POLITICS: US Think-Tank Sees Limits on Humanitarian Intervention

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Sep 29 2000 (IPS) - A US think-tank has warned that military action in response to humanitarian crises should be undertaken only as a last resort.

“This will provide comfort to smaller countries that such intervention will not be done lightly”, says the Stanley Foundation based in the US State of Iowa. “It will also limit the number of such interventions to a level that the more powerful nations are willing to support,” the Foundation argues.

In a new report on Humanitarian Crises released Thursday, the Foundation says the “bar” for humanitarian intervention must be kept high.

The conclusions in the report are based on the outcome of a conference last June sponsored by the Foundation and attended by experts, diplomats and representatives of non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

Richard Stanley, president of the Foundation, said there was a high degree of consensus among participants that there were circumstances when the international community did need to intervene, perhaps forcefully, “to mitigate egregious humanitarian situations in spite of claims of national sovereignty.”

But countries need to be assured that the concept of humanitarian intervention was not a new kind of colonialism, he told a UN news briefing.

The participants in the conference, he said, agreed that the UN Security Council was the preferred authorising body for such interventions, although they differed on whether it should be the only authorising body.

The open question, however, was whether a set of guidelines could be established that might help the Security Council as it considered issues relating to humanitarian intervention, he added.

Last year, in a highly controversial move, members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), led by the United States, decided to act unilaterally to bomb the former Yugoslavia.

The aerial bombings, which continued uninterrupted for about 78 days, were prompted by widespread charges of genocide and human rights violations against ethnic Albanians and Kosovars by the government of President Slobodan Milosevic.

In an interview published in a London newspaper last year, former South African President Nelson Mandela criticised both the United States and Britain for their unilateral action in the former Yugoslavia and also for not seeking “explicit permission” from the Security Council for their military action.

“The message they’re sending is that any country which fears a (UN) veto can take unilateral action,” he said. “That means they’re introducing chaos into international affairs: that any country can take a decision which it wants.”

Announcing the establishment of an “International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty,” Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy told reporters mid-September that humanitarian intervention was “one of the most difficult and divisive issues on the international agenda today.”

“One of the sacred tenets around this (UN) building is that sovereignty is supreme,” Axworthy noted, “And yet so are people.

“Many people told us that even using the term ‘intervention’ is controversial, we could have called this Commission something else, but it wouldn’t get rid of the problem.”

The Commission is expected to do an in-depth study of humanitarian intervention and propose guidelines for such intervention.

The 114 members of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) at the United Nations – all developing nations – argue that arbitrary humanitarian intervention is a violation of national sovereignty.

At a ministerial meeting in Colombia early this year, NAM condemned “all unilateral military actions or threats of military action, including humanitarian intervention, against the sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence of the members of the Movement (NAM)”.

This view is also shared by at least two of the five veto-wielding permanent members of the Security Council, namely China and Russia, while the other three, the United States, Britain and France, are strongly supportive of humanitarian interventions.

China fears international intervention in Tibet and Russia fears humanitarian intervention in Chechnya. Without Chinese and Russian restraints, both Tibet and Chechnya could potentially breakaway into separate states.

Addressing the General Assembly Wednesday, Ambassador Sergey Lavrov of Russia said that Chapter VII of the UN charter confirms unambiguously the exclusive powers of the Security Council to sanction the use of force in international relations.

“The world will otherwise slip into anarchy and lawlessness, when someone tries to establish order by using the right of force under cover of the concept of ‘humanitarian intervention’ and ‘limited sovereignty,”‘ he added. In case of a threat or mass violation of human rights, he added, it is the world community that should act collectively, but in accordance with the decisions of the Security Council.

In his annual report released last week, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan takes the view that the world has a responsibility to act when there are massive violations of human rights.

Annan asks how the international community can respond to gross and systematic violations of human rights, if humanitarian intervention is considered an “unacceptable assault on sovereignty”.