A coalition armed with good excuses

Was Nato's intervention in Kosovo humanitarian, imperialist or merely naive? Brendan Simms looks at the latest books to explore the quagmire.

Kosovo was a war unparalleled, a campaign of humanitarian intervention waged by Nato without the explicit authority of the United Nations, grudgingly tolerated by the Greek government, and (incredibly) supported by the new Red-Green coalition government in Germany. Without (incredibly) incurring any battle casualties themselves, the western allies secured the withdrawal of Serbian security forces and the return of hundreds of thousands of ethnically cleansed Albanian refugees. Tony Blair was to hail this as a victory for the doctrine of "international community", first enunciated by him during the conflict itself at a famous speech in Chicago."Good has triumphed over evil," the prime minister announced just after the suspension of hostilities, "justice has overcome barbarism, and the values of civilisation have prevailed."

Leading the war's critics on the international stage were Russia and China - the ugly ducklings of the New World Order - who saw the Kosovo campaign as a thinly disguised exercise in American hegemony. The war was similarly traduced by intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Edward Said, Harold Pinter and Robin Blackburn. Theirs was a well-rehearsed script, which largely reflected the para-Marxist or third-world-ist milieu in which they had resided for more than 30 years. But the Kosovo war was also criticised, rather less obviously, by such seasoned conservative Balkan observers as Mark Almond and Norman Stone. On their reading, Nato - misled by facile comparisons with the traumatic Bosnian conflict - allowed itself to be "suckered" into supporting a radical groupuscule of Marxist mafiosos - the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) - which promptly expelled the Serbian minority.

Tim Judah's Kosovo: War and Revenge is a welcome contribution to this debate. The author benefits not only from a long period as The Times correspondent in Belgrade but also from the work of the Cambridge international lawyer Marc Weller, especially his collection of documents and analyses, The Crisis in Kosovo 1989-99: From the Dissolution of Yugoslavia to Rambouillet and the Outbreak of Hostilities (1999). The resulting volume traverses the historical origins of the conflict - such as the original battle of Kosovo in 1389, at which the Turks defeated the medieval Serbian kingdom - at speed, but in enough detail to remind the reader of the extraordinary pull that Kosovo exerted on the Serbian imagination, even after the province had become overwhelmingly Albanian in population. It thus complements Noel Malcolm's recent scholarly history, particularly in its more detailed treatment of the decade after 1989, when the Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic abolished the autonomy of Kosovo.

For nearly ten years - and here Judah gracefully acknowledges the pioneering field-work of the intrepid Denisa Kostovic - the province became the scene of an extraordinary experiment in passive resistance. Under their idiosyncratic leader, Ibrahim Rugova, the Albanian population refused to be goaded into revolt by a systematic Serbian policy of repression, exclusion and expropriation, and thus escaped the horrors of ethnic cleansing visited on Bosnia and Croatia. Instead, the Kosovars ran their own virtual "parallel" world, which included a semi-clandestine education system, run by sacked schoolteachers and academics, and funded by a semi-voluntary levy on the diaspora.

On the other hand, Judah tells us relatively little about the decisive shift in Serbian politics in the mid-1980s, which is the key to understanding all the wars of the Yugoslav succession, perhaps because he has already covered some of this ground in The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (1997). For this one must turn to Nebojsa Popov's edited collection, The Road to War in Serbia: Trauma and Catharsis .The title is somewhat misleading, for the war referred to is not Kosovo 1999, but Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia, 1991-95, and the original Serbian edition appeared in 1996. As one would expect, the contributions are somewhat uneven in quality and sometimes rather more abstract than necessary. But the volume as a whole is informed by a coherent theme, which is the progressive decline of mainstream Serbian politics into paranoid and exclusivist nationalism from the mid-to-late 1980s onwards. This enabled the Serbian communists under Milosevic to perpetuate their power long after the party elites had lost theirs in most of the other Yugoslav republics. The abolition of the autonomy of Vojvodina and Kosovo in 1988-89, and the wars in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia in 1991-95, were thus not so much spontaneous combustions of ethnic hatred as carefully planned stratagems in the struggle for mastery within Serbia itself.

This strategy was successful because, as Dubravka Stojanovic shows in her penetrating article on "The traumatic circle of the Serbian opposition", the nationalist virus had infected all but a peripheral minority in Serbian politics. Both of the possible "democratic" alternatives, Zoran Djindzic and Vuk Draskovic, were periodically more nationalistic than Milosevic himself. One of the few consistent opponents of war and nationalism was Vesna Pesic, who figures prominently in Popov's volume. Her article, "The war for ethnic states", is a pitiless exposition of the rise of a "black-red coalition" spanning the party bureaucracy, the security apparatus, the Serbian orthodox church and the nationalist intelligentsia, many of them former dissidents. In this way, as the courageous and outspoken former colonel Miroslav Hadzic points out in his article, "The army's use of trauma", the Yugoslav National Army (JNA), supposedly a "people's army of all the republics", allowed itself to be instrumentalised for Serbian nationalist purposes.

The unstable equilibrium reached in Kosovo by the mid-1990s was shattered by two unrelated but mutually reinforcing events. For in October 1995, the Dayton agreement to end the war in Bosnia not only failed to consider the Kosovo question, it also appeared to reward armed revolt by recognising a separate and ethnically cleansed Bosnian Serb republic. Then, in 1997, neighbouring Albania collapsed into anarchy: huge quantities of small arms found their way across the border into Kosovo. Not only had Rugova's long-standing policy of passive resistance and reliance on the international community been comprehensively undermined, now his critics had enough weapons to pursue a low-intensity guerrilla war against the Serbs.

Some of the most fascinating passages in Judah's book show the way in which the shadowy KLA vaulted within two years from being an exile splinter grouping to a major protagonist. In the process, he argues, the movement's original Marxism was heavily diluted. The resulting conflicts with Rugova, and particularly with his treasurer Bujar Bukoshi over foreign bank accounts, are skilfully portrayed.

Within a very short period of time, the KLA secured what Rugova had failed to achieve: international intervention. As the evidence of Serbian atrocities mounted, western leaders - mindful of their failure in Bosnia - scrambled to defuse the conflict. Last-minute talks at Rambouillet were unsuccessful, not so much because of Albanian foot-dragging - here Judah vividly captures the high drama and internecine squabbling of the Kosovar delegation - but because Milosevic was not negotiating in good faith. While an obviously junior Serbian delegation haggled, he used the time to prepare the coup de grâce against the KLA that led to the Nato intervention in late March 1999.

If there is a flaw in Judah's book, it lies in his critique of Nato's strategy during the war itself. By relying exclusively on air-power, he argues, the allies misapplied a supposed lesson from the Bosnian war, intervened before the parties were "exhausted" and thus "got it wrong". The intervention, on this reading, caused the very humanitarian crisis it was meant to prevent. Of course, Nato made mistakes, but unlike the Bosnian war, the West ascended a steep learning curve. If it sidelined the UN, this was not only because of the organisation's unfortunate role in Bosnia, but also, as Judah reveals, because the Russian foreign minister had privately asked the West not to embarrass him by bringing the issue to the Security Council. If the use of ground troops was initially ruled out, this was not just because of well-known American objections, but because to have done otherwise would have shattered the fragile consensus with Italy, Germany and the Greek government. And while the intervention undoubtedly aggravated the refugee problem in the short term, there were already 250,000 internally displaced people in Kosovo before the war started and every prospect of a Bosnian-style deterioration, with or without Nato.

Finally, while it is true that Nato made serious targeting errors - particularly against the Chinese embassy in Belgrade - these made up less than half a per cent of all missions. The only conceptually flawed raid was that on the Serbian television centre, by which Nato tried to control the narrative, but temporarily lost the plot.

Both War and Revenge and The Road to War in Serbia are in their different ways humane and liberal books, designed not to obscure nationalist hatreds,but to understand and overcome them. One hopes that they will be widely read, because, to quote Sigmund Freud's famous words, cited in Popov's introduction, "the voice of the intellect is quiet but it does not cease until listened to".

Brendan Simms is lecturer in international relations, University of Cambridge.