OPINION:The lessons of UN and EU failures in the Balkan wars are still being worked through, writes PETER MURTAGH
THE SPRAWLING graveyard in the lush green valley of the east Bosnian village of Srebrenica welcomed more bodies on Saturday. Fourteen years after they were murdered, 534 men and boys, their remains at last identified and their surviving families told, were reinterred in the genocide memorial cemetery on the anniversary of the start of the slaughter, July 11th, 1995.
Almost a decade and a half after the butchery of more than 8,000 men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces, only about 3,200 bodies have been found and identified for reburial. Some 4,800 bodies remain, most of them in the mass graves in and around Srebrenica, where they were dumped by their killers.
The Srebrenica massacre was the single worst act of genocide on European soil since the end of the second World War. In many instances, the killers were neighbours of the killed. Bosnia is a place not unlike Ireland with everybody knowing everybody else. Srebrenica, and the Balkan wars of the 1990s in general, gives perspective on our own Troubles.
Srebrenica shocked the civilised world, convulsed the UN and forced the EU to think long and hard on what it was about. The outworking of all that remains hugely important and is not unrelated to the decision we all have to make on October 2nd.
The people to blame for Srebrenica are, of course, the people who did it – the Bosnian Serb army. But the UN and the international community come a close second. Srebrenica was a UN safe haven, supposedly protected by Dutch UN forces.
Well, we know what happened. And in the guilt-ridden aftermath, people like Kofi Annan tried to encourage others – the UN, of course but the EU as well – to think through how to prevent such an event happening again.
In a 1990 report, he admitted that “the tragedy of Srebrenica will haunt our history forever”. He continued: “Through error, misjudgment and an inability to recognise 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 “cardinal lesson”, said his report, is that a “deliberate and systematic attempt to terrorise, expel or murder an entire people must be met with all necessary means and with the political will to carry the policy through to its logical conclusion”.
The logical conclusion is that, unlike the luckless Dutch encamped in Srebrenica, you give your forces a clear, unambiguous mandate that allows them to meet force with force – to kill, in other words, in defence of life. Anything less is appeasement and plays into the hand of the aggressor.
But, as Annan implicitly acknowledged, the UN is not capable of harnessing the political resolve, nor backing it with the appropriate force. The horrors in former Yugoslavia were brought to an end not by the international community and the UN but by US (mainly) and Nato bombing. As Alexander Ivanko, UN spokesman in Sarajevo at the time of the massacre, later noted: “If there is a need to send an international force into a war zone, let us leave this, excuse the expression, to coalitions of the willing, and not the wary. To forces equipped and trained to do the job, with rules of engagement more robust than those of the UN.”
That sort of thinking, post-Srebrenica, post-Rwanda, is on all fours with Annan’s. He urged regional groupings around the world to get involved in policing, peacekeeping and, if necessary, peace-enforcing in their own regions.
In 2000, a report by the Panel on UN Peace Operations urged UN member states “to enter into partnerships with one another . . . to form several coherent brigade-size forces, with necessary enabling forces, ready for effective deployment within 30 days of the adoption of a Security Council resolution establishing a traditional peacekeeping operation . . .” This is the sort of thinking that finds expression in the EU’s security and defence policy, and all that goes with it – the European Defence Agency, Partnership for Peace, EU battle groups et al.
Force alone indeed cannot succeed in most instances. And that is why EU forces with a UN mandate, Irish among them, are in Chad and Kosovo preventing (almost guaranteed) further bloodshed in both places and, in the case of Kosovo, supporting political efforts to build stable institutions.
I hope that in my lifetime, neither I nor my children, will witness the sort of events that happened in the Balkans in the 1990s. The EU has a huge role, a decent, honourable role, to play in reducing massively the possibility of them happening again.