Use any euphemism you wish, but in the end these interventions have to be about regime change if they are to have any chance of accomplishing their stated goal. (That is why they are opposed in many parts of the formerly colonized world even as they are supported in the formerly colonizing West.) After all, how can the people of Darfur ever be safe as long as the same regime that sanctioned their slaughter rules unrepentant in Khartoum? Or, for that matter, how can the Myanmar government be trusted to look after the slow business of reconstruction in the zones hit by the cyclone if it was unconcerned with the fate of Nargis’s survivors from the beginning?
The harsh truth is that it is one thing for people of conscience to call for wrongs to be righted but it is quite another to fathom the consequences of such actions. Good will is not enough; nor is political will. That is because, as Iraq has taught us so painfully, the law of unintended consequences may be one of the few iron laws of international politics. And somewhere, despite all the outcry, leaders know that the same people calling for intervention may repudiate it the moment it goes wrong.
"Humanitarian Vanities" by David Rieff
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/magazine/01wwln-lede-t.html?ref=magazine
Ours is an age in which the responsibility for protecting people when their physical survival is at stake has become an increasingly accepted principle in international relations. It is even enshrined in a United Nations-approved covenant as the “responsibility to protect” — the idea being that a state that engages in criminal behavior toward its own people has forfeited not just its moral but also its legal right to sovereignty.
ReplyDeleteOnce again, in reaction to the government of Myanmar’s initial refusal to welcome cyclone relief from abroad — a decision that France’s foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, described as a potential crime against humanity — a heated debate about protecting citizens from their own governments erupted. Should the Myanmar government have been forced, militarily if necessary, to accept foreign aid and foreign-aid workers? And if not — if pragmatism and respect for state sovereignty preclude such a course — was it really conscionable to stand by knowing that the dictatorship of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, showed few signs of caring about the victims of Cyclone Nargis?
These are urgent questions. Yet it is striking that all the strong talk about the need to intervene immediately in Myanmar did not in fact lead to action of any sort, let alone the kind of radical action activists and some major international political figures like Kouchner considered. Certainly there were practical reasons why nothing was done. The Chinese were opposed and the U.S. military unenthusiastic, as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made clear. And in fairness, the responsibility to protect is a new doctrine; it was only adopted at the U.N. World Summit in 2005.
But there is more to the gap between principle and practice than that. If well-intentioned people in the West, and elsewhere, uphold the right to protect, why is it so seldom exercised? The trouble lies not only in power politics but also in the challenge of sustaining popular support for humanitarian missions and in the unintended consequences of acting in unfamiliar ways in unfamiliar places. Given such difficulties, you might ask, do our intervention debates exist on a separate plane, that of symbolic rather than practical politics? Or, to put it somewhat brutally, are we talking about people in desperate need of aid or are we talking about ourselves when we debate such matters?
Perhaps the Myanmar example is anomalous in that it involves a natural disaster and a malefactor government’s acts of omission, not commission. The responsibility to protect was not originally intended to cover catastrophes. Yet the debate differs little from those that have taken place over the man-made disasters of ethnic cleansing and massacre.
ReplyDeleteThink of Darfur. No international political cause since the campaign against apartheid in South Africa — not Bosnia, not Tibet, not El Salvador — has been as compelling to as many Americans as what, in this country at least, is generally thought to be the genocide going on in western Sudan. Unlike Central America, Darfur is the cause of the political right as well as of the political left, of the Congressional Black Caucus as well as of neoconservatives, of the American Jewish community as well as of Christian evangelicals. In other words, it is much more than the concern of a small elite, as was the case, for example, with pro-interventionist activism on behalf of Bosnia in the early 1990s. (I know; I was part of it.) Indeed, the main activist organization, Save Darfur, can legitimately claim to represent a genuine mass movement.
But the stubborn fact is that despite this extraordinary mobilization, no effective intervention has actually been mounted to prevent the genocide in Darfur. (Again, as the activists see it; some groups, like the French section of Doctors Without Borders, which has been on the ground in the region for many years, deny that genocide properly describes the situation.) Part of the reason is that China opposes such a move, and it is a lot harder for the U.S. in 2008 to go against the wishes of a country that holds so much of its government paper than it was to defy the wishes of a then-weak Russia in Bosnia in 1995 and Kosovo in 1999. But while realpolitik certainly has played a role, the failure to intervene in Darfur cannot be attributed to calculations of power alone.
After the Iraqi debacle, it is hardly surprising that we are hesitant to undertake interventions that may well involve regime change. And regime change — its moral legitimacy and political practicality — is the ghost at the banquet of humanitarian intervention. Use any euphemism you wish, but in the end these interventions have to be about regime change if they are to have any chance of accomplishing their stated goal. (That is why they are opposed in many parts of the formerly colonized world even as they are supported in the formerly colonizing West.) After all, how can the people of Darfur ever be safe as long as the same regime that sanctioned their slaughter rules unrepentant in Khartoum? Or, for that matter, how can the Myanmar government be trusted to look after the slow business of reconstruction in the zones hit by the cyclone if it was unconcerned with the fate of Nargis’s survivors from the beginning?
The harsh truth is that it is one thing for people of conscience to call for wrongs to be righted but it is quite another to fathom the consequences of such actions. Good will is not enough; nor is political will. That is because, as Iraq has taught us so painfully, the law of unintended consequences may be one of the few iron laws of international politics. And somewhere, despite all the outcry, leaders know that the same people calling for intervention may repudiate it the moment it goes wrong.