British MPs Question Legality of Kosovo Intervention

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 3, 2000 | by Jamie Dettmer, | Jennifer G. Hickey

A British House of Commons committee strongly has criticized the conduct and strategy of NATO's war last summer against Serbia, questioning the legality of the Atlantic alliance's intervention on behalf of Albanians living in Kosovo.

Although the panel eventually concluded in its report that the mission was justified on moral grounds, it warned the bombing of the former Yugoslavia by U.S., British and allied warplanes was of "dubious legality." The members of parliament, or MPs, say that NATO had no legal right to launch the war without U.N. consent.

In the report from the British Parliament's top foreign-affairs panel, NATO's political and military leadership come in for a drubbing. They are faulted for failing to predict that Serb strongman Slobodan Milosevic would retaliate quickly against the initial bombing runs by ordering the mass expulsion of Albanians from Kosovo. "We believe a very serious misjudgment was made when it was assumed that the bombing would not lead to the dramatic escalation in the displacement and expulsion of the Kosovo Albanian population," the report says.

The MPs say that NATO was overly optimistic about the bombing strategy and criticized the alliance's political leaders for tipping their hand by publicly ruling out the possibility of overcoming Serb defiance by launching a ground invasion of Kosovo -- a point raised at the time by U.S. congressional critics of the war, including Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

The report says that tactical planning for a ground assault came too late and that, if an invasion had been needed, that tardiness could have resulted in more allied deaths than would have been necessary. "Serious consideration of the ground assault only began towards the end of the campaign and, given the military and logistical difficulties involved, it is likely that if it had proved necessary to launch a ground assault the conflict might have been prolonged and might have involved many more casualties," the report says.

MPs called on the British government to explain and justify the controversial NATO strike on a Belgrade broadcasting station that led to 16 civilian deaths. The House of Commons' concern about that particular bombing mid dovetails with a controversial report issued a few days earlier by the human-rights group Amnesty International, which accused NATO of committing war crimes and specifically cited the strike on the TV center as contrary to established rules of war.

Clinton administration spokesmen immediately attacked the Amnesty report but were reticent about the House of Commons study.

In their report, the British MPs call on NATO to publish its secret assessment of the conduct of the war and urge NATO to make public the review it conducted of the accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade.