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Pugwash Meeting No. 249
Putting the other workshops and symposia aside, I would like to comment briefly on the one we had in Castellón Spain in early July on NATO and European Security. I do this because it turns out to be relevant to the main theme of my remarks today, which might perhaps be titled “Reflections on Kosovo”. I would note that the Castellón meeting was perhaps the best workshop in my experience in Pugwash in at least the last 20 years, and the report that will appear in the next issue of the Newsletter, and which is available on the web, is probably the best I’ve ever seen of a Pugwash workshop: more insightful, thorough and longer than we usually get. Let me refresh your memories of the events relating to Kosovo; then, I want to discuss at some length how Pugwash reacted to them; and then turn to some observations, again going back to the Castellón meeting. Finally, a few remarks about lessons and quandaries that are left over from the Kosovo experience, and about future related Pugwash activities. Although the international community was concerned about developments in Kosovo much earlier, I go back only to 1998. I do no not think that many of us in Pugwash, myself included, really focused very heavily on what was happening there until that year. Then, especially after the bombing started, it became an issue of great concern. The critical events happened then and in the first half of 1999. Noteworthy were the Security Council resolutions in March, 1998 calling for an embargo on arms shipments to Yugoslavia, and one of September calling for a cessation of action by the Serb security forces against the civil population of Kosovo. Then, there were the negotiations of mid-October by Richard Holbrook, which resulted in a partial withdrawal of those forces, to be monitored by an OSCE observer force. Although monitors were deployed, continuing Serb activity led to their quick withdrawl. Then, after the failure of the Rambouillet negotiations, and repeated, but unheeded, threats to Milosevic of bombing in the event of continuation of Serbian ethnic cleansing operations against the Kosovar Albanians, the bombing campaign began on March 24, 1999. It continued for 11 weeks with, as you no doubt recall, repeated statements, particularly from US spokesmen, that NATO would bomb and bomb but would deploy ground forces in Kosovo only for peacekeeping and only after the termination of hostilities. Now, why such a commitment to the use of airpower alone and, indeed, only from high altitudes? Experience in Somalia and elsewhere had made it pretty clear that on an issue such as Kosovo, any casualties at all would be politically intolerable in the United States. Moreover, there had to be questions about whether all of the other eighteen NATO members would go along with the early introduction of ground forces considering sensitivities of their publics, too, to casualty possibilities and, in the case of at least Greece, about NATO ground forces being sent into Kosovo through Salonika, the only reasonable route for a large scale deployment other than through Hungary (which would have entailed attacking Serbia directly, an option that would almost certainly have had little support in any NATO government). It is remarkable, in my view, that the attempt was made to coerce Milosevic into surrender by bombing alone and that the alliance held together when the bombing campaign took so long: much longer than the Clinton Administration apparently anticipated, and longer than it no doubt led the other NATO states to believe would be required. That some in the Administration could profess such optimism as they did about the efficacy of bombing was very likely a consequence, in part, of an erroneous lesson having been drawn from Bosnia. It was widely understood by many, including possibly, but inexcusably, by some in the upper echelons of the Administration that airpower was entirely decisive in bringing conflict there to an end. The reality is that Croatian ground forces, armed and trained largely by the United States to the point where they had superiority over the Serbs, were at least as important as airpower in the realization of the Dayton accords and in the cessation of open hostilities in Bosnia. But the misguided belief, fed by some airpower advocates, coupled with White House perceptions about the political unacceptability of casualties that might result from military operations not widely seen to be essential to American interests, led apparently to the airpower-only approach to Kosovo. I can not conceive of any general officers -- or admirals, for that matter -- in whom I have confidence, believing that bombing alone could be decisive in a situation such as obtained there. One of the astonishing things is that none of the people in the higher levels of the American military and foreign policy establishments -- none of the generals, admirals or senior civilians in the Defense or State Departments -- chose to resign rather than go along with a campaign that seemed so nonsensical from a military point of view. Other American officials have resigned in instances when they disagreed with policy. I think of General Maxwell Taylor’s resigning as Chief of Staff of the Army when he disagreed with President Eisenhower’s commitment to airpower and nuclear weapons and of Cy Vance’s resigning as Secretary of State when he decided he could not go along with the Carter Administration’s Iran rescue effort. I’m just surprised that this did not happen in the Kosovo case, because the feelings were very strong that though the objectives might be sound, even laudable, the means chosen made little sense. You all know that finally after the 11 weeks of bombing, Milosevic did cave in. Did he do so because of the bombing? Certainly, it had some effect, but surely it was not the only reason, perhaps, not the decisive one. There will be speculation about this, and someday we will perhaps have a better understanding than we now do. But it is my impression that NATO use of airpower alone was not the only important factor. By the end of the 11 week period, ground operations by KLA forces in at least one significant instance forced the Serb forces into the open where bombing against them could be effective. Until that happened, as we later learned from post-bombing assessment, the amount of damage done to the Yugoslav military was really minimal. There was a lot of destruction of fixed structures, civil and military, but one of the lessons of all this is that, although precision-guided munitions can destroy fixed targets, against military forces that have some mobility their effectiveness is not likely to be great. There were also, toward the end of the operations, indications that ground forces were perhaps going to be introduced. There were increases in levels of forces that were specified for occupation when hostilities might be terminated, and there was improvement in the transport system from the Adriatic coast that would have been necessary if a large scale intervention by ground forces were to be attempted. Perhaps these developments and evident pressure on the United States, notably from the United Kingdom, might have been viewed by Mr. Milosevic as signals that, notwithstanding earlier remarks, ground forces might be introduced to bring the hostilities to an end. Finally, and I think probably most decisive, but again this remains to be determined, there was the withdrawal of Russian support. Recall Martti Ahtisaari’s meetings with Viktor Chernomyrdin and Strobe Talbott, after which Russian policy changed. It is clear from some sources that the Serbs felt betrayed and perhaps that their situation was hopeless. Well, so much for a brief history except to warn of the possibility of wrong conclusions being drawn about the efficacy of bombing, even as was the case in Bosnia. Now let me say a bit about how Pugwash reacted. The bombing started on the 24th of March and, although I have not checked my records, I believe I began to be bombarded by e-mail on the 25th from some people asking what was Pugwash going to do about it, and from others urging various courses of action. Should we release a statement condemning the bombing or one trying to get negotiations going again to bring hostilities to an end? There ensued a rather lengthy and difficult effort on the part of the Executive Committee of Pugwash to try to come up with a consensus statement relating to these questions, but after extended exchanges of email and phone calls, I concluded, as Secretary General, that I could not see consensus in sight. Yet, we felt some obligation to inform the Pugwash constituency of our efforts, including about points of difference among us. So, you will find in the current issue of the Newsletter, the one that came out last April, seven pages at the beginning containing five statements by our four officers and Jo Rotblat, reflecting our different views of what Pugwash should or might say. If you read them, and I recommend you do, you will, I hope, understand why we differed, how we differed, and why it was not possible to get a consensus. You will note too that some of us also differed, as we generally do, on the issue of how important it was to issue a statement, but I do not want to get into that today. As to what we ought to say, I believe there is a single most significant issue of cleavage, although, as I say, you will find the five statements in the Newsletter and on the web. There was sentiment, obviously very strongly felt, that we ought to call for a return to the negotiating table, which had been vacated after the Rambouillet failure, to try to reach some kind of a settlement, and that we should call for immediate termination of hostilities: in particular, that we ought to ask NATO leaders to stop the bombing, conditional on ethnic cleansing being discontinued. Others, including me -- and it is no secret who was on which side of these issues because it is all in the Newsletter -- felt very strongly that they could not live with these calls. Why not? In my case, because it implied a total cave-in to Milosevic and the abandonment of the Kosovar Albanians. If my memory is correct, when we were trying to find consensus on a statement, about a half a million Albanians had already been forced out of Kosovo, and I don’t know how many more from their homes into the hinterlands within Kosovo. My feeling was that if there were an armistice within, say, the first weeks after the bombing started -- and recollect that with its initiation, the expulsion of the Kosovar Albanians accelerated greatly -- we, i.e., the world, would be left with of the order of a million people having been forced from their homes and with winter approaching: pretty grim prospects. I couldn’t see accepting this. The alternatives of course were pretty grim too: continuing bombing and further ethnic cleansing. I felt, in some ways, that much more vigorous military action could be desirable: that ground forces ought to be employed to conclude the operation in a hurry before more people got expelled from their homes or killed. But this seemed to me to be totally unrealistic, so I had no good recommendation as to what should be done; rather, only the bad one of just continuing with the bombing in the hope, but with grave doubts and no confidence, that the Serbs might decide that continuing the conflict would not be worthwhile. Abandonment of the Kosovars seemed to me to be intolerable, but the conquest of Serbia and the removal of Milosevic by force seemed to me to be politically so unlikely as not something to be advanced seriously. When I concluded that the Executive Committee was irreconcilably split on the substance of a possible statement, the only alternatives seemed to be to say nothing or to release, as we did, statements reflecting our different views. Any post-mortem on the behavior of NATO, the behavior of the Russians, the behavior of the Serbs and the KLA forces, and the behavior of Pugwash, will, I suspect, reveal us still in disagreement, even after it is all over, as to what should have been done. These are the realities. It would have been nice to have had consensus but we didn’t reach it in this case. We still talk about it. At the meetings of Council in the last two days, the issue has come up again and again. It came up incidentally in connection with whether we should say something about current events in East Timor. We did agree on a simple, and I think non-controversial, statement to be sent to the U.N. Secretary General, an open letter, if you like. But, if events develop -- God help us -- so that East Timor begins to look like a replay of what we saw in Kosovo, where increasing numbers of people will become refugees, and large numbers will be killed, I expect we could again find ourselves in disagreement about what kinds of military action should be employed, about under whose auspices, and about under what conditions there should be an armistice or negotiations to try to bring hostilities there to an end. I would like now to return briefly to the report of the Castellón workshop. The decision to hold it was made before the maturation of the crisis in Kosovo, at a time when a second round of NATO expansion was a prospect. The possible adverse affects on relations between Russia and the West of further enlargement seemed worrisome, at least to me. And, I was concerned about questions regarding the future for NATO. Was it an anachronism? Perhaps, a menace? Could, its major role -- even its raison d’etre -- be in dealing with problems of the kind we have seen in the former Yugoslavia? Shouldn’t the big review of NATO’s future that was much touted a year or so ago, have been more open-ended? I got support for having a meeting that would address these kinds of questions,. but, as it turned out, we met one month after the Kosovo bombing started so, as I noted earlier, about half our discussion was Kosovo-related. The last parts of Jeffrey Boutwell’s report deal largely with the kinds of problems we faced there and that we might face in future Kosovos. I had expected that within the group we had assembled there would be different views on many questions, participants having been invited partly with the objective of bringing out different perspectives, but there was one surprise. I found less support, though there was some, for the view that NATO had out-lived its utility and should be scrapped. Besides Jeffrey’s report I want to recommend to you one other piece of reading, if I may. It is a very thoughtful piece by Adam Roberts of Oxford University in the current issue of Survival, which I actually got the day I left for this conference. I found it very useful in refreshing my own memory and clarifying my thinking about what had happened in Kosovo. Now, some remarks about what has come out of all of this. Our failure to reach consensus within the Council led to a suggestion by one of the members that we ought to look at military intervention in defense of human rights from a longer term perspective, and that we ought to take the question pretty seriously because we are not out of the woods yet in Kosovo and because we are likely to see other somewhat similar problems all over the world. We have seen a number of them in the last decade, and we see one now in East Timor. These observations and the discussion in the meeting in Castellón, reinforced my view that we ought now to undertake as a major Pugwash activity at least one workshop, indeed, probably a series of efforts going over at least a couple of years, to look into many of the kinds of questions that were raised by Kosovo and by our inability to deal very effectively with them. Nobody can be happy with the way Kosovo worked out. There is much to criticize in detail, but there are more general questions also raised. I should say before I finish that I spent time during the last several years looking at a number of other cases of intervention that have involved the use of military force: events in the Congo in the 60s, those incident to the former Yugoslavia’s splitting apart, and at Somalia, Cambodia, Rwanda and Haiti. I hate to say this, but when all was said and done, I’m not sure if any of them should be counted real successes if the question at issue is “are the regions better off now than they would be had there been no intervention”. Questions have to arise, then, that have to be faced very seriously. Are we just going to tolerate affronts to life and human dignity that now increasingly occur in intra-state conflict? Or, should the world community intervene militarily, recognizing that doing so will often be an affront to sovereignty and that such intervention may often be, at best, only partially successful. And, if we are to intervene, under what conditions? A last observation about Kosovo. In a gross sense, I’m not sure things were done wrongly. What happened was tragic, but I also think it would have been tragic if there had been no intervention and if ethnic cleansing of the Kosovar Albanians had continued, with Milosevic now being in a stronger position than he is to pursue his objective of a “greater Serbia” beyond Kosovo. I certainly do not want to defend the bombing, but I do believe that the objectives of stopping the ethnic cleansing of the Kosovar Albanians and of reining in Milosevic were laudable, though the the means of military intervention (bombing, mostly of targets in Serbia, with inadequate concern about damage to innocent Serbs and to civil infrastructure and with disproportionate concern about possible NATO military casualties) and the failure to plan realistically for necessary post-conflict involvement in Kosovo was execrable. But, it is not clear that effective intervention could have been carried out in any other way for the reasons I mentioned earlier: little support in the United States for the employment of ground forces and very deep -- and understandable -- aversion to casualties, not to mention there being no prospect of getting enthusiastic support from all of the other countries within NATO for a quick, decisive defeat of the Serbs, much less of getting support, or even acquiescence, of the Chinese and Russians that would have made it possible to carry out intervention under UN auspices. So, while Kosovo was very badly handled in a tactical sense, maybe that was the only way it could have been handled at all: a very tough choice. I would hope that Pugwash’s getting involved systematically in the questions of intervention, military and otherwise, in defense of human rights -- and in the problems of tension between such intervention and respect for sovereignty -- might permit us to contribute to the world’s being confronted with less stark and undesirable choices. It would be unconscionable were we not to try. Now, I should say we are going to have a panel where we’ll have some opportunity later on to discuss questions of intervention further and we are also going to have an opportunity tonight, though it is not in the program, for some discussion of East Timor, in particular. We decided on this yesterday in the belief that, it being a current issue of very great concern -- it ought to be of great concern to everybody -- we ought to have an opportunity for people to sound off. So, we are changing the schedule for this evening somewhat to accommodate this. |