The meaning of Kosovo

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the West have been very lucky, for it could all have come out differently in Kosovo. One more big blunder in the week of the Chinese embassy bombing -- cluster bombs in a packed schoolyard somewhere in Serbia, say -- and the Italian, German and Greek governments would have started calling publicly for a bombing pause that other NATO leaders, faced with collapsing popular support at home, would have been unable to resist.

That would have been the end of many things, including, for all practical purposes, the NATO alliance itself. Another Balkan genocide would have gone unpunished, and we would be urgently seeking permanent homes abroad for up to a million Kosovar refugees before the sheer weight of their presence destabilized Albania and triggered outright civil war in Macedonia.

A wave of isolationist sentiment would be sweeping the United States, while eastern and southern European countries would already be making secret alliances to protect themselves in the new power vacuum. The demon king of the Balkans would be plotting the suppression of the defiantly democratic government in Serbia's sole remaining sister republic, Montenegro. The world would emphatically not be a better place.

On the other hand, it might be a very much better place if Slobodan Milosevic had fallen under a bus ten years ago. A democratic and reasonably prosperous federal Yugoslavia, still united and ethnically tolerant, might be at the head of the queue to join the European Union -- and NATO would be bidding farewell to the last American troops as they finally went home from Europe.

NATO's political structure would doubtless survive for a while anyway: huge bureaucracies like this are almost impossible to kill outright. But without nine years of Balkan wars, the alliance's ability and will to deploy troops, which in the real world include 30,000 NATO soldiers in Bosnia and now another 50,000 in Kosovo, would have largely withered away by now. (Then, so would the need.) The military bureaucrats owe a large vote of thanks to Milosevic.

As it is, we have neither the worst nor the best of all possible worlds, but the usual muddle in the middle -- with one possible, shining exception, most clearly articulated by British Prime Minister Tony Blair in a speech in Chicago seven weeks ago. The Kosovo intervention, he suggested, might become the precedent for a "new doctrine of international community" that transcends sovereignty and allows military intervention in defense of human rights because "we cannot turn our backs on conflicts and the violation of human rights within other countries if we want still to be secure."

He wasn't exactly saying that what NATO has done for the Kosovars, it now stands ready to do for the Tibetans and the East Timorese, but putting human rights on an equal footing with sovereignty, even in principle, would be a revolution in human affairs. Some would also say that it is a recipe for perpetual war. It's a non-starter, however, unless this precedent-setting intervention comes out reasonably well. Will it?

The Security Council resolution has been passed, the bombing has stopped, and the Serbian troops are pulling out of Kosovo, but the outcome on the ground is still uncertain. Last Friday the Russian military authorities (who hate NATO in general, and the deal brokered by President Boris Yeltsin's mediator, Viktor Chernomyrdin, in particular) broke off talks in Moscow on joint command arrangements for Russian and NATO peacekeeping troops in Kosovo -- and unilaterally ordered a Russian contingent now based in Bosnia to move through Serbia to Kosovo.

The intent, presumably, is to set up a de facto Russian zone in northern Kosovo before the Serbian withdrawal is completed and NATO troops reach there. Those among the Serbian minority who choose to stay in Kosovo would flock to this zone (which also happens to be where Kosovo's mineral wealth is concentrated), and by the same token no Albanian former residents would dare to return there. It would amount to the partition of Kosovo, despite all of NATO's promises that will not be allowed.

Will this actually happen? We have a week to find out, but probably not. For one thing, one of the biggest concentrations of Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) fighters inside Kosovo is precisely in this putative Russian zone, in the hills around Podujevo. If the Russians look like they are going to get away with this manoeuvre, the KLA will start killing Russian soldiers -- and Russian public opinion has no stomach whatever for a "new Chechnya". For another thing, Yeltsin will probably yank quite hard on his army's chain when he learns what they're up to.

Much as Russian nationalists may dislike it, there is a well- established pattern in their country's reaction to unwelcome Western initiatives. First it growls ferociously and utters dark threats, as though it were still solvent and a superpower. Then it quietly gives in.

Moscow has gone through this routine over NATO enlargement, over withdrawing its troops from bases in the Baltic states, and over the status of Russian troops in Bosnia. It has already recapitulated the same pattern in its diplomatic mediation on Kosovo. The attempt to create a separate Russian zone will probably meet the same fate.

Indeed, the Russian military are so desperately short of funds that their peacekeeping troops in Kosovo may ultimately number not much more than 3,000, rather than the permitted 10,000. (NATO subtly pushed the Russians in this direction by ensuring that the UN resolution authorizing the force does not explicitly designate KFOR, the "international security presence" occupying Kosovo, as UN troops. That way it is Moscow, rather than the UN, that has to pay for them.)

Isn't NATO storing up long-term trouble for itself by treating the Russians in such a cavalier fashion? Maybe, but there is little point in placating Russian generals who lament the demise of the Soviet Union -- and little alternative when dealing with a government as feckless and as tightly focussed on considerations of domestic power as Yeltsin's. If there is a price to pay for this, we will find out later, but there may not be.

And what of NATO, the Lazarus of our times? Just in time, it has found a new role in the Balkans that should keep it busy for years (if not decades).

Like the European Union, NATO will eventually be asked to deliver on its half-promises of membership to the Balkan countries that provided bases, shelter for refugees, or diplomatic support for its campaign in Kosovo: Rumania, Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania. But among these, only Rumania is big enough to make much difference, and from the political point of view it is a quite respectable candidate. (In terms of having reasonably democratic governments, all the others make the grade too).

This is not a crippling price to pay. In fact, if EU membership is also part of the package, it could even be seen as a positive economic outcome of the war. If it diverts the main thrust of NATO expansionism from the east to the south, it can also be seen as a positive political outcome of the war.

But the biggest issue by far is also the most imponderable. Has this incident in Kosovo (for that is all it is in the broad sweep of history) actually created a precedent for a new kind of international action in defense of human rights? And if it has, is that a Good Thing?

For all of history in practice, and for the past 54 years in law as well, sovereignty has been supreme in international law. States have always jealously guarded the right to do whatever they want on their own territory, and since 1945 that right has been reinforced by the United Nations Charter, which even obliges other states to take collective action against any attempt by one country to intervene by force in another member's internal affairs.

That rule owes its existence to a fully justified fear of big- power war, especially nuclear war. If the only way to secure international peace is to guarantee the borders and internal freedom of action of all governments, then that is a price we must pay. Even if the corollary is that they are free to do whatever they want to their own citizens, including massacre them.

But even back in the 1940s, the rival concern about human rights and "natural justice" found expression in parallel (and wholly contradictory) UN legislation like the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the Convention Against Genocide, both signed in 1948. These instruments explicitly place human rights on an equal, if not higher level than state sovereignty -- but they contain no machinery for enforcement.

And that is where matters remained through the long decades of the Cold War, because nobody was going to argue for enforcing human rights at the risk of nuclear war. Even then, however, groups like Charter 77 in the former Czechoslovakia found the human rights provisions contained in treaties like the Helsinki Accords on Security and Cooperation in Europe very useful in trying to curb the actions of a tyrannical government.

Perhaps we are now moving on to the next stage: where the "international community" -- or at least coalitions of the willing within given regions (like NATO in Europe) -- take action to prevent genocide even if it involves infringing on the sovereignty of the offending state. The Nigerian-led interventions to stop genocides in West Africa and Uganda's support for the invasion that ended the genocide in Rwanda are striking African examples of the same logic.

Nobody has even begun to figure out what the rules are for this, or how you prevent aggressors from exploiting it to justify their own selfish goals. The potential for abuse is huge, as is the likelihood that well-intentioned interventions could end up as bloody messes. But when the UN Security Council adopted the resolution on Kosovo last Thursday evening, it retrospectively ratified the principle that intervention in sovereign states in defense of human rights is permissible, at least in certain (as yet undefined) circumstances.

We will spend the next half-century defining the limits of this, and perhaps in the course of it we will evolve a new tier of world government. But the can of worms has been opened, and it will not be closed again.