1. Korea University
Division of International Studies
Military Intervention
FINAL PAPER
Presented by: Jenny Lafaurie
Date: December 19, 2012
Morality VS International Law:
A Brief Case Study of UN Interventions in Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo
Introduction.
The United Nations Charter legally bans the use of force under Article 2, which
states that “all Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or
use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”1
However, and in spite of the fact that Article 2 stresses the importance of non-
interference in “matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any
state”, the illegality of the use of force is subject to two exceptions as established in
articles 24 and 51 of the Charter. Regarding the former, the Security Council is
conferred the power to authorize the use of force; while the latter indicates Member
State’s right to individual or collective self-defense without undermining the “authority
and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time
such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and
security.”2
The responsibility convened to the Security Council is established under
Article 39, by which it “shall determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach
of the peace, or act of aggression and shall make recommendations, or decide what
measures shall be taken in accordance with Articles 41 and 42, to maintain or restore
international peace and security.”3
As Martti Koskenniemi states, a sovereign state paradigm was in place during
the Cold War upon which the Security Council strived to guarantee state sovereignty
and territorial integrity by maintaining the exclusive power to authorize the use of
1
Charter of the United Nations. Chapter I: Purposes and Principles. Available in:
http://www.un.org/en/documents/charter/chapter1.shtml
2
UN Charter. Chapter VII: Action with respect to threats to the peace, breaches of the peace, and acts of
aggression.
3
UN Charter. Chapter VII.

2. military force against threats to international peace and security.4
However, and as
Adam Branch argues, the end of the Cold War and the first great intervention of the new
era, the Gulf War of 1991, marked the beginning of two important trends that were to
define the United Nations military interventions:
“First, the development of a deformalized, non-legal, moral-humanitarian mode of argumentation by the
Council in its resolutions […] in which the legitimacy of military intervention was divorced from
questions of law and instead inscribed in morality. In the end, Security Council authorization itself was
bypassed as mere legalism, and moral claims were privileged instead. Second, the progressive delegation
of military enforcement duties by the Security Council to other bodies, especially to the US and NATO,
and the refusal to allow a UN military capacity to develop, which took place in large part under pressure
from the US, were mutually-reinforcing and gradually produced a discourse of the dangerous
incompetence of the UN and a belief in the need for military action to be the exclusive preserve of major
Western powers.”5
Furthermore, as complex and multidimensional intrastate conflicts spurred in the
post-Cold War era, characterized by gruesome human rights violations, heated debates
regarding UN interventions claimed center stage. Various important questions are of
imperative consideration: Do human rights violations threaten international peace and
security and thereby ultimately justify enforcement action on the part of the SC under
Chapter VII of the UN Charter?6
Does the Security Council should not take action under
Chapter VII if it faces a situation which poses no immediate threat to international
peace? 7
Is UN intervention effective?
The following essay aims at briefly analyzing the cases of military intervention
in Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo in order to exemplify how the two trends mentioned
above gained momentum, and to assess the important questions regarding effectiveness
and legitimacy of the military interventions in the three cases.
Somalia.
The case of Somalia marks the first instance in history were humanitarian
intervention rhetoric was used to justify intervention. In 1991, as the humanitarian crisis
in Somalia intensified, the George H. W. Bush administration authorized Operation
Provide Relief to Somalia, under which an airlift operation provided much needed
4
KOSKENNIEMI, Martti. The Place of Law in Collective Security. Michigan Journal of International
Law 17. Winter 1996. Pg. 455–90.
5
BRANCH, Adam. American Morality over International Law: Origins in UN Military Interventions,
1991–1995. In: Constellations Volume 12, Number 1, 2005. Pg. 104.
6
OSTERDAHL, Inger. By All Means, Intervene! In: Nordic Journal of International Law 66: 241–271, 1997
7
Ibid.

3. supplies to the population. However, the operation brought upon two dire consequences
that severely threatened the humanitarian intervention and that were to constitute
important pillars upon which military intervention was to be justified: first, aid made
available by the US operation led to rising violence as gangs and factions competed for
the control of the supplies; second, the fact that Mogadishu became the center of
distribution of international aid led to the massive migration of displaced people into the
war-torn city, subjecting the desperate populace under the control of the merciless
warlords.8
On November 1991, the Bush administration was determined not to jeopardize
the humanitarian operation, hence offering the United Nations 28,000 troops that were
to undertake a peace-enforcement operation “to facilitate the distribution of relief
supplies, using overwhelming force under generous rules of engagement.”9
The United
Nations then-Secretary General, Boutros-Ghali, accepted the US offer and the Security
Council moved forward to approve Resolution 794 on December 3rd
, 1992, according to
which the grave humanitarian situation in Somalia represented a threat to the
international peace and security, and granted the United States the unified command and
control over the United Task Force (UNITAF).
The first trend, regarding the marginalization of legal language by the Security
Council in pro of moral claims to justify military intervention, is exemplified by the
legal ambiguities and informalities present in Resolution 794, among them: the lack of
explanation regarding the criteria used to decide how the “human tragedy” in Somalia
constituted a threat to international peace and security and the failure to answer why the
unique, complex, and extraordinary nature of the conflict required military intervention
while other humanitarian crises did not.10
Regarding the second trend – “the progressive delegation of military
enforcement duties by the Security Council to other bodies, especially to the US and
NATO, and the refusal to allow a UN military capacity to develop” 11
- is clearly
exemplified by the delegation of the first, crucial phase of military intervention under
8
GODFREY RAMUHALA, Mashudu. Post-Cold War Military Intervention in Africa. Scientia Militaria,
South African Journal of Military Studies, Vol 39, Nr 1, 2011. Pg. 36.
9
See, BRANCH. Pg. 111.
10
Ibid. Pg. 111-112.
11
Ibid. Pg. 104.

4. US command through UNITAF. According to Chester A. Crocker, the Somalia
enterprise under UNITAF was characterized by a series of successes that are too often
eclipsed by the failures of the entire operation: it provided safety for relief workers; it
managed to maintain warlords placated and off-balance; it pushed towards a political
process involving the military factions of the country; it sought to reinstaurate security
by, among others, removing heavy weaponry from key areas of the Somali geography;
and fostered the restoration of government and police functions.12
However, the real
debacle came upon the transfer of command by UNITAF to UN peacekeeping forces
under UN Operation in Somalia (UNOSOM II), from May 1993 until March 1995.
UNOSOM II’s peace-enforcement mandate included the continuing efforts to secure
aid, disarmament and an ambitious quest towards nation-building (under UNSC
Resolution 814). However, UNOSOM II proved to be a dismal failure as it showed that
UN peace enforcement missions “cannot manage complex political-military operations
when its own structure is an undisciplined and often chaotic set of rival fiefdoms that
resist unified command and control in the field at both the civilian and military levels.”
13
Such crippled scenario led to a bloody escalation of violence between UN and US
forces against the deadly militia of Mohammad Farah Aideed, which consequently led
to the withdrawal of US and international troops from the country beginning in 1994
and seriously tainted the UN with criticism over its military incompetence as UNOSOM
II failed, prompting the country once again in civil war, famine and ultimately, state
failure. Thus, Somalia was to become the example upon which the United States would
favor military interventions with overwhelming force under the command and control of
a Western power.14
Bosnia-Herzegovina.
As Carrie Booth Walling states, the dissolution of the Social Federalist Republic
of Yugoslavia raised important questions regarding the conflicting principles of non-
interference in internal state affairs versus the protection of human rights, the meaning
of self-determination, and the purpose for the use of military force.15
Particularly, the
crisis in the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina raised important questions to United
12
CROCKER, Chester A. The Lessons of Somalia: Not Everything Went Wrong. In: Foreign Affairs, Vol.
74 No. 3. 1995.
13
Ibid.
14
See, BRANCH. Pg. 113.
15
BOOTH WALLING, Carrie. The United Nations Security Council and Humanitarian Intervention:
Causal Stories about Human Rights and War. Pg. 140.

5. Nations Members: “how to resolve situations of contested state sovereignty; what
constitutes the legitimate means to self-determination; whether norms of human rights
or non-intervention should take precedence when they conflict; and what the Charter
obligations of Security Council Members are in responding to war – whether between or
within states.”16
The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992-1995) became the focus of great attention
by the UN Security Council, exemplified by the more than 70 Resolutions enacted by
the SC during the conflict timeframe. Regarding the first trend, the Security Council’s
veering towards moral justification to authorize military intervention came with
Resolution 836, of June 4th
1992. Under such resolution, the word ethnic cleansing was
not only introduced as part of the interventionist lexicon, but it was also established as a
valid cause for military intervention. Regarding the second trend, Bosnia was
“characterized by the fall of UN commanded and controlled forces and the rise of
NATO airpower.”17
Under the same Resolution, 836, for the first time was NATO
authorized to support the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) mission of
protecting UN-declared safe areas through air strikes. The use of air power by NATO
began in 1994, after the shelling of Sarajevo by Bosnian Serb forces, followed by
another campaign in early 1995 in response to continued attacks to the safe areas by
Bosnian Serbs. However, the most important event that was to seriously cripple the
UN’s role as an effective peace enforcement force came with the bloody massacre of
Srebrenica, which many point out could have been prevented if the United Nations
would not have been hesitant to authorize the use of preemptive airstrike by NATO. The
unfolding at Srebrenica and the Markale Massacres triggered what became NATO’s
first was extended air operation, Operation Deliberate Force. Such operation, combined
with a Croatian ground offensive, and the impending rearmament of the Bosnian
Federation government were important causes that led to the capitulation by Bosnian
Serbs in September 1995, ending the gruesome conflict, and a peacekeeping force was
established by SC Resolution 1031, which established a multinational Implementation
Force (IFOR) in order to carry out the mission under UN-NATO unified command and
control.18
Without a doubt NATO, under the undeniable leadership of the United States,
came as the triumphant force that was able to successfully militarily address the dire
16
Ibid. Pg. 151.
17
See, BRANCH. Pg. 119.
18
Ibid. Pg.120.

6. armed conflict in the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, while the UN peacekeeper
mission proved once again to lack the adequate logistics, organization and resources to
carry out its mandate successfully.
Kosovo.
Perhaps one of the most controversial cases in recent history of military
interventions is Kosovo, where the United States and NATO carried out Operation
Allied Force in 1999, on behalf of Kosovo Albanians without the authorization of the
UN Security Council, deeming the operation illegal under UN Charter. Two main
factors explain the failure of the SC at authorizing a humanitarian intervention in
Kosovo: first, the SC Members could not agree on whether the conflict was indeed a
systematic ethnic cleansing, or a civil war instead; second, they also disagreed on
whether an internal conflict was taking place at all or if it was simply a police response
to disruptive citizens.19
Whatever the explanation for the lack of UN authorization, the launching of
Operation Allied Force can be regarded as the “fundamental rupture in the history of the
relation between law, military force, and international institutions”, 20
and the
culmination of the trends previously discussed that began with Somalia. The United
States disregard for the Security Council, then, was viewed as an unofficial
disengagement from the rule of law regarding military intervention and, very
importantly, as the event that would mark a precedent for the Afghanistan and Iraq
military incursions in 2001 and 2003 respectively.
In the absence of UN involvement, the question of legitimacy under
international law is already answered: Operation Allied Forces was illegal under the law
of war. On the question of effectiveness, critics signal that the situation in Kosovo
following the aerial bombardment campaign brought upon dire consequences that signal
failure of the operation: Milosevic intensified its attacks against the Kosovars,
prompting massive flows of refugees into neighboring countries, especially raising the
concerns in the European Union.
Conclusion.
The cases of Somalia and Bosnia depict two enlightening examples of two
trends that characterized the United Nations Security Council’s approach to the
19
See, BOOTH WALLING. Pg. 240.
20
See, BRANCH. Pg. 105.

7. authorization and conduct of military operations in the immediate post-Cold War era:
first, the marginalization of legal language by the Security Council in pro of moral
claims to justify military intervention; second, the United Nations neglect of its military
capacity while delegating crucial military duties to the United States and NATO. Such
crises – along with other controversial examples such as Haiti and Rwanda- , and the
consequent intervention by the UN along the lines of the trends explained above,
marked the precedent for the United States’ to disengage from the rule of law governing
military interventions: the authorization by the United Nations Security Council as
established by the UN Charter under Articles 24 and 51. Such disengagement was
formalized with the launching of Operation Allied Forces in Kosovo. Furthermore, the
delegation of military duties to other bodies, especially and particularly the United
States, showed the grave loopholes present in the UN military command and control,
which made, in both cases, UN intervention prone to failure, while the US led
operations saw greater successes and effectiveness.
Bibliography.
- BOOTH WALLING, Carrie. The United Nations Security Council and Humanitarian
Intervention: Causal Stories about Human Rights and War.
- BRANCH, Adam. American Morality over International Law: Origins in UN Military
Interventions, 1991–1995. In: Constellations Volume 12, Number 1, 2005.
- Charter of the United Nations. Chapter I: Purposes and Principles. Available in:
http://www.un.org/en/documents/charter/chapter1.shtml
- CROCKER, Chester A. The Lessons of Somalia: Not Everything Went Wrong. In: Foreign
Affairs, Vol. 74 No. 3. 1995.
- Dijkstra, Hylke. Efficiency versus Sovereignty: Delegation to the UN Secretariat in
Peacekeeping.International Peacekeeping. Nov2012, Vol. 19 Issue 5, p581-596.
- GODFREY RAMUHALA, Mashudu. Post-Cold War Military Intervention in Africa. Scientia
Militaria, South African Journal of Military Studies, Vol 39, Nr 1, 2011. Pg. 36.
- HENDRICKSON, Ryan. Leadership at NATO: Secretary General Manfred Woerner and the
Crisis in Bosnia. Journal of Strategic Studies. Sep2004, Vol. 27 Issue 3, p508-527.
- HENKIN, Louis. Editorial Comments: NATO's Kosovo Intervention: Kosovo and the Law of
'Humanitarian Intervention. American Journal of International Law 1999/10/01, Vol: 93
- KOSKENNIEMI, Martti. The Place of Law in Collective Security. Michigan Journal of
International Law 17. Winter 1996. Pg. 455–90.
- OSTERDAHL, Inger. By All Means, Intervene! In: Nordic Journal of International Law 66:
241–271, 1997.
- SHAH, Anup. Bombing has been opposite to the stated goals. January, 2001. Available in:
http://www.globalissues.org/article/130/bombing-has-been-opposite-to-the-stated-goals