From NATO's Own Experts: Bombing of Yugoslavia Was a Failure - Brief Article

Humanist, Nov, 1999 by Bob Harris

In a story that, outside of the independent Counterpunch newsletter, went virtually unmentioned in the United States, the London Daily Telegraph reported in its July 22, 1999, edition that a private preliminary review by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's own experts found that the seventy-eight-day NATO bombing of Yugoslavia had "almost no military effect." Let that sink in for a moment. NATO leaders would have us believe that the thousands of NATO bombing runs--targeting everything from military bases to civilian bridges to columns of Albanian refugees--were the primary cause of Serbia's withdrawal from Kosovo.

Nope.

Instead, NATO's own experts privately conclude that the NATO bombing campaign "failed to damage the Yugoslav army," that Belgrade's 47,000 troops withdrew with their equipment virtually intact, and that the war ended primarily because Russia withdrew its diplomatic support for the Belgrade regime and pressed Serbia to sign the Chernomyrdin-Ahtisaari accord.

The news gets worse.

Equally unreported is the fact that the Chernomyrdin-Ahtisaari agreement--which led to the current ceasefire--when compared to NATO's "non-negotiable" Rambouillet proposal, represents several major NATO concessions regarding the key terms of occupation:

For all of these terms, the current agreement much more closely resembles Belgrade's pre-war negotiating position than NATO's. (The complete texts can be found online at www.bobharris.com/ scoop/kosovo/kosovodocs/rambouillet.htm and www.bobharris.com/scoop/ kosovo/kosovodocs/chernomyrdin.htm. respectively. Compare them for yourself.)

Now consider the most recent revelations concerning the Serbian war crimes committed between the onset of the bombings (which began after the failure of Rambouillet) and the ceasefire: possibly as many as 10,000 ethnic Albanians were killed in massacres committed by Serbian forces. And according to NATO's own experts, NATO's bombing campaign did little to stop the killing. Instead, as the slaughter went on virtually unaffected:

* Between 1,200 and 2,000 more civilian casualties were added to the carnage, a total that will surely grow among the poorest and least-powerful of all nationalities as the region enters winter missing much of its infrastructure.

* Serbian political opposition to Slobodan Milosevic was essentially eliminated--and now, while protest has returned, Milosevic still has an intact military with which to retain power.

* Wider conflict between the United States and Russia was dangerously countenanced, U.S. relations with China were greatly strained, and NATO credibility in many other countries was greatly reduced.

* Thanks to the destruction of the Danube bridges, the economies of Romania, Bulgaria, and every other country in the region were and remain badly shaken, leading to even more future instability.

* International law, the NATO treaty, the United Nations charter, and the Geneva conventions (which define the intentional bombing of civilian targets as a war crime) were violated by NATO itself and still the killing continued, right up until NATO agreed to terms it could have likely obtained before the bombings began.

NATO presents this to the world as a victory.

After an initial NATO military outlay of at least $10 billion for the bombing campaign, the European Union now reportedly estimates future costs of the war at as much as $25 billion to rebuild the local infrastructure, plus another $25 billion every year that NATO maintains its occupational forces. These figures don't include humanitarian aid, which Bill Clinton announced would be withheld from the civilians of Serbia--many of whom don't even have clean water to drink--until they rise up and overthrow Milosevic, who still has his army.

All told, some European experts place the ultimate price tag for NATO's Balkan strategy at $100 billion. And still Milosevic is in power, 10,000 Kosovars are dead, and a lasting peace is nowhere in sight.

NATO presents this to the world as a victory.

None of this had to happen. As British diplomats concluded this past July, the key point where the crisis should have been averted was during the Dayton negotiations in 1995, when the enlightened West treated Milosevic as a fair broker and pointedly left the Kosovar Albanians out of the talks. Worse, as Counterpunch notes, NATO's experts draw from this experience an unexpected lesson: that next time, since it's so hard to hit military targets, the bombing strategy should include even more civilian targets (and therefore more war crimes), sooner. Let that sink in for a moment, too.

What Serbian military and paramilitary forces did in Kosovo was criminal. Too bad the world's NATO supercop can't figure out how to shoot at the bad guys.

One final note regarding U.S. media coverage of the internal NATO analysis: as far as I can tell, when the story was first reported in the United Kingdom, only Counterpunch bothered to carry it. At press time, the September 20 edition of U.S. News and World Report finally got around to mentioning the NATO analysis--if only to repeat, unblinkingly, the report's ludicrous, immoral conclusion that next time NATO should bomb even more civilian targets. The actual terms of the final peace agreement, and their profound differences with what NATO claims the war was fought to achieve, remain unreported in the mainstream press.