From the January 2003 issue

BOOK REVIEW: BOBBITT'S VIGILANTES

Yugo Kovach

     Professor Philip Chase Bobbitt is an eminent American. Besides being a leading constitutional theorist and a member of The Council on Foreign Relations, he has served, amongst other things, as the Counselor on International Law at the State Department and Senior Director for Strategic Planning at the National Security Council. His views are worth noting and they are to be found in his recently published book The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and Course of History.

     Most of his book traces through history the effect of the changing nature

of war on how the state is organised and statecraft is practised. It is his

prognosis that caused a stir. Bobbitt tells us to wave goodbye to customary

international law and diplomatic norms because the geopolitical way of the

future lies not with the UN but with a US-led posse of market-states.

     His attack on the UN is unfair though it is an easy target being the ultimate unwieldy committee with NATO, admittedly, a close second in this respect.

     As for Bobbitt's endorsement of 'empire,' one disagrees but has to acknowledge the long queue of countries willing to submit. Where Bobbitt is demonstrably wrong is his claim that the Yugoslav wars was a trial run which vindicates his prognosis.

     From the start of former Yugoslavia's troubles, Western intervention was far reaching. It was also consistently ham-fisted. Declaring the federation and its constitution non-existent broke international law. Decreeing a crude winner-take-all independence referendum for explicitly multi-national federal units was nonsense on stilts. Prematurely recognising Croatia without first having settled the Krajina problem and then, in knee-jerk fashion, recognising a non-existent Bosnian state further fed ethnic flames. The resultant backing of unilateral as opposed to negotiated secession has set an ominous precedent.

     As for principle, the boundaries of federal units were deemed inviolable but that of Serbia, with its Kosovo province, only for the time being. Moreover, Croatia was allowed to downgrade the constitutional status of its Serbs from "one of Croatia's two historical nations" to that of a minority but Macedonia was later pressured to upgrade its Albanian minority to that of a nation. 

     Intervention has also had its shameful aspects. Aside from the murderous expulsion of the Krajina Serb nation by Croatia's American-trained military, there was the first full-blown experiment in humanitarian intervention - NATO's war over Kosovo - which brought on one humanitarian disaster after another.

     NATO intervention not only escalated what had been a nasty little insurrectionary war but triggered the mass exodus of "Kosovars." Following NATO's occupation of Kosovo, the KLA drove out most of the province's Serbs, Roma and other non-Albanians.

     Then the supposedly 'disarmed' KLA went on to use NATO-occupied Kosovo as a base to make war on neighbouring Macedonia. Far from rushing to confront the KLA insurrectionists as was its legal obligation, NATO's response was one of appeasement. Skopje was duly pressured to make concessions. The victim had been well and truly humiliated.

     The ultimate criticism of those who put themselves above the law is that they are predisposed to the quick-fix solution, namely war. Note that prior to the bombing of Belgrade NATO had held Partnership in Peace exercises with the Albanian Army in Albania while turning a blind eye to that country's hosting of KLA training camps. Bobbitt's Partnership for an Impending War more aptly described those exercises.

     For a UN point of view, there is the recently published book Peacemonger by former top UN official Marrack Goulding, deputy to Boutros Boutros-Ghali who was in charge of peacekeeping operations. Goulding rightly blames Germany for browbeating its EU colleagues into prematurely recognising former Yugoslavia's secessionist federal units.

     Europe had indeed laid down the law - Luxembourg's Jacques Poos memorably rose to the occasion, describing it as Europe's "finest hour" - but who was going to enforce it? Not Germany because its constitution forbade foreign military involvement. So it was up to the British and French military to enforce the law, in which case they would have acted as mercenaries of German foreign policy or, as it turned out, there was no timely enforcement which had the effect of further fuelling ethnic flames. Not the finest hour for the Foreign Office or the Quai d'Orsai.

     With such an inauspicious Yugoslav overture, it is no surprise to hear from Goulding that Boutros-Ghali had his doubts about the UN getting involved in Yugoslavia.

     Boutros-Ghali also opposed the safe area designation for Srebrenica because there were too few UN troops to ensure Srebrenica's protection as well as its demilitarisation. The US-led West had its way, Srebrenica was designated a safe area, it was not demilitarised and continued to be used as a springboard for Bosnian Muslin offensives. Not surprisingly, Srebrenica was anything but safe.

     Srebrenica then became a victim of a trans-Atlantic dispute. Washington advocated air strikes but vetoed the use of US ground troops. The Europeans argued that a policy of air strikes imperilled vulnerable enclaves such as Srebrenica. The compromise was the despatch to Srebrenica of a token Dutch force. The solitary battalion became the prisoner of both the local Bosnian Muslim military and of the surrounding Bosnian Serb forces.

     Needless to say, the UN was made a scapegoat for the Srebrenica debacle and

Washington vetoed Boutros-Ghali's second term.

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