The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (73 page)

Vance’s success created two new problems, however: first, for the Serbian leadership in Belgrade, to Wnd a way to persuade Croatian Serbs to accept the substitute of UN troops (they remained convinced, rightly in the end, that the withdrawal of the Yugoslav army left them with no protector); and secondly,
for the Secretariat, to persuade the Security Council and potential troop-contributing countries that conditions for a ceasefire and UN deployment did exist. The Security Council responded by sending a military fact-finding mission to Croatia, and in the interim, encouraging humanitarian efforts by the Secretary-General in liaison with ICRC, UNHCR, UNICEF, and others, and strengthening measures to implement the ‘general and complete’ arms embargo. Far more fateful, however, were the terms under which the Council had assumed responsibility for the Yugoslav crisis: by defending Yugoslav sovereignty only as a minority insistence on the principle of non-interference in its domestic affairs (whatever that meant by 25 September) and by accepting wholesale the policies and results of European efforts to solve the crisis even though it was the failure of these efforts that led to Council engagement in the first place. Although France sought UN involvement as a source of troops and an end-run against the German position, it had succeeded by forming an alliance with others, especially Austria, who were in the German camp. Security-Council actions from then on reflected three internal divisions: between Europe and the rest of the world (especially Russia and the non-aligned) over intervention, among NATO powers (particularly the US and UK against the rest) on the purpose of intervention, and within the EC/EU on the nature of the wars and political options.

The expressed concern at the Council session on 25 September over the violence, possible spillover, and threat to international peace and security together with Yugoslav formal consent did not dampen the objections expressed during the preceding informal consultations about the use of
Chapter VII
language or violation of Article 2(7) on non-intervention. The representatives of China, Côte d’Ivoire, India, Romania, Yemen, USSR, Zaire, and Zimbabwe took the floor to reiterate the principle of non-intervention, condemn the flow of arms from outside the country, and emphasize the necessity of a solution reached by the Yugoslavs themselves. All, though most distinctly Ecuador, conceded only because they were endorsing a
Chapter VIII
effort at peaceful settlement of disputes by the EC and CSCE. In the words of the Indian foreign minister, ‘The main purpose of the draft is, in my delegation’s view, to throw the Council’s moral and political weight behind collective regional efforts.’
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None expressed any awareness that the EC and US had already
made irreversible decisions on the acceptable terms of a political settlement in the service of which the United Nations instruments of peacekeeping troops, good offices, universal sanctions, and moral authority would be placed at an increasing frequency over the next four years (ninety Resolutions and ninety Presidential Statements from Resolution 713 to the end of the Bosnian war in late 1995).
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Discussion did not occur, at this session or later, of the conditions necessary to allow the Yugoslav people themselves to find a solution or on the creation of a UN policy separate from that of the EC and US.
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Three reasons suggest themselves. One is that new alternatives were already being crowded out within the Council by two polar-opposite characterizations of the conflict – as Serbian aggression against internationally recognized internal borders, according to US Secretary Baker in his speech at the Council on 19 September, and the other, as ‘tribal conflicts’ (Zimbabwean foreign minister Shamuyarira) and ‘a slide toward fragmentation and anarchy’ inside states similar to Liberia and Somalia at the time (Yemen’s permanent representative). A second reason is the original construction of the Council, at San Francisco. As long as the Yugoslav conflict did not provoke war among the major powers, the UN’s role in collective security was fulfilled, even though Yugoslavs themselves had twice, in 1914 and 1941, learned the need as well for institutional protections of smaller states against those powers.
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There is some support for this second reason in the growing tendency over the subsequent sixteen years to treat any Russian or Chinese opposition to Council actions on the Yugoslav conflicts, whether or not they threatened to veto, as the real problem – as uncooperative obstacles to action – instead of as efforts at policy debate or, in its absence, at balancing against the US and Europe.
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The third reason is the one commonly accepted since then: the constraints on UN deployment of military force. The Council could authorize states acting individually or collectively to use force, but the US opposed all such options at the time because it would admit the possibility of European defence autonomy. The conditions for a UN deployment instead – the rules of consent, impartiality, and the proportionate use of force in self-defence only – did not exist in July, when this option was first entertained as an alternative to German policy. By the time those rules could be assured, when the Security Council endorsed the Vance Plan for Croatia on 21 February 1992 following a formal ceasefire, however, Germany’s option had won. EC member states bowed to German pressure on 16 December and recognized Slovenia and Croatia as independent states. The mandate of UNPROFOR, which deployed to Croatia on 8 March 1992, was to support a ‘plan and its implementation [which] are in no way intended to prejudge the terms of a political settlement’,
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but the EC (and others such as the Vatican and Ukraine) had erased the political context of Vance’s ceasefire and any remaining possibility for negotiations on the Yugoslav space. Not only did the recognition decision, ‘before a global agreement … undermine the very bases of the peace conference’, in Carrington’s words,
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but also the basis of Security Council involvement in the conflict itself – Resolution 713. Now UNPROFOR was deployed to enable peaceful negotiations between two parties, one of whom was now recognized by the EC as sovereign over the territory under UN protection and had made clear that the UN presence and mission were the one remaining obstacle to its realization of that sovereignty.

The EC recognition decision did require Croatia to grant the ‘special status’ (presuming territorial autonomy) for Serbs in these ‘enclaves’ proposed by the Carrington Plan and German experts assisted in the redrafting of the Croatian constitutional law accordingly, but the government simply ignored this commitment.
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The mission’s design in what Vance and his assistant Herbert Okun called an ‘inkblot’ or ‘leopard skin’ pattern, placing the 14,000 troops at ‘flashpoints’, appears a literal interpretation of the UN role – to keep the ceasefire but not to intervene in the domestic affairs of what was now, basically, a sovereign state – but its consequence was to reaffirm the EC decision by handing decisive influence over any political settlement between the Croatian government and Serbs in what they called ‘the Republic of Serb Krajina’ to the former. Because this plan was militarily unimplementable, creating such difficulties for UNPROFOR military commanders that they eventually had to map a military ‘confrontation line’ and adjoining ‘pink zones’ excluding all military activity and to adjust their deployment accordingly,
however, the prospect of territorial autonomy did become the basis of subsequent negotiations (and the necessity, in Zagreb’s view, to return to war in 1995).

The Croatian army waged military offensives against the UNPAs and thus UN troops four times between 1992 and 1995: at Maslenica Bridge on 21 June 1992; in Medak pocket on 9–17 September 1993, where three whole villages of Serbs were massacred;
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on 1 May 1995, to capture the UNPA of Western Slavonia; and on 4 August 1995, to retake UNPA Sectors North and South, deliberately attacking and killing UN peacekeeping soldiers and Serb civilians and creating the largest refugee wave of the entire Yugoslav conflict: 250,000 Croatian Serbs. Diplomatic negotiations also continued, first under Carrington and then when the EC and UN joined forces in the International Conference on Former Yugoslavia (ICFY) in August 1992, although the EC half of Owen, then Stoltenberg and his assistant Kai Eide, took responsibility for Croatia. But none had any remaining leverage.
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Throughout the three years from March 1992 to March 1995, however, the Security Council never changed UNPROFOR’s mandate in Croatia (the Vance Plan), indeed it reaffirmed it multiple times until it acquiesced to a Croatian government demand in January 1995 to separate it from the other two missions.
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The broader issue, however, is the surprising lack of attention by the Council to rules on recognition of statehood since this is what the wars in Yugoslavia are all about. Here, too, the EC made the decisions and the Security Council ratified them. In a compromise that Germany proposed on 16 December 1991 to secure the necessary EC consensus against remaining opposition to recognition, especially from France, Greece, and the UK, the EC invented a procedure. It would invite all six republics (thus dismissing the vital disputes over eventual borders) to submit requests for recognition. The Security Council made no reference to the Montevideo Convention at the time or in May 1992 when it recommended to the General Assembly to admit Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina as UN member states,
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though neither controlled the territory in their recognized boundaries. Thus, neither Bosnia nor Croatia met the conditions for recognition, as the EC’s Arbitration Commission noted in January 1992.
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Nonetheless, the decisions of the previous six months had demonstrated that any Yugoslav leader who wanted the status of full negotiating partner (including the authority to request United Nations troops) would have to seize the EC invitation and presume the right to sovereignty, regardless of the political consequences that such a momentous act entailed. This was, Carrington declared, ‘a tragic error’ for Bosnia-Herzegovina which ‘unless there is a rapid deployment of an “important presence of the UN in BiH”’ (for which Vance and Under-Secretary-General for Peace-keeping Operations Marrack Goulding both declared the conditions did not exist) ‘would only uncork a civil war’.
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After seven months of violence in the republic, that war was officially declared by President Izetbegovi
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on 4 March, a month before its recognition as a UN member state. It was some time before the consequences would also face the eastern half of former Yugoslavia.

Secretary-General Pérez de Cuéllar, along with Vance and Carrington, did warn Genscher of war on a ‘horrific scale’ in Bosnia in letters they sent in November 1991, but Bosnian sovereignty was not German policy. European stability required, it argued, that Yugoslavia break into three states, Slovenia, Croatia, and a rump Yugoslavia of the remaining four republics. Given that the Security Council was only providing moral weight to, and authorizing enforcement of, EC/EU policy, and given that Bosnia was not yet sovereign, the Council’s position prior to 16 December, despite its tragic consequences, was to refuse multiple requests for preventive action, especially border monitors in October from Serbian president Miloševi
and in November and December from Bosnian president Izetbegovi
. Although Germany abandoned its own policy, that Yugoslavia should break into three states, to win independence for Croatia, it also defied the EC decision it had obtained to wait until the Badinter Commission could rule in January, recognized Slovenia and Croatia on 18 December, and then moved to build regional stability by bringing Serbia back into the fold. Now, however, opposition came from the United States. Although actively pushing the view since June 1991 that Serbia was the aggressor in Slovenia and Croatia (stated without finesse by Secretary of State Baker in the Council discussion of Resolution 713 in September),
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the Bush Administration had insisted on the non-intervention position in the Council. Now German policy
threatened the US’s dominant role regarding European security (including in the east where Germany was taking the lead after 1989), and Washington’s relations with the vigorous Croatian lobby at home. Ever more assertive during February-March 1992, the US demanded immediate recognition of all four republics so requesting, so that it had a principled basis to recognize Croatia, even though the EU decision in January on Bosnia and Herzegovina was to insist on a constitutional agreement between the three nations of Bosnia prior to recognition and the Portuguese EU presidency had begun negotiations.
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Nonetheless, the EU gave in to Baker’s campaign on 6 April and recognized Bosnian sovereignty.