Has there been a growing commitment to humanitarian intervention in the post cold-war era?

Humanitarian intervention can be defined as „foreign intervention (whether unilateral or multilateral) carried out to limit human suffering and death because of government oppression or because of a country’s political disintegration” (Armstutz, 1999, pp. 136). Wheeler and Bellamy, writing in “The Globalization of World Politics”, suggest the three aspects under which the humanitarian character of an intervention should be assessed by are the motive, means and outcome of the intervention (Baylis and Smith, 2001). Judging by these definitions, it is arguable that the toppling of Saddam Hussein's oppressive regime by the U.S. and U.K. led invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a humanitarian intervention. George W. Bush and Tony Blair would most certainly like the world to see the intervention as such. In reality, though, it is clear that although the intervention may have humanitarian consequences in the long run, the original motive given by both Blair and Bush for it was not to save the suppressed Iraqi people but to find the weapons of mass destruction that they said were a threat to the world. Whether historians will look back at the second Iraq war as an humanitarian intervention is doubtful but this essay will focus first on the lack of humanitarian interventions during the Cold War and then on the post cold-war and pre- 9/11 world of the 1990’s, concentrating on the crises in Iraq, Rwanda, Somalia and Kosovo, where the issue of humanitarian interventions undoubtedly became more prominent than ever before.

During the Cold War, the rivalry between the US and USSR dominated global politics and therefore also the motives behind interventions. On either side, motives for interventions were based on protecting national interest or furthering their ideological goals and never on purely humanitarian causes (Armstutz, 1999). The USSR, for example, intervened in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Afghanistan in 1979 to strengthen communism in both states. Examples of US intervention, on the other hand, are in the Dominican Republic in 1965 and Grenada in 1983, both with the motive to challenge anti-democratic forces. Also, the US led wars in Korea and Vietnam were driven by their rivalry with the USSR. Hence, throughout the cold-war, the two superpowers’ confrontation and rivalry meant that neither would even consider intervening in a state for the sole purpose of limiting human suffering or death. The non-intervention principle was regarded so highly in international politics that the question of whether a country should intervene in the affairs of other countries to change the character of alien and repressive regimes was rarely discussed during the Cold War (Roberson, 1998). As the USSR was involved in serious human rights abuses and could be classified as a repressive regime itself, this is hardly surprising.

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Tanzania’s intervention in Uganda and Vietnam’s intervention in Cambodia, both taking place during the Cold War in the 1970s, may well have been justified today on humanitarian grounds. Despite both Uganda and Cambodia having murderous regimes clearly guilty of genocide ( Idi Amin’s dictatorship in Uganda was estimated to have killed 300,000 people, Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime was estimated to have killed 2-3 million people), they did not attract international military intervention due to the geopolitical climate and superpower rivalry at the time. It was left to Vietnam and Tanzania to justify their actions as self-defence (the right of all states under the UN charter 51) and restrain from claiming the right to humanitarian intervention (Baylis and Smith, 2001). Although the justification of the interventions as self defence can be argued against since one could challenge that self-defence did not require the complete overthrow of both governments, the reason both countries did not want to go against the non-intervention principle despite the murderous states they opposed was most likely the fear of jeopardising the rules of sovereignty, as this would involve high risks of being targeted themselves. Regardless of the clearly humanitarian consequences, it seems that there was a belief in Tanzania and Vietnam that any other motive than self defence would have been regarded as an illegal intervention by the global community and could put both countries in danger (Salmon, 2000).

The end of the Cold War meant an end to the fears of superpower confrontation which any intervention could lead to. It also meant that the US would dominate the development of global politics. This meant that the US media, Non-Governmental Organisations, special interest groups and public opinion would play a major role in the development of global politics since they, to a certain extent, hold the power to pressurise the US government into humanitarian interventions.

In 1990-1 Sadam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait threatened the geopolitical and economic interests of the western powers and alarmed Iraq’s neighbours, making it easy for the US to find wide-ranging support, including the endorsement of the UN for the first time since the Korean war of 1950, in countering the invasion with relatively quick success (Roberson, 1998). Following the war, the passing of UN Security Council Resolution 688 in April 1991 for the creation of “safe havens” for the suppressed Kurdish and Shiite communities in Southern Iraq was very much a response to public opinion and the outrage of the international community at the plight of the Kurds and Shiites (Roberson, 1998 and Baylis and Smith, 2001). It was also a significant development in the acceptance of humanitarian intervention without consent, as the resolution meant that a humanitarian intervention in Southern Iraq had been legalised by the international community.

Public opinion and the media also played a major role when US intervened in Somalia in 1992. Influenced by pictures of starving Somalis in the media, public opinion pressurized the US government into taking action to protect food supplies (Kent and Young, 2004). “Operation Restore Hope” backfired though, as thirteen US soldiers were killed in a helicopter attack on Mogadishu and pictures of dead US soldiers being dragged through the streets of the city swayed public opinion in the opposite direction, forcing President Clinton to withdraw the troops (Baylis and Smith, 2001). This was clearly an intervention based purely on humanitarian motives, as Somalia held no vital interests to the US. Ironically, it ended in a non-humanitarian outcome. It shows that public opinion is “notoriously fickle” (Roberson, 1998, pp.179) and can turn against the government rapidly, specifically when casualties rise in a war (also seen in the recent Iraq war, where the coffins of casualties returning to the US were banned from being shown on television). Its failure certainly influenced the inactive role the US chose to take when dealing with the Rwandan crisis.

The Rwandan crisis is a major contradiction to the thesis that there has been a growing commitment to humanitarian intervention in the post Cold War period. The mass genocide which started in April 1994 was met by nothing more than moral outrage. The UN Secretary-General at the time, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who was dependant on UN member states providing resources to intervene, is quoted as saying the “international community did little or nothing as the killing in Rwanda continued” (Kent and Young, 2004, pp.694). The US, with the failure of Somalia in the back of many a politicians mind, refused to have any direct involvement in stopping the killings. The only country willing to intervene, France, did so on a dubious motive and once most of the atrocities had already been committed. Although the French government emphasised that the intervention was humanitarian, this lacks credibility as the French President at the time, Mitterrand, was reportedly anxious to restore waning French credibility in Africa (Baylis and Smith, 2001). Also, the French had played a role in the escalation of the conflict by aiding the Rwandan military since 1975, without which some say the genocide may never have been able to take place (Kent and Young, 2004). That said, the French intervention did save lives and therefore had a humanitarian outcome. The lack of commitment to humanitarian intervention in this severe case certainly puts a doubt on the question of whether the post Cold War years were more committed to humanitarian intervention.

In 1999, the repression of Kosovar Albanians by the Serbs in former Yugoslavia led to a NATO-led intervention. This was clearly an intervention where humanitarian concerns were the main motive. Questionable, though, were the means by which the intervention was undertaken. The means applied to stop the ethnic cleansing was a bombing campaign of strategic targets. This was despite expert views that ground forces were a better means for preventing the atrocities committed by Milosevic’s government. The air raids provoked Milosevic into increasing his effort of ‘ethnically cleansing’ the Kosovar population and also resulted in up to 2000 civilian casualties despite the use of modern technology. What can be concluded from this intervention is that the humanitarian commitment to protecting the Kosovar population did not extend to risking soldiers from the NATO countries’ lives, as ground forces would have resulted in more casualties on NATO’s side (Baylis and Smith, 2001). Despite the means being questionable, the Kosovo crisis does suggest a return to a commitment to humanitarian interventions after the negligence that was Rwanda.

As shown in this essay, the US played major roles in humanitarian interventions in the 1990s. As the only superpower left in world politics following the Cold War, the US were able to construct their foreign policies without major influence from outside, often reacting to public opinion, as shown in the Somalia intervention. Without a real enemy, they could afford to play the role as the ‘world police’ when they chose to. The importance of this role for global politics is underlined by the fact that the one major crisis which the US chose not to intervene in, Rwanda, resulted in a major catastrophe. Following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001, the ‘War on Terror’ became the new focal point of US foreign policy. Terrorism became the new enemy of the US. The justifications for the US led invasions of Afghanistan (aiding and harbouring terrorists) and Iraq (Weapons of Mass Destruction) were not humanitarian. Thus, with the US distracted and overstretched by the developments in Iraq, issues like Sudan, where thousands are dying largely due to government oppression and the responsibility to intervene has been given to the incapable African Union, are being overlooked and the growing commitment to purely humanitarian interventions seems to have halted.

Bibliography

Armstutz, M.R., (1999), “International Ethics; Concepts, Theories, and Cases in Global Politics”, Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc., Lanham, Maryland (U.S.A)
Baylis, J. and Smith, S., (2001) “The Globalization of World Politics”, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York
Kent, J. and Young, J. (2004) “International Relations since 1945”, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York
Roberson, B.A., (1998), “International Society and the Development of International Relations Theory”, Pinter, London and Herndon, Virginia (U.S.A)
Salmon, T.C., (2000), “Issues in International Relations”, Routledge, London and New York

Has there been a growing commitment to humanitarian intervention in the post cold-war era?

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