MEDIA STUDIES
I now believe more than ever that this war was wrong
STEPHEN GLOVER
Kosovo Many opponents of the bombing of Serbia had their doubts. I certainly did. For some antis the crucial issue was the bomb- ing. We were told by experts, most notably the distinguished John Keegan in the Daily Telegraph, that bombing could never win a war, and it came as something of a shock when after 71 days these know-alls appeared to have been proved wrong. In fact there were better reasons for opposing the war than the alleged futility of bomb- ing; and in any case, as General Sir Michael Jackson later argued, the single fact which persuaded Slobodan Milosevic to capitulate was not the bombing but the decision by the Russians on 3 June to stop shoring him up and to support Nato. All the same, the seeming vindication of the bombing strat- egy was represented by the war party as a triumph and accepted as such by some of the antis. It didn't help that Mr Keegan, in his characteristically gentlemanly way, should have run up the white flag so quickly and apologised for getting it wrong.
Being in Kosovo almost nine weeks after the end of the war helps you to see the whole thing in perspective. If one thought simply with a patriotic heart, one would cheerfully follow Mr Keegan straight into the confessional. Everything they say about the British army is true. Our soldiers are polite, competent and decent. If you approach them without revealing that you are a member of the press, they are helpful and open; by contrast, a French soldier in the northern town of Mitrovica practically arrested me when I asked him an innocu- ous question. And it is meant as no insult to the officers to say that it is the men who are more impressive. The officers are the sort of clued-up chaps you might hope to encounter in any merchant bank or even a newspaper. They are recognisable types. The men, all strongly working-class and exhibiting every regional accent in the United Kingdom, are visitors from a van- ished age, upholders of lost virtues. One Irish guardsman told me that when the army liberated Kosovo on 12 June he had never felt prouder to be British. By the way, it was the Irish Guards, not the Parachute Regiment, who first entered Kosovo.
All this is moving, and when one adds the Union Jacks that bedeck every café and shop, not to mention the admiration which many Kosovar Albanians evidently have for the British, it is impossible not to feel a tin- gle of pride that we still amount to some- thing useful in the world. But these are the happy consequences of a war; they do not justify it. We obviously can't go around fighting tyrants just so that we can feel bet- ter about ourselves.
How did we get here? The British gov- ernment has refused an inquiry, but there really should be one. The bombing began because Slobodan Milosevic did not accept the terms that had been offered to his dele- gation at Rambouillet in February. Two of these terms were so exiguous that one is tempted to wonder whether the intention, at least on the part of the then gung-ho Americans, was that Milosevic would reject them so that the bombing could begin. Madeleine Albright, the US Secretary of State, promised the Kosovar Albanians a referendum on independence after three years. Since the Albanians at that time accounted for 90 per cent of the population of Kosovo (call it 98 per cent now) this was in effect a promise of independence which the Serbs were bound to oppose. They were also certain to take exception to a military annexe which enabled Nato forces to criss- cross Serbia to take up their positions as the new rulers of Kosovo. These were terms that no sovereign state would accept.
In Kosovo the war between the Serbs and the Kosovar Albanians appears in a new light. Whenever I talk to a Kosovar Alban- ian about 'the war', I mean the bombing that began on 24 March, whereas to him, or her, it means the war that started in Febru- ary 1998 when the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) engaged the Serb army in Kosovo. We tend to think of Serb paramili- taries ethnically cleansing villages, and car- rying out the occasional massacre, until Nato could bear it no more. But of course it takes two to fight a war. The Serbian forces were extremely brutal, but the KLA were no girl guides, and they murdered dozens of Serb policemen and many Serb farmers, attracting retribution on the Albanian pop- ulation. This was an ethnic war, and the Serbs, whose proportion of the population had fallen from nearly 30 per cent in 1950 to 10 per cent, were fighting to hang on to what, rightly or wrongly, they regarded as the cradle of their nation. It is a crucial point that it was not until the bombing began that the Serbs turned to genocide. In the previous 12 months some 2,000 people had been killed on both sides; the bombing precipitated an orgy of rape and murder, and in the next 71 days the Serbs killed at least 10,000 Kosovar Albanians.
However grim the life of Kosovar Albani- ans under the Serbs — and the common comparison with apartheid seems a bit extreme — the KLA bears a heavy respon- sibility for taking up arms, particularly since in President Ibrahim Rugova the Kosovar Albanians had a leader who plausibly preached non-violence and passive resis- tance. Now that they have emerged, thanks to Nato, as top dogs, the KLA and its fol- lowers are displaying the same ethnic ruth- lessness towards the Serbs as the Serbs once showed towards the Kosovar Albani- ans. We have succoured a monster. The Serb population of Kosovo which stood at some 200,000 before the bombing may now be as low as 30,000, although some esti- mates put it at 50,000. In Pristina, where there were perhaps 20,000 Serbs when the British arrived, and 40,000 before the war, there are now no more than 2,000. Most of those who remain are elderly and played no part in the civil war. Every' night brings new stories of Serb houses burnt, and of elderly Serbs stabbed, shot, drowned or otherwise dispatched. One Western diplomat admit- ted to me what is plain to see for anyone with half a brain. In a year or two's time there won't be any Serbs left in Kosovo.
For me this is one final item to enter in the debit column of the war — and I haven't even mentioned the humanitarian disaster that Nato visited on Serbia by its bombing. Happy as I am to see Kosovo free, and Albanians thronging the streets under the noses of British soldiers, I now believe more than ever that this war was wrong. In the end we have exchanged one injustice for another, having helped thou- sands of people to die, who otherwise would not have done, along the way. And now that the Serbs in Kosovo are the persecuted minority, my heart goes out to them. The other day I visited the beautiful Serbian Orthodox monastery at Grananica, near Pristina, and spoke to Bishop Artemije, a vocal critic of Milosevic. With his beard and hat he may not look exactly like an Angli- can bishop, but as he described to me the tribulations of his flock, and black-clad nuns brought us coffee and some throat-searing liqueur, I thought to myself: these are our people and we have forsaken them.
Previous page
