Making War to Keep Peace

by Jeane J. Kirkpatrick

  In this period, Serbs and Croats often collaborated in attacking Bosnia’s Muslims. Milošević and Croat president Franjo Tudjman had previously discussed dividing Bosnia and Herzegovina between them, but Milošević was resistant to any agreement; he and Karadzic were apparently moved only by the prospect of enhancing Serb power, and did not hesitate to ignore cease-fire agreements they had signed. It was clear to all that Milošević had no interest in a peace that established democratic self-government for Bosnia or Kosovo, or protected the minority rights of Muslims. He had no intention of demilitarizing Kosovo, reducing his forces, or implementing a cease-fire. Instead, he escalated his campaign of violence.

  Early in 1993, the cold-blooded murder of Bosnia’s deputy prime minister, Hakija Turajlic, seriously called into question UN competence and rules of engagement.63 As the nation’s vice president, Ejup Ganic, said, “The assassination was in a United Nations APC, on a road controlled by the United Nations, and under the protection of UN soldiers…. The United Nations is responsible for this tragedy.”64 The true responsibility for the murder, of course, lay first and foremost with the Serb soldier who fired seven shots into the deputy prime minister, but it was shared by the UN officer in charge and by the UN itself, whose rules of engagement made it unnecessarily difficult to protect Turajlic. The armored vehicle carrying Turajlic was halted at gunpoint by a force of forty Serbs. One of the UNPROFOR troops assigned to guard him—probably the French officer in charge, Colonel Patrice Sartre—opened the locked back doors of the vehicle, leaving him exposed to the Serb assailants. A peacekeeper was asked if he had fired at the man who killed Turajlic. “Returning fire,” he explained, “is not permitted under UN rules of engagement except to save your own life.”65

  In February 1993, the Security Council passed Resolution 808, establishing the International Criminal Tribunal to investigate and prosecute war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia. But the siege of Sarajevo continued unabated, with no war criminals arrested or charged. In June, air strikes were again authorized but not conducted, and though six Muslim towns were declared safe areas, none were safe. All remained under attack and without food and medicine.

  PEACEKEEPING: THE UNITED STATES MEETS THE UN RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

  At the start of 1993, three enclaves in eastern Bosnia remained under Bosnian government control. Each was desperately overcrowded and undersupplied, overflowing with refugees from other towns that had been attacked, and each was surrounded by Serb forces. Sniping and heavy artillery cut them off from food, medicine, and supplies. Despite UN resolutions and the assurances of Serb officials, UNHCR convoys bearing aid were repeatedly denied passage. Inside the towns, hunger became starvation and people died.

  In a report to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), humanitarian relief expert Thomas Brennan charged that the United States and the UN were “clearly failing to prevent genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and may actually be facilitating its implementation.”66 Brennan also blasted the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), who had “generally opted for negotiation and appeasement rather than forceful determination to deliver relief supplies to those most in need,” and concluded that “immediate U.S. political leadership and military intervention is essential to halt genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina.”67

  The UN’s typical unwillingness to take forceful action unfortunately characterized its response to ethnic cleansing. It was no surprise that the Serbs opposed relief for Bosnian Muslims, whom they were systematically starving and driving out of the country. But the opposition of UN commanders to the airdrops of food and medicine—as if there were some sort of international duty to stand in a neutral pose while Muslims died—was another matter entirely. In Bosnia, to require neutrality was to suggest moral equivalence between the refugees who were forced to flee their homes and those who forced them to flee.

  By early 1993, the community of Cerska in eastern Bosnia had been cut off for seven months. People were reduced to eating leaves, animal fodder, and the bark of trees and many froze to death. They lived under constant shelling, with no medical supplies; those who were wounded or ill usually died. Damaged arms and legs were amputated with hacksaws and without anesthesia. Those too old or ill to flee were beaten unmercifully, and amateur radio operators reported massacres of the people remaining at Cerska.

  From Zepa, another “safe” area, a shortwave radio operator broadcast “a cry for help from a frozen hell.” The twenty-nine thousand people of Zepa were described as “too exhausted to dig graves in the frozen ground.”68 There was no electricity, no running water, no heat. There were no houses, few clothes, no live animals—all had been killed by Serb shelling. The town had been under siege for months. The broadcast continued, “I beg…to all humanitarian organizations to help us. My personal statement and from all the people of Zepa is that we don’t trust the United Nations any longer…. But we have great confidence in the American people. It’s only the Americans whom we can trust now.”69 The UNHCR had agreed to consider making emergency airdrops of food to Zepa and two or three other beleaguered cities. Incredibly, UN officials told the Bosnian government that this could only be done if the Serbs agreed. They did not.70

  Traditional peacekeeping requires the consent of all parties to a conflict, a will to peace among the parties, and peacekeepers committed to strict neutrality. Yet none of these circumstances obtained in Bosnia. Serbia denied that it was an active participant in a war against the Bosnian Muslims and did not consent to the deployment of peacekeepers on its border with Bosnia. And the UN peacekeepers could hardly be neutral when the UN had called for acts in support of Bosnia. In a series of resolutions, the Security Council had authorized safe havens and necessary measures to deliver humanitarian assistance, declared a no-fly zone, and put monitors on the Serb border to stop the flow of vehicles, weapons, ammunition, oil and gas, and food from Serbia into Bosnia. These resolutions were not consistent with neutrality or equal treatment of the parties, but they were followed regardless.

  Boutros-Ghali believed that peacekeepers should be studiously neutral, never affecting the balance of power between the contending forces, and in Bosnia the Secretariat restricted its peacekeeping force to the sacrosanct UN rules of engagement. Yet (like UN peacekeeping itself) those rules had no formal standing; they were simply conventions that had developed over time in small conflicts in places like Cyprus, Kashmir, the Golan Heights, and southern Lebanon. The UN forces following these rules in Bosnia failed to contain violence, prevent the shelling of civilians, deliver food to the hungry, or ensure safety in the safe havens, but no authority challenged the appropriateness of these rules to this specific region or conflict.

  In Somalia, the Bush administration had declined from the outset to be bound by such rules. The American forces who entered Somalia in Operation Rescue did not have the consent of General Mohammed Farah Aideed. They were not neutral, and they used force. Though some participants in the Somalia peacekeeping operations complained that the use of force increased the dangers in the region, Boutros-Ghali had dismissed the complaints: “[W]e have to use force to disarm the various forces…without that we will not be able to promote national reconciliation and offer humanitarian assistance to the populations.” This was equally true in Bosnia. In Somalia, UN policies had been flexible and fairly successful. In Bosnia, they were rigid and timid and achieved little. Certainly, they did not help the Bosnian Muslims.

  Each effort by the Security Council to modify the terms under which UN forces operated in Bosnia met with resistance from the Secretariat. And personal heroism was not consistent with UN rules of engagement. In March 1993, when the UN commander for Bosnia, General Philippe Morillon, demonstrated extraordinary personal courage to expedite the delivery of food and medicine to Srebrenica, the secretary-general asked the government of France to recall him.

  By January 1993, UN troops in Bosnia were being widely condemned for failing to protect the people they had been sent to protect. The direc
tor of UN relief operations for Bosnia, José-Maria Mendiluce, reported that convoys bearing food, fuel, and medicine were being blocked or turned back from the area, exacerbating the humanitarian crisis. Mendiluce asked the UN to ask NATO to airlift supplies to the estimated 150,000 Bosnians in danger of starving and freezing, 71 assuming—like almost everyone else—that planes dropping food to starving people under siege would be protected. Yet the British resisted introducing any further military elements into Bosnia, including protection for humanitarian aid.

  During his presidential campaign, Bill Clinton had promised repeatedly that he would airlift food to the Bosnians to save them from starvation. Clinton had barely been inaugurated before the UNHCR made a passionate appeal to him to airdrop food and medicine. José Maria Mediluce, director of UN relief operations for over a million and a half Bosnians in “safe areas” such as Zepa, Cerska, and Srebrenica, publicly stated that civilians in these towns were dying of starvation and incessant shelling.72 In March 1993, without securing Europe’s approval, the United States began dropping food into Bosnia. Boutros-Ghali approved the plan only after Clinton agreed that the U.S. planes would fly without military escorts and would make their drops from about ten thousand feet (which greatly reduced their accuracy). Despite these limits, UN professionals and others later agreed that the drops were critical to the survival of the Bosnians.

  But the Serbs’ merciless attacks on Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia continued, and the presence of the severely restricted UN peacekeepers was doing little to stem its tide. Ethnic cleansing was in full force in Banja Luka, Bosnia’s second largest city. The Serbs were attacking private homes with grenades, firing non-Serbs from their jobs, looting and seizing Muslim property, and murdering Muslims. Some twenty thousand Muslims and five thousand Croats fled the area in January 1993.73 UN commander general Lewis MacKenzie of Canada and his successor, General Michael Rose of Great Britain, were repeatedly charged with partiality to the Serbs. Yet the Americans still sent no men and no commanders to the region.

  Early in 1993, the Clinton administration moved tentatively toward a more active role in Bosnia. Soon after he took office, Secretary of State Warren Christopher attempted to persuade the U.S. allies to lift the arms embargo and mount air strikes against the enemy. This policy was widely supported in the U.S. Congress, but was opposed by the Europeans, and Christopher made little progress.

  The continued violence presented Clinton with an extremely difficult decision: should he commit U.S. troops to peacekeeping under a UN command that seemed incompetent and ineffective, and that imposed rules of engagement that would render them nearly helpless and unable to achieve most of their goals? The Serb forces, which had driven the Muslims out of one Bosnian town after another, were closing in on Srebrenica. By April 1993, they had begun shelling this last Muslim town in East Bosnia—now jammed with refugees. Once again, unarmed inhabitants of a large Muslim town waited helplessly while Serb forces prepared to drive them from their homes.

  Now it was Bill Clinton’s turn to explain why he was not doing more. “I’ve done everything that I know to do consistent with the possibilities we have for further action in the United Nations with our European allies and the members of the Security Council,” Clinton said. “It is a very frustrating and difficult situation.”74 In many cases, he asserted, the United States was willing to do more than its allies, who resisted virtually every proposed move to counter Serbian ethnic cleansing of Bosnia. But except for the food drops—undertaken in the face of European and UN resistance—the United States did not act on its own, and Clinton quickly became the second American president who allowed the Europeans to stifle the impulse to action.

  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.”75 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.76

  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 difficult 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.77 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.”78 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 “pu
rification” 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.