op 18 front pages-converted - The Watson Institute for International ...

there,” worrying about such essentials as nutritional adequacy,
prenatal care, and the training of social workers. The most
sensible course of action, said a senior humanitarian official in
Belgrade, is simply to accept the fact that “For people here in
Serbia, the U.N. is the U.N., and the U.N. is UNPROFOR.”
Even those who acknowledged that the organization’s
political and military action framed the context for their action
insisted that humanitarian activities never be viewed as a
component of peacekeeping operations. It is worth remembering,
noted DHA Director Charles LaMunière, that in Bosnia
and Somalia, if not in Croatia, humanitarian operations triggered
troop deployment, and that humanitarian action had its
own special imperatives and distinctive style.
In the view of UNICEF’s Deputy Executive Director Richard
Jolly, the fact that different parts of the U.N. take different
approaches reflects the complexity of the issues, not a fatal
disarray within the organization. “I have no problem with
somewhat contradictory responses within the U.N.,” he said.
On the other hand, an insistence on total consistency could
become the enemy of humanitarian action.
Others read the lessons of the former Yugoslavia more
negatively. The conclusion noted earlier that the “UNHCR
should never get involved in a civil war again” was reached by
an official who saw a fundamental contradiction in a humanitarian
operation run, as he put it, by Security Council resolutions.
Some viewed what they called the schizophrenia within
the system as so structural as to justify the creation of a new
unit within the U.N.’s peacekeeping department that would
take over humanitarian duties whenever the Security Council
imposed economic sanctions or committed troops in an enforcement
action.
UNICEF’s Jolly disagreed. To sideline an agency like
UNICEF, whose mission and history equip it to help vulnerable
populations in war zones, would be shortsighted. While
maximum distance between the two facets of the United
Nations should be maintained, he expressed the view that
placing those who need assistance outside the reach of its
existing humanitarian organizations would compromise their
very reason for being.
In short, the United Nations’ experience in the former
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