Originally published October 4, 2022
At a high point for international interventionism in the spring of 1999, NATO launched widespread air strikes across the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia—today’s Serbia. Even with the benefit of laser-guided bombs, NATO fighter-bombs struck targets almost indiscriminately, knocking out bridges, destroying hospitals, and igniting a major oil refinery in the northern city of Novi Sad.
A year later, Yugoslavian citizens rose up peacefully and removed quasi-dictator Slobodan Milosevic, ultimately handing him over for prosecution in a special international tribunal in the Hague. The entire air operation against Yugoslavia was predicated on preventing ostensible ethnic cleaning against ethnically Albanian Kosovars in the southwest Yugoslavian region of Kosovo. NATO ground forces, constituted as KFOR, took over administration in Kosovo.
KFOR still exists and is still in-place in Kosovo. NATO has been unable to withdraw due to ethnic strife it did not anticipate. A large plurality of Kosovo’s population are Orthodox ethnic Serbs. In 2004, Kosovars launched pogroms against their Serbia neighbors destroying homes and churches. NATO’s remaining 5000 troops are essentially unable to withdraw due to concerns about ethnic cleansing against Serbs.[1]
Carving off Kosovo from Serbia by NATO fiat was a watershed moment. Before the controversial interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, it marked a high point of NATO internationalism and prompted George W. Bush to condemn interventionism on the campaign trail in 2000. It also alarmed the Russian Federation. Leaders in Moscow notably signed on to NATO’s air campaign against the Republic Srpska in Bosnia, in 1995, to stop ethnic cleansing, but grew suspicious of NATO internationalism after 1999. Russia makes much of the Kosovo intervention and the unilateral declaration of Kosovo’s independence in 2008 (the gap in time between NATO’s intervention and Western recognition of Kosovo is the same as the gap between Russia’s intervention in the Donbass and its recognition in of the Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republic).
Lingering problems in Kosovo nearly came to a head in the summer of 2022 when the Kosovar government threatened to ban Serbian license plates. Ethnic Serb villages along the fringes of Kosovo, on the Serbia border itself, blockaded roads in protest and the Serbian prime minister announced the possibility of war. Fortunately, Kosovo backed down. Nevertheless, this latest flare up suggests that there is a lingering risk of conflict.[2]
NATO should help to broker talks between Serbia and Kosovo that would result in Serbian recognition of Kosovo and the transfer of ethnic Serb villages back to Serbia. After 23 years, it is time for the longest modern experiment in nation-building to come to an end.
References [1] Failure to Protect: Anti-Minority Violence in Kosovo, March 2004, Human Rights Watch, (Jul. 25, 2004), https://www.hrw.org/report/2004/07/25/failure-protect/anti-minority-violence-kosovo-march-2004. [2] Thomas O. Falk, What’s behind the renewed tensions between Serbia and Kosovo?, Al Jazeera, (Aug. 4, 2022), https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/8/4/whats-behind-the-renewed-tensions-between-serbia-and-kosovo.
Image Credit: Mrika Selimi, Unsplash
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