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NATO?s Actions In Kosovo Essay, Research Paper

NATO?s Actions in Kosovo

Contravened International Law

On Wednesday 24th March 1999 NATO Chief Javier Solana ordered air strikes on Serbian troops. These soldiers were in their sovereign country and in an area was known as Kosovo.

In this essay I will discuss how the situation arose and what were the real aims of this action.

The Serbian province of Kosovo has long been regarded as the most volatile region in all of the former Yugoslavia.

Serbian authorities abolished Kosovo’s parliament in 1990, forcing the region’s political leaders to seek refuge in the Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, where they declared Kosovo’s independence. However, the underground government of Ibrahim Rugova, elected in May 1992, was declared illegal by the Serbian government.

Albanians in Kosovo continued to agitate for secession from Serbia, seeking either annexation to Albania or outright independence, and tensions mounted between Albanians and Serbs. In August 1995 Kosovo became the destination of several thousand Serb refugees from the Krajina region of Croatia; Krajina had been recaptured by Croatian military forces after several years of Serb occupation. The government of Albania protested the resettlement of Serbs in the predominantly Albanian region.

In 1996 a militant ethnic Albanian separatist group called the Kosovo Liberation Army formed in the region. Albanian separatists reportedly killed several Serbian police officers in February 1998, tensions exploded between Albanians and Serbian forces, resulting in numerous killings, beatings, and arrests of Albanians by Serbian police and Yugoslav military units. Despite threats of sanctions by the international community, the Yugoslav government continued to raze villages, killing more than 200 people by June 1998 and driving thousands across the border into neighbouring Albania.

The Serbian Army had been brutally imposing a scorched earth policy on the Kosovan Albanians who after the end of the Balkan troubles wanted there own country.

But the diplomacy over Kosovo quickly grew much more complicated. Unlike Bosnia, which was internationally recognised as a sovereign country, Kosovo was still considered a part of Serbia. Any NATO intervention in Kosovo against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia?s wishes might be taken as an act of war. Several NATO governments concluded the alliance could not act in the province without a mandate from the UN Security Council. Russia, meanwhile, was threatening to use its Security Council veto to block such approval.

The six-country Contact Group?a panel responsible for monitoring events in the territories of the former Yugoslavia and comprising France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States?quickly convened to coordinate peace-making efforts, as it had done earlier for Bosnia. Richard Holbrooke, the tough-talking U.S. diplomat who brokered the 1995 Bosnia peace agreement in Dayton, Ohio, was called into duty again to negotiate a Kosovo deal. The United States and other North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies threatened to intervene. ?I assure you,? declared NATO Secretary General Javier Solana, ?we will not tolerate another war like the one in Bosnia. The international community will not allow that to happen.?

The last chance of peace vanished with the departure of Holbrooke from Belgrade after fruitless talks with the Yugoslav president Slobodan Miloseviv calling for the withdrawal of his troops. Before leaving to brief the NATO council in Brussels, Holbooke said the situation was ?the bleakest since we began this effort almost four years ago.?

President Clinton prepared the United States for military action, saying that it was justified to end ?the thirst of Slobodan Milosevic to dominate and crush? the people of the region.

And so NATO started a campaign against the Serbian forces in Kosovo.

The main stance that is in the public eyes and what was mainly portrayed was that NATO was intervening for ethnic reason. Prime Minister Blair used the plight of the Kosovar civilians to justify military action. Air strikes would be launched ?to save thousand of innocent men, women and children from humanitarian catastrophe, from death, barbarism and ethnic cleansing by a brutal dictatorship?.

He said that 250,000 Kosovars were homeless with 60,000 forced to leave home in the last month and he raised the spectre of the war spreading.

?If Kosovo was left to the mercy of Serbian repression there is not merely a risk but a high probability of re-igniting unrest in Albania; Macedonia destabilised, almost certain knock on effects in Bosnia and further tension between Greece and Turkey. There are strategic interests for the whole of Europe at stake. We cannot contemplate, on the doorstep of the EU, a disintegration into chaos and disorder.?

One of the first things that should be considered is under international law Serbia is a sovereign state, of which Kosovo is a province. (The same as the UK and Northern Ireland.) At no point in NATO doctrine does it state that NATO should or could interfere in the domestic affairs of any state, no matter how disgustingly its government may treat its own people.

?The North Atlantic Treaty? begins with the injunction that its parties ?reaffirm their faith in the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations.?

Article 1 declares ? The parties undertake, as set forth in the charter of the United Nations, to settle any international disputes in which they may be involved by peaceful means, in such a manner that international peace and security and justice are not endangered, and to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purpose of

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