Diplomacy at Gunpoint: Kosovo: the Illegal and Unnecessary War

By James Rothrock

On the eve of March 24, 1999, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) began bombing the sovereign nation of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, a poorly developed nation the size of Kentucky with a population of eleven million. Led by the United States, NATO bombed Yugoslavia for seventy-eight days and nights, with the objective of ending the repression of the ethnic Albanian population in the province of Kosovo. This book explores the numerous questions about the legality, morality, and necessity of NATO’s military intervention.

Colonel Rothrock probes some of the pervasive questions about the Kosovo War:

• Were all alternatives short of war explored?
• Were conventions of international law contravened?
• Why were some provisions of the Rambouillet peace agreement nonnegotiable?
• Was the proposed Rambouillet agreement written with provisions that no sovereign nation could accept?
• Why did the United States insist that only a NATO implementation force inside Yugoslavia and Kosovo was acceptable?
• Why was the Yugoslavian Parliament’s last-minute offer to consider an international occupation force other than NATO ignored?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Jun 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781665703130

James Rothrock

James Rothrock, Lt. Colonel U.S. Air Force (Ret.), served twenty-eight years in the U.S. Air Force, including eleven years abroad with travels in Europe, the Far East, and the Middle East. He served three years in a NATO command, two years as an advisor to the Hellenic Air Force in Athens, Greece, was a launch control officer of nuclear forces for three years, and he completed a one-year tour in Vietnam at the height of that war. He is a former special investigator for the U.S. government and an adjunct professor of world geography. He is the author of two other books: Live by the Sword and Divided We Fall.

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Copyright © 2021 James Rothrock.

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ISBN: 978-1-6657-0314-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-0312-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-0313-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021903394

Archway Publishing rev. date: 07/23/2021

Contents

Introduction

CHAPTER 1 Genesis of the Conflict

CHAPTER 2 At the Crossroads

CHAPTER 3 A Fragile Cease-Fire

CHAPTER 4 Conflict Intensifies

CHAPTER 5 The Turning Point

CHAPTER 6 Rambouillet Accords

CHAPTER 7 Sign or Be Bombed

CHAPTER 8 Air Strikes

CHAPTER 9 Legality, Morality, Necessity

CHAPTER 10 The Aftermath

Glossary

Endnotes

Introduction

On March 24, 1999, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) began bombing the sovereign nation of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) with the objective of ending the repression of the ethnic Albanian population in the province of Kosovo. This was the beginning of a seventy-eight-day war against a small, poorly developed nation the size of Kentucky with a population of eleven million and a military equipped with weapons from the Cold War era handed down from the former Soviet Union. At that time, Yugoslavia consisted of two republics, Serbia and Montenegro. Kosovo was a province within the Republic of Serbia.

Led by the United States, thirteen of the (then) eighteen NATO nations launched air strikes against Yugoslavia using the most modern weapons of that day, including cruise missiles, stealth and conventional fighter and bomber aircraft, and attack helicopters. In all, some four hundred air strikes were carried out the very first night, including fifty-five cruise missiles fired from US and British attack submarines. A total of twenty-eight thousand bombs and missiles were launched against Yugoslavia by US and other NATO aircraft during this brief war.

Understandably, you might ask why such a massive attack would be launched against a small, underdeveloped country. The United States and NATO officials say it was a humanitarian war to stop ethnic cleansing of the Kosovo ethnic Albanians by Slobodan Milosevic, who was then the president of Yugoslavia. Many argue that the bombing created a greater humanitarian disaster than would otherwise have occurred. One thing that most people agree with is that NATO’s attack on Yugoslavia resulted in the worst humanitarian disaster since World War II.

The bombing of Yugoslavia prompted a firestorm of debates over the legality of NATO’s actions. Unquestionably, it violated the basic tenets of the NATO treaty. NATO was formed as a mutual defense alliance wherein if one of the member nations was attacked, the others would come to its defense. It was also a contradiction of Article 1 of NATO’s own treaty, which states that NATO will never use force or threaten to use force to resolve international disputes.

NATO’s intervention was also a breach of the United Nations Charter. The UN Charter requires that any non-defense use of force must be approved by the majority of all the Security Council’s five permanent members. NATO did not seek or receive the Security Council’s approval, nor was it acting in self-defense. The disregard for the United Nations, the primary body for maintaining peace and world order, has set a dangerous precedent.

What became known as the Kosovo War left many unanswered questions:

a. Was the military intervention legal, and were conventions of international law contravened?

b. Was the use of military force really necessary?

c. Were all alternatives short of war explored?

d. Why were certain conditions of the proposed Rambouillet peace agreement nonnegotiable?

e. Why was Milosevic given only two options: sign the proposed Rambouillet agreement or be bombed?

f. Was the proposed Rambouillet agreement written with provisions that no sovereign nation could accept?

g. Why did the United States insist that only a NATO occupation force inside Yugoslavia and Kosovo was acceptable?

h. Why was the Yugoslavian Parliament’s last-minute offer to consider an international occupation force other than NATO ignored?

i. Why did the proposed agreement include the provision that NATO forces could move throughout Yugoslavia with immunity and without restrictions of any kind?

j. Why did it take so long for the United States to deploy its complement of the Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM)?

k. Why weren’t the KVM verifiers armed?

l. Why didn’t they increase the number of KVM verifiers?

m. Was the Kosovo Verification Mission pulled out too soon?

n. Was this war in the national interests of the United States?

The purpose of this book is to reveal answers to these questions, with special emphasis on the legality, morality, and necessity of this war. Before proceeding, it is necessary to make one point very clear. This book in no way excuses the barbarism of Slobodan Milosevic or any of his murderous thugs. Rarely has the world seen such brutality as was inflicted on the Kosovar Albanians by Milosevic’s Serbian police and military forces. Nevertheless, such uncivilized conduct does not entitle others to rain carnage on an independent, sovereign nation that is being ravaged from within by a separatist insurrection, without first exhausting all peaceful means at their disposal.

Throughout this book, extensive use is made of firsthand, on-the-ground reports by members of the Kosovo Diplomatic Observer Mission (KDOM) and the Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM) who risked daily patrols to provide a true picture of the conflict in Kosovo as it unfolded. Additionally, numerous official documents emanating from the United Nations, NATO, United Kingdom, Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (then), US State Department, US Defense Department, White House, and US Senate provide authenticity to events described in this book. These twenty-year-old documents, from the author’s private collection, provide factual, firsthand information upon which to draw a conclusion as to whether the decision to bomb Yugoslavia to force the settlement of the Kosovo conflict was legal, moral, and necessary. Were there other alternatives short of military intervention which could have avoided the death and destruction from the bombing and a major humanitarian disaster?

The seeds of the Kosovo conflict were sown many years in the past. That is where this story begins.

Map1.psd

Former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

Source: CIA World Factbook

Map2.psd

Province/Republic of Kosovo.

Source: CIA World Factbook

Chapter 1

GENESIS OF THE

CONFLICT

W e must look back several centuries to find the origin of the conflict that eventually led to NATO’s war with Yugoslavia. Modern-day Yugoslavia, except for Montenegro, originated in southeastern Europe, where it arose from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire. This area was inhabited by people of varied ethnicity, language, religion, and culture, setting the stage for centuries of conflict. The main areas of conflict were between Islam and Christianity and the interfusion of Albanian and Serbian nationalism. In 1389 Serb forces were defeated by the Ottomans at the Battle of Kosovo Polje (plain). The defeat notwithstanding, this heroic battle led the Serbs to raise this area to a symbol of their cradle of civilization. However, the Albanians also have a significant attachment to Kosovo. They claim they were the original inhabitants and the majority of the population. ¹

After centuries of Ottoman rule, Serbia became an independent state in 1878 and following the Balkan Wars in 1913 gained control of Kosovo, even though the majority of the population in that area was ethnic Albanian. A year later, a Serbian national assassinated Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, igniting the powder keg that started World War I. Soon after the war began, Serbia was occupied by Austria-Hungary. Following the downfall of the occupation forces at the war’s end, the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes united under the kingdom of Serbia. In 1929 the name was changed to Yugoslavia.²

During World War II Nazi Germany invaded Yugoslavia and established a puppet government. A Serbian resistance movement was formed which was co-opted by a determined communist partisan group. Communist-led partisans waged a courageous guerrilla war against foreign invaders. As the war drew to a close, the partisans, along with the Soviets and Allied forces, drove out the occupiers. In 1945, Yugoslavia was reconstituted as a socialist federation under the devout communist Marshal Josip Tito, who remained head of state for the next thirty-five years. Under Tito, Yugoslavia remained independent of the Soviet Union. It consisted of six independent republics: Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Slovenia, and Montenegro.³

After Kosovo was liberated by Yugoslav communist partisans near the end of World War II, it became a province of the Yugoslav Republic of Serbia. The Kosovar Albanians rejected this status and began battling Yugoslav troops for control of Kosovo. Thousands are thought to have been killed on both sides during this conflict. Unrest continued long after the battles ended, with ethnic Albanians in Kosovo subject to harsh treatment and life under dire economic and political conditions. The Yugoslav Constitution of 1963 referred to Kosovo as an autonomous province, but its constitutional status was left to be determined by Serbia’s parliament.⁴

In 1968 ethnic Albanians began demonstrations across Kosovo for independence. State police used force to quell the demonstrations, and many leaders of the movement were arrested. Under the new Yugoslav Constitution of 1974, Kosovo was finally granted autonomy and became a Socialist Autonomous Province of the Federation of Yugoslavia with direct representation and voting rights on the Federal institutions. The constitution gave Kosovo essentially the same rights as the country’s republics. However, this did not significantly improve the livelihood of the Kosovars, who continued to become more and more economically disadvantaged. Unemployment in Kosovo went from 18.9 percent in 1971 to 27.5 percent in 1981. It was not surprising that large-scale demonstrations took place in the spring of 1981, which led to the complete purging of the Kosovo political party by Serbian officials. Demands were made for Kosovo to be given republic status and rights of secession. Thousands were imprisoned, many were injured, and some were killed. Albania was accused of overtly supporting Kosovo’s drive for republic status.⁵

After Marshal Tito’s death, Slobodan Milosevic gained power in Serbia and capitalized on a rise in Serb nationalist sentiment, especially among the Serb minority in Kosovo. In 1987 Milosevic visited Kosovo, where he sided with the Serb minority and promised to protect them from alleged mistreatment by the Albanian majority, which included 90 percent of the population. He became president of Serbia that year and pushed through constitutional amendments reasserting Serbian control over Kosovo. In 1989 the autonomy given to Kosovo in 1974 was revoked. A state of emergency was declared, Kosovo government bodies were dissolved, and Kosovo Albanians were removed from state government and party positions. Many civil rights were suspended. Legislation was passed denying ownership and work to Kosovo Albanians. Thousands of ethnic Albanians lost their jobs. The unemployment in Kosovo rose to a disastrous 57 percent. A state of emergency was imposed in Kosovo in response to rioting over the dismissal of Kosovo Albanian officials and termination of the Kosovo Assembly. It was enforced by strong Serbian police actions and strict security measures, which took place from late 1987 through 1992.⁶

Following the dissolution of the Kosovo Assembly in 1989, the deposed legislators declared Kosovo’s independence from Serbia and its status as a full republic of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). This move was declared illegal by Serbia and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. In September of that year the legislators met secretly and again proclaimed an independent Republic of Kosovo. A year later the legislators organized a referendum on sovereignty, declared a Republic of Kosovo, and formed a provisional coalition government. The activities of this fledgling government were kept secret from Serbian officials to avoid arrest.⁷

The revocation of Kosovo’s autonomy was a crucial turning point in the Kosovo conflict and a major factor leading to the military intervention by NATO. The following quotation by Robert Bideleux, then Director of the Centre of Russian and East European Studies of Wales, gives a clear picture of the incredible conditions the Kosovar Albanians were subjected to by the Serbs during the 1990s:

In mid-1990, Serbs took control of Kosovo’s radio and television stations and major industrial enterprises, and closed or purged the main Kosovar newspapers, theaters, libraries, museums and film units. School curricula were Serbianised and Kosovar teachers were sacked. The University of Pristina was Serbianised from September 1991. However, Kosovars soon organized an Albanian language ‘parallel’ university and school system staffed by dismissed Kosovar teachers, as well as a parallel health service run by sacked Kosovar doctors and nurses, although everything was run on a shoestring and the incidence of poverty and disease increased. Ironically, Kosovo’s Serbs have also become much poorer.⁸

From 1991 to 1992 the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) began breaking up. The republics of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Macedonia all seceded from Yugoslavia. In 1992 the remaining republics, Serbia and Montenegro, joined to form a new Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). The former Serbian province of Kosovo was officially designated as an autonomous province of the FRY. However, there was no official Kosovo assembly, and Serbia condemned any parallel elections. In defiance of Serbian authorities, ethnic Albanians in Kosovo elected Dr. Ibrahim Rugova as president of the self-proclaimed Republic of Kosovo and the Democratic League of the Kosovo party. Under Dr. Rugova’s leadership, nonviolent resistance was the protocol. However, many Kosovars became disillusioned with this practice when the Bosnia peace talks at Dayton did not address or bring about any relief for the Kosovo crisis but instead lifted the sanctions against Serbia and Montenegro.⁹

In response to continued suppression by Belgrade and attacks by the Serbian police, a paramilitary force, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), began to form in 1996. It was initially based on small village units concerned with defense of the village from Serbian police and security forces, but it evolved to a localized regional structure with a central command. Its objective was to lead the struggle for the separatist movement. In the beginning it used guerrilla tactics with ambushes of rural police patrols using small arms. A large number of the KLA’s weapons came from Albania after that country fell into internal disarray. The KLA was not successful in attacking large units of FRY or Serbian forces, and after failing several attempts, they concentrated on hit-and-run attacks and ambushes.¹⁰

With the rise of the KLA, the already pervasive police harassment of Albanians by the Serbian government increased. The KLA was declared a terrorist organization by the Federal Republic, which then justified searches, detentions, and political trials. In 1997 the KLA began openly making public appearances and attended funerals of its soldiers and sympathizers. They also began to openly confront Serbian police control in the areas of Drenica and Pec and declared them to be the first liberated areas of Kosovo. In response to the KLA actions, the number of armed clashes with police in Kosovo increased dramatically.¹¹

FRY/Serb forces ignored international calls for restraint and dialogue and accelerated their repressive counterinsurgency operations. In January 1998, Serbian special forces began exercises in the Drenica region aimed at intimidating the Kosovo Albanian population. Coincidently, Serb civilians in Kosovo were armed, and paramilitary groups entered Kosovo from Serbia. In early February 1998, armored units and helicopter gunships attacked the Drenica village of Likosane. Fighting went on for several days in that region with an unknown number of Albanians killed. In response, protests broke out in the Kosovo capital of Pristina. Yugoslav forces forcibly broke up the protests using water cannon, tear gas, and batons, injuring almost three hundred Albanian civilians. A week after the fighting in Drenica, Serbian police converged on the Jashari clan in the Drenica area to arrest Adem Jashari, whom they sought to arrest for his leadership role in the KLA. Heavily armed police backed by artillery attacked Jashari clan houses. Sharpshooters fired at those who fled. The attack left fifty-four ethnic Albanians dead, including Adem Jashari.¹²

After investigating the Serb actions in the Drenica region, including the villages of Likosane and Cirez, Human Rights Watch (HRW) concluded that it was evident that Serb police had planned the attack, and there was no doubt that the police had used arbitrary and excessive force against the villagers even after resistance had ended. The report concluded that a number of civilians, including dozens of women and children, were killed in the conflict. The report also cited a wide range of human rights violations committed by the Serb forces, including attacks and restrictions on humanitarian workers, arbitrary arrests and detentions, restrictions on the media, and forced disappearances. The report also cited abuses by the KLA against the Serbs.¹³ With the number of internally displaced people swelling to thousands in the wake of the Serb attacks, the conflict began to receive growing international attention. The United Nations (UN); the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); the European Union (EU); the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) consisting of fifty-four states; and the Contact Group, comprised of France, Germany, Italy, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, all voiced concern for the escalating tensions in Kosovo.

On March 9, 1998, the foreign ministers of the Contact Group countries met in London to discuss the increasingly tense situation in Kosovo and the unacceptable use of force by the Serbian security forces. The Contact Group noted particular concern for the recent violence in Kosovo resulting in at least eighty fatalities, and it condemned the use of excessive force by Serbian police against civilians and against peaceful demonstrations in Kosovo’s capital city of Pristina. They also condemned the terrorist actions by the Kosovo Liberation Army. The Contact Group called on President Milosevic to take rapid and effective steps to end the violence and commit himself to a political solution through unconditional dialogue. It also called on the leadership of the Kosovar Albanian community to join in peaceful dialogue.¹⁴

In response to the Contact Group, the government of Serbia invited the Kosovo Albanians to begin negotiations. The invitation was issued solely in the name of the Republic of Serbia, although a representative of the Federal Republic was to be present. It was also to be held in Serbian government offices. The Kosovar Albanians rejected this invitation. The Serbian government then issued another invitation for talks on March 16, 1998. The Albanian leadership failed to attend, but minority representatives did attend. On March 18, Milan Milutinovic, president of Serbia, proposed dialogue with Kosovo and restoration of various OSCE humanitarian and educational missions in Kosovo.