It is tragic that in this 50th anniversary year of the founding of the United Nations that it should have failed so comprehensively in the former Yugoslavia. It now seems that the UN safe zones for Bosnian Muslims in the east of Bosnia are not such thing. Bosnian Serbs have been allowed to move in to the most significant of them _ Srebrenica _ and forcibly take away all male Muslims aged between six and about sixty and force the remaining population out to the north. The aim is clear. It is “ethnic cleansing” of pockets of Muslim territory which are surrounded by Serbia areas. The aim is clearly a Greater Serbia, created by force. Worse, it is being created at the expense of the Muslim population in flagrant disregard of human rights and UN principles while supposedly powerful nations seem helpless to do anything about it.
From the Bosnian Muslim point of view the UN and NATO role has been doubly cruel. On one hand the UN and NATO have failed to provide protection yet on the other hand they have enforced an arms embargo precluding the Muslims from defending themselves.
It is not that the UN and NATO should have stayed out and allowed the Serbs and Muslims to fight it out. Rather, having decided to go in, they should have done a thorough job.
Perhaps the UN role of peace-keeping needs to be redefined. At present in any theatre it will try to maintain a peace, but once there is no peace to keep it withdraws. Perhaps the world needs an international policeman with a multi-national force. And once the UN decides to intervene to stop territorial aggression and the breaches of human rights that go with it, it should engage in overwhelming, comprehensive and conclusive force to re-establish civilised government and the rule of law.
But as the UN commanders in the field have so desperately pointed out the job cannot be done without the resources. In the face of conduct like that displayed by the Serbs, this means an international standing army ready to go in early in a comprehensive way to nip territorial ambition in the bud.
Clearly, constitutional changes were needed after the communist regime fell in Yugoslavia. The Tito regime had cleverly played off historic ethnic and religious rivalry by giving notionally autonomous regions to the Slovenes, Croats and Bosnians much larger than their representation in the total population would warrant. The Serbs then held tight central control over the whole of Yugoslavia. With the break-up, the minorities tried to keep all of their “territory” in former Yugoslavia. The Serbs resisted.
The tragedy is that the unworkable and unrepresentative Tito boundaries could not have been redrawn after negotiation and plebiscites. That cold have happened and the historic rivalries and entrenched positions put aside if the UN had had a strong policing army at its disposal very early on in the conflict. It might be too late for the Balkans, but the lesson is their for other disputes.