Mahmood Mamdani

Mahmood Mamdani, a Ugandan citizen, is Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and director of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University. He received his doctorate from Harvard and has previously taught at several African universities. He is currently completing a political analysis of the causes and consequences of the genocide in Rwanda.

Advocates of "humanitarian intervention" argue that Rwanda needs to be a turning point in post-cold war politics, one that will introduce a renewed consensus on human rights into international politics. If the pledge that followed the Holocaust--"never again"--could not be upheld because of the cold war, they argue, the end of the cold war provides the context necessary to renew that pledge and give it teeth.

The consensus around "humanitarian intervention" brings together two different points of view. For some, the end of the cold war provides a real opportunity for observing a human rights standard internationally. Now that dictators hitherto nurtured by the cold war--Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic, for example--have been orphaned by its end, they must be forced to observe minimal international human rights standards. Should they fail to observe these standards, they must be the target of armed humanitarian intervention.

For others, the end of the cold war entails the danger that big powers may succumb to isolationism, and underlines the need to hold those powers responsible for international policing. From this point of view, the need for humanitarian intervention arises precisely in those cases where powerful nations do not have direct interests at stake and are thus unwilling to risk anything. In those instances, say human rights activists, it is vital to compel big-power intervention for humanitarian purposes. In other words, if intervention is not a political necessity, it must be made one through a popular crusade that demands it.

I disagree with those who call for "humanitarian interventions" in the post-cold war era for one reason: I think it necessary to judge each intervention on its own merit, particularly its political merit. In a globalized world of highly unequal actors, humanitarian intervention will be a name for big-power intervention in practice. Every intervention will serve a complex of interests, general and specific. There can be no such thing as an unambiguous humanitarian intervention.

Like every turning point, Rwanda offers us not one but several lessons. The UN did not just withdraw; it also authorized a humanitarian intervention by the French, code-named Operation Turquoise. That intervention did save many Tutsi, but it also saved the political and military leadership that carried out the genocide. As if to underline that "humanitarian intervention" is indeed a political blank check, neither the UN nor any other international forum has held the French accountable for that intervention.

Rather than being an exception, doesn't Operation Turquoise fit neatly into a history of imperial intervention over the past several centuries? Didn't slaving powers portray Africa as a state of nature where life was nasty, brutish and short and where slavery salvaged the lives of its victims, introducing them to the nobility of labor? And didn't colonial powers entering Africa toward the end of the nineteenth century claim to be stamping out slavery? In other words, hasn't every imperial intervention claimed to be humanitarian?

In addition to the French intervention in Rwanda, the US-led interventions in Iraq and Kosovo also teach us that every intervention has its politics. Iraq brought home the fact that the lives of ordinary Iraqis were dispensable, whether they turned the intervention into an opportunity to remove the dictatorship through popular action or whether the dictatorship turned them into human shields against the intervention. Kosovo brought that same lesson home in a different way: The lives of individual pilots in the sky were far more precious than those of the multitudes living on the ground.

This is not to say that every external intervention is imperialist, but it is to say that calling an intervention "humanitarian" cannot strip it of its politics. If the cold war led to a single-minded focus on imperial powers, the end of the cold war should not replace it with a single-minded focus on local despots. If the cold war generated a preoccupation with politics that lost sight of humanity, the end of the cold war should not be turned into an invitation--or a temptation--to disregard politics in the name of humanity.

Rather than calling for a type of intervention that is free from political accountability, we should be placing the question of accountability at the center of the discussion. Globalization shows that we have enhanced technological capacities, but it also underlines the need to put in place some kind of representative governing structure internationally. At the very least, it calls on us to examine the representativeness of the international arrangements that now exist, from the UN to the Bretton Woods institutions. The point is to make these institutions accountable to those who will suffer the consequences of the decisions they make.

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