January
27, 2003 9:30 a.m. When
Policy Kills
More
deadly U.N. issues.
By Dave Kopel, Paul Gallant & Joanne Eisen
he
spread of illicit arms and light weapons is a global threat to human security
and human rights," insists
United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan. But it would be far more
accurate to say: "The U.N.'s disarmament policy is a global threat
to human security and human rights." It was the U.N.'s lethal policy
that was directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocents
in Srebrenica in 1995.
For orchestrating
a vicious ethnic-cleansing campaign that included the slaughter in Srebrenica,
ex-Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic stands accused of genocide and
crimes against humanity before the International
Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at the Hague. The
trial, which began on February 12, 2002, and is expected to last two years
or more, has been billed
by Reuters as "the biggest international war crimes trial in
Europe since Hitler's henchmen were tried at Nuremberg." Milosevic,
the first head of state to face war-crimes charges, faces a maximum sentence
of life imprisonment. (The tribunal has no death penalty.)
The toll in Bosnia has been estimated
at 200,000 dead and one million refugees. The carnage included the massacre
at Srebrenica in 1995 — Europe's worst atrocity since World War II.
The massacre of more
than 7,500 men and boys at Srebrenica garnered worldwide publicity after
Bosnian Serb general Radislav Krstic, the senior commander charged with
genocide there, was
found guilty by the ICTY on August 2, 2001. As CNN
explained: "Krstic planned and led a week-long rampage in July
1995 in the U.N. declared 'safe zone' of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia,
where Muslims had been promised protection by U.N. soldiers." Krstic
was given a 46-year prison term. (Although the terms "safe area,"
"safe haven," and "safe zone" are often used interchangeably,
there are legal distinctions between them; Srebrenica was supposed to
be a "safe area.")
A large share of the blame
for Srebrenica was placed on the Dutch government and ill-prepared Dutch
"peacekeepers," as detailed in an April 2002 report
by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation. Dutch prime minister
Wim Kok — and his entire cabinet — resigned in shame a week
later.
Located near the eastern border of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the silver-mining
town of Srebrenica
was once part of the Republic of Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia had been created
by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, and until the country broke up in
1991, it was the largest nation on the Balkan peninsula, approximately
the size of the state of Virginia.
Yugoslavia was turned into a Communist dictatorship in 1945 by Marshal
Tito. When Tito died in 1980, his successors feared civil war, so a system
was instituted according to which the collective leadership of government
and party offices would be rotated annually. But the new government foundered,
and in 1989, Serbian president Milosevic began re-imposing Serb and Communist
hegemony. Slovenia and Croatia declared independence in June 1991.
Slovenia repelled the Yugoslav army in ten days, but fighting in Croatia
continued until December, with the Yugoslav government retaining control
of about a third of Croatia. Halfway through the Croat-Yugoslav war, the
U.N. Security Council adopted Resolution
713, calling for "a general and complete embargo on all deliveries
of weapons and military equipment to Yugoslavia" (meaning rump Yugoslavia,
plus Croatia and Slovenia). Although sovereign nations are normally expected
to acquire and own arms, Resolution 713 redefined such weapons as "illicit"
in the eyes of the U.N.
It was universally understood that the Serbs were in control of most of
the Yugoslavian army's weaponry, and that the embargo therefore left them
in a position of military superiority. Conversely, even though the embargo
was regularly breached, it left non-Serbs vulnerable. The U.N. had, in
effect, deprived the incipient countries of the right to self-defense,
a right guaranteed under Article
51 of the U.N. Charter.
Macedonia seceded peacefully from Yugoslavia in early 1992, but Bosnia-Herzegovina's
secession quickly led to a three-way civil war between Bosnian Muslims
("Bosniacs"), Serbs (who are Orthodox), and Croats (who are
Roman Catholic). The Bosnian Serbs received substantial military support
from what remained of old Yugoslavia (consisting of Serbia and Montenegro,
and under the control of Slobodan Milosevic).
Security Council
Resolution 713 now operated to make it illegal for the new Bosnian government
to acquire arms to defend itself from Yugoslav aggression.
The Bosnian Muslims were told by the U.N. that they didn't need weapons
of their own; instead, they would have immediate access to the upper echelons
of U.N. and NATO "peacekeeping" forces. As noted in U.N. documents,
Bosnia-Herzegovina president Izetbegovic "was in favour of the UNPROFOR
[United Nations Protection Force] proposal, which, as he understood it,
meant that the Bosniacs would hand their weapons over to UNPROFOR in return
for UNPROFOR protection."
The Bosniacs subverted
the U.N. arms embargo, by importing arms from Arab countries while the
U.S. winked. At the same time, the Bosniacs also tried to play the part
of good guys, under the theory that they would garner more territory in
the long run by being the party that did what the U.N. said. Not until
1995 did the Bosniacs begin to achieve arms parity with the Serbs —
and it was the prospect of impending parity that convinced the Serbs to
make a final grand offensive, to acquire as much territory as possible
before losing their military advantage altogether. Srebenica was one result
of the final Serb offensive.
The other policy
that proved disastrous was the creation of "safe areas" pursuant
to Resolution
819, which was adopted by the Security Council in April 1993. Safe
areas were "regions, which should preferably be substantially free
of conflict beforehand, where refugees could be offered a 'reasonable
degree of security' by a brigade of peacekeeping troops." The concept
of a "safe area," however, was a pacifist fantasy, with little
resemblance to the reality on the ground. Even the U.N. forces were not
safe; they couldn't even protect themselves, let alone anyone else. In
fact, they
were taken hostage, casually, at will, without resistance — sometimes
in hundreds at a time. These U.N. hostages would then be used by the Bosnian
Serbs to deter the U.N. and NATO from taking more aggressive action.
While the U.N. peacekeepers had collected some of the Bosniacs' weapons,
the Bosniacs retained the better ones. With those weapons, they attacked
Bosnian Serb villages and civilians, returning afterwards to Bosniac "safe
areas." Each successive raid left the Serbs more infuriated. The
U.N. was aware of these raids, and was aware that the Bosniacs had sequestered
some weapons; but it took no steps to ensure the safety of Bosnian Serb
civilians.
By the summer of 1995, the population of Srebrenica, a designated safe
area, had swelled with refugees. By the time of the massacre, it was an
island of Bosniacs in Bosnian Serb territory — an island the U.N.
had sworn to protect.
But the U.N. would not honor its pledge. As the BBC
later reported, "A former United Nations commander in Bosnia
has told a Dutch parliamentary inquiry into the Srebrenica massacre that
it was clear to him that Dutch authorities would not sacrifice its soldiers
for the enclave."
And, indeed, on July 11, 1995, Bosnian Serb forces entered Srebrenica
without resistance from Bosniac or U.N. forces; not a shot was fired.
(The Bosniac general in Srebrenica had recently been recalled by his government,
leaving the Bosniac forces leaderless.) Ethnic cleansing and genocide
followed. The men and boys were separated from the women, then taken away
and shot.
Knowing that remaining in the U.N. "safe area" would mean certain
death, some 10,000 to 15,000 Bosniac males fled into the surrounding forests,
escaping to the Bosniac-held town of Tuzla. Only about 3,000 to 4,000
were armed, mostly with hunting rifles; these were the men who survived
what has since become known as the six-day "Marathon of Death."
And the rest? Laura Silber and Allan Little, in their book Yugoslavia:
Death of a Nation, describe the slaughter in the forest:
Some were killed
after having surrendered, believing the UN would protect them . . .
Serb soldiers, some even dressed as UN peace-keepers driving stolen
white UN vehicles, would guarantee the Muslims' safety. Then they would
shoot.
In this way, over
7,500 men and boys were killed.
Three months after the massacre at Srebrenica — lightning speed for
the U.N. — a unanimous Security Council rescinded
its arms embargo against the nations of the former Yugoslavia.
The U.N. Convention
on genocide, adopted in 1948, makes "complicity in genocide"
a punishable act. The U.N.'s reflexive attempt at disarmament prior to
the massacre at Srebrenica might convincingly be argued to fulfill the
definition of complicity: "a state of being an accomplice; partnership
in wrongdoing." (American College Dictionary, Random House,
1967 ed.) Even if not legally complicit, the U.N. undeniably functioned
as a facilitator of genocide.
And the U.N. can hardly claim ignorance of Serb intent. Prior to Srebrenica,
the international body had knowledge of other mass killings committed
by the Serbs against the Bosniacs between 1991 and 1994. One of the largest
of these occurred in April 1992 in the town of Bratunac, just outside
Srebrenica. There, approximately 350 Bosnian Muslims were tortured
and killed by Serb paramilitaries and special police.
Given that the U.N. was fully aware of Milosevic's designs for a "Greater
Serbia" (incorporating portions of Bosnia), and that the U.N. was
fully aware of the disparity in military capabilities between Milosevic
and his intended victims, the U.N. had every responsibility to defend
the Muslims; if the U.N. itself could not, it at least had a duty to withdraw
the arms embargo immediately and allow Bosnia's Muslims to defend themselves.
Nor can the U.N. claim ignorance of what happens when victims are abandoned
to their oppressors. The Srebrenica scenario is reminiscent of the 1994
genocide in Rwanda, when promises by the U.N. to protect Rwandan civilians
proved just as empty. There, too, U.N. personnel knew that the victim
groups had been previously disarmed — in this case, by laws enacted
in 1964 and 1979. Early on in the genocide, thousands of Rwandan civilians
gathered in areas where U.N. troops had been stationed, thinking they
would be protected. They weren't. If the Rwandans had known that the U.N.
troops would withdraw, they would have fled, and some might have survived.
"The manner in which troops left, including attempts to pretend to
the refugees that they were not in fact leaving, was disgraceful,"
an independent
report later concluded.
In short, the U.N. was aware of Milosevic's propensity for ethnic cleansing,
and had ample reason to know that its actions would create a situation
ripe for genocide. The atrocities at Srebrenica could not have been perpetrated
by the Serbs on such a grand scale had not the U.N. and its policies first
prepared an enclave of victims, most of them disarmed.
Radislav Krstic has already been sentenced to jail, and the trial of Slobodan
Milosevic is proceeding at the Hague — yet upper-echelon U.N. policymakers
have escaped accountability for their role in the tragedy. Kofi Annan,
who had served during this period as undersecretary-general for peacekeeping
operations, was presented with the Nobel Peace prize on December 10, 2001;
he should have been indicted. Likewise unscathed is Boutros Boutros-Ghali,
who presided as secretary general at the time of the Srebrenica massacre.
In 1998, three years after the Srebrenica massacre, Kofi Annan offered
an apology:
The
United Nations . . . failed to do our part to help save the people of
Srebrenica from the Serb campaign of mass murder . . . In the end, the
only meaningful and lasting amends we can make to the citizens of Bosnia
and Herzegovina who put their faith in the international community is
to do our utmost not to allow such horrors to recur. When the international
community makes a solemn promise to safeguard and protect innocent civilians
from massacre, then it must be willing to back its promise with the
necessary means. Otherwise, it is surely better not to raise hopes and
expectations in the first place, and not to impede whatever capability
they may be able to muster in their own defense.
Just months after
this show of contrition, Kofi Annan and the U.N. were back at work preventing
prospective genocide victims from defending themselves. This time, the
victims were the people of East Timor. Left unprotected because their
firearms had been sequestered at the behest of the U.N., the Timorese
were attacked
by the Indonesian military.
The fraud of U.N. "protection" was underscored yet again in
May 2000. As Dennis Jett explains in Why
Peacekeeping Fails, Sierra Leone "nearly became the UN's
biggest peacekeeping debacle" when 500 peacekeepers there were taken
hostage by rebels of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). The RUF has
been described by Human
Rights Watch as a "barbarous group of thugs," who "lived
off the country's rich diamond fields and terrorized the population with
its signature atrocity of chopping off arms and hands of men, women and
often children."
Jett continues: "The RUF troops are unspeakably brutal to civilians,
but will not stand up to any determined military force. Yet the UN peacekeepers,
with few exceptions, handed over their weapons including armored personnel
carriers and meekly became prisoners." It was only the deployment
of Britain's troops to the former colony that saved civilian lives and
averted a "complete U.N. defeat."
It would be difficult to find an organization whose work has facilitated
government mass murder of more people, in more diverse locations around
the world, than the United Nations has in the last decade. And the U.N.'s
current campaign to disarm the world's peoples suggests that the genocides
of the previous decade are to be repeated in many other places in the
years to come.
An e-mail from one of our readers encapsulates the horrific consequences
of the U.N.'s program to disarm non-state actors:
In 1999 I spent
a year with the peacekeeping mission in Bosnia. I was stationed in the
former "safe" area Gorazde. I learned a lot about that war
and how the civilians were massacred. One day we were discussing guns
and private ownership. In response to the
statement that the U.N. believes only the police and military should
have guns, a Bosnian exasperatedly asked: "Who do you think slaughtered
everyone?
(For those interested
in reading more, we recommend the following books: David Rohde, End
Game; Laura Silber and Allan Little, Yugoslavia;
Jan Willem Honig and Norbert Both, Srebrenica;
John Hillen, Blue
Helmets; Dennis C. Jett, Why
Peacekeeping Fails.)
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he
spread of illicit arms and light weapons is a global threat to human security
and human rights," 
