Volume 8 Number 3

Summer 1999

Feature: Can a moral war be waged immorally?

Eastern Europe After Kosovo
     The War and the Human-Rights Community
     Dimitrina Petrova

I will address three questions: (1) How did the international human-rights community respond to the Kosovo war and, in particular, to the NATO air strikes against Yugoslavia? (2) What did the community fail to say? (3) What does the Kosovo war reveal about the current status of the international human-rights community?

What did the international human-rights community say about NATO intervention?

Significant segments of the human-rights community were silent, confused, and unable to influence public discussion on Kosovo, to the extent that any discussion existed. Whenever the human-rights organizations and activists did participate in the public debate, their thinking lacked rigor. True, the community has developed a broad consensus on the principle of human- itarian intervention and on the unacceptability of impunity for gross human-rights violations, an historic achievement. But it failed to reaffirm this achievement in a way that is consistent with the human-rights value system.

This failure took a variety of forms, from complete abandonment of the principle of forcible humanitarian intervention in the name of radical pacifism to absolute support of interventionism and NATO's air strikes. The principle of humanitarian intervention is based on the assumption that, when a government engages in gross and systematic human-rights violations, the international community must intervene, if necessary by military force. It has been argued that the air strikes constituted a breach of existing international law and were contrary to the UN Charter. But human rights, as a moral system, have precedence over positive law: legislation does not create human rights; human rights create legislation. From this perspective, discussion of the legality of the NATO bombing, though important for the future of the international human-rights regime, is not, and should not have been, decisive in forming opinion on the human-rights dimension of the Kosovo war. Concern for human rights ought not be hampered by an obsession with written law.

Most human-rights defenders agree that human rights are of international concern, and that, if gross and systematic violations of human rights are committed within the borders of a sovereign state, whether the government is elected or not, the international community must intervene, even absent sufficient legal grounds. Further, if peaceful intervention proves impossible, military action is justified. If we do not act promptly and decisively to protect victims, we accommodate slaughterers. The human-rights community, or at least most of it in the West, subscribes to this logic. This is especially the case since the tragic lessons of Bosnia and Rwanda, where many lives could have been saved had the international community acted quickly and dispatched troops to protect civilians. Remaining passive when thousands of people are killed, tortured, evicted from their homes, and abused bespeaks both weakness and irresponsibility.

By the time the Milosevic government had refused to sign the Rambouillet agreement, a combination of strength and responsibility, guided by a unanimous political will to action in the name of human rights, was demanded. NATO was the only international player able to meet this demand, and was thus called on to act. The international human-rights community had reason to celebrate. If the world had come to a standstill at the moment when the decision to launch a military campaign was made, everything would have been neat and clean. March 24, 1999, was a good day for an orthodox human-rights defender to die happily, nearly reconciled with this world, contemplating the bright future of human rights on Earth.

We missed that chance. After March 24, we witnessed how the NATO air campaign resulted in greater loss of life and severer violations of human rights than had occurred in the status quo ante. Was NATO the cause, the trigger, or just one factor among others? To make a case against NATO, answering these questions is not critical. Call it as you wish, according to your own historical metaphysics. NATO bears significant responsibility for what has happened to hundreds of thousands of people. It is also responsible-together with the Belgrade authorities-for the human suffering and loss of life on the territory of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Denying this responsibility is a cheap war-propaganda strategy, and I will not deal with it here. My argument is important only for those who assume that NATO is responsible for loss of life and human suffering but, by being responsible, is not thereby automatically guilty. Asserting that NATO is responsible does not necessarily require that NATO be blamed, denounced, or shamed. It is possible to cause loss of life and severe suffering and still be morally right-to be acting in accordance with the human-rights value system. My argument against the NATO bombing campaign takes all this into consideration, and asks whether, on the above assumptions, the NATO campaign was wrong from the moral point of view inherent in the human-rights paradigm.

What did the human-rights community fail to say about NATO intervention?

Moral integrity is impossible without the capacity to arrange one's values and principles in a hierarchy-not just to have these values lying around, ready at hand, to be referred to as an occasion arises, as is typical of -ideologies."

The right to life is the foundation of the human-rights hierarchy. It is laid down before all other rights in the major international and domestic instruments. According to the moral norm behind this right, killing is wrong. At this point, it is important to grasp what extreme pacifists and radical opponents of violence do not agree with, or even consider-that the principle of forcible humanitarian intervention does not contradict the -no killing" imperative but indeed logically follows from it. If one's most important value is human life, a certain behavior is expected. One must kill if, by killing, one directly saves more lives than one destroys.

The next and most important implication of the human-rights morality is either disregarded or misunderstood by proponents of forcible intervention who wanted NATO to keep bombing for -as long as it took" to defeat Milosevic. The -kill if," and hence the forcible intervention principle, is derivative and secondary. It is limited by the more basic principle-protection of life-from which it follows and whose instrument of implementation it is. It is acceptable only so long as it remains such an instrument of implementation. Therefore, just as one would abandon a vehicle moving in the direction of a crash, one must abandon the secondary principle of intervention and fall back on the firm foundations of the primary value-the right to life-as soon as it is clear that the instrument does not work or is counterproductive. If this is so, then our position on the NATO bombing should be judged in terms of the air campaign's ability to protect human life.

Soon after the bombing began, many observers signaled alarm: the human-rights situation was deteriorating with every passing day. Worried by the momentum of the military machine, some -interventionists" (including the author of this article) appealed for the bombing's termination and the immediate negotiation of a peaceful solution. Others from within the human-rights community responded that, if NATO stopped its offensive, it would be granting Milosevic victory and that the status quo imposed by Milosevic-an ethnically cleansed Kosovo-would prevail. I shared this fear but, despite it, insisted that, if the bombing continued-and even if, in the end, NATO achieved the goal of completely reversing the ethnic cleansing-the price for such a victory would be unjustifiably high: hundreds and probably thousands of further deaths and devastated lives. Continued military action, therefore, could not be justified on human-rights grounds. What opponents of the air strikes said, soon after the bombing began, in the future tense can now only be sadly repeated in the past and present perfect tense.

Events confirmed that a quick and bloodless victory over Milosevic would not happen. The cost of supporting air strikes for the sake of salvaging the humanitarian-intervention principle indeed turned out to be too high. The air strikes continued, and more violations of human rights (particularly those of the Kosovo Albanians themselves) occurred than would have been prevented or punished by the strikes. This might not have been the case if, instead of a -safe" bombing campaign, NATO had introduced ground troops. In any case, the miraculously fast and enormously efficient blitz offensive that many had hoped for did not materialize. Time worked against Kosovo's civilian population as well as against Serbian civilians. Did NATO actually prevent the repression of the Kosovars? Not at all. In other words, NATO failed to do the most serious part of its job, the core task that justified its engagement in the first place. The Serbian and Montenegrin populations have been victimized as well. Whole communities-including the Roma throughout Yugoslavia-have been decimated by the war. How can one destroy military capacity without degrading an entire society? Why not bomb the bakeries? They make bread for the soldiers. As the days passed and the pictures of refugees pouring out of Kosovo grew increasingly haunting, we began to witness how, with tragic inevitability, the game changed. From a campaign to defend the lives and rights of Kosovo

Albanians, it metamorphosed into something else: the monster of an escalated war. Listening to NATO spokesmen, and those in the mainstream media who were supportive of NATO's actions, one realizes that they were trapped in a military standard of evaluation that is quite distinct from any human-rights standard. NATO experts-very predictably-developed their strategy according to the rationale of military victory. The imperative of military victory is always accompanied by its shadow-a ruthless propaganda war. In this shadow war, we are all targets. The Western public was given few opportunities to sympathize with Serbia's bombed population, left without electricity, water, transportation, medicine, and food, and driven to the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe of enormous dimensions. CNN's viewers, told in the morning -it was another busy night for our pilots," were guided toward a worldview that was blind to the sufferings of the Serbs. People in the Balkans wondered whether the citizens of the Western democracies could sense the immense cynicism of the NATO spokesman in Brussels when he commented on the results of the previous day's bombing in terms of a tennis match: -We won the game, we are about to win the set, we will surely win the match," and so on.

NATO is not a global police force. Its own constituencies have been allergic to this idea. Yet, in essence, NATO was called on to play exactly such a role in Kosovo. Well, it failed. It behaved as it ought to, as an army. Unlike the police, armies are for winning military victories not for protecting the rights of the weak, not for enforcing law and order. Victory is the only valid goal in military thinking. As one Soviet-era song from the film The Belarusian Station puts it, -Now we need only victory, one for us all, we will not trifle about the cost." As the days passed, the NATO engagement in Yugoslavia changed from a police campaign, to protect the lives and rights of the Kosovars, into a war in which the reasons why it began mattered increasingly less. All that mattered was how it would end; in other words, how to proclaim victory, regardless of the human cost.

Had an international police force intervened, it would have been limited in its goal: to protect life and reduce human-rights violations, as well as to arrest the perpetrators, always respecting the rule of proportionate use of force. A police force is taught that the use of excessive force is criminal. Police know to refrain from shooting into a crowd. Soldiers are taught differently: -Fight and win!" When the decent police chief fails, he resigns. When the general fails, he commits suicide. This unwritten, ancient code of honor implies the absoluteness of war thinking, since every war, for the general, is between good and evil. For the general, casualties matter, but only on his side. Despite all the laws of war in existence, for the military the enemy must be degraded and destroyed, and the civilians on the enemy's side are part of the circumstances, hence they are generally immaterial in strategic decision making. Civilian casualties on the enemy's side are -collateral damage."

NATO's bombing campaign was a complete and unacceptable failure from the point of view of a police function. And from the point of view of a military function, the -victory" against Milosevic proves only that the NATO alliance is militarily stronger than Serbia, which is good to know.

Projects based on a good principle, when put into practice, sometimes follow a logic of their own not envisioned by the proponents of the good principle. -The road to hell is paved with good intentions." Implementation of a justifiable moral principle can backfire and ultimately defeat the good principle. This is an essential aspect of human existence: our fallibility. It takes genuine courage, openness, and humility to acknowledge the failure of an action enforcing a principle in which one believes and to accept reality. Human life, and its fallibility, is part of reality before it is captured by any kind of principle, even the most humane.

Had we acknowledged the failure of the action attempting to enforce it, we might have saved the moral principle untarnished for use in future situations. Refusal to admit the failure of the action compromises the principle for a long time to come. Forcible humanitarian intervention in the name of human rights, this time, has done a disservice to human rights. What human-rights advocates also forgot was that forcible humanitarian intervention is secondary while protection of life is primary.

What does the Kosovo war reveal about the current status of the international human-rights community?I will limit my remarks to this question only, leaving aside the question of the damage done by NATO's intervention to democratic processes and the human-rights movements in Yugoslavia, the Balkans, and Europe.

The human-rights community in the Balkans, and in the entire East European region, is confused. Everyday, during the intervention, human-rights defenders read and circulated among themselves dozens of messages on Kosovo but tried not to abandon their traditional political neutrality, required by standards of professionalism. In the first weeks following the beginning of air strikes, they limited their statements to reporting on human-rights violations. They took no decisive stand on what the Western alliance ought to have been doing next. They effectively excluded themselves from commenting on decision making, leaving it to the military and political elites of the Western alliance. But the silence of human-rights defenders on the war's political and military aspects was widely interpreted as support for the military strikes.

In addition to political neutrality, at least three further factors overwhelmed the judgment of human-rights organizations in Eastern Europe, Russia, and the Balkans. First, the democratic forces in various East European societies have opted for NATO membership, and the human-rights community in the region feared that strong voices criticizing NATO from within the democratic lobby would jeopardize their countries' chances of being admitted into the alliance. Second, the very status and jobs of human-rights defenders in the region have been sustained by the generous support of Western and, particularly, US donors. Without their continued support, the future of the human-rights movement in the region, and even of -civil society" as the realm in which citizen participation and civil liberties may be promoted, is uncertain. Third, the human-rights community was quickly trapped in the sinking ship of Cold War logic. Human-rights defenders feared that whatever they said immediately placed them in one of two camps-for or against NATO. If one was against NATO, one was a friend of Milosevic and an enemy of democracy. The black-and-white scheme prevailed, and nuances were only admissible if they concerned details. Political correctness dictated unholy choices.

Nevertheless, the opinions of the regional human-rights community might have been solicited by NATO governments. But they were not. I doubt whether it ever occurred to Western decision makers to consult human-rights activists or indeed anyone from the nongovernmental sector in Eastern Europe on intervention strategies. We are regularly consulted when the democratic deficit of our societies has to be addressed and when postcommunist governments have to be pressured toward democratic reform. Oddly enough, no such consultation occurred in the case of a war in the region waged in the name of human rights.

If this is how things stand with the human-rights community in Eastern Europe, what about the Western, allegedly more mature, part of that community? Disturbingly, voices of human-rights defenders on the Kosovo crisis were practically silent in the US and British mainstream media as well. To the generation of the Western left, now in power, the -Serbs are moral outcasts, beyond the pale of reason and pity." The Western human-rights community did little to respond to this attitude. It could not counteract simplistic chauvinist talk about Nazis, fascists, and evil empires.

The human-rights community was more concerned about the possible ways NATO could drag itself out of the quagmire it had created and save face than with formulating a consistent and convincing set of human-rights demands. Had it focused on the latter, it would have clearly denounced the NATO bombing campaign. Unfortunately, criticism of NATO by the major human-rights organizations was moderate and did not include an appeal to stop the bombing campaign. Many people, who understood the catastrophic inefficiency of the bombing, were conveniently asking, -What if, following the halting of air strikes, the situation becomes worse?" They thought that this question showed their responsibility; but they were unable to provide a plausible scenario of such a worsening. Above all, they could not explain how the termination of bombing would increase the loss of lives. In addition, it is irrational to postpone the halting of an obviously vicious activity only because you do not know what may happen next.

Since the international acceptance of the basic human-rights principles-such as that of forcible humanitarian intervention-has important political consequences, the human-rights community has a formidable responsibility in world politics. The more human-rights ideas win support among the ruling political classes of the Western democracies, the more this responsibility will grow. But the community's behavior during the Kosovo war suggests that it does not have the capacity to bear or even to understand that responsibility.

In responding to the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, the international human-rights community failed to make human rights count. It failed to provide the moral leadership that should have been expected of it. This failure is due not to organizational weaknesses, conceptual difficulties, or legal gaps. It confirms an ongoing transformation of the community's political function. Human rights continue to be a mobilizing paradigm guiding movements against oppressive regimes in many parts of the world. But in the Western democracies, human rights are becoming indistinguishable from official political ideology. We are witnessing a gradual usurpation of the human-rights culture by the dominant powers, and the very argument for human rights is turning into an apologia for the global status quo, all in the interests of these very powers.

NATO's liberal and humanitarian war against Yugoslavia is only an illustration of the changing political function of human rights. An illustration is not a proof. One -illustrates" a preexisting -text." Here I have presented the illustration but not the text, the application of the theory but not the theory itself. The theory is only hinted at in the preceding paragraph; developing it falls outside the scope of this article. Dimitrina Petrova is executive director of the European Roma Rights Center, Budapest, Hungary.

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