivered the goods.

The war in the Balkans, he said, "is neither an easy struggle nor a popular one. This is probably the first war ever fought that is not being fought in the name of interests, but in the name of certain principles and values. If it is possible to say about a war that it is ethical...it is true of this war."

Uncompromising words by a man who lived most of his life in a country where the principles of sovereignty and non-intervention were often invoked to shield a Communist tyranny from outside criticism. He spent a good deal of time in Communist jails, and his conclusions are simple: "Human rights rank above the rights of states. Human liberties constitute a higher value than state sovereignty."

Most people would agree with those statements in the abstract. They just have trouble understanding why North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has suddenly discovered them after ignoring them for all of its history -- including, notably, in the case of Havel's own country, Czechoslovakia. No Western bombers took off when Czech democracy fell to a Communist coup in 1948, or when Soviet tanks crushed the "Prague spring" in 1968.

So why is NATO taking unilateral action in defence of human rights now and why in Kosovo, after letting terrible things happen in so many other places without lifting a finger to stop them?

Context is everything, and to an astounding extent the world is still living in the context of 1945. At the end of the most terrible war in history, with over 50 million dead, half of the world's large cities bombed flat (two of them by nuclear weapons), and the horrifying images of the Holocaust dominating everyone's imagination, the human race made two new rules. They were, of course, mutually incompatible.

To break the endless cycle of wars, we simply made it illegal (for the first time in history) for one country to attack another. No border change accomplished by force would ever be accepted by the international community and in theory, at least, the whole world was bound to come to the help of any country under attack.

This was written into the United Nations Charter in 1945, and in effect it made sovereignty absolute. If every border is sacred and no intervention in another country's internal affairs is allowed, then every regime can do whatever it wants at home. Even Hitler could have gone ahead with the Final Solution, if only he hadn't also invaded his neighbours. In an age of nuclear weapons, that was the price we were willing to pay to end war.

But soon we made another set of rules, also in response to World War II. By 1948 the full horror of the Holocaust had sunk in -- so the same countries that signed the UN Charter in 1945 also ratified the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the Convention Against Genocide.

The latter, in particular, states bluntly that there are some crimes so heinous that even sovereignty cannot protect their perpetrators.

Nobody worried much about the innate contradiction between these rules at the time, and soon after the Cold War made the whole question moot. In a world living under the threat of nuclear holocaust, preventing war was an absolute priority, so the UN Charter and sovereignty took precedence over human rights issues (including even lesser holocausts like Cambodia and East Timor).

That's why nobody else came to the defence of human rights in Czechoslovakia in 1948 or 1968 and even Havel would not have asked them too. It was not worth risking a nuclear war for. But now that the danger of a nuclear holocaust has receded below the horizon, Havel believes it is time to return to the human rights agenda.

That, for Vaclav Havel, is what NATO is doing in the Balkans, and Yugoslav sovereignty be damned: "Decent people cannot sit back and watch systematic, state-directed massacres of other people...if a rescue action is within their power."

In reality, of course, decent people did sit back as the massacres happened in Bosnia and Rwanda, though rescue action was within their power but guilt over their inaction then is a major factor in making NATO leaders act over Kosovo now. Better late than never.

Speaking in Ottawa, Havel pointed out that "Kosovo has no oil fields whose output might attract someone's interest; no member country in the alliance has any territorial claims there; and (Yugoslav President Slobodan) Milosevic is not threatening the territorial integrity...of any NATO member. Nevertheless, the alliance is fighting. It is fighting in the name of human interest for the fate of other human beings."

This is all true, and even praiseworthy. It's just a pity that NATO's strategy and tactics are so awful.