March 24 marked the 25th anniversary of the start of Operation Allied Force — the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s air campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, or FRY, during the Kosovo War.
The bombing ended on June 10, 1999, after FRY President Slobodan Milosevic agreed to withdraw troops from Kosovo and allow in peacekeepers.
On March 25, Russia’s state-owned Sputnik news agency disputed the pretext of the military intervention, namely that Albanian Muslims in Kosovo were being ethnically cleansed.
“The world learned that the U.S. and NATO see the globe as their own playground where they do as they please a quarter of a century ago,” Sputnik wrote.
“On March 24, 1999, Western nations started bombing the city of Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia, under the far-fetched pretext of ‘protecting’ Kosovars.”
Sputnik’s claim that there was no legitimate pretext for protecting Kosovo Albanians is misleading.
Scholars have debated what ultimately motivated NATO to launch the 2½-month air campaign against the FRY and whether the “humanitarian intervention” was legal under international law.
Still, the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, several acts of mass killing and other grave rights abuses inflicted on Kosovo Albanians preceded the NATO bombing campaign.
An estimated 250,000 Kosovo Albanians had been driven from their homes by the autumn of 1998. Amid fears of a humanitarian catastrophe, events such as the February-March 1998 Drenica massacre and the January 1999 Racak massacre contributed to NATO’s decision to use military force.
First-hand accounts of senior Washington policymakers suggest that the Racak massacre “transformed the West's Balkan policy,” convincing the administration of U.S. then-President Bill Clinton and later NATO allies “that a six-year effort to bottle up the ethnic conflict in Kosovo was doomed,” Barton Gellman of The Washington Post reported at the time.
International relations scholars James Goldgeier and Gorana Grgic argue that the 1999 NATO intervention should be viewed in the context of “the largest act of mass killing in Europe” — the Bosnian genocide that Serbia and ethnic Bosnian Serbs had carried out during the Yugoslav Wars.
“For almost a year, the international community tried to deter Milosevic’s regime from attacking the Albanian civilian population in Kosovo by imposing a range of trade and investment sanctions, asset freezes and arms and oil embargos. All of these were in vain and some even outright counterproductive, as in the case of an arms embargo on the significantly weaker Kosovo Albanians forces. As the human rights violations, large-scale displacement and death counts began to soar, and the international attempts at mediation failed, it became clear direct military intervention remained as the last resort,” Goldgeier and Grgic wrote.
Gregory Stanton, a scholar of genocide, argues the very term “ethnic cleansing” was “invented by Milosevic and Serbian propagandists as a euphemism for forced deportation and genocide.”
The United Nations said ethnic cleansing is a “literal translation of the Serbo-Croatian expression ‘etnicko ciscenje,’ but noted “the precise roots of the term or who started using it and why are still uncertain.”
Still, the roots of the conflict are complex, and no side is without blame.
In 1989, Milosevic, then Serbia’s president, rose to prominence by eliminating Kosovo’s autonomy. Yugoslavia had granted Kosovo, a province within Serbia, autonomy in 1974. In April 1992, the republics of Serbia and Montenegro formed the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, after Yugoslavia collapsed amid the Yugoslav Wars, which started in 1991.
Milosevic served as Serbia’s president from 1989-1997, and then took the helm of the FRY from 1997-2000.
Kosovo Albanians' resistance to Serbian rule eventually grew into a low-level insurgency with the emergence in 1996 of the Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA, which sought secession from the FRY and the eventual creation of a “Greater Albania.”
The armed insurrection had significantly heated up by 1998, prompting a severe crackdown by the Serbian government on the Albanian population.
As attacks intensified from both sides, the KLA, FRY and Serbian security forces were implicated in atrocities that led to failed international efforts to contain the violence.
Albanian civilians were disproportionately affected.
In February 1999, at NATO-supported peace talks in Rambouillet, France, the Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo was presented to both sides to “end the violence in Kosovo and facilitate the return of refugees and displaced persons.”
That agreement eyed a withdrawal of Serbian and FRY security forces from Kosovo.
The agreement also envisioned a return to Kosovo autonomy and would have granted NATO forces “unimpeded access throughout the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.” Some scholars and former U.S. diplomats argued those conditions were untenable for Milosevic.
Milosevic's refusal to sign the accords precipitated the NATO air campaign.
Then-U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan characterized military action as a regrettable but necessary last resort.
Serbian and FRY security forces drastically ramped up the ethnic cleansing campaign following the withdrawal of the Organization for Security and Cooperation Kosovo Verification Mission and the start of the NATO bombing campaign.
New York-based Human Rights Watch said that 525,787 refugees fled to neighboring countries from Kosovo in the first three weeks of the air campaign, with government forces ultimately expelling 862,979 ethnic Albanians from Kosovo.
Stephen Hosmer, a senior staff member at the RAND Corporation, a U.S. think tank and research institute, argued in 2001 that Milosevic mistakenly assumed the refugee crisis resulting from the Serb ethnic cleansing campaign in Kosovo would give him leverage over NATO to cease its attacks.
While Sputnik contends the NATO bombing of the FRY caused a humanitarian catastrophe, Albanian civilians killed by FRY and Serbian security forces account for a large percentage of the war victims.
The Kosovo Memory Book database, which documents deaths in that conflict from 1998-2000, puts the overall number of war victims at 13,535. It said that “10,317 civilians lost their lives or went missing in connection with the war, of whom 8,676 were Albanians.”
In terms of civilian deaths, an additional 1,196 Serbs and 445 Roma and other civilians, lost their lives.
According to the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, an nongovernmental organization, the Kosovo Memory Book database “documents all or nearly all the human losses” during the conflict.
The KLA was implicated in some of those killings.
According to a 2012 Amnesty International report, the KLA allegedly abducted and murdered 800 members of minority communities in Kosovo, including some Kosovo Albanians it believed to be “collaborators.”
During the 78-day air campaign, NATO aircraft flew 38,400 sorties, including 10,484 strike sorties, in which 23,614 air munitions were dropped.
An extensive fact-finding mission by Human Rights Watch concluded “that as few as 489 and as many as 528 Yugoslav civilians were killed” in the NATO air campaign. It noted that 62% to 66% of the total civilian deaths occurred in twelve incidents.
Based on that bombing-to-civilian-casualty ratio, the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia determined the figures did “not indicate that NATO may have conducted a campaign aimed at causing substantial civilian casualties either directly or incidentally.”
The U.N. tribunal also noted an FRY Ministry of Foreign Affairs publication, “NATO Crimes in Yugoslavia,” which included an estimate of “495 civilians killed and 820 civilians wounded in specific documented instances.”