The Kosovo War 20 Years Later: A Prototype for US-led Proxy Wars

We were told that the US-led NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999 was undertaken to defend Kosovar Albanians from Serbian “ethnic cleansing.” This was a lie. The war was, in fact, a prototype for the US-led wars in Libya and Syria. This article is adapted from the book, Union Jackboot (with Matthew Alford).

The months of March to June mark the 20th anniversary of the US-led bombing of Serbia in 1999. Before the NATO bombing, Western politicians and media claimed that the Serbs were “ethnically cleansing” thousands of Kosovar Albanians. The reality was very different. Western leaders and media also told us that bombing Serbia was a “humanitarian intervention.” The evidence shows that the pretext of “humanitarian intervention” became a template, used 12 years later in Libya when the same powers wanted to overthrow Col. Gaddafi. In addition to the “humanitarian” cover, another template was set: the training, arming, and organising of proxies to provoke counterattacks from regimes that the US and its allies want to depose. This also played out more recently in both Libya and Syria, when Western forces trained jihadis in both countries.

Consider the case of Kosovo, which was then part of Serbia.

From circa 1996, the British and Americans secretly trained and organised the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) to serve as their proxy force. The public relations firm Ruder Finn was hired to give the KLA a positive spin and make it look like a legitimate independence movement. The KLA did not represent the wishes of most Kosovar Albanians at that time. Quite the opposite. The book Deterring Terrorism (2019) notes that the leaders of the KLA planned to attack Serb government and even civilian targets to provoke a response and then use any counterattacks to build support for their cause from the US and UK; or “international community” as it’s called in Western media propaganda.

Like Libya in 2011, the UN Security Council never authorised the use of force in Serbia-Kosovo and never authorised a NATO presence. The British Special Air Service (SAS) began operating in Serbia in late-1998. This was followed by the Račak massacre, in which 45 Kosovar Albanians were murdered. The massacre was blamed on the Serbs. Rumours of large-scale “ethnic cleansing” circulated. It’s true that there were disappearances. Bodies believed to be of Kosovar Albanians were discovered over ten years later, but there is no evidence that a pre-NATO bombing “ethnic cleansing” (i.e., large-scale efforts to remove Kosovar Albanians from Serbia) took place.

Despite the claims from media and politicians, the British House of Commons Library says that until March 1999, when the NATO bombing started, approximately 2,000 people on both sides -- Serbs and Kosovar Albanians -- had been killed in the civil war. NATO later confirmed that before its bombing in March 1999, 1,500 Kosovar Albanians had died. Neither of these sources confirm tens- or even hundreds of thousands killed, as claimed by Western leaders and media.

The reason real for NATO’s destruction of Serbia and its aiding of largely unwanted Kosovar independence had nothing to do with “humanitarian intervention.” Kosovo is a key region in what strategists like President Jimmy Carter’s former National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, called the “game” for world domination (see his book, The Grand Chessboard). As proof, the US built a permanent military base -- one of the biggest in the world, Camp Bondsteel -- right on the intersection of the oil and gas pipelines that go through Kosovo. (As an aside, the British Army nurse, Col. Alison McCourt, who just happened to be one of the first witnesses to the alleged poisonings of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in the UK in 2018, had previously served at the US-British hospital in Camp Bondsteel.)

Ten years after the NATO bombing of Serbia, then-NATO Secretary-General, Jaap de Hoop Schefer, told a conference that “the present strategic concept of NATO, of dating back, as you know, to 1999,” i.e., the same year as the bombing of Serbia, “is already talking about the free flow of energy. So you cannot possibly state and argue that this is a subject alien to NATO … Let’s be glad that the gas is flowing again.”

So much for “humanitarian intervention.” Consider the re-run in Libya in 2010-11.

In October 2010, Britain’s MI6 began training anti-Gaddafi jihadis at “farms” in Libya. (A fellow “farmer” said in March 2011 that agent “Tom Smith” had been present for five months, meaning since at least October 2010.) In February 2011, when the peaceful, pro-democracy Arab Spring began, these violent, British-backed jihadis hijacked the demonstrations. Having been trained by the SAS when Libya was an ally, Gaddafi’s forces killed Arab Spring protestors and jihadis alike. The British media and political establishment followed the Kosovo template: having armed, trained, and organised a proxy militia in secret to fight an enemy, they then claimed that an “ethnic cleansing” was about to take place; in this case of Arabs based in Benghazi, a historical centre of anti-Gaddafi jihadism. A British government inquiry later admitted that this was “not informed by accurate intelligence.”

Consider the template in Syria. As early as November 2011, US, British and French Special Forces were reportedly training the anti-Assad Free Syrian Army, as diplomats like then-British Foreign Minister Alistair Burt, hosted meetings to help turn the related Syrian National Council into a “legitimate” political party. Just as they had in Serbia and Libya, Western media and politicians concealed their involvement in working with violent militias and instead focused only on Bashir al-Assad’s counterattacks.

The US General Joseph W. Ralston said that 1,500 Serbs had been killed by the NATO bombing. The Red Cross reported that nearly 300,000 cluster bomblets had been dropped; these are de facto landmines that lay in wait for years and blow the legs of Serb and Kosovar children who step on them. NATO also bombed an oil refinery at Pančevo, contaminating water and soil. In Libya, NATO and its on-the-ground proxies killed 30,000 people and triggered a refugee crisis. In Syria today, $200bn of damage has been wrought on the country and nearly half a million people have been killed.

In Kosovo, “humanitarian intervention” turned out to be a tragic template for imperial wars by proxy. Where the US succeeded in Kosovo and Libya, they failed in Syria; so far, at least…

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