To: Kosovo Talk
From: Barbara Ehrenreich
Subject: roundtable entry from BE In answer to your first question, Mat:
Yes, I think there was a moral imperative for someone to intervene, somehow, to stop the Serb brutalities in Kosovo. Some of my friends point out that the U.S. and international bodies calmly sat out genocide in Rwanda and against the Kurds in Turkey, as if this were a reason for not doing anything this time around. I don't follow that logic. I'm sorry no one intervened in Rwanda and would like to see more international readiness to stop anti-civilian warfare wherever it crops up.
That said, is NATO the body to do it in this case? The worrisome thing about NATO is that it is now constituted to maximally irritate Russia, as with the NATO bombing campaign. Why risk deepening and widening tensions in this way? It seems to me that the more appropriate body to intervene in this and future cases would have been the U.N., but by completely bypassing the Security Council, NATO and the U.S. have contributed to further undermining the United Nations.
As for "use of force," this is not easy to separate from "tactics." Naturally, you are not going to send unarmed peacekeepers into a place like Kosovo. But there could have been, and probably still should be, a DEFENSIVE, on-the-ground, peacekeeping mission to protect Kosovar Albanians and their cities and villages and to establish a safe haven for refugees within Kosovo. But the air strikes have not done a thing to help the Kosovars:
1. In the first phase, the U.S./NATO completely neglected to bomb Yugoslav troops in Kosovo because this would have meant flying dangerously low. No help for Kosovars from that.
2. In bombing Serbia, the emphasis has been on striking anti-aircraft sites -- to make things safer for the bombers, not for the Kosovars.
3. In the current phase, NATO is supposedly targeting command-and-control centers and supply routes within Serbia. But it is not clear to me that the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia troops in Kosovo would be stopped in their tracks by being cut off from Serbia. Looting can be an effective substitute for supply lines; and, to the extent that the ethnic-cleansers in Kosovo are paramilitary units, they may not be entirely dependent on orders from any central command post.
So what has been accomplished so far?
Toward stopping the expulsion of ethnic Albanians from Kosovar: exactly zero. Maybe less than zero -- if in fact the Serbs stepped up their ethnic-cleansing campaign in response to the onset of bombing.
Toward undermining Milosevic: definitely less than zero. The effect of the bombings so far has been to eliminate his considerable opposition within Serbia and produce an extraordinary burst of unity and solidarity within the Serb population. This could have been predicted.
In short, the effect of the NATO/US bombing campaign has been to do nothing for the suffering Kosovar Albanians and to consolidate Milosevic's power domestically. Clever, no?
