[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 6]
[Senate]
[Pages 8120-8121]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                     ON NATO INTERVENTION IN KOSOVO

  Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, a month ago, April 7, as the war in 
Yugoslavia began to assume its present form, President Clinton spoke to 
the U.S. Institute for Peace. It was an important statement about the 
nature of conflict in the years to come. ``Clearly,'' he stated, ``our 
first challenge is

[[Page 8121]]

to build a more peaceful world, one that will apparently be dominated 
by ethnic and religious conflicts we once thought of primitive, but 
which Senator Moynihan, for example, has referred to now as post-
modern.'' I am scarcely alone in this; it has become, I believe, a 
widely held view. A recent article in The Wall Street Journal began by 
asking: ``Does Kosovo represent the future or the past.'' The 
distinguished Dean of the John F. Kennedy School had an emphatic 
answer.

       . . . Joseph Nye, a Clinton Pentagon alumnus, forecasts a 
     brave new world dominated by ethnic conflicts. There are 
     thousands of ethnic groups that could plausibly argue they 
     deserve independence, he estimates, making it imperative for 
     the U.S. to decide where it should intervene. ``There's 
     potential for enormous violence,'' he says.

  In this spirit, just yesterday, The Times spoke of ``The Logic of 
Kosovo.''

       With the cold war over, the country needs to devise a new 
     calculus for determining when its security is threatened and 
     the use of force is warranted. Kosovo is a test case. If the 
     United States and its NATO allies are prepared to let a 
     tyrant in the Balkans slaughter his countrymen and overrun 
     his neighbors with hundreds of thousands of refugees, other 
     combustible regions of Europe may face similar upheavals.

  Almost a decade ago the eminent scientist E. O. Wilson offered a 
perspective from the field of sociobiology. Once ``the overwhelmingly 
suppressive force of supranational ideology was lifted,'' ethnicity 
would strike. ``It was the unintended experiment in the natural science 
mode: cancel one factor at a time, and see what happens.'' For ``coiled 
and ready ethnicity is to be expected from a consideration of 
biological evolutionary theory.''
  Throw in television and the like, and surely we are in a new 
situation. Just as surely, it is time to think anew.
  The first matter has to do with the number of such potential 
conflicts. Here it is perhaps the case that the United States bears a 
special responsibility. For it is we, in the person of President 
Woodrow Wilson, and the setting of the Versailles Peace Conference who 
brought to world politics the term ``self-determination.'' It is not 
sufficiently known that Wilson's Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, of 
Jefferson County, New York, had the greatest foreboding. Hence this 
entry in his diary written in Paris on December 30, 1918.

                 ``Self-Determination'' and the Dangers


                           December 30, 1918

       The more I think about the President's declaration as to 
     the right of ``self-determination'', the more convinced I am 
     of the danger of putting such ideas into the minds of certain 
     races. It is bound to be the basis of impossible demands on 
     the Peace Congress, and create trouble in many lands . . . . 
     The phrase is simply loaded with dynamite. It will raise 
     hopes which can never be realized. It will, I fear, cost 
     thousands of lives. In the end it is bound to be discredited, 
     to be called the dream of an idealist who failed to realize 
     the danger until too late to check those who attempt to put 
     the principle into force. What a calamity that the phrase was 
     ever uttered! What misery it will cause! Think of the 
     feelings of the author when he counts the dead who dies 
     because he coined a phrase! A man, who is a leader of public 
     thought, should beware of intemperate or undigested 
     declarations. He is responsible for the consequences.

  There have to be limits, and it should be a task of American 
statecraft to seek to define them. It is not that 185 members of the 
United Nations are enough. There is room for more. But surely there 
needs to be a limit to the horrors we have witnessed in the Balkans in 
this decade, and in Kosovo this past month. From the Caucuses to the 
Punjab, from Palestine to the Pyrenees, violence beckons. It is not 
difficult to get started. At least one American diplomat holds a direct 
view of the origin of the present horror. I cannot speak for every 
detail of his account, but some are well known, and his view is not, to 
my knowledge, contested.

       The current phase of the Kosovo crisis can be traced back 
     to 1996, when financial collapse in Albania (small investors 
     lost their meager life savings in a classic Ponzi scheme 
     condoned by the then government) led to political and social 
     chaos. President Berisha (a Geg from the misnamed Democratic 
     Party) was forced out amidst massive rioting in which the 
     army disappeared as its armories were emptied. Arms found 
     their way into the armed gangs and eventually to an incipient 
     Kosovo Albanian guerrilla movement that called itself the 
     Kosovo Liberation Army. The new government of Socialist Fatos 
     Nan (a Southerner, a Tosk, and a former Communist) was unable 
     to establish effective control over the north and Berisha 
     made a conspicuous point of not only supporting the KLA, but 
     actually turning his personal property in the north over to 
     the KLA as a training base. Supporting fellow Gegs apparently 
     makes for good politics among the northerners.
       The KLA's strategy was very simple: Target Serbian 
     policemen and thus provoke the inevitable brutal Serb 
     retaliation against Kosovo Albanian civilians, all in the 
     hopes of bringing NATO into the conflict. They have succeeded 
     brilliantly in this goal, but have not proved to be much a 
     fighting force themselves.

  These are not arguments new to the Senate. A year ago, April 30, 
1998, my eminent colleague John W. Warner and I offered cautionary 
amendments concerning NATO expansion eastward. I went first with a 
proposal that new NATO members should first belong to the European 
Union. I received, as I recall, 17 votes. My colleague then proposed to 
postpone any further enlargement of NATO for a period of at least three 
years. That proposal, again if I recall, received 41 votes. We felt, on 
the whole, somewhat lonely. Now, however, we learn that Defense 
Secretary William Perry and his top arms-control aide, Ashton Carter, 
as related by Thomas L. Friedman in The Times of March 16, 1999.

       Mr. Perry and Mr. Carter reveal that when they were running 
     the Pentagon they argued to Mr. Clinton that NATO expansion 
     ``should be deferred until later in the decade.'' Mr. Perry 
     details how he insisted at a top-level meeting with the 
     President, on December 21, 1994, that ``early expansion was a 
     mistake,'' because it would provoke ``distrust'' in Russia 
     and undermine cooperation on arms control and other issues, 
     and because ``prematurely adding untried militaries'' at a 
     time when NATO itself was reassessing its role would not be 
     helpful.

  The Secretary of Defense lost the argument; in Friedman's view 
domestic politics overrode strategic concerns. But who won? The various 
pronouncements that issued from the recent NATO summit come close to a 
telephone directory of prospective new NATO members. Before we get 
carried away, might we ask just how many of them have the kind of 
internal ethnic tension so easily turned on? Which will be invaded by 
neighbors siding with the insurgents? Must NATO then go to war in the 
Caucuses?
  The second matter of which I would speak is that of international 
law. The United States and its NATO allies have gone to war, put their 
men and women in harm's way for the clearest of humanitarian purposes. 
They have even so attacked a sovereign state in what would seem a clear 
avoidance of the terms of the U.N. Charter, specifically Article 2(4). 
The State Department has issued no statement as to the legality of our 
actions. An undated internal State Department document cites Security 
Council Resolution 1199 affirming that the situation in Kosovo 
constitutes a threat to the peace in the region, and demanding that the 
parties cease hostilities and maintain peace in Kosovo. The Department 
paper concludes: ``FRY actions in Kosovo cannot be deemed an internal 
matter, as the Council has condemned Serbian action in Kosovo as a 
threat to regional peace and security.''
  A valid point. But of course the point is weakened, at very least, by 
the fact of our not having gone back to the Security Council to get 
authorization to act as we have done. We have not done this, of course, 
because the Russians and/or the Chinese would block any such 
resolution. Even so, it remains the case that the present state of 
international law is in significant ways a limitation on our freedom to 
pursue humanitarian purposes. Again, a matter that calls for attention, 
indeed, demands attention.
  In sum, limits and law.

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