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| Endless Appeasement’ Continued from previous page Review by Mark Thompson in the Journal Survival, published by the This brings us to the worst sentence in the report: ‘Ultimately, it is not possible to say with any certainty that stronger actions [to protect civilians in Srebrenica] by the Dutch [battalion] would have saved lives, and it is even possible that such efforts could have done more harm than good’ (para. 473). This flies in the face of UNPROFOR’s experience that the Serbs (and others) usually backed down when resolutely confronted. I do not recall that any UN hostages were physically harmed by their Serb captors. While the Secretariat may have had to yield to the concerns of a troop-contributing country when its soldiers were at risk, the analysis should not be trimmed now. For most of the Bosnian war, Annan served in the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO). To his credit, he implicates himself sufficiently. Occasional differences of opinion between the Secretariat and the mission (for example, paras 139, 144, 155, 160) do not alter the impression of a careful and even artful collusion, skirting the thorny issues. Nor does the report spare Akashi or the UNPROFOR Force Commander in 1995, General Bernard Janvier. Janvier’s inadequacy is laid bare: he underestimated the stakes in Bosnia and overrated the Serbs. Akashi’s milieu at HQ is evoked by a dreadful example. During the crisis of April 1994, when Mladic’s forces seemed on the brink of capturing the ‘safe area’ of Gorazde, a ‘senior adviser to the SRSG proposed “some psychological action in place of military action that [could] break the deadlock in the political situation”’. The adviser proposed, amongst other measures, offering the Serbs independence, or lifting the sanctions against them’ (para. 139). By their advisers shall ye know them. On this occasion the Secretariat demurred. However, the mission’s failings were simply the reflection – magnified, denuded, but not distorted – of the accommodations and evasions at the heart of the Secretariat’s ‘institutional ideology’. There were, of course, dissenters. The report quotes an unnamed mission member on the ‘policy of endless appeasement’ (para. 156). Whether that memo reached New York, we are not told. The word ‘appeasement’ does find a due place in Annan’s report (para. 500), as does the phrase ‘attempted genocide’ (paras 491, 501, 505) – language shunned by the UN at the time. I remember a cable from UN Headquarters in December 1994 from Annan’s special assistant in the DPKO, Shashi Tharoor, widely regarded as one of the sharpest minds in the Secretariat, here arguing somewhat heretically that ‘the assertive delivery of supplies to UNPROFOR and to civilians in the safe areas’ was the only available option with ‘the slightest hope of breaking out of the present stalemate’. The memo sank without trace. In public, as far as I know, Tharoor expressed orthodox disdain for the use of force: ‘we’re deployed to help extinguish the flames of war, not to fan them’.5 The key dissenter, in the end, was a British general. Rupert Smith took command of the Bosnia theatre early in 1995, and seems to have decided by May that the mission had to be ready to ‘escalate to success’, a phrase attributed to Smith by Tim Ripley (p. 47). Ripley got closer to the publicity-shy Smith and other UNPROFOR officers, including Janvier, than any other journalist. Unless Smith turns to writing in his retirement, this will surely remain the best record of the UN’s outstanding commander in the former Yugoslavia. Operation Deliberate Force is fast-paced, enthusiastic and bristling with weapons-system acronyms. (The editing of the book, however, leaves something to be desired.) A painstaking work, attuned to Bosnian realities, it gives the fullest account that I’ve seen of the denouement of the war. Peace processes Given the remarkable institutional honesty of the UN’s Srebrenica report, and the wealth of good journalism and scholarship (to which the Ripley book is a worthy addition) on the subject of the Bosnia débâcle, it is doubly disappointing to read the untempered apologia from Smith’s predecessor, General Michael Rose. Rose’s Fighting for Peace, an account of his 1994 tour in Bosnia as UNPROFOR commander, is tendentious and bitter, replete with unargued assertions and elementary errors.6 Given Rose’s assertion that Yugoslavia was populated by different ‘races’ (p. 4), it is perhaps not surprising that his book is full of ethnic stereotypes. He opines that ‘the culture of the Serbs stems from a dangerous mix of raw passion and religious mysticism’ (p. 5); sees a Bosnian politician as having ‘abandoned his birthright’ as a Muslim (p. 26); and doubts that Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic can understand ‘the Christian sentiment’ behind Mozart’s Requiem (p. 146). Rose digresses on ‘the Jewish influence on current events’ (p. 5). Inevitably, he buys into the ancient-hatreds thesis: ‘every child [in the region] is taught stories of the cruel deeds perpetrated against its community throughout the ages’ (p. 4). Rose plays up Bosniac leaders’ role in the conflict and also the UN’s achievements, while playing down Serb responsibility and NATO’s role. The real enemies of peace were the Bosniac leaders with their ‘sheer venality and lack of humanity’ (p. 227), the ‘hawks in NATO’ (p. 118), and Sarajevo-based journalists – ‘jackals circling the decaying corpse’ (p. 163). The demon of the piece seems to have been Bosnia’s vice-president, Ejup Ganic, portrayed as ‘contemptible’, ‘incredibly inept’, ‘smirking’, talking ‘drivel’ in a ‘high nasal voice’. General Joulwan, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), fares not much better. The principal hero is Rose’s bodyguard, a warm-hearted roisterer handy with his fists, out of Kipling’s Soldiers Three. Like Akashi and Janvier, Rose misjudged the Serbs and the utility of force. He pulled his team out of besieged Gorazde on 17 April 1994 because ‘the fighting was dying down’ (p. 115); the crisis raged on, and two days later Bosnia seemed to be ‘sliding uncontrollably towards war’ (p. 116). When NATO bombarded Serb-controlled Udbina airport in November 1994, Rose thought ‘the Serbs would undoubtedly respond by shelling the UN’ (p. 201). On the contrary, ‘the next day, the UN airlifts into Sarajevo restarted and aid convoys resumed throughout Bosnia’ (p. 202). ‘We did not cross the “Mogadishu line” after all’, notes Rose – but he fails, incredibly, to draw the obvious lesson. He overstates the flexibility of the Bosnian Serb leaders and the belligerence of their Bosniac counterparts. Despite the dearth of evidence, he remains convinced that the local armistices brokered by UNPROFOR could have delivered an overall settlement in 1994. When discouraged, he denounces all the parties in worst UN style for not ‘wanting peace’ (p. 187). The book is also internally contradictory. NATO’s Operation Deliberate Force is dismissed as having had ‘negligible’ effect in 1995 (p. 6), yet elsewhere Rose admits that NATO air-power played ‘an indispensable role’ and concedes that ‘the peace process was suspended for a brief period [sic] and the Serbs were compelled by force of arms to accept a negotiated settlement’ (pp. 248, 251). President Izetbegovic’s ‘talk of creating a multi-religious, multi-cultural State was a disguise for the extension of his own political power and the furtherance of Islam’ (p. 38). Later, the Bosniac leader is ‘a courageous man caught up in a web of deceit, corruption and religious extremism within his party’ (p. 236). Rose starts by writing of Sarajevo as ‘under siege’, of ‘tyranny’ (p. 1) and ‘aggression’ (p. 3). By page seven, the conflict is ‘a three-sided civil war over territory’ produced by ‘ethnic differences’. Predictably, Rose is convinced that force should be alien to the search for peace and to peacekeeping. He chronicles his efforts to prevent air strikes (pp. 60, 64, 204), and belittles the effectiveness of credible threats against the Serb side, such as NATO’s ultimatum over Gorazde (pp. 118–19). His controversial refusals to entertain requests from his own commanders for NATO air presence or support over Tuzla and Bihac go unmentioned. Rose’s attitude to the ‘peace process’ was protective, at times proprietorial: ‘As far as I was concerned, the peace process was still alive’ (p. 181). In truth, until late summer 1995, this process was an illusion resting on the hope that ‘at some point both sides would stop fighting and try to resolve their differences through negotiation’ (p. 117). Rose clung to this hope despite sound advice from Bosniacs. Izetbegovic said that ‘the Serbs would only agree to end the war when they had lost it and that NATO should help the Bosnian Army to bring about this eventuality’ (p. 46). Months later, a local commander in the Bosnian Army told Rose that ‘the West was unnecessarily scared of the Serbs, and … if a coalition of forces were established between NATO and the newly-formed Federation, the Serbs would be defeated’ (p. 149). Perhaps these remarks made so little impact because they were made by, respectively, a dissembling fundamentalist and a ‘fat, half-shaven, swarthy man who broke into high-pitched giggles’. Rose’s tour was marked by crises over Sarajevo, Gorazde and Bihac. Kofi Annan’s report contains more reliable accounts of these episodes. Rose omits the 12 December 1994 short-range attack on a UN personnel carrier by Serb soldiers, murdering one Bangladeshi peacekeeper and wounding four others. When Rose denied the local UN commander’s request for NATO air presence, morale in mission HQ plumbed new depths. His book usefully reminds us of Rose’s opposition to NATO’s proposal to destroy the Bosnian Serbs’ air-defence system (pp. 200, 204), a crucial error that paved the way for the UN’s humiliation the following year. Mark Thompson is the author of A Paper House: The Ending of Yugoslavia (London: Vintage, 1992) and Forging War: The Media in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Hercegovina (London: Article 19, 1994 and 1999). He worked for the United Nations in the former Yugoslavia between 1994 and 1998. Notes
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