The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (75 page)

From 18 June, when the Council added
Chapter VII
authority to enforcement of the sanctions regime,
⁶⁰
to Resolution 770 passed on 13 August, when it called on states ‘to take nationally or through regional agencies or arrangements all measures necessary’, the Council rapidly increased the instruments of authority and troops to implement UNPROFOR’s mandate in Bosnia.
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Within two months, the financial cost of delivering humanitarian aid by air forced a shift to land convoys through Croatia and particularly through Serbia, with UNPROFOR protection. In immediate response to Resolution 770, France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, and the UK agreed to send troops. To the humanitarian mandate, moreover, Resolution 770 added a second obligation lowing from international humanitarian law and norms, this time in response to journalists’ reports in July that Bosnian Serbs might well be violating the Geneva Conventions in detention camps in eastern Bosnia. Resolution 770 now required UNPROFOR to help ensure access to camps, and protect special envoys and commissions on human rights and convoys carrying civilians or prisoners of war being exchanged.
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The second stage of Security Council policy governing the use of force in Bosnia also began from European initiative, to resume efforts at finding a political settlement to the war. Acting as chair of the EU presidency and following a month of consultations with the US and Russia to gain their support, the UK proposed on 25 July to join the diplomatic efforts of the EU and the UN.
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ICFY was inaugurated at London on 26–27 August, welcomed by the Security Council, and went into permanent session in Geneva. Mindful of the initial
Chapter VIII
construction of Council action in Yugoslavia, and also of the severe financial constraints on UN action elsewhere, the Secretary-General repeatedly encouraged the EU to take action, implying that the Security Council would have no trouble authorizing it – after all, it had welcomed and affirmed all EC/EU action until then. The implications for UN military assets, however, had already created deep tensions between him and the UK (and later the US): the SG had been furious that the UK, without informing him, had induced the Council to mandate UN supervision
over all heavy weapons throughout Bosnia according to the terms of an EU-negotiated ceasefire of 17 July.
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There was little or no disagreement between them, however, over the solution to the war – that there was no military solution but only a political agreement which would then create the conditions for a UN peacekeeping deployment. As Prime Minister John Major noted in his opening remarks establishing the principles of the conference, it could propose but not impose. The principles also reaffirmed EU policy (which the Security Council adopted in May) on the political outcome, that the borders of the federal units of Yugoslavia were now international borders and that the Bosnian war was a fight among three political nations over their constitutional rights to self-determination
within
Bosnia’s borders.

Although the ICFY negotiators failed repeatedly over the following two years to obtain a political agreement that would meet the Security Council criteria for a peacekeeping operation,
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there was now a UN policy guiding the use of force. Officially declared a distinct Bosnia force of 7,700,
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though with overall command remaining in Zagreb, UNPROFOR had two goals in Bosnia: minimize civilian casualties while the war raged, and take all actions possible ‘to create the conditions for peace and security’. Military instruments were increasingly mandated to assist these two goals in the field, while negotiations took place. Thus, the Council banned military flights over Bosnia,
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extended the arms embargo and economic sanctions to fuel and maritime shipping with a naval blockade (beginning with routine inspections) on the Adriatic and Danube,
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welcomed air drops of relief into eastern Bosnia by US planes beginning on 1 March 1993, and, in five Council resolutions from 16 April to 18 June, created safe areas, starting with weapons-exclusion zones within a specified perimeter around Sarajevo and then an additional five Muslim-majority towns (Srebrenica, Žepa, and Goražde in eastern Bosnia, Tuzla in north-central Bosnia, and Bihac in the north-west).

In accord with the goal of a negotiated settlement and the fact of UN authorization, these uses of force had to respect the principle of sovereignty and thus consent. This meant to be ready to enforce agreements made by the parties themselves, from access for aid convoys to the terms of local ceasefires, and thus to employ force transparently (with prior warning) and in proportion to the specific violation or in self-defence. Impartiality, the brunt of much criticism, meant that all civilians had the equal right to UNPROFOR’s protection and that all mandated tasks applied equally to all warring parties. Although the principle of consent was necessary to protect the premise of a negotiated end to the war, it had three additional, crucial reasons: (1) for obtaining consensus in the Security Council by protecting the principles of legitimate intervention; (2) for obtaining troops since no state was willing to provide ground troops equipped and willing to go to war, and most adamantly and persistently the one state which had such assets, the United States; and (3) because it was likely to be most effective in ending the war.

UNPROFOR’s rules of engagement (ROE) for the use of force were mercilessly criticized as classic peacekeeping rules unsuited to war, but they had, in fact, both doctrinal and practical reasons for just such conditions, given the UNPROFOR mandate. Doctrinally for most units in UNPROFOR, these rules were based on the serious argument (called ‘the dynamic of force’) that the more force one uses, the more it escalates. Interpreting the UNPROFOR mandate as reducing the lethality of war and thus the number of civilian victims while supporting an end to the war by negotiation, military commanders also saw adding force to the environment as counterproductive. This reasoning was reinforced on a daily basis by UNPROFOR’s experience with the warring parties, particularly the Serbs, as Council, diplomatic, and international attention increasingly focused on their compliance alone and ways to force it. When force was used according to these ROE, it was respected; when it was not, the violence escalated seriously, cooperation collapsed, civilians were deprived of humanitarian relief or life itself, and the specific tasks could not be done.
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At the same time, these ROE had to serve the same troops in their other goal, to facilitate conditions for peace, which included actual peacekeeping tasks, that is, responsibility to assist in the implementation of ever more local ceasefire agreements, whoever negotiated them, including the Sarajevo ceasefire of February 1994 (negotiated by UNPROFOR civilian and military leadership under a NATO bombing threat), the March 1994 (‘Washington’) agreement between the Bosnian government (Bosniac forces) and Bosnian Croats negotiated by US and German diplomats, and the Christmas truce of December 1994 negotiated between Bosnian Serbs and the Bosnian government by former US president Jimmy Carter. All were consensual agreements, even if, as in the Washington agreement, the purpose was to forge a military alliance to wage war against the
third party (Bosnian Serbs). Being perceived as politically neutral was also necessary to their peacemaking role, in which commanders on the ground sought every opportunity to keep lines of communication and contact open between the warring parties, to negotiate and then monitor local ceasefires as a bottom-up approach to a general ceasefire, and, with the assistance of UN civil affairs officers, to promote peace-building activities with civilians, such as family visits across confrontation lines, mine clearing for agricultural activities, and local commerce to improve livelihoods.

Four aspects of Council decisions interfered with this policy, however, and provoked a third stage in the Council’s policy on force. First, as military commanders correctly and repeatedly complained, the Council’s resolutions on the use of force seemed to show no respect for the requirements of military operations.
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They were too vague, too slow in relation to events on the ground, and under-resourced. In a constant struggle to find countries willing to provide troops, even as the mission became the largest in the history of the United Nations by early 1994,
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the Council notoriously ignored military advice on what would be necessary to implement its resolutions and adopted in each case the ‘light option’ (e.g. authorizing 7,600 troops to implement the safe-area mandate where the Force Commander had estimated the need, for deterrence alone, of 34,000),
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and then did not even provide what it had itself committed. Secondly, to compensate, NATO increasingly offered its assets but, due to US objection, refused to be a part of UNPROFOR command and control. In fact, UNPROFOR in Bosnia was composed initially entirely from NATO countries, and its headquarters was formed in September 1992, to the dismay of UNPROFOR officials from countries with a peacekeeping tradition, by NATO’s Northern Army Group. Under-resourced and at serious risk to their soldiers from the war around them, UNPROFOR commanders welcomed the additional security which NATO offered in terms of close air support (CAS), but they increasingly lost command and control of their units because
countries insisted on separate instructions (e.g. varying ROE) and additional assets (e.g. Danish tanks near Tuzla) to protect their troops as both war and NATO’s actions increased the risks.

Thirdly, the ambiguity in the approach to Bosnian sovereignty of the EC ‘solution’ placed UNPROFOR in a genuine dilemma: were they responsible to the Security Council’s mandates and its policy of a negotiated settlement among the three warring parties and impartiality, or to those treated as legally representing the Bosnian government, a UN member state? Conflicts between these two principles, without guidance, confronted UNPROFOR commanders in operational decisions on the use of force every day. Fourthly, this ambiguity in Council policy was worsened by what was perhaps its most significant complication, the early abandonment of neutrality by the Security Council itself. Moving increasingly in its resolutions to single out one of the three parties, the Bosnian Serbs, as non-compliant and the obstacle to peace, the Council sought to impose its decisions, with force if necessary.
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As UNPROFOR military doctrine predicted, moreover, the more it violated impartiality and proportionality in the use of force, the more it was seen as a party to the war and needed protection, creating a vicious spiral of force, ever greater anti-Serb targeting, especially by NATO air power, and risk to UN soldiers.

The political-military strategy to end the war in Bosnia of this second stage bears the primary brunt of criticism of the Security Council and UNPROFOR – either it did not exist, or it was incoherent, or it was wrong because it would never work, or it was immoral because of its neutrality toward the parties. Its actual effects cannot be tested, however, because already by mid- to late 1993, there were two competing strategies on the ground. Designed and driven by the US, although it had at least implicit support among some EU states, the second policy was to go to war against the Serbs.
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This military defeat had to be accomplished without US ground forces, however, so the strategy was to shift the military balance in favour of both Bosnian government and Croatian forces through covert arms deliveries (called ‘levelling the playing field’), NATO air power, and Council resolutions restraining Bosnian Serb military action. Simultaneously, the Serbian leadership in Belgrade had to be persuaded, by sanctions and diplomacy, to commit actively to the recognized borders of both Bosnia and Croatia and Serbs’ status as minorities in both countries. Although the core elements of this policy originated with the Bosnian Muslim leadership of Izetbegovi
, his foreign minister Haris Silajdži
, and their UN
envoy, Muhamed Sa
irbey, and was entertained by the Bush Administration in summer and autumn 1992 under congressional pressure and Pentagon planning, this idea of ‘lift and strike’ – lift the Security Council arms embargo on Bosnia on the basis of Article 51 of the Charter and deploy NATO air strikes in support – was repeatedly rejected by the Council throughout 1992: first by the UK, France, and UNPROFOR Force Commander Satish Nambiar in July, then in general response to a written request from Izetbegovi
on 3 August, and again in November by Russia. US diplomatic consultations in EU capitals in December 1992 and again in February 1993 also failed to persuade its European allies. Endorsed as policy, nonetheless, by US President Clinton in April 1993, its execution had to be secret.