What made NATO's intervention in Kosovo so controversial was that it was launched and justified, for reasons that will be discussed shortly, without recourse to existing legal instruments. There was no Chapter VII authorization or attempt to use the Genocide Convention. Thus, in attacking a sovereign state, NATO members clearly violated Article 2(4) of the UN Charter. For many observers, particularly in the developing world, such actions stirred unpleasant memories of an earlier period when colonial powers intervened with impunity under similar pretexts to preserve order and save lives albeit those of their citizens. For others, the specter of various cold war "interventions" came to mind. More generally, many interpreted NATO's intervention as just the latest in a general campaign by Western nations to impose their values―forcibly if necessary―on the rest of the world.20 A special UN General Assembly debate held afterwards on the question of humanitarian intervention largely confirmed the prevalence of such beliefs among the so call G-88 countries.
The second source of contention derived from the first in that NATO essentially usurped the supremacy of the UN Security Council to authorize the use of force for anything other than national or collective self defense. Under Article 51(1) of the Charter, the Security Council is explicitly invested with such exclusive rights. While the Charter concedes that regional arrangements and agencies can be utilized to carry out such missions, it states unequivocally that "no enforcement action shall be taken under regional arrangements or by regional agencies without the authorization of the Security Council… "As is widely known, NATO deliberately avoided seeking a formal UN Security Council mandate on the grounds that it knew this would be vetoed by Russia with China's support. It calculated, therefore, that it was better to proceed without such authorization than to continue in the face of outright opposition by two permanent members of the Security Council.21
While this calculation was considered by many within NATO to be morally justified if not legally defensible, it was nevertheless widely condemned, particularly in many non-western countries, for setting a dangerous precedent22 As Jeffrey Laurenti argued subsequently, the "abandonment of the Security Council's asserted monopoly on determining the lawful use of force against others, except in self defense, could put the world community on a slippery slope of competing claims of "rights" to intervene―with the potential consequence of escalating hostilities rather than resolving them… Some warn that such fragmentation of lawful authority on the use of force could prompt the emergence of counter―alliances among those fearful of high-handed interventionism by an overweening Western alliance. If the U.N. has too many inhibitions about the use of force, these worry, NATO under U.S. pressure may have too few."23
The third, somewhat contradictory, source of friction that surfaced during the Kosovo conflict stems from the conviction also held in many non-western countries that only when the West's vital geo-strategic interests are threatened will it intervene for humanitarian purposes. Thus, many saw NATO's actions in Kosovo being motivated as much by concern over the continued vitality of the Alliance than with the fate of the Kosovar Albanians. Others saw evidence of a race-based hypocrisy in what NATO did. In essence, despite paying lip service to universal values, the leading western members of the international community have expanded the license to intervene for really only self serving purposes.24
