Examination of Witnesses (Questions 140
- 159)
TUESDAY 18 JANUARY 2000
MR TIM
JUDAH, PROFESSOR
ADAM ROBERTS,
JANE SHARP,
MR JONATHAN
STEELE AND
MR JOHN
SWEENEY
Mr Chidgey
140. Just a quick one, Mr Sweeney, if I may.
Going back to some of your earlier remarks about how Milosevic
basically broke up Yugoslavia and threw out the other ethnic groups
from any political control, I wonder if you have got any comments
you might like to make on the relations that Milosevic had with
Tudjman, because Tudjman was always well known for saying that
they had a plan of how to carve up Yugoslavia? I am sure you will
remember the famous table napkin incident with Paddy Ashdown,
where he had worked out the plan of what it would be. There is
something inconsistent here; if, on the one hand, Milosevic is
tearing the place apart, and when Tudjman was responding in Croatia
with the atrocities that they committed, how does that fit with
any grand plan that the two of them may have worked out?
(Mr Sweeney) Why do you not answer that, because I
think we almost speak with one mind.
(Mr Judah) It is very simple, because they agreed
on the general idea of it but they could not agree on the details;
it is as simple as that, where was the border going to lie?
141. So, if 200,000 were going to die because
they could not agree on the details, that was a shame, to be honest?
(Mr Sweeney) Let me refine it, in a slight way. Compare
it with what happened in Czechoslovakia; there, in Czechoslovakia,
you had a great man, Václav Havel, who had the courage,
and the political courage, to say, "We're going to split
up, and even though the Czechs are in the majority in Czechoslovakia
we will not invade Slovakia, we will not be brutal; if they want
to part with us, okay, so be it, I am saddened but let that happen."
Even, and I hesitate to defend the Romanian regime under Iliescu,
who was a nasty piece of work, you have a big Hungarian minority
in Transylvania of about two million people, and they could have
had a lot of fun saying, "These are spies, let's kill them,
and let's have a nasty little version of Northern Ireland,"
or whatever, persecuting the Hungarian minority. By and large,
they did not, but Milosevic and Tudjman could not say—remember
that they were campaigning on a nationalist agenda—"We're
going to do a dirty deal in private" and retain their nationalist
agenda, "We hate the Croats, we hate the Albanians, we hate
the Slovenes," in public.
Chairman: I would like to make progress and
move on to Rambouillet: Sir John Stanley.
Sir John Stanley
142. Just before going on to Rambouillet, I
have to say, Mr Sweeney, I did find your comments in relation
to the previous Government fairly extraordinary, and could you
just answer this question. How do you maintain the line that the
previous Government was weak and feeble when the previous Government,
like the present Government, had threatened air strikes, had implemented
air strikes and actually had delivered the Dayton Agreement on
the back of air strikes?
(Mr Sweeney) It took a long, bloody time. In 1991
they started shelling hospitals, and it took five years, and it
took five years of people saying, "Why are we continuing
to watch people die in front of our eyes?" Essentially, they
did it without enthusiasm; yes, when it came to the crunch, they
did it, and I am grateful for that, but, nevertheless, it took
too long. And Milosevic sensed the weakness and played on that
weakness for too long; and he charmed and bamboozled his international
interlocutors, like Carrington, like Owen, knowing that, at heart,
the British Government, and I think this was fair, was reluctant
actually to get in touch. Just one final thing. I used to worry
very much about British soldiers losing their lives over this
thing, so, to be fair to you, Sir, I understand their concerns,
but, eventually, there had to come a time when we had to say,
"Enough is enough;" and that took too long.
143. Could we turn now to what was the nodal
foreign policy judgement before the war began in March. This Committee
obviously is concerned with foreign policy, and in this particular
respect, though it was a NATO initiative, as the British Foreign
Secretary has said many times, in and outside the House, the British
Government were in a leading role in negotiating the Rambouillet
Accords. The question I would like to ask you is this, do you
consider that the Rambouillet Accords, including what was then
a confidential military annex to those Accords, which, of course,
is now declassified and is in the public domain, were well judged
or ill judged? Well judged in the sense that they represented
a realistic basis on which Milosevic might have been able to accept
them and thereby avert the war; or ill judged on the basis that
the terms were much, too steep, too intrusive, that there was
never any possibility that Milosevic could have accepted the Rambouillet
terms, and that the Rambouillet process merely served to put him
in the mind set that war was inevitable and that the only option
left for him was to utilise the war to further his own appalling
ethnic agenda inside Kosovo. So, I ask you, do you think the Rambouillet
negotiation was a well-judged one, in foreign policy terms, or
an ill-judged one?
(Professor Roberts) Firstly, I think one has to set
it against a background, and the background of Rambouillet was
a long history of a really rather fundamental clash over Kosovo,
and a long history of western involvement in that clash, especially
through, of course, the Agreement of October 1998, which gave
NATO a monitoring role in respect of events in Kosovo. And, incidentally,
in commenting on Mr Steele's suggestion that it might have been
different and under a different basis, I think that the history
of it was one that had involved NATO in a monitoring role, and
therefore it is not surprising, apart from all the other considerations,
both military and to do with legitimacy, that it was NATO that
felt obliged to carry on with that involvement. Against that background,
there is no doubt that Rambouillet was, from the very start, presented
as the last chance. I can well remember Robin Cook, as it were,
announcing that there were to be negotiations at Rambouillet,
trying to sound like Winston Churchill and indicating that this
was Milosevic's last chance. So, against that background, it would
not be surprising if there were criticisms of Rambouillet as being
a tough Accord which was bound to be difficult for Serbia and
for the Yugoslav regime to accept. Now one thing I would like
to clear out of the way in the whole issue of Rambouillet is the
military agreement.[27]
The military agreement, that subsequently became public, and indeed
quite soon during the war became public, is on one level a complete
scandal, and it shows an absence of any understanding whatever
of Serbian society, because to write into a military agreement
that the Yugoslav Government had to accept NATO troop rights,
not merely in transit but manoeuvre and goodness knows what else,
was outrageous, bearing in mind that Yugoslavia is a country where
it had been a constitutional offence, under the Tito constitution,
and since 1971 actually, to accept the presence of foreign forces
on Yugoslav soil. And it is not correct to say, as has been commonly
done, including still today by Wes Clark, that the military agreement
was simply a carbon copy of the Dayton Agreement in respect of
Yugoslavia. There are provisions in there that were not in the
Dayton Agreement, and whoever wrote that military agreement, or
produced it off a word processor, should be taken aside and shot.
But, having said that, there is no evidence at all that the military
provisions in that agreement played any part in the breakdown
of negotiations at Rambouillet, at least, I have yet to see any,
it may be that some can be produced. But those who took part in
the negotiations say that that military annex was never discussed;
if it was delivered at all to the Yugoslav side it was on the
very last days of the negotiations, and it appears they made no
fundamental objection to it, and that is because it was the main
substance of the Rambouillet Agreement that was under discussion
and they would only have got to that subsequently. On the main
substance of the Rambouillet Agreement. On the whole, and one
can easily make criticisms of it with hindsight, but on the main
text of the Agreement proper (which is now history, it is not
something which can now be implemented). I think that in itself
it was not unreasonable.
(Mr Steele) I would like to enlarge on
that and perhaps go even a little bit further. I think it was
a very well-judged agreement, and it was not just a last chance
in the sense of an ultimatum, "You either accept this agreement
or we bomb you," it was a last chance for an honourable way
for Milosevic, or a senior Yugoslav leader, to get out of Kosovo
with some kind of dignity. And I remember writing an article just
before the Rambouillet talks actually started, when we knew what
the parameters were, saying that the jury was still out on whether
Milosevic was looking for a way of getting out of Kosovo, because
if he was he could accept Rambouillet and do it with dignity.
He would have had peace-keepers in there, he would have had Yugoslav
territorial integrity guaranteed, he would have had Yugoslav forces,
more importantly, remaining in there, with the KLA demilitarising
and disarming, while Serbian forces remained there for at least
two more years; and so, in that way, it would have looked as though
the "terrorists" were having to disappear from the scene
and be disarmed by international peace-keeping forces, while his
own forces remained in operation. So it could have been perceived
as a very generous agreement which allowed him to get out with
dignity. Obviously, everybody knew, that once you have peace-keeping
forces in there Serb political authority disappears, ultimately;
and, probably, at some future point, three years, or maybe two
years, there would be a referendum and it would become an independent
state. But the fact was, and I think this is often overlooked,
that Kosovo was a colony, really. When the Serbs reoccupied Kosovo
in 1912, when the Ottoman Empire was disintegrating, the Albanians
were already the majority population; so the Serbs were trying
to recreate an ancient medieval empire but in completely different
historical circumstances where they were already the colonial
minority. And they operated under Tito, at least between 1974
and the end of his life, and then for the next few years, a pretty
relaxed regime, where, as I think John Sweeney has already mentioned,
there were Albanian police, Albanian self-defence units, and so
on. But Milosevic destroyed all that in 1989 and reverted to a
very repressive, colonial regime, an apartheid-style regime, which
we were all writing about, with separate schools, and so on, and
all the Albanian civil servants, everybody, the doctors, the professors,
and so on, were all sacked, and it became a very oppressive, colonial
regime. But other countries have given up colonies with dignity,
and Milosevic could have done that under the Rambouillet Agreement;
and then, of course, the jury came back in and it was quite clear
from his behaviour that he did not want to give up Kosovo, he
wanted to get rid of all the Albanians out of Kosovo.
144. In these answers, I put to you a very clear
question and in your comments the whole Committee would like to
hear your conclusion, and Professor Roberts did so, we actually
want to have your view, was it ill judged or well judged?
(Mr Steele) I think I was trying to say it was well
judged, if Milosevic had been a normal politician, but he is not,
he is a war criminal.
Chairman
145. Mr Judah, as regards that specific question?
(Mr Judah) First of all, this agreement, well, it
is not an agreement, it is what was supposed to have been an agreement,
it was not just dreamed up in Whitehall or in Washington, this
was the result of months of shuttle diplomacy, for a start, between
Belgrade and Pristina, conducted by Chris Hill, for the US, and
Wolfgang Petritsch for the EU. So that is the first thing. It
also represented, not only an honourable compromise but it was
a historic compromise. It was a kind of virtual independence for
Kosovo, but it safeguarded the rights of minorities or the Serbs
and it kept it within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia; so it
was a historic compromise.
146. And so your answer to Sir John's question?
(Mr Judah) I have not quite finished yet. The military
annex was just a complete excuse, was just a red herring, because
on the very last day Ratko Markovic the head of the Yugoslav delegation,
wrote three letters, fulsome in his praise, to the negotiators,
saying "We're looking forward to coming back to Paris in"
whatever it is, "two weeks' time, and we think we've made
substantial progress," etc., etc. The military annex was
never mentioned. Three, four days later, obviously the order went
out in Belgrade, "We've decided we're not going to have any
of this;" they just picked that out of the blue as the excuse,
it was obvious. But what had happened was that Milosevic decided
to gamble, he was not going to take the historic compromise; by
this time we had very much the talk, "Well, if there's going
to be bombing, it will only last three days and Milosevic will
back down." You had a kind of information short circuit,
Milosevic thought, "Three days; well I can withstand three
days," so he decided, "Well, let's go for bombing and
see what happens." Do not forget, he had also watched on
TV Desert Fox, the 70-hour operation against the Iraqis, in December,
which came after, of course, the Holbrooke Agreement, when he
had been genuinely scared he was going to be bombed, he thought,
"Well, kind of three days, yes, I can deal with that, they'll
come to me after and say, `Well, let's talk peace, etc., etc.'."
So it was a historic compromise, it was an honourable agreement,
Milosevic decided to gamble and he lost everything.
(Ms Sharp) Just three brief remarks. I think Rambouillet
was not badly judged, whether it was well judged is something
else but it was not badly judged. I think it is a myth to talk
about British leadership at Rambouillet; we had an Anglo-French
chairmanship but it was made in Washington DC, the text. But I
think the sort of kicker in this is the role of the Russians.
I think, in hindsight, we probably did not spend nearly enough
time working with the Russians on Rambouillet, because I am sure
that Milosevic would not sign Rambouillet because he was getting
assurances from the Russians of various things. There is a debate
in the West on how helpful the Russians were, I think probably
Jonathan and I disagree on this; one thinks of Ahtisaari and Chernomyrdin
as having a relatively positive role, but my feeling is that throughout
policy towards Milosevic the Russians have been more mischievous
than helpful. And I think it is very interesting to go back, and
I am trying to raise some money to do this myself, and look at
the whole Russia/Western relationship, in the Balkan context,
since Gorbachev. You will remember that Milosevic was very much
in support of the military coup against Gorbachev, and if we had
been paying attention to the Balkans in the late eighties, as
we should have been, we had Gorbachev there from 1985 to 1991,
I think we could have done some useful things. And I think we
just have not spent enough time working with the Russians on this.
147. And your answer to John's specific question?
(Ms Sharp) I say that Rambouillet is not badly judged;
and I think the Russians were mischievous at Rambouillet.
(Mr Sweeney) I think it was well judged and not badly
judged. My caveat from that is, Milosevic could not get
out of Kosovo, given his nationalist rhetoric, given his nationalist
agenda, given his nationalist position, he had to be forced out,
and he made the calculation, he thought he could get away with
it, also he was in bed with the Russian coup plotters. The other
people that he talks to every now and then are the Iraqis, and
the Iraqis are a regime not in a different setting, not dissimilar,
I would say; certainly the Belgrade students, the Serb students,
used to call him "Slobo/Saddam". That said, Milosevic
could not say, "We're leaving, the Serbs are leaving Kosovo,
and I am still President of Yugoslavia," he could not do
that, he had to be forced out. So, in that context, I cannot see
any way he could guarantee political survival, which is the thing
he cares about, in Serbia, and sign any deal which would have
allowed a fair say for Kosovo's majority Albanian population.
Mr Rowlands
148. On that basis and what you have been telling
us, he could not possibly have signed it; is that the general
agreement?
(Mr Sweeney) He has got a real difficulty, because,
let us remember, he is the man who is saving the Serbs and framing
their historic destiny. Let us also remember that while the Rambouillet
talks are going on Albanians are being massacred by Arkan's Tigers
back in Kosovo; so that the reality, to the question of the legalistic
framework, is that people are being killed for no good reason,
and that is whirring away.
149. But can I get some clarification. Are you
all saying that he could not sign it because that would be his
political death warrant, and that anyway he had reached the stage
by which he had seen the rest of Yugoslavia fall off, piece by
piece, and this was the last piece, and he had to make a last
stand?
(Mr Sweeney) I am saying that I am not sure about
it.
(Mr Judah) I think I would beg to differ with John
here, because I think that if he had decided to go for it that
he could have done, and all it would have taken—
Chairman
150. And sold it to his people?
(Mr Judah) Yes; because he controls all the important
media. All it would have required was the media to say, "This
is a marvellous agreement, it safeguards Kosovo for Serbia, and
for Yugoslavia," and I think he could have done. We only
have to think back to the Vance/Owen Agreement in Bosnia, which
originally they had been very sceptical about, when Belgrade decided
that they were going to support it, the media was blaring, "This
is a marvellous agreement." Well, the Bosnian Serbs disagreed
and they failed to persuade them. But then you just looked at
all the opinion polls, and all the opinion polls were showing
that immediately the media started saying something the opinion
polls followed what the press was telling them. So I think that
he could have done, but I think he just decided, "Forget
it, I'm not going to do it."
Mr Mackinlay
151. Something Jane Sharp said really prompts
me. I realise, in this matter of the Balkans, you can go back
almost to Adam to find the genesis of the problem, can you not;
and, in fact, I have been reading the telegrams of July 1914,
which has a similarity, actually, the demands on Serbia, humiliating
demands. But it does seem to me, when the Russian Federation was
created, basically we had a decade of a wasted window of political
opportunity; we have engaged insufficiently with the Russians,
brought them in, and, in fact, exactly the opposite, we were disregarding
them, and in the immediate period leading up to Rambouillet they
had been sidelined, rightly or wrongly. But it just seems to me
that that is part of our problem, we have not done a whole lot
of linking and matching and bringing on and recognising the status
of the Russian Federation; and, in a sense, the mischief, which
one of you referred to, you used the word "mischief",
I am sure it was mischief, but in a sense you can almost understand
it, that they were fighting for their historic, legitimate area
of influence, and the West, the United Kingdom, have just neglected
Russia?
(Mr Judah) The Russian factor, I think, personally,
is overestimated, and I think that the Serbs could not care less
about the Russians, they will use them if they can and they will
sign agreements with them, just as they sign agreements with everybody
else, as Milosevic did with Yeltsin, and totally disregard it.
So it does not make any difference if they sign an agreement with
Holbrooke or the Russians, and the Russian leadership and the
people who have met him they loathe him because he humiliates
them and has humiliated them just as much. The reason that Serbia
is slightly important in Russia is for domestic reasons, and I
think this whole argument is overplayed, and, historically, every
time the Serbs have looked to the Russians for something they
have always let them down, and the Serbs know that.
(Professor Roberts) I think, on Russia, one has to
accept that there is bound to be a difference of perspective between
Russia and Western powers, in relation to the former Yugoslavia;
and it is not that there is a hugely strong emotional link between
fellow Slavs so much as that these are two countries in a very
similar situation. Here you have two former communist federations
which have inherited an extraordinary ethnic and administrative
patchwork, and are both very aware of the fragility of that patchwork
and very nervous about foreign interference in any possible break-up.
And I think it is not in the least surprising that Russia, on
the whole, has had a different perspective on these events from
many Western powers; and when you add to that Russia's sense of
being a great power that has lost its power and lost the respect
it once had in the world, one is bound to have a difficult situation
where it would not be realistic to expect total agreement. I am
all in favour of those who make every effort to keep Russia involved
in these negotiations, and so on, and more no doubt could have
been done; but I do not think we should be particularly optimistic
that by that process we will get anything like total agreement.
And what you said earlier, about the historical origins of this
conflict, does make one question the exclusive emphasis on the
character of Milosevic that some of my colleagues here have put
forward. I have to remind you that already in the 1920s, I have
seen this in the old League of Nations Library in Geneva, there
were numerous complaints about Serb massacres in Kosovo of exactly
the kind we had later in the 1990s; and the problem that Milosevic
inherited was totally different from, unrelated to, the problem
of the break-up of Czechoslovakia: the ethnic composition, not
to mention the memories of political violence, were completely
different. And so one should not personalise the issue too much.
(Mr Judah) This is kind of obvious. As far as I can
see, the Russians, they look at Kosovo and they see Chechnya,
they see an annoying Muslim breakaway, a bit "that we want
to keep." It is the same for the Greeks; they look at Kosovo
and they see the Turks, Cyprus. And the Chinese, too; the joke
in Belgrade is "What's the Chinese word for Kosovo?"
The Chinese word for Kosovo is Tibet.
Mr Rowlands
152. To try to sum up the impression you leave
with me on the evidence to date, could, or should, western diplomatic
assessments have read Milosevic's motives better, or was he so
unpredictable that it is unfair to criticise them for it?
(Mr Steele) I think it is difficult, because, on the
historical record, of course, he had done some terrible things
in other places; on the other hand, Kosovo was a special case.
It has a 90 per cent Albanian majority, there was no way that
Serbia could really legitimately or seriously, practically, think
of holding it for very many years in the future, and therefore
he could have been thinking about getting out. And one must not
forget what the Albanians thought; the Albanians, after all, know
the Serbs probably better than we do, and they did not expect
this massive ethnic cleansing that Milosevic unleashed as soon
as the bombing started. I remember being with a Pristina Albanian
family on the first night of the bombing, and when we saw from
the ninth floor balcony the distant flashes of enormous orange
fire going up in the sky they opened a bottle of wine, these were
not people who normally drank at all, they were so delighted,
they said, "Finally, they've done it; this is it, this is
liberation." They did not know, that same family, that five
days later they would be in the mud of the Blace crossing point,
as refugees, going into Macedonia. So, I think, to blame western
statesmen for not correctly predicting this is really unfair,
because nobody predicted it.
Mr Chidgey
153. Can I just draw us back to Sir John's points
he started with, on the Rambouillet Agreements. I think I am right
in saying that all of you, at one stage or other, have said in
the last ten minutes that Milosevic could not have signed up to
the Agreement without committing political suicide. Well, if that
is the case—
(Ms Sharp) No.
154. Well that is the message I have been getting,
and if that is the case how could it be well judged?
(Mr Judah) I said I begged to differ with that view.
Chairman: I think it was only Mr Sweeney who
said that.
Mr Chidgey
155. Perhaps you could take that, Mr Sweeney?
(Mr Sweeney) Actually, I did not use the words "political
suicide", but I think that he had a serious problem; and
when we were talking, and when Tim was talking, about the Vance/Owen
thing, Milosevic never left anywhere in the former Yugoslavia
unless at the threat of force. For example, the principle of Croat
freedom and that Croatia could exist came after the blood-bath
of Vukovar; and it was at that point that enough blood was spilt
that the two, well, I was about to use the word "dictators",
and, yes, in the European sense I believe that to be true, Milosevic
and Tudjman said, "Okay, that's enough blood spilt; we part."
So the only exception to this is Slovenia, which is almost entirely
pure Slovene, so there are no Serbs there, so there is not a domestic
political agenda, or a domestic political problem, for Milosevic
in letting the Slovenes go; there was for Kosovo. So you had a
serious problem. Whether it was political suicide or whether he
could have squeezed it through the information machine that he
controls I do not know; my own feeling is, he could not really
have given the Albanians what they wanted, they had to take it
away from them.
156. So you are saying it was not well judged
then?
(Mr Sweeney) No, I do, because I do not think the
West, the whole West, really had any option but to do something
about this, but to frighten Milosevic to stop committing such
inhumanity. And my thinking about the war, in a sentence, was,
there was going to be this liberation war, it was going to go
on and on and on until the Albanian nine-tenths majority won,
as they were bound to do eventually, and Western intervention
telescopes the time-frame. And I also think, at the end of it,
fewer people were killed than would have been killed in a bloody,
awful, civil war, which would have been still going on today had
we not intervened.
(Mr Judah) Can I add one, just one, very brief point,
that the vast majority of Serbs, and especially educated Serbs
in Belgrade, well-connected people, that I knew, that I was talking
to, right up to the last moment, in Rambouillet, they all thought
there was going to be a deal, they all said, "He's going
to negotiate right to the wire, but there's going to be a deal,
he's not going to go for it;" they got it wrong, like everybody
else. They were ready for a deal. They said, "Look, there
is a problem with troops, yes, but of course they are building
it up, but they will make some deal, there will be NATO troops
but they'll be wearing blue berets, or something like that, yes,
they'll make some cover."
Sir John Stanley
157. I was not going to make any further response
on this point, but just in response to Mr Steele, who made, I
thought, the quite extraordinary claim that nobody had given any
warning at all of the so-called ethnic cleansing consequences
at the start of NATO bombing. Just using non-classified sources,
the Sunday Times (with apologies to Mr Sweeney), on 28 March,
gave a detailed account of the briefing given to President Clinton
by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Shelton. And it said
this: "The report did not make encouraging reading. Clinton
and his cabinet members, including William Cohen, the Defense
Secretary, and Sandy Berger, the National Security Adviser, sat
in silence as Shelton outlined the thrust of the analysis. There
was a danger, he told them, that far from helping to contain the
savagery of the Serbs in Kosovo, a moral imperative cited by the
President, air strikes might provoke Serb soldiers into greater
acts of butchery; air strikes alone, Shelton said, could not stop
Serb forces from executing Kosovars. Britain's Ambassador to Belgrade
had been making similar arguments in a flood of cables to London."
So I really am absolutely astounded, Mr Steele, that you can claim
that nobody had given any warnings of what the consequences might
be?
(Mr Steele) I do not think the consequences, even
from that report that you are quoting there, are the same as what
appeared to be, at the beginning of the bombing campaign, an effort
to get rid of every Albanian out of Kosovo. That report talks
about acts of violence, more acts of violence, or more severe
acts of violence, against Albanian civilians; that is quite different
from an almost Nazi-like campaign to eliminate the entire population
from the country. I would challenge you to find anybody who really
predicted that, which is actually what Milosevic tried to do.
Sir John Stanley: I am being put under a challenge,
which I am very happy to say, and I just simply refer you, Mr
Steele, to many articles that have been written in relation to
widespread knowledge about Operation Horseshoe, which was the
operation to carry out large-scale ethnic cleansing, which was
widely known to many people prior to the start of the bombing.
Chairman
158. In response to Sir John, we have heard
Operation Horseshoe, what do you understand to be Operation Horseshoe?
(Mr Judah) In the course of the work for the book
I have just done on Kosovo, I went to talk to people at the top
of the Foreign Office and said, "Did you know about Operation
Horseshoe?"; answer, "No; yes, we heard about it afterwards."
How come everybody else knew about it but people at the top of
the Foreign Office did not know about it.
159. What do you understand by Operation Horseshoe?
(Mr Judah) It is something that the Germans produced
and claimed that was some sort of plan for ethnic cleansing, and
I think it was far less so, to the eye. And even people as senior
as Strobe Talbott, I went to interview him for my book, I said,
"Did you know about it?" and he said, and I am paraphrasing
here "Well, we had some kind of vague idea but we did not
really know what it was and obviously we did not take it seriously."
(Professor Roberts) We know of no evidence of Operation
Horseshoe that emerged in the West before 24 March, I have not
come across any, I have asked a large number of officials, that
is to say, about a specific plan. On the other hand, it was perfectly
obvious that if there were to be military operations there would
be likely to be renewed and extreme Serb violence against the
unfortunate inhabitants of Kosovo. And, indeed, one of your colleagues,
Sir John, in the Defence Committee, on the very day the bombing
began, 24 March, made the point, very strongly, when George Robertson
was giving evidence, that there would be a likelihood of the Serbs,
in his words, giving "instant payback to the Kosovars"
in the form of attacks and expulsions. So that likelihood was
always there and was always known about. And, in my opinion, one
of the problems of Western policy is how much they did in response
to what was obviously the likely Serb response to military action.
(Ms Sharp) I agree with that, and I think it is worth
remembering that when NATO first made its bombing threat, which
was October 1998, the Serb General Perisic, who has since resigned,
warned then that if there were bombing there would be retaliation
against the Kosovars. And, remember, all this is in the context
of the very ill-judged NATO policy of denying that we had any
plans to use ground troops at all; it was like flashing a green
light at Milosevic and the Serbs, doing that.
(Mr Sweeney) On that particular point that Jane has
just said, yes, I entirely agree, it was dreadful military strategy
to say, "We're going to hurt you; get out of Kosovo, stop
being cruel to the Albanians, but we're not actually, personally,
going onto the ground." That was a dreadful mistake. Even
though, in the light of, one must record, no Allied soldiers,
airmen, were killed during this campaign, that is very good and
it rewrote the military textbooks; but, nevertheless, not to issue
the threat, to take that threat away from Milosevic, I think that
was a stupid thing to do.
27 Appendix B of the Rambouillet Accord. Back
|
