FORTRESS EUROPE? - Circular Letter (FECL)

KEEPING REFUGEES AWAY: THE NATO AND EU WAR IN THE BALKANS

FECL 58 (June 1999)

Much has been said about the broad moral, legal and geo-political implications of the NATO war against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY).

This article examines a specific aspect of the war - its interrelation with Western, and above all, Western European, policies in the fields of asylum and immigration.

When NATO, launched its air strikes against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) on 24 March, Western leaders justified the military intervention by arguing that, although it breached international law and NATO's own statutes, it was the only way to prevent the Milosevic Regime from carrying out a plan of ethnic cleansing, aimed at driving out the entire ethnic Albanian population of Kosovo. Accordingly, NATO governments described their war against the FRY as a "humanitarian intervention" that should enable the ethnic Albanian people of Kosovo to stay in, or return to their home country.

Indisputably, ever growing numbers of ethnic Albanians have been fleeing from Kosovo since the early 1990s as a result of Serb suppression of the growing ethnic Albanian independence movement. The number of Kosovo-Albanian refugees attained new records in 1997 and 1998, as a direct result of the armed conflict between the Albanian nationalists of the KLA and Serb security forces.

However, NATO and the West still have not provided any evidence of the existence of any Serb "ethnic cleansing" plan prior to the NATO air strikes 1).

Western assessment of the human rights situation in Kosovo: from understatement to exaggeration

In fact, until days before the beginning of the bombings, official Western European government briefings and reports on the situation in Kosovo denied that Kosovo-Albanians were threatened with indiscriminate group persecution by Serbs on ethnic grounds. This assessment was made, for example, in a number of confidential situation reports sent by the German Foreign Department to courts around the country, deciding on appeals from Kosovo-Albanian asylum seekers. The leaking of some of these Foreign Department notes to the press, just two weeks after the beginning of the NATO air strikes, came as a major embarrassment to the Federal Government.

One Foreign Department note, dated 6 January, states that "now as ever there is a limited possibility for Kosovo-Albanians to settle individually (with their closer family) especially in those parts of Yugoslavia, where countrymen or friends are already living and are willing to receive and support them". Another note of 12 January maintains that "not either in Kosovo can political persecution explicitly linked to Albanian ethnicity be noted". The report goes on to note that the eastern part of the province has so far been spared from the armed conflict and that "public life in cities like Pristina, Urosevac, Gnjilan, etc is taking a relatively normal course". The report concludes that "action of the [Serb] security forces [is] not directed against the Kosovo-Albanians as an ethnically defined group but against the military enemy [i.e the KLA] and its actual or presumed supporters".

Based on such information from the Foreign Department, the Superior Administrative Court (Oberverwaltungsgericht) of Münster found on 11 March that "Ethnic Albanians from Kosovo have not been and are not exposed to regional or country-wide group persecution in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia" 2).

This official German assessment of the situation in Kosovo was generally shared by other Western Europe States. Although the armed conflict between Serb security forces and the KLA started in 1996, target countries of Kosovo-Albanians refugees, such as Switzerland and Sweden, felt no need to revoke their bilateral readmission agreements with the FRY and asylum applications from Kosovo-Albanians were very likely to be turned down. In one particularly notable decision of 26 March (two days after the start of the NATO air strikes!) the Swiss Federal Office for Refugees turned down the application of a Kosovo-Albanian man and ordered his deportation back to the FRY. The man was member of a family targeted by Serb security forces because of their involvement with Ibrahim Rugova's LDK. In June 1998 he fled to Macedonia and later to Switzerland after his brother was arrested by Serbian police. In the grounds for the decision reference is made to the Rambouillet peace negotiations in February as follows: "In this context one cannot speak of an open civil war or of a situation of generalised violence amounting to a concrete threat against the population that would be likely to entail the general unreasonableness of repatriations" 3).

The above strongly suggests that, in their efforts to stem the steadily growing influx of Kosovo -Albanian refugees, Western European governments had for years, systematically downplayed the extent of repression and terror in Kosovo. This policy of systematic understatement of the plight of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo was suddenly and swiftly replaced by a policy of exaggeration (references to alleged Serbian plans for ethnic cleansing and genocide) when NATO and EU governments needed a "humanitarian" pretext for bombing the FRY.

As a matter of fact, it was NATO's bombings of the FRY that triggered Serbian retaliation against the entire Albanian population in Kosovo - retaliation that, this time, did culminate in indiscriminate terror and "ethnic cleansing".

Mass flight "unpredictable"?

It can hardly be disputed that the NATO bombings did not enable the Kosovo Albanians to "stay at home in safety" but entailed the largest mass exodus in Europe since World War II. By early June, the number of displaced people had risen to an estimated 800,000 (as against 50,000 before the war), and the number of deaths had jumped from 2,000 to an estimated 15,000 4).

Was this catastrophe "unpredictable" and "totally unexpected", as NATO leaders now stress?

As a matter of fact, both Western military and political experts well acquainted with the situation in the former Yugoslavia did give timely warning against the possible effects of NATO air strikes. Along with other experts, August Pradetto, a teacher of international politics at the University of the Bundeswehr (the German Army) in Hamburg, warned against a possible mass flight of Kosovars as a result of NATO air strikes as early as summer 1998. "One thing was clear", Pradetto wrote in the Frankfurter Rundschau. 5) : "In the event of a war on the 'cradle of the Serb nation', hate and brutality would reach the highest levels still possible. In response to repression by Belgrade, Albanians inside and outside Yugoslavia have pressed NATO for a year to bomb Serbia and to separate Kosovo from Yugoslavia. Since the bombings started, revenge is being taken in the worst conceivable forms". Pradetto blames the German Foreign Ministry for not having reckoned with such a development very much inherent in the nature of wars and bitterly notes that Kosovo-Albanians are now paying for this "miscalculation".

Was it actually a "miscalculation"? On March 28, the British newspaper, the Sunday Times, reported that on 15 March (i.e. nine days before the beginning of the NATO air strikes) "Clinton and his cabinet members, including William Cohen, the defence secretary, and Sandy Berger, the national security adviser, sat in silence as Shelton [General Hugh Shelton, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff] outlined the thrust of the analysis. There was a danger, he told them, that far from helping to contain the savagery of the Serbs in Kosovo - a moral imperative cited by the president - air strikes might provoke Serb soldiers into greater acts of butchery. Air strikes alone, Shelton stated, could not stop Serb forces from executing Kosovars".

The German former EU chief administrator of Mostar (Bosnia), Hans Koschnik said: "I cannot understand that one did not prepare oneself for this catastrophe and was taken by surprise by the mass expulsions [of Kosovars]. There is no excuse for this. Every politician could have foreseen this, just by recalling what happened in Bosnia".6)

As for the NATO Commander, US General Wesley Clark, he declared that it was "entirely predictable" that Serbian terror and violence would intensify after the NATO bombing.7)

Numerous western politicians and military experts, well acquainted with the situation in Yugoslavia (e.g. Carl Bildt and the former Commander of the UN forces in Bosnia, General Michael Rose), gave timely warning that air strikes alone, without the simultaneous massive deployment of ground troops, would not provide any protection to the population in Kosovo.8)

To sum it up, for anybody who bothered to ask, the mass displacement of Kosovars did not come as a surprise.

EU asylum and refugee policy objectives before the war

During the war in Bosnia, the EU proved unable to prevent the mass arrival of war refugees on its territory. The Bosnian experience led the EU and Schengen countries to define a new prime objective of refugee and migration policies: to contain refugee and migrant fluxes within countries of origin and their "neighbouring regions".

On 26 January 1998, following the "mass arrivals" of Kurdish refugees from Iraq and Turkey on the Italian coast in late 1997, the EU Foreign Affairs Council adopted an Action Plan on the "Influx of migrants from Iraq and neighbouring regions" (see FECL No.53: "Kurdish Exodus triggers EU-war on 'illegal immigrants'"). The 46 point plan amounted to a compilation of policy guidelines aimed at preventing refugees from leaving their region of origin in the first place, and enabling their forcible return, both to transit and home countries. Among other things, the Council pledged to "consider the scope for developing a regional approach to protection in appropriate cases involving cooperation with non-Member States and the possibility of identifying safe areas within the region of origin".

A similar, but more specific, plan was adopted by Schengen Ministers, as early as December 1997. Among other things, the plan called for readmission agreements between the Schengen countries and Turkey, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Slovenia. Further, the plan provided for the setting up of a "task force" on immigration and asylum policies with representatives from the six main target Member States of refugees and migrants, mandated with monitoring and developing measures aimed at reducing migratory pressure (see FECL No.53: "Kurdish Exodus triggers EU-war on 'illegal immigrants': Secretive police meeting in Rome").

In summer 1998, it emerged that officials of the K4 Committee under the EU Justice and Home Affairs Council had held several secret meetings in Istanbul and Ankara, with representatives of the Turkish government and the Turkish police and security authorities. According to a K4 Committee report on the meetings, Turkey pledged to set up so-called "reception houses" for the detention of illegal migrants (i.e. refugees using Turkey as a transit country on their way to destinations in Western Europe). The report noted that the "[EU] Presidency and the Commission indicated that this could be a project where EU expertise and funding might be of benefit" (see FECL No.55: "Justice and Home Affairs Council of 28-29 May : Action Plan on immigration from Iraq and neighbouring regions").

On 1 July 1998, the then Austrian EU Presidency presented its controversial "Strategy Paper on Asylum and Immigration Policy" (SPAM, see FECL No.56: "EU Strategy Paper on Asylum and Immigration Policy"" and "'Zero tolerance' policy on immigration is the real security threat"). The paper recommends that the EU show "political muscle" in preventing refugee and migrant fluxes. Among other things, it openly advocates EU foreign policy action against refugee generating countries. Actions to "reduce migratory pressure" are "potentially quite successful", it is argued, "if they are not conducted on a political level only, but involve as broad a range of activities as possible" (SPAM, point 53). Europe should "act independently in future in this field and not confine itself to joining in the activities of other bodies". Since "effects on Europe of migration from various conflicts were dramatic", it is "quite legitimate for Europe to take its own decisions regarding intervention in such impending cases" (point 54). "[D]irect influence and presence is necessary, not only for the prevention and rapid containment of conflicts, but also for the restoration of normality which makes it possible for displaced person to return and stabilises regions in the longer term" (point 55). "Voluntary repatriation" of refugees should be safeguarded, "if necessary using the same means of force employed by the international community for maintaining peace and bringing conflicts to an end" (point 131). To sum it up, these recommendations amount to a barely veiled call for action, unilaterally decided by the EU, including military "peace keeping" and "peace enforcement" interventions not condoned by the UN Security Council.

Significantly, the paper also stressed that the UNHCR which "is today still concerned primarily with the situation of refugees in the State of refuge" should be brought to concentrate on "the States responsible for displacing people or the push factors in the countries of emigration" (point 62).

In December 1998, the EU General Affairs Council decided to set up a High Level Working Group on Asylum and Immigration (see FECL No.57: "JHA meeting 3-4 December" and "Informal JHA meeting in Berlin, 11-12 February"). This group of high-ranking officials was commissioned with establishing plans in respect of six main countries of emigration to the EU, including "Albania and its neighbouring regions". Among others, these plans were to focus on: EU assistance in the reception of displaced persons in the home region concerned; readmission agreements; and, assessments as to whether "safe return" to the country of origin is possible or whether "internal settlement alternatives exist". Furthermore, the group was tasked with "indicating possibilities" for closer cooperation with the UNHCR and other intergovernmental, governmental and non-governmental organisations in the regions of origin concerned (i.e rather than in Western European host countries).

Keeping refugees away

The common feature of the EU and Schengen policy outlines mentioned above is their focus on the containment of refugee and migrant flows within their regions of origin. In the light of the NATO war against the FRY this containment policy appears in a new light. It would seem that many of the concepts developed by EU governments in recent years, were applied for the first time in a more concerted and consistent way in tackling the flow of refugees and migrants from the former Yugoslavia.

From the very beginning of the air strikes, Western European governments made it very clear: Kosovo-Albanian refugees should not expect to be granted refugee status or permanent stay on other grounds. Instead, refugees were advised (with little other choice) to seek shelter in make-shift tent camps, hastily put up in Albania and Macedonia (i.e. the "neighbouring region" of Kosovo). For the refugees concerned, almost the only legal way out of these de facto internment camps was to register with the UNHCR and to apply for evacuation to a host country willing to temporarily receive them on a quota basis, on condition that they met the restrictive eligibility conditions stipulated not by the UNHCR but the host country in question.

German Interior Minister Otto Schily made things very clear in the early days of the war. Absolute priority, he emphasised, was given to accommodation and supply for the refugees in the neighbouring countries, "that is, Albania, Macedonia, or anyone else offering this". The stay of refugees in other (i.e. Western European) countries should be considered only as a last resort. Schily justified the misery of the tent cities in Macedonia and Albania by claiming that it was "easier to ensure supplies there", and that refugees could "use their own language" and benefit from "cultural and family ties". The German government also expressly refrained from officially decreeing a moratorium on deportations of rejected Kosovo-Albanian asylum seekers. Interior Minister Schily's comment: "De facto, obviously nobody will be deported [to the FRY] in a foreseeable future. That goes without saying. But the legal status will not be changed. That is true too, because we don't want a consolidation of the toleration of stay". Referring to the EU Ministers' continuous squabbling over "burden sharing" with regard to the reception of refugees, Mr Schily said: "Therefore, the basic rule remains: assistance on the spot. On this point, at least, there is agreement" 9).

"Cash for Shelter"

Agreement there was, indeed. Emma Bonino, the EU Commissioner responsible for humanitarian affairs, proposed, in early April, to relocate the Kosovo refugees "closer to home". Besides Bulgaria, Slovenia, and Croatia, Ms Bonino did not even hesitate to name Bosnia, with its thousands of internal refugees and an economy in shambles, as a suitable sanctuary for Kosovo refugees.10)

On the very day the bombings started, Italy launched its "Operation Rainbow", whose goal was to assist refugees in Albania rather than offering them sanctuary in Italy. Already a month before the bombings, some thousand Italian police had been deployed on the Albanian coast, to stem the growing flow of "illegal" refugees. Moreover, in January, in a notable anticipation of its now apparent involvement in "refugee management", NATO had tasked its Mediterranean fleet with monitoring traffic on the Adriatic Sea to help Italy stem the smuggling of Albanian migrants and Kosovo refugees (see FECL No.57: "Tackling 'illegal immigration'").

The only Western European country to openly make preparations for a mass reception of Kosovo refugees was Switzerland. In April, the Swiss government said it was preparing for the reception of an additional 60,000 asylum seekers up to the end of the year, and made it clear that this number could be significantly exceeded if the 200,000 Kosovo-Albanians already living in Switzerland actively brought their relatives into the country. At the same time, however, the Swiss government too hurried to launch its version of the Italian "Operation Rainbow". In this country of banks and bankers, however, the programme of assistance on the spot was run under the somewhat more prosaic name of "Cash for Shelter".

Deterring spontaneous refugees

Western European governments tried hard to enforce the principle that only refugees in the Macedonian and Albanian camps, hand-picked by the UNHCR in a bureaucratic and corruption-afflicted procedure, should be allowed entry to their territory - not as Convention refugees, but on a temporary basis and in accordance with quota allowances set by the host countries concerned.

Immigration authorities and embassies surpassed each other in inventing ever new legal and bureaucratic obstacles, clearly aimed at preventing "spontaneous" refugees from entering a host country by their own means or with private help. For many refugees, this entailed absurd, and sometimes, tragic consequences.

In France, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, reacting to public pressure, quickly promised that Kosovo refugees who were offered accommodation by their family members in France would benefit from a simplified visa procedure. But it soon turned out that Kosovar host families in France ran into almost insurmountable bureaucratic obstacles in trying to get family members out of the camps in Macedonia and Albania. In one case, French embassy officials asked a host family, that had already submitted a number of attestations confirming their ability to accommodate relatives from Kosovo, to additionally send three pay slips and property or rent certificates for their home. As a result, when their family members, after a stressful and expensive journey appeared at the French embassy in Tirana to get their visa, they were turned away and told to come back the following week. Commenting on this and similar dissuasive practices of French authorities, the Paris Libération noted: "One understands better why the refugees, expected to arrive within days, are still not coming".11)

A young auto mechanic from the Kosovar town of Prizren entered Germany illegally via Italy and Austria, along with his wife and small daughter. The man said Serbian police in Kosovo had detained him in a sports centre, together with some 300 other ethnic Albanians. The men were forced to dig graves before he managed to escape. He said his wife was held in a barracks and repeatedly raped by Serbian police. In Germany, the family was accorded the lowest legal status - a temporary suspension of deportation, valid for six months. If there is even a modicum of peace in Kosovo when their permits expire, renewal is unlikely.12)

In April, Christa, a German woman married to a Kosovo Albanian, travelled to Macedonia, Albania and Bulgaria in an attempt to find her husband's parents, who she knew had managed to flee from Kosovo, and bring them to Germany on her own account. In Sofia, she asked the German embassy for help, but was told that she could not expect any assistance. While Christa was still searching for her parents in law, in Germany the Conference of the Federal and the State Interior Ministers decided that Kosovo refugees brought to Germany by private persons, would be denied entry visas at the border.13)

In Luxembourg, authorities reacted to what they termed a "recrudescence of illegal immigration of persons from the Balkans" by reintroducing controls at "internal" borders with Schengen Member States, in application of a clause of the Schengen Implementing Agreement.14

In Sweden, a 69 year old women and her 78 year old husband, who had entered the country via Albania, Italy and Germany, were issued an immediate expulsion order, in strict application of Schengen and Dublin Convention rules on the first country of entry. Immigration authorities denied the couple legal aid on the grounds that they should apply for protection in Germany. Five of the elderly couple's seven children live in Sweden, but Swedish immigration authorities said it was out of the question to grant the couple permission to stay on family reunification grounds. Instead, Swedish authorities continued to insist that the selection of refugees to be admitted to Sweden should continue to be handled by the UNHCR in Macedonia, in spite of the fact (admitted by Immigration officials) that local UNHCR employees in Macedonia take bribes to put refugees on evacuation lists.15)

In another case, a Swedish refugee aid group spent a whole week trying to obtain the emergency evacuation of a family in a Macedonian camp to Sweden. The family had a 6 years old child in urgent need of medical treatment for a life-threatening liver disease. The refugee aid group contacted SIV (the Swedish Immigration Office), the Foreign Ministry and the regional office of UNHCR in Stockholm. The Foreign Ministry officials said, they were waiting for a formal request for evacuation by UNHCR. UNHCR officials said they were waiting for a formal confirmation by the Swedish government that Sweden was prepared to receive refugees from the camps. SIV said they were waiting for instructions from the government on how to determine the eligibility of refugees for evacuation. In the meantime, down in the Macedonian camp, the father of the sick child queued for 10 hours just to register his wish to go to Sweden. When his turn had finally come, he was told that it was not yet possible to register such a request. While the refugee aid group in Sweden was continuously being fobbed off by various bureaucrats, the sick child's condition worsened dramatically. On 15 April, UNHCR in Macedonia finally decided to evacuate the child and its family immediately... to Germany, and not to Sweden where the family had relatives.16)

Bashkim, a Kosovo-Albanian in Sweden, found out that his brother, Aim, had made it to the Stankovic camp in Macedonia, along with his family. On Bashkim's request, a Swedish friend, journalist Birgitta Albons, visited the family there. She found one of the children, 11 years old Labinot, suffering from a serious trauma. He had stopped speaking. The day of Ms Albons' arrival at the camp, the family was offered evacuation to Canada, although they had asked for Sweden. Ms Albons contacted a Swedish immigration official present in the camp to inform him about what she thought was an unintentional administrative blunder. But the official lectured her: "This is not a quota for family reunification, this is a quota for evacuating people. They will go to Canada. People shouldn't believe they can choose. Sweden won't receive them".17)

In Switzerland, a month after the start of the NATO bombings, border guards at the Swiss-Italian frontier were busy expelling Kosovo-Albanian refugees caught at crossing the border illegally. Switzerland's popular "refugee chaplain", Father Cornelius Koch, accused the border police of almost systematically turning away the first war refugees from Kosovo, including even small children and pregnant women. A spokesperson for the Federal Office of Refugees later confirmed that border guards were instructed to return to Italy anyone caught entering Switzerland "illegally". From the Swiss authorities' point of view, the real problem lies in Italy's lack of goodwill, as regards the readmission of refugees. Currently, Italy refuses to readmit between 20 and 50 percent of the foreigners denied entry by Switzerland.18)

Refugees confined to high-risk zone

For the refugees concerned, "assistance on the spot" actually is tantamount to being confined to mass reception tent camps, most of which have been set up in the immediate vicinity of the Yugoslavian border. NATO and EU reacted with striking leisureliness to insistent demands from UNHCR that the camps be moved away from the border as soon as possible. In so doing NATO and the EU governments very consciously exposed hundreds of thousands of Kosovo-refugees to the risk of being virtually sacrificed as easy targets in the event of the war spilling over the Macedonian or Albanian border.

The camps were targets, indeed. The KLA was systematically recruiting male refugees upon their arrival in Albania. "In Kukes, the KLA shows itself completely openly, and side by side with the regular Albanian army", the Swiss Neue Zürcher Zeitung reported in April. "A few kilometres outside the town, armed, sometimes masked, men bearing the emblem of the KLA comb every refugee transport for able-bodied men. These obviously forcible recruitment activities are taking place under the watching eyes of officers of the regular Albanian army who, according to our sources, act at the same time as military trainers". It goes without saying that this made the camps a likely target of Serb retaliation. The KLA regularly attacked Serb forces from within Albanian territory. In late May, the Albanian army carried out manoeuvres at the border with Kosovo, firing hundreds of grenades and rockets in the direction of a border area, where heavy combats between the Yugoslav army and KLA units had taken place some days earlier.19) In early June, Serb artillery shelled presumed KLA positions on the Albanian side of the border.

Dubious intertwining of military and humanitarian action

The objective of granting refugee assistance on the spot has led to intertwining of the activities of NATO military forces and humanitarian aid organisations. For example, NATO decided on 11 April to deploy 8,000 soldiers in Albania to "ensure the safe arrival, transport and distribution of humanitarian aid" to the 300,000 refugees in this country. According to an official reading, these troops were to act under UNHCR "coordination". Governmental and non-governmental aid organisations from various Western European countries are depending on NATO's logistic and technical support to run their relief projects. While this intertwining may have benefited the efficiency of prompt humanitarian aid in some cases, it obviously casts a strong doubt on the independence and neutrality of the aid organisations concerned. As a consequence of this close cooperation between military structures of a warring party and humanitarian aid organisations, there is a strong risk that military and political considerations of NATO governments will prevail in the definition of the focus of relief work. This, in its turn could further fuel mounting suspicion throughout the world that humanitarian organisations are an integrated part of the Western war machine.

Commenting on the "humanitarian" NATO soldiers under UNHCR coordination, an article in the Paris Le Monde expressed concern that UNHCR's neutrality status could be undermined if Albania suddenly became a battlefield.20)

The idea, outlined in the above-mentioned EU documents and decisions, of bringing refugee aid organisations to concentrate on assistance in the home regions of refugees rather than on the reception and settlement of refugees in Western host countries, seems to have gained ground in the context of the Kosovo war. In all Western European countries, the large and established charities, supported by the media, are encouraging a public eager to help the Kosovar refugees to donate money and supplies for aid projects in the neighbouring region of Kosovo. At the same time, the lack of interest of the same organisations for the plight of spontaneous refugees, knocking at the doors of Western European countries, is striking. In Sweden, for example, FARR, a very active coalition of local grass root refugee support groups, found themselves quite alone when they called on the government to ease visa restrictions on at least those refugees from the former Yugoslavia whose accommodation in Sweden was guaranteed by voluntary individuals and groups. Similar proposals by Swiss families and the strong Albanian community in this country, that Kosovo refugees be allowed into the country swiftly and accommodated by voluntary groups and individuals rather than placed in reception centres, were politely declined by the Swiss authorities who, instead encouraged the public to support official aid programmes in the region of conflict.

No "Burden sharing"

The NATO war against the FRY, probably once and for all, showed the unwillingness of Western European governments to ensure a continued reception of refugees through a policy of "burden sharing" - i.e. binding agreements between Western European host countries on a fair distribution of refugees and the costs of their reception among the host countries.

At a conference for the coordination of aid to Kosovo refugees held on 6 April upon the initiative of the UNHCR, more than 50 participating States from all over the world made preliminary offers to receive a total of only 74,000 Kosovo refugees. Most offers were so noncommittal that the UNHCR said it would still have to examine the specific conditions set by each State. All this happened as the number of war refugees from the FRY was quickly exceeding 500,000 and the neighbouring countries were on the brink of collapse. The item of "burden sharing" was not even discussed at the conference, since the EU Member States insisted that they had to decide on a EU-internal level first - at a Council meeting in Luxembourg, carefully scheduled to take place one day after the UNHCR conference. Not unexpectedly, in Luxembourg the EU Justice and Home Affairs Ministers did not agree on whether and how many refugees each Member State would receive. In contrast, there was unanimity concerning the principle that refugees should be sent back as soon as possible after the end of the war. The Netherlands voiced concern that Kosovo refugees might prove eligible for a full asylum procedure and that this could delay their return. But there was a large degree of consent among Ministers that Kosovars should not have the status of asylum seekers but be considered "temporarily displaced people". As a consequence of the Luxembourg meeting it was up to each EU Member State to negotiate individually with the UNHCR on the number of quota refugees it would accept. This outcome considerably delayed the evacuation of quota refugees to Western Europe. Six weeks after the start of the NATO bombings, only 30,000 refugees had been evacuated to EU countries.

Some Conclusions

1. A prime objective of EU "refugee management" - preventing further arrivals of refugees - may have been the crucial reason for Western European governments backing the US decision to start the war against the FRY. Indeed, the declared purpose of the air strikes was neither to topple the Milosevic regime nor to support the cause of the Albanian nationalists, but to "enable" the Kosovar people to "stay at home".

2. It was entirely predictable that, in the event of NATO bombings, the Serbs would retaliate against the ethnic Albanian population by an operation of indiscriminate terror and ethnic cleansing. This implies that NATO governments consciously put up with this eventuality, when they decided to launch the air strikes, and gives rise to chilling speculations: could NATO leaders actually have launched the air strikes with an aim (among others) to provoke the Milosevic regime into retaliating by an operation of ethnic cleansing and terror?

At first sight, such thoughts may appear far-fetched and aberrant. Yet, as a matter of fact, the Serb operation of ethnic cleansing did allow NATO to put all the blame for the humanitarian catastrophe caused by the war on the "barbarian Serbs" - an argument that was likely to be of good use in justifying later moves by the West to achieve total military, political and police control over Kosovo. It is obvious too that Western European governments' main concern as regards the Balkans in recent years was not to prevent mass killings. It was not compassion with the victims of violence, human rights violations, ethnic cleansing and economic misery in the Balkans. It was not conflict prevention and mediation that would have allowed people to "stay at home in safety". Instead, their prime concern was to develop instruments of "refugee management" designed to contain would-be refugees and immigrants from notorious conflict areas in their "home region", that is, at safe distance from Western European target countries of migration.

1. Everything suggests that the achievement of this goal was not jeopardized, to say the least, by NATO's military intervention. Indeed, while the NATO bombings did trigger a humanitarian catastrophe, the strong presence of NATO military and their "humanitarian" baggage train in the neighbouring region of Kosovo made it possible to keep much of the mass flow of refugees away from Western Europe.

2. In their efforts to prevent the Kosovo refugees from leaving the region, Western European governments did not hesitate to expose hundreds of thousands of Kosovo-Albanian civilians, virtually trapped in the make-shift mass camps in immediate proximity of the Yugoslavian border, to the indisputable risk of being massacred in the event of a Serb advance on Albanian territory.

3. During the war in Bosnia, the absence of coordination between Western European governments and the lacking mutual approximation of national asylum and immigration policies resulted in the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees. Western European governments seem to have learned the lesson. In the context of NATO's war against the FRY, many restrictive instruments conceived during or in the wake of the war in Bosnia were for the first time used in a more coordinated and systematic way. Among these instruments are: the common EU and Schengen visa obligations for refugee and migrant generating countries, the Dublin Convention rules determining the Member State responsible of examining an asylum application, the concept of "manifestly unfounded" asylum applications, the Schengen rules on improved external border controls, and readmission treaties with transit countries (so-called "safe third countries").

4. Temporary protection rules, introduced in most Western European national asylum and foreigner laws during and after the war in Bosnia, were immediately applied. According to prevailing interpretations of the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees, refugee status can be granted on a collective basis and without any further individual examination to persons threatened with persecution on the ground of their ethnic origins.21) Yet, facing a mass arrival of Kosovo-Albanians, EU governments hurried to stress the principle that refugee status could only be granted as a result of an individual examination and that ethnic Albanians from Kosovo were not eligible for refugee status under the Convention but should be considered as "displaced people" in temporary need of protection. Accordingly, Kosovo-Albanians were either denied access to the asylum examination procedures, or their applications were shelved. Even quota refugees hand-picked by the UNHCR, were received on a temporary basis only.

5. Western European governments were quite successful in redefining the focus of refugee aid away from monitoring and ensuring the reception of refugees in Western host countries to "assistance on the spot". By more or less reluctantly accepting this redefinition of their tasks, international, governmental and non-governmental organisations made themselves the (more or less) involuntary accomplices of a ruthless policy of refugee containment.

6. Since the war about Kosovo, "refugee management" consists in preventing refugees from fleeing, rather than receiving them. In pursuing this goal, human lives do not count. As Swedish journalist Birgitta Albons wrote from Macedonia: "Every day, desperate men and women in the camps ask me, often in Swedish, whether I can help them escape from this hell... The truth is that wealthy Europe does not want to have more refugees. The truth is that Europe is helping Milosevic to maintain people in terror, to kill many Kosovo-Albanians".22)

7. The introduction of the concept of "assistance in the region of origin" appears to have killed off all discussions on "burden sharing" in respect of the reception of refugees in Western Europe. In this war, the EU have demonstrated beyond doubt that they prefer evading the burden of refugees rather than sharing it. We might soon discover that the difference between burden evasion and burden elimination, is little.

This denial of sanctuary to the victims of ethnic cleansing recalls a dark chapter of European history. In early 1938, several years before the Holocaust, some 150,000 Jews had already left Germany as a result of growing harassment and discrimination by the Nazi regime. A further rise in the refugee flow was predictable. From 6 to 14 July 1938, 32 States gathered at a conference in the French town of Evian in an effort to coordinate the further reception of Jewish refugees. After 10 days of negotiations, only one of the 32 participating States, the Dominican Republic, offered to take in a limited number of European Jews.

Long before resorting to the "final solution", the genocide of the Jewish people, the Nazis were prepared to get rid of the Jews by letting them emigrate. The problem was that nobody wanted to receive them. The failure to agree on "burden sharing" in Evian, eventually ended in "burden elimination" in the concentration camps of the Third Reich.23)

Epilogue

The war in the Balkans has come to an end - at least for the time being. While ethnic Albanians are already beginning to return to a country in ruins, we are witnessing the beginning of a new mass exodus - this time of the Kosovo-Serbian population. Reports from the city of Prizren suggest that German (!) KFOR troops on the spot are mingling with the KLA and doing nothing to protect the Serbs from Albanian reprisals. This can only strengthen the prevailing conviction among the Serbian Kosovars, that they can expect no help from NATO. Thus, they are likely to head for Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia.

In Bosnia, an already fragile process of reconstruction and confidence building has been set back by years as a result of the war on Kosovo. Four years after the end of the war in Bosnia, more than 80 per cent of the Bosnian refugees have not been able to return to their homes. In this context, the mass arrival of Serbian refugees from Kosovo threatens to prove the spark causing a new explosion of the Bosnian powder keg.

The FRY is already coping with hundreds of thousands of refugees. The country lies in ruins, the economy is destroyed. Millions have lost their work, and a period of political unrest and violence must be reckoned with. The economic and political stability of neighbouring countries like Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria and Romania has suffered serious blows.

Thus nothing authorises us to expect that the proclaimed end of the war on Kosovo means an end to the refugee problem in the Balkans. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people in all parts of region might find that they have no future there and try to make their way to the West.

Whether we call them refugees, displaced people or economic migrants will be of little practical importance in coping with the problem. If the West continues to ignore the root causes of the conflict in the Balkans, there is a risk not only for Kosovo but for the entire Balkans region of being transformed into a heavily guarded protectorate of NATO and the EU, where much of the activities of international military and police forces, as well as local authorities under their orders, will focus on forcibly preventing would-be refugees and migrants from leaving the region. The Balkans region soon might resemble a gigantic detention centre for "illegal migrants".

Nicholas Busch

References:

• Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research (TFF), Lund, Sweden: PressInfo No 64, 25.4.99.
• Quoted from 'Junge Welt', 24.4.99; our translation.
• Swiss Federal Office for Refugees (ODR): decision N 351 311 Mls/Gbd/Zss, 26.4.99; our translation from French.
• TFF, PressInfo No 69, 9.6.99.
• Frankfurter Rundschau, 23.4.99.
• Süddeutsche Zeitung, 8.4.99.
• Noam Chomsky, The current bombings behind the rethoric, 31.3.99.
• Yorkshire Post, 10.5.99, Svenska Dagbladet, 12.4.99.
• Süddeutsche Zeitung, 8.4.99.
• Los Angeles Times, 7.4.99.
• Libération, 17/18.4.99.
• Christian Science Monitor, 8.6.99.
• 'Freitag', 16.4.99.
• Associated Press, 5.6.99.
• Länderkommittén för f.d. Jugoslavien, Borås, Sweden, 17.5.99.
• Länderkommittén för f.d. Jugoslavien, 16.4.99.
• Dagens Nyheter, 11.5.99.
• Tagesanzeiger, 27.5.99.
• Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 29/30.5.99.
• Le Monde, 17.4.99.
• see: Le Soir (Brussels), 14.4.99: 'Les Kosovars sont des réfugiés', by Prof. Jean Yves Carlier, Catholic University of Louvain.
• Dagens Nyheter, 11.5.99
• Alfred Häsler, 'Das Boot ist voll'; 'Kein Land bot den flüchtenden Juden Hort: Alle Boote waren voll!', www.haganah.org/homepage_ger/shoah/, Dienst Nr.1, Haganah.