Beyond Humanitarian Intervention

The 20^th  century was the most violent in the history of mankind. Looking back across the war-torn century, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan voiced the blood-soaked wisdom of the era in a 1999 speech to the UN General Assembly and urged for the next hundred years to be more peaceful. “The core challenge to the Security Council and the United Nations,” he said, “[is] to forge unity behind the principle that massive and systemic violations of human rights—wherever they take place—should not be allowed to stand." After a century marked by such violations—from the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust during World War II to the horrific reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, Slobodan Milošević’s  “ethnic cleansing” campaign in Bosnia to the brutal Rwandan genocide—one lesson seemed clear: the timidity of the international community in allowing crimes against humanity to go unstopped or unpunished because of state sovereignty was unforgivable. Throughout the century, millions had died at the hands of their own governments while the world watched and did nothing.

Taking this lesson to heart, US President Bill Clinton stated in 2000 that the United States had the right to intervene in any country it deemed to be abusing the human rights of its citizens, based solely on humanitarian grounds. It was a far cry from the turn of the 19^th  century, when the inviolable tenet of state sovereignty prevented punishment of even the most heinous crimes by state leaders.

A decade into this new century, looking  back at two bloody—and ongoing—conflicts that the United States and its allies justified at least in part or in retrospect on humanitarian grounds, it is evident  that repenting for the international community’s inaction in the 20^th century has likewise proven deadly and troublesome. Indeed, since the beginning of the decade, the European Union has intervened abroad more than 15  times under the justification of humanitarian intervention. Some interventions have been successful; many have not.

The concept of military humanitarian intervention—the most visible and controversial form of humanitarian intervention—is being rethought and redefined. The international community has realized that forcefully imposing Western systems of statehood and development is an onerous, painful, and perhaps impossible process that harms the occupier as much as the occupied. Indeed, some recent interventions have ended up being so violent and bloody that they can hardly be considered “humanitarian.” But international players like the United Nations, the United States, and the European Union also refuse to altogether abandon failed and struggling states like Somalia, Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan, Haiti, and Yemen—after all, there are cases where, both morally and politically, inaction is not an option. So where is the line to be drawn?

Just War?

Oxford University professor Adam Roberts, the President of the British Academy, has defined "humanitarian intervention" as “coercive action by one or more states involving the use of armed force in another state without the consent of its authorities, and with the purpose of preventing widespread suffering or death among the inhabitants.” The term humanitarian intervention encompasses a wide range of possible actions—including economic sanctions and diplomatic efforts—and involves military force only in the most extreme cases. Yet it is the military aspect of the doctrine that has received the most attention from scholars and from world leaders. Annan, for example, stated in 1998 that it was sometimes the responsibility of the United Nations to intervene. “State frontiers should no longer be seen as a watertight protection for war criminals or mass murderers,” he said. “The fact that a conflict is ‘internal’ does not give the parties any right to disregard the most basic rules of human conduct.”

But Annan himself realized the troubling implications of such a doctrine, especially since the UN Charter states explicitly that force should be used only in the common interest. In his 1999 Annual Report to the General Assembly, Annan asked: “But what is that common interest? Who shall define it? Who will defend it? Under whose authority? And with what means of intervention?”

Some public intellectuals, notably linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky, believe that pure humanitarian intervention has never occurred—that all military interventions are motivated by more than purely a desire to protect the weak. Even the 1999 bombing campaign by NATO to remove Slobodan Milošević’s Yugoslav forces from Kosovo, often cited as the clearest example of humanitarian intervention, does not qualify. According to a speech by Chomsky at the International Relations Center’s 20^th Anniversary celebration, it is “overwhelmingly obvious” that the war in Kosovo was not motivated by humanitarian concerns. Instead, the bombing campaign ended up increasing the rate and severity of atrocities in the region, a result that US analysts had actually predicted before the campaign began.

But whether a pure humanitarian intervention has ever occurred is less important than the fact that conflicts such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to be justified, at least in part, on humanitarian grounds. Indeed, the rhetoric about the United States liberating Iraq and freeing its people from the grip of a power-mad dictator reached such heights after the invasion that Human Rights Watch went so far as to a title a 2004 World Watch Report: “Iraq: Not a Humanitarian Intervention.” Similar arguments about the moral imperative to help Afghan women and children have been deployed to support the US occupation. But when thousands of civilians have been killed as a result of the intervention, can it still be called humanitarian?