The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (160 page)

²¹
UN doc. S/PV.3009 of 25 Sep. 1991.

²²
Between SC Res. 713 and the end of 2006, the Security Council adopted 172 Resolutions on parts of the Yugoslav conflicts and issued 193 presidential statements.

²³
A major unresolved dispute about the causes of the Yugoslav crisis includes the extent to which the Yugoslav state was irredeemable by 28 June 1991, or could have survived the crisis and continued its process of democratization. The EC and CSCE delegations clearly considered the latter unthinkable, but there is much evidence to the contrary – in public opinion polls, the ambiguous meaning of the Croatian referendum on independence in May, the many alternative citizens’ groups, political organizations, and social movements (see the work of Ana Devi
in particular), the explicit proposals made in June by the presidents of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Macedonia, etc. (see Woodward,
Balkan Tragedy
, ch. 5, and ‘Costly Disinterest’). Sir David Hannay criticizes the Yugoslav government for its ‘reluctance to come to the UN’, (‘The UN’s Role’, 8), but when it was still being heard, the prime minister and foreign minister were looking to the US and EC for help.

²⁴
Sir David Hannay (‘The UN’s Role’) is explicit about this concern in regard to Bosnia in the spring of 1992, which many critics of the UN’s non-action rued, ‘the one common point amongst all the external parties was their determination not to be drawn into the fighting themselves’ (5) and ‘the risks of the Balkans becoming a cockpit for great power rivalry’ are fewer than before 1914 or in the 1930s but ‘not so negligible as to be completely ignored’ (10). If not already, then within months this would no longer be true.

²⁵
The Russian role is very complex and much criticized from within as well (see, e.g. Oleg Levitin, ‘Inside Moscow’s Muddle’,
Survival
42, no. 1 (2000), 130–40, and James Gow,
Triumph of the Lack of Will: International Diplomacy and the Yugoslav War
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), ch. 8).

²⁶
SC Res. 740 of 7 Feb. 1992.

²⁷
Cited by Henry Wynaendts, Carrington’s assistant for the Hague Conference, in his memoir,
L’engrenage: Chroniques yougoslaves juillet 1991-août 1992
(Paris: Denoël, 1993), 154.

²⁸
An effort to revive this idea in the ‘Z-4 Plan’ of spring 1995 when the ICFY team joined forces with the US and Russian Ambassadors to Croatia was similarly doomed from the start, although many declared great hopes for it at the time.

²⁹
There is now a large literature in Canada about this operation, which involved Canadian contingents of UNPROFOR in war-fighting; see, for example, Lee A. Windsor, ‘Professionalism Under Fire: Canadian Implementation of the Medak Pocket Agreement, Croatia 1993’,
Canadian Military History
9, no. 2 (2000); and the debate on Carol Off,
The Ghosts of Medak Pocket: The Story of Canada’s Secret War
(Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2005); SC Res. 762 of 30 June 1992 demanded a halt to the operation.

³⁰
See Wynaendts,
L’engrenage
, 151–6.

³¹
SC Res. 981 of 31 Mar. 1995 established the United Nations Confidence Restoration Operation in Croatia (UNCRO) as ‘an interim arrangement to create the conditions that will facilitate the negotiated settlement consistent with the territorial integrity of the Republic of Croatia’ which ‘guarantees the rights of all communities irrespective of whether they are majorities or minorities’.

³²
SC Res. 753 of 18 May 1992; SC Res. 755 of 20 May 1992.

³³
The Badinter Commission ruled that only Slovenia and Macedonia, of the four requesting EC recognition, met the international-legal conditions of statehood, but the EC ignored this ruling in response to national interests in three cases – Croatia because of Germany, Macedonia because of Greece, and eventually, Bosnia-Herzegovina because of the US. In the Security Council, the recommendation to admit was adopted without a vote, but the president of the Council issued the following statement on their behalf: ‘We note with great satisfaction Bosnia and Herzegovina’s solemn commitment to uphold the Purposes and Principles of the Charter of the United Nations, which include the principles relating to the peaceful settlement of disputes and the non-use of force’ (UN doc. S/PV.3079 of 20 May 1992).

³⁴
Cited by Wynaendts,
L’engrenage
, 154.

³⁵
Izetbegovi
did not actually have that authority because his term as chair of the collective presidency had expired in Nov. 1991, but his refusal to allow the normal rotation to the Croat member, as the constitution required, and his claim to be the legitimate Bosnian president until the first postwar elections elected him and two others in Sep. 1996, drew little notice and no challenge by external actors throughout the war.

³⁶
UN doc. S/PV.3009 of 25 Sep. 1991.

³⁷
Given only one week to request recognition by the EC in December (‘a Hobson’s choice’, as Elizabeth Cousens writes in Cousens and Charles K. Cater,
Toward Peace in Bosnia: Implementing the Dayton Accords
(Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001), 19), the Bosnian president had consulted no one, despite the country’s power-sharing constitution that required consensus among all members of the collective presidency, thus all three constituent nations and the ‘others’.

³⁸
SC Res. 749 of 7 Apr. 1992. The US delayed recognition until 7 April, at Izetbegovi
s request, for domestic symbolic reasons.

³⁹
These calls began much earlier, in 1991, from knowledgeable Yugoslavs and some Western diplomats and scholars, and the ideas are worth recording in the list of alternatives under such circumstances, for example, a state treaty of the kind the Allied powers used after the Second World War to protect Austrian integrity and neutrality until 1955, guaranteed by Europeans, or a revival of the UN concept of trusteeship, which had more adherents. See for example James Fearon and David Laitin, ‘Neotrusteeship and the Problem of Weak States’,
International Security
28, no. 4 (2004), 5–43. See also Richard Caplan’s discussion of this issue in
Chapter 25
.

⁴⁰
SC Res. 757 of 20 May 1992; SC Res. 777 of 19 Sep. 1992.

⁴¹
The Council recommended Macedonian admission to membership in SC Res. 817 of 7 April 1993, long before the recognition by the EU or the US, but under a temporary name, ‘The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia’, (FYROM, listed under ‘T’).

⁴²
For the ‘Belgrade Joint Communique’, see B. G. Ramcharan, (ed.),
The International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia: Official Papers
, volume 1 (The Hague, London, Boston: Kluwer Law International, 1997), 454–6.

⁴³
SC Res. 779 of 6 Oct. 1992. The monitoring mission began with 14 observers, expanded to 26, and when UNCRO ended, it was given a separate mandate as UNMOP (SC Res. 1038 of 15 Jan. 1996). While independent, it was transferred to the UN Mission in Bosnia. Renewed 16 times every 6 months, it was only terminated on 15 Dec. 2002 after Croatia and the FRY agreed a provisional cross-border regime on 10 Dec. 2002.

⁴⁴
SC Res. 1437 of 11 Oct. 2002.

⁴⁵
SC Res. 795 of 11 Dec. 1992.

⁴⁶
UNPROFOR in Macedonia was renamed UNPREDEP (United Nations Preventive Deployment Force) in March 1995 when Croatia insisted on separate mandates and names for the three components of UNPROFOR.

⁴⁷
SC Res. 1037 of 15 Jan. 1996. Originally authorized for twelve months, the mandate of UNTAES was extended by the Council twice for another six months. A transitional support group of 180 civilian police monitors, authorized for nine months, replaced UNTAES in 15 January 1998 (SC Res. 1145 of 17 Dec. 1997).

⁴⁸
Reflecting the legal complexity, the US ambassador to a country that no longer existed (Yugoslavia) counselled Alija Izetbegovi
, whose position as chair of the Bosnian collective presidency had ended in November 1991, to reverse his support in Mar. 1992 for the Lisbon Accord and then treated him throughout the war, as did the Security Council, as the legal Bosnian president.

⁴⁹
SC Res. 749 of 7 Apr. 1992.

⁵⁰
See, for example, Rosalyn Higgins, ‘The new United Nations and former Yugoslavia’,
International Affairs
69, no. 3 (1993), 465–83.

⁵¹
This argument would appear to differ, therefore, from that presented in Ch. 19 by Rupert Smith, who makes the same crucial distinction between military force and the political aim that force is to achieve, but who argues that the Security Council failed because until mid-1995 ‘the Bosnian operation of UNPROFOR was an operation without a strategy.’ I will argue here that there was an agreed political aim, but until mid-1995, two real but competing political-military strategies.

⁵²
A decision by UN DPKO, it is said, as a symbolic gesture of support to Bosnia (requested initially by Izetbegovi
:, according to Marrack Goulding,
Peacemonger
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 299), but more important was to make clear its commitment to neutrality by distinguishing itself physically from the EU presence. The resulting logistical nightmare led UNPROFOR to redeploy to Zagreb on 17 May 1992 but to leave 120 personnel behind in Sarajevo.