(July 9) - The basic dishonesty and flagrant self-serving mendacity which characterizes the UN's handling of the video cassette showing UNIFIL involvement in some aspects of the abduction of IDF soldiers by Hizbullah are symptoms of a deeper malaise afflicting the ways in which the United Nations is running some of its so-called peacekeeping operations.
Two recent episodes come especially to mind, and in both of them the behavior of the UN bureaucracy and UN forces verges on complicity in war crimes and genocide.
The first case is that of the behavior of the UN-commanded Dutch battalion in Srebrenica in Bosnia in 1995. At the time, this Bosnian Muslim enclave, besieged by Serbian forces, was a "UN protected zone."
In return for this status, the beleaguered outgunned Muslim defenders of the enclave deposited their weapons with the UN - in other words, they were disarmed. A Dutch battalion was stationed in the city as a symbol of the UN's protection.
When, in July 1995, Serbian-Bosnian forces under Military Commander Ratko Mladic occupied the town, the disarmed Muslim defenders were totally helpless.
The UN-controlled Dutch battalion did nothing to defend, even symbolically, the Muslim population: most of the women and children were expelled by the Serbs, and about 8,000 men were brutally slaughtered. All the UN forces were involved - under orders from New York UN headquarters and Dutch authorities - in what is euphemistically called "force protection" - that is, making sure that they themselves would not be harmed. The Dutch commander even met with Mladic and is shown on a video cassette (oh, the power of modern technology!) enjoying a friendly toast with him while the slaughter was going on.
It was the massacres at Srebrenica which ultimately forced US president Bill Clinton, and hence NATO, to intervene with force against the Serbs and put an end to the killings. This led to the Dayton accords - a flawed agreement, but at least it put an end to the killings, the rapes and the ethnic cleansing.
When Dutch journalists discovered not only the helplessness, but also the complicity - albeit a passive one - of the Dutch battalion, all hell broke loose in the Netherlands. A parliamentary commission looked into the details of Dutch passivity in face of murder, TV documentaries shocked the nation and some mild steps were taken against some of the commanders involved.
But the UN as such did not do anything; it washed its hands like Pontius Pilate. If and when Mladic eventually faces the Hague Tribunal, will the co-defendants include the commander of the Dutch battalion, the Dutch minister of defense, the UN representative in Bosnia at that time, and perhaps also the then UN secretary-general Boutrous Boutrous Ghali? One wonders, but it is a legitimate question.
This was not the first time that UN forces in Bosnia were complicit in murder. A few years earlier, during the siege of Sarajevo (in which the UN was again an evenhanded and "neutral" observer), a Muslim Bosnian deputy prime minister was murdered by Serb forces when he traveled, in a UN van and under UN protection, from downtown Sarajevo to the city's airport. He was taken out of the UN armored vehicle by Serb forces and shot while French UN forces stood by. Again: "force protection." Using a more honest vocabulary - complicity in murder.
The other blatant example is Rwanda. There was a small UN force in Rwanda when the Hutu massacres of the Tutsi minority started. It was immediately recalled - under orders of the person who at that time was responsible for UN peacekeeping operations world-wide, Kofi Annan. He has since apologized for this cowardly act, which facilitated the Hutu genocide. This did not prevent him from being elected - and now re-elected - UN secretary-general. Belgium similarly decided to evacuate a small force it maintained in Rwanda, which was once a Belgian League of Nations mandate.
Will Annan, the prime minister and defense minister of Belgium be fellow indictees at the War Crimes Tribunal in Arusha, which was set up by the UN to try the genocide in Rwanda? Will a Belgian prosecutor ever entertain indicting them under existing Belgian laws?
Again, one wonders.
Let it be clear: the UN is not a criminal organization, and UN forces are not death squads. Yet the UN is a deeply flawed organization - it never succeeded in brokering, establishing and maintaining peace - not in Kashmir, not in Cyprus, not in the Middle East - nowhere. Occasionally it can be useful as a stopgap measure. But its failure to achieve peace turns even relatively useful stopgap measures such as UNIFIL into a travesty.
Its utter failure to stop Serbian aggression - first in Croatia (remember the destruction of Vukovar and the shelling of Dubrovnik), then in Bosnia and finally in Kosovo has turned its operations into the opposite of what they should have been. From being peacekeeping forces, they became forces that stabilized the gains of the aggressors, and in the case of Srebrenica they became even accomplices to mass murder, war crimes and genocide.
Like every organization, the UN should be judged not by its rhetoric, but by its deeds. Its rhetoric is wonderful (so was Stalin's Soviet Constitution): its deeds, however, turn it into a combination of impotence, hypocrisy and complicity in crimes. That's exactly why the League of Nations was eventually disbanded.
(The author is professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a former director-general of the Foreign Ministry.)