Wikipedia - Kosovo war

The NATO bombing campaign

NATO WAR FIREWORKS
Belgrade "postcards" - Serbian anti-aircraft artillery in action during a NATO bomb raid

NATO's bombing campaign lasted from March 24 to June 11, 1999, involving up to 1,000 aircraft operating mainly from bases in Italy and aircraft carriers stationed in the Adriatic. Tomahawk cruise missiles were also extensively used, fired from aircraft, ships and submarines. The United States was, inevitably, the dominant member of the coalition against Serbia, although all of the NATO members were involved to some degree — even Greece, despite publicly opposing the war. Over the ten weeks of the conflict, NATO aircraft flew over 38,000 combat missions. For the German Air Force (Luftwaffe) it was the first time it had participated in a conflict since World War II; two German Tornado pilots became the first prisoners of war in this conflict on 27 March 1999. In addition to airpower, one battalion from the US Army's 82nd Airborne Division was deployed to help combat missions. The battalion secured Apache attack helicopter refueling sites and a small team forward deployed to the Albania/Kosovo border to identify targets for Allied/NATO airstrikes.

The proclaimed goal of the NATO operation was summed up by its spokesman as "Serbs out, peacekeepers in, refugees back". That is, Yugoslav troops would have to leave Kosovo and be replaced by international peacekeepers in order to ensure that the Albanian refugees could return to their homes. However, the summary had an unfortunate double meaning which caused NATO considerable embarrassment after the war, when over 200,000 Serbs and other non-Albanian minorities fled or were expelled from the province. It was also suggested that a small victorious war would help give NATO a new role. Propaganda terms "humanitarian bombing" and "humanitarian war" were employed by the politicians.

Slobodan Milošević agreed to withdraw his forces from Kosovo. Shortly after agreeing to withdraw forces, he resisted and did not withdraw his forces. NATO was then outraged and violently attacked Serbia.

After first NATO attacks on Serbia Milosevic regime intensified
campaign against Kosovo Albanian secessionists with indiscriminate use of force
 which caused an exodus of dozens of thousands of Kosovo Albanian citizens

The campaign was initially designed to destroy Yugoslav air defences and high-value military targets. It did not go very well at first, with bad weather hindering many sorties early on. NATO had seriously underestimated Milošević's will to resist: few in Brussels thought that the campaign would last more than a few days, and although the initial bombardment was more than just a pin-prick, it was nowhere near the concentrated bombardments seen in Baghdad in 1991. On the ground, the ethnic cleansing campaign by the Serbians was stepped up and within a week of the war starting, over 300,000 Kosovo Albanians had fled into neighboring Albania and Macedonia, with many thousands more displaced within Kosovo. By April, the United Nations was reporting that 850,000 people — the vast majority of them Albanians — had fled their homes.

The cause of the refugee exodus has been the subject of considerable controversy, not least because it formed the basis of United Nations war crimes charges against Slobodan Milošević and other officials responsible for directing the Kosovo conflict. The Yugoslav side and its Western supporters claimed that the refugee outflows were caused by mass panic in the Kosovo Albanian population, and that the exodus was generated principally by fear of NATO bombs. It was also alleged that the exodus was encouraged by KLA guerillas, and that in some cases the KLA issued direct orders to Albanians to flee. Many eyewitness Albanian identified Serbian security forces and KLA paramilitaries as the culprits, responsible for systematically emptying towns and villages of their Albanian inhabitants either by forcing them to flee or executions. [16] There were certainly some well-documented instances of mass expulsions, as happened in Priština at the end of March when tens of thousands of people were rounded up at gunpoint and loaded onto trains, before being dumped at the Macedonian border. Other towns, such as Peć, were systematically burned and their inhabitants killed.

German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer claimed that the refugee crisis had been produced by a Serbian plan codenamed "Operation Horseshoe". While the existence of a plan of that name remains controversial, the United Nations and international human rights organisations were convinced that the refugee crisis was the result of a deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing. A postwar statistical analysis of the patterns of displacement, conducted by Patrick Ball of the American Association for the Advancement of Science [17], found that there was a direct correlation between Serbian security force operations and refugee outflows, with NATO operations having very little effect on the displacements. There was other evidence of the refugee crisis having been deliberately manufactured: many refugees reported that their identity cards had been confiscated by security forces, making it much harder for them to prove that they were bona fide Yugoslav citizens. Indeed, since the conflict ended Serbian sources have claimed that many of those who joined the refugee return were in fact Albanians from outside Kosovo.

It is unclear what Milošević may have hoped to achieve by expelling Kosovo's Albanian inhabitants. One possibility is that he wished to replace the Albanian population with refugee Serbs from Bosnia and Croatia, thereby achieving the "Serbianization" of the province. It is quite clear that NATO achieved a considerable moral advantage by the flight, whether desired or not. If so, if desired it was a great success, as it convinced NATO's member states' populations that they had to win the conflict. Europe was already finding it hard to cope with previous waves of refugees and asylum seekers from the Balkans, and a further wave of refugees could have dangerously destabilised southeastern Europe. It is arguable that the war in Kosovo was not initially in the direct interests of the NATO states, but the refugee crisis made it so. The television pictures of thousands of refugees streaming across the border were an invaluable morale boost for NATO, making it much easier for the alliance to argue that Serbian ethnic cleansing was a greater evil than NATO bombardment.

NATO military operations switched increasingly to attacking Yugoslav units on the ground — hitting targets as small as individual tanks and artillery pieces — as well as continuing with the strategic bombardment. This activity was, however, heavily constrained by politics, as each target needed to be approved by all nineteen members states. Montenegro was bombed on several occasions but NATO eventually desisted in order to prop up the precarious position of its anti-Milošević leader, Đukanović. So-called "dual-use" targets, of use to both civilians and the military, were attacked: this included bridges across the Danube, factories, power stations, telecommunications facilities and — particularly controversially — the headquarters of Yugoslavian Leftists, a political party led by Milošević's wife, and the Serbian state television broadcasting tower. Some saw these actions as violations of international law and the Geneva Conventions in particular. NATO however argued that these facilities were potentially useful to the Yugoslav military and that their bombing was therefore justified.

Marginalized by history: Generals Mladic and Clark exchange their general hats
Historical irony. ICTY indicted Bosnian Serb gen. Ratko Mladic with Gen. Wesley Clark the future NATO campaign Commander exchanging their general hats in Bosnia before the Dayton Agreement in 1995. While General Mladic is still evading facing justice for war-crimes in Bosnia, Gen Clark has quickly fallen into oblivion after the NATO campaign in Kosovo which will hardly remain a victory in the history of NATO.

To add to the tension, on March 31 Yugoslav forces captured three U.S. soldiers on the Yugoslav-Macedonian border. Staff Sergeant Andrew Ramirez, Staff Sergeant Christopher Stone, and Specialist Steven Gonzales were assigned to the 1st Infantry Division, which had been part of the United Nations Preventive Deployment Force (UNPREDEP) in Macedonia. The UNPREDEP mission had ended in February, but the U.S. contingent continued to conduct patrols. Yugoslavia contended that the soldiers had crossed the border in Yugoslavia, while the United States asserted that they were captured in Macedonia. During their detention, the soldiers were roughly handled and broadcast on Yugoslav television. An unofficial delegation of U.S. religious leaders including Jesse Jackson secured their release on May 2.^[2][3]

At the start of May, a NATO aircraft attacked an Albanian refugee convoy, believing it was a Yugoslav military convoy, killing around 50 people. NATO admitted its mistake 5 days later, but the Serbs accused NATO of deliberately attacking the refugees. On May 7, NATO bombs hit the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, killing three Chinese journalists and outraging Chinese public opinion. NATO claimed they were firing at Yugoslav positions. The United States and NATO later apologized for the bombing, saying that it occurred because of an outdated map provided by the CIA. This was challenged by a joint report from The Observer (UK) and Politiken (Denmark) newspapers [18] which claimed that NATO intentionally bombed the embassy because it was being used as a relay station for Yugoslav army radio signals. The bombing strained relations between China and NATO countries and provoked angry demonstrations outside Western embassies in Beijing. According to one news source, unnamed high ranking NATO sources confirmed in 2005 that the attack was in fact deliberate: "The NATO sources told Defense & Foreign Affairs that the attack was based on intelligence that then Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic was to have been in the Embassy at the time of the attack. The attack, then, was deliberately planned as a "decapitation" attack, intended to kill Milosevic." [19]

In another major incident - Dubrava prison in Kosovo - the Yugoslav government attributed 85 civilian deaths to NATO bombing. Human Rights Watch research in Kosovo determined that an estimated 18 prisoners were killed by NATO bombs on May 21 (three prisoners and a guard were killed in an earlier attack on May 19.

By the start of April, the conflict seemed little closer to a resolution and NATO countries began to think seriously about a ground operation — an invasion of Kosovo. This would have to be organised very quickly, as there was little time before winter set in and much work would have to be done to improve the roads from the Greek and Albanian ports to the envisaged invasion routes through Macedonia and northeastern Albania. US President Bill Clinton was however extremely reluctant to commit American forces for a ground offensive. At the same time, Finnish and Russian negotiators continued to try to persuade Milošević to back down. He finally recognised that NATO was serious in its resolve to end the conflict one way or another and that Russia would not intervene to defend Serbia despite Moscow's strong anti-NATO rhetoric. Faced with little alternative, Milošević accepted the conditions offered by a Finnish–Russian mediation team and agreed to a military presence within Kosovo headed by the UN, but incorporating NATO troops.

Slobodan Milosevic will be remembered both by Serbs and Albanians as a person with a huge amount of responsibility for their suffering. His death before the final ICTY verdict challenges Serbia to more decisively get rid of all traces of his dictatorship.

On June 12, after Milosevic accepted the conditions, KFOR began entering the war-torn land of Kosovo. KFOR, a NATO force, had been preparing to conduct combat operations but in the end its mission was only peacekeeping.^[4] It was based upon the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps headquarters commanded by then Lieutenant General Mike Jackson of the British Army. It consisted of British forces (a brigade built from 4th Armoured and 5th Airborne Brigades), a French Brigade, a German brigade, which entered from the west while all the other forces advanced from the south, and Italian and United States Army brigades. The US contribution, the Initial Entry Force consisted of forces from the 2nd Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment from Fort Bragg, N.C; the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina; the 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment from Schweinfurt Germany, and Echo Troop, 4th Cavalry Regiment, also from Schweinfurt, Germany. Also attached to the U.S. force was the Greek Army's 501st Mechanized Infantry Battalion. The initial US forces established their area of operation around the towns of Urosevic, the future Camp Bondsteel, and Gnjilane, at Camp Monteith, and spent four months - the start of a stay which continues to date - establishing order in the south east sector of Kosovo. Even though greetings were temporary, during initial incursion the US soldiers were greeted by Albanians young and old cheering and throwing flowers as US Soldiers and KFOR rolled through their villages. At least three U.S. soldiers from the Initial Entry Force lost their lives.^[5]

Reaction to the war

The legitimacy of NATO's bombing campaign in Kosovo has been the subject of much debate. NATO did not have the backing of the United Nations Security Council to use force in Yugoslavia but justified its actions on the basis of an "international humanitarian emergency". Criticism was also drawn by the fact that the NATO charter specifies that NATO is an organization created for defence of its members, but in this case it was used to attack a non-NATO country which was not directly threatening any NATO member. NATO countered this argument by claiming that instability in the Balkans was a direct threat to the security interests of NATO members, and military action was therefore justified by the NATO charter.

Many on the left of Western politics saw the NATO campaign as US aggression and imperialism, while critics on the right considered it irrelevant to their countries' national security interests. Veteran anti-war campaigners such as Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Justin Raimondo, and Tariq Ali were prominent in opposing the campaign. However, in comparison with the anti-war protests against the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the campaign against the war in Kosovo aroused much less public support. The television pictures of refugees being driven out of Kosovo made a vivid and simple case for NATO's actions. The personalities were also very different — the NATO nations were mostly led by centre-left and moderately liberal leaders, most prominently U.S. President Bill Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Anti-war protests were generally confined to the far left and Serbian emigrés, with many other left-wingers supporting the campaign on humanitarian grounds.

There was, however, criticism from all parts of the political spectrum for the way that NATO conducted the campaign. NATO officials sought to portray it as a "clean war" using precision weapons. The US Department of Defense claimed that, up to June 2, 99.6% of the 20,000 bombs and missiles used had hit their targets. However, the use of technologies such as depleted uranium ammunition and cluster bombs was highly controversial, as was the bombing of oil refineries and chemical plants, which led to accusations of "environmental warfare". The slow pace of progress during the war was also heavily criticised. Many believed that NATO should have mounted an all-out campaign from the start, rather than starting with a relatively small number of strikes and combat aircraft.

The choice of targets was highly controversial. The destruction of bridges over the Danube greatly disrupted shipping on the river for months afterwards, causing serious economic damage to countries along the length of the river. Industrial facilities were also attacked, damaging the economies of many towns. In fact, as the Serbian opposition later complained, the Yugoslav military was using civilian factories as weapons plants: the Sloboda vacuum cleaner factory in the town of Čačak also housed a tank repair facility, while the Zastava plant in Kragujevac made both cars and Kalashnikov rifles, although in completely separate buildings and locations. In addition only state owned factories were targeted. No private or foreign owned industrial sites were bombed. Perhaps the most controversial deliberate attack of the war was that made against the headquarters of Serbian television on April 23, which killed at least fourteen people. NATO justified the attack on the grounds that the Serbian television headquarters was part of the Milošević regime's "propaganda machine". Opponents of Milošević inside Serbia charged that the managers of the state TV station had been forewarned of the attack but ordered staff to remain inside the building despite an air raid alert.

Within Yugoslavia, opinion on the war was (unsurprisingly) split between highly critical among Serbs and highly supportive among Albanians — although not all Albanians felt that way; some appear to have blamed NATO for not acting quickly enough. Although Milošević was increasingly unpopular, the NATO campaign created a mood of national unity. Milošević did not leave matters entirely to chance, however. Many opposition supporters feared for their lives, particularly after the murder of the dissident journalist Slavko Curuvija on April 11, an act widely blamed on Milošević's secret police. In Montenegro, President Milo Đukanović — who opposed both the NATO bombardment and Serbian actions in Kosovo — publicly expressed fear of a "creeping coup" by Milošević supporters.

Opinion in Yugoslavia's neighbours was much more mixed. Macedonia was the only Yugoslav republic apart from Montenegro not to have fought a war with Serbia and had tense relations between the Macedonian majority and a large Albanian minority. Its government did not approve of Milošević's actions, but it was also not very sympathetic towards the Albanian refugees. Albania was wholly supportive of NATO's actions, as might be expected given the ethnic ties between Albanians on both sides of the border. Croatia, Romania and Bulgaria granted overflight rights to NATO aircraft. Hungary was a new member of NATO and supported the campaign. Across the Adriatic, Italian public and political opinion was against the war, but the Italian government nonetheless allowed NATO full use of Italian air bases. In Greece, popular opposition to the war reached 96%.

It was claimed at the time by some NATO officials that Milošević might try to spread the war to Bosnia in order to tie up NATO on two fronts. At the beginning of the war, two Yugoslav MiG-29 fighters had flown into eastern Bosnia combating NATO planes, but were shot down by NATO aircraft. In the event, Bosnia was quiet during the Kosovo war.

Criticism of the case for war

Some critics have accused the coalition of leading a war in Kosovo under the false pretense of genocide.^[6] This was, in fact, no pretense at all. President Clinton of the United States, and his administration, were accused of inflating the number of Kosovar Albanians killed by Serbians.^[7] Clinton's Secretary of Defense William Cohen, giving a speech, said, "The appalling accounts of mass killing in Kosovo and the pictures of refugees fleeing Serb oppression for their lives makes it clear that this is a fight for justice over genocide."^[8] On CBS' Face the Nation Cohen claimed, "We've now seen about 100,000 military-aged men missing...They may have been murdered."^[9] Clinton, citing the same figure, spoke of "at least 100,000 (Kosovar Albanians) missing".^[10] Later, talking about Yugoslav elections, Clinton said, "they're going to have to come to grips with what Mr. Milošević ordered in Kosovo...They're going to have to decide whether they support his leadership or not; whether they think it's OK that all those tens of thousands of people were killed...".^[11] Clinton also claimed, in the same press conference, that "NATO stopped deliberate, systematic efforts at ethnic cleansing and genocide."^[12] Clinton compared the events of Kosovo to the Holocaust. CNN reported, "Accusing Serbia of 'ethnic cleansing' in Kosovo similar to the genocide of Jews in World War II, an impassioned President Clinton sought Tuesday to rally public support for his decision to send U.S. forces into combat against Yugoslavia, a prospect that seemed increasingly likely with the breakdown of a diplomatic peace effort."^[13] Clinton's State Department also claimed Yugoslav troops had committed genocide. The New York Times reported, "the Administration said evidence of 'genocide' by Yugoslav forces was growing to include 'abhorrent and criminal action' on a vast scale. The language was the State Department's strongest yet in denouncing Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević."^[14] The State Department also gave the highest estimate of dead Albanians. The New York Times reported, "On April 19, the State Department said that up to 500,000 Kosovar Albanians were missing and feared dead."^[15]

The United Nations Charter does not allow military interventions in other sovereign countries with few exceptions which in general need to be decided upon by the United Nations Security Council. The issue was brought before the UN Security Council by Russia, in a draft resolution which - inter alia - would affirm "that such unilateral use of force constitutes a flagrant violation of the United Nations Charter". China, Namibia and Russia voted for the resolution, the other members against, thus it failed to pass [20][21] (PDF).

On April 29, 1999 Yugoslavia filed a complaint at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague against ten NATO member countries (Belgium, Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy, Canada, The Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and the USA). The Court did not decide upon the case because Yugoslavia was not a member of the UN during the war.

In Western countries, opposition to NATO's intervention was mainly from conservatives and libertarians on the right, and from most of the far left. In Britain, the war was opposed by many prominent conservative figures including former UK Foreign Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind, former Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont, and journalists Peter Hitchens and Simon Heffer, whereas opposition on the left was confined to The Morning Star newspaper and left wing MPs like Tony Benn and Alan Simpson. However, the Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee), a Leninist splinter-group, backed the Kosovo Liberation Army (while opposing NATO's intervention, seeing it as American-led imperialist opportunism) and support the complete secession of Kosovo from Serbia.

Consequences of the war

When the war ended on June 11, 1999, it left Kosovo in chaos and Yugoslavia as a whole facing an unknown future.

The war inflicted many casualties. Already by March 1999, the combination of fighting and the targeting of civilians had left an estimated 1,500-2,000 civilians and combatants dead. [22]

Civilian casualties

The exact number of Albanian civilians killed is unclear. Some mass graves were also found in Serbia itself, on Yugoslav military bases or dumped in the Danube. The total number of Albanian dead is generally claimed to be around 10,000 although several foreign forensic teams were unable to verify the exact amount [24] (PDF). One explanation is that some of the largest mass graves were cleared before the war's end in an apparent effort to obliterate potential war crimes evidence. As of July 2001, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) had exhumed approximately 4,300 bodies believed to have been victims of unlawful killings by Serbian and Yugoslav forces in Kosovo. This is certainly less than the total number of those killed by government troops. Most importantly, there is incontrovertible evidence of grave tampering and the removal of bodies by Serbian and Yugoslav troops; between 1,200 and 1,500 bodies were destroyed at Trepca mine. [25] As of July 2001, the Serbian authorities had announced the discovery of four additional graves in Serbia with as many as 1,000 Kosovar Albanian bodies. [26]

A study by The Lancet (PDF), Vol 355, 24 June 2000, estimated "12,000 (95% CI 5500 18 300) deaths in the total population."

No invincibles - One of rare Serbian 1999 war trophies
The tail and canopy of F-16AF 88-550 USAF Stealth bomber shot near Belgrade on May 2 1999.
But the time is changing and the present Serbian army pilots are being trained by NATO instructors
within the program of the "Partnership for peace" as a first step to
Serbia's joining NATO Alliance

Military casualties and losses

NATO

There were other casualties after the war, mostly due to landmines. After the war, the alliance reported the loss of three helicopters, 32 unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) and five aircraft — all of them American, including the first US stealth plane (a F-117 stealth fighter) ever shot down by enemy fire.^[19] A second F-117A was also heavily damaged, and although it made it back to its base, it never flew again.^[20] Several of these were lost in accidents and not by enemy action. The Yugoslav armed forces claimed to have shot down seven helicopters, 30 UAVs, 61 planes and 238 cruise missiles, counting only those that crashed within the territory of Yugoslavia.

Truth in Media^[21]reported on 29 August 2006 about raids by the Serbian Air Force on the Tuzla airport in Bosnia, and on Tirana airport, Albania (13 April-26 April 1999), destroying a number of NATO aircraft on the ground. Newsweek^[22]of 15 May 2000 published an article about the aftermath of the conflict. It quotes a previously suppressed report from US Air Force describing the NATO air campaign as "largely unsuccessful", since US Air Force investigating teams were unable to find evidence to substantially support the NATO claims of destroyed Serbian tanks and weapons. However the lack of any kind of independent verification of such claims casts a strong shadow of doubt on them.