André Erdös, Hungary’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations

André Erdös served as Hungary’s permanent representative to the United Nations from 1990 to 1994. Here he discusses the degree of information that was available to the international community during the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, the lack of strategic interest in the country, and the inadequate understanding of the country and culture.

Transcript

[H]ere is an important point that I want to make. I was flabbergasted by the lack of knowledge, of information, among the members of the Security Council as to what Yugoslavia was. There was one important point, that as long as the bipolar world existed—and if you look at the map of Europe, you will see that Yugoslavia was located in a vitally strategic place in Europe, separating practically the NATO from the Warsaw Pact countries—and as long as this bipolar division existed, both in the West and in the East, people were interested to keep this country intact, to separate, being as some kind of a buffer zone between the two, to avoid any kind of possibility of a military conflict.

When the bipolar world ended, all these concentrations evaporated, and people lost their interest in the preservation of Yugoslavia as a state. The raison d’etre of Yugoslavia simply disappeared and started this process which led to what it led. And therefore because there was this interest in keeping Yugoslavia together, people were not so much interested in scratching the surface and find[ing] out what Yugoslavia actually was. What kind of republics were there, what kind of ethnic and religious communities were there, people didn’t know.

Hence, the UN has an even more acute responsibility. And not only the UN, believe me, when we talk about the Yugoslav, you know, the management of the crisis, it’s not only, and not so much the UN, but the member states of the United Nations that can make a difference because the UN and the secretary-general of the UN is not someone instructing Beijing and Moscow and Washington and Paris, etc., to do this and that. The UN is not a world government.

What the UN can do depends on the political will of the member states, and here I go further down, saying that, obviously, we have today 193 member states. Not all of them are equal in terms of their capacity. There are places that an ordinary Hungarian doesn’t even know where they exist, though they are members of the United Nations—Tuvalu, Kiribati, Trinidad and Tobago, and I could go on and on.

Therefore, what I mean is that among all of these countries there are others who have a—who bear a special responsibility, those who can make a difference. Here obviously I talk about the permanent members and the various important groupings, like the European Union, who have a responsibility to direct the efforts of the United Nations in the right direction, so to say. As long as there is no harmony, there are no—there is no consultation to come up with a one unified position among those who can make a difference, we will still be running into difficulties just as we saw in Yugoslavia.

Definitely there was a loss of, as I earlier said, this raison d’etre disappeared. There was no more a vital interest in terms of preventing some kind of a military confrontation between two antagonistic camps. These camps did not—at least one camp disappeared, the other had to find its way in a totally new world, a new world environment, and that was one of the reasons. The second is that, as I said, they did not—the participants, the protagonists, and the members of the Council and the international community, did not measure well the implications and the consequences of a drama that was unfolding in Yugoslavia because they did not know.

If I were to ask my colleagues in the Council, for instance, to explain to me the difference between Slovenia, Slovakia, and Slavonia, no one could have given me the answer. Whereas if you want to start managing a serious situation, the basic knowledge is something unavoidable. I mean, if you want to be a master of the future of the development of the events there, you must know the basic facts on the ground. As long as you do not know them, you might take wrong decisions, misjudgments, and this is what actually happened.

In the last period of time, I must say, that there have been a number of resolutions in the Security Council which indicate in the right direction, which speak about things that were unheard of and unimaginable during the Yugoslav crisis. In Africa, for instance, the resolutions of the Council speak about the creation of “intervention brigades” by the peacekeepers. They speak about, explicitly about, the defense of the civilian population. They speak about “robust” actions, robust offensive actions. Again, during the Yugoslav drama these were unheard of words. I mean, this would have been totally unimaginable.

Today we have reached this stage of—at least on paper and in practice also in Congo, there is a new chapter being opened up by the peacekeepers. Now, I cannot anticipate how all this will be developing later on because we have seen that just because something is written on paper, it doesn’t mean that all this will be implemented. And it’s easier said than done, but at least we made a step forward, and I hope very much that all this will be taken seriously by either the parties that are confronting each other, and the United Nations.