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June 7, 2000
Kosovo one year later: Failed intervention leads to new round of "ethnic cleansing," study says
On the one-year anniversary of the end of NATO's bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, a new Cato Institute study says that the Clinton administration's policy of bringing stability to the Balkans and building a multiethnic democracy in Kosovo has been a "conspicuous failure."
The administration's intervention not only sparked the initial round of ethnic cleansing against Kosovo's Albanian minority, the study charges, but it laid the groundwork for the new round of ethnic cleansing now being waged against the Serbian majority.
"Not until NATO began its bombing did [Serbia's] objective in Kosovo change from counterinsurgency to a deliberate campaign to expel the province's ethnic Albanians," argue Christopher Layne, a Cato visiting fellow in foreign policy studies, and Benjamin Schwarz, a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly. The original intent of NATO action was to prevent a humanitarian disaster, they say, but "NATO's air campaign triggered the very debacle it was said to be preventing."
Now that the bombing has ceased, the authors note, "the war's only beneficiary has been the Kosovo Liberation Army," which is currently engaged in a brutal ethnic-cleansing campaign against the Serbs and is fomenting insurgency in the province. Layne and Schwarz say the Clinton administration's "multi-billion-dollar nation-building adventure" has been premised on "inept diplomacy and strategic miscalculation," especially the notion that the hateful Balkan factions will settle into "a society shaped by the values of democracy, diversity, and tolerance."
In retrospect, the Kosovo conflict illustrates the problems with the Clinton administration's foreign policy doctrine of "virtuous power," the authors say. "The administration consoles itself that, as the president says, it 'did the right thing in the right way' when it intervened," write Layne and Schwarz. "Even granting that doubtful premise, this is not enough to exonerate policymakers from their responsibility for the situation the United States confronts today."
Dubious Anniversary: Kosovo: One Year
Later
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