Kosovo. posted by Richard Seymour

Imperialism and human rights don't really mix, unless the latter is reduced to a cynosure of military liberalism. This is obviously what happened during the 1990s, and so much worse for much of the Left that it allowed itself to be fooled ("well, they say it's for human rights, that must be good"). Kosovo was the high watermark of this, the Nato intervention representing the moment at which what you might call a humanitarian 'suspension of the law' changed the very coordinates of the international legal structure. Before the war took place, all were agreed that it was a violation of the UN Charter - but something had to be done, regardless. The ethical , it was said, over-rode the political. After the war, international legal scholars either hailed a sea change in the law or retroactively legitimised the intervention in various ways.*

There is no need to expend a great deal of energy pointing out the various ways in which this ideological mirage can be seen through. We know, because figures in the know have told us:

Mr Bush showed a misunderstanding of a major strategic achievement of the Clinton administration ... In particular [he] missed the intrinsic connections between enlargement and the conflict in the Balkans ... NATO enlargement advanced US interetsts in dealing with one of the country's foremost strategic challenges: coping with a post-communist Russia whose trajectory remains in question. (David Benjamin, member of the US National Security Council under Clinton, quoted in Vassilis K. Fouskas, Zones of Conflict: US Foreign Policy in the Balkans and the Greater Middle East, Pluto Press, 2003, p 49).

Even if the motives of the bombers had been entirely benign, there were well known alternatives at the time. Since that intervention which predictably resulted in catastrophe, the major threat to peace in the region has been the rise of Albanian nationalist extremism in Kosovo. This led to scenes last year which were described by one UNMIK official as "Kristallnacht" . Well, no, I don't like the use of that term either, but there was a serious risk of ethnic warfare. What is more, according to Dutch military analysts at The Clingendael Institute, the US has been stirring the pot by supporting the NLA and its attacks on Macedonian forces. The UN has done its best to make Serbs resentful, while alienating the 'liberated' Kosovo Albanians so much that they now demand that this "colonial" body evacuate themselves immediately. And, it goes without saying, the Serbian government have been stirring things up in an effort to maintain some grip on the region. All of this has been occluded somewhat by the hopelessly triumphant coverage of the Milosevic trial.

Now, via Histologion , we learn that Kosovo has as its elected leader a war criminal and possible mafioso . The 'elected leader' is, of course, not a wholly meaningful position in a region run by Bernard Kouchner on behalf of the UN, but it does mean something for the future of Kosovo that it is riddled with extreme nationalist groups attacking Serbs and Macedonian troops, and its political elite are seperatist, bigoted, war criminals. The least one can say is that this sordid story doesn't redound to the credit of the liberal imperialists.


*(See, for instance, See, for instance, Press Communique 99/32 and 99/23, International Court of Justice, 2nd June 1999; “Legal Standards and the Kosovo Conflict”, Appendix B, “Yugoslav Forces Guilty of War Crimes in Racak, Kosovo”, Human Rights Watch 29th January, New York; Louis Henken, “Kosovo and the Law of Humanitarian Intervention”, American Journal of International Law, v. 93, no. 4, October 1999)