A Review of NATO’s War over Kosovo
Noam Chomsky
In the two State Department reports and the Tribunal indictment, the detailed chronologies are restricted, almost entirely, to the period that followed the bombing campaign initiated on March 24. Thus, the final State Department report of December 1999 refers vaguely to “late March” or “after March,” apart from a single reference to refugee reports of an execution on March 23, the day of NATO’s official declaration that the air operations announced on March 22 would begin. The one significant exception is the January 15 Racak massacre of 45 people.
But that cannot have been the motive for the bombing, for two sufficient reasons: first, the OSCE monitors and other international observers (including NATO) report this to be an isolated event, with nothing similar in the following months up to the bombing; we return to that record directly. And second, such atrocities are of little concern to the U.S. and its allies. Evidence for the latter conclusion is overwhelming, and it was confirmed once again shortly after the Racak massacre, when Indonesian forces and their paramilitary subordinates brutally murdered 50 or more people who had taken refuge from Indonesian terror in a church in the remote Timorese village of Liquica. Unlike Racak, this was only one of many massacres in East Timor at that time, with a toll well beyond anything attributed to Milosevic in Kosovo: 3-5000 killed from January 1999, credible church sources reported on August 6, about twice the number killed on all sides in Kosovo in the year prior to the bombing, according to NATO. Historian John Taylor estimates the toll at 5-6000 from January to the August 30 referendum.
The U.S. and its allies reacted to the East Timor massacres in the familiar way: by continuing to provide military and other aid to the killers and maintaining other military arrangements, including joint training exercises as late as August, while insisting that security in East Timor “is the responsibility of the Government of Indonesia, and we don’t want to take that responsibility away from them.”
In summary, the State Department and the Tribunal make no serious effort to justify the bombing campaign or the withdrawal of the OSCE monitors on March 20 in preparation for it.
There are other winners. At the war’s end, the business press described “the real winners” as Western military industry, meaning high-tech industry generally. Moscow is looking forward to a “banner year for Russian weapons exports” as “the world is rearming apprehensively largely thanks to NATO’s Balkans adventure,” seeking a deterrent, as widely predicted during the war. More important, the U.S. was able to enforce its domination over the strategic Balkans region, displacing EU initiatives at least temporarily, a primary reason for the insistence that the operation be in the hands of NATO, a U.S subsidiary. A destitute Serbia remains the last holdout, probably not for long.
A further consequence is another blow to the fragile principles of world order. The NATO action represents a threat to the “very core of the international security system” founded on the UN Charter, Secretary-General Kofi Annan observed in his annual report to the UN in September. That matters little to the rich and powerful, who will act as they please, rejecting World Court decisions and vetoing Security Council resolutions if that becomes necessary
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