GLOBAL DIALOGUE Volume 7 ● Number 1–2 ● Winter/Spring 2005—Humanitarian Intervention

Putting National Interest Last: The Utopianism of Intervention

MICHAEL RADU

Michael Radu is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, and co-chair of its Center on Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Homeland Security.

ince the end of the Cold War in 1991, the issue of humanitarian intervention has become an important one in international affairs—and the timing is no coincidence. Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the notion that military force could be used to protect a population from its own government (or lack thereof) would have been inconceivable. Not only were communist regimes, led by the nuclear-armed Soviet Union and China, the worst offenders, but the latter two powers also had a veto in the United Nations Security Council. No resolution allowing Western military intervention against a genocidal or brutal Third World regime would have had a chance of being passed. Outside the United Nations, any decision to engage in such intervention would have risked provoking a superpower confrontation with unpredictable consequences. Indeed, even post-communist Russia managed to stop the Security Council from blessing the NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, however, two major developments have changed both the circumstances that lead to crises giving rise to calls for humanitarian intervention, and the willingness of states to engage in such intervention.

First, the ability of states to function independently has declined dramatically, for a number of reasons. Many post-colonial states, especially but not only in sub-Saharan Africa, having lost the outside support from the West or Moscow—whether economic, security, or political—that kept them from falling under the influence of the other side, proved to be non-viable or dysfunctional. Somalia, Liberia, Haiti, and Sierra Leone are good examples. In addition, the fall of communism signalled the end of the forced and effective suppression of existing nationalisms and regionalisms in multiethnic states, thus opening the door to the kind of separatist violence witnessed in the former Yugoslavia and parts of the former Soviet Union. However, it is not that declining state autonomy necessarily leads to humanitarian disaster, as is demonstrated by the member states of the European Union, which have also become less sovereign, albeit by democratic process.

Second, the exponential growth of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), especially human rights bodies, and their influence in the United Nations, in various Western capitals, and in an increasingly globalised media, have made some governments take decisions which are not directly related to national or security interests, but rather are in response to public pressure based on the media’s emotional treatment of issues. Hence the “CNN effect” that played such an important role in the decision of the United States to intervene in Somalia and Kosovo, areas of no economic, security, or political interest to Washington.

A Global Movement

International law scholar Louis Henkin of Columbia University has defined the “international human rights” movement as follows:

“International human rights” refers to an international movement to promote and protect and assume and assert international responsibility for national human rights, that is, rights within societies. The international human rights movement has sought to establish an international human rights standard—a minimum standard that national societies are expected to satisfy and by which national human rights are to be judged—and to have states assume legally binding international obligations to live up to the international standards.¹

The international human rights organisations—and there are thousands of them, the most prominent being Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the International Federation of Human Rights—are indeed part of a movement. One might call this movement the “human rights establishment” (HRE), an amorphous system of groups with similar goals, methods and donors, united by common values that—and this is the crux of the matter—are increasingly those of the Western Left (i.e., European socialists, social democrats and elements further to their left, and American liberals).

This is where the problems begin, because those values are far from being universally shared. In fact, in some cases (such as the HRE’s fundamentalist opposition to capital punishment) they are not even supported by a majority in the West—certainly not in the United States. Thus, any international standards, minimal or otherwise, advocated by the HRE are bound to encounter significant opposition from most of the world’s governments and cultures, which are neither Western nor left of centre. Indeed, some of the recent humanitarian interventions—Somalia and Kosovo immediately come to mind—were not understood, supported, or even accepted in many parts of the world. Many Muslims, and not just Somalis and radicals such as Osama bin Laden, saw the UN/US intervention in Somalia as an attack on Islam. They have a similar opinion about calls for intervention in Sudan’s Darfur region, while Russians, Greeks, and the Orthodox countries in general (even if not all their governments) saw the Kosovo and Bosnia interventions as pro-Muslim and anti-Orthodox rather than humanitarian. The point here is not whether those interventions were morally and legally justified, but whether or not the claim made by those who intervened, and by the NGOs which demanded the interventions, that they were enforcing “universal standards” rather than Western ones was borne out. The evidence so far suggests that it was not.

Criteria for Intervention

The HRE position on humanitarian intervention is perhaps best described by Ken Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch (among the more moderate of these groups):

In our view, as a threshold matter, humanitarian intervention that occurs without the consent of the relevant government can be justified only in the face of ongoing or imminent genocide, or comparable mass slaughter or loss of life … Only large-scale murder, we believe, can justify the death, destruction, and disorder that so often are inherent in war and its aftermath. Other forms of tyranny are deplorable and worth working intensively to end, but they do not in our view rise to the level that would justify the extraordinary response of military force. Only mass slaughter might permit the deliberate taking of life involved in using military force for humanitarian purposes.²

Has there ever been a case where a “relevant government” consented to outside humanitarian intervention, and more pertinently, could there be? The pseudo-government of Sierra Leone, which welcomed the arrival of a British military task force in 2000, may be an exception, but that, of course, was a government without a country.

Even more important, the term “genocide”, as currently used in international political and media discourse as well as by the self-proclaimed “human rights” and “international law” experts, is of highly dubious definitional value. Its vagueness has led to misapplications, such as when descendants of slaves in the United States filed a $1 billion lawsuit in March 2004 against the insurers Lloyd’s of London, US tobacco-makers R. J. Reynolds, and other leading companies, accusing them of profiting by committing genocide against their ancestors.

Again, in July 2004, Mexican special prosecutor Ignacio Carrillo argued that since dozens were killed on 10 June 1971 when security forces attacked protesters with sticks and guns, the crime fitted a 1967 Mexican law outlawing genocide. Judge Julio Cesar Flores disagreed, and many in Mexico said the charges against former president Luis Echeverria, who was accused of ordering the attack, devalued the term “genocide”.³ Add to this Fidel Castro’s claim that the US unilateral trade embargo on his island is “genocide”, and the death sentence (promptly executed) by a Romanian military court in December 1989 against the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena for “genocide” (they had oppressed a nation of twenty-two million since 1965, but only killed a few dozen)—and it is clear that the “international standards” for human rights and humanitarian intervention are based on shifty ground indeed. If “genocide” is whatever a politician or the immediate convenience of a government’s actions dictates it is, everything (and thus nothing) is “genocide”.

On the use of force, Roth states the Human Rights Watch position as follows:

[T]he capacity to use military force is finite. Encouraging military action to meet lesser abuses may mean a lack of capacity to intervene when atrocities are most severe. The invasion of a country, especially without the approval of the U.N. Security Council, also damages the international legal order which itself is important to protect rights. For these reasons, we believe that humanitarian intervention should be reserved for situations involving mass killing.⁴

Fair enough, except that it is not clear why UN Security Council approval is a legitimising factor, and especially why a lack thereof damages anything—international order included. After all, any Security Council decision depends, legally and de facto, upon acceptance by China, itself accused by Tibetans and Uighurs of “genocide”, or upon acceptance by Russia, similarly accused by the Chechens.

But how to define “mass killing”? Roth acknowledges that it is a subjective term. Human Rights Watch, he explains, does not propose a “single quantitative measure”, but holds that “because of the substantial risks inherent in the use of military force, humanitarian intervention should be exceptional—reserved for the most dire circumstances”. Should this “high threshold” be met, the organisation looks to five other factors to determine whether the use of military force can be characterised as humanitarian:

First, military action must be the last reasonable option to halt or prevent slaughter … Second, the intervention must be guided primarily by a humanitarian purpose; we do not expect purity of motive, but humanitarianism should be the dominant reason for military action. Third, every effort should be made to ensure that the means used to intervene themselves respect international human rights and humanitarian law … Fourth, it must be reasonably likely that military action will do more good than harm … Finally, we prefer endorsement of humanitarian intervention by the U.N. Security Council or other bodies with significant multilateral authority. However, in light of the imperfect nature of international governance today, we would not require multilateral approval in an emergency context.⁵

“Last reasonable option”? Who defines “reasonable”—Human Rights Watch? Diplomats at the United Nations, realities on the ground, or the military capabilities of the few powers able to intervene in the first place? How long does it take effectively to stop mass murder or “genocide”?

It is impossible to sell the Human Rights Watch stance on intervention to any Western democracy’s electorate for any length of time, because it is counterintuitive and an insult to reason. What Roth—and to repeat, he is among the most rational and serious representatives of the HRE—demands as a necessary precondition for legitimate humanitarian intervention (see his second “factor” above) is that soldier-citizens of democratic Western countries be sent to risk their lives for charity—for moral reasons that have to be, by definition, unrelated to the national security interest.

Basically, what the HRE says is that there must be an inverse relationship between national interest and humanitarian intervention, that a democratic republic can only send its children to die in faraway places because it has no national interest in doing so. Thus, according to Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and associated human rights NGOs, the less the national interest and security count for “humanitarian intervention” by, say, US troops, the more “noble” is their dying in Kosovo, Bosnia, Somalia, or Kuwait.

This argument will hardly convince in those US states that produce most of the personnel for the armed forces—Virginia, Mississippi, California, Arizona, etc. The small number of US fatalities in Kosovo may make most Americans forget that in 1999 President Clinton promised that US forces would withdraw in a year and a half—but they are still there today, in 2005.

Genocide?

So much for theory, “legality”, and morality. We turn now to the actual practice of humanitarian intervention since the end of the Cold War, looking at countries where interventions took place and others mooted as candidates for intervention. The cases under study include Kosovo (1999), Bosnia and Herzegovina (1995–6), Somalia (1993), Sierra Leone (1997, 2000), and Rwanda (1994 and since), with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo) and Darfur as two crisis-areas currently much touted as being in need of humanitarian intervention. How do any of these conflicts qualify as “genocide”, assuming Fidel Castro’s accommodating definition is not accepted? That is key if the interventions are to be “legitimate”, at least according to Human Rights Watch and Ken Roth.

Article II of the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines “genocide” as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Which, if any, of these criteria applied to the above crises? Upon careful examination, with the exception of Rwanda, the single “not politically correct” instance, none of these cases truly fits the standard reason for humanitarian intervention set forth by Roth. There was no genocide in Sierra Leone, Kosovo, and Bosnia, let alone in Somalia. Rwanda was genocide and thus required international intervention under UN rules; the others were little more than media-created cases, conflicts not much different in nature from, although larger than, what is still going on in many parts of Africa and Asia. Cleared of media clutter and Albanian propaganda, Kosovo was a case of standard counterinsurgency by the Serbian forces, exacerbated by ill-disciplined paramilitaries and Kosovo Liberation Army provocations. In Bosnia the situation was less clear, but even at the time it was evident that the ultimate Serbian goal was territorial control rather than the physical extermination of the Muslim or Croat communities. The Bosnia conflict, too, involved local atrocities (on all sides, with the Serbs more guilty than others) and acts of military indiscipline. As for Somalia, DR Congo and Sierra Leone, these were (and are) acephalous entities, where chaos rather than evil and planning led to massive loss of life.

Rwanda

Rwanda is an exception despite all the rhetoric of Western “experts” since 1994. Those “experts” claim, as is politically correct nowadays, that applying the concepts “tribal”, “ethnic”, and “racial” to Rwanda was a Western (i.e., Belgian) colonial invention. The problem is, and was in 1994, that everyone—including, obviously, the overwhelming majority of Rwandans—acknowledges the difference between a Tutsi and a Hutu. One may well deride descriptions like “tall, long legs, sharp nose, light colour” to describe a Tutsi, or define them as “colonial constructions”, as they do in academia and the New York Times; but any Rwandan would tell you that such identifiers are real—and they were certainly real enough for the genocidal murder of some half-million or more so-defined Tutsis in April 1994. Simply put, the majority Hutus as a community—and here we are talking about another politically incorrect and inconvenient (for the HRE) fact—engaged in genocide, killing all Tutsis in sight, regardless of gender or age. The fact that most Tutsi victims of the 1994 genocide were killed not by the (Hutu) army or by heavy weapons but by their Hutu neighbours with machetes has a number of implications (one might even call them “lessons”, if one were an optimist).

The first is that communities—not just corrupt, vicious or inhuman demagogues—can be involved in mass murder based on ethnicity or race. Hutus by the tens of thousand fled to Zaire after the removal (by Tutsi exiles, one might add, not by the “international community”) of the genocidal regime in Kigali, and as refugees in UN-run camps there continued to support genocidal groups like the interahamwe militias.

Kosovo and Bosnia

Community hatreds also figured prominently in the Kosovo conflict. For those who believed that Serb (and Macedonian Slav, Montenegrin, Greek, and even Romanian) historic antipathy towards and suspicion of Albanians was simply stoked by a few demagogues such as Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic and Vojislav Seselj, Rwanda should have been, but was not, a wake-up call. On the contrary, Western politicians, foremost among them Madeleine Albright, US ambassador to the United Nations and later Secretary of State, convinced themselves—with massive media help and their own understandable distaste for Milosevic and his clique—that not only were the Serbs guilty, but that they were the only guilty party. And so the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) became “freedom fighters”, having at their disposal the largest air force in world history—NATO’s.

That was perfect for the KLA, a violent group of highly dubious ideological and moral background, heavily involved in crime and drug trafficking throughout its history and, most importantly, having the support of only a minority of Albanians in Kosovo, as post-1999 election results attest. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” seems to describe the attitude of the Western powers towards the KLA. Predictably enough, the “ethnic cleansing” of Albanians in Kosovo turned course and became the “ethnic cleansing” of non-Albanians (all of them, not just Serbs, but Gypsies and even Turks) by the Albanians, all under the nose of NATO forces, a situation that continues today. A good case could be made for saying that the “ethnic cleansing” perpetrated by the Albanians since 1999 is both larger and more permanent than that committed by the Serbs which justified the outside intervention.

Since Kosovo and Bosnia are in Europe, presumably the West should be better able to understand their situations than those of more culturally and geographically distant crisis-spots. Were they cases of genocide in immediate need of outside military intervention lest an ethnic group—Bosniaks (Muslim Slavs) or Albanians—be wiped out, or just a matter of smart propaganda and personal commitment by important US policymakers? The factual answer is, the latter. There is no need here to go through the various arguments for and against those interventions. It remains the case that by the United Nations’ own definition of genocide, there was no such thing in Kosovo prior to the 1999 NATO intervention. Albanians were killed by Serbs, but many of those were KLA militants or sympathisers; and many Serbs, not all of whom were combatants or activists, were killed by the KLA. And, yes, there was a mass exodus of Kosovo Albanians to Albania and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, but mostly following the start of the NATO bombings, and often at the incitement of the KLA itself. Does that amount to genocide? No.

On the other hand, such massive population displacement and war within Europe’s borders was destabilising and threatening, and thus a security problem to be dealt with. Add to that then–US secretary of state Madeleine Albright’s open obsession with the anti-Serb (or anti-Milosevic) cause, and the Serbs’ own nationalist denial of reality, and a pretext had to be found to do what had to be done. Hence the genocide and humanitarian justifications for the Kosovo intervention. By and large, the same applies to Bosnia: to sell “humanitarian intervention” alone to voters in the West, especially in the United States, is nearly impossible, and some other reason has to be provided. Hence the official Washington depiction of Milosevic, a petty, opportunistic and corrupt neo-communist Balkan strongman, as a new Hitler—all this with the enthusiastic help of the HRE.

Indeed, of the five conditions the United Nations uses to define genocide, the last three never applied to Kosovo or Bosnia, and the first two—(a) killing members of the group and (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group—are often indistinguishable from counterinsurgency anywhere. Insurgents, whether Albanians in Kosovo, Sunnis in Iraq, or Islamists in Algeria, do get killed and indeed do suffer “serious bodily or mental harm”, such as being killed or interrogated under rather rough conditions. But is that genocide in a legal or in a Castroesque sense?

In Bosnia, the Bosniaks and their tactical allies, the Roman Catholic Croats, were locked in battle with the Serbs over control of an artificially defined (by Tito’s communist regime) entity, the “republic” of “Bosnia Herzegovina”, part of the collapsing federation that was Yugoslavia. Bosnian Serbs considered their part of Bosnia a natural part of Serbia. Croats saw things similarly: Herzegovina, long defined as “a place where only Croats and snakes would live”, was seen as a natural part of Croatia. And the Bosniaks, because of their relative majority, thought that they could have a state where they were in charge. The inevitable result was war, with Serbs supported by Serbia, Croats by Croatia, and Bosniaks by the Muslim world. While Serbia and Croatia were close by, the Muslim world was not, and thus the Bosniaks were losing the war. And when the notion of genocide came in, along with overblown CNN coverage, the Bosniaks became “innocent victims” rather than war losers. The rest is history. Was mass murder being committed by Serbs in Bosnia? Yes, if judging by the July 1995 massacre in Srebrenica. Did the Croats and Bosniaks do the same, although, given their military inferiority, on a lesser scale? Yes. But in neither case was it genocide. It was bloody instability on the borders of the European Union, something to be taken seriously, but not what one could describe as genocide.

Sub-Saharan Africa

In Sierra Leone, the problem was that in the absence of a real government, the entire place, only notionally called a “country”, was a no-man’s land. Was it in a position to “invite” outside intervention, military or not? The same goes for DR Congo: whether someone in the remote city of Kinshasa names it the “Democratic Republic of” or simply “Zaire”, it remains a post-colonial fiction accorded international legitimacy only by the United Nations and legal habits associated with it. In polite internationalist circles in London, Washington, or Paris, let alone the United Nations’ East Side headquarters in Manhattan, it is utterly unmentionable that DR Congo and Sierra Leone are in fact creations of an international and anti-Western hysterical fantasy at the United Nations in the 1960s and nothing more. Phantasmagoric “states” were created and expected to be taken seriously on the simple basis that their people were victims of Western colonialism. But phantasmagoric they remain, and their collapse after the Cold War was wholly unsurprising.

There are in fact societies whose political culture, for one reason or another, is dependent or structurally unprepared for building a modern state. Fourteen years after Siad Barre’s expulsion from Mogadishu, Somalia’s people still cannot find a way to a unified country—and this in a country which, unlike most of post-colonial sub-Saharan Africa, is ethnically homogenous (its cleavages are not along ethnic but tribal and clan lines). Albanians in Kosovo still seem to think that Serbs have no place in that province. Liberians, facing the collapse of their country, may call for US help in the name of solidarity, but how many Americans actually see Liberia as a place to which they owe a particular moral or financial debt? Probably close to zero.

US Ability, European Weakness

The United States is ultimately the only power that can provide effective humanitarian intervention forces. Whether for reasons of moral indifference or military weakness, European countries tend not to mount such interventions. Does France want to send troops to Africa? Most of the time it would need American transport planes. German Defence Minister Peter Struck may have visited the 1,480 German troops in Afghanistan in September 2004, but he had to rent Ukrainian transport planes, just as Spain had to in order to bring soldiers back from Afghanistan. And that is a problem, politically as well as militarily, because it exposes the gap between the internationalist ambitions of the European Union and its ability to back them up with actual military capabilities.

None of this, however, has prevented some European governments and most NGOs from accusing the United States, especially with regard to Iraq, of “imperialism”. But President George W. Bush, contrary to his detractors, is an “imperialist” only in the sense that he and most of his advisers actually believe, rightly or wrongly, that democracy, if it is good for Americans, is good for everyone—a conviction not that far removed from the apocryphal old Texas lady who claimed that “if English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for Texas”. Perhaps “idealist” or even “naïve utopian” would better describe President Bush, but “imperialist”, like the British or French leaders of 1900? In this outlook, President Bush is not necessarily supported by a majority of Americans, but he has a strong grounding in the US cultural tradition of seeing all foreigners as either potential Americans or as peoples who would or should be “like us”. Nor is it clear why removing a regime that had murdered hundreds of thousands of its citizens is “imperialist”, while intervening against Belgrade’s attempt to expel Kosovo Albanians is a noble, humanitarian action.

Final Thoughts

Several conclusions may be drawn from the discussion so far:

1. “Humanitarian intervention” is a Western concept, and a badly defined one (morally and legally). The United Nations is not and should not be the definitive legal arbiter on applying this vague concept, nor are NGOs. “Humanitarian intervention” is and can only be grounds for a tricky and selective political, rather than moral, decision by … politicians. The more democratically elected and responsible those politicians are, the better, but it is politicians, especially freely elected ones, not self-selected NGOs (even when they claim to pronounce in the name of “human rights”), who must define the concept.

2. Only the Western powers, chiefly the United States, can effectively deploy military force for humanitarian reasons. The dilemma is that it is also only, or mostly, Western democratic societies and their unrepresentative but vocal NGOs which define the reasons for and the methods of such interventions. Hence the perennial problem of appearances: if it is the West that defines and acts, isn’t “humanitarian intervention” just another form of Western aggression (e.g., against Islam)? This is precisely the argument now used by the Sudanese regime to prevent an outside intervention in Darfur.

3. Western societies, heavily media influenced, are also very fickle. The “do something” emotions fuelled by a CNN report from Kosovo, Somalia, Haiti, Darfur or elsewhere eventually tend, after the interventions, to be balanced by the question, “Why should Pierre (or Johnny or Hans) die for Darfur, or Kosovo’s Albanians, or Bosniaks, or Sierra Leoneans, or Congolese?”

Westerners are expected to define, pay for, and correct by intervention humanitarian crises in non-Western societies, thus opening themselves to accusations of imperialism, insensitivity, and indifference. It is a no-win position that it is to be hoped more Western politicians, journalists, academics and analysts will address. Until then, the entire idea of humanitarian intervention remains a lobby target of NGOs which lacks both coherence and responsibility.

Ultimately, specific societies produce humanitarian crises, and only those societies can fix them in the long run. If Kosovo Albanians cannot live with even a marginal Serb community in their midst, then perhaps the Serbian military should enforce a partition—no matter how much Amnesty International would howl. If Hutu “refugees” persist in supporting genocide against Tutsis, perhaps they should cease to be seen, or supported by Western taxpayers, as refugees and instead be treated as what they are: genocidal murderers deserving criminal tribunals rather than UN food rations. If a Sierra Leonean could finally create a Sierra Leonean state, or country, let alone a nation, we should all support such efforts; and if a Somali leader could do the same for his people, he should be helped—from outside and at no cost in blood and little in money for remote taxpayers—regardless of what Amnesty International may claim.

More recently, the United Nations has had a new “humanitarian crisis” to deal with, in Darfur. There, the issue (the Arab League is reluctant to accept the very notion that there is a problem) is one of Arab Muslim nomads killing black Muslim agriculturalists over land, pasture, and water rights—nothing new, actually. The United Nations and the African Union pretend to act, the Arab League tries to make the question one of the victimisation of Muslims (which ones, the black or the Arabised ones?) by everyone else, and Washington talks about genocide. Again, loose terms and loose words tend to lead, sooner or later, to corpses, Western or native—a steady and deadly result of confused thinking, media hype, and misguided politicians. Humanitarian intervention is a tricky problem, with few winners and many losers, both among the alleged beneficiaries and the interveners.

Endnotes

1. Louis Henkin, “Human Rights: Ideology and Aspiration, Reality and Prospect”, in Realizing Human Rights: Moving from Inspiration to Impact, ed. Samantha Power and Graham Allison (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000), p. 8.

2. Ken Roth, “War in Iraq: Not a Humanitarian Intervention”, in Human Rights Watch World Report 2004: Human Rights and Armed Conflict (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2004), pp. 17–18 (italics added).

3. See Mark Stevenson, “Opinions Vary on Mexican Genocide Case”, Associated Press, 25 July 2004.

4. Roth, “War in Iraq”, p. 18.

5. Ibid., p. 19 (italics added).