SECURITY & DEFENCE (Mini-articles) Index

Drug battles in the favelas of Brazil, fighting between Italian police and Albanian refugees, and severed heads and limbs paraded in the anarchy of war-torn Sierra Leone were all featured on this week’s feature of BBC’s Panorama. It used these images to unveil a terrifying vision of the future—that of Martin Van Creveld, the Israeli military analyst.

Creveld does not merely reject President George Bush’s hopes of a New World Order. He substitutes for that optimistic expectation its absolute opposite: a dark and terrible world of disorder and savagery, dominated by the cruel and the fanatical. Van Creveld believes we will look back on the Cold War as the world’s last good time, when superpowers ruled the earth and colluded, whatever their ideological differences, to see that rogue rulers were forced to choose sides and behave themselves, and when terrorist movements which did not do the superpowers’ bidding were slapped down. All that, he says, now belongs to the past. The removal of the discipline of the Cold War spells the end of state authority.

From now on, power will pass progressively from elected governments, commanding popular assent, to the selfish and obsessive—robber barons of the drugs world and computer banking fraud, ayatollahs and ideologues of sectarian religion, extreme nationalism or crazy politics. Creveld, a mild-mannered military historian at the renowned Hebrew University of Jerusalem, does not base his predictions on guess work but on the obvious events that are taking place around us.

From an article in the Daily Telegraph, 23 Mar 1995

The UN can still, sometimes, defuse a crisis, separate combatants or set the stage for negotiations; but it still cannot settle underlying disputes or enforce a solution as it was originally intended. The procedures have changed, but not the underlying restrictions to its powers.In the old days, avoiding a veto from one of the members of the Security Council and getting a resolution through was like towing a recalcitrant brontosaurus through a glutinous swamp. Nowadays, things rattle along, and resolutions pour off the production line by the dozen. But the fiascos and the failures, these days, are no less.

Nor has the agenda altered all that much. Although the ideological conflict between capitalism and communism dominated world affairs until the late 1980s, the UN was elbowed aside when the Titans clashed, used as a rubber stamp if at all. For most of its 50 years, the UN has been a decolonisation machine grindingly absorbed in the dismantlement of western empires. Now, much of its energy goes into tackling the scattered debris from the decolonisation of the Russian empire; the landscape -- ethnic and sectarian disputes, separatist tendencies within artifical states -- all too familiar. They will continue for many years and it is liekly that the UN will be ground to nothing in the process. Its deliberaions will be ignored, just as its 50th anniversary will be next year.

Abstract from "From the Cold War to the Hot Peace", 1994

If everything had gone according to plan, this would have been a month of high-wire diplomacy. At the UN, entering its 50th year of existence, leaders of the nations who make up the Security Council would have held a spectacular, photogenic meeting and laid out some bold plans for the next half-century. Last month, however, the Security Council was quietly and indefinitely postponed. It was a blunt admission of the waning of utopian expectations that surfaced after the collapse of Soviet communism.

For a brief period, it seemed that the world’s leading powers were pursuing compatible strategic goals through a set of institutions which everyone wanted to see strengthened. But, by mid-December, it was clear that summitry, and international institutions that purport to guarantee security, were going out of fashion. Earlier in the month, a summit in Budapest of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe had descended into name-calling, after Russian President Boris Yeltsin lashed out at the US for trying to speed up the enlargement of NATO.

From an article in the Financial Times, 6 January 1995

Foreign tourists were warned yesterday to stay away from Sri Lanka by a Tamil rebel faction claimed it carried it carried out a failed attempt to blow up the island’s internatinal airport last week. The threat of further attacks is seen as the clearest risk yet to foreign travellers who have rarely been targets during the 12-year civil war. Britons were the siggest single group among the 400,000 foreign visitors to Sri Lanka last year.

Although the haphazardly typed warning came from the little-known Ellalen force, Western analysts in Colombo suspect it was actually the Tamil Tigers who planted 77lb of plastic explosive iniside a van in a car park at Colombo airport.

An ambitious peace initiative by President Chandrika Kumaratinga was shattered in April when the Tigers broke the cease-fire with a series of bloody attacks, saying the government was ignoring their demands. The rebels shot down two military transport aircraft with shoulder-held surface to air missiles, killing 97. The availability of such weaponry has alarmed other Asian countries fighting their own insurgent factions. Also, the Sri Lankan government is fearing a similar attack on commercial aircraft. Hoteliers and tour operators now fear an escalation in violence in Colombo which could devastate tourism this year.

From an article in the Daily Telegraph, 14 June 1995

"Why does the world give everything away so cleanly?" said the old man, with bitter emphasis on the word "cleanly". He was too old to be considered dangerous, even by the Bosnian Serbs who, in their biggest and fastest example of ethnic cleansing of the Bosnian war, have swept an estimated 30,000 unwanted women, children and old men like like so much debris into the Muslim heartland of central Bosnia. But they have kept back thousands of young men and women on "liberated Srebrenica".

Yesterday in the northern Bosnian town of Tuzla,which is overwhelmed with refugees, dozens of dirty hands clawed upwards trying to grab a yoghurt, a lemon, or a cucumber, being thrown to the sweaty, shouting throng of women. Ajka Husic didn;t join the fray. She stood by, crying silently at the recollection of her 19-year-old son being put on display by Serb conquerors. "I saw him. I saw my son captured and lying there with his hands tied behind his head," she said. Travelling in a bus packed with refugees from the fallen "safe area" of Srebrenica, Mrs Husic spotted her boy, Fikret, among the men sprawled along the road, some captive, some dead. "The Serbs stopped the bus and told us: "Look, this is your army," and I looked at them and I saw him. I screamed and called his name, but he couldn't hear me."

It was common knowledge in the refugee camp near Tuzla airport that Muslim men had been rounded up in the woods as they attempted to flee the advancing Serbs. With each new busload of refugees came fresh reports. Someone had seen someone's husband or brother or son lying by the road, or being led away by Serb soldiers or being shot. Refugees told of women being dragged away and raped, civilians being shot and young boys being dragged from transports. This was the kind of scene which, 50 years after World War II, Europe did not expect to see again. These are people who have lived much as we live. Yet they were glad of a crust of bread and a drop of water.

From The Independent on Sunday, 16 July 1995

The United Nations turns 50 today and is celebrating the way it likes to mark events it considers of global importance by budgeting £9 million for a rolling jamboree lasting until the end of July. The original signatories to the UN Charter would be surprised by the tarnished image of the organisation today. The original lean operation of 1,500 idealistic staffers has mushroomed into a monstrous bureaucracy now employing 51,000 people all around the world in its 70 related agencies, with a total annual budget of over £6.5 billion. At the UN's high-rsie headquarters in New York, staffers grow impatient and tetchy, when questioned about the legendary progligacy and incompetence. Stories of baffling wastage and bungling range from the £2.5 million stolen from UN headquarters in Mogadishu last year to the tens of thousands of pounds still being spent to study the scourge of apartheid.

In New York, an atmosphere of nepotism, cronyism and sexual harassment pervades the building. Crucial budgetary decisions are taken behind doors not so much closed as hermetically sealed from public scrutiny. Redundant programmes are rarely jettisoned because one country will lose positions and threaten to vote against the pet projects of other nations. The UN ethos of "if in doubt, have a conference" costs taxpayers tens of millions of pounds a year. The recent "social summit" in copenhagen, which passed all but unnoticed expcept by the expenses-paid delegates, cost £37 million.

Madeleine Albright, America's UN ambassador, likens the organisation to a "business with 185 members of the board, all of them with strong and contradictory opinions, coming from every coneivable culture, speaking every conceivable language -- and each with a brother-in-law who is unemployed." To be fair, the UN has taken some steps towards better house-keeping. A former executive at Price Waterhouse has been appointed to control the personnel monster and staff have been warned that a UN job is not always for life. Sir Brian Urquhart, former Under-Secretary General, believes the bureacratic bungling distracts attention from the real challenge, which is to find a mission for the UN in the post-Cold War eraa. The UN was founded "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war" between nations, but now it has become a "sort of international rescue service", he said. Largely because of television images, it is being drawn into conflicts, such as Bosnia, "where it doesn't have the capacity or the mandate to intervene".

From the Daily Telegraph 26 June 1995