The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (76 page)

All four elements of this alternative US strategy required UN acquiescence or active support: (1) the covert violation of the arms embargo used Iranian and Turkish planes into Zagreb and Tuzla airports and Ukrainian helicopters into the Biha
pocket (all of which were UN-controlled) to deliver weapons and other military equipment; (2) the ‘Washington agreement’ to ally Bosnian Croats and Bosniacs militarily against the Serbs and gain Croatian consent to open supply lines for weapons deliveries to Bosnian government forces in violation of the arms embargo, which was negotiated by US and German diplomats between Tudjman and Izetbegovi
, and was implemented by UNPROFOR; (3) ever greater pressure on UNPROFOR from NATO (AFSOUTH) not to limit its requests to CAS but to call in NATO air strikes against Bosnian Serb forces for violating weapons-exclusion zones around the six safe areas and against their planes for violating the ban; and the one exception until mid-1995,(4) a train-and-equip programme for the army in Croatia by Military Professional Resources, Inc. (MPRI) (on contract to the US State Department under a programme for the democratization of armed forces in eastern Europe for purposes of plausible deniability) which strategized the Croatian military campaigns of 1 May and 4 August 1995 to overrun three of the UNPAs, followed by a Croatian sweep through western Bosnia immediately thereafter, which then combined with a new UNPROFOR strategy to end the military stalemate in Bosnia.

The result of the internal complications created by Council resolutions and this competing US campaign was the third stage of Security Council policy, clear to all on the ground by late autumn 1993. Council-authorized instruments and policies on the use of force were now serving two competing political-military strategies, one official, one covert, in the same theatre. UNPROFOR commanders faced an ever messier military situation and enlarged mandate driven by both strategies, peacemaking on the one hand and war-fighting on the other. The US strategy created havoc with the official policy and UNPROFOR tasks, reducing cooperation by all parties with UNPROFOR. Whereas Washington had prevented a political settlement before the war (Lisbon) and in early 1993 (Vance-Owen Peace Plan), its policy now gave a strong incentive to the warring parties in Zagreb and Sarajevo to retard ICFY political negotiations as each waited for the military strategy to play out in their favour. While one ICFY peace plan after another failed to get signatures of at least
one or more parties, the war dragged on. It increasingly tried the patience of troop-contributing countries and also became ever bloodier and brutal as each side had a rising incentive to fight (and, with the Bosnian Serb army, to take ever greater risks as it perceived itself at war with NATO and increasingly abandoned by Belgrade and UNPROFOR).

Although the Security Council continued to insist in resolutions and statements that its goal was a negotiated settlement to the war among Bosnian parties, the distance between this political objective and the tasks which it mandated UNPROFOR and authorized NATO to do grew ever greater.
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Resolutions were being drafted by representatives of both strategies, the US and the primary troop contributors, above all France and the UK. An increasingly mobilized international public only saw failure to stop the war and added constant pressure on the Council (from the General Assembly,
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domestic publics of Council members, the global media, human rights envoys,
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and even Secretary-General’s reports) to authorize more force and troops. Had the Council taken some responsibility for the implementation of its policy on the ground, it might have had to confront its inconsistencies. Instead, it focused on adding instruments which could then be used by either strategy and on delegating authority to ever more complex hierarchies. While the ICFY peace negotiations took place in Geneva, for example, the parties were also aiming their military operations and their local agreements with UNPROFOR at improving their bargaining position. Because the ICFY and UNPROFOR missions were both so demanding, the civilian leadership was divided in January 1994 with little obvious policy connection other than personal communication between SRSGs (and then the Contact Group, too). The effort to keep the three UNPROFOR commands separate in line with the sovereignty of the three countries involved made little sense when at least two theatres were militarily and logistically intertwined and the Council itself had created a single UNPROFOR command with one ultimate Force Commander. Adding NATO to the mix made this much worse. The solution, in practice, to repeated debates over the actual locus of command over UN troops was left, as the desk officer in DPKO for Yugoslavia in this period, Shashi Tharoor, wrote in 1994, ‘in the hands of the commanders in the field’.
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Two of the most contentious instruments which the Council authorized, NATO air power and the ‘dual key’, and safe areas, can best illustrate this confusion and the conflict it created. NATO air power served two purposes: close air support, which UNPROFOR commanders could call in to defend lightly armed and under-resourced UNPROFOR soldiers at risk from any of the parties (and a welcome additional asset), and air strikes to enforce Council resolutions and parties’ agreements, such as on safe areas, weapons-exclusion zones, and air-interdiction resolutions. As long as UNPROFOR commanders were in control of both so that their ROE of transparency, proportionality, and self-defence governed their use, the first political-military strategy prevailed. Thus, as originally demanded by the UK, a ‘dual key’ was necessary whereby UN authorities would initiate and NATO officials agree to a decision to bomb. Yet for those who supported, knowingly or not, the second strategy, the problem was that NATO was not bombing Serbs (or was only delivering ‘pinpricks’), and this was because UN officials (civilian and military) refused to ‘turn its key’. While the conflict between the UN and NATO on air power was about the doctrinal and pragmatic issues discussed earlier on the use of force, in reality the primary problem of the quite practical military obstacles to the effective use of air power in this theatre was never adequately explained.
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The same misunderstanding arose over the military concept of ‘robustness’, to keep humanitarian convoys moving. For most UNPROFOR military, ‘all necessary means’ in Council resolutions meant a finely tuned calculation of military force to succeed largely through its psychological effect so as to protect the legitimacy of its use in the future and be more effective in the present. For critics, it meant forceful protection of blue routes, air drops, and disproportionate force to deny access to strategic routes, deliver weapons, and provide cover for actual war-fighting. International control over airports (Sarajevo and later Tuzla) had the same dual purpose and critical reaction.
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The other main debate on the use of force focused on the safe-area policy. Initially proposed by the UK to counteract German demands in July 1992 for EU burden-sharing quotas on refugees (i.e. protect Bosnians at home instead), the concept was taken from the safe havens created after the Gulf War for Iraqi Kurds (Operation Provide Comfort). The idea coincided with the effort at the time by the High Commissioner, Sadako Ogata, to add a ‘right to return’ and a ‘right to stay’ to UNHCR’s protection regime. At the same time, activists in France, the US, and UK pushing for a stronger international right to intervene, and in Bosnia in particular, conceived the safe areas in ways closer to the second strategy, to defeat the Bosnian Serbs from initially small to ever larger territory where UN troops and NATO airpower would defend civilians militarily and stop the war. The Security Council
adopted the concept in Resolution 819 on 16 April 1993, however, when the substantial operational latitude its actions gave to UNPROFOR commanders produced a problem, that is, not for reasons of policy or strategy. After rushing to Srebrenica at the demand of local authorities who then refused to allow him to leave, the French commander of UNPROFOR in Bosnia, François Morillon, proposed UN protection for the town in exchange for his exit.
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To cover the embarrassment with a principle, the concept was extended on 6 May to five other Muslim-majority enclaves surviving in Bosnian Serb held territory.
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A huge literature analyses the failure of the Security Council to define the resolution’s phrasing (‘deter attacks’), to understand the military requirements of its implementation, and to provide the military resources necessary.
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Nor was there much effort made to explain to residents of these towns or to the international public what was being promised, what was not, and what was possible. Yet it is very clear that where its implementation followed the rules of the official Council policy, it succeeded, as in Sarajevo, where General Briquemont, commander of Sector Sarajevo in 1993, laid its political preconditions with careful local negotiations for months leading up to the NATO threat to bomb Serb positions in the weapons-exclusion zone around Sarajevo in February 1994, and then UNPROFOR civilian and military officials together negotiated a ceasefire that held for more than six months. Where the safe areas were an integral component of the second, war-fighting strategy of the Sarajevo government and US covert policy, however, all such efforts to negotiate and monitor local ceasefires were repeatedly interrupted (most notably in Goražde and Srebrenica) on purpose. While their location deep into Bosnian Serb held territory and at strategic crossroads did, as aimed, tie down substantial Bosnian Serb forces in defending against Bosnian army forces within the towns (only demilitarized in Security Council resolutions, but not in reality), the price was paid by the local inhabitants and surrounding villages, and when the clash between the two strategies had to be resolved in the spring and summer of 1995, most egregiously by the men and boys of Srebrenica.
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In the fourth and final stage of Security Council policy toward the Bosnian war, when these two competing strategies had created more than a year of political stalemate and increasing inability of UNPROFOR troops to implement Council resolutions, the Council was de facto irrelevant, limited to providing authorization for a combined political-military strategy designed elsewhere. On the diplomatic front, the Contact Group and US diplomats separately pursued the US strategy to complete the isolation and political defeat of the Bosnian Serbs by working only with Serbian president Miloševi
and rewarding him accordingly. Militarily, UNPROFOR’s Bosnia commander, British General Rupert Smith, began in early spring 1995 to put in place his own strategy for breaking out of the stalemate and ending the war. The Council responded by adjusting its sanctions regime against the FRY,
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removing the dual key and authorizing NATO air strikes to allow NATO greater independent latitude, and, crucially, authorizing the establishment of a rapid reaction force (RRF) for UNPROFOR of 12,500 additional troops armed with heavy artillery which the British and French, with some Dutch and Belgian support, had already created for General Smith for the Mount Igman Road in and out of Sarajevo.
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All Council resolutions still reiterated UNPROFOR’s original mandate and the commitment to a negotiated, non-military solution to the war. Most notable, however, is a return to its lame stance of early 1992 – condemning armies and demanding compliance after the fact (e.g. Resolutions 994 of 17 May and 1009 of 10 August on Croatian forces
after
Operations Flash and Storm, Resolution 998 of 16 June on Bosnian Serbs
after
taking UNPROFOR soldiers hostage, and Resolution 1004 of 12 July on the day
after
Bosnian Serbs took Srebrenica and the day the massacre began).
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