From Kosovo to Conflict?

At the end of April, four European countries agreed on the formation of a joint military structure. Did NATO’s successful intervention in Kosovo lay the seeds for a challenger to its position?

by Paul Kieffer

Just prior to the 50-year anniversary of NATO, the alliance embarked on the first real military intervention in its history in March 1999 by conducting a six-week bombing campaign of Serbian military units and the infrastructure in Kosovo and Serbia. The ultimately successful drive to halt the harassment and resulting deportation of ethnic Albanians in the province of Kosovo seemed to justify NATO’s continued existence nearly a decade after the collapse of the Soviet system.

Germany’s military contribution

Among the member nations contributing aircraft, personnel and air bases for the joint effort was Germany. NATO’s intervention in Kosovo was a historic event for the German people, moving well beyond previous peacekeeping missions (German soldiers had come under fire once in 1993 during their United Nations assignment in Somalia). In Kosovo, German military units were involved in an armed conflict for the first time since World War II. With its all-weather deployment capability, Germany’s squadron of Tornado aircraft proved itself on numerous missions over Kosovo and Serbia.
For Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and his foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, Germany’s involvement in the military effort to coerce Serbia’s Slobodan Milosovic to the negotiating table was quite a domestic political challenge. Germany’s post-war constitution requires parliamentary approval for German armed forces to be used internationally. Pacifist elements in Schroeder’s Social Democratic party and in Fischer’s Green party threatened to veto the Bundeswehr’s participation in the NATO intervention. Emphasizing his country’s responsibility within the international community, Chancellor Schroeder got the needed majority support to allow his country’s military contribution to the NATO effort

Even with European participation, the NATO strike force comprising hundreds of aircraft was quite a lopsided alliance in favor of America. At one point during the six-week air campaign, Gerhard Schroeder complained about America’s lack of willingness to share its satellite intelligence with its NATO allies on the positioning of Serbian forces and the impact the bombing was having on them. Requests and complaints were of little use, however, as Schroeder himself admitted to his aides, since the United States was supplying more then 90 percent of the military hardware and personnel for the joint effort

Read the full article at www.wnponline.org/wnp/wnp0306/kosovoconflict.htm

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