U.N. Takes Some Blame for ’95 Bosnia Massacre
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UNITED NATIONS — A candid and damning United Nations report released Monday on a 1995 massacre of Bosnian Muslims blames the U.N. peacekeeping operation for failing to prevent “ethnic cleansing” in the so-called safe haven of Srebrenica and says the mission was doomed from the start.
The assessment, authored by Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who was in charge of U.N. peacekeeping through most of the 1992-95 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, blames Annan’s own division, as well as the Security Council and U.N. member states, for not allowing U.N. troops or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to use force to confront Serbs intent on mass killing.
“Through error, misjudgment and an inability to recognize the scope of the evil confronting us, we failed to do our part to save the people of Srebrenica from the Serb campaign of mass murder,” the report says. “The tragedy of Srebrenica will haunt us forever.”
The self-assessment commissioned by the General Assembly is a 155-page dissection of what went wrong in Bosnia--and how not to let anything like it happen again. The report declares that “the fall of Srebrenica is shocking” not only because of the magnitude of the massacre--with 2,500 bodies discovered and thousands more unaccounted for, it was the largest mass killing in Europe since World War II--but also because the safe zone’s inhabitants believed that the U.N. would protect them.
The killing began July 6, 1995, as Bosnian Serb forces launched a five-day attack on the enclave. Though the peacekeepers and Srebrenicans were far outnumbered and outgunned, U.N. officials rejected their requests for air support because they feared a protracted battle with the Serbs and were concerned for the safety of the 150 peacekeepers in the enclave. They also refused to return surrendered arms to the besieged Bosnian Muslims.
Further, the report explains, instead of using force to stop the assault, international representatives negotiated with Serbian leaders “while their forces on the ground executed and buried thousands of men and boys within a matter of days.”
“These negotiations amounted to appeasement,” the report states.
The U.N., it says, is not solely to blame. Bosnian Serb leaders were intent on eradicating Muslims from the area to gain an unbroken swath of territory populated by ethnic Serbs, and entered talks just to distract and stall, it concludes. Member states did not share intelligence that the Serbs were preparing an attack. And the Security Council kept increasing the peacekeepers’ mandate without providing money or manpower to carry it out.
The report makes public previously classified U.N. cables and was based on interviews with participants and witnesses from all sides.
But most significantly, it was authored by Annan, who now leads the United Nations. Though his personal role is not made clear in the report, it does say he accepts responsibility for the consequences.
This year, Annan embraced a policy of “humanitarian intervention,” saying that the U.N. has an obligation to intervene inside a country’s borders to stop a government from killing its own people.
That determination also appears as the conclusion of the report.
“The cardinal lesson of Srebrenica is that a deliberate and systematic attempt to terrorize, expel or murder an entire people must be met decisively with all necessary means,” it states, “and with the political will to carry the policy through to its logical conclusion.”
The secretary-general’s office has commissioned an assessment of the U.N.’s failure to deter mass killings in Rwanda.
Such self-examination is rare for the United Nations. “The impulse to have in-depth reports like these is extremely healthy for the U.N.,” said David Malone, president of the International Peace Academy, an independent think tank concerned with peace and security issues. “What it should do is make the Security Council much more careful about crafting a mandate for the peacekeeping operations. They must be clear in their mission and provide the forces to do it.”
In hindsight, the report concludes, the disaster stemmed from a doomed beginning: The U.N. tried to keep the peace when there was no peace to keep.
The lessons for the future are this: “Peacekeepers must never again be deployed into an environment in which there is no cease-fire or peace agreement. . . . If the necessary resources are not provided--and the necessary political, military and moral judgments are not made--the job simply cannot be done.”
A copy of the U.N.’s Srebrenica report can be found at https://www.un.org/news/ossg/srebrenica.htm.
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