Keep the Peace: UN Peace operations in the Bosnian War
The United Nation’s peace operations have developed as responses to the changing nature of warfare all around the world. The decline of inter-state conflict and the rise of ethnonational intra-state conflict can be seen over time, and particularly since the end of the Cold War. Prior to the 1990s, UN peace operations had predominantly been about refereeing a conflict, rather than stopping it. The UN had to evolve its methods as the international community didn’t want to sit back and ignore the violence or endure another endless UN peace mission. The Yugoslav Wars put the region at the forefront of this evolution and Bosnia was the red line where the UN decided that peacekeeping would not be enough.
Yugoslavia
The Bosnian War, as part of the Yugoslav Wars, was a civil war in the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a majority Muslim Bosniak state, that declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1992. Yugoslavia, or the land of the Southern Slavs, was a multi-ethnic and multi-confessional state on the edge of the Cold War battleground. It was held together by a communist ideology that violently split into its separate ethnonational groups when able to do so, this was known as the Yugoslav Wars.
Bosnia was one of several sub-states in Yugoslavia and possibly held the most tenuous position amongst them as it was a meeting point of the main ethnic and religious groups. Throughout the history of the Balkans, Bosnia became the confluence of Ottoman, Slavic, and European cultures and empires, as well as three-way crossroads of Islam, Orthodox and Latin (Catholic) Christianity. Its ethnic dispositions and religious breakdown show this clear clash of people.
Ethnicities, politics and religions are not always aligned and it is poor analysis to refer to them as such — Christopher Hitchens wrote of this in the form of a joke told by a secular Croatian, who said:
“If I tell someone I’m an atheist and Croat, they ask me;
How can you prove you’re not a Serb?
In other words to be Serb is to be Christian Orthodox, to be Croat is Roman Catholic and to be Bosniak is to be Sunni Muslim. But this is not always the case. Many Serbians were in Sarajevo during its besiegement. One of the most famous was General Jovan Divjak, a military commander in the defence. This folk hero was an ethnic Serb born in Belgrade, but identified as a Bosnian — he sadly passed away in April this year. The point being, that Bosnia is a complex religious, ethnic and cultural entity — hence the conflict.
The Conflict
In the break up of the Yugoslav state, its divisions instantly resurfaced creating territorial, ethnoreligious and political turmoil that blurred the lines between interstate and intrastate relations. Two regions of Bosnia declared their independence; The Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia and The Republika Srpska.
Serbia, led by Slobodan Milosevic, an ex-communist xenophobe, used the Serbian-Orthodox proto-state to push forward his anti-Muslim crusade and invade Bosnia. It was a planned genocide disguised as an ultranationalist invasion to bring Bosnia into a ‘Greater Serbia’. The Serbs made it clear very early that to achieve their irredentist plan, they were in the business of ethnic cleansing.
Meanwhile, with pictures of the Virgin Mary taped to the buts of their AK47s, Croatia jumped to support the Bosnian Croat breakaway region. With the cracking of Yugoslavia, Croatia attempted to take control of Herzavagina — as they once had enjoyed as an ally of The Third Reich. The fascist Ustaša organisation ruled Croatia in the 1930s and 40s and their persecution of Jews, Roma and Serbs even led many Nazi officers to complain of their brutality.
The Bosniaks were squeezed on both sides by Serb and Croat forces. They were supported however by global Muslim nations, but this was much less simple as Bosnia borders Serbia and Croatia, not Pakistan. Interestingly the persecution of the Bosniaks saw Shia and Sunni Muslims join hands, so to speak, that they may funnel weapons and munitions to the fight. Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia all put money down directly, or through the Bosnian Mujahideen — not unlike the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan.
As shells and bullets flew in all directions, the international community had to act. It was one of the first clear conflicts since the end of the Cold War and the USA was not yet ready to take on the mantle of interventionist police — Tony Blair and the “Never Again” foreign policy were needed first. The UN had to act, and I suppose that is the job of the UN.
Peace Operations
The peace operations around the conflict in Bosnia evolved from peacekeeping, in the form of the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) into peace enforcement with the NATO Implementation Force (IFOR) as the conflict worsened. UN capstone doctrine provides definitions on these two types of missions:
- Peacekeeping is consensual; that is, the parties to a conflict agree to the UN assisting them with implementing a cease-fire or peace agreement. Peace enforcement does not necessarily require consent from the host nation or other parties to the conflict.
- Peace Enforcement involves the application of coercive measures, including military action to enforce a ceasefire and requires the explicit authorisation of the Security Council.
- Peacekeeping troops deploy under a UN banner, but peace enforcement should be delegated to a more suitable organisation — in Bosnia, this was delegated to NATO.
- Peacekeeping attempts to remain impartial and the parties to the conflict are treated equally and peacekeeping troops are only permitted to use the minimum force necessary to protect themselves and others mandated while peace enforcement is militarily offensive in nature3.
It’s somewhat self-descriptive:
Peacekeeping is there to keep the peace.
Peace enforcement is there to force peace.
UNPROFOR
UNPROFOR was initially a combination of three operations across former Yugoslavia which was adopted in 1992 as S/743, later expanded upon by S/871 in 1993. UNPROFOR was mandated to create the conditions for peace required for the negotiation of an overall settlement of the Yugoslav crisis — a fairly typical peacekeeping task.
As the conflict intensified in Bosnia, UNPROFOR was mandated to secure the airport at Sarajevo, ensure delivery of humanitarian assistance and protect civilian populations. UNPROFOR through NATO also monitored and coordinated the ‘no-fly’ zone established around Bosnian towns. In the taxonomy of peace operations, as UNPROFOR peacekeepers had an aim to protect the population, they were already moving towards stabilisation and enforcement. By this measure, one can infer that doctrinal peacekeeping would not be enough — and the UN knew this.
The humanitarian operations of UNPROFOR’s mandate were inherently unenforceable as it was undertaken in the middle of an ongoing war — there was no peace to keep. UNPROFOR’s first success was negotiating with the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) to allow the UN to occupy the airport in Sarajevo to land international aid. Although this aid could get into the country, spoilers were too easily able to prevent UNPROFOR troops from achieving their distribution goal. Antagonistic and violent Orthodox and pro-Serb militias were conveniently outside the control of Republika Srpska and Serbia and were able to deny freedom of movement to UNPROFOR. The Rules of Engagement (ROE) permitted the use of force but tactical commanders judged that ‘fighting the aid through’ was not practicable — I do agree if you have to kill people to deliver aid to other people, the game becomes quite tricky.
The peacekeepers were unable to enforce the safe areas, deliver aid or reach and protect Muslim communities from Serb assaults despite the “consent” of the host nation — UNPROFOR could not enforce its mandate due to the conflict ‘getting in the way’.
The Cost Peacekeeping
The UNPROFOR troops failed to prevent violence and were not initially prepared to begin decisive combat operations against Serb forces, this is exampled with the Srebrenica massacre. Despite the installation of a no-fly zone voted in Resolution 743 between 21 February 1992 and 1 December 1994, 3,317 Serb and Bosnian flights violated the air space.
In March 1993, the UN reported that the designated safe zone of Srebrenica, a city that was surrounded and besieged by the VRS and Serb paramilitaries was continuously under attack. The attacks resulted in heavy loss of life among the civilian population. As international pressure built up around the reported 30–40 deaths per day, in 1994 the UN experienced mild success enforcing the no-fly zones by shooting down four Republika Srpska jets in NATOs’ first air combat. The continued threat of NATO airpower was also used to ensure the safe passage of humanitarian aid. Now, we have a situation where the international community is beginning to realise they will need more than troops wearing blue berets asking nicely to stop the war.
In Srebrenica, VRS forces were ordered to prevent UNPROFOR troops from entering and relieving the city. Despite being deployed against parties that were unwilling to cooperate, or paramilitary groups that were not ’controllable’, UNPROFOR could not use force to achieve their goals, right when it was required to relive the city.
By July 1995, the Serbs had broken through UNPROFOR positions, taken over Srebrenica and began to massacre the population; UNPROFOR and NATO could not intervene due to fear of further violence and a desire to remain impartial according to the mandate for peacekeeping. Over 8,000 people were massacred in Srebrenica.
As the full extent of the massacre was not realised initially, it wasn’t until the following month in Sarajevo when a widely publicised mortar attack on the marketplace led the UN to abandon its impartiality and begin kinetic lethal actions in Operation Deliberate Force.
It took a heavy cost of Bosnian life to finally convince the international community to get serious about peace. Despite the mandate and nature of peacekeeping, the UN could no longer remain impartial in the face of genocide — I think all world leaders could still hear the echo of the alarms from Rwanda.
Deliberate Force
Operation Deliberate Force was successful for two reasons: Firstly, the rapid deployment and mass NATO aircraft using advanced guided munitions emphatically outmatched the soviet style military of the VRS. The Serb forces were not greatly attritted but suffered a psychological jolt which led them to back down. Secondly, the UN regained its composure and credibility following the bombing and significantly demonstrated its resolve not only to the VRS but also to the international community.
This sustained air campaign against VRS targets pressured Serbia to take part in negotiations that resulted in the Dayton Agreement reached in November 1995. Then under UN Resolution S/1031, NATO established a year-long 60,000 strong Implementation Force (IFOR) whose troops were authorised to use lethal force in achieving their aims — not merely in self-defence. The aims of IFOR were to ensure the Dayton Accord parties’ compliance with the cease-fire and withdrawal of forces from the agreed zones; ensure the collection of heavy weapons and demobilisation of remaining forces.
Under IFOR, the troops could fight through if they needed, but the blow had already been done. It seemed that IFOR was such a sufficient threat of force that their authority to oversee the implementation of the Dayton Accord’s military aspects was not challenged by uniformed military adversaries, if anything, it reinforces the success of the NATO bombing under Operation Deliberate Force. Once the UN proved it wouldn’t allow the violence, Serbia backed aways.
A month after IFOR’s deployment on 19 January 1996, the VRS and Bosnian military forces were withdrawn from either side of the agreed cease-fire line and by 19 March the transfer of the agreed territories was completed. By successfully fulfilling its military tasks, IFOR played a pivotal role in the peace process in Bosnia and oversaw a stable 1996 general election.
This example in Bosnia exposes a paradox of the UN peace operations; UNPROFOR had performed its ‘peacekeeping mission’ in an environment of conflict, but later when IFOR was endowed with the military clout to enforce compliance they had no requirement to do so. The slow pace transition or willingness to put bombs down range saw the UN static in the face of genocide — almost; another few weeks and the deaths tolls would be much, much higher than they already were.
So What?
Peace enforcement in Bosnia was successful at the antipode of peacekeeping’s failure — one cannot keep the peace if there isn’t one.
Peacekeeping mandates create a situation where if one of the parties want to continue fighting there is very little that peacekeepers can do to prevent it; Srebrenica is a horrific example of this impotence — there are many more. Paradoxically, it is a hard pill to swallow, but more violence in the form of NATO bombing was required to bring about peace — and this is my point.
Stopping a conflict is not always enough. On a long enough timeline, the conflict will resume. Ethnic, cultural political and geological issues are not always worked out in a meeting room — they are worked out on the battlefield: Korea, Kashmir, Western Sahara, Cyprus, Lebanon, Nagorno-Karabakh, Ukraine … all possibly endless ceasefires that will require perpetual peacekeepers. UN impartiality might be keeping these disputes alive by refusing to finish them. It took tremendous violence in Bosnia for the UN to admit one side was a victim and the other a perpetrator, but when they could, peace was easier to work towards. Either way, as peace enforcement requires UNSC approval, there is another hurdle to overcome, how many frozen conflicts involve, or are at supreme interest to great powers — the UNSC P5. Perhaps in this, the mid-90s and Bosnia was unique.
Clearly, I offer no solutions to the problems, but surely the UN can figure them out.
