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The United Nations and Ethnic Conflict Management: Lessons from the Disintegration of Yugoslavia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

William Maley
William Maley*
Affiliation:
University College, University of New South Wales, Canberra, Australia
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Extract

On 14 December 1995, an agreement as the Elysée Treaty (earlier initialled in Dayton after weeks of difficult negotiation) was signed in Paris by the Heads of State of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Republic of Croatia, and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. One of the witnesses at the ceremony was the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Dr. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, and, in a real sense, it marked the nadir of his term of office. In June 1992, amidst the euphoria of U.S. President George Bush's articulation of hopes for a new world order, Boutros-Ghali had presented a report to U.N. members entitled An Agenda for Peace which painted an ambitious picture of the opportunities for constructive involvement of the U.N. in conflict resolution. Yet ironically, this was almost the moment at which the intensification of intergroup conflict precipitated Bosnia-Hercegovina's slide into social and political disarray. The ultimate humiliation for the U.N. came in July 1995 when the massacre of Bosnian Muslims by Bosnian Serb forces in the U.N.-declared “safe area” of Srebrenica triggered the chain of events which saw responsibility for Bosnia-Hercegovina decisively removed from the U.N.'s grasp, and assumed by the United States and its NATO allies. The U.N. may recover from the shame of its Balkan entanglement, but the scars are likely to prove permanent.

Type
Part III: International Reactions to Yugoslavia's Disintegration
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 25 , Issue 3: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia: Inevitable or Avoidable? , September 1997 , pp. 559 - 573
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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