Noam Chomsky on Yugo/Kosovo

Here's a commentary that might interest folks.  It's from another one of
those dreadful professor-types, but not one who explicitly calls himself a
"world-system analysis" dude (though it DOES seem like he has a certain
affinity for our way of looking at the world):  

>X-Sender: ameredith@benfranklin.hnet.uci.edu
>Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 05:39:10 -0800
>To: jafujii@uci.edu, r2chow@uci.edu
>From: "John V. Wilmerding" <jvw@together.net> (by way of Austin Meredith
<kouroo@uci.edu>)
>Subject: Noam Chomsky on Yugo/Kosovo
>
>The Current Bombings
>by Noam Chomsky
>
>There have been many inquiries concerning NATO (meaning primarily US)
>bombing in Kosovo.  A great deal has been written about the topic,
>including Znet commentaries.  I'd like to make a few general observations,
>keeping to facts that are not seriously contested.
>
>There are two fundamental issues: (1) What are the accepted and applicable
>"rules of world order"? (2) How do these or other considerations apply in
>the case of Kosovo?
>
>(1) What are the accepted and applicable "rules of world order"?
>
>There is a regime of international law and international order, binding on
>all states, based on the UN Charter and subsequent resolutions and World
>Court decisions.  In brief, the threat or use of force is banned unless
>explicitly authorized by the Security Council after it has determined that
>peaceful means have failed, or in self-defense against "armed attack" (a
>narrow concept) until the Security Council acts.
>
>There is, of course, more to say.  Thus there is at least a tension, if not
>an outright contradiction, between the rules of world order laid down in
>the UN Charter and the rights articulated in the Universal Declaration of
>Human Rights (UD), a second pillar of the world order established under US
>initiative after World War II.  The Charter bans force violating state
>sovereignty; the UD guarantees the rights of individuals against oppressive
>states. The issue of "humanitarian intervention" arises from this tension.
>It is the right of "humanitarian intervention" that is claimed by the
>US/NATO in Kosovo, and that is generally supported by editorial opinion and
>news reports (in the latter case, reflexively, even by the very choice of
>terminology).
>
>The question is addressed in a news report in the NY Times (March 27),
>headlined "Legal Scholars Support Case for Using Force" in Kosovo (March
>27).  One example is offered: Allen Gerson, former counsel to the US
>mission to the UN.  Two other legal scholars are cited.  One, Ted Galen
>Carpenter, "scoffed at the Administration argument" and dismissed the
>alleged right of intervention.  The third is Jack Goldsmith, a specialist
>on international law at Chicago Law school.  He says that critics of the
>NATO bombing "have a pretty good legal argument," but "many people think
>[an exception for humanitarian intervention] does exist as a matter of
>custom and practice."  That summarizes the evidence offered to justify the
>favored conclusion stated in the headline.
>
>Goldsmith's observation is reasonable, at least if we agree that facts are
>relevant to the determination of "custom and practice."  We may also bear
>in mind a truism: the right of humanitarian intervention, if it exists, is
>premised on the "good faith" of those intervening, and that assumption is
>based not on their rhetoric but on their record, in particular their record
>of adherence to the principles of international law, World Court decisions,
>and so on.  That is indeed a truism, at least with regard to others.
>Consider, for example, Iranian offers to intervene in Bosnia to prevent
>massacres at a time when the West would not do so.  These were dismissed
>with ridicule (in fact, ignored); if there was a reason beyond
>subordination to power, it was because Iranian "good faith" could not be
>assumed.  A rational person then asks obvious questions: is the Iranian
>record of intervention and terror worse than that of the US?  And other
>questions, for example: How should we assess the "good faith" of the only
>country to have vetoed a Security Council resolution calling on all states
>to obey international law?  What about its historical record?  Unless such
>questions are prominent on the agenda of discourse, an honest person will
>dismiss it as mere allegiance to doctrine.  A useful exercise is to
>determine how much of the literature -- media or other -- survives such
>elementary conditions as these.
>
>2) How do these or other considerations apply in the case of Kosovo?  There
>has been a humanitarian catastrophe in Kosovo in the past year,
>overwhelmingly attributable to Yugoslav military forces.  The main victims
>have been ethnic Albanian Kosovars, some 90% of the population of this
>Yugoslav territory.  The standard estimate is 2000 deaths and hundreds of
>thousands of refugees.
>
>In such cases, outsiders have three choices:
>
>(I) try to escalate the catastrophe
>
>(II) do nothing
>
>(III) try to mitigate the catastrophe
>
>The choices are illustrated by other contemporary cases.  Let's keep to a
>few of approximately the same scale, and ask where Kosovo fits into the
>pattern.
>
>(A) Colombia.  In Colombia, according to State Department estimates, the
>annual level of political killing by the government and its paramilitary
>associates is about at the level of Kosovo, and refugee flight primarily
>from their atrocities is well over a million.  Colombia has been the
>leading Western hemisphere recipient of US arms and training as violence
>increased through the '90s, and that assistance is now increasing, under a
>"drug war" pretext dismissed by almost all serious observers.  The Clinton
>administration was particularly enthusiastic in its praise for President
>Gaviria, whose tenure in office was responsible for "appalling levels of
>violence," according to human rights organizations, even surpassing his
>predecessors.  Details are readily available.
>
>In this case, the US reaction is (I): escalate the atrocities.
>
>(B) Turkey.  By very conservative estimate, Turkish repression of Kurds in
>the '90s falls in the category of Kosovo.  It peaked in the early '90s; one
>index is the flight of over a million Kurds from the countryside to the
>unofficial Kurdish capital Diyarbakir from 1990 to 1994, as the Turkish
>army was devastating the countryside.  1994 marked two records: it was "the
>year of the worst repression in the Kurdish provinces" of Turkey, Jonathan
>Randal reported from the scene, and the year when Turkey became "the
>biggest single importer of American military hardware and thus the world's
>largest arms purchaser."  When human rights groups exposed Turkey's use of
>US jets to bomb villages, the Clinton Administration found ways to evade
>laws requiring suspension of arms deliveries, much as it was doing in
>Indonesia and elsewhere.
>
>Colombia and Turkey explain their (US-supported) atrocities on grounds that
>they are defending their countries from the threat of terrorist guerrillas.
> As does the government of Yugoslavia.
>
>Again, the example illustrates (I): try to escalate the atrocities.
>
>(C) Laos.  Every year thousands of people, mostly children and poor
>farmers, are killed in the Plain of Jars in Northern Laos, the scene of the
>heaviest bombing of civilian targets in history it appears, and arguably
>the most cruel: Washington's furious assault on a poor peasant society had
>little to do with its wars in the region.  The worst period was from 1968,
>when Washington was compelled to undertake negotiations (under popular and
>business pressure), ending the regular bombardment of North Vietnam.
>Kissinger-Nixon then decided to shift the planes to bombardment of Laos and
>Cambodia.
>
>The deaths are from "bombies," tiny anti-personnel weapons, far worse than
>land-mines: they are designed specifically to kill and maim, and have no
>effect on trucks, buildings, etc.  The Plain was saturated with hundreds of
>millions of these criminal devices, which have a failure-to-explode rate of
>20%-30% according to the manufacturer, Honeywell.  The numbers suggest
>either remarkably poor quality control or a rational policy of murdering
>civilians by delayed action.  These were only a fraction of the technology
>deployed, including advanced missiles to penetrate caves where families
>sought shelter. Current annual casualties from "bombies" are estimated from
>hundreds a year to "an annual nationwide casualty rate of 20,000," more
>than half of them deaths, according to the veteran Asia reporter Barry Wain
>of the Wall Street Journal -- in its Asia edition.  A conservative
>estimate, then, is that the crisis this year is approximately comparable to
>Kosovo, though deaths are far more highly concentrated among children --
>over half, according to analyses reported by the Mennonite Central
>Committee, which has been working there since 1977 to alleviate the
>continuing atrocities.
>
>There have been efforts to publicize and deal with the humanitarian
>catastrophe.  A British-based Mine Advisory Group (MAG) is trying to remove
>the lethal objects, but the US is "conspicuously missing from the handful
>of Western organisations that have followed MAG," the British press
>reports, though it has finally agreed to train some Laotian civilians.  The
>British press also reports, with some anger, the allegation of MAG
>specialists that the US refuses to provide them with "render harmless
>procedures" that would make their work "a lot quicker and a lot safer."
>These remain a state secret, as does the whole affair in the United States.
> The Bangkok press reports a very similar situation in Cambodia,
>particularly the Eastern region where US bombardment from early 1969 was
>most intense.
>
>In this case, the US reaction is (II): do nothing.  And the reaction of the
>media and commentators is to keep silent, following the norms under which
>the war against Laos was designated a "secret war" -- meaning well-known,
>but suppressed, as also in the case of Cambodia from March 1969.  The level
>of self-censorship was extraordinary then, as is the current phase.  The
>relevance of this shocking example should be obvious without further comment.
>
>I will skip other examples of (I) and (II), which abound, and also much
>more serious contemporary atrocities, such as the huge slaughter of Iraqi
>civilians by means of a particularly vicious form of biological warfare --
>"a very hard choice," Madeleine Albright commented on national TV in 1996
>when asked for her reaction to the killing of half a million Iraqi children
>in 5 years, but "we think the price is worth it."  Current estimates remain
>about 5000 children killed a month, and the price is still "worth it."
>These and other examples might also be kept in mind when we read awed
>rhetoric about how the "moral compass" of the Clinton Administration is at
>last functioning properly, as the Kosovo example illustrates.
>
>Just what does the example illustrate?  The threat of NATO bombing,
>predictably, led to a sharp escalation of atrocities by the Serbian Army
>and paramilitaries, and to the departure of international observers, which
>of course had the same effect.  Commanding General Wesley Clark declared
>that it was "entirely predictable" that Serbian terror and violence would
>intensify after the NATO bombing, exactly as happened.  The terror for the
>first time reached the capital city of Pristina, and there are credible
>reports of large-scale destruction of villages, assassinations, generation
>of an enormous refugee flow, perhaps an effort to expel a good part of the
>Albanian population -- all an "entirely predictable" consequence of the
>threat and then the use of force, as General Clark rightly observes.
>
>Kosovo is therefore another illustration of (I): try to escalate the
>violence, with exactly that expectation.  To find examples illustrating
>(III) is all too easy, at least if we keep to official rhetoric.  The major
>recent academic study of "humanitarian intervention," by Sean Murphy,
>reviews the record after the Kellogg-Briand pact of 1928 which outlawed
>war, and then since the UN Charter, which strengthened and articulated
>these provisions.  In the first phase, he writes, the most prominent
>examples of "humanitarian intervention" were Japan's attack on Manchuria,
>Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia, and Hitler's occupation of parts of
>Czechoslovakia.  All were accompanied by highly uplifting humanitarian
>rhetoric, and factual justifications as well.  Japan was going to establish
>an "earthly paradise" as it defended Manchurians from "Chinese bandits,"
>with the support of a leading Chinese nationalist, a far more credible
>figure than anyone the US was able to conjure up during its attack on South
>Vietnam.  Mussolini was liberating thousands of slaves as he carried forth
>the Western "civilizing mission."  Hitler announced Germany's intention to
>end ethnic tensions and violence, and "safeguard the national individuality
>of the German and Czech peoples," in an operation "filled with earnest
>desire to serve the true interests of the peoples dwelling in the area," in
>accordance with their will; the Slovakian President asked Hitler to declare
>Slovakia a protectorate.
>
>Another useful intellectual exercise is to compare those obscene
>justifications with those offered for interventions, including
>"humanitarian interventions," in the post-UN Charter period.
>
>In that period, perhaps the most compelling example of (III) is the
>Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in December 1978, terminating Pol Pot's
>atrocities, which were then peaking.  Vietnam pleaded the right of
>self-defense against armed attack, one of the few post-Charter examples
>when the plea is plausible: the Khmer Rouge regime (Democratic Kampuchea,
>DK) was carrying out murderous attacks against Vietnam in border areas.
>The US reaction is instructive.  The press condemned the "Prussians" of
>Asia for their outrageous violation of international law.  They were
>harshly punished for the crime of having terminated Pol Pot's slaughters,
>first by a (US-backed) Chinese invasion, then by US imposition of extremely
>harsh sanctions.  The US recognized the expelled DK as the official
>government of Cambodia, because of its "continuity" with the Pol Pot
>regime, the State Department explained.  Not too subtly, the US supported
>the Khmer Rouge in its continuing attacks in Cambodia.
> 
>The example tells us more about the "custom and practice" that underlies
>"the emerging legal norms of humanitarian intervention."
>
>Despite the desperate efforts of ideologues to prove that circles are
>square, there is no serious doubt that the NATO bombings further undermine
>what remains of the fragile structure of international law.  The US made
>that entirely clear in the discussions leading to the NATO decision.  Apart
>from the UK (by now, about as much of an independent actor as the Ukraine
>was in the pre-Gorbachev years), NATO countries were skeptical of US
>policy, and were particularly annoyed by Secretary of State Albright's
>"saber-rattling" (Kevin Cullen, Boston Globe, Feb.22).  Today, the more
>closely one approaches the conflicted region, the greater the opposition to
>Washington's insistence on force, even within NATO (Greece and Italy).
>France had called for a UN Security Council resolution to authorize
>deployment of NATO peacekeepers.  The US flatly refused, insisting on "its
>stand that NATO should be able to act independently of the United Nations,"
>State Department officials explained.  The US refused to permit the
>"neuralgic word `authorize'" to appear in the final NATO statement,
>unwilling to concede any authority to the UN Charter and international law;
>only the word "endorse" was permitted (Jane Perlez, NYT, Feb. 11).
>
>Similarly the bombing of Iraq was a brazen expression of contempt for the
>UN, even the specific timing, and was so understood.  And of course the
>same is true of the destruction of half the pharmaceutical production of a
>small African country a few months earlier, an event that also does not
>indicate that the "moral compass" is straying from righteousness -- not to
>speak of a record that would be prominently reviewed right now if facts
>were considered relevant to determining "custom and practice."
>
>It could be argued, rather plausibly, that further demolition of the rules
>of world order is irrelevant, just as it had lost its meaning by the late
>1930s.  The contempt of the world's leading power for the framework of
>world order has become so extreme that there is nothing left to discuss.  A
>review of the internal documentary record demonstrates that the stance
>traces back to the earliest days, even to the first memorandum of the
>newly-formed National Security Council in 1947.  During the Kennedy years,
>the stance began to gain overt expression.  The main innovation of the
>Reagan-Clinton years is that defiance of international law and the Charter
>has become entirely open.  It has also been backed with interesting
>explanations, which would be on the front pages, and prominent in the
>school and university curriculum, if truth and honesty were considered
>significant values.  The highest authorities explained with brutal clarity
>that the World Court, the UN, and other agencies had become irrelevant
>because they no longer follow US orders, as they did in the early postwar
>years.
>
>One might then adopt the official position. That would be an honest stand,
>at least if it were accompanied by refusal to play the cynical game of
>self-righteous posturing and wielding of the despised principles of
>international law as a highly selective weapon against shifting enemies.
>
>While the Reaganites broke new ground, under Clinton the defiance of world
>order has become so extreme as to be of concern even to hawkish policy
>analysts.  In the current issue of the leading establishment journal,
>Foreign Affairs, Samuel Huntington warns that Washington is treading a
>dangerous course.  In the eyes of much of the world -- probably most of the
>world, he suggests -- the US is "becoming the rogue superpower," considered
>"the single greatest external threat to their societies."  Realist
>"international relations theory," he argues, predicts that coalitions may
>arise to counterbalance the rogue superpower.  On pragmatic grounds, then,
>the stance should be reconsidered.  Americans who prefer a different image
>of their society might call for a reconsideration on other than pragmatic
>grounds.
>
>Where does that leave the question of what to do in Kosovo?  It leaves it
>unanswered.  The US has chosen a course of action which, as it explicitly
>recognizes, escalates atrocities and violence -- "predictably"; a course of
>action that also strikes yet another blow against the regime of
>international order, which does offer the weak at least some limited
>protection from predatory states.  As for the longer term, consequences are
>unpredictable.  One plausible observation is that "every bomb that falls on
>Serbia and every ethnic killing in Kosovo suggests that it will scarcely be
>possible for Serbs and Albanians to live beside each other in some sort of
>peace" (Financial Times, March 27).  Some of the longer-term possible
>outcomes are extremely ugly, as has not gone without notice.
>
>A standard argument is that we had to do something: we could not simply
>stand by as atrocities continue.  That is never true.  One choice, always,
>is to follow the Hippocratic principle: "First, do no harm."  If you can
>think of no way to adhere to that elementary principle, then do nothing.
>There are always ways that can be considered.  Diplomacy and negotiations
>are never at an end.
>
>The right of "humanitarian intervention" is likely to be more frequently
>invoked in coming years -- maybe with justification, maybe not -- now that
>Cold War pretexts have lost their efficacy.  In such an era, it may be
>worthwhile to pay attention to the views of highly respected commentators
>-- not to speak of the World Court, which explicitly ruled on this matter
>in a decision rejected by the United States, its essentials not even
reported.
>
>In the scholarly disciplines of international affairs and international law
>it would be hard to find more respected voices than Hedley Bull or Leon
>Henkin.  Bull warned 15 years ago that "Particular states or groups of
>states that set themselves up as the authoritative judges of the world
>common good, in disregard of the views of others, are in fact a menace to
>international order, and thus to effective action in this field."  Henkin,
>in a standard work on world order, writes that the "pressures eroding the
>prohibition on the use of force are deplorable, and the arguments to
>legitimize the use of force in those circumstances are unpersuasive and
>dangerous...  Violations of human rights are indeed all too common, and if
>it were permissible to remedy them by external use of force, there would be
>no law to forbid the use of force by almost any state against almost any
>other.  Human rights, I believe, will have to be vindicated, and other
>injustices remedied, by other, peaceful means, not by opening the door to
>aggression and destroying the principle advance in international law, the
>outlawing of war and the prohibition of force."
>
>Recognized principles of international law and world order, solemn treaty
>obligations, decisions by the World Court, considered pronouncements by the
>most respected commentators -- these do not automatically solve particular
>problems.  Each issue has to be considered on its merits.  For those who do
>not adopt the standards of Saddam Hussein, there is a heavy burden of proof
>to meet in undertaking the threat or use of force in violation of the
>principles of international order.  Perhaps the burden can be met, but that
>has to be shown, not merely proclaimed with passionate rhetoric.  The
>consequences of such violations have to be assessed carefully -- in
>particular, what we understand to be "predictable."  And for those who are
>minimally serious, the reasons for the actions also have to be assessed --
>again, not simply by adulation of our leaders and their "moral compass."
>
>
>
>