Interventions by Kofi Annan

create “ethnically pure” regions by terrorizing, killing, and expelling non-Serb populations from hitherto mixed areas. However, he also concluded that “in its present phase this conflict is not susceptible to UN peacekeeping treatment.” Boutros-Ghali accepted the conclusion, as did the Council on May 15.
    By this time, much of UNPROFOR’s headquarters in Sarajevo had been evacuated due to the fighting, and although some forty military observers had been sent to the Mostar region in late April, there was only a very limited UN presence throughout the republic in the period when Bosnia Serb forces consolidated their hold on much of eastern and northern Bosnia. The accompanying scenes of barbarity that saw thousands, mostly Bosnian Muslims, killed or expelled from their homes, were not, in general, witnessed by UNPROFOR officials.
    The full scale of the horrors taking place in Bosnian Serb–controlled territory, however, could not long be hidden from the international community, particularly in light of the evidence of the rapidly growing population of refugees. To Europeans, who had recently lived through the end of the Cold War and had come to expect that transitions from communist rule to democracy could be both orderly and peaceful, the reports that emerged from Bosnia in the summer of 1992 were deeply disturbing. The images of emaciated prisoners, frightened, traumatized, and huddled behind barbed wire, evoked memories of the darkest days of European history. There was also an ongoing, systematic rape campaign that clearly became common practice in the conflict. Particularly abhorrent were the “rape camps” where Bosnian women were held at the disposal of Serbian soldiers and paramilitaries.
    The demand for further action only grew in intensity—even though the conditions that, back in May, had been found to rule out a traditional peacekeeping mission had not changed. In June, UNPROFOR troops assumed control of Sarajevo Airport from Bosnian Serbs, thus establishing a vital lifeline for humanitarian supplies into the country, which was kept open by the UN throughout the period of the war. The first significant expansion of the UN’s role in Bosnia, however, came in September, when the Security Council, in response to the deteriorating situation in Sarajevo and elsewhere, authorized an increase in UNPROFOR’s strength in order to protect UNHCR convoys delivering humanitarian aid.
    Although deployed into what was plainly an ongoing war, member states insisted that the enlarged force should operate in accordance with the “established principles and practices of UN peacekeeping.” The emphasis was significant and telling: “doing something” did not at this stage, nor, indeed, at any time until after the fall of Srebrenica in the summer of 1995, involve war fighting. On this much, at least there was agreement among the permanent five member states as well as the major troop contributors to the mission.
    The Secretariat viewed this as an inescapable reality. Again and again I learned, in my regular meetings with troop-contributing countries as head of DPKO, accompanied by my trusted and insightful special assistant Shashi Tharoor, that no one was willing to reconfigure the mission to engage in war fighting. To do so, I was told, would expose their troops to “unnecessary” risks. Yet as the war dragged on, the international media and key member states, notably the United States and Germany, publicly and rightly questioned the viability of the nonconfrontational peacekeeping basis on which UN involvement was based. Rather than risk soldiers, they pressured us to take more forceful action through the use of air power.
    Every new resolution, however, also reaffirmed previous resolutions, which rejected active war fighting. Although some forty thousand UN peacekeepers were eventually deployed, Bosnia remained essentially a peacekeeping mission: lightly