There are urgent moral and pragmatic reasons for the US-British policy in Kosovo, but perhaps the most telling argument for air strikes is the roll-call of those public figures who are against the idea. Perhaps the most useful intervention this week was by Tony Benn, who, on the Today programme, condemned the Nato action and added for good measure that he understood that Henry Kissinger was of the same mind. So, too, was Jimmy Carter. All it takes is for Edward Heath to weigh in on the side of the non-interventionists and the argument is half won. Can I also throw in the news that Germaine Greer is strongly anti-air strikes? Addressing her admirers in the Westminster Central Hall, she announced this week that “the organ of the state is erect and ready to bomb”, and recommended that women should descend in great numbers on Kosovo and defy western bombers.
If personalities do not appeal, how about the issues? The first is the notion that it’s none of our business. That ethnic cleansing in Kosovo is very distressing, but Serbia is hardly unique in repressing ethnic populations and if we start here, where will it all end?
Moreover, they say, most people would not be able to tell you where Kosovo is if they didn’t have a map of it in front of them on the news; indeed, the pragmatist’s customary jibe is that the People’s Politicians are conducting foreign policy as dictated by heart-rending images on the telly. (Yes, Corelli Barnett, I mean you.)
There is something peculiarly repellent about people who take pride in their stoic immunity to human suffering. The Prime Minister, to his credit, is not one of them. We may not be able to prevent the terrorisation of whole peoples throughout the world, but why is that an argument against attempting to impede a singularly brutal instance of it under our noses? Since last summer, some 250,000 Albanians have been violently dispossessed from their homes: women, children, the old, the sick, the lot. And over the past few days, 20,000 people have been forced out of their villages by Serbian bombardment. The images of the poor wretches on tractors is true, but it’s not the half of it. We see a few of the thousands of women and children whose paths overlap with those of journalists; what we don’t see is what happens when Serbian forces enter a village – in response, characteristically, to shootings on police – and take away the menfolk.
What we can document is a scorched-earth policy of terror and dispossession against civilians by the Yugoslav army. And these actions can be impeded by attacking the attackers, by disabling the forces of the state which is at present invincible against the risibly ill-armed and unarmed Albanians. Air strikes fall short of what Albanians actually ask for, which is protection by troops stationed in their villages, but they mean that ethnic cleansing cannot be carried out with impunity. That is not a small thing.
Then there is the strategic argument. What is striking about Albanians is the way that national identity is the defining thing about them. In Kosovo, I found Catholic Albanians were quite as independence-minded as Muslims; as for the Muslims, the remarkable thing about them was their inclusiveness. People boast to you about having two religions in one family.
But if Albanians can’t be written off as Muslim fundamentalists, or even as Muslims, it does mean that we have to take seriously the presence of 100,000 Albanians in Montenegro, the fact that something between a quarter and a third of the Macedonian population is Albanian and that Albania itself borders directly on Kosovo. It takes extraordinary optimism to imagine that these Albanians will obligingly stand by while Kosovo Albanians are systematically cleansed. That, of course, is a Balkan problem; the refugee problem created by dispossession is ours, still more it is Germany’s, which has received 17,000 applications from Kosovars for political asylum in the past three months. The Italian prime minister says he fears the influx of 150,000 refugees. There are consequences about expelling people from their homes: the terrorised and dispossessed may have the bad taste to try to come here.
The UN Security Council has not authorised bombing. Two members, China and Russia, are resolutely opposed to the idea. What this impasse does is usefully to remind us that the Security Council of the United Nations is not the embodiment of international law. Actually, perhaps we could just repeat those two names – Russia and China – and then try to say the words “humanitarian crisis” and “human rights” straight afterwards. See? You can’t do it. The General Assembly, however, has condemned the Serbian actions: twice.
The Nato action is, it is often said, the first against a sovereign state. This somehow conveys the impression that Kosovo is to Serbia what Northumbria is to England. It is not. Kosovo was a federal unit in the old Yugoslav federation, a member of the federal presidency, an autonomous province with a degree of self-government only just short of the republics like Slovenia and Macedonia. In 1992, the Badinter Commission determined that the federation no longer existed and was reduced to its constituent parts. Kosovo’s claim to independence is based precisely on its status in the old Yugoslavia. It can’t be treated merely as an integral part of Serbia.
Which reminds me: when Belgrade unconstitutionally took away the autonomous status of Kosovo, when Kosovo Albanians were expelled from state jobs, when Kosovo became a police state in which the harassment of Albanians was tantamount to apartheid, when the constitutional LDK party was begging the international community for help, when the Kosovo Liberation Army hadn’t been heard of, where were the right-thinkers, the British left, the people who are whingeing now about air strikes? Sitting on their hands, that’s bloody where. It’s one small reason why we’re in this predicament now.
Content from our partners
Related
