International Society, Global Polity: An Introduction to International Political Theory by Chris Brown

Author:Chris Brown [Brown, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Political Science, General, History & Theory
ISBN: 9781473911277
Google: h8j-AwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 30145420
Publisher: SAGE
Published: 2014-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

Humanitarian war in former Yugoslavia

The fighting in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina inevitably led to civilian casualties, refugees and the disruption of normal food production and distribution; the EC and the UN provided what humanitarian relief they could, and in February 1992 in UN Security Council Resolution 743 established a UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR) to provide protection for the relief effort, initially in Croatia, but extended to Bosnia-Herzegovina in June and to the new republic of Macedonia in December. The humanitarian effort saw itself as non-political, delivering aid to those in need, of whom there were many, but one of the principles that the Yugoslav and other crises of the 1990s established is that in a war zone it is more or less impossible for humanitarian aid to be given without political consequences. To put things bluntly, if you attempt to feed people who someone else wishes to starve, you are engaging in politics however much you may want to avoid doing so. Even more to the point, in these conflicts, as in many other ‘New Wars’ in this period, the creation of civilian distress was not an unfortunate by-product of a conventional war but, on the contrary, a deliberate strategy designed to bring about ethnic cleansing, driving populations of the wrong sort away from their current homes (Kaldor, 1999). In so far as humanitarian actors were able to prevent this from happening they were frustrating the plans of the aggressors.

The result was that UNPROFOR frequently found itself attack, usually, but not always from Serbian forces. A sequence of international responses to this situation followed; mandatory sanctions against the new Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (previously Serbia & Montenegro) were introduced by UN Security Council Resolution 757 in May 1992, and a ‘No Fly Zone’ was established in Bosnia-Herzegovina enforced by NATO in October 1992 as a way of neutralising at least one aspect of the advantage to the Serbs of the aforementioned arms embargo. In April and May 1993 ‘safe areas’ were designated in Bosnia-Herzegovina under the protection of UNPROFOR whose mandate was extended for this purpose, and which could now call on NATO air-power for this task under a dual-key arrangement, with both UNPROFOR and NATO having a key. In effect, the international community increasingly found itself engaged in a conflict with Serbia and Serb forces in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina – however, predictably, things were not that simple.

As the conflict intensified some voices were heard in Europe and, especially, in the United States, calling for the pretence of neutrality to be dropped, for the arms embargo to be ended and for air-power to be used against the Serbs – the policy of ‘lift and strike’ as it became known in the US. This was opposed quite vehemently by the UK government, which argued that the international community should avoid taking sides in what it described as a long-standing tribal conflict. Brendan Simms has with some justice described this as Britain's ‘unfinest hour’, however there was one aspect of the British position that captured a genuine dilemma (Simms, 2001).

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