[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 68 (Wednesday, May 12, 1999)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E944-E946]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




 CRISIS IN KOSOVO (ITEM NO. 3) REMARKS BY DAN PLESCH DIRECTOR, BRITISH 
                 AMERICAN SECURITY INFORMATION COUNCIL

                                 ______
                                 

                        HON. DENNIS J. KUCINICH

                                of ohio

                    in the house of representatives

                        Wednesday, May 12, 1999

  Mr. KUCINICH. Mr. Speaker, on April 29, 1999, I joined with 
Representative Cynthia A. McKinney and Representative Michael E. 
Capuano to host the second in a series of Congressional Teach-In 
sessions on the Crisis in Kosovo. If a peaceful resolution to this 
conflict is to be found in the coming weeks, it is essential that we 
cultivate a consciousness of peace and actively search for creative 
solutions. We must construct a foundation for peace through 
negotiation, mediation, and diplomacy.
  Part of the dynamic of peace is a willingness to engage in meaningful 
dialogue, to listen to one another openly and to share our views in a 
constructive manner. I hope that these Teach-In sessions will 
contribute to this process by providing a forum for Members of Congress 
and the public to explore alternatives to the bombing and options for a 
peaceful resolution. We will hear from a variety of speakers on 
different sides of the Kosovo situation. I will be introducing into the 
Congressional Record transcripts of their remarks and essays that shed 
light on the many dimensions of the crisis.
  This presentation is by Dan Plesch, Director of the British American 
Security Information Council (BASIC). Mr. Plesch discusses a number of 
options for resolving the crisis, and emphasizes the importance of non-
military solutions and looking ahead to the need for massive 
reconstruction aid for the Balkans. Following his presentation is a 
Washington Post column by Mr. Plesch and Julianne Smith describing 
their concept of ``Civilian Intervention Units'' to help avoid tense 
situations deteriorating into war. I commend these documents to my 
colleagues.

     Presentation by Dan Plesch to Congressional Teach-In on Kosovo

       My organization has been involved in advocating, lobbying, 
     coaxing, and cajoling political leaders and the alliance 
     itself for the best part of a decade now in how to avoid and 
     prevent situations like the one we are in now. These horrors 
     are tragically not the last in this part of the world and 
     certainly we know that these issues are presented to us as 
     immensely complicated problems. I will sketch out a rather 
     simple description, which will lead from that into how NATO 
     leaders were handling these issues at last week's summit.
       If you can take leave of imagination with me, and think of 
     the Balkans as some of our own troubled inner cities, and if 
     you think of trying to manage law and order in Washington, 
     DC, or somewhere else, the only tool available to you is the 
     SWAT team of a private security force, which is about 
     equivalent of the NATO military. Not under the town council, 
     if you will, the United Nations, but a private security force 
     that does not come when you call 911 unless you've got a 
     credit card to go with it. In this case, neighborhoods would 
     be burning and all over DC, without neighborhood programs, 
     without community policing, without the whole infrastructure.
       We have learned in our cities that relying on the SWAT 
     teams and police cruisers is not the way forward. If you look 
     at models in Boston or other places in this country we can 
     see that it is the complex, much derided social work model 
     that provides security. That helps to dispense with the SWAT 
     team approach and permits other tools in the tool box. The 
     political actions of our leaders in this country in 
     particular speak to the current situation at hand.
       What this country does, many others follow. My own country, 
     the United Kingdom and other countries in Europe, has so far 
     followed the U.S. in ensuring that when policy makers, 
     politicians, parliamentarians wish to take action to prevent 
     and manage conflict, virtually the only tool available to us 
     is military force.
       In Kosovo today we are using air power, which is largely 
     ineffective. We are told that Serbian military forces are 
     arriving in Kosovo in larger quantities than we are 
     destroying, even with the best efforts of Allied aircraft. 
     The other possibility on the table are ground forces, which 
     are virtually unusable as a political tool. So we have 
     limited our options in the first place to the NATO alliance, 
     a private security organization involved in the international 
     community and then limited our military force options. That

[[Page E945]]

     was the position we put ourselves in the Rambouillet talks. 
     And the position that the administration led the Alliance and 
     European security to with all deliberate speed. Kosovo, if 
     you recall, was to be, as Richard Holbrook put it, the 
     prototype within NATO, for military actions outside of NATO's 
     borders without U.N. authority. There was great pride that 
     Russian participation could be dispensed with, and nobody 
     even mentioned the two words, United Nations, for almost six 
     months in public.
       Ground war as proposed is a fantasy akin to the air war--
     the fantasy being that we might be able to be involved 
     without the war spreading. Proponents of a ground war need to 
     answer the question of how we could contain the ground war, 
     how they would limit Milosovic's options to broaden it. Those 
     people who want to drive tanks through Hungary should explain 
     how they would intend to do it without creating a similar 
     situation we have here for the 300,000 Hungarians living in 
     northern Serbia.
       If, as in Bosnia, we decide to unleash the Croat army 
     against the Serbs, which is one of the main options, and 
     indeed an arms program for Croatia was one of the less 
     publicized decisions of the summit. If we decide to allow the 
     Croats do our fighting for us, then we risk massive, long-
     term escalation of the conflict. Privately NATO officials 
     believe that either we take the opportunity over the next few 
     weeks to negotiate our way out of this, and those options 
     have been discussed here in the media and the congressmen who 
     are to take part in some of these peace discussions in 
     Vienna, or the race is on between a peace deal and a ground 
     war driven by pride and machismo. That is why of course we 
     still continue the air war. Nobody wants to fail. That same 
     logic will lead us to start using a wider range of artillery 
     in our actions in a week or so and from that into a ground 
     war, which [I learned from] talking to officials at the 
     margins of the NATO summit meetings. Despite the possible 
     escalation, there has been a deafening silence from NATO 
     about the fate of the remaining Kosovars in Kosovo right now.
       Nothing has been said by the Alliance for one or two weeks 
     now about the hundreds of thousands of displaced people. That 
     will change. When that changes, on the propaganda front, I 
     will regard it as a signal for a major escalation of the 
     conflict, because it will be used to escalate the public mood 
     to support an escalation of the conflict. The strategic shift 
     in policy that could have been made at any time in the last 
     eight years away from the SWAT team, heavily armed only 
     approach to international security towards resourcing other 
     aspects of security, is beginning to be supported more 
     strongly from the Europeans.
       At the summit there was a welcome endorsement by the United 
     States of the European plan for long-term economic 
     stabilization of the region. (Some of this analysis is on our 
     web site (http://www.basicint.org/). Very broadly we advocate 
     a long overdue economic and security plan. Such a plan was 
     used very successfully in Eastern Europe after the Cold War. 
     States must put aside their longstanding political 
     differences and take the necessary human rights, election 
     law, and other legal measures between themselves. Then the 
     European Union should put a lot of money into subsidizing the 
     building of a modern infrastructure in the countries of the 
     Balkans, including Yugoslavia, including Serbia. This 
     proposal is very seriously put forward by the German 
     government and others and has full European Union backing. 
     And there is enlightened self-interest in this very clearly.
       Now those plans of the Europeans got lukewarm support here. 
     But as the legislation that comes before you to support this 
     war, I would urge you to look very seriously at supporting 
     non-military strategies, which are beginning to come out of 
     the Alliance and the Europeans.
       I could spend my time talking more negatively about the 
     summit, but let me outline the strategy and some views on the 
     immediate future. I would just like to close with a number of 
     elements that need close attention and support.
       The first is that we should support anti-fascist 
     dissidents, as we supported anticommunist dissidents during 
     the Cold War. Secondly, we should indict Milosovic as a war 
     criminal, and the United States must join the international 
     criminal court. Thirdly, the moment the United States puts in 
     $10 million into support of all operations on regular basis 
     of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, 
     move the decimal point to $100 million or $1 billion. Believe 
     me, the OSCE could use that money incredibly usefully in the 
     region in a minute to professionalize the sort of functions 
     that we saw in verifying in Kosovo. Very few people realized 
     that the mission that drove around in orange jeeps was 
     temporary help. The reason that monitoring in a permanent 
     capacity in Europe and elsewhere was because policy makers 
     and geostrategists dismiss it as social work that should not 
     be funded. That was inexcusable in 1990 and a tragedy today.
       Finally, to ensure that the ideas contained in the concept 
     to open up a whole new range of arms control and reduction 
     measures in Europe are fully fleshed out and the 
     administration is made to bring detailed proposals to the 
     table, we must make sure that the rhetoric of war is not 
     simply used to rearm former communist militaries in countries 
     from Eastern Europe to the Caucuses to the Chinese border and 
     to train militaries underneath the rubric of arming them with 
     the cause of democracy. Programs such as these are carried 
     out with no congressional supervision under the provision 
     that military training programs don't have to be 
     authorized by the Congress. This strategy will bring about 
     a series of problems akin to those we've already seen 
     across the region.


     
                                  ____
                [From the Washington Post, Feb. 7, 1999]

                    More Than Bombs and `Verifiers'

                 (By Daniel Plesch and Julianne Smith)

       The United States is once again considering sending troops 
     abroad, this time as part of a NATO peacekeeping force that 
     would attempt to bring order to Kosovo in the Balkans. The 
     Clinton administration has been reluctant to commit to such 
     an effort, but the recent massacre there has created an 
     impetus for intervention. This crisis might have been averted 
     altogether if either NATO or Europe's primary security 
     organization had a professional ``intervention force'' that 
     could be used to defuse such situations.
       As things stand now, the United States and its allies have 
     only two choices when ethnic massacres occur overseas. One is 
     to issue warnings to the warring parties, which are often 
     ignored. The second is to respond with some kind of military 
     force. But that comes with its own problems, including 
     casualties and an ever-expanding and never-ending mission. 
     What we are suggesting is a third option of nonmilitary 
     intervention.
       We need to create a new type of unit to intervene before 
     military action is necessary. The requirements for this new 
     formation, which might be called ``Civilian Intervention 
     Units,'' would include both a permanent core of workers and 
     the capability to draw on larger numbers as needed. 
     Operations would vary from election monitoring to disaster 
     relief to peacekeeping.
       A permanent unit would be an alternative to the team of 
     ``verifiers'' that the Organization for Security and 
     Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) created and sent to Kosovo in an 
     effort to resolve tensions between warring Serbs and Albanian 
     separatists. The verifiers are not part of any permanent unit 
     and most of them have no prior experience in peacekeeping. 
     Indeed, the ``verifiers'' label was invented for use in 
     Kosovo. The ad hoc nature of the OSCE mission was itself a 
     problem: In the weeks that it took for the participating 
     governments to gather a group of retired military officers 
     and diplomats to send to the region, the deal they were 
     trying to preserve began to erode.
       The OSCE ``help wanted'' advertisement for the verifiers is 
     telling: It had such minimal requirements--essentially, a 
     knowledge of English and computers and a drivers' license--
     that it could be mistaken for an attempt to hire unskilled 
     office help. But the 700 verifiers are now involved in 
     complex, difficult work--mediating disputes, building 
     democracy, investigating war crimes and preparing elections. 
     These tasks should be carried out by a highly skilled unit 
     with several thousand members to draw upon. The need is 
     not just in Kosovo, but in other parts of the world, too.
       A permanent unit of trained monitors is needed to observe 
     elections, oversee the control and destruction of armaments, 
     conduct forensic investigations of war crimes, mediate and 
     arbitrate. These requirements are too frequent and too 
     specialized to continue to rely on temporary missions--which 
     once over, are essentially cast aside. The administration did 
     not even debrief the monitors it sent to recent elections in 
     Bosnia.
       Tough security backup would be essential, but that could 
     consist of a police force accustomed to interacting with 
     civilians. Paramilitary police units with light armored 
     vehicles--such as the German border guards and Italian 
     carabinieri--exist in several European states and could serve 
     as prototypes.
       Coordination of humanitarian relief is also needed. 
     Governments and nonprofits are comparatively well prepared to 
     supply food, medicine, clothing and shelter, but its 
     management is often poor and should be overseen by these new 
     units.
       Creating a permanent unit would not be easy. There is no 
     precedent and the bureaucracies in Washington and Europe seem 
     to lack imagination as they wrestle with the crises that 
     dominate the modern age. The corporate cultures of Foggy 
     Bottom, the Pentagon and Capitol Hill dismiss nonmilitary 
     intervention as ``social work.'' The United States has 
     opposed proposals from Sweden and Argentina in the United 
     Nations for a standby civil intervention unit. Those who 
     follow the U.S. lead get the message. As a result, military 
     spending is increasing, while the budget for nonmilitary 
     intervention is relatively meager: The OSCE's entire budget 
     is less than $100 million, compared with NATO's $400 billion 
     for military spending. The OSCE cannot be blamed for 
     recruiting ``temps'' when the United States and other nations 
     have denied it the resources it needs.
       With only military means available to tackle security 
     issues, is no surprise that crises deteriorate until the 
     military is needed. It should also be no surprise that NATO's 
     ``SWAT'' team is of limited use in complex situations. In 
     domestic law-and-order policy, the value of investing in cops 
     in the beat, youth employment programs, mediation, counseling 
     and gun control is understood. But international security 
     policy is overwhelmingly military.
       Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright should both 
     encourage the Europeans to develop this new force and ask 
     Congress to support its creation. Nonmilitary tasks are not

[[Page E946]]

     NATO's job, but the alliance should favor any policy shift 
     that would reduce the calls on its military might.
       Europe, and the world, needs something more than SWAT teams 
     and untrained verifiers.
       Daniel Plesch is director of the British American Security 
     Information Council an independent research organization. 
     Juliane Smith is BASIC's senior analyst.


                          SOME QUALIFICATIONS

       Here is the OSCE's job posting for the Kosovo Verification 
     Mission. Words in bold are as they appeared in the ad, along 
     with the phrase, ``POSTS ARE OPEN UNTIL FILLED''.
       ESSENTIAL: Several years experience in the area of work; 
     knowledge of written and spoken English; computer literacy 
     (Microsoft applications); excellent physical condition with 
     no chronic health problems that limit physical activity; 
     possession of a valid driver's license and capability to 
     drive standard transmission vehicles; ability to establish 
     contact and develop confident relations with local population 
     as well as the ability to work with government officials and 
     institutions; flexibility and adaptability to difficult 
     living conditions; willingness to be deployed in different 
     Field Offices; ability to perform in a crisis environment.
       DESIRABLE: Knowledge of local languages; prior experience 
     in peacekeeping, international operations, or another 
     international organization.

     

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