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Show THE UNITED NATION'S OPERATIONS IN THE FORMER YUGOSLAVIA: SHORTCOMINGS IN CROATIA AND BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA Amity N. James been able to provide Bosnian civilians with 18 percent of the necessary food (O'Ballance 1995, 236). While the UN was sitting back and watching the conflict grow, it should have leapt to action. When the EC was fumbling the crisis in Croatia, the UN should have jumped right in full force instead of taking baby steps that were hardly significant. The UN needed to come up with a full scale plan to help change the situation in Croatia instead of implementing a plan that did nothing to solve the real problem (ethnic tension and disputes over territory and systems of governance.) The early days of the conflict should have seen the UN sending aid to all areas of the former Yugoslavia instead of focusing on one area at a time. While the UN was giving Croatia conflict control, it should have also been giving Bosnia conflict prevention. If the UN had done so early on, the crisis in Bosnia-Herzegovina would have been far less destructive. The UN should have also been prepared to back up its declarations and threats with force or should have not threatened force at all. It has been said that "...international intervention in local conflicts cannot be effective without credible threat of force and resolve to use it (Silovic 2000, 157). The threatened use of force without backing it up caused the parties in the conflict to dismiss and undermine UNPROFOR-BH's credibility, and by extension, NATO's and the UN's. It seems that at all times during this crisis, the UN remained one step behind the game. The delay at the very beginning of the crisis created a whole chain of mishaps that caused the UN to be always lagging behind. The members of the United Nations allowed their local politics and their apathy to get the best of them. In her book, Phyllis Bennis sums up the problem nicely: The bottom line of the Bosnian policy of the Northern pow-ers-of France, Britain, but most especially the U.S.-was to satisfy domestic political demands and appear to be "doing something" while in fact doing as little as possible and risking even less. The UN, whose strategic involvement was controlled largely by those three countries, would prove useful for both (142). This statement clearly supports the fact that, in the beginning, nobody cared enough about the people in the former Yugoslavia to help them. When the international community realized that this conflict wasn't going to go away, it tried to pawn off its duties and responsibilities to a group (the EC) that could at once not afford to refuse the assignment, but wasn't equipped to handle a conflict of this magnitude. Although this paper has focused mainly on the United Nation's shortcomings in the Croatian/Bosnian conflict, the UN is not solely to blame. All of the major world powers can equally share the blame, on an individual basis, with the United Nations, because the UN is often limited by its members and their individual agendas. The Yugoslav case is not just an unfortunate episode in the world's history. It is an important example of what can happen when the world underestimates and ignores a region simply because it has been deemed politically and economi- cally irrelevant. The Yugoslav case also provides invaluable information and lessons that the UN needs to learn so that future conflicts can be prevented or rapidly resolved. This paper has critically examined the UN's actions during the Yugoslav crisis, not for the sake of criticizing the UN, but with the hopes that analyzing this case will lead to further research and will generate more potential solutions so that nothing so horrendous as Yugoslavia will ever take place again. REFERENCES All, Rabia and Fawrence Fifschultz. 1993. "Introduction: In Plain View." In Why Bosnia? Writings on the Balkan Wars. Ed. Rabia All and Fawrence Fifschultz. Stony Creek, CT: The Pamphleteer's Press, Inc.: xi-lv. Bennis, Phyllis. 1996. Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today's UN. New York: Olive Branch Press. Durch, William J. and lames A. Schear. 1996. "Faultlines: UN Operations in the Former Yugoslavia." In UN: Peacekeeping, American Policy, and the Uncivil Wars of the 1990s. Ed. William J. Durch. New York: St. Martin's Press: 193-274. Durch, William J. 1996. "Keeping the Peace: Politics and Fessons of the 1990s." In UN: Peacekeeping, American Policy, and the Uncivil Wars of the 1990s. Ed. William J. Durch. New York: St. Martin's Press: 1-34. Higgins, Rosalyn. 1993. "The New United Nations and Former Yugoslavia." International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs) 69(3), July: 465-483. O'Ballance, Edgar. 1995. Civil War in Bosnia, 1992-1994. New York: St. Martin's Press. Silovic, Darko. 2000. "The International Response to the Crisis in Yugoslavia." In The Lessons of Yugoslavia. Ed. Metta Spencer. New York: Elsevier Science: 145-157. Thompson, Mark. 1993. "The Final Solution of Bosnis-Hercegovina." In Why Bosnia? Writings on the Balkan Wars. Ed. Rabia All and Fawrence Fifschultz. Stony Creek, CT: The Pamphleteer's Press, Inc.: 165-180. Williams, Paul. 2001. "The International Community's Response to the Crisis in Former Yugoslavia." In The War in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina 1991-1995. Ed. Branka Magas and Ivo Zanic. Portland, OR: Frank Cass Publishers:273-281. Ziring, Fawrence Robert Riggs and lack Piano. 2000. The United Nations: International Organization and World Politics. 3rd edition. New York: Harcourt-Brace. 48 |