Why The Road To Genocide Can Be Distrubingly Short

The ongoing situation in Ukraine is, sadly, another illustration of how quickly conflicts can explode, even among people who previously had lived together as neighbors and friends.

This was illustrated by a video clip shown by the BBC on Monday, April 14.  It showed the aftermath of the seizure of a police station in eastern Ukraine by pro-Russian militias.  Two men, presumably Ukrainian police officers, were being assaulted by a mob at the foot of a staircase.  The makeup of the mob at first was typical – a group of young men in their late teens/early twenties, but then something unexpected happened: two older women, perhaps in their forties, who had been watching the attack, stepped forward and got their own licks in on one of the prone men.  According to the BBC, the man thankfully survived his beating.

The video serves as an illustration of a disturbing, yet fascinating, phenomenon: how quickly peaceful, multi-ethnic communities can devolve into open sectarian - and often brutal - war.  

Since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine has been a nation with a large Russian minority population.  While there has been some occasional tension between the groups over issues like whether or not Russian should be recognized as an official language in Ukraine, the two ethnicities have basically lived together peacefully – there have been no reports of systematic violence between the two groups.  This is especially true in eastern Ukraine, where the bulk of Ukraine's Russian population is located.  There, the two ethnicities lived together and intermarried; it was not uncommon for families to be spread out between Russia and Ukraine and crossing the border of the two nations was usually given about as much thought as crossing the street.  Certainly there are no outward physical signs to distinguish a Russian from a Ukrainian.  Even just a few months ago such inter-ethnic violence in Ukraine would have been unthinkable.  Yet now, cities across eastern Ukraine are being roiled by just such attacks.  Ethnic Russians in Ukraine have been flooded by messages from Russian-based media outlets condemning the “Fascist putsch” that overthrew the government of President Viktor Yanukovych and ominous warnings that Fascist mobs were heading east from Kiev to brutalize the ethnic Russian population (a comprehensive United Nations report could find no evidence of these alleged attacks).  For their part, some ultra-nationalist groups that became involved with the Maidan protests in Kiev have talked openly about their desire for Ukraine to be “for Ukrainians” - meaning ethnic Ukrainians and not Russians who happen to also be citizens of Ukraine; though again, the anti-Russian, Ukrainian-nationalist mobs that the Russian media constantly warns about have not materialized.

The BBC video brings to mind another recent European conflict: the Yugoslavian Civil War in the 1990s.  Before the conflict – Europe's bloodiest since World War II – Yugoslavia had been a fairly prosperous multi-ethnic nation, of Serbians, Croatians and Bosniaks (Muslims from Bosnia), who peacefully co-existed.  Nowhere was this more apparent than in Sarajevo, a vibrant, multi-ethnic city that hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics.  A decade later, the city would lie largely in ruins, having borne witness to the worst acts of ethnic cleansing since the Holocaust.  The roots of the Yugoslavian Civil War can be traced back to then-Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, himself an ethnic Serb.  In an effort to bolster his regime, Milosevic filled the airwaves with Serbian nationalist rhetoric, some of it reviving ancient ethnic tensions that dated back to the Battle of Kosovo Polje in 1389 between the Serbs and the Muslim Ottoman Empire.  A conflict soon emerged with neighbors who had lived together, sometimes for decades, beating, killing and raping each other in a brutal inter-ethnic war.

The Ukrainian crisis also comes along at the 20^th anniversary of one of the worst atrocities of the past century; the Rwandan Genocide of 1994.  Here again, two ethnicities – the Hutus and the Tutsi – who had lived side-by-side were soon embroiled in a genocide that would kill more than 800,000 people in the space of just three months.  The roots of that conflict can be traced back to Rwanda's time as a colony when the ruling Belgian empire used minor physiological characteristics to create a division between the two very similar Hutu and Tutsi peoples.  A century later, these differences would be exploited - again through a deliberate mass-media campaign - to sow division between the two groups that would eventually lead to the genocide.

In the United States even today tension exists between the Caucasian and African-American communities; occasionally the rhetoric employed around this tension can be ugly and hateful.  But with these two communities, there are outward signs of difference; a way for one to cite the “otherness” of the opposite community.  These outward differences are minor in the cases of the ethnicities involved in the Rwandan and Yugoslav conflicts and totally absent in Ukraine where the “Russian” and “Ukrainian” ethnicities are entirely social constructs with no basis in physiology.  Yet in each case it has been remarkably easy for some actors within one community to use the mass-media to portray the other ethnicity as something evil or dangerous, an existential threat to the welfare of the actor's ethnicity.  What is disturbing is how willingly people are to buy into the victimization narrative and turn on the others, even if they were their friends and neighbors.  During the heights of the Yugoslavia and Rwanda conflicts it was not uncommon for people to rape and murder the neighbors they had lived next to for many years just because they belonged to the other ethnicity.  

Ukraine has not sunk to that level of violence yet, but recent history has shown that it can sadly be a very short descent.

Divac, Eagleburger And Non-Intervention

What can you learn about non-interventionist foreign policy from a former NBA player? Surprisingly, a good bit. This past weekend I happened to watch another installment of ESPN's excellent documentary series 30 for 30, the subject of “Once Brothers” were Vlade Divac and Drazen Petrovic. The two were stars of Yugoslavia's national basketball team and were both trying to break into the NBA in the early 1990s at the same time as their country was coming apart. Divac, a Serbian and Petrovic, a Croatian, had been extremely close, but their relationship ended as Serbian-led Yugoslavia went to war with Croatia and Slovenia after the two former republics declared their independence from Yugoslavia. Divac inadvertently became Public Enemy #1 in Croatia for refusing to take a Croatian flag during a post-victory celebration for the Yugoslav national team a few months earlier, an act that would help to drive him and Petrovic apart. Petrovic's untimely death in a car accident ended any chance of reconciliation between the two former friends. “Once Brothers” featured the story of Divac's first trip back to Croatia in 20 years to visit Petrovic's parents.

The Yugoslav War also came up in discussions about the legacy of recently-deceased former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger. Though he no longer served in government, the jowly, bespectacled Eagleburger was a frequent guest on the news-talk circuit, speaking on issues of US Foreign Policy. In the 1990s, Eagleburger had been adamant about the US not intervening in the Yugoslav conflicts. From a humanitarian standpoint it was a tough call. The Yugoslav War was the worst conflict in Europe since the end of World War II, civilians bore the brunt of the fighting, and thanks to advances in satellite technology and the birth of 24-hour news outlets like CNN, images of the war were beamed into homes around the world. But Eagleburger argued that Yugoslavia wasn't America's fight and that we would be quickly drawn into a conflict that would last for years. The United States stayed out of the conflict – for awhile at least; by 1995 the US-led peace talks resulted in the Dayton Accords that ended fighting in Bosnia, the United States was also later the driving force in a NATO bombing campaign that brought about an end to the last stage of the Yugoslav conflicts, the fighting between Serbia and its breakaway region, Kosovo in 1999.

You could probably write a series of novels on what might have happened if the US hadn't followed Eagleburger's advice and had intervened in Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. If current examples are any indication, we'd likely still be engaged in the region in a big way. Eight years after the start of Gulf War II, the United States is still in Iraq and is arguing to stay for awhile longer to support the fragile Iraqi government; ten years after going into Afghanistan to get Osama bin Laden, the US is still there as well, fighting the insurgent Taliban even after the death of OBL and with plans to stay until 2014, at least; and coalition forces seem to be getting more deeply involved in Libya, with NATO stepping up airstrikes against Gadhafi's regime. This last one is probably the best analogy to what could have happened in Yugoslavia – it is easy to see the US (and maybe a reluctant coalition of European nations like France and Great Britain) going in to set up “safety zones” for civilians and quickly being drawn into the fighting on the side of the Croats/Slovenians against the Soviet/Russian-backed Serbs, just as NATO is now supporting the Libyan rebels against Gadhafi in that supposedly “humanitarian” intervention.

It's no doubt that the fighting in Yugoslavia was bloody, resulting in far too many civilian deaths, but the countries that emerged seem to be doing pretty well today: Slovenia is a member of the European Union and a prosperous and popular tourist destination; Croatia too is doing well after recovering from the war and is in the final stages of becoming an EU member; even Serbia is emerging from almost two decades of largely self-imposed isolation from Europe, thanks to the policies of nationalist leaders like Slobodan Milosevic, and is now looking towards a future in the EU. Conversely Bosnia, where the warring Bosnian, Croat and Serb factions were wrestled into a peace deal in the Dayton Accords 15 years earlier, remains a deeply divided state; about once a month an op-ed will appear with a dire warning about Bosnia's impending collapse. Kosovo meanwhile is fairing little better – its independence is still not recognized by more than half of the members of the United Nations and their government is alleged to have more in common with the Sopranos than the Founding Fathers.

“Once Brothers” ended with Divac traveling to Zagreb, Croatia. Many of the Croats recognized him, but few approached, still apparently harboring ill-feelings towards him from two decades earlier. But the streets themselves were peaceful and well-kept, and Divac himself was warmly greeted by Petrovic's parents. A post-script to the story said that he was slowly rebuilding his former friendships with other Croats from the former Yugoslav national team like former NBA-er Toni Kukoc. Perhaps the message here is that intervention, however well-intentioned it may be, in the long run isn't the best course of action and that warring people need to find their own ways to peace.

Body Snatchers Redux

Last Tuesday the Council of Europe voted to endorse a 27-page report accusing the prime minister and other members of Kosovo's government of operating a human organ smuggling ring during the Kosovo-Serbia War in the late 1990s. The alleged ring was discussed earlier in this post, but in short, a branch of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) known as the Drenica Group is accused of smuggling both Kosovars and captured Serbian soldiers into Albania, where they were executed and their organs harvested for transplant (for a tidy profit of course). This is on top of other more run-of-the-mill criminal activities Drenica is said to have engaged in like drug smuggling and prostitution. The man in charge of the Drenica Group at the time is Kosovo's current Prime Minister Hashim Thaci; much of the leadership of what then was the KLA is now Kosovo's government.

The Council of Europe report will do nothing to boost the image of Kosovo, which had already taken a hit over allegations that their most recent parlimentary elections were far from fair and open. Nor will they help to change a perception that Kosovo is less of a country than it is a massive criminal enterprise. Black market activities, like drug smuggling, are said to make up a large chunk of Kosovo's economy; in fact the joke going around Russia when Afghanistan recently recognized Kosovo's independence was that this marked the first time that a drug supplier had recognized the independence of one of their major dealers.

But the heinous nature of the crimes – the murder of people to sell their organs – trancends mere criminal activity. Not surprisingly, the government of Kosovo is vigorously denying the charges and Thaci is even threatening to sue the author of the report, investigator Dick Marty, for libel. What remains to be seen is if the European Union will take up the charges laid out by the Council of Europe. As Al Jazeera's Laurence Lee notes: “given that a number of Western countries, including the US, have now formally recognised Kosovo it's an open question whether there's the political will to pursue Hashim Thaci.” Good question indeed.

And frankly, for all their talk about support of human rights, the European Union has been fairly weak in taking steps to actually protect them, especially among certain less-favored populations: the Roma (or Gypsies) in Central Europe, ethnic Russian minorities in the former Soviet Baltic republics and African migrants in places like Italy and France. Since Kosovo is a pet project for the EU and the Serbs, at least until recently, were cast in the role of Europe's bad guys, it will be interesting to see if the EU takes the allegations contained in the Council of Europe report seriously. I won't be holding my breath.

Chinese Stealth, American Research

China caused a stir, and something of a minor diplomatic incident, earlier this month when they undertook the first flight of their stealth fighter jet, the J-20, during a visit by US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. I wonder if the Chinese were kind enough to thank Gates for all the help America unwittingly gave China in building the jet?

According to a new report on the BBC, the J-20 owes much of its stealthy design to parts from an American F-117 Nighthawk stealth jet shot down during the NATO-led, and US-backed bombing campaign against Serbia in 1999. The F-117 was the first operational stealth aircraft employed by any military in the world; a stealth aircraft uses a combination of shape and radio wave-absorbing materials to make the airplane nearly invisible to radar. Yet somehow the Serbians still managed to shoot one down during the conflict, military sources from the Balkan region say that Chinese intelligence agents reached the crash site and retrieved parts of the aircraft, which were believed to have given Chinese engineers a great advantage in building the J-20 they recently unveiled. The story does make some sense since in 1999 there were deep ties between Serbia and China, at the time the US angrily accused China of sharing military intelligence with Serbia. (It's worth noting that during the bombing campaign against Serbia, the Chinese embassy was “accidentally” struck by an errant bomb.) It is also strange, based on the BBC report, that the United States didn't make an effort to secure the wreckage of the F-117, or at least destroy it. The crash site was allegedly visited by Chinese, American and Russian officials and even today pieces of the F-117 are displayed in a museum in Belgrade, Serbia.

Of course China doesn't seem to have taken the most valuable lesson from the F-117 wreckage; namely that stealth technology isn't all that it is cracked up to be. Even though building a stealth jet today is the holy grail of the world's most advanced air forces, the planes do have one glaring weakness – while it is possible to make the aircraft itself nearly invisible to radar, it's not possible to disguise the turbulence it leaves as it moves though the air. Just like a boat leaves a wake in the water as it moves, so to does an airplane. And while American officials dismissed the Serbian downing of the F-117 in 1999 as a “lucky shot”, in fact the Serbs had figured out a clever way to use Doppler radar (the same kind your local weatherman uses) to track the wake of the F-117. All they had to do then was shoot at the point where the wake was starting to hit the airplane.

Getting back to the Chinese J-20, in addition to thanking the US, China probably also owes Russia a debt of gratitude as well. A few weeks ago, the Washington Post published this article about how despite their best efforts, the Chinese defense industry has had little luck in creating durable jet engines for their air force and were looking into long-term deals with Russia for a supply of aircraft engines. Just a little something to keep in mind next time you read an article about the growing might of the Chinese military.

Kosovo Body Snatchers

Kosovo's Prime Minister Hashim Thaci was probably planning to spend the week celebrating his party's victory in his country's first national elections, instead he is defending himself from charges that he ran a ring of international body thieves.

The allegations go back nearly a decade to the time when the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was fighting an insurgent campaign against Serbian paramilitaries as well as the Serbian government, which was trying to pacify the rebellious region of Kosovo. The Serbs were charged with a host of war crimes against the population of Kosovo, charges that eventually resulted in a NATO-led bombing campaign against Serbia, followed by the partition, and eventual independence, of Kosovo from Serbia. But rumors persisted that the Kosovars were committing atrocities of their own, namely that they were taking civilians and captured Serbs, killing them, and then selling their organs for transplant on the black market, rumors that we have previously discussed here. With officials in Kosovo, Albania -where many of the murders and transplants allegedly took place - and EULEX (the European Union security force dispatched to Kosovo for much of the 2008) unwilling to take the allegations seriously, it seemed like they would remain rumors that is until Dick Marty, a special human rights investigator for the Council of Europe, released a report this week saying that he had proof of the body-snatching ring.

Prime Minister Thaci was obviously upset by the rumors and has branded them as an attempt to slander his fledgling state. But there are a few things worth considering: much of the current Kosovar government is made up of former members of the KLA, Thaci included; and before the KLA became allied with the West in their struggle against the Serbian government, they were listed by a host of governments (the United States included) as a potential terrorist organization with possible links to al-Qaeda (we also learned this week that some felt the KLA put more effort into fighting rival factions in Kosovo then they did the Serbs). Even though they may no longer be considered to have terrorist links, the factions of the old KLA are thought to be closely allied with organized crime groups in Kosovo and Albania; much of Kosovo's economy is currently based on activities like smuggling and other criminal activities, along with foreign aid payments and remittances by Kosovars living abroad, not exactly the basis for a thriving economy.

Kosovo has been a political football for the past several years between the US and key European powers like Great Britain and France on one side and the Russians with their traditional allies the Serbs on the other. Kosovo and Serbia spent much of the 2000s engaged in a UN-brokered set of talks to determine Kosovo's final status, a process that was short-circuited in 2008 when the Kosovars decided to walk away from the talks and declare independence and the US/UK/France decided to recognize them as the world's newest nation. The rationale given by the Western powers was that it was a necessary step to ensure another ethnic conflict didn't break out between Kosovo and Serbia, but Serbia was a much different country in 2008 – the nationalists who had driven the Kosovo conflict were out of power and the country was looking to align itself with greater Europe – it was hard to think another round of conflict was in the offing. The move rather felt like delayed payback to Serbia for causing so much mischief in the 1990s, along with an attempt to weaken the Russian position in Europe by weakening one of their allies.

As such, the Europeans didn't bother to give the persistent rumors of the Kosovo body snatching ring a proper investigation, at least until Marty came along; nor have they taken much action to quell the hold organized crime has over the country, despite the fact that – thanks to Wikileaks – they were well aware of the crime situation. Frankly, its hard to imagine what Kosovo's economy would be based on, the nation is relatively small, landlocked, and has a sparse population – the question of whether it could be a viable state was apparently not considered in the rush to recognize its independence.

It will be interesting to see how Europe moves forward with Kosovo. In addition to the body snatching ring, which Marty promises to present evidence of in the coming weeks, there are also reports from the region that there were widespread irregularities in last weekend's election that saw Thaci's party win a solid majority; certainly not good signs for the future of the Western power's pet project.

Did Wes Clark Almost Start World War III?

That's the inference being made by James Blunt in a new interview with the BBC. Blunt is probably best known in the United States for his soft rock hit single “You're Beautiful”; but before making his mark on the airwaves, Blunt was a cavalry officer in the British military. In 1999 he was leading troops as part of the NATO mission in Kosovo aimed at halting the fighting between the Kosovars and Serbian forces. A key point in the NATO strategy to establish security in Kosovo was to gain control of the airfield outside the capital, Pristina; but in a surprise move Russian forces swept through Kosovo and seized the airfield ahead of the NATO troops. While the Russians were supposedly part of KFOR, the international alliance that had come together to halt the fighting in Kosovo, suspicion ran high in the US/NATO command that the Russians were in fact trying to hinder the KFOR mission on behalf of their traditional allies, the Serbians who feared Kosovo would breakaway from Serbia (a fear that turned out to be correct).

According to Blunt, General Wesley Clark, then the NATO Supreme Commander Europe, ordered NATO forces to attack and “destroy” the Russians and take control of the Pristina airfield by force. Blunt, who was at the head of the NATO column approaching the airfield, would have led the attack, but the orders seemed so crazy to him that he called up his own superior officers for clarification. Commander of the British forces, General Sir Michael Jackson ordered Blunt and his troops to stand down, saying: “I'm not going to have my soldiers be responsible for starting World War III.” The NATO troops instead encircled the airbase; the Russians, who had rushed into Pristina in such a hurry that they didn't bring enough supplies for a siege offered to share command of the airbase two days later.

Now frankly I've always thought of Wes Clark as one of the better voices out there on foreign affairs, but his command to attack the Russians is just daffy and very possibly could have led to WWIII. I'd be tempted to doubt Blunt, except for the fact that Jackson backs up his account, and if you remember any of the news accounts from the KFOR mission, then you remember that Sir Mike Jackson was most definitely a no BS kind of guy.

For his part, Blunt says that even if Jackson had not backed him up, he still would have refused General Clark's order to attack the airfield and the Russians, even though it likely would have meant his court martial, since the orders were so blatantly reckless. He explained to the BBC that a “sense of moral judgment is drilled into us as soldiers in the British army” as to why he would have refused Clark's orders.

Would The US Bomb Argentina?

The setup to that question deals with the British government, which last week as part of a fiscal austerity program announced across-the-board budget cuts that included the Ministry of Defense, which will see its budget cut by 8%. To put that in some perspective that would equal a roughly $56 billion dollar cut in current US defense spending (and to put that in perspective, that figure is nearly equal to Great Britain's entire defense budget). Bearing the brunt of the MoD cuts is the Air Wing of the Royal Navy. The Royal Navy is planning to add two state-of-the-art aircraft carriers to the fleet this decade; the Queen Elizabeth and the Prince of Wales. Normally when budgets are cut, proposed weapons systems are the first to go, but the British government found that because of the way the shipbuilding contracts for the carriers is written, it would actually be cheaper to build the carriers than to cancel the project outright. This has put the MoD in the odd position of announcing that the Queen Elizabeth will be built and put into service in 2016 without aircraft (which is kind of the whole purpose of an aircraft carrier...) for about three years until the Prince of Wales is finished; the Queen Elizabeth will then be retired in almost new condition. To make matters worse, the Royal Navy will retire their two existing carriers by 2014, leaving them without any aircraft carriers in service for three years and without any with actual airplanes aboard ship for almost six.

This situation has some in Britain – pundits, defense analysts, and judging by the comment boards of English newssites a fair number of average citizens – quite upset. The question being asked is how Great Britain can consider itself a world power without a way of projecting that power around the globe in the way that only a fully functioning aircraft carrier can. More specifically, some are asking how (or even if) Great Britain will be able to protect some of their last remaining far-flung bits of Empire, and here talk generally falls on the Falkland Islands. In 1981 a British fleet sailed halfway across the globe to wrestle the Falklands away from an invading force from Argentina (the two countries have spent nearly a century and a half of wrangling over possession of the islands, for a more detailed history, check this earlier post about the Falklands situation). Now, critics in Britain say that the MoD cuts would make a repeat of the 1981 flotilla an impossibility, while also noting that reclaiming the Falklands (or Las Malvinas as the Argentineans call them) is a recurring motif in Argentine politics and that the islands themselves may sit on rich oil and natural gas reserves, making them potentially very valuable real estate.

Some in America are upset by the British cuts as well since the British have been arguably the most active and most valuable members of the military coalitions assembled by the United States in recent years – the 1999 bombing campaign against Serbia, the first Gulf War, the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the ongoing GWOT mission in Afghanistan. The MoD cuts though make it less likely that the British will be able to participate in future American-led coalitions like they have in the past, a fact upsetting the military minds in the United States.

And all of that brings us to the question asked in the headline; does that kind of partnership go both ways? In none of the coalition examples listed before was there a direct threat to the British homeland, people or interests abroad, yet Great Britain was an active and valued participant in what were essentially American military campaigns (particularly the “Global War on Terror” and the 2003 Iraq War). So what if the British asked the United States to join in a military campaign to defend their interests, would we join? For the sake of argument, let's assume that its 2015 and after a quick naval landing Argentina has retaken the Falkland Islands. The British government has vowed to retake the islands and has assembled another armada for the long sail across the Atlantic, just as they did in 1981. The difference is in 2015 the British don't have a functioning aircraft carrier, meaning they can't protect the armada from the air or support their Marines in a landing to retake the Falklands; in modern military terms, this makes the British mission nearly suicidal. The British ask the United States to join their coalition by adding one of our aircraft carriers to the fleet and providing air support. What would our answer be?

Almost certainly, it would be no. In terms of the Falklands/Malvinas issue, the United States historically has not taken a position – not wanting to offend either our long-standing allies the British, nor wanting to upset the nations of Latin America (or to provide any anti-colonial fodder for Latin America's more leftists leaders like Hugo Chavez by backing the British claim). Since the United States has spent the last century telling the two sides to “talk” about the Falklands/Malvinas issue and didn't support the British in the 1981 operation, it's impossible to see the US agreeing to go to war with Argentina on Britain's behalf.

Of course, from the British side you'd have to wonder what was the point of backing America on all of those earlier military coalitions if the US isn't going to support you when you need them the most. It is an interesting foreign policy question indeed...

Other People's Backyards

Two recent posts/events got me thinking (again) about America's foreign policy role in the world of 2010. The first was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's recent swing through the Balkans, with stops in Kosovo and Bosnia (her stop in Kosovo led to what might be the foreign policy picture of the year, her posing in front of the statue the Kosovars put up to honor her husband, former President Bill Clinton, in their capital, Pristina). Part of her trip was the usual mission of just flying the US flag in some part of the world to let them know that America still remembers them; the other rationale for the trip though was to highlight the unresolved problems of the region and to gently prod the Europeans into taking action. While Kosovo may have won its independence from Serbia three years ago, the country is still in a delicate condition with foreign aid, expat remittances and a thriving black market accounting for much of Kosovo's economy; in Bosnia the situation is even more precarious, 15 years after the end of the bloody Bosnian conflict, the nation remains really two separate states – one Serbian, one Croatian/Bosnian Muslim – loosely bound together by a weak central government. The second story was this one from RealClearWorld about Afghanistan, which argues that the US presence in that country has brought enough stability to allow regional Asian powers – namely China and India – to start their own economic investment in the place. China, for example, is looking to invest in natural gas pipelines that would run from Turkmenistan (holder of one of the world's largest reserves of natural gas) through northern Afghanistan to help fuel China's economic growth, they are also investing in a massive copper mine south of Kabul.

And that brings us to the question; should the United States really be pursuing security goals (and in the case of Afghanistan sacrificing the lives of our soldiers and hundreds of billions of dollars) to make the backyards of Europe and Asia safe places? Shouldn't these be projects for the regional powers in Europe and Asia to undertake? Or in other words, if China wants Afghanistan to be safe enough for pipeline routes and mineral exports, why shouldn't they send in their own soldiers and spend their own budget on the project? If Europe is serious about making the Continent a safe and secure place (which was the point of the whole European Union project), shouldn't they take the lead in Bosnia and Kosovo?

Past the theoretical question of whether the United States should be involved in bringing order to places on the other side of the globe, there is the practical question as well. The Afghan mission has been hugely expensive both in terms of money and the lives of soldiers; yet nearly a full decade into the mission and the primary goal – the capture or elimination of Osama bin Laden still has not been achieved, nor is Afghanistan yet a stable and secure member of the global community of nations; it's hard to imagine that another year or two or five will appreciably change that situation. In the Balkans, 15 years ago through tough negotiations, the United States managed to stop the brutal war in Bosnia, but stopping a war is not the same as securing a lasting peace. The Dayton Accords, which stopped the fighting in Bosnia, also set up the dual state system and enshrined the Serbian entity, the Republika Srpska, as a political system – a situation that has led to the deadlock that grips Bosnia today and has observers worried that nationalists on both sides could drag the region back into conflict. In Kosovo, the United States again dragged a reluctant Europe into stopping the conflict there as well (this time via a “NATO-led” aerial bombing campaign of Serbia conducted mostly by the United States Air Force), yet little has been done to make Kosovo into a real and sustainable state.

Logically the Chinese, Indians, Russians and other neighboring lands should be more concerned with the growth and stability of Afghanistan than the United States; ditto for Bosnia/Kosovo and Europe. Yet in both cases, the United States is put in the position of taking the lead. Perhaps it's time to let other people deal with the problems in their own backyards.

Wakhan, Somaliland and The Modern State

My latest post over at The Mantle deals with a few out of the way regions of the world: Somaliland, Abkhazia and Afghanistan’s Wakhan Corridor. So what do a collection of places you may have never heard about have to do with global affairs in the 21st century? Quite a lot it seems, especially when it comes to the idea of what makes a modern nation-state and what are the rights (and the limits to those rights) of a group of people to decide to breakaway and form their own country. Read more about it over at The Mantle.

The Domain That Refused To Die

My latest bit of writing over at The Mantle - nearly two decades after the end of the Soviet Union, one piece of the old empire persists: the Internet domain ".su", despite all the best efforts to delete it. In my post I take a look at the ."su" domain, who uses it and what the future holds for the last vestige of the old Soviet empire.

Bosnia, A Test Case for Multilateralism

In my latest post over at The Mantle I tackle the topic of Bosnia, actually former Senator Bob Dole's take on the situation in Bosnia, which he worries could be split apart because of gridlock within the government between the Bosnian Serb and Bosnian Croat/Bosnian Muslim sides. With the specter of a new Balkan war in the background, Dole calls for the US to get involved to fix the political situation or risk disaster. My take though is that Bosnia could provide serve as a great test case for the new era of multilateralism that President Obama has made the center point of his foreign policy.

Give my whole argument a read over at The Mantle.

More Recognition for Abkhazia, South Ossetia

Add Venezuela to the list of countries recognizing Abkhazia and South Ossetia's independence from Georgia. Of course, that's a pretty short list that includes Russia and Nicaragua, and that's it. But it is at least a little boost for the independence dreams of the two breakaway regions, and another reason for the United States to be angry with Hugo Chavez. The US continues to push for "support for Georgia's territorial integrity", despite explicitly NOT respecting Serbia's territorial integrity when it comes to Kosovo...but that's a topic we've talked about here on numerous occasions, so no need to rehash now.

So why did Pres. Chavez make the decision about Abkhazia and South Ossetia now? He's in the middle of a world tour and today's stop had him speaking with Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev - Russia is the patron of both would-be countries. And according to the last line in the VOA story: "President Medvedev also announced that Russia will sell Venezuela tanks and whatever weapons it asks for."

A Visit to the ABC Republic

I wanted to link to this story from Der Spiegel about Abkhazia (abrieviated 'ABC' in diplomatic circles), the region of Georgia trying to breakaway and become an independent nation in its own right.

Abkhazia, in case you don't know from earlier posts here, is a land of about 300,000 people along the Black Sea that was once referred to as the "Côte d'Azur of the Soviet Union" or more simply as the "Soviet Riviera" since it was part of the only sub-tropical climate to be found anywhere in the massive landmass of the Soviet Union (which itself covered 1/6th of the globe). Georgia hasn't exercised any real control over the region since losing a brief civil war in 1993, yet still insists that Abkhazia remains a part of Georgia. The Abkhaz people, meanwhile, have managed to do a fairly good job of governing themselves, according to the Der Spiegel piece. Ten years ago the capital Sukhumi (or Sukhum as the Abkhaz spell it) was a city devastated by the civil war with Georgia. Today, Der Speigel notes: "Nowadays there are electric buses in the streets, banks are open and adolescents in school uniforms congregate in front of the Pushkin High School. A Louis de Funès film with Abkhazian subtitles is playing at a local cinema. There are traffic lights, a children's library and speed limits."

But so far only Russia and Nicaragua have recognized Abkhazia's independence. The reason is largely political - the 'Western' powers (the US, UK, France, Germany) all back Georgia, so they refuse to participate in carving a new state out from its flanks - even though they have no misgivings about carving an independent state of Kosovo out of Serbia. Others, like China, don't want to recognize any new ethnically-based states for fear of encouraging restless (and often oppressed) ethnic groups within their own borders.

So Abkhazia remains trapped in a kind of Twilight Zone of international politics - existing as a functioning nation in everything but name.

VP Biden On Cheer-Up Tour of Georgia, Ukraine

Vice-President Joe Biden is heading overseas for a visit to two of our Eastern European allies, Georgia and Ukraine. The context for the visit is basically to tell them not to worry, that even while the United States is trying to 'reset' relations with Russia, we won't forget about them and their desire to join NATO. But supporting their NATO ambitions now is exactly the wrong thing to do.

First, it violates (again) a pledge that the United States made to the newly-independent Russia just after the end of the Soviet Union back in the 90’s when the countries of Eastern Europe were clamoring for NATO membership: don't worry, we won't let NATO expand into the former Soviet Union. It's a promise that the US has already broken by supporting the membership of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. (And if you want to know why US-Russian relations are in a bad state, broken NATO promises are a big reason).

But second, promises aside, neither Georgia nor Ukraine deserves NATO membership, at least not now. NATO membership has been one of the 'rewards' to Eastern/Central European countries for making the transition from Communism to Democracy. But the governments of both Ukraine and Georgia are a mess. Ukraine has been paralyzed by political infighting for almost two years; their parliament just ended its session this week with a fistfight among some of its members. Meanwhile in Georgia, protesters have occupied parts of Tbilisi for three months now, charging that President Mikhail Saakashvili has become exactly the same kind of petty autocrat that he helped depose during Georgia's much-celebrated 'Rose Revolution'.

Biden's also going to Georgia to tell them (and Russia) that the US supports their 'territorial integrity' and their claim to the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia that Russia has recognized as independent countries. Of course in May during his own 'reset' mission to Serbia, Biden told the Serbs that the United States did recognize the independence of their breakaway region Kosovo, that Kosovo was gone and the Serbs needed to stop their crying about it. Mix messages Mr. Vice-President?

Meanwhile European officials are delaying the release of a report into last summer's conflict between Georgia and Russia over South Ossetia because the report, apparently, will put a lot of the blame on the Georgian side by suggesting they started the fighting - a move that's not politically popular with the British (or the US for that matter), who want the blame for the war to fall squarely on Russia. EU officials say they don't want to release the report now because they're worried about raising tensions in the region.

Like Biden's visit isn't going to do that, especially given Biden's penchant for, shall we say, going off script? I expect there's a good chance that Biden's visit will undo all the progress that Presidents Obama and Medvedev made in mending US-Russian relations two weeks ago in Moscow.

Reset Button Pt. Deux: Biden goes to Serbia

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced with much fanfare (and a wrongly-worded prop) that the US wanted to 'reset' relations with Russia. Last week Vice President Joe Biden jumped on the reset bandwagon and tried to mend fences with another country - Serbia.

US-Serbian relations have been in poor shape since the United States prompted NATO to launch a two-month aerial bombing campaign against the Serbs to force them to halt military action in Kosovo in 1999. Those relations were further strained last year when the United States was one of the leading members of the international community to recognize Kosovo's claim of independence.

So Biden traveled to the Balkans to show the flag and tell the locals that the US was interested in turning the page. I talked with a Serbian friend this weekend who told me though that folks in Belgrade were more annoyed that large parts of their city were locked-down for the visit of the Vice-President of the United States than they were interested in what he had to say. Biden's meeting with Serbian President Boris Tadic didn't fare much better.

Biden encouraged Serbia to join the European community (something most Serbs want at this point anyway), but said that the US and Serbia would have to 'agree to disagree' over the status of Kosovo - Serbia, which views Kosovo as an integral part of their country, adamantly refuses to recognize Kosovo's independence.

I've expressed my opinion a number of times on this site that recognizing Kosovo's independence was a big mistake - that it's doubtful Kosovo is a viable independent state and that its current leadership includes former terrorists and possible war criminals - so I won't rehash that argument here. Biden's subtext to Tadic was though that Kosovo wasn't going to give up their 'independence', so Serbia might as well just accept it (Biden might want to present that same argument to his allies in the Georgian government about Abkhazia and South Ossetia).

But that attitude could cause problems in another of the Biden Tour's stops - Bosnia. There the Vice-President endorsed the idea of a multi-ethnic state in Bosnia, though infighting among the country's three ethnic groups: Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks), Croats and Serbs have brought the government to a standstill. And thanks to the example of Kosovo, the Bosnian Serbs have talked about leaving the Bosnian Federation all together and seeking unification with Serbia.

And the United States’ renewed interest in the Balkans isn't sitting well in the capitals of Europe, according to the Guardian newspaper in Britain. According to them, the United States is quite worried that Bosnia could dissolve into another civil war and is prodding the Europeans to get more involved; meanwhile the Europeans see Bosnia as a governance problem and believe that despite some tough talk, none of the three sides really has an appetite for a new round of conflict.

Amnesty International accuses NATO of war crimes, ten years later

One of the world's top human rights groups is demanding that NATO be investigated for possible war crimes committed in Serbia ten years ago.

Last month marked the ten-year anniversary of the bombing campaign NATO launched to force Serbia to end military operations against separatists in the (then) Serbian province of Kosovo. At the time, NATO said the air campaign was needed to force a halt to atrocities NATO claimed the Serbs were committing against the Kosovars (since then evidence has come out that the Kosovars were committing atrocities of their own against the Serbs, but that's another post).

Now Amnesty International is calling for an investigation into what they're describing as a 'war crime' committed by NATO forces – the bombing of the headquarters of Radio Television Serbia (RTS) on April 23, 1999, an attack that killed 16 civilians and wounded 16 others. At the time, NATO claimed that RTS – located in the heart of Belgrade, far removed from Kosovo - was a legitimate target because it was the source of a massive anti-Kosovar propaganda that was stoking the Serbs to fight.

Amnesty disputes this claim, saying that RTS was a civilian installation, and thus exempt from attack under international law, and even if you accept the propaganda claim, NATO used 'disproportionate' force in the attack – then also grounds for a war crimes charge. They are calling on NATO member states to launch their own investigations.

That's pretty unlikely, but it’s (yet) another blow to NATO's credibility, which is at a pretty low level these days. For a different slant on the RTS bombing, check out this piece by Belgrade-based media outlet B92. The RTS headquarters still remains in ruins in the middle of Belgrade, the families of those killed in the attack are pushing for the site to remain a memorial to their loved ones.

Are War Crimes committed in Kosovo being ignored?

The Kosovo Liberation Army fought to free Kosovo from Serbian rule, but now they're being accused of also liberating internal organs from captured prisoners for sale on the black market.

Last week the BBC ran gruesome testimony from a former KLA soldier who said he routinely saw prisoners being starved, tortured, beaten and shot while working at a prisoner-of-war camp during the Kosovo-Serbia conflict in 1999. The soldier said that many former KLA members knew of similar abuses, but kept quiet both out of feelings of loyalty to their former comrades and fear of retribution - according to the United Nations, some KLA officers who spoke out on possible war crimes committed by their side have received death threats, while some have just disappeared.

But the BBC story left out the worst allegations, that the KLA killed Serbian soldiers captured during the war to harvest their organs, which were then sold on the black market for transplant operations. Last November the Guardian sent reporter Paul Lewis to a small farmhouse in Northern Albania where some of the organ harvest was said to have taken place. According to the report, organs were removed from captured prisoners, driven to the airport in Albania’s capital, Tirana, where they were then flown to Turkey and transplanted into waiting patients.

Carla Del Ponte, the hard-nosed former prosecutor for war crimes committed during the wars that followed the break-up of Yugoslavia, said she has “credible” reports about KLA harvesting the organs of as many as 300 Serbian prisoners. But here’s where the story takes a turn towards the conspiracy side. In the Guardian report from last November, Del Ponte said she was stymied in her efforts to investigate the KLA organ ring because of evidence that suddenly went missing and resistance from senior UN officials. Now the Huffington Post is reporting that the Swiss government is barring Del Ponte from promoting her new memoir about her time as special prosecutor: “The Hunt: Me and War Criminals,” over what the Swiss government is calling “statements, which are impermissible for a representative of the government of Switzerland.” Those statements are thought to be her claims about the KLA organ smuggling ring.

So why the reluctance to investigate, or even discuss, these awful crimes? Two likely reasons: first there’s a reluctance (still) to promote anything that doesn’t portray the Serbs of the 1990s as the bad guys set on ethnically cleansing their little corner of Europe. The bigger reason though is likely that European and American officials don’t want the young Kosovo government to be painted in a bad light. The US and Europe were enthusiastic supporters of Kosovo’s bid for independence in February 2008, short-circuiting an UN-led effort in the process. Kosovo’s government today is made up largely of old KLA figures; so an investigation into these same individuals as war criminals would be rather embarrassing to Kosovo’s Western patrons. It’s worth noting again though that as recently as the mid-1990s, the United States, and other Western governments, listed the Kosovo Liberation Army as a terrorist group with probable ties to al-Qaeda.

The attitude among the Europeans and Americans though now seems to be to let bygones be bygones, even if that means ignoring some truly disturbing allegations into what are rightly called war crimes by some.

NATO's Serbia campaign, ten years later

Tuesday was the 10-year anniversary of a milestone event in world history since the end of the Cold War - the start of NATO's 78-day bombing campaign against Serbia.

NATO launched the aerial campaign in 1999 after then-Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic refused to halt military action against separatists in the Kosovo region, amid reports of atrocities committed by Serbian forces against the Kosovars. The European Union and United States were still smarting from allegations that the Western powers didn't do enough (really anything) to stop similar atrocities during Bosnia’s war for independence from Serbia in the mid-1990’s - in particular the Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 ethnic Muslims by Bosnian Serb forces. Determined not to let history repeat itself, NATO organized and led a bombing campaign to compel Milosevic to stop Serbia’s Kosovo campaign.

Not surprisingly the Serbians view this whole thing a little differently. Russia Today did a half-hour special yesterday on their TV newscast (which is excerpted here) that focused on the Serbian side of the bombing campaign and its aftermath. The Serbians argue that the evidence of alleged atrocities committed by Serbs in Kosovo is flimsy and that NATO’s self-described “humanitarian intervention” actually killed 1,200 Serbian civilians (Western estimates put the civilian casualty toll at less than 500 Serbs).

Then there are the conspiracy theorists who speculate that NATO’s campaign was less about intervening on behalf of the Kosovars and more about completing a plot to dismantle Yugoslavia. The theory goes like this: that a strong, independent, socialist Yugoslavia stood in the way of the European Union’s expansion plans and that after the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Western powers (namely the US, UK, France, and Germany) didn’t want Russia to have a strong ally in the strategically-important Balkan region of South Eastern Europe. So the West set about exploiting ethnic tensions to break up Yugoslavia, starting with Slovenia and Croatia, then Bosnia; the 1999 bombing campaign was the final act in ending Yugoslavia’s reign as a regional power.

While I’m not much for conspiracy theories, some questions remain from the 1999 campaign – like why a mission to stop military action in Kosovo focused so much on Serbia’s capital Belgrade, where factories, government agencies and bridges were all primary targets of the bombing campaign and the cause of many of the civilian casualties. It is also odd how quickly the Kosovo Liberation Army (the main insurgent group in Kosovo) was adopted as a band of brave ‘freedom fighters’ by the West after only a few years earlier being identified by most Western governments (particularly by the United States) as a ‘terrorist organization’, one likely with ties to al-Qaeda.

Whether or not the grand conspiracy existed, its stated results did come to pass. The 1999 NATO campaign did bring the end of the last vestiges of Yugoslavia – the last two former Yugoslav republics, Serbia and Montenegro would split in 2006, and Kosovo would declare its independence from Serbia in 2008. Slobodan Milosevic would die in jail in The Hague while on trial for war crimes; Serbia meanwhile is now on the path for EU membership.

One lasting, and overlooked, effect of the campaign was the souring of NATO-Russian relations. Throughout the 1990’s Russia’s fears of their old Soviet-era military nemesis’ eastward expansion were played off, particularly by Pres. Bill Clinton, with the explanation that NATO was “strictly a defensive alliance”, and Russia didn’t have any plans to attack, right? So then there was nothing for Russia to worry about from NATO. But then in 1999, for the first time in its history, NATO went on the offense – bombing Serbia on behalf of Kosovo (neither of which was a NATO member). The whole “defensive alliance” idea went out the window.

Think about that next time you read about Russia’s complaints about bringing their neighbors Ukraine or Georgia into the NATO fold.

Kosovo, one year on

It was one year ago that Kosovo unilaterally declared its independence from Serbia. Thankfully a lot of the predictions of doom and gloom - namely a war between the Kosovars and the Serbs - never came to pass. But that’s not to say that everything is rosy for the world’s newest nation.

Only about a quarter of the UN’s member nations have recognized Kosovo as an independent country, and a lot of the places that have are members of the European Union (as well as the US and Canada). The Serbs who live in the far north of Kosovo in towns huddled along the Serbian border do not feel that they are a part of the new state and a mission of European Union troops (the largest-ever military mission by the EU) maintains an uneasy peace. Russia refuses to recognize Kosovo, blocking attempts at the UN to do so, while using the example of Kosovo as a justification for their own recognition of the Georgian lands of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states.

Much of the early excitement about independence has ebbed, as the reality of crushing poverty takes hold in Kosovo. Unemployment is running at a rate of 70% (and is much higher among Serbs and women), and according to the Independent newspaper of the UK, the economic situation will likely get worse. So far the country’s economy has been dependent on remittances from the roughly one million Kosovars living abroad. But they too have been hit by the global economic crisis and many find that they don’t have spare cash to send home, so Kosovo’s main source of income seems to be drying up, at least for the short term.

The economy in Kosovo, the legal part at least, is based mainly on subsistence farming, not great base to grow an economy on. Kosovo does have potential resource wealth - coal and other minerals - but getting them out of the ground and to market will take billions of dollars of investment in the national infrastructure, something unlikely to happen anytime soon.

The question of whether Kosovo was really a viable country, or whether the Kosovars would have been better as an autonomous region in a larger Serbia that was fast-tracked into the European Union, was a good question to ask about a year ago. But for reasons that seemed to have more to do with settling old political scores with Serbia and Russia rather than Kosovo itself, the Western powers (US, UK, France, Germany) were all quick to recognize Kosovo’s claim of independence. So the EU is stuck with an ill-prepared new nation that now seems destined to be dependent on foreign aid - both from other nations and their own citizens living abroad - for years to come; a place of simmering ethnic tensions and bleak futures for its citizens.

But at least, so far, it hasn’t turned out as bad as it could have.

End of the line for the Yugo

It outlived the country it was named after, but time has finally caught up with the venerable Yugo automobile.

The BBC was on hand as the last few examples of the bargain priced hatchback rolled off the assembly line in Serbia. Well, they would have been on hand, except work was delayed because the production line broke down, something that apparently happens quite often these days.

Often the butt of jokes (why does the Yugo have a rear window defroster? To keep your hands warm while you push), when production stared in 1980, the car was the pride of socialist Yugoslavia - an inexpensive auto that everyone could afford, a modern-day Model-T. It was exported to more than 70 countries, including the United States. Even this past year I would often see one Yugo in a neighborhood in Manhattan (though it never did seem to move…). Amazingly, officials in Serbia estimate that one in three Serbs have at one time owned a Yugo.

And even though production of the Yugo is stopping the factory that makes them will go on. After a much-needed modernization (amazingly Yugos were hand-built because upgrading to an automated production line was deemed too expensive, thus giving the Yugo one thing in common with Ferraris and Rolls-Royces) the factory is slated to start producing Fiats in 2010.



Yugo poster from wikipedia.