DAWN - Opinion; 11 April, 1999
The controversy over Kosovo
By Eqbal Ahmad
WARS produce unlikely bedfellows. In the famous photograph a smiling Joseph Stalin sits between Winston S. Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt. NATO's air attack on targets in Kosovo and Serbia offers the latest demonstration of the old adage. India joined Iraq and Libya, and China made common cause with Russia in condemning NATO's intervention. Among the individuals who have commented on the event a similar dissonance is notable.
Ramsey Clark, former US Attorney General and a quintessential American liberal who once defended me in court, denounced NATO's intervention as a gross violation of international law and was welcomed as a hero in Belgrade by, among others, Slobodan Milosevic, a hatemonger and war criminal. In an article in The Guardian, Tariq Ali has forcefully denounced NATO's intervention as a "liberal imperialist adventure". He must feel uncomfortable being in the same camp in which the right-wing Zionists are and who condemn "the diktat of Rambouillet" along with the "diktat of Wye". What considerations/emotions have compelled this unusual convergence of otherwise antagonistic nations and individuals?
Nation states, which provide the framework of international relations in our time, are notorious for practising double standards. 'Nations behave like nations' runs the cliche, meaning that they follow their national interests without regard to law, morality, and the costs their policies might inflict on another country or people. It is hard to locate a nation state that has not committed crimes, small or large, upon its own people or others. The difference, as we shall discuss later, arises when the scale of atrocity exceeds the norm prevalent at a given time. But in all instances governments which engage in atrocious and un-humanitarian acts invoke the principle of sovereignty as a defence against external censure or intervention. Often their claim is supported by other nations and individuals.
The argument which Russia, India and China have most forcefully used against NATO's air war is that it violates Yugoslavia's sovereignty and the United Nations Charter. It is a spurious argument. It lacks conviction and consistency. In the Hindustan Times, Radha Kumar, author of Divide and Fall?: Bosnia in the Annals of Partition wrote: "Given that Russia and India, and China more indirectly, have each intervened in other countries' wars, this protest rings hollow." She recalls the excitement and moral fervour that accompanied India's intervention in East Pakistan and reminds: "Given her arguments at the time, India's present stance is both inconsistent and unconvincing. We said that Indian intervention in Pakistan's civil war was justified on both humanitarian grounds and because that war and the refugees it created posed a threat to our stability."
These precisely are NATO's justification for intervening in the Balkans. She might have noted that Pakistan, which supports NATO's intervention, had protested India's intervention in 1971 and its outraged foreign minister had thrown a torn out Resolution at the UN Security Council. Russia had supported India and the US had criticized it. Nation state thy name is inconsistency!
But there is a method in it, generally dubbed as the national interest. India, China, and Russia have one thing in common. They have unstable boundaries, unresolved territorial questions, and ethnic nationalisms which are pressing their 'right to self-determination'. All three are confronting armed insurgencies of varying intensity. Protracted insurgencies have endured in the Northeast of India and in the disputed region of Kashmir, and there are putative challenges in other places. China confronts decades long insurgency in Sinkiang, and the territorial status of Taiwan remains in dispute. Since the break up of the Soviet Union, Russia faces multiple challenges from within - Abkhazia, Chechnya, Crimea.
Russia also confronts challenges from without. The most serious of these are its increasing encirclement by NATO, and concerted American efforts to cut it off from the oil and gas resources of Central Asia. Moscow's support for Milosevic's fascist regime is morally reprehensible but the United States and Western European nations bear the great responsibility for arousing Russian anxiety by seeking to expand the western alliance into Eastern Europe.
Similarly, Iraq and Libya are at the receiving end of American interventionism. They cannot afford, politically or emotionally, to support yet another intervention by their tormentor. This is particularly true of Iraq which a decade after Desert Storm remains subject to American air raids, and a cruel sanction which has cost the lives of an estimated half a million children. Is that a justifiable loss to inflict upon Iraq's people in pursuit of policy? "We think it is worth the price" the U.S. Secretary of State had replied to a reporter. For four centuries the distinction between fascism and imperialism have continued to be blurred.The amorality of nation states is entrenched, and 'experts' tend to lend legitimacy to it. Critics of national policy can rarely penetrate the armour of the experts' "perception" of national interest. The perception is skewed more often than not. Examples abound. One may suffice. Starting in 1964, critics of American intervention in Vietnam variously argued that US interests were against its engagement in Indo-China, and it was immoral to boot. But policy makers and academic functionaries like Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski kept dismissing this argument as moralistic, lacking hard headed realism, and unmindful of such dangers as the 'dominos effect'.
An estimated five million deaths, $200 billion of war expenditure, untold suffering and a decade later the United States withdrew as a defeated power from Vietnam. The dominoes did not fall. To the contrary, in the decades after the Vietnam war American political influence and economic power witnessed a certain revival in Asia and the world at large. The anti-war critics who were on the mark are by now forgotten. Kissinger and Brzezinski continue to preside as the high priests of strategic punditry. The nexus of knowledge and power serves to legitimize power and devalue knowledge.
National interest is a 'mantra' comprehended so ritualistically that it often hurts the interests of the nation. There is a formalistic adherence to its 18th and 19th century precepts such as inviolability of national sovereignty, balance of power, strategic balance, secure boundaries, and international precedence. These are concepts which have lost their old meaning and applicability in our time. For example, as a concept sovereignty entails the will and capacity to maintain not only the territorial independence but also the autonomy of a national economy. Yet, some 120 United Nations members, many of which invoke ad nauseam their sovereign rights, surrender their sovereignty, often four times a year, to the IMF and the World Bank. Also, since the end of World War I a large number of laws and conventions, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on Genocide, circumcise the sovereignty of nation states.
In international relations precedence holds but little value. What could India or China or Russia lose if they gave qualified support to NATO's belated intervention in Kosovo? Russia had a free hand when it inflicted great suffering upon the people of Chechnya. Hardly anyone has raised an eyebrow over Chinese repression in Sinkiang, and mere ripples went up over its intervention in Tibet. India suppressed the insurgency in Punjab with an iron hand, virtually wiped out a generation of Nagas and Mizos in the 1960s and 1970s, and has been harsh on the Kashmiris. Yet apart from an unfavourable human rights report, it has had a free hand. The reasons for this insouciance are political and economic not legal or moral, and these shall remain irrespective of what Russia, India or China say about Kosovo. They could afford to take a moral and humane stand on the issue without compromising whatever they perceive as their 'national interest'.
Most critics have unequivocally opposed NATO's intervention on the grounds that it violates national sovereignty, that the United States and Europe have condoned gross humanitarian violations by such allies as Turkey, Israel and Indonesia, and that the United States itself has been a rather consistent violator of international laws. Only Noam Chomsky, the most forceful critic of NATO's intervention, takes an uncharacteristically ambivalent position. Following a devastating exposition of US violations of international laws and its subversion of the United Nations, he asks: "Where does that leave the question of what to do in Kosovo?" The question remains "unanswered" he writes. The legitimacy of NATO's intervention is dubious. It has so far added to the suffering of Kosovo's people. Yet it offers the victims at least some protection from a predatory state.
After the publication last week of my essay in this space, many readers around the world have written to express a disappointment that I too shied away from either opposing or supporting NATO's intervention. It is true that my emphasis was on the United States' and NATO's failure. But I wrote of failure in the Balkans, specially in Kosovo as they relate to NATO's current intervention. Washington's policy has lacked seriousness of purpose, and bombs I wrote "cannot compensate for the absence of seriousness and resolve." The result is before us - an acceleration of genocide, half of Kosovo's citizens have been cleansed out of their homes.
For ten years the United States discouraged a UN role in resolving the simmering conflict in Kosovo. It had not wanted to water down NATO's monopoly in Europe. For eight years it coddled a fascist hate-monger in Belgrade. And now NATO engages in a clinical intervention that has done little to relieve a nation under cruel assault. This is not worthy of applause. The imperial powers, former and current, will have to show the same resolve as they did in 1939 for civilized opinion to wholeheartedly support the democracies' intervention against fascism. Until then we must oppose genocide and bemoan this halfhearted intervention to stop it.