The approach of the international community was wholly inadequate to the Serb campaign of ethnic cleansing and mass murder which culminated in Srebrenica. Evil must be recognized as such and confronted by the international community; the UN's commitment to ending conflicts, far from precluding moral judgment, makes it all the more necessary. One key paragraph from the report is worth quoting in its entirety:
The cardinal lesson of Srebrenica is that a deliberate and systematic attempt to terrorize, expel or murder an entire people must be met decisively with all necessary means, and with the political will to carry the policy through to its logical conclusion. In the Balkans, in this decade, this lesson has had to be learned not once, but twice. In both instances, in Bosnia and in Kosovo, the international community tried to reach a negotiated settlement with an unscrupulous and murderous regime. In both instances it required the use of force to bring a halt to the planned and systematic killing and expulsion of civilians.5
The lesson has since been strongly reaffirmed by an international panel on peacekeeping led by Lakhdar Brahimi, a former Algerian Foreign Minister and a highly effective UN Special Representative in Haiti, South Africa, Afghanistan and elsewhere in recent years. His colleagues on the panel brought a cross-section of in-depth experience relevant to peacekeeping. The panel reported its findings in August 2000.6 In its view, timidity masquerading as political neutrality has led to the operational failure to confront openly those who challenge UN peacekeeping operations in the field. Echoing the Srebrenica report, the Brahimi panel argues in forceful language that the UN's commitment to impartiality means adherence to the principles of the UN Charter and the objectives of the mission's mandate. Mistakenly collapsing this into equal treatment of all parties in all cases can degenerate into a policy of appeasement. "In some cases, local parties consist not of moral equals but of obvious aggressors and victims, and peacekeepers may not only be operationally justified in using force but morally compelled to do so."7 The UN Secretariat is exhorted by the Brahimi panel to abjure best-case scenarios when "local actors have historically exhibited worst-case behaviour."8
4. NATO = War, UN = Peace
The fourth strand is that while NATO made war, it still needed the UN to help secure the peace. A UN-lead peacekeeping mission established a de facto protectorate in Kosovo, supported by a military presence (KFOR) with a large NATO component but also a Russian element. Far from discrediting the UN permanently, therefore, Kosovo99 showed that a UN role remains indispensable even for the most powerful military alliance in history. The Kosovo experience will have made all countries even more reluctant to engage in military hostilities outside the UN framework, as confirmed by the way in which the force for East Timor was assembled and authorized only, and quite deliberately, under Security Council auspices.
5. G8 = Real UNSC
Fifth and finally, one could argue that the sequence of events shows that the real center of international political and economic gravity has shifted from the UNSC to the G-8 countries plus China. That was the forum in which the critical negotiations were held and the crucial compromises and decisions made. With the assistance of Russia and through the involvement of the G-8 (the group of seven industrialized states plus Russia), whose mediation was accepted by Belgrade, the war was eventually brought to an end and Yugoslav troops were withdrawn from Kosovo. This reflects the failure to reform the UN Security Council in composition and procedure, as a result of which it no longer mirrors the world as it really is.9 In essence, therefore, the 'G-8 plus' is the Security Council as it ought to be.
