Alice in Rwandaland and Through the Looking Glass

Could it be argued that the UK’s intervention in Sierra Leone had some impact in stablising the country and dissuading rebel activity?

Well, Op Turquoise failed only in as much as you think its intention was to stop the Rwandan genocide, rather than to prop up the French-allied government of Rwanda against attacks by the RPF. (OK, it failed to do that as well, but that wasn’t a failure of a humanitarian intervention against genocide, but a failure of a political intervention in a civil war.)

As for examples of interventions that actually worked, Sierra Leone is a fairly uncontroversial one, though it was undertaken in support of the local government rather than against it, as Rwanda would have been, and Kosovo one that is slightly more controversial – though I think that the alternative without Nato intervention would have ended up with a lot more dead and displaced Kosovars, so I suppose that counts as a success. There’s also Op Provide Comfort – aid and protection for the Iraqi Kurds post-1991 – which worked pretty well.

what about UNAMIR? To my knowledge it did save lives. Regardless of how and whether it could have been improved, that ought to count for something, right?
FWIW, I think we ought to reserve the term peacekeeping for missions requested by both sides and admit to ourselves, that “responsibility to protect” will quite often mean going in and waging all out war against the perpetrators of a genocide. I’m fine with that.

Concerning your objections in the second part, I fail to see how this isn’t the perfect being the enemy of the good. Yes, resources are limited, they’ll always be and the process of deciding who gets help and who doesn’t is very far from perfect. That shouldn’t stop us from trying to improve it and do what we can. Similarly, the failure of Operation Turquoise doesn’t indicate there should be no interventions, but that there should be more UNAMIRs and less Turquoises and the failures of UNAMIR indicate that we ought to improve that kind of mission as well.

5: one of the proposed justifications for the Iraq war was exactly that.

While not one to defend the government of Vietnam or its former puppet regime in Cambodia, it is difficult to imagine a worse regime than the Khmer Rouge in terms of human rights. Even Joseph Stalin comes out ahead on a per capita basis. So as bad as the Heng Samrin regime was it was vast improvement over the previous one in terms of human rights. I do think there are any other modern regimes that killed as great a percentage of their own citizens as the Khmer Rouge. So regardless of Hanoi’s motivations the invasion of Cambodia had a humanitarian effect. Of course the US, China, UK and Thailand all backed the Khmer Rouge against the Vietnamese after the invasion.

I would add that the wh*resons and -daughters on the right in the USA blocked US intervention in Rwanda. For [no oil] some [no oil] odd [no oil] reason, [no oil] the [no oil] right [no oil] in [no oil] the [no oil] USA [no oil] wasn’t [no oil] in [no oil] favor [no oil] of [no oil] intervention [no oil] . I [no oil] can’t [no oil] imagine [no oil] why [no oil] .

Frankly, intervention in the USA consists of neocons serving Israel, the military-petroleum complex, and those foolish liberals who think that sucking up to the right will get them respect.

Daniel, it’s because you have a utilitarian cognitive module; your ancestors evolved on the Scotts Pleistocene Savannah.

Soru: “…or someone getting arrested and changing their life while in prison.”

This actually fits in quite well; I’d bet the most people’s lives are changed if they are in prison. Not for good, of course.

Hmm… ECOMOG’s dubious. Was it actually aimed at the local government? I’m still trying to think of a clear-cut example along the lines of “the Taschist government of Borduria was massacring its own citizens, and for this reason Syldavia invaded Borduria”. I don’t think that’s actually happened very often – certainly not often enough for one to be able to make sweeping statements along the lines of “history shows us that interventions never work”.

So regardless of Hanoi’s motivations the invasion of Cambodia had a humanitarian effect.

Well, yes, and the same thing could be said about both WW2 and the Falklands (inasmuch as defeat led indirectly to Galtieri’s downfall and the closure of the Argentinian Navy’s engineering school). But they were neither of them waged for that reason, and nor was the invasion of Cambodia, so they’re not really relevant to the discussion.

13: I’m actually going to come down on one side of the fence and say that preventing or stopping crimes against humanity by a local government is one of the few things that armed intervention probably could achieve, in some cases. As we’ve seen in Iraq and elsewhere, modern armies are very good at creating anarchy, not so good at creating functioning states – but if one of the things the state is doing is mass slaughter, then destroying the state is probably a good thing. It takes quite a bit of organisation, generally, to produce genocide (yes, even in Rwanda). Of course, it’s going to have to be pretty bad in terms of crimes against humanity before anarchy looks like a better alternative.

Maybe the symbolism of ‘symbolically’ is wrong but it does show some of governments that you run a risk in going too far. To establish that risk you can’t avoid but intervene, even if you know you haven’t found the solution yet for doing it at the right time and in the right way.

PS: it’s a bit unfair to limit success of UN missions to those few instances in which they are sent in to deal with genocidal governments, missions like MONUC (for all its woes) do show that the interventionary reflex can work (& are there enough instances to make any statistically sound statement? Except for Talibanistan & Kim Jong Il what would count? That may be the worst of Save Darfur Coalitions: they discredit interventionism by applying it to cases in which it should not be applied, maybe the right wing should set up a Save Venezuela Coalition (I forget: this was common practice a couple of decades ago))

“but in return I get to include everything else. ”

Well, no, you only get to keep those things that were done for the sake of humanitarian rescue, which as ajay has said, isn’t many. There have just been too few humnaitarian military interventions for anyone to make any broad generalisations

“it is a symbolically rich signal”
So was Jenkin’s ear.

So, we have East Timor, Sierra Leone, Iraqi Kurdistan, Kosovo, Somalia as actions that fit a generally acceptable definition of military humanitarian intervention (to posters on here). Have I missed any? From that list, it seems that East Timor, Sierra Leone and Iraqi Kudistan would generally be considered successes, Somalia a failure and Kosovo a side-taker.

I don’t know. I thought it was in the gift of the thread owner. Don’ty worry, I can livfe without my wisdom going public and I am very sure the rest of you can. I think I used a phrase that might have an obscene use in another context.

“no, I don’t agree – any “nation building” exercise has enough in common with the strict-sense interventions to be usefully informative.”

How can it? I agree that Somalia belongs in there because the purpoise was explicity humanitarian, but Haiti was simply regime change, not humanitarian in any sense that people mean when they talk abour R2P.

“Surely a “military intervention” has to involve shots being fired though? ”

Why? If a military intevenes, what else is it but a military intervention?

Daniel at 23, meet Daniel at 21. And, for that matter, Daniel at 3.

MONUC isn’t a military intervention though.

MONUC has over 16,000 troops in country with a mandate to, inter alia, “protect civilians under imminent threat of physical violence” as well as demining, aid protection and supervising a ceasefire.

Also, “So let’s go for an expansive definition which lets all the examples mentioned in”.

No, let’s not. My argument isn’t “history shows that humanitarian military interventions are generally really great”; my argument is that “history doesn’t really show anything at all either way, so let’s base the argument on other grounds than what history shows”.

Let’s go back to first principles. We’re talking, as in the Traub passage you quote, about the argument that “states have an obligation to protect their citizens from crimes against humanity and other mass atrocities, and that, should they be unable or unwilling to do so, other states incur that obligation. That responsibility, in the most extreme cases, includes military action”.

So we’ve got a few possible situations:
Borduria’s government is brutalising its own citizens;
or some other force is brutalising Bordurians, and the Bordurian government tacitly approves;
or it doesn’t approve, but is too weak to act against this other force;

and, in order to protect Bordurian citizens’ lives, Syldavia takes action, potentially military.

Your claim is that, most of the times this has happened, it has been a failure, and therefore this sort of intervention should not be performed.
My claim is that it has almost never happened (as John and Conor point out), and therefore you shouldn’t generalise from history because there isn’t a big enough sample size.

The other way of learning from history is to say “here are some times where this didn’t happen, and things would have been better if it had”. This is tricky, like all counterfactuals.

But here’s a thought: there are a few natural experiments, where the government of a country (like Cambodia or Uganda) was brutalising its own people and then got toppled by military force for an unrelated reason. You can then ask “did things improve for the Cambodians and Ugandans as a result of their brutalising governments being toppled by foreign armed intervention?”

Daniel@29, but that’s too easy because obviously nobody is defending that anybody can go and rescue another country’s citizens without any process whatsoever. UN-sanctioned intervention has its successes, unless of course you only focus on the subset of controversial all-out wars; of which you’re right that we should have as little as possible but that doesn’t mean that the threat should be there. It should be a realistic possibility. I don’t think we should even contemplate the regime change in Sudan but I do think that without the threat of intervention there would never have been the current status described in the other post – including the presence of the African forces.

We should have less interventions through the establishing of a process that makes intervention based on a clear UN-mandate more predictable.

A genuine military humanitarian intervention may or may not be successful to various degrees, and that would be a function of proper and competent planning and execution.

The problem is that, of course, a genuine military humanitarian intervention is an imaginary event, fiction. As the actors involved inevitably pursue their own interests, the whole things becomes meaningless: what constitutes success? Suppose the place has become quiet and a new colonial (or quasi-colonial) rule is established (or restored) – is that a success? Who knows.

I think that the more successful interventions have been the ones in which no shots were fired (the Brits did not take on the RUF in Sierra Leone)

Not actually true. The RUF tried to take on a Para Pathfinder patrol at Lungi airport one night. The results were as one might expect. And the only reason that no more widespread fighting occurred is that, basically, the RUF were scared off.

I’m not an expert on this example, but what about the Tanzanian intervention into Idi Amin’s Uganda? I’m wary of humanitarian based military interventionism, but I recall that being held up as a good example of non-imperialist success in deposing a brutal regime.

43: but the US government didn’t attempt to justify Iraq by using the R2P, did they? They attempted to justify it by pointing to WMD production as a breach of the 1991 ceasefire terms, and by pointing to links to AQ in order to link the Iraq war to the ‘self-defence’ argument used for Afghanistan. Remember Colin Powell’s presentation? Iraq would have happened even if no one had ever uttered the words “responsibility to protect”.

Iraq would have happened even if no one had ever uttered the words “responsibility to protect”.

clearly does not follow from the fact that

the US government didn’t attempt to justify Iraq [to the UN security council] by using the R2P

47: it doesn’t necessarily follow but I think it’s a pretty good assumption.

Daniel, OK, yes, definitely – if accepting R2P means that any government can claim it in order to justify whatever the hell it thinks is OK then R2P should be out. If on the other hand, the UN (or an organization defined by it) has the final authority to say whether the R2P is claimed justly — I do not see your problem: Iraq is out, Congo is in.

Chomsky, here, addresses the interpretation of East Timor as a success for R2P. And has many other useful and sceptical things to say.

50: All that is true, but if there haven’t been any MHIs (or at most one or two) then you can’t draw any inferences from the history of non-MHI wars either way. The logic’s flawed.
In fact, going back to my ‘natural experiment’ point: wars waged (for other reasons) against states that are brutalising their own populations often though not always have the (unintended) effect of stopping them from doing so: see Cambodia, the Falklands, Uganda, the Second World War etc.
So it’s not unreasonable to suppose that wars waged against brutalising states with the intention of stopping them from being brutal might also have some success.

Conor Foley 08.14.09 at 1:41 pm: ‘Good point, although I think that the more successful interventions have been the ones in which no shots were fired (the Brits did not take on the RUF in Sierra Leone, western forces turned back the Iraqi army from the Kurdish safe haven without opening fire and the various interventions in Haiti have not invloved much fighting). ‘

Conor, you are completely wrong to say that no shots were fired in the Sierra Leone or Kurdish interventions.

The first British intervention in Sierra Leone, in May 2000, involved a gunbattle between the Pathfinder platoon attached to 1 Para and the RUF, in which a number of RUF were killed. The RUF then fell back from Freetown, and it’s reasonable to say that the defeat at the hands of the Pathfinders had something to do with that. In September 2000, there was a very intense gunbattle between British forces seeking to rescue hostages, and the West Side Boys militia, in which one British soldier and a large number of militiamen were killed. This led to the disappearance of the West Side Boys and a number of other militias. These two operations were widely reported at the time, eg http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1351052/Soldiers-rifle-failed-in-battle-says-secret-report.html or http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/1354976/Paras-free-hostages-in-jungle.html .

Also in May 2000, there was very heavy fighting between the Indian and Kenyan battalions serving under UN command in Sierra Leone, and the RUF, in which the rebels were ultimately defeated. Phil Ashby’s book ‘Unscathed’, despite having a silly title, has a firsthand description of the fighting between the Kenyans and the RUF.

There were also a number of gunbattles in the Kurdish safe havens in 1991 between Iraqi forces and the Royal Marines sent to protect the Kurds- I can’t find any online references, but the fights were mentioned at the time in print journalism by correspondents like Robert Fox, who is reliable.

Haven’t there also been innumerable WOAs which were, in whole or in part, presented by the people who started them (usually in bad faith) as:

– legitimate self defence
– preemption
– retaliation
– restoration of sovereign control over an indivisible part of the country which has only recently come under the sway of illegitimate separatists/imperialists.

If anything, I think that last category is by far the biggest – it covers at least Tibet, the Korean and Vietnamese wars, Cyprus, East Timor, Bosnia, Falklands, and the first Gulf War.

If you have the ability to successfully lie, I don’t particularly see what difference the nature of that lie makes. If you can fake a solid alibi, intimidate a jury, or bribe a judge, you can get one charge as easily as another.

So you should probably focus discussion on the cases where the truth has some influence.

So because most interventions so far where halfhearted ones that failed due to the pressure of those that lobyied against them we should just stop any atempt to do it serious in the future? Sure those lets just watch and scare them with our gun even so they know no one is alowed to use those guns nor are those guns more than we have missions failed.

I think I’m with soru here. If a country wants to wage an aggressive war and is prepared to lie about it, the nature of the lie isn’t really relevant. And if we should get rid of principles of international law because they could provide cover for aggression, we should get rid of self-defence and the sanctity of borders first.
Also, recovering occupied territory certainly isn’t illegal, retaliation can be justified as ‘self defence’ and even pre-emption has much to be said on its behalf.

i am surprised no one has mentioned india’s intervention in the bangladeshi war of independence. obviously india’s actions were completely self-serving, but they did put an end to atrocities that could plausibly be described as genocide, with an umabiguous long term benefit for bangladeshis (and indeed for pakistanis too as it led directly to a brief restoration of civilian government).

22
JoB 08.14.09 at 1:06 pm

“Maybe the symbolism of ‘symbolically’ is wrong but it does show some of governments that you run a risk in going too far. To establish that risk you can’t avoid but intervene, even if you know you haven’t found the solution yet for doing it at the right time and in the right way.”

Yes, but ‘going too far’ tends to mean ‘p*ssing off a stronger government due to geopolitical reasons’. Classic example – Vietnam invaded Cambodia (IIRC), only after the Khmer Rouge government attacked Vietnam. The KR could have sat in Cambodia killing people for many more years, with little fear of invasion.

A second classic example would be, of course, Nazi Germany.

A more recent example would be Saddam Hussein and the USA. The USA happily sold him goodies, until he invaded Kuwait, and proved problematic. Attacking Iran and massacring his own people were no big problem (the latter was only a PR problem for the right in the US and the UK). And afterwards, he was only deposed by the USA because he had oil – even after 9/11, Mr. Random Mass Murdering Dictator has been pretty safe from US intervention, one might note.

So what would you have the international community do then Daniel, should another internal genocide occur (which is pretty much a given)? Sit on the sidelines wringing our hands, unable/unwilling to do anything?

I understand your concerns, I really do – but there has to be a point between “a R2P will mean any country can do anything to another country under that guise” and “let’s get in there everytime something a bit nasty might be happening”.

As someone else said, there’s always some excuse that an aggressive country can hang their intervention/aggression on, but that’s what international law is supposedly for – to distinguish between the bollocks and the real. UNSC approval is a good place to start for a stamp of legitimacy, although given the political realities of that body it’s not ideal (that’s a whole larger UN organsiation issue though).

So what would you have the international community do then Daniel, should another internal genocide occur (which is pretty much a given)?

Put a resolution authorising the use of force to the UN Security Council and get it passed, more or less as the current state of international law actually has it.

this doctrine is “Pernicious” in the sense of offering us fewer Iraqs, fewer Turquoises, fewer Ossetias?

“Saddam used weapons of mass destruction on his own people” – didn’t we hear that one endlessly? Humanitarianism was certainly part of the case for the Iraq War, and, if it was not part of what was officially stated to the UN (though was the gassing actually not mentioned? I doubt it), it was certainly part of the case as made to the public by the key leaders including Cheney and Bush.

Sierra Leone should also be excluded. In 1995, 5 years prior to the UN / British involvemnt, the National Provisional Ruling Council had successfuly defeated the RUF using South African mercenaries. The UN demanded the removal of the mercenaries, as a direct result the RUF where in a military possition to safely violate the Abidjan Peace Accord in 1996. The revival of the cival war from 1996 – 2000 was enabled by UN intervention in Sierra Leone.

Re my comment above. I’m pretty sure I specifically remember Colin Powell bringing up the “he used weapons of mass destruction on his own people” argument at the UN. Am I mistaken? The argument is ambiguous in that it can be seen both as emphasizing how dangerous a character he is and as an accusation of atrocities (in the past, but implicitly possible in the future as well) sufficient to justify intervention. I suppose ambiguous humanitarian justifications introduce another issue.

I think that R2P limited by Edward Hyams’s interesting ideas about when it is legitimate to assassinate political leaders might be one way forward.

The whole idea of the UN was, when it was created, to prevent wars between the nation-states: “to maintain international peace and security”. So, for them then to turn around and endorse military aggressions is what – an act of subversion?

HV, that wasn’t the ‘whole idea’. Have a look at the Preamble to the UN Charter, for instance, which resolves, among other things, ‘to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small’ and ‘to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest’.

Doesn’t that one have a mixed motive problem? If it were a humanitarian intervention, I’d be all for it (I’m all for it in any case), but the North’s motive was either retention or acquisition of territory, depending on whether you view secession as a political reality or not.

This is uncharacteristically idealistic of you, Henri: why does the UN, of all bodies, get to dodge the laser-lash of your ultra-cynical pragmatism, as regards motives and intentions and purposes? Think about it: who was the UN set up by, and why?

So the argument as I understand it is that R2P doesn’t work, and is actually bad, because it simply creates a legal option to intervene; and this allows states to use R2P to justify (what? non-humanitarian interventions?) military actions that will only make things worse.

The argument assumes that, once a state has sufficient reason internally to authorize military action in a foreign country, it will then be forced to look for reasons justifying that action under international law (IL). This need for an IL justification acts to hamper a state’s ability to use military force. Otherwise, of course, the existence or non-existence of a R2P doctrine wouldn’t make a shred of difference with respect to non-humanitarian uses of military force.

And it’s this assumption that I do not buy. There are certain norms of international behavior that inform the likely international reaction to a state’s use of military action. But these do not, on my view, have much to do with IL. A state may consider likely economic sanctions, or worse, from other countries. Whether these sanctions, or worse, are forthcoming has very little to do with close legal questions of intent (e.g. did they REALLY mean this to be a humanitarian mission?). There is no impartial judge deciding whether sanctions, or worse, are warranted; there is a group of self-interested nations deciding whether sanctions, or worse, are warranted.

So I simply do not see how a state’s ability to plead R2P as justification has much to do with whether the state takes military action, and whether other states support or punish that military action.

The benefit of an R2P doctrine is NOT that it will thereby, by legal force alone, change the behavior of states; nor is the problem that it will thereby, by providing legal justification, change the behavior of states.

Rather the limited benefit is that it contributes to the growth of a new international norm, and is an explicit indication that sovereignty is not a legal shield for crimes against humanity. Will that make much difference in itself? No. Is it a small part of a larger process of bringing order to the conduct of states in the world? Yes.

…and is an explicit indication that sovereignty is not a legal shield for crimes against humanity.

And this is exactly the problem. If sovereignty is not a shield against military invasions, then you need weapons, preferably nuclear weapons. There are, of course, plenty of other ways to disincentivize bad behavior: political, economic, legal (indictment of leaders of states, for example).

Kosovo is the least tainted example of humanitarian intervention that comes to mind… but it can’t really be used to justify future interventions because even its supporters call it “sui generis” and swear it’ll never happen again. Even if you count Kosovo and Sierra Leone as successes, they’re outnumbered exponentially by mountains of failures, failures where the intervention not only didn’t help but actively worsened the situation. Not a good enough average to justify humanitarian interventionism at all.

The main problem with intervening in an ethnic war like Rwanda is that, even if your intentions are noble (doubtful, especially for France), what do you do once you’re there? In Kosovo, we won the war for the Kosovars, ostensibly because they were victims of ethnic cleansing. If we’d done the same in Darfur, the entire country and probably several of its neighbors would have collapsed in catastrophic violence. If we’d intervened in Sri Lanka, whose side would we have taken? The government who now holds 250,000 people in concentration camps? The terrorist LTTE?

Ethnic wars end when someone wins, or when both sides realize they can’t and agree to a political solution. Political solutions, like that in Kenya last year (incidentally the only time R2P has actually been employed, according to UN R2P expert Ed Luck), are usually the only hope for ending ethnic violence… or a smashing victory by one side, as in Rwanda in 1994 or Sri Lanka this year. We didn’t intervene in Sri Lanka, even when a thousand people were dying a day. We didn’t even really consider it. Nor should we have. The world’s a cruel place sometimes, and sending in foreign guns to an internal conflict seldom makes it less so.

105: well, yes. Hence my doubt that it counts as “unambiguously positive”…