The violations of international law that NATO had possibly committed during its 1999 bombing campaign in Yugoslavia remain largely uninvestigated 20 years after the intervention, the anniversary of which will be marked on Sunday.
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 23rd March, 2019) The violations of international law that NATO had possibly committed during its 1999 bombing campaign in Yugoslavia remain largely uninvestigated 20 years after the intervention, the anniversary of which will be marked on Sunday.
In 1999, the armed confrontation between the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), an ethnic-Albanian militia, which had supported Kosovo's independence since the 1990s, and the Serbian army and police led to NATO airstrikes against what was then Yugoslavia (now Serbia and Montenegro).
Operation Allied Force begun on March 24, 1999, and ended on June 10. The Serbian government estimates that about 2,500 people, including 89 children, were killed during the US-led bombing campaign, and some 12,500 were injured.
ASSESSING NATO BOMBING CAMPAIGN: AN ACT OF AGGRESSION OR PROTECTION?
According to NATO, one of the key objectives of its operation in Yugoslavia was to bring about "a verifiable stop to all military action, violence and repression" as well as the safe return of refugees. The bombing campaign, however, was not sanctioned by the UN Security Council.
Aleksandar Sekulic, a member of the presidency of the Montenegrin Democratic People's Party, Dr. Srdja Pavlovic, a research associate at the Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies at the University of Alberta, and Tatjana Macura, a co-president of the Party of Modern Serbia and member of the Serbian National Assembly, shared their views with Sputnik about NATO's bombing campaign.
"The assessment of the 1999 NATO intervention in Yugoslavia varies depending on who you ask. I suspect that, while high emotional content might be a shared feature, answers coming from Belgrade and Pristina would otherwise be quite different ... For many Serbs, in addition to suffering the immediate casualties and material damage and long-term consequences ... of the bombing, the NATO intervention had been an act of aggression that also facilitated the establishment of the state of Kosovo," Pavlovic said.
For the Kosovo Albanians, however, it was both "a protective action that helped save numerous refugees from uncertain destiny, and a boost needed for the creation of an independent state," he noted.
"For NATO member states, it was an action needed to justify the existence and relevance of this military alliance. But it was also a defeat for the United Nations as a collective body of some international reputation since the bombing of Serbia and Montenegro was not sanctioned by the UN," Pavlovic stressed.
Macura expressed similar opinion, saying that the NATO campaign cannot be labeled as either an act of "protection" or "aggression" as, according to her, for more than 90 percent of Kosovo population it brought stability, while for the minority of Kosovo Serbs, the intervention became the source of insecurity.
At the same time, Sekulic describes the NATO military campaign solely as an act of "a unilateral and unprovoked aggression against Yugoslavia," the aim of which was to "implement additional fragmentation and ghettoization of the Balkans."
"Everything that we have gained following the depleted uranium bombs and thousands of deaths, is that the territory of Kosovo today is uncontrollably litter of lawlessness, and is one of the main points of the distribution of crime, narcotics and more often than not, Islamic fundamentalism in Europe," he pointed out.
AFTERMATH: MULTIPLE CIVILIAN DEATHS, ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE
In its report that documents civilian deaths in Operation Allied Force, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said some 500 Yugoslav civilians were killed over 78 days of bombing, adding that this evidence may be incomplete. The HRW investigation also found that NATO had violated international humanitarian law.
Moreover, according to the 2001 Council of Europe report, titled "Environmental impact of the war in Yugoslavia on south-east Europe," NATO officials have confirmed the use of ordnance containing depleted uranium - a highly toxic element - during the bombing campaign in Yugoslavia. The report concluded that the military operation "caused serious damage to the country's natural environment," which extended to several other countries of south-east Europe.
Last year, the Serbian parliament voted in support of establishing a commission which would investigate the consequences of NATO bombing campaign on human health and environment. Its main goal is to establish whether the use depleted uranium bombs by NATO could be behind the increase in the number of serious diseases.
Russia has been one of the countries that strongly criticized NATO's airstrikes against Yugoslavia. In a recent interview to the NTV broadcaster, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that the West would "do everything" to prevent an international investigation into crimes committed during the 1999 bombing campaign from taking place.
"I think that the West is doing and will be doing everything possible to prevent this [investigation]. As for [the use of] the banned ordnance, the Serbs are conducting their own investigation. Judging by its result, we will see what can be done so that this crime does not remain unpunished. I will say it once again, I see almost no chance that international institutions, where the West is present and its opinion is taken into consideration, will allow this. They will do anything to prevent this," Lavrov stressed.
The diplomat noted that, during the bombing campaign, NATO committed "gross violations of all principles of international humanitarian law" since the airstrikes had targeted "purely civilian objects." He recalled that NATO air forces had carried out strikes targeting a passenger train and a tv center, saying that this had long-lasting consequences.
The Russian foreign minister said he believed that the mass killing of Albanians in the village of Racak in central Kosovo, allegedly carried out by Serbian authorities in 1999, was a provocation in order to justify NATO intervention.
"It was not a reason [for NATO to conduct airstrikes] but an artificial pretext. It is a long-known fact that it was a provocation ... The allegedly killed civilians were in fact servicemen, they were militants of the Albanian liberation army, of the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army. They were just dressed into civilian clothes. It is a long-known fact there was such a set-up," Lavrov explained.
In March 2002, the UN Environment program confirmed the presence of widespread, but low-level, depleted uranium contamination at five sites in Serbia and Montenegro, saying, however, that "the sites studied do not present immediate radioactive or toxic risks for the environment or human health-significant."
Yet, the Serbian media reported on March 19, citing a research conducted by the commission investigating the consequences of 1999 NATO air campaign, that children born in Serbia between 1999 and 2015 were "exposed to a toxic factor" that made them vulnerable to malignant diseases more often than other generations of the same age.
Pavlovic suggested one of the most effective ways to shed light on the events of 1999 in Yugoslavia could be the launching of a multilateral investigation, which would take into account the use of depleted uranium during the bombing.
"I would be glad to see three parallel investigation streams. One would be the investigation into the warfare practices of NATO in relations to the use of depleted uranium during the bombing of Yugoslavia. Second would be the investigation of atrocities committed by the Serb military and police forces, as well as Serb paramilitary units that operated in Kosovo. The third would be the investigation into atrocities committed by the Kosovo Liberation Army units against non-Albanian civilians," he underlined.
In 2015, after his meeting with then-Prime Minister of Montenegro, Milo Djukanovic, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said he regretted the loss of lives during the 1999 bombing, saying that "unfortunately, in the concrete case we could not avoid the suffering of civilians."
"I hope that, after so much time, a moment has come when the NATO countries must begin to confront the repercussions of such a wrong and illegal war. I think that the apology declared to the victims by NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg, which he offered only a few years ago to the citizens of Serbia, is maybe the beginning. But it is certainly but not the full, or even long-term, path that we will all need to see, for us to fully hope for a proper investigation," Sekulic said.
He expressed confidence that, 20 years after the air campaign in Yugoslavia, it had become "much clearer" for NATO member states that the attack on sovereign states was "an unacceptable and too expensive mistake, which they will not repeat."
Pavlovic, however, was less optimistic as he argued that "no one learns from history," noting that state sovereignty "means precious little for international bodies and for national governments of those mighty states."
"Why would we expect NATO to act differently. As a matter of fact, we are reverting to an old political concept championed many decades ago by Leonid Breznev: limited sovereignty. Once modernized and adjusted for our digitalized world, this concept would be used to legitimize invasions, expansionist acts, secession, and much more," he pointed out.
According to the Russian foreign minister, Western countries began dismantling the international legal framework when NATO decided to launch airstrikes in Yugoslavia.
Lavrov argued that Western states had not learned the lesson of the NATO air campaign in Yugoslavia as they continued to conduct military operations against sovereign states, such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
