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

The difficulties encountered in the former Yugoslavia by
all humanitarian organizations led to soul-searching by both
the principled and the pragmatic. The ICRC, buffeted by
recent difficulties in the former Yugoslavia, Somalia, and
elsewhere, reviewed its own approach and redoubled its
efforts to encourage greater fidelity to international humanitarian
law. In August 1993, the Swiss government at the
ICRC’s urging convened an international conference for the
protection of war victims. International humanitarian law
was, ICRC President Cornelio Sommaruga told the meeting,
“the last bastion of human solidarity.”
Recent events also led the U.N. to rethink the terms of its
own engagement in situations of internal armed conflict.
While most scrutiny was directed toward a perceived overextension
of the U.N.’s peacekeeping and peacemaking activities,
U.N. humanitarian operations also began to come in for
review. The process, however, did not yet include a fundamental
examination by the world body of alternative means
for dealing with belligerents who flout humanitarian values.
It also did not examine the tensions created when member units
of the same organization conduct humanitarian programs sideby-side
with peacekeeping and peacemaking activities.
The Balance Sheet
As of late 1993, the jury was still out on whether one
approach was more successful than the other in the former
Yugoslavia. In a setting in which staff members of both schools
were hunkering down in the same quarters in the same towns,
the early evidence did not point decisively to the greater
success of one approach or the other. However, several elements
were already a matter of record.
First, the belligerents differentiated among organizations
and took the best deal they could get. In the area of assistance,
the parties sooner or later generally agreed to the conditions
stipulated by UNHCR, the basic supplier, for lifting the suspension
of food deliveries, although problems also recurred.
In the area of protection, the requests of UNHCR to visit
detention centers, unlike those of the ICRC, had few or no
conditions attached. As a result, ICRC feared that visits of-
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