Former American ambassador: NATO campaign would not be successful without KLA on the ground

Former US Ambassador to Kosovo Christopher Dell, in an interview for Oral History Kosova, has been talking about his diplomatic career within the framework of the State Department Foreign Service since the years of the 80s.

He has told of his first experience when he arrived in Kosovo right after the war at the time he was deputy ambassador to the American Embassy in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Dell his first visit to Kosovo has been carried out in February 2000, where he felt the major damage to war.

He has said that when he entered Kosovo from Macedonia on his way to Pristina, the only colors he has seen have been national and American flags, the newspaper Express broadcast.

The only thing I remember seeing was the Albanian and American flag. Everywhere you looked these two flags were”, he said.

After this visit to Pristina, he had returned to Sofia, and after two weeks he had moved back to Pristina to help regulate the US diplomatic mission in Kosovo.

Dell has said that two weeks after his stay in Sofia when he arrived he found the Youth Palace in burnt Pristina.

I arrived in Pristina to look closely at the situation and to familiarise myself with the situation I returned to Sofia, where I stayed for two weeks and when I returned to Pristina I saw the Sports Centre completely burned, and I said to myself what a big change for only two weeks”, Dell said.

The American diplomat said military intervention by NATO has been necessary in Kosovo and has had to happen.

I didn't understand the aggressive situation of Serbs for ethnic cleansing in Kosovo at first, and I believe we had to stop it, I had no doubts about the intervention in Kosovo. We had the example of Bosnia, Croatia with wars and couldn't sit down and hope that Milosevic would start behaving well”, he said.

He said that the intervention of NATO through air could not have been successful if there were no co-ordination with the KLA on the ground.

I'm not sure if the air strikes would work, so we needed co-operation with people on the ground, so KLA, and that made our tactics more successful in intervention. Also, images of refugees in trains, fleeing their homes exposed Milosevic and his tactics failed and allowed the West to intervene”, Dell said.

Dell has also recalled the time during the 1999 NATO bombings when he was serving in Bulgaria.

He has confessed NATO's air campaign when a rocket launched by North-Atlantic alliance planes was accidentally completed in the Bulgarian capital a mile from where he was standing after the missile had missed the target as a result of the Yugoslav Army's quick shutoff.