Humanitarian Intervention: A Forum (Page 3)

Carl Tham

The concept of humanitarian intervention emerged in the 1990s against a background of civil war and atrocities in a number of regions. In all these cases, vast segments of the population were oppressed, tortured or murdered. In Rwanda more than 500,000 were killed within the space of three months. It was genocide, but the international community did little to stop it.

These experiences led Secretary General Kofi Annan, following the example of his two predecessors, to suggest that the international community has the right to intervene--and should intervene--to protect vulnerable groups in cases of immediate, severe and large-scale abuses of human rights or genocide. To employ military force in extreme situations of abuse is not necessarily inconsistent with the spirit of the UN Charter and international law, they argued, if such an intervention has the backing of a Security Council resolution.

The 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo was carried out without such a resolution. The Independent International Commission on Kosovo later concluded that the NATO action was legitimate because diplomatic means had been exhausted and because it was necessary to put a stop to the Serbian atrocities and oppression of the Albanian Kosovars--but still illegal because it did not receive approval from the Security Council. The commission suggested a principled framework, which could be used to guide future responses to imminent humanitarian catastrophes and to narrow the gap between legality and legitimacy. A Canadian commission later reached the same conclusion and developed criteria for possible interventions.

These reports, as well as the statements of the Secretary General, stressed that a military intervention can be legitimate only if there is an acute human rights crisis and if all diplomatic efforts have failed. The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, for instance, says that military intervention for human protection is warranted only if there are abuses of human rights that result in large-scale loss of life with or without genocidal intent, or large-scale ethnic cleansing.

Was the US intervention in Iraq of this kind--legitimate but illegal? Certainly the Saddam Hussein regime was oppressive, but there was no immediate human rights emergency. The potential threat of weapons of mass destruction--which was the main issue the United States brought to the Security Council--had nothing to do with the arguments in favor of humanitarian intervention. Also, diplomatic efforts were not exhausted. In fact, it was very obvious that the Bush Administration had already decided in favor of war against Iraq as a demonstration of the doctrine of preventive action, which is very far from humanitarian intervention.

The arguments made by the United States in favor of the war were different from arguments for humanitarian intervention. The war was publicly launched as a war against terror or against evil; the Saddam regime was claimed to be a threat to the United States, indeed the whole world. These last arguments were so obviously exaggerated that they were dropped in favor of the argument that the war was a war of liberation against an oppressive regime, which was also Tony Blair's favorite argument.

The war against Iraq was illegal--few dispute that--and it was not legitimate in the sense of the Kosovo war: an unavoidable war because all diplomatic efforts had failed in an emerging human rights catastrophe. The idea to expand the very restrictive idea of humanitarian intervention into a general license for war against repressive regimes is, I think, very dangerous. Even more so is the concept of preventive action, which can be used at random as an argument for war. It will in fact erode the whole idea of an international legal order as expressed in the UN Charter and its prohibition of the use of force.

Carl Tham is the Swedish ambassador to Germany.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• 10
• 11
• 12
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.