After three weeks of NATO's bombing campaign against Serbia the bones of a possible diplomatic initiative to resolve the Kosovo crisis are at last coming seriously into play. The constructive initiative proposed by European Union leaders at their informal summit yesterday in Brussels is to be welcomed for the central role assigned to the EU, the United Nations and Russia. The catastrophic condition of the Kosovar refugees brutally expelled from their homes is a standing and graphic reminder of the necessity to find a means of resolving the conflict that does them justice.
NATO's air campaign was launched on its own initiative precisely because of the diplomatic impossibility of securing UN approval for military action to implement the Rambouillet accords and to secure the human rights and humanitarian needs of the Kosovars. The bombing campaign is politically justified as a means of forcing Serbia back to the negotiating table only insofar as diplomacy is taken equally seriously.
There is much room for discussion about the timing and substance of diplomatic plans to resolve the conflict, as well as about the miscalculations of NATO's air campaign and overall military strategy. The United States and Britain believe it is premature to call off the bombing campaign before it has achieved its primary military objectives of degrading the Serbian armed forces and infrastructure and effecting their withdrawal from Kosovo.
But there is a legitimate question of whether this can be done by air power alone, without the commitment of ground troops; if they are committed there is the further question of whether a prolonged and escalating war is the most sustainable means to resolve the conflict. Events such as the presumably mistaken NATO attacks on a train and on a refugee convoy show up the tragic shortcomings of restricting military strategy to air power alone.
There is in fact precious little evidence of a political or popular willingness in NATO to contemplate a prolonged military conflict, especially since diplomacy has still been so inadequately tried. The EU initiative, based on a German plan, contains an intelligent means of mobilising political and diplomatic will to deal justly with the Kosovo question.
Return of the refugees is a central condition of the initiative, which will be presented to the UN Security Council in the form of a resolution seeking a mandate for an international force under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. The UN Secretary General, Mr Kofi Annan, who attended yesterday's Brussels EU summit is given a vital role in brokering Russian involvement in the diplomatic and security endgame. The EU offers to act as an administrator of Kosovo ahead of elections; on a wider front the proposed stability agreement to include the Balkan countries in the EU and NATO in the long term opens up a valuable means of incorporating them in European political, economic and security structures.
Such a vision is an essential means of resolving the Kosovo crisis and heading off a disastrous drift to a larger European war. Military means have a real and undoubted role to play, however unsatisfactory NATO's legal mandate, as a result of transition from pure national sovereignty to more cosmopolitan and human rights-based norms of intervention. The Kosovo crisis throws up the necessity of making that transition by developing the mandate and capacity both of the EU and the UN, as well as by striving for an inclusive diplomacy on Kosovo that locks Russia into finding a solution.