ABSTRACT
A vital prerequisite for having peace enforcement soldiers detain indicted war criminals is necessarily that the mandates authorise the soldiers to do so and that the rules of engagement enable the soldiers to carry out the detentions successfully. Unsurprisingly, experience from IFOR and SFOR shows that the way the mandate is formulated seriously influences the mission’s ability to detain the indicted. In IFOR’s case, because the authorisation was not explicit, the mandate allowed for a wide variety of interpretations.32 This endorsed IFOR to apply a very flexible and ineffective approach to the task, which meant that IFOR failed to detain any indicted war criminals. Similarly, SFOR commanders also spent a lot of time discussing actions allowed by the mandate, which meant that SFOR only detained a relatively limited number of indicted war criminals. In KFOR’s case, the failure to mention the task in the mandate meant that KFOR seemingly did nothing to detain indicted war criminals on its own initiative but rather only responded to the requests of UNMIK (KFOR interview 2003). Hence, the experiences of IFOR, SFOR and KFOR call for a discussion about what should be included in the mandates of missions if peace enforcement soldiers are to successfully carry out detention operations.
