The New York Times

Tuesday, November 16, 1999

U.N. Details Its Failure to Stop '95 Bosnia Massacre

By BARBARA CROSSETTE

UNITED NATIONS -- Secretary-General Kofi Annan laid out in a somber, self-critical report Monday the tragic story of how the United Nations allowed the Bosnian Muslim "safe area" of Srebrenica to be overrun in July 1995 by Bosnian Serbs, who then systematically killed thousands of its men and boys.

The fall of Srebrenica became a damaging symbol of the organization's failure at peacekeeping in a new era of brutal civil wars, and it demonstrated the inadequacy of a system that allowed political considerations to color military decisions when troops were under U.N. command.

"The tragedy of Srebrenica will haunt our history forever," the report concludes.

The fall of Srebrenica and other towns that the Security Council had identified as safe areas, but then refused to authorize enough troops to defend, led four months later to the U.S.-sponsored Dayton peace agreement and the introduction of a NATO-led international military force in Bosnia.

While blame is widely distributed in the U.N. report, the organization's examination of its own record in Srebrenica breaks new ground by effectively damning the diplomatic nicety of trying to remain neutral and above the fray in civil conflict.

This conclusion comes two months after Annan, taking a more aggressive stance on crimes against civilian populations, startled the opening session of this year's General Assembly by saying that national borders would no longer protect leaders who abuse people under their control.

With his declaration and Monday's report, the United Nations is saying that the time has come when it will have to take sides.

"Through error, misjudgment and the inability to recognize the scope of evil confronting us we failed to do our part to save the people of Srebrenica from the Serb campaign of mass murder," a senior U.N. official said Monday, introducing the report. "These failings were in part rooted in a philosophy of neutrality and nonviolence wholly unsuited to the conflict in Bosnia."

"In particular," this official said, "the report makes clear the inadequacy of the entire approach of the United Nations to the Serb campaign of ethnic cleansing and mass murder, culminating at Srebrenica."

Annan was then in charge of U.N. peacekeeping; Boutros Boutros-Ghali was the secretary-general, in overall command.

The report, based on about 100 interviews with a range of international figures involved in Bosnia, singles out the Bosnian Serb political and military leaders, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, as the "architects and implementers of the attempted genocide in Bosnia" and criticizes all those who negotiated with them rather than using military force against them in the early stages of the war. It demands that they be brought to trial.

"The cardinal lesson of Srebrenica," the report says, "is that a deliberate and systematic attempt to terrorize, expel or murder an entire people must be met decisively with all necessary means."

The report on Srebrenica was released on the same day that the three joint presidents of Bosnia, speaking to the Security Council on the fourth anniversary of the Dayton agreement, pledged to create the first integral national institutions for Bosnia. The country is now divided into an ethnic Serbian republic and a federation of Bosnian Muslim and Croat areas.

A multiethnic border patrol will be established to help curb cross-border terrorism, smuggling and corruption. A secretariat will be created for the joint presidency, which has had no shared staff, and a common passport for all Bosnians will be introduced. The three presidents have also agreed to form a peacekeeping unit of their own to contribute to the U.N. mission.

U.S. diplomats said that while these may seem like small steps, it took Richard Holbrooke, the author of the Dayton accord and now chief U.S. representative at the United Nations, six hours Sunday night to extract agreement on them.

Officials say that the willingness of the three presidents -- Alija Izetbegovic, a Muslim; Ante Jelavic, a Croat, and Zivko Radisic, a Serb -- to act jointly in issuing what they call their Declaration of New York reflects some important changes in the political atmosphere of the Balkans.

The Bosnians now see their neighbors moving toward integration in Europe and possible membership in the European Union -- a hope that a fragmented, frequently dysfunctional Bosnian state cannot possibly entertain.

Moreover, U.S. officials said, the crumbling economic power and unstable political situation in Serbia, the major republic remaining in Yugoslavia, mean that Serbia is no longer a beacon to the Bosnian Serb republic, which is now economically stronger in some ways than the Serbian motherland.

The officials said that in recent months displaced people in Bosnia, apparently feeling more secure, have begun returning to rural areas from which they were displaced as ethnic minorities during the four-year Bosnian war.

"With this important act," Holbrooke said in the Security Council on Monday, "the presidents have taken a major step toward consolidating the progress of the past few years -- and in doing so, have helped Bosnia take another step toward fulfilling the vision of Dayton: a unified, single democratic country."

Bosnian Muslims now control the Srebrenica city council, though not without considerable fears for their own safety, officials say. Elected in 1997 but unable to venture back to the town for more than a year, they were among the survivors of the massacres in July 1995.

Srebrenica was then under the guardianship of 110 Dutch peacekeepers, who were no match for the Serbs who suddenly surrounded and assaulted the town. The U.N. report on Monday says that the Dutch commander had asked for NATO air support on four or five occasions but was either turned down or, finally, provided with two patrols that dropped only two bombs and left.

The Dutch government, however, feared that its troops might be taken hostage and at least on one occasion strongly opposed airstrikes.

The report says that the Dutch could have been more forthright in reporting immediately after the incident what evidence they had that a massacre was taking place. The study also faulted French and British commanders leading U.N. troops for their reluctance to call on NATO.

But at the heart of the problem of protecting the safe areas -- Srebrenica, Zepa, Goradze, Bihac, Tuzla and Sarajevo -- was the refusal of Security Council members, including the United States, to authorize enough troops to do the job. Boutros-Ghali wanted 34,000; the Security Council authorized only 7,400. Later, U.S. politicians blamed the secretary-general for the capture of most of those enclaves.

"When the international community makes a solemn promise to safeguard and protect innocent civilians from massacre," the report says, "then it must be willing to back its promise with the necessary means."