The pundits and talking heads have moved on to other subjects; the Current Hot Topics seem to be how Washington can further increase the cost of health care in America, and how the Vice President is basing his campaign on a radical new repackaging of the totally counterproductive policies of the last half-century. But all through most of June -- and of course on the 4th of July -- we were treated to endless tributes on TV and in print to the administration's great victory and the "moral vision" underlying US intervention in Yugoslavia.
Some people, of course, don't have the privilege of simply changing the subject when it becomes "old news." And most adults have come to realize that what happened yesterday has a fairly strong influence on what's happening today -- though this basic concept seems to escape our politicians. So before "Operation Allied Force" becomes just another footnote in the depressing history of the 20th century, it might not be a bad idea to take another look at America's Great Moral Triumph.
Leaving aside the fact that any reference to the Clinton administration and morality in the same sentence will provoke derisive laughter everywhere outside the Washington Beltway, one does not even have to take a particularly long view of the situation in Yugoslavia to see through the pretense; just the immediate history of the operation refutes any claim to moral justification.
At Rambouillet the US presented the Yugoslav delegation with a set of demands, intimating that if they did not sign, they would be bombed. When the Yugoslav parliament passed a resolution accepting autonomy for Kosovo and UN troops to enforce a cease-fire in the province, the US, without consulting or even advising its NATO allies, added an Appendix B to its list of demands, which specified that NATO troops were to have free rein everywhere in Yugoslavia, to be immune from prosecution for crimes, and to have control of Yugoslav broadcast facilities. No country in the world would allow its head of state to sign such a document.
Under the Vienna Convention on Treaties of 1963, agreements negotiated under threat of force are null and void. And of course, threatening to bomb a country which is not attacking its neighbors (or anyone else) is ipso facto an act of aggressive war under the UN Charter. The NATO treaty itself permits going to war only to defend a NATO member from attack. Thus the US officials at Rambouillet were already in violation of fundamental international laws even before "Operation Allied Force" actually began.
Once the bombing started, there was no serious effort to avoid civilian casualties, either in Kosovo or elsewhere in Yugoslavia. By the time the campaign ended, NATO had killed more than 2,000 civilians -- Serbs, Gypsies, Albanians, Hungarians, you name it -- compared to fewer than 600 Yugoslav soldiers.
Within the first month, when NATO had already managed to turn a dirty little civil war into a major humanitarian disaster, US bombs destroyed a cigarette factory and damaged a 300-year-old former Austrian fortress full of museums and cafes, on the grounds that they were military targets. More than 200 schools have been hit; one bitter Yugoslav joke is that they were military targets because some of the kids might grow up to be soldiers. At the Belgrade Zoo, a rhinoceros, mad with terror at the noise and smell of the explosions, battered his head against a concrete wall until he died.
The chemical plant at Pancevo, a few miles downstream from Belgrade, was repeatedly attacked, apparently in the belief that it provided nylon stockings and bug spray for the army. After the April 18 bombing, a choking chemical fog settled over the city and remained there for days. This and similar attacks have caused an ecological nightmare in all of southeastern Europe, contaminating groundwater and polluting the Danube -- which flows through Romania and Bulgaria to the Black Sea -- with thousands of tons of toxic chemicals. In May, the Romanian Environment Ministry reported that acid rains along the Yugoslav border had been caused by the bombing, and that several localities had measured greatly increased levels of heavy metals in the Danube.
"We have heard nothing from the government," Pancevo mayor Srdjan Mikovic said, in an interview in the July 14 New York Times. "We have never supported the [Milosevic] regime and for this reason I fear we will be sacrificed. NATO had to understand what they were doing to us because these factories were built by American and European firms. They could not have been ignorant of the environmental damage. I have given up. I eat the fish. How much more can I be poisoned after living in clouds of this stuff?"
Contributing to the ecological damage were bombs and shells sheathed with depleted uranium, which emits dangerous radiation and has a half-life in the thousands of years. When the bombs explode, a toxic dust is widely dispersed, to be breathed by humans and animals, to settle on crops, and -- again -- to contaminate groundwater.
Then of course there were the cluster bombs. These are anti-personnel weapons which consist basically of a huge drum of hand grenade-like canisters about the size and shape of a soda can or a baseball. Several hundred feet above the ground, the mother bomb explodes, spreading the canisters over an area the size of several football fields. Then at a height of a few yards above the ground, each canister explodes, sending shrapnel in all directions. They are utterly useless against anything much more solid than a cardboard box, but they chop and shred flesh quite effectively.
On May 7, in the middle of the day, we dropped cluster bombs on the downtown area of Nis, killing and injuring scores of shoppers, destroying 20 homes, and damaging a hospital. No military (or even industrial) area was anywhere nearby.
On May 20, in the wee hours of the morning, Belgrade's Dragisa Misovic Hospital was hit by cluster bombs. Four patients were killed, and several women in labor were injured. The bombs destroyed the hospital's maternity ward and its center for children with lung diseases, the only such facility in the western Balkans. NATO said that one of its bombs had overshot its target by about half a kilometer, but never explained why cluster bombs were being used against a densely-populated city in the first place. ("Smart bombs", by the way, are typically specified by some such characteristic as "50% of the bombs will strike within N meters of the intended target." This also implies, of course, that 50% will not...)
On May 30, Pentecost Sunday, NATO planes dropped cluster bombs into the riverfront market area of Varvarin, a town of about 5,000, at 1 pm, when it was crowded with people shopping and strolling right after Mass. The ostensible "military target" was a bridge in the middle of town. The bridge, built in the mid-19th century, was barely wide enough for a horse and buggy, let alone a tank. But just to make sure, NATO dropped some more cluster bombs on it seven minutes later, killing several more shoppers -- and beheading a local priest, Milivoje Ciric, who had rushed to the scene to help casualties from the first bombs. His necktie was undisturbed, said a witness, but there was no head above it. Cluster bombs are ineffective against bridges anyway, but they'll do quite a job on anyone standing near one...
The little canisters are usually painted a bright yellow or orange, and they have a failure rate between 5% and 8%, which means at least one out of twenty fail to go off in the air. So they lie on the ground, ready to explode some random interval after they are next disturbed. Italian fishermen in the Adriatic have been killed pulling up the canisters in their nets, dumped there prior to landing by returning NATO pilots. The pretty little things, looking like toys, are all over Kosovo, since that small area (about 60 miles square) was the most intensively bombed. Several Albanian children have been killed playing with them since the bombing stopped, as have two Gurkhas from a British bomb disposal squad.
Based on NATO figures, there are between 11,000 and 16,000 unexploded canisters scattered over Yugoslavia, an area about the size of Kentucky. In Laos and Cambodia, small children are still finding the bomblets left by the US more than a quarter of a century ago. They are finding them, and they are dying.
Such otherwise rational liberal commentators as Thomas Friedman of the New York Times attributed a sort of collective guilt to the entire Serbian people, advocating bombing the whole country back to a preindustrial condition. "You want 1389? We can do 1389, too." Precisely how this logic differs from the ostensible crime of the Milosevic regime -- brutalizing the entire Albanian population of Kosovo in punishment for the activities of the Albanian supremacist KLA -- was never explained.
And in any case, Serbia is one of the most ethnically diverse countries in Europe; only 63% of its citizens are Serbs. In Novi Sad, the capital of Vojvodina, Serbs are not even a majority -- yet that city was bombed even more heavily than Belgrade. Even if one accepts Friedman's lunatic racist apologia for the bombing, NATO's campaign makes no sense.
During the meetings on the Macedonian border between NATO and Yugoslav military officers, the NATO representatives tried to hustle and bluster the Yugoslavs into signing a document which completely ignored crucial aspects of the G8 accord to which both the Yugoslav parliament and the UN Security Council had just agreed. When the Yugoslav officers insisted on the accepted terms and called for Russian support, they were accused of stalling and trickery by the shamelessly partisan American press. (Another casualty of this operation has been the international reputation of the global news service CNN; most of the world now understands that they are simply a mouthpiece for the American administration. The fact that the administration has to be Democratic is a nuance that is as yet understood only by Americans.)
Once inside Kosovo, of course, NATO proceeded to completely disregard the G8/UN accord and run the province according to its own wishes, ignoring the Russians' role in the settlement and turning the effective governance of Kosovo over to the racist KLA.
Some observers have praised NATO's cleverness in using fraudulent diplomacy as a tool to bypass Yugoslavia's formidable ground defenses. On the other hand, the next time NATO (or the US) needs to come to a military agreement with some other country, they might find it difficult to negotiate, since their opponent will simply not believe any assurances they may offer. The Kosovo trick will work only once.
The settlement was heralded by the American media as a surrender by Yugoslavia. It was nothing of the kind. What NATO pretended to accept differed from the Rambouillet ultimatum in three crucial respects:
- The troops occupying Kosovo were to be under UN, rather than NATO, command;
- No foreign troops were to be allowed access to the rest of Yugoslavia;
- Yugoslav sovereignty and territorial integrity were to be respected. (Rambouillet had essentially called for independence for Kosovo after three years.)
In short, these are the terms that the Yugoslav parliament had for the most part agreed to a month before the bombing began. It was in fact a NATO capitulation; the Yugoslav position had hardly changed at all.
The total damage to Yugoslavia by the 78 days of NATO bombing is estimated at about $136 billion. The total Gross Domestic Product of the country -- radically reduced over the last decade by the insane "economic sanctions" imposed at US insistence -- was about $17 billion last year. This means that it would take eight years of Yugoslavia's total GDP just to repair the damage caused by this utterly senseless bombing campaign. (The US GDP, for comparison, is around $20 billion a day.)
In fact, of course, the Yugoslav GDP will be substantially reduced -- by at least 25% next year alone -- due to the destruction of its industrial base, and the entire GDP can't be devoted to rebuilding, any more than a family can devote its entire income to a car payment. So ten million Yugoslavs will suffer for decades into the next century for having had the audacity to resist an American ultimatum.
So much for the new NATO -- that is, the new US -- "moral vision." In World War I, the war which set the tone for the entire 20th century (and which also began when a Great Power presented an impossible ultimatum to Serbia), it was the vandalism and brutality of the Kaiser's troops against the Belgians that in the long run cost Germany the war, since it turned worldwide public opinion against the Central Powers and allowed Britain and (eventually) the United States to enter the war. Bill Clinton's "moral vision" appears to most of the world to consist of equal parts of ruthlessness, mendacity, vengefulness, and cowardice; it remains to be seen what effect this will have on international relations in the 21st century.
But considering the flimsy pretext and political motivations for the bombing, its violation of every known principle of international law, and its total pointlessness, future historians will almost certainly view this operation as the greatest single act of random nihilistic vandalism in Europe since the Nazi occupation of Poland ended more than fifty years ago.
William Jefferson Clinton has his legacy.
Craig Goodrich lives in the woods in northern Alabama with his wife, two children, and four cats. He is a former Congressional candidate of the Libertarian Party of Alabama.
References & Acknowledgments:
- Antiwar's collection of essays and links.
- Stratfor's strategic and diplomatic analyses:
- Counterpunch's list of civilian victims of NATO's operation.
- Diana Johnstone has an excellent article in the current Covert Action Quarterly discussing Rambouillet, NATO, and the Albanian lobby in Washington.
- Jacob Sullum's May 12 column Collective Guilt.
- For more information on cluster bombs, see
- A formal portrait of Our Friend the CBU-87/B Combined Effects Munition (CEM). According to this source, the dud rate is only 5%, meaning that there are about 11,000 unexploded bomblets in Yugoslavia.
- A less-formal portrait by columnist Norman Solomon.
- Kosovo war's jetsam leaves Italy fishermen trawling for trouble in the July 16 Chicago Tribune
- War's insidious litter: cluster bombs in the June 9 Christian Science Monitor.
- The Atlantic has made available excerpts from Rebecca West's masterpiece on Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, originally published in the magazine in 1941. There are some illuminating general articles on the Balkans and Albania there, too.
- Bojan on Novi Sad
Some of CG's earlier writings on Yugoslavia:
- Lessons -- warmongering at the New York Times and elsewhere
- Kosovo under Albanian rule -- Here we go again.... (at Paul Miniato's Odyssey site)
- Sincere Regrets -- NATO's accomplishments up to the bombing of the Chinese Embassy
- Morituri ... -- Easter reflection
- Deus ex B52 -- Deep Backgrounder from Jamie Shea's ventriloquist
Last modified: Thu Jul 29 12:34:00 CDT 1999