Scenarios Reach the TV Screen-6
As television producer Roberts recalls, it was a Ukrainian friend who, seeing the
implications for his own country of the Abramowitz humanitarian war plans, set him to
worrying. "If the U.S. endorsed this new foreign policy principle the potential for
international chaos was immense. Real or trumped up incidents of destruction or
displacement would be grounds for Russian or American military intervention in dozens of
countries where nothing like a melting pot has ever existed."
"Real or trumped up" -- that is the question. For once so much is at
stake -- nothing less than the future of the greatest power the world has ever seen --
events are all too likely to follow the imaginary scenario laid out by the policy
planners.
This can happen in at least three ways.
1 - Reality imitates fiction. It is a common human psychological phenomenon that
people see what they are looking for, or have been led to expect to see, often when it is
not there. This happens in countless ways. It may account for desert mirages, or
apparitions of the Virgin, or simple errors of recognition that occur all the time.
When reporters unfamiliar with the country are sent into
Bosnia or Kosovo to look for evidence of "Serbian war crimes", and only evidence
of Serbian war crimes, that is what they will find. And if Croats, Muslims and Albanians
who are fighting against the Serbs know that that is what they are looking for, it will be
even easier.
If they are expecting, say, Serbs to be criminals,
everything Serbs say or do will be interpreted in that light, with greater or less
sincerity. Every ambiguous detail will find its meaning.
2 - Evidence will be trumped up. This is an age-old practice in war.
3 - Circumstances can be arranged to incite the very crimes that the power wants
to be able to punish. In police language, this is called entrapment, or a
"sting" operation, and is illegal in many countries, although not in the United
States.
The Kosovo scenario has been advanced in all three ways.
Military intervention may be justified "when a
self-determination claim triggers an armed conflict that becomes a humanitarian
crisis", wrote Scheffer and Halperin.
The much-praised non-violent movement of Ibrahim Rugova could not meet this
criterion. It failed precisely because it was not a movement for political equality but a
movement for secession. A non-violent movement for political equality can find many active
ways to illustrate its exclusion and press its demands for inclusion. But the goals of the Albanian movement were not inclusion but complete
independence from the existing State. To show their rejection of Serbia, Kosovo Albanians
in the Rugova period refused to use the democratic rights they had, boycotted elections,
refused to pay taxes, and even set up their own parallel schools and public health
service. The odd thing is that this movement of passive resistance was met for the
most part by passive resistance on the part of the Serbian State, which allowed Dr Rugova
to go about his business (obviously in defiance of Serbian laws) as "President of the
Republic of Kosova", let people get away with not paying taxes and did not force
children to attend Serbian schools. Certainly, there were numerous instances of police
brutality, although their extent is hard to judge, in-as-much as
Kosovar Albanian Human Rights Groups notoriously exaggerated such incidents in order to
claim that their people were being brutally oppressed -- a claim which was not accepted by
the German government, incidentally, despite its support to the separatist movement.
But in reality, internal separatism was too easy. The two communities grew ever farther
apart, but peacefully. There was an impasse.
That impasse was broken by the UÇK/KLA, acting with the
backing of the United States. The strategy was summed up by Richard Cohen:
The KLA had a simple but effective plan. It would kill Serbian policemen. The Serbs would retaliate, Balkan style,
with widespread reprisals and the occasional massacre. The West would get more and more
appalled, until finally it would, as it did in Bosnia, take action. In effect, the United
States and much of Europe would go to war on the side of the KLA. It worked.
This version perhaps gives the KLA/UÇK a little too much credit. The United
States has been watching Kosovo closely for years, and there are strong indications that
it both passively and actively assisted the armed rebels in their humanitarian sting
operation. The KLA did indeed kill Serbian policemen, as well as a
number of civilians, including ethnic Albanians who failed to boycott the Serbian state.
But in between these killings and the Serb retaliation, "Balkan style", there
was a very significant encouragement from Richard Gelbard,
acting as U.S. proconsul for former Yugoslavia. Normally, Gelbard's visits to Belgrade
were marked by utterances berating Serbian authorities for not doing Washington's bidding
in one respect or another. But on February 23, 1998, Gelbard visited
Pristina and declared publicly that the KLA/UÇK was indeed "unquestionably a
terrorist organization".
To the Serbs, this simply seemed to be recognition of what
to them was an obvious fact. Naively believing that the United States was, as it continued
to declare, sincerely opposed to "international terrorism", Serbian authorities
took this remark as a green light to do what any government normally does in such
circumstances: send in armed police to repress the terrorists. After all, they were
not hard to find. Unlike guerrillas in most conflicts, they made no effort to conceal
their whereabouts but openly proclaimed that they were hanging out in a number of villages
in the Drenica hill region. Far from heading for the hills when the police approached, the UÇK let civilians who didn't want to get shot head for the hills
while they themselves hunkered down at home, sometimes with a few remaining family
members, and shot it out with police. This suicidal tactic may have stemmed from
the fact that Albanian homes often double as fortresses in the traditional blood feuds,
but could not withstand Serbian government fire power. In any case,
the results were enough dead Albanians in their villages to enable Madeleine Albright and
her chorus of media commentators to cry "ethnic cleansing". It was not
"ethnic cleansing", it was a classic anti-insurgency operation. But that was
enough for the trap to start closing.
It is easy to imagine how the same scenario could enfold again in some remote area
of the "Eurasian Balkans", where folk customs are not frightfully different from
those of the Albanians.
[ Clinton Doctrine ] [ Importance of War Crimes ] [ Humanitarian Realpolitik ] [ Cultural Divides ] [ Scenarios Reach the TV Screen ] [ Abramowitz-Albright Policy For Yugoslavia ] [ How to sabotage the OSCE ] [ How to obtain "Justice" ] [ Unified Empires ] [ History as Melodrama ]
