Human Rights in a New Era:
Wars for Peace?
David Morrison
Great Decisions 2009
(vocabulary adapted)
In May 2008, the most deadly cyclone ever to hit the north Indian Ocean slammed into Burma – now officially called Myanmar. The immediate toll is still uncertain-the country’s insulated ruling generals deliberately stopped counting – but has been pegged at 138,000 deaths. The tragedy of this unavoidable humanitarian disaster loomed ahead when the Burma junta refused landing rights to the foreign ships and planes that flocked to help an estimated 2.4 million destitute and displaced Burmese.
The off-coast humanitarian flotilla of U.S. Navy relief forces only compounded the paranoia infecting Myanmar’s rulers, given to bizarre irrationality at the best of times. “What the generals truly fear is that if they allow U.S. warships and foreign forces to come to the aid of cyclone survivors, people will soon rise up and the regime would be overthrown,” a Burmese dissident paper, The Irawaddy, suggested at the time. Meanwhile, Burmese officers began taking for themselves what supplies did make it through, even as experts darkly forecast a million or more deaths from disease, starvation and exposure.
As it dawned on the world that a suffering populace was the least of this odd government’s concerns, frustrated would-be Samaritans began speaking openly of forcing the door, delivering assistance at the tip of a bayonet, if necessary. Most outspoken on this score was French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner – a founder of the international care group, Doctors Without Borders – who repeatedly urged consideration of a new doctrine the United Nations approved more or less in passing three years before. Called Responsibility to Protect, or R2P for short, the new concept is based on a controversial type of foreign action called ‘humanitarian intervention’, or using military force against countries whose non-compliant administrators refuse to stop tormenting their own people.
In response to the atrocities committed during World War II, the U.N. General Assembly in 1948 adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, specifying basic rights and fundamental freedoms to which people everywhere are entitled. However, the pressing issue today is what to do when countries do not respect the rights of their people. What option do nations and the people horrified by such tragedies have to enforce such rules?
A classic mission of humanitarian intervention was Washington’s dispatch to crumbling, starving, war-torn Somalia in late 1992 of 25,000 U.S. troops as the foundation of a multi-national force charged with safeguarding relief efforts and, if possible, restoring some order. Such was the chaos that the mission grew less humanitarian and more intervention oriented. After 18 Army Rangers were killed in an ambush, President Clinton terminated ‘Operation Restore Hope’ which had been initiated by President Bush 41. Somalia remains today a cockpit of anarchy and Islamist militancy, in whose doings Washington dabbles from a discreet distance.
Another case study from the 1990s is the U.S.-North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) air campaign mounted in 1999 to prevent feared ethnic cleansing in Serbia’s largely Albanian Kosovo province. “This is probably the first war that has not been waged in the named of ‘national interests’, but rather in the name of principles and values,” Czech writer-politician Vaclav Havel applauded. Although the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade was bombed, alongside other ‘collateral’ death and damage, ‘Operation Allied Force’ succeeded, to the extent that an Albanian Kosovar government – which has its own human rights violations, and is sustained by thousands of foreign troops, declared independence in February 2008 – although Serbia continues to reject Kosovo autonomy.
Responsibility to Protect is a bid to entrench in global practice an understanding that countries bear absolute responsibility to protect their people; if they fail in that, their sovereignty is effectively ceded to outside actors who will protect them. Six criteria determine R2P applicability:
§ Parties to any intervention must act only as a ‘last resort’
§ and with the ‘right intentions’,
§ using ‘proportionate means’
§ that have a ‘reasonable prospect’ of success.
§ The mission must also be approved with the ‘right authority’, meaning some sort of international sanction, preferably by the U.N. Security Council.
§ Most importantly, force can only be used for a ‘just cause’, defined as addressing large-scale losses of life, genocidal or not, or ethnic cleansing, “whether carried out by killing, forced expulsion, acts of terror or rape.”
On paper, this is a morally civilized approach with the outbreaks of savagery so regularly visited upon populations the world over. The ethnic slaughter of Bosnian Muslims and the unimpeded extermination of 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda both occurred half a century after Nazi death camps prompted the world to firmly declare “never again.” The Rwandan horror show, reflected by thousands of hacked bodies carried downriver into neighboring lands, in particular inspired the creation of R2P.
It is really not that complicated, genocide-reporter Samantha Powers urges: “If we are ever to prevent genocide and not merely grieve after the fact, we have to improve our capacity to imagine the costs of inaction, and to act upon evidence of direct and immediate mortal threats”.
Mission Creep
Few would admit being in favor of mass murder, but not everyone favors R2P. One school of policy analysts believes it marks a dangerous reduction of state autonomy while serving as a cover for major powers to dominate the world. When weighing the right to impose a moral order on an unruly neighbor, answers tend to depend on whose doors are being kicked in.
A case in point: in August 2008, Russia earned international condemnation by bringing crushing force to bear in the long-running standoff between Georgia and two breakaway ethnic enclaves (territory surrounded by a foreign power). Moscow responded to a torrent of criticism with a wounded innocence that was not perhaps as improbable as it first appeared.
“When Russian forces crossed into South Ossetia,” which borders Russia but is inside Georgia, Moscow claimed that its purpose was “to protect an endangered minority, many of whom hold Russian passports,” Mary Dejevsky, chief editorial writer, notes in The Independent (London). “It is quite hard to argue that there is one law for assisting Albanians in Kosovo and quite another for Russians and Ossetians in Georgia.”
Similarly, China has repeatedly been blamed for not pressing the Sudanese government over Darfurian atrocities. “Would those advocating a more interventionist China,” Dejevsky further wonders, “be so enthusiastic if Beijing applied it, say, to Taiwan, or overseas Chinese in parts of Southeast Asia?”
Back to typhoon-traumatized Myanmar, such powers as China, Vietnam, South Africa and Russia are said to have argued in closed councils against granting Kouchner’s call to involve the U.N. Security Council in the aid stand-off. According to Reuters (news service), “China’s envoy compared the crisis to a deadly heat wave in France in 2003, questioning why the Security Council should step in now when it did not do so in the French case.” Obviously, R2P was not brought to bear in the Myanmar disaster. Rather, a controlled system of supply was finally instituted and aid mostly reached the needy. Widespread death was averted, while the junta’s unhappy grip on its people remained unaffected.
More calls to invoke R2P were brought on by another of 2008’s many political crises. After decades of Robert Mugabe’s misrule, Zimbabwe was already spiraling into a humanitarian crisis when the founder-president refused to acknowledge opposition party gains in a sickeningly violent June 2008 election. Again, the prospect of humanitarian intervention to jump-start a democratic transition in Zimbabwe was raised in the U.N. Security Council. However, aside from a condemning statement, even the prospect of sanctions against Zimbabwe was vetoed by both Russia and China in the Security Council. As it happened, the political conflict eased in Zimbabwe, regional organizations got involved, for better or for worse, and the parties are now butting heads over the formation of a national unity government.
It is said that to one equipped with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. The current popularity of the notion of humanitarian intervention may flow from the same impulse: invading countries is something the U.S. is good at; reforming and rebuilding them – well, not so good. As Martin Jacques, The Times (London) columnist charged in The Guardian: “Even when the very thought is ridiculous and utterly impractical, the call for military intervention, on the part of political leaders and media commentators alike, is seemingly the invariable reflex action.”
The near-simultaneous rejections of R2P missions in both Myanmar and Zimbabwe signal a subtle shift in power from the West to the rest, and as Jacques also believes, a sign that the sun is setting on a post-Cold War era of sole super-power intervention – humanitarian or otherwise. However, such a conclusion may be premature.
More likely, as World Politics Review judges, these two cases simply “demonstrate that the doctrine is not yet ready for prime time.” The U.S. was comfortable helping storm battered Burmese and condemning Mugabe’s thuggery, but had no interest in parachuting troops into either disaster area, or into the ongoing one-sided ethnic/tribal war in Darfur, supported by the Sudanese government. Nations on all sides condemn the some 300,000 dead since 2003 as well as the 2 million internally displaced in Darfur, the result of acts that the U.S. has formally proclaimed to be genocide. There is a broad rhetorical consensus for some sort of military intervention – an end point that seems fated never to arrive.
The key question remains: who is going to make it happen? At the end of even the most challenging debate, world politics still comes down to national power – mighty countries get to make the most of the decisions. Conversely, post 9-11, the mightiest of them all, the U.S., suffers severely from intervention over-stretch and, with the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, has diminished world trust in its charitable good intentions.
“To put the matter starkly,” journalist and policy analyst David Reiff writes in The New Republic, “the U.S. no longer enjoys enough moral credibility in the world as a whole to intervene in Darfur in a way that would avoid deepening the civilization crisis in which we find ourselves.”
Above All, Do No Harm
The roadblock in this case is the almost six-year old U.S. intervention in Iraq. Checking the usual criteria, Human Rights Watch judged in 2004 that “despite the horrors of Saddam Hussein’s rule, the invasion of Iraq cannot be justified as a humanitarian intervention.” It does not help that many more Iraqi people have died from conditions generated by the occupation than likely would have had Hussein been left in power. Humanitarian-intervention enthusiasts, a commentator counsels, might do well to heed the first principle of the medical profession: Above all, do no harm.
But the harm was done, made worse, some contend, by then British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s insistence on flatly categorizing the Iraq occupation as a humanitarian coup. “The notion of national sovereignty (self-rule) as sacred is gaining ground, helping in no small part by the disastrous results of the American invasion of Iraq,” Clinton-era Secretary of State Madeleine Albright mourned in The New York Times. “Indeed, many of the world’s necessary interventions in the decade before the invasion – in places like Haiti and the Balkans – would seem impossible in today’s climate.”
Two other factors clouding these waters are ‘mission creep’, always an institutional danger, and the fact that ‘homeland security’, not human rights, per se, is very much the flavor of the decade. The Harvard Journal of Human Rights spotlights attempts to expand the R2P criteria to circumstances beyond its originally intended scope, a ‘duty to prevent’ potential security disasters, particularly nuclear ones, for instance, or to unleash preemptive strikes on suspected terrorist targets.
President Bush’s post 9/11 pronouncement of a doctrine of preemptive attack to quell potential future threats has not paved the way for humanitarian interveners today. Some fear, as Andrew Clapham, professor of international law, notes in Human Rights: A Very Short Introduction, that human rights are “deployed as excuses for intervention by powerful countries in the political, economic and cultural life of weaker countries from the South.” It seems that Burma’s cynical self-serving leaders are not the only ones reacting to this apprehension.
Innately suspicious of major powers’ real motives – and given that only very strong states can afford humanitarian intervention – critics on the left are not hesitant to insult what they view as imperialism wearing a halo of compassion. “I’m not going to say that there aren’t circumstances under which the use of military force to prevent genocide might be called for, but the issue always is who decides that it’s legitimate to do so,” foreign policy critic Chalmers Johnson argues. Only international law and global councils can confer that legitimacy. He adds: “If you yourself say, ‘I’m invading Panama but this is humanitarian intervention’; well, not that’s imperialism.”
Many on the right, by contrast, could not care less how U.S. military expeditions launched in service of American national interests are viewed elsewhere. They seek, above all, a free hand to make such decisions unilaterally. “The U.S. should continue to assert that it needs no authorization from the U.N. to use its military as it sees fit to protect the American people,” a Heritage Foundation analysis asserts in connection with R2P.