Introduction
1 A former candidate in the current
Presidential election asked why America with a
population of 260m should send 100k soldiers to
defend a rich Europe that has a population of 360m to
defend it from an impoverished Russia that only has a
population of 160m? Putting it another way, he
queried whether the US, as a super power, has a duty
to use its wealth and military might to re-shape the
world in its image, - or whether America is, in the
words of its founding fathers, 'a land of liberty to
be preserved for itself', - without regard for what
is happening elsewhere in the world.
2. He answers these questions by saying that
the US should withdraw its forces from Europe and
re-negotiate article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty,
which in his view should be an option not a binding
obligation. In doing so he reveals himself to be an
isolationist of the old school, - in fact he is a
little like Lord Walpole who once proudly reported to
the Queen'50k people killed in the Balkans, but not
one Englishman'.
3. Leaving aside the moral position so eloquently
expressed by the
17th century poet John Donne when he said that no man
was an island,
it is clear that political reality and national
self-interest also suggest that we all have to stay
engaged, - if only, because the inevitable shift
towards the globalisation of national economies means
that trade in the 21st century will increasingly have
to be with developing nations, instead of being
either domestic or between the triad of wealthy
nations as it tended to be in the past.
4. For it is their populations who now make up
80% of the world, and it will therefore be amongst
these poorer nations that the greatest growth in GDP
is likely to occur and where consequently the
greatest commercial opportunities will arise. To
take advantage of these opportunities, the West in
the future will require very different commercial
strategies; - one's based on long-term investment
rather than quick profit. 90% of medical research,
for example, carried out at present, by the large
pharmaceutical companies is concerned with rich men's
diseases, - because this is where the greatest and
most immediate profits lie. To invest in research
into poor people's diseases such as malaria, or
leptospirosis, will not reap comparable rewards. Yet
how can a country or economy develop when so much of
its productive capacity is destroyed by disease? We
need a vision for the future in which long term
investment would unlock a tremendous human and market
potential, and also reap a benefit ourselves.
5. Sadly the poorer regions of the world are
also regions where political uncertainty, civil war,
and corruption, make it difficult, if not impossible,
to carry out trade. And as with health, without
order there can be no economic or human development.
We therefore also need to revisit our ideas about how
to bring peace and security to the troubled parts of
the world, for the old traditional concepts of
peacekeeping have not been able to deal effectively
with the chaos and brutality of the modern world. If
civilisation is to survive in the future, we must
accept that global security is a human problem that
confronts us all. We are indeed all One People.
World
6. Caspar Weinberger, at the end of the
Cold War, once remarked that 'The future ain't what
it used to be'. And it is indeed true that since
1989. World history has been one of political
disintegration and conflict, rather than the advent
of a new order. Although the prospect of super power
conflict has now receded and the chances of a major
regional war seem remote, there are some 30 major
conflicts in the world today, - excluding terrorism,
- and most of these are civil wars taking place in
regions where nation states have ceased to exist. In
these wars, most of the .25m people killed each year
are civilians and half of those are children, - many
of whom are killed by other children. The human
consequences of these wars are enormous. In the last
decade of the last millennium the world witnessed in
the Great Lakes area of Africa, the largest mass
movement of populations that it has ever seen. Over
30m people are displaced or have become refugees, and
now need to be looked after by the richer countries
of the world. Over a quarter of the world population
has inadequate food and water, no education and has
never seen a doctor, - much of this as a result of
war. All this is happening in a world where the
population is around 5bn people. Yet before the next
century has run half is course, there will be 10bn
people trying to live on this planet. Something
needs to be done.
7. Lord Melbourne, another British Prime
Minister, once said that 'When 1 hear people saying
something must be done, 1 know something foolish is
about to happen. And although it has not yet been
possible to make a full or objective assessment of
the war in Kosovo, it is 1 think, already clear that
NATO became engaged last year in a new form of
conflict. It was a humanitarian war whose purpose
should have been the preservation of human life
rather than the destruction of an enemy war machine.
Although 1 believe that it was right for the
international community to have intervened in Kosovo,
it is clear to me that in Kosovo, NATO fought the
wrong war, - having failed to understand the
implications of becoming engaged in humanitarian
conflict.
8. NATO 's failure was a tragedy for the
people of Kosovo. In spite of launching one of the
most intensive bombing campaigns in the history of
war, - and whilst the combat troops of the most
powerful military Alliance in the world stood
helplessly by, - thousands of Kosovo Albanians were
brutally slaughtered and a million people were driven
from their homes. Notwithstanding the frequently
made suggestion that somehow NATO 'won', it is a fact
that the Alliance failed to achieve its primary
objective when it went to war on 24th March 99. In
the words of Mr Solana the Secretary General of NATO
its object was 'to prevent more human suffering and
more repression and violence against the civilian
population of Kosovo'. It did not do so. Nor indeed
did the NATO bombing campaign succeed, - for far from
being progressively disrupted, degraded and finally
destroyed', to use the words of General Clarke, NATO
's commanding general, the Serb Army withdrew to
Serbia undefeated and virtually unscathed.
9 If the West is to develop a more effective
response to the security challenges of this century,
then we will need to look further than the belief,
apparently widespread amongst today's generation of
politicians, that global security can be provided
through the unique application of air power. It is
simply not possible to solve complex political,
social, economic or even military problems on the
ground from 15,000 ft. When 1 was in command of the
UN forces in Bosnia in 1994 - a similar strategy
called 'Lift and Strike' was being strongly advocated
at that time by the proponents of air power. Had we
listened to these siren voices calling us to war, the
result would have undoubtedly been the end of the
state of Bosnia, much further slaughter and suffering
of the population and a flood of at least 4m
refugees. As the Head of UNHCR told the US Secretary
of Defence at the time, you cannot feed people by
bombing. Fortunately, William Perry not only
understood this, - but had the courage to take back
to Washington the message that the international
community needed to support the UN humanitarian
mission on the ground. In the future, our political
leaders must likewise have the courage to deploy
soldiers and aid workers on the ground into these
civil war situations, - if we are to prevent the sort
of dreadful thing that happened in Kosovo from
becoming the common condition of so much of mankind.
And Kosovo has shown us just how quickly a tyrant
like Milosevic can create a major humanitarian
problem. The British Army deployment in Sierra Leone
also showed how quick an impact well-trained troops
on the ground can have.
The Right to Intervene
10 As we examine the changed operational
circumstances which faces the international community
today, as it struggles with the new concept of
humanitarian war, it is of course important that we
understand the legal and moral basis on which we
ignore the principle of non-intervention which under
Article 2 of the UN Charter clearly establishes the
equal sovereignty of all nations under international
law.
11 We need to remind ourselves that the UN
Charter was written by a generation of statesmen who
themselves had lived through two world wars and who,
in the words of the preamble to the Charter, 'were
determined to save succeeding generations from the
scourge of war'. Yet today the international
community seems increasingly to be opting for a
policy of military intervention on the grounds that
where nation states no longer exist, where civil wars
that are in danger of spreading, where there is a
dire need for humanitarian aid, or where there are
gross violations of human rights, the UN has a duty
to intervene. These are ill-defined criteria,
although somehow, 1 suppose they do provide some
justification for NATO 's intervention in Kosovo.
Although 1 believe that NATO was wrong in failing to
obtain prior authority from the Security Council
before acting, - thus setting a very dangerous
precedent for the future.
12. There are also many moral questions posed by
such military interventions. To which crises should
we, the international community, respond, and which
ones should we ignore? Not even the UN can act as a
world policeman everywhere, - nor is it appropriate
to intervene in all crises. 1 do not suppose that the
British would have been particularly pleased to see
blue helmets of the UN deployed in the streets of
Belfast in 1969. Nor must we allow the media to
determine our policy in the way it so often seems to
do. BBG once referred to there being 16 members of
the Security Council, - the 15 national
representatives, and CNN. Is the international
community only to react to those conflicts where the
media moguls have sent their most capable teams and
whose slick sound bites and clever camera angles have
attracted the concern of the viewer and thereby
hi-jacked public debate?
13. The peacekeeping mission in the Balkans was the
largest that the world has ever seen. 36,000
peacekeepers were deployed in an operation which cost
billions of dollars, Yet when General Dallaire asked
for three thousand soldiers to go to Rwanda, to stop
what was a genuine genocide in which at least a
million people died, the world failed to respond. It
is said that today the international community is
spending $50k on each Kosovo Albanian, - and yet we
only spent 30 cents on each Orissa Indian whose lives
were devastated by floods last year. What is the
moral basis for such inequality?
Specific Mandate
14. Liddell Hart once said that 'strategy was
the 'art of distributing and applying military means
to fulfil the ends of policy'. In the confused and
brutal circumstances prevailing in much of the world
today, it is often impossible -to define clearly what
are the 'ends of policy'. Certainly there has been a
wide variety of reasons given for NATO going to war
in the Balkans. On 23rd Marsh in the House of
Commons the Prime Minister stated that the prime
'casus belli' was to avert a humanitarian disaster in
Kosovo. President Clinton stated that it was to
maintain the security of Europe. Others believed
that it was to sustain the credibility of NATO.
Military commanders need greater clarity in the
mission statements.
15. In any military intervention, but especially in
humanitarian conflicts, it is obvious that the prime
requirement is for there to be a clear, unequivocal
mandate which is continuously backed by adequate
resources and the political will of the international
community. But it is less widely understood that in
operations short of all-out war the mandate must also
define the limitations of the operation, not merely
the aspirations of the international community. This
will prevent confused aims, as for example happened
in Bosnia in which the peacekeeping mission was asked
to deliver war fighting goals, something that it
clearly cannot do, or when NATO was asked to deliver
humanitarian objectives but given the wrong means. A
clear mandate is something that all military men will
ask for, but is rarely forthcoming, - even less so in
an alliance or coalition of forces. In an
organisation such as the UN in which there are 185
different nations each with their own political
agendas, it is most probable that UN military
commanders will probably have to do what 1 did in
Bosnia, and pluck from the often contradictory UNSCR'
s (743 -990) their own mission statement ... which in
my case was to sustain the people of Bosnia in the
midst of a three sided civil war, try and bring about
the conditions necessary for a peace agreement and
finally to contain the conflict to Bosnia.
16. It is my contention that the UN mission in
Bosnia, if judged against this mandate, and the tasks
that the peacekeepers were actually given, was indeed
accomplished in a most heroic way by the twenty three
and a half thousand young men and women who
volunteered to go to Bosnia as peacekeepers and risk
their lives so that others could live in peace -- or,
indeed, could live at all. That the opportunities
for peace so painfully won were ignored by the
political leaders of Bosnia, and also by some
Politicians abroad, can scarcely be blamed on the UN.
17. Nevertheless 2.7 million people were
sustained by the UN throughout three and half years
of bloody, and at times three-sided civil war. Over
2.000 metric tons of stores a day were delivered to
even the remotest parts of Bosnia along roads built
by the UN and using airfields operated by the UN.
Without this aid many thousands of Bosnians, Muslims,
Croats and Serbs would have died.
18. The second part of the mission was also
achieved, - as after the deployment of the UN into
Bosnia the casualty rate from the war dropped from
130k in 1992, to 30k in 1993, to around 3k by 1994.
Far from presiding over genocide as a number of
propagandists have subsequently accused the UN of
doing, the presence of the UN peacekeepers
effectively halted the slaughter and finally created
the conditions in which there could be some political
initiative ... initially by implementing the peace
deal between the Muslims and Croats- a necessary
first step in bringing peace to the region. For if
you are going to halt a three sided civil war, you
will almost certainly first have to stop the fighting
between at least two out of the three warring
parties.
19. And finally the conflict was indeed contained
within Bosnia with only minimal spill over into other
parts of the Balkans.
Use of Force
20. In order to achieve the successful outcome of a
mission that is humanitarian based, - in the new
conditions of the world disorder, any peacekeeping
force will have to be extremely robust in its use of
force. In the circumstances in which they are likely
to find themselves, peacekeepers cannot afford to be
pacifists, - and the UNPROFOR was no exception ....
millions of rounds of small arms, tank main armament,
artillery and mortars were used as was air strikes by
NATO aircraft. However in any peacekeeping mission
there will always be limits on the use of force, -
indeed this is what distinguishes it from war
fighting. For, every time force is used, there will
be a halt to the flow of aid and people most at risk
will immediately start to die. This is a
consideration that commanders in any humanitarian
conflict must take into account, especially where the
level of consent, on the part of the warring factions
it at best patchy. After all, it is the sustainment
of the civilian population that provided the moral
and legal justification for intervention in the first
place, - not the defeat of an enemy.
21. The line between a peacekeeping mission or
humanitarian conflict and all-out war is, however,
determined less by the level of force used, than by
how it is used. For the goals of military force must
be appropriate to the type of conflict in which it is
engaged - in this case humanitarian conflict. This
level of force used may be far removed from the level
of force, which applies in war fighting. This is not
widely understood. In Bosnia when 1 called for Nato
close air support, 1 was often accused of using
pinpricks against the Serbs. This would have been
true if 1 had been at war. But 1 was not. At the
other end of the spectrum, the application of air
power in Kosovo was manifestly disproportionate to
the humanitarian objectives of the war.
22. In a peacekeeping operation, force used must be
proportional to the objectives of the mission and
only a minimum level of force should be used to
achieve a specific aim, - such as ensuring the
passage of a convoy, the maintenance of the regime of
a TEZ or deterring attacks against safe areas. The
use of force should be even handed, impartial and
only applied after due warning. Force cannot be used
to punish an aggressor, obtain military objectives,
or solve the underlying political problems of a
country in the midst of civil war. These are
war-fighting goals. A peacekeeping or humanitarian
mission can merely help create the necessary
conditions for a peaceful resolution of the
conflict. It is vital that war fighting goals are
never pursued by humanitarian or peacekeeping forces,
- as happened in Somalia for such force can never
become a combatant itself For you do not go to war in
white painted vehicles.
23. One of the most dangerous, and incorrect
lessons that was drawn from the interlocution in
Bosnia was the assertion that NATO delivered the
Dayton peace agreement by bombing the Serbs in the
late summer of 1995, - the inference being that
bombing can therefore succeed in Iraq, Sudan,
Afghanistan, or Kosovo. Nothing could be further
from the truth. The Dayton Peace Accord was not
delivered by Nato bombing. It was achieved over a
protracted period of time, through a combination of
political, humanitarian and military actions in which
NATO of course played a part. When, by the end of
1995 it had become clear that no political compromise
between the Bosnia Federation and the Serbs could be
reached, and the people and state of Bosnia were no
longer dependent on the presence of the UN for their
survival, the UN mission was suspended and for a
brief period NATO launched air strikes against the
Serbs. However, in military terms this proved to be
relatively insignificant, and the decisive military
blow against the Serb military machine was struck
when the Croatian forces seized the Kryenias and
those parts of western Bosnia which the Serbs hoped
to trade for peace on their terms.
24. In any humanitarian conflict therefore there
have to be three elements present, political action,
humanitarian action and military action. No one
element can act without a consequent effect on the
other. There is no such thing as neutral aid, for to
deliver aid to a city under siege is to act against
the strategic interests of the warring party setting
that siege. Humanitarian aid also tends to fuel the
war, going to the fighters and their families first
and only then to the displaced people who need it.
This is something that has to be minimised by the way
that the aid delivery system is structured, - the
best aid of course being that which is delivered
directly to the people, - not to their governments.
25. The command and control infrastructure of the
mission should reflect the interdependence of the
political humanitarian and security elements, with
the civil authority being in overall control. Sadly
it often does not. In Bosnia, one of the greatest
difficulties facing the mission was the exclusion of
the political element caused by the creation of the
Contact Group. This allowed the warring parties to
fragment the efforts of the international community
often for reasons that had nothing to do with the
war, and to the great detriment of the ordinary
people trying to survive the war. Both Dayton and
the Kosovo peace agreement have made the same mistake
in separating the civil and military infrastructures.
Affect of the Media on Policy Making &
Peacekeeping
26. Thucydides once commented that it was
never sensible to believe the first messenger who
arrived with reports of a battle, - for inevitably he
was likely to be the person who had run away first
and therefore most of his report was likely to have
been invented! Today, in the same way it is unwise
for politicians to base national and international
policy on simple news reports emanating from the
field, particularly in complex civil war situations
where the solutions are likely to be long term and
multi-functional. Too often in the past we have seen
decisions being taken by Governments whose peoples
have been exposed to exaggerated or incorrect TV
reports. It is, of course widely understood by the
leaders of the warring parties in these civil war
situations how important it is to win the sympathy of
the international community and the moral high
ground.
27. The International Commission to Inquire
into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars of
1912 and 1913 declared that 'The real culprits in
this long list of executions, assassinations,
drownings, burnings, massacres and atrocities ... are
those who mislead public opinion and take advantage
of the people's ignorance...'
28. Today nothing much has changed. The war
in Bosnia was described as a war of information and
misinformation, - a war for the sympathy of the world
in which the media itself all too often became
manipulated by the propaganda machines of the
protagonists. One of the greatest failures of the UN
in Bosnia was its inability to win in the information
battle.
29. Truth it is said is often the first casualty
of war. In Kosovo NATO was certainly in danger of
losing its grip on the truth as it desperately sought
to cover up its own failures, initially blaming the
Serbs for its killing of civilians, then justifying
these deaths by telling the world that because
Milosevic was committing worse atrocities their
actions were therefore acceptable. 1 do not believe
that a soldier in Northern Ireland who had used undue
force would have been acquitted on the grounds that
the IRA were killing more innocent civilians than he
was. Even today we have the dismal sight of NATO
politicians claiming that the Alliance had somehow
'won', and that their strategy of bombing therefore
had succeeded. Those who questioned NATO' s bombing
campaign during the war were accused of being
defeatist and undermining the morale of the troops.
Yet as Wingate once said, it is the assurance of
victory, not failure, that will best get men to risk
their lives. Surely in any conflict, especially a
humanitarian one, politicians in democratic countries
who act to extend the concept of freedom to others
should be the last people to engage in the same
propaganda tactics of tyrants like Milosevic.
The Way Ahead
30. One of the consequences of the post Cold War
experience is that the UN has become dangerously
marginalised. It is seen increasingly as an
organisation that has failed, and peacekeeping is
likewise regarded as having little relevance to modem
conflict resolution. Such views are, 1 believe,
highly dangerous for the future of world order. The
UN with all its failings still remains the principal
intergovernmental organisation responsible for peace
and security, in the world today. Those who try to
ignore it will be making the same mistake as those
who ignored the League of Nations in the 1930s. And
of course peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention
are actions that provide and alternative to the two
extremes of war and peace.
31. If the international community is going to be
able to respond better to human emergencies as
complex as the one in the Balkans, then it will need
to give greater support to the UN. Certainly the UN,
for its part, needs to reorganise its own structure
and refine its peacekeeping doctrine. It needs to
develop a whole new approach to humanitarian
conflict. Above all it needs a crisis management
machinery capable of early and preventative action.
It needs new technical capabilities, especially in
the field of intelligence gathering, and it needs to
insist on operational standards from the troop
contributors.
32. Just how far we can go in terms of
reorganisation remains to be seen. The idea of
having permanent UN strategic forces, is at first
thought an attractive one, but 1 doubt if such a
standing force would retain the same level of
capability as that produced by the defence forces
contributed by individual nations.
33. At the end of the day, the UN is, of course,
us. We can will the organisation to do whatever we
wish. We cannot blame it for what are ultimately our
own failures.
Conclusion
34. Modem conflicts are about people. It is
their condition that should dictate our approach to
both war and peace. It is obvious that we need to
devote as much thinking and resources to the
prevention of conflict and to humanitarian
intervention as we do to war fighting. What is less
clear is how we should set about winning the peace
that we win in the post conflict phase of
reconstruction, - for today we see in Bosnia and
Kosovo two countries that have become virtual
dependencies of NATO. We should not expend resources
on civil reconstruction until the essential
institutions which safeguard civilised society,
notably freedom of speech, democracy, and a just
legal system. Otherwise we will be in danger of
institutionalising the corruption and oppression of
the political leaders and war criminals who were
responsible for the war in the first place.
35. It is clear that the road to peace is long and
difficult and costly, but as President Truman once
said. "If you do not wish to pay the price of peace,
then you had better be prepared to pay the price of
War