As nations throughout the region strove to reform their economies, mitigate ethnic tensions, and broaden civil society, Belgrade seemed to delight in continually moving in the opposite direction. It is small wonder that NATO and Yugoslavia ended up on a collision course.

It was Yugoslavia's resistance to the broader trends of political and economic reform-not the plight of Kosovo Albanians-that best explains NATO's war

--John Norris, Director of Communications for Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, Collision Course

The Kosovo conflict is still being investigated over the course of the trial at The Hague; Dr Patrick Ball and the American Association for the Advancement of Science have statistical evidence retrieved from border areas that has been presented at the Hague that argues, contrary to the more spurious allegations made by some critics of the NATO intervention, that the expulsions of Albanian Kosovans were organized by the Yugoslav army.

Evidence procurred thus far otherwise fails, to my knowledge, to address key components of the criticisms made about the NATO bombing that strike me as potentially reasonable or unanswered, and critics such as Blum, Parenti and Chomsky never denied that Serb forces were responsible for mass expulsions, they merely noted that they didn't escalate much until after the NATO campaign began, which was their point to begin with: how do you justify waging a war in such a fashion that it directly results in atrocities equal to those it was attempting to circumvent. The order of civillian casualties due to the bombing and due to inter-ethnic violence shortly prior to the bombing are on par with one another, at the very least in hindsight it should be patently obvious that it shouldn't be regarded as a "good war", but a terribly selected "alternative" among available options.

1. The term "genocide" and how it's been defined, redefined, undefined, etc: according to the reports at the time some 2,000 people had been killed the year previous to the NATO bombings - perhaps the violence was going to ascend to the levels of the early and mid 90s regardless of action by NATO, but the NATO bombing certainly didn't prevent the escalation from happening, and its critics proposed rather strong arguments that an intervention of this sort had a greater likelihood of worsening conditions than in improving them. From my own recollection, however poor, of the press during that period it seems like there was little serious consideration of those arguments.

   This relates to Western responses to far worse atrocities in Rwanda (where there was none), Iraq (the West's sanctions regime could have been suspended at any point, or we could have simply repaired water treatment plants and the like ourselves), and East Timor (where the response was late by 25 years - and was driven in the US primarily by popular outrage rather than the kind of huge PR campaign in the media that spurred the involvement in the Balkans - and took a minimum threat to gain consessions from the Indonesian government, and where since then violence is still being funded by private US companies; suffering continues). One might be tempted to call appeals to human rights by the US government a charade. The question of how to effectively address such concerns remains - one could easily assume a hypocrasy in critizing favored trade status for China while calling for an end to emargos against Cuba and Iraq (in effect just the opposite hypocrasy to that of the status quo), if one assumed that they opposed trade with China, so much as the implicit condonment implied by favored trade status and lack of official response to Chinese transgressions.

   I disagree with Chomsky et. al., insofar as I understand them, that these failures belay a lack of any humanitarian intention (they might just be arguing that any humanitarian concerns were irrelevant, in which case I am more prone to agree), rather it's merely a hitch up my ass about hypocrasy. Considering that these other instances occurred at the same times as our interventions in the Balkans in '95 and '99 the stress on humanitarian concerns rings just a little hollow, and it seems objectively true that the real reason for US intervention, when it finally came, was to preserve NATO credibility, not to prevent atrocity.

2. In keeping with the prior, since our great humanitarian interventions in the Balkans there have been no adjustments to IMF, international debt incurred by Tito, and other economic policies that were and are adding a great deal to the suffering and strife in the region: Western economic policy as a whole apparently has not yet followed military policies in being motivated by humanitarian concerns.
3. As described in the Balkans section the US and Europe took actions earlier in the decade that directly precipitated conflicts in the Balkans, in this case I point to US support for internal factions that were contributing to the violence and the abandonment of the democratic non-violent opposition whose discredit lead in part to the rise of the KLA.
4. Pursuing bombing required the removal of humanitarian organiations - international observation and relief workers - that put some restraints on the Serbian army. William Blum in addressing this quotes the New York Times of March 26, page 1, which reads:

   ... with the NATO bombing already begun, a deepening sense of fear took hold in Pristina [the main city of Kosovo] that the Serbs would NOW vent their rage against ethnic Albanian civilians in retaliation. [emphasis added by Blum]

   Thus placing the onus for the refugee crisis on a percieved threat from Serbian forces, caused by the NATO bombing.

5. Ethnic violence occurred on both sides - so why did NATO pick one? Some of the worst refugee flows came out of Serbian Krajina [2], which shortly proceeded after US military aid and training to the Croatian army (there are also allegations that the US provided air support). At that time there was no "humanitarian intervention", despite the number of Serbian refugees from Croatia after Krajina exceeding the number of Albanian refugees from Kosovo at the time of the bombing. Was the West picking sides along ethnic lines?
6. After the 4th week of bombing NATO ran out of military targets and held a conference in which it was decided to engage targets in Kosovo and generally expand the bombing to civillian infrastructure [a timeline of indiscriminate bombing]: The bombing of electric and water facilities, factories, residential districts, broadcasting stations, area bombing, and the use of cluster bombs and depleted uranium. From a report by the Independent International Commission on Kosovo the NATO bombing resulted in the following:
   "59 bridges (seven on the Danube), nine major highways (including Belgrade-Nis or Belgrade-Zagreb), and seven airports were destroyed. Most of the main telecommunications transmitters were damaged, two thirds of the main industrial plants were nearly destroyed. According to NATO, 70% of the electricity production capacity and 80% of the oil refinery capacity was knocked out."
7. Refusal to negotiate: as is typical the West's idea of "negotiations" meant not a cease fire but unnegotiated surrender.
8. Acting without Security Council authorization (a wink and a nod for the much-touted "rule of law").
9. It was widely noted that an extended bombing campaign would likely create a massive refugee crisis - little if anything was done to ensure the welfare of refugees. It's uncontroversial that NATO was unprepared for the scale of the crisis. Certainly nothing comparable to the billions spent in bombing has been expended to resolve the crisis, nevermind that the US had completely cut funding to the UN and its associated aid agencies. This is one point that the US government has acknowledged as a definite shortcoming in the Kosovo bombings, and it was more than obvious that it was a larger problem than NATO was prepared for by the time they started targetting civilian infrastructure. A responsible organization might have suspended bombing to deal with the overwhelming humanitarian crisis, and allowed independent organizations to conduct a thorough investigation into it's cause.
10. Camp Bondsteel: Despite reluctance to put ground troops into the fighting and a purely humanitarian mission, the US nevertheless established a permanent base near Kosovo as well as numerous others in and around the region: but "some Western diplomatic sources scoff at the idea of Kosovo having any real strategic value." There have been cases of economic interests as well. All in all Western economic policy towards Kosovo and the rest of the Balkans reflects what is occuring throughout the former Soviet Block, all these countries are being integrated into the economic order, taking a seat at the back of the bus. I tend to think that this would have occurred with or without the Kosovo intervention - it occurs elsewhere just fine through IMF/WB policies.
11. Problems with precision bombing.
12. The results: No indepence for Kosovo; as many as 500,000 Serbian refugees - rarely mentioned and 800,000 Albanian refugees (figures for internal displacement are much higher, particularly for Serb populations). Many remain unsettled
13. Late to the table, so NATO crashed the party.

According to the IICK, referencing NATO: Of 38,400 sorties flown 10,484 were strikes. The US flew 60% of all sorties and 80% of the strikes. The IICK states that NATO expected a proposed cease fire shortly after the bombing began, but Yugoslavia proposed a cease fire in late March [Salon, 3/30/99] - less than a week after the campaign began - contradicting the IICK's statement that "After four weeks of bombing, the Yugoslav leadership still would not respond to negotiation proposals."

The AAAS report argues that the Yugoslav government was responsible for the bulk of the killing and expulsion - it demonstrates that the relationship between NATO violence and the refugee flow do not correlate - it still leaves these issues unresolved.

All Milosevich needs to demonstrate his argument on the AAAS finding that "the greatest statisticians of the world can prove anything by statistics" is to get a statician to use the same data and prove a different case. Presumably the data is being shared with other human rights organizations for verification. He appears to be correct in his assessment that the AAAS report does not account for Serbian refugees, a subject which is due some concern as there were some 70-100,000 Serbian refugees over the course of the NATO campaign [Parenti, citing the Washington Post, 6/6/1999].

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have reported that NATO killed 500 civillians during the bombing campaign. These reports have been predictably dismissed out of hand by the Pentagon and NATO, and one can safely predict that the perpetrators will not face a tribunal. The likelihood of further deaths due to unexploded ordnance and the health effects of depeleted uranium, nevermind the massive destruction of civillian infrastructure, are not included in these tallies. Likewise these groups did targetted studies of specific events, not a broad survey - meaning not all instances of civillian casualties were studied (HRW studied 90 incidents), which leaves the possibility for unreported incidences. In comparison the Yugoslav government claims 1,200 to 5,700 civillian casualties.

When the bombing ended the Yugoslav army was largely intact. There were about 1,000 (FYR) to 5,000 (NATO) military casualties. About 3,000 unidentified bodies have been found in mass grave sites, most of which have generally been located and identified by the KLA (interim fighting between Yugoslav forces and the KLA - who in 1998 had begun attacking Serbian police and committing acts of terrorism - was the cause of the conflict to begin with, and Serbian forces responded by reprehensibly attacking civillian populations, just as the US has done in similar situations and as, for example, Israel is doing, nor is hiding the bodies unique). Western estimates of the scale of the Serbian "genocide" were based primarily on the wild conjecturing of government officials. There is little reason to consider KLA and NATO sources any more objective than Yugoslav sources, and by extension most of what is claimed in the press is unverified, as all they do for the most part is quote this or that shit eating stooge.

In questioning the West's humanitarian motivations many NATO supporters make apropos observations about the end of Western support for many repressive regimes and the proportionate rise in the number of democracies in the world. This, it is argued, suggests at least some significant change in the West's priorities. Critics rejoin with the observation that most of these new democracies are thin, with militaries kept on the payroll and ready for a coup at the nod from the US, and that the economic policies forced on them by the WTO/WB/IMF through various aggressive means are implicitly destructive to human well being, but beneficial for US transnationals. Both parties have a point - and without the hubris of Cold War rhetoric it's become just that much harder for Western democracies to escape criticism from their own subjects about their foreign policy. In so far that this is true it does represent a significant functional change in the operations of Western government, a shortcoming which the present "war on terrorism" is obviously being spun to correct - due at least nominally to the Bush administration's disregard for any concerns over domestic support or international law.

Finally, the AAAS report also makes the obvious case that "NATO's bombing was tactically ineffective at stopping the forced eviction of Kosovar Albanians", and does not address the possibility that NATO bombing was the impetus for the Yugoslav decision to pursue systematic mass expulsion. Do I want their freakin livers? No, it's just that after the first month of bombing there was no point in NATO continuing to pursue the campaign besides proving that they've got bigger cajones than any given thug involved in the conflict.

• Seven Misconceptions about the Organized Atrocities in Kosovo, Sells claims the pro-democracy movement formed because Milosevic had not carried out ethnic cleansing with enough efficacy.
• The current bombings, Chomsky argues that intervention was laudible and maybe even necessary, but that the program undertaken escalated atrocity and failed to adequately persue diplomatic options, which is a bit off from Sells' "Noam Chomsky ... showed an almost total ignorance or indifference to ten years of Serb nationalist atrocities in the Balkans and to the longstanding, openly publicized plan to annihilate the Kosovo Albanian community and expel the survivors, where they would live for the indefinite future in refugee camps along the borders of unstable countries like Macedonia." Having read many pro-intervention pieces while grappling with this particular non-starter of an argument I don't recall anything referring to an "open publicized plan" of genocide, which is a prime example of:
• everybody talking past one another.
• Chomsky's comments on Milosevic ouster, I'm still unclear about Serb refugees being "by far the largest refugee population in the region", nor does he site a source.

I plead sitting on the fence.