As Europeans Stall Bosnia Action, U.N. Mission Harassed by Serbs

By Ian Williams

Sanctions, it seems, are now-and-then things at the United Nations. Recently the U.N. has renewed sanctions against Iraq for breaking U.N. resolutions, refused to introduce an oil embargo against Libya to add to existing sanctions, tightened sanctions against the Serbs—and, of course, refused to consider any such thing against Israel for ignoring U.N. Security Council Resolution 799 calling on Israel to repatriate immediately the Muslim Palestinians expelled last December.

So, in the case of Iraq, most of the world assumes that the sanctions will remain until Saddarn Hussain meets his maker. The U.S. and Britain would veto any attempt to lift them. In the case of Libya, the West refused all offers of negotiation by Qaddafi, such as an offer to hand two suspects in the Pan Am 103 bombing to a neutral country. They would almost certainly veto any attempt to lift the sanctions, but cannot at the moment secure enough support to strengthen them, as President Clinton promised when campaigning. So the Western powers were happy to seize upon the face-save offered by Arab League Secretary-General Abdel Meguid, who promised that Arab countries would try to mediate.

Despite strong and rebellious action by Third World delegations, the Europeans managed to stall effective action in the Balkans, in the gums, one might say, of a fairly toothless U.S. resistance. Indeed, there have been so many ineffectual resolutions passed on their behalf, the Bosnians are now on the verge of being honorary Palestinians. More than any other issue, the credibility of the U.N. now is at stake.

The latest resolution for the first time gives U.N. endorsement to the Vance Owen plan—just as that ill-conceived rationalization for ethnic cleansing seems to have been finally killed on the ground. The U.S. has, rightly, always been dubious of the premise that it was impossible to have a multi-confessional state in Bosnia, and others have pointed out that if it was impossible to have such a nation-state, it was unlikely that a federation of ten smaller states replicating the same problems would do any more than multiply the problem tenfold. One cannot help suspecting that at least part of the European reluctance to act is based upon the realization that firm and effective action would, by implication, make their inaction culpable for the horrifying events of the last year and a half. In the meantime, the United Nations forces on the ground pay the price for their indecision. Ambassador O'Brien of New Zealand, just returned from a Security Council Mission to Bosnia, told the Washington Report that the U.N. staff he spoke to were extremely frustrated with their mandate. "Imagine what it is like for professional soldiers in UNPROFOR to be stopped by a gang of louts in combat fatigues who would probably run away very quickly if there were real fighting." He added that "there was not much optimism at any level of the U.N. presence. They are just hanging on and trying to save lives. "

The U.N. Mission to Bosnia

The Washington Report secured an advance copy of the "Report on the Mission to Bosnia. " The mission included representatives of France, Hungary, Pakistan and Russia, as well as the ambassadors of Venezuela and New Zealand, who had insisted so strongly on the mission in the face of skepticism by the Western Europeans.

Ambassador O'Brien told the Washington Report that he hoped that the report's recommendations of strongly enforced safe areas for the Muslims could prove a "halfway stage from where more aggressive steps could be contemplated." He explained it is a long way from the present limited mandate of the UNPROFOR troops, which is to prevent Serbian air strikes and protect humanitarian efforts.

The report unequivocally accuses the Croatians of beginning a new round of ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims, and sources on the inspection team told the Washington Report that UNPROFOR Generals Morillon and Wahlgren privately confirmed that the Croat operation had been planned months before and that the Croats had been moving up forces for the past two months.

The report implies that the mission was not very impressed with Mate Boban, the head of the Bosnian Croats, who gave token condemnation of the massacres but "nevertheless states that 'one must not look only to the effects but to the causes. "Boban claimed that Croats had also been massacred by Muslims. The mission carefully recorded the opinion of President Tudjman of Croatia itself that there could be no solution to the problem of Bosnia except as a confederation of three national republics. This, of course, is not a solution he is prepared to countenance for the Serbian areas in Croatia!

The report unequivocally accuses the Croatians of beginning a new round of ethnic cleansing.

The visitors were clearly shocked by the state of Srebrenica, and were almost equally shocked by the way in which UNPROFOR troops defer to Serbian forces. They report with barely concealed indignation that nobody had told the Security Council when they were adopting the resolution declaring the town a safe area that U.N. commanders had been involved in negotiating the Srebrenica cease-fire agreement for a month and had helped persuade the Bosnian commander to sign. But the report leaves unasked and unanswered whether other courses would have been possible if the council had known earlier, and some Security Council members privately confessed that it was an "unequal deal."

Their helicopter had to stop for Serbian inspection on the way to Srebrenica, and the team was held against its will for half an hour on the way back. And the Serbs were refusing water supplies to the town and refusing to allow a badly needed surgeon to enter. Even on the way to Sarajevo, the Security Council Mission was held up at gunpoint for an hour and a half, with a tank's machine gun pointed at Diego Arria, the Venezuelan ambassador and coordinator of the Security Council Mission. At the same place a humanitarian convoy had been held up for 24 hours.

In Srebrenica itself, conditions obviously shocked the ambassadors out of their diplomatic isolation. Their report calls it the "equivalent of an open jail where its people can wander around but are controlled and terrorized by the increasing presence of Serb tanks and other heavy weapons." The mutilated remains of the 15 children killed by a shell on the schoolyard are still scattered around the area where there is now a children's refugee center.

On top of this, members of the mission could see for themselves that the Serbs were ignoring Security Council Resolution 819, calling for them to pull back the besieging soldiers and artillery, and were instead reinforcing their forces. While calling for the withdrawal of Serb forces to a safe distance and praising the 150 Canadian troops who are in Srebrenica, the mission calls for Gorazde, Zepa and Tuz1a to be declared safe areas with Security Council monitoring and backing. It seems likely that some such plan will be adopted by the Security Council, since Karadjic's belated agreement to the peace plan should hearten those who have all along said that the merest hint of a strong hand would make the Serbs reconsider.

Nonaligned Dissent

On May 14 the nonaligned members of the Security Council—Cape Verde, Djibouti, Morocco, Pakistan and Venezuela—issued perhaps their most strongly worded dissenting statement since the Gulf war, which declared that the council had been " fundamentally unable to discharge its full responsibilities under the charter, " and that therefore Bosnia-Herzegovina had been the subject of "moral rape" in being deprived of its right to self-defense. Accepting, reluctantly, that there was "now" no alternative to the peace plan, it asked what enforcement measures the council was prepared to take to ensure implementation. The caucus called for the lifting of the arms embargo and for military action to deal with the crisis. It countered objections to this by pointing out that UNPROFOR, which was set up under Chapter VII of the charter to stop mass killings, has had its mandate restricted to the provision of humanitarian assistance.

Good News from Eritrea

One piece of badly needed good news was the U.N. -observed referendum on Eritrean independence, which returned an almost embarrassingly overwhelming majority voting at the end of April in favor of breaking away from Ethiopia. The outcome was promptly recognized by the new government in Addis Ababa and it is very likely that it will soon be recognized by the Israelis, who have been assiduously courting the new nation, assuming there will be no hard feelings for all the Israeli-supplied cluster bombs Ethiopia's Colonel Mengistu dropped on the Eritreans during their war for independence. The Eritreans have in the past declared their intention to join the Arab League, but that was during an entirely different political era. (Like Arab League member Somalia, but unlike all other Arab League members, Eritrea's first language is not Arabic.)

Another Line in the Sand?

Of course Iraq has yet to recognize the independence of Kuwait, but theU.N. mission demarcating the border is finally winding up its work with a detailed maritime boundary, drawn, exclaims one expert delightedly, to four decimal points of a second. The new line will be reported to the Security Council and the Kuwaitis are busily drawing up a draft resolution which will enforce the boundary. Indeed, it has been reported they intend to draw a line, literally in the sand, by digging a ditch along the way. Unfortunately, however, this is unlikely to reinforce the adage about good fences making good neighbors.

Ian Williams is a British journalist based at the United Nations.