II. WAR AND PEACE

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Notes

¹For insight and perspective on the disintegration process, see, for example, Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War (London: Penguin Books, 1996).

²The term ‘ethnic’ is used here in the regional shorthand whereby religious affiliation is equated with ethnicity.

³The estimate endorsed by the Slovenian government is sixty-three dead and 328 wounded on both sides: Janez J Svajncer, ‘War for Slovenia 1991’, Slovenska Vojska, May 2001, <http://www.slovenija2001.gov.si/10years/path/war/>, accessed 28 October 2012.

⁴The Croatian War of Independence ended with a final death toll of approximately 22,000. Marko Attila Hoare, ‘Genocide in Bosnia and the Failure of International Justice’, Working Paper Series No. 8, Helen Bamber Centre for the Study of Rights and Conflict, Kingston University, London, April 2008, p. 8, <http://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/5511/1/Hoare-M-5511.pdf>, accessed 10 March 2013.

⁵Council of Europe, ‘Report Submitted by Bosnia and Herzegovina Pursuant to Article 25, Paragraph 1 of the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities’, ACFC/SR (2004) 001, 20 February 2004, <http://www.coe.int/t/dghl/monitoring/minorities/3_fcnmdocs/PDF_1st_SR_BiH_en.pdf>, accessed 8 March 2013.

⁶Rebekah Heil, ‘Bosnia's Book of the Dead’, Institute for War and Peace Reporting, 26 June 2007, <http://www.iwpr.net/report-news/bosnias-book-dead>, accessed 4 November 2012.

⁷A UN force was deployed in 1992 with the mandate to ensure the delivery of humanitarian supplies, but there is not space to discuss that operation in depth, nor NATO support to the UN operation before the climactic year of 1995. That NATO support comprised two elements: a maritime blockade intended to isolate the battlefields of former Yugoslavia, conducted in co-operation with the Western European Union, and the enforcement of a no-fly zone over BiH.

⁸Western leaders still hoped that negotiations could lead to peace, but the reality was that six major efforts had been rejected: 1) the European Economic Community Carrington–Cutileiro Peace Plan; 2) the Vance–Owen Peace Plan; 3) the HMS Invincible Peace Talks; 4) the Owen–Stoltenberg Plan; 5) the Contact Group Plan; and 6) the four-month Carter Cessation of Hostilities Agreement. The warring parties were set on a military solution: the prevailing idea was that if the adversary did not surrender, the final peace agreement would divide the country in two, and the preceding peace negotiations would be based on territory held. Thus, holding ground was more than symbolic: it was a matter of getting what all parties believed to be rightfully theirs, and, more than ever in this lengthy slogging match, success was measured in metres.

⁹For a perspective on this history of Serbs in general, see Tim Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

¹⁰The UN ‘safe areas’ were designated ‘humanitarian corridors’ under the protection of UN peacekeeping units, established in 1993 by UN Security Council Resolutions 819 (16 April, Srebrenica) and 824 (6 May, Bihac, Goradze, Sarajevo, Tuzla and Zepa).

¹¹On 25 May 1995, the UN Protection Force commander, General Rupert Smith, announced that all heavy weapons, tanks, artillery and large mortars had to cease fire by noon that day, and that all such weapon systems had to be delivered to UN checkpoints, or moved outside of a long-established 20-kilometre exclusion zone by noon on 26 May. Smith declared, ‘Failure to comply with either deadline will result in the offending party or parties being attacked from the air’. The Army of the RS (VRS) did not comply with the deadline; as a consequence US aircraft operating under NATO auspices attacked an ammunition storage site a short distance outside Sarajevo. General Mladic's retaliatory move was to shell the market square in Tuzla, killing seventy people. To demonstrate resolve, NATO attacked six more military bunkers. In return, General Mladic ordered his troops to take UN hostages, chaining them to the ammunition bunkers in Pale and the nearby communications site. These ‘human shields’ were also paraded as hostages on television. The leaders of the UN countries involved were furious, but so concerned with the safety of their troops that NATO had to stand down. General Mladic saw this outcome as an undisputed victory. He had ordered Bosnian Serb troops to take UN personnel hostage before and in his mind these last events confirmed that taking UN hostages constituted a successful response to NATO bombing. These actions were clearly in breach of international law and led to very bad publicity for the Bosnian Serbs. See Tim Ripley, Operation Deliberate Force: The UN and NATO Campaign in Bosnia 1995 (Lancaster: Centre for Defence and International Security Studies, 1999), p. 107. For more insight into General Smith's thoughts on this time period, see Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (London: Penguin Books, 2006), pp. 332–70.

¹²This was determined subsequently by the International Court of Justice to have been genocide. International Court of Justice, Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro), Judgment, ICJ Reports 2007 (The Hague: ICJ, 2007).

¹³Willy Claes, press statement of 30 August 1995, quoted in Robert C Owen (ed.), Deliberate Force: A Case Study in Effective Air Campaigning (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 2000), p. 59. The strategic political objectives of NATO's air campaign, agreed upon by the UN and NATO countries that summer, were to: reduce the threat to the Sarajevo safe area and deter further attacks there or on any other safe area; force withdrawal of Bosnian Serb heavy weapons from the 20-kilometre total exclusion zone around Sarajevo; ensure complete freedom of movement for UN forces and personnel as well as NGOs; and to ensure unrestricted use of Sarajevo airport.

¹⁴Mark A Bucknam, ‘Michael E. Ryan: Architect of Air Power Success’, in John Andreas Olsen (ed.), Air Commanders (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2013), p. 359.

¹⁵Mark A Bucknam, ‘Michael E. Ryan: Architect of Air Power Success’, in John Andreas Olsen (ed.), Air Commanders (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2013), p. 359.

¹⁶Ripley, Operation Deliberate Force, p. 316.

¹⁷‘Operation Deliberate Force: country vs. number of sorties: United States (2,318); United Kingdom (326); France (284); the Netherlands (198); Spain (121); NATO, NAEWF (96); Turkey (78); Germany (59); and Italy (35) – total of 3,515.’ See John A Tirpak, ‘Deliberate Force’, Air Power Magazine, October 1997, p. 39. In the end, Operation Deliberate Force encompassed 3,515 sorties flown (of which 2,470 were bombing strikes as opposed to surveillance and other support missions). Leaving out the days between 30 August and 20 September when the bombing was formally halted, the entire campaign involved less than two weeks of strikes from the air. As a comparison, in NATO's two subsequent air campaigns, Serbia was subject to 38,004 sorties over a seventy-eight day period whilst in Libya, 26,500 sorties took place over eight months.

¹⁸NATO would in due course play a military enforcement role in the peace, and to some extent this required a degree of confrontation with Bosnian Serbs – notably in the process of apprehending indicted war criminals. On the whole, however, NATO has viewed its post-war peace-enforcement role and subsequent involvement in defence reform as separate from the air campaign and preceding no-fly-zone and maritime-blockade operations.

¹⁹The UN Security Council has renewed the mandate in the November of each year since 1995.

²⁰The legitimacy of the ‘Bonn Powers’ (named after the location in which the PIC met to define them) has been challenged increasingly both within and outside BiH, and the appetite to use them is now much reduced. However, during the period 2002–06, the Bonn Powers were widely used by the incumbent High Representative Paddy Ashdown.

²¹Although after the war a range of figures up to 200,000 casualties were cited by various sources, in 2007 the Sarajevo-based Research and Documentation Centre offered an estimate of approximately 97,000 (40 per cent of whom were civilians), based on two years of research subjected to external review (see Heil, ‘Bosnia's Book of the Dead’). In 2010, two well-placed researchers working for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia arrived at an estimate of approximately 104,000: 35–40 per cent of them civilians. See Jan Zwierzchowski and Ewa Tabeau, ‘The 1992–95 War in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Census-Based Multiple System Estimation of Casualties’ Undercount’, conference paper for the International Research Workshop on ‘The Global Costs of Conflict’, Berlin, 1–2 February 2010.

²²And three languages – Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian – vice what had previously been one language called Serbo-Croat written in two alphabets (Latin and Cyrillic).

²³Office of the High Representative, ‘The General Framework Agreement: Annex 1A: Agreement on the Military Aspects of the Peace Settlement’, 14 December 1995, <http://www.ohr.int/dpa/default.asp?content_id =368>, accessed 4 November 2012.

²⁴OHR, ‘The General Framework Agreement: Annex 4: Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina’, 14 December 1995, <http://www.ohr.int/dpa/default.asp?content_id=372>, accessed 4 November 2012.

²⁵Observations by Rohan Maxwell (co-author), participant in a number of these efforts in 2003–04.

²⁶Christian Haupt and Jeff Fitzgerald, ‘Negotiations on Defence Reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina', in Predrag Jurekovic and Frederic Labarre, From Peace Making to Self Sustaining Peace: International Presence in South East Europe at a Crossroads?, Report of the 8th Workshop Study Group, ‘Regional Stability in South East Europe' (Vienna: National Defence Academy, 2004).

²⁷Observations by Rohan Maxwell (co-author), observer and evaluator for this exercise. The exercise is also described by SFOR in SFOR Informer, ‘BiH Defence Force “Assist the Casualties, 2004”’, No. 171, June 2004, <http://www.nato.int/sfor/indexinf/articles/040508a/t040508a.htm>, accessed 10 March 2013.

²⁸Haupt and Fitzgerald, ‘Negotiations on Defence Reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina’. Note that other UN contributions were considered. During 2002, the military adviser to the UN Mission to BiH brokered consensus on the deployment of a BiH composite VRS/VF transport unit on UN peace-support duties, but the entities could not agree on a command structure for the unit and the UN refused to accept the solution proposed by BiH (a unit comprised of BiH personnel, but with a commander from another country).

²⁹At this juncture, the OHR had a multinational military cell headed by a two-star general, while SFOR, commanded by a three-star, had a Joint Military Affairs division headed by a one-star. The OHR led the effort to develop the SCMM, with support and technical expertise provided by both SFOR and the US-funded consultant company, Military Professional Resources Incorporated. Observations by Rohan Maxwell (co-author), assigned to the OHR Military Cell in 2003.

³⁰Haupt and Fitzgerald, ‘Negotiations on Defence Reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina’.

³¹OSCE Mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina, ‘Politico-Military Section Comments on OHR Possible Reforms in Defence’, Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, Sarajevo, 14 March 2003.

³²Author correspondence with Johannes Viereck, OHR Security Sector Advisory Unit, 3 February 2013.

³³George Robertson, NATO secretary general, ‘Letter to Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina’, 11 November 2002.

³⁴OHR, ‘Decision Establishing the Defense Reform Commission’, 9 May 2003, <http://www.ohr.int/decisions/statemattersdec/default.asp?content_id=29840>, accessed 4 November 2012.

³⁵Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, NATO secretary general, Letter to Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 16 December 2004.

³⁶OHR, ‘Decision Extending the Mandate of the Defence Reform Commission’, 31 December 2004, <http://www.ohr.int/decisions/statemattersdec/default.asp?content_id=33873>, accessed 28 February 2013.

³⁷NATO, ‘NATO Istanbul Summit Communiqué, Issued by the Heads of State and Government Participating in the Meeting of the North Atlantic Council', 28 June 2004, <http://www.nato.int/docu/pr/2004/p04-096e.html>, accessed 24 April 2013.