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

ing. Whatever the difficulties with helping people flee, assisting
those who had fled could hardly be construed as encouraging
ethnic cleansing. As IOM Director-General James N.
Purcell, Jr. remarked in July 1992, “While all efforts have to be
made to stop ethnic cleansing, we cannot close our eyes in
front of the needs of those forced to flee.” At the same time, the
appropriateness of assisting civilians, once they had moved
into cleansed areas, required review. Doing so seemed to
accept ethnic cleansing, even granting the human needs of
populations shifted into newly available areas.
It is easy to be wise after the event and to criticize UNHCR
for having made questionable choices. The international community
deserves to be held accountable for not having prevented
genocide or bringing ethnic cleansing to an effective
halt. Moreover, given the reality that all humanitarian initiatives
have political ramifications, the UNHCR challenge was
to minimize the negative political consequences of its undertakings,
not to refrain from undertaking humanitarian action
altogether.
4. Carrying out Strategic Planning
A recurring policy challenge in major humanitarian initiatives
is strategic planning. Difficult in natural disasters, developing
and implementing a strategic plan is more difficult still
in complex emergencies. The unusual complexity and scale of
the crisis in the former Yugoslavia made strategic planning a
formidable task.
How well did the U.N. meet the challenge? “The U.N.
never had an overall plan or concept of what it was trying to
accomplish with humanitarian activities in the former Yugoslavia,”
said Fred Cuny, a veteran of many relief operations,
who had spent much of 1993 in Sarajevo spearheading efforts
by the International Rescue Committee and Soros Foundation
to rehabilitate energy and water systems. “The U.N. agencies
found themselves unprepared to operate in the midst of a war.
They lacked the experience, operational doctrines, standard
operating procedures, and legal framework to guide their
moves. As a result, the U.N.’s humanitarian organizations
reacted to events rather than shaping them.”
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