The Mulroney government and humanitarian intervention in the former Yugoslavia

Introduction

In a major address at Stanford University on 29 September 1991, Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney outlined his vision of the post-Cold War world order. “We favour re-thinking the limits of national sovereignty in a world where problems respect no borders,” he said. He labelled an absolute commitment to non-intervention as “as out of date and as offensive to me as the police declining to stop family violence simply because a man’s home is supposed to be his castle.” ¹ Yet less than two years later, the foreign policy pursued by Mulroney and his short-lived successor Kim Campbell faced intense criticism. The Toronto Star charged that “Ottawa’s misguided humanitarianism” in Bosnia had appeased the Serb forces and prevented decisive Western intervention. ²

This article explores why the Mulroney government intervened in Yugoslavia, and how it responded to events there that challenged its initial assumptions. It argues that the Mulroney government chose to play a leading role in the international intervention in the former Yugoslavia because doing so both allowed the government to implement its vision of a post-Cold-War world order that aligned with its understanding of Canadian interests, and satisfied the demands and preferences of the Canadian public. At the same time, Mulroney’s government stumbled into unanticipated situations in Yugoslavia and failed to respond to them effectively, leading it to commence a review of peacekeeping and intervention that it would not live to implement. ³

The origins of Mulroney’s interventionist foreign policy

The values that would later inform the Mulroney government’s pursuit of humanitarian intervention were deeply rooted in Canadian political culture, and were expressed in postwar Canadian foreign policy. Yet Cold War divisions at the United Nations (UN) and the hostility of postcolonial states to interventionist principles meant that the consent of the parties to the conflict was necessary for any peacekeeping operation to proceed. Peacekeepers were lightly armed, and generally avoided using force. Canada’s Cold War alliance commitments also made peacekeeping a distinctly secondary priority. ⁴

Upon taking office in 1984, Mulroney showed a strong concern for human rights which sometimes led him to diverge from past Canadian policy. Mulroney had a deep personal interest in international human rights issues, particularly in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Even critics of his South Africa policy credit him with a striking and positive departure from previous cautious policies in the years 1985–1986. This commitment was genuine and was not only a way of winning votes, since there were few votes to be won on apartheid or by condemning human rights abuses in East Timor. Mulroney opened up the foreign policy process by consulting with civil society, thus giving ethnic minorities and human rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs) a greater voice. ⁵ Canada also pursued a tough line on human rights in the Soviet Union through the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), and broke with past foreign policy practice by supporting Ukrainian aspirations for statehood. ⁶ Furthermore, Mulroney ensured that Canada played a leading role in the multi-dimensional, intrusive peacekeeping missions involving election monitoring, refugee protection, aid distribution, and peace-building which the UN embarked on as the Cold War drew to a close. ⁷

In addition, the Gulf War fuelled a shift in Canadian foreign policy towards greater military engagement and intervention in support of human rights. For the first time since the Korean War, Canada sent troops into war, and public support for the Canadian Forces actually increased. ⁸ President George H. W. Bush declared that the coalition was fighting for “a new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind—peace and security, freedom, and the rule of law.” ⁹ This rhetoric of the New World Order heightened pressure to respond when Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s bloody repression of Iraqi Kurds and Shiites following the Gulf War’s end created a humanitarian crisis. In response to intense media coverage of Kurdish refugees and resulting public pressure, the USA launched Operation Provide Comfort, creating a no-fly zone in northern Iraq to protect the Kurds from Iraqi airstrikes and sending US troops to assist Kurdish refugees. Unlike the Gulf War itself, whose legal justification was to uphold Kuwait’s sovereignty, the operation clearly violated the legal principle of non-intervention in a state’s internal affairs, and “was the prototype armed humanitarian-intervention operation,” in the words of military historian Sean Maloney. ¹⁰ Yet Canada still contributed a medical unit and transport aircraft to the mission. Many Canadian politicians and intellectuals saw Operation Provide Comfort as a positive precedent to imitate in future crises, as proof that intervention without the consent of the state in question was required to save lives. Liberal external affairs critic Lloyd Axworthy cited the difficulties the UN experienced in trying to stop the killing as proof that absolute “national sovereignty … does not fit our growing interdependence.” ¹¹

Mulroney responded to the end of the Cold War by further centralizing control of foreign policy. Notably, in April 1991 he replaced his long-time secretary of state for external affairs (SSEA) Joe Clark with Barbara McDougall. Clark had played an important role in shaping Canada’s response to the end of the Cold War by supporting the expansion of the UN’s role in conflict resolution and proposing the use of multilateral institutions like the CSCE to promote human rights. Yet Clark also had been more cautious than Mulroney regarding sanctions on South Africa, and the doctrine of “cooperative security” that he proposed still saw states as the principal actors in international relations and took a traditional understanding of state sovereignty. In contrast, McDougall was a domestic minister with no experience in international affairs, who struggled to make her mark on the external affairs portfolio. By replacing the independent-minded Clark with McDougall, Mulroney signalled his intent to take greater control and make Canadian foreign policy more interventionist. Mulroney also made several new appointments within the Department of External Affairs (DEA), and increasingly relied on younger DEA officers who favoured his globally assertive policy. ¹²

As this analysis suggests, Mulroney was trying to put Canada’s defence and foreign policy on a new footing to shape the New World Order. As its Cold War defence policies quickly became out of date, the government struggled to construct a new security policy. In particular, Mulroney and External Affairs saw the success of the UN, NATO, and other regional and international organizations as key to ensuring global stability. Even in conflicts where Canada had no direct stake, Canada had an interest in improving the international ability to respond so that the international security architecture did not become discredited. Clark and McDougall adopted the doctrine of “cooperative security,” which emphasized enmeshing states in a coordinated web of regional and international institutions to foster cooperation and peace. ¹³ Specifically, the government’s policy towards European security relied on the concept of “interlocking institutions,” involving cooperation between NATO, the European Community (EC), the CSCE, and the Western European Union (WEU) to forge a new European security architecture with a role for Canada. The end result would be greater security at less cost, an important objective for Canada, given the nation’s parlous fiscal situation and the desire to see Europeans assume more responsibility for their own security. ¹⁴

Mulroney also took advantage of the end of the Cold War to advance a good governance agenda that challenged traditional understandings of sovereignty. In 1991, he delivered three major speeches at the Harare Commonwealth Summit, the Paris Francophonie summit, and Stanford University that outlined his vision of the importance of human rights in the post-Cold-War order. At the Commonwealth and Francophonie summits, he explicitly tied Canadian foreign aid to a country’s performance on good governance and human rights. As the Stanford speech made clear, the good governance agenda entailed a greater willingness to intervene in what were previously considered strictly internal affairs. Mulroney favoured “re-thinking the limits of national sovereignty in a world where problems respect no borders,” so that states could no longer use sovereignty as a shield to block weapons inspections or humanitarian aid. ¹⁵

The DEA did provide support to Mulroney as he developed this new, more interventionist policy. The early 1990s were a period of internationalist enthusiasm in which new ideas for global governance seemed to bubble up by the day. The DEA’s Policy Planning Staff (PPS) tried to synthesize and integrate these new ideas to guide Canadian foreign policy. The PPS predicted in late 1991 that the international community expected Canadian leadership in creating an international framework to fill the void left by the collapse of Cold War structures. ¹⁶ An early 1992 paper by PPS director Daniel Livermore and others on “sovereignty, non-intervention, and the intrusive international order” argued that a more intrusive, rule-based international order that would erode traditional sovereignty was in Canada’s long-term interest. They proposed that the government should seek pragmatic ad hoc departures from traditional sovereignty in responding to specific crises, citing Canada’s responses to Haiti and Yugoslavia as examples. ¹⁷ These PPS papers showed that some of the most creative officers within the Department supported Mulroney’s push for a more interventionist, globally engaged Canadian foreign policy.

Mulroney was also likely motivated by the supportive political environment and the enthusiasm of public opinion for his foreign policy. Anti-communist Canadians of Eastern European descent in the Progressive Conservative (PC) base had a natural interest in human rights in that region. The opposition and the media also took the issue seriously. Individual members of parliament (MPs) of all parties often raised human rights issues, thanks to pressures from NGOs and their constituents. Likewise, The Globe and Mail editorials from 1992 were strongly supportive of more interventionist policies and a more robust role for the UN in world affairs. Public support for both peacekeeping and the Canadian Forces actually increased significantly in 1991 and 1992. At a time when Mulroney was stymied on the domestic front by an economic slump and constitutional gridlock, it was only logical that he would pursue an active agenda in foreign affairs. ¹⁸

Canadian response to the breakup of Yugoslavia

The crisis in Yugoslavia was the first real test for the Mulroney government’s new approach to international security. Following the death of Yugoslavia’s founding leader Josip Tito, the economy began to flounder, and decentralization of power from the centre to the constituent republics began to take hold. The Canadian mission in Belgrade advised Ottawa that Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic’s persecution of Albanian Muslims in Kosovo was driving Yugoslavia to a breaking point. The DEA’s Yugoslavia desk officer Peter B. Taylor warned of rising distrust of Serbia by Croatian nationalists, and argued that the West should support Yugoslavia’s economic reforms to prevent instability. Mulroney responded to Taylor’s warnings by ensuring that Canada played a leading role in lobbying the International Monetary Fund to extend assistance to Yugoslavia during the late 1980s. ¹⁹

Despite these efforts, Canada was ultimately powerless to prevent the breakup of Yugoslavia. As tensions between Serbs and non-Serbs rose, the republics of Slovenia and Croatia declared independence on 25–26 June 1991. Belgrade let Slovenia go, but decided to intervene militarily in Croatia where there was a sizable Serb minority. The result was a bloody civil war over the Serb-inhabited area of the Krajina and its adjacent areas. The Yugoslav National Army (JNA) used heavy weapons against civilian areas, and both sides engaged in ethnic cleansing. The international response was clumsy and uncoordinated. Canada’s European allies were surprised and overwhelmed by the sudden breakup of Yugoslavia. Germany had encouraged its old ally Croatia to secede and had thus helped precipitate the conflict, but German differences with France and Britain over this move hindered the EC’s ability to respond. However, President Bush and his secretary of state James Baker did not see major US national interests at stake, and wanted the EC to take the lead. As Canada’s permanent representative to NATO, James Bartleman, stated, the resulting “decline in American engagement and the political and institutional leadership vacuum” inhibited effective international action. ²⁰

From the beginning, Mulroney determinedly pushed for vigorous international action to stop the Yugoslav civil war. As Hugh Segal suggests, Mulroney’s Serbian wife Mila and the numerous anti-Communist Canadians of Yugoslav origin in the Tory party gave him a unique interest. Canada’s Croatian community had followed the developments in Yugoslavia with acute interest and repeatedly lobbied the government prior to 1991. ²¹ Public interest in the conflict increased dramatically following the JNA’s invasion of Croatia and the extensive media coverage of the naval bombardment of the beautiful medieval town of Dubrovnik. Parliament’s special debate on Yugoslavia on 18 November 1991 reflected this. Axworthy called Yugoslavia a “test case” for the future of global security, and called for NATO military intervention to break the blockade of Dubrovnik. The New Democratic Party (NDP) external affairs critic Svend Robinson asked, “What has the New World Order meant for the people of Dubrovnik?” Liberal and NDP MPs both charged the government with hypocrisy for acting to stop Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait but failing to help Croatia. NDP MP Simon De Jong even went so far as to call for Canada to “knock out” the JNA if it did not pull out of Croatia. PC, Liberal, and NDP MPs alike criticized a strict adherence to sovereignty for inhibiting intervention, and argued in the words of PC MP Jim Edwards that “sovereignty must observe more fundamental principles.” ²²

In fact, the Mulroney government was well ahead of its allies in pushing for vigorous international action. Canada was the first state to request the Security Council to address the Yugoslav crisis and to offer to send peacekeepers. At the November 1991 NATO Summit in Rome, Mulroney highlighted the bombardment of Dubrovnik and called for a tough line against Serbia. At the December North Atlantic Council summit, McDougall recommended deploying peacekeepers to Yugoslavia because the combatants would ignore softer measures. ²³ As Livermore suggested, Mulroney did not see any direct Canadian interest in Yugoslavia, but did perceive it as a critical first test of NATO and the UN. For instance, in a speech the day after Parliament’s special debate, McDougall labelled Yugoslavia an “extreme example” of the new post-Cold-War challenges, and said that Canada was trying to strengthen the UN’s ability to promote human rights in response. ²⁴

Yet Canada’s hands were ultimately tied by the inability of the Europeans and the USA to reach consensus and act. Because Canada lacked the capability to intervene unilaterally, it had to wait for an international organization or coalition to act. McDougall authorized Bartleman to attend a WEU meeting on Yugoslavia and offer 1200 peacekeepers, but Bartleman did not commit them because the WEU failed to reach consensus. Despite strong Canadian lobbying, the Rome Summit NATO communiqué failed to mention Yugoslavia at all. Canada only gained an entrée to the crisis when the UN secretary-general’s special representative Cyrus Vance brokered a peace plan between Milosevic and Croatian leader Franjo Tudjman. The Vance plan created United Nations protected areas in the Serb-minority areas of Croatia that would be guarded by UN peacekeepers, and the Security Council approved the creation of the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) in February 1992. ²⁵

Canada’s involvement in UNPROFOR to resolve the Serb–Croat conflict unexpectedly catapulted it into a prominent role in the conflict that erupted in Bosnia. The precipitating factor was a decision completely outside Canada’s control, namely the UN’s decision to locate the UNPROFOR headquarters in Sarajevo. This made UNPROFOR the focal point for all of Bosnia’s problems. UNPROFOR had been in Bosnia for less than a month when the Muslim-dominated government of Bosnia declared independence on 6 April. In response, the Bosnian Serbs attacked Sarajevo and commenced a campaign of ethnic cleansing with support from the Serb-dominated Yugoslav government. Canadian general Lewis MacKenzie, as the chief of staff to UNPROFOR commander general Satish Nambiar, was in the centre of the situation. According to MacKenzie’s memoirs, he perceived an opportunity to have UN peacekeepers secure the Sarajevo airport to allow for the delivery of aid, and on the spot proposed to Nambiar the idea of sending the Canadian battalion stationed in Croatia to perform this mission. MacKenzie did not consult Ottawa in advance, though he did request permission after Nambiar approved his initial proposal. ²⁶

The Mulroney government saw MacKenzie’s request as an opportunity to assume a leadership role in the crisis and reaffirm Canada’s commitment to European security. After all, the government had been seeking to lead the international response since the crisis erupted. Furthermore, the request came at a time when Canada’s standing in NATO was low, owing to the decision to close Canadian military bases in Germany. By deploying troops to a high-profile mission in Yugoslavia, the government could tell its allies that the Canadian military had not really left Europe, but had merely redeployed to the location it was needed most. ²⁷ Given these two persuasive rationales, Cabinet quickly approved MacKenzie’s request.

Mulroney’s next step was to secure support from the United States. On 27 June, Bush called Mulroney to discuss the Bosnian crisis, and the two men agreed that the UN should lead the response. During the call, Mulroney emphasized the hazards that Canadian troops would face. At a news conference the following week, Bush praised Mulroney effusively for sending Canadian peacekeepers to Bosnia, and stated that the Canadian troops would not lack United States support. According to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, this public pledge was accompanied by a “tentative understanding” with the Canadian government that the USA would provide military support to Canadian peacekeepers when Canada so requested. As a result, the Canadian battalion travelling from Croatia to Sarajevo had access to the firepower of a US carrier battlegroup. ²⁸

The Sarajevo mission put the Canadian military into an undefined situation. As late as 28 June, Canadian diplomats in New York warned Ottawa that it was still unclear whether the UN would authorize the Canadian battalion to engage in traditional peacekeeping or more robust peace enforcement operations. This placed the Canadian troops in a situation that military doctrines of warfighting and traditional peacekeeping did not define. ²⁹ The Mulroney government approved the deployment of a battalion which was fully equipped for combat. ³⁰ In violation of UN rules, the Canadian military equipped the battalion’s armoured personnel carriers (APCs) with advanced anti-tank missiles. ³¹ As a result, the Canadian battalion was able to use its superior firepower to deter a Bosnian Serb unit from blocking its path to Sarajevo. Upon arrival at the airport on 2 July, the peacekeepers engaged hostile snipers and were willing to shoot first to eliminate them, a departure from traditional peacekeeping principles. As a National Defence Headquarters review concluded in fall 1992, the mission showed that it had become very difficult to separate peacekeeping and peace enforcement. ³²

Despite these conundrums, the mission catapulted Canada into a leadership role in the crisis. On 6 July, the Canadian mission in London reported that MacKenzie and the Canadian troops had impressed lead EC peace negotiator Lord Carrington. Diplomats advised that media coverage of Canadian peacekeepers gave Canada “a relatively high public profile” on Bosnia. ³³ “Today [Canada’s] standing is perhaps at the highest it has ever been in Europe,” Bartleman argued in a late September report. “As consequence, [Canada’s] voice in [the] past month has proven to be [a] decisive one in alliance debates on how to support peacekeeping.” ³⁴

Support abroad was matched by support at home. The government framed the mission in terms of Canada’s traditions of peacekeeping and supporting the UN. Public support for peacekeeping increased dramatically due to the substantial media coverage of Canadian peacekeepers. By September 1992, a Gallup poll showed that 64 percent of Canadians supported Canadian participation in a peace enforcement mission in Bosnia. As senior DEA official Jeremy Kinsman later said, the Sarajevo mission in July was “a little moment … where it seemed that United Nations peacekeeping was having some effect.” ³⁵

Canadian policy initiatives and policy drift in Yugoslavia

One of the government’s first instincts upon having attained this position of leadership was to use the CSCE to address the conflict. From the beginning of the crisis, the Mulroney government had seen the CSCE as a privileged avenue for Canadian foreign policy. At a December 1991 security conference in Prague, House External Affairs committee chair John Bosley stated that the CSCE gave Canada “an equal voice at the table” and reflected a “Canadian view of multilateralism.” Or as the Norwegian minister of defence said, the CSCE prevented Canada from “being marginalized.” ³⁶ Regardless, McDougall repeatedly emphasized the role of the CSCE for conflict prevention in Yugoslavia. She envisioned the CSCE as a means for Canada and its like-minded allies to intervene in the internal affairs of other states. ³⁷

Yet this policy proved ineffective because the very assets that made the CSCE so attractive to Canada—namely its reliance on consensus-based multilateralism with an equal voice for all—rendered it incapable of action. Canadian diplomats reported that at the CSCE’s 11 June 1992 meeting, Russian opposition and the unease of other delegates caused the CSCE to adopt a “stop-gap declaration” instead of asking NATO to send peacekeepers. Strikingly, the Bosnian foreign minister declared that the CSCE was powerless and would be better to simply ignore the crisis instead of giving false hope through empty rhetoric. In her address to the CSCE summit in Helsinki a month later, McDougall lambasted the organization for abdicating responsibility, sardonically remarking that the summit’s outcome document had failed to even mention Bosnia. By 1993, mention of the CSCE had almost disappeared from McDougall’s speeches on Yugoslavia, proof of its growing irrelevance to Canadian policy. ³⁸

Another major Canadian initiative was creating an international criminal tribunal (ICT) to prosecute individuals for crimes committed in the Bosnian conflict. McDougall focused on enforcing international humanitarian law at the London Conference, and her definition of “outlaws” made an impact and was apparently picked up by British prime minister John Major. The proposal also built on the work of Canadian Forces lawyer Commander W. J. Fenrick, whom Canada had assigned to the Commission of Experts established by the Security Council in October 1992 to investigate war crimes. Canadian diplomats in Geneva reported that the appointment of Fenwick and other Canadians gave Canada a high profile on the human rights dossier. ³⁹ The ICT proposal also enjoyed strong political support in Canada. By summer 1992, strong public concern about war crimes and sexual violence in Bosnia led the opposition to demand an international court to judge the perpetrators. McDougall ensured that Canada hosted the March 1993 international meeting of legal experts to discuss the creation of an ICT. In her speech to the meeting, she argued that an ICT would deter war crimes by removing impunity for the perpetrators. The court would create “a fundamental moral vision of the future.” ⁴⁰ The Security Council established the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) two months later.

However, the ICTY proved no panacea to the Yugoslav conflict itself. McDougall and other ICTY supporters hoped that the court would deter war crimes in Bosnia. Yet as a 1 October 1992 memo from Livermore suggested, belligerent leaders would have less incentive to negotiate if the ICTY threatened them with prosecution. Even leaving this conundrum aside, the ICTY lacked the enforcement capability needed to have a deterrent effect. UNPROFOR not only lacked a mandate to arrest war criminals, but seemed to be incapable of protecting the aid convoys it was mandated to defend. The ICT proposals were strangely out of touch with McDougall’s comments at the Oslo North Atlantic Council meeting in June 1992, wherein she had stated that the extremists in Bosnia only listened to force. ⁴¹

Troublingly, McDougall appeared unable either to exercise leadership herself or to be led by her department in making policy on Bosnia. For instance, on 14 August 1992, McDougall received an action memorandum entitled “The Bosnian Crisis: Choices for Canada” from three senior DEA officials. The authors made the case for intensified Canadian involvement, recommending that Canada make a major military contribution to peace enforcement, monitor heavy weapons cantonment, and play a leading role at the London Conference. Yet the memo seems to have vanished from the policy-making process. The minister’s decision on this memo merely said “overtaken by events,” and was received only several months later. ⁴² Similarly, on 31 August 1992, Assistant Deputy Minister for Europe David Wright sent McDougall a draft memorandum proposing that Canada focus its efforts on international humanitarian law, humanitarian aid, and implementing an embargo on Yugoslavia. Yet on 21 September, Wright received a minister’s decision stating simply that “SSEA declined to sign.” ⁴³

It is also difficult to determine the Prime Minister’s role in shaping policy following the decision to send peacekeepers to Sarajevo. Mulroney’s memoirs explain the decision to send peacekeepers to the original UNPROFOR in terms of Canada’s commitment to the UN and European security in a few brief sentences. The only other reference to Bosnia in the memoirs is a quick mention of his December 1992 Harvard speech which called for military intervention in Bosnia. ⁴⁴ The available documentary record about Mulroney’s attitudes and actions on Bosnia is sparse as well. Bosnia appears in none of the conversations between Bush and Mulroney that are in the possession of the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum following the 27 June teleconference. It is known that the Mulroneys had lunch with MacKenzie on 6 August 1992; however, the general said nothing of the substance of the conversation, finding it more important to discuss how irritated he was that his wife was not invited. Canadian diplomats cited to Prime Minister Major Mulroney’s interest in having Canada represented at the London Conference, in order to secure Canada an invitation, yet Mulroney did not attend the conference himself, instead sending McDougall. Mulroney did send letters to the leaders of Bosnia, Serbia, and Croatia, urging them to negotiate seriously in advance of the London Conference. However, these were drafted by the DEA, and Mulroney’s involvement was likely limited to putting his signature on the finished product. ⁴⁵

In fact, Canada’s policy on Bosnia began to drift following the London Conference, and was driven largely by UN decisions and events on the ground. The UNPROFOR mission mandate metastasized from summer 1992 onward. Security Council Resolution (SCR) 770 of August 1992 enabled the use of force to deliver aid, while the following month’s SCR 776 gave UNPROFOR a mandate to protect aid convoys. UN officials were dismayed when, in March 1993, UNPROFOR’s deputy commander unilaterally declared that the inhabitants of the besieged Muslim town of Srebrenica were under the protection of the UN. The following month, SCR 819 declared Srebrenica to be a “safe area,” yet the Canadian peacekeepers who entered it were only mandated to disarm the inhabitants and deliver aid, not to actually defend the town. As a former director of peacekeeping operations at National Defence testified in February 1993, “The original UNPROFOR mandate was complex enough without the addenda.” ⁴⁶

Moreover, UNPROFOR lacked the forces and equipment necessary to protect itself, let alone the aid convoys or Bosnians themselves. Canadian peacekeepers were using obsolete and lightly armoured APCs when the Bosnian Serbs possessed heavy weapons, making a military disaster a real possibility. Aid organizations such as Médecins Sans Frontières saw the safe havens as ineffective, and the insecurity caused many humanitarian organizations to suspend aid operations in Bosnia in February 1993. In an incident that symbolized UNPROFOR’s ineffectiveness, on 8 January 1993, Bosnian Serb forces stopped a French UNPROFOR APC carrying the Bosnian deputy prime minister Hakija Turajlic, opened the back hatch of the vehicle, and killed him. ⁴⁷ While the peacekeepers were part of the UN Protection Force, they actually lacked a mandate to protect Bosnian civilians. As MacKenzie bluntly told MPs in November 1992, Bosnians rapidly came to despise the peacekeepers “because we were the United Nations Protection Force and we were not protecting anybody.” ⁴⁸

From interventionism to caution

The vulnerability of Canada’s peacekeepers rapidly transformed what had been an interventionist Canadian policy into one that increasingly obstructed American efforts at decisive intervention. When the French minister of foreign affairs hinted that France would intervene unilaterally to free prisoners from Bosnian Serb camps following the killing of Turajlic, Canada argued that this would undermine the peace process. In March 1993, Canadian diplomats told leading peace negotiators Cyrus Vance and Martti Ahtisaari and high-ranking UN officials that robust enforcement of the Vance–Owen peace plan would be problematic for Canada. Even if the Croat, Bosnian Muslim, and Bosnian Serb factions signed a peace agreement, Canadian officials feared that this agreement could face strong resistance from Bosnian Serbs, and were unwilling to face the risks of “enforcing” it on them. Even after EC negotiator Lord Owen told the Security Council on 24 March that by failing to enforce the peace plan the Council had allowed the belligerents to block progress in the negotiations, Canada did not shift its position. ⁴⁹

In the end, Canada ultimately stymied the US attempt to gain NATO support for airstrikes against the Bosnian Serbs that might have provided the coercive force necessary for a diplomatic settlement. A memorandum for the Director of Central Intelligence dated 5 August 1993 warned that if the USA launched unilateral airstrikes, Britain, France, and Canada would break with the USA at the UN, and would likely begin withdrawing their troops, inflicting grave damage on NATO. Recognizing this, the Clinton administration asked its NATO allies to agree to airstrikes. Canada was the only one that refused. Acting under instructions from Prime Minister Campbell, in August 1993 Bartleman told the other NATO representatives that the airstrikes would endanger the lives of peacekeepers and undermine the role of the UN. He warned that if the USA did go ahead with the airstrikes, Canada would pull its troops out of Yugoslavia and would try to end UNPROFOR. In the end, the USA was forced to give the UNPROFOR commander in Bosnia a veto on the choice of targets for bombing. This reassured Canada that NATO airpower would only be used to protect peacekeepers instead of endangering them. Yet as Bartleman frankly admitted, this arrangement meant that the war would rage on uninterrupted. ⁵⁰

The result was that a huge gulf opened up between Canadian interventionist rhetoric and Canada’s actual anti-intervention policy. For instance, Mulroney called for military intervention in Bosnia in a December 1992 speech to the Harvard Kennedy School. During his May 1993 swansong trip to European capitals, he argued that existing methods had failed in Bosnia and that diplomacy required a credible military option. Likewise, McDougall declared on 8 February 1993 that the West should act to stop the war crimes and violence. In an address that May, she expressed her frustration with the “received wisdom” that the Bosnian conflict was complex and could not be solved. ⁵¹

Yet a closer analysis reveals that despite their calls for action, Mulroney and McDougall were actually advocating policies that led to continual inaction. For instance, Mulroney’s May 1993 address allowed military intervention only if it did not endanger peacekeepers, a condition which in effect made decisive intervention impossible. A careful reading of this speech shows that he did not propose any new plan or actions to end the fighting. ⁵² Likewise, McDougall praised the Clinton administration for allegedly recognizing that an enforcement mission would not achieve peace in Bosnia. McDougall had labelled the Bosnian conflict “unparalleled in terms of the complexity” in a March 1993 address, and had emphasized its deep historical roots as early as November 1991. ⁵³ McDougall’s remarks thus supported, whether advertently or inadvertently, the popular but ultimately misleading arguments made by MacKenzie and others that only colossal and bloody military intervention could end conflicts supposedly rooted in ancient tribal hatred. ⁵⁴

Rethinking peacekeeping and intervention

Canada’s experiences in Bosnia convinced the Mulroney government of the need to revamp Canada’s policies on peacekeeping and intervention to account for the unsettling realities that Canadian troops had experienced. As a result, the government directed both the House Standing Committee on National Defence and Veterans’ Affairs and the Senate Sub-Committee on Security and National Defence to review Canada’s international peacekeeping policy. The Senate sub-committee heard testimony from a host of Canadian officials, UN representatives, foreign ambassadors, civil society leaders, and academics. Its February 1993 report, Meeting New Challenges: Canada’s Response to a New Generation of Peacekeeping, recommended intervening early and then pulling peacekeepers out after replacements arrived from other states. It also recommended that the government better define both the nature of peacekeeping and its own interests in any given mission. ⁵⁵

The DEA also organized a seminar on Canada’s agenda for international peace and security. Held in Ottawa in February 1993, the seminar attempted to distill the emerging thinking on peacekeeping and intervention to guide Canadian policy. In her keynote address, McDougall expressed her determination to find “new forms of intervention” to break the cycle of violence. She suggested ways to make Canadian military involvement less resource-intensive by focusing on “knowledge and skill dimensions.” ⁵⁶ Yet it proved a major challenge to even agree on the proper terminology. In his address to the Ottawa seminar, the Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral J. R. Anderson, listed five new concepts of peacekeeping. Similarly, in a 17 February speech, McDougall outlined a six-part framework to respond to conflict. ⁵⁷ Yet the seminar participants raised the prospect of a “definitional morass” and failed to even agree on a definition of peacekeeping. Attempting to sum up the discussion, the seminar’s rapporteur concluded that “clearly we are in a new peacekeeping age.” ⁵⁸ What he did not say is that there was no expert consensus on what exactly this new age meant.

Neither did Mulroney’s ministers have clear answers for the new trends. In fact, they presented themselves to the public as humble and eager to consult. McDougall admitted in a 1993 speech that Canada and other Western countries were forced to improvise policy solutions, and stated in another speech that year that “real life is not political science.” ⁵⁹ Similarly, Minister of National Defence Kim Campbell emphasized in February 1993 that the government was seeking external advice and wanted to engage Canadians in a debate about peacekeeping and the post-Cold-War security environment. ⁶⁰ In the end, the Tories were unable to answer these questions, completely owing to their crushing defeat in the 1993 elections. The Liberal government was left to pick up where the Conservatives had left off.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the Mulroney government chose to play a leading role in the international intervention in the former Yugoslavia because doing so both allowed the government to implement its vision of a post-Cold-War world order that aligned with its understanding of Canadian interests, and satisfied the demands and preferences of the Canadian public. At the same time, the Mulroney government encountered unanticipated situations in Yugoslavia, which it failed to respond to effectively, leading it to commence a review of peacekeeping and intervention that it would not live to implement. Yet this essay also leaves much room for additional research. In particular, the exact role of Prime Minister Mulroney in crafting policy on Bosnia following the deployment to Sarajevo is unclear and merits further exploration.

The Mulroney government’s experience with humanitarian intervention illustrates some of the dangers inherent in intervening in support of human rights abroad. One such danger is allowing policy to be driven by public opinion and media coverage, when the public is often not well informed about the dangerous nature of modern peace operations and how they differ from traditional peacekeeping. ⁶¹ Another danger is committing Canadian troops to undefined conflict situations without either clearly understanding the risks involved or setting specific and achievable objectives for the Canadian contingent. As Canada’s experience in Yugoslavia demonstrated, such improvisation in response to public opinion and the pressure of events could later lead to adverse consequences for the mission and a retreat from overambitious initial rhetoric. As the Mulroney government recognized toward the end of its tenure, it is important to take a clear-eyed view before committing to peace operations, in order to ensure that Canadian troops can make the most effective contribution possible.

It is encouraging that the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appears to be taking such a clear-eyed approach in its deliberations about committing Canadian troops to new peace operations in Africa. Minister of National Defence Harjit Sajjan has explicitly recognized that traditional peacekeeping terminology is inapposite for the risky operations that Canadian troops would be undertaking in war-torn countries such as Mali, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Minister Sajjan has also indicated that Canada is looking for a robust UN mandate and rules of engagement to ensure the protection of civilians, and intends to focus on training and capacity-building of host states’ and other peacekeeping countries’ troops in order to have a lasting impact. ⁶² While the Mulroney government entered into unexpected situations that traditional peacekeeping approaches were not suited for, it appears that the Trudeau government has learned from the evolution of peacekeeping since the shock of the conflicts of the early 1990s that this essay has described.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.