Bosnia Mustn’t Be U.N.’s Death Knell : Over decades, world body has been invaluable

If Bosnia-Herzegovina cannot be saved, if NATO is on its way out, can the United Nations nonetheless be saved for a useful future? We think so, but urgent action is called for.

As the U.N. humanitarian and peacekeeping missions in Bosnia have neared collapse over the last two weeks, apologists like U.N. Undersecretary General Kofi Annan, a Ghanaian, have properly drawn attention both to the many U.N. humanitarian or peacekeeping missions that have gone better than this one and to the many lives that have been saved even in Bosnia.

BASE UNDERMINED: Unfortunately, there is every reason to believe that if the United Nations is hounded out of Bosnia by Serb arms, the organization’s relatively good pre-Bosnia record will not be matched by its post-Bosnia record. Its ability--using moral authority backed only by light arms--to interpose itself between combatants elsewhere in the world will go into decline. For the authority of the United Nations is no more than the transferred collective authority of, above all, the major world powers. And in Bosnia, those powers, armed and organized in the form of NATO, failed or were foiled in the attempt to back up the United Nations. Between them, the two organizations chose not to use available military force to defend U.N. personnel or enforce such U.N. decisions as the “safe area” guarantees.

Political difference among the major powers about the optimum, or even the minimum, outcome in the Bosnian conflict had much to do with this. The United States has taken the position, reiterated by President Clinton as recently as Sunday, that the territorial integrity of Bosnia-Herzegovina has to be preserved. The British and the French have favored ceding much of Bosnia to Serbia in the hope that the Serbs would then agree to make peace.

FRANCE A SUSPECT: A second reason for the humiliation of the United Nations, however, according to leaked Defense Department intelligence reports published this week in Time, may be that France, which advocates the breakup of NATO, is purposely inflaming tensions over Bosnia to split the United States and Britain. Obviously, for reasons of their own, the Russians would also welcome the disbanding of NATO.

But are France and Russia willing to sacrifice the effectiveness of the United Nations, perhaps for years to come, to achieve the disbanding of NATO? Looking beyond Bosnia, would not even they agree with Sir David Hannay, Britain’s U.N. representative, that “Five years into the post-Cold War era, we’ve all learned . . . that it’s the U.N. with all its warts or it’s the law of the jungle”? Tomorrow, if not today, France or Russia may need the now threatened international body.

If the United Nations will not ask forthrightly for protection, then it cannot be protected. But even as U.N. evacuation impends, the United States should try once more to prevail upon the key U.N. officials to ask for massive air reprisals against any party to the Bosnian conflict that kidnaps U.N. personnel or otherwise interferes with U.N. operations. Even if Bosnia cannot be saved, there may still be a chance to save the United Nations.