Talk:Kosovo War/Archive 1

Archive 1Archive 2Archive 3→Archive 5

This is a little controversial look at Kosovo. I took it from something I wrote for something else, so I'm in the process of making it more neutral

As it turned out I didn't do this. Undoubtedly, someone else will have an easier time making this NPOV then I will. I'm thinking of moving this to Kosovo conflict since it seems somewhat more popular, though on google they yield about the same results.- Eean
"Kosovo conflict" should cover tensions and trouble between Albanians and Serbians in Kosovo from 1978/80 up until now. "Kosovo war" should cover the full-scale war from march 24th to June 10th of 1999, I think. I'll start reworking Kosovo war now. -Guppie
Is that just what you think, or actual usage? Sounds to confusing to me - I think we shouldn't make such a differention just from using the word War as opposed to Conflict. Those using Conflict are doing so probably because it was not legally-speaking a war. -Eean

--- This page is awful. I wouldn't know where to start. Last I checked Russia was not part of NATO and they sent peacekeepers. At one point, the UN had 9000 peacekeepers from 47 countries in Kosovo.

Where does it say Russia is part of NATO? If it does, fix it! There's a History - feel free to edit and remove. - Eean

"the diplomatic options were not looked into enough by NATO" --according to whom? http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/Kosovo/Kosovo-Massacres.htm lists several "massacres", may have some useful information --rmhermen

Yeah, especially important for this article to be quite neutral, as it is going to be referenced by people interested in Milosevic's trial and The Hague human rights tribunal.

Contentious. Milosevic made the valid point that the heads of state of the countries bombing and invading Serbia didn't recognize the court, and that Tony Blair or G. W. Bush for instance would not be put on trial no matter how many kids were hit by not-too-smart bombs in AF... since he was put on trial just as that was happening, it's interesting from an international law point of view.

There's at least a "human rights"/moral necessity, a "tribunal"/legal, a diplomatic/military, and economic/ethnic/political angle in this one.

The war also broke up Yugoslavia fairly definitively into Kosovo, and the new "Serbia and Montenegro" - which renamed itself a month or two ago.

Not too many wars create three new countries and get an elected head of state put on trial, so this war needs a particularly careful treatment.

Remember to be Bold. Moving this paragraph here, as I don't like notes within the text. - Eean

Very un-NPOV paragraph, must be reworked: It is unlikely that this is what spurred the war. Many reports of Albanians being slaughtered by Yugoslavia were broadcast by western media creating a popular opinion by the general public. Many of these were later found to be false fabricated claims by separatist Albanians but these new discoveries only surfaced on certain independent media channels.

I don't have time right now, but this article needs major rewriting. It's strictly one-sided, and is hardly NPOV.

also known as humanitarian bombardment ... If any bomb had hit Serbian civilians, that was strictly colateral damage, and appology was issued by "humanitarian worker" Jamie Shea.

I've removed these two snippets, as they appear to be sarcastic in nature. Certainly the biased reportage of the Western media and attitude of the NATO governments on the war needs to be discussed, but this isn't particularly helpful. --Brion 06:42 Jan 15, 2003 (UTC)

whoever added these photos, thanks. Vera Cruz

Vera do you think that tv screen photos are copyright free ? Ericd

Serbian TV got bombed by NATO, I don't think they are going to care. Also my understanding is that all of the photos are from the University of Belgrade and in the public domain. If you are referring to adding new photos, no they are not, but I am of the understanding that you can use a tv screenshot under educational and fair use rights. Vera Cruz

I hope I like these photos but I hope none of theses come from an occidental press agency. Ericd

I feel that the content and the selection of photos is extremely POV. It focuses almost entirely on NATO bombing mistakes (which are important, don't get me wrong) but not on the atrocities and genocide committed by the Serbians and the KLA. Can we get a little more balance here? Chadloder 12:14 Jan 24, 2003 (UTC)

I don't suppose there is any chance of anyone turning this into a properly NPOV article? It reads like a Milosevic press release at present. Tannin 13:11 Jan 26, 2003 (UTC)

This article is now MUCH improved, thanks to whoever provided the new version. However, I am going to add more details regarding the legality (or illegality) of NATO's action under international laws.

The Kosovo war is as difficult to discuss honestly and openly as Operation Desert Storm was in its day, or Guantanamo Bay probably still is. The propoganda war on all three fronts was intense and unrelenting, and once sold on a position most of the populace can't even register contradictory evidence.

When the US invaded Iraq the first time, they propped a young girl in front of the Senate who claimed she was a nurse in a Kuwaiti hospital who saw Iraqi soldiers pull babes from incubators and dash them to the ground. The newspaper stories that immediately sprang up documenting that she had been nowhere near Kuwait were immediately suppressed. Combined with the fact the U.S. envoy admits that she gave Saddam the green-light for an invasion (—but I never imagined he'd take the whole country), it's hard to describe the origins of Operation Desert Storm without sounding like an apologist for Saddam. The whole point of NPOV is not to worry about what light the facts cast the participants in. If the other side has a story, present it.

Similarly within a few hours of the Racak thing hitting the news (January of 1999) I had already culled from the KLA web-site and various Albanian discussions of KLA extortion a pretty good idea of what sort of terrorist organization we were discussing. I knew that the freely elected leader of the Kosovar Albanians—Ibrahim Rugova(footnote)—opposed the KLA, wanted an independent Kosovo, but was opposed to the military solution and preferred Kosovar dependence to NATO intervention; I knew that Yugoslavia had a fairly liberal system of government that allowed the many ethnic groups their freedom; I knew that Kosovo had been formerly Autonomous under Albanian rule and I knew what had come of that.

I thought that anyone with access to the web or other information sources (I remembered the NYTimes article about Albanian rule in the mid 1980s) should be suspicious of the whole endeavor and dig deeper into what was happening. Instead what we got was the rush to war, self-righteous war, oh yeah. Just like the current U.S. administration is trying to do with Iraq.

If your fear is that a sober and accurate assessment of the Kosovo War is going to look like a press-release for Milosevic, well that's certainly a legitimate fear, but one I think is mitigated by the anti-Albanian atrocities which commenced only after the bombing began. To claim that they would have happened anyways is not merely speculative but almost certainly false. (A much more interesting article that would actually address the core issue here would be about combatting guerilla warfare.) According to prosecution testimony in the Milosevic trial, members of the Regular Army who were involved in atrocities were arrested, tried, convicted, and punished according to army regulations. Any or most unpunished atrocities were conducted by the militia, and it is hard to fault a breakdown in the normal mechanisms of the law for handling such things in the chaos of the bombing campaign. So Milosevic may in fact be mainly free of fault in Kosovo. Don't worry, this is unlikely to have any effect on the outcome of the trial.

Footnote: Rugova has become something of a puzzle. During the war he was a courageous advocate for peace, but since the war he has become completely pro anything that keeps him in power. His testimony in the Milosevic trial contains such howlers as maintaining that no Serbian was abused by an Albanian during the 1980s when systemic anti-Serbian abuse was decried in all the major papers of the world. From the trial (responding to David Binder's 1987 NYTimes article): 

(Rugova) 20 A. No. No. That is not at all true. As I said earlier, at that
21 time, no violence was perpetrated by the Albanians against other ethnic
22 groups. Second, it is not true that the wells were poisoned.
23 Unfortunately, it was done by the Belgrade regime led by the accused in
24 1998, 1999. And people have been thrown in these wells. That is the
25 truth.

Page 4314
JUDGE ROBINSON: Dr. Rugova, might there have been isolated acts
2 of violence against the Serbs, as distinct from something on a wholesale
3 level?
4 THE WITNESS: (Interpretation) At that time, no. No. Not even
5 individual cases or an organised campaign.

My guesses are:

  1. Terrible translation problems.
  2. A complete political chameleon.
  3. the over-the-top testimony is a cry for help that the KLA are holding his family hostage (he also claims the KLA does not use and has never used terrorist means).

I just added more information about NATO justifications for action and charges of NATO war crimes. I personally feel that NATO was justified in intervening, but I also feel that NATO committed war crimes during the bombing campaign. I would like someone to take the pictures and expand the article to include a detailed list of NATO bombing "mistakes" (bombing of bridges during the daytime when trains were going over them, bombing the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, using cluster bombs near civilian targets, bombing a convoy of farmers on their tractors, etc.). I do NOT want to come off like a NATO apologist, but I'm afraid someone might interpret my arguments that way, so feel free to clarify and expand. Chadloder 20:04 Jan 26, 2003 (UTC)

I'm a little uncomfortable with the way the article is structured. Or unstructured. It needs to have some sort of table of contents or more better be broken into individual discussions of the various issues. What would be major heads inside an article in a print encyclopedia I think work better as sub-articles here in wiki-wiki-land.

I think a separate article on NATO violations of the Geneva Protocols as well as one on any Yugoslav ones (which probably don't exist as they were fighting on their own soil) would be very useful because it could be linked both from Kosovo War and from a general article discussing the impact of the Geneva Protocols on the conduct of war.

Chadloder, I'm glad you feel the bombing was justified, we need someone to lay out the justifications. On the one hand I was deeply involved when it happened and on the other it's a bit of old news. I can no longer remember which justifications NATO proferred at which time, and in the past three years I have not heard a single explanation of the assault that did not depend on atrocities that commenced after the bombing; and most of the atrocities reported at the time were later proven to have been mythical. Not that there weren't many real ones, but that the emotional impact of all the atrocities we had reported to us was falsely engendered and managed for NATO and KLA propoganda reasons.

The actual mechanism reported after the war was that NATO used KLA members as forward observers; these forward observers would variously report, fake, or create (by calling in strikes against non-KLA Albanians) atrocities; NATO would take their reports almost without question and deliver them as briefings to the press; which would in turn present them as fact to the Western public.

I don't object to putting the NATO justifications in another article and linking to it from here. The first version of the article was totally POV, but has since been revised to be somewhat better. And NATO use of the KLA is well-documented. Gen. Wesley Clark admits to it in his book. Can you please sign in and sign your statements? Thanks. Chadloder 04:24 Jan 27, 2003 (UTC)

Regarding the spin doctors who supposedly "were sent to work at CNN". Can someone provide a reference for this statement? What were the spin doctors' names, and when specifically did NATO send them there? I'm not saying it didn't happen, but I would like a little documentation. Thanks. Chadloder 04:32 Jan 27, 2003 (UTC)

Also, let's get some balance in the selection of pictures. As the article states, the war in Kosovo started before the 11-week bombing campaing and continued after it. There are plenty of pictures of Kosovo massacres by both the Serbs and the KLA, plenty of pictures of ethnic Albanians being marched from their houses -- of course these would NEVER have been shown on Serbian TV (which was controlled by Milosevic), but I'm sure we can find some. Just asking for more context. Chadloder 04:51 Jan 27, 2003 (UTC)

Zoe, I think the NATO bombing mistakes pictures should be left in the article. They are an important part of the story. We need to research the copyright issues, of course, but your removing them is going to look like a whitewash, especially if you move my section on NATO justifications back in here. Chadloder 05:39 Jan 27, 2003 (UTC)

They're obviously there for their shock value, and there are too many of them. One or two would be fine, as long as there were also photos of mass graves of Albanians killed by Serbs and destruction of Albanian villages. -- Zoe

The photos SHOULD shock. I agree that we need more pictures of the REST of the Kosovo War, but some Americans, and most of the rest of the world found the bombing mistakes shocking. Chadloder 05:49 Jan 27, 2003 (UTC)

No, they, shouldn't, not in Wikipedia. We're not here as advocates, but as a neutral encyclopedia. If you want shock, go to a news site. -- Zoe
Shockingness should neither be a reason to include something or not. If war is ugly, it's not our job to censor the ugliness. Mkweise 06:07 Jan 27, 2003 (UTC)


War is not pretty. This is not a textbook for American schoolchildren. Chadloder 05:55 Jan 27, 2003 (UTC)

By the way, the following two paragraphs are far too POV:

The Kosovo War was significant from a military standpoint in that it marked the first effective use of low technology local ground forces in combination with high technology air power provided by the United States. This combination would also prove effective in the United States campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001. Given the almost complete survival of the Yugoslav military infrastructure, it is not clear whether this approach would be effective against a totalitarian dictator (who presumably is less concerned about the civilian populations), but it was demonstrably effective against a democracy.
It was also significant in that it demonstrated the impotence of the United Nations and the Geneva Protocols at restraining the aggressive impulses of the world's last remaining superpower.

Where shall I begin? First, ground forces were not used. As far as I've read, the war was completely an air-war until KFOR moved in after Serbia pulled back. Second, the Yugoslav military infrastructure consisted of marauding Serbs in pickup trucks. Tanks, airplanes, etc. -- all the pieces of modern militaries, were pretty well decimated. Third, while Milosevic was democratically elected, Serbia under Milosevic and his generals wasn't a democracy, no more so than Germany was under Hitler (who was democratically elected). Get real. Milosevic is in the Hague for a reason. Chadloder 06:04 Jan 27, 2003 (UTC)

It is also not our place to try to shock people. Why don't we have Matthew Brady's photos of dead soldiers in the article on the American Civil War and the photo of the decapitated Japanese soldier from Life Magazine in the article on the Battle of Guadalcanal? -- Zoe

Matthew Brady's photos were staged, otherwise I would say put them in. Pictures of war are an important part of war stories. We should be after the TRUTH of war, and if the truth is shocking, so be it. Chadloder 06:12 Jan 27, 2003 (UTC)

Well, I'm not going to get into an edit war with you, but be sure you have the right to put the pics on this page if you do revert them. And if you do include them (and I think ten pictures is too many for any article, or however many there were), I'll take the disucssion to the mailing list for resolution. -- Zoe


I wrote long ago in another context that a carefully reasoned document that fully justifies all its conclusions is not a convincing argument, but a photo of a starving child is. The point was that only stupid people are convinced by a photo, but that includes most people. I'm not particularly convinced that photos are a necessary part of this discussion, though I do want to note that they counter the tendency of humans to disbelieve mere textual evidence. There is no need for shock here, though. Photos serve as reference and illustrative material.

I suggest a bunch of you take a nice time out and pick a few encylopedias at home or at the library and check some of the discussions of controversial justifications in history. This is actually how I usually rate encyclopedia-style texts.

It is a truth of history that sometimes wars are started for legitimate reasons, sometimes wars are started partly for legitimate reasons, and some wars arise for reasons completely alien to the reasons enunciated by the aggressive government.

The job of the encyclopediast is neither to argue the part of the underdog nor to roll over and play lap-dog to the victors and report pretext as fact. What we must do is take the claims of one side and lay them out as the claims of that side. Take the claims of the (one or more) other side and lay them out clearly. Substantiate or refute those claims as best we can, and leave the conflicting and unprovable claims clearly labeled.

If the claims of one side are completely or mostly refuted, apply the inexorable machinery of logic to them and state clearly that the justifications were clearly pretexts. Do not overreach yourself: if there was every reason to believe the justifications at the time of the initial action, then the action was justified. Do not report the Battle of New Orleans, for example, as an unwarranted aggression in time of peace. the librarian

--- and... just as Librarian was chiming in... hey, kids. Some rhyme here, maybe some reason, too. It takes time for some of these issues to have the benefit of being seen with historical perspective. The pictures of death and the crass cruelty of war bring to light the nature of evil conduct as the culprit, independent of human will or accountability. Milosevic may die for his crimes, but the deaths will still be there. Something Rumsfeld said regarding Afghan deaths by Americans, he said that all this death rest "squarely at the feet of Al-Quaeda snd the Taliban." Of course that just his opinion, and his opinion represents one whole side of this issue of collateral damage, and the policy of choosing military targets as having greater value than civilian lives - the 'American position' is unquestionably hypocritical; of 911, WTC victims were called both "innocent victims", and "soldiers in the war on terror" by policy makers - these cant both be right.

So the question is a moral one, but our question is how do we frame the moral debate in a way thats NPOV, and doesnt get too scattered. - I suggest that this moral debate fits under the Casualties of war / ( the collateral damage aricle should be short, and point to the CoW article, and within this context of CoW, we can deal with framing these moral issues. Be well all.-Stevert

Was it Napoleon who observed that the first casualty of war is truth"? Tannin

No.

U.S. Senator Hiram Johnson, speech before the Senate, 1917. the librarian

Ah yes, Hiram Johnson - for whom we have no article.. lib? :)-Stevert

Ha.

The Kosovo War page has changed a great deal since I skimmed it yesterday, and not for the better. Obviously emotions run high, but a firmer and less excitable hand is needed here. Which is hard in an anarchy.

A great deal of propaganda is generated in war; check out Ayn Rand's testimony before the McCarthy inquisition (http://www.objectivism.addr.com/texts/huac.html ). I particularly like her statement:

I don't believe the American people should ever be told any lies, publicly or privately. I don't believe that lies are practical. I think the international situation now rather supports me. I don't think it was necessary to deceive the American people about the nature of Russia. I could add this: if those who saw it say it was quite all right, and perhaps there are reasons why it was all right to be an ally of Russia, then why weren't the American people told the real reasons and told that Russia is a dictatorship but there are reasons why we should cooperate with them to destroy Hitler and other dictators? All right, there may be some argument to that. Let us hear it. But of what help can it be to the war effort to tell people that we should associate with Russia and that she is not a dictatorship?

At the end of a war the propaganda--messages crafted to elicit emotional responses like the pictures previously present were--lingers; the hatreds evoked linger and the false impressions linger. War itself creates new hatreds which must also be ameliorated before the truths can be faced. Not all American soldiers are heroes; not all Serbian soldiers are villains. Our task here is to a different purpose: What actually happened? What notable lies were told, and what is the truth?

In 1972 you could write an article that laid out the two sides of the arguments about what happened in the Watergate Hotel. In 2003 you must take the side that evidence vindicated and report that the other lied. the librarian

Truly this is a topic about ugliness. I read through the first reference article: it was a press-release for a complete document; I changed the link to refer to the report. HRW reports are less NPOV than they were ten years ago. The reporting of atrocities in this one is NPOV, but then there are sections of conclusions that are pure POV. No evidence in the slightest is presented. Depressing. the librarian

I'm a little confused by the latest edits; Iran was definitely a major contributor to the KLA. The edit pretends that there was meaningful (traitorous) opposition to Milosevic's rule in Yugoslavia, despite his democratic election; much more accurate to say that NATO had deceived itself as to the depth of the opposition. The Historian speaking in retrospect should not be surprised.

In other ways the edit is better writing than my version which it replaced, though I thought it important to note that the militia—responsible for most of the atrocities—had to be armed to repel a ground invasion and were frustrated and impotent in the face of the high-altitude bombing of mostly civilian targets.


The fact is that KLA was supported by Iran, Al Quaida and many others. But it is misleading to emphasize this as KLA was mainly nationalist - separatist movement, not Islamic one. It has Maoist ideology and is not particulary interested in Islam, nor are Albanians (part of whom, not in Kosovo though, are Christians) - they view their struggle as strictly national, not religious. Most of the support came from Albanian diaspora and narco business at Kosovo in fact.
Also, it is not true that most Serbs were for Milosevic. The percent of pro-Milosevic population is 20% now and was under 40% from the early 1990s, and it was less than 30% when Socialists won their last elections. Voter apathy, i.e. large number of abstinents, divided opposition, and stolen elections (votes of Kosovo Albanians, who did not vote in fact, were routinely cast falsely for Milosevic) ensured that Milosevic and Socialists had won all the elections. Their support was authentic, but most of the Serbs were against Milosevic in 1999. But when the bombing started, virtualy ALL of them were opposed to NATO and stood back behind Milosevic as supreme comander. That is evident from the free press which operated in Milosevic years - the editors and journalists were wholehartedly against NATO bombing - there was censorship, but even today they claim that that opposition was authentic

---

I only just noticed this: “Tanks, airplanes, etc. -- all the pieces of modern militaries, were pretty well decimated.”. False false false. Read KFOR's reportage of what they found when they entered Kosovo. The planes were mostly destroyed, I believe, but KFOR was aghast at the number of healthy tanks that pulled out and how few (13) had been eliminated. Additionally the air defences were protected by the simple mechanism of leaving them switched off most of the time. Please don't get too excited about repeating NATO war-time propoganda.

Here we go again. I've only been doing Wikipedia for a week and already I think it's pointless to continue editing articles. So this will probably be my last comment I ever make on this stupid encyclopedia.

Satelite images were doctored in order to produce proofs of mass graves, but these claims were dropped when western journalists were brought to the place of the alledged mass graves. The bad reputation of Bosnian Serbs and atrocities comitted in years of Bosnian civil war have helped this demonization of the Serbs, and made these vastly exaggerated claims beliveable to the western public, especially when juxtaposited with the images of fleeing refudgees

Here we have a statement recently inserted into the article by an anonymous user. Now the article is denying that Serbian atrocities ever took place? Based on what evidence? Are the Human Rights Watch reports and the words of the refugees themselves somehow less reliable than, say, Serbian media reports? On one side, we've got Western apologists who want to take the photos of bombing victims out because they are "shocking" -- well too f*cking bad, war is a shocking thing. On the other side, we've got the anonymous users who continue to insert statements about how no Serbian atrocities were ever committed. There are maybe one or two people I've seen in this WHOLE editing war who are interested in an article which is truthful and not propagandist. Unfortunately, I don't have the energy to fight with you people, especially when Wikipedia lets anyone just come along and insert stuff into the article. There will be no end to this. I've come to the realization that Wikipedia is not the proper format for an encyclopedia. So...this is my last Wikipedia post. Chadloder 17:37 Jan 27, 2003 (UTC)


The paragraph is not denying that the atrocities of Serbians took place - the inserted paragraph is pretty clear about this, as it claims that atrocities were done by Serbian militia and irregulars - see the last sentence. Overblowing the atrocities of Serbs was claimed, not the innocence of the Serbian side. One thing is to kill 5,000 Albanians in conflict and chaos and quite an other to kill 500,000 and commit genocide. Even the indictment of Milosevic does not have genocide in Kosovo (but it has it for Bosnia), as there is no case for that. The doctored photos are just one example of the lies used to demonize Serbs and brainwash the Western public
You are making some very serious allegations about a NATO conspiracy against the Serbs. This requires a great deal of evidence. --mav
Propaganda war is not the conspiracy against the Serbs. It is nothing new to use lies as a weapon in PR during the war - the doctoring of the photos is not the worst thing US military has done in many conflicts. The lies need to be exposed, as well as the demonization of any nation/side which happens to be in war.

Even after the revert, this article still needs some serious NPOVing. The anon that has been working on this article has violated our most important policy - NPOV and as a result has driven another user away in disgust. This is not acceptable behavior and I will be watching this article to make sure it begins to fairly represent all relevant sides to this issue. --mav

Cont: Talk:Kosovo War