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May 2007

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Inhumanitarian Intervention

By Edward Herman
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May 2007
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O ne of the really depressing features of the Democratic political advance is that it forwards the career of Richard Holbrooke, widely thought to be the most likely Secretary of State under a Democratic presidency. Holbrooke represents an aggressively imperialist United States, not perhaps at its irrationally ultra-dangerous as in the case of a Cheney, but not much better. He proved his credentials for the merciless pursuit of the “national interest” in his stint in the State Department under Carter, where he was the front person for apologetics for Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos and even more dramatically in the protection of the murderous Indonesian occupation of East Timor, a support policy which had not eased at the time he told Congress on December 4, 1979, that “the welfare of the East Timorese people is the major objective of our policy toward East Timor.” For Holbrooke, it was not the Indonesian killing but the “centrally directed Fretilin armed activity” that presented “a significant problem,” finally allegedly “contained” in early 1979 (a claim that was contested by East Timorese refugees). 

It is revealing that Holbrooke was on very collegial terms with his successor in Indonesia, Paul Wolfowitz, telling an Italian audience back in 2000 that Wolfowitz’s “recent activities illustrate…the degree to which there are still common themes between the parties,” and that “Paul and I have been in frequent touch to make sure that we keep [East Timor] out of the presidential campaign, where it would do no good to American or Indonesian interests”—note his omission of East Timorese or “human rights” interests. Wolfowitz and Holbrooke clearly speak the same language. (The quotes are from Tim Shorrock, “Paul Wolfowitz, Reagan’s Man in Indonesia, Is Back at the Pentagon,” Foreign Policy In Focus , February, 2001.) 

Holbrooke’s admirers at Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch are able to ignore Holbrooke’s record on East Timor and the Philippines because these are not their favorite country subjects. They prefer focusing on places where U.S. targets, rather than U.S. client states, are allegedly misbehaving and violating human rights. 

Both Carr and HRW have focused heavily on Bosnia and Kosovo, an area in which Hol- brooke played an important role, once again in a Democratic (Clin- ton) administration. U.S. policy there was designed: (1) to preserve and expand the NATO military bloc; (2) to humiliate the European Community (later the European Union) over its inability to provide a decisive threat-making and militarily punishing force in its own backyard; and (3) to destroy any holdouts in the form of socialist and planned economic arrangements.  

To serve these ends the Clinton administration and Holbrooke sabotaged a stream of peace efforts between 1992 and the Dayton accord of 1995; encouraged Bosnian Muslims to refuse to settle until their military position was improved; helped arm Muslims and Croats to shift that balance; and finally settled at Dayton with an agreement that imposed a Western-managed neo-colonial regime on a Bosnia that 12 years later is an undemocratic and much divided mini-state. Holbrooke bears substantial responsibility for this lagged settlement and failed resolution. Amusingly, under his watch and with Clinton administration connivance, thousands of Mujahadeen were brought into Bosnia to help their fellow Muslims, and Al Qaeda came in as well, using Bosnia as a training ground—2 of the 19 September 11, 2001 bombers, as well as the “mastermind” of the attack, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, all “fought” in Bosnia. Osama bin Laden visited Izetbegovic in Sarajevo and had “service” offices in both Zagreb and Sarajevo—awkward points that are carefully suppressed by the mainstream media and Holbrooke’s Carr, HRW, and other allies and admirers. 

As the engineer of the Dayton Accord in 1995, Holbrooke had to acknowledge at the time that Milosevic played a positive role in that settlement. (“People keep asking whether Milosevic is going to deliver on the peace agreement,” Holbrooke said at Dayton. “It’s impossible to answer that question right now. All we know is that he has delivered on everything...over the past four months.”) But this, and other real world facts, didn’t prevent him from declaring at the time of Milosevic’s death that “Milosevic started four wars. He lost them all. The biggest of them all was the one in Bosnia, where over 300,000 people died, two-and-a-half million homeless. And we bombed him in August and September of 1995. We should have done this much earlier.” 

These are the words of a demagogue without a vestige of intellectual scruple. Milosevic didn’t start those four wars, Slovenian and Croatian nationalists did, with encouragement from Germany, and the “wars” began as conflicts within Yugoslavia, not cases of external attack such as the one NATO engaged in against Yugoslavia in 1999. Holbrooke gives the figure of 300,000 dead in Bosnia, although two establishment research organizations (one sponsored by the Prosecutor’s Office of the Yugoslavia Tribunal) had each long before come up with totals of about 100,000 dead. 

Holbrooke’s vested interest in the establishment narrative about how NATO saved Kosovo as well as Bosnia from evil men, as well as his lack of intellectual scruple, is well illustrated in his recent op-ed column on “Russia’s Test In Kosovo,” in the Washington Post (March 13, 2007). According to Holbrooke, the Bush administration, obsessed with Iraq, paid too little attention to “a series of Russian challenges to the stability of Europe.” Putin engaged in policies that sometimes “look like blackmail” (i.e., his energy cut-offs and threats, by implication the kind of thing the United States would never do), and Putin even had the audacity to “harshly criticize” U.S. policy at Munich with Gates, Lieberman, McCain, and Lindsey Graham “sitting in front of him.” Presumably, the Putin stress on Bush’s unilateralism, the attack on Iraq in violation of the UN Charter, the provocative attempt at missile placement in Eastern Europe, and renewal of a nuclear arms race, was offensive to this key foreign policy representative of the Democratic Party as well as to Gates, Lieberman, McCain, and Graham. 

“Now a key test of Russia’s relationship with the West is at hand, and Russia’s actions could determine whether there is another war in Europe.” He is not referring to the immensely provocative effort of the Bush administration to place new missiles in Europe near Russia’s borders. He means the threat of a war in Kosovo that might possibly occur if Russia supports Serbia in not giving Kosovo its independence. Do you suppose if Russia sought to place missiles in Cuba or Venezuela Holbrooke would fail to consider that destabilizing? 

In this Post article on Kosovo, Holbrooke says that the bombing war was closed with a UN Security Council resolution that left the final status of Kosovo “unresolved.” This is a half-truth at best—the language of that resolution was clear: that Kosovo would remain part of Yugoslavia. (Resolution 1244 of June 10, 1999 is explicit that calling for “substantial autonomy” for Kosovo requires that this be done while “Reaffirming the commitment of all Member States to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the other States of the region, as set out in the Helsinki Final Act and annex 2.”) It was only “unresolved” because the Kosovo Albanians and United States were determined to ignore the clear statement and grant the Albanians full independence. 

The resolution also calls on the occupation forces to perform “basic civilian administrative functions” (which would include maintaining the peace and protecting minorities from violence) and for “demilitarization of UCK” (the KLA). Hol- brooke says that “NATO has protected the region ever since.” This is untrue: the NATO occupiers incorporated the terroristic KLA into the Kosovo Protection Corps and under the auspices of these protectors several thousand Serbs and Roma have been killed, 200,000 Serbs and Roma have fled Kosovo in what Jan Oberg has called “the greatest ethnic cleansing in the Balkans” (in proportionate terms), and Kosovo is a fear-ridden, mafia-dominated, broken society doing a large trade in drugs and women.  

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There is no hint at this reality in Holbrooke’s account and of course he doesn’t mention that his boss Bill Clinton said that the objective of the NATO war was to make Kosovo into a “multi-ethnic, tolerant, inclusive democracy.” It had the opposite effect, as any honest person could have anticipated, and it is today considerably more intolerant and non-inclusive than it was before the NATO war. While Belgrade and Serbia are truly multi- ethnic and are not subject to any trace of ethnic cleansing, Pristina and Kosovo have terrified and shrinking minorities and ethnic cleansing is active and threatening. 

Holbrooke favors the independence plan of former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari, and he explains that Serbia has forfeited its rights in Kosovo as “a result of the policies of the former Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic.” Milo- sevic was actually elected, in contrast with Suharto in Indonesia or Marcos in the Philippines, neither of whom Holbrooke ever called a dictator. And if a country can be made to forfeit a piece of its territory where inhabitants are badly treated, wouldn’t that require that Indonesia forfeit any claims to East Timor—which was actually held based on open aggression by Indonesia—where Holbrooke, instead of calling for forfeiture supported Indonesia’s genocidal violence? Shouldn’t NATO and the Kosovo Albanians have forfeited the right to rule Kosovo by their failures to protect large minorities there from brutal ethnic cleansing? Shouldn’t Israel be forced out of the occupied territories and the United States out of Iraq as a result of criminal behavior? 

Holbrooke also fails to mention that prior to the NATO bombing war in 1999 the CIA was training and supplying the KLA in Kosovo and encouraging them to believe that by provoking the Serbs into retaliation against Kosovo Albanians they might induce a NATO intervention. Former NATO Secretary General George Robertson has stated that before the bombing war the KLA killed more people in Kosovo than the Serbs. Shouldn’t this willingness to terrorize before the bombing war as well as after cause them to forfeit any right to independence? Shouldn’t the U.S. support of that prewar terror make it ineligible for any role in Kosovo? 

Holbrooke says that if the Russians don’t support Kosovo independence, “NATO, which is pledged to keep peace in Kosovo, could find itself back in battle in Europe.” What hypocrisy. There has been no peace in Kosovo, with steady killings, massive ethnic cleansing, endemic fear, and with no end in sight given the ideology and aims of the dominant Kosovo Albanian leadership. 

Holbrooke finds the Russians quite unprincipled, with their leadership “having no feeling whatsoever for the Serbs,” whereas Hol- brooke and company really have feeling for the people of Kosovo (like he had for the East Timorese) and want peace and human rights protection, although U.S. intervention from 1992-1995 prevented peace and in Kosovo brought about an ugly war and then a NATO- KLA regime that has engaged in ecumenical ethnic cleansing beyond anything that happened in pre-war Kosovo—where the difficulties were stoked by CIA policies. 

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Holbrooke has had an almost regular monthly column in the Washington Post since January 2005. He is greatly admired by Samantha Power and her colleagues at the Carr Center of Human Rights Policy, and by Kenneth Roth and other leaders of Human Rights Watch. He may be our next Secretary of State if the establishment “left” is triumphant. Holbrooke should provide continuity from Powell-Rice and display, as he said in reference to his buddy Paul Wolfowitz that “there are still common themes between the parties.” In short, a ruthless imperialism is here to stay, barring a political turn not yet in sight, though desired and supported by what may even be a public majority at this juncture. 

Z  


Edward S. Herman is an economist and an author of numerous articles and books. 

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