Blair's other illegal war

Neil Clark

January 18, 2007 08:00 PM

Pop the champagne corks! Get out the cigars! At last! Tony Blair is standing trial for war crimes. Well, at least on Channel 4 he is, anyway.

But as pleasing as it is to see Blair - or rather Robert Lindsay portraying Blair - in the dock, why is the British PM only being charged with starting one illegal conflict?

Four years before "shock and awe" was unleashed on Baghdad, Blair played a key role in another act of international aggression which, like the Iraq war, was also based on a fraudulent prospectus.

The 1999 attack on Yugoslavia was in clear breach of international law. Only the UN security council can authorise military action against a sovereign state, and the UN security council was not consulted. The attack was also in breach of Nato's own charter, which only allowed the use of force when a member state was attacked.

The stated casus belli was that Yugoslavia, in Blair's own words, was "set on a Hitler-style genocide equivalent to the extermination of the Jews in world war two'' against the ethnic Albanian population in the province of Kosovo.

There was no evidence to back this assertion up at the time, and there certainly isn't any today. Over 100 prosecution witnesses were called at the trial of Milosevic at The Hague: not a single one testified that the former Yugoslav president had ordered genocide, or in fact had ordered any crimes or violence against the civilian population of Kosovo whatsoever. On the contrary, a Muslim captain in the Yugoslav army testified that no one in his unit had ever committed systematic harassment of Albanian civilians in Kosovo, and that he had never heard of any other unit doing so either, while the former head of security in the Yugoslav army, General Geza Farkas (an ethnic Hungarian), testified that all Yugoslav soldiers in Kosovo had been handed a document explaining international humanitarian law, and that they were ordered to disobey any orders which violated it.

In reality, the "Kosovan crisis" was as contrived as the Iraqi "WMD crisis" of four years later. The west encouraged a terrorist group, the KLA, to provoke the Yugoslav authorities, and when the anti-terrorist response from Belgrade came, the US and Britain were ready to produce a document at the Rambouillet "peace" conference, which as defence minister Lord Gilbert has conceded, was deliberately designed to be rejected by the Yugoslavs.

Why was it all done? The rump Yugoslavia was targeted not for "humanitarian" reasons - as many on the liberal-left still mistakenly believe - but simply because it stood in the way. You don't have to take my word for it - here's George Kenney of the US state department. "In post-cold war Europe no place remained for a large, independent-minded socialist state that resisted globalisation."

The illegal war against Yugoslavia may not have led to as much bloodshed and carnage as the Iraq conflict, but its importance should not be underestimated. For the first time since Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia in 1968, a European state, which threatened no other, had been attacked.
A dangerous precedent - that of riding roughshod over international law - had been set.
Just how dangerous, we would all see four years later.