NDËRHYRJA USHTARAKE E NATO-S NË KOSOVË: RAST PRECEDENT APO PËRJASHTIM?
NATO MILITARY INTERVENTION IN KOSOVO: A PRECEDENT CASE OR EXCLUSION?

Summary/Abstract: In the aftermath of the Cold War, human rights violations and international humanitarian law were considered an international issue rather than simply as a domestic issue. This gave the international community and international organizations a basis to take action and intervene in cases where a state or an entity is either incapable or unwilling to protect its own people, or is actively persecuting them. However, in the case of Kosovo, NATO intervention against Serbian on March 1999 targets took place with the prior authorization of the Security Council, due to the Russian threat to use its veto power. A year before, the Security Council had Adopted three Resolutions 1160 (March 1998), 1199 (September 1998) and 1203 (October 1998) through which it condemned the repressive campaign and ethnic cleansing in Kosovo by Serbian security forces. Witnessing the Serb regime’s grave violation of human rights and genocide in Bosnia in 1995, the international community had a strong reason to believe that the same would happen in Kosovo if a humanitarian intervention would not take place. This happened due to two main reasons: first, because the International Community had already gathered evidence that Milosevic’s government started implementing the “horseshoe” operation, through which all ethnic Albanians from Kosovo would be displaced and moved out of their homes to neighboring countries and elsewhere, to create a “lebensraum” for the Serb minority in Kosovo and second, due to the fact that NATO’s credibility and South Eastern Europe’s security were at stake. NATO’s intervention in Kosovo is legitimate also because of these factors: Belgrade’s direct violation of previous Security Council resolutions which referred to Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter; warnings from the International Community on the dangers of a humanitarian catastrophe in Kosovo; threatening of peace and security in the region and also because it was impossible to pass another resolution on the matter due to continuous veto and resistance from Russia and China at UNSC. Another lesson drawn from the intervention in Kosovo is that where there is violation of human rights and such state is either incapable or unwilling to protect its own people, or is actually actively persecuting them, the domain of “domestic affairs” and “sovereignty” of one state over its domestic issues becomes irrelevant. On this matter, Kosovo’s case opened the path for a new concept for humanitarian intervention in international law. Kosovo’s case pushed forward the development of the strategies in international law that would allow for future humanitarian interventions. Consequently, in 2000, the Canadian government and several other actors announced the establishment of the International commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) to address the challenge of the international community’s responsibility to act in the face of the gravest of human rights violations while respecting the sovereignty of states. This doctrine aims at addressing four types of crimes; genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Therefore, in cases where there is threat for genocide, the justification that other parties can not interfere in domestic affairs of another country does not stand and should not be implemented

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