THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  In early May, Christopher returned to Europe with this plan. One day after his departure, the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic announced that he had agreed to the Vance-Owen peace plan; the only remaining step was approval by the Bosnian Serb assembly. Christopher's mission was neatly thwarted. London and Paris rejected “Lift and Strike” and waited for approval by all parties of the Vance-Owen Plan. Four days into the trip, however, the Serbian assembly rejected the plan. Nevertheless, the Europeans now informed Christopher that “Lift and Strike” was dead as far as they were concerned. It would jeopardize their troops and abort whatever prospects remained for Vance-Owen. In Washington, the White House stuck to “Lift and Strike” but refused to go ahead without the concurrence of the Europeans. Removal of the threat of action against the Bosnian Serbs, however, had the effect of sinking Vance-Owen.

  In mid-May Christopher testified that Bosnia was “a European problem” in which the United States could not act unilaterally. In June, to the question “Are people dying because the United States could do a lot more if we wanted to?” the undersecretary of state for political affairs, Peter Tarnoff, responded:

  Yes… I am perfectly able to withstand criticism that we are abdicating power on this issue because I believe, and more importantly the President and the Secretary believe, that for major international issues of this sort, where other regional players have a great stake, we should make very clear that we will play a role, we will have a leadership role, but we are not going to be so far out in front as to allow them to defer to the United States when it comes to making the very hard decisions on the commitment of men and women and resources.66

  The Europeans meanwhile refused to put their own troops in further peril in the absence of American forces.

  Thus the states of the West resolved Darley and Latane's question as to who should act by a complicated rondeau in which no one really had to take decisive action, but all were protected from public criticism by pointing at each other as the responsible party.

  A MATTER FOR THE UNITED NATIONS

  To many, the United Nations appeared to be the appropriate party to resolve the Bosnian emergency. The crimes against humanity perpetrated in Bosnia, the possibility of a wider war, and the flow of refugees fleeing the conflict—more than 500,000 fled to other European countries—provided ample reasons for U.N. action within the terms of the U.N. Charter. Moreover, the transnational consequences of the war did not directly threaten the vital interests of any one particular state outside Yugoslavia; for this reason too the U.N. must have seemed the right institution to act.

  On June 15, 1993, at a news conference, President Clinton said, “Let me tell you something about Bosnia. On Bosnia I made a decision. The United Nations controls what happens in Bosnia.” On July 6 he conceded “[w]hen it became obvious that I could not prevail upon the United Nations because of the opposition of some of the European nations, that's when things began to deteriorate again instead of move toward peace… [But] I have a policy.”67

  It is tempting to conclude that the decisions of the secretary-general and his appointees in Bosnia—the United Nations Protection Force (Unprofor) commanders, and the special political representative—were largely responsible for the debacle in that country because the U.N. was the institution that the society of states selected as the principal manager in the Third Yugoslav War. In March 1992, 14,000 troops—Unprofor, one of the largest U.N. peacekeeping forces ever constituted—arrived to monitor the Serbian and Croatian soldiers. Whatever the world may think now, it was once widely thought that this force was to protect civilians. The inability of Unprofor to defend the U.N.-declared “safe areas”—despite a Security Council resolution ordering them to do so with all necessary means—U.N. complicity in ethnic cleansing in the Serb depopulation of Muslim villages (even to the point of providing the transport),* the failure to arrest war criminals even when these were indicted by a War Crimes Tribunal set up pursuant to a U.N. Security Council resolution, the refusal of the U.N. to permit NATO to enforce no-fly zones (also declared by the Security Council)—all provide a long list of failures for which critics will indict the United Nations.

  Should we be persuaded by this indictment? It is true that all NATO air strikes had to be requested by U.N commanders and then approved by the political counselor representing the secretary-general before NATO could act, and that on many occasions the world witnessed awful slaughter because the responsible officials* could not be made to sign off on such strikes.68 But who set up these rules? Not the secretary-general himself. In the Gulf War, although the Coalition was fighting with the authority of Security Council resolutions, there was never a suggestion that local commanders had to get the approval of U.N. personnel before acting to protect their troops. And why were Messrs. Akashi and Boutros-Ghali and generals Rose and Janvier so reluctant to use air strikes? Partly it was because, as they said at the time, 69 they were doubtful such air strikes would be effective. Partly it was also, I am inclined to believe, because the governments to whom the secretary-general reported did not really want air strikes if they were effective because these governments believed a weakened Serbian offensive would only prolong the war that was causing them such political embarrassment at home and presenting them with such difficult and risky choices abroad. Successful air strikes would only stiffen the spine of the Bosnian government to resist when the problem, as Boutros Boutros-Ghali repeatedly said, was that the parties did not “show the political will to end this terrible war.”70

  True, the local U.N. commanders were reluctant to risk retaliation against their own forces;† but who was responsible for the declaration of the “safe areas” policy in the first place—which accelerated ethnic cleansing by promising the fleeing Muslims safe refuge if they abandoned the countryside and their threatened villages—and for permitting artillery encirclements and sieges once the Muslims had been crowded into these city-camps? And who studiedly refused to provide enough troops and arms to carry out missions in Bosnia that were announced with such fanfare and resolve in New York? This was perhaps the most cynical of all the moves made in Yugoslavia because the European sponsors of Unprofor knew that once these troops were on the ground, they would effectively prevent any further action by the West. Because they were lightly armed and had no heavy armor, they could not protect themselves, and because they were vulnerable and present in so many dispersed locations, any forceful moves on their behalf threatened their lives. In effect, they were sent as hostages although they were dressed as peacekeepers.

  The U.N. might have served as an open forum in which member states put the question of “Who is to act” to a public debate. Something like this was contemplated by the White House in June 1993 but rejected on the grounds that it would have embarrassed Allied leaders. “Christopher came back and the issue was, do we roll them and just say, ‘OK, by God, we're going to the U.N. We're going to introduce a resolution. Veto it if you will,’” a senior White House official told reporters from six leading American newspapers. “European leaders called the White House after the visit by Mr. Christopher and argued that their reluctance to support air strikes and lift the arms embargo [Lift and Strike] was based on domestic political concerns.” He said that “they pleaded that there be no destructive public recriminations. We concluded that then was not the moment to bring this into [an open debate].”71

  Instead the U.N. was used by all parties as a cover for their own policies. The apparent answer to the question “Who is to act?” was the U.N., but this was only apparent. The actual answer was no one.

  IMPLEMENTATION: WHAT IS TO BE DONE

  The various policy options facing bystander states once they had decided to act can be grouped into several courses of action: (a) military responses; (b) neutrality; (c) economic sanctions; (d) humanitarian aid; and (e) political settlement. These courses of action were not mutually exclusive alternatives; they could be combined in different ways. Because each of these approaches also concealed various opti
ons—for example, precisely what military responses were appropriate: air strikes? ground attacks? monitoring by lightly armed observers?—they could be recombined in countless variations. Moreover, within each option the fundamental difference persisted between those who wished to intervene on behalf of the Muslims and those who did not. The result was that until one state actor, the United States, threatened to act unilaterally, the requirement of consensus largely frustrated any decisive action to bring the merciless suffering in Bosnia to a halt.

  MILITARY RESPONSES

  Consideration of the military option went through four phases that, like the more comprehensive Darley-Latane decision process, constantly recycled themselves, as decision makers searched restlessly for effective options, returning again and again to those that had been discarded when the ones that were chosen—usually various forms of inaction—proved disastrous.

  The first phase was the consideration by the Pentagon of military action in the fall of 1991 when Dubrovnik was bombarded and Vukovar overrun. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, expressed the view that nothing short of a massive deployment of ground troops for an indefinite period would be able to end the conflict. His view was by no means unanimously shared. Intelligence reports at the time disparaged the Serbian forces as undisciplined, poorly trained, and easily routed if confronted by regular armies. General John Galvin, at that time Supreme Allied Commander, Europe (SACEUR), urged the approval of air strikes that he believed would dispirit the Serbs, disrupt their steady supply of war materiel from Serbia, and remove the threat of heavy bombardment from Sarajevo. Powell's views, however, were far more sensitive to the political need, felt by all the member states of NATO in varying degrees, to avoid an open-ended commitment to a theatre of marginal political and strategic significance. Air power had been frequently oversold in the past; most governments realized that true pacification could come only with ground forces. Every government faced the same dilemma: the publics of the West were outraged by the horrific crimes in Bosnia but were united in opposition to sending ground troops to halt those crimes. As late as July 1995, Malcolm Rifkind, the British foreign secretary who succeeded Douglas Hurd, put it: “Britain hoped that the threat [of air strikes] would never have to be carried out. No one wishes to use air power, no one believes that that by itself will conclude the war in Bosnia.”72

  Moreover, the option of air strikes was intertwined with other, nonmilitary choices: the delivery of humanitarian aid to the besieged cities, for example, depended upon Serb cooperation. Once air strikes began, this cooperation ceased. Air strikes prejudiced the policy of neutrality toward all parties that was the posture of Unprofor, and it thus also jeopardized the safety of Unprofor forces who might be seized (as occurred in Pale after the air strikes in 1995) or fired upon.73 When U.N resolutions authorized air strikes, the United States, Britain, France, and the Netherlands all sent planes to the region but no strikes occurred. Supported by the French, the U.N. secretary-general stipulated that strikes should be employed only if Serb tanks or artillery fired upon U.N. troops, and that the strikes should be limited to the sites from which the Serbs had fired. Only when U.N. peacekeepers were withdrawn and the secretary-general removed from the chain of command were effective air strikes really an option.

  NEUTRALITY

  One source of the paralysis that affected the assessment of options for action was the insistence of U.N. personnel that they remain neutral in the conflict. On such grounds, in September 1992, the secretary-general actually opposed enforcement of the no-fly zone despite a U.N. Security Council resolution to the contrary. In the spring of 1993, he reiterated instructions that U.N. peacekeepers were to remain neutral even when civilians were shelled inside U.N.-protected enclaves. In April of that year, he effected the recall of French General Philippe Morillon, who had personally led a convoy through Serb lines to relieve Srebrenica. In the fall of 1994, Boutros Boutros-Ghali requested the recall of a second French commander, General Jean Cot, who, he felt, had pressed too hard for air cover for his forces. Other U.N. officials said that strict neutrality should be maintained because the Serbs were no more guilty of aggression than the Croats and Muslims. In retrospect it can now be seen that the U.N. attempted to bolster its position of neutrality through the questionable suppression of information unfavorable to the Serbs: although the first press reports of Serbian concentration camps in Bosnia were published on August 2, 1992, U.N. relief officials in Sarajevo admitted to having known about the camps for at least a month but having decided not to report this fact officially to New York. In any event, U.N. refugee officials in New York stated that action on the camps was an issue for the Red Cross, not for the U.N. David Owen points out in his memoir of this period that he “often stressed that the U.N. must not be seen as being at war with the Serbs.”74

  The difficulty with this position is that it was absurd in the Bosnian context: action (or inaction) by the U.N. inevitably helped one side in the war or the other. As James Steinberg has observed:

  The effort to maintain the U.N.'s “neutrality” in Bosnia face[d] an inherent contradiction: any effort to bring in humanitarian aid help[ed] the Bosnian forces in the struggle with the Serbs since the Serbs [were] attempting to use starvation and exposure to force the Bosnian government to capitulate. On the other hand, if Unprofor decline[d] to use force to overcome Serb barriers to the delivery of humanitarian aid, the U.N. [was] capitulating to the Serbs' strategy [and effectively aiding them because], in the guise of neutrality, the U.N. [would] neither guarantee the delivery of humanitarian aid nor allow the Bosnians to take their own effective measures.75

  ECONOMIC SANCTIONS

  Economic sanctions were widely applied in the Yugoslav conflict. Perhaps their most creative employment was the conditional sanctioning by the E.U., which offered relief from economic sanctions following compliance with the human rights and other constitutional recommendations of the Badinter Commission. Sanctions were also applied to Serbia by the U.N. Security Council, initially in an effort to persuade Serbia to cease aiding the Bosnian Serbs. These sanctions seem to have had some effect: they are widely considered to have been the reason for the public distancing of Milosevic from the Pale government (the Bosnian Serbs), and for igniting anti-Milosevic opposition in Belgrade. The most controversial economic sanction, however, and the most far-reaching in its consequences, was the imposition and maintenance of an arms embargo on all the former states of Yugoslavia.

  The arguments on this issue were partly strategic, partly legal, and partly moral. In military terms, it was clear that JNA weapons had made the material difference in the early seizure of 70 percent of Bosnian territory by Serb forces, but it was less clear that the Bosnian government would be able to hold on long enough to train its forces and equip them even if the embargo were lifted. Legally, the Bosnian government argued, the U.N. Security Council could neither institute a blockade (such as the one in the Adriatic that enforced the arms embargo) against, nor deny Article 51 rights of self-defense guaranteed under the U.N. Charter to, a member state that was plainly not an aggressor. The crucial argument, however, was moral: were the states of the West simply prolonging the suffering of the people of Bosnia by allowing arms to be brought in, or were they only giving the Bosnian government a fair chance to defend itself? To this last question the answer had to be “neither”—the words “simply” and “only” were not applicable in such a complex moral environment.

  HUMANITARIAN AID

  There was some shock in August 1992 when the former diplomat and columnist Leslie H. Gelb wrote in the New York Times that Western officials had told him their policy was to feed the Bosnian Muslims while “prompting them to surrender.” “Let me be chillingly blunt about what Western officials told me regarding the Balkan crisis,” he wrote. “They said that nothing they are doing or plan to do is at all likely to compel the Serbs to stop killing Muslims.” Prior to this time it was not widely appreciated that the humanitarian m
ission to Bosnian Muslims was consistent with Serbian political objectives. In retrospect we can see that it couldn't have been any other way.

  The supply of humanitarian assistance was made necessary in the first place by the Serb interdiction of utilities, water, medicine, and food to cities swollen with refugees fleeing Serbian attacks. These surrounded cities could not be resupplied by the U.N. without Serbian cooperation, which would be jeopardized by any Serb/U.N. confrontation. U.N. and U.S. analysts have concluded that in any case only about one-quarter of the needed humanitarian supplies were reaching the target populations.76 What did get through, however, depended upon negotiations with the Serbs who controlled access to the Muslim enclaves. This had the effect of pitting the officials of the humanitarian mission against any use of force against the Serbs, lest their relief routes be cut entirely. A senior U.N. officer in Sarajevo was quoted by the New York Times as acknowledging that a newly proposed U.N. humanitarian relief plan for Sarajevo was not appreciably different than previous plans, all of which had failed. “But we felt we had to do something,” said the officer with a Bridge on the River Kwai sort of logic, “or there would be no alternative to air strikes.” Thus, despite a Security Council ban on all Serbian and other military flights in order to ensure “the safety of the delivery of humanitarian assistance,” the U.N. actually resisted enforcement of the ban and limited itself to stationing monitors to observe infractions.77