The Current Bombings
By Noam Chomsky
There have been many inquiries concerning NATO (meaning primarily
US) bombing in Kosovo. A great deal has been written about the
topic, including Znet commentaries. I'd like to make a few
general observations, keeping to facts that are not seriously
contested.
There are two fundamental issues: (1) What are the accepted and
applicable "rules of world order"? (2) How do these or other
considerations apply in the case of Kosovo?
(1) What are the accepted and applicable "rules of world order"?
There is a regime of international law and international order,
binding on all states, based on the UN Charter and subsequent
resolutions and World Court decisions. In brief, the threat or
use of force is banned unless explicitly authorized by the
Security Council after it has determined that peaceful means have
failed, or in self-defense against "armed attack" (a narrow
concept) until the Security Council acts.
There is, of course, more to say. Thus there is at least a
tension, if not an outright contradiction, between the rules of
world order laid down in the UN Charter and the rights
articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UD), a
second pillar of the world order established under US initiative
after World War II. The Charter bans force violating state
sovereignty; the UD guarantees the rights of individuals against
oppressive states. The issue of "humanitarian intervention"
arises from this tension. It is the right of "humanitarian
intervention" that is claimed by the US/NATO in Kosovo, and that
is generally supported by editorial opinion and news reports (in
the latter case, reflexively, even by the very choice of
terminology).
The question is addressed in a news report in the NY Times (March
27), headlined "Legal Scholars Support Case for Using Force" in
Kosovo (March 27). One example is offered: Allen Gerson, former
counsel to the US mission to the UN. Two other legal scholars are
cited. One, Ted Galen Carpenter, "scoffed at the Administration
argument" and dismissed the alleged right of intervention. The
third is Jack Goldsmith, a specialist on international law at
Chicago Law school. He says that critics of the NATO bombing
"have a pretty good legal argument," but "many people think [an
exception for humanitarian intervention] does exist as a matter
of custom and practice." That summarizes the evidence offered to
justify the favored conclusion stated in the headline.
Goldsmith's observation is reasonable, at least if we agree that
facts are relevant to the determination of "custom and practice."
We may also bear in mind a truism: the right of humanitarian
intervention, if it exists, is premised on the "good faith" of
those intervening, and that assumption is based not on their
rhetoric but on their record, in particular their record of
adherence to the principles of international law, World Court
decisions, and so on. That is indeed a truism, at least with
regard to others. Consider, for example, Iranian offers to
intervene in Bosnia to prevent massacres at a time when the West
would not do so. These were dismissed with ridicule (in fact,
ignored); if there was a reason beyond subordination to power, it
was because Iranian "good faith" could not be assumed. A rational
person then asks obvious questions: is the Iranian record of
intervention and terror worse than that of the US? And other
questions, for example: How should we assess the "good faith" of
the only country to have vetoed a Security Council resolution
calling on all states to obey international law? What about its
historical record? Unless such questions are prominent on the
agenda of discourse, an honest person will dismiss it as mere
allegiance to doctrine. A useful exercise is to determine how
much of the literature -- media or other -- survives such
elementary conditions as these.
(2) How do these or other considerations apply in the case of
Kosovo?
There has been a humanitarian catastrophe in Kosovo in the past
year, overwhelmingly attributable to Yugoslav military forces.
The main victims have been ethnic Albanian Kosovars, some 90% of
the population of this Yugoslav territory. The standard estimate
is 2000 deaths and hundreds of thousands of refugees.
In such cases, outsiders have three choices:
(I) try to escalate the catastrophe
(II) do nothing
(III) try to mitigate the catastrophe
The choices are illustrated by other contemporary cases. Let's
keep to a few of approximately the same scale, and ask where
Kosovo fits into the pattern.
(A) Colombia. In Colombia, according to State Department
estimates, the annual level of political killing by the
government and its paramilitary associates is about at the level
of Kosovo, and refugee flight primarily from their atrocities is
well over a million. Colombia has been the leading Western
hemisphere recipient of US arms and training as violence
increased through the '90s, and that assistance is now
increasing, under a "drug war" pretext dismissed by almost all
serious observers. The Clinton administration was particularly
enthusiastic in its praise for President Gaviria, whose tenure in
office was responsible for "appalling levels of violence,"
according to human rights organizations, even surpassing his
predecessors. Details are readily available.
In this case, the US reaction is (I): escalate the atrocities.
(B) Turkey. By very conservative estimate, Turkish repression of
Kurds in the '90s falls in the category of Kosovo. It peaked in
the early '90s; one index is the flight of over a million Kurds
from the countryside to the unofficial Kurdish capital Diyarbakir
from 1990 to 1994, as the Turkish army was devastating the
countryside. 1994 marked two records: it was "the year of the
worst repression in the Kurdish provinces" of Turkey, Jonathan
Randal reported from the scene, and the year when Turkey became
"the biggest single importer of American military hardware and
thus the world's largest arms purchaser." When human rights
groups exposed Turkey's use of US jets to bomb villages, the
Clinton Administration found ways to evade laws requiring
suspension of arms deliveries, much as it was doing in Indonesia
and elsewhere.
Colombia and Turkey explain their (US-supported) atrocities on
grounds that they are defending their countries from the threat
of terrorist guerrillas. As does the government of Yugoslavia.
Again, the example illustrates (I): try to escalate the
atrocities.
(C) Laos. Every year thousands of people, mostly children and
poor farmers, are killed in the Plain of Jars in Northern Laos,
the scene of the heaviest bombing of civilian targets in history
it appears, and arguably the most cruel: Washington's furious
assault on a poor peasant society had little to do with its wars
in the region. The worst period was from 1968, when Washington
was compelled to undertake negotiations (under popular and
business pressure), ending the regular bombardment of North
Vietnam. Kissinger-Nixon then decided to shift the planes to
bombardment of Laos and Cambodia.
The deaths are from "bombies," tiny anti-personnel weapons, far
worse than land-mines: they are designed specifically to kill and
maim, and have no effect on trucks, buildings, etc. The Plain was
saturated with hundreds of millions of these criminal devices,
which have a failure-to-explode rate of 20%-30% according to the
manufacturer, Honeywell. The numbers suggest either remarkably
poor quality control or a rational policy of murdering civilians
by delayed action. These were only a fraction of the technology
deployed, including advanced missiles to penetrate caves where
families sought shelter. Current annual casualties from "bombies"
are estimated from hundreds a year to "an annual nationwide
casualty rate of 20,000," more than half of them deaths,
according to the veteran Asia reporter Barry Wain of the Wall
Street Journal -- in its Asia edition. A conservative estimate,
then, is that the crisis this year is approximately comparable to
Kosovo, though deaths are far more highly concentrated among
children -- over half, according to analyses reported by the
Mennonite Central Committee, which has been working there since
1977 to alleviate the continuing atrocities.
There have been efforts to publicize and deal with the
humanitarian catastrophe. A British-based Mine Advisory Group
(MAG) is trying to remove the lethal objects, but the US is
"conspicuously missing from the handful of Western organisations
that have followed MAG," the British press reports, though it has
finally agreed to train some Laotian civilians. The British press
also reports, with some anger, the allegation of MAG specialists
that the US refuses to provide them with "render harmless
procedures" that would make their work "a lot quicker and a lot
safer." These remain a state secret, as does the whole affair in
the United States. The Bangkok press reports a very similar
situation in Cambodia, particularly the Eastern region where US
bombardment from early 1969 was most intense.
In this case, the US reaction is (II): do nothing. And the
reaction of the media and commentators is to keep silent,
following the norms under which the war against Laos was
designated a "secret war" -- meaning well-known, but suppressed,
as also in the case of Cambodia from March 1969. The level of
self-censorship was extraordinary then, as is the current phase.
The relevance of this shocking example should be obvious without
further comment.
I will skip other examples of (I) and (II), which abound, and
also much more serious contemporary atrocities, such as the huge
slaughter of Iraqi civilians by means of a particularly vicious
form of biological warfare -- "a very hard choice," Madeleine
Albright commented on national TV in 1996 when asked for her
reaction to the killing of half a million Iraqi children in 5
years, but "we think the price is worth it." Current estimates
remain about 5000 children killed a month, and the price is still
"worth it." These and other examples might also be kept in mind
when we read awed rhetoric about how the "moral compass" of the
Clinton Administration is at last functioning properly, as the
Kosovo example illustrates.
Just what does the example illustrate? The threat of NATO
bombing, predictably, led to a sharp escalation of atrocities by
the Serbian Army and paramilitaries, and to the departure of
international observers, which of course had the same effect.
Commanding General Wesley Clark declared that it was "entirely
predictable" that Serbian terror and violence would intensify
after the NATO bombing, exactly as happened. The terror for the
first time reached the capital city of Pristina, and there are
credible reports of large-scale destruction of villages,
assassinations, generation of an enormous refugee flow, perhaps
an effort to expel a good part of the Albanian population -- all
an "entirely predictable" consequence of the threat and then the
use of force, as General Clark rightly observes.
Kosovo is therefore another illustration of (I): try to escalate
the violence, with exactly that expectation.
To find examples illustrating (III) is all too easy, at least if
we keep to official rhetoric. The major recent academic study of
"humanitarian intervention," by Sean Murphy, reviews the record
after the Kellogg-Briand pact of 1928 which outlawed war, and
then since the UN Charter, which strengthened and articulated
these provisions. In the first phase, he writes, the most
prominent examples of "humanitarian intervention" were Japan's
attack on Manchuria, Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia, and
Hitler's occupation of parts of Czechoslovakia. All were
accompanied by highly uplifting humanitarian rhetoric, and
factual justifications as well. Japan was going to establish an
"earthly paradise" as it defended Manchurians from "Chinese
bandits," with the support of a leading Chinese nationalist, a
far more credible figure than anyone the US was able to conjure
up during its attack on South Vietnam. Mussolini was liberating
thousands of slaves as he carried forth the Western "civilizing
mission." Hitler announced Germany's intention to end ethnic
tensions and violence, and "safeguard the national individuality
of the German and Czech peoples," in an operation "filled with
earnest desire to serve the true interests of the peoples
dwelling in the area," in accordance with their will; the
Slovakian President asked Hitler to declare Slovakia a
protectorate.
Another useful intellectual exercise is to compare those obscene
justifications with those offered for interventions, including
"humanitarian interventions," in the post-UN Charter period.
In that period, perhaps the most compelling example of (III) is
the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in December 1978, terminating
Pol Pot's atrocities, which were then peaking. Vietnam pleaded
the right of self-defense against armed attack, one of the few
post-Charter examples when the plea is plausible: the Khmer Rouge
regime (Democratic Kampuchea, DK) was carrying out murderous
attacks against Vietnam in border areas. The US reaction is
instructive. The press condemned the "Prussians" of Asia for
their outrageous violation of international law. They were
harshly punished for the crime of having terminated Pol Pot's
slaughters, first by a (US-backed) Chinese invasion, then by US
imposition of extremely harsh sanctions. The US recognized the
expelled DK as the official government of Cambodia, because of
its "continuity" with the Pol Pot regime, the State Department
explained. Not too subtly, the US supported the Khmer Rouge in
its continuing attacks in Cambodia.
The example tells us more about the "custom and practice" that
underlies "the emerging legal norms of humanitarian
intervention."
Despite the desperate efforts of ideologues to prove that circles
are square, there is no serious doubt that the NATO bombings
further undermine what remains of the fragile structure of
international law. The US made that entirely clear in the
discussions leading to the NATO decision. Apart from the UK (by
now, about as much of an independent actor as the Ukraine was in
the pre-Gorbachev years), NATO countries were skeptical of US
policy, and were particularly annoyed by Secretary of State
Albright's "saber-rattling" (Kevin Cullen, Boston Globe, Feb.
22). Today, the more closely one approaches the conflicted
region, the greater the opposition to Washington's insistence on
force, even within NATO (Greece and Italy). France had called for
a UN Security Council resolution to authorize deployment of NATO
peacekeepers. The US flatly refused, insisting on "its stand that
NATO should be able to act independently of the United Nations,"
State Department officials explained. The US refused to permit
the "neuralgic word `authorize'" to appear in the final NATO
statement, unwilling to concede any authority to the UN Charter
and international law; only the word "endorse" was permitted
(Jane Perlez, NYT, Feb. 11). Similarly the bombing of Iraq was a
brazen expression of contempt for the UN, even the specific
timing, and was so understood. And of course the same is true of
the destruction of half the pharmaceutical production of a small
African country a few months earlier, an event that also does not
indicate that the "moral compass" is straying from righteousness
-- not to speak of a record that would be prominently reviewed
right now if facts were considered relevant to determining
"custom and practice."
It could be argued, rather plausibly, that further demolition of
the rules of world order is irrelevant, just as it had lost its
meaning by the late 1930s. The contempt of the world's leading
power for the framework of world order has become so extreme that
there is nothing left to discuss. A review of the internal
documentary record demonstrates that the stance traces back to
the earliest days, even to the first memorandum of the
newly-formed National Security Council in 1947. During the
Kennedy years, the stance began to gain overt expression. The
main innovation of the Reagan-Clinton years is that defiance of
international law and the Charter has become entirely open. It
has also been backed with interesting explanations, which would
be on the front pages, and prominent in the school and university
curriculum, if truth and honesty were considered significant
values. The highest authorities explained with brutal clarity
that the World Court, the UN, and other agencies had become
irrelevant because they no longer follow US orders, as they did
in the early postwar years.
One might then adopt the official position. That would be an
honest stand, at least if it were accompanied by refusal to play
the cynical game of self-righteous posturing and wielding of the
despised principles of international law as a highly selective
weapon against shifting enemies.
While the Reaganites broke new ground, under Clinton the defiance
of world order has become so extreme as to be of concern even to
hawkish policy analysts. In the current issue of the leading
establishment journal, Foreign Affairs, Samuel Huntington warns
that Washington is treading a dangerous course. In the eyes of
much of the world -- probably most of the world, he suggests --
the US is "becoming the rogue superpower," considered "the single
greatest external threat to their societies." Realist
"international relations theory," he argues, predicts that
coalitions may arise to counterbalance the rogue superpower. On
pragmatic grounds, then, the stance should be reconsidered.
Americans who prefer a different image of their society might
call for a reconsideration on other than pragmatic grounds.
Where does that leave the question of what to do in Kosovo? It
leaves it unanswered. The US has chosen a course of action which,
as it explicitly recognizes, escalates atrocities and violence --
"predictably"; a course of action that also strikes yet another
blow against the regime of international order, which does offer
the weak at least some limited protection from predatory states.
As for the longer term, consequences are unpredictable. One
plausible observation is that "every bomb that falls on Serbia
and every ethnic killing in Kosovo suggests that it will scarcely
be possible for Serbs and Albanians to live beside each other in
some sort of peace" (Financial Times, March 27). Some of the
longer-term possible outcomes are extremely ugly, as has not gone
without notice.
A standard argument is that we had to do something: we could not
simply stand by as atrocities continue. That is never true. One
choice, always, is to follow the Hippocratic principle: "First,
do no harm." If you can think of no way to adhere to that
elementary principle, then do nothing. There are always ways that
can be considered. Diplomacy and negotiations are never at an
end.
The right of "humanitarian intervention" is likely to be more
frequently invoked in coming years -- maybe with justification,
maybe not -- now that Cold War pretexts have lost their efficacy.
In such an era, it may be worthwhile to pay attention to the
views of highly respected commentators -- not to speak of the
World Court, which explicitly ruled on this matter in a decision
rejected by the United States, its essentials not even reported.
In the scholarly disciplines of international affairs and
international law it would be hard to find more respected voices
than Hedley Bull or Leon Henkin. Bull warned 15 years ago that
"Particular states or groups of states that set themselves up as
the authoritative judges of the world common good, in disregard
of the views of others, are in fact a menace to international
order, and thus to effective action in this field." Henkin, in a
standard work on world order, writes that the "pressures eroding
the prohibition on the use of force are deplorable, and the
arguments to legitimize the use of force in those circumstances
are unpersuasive and dangerous... Violations of human rights are
indeed all too common, and if it were permissible to remedy them
by external use of force, there would be no law to forbid the use
of force by almost any state against almost any other. Human
rights, I believe, will have to be vindicated, and other
injustices remedied, by other, peaceful means, not by opening the
door to aggression and destroying the principle advance in
international law, the outlawing of war and the prohibition of
force."
Recognized principles of international law and world order,
solemn treaty obligations, decisions by the World Court,
considered pronouncements by the most respected commentators --
these do not automatically solve particular problems. Each issue
has to be considered on its merits. For those who do not adopt
the standards of Saddam Hussein, there is a heavy burden of proof
to meet in undertaking the threat or use of force in violation of
the principles of international order. Perhaps the burden can be
met, but that has to be shown, not merely proclaimed with
passionate rhetoric. The consequences of such violations have to
be assessed carefully -- in particular, what we understand to be
"predictable." And for those who are minimally serious, the
reasons for the actions also have to be assessed -- again, not
simply by adulation of our leaders and their "moral compass." _
(
geocities.com/CapitolHill)