It was late November at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. The presidents of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Croatia had come together to put an end to almost four years of conflict in the former Yugoslavia. At the close of three weeks of negotiations led by Brown alumnus Richard Holbrooke, the leaders approved the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina. On November 21, 1995 – twenty years ago today – there was a new plan for peace.
Two decades after the signing of the Dayton Accords, there is still much to be learned from the Bosnian War. Today, Bosnia and Herzegovina suffers from high rates of unemployment and political divisions are locked in stalemate. With an upcoming independence referendum planned for Republika Srpska, one of the two administrative entities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, many warn that war is again on the way. Others suggest the initial Dayton Accords were flawed and need reworking. The war in Bosnia is perhaps most significant today, however, because of its implications for humanitarian intervention. Claiming over 250,000 lives and forcing another two million to flee from their homes, it was one of the worst examples of the human cost of ethnic conflict in recent history. Twenty years and countless wars later, there is still much to learn about the power of peacekeeping in twenty-first century conflict.
The Bosnian War began in 1992, only a year after the end of the Cold War. With the disintegration of Yugoslavia, President Slobodan Milošević of Serbia launched a campaign to take territory and create a “Greater Serbia.” The war that followed pitted Bosnian Serbs against Bosnian Muslims, or Bosniaks, and Bosnian Croats. In an effort to “cleanse” the region of its Bosniak plurality, Serbian forces destroyed cultural sites, encouraged expulsion, and launched massacres against the local population.
Given the extent of these war crimes, the international community was quickly involved in the conflict in Bosnia. This began with the creation of the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR). Under the direction of the Security Council, UNPROFOR was initially responsible for protecting civilian refugees and supporting humanitarian aid delivery in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Unfortunately, however, these international forces were unprepared for the violence spreading through Bosnia at the time. UN “blue-helmets” were only lightly armed and lacked sufficient troop numbers to protect civilians against Serbian forces. The UNPROFOR mission was soon “expanded to include the monitoring of six safe havens,” but even these designated civilian areas lacked the UN peacekeepers to be properly secured.
Under this direction, the UN’s worst nightmare became reality. Despite the “guardianship of 110 Dutch peacekeepers,” in July 1995, the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica – a UN safe area –was taken over by Serbian forces who murdered 8,000 men and boys living in the town. The Srebrenica Massacre became a symbol of the failure of UNPROFOR and a scar on the international peacekeeping mission. From then on, the world was more meaningfully invested in the Bosnian War. After the massacre, the North American Treaty Organization (NATO) began a bombing campaign in the region, eventually leading to the Dayton Accords supervised by the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and the European Union (EU). With this agreement, the United Nations Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina (UNMIBH) was put in place to oversee peace under the Accords. In many ways these efforts were too late, but they were able to curb further catastrophe in the region.
For decades, the United Nations has led peacekeeping operations around the world. Though this mechanism is not explicitly described in the UN Charter, Article 43 empowers the Security Council to call on foreign support “in order to contribute to the maintenance of international peace and security.” For the first forty years of its existence, this was a rather passive affair, involving a light commitment of forces that monitored ceasefires between states. Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the bipolar world, however, a stronger “second generation” of peacekeeping has emerged. As the UN website explains, operations today help “support the organization of elections, protect and promote human rights and assist in restoring the rule of law.”
This expansion in scope has led to many issues in the last twenty years, the war in Bosnia being no exception. The 1992 United Nations Operation in Somalia (UNOSOM) faced an onslaught of attacks amidst aid delivery efforts, threatening the stability of peacekeeping in the country. In Rwanda, the inaction and withdrawal of UN forces left the country alone to confront genocide. Ineffective operations by Sudan’s United Nations-African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID), and sex scandals in Haiti have not made supporting UN peacekeeping efforts any easier.
Despite this history – or perhaps because of it – the last few months have seen renewed calls to strengthen international peacekeeping programs. UN forces currently host sixteen separate operations, involving over 120,000 personnel and an operating budget of more than eight billion dollars. Considering recent actions by President Barack Obama, however, those numbers may soon rise. Not only did the President decide to host the 2015 Peacekeeping Operations Summit, but in September he also released a memo committing the Departments of State and Defense to help “strengthen and modernize” UN force operations. This recommitment to multilateralism has been a major political issue in Canada, as well. For new Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, peacekeeping operations mean a smarter foreign policy for the future.
And then there is Syria. For a forward-thinking UN, the conflict in Syria represents everything that lies in the way of peacekeeping programs today. With four years of civil war, massive casualties, and war crimes committed by the government, Syria is reminiscent of Bosnia twenty years ago. The main obstacle preventing true peacekeeping is the veto of the Security Council.
Unfortunately, there is a political price for such humanitarian intervention. After witnessing the complicity of international forces in the Rwandan Genocide and other wartime catastrophes, the UN World Summit in 2005 created a “responsibility to protect” (R2P). The international community now had an obligation to intervene in states where the government failed to protect peoples’ rights and security. In 2011, Libya was the first case of R2P in action, with foreign nations joining together to help civilians in the beginning of the Arab Spring.
In many ways, however, Libya was also the end for R2P. After seeing how easily Muammar Gaddafi was removed from power, permanent Security Council members Russia and China grew wary of R2P’s threat to their own sovereignty. In the case of Syria, Russia especially is hesitant to back UN involvement if it means the removal of Bashar al-Assad. This is the context that colors the Syrian Civil War today.
But the lessons of the Balkans are clear. Humanitarian involvement must not be sacrificed for the sake of politics. International action must be taken before it is too late. After the Srebrenica Massacre in the 1990s, a UN official explained that “[t]hese failings were in part rooted in a philosophy of neutrality and nonviolence wholly unsuited to the conflict in Bosnia.” Today, there are clear, non-neutral steps that can be taken to forge peace in places like Syria. Peacekeeping units authorized to use force can help defend civilian enclaves, while “refugee protection zones” can create more stable conditions on the ground. It will take time – possibly decades – but the international community has a responsibility to act. No doubt, there are proxy politics at play in the modern Middle East. Yet as journalist David Rohde makes clear, “half-measures can do far more harm than good.” In the aftermath of the Bosnian War, the world must not be afraid to work around geopolitical obstacles and act for what is right.
This month commemorates the twentieth anniversary of a peace process that ended four years of conflict in the Balkans. Two decades ago, three leaders came to an agreement in Dayton, Ohio, resolving an ethnic campaign that had taken a quarter of a million lives. Because of this, though Bosnia and Herzegovina continues to face instability, it does so today from a position of peace. As the cycle of history continues now and into the future, the legacy of the Dayton Accords must not be lost. For the sake of the international community and for the sake of humanity, the world cannot afford to forget.
