Dealing with the Displacement

and Suffering Caused by Yugoslavia’s Wars

Thomas G. Weiss and Amir Pasic

The fundamental lesson to be learned from displacement in the former Yugoslavia is to avoid the tragic conflation and confusion of humanitarian and political issues. There are five internationally recognized states in the erstwhile Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (see map). The causes and consequences of involuntary displacement and war-inflicted suffering in the five units are so intertwined that they are best analyzed as a single case, particularly for the focus of this essay: Croatia, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia/Montenegro), and Bosnia-Hercegovina.

Though the major dramas of violent displacement have ended with efforts to implement the Dayton Peace Accords of November 1995, the problem of displacement continues to haunt Bosnia and its neighbors. The return of refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) continues to be one of the major unfulfilled provisions of the Dayton Accords.

The authors are grateful to UNHCR’s chief statistician, Béla Hovy, who helped generate data for this chapter and made other useful comments on the overall approach, and to Larry Minear who helped sharpen its conclusions.

Certainly, the military forces in the former Yugoslavia have been silent since the arrival of the NATO and partner troops to Bosnia in December. There has been no distressed movement of large numbers of people since the early 1996 exodus of Serbs from Sarajevo during the early stages of implementing the military part of the Dayton Accords. Nonetheless, the subsequent analysis, with its focus on the origin and trajectory of human displacement before the end of 1995, supports the emerging reality that displacement promises to be a major impediment to achieving a lasting peace. Understanding the political context of displacement becomes more crucial than ever.

The political roots of violence in the Yugoslav case indicate that the lessons are overwhelmingly related to actions that should be, and should have been, taken in the political arena. Humanitarian measures cannot address fundamentally political problems. As in other complex emergencies, misplaced humanitarianism and political ineffectiveness often combined in the former Yugoslavia to make a bad situation worse. Future humanitarian efforts must avoid such a syndrome of negative reinforcement.

In many ways, this case study highlights efforts by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to alleviate the suffering of all displaced–both refugees and IDPs–and besieged populations. We argue for a principled extension of this ad hoc practice for all the victims of war. This is a logical extension not only of using UNHCR as the UN’s "lead agency" in the former Yugoslavia–that is, the agency in the driver’s seat for the international humanitarian response–but also of the general concern for IDPs that has found official expression by the UN secretary-general and his special representative on the matter. Though the specific needs of people who have been uprooted appropriately draw our attention, the specific needs of all those who require care and refuge should be dealt with flexibly and without discrimination, regardless of the most appropriate institutional form for humanitarian action. UNHCR’s designation as lead agency extended its mandate to assist and protect all those who can no longer count on any state for their security and provided a glimmer of hope in the humanitarian travesties of the former Yugoslavia.

This case was, in Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s words, a "rich-man’s war," drawing an exceptionally massive dedication of resources and sustained international concern. As such, we consider it to be instructive as an extreme case. It is hard to imagine that other endangered populations would receive similar treatment. Because the international attention devoted to the former Yugoslavia may be highly unusual, it suggests the limits of what can be reasonably expected. This case also dramatically reveals the vital importance of the political context and its enmeshment with humanitarian efforts. Indeed, responsibility for fellow humans implies a political act that either directly contravenes or significantly adjusts the political lives of suffering populations who are supposed to be separate, whole, and distinctive as a result of the sovereignty of their country.

Characterizations of Yugoslavia’s wars and the role of displaced and besieged populations have been profoundly political. The three most common characteristics of sovereignty–territory, authority, and identity–have been in continuous flux and contested at every turn. The situation in the former Yugoslavia may be the most extreme example of the inappropriateness of distinguishing "refugees" and "internally displaced persons." These terms have been called into question because of their lack of operational significance although in other cases there are more obvious needs to separately identify IDPs. Adding to the problematic nature of conceptual and operational distinctions between these two categories are persons "affected" by war itself–or "war victims" in the terminology of the UNHCR. Those not uprooted but in dire need of humanitarian assistance and protection composed over 40 percent of the refugee agency’s beneficiary population in 1993, 1994, and 1995.

In analytical terms, "displacement" may in many cases be an inappropriate policy guide unless it is conceived in the broadest sense to encompass the conditions of those who have crossed a border or stayed behind–all those who have been literally or figuratively uprooted from the conditions of humane survival. This is a humanitarian adaptation of "the end of geography"–which originally signified the lack of salience of borders because of modern international finance and communications, but which increasingly applies also to comprehensive coverage to all those affected by war regardless of their physical location.

When the bounds of territory, authority, and identity–of borders, political arrangements, and collective solidarities–are both ambiguous and uncertain, they serve as poor guides for action. In other words, it is conditions of deprivation and not categories of victims that should be addressed. Although categories of victims are discernable and classifications possible, all of those who suffer are victims. Those suffering should receive attention strictly in consideration of their specific needs, whether or not they have been displaced. The special requirements and specific contexts of particular victims–for example, some IDPs may have more immediate nutritional needs than others–should be taken into account rather than their legal status.

In the former Yugoslavia, additional problems arose simply because uprooted people were categorized as belonging to an ethnic group; their group membership was used to determine whether and when they received aid or other consideration by the international community. Adding to the complexity of defining victims in circumstances where identities are intensely politicized is the related disagreement over "international" and "internal" borders. Because the boundaries of citizenship did not coincide with those of ethnic identity, external recognition of boundaries became a key feature in shaping not only the prolonged horror of displacement in the former Yugoslavia but also domestic and international responses, in ways that did not reflect the intentions of the act of recognition or the purpose of the institution of recognition. Such action implies a form of participation in the "ethnification" of peoples whose country has been decimated largely through a political process that destroyed interethnic trust and led to the degeneration of an existing multiethnic society as a result of manipulating ethnic differences, making them the basis for spreading fear and divisiveness.

All census data can be used for political purposes, but one of the most graphic illustrations of how extreme this phenomenon has become is the widely distributed color map of Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina in which there is a breakdown, commune by commune, of the three major ethnic groups on the basis of the 1991 census. This indicated the raw material for displacement, even before the triumph of nationalism and "ethnic cleansing." Catering to the needs of those who had the greatest potential to be displaced before the conflict would have been preferable to alleviating their suffering after ethnic homogenization.

Knowing that afflictions that often accompany war and displacement can be diverse and highly specific to regions, peoples, gender, and age, one would prefer to be able to practice preventive medicine. Unfortunately, there is no mobile hospital with the well-delineated and managed ward that could be appropriately designed to accommodate IDPs in all situations. Sometimes they are the most needy; at other times they are the relatively privileged. Displacement is manifested differently in different countries and also within locations in a country. Given current resource constraints and the fluid conditions facing actually or potentially threatened populations, devising a full-fledged public health approach to IDPs is infeasible. The metaphor of triage might serve us better; it allows for flexibility to determine acute needs and provide tailored responses in light of the capacities of international institutions to protect and assist victims.

Categorizing persons is appropriate only when it facilitates protection or the delivery of needed assistance. Indeed, the case of Yugoslavia demonstrates the need to proceed with caution and to adopt longer-term perspectives about the impact of humanitarian assistance, which has political consequences that should not be obscured by the well-intentioned rush to rescue the afflicted. In particular, humanitarian efforts affect both the mental well-being as well as the basic political orientations of local populations. The broadening of concern toward IDPs–and toward endangered populations–implies a commitment to the political evolution of a society that is in need of immediate rescue and subsequent rehabilitation.

This chapter proceeds in six sections. First, we begin with a survey of the causes of the armed conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, paying particular attention to international factors in the political manipulation of identities. Second, we offer a statistical and chronological overview of the scope of displacement in the former Yugoslavia, which reflects major political and military developments. We discuss the specific difficulties faced by IDPs and other endangered populations, especially the deep political involvement in traditions and cultures whose autonomy has been respected more in normal times.

Third, we discuss international responses to the conflicts, illustrating their effect on IDPs; this is the most lengthy and complex part of the argument. We begin with recognition–diplomatic, pragmatic, and media–and then proceed to both military and humanitarian responses, explicating the enmeshment of politics and humanitarianism. We analyze the leadership role of UNHCR, which suggests that although general efforts at protection failed, its successful delivery of assistance was an organic outgrowth and a coherent extension of its concern for those without refuge who have crossed an international boundary.

Fourth, we discuss the hallmarks of the Yugoslav case and the lessons that might be drawn from it. Fifth, we consider the politics of rescue and argue for an articulation of, and engagement with, the political implications of humanitarian action.

Last, we advocate reactivating the abandoned (since 1992) practice of designating a lead agency to orchestrate the international community’s rescue efforts. Although a lead agency could not be as comprehensive in its undertakings as a completely new unit dedicated to the task, we believe this to be a pragmatic approach that could lead to greater international responsibility and a more comprehensive public health approach in complex emergencies.

The Causes of Yugoslavia’s Wars

A deteriorating economy provided the background for nationalist and ethnic dissatisfaction and mobilization as well as its subsequent manipulation. Initially, certain members of the Serb elite were the strongest supporters of unrest; they had the most to lose from a devaluation of their predominant role in state bureaucracies. Beginning with the suppression of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo in the early 1980s, widespread politicization of both ethnicity and the ethnodemographic history of certain portions of the territory became commonplace. Also relevant were the role of the Yugoslav military as a failed all-Yugoslav institution and the cumbersome constitution bequeathed by Marshal Tito–both became forces for separation rather than unity.

The internal economic, political, legal, and ethnic structure of Yugoslavia created conditions and a climate within which neighbors could slaughter one other. Yet such conditions had existed for some time before the actual explosion of ethnic violence, and they also exist in countries that have not undergone such social upheaval. The most salient explanation lies in the radicalization of perceptions about differences, inequalities, and the role of neighbors in perpetrating injustices. These perceptions changed the course of Balkan history. The recourse to a politics of fear based on ethnicity drove many men (and very few women) to pick up arms lest their home and identity fall prey to the designs of neighbors who were suddenly recast as threatening strangers.

If any consensus is emerging from the scholarship on Yugoslavia’s demise, it may be one that runs directly counter to the ethnic/religious/primeval hatreds that underlie many media treatments and popular understandings of what Susan Woodward has called the "Balkan Tragedy." There is general agreement that leaders and intellectuals within Yugoslavia more or less consciously employed divisive language and accentuated past episodes of intra-Yugoslav armed conflicts for political purposes. More than simply reflecting the sociopolitical realities that were fundamental in their country, leaders stirred the cauldron of ethnic tensions and added fuel to the embers underneath it; they calculated that their hateful messages would serve political goals by mobilizing support. At the same time, many who formulated or condoned malicious national and ethnic ideology never fully contemplated the possibility that their ideas would bring back genocide as a policy option on the European continent, but international organizations nonetheless abetted matters by recognizing those actions that favored ethnic identity over other forms of identity.

One important reason that ethnic and nationalist discourse flourished in Yugoslavia was its international resonance among numerous observers who expected ethnic divisions to assert themselves in the Balkans, sooner or later. Consequently, the international context added to the significance of the malicious domestic hatreds that were first acted on by para-military groups whose entrance onto the political scene brought a new and dangerous tenor to local political processes. Moreover, politicians and political parties who first constructed and then stressed the presence of dangerous ethnic threats added to the damage by confronting ethnic swaggering with jingoistic bravado. Those who tried to counter the hysteria of ethnic menace by calling for tolerance and coexistence found little support. These voices were dampened initially because they emanated from a confused left that was experiencing the defection of key personalities to nationalist causes at the same time that socialism was losing its luster. In a time of general crisis and despair, ethnic ideologies met with popular acclaim, and because they reflected aspirations to national self-determination they also received international encouragement.

An element of social breakdown that is particularly relevant in this case was the creation of a "moral ambiance" that sanctioned the inhumane treatment of those who until shortly before had been viewed as trustworthy neighbors. The perpetrators of such acts first had to be desensitized by long and intense exposure to dehumanizing ideas about those on whom they would vent their frustrations. The absence of mercy for those known rather intimately accounted for some of the most bewildering and inhumane episodes of displacement. Outside organizations and negotiators unwittingly participated in condoning and perhaps enabling the initial "ethnification" of politics in Yugoslavia and then in advancing ethnic solutions by framing the options in essentially ethnic terms.

Yugoslavia unraveled so completely and quickly because it arrived at a time when the world was undergoing profound economic and political transformations. Deadly ideas were intensifying and preparations were being made for armed hostilities in the Balkans at the moment when the Berlin Wall and the Soviet bloc collapsed and Iraq invaded Kuwait. There were warnings of an impending conflagration in the Balkans, but Europe was giddy about the enhanced prospects for European unification in the aftermath of the Maastricht Treaty. The Conference on (now Organization for) Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE, now OSCE) was just setting up its institutional capacity for emergencies at the time, and the United States did not consider that its national interests were significantly affected by Balkan machinations.

Overview of Displacement: June 1991–December 1995

More precise data about what we call the "casualties of war"–all of the victims of armed conflict including refugees, internally displaced persons, returnees, and war victims–would be useful for scholarly analysis as well as for planning, budgeting, fundraising, and programming. Yet conceptual and practical problems abound. In the prose of The State of the World’s Refugees 1995, in spite of "the constant demands on UNHCR for facts and figures....[it is] difficult to answer such queries with any real degree of accuracy.

Displacement and suffering in the former Yugoslavia can be divided into three periods, which roughly correspond to major political changes resulting from the application of military force and armed intimidation. The significant changes in effective military control that served as the proximate causes of displacements since 1991 are: the Croatian War (June 1991-November 1992); the Bosnian Wars (March 1992-August 1995); and the offensive by Croatia and the Bosnian-Croatian federation in tandem with NATO air power against the Croatian and Bosnian Serbs (August-November 1995). These military engagements were the proximate causes for the preponderance of involuntary displacement, even though it continued steadily throughout the period under review.

The well-known difficulties of compiling accurate statistics within war zones should not prevent efforts to understand how data, however sketchy or exaggerated, are used both by warring parties and by the international humanitarian system. As one UN official close to the operation put it, "Numbers were used and abused by all parties during the war." The statistics for each of the three periods present different snapshots of displacement and suffering depending upon the point of departure: political authority as gauged from Belgrade/Knin/Pale, Zagreb, and Sarajevo; identity as measured from inclusion in Serb, Croat, or Muslim categories; and territorial claims using the internal administrative boundaries of the former republics of Yugoslavia that became the de jure international borders.

The latter juncture is where we begin because this is where the most comprehensive and viable data exist. There are few if any accurate flow statistics available. However, approximately 700,000 refugees moved to Western Europe–over half in Germany–who to date have been cared for mainly by host countries after being moved by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), but who become part of UNHCR’s caseload as repatriation proceeds. These statistics are accurate and reliable (unlike many provided by belligerents). Global flow statistics for the over 4 million persons displaced in the territory of the former Yugoslavia, if available, would no doubt mirror the patterns depicted in figure 6-1 (the annual summaries of displacement in Europe). These data indicate that overall displacement pressures faithfully reflected changes in the political and military situation on the ground during the wars.

The first major period of displacement was the war in Croatia from June 1991 to January 1992. This resulted in Serb rebels laying claim to about one-third of Croat territory and the displacement of some 200,000 Croats, Hungarians, and others from Baranja, Slavonia, and what came to be known as Serb Krajina. Measuring the conflict’s consequences in February 1992, UNHCR estimated that there were 605,000 displaced people in all the countries of the former Yugoslavia: 324,000 in Croatia, about 100,000 each in Bosnia-Hercegovina and Serbia proper, and 60,000 in Vojvodina. The lull in hostilities was to be short-lived, reflected in UNHCR’s switch from issuing a "Situation Update" to an "Emergency Report" in April 1992.

The second major period of displacement was the war in Bosnia (March 1992-August 1995). The war may be over, but migration continues. Most displacement took place in 1992 through a series of territorial shifts and incidents of "ethnic cleansing," which generated more than 1 million internally displaced persons and some 1.1 million refugees who left the territory of Bosnia-Hercegovina but remained on the territory of the former Yugoslavia. Approximately 500,000 people emigrated out of the area and may or may not choose to be repatriated. It is also within Bosnia that the most intense "nonethnic" warfare took place: Fikret Abdic, the rebel strongman, fought against Bosnian government troops in Bihac. He was allied with the Serbs in spite of his own Muslim background. Continual movement into and from the Bihac pocket marked an important exception to the general rule that displacement in the former Yugoslavia only mirrored ethnicity.

The final major period of displacement began in August 1995 and resulted in a mass migration of nearly 150,000 civilian and 50,000 soldiers from the Krajina region–Serbian "expellees" in Belgrade’s view. In addition, there were incidents of designed expulsions of tens of thousands of non-Serbs from the Banja Luka region controlled by Bosnian Serbs. The continuing spillover from what was the largest involuntary displacement of Europeans since the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 took place in the six months immediately preceding the Dayton negotiations and is shown in table 6-1. The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia estimates that about 750,000 refugees had arrived from other former republics by mid-October 1995. This essay is not the place to do more than note that the humanitarian burden on the displaced populations in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was exacerbated by the sanctions that had been imposed by Security Council Resolution 820 of April 1993. Additional refugees heightened the impact of the sanctions on the general populace because a remarkable number, some estimate 90 percent, of refugees in Serbia/Montenegro were accommodated in private households.

The future of Bosnia portends more displacement. Annex 7 of the peace settlement is designed to bring refugees and internally displaced persons back to their prewar homes to claim property that was destroyed or occupied by voluntary or involuntary migrants from other parts of the former Yugoslavia. It will take some time to straighten out the chain of illegal property transfers that accompanied "ethnic cleansing," in spite of the establishment of the Commission for Displaced Persons and Refugees. So much housing and infrastructure have been destroyed that it is unclear to what extent returnees and the persons whom they will displace (that is, the illegal occupants who themselves may have been chased from their own property) can be accommodated. Again, displacement will be a part of the policy landscape for international and local officials for decades.

At the moment that the Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian presidents initialed the first agreement of the Dayton accords at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in November 1995, the government of Croatia claimed to be caring for almost 400,000 displaced persons. It estimated that 130,000 could return to their original places of residence, as soon as the reconstruction process allowed them to do so. To this end, the government set up a program of reconstruction loans, the use of which changes the displaced person’s status to that of a "returnee."

In Serbia, displacement also promises to remain an ongoing problem. The government claims that its resettlement policies are intended to achieve an equitable distribution of displaced persons across municipalities. Those displaced from the Krajina are being resettled in Vojvodina, often in housing from which Croats, Hungarians, and other non-Serbs were evicted. A similar but more contentious policy seems to be in progress in Kosovo; most Krajina Serbs probably do not want to go to serve as a form of ethnic currency in Belgrade’s attempt to alter the demographic balance where ethnic Albanians constitute some 90 percent of the population. This may be one of the reasons why some Serbs have even expressed their desire to return to Croatia, in spite of the possibilities for retaliation against them.

In Bosnia, the obsession with the ethnic categorization of victims continued as the official peace agreement was signed in Paris. The map that appears here as figure 6-2 was dropped from UNHCR’s monthly "Information Notes" after December 1995. Yet, the comparison of prewar and postwar categories of populations according to the breakdown into three ethnic categories illustrates the extent to which the casualties of the war in Bosnia also were "ethnified" as part of the international response.

The preceding data suggest the difficulty of attempting to differentiate refugees, IDPs, returnees, and war victims in armed conflicts like those in the former Yugoslavia. In addition to the operational pull to merge the four categories, the analysis of the human toll from Yugoslavia’s wars leads us to argue for a single category of "casualties of war" on conceptual grounds as well. Efforts to place persons in one category or another depend on the analyst’s or policymaker’s assumptions about the acceptability of particular claims to territory, to authority, and to identity. Rather than take sides in this unseemly exercise, why not straightforwardly help all those who are suffering because they are entitled to human solidarity and protection by international norms? As explained below, comprehensive coverage without discrimination was precisely the basis for UNHCR’s actions in the area.

This case study does not focus on the current needs of displaced peoples and other threatened populations in the former Yugoslavia but rather on the four-year period during which hostilities and the threat of death and radical destitution were constant and real possibilities for many civilians. It is in this context that our stress on the politics of humanitarian engagement should be read because an explicit clarification of principles would allow multilateral policy to tackle the political environment more vigorously in conflicts like the former Yugoslavia. Rather than clinging steadfastly to an illusory middle ground that often requires inaction, we argue that all victims should be protected and assisted without differentiating among them.

Although identifying the specific needs of displaced and other afflicted populations is important when devising appropriate intervention strategies, it was extremely difficult in the former Yugoslavia because populations and boundaries shifted continuously. When would it have been appropriate to consider precise population distributions as given and stable in order to constitute a statistical gauge against which to measure the need for protection and assistance? Nonetheless, certain public health efforts were launched. For example, the World Health Organization helped to support surveillance of infectious diseases during the war in Bosnia. Public health advocates have argued since that such humanitarian aid should be sensitive to the future needs of the communities at war.

Data are scarce, but there is much anecdotal and some systematic evidence regarding the special needs of the displaced and various categories of victims that tend to be disproportionately represented in their ranks. Women, children and the elderly faced particularly acute hardships in the former Yugoslavia, as in all wars. In addition, the impact of the turmoil on their identities has rarely received adequate attention. Perhaps the international community can help facilitate the political conditions in which identities can be actively reconstructed by the victims of war. Indeed, one medical report has commented on the psychosocial problems that emerged in Sarajevo, including the dislocation and bewilderment shared by both doctors and patients regarding the West’s perception that they were "Muslim fundamentalists."

This phenomenon points to the profound importance of carefully considering the manner in which contact between the victims and those who seek to relieve their plight is established and sustained. Categories and characterizations are not only key for targeting the problems and delivering the goods, they also provide an indication to the afflicted of how the "outside world" sees them and the nature of the international commitment to the shared humanity that is said to motivate assistance.

Because women and children figure prominently as casualties, focusing on women seems to be a way of supporting peace and empowering those who generally do not directly participate in hostilities or the abuse of international norms. The usual victimization of women in war was taken to an extreme in Bosnia where rape was an explicit war aim. A recent report has emphasized the particular needs of women in the former Yugoslavia, not only because of a general lack of response to date but also because of their vital role in reconciliation. Also, in the former Yugoslavia as in other societies, women’s displacement disrupts their capacity to support their families and subsequently to reconstruct the war-torn communities that they undergird. After a war that killed an estimated 250,000 people, mostly men, thousands of widows are now their families’ sole breadwinners, and many have few skills with which to support themselves and their children.

The study by the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children draws attention to the fact that women are not being integrated effectively into the postwar economy, and that local governments and international aid agencies are not adequately addressing women’s needs. While many programs aim to create jobs for demobilized soldiers, the study warns that this should not come at the price of excluding widows and female heads of household from taking part in the economic reconstruction. Although their integration into international programs might meet local resistance, both international standards and the rehabilitation needs of a war-torn society make it essential.

In Sarajevo, a relatively large cadre of scientifically capable personnel have made it possible to monitor needs systematically. One study of the nutritional situation during the winter of 1993-94 concluded that the elderly were the most nutritionally vulnerable group. Meanwhile, displaced people housed in collective centers were the most "food insecure" as they were completely dependent on aid, had fewer relatives outside Sarajevo who could help, and did not have access to gardens. The study nonetheless concluded that the winter did not bring a nutritional disaster.

A similar conclusion was reached regarding the general success of preventing major nutritional shortcomings in Bosnia during 1993. Again, in Sarajevo, a study of trends in birth weight during the war concluded that babies were adequately protected in part because of the efforts of UNICEF to promote breast-feeding and to distribute food supplements to mothers and babies.

Regarding the elderly, the London-based Institute of Child Health reported in 1995 that one in seven elderly people in Bosnia’s urban areas was suffering from malnutrition. The Institute suggested that even though women and children have been traditionally seen to be at risk from malnutrition in war zones in Bosnia, they were not as significantly afflicted as the elderly by actual or threatened malnutrition.

Finally, there is also some evidence that aid deliverers and so-called protectors often contributed to exacerbating the problems of victims. Peacekeepers around Sarajevo are widely reported, for example, to have engaged in smuggling, recruiting women for prostitution, and selling aid shipments illegally. Although the behavior of the vast majority of international personnel is beyond reproach, outsiders often become a negative presence in the lives of endangered populations.

International Responses to Displacement

International responses to the massive displacements in the former Yugoslavia can be analyzed under three rubrics: various acts of recognition, military operations, and humanitarian action. They are interrelated and their effects are often difficult to disentangle, but their understanding is especially critical for purposes of the present analysis. The hasty and often haphazard process of recognizing the former republics of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia as states, without realistic guarantees for minorities, represented the international community’s initial attempt to influence the course of the conflict. Subsequently, international responses consisted of military and humanitarian action, which were often counterproductive with respect to the stated political intentions of the international community. These responses merit in-depth examination as part of our attempt to understand the contribution of humanitarian politics to displacement and suffering in the Balkans from 1991 to 1995.

Formal and Informal Recognition as Responses

By uprooting people from their habitual residences, displacement calls identity into question; but often pre-existing differences in identity, however defined, inadequately explain the causes of violence. Displacement severs that aspect of identity tied to a residence, possibly leading to an intensification of those aspects of a person’s identity that can accompany the movement of an involuntary migrant. For the sedentary war victim, his or her place of residence becomes transformed and is no longer able to sustain the normal activities that formerly produced a livelihood. Besieged populations, especially in an atmosphere that transforms neighbors into enemies, become isolated and functional refugees in their own homes. Finally, the notion of collective identity is crucial, which is why aspirants to statehood eagerly anticipate its validation by established states.

A key feature of personal and collective identity is how others perceive identity, as well as how it is "imagined." It is also important to recognize the efforts that are expended to maintain identities, often outside the ambit of official institutions. Thus, the issue of recognition amidst displacement should be viewed more broadly than the concerns of state-to-state recognition under international law. Although the precipitous official recognition by Bonn and Washington of Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia are generally seen as crucial for precipitating Yugoslavia’s unraveling, other types of recognition were crucial for the evolution of Yugoslavia’s wars and the resulting displacement.

Formal recognition is well developed in state practice and legal scholarship, but considerably less analytical work has been done to understand the profound consequences of nonstate recognition on the plight of displaced peoples and the conduct of the conflicts that victimize them. The first supplement to official practice is pragmatic recognition by humanitarians, and the second is media recognition that informs local and international actors about how they are perceived. In the same way that the location of state authority in the economic arena has moved from states toward corporations, economic blocs, and even crime syndicates, so too has the locus of effective political recognition been released from the narrow confines of state-to-state relations. Pragmatic and media recognition are important supplements to formal recognition because they reflect the unsettled and "constructed" nature of sovereignty. As such, sovereignty is better viewed as a continuous, fluctuating process rather than a final and perpetual symbol of unassailable majesty tied to a specific geographic location.

diplomatic recognition. Formal state recognition was meant to confirm and reflect the existence of effective control over a population and territory, signaling the finality of political settlements that could be taken for granted once official recognition had been conferred. The leaders of the former Yugoslav republics that were to become five separate states understood the importance of legal recognition by states outside the Balkans.

Although it does not exhaust the ways in which outsiders affected Yugoslavia, the issue of formal recognition by other states, separately and collectively through intergovernmental bodies, turned out to be an especially important factor in massive involuntary displacement. Many citizens of the former Yugoslavia were either ethnic minorities in a post-Yugoslav state that claimed territorial jurisdiction over their original place of residence, or they were minorities in a state to which they fled–even when they fled to the state that was the "homeland" of their nationality or ethnicity. A Croat from Mostar who found himself in Zagreb and a Serb from Knin who found herself in Belgrade soon found that there were other nonethnic distinctions that could make one a minority and marked for discrimination, even in the capital of one’s ethnic or national heartland.

Legal recognition acquired additional importance because of the explicit conditions imposed by the European Community (EC), now European Union (EU). The Badinter Commission, a panel of prominent international jurists, was asked to determine a set of criteria for recognizing new states, and more specifically whether states that had seceded from Yugoslavia fulfilled these explicit criteria. The three essential characteristics that a state had to exhibit in order to be deemed worthy of recognition were protecting individual and minority rights, respecting democratic processes, and demonstrating a commitment not to change internal borders by force. In December 1991, the EC foreign ministers expressed their commitment to recognize Slovenia and Croatia pending the Badinter Commission’s findings regarding the aspirant states’ observance of the requisite criteria. The panel of experts also suggested that Bosnia could demonstrate its democratic will by engaging in a nationwide referendum, which was promptly scheduled for February 29 and March 1, 1992–even though Serbs boycotted the process and used the occasion to justify the erection of their own rebel state within a state.

informal recognition: pragmatic. Aside from diplomatic recognition from individual states and the EC, there was also the ongoing process of pragmatic recognition of various claimants to authority. How do humanitarian agencies–be they governmental or intergovernmental organizations or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)–designate those whom they are helping? Do they view exchanges of ethnic hatred with equanimity, or do they shame those who express jingoism? By immediately negotiating with those who claim control and prevent access to victims, do humanitarians legitimize thugs and encourage victims to see criminals in a new light? For instance, many of the men controlling vital roadways were, until they were given arms and uniforms, unemployed adolescents with little constructive activity to fill their time. Outsiders’ treatment of them as officers of a responsible political entity enhanced their authority but increased despondency and resignation of the victims.

The political ramifications of this kind of pragmatic recognition result from the mundane task of classifying victims for administrative purposes. To some extent, identifying people by their ethnicity implies an endorsement, albeit an unwitting one, of the political dynamics or the political agendas that benefit from deepening such identifications. UNHCR mainly used geographical boundaries and resisted pressures for the most part to gather or publicize statistics on the basis of ethnic groups, a practice that was more widespread among NGOs because of its obvious fundraising potential.

One prominent illustration of the importance of pragmatic recognition can be seen from the way that UN forces became instruments to symbolize the recognition of territorial claims. It is as if the warring parties hoped to elicit eventual official recognition for their territorial claims by accumulating as much pragmatic recognition as possible. Among belligerents, international actors’ acknowledgment of or acquiescence to control over territory in itself constituted an important sign of legitimacy. The implication was that this eventually would lead to official confirmation.

For example, activities on Croatian territory, at least for much of the first two years of the war, highlighted this tactic. Both the rebel Serbs and the Zagreb government believed that their incompatible and exclusive claims to the so-called United Nations Protected Areas (UNPAs) within the Krajina and western Slavonia were being strengthened by the UN’s presence. Both the Croatian government and the rebel Serbs tried to interpret the mandate of the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) in the UNPAs as implying a recognition of their exclusive claims to this territory. As misinterpreted symbols of recognition, peacekeepers were perceived by both sides as advancing their case. UN soldiers separated belligerents and often prevented conflict, but they did not serve as a catalyst for the kind of political negotiations that the international community had hoped would resolve the Serb insurgency in Croatia. In fact, peacekeepers became pawns whose presence was manipulated.

In Bosnia, UNHCR and UNPROFOR found themselves in the ironic position of partially facilitating war aims (that is, "ethnic cleansing") in order to protect endangered civilians from the "wrong" ethnic group who found themselves in freshly conquered territory. Susan Woodward has argued that "Bosnian Serb military tacticians were particularly adept at getting UNPROFOR II to pacify an area they had seized once they were ready for a cease-fire." Thus, there was a presumption that the presence of the UN flag in an area over which one side had achieved a strategic hold would cease to be a military threat and perhaps also become more legitimately a bargaining chip for future negotiations.

That people gamble with the symbolic resource of recognition does not mean that they always win their wagers. Pragmatic recognition did not always serve as a stepping stone to the official variety. This was certainly a disappointment to the Krajina Serbs who lost their proto-state, and the Bosnian Serb leadership ultimately did not benefit from having been dubbed "High Contracting Parties" at various international conferences on the former Yugoslavia from 1991 to 1995. As a result of the Dayton agreement, the rebel Serb state in Croatia no longer exists; and the Republika Srpska in Bosnia has lost its autonomy. But it would be imprudent to discount the role of pragmatic recognition in affecting the behavior of belligerents during four years of war.

Bosnia provided numerous demonstrations of the destructive potential of apparently apolitical, benign recognitions of peoples by humanitarian actors. Although indispensable for access, international actors should carefully consider how they alter, and occasionally even transform, the status and capacity of local actors chosen as interlocutors or partners. In addition, the categories that are used to identify people for administrative purposes should be examined for their effect on both displaced peoples whose tattered identities have lost the important moorings of their homes and on those who were not uprooted but found themselves vulnerable in their homes. There is clearly a vast difference between the kind of recognition bestowed upon a Radovan Karadzic and a Ratko Mladic, the leaders of the Bosnian Serbs, on the one hand, and the procedure used to select a local driver for an aid convoy, on the other. Nonetheless, the experience in Bosnia has demonstrated the importance for humanitarian actors of treading carefully and consciously where their footsteps alter the terrain.

informal recognition: media. Media recognition served as a mirror for local and outside actors to evaluate not only what was taking place but also how the world perceived it. In the former Yugoslavia, images of the conflict in the Western media were critical of how local citizenry understood the conflict–from crude conspiracy theories, to despondency regarding the absence of a meaningful response to aggression, to the disbelief that their own people could be seen as the villains. Reactions often were sustained by what the media said and how they said it. States and proto-states within the former Yugoslavia tailored their propaganda to speak to the concerns about the region as they were framed by CNN or the New York Times. There is no doubt that the Bosnian Serb belligerents were the worst human rights violators. At the same time, because journalists were denied access to Serb-held territories, their portrait was almost universally negative.

Outside and local media thoroughly adopted the practice of ethnic designations. Journalists generally referred to "Croats," "Serbs," and "Muslims" rather than the political regimes that were in power, whose nature was usually presumed to be "ethnic" or "religious," somehow reflecting centuries of inscrutable Balkan hatreds. There were bold and prominent exceptions who sought to alter the tenor of coverage as the conflicts wore on. But the media generally used "Bosnian" as an adjective to designate a territory rather than a people; thus, there were Bosnian Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. Yet in Croatia there were no Croatian Serbs or Croatian Muslims because that would have implied a mixture of ethnic labels violating the media’s conventional presentations of what "the war was all about." Those who struggled to avoid the complete ethnification of their identity or the reduction of a multi-ethnic background to a single ethnicity rarely saw their self-images reflected by the media. Undeniably, those political actors whose power and appeal were based on clashes of unitary ethnicities benefited.

the importance of informal and formal recognition. This discussion suggests the extent to which recognition by actors other than states can change what actually constitutes sovereign recognition. States–separately or collectively, for instance, through the United Nations or the European Union–formally recognize the claims of other states to assume ultimate responsibility over a population and territory. Becoming a recognized sovereign entity serves as a legal culmination to the process through which a state demonstrates the appropriate integrity of a population and territory and adequately justifies its claim to assume responsibility for them.

Often, observers overlook the extent to which there are ongoing domestic and international sociopolitical processes that amount to recognition, and indeed that recognition is not reducible to a single event. This kind of constancy in less troubled states and societies is understandable because of assumptions about the normal continuity that undergirds sovereignty. But as a case of radically uncertain and unsettled sovereignty, the former Yugoslavia demonstrates the extent to which nonstate actors are involved even in sovereignty’s putatively domestic side. This case reveals a multiplicity of informal acts and avenues of recognition that undermine the conventional image of self-contained, local dynamics that, once settled, are then presented to the community of states for ratification.

As political authorities lose or abandon responsibility for the uprooted, international actors assume responsibility for them. What amounted to groping with the phenomenon of displacement in the former Yugoslavia demonstrated the extent to which recognizing sovereignty was decentralized and distributed among various nonstate and state actors. The result was blurred conventional, conceptual, and legal divisions, including those that separate domestic and international affairs.

Military Responses

The other international responses that circumscribed and contributed to displacement were outside military forces. However, even before the actual wars in Croatia and Bosnia, a pattern of extreme rhetoric and threats of violence had already developed around perceived demographic imbalances. The rise of Slobodan Milosevic and his strong-armed intimidation to install his "greater Serbia" cronies to head the governments of Kosovo and Vojvodina (two formerly autonomous provinces of Serbia) and Montenegro established the precedent that violence was an acceptable and effective instrument for political intimidation. The stratification of the army according to ethnic categories doomed the one actor that otherwise might have reigned in the lawlessness that brought fear of ethnic conspiracies into everyday life. Once hostilities erupted, many armed groups, including significant segments of the former Yugoslav People’s Army, considered one of their primary goals to be the "ethnic cleansing" of territory.

Because of its genocidal implications, "ethnic cleansing" elicited a number of international legal responses, including the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. More important and in spite of the arms embargo, outsiders altered the military balance on the ground in numerous ways. Even before Croatia’s stunning Blitzkrieg in the summer of 1995 that eliminated Serbs as a political force in Croatia, there had been much speculation about the West’s (primarily Washington’s) clandestine support for Croatia and Bosnia despite the arms embargo. It subsequently has come to light that the Clinton administration had turned a blind eye to arms shipments to Bosnian Muslims by Iran and other countries, including sending a message to Zagreb that it would not stop shipments through Croatia, or Zagreb’s "commission" for permitting them.

However, the failure of legal efforts, the brazen manipulation of humanitarian efforts, and the relatively feeble position of the Bosnian-Croat Federation until late 1995 also had led to a greater willingness by the international community to deploy troops and use military force. The history of European and American military efforts to address the breakup of the former Yugoslavia is rife with examples of wishful thinking and piecemeal action. The 14,000 UN blue helmets initially authorized in early 1992 to act as a buffer between the Croats and the Serbs in newly independent Croatia never achieved the two most critical objectives of their mandate: collecting heavy arms from the Serbs in the UNPAs and facilitate the return of the Croatian refugees who had been "cleansed" from the protected areas.

The initial deployment of UN troops in Croatia was accompanied by a token presence in Sarajevo. The troops were of limited value in staving off atrocities in the Balkans. Some 1,000 blue helmets were initially deployed to Bosnia and were followed by a steadily growing number of additional troops, mainly from NATO countries; no-fly zones were imposed but not fully enforced; other forms of saber rattling, including low-altitude sorties over Serbian positions and warnings about possible retaliatory air strikes were tried; the Security Council passed what The Economist called "the confetti of paper resolutions"; and numerous cease-fires were negotiated. As Lawrence Freedman observed, the Security Council "experimented with almost every available form of coercion short of war."

UN peacekeepers in Croatia were unable to implement their mandate because they received no cooperation from the Croats or Serbs in the UNPAs. In Bosnia, the situation was even more problematic. The UN force there was under Chapter VII, with the coercive authority of the UN Charter, but it lacked the capability to apply coercive force across a wide front. Unable to create the conditions for its own success, UNPROFOR was not militarily credible. Shortly before resigning in January 1994 from a soldier’s nightmare as UN commander in Bosnia-Hercegovina, Lt. Gen. Francis Briquemont lamented the disparity between rhetoric and reality: "There is a fantastic gap between the resolutions of the Security Council, the will to execute those resolutions, and the means available to commanders in the field."

The international unwillingness to react militarily in the former Yugoslavia until August 1995 provides a case study of what not to do. In the words of Rosalyn Higgins, who has since become a member of the World Court, "We have chosen to respond to major unlawful violence not by stopping that violence, but by trying to provide relief to the suffering. But our choice of policy allows the suffering to continue." This inaction left many of the inhabitants of the region mistrustful of the United Nations and lent a new and disgraceful connotation to the word "peacekeeping." Bound by the traditional rules of engagement (fire only in self-defense, and only after being fired upon), UN troops never fought a single battle with any of the factions in Bosnia who routinely disrupted relief convoys. The rules of engagement led to the appeasement of local forces rather than to the enforcement of UN mandates. Among the most unsafe locations in the Balkans, indeed in the world, were the so-called safe areas. The provisions for economic and military sanctions in the UN Charter were designed to back up international decisions to counteract aggression and to halt atrocities in just such situations as the one in Bosnia. Yet, with apt gallows humor, many in Zagreb and Sarajevo referred repeatedly to the UN soldiers as "eunuchs at the orgy."

Thus armed force was central in the drama of displacement in Yugoslavia. It was employed by the warring parties, whose violence directly caused rapid displacement and led to ongoing involuntary migration as the consequence of continuous military activity. The use of force under United Nations auspices also contributed to displacement, albeit in different ways, facilitating nonforceful emigration and deterring changes in the status quo among belligerents. In addition, the arms embargo coupled with the no-fly zone was meant to prevent any faction from achieving military advantage, so that belligerents would be compelled to hammer out their differences at the negotiating table. In fact, a much heavier dose of NATO bombing and U.S. arm twisting proved necessary to compel the belligerents to attempt to reach a political settlement, sequestered at Ohio’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

The international military responses to the former Yugoslavia can be seen as a protracted yet steady escalation against the Serbs. Ironically, much of the earlier displacement was a result of feeble Western military actions, whereas the largest single episode of involuntary migration in Europe since the 1956 Soviet crushing of the Hungarian uprising took place after robust Western military action was combined with the Croatian-Bosnian offensive in August and September 1995. The deployment of NATO-led forces after Dayton–first through the Implementation Force (IFOR) and then the Stabilization Force (SFOR)–was considerably more realistic.

Humanitarian Responses and UNHCR’s Role

From the outbreak of violence and the first involuntary displacements, the primary international responses to Yugoslavia’s wars were humanitarian. As the peace agreements were going into effect, external humanitarian organizations were providing assistance for almost 4 million civilian war casualties within the borders of the former republic. UNHCR as lead agency was spending about $500 million in the region annually, and various other governmental, intergovernmental, and nongovernmental organizations another $1 billion. It might be assumed that it would be easier in the humanitarian than in the military arena for the United Nations first to reconcile principles with political and operational realities, and hence to mount coherent and effective programs of action to mitigate the suffering from massive displacement. Yet in the former Yugoslavia, international actors begged ethical and operational questions, with distinctly negative consequences for the shape and impact of UN operations on behalf of the displaced and other war victims.

There are operational implications for dealing with displacement that arise from sustaining the shibboleth of Charter article 2(7), with its emphasis on nonintervention in "matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state." Some UN practices themselves were antihumanitarian, including the decisions to prevent civilians from leaving Sarajevo and other besieged areas in Bosnia and from entering or leaving protected areas. The conscious restriction of activities precluded UN staff from confronting political authorities about human rights abuses as a routine part of their missions. The need to reinforce the neutrality of the United Nations is the most sanguine explanation. The world organization’s leadership routinely wishes to sidestep confrontations with states, move ahead with negotiations, and be seen as an impartial partner once cease-fires are in effect. The promotion of human rights is a victim of such well-intentioned evenhandedness.

In the former Yugoslavia, UN personnel acted as if the most, and sometimes the only, essential undertaking was the delivery of relief goods–a recent manifestation of myopic do-goodism that one prominent and disillusioned activist has called "two centuries of ambiguous humanitarianism." The world organization downplayed such tasks as protecting fundamental rights, gathering information about war crimes, and assertively and routinely investigating alleged abuses. Dealing mainly with the products of war rather than with its causes, the United Nations ignored opportunities for at least documenting and publicly denouncing some of the causes. The main exception was the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, whose staff fairly consistently exposed abuse. However, treating human rights more as nonessential luxuries than as central elements in UN operations caused Human Rights Watch to lament the "lost agenda" that has "led to a squandering of the UN’s unique capacity on the global stage to articulate fundamental human rights values and to legitimize their enforcement." Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in the former Yugoslavia, resigned in protest.

Moreover, potentially significant innovations in meeting human rights challenges in the former Yugoslavia have received so little financial and political support from governments as to be the subject of ridicule. Among these innovations were a first-ever emergency session by the UN Commission on Human Rights after the discovery of concentration camps in western Bosnia; the appointment of a commission of experts to report on breaches of the Geneva Conventions; the deployment of field monitors by the UN Centre for Human Rights and the assignment of human rights responsibilities to UNHCR protection officers; and, most significant, the convening of an ad hoc international war crimes tribunal. About the latter, one observer has concluded: "Lacking the political will to act decisively to curtail abuses of prisoners and civilians, they endorsed or went along with the creation of the Tribunal," a lamentable charade that constituted a "black eye." The lack of political will and leadership undermines the utility of these initiatives, with repercussions not only for today’s victims in the former Yugoslavia but also for the victims of tomorrow’s armed conflicts. However, their potential value, not simply as moral statements but also as effective deterrents, should not be minimized.

Some senior officials, in interviews both in the field and in Geneva, argued that the UNHCR should never again become involved in providing emergency relief in an active civil war, a task better left to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). However, the ICRC is skeptical about institutionalizing IDPs as a special category of concern. Its expressed institutional preference is to protect threatened ethnic minorities in situ and to focus instead on disseminating and strengthening international humanitarian law, of which it is the custodian, and more especially to enhance the coverage for civil wars–530 articles apply to international armed conflicts, but only 29 to intrastate armed conflicts.

At the same time, the ICRC has expressed its concern that protection activities in the former Yugoslavia have been carried out so much less effectively the delivery of assistance. An independent evaluation of efforts in the former Yugoslavia by a former staff member acknowledges "a record of solid achievement" in emergency delivery but admits that the "scales tip sharply to the wrong side" in terms of protection. Moreover, ICRC President Cornelio Sommaruga has indicated that his institution is grappling with "the extent to which international humanitarian law covers the various categories of personnel involved in the different types of actions undertaken by the United Nations and the furnishing of assistance and protection in extreme situations by resorting to military means."

Humanitarian action requires effective management of inevitable political pressures rather than maintaining the fiction that humanitarianism and politics occupy separate spheres. What is especially vital about UNHCR’s actions in the former Yugoslavia was its principled adaptation of its guiding mission beyond supporting the right of asylum to aiding all those with a well-founded fear of prosecution whatever their location. From its inception, the refugee agency has operated at the interstices of sovereignty, catering to the one human right that is both national and international. In the process of expanding its mandate to cover IDPs and even the sedentary war-afflicted, it extended the legitimate purview of international organizations, although the debate will continue as to whether states have consented or been unable to mount an effective protest.

UNHCR has been struggling to square its mandate, which is confined to convention refugees, with the stark reality that other persons involuntarily displaced by wars are "refugees in all but name," while still others live in "refugee-like conditions." With IDPs outnumbering refugees worldwide and with her agency having been requested by the UN secretary-general and donors to assume increasing responsibility for assistance to and protection of both categories of displaced people, UN High Commissioner Sadako Ogata commissioned a study that sought to evaluate past experience with a view to spelling out a "comprehensive approach to coerced human displacement."

There is clearly a need for newer thinking about the beneficiaries of UNHCR’s humanitarian action in the former Yugoslavia (see table 6-2). IDPs, depending upon the year, are three or four times as numerous as refugees. For an agency whose primary clients cross international boundaries, the adaptation to IDPs is logical, albeit controversial. IDPs are on the move, and UNHCR’s institutional culture is based on movement and serving those who have no alternative refuge from political calamity.

As UNHCR has progressed from dealing with a restricted scope of refugees under the 1951 Convention to the broadening of its initial regional competence with the 1967 Protocols, it expanded its attention to IDPs in the 1990s. In the former Yugoslavia, the most numerous beneficiaries of UNHCR’s attention were persons who did not move at all. Approximately 85 percent of UNHCR’s half-billion-dollar budget for the former Yugoslavia was allocated to victims who were outside the boundaries of its official mandate. In the most visible crisis area of Bosnia-Hercegovina that was driving international policy, virtually no UNHCR beneficiary was legally a refugee.

According to program officials, differences in assistance benefits did not result from the category in which a person was classified. Per capita expenditures on assistance for each category were approximately the same. Displacement creates a legitimate presumption of the need for assistance and protection and, in fact, is prima facie evidence of vulnerability. In the former Yugoslavia, however, besieged populations that had remained in their communities oftentimes were as or even more vulnerable.

Assistance varied according to logistical or damage-related differences–for example, transport and insurance varied with distance from distribution centers, and winterization materials reflected the extent of destruction. Differentiation in relief benefits resulted not from classification but rather assessed caloric needs, which for the most part reflected whether persons were totally or partially dependent upon outside succor. In the middle of 1993 after nutritional surveys were completed, estimates for food needs were modified to reflect the fact that IDPs, refugees, and war victims who were on their own or with families–irrespective of their legal status–required less help than those living in collective centers.

Refugees received more protection than IDPs or war victims. This was not because of a lack of desire to help out the latter, but because they were removed from the war zone. UNHCR’s well-established conventions and mechanisms apply to refugees outside war zones, whereas IDPs and war victims must rely upon the application of jus in bello and human rights norms. Weak international mechanisms to help ensure compliance meant that in-country protection for them was considerably more problematic; and formal and informal protestations by UNHCR and ICRC generally proved inadequate. Although the law relating to the conduct of armed conflicts and to human rights should have applied to the numerous victims of Yugoslavia’s wars, there were no enforcement mechanisms; and local political authorities ignored this law.

UNHCR truly acted as the "lead agency" in the former Yugoslavia–UN jargon for being in the humanitarian driver’s seat. It played what a growing number of observers see as a vital role, namely a "UN humanitarian organization for casualties of war." In many ways, this ad hoc adaptation responded to the long-standing complaints about the largely uncoordinated UN system in complex emergencies. After the embarrassing slowness and disorganization of international humanitarian responses to the various Persian Gulf crises, donor countries finally pushed the General Assembly in December 1991 to authorize the appointment of a humanitarian coordinator and the creation of the Department of Humanitarian Affairs (DHA). However, DHA has made no appreciable difference in emergencies since its establishment in 1992. This is hardly surprising when the coordinator–in 1996, Yasushi Akashi became the third in four years, following Jan Eliasson and Peter Hansen–has no real budgetary authority and does not outrank the heads of the agencies that he is supposed to coordinate.

Thus, a different approach is moving into the mainstream of intergovernmental discussions, one whose rationale is highlighted in the former Yugoslavia: the urgent requirement for a single body to set priorities, to raise and distribute resources, and to coordinate emergency inputs. Disparate views remain among Western governments about the exact shape of such a mechanism. But U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher tabled a proposal at the July 1995 session of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) to consider "whether and how to consolidate the emergency functions of UNHCR, the World Food Programme (WFP), UNICEF, and DHA into a single agency." This was also one key option, albeit controversial, emanating from the unprecedented multinational, multidonor evaluation of the international response to the Rwandan tragedy. Such a consolidation would build upon recent proposals by seasoned practitioners for dramatic centralization. Unfortunately, momentum in this direction evaporated from the early drafts of the secretary-general’s much-heralded but lackluster report on UN restructuring in mid-1997.

UNHCR’s enterprising adaptation in the former Yugoslavia helps to contextualize calls for consolidation of the emergency capabilities of the United Nations. Although there were real risks and even potential disaster lurking in such a large and complex venture, seizing an opportunity to expand an institution’s financial base is, for idealists as well as cynics, an important explanation for organizational behavior.

Ogata became high commissioner in February 1991 when UNHCR was at a low point: recovering from the unceremonious departure of Jean-Pierre Hocké, suffering low morale, and trying to compensate for the embarrassment of having been caught totally off-guard in the Persian Gulf. The Yugoslav crisis that began in June 1991 was a proving ground for Ogata’s call for "emergency preparedness" and helped overcome what one senior staff member described as an image of being "irrelevant in Europe and the former Soviet Union." Her agency responded quickly and well, and its budget doubled virtually overnight. Expenditures in the former Yugoslavia reached $500 million, or half of the institution’s budget in 1993. In programmatic terms, the program for the Balkans became what one official called "a state within a state," an image that mirrored the high commissioner’s self-deprecating self-description as "the desk officer for the former Yugoslavia."

The former Yugoslavia compelled UNHCR to act and overcome two important impediments to undertaking responsibility for IDPs: what its internal study had identified as the primary "reasons most frequently invoked against UNHCR getting involved–or involving itself more–in such cases." In the former Yugoslavia, nothing could have been farther from the truth than "others are doing the job." No other agency of the UN system had more operational expertise or was better prepared to take up the gauntlet.

Furthermore, donors–particularly Europeans whose own asylum policies were getting tighter as a result of the migration pressures following the collapse of the Soviet bloc–pushed UNHCR to help stem the hemorrhage of refugees on the continent. The internal study also had pointed to "proved or putative lack of donor interest…as a major constraint to extending UNHCR’s programs in favour of the internally displaced." In fact, as more than one senior staff argued, "money was never a problem." When comparing the statistics from 1995’s UN Consolidated Inter-Agency Humanitarian Assistance Appeals, the former Yugoslavia received more than 100 percent of requirements, as it had in previous years, unlike such other countries as Angola, Sudan, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Sierra Leone, which received less than 50 percent.

The availability of resources meant that there was little pressure to register accurately the various types of victims in the former Yugoslavia; it was never a priority for UNHCR. Normally, donors insist upon better and more accurate numbers in order to control the number of beneficiaries. But because of donor largesse, there was really no reason to distinguish refugees from "affected nationals" (that is, IDPs and war victims). The casualties of Yugoslavia’s wars received benefits simply because of their needs and not because of their legal classification. However, more resources did not necessarily translate into adequate protection.

In spite of these valorous efforts, humanitarian "assistance" in the former Yugoslavia, especially in Bosnia-Hercegovina, often was a double-edged sword whose use both helped and injured the victims of displacement. Assistance to refugees no doubt decreased their suffering, but it also fostered "ethnic cleansing" by facilitating the movement of unwanted populations, one of the central war aims of both Serbs and Croats. Air drops of food may have had some positive impact, but they also helped to dissipate political pressure for more vigorous action. It has been reported that in many instances massive shipments of food and medicine intended for civilians were diverted to soldiers. Although exact percentages are virtually impossible to verify, there is no doubt that too many concessions were made to belligerents in Yugoslavia’s wars. As in other war zones, a more principled approach with fewer "deals" might have led to less extortion, a subject to which we return in the penultimate section.

Hallmarks of the Case

Six characteristics in Yugoslavia’s wars suggest limits for the lessons from this case, both as a generalizable instance of displacement as well as an example of dealing comprehensively with displacement through mainly humanitarian means. Nonetheless, the Yugoslav case can at least be instructive.

The first peculiarity is the region’s proximity to western Europe and the relative socioeconomic privilege of its victims. This geopolitical position of the countries of the former Yugoslavia had consequences for a variety of issues ranging from military logistics and journalistic coverage, to emigrant destinations and humanitarian access. Distances, logistics, the literacy of the populations, and available infrastructure were only obstacles because they became part of the political conflict.

In a related manner, the second hallmark is the precipitous unraveling of the economic and social fabric of an industrialized county into unspeakable living conditions and chaos. The siege of complex urban areas demonstrates the degree to which their populations can be more vulnerable than their counterparts in less economically advanced and urbanized countries because so much of their survival depends on imports of foodstuffs, an industrial base, and public utilities that can all be relatively easily disrupted or destroyed.

In this respect, however, Yugoslavia does not seem destined to remain an exception. There are a growing number of candidates for help in the former second world because nine of fifty-three member states of the OSCE have been actively involved in shooting wars in the post-cold war era. Yugoslavia was, however, the first on the international agenda. As such, it exposed both intergovernmental and nongovernmental humanitarian organizations as ill-prepared to work in areas where until recently they had recruited expatriate staff and raised money. There were no country files, expertise, or language skills. Now that the third world no longer has a monopoly on complex emergencies, humanitarian organizations have much to learn from their unusual first exposure to a new range of problems in the former Yugoslavia.

The third feature is that the case represented an extreme instance of the politicization of displacement. Moving people was not simply a side-effect of armed conflict; it was the explicit aim of both political and military actors in the region. Visible and vituperative political crises, with displacement as the major theme, preceded the actual uprooting of groups and individuals. A general perception of being "in the wrong political place" accompanied political developments, which situated "ethnic" or "national" groups within legal and political jurisdictions that they or their leaders found unacceptable.

Perceptions of political displacement preceded physical displacement, the latter then becoming a direct result of the former. When people became aware that they found themselves in the wrong political space, their actual displacement often seemed to be the logical conclusion to a steady build-up of hostility and isolation. The political process that reconstructed the relations between their places of residence and made an issue of "who" would govern, rather than "how," eliminated the trust that allows political processes without violence. For too many people, even those who did not suffer physical displacement, there was a severe dislocation because the social environment generally deteriorated into fear and hatred, in which certain kinds of people were simply excluded from a common social and political space.

The fourth peculiarity is that physical displacement, however involuntary, was not always unwelcome or inhumane, especially when it alleviated more suffering than it caused. Involuntary migration was often the alternative to outright extermination in the former Yugoslavia. Indeed, this allowed "ethnic cleansers" to style themselves as humanitarian saviors of the populations whom they threatened to slaughter. One political commentator went so far as to argue that "ethnic cleansing was a prerequisite for peace." Although many observers attack separation as immoral, there is a growing literature on the potential positive impact of ethnic homogeneity on conflict resolution. One scholar has pointed out in relationship to the Balkans, for example, that "as the progress of the war has left fewer and fewer unmoved people still to move, more realistic proposals have gradually emerged."

Occasionally, those who moved or were forced to move attracted far more attention and relief than those who remained in besieged enclaves. Given the various kinds of physical displacement experienced by the peoples of Bosnia and their different fortunes at different stages of the wars, the relative desirability of being displaced and herded into in a concentration camp as in Omarska or staying in one’s hometown and being shelled or massacred as in Srebrenica is not always clear-cut. There may even be long-term political and economic benefits from such migration.

Needless to say, such unsentimental realism is not without problems. Involuntary displacement clearly violates human rights norms and the prohibition against forcing civilian migration under international humanitarian law. The definition of the public interest is torn between accepted notions pertaining to a club of states and those pertaining to humanitarians. Empirical and normative knowledge is continually evolving, but the Yugoslav case suggests an uncomfortable tentative hypothesis: In certain circumstances–and the intractable political conflict within the former Yugoslavia is one because demographic distributions were fundamental war aims–tolerating distressed migration, while preventing its worst consequences, may involve less suffering than ineffective protection efforts without displacement. This line of argument about separating ethnic populations at war is especially apt if there is no political will to implement effective prevention or to sustain long-term outside military occupation and trusteeship. In the demonstrated absence of political will, it is prudent to acknowledge straightforwardly the failure to protect norms but to try nonetheless to minimize suffering.

The fifth characteristic, unique to date in complex emergencies, is the prevalence and salience of international security organizations in the conflicts of former Yugoslavia. The densely populated environment included the EC (later, EU), NATO, CSCE (later, OSCE), and the Western European Union (WEU). Such a formidable array of politically powerful and resource-rich actors is unusual in humanitarian emergencies. It is hard to imagine such a range and depth of involvement by the West or other powerful military actors in other future cases of displacement elsewhere.

The operational implications alone are remarkable. For instance, UNHCR as lead agency for the first time in the midst of armed conflict was obliged to innovate with military liaison and personnel. Seconded military personnel in headquarters helped plan the air lift, and large numbers of new recruits in the field who had previous military experience were a first. Subsequently, a recently retired Western military officer was engaged as an adviser to the high commissioner, and UNHCR published a manual for staff working side by side with outside military forces. Nonetheless, despite the organizational innovations that were effected to deliver aid, the density of formidable military capabilities proved irrelevant until there was political will to use them to stop the killing of civilians.

The sixth and final distinguishing feature of the crisis is the extent to which UNHCR as lead agency, with the blessing of donors, provided succor to all casualties of Yugoslavia’s wars, whatever their juridical status or physical location. As detailed earlier, UNHCR moved away from its preoccupation with categorizing refugees as distinct from other civilian victims. With the urging and financial support of donors, UNHCR helped everyone who needed help. It is worth underlining that "populations of concern" to the refugee agency included all the casualties of Yugoslavia’s wars, 85 percent of whom fell outside the mandate of the refugee agency.

There was no question of a shortage of resources, other than political ones. The generosity and longevity of international response–four years with more than adequate resources–is unlikely to occur in other areas. Nonetheless, this allows the case to serve as an indicator of what can be accomplished by humanitarian assistance without serious resource constraints. Moreover, UNHCR can be viewed as a symbol of the international community’s willingness to assume responsibility where political authorities of the former Yugoslavia had failed.

The Politics Of Rescue

Distinctions between humanitarian and political concerns are instructive, reflecting the difference between the goals of rescue and of stability. In spite of lofty rhetoric in the post-cold war world, our analysis of the former Yugoslavia suggests more reflections and fewer visceral responses to humanitarian tragedies. Removing superpower rivalry has been insufficient for the international humanitarian system to move from merely pursuing rescue toward instituting political order.

There are inevitable tradeoffs between the two goals. Pursuing rescue seeks the immediate and unconditional alleviation of human suffering. Instituting stability seeks to create and sustain viable social institutions that will forestall the need for subsequent rescue. Political strategies to create an enduring sociopolitical order may even require temporarily attenuating the absolute humanitarian impulse to save lives and alleviate the suffering of noncombatants with all available means. In the prescient prose of Alain Destexhe, the former secretary-general of the International Office of Médecins Sans Frontières:

To complicate matters, there is a much more philosophically loaded trade-off lurking within the concept of stability that emerges from the use of "peace" as a synonym for "stability." No one is willing to sacrifice everything for peace, and not all political orders are worth preserving no matter how apparently stable. Thus we confront the age-old tensions between order and justice. As demonstrated by twentieth-century struggles against colonial domination, there are situations in which increased suffering and disorder is justifiable to fashion a more equitable and sustainable political order. How and under which circumstances is it possible and justifiable to calculate the costs and benefits of such endeavors is, of course, by no means obvious. Moreover, the conflict between order and justice has been temporarily obscured by a superficial consensus about the values of democratization and liberalization.

What makes the problems of rescue, order, and justice stand out so vividly is the conventional wisdom regarding the "impulse"-- some, such as the ICRC, would say the "imperative"-- of rescue even in cases where sovereignty presents a legal prohibition. Most humanitarian endeavors without the consent of a state take place in areas of turmoil supposedly governed by weak or even failed and collapsed states. However intrusive, the subordination of sovereignty to rescue is still less problematic than the moral and operational implications of assuming responsibility for the consequences of rescue efforts. Even in situations where effective political authority is absent, humanitarian intervention implies an obligation to assume a longer-term commitment to the sustainability and health of a society rather than merely a short-run episode of rescue.

No matter how intense and heroic an intervention to deliver food, resettle people, or eliminate an irresponsible tyrant or an armed threat, it is only a start. Declaring that sovereignty presents no bar to outside intervention when the human suffering reaches intolerable levels only begins to pose extremely thorny questions about obligations across borders. Not only do we not know how the international humanitarian system might work to maintain long-term order after an intervention, we also do not even know what normative criteria might be appropriate to trigger interventions that are more consistent, or perhaps less selective, in giving reign to the humanitarian impulse.

"Ethnic cleansing" is a poignant example of how ideas move people figuratively and can also serve to displace them literally. In situations where people are not threatened at gunpoint, the thought of fear can move them, whether or not the fear is warranted. In the Yugoslav context, ethnic identity became a potent tool even for those national and international actors who most wanted to stop hostilities and were appalled by the disappearance of a multiethnic society. As Susan Woodward wrote of the September 1991 peace conference in The Hague, convened under the auspices of the European Community: "No pro-Yugoslav parties were represented in the formulation, nor were the representatives of non-ethnic parties, the civilian population, or the many civic groups mobilizing against nationally exclusive states and war consulted." Genocidal extermination, distressed migration toward ethnic purity, and national animosity did not fester in a vacuum. They were clearly and faithfully reported and legitimated by the international community’s actions even before violent hostilities commenced.

The overarching lesson from this analysis of involuntary displacement and the lot of war victims in the former Yugoslavia is the extent to which humanitarianism and politics were inextricably intertwined. Should policy aim to keep the two as separate as possible or, alternatively, recognize the inevitable enmeshment of politics and humanitarianism while seeking to understand how they should be addressed simultaneously?

The former–largely visceral and apolitical–approach advocates keeping the issue of who decides for those at risk largely their own affair. As such, humanitarians provide relief to those in need, making whatever compromises are required. Aid providers respond viscerally to massive human suffering, which may require military force to secure immediate and direct access to civilian victims as the highest priority. Issues of sustainable order, much less its quality, are so distant that even thinking about them detracts from the immediacy of the life-saving task at hand.

The latter–more calculating and political–approach recognizes that virtually all humanitarian agencies, even the 125-year-old International Committee of the Red Cross, have had to compromise in many complex emergencies of the post-cold war era. For example, they relied upon armed escorts, including the infamous "technicals" in Somalia, because sometimes only such private mini-armies or gangs could secure access and protect humanitarians in areas of turmoil. By actually diverting a portion of aid as bribes to those who control infrastructure, or allowing themselves to be extorted, humanitarian efforts are already deeply involved in political affairs. All humanitarian delivery has distributional effects with political consequences. As High Commissioner Ogata has stated, ignoring the political consequences of humanitarianism is not an option: "Mass displacement of the most cruel kind imaginable has become a conscious objective of the combatants in many armed conflicts. Humanitarian assistance is used as a weapon of war."

Perhaps an incident in Bosnia can serve as a particularly poignant illustration of the politicization of humanitarian efforts–despite the fervent desire by its purveyors to remain neutral and impartial. At the beginning of 1993 the UN was unable to cajole the Bosnian Serbs to let humanitarian convoys through to besieged towns in eastern Bosnia, where people were faced with imminent starvation. Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb president, guaranteed "humanitarian corridors" of safe passage to the Muslims of Gorazde, Srebrenica, and elsewhere provided that they removed themselves from their besieged towns and thus from their islands in Bosnian Serb-occupied territory. Responding with indignation to what they saw as a proposal for "ethnic cleansing" under humanitarian auspices and for emptying their political commitment to eastern Bosnia, the Bosnian government banned all aid deliveries in Sarajevo with the intention of goading the UN into a more aggressive stance toward the Bosnian Serbs. Viewing this as blackmail and as a clear indication that the warring parties were unwilling to respect internationally sanctioned procedures, Ogata suspended all relief in Serb-held Bosnia and ordered staff to withdraw from Sarajevo. On the next day, February 19, UN Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali reversed her decision.

This incident illustrates the degree to which humanitarian endeavors often become part of the local political landscape, especially when they help to change the ethnic composition of an area. Although Karadzic’s plan for eliciting humanitarian endorsement for "ethnic cleansing" was not accepted, on many occasions international staff have indeed greased the wheels of ethnic resettlement in less visible ways. This has been especially the case, understandably, when the apparent alternative was the possible death of civilians had they chosen to stay where they were.

"Ethnic cleansing" is an utter abomination. At the same time, would accepting Karadzic’s offer have been sensible? Doing so would have required accurate knowledge of local and international contexts. The latter would have included appreciating that the alternative would have been unmentionably worse because the West was unwilling to use military force. With the advantage of hindsight, we now know that Srebrenica and Zepa were overrun by Bosnian Serbs in the summer of 1995, leading to the haphazard and dangerous flight of tens of thousands from the area, which included a massacre in Srebrenica under the watch of Dutch UN soldiers. Our humanitarian impulse would have us turn back the clock and accept Karadzic’s "humanitarian corridor." This would have been clearly the right thing to do for the people who were massacred in Srebrenica. Or would it?

This perspective and calculation are incomplete because Srebrenica’s citizens were not the only victims who would have suffered from an acceptance of Kardzic’s proposal. The movement out of the enclaves in eastern Bosnia would also have dramatically changed the strategic situation by creating what the Serbs had long sought, an ethnically homogenous swath of territory bordering on Serbia itself. Thus the delicate balance on the ground that was being maintained by the interaction of the various actors would have been altered. The moral justification for order is conservative, reflecting fears that tampering with established procedures could bring about an even worse state of affairs. The rejection of Karadzic’s proposal seems to have embraced the argument regarding the need to preserve the strategic order, but it also went beyond to considerations of justice and morality.

Sometimes the need to preserve order does not seem to be the dominant norm. We often are confident that improvements can be made without risking chaos, that dramatic changes are imperative. In such situations, people sacrifice themselves for a collective good. Although the Bosnian government and the UN literally did not have to sacrifice themselves, they did face the almost certain prospect of institutional failure if eastern Bosnia turned into even bloodier killing fields. They could not bow to Karadzic even though he seemed to have the capacity to realize his implied threat.

The justifiable rejection of Karadzic’s proposal involved a political judgment by both the United Nations and the Bosnian government that subordinated the normal impulse to rescue the Muslims of eastern Bosnia. The implication is that there was a greater value to be gained or protected by not rushing to provide immediate succor to victims. There was also the outright rejection of the terms of reference of the choice proposed by Karadzic. His implied threat that aid would not be allowed was met with a momentary stiffening of NATO resolve. His proposal also made him seem even more of a pariah because the consequences that he implied were beyond what was considered imaginable abuse even by the deteriorating standards for official behavior in the Balkans.

It took some time for the UN and the West to realize that negotiating with Karadzic was not fruitful even if at loggerheads with the rescue impulse. How can we make explicit the implicit political judgments according to which this proposal was set aside and Karadzic rejected? Can we find a way of systematically considering relevant factors? Are there ways to analyze conflicts and leaders more quickly and more directly, so that we do not waste so many lives and resources in the process of blundering our way into situations where help is counterproductive?

A logical starting place would be to spell out "terms of disengagement"–political and ethical principles that define in advance points beyond which compromise would be so egregiously out of kilter with enunciated principles as to be unthinkable. It is not so much the separation of humanitarianism and politics that presents a challenge for the future but rather their contextualization and conscious management. From a global perspective, the dilemmas that attend the scarcity of resources and the burgeoning demands for rescue have been compared to triage in medical emergencies. Such decisions regarding who gets first attention and scarce medical resources are based on a stock of medical knowledge and a corpus of medical ethics supported by a substantial body of practice. In the rapidly changing field of politically conscious humanitarian engagement, however, we have only begun to digest the profound implications of "humanitarian war" and some of the limits of multilateral military efforts.

We can continue to assume the appropriateness and applicability of an apolitical humanitarian impulse to earthquakes or other natural disasters even if the organization of those who have suffered or been made homeless has political consequences. Complex humanitarian emergencies are totally different. Domestic decisions and actions, not nature’s vagaries, have overwhelmed local capacities to cope. It is necessary to contemplate the need, rationale, and consequences of lending outside helping hands in such circumstances. The developments that bring about the deterioration in the human condition, cause international outrage, and catalyze international responses are also part of the social fabric that outside assistance is supposed to mend. Into this maelstrom, outside humanitarians must proceed with care, reflecting before responding viscerally. They must recognize that they are not simply mending a rent fabric, but they are also participating in a domestic process through which it is either rewoven or frayed further.

Conclusion

The prominent role of refugees and internally displaced persons in the peace plan initialed in Dayton and signed in Paris highlights the policy implications of the preceding analysis. The problem of displacement, broadly construed here to include all those whose places of livelihood have been destroyed, serves as a very human indicator of the failure of politics in the Balkans. And the problem has only begun. What is to be done with all those who need a place to resume productive lives and the even greater number who will remember displacement with bitterness or look to avenge their suffering? As developments since the end of 1995 aptly demonstrate, continued displacement and jockeying for territory are hardly things of the past.

Dealing with all the casualties of armed conflict–refugees, internally displaced persons, returnees, and besieged populations–is the ultimate challenge to stylized notions of sovereignty that assume states to be the natural and exclusive locus of responsibility and authority. International responses to the plight of Yugoslavia’s civilian victims demonstrate that sovereignty is continually redistributed and promises to go through even more alterations, especially if humanitarians abandon some of the naïveté that often characterizes their rescue mission. In international society, as in all societies, responsibilities can be embraced boldly or shirked, authority can receive greater luster or be corrupted. The choice is triage or dealing comprehensively with the crisis of displaced populations.

The ideal for humanitarian action would be to have the equivalent of a full-fledged, completely staffed and equipped mobile field hospital with well-designated wards for all the victims. Whether they moved involuntarily or their conditions for survival were removed from them in their communities, there would be appropriate medicine (relief) and care (protection). However, even in the former Yugoslavia where resource constraints were absent, there was no coherently administered public health approach that took into consideration the long-term nature of needs generated by the region’s wars. Acute needs took over, no matter who or where the victims were, which was perhaps wise, especially because the real specificity of individual needs for IDPs, refugees, and other victims varied greatly. Indeed, how could it be otherwise as outside humanitarians do their best to cater to military and political transformations, as the populations whom they support are continuously manipulated and reconfigured in direct contravention of the fundamental norms that guide humanitarians?

In the absence of the type of sustained engagement that would be implied by the actualization of the above public health metaphor, the case of the former Yugoslavia was still a humanitarian accomplishment. UNHCR as lead agency managed to assist those with the most acute needs, whose relative satisfaction was remarkable given the politically hostile terrain. Nonetheless, international responses to Yugoslavia’s wars demonstrate that triumphalism in the garb of humanitarian rescue is out of place. If there are adequate resources and a competent lead agency, at least a successful triage-based provision of emergency assistance can occur.

Such a conclusion should not be taken lightly because it is essential to comprehend the limits of humanitarian action in war zones until the international community is prepared to move beyond rescue and institutionalize a more comprehensive public health approach. At the same time, we should be clear about the implications of moving beyond rescue, which would constitute a thorough political enmeshment in the domestic lives of the displaced and other victims whose social health a sustained humanitarianism would be seeking to rehabilitate. Displacement is a symptom and not a disease.

We doubt that additional legal and normative coverage for internally displaced persons and associated victims would make any appreciable influence on rogue authorities because the violation of norms is integral to achieving their war aims. Those who appreciate human rights and international humanitarian law are those who try to assuage the horrors witnessed in the former Yugoslavia. Outsiders affect political perceptions of belligerents and their victims. Therefore, humanitarians must be aware of the ramifications of their actions.

This case study reinforces the argument that identifying the host of problems associated with displacement inevitably forces the analyst to confront the ongoing trials and tribulations of sovereign responsibility. The focus on UNHCR was critical, not only because it was the lead agency, but also because its narrow mandate as the caretaker of people who are exiled from state protection points ironically in the direction of a concern for all those who suffer, whatever their location, who have no access to state protection. If authorities provide no protection, the only alternative is to jump wholeheartedly into the political fray.

There is no overarching structure that necessarily will lead to a more comprehensive approach on behalf of those suffering the consequences of war. Thus the central challenge posed by displacement for sovereignty is the assumption of responsibility. Displacement is usually a signal that those in charge of the social order have washed their hands of responsibilities or are simply overwhelmed by their magnitude. That outsiders feel a sense of responsibility is suggested by the robustness of the humanitarian impulse to rescue. Whether the humanitarian impulse will be extended beyond rescue to assume responsibility for populations and publics in distress is the challenge posed by successful rescue in the former Yugoslavia.

Reinventing UNHCR to confront the tragedy of the former Yugoslavia was a useful and necessary adaptation to the emerging humanitarian needs of post-cold war disorder. In many ways it was a microcosm of institutional identity crises, both of the UN system as a whole and of the UNHCR, in confronting modern humanitarian dilemmas.

There is little support at present for an international convention on behalf of the internally displaced to complement the 1951 Convention and the 1967 Protocol for Refugees. An extension to IDPs of the international community’s legal obligations would institutionalize a principle that straightforwardly gives victims priority over sovereigns. It would go beyond the fiction that states only occasionally fail to act responsibly toward their populations. A system to succor and protect victims wherever they are found would extend informal normative coverage and operational outreach to those who have not crossed an international border but who are ever more frequently victimized by the failure of so-called sovereigns to assume responsibility for what takes place within their borders.

Mainstream policy debates frequently ignore the significant differences between the well-developed conventions and mechanisms for the protection of refugees and the gap for affected nationals, especially in terms of an international institution capable of intervening on behalf of IDPs and other war victims. Although host countries have pressured UNHCR to pursue "in-country protection" to prevent displacement, the organization is unable to intervene effectively for both IDPs and refugees.

What nervous potential host countries fail to appreciate is that the humanitarian principles under which they want to "internalize" refugees and thus prevent them from showing up on their doorstep contradict sovereignty. Refugees have always been an embarrassing phenomenon for sovereign authorities. But as long as they appeared to constitute sporadic and small-scale "failures" of sovereignty, asylum was an acknowledgement of the need for occasional corrections.

However, moving toward an internalization of the refugee problem, which was the effective result from the donor practice to provide UNHCR with sufficient resources to keep migrants confined to the Balkans, implies a dramatic deepening of the humanitarian impulse. Endangered persons are becoming an international concern even if they do not cross a boundary but are victims of a nominal sovereign’s failure to exercise minimal stewardship over its population and territory. Although there has been no codification, the separation and autonomy that sovereignty supposedly guarantees to states over their populations has been weakened. Humanitarianism expresses its concern and brings its relief to humanity–not to nations, ethnicities, or political systems. Thus we are drawn again toward a medical analogy because medical professionals commit themselves to action because a victim is a human, not a particular kind of human.

Humanitarianism necessarily jumps the fences of sovereignty because borders that have previously mediated the relations of peoples become defective when they no longer circumscribe a distinctive and integral political society. Populations lose their distinctiveness when they become of "humanitarian concern"; they are no longer separated by boundaries. Their plight has connected them to the rest of humanity because their condition signals their common, and often imminent, mortality. Humanitarian assistance in the former Yugoslavia, however politically misguided, implicitly reflected precisely such principles.

Although there is significant room for strengthening the international safety net, emergency assistance can be–and is to a remarkable degree–delivered to casualties of wars through the workings of the present international humanitarian system. Protection is a different matter. Despite some rhetorical progress, the ICRC is an inadequate mechanism to ensure compliance with international humanitarian law for IDPs and other war victims. There is only limited effective internationalization of human rights.

Furthermore, UNHCR is not presently keen to become the universal institutional solution for the problems of displacement writ large. High Commissioner Ogata has repeatedly made it clear that the task is too overwhelming. Thus there is a danger in letting governments off the hook when speaking indiscriminately of delivery and protection as if both were equal responsibilities of the so-called international community. Emergency assistance for everyone and protection of refugee rights are widely seen as general human concerns, whereas only governments are responsible for the human rights of their own citizens, albeit with prodding from the ICRC as custodian of jus in bello. At present there is no effective global mechanism to which to address the human rights claims of IDPs and other war victims who remain within their country of origin. As one philosopher has noted, "The international community may help rescue, but it is not a possible addressee of human rights," and "The UNHCR cannot be and does not want to be the addressee of the harassed human rights."

In the absence of intergovernmental decisions about conventions or the establishment of a new agency with a dedicated capacity to respond to the urgent needs of all civilian victims, UNHCR effectively assumed the ad hoc rescue role of a "UN humanitarian organization for casualties of war" along with its traditional role as protector of refugee rights. Because of their capacities in both delivery and protection, the only realistic candidates for assuming these expanded rescue responsibilities are UNHCR and UNICEF. They should be encouraged to assist and protect victims–irrespective of whether they are refugees, IDPs, or others who are equally affected by war–when a commensurate tragedy develops, as it is certain to do within the present world disorder.

Although the UN secretary-general declined to name UNHCR a "permanent lead agency" in his disappointing mid-1997 program for reform, the humanitarian institution that is the most operational in a particular region should be named by the secretary-general to head a coalition of UN agencies and be given the authority to exercise leadership. In spite of the compelling logic and some political support, consolidating the UN’s emergency capabilities within a new institution appears for the moment to remain largely a visionary proposal, as does any substantial restructuring.

Although one case does not a general theory make, the lessons from the former Yugoslavia suggest that the United Nations should revive the standard mode of humanitarian operations during the cold war. Set aside since DHA’s establishment in 1992, the nomination of a lead agency to take charge would be more efficacious than relying upon feeble or untested coordinating mechanisms. Operationally, the most practical course in the former Yugoslavia at war was to deal comprehensively with all those in need without discrimination. It was preferable to identify and supplement institutional capacities rather than building bureaucracies in the sky. UNHCR shed some light in the Balkan gloom by pragmatically and responsibly embracing the challenge of displacement in its largest sense.

In sum, the salience of politics in the displacement and related suffering resulting from Yugoslavia’s wars is indisputable. To neglect this insight is to make humanitarianism a substitute for a clear strategy to end violence, more particularly, to exert robust diplomacy and military efforts. "Doing something," meaning salving consciences, becomes a convenient excuse to ignore political realities, the neglect of which leads to greater suffering in the long run. In the words of José-Maria Mendiluce, UNHCR’s first special envoy to the former Yugoslavia and now a member of the European Parliament, humanitarian action served as "a palliative, an alibi, an excuse." Our analyses of statistics, the variety of international responses (recognition, military, humanitarian), the UNHCR’s role, the hallmarks of humanitarian action, and the politics of rescue in the former Yugoslavia from 1991 to 1995 reinforce the conclusion

Dealing with the Displacement