Making War to Keep Peace (28 page)

There was some truth in the excuses offered for every capitulation, but no adequate explanation of why President Clinton so quickly accepted the limits on U.S. action in Bosnia that candidate Clinton had harshly criticized. “If you believe that we should engage these problems in a multilateral way,” he said, “if you believe in what happened in a good way in Operation Desert Storm, then the reverse has to be true, too. The United States has got to work through the United Nations, and all of our views may not always prevail.”
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Apparently, he had forgotten that Desert Storm was conducted under American command.

Was it the search for consensus among the permanent members of the Security Council that led Clinton to abdicate American leadership in the Balkans? Did he see unilateral action as incompatible with U.S. commitments to NATO?

Christopher had promised that the new administration would bring “the full weight of American diplomacy” to a search for a negotiated settlement, after which U.S. troops would help enforce the peace. But it often seemed that he did not fully understand the many obstacles to peace. He assured all that the new administration would take immediate steps to reduce suffering and bloodshed—including enforcement of the no-fly zone under the UN resolution. He called on all parties to expedite the flow of humanitarian aid to relieve suffering. He suggested that American forces might be used to ensure safe passage of food and medicine to areas under siege, and reiterated that the Clinton administration planned to work with Vance and Owen to make their proposals more acceptable to the Muslims.
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In March 1993, special rapporteur Mazowiecki made an urgent appeal to the UN Human Rights Commission, then meeting in Geneva. Serb officials agreed to give UNHCR brief access to prison camps and towns under siege. On March 5, General Morillon (the French UN commander for Bosnia-Herzegovina) and the UNHCR representatives arrived in Srebrenica for a fact-finding mission. The facts were not diffi
cult to ascertain. Serb forces temporarily diminished their shelling, but resumed it as soon as Morillon left. Many people who tried to escape behind his convoy were ambushed and murdered. Among those who stayed, many died under the intensified shelling.

On March 12, General Morillon arrived again in Srebrenica, where he announced that he would remain until Serb officials permitted evacuation of the wounded. Nine days later, a single UN aid convoy was admitted to Srebrenica. Conditions continued to deteriorate. On April 2, Sadako Ogata, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, wrote to the secretary-general, “[T]hese people are desperate to escape to safety because they see no other prospect than death if they remain where they are.” Ogata saw only two options: (1) immediately enhance the international presence, including UNPROFOR, turn the area into a United Nations Protected Area (UNPA), and provide lifesaving assistance; or (2) organize a large-scale evacuation of the endangered population.

Safe Areas Established

Although the special rapporteur had explicitly recommended the establishment of security zones in Bosnia and Herzegovina in November 1992, nearly six months passed before the Security Council passed Resolution 819 on April 16, 1993, established Srebrenica as a safe area—an area theoretically free from armed attack or any other hostile act. The resolution also demanded that the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) immediately stop supplying weapons to Bosnian Serb paramilitary units.
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In May, in Resolution 824, the Security Council declared that Sarajevo, Tuzla, Zepa, Gorazde, Bihac, and Srebrenica should be treated as safe areas from which all Bosnian Serb military and paramilitary forces should withdraw.

UNPROFOR's task was not to defend a geographical area but to protect the civilian population of the area against armed attack. As Mazowiecki noted, however, the safe areas were safe only on paper. “The Security Council…refrained from authorizing the additional troops deemed necessary by the secretary-general to ensure full implementation of UNPROFOR's mandate.”
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The safe areas were mobbed by displaced
persons, overwhelmingly women and children; people were dying daily from shelling, starvation, illness, and wounds.

By summer's end, the Serbs' shelling, sniping, and starving of civilians had resumed. In August, Resolution 836 reaffirmed the safe areas, extended the mandate of UNPROFOR to enlarge them, and authorized the use of airpower to support the mandate. But by then the Bosnian Serb leadership thought it had prevailed. Its detestable “purification” of Bosnia was nearly complete: Entire Bosnian Muslim communities had been destroyed in the merciless military campaign to establish exclusive Serbian power over the country. One by one, Muslim towns had been attacked by Serb mercenaries and regular army troops, their populations driven out, swelling the refugee population to 1.6 million. It was the largest wave of refugees in Europe since World War II.

Sarajevo's airport had been shut down for months, and the city was surrounded by Serb troops. Food was so scarce that many families lived on one meal a day. Diabetics lacked insulin; the wounded lacked antibiotics and painkillers. The international community managed little effective action. Neither the sanctions imposed on Serbia by the UN Security Council nor the arms embargoes were working. UNPROFOR was not an effective force. Cease-fires were negotiated and violated, pledges made and broken. Safe routes created for the delivery of humanitarian supplies were shut tight. Serbian mortars pounded Sarajevo's neighborhoods almost daily and fired on safe areas packed with refugees. In the last three months of 1993, there were 225 violations of the no-fly ban.

Western Non-response

The commitment, dedication, and heroic style of UN commander general Philippe Morillon and his fact-finding missions illustrated what the international community could have been doing to stop the devastation. His behavior threw the feckless performance of the UN, NATO, the EC, and the United States into embarrassing contrast, paving the way for high-ranking UN officials to call for the removal of Morillon—whom the French media were calling “General Courage”—in April 1993.

The Serb government complained bitterly that General Morillon was not “neutral and objective” in drawing distinctions between the refugees
and their oppressors. In the UN Secretariat, anonymous officials alluded to Morillon's habits of exceeding instructions, violating the rule of neutrality, and attracting too much media attention. They discreetly requested his recall. No one in the Secretariat or the French government acknowledged their intentions to remove General Morillon, although France's defense minister, François Leotard, said that Morillon would probably be back in Paris by May.

The treatment of General Morillon was an exercise in cynicism, like sending NATO planes to patrol the no-fly zone and then not permitting them to enforce it. Though Boutros-Ghali insisted on his policy of neutrality, the events in Bosnia dramatized the need to rethink the theory and practice of UN peacekeeping—indeed, of UN military involvement in international conflicts and in the provision of humanitarian assistance.

It was not clear, for example, that peacekeeping forces should ever have been committed to Croatia, where their presence protected Serbian conquests, or to Bosnia, where a major war of aggression had been under way for a year and the presence of UN peacekeeping forces was repeatedly used as an excuse for inaction. The arms embargo was the clearest example of a UN action that made the situation worse. By the time Clinton was inaugurated in January 1993, the homes, families, communities, and lives of Bosnia's Muslim population had been largely destroyed.

Yet no wave of outrage swept the world at this genocide in the heart of Europe. The Serb offensive had destroyed the existing Bosnian society in less time than it took the international community to pass resolutions promising to use necessary force to deliver food and medicine. It was difficult not to conclude that the indecision and inaction of Western governments, which chose not to act effectively—either unilaterally or through the UN, NATO, the WEU, the EC, or the Contact Group—constituted passive acquiescence in Serb aggression.

It was not the first time in the twentieth century that the West had been faced with organized brutality—and not the first time Western leaders had equivocated and procrastinated and offered only the most measured and detached response. Their busy nonresponse to Serb aggression recalled the inaction of the Western leaders who confronted Adolf Hitler at the outset of World War II.

But this time the West had several activist leaders: Margaret Thatcher, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, EC president Jacques Delors, and, a bit later, Bill Clinton used the media to draw attention to the problems and raise the stakes. These leaders spoke boldly about alternatives that John Major, François Mitterrand, and George H. W. Bush had preferred not to consider. Thatcher, the former prime minister, insisted that Bosnia was a defining moment, and she was right. The world's response to Serbian genocide defined its lack of seriousness about a new world order and collective security from aggression. It illustrated the ineptitude of the elaborate international institutions constructed to deal with just such crises.

In this first test of the post–cold war period, the WEU was partially incapacitated by the EC's “dangerous lack of resolve,” against which Delors had warned. NATO was partially incapacitated by French opposition to its participation. The UN was partially incapacitated by the reluctance and indifference of its member states, and by Boutros-Ghali's resistance to involvement in what he called “a rich people's war.”
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The Red Cross was partially incapacitated by the Serbs' denial of access to prison camps and by its own lack of a sense of urgency. The United States was partially incapacitated by a lack of empathy among some of the people in the administration and in Congress who were responsible for foreign policy. The UN response also was distorted by its pose of neutrality. For years, some UN officials and Security Council members clung to its contention that this war of aggression was a civil war.

The Serbs' systematic destruction of Bosnia was an ugly model for fanatical nationalists and would-be aggressors and dictators in other parts of Central and Eastern Europe. It trivialized efforts to establish collective security, and it sapped the intellectual and moral foundations of collective action anywhere.

Thatcher advised European and American leaders to issue a series of ultimatums to the government of Slobodan Milošević: cease military action and the flow of weapons into Bosnia, or else. Tell Serb forces in Bosnia to turn over their heavy weapons to an international body, or else. Permit Muslims to return to their devastated homes under international protection, or else. She advised the United States and the EC to tell Milošević that failure to do these things would result in the destruction of
Serb military assets and the encouragement, by all means, of opposition groups.
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Serbia, she noted dryly, was not a world power. It was a savage, racist regime for which there was no room in any new world order worth preserving.
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Yet Boutros Boutros-Ghali raised objections against these proposals for effective action, as he had more than once before. In July 1992, he had opposed implementation of the London Agreement, which called for Serbia to deliver its heavy artillery to UN forces. In September, he had opposed enforcing the no-fly zone. A few months later, out of fear of offending the Serbs, he had resisted airdropping food to towns filled with starving people.

The news that four Bosnian residents of a home for the aged had frozen to death in a single night a block from UN headquarters in Sarajevo did not help the UN's reputation for humanitarian concern and efficacy. Cyrus Vance's personal efforts to prevent U.S. officials from meeting with Bosnian president Alija Izetbegovíc in Washington, where he met with President Clinton in the fall of 1993,82 did not help Vance's reputation as an evenhanded, humane mediator. Many Bosnians, Croa-tians, Africans, and Cambodians began to see the UN as part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

The UN Secretariat functioned like many other bureaucracies. It took action only by consensus, which was hard to build and harder to maintain. Responsibility was so widely shared and so depersonalized that ordinary moral and social disciplines disappeared. Where everyone is responsible, no one is responsible. If it is difficult to hold governments responsible for their actions, holding international institutions is even more difficult.

At the same time, the EC, the Security Council, and the member states did not challenge Boutros-Ghali's unprecedented assertions of authority. Although he was described as an activist secretary-general, he resisted all but the most limited peacekeeping in Bosnia. When the Security Council considered enforcing the no-fly zone or the delivery of humanitarian assistance, Boutros-Ghali appealed for more time to find a political solution. The result was continued Serb aggression against a background of endless negotiation. Although the UN Charter vests executive power in the Security Council, its member states accepted the secretary-
general's priorities and programs as if he were the chief executive in a presidential system and the Security Council a rubber-stamp legislature.

By May 1993, the already-disastrous human situation had worsened, as Serb forces launched successive attacks on the region's remaining Muslim towns, which had grown more swollen with refugees. Despite the powerful moral argument for using American airpower to save Bosnians, all sides ventured further counterarguments on both moral and practical grounds. Britain, France, Belgium, and other countries with troops on the ground feared that air strikes would endanger their troops. Many Americans feared that air strikes would constitute an openended U.S. commitment that could end in a Balkan quagmire; others believed that a unilateral U.S. decision in favor of air strikes would violate international norms and endanger peacekeeping forces; still others argued that American national interests were not involved in the Balkans, and the U.S. government should not commit military forces. This left President Clinton with a critical decision: whether to commit American power, under UN command, in the pursuit of purely altruistic goals.