Ending a Fool’s Errand

The United Nations, so recently a part of the solution in the Balkans, has become a part of the problem.

On Wednesday U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali reported that Croats had begun shelling peacekeepers holding the Peruca dam, scene of the fiercest recent fighting in newly embattled Croatia. On Thursday, 80 Kenyan peacekeepers on duty near the dam were forced to flee. Twenty-one peacekeepers were held hostage in a hotel in Benkovac by Serbs apparently hoping to prevent advancing Croats from shelling it. New stories of the abuse of the peacekeepers arrive almost hourly.

Three weeks from now, when the U.N. mandate in Krajina comes up for renewal, it should be terminated, and all U.N. forces should be withdrawn from the Balkans at that time. The claim will be made that a continuation of the peacekeeping effort is better than nothing, but that claim is mistaken. Peacekeepers cannot keep a peace that has not yet been made. To require them to do so is to risk their lives in order to save face for governments that, on the one hand, don’t want to be seen to be doing nothing but, on the other, don’t want to actually do anything.

“It would take 72 hours for a general war to break out once we left,” a U.N. official said Wednesday. Forty-eight hours later, as Serbs detonated mines they had earlier placed in the Peruca dam, threatening Croatia with a potentially catastrophic loss of life, it was clear that general war had in fact broken out.

The Geneva talks having failed, no one knows what lies ahead. The Clinton Administration is reported to be considering the full range of options from the most dovish to the most hawkish. Meanwhile, it is blindingly clear that Indian Gen. Satish Nambiar, who called the U.N. mission a failure weeks ago, was right. At this point, the evacuation of the peacekeepers would bespeak both the self-respect of the United Nations as an organization and a reasonable concern for brave men and women who deserve more than to be sent to their death on a fool’s errand.