To: Kosovo Talk
From: Phyllis Bennis
Re: Welcome to Kosovo Talk Okay Mat, here goes...
-- Question 1 --
The question begs the answer. I think there may well have been (and still is) a moral imperative to intervene -- but NOT for NATO! The U.S. sidelining of the U.N. in international affairs -- replacing UN primacy either with unapologetic unilateralism, as we saw during the last several years in Iraq, or with NATO as the bestower of international legitimacy, as we are seeing in Kosovo -- represents a major catastrophe for U.S. foreign policy.
So while there may BE a moral imperative, that doesn't make this U.S./NATO mission a moral response. Certainly one must be skeptical about morality having anything to do with U.S. policy. The continuing humanitarian crisis in Iraq -- where far more people are still dying, today, as a DIRECT result of U.S. policy, than are dying even now in Kosovo -- should provide enough evidence to anyone for whom the delayed and disastrously handled attention to Somalia, the deliberate decision to allow genocide in Rwanda to go forward, the disasters of Bosnia, Sierra Leone, etc. still leave questions.
But we cannot challenge Washington's double-standards by claiming that because it refused to move in the past, it should not move now. While we must continue to identify, analyze, and condemn past failures to prevent or halt genocide, we must also continue to demand appropriate action to prevent or stop such humanitarian crises now.
The question for us should be whether there were other options beside THIS use of force by THIS agency -- and the answer to that, I think, is yes. The U.N. Charter unequivocally says that the use of force is justified only in the context of two scenarios: either a Security Council authorization (despite all of the problems inherent in that because of U.S. domination of the Council), or an immediate, self-defense response to armed aggression, and then only until the first opportunity for the Council to meet. What took place here was neither -- it was a clear refusal by the U.S. (with the Brits trotting along behind) to allow the Council to debate the issue, as France had proposed.
Even under the terms of the Genocide Convention, the obligation to act to prevent genocide does not supercede the primacy of the U.N. in responding to an international crisis. And whether or not one accepts the applicability of that term (based on the part of the definition of genocide that speaks of creating conditions that render a group's survival impossible -- something that may well be approaching if the ethnic-cleansing efforts result in a near-complete expulsion and forced dispersion of Albanian Kosovars from Kosovo) it is significant that the U.S. has NOT claimed it as a justification of its actions. And of course, U.S. awareness of the possibility (not probability, given Russia's continued dependence on Western aid) of a Russian veto does not provide a legal 'out' for avoiding a Council decision.
What might the Council have decided, even if a full-scale U.N. Blue Helmet deployment was not a likely outcome? One very reasonable possibility, as early as months ago, could have involved U.N. authorization for an Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) -- certainly NOT NATO -- protection force, not the limited unarmed OSCE monitoring force that was pulled out at the moment it was most vitally needed. The U.N. Charter speaks of looking first to regional solutions to regional problems -- but certainly OSCE, which includes eastern Europe and Russia as well as the western European powers, is a far better example of regional diplomatic actors than a U.S.-dominated NATO military alliance.
What could the U.N. look towards now? One possibility would be to rely (however ironically) on the precedent set by the Korean War-era Uniting for Peace resolution. Under its terms, the General Assembly can, when the Council is judged to be deadlocked or otherwise unable to work, meet in special session to make decisions regarding war and peace, issues generally left to the providence of the Council. The Russians have recently proposed such an Assembly meeting. Its first task would be to call a halt to NATO's bombing and the Serbs' expulsions of Kosovar Albanians, release of all detainees, and massive refugee assistance. While bringing NATO, let alone the Milosevic-led military, to heel would by no means be guaranteed by such a U.N. resolution, a specific Assembly demand for an end to the bombing would go far towards delegitimizing NATO's role, challenging the U.S., and reasserting the centrality of the U.N. in dealing with the ethnic cleansing, thus providing a much better chance of a policy that would, in the hippocratic sense, "first, do no harm."
Further, the Assembly should not only call for a resumption of serious diplomacy, but delegate representatives to act in the name of the most democratic part of the U.N., the General Assembly, and carry out such diplomacy on behalf of the international community. Such a diplomatic effort, I would propose, might best be carried out by Nelson Mandela and Kofi Annan -- two African statesmen without personal vested interests in the region or conflict -- combining the international legitimacy of the UN with the internationally recognized personal credibility of the South African leader.
What might such a diplomatic "dream team" be able to accomplish that NATO bombing could not?
