Exclusive: President Bill
Clinton’s Kosovo war of 1999 was loved by neocons and liberal hawks – the
forerunner for Iraq, Libya, Syria and other conflicts this century – but
Kosovo’s political violence and lawlessness today underscore the grim
consequences of those strategies even when they “succeed,” writes Jonathan
Marshall.
By Jonathan Marshall
The insatiable appetite of America’s
bipartisan foreign policy elites for military intervention — despite its record
of creating failing states in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen —
traces back to the marriage of liberal and neoconservative interventionists
during the Clinton administration’s 78-day bombing of Serbia to create the
break-away state of Kosovo in 1999.
One scholar-advocate has called NATO’s
campaign “The most important precedent supporting the legitimacy of
unilateral humanitarian intervention.” Even Sen. Bernie
Sanders was proud to support that use of American power, ostensibly “to
prevent further genocide.”
But Kosovo, which is still not
recognized as an independent state by nearly half of all UN members, and
which still relies on 4,600 NATO troops
to maintain order, is hardly a showcase for the benefits of military
intervention. With an unemployment
rate of 35 percent, Kosovo is wracked by persistent
outbreaks
of terrorism, crime, and political violence.
Following a series of violent
street protests and wild disruptions of parliament, the leader of the radical
nationalist party, Vetëvendosje, announced
on Feb. 19, “This regime is now is in its final days. They will not last long.”
That day, members of
Vetëvendosje set off tear gas cannisters in parliament and tussled with police
in the latest of their many protests against an agreement
reached by the government last summer to grant limited powers to the country’s
Serbian minority, in return for Serbia’s recognition of Kosovo. Opposition
lawmakers also rail against endemic corruption and the country’s
under-performing economy.
Two days earlier, at least
15,000 Kosovars gathered
in the central square of Pristina, the country’s capital, to demand the
government’s resignation. In January, thousands of protesters clashed with
police, hurling Molotov cocktails, setting
a major government building and armored police cars on fire, and wounding
24 police officers.
“The aim of this protest was
to overthrow the government with violence,” the government said in a statement.
The U.S. ambassador chimed in, “Political violence threatens democracy and all
that Kosovo has achieved since independence.”
This violence gets little attention
from the American media in part because, unlike the Ukrainian demonstrators who
overthrew their democratically elected government in 2014, Kosovo’s protesters
are targeting a pro-Western government that eagerly seeks membership in the
European Union.
But it’s no wonder that
Kosovo’s political fabric is so rent by violent confrontations. The rump state
was created by a violent secessionist movement led by the Kosovo Liberation
Army (KLA). That guerrilla band of Albanian nationalists was covertly
backed by the German secret service to weaken Serbia. Its terrorist attacks
on Serbian villages and government personnel in the mid-1990s prompted a brutal
military crackdown by Serbia, followed by NATO’s decisive intervention in 1999.
During the fighting the KLA
drove tens of thousands of ethnic Serbs from Kosovo as part of an ethnic
cleansing campaign to promote independence for the majority Albanian
population. It recruited
Islamist militants — including
followers of Osama Bin Laden — from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Afghanistan and
other countries.
President Bill Clinton’s
special envoy to the Balkans, Robert Gelbard, called
the KLA “without any question, a terrorist group,” and a Council on Foreign
Relations backgrounder
added, “most of its activities were funded by drug running.”
None of that, however, stopped
Washington from embracing the KLA’s cause against Serbia, a policy spearheaded by the
liberal interventionist First Lady Hillary Clinton and Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright. Without authorization from the United Nations, NATO began
bombing Serbia in March 1999, killing
some 500 civilians, demolishing billions of dollars’ worth of industrial
plants, bridges, schools,
libraries and hospitals, and even hitting the Chinese embassy. (“It should
be lights out in Belgrade,” demanded New
York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. “Every power grid, water pipe, bridge,
road and war-related factory has to be targeted. Like it or not, we are at war
with the Serbian nation.”)
Following Serbia’s
capitulation, according
to Human Rights Watch, “elements of the KLA” engaged in “widespread and
systematic burning and looting of homes belonging to Serbs, Roma, and other
minorities and the destruction of Orthodox churches and monasteries. This
destruction was combined with harassment and intimidation designed to force
people from their homes and communities. By late-2000 more than 210,000 Serbs
had fled the province . . . The desire for revenge provides a partial
explanation, but there is also a clear political goal in many of these attacks:
the removal from Kosovo of non-ethnic Albanians in order to better justify an
independent state.”
Former KLA leaders, including
its political head Hashim Thaçi, went on to dominate the new Kosovo state. A 2010
report by the Council of Europe declared that Thaçi, who was then Kosovo’s
prime minister, headed a “mafia-like” group that smuggled drugs, guns and human
organs on a grand scale through Eastern Europe. The report’s author accused
the international community of turning a blind eye while Thaçi’s group of KLA
veterans engaged in “assassinations, detentions, beatings and interrogations”
to maintain power and profit from their criminal activities.
Prime Minister Thaçi and the
Kosovo government strenuously denied the allegations and succeeded for years in
resisting
accountability. Their American friends were eager to put the past behind as
well. In 2012, Madeleine Albright and a former Clinton special envoy to the
Balkans bid to take
control of the country’s state-owned telecommunications company despite
widespread allegations of corruption, the attempted assassination of the
telecommunications regulatory chief, and the murder
of the state privatization agency’s chief.
No one seemed immune from
corruption. A study
of the European Union’s own legal mission to Kosovo suggested that its members
may have taken bribes to drop investigations of senior Kosovo politicians for
rampant criminal activity.
In 2014, a three-year E.U.
investigation concluded
that “senior officials of the former Kosovo Liberation Army” should be indicted
for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including “unlawful killings,
abductions, enforced disappearances, illegal detentions in camps in Kosovo and
Albania, sexual violence, other forms of inhumane treatment, forced
displacements of individuals from their homes and communities, and desecration
and destruction of churches and other religious sites.”
Under tough pressure from the
United States and E.U., Kosovo’s parliament finally agreed
last summer to permit a special court to prosecute former KLA leaders for war
crimes. The court will begin
operating this year in The Hague.
“The sad thing is that the
United States and European countries knew 10 years ago that Thaçi and his men
were engaged in drug smuggling and creating a mafia state,” said
one European ambassador last year. “The attitude was, ‘He’s a bastard, but
he’s our bastard.’”
Whether delayed justice will
clean up Kosovo’s “mafia state,” and whether belated granting of rights to the
Serbian minority will ease or aggravate Kosovo’s explosive ethnic tensions,
remain to be seen. One thing’s for sure: a great many people have died in the
name of this great “humanitarian intervention,” and many more are still
suffering for it. Kosovo is no Libya or Syria, but neither is it any kind of
showcase for the benefits of U.S. armed intervention.
Jonathan Marshall is author or
co-author of five books on international affairs, including The
Lebanese Connection: Corruption, Civil War and the International Drug Traffic (Stanford
University Press, 2012). Some of his previous articles for Consortiumnews were
“Risky
Blowback from Russian Sanctions”; “Neocons
Want Regime Change in Iran”; “Saudi
Cash Wins France’s Favor”; “The
Saudis’ Hurt Feelings”; “Saudi
Arabia’s Nuclear Bluster”; “The
US Hand in the Syrian Mess”; and “Hidden
Origins of Syria’s Civil War.” ]
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