The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (72 page)

The NATO operation forced the withdrawal of the UN border monitors from Macedonia in February 1999,
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and, alongside the international support for Albanian rights in Kosovo, left Macedonia (whose independence was not yet fully recognized due to open Greek and covert Bulgarian opposition) exposed to a spillover of weapons and militia into the internal conflict over national rights and sovereign border between the government and the Albanian minority. In February 2001, the sixth war began when a Macedonian branch of the KLA attacked government police in villages near the Kosovo border.
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Although the violence was very brief due to intervention by the EU, US, and NATO in August 2001, doubts remain about the viability of the required constitutional reformulation of the Macedonian state (and that of Bosnia as well) in the face of a still unresolved and frequently violent contest over the sovereign status of neighbouring Kosovo.

Where was the Security Council in this unfolding story? Its alleged failure to use force to stop the violence is only the third of three problems the Yugoslav crisis posed. The two prior issues are far more consequential, even in retrospect: (1) defence of the territorial integrity and sovereignty of a UN member state; and, when that failed, (2) the management of a country’s break-up with the minimum of violence. If the Council had addressed these two questions successfully and as core tasks of collective security, not only that of Yugoslavia, the third issue of its use of force would never have arisen.

Because it is now conventional wisdom that internal wars of the Yugoslav kind are the primary threat to international peace and security in the post-Cold War era, it is necessary to recapture the moment and the way that the Yugoslav crisis first reached the Council’s agenda. This was nearly twelve months to the day after the violence began in Croatia and the military preparations (including covert arms deliveries) for Slovene and Croatian independence became public, in August 1990. By November, when intelligence in major capitals and political analysis within the Secretariat were predicting Yugoslavia’s violent disintegration, US President George Bush made very clear that Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty excluded NATO action in Yugoslavia; it was ‘out of area’. Although the Charter of Paris adopted by the CSCE summit on 21 November aimed to shift leadership over common security for a reunified Europe (calling it cooperative rather than collective), the United States and the Soviet Union both vetoed an explicit request at the Paris Summit that the CSCE act in Yugoslavia, arguing the principle of nonintervention. The same month, the Security Council authorized Operation Desert Storm to reverse Iraqi aggression against Kuwait.

Less than two months later, in January 1991, however, the idea that internationally prohibited aggression could also occur within a country was implicit in harsh warnings from the US Ambassador to the Yugoslav army against its efforts to restore internal order so as to support the political negotiations taking place between January and June among the presidents of its six federal units over Slovene conditions to remain a member of the federation and the necessary constitutional principles. Given the large number and types of external actors and actions already deeply involved in the Yugoslav crisis, particularly in the period leading to war, 1987–91, this was no longer, any more than other internal wars in the current era, a solely domestic conflict. Some were pursuing specific interests (such as bankers or the IMF seeking debt repayment), or national interests (such as neighbouring states, the US Treasury and diplomatic corps [as Yugoslav patron since 1949], or states supporting Slovene and Croatian independence with advice or arms, such as
Austria, Germany, Denmark, Norway, and Hungary).
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Others engaged on the common security implications for Europe of a violent implosion. Like the CSCE, the EC was also in the process of adopting a new treaty (Maastricht), to be signed at the end of 1991, which included a commitment to a Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and the instruments necessary to it. EC federalists (especially EC President Jacques Delors and the current and upcoming presidencies of Luxembourg and the Netherlands and later the Italian foreign minister) seized on the opportunity that Yugoslavia provided. The difficulty was that these many actors had not only disparate interests but also profound disagreements as to the preferred fate of Yugoslavia. The solution to collective action was found in their insistence on the Helsinki Charter (to which Yugoslavia was a signatory) on the peaceful resolution of disputes. Thus, although coming from very different political perspectives, Europeans and the US settled on a definition of the Yugoslav problem as the domestic use of force.

But what actions did this principled stand require? There were two obstacles. The Helsinki principles, like the UN Charter, also included the territorial integrity of existing states. On what principle could they intervene? The Slovene government solved this problem by accompanying its declaration of independence on 25 June with a request for European intervention. Within three days, EC and CSCE delegations began negotiating the steps toward ceasefire in Slovenia, de facto recognition of its independence in the Brioni Agreement of 7 July, and the groundwork for the other half of the Slovene and Croatian strategy, the withdrawal of the Yugoslav army.

The second obstacle, which had already been foreseen by the West European Union (WEU) secretariat in December 1990, was pragmatic and operational: what if negotiations did not stop the violence? The WEU (and later France) had drawn up plans for a potential interposition force around a core of French, German, and possibly Belgian and Dutch troops, but this had been adamantly opposed by the United States as a direct threat to NATO’s role in European security. Without US troops, the UK refused to agree to a separate force as well (in part because of the drain of the concurrent Operation Desert Storm). The alternative emerged early in July from the German parliament (Bundestag): recognize Slovene and Croatian independence immediately.
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By early July, therefore, a new line had been drawn within Europe. On one side was an increasingly activist German foreign minister, Genscher, supported by the early advocates of Slovene independence (Austria, the Vatican, Denmark, and
Switzerland), and on the other were those such as the participants at the G7 Summit in July who sought to send a military force to interpose between warring parties, whoever they were, so as to create conditions for negotiating an all-Yugoslav solution. As debate between these two options intensified, the EC reached for such instruments as it had. On the basis of its achieved consensus that the Yugoslav problem was the use of force
by the federal army
, it suspended, on 5 July, the second and third protocols (US $1 billion) of the US $4.5 billion in aid it had promised the federal government as late as May on the conditions that the country remain together and continue its programme of economic reform, and it imposed an arms embargo on the federal government.
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The Brioni agreement of 7 July set a three-month moratorium on Slovene independence (and by implication, that of Croatia), required the federal army to return to barracks, demanded an end to opposition by the Serbian-led coalition in the federal (collective) presidency to the election of the Croatian representative as chair,
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and established an unarmed monitoring mission (the ECMM) for neighbouring Croatia (but refused to send one to Bosnia-Herzegovina). Working in parallel, EC and CSCE
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negotiators then began rounds of discussions with the federal prime minister and foreign minister and the presidents of Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia to obtain a ceasefire in Croatia but refused to speak to the Yugoslav army. Equally inexplicably, the negotiators simply ignored the other three republics (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Montenegro). Although the new Dutch presidency of the EC, led by foreign minister Hans van den Broek, appears to have understood fully the many complications of dissolving a country and state, its confidential telegram to the other eleven EC members proposing serious negotiations on all such details, including the borders of the new states, was rejected on 29 July by all eleven.
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As both the violence in Croatia and German pressure for immediate recognition mounted during July, EC foreign ministers meeting on 3 August at the initiative of Luxembourg revived the idea of an interposition force, but France took the issue
directly to the Security Council, on 5 August. Three of the Permanent Five (P5) – the US, USSR, and the UK – were against the proposal, most openly the USSR, stating that intervention would be one-sided and thus fuel the violence, with the potential of an all-European conflict. Criticism has focused on the Soviet and subsequently Russian role in the Council as anti-Western and anti-interventionist, but it is worth noticing that none had a deeper understanding of the substantive issues at stake because the USSR was going through its own state crisis for nearly identical reasons (a similar economic reform programme, constitutional revision, and massive mobilizational cycle based on national identities and secessionist demands); the attempted putsch against the new Union Treaty took place on 19 August, and by 24 December, the USSR was no more. Equally important, however, was the reason that France turned to the Council, to seek a United Nations force as substitute for the military force the EC lacked and whose creation the US was preventing. The US objection to such a deployment was no less firm in the Security Council, having decided in 1987 that Yugoslavia was no longer strategically important to it. France countered by mobilizing Austria, Canada, and Hungary – all sitting as Nonpermanent Members at the time – and prepared a draft resolution, written by the foreign ministers of France, the UK, and Belgium, to permit the deployment of UN troops without the consent of the parties. Only after an Austrian request for urgent informal consultations among its members to debate on what grounds it could agree to violate Yugoslav sovereignty, however, did the Council agree to grapple with the Yugoslav crisis, on 19 September.

By this time, the EC had recognized Slovene and Croatian leaders as legitimate negotiating partners internationally; assigned responsibility for the violence to the federal government, declaring on 27 August the army’s use of force (including in defence of Croatian Serbs) illegal; established an arbitration commission of foreign jurists to decide on matters of the country’s dissolution (primarily the distribution of economic assets and financial obligations);
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and proposed a peace conference, which opened on 7 September at The Hague, to negotiate its end. While war between the Croatian and federal armies raged,
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the conference reaffirmed the Helsinki principle that only peaceful change in borders was acceptable and, at the
same time, adopted the position already set by the European parliament on 13 March that the only acceptable international borders were the existing borders of the federal republics.

At the meeting of the Council on 19 September, opposition to action came from Zimbabwe, India, China, Cuba, and Zaire,
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on the principle that this was an internal conflict. France, holding the presidency at the time, thus proposed a draft endorsing EC actions up to that point, including the peace conference. It also proposed to universalize the EC embargo on weapons and military equipment on the basis of
Chapter VII
, and to ask the Secretary-General to begin fact-finding consultations, all on the grounds that the violence was a threat to the
region
’s security. The Council met again on 25 September, with eleven of the fifteen represented by foreign ministers (two others were caught in delayed aeroplanes). All fifteen spoke, and Resolution 713 was adopted unanimously, but only because of a letter obtained the evening before from the Yugoslav Permanent Representative that ‘my government welcomes the decision’ of the Council to meet, followed by the presence and a statement of the Yugoslav foreign minister, Budimir Lon
ar – a decision taken alone, however, by the chair of the Yugoslav federal presidency, the Croatian representative whose installation had been required by the EC in July and who had refused to convene the presidency after 6 September in anger at the army.
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This success, in finally getting the Yugoslav crisis onto the Security Council agenda, did serve its initial intention. The Council authorized Secretary-General Pérez de Cuéllar to send an envoy, and in contrast to the EC diplomatic efforts led by Lord Peter Carrington as chair of the EC peace conference, which began 7 September and included fourteen signed and failed ceasefires, Cyrus Vance did finally succeed in obtaining a sustainable ceasefire in the Croatian war on November 23. Two reasons for his success, all agree, are that unlike the EC, Vance thought it necessary to talk to the Yugoslav army (by including the Minister of Defence Kadijevi
in negotiations), and as UN envoy, he could offer to both parties the promise of United Nations peacekeeping forces to help enforce a ceasefire. For Croatia, UN troops would replace the Yugoslav army, a necessary element of their independence strategy, while Germany was still promising the other piece, nearly immediate recognition. For Serbia, now treated by the EC (and thus the UN) as the political arm of the federal army and, by similar logic, as representative of the interests of Serbs in Croatia, the UN was the lesser of two evils, still offering the possibility of diplomatic objectivity against EC bias and of respect for Yugoslav sovereignty.