Once more, war threatens the Balkans and, once more, the "something must be done" brigade moves into battle formation. Lord Robertson, the secretary- general of Nato - the same George Robertson who, as British defence minister, so fervently prosecuted the Kosovo war two years ago - demands another 1,400 soldiers to add to the 42,000 already in the region. In the Washington Post, General Wesley K Clark, a former supreme allied commander in Europe, calls for "a prompt western response". Newsweek warns that "if Nato loses its will and pulls out, it could call into question the alliance's very legitimacy". Western legislatures and media outlets ring with calls for intervention: to protect Macedonia, to protect the Albanian minority in Macedonia, to protect Serbs in Kosovo, to protect moderate Kosovars. Who cares who is protecting whom against whom? We are talking feel-good factors here, and politicians and opinion-formers never feel so good as when they are meddling in other people's business under the umbrella of western civilisation or human rights or ethical foreign policy. What a delight, after all these years, to take up the white man's burden once more! Better still, we can do it from the comfort of our armchairs in London and Washington.
We should be thankful, in this one instance, for a Republican in the White House, a supposedly "isolationist" president who probably couldn't find Kosovo on a map. We should be thankful, too, that, for the time being, the British Foreign Secretary, recognising that British forces are already overstretched, shows no inclination to respond to Lord Robertson's call and send further troops. Robin Cook, all the same, has been "on the telephone" to his counterparts in the US and other European countries. "Border patrols will be stepped up both on the ground and in the air," we are assured. A 20-strong British unit is to "advise" the Macedonian government. We have been here before, many times. "Advice" has a nasty habit of turning into deeper involvement once the television cameras have something more dramatic to film than a few bursts of gunsmoke on the hillsides.
It is hard, indeed, to see how Nato can extricate itself from the Balkan imbroglio. The extent to which the Kosovo adventure has turned out as the critics predicted is enough to make one weep, laughter being inappropriate for so great a tragedy. Intervention was designed to prevent the ethnic cleansing of the Albanians in Kosovo. As the BBC's foreign editor John Simpson argues on page 50: "It gave Slobodan Milosevic's thugs an excuse to murder even more ethnic Albanians." Now, Nato is saddled, for the indefinite future, with the government of Kosovo. Victims and oppressors have changed sides. Serbs have been largely cleansed from the province, and one of Nato's functions is to run a special train, guarded by troops and helicopter gunships, so that they can move between the few enclaves where they remain. The Kosovo Liberation Army, the heroic freedom fighters of 1999, now supposedly disarmed, reappears (under a new name but in the same uniform) in the hills of Macedonia and in the Presevo Valley of southern Serbia. Some of its members openly threaten that Montenegro will be next. Within Kosovo, moreover, its former operational zones have mutated into Mafia-style fiefdoms, grown plump on the money poured in by the Nato powers. Civic society and the rule of law have all but collapsed. Drugs and prostitution are the region's fastest-growing industries; Kosovo, indeed, has no other economy worth the name. This is not an accidental by-product of Nato's intervention two years ago; it is the inevitable result, and it was predicted at the time.
Western intervention in the former Yugoslavia has been a disaster from start to finish. Its defenders may point to peace and stability in Bosnia, but it is nothing of the sort. Bosnia threatens to blow apart at any moment, with the Croat minority defecting to Croatia. The west's belief that it could bring stability to the Balkans has proved utterly unfounded: the chances of Greece and Turkey being drawn into the conflict are now greater than ever.
Does this imply that the west should harden its heart to human suffering, that it should abandon its commitments to human rights? In one sense, yes, since the repeated lesson of the 1990s was that well-intentioned interventions in civil conflicts only prolong and even worsen them. But human rights are not infringed only in wars. The west can stop selling arms to repressive regimes because they happen to suit its strategic and economic interests. It can do far more to organise the world trade system to the advantage of poorer countries, mainly by ceasing to subsidise its own farmers. It can unite to restrict the exploitation of the developing world by multinational corporations. It can make cheaper drugs available to those who suffer Aids in Africa. It can be more generous in opening its borders to those, not least in the Balkans, who wish to better themselves economically, whether or not they are also fleeing persecution. But all this is more expensive and less dramatic than sending in a few units of troops or bombing Balkan capitals.
A sick man in America
Sometimes, Schadenfreude is simply irresistible. Most Britons under 55 have spent almost their entire adult lives being lectured about the superiority of Japan and the United States. These two countries, it must be said, could hardly have been more different. One was rigid and hierarchical, the other flexible and democratic to a fault; one educated its children in obedience, the other in self-expression; one was statist, the other a free-market haven. But both were said to be more efficient, dynamic, forward-looking than the sickly British, who needed constant attention from the IMF. Now, Japan, says its finance minister, is near to bankruptcy while the US, like Britain in the 1970s (under a Tory government, for those too young to remember), cannot even keep the lights on, with power cuts already disrupting California and expected soon to spread to New York and the Midwest. Thank goodness for foot-and-mouth and the railways. Otherwise, we might start to believe we have everything right.
