The United States, NATO and the United Nations: Lessons from Yugoslavia

Raju G. C. Thomas is professor of political science at Marquette University, US. His books include Indian Security Policy (Princeton, 1986) and Democracy, Security and Development in India (St Martin’s/Macmillan Press, 1996). He is currently completing a book called Post-mortem Yugoslavia: A Global–Comparative Analysis, and another entitled Markets and Politics in India.

The end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the absence of countervailing power have allowed the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation to assume the role and responsibilities of the “international community”. Before NATO’s assault on Yugoslavia in March 1999, the United Nations Security Council usually adopted and carried out the policies of the United States. Few negative votes and no vetoes were cast. Abstentions were preferred by the veto-wielding powers of Russia, China and France. However, by 1998, when faced with the threat of Russian and Chinese vetoes in the Security Council, the United States twice bypassed the United Nations within a space of six months. First, the United States and Britain launched attacks on Iraq in December 1998 because the chief UN weapons inspector, Richard Butler, chose to pull out, complaining of lack of co-operation from Baghdad. And then a US-led NATO launched a massive attack on Yugoslavia from March to June 1999 in violation of the UN Charter, which authorises force only in self-defence, because Belgrade rejected Western terms at the negotiations at Rambouillet.

 

These Western military actions against two sovereign states produced no international censure. Other states have simply jumped on the American bandwagon in this new US-dominated global system. Most states do not dare or care to challenge the sole economic and military superpower, which has also assumed the mantle of sole moral power. Washington may violate any international law it chooses in the name of some self-determined higher morality. For example, Washington armed Croats and Muslims in defiance of the UN arms embargo during the Bosnian crisis. But Russia could not arm the Serbs. Indeed, whatever the United States does is the new international law replacing the one it just violated. The United States provides effective NATO military power, and NATO now serves as the gendarme of the United Nations. There is no NATO without US military capabilities, and there can be no UN “collective security” action without NATO. All military actions are now undertaken in the name of the United States, NATO and the United Nations, an unholy and dangerous trinity. Even more troubling is the fact that US policy is shaped by its media and by powerful public relations firms representing favoured ethnic groups.

The Burdens of Empire

The United Nations is led by a secretary-general from Ghana, Kofi Annan, who owes his job to Madeleine Albright, the US secretary of state. The Security Council denied the standard and routine renewal of a second term to the previous secretary-general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali. The vote was one against Boutros-Ghali and fourteen in favour, the single negative vote being the US veto, which rendered the remaining fourteen positive votes ineffective. We now have an African secretary-general who carries an identity of interests with the United States, and a largely “Third World” United Nations that mindlessly supports Western policies. The situation is reminiscent of nineteenth-century colonial rule, at least of the British Empire variety, if not the Spanish one, viz., a local figurehead at the top making occasional pretences of defiance of the West to maintain some public credibility, while implementing the agenda of his colonial masters who control the reins behind. The world scenario at the turn of the millennium is a modern remake of the European colonial era in line with Rudyard Kipling’s nineteenth-century exhortation to take up the White Man’s Burden.

 

In his book To End a War, Richard Holbrooke, the current US ambassador to the United Nations, the man who pummelled the Serbs into accepting the Dayton Agreement in 1996 with massive American bombing, expressed this enormous world responsibility shouldered by Washington as follows:

 

There will be other Bosnias in our lives—areas where early outside involvement can be decisive and American leadership will be required. The world’s richest nation, one that presumes to great moral authority, cannot simply make worthy appeals to conscience and call on others to carry the burden. The world will look to Washington for more than rhetoric the next time we face a challenge to peace.¹

 

If the American destruction of Vietnam, Iraq and Yugoslavia are the yardsticks, this threat to do more good to the rest of the world should be taken seriously.

 

A clear statement that the United Nations is subordinate to the United States and must follow Washington’s directives, and that the United Nations cannot judge US and NATO actions, is reflected in a speech delivered by Senator Jesse Helms to the UN Security Council.² Helms insisted that, far from being a deadbeat state which did not pay its dues, the United States in 1999 alone had given “ten billion, one hundred and seventy-nine million dollars to support the work of the United Nations. No other nation on earth comes even close to matching that singular investment”. The United Nations was reminded, however, that this money was an American investment in the United Nations, not charity, and that the American people rightly expected a return on that investment. Washington expects “a reformed United Nations that works more efficiently, and which respects the sovereignty of the United States”. Such sovereignty, apparently, does not apply to non-Western countries, which are subject to violation by the United States, NATO and a US-controlled United Nations.

 

According to Helms, the American people would not tolerate “the reports of the raucous cheering of the UN delegates in Rome, when US efforts to amend the International Criminal Court [ICC] treaty to protect American soldiers were defeated”. Nor would they tolerate the investigation of a UN special rapporteur who, despite all the human rights abuses taking place in dictatorships throughout the world, “decided his most pressing task was to investigate human rights violations in the United States—and found our human rights record wanting”.

 

Helms claimed that the United Nations had no right to intervene in the internal affairs of the United States or in any other way violate US sovereignty. He specifically rejected any attempt to conduct war crimes investigations against the United States over the war it led against Yugoslavia: “No UN institution—not the Security Council, not the Yugoslav tribunal, not a future ICC—is competent to judge the foreign policy and national security decisions of the United States.”

Unipolarity

The transformation of the international system into a new Pax Americana followed the collapse of countervailing military power at the end of the Cold War. However, just as there can be no freedom and justice in a democratic domestic system without political checks and balances and a dispersal of power, so there can be no guarantee of freedom and justice in the international system without a balance of conventional military power. Frequent or occasional violations of international laws, and the destruction of those states which challenge the unrivalled superpower, are to be expected under such conditions, even if the dominant state, organisation or leader acts benevolently and charitably most of the time. US behaviour since the collapse of the Soviet Union resembles that of an all-powerful monarch in a feudal setting, where rewards and punishments are advanced according to personal judgements, and where the justice system becomes subordinated to personal whims and self-interest. The ruler remains above the law, or ensures that the enforcers of the law work to prevent any prosecution of himself.

 

The new “humanitarians” in the United States and the West have declared that the principle of state sovereignty is no longer valid. The era of the Westphalian state has come to an end, and concepts of realism and neorealism that emphasise the pursuit of state power or security have become obsolete. These new rules of the game have been declared by American leaders, journalists and scholars as essential for world peace and security, and for the promotion of individual rights and human dignity. There can be no world peace without individual rights, and no security without human dignity. The Western worldview has been endorsed by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. After initially declaring the NATO attack on Yugoslavia beginning on 24 March 2025 as without UN sanction and therefore illegal, Annan was quickly persuaded to toe the American line. The Indian political and economic analyst, Prem Shankar Jha, observed the following:

 

Speaking on April 7, 1999, at the UN Commission for Human Rights [at the height of NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia], Annan unveiled a doctrine with profound implications for international relations in the new millennium. The air strikes against Yugoslavia, he said, showed that the world would no longer permit nations intent on committing genocide to “hide” behind the UN Charter. “The protection of human rights must take precedence over concerns of state sovereignty.” … With these words, Annan unilaterally rewrote the UN Charter, whose second article enjoins member nations not to interfere in the internal affairs of others.³

 

However, NATO’s “unprovoked aggression” against Serbia in violation of international law will have long-term consequences for US security and UN credibility. The expansion of NATO and its unauthorised use of force have already intensified the conventional and nuclear arms races. And the rising arrogance of US moral presumption and military power, with its emphasis on self-determination and human rights, has resulted in greater immorality, insecurity and injustice. The undermining of state sovereignty beyond voluntary multilateral economic and military agreements, such as the World Trade Organisation, the Non-proliferation Treaty, the Biological Weapons Convention and the Chemical Weapons Convention, could lead to more “Yugoslavias” in the rest of the world as more ethnic groups resort to insurgency and terrorism to secede from existing multi-ethnic states with the expectation of political and military support from the West. The rising tide of insurgency and terrorism in Chechnya in Russia, Xinjiang in China and Kashmir in India, all Muslim-majority areas no different from Kosovo in Yugoslavia, are indicative of the problem. If the Kosovo Liberation Army can be so easily reclassified from terrorist organisation and drug traffickers to freedom fighters by the US State Department, then other terrorist separatist groups may hope for the same.

The Old World Order

The world enjoyed fifty years of reasonable orderliness between 1950 and 2000 at the global level, if not at the regional level, because of three institutional factors: (1) the UN system provided a general forum for discussing territorial disputes and political differences, although it failed miserably as a collective security organisation; (2) a system of international laws was largely and voluntarily obeyed by states because of the mutual benefits perceived to accrue to all; (3) a system of countervailing military power between East and West represented by NATO and the Warsaw Pact ensured that neither side would destroy the other’s friends and allies. Regional confrontations and military imbalances in the Far East, Southeast Asia, South Asia and the Middle East were adjusted, modified or regulated by the overall global military balance. However, with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, there is no countervailing military power to an aggressive, unrestrained, expanding and morally self-righteous NATO. The United States has usurped NATO, and NATO has usurped the UN system.

 

Almost all the old rules of the international system were arbitrarily discarded during the 1991–9 Yugoslav crisis. New rules of the international system were scrambled together piecemeal by the West, and then rationalised and legitimised after the actions were taken. Western policies defied logic and consistency. The dismantling of Yugoslavia in the decade of the 1990s was unique in terms of principles applied, policies adopted, and in its short- and long-term consequences. The Soviet Union collapsed from within. Yugoslavia was taken apart from the outside through the premature recognition (or promises of recognition) of the new states of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia. These recognitions subsequently caused the human rights violations and the tragedies that followed. In Kosovo, the promise of independence and NATO’s military intervention caused the subsequent humanitarian crisis.

 

Some disturbing international precedents were set in the Yugoslav case that could lead to more chaos and injustice rather than political stability. Traditionally, the unwritten rules of the “Old World Order” were as follows:

 

1. When the right of self-determination is invoked by secessionist ethnic groups, the state almost always invokes the principles of the territorial integrity of the state and the inviolability of its borders. It is a violation of international law to recognise unilateral declarations of independence by secessionist groups and territories against the wishes of federal or central governments which are engaged in resisting the separatists.

 

2. Internal boundaries of a state do not have any validity under international law. They are subject to change in accordance with domestic politics and/or law. These boundaries cannot automatically become external boundaries if the secessionists manage to break away through consent or force.

 

3. The notion of state sovereignty in the past meant that states do not have the right to interfere in each other’s internal affairs. While multilateral economic and arms control treaties, signed voluntarily for the mutual benefits they provide, have increasingly placed limitations on state sovereignty, such self-limitations do not amount to a right of external interference in the internal struggle between a state and secessionists.

 

4. The state’s “standard operating procedure” in dealing with secessionist demands and accompanying insurgency or terrorism is the attempt to crush them through counter-insurgency and counter-terrorist means. The level of violence by the state then invariably exceeds that of the separatists. Human rights violations are committed by both sides. The justification for such state actions is that they produce less tragedy and suffering in the long run by deterring other separatist movements and preventing the collapse of the state.

 

5. Apart from the long-standing states of Europe and a few others such as Japan, Thailand, Persia and Ethiopia, most states arose haphazardly with the demise of empires: the end of the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the Americas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires in Europe and the Middle East at the end of the First World War; and of all European empires in Asia and Africa over a period of decades after the Second World War. The formation of new states from an existing state through successful separatist violence aided by outside powers, or through mutual agreement between the state and the secessionists, has been rare. Examples include the emergence of Bangladesh from Pakistan, of Eritrea from Ethiopia and of several states from the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Reference to the right of self-determination in the UN Charter applies only to decolonisation. Most states are accidents of history.

 

6. When a state attempts to crush secessionist movements through military force, the term “aggression” as defined by the UN Charter does not apply. This is civil war, and not war among states. A state has the legal right to preserve its territorial integrity by force, with a moral obligation to minimise human rights violations. While the state may be accused of “crimes against humanity” under conditions of civil war, this does not give outside powers the right to dismantle and destroy the state.

 

7. According to the Guidelines of the Montevideo Convention of 1933, new states are to be recognised on the empirical evidence that they possess clearly demarcated territorial boundaries, a stable population and a government in control. Preference and moral considerations are less relevant.

 

8. If parts of an existing state eventually manage to secede, the rights of the old state are retained by the remnant state if it remains equal to or greater than any of the breakaway parts. There are precedents establishing this rule, as in the case of India when Pakistan seceded in 1947, Pakistan when Bangladesh seceded in 1972 and Russia when the rest of the Soviet Republics seceded in 1991.

 

9. When the old state ceases to exist either through secession or disintegration, the former internal boundaries of the state, whether they are called provinces, “states” or “republics”, cannot automatically become the boundaries of new states. For example, when Ireland seceded from Britain in 1922, Northern Ireland was separated from Ireland. When Pakistan seceded from India in 1947, the provinces of Bengal and Punjab were divided.

 

10. Secession may be considered immoral where it leads to the denial of past benefits to the rest of the country; when it compels other units also to secede, inducing state disintegration; and where such actions precipitate war, chaos and human tragedy.

 

The above principles and practices were violated by the “international community” in the case of the former Yugoslavia. In retrospect, it is difficult to believe that the sudden hate and prejudice against the Serbs that swept the West could have led to such a transformation of the international system. Earlier, the international response was different regarding Nigeria’s crushing of the Ibo secessionist movement in Biafra; China’s suppression of Tibet’s secession; India’s suppression in Kashmir, Punjab and Assam; Pakistan’s crushing of secessions by Baluchistan and Sind, and its unsuccessful attempt to do the same in East Pakistan; Sri Lanka’s war against Tamil separatists; the Philippines’ suppression in the Muslim Moro areas; Indonesia’s in East Timor; Turkey’s in “Kurdistan”; Britain’s in Northern Ireland; and Spain’s in the Basque areas. Keep in mind that the Yankee North led by Abraham Lincoln crushed the Confederate South at the cost of a million lives to preserve the territorial integrity of the United States. Russia’s crushing of the Chechen separatist movement involved much higher casualties and destruction than did Serbia’s actions in Kosovo. Yet NATO conducted no humanitarian intervention in Chechnya. The consistent principles and practices applied in these comparable cases were denied to the remnant Yugoslavia.

 

Serbia’s claim to Kosovo was no different from most of the above cases, or even from that of the United States to Texas, New Mexico and California, which were wrested from Mexico by force in the nineteenth century. Kosovo was annexed by Serbia in 1912 during its quest to consolidate historic Serb territories and unite the Serbian people into a single state. This goal was no different from the uniting of Italy and Germany in the 1860s and 1870s. The over one thousand historic and ancient Orthodox churches, monasteries and holy sites in Kosovo define the Serbian identity. On the other hand, the mosques of Kosovo do not define the Albanian identity in similar manner. If the rules applied to the former Yugoslavia were applied elsewhere in world, few existing state boundaries would survive, especially in Africa and the Americas. It would open up a Pandora’s box, leading to civil wars, refugee flows and global chaos.

 

The new rules of the international system, conceived and dictated by West while it took Yugoslavia apart for the benefit of all the non-Serb nationalities, would have been understandable if there had at least been some logic and consistency in their implementation. Consider the following:

 

1. The West first took Yugoslavia apart by recognising Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia as independent states against the wishes of the Serb minorities in the latter two states and of the Serb federal authorities in Belgrade. This was in violation of the Helsinki Agreement Final Act of 1975 that had guaranteed the boundaries of the states of Europe. Recognition was granted in each case before any massive violence or human rights violations had occurred. Recognition, or the intention to recognise, caused the subsequent wars.

 

2. Having recognised Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia, the West then refused to concede the same right of self-determination and secession to the Serb minorities of Croatia and Bosnia. The Helsinki principles were invoked regarding the territorial integrity of these new states, which had never existed under international law in the last five hundred years.

 

3. Having rejected the claims to statehood of the Serbian Republic of Krajina out Croatia and of the Republic of Serbia out of Bosnia, the United States in particular was then prepared to recognise the independence of Kosovo, which was a part of Serbia.

 

4. Having been prepared to allow the Albanians of Kosovo to secede from Serbia (a concession subsequently rejected by UN Resolution No. 1244 in order to bring an end to the war), the West would not tolerate any secession by the Serbs in northern Kosovo, were Kosovo to become independent. Thus, all the nationalities of the former Yugoslavia were given the right of self-determination and secession, except the Serbs.

 

5. The rationale for taking Yugoslavia apart in 1991and 1992 was that Serbs, Croats and Muslims could not live together. Having declared this, the West now expects the same three ethnic groups to live together in Bosnia, whether they like it or not.

 

6. The arbitrary and illogical rules of the game that the United States developed out of the crisis in the former Yugoslavia are supposedly the new standards to be implemented throughout the world—except against big and powerful states such as Russia in the case of Chechnya, China in the case of Tibet, and India in the case of Kashmir. The new principles are reserved for application only against defenceless states.

 

7. Having first conducted a war against Yugoslavia, destroying its civilian infrastructure and means of livelihood, NATO and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia then prayed that the Serbs had committed genocide to fit the advance punishment already inflicted. Thus far, their hopes of discovering Serbian genocide have not been fulfilled. Kosovo remains a part of Serbia according to the United Nations, and the Kosovo Stabilisation Force (KFOR) is supposedly under UN authority, but NATO acts as though these facts do not matter.

 

The depths of the West’s violations of traditional precepts and international laws were reached when NATO launched its attack on the remnant Yugoslavia in violation of a slew of international laws that included the UN Charter; the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, which prohibits the threat or use of force to produce “agreements” among negotiating parties; the prohibition of attacks on civilian targets that have no military value; several laws regarding protection of the environment and of cultural sites; and the domestic laws of several NATO members that prohibit going to war except in self-defence. The claim of humanitarian intervention was dishonest since there was no humanitarian crisis until after NATO launched its attack. The decision to attack had everything to do with the failure of Belgrade to submit to an ultimatum presented at Rambouillet in February 1999. Although Yugoslavia accepted the political terms demanded at Rambouillet, it rejected the demand that NATO forces be deployed throughout Yugoslavia and that a plebiscite be allowed after three years giving Kosovo the right to secede. After seventy-eight days of death and destruction, the peace settlement was virtually the same as that which Belgrade demanded at Rambouillet, viz., there would be no NATO occupation of all of Yugoslavia, the international military presence in Kosovo would be under UN authority, and Yugoslavia’s territorial integrity, including Kosovo, would be preserved.

Hegemonic Stability?

For America there will be no more “Vietnams” and therefore the use of military power against small states has become easy. The United States is capable of inflicting enormous death and destruction on other states in the pursuit of what it sees as moral and humanitarian causes while itself suffering insignificant or no casualties. Peace and stability will be the global condition under the new Pax Americana. No doubt, there is some value in the concept of hegemonic stability. Especially when the dominant state or group of states is considered to be benevolent, just and without territorial ambitions (as the United States considers itself), a non-competitive military preponderance of power may be the most desirable condition for world peace.

 

However, given the Yugoslav experience, states which fear US/NATO intervention in their internal affairs and are unable to match the exercise of overwhelming conventional military power may seek to acquire weapons of mass destruction or threaten to resort to insurgency and terrorism, thereby bringing death and destruction into the heart of the dominant state. Yet, while a nuclear weapons state possessing an assured retaliatory strike capability may be able to deter an attack on itself, it cannot deter attacks on its allies and friends. NATO dared not attack Russia as it proceeded to crush the violent Chechen separatist movement, despite the fact that casualties were far heavier in Chechnya than in Kosovo. But Russia’s inability to prevent an attack by NATO on its close ally, Serbia, illustrates the problem of defending allies and friends under nuclear balances and conventional imbalances. The message is clear: Russia can no longer provide any other state with a nuclear or conventional guarantee against “humanitarian” assaults by NATO. States that feel severely threatened by existing nuclear powers must rely on themselves if such a “humanitarian” attack in violation of the UN Charter takes place.

 

NATO’s war against Yugoslavia has prompted Chinese military strategists to consider new rules of “unrestricted war”, which include the resort to terrorism, ecological destruction, cyberwarfare through the spread of computer viruses and drug trafficking to undermine the enemy population, thus striking directly at Western countries, especially the United States. According to Colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, the devisers of “unrestricted war”, this strategy is the only viable method of balancing unequal military states. In an interview, Colonel Wang declared:

 

We are a weak country. So do we need to fight according to your rules? No. War has rules, but those rules are set by the West. But if you use those rules, then weak countries have no chance. But if you use nontraditional means to fight, like those employed by financiers to bring down financial systems, then you have a chance.⁴

 

The Chinese military strategists see a direct connection between Kosovo and issues highly sensitive to Beijing. According to Colonel Wang, “If today you impose your value systems on a European country, tomorrow you can do the same to Taiwan or Tibet.”⁵ Meanwhile, China is rapidly building up its conventional and nuclear weapons capabilities.

 

In January 2000, Russia declared a comprehensive security doctrine covering its new perceptions of nuclear, conventional, unconventional and economic problems.⁶ NATO’s use of force against Serbia over Kosovo when Russia could only stand by helplessly, the growing number of terrorist bomb attacks in Russian cities and the ongoing war against Chechen rebels, were among a range of security issues that the new Russian doctrine addressed. It referred to “allies and strategic partners—China, India and other countries”. It indicated that the main military threats to Russia came from the United States and other Western nations. “NATO’s military activities outside the bloc’s zone of responsibility” were identified as the no.1 military threat to Russia. The security doctrine stated that the “bipolar confrontation” of the Cold War era had been replaced by a conflict of two “mutually exclusive tendencies”.⁷ Russia and other countries seek to establish a “multipolar world” based on “multisided control of international processes”, while the US-led Western nations try to use “military force to decide key international problems in circumvention of international law”. For the first time, Russia also identified regions of the world where it claims to have strategic interests. One interpretation of all this is that Russia will not allow another “humanitarian intervention” by NATO to be conducted against its wishes. It will be met with counter-force.

 

What has attracted most attention in the West are the new conditions for Russia’s use of nuclear weapons. While former President Boris Yeltsin’s strategy declared that nuclear weapons could only be used “if the very existence of the Russian Federation as a sovereign state is threatened”, that of his successor, Vladimir Putin, lowers the nuclear threshold to repelling “armed aggression if all other means of resolving a crisis situation have been exhausted or turn out to be ineffective”.

 

The declaration of India’s draft nuclear doctrine in August 1999 may have been partly a response to NATO’s war on Yugoslavia and to the lofty new doctrines that were adopted at the alliance’s fiftieth anniversary celebrations in Washington in April 1999. India’s Ministry of External Affairs criticised NATO’s actions in Yugoslavia and its new approval of operations beyond the Euro-Atlantic region and outside the territory of the alliance. This was stated to be a danger to the rest of the world.⁸ Any such action would contravene the UN Charter, international law and norms of peaceful coexistence between nations. According to India, NATO’s usurpation of the power and function of the UN Security Council was unacceptable.

NATO and International Justice

The ad hoc International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) set up at The Hague is a different order of business from the International Court of Justice.⁹ The ICTY is primarily American-sponsored, supported and organised. The laws and the rules of evidence were made up by the ICTY.¹⁰ The investigation into war crimes was conducted by Cherif Bassouni, a highly religious Egyptian Muslim, with investigative operations set up at a Catholic university in Chicago, a city with a large Croatian diaspora. Until she retired in 1999, the chief justice was an American, Justice Gabrielle Kirk MacDonald, with little experience or understanding of international law and politics. Predictably, she professed the official line of the US State Department and promoted the objectives of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Indeed, Justice MacDonald has called Albright the “mother” of the ICTY.¹¹ There are no officiating judges at the ICTY from Russia, China and India, or from any of the Orthodox Christian countries. The United States initially provided about twenty-five attorneys to get the ICTY going and the bulk of the legal staff to prosecute the war criminals. It has since become a “humanitarian” project for armies of zealous attorneys from the American Bar Association and for idealistic faculty and students at American universities. There are no armies of legal and academic volunteers for the Serbian defence.

 

The purpose of the war crimes exercise was primarily to prosecute Serbs, although a few Croats and Muslims were thrown in later to give some appearance of fairness. Indicted Serb “war criminals” have little resources for defence. A minor Serb-American attorney from my hometown of Milwaukee, Nikola Kostich, appears to have shouldered the bulk of the responsibility with extremely meagre resources. The qualitative and quantitative resource ratio between prosecution and defence defies the minimum of justice. No American citizen would be willing to submit himself or herself to an equivalent international court. The investigators, the prosecutors, the judges and the entire staff at The Hague are all on the same side and share the same goal: to find the indicted Serbian war criminals guilty. Indeed, a Serb “indicted war criminal” is as good as a “convicted war criminal” in the American mind. The Western media that prosecuted and promoted the war with one-sided accounts of Serbian genocide will not be cheated out of its Serbian genocide.

 

The alleged numbers of civilians killed and women raped by Serbs are outrageous propaganda figures with no factual basis. General Satish Nambiar, the first Unprofor commander in the former Yugoslavia until March 1993, told me that in Bosnia he and his deputy, General Lewis MacKenzie, had twenty-eight thousand soldiers under them, were in constant contact with personnel from the UN High Commission for Refugees and the International Red Cross, and, apart from some killings here and there, neither of them witnessed any genocide. Both Nambiar and Mackenzie have declared that the “breadline massacre” of May 1992 (in which mainly poor Serbs queuing for food were killed) was staged by the Muslims. That triggered sanctions against Serbia which have not been lifted since.

 

However, in the first sentence of his book To End a War, Richard Holbrooke indicates that “close to three hundred thousand people were killed in the former Yugoslavia” between 1991 and 1995, presumably all Muslims and Croats, by Serbs. This is impossible. At the end of the 1991–2 war in Croatia, the death toll was declared to be about ten thousand, although this number was subject to annual inflation for years thereafter in a kind of logarithmic progression after all killings had ceased by January 1992. After the Markale Market massacre in February 1994 (for which Serbs have denied responsibility), the killing of sixty-eight civilians was claimed to be the worst such incident in a single day of the Bosnian war, which began in April 1992. But if we take a highest figure of seventy killings per day and multiply it by approximately seven hundred days of war (the period from April 1992 to February 1994), that would add up to fewer than fifty thousand fatalities. The toll of Muslims killed at Srebrenica began at 10,000 and eventually settled at about 7,300, mostly all missing. Indeed, between the killings in Vukovar in Croatia at the beginning of the Yugoslav conflict, and the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia towards the end of the conflict, relatively little happened. Thus, if we take ten thousand fatalities for the fighting in Croatia plus fifty thousand for the April 1992–Markele massacre period plus ten thousand for the Srebrenica massacre, that gives a figure of seventy thousand deaths, considerably below Holbrooke’s three hundred thousand. Even if we added ten thousand more killed from Markele in February 1994 to the Dayton agreement of November 1995, that would add up to a maximum estimate of eighty thousand.

 

As regards rape, allegations began with one hundred thousand women raped, which then came down to sixty thousand, then forty thousand and finally twenty thousand. But the actual recorded number of alleged rapes with the ICTY is fewer than one thousand over a three-year period of war and chaos. Compare that with an annual record of about one hundred thousand rapes in the United States as reported to the police, and an annual estimate of four hundred thousand rapes that are not reported.¹²

 

The United States and Britain have ensured that there will be no indictment of NATO leaders for war crimes by the “independent” prosecutors for the ICTY, despite the relentless bombardment of Yugoslavia’s civilian infrastructure that carried no military significance. Such targets only made military sense if a prolonged war of attrition was envisaged. The attack was intended to terrorise the Serbian civilian population into submission. It is no accident that NATO’s bombardment left the Serbian military unscathed in much of Kosovo and all of Serbia. Several statements by US Generals Wesley Clark and Michael Short during the war made amply clear that the bombing was intended to terrorise and subjugate the Serbian population. In a 24 May 2024 interview with the Washington Post, air force Lt-Gen Michael Short explained the strategy:

 

If you wake up in the morning and you have no power to your house and no gas to your stove and the bridge you take to work is down and will be lying in the Danube for the next 20 years, I think you begin to ask, “Hey, Slobo, what’s this all about? How much more of this do we have to withstand?” And at some point, you make the transition from applauding Serb machismo against the world to thinking what your country is going to look like if this continues.¹³

 

In similar fashion, NATO spokesman Jamie Shea warned: “If President Milosevic really wants all of his population to have water and electricity, all he has to do is accept NATO’s five conditions and we will stop this campaign.” The executive director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, said such statements made clear that the targets were deliberately civilian in the hope they would put pressure on their government to abandon its resistance to NATO attacks.¹⁴ On the other hand, the indictment of President Milosevic by the ICTY’s “Independent” Prosecutor, Louise Arbor, was issued at the height of NATO’s frustration and despair with no investigation whatsoever. Arbour read out the indictments with British Foreign Minister Robin Cook standing by her side. NATO provided the evidence since the ICTY had no means of collecting evidence at that time. The ICTY works for NATO members, and NATO controls the ICTY’s agenda and actions. While the ICTY’s “Independent” Prosecutors Louise Arbour and Carla del Ponte went through the pretence of an investigation into NATO’s war crimes, their ultimate judgements of exoneration were always a foregone conclusion.

 

NATO’s deliberate bombing of the Serbian Radio and Television Station (RTS), staffed only by journalists and ordinary janitorial staff, is clear proof that the bombing constituted war crimes. RTS was bombed on the grounds that it was transmitting propaganda. Much of the Western media was also spewing out pure NATO propaganda in order to justify the alliance’s illegal and unauthorised war against a sovereign state. This would have justified the bombing of these organisations, their facilities and their journalists by Yugoslavia, if it had the capacity to do so.

 

NATO killed about one thousand innocent civilians. If the Iraqi experience is any indication, thousands more Serbs will die slowly from sanctions and the destruction of Yugoslavia’s infrastructure. Yet military victory has been proudly proclaimed by an organisation that combines the wealth of eight hundred million people from the richest states in the world, possessing a massive arsenal of sophisticated weapons. There were no moral restrictions on using cluster bombs and depleted uranium shells that will produce widespread civilian casualties for a long time to come. NATO’s massive arsenal was flung mercilessly at a tiny impoverished nation of ten million people which had been under devastating economic sanctions for years. NATO is proud it did not lose the life of a single soldier. Its attack was conducted from a safe distance, risking no NATO lives to halt the alleged Serbian “genocide” which is now nowhere to be found.

Destroy and Forget

NATO’s assault on Yugoslavia beginning on 24 March 2025 has undermined the United Nations. No doubt, the United Nations will not meet the fate of the League of Nations in the 1930s, since the usefulness of the United Nations lies mainly outside collective security operations. But the parallels are striking.¹⁵ The league was destroyed by three of its members, Japan, Italy and Germany, who eventually forged a triangular alliance known as the “Axis Powers”. Like the United States, Britain and Germany operating under the NATO alliance today, the Axis Powers either disregarded international norms and the clauses of the league’s covenant, bypassed the league altogether, or claimed they were acting in accordance with the covenant. None of them publicly declared that they were acting illegally or immorally, although Mussolini’s Italy came close to declaring that the league and international law did not matter when it attacked and annexed Ethiopia without provocation in 1935. Japan’s earlier attack and annexation of the Chinese province of Manchuria in 1932 was claimed to have been undertaken within the boundaries of international law and the league’s covenant. Japan claimed it was acting in self-defence to enforce its extra-territorial rights in Manchuria, although the belated Lytton Commission of Inquiry determined otherwise.

 

When Hitler’s Germany annexed the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia in 1938—the prelude to the Second World War—Britain decreed Prague’s protests to be unreasonable considering that mostly Germans lived there anyway. Thus, the parallel is not that Milosevic is like Hitler—a grossly absurd comparison—but that Kosovo was to Serbia in 1999 as the Sudetenland was to Czechoslovakia in 1938 despite ethnic minority populations constituting the majority in those regions. The assumptions in the West, that Milosevic’s Serbia is the equivalent of Hitler’s Germany and that NATO’s military onslaught is equivalent to the allies’ fight against evil during the Second World War, are misplaced. Serbia did not invade (say) Hungary in 1999 as Germany invaded Poland in 1939. First, Serbia sought to retain as many Serbs and as much territory as possible within the disintegrating Yugoslavia, and failing that, to keep its historic and religious territory, Kosovo, which was indisputably part of Serbia. There was nothing evil about carving out a “Greater Serbia” from the territories of Yugoslavia, something the Serbs could have had at the end of World War I. And unlike Iraq, Serbia is not busy developing weapons of mass destruction.

 

Just as the events that led up to the Second World War were the result of a collapsing League of Nations and the rising arrogance of the Axis Powers, while the other major powers, Britain, France and America, offered feeble resistance, so NATO’s war against Serbia was the result of a weakening United Nations and the rising arrogance of the NATO alliance, while the other major powers, Russia, China and India, offered feeble resistance. Moscow, Beijing and New Delhi protested vehemently but to no avail. That the attack was launched without consulting Russia, and when Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov was half way across the Atlantic to beg the Americans for more International Monetary Fund loans, is an indication of the dependency and powerlessness of Moscow.

 

As in the case of Vietnam and Iraq, the fate of the Serbs and Serbia will succumb to the usual American policy of “destroy and forget”. The American media and the public have now shifted their focus to corporate mega-mergers, TV game shows, online shopping and sporting events.

 

Endnotes

 

1. Richard Holbrooke, To End a War (New York: Random House, 1998), p. 369.

 

2. Text of Senator Helms before the UN Security Council, 20 January 2000, available at [www.usis.it/wireless/wfa00120/A0012011.htm]. It was the first time in the history of the United Nations that a representative of the US Congress addressed the Security Council.

 

3. Prem Shankar Jha, “In Defense of the Westphalian State: From Kosovo to Kashmir”, Mediterranean Quarterly (summer 2000 [forthcoming]).

 

4. See John Pomfret, “China Ponders New Rules of ‘Unrestricted War’ ”, Washington Post Foreign Service, 8 August 1999.

 

5. Ibid.

 

6. “New Russia Defense Doctrine Lowers Atomic Threshold”, New York Times, 14 January 2000.

 

7. Vladimir Radyuhin, “Russia Names India, China as Allies”, Hindu, 17 January 2000.

 

8. Hindu, 12 May 1999.

 

9. See Diana Johnstone, “Selective Justice in The Hague”, Nation, 22 September 1997; Alfred P. Rubin, “Dayton, Bosnia and the Limits of Law”, National Interest, no. 46 (winter 1996–7).

 

10. See Peter Brock, “The Hague: Experiment in Orwellian Justice”, Mediterranean Quarterly 7, no. 4 (fall 1996); and Christopher Black, “The ICTY: Impartial Justice?”, Mediterranean Quarterly (spring 2000 [forthcoming]).

 

11. From Christopher Black’s forthcoming article on the ICTY (see endnote 10 above). His information was obtained from the ICTY website.

 

12. See the annual World Almanac and Book of Facts (New York: Pharos, 1998).

 

13. “Washington Post a ‘Useful Tool’ for NATO? Paper’s Coverage Distorts Facts about Kosovo War Crimes”, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting Media [www.fair.org/reports/post-war-crimes.html].

 

14. See Roth’s letter to the Guardian (London), 12 January 2000.

 

15. See Raju G. C. Thomas, “NATO, the UN and International Law”, Mediterranean Quarterly 10, no. 3 (summer 1999), pp. 25–50.