Last update 15 Jan. 2001 - corrected according the TV film
BBC:
A BBC2 special, 9pm Sunday 12 March 2000
Reporter Allan Little
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| Gen. Wesley K. Clark |
Q: You told the North Atlantic Council that it was the
KLA side who were largely responsible. GENERAL NEBOJSA PAVKOVIC: We
did have some very good data. But mainly our predictions were accurate. There
are things which remain secret, which I cannot discuss. GENERAL WESLEY
CLARK:In some cases we had some indications maybe they did have
some information, about some specific things that were being targeted.
A: I would have to go back and
re-read my notes. I don't remember. Most of the briefings I gave to the North
Atlantic Council was that both sides were in non-compliance. Both sides were
doing things that were wrong. Obviously it was easier to point at the
government.
JAMIE RUBIN, US ASST SECRETARY OF STATE :
Q: How
far did the KLA have to go to jeopardise international backing?
A: Well
again there would have been a point. I don't know where that point came they
obviously never reached it..
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT:
Q: There was no clear mechanism
to punish them if they failed to behave in what you call a reasonable way?
A: Well I
think the punishment was that they would lose completely the backing of er the
United States and the Contact Group.
LITTLE: With US backing for the
KLA now barely concealed, Milosevic sent the army back into action to clear the
KLA out of Podujevo. The doomed procession to war with NATO had begun. The KLA
continued to smuggle arms over mountain passes from Albania. Albanian civilians
were press ganged into service. Before dawn on the fifteenth of December, they
walked into a well prepared Serbian ambush. Most of those taken by surprise fled
back into Albania. But 31 Albanian men were killed. Later on the same day in an
apparent act of revenge, what remained of ethnic co-existence in the city of Pec
nearby, was to be torn apart. A group of hooded, masked men drove up to this bar
which was popular with young Serbs.
LAZAR OBRADOVIC: The doors opened
and then we heard the machine gun fire …"
LITTLE: Lazar's teenage son,
Ivan, was in the bar. He was a bright and promising school boy, who'd come top
of his class..
LAZAR OBRADOVIC: It was a horrifying sight. We tried to
help those that were still moving. There was blood everywhere. Ivan didn't stand
a chance. He was sitting right by the door. So he was the first one to be hit.
FATHER
MIRJLKO KORICANIN, PARISH PRIEST, PEC: The situation in Pec became
unbearable. The Serbs couldn't stand the Albanians because they had killed 6
children. And the Albanians couldn't stand the Serbs. Nobody knew what would
happen next.
LITTLE: Walker condemned both the ambush on the border
and the killings in the bar in equal measure.
WILLIAM WALKER, HEAD, KOSOVO
VERIFICATION MISSION: It really looked like this was a tit for tat again.
KLA hearing about their people being killed up on the border had done this in
Pec.
WILLIAM WALKER:
Q: There is a huge difference,
isn't there, between people killed in a legitimate military exchange and a bunch
of hooded unknowns walking into a bar and killing some teenagers..?
A: I
think the point is, we really didn't know what had happened in Pec. Yes the
government was saying it was KLA gangsters who had come in and sprayed this bar.
When you don't know what has happened, it's a lot more difficult to sort of
pronounce yourself.
LITTLE: One month later Walker was to break this rule to
spectacular effect. He pronounced himself with absolute certainty about a
massacre that occurred here, in the village of Racak. Even now, more than a year
on, important questions about what happened here remain unanswered. This is the
story of that massacre, of the political uses to which it was put, of how it
galvanised the west to go to war, and of the pivotal role played by William
Walker. There is nothing remarkable about Racak. Except that by January 1999,
the KLA had moved in, most of the villagers had fled, and trenches had been dug
on the edge of the village.
PAULA GHEDINI, UN REFUGEE AGENCY: We encountered many
villages where the villagers themselves told us in very clear terms that they
would prefer to be left completely alone. Often times they felt that if a KLA
group were to come into their village, that would put them under greater
threat.
LITTLE: From camouflaged positions near Racak the KLA
launched well prepared hit and run strikes against Serb patrols. In early
January, they killed four Serb policemen.
ZYMER LUBOVCI, KLA FIGHTER: We
saw them coming, so we prepared and opened fire. But it was guaranteed that
every time we took action they would take revenge on civilians.
LITTLE:
Racak did not have to wait long for the retaliation. The attack began on the
morning of January 15th.
HASIM THACI, KLA LEADER: A ferocious struggle took
place. We suffered heavy losses, but so did the Serbs. They set out to commit
atrocities, because a key KLA unit was based in this area.
LITTLE:
International observers watched from safe high ground as Serb forces took
control of the village. They moved from house to house. Most were empty. The KLA
had gone. When the Serb forces pulled out in the afternoon, they announced
they'd killed 15 KLA men in action. The international monitors entered the
village and reported nothing unusual. Only next morning did the full force of
Serb retaliation become apparent. William Walker went to see for himself.
WILLIAM
WALKER: We progressed up the hill and about every 15 or 20 yards there was
another body as we kept going up the hill, and I don't know how many bodies we
passed before we got to a pile of bodies.
LITTLE: By the time Walker
arrived the KLA had retaken control of Racak.
WALKER [archive]: I think its
going to take me a few minutes to determine what I really should say, and I'd
like to hold a press conference in Pristina later this afternoon.
Walker
[archive]: The facts as verified by KVM include evidence of arbitrary
detentions, extra-judicial killings, and the mutilation of unarmed civilians of
Albanian ethnic origin in the village of Racak by the MUP and VJ.
LITTLE:
In other words, he blamed the Serbian police and the Yugoslav army. Walker
was supposed to be an independent international official. But did he seek direct
instruction now from the Americans?
WILLIAM WALKER: Without calling
any of my capitals I told what I thought I had seen, which was the end result of
a massacre.
RICHARD HOLBROOKE: William Walker, the head of the
Kosovo Verification Mission, called me on a cell phone from Racak.
WILLIAM
WALKER:
Q. But you don't remember calling Washington at all?
GENERAL WESLEY
CLARK, SUPREME ALLIED COMMANDER EUROPE:: I got a call from Bill
Walker. He said there's a massacre. I'm standing here. I can see the bodies.
WILLIAM
WALKER:
(No reply to
question)
Q: And you didn't speak to Gen.
Clark or anybody like that?
LITTLE: Walker's comments gave
America the green light to enter Kosovo's war. The KLA had pulled in it's mighty
ally.
DUGI GORANI, KOSOVO ALBANIAN NEGOTIATOR: With Racak, and
with lots of others, the Serbs were playing into KLA hands. It will remain I
would say an eternal dilemma whether the KLA initiated these battles in the
civilian inhabited areas because it knew that the Serbs will retaliate on them.
Personally I don't think so, but of course, it was a war.
GENERAL WESLEY
CLARK: Clearly, after Racak, extraordinary measures had to be
taken.
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: It clearly is a galvanising event,
and the President really felt that we could then move forward, make clear that
the US was going to be a part of an implementing force.
LITTLE:
But Albright knew that the galvanising effect of Racak would not last long.
She had to get her European allies on board. She insisted there could be no more
diplomacy without the credible threat of force. The Europeans agreed. There
would be one last diplomatic effort. The mesmerising splendour of the Chateau
Rambouillet near Paris became the most luxurious last chance saloon in
diplomatic history? Would the grandeur of Rambouillet beguile and seduce old
foes to reconciliation?
DUGI GORANI, KOSOVO ALBANIAN DELEGATE: We became used to
rare wines. We became used to delicious and I suspect tremendously expensive
French specialities. We became used to a luxury which the main aim was to see us
taking up a pencil and signing a piece of paper. So luxury was there, everything
was there : you just sign the damned document.
LITTLE: As the delegates arrived,
the last ditch nature of the talks became clear. The atmosphere was tense, it
was the first time these old enemies had sat in the same room. The Europeans,
some reluctant converts to the threat of force, earnestly pressed for an
agreement both the Serbs and the Albanians could accept. But the Americans were
more sceptical. They had come to Rambouillet with an alternative outcome in
mind.
JAMIE RUBIN, US ASST SECRETARY OF STATE: The second
acceptable outcome was to create clarity where previously there had been
ambiguity. And clarity as to which side was the cause of the problem and clarity
as to which side NATO should defend and which side NATO should oppose and that
meant the Kosovar Albanians agreeing to the package and the Serbs not agreeing
to the package.
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: If the Serbs would not agree, and
the Albanians would agree, then there was a very clear cause for using force.
LITTLE:
The Europeans clung to the formal purpose of the talks - an agreement by
both sides.
ROBIN COOK, FOREIGN SECRETARY:
Q: At the
end of the day it was much more important for the Albanians to say yes than for
the Serbs to say yes?
A: NO it was important for both to say yes. After all
this was not a tactical exercise to prepare the ground for a reaction this was a
genuine attempt to find the peace formula that the Serbs had said they wanted.
JAMIE
RUBIN: Obviously, publicly, we had to make clear we were seeking an
agreement, but privately we knew the chances of the Serbs agreeing were quite
small.
LITTLE: The Serbs did not object to the political
aspects of the peace plan - including wide ranging autonomy for Kosovo. But
their delegation refused even to consider the military part - a NATO peace
implementation force.
GENERAL NEBOJSA PAVKOVIC: They would have unlimited
rights of movement and deployment, little short of occupation. Nobody could
accept it.
JAMIE RUBIN:
Q: There must have been a bottom
line.. how far would you have gone to appease Serb anxieties? Would you for
example have compromised on the question of NATO's role in that force?
A: No .
the force had to be NATO because if it weren't NATO it weren't going to work!
LITTLE:
Focus now shifted to the Albanian delegation. They'd elected the young and
inexperienced KLA man Hashim Thaci as their leader. The entire delegation urged
him to accept. But he refused because the agreement on offer did not include a
referendum on independence.
DUGI GORANI: The delegation appointed Thaqi for a leader
not knowing they may become his prisoners.
VETON SURROI, KOSOVO ALBANIAN
POLITICAL LEADER: It was a formidable yes on all sides. Except when it came
to Thaci - who was very strained and he said no.
DUGI GORANI: Thaci was really
blunt to the delegation stating that look this document this actual presentation
is completely unacceptable.
VETON SURROI: He used language which could be threat...
could be understood as threatening.
DUGI GORANI: And whoever signs it
now, I would treat him or consider him as the enemy of the nation.
LITTLE:
It was a graphic illustration of the power the gun now wielded among the
Kosovar Albanians. Thaqi's intimidation of his fellow delegates did not stop a
warm relationship developing between him and his international sponsors.
JAMIE RUBIN:
He was somebody who was a younger member of the delegation more my age and
so there was a certain natural rapport. I think I used to tease him a little bit
about how he might look good in a Hollywood movie and I think he appreciated
that sort of basic teasing back and forth.
LITTLE: Thaqi did not respond to
this flattery. The Americans sent for their diplomatic big gun. Madeleine
Albright arrived on St Valentine's Day. She was absolutely focussed on getting a
yes from Thaqi. She spent four days wooing him.
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: When we got
there, it was very evident that Mr Thaqi was kind of a leader and we actually
compared him to Gerry Adams
DUGI GORANI: she insisted on him making a sort of a
symbolic choice.
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Perhaps here was a leader who had a
goal who was able to be part of a political solution.
VETON SURROI:
..which Thaqi partly liked, and more disliked. He liked the idea of Ok, now
he's being ushered into politics.
LITTLE (Night time Rambouillet):
Deadlines came and went, Thaqi still held out.
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: I must say I
was unbelievably frustrated. We needed clarity then and there.
VETON SURROI:
She was saying you sign, the Serbs don't sign, we bomb. You sign, the Serbs
sign, you have NATO in. So it's up to you to say. You don't sign, the Serbs
don't sign, we forget about the subject it was very explicit.
LITTLE:
It took three weeks, but America's chief diplomat got there in the end. The
Serbs said no. The Albanians, finally, said yes. It was the unambiguous clarity
the Americans had sought. NATO, led by the US, could now wield the credible
threat of force against Milosevic, in the confident belief that the threat alone
would be enough. They were wrong. In Kosovo, Serb forces moved into position,
the international monitors prepared to leave.
WILLIAM WALKER: The personal
security of the international verifiers was our highest priority. No country in
Europe, no country in North America wanted to lose any of its people.
LITTLE:
Walker called his local Serb and Albanian staff together for a surprise
announcement.
WILLIAM WALKER We had to say, look, I've been told by
the minister that we're pulling out. We can't offer to take you out, even if you
wanted to go.
BEATRICE LACOSTE, KOSOVO VERIFICATION MISSION: You know
I'm really sorry to leave you behind. You've done a great job, but hey we'll be
back in a few days. It'll be a little tough, but we'll be back.
WILLIAM
WALKER: Let's get on with the shredding. Let's not leave too much behind.
BEATRICE
LACOSTE: I was very unhappy. I could imagine that there would be a lot of
retaliation. Walker gets into car.
CAPTAIN ROLAND KEITH, KOSOVO
VERIFICATION MISSION: There was a lot of disquiet as our very lengthy
convoys of international orange vehicles motored out of the province. I guess
foreboding of what was coming next. I personally felt frustration, betrayal? Yes
to some extent.
WILLIAM WALKER: We got out in record time. we sort of
congratulated ourselves on being even more organised than we thought we were.
And it wasn't till a few days later that we realised that Milosevic and his
troops had been anxious for us to leave, and sort of cleared the way, made sure
we did get out in record time, so that they could start the campaign that kicked
off immediately.
LITTLE: In Pristina, the local staff who'd been left
behind now paid the price of their loyalty to the international community.
BEATRICE
LACOSTE: Some of the guards who had been given two weeks pay and asked to
stand outside the building of the OSCE, one of them was shot down and another
one was very badly beaten up,
LITTLE: In the absence of international observers, Serb
forces began to pillage and burn and kill with the casual cruelty they had
taught the world to expect of them. Kosovo was sliding into chaos.
ZELIHE
REXHEPI: They said "If you even move we will slit your throats or shoot you.
We didn't dare move.
LITTLE: This is what that remains of the village of
Chirez. There was no military purpose to this. It was wanton, wilful
destruction, a pre-emptive campaign of revenge for NATO's threat. This group
captured on camera the undiluted pleasure they took in their barbarity.
ZELIHE
REXHEPI: They took my daughter away with a young girl and an old woman. When
I heard the gunshots I knew they had killed her. Her little son cried on my lap.
LITTLE:
The credible threat of force as a tool of diplomacy collapsed amidst this
depravity. Its bluff was called. In Belgrade, there would be one last attempt to
salvage the doomed policy of coercive diplomacy.
RICHARD HOLBROOKE: We sat alone
in this vast white palace surrounded by Rembrandts or fake Rembrandts who knows,
and we were totally alone and I said "You understand what will happen when I
leave here?" and he said very flatly, no emotion, Milosevic said "Yeah, you're
gonna bomb us, you're a big powerful country, you can do anything you want". And
I said "Well that's it Mr President I have to go now". And there was dead
silence in this room where there had rarely been silence. And he said as we
walked out "I wonder if I'll ever see you again". And I said "Well that depends
on your actions Mr President". And we shook hands and that was it. The bombing
started twenty nine hours later.
LT COLONEL RODRIGUEZ: Every last
detail every second, every manoeuvre transitions through your brain, through
your hands, through your eyes very quickly so that when the right time comes,
call it the push time, everything starts to click like clockwork
GENERAL WESLEY
CLARK: We got the Go message and go tomorrow unless something
stops it.
LT COL. CESAR RODRIGUEZ, US AIR FORCE: We had the
chaplain give us a few words of wisdom which were very encouraging, and then we
suited up and prepared to do the mission..
CAPTAIN PAT MACKENZIE, US AIR FORCE:
As I stepped into the jet the nerves took over a little bit. I think one of
the things I will not forget is the fact that there was an individual that was
standing on the flight line waving an American flag as we taxied out. I mean it
just sent chills down my spine. It was just amazing
LT COL CESAR RODRIGUEZ: I myself
personally experienced moments of extreme fear. At times you kind of question
whether you're ready for it
SQUADRON LDR CHRIS HUCKSTEP, ROYAL AIR FORCE: I can
remember thinking this is it. In a couple of miles in a couple of seconds I'll
be over the border I'll be over enemy territory. They'll be trying to shoot me
down. I'll try and prosecute the target then, and drop bombs on them. I threw up
a little prayer: Lord you've got to help me this is it I can't do any more now.
GENERAL
NEBOJSA PAVKOVIC: At about 7pm I received an anonymous phone call. A voice
said: I must avert the attack on my country, that it would be worse than the one
on Iraq. I hung up.
LITTLE: From ships in the Adriatic, the first cruise
missiles targeted Yugoslavia's air defence system to try to make the skies safer
for NATO pilots. Phase One of the campaign began with a very limited list of
targets. Each missile carried a camera in its nose, recording an image of its
target until the moment of impact.
CAPTAIN PAT MCKENZIE, US AIR FORCE:
I knew exactly when I was crossing into what we call bad-guy's side and the
adrenaline started flowing a little bit. Once we saw the Triple A coming off the
ground, the training kind of took-over. This Triple A over there is not a
factor. This Triple A over here could be a factor to me.
Whatever the case may be. And that's - that's um training.
WING CDR TIM ANDERSON, ROYAL AIR
FORCE: Perhaps more worrying were the surface-to-air missiles and when they came
then definitely you were very focussed on where they were going, what they were
doing and how you were going to defeat them.
LITTLE: In Washington in the last
of the day's spring sunshine, the White House went on a full war footing.
President Clinton was preparing to address the nation. Now that hostilities had
begun, the National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger became Clinton's key
lieutenant. Power in the cabinet had shifted away from Madeleine Albright.
Together they worked out 3 basic aims. Those aims were not to last beyond the
first few days of the air campaign.
PRESIDENT CLINTON [Speech]: My
fellow Americans, our mission is clear: to demonstrate the seriousness of NATO's
purpose so that the Serbian leaders understand the imperative of reversing
course...
SANDY BERGER, US NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR: There was
the hope that the use of force by NATO in a strong way would cause him to stop,
would deter him from going through, but I think that there was no illusion that
that was by any means a certainty even perhaps a probability.
LITTLE:
The second aim astonished NATO's military leaders. They'd already warned the
politicians that it could not be achieved.
[Clinton speech ]: ... To deter
an even bloodier offensive against innocent civilians in Kosovo
GENERAL HENRY
SHELTON, CHAIRMAN, JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF: The one thing we knew we could not
do up front, was that we could not stop the atrocities or the ethnic cleansing
through the application of our military power ...
LITTLE: And the third would prove
so hazardous to implement that it threatened to tear apart the NATO alliance
itself.
[Clinton Speech ]: .. and if necessary to seriously
damage the Serbian military's capacity to harm the people of Kosovo. That is why
we acted now because we care about saving innocent lives.
GENERAL KLAUS
NAUMANN, CHAIRMAN, NATO MILITARY COMMITTEE: I said on one occasion the
Council, we cannot stop this by using air power alone. It's impossible. No-one
in the political arena should have had the illusion that we could do it, but as
soon as a statement is done, it's there.
SANDY BERGER, US NATIONAL SECURITY
ADVISOR:
Q: So you knew that air power alone couldn't necessarily
prevent the mass murder and mass deportations that everybody knew he was capable
of?
A:
Well I'm not quite sure it would, we knew that it was that, that a military
response would not necessarily cause him to stop and if he didn't stop that we
had to be prepared to destroy him.
LITTLE: The Generals had to
produce military action that could match that rhetoric. When the threat of force
became actual force, the diplomatic aims stayed the same. The generals were not
yet given clearly defined and achievable war aims for one simple reason:
GENERAL WESLEY
CLARK: It wasn't a War. There was no declaration of War. It
wasn't legally a War. And we weren't going in there to conquer territory. It was
simply one plank of the diplomatic strategy. And I don't think there was a
single member government of NATO that sought to go to war with Slobodan
Milosevic.
LT GENERAL MIKE SHORT: I certainly acknowledge that
there were people within the Alliance who felt we weren't at war but as a
commander of young people going in harms way every day and very night, my
mindset was that I was at war, the people under my command were at war and that
was how we had to do our business.
LITTLE: It certainly felt like a
war beneath those NATO flight paths, the Albanians of Pec were about to pay the
price of winning NATO's support - in a programme of mass and systematic revenge.
VALMIR
HAKLAJ, ALBANIAN: The Serbs knew that they couldn't fight NATO, so they took
it out on us instead. Through the windows we saw smoke and flames. They were
burning Albanian houses. I was horrified because the same fate awaited us. They
were going to expel us from the home and then burn it down. I felt desperate.
LITTLE:
Valmir and his sister Valentina remembered the threats their Serbian
neighbours had issued earlier. Now their neighbours turned on them again.
VALENTINA
HAKLAJ: Five minutes after we went to bed someone banged on the door. A man
shouted in Serbian: Its the police, open the door.
VALMIR HAKLAJ: We knew that
voice. It was our neighbour.
VALENTINA HAKLAJ: He was either going to kill us or do
something terrible .
LITTLE: That night they were herded with thousands of
others into a sports stadium.
VALENTINA HAKLAJ: It was a horrific sight. The whole
city, or rather our half of it, was there. There were old people, babies, the
sick, the disabled: but they wouldn't let anyone leave. They said: you wanted
NATO now you can pay for it.
LITTLE: The next day they were driven, on foot, from
their country. The first trickle of what would soon become a flood of humanity,
changing the dynamic of NATO's moral crusade. Valentina thought only of
returning, and revenge.
VALENTINA HAKLAJ: I asked God: will you be merciful. May
the day come when we do the same to them.
LITTLE: NATO's first priority was
not to help the likes of Valentina but to make the skies safe for their own
pilots. Using cluster bombs they struck Yugoslavia's air defence systems. But
some MiG fighter planes made it into the air.
LT COL CESAR RODRIGUEZ, US AIR FORCE:
We'd located a MiG 29 that was coming out of the Pristina airspace.
LITTLE:
High above Yugoslav airspace, air controllers in AWACS surveillance planes
carefully choreographed the movements of hundreds of aircraft.
LT COL CESAR
RODRIGUEZ: There was some confusion amongst the controller in our formation.
The confusion comes from not having trained together. The confusion comes from a
slight language barrier. I handed him off to my wingman who was very young, his
very first combat mission, goes by the name of Wild Bill. I've got the threat on
my radar scope. I'm monitoring him. We'll take the shot. We can't see very far
and we're not really equipped with night-vision equipment. But when the MiG 29
explodes , the large orange fireball that erupts, it illuminates and reflects
off the western mountains, lighting up the sky. First blood had been drawn on
night one:
LITTLE: NATO was not to lose a single pilot in combat
throughout the campaign. But the Yugoslavs were much more effective adversaries
than NATO had expected. That first objective to destroy Serb anti-aircraft
positions, was supposed to take just 3 days. In fact it was never achieved. NATO
couldn't even locate, far less destroy, all the anti-aircraft missile systems.
Missiles remained a threat every single night, forcing NATO to fly higher.
GENERAL
NEBOJSA PAVKOVIC: We knew that they would try to make a good start by
hitting our units, our command and control centres. So we undertook all
necessary measures to protect our soldiers and equipment.
We made them unreachable, untouchable.
LT GENERAL
MIKE SHORT: The key is that we were never able to get to the point where I
could look him in the eye and say Okay, the risk isn't there any longer from
radar missiles: we have killed them all. That never occurred. They had to assume
they were in a threat range- all the time . That makes the hair stand up on the
back of your neck all the time.
LITTLE: Short insisted that his
pilots stay above 15,000 ft, 3 mile above the ground. On the ground the chaos
that was sweeping the countryside was about to hit the capital. Unhindered by
NATO air strikes, armed police and paramilitaries began to spread terror among
the civilian population - looting as they went.
GENERAL NEBOJSA PAVKOVIC: We
couldn't allow attacks on the police or army from inside Kosovo. As soon as NATO
started attacking civilian targets, there was a mass population movement out of
Kosovo. This favoured our defensive deployments.
LITTLE: Armoured police vehicles
patrolled the streets as, systematically, the civilian population were given a
few hours to leave. These pictures were taken secretly by an concealed Albanian
photographer.
GENERAL NEBOJSA PAVKOVIC: We tried to dissuade them, and
sometimes we succeeded. A great number stayed in Kosovo and were protected by
our units.
LITTLE: The whole world could see that that was a lie.
General Pavkovic's units were in fact organising the biggest programme of forced
deportation in Europe since the second world war. It was bound by the sheer
force of the image to evoke memories of Nazi Germany.
GENERAL WESLEY
CLARK: We knew that there would be have been some effort to
retaliate against the population. But what we didn't foresee is that it would be
calculated in a way that would have generated the massive refugee outflow.
LITTLE:
The scale of it was breathtaking. Milosevic had dramatically raised the
stakes. These images bore alarming testimony to the failures - so far - of the
air campaign. Everywhere the reaction was the same.
IVO DAALDER, US NATIONAL SECURITY
COUNCIL 1995-96: Shock. .In many ways, the - it made the team that had been
- led the President into this decision was shell-shocked. They never thought
that this was going to happen.
LITTLE: In Washington, the
recriminations began. How and why could a war that had been launched so boldly,
so confidently, now seem so out of control? On March 30th, six days after the
war began, there was a crisis meeting of Clinton's cabinet. Washington turned
its heat on Madeleine Albright.
IVO DAALDER: There was a sense
that in fact she had led the Administration down this path and had failed.
Madeline's War, as it became called, all of a sudden didn't look so good.
JAMIE RUBIN,
ASST US SECRETARY OF STATE:
Q: A lot of people said this was
Madeline's war and it was going all wrong. Was she under pressure?
A:
Absolutely. (laughs) That was a very, very difficult time. There were a lot
of people who were looking for scapegoats when things didn't go well quickly.
Washington has become a very impatient place where if success isn't achieved
instantly then knives go out.
IVO DAALDER: They always thought that at worst, this
would take a bombing campaign of about 12 days and then it would be over, then
he would give in. They never considered that in fact, rather than giving in or
even hunkering down, it would escalate.. escalate to these massive proportions.
MADELEINE
ALBRIGHT: All of us knew that this was not going to be easy. I mean I think
there is so much misinformation about there, that we thought this was going to
be an easy military campaign..
LT GENERAL MIKE SHORT: I was
being told, again quote, "Mike you're only going to bomb for two or three
nights, that's all the Alliance can stand, that's all Washington can stand".
LITTLE:
But Madeleine Albright had herself handed fortune a hostage. On the opening
night of the campaign she had given the clear impression that it would be short.
She appeared unconcerned - almost casual.
MACNEIL LEHRER: Can you give us
any time frame in our own mind, the ideal situation, as to how long it might
take to get where you want to go?
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: I don't see
this as a long-term operation. I think that this is something that the deter and
damage, is something that is achievable within a relatively short period of
time.
LITTLE: Among the military, the knives were also coming
out. Some believed NATO was fighting a war by committee, and moving at the pace
of the slowest member.
LT GENERAL MIKE SHORT: This is my first time fighting a
war with 19 partners. But I've heard the term "lowest common denominator" used.
It's probably overused but you don't have a better one.
LITTLE:
All the military men agreed the need for political consensus was hindering
the military effort.
LT COL CESAR RODRIGUEZ: The first phase of the -the
Kosovo operation, it'll be looked at as a failure, because we did not employ our
assets in a swift and lethal fashion, so as to bring the enemy to - to sue for
peace, in an early fashion.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK:
Once you begin to use force you should use it as decisively as
possible as rapidly as possible but that is based on some prior understandings..
those understandings weren't there.
LITTLE: But a nineteen member
coalition is unwieldy in a more sinister sense.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK:
We got additional assets coming in now, and it's very good
results...
LITTLE: Each morning Clark convened a video conference. He grew
increasingly concerned about the security of information. The Serbs were evading
the effect of bombing so well, that they appeared to know not only what was to
be bombed, but when.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: ...and I think the real
thing for today is to make sure...
LITTLE: The Serbs were evading
the effect of bombing so well, that they appeared to know not only what was to
be bombed, but when.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: There was a lot of
effort put forward by the Serbs I'm sure to try to figure out exactly what the
targets were.
LITTLE:
There was alarming precedent. Six months earlier the Serbs had been passed a
copy of the Top Secret Operations Plan. It told them precisely what targets
would be hit in the opening phase of the campaign.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK:
Q: On that first night did the Yugoslav regime know the
targets, that were going to be?
A: I think they knew the
categories of targets, and I think they understood exactly what we were coming
out after the first night. A - in at least one proven case, the operations plan
had been given to the Serb government by an officer assigned at NATO
headquarters.
Q: How do you know that?
A: This officer basically
confessed to this.
Q: How damaging was that?
A: Well I think it was it was one
of the factors that helped the Serbs have greater confidence that they would
know what NATO was going to do.
LITTLE: That information had been
passed by a French officer called Pierre Henri Bunel. The question was - was it
still happening. Clark thought it was.
GENERAL WESLEY
CLARK: We looked for all indicators that the Serbs might have
known what we were doing. We worked these back into what else could we do to
tighten operation security?
LITTLE: We've learned that an internal US air force
investigation conducted after the war concluded that the Serbs were being passed
the highly sensitive air tasking orders. Those orders list the targets to be
hit, the flight paths and the timings. Clark ordered access to the air tasking
orders to be restricted.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: There were certain
elements that certain people who didn't get an air tasking order, and we
restricted who had access to it, we progressively tightened it down. We
kept certain sensitive items that didn't need to be on the air tasking order,
off the air tasking order.
LITTLE: We've learned that initially, no fewer than six
hundred people had access to the air tasking orders. This was then cut to a
hundred. The internal investigation concluded that when this was done the impact
on what the Serbs appeared to know, was immediate. No spy has yet been caught.
In the skies above Kosovo unmanned projectiles called 'drones' photographed the
tragedy below. They confirmed the worst fears.
RODRIGUEZ: There's no doubt there
were - you could see through the fires on the ground that here was in fact pain
and destruction down there.
LITTLE: Streams of refugees were being herded along the
roads. The reality was stark - the air campaign could not stop this.
CAPTAIN PAT
MCKENZIE, US AIR FORCE: It was frustrating. When you see a building go up in
flames and you go 'wow I wonder what's going on down there'. And as you continue
to watch this target area you see the house next door go up in flames. As I'm
watching these houses burn there's really nothing I can do based on the rules.
LITTLE:
It made the moral imperative greater than ever. The unfolding tragedy
demanded action. The politicians had become prisoners of their own confident
eve-of-campaign assertions.
BLAIR [Speaking in Commons]: We must act to save
thousands of innocent men, women and children from humanitarian catastrophe,
from death, barbarism and ethnic cleansing by...
ROBERTSON [at MoD press conference]:
The military objective of these operations is absolutely clear cut. It is to
avert an impending humanitarian catastrophe by disrupting the violent attacks...
GENERAL WESLEY
CLARK: We had men and women on the ground, Albanian men and women
being cleared out of their homes, families fleeing to the forests. Naturally
there was a great desire on the part of the political leadership to go after
those forces that were directly involved in perpetrating these atrocities.
LITTLE:
Tony Blair went to NATO headquarters, shocked at the sense of drift that now
prevailed. He wanted the Army in Kosovo hit, and NATO's PR sharpened up.
TONY BLAIR:
I certainly believed that we had to take a grip on the whole way the thing
was run and organised because it was a big - it wasn't just a military campaign
it was also a propaganda campaign and we had to take our public opinions with
us. You know you had a NATO Alliance, a bureaucracy that simply wasn't tuned up.
Organising it was a problem and I felt a bit like.. you know, at the beginning
of a big political campaign, where you know your officials were all assembled in
different places and no one had ever quite done like this before
LT GENERAL
MIKE SHORT: I think the pressure on General
Clark was absolutely intense from the political leadership of the
alliance. There was a moral imperative to be seen to attack the Third Army in
Kosovo, to respond, quite frankly, to public pressure to be bombing those forces
that were committing the atrocities.
TONY BLAIR: The moral purpose was
very simple. A gross injustice was being done to people right on the door step
of the European Union which we were in a position to prevent and reverse.
LT GENERAL
MIKE SHORT: I don't wish to be impertinent but I don't think most of our
civilian leadership generally understands air power and how it should be
employed. Their exposure to it has been films of the Gulf War which looked very
much like a video game. And what they were seeing on television was ethnic
cleansing - streams of refugees being forced out of their homes.
LITTLE:
What the politicians wanted was very clear. But the pilots could not deliver
it.
SQUADRON LEADER CHRIS HUCKSTEP, RAF: We were flying,
every day every night we were flying missions and yet you knew that there were
still refugees pouring out, horrendous stories of what was going on, on the
ground, in Kosovo and while we were doing everything we could, we weren't
actually stopping it happening. The Serbs weren't leaving and that was painful.
You'd get back to your hotel at night and watch the news and you knew you were
doing everything you could and it was still going on. So that hurt sometimes.
LITTLE:
At fifteen thousand feet NATO's pilots were safe but so were the Serbs they
were trying to find. General Pavkovic commanded the Third Army in Kosovo. This
was not an army on the run. It was calm, defiant, and secure.
LT GENERAL
MIKE SHORT: The Serbs dictated the pace of events, they dictated the battle
rhythm. They came out to burn villages when they wanted to, they hid when the
weather was good. His troops had dispersed. His Command and Control capability
was out in the field or in tents or in the trees or wherever they needed to be.
GENERAL
NEBOJSA PAVKOVIC: We used other measures too: miniaturisation, camouflage,
decoys. We created many false targets, and it was mainly these that NATO
aircraft destroyed.
LITTLE: It was Kosovo's guerrilla fighters that took to
flight. Lirak Chejna's unit found itself isolated and vulnerable, mystified that
their mighty enemy seemed unaffected by NATO action. They struggled and failed
to protect fleeing civilians against retribution.
LIRAK CELAJ, KLA FIGHTER: I had
some pictures which I shoot with camera. I will never forget these pictures.
People which didn't have enough to eat, who are sleeping in the car. I saw
children suffering. We decided to organise them in a big convoy to send them to
Pristina. It was very sad to let your people go in the Serbs' hands. We couldn't
protect them any more.
LITTLE: The end of the convoy was too slow. Serb
paramilitaries surrounded it near the town of Koljic.
JEHONA
LUSHAKU: I remember my father was so, so afraid. He said to us 'Oh my God
what I have done'.
LIRAK CELAJ:When the Serbs arrived in Koljic they
already found some Albanians because the convoy was too long.
JEHONA
LUSHAKA: It was a paramilitary forces, have separated us and they want to
execute all my family. Then my father paid 1000 DM to rescue us.
LITTLE:
Those who couldn't pay were not spared. Dozens, perhaps as many as eighty,
were murdered. The aftermath of this atrocity was caught on camera. How many
others were not?
LIRAK CELAJ: We sent our reports every night of Serb
position and Headquarter. They were supposed to pass it to NATO. They were all
out in the field. It was I think very easy to attack this, but they never did.
LITTLE:
The mismatch between real military achievement and the resolute confidence
of the politicians was clear.
OOV ROBERTSON: Day and night, the regularity of pounding
is already having an effect, is severely depleting their capability of carrying
on this violence. They are being hurt very badly on the military front
TONY BLAIR:
There is no doubt at all it has been hugely inhibited his policy of ethnic
cleansing and as a result of the destruction of his air defence systems his
military infrastructure, his supplies, we are of course, halting that machine…
Q: We
weren't really having a fairly devastating effect at that time were we?
A: Well
it is true that in terms of what he was able to do in Kosovo, we were hindering
him rather than stopping him, at least in the initial stages. And that was
because of the limitations of that type of military action.
GENERAL WESLEY
CLARK: So those we didn't destroy, we degraded their operations.
I think it had a huge impact on their army.
LT GENERAL MIKE SHORT:
Q: What
impact did that strategy have on his ability to carry out ethnic cleansing? A: I don't think it impacted him at all. Clearly all the
targets that we struck - at least in my mind, that we struck in Kosovo, he had
evacuated long before.
LITTLE: The pilots found these small mobile targets so
hard to find that on some days they dropped half their bombs on so-called 'dump
sites' known to be empty. The head of the air campaign himself so despaired of
being forced to chase such elusive targets that he considered resigning.
LT GENERAL
MIKE SHORT: As any human being dealing with kind of frustration there were a
couple of times when I thought I can't do this any more. I don't believe that
we're doing this right and I owe it to my people to stand up and say we're not
doing this right.
LITTLE: Short believed there was an alternative. He
wanted to go outside Kosovo and hit major strategic targets that would directly
hurt the Milosevic regime. He pressed the political leaders to let him do it.
LT
GENERAL MIKE SHORT: But their reaction was 'we need to strike at those
troops that were committing the atrocities'. That's an understandable reaction.
I believe our military reaction should have been 'No Mr Prime Minister, Mr
President, Mr Chancellor, we need to strike at Milosevic, and you need to give
me permission to do that tonight!
LITTLE: To the people of Serbia,
NATO's war came out of the blue. They were told nothing about atrocities in
Kosovo - Milosevic told them NATO's campaign was an unprovoked war against
ordinary Serb people.
SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC: We are facing the danger of a NATO
attack. Every citizen must contribute to the defence of the country.
LITTLE:
Serbian Radio and Television played to the worst fears of a paranoid
population. Day and night it evoked the horrors of the 1940s when Nazi Germany
occupied Yugoslavia. Belgrade itself had not yet been bombed. That was about to
change.
GENERAL
WESLEY CLARK: We talked about the need to move into targeting
facilities, Command and Control facilities in Belgrade. After all, this is where
the ethnic cleansing was being driven. This is the central headquarters of the
Interior Ministry there. And there was no reason why we shouldn't be striking
it.
LITTLE: Bombing Belgrade meant moving to Phase Three of
air campaign. A dramatic escalation. Could the consensus of NATO hold together?
The question was expertly side-stepped. The North Atlantic Council was never
asked to give its approval. The decision was made by the Secretary General and
his top military advisor.
GENERAL KLAUS NAUMANN: Phase three could have been seen
as an all-out air war against Yugoslavia and the NATO nations, well not all NATO
nations were prepared to go as far…and for that reason we never took the risk to
ask the question knowing that we may run into some problems.
LITTLE:
All out war came to Belgrade on April 3rd - Day 11. NATO hit the Interior
Ministry, the campaign headquarters of Kosovo's ethnic cleansers. For the head
of the air campaign, the real war had finally begun. But it was to prove a false
start.
LT
GENERAL MIKE SHORT: We were going to Belgrade but Belgrade was in flames. We
attacked the proper target sets. The issue from that point on was to stay after
it and we had some difficulty doing that.
LITTLE: That difficulty came from
France. Paris claimed not to have been consulted. President Chirac was furious
to learn of the attack only afterwards. He and his foreign minister determined
they would be consulted from now on.
HUBERT VEDRINE, FRENCH FOREIGN
MINISTER: We wanted political control when we changed phases, that is to say
when we changed targets.
LITTLE: A French general moved into Clark's office - to scrutinise the targets in
advance.
GENERAL
WESLEY CLARK: I had a French 2-star that stayed there with us the
whole time who came round to my house virtually every night, and we talked about
progress and he liased for me.
LITTLE: These new tensions in the
Alliance were made worse by Belgrade's response. Far from being cowed, the
population of the city rallied. They consciously taunted NATO, testing its
nerve.
LT
GENERAL MIKE SHORT: For strategic reasons and, quite frankly, for signal
reasons, I wanted to strike what had become... called the rock 'n roll bridge,
the bridge that the Serbs were dancing on during the campaign to demonstrate
their defiance. I wanted to bring that bridge down, and by one country we were
denied the ability to strike that bridge. And in fact, what was relayed to me
was that, the leadership of that country had said "Don't even ask".
Q: Which
country?
A: It was France.
HUBERT VEDRINE, FRENCH FOREIGN
MINISTER: We tried hard to avoid targets affecting the economic life of the
country, in other words people's day-to-day lives in the most fundamental sense.
LT
GENERAL MIKE SHORT: I never had anything but the greatest support both moral
and material from the French Air Force. I cannot begin to offer opinions on why
their government made the decision that they did.
LITTLE: They made those decisions
because they knew that a major targeting error down town could cause so many
casualties that public support for NATO would ebb away. In Belgrade, as in the
west, public opinion was a weapon. Radio Television Serbia - RTS - transmitted
anti- NATO propaganda day and night.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK:
Nations beginning to ask us, in the region, said please get rid
of Serb Television it's just a huge propaganda weapon for Milosevic, its the way
he maintains command and control. It's a legitimate military target you need to
disable this. And so we looked at a number of different techniques that could
have been used to disable it. We finally concluded that the best way to do it
was to bomb it.
LITTLE: RTS pictures were beamed around the world.
Western television journalists in Belgrade used them too.
CNN 2-way
Presenter: CNN's Alessio Vinici
is there - Alessio.
Alessio: Serbian Television reported that the bombing
heavy bombing went on all night.
LITTLE: The American network CNN
was based in the RTS building itself.
ALESSIO VINCI, CNN, BELGRADE: We
started talking to our colleagues in Atlanta, to some contacts again in
Washington and Brussels and we heard more and more that RTS was coming up on the
target list.
LITTLE: When these pictures hit western television
screens they became a real threat to NATO's ability to sustain the war. Whenever
NATO made mistakes Western journalists were taken to film civilian casualties.
At Djakovica, the allies bombed a convoy of Albanian refugees, wrongly believing
it to be a Serbian military column, RTS pictures had an impact around the world.
ALESSIO
VINCI, CNN, BELGRADE: We also heard from sources in Brussels and Washington
that there was - a lot of people were unhappy with the way RTS was broadcasting
their own part of the story. It was also a time when NATO started making the
first mistakes, hitting civilian areas, and RTS was obviously prominently
showing that... they were concentrating 99.9 per cent of their coverage on the
mistakes or so-called mistakes that NATO would do.....and of course we were
using those pictures because they were the only pictures that we had available.
TONY
BLAIR: This was one of the problems about waging a conflict in a modern
communications and news world...we were aware that there would be pictures
coming back, the convoys were the, in many ways the worst of the refugees, that
were hit by NATO bombs. We were aware that those pictures would come back, and
there would be an instinctive sympathy for the, for the victims of the campaign.
LITTLE:
RTS journalists openly taunted the west.
Newsreader: Let Clark take a shot, we are waiting for him.
Our address is 10 Tarkovska street, I wont give you the co-ordinates, you'll
have to work them out yourselves.
ALESSIO VINCI, CNN, BELGRADE: And
then at some point we were told that it was better to just leave the building
altogether, because the risk of staying there, even during the day was too high
because NATO had started 24-hour bombing, and that there was no way to find out
when exactly RTS may get bombed.
LITTLE: Although the foreign
journalists had pulled out local technicians continued to work their
nightshifts. Kasenja Bankovic was among them. She believed that if the building
was to be bombed the RTS bosses would warn the staff in advance.
BORKA
BANKOVIC: She was never scared of going to work at the TV building. Somehow
she felt that she was safe there. She said 'Mother, I'm leaving'. I looked at
her saying 'Okay, take care.' She replied "don't worry, I will take care..."
LITTLE:
At six minutes past two, on the morning of April 23rd, an American stealth
bomber did indeed target 10 Tarkovska Street. RTS was broadcasting a
pre-recorded interview with Milosevic. Kasenja's mother rushed to the bombed
building. No one from the RTS management offered help or information.
BORKA
BANKOVIC: I had the crazed look of a person searching through a crowd.
Someone asked, Madam, was someone you know working here tonight? I said yes, my
daughter.
LITTLE: Ksenija Bankovic and fifteen others, mostly
technicians, died.
LITTLE: When Belgrade woke the next morning, RTS was
triumphantly back on the air. They were re-running the interrupted Milosevic
interview. RTS had made a contingency plan in the event of bombing. It did not
include evacuating their own staff.
ALESSIO VINCI, CNN, BELGRADE: One
can only wonder why those technicians and why those people were kept there,
especially at night when everybody at that time, especially you know so late
into the war, knew that RTS was going to be a target.
BORKA
BANKOVIC: They were sacrificed. I don't know why. You'll have to look for an
answer elsewhere.
Q: Where?
A: Well, first of all with the
people at RTS, and then from the government at all levels. I don't know.
LITTLE:
To what end did Kasenja Bankovic die. Her family believe she was
deliberately sacrificed by the Serbian regime for whom civilian deaths produced
valuable propaganda. NATO derived no benefit at all from the bombing.
GENERAL WESLEY
CLARK: We knew that when we struck it there would be an alternate
means of getting out the Serb television. There's no single switch to turn off
everything. But we thought it was a good move to strike it and the political
leadership agreed with us
TONY BLAIR: They could have moved those people out of
the building. They knew it was a target and they didn't; I think that was
probably for you know very clear propaganda reasons: but there's no point. I
mean there's no way of waging a war in a, you know, in a pretty.. it's ugly,
it's an ugly business.
BORKA BANKOVIC: This was an outrage. I can't just
condemn RTS and say NATO was right, because NATO killed my child and RTS were
accomplices. NATO is the murderer.
LITTLE: It is an inherent
weakness when democracies go to war. Western publics must confront the innocent
suffering inflicted in their name.
LT GENERAL MIKE SHORT: If we
allowed this butcher, murderer and dictator to defeat the most powerful alliance
on the face of the earth because we didn't have the stomach for collateral
damage and we didn't have the stomach for unintended loss of civilian life, then
we were going to cease to exist as an alliance.
LITTLE: Public opinion in the
west grew more sensitive as the bombing campaign was stepped up. But how far
could public support be pushed? When NATO struck the Chinese embassy mistakenly,
they claim the politicians again reigned in the military. They imposed a five
mile no-bomb zone around Belgrade.
HUBERT VEDRINE, FRENCH FOREIGN
MINISTER: I think political control was in the end maintained in the correct
manner. But I also think that to a large extent this was thanks to France.
LT GENERAL
MIKE SHORT: A nation clearly had the ability to say 'no-one can strike that
target'. Not just us, not just you, no-one can strike that target set. And what
their motivation was in making that decision certainly no-one ever shared with
me.
GENERAL WESLEY
CLARK: : My military colleagues have got to understand that there
will be political in which targets are struck and that we want political
approval for these politically sensitive targets.
LITTLE: American stealth bombers
flew missions directly from bases inside the united states. The French
government accused the Americans of flying unilateral bombing raids of their own
outside the NATO command structure.
HUBERT VEDRINE: All the countries
s in the Atlantic Alliance acted as part of NATO, with full discussion about
what to target, but the US was also carrying out a separate American operation.
They deployed national forces, with a national decision-taking mechanism
commanded from the US, and the European allies did not know about these other
actions.
GENERAL
WESLEY CLARK: With all due respect the French foreign minister
that's incorrect.
Q: Why would he say it?
A: It's incorrect I am not going
to speculate on his motives. I can simply tell you it's not correct. I commanded
all assets and all assets were integrated into the NATO plan.
LITTLE:
NATO unity itself was under growing strain. For America the legacy of
Vietnam is a simple rule: put crudely - no body bags. But as the air war dragged
on, Britain began to press America to plan for a possible ground invasion. The
problem was, Clinton had ruled it out on the very first night.
BILL CLINTON:
If NATO is invited to do so our troops should take part in that mission, to
keep the peace. But I do not intend to put our troops in Kosovo to fight a war.
LITTLE:
Sandy Berger had put that sentence in the President's speech.
SANDY BERGER,
US NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR: Had there been at the beginning a debate about
ground forces, we would have started this campaign not with a solid NATO facing
Milosevic, we would have started this campaign with a NATO with its guns pointed
at each other.
LITTLE: NATO had sent twelve thousand troops to
neighbouring Macedonia, to go into Kosovo only once Milosevic had agreed to a
peace deal. Britain now argued that they could be turned into a ground invasion
force.
TONY BLAIR: I became convinced that we had to have that
option there, and I became convinced even more so once I had visited NATO and
sat down and talked to the guys who were fighting the campaign.
LITTLE:
Blair's intervention had redefined the political aims of the war. They were
blunt - Serbs out, NATO in, refugees home. He now wanted to redefine the means
to achieve those aims.
TONY BLAIR: You had to prepare for all contingencies.
Which was a you know euphemism for making sure that you had the ground force
option there if you needed it.
JAMIE RUBIN, US ASST US SECRETARY OF
STATE: There was certainly irritation at the very public way the British
Government was pushing the ground troops issue, it was interesting, especially
because the kind of option that was a serious option, meant they were pushing
essentially for the deployment of American ground troops.
TONY BLAIR:
People used to say to me occasionally well for goodness sake Tony just don't
talk about it at all, I'd say look it's quite difficult; I mean you're out there
and people ask you; and as I say we don't have Milosevic's media and jolly good
thing that we don't. But the fact is my guy's asking me, and your guys ask you,
and you know you're expected to have some sort of answer to this.
LITTLE:
In April the Allies gathered in Washington, for NATO's 50th anniversary
summit. The issue threatened to expose NATO as weak and divided. The Americans
told the British bluntly to stop talking about it in public.
JAVIER
SOLANA, SECRETARTY GENERAL, NATO: We meet at a time of crisis in Kosovo.
LITTLE:
Clinton told Blair that NATO would not be allowed to lose. Blair took this
to mean that US troops would be committed if needed.
TONY BLAIR & OOV: I was never
in any doubt that they would do what is right. America does do what is right, in
the end the President would have taken the decision necessary to make sure this
thing was seen through.
LITTLE: But in the Pentagon there was intense
opposition. When General Clark took a
ground invasion plan to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he was cold shouldered.
GENERAL WESLEY
CLARK: I showed them the assessment that we'd made. They weren't
actually the plans, they were the assessment of how a plan like this would be
done.
GENERAL HENRY SHELTON, CHAIRMAN, JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF:
What he had at that time was somewhat analogous to the sport section out of
the entire Sunday newspaper that you normally anticipate in a military plan.
GENERAL WESLEY
CLARK: They were very appreciative of receiving then information.
I didn't ask for a decision. So they didn't make a decision.
GENERAL HENRY
SHELTON, CHAIRMAN, JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF: That was not sufficient to allow
us to make a strong recommendation to the political leadership as to whether or
not we should be undertaking a ground option.
LITTLE: The American military was
closing off Blair's ground option. Instead, the alliance stepped up the bombing
campaign. Graphite bombs cut off the electricity. The targets were no longer
purely military.
LT GEN MIKE SHORT: The impact that it had on the
leadership cadre around Milosevic I think is extreme.
LITTLE:
But the leadership cadre stayed calm. They believed that the heavier the
bombing the greater the chance that the Alliance would crack, and that danger
was real. This was militarily effective, but politically risky. Some of the
European allies believed they could not carry public opinion with them much
longer.
PROF KARL KAISER, ADVISOR TO GERMAN CHANCELLOR: It was
not easy for Germany. This country was particularly interested in getting the
war ended. There was a possibility that the crisis could evolve in a way that
could end up in a tragedy.
LITTLE: NATO now turned to an old adversary for help.
The Russian envoy Viktor Chernomyrdin opened a new diplomatic channel with his
US and European counterparts. He saw it as an admission of NATO's growing
desperation.
VIKTOR CHERNOMYRDIN, RUSSIAN PEACE ENVOY: They were
looking for a way out. They realised that it would not be over in two or three
months.
LITTLE: But it wasn't Chernomyrdin that mattered to
Belgrade. Milosevic believed he had potential allies in the powerful old
security establishment: the military, the secret police, and the successor to
the KGB.
GENERAL LEONID IVASHEV, RUSSIAN DEFENCE MINISTRY: NATO,
led by the USA, was flouting all the principles of international law. These
principles had been in place since World War Two.
PROF KARL KAISER, ADVISOR TO GERMAN
CHANCELLOR: Chernomyrdin represented, so to speak, the government, President
Yeltsin. But to Milosevic, whose conception of power and whose relationship with
the security services was of a very special nature, it was extremely important
that the security part of the Russian power structure said the same, in fact
said even more.
LITTLE: Russian security forces co-operated with Germany
to open a secret back-channel to Milosevic himself. It relied on the connections
of an inconspicuous Swedish financier called Peter Castenfelt. Peter Castenfelt
went to Moscow to meet the security forces. What he was told there would be
crucial in bringing the war to an end.
PROF KARL KAISER: Peter
Castenfelt, having given advice to the Russian government, including Yeltsin,
had the full trust of the Russian leadership, and the intelligence and security
site there. He waited for a signal, the signal came, the Russian secret service
took him to the border and there the Yugoslavs were waiting and a car was there
and avoiding the bombs took him to Belgrade where he then met Milosevic.
LITTLE:
For four days, Castenfelt held a series of secret meetings with Milosevic.
He delivered a message that ended the Serbian leader's dream's of a Russian
intervention. The Russian government was about to agree a peace plan with NATO
and the Russian security forces had accepted it.
PROF KARL KAISER: It was so to
speak a message that he would take more seriously than any other message from
the Russians because those were the people that formed the power apparatus
around him. The security apparatus in Moscow said 'End the War. Or 'here are
some conditions that look acceptable to us, and we cannot help you beyond it, so
exit now'.
LITTLE: Ahtisaari and Cherno arrive. The official
international envoy was now the Finnish President Marti Ahtisaari. He went to
Belgrade with Chernomyrdin carrying the joint NATO Russian peace plan.
PRESIDENT
MARTTI AHTISAARI, EU PEACE ENVOY: Both he and I didn't believe for a moment
that we could get agreement in Belgrade. We drove through the city. First of all
the city didn't look so damaged as one might have thought. We went to the guest
house where he was waiting and he looked and he looked like I would have met him
yesterday. He took politely us and we decided to go straight to the negotiating
table. I actually read the peace offer, and he said "can we have a copy?". They
got it, and then they asked me if they could start improving the proposal. I
said, unfortunately not, that this is as good as we can come up with, and if we
can't agree on this, then the next offer will be worse than this, from your
point of view.
LITTLE: NATO had agreed two key compromises.
PRESIDENT
MARTTI AHTISAARI: For them I think the important points were the whole thing
would happen under UN auspices and secondly that Kosovo would remain a part of
Yugoslavia. That made the deal acceptable to the Russians. It also gave
Milosevic something that had not been on offer before the bombing started: a UN
mandate. There was a sort of sigh of relief, and I congratulated Chernomyrdin,
and hugged him in a brotherly fashion.
LITTLE: But the relief was
premature. The Russian military had expected their own sector of Kosovo,
independent of NATO. They now felt double crossed.
GENERAL LEONID IVASHEV, RUSSIAN
DEFENCE MINISTRY I felt as if I were the defeated one. That was the feeling
I had, as if I myself had been defeated. I felt that evil was triumphing over
good.
LITTLE: They decided to try to take what they had been
denied. Russian troops stationed in Bosnia rolled towards Kosovo.
GENERAL WESLEY
CLARK: They had informally conveyed information that they might
be an advance party for an airborne operation that would go into Pristina
Airfield and potentially partition the country.
LITTLE: The question was - could
they be stopped?
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I called the Secretary
General and told him what the circumstances were. He talked about what the risks
were and what might happen, if the Russians got there and he said: Of course you
have to get to the airport. I said do you consider I have the authority to do
so. He said of course you do, you have transfer of authority.
LITTLE:
There was a way to stop the Russians. In a Macedonian cornfield, Clark put five hundred British and French
paratroopers on immediate standby to launch an air-borne assault. But Clark's British subordinate told him the plan
risked sparking World War Three.
LT GEN SIR MICHAEL JACKSON,
COMMANDER, KOSOVO FORCE: We were standing into a possibility - let me put it
no more strongly than that – a possibility of confrontation with the Russian
contingent, which seemed to me probably not the right way to start off a
relationship with Russians who were going to become part of my command.
LITTLE:
British and French objections thwarted Clark's plan. The two hundred Russian troops
passed through Kosovo and were greeted as liberating heroes by local Serbs. They
took the airport unopposed. The world watched nervously. The Russians were
planning to fly in thousands of paratroopers, who would then cut Kosovo in half,
leaving Milosevic in control of the North.
GENERAL LEONID IVASHEV: The
Defense Ministry already had plans, proposals, ready to put into action. Let's
just say that we had several air bases ready. We had battalions of paratroopers
ready to leave within 2 hours.
LT GENERAL SIR MICHAEL JACKSON
There was concern that there may be Russian aircraft inbound, and that one
answer to this would be to block the runways at Pristina airfield, and what was
looked at was putting some armour, tanks, on the runway.
Q: Were
you in favour of that?
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I believe it was an
appropriate course of action.
LITTLE: But Clark's plan was again overruled by Britain.
Instead Clark asked neighbouring countries to try to
stop Russian aircraft flying towards Kosovo. The Romanian defence minister took
great pleasure in warning Moscow not to try to fly over his country.
GENERAL WESLEY
CLARK: He said you could do that of course, but we would be
obliged to send an aircraft up to intercept your aircraft. And there are only
two buttons on our aircraft, and if the pilot pushes the wrong one, he'll shoot
down your transport plane with all of these people on board. Of course, that
would be a crime, he said, and he would be prosecuted under our law. He'd be
convicted and would be sent to jail, for seven years. But he would also be a
national hero.
LITTLE: June 12th 1999, Force Entry Day, With the
agreement of Slobodan Milosevic, fifty thousand NATO troops entered Yugoslavia
at last. They went more in relief than in triumph. It had taken 78 days of
non-stop bombing. Militarily undefeated and defiant to the last - the Serb
forces who'd so laid waste to Kosovo pulled out unimpeded and unpunished for
what they'd done. Serbs out. NATO in. Refugees home.
VALENTINA HAKLAJ: People could
hardly wait to go home and see what had happened to their land. There was
nothing left to see. It was horrible. The small of war, burning and gun powder
hung over the city.
LAZAR OBRADOVIC: Before leaving Pec we visited my sons
grave. I will never forget that moment as we wept and asked "Ivan, will we ever
be able to come and visit your grave again?" That was hard, really hard. It
can't get any harder than that.
LITTLE: The Kosovo Liberation
Army recruited NATO to its cause. An old injustice was defeated here. But NATO's
moral war rewarded those who took up arms.
RICHARD HOLBROOKE: I don't
believe that any of the liberation forces, or guerrilla forces of our lifetime
moved more rapidly, or more successfully, from total obscurity to international
standing and recognition than the Kosovo Liberation Army.
LITTLE:
The Serbs that remain live in ghettos now. At Gorazdevac, near Pec, six
hundred Italians stand between them and the vengeance of their old neighbours.
The war started as a moral crusade to end such intolerance. But in the end it
wasn't about morality. It wasn't even about Kosovo. It was about saving NATO
from collapse.
TONY BLAIR: The bottom line was we couldn't lose. If we
lost, it's not just that we would have failed in our strategic objective; failed
in terms of the moral purpose - we would have dealt a devastating blow to the
credibility of NATO and the world would have been less safe as a result of
that...
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