Interventions by Kofi Annan Page A

equipped, widely dispersed with limited mobility and no strategic reserve, vulnerable logistics, and reliant on the consent of parties to carry out its tasks.
    Some said, as a result, that the UN was effectively abandoning the Bosnians. Yet the way in which the public sympathized with the victims of the conflict sometimes overshadowed their understanding of what obstructed the UN from doing what ought to be done—and from what the UN
was,
in fact, doing.
    UN peacekeepers in the former Yugoslavia were deployed originally in support of three major purposes. Chief among them was the effort to alleviate the human suffering caused by the war. This meant keeping Sarajevo Airport open and the airlift going; supporting the efforts of UNHCR to deliver food and medicine as well as protecting their storage centers and other UN facilities; providing protection for other humanitarian agencies and, when requested to do so by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), providing protection for convoys of released detainees. It was a large and complex operation for which many peacekeepers and aid workers paid with their lives. By the end of 1995, the airlift operation had delivered nearly 160,000 metric tons of food in nearly 13,000 sorties, while UNPROFOR-supported convoys had delivered more than 850,000 metric tons of aid by road.
    The second broad purpose for which the UN was deployed was to contain the conflict and mitigate its consequences as far as possible, making sure it did not spread within or beyond the territory of the former Yugoslavia. This involved imposing various constraints on the warring parties, through such arrangements as the no-fly zone over Bosnia adopted in October 1992, weapons-exclusion zones, and the preventive deployment of UN troops, the first mission of its kind, to the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia in December 1992.
    The third objective was to facilitate the efforts by the warring parties—both locally and at the strategic level—to reach a peaceful settlement to the conflict. To this end, the UN negotiated local cease-fires and provided support for an overall political settlement. The latter included support for activities of the International Conference on the former Yugoslavia and those of the contact group established in April 1994.
    While these were all important goals, they did not constitute a clear political objective for the UN mission. The peacekeepers had not deployed to end the war in Bosnia, nor was it an army sent out to fight on one side.
    By 1993, the Bosniak town of Srebrenica—a refugee-filled enclave containing some sixty thousand trapped Muslims—was besieged, bombarded daily by Bosnian Serb forces threatening extreme ethnic cleansing. Consequently, on April 16, 1993, the Security Council demanded that “all parties treat Srebrenica and its surroundings as a safe area which should be free from armed attacks and any other hostile action.” A few weeks later, the Council conferred the same status on five other threatened towns: Zepa, Gorazde, Bihac, Tuzla, and the capital city, Sarajevo.
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    T he decision to accord the status of “safe area” to Srebrenica provided no more than a temporary respite from violence. The fighting around the enclave and shelling of the town ratcheted up once more, and it soon became clear that the Council would have to return to consider their professed commitment “to ensure full respect for the safe areas.”
    In mid-May, the self-styled Bosnian Serb Assembly in Pale rejected a peace plan proposed by UN special envoy Cyrus Vance and European Community representative Lord Owen, after which both the nonaligned caucus—led by Venezuela, which was then on the Council—and the United States called for more “forceful” action to be taken, including a lifting of the arms embargo on Bosnia combined with NATO air strikes against Bosnian Serb targets. The UK and France, both with large