2. Implicit UN Authorization
By contrast, NATO leaders argued that military action outside the UN framework was not their preferred option of choice. Rather, NATO's resort to force was a critical comment on the institutional hurdles to effective and timely action by the United Nations. The lacuna in the architecture of the security management of world order that was starkly highlighted by the NATO bombing needs to be filled. While NATO action was not explicitly authorized by the UN, it was an implicit evolution from UN resolutions, and certainly not prohibited by any UN resolution.
NATO's campaign against Serbia took place in the context of a history of defiance of UN resolutions by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. Over the years, the Security Council had become increasingly more specific in focusing on human rights violations by the Milosevic regime, not by both sides; and increasingly coercive in the use of language threatening unspecified response by the international community. The Russian and Chinese draft resolution of March 1999 condemning NATO action received the support of only one other member of the Security Council, Namibia; the remaining 12 members voted against it. Moreover, the Security Council had relied progressively on NATO as its enforcement arm in the Balkans over the 1990S. Its actions in Kosovo were thus a logical extension and evolution of a role already sanctified by the Security Council.
3. The Milosevic Challenge to UN Ideals
A third response is that Serbian atrocities in Kosovo challenged some of the cherished basic values of the United Nations. Its Charter contains an inherent tension between the principles of state sovereignty, with the corollary of non-intervention, and the principles of human rights, with its corollary of international concern. In the first four decades, state sovereignty was privileged almost absolutely over human rights, with the one significant exception of apartheid in South Africa. The balance tilted a little in the 1990s and is more delicately poised between the two competing principles at the start of the new millennium. The days when a tyrant could shelter behind the norm of non-intervention from the outside in order to use maximum brutal force inside territorial borders are past. Political frontiers have become less salient both for intervening organizations, whose rights can extend beyond borders, and for target states, whose responsibilities within borders can be held to international scrutiny. The indictment of Milosevic as a war criminal, as well as the arrest of former Chilean President Augusto Pinochet while on a visit to Britain, shows the inexorable shift from the culture of impunity of yesteryears to a culture of accountability at the dawn of the twenty-first century.
The UN Charter is a dynamic compromise between state interests and human rights. Had Milosevic been allowed to get away with his murderous campaign of ethnic cleansing, the net result would have been a fundamental erosion of the idealistic base on which the UN structure rests. NATO action was not a regression to old-style balance-of-power politics, but a progression to new-age community of power. After all, in values, orientation, and financial contributions, some of the NATO countries, for example Canada and the northern Europeans, represent the best UN citizen-states.
Interestingly enough, support for this line of argument can be found in the UN's official report, published after the Kosovo War ended, on the fall of Srebrenica in 1995. Acknowledging at least partial responsibility for the tragedy, the report in effect concludes that the UN peacekeeping philosophy of neutrality and non-violence were unsuited to the conflict in Bosnia where there was a systematic attempt to terrorize, expel or murder an entire people in a deliberate campaign of ethnic cleansing.
