Shashi Tharoor, Special Assistant to the UN Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations

Shashi Tharoor served as special assistant to the UN under-secretary-general for peacekeeping operations from 1989 to 1996. Here he identifies contradictions in the concurrent international responses of both a neutral peacekeeping force and threats of military action in the former Yugoslavia; the components necessary for an effective and functioning peacekeeping mission; and factors that hindered international involvement in the former Yugoslavia.

Transcript

The success of any UN peacekeeping effort really depends on three things: the existence of a coherent mandate, one that makes sense and can be implemented; the availability of adequate resources for that mandate; but above all—and this is what underpins both of these—political will. Now, when there is political will in the international community, it is usually reflected in terms of strong agreement of the Council, things get done. When the permanent members of the Council have no clue what they want to accomplish, what their end goal is, things don’t get done.

And what we saw in Yugoslavia was a terribly divided Council, uncertain of what to do, with a kind of Band-Aid operation taking place with some countries, Britain and France notably, wanting to send the peacekeeping operation because it was at least an existing concept they knew how to use, and they couldn’t think of anything more coherent—sending a peacekeeping operation where there was no peace to keep.

You had the nonaligned countries essentially clamoring for the international community to come in on the side of the Bosnians, and you had the US unable to make up its mind on what it wanted to do—a lot of media and political opinion in favor of aggressive, assertive action, but safely from the air. But, as somebody has remarked, that’s like modern courtship: it’s gratification without commitment. You bomb from a great height and fly away, and other people, the troops on the ground, wake up and have to live with the consequences because after all, in these so-called safe areas you had people—UN soldiers deployed with the consent of the Serbs. They couldn’t get their own supplies in, their own fuel, their own food, let alone that of the people they were there to protect, without the cooperation of the very Serbs whom the US wanted to bomb.

So there was complete incoherence and confusion, and what was dangerous and tragic in this situation was that peacekeeping was deployed as a substitute for political will. They couldn’t collectively make up their minds on what decisive action to take. Peacekeeping became the sort of temporizing alternative. A lot of lives were saved, but many lives were also lost. There was a huge human tragedy, and indeed the credibility of the UN suffered a great deal as well in the process.

One of the problems is that peacekeeping as a concept requires essentially not taking sides amongst differing factions. It means that you’re neutral. You operate with the consent and cooperation of all the parties to the conflict. You paint your vehicles white so that they can be seen from a great distance. You do everything openly and transparently. And that kind of operation makes sense where there is an agreed peacekeeping concept and the various armed factions have all taken on common responsibilities that then the peacekeeping operation can help implement. But that didn’t exist here and, on top of that, morally, we were attacked for essentially treating on the same footing both the innocent civilian victims on the Bosniak side and their reviled besiegers who were attacking them, named the Bosnian Serbs. We had to be even-handed because that was the whole concept.

You can’t have a peacekeeping concept of operations with the requisite deployment, battalion equipment, and so on, and at the same time try and threaten military action, bombing from the air—peace enforcement, in other words. As our feared force commander in 1993 put it eloquently in a cable to headquarters, you cannot make peace and war at the same time.