NATO warplanes launched air strikes against Serbian targets in Yugoslavia Wednesday with the United Nations very much on the sidelines – leading UN officials and legal experts to ponder the legitimacy of the strikes.

Many diplomats here defended the strikes as necessary following the worsening situation in Kosovo where Yugoslav government forces have been in action against guerrillas of the Kosovar Liberation Army (KLA).

The fighting had caused the destruction of dozens of villagers and forced thousands of ethnic Albanians, who form the province’s majority, to join the swelling ranks of refugees.

But UN officials feared that the NATO bombing had dealt a crucial blow to the world body’s authority.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, speaking within hours of the first strikes by NATO planes on targets in Kosovo, exemplified both sides of the debate: Diplomacy had failed to halt the bloodshed in Kosovo but the UN Security Council should have played a role before any attack.

“There are times when the use of force may be legitimate in the pursuit of peace,” Annan told reporters, adding that Chapter Eight of the UN Charter allowed regional groups like NATO to play a role in peace and security affairs.

However, he argued, “under the Charter, the Security Council has primary responsibility for maintaining international peace and security – and this is explicitly acknowledged in the North Atlantic Treaty (which governs NATO). Therefore, the Council should be involved in any decision to resort to the use of force.”

Yet the 15-nation Security Council has not been asked to authorise the use of force in Kosovo, by NATO or anyone else. Nor is this likely to happen while two veto-holding permanent members of the Council, China and Russia, can be expected to block any attempt to authorise military action against the Yugoslav government.

(Russian Ambassador Sergey Lavrov called an emergency meeting of the Security Council on Wednesday afternoon, and urged an open debate in which all nations could discuss the NATO action.)

For supporters of the Kosovo strikes – including many Western and Islamic nations who had urged a halt to the Yugoslav crackdown in the Albanian-majority province – the NATO attacks posed a dilemma:

If they lacked approval by the Security Council, were they therefore illegal?

Some international law experts believed so. “The United States has essentially replaced the UN Security Council, and that’s disastrous,” said Michael Klare, a professor at Hampshire College in Massachusetts.

According to Michael Ratner, a lawyer at the New York-based Centre for Constitional Rights, the US push for Kosovo strikes never had the necessary authorisation from the United Nations – putting it in the same sphere of dubious legality as the US- British strikes on Iraq last December.

Despite the legal problems over the attack on Serbia the United Nations – and particularly the Security Council – had been notably silent in recent weeks as the NATO threat against Yugoslavia grew.

There were few Council meetings on the topic largely because, as Yugoslav Ambassador Vladislav Jovanovic contended Wednesday, “one country is too strong that the others don’t dare say anything.”

Jovanovic accused the United States of blocking debate on Kosovo in the Council, and said many Council diplomats believed that US and British veto power would block any criticism of NATO’s actions.

“NATO is not authorised to maintain peace and security outside of its territory,” Jovanovic declared. “But in the absence of Security Council effort…NATO countries have found themselves encouraged to go further…It is an unprecedented defiance of the authority and prestige of the Security Council.”

The Yugoslav ambassador told IPS that the Security Council would never be able to find Belgrade guilty of any act of aggression warranting a military response, since the crackdown on Kosovo occurred only within what all sides – including the United States – define as Yugoslavia’s borders.

“You cannot make aggression within your own country,” he contended.

Nevertheless, some Council diplomats, including Slovenian Ambassador Danilo Turk, argued that the Council had conferred authority for NATO to use force under Chapter Seven of the UN Charter, in previous resolutions concerning peace efforts in the Balkans.

In any case the violations of human rights occurring in Kosovo needed a response, Turk said.

That essentially was the same argument by US officials in Washington, where White House spokesman Joe Lockhart warned that “the price of inaction here is greater than the price of any possible action.”

Annan added his own regret that the Belgrade authorities “have persisted in their rejection of a political settlement, which would have halted the bloodshed in Kosovo.”

In recent days, UN officials have estimated that 235,000 Kosovars have been driven from their homes by fighting, including more than 25,000 in the past week.

Some diplomats conceded that the NATO strikes could have wider repercussions throughout the Balkans.

Bosnian Ambassador Muhamed Sacirbey told IPS that the Sarajevo government was concerned that an attack on Yugoslavia could prompt violence by Serb forces within Bosnia-Hercegovina. But he added that his government would have been far more worried if the Kosovo crisis worsened without any international response.

Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic had been pushing for a partition of Kosovo through his tactics in dismissing the failed peace talks held in recent weeks in Rambouillet and Paris, Sacirbey argued.

If he could have succeeded, the Bosnian ambassador added, “guess what would happen to us” in the ethnically-divided zones of Bosnia.