NATO Bombs Yugoslavia to Halt Kosovo’s Ethnic Cleansing, Clinton Is Acquitted in His Senate Impeachment Trial and Hundreds of Thousands of Albanians Flee Into Macedonia and Albania

Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review | Published 3 April 1999 | Reporting Period: 3 January – 2 April 1999

Quarterly Briefing

• NATO launches its first combat operation in its 50-year history on March 24, beginning an air campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to halt Serbian ethnic cleansing of Kosovo’s Albanian population; the campaign, which has been in progress for ten days as this edition is published, follows the collapse of peace negotiations at Rambouillet on March 23; Serbian security forces accelerate their expulsion of Albanians from Kosovo as the bombing begins; hundreds of thousands of refugees are streaming into Albania and Macedonia; the humanitarian crisis is the worst in Europe since the Bosnian War.
• The United States Senate acquits President Bill Clinton on both articles of impeachment on February 12, ending a political crisis that had consumed Washington since December 1998; Clinton is found not guilty of perjury (45-55) and obstruction of justice (50-50), both short of the two-thirds majority required for conviction; Clinton remains in office; the episode is the second presidential impeachment trial in US history and the first since Andrew Johnson in 1868; the affair’s legacy is a bitterly divided political culture and a presidency that has lost the domestic authority needed to pursue major legislation in its final two years.
• Kosovo’s crisis had been building throughout 1998; the massacre of 45 Albanians at Racak on January 15, 1999 by Serbian security forces is the final catalyst for international intervention; the Contact Group convenes emergency talks at Rambouillet, France in February; the conference’s failure to produce agreement — the Serb delegation refuses to sign an implementation annex requiring NATO access to all of Yugoslavia, not just Kosovo — leads directly to the bombing campaign; the US and its allies determine that diplomatic options are exhausted.
• The Kosovo refugee crisis is accelerating with the bombing campaign; Serbian forces are conducting systematic operations to empty Kosovo of its Albanian population; villages are being burned; civilians are being driven onto roads toward the Macedonian and Albanian borders; the UNHCR estimates that 300,000 people have been displaced within Kosovo and a further 100,000 have crossed international borders as this edition is published; the scale of the displacement is the largest in Europe since the Second World War’s mass population movements.
• The euro is launched as the world’s new common currency for eleven European Union member states on January 1, 1999; the euro exists initially as a financial currency for electronic transactions; euro notes and coins will not enter circulation until 2002; the launch, a historic step in European integration, creates the world’s largest single currency area; the Caribbean’s significant economic ties to European markets — through the Lomé Convention, tourism and diaspora remittances — make the euro’s launch of direct relevance to the region.
• The Caribbean closes the first quarter of 1999 with a cautious economic outlook; the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, which had suppressed global commodity prices and tourist flows from Japan and other Asian markets, is abating; Jamaica’s FINSAC financial sector restructuring following the 1995-97 banking crisis is ongoing; the US economy’s continued strong performance provides the foundation for Caribbean tourism and remittance flows; but the Kosovo conflict’s implications for European stability and global energy markets are being monitored closely.

Prologue: The Alliance Acts

NATO’s decision to bomb Yugoslavia was the most consequential act of collective Western security policy since the end of the Cold War. It was made without a UN Security Council resolution — because Russia and China would have vetoed one — on the basis of a humanitarian emergency that NATO governments judged sufficient to override the normal requirement of Security Council authorisation for the use of force. The legal debate that surrounds the campaign will not be resolved quickly; the practical debate about whether the bombing is achieving its stated objective of halting the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo is even less resolved as the first week of strikes shows Serbian forces not deterred but accelerated in their expulsion of the Albanian population.

Kosovo’s Refugees and the Caribbean’s Perspective

The images of Albanian Kosovars walking in columns along mountain roads toward Macedonia and Albania’s borders — hundreds of thousands of people expelled from their homes by organised state violence — were the defining images of the quarter. For the Caribbean, the Kosovo crisis raised questions that resonated with the region’s own historical experience of displacement and the use of international systems to protect the vulnerable. The 1994 US intervention in Haiti, which had restored the elected government under threat of military force, had been a model of US-led action in the Caribbean’s neighbourhood; Kosovo was a demonstration of a similar logic applied to Europe’s neighbourhood, with the additional complexity of bombing a European country for the first time since 1945.

The euro’s January 1 launch offered a different kind of European story: the peaceful integration of eleven national economies into a single monetary system was, regardless of its eventual fate, an extraordinary political achievement. For Caribbean states whose exports to Europe were governed by the Lomé Convention and whose tourists arrived primarily in British pounds, French francs and German marks, the euro’s introduction created both uncertainty and potential simplification in their European economic relationships. The process of recalibrating trade agreements and financial contracts to the euro was just beginning.

Looking Ahead

The Kosovo bombing campaign has no declared end point; NATO’s stated objective is to compel Milosevic to accept an international presence in Kosovo and cease the ethnic cleansing; whether bombing will achieve this, and on what timetable, is entirely uncertain as this edition is published. The refugee crisis is growing by the day; regional stability in the southern Balkans — Macedonia, Albania, Montenegro — is at risk if the flow is not contained. Clinton’s acquitted presidency has two years remaining; its foreign policy ambitions — Middle East peace, Northern Ireland, Balkans stability — will be pursued but against the backdrop of a White House diminished by the impeachment process. For the Caribbean, the economic outlook remains positive; but the proximity of a European war to the international travel market that sustains Caribbean tourism is a concern that no one in the industry is dismissing.

Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review is published quarterly, examining how wars, geopolitical tensions and major international crises have shaped Jamaica, the Caribbean and their economies.