Humanitarian intervention: the new missing link in the fight to prevent crimes against humanity and genocide?

AuthorWilliams, Paul R.
PositionInternational Conference in Commemoration of the Sixtieth Anniversary of the Negotiation of the Genocide Convention

INTRODUCTION

Over the course of the 1990s, the international community saw significant development and utilization of legal frameworks for mechanisms designed to prevent crimes against humanity and genocide. These mechanisms were used in over a dozen conflicts and allowed the international community to intervene to halt atrocities, punish those responsible for atrocities, provide redress for victims, and work together to prevent such crimes in the future. Utilized together, these mechanisms have the potential to be powerful tools against the perpetration of crimes against humanity and genocide.

Humanitarian intervention is a particularly crucial piece in this emerging mosaic of measures designed to prevent crimes against humanity and genocide. Since the early 1990s, there has been a Significant need for humanitarian intervention, a need that will likely continue well into the future. For a time, there was also a significant reliance on humanitarian intervention to address many of the worst intrastate and interstate conflicts.

Unfortunately, despite the importance of humanitarian intervention, the international community is less likely to undertake meaningful and effective humanitarian interventions in the coming years. Future use of humanitarian intervention is limited by both the failure to develop an adequate legal basis for the doctrine of humanitarian intervention, and by a number of geo-political factors that mitigate against any significant humanitarian interventions in the near future. As such, the international community has lost one of its key tools to prevent crimes against humanity and genocide, thereby weakening its overall ability to address such atrocities.

DEVELOPMENT OF HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION SINCE 1990

Humanitarian intervention can take many forms, including using military forces to help deliver humanitarian aid, protect humanitarian aid operations, protect and defend the victims of violence, and, in some instances, defeat the perpetrators of violence. (1)

Furthermore, effective humanitarian intervention consists of something more than simply deploying peacekeepers. Too often peacekeeping missions are not provided ample personnel or material resources or are restricted by a narrow mandate. The missions in Rwanda and Darfur are examples of the challenges such limitations create for interventions. Similarly, the deployment of peacekeepers after atrocities have occurred does not constitute genuine humanitarian intervention. The purpose of humanitarian intervention is to interpose international military forces into the conflict in order to either end the conflict or to provide for human security. To be effective, missions must be provided with the resources and mandate to meet that purpose.

Since 1990, there have been a large number of interventions, as well as a significant and increasing need for humanitarian intervention. During that period, there have been at least seventeen humanitarian interventions, including: northern and southern Iraq, East Timor, Bosnia, Somalia, and Kosovo. (2) Many of those interventions were effective in either halting or preventing further crimes against humanity and genocide, but many others were not.

In addition to those conflicts where the international community deployed forces in an effort to stop the conflict or lessen its consequences, there were many others that desperately required the intervention of the international community but did not receive it, including: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Georgia, Moldova, Chechnya, and Uganda.

In the cases where the international community conducted humanitarian interventions, whether effective or ineffective, international approval for the interventions was not always easily won. In fact, the international community is rarely united on such matters. Even where the international community had clear evidence of atrocities, such as in Bosnia and Kosovo, members of the international community have grappled with how to respond, often stalling for months or years before conducting effective interventions.

THE NEED FOR HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION WILL CONTINUE IN THE NEAR FUTURE.

Despite the large number of humanitarian interventions since 1990, the need for future humanitarian intervention has not waned, and will not wane in the foreseeable future. A number of current conflicts around the globe warrant international intervention based on their brutality and violations of international law.

In the Sudanese region of Darfur, for instance, government and government-backed forces have carried out a targeted, organized, and well-documented campaign of genocide against Darfurian civilians. The campaign has lasted for over four years, and conservative estimates number civilian deaths at over 200,000, with an additional two million refugees and internally displaced persons. (3) Throughout the campaign the international community has watched from afar, chastising the Sudanese government, but failing to take decisive action to stop the attacks on civilians. Even the United States government, which took a stand early on by labeling the campaign genocide, has failed to match its rhetoric with action. The limited deployment of African Union peacekeepers, which are unable to even secure their own bases against attacks, and the slow deployment of a limited number of United Nations (U.N.) peacekeepers does not constitute the basis for a genuine humanitarian intervention. As currently configured, these limited forces have been unable to stop the ongoing genocide, and are unlikely to be able to do so in the future.

Similarly, in recent months there have been widespread calls for intervention in Sri Lanka, (4) as the longstanding civil war there has resumed following a short-lived ceasefire. For over twenty years, the LTTE and the Government of Sri Lanka have fought a brutal civil war in which an estimated 67,000 people have been killed and over half a million displaced. Despite calls for humanitarian intervention based on the Responsibility to Protect, it is unlikely that the international community will do more than simply provide good offices for ongoing negotiations.

In Burma, military leaders have repeatedly used brutal force to defy calls for democratic reform while their harsh rule has pushed hundreds of thousands of refugees across the state's border (the exact number is unknown). (5) In 1988, the military killed over 3,000 pro-democracy demonstrators. In the fall of 2007, the military launched a brutal crackdown against Buddhist monks and civilians seeking democratic reform. To quash the protests, the military raided monasteries, beating, torturing, and arresting the monks en masse. (6) The military government has also carried out a long-term military campaign against numerous ethnic minorities in Burma. Recent studies utilizing satellite technology have scientifically confirmed ethnic cleansing of the Karen minority. (7)

Finally, many analysts predict, and a number recommend, that as the civil war in Iraq intensifies, the U.S. military may withdraw to four or five major bases and wait out the conflict. If this were to occur, there will be a need and call for humanitarian intervention to stop the civil war. It is unclear whether the United States would then redeploy its forces to stop the civil war.

In each of these cases, the violence, level of brutality, and number of violations of international law is roughly equal to or greater than those in prior instances that have received humanitarian intervention; but the prospect of intervention is limited. This is because the international community has, to date, failed to find an adequate legal framework to justify intervention, and a range of geopolitical factors together limit the ability of the international community to agree to conduct future interventions.

HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION'S PLACE IN THE MOSAIC DEVELOPED TO PREVENT CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY AND GENOCIDE

Since 1990, the international community has come...

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