by Kofi Annan
Under General Smith, UNPROFOR was transformed, enabling it finally to apply credible military force. The key to this transformation was the third development, which was a change in the rules governing the use of NATO air power in support of UNPROFOR. This had been a long-standing tension between the United States and the Europeans, who had troops on the ground. The London meeting on July 21 had threatened the Serbs with sustained air strikes if they attacked Gorazde. It was clear to all that this commitment, especially in the cold light of Srebrenica, required changes to the existing dual-key system—whereby the secretary-general of NATO and the secretary-general of the UN both had to approve any air attacks—and which was now recognized as being unwieldy and far too slow. It had to be replaced by a more flexible arrangement.
The course of events was also shaped by another critical development. This was Operation Storm, the Croatian military offensive in the Krajina region in early August aimed at reasserting Croat control over the whole of its territory, following their earlier offensive in western Slavonia in May 1995. The operation owed much of its speed and success to tacit support from the United States and other key member states. Thousands of Serbs were driven from their homes by Croatian army units in a campaign whose brutality matched many of the atrocities committed across the border in Bosnia. Despite these atrocities, the Croat offensive did weaken the military position of the Bosnian Serbs.
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While nearly one hundred thousand lives had been claimed in Bosnia by this stage, the spark that lit the fuse for a decisive military intervention was a single mortar attack on Sarajevo on August 28, 1995. It hit one of the city’s main markets where people were queuing for bread, and thirty-nine people were killed. The outrage in the press around the world was instantaneous, and after years of brutal atrocities in Bosnia—and the changes on the ground that had taken place in the previous months—it seemed that, finally, enough was enough.
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.
THE COMPLICITY WITH EVIL
“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.
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It 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 commissio
ned 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.
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But 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
FIVE MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT IN EAST TIMOR
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 genocid
e” 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.
