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Date sent: Fri, 09 Apr 1999 16:32:10 -0700
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From: Sid Shniad <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: CLINTON BOMBS AGAIN - The Village Voice
The Village Voice April 7-13, 1999
CLINTON BOMBS AGAIN
How the Air Strikes Destroyed Democratic Movements In
Kosovo, Serbia, And Montenegro
By Jason Vest
Washington — Bill Clinton isn't the first chief executive in U.S.
history to curtail democracy and human rights abroad ostensibly in
the name of protecting them. He is, however, rapidly distinguishing
himself in this regard. Not that the Clinton administration can be
held entirely responsible for perpetrating the latest round of
international lunacy, this time in the Balkans. Congress, as it did
twice last year, has chosen not to exercise its constitutionally
required duty to declare hostilities, thus allowing Clinton's dogs of
war (Down, Sandy! Down, Madeline!) to run wild again. Not that
this politico-military charge at a windmill is devoid of noble intent.
However, among the many problems with this crusade is that,
much as the average American no doubt is opposed to repression
and annihilation, they are part and parcel of U.S. foreign policy —
as the Clinton administration's Balkan approach continues to show.
It's appalling enough that bombing a country in the name of halting
depredation (and instead, engendering it) takes place against a
historical backdrop of support for such repressive regimes as
Turkey and Indonesia, which pursue their own policies of ethnic
cleansing. But even more revolting was watching Clinton slyly
revise history while trying to strike a morally imperative chord
("We must apply the same lessons in Kosovo before what happened
in Bosnia happens there too") without — surprise — taking any
real responsibility for the machinations and calculations, deliberate
and errant, that have have led to this debacle.
But, then, Clinton has always been more inclined to say the
right thing rather than do it. In regard to Bosnia, as Mark Danner
astutely pointed out in a 1997 New York Review of Books essay,
Clinton's articulated policy ("The U.S. should always seek an
opportunity to stand up against — at least speak out against —
inhumanity") was "one consisting solely of words [that] brought
moral credit [and] carried no risk," and that helped pave the way to
the Serbs' massacre of thousands at Srebenica. Rather like Bosnia
— in which Clinton blamed European allies for undermining the
"lift and strike" approach and made the case that his administration
honestly tried, while the problem partially resolved itself through
mass murders and expulsions — so too, perhaps, with Kosovo.
The Clinton administration has shown itself to be adroit in the
use of that old tool of statecraft, "signaling," to provoke ethnic
purges rather than preventing them through proactive diplomacy. In
1995, for example, Croatian forces (trained by exU.S. military
personnel with the tacit blessing of the Pentagon) were giddy when,
on the verge of undertaking a campaign for lebensraum against
Serbs in Krajina, President Franjo Tudjman was informed that the
U.S. was merely "concerned" about the buildup of Croat troops. In
short order, at least 170,000 Serbs were driven from their homes or
killed. While France, Russia, and Great Britain condemned the
offensive, Clinton praised it, saying he was "hopeful Croatia's
offensive will turn out to be something that will give us an avenue
to a quick diplomatic solution."
"In essence, the U.S. gave diplomatic cover to the Croatians for
this action," says Hussein Ibish, a foreign policy analyst at the
American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. "It prevented any
UN condemnation of what happened, and it certainly never
registered any dismay."
Last year, when U.S. special envoy Robert Gelbard visited the
Balkans, he publicly vilified the Kosovo Liberation Army, saying, "I
know a terrorist when I see one, and these men are terrorists." In
Washington foreign policy circles, some regard this statement as the
beginning of a chain reaction that resulted in the current situation,
rife with the death of both human beings and democratic
movements.
When Gelbard spoke, the KLA was a fairly marginal force, seen
by many in both Belgrade and Washington as a diplomatic irritant.
Belgrade interpreted Gelbard's comments as approval to act against
the KLA with impunity, which, in practice, meant the massacre of
nearly 100 people (mostly women and children) in Kosovo's
Benitsar enclave.
Until that point, the KLA had not enjoyed broad support. In
fact, for most of the past decade, the primary method of ethnic
Albanian resistance to Serbian hegemony was a focused political
movement utilizing civil disobedience and negotiation. "Even
though the Serbs set up what amounted to an apartheid system in
Kosovo after it lost its autonomy, rather than arm, the Kosovars
began and sustained a nonviolent struggle to achieve their goals,"
says Michael Beer, director of Nonviolence International. "They
held referendums and organized a parallel government. They even
had their own form of taxation. A handful of us with chump change
did the best we could to try to provide resources to support this
movement, but what we had was paltry."
According to Beer, what was lacking was international
recognition."If the U.S. had chosen to spend one cruise missile's
worth of money on the Kosovars' efforts, and lent them moral
support, we could have done a lot with that," Beer says.
Unfortunately, he adds, waging proactive peace isn't as sexy as
massive military action. By not taking the Kosovars' nonviolent
struggle seriously, and by giving the Serbs a green light to massacre
in the name of anti-KLA operations, the U.S. helped radicalize
many Kosovars who had previously inclined toward nonviolence
and didn't necessarily share the KLA's stated goal, which is not
merely independence from Kosovo but the establishment of a new,
pan-Albanian federation that would encompass Kosovo, Albania,
and parts of Macedonia and Montenegro — not exactly stabilizing
goals for the Balkans.
Of course, Kosovan democracy hasn't been the only victim of
the recent hostilities. Largely ignored has been the virtual collapse
of the fledgling republican movement in Montenegro. Despite its
technical status as part of the Yugoslav federation that includes
Serbia, Montenegro elected a pro-Western, anti-Milosevic
government in 1998, and its president, Milo Djukanovic, has made
no secret of his contempt for Belgrade's actions in Kosovo. To
date, Montenegro has enjoyed a tenuous autonomy from Belgrade.
However, rather than leave the few Serb military installations in
Montenegro alone, U.S.-led NATO forces have bombed them — an
action that Zorica Maric of the Montenegrin Trade Mission in
Washington says has put the Djukanovic government in serious
jeopardy. "NATO is failing to distinguish between democratic
Montenegro and Serbia with regard to Kosovo," she says,
explaining that with each day the bombing continues, the likelihood
grows that Milosevic will use it as an excuse to depose the
government of Montenegro — or treat it as a "traitorous" province,
much the way Serbia has Kosovo.
Perhaps far worse for Balkan democracy is the situation in
Serbia, where the bombings have shattered that country's
progressive movement. As Vojin Dimitrijevic, director of the
Belgrade Centre for Human Rights, put it in an Internet dispatch,
"In one night, the NATO air strikes have wiped out 10 years of
hard work of groups of courageous people in the non-governmental
sector and democratic opposition. We have not tried to overthrow
anyone, but we have tried to develop the institutions of civil
society, to promote liberal and civic values, to teach nonviolent
conflict resolution. . . . In the prevailing atmosphere of war, anti-
democratic forces are increasingly losing their inhibitions.
Meanwhile, clumsy foreign attempts to 'assist' democracy and
respect for human rights in Serbia with vague promises of money
merely expose the non-governmental sector to accusations that it is
a fifth column."
At a forum in Washington last week hosted by the Institute for
Policy Studies, a member of the liberal Serb organization Women in
Black was so overcome that she dressed down the assembled
panelists, even though they were all fundamentally in agreement.
"My friends have been working for democracy in Serbia, and now,
we're lining up behind Milosevic. Did the Clinton administration
think my people would be saying 'hurrah'?" she fumed. "Bill Clinton
has done more for Milosevic than Milosevic could have done for
himself."
Indeed, as a Southerner, Clinton might have seen some parallels
between the Confederates and the Serbs. As Civil War authority
Shelby Foote has noted, when the poorly supplied, outgunned
rebels were captured by the Yankees and asked why they were
fighting, the standard response was, "Because you're down here."
Writing to an American journalist last week, a Belgrade University
professor explained the rallying around Milosevic in much the same
terms: "In this moment we have only one solution. We must protect
our country," he wrote. "We do not have another one." But
Clinton's historical myopia is par for the course. As Julianne Smith,
a senior analyst at the British American Security Information
Council, notes, "Saying bombing enough will get Milosevic back to
the table is false — look at the recent history in Iraq, where it
clearly hasn't been effective. And as for saying bombing is a
protective tool, nothing could be further from the truth. And the
assumption that the KLA will stop fighting if the Serb military is
degraded is false. There is no evidence that they'll stop and say,
'Fine, we're content with autonomy.' And very little concern is being
given to Russia."
To most here in Washington, the initial Russian reaction elicited
little concern. As one Republican congressional staffer gleefully put
it, "This is our chance to show the world just how little the
Russians matter anymore." According to Bill Hartung, international
arms expert for the World Policy Institute, this view — embraced
to varying degrees among both Republicans and administration
officials — is shortsighted. "For a certain strain of unreconstructed
Cold Warrior, it's very emotionally satisfying to kick the Russians
when they're down, but a weak Russia simply doesn't serve our
interests — we really should want a good relationship with the
country that has the largest and least secure nuclear stockpile," he
says. "They could deep-six START II and slow down the Nunn-
Lugar [cooperative nuclear disarmament] stuff. And the easiest
thing to do is start reviving some of their relationships with
countries the Pentagon is nervous about."
At the start of this week, the answer to the big question that is
pertinent to both Russia and NATO — whether ground troops
would be deployed — remained unlear. However, even though the
Independent's Robert Fisk noted two weeks ago that the Kaiser's
policy ("the Balkans are not worth the bones of a Pomeranian
grenadier") has been adopted to the letter by NATO, Clinton, in a
speech in Norfolk, Virginia, seemed to signal an impending shift.
Not only has NATO demanded what it previously had not — that
the Serbs pull out and allow the Kosovars to return sans a
negotiated peace agreement — but, according to Clinton, the
formal objective has changed from degrading Serbian capabilities to
the restoration of ethnic Albanians to Kosovo.
This obviously is going to be difficult to accomplish without
ground forces. However, unlike the Gulf War — fought on desert
plains against apathetic conscripts — NATO forces will be in
mountainous regions that lend themselves to guerrilla warfare,
facing zealously united soldiers and paramilitaries. Perhaps
sustained bombings will soften them up. But recalling the actions of
the Serbs who left Sarajevo in 1995 — they dug up their own dead
and lugged the corpses over refugee trails rather than let them
remain interred in Muslim-occupied land — it seems unlikely that a
protracted ground war in Serbia and Kosovo will reflect the relative
ease of reclaiming Kuwait. One has to wonder, in light of all this,
just how festive NATO's upcoming 50th birthday party will be.
Research: Wayne Madsen and Ginger Otis
[PEN-L:5083] (Fwd) CLINTON BOMBS AGAIN - The Village Voice
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