Interventions

by Kofi Annan

  Alarmed by these developments, pressure began to build from member states, as well as some of the key Council members, for the international community to “do something” and for the UN to expand its activities into Bosnia. While Boutros-Ghali was reluctant to take on yet another large-scale peacekeeping commitment in the Balkans, President François Mitterrand of France urged him to consider it in light of the catastrophe that was unfolding on the ground. He responded by sending Marrack Goulding on a fact-finding mission to Bosnia in May 1992 in order to assess the possibility of deploying a peacekeeping mission to the republic. Goulding reported back on the ongoing war, noting how Bosnian Serbs supported by JNA were deliberately seeking to create “ethnically pure” regions by terrorizing, killing, and expelling non-Serb populations from hitherto mixed areas. However, he also concluded that “in its present phase this conflict is not susceptible to UN peacekeeping treatment.” Boutros-Ghali accepted the conclusion, as did the Council on May 15.

  By this time, much of UNPROFOR’s headquarters in Sarajevo had been evacuated due to the fighting, and although some forty military observers had been sent to the Mostar region in late April, there was only a very limited UN presence throughout the republic in the period when Bosnia Serb forces consolidated their hold on much of eastern and northern Bosnia. The accompanying scenes of barbarity that saw thousands, mostly Bosnian Muslims, killed or expelled from their homes, were not, in general, witnessed by UNPROFOR officials.

  The full scale of the horrors taking place in Bosnian Serb–controlled territory, however, could not long be hidden from the international community, particularly in light of the evidence of the rapidly growing population of refugees. To Europeans, who had recently lived through the end of the Cold War and had come to expect that transitions from communist rule to democracy could be both orderly and peaceful, the reports that emerged from Bosnia in the summer of 1992 were deeply disturbing. The images of emaciated prisoners, frightened, traumatized, and huddled behind barbed wire, evoked memories of the darkest days of European history. There was also an ongoing, systematic rape campaign that clearly became common practice in the conflict. Particularly abhorrent were the “rape camps” where Bosnian women were held at the disposal of Serbian soldiers and paramilitaries.

  The demand for further action only grew in intensity—even though the conditions that, back in May, had been found to rule out a traditional peacekeeping mission had not changed. In June, UNPROFOR troops assumed control of Sarajevo Airport from Bosnian Serbs, thus establishing a vital lifeline for humanitarian supplies into the country, which was kept open by the UN throughout the period of the war. The first significant expansion of the UN’s role in Bosnia, however, came in September, when the Security Council, in response to the deteriorating situation in Sarajevo and elsewhere, authorized an increase in UNPROFOR’s strength in order to protect UNHCR convoys delivering humanitarian aid.

  Although deployed into what was plainly an ongoing war, member states insisted that the enlarged force should operate in accordance with the “established principles and practices of UN peacekeeping.” The emphasis was significant and telling: “doing something” did not at this stage, nor, indeed, at any time until after the fall of Srebrenica in the summer of 1995, involve war fighting. On this much, at least there was agreement among the permanent five member states as well as the major troop contributors to the mission.

  The Secretariat viewed this as an inescapable reality. Again and again I learned, in my regular meetings with troop-contributing countries as head of DPKO, accompanied by my trusted and insightful special assistant Shashi Tharoor, that no one was willing to reconfigure the mission to engage in war fighting. To do so, I was told, would expose their troops to “unnecessary” risks. Yet as the war dragged on, the international media and key member states, notably the United States and Germany, publicly and rightly questioned the viability of the nonconfrontational peacekeeping basis on which UN involvement was based. Rather than risk soldiers, they pressured us to take more forceful action through the use of air power.

  Every new resolution, however, also reaffirmed previous resolutions, which rejected active war fighting. Although some forty thousand UN peacekeepers were eventually deployed, Bosnia remained essentially a peacekeeping mission: lightly equipped, widely dispersed with limited mobility and no strategic reserve, vulnerable logistics, and reliant on the consent of parties to carry out its tasks.

  Some said, as a result, that the UN was effectively abandoning the Bosnians. Yet the way in which the public sympathized with the victims of the conflict sometimes overshadowed their understanding of what obstructed the UN from doing what ought to be done—and from what the UN was, in fact, doing.

  UN peacekeepers in the former Yugoslavia were deployed originally in support of three major purposes. Chief among them was the effort to alleviate the human suffering caused by the war. This meant keeping Sarajevo Airport open and the airlift going; supporting the efforts of UNHCR to deliver food and medicine as well as protecting their storage centers and other UN facilities; providing protection for other humanitarian agencies and, when requested to do so by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), providing protection for convoys of released detainees. It was a large and complex operation for which many peacekeepers and aid workers paid with their lives. By the end of 1995, the airlift operation had delivered nearly 160,000 metric tons of food in nearly 13,000 sorties, while UNPROFOR-supported convoys had delivered more than 850,000 metric tons of aid by road.

  The second broad purpose for which the UN was deployed was to contain the conflict and mitigate its consequences as far as possible, making sure it did not spread within or beyond the territory of the former Yugoslavia. This involved imposing various constraints on the warring parties, through such arrangements as the no-fly zone over Bosnia adopted in October 1992, weapons-exclusion zones, and the preventive deployment of UN troops, the first mission of its kind, to the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia in December 1992.

  The third objective was to facilitate the efforts by the warring parties—both locally and at the strategic level—to reach a peaceful settlement to the conflict. To this end, the UN negotiated local cease-fires and provided support for an overall political settlement. The latter included support for activities of the International Conference on the former Yugoslavia and those of the contact group established in April 1994.

  While these were all important goals, they did not constitute a clear political objective for the UN mission. The peacekeepers had not deployed to end the war in Bosnia, nor was it an army sent out to fight on one side.

  By 1993, the Bosniak town of Srebrenica—a refugee-filled enclave containing some sixty thousand trapped Muslims—was besieged, bombarded daily by Bosnian Serb forces threatening extreme ethnic cleansing. Consequently, on April 16, 1993, the Security Council demanded that “all parties treat Srebrenica and its surroundings as a safe area which should be free from armed attacks and any other hostile action.” A few weeks later, the Council conferred the same status on five other threatened towns: Zepa, Gorazde, Bihac, Tuzla, and the capital city, Sarajevo.

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  The decision to accord the status of “safe area” to Srebrenica provided no more than a temporary respite from violence. The fighting around the enclave and shelling of the town ratcheted up once more, and it soon became clear that the Council would have to return to consider their professed commitment “to ensure full respect for the safe areas.”

  In mid-May, the self-styled Bosnian Serb Assembly in Pale rejected a peace plan proposed by UN special envoy Cyrus Vance and European Community representative Lord Owen, after which both the nonaligned caucus—led by Venezuela, which was then on the Council—and the United States called for more “forceful” action to be taken, including a lifting of the arms embargo on Bosnia combined with NATO air strikes against Bosnian Serb targets. The UK and France, both with large conting
ents of troops on the ground and deeply opposed to U.S. ideas of air power, sought another option. The result was resolution 836, adopted on June 4, 1993, again extending the mandate of UNPROFOR in the safe areas, affirming its responsibility for their protection and allowing for the potential use of air power in or around the safe areas.

  At this moment I was acutely aware of the complexities of our new plan in Bosnia and how difficult it would be to raise more troops. The force was already stretched dangerously thin on the ground, and I was alarmed at the ambiguous and imprecise wording of the resolution. Although members did not appreciate being reminded of the gap between mandate and resources, I was determined to raise my concerns regarding the troop numbers that would be required to implement the safe-areas plan.

  In this case, none of the cosponsors—the United Kingdom, France, Russia, Spain, and the United States—offered to increase their contingents, nor were they willing even to redeploy existing contingents in theater to the newly established safe areas. This was concerning enough, but I was particularly eager to clarify three aspects of the resolution: the precise meaning attached to the word “deter,” the provisions they envisaged for demilitarizing the safe areas, and the conditions under which air strikes would be justified and under whose authority they would be initiated. I asked the force commander in Bosnia at this time, Lieutenant-General Lars Eric Wahlgren, to draw up a staff study of the implications of the safe-area concept, asking in effect what it would take to make the concept at all credible and if it could be done with their existing force.

  At a meeting with the cosponsor countries, I asked my military advisor, General Maurice Baril, to give an oral presentation on UNPROFOR’s preliminary military staff study. It called for thirty-two thousand additional troops “to credibly implement the safe areas concept.” I did not expect that we would be able to raise that number, but I was determined to get the message across about the consequences of taking on new commitments. The cosponsors, especially Britain and France but also the United States, reacted with anger to the presentation, accusing DPKO of incompetence and failure to do its job properly. Their preference and what they wanted DPKO to spend their time on was the “light minimum” option, which had been drawn up earlier by France and which envisaged the deployment of only five thousand troops.

  David Hannay, the UK permanent representative, was especially unhappy with our performance and did not mince words. As for the actual language of the resolution, he made it clear that the phrase “to deter attacks against the safe areas” had been chosen deliberately rather than “to defend” and, likewise, that “to promote withdrawal of military and paramilitary forces” had been chosen rather than to “ensure or enforce.” The cosponsors, he stressed, wanted UNPROFOR’s “deterrent capacity” to derive from its presence in the safe areas—not from its actual military strength. As for demilitarizing the safe areas, UNPROFOR should “seek assurances” and, if possible, negotiate “voluntary agreements” with the Bosnian government. Reporting back on the meeting to General Wahlgren, I wrote that none of the six representatives present “seemed to envisage a force capable of effectively defending these areas” and, crucially, that none of them were willing to contribute any additional troops to UNPROFOR.

  Justifying their stance, the cosponsors stressed that the creation of the safe areas was only a “temporary measure” adopted in anticipation of an overall political settlement. We knew however that “temporary” measures had a habit of becoming permanent and of acquiring a life and logic of their own. Moreover, even if only temporary, commitments of this kind inevitably created expectations, and, crucially from our point of view, they required resources. Even the light-minimum option proved impossible to meet, and we would be forced to muddle through with the limited resources we had.

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  There were several fundamental features driving the political dynamics at this time, limiting our room for maneuver. The first and most important of these were the deep divisions that existed throughout much of the war between key members of the Security Council—notably between the UK and France on the one hand and the United States on the other—about the nature of the Balkan conflict and, crucially for us in DPKO, the appropriate way forward on the ground. Unlike other operations at that time, including successful ones in Cambodia, El Salvador, and Mozambique, agreement among Council members and troop-contributing countries frequently extended only to the need for action, not to the definition of what kind of action to take. In Bosnia the persistent source of disagreement concerned the use of air power in support of UN peacekeepers.

  There was a standoff between countries with peacekeeping forces on the ground, mainly the Europeans, and the Americans, who were not on the ground. The Europeans felt that any attempt to use air power would place their troops at risk—they might then face a military backlash they had not been deployed to sustain. The Americans, meanwhile, felt that the only way to resolve the issue and stop the Serbs was to use air power. The French and others demanded that this could happen only if the ground troops were reinforced with troops prepared to fight.

  Second, member states were reluctant to provide additional troops, nor were they prepared to redeploy existing troops within theater in order to meet new commitments. The governments of troop-contributing nations tended to deal directly with the commanders on the ground, further undermining unity of command.

  Third, there simply was no appetite among troop contributors for abandoning peacekeeping in favor of a combat mission, however much the wording of individual resolutions appeared to suggest greater toughness and resolve. This created the “fantastic gap” that General Briquemont spoke of.

  Finally, it seemed to me and many of us in DPKO that the complexity of the situation was sometimes missed, other times willfully ignored, by certain member states. No one within DPKO ever questioned the overwhelming primary responsibility of the Bosnian Serbs and its allies in Belgrade for the tragic course of events in Bosnia, their duplicity, and the untold horrors and suffering caused daily by their campaign of ethnic cleansing. But there were other aspects to the war that UNPROFOR on the ground could not ignore. The ferocious war that raged between Bosniak forces and those of the Croatian Defence Council supported by Zagreb in 1993 and 1994, for example, barely registered in the U.S. public discussion about the war, even though some of the worst individual atrocities save for Srebrenica—in Stupni Do and the Medak pocket in September 1993—were committed during that struggle.

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  By the spring of 1995, it was becoming increasingly clear that “muddling through” another year in Bosnia was simply no longer an option. In mid-March, General Rupert Smith, in his first directive as force commander in Bosnia, noted that UN efforts to advance the existing cease-fire were failing while warlike preparations by the parties were intensifying. The vulnerability of the peacekeeping force in Bosnia, thinly spread out as an effectively indefensible force, was further underscored by the capture of some four hundred UN personnel in late May following NATO air strikes against a few targets around Sarajevo on May 25 and 26. The personnel were held hostage in retaliation for those strikes, and although their capture was humiliating enough, the air strikes then stopped in acquiescence to this Serb tactic. The response of troop-contributing countries to that crisis—retrenchment and a reaffirmation of the peacekeeping character of the mission—only sharpened the dilemmas confronting us, as we made very clear in the secretary-general’s report to the Council on May 30. After more than three years, it concluded, UNPROFOR was still “deployed in a war situation where there is no peace to keep.” As a result, we now found ourselves obstructed, targeted, denied resupply, and restricted in our movements. At the time, we had great difficulty seeing a way out of the situation. But the real prison, of course, was the one that caged Bosnia’s civilians with no escape from the deadly conflict.

  After a series of demonstrations of the Security Council’s lack of commitment to take
serious action to protect the safe area, on July 11, 1995, Bosnian Serb forces under the command of General Ratko Mladic overran Srebrenica. The reports began only a few days after the fall of Srebrenica that thousands of young men and boys were unaccounted for, and the stories grew each day with thousands of women desperately trying to discover the whereabouts of their husbands and sons. As the days passed, the worst suspicions were increasingly confirmed. We later learned that, within days of Srebrenica’s capture, thousands of Bosniak men and boys were summarily executed by Serb forces, many of them mercilessly hunted down as they desperately sought to reach government-controlled territory. The precise figure of those massacred has yet to be established, though at least eight thousand Bosnian Muslims are known to have been murdered in the immediate aftermath.

  The safe area of Zepa would fall shortly after, and one might have thought that this would have finally compelled the Security Council to more fervent action. I vividly recall, however, at the international conference of defense ministers in London in the aftermath of the fall of Srebrenica and Zepa on July 21, that deep differences persisted among member states about the way forward. While the meeting did threaten air strikes if the Serbs attacked the remaining enclave of Gorazde, I remained deeply skeptical whether this was a serious commitment.

  By this stage, however, a raft of key developments had come together. First, UN troops were finally concentrating their positions, with remote units pulled into tighter and better defended positions, negating the threat of hostage taking that had been used to such effect by the Bosnian Serb forces in May. Second, in early June the European countries created a Rapid Reaction Force (RRF) consisting of British, French, and Dutch elements, which, although initially set up to cover a possible withdrawal of UNPROFOR, also provided the mission with a genuine, self-contained and combat-capable force of some seven thousand troops. In particular, the RRF provided heavy artillery, which General Rupert Smith, UNPROFOR’s highly capable commander, who had been in post since February 1995, then deployed on Mount Igman.