The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (71 page)

The Volcker Inquiry points to even more severe limits on the Council’s capacity to maintain collective security through a legal-regulatory approach. Resolution 687 represented a bold new experiment, substituting regulatory enforcement for military enforcement: but its implementation was often absent-minded, inconsistent, politicized, and, over time, increasingly incoherent. The Council’s early acquiescence in unilateral military action by several Permanent Members against Iraq further aggravated matters, suggesting that different member states played by different rules.

The Council might avoid these failings in the future, but only if it recognizes its own pathologies: its brief attention span and tendency to improvise in response to immediate stimuli – its tendency, in the words of former UN Under-Secretary-General Kieran Prendergast, to ‘expediency’;
¹²²
and the limits of its own political and legal power and of its regulatory capacities. If it wishes to persevere with legal-regulatory approaches, it will need to engage in reflection and reform to ensure it can do so credibly, and not thereby risk further undermining its own legitimacy, effectiveness, and utility.

Secondly, the Council must also continue to grapple with US ambivalence. The US is, after Iraq, resentful of the lack of international support in the Council in 2003, but also, after the problems it encountered during its occupation of Iraq, aware of the utility of the Council as a US policy instrument in 1990 and much of the subsequent fifteen years. The Iraq case demonstrates both how useful the Council can be to the US, and how risky ignoring international sentiment (as reflected in the Council) can be.

Finally, perhaps the most important lesson relates to the costs of unilateralism – for all concerned. In 1990, George H. W. Bush, who understood the value of the legitimacy and burden-sharing offered by Council support, relied on diplomacy focused on and through the Council to build a broad coalition, including credible Arab support. His successors, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, gave less heed to the Council as a means of leveraging US power.

The events of 9/11 inspired the younger Bush to act, but bearing none of his father’s reservations over a US occupation of Iraq in mind. With potential international support undermined by clumsy diplomacy and weak rationales for war, the US attacked Iraq without clear international legal sanction, supported by a narrow coalition including no regional powers. Costs for the US, for Iraq, and for the UN have been staggering. Among the UN’s members, only Iran emerged a clear winner from the fiasco.

At the time of writing, the US is once again recognizing the usefulness of allies and partners, and reengaged meaningfully with the Council on Iran, Lebanon, and Haiti. Although the post-Cold War unity of the Council is much tested by several key security challenges, the Council is likely to remain not only the UN’s most effective decision-making body but also a key forum for international diplomacy, for dealing with wars and, on occasion, for waging them.

SUSAN L. WOODWARD

T
HE
role of the Security Council in response to the violent break-up of former Yugoslavia, beginning in 1991, tarnished the reputation of the United Nations so deeply that many feared it might not recover. Analysts writing at the time and since have been at pains to express the widespread outrage: ‘a spectacular setback’,
¹
‘collective spinelessness’,
²
the first in a ‘series of horrendous failures’ in the 1990s.
³
The anger was not limited to the vast, mobilized public opinion but included
practitioners, within and outside the UN system, who sought as early as late 1992, in Somalia,
⁴
and in 1994 in Rwanda to avoid making the same mistakes again.

Nor did the influence of this global disillusionment wane. In 1995, the case led the Secretary-General to qualify his hopeful
Agenda for Peace
of June 1992.
⁵
It shaped key recommendations of the Brahimi Panel for reform of peacekeeping operations in 2000
⁶
and the UN reform proposals made by the High-level Panel Report on Threats, Challenges, and Change in December 2004. It provided the public excuse and justification for the United States and its NATO allies to defy the Security Council entirely in threatening and then unleashing a bombing campaign of seventy-seven days against Serbia in March 1999. Even France’s conditions in negotiations over an enhanced UNIFIL mandate in Lebanon in the summer of 2006 drew directly from the lessons of its peacekeepers in the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) in Yugoslavia.

This legacy of ignominy is almost entirely based, however, on the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1992–5, and specifically on the cavalier invocation by the Security Council of
Chapter VII
authority without providing the mandate or resources necessary to stop the war – sending peacekeepers, the refrain went, where ‘there was no peace to keep’. All lessons drawn, moreover, focus on the use of force. This chapter will argue that the Security Council did fail miserably in this case, but that to explain why, one cannot treat the Bosnian war or the use of force in a vacuum. The focus must shift to the problem that the crisis in Yugoslavia in general presented to the Council and to the full range of actions it authorized or enabled. The Council did not have then, nor does it yet have, a policy on how to address and manage conflicts that threaten the territorial integrity of a country from within. It cannot, therefore, prevent the parties in conflict from resorting to violence. Secondly, it does not have a mechanism for establishing a policy of collective security separate from a policy of European security and those on the Council who would set such a policy. The apparent end of the wars in former Yugoslavia, circa 2004, had not brought an end to either problem for the Security Council as it confronted a new stalemate in 2007 on the former Serbian province of Kosovo.

To restore perspective to the role of the Security Council in the wars of former Yugoslavia, this chapter will first examine the problem that the principle of territorial integrity caused for the Security Council in 1990–1, then turn to its role as a handmaiden of European security, and finally to the use of force in Bosnia-Herzegovina and how the Security Council did, in fact, wage war.

The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1992–5, was the third in a series of wars – five or six by 2007, plus at least two prevented – in the contested unravelling of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia that began with the secession of one part, the republic of Slovenia, on 25 June 1991. The causes leading up to the crisis of 1991 were many and remain highly disputed.
⁷
They are inseparable from the changes taking place internationally that also affected the Security Council, from the global debt crisis of 1979–80 to the end of Europe’s division and the Cold War. The effects in Yugoslavia of economic crisis and then political conflict over the appropriate economic and security policies provoked calls for (and disagreements over) fundamental reform of its constitutional order. The end in 1989 to socialist property rights and in 1990 to one-party rule only intensified the last phase of constitutional conflict about the federal system, citizenship rights, and the country itself.

Until 28 June 1991 when the European Community (EC) and Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) intervened,
⁸
however, the crisis was not seen as an issue of regional or international security. Both NATO and the CSCE discussed engagement in November 1990 but decided against on the principle of non-intervention. The Security Council did not discuss the Yugoslav situation at all until September 1991 and then reaffirmed the non-intervention principle in its first Resolution (SC Res. 713) on 25 September. After 28 June, the issue was still squarely one of sovereignty, but in its other face: the right to sovereignty – who had it, and what were its territorial borders?

The first war, when the government of the federal republic of Slovenia seized control over its external border posts and waged war against an unprepared federal army, lasted only ten days, from 28 June to 7 July. The second war, in the federal republic of Croatia, was preceded by significant armed clashes in August 1990 and spring 1991 when paramilitary Croat nationalists sought to force Croatian Serbs to leave their homes in border areas, and when the Serbs’ elected leaders sought defence in territorial autonomy after the Croatian parliament demoted the legal status of all citizens who were not ethnically Croat to that of a minority. The federal government and its army sought to restore order, including a campaign to expose and interrupt a secret Croatian government plan of defence preparation that involved the purchase and import of weapons from Hungary and Germany, but its efforts were criticized internationally,
particularly by the United States, and the violence worsened when the Croatian government also declared independence, on 25 June. These two secessions created a constitutionally ambiguous situation for the federal government and army, however, while Slovenia and Croatia had succeeded in winning their year-long propaganda campaigns. Two months of low-intensity warfare, when the army attempted to interposition as a way of reducing the violence but also preventing secession and of defending minority Serbs, gave way to full-scale war and appalling destruction after 22 August, when Croatian President Tudjman declared war on the army as an occupying force and the two fought for control in ethnically mixed border regions.

Not only the status of the army and federal government was constitutionally ambiguous by September 1991; so, too, were the exact borders and political allegiances in the contest over who would rule and where in the rest of the Yugoslav space. Whereas Slovenes and Croats were ethnically in the majority in their two republics, the federal republic bordering Croatia – Bosnia and Herzegovina – was constitutionally the home of three equal nations, Croats, Muslims (renamed Bosniacs in 1993), and Serbs. The first multiparty elections in Yugoslavia in 1990, moreover, had created a consensual, power-sharing government of parties representing these three national identities (they defeated social democrats, former communists, and federalists) plus one representative of ‘others.’ As in Croatia, armed violence in the republic preceded the official start of war by at least six months. By September, the Croatian war was no longer respecting Bosnian borders, for example, and growing uncertainty about the future also led villages and towns to arm defensively and paramilitaries to form along partisan lines. The end of the Yugoslav framework opened two options, to negotiate a new constitutional framework for an independent Bosnia or for Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Serbs to ‘secede’ and join their sister political parties and ‘homelands’ in neighbouring Croatia or Serbia. It was only when an EU-mandated referendum on independence and then EU and US recognition chose the first option, in March-April 1992, however, that this third war began officially. Repeating the pattern in Slovenia and Croatia, the head of the Bosnian Muslim/Bosniac party ordered mobilization and demanded the Yugoslav army depart; Bosnian Serb leaders left the government in protest and began a brutal campaign of terror in the east while Croat and Muslim paramilitaries turned on each other in mixed communities in the centre and west.

Two military campaigns by the Croatian government in May and August 1995, although the last phase of the Croatian war of independence, are worth labelling a fourth war because the goal was to ‘liberate’ three of four UN Protected Areas (UNPAs) from the control of UN peacekeepers. The two campaigns were also part of a wider regional strategy to defeat Serbs militarily, in alliance with a joint UN-NATO operation in Bosnia.

Not all territorial contests in the former Yugoslavia led to war, however. In at least two, this was due to UN preventive deployments to the Prevlaka Peninsula and to Macedonia. At the same time, the last secession from what was once Yugoslavia, that
of Montenegro, took place peacefully through a referendum on independence on 21 May 2006, with international recognition in June, against all predictions that the post-1992 Yugoslav army would attempt to use force to prevent it.

The ‘Albanian question’, however, like that of Croats and Serbs who wanted to be citizens in a country of their own nation, not a minority in another state – in this case affecting three republics, Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia, where Albanians lived – did eventually lead to war as well – a fifth over Kosovo and a brief sixth in Macedonia. While Albanians in the Serbian autonomous province of Kosovo declared their right to independence in July 1990 at the same time as Slovenia and Croatia first did, this did not lead to war initially because the Serbian leadership in Belgrade imposed martial law on the province and the Albanian leadership in Kosovo chose a non-violent strategy of resistance and created an entirely parallel system of governance. This stalemate of accommodation between the two lasted until 1996 when impatience at continuing international disinterest and the demonstrated success of a violent strategy for Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia won out. Disparate village militia calling themselves members of a Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) sought to repeat the Slovene strategy, provoking retaliation by the ‘Yugoslav’ security forces (such as with targeted assassinations of police in Kosovo and Macedonia) to gain international sympathy and action. The local violence escalated by 1998 into the fifth war when Belgrade chose an active counterinsurgency response and, in March 1999, NATO intervened with a bombing campaign aimed at the Serbian president, Slobodan Miloševi
, and his army and security police.