GLOBAL DIALOGUE Volume 7 ● Number 1–2 ● Winter/Spring 2005—Humanitarian Intervention

Institutionalising Impermanence: Kosovo and the Limits of Intervention

AIDAN HEHIR

Aidan Hehir lectures in politics at the University of Limerick.

UNMIK is in a funk … After five years on the ground, progress towards UNMIK’s objectives remains elusive and the mission seems to be nearing the point of overstaying its welcome. There are obstacles on all fronts, and the outlook for the medium term is worse.

—Leaked UN report on the situation in Kosovo, August 2004¹

ive years have passed since NATO’s ostensibly humanitarian intervention, yet Kosovo remains a divided and violent society. The moralistic rhetoric that accompanied “Operation Allied Force” proclaimed that NATO was forging a new era in which systematic violations of human rights would not be tolerated. It was, according to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, “a war fought for the values of civilisation”. However, the events of the last five years in Kosovo, if not the wider world, illustrate a pronounced disparity between Western promises and Western action. The riots in the divided town of Mitrovica in March 2004 show that the Kosovo intervention has failed utterly in its immediate aim. But the template established in Kosovo facilitated the escalation of Western hegemonic aggression in the post–Cold War world, as indicated by the ongoing United States–led occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.

The issue of post-intervention Kosovo had been off the international political agenda for nearly five years before the illusion of peace was finally shattered. On 17 and 18 March 2004, nineteen people were killed and some nine hundred wounded when thousands of ethnic Albanians rioted throughout Kosovo. More than five hundred Serb and minority homes were burnt, along with twenty-seven Orthodox churches and monasteries. Touring the area in the aftermath of the carnage, Harri Holkeri, then head of the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), solemnly declared, “The concept of multiethnic Kosovo that the international community has been persistently attempting to implement in recent years is no longer tenable.”² In other words, the incompatible ethnic identities in Kosovo had triumphed over the West’s earnest efforts to instil a culture of multiethnicity. In reality, the international community, in the guise of NATO, initially accentuated the ethnic fissure in Kosovo through its intervention in 1999, and the record of the United Nations since the cessation of Operation Allied Force has been marked by a tolerance of low-level ethnic oppression rather than by any genuine attempts to reconcile the communities.

‘Ancient Ethnic Hatreds’

Western diplomatic efforts in the Balkans throughout the 1990s were consistently predicated on the alleged existence in the region of ineradicable ethnic hatreds. The periodic failure of Western diplomatic initiatives was blamed on the locals’ inability to distance themselves from their primitive ethnic identities and genetic predilection for violence. In assessing the violence in the Balkans, US strategist George Kennan stated that “deeper traits of character inherited, presumably, from a distant tribal past … seem to be decisive as a determinant of the troublesome, baffling and dangerous situation that marks that part of the world”.³ If the region were ever to become civilised, the argument went, order would have to be forcibly imposed from outside. This contemporary variant of the white man’s burden has imbued with a sense of cultural and political superiority the myriad Western “internationals” who wield enormous power throughout the Balkans. It is, therefore, not surprising that Harri Holkeri could survey the wreckage of the March 2004 riots without seeing any correlation between the violence and Western (in)action.

Throughout the 1990s, the West accepted Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic’s appraisal of the situation in Kosovo by consistently describing it as an “internal matter” for Yugoslavia. The lack of any provision relating to Kosovo in the 1995 Dayton Accords on the Bosnian conflict inflamed the Kosovo Albanian community, which had established a parallel political system in the province following the constitutional changes in 1989 revoking Kosovo’s autonomous status within Yugoslavia. The pacific path to separatism advocated by the LDK, the largest party in Kosovo, soon lost credibility among ethnic Albanians as the West continued to ignore their plight. By 1998, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) had begun to gain wide support, and its increased terrorist activities precipitated an escalating cycle of violence between itself and the Yugoslav security forces. The violence reached a peak in the summer of 1998, when the situation could no longer be ignored. By the time Western actors became involved, both Kosovo communities—Albanian and Serb—had become polarised and implacable in their absolutist approach to the conflict. As the Independent International Commission on Kosovo (IICK) noted, “the failure to respond adequately at an early stage of the evolution of the conflict created difficulties in later stages. At each stage of the conflict, the diplomatic options narrowed.”⁴

The diplomatic approach taken by the West was exclusionary and unnecessarily confrontational. The Western, and specifically US, dominance of the attempts made to resolve the conflict effectively sidelined the United Nations, Russia, and regional actors. The United Nations was in severe financial difficulties, largely because of the non-payment of fees by its member countries, especially the United States. As noted by IICK, owing to “the dwindling enthusiasm of key member state contributors for peacekeeping operations”, the United Nations “lacked both the resources and the political will to take on a primary monitoring role. The work … was instead taken on by a range of regional organisations inherently lacking in coherence”.⁵

The resolution of the situation essentially became the sole preserve of the United States and its closest allies. The six-nation “Contact Group” on Kosovo provided a veneer of international co-operation, but the opinion of Russia was rarely heeded, and other members of the group—Germany, France, Italy and the United Kingdom—played a secondary role to the United States. In particular, the rigid diplomatic approach pursued by US Secretary of State Madeline Albright and US envoy Richard Holbrooke militated against success, and while it can never be proven, greater appreciation of the root causes of the conflict, the status of Kosovo in Serbian culture, and the political climate within Yugoslavia, might have resulted in a peaceful resolution of the dispute. The development of such appreciation would surely have been more likely had the United Nations, Russia, and other regional states been given a greater role in the diplomatic initiatives in 1998 and 1999.

Rambouillet

The immediate catalyst for the recourse to war was the failure to reach agreement in talks at the French town of Rambouillet, and later at Paris, in February and March 1999. The negotiations conducted at Rambouillet constituted a determined attempt by the Contact Group, dominated by the United States, to impose an extensive political settlement on the disputants, with very little real consultation with either side. The non-negotiable nature of the proposed settlement and the lack of direct contact between the Serbs and the Kosovo Albanians were at variance with what were supposed to be negotiations between two warring groups. Failure to accede to US pressure was perceived as demonstrating a predilection for war or an intellectual inability to grasp the benefits of the deal, as opposed to a genuine, measured opposition to the terms of the proposed agreement.

There is evidence that the US strategy at Rambouillet was designed to ensure that the Kosovo Albanian delegation signed the proposal, rather than to accommodate both sides’ perspectives. The immense pressure brought to bear on the Kosovo Albanians eventually brought their consent, but the minimal overtures made to the Yugoslav government delegation, specifically in relation to the military provisions granted to NATO under Appendix B of the plan produced by Albright, suggest that recourse to war on the basis of a Yugoslav refusal was not considered the worst available option. Appendix B would have given NATO forces complete freedom of movement throughout the whole of Yugoslavia, without any payment of fees or tolls, and with no liability to arrest or detention by the Yugoslav authorities. Appendix B constituted a clear and gross violation of Yugoslavia’s sovereignty, and unsurprisingly was rejected by the Yugoslav delegation.

The insistence that a NATO force should be deployed in Kosovo appears particularly unreasonable and unnecessary. Letters submitted by the Yugoslav delegation at Rambouillet stated that Yugoslavia agreed to discuss the scope and character of any international presence in Kosovo. Thus, the idea of an international presence was not in itself objectionable to the Yugoslavs; it was the proposed nature of this force that proved intolerable. The compromise on the competencies of the NATO-led Kosovo Force (KFOR) agreed in the Military Technical Agreement that eventually concluded hostilities—specifically, the removal of the provisions contained in Appendix B—suggests that had such a deal been offered at Rambouillet the Yugoslavs might have agreed to it.

Speaking on US television’s “Charlie Rose Show” in April 2000, Madeline Albright’s personal secretary James Rubin admitted, “Our internal goal was not to get a peace agreement at Rambouillet.” He later added that Washington’s “first priority was to unite the Europeans behind air strikes by clearly defining the aggressor and the victim”.⁶ Though the US desire at Rambouillet seems to have been either to facilitate the initiation of air strikes or to impose a hugely restrictive settlement on Yugoslavia, this was born out of a mistaken, and implacable, belief in the necessity of armed intervention, rather than a gratuitous desire to use force. The United States’ lack of flexibility and its blinkered assessment of how to resolve the crisis combined to make agreement impossible, and it must be assumed that more genuinely inclusive and non-partisan diplomatic initiatives would have been unlikely to tolerate such a strategy. The terms of the Military Technical Agreement which finally brought an end to the NATO air strikes omitted a number of the more contentious details of the original deal offered at Rambouillet, and this suggests that the Yugoslavs might have accepted a compromise draft agreement had it been offered to them. As one observer asks, “Should Kosovo … be a model for future negotiations with brutal regimes? If so, why were the terms presented to Serbia at Rambouillet more onerous than those offered after a 78-day bombing campaign?”⁷

Ethnic Cleansing

The enduring images of the campaign in Kosovo are those of thousands of ethnic Albanian refugees fleeing the province. With NATO warplanes flying at fifteen thousand feet to ensure they sustained zero casualties, sections of the Yugoslav security forces were unimpeded in their efforts to uproot the Kosovo Albanian population. In a meeting on 6 March 1999, Albright had asked NATO commander, General Wesley Clark, “If we commence the strikes will the Serbs attack the population?” He replied, “Almost certainly.”⁸ Thus, as Lazar Nikolić notes, “The result [of the NATO bombing] was hardly unpredictable and was in fact predicted by military and CIA analysts, but these predictions were ignored.”⁹

Despite numerous warnings and the predictions of senior military figures, no preparations were made for the refugee crisis that erupted. In fact, Clark later noted, “one of the most obvious features of the conflict was the West’s lack of preparedness when the conflict actually began.”¹⁰ This lack of preparedness was severely criticised by human rights organisations, and particularly by the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, which bore the brunt of the refugee exodus. Prime Minister Ljupco Georgijevski observed sardonically, “The people in Brussels started this war and left for Easter holidays.”¹¹

One week after the air strikes began three hundred thousand refugees, primarily ethnic Albanians, had left for neighbouring countries. After the war, US House Intelligence Committee Chair Porter Goss stated, “Our intelligence community warned us months and days before [the air strikes] that we would have a virtual explosion of refugees over the 250,000 that was expected as of last year.”¹² Despite this, NATO did not alert the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to its intelligence predictions. In its post-war report, UNHCR noted that prior to Operation Allied Force, NATO governments had in fact been urging the organisation to prepare for the implementation of the Rambouillet accords. The report further declared, “UNHCR received no advance warning from any government or other source.”¹³

The removal of Yugoslav forces from Kosovo precipitated a round of counter ethnic cleansing and murder that prompted Carla del Ponte, chief prosecutor with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, to declare, “What is currently happening is as serious as what happened there before.”¹⁴ According to a November 2003 report by the Serbian Ministry of Internal Affairs, based on data from the tribunal, the Red Cross, and the United Nations, 1,192 Serbs and 593 other nationals had been murdered in Kosovo by then since the deployment of 21,000 NATO peacekeepers in June 1999. UNMIK disputed these figures, claiming that the total number of deaths was only 250—almost certainly an underestimate. Up to 200,000 Serbs and 67,000 Slavic Muslims are believed to have fled Kosovo, while a further 790 people remain unaccounted for. The number of non-Albanian refugees who have returned to Kosovo is, according to a 30 October 2003 UN Security Council press release, “a small fraction of the number of Kosovo Serbs internally displaced in Serbia and Montenegro”. A 2003 Amnesty International report outlined the appalling conditions endured by non-Albanians: “Serbs and other ethnic minorities in Kosovo remain at serious risk of death or injury … beatings, stabbings, abductions, drive-by shootings and the use of hand grenades to intimidate and kill members of these minorities are common in the province.”¹⁵ Yet the reality of the situation on the ground in Kosovo was eclipsed by the build-up to and launch of the US-led invasion of Iraq, and the simmering discontent and escalating ethnic disharmony in the province were largely ignored.

Mitrovica: 17 March 2004

Kosovo’s Ombudsman, Marek Antoni Nowicki, reported to the Council of Europe in February 2004 that human rights observance in Kosovo was far from meeting “the minimum of international standards”. He warned that it was the intent of certain sections of the Albanian community to “cleanse this land from the presence of all Serbs”. His words proved prophetic the next month when ethnic Albanians ran riot in northern Kosovo. The spark for the violence was the allegation that Serbs had chased three Albanian children to their deaths with wild dogs. This later proved untrue, with NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer and others stating that the violence had been orchestrated well in advance by elements within the Albanian community.

In July 2004, Human Rights Watch accused KFOR and UNMIK of failing “catastrophically” to protect minority communities during the March violence. The report details KFOR’s shameful inertia in the face of the bloodshed, castigating the French, German and Italian contingents in particular: “In numerous cases, minorities under attack were left entirely unprotected and at the mercy of the rioters.”¹⁶ In perhaps the most damning indictment of the post-intervention administration of Kosovo, the report accuses the international community of appearing to be in “absolute denial about its own failures” in the province:

While international actors have been universally—and accurately—critical of the failures of the Kosovo Albanian leadership during and after the crisis, the dismal performance of the international community has escaped similar critical scrutiny. Instead, the leadership of KFOR and UNMIK seem happy to continue with “business as usual,” rather than putting in place the reforms needed to prevent a recurrence of mass violence—and a renewed collapse of the security institutions in the future.¹⁷

The violence demonstrated the extent of UNMIK’s shortcomings and the glaring gap between the West’s promises during and immediately after Operation Allied Force, and its failure to resolve the final status of Kosovo and create conditions for lasting ethnic harmony.

The fortunes of the Albanian community have improved since 1999, yet under the aegis of the United Nations and NATO one unrepresentative political administration has replaced another. The Kosovo Albanians’ lack of political power persists. According to Aldo Blumi, executive director of the Albanian Institute for International Studies, “What has changed in Kosovo since June 1999 is the nature of rule not the discursive relationship between power and subjects.”¹⁸ Following the March riots, Arsim Bajrami, leader of the Democratic Party of Kosovo in the Kosovo Parliament, noted bluntly, “We are dissatisfied with how UNMIK operates.”¹⁹

As new concerns came to dominate the international agenda, the final status of Kosovo stagnated, without any diminution of the mutually exclusive Serb and Albanian claims on the province. In December 2003, UNMIK stipulated that no examination of Kosovo’s final status would take place until certain political and humanitarian standards were reached, suggesting 2006 as the earliest likely date. UNMIK thus looks likely to emulate the UN administration in Bosnia, which has now run eight years over its original remit with similarly few signs of a resolution of underlying problems in the area. UNMIK’s lack of a clear exit strategy and the central paradox of refusing to endorse Kosovo Albanian independence while negating Serbia’s influence have meant that since Operation Allied Force, UNMIK has become isolated from both communities. Ethnic Albanian calls for self-determination have become increasingly militant in the face of UN prevarication on Kosovo’s final status.

The frustration felt by the ethnic Albanians is understandable. Having initially welcomed NATO and the United Nations as emancipators, they have begun to realise that their faith in the West was misplaced. As David Chandler remarks, “The ethnic Albanians are discovering that removing Belgrade appointees from positions of influence … is not necessarily a step towards greater autonomy or self-rule.”²⁰ UN Security Council resolution 1244, drafted to consolidate the post-war situation, reaffirmed “the commitment of all member states to the sovereign and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia”. This explicit recognition of Belgrade’s authority over Kosovo is anathema to the Albanian community, and prompts observations such as the following by Professor Michael Mandelbaum of Johns Hopkins University: “The [NATO] alliance had therefore intervened in a civil war and defeated one side, but embraced the position of the party it had defeated on the issue over which the war had been fought.”²¹ UNMIK has been unable to overcome this inherent paradox in the international community’s stance on Kosovo’s status. In March 2004, Faton Klinaku, leader of the “war associations”, three interconnected organisations representing KLA war veterans, described UNMIK as “neo-colonialist” and accused it of “carrying out the same politics applied by Serbia”.²² A subsequent headline in the Kosovo Albanian newspaper Epoka e Re ominously warned, “UNMIK beware, KLA will burn you down”.

Externally Imposed Solutions

As in Bosnia and Northern Ireland, the political solution imposed by external actors in Kosovo was based on those contrived nationalist fissures that created the initial tension. UNMIK has institutionalised the ethnic divisions that emerged in the province, and while in the short term this is conducive to the reduction of tension, the underlying breach between ethnic groups will eventually impact on the functioning of the political system.

In Northern Ireland, the division between Unionists and Nationalists persists, and no cross-cultural political movement has achieved electoral success since the Belfast Agreement came into effect in 1998. In fact, support has moved from the moderate parties in both communities towards the hardliners. The imposition of ethnic classification in the Bosnian political system, as defined under the terms of Dayton, has all but destroyed the intercultural climate that existed in Bosnia prior to the conflagration that erupted in the 1990s. The international community has mistakenly perceived ethnic disharmony in these regions as a product of local prejudices and accepted it as a permanent fixture. This perspective fails to appreciate the divisive influence of external actors in provoking the disintegration of intercommunity relations. The imposition, therefore, of political provisions based on these false fissures and contrived differences is inherently flawed. Yet such provisions are widely institutionalised.

The newly imposed political systems in Bosnia and Kosovo depend extensively on external administration. This dependence has hindered the development of an indigenous civil society essential to the functioning of any democracy. Institutional paralysis in Kosovo has been accompanied by an accentuation of the original societal divide. Aldo Blumi comments that

The world should be appalled at the UN’s adoption of ethnic categories to parcel out a number of operational domains for Kosovo’s population. Unless reversed, any future interaction between Kosovars will be permanently based on criteria beyond their control, giving self-asserted nationalists veto over any policy inside Kosovo.²³

The political dependence on external actors is replicated in Kosovo’s economy, which is highly reliant on international support. According to UNMIK economist Iain King, what growth there has been in Kosovo since Operation Allied Force has been almost wholly the result of external assistance, based largely on loans and aid packages. Yet despite the influx of EU and US loans, unemployment stands at 57 per cent, and this has added to the disillusionment and discontent within Kosovo. Imports outnumber exports by ten to one and as King notes, “Much of the new wealth earned in Kosovo is being used to create jobs elsewhere.”²⁴ External actors determine the functioning of Kosovo’s economy and political system, and this has seen a similar growth of the dependency culture identified in Bosnia since Dayton. The resources exhausted during the military intervention dwarf those allocated to the post-conflict administration. UNMIK’s annual budget is less than the cost of one day’s bombing. An international donors’ conference organised in 2001 to help rebuild Kosovo’s crippled infrastructure succeeded in raising $1.3 billion, approximately 4 per cent of the estimated cost of the war to the Yugoslav economy.²⁵

Learning from Kosovo

The intervention in Kosovo indicates that military victory is less important to future stability than a coherent post-conflict administration, yet the crises in Afghanistan and Iraq show that this lesson has not been learned. Far from creating an atmosphere in which a viable political solution to the Kosovo conflict might be found, the international community forced the province into an arrangement that is impossible to sustain over the long term precisely because it does not adequately address the underlying issues. By siding with the Albanian community and intervening on its behalf, to the extent of co-operating with the KLA, whose expressed aim is an ethnically pure Kosovo, the international community accentuated the divisions there, hardening Serbian hearts to the Albanians’ cause and imbuing the Albanians with a sense of righteous infallibility. UNMIK’s efforts have not resolved the situation to either side’s satisfaction and will continue to prove futile unless the oppression of the minority population is stopped and a coherent plan for Kosovo’s final status, based on regional perspectives and enshrining local ownership over political power, is implemented. The United Nations’ centrality in the Kosovo debacle suggests that those who argue for a UN administration in Iraq as a means towards reconstructing the country may be overestimating the organisation’s capabilities.

Operation Allied Force, supported by the vast majority of Western states, seemed to establish that military action without a UN mandate was acceptable. However, the “international consensus” in favour of the Kosovo intervention was conspicuously Western in nature. The fact that immediately after the intervention the 133 states constituting the G77 group of developing countries twice adopted declarations unequivocally condemning any unilateral humanitarian intervention has been largely ignored in the West. The emerging consensus in the West among statesmen, academics and lawyers that unilateral intervention is today permissible is a blinkered assessment of the status of such intervention internationally. As two distinguished legal scholars observe, “The novel conception of international law that is being constructed and reinforced by a limited number of groups of Anglo-American international lawyers is possible only by ignoring the wider circle of states and international lawyers around the world.”²⁶ The norm of non-intervention and the primacy of sovereign equality are still cherished by the vast majority of states, which see in the new Western dispensation not a growing awareness of human rights, but a regression to the selective adherence to sovereignty of the pre–UN Charter world. The pleading of moral justifications for the US-led invasion of Iraq has confirmed the fears of those states that saw the Kosovo intervention as a threatening development.

NATO’s recourse to military action over Kosovo was both avoidable and unhelpful. The dispute between the Kosovo Albanians and the Yugoslav state could have been addressed at an earlier stage when both sides were less implacable and were unscarred by internecine violence. The failure to prevent the escalation of the conflict must be recognised as the responsibility of the international community as a whole, but those Western states which bargained away Kosovo at Dayton in 1995 in order to achieve peace in Bosnia must take the brunt of the blame.

There is also strong evidence to suggest that diplomacy might have worked had it been conducted in a less exclusionary, confrontational and unyielding fashion. The United States’ dominance of the negotiations points to the need for multilateral approaches to conflict resolution lest sectional agendas and biases corrupt the process.

The supposedly humanitarian motives behind the Kosovo intervention were belied by the methods NATO chose in pursuit of military victory. Efforts to minimise civilian casualties and prepare for the predicted refugee exodus were minimal. As Michael Ignatieff notes, “The leaders of NATO talked the language of ultimate commitment and practised the warfare of minimal risk.”²⁷ The intervention has done little to resolve the underlying tension in Kosovo and has exacerbated the polarisation of its two major communities. The pronounced failings of both UNMIK and KFOR have engendered hostility among Serbs and Albanians alike towards the international community, a hostility that will surely hinder future negotiations.

Far from acclaiming NATO’s ostensibly humanitarian intervention in 1999, the international community should decry the moral duplicity, violence and political inertia that have characterised the record of the United Nations and NATO during the past five years in Kosovo. The combination of empty rhetoric, administrative impotence and UN-aided entrenchment of aggressive ethnic identifications bodes ill for the future stability of “the powder keg of Europe” and illustrates the limits of the West’s “nation-building” capabilities. The adverse consequences of the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq have been more immediately obvious, but those of the campaign in Kosovo, and the subsequent mishandling of the post-war situation, are becoming increasingly apparent.

Endnotes

1. Quoted in Christian Jennings, “NATO Peacekeepers Unable to Keep a Lid on Violence in Kosovo”, Scotsman (Edinburgh), 2 September 2004.

2. “Holkeri: Previous Concept of Multiethnicity Will Be Changed”, BETA News Agency, 23 March 2004.

3. Quoted in Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 5–6.

4. Independent International Commission on Kosovo, Kosovo Report (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 62.

5. Ibid., p. 141.

6. James Rubin, “Countdown to a Very Personal War”, Financial Times (London), 30 September 2000.

7. Simon Chesterman, “Hard Cases Make Bad Law”, in Just Intervention, ed. Anthony Lang (Georgetown University Press: Washington, D.C., 2003), p. 54.

8. Wesley Clark, Waging Modern War (Oxford: Public Affairs, 2001), p. 173.

9. Lazar Nikolić, “Ethnic Prejudices and Discrimination: The Case of Kosovo”, in Understanding the War in Kosovo, ed. Florian Bieber and Zidas Daskalovski (London: Frank Cass, 2003), p. 65.

10. Clark, Waging Modern War, p. 423.

11. Quoted in Elizabeth Allen Dauphine, “Rambouillet: A Critical (Re)Assessment”, in Understanding the War in Kosovo, ed. Bieber and Daskalovski, p. 109.

12. Quoted in Noam Chomsky, The New Military Humanism (London: Pluto Press, 1999), p. 21.

13. Quoted in Tim Judah, Kosovo (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 240.

14. Ibid., p. 150.

15. Amnesty International, Serbia and Montenegro: “Prisoners in Our Own Homes”, April 2003 [http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGEUR700102003].

16. Human Rights Watch, Failure to Protect: Anti-Minority Violence in Kosovo, March 2004 (New York, July 2004), p. 2.

17. Ibid., p. 3.

18. Aldo Blumi, “Ethnic Borders to a Democratic Society in Kosova: The UN’s Identity Card”, in Understanding the War in Kosovo, ed. Bieber and Daskalovski, p. 223.

19. Human Rights Watch, Failure to Protect, p. 17.

20. David Chandler, “Bosnia: Prototype of a NATO Protectorate”, in Masters of the Universe? NATO’s Balkan Crusade, ed. Tariq Ali (London: Verso, 2000), p. 281.

21. Michael Mandelbaum, “A Perfect Failure: NATO’s War against Yugoslavia”, Foreign Affairs 78, no. 5 (September/October 1999), p. 5.

22. Human Rights Watch, Failure to Protect, p. 18.

23. Blumi, “Ethnic Borders”, in Understanding the War in Kosovo, ed. Bieber and Daskalovski, p. 224.

24. Iain King, “Kosovo’s Economy: The Balkan Tiger” [http://www.unmikonline.org/pub/focuskos/june02/focuskeco2.htm].

25. Figures quoted in Gordon Bardos, “International Policy in Southeast Europe: A Diagnosis”, in Yugoslavia Unravelled, ed. Raju Thomas (Oxford: Lexington Books, 2003), p. 152.

26. Michael Byers and Simon Chesterman, “Changing the Rules about Rules? Unilateral Humanitarian Intervention and the Future of International Law”, in Humanitarian Intervention: Ethical, Legal and Political Dilemmas, ed. J. L. Holzgrefe and Robert Keohane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 190.

27. Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War (London: Picador, 2000), p. 111.