Brussels – After NATO bombed the then-Yugoslavia for 78 days in 1999 to force Serbian forces to pull out of Kosovo, the commanding US General Wesley Clark was asked how many targets were destroyed.

“Enough,” Clark said. Now, 10 years since it launched its aerial campaign against the Serbian military, NATO still gives no figures about the number of targets it destroyed.

There is also no NATO figure on the number of civilian casualties of the bombing, as only the political goal mattered: to stop the ethnic cleansing carried out by Slobodan Milosevic’s regime against the majority ethnic Albanian population in Kosovo.

“A just and necessary action” is how former (1999-2003) NATO secretary general George Robertson described NATO’s first war, which effectively involved the entire membership, then 19 countries.

The campaign was conducted by his predecessor, today the European Union’s chief diplomat, Javier Solana, as an intervention to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe. Already in late 1998, 300,000 Kosovo Albanians were on the run from Serbian forces.

“We were able to stop and reverse the worst ethnic cleansing … in Europe in the past half century,” Roberston said.

In Brussels’ NATO headquarters, the aerial war against Serbia – 38,000 flights, out of which 10,484 carried precision bombs – is considered an important success.

The population in Kosovo was protected and the road for its return home cleared with Milosevic’s capitulation. At the same time, contrary to what Milosevic had hoped for and expected, the alliance did not disintegrate and the front against him remained intact.

Most of all, a message was sent to Russia, where Boris Yeltsin was still president, that NATO was a military force to be taken seriously.

“Could it have been done better?” The question heads a page on NATO’s official website, acknowledging a series of issues that remain open.

One of them is whether the intervention was legal without a mandate from the United Nations Security Council. Another asks whether there was indeed a genocide to warrant an attack.

NATO chiefs allow themselves no doubts of their righteousness and often point that not a single Allied was killed in action. Critics, however, say that is so because only high-altitude missions were allowed, even if that lead to civilian casualties.

Officials in Brussels vehemently deny any disregard for civilian life, insisting that targets and weapons were carefully selected for each mission, with an aim to avoid unintended casualties and damage.

“Despite all this, it was inevitable that some mistakes would occur and that weapon systems would sometimes malfunction,” Robertson has acknowledged.

According to the international organization Human Rights Watch, 90 missions produced civilian casualties. But NATO shrugged that off, noting that figures amounts to less than 1 per cent of all sorties.

NATO heads also dismiss allegations of bias, pointing out that Serbs in Kosovo also enjoyed NATO protection, safe from vengeful attack of the Albanians.

Another unanswered question, now a decade old, is what finally forced Milosevic to capitulate?

NATO says it was in response to the increasing devastation of Serbia under the steadily increasing power of bombing attacks and the threat of a ground invasion. Others point to Yeltsin’s withdrawal of full political support, perceived in Belgrade as Russia’s betrayal.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s security adviser, says that Yeltsin and Milosevic miscalculated with their plan, spoiled by NATO, to keep at least a part of Kosovo Serbian.

NATO plans no special occasions to mark the 10th anniversary of the war on Yugoslavia, which meanwhile disintegrated further when Montengro split from Serbia.

A year ago, Kosovo, which was under UN administration since Belgrade’s capitulation to NATO in June 1999, unilaterally declared independence from Serbia. (dpa)