Is Nato now the world's policeman?

12/06/1999

Last week Professor Adrian Hastings, a staunch supporter of action against President Milosevic, attacked Nato?s conduct of the war. It could no longer be considered just, he said. But there has now been a breakthrough. This week, the former British High Commissioner to India also brings the just war criteria to bear as he assesses the new world order envisaged by Tony Blair. AFTER nearly three months of Nato bombing, a precarious peace looks about to settle on Yugoslavia.

The terms of the settlement are unclear in some important respects. There is the continued Russian insistence that its contingent will not be under Nato command, raising the possibility of Kosovo?s de facto partition. Kosovo is to enjoy an unspecified form of self-rule, but it is to remain within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, with full consideration for . . . the principles of the territorial integrity of that federal republic (a studiedly opaque phrase); and the Kosovo Liberation Army is to be demilitarised ? a formidable proposition for the international force which is to police the settlement. A limited number of Serbian troops is to be allowed back into Kosovo after the withdrawal has been completed. On all these ticklish issues negotiations either continue or have yet to begin. Meanwhile the agreement makes no mention of what is to happen to Milosevic himself, whose removal and trial as a war criminal the British Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary are demanding.

How all this will work out on the ground as implementation begins is anyone?s guess: the way ahead will be messy, expensive and probably punctuated with armed confrontations. It is too early to proclaim a victory. Nevertheless, the Serbs have agreed to withdraw their forces from Kosovo; the refugees are to return under United Nations and Western protection; and there is to be fundamental Nato participation in the international force.

So it looks as though the wrongs perpetrated by Milosevic against the Kosovars, although they were not prevented, are to be redressed; and Nato, after a slow start and some horrendous mistakes, has demonstrated its ability to take and sustain collective military action in support of its just demands. The critics who argued that bombing alone, without the use of ground forces, could never achieve its objective, seem to have been proved wrong ? although reports suggest that the belated allied prepara- tions to move to a ground war were an important factor in forcing the Serbian climb-down.

Whether or not it can be counted a success, the Nato action has raised fundamental questions which will be with us for a long time. Did it meet the criteria for a just war? Was it right to take military action without explicit sanction from the UN Security Council? Does it signal the arrival of a new world order, a new internationalism in which (to quote the British Prime Minister) dictators know that they cannot get away with ethnic cleansing or repress their peoples with impunity? If so, by whom, and on whose authority, is the new world order to be imposed, and where are the resources for enforcing it to come from?

In last week?s Tablet, Adrian Hastings attacked the conduct of the war, but made an eloquent case for the justice of the cause for which it was being waged. He pointed out that the decision to initiate the bombing was not just to be seen as a response to Milosevic?s refusal to accept any settlement in Kosovo which would have effectively protected the position of the Kosovars. It had also to be viewed, he argued, in the light of the whole history of the Serbian dictator?s ruthlessly aggressive behaviour at earlier points in the break-up of Yugoslavia ? in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia ? when hindsight strongly suggests that determined military action by Western powers at an early stage could have prevented disproportionate bloodshed and suffering.

Given Milosevic?s record and the scale of the suffering which he was in the process of inflicting on the Kosovars, it is difficult to argue that Nato?s bombing campaign was from the outset an intrinsically unjust war; nor, even after the intensification of the bombing, would it be easy to show that the suffering and damage being inflicted were disproportionate to the suffering it was seeking to prevent or redress. Whether this would still be the case if the bombing campaign were to be further intensified, with more and more civilian casualties and economic destruction, becomes more questionable.

What are certainly open to question are the political and military judgements which determined the initial strategy. It would be unfair to reach conclusions about this without knowing on what intelligence those judgements were based. Perhaps there really was reason to believe that a show of light bombing would give Milosevic the excuse he was looking for to back down. But if not, was it sensible to think that light bombing alone would do the trick, and to rule out the possible use of ground forces so firmly and publicly at the start, thereby signalling to Milosevic that he had nothing to fear on that score? Did the politicians ignore or overrule military advice on questions of strategy and tactics ? something that Mrs Thatcher was careful never to do in the course of the Falklands campaign? Was the prospectus on which we were taken into the war ? that it would halt the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, and do so at no cost in allied lives and minimal cost in civilian casualties ? culpably misleading?

Allowing that the Nato cause was just, was it, or is it now, of sufficiently direct concern to either the United States or the United Kingdom to justify risking the lives of American or British servicemen? This may sound an intolerably selfish question, but it is one which governments surely have to ask themselves before risking the lives of their own citizens in an armed conflict. It is one of the ironies of a campaign fought in the interests of stability in Europe that 90 per cent of the cost is being borne by the United States. If a threat to stability anywhere in Europe is to be treated as a direct threat to the whole of Europe, including the United Kingdom, then European governments ought in equity to be in a position to deal with such threats without being almost totally dependent on the United States, as at present. So it is interesting that last weekend?s European summit in Cologne has taken the first small steps towards giving the European Union a co-ordinated military capability of its own.

Even larger questions surround the British Prime Minister?s vision of a new world order1, in which war is a legitimate weapon to use against dictators and repressive regimes in general, irrespective of territory or of national interest in any direct sense. In the absence of an effective world government, and if the need for UN Security Council endorsement can be disregarded on the grounds that Russian or Chinese obstruction makes it unobtainable, who is entitled to come to the necessary judgements as to what constitutes an unacceptable level of oppression? Hitler, after all, came to that judgement in regard to the Czechoslovak Government?s treatment of the Sudeten Germans.

Viewed from London or Washington, the credentials of Western governments collectively to decide what is and is not tolerable behaviour may seem impeccable; but one has only to open an Indian or even an Irish newspaper, let alone a Russian one, to see that this view is not shared outside the Western consensus. As a former senior Indian diplomat wrily remarked to me apropos of the terms of the Kosovo agreement, how does the West justify ignoring the UN Charter when it was proving inconvenient, only to foist responsibility on to the UN for presiding over the resulting mess? To much of the world, the prospect of an American-led alliance, without clear United Nations endorsement, forcibly intervening in the internal affairs of a smaller country which is committing no act of external aggression, looks like a blatant exercise of superior military power, contrary to both the letter and the spirit of the UN Charter. However unfairly, the message it sends is that in today?s unipolar world any regime to which the United States and the European Union take a dislike is susceptible to American or Nato bullying ? provided it is small enough to be bullyable without serious risk.

The plausibility of this message is reinforced by the selective nature of Western military or other sanctions. The Prime Minister?s concept, like Robin Cook?s ethical foreign policy, is intended to have a general application. Yet China, Indonesia and Turkey, to take some examples, are all vulnerable to charges of genocide as that crime is now interpreted: China in Tibet, Indonesia in East Timor and Turkey in regard to the Kurds. (Some Irish Americans would probably add the United Kingdom in respect of Northern Ireland.) Even if military action in these cases is ruled out on the grounds of sheer impracticability, how do we justify maintaining normal economic and commercial relations with China or Indonesia while doing our best to destroy Serbia?s economic infrastructure by force?

Discarding the criterion of national interest and emphasising instead the primacy of ethical considerations in the conduct of foreign and defence policy may sound like a moral advance, but without more rigorous definition it is likely to be a recipe for apprehension, resentment and disillusionment. The new world order envisaged by the British Prime Minister cannot command international respect or contribute to lasting international peace as long as it is seen as an instrument of American and European domination, or as a rhetorical device to justify the imposition of Anglo-Saxon values on non-Anglo-Saxon peoples.

If we are to move beyond rhetoric towards a system in which supranational judgements about the internal behaviour of national governments can be made fairly, will be widely respected and can then be enforced, the system will need to be operated by international institutions markedly more representative than the UN Security Council as at present constituted and equipped with the resources which will enable them to enforce their judgements. At the moment, for example, the United States is notoriously in arrears with its UN dues and has declined to recognise the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice at The Hague, before which it wants to see Milosevic arraigned as a war criminal.

Before Tony Blair?s vision can become a reality, there will have to be a fundamental reappraisal by every major country, starting with the United States but including the countries of the European Union, of where their wider national interests lie, resulting in a willingness to submit themselves to the same procedures and sanctions as they would wish to visit upon others. We have some way to go before that point is likely to be reached.

1We need to enter a new millennium where dictators know that they cannot get away with ethnic cleansing or repress their peoples with impunity. In this conflict we are fighting not for territory but for values. For a new internationalism where the brutal repression of whole ethnic groups will no longer be tolerated. For a world where those responsible for such crimes have nowhere to hide. Tony Blair in Newsweek, 19 April.