The Humanitarian War
40’10”
October 1999
Summary:
In March NATO went to war. It was a war fought in the name of human rights, yet NATO's determination not to take casualties extended the war and suffering. The main players of the war tell their story for the first time - how Operation Allied Force was won.
Transcript:
Reporter: Greg Wilesmith
Producer: Virginia Moncrief
Researchers: Anna Bracks (London), Peter Cronau (Sydney), Ivan Stojanovic (Belgrade), Joanne Velin (Brussels), Ric Young (Washington)
Greg Wilesmith:
Tuesday night in the Kosovo capital of Pristina. The NATO peacekeepers from KFOR are on reassurance patrol. Corporal Kevin Martin of the Royal Irish Regiment is acting as a social worker. Lubica and Dobrica are in their '80s and they're trembling with fear. Albanians have threatened to kill them. The bruise on Lubica's forehead is from a recent confrontation.
Translator:
She was in front of the door and somebody suddenly struck her with the door. The lady is saying they are not against the law - if the law says they must leave, they.
Corporal Kevin Martin:
The law does not say they have to leave. They are free to live here like anybody else.
Greg Wilesmith:
Free in principle but not in practice. Intimidation has been systematic. More than half the Serbian residents have fled Kosovo. The war that NATO fought to stop the ethnic cleansing of Albanians has created a new cycle of revenge. Now the Serbs are the main victims and that's a striking reversal of the power balance in the province of these past 10 years. How the Serbs lost Kosovo is a complex story of failed international diplomacy and misjudgments that lead to the worst war in Europe in half a century. In March the US Special Envoy, Richard Holbrooke was sent on a final mission to negotiate with Yugoslavia's President Slobodan Milosevic.
Richard Holbrooke, US Special Envoy to Yugoslavia:
President Clinton and Secretary Albright sent our delegation here to Belgrade on a mission of peace at a time of escalating violence in the region.
Greg Wilesmith:
Holbrooke persuaded Milosevic to end the Bosnia war in 1995. Now, he threatened a new war unless the oppression of the Albanians was stopped.
Richard Holbrooke, US Special Envoy to Yugoslavia:
At about 10.00 in the morning on March the 23rd, I went to see him alone and we sat alone in this vast room in the White Palace surrounded by his art, and normally there were other people in the meetings, and I said to him, 'You understand what will happen when I leave here today if you don't change your position?' And he said, 'Yes, you will bomb us.' And there was dead silence in the room, uncharacteristic. And I said, 'I want to be clear with you, it will be...' - and I used these three words I had worked out very carefully with the US military - 'It will be swift, it will be severe, it will be sustained.' And he said in a very matter of fact way, very flat, 'No more engagement, no more negotiations, I understand that. You will bomb us.'
Greg Wilesmith:
Thirty hours later, we climbed atop of our hotel roof and watched as the first missiles of Operation Allied Force slammed into the outskirts of Belgrade. NATO had planned a short war.
Paul Beaver, Balkan Analyst, Jane's Defence Weekly:
I think there's no doubt at all that NATO believed that this would be a very quick military operation. I think two or three days is perhaps a little much of an exaggeration, but certainly they thought it would be over in a week.
Lord Carrington, NATO Secretary General 1984 - 1988:
I made a speech in the House of Lords in which I said that bombing would not end it in three days, it would stiffen the Serb resistance and it would cause much more hardship to the Kosovo Albanians if we hadn't done it.
Ivo Daalder, Co-ordinator, US Balkans Policy 1995-1996:
The big difference was the estimate of whether it was likely to be a two day bombing campaign or a two week bombing campaign, and the real underlying reason for that was that everybody believed that Bosnia had shown in 1995 that if only you bombed for two weeks you would have peace.
Greg Wilesmith:
But NATO had miscalculated. Kosovo was more important to most Serbs and certainly to Milosevic than Bosnia. While journalists from NATO countries were either expelled or advised to leave, we were able to keep reporting. Now it's time to return.
Greg Wilesmith (in Belgrade):
I've been looking forward to this day for some time - going back to Belgrade. Having reported the war there for three months I'm keen to feel what peace is like in the city, and to talk to government ministers about the war they fought, about the genocide in Kosovo, the forcible expulsion of perhaps a million people and most particularly, about the lies that they told the Yugoslav people.
Greg Wilesmith:
Zividan Jovanovic is the Foreign Minister of Yugoslavia. He is an old-style socialist. On the day we met him, he had just come from President Milosevic's White Palace, and he was ready as ever to argue the claim that NATO's campaign breached international law.
Zividan Jovanovic, Yugoslavian Foreign Minister:
You could hardly expect a sovereign country and especially this country with a well known history to surrender, indeed with, and because of threats [and] absolutely unacceptable positions which were not justified by law, by standards, by moral principles, etcetera.
Greg Wilesmith:
Mr Jovanovic tries to characterise Yugoslavia as the righteous David up against the Goliath-like NATO.
Zividan Jovanovic, Yugoslavian Foreign Minister:
The mightiest military organisation on one hand, and here you have one very tiny, small country, small people, resisting and defending itself.
Bratislav Grubacic, Serbian Political Analyst:
Politically speaking, the political parts of NATO countries expected, basically, [for] Milosevic to accept NATO demands after [a] couple of days of not so serious bombing, and he on the other hand, Milosevic here, he thought that after [a] couple of weeks bombing that European public opinion will go against NATO and against air strikes, against United States.
Greg Wilesmith:
Milosevic hoped the 19 nation Alliance would split. After all, Greece, Italy and other countries had never favoured going to war. For NATO, maintaining unity would become the overriding challenge, and it would test all of the diplomatic skills of the Alliance's supreme commander, General Wesley Clark.
General Wesley Clark, Supreme Commander, NATO:
From the time we went into this we had to move from a political dynamic - of consensus, compromise, least common denominator solutions - up to a military dynamic that relied on the principles of war - surprise, mass, concentration, focus on the objective and so on.
Greg Wilesmith:
From the outset, General Clark was hamstrung by political directives: NATO would fight the war from the air, not from the ground.
Paul Beaver, Balkan Analyst, Jane's Defence Weekly:
He'd been a soldier in Vietnam, he'd been an ordinary soldier who'd come up through the ranks, he knew how important it was to have ground troops - you could only clear ground, hold ground with soldiers. You can't do that with air power.
Greg Wilesmith:
The German general, Klaus Naumann, was head of NATO's Military Committee, effectively he was Clark's deputy, and he too had urged a land force component to the campaign.
General Klaus Naumann, Chair, NATO Military Committee 1996-1999:
We had to understand rather early in the summer that NATO nations were not prepared to employ ground forces, and some nations believe, I think, in the illusion that one can fight a military campaign without risking the life of one of their soldiers and that is, as we all know, it's an illusion.
Richard Holbrooke, US Special Envoy to Yugoslavia:
The Administration handled the ground troops issue - under pressure, domestic and foreign - with great skill and courage. If we had invaded with ground troops, first of all it would have taken three months to assemble the force, secondly if the force would have gone there would have been casualties on the NATO side - which, thank God, there weren't in the real world.
Greg Wilesmith:
Instead there was a catastrophe in Kosovo. The casualties in this war would be civilians, not NATO pilots. Hundreds of Albanian civilians would be killed by air strikes - on several occasions their tractor convoys were mistaken for Serb artillery. Serb paramilitaries responded to the bombing by committing genocide on a scale not seen in Europe since the Second World War - a response some had expected.
Bratislav Grubacic, Serbian Political Analyst:
Before the air strikes started, basically from the Serbian side there were a lot of announcements and even everybody here, it was kind of common knowledge - and I think it was announced to the foreign diplomats and mediators - that if air strikes start that [then] Albanians will really suffer from that.
Zividan Jovanovic, Yugoslavian Foreign Minister:
If you have, as it was the case, 500 aeroplanes with I don't know, maybe even thousands of drops of missiles and rockets and bombs on a daily basis - bombing Pristina, bombing Glogovac, Prizren, Orahovac, bombing all major places and towns in Kosovo - can you contemplate [the] reaction of citizens or population? Would they stand up and raise their hands up in order to protect themselves, or they would try to find a safer place?
Lord Carrington, NATO Secretary General 1984-1988:
The signal for bombing was the signal to Milosevic to get rid of the Kosovo Albanians from Kosova, and they streamed across the border because the Serbs decided this was the moment to get rid of them - they were being bombed and this was their opportunity.
Greg Wilesmith:
Having planned for a short war, NATO was unprepared for the hundreds of thousands of Kosovars who flooded out of the province. The unintended consequence of the bombing was to create a refugee crisis. Like so many others, Arber Demiri realised that only by escaping could he stay alive. He had started to drive towards Macedonia when he was stopped by the Serb police.
Arber Demiri:
They just told me to get out from the vehicle and they asked me which nationality I belonged to, and when I told them that I am Albanian they started to hit me. And at the end they took my vehicle and they told me after this, then I can continue walking to Macedonia. An don our way back, on a building just 30 metres left, I saw a guy with a mask and when he took off his mask I recognised him. And when he saw me - actually we looked at each other straight in the eyes and we recognised each other.
Q: So when he pulled the balaclava off his face and you saw his face, did you think, 'Now that we've seen each other he will kill me.' Or did you think there's more chance that he'll let me go?
A: To tell you the truth, I was thinking he would report me to the others, maybe not himself, but he will report to the others and they will take me and of course my future and my relatives' future will be uncertain.
Q: So your life was decided in that second really?
A: Well, yeah, I think so, yeah, about seconds. It was actually between life and death.
Greg Wilesmith:
NATO leaders like Britain's Prime Minister, Tony Blair, responded emotionally to the refugee crisis, strengthening their advocacy of the war as a moral crusade.
Tony Blair, British Prime Minister:
People driven from their homes at the point of a gun, women raped, young men taken out and murdered, a whole people displaced and dispossessed simply because of their ethnic identity - my generation never thought to see those scenes in Europe again.
Greg Wilesmith:
For the UCK - the Kosovo Liberation Army - which had been battling the Serbs with light weapons for 15 months, the forced expulsion of their people was a disaster and they wanted NATO to invade Kosovo.
General Agim Ceku, Commander, KLA:
Yes, of course, yes we are concerned about it. We wait every day for NATO to come to Kosovo. It would be very easy for NATO if we undertake a ground campaign. I know very well Serbians. First day maybe some difficulties, just first day, in first light. Then all of the Serbs leave Kosovo.
Paul Beaver, Balkan Analyst, Jane's Defence Weekly:
There's no doubt that Milosevic would have been under incredible pressure from day one of the air campaign had he thought that within a matter of weeks if not a month that there would have been ground troops swarming in over Kosovo, because his soldiers would not have been a match for trained, professional NATO soldiers.
Greg Wilesmith:
Instead of mobilising for an invasion of Kosovo, NATO fired up the air campaign and increasingly directed it against the Serb capital, a city over which wars have been fought through the centuries.
Greg Wilesmith (in Belgrade):
In the earlier stages of the war Belgrade was largely spared from the bombing campaign, but when it became clear that the Government was being much more resistant to NATO's demands than expected, there was an intensification of the campaign. The aim was to knock out the Defence Ministry headquarters behind me, the Army headquarters on the other side of the road, the Serbian government buildings over there, the Foreign Ministry was here, which suffered quite bad collateral damage. And then further down this street, Kneza Milosa Street - it sort of became the bomb alley of Belgrade - they hit the Serbian Interior Ministry and the Federal Interior Ministry, which directed the activities of the police.
Greg Wilesmith:
These buildings were declared by NATO to be legitimate military targets - in theory, but in fact these were largely symbolic strikes. Destroying the ministries did nothing to hasten the war - they'd been empty for weeks. Even so, there were victims. Ratko Bulatovic is 40 years old, an opposition party member and a civil defence worker until his legs were blown off. The night NATO hit the Defence Ministry, Ratko rushed to the scene, fearful there might be civilian casualties in surrounding apartment buildings.
Ratko Bulatovic:
What happened was , 10 minutes after the first strike, NATO aggressors repeated the same strike on the same building so we were injured by the second strike that was not expected at all. What I remember and I will never forget, is the sound of the aeroplane followed by a loud detonation and I felt something struck me from the back and I fell. I didn't know I'd lost both my legs. I was aware that the injuries were very serious and with the last atoms of my strength I looked back and saw my leg in an unnatural position, you could almost say chopped off.
Greg Wilesmith:
Deciding what to bomb was the subject of intense and frequently bitter debate at NATO. The generals had permission to hit military installations, designated Phase 1 and Phase 2 targets, but civilian infrastructure such as the bridges of Belgrade over the Sava and Danube rivers were considered Phase 3 targets. Some NATO commanders wanted to destroy them to try to paralyse the economic heart of the nation. France saved the bridges by exercising its veto. For the most part though, General Clark won the diplomatic battles.
General Wesley Clark, Supreme Commander, NATO:
Now on any individual target I sort of worked it around through governments. I found which ones wanted to push harder, which were nervous, and I tried to pick out the targets in such a way that I maintained support and cohesion. I didn't always defer to those who wanted targets withheld.
Greg Wilesmith:
One target which was on the list, then off and finally back on again, was the main Belgrade studio of the government station, Radio Television Serbia.
General Klaus Naumann, Chair, NATO Military Committee 1996-1999:
We had discussed this issue in the NATO council and we had made the point from a military point of view that if we want to hurt Milosevic and to make him blink, then we had to attack those targets which kept him in power, and one of the instruments which kept him in power was without doubt the media and the centralised, controlled TV.
Greg Wilesmith:
On April 23rd a missile blasted into the television station, shearing off the back wall closest to the nerve centre of RTS, the Master Control. When we arrived shortly afterwards they were digging frantically to save a technician buried in the rubble - they failed. Watching on, I thought that it could have been me, or the ABC's cameraman, Tim Bates, for this was where we came to satellite our stories. We hadn't been here for two nights - foreign journalists had been warned by NATO to stay away from RTS.
Marko Dragojevic:
I was on the mezzanine and you have upper floor, I was there behind that wall...
Greg Wilesmith:
Marko Dragojevic was in video editing.
Marko Dragojevic:
We are broadcasting news, and we heard a huge bang. All that we felt was pressure that threw us into the building. My first thought was the simple, pure anger. 'Why they bomb us? We are just people who work there and we are just do our job.' In Master Control there were six or seven people and they are all, as you know, dead. Some of them couldn't...
Q: Are they friends of yours?
A: Yes, friends of mine [for] six years. The only feeling that I have now, and then, is the regret because they are all young people, girls and boys from 23 to 25 years old...
Greg Wilesmith:
NATO struck, it said, to silence a major outlet of Serbian propaganda. 16 civilian television staff were killed.
Milovan Drecun, Yugoslav War Correspondent:
Why do you think the Americans, NATO, struck at RTS? The picture about what was going on, about the morale of our people, especially in Kosovo, was exclusively covered by RTS. There were no foreign journalists present to see our morale.
Paul Beaver, Balkan Analyst, Jane's Defence Weekly:
I think it's defensible to, in military terms, to attack television stations. Morally there might be a few a few problems with that, but we get this tremendous problem of ethics. Was this a war or was t his not a war? A far as I'm concerned, a state of hostility existed.
General Wesley Clark, Supreme Commander, NATO:
You see, what wasn't predictable was at what point Milosevic would toss in the towel. There was never a specific level of bomb damage that could be correlated with his loss of will. It wasn't as though you could say, 'OK, we're gonna, once we take out his house, this guy's gonna give up.' OK, it wasn't the house. 'Well, what about when we strike the television? Well, that'll make him real mad.' But he didn't give up for that either.
Greg Wilesmith:
In public at NATO's 50th birthday celebrations, the United States and Britain were stressing their confidence in the air war, but behind the scenes Tony Blair was pushing for a ground option.
Paul Beaver, Balkan Analyst, Jane's Defence Weekly:
Tony was indicating that he had a frustration with the American reluctance to commit ground troops. The British have a different attitude to the Americans to using ground troops. We had a professional army for far longer and I think that that was very much the case that British troops, because of their experience in the Balkans, actually knew what they were capable of doing.
Ivo Daalder, Co-ordinator, US Balkans Policy 1995-1996:
In Washington there were two fundamental reasons to object to that. One was the risk that this would entail, particularly to American forces which would have to lead any such invasion, and secondly there was the risk to the NATO Alliance, the belief that if you were to raise the issue of ground forces at this stage, NATO might start debating this issue and lose the unity that was necessary to make the bombing campaign succeed.
Bratislav Grubacic, Serbian Political Analyst:
Milosevic really had the premise that [the] Washington Summit of NATO would lead to [a] serious quarrel between Western Europe and [the] United States. He hoped that he would manage to make, get between Western Europe and [the] United States, and particularly involving Russia and eventually China in the game. He really thought that he would make [a] complete mess of the world, which is, as we all know here living in Serbia, is Milosevic's chief political characteristic - to make people quarrel.
Greg Wilesmith:
Milosevic had misjudged the commitment of Alliance members to maintaining unity. NATO set aside the notion of a land war in favour of escalating the air war - the number of aircraft was trebled to a thousand. In Kosovo though it wasn't working. NATO pilots were barred from flying lower than 15,000 feet so as to stay out of Yugoslav missile range. Consequently they couldn't be sure whether they were hitting real tanks or elaborate decoys. The Serb TV correspondent, Milovan Drecun, was the only journalist to see the war up close.
Milovan Drecun, Yugoslav War Correspondent:
I was there filming how NATO was attacking phoney positions of the Yugoslav army to the point of exhaustion.
Greg Wilesmith:
The inability of NATO to prevent the slaughter of ethnic Albanians and their expulsion from Kosovo was galling for the NATO commanders. Apache helicopters capable of long distance strikes at low levels against small Serb units on the ground were dispatched to neighbouring Albania, but they weren't allowed to be deployed.
Ivo Daalder, Co-ordinator, US Balkans Policy 1995-1996:
Clearly General Clark and the Pentagon leadership got, during the war, as they had from many times before the war, into something of a tiff over what was necessary. Clark from very, very early on thought that you fight a war with all the tools available. That doesn't mean that you only fight it at 15,000 feet dropping bombs on strategic targets, it means you get the army involved, you get everybody involved in order to put decisive force at the disposal of the commander so he can win. The military and political leadership inside Washington was not prepared to back him on that. They were not prepared to make the case for ground force, they were not prepared to make the case for flying aircraft at lower altitudes in order to go after tanks and artillery, let alone paramilitary troops engaged in ethnic cleansing.
Greg Wilesmith:
Instead NATO's focus was on destroying the industrial infrastructure of Serbia bit by bit - oil refineries, bridges, roads, the only car factory, even a vacuum cleaner factory - every big static target was being hit. NATO's objective was to influence Milosevic's circle of business supporters.
Ivo Daalder, Co-ordinator, US Balkans Policy 1995-1996:
A psychological campaign was raised against them where people would receive faxes telling them that their factories would be destroyed within 12 or 24 hours and telling them the next factory won't be destroyed if they could find a way to end this war. And there were a number of ways, of different secret and not so secret, in which the United States and NATO tried to influence those around Milosevic in order to raise the psychological pressure on him.
Paul Beaver, Balkan Analyst, Jane's Defence Weekly:
I'm quite convinced that the attacks on the Pancevo chemical works were not aimed at depriving Yugoslavia of its chemical capability. More likely they were there because so many of the leadership , of the clique around Milosevic, actually have ownership of these plants and get considerable income from them, and this was really hitting their pockets rather than the infrastructure of Yugoslavia.
Greg Wilesmith:
The campaign was what General Clark called 'high stakes coercion'.
General Wesley Clark, Supreme Commander, NATO:
This is the most heavily leveraged air campaign yet seen...
Greg Wilesmith:
While NATO constantly promoted its successes, privately as two months ticked by, NATO commanders were despairing. What had previously been unacceptable was now on the agenda - secret planning for a land war was under way. The plan was called Operation Bravo Minus.
Paul Beaver, Balkan Analyst, Jane's Defence Weekly:
That plan was to actually mount a ground attack from three different axes - one in through Albania and two in through Macedonia. In the event these were actually the routes that NATO troops used in June to go in - the Germans through Albania and the British and French through Macedonia. But there was a very serious consideration there of bringing S4 troops in from Bosnia, crossing Montenegro if necessary, but at no time breaching, if you like, Serbia proper and going into that part of Yugoslavia.
Greg Wilesmith:
Bravo Minus would have involved in excess of 150,000 troops. The invasion was going to be bloody. The British, who were offering 50,000 troops, anticipated seven per cent of their soldiers would either be killed or injured.
Zividan Jovanovic, Yugoslavian Foreign Minister:
I can surely tell [you that] we were very much prepared to meet attacks, ground attacks from any side, from any quarter, be it north, east, west, be it south, be it only with tanks or with Apache helicopters, and so on. We were contemplating such a possibility and we were very well prepared to meet such a possibility, convinced that it immediately would change proportions of advantages to the worse of NATO.
Greg Wilesmith:
D-day was set for mid September, then unexpectedly in early June President Milosevic capitulated.
Slobodan Milosevic, Yugoslavian President:
The agreements we have reached take away the military threat against our country and ensures safety for all nationalities in Kosovo.
Greg Wilesmith:
The breakthrough had come during a joint visit by the European Union's envoy and Finnish President, Marti Ahtisaari, and the Russian Envoy, Victor Chernomyrdin. Milosevic and his war council were presented with an ultimatum. The Russians - whom Milosevic had always hoped would save him - and the Europeans, told him to give up.
Bratislav Grubacic, Serbian Political Analyst:
This was quite [a] long, intense meeting. What I understood basically [was] that [the] Russians didn't even have the text of [the] NATO demands, that only Ahtisaari had that piece of paper. He gave it to Milosevic, [the] Serbian part of [the] delegation, they looked at it. One of the members of the Serbian delegation, Mila Milutinovic, [the] Serbian President, started to comment on the paper suggesting that some changes might be done, and Ahtisaari was very clear in saying that absolutely nothing can be changed in this paper. 'We just came here to say, to give him the paper and to have [the] answer to be yes or no.'
Zividan Jovanovic, Yugoslavian Foreign Minister:
Q: Is it true to say in fact that you were very disappointed in the attitude of the Russian Government?
A: We are, you see, in the field of politics and not emotions, so I would not describe our feelings, then or now. We are talking about interests, and it is obvious that Russia...
Q: But you must have felt betrayed almost?
A: Russia and Russian leadership obviously thought this was [a] document meeting the interests of Russia.
Greg Wilesmith:
While the withdrawal of Russian support was a significant factor for Milosevic, so was rising public anger throughout Serbia - NATO had been turning off the lights in Belgrade.
Bratislav Grubacic, Serbian Political Analyst:
Belgrade - after four days [of] not having electricity and water supplies, living in a permanent fear that new bombs would come and flatten Belgrade - [the] civilian population was really dissatisfied.
Greg Wilesmith:
Milosevic was determined to preserve his power base, ordering his army and police forces, still largely intact, to retreat from Kosovo. NATO is enjoying its victory. There's a joyous, vibrant air in the Kosovo capital. When the Serbs ran it, I always felt when visiting Pristina that it was a desolate, fearful place. Now festivals of music and dance are put on by the likes of Vanessa Redgrave - a little light relief for the traumatised Kosovars. It is though, too early for some to have such forgiveness for the Serbs.
Arber Demiri:
To tell you the truth, I don't really care about them, because I was in the same position six months ago - well actually, in a worse position than they are now because they are, at least they have a UN and KFOR protection, so , and I was just decided by them [whether] I live or die.
Greg Wilesmith:
As you drive around Kosovo you wonder bout the extraordinary human cost of it all - the homes abandoned, the families destroyed, and the lives lost in the confusion of war. Hundreds of Albanians and Serb civilians were killed by mis-targetted NATO bombs in Kosovo and in Serbia. These deaths were regretted by NATO as being unavoidable in war, yet all the while NATO had run a zero casualty policy.
Ivo Daalder, Co-ordinator, US Balkans Policy 1995-1996:
In the end air power itself did not do what we thought was necessary in Kosovo. For one, air power protected no Kosovar Albanians - 1.5 million people were kicked out of their homes, at least 10,000 were killed, many, many thousands were raped, many tens of thousands were wounded and mutilated, and 800,000 were kicked out of the country - air power didn't stop that. In fact, one can argue that air power and the way we conducted the war may have aggravated rather than, contributed to it. In the end air power was a crucial instrument to convince Milosevic to give in, but only after he had done a lot of damage.
General Klaus Naumann, Chair, NATO Military Committee 1996-1999:
Some nations believe, I think, in the illusion that one can fight a military campaign without risking the life of one of our soldiers, and that, as we all know, it's an illusion, it will never happen. We were lucky in Kosovo that we didn't lose one air crew member, but it was sheer luck.
Greg Wilesmith:
KFOR peacekeepers will be lucky to do as well, given the regular confrontations now between the rival communities. The most striking legacy of this war are the graves all over Kosovo. The War Crimes Tribunal is investigating 470 mass graves like this one, and more are reported every week. It's arguable whether air power really proved to be an effective instrument for NATO's humanitarian war. In the end, it couldn't prevent mass murder on the ground in Kosovo.
40’10”
October 1999
Summary:
In March NATO went to war. It was a war fought in the name of human rights, yet NATO's determination not to take casualties extended the war and suffering. The main players of the war tell their story for the first time - how Operation Allied Force was won.
Transcript:
Reporter: Greg Wilesmith
Producer: Virginia Moncrief
Researchers: Anna Bracks (London), Peter Cronau (Sydney), Ivan Stojanovic (Belgrade), Joanne Velin (Brussels), Ric Young (Washington)
Greg Wilesmith:
Tuesday night in the Kosovo capital of Pristina. The NATO peacekeepers from KFOR are on reassurance patrol. Corporal Kevin Martin of the Royal Irish Regiment is acting as a social worker. Lubica and Dobrica are in their '80s and they're trembling with fear. Albanians have threatened to kill them. The bruise on Lubica's forehead is from a recent confrontation.
Translator:
She was in front of the door and somebody suddenly struck her with the door. The lady is saying they are not against the law - if the law says they must leave, they.
Corporal Kevin Martin:
The law does not say they have to leave. They are free to live here like anybody else.
Greg Wilesmith:
Free in principle but not in practice. Intimidation has been systematic. More than half the Serbian residents have fled Kosovo. The war that NATO fought to stop the ethnic cleansing of Albanians has created a new cycle of revenge. Now the Serbs are the main victims and that's a striking reversal of the power balance in the province of these past 10 years. How the Serbs lost Kosovo is a complex story of failed international diplomacy and misjudgments that lead to the worst war in Europe in half a century. In March the US Special Envoy, Richard Holbrooke was sent on a final mission to negotiate with Yugoslavia's President Slobodan Milosevic.
Richard Holbrooke, US Special Envoy to Yugoslavia:
President Clinton and Secretary Albright sent our delegation here to Belgrade on a mission of peace at a time of escalating violence in the region.
Greg Wilesmith:
Holbrooke persuaded Milosevic to end the Bosnia war in 1995. Now, he threatened a new war unless the oppression of the Albanians was stopped.
Richard Holbrooke, US Special Envoy to Yugoslavia:
At about 10.00 in the morning on March the 23rd, I went to see him alone and we sat alone in this vast room in the White Palace surrounded by his art, and normally there were other people in the meetings, and I said to him, 'You understand what will happen when I leave here today if you don't change your position?' And he said, 'Yes, you will bomb us.' And there was dead silence in the room, uncharacteristic. And I said, 'I want to be clear with you, it will be...' - and I used these three words I had worked out very carefully with the US military - 'It will be swift, it will be severe, it will be sustained.' And he said in a very matter of fact way, very flat, 'No more engagement, no more negotiations, I understand that. You will bomb us.'
Greg Wilesmith:
Thirty hours later, we climbed atop of our hotel roof and watched as the first missiles of Operation Allied Force slammed into the outskirts of Belgrade. NATO had planned a short war.
Paul Beaver, Balkan Analyst, Jane's Defence Weekly:
I think there's no doubt at all that NATO believed that this would be a very quick military operation. I think two or three days is perhaps a little much of an exaggeration, but certainly they thought it would be over in a week.
Lord Carrington, NATO Secretary General 1984 - 1988:
I made a speech in the House of Lords in which I said that bombing would not end it in three days, it would stiffen the Serb resistance and it would cause much more hardship to the Kosovo Albanians if we hadn't done it.
Ivo Daalder, Co-ordinator, US Balkans Policy 1995-1996:
The big difference was the estimate of whether it was likely to be a two day bombing campaign or a two week bombing campaign, and the real underlying reason for that was that everybody believed that Bosnia had shown in 1995 that if only you bombed for two weeks you would have peace.
Greg Wilesmith:
But NATO had miscalculated. Kosovo was more important to most Serbs and certainly to Milosevic than Bosnia. While journalists from NATO countries were either expelled or advised to leave, we were able to keep reporting. Now it's time to return.
Greg Wilesmith (in Belgrade):
I've been looking forward to this day for some time - going back to Belgrade. Having reported the war there for three months I'm keen to feel what peace is like in the city, and to talk to government ministers about the war they fought, about the genocide in Kosovo, the forcible expulsion of perhaps a million people and most particularly, about the lies that they told the Yugoslav people.
Greg Wilesmith:
Zividan Jovanovic is the Foreign Minister of Yugoslavia. He is an old-style socialist. On the day we met him, he had just come from President Milosevic's White Palace, and he was ready as ever to argue the claim that NATO's campaign breached international law.
Zividan Jovanovic, Yugoslavian Foreign Minister:
You could hardly expect a sovereign country and especially this country with a well known history to surrender, indeed with, and because of threats [and] absolutely unacceptable positions which were not justified by law, by standards, by moral principles, etcetera.
Greg Wilesmith:
Mr Jovanovic tries to characterise Yugoslavia as the righteous David up against the Goliath-like NATO.
Zividan Jovanovic, Yugoslavian Foreign Minister:
The mightiest military organisation on one hand, and here you have one very tiny, small country, small people, resisting and defending itself.
Bratislav Grubacic, Serbian Political Analyst:
Politically speaking, the political parts of NATO countries expected, basically, [for] Milosevic to accept NATO demands after [a] couple of days of not so serious bombing, and he on the other hand, Milosevic here, he thought that after [a] couple of weeks bombing that European public opinion will go against NATO and against air strikes, against United States.
Greg Wilesmith:
Milosevic hoped the 19 nation Alliance would split. After all, Greece, Italy and other countries had never favoured going to war. For NATO, maintaining unity would become the overriding challenge, and it would test all of the diplomatic skills of the Alliance's supreme commander, General Wesley Clark.
General Wesley Clark, Supreme Commander, NATO:
From the time we went into this we had to move from a political dynamic - of consensus, compromise, least common denominator solutions - up to a military dynamic that relied on the principles of war - surprise, mass, concentration, focus on the objective and so on.
Greg Wilesmith:
From the outset, General Clark was hamstrung by political directives: NATO would fight the war from the air, not from the ground.
Paul Beaver, Balkan Analyst, Jane's Defence Weekly:
He'd been a soldier in Vietnam, he'd been an ordinary soldier who'd come up through the ranks, he knew how important it was to have ground troops - you could only clear ground, hold ground with soldiers. You can't do that with air power.
Greg Wilesmith:
The German general, Klaus Naumann, was head of NATO's Military Committee, effectively he was Clark's deputy, and he too had urged a land force component to the campaign.
General Klaus Naumann, Chair, NATO Military Committee 1996-1999:
We had to understand rather early in the summer that NATO nations were not prepared to employ ground forces, and some nations believe, I think, in the illusion that one can fight a military campaign without risking the life of one of their soldiers and that is, as we all know, it's an illusion.
Richard Holbrooke, US Special Envoy to Yugoslavia:
The Administration handled the ground troops issue - under pressure, domestic and foreign - with great skill and courage. If we had invaded with ground troops, first of all it would have taken three months to assemble the force, secondly if the force would have gone there would have been casualties on the NATO side - which, thank God, there weren't in the real world.
Greg Wilesmith:
Instead there was a catastrophe in Kosovo. The casualties in this war would be civilians, not NATO pilots. Hundreds of Albanian civilians would be killed by air strikes - on several occasions their tractor convoys were mistaken for Serb artillery. Serb paramilitaries responded to the bombing by committing genocide on a scale not seen in Europe since the Second World War - a response some had expected.
Bratislav Grubacic, Serbian Political Analyst:
Before the air strikes started, basically from the Serbian side there were a lot of announcements and even everybody here, it was kind of common knowledge - and I think it was announced to the foreign diplomats and mediators - that if air strikes start that [then] Albanians will really suffer from that.
Zividan Jovanovic, Yugoslavian Foreign Minister:
If you have, as it was the case, 500 aeroplanes with I don't know, maybe even thousands of drops of missiles and rockets and bombs on a daily basis - bombing Pristina, bombing Glogovac, Prizren, Orahovac, bombing all major places and towns in Kosovo - can you contemplate [the] reaction of citizens or population? Would they stand up and raise their hands up in order to protect themselves, or they would try to find a safer place?
Lord Carrington, NATO Secretary General 1984-1988:
The signal for bombing was the signal to Milosevic to get rid of the Kosovo Albanians from Kosova, and they streamed across the border because the Serbs decided this was the moment to get rid of them - they were being bombed and this was their opportunity.
Greg Wilesmith:
Having planned for a short war, NATO was unprepared for the hundreds of thousands of Kosovars who flooded out of the province. The unintended consequence of the bombing was to create a refugee crisis. Like so many others, Arber Demiri realised that only by escaping could he stay alive. He had started to drive towards Macedonia when he was stopped by the Serb police.
Arber Demiri:
They just told me to get out from the vehicle and they asked me which nationality I belonged to, and when I told them that I am Albanian they started to hit me. And at the end they took my vehicle and they told me after this, then I can continue walking to Macedonia. An don our way back, on a building just 30 metres left, I saw a guy with a mask and when he took off his mask I recognised him. And when he saw me - actually we looked at each other straight in the eyes and we recognised each other.
Q: So when he pulled the balaclava off his face and you saw his face, did you think, 'Now that we've seen each other he will kill me.' Or did you think there's more chance that he'll let me go?
A: To tell you the truth, I was thinking he would report me to the others, maybe not himself, but he will report to the others and they will take me and of course my future and my relatives' future will be uncertain.
Q: So your life was decided in that second really?
A: Well, yeah, I think so, yeah, about seconds. It was actually between life and death.
Greg Wilesmith:
NATO leaders like Britain's Prime Minister, Tony Blair, responded emotionally to the refugee crisis, strengthening their advocacy of the war as a moral crusade.
Tony Blair, British Prime Minister:
People driven from their homes at the point of a gun, women raped, young men taken out and murdered, a whole people displaced and dispossessed simply because of their ethnic identity - my generation never thought to see those scenes in Europe again.
Greg Wilesmith:
For the UCK - the Kosovo Liberation Army - which had been battling the Serbs with light weapons for 15 months, the forced expulsion of their people was a disaster and they wanted NATO to invade Kosovo.
General Agim Ceku, Commander, KLA:
Yes, of course, yes we are concerned about it. We wait every day for NATO to come to Kosovo. It would be very easy for NATO if we undertake a ground campaign. I know very well Serbians. First day maybe some difficulties, just first day, in first light. Then all of the Serbs leave Kosovo.
Paul Beaver, Balkan Analyst, Jane's Defence Weekly:
There's no doubt that Milosevic would have been under incredible pressure from day one of the air campaign had he thought that within a matter of weeks if not a month that there would have been ground troops swarming in over Kosovo, because his soldiers would not have been a match for trained, professional NATO soldiers.
Greg Wilesmith:
Instead of mobilising for an invasion of Kosovo, NATO fired up the air campaign and increasingly directed it against the Serb capital, a city over which wars have been fought through the centuries.
Greg Wilesmith (in Belgrade):
In the earlier stages of the war Belgrade was largely spared from the bombing campaign, but when it became clear that the Government was being much more resistant to NATO's demands than expected, there was an intensification of the campaign. The aim was to knock out the Defence Ministry headquarters behind me, the Army headquarters on the other side of the road, the Serbian government buildings over there, the Foreign Ministry was here, which suffered quite bad collateral damage. And then further down this street, Kneza Milosa Street - it sort of became the bomb alley of Belgrade - they hit the Serbian Interior Ministry and the Federal Interior Ministry, which directed the activities of the police.
Greg Wilesmith:
These buildings were declared by NATO to be legitimate military targets - in theory, but in fact these were largely symbolic strikes. Destroying the ministries did nothing to hasten the war - they'd been empty for weeks. Even so, there were victims. Ratko Bulatovic is 40 years old, an opposition party member and a civil defence worker until his legs were blown off. The night NATO hit the Defence Ministry, Ratko rushed to the scene, fearful there might be civilian casualties in surrounding apartment buildings.
Ratko Bulatovic:
What happened was , 10 minutes after the first strike, NATO aggressors repeated the same strike on the same building so we were injured by the second strike that was not expected at all. What I remember and I will never forget, is the sound of the aeroplane followed by a loud detonation and I felt something struck me from the back and I fell. I didn't know I'd lost both my legs. I was aware that the injuries were very serious and with the last atoms of my strength I looked back and saw my leg in an unnatural position, you could almost say chopped off.
Greg Wilesmith:
Deciding what to bomb was the subject of intense and frequently bitter debate at NATO. The generals had permission to hit military installations, designated Phase 1 and Phase 2 targets, but civilian infrastructure such as the bridges of Belgrade over the Sava and Danube rivers were considered Phase 3 targets. Some NATO commanders wanted to destroy them to try to paralyse the economic heart of the nation. France saved the bridges by exercising its veto. For the most part though, General Clark won the diplomatic battles.
General Wesley Clark, Supreme Commander, NATO:
Now on any individual target I sort of worked it around through governments. I found which ones wanted to push harder, which were nervous, and I tried to pick out the targets in such a way that I maintained support and cohesion. I didn't always defer to those who wanted targets withheld.
Greg Wilesmith:
One target which was on the list, then off and finally back on again, was the main Belgrade studio of the government station, Radio Television Serbia.
General Klaus Naumann, Chair, NATO Military Committee 1996-1999:
We had discussed this issue in the NATO council and we had made the point from a military point of view that if we want to hurt Milosevic and to make him blink, then we had to attack those targets which kept him in power, and one of the instruments which kept him in power was without doubt the media and the centralised, controlled TV.
Greg Wilesmith:
On April 23rd a missile blasted into the television station, shearing off the back wall closest to the nerve centre of RTS, the Master Control. When we arrived shortly afterwards they were digging frantically to save a technician buried in the rubble - they failed. Watching on, I thought that it could have been me, or the ABC's cameraman, Tim Bates, for this was where we came to satellite our stories. We hadn't been here for two nights - foreign journalists had been warned by NATO to stay away from RTS.
Marko Dragojevic:
I was on the mezzanine and you have upper floor, I was there behind that wall...
Greg Wilesmith:
Marko Dragojevic was in video editing.
Marko Dragojevic:
We are broadcasting news, and we heard a huge bang. All that we felt was pressure that threw us into the building. My first thought was the simple, pure anger. 'Why they bomb us? We are just people who work there and we are just do our job.' In Master Control there were six or seven people and they are all, as you know, dead. Some of them couldn't...
Q: Are they friends of yours?
A: Yes, friends of mine [for] six years. The only feeling that I have now, and then, is the regret because they are all young people, girls and boys from 23 to 25 years old...
Greg Wilesmith:
NATO struck, it said, to silence a major outlet of Serbian propaganda. 16 civilian television staff were killed.
Milovan Drecun, Yugoslav War Correspondent:
Why do you think the Americans, NATO, struck at RTS? The picture about what was going on, about the morale of our people, especially in Kosovo, was exclusively covered by RTS. There were no foreign journalists present to see our morale.
Paul Beaver, Balkan Analyst, Jane's Defence Weekly:
I think it's defensible to, in military terms, to attack television stations. Morally there might be a few a few problems with that, but we get this tremendous problem of ethics. Was this a war or was t his not a war? A far as I'm concerned, a state of hostility existed.
General Wesley Clark, Supreme Commander, NATO:
You see, what wasn't predictable was at what point Milosevic would toss in the towel. There was never a specific level of bomb damage that could be correlated with his loss of will. It wasn't as though you could say, 'OK, we're gonna, once we take out his house, this guy's gonna give up.' OK, it wasn't the house. 'Well, what about when we strike the television? Well, that'll make him real mad.' But he didn't give up for that either.
Greg Wilesmith:
In public at NATO's 50th birthday celebrations, the United States and Britain were stressing their confidence in the air war, but behind the scenes Tony Blair was pushing for a ground option.
Paul Beaver, Balkan Analyst, Jane's Defence Weekly:
Tony was indicating that he had a frustration with the American reluctance to commit ground troops. The British have a different attitude to the Americans to using ground troops. We had a professional army for far longer and I think that that was very much the case that British troops, because of their experience in the Balkans, actually knew what they were capable of doing.
Ivo Daalder, Co-ordinator, US Balkans Policy 1995-1996:
In Washington there were two fundamental reasons to object to that. One was the risk that this would entail, particularly to American forces which would have to lead any such invasion, and secondly there was the risk to the NATO Alliance, the belief that if you were to raise the issue of ground forces at this stage, NATO might start debating this issue and lose the unity that was necessary to make the bombing campaign succeed.
Bratislav Grubacic, Serbian Political Analyst:
Milosevic really had the premise that [the] Washington Summit of NATO would lead to [a] serious quarrel between Western Europe and [the] United States. He hoped that he would manage to make, get between Western Europe and [the] United States, and particularly involving Russia and eventually China in the game. He really thought that he would make [a] complete mess of the world, which is, as we all know here living in Serbia, is Milosevic's chief political characteristic - to make people quarrel.
Greg Wilesmith:
Milosevic had misjudged the commitment of Alliance members to maintaining unity. NATO set aside the notion of a land war in favour of escalating the air war - the number of aircraft was trebled to a thousand. In Kosovo though it wasn't working. NATO pilots were barred from flying lower than 15,000 feet so as to stay out of Yugoslav missile range. Consequently they couldn't be sure whether they were hitting real tanks or elaborate decoys. The Serb TV correspondent, Milovan Drecun, was the only journalist to see the war up close.
Milovan Drecun, Yugoslav War Correspondent:
I was there filming how NATO was attacking phoney positions of the Yugoslav army to the point of exhaustion.
Greg Wilesmith:
The inability of NATO to prevent the slaughter of ethnic Albanians and their expulsion from Kosovo was galling for the NATO commanders. Apache helicopters capable of long distance strikes at low levels against small Serb units on the ground were dispatched to neighbouring Albania, but they weren't allowed to be deployed.
Ivo Daalder, Co-ordinator, US Balkans Policy 1995-1996:
Clearly General Clark and the Pentagon leadership got, during the war, as they had from many times before the war, into something of a tiff over what was necessary. Clark from very, very early on thought that you fight a war with all the tools available. That doesn't mean that you only fight it at 15,000 feet dropping bombs on strategic targets, it means you get the army involved, you get everybody involved in order to put decisive force at the disposal of the commander so he can win. The military and political leadership inside Washington was not prepared to back him on that. They were not prepared to make the case for ground force, they were not prepared to make the case for flying aircraft at lower altitudes in order to go after tanks and artillery, let alone paramilitary troops engaged in ethnic cleansing.
Greg Wilesmith:
Instead NATO's focus was on destroying the industrial infrastructure of Serbia bit by bit - oil refineries, bridges, roads, the only car factory, even a vacuum cleaner factory - every big static target was being hit. NATO's objective was to influence Milosevic's circle of business supporters.
Ivo Daalder, Co-ordinator, US Balkans Policy 1995-1996:
A psychological campaign was raised against them where people would receive faxes telling them that their factories would be destroyed within 12 or 24 hours and telling them the next factory won't be destroyed if they could find a way to end this war. And there were a number of ways, of different secret and not so secret, in which the United States and NATO tried to influence those around Milosevic in order to raise the psychological pressure on him.
Paul Beaver, Balkan Analyst, Jane's Defence Weekly:
I'm quite convinced that the attacks on the Pancevo chemical works were not aimed at depriving Yugoslavia of its chemical capability. More likely they were there because so many of the leadership , of the clique around Milosevic, actually have ownership of these plants and get considerable income from them, and this was really hitting their pockets rather than the infrastructure of Yugoslavia.
Greg Wilesmith:
The campaign was what General Clark called 'high stakes coercion'.
General Wesley Clark, Supreme Commander, NATO:
This is the most heavily leveraged air campaign yet seen...
Greg Wilesmith:
While NATO constantly promoted its successes, privately as two months ticked by, NATO commanders were despairing. What had previously been unacceptable was now on the agenda - secret planning for a land war was under way. The plan was called Operation Bravo Minus.
Paul Beaver, Balkan Analyst, Jane's Defence Weekly:
That plan was to actually mount a ground attack from three different axes - one in through Albania and two in through Macedonia. In the event these were actually the routes that NATO troops used in June to go in - the Germans through Albania and the British and French through Macedonia. But there was a very serious consideration there of bringing S4 troops in from Bosnia, crossing Montenegro if necessary, but at no time breaching, if you like, Serbia proper and going into that part of Yugoslavia.
Greg Wilesmith:
Bravo Minus would have involved in excess of 150,000 troops. The invasion was going to be bloody. The British, who were offering 50,000 troops, anticipated seven per cent of their soldiers would either be killed or injured.
Zividan Jovanovic, Yugoslavian Foreign Minister:
I can surely tell [you that] we were very much prepared to meet attacks, ground attacks from any side, from any quarter, be it north, east, west, be it south, be it only with tanks or with Apache helicopters, and so on. We were contemplating such a possibility and we were very well prepared to meet such a possibility, convinced that it immediately would change proportions of advantages to the worse of NATO.
Greg Wilesmith:
D-day was set for mid September, then unexpectedly in early June President Milosevic capitulated.
Slobodan Milosevic, Yugoslavian President:
The agreements we have reached take away the military threat against our country and ensures safety for all nationalities in Kosovo.
Greg Wilesmith:
The breakthrough had come during a joint visit by the European Union's envoy and Finnish President, Marti Ahtisaari, and the Russian Envoy, Victor Chernomyrdin. Milosevic and his war council were presented with an ultimatum. The Russians - whom Milosevic had always hoped would save him - and the Europeans, told him to give up.
Bratislav Grubacic, Serbian Political Analyst:
This was quite [a] long, intense meeting. What I understood basically [was] that [the] Russians didn't even have the text of [the] NATO demands, that only Ahtisaari had that piece of paper. He gave it to Milosevic, [the] Serbian part of [the] delegation, they looked at it. One of the members of the Serbian delegation, Mila Milutinovic, [the] Serbian President, started to comment on the paper suggesting that some changes might be done, and Ahtisaari was very clear in saying that absolutely nothing can be changed in this paper. 'We just came here to say, to give him the paper and to have [the] answer to be yes or no.'
Zividan Jovanovic, Yugoslavian Foreign Minister:
Q: Is it true to say in fact that you were very disappointed in the attitude of the Russian Government?
A: We are, you see, in the field of politics and not emotions, so I would not describe our feelings, then or now. We are talking about interests, and it is obvious that Russia...
Q: But you must have felt betrayed almost?
A: Russia and Russian leadership obviously thought this was [a] document meeting the interests of Russia.
Greg Wilesmith:
While the withdrawal of Russian support was a significant factor for Milosevic, so was rising public anger throughout Serbia - NATO had been turning off the lights in Belgrade.
Bratislav Grubacic, Serbian Political Analyst:
Belgrade - after four days [of] not having electricity and water supplies, living in a permanent fear that new bombs would come and flatten Belgrade - [the] civilian population was really dissatisfied.
Greg Wilesmith:
Milosevic was determined to preserve his power base, ordering his army and police forces, still largely intact, to retreat from Kosovo. NATO is enjoying its victory. There's a joyous, vibrant air in the Kosovo capital. When the Serbs ran it, I always felt when visiting Pristina that it was a desolate, fearful place. Now festivals of music and dance are put on by the likes of Vanessa Redgrave - a little light relief for the traumatised Kosovars. It is though, too early for some to have such forgiveness for the Serbs.
Arber Demiri:
To tell you the truth, I don't really care about them, because I was in the same position six months ago - well actually, in a worse position than they are now because they are, at least they have a UN and KFOR protection, so , and I was just decided by them [whether] I live or die.
Greg Wilesmith:
As you drive around Kosovo you wonder bout the extraordinary human cost of it all - the homes abandoned, the families destroyed, and the lives lost in the confusion of war. Hundreds of Albanians and Serb civilians were killed by mis-targetted NATO bombs in Kosovo and in Serbia. These deaths were regretted by NATO as being unavoidable in war, yet all the while NATO had run a zero casualty policy.
Ivo Daalder, Co-ordinator, US Balkans Policy 1995-1996:
In the end air power itself did not do what we thought was necessary in Kosovo. For one, air power protected no Kosovar Albanians - 1.5 million people were kicked out of their homes, at least 10,000 were killed, many, many thousands were raped, many tens of thousands were wounded and mutilated, and 800,000 were kicked out of the country - air power didn't stop that. In fact, one can argue that air power and the way we conducted the war may have aggravated rather than, contributed to it. In the end air power was a crucial instrument to convince Milosevic to give in, but only after he had done a lot of damage.
General Klaus Naumann, Chair, NATO Military Committee 1996-1999:
Some nations believe, I think, in the illusion that one can fight a military campaign without risking the life of one of our soldiers, and that, as we all know, it's an illusion, it will never happen. We were lucky in Kosovo that we didn't lose one air crew member, but it was sheer luck.
Greg Wilesmith:
KFOR peacekeepers will be lucky to do as well, given the regular confrontations now between the rival communities. The most striking legacy of this war are the graves all over Kosovo. The War Crimes Tribunal is investigating 470 mass graves like this one, and more are reported every week. It's arguable whether air power really proved to be an effective instrument for NATO's humanitarian war. In the end, it couldn't prevent mass murder on the ground in Kosovo.