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Show HINCKLEY JOURNAL OF POLITICS 2002/2003 UN safe zones, leaving civilian and UN casualties in its wake. The UN eventually had no choice but to ask the Croatian government for permission to safely evacuate the members of the UNPROFOR-Croatia mission. Permission was granted and the UN pulled its forces out and left. By mid-1994 the UN had tired of Bosnian Serb aggression and authorized major NATO air strikes against them. The United States, looking for a way to appease the public in time for the upcoming election, instigated major negotiations and solicited the help of Serbia's Slobodan Milosovic to bring the Bosnian Serbs to the table. Richard Holbrooke, then U.S. Assistant Secretary of State was sent to do the job, eventually arranging a cease-fire and hammering out an agreement with regards to the formation of the Bosnian state and its boundaries. An agreement was signed and took effect in November 1995. The UN formally approved this agreement and declared that a peacekeeping mission should remain behind to oversee the transition and prevent further conflict from erupting. However, this peacekeeping force was to be led and enforced by NATO. Some of UNPROFOR-BH's peacekeepers were left behind, but their command was transferred to NATO as well. The rest of UNPROFOR-BH was pulled out of the country. Although 1995 saw the end of most of the conflict in former Yugoslavia, it was a dismal ending for the United Nation's peacekeeping missions. This is because the Croatians themselves ended the conflict in Croatia, and conflict was resolved in Bosnia-Herzegovina due to American intervention and NATO leadership. Neither UN operation helped bring about resolution. In fact, the failures of the UN in this mission probably prolonged the conflict. POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS The crisis in the former Yugoslavia taught the world many disturbing lessons. We learned that people are capable of committing horrendous atrocities over something as natural as ethnic diversity. We also learned that our institutions are not capable of coping with a crisis of enormous magnitude, a fact that is more than a little frightening. To prevent such a tragedy from occurring again, possible solutions need to be sought. There are dozens of routes that the UN could have taken during the Yugoslav crisis 14some might have improved the outcome, others might have made the outcome worse, and yet others might have ended with the same results. Because it is impossible to actually go back and apply possible solutions to the crisis, it will never be known what the best options would be. However, using what is known about the crisis and applying hindsight, possible solutions to the next crisis can be created and analyzed before it actually erupts. The best thing that the United Nations could have done in Yugoslavia (and should do in future conflicts) is to act early. Rabia All and Lawrence Lifschultz noted that the governments of the most prominent members of the UN- France, the United Kingdom, and the United States-wasted almost a year ".. .engaged in a protracted, contentious, and in the end, sterile debate over the options available to stop the war" (1993, xxwii) while innocent people were dying in Bosnia. The UN should have responded to the threat sooner and put together a comprehensive plan to deal with the situation. Another possible solution to the peacekeeping dilemma is to alter the structure of UN organization. Funding for all UN activities comes from the members themselves. The system is set up to be a fair scale of membership dues which should help fund peacekeeping operations. In reality, the system of peacekeeping funding is flawed and many scholars, such as Rosalyn Higgins, see this as a major contributor to the failings of the UN in the former Yugoslavia (1993, 477-489). As pointed out by Higgins, peacekeeping operations are to be funded through regular dues memberships, but many countries fail to pay their dues. Some of the largest members of the UN (such as the Russian Federation) had failed to pay their allocated portion of the costs for UNPROFOR as of February 1993 (1993, 478). Naturally, a delay in payments harms the ability of the UN to successfully pull together an operation. While it is unlikely that there will be any changes to the permanent membership of the UN Security Council, perhaps the threat of loss of that membership might cause the five members to pick up their share of the burden. Conversely, the possibility of gaining a permanent seat on the Security Council might be incentive for the second-tier nations to pick up some extra slack. Either way, the shakeup could only benefit the UN and its peacekeeping activities. A last possible solution considered in this paper is to analyze and understand the background of the conflict and the problems the UN had in containing the conflict. A large part of what happened in Yugoslavia in the early 1990s was preventable. The UN underestimated the seriousness of the conflict. Additionally, the nature of the conflict was imperfectly understood by the UN. Therefore, the UN was unable to respond appropriately to the situation. To prevent the outbreak of future similar conflicts (or to at least contain them before they get out of control), more research needs to be done on the Yugoslav case. The situation itself needs to be examined as well as the actions of the UN and the other major players in the conflict. Future research should take the lessons learned from this analysis and apply them to common theories of International Relations, such as Realism and Institutionalism, in an effort to establish feasible solutions to future potential conflicts. CONCLUSIONS The seven major mistakes made by the UN in this conflict are clear. Almost everything it did in this operation was wrong. The missions were so flawed that they have even been referred to as "the endless sequel of mistakes..." (Thompson 1993, 167). This operation did not even manage to meet even its most basic goal-to provide humanitarian relief. The situation was so bad that in a given month, the UN had only 47 |