At the start of 1990 decade, Yugoslavia imploded in a fratricide war. It was a horrible war that took the life, or disappeared with, of about a quarter of a million people. Furthermore, it was estimated that approximately one million people lost their houses, becoming displaced from their original region, living in very poor conditions, and another two million became refuges in some other country. Many of the crucial infrastructures of the former Yugoslavia territory was destroyed.
From 1992 to 1995, 11 541 people died in the besieged City of Sarajevo. Two decades after the beginning of Bosnia Herzegovina’s conflict, on the 6th April 2012, Sarajevo honored its 11 541 deceased citizens, in a street concert called “Why are you not here?” To visualize there immensity of the number, they placed on one of Sarajevo’s main avenue a red chair for each dead person.
When the Yugoslavian conflict started, the United Nations reacted promptly and deployed blue helmets to the site –The United Nations Protection Force, UNPROFOR – a conflict characterized as the worst conflict in Europe since the end of World War Two. UNPROFOR’s blue helmets tried to mitigate the problems of the conflict in Croatia, and (later) in Bosnia; however, it didn’t work very well. The UN had deployed a Peacekeeping force, with a peacekeeping mandate, without have a Peace to deal with. The peacekeepers were sent to the middle of an ugly war, which appeared no one was interested in stopping or reducing.
For many, UNPROFOR was an operational failure, because the UN was not solving the problem (at least … not in time). For others, it was the possible thing to do; trying to gain time, with least cost of lives, in order to reach an enduring agreement. For me, UNPROFOR was crucial for the conflict not to escalate to a full regional war. Not only that; UNPROFOR laid the bases of the new UN posture for Civilian Protection in future NUN missions, and the entire UN “Concept of Operations” for future missions. Something that ended-up saving many, many, lives in the years to come. I’m proud to have been UNPROFOR blue helmet.
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