Interventions (10 page)

On the first night alone, over one hundred aircraft from the United States, the UK, France, Spain, and the Netherlands took part and destroyed twenty-four targets to the south and east of Sarajevo, including strikes near the Bosnian Serb headquarters in Pale. These were not pinprick, symbolic attacks, as had occurred on previous occasions when attempts to deter assaults on the safe areas were made. Fast jets were now attacking arms depots, command and control centers, artillery positions, and surface-to-air missile batteries. Most important, the UNPROFOR troops were now shored up in secure positions, and the bombing could go on without fear of reprisals and hostage taking against them. Over eleven days, more than thirty-five hundred sorties were flown by NATO warplanes and nearly four hundred targets were attacked. Artillery and mortar batteries of the RRF added their power to the air strikes, with the units on Mount Igman able to neutralize the Serb guns firing on those using the Mount Igman road running into Sarajevo, or those bombarding Sarajevo itself. This was Operation Deliberate Force, and it broke the hold of the Bosnian Serbs, who were already being pushed back by the Croat forces.

By this time, the Bosnian Serbs were also under pressure from Miloševic in Belgrade to cut their losses. The Security Council by now had decided to take sides in the conflict, choosing war in firm rejection of peacekeeping. Doing so dangerously weakened the Bosnian Serb forces and compelled them to the negotiating table. Having gone from controlling around 70 percent of the country to only half in just a few weeks, on September 17, the Serbs agreed to withdraw most of their artillery from the hills surrounding Sarajevo. By November, all parties were locked in concerted peace negotiations in Dayton, Ohio.

The resulting deal, or Dayton Accords, brilliantly negotiated by the U.S. ambassador Richard Holbrooke, finally ended the war in Bosnia and the brutal cruelty to civilians that accompanied it. It was an uneasy peace, with deep and recent wounds inflicted across Bosnian society and between communities that would have to now be carried forward, and there were many contradictions and tensions in the agreement, particularly surrounding the governance and policing of respective territories by different communities—but it is a peace that has held for nearly twenty years.

T
HE
C
OMPLICITY WITH
E
VIL

“Could we have a moment alone please?” I asked the crowd of politicians, aides, and reporters who surrounded us. In far greater numbers than our entourage were the hundreds and hundreds of skulls and other bones—some clearly broken by force—stacked on simple green tarpaulin-covered tables. Underneath the timber and corrugated iron shelter in which these remains were displayed at a site thirty miles southeast of Kigali, Nane and I took a quiet few minutes as the crowd backed away. We stood there while we let this symbol of suffering—and what had happened in Rwanda four years earlier—speak for itself.

The day before, on May 7, 1998, early in my first tenure as secretary-general, I had addressed the Rwandan parliament. I believed it important that, as head of the UN, I should pay this official visit to the nation that had suffered the most while under the UN's gaze. I publicly called it “a mission of healing,” and it proved a difficult visit politically. In my address, I fully acknowledged the failure of the UN and the international community in Rwanda: “We must and we do acknowledge that the world failed Rwanda at that time of evil. The international community and the United Nations could not muster the political will to confront it. The world must deeply repent this failure.” And I went on to say: “Rwanda's tragedy was the world's tragedy.”

There was a reception scheduled for after the speech, but as we were walking toward the venue, it became clear that the president and his cabinet had boycotted the event in a show of anger—one that they were already taking steps to publicize across Rwanda. The president's spokesman soon announced that the reason for the boycott was the “arrogance” displayed that was “insulting to the Rwandan people.” In the speech I had used the line that Rwanda's horror “came from within,” and this was now a lightning rod for criticism. I had used this phrase as part of what should have been an uncontroversial point: that, while the international community and the UN had failed to act when it could have done so much more, the source of Rwanda's suffering came from demons within the country itself. This was a testament to the scale of the challenges their country now faced, particularly for national reconciliation. It was the biggest single issue facing the country and required acknowledgment. I also felt it would be counterproductive, for the UN and Rwanda, to in any way endorse the idea that the UN and the international community, while sorely culpable, was somehow the prime perpetrator.

As I stressed at the time in briefings with the press, the problem had been in the international community's collective refusal to act, through the UN in particular. But the mistaken idea that the UN peacekeeping force itself could have stopped the genocide—therefore implying that a full and ready instrument for ending the genocide was already there and waiting in the country and had just stood by—was now circulating, as if it were an accepted fact. The UN force in Rwanda could not alone have stopped the genocide. It was a peacekeeping force, sent in a deliberately weak and vulnerable form to engender the trust of both sides, which emerged as even weaker in reality due to the challenges of finding troops and equipment. UNAMIR could have been reinforced to save more lives, for certain. But a very different force would have been needed to stop an entire national campaign of genocide. Such a force would have needed full war-fighting capabilities similar to those of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, whose army had to conquer the entire country before it ended the genocide.

—

I
t was not long after this visit to Rwanda in 1998 that I began a concerted process of reform of UN peacekeeping. The first step was to acknowledge the recent history of failure, fully and honestly. The UN's association with the worst atrocities of recent civil wars was a terrible stain on the organization. But this was a painful reminder that we could use: a shock to us all that we could turn into a productive and powerful instigator of reform. In this endeavor I commissioned two reports, one investigating the UN's failure leading up to the massacres at Srebrenica in Bosnia, and the second investigating the sources of the UN's failure in the lead-up and response to the Rwandan genocide. Both of these reports were produced and delivered to me in November and December 1999. Both reports were critical of many parties, particularly of member states and their political leaders, but also of the UN Secretariat and, specifically, of my own former office in DPKO.

In follow-up I informed the Security Council of my intention to use the stern findings of both reports to begin a major process of learning and reform in UN peacekeeping. Contrary to the urgent advice of some, I ordered both reports to be released in full without amendment to the public. I knew no real process of reform and healing could begin without absolute candor, honesty, and openness.

What followed was the Brahimi Report, named after the remarkably capable and experienced diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi, whom I selected to lead a high-level panel of experts to investigate what was required to reform peacekeeping in the post–Cold War world. On completion, I had the report released to the Security Council, the General Assembly, and the public on August 21, 2000.

The report recognized the particular challenges posed by UN peace operations in territories torn by civil war as the most important qualitative change. Consent of the belligerent parties, impartiality, and the use of force only in self-defense still had to remain the bedrock of peacekeeping, as it had before. Otherwise, peacekeepers would rarely be accepted by any belligerent parties. But the greater fluidity of civil wars rendered peacekeepers more exposed and vulnerable to changes in the balance of force and aggression between parties, as well as more prone to manipulation as belligerents jostled for advantage. This meant peacekeepers needed more credible means of self-defense.

The report also stressed the need for the integration of peacekeeping and peacebuilding activities. Sustaining a peace process after civil war required a whole range of activities beyond traditional peacekeeping, including long-term development efforts. To ensure the possibility of an exit for peacekeepers, the activities of their operations had to include efforts more usually understood as state building if they were to ensure any long-term success and the self-sustainability of the peace they left behind.

The report also heavily stressed the need for improvements in the relationship among the Secretariat, the Security Council, and troop-contributing governments—to communicate and coordinate more cohesively during fast-moving crises. Yet the tripartite structure, no matter how dysfunctional, could not be replaced. Therefore, troop contributors needed to be brought into the Security Council to consult directly with its members and the Secretariat at every stage of mandate formulation and other key decisions. Furthermore, the Secretariat needed to exert a stronger advisory voice during this process, to be firm in conveying its expertise in the face of the Security Council, telling it what it
needed
to hear, not what it
wanted
to hear.

The Brahimi Report covered these problems and many others regarding the doctrine, strategy, and decision making of peacekeeping. But the biggest issue it had to reckon with was the epicenter of the peacekeeping storm: the complicity with evil. As the Brahimi Report states: “UN peacekeepers—troops or police—who witness violence against civilians should be presumed to be authorized to stop it.” Never again should they stand aside and not help the people who thought they were there to save them. But the report also pointed out that peacekeepers could, naturally, only do this “within their means.”

This left a major problem: the consistent weakness of peacekeeping forces who could be expected to do little to intervene substantially in a civil war and stop atrocities wholesale. As the Brahimi Report suggested, the greater responsibility was for member states, particularly on the Security Council, not to use the deployment of peacekeeping forces as a fig leaf designed to conceal their unwillingness to intervene with the true commitment necessary, as a means of appeasing demands for forceful humanitarian intervention.

Peacekeepers cannot decisively change the balance of force in any conflict. In this sense, peacekeeping can be only a secondary instrument of peace, not a primary one. In certain circumstances, it must be stressed, UN peacekeeping can accomplish significant achievements, as it did throughout the Cold War and in several other operations in the early 1990s, including in Central America, Mozambique, Namibia, and the huge operation in Cambodia. But in other circumstances it can be deeply inadequate. This is because peacekeeping cannot take the lead in driving outcomes in war zones. Those instruments are the commitments of the armed factions to peace or war, and the commitment of the international community to affecting the balance of forces on the ground. Only a decision to deploy a self-contained fighting force—capable of defeating other military formations—can match the ambition of altering a civil war. This was what happened in Bosnia, when the decision was eventually made to reform the force and to take sides.

During my time in the senior management of the UN, we could chalk up as one of our collective achievements the adaptation of the instrument of peacekeeping from a relatively simple tool—designed for limited conflict between countries during the Cold War era—into one that could valuably be applied to aiding the resolution of complex civil wars, the dominant form of conflict in the modern world. Testament to this was the fact that UN peacekeeping did not wither away after the disasters of the mid-1990s, as some thought it might, but instead would return again in force alongside our reform efforts, with operations repeatedly sent to territories torn by civil war. It is in these conflicts where by far the most war-related deaths occur in the world, and where, therefore, some of the greatest contributions to peace are to be made. Indeed, almost all UN peacekeeping operations since 1992 have been deployed to conflicts that cannot be readily categorized as between countries, and there are now, at the time of writing, almost one hundred thousand uniformed personnel serving on sixteen such operations.

—

B
ut the crucial fact was that the biggest problem encountered by UN peacekeeping operations in the early 1990s could not be solved by UN peacekeeping. We could do what we could to help salvage and preserve the reputation of peacekeepers in the field, guided by the Brahimi Report and adapting our management of operations. But such reform could not end the true problem of the early 1990s: the international community's complicity with evil—of standing by in full knowledge of horrors on the ground that it had the power to stop. Notwithstanding the inherent limitations on what force alone can achieve, there were clearly times when the international community could, and should, decisively intervene.

From the Department of Peacekeeping Operations to the office of the secretary-general, I took with me, above all, the lessons of Bosnia and Rwanda. Evil in civil war zones occurs due to the will of the conflict protagonists, which must be rounded upon, confronted, and stopped—and through force if necessary. But while I was serving as secretary-general, there were many in the international community, in diplomatic missions, and in capital cities around the world, who clung to a vision of the UN Charter that, in their view, said that the use of such force was unacceptable.

This left me with what would become my greatest challenge as secretary-general: creating a new understanding of the legitimacy, and necessity, of intervention in the face of gross violations of human rights.

III

SOVEREIGNTY AND HUMAN RIGHTS

Kosovo, East Timor, Darfur, and the Responsibility to Protect

F
IVE
M
INUTES TO
M
IDNIGHT IN
E
AST
T
IMOR

We are in your hands now,” Xanana Gusmão told me. It was September, 5, 1999, and I had called the East Timorese independence leader in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta. He was being held under house arrest by a government whose militias had unleashed an orgy of violence in his homeland following the UN-sponsored referendum six days earlier. Our worst fears were coming true. Xanana warned me in a concerned but calm and determined voice that “a new genocide” was threatening his people. I told him I would do everything I could to end the onslaught, and concluded the call by urging him to take every precaution to ensure his personal security in the coming days. If his people were being murdered in the streets of Dili, the capital of East Timor, he was in no less danger in Jakarta.

In the preceding weeks and days, I had been warning publicly and privately of the threat of violence in the aftermath of a referendum that would give the people of East Timor their long-sought opportunity to determine their own destiny. In negotiating the process leading to the vote, I had established a close and confidential relationship with the Indonesian president Bacharuddin Jusuf “B. J.” Habibie. In many ways an accidental president who had succeeded his country's long-term leader Suharto a year earlier, Habibie had convinced me of his desire to see the conflict in East Timor resolved peacefully.

His ability to do so, however, was clearly a different matter. He was neither in control of his own armed forces operating in the region in collusion with local militias, nor was he being told the truth about the killing and burning that they had unleashed. I had called him five days earlier to say that we were pleased that the polling had taken place under largely peaceful conditions, with the vast majority of voting-age East Timorese casting their ballots. Habibie told me that his government had acted “without dirty minds” and that they would “accept and honor any decision by the people.” He said directly that if the decision was for separation, he was ready to withdraw the Indonesian police and military. The result was similarly unambiguous—some 80 percent had rejected the option of autonomy within Indonesia and voted for full independence.

On the ground in East Timor, however, a horrifying reality then began playing out—one that would test the will and ability of the United Nations and the international community to manage a separatist process within the borders of a major country. By the time I spoke with Xanana, I had concluded that an international force was needed to bring security to the territory. I also knew that it could be inserted only at the invitation of the Indonesian government. This became my overriding focus in the days ahead, and my peacekeeping experience had taught me that an effective lead nation for the intervention force was critical. On the day Xanana warned me of the scale of the violence threatening his people, I called the prime minister of Australia, John Howard. As the looting and killing was metastasizing throughout the territory, I asked him if his country would lead a multinational intervention force with the authority to end the violence.

To his—and his nation's—great credit, he immediately agreed, but not before saying that we were “at five minutes to midnight” in getting an agreement out of Habibie. In a call with President Clinton later that day, it became clear to me that the U.S. president's major concerns were securing a Security Council authorization for a mission against a key U.S. ally, and, at the same time, addressing congressional hostility to U.S. participation in such an operation. The urgency of the situation on the ground did not seem to have been impressed on the president. This did not prevent my friend Richard Holbrooke, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, from asking me if this was “Srebrenica all over again,” while adding that there was what he called a “Bosnia-style” division within the U.S. administration on what to do.

What was clear was that no one—and certainly not the United States—was prepared in this case to contemplate war with Indonesia to protect a minority under siege within its borders. Only an intensive diplomatic campaign could succeed in convincing Jakarta that its own future relationship with the international community depended on allowing the long-developing issue of East Timor to be resolved peacefully, and that required an outside presence on the ground. The question haunting us all was whether it all would be too late for the people of East Timor.

S
OVEREIGNTY AND
I
NTERVENTION

The crisis over East Timor was, like every other challenge we confronted, not happening in a vacuum. There were other conflicts, such as those in Kosovo, Congo, and Sierra Leone, that challenged our conceptions of sovereignty and intervention. I took office as secretary-general in early 1997 with a deep personal conviction that we had to put the individual at the heart of everything we did at the United Nations. An organization of member states had to become focused, once again, on the rights and protections of the “We the Peoples” in whose name the Charter was written. I also knew that, in addition to shifting the burden of the UN's focus and engagement, I needed to make a broader case for intervention and challenge the conventional views on national sovereignty as immutable and inviolable no matter what outrages were committed within the borders of states.

In strengthening our focus on the sanctity and universality of human rights—in word and deed—we sought to make them a core element of all our work, from development to health to peace and security. When civilians are attacked or killed because of their ethnicity, the world looks to the United Nations to speak up for them. When women and girls are denied their right to equality, the world looks to the United Nations to take a stand. In a world where globalization has limited the ability of states to control their economies, regulate their financial policies, and isolate themselves from environmental damage or human migration, states cannot and must not have the right to enslave, persecute, or torture their own citizens.

Human rights to life and basic security were being threatened, in an increasingly visible fashion, by conflicts that were internal to states, and this meant that we needed to reframe the relations between citizens and governments. We needed to convince the broader global community that sovereignty had to be understood as contingent and conditional on states' taking responsibility for the security of their own people's human rights—and for this to be taken as seriously as the states' expectations of noninterference in their internal affairs. I had come to this conclusion through the trials of UN peacekeeping—from Somalia to Rwanda and Bosnia. And in the words often spoken by my most trusted aide and advisor, Chef de Cabinet Iqbal Riza, we needed now to insist on a moral dimension to our engagement with the conflicts of the world—whether they took place between or within states.

I had recognized this looming conundrum for the international community for some time. At a press conference in New York in 1993, when I was still under-secretary-general for Peacekeeping Operations, amid the growing tensions in dealing with the militias of Mogadishu, I was asked if our operations entailed a new definition of the UN's role. I answered by noting that what we were trying to do was to rid southern Mogadishu of weapons by proceeding rapidly with a disarmament program with the cooperation of the Somali people—but there were also elements who did not hesitate to use violence against this effort. I asked if the best way really was to appease criminal elements and to give in to them? “The UN,” I continued, “is caught in a very difficult situation where we are accused in Bosnia of not doing enough, of having too weak a mandate, of standing by when these criminal elements attack women, shell cities, and kill civilians. For the first time, here in Somalia, we have a mandate to try to check some of these criminal elements. And I think these are questions that the international community, the politicians, and the world at large will have to deal with. We have to go beyond the traditional UN concepts of intervention. If we do intervene in the face of massive human rights abuses, in the face of cruel humanitarian situations, and we do have a mandate to settle the situation, are we going to become engaged or do we not? Do we stand by and let these things go on?”

Later that year I asked this question again, in starker terms, putting it to a room full of reporters sitting with me in a hot Mogadishu briefing room, some of whom were again questioning the use of force in the Somalia operation going on outside. I was, once more, begging the answer that decisive action was needed: “What do you do when people are starving, dying, not because there is drought but because people, a group of men, are stopping them [from] getting the food?” I asked. “What do you do? Sit? Negotiate? Or what?” No one answered at that moment, but the thinking was beginning to change.

In 1995 I was appointed Special Envoy to the Former Yugoslavia and NATO. At a ceremony that year in Zagreb marking the handover of military authority in Bosnia from the UN to NATO following the Dayton Agreement, I again urged the assembled officials to reflect on the high price paid by the people caught in the conflict, this time in Bosnia: “In looking back, we should recall how we responded to the escalating horrors of the past four years, and ask ourselves the questions, What did I do? Could I have done more? Could I have made a difference? Did I let my prejudice or indifference or my fear overwhelm my reasoning? How will I react the next time?” I did not spare the UN from the condemnation this implied for our own policy of neutrality between the parties during the Bosnian war—which for too long made us too-passive witnesses to the Serbian campaign of ethnic cleansing. I knew that this wouldn't be the last time that our principles and practices in relation to state sovereignty would be tested in a world riven by civil wars.

The fact was the environment had changed—we saw it in Bosnia and later in Congo and other conflicts where neutrality and “not taking sides” in the deployment of peacekeepers would not work; indeed, where sticking to neutrality could result, however inadvertently, in abetting the aggressor and punishing the victim. In some cases we had to take action to stop aggression, to protect the innocent, and that meant going far beyond traditional forms of UN intervention.

K
OSOVO
: T
HE
R
ETURN OF THE
B
ALKAN
W
ARS

In the year prior to the East Timor referendum and its ensuing violence, the world had gone through a major crisis over Kosovo. There, in a similar set of circumstances, an ethnic minority had been punished with gross violations of human rights for its desire for self-determination. What set Kosovo apart for all of us—the United Nations, Europe, NATO, and the United States—was that it was an all-too-familiar crisis with an all-too-familiar predator setting fire to yet another corner of the Balkans.

In the case of Kosovo, we were dealing with a region that had been at war for several years and had been deformed by the behavior of one state and one leader, above all, who was still on the prowl. This was Slobodan Miloševic, and his eyes were now fixed on Kosovo. In the wake of Bosnia, we had good reason to suspect that if the international community did not act, the ethnic Albanian population of Kosovo would receive treatment similar to the Bosnians. The link with Bosnia was very much on our minds as the crisis in Kosovo escalated. There was a powerful sense that we could not sit back and watch the Serbs do the same to the Kosovar Albanians.

There was no trust in MiloÅ¡evic on the part of anyone in the international community—not even from the Russians, his ally—and little sense that he would be persuaded of the merits of peaceful compromise over Kosovo. Even as I warned other governments of MiloÅ¡evic's habit of miscalculation, I had also seen him act as a master manipulator. MiloÅ¡evic told me more than once that he considered Kosovo the cradle of their civilization and would never let it leave Serbia. The year 1389 was when Ottoman Turks defeated Serbs at the battle of Kosovo Polie, leading to Ottoman dominance of their lands for nearly five centuries. MiloÅ¡evic had ruthlessly and effectively exploited this mythical importance of Kosovo to the Serbs, and in 1989, in what later became seen as the trigger of the Bosnia war, he had gone to Kosovo to stoke the ethnic tensions there, declaring to his Serbian audience, “Nobody has the right to beat you.”

Some three years after the end of the Bosnian war, in early 1998, tensions on the ground began to escalate in Kosovo between Serbian forces and ethnic Albanian militias seeking independence. Miloševic's response to the Kosovo Liberation Army's resistance campaign was as brutal as it was familiar. Rather than seek to resolve the dispute peacefully—or focus his wrath on the armed men of the militias—he directed his forces to embark on a wholesale campaign of ethnic cleansing, with hundreds of thousands of civilians the target of the operations.

The campaign appeared to have one aim above all: to expel or kill as many ethnic Albanians in Kosovo as possible. The result was a calamity for the people of Kosovo and a humanitarian disaster throughout the region. This time, the leaders of Britain, France, and Germany decided that Europe's own future depended upon responding forcefully to Miloševic's campaign. Principally through NATO, they began issuing warnings that this time a Balkan war on civilians would not be allowed to stand. For the United Nations, the crisis presented a different, if equally important, challenge. Without a ground presence in Kosovo, we were unable to provide assistance to civilians. That meant the interventions we could make would have to be political and diplomatic—in my statements and in our work with the Security Council—to try to unite the international community around halting the abuses of human rights and preventing a wider war.