Victory of peace

The war over Kosovo has ended. While it was still raging, it was justified primarily in terms of the need to protect ethnic Albanians from egregious human rights abuses by the Milosevic regime. In a speech titled "Kosovo and the End of the Nation-State," President Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic put the justification eloquently: "This is probably the first war that has not been waged in the name of 'national interests,' but rather in the name of principles and values. . . . The alliance has acted out of respect for human rights as both conscience and international legal documents dictate. This is an important precedent for the future."

Havel's deserved reputation as public moral conscience of the West notwithstanding, one can plausibly argue that international legal documents prohibited the intervention more than they dictated it (it did not have a UN mandate), and that the alliance acted less for ethical reasons than out of strategic interests (warnings that an intervention would ensue if Milosevic overplayed his hand in Kosovo were issued already in 1992 as atrocities were being committed in Croatia and Bosnia, but NATO had no intention of intervening). And looking at the result, one may well question the wisdom of making the NATO intervention a precedent for the future.

The reasons for the intervention be as they may, in the political rhetoric of NATO countries, appeals to human rights abounded. They were employed because they are good for fighting. Now that the war is over and the animosities between the ethnic Albanians and Serbs have reached almost unsurpassable heights, we need more than appeals to human rights. We need a vision of reconciliation. Whether as a single political entity or not, ethnic Albanians and Serbs will continue to live as neighbors. Without a vision of reconciliation they will be able neither to start nor to sustain a sorely needed but laborious process of social healing.