http://canberra.yourguide.com.au/news/opinion/opinion/independent-kosovo-a-minefield-not-a-triumph/1194429.html
CANBERRA TIMES (AUSTRALIA)
Monday, 3 March 2008
Independent Kosovo a minefield, not a triumph
Seumas Milne
It might have been expected that the catastrophe of Iraq and the bloody
failure of Afghanistan would have at least damped the enthusiasm among
Western politicians for invading other people's countries in the name of
democracy and human rights.
But the signs are instead of a determined drive to rehabilitate the idea of
liberal interventionism so comprehensively discredited in the killing fields
of Fallujah and Samarra. First there was the appointment of the committed
interventionist, Bernard Kouchner, as French Foreign Minister. Then, late
last year, that supposedly reluctant warrior, British Prime Minister Gordon
Brown, reasserted the West's right to intervene across state borders.
This month, his Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, argued "mistakes" in Iraq
and Afghanistan should not weaken the moral impulse to intervene in support
of democracy, "economic freedoms" and humanitarianism, whether peacefully or
by force. In the United States, both contenders for the Democratic party
nomination have signed up long-standing liberal interventionists as foreign
policy advisers academic Samantha Power in the case of Barack Obama and
1990s veterans Richard Holbrooke and Madeleine Albright in Hillary
Clinton's.
The interventionists, it seems, are back in business. And now Kosovo's
declaration of independence has given them a banner to rally the
disillusioned to a cause that gripped the imagination of many Western
liberals in the '90s. The British Foreign Office spin doctor who drafted the
infamous Iraq war dossier in 2002, John Williams, wrote last week that the
Kosovo war had convinced him to follow Tony Blair on Iraq and it would be a
"tragedy" if Iraq made future Kosovos impossible. The Independent went
further, calling Kosovo's new status a "triumph of liberal interventionism".
But it's hard to see much triumph in the grim saga of Kosovo. NATO's 1999
bombing campaign, unleashed without United Nations support and widely
regarded as a violation of international law, was supposed to halt
repression and ethnic cleansing, but triggered a massive increase in both;
secured a Serbian withdrawal only through Russian pressure; and led to mass
reverse ethnic cleansing of Serbs and Roma, including almost the entire Serb
population of Pristina. After nine years of NATO occupation under a nominal
UN administration, crime-ridden Kosovo is more ethnically divided than ever,
boasts 50 per cent unemployment and hosts a US military base described by
the EU's human rights envoy as a "smaller version of Guantanamo".
Its independence declared in defiance of the United Nations Security Council
and damned by Russia, China and European Union states such as Spain as
illegal is a fraud and will remain so as an EU protectorate controlled by
NATO troops. By encouraging a unilateral breakaway from Serbia, without
negotiation and outside the UN framework, the US, Britain and France have
given the green light to secessionist movements from Abkhazia to Kurdistan.
The claim that Kosovo sets no precedent because it suffered under Serbian
rule is absurd. Haven't the Kurds or Chechens suffered? The difference boils
down to power and who is supporting whom, not justice. Of course the
Kosovans have the right to self-determination, but they certainly won't get
it as a NATO colony, nor at the expense of other nationalities in the
Balkans, where the impact of Kosovo's declaration on Bosnia and Macedonia
could be conflagrationary.
The significance of the breakaway has not been lost on the Muslim world,
which has long been urged to see US support for Muslim Kosovo and Bosnia as
proof of US good intentions, but has been notably slow to recognise the
breakaway province. As Yasser az-Za'atra wrote in the Jordanian daily
al-Dustour, "Besieging Russia is the main reason that led [George W.] Bush
to support Kosovo's independence. The rise of Russia and China provides a
balance to the US and is undoubtedly in the Muslims' interest. It is not in
the Muslims' interest to secede not in Kosovo, nor in Chechnya, nor even in
China."
Far from helping to rehabilitate liberal interventionism, Kosovo highlights
the fatal flaws at its heart. By supporting one side in a civil war,
bypassing the UN and acting as judge and jury in their own case, the Western
powers exacerbated the humanitarian crisis, bequeathed a legacy of
impoverished occupation and failed to resolve the underlying conflict. They
also laid the ground for the lawless devastation of Iraq the bitter fruit of
the Kosovo war. At the height of the 1999 NATO bombing campaign, Blair set
out five tests for intervention as part of his "doctrine of international
community", a catechism for liberal interventionists admired by US
neo-conservatives who followed them. Arguably, only one of the five was met
in Iraq.
What's more, both the US and Britain not only committed military aggression
on the basis of falsehoods, they have been responsible for hundreds of
thousands of deaths and millions of refugees in Iraq and Afghanistan a
humanitarian crisis that dwarfs anything that happened in the former
Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Between them, they have also been responsible for
torture, kidnapping and mass detentions without trial. The latest
allegations of beatings, killings and mutilations of Iraqi prisoners by
British soldiers at Camp Abu Naji near Amara in 2004 are the most extreme of
a series that include the unpunished beating to death of Baha Mousa in
custody in Basra.
But there is, of course, not the slightest prospect of any humanitarian
intervention against the occupiers of Iraq for the obvious reason that they
are the most powerful states, who act in the certain knowledge that they
will never be subject to any such violent sanction for their own violations
of humanitarian and international law. But it is exactly that widely
understood reality that undermines the chances of a genuine multilateral
basis for humanitarian intervention.
As the ability of the US to dictate to the UN weakens, it's not surprising
that pressure to revive unilateral liberal interventionism has grown. But
any rules-based system of international relations has to apply to the
powerful as well as the weak, allies as well as enemies, or it isn't a
system of rules at all it's a system of imperial power enforcement which
will never be accepted. Guardian
CANBERRA TIMES (AUSTRALIA)
Monday, 3 March 2008
Independent Kosovo a minefield, not a triumph
Seumas Milne
It might have been expected that the catastrophe of Iraq and the bloody
failure of Afghanistan would have at least damped the enthusiasm among
Western politicians for invading other people's countries in the name of
democracy and human rights.
But the signs are instead of a determined drive to rehabilitate the idea of
liberal interventionism so comprehensively discredited in the killing fields
of Fallujah and Samarra. First there was the appointment of the committed
interventionist, Bernard Kouchner, as French Foreign Minister. Then, late
last year, that supposedly reluctant warrior, British Prime Minister Gordon
Brown, reasserted the West's right to intervene across state borders.
This month, his Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, argued "mistakes" in Iraq
and Afghanistan should not weaken the moral impulse to intervene in support
of democracy, "economic freedoms" and humanitarianism, whether peacefully or
by force. In the United States, both contenders for the Democratic party
nomination have signed up long-standing liberal interventionists as foreign
policy advisers academic Samantha Power in the case of Barack Obama and
1990s veterans Richard Holbrooke and Madeleine Albright in Hillary
Clinton's.
The interventionists, it seems, are back in business. And now Kosovo's
declaration of independence has given them a banner to rally the
disillusioned to a cause that gripped the imagination of many Western
liberals in the '90s. The British Foreign Office spin doctor who drafted the
infamous Iraq war dossier in 2002, John Williams, wrote last week that the
Kosovo war had convinced him to follow Tony Blair on Iraq and it would be a
"tragedy" if Iraq made future Kosovos impossible. The Independent went
further, calling Kosovo's new status a "triumph of liberal interventionism".
But it's hard to see much triumph in the grim saga of Kosovo. NATO's 1999
bombing campaign, unleashed without United Nations support and widely
regarded as a violation of international law, was supposed to halt
repression and ethnic cleansing, but triggered a massive increase in both;
secured a Serbian withdrawal only through Russian pressure; and led to mass
reverse ethnic cleansing of Serbs and Roma, including almost the entire Serb
population of Pristina. After nine years of NATO occupation under a nominal
UN administration, crime-ridden Kosovo is more ethnically divided than ever,
boasts 50 per cent unemployment and hosts a US military base described by
the EU's human rights envoy as a "smaller version of Guantanamo".
Its independence declared in defiance of the United Nations Security Council
and damned by Russia, China and European Union states such as Spain as
illegal is a fraud and will remain so as an EU protectorate controlled by
NATO troops. By encouraging a unilateral breakaway from Serbia, without
negotiation and outside the UN framework, the US, Britain and France have
given the green light to secessionist movements from Abkhazia to Kurdistan.
The claim that Kosovo sets no precedent because it suffered under Serbian
rule is absurd. Haven't the Kurds or Chechens suffered? The difference boils
down to power and who is supporting whom, not justice. Of course the
Kosovans have the right to self-determination, but they certainly won't get
it as a NATO colony, nor at the expense of other nationalities in the
Balkans, where the impact of Kosovo's declaration on Bosnia and Macedonia
could be conflagrationary.
The significance of the breakaway has not been lost on the Muslim world,
which has long been urged to see US support for Muslim Kosovo and Bosnia as
proof of US good intentions, but has been notably slow to recognise the
breakaway province. As Yasser az-Za'atra wrote in the Jordanian daily
al-Dustour, "Besieging Russia is the main reason that led [George W.] Bush
to support Kosovo's independence. The rise of Russia and China provides a
balance to the US and is undoubtedly in the Muslims' interest. It is not in
the Muslims' interest to secede not in Kosovo, nor in Chechnya, nor even in
China."
Far from helping to rehabilitate liberal interventionism, Kosovo highlights
the fatal flaws at its heart. By supporting one side in a civil war,
bypassing the UN and acting as judge and jury in their own case, the Western
powers exacerbated the humanitarian crisis, bequeathed a legacy of
impoverished occupation and failed to resolve the underlying conflict. They
also laid the ground for the lawless devastation of Iraq the bitter fruit of
the Kosovo war. At the height of the 1999 NATO bombing campaign, Blair set
out five tests for intervention as part of his "doctrine of international
community", a catechism for liberal interventionists admired by US
neo-conservatives who followed them. Arguably, only one of the five was met
in Iraq.
What's more, both the US and Britain not only committed military aggression
on the basis of falsehoods, they have been responsible for hundreds of
thousands of deaths and millions of refugees in Iraq and Afghanistan a
humanitarian crisis that dwarfs anything that happened in the former
Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Between them, they have also been responsible for
torture, kidnapping and mass detentions without trial. The latest
allegations of beatings, killings and mutilations of Iraqi prisoners by
British soldiers at Camp Abu Naji near Amara in 2004 are the most extreme of
a series that include the unpunished beating to death of Baha Mousa in
custody in Basra.
But there is, of course, not the slightest prospect of any humanitarian
intervention against the occupiers of Iraq for the obvious reason that they
are the most powerful states, who act in the certain knowledge that they
will never be subject to any such violent sanction for their own violations
of humanitarian and international law. But it is exactly that widely
understood reality that undermines the chances of a genuine multilateral
basis for humanitarian intervention.
As the ability of the US to dictate to the UN weakens, it's not surprising
that pressure to revive unilateral liberal interventionism has grown. But
any rules-based system of international relations has to apply to the
powerful as well as the weak, allies as well as enemies, or it isn't a
system of rules at all it's a system of imperial power enforcement which
will never be accepted. Guardian
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