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Serbian aggressors is not effective,” they wrote. They recommended
countering Serbian obstruction with “a credible deterrent”
to protect Muslim areas, including the use of aircraft
“to attack artillery units which are firing on those enclaves or
on humanitarian convoys.”
The experience in the former Yugoslavia shed more light
on the constructive roles of the military in certain areas such as
regular security advice and occasional convoy escort than it
did on the application of various levels of military force in
support of humanitarian operations in war zones. While the
terms of engagement in the former Yugoslavia were demonstrably
ineffective, the impacts on humanitarian operations of
additional force and more insistent military pressure are not
known.
Issues related to the application of military clout in support
of humanitarian objectives are connected to the broader
issue of the use of force in international relations. The limited
terms of reference of UNPROFOR troops in a setting where the
indiscriminate use of force by the belligerents made a mockery
of humane values struck many, reportedly including the warring
parties themselves, as self-defeating. UNPROFOR troops
were dubbed by detractors as “eunuchs at an orgy.”
In January 1993, following a Croatian army attack on a
Serb-controlled area in the Krajina, UNPROFOR troops stationed
in the area were criticized for not having intervened.
UNPROFOR’s chief of civil affairs Cedric Thornberry responded,
“We can’t go around and bang the table and say,
‘You do this or else we will blow you to blazes...’ That’s not the
goal of the United Nations and we don’t have the authority to
do it.” The U.N.’s approach, he said, is to work “the slow
way...building bridges between communities.”
While agreeing that the use of military force was characterized
by inflated rhetoric and deflated muscle, the team did
not agree on whether the application of greater force would
have resulted in more effective humanitarian programs. We
were in even less of a position to evaluate whether alternative
military strategy and tactics—“ring deployment” around strategic
areas, “take down” of the heavy artillery ringing Sarajevo
and air strikes against other Serb positions, serious enforcement
of the “no-fly zone,” and “over the top” insertion of
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