factfinder

NATO versus the UN
When gen.Mladic was marching on S., a complete confusion governed in the Sarajevo UNHQ, only Russsian officers seemed to be in the know but did not tell.UK ge. Rupert Smith,the UNPROFOR commander ,when speaking of the military situation in the theater used to say :" We have no intelligence, we cannot work .. " NATO completely ignored the UN military staff and was unwilling to share with it whatever intelligence it had. The UN military staff had very few i. resources of its own - it had no satellites and its unarmed military observers /UNMOs were not authorized to gather i. Of course they did but they were limited in what they could collect ... That´s why the UN military staff had no idea of the real intentions of Mladic , at first thinking that he just wanted to cut off the southern third of S. in order to be able to save mileage when transporting troops and supplies across Bosna from Serbia because the Serbs very strapped for fuel ...If they could cut it , they would save 50 kms.
Gen. Kees Nicolai UNPROPFOR Chief of Staff,Dutch citizen, was on the phone constantly to the Hague to discuss whether or not NATO should bomb because of the fear for the Dutch soldiers in S., scattered among the local population ... The Danish public would not take lightly having their soldiers killde by the NATO bombs ... Once the takeover of S. had been completed Philip Corwin decided to go there (see the book Dubious Mandate) to bring an international presence to the scene and to negotiate the safety of the survivors - he contacted BS viceprez. Nikola Koljevic who wanted to meet him in Pale and travel with him to S. His HQ in Zagreb,however, did not want him to go because Mladic might inteprete it in public as an UN endorsement , so Zagreb HQ suggested to send to S. some official of minor rank but Pale refused anyone else than Corwin .
If Nato had not the identity crisis with the end of the cold war and the precipitious ambition to push eastward and diplomacy had been given better chance, it is possible that there might have been a peaceful breakup of YU
A more general comment - all the three parties committed atrocities and are equally guilty,so the Serbs should not be demonised and an allowance should be made for their historical memory of the WW II when "the Serbs ,Jews ,Gypsies and Dogs " (authentic words from an Ustaše leaflet " ) were exterminated not only by the Nazists but chiefly by their local puppets - the Bosnian and Croatian fascists (Ustasevs)- the Serbs might have some suspicion about becoming minorities in new countries that were their killers in the WWII, whereby I mean they might have had the right not to hasten the split up of the YU ...