Making War to Keep Peace (30 page)

THE DUAL-KEY PRINCIPLE

Perhaps because they did not fully understand what was at stake, the Clinton administration accepted a “dual-key” principle that seriously hampered the ability to use airpower. The dual-key, or double-veto, system required that airpower be requested by the UNPROFOR military commander and approved (or, more often, denied) by the secretary-general's special representative, Yasushi Akashi. This chain of control was added to the already extremely restrictive rules of engagement, which prevented the use of force for retaliation and provided for no use of force except to provide air cover.

In its first few months in office, the Clinton administration formulated a policy on peacekeeping that it outlined in Presidential Decision Directive 13 (PDD-13), which provided the rationale for its policies concerning command and control of U.S. forces in peacekeeping operations.

The directive and policies reflected the administration's ambivalence about the use of force and, I believe, its failure to fully understand that the heavily armed Serbs could be deterred only by much greater force. The directive provided that, while the U.S. government retained
command
over its troops in peacekeeping missions,
operational control
could be turned over to the UN or some other multilateral body.
⁹⁶
This “command without control” principle was also described in the
Army Field Manual
, which discussed a dual-command structure for peacekeeping operations. A U.S. force commander would have two chains of command above him. One chain made him answerable to the U.S. commander in chief, while a second chain integrated him under the UN force commander.

Walter Slocombe, deputy undersecretary for policy, outlined the complex UNPROFOR chain of command in testimony to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs:

The dual-key arrangement caused delay and ineffectiveness, but many months passed before it was abandoned in favor of a more effective chain of command.

It was never clear why Boutros-Ghali thought he had the right to control the use of airpower in the first place. No such right had existed previously, certainly not in U.S. experience with wars authorized and carried out by the UN. It was not described in the UN Charter. Resolution 770 stated that the Security Council could take “all necessary measures nationally or through regional agencies or arrangements” to deliver humanitarian assistance in Bosnia-Herzegovina. But Boutros-Ghali interpreted the resolution as authorizing the Security Council to take such measures
as requested by the secretary-general
. Moreover, he insisted that Resolution 816, which authorized states and regional groups to use force if necessary to enforce no-fly zones, was contingent on the secretary-general's approval, and that Resolution 836, which authorized member states acting nationally or through regional organizations to use airpower to protect UN peacekeepers, only applied
if the secretary-general approved
.

Even after the Security Council had clearly stipulated otherwise, Boutros-Ghali claimed that he alone had the authority to initiate the use of force in Bosnia. However, from 1990 through 1993—while hundreds of thousands of Bosnians suffered and died from injuries and lack of food, water, and medicine—he did not use the power he claimed; rather, he prevented its use. It was a mystery why the secretary-general so consistently opposed the Security Council in providing assistance to the besieged Bosnians, and why the governments that were providing peacekeepers—Britain, France, and the Netherlands among them—accepted his decisions. At a June 1993 NATO meeting I attended, one of Boutros-Ghali's top deputies explained to a group of high-level, mainly European
officials that, in the secretary-general's view, the conflict in Bosnia should be permitted to “play itself out,” after which the international community should develop plans for reconstruction. He spoke as if he believed governments that stood by passively during the slaughter of Bosnians would later offer economic aid to Serbia and Croatia.

The Bosnian government repeatedly pleaded with the United Nations and the United States to lift the arms embargo and help them get weapons with which to defend themselves against the Serbian army and Serb irregulars. Serb shells landed on the safe area of Sarajevo at the rate of a thousand a day between April 1992 and August 1995, when NATO's Operation Deliberate Force joined the action. Yet the Secretariat called for fulfillment of UNPROFOR's mandate by persuasion, not coercion, and expressed its concern that “air strikes would pose grave dangers to UNPROFOR and the humanitarian convoys and, therefore, should be initiated with the greatest restraint and, essentially, in self defense.”
⁹⁸

After consulting with the UN secretary-general and the commanders of NATO and the North Atlantic Council (NAC), NATO secretary-general Manfred Worner called for stronger measures. Stressing the importance of maintaining the distinction between defensive “close air support” and offensive “air strikes,” Worner interpreted Resolutions 836 and 844 as permitting the use of airpower in self-defense, in response to bombardments of safe areas, in response to armed incursions into safe areas, and in response to Serb efforts to obstruct the movement of UNPROFOR forces or humanitarian convoys. After the attack on the market in Sarajevo in February 1994, Worner suggested that the accumulation of Security Council mandates had transformed the task, making UNPROFOR more of a player in the struggle. Worner warned that attacks on the Sarajevo, Gorazde, and Bihac safe areas demonstrated that Serbs were not deterred by the demarcation of safe areas, their demilitarization, or negotiations. He added, “The recent experience in Bihac has demonstrated once again…the inherent shortcomings of the current ‘safe area' concept at the expense of the civilian population who have found themselves in a pitiable plight.”
⁹⁹

General Sir Michael Rose, designated as the next UN commander for the area, arrived in Bosnia soon after the market attack.
¹⁰⁰
Although Sarajevo was supposed to be a safe area, attacks on the civilian population
continued unabated. General Rose was able to slow or stop the shelling of Sarajevo with an impermanent cease-fire in February 1994, but he seemed almost unconcerned about the continuing attacks on Gorazde, another safe haven whose population was being decimated.

UN military observers reported that as many as seventy thousand people were trapped inside Gorazde, where up to half the houses had been destroyed. Gorazde was the last fortified town in Serb-controlled east Bosnia. The attacks were described in some detail by ABC correspondent Peter Jennings and other journalists in the area, who spotlighted the conditions in Gorazde, where approximately sixty-five thousand Muslims had gathered after being driven out of smaller towns in eastern Bosnia. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees reported seven hundred dead and two thousand wounded in the area.

Rose said flatly that the figures were exaggerated “because they [the Bosnians] want us to fight their war for them…. I've long since ceased to believe the first reports I hear in this country.”
¹⁰¹
Rose sent a Canadian observer to verify the reports, but instead of supporting Rose's doubts, the observer confirmed that a major offensive was under way, with many casualties. But although Rose had the power and responsibility to call in NATO planes, and the American general Leighton Smith was ready with planes and targets, Rose chose not to accept Smith's recommendation for more robust air attacks. He told Peter Jennings, “We are not there to impose a political or military solution on any party as peacekeepers. That is not a war-fighting mission. We are not there as war fighters.”
¹⁰²
When Rose finally called in air strikes against the Serbs attacking Gorazde, the strikes were so mild as to be harmless.

Air strikes were a long time coming. The groundwork had been laid in August 1992, when the Security Council passed Resolution 770, authorizing member states to take “all necessary measures to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian relief to Bosnia.” In October 1992, Resolution 781 imposed a ban on military flights over Bosnia-Herzegovina but did not provide for enforcement. In November, Resolution 786 described the secretary-general's plan to monitor the no-fly zone. In March 1993, Resolution 816 authorized (but did not instruct) member states to enforce the no-fly zone. In August, Resolution 836 “authorized UNPROFOR…to take necessary measures, including the use of force
in reply to bombardments against the safe areas” and decided that member states “in coordination with the Secretary and UNPROFOR could take all necessary measures, through the use of airpower in and around the safe areas, to provide support for UNPROFOR.”
¹⁰³

By the fall, typhoid was spreading in the overcrowded refugee camps, even as fresh assaults by Serbian forces were creating new Muslim and Croatian refugees. In Croatia, Serb irregulars terrorized unarmed civilians in a new campaign of ethnic cleansing in towns previously pacified under a UN-sponsored peace plan. In Kosovo, the Serbs tightened the screws on the Muslim majority, many of whom abandoned their homes and possessions to seek refuge in Albania, a country whose meager resources were already strained.

As winter came to the region, snow and ice blocked the fleeing families. A week before Christmas, NATO agreed to support the United States if it decided to enforce the ban on Serbian flights over Bosnia. The previous summer, the United States had contributed 315 U.S. personnel and equipment to the UN peacekeeping operations and had been keeping U.S. ships in the Adriatic to help enforce the blockade.
¹⁰⁴
At the beginning of 1994, Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali hinted that the UN was ready to use airpower to achieve some relief for the Bosnians, but UN and NATO forces stood by while their planes were shot from the sky. The problem was not with the soldiers or pilots, it was with their mission, their rules of engagement, and, above all, with the UN secretary-general and his special representative, Yasushi Akashi.

Clinton's policy in Bosnia had one virtue: it did not commit lightly armed U.S. forces to a war zone under UN rules of engagement. Clinton stuck to his decision that Americans would participate as ground forces in peacekeeping in Bosnia only when a cease-fire had been agreed to by all parties to the conflict. After the traumatic experience in Mogadishu in October 1993, Clinton understood that peacekeeping could be dangerous when there was no peace to keep, but he was not yet ready to use adequate force. I wondered why not, given the failure of peace operations in Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, and, especially, Bosnia. In Bosnia and Croatia, the UN peacekeepers had served principally to inhibit energetic resistance to the Serb attackers. They had not prevented the sieges and de
struction of the safe-haven towns (Srebrenica, Tuzla, Sarajevo, and Gorazde) on the eastern side of Serbia. Sometimes they had not even tried. The UN Secretariat tried intermittently to negotiate cease-fires to prevent the complete destruction of one civilian population after another. Sometimes the threat of NATO air interventions persuaded Serbian forces to move their big guns on to another town and another target. Sometimes it had no effect at all.

Humanitarian relief was not what civilians under bombardment most desperately needed. They needed weapons and allies. There was a great deal of confusion in diplomatic and UN circles regarding appropriate measures of response to Serbian aggression. But Article 15 in the UN Charter could not be clearer: All states have an inherent, unalienable right to defend themselves against aggression and to call on others to help them. Kuwait called for help when Iraq attacked, and got it. Bosnia-Herzegovina called for help when it was attacked by Serbia and the Bosnian Serbs—but all it got was an arms embargo. The UN rules of engagement protected no one. Security against the Serbian aggressors could not be provided by peacekeepers who drew their guns only in defense of their own lives. But the secretary-general was little more to blame for the situation than the UN member states that accepted those rules. The military commanders provided by France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, and the Netherlands understood that very different tactics were required to help the Bosnians.

The United States, the UN, and NATO could have lifted the arms embargo. In fact, the state for which the embargo was created, Yugoslavia, no longer existed. But the European members of UNPROFOR were unwilling to lift it as long as they had troops in the region. The United Kingdom, France, the United States, and other allies could have granted NATO the authority to enforce no-fly zones and safe havens and protect those delivering humanitarian assistance. But those things had not happened, so no one expected much from the decision to use NATO airpower in Bosnia, especially after the defeat of a resolution to exempt Bosnia from the arms embargo. That resolution won only six of the nine votes needed to pass. Cape Verde, Djibouti, Morocco, Pakistan, the United States and Venezuela voted in favor of the resolution. Brazil,
China, France, Hungary, Japan, New Zealand, the Russian Federation, and the United Kingdom abstained. France and the United Kingdom spoke against ending the embargo.