Bosnia solution: Back to basics

By Jonathan Power

GENEVA (JP): Let us not forget why the United Nations went into Bosnia. It was not to fight the Serbs, but to provide, first, relief and second, wherever possible, however local the achievement, help in keeping the peace.

In the beginning, it was to open Sarajevo airport for humanitarian deliveries. Next, it was to guard the relief convoys of the UN's High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). Next, it was to protect the threatened Moslem enclaves in the east and, most significant of all, to help Sarajevo return to a more normal life after the then UN force commander, Gen. Michael Rose, persuaded the Serbs to put into UN storage their heavy guns located on the surrounding hills.

All along, the UN was not there to engage the Serbs or anyone else in combat. Any success, such as the opening of Sarajevo airport or the silencing of the big guns, had to be won by negotiation, not by bombardment.

To restate this, which should be, but no longer is, is the obvious. It is the hawks, a disproportionate number inhabiting Washington, who have obfuscated it. Now, hopefully, having momentarily got their way recently with the NATO bombing, they've received their comeuppance.

If they haven't, God help us. For if Washington, Paris and London now decide to up the ante, then have no doubt that the Yugoslav army of Serbian President Slobodan Milosovic will not hesitate to enter a war against NATO and the Bosnian government. Then we would end up with a quite terrible, long drawn-out war, involving more American ground troops than were deployed against Saddam Hussein, and no assurance of "victory", short of the use of nuclear weapons.

It is time overdue to unscramble this egg. UN peacekeeping has got hopelessly mixed up with peace-enforcement, Desert Storm style. These are two very separate things, not to be confused, unless you like egg on your face, which is now the situation.

This pass has been a long time in the making, but the warning signs were there all along. A mixture of weak leadership by UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros Ghali and macho-pushing by the U.S., which seems to have learned nothing from the debacle in Somalia, where the same confused thinking was its undoing, has allowed UN peacekeeping to become totally discredited.

We need to get back to basics, to the style of peacekeeping that went on through all the years of the Cold War, which the super-powers, by and large, kept their noses out of. The advent, at more or less the same time, of the end of the Cold War, which meant that super-power action was possible, and the sudden growth of CNN instant television and its imitators, that often convinced viewers that action was immediately desirable, was an unfortunate and destabilizing cocktail.

Old-time peacekeeping, as practiced in Kashmir, the Golan Heights, Sinai, Cyprus, Lebanon and Namibia--and as still practiced in new theaters of operation, Angola, Mozambique and El Salvador--is where UN peacekeepers work slowly and patiently. They work mostly out of the public eye, with the legal consent and practical cooperation of all sides to the conflict, upholding, monitoring and implementing agreements between or amongst warring parties, without prejudice to the rights and claims of any side. Peacekeepers have no enemies, are never deployed to help win a war, but only to help the warring parties end one.

In Bosnia, from the beginning, the "peacekeepers", although not Americans, seem to have taken a cue from American rhetoric on the subject. Their equipment, including tanks and machine-gun- mounted armored personnel carriers, vastly exceeds that of any prior peacekeeping force, other than Somalia. In short, they are visually giving the wrong impression and in practice, by over- retaliating, as when French peacekeepers recently stormed Serb positions on the Vrbanja bridge, have become dangerously close to becoming party to the conflict.

The UN mission in Bosnia now needs to be redefined. In return for a pledge to call off, for all time, NATO bombers, it should be easy to win the release of the UN hostages. Then the UNHCR should be asked to withdraw and hand over the humanitarian work to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which, besides being all too willing to take over this job, would only do it on condition that they weren't protected by soldiers, the UN's or anyone else's.

The peacekeepers could then concentrate on peacekeeping, keeping the peace when local agreements, that serve the needs of the warring parties, need policing. To rescue Gen. Rose's legacy--a sniper-free Sarajevo, and the Moslem enclaves reasonably safely protected--is probably now beyond the UN's reach. But the peacekeepers can remain on hand for when the warring parties do decide enough is enough.

The UN cannot solve every war--and certainly not by force. All we in the international community can do is to offer help. That itself is a great step forward for mankind, compared with pre-UN generations. It is one that we belittle at our own peril.