Making War to Keep Peace (31 page)

BOUTROS-GHALI'S POWER GRAB

When the heads of state at the NATO summit decided to use airpower to open Sarajevo and other Bosnian towns under siege, the secretary-general responded by asserting that he alone had the authority to decide when the first air strike could be made in any engagement. In a meeting with the Foreign Relations Committee of the French Parliament in Paris, Boutros-Ghali claimed that the Security Council gave him this extraordinary authority, which he refused to either use or delegate to the UN commander, the French general Jean Cot. The previous commander—the Belgian general Francis Briquemont—had resigned his command the week before, complaining of inadequate resources and authority. Cot, too, eventually went public with his frustrations, telling
Le Monde
that he had repeatedly requested the authority to call in air strikes, only to be turned down by Boutros-Ghali.
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“It is not for generals to ask me for the authorization,” the secretary-general asserted haughtily. “It is for the special representative…. If the special representative…requests it, I will be the first to accede to this demand.” The position of special representative (held by Yasushi Akashi) does not exist in the UN Charter; he was appointed by and responsible to the secretary-general and had no military competence.

Of course, it was not the first time Boutros-Ghali had claimed such power. Yet none of the Security Council resolutions he cited—770, 816, and 836—supported his position. None of these resolutions mandated bypassing the military commanders or delegated the decision to use airpower to the secretary-general. None required his authorization. On the contrary, the UN Charter vests all decisions concerning the use of force in the Security Council and the military forces of member states. Neither the Charter nor the Security Council makes the secretary-general the supreme commander of military operations. Although Boutros-Ghali himself was unsuited by training and experience to exercise such powers, he doggedly sought to prevent NATO from using the airpower authorized by the Security Council.

His actions had terrible consequences for Bosnia, virtually ending all hope of establishing collective security or effective deterrence of aggression through the UN. He undermined the UN's capacity to act, challenged the member states' right of collective self-defense, and denied the capacity of the Security Council to decide when aggression had occurred and when a serious threat to international peace and security existed. The secretary-general claimed nothing less than a personal veto over the legitimate use of force. It was the most sweeping power grab in the history of international organizations. It should have been firmly rebuffed, but it was not.

When the heads of state of the NATO governments announced that they would use NATO's airpower to lift the sieges on Sarajevo, Tuzla, Gorazde, and Srebrenica, they seemed decisive and credible. But all too soon it became clear that few of them actually expected air strikes to take place. The pretense that significant action has been taken when nothing has really happened was a characteristic of the UN style, in Bosnia and in subsequent international crises.

American pilots were fully prepared to carry out the air strikes, but there was no agreement on their authorization to do so. The same governments that Boutros-Ghali claimed had given him a veto over air strikes could have withdrawn that power. Yet the secretary-general's military power was simply accepted by key governments—notably the United Kingdom, France, and the Netherlands. If there were no air strikes to save the starving inhabitants of Sarajevo, Tuzla, Gorazde, Srebrenica, and the other safe areas, it was because the British, French, Dutch, and American governments did not act. Instead, the leaders of the Western world tried to work out a response to Serbia's savage violence that was acceptable to Serbia. Christopher sought the approval of French foreign minister Alain Juppé, who sought the approval of Christopher and British foreign secretary Douglas Hurd. Consensus was the central value in a situation where humanitarian concerns should have dominated.

A month passed as the struggle for consensus continued. After careful consultation with Milošević and Karadzic, the secretary-general finally proposed a solution for Tuzla. He suggested that Bosnian forces should surrender the Tuzla airport and that the Serbs should be permitted to
place monitors at the airport to ensure that no military use was made of it. If more violence occurred, the secretary-general would authorize his special representative to approve a request to NATO for close air support from the UNPROFOR commander, with the understanding that “close air support” did not imply punitive or preemptive air attacks. Thus, surrender of more Bosnian territory would be a condition of the delivery of humanitarian assistance. The secretary-general continued to resist the effective use of force long after it had been authorized by Security Council resolutions; he was a major obstacle to saving the Bosnians.

On February 5, 1994, Serb artillery fired into a market in the heart of Sarajevo, leaving sixty-eight dead and two hundred wounded. The ground was littered with “bodies and pieces of bodies…like a butcher shop.”
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By this time, Serb shells had been battering Sarajevo for twenty-two months; the market had been bombed once before, in 1992. A local journalist said, “Here in Sarajevo we have been deceived once again. Promises of planes, food, and aid have been broken. Having lied to us, the criminals have continued to destroy Zepa, Sarajevo, Mostar, Jablanica, and Gorazde. As well as monuments, they have destroyed history, hope, and goodness. It is their aim to destroy everything down to the last Bosnian.”
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In Washington, Paris, Brussels, and London, Western leaders told one another that something must be done. This time, the secretary-general seemed to agree. In a February 7 letter, he asked NATO to launch air strikes on artillery positions around Sarajevo if they were requested by the United Nations.
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Did this mean that NATO would function under the command of Boutros-Ghali? The U.S. Congress would support air strikes as long as NATO planes remained under NATO's control, not the UN's. The European Union (EU) issued another declaration that suggested it was ready to support the use of airpower—although it did not specify air
strikes
, and Boutros-Ghali had insisted on a distinction between the two. The new U.S. secretary of defense, William Perry, said, “I can state categorically that we will not unilaterally conduct air strikes.”

No fact-finding mission was required to determine that a member state of the United Nations had been the object of savage aggression. No further action by the Security Council was required to authorize whatever steps were necessary—including air strikes—to end the strangulation of Sarajevo, Tuzla, Srebrenica, Zepa, and the other Bosnian safe
areas. All that was required was that the NATO countries have the will to use the powers they had been given.

A little more than three weeks later, on February 28, American pilots in F-16 fighters operating from a NATO base in Aviano, Italy, under the command of Admiral Jeremy M. Boorda, senior NATO commander for southern Europe, twice warned Serb planes in positions around Gorazde to leave. When four Serb planes persisted in violating the no-fly zone, the Americans shot them down. This was the first NATO military engagement in its forty-five-year history. “If it was a test, I think we passed,” Admiral Boorda said.
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Yet the fact that the American planes came from a NATO base made U.S. officials nervous, and they took “unusual steps to assure the Russian government that the incident was not intended as a hostile act toward Moscow,” according to a
New York Times
report. “Thomas Pickering, the American ambassador to Moscow, was dispatched to convey the message personally to a representative of President Boris N. Yeltsin.”
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IF CRIMES GO UNPUNISHED

By 1994, more and more Americans were convinced that compelling moral and strategic reasons existed for caring about Bosnia. By then, more than 100,000 Bosnians had been killed in the war, and more than 1.6 million people had been driven from their homes and villages. Many Americans believed that the United States could not remain indifferent to such pain without brutalizing ourselves; that we could not deny empathy to the Bosnians without dehumanizing them and us. It seemed ever clearer that our indifference to their suffering would encourage their tormentors, and others. As Sigmund Freud argued in
Civilization and Its Discontents
, crimes that go unpunished only incite other crimes and incite others to commit crimes. Commentators referred to the lessons of Hitler's seizure of the Rhineland, Mussolini's seizure of Ethiopia, and Neville Chamberlain's capitulation at Munich, which showed that ignoring, appeasing, and even rewarding aggression encourages more aggression.

The strategic argument for caring about Bosnia was as clear as the moral argument. The pattern of aggression and expansion in which
Serbia had already engaged—in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Macedonia, and toward Vojvodina, Kosovo, and Albania—made it clear that Serb leaders were operating from a large appetite and an ambitious strategic plan that was especially dangerous at a time of great instability in Central and Eastern Europe. Restricted to Serbia, Milošević was a tyrant; permitted to expand, he would prepare the way for other tyrants.

Bosnia's fate had special significance for another reason: it was a test of the ability of the United States, the UN, NATO, the EU, and the CSCE to cope with an aggressor. By establishing diplomatic relations with Bosnia and admitting it to the UN, the United States and the EU had endowed it with the legitimacy and rights of states in the contemporary world. If they could not make collective security work for Bosnia, there was no reason to think they could make it work anywhere else.

Bosnia was an especially important test for the United States, the UN, and the EU. When the Security Council imposed an arms embargo that deprived Bosnia of the right to self-defense, it assumed responsibility for that defense. Again and again, the Security Council adopted resolutions promising the delivery of humanitarian assistance, the establishment of safe zones, and the protection of Bosnian towns against strangulation by sieges and annihilation from the air. The credibility of the major powers and of collective security itself were at stake.

Bosnia was also a test for the American government, which had assumed a special responsibility for the collective security structures constructed after World War II. We had planned them, vouched for them, and come to believe our own assurances. But the elaborate architecture of collective security was not proving up to the challenge. An international failure in Bosnia would be our failure as well.

Finally, Bosnia had become a test of the Russian-American relationship, in which the Bush and Clinton administrations had invested much. Russia's unexpected demand for a major role in a Bosnian settlement suddenly gave the problem a new great-powers dimension. But effective action proved elusive.

In the meantime, the UN peacekeepers suffered continued attacks, demonstrating how Boutros-Ghali's determination to control the use of force by UN troops had hamstrung operations. Take the following case, by no means unique: At 6:30 PM one evening in the fall of 1994, a Serb at
tack pinned down French peacekeepers near Bihac. At 7:00 PM, the peacekeepers called the UN commander for Bosnia, General Michael Rose, at his headquarters with a request for air support. At 8:30 PM, the request was transmitted to General Jean Cot, UN commander for the former Yugoslavia. At 10:40 PM, Cot transmitted the request to the secretary-general's special representative, Yasushi Akashi. A spokesman for the UN Secretariat claimed that the authorization for air strikes was granted at 11:35 PM, but that weather conditions made the strikes impossible. According to a NATO spokesman, the UN authorization never came—despite that French forces were in clear danger and NATO planes were overhead.

After several such episodes, including one a week later in which a French soldier was killed, French prime minister Edouard Balladur and defense minister François Leotard visited French forces in Bosnia, where Balladur demanded that procedures be promptly and definitively revised so that reinforcements could be provided when they were needed. “But,” said foreign minister Alain Juppé, “the problem is not only delay. It is also will. One does not get the impression that UN representatives on the ground—those who represent the secretary-general of the United Nations—have a firm determination to use force each time that it is necessary.”

Bihac was by no means an isolated problem. On February 22, 1994, Swedish peacekeeping troops near Tuzla came under heavy mortar attack and requested NATO air cover. General Rose relayed the request to General Cot, who was away. Cot's chief of staff presented the request to Akashi, who turned it down, saying the encounter was not serious enough to warrant a NATO air strike. Five Swedish peacekeepers were wounded. General Cot went public with the complaint that he had repeatedly asked for air strikes to protect UN forces, only to have his requests turned down by the UN representative on the ground. He made it clear that the situation of Bosnian towns under siege did not improve after NATO decided to undertake air strikes because the secretary-general's cumbersome rules of engagement and chain of command prevented the effective use of airpower. The French ambassador to the UN demanded that the power to call for air support be vested in military commanders. In Washington, Secretary of Defense William Perry
agreed, describing the decision-making process as “torturous” and insisting that there must be a more streamlined command authority. Perry noted that Security Council resolutions permitted UN military commanders to request help directly from NATO headquarters and stated his expectation that, in the future, they would do so.

It was past time for the governments participating in UNPROFOR to assume responsibility for the security of their forces and the success of their operations. They needed to recognize that the secretary-general had neither the military expertise nor the authority to exercise command and control. The UN Charter vests authority over military operations in the Security Council, and the Security Council had already authorized the use of force in Bosnia-Herzegovina in three resolutions: