Dilemmas of Reacting to Mass Atrocities: Humanitarian Intervention to End Violent Conflict in the Western Balkans

Abstract

The question of international intervention, which emerged with full force in the 1990s conflicts in the Western Balkans, has taken center stage in world politics. This article analyzes the way humanitarian intervention was carried out in Bosnia and Kosovo, primarily from two perspectives: policy and strategy. It considers what issues were contested and why, and how their consideration has advanced and/or limited the humanitarian intervention debate. Presently, the perception of use of international institutions and norms to advance state interests other than humanitarian is likely to pose formidable challenges to mobilize sufficient international support for dealing with humanitarian emergencies.

Keywords:

• North Atlantic Treaty Organization
• Policy and Strategy of Humanitarian Intervention
• Prosecution of War Crimes
• Western Balkans

Notes

1. International Development Research Centre for ICISS, The Responsibility to Protect: Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre for ICISS, 2001), http://www.iciss.gc.ca/pdf/Commission-Report.pdf (accessed April 20, 2011). For the evolution of the concept of Responsibility to Protect, see Alex J. Bellamy, “The Responsibility to Protect—Five Years On,” Ethics and International Affairs 24, no. 2 (2010): 143–169. For the argument that changing the language of humanitarian intervention (from sovereignty vs. human rights to responsibility to protect) has not changed its underlying political dynamics, refer to David Chandler, “The Responsibility to Protect? Imposing the ‘Liberal Peace,’” International Peacekeeping 11, no. 1 (2004): 59–81; and Alex J. Bellamy, “Responsibility to Protect or Trojan Horse? The Crisis in Darfur and Humanitarian Intervention after Iraq,” Ethics and International Affairs 19, no. 2 (2005): 31–53, especially 34.

2. See Hugo Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis [On the Law of War and Peace], Book II, Chapter 25, par. VIII. http://www.lonang.com/exlibris/grotius/grov-225.htm (accessed April 20, 2011).

3. Refer to Nicholas J. Wheeler, “Reflections on the Legality and Legitimacy of NATO's Intervention in Kosovo,” The International Journal of Human Rights 4, nos. 3/4 (2000): 149.

4. Ellery C. Stowell, Intervention in International Law (Washington, DC: John Byrne & Co., 1921), 53.

5. J. L. Holzgrefe, “The Humanitarian Intervention Debate,” in Humanitarian Intervention: Ethical, Legal and Political Dilemmas, ed. J. L. Holzgrefe and Robert O. Keohane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 18.

6. Intervention on humanitarian grounds, nonetheless, may include cases when a government invites a foreign army to end or prevent human rights abuses against its civilians. The latter case would include the intervention of Italy in Albania in 1997 or Western intervention in Bosnia in the first half of the 1990s—both the Tirana and Sarajevo governments had invited the international community to intervene.

7. This was stated in the report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty: “…any coercive intervention for human protection purposes is but one element in a continuum of intervention,” where such a continuum includes mechanisms of less and more coercive external interference such as human rights monitoring, sanctions, arms embargoes, war crimes trials, preventive deployment of peacekeeping forces, and the threat of use of force. International Development Research Centre for ICISS, Responsibility to Protect, 67.

8. Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, Book II, chap. 25, par. VII.

9. See, for instance, Fernando R. Tesón, “The Liberal Case for Humanitarian Intervention,” Humanitarian Intervention: Ethical, Legal and Political Dilemmas, ed. J. L. Holzgrefe and Robert O. Keohane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 97.

10. Kok-chor Tan, “The Duty to Protect,” in Humanitarian Intervention, ed. Terry Nardin and Melissa S. Williams (New York: NYU Press, 2005), 86, 96.

11. These were the recommendations of the International Development Research Centre for ICISS, Responsibility to Protect, par. 4.19, 6.11, 6.29–40, pp. xii–xiii.

12. For a discussion of these concepts refer to International Development Research Centre for ICISS, Responsibility to Protect. See also Ved P. Nanda, “Tragedies in Northern Iraq, Liberia, Yugoslavia, and Haiti: Revisiting the Validity of Humanitarian Intervention Under International Law, Part I,” Denver Journal of International Law and Policy 20 (1992): 311.

13. The expression “supreme humanitarian emergencies” comes from Nicholas J. Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 34.

14. International involvement in Bosnia—likewise in Kosovo—was a mixture of international intervention in the form of negotiations, attempting to broker an end to war, and physical intervention in the form of military actions. Although it is the latter form of intervention that stands in greatest need of justification, it is necessary to incorporate in the following analysis both forms of interventions given that they were interrelated and impacted continuously on each other.

15. For works on the causes and dynamics of this conflict, refer to Lenard J. Cohen, Broken Bonds: Yugoslavia's Disintegration and Balkan Politics in Transition, 2nd ed. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995); Laura Silber and Allan Little, Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation (London: Penguin, 1997); James Gow, The Serbian Project and its Adversaries: A Strategy of War Crimes (London: Hurst, 2003); and Klejda Mulaj, Politics of Ethnic Cleansing: Nation-State Building and Provision of In/Security in Twentieth-Century Balkans (Lanham: Lexington Books/Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).

16. See, for instance, David Campbell, National Destruction: Violence, Identity, and Justice in Bosnia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 157.

17. This contention was rejected by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Prosecutor v. Dusko Tadić, Appeals Judgement of July 15, 1999, case no. IT-94–1-A. Printed in Annotated Leading Cases of International Criminal Tribunals, ed. André Klip and Göran Sluiter, Volume III, The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia 1997–1999 (Antwerp: Intersentia, 2001), especially par. 83–162.

18. See, for instance, Final Report of the Commission of Experts Established Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 780 (1992), Part III, par. A.; Prosecutor v. Duško Tadić, Appeals Judgement of July 15, 1999, especially par. 146–162; James Gow, Triumph of the Lack of Will: International Diplomacy and the Yugoslav War (London: Hurst, 1997), 31, 33–35; and Cohen, Broken Bonds, 248, 339.

19. Although “the West” is used extensively to refer to the Euro-Atlantic Alliance, no claim is made here that in the context of the Bosnian—and less so Kosovo—conflict the West acted as a unified actor. For a groundbreaking work that documents the fissures within the West regarding foreign policy making in the course of the Bosnian war, see Brendan Simms, Unfinest Hour: Britain and The Destruction of Bosnia (London: Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, 2001). Simms argues forcefully that the US advocated—progressively—military intervention in Bosnia, whereas Britain and France opposed military intervention—persistently and variably, respectively.

20. Christopher Bennett, “Ethnic Cleansing in Former Yugoslavia,” in The Ethnicity Reader: Nationalism, Multiculturalism and Migration, ed. Montserrat Guibernau and John Rex (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), 126.

21. See Philip H. Gordon, “Europe's Uncommon Foreign Policy,” International Security 22, no. 3 (1997–1998), especially 75–76.

22. Silber and Little, Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation, 190.

23. Cited in Simms, Unfinest Hour, 12.

24. Cited in Philip Webster and Robert Morgan, “Thatcher Says Massacre Brings Shame on West,” The Times, April 14, 1994. Insofar as efforts to support Bosnia were concerned, Margaret Thatcher became a foreign-political pilgrim. She despaired with Britain's policy on Bosnia and “…therefore focused on the United States, seeking to awaken the consciousness of the West.” Throughout the conflict she remained convinced that help for Bosnia could come from the US, or it would not come at all. Citation from Simms, Unfinest Hour, 51.

25. Stefan Wolff and Annemarie Rodt, “European Union Crisis Management in the Western Balkans: Policy Objectives, Capabilities and Effectiveness,” in International Intervention in Local Conflicts: Crisis Management and Conflict Resolution since the Cold War, ed. Uzi Rabi (London: I. B. Taurus, 2009), 80.

26. Noel Malcolm, “Bosnia and the West: A Study in Failure,” The National Interest 39 (Spring 1995): 7; Christopher Cviić and Peter Sanfey, In Search of the Balkan Recovery (London: Hurst, 2010), 104.

27. See The Fall of Srebrenica, Report of the Secretary-General Pursuant to General Assembly Resolution 53/35 (November 15, 1999), http://www.un.org/peace/srebrenica.pdf (accessed April 20, 2011). Srebrenica also exposed the flaws of the safe-areas policy and the lack of international commitment to defend them. About 35,000 troops were required to protect the “safe areas,” but the UN Security Council authorized 7,500, while money was appropriated for only 3,500 troops. Moreover, protection of safe areas was a job for combat-capable, peace-enforcement operations, while the UN troops on the ground were given only a peacekeeping mandate—a strategic incompatibility, in fact, since there was no peace to keep and civilians were increasingly the target of violence. Srebrenica, Sarajevo, Tuzla, Bihać, Žepa, and Goražde were declared “safe” but, in practical terms, there was no possibility of rendering them safe because the UN was reluctant to abandon its position of neutrality. Having been established without the consent of the parties and without any credible military deterrent, the “safe areas” were not safe in any military meaningful sense. Indeed, they were among the most insecure places in the world. See Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), especially 65.

28. Resolution 836 of June 4, 1993 authorized the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) in Bosnia to use force in order to protect the “safe areas.” See the text of the resolution at http://www.nato.int/ifor/un/u930604a.htm (accessed April 20, 2011). A NATO Communique drafted in August 1993 and passed in February 1994 reaffirmed the readiness of the Alliance to carry air strikes. See http://www.nato.int/docu/pr/1994/p94-015.htm (accessed April 20, 2011).

29. Richard Holbrooke, To End a War (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 83–84.

30. Disagreement among NATO members over intervention in Iraq (2003) is the only other case that closely resembles the extent of crisis experienced in Bosnia. The existing rift within the Euro-Atlantic Alliance has been shrewdly analysed by Christopher Coker in his Empires in Conflict: The Growing Rift between Europe and the United States (London: Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies, 2003).

31. Tim Ripley, Operation Deliberate Force: The UN and NATO Campaign in Bosnia 1995 (Lancaster: Centre for Defence and International Security Studies, 1999).

32. UN SC Res 827, UN Doc S/Res/827 (May 25, 1993).

33. It was only after the war ended that the ICTY focused on the indictment of high-level offenders, arresting key political and military leaders such as General Momir Talić (a key commander during the Bosnian war), Momćilo Krajišnik (President of the Bosnian Serb Assembly from 1990 to 1995), Biljana Plavšić (former deputy to Radovan Karadžić and former Bosnian Serb President), Slobodan Milošević (former President of the former federation of Yugoslavia), and Radovan Karadžić (former President of Republika Srpska). The Serb general Ratko Mladić—who oversaw the execution of the war in Bosnia on the Serbian side—remains to date at large.

34. Out of an estimated several thousand perpetrators of war crimes, the ICTY has indicted 161 persons. As of April 2011 it had concluded proceedings against 125 accused. Updated figures are available at www.icty.org/sections/TheCases/KeyFigures (accessed April 20, 2011).

35. The Tribunal has suffered from logistical problems such as limited funding, large number of suspects, the inclination of peacekeepers on the ground to avoid casualties in order to arrest indictees, and limited cooperation on the part of Belgrade and Zagreb. Nevertheless, despite operating amid mounting difficulties, the ICTY's trial proceedings have contributed to establish a historical record that will impede revisionist efforts to distort the past. See Gary Jonathan Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Klejda Mulaj, “Impact of Criminal Justice on Reconciliation” (paper, International Studies Association 48th Annual Convention, Chicago, February 28, 2007).

36. Kaldor, New and Old Wars, 58.

37. For the partition plans, see Campbell, National Destruction, chap. 5; and Leo Tindemans et al., Unfinished Peace: Report of the International Commission on the Balkans (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1996), 42–54.

38. The failure of the Western powers in Bosnia, however, was primarily political, not humanitarian. Hundreds of thousands of lives were saved, and millions of people were fed by the UN peacekeeping operations, with UNPROFOR's annual budget spiralling above $1 billion in 1994 alone. See Christopher Bennett, Yugoslavia's Bloody Collapse: Causes, Course and Consequences (London: Hurst, 1995), 4. This is not to say, nevertheless, that humanitarian relief operations were perfect and uncontroversial. Indirectly, on certain occasions, aid contributed to the financing of fighting and gave warring parties more reasons to fight.

39. For debates on this point in the context of divided societies, refer to John Nagle and Mary-Alice C. Clancy, Shared Society or Benign Apartheid: Understanding Peace-Building in Divided Societies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 212–219, especially 216.

40. Mulaj, Politics of Ethnic Cleansing, 101.

41. See, for instance, Alex J. Bellamy, “Human Wrongs in Kosovo: 1974–99,” The International Journal of Human Rights 4, no. 3/4 (2000): 105–126.

42. Gow, Serbian Project and its Adversaries, 202, 209–210, 277.

43. See, for instance, Michael Mandelbaum, “A Perfect Failure: NATO's War Against Yugoslavia,” Foreign Affairs 78, no. 5 (1999): 2–8; Christopher Layne and Benjamin Schwarz, “For the Record,” The National Interest, Fall 1999, 9–15.

44. Wheeler, Saving Strangers, 269. See also Independent International Commission on Kosovo, Kosovo Report: Conflict, International Response, Lessons Learned (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), especially 152.

45. Lawrence Freedman, “Victims and Victors: Reflections on the Kosovo War,” Review of International Studies 26 (2000): 352; Independent International Commission on Kosovo, Kosovo Report, 3; Michael Walzer, “Kosovo,” in Kosovo: Contending Voices on Balkan Intervention, ed. William Joseph Buckley (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2000), 333; James B. Steinberg, “A Perfect Polemic: Blind to Reality on Kosovo,” Foreign Affairs 78, no. 6 (1999): 128–33; Ivo H. Daalder, “NATO and Kosovo,” The National Interest, Winter 1999/2000, 114.

46. Marc Weller, “Armed Samaritans,” Counsel, August 1999, 20–22. NATO's Operation Allied Force started (March 24, 1999) as a low-scale bombing campaign—in terms of target numbers and force size—that was intended to be of short duration, but which escalated into a more aggressive air campaign that went on for 78 days.

47. See Dana H. Allin, “NATO's Balkan Interventions,” Adelphi Papers 347 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2002), 52.

48. For the rationale behind NATO's intervention in Kosovo, see Independent International Commission on Kosovo, Kosovo Report, 159–160, 172, 185; and Adam Roberts, “NATO's ‘Humanitarian War’ over Kosovo,” Survival 41, no. 3 (1999): 104, 107–108.

49. Refer to President Clinton, “Address to the Nation,” March 24, 1999, available from http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/europe/jan-june99/address_3-24.html (accessed April 20, 2011).

50. Tony Blair, A Journey (London: Hutchinson, 2010), 239.

51. Ibid., 228.

52. Tim Dunne and Nicholas Wheeler, “Blair's Britain: A Force for Good in the World?” in Ethics and Foreign Policy, ed. Karen Smith and Margot Light (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 177.

53. Benjamin S. Lambeth, NATO's Air War for Kosovo: A Strategic and Operational Assessment (Santa Monica: Rand, 2001), 226.

54. Gow, Serbian Project and its Adversaries, 296–297.

55. Lambeth, NATO's Air War for Kosovo, xxii.

56. Wheeler, Saving Strangers, 268; Independent International Commission on Kosovo, Kosovo Report, 4, 86, 289.

57. Lambeth, NATO's Air War for Kosovo, 182–184; Dick Leurdijk and Dick Zandee, Kosovo: From Crisis to Crisis (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 61–62; Daniel L. Byman and Matthew C. Waxman, “Kosovo and the Great Air Power Debate,” International Security 24, no. 4 (2000): 29–30.

58. Refer to Independent International Commission on Kosovo, Kosovo Report, 172, 290; see also Jürgen Habermas, “Bestiality and Humanity: A War on the Border between Law and Morality,” in Kosovo: Contending Voices on Balkan Intervention, ed. William Joseph Buckley (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2000), 306–316 and Catherine Guicherd, “International Law and the War in Kosovo,” Survival 41, no. 2 (1999): 19–34.

59. Refer to Wheeler, Saving Strangers, 275–281.

60. Thomas M. Franck, “Legal Interpretation and Change in the Law of Humanitarian Intervention,” in Humanitarian Intervention: Ethical, Legal and Political Dilemmas, ed. J. L. Holzgrefe and Robert O. Keohane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 225.

61. Independent International Commission on Kosovo, Kosovo Report, 4, 61.

62. Ibid., 4–5, 163–64, 172–73, 176.

63. International Development Research Centre for ICISS, Responsibility to Protect.

64. See, for instance, Gareth Evans, Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2008).

65. See, for instance, Aidan Hehir, “The Responsibility to Protect: ‘Sound and Fury Signifying Nothing?’ ” International Relations 24, no. 2 (2010): 218–239; David Chandler, “The Paradox of the ‘Responsibility to Protect,’ ” Cooperation and Conflict 45, no. 1 (2010): 128–134.

66. Hehir, “Responsibility to Protect,” 233–35.

67. Alex J. Bellamy, “Whither the Responsibility to Protect? Humanitarian Intervention and the 2005 World Summit,” Ethics and International Affairs 20, no. 2 (2006): 143–69, specifically 169.

68. Bellamy, “Responsibility to Protect or Trojan Horse?” 52.

69. Ibid., 31–53.

70. For the impact of norms on political change see Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink, “International Norm Dynamics and Political Change,” International Organization 52, no. 4 (1998): 887–918. See also, Ward Thomas, The Ethics of Destruction: Norms and Force in International Relations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001).