About the Kosovo War back when …

Stephen Walt, who I freely admit is my favorite foreign policy scholar - which doesn’t mean I always agree with him, though I more often than not don’t find reasons to argue with his conclusions – recently mentioned the “avoidable and clumsily waged war over Kosovo in 1999.” (1)

Which reminded me of this, which isn’t new. CNN was reporting it already in 1999:

U.S. Army Gen. Wesley Clark, who is stepping down early as NATO supreme commander, clashed with British commander Gen. Mike Jackson over how to react to the movement of Russian forces in Kosovo after the alliance's victory there, sources say.

Pentagon and NATO sources told CNN that Clark ordered Jackson, the commander of NATO ground forces in Kosovo, to dispatch helicopters to take control of Pristina's airport before the Russians arrived June 12.

Jackson reportedly favored a less confrontational approach and was slow to relay Clark's orders. As a result, Apache helicopters were unable to reach the airport because of bad weather.

After the Russians took control of one end of the airport, Pentagon sources say Clark ordered Jackson to move British tanks onto the runway to prevent Russia from flying in reinforcements.

This time, Jackson delayed while he sought political guidance from London. Clark also appealed to political leaders in Washington for support, the U.S. magazine Newsweek reported Sunday.

Clark's orders were never carried out. "I'm not going to start World War III for you," Jackson is quoted in Newsweek as telling Clark after the incident. [my emphasis] (2)

Most Americans probably think of the Kosovo War as a success story, if they remember it at all. It was a quarter century ago, after all.

[The] Kosovo conflict, (1998–99) [was a] conflict in which ethnic Albanians opposed ethnic Serbs and the government of Yugoslavia (the rump of the former federal state, comprising the republics of Serbia and Montenegro) in Kosovo. The conflict gained widespread international attention and was resolved with the intervention of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). …

On March 24 NATO began air strikes against Serbian military targets. In response, Yugoslav and Serbian forces drove out all of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians, displacing hundreds of thousands of people into Albania, Macedonia (now North Macedonia), and Montenegro. The NATO bombing campaign lasted 11 weeks and eventually expanded to Belgrade, where significant damage to the Serbian infrastructure occurred. In June NATO and Yugoslavia signed a peace accord outlining troop withdrawal and the return of nearly one million ethnic Albanians as well as another 500,000 displaced within the province. Most Serbs left the region, and there were occasional reprisals against those who remained. UN peacekeeping forces were deployed in Kosovo, which came under UN administration. (3)

Anatol Lieven wrote in 2001:

Meanwhile, the limited contingent of U.S. troops on the ground in Kosovo are discovering that they lack both the numbers and the determination to prevent ethnic cleansing by the victorious Albanian majority, or even adequately to patrol Kosovo's border with Serbia proper and, even more importantly, with Macedonia. To accomplish the tasks those soldiers actually face, horses and mules would be more useful than additional smart weapons, fighters, and main battle tanks. [my emphasis] (4)

So, it was risky enough to almost start a shooting war between the NATO forces and Russia, or at least Gen. Mike Jackson thought so, and not implausibly. It didn’t fully achieve its nominal objective of stopping Yugoslavia (essentially Serbia, at that point) from ethnically cleansing the Kosovars. “The massive violation of international norms posed by the Yugoslav campaign of ethnic cleansing-a campaign that allied air power failed to check-required a ground presence to provide immediate, effective protection to the afflicted Kosovar Albanian population.” (5)

And it was not able to stop the Kosovars from ethnically cleansing Serbians from part of that territory. Since we’ve been seeing for months now what ethnic cleansing in Gaza looks like, we know that not restraining it is far from a trivial failing.

And, oh yeah, in the process we managed to bomb China’s embassy in Belgrade:

On May 7, 1999, a U.S. Air Force B-2 Spirit intercontinental range stealth bomber launched a Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) satellite guided bomb over the Yugoslav capital Belgrade to destroy the office of the military attaché in the Chinese embassy. The strike caused 27 casualties, including three deaths, and marked the most significant attack on a diplomatic building since the end of World War II.

Although the attack was launched during NATO air operations against Yugoslav forces, which had begun 44 days prior on March 24, it was later confirmed by CIA director George Tenet that the air strike had been a special mission carried out outside of NATO. It was the only air strike operation of the campaign organized and directed by his agency rather than by the Pentagon.

The CIA, the State Department, and British Foreign Office all maintained the strike was accidental, with the real target meant to be the headquarters of a Yugoslav arms agency. They claimed that the strike was the result of compounded errors, as the embassy was not clearly marked and NATO was using obsolete maps. This was not widely considered credible by experts or officials. [my emphasis] (6)

Gosh, y’all, we didn’t know it was an embassy! Actually, as the story just cited reports, NATO did know exactly where the Chinese embassy was but the CIA (or some other federal agency) was directing that particular strike and somehow they didn’t manage to get the right information. That’s why the accident story “was not widely considered credible.”

China’s leader Xi Jinping recalled the incident on its 25th anniversary last month:

“Twenty-five years ago today, NATO flagrantly bombed the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia, killing three Chinese journalists,” Xi wrote in a letter published by the Serbian outlet Politika on Tuesday.

“This we should never forget. The Chinese people cherish peace, but we will never allow such tragic history to repeat itself,” Xi wrote. (7)

But, hey, that’s “Red China” talking, so who cares what they think, amirite?

Although more recently, when Israel struck an Iranian consulate in Syria, the Biden Administration obviously realized that was a pretty serious incident. Which could have led to much more regional escalation than it did.

Also, Kosovo was legally part of Yugoslavia. The NATO intervention there was in support of a secessionist movement against a sovereign country. It’s a continuing issue in efforts to expand the EU to include Serbia and Kosovo. (8)

Russia then and now has maintained good relations with Serbia. And when they make propaganda reminders of the Kosovo War in connection with NATO’s defense of the sanctity of borders in Ukraine, well, they don’t have to make that part up. That doesn’t justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or annexing parts of its territory. But it’s worth noting that the fallout from the Kosovo War has not been resolved yet, 25 years later.

Notes:

(1) Walt, Stephen (2024): Biden’s Foreign-Policy Problem Is Incompetence. Foreign Policy 06/04/2024. <https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/06/04/biden-foreign-policy-gaza-ukraine-foreign-policy-incompetence/> (Accessed: 2024-04-06).

(2) Sources: Top NATO commanders clashed over Russians' actions in Kosovo. CNN 08/02/1999. <http://edition.cnn.com/WORLD/europe/9908/02/jackson.clark/> (Accessed: 2024-04-06).

(3) Editors (2023): Encyclopedia Britannica 12/04/2023. <https://www.britannica.com/event/Kosovo-conflict> (Accessed: 2024-04-06).

(4) Vickers, Michael G. (2001): Revolution Deferred: Kosovo and the Transformation of War. In: Bacevich, Andrew J. & Cohen, Eliot A., eds. War Over Kosovo: Politics and Strategy in a Global Age, 197. New York: Columbia University Press.

(5) Lieven, Anatol (2001): Hubris and Nemesis: Kosovo and the Pattern of Western Military Ascendancy and Defeat. In: Bacevich & Cohen, op. cit., 120.

(6) Abrams, A.B. (2024): 25 Years Later: How a US Stealth Bomber Strike on China’s Belgrade Embassy Shook the World. The Diplomat 05/07/2024. <https://thediplomat.com/2024/05/25-years-later-how-a-us-stealth-bomber-strike-on-chinas-belgrade-embassy-shook-the-world/> (Accessed: 2024-04-06).

(7) Ahmatović, Ŝejla (2024): Xi Jinping: China will ‘never forget’ NATO bombing its embassy in Serbia. Politico EU 05/07/2024. <https://www.politico.eu/article/china-nato-bombing-serbia-xi-jinping/> (Accessed: 2024-04-06).

(8) Toward Normal Relations between Kosovo and Serbia. International Crisis Group 01/30/2024. <https://www.crisisgroup.org/europe-central-asia/balkans/kosovo-serbia/toward-normal-relations-between-kosovo-and-serbia> (Accessed: 2024-04-06).