Interventions (8 page)

In New York—with feelings of shock and disbelief that only escalated each day—we read the reports and news releases as they came in. By April 21, it was clear that the violence was being conducted in a systematic and intensifying fashion across the country. On that day, the Security Council then voted to draw down the UNAMIR force to just 270 troops. There was no interest in getting involved. As Bob Dole, the Republican leader in the United States Senate, said a few days before the Council's decision: “I don't think we have any national interest here. I hope we don't get involved . . . The Americans [U.S. citizens in Rwanda] are out. As far as I'm concerned, in Rwanda that ought to be the end of it.”

The choice offered to the Security Council on that day by Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali included options for the complete transformation of the force and a major military intervention. This was summarily rejected. The Security Council took no responsibility for the situation in Rwanda and the growing number of lives lost, and its key members flatly denied the notion that a genocide was taking place. However, a CIA briefing report, dated April 23, 1994, two days after the Security Council decision to withdraw, demonstrates that at least by this date the conflict was considered and referred to as a “genocide” by officials in the U.S. administration.

The Security Council turned its back, but the news reports did not stop in their growing testimony to atrocities that were beyond imagination. On April 29, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) published statistics indicating that over 250,000 Rwandans had crossed into neighboring Tanzania alone, which made this the largest mass exodus of refugees ever witnessed by the UN agency. At that same point, the UN estimated that over 200,000 people had been killed inside Rwanda. By early May, we at the UN were officially describing the killings in Rwanda as genocide, having dispatched Iqbal Riza to Rwanda to make his assessment of the situation. These different points of pressure finally compelled the Security Council to restart deliberations on Rwanda on May 6. The secretary-general, supported by us at DPKO, submitted options to the Council for a response, including a range of interventions involving different levels of force. Eventually, on May 17, the Council issued resolution 918, mandating the reestablishment of the UNAMIR mission (with the new name, UNAMIR II) with a force of 5,500.

However, not one of the Council's members was willing to provide troops. At DPKO, we spent endless days frantically lobbying more than a hundred governments around the world for troops. I called dozens myself, and the responses were all the same. We did not receive a single serious offer. It was one of the most shocking and deeply formative experiences of my entire career, laying bare the disjuncture between the public statements of alarm and concern for the suffering of other people on the one hand, and, on the other, the unwillingness to commit any of the necessary resources to take action. The world knew the scale of the killing in Rwanda, and yet we could not get anyone, from governments across the world, to do anything serious to help.

What brought the genocide to an end—but not before it saw a staggering 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus killed in just 100 days—was the victory of the RPF over the government. The RPF military drove the government's genocidal forces from Rwanda in a military campaign that came to its completion in July, and a new government under the RPF was established. It was only after this, in August, that troops were finally sent to form UNAMIR II, by which time the genocide and the civil war were firmly over.

The lesson of the RPF victory was that ending the genocide and protecting civilians on a large scale would have required military capacity and the political will to act to stop the killing. But in 1994, there was simply no culture or precedent in the international system of UN intervention in an internal conflict to use military force decisively to protect civilians. Combined with the impact of events in Mogadishu, the result was total inaction. It would take another war, and the deaths of thousands more civilians—this time in Europe—for the world to learn to take sides.

B
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“A fantastic gap between the resolutions of the Security Council, the will to execute these resolutions, and the means available to commanders in the field.” That was Belgian general Francis Briquemont's acerbic observation and summation of the UN mission in Bosnia at the end of his command of the peacekeeping force there. This gap would be filled, once again, with dead civilians, and on a scale not seen in Europe since World War II.

The UN was, and will probably always remain, an easy target when it comes to analyzing failed peacekeeping operations. The limits on our resources, the extreme reluctance of troop contributors to take risks with their troops, and, above all, the profound divisions over policy and strategic direction that often existed among members of the Security Council were often conveniently forgotten when apportioning responsibility for what was routinely referred to in those years as the “crisis in UN peacekeeping.” Nowhere was this more so than in Rwanda and Bosnia, where between 1992 and 1995 the UN was asked to keep the peace in the midst of an ongoing and brutal war.

I had taken up my post as deputy to Marrack Goulding, under-secretary-general in charge of peacekeeping, in early March 1992, just as the situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina was about to take a dramatic and violent turn for the worse. With the disintegration of Yugoslavia alongside the end of the Cold War, and after an intense but relatively brief war in Croatia, the Security Council in February 1992 authorized the deployment of UN peacekeepers, the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR), to oversee the separation of warring parties along the confrontation line between the Krajina Serbs and Croatian forces. Deployed firmly on the basis of traditional peacekeeping principles—host state consent, impartiality, and minimum use of force—UN blue helmets were to establish three so-called Protected Areas, ensure their demilitarization, and control access to them. They were also tasked to verify the withdrawal of the Serb Yugoslav National Army (known as the JNA) and irregular forces from Croatia, many of whom, as it turned out, would soon be providing logistic support to and fighting alongside Bosnian Serb militias in neighboring Bosnia.

Two months earlier, following the recognition of Slovenia and Croatia by the European Community on January 15, 1992, Bosnia held a referendum on independence. It was boycotted by the Bosnian Serbs but, unsurprisingly, overwhelmingly supported by the majority of Bosnian Muslims and Croats in the republic. On April 6, Bosnia's independence was duly recognized by a majority of European Community members, and what had hitherto been sporadic fighting exploded into full-scale war that crossed the new internationally recognized borders.

It proved a one-sided affair. Over the next three months, a savage onslaught by Serb militias and paramilitary forces, aided and abetted by the rump Yugoslav army, resulted in the displacement of some 1 million people from their homes. The attack on the town of Bijelinja by forces commanded by Željko “Arkan” Ražnatovi´c—a notorious career criminal turned paramilitary leader and later indicted for crimes against humanity—set the pattern for a campaign of murder, rape, looting, and destruction aimed at ethnically cleansing a swath of territory in the north and the east of the country. Conducted with the utmost brutality, Bosnian Serb forces sought the wholesale expulsion of the non-Serb, largely Muslim population from towns and cities where, in many cases, non-Serbs had constituted the majority population before the war. The offensive was as swift as it was brutal, and, in fact, most of the territory captured by the Bosnian Serbs during the war in Bosnia was secured within the first sixty days.

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.