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The intervention of NATO thus contravened both the United Nations Charter and the North Atlantic Treaty itself.

This ?power? to enter or attack another countries armed forces must come from the United Nations. As usual the United Nations were taking far to long to make a decision, a resolution, to start an armed response to the ethnic cleansing problem occurring in Kosovo. But the United Nations had other problems as this battle within this sovereign state was, simply a civil war.

An analogy to America’s own bitter war of secession can illustrate what NATO was trying to compel Serbia to do. It was as if the nineteenth-century concert of Europe had forced President Lincoln to accept Southern independence and European troops on American soil to police the agreement, and had threatened to intervene militarily in support of the Confederate Army if Lincoln refused. After all, the unprecedentedly murderous American Civil War appalled Europeans just as much as the Kosovo conflict did to the Western leaders. And just as Europeans believed that North American “stability” (and access to Southern cotton) was vital to their prosperity, so Western policy-makers today are convinced that European stability is essential to the America?s and the European Communities economic well-being. (Of course, the social systems defended in Kosovo and the American South are not of parallel.) ?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 the United Nations.?

The intervention of NATO thus contravened both the United Nations Charter and the North Atlantic Treaty itself.

Since NATO has become redundant since the collapse of the cold war it could be asked was this a ruse by the strong Western Powers (UK and USA) to give NATO a boost. But this was very dangerous as opposition to NATO’s attacks and its expansion was probably the one major foreign policy issue on which virtually the entire Russian political class was and is united. NATO, after all, was supposedly designed as a defensive alliance to repel a military attack on its member states, but in Kosovo it radically extended its writ by intervening in a state unconnected to it. Furthermore, from Moscow’s perspective, NATO, by bringing its powerful military alliance to Russia’s borders, had reneged on a bargain it struck with Russia at the end of the cold war.

At that time Moscow agreed to quit Eastern Europe and to allow German unification. Moreover, Russia acceded to the continued existence of an alliance that had been hostile to it and even agreed to the inclusion of newly unified Germany in that alliance. In return, Moscow received assurances from the United States and its allies that they would not take advantage of this situation to tip the geopolitical balance in a way that would potentially threaten Russia’s security.

Russians had good reasons to worry about NATO expansion, which, as Clinton and Blair acknowledged, was a means to consolidate and extend the UK?s and more so America’s military and political leadership in Europe. Great powers have always been more concerned about competitors’ capabilities than about their intentions–because intentions can change quickly. In the post-cold war era, NATO remains the most powerful military alliance the world has ever seen. Even those Russians who are not closet aggressors are anxious about having such an impressive military association poised on their frontier. NATO’s expansion, coupled with its intervention in cases in which the alliance’s security is not threatened, could lead to a nationalist backlash.

Another factor in NATO intervening in Kosovo was that, I feel, certain Western powers were funding and training the Kosovo Liberation Army. The US and the West has no qualms by being allied with what the US envoy, Robert Gelbard, in early 1998 called a terrorist organisation, namely the KLA or UCK. It had built its military capacity on weapons, ammunition and training supplied by various Western sources; it had been given political legitimacy in Rambouillet through the embrace of the US and UK; it also served as NATO’s ally on the ground during the bombardments. It was obvious that the KLA were loosing the war against the Serbian forces. Those Western powers needed to shift the military balance.

When president Clinton gave his explanation of the Kosovo conflict’s background was, to put it charitably, misleading. He glossed over the fact that the province of Kosovo (the cradle of Serbia’s cultural and national identity) is an integral part of Serbia’s sovereign territory. Far from being a case of one state committing aggression against another, the conflict was, of course, a civil war, the root of which is the province’s ethnic Albanians’ armed struggle to break free of Serbia and establish an independent state. Thus, as in numerous ethnic conflicts in the Balkans and elsewhere, the opposing sides’ objectives could not be reconciled.

He was also misleading in placing sole blame for the breakdown of the recent NATO-brokered Rambouillet peace talks on the Serbs. The ethnic Albanians also refused at first to sign the NATO peace deal, because it failed to guarantee their eventual independence from Serbia. The United States finally induced them to sign by threatening to cut off the Kosovo Liberation Army’s access to arms and by reminding the KLA that without its

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