The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (95 page)

When Milosevic stepped up the intensity of his attacks on Albanian villages over the next three months, pressure mounted within NATO to move away from neutrality and towards stronger action against Serbia.
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As international attention to the civilian suffering and displacement grew, the Security Council requested a special UNHCR briefing about events on the ground in Kosovo.
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While heated debate ensued among Security Council members, NATO’s hopes that the Council would mandate the use of force were dashed. Resolution 1199, adopted on 23 September 1998, repeated the earlier determination that the events in Kosovo threatened international peace and security.
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However, while this time China was alone in abstaining, the Council’s reluctance to infringe upon the territorial integrity of the FRY was made clear. Moreover, although the Council acted under
Chapter VII
, it did not explicitly threaten military action.

Despite the attempts by the US and UK to produce a further Security Council resolution authorizing a NATO military strike against the Milosevic regime, Russia and China continued to threaten their veto. This forced the alliance to justify its eventual bombing on the basis of previous Council resolutions
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– a strategy which much subsequent analysis judged to be illegal.
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Nonetheless, some have argued that NATO’s intervention was accepted as legitimate, given its purpose (to address ethnic cleansing) and the fact that it was endorsed by many member states of the UN and enjoyed majority support within the Council.
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Evidence for this latter point can be found in the defeat of a Russian-sponsored resolution of 26 March 1999, condemning NATO’s use of force.
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‘[I]n the eyes of many members of international society,’ write Morris and Wheeler, ‘NATO’s action was in conformity with the underlying normative purposes of the collective security regime, but…the voting requirements of the Charter were preventing the UNSC from living up to its responsibilities.’
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In the end, however, NATO never gave members of either the Council or the General Assembly a chance to vote in the affirmative for its military campaign. While delegation to regional bodies is a recognized and legitimate practice,
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under the UN Charter members of such organizations cannot assume an enforcement role without explicit authorization. Thus, one of the main lessons drawn from NATO’s bombing of Serbia was the need to make the Security Council work more effectively so as to avoid deadlock among the Permanent Five (P5) over whether force should be used to address a humanitarian crisis.
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The other legacy of the NATO intervention was the Council’s establishment in June 1999 of an interim administration for Kosovo (UNMIK) to facilitate the return to a ‘peaceful and normal life for all inhabitants’.
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The debate leading up to the passage of Resolution 1244, however, revealed the extent to which P5 members remained divided over the legitimacy of military action to address a humanitarian crisis within the domestic jurisdiction of a member state of the UN. In the end, China agreed not to block the resolution owing to the text’s strong reaffirmation of the FRY’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and to the fact that the FRY had consented to the peace plan.
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The UN’s intervention in East Timor
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came at the end of a decade in which the international community, through both the UN and other organizations, had proven willing and able to use force for humanitarian purposes. But it also occurred in the context of the contentious cases of Rwanda and Kosovo, where the Council had either failed to contemplate action or reached an impasse over whether intervention was justified.

What is noteworthy about this case is the change in language within the Council with respect to threats to international peace and security. While during earlier instances, such as Somalia and Haiti, member states had stressed the unique and non-precedent setting nature of the Security Council’s actions, in East Timor there was a greater willingness to describe action as consistent with both the Charter and contemporary expectations of the international community’s obligations. That consensus was facilitated, however, by the crucial factor of Indonesian consent for the intervention. This made it easier for previously reluctant states, such as China, to support military action within the sovereign jurisdiction of another state.

In late January 1999, following more than two decades of oppression that left roughly 200,000 people dead, the newly elected President Habibie of Indonesia agreed to give the people of East Timor the choice between autonomy within Indonesia or independence. On 5 May 1999, an agreement between Indonesia and Portugal (as the administering power of a non-self-governing territory) provided the framework for a ‘popular consultation’ on East Timor’s future, to be held in August. The Security Council’s involvement in this process began in June,
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when it passed Resolution 1246 establishing UNAMET (the mission whose primary objective was to organize and conduct the popular consultation).
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While UNAMET was responsible for overseeing the election and advising the police, the Government of Indonesia was responsible for maintaining peace and security in East Timor during the election to ensure that it was ‘free of intimidation, violence or interference from any side’.
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Despite numerous instances of intimidation and violence prior to the vote, the popular consultation was held on 30 August 1999, with 98.6 per cent of those registered turning out to vote, and 78.5 per cent voting for independence. The initial optimism surrounding the consultation was obliterated when pro-Indonesian armed elements engaged in massive violence, killing approximately 2,000 East Timorese, displacing several hundred thousand, and forcibly deporting over 200,000 to refugee camps in West Timor.
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These actions resulted in the majority of UNAMET personnel withdrawing on 5 September. In response, the UN launched a series of diplomatic initiatives in an attempt to contain the violence and incite greater Indonesian action in controlling the situation. These initiatives included the dispatch of a Security Council mission led by the Ambassador of Namibia on 8 September, the first of such missions to be sent by the Council since Haiti in 1994–5.

From this point onward, member states shifted from trying to induce Indonesia into taking effective action to end the violence, to pressing the Indonesian government for its consent to the deployment of an international force. This shift was largely brought about by reports from the field which increasingly implicated the Indonesian military in the violence and displacement of civilians. On 12 September, Habibie yielded to international pressure and gave his consent, albeit somewhat reluctantly, for a UN-authorized multinational force.
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In ‘inducing’ consent, the role of international financial institutions was pivotal, as they warned of dire economic consequences if Indonesia did not honour its commitment to restore order and respect the results of the ballot.

The Council deliberated over the issue of intervention by a multinational force on two occasions: an open Council session held at the request of Portugal and Brazil on 11 September 1999, and a Council meeting on the draft of Resolution 1272 held on 15 September 1999. Of these two sessions, 11 September was by far the more substantial with delegations from fifty countries taking the floor. The majority of states condemned the grave security situation, or what the Portuguese delegate described as the ‘rape of East Timor’.
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It was these concerns – informed by reports from the Security Council Mission, on-the-ground media, and independent observers – which formed the basis of the delegates’ description and conceptualization of threats to peace and security. Several members of the Council contended not only that Indonesia was failing to fulfil its obligation to maintain peace and order, as per the May Agreements, but also that the Indonesian military was colluding with the various militias committing the atrocities.

The case for intervention was further strengthened by specific references to earlier post-Cold War cases where similar atrocities were committed and in which the international community had either intervened, thus setting a precedent (Somalia and the former Yugoslavia), or failed to intervene, leading to international condemnation (Rwanda). Austria emphasized the ‘uncanny parallels to the killings, attacks on and forced relocations of civilians, the destruction of homes and property, and the total lack of respect for international humanitarian law and human rights in…Yugoslavia and in Kosovo’.
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For its part, the United States asserted that the crisis in East Timor, compared with that in Kosovo, is ‘even deeper, the need for action even greater and the dangers at this point larger. Our responsibility is similarly profound’.
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In citing these previous cases, several states raised questions about the credibility of the UN, arguing that the failure to act would weaken the organization’s reputation in the eyes of the international community. Alluding to cases such as Rwanda and Bosnia where UN troops acted merely as ‘shameful bystanders’, Portugal contended that ‘[t]he UN cannot afford to – and it must not – once again intervene in a conflict only to stand by helplessly while the process then loses its way.’ Stating it more bluntly, the French asked: ‘Are we backin 1994, dealing with another Rwanda? Are we back in 1998, facing another Kosovo? Are we going to react in time to prevent forced exodus and massacres?’ Singapore and Pakistan both cast East Timor as an opportunity for positive precedent setting, emphasizing that the Security Council’s action in this case could ‘set a pattern for the Council’s response to future similar tragedies, wherever they may occur’.
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On 15 September 1999, under Resolution 1264, the Council unanimously established the Australian-led International Force in East Timor (INTERFET) in Operation Stabilize.
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The Council had determined that the situation ‘constitut[ed] a threat to peace and security’ and thus called upon a multinational force to ‘use all means necessary’ to bring about the cessation of hostilities. The force was tasked with restoring peace and security in East Timor, providing UNAMET with protection and support to carry out its mandated tasks, and, within force capabilities, to facilitate humanitarian assistance operations. Moreover, the Council requested the planning and preparation for a UN transitional administration with a peacekeeping component.
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Any assessment of the Council’s involvement in situations of humanitarian crisis requires analysis of not only how the Security Council justified action (or inaction), but also whether its authorized interventions were in fact successful. But as philosophers and political scientists have shown, the task of evaluating consequences in the realm of humanitarian intervention is notoriously tricky. Most agree that it is useful to distinguish between short- and long-term outcomes, with the former referring to the immediate alleviation of human suffering (by ending the killing, delivering humanitarian assistance, and assisting refugees in returning to their homes), and the latter addressing the underlying causes of that suffering through the reconstruction of stable and viable polities.
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Philosophers such as Michael Walzer argue that a just and successful humanitarian intervention by necessity must address the deeper political, social, and economic problems that give rise to the human rights crisis. In Walzer’s words:

Using this standard, however, one would judge none of the above cases of intervention as particularly successful. In northern Iraq, for example, the interest of Western powers declined over time and the UN relief effort was badly equipped, leaving the long-term protection of the Kurds in jeopardy once they had returned to their homes. Similarly, looking at East Timor today, it is clear that many facets of the new state are precarious and that both unrest and violence are common features of daily life for its inhabitants. Haiti gives rise to even greater pessimism as, by 2004, the country’s fortunes seemed to have ‘executed a full circle’, with a new international intervention launched to restore peace and stability.
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And finally, in the case of Somalia, the expanded UN mission (UNOSOM II) which followed on from UNITAF in May 1993 was not up to the task of disarming the militias or restoring law and order in the country – both fundamental to addressing the underlying causes of the humanitarian crisis. As Wheeler and Bellamy conclude: ‘The haunting question raised by Somalia is whether intervention that tries to combine both the short-term and long-term goals of rescuing victims from starvation and lawlessness, and restoring legitimate authority, is
always
doomed to end in a humiliating exit.’
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Using a more modest and short-term yardstick, which focuses on saving civilians from starvation and violence and on refugee returns, it is possible to find some positive consequences from four of the interventions for humanitarian purposes that were carried out in the 1990s with UN involvement.
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The first two, Haiti and East Timor, involved a similar pattern: a well-equipped MNF responding quickly under Security Council authorization, followed as soon as possible by a UN force (in which some of the same troops would come under UN command) and peace-building mission. This strategy enabled the Council to circumvent the full UN procedures for authorizing and assembling a force, which might have taken months.
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In both instances, the short-term objectives of the MNF were largely met. By 18 September 1994, when US military aircraft were preparing to set off for Haiti, the military leadership in the country agreed to leave. By 15 October, Aristide had returned, and the next day the Security Council lifted both the sanctions and blockade. By January 1995 the MNF commander on the ground proclaimed a ‘secure and stable environment’ in Haiti.
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And in the case of East Timor, advance planning by Australia for an extraction force to pull out UNAMET officials enabled it to respond quickly to the eventual mandate to lead a multinational enforcement operation. Five days after the Security Council passed the resolution authorizing Operation Stabilize, the international force was on the ground in Dili and taking effective action to quell the post-ballot violence. In addition, Haiti and East Timor witnessed the return of a significant number of refugees – an indication that the peoples of both countries perceived a more secure environment.