Word: bosnia
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Yasushi Akashi, the former U.N. diplomat in charge of the disastrous Bosnia peacekeeping mission, spoke to the U.S.-Japan seminar at Harvard just a few years after refusing to stop a Bosnian Serb attack on a town called Srebrenica, resulting in the worst massacre in Europe since World...
...past few years, he has been refining a policy that calls on the states of the world to step in wherever and whenever human lives are being consumed in conflagrations of hate, disease or poverty. He has not always succeeded. On his watch, in places like Rwanda and Bosnia, he has seen thousands die as they awaited help. He is haunted by their faces--and determined to perfect his organization so those mistakes never occur again...
...wherever it is needed. But he has nightmares about trying to contain some of the world's most evil men with the resources of a local sheriff's department. He has tried that before: Rwanda, where 800,000 Tutsi were slaughtered by rival Hutu tribesmen; Srebrenica, Bosnia, where 8,000 Muslims were killed by Serbs. It wasn't only the U.N. that walked away from these tragedies. In both cases the Security Council--led, at times, by the U.S.--cowered. But the U.N.'s peacekeeping division, under Annan's leadership during these conflicts, bungled its attempts to implement the doctrine...
Colin Powell, when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, upheld a doctrine that called for decisive use of U.S. military force with a clear goal. That notion eroded under his successor, John Shalikashvili, who told Congress in 1995 that U.S. troops sent to Bosnia as peacekeepers would be home within a year. Five years later, 5,000 U.S. troops are still there. An additional 6,000 are patrolling nearby Kosovo. Republicans on Capitol Hill have criticized such costly deployments as dulling the U.S. military's fighting edge...
...growing role as "rent-a-cops." Yet grunts serving in the Balkans have higher morale and are more likely to sign up for another tour than their Stateside buddies. Some officers see value in the missions that Powell disdains. Army General Montgomery Meigs, who led the peacekeeping forces in Bosnia and now commands all U.S. Army troops in Europe, says his forces can switch easily between peacekeeping and combat. Beyond that, they're learning valuable lessons. "You're getting a core of young leaders in the Army who are very tough and experienced," he says. "And that is worth...