The Kosovo War, 25 Years Later: And So To War

Part 4 and (for now) last of this series. Earlier installments can be found here.

So, by early 1999 various attempts to resolve the Kosovo situation had failed. In autumn 1998 the Americans had sent Richard Holbrooke as a special envoy to Belgrade. Holbrooke negotiated a deal that looked good on paper, with a ceasefire, partial Serb withdrawal, international observers, and negotiations leading to eventual elections. However, in practice the KLA ignored the deal – they hadn’t been consulted, after all – and the Serbs quickly began to foot-drag and renege. So, by January 1999, armed intervention was under serious discussion.

One theory of the conflict deserves mention here. This is the idea that US President Bill Clinton provoked the bombing campaign in order to distract public attention away from the Monica Lewinsky scandal and his subsequent impeachment. This idea was widely discussed at the time, usually referencing the 1997 movie Wag the Dog, in which a US Presidential administration concocts a war in Albania to distract from the President’s sexual misconduct.

It’s not completely impossible! But on the other hand, it’s also completely unprovable. There’s no way to know what Clinton was thinking, and there’s no evidence that distraction from the scandal was a core motivation.

Also, there are several problems with this theory. One is that, in the particular case of Kosovo, the Americans were not the ones pushing hardest for action. American public opinion was slow to become interested in Kosovo. It was in Europe that reports of oppressions and atrocities circulated most widely. “Tabloid headlines in London, above the fold in Berlin, page three in Washington”. Britain’s Tony Blair, in particular, was out ahead of Clinton; he was a passionate advocate for intervention from quite early on.

Another problem with the theory is that Clinton wasn’t even the biggest hawk within his own administration. That honor probably belongs to his Secretary of State, Madeline Allbright. Allbright had several bad experiences with Milosevic and neither liked nor trusted him. But there were plenty of other voices within the administration urging a hard line.

A third problem is that Clinton had always been willing to use force abroad. The Clinton administration had bombed Iraq and fought a minor war in Somalia in 1993; had installed Jean Bertrand Aristide as President of Haiti in 1994; had carried out bombings in Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998 and — as noted a couple of posts back — had bombed the Serbs in Bosnia in 1995. So his behavior on Kosovo was pretty consistent.

Anyway, I mention the “Wag the Dog” theory because it’s still out there and sometimes comes up in online conversation. Okay, back to Kosovo.

The particular status of Slobodan Milosevic deserves some mention here. Milosevic had never been popular in Europe; rightly or wrongly, he was seen as the most culpable actor in the wars in Croatia and Bosnia. However, after Dayton there was a hope that he might now become a force for stability in the region.

These hopes were disappointed. Not only did repression in Kosovo continue and worsen, but Belgrade continued to support the Bosnian Serbs in their endless conflicts with Bosnia’s weak central government. From Milosevic’s POV, he was maintaining a valuable buffer on his border; from a European perspective, he was continuing to meddle and spoil, preventing Bosnia from emerging as a viable state. (To be fair to Milosevic, it turned out that almost every other Serbian government would take a similar position. But this was not apparent at the time.) More generally, Milosevic’s Serbia continued to be a corrupt kleptocracy with close ties to organized crime, and generally had poor to terrible relations with its neighbors in the region and with the rest of Europe generally. So, by 1999, both European leaders and European public opinion were quite thoroughly sick of Milosevic, and open to the idea of an intervention that might remove or at least neutralize him.

Note that Milosevic was not actually a dictator.  True, his party and his allies controlled most Serbian media.  They dispensed immense amounts of patronage; the judiciary was under their control; opposition leaders were spied upon, slandered, and harassed; and protestors or whistleblowers were likely to be targeted by nationalist paramilitary groups or organized crime with close ties to the government. Nevertheless, Serbia was not a one-party state. There were regular elections, and Milosevic had to contest these. Also, Belgrade in particular had a history of anti-government protest going back decades; even under Communism, protests and riots in Belgrade were a concern for Yugoslav governments. (And, in fact, it would be Belgrade protestors who would eventually bring Milosevic down.) So, Milosevic was hardly a Hitler or a Saddam Hussein or even a Vladimir Putin. He had to worry about public opinion, and also about keeping the loyalty of the army, the security services, and Serbia’s oligarch class.

On one hand, this narrowed Milosevic’s room for maneuver. Serb domination in Kosovo was popular even with most of the opposition. Among Milosevic’s core supporters, it was absolutely non-negotiable. A real dictator might have been able to ignore these sentiments; Milosevic could not.

At the same time, it made him more vulnerable. A defeat in Kosovo would certainly weaken and discredit Milosevic, and might well lead to his overthrow. (As in fact it did, though it took more than a year.) So, while almost nobody was openly talking about regime change in Serbia — bad form while you’re actually in the middle of diplomatic negotiations with a regime — it was absolutely on the menu.

Okay, so let’s summarize: why did the Kosovo War happen?

The main drivers for NATO intervention were (1) Fear of “another Bosnia” in Kosovo – another Balkan war, with massacres, refugees, and ethnic cleansing; and (2) European public opinion, which put increasing pressure on European leaders to intervene, and (3) a belief that Milosevic was the problem, and thus a desire to humiliate or break him, hopefully leading to his overthrow or at least eliminating him as a problem going forward.

In addition, three other factors made the intervention easier. These weren’t things that pushed NATO forward, but they made intervention seem simpler, more tempting, and more reasonable. These were (1) the experience of Bosnia; (2) the diplomatic isolation of Serbia, and (3) the weakness of Russia.

The experience of Bosnia has already been discussed. In brief, a short NATO bombing campaign in 1995 brought the Bosnian Serbs to the negotiating table and led directly to the Dayton Accords and the end of the war. There was a widespread belief that a bombing campaign in Kosovo would follow the same pattern – in short, that the Serbs would quickly fold.

The diplomatic isolation of Serbia under Milosevic is not much discussed, but it was absolutely a factor. Among the interested major powers, only Russia was friendly to Milosevic: China was neutral, while the US, France, Germany, the UK and Italy were all quite heartily sick of him.  In the immediate region of Serbia, things were even worse. Albania and Hungary were hostile. Romania and Bulgaria had just joined NATO. Macedonia’s government felt – reasonably enough – that Milosevic was ignoring their security concerns, since Macedonia also had a large Albanian minority who were very engaged with events in Kosovo. Even little Montenegro, which was still nominally joined with Serbia in a rump Yugoslavia, had no interest in maintaining Serb domination in Kosovo; the Montenegrin government stood aloof from Milosevic, and would be effectively neutral in the war.

The only country in the region that was somewhat friendly to Serbia was Greece. But while Greek public opinion was sympathetic to Serbia, the Greek government was not about to throw Milosevic a lifeline.  The Greeks might worry about Albanian irredentism in northern Greece, but they didn’t like or trust Milosevic either. So, an attack on Serbia would not (it was thought) drag NATO in any other conflicts, nor would any of his neighbors give him help that would prolong the conflict.

Finally, the weakness of Russia absolutely allowed NATO to be much less cautious. Russia had traditionally been the great power protector of Serbia, and this relationship had to some extent been revived in the 1990s. However, in 1999, Russia under Yeltsin was near a nadir of international influence and prestige. It was of course still a nuclear power. But Russia had no allies worth mentioning, the Russian economy was in shambles, and the Russian military had just suffered a humiliating defeat in the First Chechen War. NATO planners did not believe that Yeltsin’s Russia had either the will or the capacity to intervene in Kosovo. In this they were mostly correct; Russia gave moral and diplomatic support to Belgrade, and staged a dramatic last-minute intervention at Pristina Airport, but in the end it made no difference.

So, to summarize, NATO intervened to prevent “another Bosnia”; because public opinion, especially in Europe, was putting pressure on leaders; and because of a belief that Milosevic was the problem, and a desire to see him weakened or removed. The intervention was made more attractive by the experience of Operation Deliberate Force three years earlier; by Serbia’s diplomatic isolation; and by perceived Russian weakness.

Right. That ends this set of posts! I might come back in a bit to discuss the last-ditch attempt to avoid war at Rambouillet, the war itself, and its aftermath. (Or perhaps not. This is a bit of a niche topic. We shall see.)