Humanitarian intervention

[Keaney Michael <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Penners

This is a curious development. Previously I forwarded the list another
article by this author on this topic which yielded information which, for
the most part, is simply repeated again in the following article, with a few
additional interesting snippets (see
http://csf.colorado.edu/pen-l/2001II/msg00579.html). Among the questions to
ask here are 1) Who is Ian Bruce?, 2) Why is the Herald -- a provincial
Scottish newspaper, with admittedly bigger ambitions -- the conduit for such
material?, 3) What "independent British-American think-tank" is supposed to
be passing this stuff on? The original article authored by Bruce claimed
that Srebrenica was "allowed" to happen by US, French and German forces with
the UK kept out of the loop and the Dutch the unfortunate sacrificial pawns
in a pitifully cynical game of hegemony. Now more fragments of the story are
emerging, including the role performed by the British equivalent of the US
National Security Agency, GCHQ, which was monitoring Yugoslav communications
for the duration of the Balkans crisis (and prior to that, of course, as a
Cold War adversary). But while British complicity is now more or less
admitted, primary responsibility is now attributed to Jacques Chirac, whose
own preference for NATO above the UN requires some explanation, given
France's supposed role as thorn in the US's flesh. Certainly, Chirac could
not have "authorised" the collapse of UN safe havens if he did not already
have the support of the Clinton administration, necessary for any planned
takeover by NATO. Perhaps given his domestic troubles involving the
unravelling of the French state (witness the conviction of Roland Dumas on
corruption charges and the emergence of copious amounts of dirt surrounding
the Mitterand era), Chirac is viewed as dispensable and thus can be weakened
in order to let Jospin win next year's presidential election. Meanwhile
readers get all the usual guff that was once peddled with such gusto by
Chapman Pincher: attributions to "intelligence sources", unspecified
"documents", an anonymous anglo-US "think-tank". All very interesting.

Massacre helped Nato take charge of Bosnian conflict

IAN BRUCE

The Herald, 12 July, 2001

THE fall of Srebrenica was used by the western powers to to undermine public
confidence in the competence of UN-led peacekeeping missions and pave the
way for
the direct intervention of Nato in the Bosnian war.

Jacques Chirac, the French president, secretly vetoed requests for Nato
airstrikes to
halt the Bosnian Serb advance on the UN "safe haven" in July, 1995,
precipitating its fall
and the worst massacre of civilians since the Nazi atrocities of the second
world war.

Up to 8000 Muslim men and boys of military age were slaughtered and 30,000
women
and children turned into refugees as General Ratko Mladic, the enforcer of
ethnic
cleansing, brushed aside a token UN Dutch garrison and captured the enclave
in a
seven-day blitzkrieg.

Intelligence sources say Bill Clinton, the US president, agreed to allow
Chirac to have
the final say because he feared the Bosnian Muslims were trying to embroil
UN forces in
their fight against the Serbs.

A screen of fewer than 400 Dutch conscripts was all that stood between
Mladic's
30,000 Serb veterans and Srebrenica, crowded with refugees as well as its
resident
population.

Between July 5 and July 11, the Dutch contingent made five separate requests
for air
support as the Serbs tightened the siege and unleashed a rain of shells from
tanks and
artillery.

The requests were turned down by Lieutenant-General Bernard Janvier of
France, then
supreme commander of the UN protection forces in Yugoslavia. France fielded
the
largest single contingent at the time.

As Serb troops entered the outskirts of Srebrenica, Chirac telephoned
Janvier at his
Zagreb headquarters in Croatia to reinforce the ban on airstrikes or ground
intervention
by the UN's rapid reaction force, composed mainly of British and French
troops.

The French knew of Serb plans to overrun Srebrenica more than a month before
the
offensive was launched. The information was passed to Janvier only in his
capacity as a
French army officer, not as UN commander.

On May 24, Janvier asked a closed and unreported session of the UN security
council
to abandon the defence of Srebrenica and the other two designated "safe
havens" in
eastern Bosnia, Gorazde and Zepa, on the grounds that they were
indefensible.

Documents shown to The Herald by an independent British-American think-tank
also
reveal that Kofi Annan, then under-secretary for peacekeeping and now the UN
secretary general, and Yasushi Akashi, the UN special envoy for the Balkans,
were told
in advance that no military action would be sanctioned to halt the Serb
advance.

Akashi sent a cable on June 17, 1995, detailing a conversation with Slobodan
Milosevic, the Yugoslav president, stating that Milosevic had been advised
by the
French that Clinton would not interfere if Paris still ruled out airstrikes.

It was the green light for a Serb assault which would shatter the UN's
reputation as
protector of threatened civilians and make a nonsense of its hugely
over-optimistic
"safe haven" policy.

Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who was UN secretary general in 1995, admits that he
and his
top aides were never in control of the military situation. "French and even
British senior
officers only followed orders from their governments in Paris and London,"
he
complained. "The UN was merely a scapegoat for western failure to prevent or
halt the
Yugoslav civil wars."

British, US, and German intelligence agencies monitored communication
between the
Serb high command and its political masters in Belgrade throughout the
four-year
conflict.

An electronic listening post in the Alps set up by the CIA and its German
equivalent, the
BND, eavesdropped on telephone conversations between Mladic in Bosnia and
General Percic, the Yugoslav army's chief of staff in Belgrade, in the three
weeks before
the attack.

In addition, unmanned reconnaissance aircraft and satellite surveillance
clearly showed
the build-up of Serb armour, infantry, and artillery around the threatened
area from
mid-June.

Some senior officers at the headquarters of the UN force were bitter over
what they saw
as a cynical betrayal of their operation by France and the United States.

The Dutch were furious at having their soldiers exposed to death or injury
as a potential
tripwire sacrifice on the outskirts of a town it would have been impossible
to defend. The
conscripts had rifles and a few sub-machine guns. The Serbs had tanks and
overwhelming numbers.

Belgrade's role was even more cynical. Having bankrolled the Bosnian Serb
war effort,
and provided military advice and firepower for four years, Milosevic
abandoned his
ethnic allies at the first whiff of international sanctions after the
massacre.

It was September before Nato took a decisive hand in the conflict, elbowing
the UN
aside and bringing the Serbs to heel with a combination of US and British
airstrikes and
diplomacy from Richard Holbrooke, the American envoy.

The move put the alliance, and the US, in the driving seat and brought the
three-sided
war among Croat, Serb, and Muslim to an end. By that time, however, between
200,000
and 300,000 people were dead. Most, like the casualties of Srebrenica, were
civilians.

Full article at:
http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/archive/12-7-19101-0-12-22.html

Michael Keaney
Mercuria Business School
Martinlaaksontie 36
01620 Vantaa
Finland

michael.keaney@xxxxxx