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

with the costs of a full-service program made sense—the
inadequate response of governments to requests suggests that
the United Nations may have been correct—then this was an
international crisis that outran the willingness of the international
community to respond. If so, the concession that some
problems are too great for the international community to
tackle would have wide-ranging implications for post-Cold
War humanitarian action.
A second constraint in turning plans into operations was
that the humanitarian terrain in the former Yugoslavia was
unfamiliar and the magnitude of demands unprecedented.
Skilled professionals were hard to find and difficult to equip
with the necessary policy guidance, hardware, radio connections,
and other essential support.
In November 1991, UNHCR dispatched two officials on a
one-month tour. Two years later the agency was operating a
command center in Zagreb with four floors and an annex and
staff in each of the states of the former Yugoslavia. In addition
to a telecommunications network linking its offices and vehicles,
UNHCR operated a trucking fleet and an aircraft. In
spite of this infrastructure, it was not simply another large
operation such as the U.N. had carried out after floods in
Bangladesh or the volcanic eruption in the Philippines. The
war created special demands.
United Nations agencies that had never sustained a major
operation for an extended period in a war zone were faced
with the need for “armor” for humanitarian vehicles and staff.
UNHCR brought in security consultants, many of them former
military officers, to assist in training staff for frontline duty
and advising senior program managers on day-to-day tactical
matters. The lead agency was heavily criticized by field staff
for inadequate training and for delays in the arrival of flakjackets
and armored vehicles. Sixteen months into the operation,
there was still a shortage of flak-jackets.
If problems of suiting up the lead agency for battle were
sizable, UNHCR’s junior partners were no less overwhelmed.
In its report from the region covering the July to August 1993
period, WHO described a troubling series of security incidents.
These included, in addition to the killing of a UNHCR
staff member in a targeted attack, the capture of a U.N. convoy
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