An Uninvited Guest

LAST week Bill Clinton did something indefensible in international law. He visited a country without being invited, and against the wishes of its government and president. Worse, while there, he issued a call to its people to overthrow the regime. The country was Yugoslavia, the president, Slobodan Milosevic. But didn't Clinton visit Kosovo? He did, but according to the agreement in June to end Yugoslavia's aerial bombing, Kosovo stays a part of the country, albeit an autonomous one. So was Clinton thumbing his nose at international law and proclaiming US overlordship of the world? The answer is startlingly different.

Clinton visited Kosovo to shore up his credentials as a defender of human rights and architect of a new, moral world order. As events unfold in Kosovo, both these claims have been coming under attack. This is happening not in Moscow, New Delhi or Beijing but in Europe and, more significantly, in the US itself. The unease has been gathering for some time, but has so far been expressed in private. The nearest European nations came to expressing it in public was when France and Germany opposed the US' attempt to prevent any NATO country from helping Yugoslavia to repair war damage till the Yugoslavs ousted Milosevic. That opposition has now erupted in public.

Clinton was forced to reschedule his visit last week to Greece by a few days because their government warned him that the original date, coinciding with the anniversary of the US-endorsed Colonels' coup in '67, would have provided the pretext for countrywide student demonstrations against Yugoslavia's bombing. Despite the postponement, the protests duly occurred. The US was sufficiently rattled to feel the need for yet another retrospective endorsement of Kosovo. At the meeting of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in Istanbul last week, it succeeded in getting a resolution endorsed that internal disturbances and consequent human rights violations in any member-country were a legitimate concern of all other members. But opposition is building up in the US as well. Behind the facade of moral invincibility being maintained by, and through, the media, there's gathering unease that NATO did the wrong thing in Kosovo, and for wrong reasons. And it's the powerful east coast academia where this reaction is setting in first. A recent three-day conference on the US and International Security organised by the Weatherby Centre for International Affairs at Harvard University revealed how deep the split is.

While some of Harvard's most distinguished professors still believe the US (and NATO) 'had to do something' and that it was better to have dared and made mistakes than to have stood by and watched another holocaust in the making, younger specialists in international affairs minced no words and said the US ignored the internal dynamics of the Kosovo struggle and got ensnared into encouraging and eventually helping a violent guerrilla movement against a sovereign government. Equally revealing was the fact that two-thirds of the European participants, most of them serving or former diplomats, concurred with the latter view.

Doubts over NATO's role in Kosovo have been fuelled by the way the UN is being humiliated, and the ineffectiveness of the KFOR, the Kosovo pacification force. Almost six months after the return of 'peace', only 1,700 of the 4,000-6,000 international policemen promised by NATO and the UN have arrived. Real control has passed to the KLA, reborn as the Kosovo Security Force. The KSF provides security only to Albanians. The killing of Serbs, their expulsion from their homes, and the torching of those the Albanians don't wish to occupy, continues. And it's not just Serbs who are being killed. Albanians accused of collaborating with them are being dispensed with summary 'justice'. Among those killed recently was a former minister of the Albanian democratic shadow government of Ibrahim Rugova, former 'president' of the 'Kosovo Albanian Republic'.

Rugova himself has simply vanished from Kosovo, and neither Clinton, who met him twice last year, nor Tony Blair, nor Madeleine Albright have asked where he might be. All that the UN or the KFOR have been able to claim in answer to persistent western journalists is that the number of murders has started to decline. Not surprising, for there are very few Serbs left to harass, expel or when necessary, kill. Albanians' ethnic cleansing of Kosovo has been so complete that against the 89,000 Albanians the Serb military expelled from Kosovo in 14 months between February 6, '98, and March 23, '99, the vengeful Albanians have expelled more than 250,000 Serbs in five months. There are not even 50,000 Serbs left who are being guarded day and night to maintain Kosovo's multi-ethnicity.

The worst blot on the Kosovo operation is the news now leaking out that there had been no genocide here. With 197 of the estimated 500 genocide sites already investigated by forensic teams from 15 countries, the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) has conceded that only 2,108 bodies have been recovered, as against the 11,000 said to have been killed. The ICTY went on to say that given the fact that 300 more sites remain to be investigated, that bulldozers had been used to exhume and cart away many bodies, and that others had probably been cremated, the figure of 11,000 'was consistent with the Tribunal's findings to date'. What it didn't mention, but what the head of the Spanish forensic team told newspaper El Pais was that the bodies examined had shown various causes of death and could not all be ascribed to genocide by the Serbs.

Far from being a sign of overweening arrogance, Clinton's visit to Kosovo indicates the growing self-doubt in America. That self-doubt may flower into a potent campaign issue in the Presidential elections next year.