By Connor Huntly
Less than 30 years ago, the Srebrenica massacre constituted the greatest human rights violation in Europe since the Holocaust. The 1990’s saw the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which heralded an unprecedented age of multilateralism, with the UN freed from Security Council vetoes that had prevailed, to ensure humanitarian aid and peace to vulnerable populations. The Yugoslav Wars, which were particularly brutal, provided an opportunity for multilateral intervention. Srebrenica, and the UNPROFOR (United Nations Protection Force) mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina, became one of the first UN post-Cold War projects, and ultimately one of its most pronounced failures, as Bosnian Muslims were targeted purely due to their ethnicity and religion.
Following economic troubles and the death of their emblematic leader Tito, the late 1980’s saw Yugoslavia’s downfall, fuelled by aggressive nationalist politicians, such as Franjo Tudjman and Slobodan Milošević. These nationalist aspirations for the creation of ethnic states evolved into fully fledged war in 1991, and the war spread to Bosnia following Bosnia’s declaration of independence on the 6th of April 1992.
A year later, in April 1993, UNPROFOR established Srebrenica, a Bosnian Muslim enclave, as a ‘safe area’ with Resolution 819. This served as both an admission and a guarantee that this area was vulnerable and would be defended with UN peacekeepers. However, in spite of this, humanitarian aid was disrupted from the outset by Bosnian Serb forces. In addition, the safe area of Srebrenica was never demilitarised or protected. This denoted an initial and fundamental shortcoming of the mission, and of the sovereignty of ‘safe areas’. Such shortcomings align with Adam LeBor’s evaluation of the UN’s modern failures to confront genocide, essentially prizing their neutrality over the aims of the mission, which he labels as ‘complicit with evil’.
UNPROFOR’s concerns with being presented as partial inhibited their ability to act and were fundamental in their refusal to defend Bosnian Serb civilians in the face of the Bosnian Serb ‘relocations’ from Srebrenica. Bosnian Serb forces, over a period of 11 days, massacred over 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys after capturing the so-called ‘safe area’ of Srebrenica, without a single defensive bullet being fired by UN peacekeepers.
An important part of this overt failure from UNPROFOR was their inability to accept responsibility. In 1999, the incoming Secretary General, Kofi Annan, published a report on the mission in Bosnia and specifically on the fall of Srebrenica. In this report, Annan admits UN failure, but the justifications for this, such as conflicting mandates or a failure to fully comprehend Bosnian Serb aims, are weak. The obvious violation of the sanctity of the safe area should have, regardless of conflicting mandates or a failure to understand aims, constituted a simple decision to use force in the protection of the inhabitants of Srebrenica. This idea is further corroborated by the UN’s distinct refusal to class the Srebrenica massacre as a genocide until 2003. Essentially, the failure of UNPROFOR in regard to Srebrenica was barefaced and attempts to divert responsibility are heinous.
Whilst these failures are abhorrent, it is vital that we hold the UNPROFOR mission, and the UN as a whole, accountable. Such accountability is vital in order to set a positive precedent so further human rights violations under the scope of UN projects can be avoided. The UN’s failures in Srebrenica and Rwanda in the 1990’s led to the creation of the Responsibility to Protect Doctrine - an attempt by the UN and the international community to promote more accountability. Evidently, two catastrophes of the scope of genocide, just a year apart, under the watch of the UN, demonstrated a need for greater intervention from international organisations to protect human rights of innocent civilians.