The Bombing of Kosova - A Flawed Strategy

On February 4, 1999, US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said that "...Kosovo is not another Bosnia because we have learned the lessons of Bosnia - and we are determined to apply them here and now. We know - and we are seeing again - that the only reward for tolerating atrocities is more of the same." Implicit in her statement were three main assumptions. The first is that the military action taken by the international community in Bosnia in 1995 stopped the atrocities there. The second is that if the international community had undertaken similar military action earlier in Bosnia, the atrocities could have been stopped earlier. The third is that the method of "victory" in Bosnia was applicable to Kosovo. When NATO intervened in Kosovo the next month, it acted in accordance with Albright's assumptions. Unfortunately, because each of these assumptions was dangerously flawed, it can reasonably be said that the international community applied the wrong lessons from Bosnia to the Kosovo crisis.

NATO's two-week bombing of Serb positions in Bosnia in 1995 did not, in itself, end the war or the atrocities being committed there. Although the NATO bombing campaign certainly preceded the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords, it was only one factor among many that led Izetbegovic, Tudjman, and Milosevic to get together and end the war. The war in Bosnia had been raging for years, and all parties (as well as their respective backers) recognized that complete military victory was unlikely and were generally tired of the fighting. More importantly, by separating Bosnia's main ethnic groups into definable territories, one of the main strategies of the war had already fulfilled its purpose. Ethnic cleansing had "worked," and the only question that remained was how much ethnically-pure territory each group would hold. Although the Bosnian Serbs had rejected previous peace plans because they hoped to receive more territory than was offered to them, a massive Muslim-Croat offensive in 1995 reduced Serb-held territory by 20 percent, helping to convince the Bosnian Serbs (and more importantly, Slobodan Milosevic, their eventual "representative" at Dayton) that maintaining control of half the country would be more than acceptable. Without the backdrop of this ground offensive, it is unlikely that NATO's brief air campaign would have precipitated a lasting peace in Bosnia.

Although the NATO bombing campaign may have provided further impetus for Bosnia's peace, it certainly did not occur in a vacuum. Because conditions other than NATO's bombing had a tremendous impact on the peace process, it is reasonable to assume that a similar bombing campaign would have been ineffective had it occurred earlier, at a time when the necessary conditions for peace were not yet present. The importance of the context within which NATO's bombing occurred was overlooked in Albright's first and second assumptions. The context within which the international community intervened for Kosovo was starkly different from that of 1995 Bosnia, and furthermore gave no indication that the "lessons of Bosnia" would work there, disproving Albright's third and final assumption.

As Secretary Albright herself said during the very same February 4 speech, "... Kosovo is not Bosnia - for a host of political, geographic and historical reasons." Most obviously, Kosovo was not a region at war. The violence there was escalating rather than subsiding, indicating that Milosevic was not simply waiting for a reason to back down (as US officials seemed to believe). More importantly, in contrast to 1995 Bosnia, ethnic cleansing had not yet "worked" in Kosovo, a region much more significant to Milosevic and Serbia than Bosnia had ever been. If, as US officials claimed, Milosevic intended to replicate the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia, he would have had no reason to capitulate immediately to the demands of the international community as long as Kosovo was demographically dominated by Kosovar Albanians. Because the situation in Kosovo was ripe for violent escalation in 1999, it was unreasonable for the international community to apply the "lessons" of Bosnia's conflict, which was in its last stages even before NATO's bombing began.

Considering that the context of 1999 Kosovo precluded a repeat of NATO's easy "victory" in Bosnia before the Kosovo intervention even began, the problems of applying the Bosnia method to Kosovo are obvious. As should have been expected, a short, low-casualty demonstration of NATO air power implemented in accordance with the "lessons of Bosnia" did not solve the crisis in Kosovo. After bombing Serbia for 11 costly and controversial weeks, NATO and the international community got what it wanted when the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, a sovereign nation, surrendered authority over part of its own territory to foreign powers. Because of NATO's actions, an immediate escalation of violence engulfed Kosovo, close to a million Kosovar Albanians were displaced during the bombing and the Serbian response to it, and the violence and oppression against Albanians in the region, instead of being eliminated, was simply reversed to target the remaining Serbs. Each of these undesirable side effects of NATO's intervention was the direct result of the international community applying what it believed to be the "lessons of Bosnia" to a context that was fundamentally incompatible with those lessons.

Today, Kosovo remains a troubled region. The question of its "final status," whether it will become an independent state or remain part of Serbia, is still unresolved more than five years after the end of the war. Its economy is in shambles, its commitment to minority rights is questionable at best, and its people are angry. Because Secretary Albright and the international community assumed that NATO's bombing campaign in Bosnia ended the conflict there and could have done so earlier if implemented at an earlier stage, the crucial importance of context was overlooked. Because Secretary Albright and the international community did not understand the context that allowed Bosnia's particular kind of intervention to "work," the poor match between Kosovo's context and the "lessons of Bosnia" was ignored. For NATO, the resulting misapplication of the "lessons of Bosnia" meant that it had to engage in a much longer military campaign than it had anticipated in order to achieve its goals. For Kosovo and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (now Serbia), however, the costs were much greater. Not only were they forced to endure a misguided and devastating war, they endured it for no reason. As the deadly ethnic riots of March 2004 demonstrated so clearly to the world, Kosovo's crisis remains unsolved.