From Free Life, Issue 30, May 1999
ISSN: 0260 5112

In Free Life No. 29 (April 1999), Sean Gabb and Anthony Furlong criticised the NATO attack on Serbia in support of the Albanians of Kossovo. I would like to put forward the case in favour of the NATO action and add a few general comments about the justifications for military action in the post-communist world.

First of all, I would like to make it clear that I am not in favour of indiscriminate military intervention all over the place. As Helen Szamuely said in Free Life No. 29, we should reconsider the whole concept of peacekeeping, because it is futile to send a peacekeeping force to a place where there is no peace to keep. However, military action may still be justified in some circumstances.

If you look at the military operations carried out by the English-speaking nations in the last twenty years, the successes have been those which were undertaken either to expel a foreign invader, as in the Falklands in 1982 and Kuwait in 1991, or to overthrow a dictatorship which had negligible public support, as in Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989 and Haiti in 1994. Getting involved in a civil war is much more risky. For example, the United Nations intervention in Somalia from 1992 to 1995 was a total fiasco which achieved absolutely nothing. When a civil war breaks out in a backward Third World country such as Somalia, Sierra Leone, Algeria or the Sudan, both sides are usually just as bad as each other, so it is not worth backing either of them. These countries are not likely to become stable democracies in the foreseeable future, no matter what the Western powers do. In these sort of cases, it would be wise to follow a policy of non-intervention and leave the combatants to stew in their own juice.

I think it would also be wise to stop bombing Iraq while Saddam Hussein is not actually occupying someone else's country, or bombing it, or massing troops on its borders. He may be a dictator, but it is hard to judge how much popular support he actually has. Some Arabs seem to admire him for defying the Western infidels. If he was overthrown, the next leader might be just as bad. Iraq is another backward country, and at the present rate of progress it will be hundreds of years before the average Arab can tell a free institution from a camel's backside. (Before anyone accuses me of "racism", let me point out that the problem is cultural, not racial. The Jews are descended from the same Semitic racial stock as the Arabs, but they have created a thriving democracy in Israel, because they have already been in contact with Western culture for hundreds of years.)

Kossovo, on the other hand, is not a backward Third World country. It is a part of Europe only two hours by jet from Heathrow Airport, nearer to us than some of the places where millions of Britons spend their summer holidays. Doing nothing about it would have been like seeing three hooligans beating up an old lady fifty yards from your front door and saying it was none of your business. I think it was Robert Burns who said that even if you cannot right the world's wrongs, you should at least do what you can. The conflict between the Serbs and the Kossovars is not a case of six of one and half a dozen of the other. There is no doubt that the Serbs have committed ghastly atrocities. It is possible that the KLA have also committed atrocities, but if so, it is surprising that we have not heard more about them from Milosevic's propagandists. The Kossovars deserve at least one chance to build a free society, and it is within our power to help them.

Sean Gabb and Anthony Furlong argue that Britain should not intervene in Kossovo because we have no national interests in the Balkan region. We do, however, have a tradition of intervention overseas on humanitarian grounds. The suppression of the international slave trade in the 19th Century is the most outstanding example. There is also a historical precedent from the Balkans. In 1827 we destroyed the Turkish Navy at the Battle of Navarino to enable the Greeks to win their independence, despite the fact that our usual policy in the 19th Century was to prop up the Turkish Empire to maintain the balance of power against Russia. (It is debatable whether the pro-Turkish policy was wise, but that is another story.)
 

As for the war in Kossovo, it is clear that we can only win it by sending in ground forces. The NATO powers got into the present mess because in 1995 they bombed the Serbs in Bosnia to force them to negotiate, and it worked. They obviously thought the same tactic would work again. However, in 1995 the air raids were accompanied by a Croat offensive on the ground, which made a difference. Beating the Serbs on the ground is not a hopeless task. They may have a good army, and they may have the advantage of mountainous terrain, but they are not invincible. In 1995 the Croats routed them with an army raised and trained from scratch in only four years, even though Bosnia is just as mountainous as Kossovo.

Some journalists have recently argued that even if the NATO powers succeeded in occupying Kossovo, the Serbs could harass them for years with guerrilla warfare. I doubt this, because guerrilla warfare only works if there is a sympathetic local population to support the guerrillas. The Serbs only make up one-tenth of the population of Kossovo. When the refugees have returned, where is the support going to come from?

After the war, our aim will have to be an independent Kossovo, because the Kossovars will never tolerate Serb rule again after what they have suffered. They would have voted for independence years ago if the Serbs had not abolished their provincial assembly in 1990 to stop them doing exactly that. If they choose to unite with Albania in due course, that is up to them. To prepare them for independence, we will have to arm and train them so that they can defend themselves when we withdraw. They should be capable of this, because the mountainous terrain will be on their side this time, and they will have the morale which comes from knowing that they are defending their own homeland.

Contrary to what Sean Gabb says, Kossovo is not just another Bosnia. The difference is that in Bosnia the population is split into three rival camps, none of which has an overall majority. The proportions are roughly two-fifths Moslem, two-fifths Serb and one-fifth Croat. In Kossovo before the ethnic cleansing, on the other hand, the population was nine-tenths Albanian. This means that an independent Kossovo would stand a much better chance of becoming a stable democracy than Bosnia. The trouble with Bosnia today is that the NATO powers are keeping it united by force. What they should be doing is allowing the three communities to partition it among themselves, and keeping them away from each other's throats while they reach an agreement on how to do it. Of course, that would  mean that the Western powers would have to stop treating the idea of multiculturalism as a sacred cow and face the fact that multicultural states usually do not work. The future of Bosnia depends on whether realism can triumph over political correctness.