The popular wisdom among UN personnel was that "things had not gone far enough" to justify intervention. A year later the same people were telling me that "things had gone too far" to make the intervention feasible.
This exercise in justifying a "do-nothing policy" seriously hampered the humanitarian part of the international intervention, where (in Sarajevo) the case was crystal-clear: to intervene in order to feed people, to secure water, electricity and gas supply; to help 400 thousand people to survive through the "international peace process." It is impossible to explain why every single humanitarian convoy had to be negotiated through the check-points of all the parties, and why UN Forces had no mandate to fight their way through to the city in order to take control over food, water supply and medical facilities, to re-establish electricity and gas resources, and to make sure that these are not bargaining chips in the hands of local politicians.
Implications for NATO
In both cases, belated intervention in Bosnia and NATO strikes against FRY, from an ethical viewpoint―resort to international armed force was justified. At the same time, it is difficult, as Cassese puts it, to "avoid observing in the same breath that this moral action is contrary to current international law." For the purpose of this paper, I am not going to go into legal technicalities. Instead, I'd suggest looking into the broader consequences of an implicit marginalisation of the United Nations as a global mechanism for international conflict resolution. In Bosnia, the United Nations had to abandon the scene in favour of NATO after the United States had become interested in the region and its post-war stability. In Kosovo, the UN mechanism provided for in Chapter VII was paralysed and NATO took the steering wheel into its own hands. Indeed, it can be argued that regional organisations like NATO, OSCE, OAU and OAS are, in principle, better equipped for handling conflict situations within their regions, rather than the UN. But, given the long tradition and fruitful membership of the former Yugoslavia (with Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo, as components of the ex-Yugoslav Federation) in the OUN, the world organization was perceived as the most acceptable instrument to intervene in the crisis. Other international institutions, now present in the region (NATO and the European Union) were, for better or for worse, seen as "alien" and more "interventionist" than the UN. In the years preceding Dayton, credibility of the UN was sliding from bad to worse on a weekly rate, with the Srebrenica disaster as the final blow (summer 1995). In addition to its internal weaknesses and inefficient chain of command and decision-making, United Nations was used as a scapegoat in Bosnia in order to provide a cover for the lack of vision, long term strategy and political will of the world major governments.
The timing of the UN humiliation played very well into the hands of NATO which was desperate in trying to redefine itself after the Cold War. Finally, what happened was that the UN took an "early retirement" in Bosnia (and probably will continue do so long after Bosnia), and NATO was saved from redundancy. While NATO strategists were busy designing the Partnership for Peace and discussing the enlargement issue, they were probably aware that those grand ideas were, at the end of the day, the exercise of an "armchair policy." All it represented was reconstructing the existing institutional structure and recycling old ideas. In the midst of that boring debate, Bosnia and Herzegovina emerged with its war already at the level when it was controllable and could be brought to an end. This was an invaluable challenge for NATO: low risk and high profile operation in the region where the enlargement debate was going on.
