Killing with Compassion

Justifying War, Death, and Destruction in the Modern Era

By Bojan Ratkovic
January 20, 2009

Throughout the Cold War (1947-1991) two rival powers, the Soviet Union and the United States, justified all sorts of direct and indirect intervention into the affairs of sovereign nations around the world as preventative measures aimed at halting the expansion of the other’s power and influence. The U.S. and other western powers were especially dedicated to what they saw as the global fight against the spread of communism and against the Soviet Union in particular, colorfully dubbed the “Evil Empire” by U.S. president Ronald Reagan in 1983. This Cold War rivalry between the capitalist West and the communist East was the principal cause of countless wars and proxy wars fought all over the globe, wars in which millions were killed and dozens of nations were left in ruins. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, numerous western thinkers, led primarily by prominent neoconservative academic Francis Fukuyama, theorized about a future free from conflict and about an “end of history” that would be ushered in by a new, liberal democratic world order built around the shambles of communism. With the Cold War finally over, there would be no more need for bloody proxy conflicts and ideological saber rattling, the world would unite under the banners of freedom and democracy and the dark days of war, aggression, invasion, and destruction would become nothing but a distant memory for a newly enlightened human race. Nevertheless, despite these bright predictions for a new world free from the violence of the Cold War, the 1990’s and the first decade of the 21^st century have seen a great number of bloody intrastate conflicts, military invasions, wars, and humanitarian catastrophes. History has not come to an end, and neither has the history of war, death and destruction. The only significant change we have witnessed since the end of the Cold War is a change in the preferred justification for the same kind of death and destruction witnessed many times over in mankind’s turbulent history. The primary excuse for waging war throughout the globe is no longer a bitter rivalry between two of the world’s most powerful nations, it is the novel concept of “humanitarian intervention”.

 

Bombs of Compassion: The 1999 NATO Attack on Serbia

From March 24th through to June 10th of 1999, NATO forces engaged in a massive, continuous, and brutal bombing campaign against Serbia (then the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia), targeting not only military installations but also civilian bridges, residential buildings, television stations, hospitals, and the Chinese embassy in the capital city of Belgrade. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and numerous other human rights groups accused NATO of intentionally breaking international law and committing crimes of war by knowingly targeting civilians and by using internationally banned weaponry, including cluster bombs and bombs laced with depleted uranium. NATO officials and western media portrayed the bombing campaign as the only course of action that could put a stop to the ethnic conflict between Serbs and Albanian separatists in Serbia’s Kosovo province, a conflict for which NATO blamed exclusively the Serbian side. As Michael Parenti observes in his book To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia, “NATO powers launched round-the-clock aerial attacks against Yugoslavia, dropping twenty thousand tons of bombs and killing upwards of three thousand women, children, and men. All this was done out of humanitarian concern for Albanians in Kosovo – or so we were asked to believe.” The truth about the NATO bombing campaign, however, was far from what NATO officials and the western media made it out to be, and humanitarian concerns were hardly a concern at all.

 

In the same year that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was celebrating its 50^th anniversary, the military alliance was, in the words of William Blum, “busy saving Yugoslavia, bombing a modern, sophisticated society back to a near-third-world level. And The Great American Public, in its infinite wisdom, was convinced that its government was motivated by ‘humanitarian’ impulses”. NATO, officially established on April 4^th, 1949 for the purpose of collectively securing its member states from the threat of Soviet expansion, did not dissolve once it’s original raison d’être, the Soviet Union, ceased to be a threat. In fact, following the collapse of the Soviet Union NATO continued to expand further into the countries of the former Eastern Bloc, and its ultimate mission quickly evolved from keeping the Soviets at bay to becoming the sole global military superpower in the post-Cold War world. With its 1999 attack on Serbia, NATO turned from a supposedly defensive alliance to a blatantly offensive one, a legacy that was carried through to Afghanistan in 2001.

 

Media Lies and Distortions: Justifying Destruction

In 1999, western government officials and media outlets raved about the need to stop Serbia’s military crackdown on Albanian separatists in its southern province of Kosovo. The U.S. and its allies claimed that the Serbs were violating the human rights of Kosovo’s Albanian population, and that nothing short of a massive bombing campaign could curb the supposed humanitarian crisis in the region. The western media reported stories of massive Serbian atrocities, of mass graves where hundreds of thousands of Albanians had been secretly buried, of concentration camps and widespread ethnic cleansing committed by the Serbs. Accusations of genocide and comparisons with Nazi Germany were abundant, and the issue was presented as the biggest humanitarian crisis of our time. Once hostilities finally ended on June the 10^th, a much different truth than the one propagated by the western media came to light: the Wall Street Journal reported that the casualty count, on both sides and including military casualties, was no more than 2,500, while other sources suggested that less than 2,000 died. The conflict was undoubtedly a human tragedy, but most certainly not genocide. No mass graves or concentration camps were ever found, and most Albanian refugees had left their homes in Kosovo after the NATO bombing campaign had already commenced in order to escape the bombs themselves. Several prominent Albanian leaders, including Kosovo’s former Prime Minister Ibrahim Rugova, repeatedly called for an end to the NATO bombardment due to the fact that many Albanian civilians were in fact being killed by the bombs, much like Serbian civilians. Most of the stories of alleged Serbian atrocities were in fact picked up by the western media from obviously biased Albanian newspapers operating out of Kosovo and Albania, and from second-hand anonymous Albanian sources within separatist-controlled refugee camps. Furthermore, the western media never got around to explaining the initial cause of the ethnic conflict in Kosovo: Albanian separatist rebels started the hostilities in 1998 by blowing up civilian buses, attacking police stations and other Serbian government institutions, and kidnapping non-Albanian civilians throughout Kosovo. On March 24^th as the NATO bombing of Serbia began, the then British defense minister George Robertson testified before the House of Commons that up until mid January 1999 “the Kosovo Liberation Army (the largest Albanian rebel group) was responsible for more deaths in Kosovo than the Serbian authorities had been”. All of these facts were easily verifiable before, during, and after the conflict but were largely ignored by mainstream media in the West, thereby allowing NATO officials to falsely justify an illegal and brutal attack on a sovereign state 8 years after the Cold War had ended. 

 

Was it a Humanitarian Intervention?

Despite colorful rhetoric that compared Serbia to Nazi Germany and claimed that the Kosovo conflict was one of the biggest humanitarian catastrophes of the modern era, more serious humanitarian disasters were going on at the very same time as the Kosovo conflict itself. In his book Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, William Blum explains that “the United States, under the cover of NATO, intervened in a civil war less violent, and of shorter duration, than several other civil conflicts going on in the world at the same time, such as in Turkey, Sri Lanka, Indonesia/East Timor, Angola, and other places in Africa”. Noam Chomsky observed the same inconsistency and emphasizes that Indonesia’s repression of separatists in East Timor and Turkey’s decades-old subjugation of its Kurdish minority faced little to no western opposition, although these conflicts have been far bloodier than the one in Kosovo. The West’s failure to intervene in any meaningful way to stop the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and the on-going catastrophe in Darfur, instances in which the number of dead and displaced ranges in the millions, further proves quite clearly that the principle of humanitarian intervention was used falsely and selectively by the U.S. and its allies.

 

The fact is that the NATO “humanitarian” bombing of Serbia, which claimed thousands of innocent lives (including the life of Milica Rakić, a 3-year-old girl killed by NATO shrapnel while sleeping in the bedroom of her residential apartment building in Belgrade, Serbia) created a bigger humanitarian disaster than the one it was supposedly trying to avert. Following the NATO bombing, the Red Cross confirmed a “dramatically awful” humanitarian crisis in Serbia, while Head and Conachy concluded that people in the country “[had] no jobs, often no water and electricity, and [faced] a desperate situation in the coming winter.” The basic industry and economy of Serbia was destroyed, key infrastructure leveled, and the already desperate refugee situation was worsened. In the words of Jim Carlton, the then secretary-general of the Australian Red Cross, “after some years of economic sanctions, the economy was already in a parlous state. Now it is kaput. Many places have no electricity and no water. Many roads are affected. It took us three hours to drive from Belgrade to Novi Sad—a trip that normally takes an hour—because of diversions.” In Kosovo itself, once the Serbian military and police withdrew from the province in 1999 and Kosovo came under joint UN and NATO administration, over 250,000 Serbs and other non-Albanians were forced to flee the province as a result of organized terror and ethnic cleansing. More than 180 Christian churches were burned and destroyed by Muslim Albanian extremists, countless graveyards were desecrated and unknown numbers of non-Albanian homes and other properties were torched. The remaining Serbs and members of other ethnic minorities, including the Roma and Gorani, live in ghetto-like enclaves, protected by barbed wire for fear of further racially motivated violence by the majority Albanians. For all the talk of ethnic cleansing committed by the Serbs against the Albanians, today there are more Albanians and less Serbs in Kosovo than ever before in history. Despite the on-going widespread human rights violations in Kosovo, the U.S. and its allies rewarded Kosovo’s Albanian separatist government with recognition of their February 21^st, 2008 unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia. In addition, the U.S. has made itself at home in Kosovo, using its strategically important position between East and West to build the largest American military base in the region, Camp Bondsteel, on Kosovo’s soil. As tensions between the U.S. and Russia continue to increase, Camp Bondsteel serves as a powerful counterbalance to Russian influence in Serbia and in the region. Once all of this is taken into consideration, the real motivation behind the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia becomes clear: for the U.S. and its allies “humanitarian intervention” in fact means military expansion. In the modern era, the rhetoric of stopping evil communist empires has been replaced with the rhetoric of promoting freedom, democracy, and human rights, but the end goals of strategic military expansion and dominance on the world stage remain unchanged.

 

New Rhetoric, Same Objectives

 

The notion of humanitarian intervention as it was exercised by the U.S. and its allies in their 1999 attack on Serbia was used selectively and based on completely false pretenses. Numerous humanitarian crises and violent conflicts that were far bloodier and more serious than the ones in Serbia in 1999, including the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the on-going crisis in Sudan, the Indonesia-East Timor conflict, and the Turkish mistreatment of its Kurdish minority, have been largely ignored by the U.S. and its allies, and the notion of humanitarian intervention was not exercised in these cases. Due to the fact that Serbia (and Kosovo in particular) is a key strategic target for the U.S. and its allies, while countries like Turkey are staunch U.S. allies and places like Rwanda and Darfur have little strategic and/or economic capital, the U.S. and its allies used humanitarian intervention as a false pretense for bombing Serbia and for pursuing particular strategic objectives at the expense of Serbia’s territorial integrity. The western media has played and continues to play a major role in justifying aggressive military campaigns shrouded in the veil of humanitarian intervention, while largely ignoring more serious conflicts that the U.S. and its allies have little interest in. Although the Cold War has come to an end, the world is still a dangerous place; it is still a world where large military powers compete for dominance on the world stage without much regard for humanitarian concerns. The rhetoric has changed, but the expansionist objectives of powerful players in world affairs remain the same.