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| How Kofi Annan Enabled the Genocide in Bosnia |
| 2004-10-24 |
| From The New Yorker, an article by Philip Gourevitch .... The U.N. is composed of a hundred and ninety-one sovereign governments. These member states, as they're called, are Annan's employers, and, as his double-barrelled title indicates, his job is to serve them as the U.N.'s secretary, its chief administrative officer, and also as its general, its chief political operative. Together the member states form the General Assembly, which convenes in full each fall. The Assembly rides herd over the U.N.'s administrative functions, sets its internal agenda, and can also pass resolutions, which may have political influence but have no standing as law and no power of enforcement. For that, there is the Security Council, the U.N.'s political organ, which has only fifteen seats, ten allotted by an arcane political arithmetic to member states elected for two-year stints, and the remainder occupied since 1945 by five permanent members, known in-house as the P-5—China, England, France, Russia, and the United States—who alone enjoy the supreme power of the veto, and thereby dominate the Council's debates and decisions. The Security Council's resolutions have the authority of international law, and the Secretary-General is supposed to see that they are carried out. In addition, Annan is endowed with an independent political capacity, described vaguely in the Charter by a single sentence: "The Secretary-General may bring to the attention of the Security Council any matter which in his opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security." In other words, he is expected to tell his bosses what he thinks they should be thinking about. But, at the same time, the Charter states that he must "not seek or receive instructions from any government or from any other authority external to the Organization." So Annan must be independent—not neutral, exactly, for he must exercise judgment—serving all states while being beholden to none, interpreting the rules of the game as the world's hybrid coach and referee. Such unaligned evenhandedness is made unusually tricky because of the Council's limited membership and the concentration of its political powers in just a few hands. The U.N. is hardly the universally representative body of "international community" it purports to be. And if the P-5 rule the roost, America is the cock of the walk. In that, at least, the U.N. is truly a microcosm of global reality, and America's predominance has been the defining feature of Annan's tenure. "The rest of the world is trying to live in the shadow of the U.S., and they come to him and hope he will explain the U.S. to them, and hope he will explain them to the U.S.," Nader Mousavizadeh, a close aide to Annan, told me. When Annan took office, with the blessings of the Clinton Administration after it unceremoniously killed the reëlection bid of his Egyptian predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, there was much grumbling in the international press that he was Washington's poodle. That is no longer the view. "He appears to be everybody's Secretary-General," Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Ambassador to the U.N., said, although he was quick to add that it would be folly for Annan to ignore America's clout. ..... In 1989, peacekeeping had been handled by a suboffice of the political department, staffed by six people who oversaw around fifteen thousand troops, whose main task was to monitor front-line truces in such places as Cyprus and Kashmir. Four years later, when Annan took over the portfolio, there were thirteen U.N. peacekeeping missions in the field, with fifty-four thousand troops, and many of the newer missions were in countries where there was no real peace to keep: Cambodia, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia .... The slaughter of as many as seven thousand Bosnian Muslims, nearly all of them male, in Srebrenica, in July of 1995, was the largest genocidal massacre in Europe since the Nazis were forced to stop exterminating Jews. And, as Annan later observed, in a report that he presented to the General Assembly in November of 1999: The fall of Srebrenica is also shocking because the enclave's inhabitants believed that the authority of the United Nations Security Council, the presence of unprofor [U.N. Protection Force] peacekeepers, and the might of nato airpower, would ensure their safety. Instead, the Bosnian Serb forces ignored the Security Council, pushed aside the unprofor troops, and assessed correctly that airpower would not be used to stop them. They overran the safe area of Srebrenica with ease, and then proceeded to depopulate the territory within forty-eight hours. Their leaders then engaged in high-level negotiations with representatives of the international community while their forces on the ground executed and buried thousands of men and boys within a matter of days. The report quotes from the indictment for war crimes of the former Bosnian Serb President, Radovan Karadzic, and his Army chief, Ratko Mladic, and tells of "scenes from hell, written on the darkest pages of human history" at Srebrenica: "thousands of men executed and buried in mass graves, hundreds of men buried alive, men and women mutilated and slaughtered, children killed before their mothers' eyes, a grandfather forced to eat the liver of his own grandson." Srebrenica was just one of six safe areas established by the U.N. under Security Council mandates during the Bosnian war, and as many as twenty thousand people were killed in these enclaves. The U.N. safe areas were among the most unsafe places on earth in the mid-nineties. .... In his report, Annan had acknowledged that, as the head of peacekeeping, he was among those responsible for the abandonment of the people of Srebrenica. But, despite the prominence of his position, he remained in the background of the horror. The retreat of U.N. missions in the face of slaughter had by then become an agonizingly familiar spectacle, and Annan had learned to keep a low profile as a technocratic middleman in the machinery of international dysfunction. The excited, can-do spirit of the immediate post-Cold War period at the U.N. had been effectively extinguished in October, 1993, when eighteen American soldiers were killed in Somalia. ..... In Bosnia, as in Rwanda, however, passive neutrality was tantamount to complicity with the perpetrators of "ethnic cleansing" and mass murder. "We will not just swallow the fact that we were protected by the U.N. and were betrayed anyway," one of the Mothers of Srebrenica told Annan. "We really believed the United Nations. And what happened? They deceived us." She thought that the U.N. should pay the survivors some sort of compensation. .... He called the suggestion that the U.N. had a responsibility to the survivors, and should pay them compensation, "a novel idea." But it would require Security Council approval, he said, and—"quite frankly, speaking honestly, not to raise your hopes — I don't think they will entertain that thought." .... Annan's impressively detailed report on Srebrenica describes the enfeebling process of triangulation among the Security Council, the U.N. Secretariat, and unprofor troop contributors and commanders, but its ultimate effect is to obscure rather than to clarify individual responsibility. Individual actors are more often identified in the narrative by job title than by name. The profusion of these actors, and of the more broadly anonymous institutions or governments they represented, along with the combined weight of their misjudgments, overcautiousness, gullibility, and sheer cowardice in the face of a party of notorious ethnic cleansers and exterminators who had repeatedly hoodwinked them in the past, creates an impression of collective responsibility that comes uncomfortably close to a spirit of collective exculpation. In this respect, the report simultaneously exposes and replicates multilateralism in its most unctuous form, as a theatre of international damage control — a diplomatic safe area. What is missing, even more than a precise attribution of responsibility, is any notion of accountability, which is what the Mothers of Srebrenica seemed to be asking for. Although Annan struck a tender note of reckoning in his farewell remarks to the mothers, it was not their plight that preoccupied him but that of the U.N. "In the kind of conflict we saw here, the third party has a vital role," he said. "What is worse is when nobody cares or pays any attention. The third party who gets up and says, 'This is enough, this cannot be acceptable, this cannot go on,' and tries to take steps to help, has an impact on encouraging the victims to fight, to resist, and to carry on. Sometimes they may be around to bear witness. They may not be able to resolve the conflict and solve all the problems, but it doesn't mean that they didn't try. It doesn't mean that the involvement of the third party focussing attention on the issue and getting the people to fight back is not something that we shouldn't treasure. I really wish things could have turned out otherwise, but the intentions of coming to help and coming to assist were good." The "safe areas," however, weren't established to provide international witnesses to slaughter, much less to encourage anyone to fight back. They were set up as sanctuaries for the defenseless. The people of Srebrenica were assured that they would not be abandoned, and then the U.N. forces handed them over to their killers, without a word of protest from the Security Council or the Secretariat. Of course, as Annan said, in order to fail one first has to take steps to try to help. But to treasure the effort regardless of the results is kindergarten talk—or, worse, the language of martyrdom—and suggests a profound reluctance to acknowledge the nature of war. .... According to Richard Holbrooke, Annan got his job because of his willingness, in the summer of 1995, to look beyond the narrow habits of conventional peacekeeping. In August of that year, in the wake of the Srebrenica massacre and of a mortar attack on civilians in an outdoor market in Sarajevo, Annan agreed to nato's aerial-bombing campaign, which finally drove the Serbs to the negotiating table at Dayton. Until then, nato airpower had been hamstrung by what was known as a "dual key" arrangement with the U.N., whereby both the Secretary-General and the nato command had to approve any air strikes, and Boutros-Ghali had vetoed all but the most limited pinprick bombing, for fear of appearing to take sides. But when Boutros-Ghali was travelling, Annan was left in charge of the U.N. key. "When Kofi turned it," Holbrooke told me, "he became Secretary-General in waiting." "I think we cannot live through some of the things that we lived through in the nineties without being affected, without being changed," Annan said to me in Sarajevo. He was staying at the Holiday Inn, where a decade earlier, at the start of the war, the U.N. had set up its first offices just one floor away from the headquarters of Radovan Karadzic. Through the open window of Annan's suite, the sound of church bells mixed with the crackling wail of an evening call to prayer from a mosque. "I must say, to come back to Sarajevo today and see how they have rebuilt the city and to see people in the streets, when it used to be empty when you drove in from the airport—buildings without roofs, burned down, charred . . ." He trailed off. "You ask yourself," he said, "How can human beings be so wicked and brutal? Where is our conscience? Where's our humanity? How can this happen? And where was the rest of the world? Couldn't we have done more? Did we do enough? We were here, but was it enough?" The only possible answer was no. But Annan was more interested in the question: Why not? And to that his answer was, as always: The member states didn't want to. ..... For Annan, the chief lesson of the past decade is that the U.N. must say no to impossible missions and insufficiently supported mandates. "Peacekeepers must never again be deployed into an environment in which there is no cease-fire or peace agreement," he said, in the conclusion of his report on Srebrenica. "If the necessary resources are not provided—and the necessary political, military and moral judgments are not made—the job simply cannot be done." ..... For the past three years, Annan has been unable to raise a force of even seven thousand troops—the number that failed to hold Srebrenica—to beef up the U.N.'s minuscule peacekeeping mission in Congo, a country the size of Western Europe, where it is estimated that two to three million people have died since 1998 as a result of civil war and foreign occupation. .... For more information on this subject, see also How Kofi Annan Enabled the Genocide in Rwanda. |
| Posted by:Mike Sylwester |