Humanitarian Intervention: A Forum (Page 6)

David Rieff

As both prescription and description, "humanitarian intervention" is a misnomer. What we really mean when we speak of humanitarian intervention (or human rights intervention, or "the responsibility to protect," two newer versions of the same formulation) is war. To be sure, we mean war in a good cause. Such wars are to be fought to protect civilian populations from outside aggression when their own states have collapsed or, for some other reason, cannot or choose not to defend them. Or they may be undertaken when a state is too weak to repress warlordism, as in the case of Sierra Leone. Finally, they may be undertaken when the state itself is the oppressor, as in Kosovo.

Such wars may well be warranted and just, but let them be called by their right name, not sanitized by the term humanitarian intervention. Admitting that what is being called for is war puts the issue of whether or not to use force in a place like the Democratic Republic of Congo or Liberia in its proper context--the political. The virtue of the political is that the case for making the most tragic of all public decisions becomes controversial and a matter for public debate, rather than some kind of categorical moral imperative whose need to be undertaken is deemed to be self-evident.

And such debate is urgent. Because the inescapable result of enshrining humanitarian intervention as one desirable response to wars and refugee crises will be a new colonial order. In most cases to take military action is, in practice, to replace the government of the country in question with the rule either of the humanitarian intervener or of some other outside actor, most commonly the UN, or else of a local surrogate that is in fact controlled by the outside intervener.

For humanitarian interventionists and the human rights activists to routinely claim, as they do, that this is not a serious problem because (a) their intentions are of the best, focused solely on the interests of victims, and (b) they are only acting in accordance with settled international law, is at the very least historically amnesiac. Nineteenth-century European colonialism, particularly the so-called second imperialism of the last part of that century, was also explicitly undertaken in the name of humanitarian imperative. And this rationale was no more solely window dressing for the economic interests of Britain or France than today's humanitarianism is solely window dressing for neoliberal globalization and the "virtual empire" of the United States. It was a genuine effort at the betterment of humanity and an effort to redress some of the worst evils of the world.

In the nineteenth century, the twin goals of imperialists were stamping out slavery and bettering public health through fighting disease and improving sanitation. Today, the goal is guaranteeing human rights, preventing genocide and bettering public health through fighting disease and improving sanitation. The project of the humanitarian interventionists is a new colonial order.

Perhaps this colonialism is necessary. And perhaps humanitarian wars, including humanitarian wars that are likely to be far bloodier than those of the 1990s, are going to be necessary--morally, politically and culturally unavoidable in the present century. But let us call them by their right name, and not dress them in fantasies of international justice. Human rights and humanitarianism are not unassailable moral goods. They are ideologies--as questionable as neoliberalism or Communism or Christianity. This is the reality that the advocates of humanitarian intervention are trying--with worrying success, in my view--to finesse.

Copyright © 2003 by David Rieff, author of A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis (Simon & Schuster).

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