No Man's Land Analysis

No Man’s Land is a tragic movie about dissolution of Yugoslavia by focusing on the Bosnian War that took place in 1992. In the movie, main characters are representative of the combating sides, one is Bosnian and the other is Serbian; while the guy placed on land mine is Bosnian which might be metaphorically shows how Bosnia was sitting on the grenade prepared by Serbs while the international community did nothing to protect them. UN Peacekeeping troops, media, journalists and civilian fighters are portrayed as well. The movie demonstrates how hatred and desire to take revenge results in disaster with the combination of ineffective attempts to solve conflict by the third party. It criticizes UN Security Council, UNPROFOR, the global community
Another failure was that even though UN soldiers strived to help, they were restrained by the mandate. What peacekeepers can do is only limited to mandate, which they have to comply with. Their attempts were futile since they had to wait for “orders” as the French soldier told the journalist that he was sick and tired of watching. Although UNPROFOR appointed there “to make difference” in the conflict, they were bystanders rather than effective bodies. Therefore, the lack of will was one of the key element behind the failure of UN Peacekeeping operation in Bosnia.

In addition, another thing that led ineffective operation was the miscommunication. It had negatively contributed to course of the peacekeeping operation. Language problem between UNPROFOR and locals is significant issue that was also portrayed in the movie. Since they could not understand each other, it was hard to cooperate and conduct harmonized operation. Moreover, the miscommunication between UN forces though not due to language barrier, had negative impact on the effectiveness of the operation as
In order for conflict to not to escalate into war, UN Security Council believed that imposing arms embargo was clever choice, yet it resulted in ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims. If one takes into consideration the principle of right to self-defense (Art. 51), UN embargo illegally violated the rights of Bosnian Muslims. Even though there were several attempts to lift the embargo, UN Security Council did not step back. The so-called “neutral” party, was actually not neutral by taking no action to prevent massacre in the war. Choosing to do nothing was also a choice to turning a blind eye to crimes against humanity, which in the future UN would considered the peacekeeping operation in Bosnia as one of the biggest failures in its