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The World Today
May 1999
Seldom can a tragedy have been so predictable as the crisis which has unfolded in Kosovo since 1998 and has reached epic proportions with the onset of the NATO military campaign, Operation Allied Force, on 24 March. It has coincided with one of the most massive displacements of population since 1945. Remarkably this tragic sequence of events has given rise to repeated statements of surprise by Western governments at the course of events and the severity of human rights violations that have accompanied them—as if the history of the Balkan wars of the 1990s had not given enough forewarning of their brutal nature.
The very fact of the current Kosovo crisis makes a mockery of any serious commentator arguing the importance of ‘early warning’ as a necessary ingredient of conflict prevention. Every history of the wars of the Yugoslav succession has traced their modern origins to the now infamous Milosevic speech in Kosovo Polje on 24 April 1987 when the Serbian leader made his declarations that ‘ No one will beat the Serbs again’. Two years later, in 1989, the stripping of Kosovo’s provincial autonomy led directly to the declarations of independence by Slovenia and Croatia in June 1991. The following year Bosnia-Herzegovina declared its own independence from Yugoslavia.
Michael C. Williams is Senior Consultant to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. He was previously Director of Information for the UN in former Yugoslavia and served with the UN Peacekeeping Force in Cambodia.
There are precedents for the failure to settle the future of Kosovo at the talks at Rambouillet in February and March. Whenever the external powers have intervened to impose a settlement on the Balkans, in 1878, in 1912-13, after World War One and Two, one or other of the warring parties, and sometimes all of them, have thought they could do better by continuing to fight. The settlement is never reached quickly or without fresh alarms.
The Balkan peoples have fierce loyalties and fierce enmities. They are slow to recognise when the tide is running against them and slow to bring themselves to a stop when they think the tide is running for them. It is characteristic that both the Serbs and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) have thought that, by fighting, they could win absolute victory.
Sir Reginald Hibbert, a retired British diplomat, is an honourary fellow of Worcester College, Oxford, and was Director of the Ditchley Foundation. His Albania’s National Liberation Struggle was published by Pinter in 1991.
Are threats or the use of military force against a sovereign state in support of the declared aims of the UN Security Council legitimate when there is no explicit authorisation in a Security Council resolution? Are such threats wise? And why do UN sanctions, widely seen as an alternative to force, often lead to it? In 1998-99 these questions have arisen in crises over Iraq and Kosovo. Western political leaders have made little attempt to address them openly.
Adam Roberts is Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at Oxford University and a Fellow of Balliol College. This is a revised version of a talk he gave at Chatham House in February.
Across central Europe, and beyond, preparations are underway to mark the tenth anniversary of the collapse of communism. The leaders of the final phase of communist rule are now barely remembered. The once all-powerful communist parties have either been dissolved or been transformed beyond recognition into democratic organisations whose electoral fortunes over the past decade have varied enormously. Everywhere, except in Serbia. In Serbia alone both the communist-era leader, Slobodan Milosevic, and the revamped communist party, known as the Socialists, have managed to stay in power without a single interruption over the past decade.
Gabriel Partos is the BBC World Service’s Balkan Affairs Analyst.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s analysis of the Bolshevik Revolution has much relevance to the plight of present-day Indonesia. In Solzhenitsyn’s view, the October 1917 events derailed the locomotive of Russian history, forcing the Russian people to live along the rail ‘embankment’ for the next seventy years. Only with the collapse of Communism in the late 1980s could the train be hoisted onto the old rail-bed once again, the engine fires relit and the passengers reembarked. Even then passage along the long neglected line would remain pitifully slow.
In Indonesia’s case, the experience of derailment has been shorter but no less painful. Starting with President Sukarno’s ‘Guided Democracy’ (1959-65), it continued until the collapse of Suharto’s ‘New Order’ government (1966-98) in May 1998.
In the intervening forty years many of the historical processes which had begun to shape the young republic in the 1950s were put on hold. Most notable was Indonesia’s brief experiment with multi-party democracy, as well as its attempts to find a more equitable relationship between the Javanese centre and the resource-rich ‘outer islands’
Peter Carey, of Trinity College, Oxford, writes on contemporary Indonesia and is currently researching a new book on East Timor under Indonesian occupation.
Imagine a place with villages so remote that they can only be reached by air or water. A place where the wind chill can hit -100 degrees fahrenheit. A place that imports virtually everything except cold air. This is not a land devoid of modern conveniences, however. The people are kept warm by hundreds of small hydro, diesel, coal and gas-fired units. Telecommunications provide the indispensable link with distant water and wastewater treatment plants, power generators, airports, medical services, schools and the like. If these systems fail, the environment could be fouled, facilities could be destroyed, and people could die. Indeed, it has a very real reliance on information technology and very high exposure to problems borne on the wings of the Millennium bug. Now consider that this place—Alaska—is in the United States. And if such risks to people and property exist within the most Y2K advanced of nations, image what the computer date crisis means to the developing world. The problem is that very few in or out of government have tried to make this mental calculation.
How can a looming crisis of global proportions go relatively unnoticed for years? To answer this question, perspective is necessary. Start by understanding that the ‘Y2K problem’ is really nothing more than a commonly used software programming convention, a method of representing the year in two digits rather than four. This saved billions of dollars back in the days when computer memory and media were very costly. Now the shorthand notation is enough to make computers and other intelligent devices with embedded software trip over their century calculations
Harris N. Miller is President of the Information Technology Association of America.
Israel is about to choose a new parliament and prime minister. The process is likely to be lengthy with difficult coalition talks and a second round of voting to select the next directly elected prime minister. The new government will take office almost six years after the Oslo peace process began. What sort of a peace can now be produced?
Security for me is the ability of societies to coexist without resorting, often and predominantly, to violent means in their interactions. Seen from that angle the Oslo Peace Process is a complete failure. For me Oslo is an existential issue, hence I am going to examine it from the perspective of a human rights activist as well as from that of the professional historian and political scientist. The Oslo and Wye agreements threaten my security, and that of many others, by producing a discourse for peace while creating a reality which is far away from peace. Quite to the contrary, it is a reality of occupation, misery, frustration and in turn more violence.
Ilan Pappé is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Science, Haifa University. This is an edited version of a lecture he gave at Chatham House earlier this year.
Following the retirement of President Nelson Mandela from political life in June, executive power will formally pass to fifty-six year old Thabo Mbeki, the current Deputy-President. His task is likely to be daunting for, in addition to the range of seemingly insuperable domestic problems which confront him, he must attempt to fill the vacuum left by one of the genuine political icons of the twentieth century.
Not surprisingly, there are doubts about his ability to match the achievements of a figure who has bestrode South African politics like a Colossus for the last decade. Over the last two years, the transition from the leadership of Nelson Mandela to that of Thabo Mbeki has been rather skillfully handled by the ruling African National Congress (ANC). In many respects, it has mirrored the wider political changes and has been a ‘process rather than an event’, to borrow Nelson Mandela’s famous description of the ANC’s mission to build a new nation. Mandela has gradually withdrawn from the daily political fray—and has chosen to focus on the more ceremonial aspects of his duties—with Mbeki adopting the role of a chief of staff or de facto prime minister with a firm hand on the administrative tiller.
James Hamill lectures in the Politics Department at the University of Leicester.
European elections assume the somewhat surreal character of not being about the institution that is being elected, the European Parliament. Instead, the campaigns in fifteen countries with some three hundred million potential electors are dominated by national politics and are often said to be ‘second-order’ in nature. 1 Recent evidence of parliamentary assertiveness, culminating in the dramatic resignation of the entire European Commission, raises two questions. Have voters underestimated the importance of the European Parliament and its elections? And will European polls become less second-order once the parliament is taken seriously as an agent of real change? Paradoxically, the answer to the first question may be ‘yes’ and the second ‘not necessarily’.
Dr Christopher Lord is Jean Monnet, Senior Lecturer in European Parliamentary Studies in the Department of Politics, University of Leeds.
Ever since the 1970s, there has been a flood of revelations about the covert propaganda operations of the American CIA. Much less has been written about British covert propaganda—largely because Britain, unlike the United States, still lacks a Freedom of Information Act. The authors of this highly readable book have now made an important contribution to filling this gap. Using a variety of sources, including interviews and official records where available, they have written the first full-length account of the so-called Information Research Department (IRD) secretly set up in 1948 within the British Foreign Office.
David Wedgwood Benn is a writer on European and Russian affairs and was previously with the BBC World Service.