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The World Today
June 1999
An international peacekeeping force is going to be needed in Kosovo to take care of security. There are serious doubts about whether the UN is up to the job: its peacekeeping department is in transition, the UN barons still flex their muscles in rivalry and the reform process is far from complete.
It took barely five years for the UN to move from its highest point in the 1991 Gulf crisis to an all time low in 1996 after failures in Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda and Angola. Its declining fortunes are reflected in a decrease in UN troops in the field from about eighty thousand to less than fifteen thousand today. This is ascribed to lack of membership support, to bad Security Council decisions and to failures within the UN institution.
John Mackinlay is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Defence Studies and a Senior lecturer in the Department of War Studies, Kings College, London.
A whirlwind of destruction and violence, unleashed by Slobodan Milosevic in 1989, has torn through Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and has now come, full circle, to an appaling climax in Kosovo. The Iron Curtain has been replaced by a new division with South Eastern Europe. Behind, languishes a zone of instability and misery. At its core is a regime that for a decade has exported hatred and bloodshed to its neighbours and, if left unchecked, could spread its poison elsewhere.
Today, after fifty years of peace, NATO is at war, locked in a new struggle against a new threat. Not against a brooding, expansionist and heavily armed belligerent — but against policies of ethnic hatred and barbarism in the midst of the European continent which, if we choose to ignore them, could ultimately destabilise European security in more subtle and destructive ways than the Warsaw Pact could ever have done.
We have not kept the peace in Western Europe for fifty years only to see it imperilled by a new tyranny at the end of the century — a century that has seen all many European tyrannies. Many may argue that we waited too long to draw the sword, too long to take up arms and to say to Milosevic on our own behalf, and on behalf of all those he has terrorised and maimed and driven from their homes: enough is enough. Now we will stand and fight.
Ambassador Jacques Paul Klein is Principal Deputy High Representative for Implementation of the Dayton Accords, Sarajevo. This is an edited version of a lecture he gave at Chatham House.
For the second time in a decade an international alliance is at war with a technologically less developed enemy. Last time, real time satellite television was said to be playing a part, in this case it may be the web war. At heart it’s the same story: information and its denial.
Some things never change. In |the propaganda surrounding only the second major inter-state conflict of the 1990s, we’ve seen most of the themes before — atrocity stories reminiscent of the 1915 Bryce Report into alleged German outrages in Belgium, consolidation of civilian morale caused by bombing as in Britain in 1940 or Germany in 1944/45, the parading of captured prisoners-of-war as in Vietnam and the Gulf, and the release of video-game-type footage of precision missile attacks, also as in the Gulf. That conflict in 1991 has been termed the ‘first information war’ because it was the first time the means of getting information around and out of the conflict area were becoming more widely available, affordable, smaller, instantaneous and harder to detect.
Philip M. Taylor is Professor of International Communications and Director of the Institute of Communications Studies at the University of Leeds. His latest book, Selling Democracy: British Propaganda in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh UP) is published this month.
Nothing illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of a country and its political system more than war. Germany may not officially be at war — the bombing campaign against the rump Yugoslavia is euphemistically described as a ‘military action’ or ‘air-strikes’. Nonetheless, Bundeswehr participation in NATO operations against Milosevic’s regime is a defining moment in the politics of the new Germany.
For the first time since 1945, German forces are taking offensive military operations against a sovereign state. This historic watershed is all the more remarkable because it is under the control of a ‘Red-Green’ coalition government, and without a clear UN mandate. The Kosovo tragedy has had a marked impact on German domestic politics, and has helped changed perceptions of the new Government.
Dr Adrian Hyde-Price is Senior Lecturer in the Institute for German Studies at the University of Birmingham.
How can Russian responses to NATO action on Kosovo be explained? After agreeing a set of principles with the leading industrial countries in early May, Moscow redoubled its diplomatic efforts to end the crisis. The targeting by NATO of China’s embassy in Belgrade apparently reinforced Russian opposition to military action against Serbia, producing further uncertainty.
Does russia’s reaction to nato attacks on yugoslavia indicate that policy to the West is moving towards Cold War-style confrontation and deterrence instead of partnership? Not really, so far. Let us take a closer look at the main Russian actions — and non-action — in regard to the Kosovo war. Russia did condemn the NATO attack, but would it have been reasonable to expect that a permanent member of the UN Security Council would keep silent when the Council was circumvented?
Dr Viktor Gobarev of the Science Applications International Corporation, Washington, was previously a Russian military officer and Deputy Head of the Strategic Analysis Department at the Military and Military-Historic Studies Institute, Moscow.
After some months of relative tranquility, the situation in Russia has been plunged into uncertainty once more. On 12 May, President Boris Yeltsin dismissed his Prime Minister, Yevgeni Primakov — the third holder of that office to be sacked in just over a year. Though the President survived parliamentary efforts to impeach him, his decision reopenned doubts about his health and the economy. An International Monetary Fund loan is dependent on parliament’s approval of new legislation. Confirmation is also needed of the President’s nominee as Prime Minister, Sergei Stepashin. This latest crisis — coinciding with Moscow’s search for an international role in the Kosovo war — is unlikely to be reassuring to the Russian people trying to make sense of their new world.
Dr Anna Matveeva is a Research Fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House.
UN delegates from around the globe are about to meet in New York to review progress on population issues since last they gathered in Cairo five years ago. Their agenda is not comforting. The developed world has not kept its promises on funding, some parts of the globe face exploding populations, while others see their people dying early. There’s a potentially catastrophic mismatch between people and resources.
For the first time since china’s great famine claimed thirty million lives in 1959-61, rising death rates are slowing world population growth. When the United Nations (UN) released its biennial population update late last year, it reduced the projected world population for 2050 from 9.4 billion to 8.9 billion. Of the 500 million drop, roughly two thirds is because of falling birth rates, but one third is the result of rising death rates.
Lester Brown is President of the Worldwatch Institute in Washington. He is co-author of Beyond Malthus: Nineteen Dimensions of the Population Challenge just published by Worldwatch (www.worldwatch.org).
Angola returned to all-out conflict in December 1998, the fourth war in living memory. The human cost since fighting resumed is impossible to determine with precision, but the United Nations estimates that more than half a million people have recently been internally displaced — seven percent of the population. Fuelled by access to oil and diamonds, both the Angolan government and the UNITA rebels appear determined to fight it out on the battlefield for the foreseeable future.
The return to war reflects the end of an uneasy peace process which commenced with the signing of the Lusaka Protocol in Zambia in November 1994. It was overseen by two United Nations (UN) peacekeeping missions, UNAVEM III and its successor, MONUA, at a cost to the international community of US$1.5 billion.
Alex Vines is an Associate Fellow of the British-Angola Forum at Chatham House.
This is a thoroughly researched and fully documented book. The author has also drawn on her own experience of Iraq and her wide personal involvement with NGOs working there. It will be an invaluable resource for all those seeking to make sense of a complex subject where often diverse and contradictory political, humanitarian and military considerations and mixed motivations on the part of all parties involved are inextricably bound up with ideological, ethnic and religious tensions and rivalries.
Sir John Moberly is an Associate Fellow of the Middle East Programme at Chatham House. He was formerly Britain’s Ambassador to Iraq and Jordan.
The Ukrainian Resurgence is a pretty strange title for a book. A country whose official Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has fallen by almost sixty percent since independence in 1991 and which in eight short years has accumulated an appaling reputation for corruption and political drift does not really convey the necessary impression of thrusting vitality. Moreover, ‘resurgence’ implies that the present feeds off the dynamism of an earlier, equally vigorous era.
Andrew Wilson is Lecturer in Ukrainian Studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, London.