Kosovo War-Crimes Indictments Could Cut Both Ways

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 28, 1999 | by Reed Irvine

The day after the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia said it was going to indict Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes, op-ed articles by two former high-level government officials called into question the wisdom and justice of this move. One by Viktor Chernomyrdin, the former Russian prime minister who has been Boris Yeltsin's special envoy for Kosovo, appeared in the Washington Post. The other, by former president Jimmy Carter, written after President Clinton had failed to respond to a letter Carter had sent him, ran in the New York Times.

Clinton had published an op-ed article in the Times on May 23 in which he implied that NATO's strategy would strengthen our relationship with Russia and said, "Russia is now helping to work out a way for Belgrade to meet our conditions." Chernomyrdin disputed this, saying Russians believe that what NATO is doing "clashes with international law, the Helsinki agreements and the entire world order that took shape after World War II." He added that "the United States lost its moral right to be regarded as a leader of the free democratic world when its bombs shattered the ideals of liberty and democracy in Yugoslavia."

Since air strikes on military targets had failed to achieve their goal, Chernomyrdin said, NATO shifted to massive destruction of Yugoslavia's infrastructure. He asked, "Are thousands of innocent people to be killed because of one man's blunders? Is an entire country to be razed?" He said NATO must suspend its raids and begin peace talks. Absent that, he said he would advise Yeltsin to suspend Russian participation in the negotiating process and end all military-technological cooperation with the West.

Clinton may find comfort in the indictment of Milosevic, but he should think about the possibility that the indictment could be expanded to include himself and others who are responsible for the bombing. The first count, "deportation," charges that Milosevic and his aides "have in a systematic manner forcibly expelled and internally displaced hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanians from their homes ... [by having] intentionally created an atmosphere of fear and oppression through the use of force, threats of force and acts of violence." It estimates the number of refugees who fled from Kosovo at 740,000, but not all of them were expelled by the Yugoslav security forces.

Steven Erlanger, reporting from Kosovo for the Times, said there were three waves of refugees. The first were those who were driven out when the bombing started. They were followed by those who left to escape the bombing. Finally, there were those who panicked because so many of their neighbors had left or were leaving. Erlanger said it was ludicrous for Milosevic to claim that his forces didn't expel anyone, but it also is ludicrous for Clinton to claim that the bombing bears no blame for the flight of many of the refugees.

The tribunal charges that forces under the control of the accused have murdered hundreds of Albanian civilians. It lists the names of 345 victims who allegedly died in seven different massacres. All but two occurred within four days of the start of the bombing, when the government launched its attack on known Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA, strongholds to destroy the terrorist forces. One took place in January, when security forces attacked Racak, a KLA stronghold, killing 43 men and two women. French journalists who observed the operation and the bodies have challenged the claim that it was a massacre, which is not supported by any forensic evidence that has been made public.

The tribunal comes close to suggesting that killing enemy terrorists is a war crime. Tell that to the Vietnam veterans who risked their lives to wipe out the Viet Cong. To the Serbs, the KLA is like the Viet Cong, only worse. Chernomyrdin says, "They are essentially terrorist organizations. Of this, Russia is sure. They are making money from drug trafficking with an annual turnover of $3 billion." He adds that our policy "encourages the emergence of a major new drug-trafficking center in that part of the world."

Reed Irvine is chairman of Accuracy in Media, a nonprofit media watchdog group in Washington.