( * A version of this document originally was published as Chapter 10 in David Chandler, Ed., Rethinking Human Rights: Critical Approaches to International Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 196-216.)

 

 

MORALITY'S AVENGING ANGELS: THE NEW HUMANITARIAN CRUSADERS

IN THE KOSOVO WAR AND NEW WORLD ORDER

 

By Edward S. Herman an David Peterson

 

Part I: Introduction

 

Operation Allied Force, NATO's 1999 war against Yugoslavia, was not a moral venture, either in the intent of its managers or in its actual effects. True, the war was carried out in the name of an humanitarian action on behalf of the Kosovo Albanians and avenging the human rights atrocities allegedly being committed against them by Serbia as of the start of the bombing, or "to protect thousands of innocent people in Kosovo from a mounting military offensive," as the American President said at the outset of the war (Clinton, 1999a).  But though the war garnered a great deal of support throughout the NATO-bloc powers due to government and media propagandists instilling a widespread belief in the authenticity of its moral goals,[1] the stated goals are contradicted by the institutional nature of the states prosecuting the war and the kinds of forces that determine state policy more generally, by the solid evidence that exists of the other, non-humanitarian ends shaping NATO policy,[2] by the history and character of the dominant NATO powers, and, most important of all, by the actual results of the war.

 

No state is a moral institution, particularly no Great Power in the execution of its foreign policy.  On the contrary, states and their policies are largely shaped by economic and political interests and strategic considerations, not by humane values; and the greater the power of a state to bestride the world's stage, to plunder, butcher, and ravish in the lying name of avenging wrongs, the more this holds true (Gilpin, 1987; Amin, 1994; Kolko, 1994: 373-451). When certain humanitarian crises around the world suddenly receive a great deal of attention within a society, and a government responds to them, as the U.S. Government and the other NATO-bloc powers claimed to do with regard to the crisis in Kosovo in 1998-1999, it is always necessary to examine the real causes of that attention, which regularly turn out to be serviceable to larger material and political interests not unwelcome to the policy-making authorities, rather than humanitarian concerns. Conversely, the same point can be made as regards the lack of attention to other humanitarian crises in other countries where both a highly publicized attention and a governmental response to them of a comparable degree would be objectionable to those same powerful interests shaping policy. Thus, for example, neither a random process of selection nor the relative scale of an humanitarian crisis or human rights abuses in any given case are remotely sufficient to explain the Great Power officials', media's, and parallel New Humanitarians' virtual neglect of the mass killings and ethnic cleansings of the Kurdish population in Turkey during the 1990s or the East Timorese by Indonesian-sponsored forces in 1998-1999, and their intense focus on human rights atrocities in the former Yugoslavia, 1991-2001.[3]

 

Among the New Humanitarians who comprise the subject of this chapter, NATO's war over Kosovo has been held up as the paradigmatic example of the "humanitarian" intervention, nothing less than the "restoration of the Kosovars to their homeland," Geoffrey Robertson writes, a "great humanitarian" achievement, with the NATO powers showing an "unprecedented attention to obeying the laws of war" (Robertson, 2000: 414).[4]  But the Kosovo crisis was in fact the fourth in a series of civil (i.e., internal) wars fought over the fate of the old Yugoslavia's federal structure, the right of the republics to declare their independence from it, and the right of the various ethnic populations within those republics to choose which emerging state they would become citizens of.[5]  And though the New Humanitarians have obsessively portrayed these multi-layered internal conflicts as instances of little more than "Serb insurrectionary wars" (Ramet, 1999: ) or even Greater Serb Aggression (i.e., as aggressive, extra-territorial wars rather than as internal or civil wars, launched from Belgrade across the newly internationally recognized borders by Slobodan Milosevic and his fellow Serbs, or what in its serial indictments of Milosevic et al. for crimes in Bosnia-Herzegovina issued by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia calls the "joint criminal enterprise" of the "forcible and permanent removal of the majority of non-Serbs, principally Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats, from large areas of the Republic" (ICTY, 2001: Par. 6), but not as constitutional contests over the fate of the old Federation or the right of the conflicting parties to choose in which new state to live), what the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in its 1862 Prize Cases decision holds true not only of the status of the belligerents in the U.S. Civil War, but also of the wars over the breakup of the unified Yugoslavia: a "civil war always begins by insurrection against the lawful authority of the government"—precisely what was being contested between the breakaway republics and the remnants of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia during the 1989-1992 period. This Supreme Court decision continues: "When the party in rebellion occupy and hold in a hostile manner a certain portion of territory; have declared their independence; have cast off their allegiance; have organized armies; have commenced hostilities against their former sovereign, the world acknowledges them as belligerents and the contest is war….Therefore we are of the opinion that the President had a right, jure belli, to institute a blockade of ports in possession of the states in rebellion, which neutrals are bound to regard" (in Wright, 1971: 43).[6]  Doubtless, the same logic applies to the rights and duties of the leadership of the Yugoslav Federation, ca. 1991-92.

 

Over the course of the past decade and now into this one as well, the New Humanitarians have helped to establish their reputations as New Humanitarians almost exclusively off the bloody wars over the fate of Yugoslavia (and to a much lesser degree over the 1994 slaughters in Rwanda).  So, contra the New Humanitarians, what, exactly, were the wars over the fate of Yugoslavia really about?

 

The Yugoslav (i.e., "South Slav") solution to this region of Southeastern Europe's "national problem"—Yugoslavia's "perennial" and ultimately insoluble problem—had always been a tenuous one.  "Failure, or the risk of failure, to maintain the [united, Federal] state throughout the [seven] decades of the country's existence has been an ever present possibility," Lenard Cohen an Paul Warwick write in a very important but little studied book about the historical fragility of ethnic relations in the country.  Historically—but especially since the inter-ethnic carnage of World War II—Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the Kosovo province of Serbia—and note that these would be the three most bloodily contested areas in the 1990s—had all been "areas of high ethnic fragmentation" and "persistent hotbeds of political criminality," that is to say, political criminality in the sense of "counterrevolutionary" political crimes, or nationalist crimes against the Yugoslav ideal.[7]  For Yugoslavia, ethnic stability (i.e., between the six officially recognized "nations"[8]) had always been "engineered by a political minority," with the Communist Party's leadership keenly aware "that it was the failure of interwar pluralism and the multi-party system to resolve the national problem which had led to the violent confrontation of ethnic animosities during World War II…."  Throughout Yugoslavia's brief history, Cohen and Warwick conclude, ethnic unity "was more an artefact of party pronouncements, induced personnel rotation, and institutional reorganization, than an outcome of genuine political incorporation or enhanced cohesion among the different segments of the population" (Cohen and Warwick, 1983: 146-162). 

 

This longstanding, ethnically fragile state of affairs is what provided the historical symbolism and vocabulary out of which each of the wars over the breakup of Yugoslavia emerged in the post-Tito period (May 1980-), after a serious, decade-long (now two decades long) economic depression and the constitutional crises of the 1989-1992 period (Cohen, 1995: 45-77; Woodward, 1995b: 339-392; Hayden, 1999a)—essentially, the de facto death of the Yugoslav Federation in four of the republics, coupled with the de jure survival of its institutions there and in the remainder of the rump Federation, with first Slovenia and Croatia declaring their independence from the old Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in June 1991, followed ten months later by the Muslim-led government of Bosnia-Herzegovina in April 1992.[9]  And this same ethnically fragile, and indeed highly volatile, state of affairs was true not the least with regard to the causes of the 1998-1999 civil wars[10] between the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and the Serbian forces over the fate of Kosovo.[11]

 

Given the evidence, there is no doubt that the real effects of NATO's supposedly "humanitarian war" against Yugoslavia in 1999 were in fact damaging to both human rights and human welfare (unless of course the respect for human rights is construed selectively along national lines, as the New Humanitarians habitually do[12]), as well as to most of the objectives claimed by the war-makers.  Instead, NATO's bombing campaign greatly intensified what had already been an ugly and brutal civil war, with an estimated 1,800-2,000 dead on all sides (though most of them ethnic Albanians) (Dienstbier, 2000a: Par. 42; Chomsky, 2000: 104), but a war whose hostilities had largely been brought under control by an agreement signed between the six member Contract Group and Belgrade in October 1998 (though negotiated by the American U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke and NATO's Supreme Allied Commander General Wesley Clark under the threat of force from Washington[13]), thus allowing many of the 250,000 refugees from the fighting earlier that year to return to their homes prior to the onset of the annually harsh 1998-1999 winter. This relatively stable situation held true throughout the fall and winter months until the termination of the Rambouillet process (March 18, 1999), the OSCE's withdrawal of the members of its Kosovo Verification Mission against the expressed objections of the Serbian Parliament (March 20), and the onset of NATO's war (March 24).[14]  From March 24 through the June 10 end of the war and the final withdrawal of Serbian forces from Kosovo on June 20, perhaps as many as 7,000 or so people were killed on all sides,[15] and the war generated a massive refugee crisis six times worse than the refugee crisis of 1998, forcing some 863,000 ethnic Albanians to flee the province, along with another 100,000 ethnic Serbs and other ethnic minorities, and another 590,000 people displaced internally, based on the combination of fear, intense zones of conflict in KLA strongholds, and forced expulsions by Serbian forces (OSCE, 1999a: "Forced Expulsions"). In the words of the Canadian OSCE observer in Kosovo, Rollie Keith, NATO's war "turned a human rights crisis into a catastrophe" (Keith, 1999), with U.N. Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Kosovo, Jiri Dienstbier, adding that that the war "has not solved any human problem, but only multiplied the existing problems" (Dienstbier, 2000d).  Last, war-related destruction and environmental damage throughout Serbia (Kosovo included) may be incalculable but was unquestionably enormous, with serious long-term ramifications for all of the countries in the region.[16]

 

But more important for students of American power and ideology and the New Humanitarians' enlistment in the service of Empire, it has also been documented that the NATO powers, the United States in particular, had underwritten and encouraged the insurgency of the KLA by pre-bombing training and support (Walker and Laverty, 2000; Beaumont et al., 2001).  Thus even though the October 1998 agreement between the NATO powers and Belgrade had called on the Yugoslav armed forces to withdraw and the KLA to demobilize, the KLA was never a party to the agreement and in fact never did demobilize, exploiting the withdrawal of the Yugoslav forces from zones of conflict to re-occupy territory it had lost in Kosovo (the KLA was estimated to have controlled as much as 40 percent of the territory in the province in 1998) and to repeatedly carry out hit-and-run operations against the security forces and civilians. This underwriting of "terrorists" (U.S. Special Envoy Robert Gelbard's assessment of the KLA in February 1998) and failure to curb KLA provocations calls into question NATO's concern over human rights violations by Yugoslav forces against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo alike.  On the contrary, as George Kenney reports, one unnamed U.S. official told him that throughout the entire Rambouillet process, Washington "'deliberately set the bar higher than the Serbs could accept'. The Serbs needed, according to the official, a little bombing to see reason," Kenney adds, all of which suggests NATO's determination to opt for war rather than peace (Kenney, 1999). 

 

The actual effects of the war also point to a non-human rights agenda.  First, it cannot be denied that almost the entire refugee crisis of 1999 was generated during the bombing campaign, rather than prior to it.  Moreover, although President Clinton said at the time that the primary aims of the war were to bring "stability" to the region and to end the "ethnic cleansing" of the Kosovo Albanians by Serbia, thus allowing the refugees (a disproportionate percentage of which were ethnic Serbs, it is worth noting[17]) to return to their homes, and all of the people in Kosovo to live together in harmony based on "the principle of multi-ethnic, tolerant, inclusive democracy" and "against the idea that statehood must be based entirely on ethnicity" (Clinton, 1999b), in fact the war not only inflamed, it permanently entrenched, ethnic hatreds and the principle of monoethnic statehood (or a political unit modeled on the classical racist European notion of the nation-state (Hayden, 1992; Hayden, 1999; Hayden, 1999b)).[18] These unnecessary catastrophes were then followed by a postwar pogrom and ethnic cleansing by KLA cadres, killing large numbers of the province's ethnic minorities (well over a thousand) and causing the flight of an estimated 330,000 ethnic non-Albanians (Dienstbier, 2000a: Par. 43; Dienstbier, 2000b). This post-war cleansing and minority flight took place under NATO's rule, but were contrary to both Clinton's and NATO's proclaimed goal as well as the commitment undertaken by the U.N. and NATO at the end of the bombing, under U.N. Resolution 1244, to demilitarize the KLA and to protect minorities (S/RES/1244, 1999).  This NATO-protected ethnic cleansing of the province was more ecumenical and extensive than anything done by the Serbs in Kosovo before March 24, 1999 to supposedly justify NATO's resort to war, in what Jan Oberg, the director of the Swedish-based Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, has called "the largest ethnic cleansing in the Balkans [in percentage terms]" (Oberg, 2000).

 

Today, the province of Kosovo has become a peculiar form of quasi-independent non-state in transition to an unknown but unpromising destiny: Fear-ridden, lawless, with a high level of inter-ethnic conflict, and—on the model of Bosnia-Herzegovina—a de facto colony run by foreign powers (NATO, the European Union, and dozens of NGOs) in the name of "democracy"—or "democracy without consent," in Robert M. Hayden's telling phrase, an "artificially multi-ethnic" state-within-a-state complete with "sham elections" that cover over the absence of either local authority or real democratic institutions, and whose alleged multi-ethnic institutions exist only "on paper" but whose actual multi-ethnicity is shrinking steadily due to voluntary flight and ethnic cleansing, as David Chandler observed in his report on the November 17, 2001 provincial elections (Hayden, 1998; Chandler, 2001).

 

Finally, by supporting and providing a home base for—or by harboring—the KLA, NATO has allowed Kosovo to become a base for other incarnations of the KLA to launch serious insurgencies within Macedonia and southern Serbia, with other regions having an Albanian minority perhaps to follow.

 

In short, sticking to the evidence provided by the actual consequences of NATO's war provides overwhelming support for the conclusion that, from a genuine humanitarian perspective, the war was a disaster, one that has taken a heavy human toll in Kosovo and is still wreaking havoc in the wider region. "If ethnic hatred triumphs [in Kosovo]," the OSCE warned in late 1999, "then everything that people of good will here and their friends in the international community struggled for during the past ten years would have been in vain.  We cannot allow this to happen" (OSCE, 1999b).  But on the ground, the outcome that NATO's military intervention and open-ended occupation and administration of Kosovo has achieved can be summed up in eight short words: The triumph of ethnic hatred and ethnic apartheid—in the grandest European tradition.  For the New Humanitarians to hold the Kosovo model up as the paradigmatic example of humanitarian intervention is scandalous indeed, and we believe it represents nothing less than a perversion, even the negation, of true  humanitarianism.

 

 

 

Part 2: The New Humanitarians to the Barricades

 

Despite the sorry, and still incomplete, record of NATO's war over Kosovo, despite the New Humanitarians' equally sorry record with respect to all of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, and despite the traditional aversion of human rights advocates and the Left more generally to war as a policy option, but especially wars waged by the Great Powers against weak countries or non-state agents, one of the most striking features of NATO's 1999 war was the support given to it by intellectuals, human rights officials, artists and writers, lawyers and jurists, and "advocacy journalism" (see Philip Hammond's chapter), a number of whom present themselves as being "on the Left," but who nevertheless accepted NATO's official claim that the war's main objective was both humanitarian in intent and necessitated by a massive humanitarian crisis either already underway or in the offing.[19] Of course, it was their willingness to take this leap of faith into supporting NATO's war that gave them ready access to the mainstream media, in a kind of power/social dynamic not unlike the one described above, in which taking the right side in a given conflict (i.e., that of the Great Powers) and criticizing the right enemies (i.e., whomever the Great Powers are eager to attack) correlates positively with media access, prestige, career advancement, monetary inputs, including funding from major non-governmental organizations, and even a kind of festishization of certain star individuals, some of whom we deal with below.  With their media access, both in terms of bylines and use as sources, they complemented and reinforced the messages of official sources as well as the rest of the media's biases producing, collectively, a very broad-based, war-supportive canvas of right-thinking ideas and images.  In short, we believe that the power/social dynamic described herein, a structure of power and ideology (i.e., saying what the Great Powers need to be said at any given moment) and the socially sanctioned rewards that follow (i.e., prestige enhancement, media access, and the like), serves to foreground and promote those commentators whose work is serviceable to the same larger political and material interests not unwelcome to policy-making authorities, rather than to the quality or the accuracy of their work.

 

The defining characteristics of the New Humanitarians are (1) that they are experts at taking the "right" sides in conflicts, in which the "rightness" of their often unstated, though nevertheless clearly exhibited, allegiances is determined by how well it coordinates with U.S. and/or  NATO policy; (2) that they reject, and even overturn, traditional humanitarianism's principles of strict neutrality, impartiality, independence, non-violence, and the provision of care; and (3) that they believe that there exists for the Great Powers (or select "coalitions of the willing," but a right that never seems to extend to Official Enemies or Lesser Powers) a "humanitarian" right or even duty to intervene by state violence to terminate human rights abuses based largely, if not exclusively, upon the willingness of United States or NATO to wage war in the name of avenging human wrongs. In the balance of this section we will discuss, briefly, who some of these New Humanitarians are, what their real commitments are, and their linkages and other sources of influence. Then in Part 3, we will deal in more detail with their beliefs and analyses of events in the former Yugoslavia as well as in other humanitarian crises which they largely ignore.

 

Among the New Humanitarians, and the set that we will study most intensively here, are the academic writers Timothy Garton Ash and Mary Kaldor, political figures such as Vaclav Havel and Bernard Kouchner, human rights stars such as Kenneth Roth and Aryeh Neier, artists and writers such as Susan Sontag, lawyers such as Geoffrey Robertson, and journalists such as Christopher Hitchens, Tim Judah, David Rieff, and Michael Ignatieff.  But there are many other New Humanitarians worthy of mention, including (among scores of others) M. Cherif Bassiouni,[20] Antonio Cassese, Ivo Daalder, Bogdan Denitch, Richard Falk, Richard Goldstone, Philip Gourevitch, Roy Gutman, Michael Glennon, Jurgen Habermas, David Held, Louis Henkin, Paul Hockenos, Stanley Hoffmann, Bernard-Henri Levy, Andrew Linklater, James Mayall, Martha Minow, Michael O'Hanlon, Diana Orentlicher, Steven Ratner, David Rohde,[21] William Shawcross, Brian Urquahart, Ruth Wedgwood, Marc Weller, Nicholas J. Wheeler, and Ian Williams. Of the 40 individuals listed here (and the list could be greatly expanded), Havel is a writer, intellectual and political leader; at least eight have worked for governments or NATO-related organizations involved in policy towards the former Yugoslavia (Cassese, Goldstone, Daalder, Havel, Hockenos, Kouchner, O'Hanlon, Urquhart); three are or have had prominent affiliations with human rights organizations (Kouchner, Neier and Roth); 10 are journalists (Gourevitch, Gutman, Hockenos, Hitchens, Ignatieff, Judah, Rieff, Rohde, Shawcross, Williams); 20 are academics (Bassiouni, Garton Ash, Denitch, Falk, Glennon, Habermas, Held, Henkin, Hoffmann, Ignatieff, Kaldor, Levy, Linklater, Mayall, Minow, Orentlicher, Ratner, Wedgwood, Weller, and Wheeler); five of the academics are professors of law (Falk, Henkin, Bassiouni, Orentlicher, Ratner); one,  Robertson, is a lawyer; Cassese is a former President of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and now one of the Tribunal's judges; and Sontag is more or less a free-floating intellectual, artist and writer.[22]

 

During the Bosnian crisis and, later, the crisis in Kosovo as well, the New Humanitarians very openly and eagerly "chose sides," most of them enlisting in the fray during the fighting within Bosnia in the early 1990s and immediately attaching themselves to the under-gunned Bosnian Muslim side, then engaged in civil wars with Bosnian Croat forces and especially Bosnian Serb forces. David Rieff for one forthrightly espoused "the Bosnian cause," and with reference to Kosovo was not only "in favor of more bombing," but asserted that "I would be in the lead vehicle" in a ground war" (Rieff, 1999c). Rieff refers to his comrade in arms Michael Ignatieff as having "campaigned for the bombing" and as having served as "an advocate" for a policy of Great Power violence against the Bosnian Serbs (Rieff, 2000b).   True, the New Humanitarians have often criticized NATO, but almost always for NATO's alleged "failure" to move against the enemy with sufficient violence and terror, for showing an excessive risk aversion, and for their "triumph of the lack of will" (Ignatieff, 2000b; Gow, 1997).   This practice of limiting their dissent to a very narrow range of themes advocating the resort to greater levels of Great Power violence has given their work a false aura of independence from political authority and won for them a false moral stature (or, to put it another way: this moral stature, the coin in which they are paid a grossly exorbitant sum, is one of the socially sanctioned rewards they receive for having the courage to take the right side), but the sides they chose consistently coincided precisely with those fixated upon by NATO's political leaders. Thus, throughout their work, whether as administrators, reporters, expert sources, legal theorists, and the like, the New Humanitarians have collectively served as cheerleaders for the Great Powers, urging their team (the U.S., NATO) on to a more aggressive style of play and ultimate victory.

 

The New Humanitarians have been members of a network of like-minded people who are often friends that work in coordination with government officials and government-linked thinktanks, bonding and hobnobbing among themselves in Sarajevo or at international conferences and being fed information by U.S. and Bosnian Muslim officials.[23]  They review one another's books and cite and laud one another as authorities profusely.[24] "In these diverse contexts, prestige accumulates in each of these higher circles, and the members of each borrow status from one another," C. Wright Mills noted five decades ago with regard to what he called the "power elite."  "Their self-images are fed by these accumulations and these borrowings….They define one another as among those who count, and who, accordingly, must be taken into account.  Each of them as a member of the power [or New Humanitarian] elite comes to incorporate into his own integrity, his own honor, his own conscience, the viewpoints, the expectations, the values of the others" (Mills, 1956: 282-283).  Sometimes, they work together in establishment operations such as the Independent International Commission on Kosovo (Richard Falk, Richard Goldstone, Michael Ignatieff, Mary Kaldor, Martha Minow), the International Crisis Group (William Shawcross), the American Academy in Berlin (Paul Hockenos), George Soros' Open Society Institute (Aryeh Neier), and offshoots of these and similar institutions. The first three groups are heavily funded by NATO governments, and have on their boards numerous NATO government officials, past and present. Indeed, the important human rights group Human Rights Watch, which was vocally supportive of NATO's ever-more aggressive war against the Bosnian Serbs and later Serbia itself, takes money from the U.S. government and has on its board a number of U.S. government officials, past and present.[25]  Thus to borrow C. Wright Mills's phrase, the movers and shakers among the New Humanitarians have very much become a part of the "shape and meaning of the power elite today." 

 

Rieff lauds Ignatieff's "close relations with such important figures in the West's political and military leadership as Richard Holbrooke and Gen. Wesley Clark" (Rieff, 2000b); and in the Introduction to his book Virtual War, Ignatieff acknowledges his work's debt to Holbrooke, Clark, and former Hague chief prosecutor Louise Arbour, among others (Ignatieff, 2000a: 6). It is clear that the New Humanitarians are part of an establishment that now includes NATO authorities as well as human rights groups, the Hague Tribunal, and the mainstream media, which treats them as honored members, authentic and objective experts, and even turns them into celebrities. Their privileged access to the media, which they share with their "good friends" in such places of power as NATO's leading governments, helps to produce a media echo chamber in which few serious opposing views or even corrections of error can be heard over the din of their chatter.

 

Choosing sides, a simple-minded identification of one side as guilty of Evil, and a simple-minded identification with the victims of the evildoers—these constantly recurring themes in the work of the New Humanitarians have caused them to take an extremely selective and highly channeled view of humanitarian and human rights issues around the world. This was true, for example, during the wars in Bosnia, and it continued through the end of NATO's war over Kosovo and beyond, where the rights and the welfare of the Bosnian Muslims and the Kosovo Albanians, as seen by the Bosnian Muslims and the Kosovo Albanians themselves, have been the New Humanitarians' main, if not exclusive, standard of appraisal for passing judgment on the necessity and justice of NATO's wars and their aftermaths.  Needless to say, the obverse of this has been a demonization and dehumanization of the Serbs, whether in Croatia, Bosnia, or Serbia itself, in a process that approaches racism, as is evidenced by the fact that their work shows them to be minimally troubled by the wartime and postwar hardships and ethnic cleansings suffered by the Krajina Serbs of Croatia, by the Bosnia Serbs, or by the Serbs, Roma, Turks, Jews, and other ethnic minorities of Kosovo—the latter minority groups all being equally Kosovars, but not in the eyes of Kosovo's Albanian population, hence not in the eyes of the New Humanitarians.

 

Bernard Kouchner, who Michael Ignatieff once called a "reluctant imperialist" (Ignatieff, 2000e), and who was the first New Humanitarian proconsul in post-bombing Kosovo, once stated in public to a crowd of Kosovo Albanians, "I love all peoples, but some more than others, and that is the case with you." He also stated that "You have fought for a better Kosovo, a Kosovo where people can lead a peaceful and happy life." But in reply to a Kosovo Serb who once asked him why the same NATO powers that had just driven the Serbian forces from Kosovo couldn't stop the violence by the "liberated" ethnic Albanians against the rest of the province's ethnic minorities, or simply allow people to live together peacefully, Kouchner replied, "I know the history of the Serbian people....We know well that because of the evils to which the Albanian people were subjected, a common life is not possible at this time" (Kouchner, 1999c). This staggering expression of bias on the part of a high-ranking U.N. administrator, with the Serbs and other ethnic non-Albanians apparently not counting as "people" in the full sense of the term, and his de facto alliance with the KLA—note that under Kouchner, the KLA was incorporated into the Kosovo Protection Corps, its war criminal leaders Hashim Thaci and Agim Ceku given honored status[26]—helps explain Kouchner's complaisance at the massive ethnic cleansing under his New Humanitarian rule in Kosovo.

 

Nor is Kouchner alone—far from it, in fact.  Almost uniformly, the New Humanitarians use the word 'Kosovar' to denote the ethnic Albanian inhabitants of Kosovo only, and their concern for the mistreatment of non-Albanians has been minimal.  Thus Ian Williams can write at the war's end about the urgency of resettling the "Kosovar refugees," while at the same time admonishing the "Serbian population of Kosovo, like that of the Krajina, will probably, and wisely, take the road back to Serbia.  And in five years, there will be an independent Kosova" (Williams, 1999a). Some ethnic cleansings are an outrage; others, entirely acceptable. 

 

A closely related effect of the New Humanitarians' manichean worldview of Good versus Evil—at one point, Christopher Hitchens wrote at the end of the savage fighting in Bosnia-Herzegovina, "This is a war between all those who favor ethnic and religious partition and all those who oppose it" (Hitchens, 1995)— is their reactionary, even profoundly Westphalian,[27] view of what constitutes humanitarian policy. As noted earlier, traditional humanitarianism meant a policy that was politically neutral and designed "to protect the lives and dignity of victims of war and internal violence and to provide them with assistance," to quote the mission statement of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC, 2001d).  But the New Humanitarians vocally casts aside the ICRC's principles of impartiality, neutrality, and independence, and advocate instead partisanship and the reliance on, cooperation with, and even the integration into the structures of Western state violence, courtesy the U.S.-led NATO bloc. And in a perfectly pre-U.N. Charter and even pre-League of Nations fashion, they consider the Great (though overwhelmingly American) Powers' resort to the most extreme form of state violence (or war) not only as an important facet of humanitarian policy, but as an historically groundbreaking, even a transformative "Grotian moment" and "post-Westphalian" advance in the cause of human rights, perpetual peace, and "cosmopolitan" democracy and world order (Held, 1995: 219-286; Falk, 1998: 3-31; 49-107; Linklater, 1998: 179-212).  As New Humanitarian Michael Ignatieff, a member of the Independent International Commission on Kosovo as well as the Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, prescribes, in certain circumstances "the international community has to take sides and do so with crushing force" (Ignatieff, 2000c).  That this represents the negation of humanitarianism seems lost on the Avenging Angels.  

   

But what has driven the New Humanitarians into supporting a series of cruel and devastating Great Power wars over the last decade? We have no doubt that most, if not all, of them have done this with the cleanest of consciences, even if they have been, as we firmly believe (and will show below), badly misguided, self-deceived, dishonest, and atrocious analysts and historians. But there are both recognitional and economic elements lurking in the background, too, that have some explantory value. Money, access to the corridors of power, and lavish accolades for membership within the group are available from both the media and from NATO governments and establishment institutions such as George Soros' network of various foundations to human rights groups, academics, and journalists who follow NATO's party line.  Furthermore, the selling of articles, books and news reports is conditioned on feeding into accepted perspectives. Those who conform to the quickly established consensus will be recognized and sell; those who contest it will not and may even find themselves publicly vilified as "apologists" for the wrong cause.

 

We also sense that there may be an element of self-fulfillment for the New Humanitarians in trumpeting the right cause. Self-presenting liberals and leftists in journalism and elsewhere have been frustrated by the fact that their liberal and social democratic leaders have joined the neoliberal brigade and failed to serve their mass constituencies.  Some also have been overwhelmed by the portrayals of one side's suffering and victimization as filtered through an effective propaganda system, including many working "on the scene" in Sarajevo.  But perhaps more important, with the collapse of the former Soviet bloc, the remaining NATO bloc and the entire Western system of power and ideology have also lost their Cold War framework for articulating international relations and for channeling moral indignation against evildoers.  We believe that the rise of New Humanitarianism since the loss of the Cold War betrays a race among the New Humanitarians to fill in the blank, so to speak, left by the demise of the Cold War system of propaganda.[28] It has proven very useful, therefore, to find an area in which villains can be found abusing innocent victims allegedly seeking to maintain a multi-ethnic democracy (e.g., Bosnia-Herzegovina) or struggling for self-determination (e.g., Kosovo), and for which substitute rewards follow. Thus moral crusades provide an escape for frustrated intellectuals, activists, and journalists, especially one in which they derive financial, recognitional, career, and media access rewards for supporting state policy.

 

In these and other ways, the New Humanitarians have helped strengthen the consensus of the Great Powers, and many of them have been swept along with it in a viciously circular, self-fulfilling process. With the relentlessly growing concentration and commercialization of the global media, the greater symbiotic relationship between the media, the government, and non-governmental organizations, and with the more sophisticated methods of government news management, the Official Line succeeds in sweeping along vast numbers of followers.[29] For as they see humanitarian issues in ways structured by a very efficient propaganda system, with the enemy rigorously demonized and his victims repeatedly portrayed in distressed circumstances, it requires a great deal of effort, knowledge of the world, genuine independence, and counter-sophistication to avoid jumping on the bandwagon. The New Humanitarians have failed this test miserably.  As we will show below, they uniformly give evidence of having accepted as premises of their own work egregious falsifications of history that, ultimately, render their work in its totality an agent of power.

 

 

 

Part III: The New Humanitarians As Propaganda Agents of NATO  

 

 

Channeled Benevolence

 

As we have noted, the New Humanitarians have focused on Yugoslavia, and their alignment there with those opposing the Serbs was in complete accord with U.S. and NATO policy. It is interesting to observe, also, that massive human rights abuses in countries supported by the NATO powers, such as Turkey, Indonesia in East Timor, Colombia, and Israel in its occupied territories, received slight or zero attention from the New Humanitarians. Thus, a large sample of the recent mainstream media publications of 12 leading New Humanitarians that deal with human rights issues, shows that while they concerned themselves with the Yugoslav conflicts in 101 articles, human rights issues relating to East Timor, Israel, Colombia and Turkey were mentioned, briefly, in only three.[30] 

 

This same channeled attention can be seen in the books written by these analysts: for example, in Aryeh Neier's study of War Crimes (Neier, 1998), there are some 200 index references to Yugoslav crimes, but zero references to East Timor, Indonesia, Colombia, Israel and the Palestinians, and only one for Turkey, but referring back to the Armenian genocide.

 

The selectivity of U.S. and NATO human rights policy flies in the face of the New Humanitarian's claim that human rights "has taken hold not just as a rhetorical but as an operating principle in all the major Western capitals on issues that concern political crisis in poor countries and failing states" (Rieff, 1999b), and that "the military campaign in Kosovo depends for its legitimacy on what fifty years of human rights have done to our moral instincts...strengthening the presumption of intervention when massacre and deportation become state policy" (Ignatieff, quoted in ibid.) Why do these "instincts" shrivel and why does the "operating principle" cease to work for massacre and deportation in East Timor, Colombia, and elsewhere? Rieff cites Aryeh Neier's "eloquent" reply, that "a human rights double standard where powerful countries like China are concerned does not mean nothing has changed" (ibid.). But Indonesia, Colombia, Israel and Turkey are not powerful countries, and their exemption suggests that the moral instinct is easily overridden, that there is no "operating principle" at all, and that we must look for factors other than a new morality to explain the Kosovo intervention.

 

What is even more interesting is the adaptation of the New Humanitarians to the human rights double standard. Even if commercial and other power-related interests weaken the new morality for political leaders, why must the New Humanitarians duplicate this double standard? Shouldn't they be struggling to offset the corrupting forces and make human rights the real operating principle? Shouldn't they be campaigning on behalf of East Timorese and other long-standing victims of Western collusion with human rights violators? That they don't do this, but instead join the bandwagon geared to Western interests and convenience, raises serious questions about their own clearly politicized human rights concerns and whether these really serve to advance human rights.

 

When confronted with the fact that they seem to give little attention to U.S.- and NATO-protected human rights abuses, the New Humanitarians have given a variety of responses. One is that Yugoslavia was in Europe's backyard, and being so close, attracted attention. David Rieff quotes approvingly Clinton's statement that NATO acted to prevent "the slaughter of innocents on its doorstep" (Rieff, 1999b). But Turkey is also on NATO's doorstep and is a part of NATO itself, and the interests of the United States and its willingness to intervene with force has been global (e.g., the Korean and Vietnam wars; the U.S. interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, etc.). 

 

A second New Humanitarian response has been that "you can't do everything," and we may therefore have to be satisfied with what is "politically possible" (Rieff, 2000a). It does not bother them that their efforts are so well coordinated with those of the imperial powers; it seems not to occur to them that governments perfectly happy to work with major ethnic cleansers such as Suharto and the Turkish generals may have non-humane agendas in the  "politically possible" places, and that the governments' real agendas might contaminate the outcomes (and a number of them acknowledge that the effects of the Kosovo war were disappointing and may threaten similar humanitarian ventures elsewhere) (Ash, 2000a). The New Humanitarians also neglect the fact that their own intense and indignant focus on unapproved villainy  (i. e., the Serbs in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo) may deflect attention from sometimes large-scale approved or acceptable villainy (i.e., Turkey's treatment of its Kurds), thereby making it easier to do nothing or even support ethnic cleansing in the latter cases. In the latter cases, also, it might be possible to control abuses without resort to war, by simply terminating or threatening to terminate support.

 

 

Accepting War as a Humanitarian Instrument

 

As noted, traditional humanitarianism demanded strict neutrality and impartiality, with a mission of assisting victims of conflict. The New Humanitarians not only cast aside these principles, they supported NATO's resort to war against Yugoslavia, often with great enthusiasm. As Michael Ignatieff has written, in certain circumstances "the international community has to take sides and do so with crushing force" (Ignatieff, 2000c).

 

The idea that war can serve a humanitarian end, and the very concepts of "humanitarian war" and "humanitarian bombing," would seem outlandish not only in terms of traditional notions of humanitarianism, but also in the light of historical experience with war. Wars produce a cycle of violence and counter-violence that is hard to contain and produces a great deal of cruelty, misery, and destruction. That it can be a useful means to humanitarian ends assumes a degree of control, fine-tuning, knowledge, restraint, and nobility of Great Power objectives that we may call Military Utopianism, as is implicit in Mary Kaldor's call for the Great Powers to move beyond peacekeeping to "peacemaking" or "humanitarian intervention"—"basically warfighting," she admits, "intervening in a war on one side" for the "enforcement of cosmopolitan norms," where it is clear that who decides what the "cosmopolitan norms" in any given conflict are, who suffers their "enforcement," will be determined by the Great Powers and by no one else (Kaldor, 1999: 124-125). The New Humanitarians have scanted discussion of postwar Kosovo, perhaps because it illustrates so well the coarsening and brutalizing effects of war, which as Dienstbier says has "only multiplied the existing problems."

 

Commenting on the repeated U.S. bombing of their well-marked warehouses in Kabul, the international director of the Red Cross, David Alexander, stated that "One problem we've had in recent years is a bit of blurring between political and humanitarian agendas, and they don't sit comfortably when they're muddled together.  They need to be kept distinct." One effect has been to seriously unsettle Red Cross workers, now bombable despite their protective signs and humanitarian purpose: "That's the only protection they have, is knowing that they are emblems of signs of protection under international law" (Lyons, 2001).  Unfortunately, Alexander is behind the times—the New Humanitarians recognize that "crushing force" with no holds barred is the new moral game for those powerful enough to call themselves the "international community."

 

Undeterred,. the New Humanitarians have argued that moral imperatives override the problematic means, ignoring not only the historic record of warfare but also the moral significance of employing dubious means in serving alleged higher ends. They also ignore the possibility that moral imperatives may be manipulated and misperceived, with the result that the means serve immoral or amoral ends (e.g., NATO's desire to punish the Serbs and to achieve certain political and geopolitical goals).

 

 

Accepting the Abrogation of the Rule of Law 

 

The New Humanitarians have had to deal with the awkward fact that NATO's war against Yugoslavia violated international law at many levels—most importantly, the U.N. Charter's prohibition of war as an instrument of policy except in self defense, the barring of intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign states, and NATO's violations of the rules of war in its attacks on civilian facilities and use of illegal weaponry (Brownlie, 2000).[31] 

 

They have dealt with this mainly by either ignoring the matter entirely or accepting that "human rights" and "morality" must sometimes be allowed to override the law. The memorable phrase of the International Commission—Falk, Goldstone, Kaldor, Ignatieff, and Minow are members—was that the NATO war was "illegal but legitimate" (IICK, 2000; 2001), as NATO was presumably righting wrongs outside the law as a global Robin Hood. Vaclav Havel claims that the NATO war took place "out of respect for the law, for a law that ranks higher than the law that protects the sovereignty of states" (Havel, 1999). In this same speech Havel also claims, falsely, that this was the first war ever waged "in the name of principles in values." He also believes that it was truly "waged for ethical reasons." Bernard Kouchner takes it for granted that morality overrides the law, and he even proposes "preemptive" intervention by the NATO powers, which implies intervention even before the immoral actions take place or reach serious dimensions (Kouchner, 1999a).

 

Apparently overwhelmed by their eagerness to support NATO's intervention on behalf of the Bosnian Muslims and Kosovo Albanians, the New Humanitarians have seemed oblivious to the dangers of abandoning the rule of law. Richard Falk can warn as recently as 1995 that "Nothing expresses secular fundamentalism more stridently than recourse to war as policy" (Falk, 1995: 242); but with regard to NATO's Kosovo war he writes that "the humanitarian benefits of this intervention were substantial, and could not have been otherwise achieved" (Falk, 2002); and now with regard to the U.S. war against Afghanistan (or what he hysterically calls "apocalyptic terrorism"), adds that it was not only "morally/legally justifiable," but that for the United States it was imperative to mount a "maximally effective response,…given its leadership in world society, as well as its linchpin role with respect to global security,…however flawed" (Falk, 2001).   Along with their blasé treatment of the selectivity of human rights attention by the Great Powers, and of those Powers' actual support of serious human rights abuses in "friendly" states, this opening of the gates for the Great Powers to ignore the rule of law, represents a major human rights regression that bodes ill for the future. For as Simon Chesterman warns in his survey of alleged "humanitarian" interventions throughout the 20th Century, "[U]nilateral enforcement is not a substitute for but the opposite of collective action; as unilateral assertions of humanitarianism displace multilateral institutional legality, so the normative restraints on the recourse to force weaken. The resulting fragmentation and regionalization of the international security system thus makes it reliant, once again, on the eirenic munificence of the modern Great Power(s). And, as international law is deprivileged to become just one policy justification among others, so fade the hopes of mediating those Great Power relations through an international rule of law" (Chesterman, 2001: 236).

 

  

Acceptance of the NATO Powers as Humanitarian Instruments

 

Along with their acceptance of the abandonment of the rule of law, the New Humanitarians have all affirmed their faith in the United States and other NATO powers as the instruments of humanitarian service, some reluctantly, others without any seeming skepticism. Michael Ignatieff bases it on the argument that "only the United States can muster the military might necessary to deter potential attackers and rescue victims" (Ignatieff, 2000a). He has no doubts that this military might will be appropriately used; his only problem is that while "principle commits us to intervene...[it] forbids the imperial ruthlessness necessary to make intervention succeed" (Ignatieff, 1998). David Rieff finds "the problem with the human rights approach...is less that it is wrong than that it is unsustainable in the absence of world government" (Rieff, 1999b). There is no problem for Rieff that the NATO governments, who he admits "have eagerly seized the rhetoric of human rights," might use it as a cover for a non-human rights agenda.  Indeed, it was only in his review of Noam Chomsky's book The New Military Humanism that Rieff castigates this skeptical view as "to side with radical conspiracy theorists" (Rieff, 2001).

 

Many of the New Humanitarians are aware that these powers have a dubious record in the past in supporting regimes of murder, and they occasionally acknowledge that such cases can be found today (Turkey, East Timor), but this has not curbed their willingness to rely on the NATO powers to do good by military intervention. Kenneth Roth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, never questions the NATO powers as instruments of human rights, but only urges them to more aggressive action (Roth, 1997).  Christopher Hitchens even suggests that their past crimes further justify their new humanitarian role: If we did wrong earlier "does this not double or triple our responsibility to remove them [bad men] from power. Do 'our' past crimes and sins make it impossible to expiate the offense by determined action?" (Hitchens, 2001a).

 

  

Acceptance of the Tribunal as Legitimate and Judicial

 

All of the New Humanitarians accept the ICTY as a legitimate judicial body dispensing justice, even a magnificent instrument—for Neier, establishing the Tribunal was "the most important step by the United Nations to protect human rights since it adopted the Universal Declaration," and the claim that the Tribunal is a "tool of the U.S." he dismisses as unworthy of refutation (Neier, 1998; 2001). The New Humanitarians do not discuss the Tribunal's NATO-power origination, purpose, funding, and staffing; its less than stellar adherence to western legal standards; or its record of service to NATO in pursuing war criminals selectively and coming to NATO's rescue in times of public relations need (Hayden, 2000; Skoco and Woodger, 2000; Johnstone 2002).

 

Geoffrey Robertson, who believes that Milosevic "bears a guilt of Göring-esque proportions for the entire tragedy [of Yugoslavia]," also believes that the legal basis of the Tribunal is unarguable. Quoting approvingly M. Cherif Bassiouni first report to the U.N. Security Council as the head of a commission of experts looking into possible violations of international law in Bosnia during the war, Robertson argues that The Hague Tribunal derives "its legitimacy from the fact that it constituted 'a measure to maintain or restore international peace and security';" and he himself adds pollyannishly that since the Tribunal's own analysis of international humanitarian law determined that crimes against humanity, war crimes, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, and genocide can be committed in internal or extraterritorial conflicts, "The Hague is equally tailored to states where there is no conflict at all—sometimes because potential subversives have been liquidated by death squads" (Robertson, 2000: 289-298).  Ignatieff says that "The great virtue of legal proceedings is that their evidentiary rules confer legitimacy on otherwise contestable facts" (Ignatieff, 1997), but he never examines the evidentiary rules of the Tribunal or evaluates the criticisms made of them—he takes their merits as unchallengable; he knows a priori that it does not dispense "victor's justice" (Ignatieff, 2000d).

 

Apart from expressing approval, neither Robertson, Ignatieff, nor their comrades discuss the Tribunal's indictment of Milosevic et al. on May 22, 1999, which gave NATO a public relations boost by a diversion of attention from NATO's escalating bombing of Serbian civilian infrastructures, and served to ratify NATO's decision to go to war on grounds that this band of Serbs really were "willing executioners."  This remarkable politicization of a supposed judicial body did not bother the New Humanitarians at all, nor did the Tribunal's refusal even to investigate the numerous claims of NATO law violations (with its public refusal based on an admitted reliance on NATO press releases for information) (Mandel, 2001). Having taken sides, legal abuses by the forces of morality were of no interest to them. The moral ends justified the means.

 

In fact, the very politicization of the Tribunal served the New Humanitarians well. They regularly cite its findings as definitive confirmation of what they want to prove in their campaigning.  Thus David Rieff cites Tribunal indictments of Karadzic and Mladic "FOR GENOCIDE" as showing what a determined West could have done at any time to bring justice to the Balkans (Rieff, 1995: 260-61). Ian Williams cites numbers produced by Carla Del Ponte on deaths in Kosovo as the final authority that "should have put questions concerning the death toll to rest" (Williams, 1999b). Rieff points out that national sovereignty no longer protects human rights abusers, "as Slobodan Milosevic learned when at the height of the Kosovo conflict, he was indicted for war crimes by an international tribunal at the Hague" (Rieff, 1999b). Rieff just takes it for granted that this was an act carried out by a dispenser of justice—its public relations service to NATO right in the midst of the NATO bombing of Serbia is unmentioned, perhaps never even strikes this war enthusiast and propagandist.

 

 

 

New Humanitarians Abuse of Historical Evidence: (1) Acceptance of

the Demon Theory of Balkan History  

 

Almost uniformly, the New Humanitarians explain developments in the Balkans in terms of a demon theory of history, or what Lenard Cohen calls the "paradise lost/loathsome leaders perspective" that has characterized much of the literature on the breakup of Yugoslavia since 1989-1991 (Cohen, 201: 380ff). Milosevic, virtually single-handedly, pursuing his dream of a Greater Serbia, was responsible for the disintegration of Yugoslavia, was the origiNATOr and predominant employer of ethnic cleansing in the region, and refused any peaceful avenues in favor of violence. Ash speaks of his "poisoned, but calculating mind" (Ash, 2000), and Rieff says that Milosevic "had quite correctly been described by U.S. officials...as the architect of the catastrophe" (Rieff, 1999b). The New Humanitarians repeatedly refer to Milosevic's speeches of April 24-25, 1987, and June 28, 1989, as allegedly announcing his ethnic cleansing program. Tim Judah refers to Milosevic's responsibility for wars in "Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo: four wars since 1991 and the result of these terrible conflicts, which began with the slogan 'All Serbs in One State' is the cruelest irony" (Judah, 2000).

 

This is not serious history, but convenient mythology. The breakup of Yugoslavia was driven mainly by German, Austrian, and elite Croatian and Slovenian incentives to separation, and from 1991 and earlier the Serbs were designated the enemy and were on the defensive. There was no "war" in Slovenia—the Yugoslav army, which had a legal right to fight against a Slovenian secession, did not do so, but withdrew from the Republic after ten days of skirmishes. Much of the fighting and killing resulted from the insistence of the West on preserving Bosnia-Herzegovina as a single entity under Muslim minority control, and the failure there and in Croatia to allow large ethnic minorities to shift from being parts of artificial Republics to less threatening associations (Woodward, 1995; Hayden, 1999; Chandler, 2000; Johnstone, 2002).

 

Milosevic supported many initiatives for resolving these problems, coming into regular conflict with the Bosnian Serb leadership as a result. His 1987 and 1989 speeches did not call for a Greater Serbia; instead, they promised to protect Serbians (i.e., inhabitants of Serbia, not merely ethnic Serbs) and called for ethnic toleration (Milosevic, 1987; 1989). Opportunistic, demagogic, ruthless, he might have been, but he failed to meet the demon role fixed by NATO, its media, and the New Humanitarians. Judah's statement that it all began with the slogan "All Serbs in One State," is not "cruel irony," it is  a gross misrepresentation of both the dynamics of those cruel conflicts and the literal language used by Milosevic.

 

The New Humanitarians regularly trace history back to a Serb action—frequently misrepresented—and stop there. Michael Ignatieff writes that "We were driven from our homes in the Croatian Krajina, Serbs will tell you. True enough, but only after the Slobodan Milosevic regime had tried to strangle Croatian independence at birth" (Ignatieff, 1999b). Note the straightforward apologetics for massive ethnic cleansing, based on a prior set of events long since terminated; the Croatian ethnic cleansing was carefully planned and extremely brutal, and was not against Milosevic but Serb citizens of Croatia. The Serbs "will also tell you" that there was a mass killing of Serbs by Croats at Gospic in September 1991, and that there is a history of Croat genocidal behavior against Serbs during World War II that caused them to fear an independent Croatia, but that is history inadmissible for Ignatieff.

 

 

Misuse of Historical Evidence: (2) Genocide in Bosnia

 

The views of many of the New Humanitarians were shaped in the wars over Bosnia, where they gathered in Sarajevo to fight for the "multi-ethnic Bosnia" and against "nothing less than genocide" (Sontag, 1995). Their distortions of history and ongoing fact in this conflict are legendary:

 

1) Repeated allegations of Serb genocide and repetition of the number 200,000 or 250,000 dead, provided by the Bosnian Muslim government as early as January 1993 and contradicted by all independent authorities and the CIA itself (Kenney, 1998; Johnstone, 2002).

2) Rape inflation based again on contaminated sources, with the added unsupported claim that Bosnia Serb rapes were "by army order" (Sontag, in Johnstone, 2002), "systematic" in nature, and an "integral part of ethnic cleansing, of eradicating entire areas of their historic Muslim populations through brutal intimidation, expulsion, and outright murder" (Post and Stiglmayer, 1993).

3) Repeated naming of towns in which Muslims or Croats were killed by Serbs—

Vukovar, Dubrovnik, Banja Luka, Sarajevo, Mostar, Tulza, Srebrenica—with a systematic failure to mention the prior large-scale Muslim and Croat slaughters of in-town or nearby Serb civilians (Rooper, 1997; Pumphrey, 1998; Bogdanich and Lettmayer, 2000).

4) A mythical representation of the Izetbegovic government as "actually committed to the rule of law" and multi-ethic tolerance—"it was in defense of the ideal of a multinational, multiconfessional Bosnia that the Bosnians shed their blood" (Rieff, 1995: 248-49, 260-61).

This ignores not only their acceptance of thousands of radical Muslims from Afghanistan and elsewhere, but also Izetbegovic's own explicit commitment to Muslim political domination; in his words, "There is neither peace nor coexistence between the 'Islamic religion' and non-Islamic social and political institutions....Having the right to govern its own world, Islam clearly excludes the right and possibility of putting a foreign ideology into practice on its territory" (quoted from his 1970 Islamic Declaration in Johnstone, 2002). These sentiments, never repudiated, are never cited by the New Humanitarians.

            5) Rationalizing the refusal to negotiate a settlement along the line of the Vance-Owen and later Owen-Stoltenberg peace plans, which Milosevic and the Bosnian Serbs accepted, on the ground that "the United States could not support a plan that 'rewarded' ethnic cleansing to such an extent" (Rieff, citing Madeleine Albright, 1995: 255).

6) That the mutual ethnic cleansing was a result of the NATO powers encouragement of the disintegration of the "multi-ethnic" Yugoslav state, and their refusal to allow threatened minorities to withdraw from artificial Republics that they distrusted, is outside the realm of New Humanitarian understanding.

  

It is also interesting to note how benignly the New Humanitarians treat the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Krajina in 1995, carried out by the Croatian army, with active U.S. assistance. While admitting it was the largest ethnic cleansing of the Balkan wars, Ash has no problem with it and refers to it neutrally as "a large ground offensive—by Croatian troops" (Ash, 2000b). Needless to say, none of the New Humanitarians have called the bombing-war response by Yugoslavia as "a large ground offensive." For none of them was the Krajina ethnic cleansing a "humanitarian disaster;" rather, implicitly, a just reward.

 

 

Misuse of Historical Evidence (3): Misrepresentations Regarding

"Ethnic Cleansing" in Kosovo         

 

Some New Humanitarians, such as Denitch and Williams, contend that Serb ethnic cleansing in Kosovo prior to the bombing was massive, whereas others like Ash, Rieff, Hitchens, Judah and Ignatieff make the flight and expulsions during the bombing war the crucial mark of Serb ethnic cleansing and genocide. When all five of Milosevic's indictments, including his indictments for genocide in Croatia and Bosnia, were unified into one single indictment for his upcoming trial, Hague Tribunal spokesperson Florence Hartman stated, "We believed that he deserved one trial because it's the same joint criminal enterprise from the beginning to the end, and that the purpose of this criminal enterprise was the forcible and permanent removal of the majority of non-Serbs from large areas in Croatia and Bosnia and also in Kosovo" (CNN, 2001).  This sentiment is uniformly echoed by the New Humanitarians.

 

Several problems confront those claiming pre-bombing ethnic cleansing. One is that it is not supported by any official document, including those of the State Department, OSCE, British House of Commons Defense Review, or any of the three indictments of Milosevic. Indeed, prior to the bombing the German Foreign Office had even denied that the refugee flows constituted a case of ethnic cleansing, contending that "[The] actions of the security forces [were] not directed against the Kosovo-Albanians as an ethnically defined group, but against the military opponent and its actual and alleged supporters" (Canepa, 1999). Ash claims that "Serb forces started systematic cleansing as the Kosovo Verification Mission pulled out, just before the bombing started" (Ash, 2000), but he offers no evidence for this charge, nor does anybody else. Ash fails to mention that the mission was withdrawn only four days before the bombing began, with the Serbs fully aware that a bombing war was about to start. He also fails to note that the OSCE Kosovo Verification Mission reported no serious incidents between January 15 and March 20, the day of their withdrawal.

 

Another problem for the New Humanitarians is the post-bombing acknowledgement that the United States had given support to the KLA prior to the bombing, which aided and encouraged the KLA to provoke the Serbs in order to justify forceful NATO intervention. The New Humanitarians have ignored such considerations. Michael Ignatieff did, however, refer to the KLA murder of six Serb teenagers, saying: "Doubtless a KLA provocation, intended to goad the Serbs into overreaction and then to trigger international intervention. The Serbs responded by killing 45 civilians in Racak in mid-January. The international community duly intervened. Yet it is worth asking why the KLA strategists could be absolutely certain the Serbs would react as they did. The reason is simple....only in Serbia is racial contempt an official ideology" (Ignatieff, 1999b).

 

We may note first that for Ignatieff the KLA killing was only a "provocation," not a murderous act to be severely condemned. Note also that although there is serious evidence that the Racak incident was arranged into a "massacre" following a furious battle, and is therefore of questionable authenticity, Ignatieff takes it as unquestionably valid. On the certainty of the Serb reaction, provocations such as those carried out by the KLA produce similar responses in civil conflicts everywhere, so that Ignatieff's blaming it on Serb racism is nonsensical for that reason alone. But it also flies in the face of Serb tolerance of Albanians in Belgrade, along with Roma—in contrast with Kosovo Albanian intolerance of both in NATO-occupied Kosovo.

 

A problem for the New Humanitarians like Ash, Rieff, Ignatieff, Judah and Hitchens, who focus on the flight and expulsions during the bombing war, is that the bombing itself precipitated the forcible response. These authors reply that an "Operation Horseshoe" was already in the works designed to do the same anyway, and was only accelerated by the bombing. But Operation Horseshoe was never mentioned prior to the bombing, and has been exploded as a propaganda fraud (Loquai, 2000). The rapid Serb response showed that they were expecting a NATO attack and were prepared to counterattack if necessary, while at the same time their negotiating position always included acceptance of a large international observer force, incompatible with implementation of an Operation Horseshoe. It is an interesting fact that the New Humanitarians have never pointed to the rapid NATO bombing response following the failure at Rambouillet as demonstrating a NATO intention to carry out a bombing war. This reflects deep bias. After all, NATO's first Activation Orders to begin bombing Yugoslavia within 72 hours were issued as early as October 13, 1998, more than five months prior to its eventual launching of the war.

 

Another problem for New Humanitarian apologetics is that there is evidence that the KLA and NATO were fighting the war in coordination, and that Serb attacks and expulsions were concentrated in strong KLA areas and were therefore based on military demands and strategy (Erlanger, 1999; Pearl and Block, 1999).  There is also evidence that a higher percentage of Kosovo Serbs than Albanians fled during the bombing period, which calls into question a simple Serb expulsion theory of flight and refugees. The New Humanitarians deal with these awkward considerations by ignoring them. Ignatieff states that "Milosevic decided to solve an 'internal problem' by exporting an entire nation to his impoverished neighbors," and he also describes it as a "most meticulous deportation of a civilian population," and "a final solution of the Kosovo problem," statements that would be hard to surpass for misrepresentation (Ignatieff, 2000a: 86-87, 78-79, 84).   

 

A third problem is that the postwar evidence on killings has not supported the inflated claims of NATO officials, which ran up to 500,000. The New Humanitarians are never critical of NATO officials for having made those wildly exaggerated claims, which did help make the moral case for devastating Serbia, and their sole preoccupation has been to protect the wartime image that Serb crimes were immense and constituted "ethnic cleansing" and even "genocide." Ignatieff calls "revisionists" those who challenged the NATO claims, and accepts that 11,334 bodies should be found, based on Tribunal estimates, which rested on "Western intelligence sources, eyewitness statements and evidence taken from surviving family members" (Ignatieff, 1999c). He says that whether those bodies will be found "depends on whether the Serb military and police removed them." Possible inflation from the Tribunal and its sources he ignores by rule of deep bias. He also never mentions the possibility that many of the bodies might have been of soldiers killed in fighting; he never mentions that the KLA was fighting a war in collaboration with NATO; and he never discusses how 11,334 (as yet unrecovered) bodies are to be reconciled with his own and official claims of "genocide."  

 

 

Misuse of Historical Evidence (4): Misrepresenting Rambouillet

  

At Rambouillet the NATO powers presented Yugoslavia with an ultimatum: surrender or be bombed. Eventually, they assured the failure of the negotiations by inserting a proviso in the proposed agreement that would have required Yugoslavia to allow NATO to occupy not just Kosovo but all of Yugoslavia (Kenney, 1999).

 

This is awkward for the New Humanitarians as it puts them into the position of approving bombing and war as punishment and sanctioning a resort to war by a refusal to compromise or negotiate. The New Humanitarians have handled this by either ignoring the matter altogether or accepting a NATO-friendly and false version of history. As noted, while they regularly point to the Serb violent response to the NATO bombing as proof of a plan to ethnically cleanse, they never suggest that the NATO bombing and rejection of negotiations at Rambouillet demonstrated a NATO plan and intent to go to war.

 

David Rieff asks, "How eager is he [Milosevic] to allow NATO troops into a portion of his country's sovereign territory, as called for by the Rambouillet agreement?" (Rieff, 1999a). But Appendix B called for NATO troops to occupy all of Yugoslavia. Rieff's misrepresentation was never corrected by him or by the New York Times. Michael Ignatieff interpreted the failure as based the fact that Milosevic "thought that he could call NATO's bluff, could risk a bombing" because he could "withstand" maybe a week's bombing (Ignatieff, 2000b). Again, no mention of the "bar" because Serbia "needed to be bombed," but putting it all on the demon, and getting away with this on the PBS's NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Tim Judah acknowledged Appendix B, but he made it into a "sort of military wish list," even if "more expansive than the norm" (Judah, 2000a: 210). He did not mention the State Department official's explanation that suggests a NATO intent to bomb, nor does he consider that this might point to the reason for insertion of the controversial clause.

 

 

New Humanitarian Apologetics for NATO's War Crimes

 

The New Humanitarians have dealt with NATO war crimes mainly by evasion. Many of them like Rieff, Kouchner, Havel and Hitchens simply never discuss them, either blocking them out of their minds or considering them insignificant or justified by the virtue of the NATO humanitarian enterprise. Shawcross praises NATO profusely for its unprecedented willingness to assist Albanian refugees—"It is, to say the least, unexpected for one of the parties to a combat to undertake vast humanitarian aid of this sort" (Shawcross, 1999). He nowhere recognizes that the NATO decision to bomb is what produced the refugees.

 

Christopher Hitchens stated that "The NATO intervention repatriated all or most of the refugees and killed at least some of the cleansers. I find I have absolutely no problem with that" (Hitchens, 1999). As more than "cleansers" were killed by NATO, Hitchens failure to mention them, and his complete disinterest in the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Krajina or any need to repatriate them, displays a bias that can accommodate any NATO illegalities, if directed against the Serbs.

 

Ash describes a number of NATO killings of civilians as "errors," based on highly disputable claims by NATO itself. But he also acknowledges the "deliberate acceptance of civilian casualties" in the bombing of Serbian broadcasting facilities, and that the intentional destruction of Belgrade's electrical power grid not only damaged "the morale" of the population but also "meant that patients on life-support systems and babies in hospital incubators had their power cut off" (Ash, 2000). He displays no indignation here and uses no invidious language: this was only an "acceptance" of civilian casualties, not deliberate killing by any poisoned minds. And he never gives figures on casualties or destruction, nor does he ever point out that these NATO actions violate international legal prohibitions against targeting civilian facilities and therefore constitute war crimes.

 

      

New Humanitarian Neglect and Misrepresentation of Inhumanitarian

Developments in NATO-Occupied Kosovo

 

As with NATO war crimes, the New Humanitarians have largely evaded addressing the inhumanitarian developments in NATO-occupied Kosovo. Like the mainstream media, they have failed to report and reflect on the massive ethnic cleansing of Serbs, Roma and others, which violates U.N. obligations under Security Council Resolution 1244, and also contradicts the alleged humanitarian aim of the war.  They were exceedingly indignant about the alleged ethnic cleansing in Kosovo before the bombing, which the German Foreign Office even denied being ethnic cleansing at all, and which the KLA (with U.S. connivance) was positively encouraging. But the real, ecumenical ethnic cleansing under NATO occupation doesn't upset them at all. Rieff says that "for the first time in the post-cold-war period ethnic cleansing was reversed" (Rieff, 1999d). Passionately indignant about ethnic cleansing and "genocide" in Bosnia and in Kosovo before the NATO occupation, Rieff is not bothered that ethnic cleansing was not only not ended, but has instead been turned against the remaining ethnic minorities. Instead, he apologizes for this as "the law of revenge," and says that "the Serbs are leaving, and there is very little the United Nations or KFOR can do to stem the exodus" (ibid.)

 

We may note that when the Serbs allegedly retaliated after six teenagers were slaughtered by the KLA, this reflected Serb racism, not a "law of revenge." Note also the benign language for the reverse ethnic cleansing—the Serbs "are leaving" in an "exodus," with no explicit mention of several thousand killed or disappeared as an exit inducement, whereas the wartime flight of the Kosovo Albanians was a monstrous and evil thing.

 

Rieff says that war permitted the return of the "Kosovars" (i.e., Kosovo Albanians), "a tremendous accomplishment." But the war was by his own admission the thing that drove them out. Also, that wartime flight created much hatred and a spirit of revenge, but Rieff and his fellow New Humanitarians never stress this ugly effect of war or suggest that it made reconciliation impossible and brought "the law of revenge" into play. Rieff mentions the hatred of Serbs by the Albanians, but he never suggests that this was seriously increased by the war he supported.

 

Rieff even misleads with his "law of revenge," because, as Jiri Dienstbier points out, "What is happening in Kosovo is not some sort of revenge of ordinary ethnic Albanians" against the remaining Serbs—it is an highly organized, systematic policy of expulsion carried out by "Albanian extremists" (2000b) protected by NATO and implementing that minority's long drive for an ethnically pure Kosovo and Greater Albania.

 

Why 40,000 U.N. troops couldn't do anything about the reverse ethnic cleansing Rieff fails to explain. Ash also notes the reverse ethnic cleansing of Serbs "under the very noses of NATO troops," although failing to mention the ethnic cleansing of Roma, Turks, and others also (Garton Ash, 2000b). But while Serbia's alleged ethnic cleansing justified NATO bombing for Ash, he does not suggest that this severe case of "reverse" ethnic cleansing should be curbed perhaps by a bit of NATO bombing!

 

Ash, following the NATO party line claiming that the intervention was based not only on humanitarian concerns but "a longstanding fear for the 'stability' of the region," mentions that while Kosovo was "liberated" it remained "an almighty mess." But he fails to acknowledge that NATO's interventions from 1991 on destabilized Yugoslavia and the region, and that the "almighty mess" in Kosovo is not only unstable, it has provided the KLA with a base to destabilize Macedonia in the interest of a "Greater Albania," a real aim that the New Humanitarians have never recognized, in contrast with their preoccupation with the mythical aim of a "Greater Serbia."

 

Ash, at least, honestly recognizes that Kosovo under NATO is "an almighty mess," and that not only Serbs, but "Albanian women are afraid to go out at night in Pristina, for fear of being kidnapped into forced prostitution by the Albanian mafia, which has moved into the province with a vengeance" (Ash, 2000a). Rieff, on the other hand, like Hitchens, Ignatieff, and Williams, a more committed and unrestrained propagandist, says "There is something magical and heartening about walking through the streets of Pristina...and seeing young people who grew up fearful in a Serb police state finally getting to behave like normal teenagers" (Rieff, 2000b).

 

 

 

Conclusion

 

The New Humanitarians have been openly committed activists, serving what they perceived to be moral causes in the Balkans, and portraying events there through the prism of these commitments and political aims. We believe that we have shown that their reporting and commentaries on developments during and leading up to the Kosovo war, and after its conclusion, have been so biased as to constitute war propaganda rather than objective news and minimally balanced commentaries.

 

The New Humanitarians did not lead NATO on and press them to do things NATO did not want to do; on the contrary, they followed and put a moral gloss on NATO choices that were evident from the beginning of the 1990s if not earlier, and that were clearly rooted in geopolitical and internal political interests and forces. The New Humanitarians provided a moral cover and helped produce an echo chamber and bandwagon support for intervention, and in fact biased that intervention away from negotiations and toward the use of force.

 

In the New World Order, with an unchallenged superpower pursuing global interests, there has been a strong tendency for the United States and its allies to use force to achieve their geopolitical ends. There is not the slightest reason to believe that this use of force will be directed toward advancing human rights, although that will surely be part of the cover as it has been in the past. This is new order imperialism, even if not characterized by direct imperial rule. By helping sustain that moral cover, and sanctioning the abandonment of the rule of law in the purported interest of human rights, the New Humanitarians have served as a political and propaganda arm of the new imperialism.

For those among us who renounce the faith that we are living in a "Grotian moment," a "time of deep transition from the statist framework of Westphalia to some differently constituted, emergent, and normatively enhanced world order" following the "end of the Cold war" and the "stability, bipolar geopolitical discipline, and conflictual behavior associated with Cold War practices" (Falk, 1998: 5-6), and yet who still want to avoid living in a world dominated by the Great Powers, one anarchical, and reminiscent of Hobbes's "natural condition of mankind," in which "every man is an enemy to every man," "nothing can be unjust" because nothing can be just, and "notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have no place," except when the Great Powers say they do—we are not living in auspicious times.

 

 

 

   ---- Endnotes ----

 

  1. On the media's crucial role in promoting the war, see Ali (ed.) (2000); and Hammond and Herman (eds.) (2000).

  2. On NATO's real but less than humanitarian objectives, see Chomsky (1999); Simma (1999); Johnstone (2000); MccGwire (2000); Parenti (2000); and Johnstone (2002).

  3. See Chesterman (2001: 220-225).  A survey of the history of alleged "humanitarian" interventions, Chesterman argues that the alleged decisive choice facing the Great Powers in times of humanitarian crises, namely, that of "doing something" or "doing nothing," is misleading and has "distorting effects…on the relationship between collective and unilateral interventions."

  4. Of course, Robertson neglects to mention that NATO's was clearly an aggressive war, and therefore in direct contravention of the laws of war.

  5. The nature and "logic" of the constitutional crisis that led to Yugoslavia's violent breakup is best exemplified by the oft-quoted, oft-misrepresented, and perhaps apocryphal quip attributed to a Macedonian political figure: "Why should I be a minority in your State, when you can be a minority in mine?"  Or in Dobrica Cosic's wonderful phrase, "the reasons for [Yugoslavia's] birth [in 1918] were the same as those for its death."

  6.  See The Prize Cases, 67 U.S. 635, 1863.

  7. "Counterrevolutionary" in this context was a Titoist term for any nationalist act that undermined the "Yugoslav" ideal.  Though grotesquely misrepresented by the bulk of the literature on Yugoslavia's breakup, often to the point of inversion, Slobodan Milosevic devoted the bulk of both his infamous April 24, 1987, and his even more infamous June 28, 1989, speeches at Kosovo Polje to the threat that ethnic nationalism posed to the integrity ("brotherhood and unity") of the Yugoslav state.  See Milosevic (1987); and Milosevic (1989).

  8. Yugoslavia officially recognized six distinct "nations"  (i.e., Serb, Croat, Slovene, Macedonian, Montenegrin, and Muslim), and another 18 different "nationalities" (i.e., minority groups smaller than the six recognized "nations").

  9. Unfortunately, we lack the space here to adequately review the interrelationships between each of these decisive factors. But amid the avalanche of misleading, and we believe simply biased, literature to be have been written about the breakup of Yugoslavia from the onset of the constitutional crisis through the war over Kosovo and its aftermath, we find the following works (among others) stand out from the rest for the quality and depth of their presentations: Cohen (1995); Woodward (1995a); Burg and Shoup (1999); Chandler (1999); Hayden (1999a); Cohen (2001); and Johnstone (2002).

  10. Note that we say "civil wars" rather than civil war in order to distinguish between the bona fide civil war of 1998, which was largely ended by the October 1998 agreement the Milosevic government and the Contact Group (though note that the KLA was neither a signatory to this agreement nor did they at any time cease their hostilities towards Serbian forces and civilians), and the much graver fighting and destruction that took place during NATO's springtime war of 1999.

  11. Within Yugoslavia, the two areas that saw the greatest changes in their ethnic composition between the end of the Second World War and the outbreak of armed hostilities in 1991 were the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Serbian province of Kosovo.  According to the 1961 census data, the ethnic breakdown of Bosnia-Herzegovina was 42.8 % Serb, 25.6 % Muslim, 21.7 % Croat, 8.4 % Yugoslav, and 1.5 % Others; the same data for 1991 were 43.7 % Muslim, 31.4 % Serb, 17.3 % Croat, 5.5 % Yugoslav, and 2.1 % Others.  And in the Serbian province of Kosovo in 1961, the ethnic breakdown was 67 % Albanian, 23.5 % Serb, 3.9 % Montenegrin, and 5.6 % Others; the same data for 1991 were (roughly) 90 % Albanians, and 10 % Serbs and Others combined.  See Lampe (1999: 337), summarizing official census data.

  12. As we show in Part Three, the New Humanitarians frequently use the term "Kosovar" in a ethnically pure way to denote Kosovo Albanians only, but not the other ethnic minorities of the province..

  13. On October 13, 1998, NATO issued Activation Orders (ACTORDs) "for both internal air strikes and a phased air campaign in Yugoslavia, execution of which will begin in approximately 96 hours….The responsibility is on President Milosevic's shoulders.  He knows what he has to do."  See "Statement by the Secretary General Following Decision on the ACTORDs, 13 October 1998," in Weller (ed.) (1999: 278).

  14. Evidence for our claim that the situation in Kosovo was "relatively stable" between the October 1998 signing of this agreement and the start of NATO's bombing on March 24, 1999, derives primarily from the lack of evidence to the contrary that has been produced by official sources such as NATO itself and its member governments, the OSCE, the State Department, and, most important, the evidence documented by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia's three indictments of Slobodan Milosevic et al. for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Kosovo.  See the review of the actual evidence in Chomsky (2000: 94-147).

  15. We caution that estimates of deaths both during and after the war vary, and no definitive accounting has yet to be produced.  Our own very tentative estimate of the approximate maximum total number of deaths derives from the combined total of known deaths within Kosovo during the war as of 2000 (3,658) and the International Committee of the Red Cross's total of people missing and unaccounted for (3,525, of which 2,746 were ethnic Albanians, and 779 from other ethnic groups). See (Del Ponte, 2000); and (ICRC, 2001a; 2001b; 2001c).  It would seem highly improbable for the actual total to exceed the sum of these numbers, and may very well turn out to be considerably less.

  16. After the war, The Economist magazine's Intelligence Unit estimated that Yugoslavia alone (Kosovo included) suffered some $64 billion in combined real physical damage and lost output and income going forward, with its per capita income now "below that of Albania, hitherto the poorest country in Europe."  See Agence France Presse (1999); Associated Press (1999); and McClean (1999).

  17. According to the OSCE's (1999a: "Forced Expulsions") data on refugee movements during the bombing, the percentage of the prewar ethnic Albanian population that fled Kosovo during NATO's war was approx. 43 percent of the pre-bombing total; but for that of ethnic Serbs, it was even higher—approximately 50 percent, or at least one-half of the pre-bombing population.

  18. As Robert M. Hayden explains the "logic" of the classical European nation-state: "The basic problem is that with the success of the ideology of the ethnic state, many identifiable populations have refused to be contained within existing borders. Where populations are not overly intermingled, partition could be accomplished relatively cleanly, as with the separation of the Czech lands from Slovakia, or Slovenia from Croatia. Where populations were intermingled, however, rejection of the state by a large portion of its putative population could only mean disaster. Their secession would lead to the expulsion of the new minority, but preserving borders on the grounds as well as on paper would require either the subjugation of rejectionist groups or their expulsion. Bosnia's agony was determined by the success of the Slovenian and Croatian rejection of the common state" (Hayden, 1999a: 151).
  19. As Michael Ignatieff wrote in his exchange with Robert Skidelsky, "Western intelligence confirms that Operation Horseshoe was already underway before the first NATO air-strikes."  That no evidence has ever been publicized to corroborate this claim, aside from the public statements of Western intelligence and political figures, clearly does not trouble this New Humanitarian (Ignatieff, 2000a: 77).

  20. Actually, M. Cherif Bassiouni has worn both hats: That of the New Humanitarian with regard to the right sides in former Yugoslavia, and that of the neglected voice in the wilderness for his even more intensive and impressive labors devoted to the wrong side of the Arab-Israeli conflict over the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

  21. It is worth noting that among the socially sanctioned rewards that have been handed out to the New Humanitarians, Philip Gourevitch, Roy Gutman, and David Rohde have each won the Pulitzer Prize for journalism for their work on Rwanda (Gourevitch) and Bosnia-Herzegovina (Gutman, Rohde).

  22. Clearly, there is much overlap in how we classify these figures, and no rigid classification of them could do justice to the lot.

  23. In a beautiful corroboration of what C. Wright Mills might have called the "social composition of the higher circles" of New Humanitarianism, Timothy Garton Ash writes: "When I arrive in the late evening…[at Hotel Tuzla,]…I step into the lift, press the button for the second floor, and at once subside, powerless, into the cellar. The reception committee in the bar consists of Christopher Hitchens, Susan Sontag, and David Rieff. When I join them, Sontag is just saying to Michael Ignatieff, 'I can't believe that this is your first time here." And he adds that on the very next day, after arriving at an event hosted by the Bosnian Muslim leadership of Tuzla, Mary Kaldor welcomed the group, and the British actress Julie Christie read a poem in homage to Sarajevo, "glowing white…as a translucent china cup"   (Ash, 1999: 147).

  24. For example, "Garton Ash right again," Tim Judah writes  (Judah, 1999); "Superb," Michael Ignatieff says of David Rieff's work (Ignatieff, 1995); and "an immensely wide-ranging intellect," Rieff in turn says of Ignatieff (Rieff, 2000c).  But when he reviewed Noam Chomsky's book A New Generation Draws the Line for the same newspaper, Rieff accused Chomsky of "arrogant fantasy-mongering," and lumped Chomsky's work among that of the "radical conspiracy theorists…who, in book after book, claim to see in the human rights movement some new disguise for American hegemony" (2001).

  25.  Among the Human Rights Watch Board members with ties to the U.S. government, note that Board member Morton Abramowitz was a high-ranking State Department official, a former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey; Paul Goble is the director of the U.S. propaganda news network otherwise known as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty; Kati Marton is the president of the Committee to Protect Journalists and the wife of Richard Holbrooke; and Warren Zimmermann was the last U.S. Ambassador to Yugoslavia during its breakup.

  26. The KPC, inaugurated in September 1999 and modeled on the U.S. National Guard, was recruited from the KLA. Kouchner stated that it had an "emergency response" function "with a mandate to providing humanitarian assistance." KLA commander Agim Ceku was put in charge, with Kouchner stating at the KFC inauguration "I look to him to lead the new members of the Corps in the footsteps of Cincinnatus, the model citizen-soldier of ancient Rome" (Kouchner, 1999c). Ceku had "masterminded the successful [Croatian] offensive at Medak [in 1993] and in 1995 was one of the key planners of the successful Operation Storm (Jane's Defense Weekly, 1999). Kouchner must have known this. A few weeks after the inauguration, the ITCY announced it was "investigating Ceku for alleged war crimes committed against ethnic Serbs in Croatia between 1993 and 1995" (Agence France Presse, 1999), though as in the case of the NATO powers, we doubt the ICTY was serious.

  27.  We say "Westphalian" here because we have noticed a pronounced tendency for the work of the New Humanitarians, but particularly among the academics (e.g., Falk, Held, Kaldor, Linklater, Mayall, Wheeler), to advocate, but only in certain cases, Great Power violations of the U.N. Charter's Article 2(4) absolute prohibition against the "threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state," and the Charter's Article 2(2) affirmation that "This Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members."  The Westphalian system for managing (or, rather, for not managing at all, but leaving it up to the Great Powers to manage) interstate affairs has rightly been called a "system of war" that "worshipped sovereign freedom without restraints…" (Kegley and Raymond). Under the Westphalian system which came out of the detailed peace treaties that finalized Europe's devastating Thirty Years War in 1648, sovereign states were free to conduct their foreign relations on any footing of their choice—the threat or use of force being the preferred method among the Great Powers first in Europe and then elsewhere.  Aggressive war was not illegal, that is.  But the destruction of World War I and especially World War II challenged this belief, if only for a moment in history.  The League of Nations, the U.N. Charter, and various other international treaties of the past 100 years or so were efforts to curb this "system of war," the highest expression of this being the U.N. Charter's absolute prohibition of the threat or use of force in international relations (short of self-defense against national attack, that is).  We strongly believe that the New Humanitarians rush to embrace Great Power "humanitarian" war over the past decade constitutes nothing less than the re-affirmation of a Westphalian system of war, with the alleged "right" to wage war now being reserved for those powers great enough to get away with it.  On the Westphalian system, see Andreas Osiander (1994); Kegley and Raymond (2002); and on the New Humanitarians' clear desire to return to something like the Westphalian system, but one managed on behalf of Great Power intervention and in the name of "human rights," see Chandler (2002).

  28. See Gibbs (2001).

  29. See Herman and McChesney (1997).

  30. Data based on a byline search using the Nexis database of 18 print media from the U.S., the U.K., and Canada (i.e., the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Time Magazine, Newsweek, The Nation, and the New Republic; the Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Financial Times, the Guardian, the Independent, and the New Statesman; and the Toronto Star, Ottawa Citizen, Gazette (Montreal), Vancouver Sun, and Calgary Herald) for articles published by our sample of 12 New Humanitarians (i.e., Timothy Garton Ash, Vaclav Havel, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Ignatieff, Tim Judah, Mary Kaldor, Bernard Kouchner, Aryeh Neier, David Rieff, George Robertson, Kenneth Roth, and Susan Sontag) during the period January 1, 1998 through June 30, 2001. We then checked the content each article to determine what its primary subject matter was, and eliminated all articles that did not deal with one of the seven following contemporaneous humanitarian crises for the period surveyed: (1) Iraq's treatment of its Kurdish population; (2) Turkey's treatment of its Kurdish population; (3) the strife accompanying Colombia's ongoing internal war; (4) the humanitarian crises and human rights atrocities that accompanied the wars over the breakup of Yugoslavia; (5) the deleterious effects of the ongoing sanctions regime on Iraq's civilian population; (6) Indonesia's treatment of the East Timorese population; and (7) Israel's treatment of the Palestinians of the Occupied Territories. To summarize, we found (a) that both the benevolence and the indignation of the New Humanitarians who comprise our sample were channeled according to the sympathies of the NATO powers and American power more specifically (i.e., in favor of the Bosnian Muslim, Kosovo Albanian, and Iraqi Kurdish sides; and against the Bosnian Serb, the Serbian Republic's, and the Iraqi government's sides); and (b) that in each of the five other cases studied (i.e., the Turkish Kurds, Colombia's internal strife, the effect of sanctions on Iraq's civilian population, Indonesia's occupation of East Timor, and Israel's occupation of the Palestinian Territories),  the expressed concern and the attention of the New Humanitarians fell to near zero, once again showing that their concern (or lack of it) was channeled according to the NATO power's and American power's lack of publicly expressed concern.

  31. See Brownlie (2000).  Also see John Laughland, "Human Rights and the Rule of Law: Achieving Universal Justice?" and Jon Holbrook, "Humanitarian Intervention and the Recasting of International Law," in David Chandler, Ed., Rethinking Human Rights: Critical Approaches to International Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 38 - 56, and pp. 136 - 154, respectively.

 

 

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* Ignatieff, Michael (1997) "The Elusive Goal of War Trials," Harper's, March.

 

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