6

The NATO-United Nations Link:

Canada and the Balkans, 1991-95

Norman Hillmer and Dean Oliver

There were two striking aspects of Canada's European security policy in the
early 1990s: the indecent haste with which the government pulled its troops
from their NATO base in Germany, and the crusading zeal with which it
sent them back, this time to the Balkans under United Nations command.
The withdrawal of troops from a theatre where they were no longer required
made some sense, as did the reallocation of the resources committed to their
maintenance. But so too did the despatch of blue berets when the UN came
calling for messy missions in the former Yugoslavia. A display of enthusi-
asm for European stability was probably necessary to counter the fury of
alliance members over Ottawa's poorly handled departure, but this was not
the whole story. Given the interventionist rhetoric which accompanied the
end of the Cold War and Canadians' addiction to peacekeeping, Ottawa's
activism was far more than a mea culpa for its exodus from a longstanding
army commitment to NATO in Europe. 1
The deployment of NATO, a defensive alliance, in military support of
the UN's floundering Balkan presence forced uncomfortable truths upon a
Canadian foreign policy establishment which had taken to pronouncing
upon the death of state sovereignty and the brave new world of humanitar-
ian intervention. Having enthusiastically embraced both NATO reform and
the new security agenda, Canadians - and, indeed, all their allies - struggled
with the implications of Cold War victory and doctrinal renovation. In the
event of success, all might be forgiven; in the event of failure, there would
be widespread recriminations. What real interests, after all, were being
served by Balkan involvement in the first place?2
The optimism of the immediate post-Cold War period was palpable. In
Canada, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, and his Foreign Minister, Barbara

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© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2001
72 Canada and the Balkans

McDougall, led the way in proclaiming a 'new internationalism.' Speaking

to a graduating class at Stanford University in California in September
1991, Mulroney justified humanitarian action even if it meant the violation
of frontiers. "Invocations of the principle of national sovereignty are as out
of date and as offensive to me as the police declining to stop family vio-
lence simply because a man's home is his castle." The foreign minister
followed this argument in a number of speeches breathtaking in their scope.
"How many men, women and children have become victims of all manner
of brutality, racism and discrimination," McDougall asked, "because the
shield of national sovereignty was raised before the international
community? Now that the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall have fallen, is it
not time to respect human dignity as much as, if not more than national
sovereignty?" 3 UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali's 1992 docu-
ment, Agenda for Peace, was very much in line with Canadian thinking. In-
deed, Ottawa's politicians and officials took credit for encouraging him to
plan for a more dynamic and muscular world body. 4
Even as the government began to eliminate Canada's troop commitment
to NAT0, 5 Mulroney pressed for a strong international presence in the Bal-
kans. He wrote to the UN Secretary-General in September 1991, encourag-
ing an emergency Security Council debate and offering peacekeepers only
days after personnel had also been promised for the European Community
Monitor Mission in Former Yugoslavia (ECCM). 6 The Prime Minister later
claimed that his was "the first government to prevail upon the Secretary-
General of the United Nations to involve himself and his organization in the
great tragedy that was unfolding." 7 Marrack Goulding, UN Under
Secretary-General for Political Affairs, was much more cautious, as was
British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, with whom Mulroney clashed over
UN intervention just at the time that the Canadians were beginning to put
pressure on the UN. 8
In March 1992, the United Nations Protection Force in the former Yu-
goslavia (UNPROFOR) was deployed. With Canadian General Lewis
MacKenzie as Chief of Staff and an initial Canadian commitment of 1200
military and 45 members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP),
UNPROFOR was the largest UN peacekeeping force since that sent to the
Congo in the early 1960s. Its personnel were deployed to Croatia, but its
headquarters were in Sarajevo, a tactic designed in part to extend UNPRO-
FOR's influence to Bosnia-Herzegovina. In May 1992, the Canadian gov-
ernment described the Serbs as "the principal, but not the only, aggressor"
in Bosnia; in June, 750 Canadian members of the UN force joined
MacKenzie in Sarajevo. By August the Bosnian situation had deteriorated
badly. UNPROFOR II, a humanitarian mission, went to the rescue, with
another 1200 Canadians in tow. 9