C. Wiebes - Intelligence en de oorlog in Bosnië 1992-1995. De rol van de inlichtingen- en veiligheidsdiensten - Engels

48Yugoslavia. A good example was the Bihac region in the north west of Bosnia. Muslim armed forcesthere who rejected the regime in Sarajevo and who were led by Abdic, hired tanks from the KrajinaSerbs. Abdic’s opponent was General Dudakovic of the Armija Bosna i Hercegovina (ABiH). He, in turn,hired tanks from the Bosnian Serbs. Another example was that it was hard for many Western militaryand intelligence officials to comprehend that the Bosnian Serbs were fighting the Croats in some areas,but at the same time they could be the greatest allies of the same Croats in other areas. 190In the general Western intelligence perception, alliances and enemies were ‘fixed concepts’.However, for the warring factions in Yugoslavia, such concepts were reviewed from day to day, withdue regard to potential local advantages that could come from an alliance. This, of course, hadconsequences for UNPROFOR, because the cooperation of the local warring factions is a conditionfor the success of a peacekeeping mission. This was hardly possible in an environment of constantlyvariable alliances.Obviously, much also depends on the nature of the conflict. If the warring factions are tworegular armies, certain patterns may be expected. It is then also relatively simple to gather intelligence.But the less central control and state authority there are, the more unpredictable the developmentsbecome, and the greater the risk that the conflict will become uncontrollable and that there will be, forexample, outbursts of violence against innocent civilians.This does not detract from the fact that regular and well-controlled army units are also capableof carrying out operations against civilians, as the Croats did in May 1995 in West Slavonia and in theKrajina in August 1995, and the Vojska Republika Srpska (VRS) in general did in Srebrenica. In general,however, attacks on civilians were usually carried out by irregular units.Nonetheless, the willingness to collaborate with each other and the assent of all warring factionsto the presence of a peacekeeping force are important factors for determining the legitimacy of apeacekeeping mission, together with the question of when force will be used. If there is no such generalwillingness and there is a vacuum of power, the warring factions - who are mostly more numerous andbetter armed than the UN troops - will challenge each display of force by the peacekeepers. In such acontext, the role of reliable intelligence becomes all the more important. The larger the externalinfluence as a deterrent to the warring factions, the less force will have to be used to protect thecivilians. During the conflict in Bosnia, neither these conditions for enforcing the peace, nor theconditions for a deterrent, were present. Therefore, intelligence was badly needed. 191All this led in 1992 to a situation in which Western intelligence services were confronted withan intelligence structure that was generally geared towards the ‘old’ threat from the East, and not suitedto the Balkans. The Western intelligence services had built up a complex set of warning indicators thatenabled them to detect this threat from the East in good time. 192 The complete capacity for gatheringintelligence was therefore concentrated on analysing a large-scale conflict, which had little to do withthe crisis in Yugoslavia. In general, the warring factions did not operate in large units, but mainly insmall and decentralized units that undertook no large-scale operations. This war was what is referred toas a low intensity conflict of which NATO (with the exception of a few member states) generally hadno experience. However, according to one source the principle US organizational and military policyshifts marking the departure from the ‘cold-war mentality’ were already completed by February 1993.According to this intelligence official they were certainly in place in Europe by that time. In particular,190 Confidential interview (45).191 David M. Last, ‘Peacekeeping Doctrine and Conflict Resolution Techniques’, Armed Forces & Society, Vol. 22 (1995)2, p.188.192 According to an US intelligence official was the US indicator system being alluded to here totally worthless, and anunsuccessful effort to adapt a cold war bean-counting mentality (where it never worked either) to an even more intractablescenario in the Balkans, and elsewhere around the world. It was broadly ignored, and only fed information becausesomewhere in Washington DC there was an avid audience for its absurd color-coded indicators. It was an enormous wasteof US time, money and manpower and was never regarded as being even remotely useful outside of Washington.Confidential information (80).