Fighting for Peace

General Sir Michael Rose had a reputation of being a tough soldier. As a paratrooper, he commanded the 22nd Special Air Service Regiment during the Falklands War and earned the Queen’s Gallantry Medal. In addition to the physical bravery he has so often demonstrated, he had the moral courage to accept without hesitation the command of United Nations forces in Bosnia, a “poisoned chalice” that had devastated the reputations of his two predecessors. Yet not long after this very capable, courageous officer arrived in Bosnia, he was derided by the U.S. media as a reincarnation of Neville Chamberlain and a Serbian lackey.

General Rose has written his new book, Fighting for Peace, not so much to restore his reputation, which needs no restoration since it remains high among responsible military and governing officials, but to describe what a peacekeeping force is, what it can and cannot do, and how best the UN can prepare for future peacekeeping operations, which now seem to be inevitable.

General Rose’s arrival in Bosnia epitomized, in a way, the entire situation there. As he drove into Sarajevo, a detachment of Bosnian army mortars began shelling Serbian positions in the hills above. A colleague explained that this was standard operating procedure. New arrivals were always treated this way, and when the Serbs responded with counterfire it was regarded as proof of Serbian aggression and a further reason for the West to support Bosnia.

The UN headquarters in Bosnia was in a large rambling structure called the Residency, dating from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Under the communists it had housed the Delegates Club, an eating and drinking place where communist officials could relax and exchange opinions. As such, it was a natural target for secret police surveillance. The Bosnian government kept to tradition by maintaining the old wire taps, even improving on them. The local staff was paid (although not well) by the Bosnian government, and it was presumed that they also reported to the secret police, who were conveniently located next door. It was thus difficult to have a confidential conversation within the building. On the other hand, it was easy to pass opinions and comments on to Bosnian intelligence without going through official channels.

General Rose considered one of his main duties to be the facilitation of the delivery of humanitarian relief supplies. In this respect, he promised a more “robust” approach. Convoys were to be better protected, combatants were to be reminded of previous agreements they had signed and subsequently broken, and the UN, to maintain its effectiveness, was obliged to be impartial.

This very pragmatic approach is perhaps what brought the beleaguered general so much criticism. Where most Western correspondents considered the war in Bosnia one of aggression, an invading Serbian army inflicting genocide on Muslim victims, Rose viewed it as a typical civil war: people with a common language but different religions all striving for mastery. The Bosnian Croats wanted to join Croatia with as much territory as possible; the Bosnian Serbs wanted to join Serbia with as much territory as possible; and the Muslims wanted Bosnia to remain intact and be ruled, of course, by themselves.

The importance of the news media and its tremendous influence on policy in obscure corners of the world was well known to General Rose and his staff. As he reports, he made considerable effort to keep the media informed of what the UN was doing and why and kept his offices open to any correspondent who wished to ask questions. But when people came with agendas to fill rather than a disinterested desire to report what was actually happening, work became difficult.

For example, after extraordinary effort the UN, despite Muslim foot-dragging, managed to impose a cease-fire in Sarajevo in February 1994. The media, of course, were skeptical as to whether the truce would hold, as they had every right to be. Yet skepticism should not get in the way of reporting. Peter Arnett of CNN arrived in time for the truce, had himself filmed on the roof of the Holiday Inn, and reported that Sarajevo was under heavy attack by the Serbs, implying that the UN cease-fire had collapsed. The truth was that there was very little firing, and what there was came from the Muslim side. When Arnett left shortly after, Rose expressed no regrets. The cease-fire, despite everything, continued to hold.

In addition to a hostile and uninformed media, General Rose was faced with a profound political split in the West between those who favored what he called a war policy, that is, arm the Muslims and use NATO air power to bomb the Serbs into submission, and those who favored continued negotiations to bring a halt to the fighting and relief to the population. If, indeed, the UN mission was to secure peace and save lives, there seemed hardly a choice. But there were those, particularly in the United States, who proclaimed “aggression should not be rewarded.” Hawkish members of Congress, led by Senator Robert Dole, pressed for immediate bombing (lift and strike was the catchphrase). Ironically, these calls for bombing came from a country that had no troops on the ground and an administration that was determined not to send troops until a clear-cut peace was reached. But even the United States was not of one mind. Secretary of Defense William Perry asked the basic question, What happens after you bomb?

A further irony is that General Rose believed that an areawide peace could have been reached much earlier if the United States had been willing to put some pressure on the Muslims. He cites in support of this argument the Vance-Owen peace plan of 1993, which foundered because of the lack of U.S. backing; the UN Protection Forces (UNPROFOR) proposals in 1994, which came to naught for the same reason. The territorial arrangements concluded in the 1995 Dayton agreements, which finally brought peace to the region, did not differ significantly from these earlier proposals.

General Rose’s main complaints, however, lie with the leaders, sometimes called warlords, of both the Muslims and the Serbs. He looked on them as impediments to the peace the majority of the population wanted. He does not dwell on the known venality of both sides but does say that the siege of Sarajevo might have been lifted much sooner if it had not been a source of profit for certain commanders.

On the Serbian side, he viewed Radovan Kradizic, the president of Bosnian Serbia, and his commanding general, Mlatko Mladic, as near psychopaths, overly dependent on alcohol and remote from reality. Both were later designated war criminals by the UN.

On the Muslim side, he describes Ejup Ganic, the vice-president of Bosnia-Herzegovina, as a man without a shred of decency and one who used other people to advance his own wealth and power. He had been the officer in charge of the Bosnian government during the massacre of Serbian officers who were leaving Sarajevo under UN safe passage. In discussing the lifting of the siege of Sarajevo, and referring to Ganic and Hazan Muratovic, Bosnian minister for cooperation with UNPROFOR, he writes, “The sheer venality and lack of humanity of the Bosnian Muslims took my breath away.”

His final words on Alija Izetbegovic, the president of Bosnia-Herzegovina, are worth citing in full: “He was a courageous man caught up in a web of deceit, corruption, religious extremism within his party, the SDA, from which he could not escape. The history of the Balkans was too powerful and too bloody for one man to change the way things were done in Bosnia. Nevertheless, as the President of Bosnia, he was one of many responsible for the unnecessary prolongation of the war.”

It is clear then that General Rose had serious problems during his service in Bosnia: the media (with a few praiseworthy exceptions); bomb-happy generals in NATO and partisan adherents in the U.S. State Department; and waffling politicians in Britain and Europe, all fortunately countered by more balanced colleagues. For example, the second U.S. ambassador to Bosnia proved considerably more helpful to both his country and the UN than did the first. All these problems paled, however, before the monumental irrationality of the leaders of the warring parties.

General Rose leaves the reader with an epilogue, highlighting the lessons of the UN experience. Much of it is a defense and explanation of what the UN did and why—why it did not bomb the Serbs and then why it did, along with the limits and uses of air power. Withal, when General Rose left at the end of his tour he was able to take pride in knowing that with the help of a capable and loyal staff he had brought peace closer to a devastated land and kept starvation at bay for its population.

He makes two particularly salient points near the end: “The greatest weakness of the UN mission in Bosnia was the inability . . . to win the information battle. . . . all too often the media was manipulated by the propaganda machines of the protagonists. . . . The continued dissemination of images of war sent a strong message to the world that the UN was failing in its mission, and exaggerated reports of the fighting in Gorazde, Bihac and Sarajevo were calculated to put pressure on the UN to raise the level of force used. The emotions of people around the world were cynically and cleverly manipulated.”

All this may be true, but whether the antiestablishment mind-set of so much of the media can be changed is questionable. The UN may, like the Pentagon, find it needs special training to handle the media, and even then may find its hands full.

The second point he makes is that it is not possible for a peacekeeping mission to succeed for long in a political vacuum. Unless some hopes of a politically inspired peace are kept alive, the opposing factions will revert to war. If there is no political meeting of the minds, the situation becomes simply one of war and conquest. It is essential, therefore, for the initiators of the peacekeeping mission to work for that potential meeting of the minds.

For anyone interested in the morass of what was once Yugoslavia, this is a highly valuable book. As fate so often wills it, however, where it is needed most it does not exist. There is no U.S. edition as yet. The British edition, however, is available on the Internet, and its purchase is worth investigating.