Kosovo War

Kosovo

The Kosovo War was an armed conflict in Kosovo, in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which involved Yugoslav government forces, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), and NATO, between 1998 to 1999.

Criticism of the war

Both Sides Violated International Law. International law was blatantly violated as NATO started the bombing campaign while the majority of the mainstream did not provide much objective coverage. NATO's own mandate says that it falls under jurisdiction of the UN, but instead it was totally by-passed. Even the US Congress had not approved war. Before the bombing, rather than there being an unusually bloody conflict, the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) was not engaged in a widespread civil war against Yugoslav forces and the death toll among all concerned (including ethnic Albanians) skyrocketed after the NATO intervention.

Support for war

The absence of war did not mean the presence of peace between Albanians and Serbians however, as the Serbs murdered 1500 Albanians and displaced 270,000 before the NATO intervention and they practiced systematic repression of the Albanian population through constitutional changes by the Milosevic regime that imposed a racial segregation in Kosovo. The Milosevic regime inexcusably cracked down on the Muslim Kosovars and KLA. The indictments for war crimes against Milosevic and members of his regime were right on, as they inflicted terrible atrocities on the Kosovars. Yet, again, the mainstream media ignored some of NATO's own violations of international humanitarian law. Also, the double standard of the humanitarian claim was not looked into.

The United Nations Charter does not allow military interventions in other sovereign countries with few exceptions which, in general, need to be decided upon by the United Nations Security Council; this legal enjoinment has proved controversial with many legal scholars who argue that though the Kosovo War illegal, it was still legitimate

Support for the Kosovo War and, in particular, the legitimacy of NATO's bombing campaign came from a variety of sources. Every member of NATO, every EU country, and all of Serbia's neighbors supported military action. The NATO military intervention was illegal, but legitimate. The human rights violations committed in Kosovo provided a ground for an intervention, but NATO did not have the backing of the United Nations Security Council and therefore it was illegal.

Casualties

Civilians killed by NATO airstrikes

Yugoslavia claimed that NATO attacks caused between 1,200 and 5,700 civilian casualties. NATO's Secretary General, Lord Robertson, wrote after the war that "the actual toll in human lives will never be precisely known" but he then offered the figures found in a report by Human Rights Watch as a reasonable estimate. This report counted between 488 and 527 civilian deaths (90 to 150 of them killed from cluster bomb use) in 90 separate incidents, the worst of which were the 87 Albanian refugees who perished at the hands of NATO bombs, near Koriša. Attacks in Kosovo overall were more deadly due to the confused situation with many refugee movements-- the one-third of the incidents there account for more than half of the deaths.

Civilians killed by Yugoslav forces

Various estimates of the number of killings attributed to Yugoslav forces have been announced through the years. The estimate of 10,000 deaths is used by the United States Department of State, which cited human rights abuses as its main justification for attacking Yugoslavia.

Bosnia

The Bosnian War was an international armed conflict that took place in Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1st of March 1992 and 14th of December 1995. The war involved several factions. The main belligerents were the forces of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and those of the self-proclaimed Bosnian Serb and Bosnian Croat entities within Bosnia and Herzegovina, Republika Srpska and Herzeg-Bosnia,

The fall of Srebrenica, a Muslim safe area, became a damaging symbol of the United Nations' failure at peacekeeping in a new era of civil wars, and it demonstrated the inadequacy of a system that allowed political considerations to color military decisions when troops were under the command of the United Nations.

The fall of Srebrenica and other towns that the Security Council had identified as safe areas, but then refused to authorize enough troops to defend, led four months later to the American-sponsored Dayton peace agreement