[PEN-L:5260] (Fwd) FATAL FLAWS UNDERLYING NATO'S INTERVENTION IN YUGOSLAVIA

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Subject:                FATAL FLAWS UNDERLYING NATO'S INTERVENTION IN YUGOSLAVIA -
        Former Commander and Head of Mission, UN forces in Yugoslavia

United Services Insitution of India, New Delhi, April 6, 1999

THE FATAL FLAWS UNDERLYING NATO'S INTERVENTION IN YUGOSLAVIA

        By Lt Gen Satish Nambiar (Retd.)

(First Force Commander and Head of Mission of the United 
Nations Forces deployed in the former Yugoslavia 03 Mar 92 to 02 
Mar 93. Former Deputy Chief of Staff, Indian Army. Currently, 
Director of the United Services Insitution of India.)

My year long experience as the Force Commander and Head of 
Mission of the United Nations Forces deployed in the former 
Yugoslavia has given me an understanding of the fatal flaws of 
US/NATO policies in the troubled region. It was obvious to most 
people following events in the Balkans since the beginning of the 
decade, and particularly after the fighting that resulted in the 
emergence of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and the 
former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, that Kosovo was a 
'powder keg' waiting to explode. The West appears to have learnt 
all the wrong lessons from the previous wars and applied it to 
Kosovo.

(1) Portraying the Serbs as evil and everybody else as good was not 
only counterproductive but also dishonest. According to my 
experience all sides were guilty but only the Serbs would admit that 
they were no angels while the others would insist that they were. 
With 28,000 forces under me and with constant contacts with 
UNHCR and the International Red Cross officials, we did not 
witness any genocide beyond killings and massacres on all sides that 
are typical of such conflict conditions. I believe none of my 
successors and their forces saw anything on the scale claimed by the 
media.

(2) It was obvious to me that if Slovenians, Croatians and Bosniaks 
had the right to secede from Yugoslavia, then the Serbs of Croatia 
and Bosnia had an equal right to secede. The experience of 
partitions in Ireland and India has not be pleasant but in the 
Yugoslavia case, the state had already been taken apart anyway. It 
made little sense to me that if multi-ethnic Yugoslavia was not 
tenable that multi-ethnic Bosnia could be made tenable. The former 
internal boundaries of Yugoslavia which had no validity under 
international law should have been redrawn when it was taken apart 
by the West, just as it was in the case of Ireland in 1921 and Punjab 
and Bengal in India in 1947. Failure to acknowledge this has led to 
the problem of Kosovo as an integral part of Serbia.

(3) It is ironic that the Dayton Agreement on Bosnia was not 
fundamentally different from the Lisbon Plan drawn up by 
Portuguese Foreign Minister Cuteliero and British representative 
Lord Carrington to which all three sides had agreed before any 
killings had taken place, or even the Vance-Owen Plan which 
Karadzic was willing to sign. One of the main problems was that 
there was an unwillingness on the part of the American 
administration to concede that Serbs had legitimate grievances and 
rights. I recall State Department official George Kenny turning up 
like all other American officials, spewing condemnations of the 
Serbs for aggression and genocide. I offered to give him an escort 
and to go see for himself that none of what he proclaimed was true. 
He accepted my offer and thereafter he made a radical turnaround. 
Other Americans continued to see and hear what they wanted to 
see and hear from one side, while ignoring the other side. Such 
behaviour does not produce peace but more conflict.

(4) I felt that Yugoslavia was a media-generated tragedy. The 
Western media sees international crises in black and white, 
sensationalizing incidents for public consumption. From what I can 
see now, all Serbs have been driven out of Croatia and the Muslim-
Croat Federation, I believe almost 850,000 of them. And yet the 
focus is on 500,000 Albanians (at last count) who have been driven 
out of Kosovo. Western policies have led to an ethnically pure 
Greater Croatia, and an ethnically pure Muslim statelet in Bosnia. 
Therefore, why not an ethnically pure Serbia? Failure to address 
these double standards has led to the current one.

As I watched the ugly tragedy unfold in the case of Kosovo while 
visiting the US in early to mid March 1999, I could see the same 
pattern emerging. In my experience with similar situations in India 
in such places as Kashmir, Punjab, Assam, Nagaland, and 
elsewhere, it is the essential strategy of those ethnic groups who 
wish to secede to provoke the state authorities. Killings of 
policemen is usually a standard operating procedure by terrorists 
since that usually invites overwhelming state retaliation, just as I am 
sure it does in the United States.

I do not believe the Belgrade government had prior intention of 
driving out all Albanians from Kosovo. It may have decided to 
implement Washington's own "Krajina Plan" only if NATO 
bombed, or these expulsions could be spontaneous acts of revenge 
and retaliation by Serb forces in the field because of the bombing. 
The OSCE Monitors were not doing too badly, and the Yugoslav 
Government had, after all, indicated its willings to abide by nearly 
all the provisions of the Rambouillet "Agreement" on aspects like 
cease-fire, greater autonomy to the Albanians, and so on. 

But they insisted that the status of Kosovo as part of Serbia was 
not negotiable, and they would not agree to stationing NATO 
forces on the soil of Yugoslavia. This is precisely what India would 
have done under the same circumstances. It was the West that 
proceeded to escalate the situation into the current senseless 
bombing campaign that smacks more of hurt egos, and revenge and 
retaliation. NATO's massive bombing intended to terrorize Serbia 
into submission appears no differrent from the morality of actions 
of Serb forces in Kosovo. Ultimatums were issued to Yugoslavia 
that unless the terms of an agreement drawn up at Rambouillet 
were signed, NATO would undertake bombing. Ultimatums do not 
constitute diplomacy. They are acts of war. The Albanians of 
Kosovo who want independence, were coaxed and cajoled into 
putting their signatures to a document motivated with the hope of 
NATO bombing of Serbs and independence later. With this 
signature, NATO assumed all the legal and moral authority to 
undertake military operations against a country that had, at worst, 
been harsh on its own people. On 24th March 1999, NATO 
launched attacks with cruise missiles and bombs, on Yugoslavia, a 
sovereign state, a founding member of the United Nations and the 
Non Aligned Movement; and against a people who were at the 
forefront of the fight against Nazi Germany and other fascist forces 
during World War Two. I consider these current actions 
unbecoming of great powers.

It is appropriate to touch on the humanitarian dimension for it is the 
innocent who are being subjected to displacement, pain and misery. 
Unfortunately, this is the tragic and inevitable outcome of all such 
situations of civil war, insurgencies, rebel movements, and terrorist 
activity. History is replete with examples of such suffering; whether 
it be the American Civil War, Northern Ireland, the Basque 
movement in Spain, Chechnya, Angola, Cambodia, and so many 
other cases; the indiscriminate bombing of civilian centres during 
World War Two; Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Vietnam. The list is 
endless. I feel that this tragedy could have been prevented if 
NATO's ego and credibility had not been given the highest priority 
instead of the genuine grievances of Serbs in addition to Albanians.

Notwithstanding all that one hears and sees on CNN and BBC, and 
other Western agencies, and in the daily briefings of the NATO 
authorities, the blame for the humanitarian crisis that has arisen 
cannot be placed at the door of the Yugoslav authorities alone. The 
responsibility rests mainly at NATO's doors. In fact, if I am to go 
by my own experience as the First Force Commander and Head of 
Mission of the United Nations forces in the former Yugoslavia, 
from March 1992 to March 1993, handling operations in Croatia, 
Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Macedonia, I would say that reports put 
out in the electronic media are largely responsible for provoking 
this tragedy. 

Where does all this leave the international community which for the 
record does not comprise of the US, the West and its newfound 
Muslim allies ? The portents for the future, at least in the short 
term, are bleak indeed. The United Nations has been made totally 
redundant, ineffective, and impotent. The Western world, led by the 
USA, will lay down the moral values that the rest of the world must 
adhere to; it does not matter that they themselves do not adhere to 
the same values when it does not suit them. National sovereignty 
and territorial integrity have no sanctity. And finally, secessionist 
movements, which often start with terrorist activity, will get greater 
encouragement. One can only hope that good sense will prevail, 
hopefully sooner rather than later. 

Lt General Satish Nambiar
Director, USI, New Delhi
6 April 1999