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

European Union on November 1, 1993—and the Conference
on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), by a succession
of Special Representatives of the U.N. Secretaries-General,
and by the Security Council itself. Neither the advent of
a new U.S. administration in January 1993 nor discussion later
that year of a major military role for NATO troops reflected a
heightened or sustained level of international resolve. The
Security Council authorized UNPROFOR to use “all measures
necessary” to deliver assistance but shrank from the application
of force.
Sensing weak international resolve early on, the
belligerents manipulated humanitarian organizations and interests.
They treated humanitarian programs and personnel
with abandon, exploiting the importance attached by international
public opinion to keeping such activities going at almost
any price. “People look at us as if to say, ‘We know you’re
feeding us to compensate for the fact that your governments
won’t act,’” observed Maria Bellacque-Bellar, Sarajevo-based
representative of the French NGO Action International Contre
La Faim (AICF). The prevailing sentiment seemed to be that,
as one columnist expressed it in November 1993, the world
was dealing with “an insoluble problem in which outsiders
could do no more than comfort the wounded and feed the
starving.”
The political impasse undermined major international
humanitarian initiatives. Efforts by UNPROFOR troops and
UNHCR officials to assist and protect civilians in Bosnia and
Herzegovina were ridiculed when the Security Council demanded
that besieged enclaves be treated as “safe areas.”
Encircling Serb forces did their best to assure that such enclaves
remained anything but safe, despite international political
rhetoric to the contrary.
“Helping people where they are” was widely viewed as a
euphemism employed by European countries to mask reluctance
to meet their accepted obligations to provide asylum.
The much-trumpeted creation of a human rights tribunal was
undercut by the failure to provide it and other bodies collecting
evidence with adequate financial and personnel resources.
The attention lavished on belligerent leaders, some of whom
might face indictment, and the speculation that eventual pros-
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