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Sun. Jul 10, 2005

UN Failure, From The Inside

A few days ago, I wrote in Ever Again about why the UN is dead to me. As we draw closer to the anniversary of the massacre at Srebrenica, others are offering evidence.

People who were there. Working for the UN. We’ll start with Edward Joseph, who “served as a U.N. civil affairs officer in Bosnia for much of the 3 1/2 years of war.“

Srebrenica is unforgettable not only for its scale, but because, unlike the present genocide going on in Sudan’s Darfur region, it happened while the international community and the world media were deeply engaged in Bosnia. The United Nations had declared Srebrenica a “safe area”—a specially protected site backed up by U.N. peacekeepers on the ground and NATO strike planes in the air. Yet the Serbs managed to seize it anyway. The question that has haunted Srebrenica ever since—as it haunts other places where officials watch as victims suffer—is: Why was there no will to act to prevent the tragedy?

I have thought about these questions more than most. I served as a U.N. civil affairs officer in Bosnia for much of the 3 1/2 years of war. My colleagues and I received the waves of women and children expelled from Srebrenica before their husbands, fathers, brothers and sons were executed. About a week later, I found myself in Srebrenica’s neighboring enclave of Zepa, face to face with Mladic, an architect of the massacres. While his forces were finishing the slaughter in Srebrenica, he had turned his sights on Zepa’s Muslim men. The Muslim commander, Col. Avdo Palic, saved his soldiers by hiding them in the forests while he stayed behind to negotiate with Mladic. A colleague and I watched and protested, vainly, as Palic was seized by Serb troops from our collapsed U.N. compound and taken away (and likely killed). Because of this experience, and my feelings of responsibility toward Palic, I continue to ask why we let Srebrenica happen, and why we don’t act to prevent other tragedies.

Many on the staff of the senior U.N. official in the former Yugoslavia, the Japanese diplomat Yasushi Akashi, internalized his overarching priority: to protect the U.N.’s neutrality and “even-handedness” by avoiding the use of force against the Serbs. Consistently, they rebuffed those who did advocate force (like the U.N.’s military commander in Bosnia, Gen. Rupert Smith), and toned down reports sent to New York to maintain the premise that “all sides were equally guilty.”

In one case, a zealous mid-level U.N. official even tried to block the deployment of peacekeepers to protect a hospital in Bihac, another collapsing “safe area” in which I served. As approaching Serb forces lobbed artillery shells at the hospital, we urged the U.N. mission headquarters to let us send a unit to defend the patients, noting that hospitals were protected areas under the Geneva Conventions. The responding official, scrupulously adhering to policy, argued that we had no basis to deploy because the U.N. itself is not a party to the Geneva Conventions.

Unfortunately, senior U.N. officials still peddle the line that the Secretariat was merely the “servant” of a divided Security Council that failed to provide the U.N. with enough resources in Srebrenica. In fact, the Secretariat independently resisted any use of force in Bosnia, including NATO airpower that could have more than compensated for shortfalls on the ground. For the sake of current and future U.N. missions, it is essential that the organization not turn explanations about Srebrenica into excuses.

The third and least understood factor in collective passivity toward evil is the prevalent taboo against “getting emotional” about death and tragedy. While there is always a risk of rushing to judgment or allowing particularly graphic evidence to cloud decision-making, the greater risk is from exaggerated clinical detachment. Without a sense of guided outrage, of empathy for the victims of abuse, organization staff, even human rights workers, are prone to “move on” and accept it when bureaucracies shrug their shoulders.

Washington Post: Bystanders To a Massacre: How the U.N. Failed Srebrenica

As long as that excerpt is, it’s only about 40% of the tale of woe Edwards gives us. You should read it all.

Next we hear from another on the inside, Alexander Ivanko, who “was the UN spokesman in Sarajevo during the fall of Srebrenica in July 1995.“

At the time I was the UN spokesman in Sarajevo. That spring our military analysts had predicted the fall of the three eastern enclaves still held by the Muslims – Gorazde, Srebrenica and Zepa – which had been declared “UN safe areas” and were surrounded by Bosnian Serb troops.

The UN Protection Force – several dozen contingents, some of them more loyal along national rather than international command lines, with a mixed bag of mandates, often contradictory – had to choose between major military operations against the Bosnian Serb army or trying to wiggle its way through with half-measures, some of them bordering on appeasement, to prevent a disaster.

The United Nations – all of us working then in Sarajevo – failed. No question about it.

One clear lesson is that at no point in the future should a peacekeeping force be sent to an ongoing conflict where it ends up trying to separate warring factions, deliver humanitarian aid, police safe areas, organize exchanges of bodies and prisoners, and perform many other functions. With so many tasks and too few resources, it is no wonder the UN failed.

If there is a need to send an international force into a war zone, let us leave this, excuse the expression, to coalitions of the willing, and not the wary. To forces equipped and trained to do the job, with rules of engagement more robust than those of the UN.

International Herald Tribune Srebrenica: Lessons of a terrible blunder

He suggests the UN be reduced to helping “by pointing in the right direction: expect the next conflict to erupt here, watch out for an insurgency there.” Which would only elicit howls of disapproval, as we all know any military action must be authorized in advance by the UN Security Council, right?

Right. Let’s put it this way. If we’d waiting for UN approval, the war in Bosnia and Kosovo would likely be ongoing today. It took unilateral action by NATO … yes, NATO, with no UN Security Coucil authorization … to finally stop the war by use of military force. First in Bosnia. Then again in Kosovo.

Mr. Ivanko’s expressed desire for the future has actually been reality for almost a decade; when genocide strikes, expect more able members of the world community to eventually become so frustrated with UN inaction that they finally do it themselves. If it’s going to get done at all.

Because it’s been clear for a decade now, when you send people with blue helmets and guns into places where they might actually need to use them, they only make things worse. You don’t need to take my word for it. Listen to the people who were there.