Ambivalence Kills: the UN’s Failure in Bosnia and Everywhere Else

One of the main principles of the United Nations is that the organization must remain utterly neutral at all costs in order to mediate between the belligerent parties in a conflict. That makes sense in principle, but the absolute refusal to take sides has led the UN down a dangerous path: that of moral equivalency. By this way of thinking, nobody is right, and nobody is wrong. To the UN, no party in a conflict is at fault; they all just need to stop fighting.

The UN is even hesitant to lay blame in cases of genocide.

There isn’t enough space here to explain why the UN doesn’t work, so I’ll just say that it doesn’t. The folly of moral equivalency and the often deliberate deception and even lying that the UN does in its effort to avoid laying blame is best illustrated by an example.

During the Bosnian War in the early 1990s, the Bosnian capital Sarajevo was subjected to a vicious siege in which civilians were specifically targeted by the Serb forces in the surrounding hills. A Washington Post article of the time gives a taste of the carnage. It also tells of the infamous Bread Line Massacre in which eighteen people were killed by a Serb shell while waiting in line for food. When UN investigators looked at the site, the UN took their report and refused to lay blame where it belonged in this and other incidents for fear of alarming Bosnian Serbs.

In many others such bombings, the UN actually began to consistently blame the Bosnian government for attacking its own people and framing the Serb aggressors in order to gain international sympathy.

When the UN lets its neutrality drag it down into inaction or even push it so far as to lay blame on victims for their own suffering, it becomes an accomplice - either active or passive - in murder, sometimes even genocide. If the UN would let go of its obsession with leveling the playing field between aggressor and victim and take a side once in a while, maybe it would finally have some success in saving lives somewhere in the world. Unless the UN soon starts to stand up and defend the weak, it will be too busy trying to wash the blood off its hands to avoid sinking into irrelevance.

Darfur could be to turning point for the UN, but its opportunity to do some good is fading quickly.