Madam, – Aidan Hehir (Opinion, March 23rd) supports the view that Nato intervention in Kosovo was illegal because it did not have the approval of the UN Security Council.
Mr Hehir neglects to mention that a Security Council resolution could not have been obtained because Russia, Serbia’s ally, would have used its veto. He then seems to link the obvious failings in the political process in Kosovo with Nato’s 1999 intervention and says that “Kosovo enjoys few of the traditional trappings of statehood, not least political autonomy”.
Kosovo was forced to declare its independence unilaterally when Russia once again made clear that it would veto any UN resolution recognising Kosovo as an independent state, even though there is not the remotest possibility that Kosovo could ever again be a part of Serbia. Kosovo is now being subjected to a form of diplomatic bullying by a Serbia that is, thankfully, disarmed but which will never acknowledge its war crimes of the 1990s and by its Russian ally, which is intent on impeding the integration of the western Balkans into the EU and the Western alliance.
If Nato had not intervened in Kosovo, Milosevic’s “Greater Serbia” project would have been implemented by force and the entire Albanian population of Kosovo would have been expelled to Macedonia and Albania. As it was, more than half the population was displaced by rampaging Serb forces in 1999, with appalling loss of life.
The facile charge of “illegality” adds nothing to the debate about international law if we fail to recognise that a Security Council veto over the implementation of laws is essentially a political rather than a legal act. The issue is not whether Nato’s intervention was “a good thing” (it was) but whether there can be a viable system of international law as long as individual nations can exercise a veto for any or no reason and in utter disregard of the human rights of the people immediately affected by the relevant issue. – Yours, etc,