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“ON NATO INTERVENTION IN KOSOVO” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the Senate section on pages S4571-S4572 on May 3, 1999.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
ON NATO INTERVENTION IN KOSOVO
Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, a month ago, April 7, as the war in Yugoslavia began to assume its present form, President Clinton spoke to the U.S. Institute for Peace. It was an important statement about the nature of conflict in the years to come. ``Clearly,'' he stated, ``our first challenge is to build a more peaceful world, one that will apparently be dominated by ethnic and religious conflicts we once thought of primitive, but which Senator Moynihan, for example, has referred to now as post-modern.'' I am scarcely alone in this; it has become, I believe, a widely held view. A recent article in The Wall Street Journal began by asking: ``Does Kosovo represent the future or the past.'' The distinguished Dean of the John F. Kennedy School had an emphatic answer.
. . . Joseph Nye, a Clinton Pentagon alumnus, forecasts a brave new world dominated by ethnic conflicts. There are thousands of ethnic groups that could plausibly argue they deserve independence, he estimates, making it imperative for the U.S. to decide where it should intervene. ``There's potential for enormous violence,'' he says.
In this spirit, just yesterday, The Times spoke of ``The Logic of Kosovo.''
With the cold war over, the country needs to devise a new calculus for determining when its security is threatened and the use of force is warranted. Kosovo is a test case. If the United States and its NATO allies are prepared to let a tyrant in the Balkans slaughter his countrymen and overrun his neighbors with hundreds of thousands of refugees, other combustible regions of Europe may face similar upheavals.
Almost a decade ago the eminent scientist E. O. Wilson offered a perspective from the field of sociobiology. Once ``the overwhelmingly suppressive force of supranational ideology was lifted,'' ethnicity would strike. ``It was the unintended experiment in the natural science mode: cancel one factor at a time, and see what happens.'' For ``coiled and ready ethnicity is to be expected from a consideration of biological evolutionary theory.''
Throw in television and the like, and surely we are in a new situation. Just as surely, it is time to think anew.
The first matter has to do with the number of such potential conflicts. Here it is perhaps the case that the United States bears a special responsibility. For it is we, in the person of President Woodrow Wilson, and the setting of the Versailles Peace Conference who brought to world politics the term ``self-determination.'' It is not sufficiently known that Wilson's Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, of Jefferson County, New York, had the greatest foreboding. Hence this entry in his diary written in Paris on December 30, 1918.
``Self-Determination'' and the Dangers
December 30, 1918
The more I think about the President's declaration as to the right of ``self-determination'', the more convinced I am of the danger of putting such ideas into the minds of certain races. It is bound to be the basis of impossible demands on the Peace Congress, and create trouble in many lands . . . . The phrase is simply loaded with dynamite. It will raise hopes which can never be realized.
It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives. In the end it is bound to be discredited, to be called the dream of an idealist who failed to realize the danger until too late to check those who attempt to put the principle into force. What a calamity that the phrase was ever uttered! What misery it will cause! Think of the feelings of the author when he counts the dead who dies because he coined a phrase! A man, who is a leader of public thought, should beware of intemperate or undigested declarations. He is responsible for the consequences.
There have to be limits, and it should be a task of American statecraft to seek to define them. It is not that 185 members of the United Nations are enough. There is room for more. But surely there needs to be a limit to the horrors we have witnessed in the Balkans in this decade, and in Kosovo this past month. From the Caucuses to the Punjab, from Palestine to the Pyrenees, violence beckons. It is not difficult to get started. At least one American diplomat holds a direct view of the origin of the present horror. I cannot speak for every detail of his account, but some are well known, and his view is not, to my knowledge, contested.
The current phase of the Kosovo crisis can be traced back to 1996, when financial collapse in Albania (small investors lost their meager life savings in a classic Ponzi scheme condoned by the then government) led to political and social chaos. President Berisha (a Geg from the misnamed Democratic Party) was forced out amidst massive rioting in which the army disappeared as its armories were emptied. Arms found their way into the armed gangs and eventually to an incipient Kosovo Albanian guerrilla movement that called itself the Kosovo Liberation Army. The new government of Socialist Fatos Nan (a Southerner, a Tosk, and a former Communist) was unable to establish effective control over the north and Berisha made a conspicuous point of not only supporting the KLA, but actually turning his personal property in the north over to the KLA as a training base. Supporting fellow Gegs apparently makes for good politics among the northerners.
The KLA's strategy was very simple: Target Serbian policemen and thus provoke the inevitable brutal Serb retaliation against Kosovo Albanian civilians, all in the hopes of bringing NATO into the conflict. They have succeeded brilliantly in this goal, but have not proved to be much a fighting force themselves.
These are not arguments new to the Senate. A year ago, April 30, 1998, my eminent colleague John W. Warner and I offered cautionary amendments concerning NATO expansion eastward. I went first with a proposal that new NATO members should first belong to the European Union. I received, as I recall, 17 votes. My colleague then proposed to postpone any further enlargement of NATO for a period of at least three years. That proposal, again if I recall, received 41 votes. We felt, on the whole, somewhat lonely. Now, however, we learn that Defense Secretary William Perry and his top arms-control aide, Ashton Carter, as related by Thomas L. Friedman in The Times of March 16, 1999.
Mr. Perry and Mr. Carter reveal that when they were running the Pentagon they argued to Mr. Clinton that NATO expansion
``should be deferred until later in the decade.'' Mr. Perry details how he insisted at a top-level meeting with the President, on December 21, 1994, that ``early expansion was a mistake,'' because it would provoke ``distrust'' in Russia and undermine cooperation on arms control and other issues, and because ``prematurely adding untried militaries'' at a time when NATO itself was reassessing its role would not be helpful.
The Secretary of Defense lost the argument; in Friedman's view domestic politics overrode strategic concerns. But who won? The various pronouncements that issued from the recent NATO summit come close to a telephone directory of prospective new NATO members. Before we get carried away, might we ask just how many of them have the kind of internal ethnic tension so easily turned on? Which will be invaded by neighbors siding with the insurgents? Must NATO then go to war in the Caucuses?
The second matter of which I would speak is that of international law. The United States and its NATO allies have gone to war, put their men and women in harm's way for the clearest of humanitarian purposes. They have even so attacked a sovereign state in what would seem a clear avoidance of the terms of the U.N. Charter, specifically Article 2(4). The State Department has issued no statement as to the legality of our actions. An undated internal State Department document cites Security Council Resolution 1199 affirming that the situation in Kosovo constitutes a threat to the peace in the region, and demanding that the parties cease hostilities and maintain peace in Kosovo. The Department paper concludes: ``FRY actions in Kosovo cannot be deemed an internal matter, as the Council has condemned Serbian action in Kosovo as a threat to regional peace and security.''
A valid point. But of course the point is weakened, at very least, by the fact of our not having gone back to the Security Council to get authorization to act as we have done. We have not done this, of course, because the Russians and/or the Chinese would block any such resolution. Even so, it remains the case that the present state of international law is in significant ways a limitation on our freedom to pursue humanitarian purposes. Again, a matter that calls for attention, indeed, demands attention.
In sum, limits and law.
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