The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (74 page)

Despite this second political fait accompli, equal in consequence for Security Council decisions and the eventual Bosnian deployment of UNPROFOR to the earlier German recognition of Croatia and Slovenia, the Council addressed the mounting violence in Bosnia for the first time on the day the US recognized it.
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The pattern of summer and autumn 1991 toward Croatia was repeated: appealing to the parties to stop fighting and to cooperate with the EU on a ceasefire and negotiated solution. Presidential statements on 10 April and again on 24 April reiterated those appeals and urged the new Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to dispatch Cyrus Vance again as his personal envoy to Bosnia and to work closely with the EU. Vance’s visit to Bosnia on 14–18 April and a visit by Goulding on 4–10 May produced reports that the conditions for deploying UN peacekeeping troops did not exist. By this time, however, there was growing pressure within the UN Secretariat and some foreign offices (including the US State Department) and among vocal Bosnian experts for an international conference to replace EU efforts (some calling even for a UN protectorate over Bosnia
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), but the new Secretary-General resisted strongly, arguing that the conflict was a matter of regional (European) security.

At first glance, the Security Council decisions in October and December 1992, to engage preventively with troops to the Prevlaka Peninsula and to Macedonia, present a sharp contrast to its approach through May 1992. Both conflicts involved competing national claims over territory and sovereignty, and both deployments occurred early enough to create the conditions necessary to let political negotiations
do their primary work in resolving those claims with relatively little violence. Neither deployment was fully consistent with the principle of consent because neither the new state created on 27 April 1992 between Serbia and Montenegro (the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, or FRY) nor Macedonia was legally sovereign (FRY had not requested recognition from the EC, claiming it was the successor to Yugoslavia, although the Council disagreed,
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while the EU continued to defer to Greek opposition on Macedonia).
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As in Croatia, both were explicitly mandated as interim measures, pending political settlements by the parties. One could speculate that the presumed threat of Serbian aggression in the formulation of each was sufficient, by satisfying the US. But whatever the reasoning, the Council was able to ignore sovereign legalities, which were the cause of war throughout the former country, when pragmatic agreements seemed to support a peaceful resolution of disputes, or at least sufficient to deploy UN military monitors.

In the case of Prevlaka, Vance and Owen, the ICFY co-chairs, negotiated a demilitarization of the peninsula, in the context of a wider negotiation on improving relations between Croatia and FRY, when Croatia sent its army onto the peninsula (federal land) and its boats into the adjacent Montenegrin Bay of Kotor to claim extensive territorial waters.
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The Council agreed to extend UNPROFOR’s Croatian mandate to monitor it,
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and the UNMOP mission lasted more than ten years until Croatia and the FRY were able to establish their own interim agreement.
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In the case of Macedonia, the Security Council responded to the formal request on 11 November 1992 from its elected President Kiro Gligorov for the kind of border-monitoring mission that had eluded Izetbegovi
, and to an approving Secretary-General’s report of an exploratory mission sent on 28 November.
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In 1994, it added ‘good offices’ to the mandate of UNPROFOR in Macedonia, to assist the OSCE with internal issues of conflict resolution while Vance and Okun dedicated substantial effort as UN envoys to negotiating the remaining conflict with Greece over the name and flag of Macedonia.
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Although the deployment of UNPROFOR along the northern and eastern border of Macedonia was justified as a ‘tripwire’ against a Serbian invasion from the north, a near total improbability, it did serve a far more important function as yet another interim arrangement necessitated by the EC decisions of December 1991, to affirm Macedonian sovereignty and borders against all neighbours who challenged both (Bulgaria and Greece, and Albanian nationalists in both Macedonia and neighbouring Kosovo) until the legal issues could be resolved to Greek satisfaction. Moreover, because, as in Croatia, there was also an internal conflict over the national character of the state between a Macedonian majority and an Albanian minority (the latter 24 per cent in 1994), the effect of this border mission was to provide the psychological reassurance of de facto international recognition that was vital to keeping the politics of these constitutional questions peaceful. It is unlikely the Security Council recognized this role, however, since it overrode this positive contribution with economic sanctions on Serbia (and FRY) without consideration of their drastic consequences for Macedonia and its domestic political stability in both the short and long run.

The irresolvable contradiction of European policy on the break-up of Yugoslavia, between recognizing the right of national self-determination while simultaneously specifying that the internal borders of the federal republics were the one and only basis for the new sovereign territories, was solved in the case of Croatia by the territorial principle. Despite the terms of its own mandate for UNPROFOR there, Council resolutions from 1992 to 1995 increasingly reflect its contractual relation with a sovereign Croatian government. It thus acquiesced in the Croatian decision to solve the problem militarily, reducing the proportion of Serbs from 12 per cent in 1991 to under 3 per cent in 1995 through expulsion and obviating any talk about autonomy. Although military conquest of the one remaining UN protected area, eastern Slavonia, would have risked regional war because it bordered Serbia, it was US negotiators on the sidelines of the Dayton talks for Bosnia and Herzegovina in November 1995 who persuaded the remaining local Serb representatives to concede to Croatian sovereignty under the promise of protection by an interim UN mission. The Council agreed to welcome this agreement signed at Erdut, and to establish the UN Transitional Authority in Eastern Slavonia, Baranja, and Western Sirmium (UNTAES).
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In 2001, after the removal of UNPROFOR from Macedonian borders and the NATO operation in Kosovo in 1999 opened the door to those who would attempt to solve the conflict between the Macedonian government and the Albanian majority with violence, the Council stayed deliberately aloof, leaving it to EU and US negotiators to mediate and NATO to help implement the resulting Ohrid Framework.

The EC peace conference and draft (‘Carrington’) treaty also declared Kosovo to be an integral part of the Serbian republic and, like Serbs in Croatia, deserving some form of special status. This, too, was no solution to the conflict between the Serbian government and an Albanian population within the province which was overwhelmingly Albanian (from 80 to 90 per cent during the 1991–9 period of standoff) and demanded independence. As in eastern Slavonia and Macedonia, the Council left diplomatic action to the US and NATO, plus the UK and France, in 1999, when violence began to escalate in 1997–8 between the KLA and Serbian security forces. Failing to find a political solution, however, they turned back to the Council with the same issue as in 1991, as if nothing had changed: would it authorize the use of force to intervene in the domestic affairs of a sovereign state in order to stop violence? What had changed was the effect on the Council debate of nine years’ experience of war in Yugoslavia and a Russia more ready to play a major power role. The consequence of a Council less ready to ratify transatlantic policy was to bypass it entirely and, after an unauthorized, 77-day bombing campaign by NATO powers against Serbia in March-June 1999, to hand back to the Council the task of implementing a ceasefire agreement and facing the irresolvable contradiction created by European decisions in 1991.

The sovereignty problem was of an entirely different order in the case of the Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina. If the basis of EC policy was to recognize new states on the principle of national self-determination and if the basis of Security-Council actions (including preventive deployments) was sovereign consent, what was to be done when there was no agreed party to represent Bosnian sovereignty or give consent? The EC solution was to presume that any government of the six federal republics could request recognition because this would (in theory) avoid a border conflict and then to add the condition (based on hurried opinions from the jurists on its Arbitration Commission) that the three national parties then in a power-sharing government negotiate a constitutional settlement and hold a referendum on independence before full recognition.

Remarkably, given the clear preferences of the Bosnian Croat and Bosnian Serb leaderships, the Portuguese presidency of the EU appeared to have succeeded by March 1992. However, the EU had already undermined its commitment to a negotiated settlement by requiring an early referendum (held 28 February-1 March),
which the Serbs chose to boycott as predetermining the outcome. Then the US scuppered the Lisbon Agreement by pressuring its European allies (successfully) for immediate recognition.
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In contrast, the Security Council appears to have learned from the Croatian war, for it now chose to add to the UNPROFOR mandate for Croatia a monitoring mission of 100 military observers for Bosnia – ironically deployed on the very day of US recognition, 7 April.
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Nonetheless, by the time the first contingent of forty-one arrived in Mostar on 30 April, there was nothing to forewarn. The worsening violence forced their retreat into Croatia two weeks later. On 20 May, the Security Council proceeded to affirm EU and US recognition with UN membership (along with Slovenia and Croatia), even though the war between Bosnia’s three national communities, each with external support, had been raging for almost three months.

It is the role of the Security Council in the war in Bosnia that provoked widespread outrage and disillusionment. The prevailing criticism is of the Council’s refusal to authorize peace-enforcement and stop the war, particularly through aerial bombing.
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This criticism mistakes the term ‘peace-enforcement’, which means the use of robust military rules of engagement up to and including war to enforce compliance with a peace agreement, for a campaign to defeat an enemy and impose a military victory. It also misunderstands what the Security Council did – what policy was guiding Security Council resolutions, how the UN eventually did wage war in Bosnia, and why success in ending the war took so long.
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The policy behind the Council’s authorization of force in Bosnia evolved in four stages. The first stage was inadvertent, a policy driven by two prior commitments – the universal mandate of the UNHCR and its protection regime and the mandate of UNPROFOR in Croatia. Like the EC, the Security Council appears to have ignored the reality it faced in the dissolution of a country, not just a state. Its areas, peoples, and infrastructure were, by definition, so interconnected that even if the borders among the successor states were uncontested (which they were not), no one theatre could be or should have been treated in isolation from the others. From the start of its deployment to Croatia, UNPROFOR faced complications from the war escalating in Bosnia: a mounting refugee crisis out of Bosnia was diverting
UNHCR, and the siege of Sarajevo was endangering UNPROFOR personnel in Sarajevo, the initial location of the mission’s headquarters,
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and relief organizations trying to deliver humanitarian supplies through Sarajevo airport. Even the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) felt compelled to pull out temporarily.
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The ground presence in Sarajevo was sufficient, however, to provide witness to the growing humanitarian crisis, contributing to its recognition in the Secretary-General’s reports to the Council in April and May.
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Although still convinced by the fact-finding visits of two UN envoys, Vance and Goulding, in April and May that conditions were not suitable for a peacekeeping deployment to Bosnia,
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the Security Council came under increasing pressure, led by France, to do more on the humanitarian crisis than its approach in earlier resolutions and statements, of simply appealing to the parties to stop fighting.
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The emerging response combined economic and military sanctions on Belgrade with military protection for the delivery of relief to Bosnians, first of the airport and later of land convoys. On 15 May, the Council demanded the withdrawal from the republic, disarmament, or subordination to Bosnian authority of all units of the federal army and the Croatian army,
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and two weeks later called for a security zone around Sarajevo airport and imposed comprehensive mandatory economic sanctions under
Chapter VII
on the new state of FRY for failure to comply with Resolution 752.
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On 5 June, UN military personnel negotiated an agreement between the Bosnian government and Bosnian Serbs to withdraw anti-aircraft weapons from the airport and to hand authority over the airport to the UN ‘exclusively’. In the first act of its almost four-year-long military involvement in Bosnia, the Council authorized the redeployment of 1,100 UNPROFOR soldiers from the Croatian theatre to implement this airport agreement and more generally to promote the conditions necessary for the ‘unimpeded delivery of humanitarian
supplies to Sarajevo and other destinations in Bosnia and Herzegovina’
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Sector Sarajevo, with a commanding general (Canadian Lewis MacKenzie), began.