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GEO-POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF NATO INTERVENTION IN KOSOVO

Testimony by S. Trifkovic

STANDING COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS AND INTERNATIONAL TRADE

House of Commons, Ottawa, February 17, 2000

        The war waged by NATO against Yugoslavia in 1999 marks a significant turning point, not only for America and NATO but also for “the West” as a whole. The principle of state sovereignty, and of the rule of law itself, has been subverted in the name of an allegedly humanitarian ideology. Facts have been converted into fiction, and even the fictions invoked to justify the act are giving up all pretense to credibility. Old systems for the protection of national liberties, political, legal and economic, have now been subverted into vehicles for their destruction. But so far from demonstrating the vigor of Western ruling elites in their ruthless pursuit of an ideology of multi-ethnic democracy and international human rights, the whole Balkan entanglement may be as a disturbing revelation of those ruling elites’ moral and cultural decay. I shall therefore devote my remarks to the consequences of the war for the emerging new international system, and – ultimately – for the security and stability of the Western world itself.

Almost a decade separated ‘Desert Storm’ from ‘Humanitarian Bombing.’ In 1991 the Maastricht Treaty was signed, and the rest of the decade has brought the gradual usurpation of traditional European sovereignty by a corporate-controlled Brussels regime of unelected bureaucrats who now feel bold enough to tell Austria how to run its domestic affairs. On this side of the ocean we had the passage of NAFTA and in 1995 the Uruguay round of GATT gave us the WTO. The nineties were thus a decade of gradual foundation laying for the new international order. The denigration of sovereign nationhood hypnotized the public into applauding the dismantling of the very institutions that offered the only hope of representative empowerment. The process is sufficiently far advanced for President Clinton to claim (“A Just and Necessary War,” NYT, May 23, 1999) that, had it not bombed Serbia, NATO itself would have been discredited for failing to defend the very values that give it meaning.

The war was in fact both unjust and unnecessary, but the significance of Mr. Clinton’s statement is in that he has openly declared null and void the international system in existence ever since the Peace of Westphalia (1648). It was an imperfect and often violated system, but nevertheless it provided the basis for international discourse from which only the assorted red and black totalitarians have openly deviated. Since 24 March 1999 this is being replaced by the emerging Clinton Doctrine, a carbon copy of the Brezhnev doctrine of limited sovereignty that supposedly justified the Soviet-led occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Like his Soviet predecessor, Mr. Clinton used an abstract and ideologically loaded notion - that of universal “human rights” - as the pretext to violate the law and tradition. The Clinton Doctrine is rooted in the bipartisan hubris of Washington’s foreign policy “elite,” tipsy on its own heady brew of the “world’s last and only superpower.” Legal formalities are passé, and moral imperatives - never sacrosanct in international affairs - are replaced by a cynical exercise in situational morality, dependent on an actor’s position within the superpower’s value system.

And so imperial high-mindedness is back, but in a new form. Old religion, national flags and nationalist rivalry play no part. But the yearning for excitement and importance, that took the British to Peking, Kabul and Khartoum, the French to Fashoda and Saigon, and the Americans to Manila, has now re-emerged. As a result a war was waged on an independent nation because it refused foreign troops on its soil. All other justifications are post facto rationalizations. The powers that waged that war have aided and abetted secession by an ethnic minority, secession that – once formally effected - will render many European borders tentative. In the context of any other European nation the story would sound surreal. The Serbs, however, have been demonized to the point where they must not presume to be treated like others.

But the fact that the West could do anything it chose to the Serbs does not explain why it should. It is hardly worth refuting, yet again, the feeble excuses for intervention. “Humanitarian” argument has been invoked. But what about Kashmir, Sudan, Uganda, Angola, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, Algeria? Properly videotaped and Amanpourized, each would be good for a dozen “Kosovos”. There was no “genocide,” of course. Compared to the killing fields of the Third World Kosovo was an unremarkable, low-intensity conflict, uglier perhaps than Northern Ireland a decade ago, but much less so than Kurdistan. A total of 2,108 fatalities on all sides in Kosovo until June 1999, in a province of over two million, favorably compares to the annual homicide tally of 450 in Washington D.C. (population 600,000). Counting corpses is poor form, but bearing in mind the brutalities and “ethnic cleansings” ignored by NATO - or even condoned, notably in Croatia in 1995, or in eastern Turkey - it is clear that “Kosovo” is not about universal principles. In Washington Abdullah Ocalan is a terrorist, but KLA are freedom fighters.

What was it about, then? “Regional stability”, we were told next: if we didn’t stop the conflict it would engulf Macedonia, Greece, Turkey, the whole of the Balkans in fact, with much of Europe to follow. But the cure - bombing Serbia into detaching an ethnically pure-Albanian Kosovo to the KLA narco-mafia, under NATO’s benevolent eye – will unleash a chain reaction throughout the ex-Communist half of Europe. Its first victim will be the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, where the restive Albanian minority comprises a third of the total population. And will the Pristina model not be demanded by the Hungarians in Rumania (more numerous than Kosovo’s Albanians), and in southern Slovakia? What will stop the Russians in the Ukraine, in Moldova, in Estonia, and in northern Kazakhstan from following suit? Or the Serbs and Croats in the chronically unstable and unviable Dayton-Bosnia? And finally, when the Albanians get their secession on the grounds of their numbers, will the same apply when the Latinos in southern California or Texas eventually outnumber their Anglo neighbors and start demanding bilingual statehood, leading to reunification with Mexico? Are Russia and China to threaten the United States with bombing if Washington does not comply?

NATO has won, for now, but “the West” has lost. The war has undermined the very principles that constitute the West, namely the rule of law. The notion of “human rights” can never provide a basis for either the rule of law or morality. “Universal human rights,” detached from any rootedness in time or place, will be open to the latest whim of outrage or the latest fad for victimhood. The misguided effort to transform NATO from a defensive alliance into a mini-U.N. with “out-of-area” self-appointed responsibilities, is a certain road to more Bosnias and more Kosovos down the line. Now that the Clintonistas and NATO were “successful” in Kosovo, we can expect new and even more dangerous adventures elsewhere. But next time around the Russians, Chinese, Indians and others will know better than to buy the slogans about free markets and democratic human rights, and the future of “the West” in the eventually inevitable conflict may be uncertain.

Canada should ponder the implications of this course, and gather the courage to say “no” to global interventionism – for its own sake, and for the sake of peace and stability in the world. Is it really obliged to watch in undissenting submission as a long, dangerous military experiment is mounted which will lead us to a real war for Central Asia? Will it soon be 'defending' new KLAs against 'genocide' along Russia’s Islamic rim, among ethnic groups as yet unknown to the Western press that can provide a series of excuses for intervention, all as good, that is as bad, as the Kosovo Albanian excuse?

Was Canada’s imperial history so sweet that it must seek another imperial command-center, in Washington, to compensate for the loss of London? Does Canada today feel comfortable with the emerging truth: that it has less freedom of choice about war and peace than it did as a free Dominion under the old Statute of Westminster? For there can be no doubt that the war NATO was fighting in April and May 1999 was not intended, or willed, by anything which can be called the Alliance, when the use of force was plotted inside the Beltway in 1998.

It is worth asking how far this re-acquisition of minor imperial status - by Canada and other NATO members - is creating a media-led political process that leaves national decision-making meaningless, beyond a formal cheer-leading function. It is also worth asking how it came to be that the chief war aim of NATO was 'keeping the Alliance together', what disciplines it implies, and how easily, and bloodily, it can be repeated.

        The moral absolutism that was invoked by the proponents of intervention as a substitute for rational argument can no longer be sustained. Genuine dilemmas about our human responsibility for one another must not be used to reactivate the viral imperialism of the re-extended West. The more arrogant the new doctrine, the greater the willingness to lie for the truth. To be capable of “doing something” sustains moral self-respect, if we can suppress the thought that we are not so much moral actors as consumers of predigested choices. At the onset of the Millenium we are living in a virtual Coliseum where exotic and nasty troublemakers can be killed not by lions but by the magical flying machines of the Imperium. As the candidates for punishment - or martyrdom - are pushed into the arena, many denizens of “the West” react to the show as imperial consumers, not as citizens with a parliamentary right and a democratic duty to question the proceedings.

         May the results of your present inquiry prove me wrong. Thank you.

[Partial transcript of the ensuing debate follows. A member asked the witness if it was preferable to have a world criminal court to deal with human rights violations, or ad-hoc tribunals for individual crisis areas.]

Ms. Serge Trifkovic: I was somewhat puzzled by the clear-cut choice between the WCC and ad hoc tribunals as the only alternatives we are facing. To me it sounds a bit like the choice between cancer and leukaemia. I do not believe that bureaucratically structured and politically motivated international quasi-judicial bodies are either desirable or feasible.

In any proper sense a “tribunal” is an impartial forum for administration of justice. If the kangaroo court that goes by the name of The Hague Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia is any indicator, I think the lesson of that particular body is that its model of justice is Moscow 1938, and not Nuremberg in 1946.

It was formed on a purely political agenda by the Security Council, on the basis of Chapter 7. The way it has acted, in terms of its procedures, its rules of evidence, and finally the selection of people to be indicted and prosecuted - and also its refusal to indict and prosecute people who at least prima facie should be, such as the leaders of the 19 NATO countries - only indicates that it is a political body par excellence. There is no reason at all why a WCC would be any different because, obviously, if you have the likes of Clinton and Blair deciding what is “necessary” and “feasible” in terms of intervention, ultimately they would be deciding what is “necessary” and “feasible” in terms of prosecution. The kind of political discipline in the world that this would impose is eerily reminiscent of the Brave New World of Huxley or “1984.”

         I suspect that such bodies will only take us a step further in the direction of global totalitarianism in which the local and national traditions of law and justice and jurisprudence - which are meaningful because they have evolved within the context of a genuine, authentic national culture - will be replaced by something that is global, something that is allegedly universal and, therefore, of necessity, ideological.

The Chair: […] You’ve always got to answer alternatives so I'll come to you and ask “What’s your alternative”. My alternative is that there’s going to be United States imperial courts applying their jurisdiction around the world to enforce it, so that may be worse for you. Anyway, that’s just-

Mr. Serge Trifkovic: My alternative is to rediscover the beauty of a society of nations in which enlightened national interests, based upon the Golden Rule of “I will not deny to anyone what I am asking for myself”, will be the basis of law and the basis of international relations. I am not claiming that it was a long-lost golden age in Europe between 1815-1914, that we ought to yearn for in terms of reactionary nostalgia. I’m simply saying that what we are offered as a replacement in the Blairites’ and Clintonistas’ brave new world is infinitely worse and infinitely more frightening.

Mr. Chuck Strahl: Well, you asked.

The Chair: I asked, and that may be. We’re going to go to Ms. Augustine and then we’re going back to Mr. Strahl and Mr. Robinson.

Ms. Jean Augustine (Etobicoke-Lakeshore, Lib.): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. [...] I am grappling with what is the future of Kosovo, is it going to be an international protectorate? Is it going to be an entity no longer linked [to Serbia-Yugoslavia]? [...]

Mr. Serge Trifkovic: I would like to make a few comments about the future because we keep forgetting the broad picture, what will happen in the long term. The Kosovo crisis is primarily the result of the U.S. involvement in the Kosovo situation. Until the moment Dick Holbrooke decided that this was something they would tackle in a big way, it was - I insist - a low-level, unremarkable conflict, the likes of which we see all over the world, all of the time.

At the moment there is a whole series of geopolitical reasons why the Washington administration wants to be involved in the Balkans. I'm afraid we have no time to go into those in any detail.

But the important thing for the members of this Committee to remember is that you shouldn’t take the “humanitarian” and other alibis as face value. You should always assume that there is an agenda behind it. One of them is to have a U.S. foothold in the European mainland that will not be subject to the ups-and-downs of the trans-Atlantic relationship, so that if and when the Germans, the French and others decide to create a European defence structure that will gradually detach West Europeans from NATO, which will ultimately lead to the closure of U.S. bases in Naples and in Frankfurt and in Munich, there will be the assets in Skopje, and in Pristina, and in Tuzla, that will provide both the physical and the political and military U.S. presence that will not be affected by such a change in the relationship.

When I say there are geopolitical reasons which have a logic of their own, I am not claiming that in this particular case we can establish a definite sequence of events. I’m simply saying that humanitarian and moralistic claims by themselves are neither sufficient nor necessary explanation.

In order to look at Kosovo in the longer term we have to ask the question: what will happen if and when the United States administration after Clinton, or even after whoever comes after Clinton, loses interest in the Balkans? At the moment they’re creating the demand for their involvement by creating a whole series of small, fragmented and unviable units that, by themselves, have neither the political, nor cultural, nor historic meaning - such as Dayton-Bosnia, such as Kosovo, such as, tomorrow maybe, Sanjak or Montenegro, or Vojvodina.

If and when the presence of the underwriters in the Balkans are removed, we will have another bout of Hobbesian free-for-all. And that is the tragedy of it all, because what is being done right now is not the foundation for a solid, just and durable peace, but just an improvisation on an ad-hoc basis. It bears no relation to history, no relation to the continuity of the political and cultural development in that part of the world, but satisfies the needs of the moment.

I’m saying this not as someone born in Serbia, but someone who is trying to look at the political essence of the problem - that so far the U.S. administration has followed the principle that all of the ethnic groups in the area can be satisfied at the expense of the Serbs. The result is a sort of Carthaginian peace imposed upon the Serbian nation that will create a constant source of revanchist resentment among the Serbs, and determination to turn the tables once Uncle Sam loses interest. I feel that there will be a war again: the Serbs will fight to return Kosovo to their own rule, because they feel Kosovo to have been unjustly detached.

And so, whatever scenario the people in Brussels, London, Washington, Ottawa, or Bonn decide for Kosovo today, it will not be worth the paper it's written on if it doesn't bear any relation to the geopolitical realities in the long term, and those realities are fairly simple. You will not be able to impose something called “multicultural” Kosovo, “multi-ethnic” Kosovo if people on the ground - and I have primarily the Albanians in mind - are determined to have a mono-ethnic Kosovo. By including 25% Serbian members in any quasi-representative bodies you introduce, you will not re-invent a “multi-ethnic Kosovo” in which grannies are able to return to their apartments.

At the moment the only way people in Kosovo will feel safe and secure living in their communities is if you have a de facto petition. Whether it is accompanied by a constitutional and political model that will sanctify that partition is neither here nor there. But in the long term you have to realize that an imposed "peace" on the Serb nation that does not take into account the legitimate interests of the Serbs, that does not take into account the sort of give and take in which each party will feel that it has lost something as well as gained something, will be unviable, will be unjust, and will be - in the long term - the source of another conflict.

Mr. Chuck Strahl: I'm going to pass to Mr. Robinson, but before I do, I understand, Prof Trifkovic, you must leave shortly to catch a plane to Europe […]

Mr. Serge Trifkovic: I can stay for another 10 minutes.

Mr. Chuck Strahl: Okay. When you're comfortable to leave just leave. I want to say, then if you just do get up and go-

Mr. Serge Trifkovic: There will be no tears shed.

Mr. Chuck Strahl: No. There will be tears. They may be crocodile. They may be joy, who knows? But certainly I just want to say we appreciate very much you taking the time to come. There’s no doubt about it being a very interesting intervention. Please, when you have to go, just feel free to get up and go and don’t think us rude if we don’t properly acknowledge your very important contribution. Thank you, sir. Mr. Robinson.

Mr. Svend Robinson: I’m afraid I’ll have to leave around the same time. I’m not sure if the tears will be quite as intense, but-

The Chair: If the tears are shed-

Some hon. members: Ha, ha.

The Chair: Mr. Robinson, the tears are shed when you arrive, not when you leave.

Mr. Svend Robinson: […] I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the responsibility of Serbs in Kosovo for wrongdoing. The United Nations High Commission on Refugees documented quite powerfully a major exodus of Kosovar Albanians before March 24. I’m sure you’re familiar with those reports. You’ve seen those reports. Figures as many as 90,000 who had left their homes, left their villages.

After the bombing started, did the bombing exacerbate the flow of people? I have no doubt that it did. Certainly a number of people who I spoke with pointed out how in some cases Serbs on the ground were pointing up into the sky and saying you were responsible for NATO. They felt that they were under siege from the KLA, the NATO bombs and obviously when people are defenceless on the ground they're totally vulnerable. It was a coward’s war in many respects, but nevertheless people were driven out in huge numbers. Hundreds of thousands of people left and were driven out.

I was on a road from Pristina down to the border with Macedonia, went through village after village which were like ghost towns, houses had been burned to the ground in many cases and there’s culpability for that and I want to hear from you some acknowledgement that, yes, we have to deal with this as well as part of the reckoning that must come out of this tragic series of events.

Mr. Serge Trifkovic: The important thing to bear in mind in the Balkans is that there are no white hats and black hats. That’s the fundamental problem that we have faced with the coverage of the war in the media, and with quasi-academic analysis, and with political decision-making. Very early on in this conflict an overall perception of the culpability of the Serbs for the Krajina, Bosnia and Kosovo was created, even though very often the reasons the Serbs reacted in the Krajina are very similar to the reasons the Albanians reacted in Kosovo and vice versa. In some cases, the Serbs were de facto separatists, wanting to secede from the separating entity. In other times, they were the unitarists. In both cases they were deemed wrong.

But if you try to quantify the evil on all sides, it’s impossible to say that the Serbs proved qualitatively, fundamentally worse than other groups. Right now the Serbs constitute the largest refugee population outside sub-Saharan Africa. To say that the Serbs have done evil things is almost a truism because in the Balkan imbroglio all sides have done very evil things. If you want the Serbs to beat their chests and shout mea culpa, well indeed, maybe they should because the Patriarch warned them against adopting some of the techniques of their enemies as they experienced them in 1941 to 1945 in the so-called independent state of Croatia. [...]

If this was the war to return the Albanians, or in the memorable words of the then-British defence minister “Serbs out, Albanians back, NATO in”, nobody is talking about "Serbs back" in Kosovo these days... a quarter of a million displaced Serbs and other non-Albanians under NATO, in the aftermath of NATO’s victory. I will be the first to admit that the Serbs have done bad things just as everybody else has done bad things. This doesn’t mean we are now going to ask the question how deserving are the Croats of being bombed because they contributed “collectively” to the exodus of a quarter of a million Serbs from the Krajina. How deserving are the Muslims of castigation and bombing because, right now, the whole of Sarajevo - until 1991, the second largest Serbian town after Belgrade - is Serbenfrei?.

If we are to re-establish a modicum of reality in this debate, we have to bear in mind that human fallibility and human culpability is not the exclusive prerogative of anyone single ethnic group. Thank you.

Mr. Svend J. Robinson: Mr. Dyer, were you wanting to comment?

Mr. Gwynn Dyer: I was particularly struck by the use of the word “Serbenfrei” to describe the Serbian authorities’ removal of the Serbian population of Sarajevo after the Dayton Accords. There were Serbians in that city who were driven from their homes by the Serbian police. I was there; I saw it. The idea that the Albanian Muslims and the Bosnian Muslims and the Croats bear equal responsibility-all of them have done bad things. Of course bad things happen in war but neither the total of refugees nor the total of dead nor the evidence of massacre suggests in any way that there is shared responsibility equally indistinguishably among the ethnic groups of the Balkans.

Now this may be to some extent because the Serbs inherited the heavy weapons of the Yugoslav army and had the ability to do more damage; I recognize that. The Bosnian Muslims didn't have heavy artillery to shell Serbian villages as the Serbs did to shell Sarajevo. But I do find the line of argument which suggests that there can be no distinguished distinction between Vukovar and Srebrenica on the one hand, and the Krajina on the other hand. The Krajina Mark Two - when it was the Serbs who lost their homes - rather Mark One, when it was the Croatian inhabitants who were driven. I think is a travesty.

Mr. Serge Trifkovic: To claim that the Krajina is less of a crime than “Srebrenica,” even though the Krajina resulted in between 9 thousand and 12 thousand Serbian deaths, is a very curious argument, both morally and intellectually. But in particular, I find it reprehensible that Kosovo is still referred to as a “massacre” because “the Kosovo massacre” is one of the biggest lies, media-mediated political lies of the decade, if not the century. In perspective, when a few decades pass, it will belong to the same category as the Belgian babies bayonetted by the Kaiser’s army in 1914. [...]