Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, June 28, 1993 TAG: 9309010263
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The tragedy will be even further compounded, however, if the world does not learn from this awful episode, if policies and institutions are not devised and put in place to prevent or at least to discourage its recurrence.
Faced with the prospect of new world disorder - spreading ethnic violence, tribal wars, nation-state disintegration - we must ask ourselves: What can be done? What will be our excuse next time if we do nothing?
As the Bosnian example reminds, the United States can't be the world's sole policeman. There are too many conflicts for any nation to police. Americans are as reluctant (with good reason) to act unilaterally as other nations are to allow us. And there are limits to our resources, our will, our interests, our blood.
We must look instead to the ongoing if halting and inconsistent steps toward collective security - a system based not on individual nations' amassing of massive armies and arsenals, but on international security arrangements developed by an increasingly interconnected community of nations.
In short, we can't help but look to the United Nations - an institution that, as one observer notes, has become essential before it has become effective.
This suggestion may seem bizarre to some. After all, there is little agreement now on what U.N. powers should be. The United Nations is a cumbersome body, underfunded, tangled in bureaucracy and grievances, and overwhelmed by demands for services it is not prepared to render. Yet all this only underscores the need not to abandon the United Nations, but to make it more effective.
The U.N. Charter itself includes provision for member nations to make military forces available to the Security Council. Because Cold War rivalry prevented the implementation of this idea, an alternative was improvised - peacekeeping forces focused on containing conflict, using lightweight weapons only in self-defense.
In fact, nonviolent peacekeeping operations have proved effective in many situations in Africa and the Middle East. But recent years have seen a proliferation of requests for U.N. help. The outmanned, out-of-place peacekeepers have been overwhelmed in out-of-control conflicts in Cambodia, Somalia and Yugoslavia.
What's happening is that the Blue Helmets' mission is expanding, from peacekeeping to peacemaking and peace-enforcement. Yet their resources and capabilities have not expanded accordingly. Their missions are still patched together on an ad hoc basis in response to crises.
To deal with Bosnia-like situations in the future, the United Nations must be able to move far more quickly - to deploy peace-enforcement forces at short notice in an early stage of a crisis, before it becomes desperate and spins out of control. Early intervention is the key to preventing violence.
With the end of Cold War rivalry, and the Security Council's ability often to reach unanimous decisions about regional conflicts, it is now possible to consider again the notion, strangled at the United Nations' birth, of the international body as a global cop enforcing collective security.
U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali has proposed international peace-enforcement units that would be ``available on call and would consist of troops that have volunteered for such service.''
Many practical, political and financial obstacles lie in the way of establishing an on-call or - even better - a permanent, standing peacekeeping force under U.N. authority.
The international community would have to achieve a reasonable level of consensus on the question of when intervention is justified - such as with breaches of international security, or human suffering and rights-violations on a massive scale. The United Nations would have to get its administrative act together. Better conflict-resolution capabilities would have to be developed to prevent the outbreak of violence where possible.
And the way peacekeeping operations are financed would have to be overhauled. As Secretary-General Perez de Cuellar said before leaving office in 1992, ``It's a great irony that the U.N. is on the brink of insolvency at the very time the world community has entrusted the organization with new and unprecedented responsibilities.''
Does anyone doubt that U.N. forces able to defuse conflicts and avoid wars would pay for themselves? The United States and other member-states could support peacekeeping activities by diverting resources from their own generously supplied militaries.
All this will take time and hard work and careful diplomacy. But if we do not begin now, what will we say the next time ethnic cleansing or systematic raping flickers on our screens?
It can never be proven that the Bosnia tragedy could have been averted in the face of an early exercise of international will. But there's at least a good possibility this is so. We owe it to the victims, and the future, to do better next time, to build a framework for peace if we can.
by CNB