Kosovo: Convenient Humanitarian War? – Maja Wilbrink

Kosovo: Convenient Humanitarian War?

MAYA WILBRINK

‘This is probably the first war ever fought that is not being fought in the name of interests, but in the name of principles and values...[a war] fought for ethical reasons.’1 Referring to NATO’s 1999 Operation Allied Force in Kosovo, Czech Prime Minister Vaclav Havel nobly declared the ‘first ever ethical war’.2

Havel’s words served to frame NATO’s mission in Kosovo as humanitarian intervention, with the righteous purpose of saving the Kosovars Albanian and preventing genocide.

In global politics, military humanitarian intervention is legally mandated by chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, which permits its use in response to threats to peace, if approved by the Security Council.3 Indeed, given President Milosevic’s regime’s oppressive treatment of the Kosovar Albanians and the real threat of genocide, the situation in Kosovo certainly was a threat to peace that warranted response. However, despite the legitimate humanitarian justification, the morality of the execution of the intervention remains contentious. By choosing airstrikes as the means of intervention, NATO chose the most convenient option for themselves. Whilst ensuring the safety of ally lives, the airstrikes increased the immediate danger for the Kosovars by hastening Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing.

Philosopher Judith Butler’s understanding of frames as constructions of social political reality provides a means to process the moral hypocrisy evident between NATO’s humanitarian justification and the execution of the airstrike campaign. In Frames of War, Butler posits that these frames may be broken or exposed at any time if reality no longer aligns with the frame’s

1 Václav Havel, NATO, Europe, and the Security of Democracy: Václav Havel - Selected speeches, articles, and interviews 1990 – 2002, ed. by Luboš Dobrovský (Prague: Theo Publishing Pardubice, 2002), 96. 2

Ibid

3 United Nations, Charter of the United Nations (1945), 9-11.

representation of events.4 A pertinent question follows: can NATO’s framing of their actions in Kosovo as humanitarian co-exist with the convenient use of airstrikes?

The answer remains ambiguous. Here, I will argue that NATO’s intentions for intervening were genuinely humanitarian, as the NATO leaders framed, and their actions did indeed somewhat contribute to ending the Kosovo conflict. However, the actual execution of the intervention through airstrikes revealed the implicit differential assigning of unrecognisability to the Kosovar Albanian’s, thereby undermining the moral premise of ‘humanitarian intervention’. As the humanitarian frame could no longer be reasonably applied to the moral hypocrisy evident in the execution of the intervention, NATO’s frame was broken in Butlerian terms. Extending the case of Kosovo more broadly, the labelling of NATO’s actions as humanitarian intervention highlights a gap in the current understanding of the moral criterion of humanitarian intervention. As Political Theorist Michael Walzer argues, intervention does not currently require a classification of equal recognition between the lives of the intervening party and those they are purporting to save, nor does it qualify the means by which the intervention should take place.5 This gap has created dangerous loopholes for intervention only when it is ‘convenient,’ which seriously bankrupts the morality of humanitarian intervention.

Creating the Humanitarian Frame: How and Why

Operation Allied Force was framed by NATO as a humanitarian intervention, with the purpose of saving theKosovar Albanians and preventing genocidal catastrophe. An interpretative frame is defined by philosopher Judith Butler as a means to construct a social-political perceptual reality.6 The humanitarian frame was constructed by NATO through repeated emphasis on the unfolding conditions within Kosovo, and the violent consequences of non-intervention. The conditions created a moral imperative according to leaders of the NATO

4 5

6 Judith Butler, Frames of War – When is Life Grievable? (NY: Verso, 2009), 23. Michael Walzer, Arguing about War (Yale: Yale University Press, 2004) 100. Butler, 8.

force, including the Prime Minister of the Czech Republic Vaclav Havel. In a speech, Havel justified NATO’s decision ‘because decent people cannot sit back and watch systemic, state directed massacres of other people.’7 With similar righteousness, on March 24, 1999, the day the strikes began, US President Bill Clinton explicitly presented the rationale for the airstrikes: ‘Our mission is clear…to deter an even bloodier offensive against innocent civilians in Kosovo; and, if necessary, to seriously damage the Serbian military’s capacity to harm the people of Kosovo.’8 Here, protecting the Albanian Kosovars is directly referenced by Clinton as the driving force behind the intervention. A month later, when it appeared that the bombing was not succeeding in its goal, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair reiterated the importance of the mission, going as far as to draw parallels between Serbian President Milosevic and Hitler.9 The rhetoric surrounding NATO’s actions served to create an interpretative frame of morally justified military humanitarian intervention. Yet, how exactly was this humanitarian frame created, a frame which warranted saving the Albanian lives in the first place? According to Butler, we grieve lives a priori, meaning the knowledge is inherent and independent of experience, and in order to grant lives grievable status, we must first register them within our domain of apprehension.10 The distinction between these terms is clarified by Butler: ‘apprehension is less precise than recognition… apprehension can imply marking, registering and acknowledging without full cognition.’11 Examining NATO’s actions as a function of Judith Butler’s grievability framework, the decision to intervene to protect the Albanians prosecuted by Milosevic’s regime, as opposed to non-intervention displayed in similar cases, demonstrates that the people in Kosovo were indeed apprehended and even framed as ‘grievable’ by NATO. However, despite the grievable status granted to the Kosovar Albanians, the means of

7

Havel, 97. 8 Charles Babbington, ‘Clinton: Containing Milosevic is Goal’, Washington Post Archives (1999) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/march99/clinton25.htm?noredirect=on [accessed 4 November 2018]. 9

Tony Blair, ‘A New Generation Draws the Line’, Newsweek (1999).

10 11 Butler, 7. Butler, 6–12.

implementation of the intervention through airstrikes demonstrates their inherent lesser value in the eyes of NATO. Returning to Butler’s grievability framework to understand this hierarchy, she explains a life must first be apprehended before it can be given grievable status, as this then allows it to be recognised.12 Not all acts of knowing are acts of recognition, because a life has to conform to a certain notion of what constitutes a recognisable life. NATO’s refusal to commit ground troops and reliance on airstrikes as a means to avoid risking ally lives exemplifies the differential aspect of the grievability framework, in which different values are assigned to lives based on their group membership. The use of airstrikes demonstrated that the Kosovar Albanians were not recognised, and instead were seen as less grievable compared to the lives of NATO armies. Although the Albanians in Kosovo were grievable to the extent that intervention became justified, their lives were viewed as expendable enough to risk the apparent ‘greater good’ of ending the conflict.

Breaking the Humanitarian Frame

This differential grievability creates a moral contradiction in the humanitarian justification of the intervention and its execution. The eleven-week military airstrike campaign conducted by NATO provided Milosevic with the pretext to accelerate and intensify his ethnic cleansing campaign, as the majority of the atrocities against the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo occurred after air warfare commenced. The worsening state of affairs was even recognised by the Clinton administration itself, with an official acknowledgment in days following the first airstrikes that the situation had taken ‘a dramatic and serious turn for the worse.’13 Despite the violence unfolding on the ground, NATO continued airstrikes and refused to consider ground troops, which not only reduced their effectiveness in halting Serb aggression, but also increased the collateral damage, including the accidental deaths of innocent Albanians and Serbs.14 This highlights a moral contradiction, as political philosopher Michael Walzer

12 Ibid, 12.

13 Daniel Williams, ‘Brutal Conditions Enveloping Kosovo’, Washington Post Foreign Service, 26 March 1999, A01. 14 Adam Roberts, ‘NATO’s “Humanitarian War” over Kosovo’, Survival – Global Politics and Strategy, 41, no. 3 (1999), 102 -23.

aptly asserts in his chapter in Arguing About War: ‘When it is our action that puts innocent people at risk, even if the action is justified, we are bound to do what we can to reduce those risks, even if this involves risks to our own soldiers.’15 To be sure, Walzer iterates that responsibility for the intensified Serbian campaign against Kosovar civilians belongs to the Serbian government and army that committed the atrocities. However, insofar as the intervention did nothing to respond to this violent result, NATO is not absolved of blame.16 Through imposing the risk of death on the people in Kosovo whilst refusing to accept the same for their own soldiers, especially as that acceptance was necessary to help the intervention, NATO’s execution of the campaign demonstrates a moral hypocrisy.

This moral hypocrisy challenges the existence of the humanitarian frame created by NATO, as the frame does not survive independently of reality. Butler qualifies that frames may be broken if the actual socio-political reality can no longer be reasonably sustained.17 Frames that seek to determine what is seen must be reproduced in order to circulate, yet this very need for the frame to exist somewhere else requires a constant breaking from context. As she explains: ‘the frame does not hold anything together in one place, but itself becomes a kind of perpetual breakage, subject to temporal logic by which it moves from place to place.’ Once a frame has been broken, Butler asserts that the previously created reality is challenged, exposing the authority who initially sought to control the frame.18 In the case of Kosovo, NATO’s refusal to commit ground troops served to break the moral force of the humanitarian frame surrounding the intervention, as NATO’s actions could no longer be reasonably viewed as humanitarian. Although the intention behind the airstrikes indeed remained humanitarian, the air campaign exposed the conditional nature of the intervention, which occurred only because it was convenient for the intervening forces.

15

16 17 18 Walzer, 100.

Ibid, 100. Butler, 8. Ibid, 10.

Extending this gap between the justification of Nato’s intervention more generally, the events in Kosovo reveal an inconsistency in the moral criterion of humanitarian intervention. Although the use of airstrikes by NATO is often regarded as having contributed to the eventual peace deal, significant lives were lost in the process that may have been avoided if ground troops were used. The framing of NATO’s actions as humanitarian partially arises from the fact that humanitarian intervention fails to address the appropriate methods of the intervention, instead leaving it dangerously open to interpretation by the intervening party, which will naturally act in its own best interest. Along with failing to require appropriate means, humanitarian intervention does not maintain equal grievability between the intervening forces and those they are purporting to save, which in a real sense corrupts the moral credibility of the word ‘humanitarian,’ as was evident in Kosovo. As Walzer argues, this dangerous inequality between the expendability of lives allows for campaigns that unfairly risk the lives of ordinary citizens. In other words, as Walzer continues, ‘How can we use military force in someone else’s country unless we are prepared to deal with the unintended consequences of our actions?’19 In fact, the internationally adopted framework of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is often described as being developed as a direct answer to the inconsistency of humanitarian intervention. In a report outlining R2P by the creators of the revolutionary framework, Gareth Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun reflect on how there existed ‘no agreed rules for [humanitarian intervention] such as… Kosovo.’20 The authors then cite that ‘great misgivings surrounded the means by which the allies waged the [Kosovo] war.’21 By beginning their report with this context, R2P is set-up as a direct response to the previously acknowledged failures of humanitarian intervention, as exemplified in Kosovo.

Conclusion

NATO’s reluctance to deploy ground forces in defence of the values they claimed to be fighting for reflected a lack of moral courage, which undermined the humanitarian credentials of Operation Allied Force. Although the intention

19 20

21 Walzer, 100. Gareth Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun, ‘The Responsibility to Protect’, Foreign Affairs 81, 2002, 100. Ibid, 101.

behind military action is certainly relevant in judging its legitimacy, the real consequences of said military action must be of the utmost importance.

However, despite R2P’s intent to resolve this inconsistency, perhaps not even a rebranding of the framework will fix the problem, as the issue lies in the unavoidable conflicting political interests of intervening parties. Indeed, it is far easier to theoretically discuss the need for the risking of troops to substantiate claims to the humanitarian high ground. The next question that inevitably arises is perhaps substantially more difficult to contend: whose lives exactly can we risk to save others, especially when the people we are saving are not technically bound by national obligations? The fact remains that we cannot force people to submit their own lives, even if it is for the noble purpose of preventing a humanitarian catastrophe. If we are to hold the moral boundaries so high, with the already murky conceptions of imperfect duty, the danger becomes no one intervening at all. Yet, even with this danger, the moral status of humanitarian intervention, especially considering the convenience of its misuse for political leaders, urges us to not become complacent.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Babbington, Charles, ‘Clinton: Containing Milosevic is Goal’, Washington Post

Archives (1999)

Balanzino, Sergio, ‘NATO’s Humanitarian Support to the Victims of the Kosovo

Crisis’, NATO Review, Summer 1999, p9. Blair, Tony, ‘A New Generation Draws the Line’, Newsweek, April 19, 1999, Vol. 133 Issue 16

Butler, Judith, Frames of War – When is Life Grievable? (NY: Verso, 2009) Evans, Gareth and Sahnoun,Mohamed, ‘The Responsibility to Protect’, Foreign

Affairs 81, 5-23, 2002.

Havel, Vaclav, NATO, Europe, and the Security of Democracy: Václav Havel – Selected

speeches, articles, and interviews 1990 – 2002, (Prague: Theo Publishing Pardubice, 2002)

Roberts, Adam, ‘NATO’s “Humanitarian War” over Kosovo’, Survival – Global

Politics and Strategy, 41, no. 3, 102-123 (1999) United Nations, Charter of the United Nations (1945) Walzer, Michael, Arguing about War (Yale: Yale University Press, 2004) Williams, Daniel, ‘Brutal Conditions Enveloping Kosovo’, Washington Post Foreign

Service, March 26, 1999, A01.

Bodies of Love, Bodies of Hate

LIN YE

The human body has been a powerful focus for many spectacles ranging from public execution hundreds of years ago, to movies and TV programs in the modern era. How does the human body render power to spectacles? In an attempt to answer this question, I will clarify two categories of objectification – deprivation and projection – and argue that objectification of the human body sustains the spectacle. Through deprivation, the spectacle strips away subjectivity, individuality, personality, and complexity from the individual by manipulating and displaying the physical body as the sole focus in the spectacle. The body thus becomes a void container, where the spectators can project their interpretations and imaginations. I will draw examples from painful public executions and pleasurable movies to demonstrate that the deprivation of subjectivity sustains spectacles by engaging the audience with strong sensory stimulus. Applying the logic of Sara Ahmed’s affect theory, I will illustrate that projection of intangible concepts onto the human body sustains spectacles by making them reproducible across time and space. These reproducible and self-sustaining qualities grant spectacles immortality and make them a latent danger in objectifying people.

While some performances grab the attention of the audience by accentuating the physical human body as a sensory stimulus in order to generate an intensive, engaged response among spectators, other spectacles simultaneously ignore the subjectivity of the individual to whom the body belongs. The human figure is merely a body, rather than a person. Public executions in France in the 17th-18th century were a spectacle of atrocity that imposed extreme physical torture on the body of the criminal before taking away his/her life. Since crime constituted an attack on the sovereign (Foucault 47), this torture was enforced by the sovereign to terrify the audience and instill fear (58). By instilling fear through torture, the sovereign restored its absolute, unrestrained power in the minds of the audience (49). The significance of the spectacle is not the torture itself, but the display

of this torture as well as the criminal’s bearing of that torture. In this spectacle, the body was treated as a purely material object to be destroyed. In order to highlight the physical body as the sole focus in the spectacle, the state stripped away subjectivity from the criminal and merely left it as a sensory stimulus. In response to the intense exhibition of the body bearing torture – screams, blood, agony, and death – the activated spectators demanded to engage in the execution. The audience demanded to witness: they complained when they could not see anything and initiated protests when the executioner took the criminal out of their sight at the last moment (58). Furthermore, the spectators participated in the execution by offering verbal insults or even physical attacks to the condemned (59). In part, the reactions of the audience perhaps originated from their disassociation from the criminal – when they did not relate to him/her as a fellow human being, they saw the criminal only as an object open to being manipulated. The objectification of the criminal’s body through deprivation thus sustains the spectacle of public execution by engaging and activating the audience in that moment through an exhibition of pain.

Deprivation of subjectivity from the body appears not only in spectacles of atrocity but also in spectacles of pleasure – for example, movies. In Laura Mulvey’s analysis of the objectification of female figures in movies, she argues that the presence of a female figure is an “indispensable element” which, however, “tends to work against the development of a story line” (11). Rather than existing in relation to the story itself, the female figure exists in relation to the male protagonist instead (7). Movies present the female figure not as an individual with subjectivity in the story but merely as an attractive body, an “erotic object” (11). While the male protagonist takes control and propagates the storyline, the female figure becomes possessed by the male protagonist when she falls in love with him (13). On the one hand, she functions as a key element in building the omnipotence of the charming male protagonist by becoming an object possessed by him. When spectators identify with the male protagonist, they are able to share his omnipotence as well as the possession of the female figure. On the other hand, the presence of the sexualized body of the female figure on the screen satisfies “a primordial wish for pleasurable looking” (9). In order to appeal to spectators by satisfying their desire for

such pleasure, movies highlight the bodily features of the female figure and simultaneously deprive her of subjectivity. Such a seductive, amorous presentation of female body parts in movies shows that the narratives assume a male perspective that spectators are forced to gaze from. While male spectators can engage with movies by identifying with the protagonist, female spectators might internalize the male gaze and use that to evaluate their fellow female figures. Either way, spectators gain pleasurable experience from looking at the spectacle on the screen. Objectification of the female body in movies through deprivation, therefore, offers a pleasurable experience that engages and activates spectators, sustaining the temporal spectacles when the movie is in action.

While spectacles of public executions as well as movies deprive the human bodies of subjectivity and treat them as material objects, the stakeholders in spectacles also objectify the body by projecting abstract concepts onto it. Such a projection turns the body into a symbol. The dynamic relations between a particular body and other bodies as illustrated by Ahmed sheds light on why a symbolic body in a spectacle is replaceable. With an analogy to capital, Ahmed points out that affect circulates among many bodies (45). When we hate a body of the other “who comes to stand for and stand in for, a group of others” (53), what we essentially hate is not this particular body, but what that body represents. Thus, any body can become the object of hate. The affect of hate does not reside in any particular body (44) but rather in the relation between the object and projection of spectators. Therefore, the affect of hate is hard to locate, yet replicable in circulation among all bodies (45), which enables it to generate a magnified effect (49). Similarly, objectification of the human body through projection also enables the affect initiated by the spectacle to circulate and perpetuate itself.

The body of hate can represent not only a group of others that we hate, but also an identity, a feature, or anything abstract that we hate. By projecting abstract concepts onto a particular body, spectators are essentially objectifying this body, turning it into a symbol for what they think the body represents or should represent. Through symbolization, the criminal’s body in French public executions transcended into a mere material being and became

an object of hate that needed to be destroyed for what it represented. For the sovereign, the body represented a threat to the absolute authority of the prince whose destruction was necessary to restore power. For the audience of executions, the body represented evil and guilt, whose destruction was necessary to restore justice. Either way, the criminal’s body on the scaffold no longer simply belonged to himself/herself. Rather, the body was transformed into a symbol onto which spectators or creators of spectacles projected their interpretations. What the state or the public essentially hated was not the body of any particular criminal, but the abstract concepts represented by the body: threat, crime, and guilt, among others. Therefore, the body on the scaffold could be anyone’s, and the same affects would be achieved. As long as spectators can make a link between a body and what they hate, the affect of hate can always be replicated. Different from deprivation of subject, which sustains a particular spectacle at one point, objectification through projection renders spectacle as some form of circulating “immortality” - the affect of which can be reinvigorated regardless of time and space.

Ahmed’s argument can apply to an even broader context of affects other than hate. As shown in public executions, the circulation of affect illustrated by Ahmed applies when the human bodies are objects of hate. But what about the bodies that are objects of love, or objects of desire? In contrast to the object of hate which needs to be destroyed, the object of love induces spectators’ desire to possess. The female figure in movies is such an object that bears love. As discussed previously, narratives of movies highlight the female figure as an attractive body from a male perspective. When spectators are forced to adopt this male perspective, the female body represents beauty and pleasure which spectators should love. While the male protagonist possesses the female figure, spectators would also possess the female figure by identifying with the male protagonist and thus sharing his power (Ahmed 13). However, what they essentially love gazing at is not any particular body itself but the beauty that body represents. What the spectators essentially love and find pleasure in is not the possession of this particular body, but the possession of such beauty which can be represented by any bodies. The female body here is a symbol that grants abstract beauty a concrete form for the spectators to perceive. Some might disagree that “any bodies” can become such a symbol since some bodies

are more attractive to some people than others. However, the statement does not hinder the idea of a replaceable symbol. What makes some bodies more attractive than others is not any intrinsic features of the body itself, but variable standards for beauty. No matter which set of beauty standards anyone adheres to, any suitable body can become a symbol that embodies beauty. No matter to whom that particular body belongs, the affect of love induced by the female figure can be reproduced at any time as long as spectators project pleasure and desire onto the body. Thus, objectification through projection sustains the spectacles in a longer time span since it allows not only hate but also love, as well as other potential affects, to be reinvigorated.

Both processes of deprivation and projection in the objectification of the human body contribute to sustaining the spectacle. The former is effective during temporary spectacles by engaging the audience, while the latter maintains the affect of spectacles beyond any particular spectacles. Objectification through deprivation of subjectivity highlights a particular feature of interest, no matter if it is atrocity and agony, or beauty and pleasure. Thus, it directs the acute focus of spectators onto the physical body and grasps the attention of spectators to induce an intensive affect in the audience. Objectification through projection enables circulation of affects since these affects do not reside in a particular body but in the relationship between a body and what the audience projects onto it. The affects come into concrete being by borrowing the bodies. Therefore, the elimination of any particular body would not eliminate the affect. A spectacle can always be reinvigorated, awakened from hibernation.

However, as impressive as the effect of objectification on spectacles is, we should be cautious about its potentially dangerous implications. On the one hand, no matter if it is deprivation or projection, objectification is essentially a dehumanizing process where the subjectivity as well as complexity of an individual is ignored and stripped off. Though the deprivation process is easy to detect, the projection process easily happens unconsciously even in daily life. In that case, what we perceive is not a person himself/herself, but an oversimplified understanding of him/her. On the other hand, the sustaining effect of objectification can get out of control when the affect starts circulating

and accumulating among spectators. Spectators might be actively engaged not because of the spectacle itself, but because of what they project onto the body of focus, which they can relate to. Eventually, spectators see what they want to see in the spectacle rather than the spectacle itself. This may lead to loss of truth in the spread of the affect and further violence or infatuation directed at the body of focus. In cyber-violence, spectators quickly join in insulting and attacking the person of attention before they confirm the truth. Though the scaffold of public executions no longer exists, the internet could potentially become another scaffold. Other than violence, a blind infatuation for a public figure could give an individual excessive power to instigate the masses and manipulate society.

Sometimes what we create endures longer than we ourselves do. Displaying mortal bodies and making temporal connections between these bodies to an abstract concept, spectators can eventually create “immortal” spectacles. Any particular spectators or creators will perish, but spectators and creators never perish. Any particular spectacle will end, but spectacles themselves never end. We are all part of these immortal spectacles – as spectators or as performers – and there is no exit.

WORKS CITED

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage

Books, 1975.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, 1975, pp. 6–18. Ahmed, Sara. “The Organisation of Hate.” The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 2nd ed., Edinburgh University Press, 2014, pp. 42-61.

Essay 3

Technology has undoubtedly permeated all aspects of our daily life; traditional celebrations have not been spared. This animated image captured at the Onam Harvest Festival in Mussafah, Abu Dhabi foreshadows the harmonious relationship expected between religion, tradition and technology in our distant future. Moreover, it exemplifies the plurality of the United Arab Emirates seen through the miscellany in the frame.

“Transformational Celebration” – Jordan Anthoneil Simpson