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| Review by Mark Thompson in the Journal Survival, published by the
I spent 1995 working for the United Nations mission to the former Yugoslavia, mostly in the Analysis and Assessment Unit at mission headquarters in Zagreb. Returning after a fortnight’s leave on 20 July, I found the HQ no more despondent than usual. One of the six ‘safe areas’ had fallen at last – Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia – and another, Zepa, was on the brink. Yet, unless my memory is playing tricks, this was not immediately seen in HQ as a turning-point. There was so much going wrong all the time. The Croatians were gearing to recapture the Serb-controlled enclaves. The great powers were still adrift. The mission had been on the ropes since the crisis over the Bihac ‘safe area’ the previous November and, by this stage, seemed incapable of decisive action or reaction. Srebrenica was another upper-cut from the Bosnian Serbs, but why should it be a knock-out blow? On 14 July, General Ratko Mladic’s soldiers began the mass execution of male captives from Srebrenica. The same day, unaware of any such horrors, two of my colleagues in the Analysis and Assessment Unit suggested in a memo that ‘the fall of Srebrenica does not necessarily signify the beginning of the end of the mission’. Though typically defensive, this was reasonable at the time. Their closing assessment, on the other hand, cannot be read without a blush: ‘The fall of Srebrenica exposes weaknesses in the mandate, but not in the mission’. There it was again, the tell-tale denial with its reassuring implication that the mission – and hence the Secretariat – had no margin for initiative, being entirely conditioned by the Security Council, the troop-contributing nations, the Contact Group, NATO and the parties to the conflict. This is a small example of how the mission and the Secretariat generally talked about Bosnia to themselves, to the Security Council and to the world. UN discourse on the former Yugoslavia has been marked by traiectio in alium, the rhetorical technique of shifting responsibility. This is worrying because UN officials should not have the licence of politicians and diplomats to justify themselves by expediency or national interest. The Charter looms behind them, demanding acknowledgement. The Secretary-General who was in office at the time has recently posed the question ‘Why was Bosnia a failure?’, only to answer: ‘Because the United States was so deeply involved politically and so deeply determined not to be involved militarily’. Whatever Washington’s manifold blunders over Bosnia, this trite judgement is not what we needed from Boutros Boutros-Ghali. His peroration then comes as no surprise: ‘The harm done to the mangled and nearly bankrupt United Nations would not easily be reversed, nor would the damage done to key principles of international behavior: no acquisition of territory by force; no genocide; and guarantees of the integrity and existence of UN member states’.1 Plainly, this sad situation had nothing to do with him. Institutional accountability What we needed to hear from Boutros-Ghali has been supplied by his successor, Kofi Annan, whose report on Srebrenica is densely written, compelling and authoritative. Reading it, one is shocked anew at how the UN and NATO sat on their hands for three years while the likes of Mladic and Radovan Karadzic spat full in their face. It merits a place on the shelf beside David Rohde’s and Chuck Sudetic’s books on Srebrenica.2 Instead of ritually blaming the ‘permanent five’ for delivering a contradictory mandate and insufficient resources, the Secretariat examines its own record, and finds it wanting. What is more, it does so with a degree of frankness that none of the politicians or diplomats involved in mediating the Bosnian conflict has matched. The candour is not complete, and there is a falling-off in the summary ‘Assessments’. Even so, the report represents a breakthrough in institutional accountability. Almost half of the report is devoted to chronicling the background to the events of July 1995, from the origins of the mission through the evolution of the ‘safe-areas’ mandate and the use of force by NATO in support of the mission. There are accounts of the major crises over the ‘safe areas’ from 1993 to 1995. By structuring his report in this way, Annan makes a vital admission: that the loss of Srebrenica was not a sudden change of fortune, hitting the mission out of a clear sky. It was, on the contrary, ‘an accident waiting to happen’, in the words of a British officer serving with the UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR), quoted in Tim Ripley’s valuable book. It is handy to have the then Secretary-General’s views on the mandate gathered together in the Annan report. In March 1994, Boutros-Ghali noted that ‘the new tasks require resources that have not been provided expeditiously by the international community’, yet advised against redefining the mandates ‘commensurate with the resources the international community is prepared to make available to UNPROFOR’ (para. 130). In other words, don’t give us the tools or we might have do the job. In May 1994, however, he understood UNPROFOR’s mandate as being ‘to protect the civilian populations of the designated safe areas against armed attacks and other hostile acts, through the presence of its troops and, if necessary, through the application of air power, in accordance with agreed procedures’. This robust interpretation did not last long. In December 1994, the Secretary-General implicitly justified the UN’s passivity during Serb attacks on the Bihac ‘safe area’ the previous month by blaming the Bosnian army, even though, as he freely admitted, ‘most of the offensive activities … from the Bihac pocket were not launched from within the safe area’. He reiterated that UNPROFOR should not be given the mandate to enforce compliance with the safe-area regime, because that would be ‘incompatible’ with peacekeeping (para. 173). Completing his revision, Boutros-Ghali argued to the Security Council in May 1995 that UNPROFOR’s mandate did not include any provision for enforcement, and the mission should abandon ‘any actual or implied commitment to the use of force to deter attacks’ – despite the unmistakable authority granted under Resolution 836 to do precisely that. He concluded this plea against the international use of force by preaching about the need to reject ‘a culture of death’. Perhaps political reasons could be adduced for each shift. Yet the conclusion is inescapable: the Secretary-General did not stick to any firm principle. Indeed, Annan’s report comes within a whisker of alleging that his predecessor deliberately misled the Security Council over the events unfolding in Srebrenica (paras 282–496). Overall, the report does not resolve the enigma of Boutros-Ghali’s stance towards the Yugoslav catastrophe. It remains baffling that this astute politician so misjudged the importance of Bosnia to the international community; and regrettable that a Secretary-General ready to argue with the Security Council did not put his trenchancy to better use. Regarding UNPROFOR as a liability, he presented the Secretariat as the Security Council’s victim, and put the mission in the hands of Yasushi Akashi, an unimaginative bureaucrat who, unlike the troublesome French generals Morillon and Cot (neither of whom rates a mention in Unvanquished), could be trusted not to ‘go native’. By trying to protect his institution in this way, Boutros Ghali did more than anybody to stain its reputation. While the Security Council may manipulate the UN, it takes the Secretariat to dishonour it. His unseating in 1996 was at least poetic justice. In operational terms, Boutros-Ghali’s approach to Bosnia entailed a cult of impartiality, pacifism and humanitarian relief. This cult would not have won so many followers if it had not drawn on decent UN traditions. This may explain why Annan documents the cult without in the end quite renouncing it. The ‘Assessments’ speak with two voices. Annan concedes self-critically that ‘the United Nations hierarchy’ made ‘errors of judgement … rooted in a philosophy of impartiality and non-violence wholly unsuited to the conflict in Bosnia’ (para. 499). He also bluntly identifies an ‘institutional ideology of impartiality even when confronted with attempted genocide’ (para. 505). Yet he cites ‘the basic and indispensable impartiality of the United Nations’ as an indubitable verity (para. 445). The term ‘impartiality’ needs unpacking. Why is it usually conceived in almost geometrical terms of equidistance between or among the parties, rather than in relation to the relevant Security Council resolutions? A peacekeeping mission should implement its mandate impartially, which may require being tougher on one party than on another. Rather than resenting Resolution 836 for ‘jeopardising UNPROFOR’s impartiality’ (para. 150) by not disarming the Bosnian forces inside the ‘safe areas’, the Secretariat might have used that resolution to try and reform international policy. Rather than complaining that the ‘safe-areas’ mandate was anti-Serb, the Secretary-General could have argued that, despite Resolution 836, the entire international intervention was anti-Bosnian. Instead of taking offence at the ‘one-sidedness’ of the media, he could have echoed their outrage, adding it to the prestige of his office to pressurise the Security Council to uphold those ‘key principles of international behavior’. Nobody doubts that the UN did a sterling job of delivering humanitarian aid in Bosnia. At the time, however, senior officials too often claimed that this task was the supreme imperative. On this point, Annan makes a clean breast: ‘The provision of humanitarian aid’ was not ‘a sufficient response to ethnic cleansing and to an attempted genocide’ (para. 491). Additionally: ‘Nor was it sufficiently appreciated that a systematic and ruthless campaign such as the one conducted by the Serbs would view a UN humanitarian operation, not as an obstacle, but as an instrument of its aims’ (para. 493). Better still: ‘The problem, which cried out for a political/military solution, was that a Member State of the United Nations, left largely defenceless as a result of an arms embargo imposed upon it by the United Nations, was being dismembered by forces committed to its destruction. This was not a problem with a humanitarian solution’ (para. 493). Amen to that. After such frankness, it is disappointing to find Annan intoning one of the UN’s propaganda pieties from the war years: ‘Peacekeeping and war fighting are distinct activities which should not be mixed’ (para. 498). The UN’s experience in the 1990s, not only in Bosnia, proved that they are not so distinct after all. Almost 60 years ago, the philosopher R. G. Collingwood observed that pacifism may promote war rather than prevent it, because it is more interested in giving the pacifist a clear conscience than in navigating the rough seas of actually-existing hostilities.3 Such was the case with the UN over Bosnia. Annan’s fundamentalism on this point is odd, given his prior sophisticated reflections on ‘coercive inducement’ as a peacekeeping or peacemaking approach, and given too the assessments cited in the body of his report that the plausible threat of force and its use had effectively supported the mission (see, for example, paras 145, 149, 450).4 |
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