23rr April 2000

United Nations and the paradox of "humanitarian" intervention

The war in Kosovo was described by some as the world's first human rights war where the killings were presumably for a "noble cause: to preserve and protect humanitarian law.

But last week two international relief agencies, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Doctors Without Borders, challenged the concept of "humanitarian war" widely used as a pretext for the sustained aerial bombing of Kosovo.

The two agencies said there is now a dangerous confusion between political action and humanitarian action in military conflicts.

Dr James Orbinski of Doctors Without Borders pointed out that the so-called "humanitarian war" in Kosovo was really an oxymoron.

"One cannot use the tools of violence in the name of humanitarianism," he told a UN press briefing last week.

Orbinski said that military action by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in Kosovo had a clear and obvious political cause. And the "humanitarian" actions of NATO had put civilians at risk.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had been effectively sidelined by the military might of NATO and by NATO's aggressive public relations campaign for a humanitarian justification for its action.

At a meeting of the UN Security Council, summoned specifically to discuss the protection of civilians in armed conflicts, Dr Jakob Kellenberger of the ICRC, said that his organisation was seriously concerned with "the weight of words" during NATO military action in the Balkans.

The term "humanitarian" has often been misused, he told delegates. "We have heard talk of a "humanitarian war" or even "coercive humanitarian countermeasures," he said.

These were expressions that "create dangerous confusion as to the respective roles and responsibilities of political actors and humanitarian organisations," he added.

"The question here is not the validity of coercive action in extreme circumstances. Such action is often a last resort and necessary to protect the civilian population," he added.

Kellenberger argued that coercive action may be essential in situations where there are large scale and systematic violations of human rights and humanitarian law.

But such coercive measures should be envisaged only in extreme cases. The Security Council has numerous other means at its disposal for enhancing the security of populations — ranging from preventive deployment to the dispatch of peacekeeping and peace-consolidation forces.

In ICRC's view, the important thing is to distinguish between political and military action aimed at addressing the causes of conflict from humanitarian action aimed at addressing its effects.

The law governing the right to use force, must therefore remain clearly distinct from humanitarian law automatically applicable in the event of military operations.

"The legitimacy of the cause being defended can, in no circumstance, exempt a military operation from the obligations laid down in international humanitarian law," Kellenberger added.

The world's more powerful states have always justified intervening in the domestic affairs of other sovereign states — as seen in the Soviet "interventions" in Hungary, the former Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, and the US "intervention" in Vietnam.

The motives, and the legal justification, may be better in some cases than the others, says Secretary-General Kofi Annan, but the word "intervention" has come to be used as a synonym for "invasion".

During the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the Security Council failed to act primarily for selfish reasons.

The US did not want to commit troops after it lost 17 of its servicemen in Mogadishu while serving as part of a humanitarian relief force in Somalia in 1993.

"There should have been an intervention by the Security Council under international law and within existing framework. That would not have been a humanitarian intervention, but a genocide intervention," Orbinski said.

Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy says "the protection of civilians requires strengthening our disposition to intervene with force, if necessary."

But Ambassador Kishore Mahbubani of Singapore argues that the key implication of this is often unmentionable in the Security Council: to save civilians you need effective military forces.

The question is where will they come from, and who will pay for their costs?.

In the case of East Timor, for example, every Australian taxpayer was asked to pay an additional 1,000 Australian dollars per person. But how many taxpayers in democracies are prepared to do this?, Mahbubani asked.