Morally and formally, one of UN's key faliures was to protect Muslim "safe areas".

With respect to these areas, UN's key failure was to define a clear and fair humanitarian objective. Apart from harboring legitimate Muslim civilians, all "safe areas" served as home for significant active Muslim army resources, and as a springboard for their military offensives. As such, using UNPROFOR military potential to "protect" them was clearly not moral, and meant taking sides - in open contradiction with the overall humanitarian objective of their mission. Their real, much overlooked, failure was the total inability to carry out their mandate in the UN Protected Areas in Croatia/Krajina, and protect them from open Croatian aggression.

"Col.Segers claims that this [arms] embargo was never enforced strictly. On the contrary, while he was in [the safe area of] Bihac as head of the monitoring team, helicopters brimming with armaments for Dudakovic's Muslim Fifth Corps and often with Red Cross signs on them, landed nightly there."

UN in Bosnia.
Mission was destined to fail from the very beginning.

"During the counterattack, however, the Bosnian government and many in the international community demanded that the United Nations and NATO protect the Bihac safe area from Serb aggression. A common theme was the impending humanitarian catastrophe if strong steps were not taken, even though this was a fight that the Muslim army had picked, there was limited damage to the safe area, and Bihac was the headquarters and garrison town of the Bosnian units that had mounted the attack."

"Then it was air strikes on Serbian forces around Gorazde, then the same for the Bihac enclave. The problem then and later was that the Muslims had figured out very well how to use UN "safe havens" as safe springboards for offensive operations out of Sarajevo, Gorazde, Srebrenica, Bihac and, later, Tuzla. This was clearly not the Security Council's intent in creating the safe havens for Bosnian civilians, but that was the practical effect."

"An UNPROFOR deputy spokesman said in Belgrade Thursday that for the one year he had been with the peace mission Croatia's attack on Serb Krajina was the most terrible event. Chris Gunness, who was leaving the U.N. mission, described the reaction by the international community to Croatia's attack on Western Slavonia as disappointing. He said U.N. personnel were isolated and frustrated for being unable to protect the Serbs during the attack in May 1995 on the U.N. Protected Area - Sector West. A mild response from the international community, he noted, prompted Croatia to apply more of the same against U.N. - Protected Areas - Sector North and Sector South - in August 1995. He said this action could only be described as ethnic cleansing, which, he said, was terrible and a big evil."

"In the face what U.N. observers in Croatia call the largest instance of ethnic cleansing in the entire Balkan wars, where were the moralist who for years have been so loudly decrying the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims. Where were the cries for block the demand for arms, the call to action on behalf of today a pitiful victims. There were the columnists, the senators, the other posturors who excoriate the West for standing by when Bosnian Muslims are victimised and are silent when the victim of the day is Serb?"

"We also saw, at the end of September, public acknowledgement that the Croatian offensive to 'ethnically cleanse' the Krajina area of Croatia of Croatian Serbs who had been living there for centuries, had resulted in the deaths and torture of many civilians, and the forceable displacement of a quarter-million people from their homes."

"In October, the Fifth Corps launched an offensive out of the U.N.-designated "safe area" of Bihac, cutting a swath through Serbian territory around the enclave. The safe zone of Bihac was used as a staging area for attacks against Serb populated areas on the Grabez plateau, leading to the expulsion of about 10,000 Serbs, who escaped to neighboring Serb-held Croatia, following the tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims who had fled the earlier Bosnian Fifth Corps offensive.

The Bihac offensives were not exceptional. Elsewhere, Bosnian government troops joined forces with the Croats to take the town of Kupres from the Serbs. They also engaged the Serbs around Trnovo, Tuzla, Mostar and Sarajevo. The cease-fire in Sarajevo was broken by government soldiers, who repeatedly entered the demilitarized zone and launched attacks against the Serbs."