Morton Halperin
Director of the Policy Planning Staff, U.S. Department of State

"Developing New Policies for New Challenges"

Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure for me to be here. I think it’s clear from that introduction that I’m not very good at holding a job, but I have had an opportunity to see important issues from a number of different perspectives. Actually, the introduction failed to mention what, in my view, is the most important fact about the number of distinguished Americans who have held the job of Director of Policy Planning since 1947, and that is that all but two of them are still alive. So, despite the stress of the job, it apparently produces longevity, and I’m looking forward to that.

I think that, given the current situation, I should focus my remarks on Kosovo, on where we are today, and how I think we got where we are, and where we’re going, and to cite and speak relatively briefly so as to leave time for questions about that. I gather from the marching outside that this is not a universally-supported policy, and I would be glad of the opportunity to answer questions and try to explain why we are doing what we are doing and why we think it is the right thing to do. I also would, of course, be glad to answer questions about other aspects of American foreign policy, what we’re trying to accomplish in the world, how we look at the world situations.

But let me try to take a few minutes to talk about how we got where we are in Kosovo. I think one needs to do that in the context of the changing attitude in the world, including in the United States, about humanitarian disasters that are occurring within countries. It is not many years ago when the world community, including the United States, viewed these as unfortunate events, as ones that the world community had no business being concerned about and, indeed, one still hears that view. Kosovo is part of Serbia, so there has been no invasion of Kosovo, and the Serbians have a right to do whatever they want in Kosovo because it’s part of their country. That is a view, I think, the international community, including the United States, is coming to reject, and the fact that we tolerated it in the past, the fact that we may have failed in this decade to [respond to] gross violations of human rights, even genocide in Rwanda, is not a reason not to intervene now in Kosovo. Rather, it is a reason for the world community to try to organize itself more effectively so that we intervene in these situations much earlier in the process. We don’t wait until we get to the kind of humanitarian disaster we’re facing, and we make it clear to leaders of countries that the world community is no longer prepared to stand by and to allow these kinds of atrocities to take place.

Now, obviously we all hoped that we could do this through the United Nations and its Security Council, exercising the responsibility that it has been given under the Charter to deal with threats to international peace and security, and we see important movement in that direction. The Security Council did authorize intervention in Somalia to deal with the humanitarian disaster, it authorized intervention in Haiti where the intervention was to restore a democratic government and to prevent gross violations of human rights by a military clique who seized power in Haiti, and even in the case of Kosovo where, until now, we have not been able to get the Security Council to act because of the different views of Russia and China. The Security Council, nevertheless, did agree that what was happening in Kosovo was a threat to international peace and security and that there was systematic and gross violations of human rights. So that in making the decision that the United States made with its NATO allies, that we would intervene in Kosovo even without the Security Council resolution and were prepared to use military force, if necessary, to carry out that intervention, we did have a Security Council resolution which noted that there was a serious humanitarian disaster in Kosovo. That disaster, because of the danger of refugee outflows and of opening boundary disputes throughout Southeastern Europe, did constitute a threat to international peace and security. It was in that context that the NATO alliance resolved that it was not going to permit on its doorstep, in the heart of Europe, the kind of systematic violation of human rights within countries which is to be sure a legacy of human history--but one that we think must come to an end.

The United States, in making that decision, believed that it had two sets of compelling interests which, taken together, made the case for action very clear. One was simply humanitarian: the fact that we believed, and we think the evidence is very clear, that Mr. Milosevic and those around him had decided that they were going to suppress the movement in Albania for autonomy and the struggle of some for independence by a systematic campaign of terrorism, of rape, of driving people out of their homes and destroying their identities and of killing people and terrorizing them in order to destroy the possibility of Albanians living peacefully in Kosovo and enjoying the autonomy that the international community believes that they are entitled to. That humanitarian danger was very compelling, but coupled with that was the perception that there was also a strategic threat: that if the United States has an interest in a Europe which is free, which is democratic, which is peaceful and in which the ethnic conflicts of the past are made part of the past and not part of the future. We recognized, as did our European allies in NATO, and as did Russia and many other countries in Europe, that what was happening in Kosovo was a threat to the security of the region, that it risked a wider war, that it risked an outpouring of refugees which could not be contained and dealt with by the countries surrounding Serbia. Therefore, we had a strategic interest as well as a security interest which required us to act, to deal with the Kosovo situation. This judgment goes back at least to the closing days of the Bush Administration, when President Bush delivered what is now known as the "December warning" to Mr. Milosevic, in which he said the United States would not permit Serbia to use military force against the Kosovo Albanians and that the United States would respond to any such efforts. So the credibility of American commitments and threats goes back to that very explicit threat made by the Bush Administration in its closing days and reenforced by President Clinton several times since then.

As you know, last October, at the very last minute, the threat of NATO bombing led to an agreement by Mr. Milosevic not to engage in ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and, for the first time, to recognize that the international community had a stake in this by permitting a group of observers to enter Kosovo to try to prevent ethnic violence from taking place. We were confronted some months after that with the breakdown of that agreement, with the clear evidence that Mr. Milosevic had no intention of observing that agreement and that he was going about trying to figure out what level of ethnic cleansing he could get away with without triggering a NATO response--or, as one NATO official put it, "he had concluded that a village a day would keep NATO away." [He believed] that he could do it slowly, in a way that would not trigger a response. And so we were faced then with the massacre that occurred, with the question of what to do, and we reached a very simple conclusion which I think has turned out to be correct. That was that the only thing that would prevent ethnic cleansing in Albania was the withdrawal of Serb forces, the introduction into Kosovo of an effective international military force, and autonomy for the Kosovo Albanians within Kosovo without affecting the overall boundaries between Serbia and Yugoslavia and the rest of Europe.

We reached that conclusion, not out of some desire--as some believe--to get American businesses into Kosovo. I can assure you there are no American business firms eager and anxious to go into Kosovo, nor, as the Russians seem to be fearing, or at least some of them, that this was a clever plot to get American troops into Southeastern Europe. I can assure you there is no one in the Pentagon who wants to put American troops into Southeastern Europe. We will do it because we have to, but we certainly have no secret desire to do so. Now that we’ve concluded that, given Mr. Milosevic’s determination to engage in ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, the only thing that would stop that were these three conditions: the Serbs out, an effective military force in, and autonomy for the Kosovo Albanians. We have had to add to that, tragically, the right of all the Albanians who were forced out of their country to return. Those have been our conditions from the beginning--they have been nonnegotiable in form, although the details of them obviously required an aberration for the simple reason that we believe, and I think absolutely correctly, that nothing less than that would prevent ethnic cleansing in Albania and we certainly wanted nothing more than that. We did not support, and do not support, independence for Kosovo. We have no desire to have any kind of American occupation of the country. Rather, we were trying to prevent ethnic cleansing and we believe that only those criteria would do it. We were forced into beginning the bombing campaign simply because it was clear that nothing less than that had a chance of stopping this ethnic cleansing.

Now, it is sometimes said, and I suspect some of the people parading outside believe, that the bombing has caused the ethnic cleansing rather than the reverse. The historical record simply does not bear that out. The fact is that the evidence is very clear that Milosevic had decided to engage in this campaign of ethnic cleansing and, indeed, to launch the major offensive which would have driven the Albanians out of Albania and out of their homes prior to the time that the bombing started. Indeed, we were receiving clear reports of the movement of these troops before the bombings began and action on the ground which went ahead of the observer force in Kosovo. An American diplomat named Walker came back to us, and came back to the Norwegians who were the government at the head of the OSCE (Organization for security and Cooperation in Europe) at the present time, and these observers work through the OSCE. Walker came back to us and said very clearly, "The offensive has started. We cannot do anything to stop it as observers here. The only thing we can do is observe. Moreover, it is clear that Milosevic will not honor his obligation not to harm the observers," and he said he believed, "unless he had authority to pull those observers out within 48 hours, their lives would be in grave jeopardy, that he would not be able to get them out and that many of them would be killed as the offensive went forward."

This was a period, as you will recall, when the then-Soviet Prime Minister Mr. Primakov was due to come to the United States. Richard Holbrooke was in Belgrade making a last desperate effort to try to negotiate an end to this conflict and the message that we sent to both of those channels was that the bombing would not start if the offensive stood down. Mr. Milosevic refused to give that assurance even to the Russians or to Holbrooke. So Holbrooke was pulled out of Belgrade, and Mr. Primakov was told that if he did not want to be in the United States when the bombing began he should not come. He turned back and we began the bombing after the offensive was underway. So that when you read in the paper of the number of people who have been forced to flee Kosovo since the bombing started you need to understand that if you’re talking about causality, what you should be reading about is the number of people who were forced to flee Kosovo or flee their homes in Kosovo since the Milosevic offensive started. The bombing started two days after the offensive started, and has not been the cause of the offensive nor has it been the cause of driving anybody out of Albania.

There are many groups in camps in Albania, in Macedonia, who have talked to the refugees, some of whom have come to the United States. Those groups do not hesitate to criticize American opinion. I can assure you that they let us know very clearly when they think we are doing something wrong, which is almost always. They report the same thing that we hear from the refugees, and that is that there are no Kosovo Albanians who believe they were driven out of Kosovo by the American bombing, by the NATO bombing, and there are none who want us to stop it. They all believe that the bombing was the only thing that could possibly bring this to an end. Now, we were told that we needed to stop the bombing in order to get Mr. Milosevic to negotiate with us. One of the difficult things about international affairs is that it is almost never possible to prove something to be false. We have one of those rare situations right now. It is now clear that that assertion, for which there was absolutely no evidence, was false. Mr. Milosevic did negotiate while the bombs were dropping. Not only did he negotiate, but he and the Serb Parliament in the last twenty-four hours have agreed to precisely the plan that was presented to them by the Finnish President and a special envoy of Russia on behalf of NATO for the conditions to stop the bombing. Not only did he not say -- which he never said -- "I will not discuss this while the bombs are falling," he has discussed it, and he and the Serb Parliament agreed to it while the bombs were falling.

Now, I don’t know what the revision of this argument is going to be, but it is very clear that the assertion that we needed to stop the bombing in order to get negotiations underway was simply false. All the evidence, as I say, was in the other direction, namely, that the only thing that would get Milosevic to agree to these conditions was understanding that the bombing would continue until he agreed. He has now done so, and while we are waiting to see whether he will now carry out the agreement, talks are beginning between his military and the NATO military about the precise details of the withdrawal. We will know in a few days whether he is serious. After that it will not be a question of trusting him, because if the Serb forces all evacuate, which they have now agreed to, all the forces out, and if an effective military force with NATO as its core moves in, we will no longer be dependent on Mr. Milosevic’s word. His control over Kosovo will have ended, the UN will be in charge of Kosovo, that will be enforced by an effective military force, and we will be able to move from there to bring the refugees back, to reestablish autonomy in Kosovo, and to proceed from there.

Now, where we are proceeding from there is, I think, important to understand. We are not suggesting that there’s going to be a quick exit. One of the phrases you have not heard, when I talk about Kosovo, is an exit strategy. Rather, what the President has said very clearly, what the Secretary of State has said very clearly, is that we are there for a long time with our NATO allies, with the other countries of Europe, including, we hope, the Russians, to rebuild Southeastern Europe and to try to turn Southeastern Europe into a zone of peace and prosperity, but also most important, into being like the rest of Europe, with the boundaries that become things that people pass through with almost no difficulty rather than things that people fight over.

We were told that this cannot happen in the Balkans, just as we were told fifty years ago that this could not happen in Western Europe. The two things we know are that it is not going to be easy and we know it is going to take a long time. But we think it is in our interest and in the interests of our NATO allies to stay there until that is done, until we have, in fact, the prospect which we believe has been reached, of a Europe which is whole and free, democratic and prosperous and in which ethnic hatreds and ethnic tensions have been put behind us. That is the goal and intention of our policies; I believe it is a goal that is worthy of your support.

Thank you.