Vol. XXXVIII / 1 - Studia Moralia

ONLY THE SOVEREIGN MAY DECLARE WAR AND NATO AS WELL 209
gross violation of human rights. The action envisaged could be
either persuasive or coercive. Among those who took the view
that the time had come for Belgrade to stop gross human rights
violations was NATO. The next question to be answered is
whether resort to war, as NATO held, was the only means open
to make Belgrade desist from the gross violation of human
rights in respect of the ethnic Albanians.
The road to war
Right at the outset we emphasise that Serb cruelty and
inhumanity towards the ethnic Albanians was, in the latter part
of the 1990’s, by every test against reasonableness a clear case of
gross violation of human rights. Action was therefore called for
to bring an end to this situation. Indeed the search for a peaceful
reversal of this situation had begun and reached its highest point
at Rambouillet. The peace negotiations at Rambouillet were
therefore an attempt to obtain the voluntary consent of the
contending parties to a mutually acceptable settlement. Had this
been achieved then NATO’s threat of air strikes would have been
superfluous and war would also have been averted. In the
complex negotiations process there occurred an odd shift away
from the main contending parties to the facilitators and the
protection of their respective interests. 32 One paramount interest
was to secure for NATO the “core” military role in the agreed
settlement. Thus even when “The Serbian delegation, under
duress, had been willing to accept the principles of the
Rambouillet package, save for the very detailed twenty-fifth
chapter on the NATO-led occupation force. … The Western
32
Marc Weller states this point in these terms: “However noble the
intentions of many of the individuals who had been assigned roles in this
play, the fate of the people of Kosovo appeared to be somehow incidental to
the proceedings, which were instead focused on a number of metaquestions.
These meta-questions concerned three principal issue areas: - a
fundamental change in the roles of international actors; - a struggle about
the core values of the international system; and – the legitimacy of the threat
or use of force in international relations.” “The Rambouillet conference on
Kosovo”, International Affairs, Vol. 75 No. 2 April 1999, p. 211-212.