Part I: Introduction 

 

Operation Allied Force was not a moral venture.  It was, however, carried out in the name of an humanitarian action on behalf of the Kosovo Albanians, and it won support in the NATO-bloc countries by a widespread belief in the authenticity of its moral goals. But such goals are contradicted by the nature of states and the kinds of forces that determine state policy; by the compelling evidence of other, non-humanitarian ends shaping NATO policy; by the character of the leadership of the dominant NATO powers; and by the actual results of the war.

 

States are not moral institutions and their foreign policies are shaped by economic and political interests and strategic considerations, not by humane values. When humanitarian crises abroad receive attention within a society, and the government responds to them, as the U.S. and several other NATO-power governments did in 1998-1999, it is necessary to explain the source of that attention, which regularly turns out to be serviceable to larger material and political interests and not unwelcome to the policy-making authorities. Conversely, the same point can be made as regards the lack of attention to humanitarian crises where focused attention would be objectionable to those powerful interests shaping policy. Neither a random process nor the scale of human rights abuses can explain the Great Power officials’, media’s, and parallel New Humanitarians’ virtual neglect of mass killings and ethnic cleansings of the Kurdish population in Turkey during the 1990s or of the East Timorese in 1998-1999, and their intense focus on human rights in the Balkans, 1991-2001.1

NATO’s “humanitarian war” against Yugoslavia was damaging to human rights, human welfare, and most of the objectives claimed by the war-makers.  The 78-day bombing campaign greatly intensified an already ugly civil war that had produced between 1,800 and 2,000 dead on all sides–most of them ethnic Albanians: prior to the start of the bombing (Dientsbier, 2000a: Par. 42; Chomsky, 2000: 104). This war had been largely brought under control by an agreement signed by the six member Contact Group and Belgrade in October, 1998, thus allowing many of the 300,000 refugees from the first round of fighting to return home (OSCE, 1999a). This relatively stable situation held throughout the fall and winter months through the end of the Rambouillet process (March 18, 1999), the OSCE’s withdrawal of its Kosovo Verification Mission, and the onset of NATO’s war.

From January 1, 1998 through the June 10 end of the war, perhaps as many as 7,000 people were killed in Kosovo on all sides,2 and the war itself produced a refugee crisis six times worse than that of 1998, causing some 863,000 ethnic Albanians to flee the province, along with 100,000 ethnic Serbs and other minorities, and with another 590,000 people displaced internally (OSCE, 1999a). In the words of Canadian OSCE observer Rollie Keith, NATO’s war “turned an internal humanitarian problem into a disaster” (Keith, 1999), and according to U.N. Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Yugoslavia Jiri Dienstbier “has not solved any human problem, but only multiplied the existing problems” (Dienstbier, 2000b).  Furthermore, war-related destruction and environmental damage throughout Serbia (Kosovo included) was massive, with serious long-term ramifications for its citizens and other countries in the region as well.

 

            It has also been documented that the NATO powers, the United States especially, had underwritten the insurgency of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) (Walker and Laverty, 2000; Beaumont et al., 2001). This support for “terrorists” (U.S. Special Envoy Robert Gelbard’s assessment of the KLA in February 1998) and failure to curb ongoing KLA provocations call into question NATO’s concern over human rights violations in Kosovo. On the contrary, their literal encouragement, and NATO’s “raising the bar” to preclude a negotiated settlement at Rambouillet, suggests NATO’s determination to go to war for other reasons.3

President Clinton said at the time that the aims of the war were to bring “stability” to the region, to end the “ethnic cleansing” of the Kosovo Albanians, thus allowing the refugees to return to their homes, and the people to live together based on “the principle of multi-ethnic, tolerant, inclusive democracy” (Clinton, 1999); but the much greater second-wave of refugees was produced during the bombing, and the war both inflamed and entrenched ethnic hatreds. These unnecessary catastrophes were followed by a postwar ethnic cleansing by KLA cadres, killing large numbers (well over a thousand) and causing the flight of an estimated 330,000 ethnic non-Albanians (Dienstbier, 2000a: Par. 43). All of this was contrary to both Clinton‘s and NATO’s stated goals as well as the commitment undertaken by the U.N. at the end of the bombing, under Security Council Resolution 1244, to demilitarize the KLA and protect minorities. This NATO-protected ethnic cleansing was more ecumenical than anything done by the Serbs in Kosovo that supposedly justified the resort to war; Jan Oberg has called it “the largest ethnic cleansing in the Balkans [in percentage terms]” (Oberg, 2000).

  

Today, the province of Kosovo has become a peculiar non-state in transition to an unknown but unpromising destiny: Fear-ridden, lawless, with a high level of inter-ethnic conflict, and–on the model of Bosnia-Herzegovina–a de facto colony run by foreign

powers (NATO, the European Union, and dozens of NGOs) in the name of “democracy.” But it is an “artificially multi-ethnic” state with its multi-ethnicity shrinking steadily by voluntary exit and ethnic cleansing, and with “sham elections” covering over the absence of either local authority or democratic institutions (Hayden, 1998; Chandler, 2001).

 

Finally, by supporting and providing a home base for the KLA, NATO has made Kosovo a haven for organized crime and the drug trade, and allowed other incarnations of the KLA to launch serious insurgencies within Macedonia and southern Serbia.

 

In short, the consequences of NATO’s war provide overwhelming evidence that, from an humanitarian perspective, the war was a disaster, taking a heavy human toll and exacerbating ethnic hatred, and wreaking havoc throughout the region.

 

 

 

Part 2: The New Humanitarians to the Barricades 

 

Despite this sorry record, and despite the traditional aversion of human rights advocates and the Left to war as a policy option, one of the most striking features of NATO’s war against Yugoslavia was the support given to it by intellectuals, human rights officials, lawyers and jurists, and “advocacy journalists” (see Philip Hammond’s chapter), a number presenting themselves as “on the Left,” who accepted the official claim that NATO’s main objective was humanitarian. This of course gave them ready access to the mainstream media, where they complemented official sources and the media’s own war-supportive biases, and helped put the war in a good light.

 

The defining characteristics of the New Humanitarians are that (1) they take sides, and have done so in parallel with NATO policy; (2) they reject traditional humanitarianism’s principles of neutrality, impartiality, independence, non-violence, and the provision of care; and (3) they advocate a “humanitarian” right to intervene by state violence to terminate human rights abuses. In the balance of this section we will discuss briefly who they are, their commitments, and their sources of influence. In Part 3 we will deal in more detail with their views and analyses of events in the Balkans.

 

Among the New Humanitarians, and the set that we will study most intensively, are Timothy Garton Ash, Vaclav Havel, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Ignatieff, Tim Judah, Mary Kaldor, Bernard Kouchner, Aryeh Neier, David Rieff, Geoffrey Robertson, Kenneth Roth, and Susan Sontag. But there are many others worthy of mention, including M. Cherif Bassiouni, Antonio Cassese, Ivo Daalder, Bogdan Denitch, Richard Falk, Richard Goldstone, Philip Gourevitch, Roy Gutman, Michael Glennon, Jürgen Habermas, David Held, Louis Henkin, Paul Hockenos, Stanley Hoffman, Bernard-Henri Levy, Andrew Linklater, James Mayall, Martha Minow, Michael O’Hanlon, Diane Orentlicher, Steven Ratner, David Rohde, William Shawcross, Brian Urquahart, Ruth Wedgwood, Marc Weller, Nicholas J. Wheeler, and Ian Williams. The 40 individuals listed here fall into a number of sometimes overlapping categories: Havel is a an intellectual and political leader, at least eight have worked for governments or NATO-related organizations involved in Balkan policy (Cassese, Goldstone, Daalder, Havel, Hockenos, Kouchner, O’Hanlon, Urquahart), four are or have been affiliated with human rights organizations (Kouchner, Neier, Orentlicher, and Roth), 11 are or have been journalists, 20 are academics, seven of the academics are professors of law (Bassiouni, Falk, Henkin, Orentlicher, Ratner, Wedgwood, Weller), one is a lawyer (Robertson), and Sontag is a free-floating artist and writer.

 

The New Humanitarians very openly and quickly “chose sides,” many of them entering the lists during the struggle within Bosnia in the early 1990s and immediately attaching themselves to the Bosnian Muslims, then engaged in civil wars with Bosnian Croat and Bosnian Serb forces. David Rieff for one forthrightly espoused “the Bosnian cause,” and with reference to Kosovo was not only “in favor of more bombing” but asserted that “I would be in the lead vehicle in a ground war” (Rieff, 1999c). Rieff refers to his comrade Ignatieff as having “campaigned” for NATO’s 1995 bombing of the Bosnian Serbs, and lauds him as “an advocate” of a policy of greater force (Rieff, 2000b).

  

            The New Humanitarians have been members of a network of like-minded people who are often friends who work in coordination with government officials and government-linked thinktanks, bonding and hobnobbing among themselves in Sarajevo or at international

conferences and being fed information by U.S. and Bosnian Muslim officials.4  They review one another’s books and cite and laud one another as authorities profusely.5  Sometimes, they work together in establishment operations such as the Independent International Commission on Kosovo (Richard Falk, Richard Goldstone, Michael Ignatieff, Mary Kaldor, Martha Minow), the International Crisis Group (William Shawcross), the American Academy in Berlin (Paul Hockenos), George Soros’ Open Society Institute (Aryeh Neier), and offshoots of these and similar institutions. The first three groups are heavily funded by NATO governments, and have on their boards numerous NATO government officials, past and present. Indeed, the important human rights group Human Rights Watch, which was vocally supportive of NATO’s war against the Bosnian Serbs and later Serbia itself, takes money from the U.S. government and has on its board a number of U.S. government officials, past and present.6

 

Rieff lauds Ignatieff’s “close relations with such important figures in the West’s political and military leadership as Richard Holbrooke and Gen. Wesley Clark” (Rieff, 2000b), and in his book Virtual War, Ignatieff acknowledges his debt to Holbrooke, Clark, and former Hague chief prosecutor Louise Arbour, among others (Ignatieff, 2000a: 6). It is clear that the New Humanitarians are members of an establishment that includes NATO, the Hague Tribunal, and human rights group officials, as well as the mainstream media, which treats them as authentic and objective experts. Their privileged access to the media, which they share with their comradely friends in the State department and Pentagon, helps produce a media echo chamber in which few opposing views or even corrections of error can be heard.

 

Having chosen sides, and made a simple-minded identification of the people doing evil and those who are innocent victims of the evildoers, the New Humanitarians take an extremely narrow view of humanitarian and human rights issues. This was true in the Bosnian wars, and it continued in Kosovo, where the welfare of the Kosovo Albanians, as seen by the Albanians themselves, has been the New Humanitarians’ main if not exclusive standard of appraisal. The obverse has been a dehumanization of the Serbs in a process that

approaches racism, evidenced by the fact that their writings show them to be minimally troubled by the wartime and postwar hardships and ethnic cleansings suffered by the Krajina Serbs or by the Serbs, Roma, Turks, Jews, and other ethnic minorities of Kosovo.

 

Bernard Kouchner, the New Humanitarian proconsul in post-bombing Kosovo, stated in public to the Albanians, “I love all peoples, but some more than others, and that is the case with you.” He also said that “You have fought for a better Kosovo, a Kosovo where

people can lead a peaceful and happy life.” But in reply to a Kosovo Serb who asked why the West couldn’t stop the violence by the “liberated” Albanians, and allow people to live together, Kouchner stated that “I know the history of the Serbian people….We know well that because of the evils to which the Albanian people were subjected, a common life is not possible at this time” (Kouchner, 1999c). This staggering expression of bias, with the Serbs (and other non-Albanians) apparently not “people,” and his de facto alliance with the KLA–under Kouchner the KLA was incorporated into the Kosovo Protection Corps, its war

criminal leaders Hashim Thaci and Agim Ceku given honored status7–helps explain Kouchner’s complaisance at the massive ethnic cleansing under his New Humanitarian rule in Kosovo.

 

            Kouchner is not alone. Almost uniformly the New Humanitarians use the word ‘Kosovar’ to mean an ethnic Albanian inhabitant of Kosovo only, and their concern for the mistreatment of non-Albanians has been minimal. Thus Ian Williams can write at the war’s end about the urgency of resettling the “Kosovar refugees,” while at the same time suggesting that the “Serbian population of Kosovo, like that of Krajina, will probably and wisely take the road back to Serbia. And in five years, there will be an independent Kosova” (Williams,

1999a). Some ethnic cleansings are outrageous; others are entirely acceptable.

 

What has driven the New Humanitarians into supporting a series of cruel and devastating Great Power wars over the past decade? We have no doubt that most of them have done this with the best of motives, even if they have been, as we firmly believe (and attempt to show below), badly misguided, self-deceived, and atrocious analysts and historians. Some have been overwhelmed by the portrayals of one side’s suffering and victimization as filtered through an effective propaganda system, including many working “on the scene” in Sarajevo.  Also important, with the old Soviet threat no longer available, it is useful to find an area where villains abuse innocent victims allegedly seeking to maintain a multi-ethnic democracy (Bosnia) or struggling for self-determination (Kosovo).

 

There is also an economic factor: Money is available from NATO governments and establishment institutions like George Soros’ network of foundations to human rights groups, scholars, and journalists who follow the NATO party line. Furthermore, the selling of articles, books and news reports is conditioned on feeding into accepted perspectives. Those that meet the quickly established consensus will sell; those that contest it will not and may even be vilified as “apologists for Milosevic.”

 

 

 

Part III: The New Humanitarians As Propaganda Agents of NATO  

 

Channeled Benevolence

 

As we have noted, the New Humanitarians have focused on Yugoslavia, and their alignment there with those opposing the Serbs was in complete accord with U.S. and NATO policy.8 It is interesting to observe, also, that massive human rights abuses in countries supported by the NATO powers, such as Turkey, Indonesia in East Timor, Colombia, and Israel in its Occupied Territories, received slight or zero attention from the New Humanitarians. Thus, a large sample of the recent mainstream media publications of 12 leading New Humanitarians that dealt with human rights issues, shows that while they concerned themselves with the Yugoslav conflicts in 101 articles, human rights issues relating to East Timor, Israel, Colombia and Turkey were mentioned, briefly, in only three.9 

 

The selectivity of U.S. and NATO human rights policy flies in the face of the New Humanitarians’ claim that human rights “has taken hold not just as a rhetorical but as an operating principle in all the major Western capitals on issues that concern political crisis

in poor countries and failing states” (Rieff, 1999b), and that “the military campaign in Kosovo depends for its legitimacy on what fifty years of human rights have done to our moral instincts…strengthening the presumption of intervention when massacre and deportation become state policy” (Ignatieff, quoted in ibid.). Why do these “instincts” shrivel and why does the “operating principle” cease to work for massacre and deportation in East

Timor, Colombia, and elsewhere? Rieff cites Aryeh Neier’s “eloquent” reply, that “a human rights double standard where powerful countries like China are concerned does not mean nothing has changed” (ibid.). But Indonesia, Colombia, Israel and Turkey are not powerful countries, and their exemption suggests that the moral instinct is easily overridden, that there is no “operating principle” at all, and that we must look for factors other than a new morality to explain the Kosovo intervention.

 

What is even more interesting is the adaptation of the New Humanitarians to the human rights double standard. Even if commercial and other power-related interests weaken the new morality for political leaders, why must the New Humanitarians replicate this double standard? Shouldn’t they be struggling to offset the corrupting forces and make human rights the real operating principle? Shouldn’t they be campaigning on behalf of East Timorese and other long-standing victims of Western collusion with human rights violators? That they don’t do this, but instead join the bandwagon geared to Western interests and convenience, raises serious questions about their own clearly politicized human rights concerns and whether these really serve to advance human rights.

 

When confronted with the fact that they seem to give little attention to U.S.- and NATO-protected human rights abuses, the New Humanitarians have given a variety of responses. One is that Yugoslavia was in “Europe’s backyard,” and being so close, attracted

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