The Geneva Option by Adam LeBor

pressed play: “ . . . a small price to pay.” Someone who had spent some time in the United States, someone who had studied or worked there. He was not a senior UN official, or at least not one she had ever met. She listened again, intently. It was a Viennese accent, with the telltale lilt of the Austrian capital.
    H USSEIN : But this . . . event goes against every founding principle of the UN.
    R EMBAUGH: [ her voice cold and hard ] Mr. Secretary-General, as you well know, there is a precedent for this. Srebrenica. You agreed that the Dutch peacekeepers would not defend the enclave. The Bosnian Serbs were allowed to capture Srebrenica in exchange for signing up to the Dayton Peace Accords.
    H USSEIN: [ anguished ] Capture the town, yes. Not massacre every man and boy.
    R EMBAUGH : Knowing the Bosnian Serbs’ history, after three years of war, that was entirely predictable. And indeed was predicted by your own UN military observers. Fareed [ her voice softer now ], you know as well as I do that it’s all a numbers game. It always has been and always will be. Eight thousand lost at Srebrenica to end the Bosnian war, which was about to set half of Europe ablaze and open the door to Al-Qaeda. Yes, it was horrible, for all of us. But how many lives were saved? Hundreds of thousands. And we brought peace to the Balkans, a peace that still holds. Believe me, Fareed, we all wish we did not have to do this. But it is the only way to clear the path to the peace accord. Like Charles says, we need to see the bigger picture here. Hakizimani has agreed to everything. His people on the ground are ready, as soon as they get the uniforms. But that deal simply will not happen under the current DPKO leadership. This is the only way to ensure the right people take control of the department. It’s a means to an end. He has to go.
    H USSEIN : Why not simply sack him? This is a high price to pay to rid the UN of one man.
    B ONNET : We, the world, will pay a much higher price if he stays. This is not about one man. Braithwaite not only has to go, he and his whole approach to peacekeeping must be completely discredited, together with his senior staff and as soon as possible. He can have no future in this house after what he has done to the DPKO. The department must be rebuilt, from the bottom up. Remember, Mr. Secretary-General, how he humiliated you in Bosnia, how he tramped on the most basic values of the United Nations. It was an outrage, an offense against our most important tenet: impartiality, no matter how extreme the provocation. He has UN soldiers actually fighting battles.
    There were several seconds of silence. Yael could almost see Hussein nodding righteously to himself as he pondered Braithwaite’s damage to the sacred neutrality of the UN. Braithwaite had gained fame at home and notoriety at the UN headquarters while commanding a battalion of peacekeepers in Bosnia in the early 1990s during the Yugoslav wars. Bosnian Serb soldiers at a checkpoint outside Sarajevo had attempted to arrest the British officer together with a British Foreign Office minister and his SAS bodyguards as they crossed the front lines and passed into government-controlled territory.
    The usual UN practice was to open negotiations, which would last hours and lead nowhere. Braithwaite simply drove his armored fighting vehicle through the checkpoint, smashing the barricade into pieces and scattering the Bosnian Serb troops in every direction. A furious Fareed Hussein had summoned the UN press corps to protest this violation of the UN’s neutrality. He described the incident as “reckless, foolhardy, and setting a dangerous precedent that would draw peacekeepers into the conflicts they were supposedly defusing.” Braithwaite had responded by inviting Hussein to visit Sarajevo for himself. The invitation was not taken up.
    Backed by the French, Russians, and the Chinese, Hussein had fought hard to prevent