Towards Some International Law and Order

Abstract

1. Yugoslavia: The Morality of Military Action On 9 February 1994, a torch of hope was lit. After two years of indecisiveness and cowardice, NATO decided to issue a credible threat of military action against the heavy weaponry in and around Sarajevo.1 NATO's actions were to be taken in close cooperation with the United Nations. Their legal basis has been sought in UN Security Council resolution 836 (1993), which gives member-states, acting nationally or through regional organizations, a right to take, 'under the authority of the Security Council and subject to close coordination with the Secretary-General and UNPROFOR, all necessary measures, through the use of air power, in and around the safe areas in the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina', to support the UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR) in the performance of its mandate.2 At the time of writing (2 March), this threat has led to the withdrawal or transfer to UN control of most of the heavy weaponry involved, so that air strikes have as yet been avoided. On the other hand NATO, in what has been described as its first joint military action ever, on 28 February shot down four fighter aircraft allegedly belonging to Bosnian Serb forces. This action is in tum linked to a ban on military flights in the airspace of Bosnia and Herzegovina, established by the UN Security Council by resolution 781 of October 1992. It remains to be seen whether these moves towards military action will be effectively followed up and will have more lasting effects. In my view, it was in my view a moral imperative to proceed from words to deeds. Almost since the beginning of the conflict, it has been clear that traditional diplomacy will not suffice. At least some of the parties to the conflict have not been interested in what would appear to be a sensible objective stability combined with human rights. On the contrary, they have wanted change, meaning ethno-nationalistic expansion, by using and fuelling brutal force as genocidal sodomy. Such diametrically opposing objectives and ideologies cannot be reconciled solely through 'negotiations'. It is only to be regretted that UN-backed military sanctions were not introduced at a much earlier stage of the conflict. Military sanctions function by stating: there are some policies and actions that we cannot tolerate; this is the line. Non-intervention has provided a powerful signal, too: you can grab territory and maim civilians as much as you like unless you happen to have oil. There are various moral and practical problems that the user of military sanctions has to face. Military force should be used with a combination of restraint and determination. Civilian casualities, extravagances and weak coordination must be avoided as far as possible. Additional obstacles may be created by public opinion and its exploitation by a mixed group of traditionalists, cynics, pacifists and plain cowards and such obstacles will have to be tackled. It is not the purpose of this paper to discuss in greater detail such problems of decisionmaking, planning and implementation. My task is of a more systemic nature. Moving from the above statements based on moral and political intuition, I wish to locate the question of collective military sanctions in a wider historical structure. It is my hope that this discussion