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Overview
Sympathetic to the UN’s achievements, yet skeptical of its acquiescence to the use of military force, Corwin is critical both of the Bosnian government’s tactics for drawing NATO into the conflict and of NATO’s eagerness to make peace by waging war. He challenges the popular depiction of the Bosnian government as that of noble victim, arguing that the leaders of all three sides in the conflict were “gangsters wearing coats and ties.” Highly caustic about Western reportage, he examines the policies of various Western political and military leaders and gives a detailed account of a pivotal phase of the war in Bosnia, a period that culminated with NATO’s massive bombing of Bosnian Serb targets and ultimately led to the Dayton Peace Agreement. Without a proper understanding of this critical period, he argues, it is difficult to understand the greater scope of the conflict. Corwin also offers insightful portraits of some of the leading players in the Bosnian drama, including Yasushi Akashi, the UN’s top official in the former Yugoslavia in 1994–95; General Rupert Smith, the British commander in Sarajevo in 1995; and Hasan Muratovic, a future Bosnian prime minister.
Capturing the essence of a tense and difficult time, Dubious Mandate will interest diplomats, politicians, military personnel, scholars, and those still trying to fathom the continuing mission of the United Nations and the unfolding of events in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822379072 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/21/1999 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 312 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Phillip Corwin held a number of posts during his twenty-seven years with the United Nations, including that of a speechwriter for former Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar. After participating in peacekeeping missions in Haiti, Western Sahara, and Afghanistan, he became the UN’s chief political officer in Sarajevo. He is also the author of three collections of short stories and three books of poetry.
Read an Excerpt
Dubious Mandate
A Memoir of the UN in Bosnia, Summer 1995
By Phillip Corwin
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1999 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7907-2
CHAPTER 1
The Notebooks
MAY
4 May 1995
Arrived Sarajevo last night by car from Split, Croatia. Eventful journey. Couldn't fly because Sarajevo airport is closed. Came as part of a convoy. Several UN vehicles. I was in a large GMC armored car. We were four. Driver was a 20-year-old Danish soldier from Headquarters company in Sarajevo. Others: a French warrant officer, mid-thirties, who was a bodyguard/driver; and my personal assistant, Dianne Fairweather.
Shortly after passing through Kiseljak, a Croatian pocket in the federation, we came upon two men in civilian clothes walking by the side of the road and waving frantically for us to stop. We were in Bosnian government territory. The two men worked in the UNPROFOR Administrative Office in Sarajevo. One was a Filipino, the other was an East European. They had just had their car hijacked by armed men in civilian clothes. Their vehicle was a white Nissan pick-up, clearly marked with the UN logo. The Filipino was terribly upset. He said it was the second time he had been hijacked, and he had had enough of Bosnia. "They pointed guns at me and told me to get out of the car," he said. "I don't know what they were saying, but one looked drunk and was pointing his gun at me. You know, these people don't like Asians. There were four of them." His companion was silent, but he was scared too, I could tell.
We contacted UNPROFOR headquarters in Sarajevo by car radio and told them to notify the closest military unit in the area about the hijacking. We then gave both men a ride to Sarajevo. The Filipino kept swearing that he was going to leave the mission as soon as possible.
Having been threatened several times myself by drunken soldiers with guns, I know very well how the two men felt. It happens to most of us on peacekeeping missions. You try to block out such memories. Sometimes you even try to block it out while it's happening. You keep saying to yourself, No, this can't he happening. He wont shoot me. There's no reason for him to shoot me. I'm not even a combatant, Ym an international peacekeeper. That's what happens on peacekeeping missions. It happened to me in Afghanistan, it happened to me in Croatia, and it will probably happen to me again in Bosnia. And no matter how many times it happens, you never get used to it. And you never forget it.
What surprised me was that the hijacking happened on territory controlled by the Bosnian government, and not far outside Sarajevo. One expects hijacking in Bosnian Serb territory, or in Bosnian Croat territory. Not here. But there are gangsters everywhere in Bosnia. Not necessarily in equivalent numbers, but they are everywhere, and they all have armed elements that hate the UN.
Doubt if UNPROFOR will ever retrieve the hijacked vehicle. Hijackers in Bosnia are very professional. Specialists, one might say. Usually drive the hijacked vehicle immediately to a pre-arranged location, more often than not a police station, spray-paint the vehicle a different color, change the license plate, and within hours, have a new car. Sometimes they sell the car on the black market, sometimes cannibalize it for spare parts to use in other stolen cars. In any case, along with the vehicle went a Motorola car radio, on which one can listen to UNPROFOR communications. And since it's impossible for us to change our communications codes every time a car is hijacked, we have to assume that our mobile communications are monitored by all sides.
Next "event" was that we almost went off the road and over the precipice while crossing Mount Igman. The dirt road over Igman is thin and narrow, and meant for goats, not wide-bodied armored vehicles. We were delayed and pushed off to the side by a Bosnian military convoy. Military convoys always move at night. It took hours for us to cross over Igman. Dark by the time we were at the top. Our vehicle had night lights, which couldn't be seen by Serb artillery gunners, who normally target the road during the day. The road, meanwhile, has numerous switchbacks. At one point our driver, who was driving slowly, didn't turn fast enough, and suddenly we had stopped and were staring at nothingness. There was brush under our tires instead of dirt road. You could feel it. The night lights were not focusing on trees or other vehicles. They were fixed on nothingness for as far as we could see. Our driver applied the brakes, backed up slowly, and turned back onto the dirt road. The French warrant officer asked if perhaps he should drive, since he had more experience in crossing over Igman. Dianne thought that would be a good idea. I said nothing. But we didn't switch drivers, and we made it over Igman.
The two men who were hijacked will make a formal report today. Probably they will leave. Any international worker who wants to leave Bosnia can do so—a privilege resented, understandably, by local inhabitants.
Law and order (what I call law and ordure) in Bosnia is minimal. One expects danger on a battlefield, but off the battlefield one hopes for a minimum of law and order. No way. The local situation is close to anarchy, most of all in Bosnian Serb areas. Most trained police have been drafted into local armies. The remaining police are either poorly trained or unconcerned with anything but their own survival, including supporting their families. And everyone has guns. Finally, the international community is considered fair prey, by all sides, albeit for different reasons, so that crimes against us are not only tolerated but even encouraged. We are considered political antagonists by the Moslems and Croats because we won't take a more aggressive stance against the Serbs, and by the Serbs because we are considered partial to the Moslems and Croats. And we are rich. We have food and clothing and electronic gear. Good pickings.
One can never relax anywhere in Bosnia.
5 May 1995
Began "familiarization" tour of Bosnia today by attending a briefing at 8:00 A.M., chaired by Lieutenant General Rupert Smith, the British commander of UN military forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Smith holds three briefings each day: one at 8:00 A.M. for heads of all departments and agencies, civilian as well as military; a second one at 9:00 A.M. for select heads of departments, which includes mine, Civil Affairs; and a third at 6:00 P.M., to review what has gone on during the day. With few exceptions we all work seven days a week. The briefings are held in the United Nations barracks in Sarajevo.
I have just been appointed the UN'S chief political officer for Bosnia and Herzegovina, and before my predecessor leaves his post, he is giving me a whirlwind, four-day tour of the Sarajevo-Pale area to meet Bosnian government and, if possible, Bosnian Serb officials, as well as the heads of international agencies. My official title reads like an overturned cup of alphabet soup, but is significant for its intentions, once deciphered. I am Civil Affairs coordinator (CAC) and delegate of the special representative of the Secretary-General (D/SRSG) for Bosnia and Herzegovina. A Civil Affairs coordinator is expected to coordinate all nonmilitary aspects of the mission. There are seven Civil Affairs coordinators throughout all of former Yugoslavia, three of whom have the heightened status of being delegates of the UN Secretary-General's special representative.
The spreadsheet reads something like this. Yasushi Akashi, a Japanese national and a UN career diplomat, is based in Zagreb, Croatia, where the headquarters of the UN'S operations in former Yugoslavia is located. Akashi is the special representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG) for all of former Yugoslavia, which comprises the six republics of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia (officially called former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia [FYROM] because the name Macedonia has not yet been agreed to by Greece), Slovenia, Montenegro, and Serbia. The United Nations operation, which includes both civilian and military contingents, is known as the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR). At this point, UN troops are concentrated almost exclusively in Bosnia and Croatia, except for a few hundred in Macedonia as part of the UN'S first exercise of "preventive deployment." Because Akashi cant be everywhere at once, and because certain outposts are considered more important than others, he has "delegates" to represent him in Sarajevo, Belgrade, and Skopje. I have a staff of about thirty, at various sites in Bosnia, including suboffices at Bihac, Tuzla, and Gornji Vakuf.
CACS are essentially the eyes and ears of the United Nations Secretary-General, a kind of zoom lens into the darkest corners of the peacekeeping mission. We see and tell. At the same time, we are periscopes that poke up from the depths of the daily realities of war and surface, hopefully, in the clear light of day. The words we write are eventually transformed into the ambiguous and hallowed phrases of UN Security Council resolutions, which comprise our mandate. We, the premier political officials in our areas of responsibility (AORS), are the ones who begin the information chain that climbs from local happenings, through several critics, and lastly into the Secretary-General's reports to the Security Council. And it is, in part, on the basis of the Secretary-General's reports that the Security Council makes its momentous decisions—whether to authorize the use of force in Bosnia, whether to recognize the legitimacy of Croatia's international borders, or even how much to pay people like myself. The Security Council has the ultimate authority on how to conduct a peacekeeping mission, and it draws much of what it knows from what we tell it.
How the Security Council chooses to act on the basis of our information, when balanced against other sources of information, is of course its members' prerogative and is also based on a number of factors, not just on our and others' reports. Critically, one of those factors is domestic constituencies, and although such considerations seem extraneous to us and often contrary to the situation in the field, we are always aware that the United Nations, in perhaps its most important dimension, is its member governments and that member governments have domestic constituencies. Such are the realities of UN peacekeeping missions.
Information from the field comes essentially in two packets: military components are expected to provide military information to UNPROFOR headquarters in Zagreb and to United Nations headquarters in New York, whereas the CACS are supposed to provide political information. But in Bosnia, for various reasons, the military has become preeminent and has virtually usurped the role of Civil Affairs. I am hoping to restore some balance to that equation, even though I suspect my best intentions will be opposed by the Bosnian government, the international press, elements of my own staff in Sarajevo, and elements of the UN military command. United Nations political officials are very unpopular in Sarajevo.
CACS also have several functions beyond political reporting, such as "coordinating" the activities of the various international agencies and assisting in bringing together the warring parties on projects of common interest. For example, I will be trying to get the Bosnian Serbs and the Bosnian government to agree on restoring utilities to Sarajevo. [Unfortunately, I was unsuccessful in that endeavor.]
Because there is war in Bosnia now, and has been for three years, it would be naïve to expect parity between the civilian and military components of UNPROFOR, especially when the military side has more than twenty-seven thousand troops in the area (prior to the arrival of the Rapid Reaction Force [RRF], which added another several thousand), whereas Civil Affairs, as stated, has less than thirty. The reason that the civilian side of the mission in Bosnia has been submerged, however, has as much to do with politics as with numbers.
The fact is that the Bosnian government (and the world press, which are virtually the Bosnian government's cheerleaders and fester with soldierly righteousness) hasn't wanted peace in Bosnia for more than a year, since the tide of the war has begun to turn in its favor. Encouraged by Washington and Bonn, the Bosnian government thinks it can achieve a military victory in the long run, and it doesn't want to settle until it can deal from a position of strength. That is perfectly understandable, but it makes the task of UN political officials very difficult. The UN operation in Bosnia is a military operation as far as the Bosnian government is concerned, and it prefers to deal with military officials rather than with civilians, especially insofar as those civilians are representatives of Yasushi Akashi, who prefers, whenever possible, patient diplomacy to military action. The Bosnian government hates him.
At the 8:30 A.M. briefing, Smith & Co. discussed the possibility of calling for the use of NATO air power in Maglai against a Bosnian Serb tank that is shelling a British position. After brief discussion, it was decided that first, letters of protest, from both the CAC and Smith, would be sent to the appropriate Serb officials, asking them to halt the shelling. Aguilar will write to political officials in Pale, and Smith will write to the Bosnian Serb military leader, General Ratko Mladic. The Serbian tank is near a school, and the use of air power may risk collateral damage.
[From the UN standpoint, two types of air power can be used: close air support (CAS) and air strikes. Close air support is used only in self-defense. Air strikes are much more wide ranging and can be used to protect designated "safe areas," of which there are six throughout Bosnia. If air power were to be employed against the Serb tank in Maglai, it would be a case of close air support.
As it turned out, the tank stopped its shelling the following day, but it would resume from time to time, unpredictably, just to let us know it was there.]
[Perhaps it is worth saying a few words about the world press here, early on, because they were such a critical factor in the Bosnian equation, as they are increasingly in most world crises. In fact, their very presence on a world scene in large numbers makes that scene a crisis. If it was not a crisis beforehand, it is a crisis once they have arrived, simply because they have arrived.
There are several factors to note about the international press in Bosnia. First, they were very, very talented and very, very biased in favor of the Bosnian government. There was a high level of representation at Sarajevo by all the world's major news media. Most of the reporters were experienced and brilliant; relentless, investigative news gatherers; eloquent and epigrammatic editorial commentators. They were also accompanied by agile and sensational cameramen. It was a formidable array by anyone's standards. At one time or another during the war in Bosnia, all the media superstars, as well as a few world-class intellectuals, took the stage in Sarajevo, and usually whatever they said had a way of resonating.
The second factor about the press in Sarajevo, a corollary to the first, was that they knew so damned much, more than most of us. They had access to most of the major players; they had networks that fed them news and background from the metropolitan capitals, and they had firsthand experience on the ground. They knew the locals; they traveled throughout the government-controlled areas of Bosnia and in the other republics of former Yugoslavia, wherever their corporations or their inquiring imagination sent them; and they gathered an extensive portfolio of facts. Sometimes they distorted those facts, and more often they ignored other facts, but all the best ones did their homework before filing.
A third factor, and perhaps the most important one from my standpoint, was that the press were intractably critical of the United Nations. In short, they blamed us for not being tougher with the Bosnian Serbs, whom they deemed the unofficially convicted demons in the Bosnian drama. And because the press had such influence, such knowledge, and such talent, we were clearly overmatched. They were our most potent adversaries.
Moreover, their lack of objectivity created problems greater than that of undermining the UN'S credibility. By taking the side of the Bosnian government, they actually undermined the peace process. They inflamed public opinion and kept it in a state of high tension. Moreover, they failed to see that there were more than two sides to the conflict. It was not simply the Bosnian government against the Bosnian Serbs. The war in Bosnia was a polyhedron made up of Serbs, Croats, Moslems, the UN, NATO, the United States, and the Russian Federation, to name only the major players. The oversimplified view of the Bosnian civil war by the press actually undermined the peace process by attempting to interpret every development in terms of what significance it had for the Bosnian government, rather than what significance it had for a durable peace.
But we had to live with the press, and we did, as much in fear as in awe and as much with admiration as with anger.]
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Dubious Mandate by Phillip Corwin. Copyright © 1999 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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