Kosovo War Has Significant Ramification for World Politics
The unilateral NATO air strike has touched off a heated debate in the international community on ties between state sovereignty and humanitarian intervention, as well as great fears in developing countries that their state sovereignty might be violated on humanitarian grounds in the future.
Against such a backdrop, the United Nations University (UNU) is expected to release the study, entitled "Kosovo and the Challenge of Humanitarian Intervention," Tuesday at the United Nations Headquarters in New York.
The study examines the crisis and its aftermath from several expert perspectives and also comes on the eve of the NATO military action against Yugoslavia, which began March 24 last year. In an exclusive interview with Xinhua here Monday, Dr. Ramesh Thakur, Vice Rector at UNU and co-editor of the study, said that the Kosovo conflict has, in the long term, significant ramification for the United Nations, major powers, regional organizations.
"One of the reasons behind our embarking on this study was in fact a feeling that the NATO countries and therefore the people immediate in the Western countries had not fully grasped the extent of unease that was felt in many parts of the world," he said, referring the worries in the developing world on relations between the state sovereignty on the one hand and humanitarian intervention on the other.
"Kosovo confronted us with an abiding challenge of humanitarian intervention: namely, it is morally just, legally permissible and militarily feasible?" Thakur said.
"Air strikes did not prevent widespread atrocities against civilians on the ground in Kosovo nor the mass exodus of refugees into neighboring countries," said the study's conclusion by contributors. "Since the war, there has been a persistent threat of ethnic cleansing of Serbs by the Albanians."
"Zero-casualty air war shifted the burden of risk to life and limb completely to the other side, including civilians," the study concluded. "By fighting and defeating Serbia, NATO became the tool for the KLA (the Kosovo Liberation Army) policy of inciting Serb reprisals through terrorist attacks in order to provoke NATO intervention."
"Expanding the list of bombing targets, such as water and electricity infrastructure and broadcasting stations, reversed progressive trends in the laws of war over the course of the 20th century," the study said.
Since the deployment in June last year under relevant Security Council resolution, the U.N. Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) and international peace-keeping force (KFOR) have been accused of the failure to protect Serbs and other non-Albanians, who, as Belgrade put it, are victims of genocide and terrorist activities undertaken by Albanian separatists and terrorists.
"We began the project shortly after the war in Kosovo began," he said. "We started identifying project contributors and participants from all around the world. We were very careful not to ask them ahead of time whether they supported or opposed the war because the United Nations University has commitment to diversity and then encouraging the diversity of opinions." The project has attracted experts from different countries and varying regions, he said. "Of the 30 or so people who have been approached, only one or two has been unable in the end to come to the project."
The respondents also included experts in Belgrade who are supporting the Government of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, he said.
"We though it important to bring together people from leading experts, from the academic world, ... who would learn about each other's concerns," he said. "No one has given, even the United Nations, the right to intervene in the domestic affairs" of a sovereign country because "this is specifically prohibited in the U.N. Charter."
"On the other hand, the balance between the state sovereignty and human rights has changed quite significantly for the 55 years since the Charter was signed," he said. "The real attention is who decides, under what rules, and on what evidence that massive human rights violations and atrocities have occurred, and something has to be done, so what has to be done?" The study offers interpretation of the Kosovo crisis from numerous perspectives: the conflict-parties, NATO allies, the immediate region surrounding the conflict, and further afield. Country perspectives are followed by scholarly analysis of the longer-term normative, operational, and structural consequences of the Kosovo crisis for world politics.
Without the authorization of the U.N. Security Council, NATO waged a war against Yugoslavia, a sovereign member of the U.N. family, thus severely violating the U.N. Charter and the international law. Under the U.N. Charter, the Security Council has the primary responsibility for the maintenance of world peace and security.
This regional security alliance has undertaken military action with the Security Council sanction, "that has created many problems," Albrecht Schnabel, co-editor of the study and Peace and Governance Program Official in NUN, told Xinhua.
Established in 1973 and based in Tokyo, Japan, UNU's mission is "to contribute, through research and capacity building, to efforts to restore pressing global problems that are the concern of the United Nations, its Member States and their Peoples."
The unilateral NATO air strike has touched off a heated debate in the international community on ties between state sovereignty and humanitarian intervention, as well as great fears in developing countries that their state sovereignty might be violated on humanitarian grounds in the future.
