U.S. MISSION TO THE OSCE

March 30, 1999

Statement on Kosovo

Delivered by Ambassador David T. Johnson to the Permanent Council, Vienna

Mr. Chairman, since NATO air strikes against the "FRY" military began last week, a number of accusations have been leveled against the United States and its Allies.

A couple of them have been so egregiously false that they demand a response, both in the OSCE and in other international fora.

The first accusation is that the "FRY" merely wants to preserve its territorial integrity, and that NATO somehow seeks to foster the country's break-up.

Mr. Chairman, we have said it before, and I will repeat it here again for the record: there is not a single member of NATO that supports independence for Kosovo. Every NATO member supports the continued territorial integrity of the "FRY."

Rather, it is the man who brought us the bloody break-up of Yugoslavia who seems determined to repeat the experience in the "FRY."

Milosevic has spent the past decade willfully stoking ethnic grievances and hatreds in his multi-national state. He and those who defend him should have the honesty to admit that the strength of the centrifugal forces in the "FRY" today are Milosevic's handiwork, not NATO's.

A second charge leveled against NATO is that the "FRY" is engaged in a fight against terrorism, and NATO seeks to deny Belgrade the right to defend itself and its citizens.

I think a couple of examples will demonstrate the hollowness of that assertion.

Last summer, "FRY" border troops ambushed a group of heavily armed KLA fighters attempting to cross the border into Kosovo. A KDOM patrol that visited the scene largely corroborated Belgrade's version of events.

There was no international outcry.

Similarly, in late January in the village of Rogovo, there was a shootout in which over twenty Kosovar Albanians died in circumstances that were not altogether clear. A number of the dead wore KLA uniforms and insignia, and the KLA later confirmed that most of those killed had been KLA fighters. Once again, there was no international outcry.

The situation was entirely different in September 1998 at Gornje Obrinje and in January 1999 at Racak. Here, "FRY" forces brutally murdered unarmed civilians, including small children and elderly people.

In its current attempt to impose a Final Solution in Kosovo, Belgrade has chosen to apply the Racak model on a much wider scale. It has apparently made a special point to slaughter moderate, reasonable Kosovar Albanian intellectuals -- precisely the kinds of people Belgrade would need to work with if it seriously sought a peaceful settlement.

NATO members, no less than other OSCE states, recognize the legitimate right to self-defense against armed insurrection and terrorism, but we will never agree that this right gives security forces a free hand to massacre civilians or engage in a scorched-earth policy of ethnic cleansing.

It would be very obliging of Milosevic if he would strictly segregate his security forces into two groups: one that engages solely in legitimate anti-terrorist operations, and one that confines its activities to wreaking havoc on defenseless civilians.

NATO would gladly target the second group, and leave the first alone.

Unfortunately, Milosevic has not been so accommodating, and NATO has had to treat ALL his security forces as instruments of actual or potential repression.

The third unfounded accusation is that the NATO air campaign somehow provoked the atrocities now taking place in Kosovo.

This curious line of reasoning has the causality exactly backwards.

The buildup of "FRY" forces in and around Kosovo has been proceeding for at least a month, in violation of Belgrade's international obligations and despite numerous pleas from the international community to cease and desist.

The reports from refugees of systematic destruction of towns, of orders to civilians to flee their homes immediately, of the separation of men from the rest of their families, all indicate that the atrocities are planned, not spontaneous.

Indeed, we have seen this all before. Belgrade has simply picked up where it left off last fall, before the deployment of the OSCE Kosovo Mission.

Thus, it is not NATO actions that have triggered atrocities, but rather, the clear preparation for atrocities that triggered the NATO actions.

The fourth and final charge that I would like to rebut is the accusation that NATO did not wait until all diplomatic initiatives had been exhausted.

To anyone who makes such an argument, I can only ask with bewilderment, "Which diplomatic initiatives do you have in mind?"

There was, indeed, a peace process embodied by the Rambouillet accords. The co-chairmen of this process, as well as the three senior diplomats who negotiated the text, had sadly come to the conclusion, after several months of frustrating diplomacy, that Milosevic was blocking a deal.

I hardly need to recall all the evidence of bad faith that Belgrade demonstrated throughout the negotiations, nor the countless appeals to Milosevic from presidents, prime ministers and foreign ministers to accept the solution offered by Rambouillet.

For the sake of clarity, let me emphasize this point: the Rambouillet process was the ONLY serious peace initiative on the table.

If anyone else had a magic peace plan to end the Kosovo conflict, they have been criminally negligent for concealing it from the rest of us.

Once it was clear that the Rambouillet process was at a dead end, it was time to act.

The only other option would have been passive complicity in the wholesale slaughter and displacement of the Kosovar Albanian community.

With the experience of Bosnia still freshly imprinted in our minds, we concluded that we could not wait to act until there were already 200,000 people dead and millions of refugees.

Mr. Chairman, I beg your indulgence for my lengthy intervention today, but I would like to close with one final thought about the notion of "Serbs as victims."

I want to emphasize to all delegations here, and to any Serbs who may hear or read these words, that NATO undertook its air campaign in sorrow, not in anger.

We have not forgotten the appalling suffering and sacrifices of the people of Yugoslavia in two world wars.

Unfortunately, this moral capital, built up at such great cost, has been squandered in less than a decade by an unscrupulous demagogue who has created one calamity after another for his neighbors and his own people.

The Yugoslav heroes of World War I and World War II would be stunned, mortified and, I hope, thoroughly ashamed that their nation is now identified in the minds of most people around the world with ethnic cleansing, Arkan, and Srebrenica.

To restore the national honor, an intellectual and moral catharsis will have to take the place of ethnic cleansing. We have no doubt that the Serbian people will rise to that occasion.