The Curse of the Unshockable World

In the photograph, a man kneels on the floor of a brightly lit shopping centre, blood on his hand and running down the side of his face, congealed in his matted hair, whilst another man reaches down a hand to help.  Two people were killed and several more injured in the rocket attack on a Donetsk shopping centre in Ukraine last October.  In another picture, this time from Syria and taken earlier this month, a man carries an bloody-faced, injured and wailing child out of dusty ruins following a government airstrike on Aleppo.

Once upon a time we would have been shocked by images like these.  Now they tend to pass us by, as we flip through our papers, at best raising a sigh and a weary shake of the head as we bypass them to gorge on stories of the latest MP to fall from grace.  We read about another gruesome video posted by ISIS, despair at how it will all end and skip to the weekend football results.

Whilst I was researching the portrayal of violence in Sarajevo during the Bosnian War, I trawled through reels and reels of newspaper footage from the early 1990s on the noisy old microfiche reader in the University library.  At least one person was killed virtually every day during the 1992-95 siege of the Bosnian capital, but the newspapers covered only the most dramatic events - the breadline massacre, killing 16, in May 1992, right at the beginning of the war; the February 1994 shell in the Markale marketplace, killing 68, the images of which I can never get out of my mind; and the second shell which landed there in August 1995, killing 37 and in part triggering the western response that would finally end the war.  But despite the best efforts of the journalists based in Sarajevo, surrounded by these horrors, the everyday deaths did not make the news outside of Bosnia.

The Bosnian War, and Sarajevo in particular, was an unprecedented situation for war reporting.  Since UN control of Sarajevo’s airport meant that journalists could fly in and out of the city with relative ease, correspondents were able to feed out a constant stream of images of the atrocities, using the most modern of satellite technology.  Other areas of the country did not receive such close attention, but certain horrifying images, such as those of the Omarska concentration camp, uncovered by ITN in August 1992, did reach the international news from time to time.

Despite heavy coverage of the war, it took three and a half years for any determined military intervention to arrive in Bosnia.  The Syrian conflict, which began in earnest in early 2011, is coming up on that dubious milestone.  The bad news for Ukraine is that their war has only been raging for just over a year.  The worse news is that it is increasingly difficult to find that one shocking image – that Markale Marketplace, or Napalmed child – that will prompt the world to declare enough is enough.  What could we be shown now that we have not seen before?

We have grown desensitised to images of war over the last few decades.  We are overexposed to them in video games and films, so that we forget what is real and what is fiction.  Events are captured on mobile phones and tweeted all over the world instantly.  We are overwhelmed with these images, so much so that we begin to feel that there are just too many wars and there is nothing to be done: the world is simply a terrible place.  It appears that war is the constant state of being in these far away countries of which we know little about.

And yet our war correspondents keep sending back these photographs and keep writing their articles; keep putting their lives in danger.  Some might argue that it’s exploitative to make a living recording the suffering of others, when journalists can fly in, take a few snaps, make an award-winning documentary, and fly back home to plaudits and safety.  Perhaps it is.  On the other hand, without these images, how would anyone ever know what was going on?  How would anyone ever be so sickened as to demand that it ends?

War correspondence as a craft grew alongside literacy rates in the 19^th century.  William Howard Russell, widely considered to be the founder of modern war correspondence, reported for the Times on the Crimean War of the 1850s.  His reports shocked Victorians reading it at home, as he exposed the British military’s blunders and the appalling conditions of the soldiers.  Although radio and early television were used, the reporting was often heavily censored, especially during the First World War, and the pen remained the most accurate source of information from frontlines around the world.  Bulky camera equipment meant that many of the cinema newsreels during the Second World War were stock footage narrated in the studio, often serving as little more than government propaganda films.

It was the Vietnam War that really changed the face of war reporting.  Dubbed the ‘television war’, the graphic, uncensored footage fed back to the American public on a nightly basis revealed the brutality of war in all its gory detail.  Roving reporters with portable camera equipment had unrestricted access to the war zone.  Iconic photographs, such as Eddie Adams’ of a Viet Cong being executed by a Southern Vietnamese General during the 1968 Tet Offensive, and later Nic Ut’s image of a young girl running from her Napalmed village in 1972, changed public perception of the war in the US.  Support for the war plummeted, a vocal and sizeable anti-war movement developed, and eventually the decade-long conflict ended in a messy and ignominious retreat for the US.

Bosnia was arguably the next big television war, but it was by no means the only conflict of the early 1990s.  The Rwandan civil war, which took place concurrently with the Bosnian war, received much less coverage.  This was undoubtedly in part due to the accessibility of Bosnia to journalists, but more importantly Rwanda was not a white, European country.  Bosnia’s familiarity to western eyes might have helped its cause a little; made those images just a little more shocking.  Then-Secretary General of the UN, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, caused an uproar when he visited Sarajevo in December 1992 and told the besieged population: “You have a situation which is better than ten other places all over the world. I can give you a list of ten places where you have more problems than in Sarajevo.”  This, he explained, was why the UN was not going to intervene in Bosnia's fight.

The sentiment that are just too many wars to do anything about has endured.  However many images are fed to us, we will not be moved because we have relentless evidence that war is inevitable; because we have seen these photographs of suffering too many times before.  There is nothing we can do to help and we’ve got problems of our own.  The sad fact is that Putin and Assad, and all the others, know this too.

Srebrenica Remembered: Peace Keepers or Peacemakers?

"The Smurfs", as Bosnians called the UNPROFOR troops

On 16 April 1993 - twenty years ago this week - the UN Security Council passed Resolution 819, declaring the town of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia a 'Safe Area'.  Just over two years later, in July 1995, Bosnian Serb forces overran the enclave, meeting little resistance from the UN Peacekeepers stationed there, and massacred around 7,000 Bosniak men and boys.

Over twenty years after the end of the Cold War, Fukyama’s ‘End of History’ is nowhere in sight.  With nation states still splintering off around the globe, the coming decade is set to see more violent conflicts than ever.  Yet it is unlikely that we will ever see a UN operation the size of the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) again.

Despite the Security Council resolution, Srebrenica was anything but safe.  The Bosnian safe areas (Srebrenica was the first of five) were an untested peacekeeping concept, which has never been attempted again.

It seems appropriate, therefore, on this anniversary, to ask whether or not the UN still has a role to play as peacekeepers.  Could and should UN troops be authorised to use force to impose a military solution on conflicts?

Once war broke out in Bosnia-Herzegovina, between the Bosnian Serbs, who wished to remain part of Yugoslavia, the Bosnian Croats, who wished Bosnia to be absorbed into neighbouring Croatia, and the Bosnian Muslims, or Bosniaks, who wanted independence, Srebrenica’s geographical location, just a few kilometres from the Serbian border, placed it firmly within the territory of the Bosnian Serbs.  Before the war, the Bosniaks had constituted a majority in Srebrenica - around 70 percent of the population - but during the first few weeks of the conflict Bosnian Serb paramilitaries drove the Bosniaks out and took the town.

A series of victories by the Bosnian Government forces (ARBiH) during 1992 recaptured the town, but by March 1993, Srebrenica was once again being heavily shelled, and the town’s population had swelled dramatically with Bosniaks fleeing from the outlying villages as the Serbs advanced.  It was at this critical moment that General Phillipe Morillon, UNPROFOR commander in Bosnia-Herzegovina, managed to force his way through Serb lines to the besieged town.  He stood on the bonnet of his white UN Jeep in the town centre and declared that the population was “now under the protection of the United Nations.”  (The Death of Yugoslavia, Episode 5, ‘A Safe Area’, (BBC2: 1995-96)).

The UN Security Council had no choice but to respond by passing the Safe Area Resolution.  The resolution was politically expedient – it showed that the international community was doing something to help, whilst at the same time using language so vague that in reality it did little to make Srebrenica truly safe.  The mandate was so ambiguous that the UN troops on the ground were able to interpret it how they saw fit, in most cases tending towards the least risky interpretation.

The member states lacked the political will to follow through on the sentiments invested in the safe area resolutions.  The Security Council required peacekeepers to play a war-fighting role, whilst failing to provide them with the weaponry or manpower to do so.  They assigned UNPROFOR a mandate which, even if only symbolically, aligned them with the Bosnian Government, but expected them to continue to rely on Bosnian Serb consent to deliver humanitarian aid.

The fall of Srebrenica in July 1995 was crucial in bringing about the end of the war in Bosnia.  Without the troublesome pockets in eastern Bosnia, the international community was finally able to force a settlement militarily upon the Bosnian Serbs.

From 1993 onwards, the UN had been authorised to use air strikes in response to BSA attacks, but had chosen not to employ them, due in part to a desire to maintain their neutrality, and partly due to fear of reprisals against civilians and peacekeepers.

Their fears turned out to be well-founded.  When General Rupert Smith, UNPROFOR commander in Bosnia from January 1995 onwards, called in air strikes in response to Bosnian Serb Army (BSA) attacks on Sarajevo, hundreds of UN peacekeepers were taken hostage in retaliation.  Smith then tried a different tack.  His opinion was that  “if you stand in the middle of someone’s fight you must expect to be pushed around; and if you do intervene, decide if you are fighting one or all of the sides and get on with it – and be prepared to risk the forces allocated to achieve the object.” (Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force, (Allen Lane, 2005), p.359) 

After the hostage crisis, the idea of a Rapid Reaction Force (RRF) began to take hold and the decision to deploy it was made in early June 1995, though the guns were not in place until mid-August.  Eventually, due to a combination of ARBiH and RRF offensives, the international forces in Bosnia were in a position to impose a military solution on the conflict.

An attack on a marketplace in Sarajevo allowed Smith to employ the UN’s “dual key” arrangement with NATO.  Operation Deliberate Force was launched on 30 August.  There was no new UN Security Council Resolution passed – UNSCR 836, passed in June 1993, was used.  The BSA surrendered in a matter of weeks.

Without a clear a political aim, military advisors and commanders erred on the side of caution and neutrality.  In response, the warring parties tested the limits of UNPROFOR’s mandate, often using the UN troops as pawns and treating them with little respect.  Knowing that the international community would not risk taking sides, which, as well as being politically contentious, could result in the deaths of their own troops, the ARBiH, BSA and HVO (Bosnian Croat Forces) felt free to continue the war, despite the presence of the blue-helmeted peacekeepers.

It seemed that the international community had learnt it lesson by 1999, when forceful and decisive intervention in Kosovo forced the withdrawal of Serbian forces in less than two months.  There were no international casualties of the fierce bombing campaign.  However, this intervention was by the planes of NATO, and not the ground forces of the UN.

Is it therefore the case that a different approach to UN peacekeeping, or rather peace making is required?

MONUSCO, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has been authorised to "use all necessary means" to carry out its mandate, but this is qualified by the addition of "within the limits of its capacity".  This is the same vague language used in Srebrenica Safe Area Resolution.  The mission, under its previous guise of MONUC, and in its current guise, has been in the country since November 1999, but its presence has not deterred the warring factions.  Millions have died and there is daily violence.  In South Sudan, 5 UNMISS peacekeepers from India were killed on 9 April whilst escorting a UN convoy.  They were not the first casualties amongst UNMISS troops.

There have been thousands of Srebrenicas since 1993.  There will be thousands more, unless something changes.  It has been demonstrated that when western governments have the political will, military success can be achieved relatively easily, as in Iraq.  What comes next - rebuilding states and shaping democratic futures - is the real challenge.

Graffiti in Sarajevo (2012) 

There are some conflicts in which international military intervention would prevent countless senseless deaths.  It may be that there is a moral necessity for the UN to play the part of peacemakers and send fighting forces into conflicts where human suffering can be alleviated by taking a decisive military stance.

The UN is the only organisation which can claim the legitimate consensus of all nations (with some notable exceptions, of course).  Whilst NATO's member states will inevitably be some of the main force contributors, it is a dangerous precedent for an elite group of nations to play world policeman.

Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, the first President of Czechoslovakia, once said that "humanity is not pacifism at all costs."  If peacemakers are endowed with meaningful mandates, and careful consideration is given to what happens after the battles are won, it could ensure that the horrors of Srebrenica, and of many more towns like it, will never be seen again.