Challenges of Genocide Intervention

Adam Jones is associate professor of political science at the University of British Columbia Okanagan in Kelowna, Canada. His books include Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (Routledge, 2010—2nd ed.).

Intervening in genocide and crimes against humanity, and preventing these atrocities where possible, has never been so prominent a theme as today—whether in the sphere of international politics and diplomacy, or academia, or public debate. Since the end of the Cold War, with its rigid geopolitical divisions and lawless proxy conflicts, an unstable but significant consensus has arisen around a “responsibility to protect” civilian populations threatened with harm. This has often fallen short of the “will to intervene” urged upon policymakers by proponents of the responsibility to protect; where that will has been exercised, it has been open to accusations of hypocrisy and neo-colonialism. This article will consider the erratic course of this norm’s evolution, with reference to the crises and controversies over “humanitarian intervention” in Kosovo and East Timor (1999), Darfur/Sudan (2000s), Libya and Syria (2011–13), and Mali (2013).

The Humanitarian Imperative

Since the publication of Nicholas Wheeler’s groundbreaking Saving Strangers in 2001,¹ a host of scholars have supplied perspectives on the rise of the humanitarian imperative that is today encapsulated in the idea of a “responsibility to protect”. The humanist revolution begun (to speak only of the Western tradition) by Thomas Aquinas was deepened by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, tested with the extraordinarily successful campaigns against slavery and for workers’ rights, and institutionalised to a significant degree in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It was in this period of a “long peace” in Europe—when the great powers were more preoccupied with invading, oppressing, and exterminating distant colonial populations than with battling each other—that an early and limited version of an interventionist discourse arose.

 

In general, as with France’s manipulation of the situation in the Levant (1860s) or William Gladstone’s fulminations against Ottoman atrocities in Bulgaria (1870s), this amounted to little more than a stance of righteous indignation when Christian peoples, and only rarely others, were attacked beyond the European metropole. However, a more cosmopolitan perspective was rapidly emerging elsewhere, buttressed by a more coherent discourse of humanitarian protection.

 

The trend was exemplified by milestones like the founding of the International Committee of the Red Cross (the first national committee was established in 1863), the signing of the first Geneva Convention (1864), and the gradual institutionalisation of advanced medical care for combatants in armies around the Western world. The Congo Reform Association’s activist campaign to unveil the mass atrocities of Belgium’s King Leopold, in the territory that Joseph Conrad imperishably dubbed “the heart of darkness”, continued into the twentieth century. As Adam Hochschild has shown, the struggle against forced labour in Congo served, like the anti-slavery movement, as a template for the humanitarian campaigns that have followed ever since²—including those today to promote policy attention to that same tortured territory of (the Democratic Republic of) Congo. In particular, the building of coalitions among religious networks, intellectual figures and celebrities, trade-union forces, and sympathetic politicos presaged contemporary strategies to intervene in outbreaks of mass atrocities.

Lemkin’s Impact

In 1915, as the Ottoman Empire unleashed genocide against Armenians, Greeks, and other Christian populations of the realm, the Allied powers issued a declaration accusing the regime of “crimes against humanity and civilisation”, entrenching a concept that has come to embody cosmopolitan and universalist discourses of rights. Little came of the Allies’ pledge to bring the perpetrators of anti-Christian genocide before post-war tribunals. But the Ottoman depredations also inspired a young Polish-Jewish scholar named Raphael Lemkin, who lamented the absence of an international law that could confront and suppress such assaults on the minority populations of nation-states.

 

Lemkin incubated his project and vocabulary throughout the 1930s, experimenting with terms like “barbarity” and “vandalism”. The Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939 sent him fleeing to Sweden and then across the Soviet Union to Japan, where he boarded a trans-Pacific liner, bound for exile in the United States. There, in 1943, Lemkin began to document for US authorities the Nazis’ crimes against subject populations—documentation that became the basis of his long and little-read volume Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944). By the time Axis Rule appeared, though, Lemkin had settled on a neologism that may qualify as the most powerful word in the English language. Chapter 9 of the book was called “Genocide”: a grafting of a Greek prefix onto a Latin suffix to describe “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves”. Genocide, Lemkin foundationally contended, “is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group”.³

 

The very invention of “Lemkin’s word”⁴ can itself be considered a notable form of “humanitarian intervention”, and by a single unprepossessing individual, no less. Lemkin’s original formulation of genocide is only now achieving the attention it deserved, with a “return to Lemkin” palpably under way in the discipline that he founded—comparative genocide studies.⁵ In particular, Lemkin’s more culturally imbued understanding of genocidal destruction—he downplayed the element of physical killing, and stressed the threat to reproduction of targeted groups as social units—has strongly influenced work by Martin Shaw, Ward Churchill, and others.⁶

 

Of greater significance, to both world politics and this article, was the campaign that Lemkin launched to persuade delegates to the nascent United Nations to enshrine his concept of genocide in an international convention banning the practice. In the drafting process, Lemkin’s cultural emphasis gave way to a greater focus on physical destruction, so that the 1948 Genocide Convention (still the international legal definition of genocide) explicitly places “killing members of the [national, ethnic, racial, or religious] group” atop its list of genocidal acts. The urgency of Lemkin’s call to prohibit genocide, meanwhile, gave rise to the convention’s prefatory pledge, which underpins contemporary calls to prevent genocide and intervene in genocidal outbreaks. “Having considered … that genocide is a crime under international law, contrary to the spirit and aims of the United Nations and condemned by the civilised world,” and “recognizing that at all periods of history genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity,” the convention called for “international cooperation … to liberate mankind from such an odious scourge.” “[G]enocide,” asserted the Contracting Parties to the convention, “whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish” (emphasis added).⁷

 

Prevent and to punish how, exactly? This, of course, was left unspecified. Tying states to specific obligations, or seeking to develop interventionist institutions beyond the veto-bound UN Security Council, would certainly have reduced the number of states willing to sign the convention—perhaps reducing it to levels fatal for the initiative. So rejection of such steps was one of many compromises, including most prominently the exclusion of political groups from anti-genocide protections,⁸ that featured in the drafting stages and travaux préparatoires⁹ of the convention process.

 

In keeping with this reluctance to move beyond pro forma declarations, state initiatives to prevent and punish genocide were minimal and (in their legal aspect) exclusively national-level from the moment the Genocide Convention entered into legal force, in 1951, through to the 1990s. Lemkin’s concept was virtually absent from international political and legal discourse. Only the efforts of small advocacy groups—for example, the network that arose to publicise atrocities against the Aché Indians of Paraguay—gave anti-genocide initiatives some marginal visibility.¹⁰

During the Cold War

The contemporary discourse of humanitarian intervention is a post–Cold War phenomenon, as Wheeler demonstrates in Saving Strangers. Granted, prior to the fall of the Soviet Union, and Russia’s shift to an uneasy alliance with the West, interventions that overthrew despots and génocidaires were not uncommon. With ten million Bengali refugees fleeing East Pakistani genocide to Indian territory, India intervened in 1971 to crush the Pakistani army and midwife the birth of an independent Bangladesh. Vietnam, infuriated by repeated armed incursions and genocidal massacres of ethnic Vietnamese by the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia, invaded in December 1978 to topple the regime in Phnom Penh and send Pol Pot scurrying to a base in the western jungle (where, ironically, he and his movement received US and other Western support for years, on the grounds that the enemy of the Vietnamese enemy was the West’s friend). In 1979, Tanzania deposed the murderous Idi Amin in Uganda—only to replace him with the similarly atrocious Milton Obote.

 

What is notable, as Wheeler points out, is that in none of these interventions was a humanitarian (let alone anti-genocide) component pre-eminent. Indeed, it was typically invisible, even in propaganda discourse. Considerations of national security were declared to be paramount: a recognition seems to have prevailed that appeals to humanitarian sentiment were unlikely to generate much in the way of public support, and could even prove politically toxic. As for any state’s actually basing its intervention on humanitarian motives, this was all but inconceivable in a world of Cold War Realpolitik.

Two Turning Points

If we wish to isolate the moments when humanitarian considerations did begin to vie with Realpolitik, and occasionally to provoke substantial humanitarian interventions, we might consider the Kurdish uprising at the tail end of the first Gulf War of 1990–1, and the later and lesser-known of the two major humanitarian interventions of 1999, in East Timor (following the more celebrated case of Kosovo). A broad consensus exists that in 1991, George Bush, Sr., and his key allies chose not to overthrow Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, and to allow him to fly his helicopters to crush regional uprisings in the north and south that Western pronouncements had previously encouraged. When the Kurds of the north rebelled at the same time as the Shias of the south, the Saddam regime’s devastating response sent hundreds of thousands of Kurds fleeing across Iraq’s borders with Iran and Turkey. The flow to Iran was larger by far. But it was in Turkey that the new twenty-four-hour news network CNN and other international reporters could readily reach the sites of large concentrations of desperate refugees in their stark hillside encampments. The resulting outcry in the United States and elsewhere gave birth to what has been called the “CNN effect”.¹¹ Ever since, debate has raged over the potency of this variable in determining policy outcomes. But it seems likely that at specific conjunctures and in particular places, a highly vocal intervention by media and mobilised publics on humanitarian grounds, often assisted by elite and/or celebrity figures, can decisively affect the outcome¹²—in the Kurdish case, by prompting the establishment of a “no-fly zone” in north-eastern Iraq, and of the Kurdish quasi-state that still exists.

 

The intervention in East Timor provides the most trenchant recent instance in which humanitarian motives trumped those of Realpolitik. To this author, it is the most intriguing of the set of avowedly humanitarian interventions conducted over the past couple of decades. The weight of “practical considerations” against intervening was so overwhelming here, and the attraction of Timorese claims to independence was objectively so limited for states and other powerful actors, that the outcome seems inexplicable without primary reference to the global protests that erupted following the crackdown by Indonesian forces in East Timor in August–September 1999. Surely, any “realist” understanding of international politics would predict that key actors, notably the United States and Australia, would maintain precisely the “hands-off” stance they had always adopted towards the East Timor issue. Indonesia would be granted a free hand to kill and oppress the Timorese, in return for maintaining the highly profitable economic, political, and military relationships with the West that were deeply entrenched by 1999.

 

But instead, when Timorese voted for independence and Indonesian-supported paramilitaries went on their rampage (while the army stood by or actively assisted in the violence), a quite extraordinary range of state and (mostly) non-state actors thrust themselves to centre stage:

 

• Pro-Timor campaigners—concentrated in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Portugal—immediately activated their carefully nurtured and highly experienced networks of supporters. They used new communications technologies to deliver rapidly thousands of messages and other expressions of concern to key political leaders, UN delegates, and so on. They also brought tens of thousands of protesters into the streets in angry, highly visible demonstrations. Otherwise ordinary civil-society actors sometimes played a notable role. In Australia, for example, military veterans of the Timor campaign during the Second World War and their children—recalling the assistance Timorese had rendered Australians at great personal cost—volubly expressed disgust at their government’s inaction, and its long-time support for the Indonesian dictatorship.

 

• The United Nations, for its part, was deeply sobered by the catastrophes it had enabled and even assisted in Rwanda (April–July 1994) and Srebrenica in Bosnia (July 1995). The head of UN Peacekeeping Operations at the time of those disasters, and supervisor of subsequent UN inquests into them, was Kofi Annan—the Secretary-General during the Timor crisis. Apparently spurred by recent and painful memories, Annan moved swiftly to mobilise great-power support and Australian leadership of an intervention force.

 

• The United States—for reasons that have yet to be studied in detail, to my knowledge—retreated from its historic support for the Indonesian military. It had guided the army in its extermination or incarceration of the membership of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), or anyone accused of membership, in the holocaust of 1965–6.¹³ Ever since, the United States, together with most of its allies, had supported and profited from the Indonesian dictatorship. Perhaps what facilitated the policy shift was the combination of a comparatively liberal US president (Bill Clinton) and a democratising regime in Indonesia (surely President Suharto would not have granted the Timorese a plebiscite on independence, as interim leader B. J. Habibie fatefully did in 1999). As well, the then-recent example of Kosovo—which saw the United States loudly proclaim humanitarian justifications for intervening against the Milosevic regime of Serbia, in the absence of Security Council approval—put the Clinton government on the spot when, just a few months later, a similarly brutal suppression of a minority group became a cause célèbre. Lastly, the United States was hardly immune to the demonstrations, message-writing campaigns, and other protests that swept the Western world during Indonesia’s bloody crackdown of August–September 1999. The East Timor Action Network (ETAN), in particular, was a notable activist and lobbying force on the US political landscape.¹⁴

 

The result was an extraordinary about-turn. The Australian government was shamed into offering to lead an armed intervention force that adopted a no-nonsense, shoot-to-kill policy towards genocidal militia who refused to lay down their arms. The United States issued a strong threat to the Indonesian military that aid and support would be suspended if it did not stand aside. Boots were on the ground in a matter of days; violent resistance was rapidly suppressed; and on 20 May 2002, East Timor became an independent state.

The Responsibility to Protect

The Kurdish and Timorese examples suggest that a humanitarian imperative has become a force in international affairs—with uneven but occasionally decisive policy consequences, not merely rhetorical ones. The imperative was enshrined in the famous report on “The Responsibility to Protect”, drafted by the Canadian-sponsored International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS). Issued in 2001, it was formally adopted by delegates to the United Nations World Summit in 2005, and buttressed further by a 2009 report by the Secretary-General. The “responsibility to protect” shaped discussions surrounding the historic Security Council resolution 1973 of March 2011, authorising member states “to take all necessary measures … to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack” in Libya.

 

The ICISS report and subsequent elaborations notably revise the concept of sovereignty, returning it to its social–contractual roots, and implying that its protections against outside interference are rendered void when a government abandons the responsibility to protect its own population, and instead inflicts genocide and crimes against humanity upon them. In such cases, the international community had its own “responsibility to protect” victimised populations from further harm. Recognising that military intervention should always be a last resort, the ICISS proposed a range of sanctions and other measures that could be implemented to restrain perpetrators and would-be perpetrators.¹⁵ Indeed, given the growing chariness of most militarily powerful states about engaging in military interventions, it is such sanctions, along with denunciations and threats of legal punishment, that tend to take centre-stage in contemporary responses to international crises and emergencies.

 

Other broadly successful interventions of the Kurdish and Timorese types may be noted: the United Kingdom in Sierra Leone in 2000;¹⁶ the United Nations’ “preventive deployment” in Macedonia (1995–8);¹⁷ the Nigerian-led Economic Community of West African States’ intervention in the Liberian civil war.¹⁸ After decades of torment by Khartoum, the territory of South Sudan gained independence in 2011, with strong international support. The worst violence in Sudan’s Darfur region subsided after 2004, though the significance of the public-advocacy effort around this case—certainly the most sustained anti-genocide initiative of the 2000s—is unclear.¹⁹

 

At the same time as a humanitarian imperative has gained ground, however, it has suffered shattering setbacks. Those in Rwanda and Bosnia, already mentioned, are only the tip of the iceberg. The Democratic Republic of Congo remains a running sore of violence, predation, and mass mortality—over five million killed, by the count of the International Rescue Committee—while even the world’s largest UN peacekeeping force (MONUC/MONUSCO) has proved ineffectual. Civil-society initiatives have also sometimes appeared temporary or faddish. The Darfur movement has been criticised for failing to acknowledge the post-2004 decline in Sudanese atrocities, and rebel responsibility for some of the violence, among other oversights. Intervention in Libya in 2011 prompted a collapse of the centralised state and its fragmentation into literally hundreds of mutually competitive and often conflictive militia-run fiefdoms. Intervention in Syria has proved a non-starter, with the exception of the efforts of neighbouring and nearby states—Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar—which seemed cynically self-interested, and which often promoted foreign and Sunni-chauvinist brands of Islamic fundamentalism, such as Saudi Wahhabism.

The Anti-Imperialists

Voices against foreign “imperial” interventions, regardless of whether the justifications offered by the interveners are humanitarian, utilitarian, or a mélange, have occasionally straddled the political spectrum. Both staunchly leftist/progressive and ultra-nationalist/neo-fascist elements protested against US intervention in Bosnia/Kosovo/Serbia, for example. Frequently as well, the left and the right have taken up opposed positions for or against a given intervention: canonically, Spain in the 1930s; Algeria and Vietnam; Iraq in 1990–1 and again in 2003. In at least one case, that of post–Khmer Rouge Cambodia, the issue of intervention prompted an almost Orwellian political realignment. When the Vietnamese banished the Pol Pot regime to the hinterland and installed their own client government in Phnom Penh, the United States, which had denounced the Khmer Rouge during their rule as the incarnation of evil, suddenly declared that a representative of a Khmer Rouge–dominated coalition should occupy Cambodia’s UN seat, citing the need to preserve “continuity” with the previous regime!²⁰

 

In the contemporary period, leftist anti-intervention discourse has been more prominent than its rightist counterpart. At the time of the Kosovo intervention of 1999 and its aftermath, “a leftwing cottage industry bloomed … depicting it as malign US/NATO imperialism rather than an altruistic venture”.²¹ Similar accusations have been levelled in the context of Western actions towards Omar al-Bashir’s Sudan, the Iran of the Ayatollahs, Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya, and Bashar al-Assad’s family dictatorship in Syria. These are strange alliances for self-proclaimed leftists to be courting, and this has not gone unnoticed, prompting many leftists—including myself—to support interventions mounted by Western actors under certain restrictive conditions.

 

The leftist critiques do, however, raise a reasonable question: should substantial self-interest rule out participation in humanitarian initiatives? I personally opposed the US–UK invasion of Iraq in 2003 on the grounds that it was a thinly disguised imperial exercise. Powerful evidence of this is offered by the documentation of US–UK negotiations to divvy up rights to exploit Iraqi oilfields in the prelude to the invasion, and the consequent sight of US forces heading straight to secure the Oil Ministry in Baghdad and virtually no other facility after their conquest of the Iraqi capital.

 

I vocally supported the Western-led and -supported interventions in Kosovo (which most on the left did not), East Timor (as nearly all on the left did, somewhat contradictorily), Sudan, Libya, and Mali. Such stances constitute “humanitarian imperialism” in some eyes²²—a putatively “progressive” version of the activities and proclamations of the Victorian-era missionaries who paved the way for colonial expansion. Consider the scathing opinion–editorial piece about France’s Mali intervention by long-time Africa observer Gerald Caplan, published in Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper in early 2013, as French forces were continuing their sweep north into formerly rebel-held areas. Caplan cautioned that when it came to welcoming interventions by the former colonial power, it was a matter of buyer beware:

 

The last time a French socialist president intervened in Africa, Francois Mitterrand threw his active support behind the genocidaires in Rwanda for the usual reasons of French realpolitik … The French worked with the extremists every step of the way, becoming actively complicit in the 1994 slaughter of perhaps a million innocent Rwandan Tutsi. French soldiers in Rwanda then allowed large numbers of the genocide leaders to escape into Congo where they promptly began to re-mobilize. The appalling wars of the Congo had begun … No one knows exactly how many dead Africans France has been responsible for, directly or indirectly, during its colonial and post-colonial pursuits in Africa … It’s quite a rap sheet.

 

According to Caplan, interventions like the French had more to do with securing access to Mali’s rich and already well-exploited mineral base than with confronting a nebulous “terrorism”.²³ The political context of Malian rebellion, moreover, was “in reality extremely complex, worlds beyond the simplistic narrative of marauding al-Qaeda terrorists”. “That foreign military intervention is capable of ‘fixing’ the crisis, whatever that means, seems wildly unrealistic,” Caplan asserted. He did not claim to know what could resolve it, but argued that “another interminable foreign war by the white world against another group of Muslims seems the least useful strategy possible, certain to fuel even more extremism, to provoke retaliation against the intervening powers, as already witnessed, and to exacerbate the humanitarian disaster”.²⁴

 

Such scepticism and opposition towards foreign interventions characterised a substantial part of my own political upbringing as well. In part, though, the support for intervention that I and others²⁵ have sometimes offered—whether fervent (East Timor) or highly qualified (Libya)—reflects a conviction that many of the recent interventions do not fit well with standard leftist interpretations of great-power behaviour. I have already cited the challenge that Iraqi Kurdistan and East Timor pose to conventional realist understandings of great-power self-interest, for example. In the case of the interventions of the 1990s (Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor), what evidence have the ensuing couple of decades offered that these interventions were acts of rapacious imperialism? Precious little, in my view. Bosnia has been a financial, political, and military sinkhole, notably for members of the European Community. This includes Germany, which many leftist theorists depicted as engineering the break-up of Yugoslavia in order to re-establish a German-dominated continental order not unreminiscent of the Nazis’. Has Kosovo since 1999 been inundated by Western investment and economic exploitation, or has it, too, proved a bottomless pit of stabilisation and security expenditures? What of East Timor? Or Iraqi Kurdistan, which the West in fact embargoed together with the Saddam regime during the 1990s, and where Turkish capital and political influence predominate today? If such interventions were links in a dastardly imperial chain, the imperialists seem to have neglected or forgotten their interests rather rapidly. They also seem willing to have endured much more of a drain on their financial, material, and symbolic resources, to prop up these post-intervention regimes, than imperial self-interest would appear to warrant.

 

I thus contend that while imperially motivated interventions must be denounced and opposed,²⁶ interventions in which imperially complicit powers participate, or which they seek to mobilise, should not be ruled out. This is especially true when there is a poverty of alternatives. France in Mali seems a viable example at the time of writing. So, too, the British in Sierra Leone and the Australians in East Timor. What if British or Australian policymakers included self-interested elements in their calculations? What if such interests even dominate a government’s calculations? I have acknowledged that “calls for intervention may legitimately be analyzed for possible ulterior motives, but the existence of such motives should not necessarily rule out intervention altogether”.²⁷ Advocates for threatened or persecuted populations may at times have to hold their noses and support intervention in which deeply unsavoury regimes and armed forces participate.²⁸ Perhaps they can even “pivot off” such support to generate greater attention to the crimes and hypocrisies of key participants.

 

Surely a nuanced and case-specific approach—one that recognises the challenges of securing accurate information, and keeping one’s position current in the face of fast-changing events—is preferable to ideologically fuelled rejection tout court. In the case of Serb atrocities in Bosnia-Herzegovina, for instance, the leftist critique of Western intervention at times reflected sympathy for the brutal Milosevic regime in Belgrade. A still grimmer abdication of moral responsibility was evinced by leftist stalwart Edward S. Herman in his co-authored book The Politics of Genocide. Herman and David S. Peterson adopted an explicitly denialist stance towards the genocide of Rwandan Tutsis by agents of “Hutu Power” in 1994. Their book was enthusiastically endorsed by several leftist luminaries, including John Pilger, and featured a purpose-written introduction by none other than Noam Chomsky. For Herman and Peterson, the mere fact that the United States and other Western countries supported the Tutsi-dominated regime of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) after 1994 demonstrates that the RPF was always a tool of Western interests and the principal agent of genocide in 1994. A handful of commentators have sought to counter this malicious and dangerous leftist denialism.²⁹ But with most people in the West and elsewhere oblivious to the distinction and relationship between Hutus and Tutsis (or Hutsis and Tutus?), they confront an uphill battle.

Conservative Critiques and ‘Moral Hazard’

In addition to the leftist anti-imperialist critique, there exists a range of conservative, “realist”, and isolationist perspectives. These share some characteristics with leftist views: for example, they emphasise the importance of preserving state sovereignty in international relations, or the need to focus on pressing domestic problems. In addition, these more right-wing critiques contend that humanitarian interventions squander resources and thereby undermine national power. They point to the unpredictability and sometimes the “boomerang effect” of interventionist outcomes. At the xenophobic–racist end of the spectrum, they question whether people in “developing” countries, distant from the centres of power, merit humanitarian consideration and protection, and whether it might not be better simply to leave them to exterminate one another.

 

The recently prominent strand of moral-hazard critique also merits discussion. It is closely associated with US scholar Alan Kuperman, who has advanced a range of arguments and a handful of case-studies to show that a tendency exists for violent rebel groups to use propaganda and humanitarian appeals to provoke attention and eventually decisive military intervention from the outside, thereby handing rebel forces a victory (usually independence or autonomy) that they could never have achieved on their own. The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and rebel groups in Sudan’s Darfur region receive the greatest attention in Kuperman’s analysis. Thus, by supporting humanitarian intervention, one may be implicitly encouraging otherwise doomed rebellion, and fomenting the kind of violence against civilians that one claims to abhor—hence the moral-hazard component. As Kuperman presented the argument in a recent article for Genocide Studies and Prevention:

 

when international pressure seeks to coerce a state to concede to rebels, the militants typically are emboldened by the perceived diplomatic support, which compels the state to intensify its counterinsurgency, thereby exacerbating humanitarian suffering and reducing the prospects for democratization ... Since at least 1945, most genocidal violence has been state retaliation against perceived civilian supporters of rebellion. Humanitarian intervention aims to protect these civilians, but, in so doing, it often rewards the rebels as well, by enabling them to attain political objectives of autonomy or independence, as in Kosovo or Iraqi Kurdistan. The recent practice of humanitarian intervention thus creates a perverse incentive for rebellion by militants who cannot protect their own civilians against anticipated state retaliation—as in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Darfur. Counterintuitive as this conclusion may seem, institutionalizing humanitarian intervention thus causes some genocidal violence that would not otherwise occur.³⁰

 

The moral-hazard critique makes a number of valuable contributions. It counters the reflexive tendency towards anti-state and pro-rebel positions of much leftist/“progressive” commentary. It urges foreign actors to ponder carefully the likely implications of support for opposition movements that include an armed component. It demands closer attention to the nature and strategies of rebel groups, rejecting the naivety and romanticism with which distant and largely ignorant observers often regard them. At times, it also overlaps with leftist critiques—when, that is, the left has its own reasons to disavow rebel campaigns. Kuperman has joined many leftist critics, for example, in denouncing the actions of Saudi Arabia and Qatar in arming, influencing, and directing the operations of increasingly Islamicised rebel forces in Syria.

 

Curiously, however, Kuperman has resembled the most ardent neo-conservative in strongly backing a military attack against Iranian nuclear sites, dismissing the need for any concern over the fate of Iran’s opposition after such an assault as likely “temporary”.³¹ Foreign military intervention is justified, even if unilateral and in defiance of international law, but only if it is in the pressing national interest of the intervening state. Kuperman’s presentation of case-studies like Kosovo and Sudan has been criticised as ahistorical;³² it is also somewhat counter-intuitive. The “international community” has proved spectacularly fickle when it comes to interventions in sovereign states, especially when pressing material/national/imperial interests are absent. (And if such incentives are present, why would marginal rebel groups have to lobby great powers to intervene?) Very often in the post‑Second World War era, key players have stood by while rebellions, opposition movements, and popular forces were crushed—a brief list of such crises would include Hungary in 1956, Nigeria during the Biafran Civil War of the 1960s, Poland in 1981, China in 1989, Iraq in 1991, Chechnya throughout the 1990s, Iran in 2009, Bahrain in 2011, and Syria in 2012–13. Rwanda in 1994 showed that even a manifest holocaust could not reliably spur the international community to intervention. At many points, moreover, this silence has denoted complicity—see Bahrain for an abject example—and/or Western powers have actively assisted the state in crushing the rebellion. The instances of this latter phenomenon are too numerous to mention.

 

No doubt many or most rebels yearn for outside intervention to advance their cause. But what rebel movement with knowledge of this past would rely on such intervention, and focus its strategy on bringing it about—even deliberately provoking state atrocities against civilian populations for the humanitarian outrage they cause? If there is excessive romanticism in many leftist portraits of rebellions and their architects, there is also overreach in the moral-hazard framework, which displays little understanding of the savage and institutionalised state violence against civilians that generally precedes the launching of any sustained armed resistance. Such violence against unarmed opponents, in most cases, is the true and original “provocation”.

Conclusion

This article has explored some of the recent history of international “humanitarian” interventions—those invasions of or incursions into sovereign territory that are defended substantially or primarily on humanitarian grounds. We have seen that there are solid reasons to expose such justifications to sustained critique. Often, as with the US–UK intervention in Iraq in 2003, humanitarian justifications crumble upon closer analysis. Sometimes, however, they do not. They may co-exist uneasily with imperial self-interest and Realpolitik, but I have suggested that even such a foul-smelling admixture is generally preferable to the continued perpetration of genocide and crimes against humanity. And on a small handful of occasions, notably Iraq in 1991 and East Timor in 1999, humanitarian considerations may actually have over-ridden the traditional understandings of their interests by great powers.

 

If this is so, it can only be because something like a humanitarian imperative has taken root in influential sectors of an increasingly global society. In his never-finished and only recently published Introduction to the Study of Genocide, written during the 1950s, Raphael Lemkin spoke of “the history of genocide provid[ing] examples of the awakening of humanitarian feelings”. He traced this “awakening of world conscience … to the times when the world community took an affirmative stand to protect human groups from extinction”, as far back as the fifteenth century.³³ Lemkin perceived the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, with its explicitly preventive and interventionist component, as part of this evolution. Though such perspectives are easily mocked as starry-eyed idealism, I think their footprint in contemporary international politics is undeniable.

 

Anyone who supports outside intervention in some cases of mass atrocity or humanitarian crisis must address a range of analytical challenges. How is accurate information on the events to be gleaned? How is one to discern whether humanitarian justifications are merely a cynical cover for imperial self-interest? If some self-interest on the part of nation-states is a given, where does one draw the line between this and predatory imperialism? Which measures can be utilised to reduce the necessity for military intervention? If such an intervention does occur, which strategies and mechanisms of oversight can help to ensure that the intervention is proportionate in its use of violence, does not commit systematic atrocities itself or support those who do, and is as temporary as reasonably possible? How can responsible national and regional actors best be involved, and perhaps granted a leading role? What are the most viable strategies for long-term conflict resolution and society-level reconciliation, and what forms of outside involvement, if any, are appropriate?

 

This far from exhausts the quandaries confronted by anyone seeking to stake out a practical and morally responsible position on a given intervention, or proposed intervention. One final dilemma—in some ways the elephant in the room—should be acknowledged in closing. Why can interventions be contemplated against only the weaker states of the world? When a state that is a permanent member of the Security Council, for example, perpetrates or is complicit in massive atrocities, why should it enjoy effective immunity from intervention and legal redress? I have argued here that even interventions by known criminals may be warranted in extremis. But this acknowledgment is not exactly heart-warming. A genuine humanitarian perspective is inherently a universalist one. Recent decades have witnessed a certain decline in the carte blanche that powerful actors have enjoyed—whether they subsequently face legal proceedings, as with Augusto Pinochet, or confront sizable and globalised protests against their actions, as with the Americans and British in Iraq or the Chinese in Tibet. My sense is that this trend will continue and deepen. If it does, perhaps the yawning inconsistencies and cynical hypocrisies that blight ostensibly “humanitarian” interventions will gradually be reduced.

Endnotes

1. Nicholas J. Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

 

2. Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Central Africa (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1999); Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Boston, Mass.: Mariner Books, 2006).

 

3. Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Leiden: The Lawbook Exchange, 2008 [1944]). The text of the crucial Chapter 9 of Axis Rule is available at [http://www.preventgenocide.org/lemkin/AxisRule1944-1.htm].

 

4. See Michael Ignatieff, “Lemkin’s Word”, New Republic, 26 February 2001.

 

5. The “return to Lemkin” is typified by new research into his previously unpublished writings on the theory and history of genocide. Much of this work has now been compiled and sensitively edited. See Raphael Lemkin, Lemkin on Genocide, ed. Steven Leonard Jacobs (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2012).

 

6. Martin Shaw, What Is Genocide? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007); Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present (San Francisco, Calif.: City Lights Publishers, 1997).

 

7. For the complete text of the convention, see [http://www.preventgenocide.org/law/convention/text.htm].

 

8. On the process by which political groups were first considered for inclusion under the protections of the Genocide Convention, then finally excluded, see David L. Nersessian, Genocide and Political Groups (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

 

9. See Hirad Abtahi and Philippa Webb, eds., The Genocide Convention: The Travaux Préparatoires, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2008).

 

10. See, for example, Richard Arens, Genocide in Paraguay (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1976).

 

11. On the “CNN effect” and similar developments in the media landscape, see Adam Jones, “Wired World: Communications Technology, Governance, and the Democratic Uprising”, in The Global Political Economy of Communication: Hegemony, Telecommunication and the Information Economy, ed. Edward Comor (London: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 145–64; available online at [http://adamjones.freeservers.com/wired.htm].

 

12. Examples of such influence from before the contemporary era of “humanitarian intervention” include the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade, the campaign against Leopold’s atrocities in the Congo, and the global mobilisation against South African apartheid. All were the products of international, highly co-ordinated, highly creative movements firmly anchored at the grassroots of various Western (and in the South African case, also non-Western) societies.

 

13. See Robert Cribb, “Genocide in Indonesia, 1965–1966”, Journal of Genocide Research 3, no. 2 (2001), pp. 219–39. [See also Katherine McGregor, “Mass Violence in the Indonesian Transition from Sukarno to Suharto”, in this issue of Global Dialogue. Ed.]

 

14. An eyewitness account and trenchant analysis of the 1999 events in East Timor is Geoffrey Robinson, “If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die”: How Genocide Was Stopped in East Timor (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009).

 

15. As articulated in the so-called “three pillars” of the Responsibility to Protect, “the State carries the primary responsibility for protecting populations from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing, and their incitement; The international community has a responsibility to encourage and assist States in fulfilling this responsibility; The international community has a responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other means to protect populations from these crimes. If a State is manifestly failing to protect its populations, the international community must be prepared to take collective action to protect populations, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.” See United Nations Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, “The Responsibility to Protect” [http://www.un.org/en/preventgenocide/adviser/responsibility.shtml].

 

16. See Paul Williams, “Fighting for Freetown: British Military Intervention in Sierra Leone”, Contemporary Security Policy 22, no. 3 (2001), pp. 140–68.

 

17. See Henryk J. Sokalski, An Ounce of Prevention: Macedonia and the UN Experience in Preventive Diplomacy (Washington, D.C.: United State Institute of Peace, 2003).

 

18. See Adekeye Adebajo, Liberia’s Civil War: Nigeria, Ecomog, and Regional Security in West Africa (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2002).

 

19. See Rebecca Hamilton, Fighting for Darfur: Public Action and the Struggle to Stop Genocide (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

 

20. See Ben Kiernan, “The Cambodian Genocide and Imperial Culture”, in 90 Years of Denial, a special publication of Aztag Daily (Beirut) and the Armenian Weekly (Boston, Mass.), April 2005, pp. 20–1.

 

21. Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 578; see also the list of authors and sources cited in note 30 on p. 604.

 

22. See, for example, Noam Chomsky, “Humanitarian Imperialism: The New Doctrine of Imperial Right”, Monthly Review, September 2008 [http://www.chomsky.info/articles/200809--.htm].

 

23. Some commentary even alleged that the Malian intervention was an attempt by France and the United States to head off China’s growing political and economic influence in West Africa. See, for example, F. William Engdahl, “Mali and AFRICOM’s African Agenda: Target China”, Voltairenet.org, 31 January 2013.

 

24. Gerald Caplan, “Shadow of Rwanda Is Cast over France’s Involvement in Mali”, Globe and Mail, 18 January 2013.

 

25. It is interesting that perhaps the best-known of the anti-interventionists, Noam Chomsky, claims to have supported the UN-approved intervention in Libya, albeit briefly. “We don’t know if Benghazi was going to be destroyed, but it [the intervention] was called to prevent a possible attack on Benghazi. You can debate how likely the attack was, but personally, I felt that was legitimate—to try to stop a possible atrocity. However, that intervention lasted about five minutes.” See Eric Bailey, “An Interview with Noam Chomsky on Obama’s Human Rights Record”, Counterpunch.org, 12 December 2024 [http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/12/12/an-interview-with-noam-chomsky-on-obamas-human-rights-record/]. See also these 1984 comments by Chomsky on intervention in El Salvador: “Everybody should be sending arms [to the FMLN rebels] … It’s perfectly legitimate to send arms to people who finally try to use violence in self-defense against a gang of mass murderers installed by a foreign power.” (Talk at the University of California, Berkeley, 14 May 2024 [http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky].) Usually it is non-state actors like the Salvadoran FMLN that command leftist support. But the era of the Spanish Civil War and Second World War serves as a reminder that the left may also favour intervention/invasion when leftist–progressive regimes are threatened, or when fascist ones are empowered.

 

26. See Adam Jones, ed., Genocide, War Crimes and the West: History and Complicity (London: Zed Books, 2004).

 

27. Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, p. 578.

 

28. As an analogy, if a child were drowning in a river, and the only person on the riverbank was a known paedophile, should one support the paedophile’s intervention—even if this risks subsequent harm to the child, or mitigation of the paedophile’s past crimes?

 

29. See Adam Jones, “Denying Rwanda”, in Jones, The Scourge of Genocide: Essays and Reflections (London: Routledge, in press); available at [http://jonestream.blogspot.ca/2010/11/denying-rwanda-response-to-herman.html].

 

30. Alan J. Kuperman, “Wishful Thinking Will Not Stop Genocide: Suggestions for a More Realistic Strategy”, Genocide Studies and Prevention 4, no. 2 (August 2009), pp. 191–9.

 

31. Alan J. Kuperman, “There’s Only One Way to Stop Iran”, New York Times, 23 December 2009.

 

32. See Jon Western, “Illusions of Moral Hazard: A Conceptual and Empirical Critique”, and Harrison R. Wagner, “The Hazards of Thinking about Moral Hazard”, both in Gambling on Humanitarian Intervention: Moral Hazard, Rebellion and Civil War, ed. Timothy W. Crawford and Alan J. Kuperman (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 74–96.

 

33. Lemkin, Lemkin on Genocide, p. 10.