Should NATO -- and Canada -- have gone to war in Kosovo?

GORDON GIBSON

Globe and Mail, Tuesday, July 20, 1999

IN VANCOUVER -- Rollie Keith lives in Chilliwack, a town about an hour's drive up the Fraser Valley from Vancouver. He was a 32-year member of the Canadian Forces, serving in armoured units and the Canadian Airborne. He retired when the last army base in this province, CFB Chilliwack, was closed down a couple of years ago. Now if British Columbia ever decides to secede, unlike Quebec we will have no standing army to start with. This is one more example of discrimination against the West -- but I digress.

Mr. Keith is a solid citizen. He holds a position on the regional health board, and has run as a New Democrat in a couple of elections. His military record will attest that he is no pacifist, and no stranger to the necessary use of force. His recent experience as one of 64 Canadian observers on the Kosovo observer group of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) is our local contact with the Kosovo tragedy. His account -- he has been making speeches on the issue -- is a disturbing one.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Keith comes across as a straight-talking, fair-minded man who does not say more than he knows. He was posted to the observer group in January. The group had grown to 1,300 members (it was authorized to have 2,000) when it was pulled out on March 20. NATO's bombs began to fall on March 24.

The question was, and remains: Was there a viable alternative to the bombing?

Our former ambassador to Yugoslavia, James Bissett, has raised the question, citing NATO figures that show that, up to March 24, only about 2,000 people had died as a result of internal skirmishes, with few external refugees and little property damage. By the end of the bombing, tens of thousands were dead, 600,000 were internally displaced and one million were refugees; there was tens of billions of dollars worth of property damage and untold human misery. The Balkans have not been stabilized. What's more, the credibility of the United Nations was seriously damaged by NATO's ignoring of its rules, and relations with Russia will not be the same for a generation.

Such a tragedy can be justified only if it is clear the bombing was the only way to save human life on a major scale. Mr. Keith's witness says otherwise.

As director of field services in an area close to Pristina, he travelled extensively. He describes a situation that was nasty but sustainable, in spite of constant destabilization attempts by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) -- the classic technique of revolutionaries everywhere.

An official Foreign Affairs chronology paints a different picture: It says that deteriorating conditions for the observers required their withdrawal for their own safety. NATO also claims that "ethnic cleansing" was already under way. (How few users of that charged phrase remember that it applies more impressively to the displacement of North American Indians by Europeans?)

Which picture is correct?

"On March 20, general stability existed within Kosovo," said Mr. Keith, though tensions and a midscale insurrection continued. When he arrived, "the bulk of the population had settled down after the previous year's hostilities, but the KLA was building its strength in preparation for a military solution, hopeful of NATO or Western military support."

He said there was "provocation from both belligerents. The KLA initiated most terrorist acts, and the security forces countered with harassment and intimidation and the employment of force. But during my presence in Kosovo I did not witness, nor did I have knowledge or a sense of, any directed state policy of so-called ethnic cleansing or other mass humanitarian or human-rights abuses being applied prior to the withdrawal of the international monitors on March 20."

The OSCE observers had small successes. The 700-person village of Donje Grabovac had been depopulated by fighting. The observers intervened, and "after our lengthy series of negotiations all participants agreed not to provoke their opponents, and we were about to escort former village delegations back to commence resettlement." Then came the order to leave.

In common with many other observers, Mr. Keith believes that the Rambouillet accords, whose rejection led to the bombing, were impossible for any Yugoslav government to accept. (And of course Belgrade improved on those terms in the eventual settlement -- though at a huge cost in lives and property.) He thinks there had to have been a better, if less macho, solution than war. His candidate would have been an inducement to Belgrade (by lifting economic sanctions in exchange for human-rights guarantees) to allow a much larger continuing observer corps in Kosovo, backed up by UN troops.

These are crucial questions. If Mr. Keith's perspective is right, the atrocities that followed the start of bombing would otherwise not have happened.

A parliamentary committee should hold hearings on this. This is not an indictment of the Canadian government; it was under terrible pressure. But we must learn from this horror whatever we can.

E-mail: ggibson@bc-home.com