by Kofi Annan
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.
SOVEREIGNTY AND INTERVENTION
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.
KOSOVO: THE RETURN OF THE BALKAN WARS
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 Miloševic 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 Miloševic’s habit of miscalculation, I had also seen him act as a master manipulator. Miloševic 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. Miloševic 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.
Beginning in early 1998, we managed to place Kosovo on the agenda of the Security Council, allowing us to present the Council with periodic reports on the developments on the ground. By summer, some two hundred thousand Kosovars had been made refugees, 10 percent of the province’s population. At this point I started speaking out with greater frequency about the need to avoid another Bosnia. As the crisis escalated in the summer and autumn of 1998, I decided that this time we would place the United Nations squarely on the side of the victims of aggression in the Balkans and offer no legitimacy to the well-worn propaganda coming out of Belgrade. This became a careful balancing act, as the pressures to act from Europe and the United States were met with implacable opposition by Russia, which still saw Serbia as a key ally and did not want to see a repeat of the punishment Miloševic received at the end of the Bosnian war.
I decided to speak out for two reasons: First, because I believed the best way of halting the terror and violence and preventing a wider war—even one fought for humanitarian reasons—was to make clear to Miloševic that he would not be able to use the United Nations, or at least its secretary-general, in a drawn-out diplomatic dance while his forces went on a rampage in Kosovo. A united international front, I believed, would lead him to capitulate on his most egregious war aims sooner. Second, and of equal importance, was the opportunity that the crisis in Kosovo provided: to draw a new line in international affairs, to set a new standard in how we held states responsible for the treatment and protection of the people within their own borders. We had to make clear that the rights of sovereign states to noninterference in their internal affairs could not override the rights of individuals to freedom from gross and systematic abuses of their human rights.
The shift in policy, controversial as it was among many member states wedded to the sacrosanct principle of sovereignty, was not without its challenges within the United Nations Secretariat itself. The Kosovo crisis led to a fierce debate among my advisors that cast into stark relief the lessons of our past decade in peacekeeping. On one side were the views of the career diplomats and Secretariat officials: they maintained that the duly recognized government in Belgrade had the right and the duty to maintain order within its territory, and that it was not for the UN—and certainly not its secretary-general—to call attention to violations of human rights in Kosovo and urge a forceful response by outside powers. On the other side were those advisors who argued that for us to maintain a blind neutrality in the face of the recidivist behavior of a well-known predatory regime intent upon ethnically cleansing yet another group in the Balkans would destroy our standing—especially with all those who looked to the United Nations to protect would-be victims of atrocities.
My own instinct was to maintain our credibility and authority with the main parties of the Security Council, including Russia, who were seeking to put an end to the violence, while making clear that this time, our own response would be different—the UN, I believed, needed to stand for the rights of the individual as strongly as it did for the rights of states. Post-Bosnia and post-Rwanda, I knew that the UN in the eyes of many was being judged on its ability to deal with gross violations of human rights and crimes against humanity.
I signaled this early on, during a visit to a NATO conference in June 1998. NATO leaders were meeting on the question of Bosnia as a test case for collective security in the next century. Traditionally, a UN secretary-general would appear at a meeting of a military alliance to urge the peaceful resolution of disputes, above all other values. On this occasion, I urged the intensification of diplomacy backed by the credible threat of force and sought to impress on them a sense of urgency. Calling on our experience of Bosnia, I urged them to ensure that the future of collective security would be both effective and legitimate. One without the other—as we had learned, and would learn again later in Iraq—would not do.
“Credible force,” I noted to the NATO leaders, “without legitimacy may have immediate results but will not enjoy long-term international support. Legitimate force without credibility may enjoy universal support but prove unable to implement basic provisions of its mandate.” I insisted that all the talk of lessons learned about the credibility, legitimacy, and morality of intervention would be hollow without applying those lessons practically and emphatically where horror threatens. Kosovo, I said, was now that threat. This time, we could “not be surprised by the means employed or by the ends pursued,” I warned, and I explicitly applauded the determination of NATO governments to prevent a further escalation of the fighting. I concluded my remarks with as direct a call for the use of force as I ever made during my time as secretary-general: “All our professions of regret; all our expressions of determination to never again permit another Bosnia; all our hopes for a peaceful future for the Balkans will be cruelly mocked if we allow
Kosovo to become another killing field.”
Later that month, at a conference in Britain, hosted by the Ditchley Foundation, I set out the case for humanitarian intervention more broadly by examining its history. In that speech, I defined it as part of other interventions, including, say, a case of a surgeon who intervenes to save a life, or a teacher who intervenes to prevent the malicious bullying of a child in school. My point was that intervention was a cause for everyone, and one not limited by any means to the use of military force.
Even during the Cold War, I went on in my speech, when the UN’s own enforcement capacity was largely paralyzed by divisions in the Security Council, there were cases of extreme violations of human rights within a country that led to military intervention by one of its neighbors. In 1971, an Indian intervention ended the civil war in East Pakistan, allowing Bangladesh to achieve independence. In 1978, Vietnam intervened in Cambodia, putting an end to the genocidal rule of the Khmer Rouge. In 1979, Tanzania intervened to overthrow Idi Amin’s erratic and brutal dictatorship in Uganda.
In all three of those cases the intervening states cited refugee flows across their borders to legitimize their action under international law. But what justified their actions in the eyes of the world was the internal character of the regimes they acted against. History has largely ratified that verdict. Few would now deny that, in those cases, forceful intervention was a lesser evil than allowing massacres and extreme oppression of that kind to continue.
When people are in danger, I insisted, everyone has a duty to speak out. No one has a right to pass by on the other side.
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In Kosovo, meanwhile, as we were debating the necessity of intervention at UN headquarters, the violence continued to escalate into the autumn of 1998 with tens of thousands of Kosovar Albanians being forced from their homes. Seeking to end the crisis, Richard Holbrooke—then the U.S. special envoy for the Balkans—negotiated the insertion of two thousand unarmed Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) verifiers to monitor a fragile cease-fire agreement. And on September 23, the Security Council adopted resolution 1199, which demanded the withdrawal of Yugoslav forces from Kosovo. NATO followed this up with its own threat of action if Miloševic refused to comply. It was a surprise to no one when Miloševic continued his campaign unabated.
