Professor of the Faculty of Political Sciences in Zagreb, Siniša Tatalović, states: "The conflict in Kosovo required NATO's response. The brutality in this conflict was a direct attack on democratic values, and one of the hallmarks of NATO's strategic concept is the readiness of allies to defend not only common territory but also common values. Second, only NATO had the military capacity and ability to carry out an air campaign that stopped the violence in Kosovo."
Knowledge from international law indicates "that the act of humanitarian intervention is legally permissible as a legal exception in international relations. Thus, humanitarian intervention is permitted in exceptional circumstances when the violent armed action of a state or group of states is directed against the government of the state that starts the massacres and other international crimes against its own population, on a large scale and over a long period of time. Its goal is to end those crimes. This was the case in Kosovo."
As for the situation in Kosovo, in 1989 the autonomy of that Province was forcibly abolished, and thus laws and policies were introduced that violated the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid from 1975. In Kosovo, legislation was introduced that limited the disposal of land on the national basically. Non-Serbs, and especially Albanians, are fired en masse from their jobs - in mines, companies, health, cultural and educational institutions. Education in the Albanian language is abolished at all levels. Peaceful protests were brutally suppressed, a considerable number of people lost their lives in prisons, during military service and during searches for weapons, due to the torture of arrested persons.
Until the Dayton Agreement at the end of 1995, resistance to apartheid was carried out by peaceful means and passive resistance. Since 1996, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) has been organized. In 1998, there were wider conflicts between the Serbian police, the Yugoslav Army and the Kosovo Liberation Army, in which mass crimes were committed against Albanian civilians.
In the resolution of the Security Council, dated September 23, 1998, it was determined that 230.000 people had to leave their homes, of which 50.000 civilians were left homeless. The first wave of refugees arrives in neighboring countries. In some villages, there is a massacre of civilians, especially in the village of Racak, where 45 Albanian civilians, including women and children, were killed. This massacre represented a key moment for the decision of NATO forces to launch an air intervention against the then Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY).
Simultaneously with the start of the NATO action on March 24, 1999, which lasted for seven weeks, massacres of civilians and expulsion of the population began on an unprecedented scale: around one million refugees fled to Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The action was planned in advance and executed according to plan. More than half of the inhabitants of Kosovo were driven from their homes. Many villages were burned to the ground. Therefore, it should be concluded that the NATO action did not lead to the exodus, but that the mass exodus was previously planned, and the first one was planned a year earlier. Therefore, it is certain that the NATO air campaign meets all the conditions of a collective humanitarian intervention and that as an armed action undertaken in these exceptional circumstances it is justified in general international law. Some experts point out that there were unwanted civilian casualties during the air campaign, but they could not be avoided. These are some objects that can be suspected of being "military targets". For Tony Blair, the goal of the intervention is clear in this regard: "We must enter the new millennium, in which dictators will know that they cannot get away with ethnic cleansing or repression of their own people. In this conflict, we are not fighting for territory, but for values".
Vuk Drašković, the then Vice-President of the Federal Government, stated that if the agreement on Kosovo offered to the Yugoslav side by representatives of the international community at the meeting in Rambouillet had been signed, he was sure that NATO would not have bombed FRY. "I asked Milosevic to sign the peace agreement", but he refused. He goes on to say that "unprecedented terror was perpetrated against Albanians in Kosovo" and that at that time he did not know "that Albanian civilians were being killed, and the corpses were being secretly transported to Serbia and secretly buried at police training grounds in Belgrade, and in rivers and lakes" by Serbian police and military forces.
Dr. Žarko Korać, retired professor of the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade and former vice president of the Government of Serbia, says: "Serbia practically abolished all its war criminals, including those who committed war crimes in Kosovo. and in 1998, Kosovo Albanians are almost not spoken about in the local public. On the contrary, Serbian officials deny the crimes committed by the Serbian army and police against the Kosovo Albanians. The rhetoric pushed by Slobodan Milošević's regime after the NATO bombing is the same as today's rhetoric in Serbia ".
"It can be said that the current regime in Serbia represents the restoration of Slobodan Milošević's regime. These are mostly people from Milošević's politics. Vučić was the Minister of Information at the time. The current political regime in Serbia, unlike Milošević, avoids direct confrontation with the international community and instead it's trying to balance between West and East," says Eric Gordy, a university professor of international law in London.
In the political parties of the ruling majority in Montenegro, there is no mention of the unprecedented terror, systematic persecution, murders, crimes and massacres of the Albanian civilian population during 1998-1999. in Kosovo, by the army and police of Serbia, which is why NATO had to intervene. Also, in Serbia and Montenegro, you can often hear certain political structures and politicians saying: "Kosovo is part of Serbia". They probably say this for the sake of political marketing and gaining votes from those citizens who still do not know enough about international relations and foreign policy, that is, the new reality of geopolitics. However, it is certain that "Kosovo is not and will never be part of Serbia".
In an interview for the Voice of America, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the NATO intervention in the FRY, retired US Army General Wesley Clark, who was the head of the NATO forces in 1999, states: "I am proud of what NATO did to prevent the campaign of ethnic cleansing directed against the Albanians in Kosovo. I will never forget when I was with President Slobodan Milošević, in November 1999, we signed the final agreement on the withdrawal of Serbian forces from Kosovo, which the UN also called upon to withdraw said: 'We know how to solve problems with Albanians, we have done it before.' .
The author is a political scientist and an associate member of DANU
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