Mary Kaldor

Mary Kaldor is director of the Global Civil Society program at the London School of Economics and author of New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Stanford).

In early February, violence broke out in Mitrovica in northern Kosovo, when groups of Serbs went from apartment to apartment throwing grenades and beating people. French KFOR troops withdrew to another part of town. UN police tried to intervene but were outnumbered. Eventually Danish troops came to their assistance, "acting on their own individual initiative," according to the BBC report, and "not at the orders" of the French commanding officer. According to the UN police, "the Danes were superb."

There are similar stories about Danish soldiers during the Bosnian war, where they disobeyed UN orders and fired back at Serbs attacking UN convoys. The Danes were criticized for not keeping to the UN mandate, but they were effective in protecting humanitarian corridors.

A genuine humanitarian intervention is much more like policing than warfighting or traditional peacekeeping. Soldiers are supposed to kill under orders. Their job is to fight in wars, which are supposed to be directed against other states. Unlike criminals, they are legitimate bearers of arms. Indeed, soldiers are considered heroes and not murderers; they kill to defend their countries and are applauded for their bravery. They do not feel morally responsible for the violence because they kill at a distance. They kill at a psychological distance because they are obeying someone else's orders, and often at a physical distance because they drop bombs or fire artillery shells and do not come face to face with their victims.

In contrast, police are supposed to enforce the rule of law domestically; their job is to protect the public from crime. They are expected to protect victims of crime and to capture criminals. They are expected to be present on the ground and to use their own initiative. They are supposed to save as many lives as possible, including the criminals who should stand trial. They are not supposed to kill or use violence except in defense and, within the rule of law, they are individually accountable for their actions.

Humanitarian intervention has to be understood as a new phenomenon, not simply in terms of goals but also in terms of methods. The idea of overriding state sovereignty in defense of human rights marks not just a conceptual break with a state-centered view of the world but a practical break with traditional forms of warfighting. Conventional war between states has become an anachronism. In contemporary wars in places like Eastern Europe or Africa, most violence is directed against civilians and involves an array of techniques, including population displacement, especially "ethnic cleansing"; atrocities like torture, systematic rape and massacres; and destruction of infrastructure and historic buildings. The aim is to control territory by sowing fear and hatred. This method of warfare directly violates the laws of war as well as the various postwar conventions and treaties on human rights.

In this type of war, humanitarian intervention has to be understood not as warfighting (intervention on one side or the other) or as peacekeeping (keeping the sides apart and/or guaranteeing cease-fires) but as international law enforcement. If contemporary wars have become a mixture of war and massive violations of human rights, then intervention has to become a mixture of policing and military operations. The aim is to restore legitimacy by countering the strategy of sowing fear and hatred with a strategy of winning "hearts and minds" by containing violence and operating within the framework of international law. This involves the direct protection of civilians and the arrest of individual war criminals. Instead of offensive operations against a military enemy, humanitarian intervention should be defensive and non-escalatory. Humanitarian intervention involves new techniques such as the creation of safe havens and safe zones, as well as humanitarian corridors.

The role of UNPROFOR in Bosnia and Herzegovina did represent a weak form of humanitarian intervention in the imposition of safe havens and humanitarian corridors. The problem was that the troops were poorly armed and ordered not to use force, and their lives were privileged over the lives of those they were supposed to protect.

In contrast, NATO's airstrikes against Serbia last year were much more in the tradition of warfighting. Although the goal was humanitarian intervention, the practice was conventional war. Instead of directly protecting civilians on the ground, NATO conducted offensive operations against the Serbian military machine, including its infrastructure in Serbia. This approach actually had counterproductive consequences, since it allowed Slobodan Milosevic to mobilize public opinion in Serbia and to speed up ethnic cleansing on the ground. It is true that in the end Milosevic capitulated, but the war led to a double ethnic cleansing. As Gen. Wesley Clark put it, you "cannot stop paramilitary murder on the ground with airplanes."

Forging a new type of humanitarian intervention requires a restructuring of armed forces. It means emphasis on ground troops rather than on sophisticated equipment for long-distance killing. But above all, it requires a cognitive and moral transformation in the way we understand the legitimate use of violence. Soldiers have to behave more like police officers. Whereas in military operations the aim is to minimize casualties on your own side, even if this means maximizing casualties on the other side, in humanitarian intervention the aim is to minimize all casualties, even if this means risking the lives of the soldiers/police officers. Whereas soldiers kill at a distance, humanitarian intervention means a presence on the ground. Above all, whereas soldiers obey orders unquestioningly and become cogs in a collective machine, the new international law enforcers have to take individual responsibility for local situations and make difficult judgments about how to respond based on their own knowledge and conscience. Even if they did disobey orders, the Danish peacekeepers seemed to understand, more than anyone else, what humanitarian intervention ought to mean.

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