By Noam Chomsky
There have been many inquiries concerning NATO
(meaning primarily US) bombing in
connection with Kosovo. A great deal has been
written about the topic, including Znet
commentaries. I'd like to make a few general
observations, keeping to facts that are not
seriously contested.
There are two fundamental issues: (1) What
are the accepted and applicable "rules of
world order"? (2) How do these or other considerations
apply in the case of Kosovo?
(1) What are the accepted and applicable "rules of world order"?
There is a regime of international law and
international order, binding on all states,
based on the UN Charter and subsequent resolutions
and World Court decisions. In
brief, the threat or use of force is banned
unless explicitly authorized by the Security
Council after it has determined that peaceful
means have failed, or in self-defense
against "armed attack" (a narrow concept)
until the Security Council acts.
There is, of course, more to say. Thus there
is at least a tension, if not an outright
contradiction, between the rules of world
order laid down in the UN Charter and the
rights articulated in the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights (UD), a second pillar of
the world order established under US initiative
after World War II. The Charter bans
force violating state sovereignty; the UD
guarantees the rights of individuals against
oppressive states. The issue of "humanitarian
intervention" arises from this tension. It is
the right of "humanitarian intervention" that
is claimed by the US/NATO in Kosovo,
and that is generally supported by editorial
opinion and news reports (in the latter case,
reflexively, even by the very choice of terminology).
The question is addressed in a news report
in the NY Times (March 27), headlined
"Legal Scholars Support Case for Using Force"
in Kosovo (March 27). One example
is offered: Allen Gerson, former counsel to
the US mission to the UN. Two other legal
scholars are cited. One, Ted Galen Carpenter,
"scoffed at the Administration argument"
and dismissed the alleged right of intervention.
The third is Jack Goldsmith, a specialist
on international law at Chicago Law school.
He says that critics of the NATO bombing
"have a pretty good legal argument," but "many
people think [an exception for
humanitarian intervention] does exist as a
matter of custom and practice." That
summarizes the evidence offered to justify
the favored conclusion stated in the headline.
Goldsmith's observation is reasonable, at least
if we agree that facts are relevant to the
determination of "custom and practice." We
may also bear in mind a truism: the right of
humanitarian intervention, if it exists, is
premised on the "good faith" of those
intervening, and that assumption is based
not on their rhetoric but on their record, in
particular their record of adherence to the
principles of international law, World Court
decisions, and so on. That is indeed a truism,
at least with regard to others. Consider,
for example, Iranian offers to intervene in
Bosnia to prevent massacres at a time when
the West would not do so. These were dismissed
with ridicule (in fact, ignored); if there
was a reason beyond subordination to power,
it was because Iranian "good faith" could
not be assumed. A rational person then asks
obvious questions: is the Iranian record of
intervention and terror worse than that of
the US? And other questions, for example:
How should we assess the "good faith" of the
only country to have vetoed a Security
Council resolution calling on all states to
obey international law? What about its
historical record? Unless such questions are
prominent on the agenda of discourse, an
honest person will dismiss it as mere allegiance
to doctrine. A useful exercise is to
determine how much of the literature -- media
or other -- survives such elementary
conditions as these.
(2) How do these or other considerations apply
in the case of
Kosovo?
There has been a humanitarian catastrophe in
Kosovo in the past year, overwhelmingly
attributable to Yugoslav military forces.
The main victims have been ethnic Albanian
Kosovars, some 90% of the population of this
Yugoslav territory. The standard
estimate is 2000 deaths and hundreds of thousands
of refugees.
In such cases, outsiders have three choices:
(I) try to escalate the catastrophe
(II) do nothing
(III) try to mitigate the catastrophe
The choices are illustrated by other contemporary
cases. Let's keep to a few of
approximately the same scale, and ask where
Kosovo fits into the pattern.
(A) Colombia. In Colombia, according to State
Department estimates, the annual level
of political killing by the government and
its paramilitary associates is about at the level
of Kosovo, and refugee flight primarily from
their atrocities is well over a million.
Colombia has been the leading Western hemisphere
recipient of US arms and training
as violence increased through the '90s, and
that assistance is now increasing, under a
"drug war" pretext dismissed by almost all
serious observers. The Clinton
administration was particularly enthusiastic
in its praise for President Gaviria, whose
tenure in office was responsible for "appalling
levels of violence," according to human
rights organizations, even surpassing his
predecessors. Details are readily available.
In this case, the US reaction is (I): escalate the atrocities.
(B) Turkey. By very conservative estimate,
Turkish repression of Kurds in the '90s falls
in the category of Kosovo. It peaked in the
early '90s; one index is the flight of over a
million Kurds from the countryside to the
unofficial Kurdish capital Diyarbakir from
1990 to 1994, as the Turkish army was devastating
the countryside. 1994 marked two
records: it was "the year of the worst repression
in the Kurdish provinces" of Turkey,
Jonathan Randal reported from the scene, and
the year when Turkey became "the
biggest single importer of American military
hardware and thus the world's largest arms
purchaser." When human rights groups exposed
Turkey's use of US jets to bomb
villages, the Clinton Administration found
ways to evade laws requiring suspension of
arms deliveries, much as it was doing in Indonesia
and elsewhere.
Colombia and Turkey explain their (US-supported)
atrocities on grounds that they are
defending their countries from the threat
of terrorist guerrillas. As does the government
of Yugoslavia.
Again, the example illustrates (I): try to escalate the atrocities.
(C) Laos. Every year thousands of people, mostly
children and poor farmers, are killed
in the Plain of Jars in Northern Laos, the
scene of the heaviest bombing of civilian
targets in history it appears, and arguably
the most cruel: Washington's furious assault
on a poor peasant society had little to do
with its wars in the region. The worst period
was from 1968, when Washington was compelled
to undertake negotiations (under
popular and business pressure), ending the
regular bombardment of North Vietnam.
Kissinger-Nixon then decided to shift the
planes to bombardment of Laos and
Cambodia.
The deaths are from "bombies," tiny anti-personnel
weapons, far worse than
land-mines: they are designed specifically
to kill and maim, and have no effect on
trucks, buildings, etc. The Plain was saturated
with hundreds of millions of these
criminal devices, which have a failure-to-explode
rate of 20%-30% according to the
manufacturer, Honeywell. The numbers suggest
either remarkably poor quality control
or a rational policy of murdering civilians
by delayed action. These were only a fraction
of the technology deployed, including advanced
missiles to penetrate caves where
families sought shelter. Current annual casualties
from "bombies" are estimated from
hundreds a year to "an annual nationwide casualty
rate of 20,000," more than half of
them deaths, according to the veteran Asia
reporter Barry Wain of the Wall Street
Journal -- in its Asia edition. A conservative
estimate, then, is that the crisis this year is
approximately comparable to Kosovo, though
deaths are far more highly concentrated
among children -- over half, according to
analyses reported by the Mennonite Central
Committee, which has been working there since
1977 to alleviate the continuing
atrocities.
There have been efforts to publicize and deal
with the humanitarian catastrophe. A
British-based Mine Advisory Group (MAG) is
trying to remove the lethal objects, but
the US is "conspicuously missing from the
handful of Western organisations that have
followed MAG," the British press reports,
though it has finally agreed to train some
Laotian civilians. The British press also
reports, with some anger, the allegation of
MAG specialists that the US refuses to provide
them with "render harmless
procedures" that would make their work "a
lot quicker and a lot safer." These remain a
state secret, as does the whole affair in
the United States. The Bangkok press reports a
very similar situation in Cambodia, particularly
the Eastern region where US
bombardment from early 1969 was most intense.
In this case, the US reaction is (II): do nothing.
And the reaction of the media and
commentators is to keep silent, following
the norms under which the war against Laos
was designated a "secret war" -- meaning well-known,
but suppressed, as also in the
case of Cambodia from March 1969. The level
of self-censorship was extraordinary
then, as is the current phase. The relevance
of this shocking example should be obvious
without further comment.
I will skip other examples of (I) and (II),
which abound, and also much more serious
contemporary atrocities, such as the huge
slaughter of Iraqi civilians by means of a
particularly vicious form of biological warfare
-- "a very hard choice," Madeleine
Albright commented on national TV in 1996
when asked for her reaction to the killing
of half a million Iraqi children in 5 years,
but "we think the price is worth it." Current
estimates remain about 5000 children killed
a month, and the price is still "worth it."
These and other examples might also be kept
in mind when we read awed rhetoric
about how the "moral compass" of the Clinton
Administration is at last functioning
properly, as the Kosovo example illustrates.
Just what does the example illustrate? The
threat of NATO bombing, predictably, led
to a sharp escalation of atrocities by the
Serbian Army and paramilitaries, and to the
departure of international observers, which
of course had the same effect. Commanding
General Wesley Clark declared that it was
"entirely predictable" that Serbian terror and
violence would intensify after the NATO bombing,
exactly as happened. The terror for
the first time reached the capital city of
Pristina, and there are credible reports of
large-scale destruction of villages, assassinations,
generation of an enormous refugee
flow, perhaps an effort to expel a good part
of the Albanian population -- all an
"entirely predictable" consequence of the
threat and then the use of force, as General
Clark rightly observes.
Kosovo is therefore another illustration of
(I): try to escalate the violence, with exactly
that expectation.
To find examples illustrating (III) is all
too easy, at least if we keep to official rhetoric.
The major recent academic study of "humanitarian
intervention," by Sean Murphy,
reviews the record after the Kellogg-Briand
pact of 1928 which outlawed war, and
then since the UN Charter, which strengthened
and articulated these provisions. In the
first phase, he writes, the most prominent
examples of "humanitarian intervention" were
Japan's attack on Manchuria, Mussolini's invasion
of Ethiopia, and Hitler's occupation
of parts of Czechoslovakia. All were accompanied
by highly uplifting humanitarian
rhetoric, and factual justifications as well.
Japan was going to establish an "earthly
paradise" as it defended Manchurians from
"Chinese bandits," with the support of a
leading Chinese nationalist, a far more credible
figure than anyone the US was able to
conjure up during its attack on South Vietnam.
Mussolini was liberating thousands of
slaves as he carried forth the Western "civilizing
mission." Hitler announced Germany's
intention to end ethnic tensions and violence,
and "safeguard the national individuality of
the German and Czech peoples," in an operation
"filled with earnest desire to serve the
true interests of the peoples dwelling in
the area," in accordance with their will; the
Slovakian President asked Hitler to declare
Slovakia a protectorate.
Another useful intellectual exercise is to
compare those obscene justifications with those
offered for interventions, including "humanitarian
interventions," in the post-UN Charter
period.
In that period, perhaps the most compelling
example of (III) is the Vietnamese invasion
of Cambodia in December 1978, terminating
Pol Pot's atrocities, which were then
peaking. Vietnam pleaded the right of self-defense
against armed attack, one of the few
post-Charter examples when the plea is plausible:
the Khmer Rouge regime
(Democratic Kampuchea, DK) was carrying out
murderous attacks against Vietnam in
border areas. The US reaction is instructive.
The press condemned the "Prussians" of
Asia for their outrageous violation of international
law. They were harshly punished for
the crime of having terminated Pol Pot's slaughters,
first by a (US-backed) Chinese
invasion, then by US imposition of extremely
harsh sanctions. The US recognized the
expelled DK as the official government of
Cambodia, because of its "continuity" with
the Pol Pot regime, the State Department explained.
Not too subtly, the US supported
the Khmer Rouge in its continuing attacks
in Cambodia.
The example tells us more about the "custom
and practice" that underlies "the emerging
legal norms of humanitarian intervention."
Despite the desperate efforts of ideologues
to prove that circles are square, there is no
serious doubt that the NATO bombings further
undermine what remains of the fragile
structure of international law. The US made
that entirely clear in the discussions leading
to the NATO decision. Apart from the UK (by
now, about as much of an independent
actor as the Ukraine was in the pre-Gorbachev
years), NATO countries were
skeptical of US policy, and were particularly
annoyed by Secretary of State Albright's
"saber-rattling" (Kevin Cullen, Boston Globe,
Feb. 22). Today, the more closely one
approaches the conflicted region, the greater
the opposition to Washington's insistence
on force, even within NATO (Greece and Italy).
France had called for a UN Security
Council resolution to authorize deployment
of NATO peacekeepers. The US flatly
refused, insisting on "its stand that NATO
should be able to act independently of the
United Nations," State Department officials
explained. The US refused to permit the
"neuralgic word `authorize'" to appear in
the final NATO statement, unwilling to
concede any authority to the UN Charter and
international law; only the word
"endorse" was permitted (Jane Perlez, NYT,
Feb. 11). Similarly the bombing of Iraq
was a brazen expression of contempt for the
UN, even the specific timing, and was so
understood. And of course the same is true
of the destruction of half the pharmaceutical
production of a small African country a few
months earlier, an event that also does not
indicate that the "moral compass" is straying
from righteousness -- not to speak of a
record that would be prominently reviewed
right now if facts were considered relevant
to determining "custom and practice."
It could be argued, rather plausibly, that
further demolition of the rules of world order is
irrelevant, just as it had lost its meaning
by the late 1930s. The contempt of the world's
leading power for the framework of world order
has become so extreme that there is
nothing left to discuss. A review of the internal
documentary record demonstrates that
the stance traces back to the earliest days,
even to the first memorandum of the
newly-formed National Security Council in
1947. During the Kennedy years, the
stance began to gain overt expression. The
main innovation of the Reagan-Clinton
years is that defiance of international law
and the Charter has become entirely open. It
has also been backed with interesting explanations,
which would be on the front pages,
and prominent in the school and university
curriculum, if truth and honesty were
considered significant values. The highest
authorities explained with brutal clarity that
the World Court, the UN, and other agencies
had become irrelevant because they no
longer follow US orders, as they did in the
early postwar years.
One might then adopt the official position.
That would be an honest stand, at least if it
were accompanied by refusal to play the cynical
game of self-righteous posturing and
wielding of the despised principles of international
law as a highly selective weapon
against shifting enemies.
While the Reaganites broke new ground, under
Clinton the defiance of world order has
become so extreme as to be of concern even
to hawkish policy analysts. In the current
issue of the leading establishment journal,
Foreign Affairs, Samuel Huntington warns
that Washington is treading a dangerous course.
In the eyes of much of the world --
probably most of the world, he suggests --
the US is "becoming the rogue
superpower," considered "the single greatest
external threat to their societies." Realist
"international relations theory," he argues,
predicts that coalitions may arise to
counterbalance the rogue superpower. On pragmatic
grounds, then, the stance should
be reconsidered. Americans who prefer a different
image of their society might call for
a reconsideration on other than pragmatic
grounds.
Where does that leave the question of what
to do in Kosovo? It leaves it unanswered.
The US has chosen a course of action which,
as it explicitly recognizes, escalates
atrocities and violence -- "predictably";
a course of action that also strikes yet another
blow against the regime of international order,
which does offer the weak at least some
limited protection from predatory states.
As for the longer term, consequences are
unpredictable. One plausible observation is
that "every bomb that falls on Serbia and
every ethnic killing in Kosovo suggests that
it will scarcely be possible for Serbs and
Albanians to live beside each other in some
sort of peace" (Financial Times, March
27). Some of the longer-term possible outcomes
are extremely ugly, as has not gone
without notice.
A standard argument is that we had to do something:
we could not simply stand by as
atrocities continue. That is never true. One
choice, always, is to follow the Hippocratic
principle: "First, do no harm." If you can
think of no way to adhere to that elementary
principle, then do nothing. There are always
ways that can be considered. Diplomacy
and negotiations are never at an end.
The right of "humanitarian intervention" is
likely to be more frequently invoked in
coming years -- maybe with justification,
maybe not -- now that Cold War pretexts
have lost their efficacy. In such an era,
it may be worthwhile to pay attention to the
views of highly respected commentators --
not to speak of the World Court, which
explicitly ruled on this matter in a decision
rejected by the United States, its essentials
not even reported.
In the scholarly disciplines of international
affairs and international law it would be hard
to find more respected voices than Hedley
Bull or Louis Henkin. Bull warned 15 years
ago that "Particular states or groups of states
that set themselves up as the authoritative
judges of the world common good, in disregard
of the views of others, are in fact a
menace to international order, and thus to
effective action in this field." Henkin, in a
standard work on world order, writes that
the "pressures eroding the prohibition on the
use of force are deplorable, and the arguments
to legitimize the use of force in those
circumstances are unpersuasive and dangerous...
Violations of human rights are indeed
all too common, and if it were permissible
to remedy them by external use of force,
there would be no law to forbid the use of
force by almost any state against almost any
other. Human rights, I believe, will have
to be vindicated, and other injustices remedied,
by other, peaceful means, not by opening the
door to aggression and destroying the
principle advance in international law, the
outlawing of war and the prohibition of
force."
Recognized principles of international law
and world order, solemn treaty obligations,
decisions by the World Court, considered pronouncements
by the most respected
commentators -- these do not automatically
solve particular problems. Each issue has
to be considered on its merits. For those
who do not adopt the standards of Saddam
Hussein, there is a heavy burden of proof
to meet in undertaking the threat or use of
force in violation of the principles of international
order. Perhaps the burden can be
met, but that has to be shown, not merely
proclaimed with passionate rhetoric. The
consequences of such violations have to be
assessed carefully -- in particular, what we
understand to be "predictable." And for those
who are minimally serious, the reasons
for the actions also have to be assessed --
again, not simply by adulation of our leaders
and their "moral compass." _