The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (77 page)

Despite obstacles from the Security Council, including surprising interventions from the US Ambassador, Madeleine Albright,
⁸⁸
Smith’s strategy did succeed eventually in forcing coherence with the second, covert strategy. Although US diplomats claim that NATO bombing of Serb targets in late August and early September 1995 (Operation Deliberate Force) ended the war because it ‘brought
the Bosnian Serbs to the bargaining table’, it was ground forces – Croatian, Bosnian government, and UNPROFOR (the RRF) in Croatia, western Bosnia, and around Sarajevo in July and August 1995 – that ended the war. Ironically, the primary role of US policy (apart from its substantial military role in Croatia) was diplomatic, in reversing its opposition to the principles of all six prior EU and UN peace plans since February/March 1992, that all three parties in Bosnia including the Serbs should be both constitutionally protected and territorially autonomous, and in persuading the Bosnian Muslim government (with Operation Deliberate Force and military commitments in the Dayton negotiations) to concede. Bosnian Serbs were actually excluded from the negotiations and represented (at US insistence) by Milosevic. Although the Security Council had no role in the denouement of May-September 1995, its original strategy had in many ways been vindicated.
⁸⁹
As always, it did agree to legitimate the General Framework Agreement for Peace and to authorize a successor to UNPROFOR led by NATO, EU, and the US, including in it a UN civilian police force (IPTF) and associated civilian office.
⁹⁰

The peace in Bosnia did not end the problem of Yugoslavia for the Security Council, indeed, the lessons drawn by the US and a new government in Britain in 1997
⁹¹
about the use of force, on the one hand, and by Russia, China, and the non-aligned states about the principle of non-intervention, on the other, sharpened the divisions. The first camp, led by the US, now insisted that only the threat of force would make diplomacy credible, while the second camp were now persuaded that intervention in internal conflicts inevitably legitimized the secessionist forces.

In response to the growing violence in Kosovo after 1997, Council resolutions eerily returned to the original debate of September 1991. Resolution 1060 of 31 March 1998 declared the territorial integrity of the FRY, called for an enhanced status for Kosovo, imposed an arms embargo under
Chapter VII
, and welcomed efforts by the US and the Contact Group to negotiate between Belgrade and Priština. It repeated this message on 23 September, though with extremely tough
language, demanding under
Chapter VII
an immediate end to hostilities by both sides to avert a ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ and to lay conditions for dialogue but also reminded the FRY of its sovereign obligation to protect international humanitarian personnel.
⁹²
One month later, it endorsed a ceasefire agreement between Belgrade authorities and the OSCE and demanded cooperation by both Serbian and Albanian leaderships with two verification missions, one by the OSCE on the ground, and one by NATO in the air.
⁹³
It also repeated the
Chapter VII
basis of its demands on FRY in Resolutions 1160 and 1199, although this time Russia and China abstained.

Nonetheless, the US and most of its NATO partners (particularly the UK and Canada) interpreted these resolutions in terms of the lessons they had drawn from 1991: that the Security Council had failed when it refused to authorize bombing in Croatia at the time of Vukovar or Dubrovnik and in Bosnia in the summer of 1992 (although such proposals never reached the Council), that (as US Secretary of State Albright repeated often) they had to pledge ‘never again’ and make up for the failure of ‘Europe’ (the EU), and that Russian rhetoric suggested the Council would refuse force again. This time, they would ignore the Security Council and take a parallel track based on Contact Group diplomacy and NATO force.
⁹⁴
And, in fact, NATO, the Contact Group, the G8, and US diplomats were already moving rapidly on a parallel track in the summer of 1998 with NATO military preparations, an official NATO threat to Miloševi
, rushed diplomatic negotiations in Belgrade, and then, in February 1999, a time-limited ‘peace conference’ at Rambouillet, France. Secretary-General Kofi Annan did brief the Council frequently, but with much stronger language than his predecessor’s. In February, the Council’s Canadian presidency chose not to seek authorization for NATO bombing from the Council so as to avoid a feared Russian veto, and two days after the bombing began, on March 26, Russia did table a resolution calling for an immediate end to the operation. Its defeat, with only Russia, China, and Namibia voting in favour, has been interpreted, as Heinbecker writes, as a ‘major moral victory for the proponents of military action’.
⁹⁵

Despite this apparent standoff on the use of force and the subsequent and major debate over whether internationally illegal action (the NATO operation) can nonetheless be internationally legitimate,
⁹⁶
British foreign-office lawyers took care to find a formulation that would retain the Council’s authority in such matters
by defining this use of force, as the UK permanent representative told the Council on the day it began, ‘as an exceptional measure to prevent an overwhelming [imminent] humanitarian catastrophe … exclusively’.
⁹⁷
On 14 May, the Council sought to restore UNHCR to its rightful role as lead humanitarian agency including refugee protection against the assertion by NATO commanders in Albania, Macedonia, and Kosovo, and it endorsed the G8 package used in June to end the bombing.
⁹⁸
Moreover, 77 days of bombing succeeded only in producing two ceasefire agreements with NATO (for Yugoslav security forces to withdraw from the territory entirely, and for KLA to ‘undertake’ to demobilize within the province) that would lay the conditions, as in Croatia in early 1992, for the Security Council to authorize a peacekeeping force. It did not resolve the underlying conflict over Kosovo’s status. Although NATO was now willing to lead this force (KFOR), at US insistence so its troops would not be under UN command, Resolution 1244 of 10 June 1999 was also only an interim agreement, refusing to take a political position on the conflict by leaving FRY (Serbian) territorial integrity intact while granting Kosovo
extensive
political autonomy. The diplomatic task returned to the Security Council and a UN transitional administration, the UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK). Like UNPROFOR, UNMIK was increasingly criticized by both parties as an obstacle to its own political goals. Pressure to end its mandate and to move toward final status came, as in Bosnia, from impatience in the US and Europe at the cost of troops and aid, despite the absence of conditions for sovereignty.
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The Council thus requested the SG in May 2005 to commission a report (written by Kai Eide)
¹⁰⁰
and appointed a negotiator (former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari) as UN Special Envoy to initiate a negotiating process on final status in 2005, but by March 2007, Ahtisaari insisted that compromise was unattainable.
¹⁰¹
After sixteen years, the Security
Council had to confront the issue raised by European decisions in 1991 and by its own willingness to provide the instruments for European policy (and later, of US policy, too) rather than assert its own, collective policy. Although the EU had already set the key international precedent in 1991 and was committed in 2007 to take on the role of implementing a Council decision on Kosovo’s status, it was more divided by the threat of the Kosovo precedent than any other decision on the former Yugoslavia.

The wars in Yugoslavia had disproportionate influence, given its relative size, death toll in the wars, and strategic insignificance to the major powers, on international practice and norms. Some resulted from Security Council actions, such as the creation of ICTY and the idea of international tribunals to prosecute war crimes in internal conflicts, and some resulted from angry reaction to Security Council actions, such as the increasing militarization of approaches to internal wars, humanitarian crisis, and other global threats promoted by a US-led coalition and supported by international outrage at the Council’s alleged failure to authorize war in Bosnia, which was manifest first on the Kosovo question in 1999 and then in 2001–3 in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Because the prevailing criticism of the Council regards its policies toward Bosnia and the use of force, it is notable that a Bosnian NGO, the Research and Documentation Centre, which is painstakingly identifying all actual war casualties, reported in June 2007 not only that the actual numbers (about 100,000) were less than half of that claimed at various times during the war but that almost half of all deaths (and more than half of civilian casualties) occurred in May-August 1992.
¹⁰²
One plausible explanation is that the military and humanitarian deployment by the Security Council in June-August did achieve the first of their two goals, to save lives while waiting for a political settlement, with striking effectiveness. This chapter has argued that the Council did fail, but in other regards whose importance for global collective security and the peaceful resolution of related disputes worldwide is far greater for those who want to prevent war in the first place than for its authorization of force once war has begun. The Council failed to defend the territorial integrity of a UN member state, and it then failed to establish and enforce rules on the recognition of statehood and borders, even though disputes over the two were the cause of the six Yugoslav wars and were well known in advance. It also failed in its implementation of
Chapter VIII
of the Charter, by
allowing European and US policies (including their many disagreements) to define Security Council policy rather than the reverse. Finally, it failed to provide transparent explanations of the policy and political-military strategy on which its resolutions were based, thereby preventing those who opposed to do so constructively and the Council itself to know when, and why, its own actions (as in Bosnia) may be vindicated. While the US and European powers and organizations bear full responsibility for the errors in the Yugoslav wars, the Security Council bears the larger moral responsibility, for never having sought to craft a policy of its own independent of the actions of its members, permanent and non-permanent, either for the Yugoslav conflicts or for the generic problem which it will continue to face, in Kosovo and in many other countries in the world.

RUPERT SMITH

T
HIS
chapter is based on my experience of UN operations in the Balkans during the 1990s and, more specifically, during 1995 when I was in command of UNPROFOR in Bosnia. During 1993 and 1994, I was a senior staff officer in the Ministry of Defence in London and dealt daily with the Balkan operations and the UN, albeit from a national perspective. As Commander of UNPROFOR, I was temporarily on the inside of the UN structure and, nominally at least, serving the Security Council.

The chapter seeks to explain the fundamental cause of the Security Council’s failure to achieve its stated purpose in the Balkans from 1992 to 1995, and to answer the following specific questions:

• How should the role of the SC be evaluated?

• Did the existence and actions of the SC significantly affect events in the conflict?

• How did the role of the SC change over the time of the conflict?

• What were the attitudes of the main actors towards the SC?

• What are the main views of the role of the SC in the conflict?

Before addressing these questions, a couple of fundamental premises regarding strategy and implementation of strategy against opponents should be explained. These premises do not serve so much to seek agreement, but rather provide the basis on which my own judgements are formed.

The first is to define ‘strategy’. I know of no better definition than that provided by Field Marshal Alanbrooke: