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Humanitarian intervention

By Jake Lynch - posted Friday, 29 May 2009


“Nationalist thug terrorises, massacres civilians in drive to crush separatists.” A story from southeast Europe a decade ago, which brought fearful retribution on the head of Yugoslavia’s president, Slobodan Milosevic. A NATO bombing campaign rained down ordnance on his country for 78 days, and he ended up in The Hague on war crimes charges.

Ten years on, it’s been replayed in south Asia, with the bloody end game of Sri Lanka’s war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who waged an indiscriminate campaign of violence for a quarter of a century. Their counterparts in Serbia were the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), seen by many in the West as a plucky little group of rebels, but known locally for attacks on civilian representatives of the federal government such as police and postal workers. A UN report found they had elbowed their rivals, the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), out of power in town halls, instructing officials to join them instead and shooting those who refused.

The task of brokering a deal to recognise the aspirations to self-determination of the Albanian Kosovars was taken up by a Contact Group, comprising the foreign ministers of the US, UK, Russia, Italy, France and Germany. The deal they put on the table in Paris would have led to Kosovo’s independence - the red line for Milosevic, and one they knew he would not cross. John Gilbert, a defence minister in the British government, later told a committee of MPs, inquiring into the sequence of events that led to war, that the talks “set the bar deliberately too high” to get an agreement.

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The Norwegian government tried to facilitate a peace deal in Sri Lanka, their efforts being rewarded by a ceasefire agreement in 2002. But Mahinda Rajapaksa’s narrow presidential election victory three years later sent the process into reverse. Like Milosevic, he forged alliances with right-wing nationalist parties, opposed to any concessions. Their agreement included revisions of the ceasefire to give the military broader powers against the LTTE, as well as ruling out any devolution to the Tamil people: the red line they could never cross.

The logical conclusion of that political gambit has just been played out, with Rajapaksa and his supporters in Colombo celebrating a military victory. The UN estimated the number of civilians killed, between January 20 and May 7, at more than 7,000, with 16,700 wounded. We can only guess how many more perished in the final, desperate ten days. That statistic, along with the dangerous conditions in camps run by the military for those who fled the fighting, amounts to a humanitarian disaster. I use the phrase in a deliberate echo of the debate over Kosovo. It was to forestall such an outcome, we were told, that NATO warplanes took to the skies.

In Sri Lanka, however, there was no outside military intervention. The British, fierce foes of Belgrade back in the 1990s, this time confined themselves to volleys of words, leading calls for a ceasefire that went unheeded.

Why things have changed

All states are obliged to take positive action to uphold human rights, under Chapter IX of the UN Charter on economic and social co-operation. Article 55 commits the world body to uphold the “universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all”, and, according to Article 56, “all Members pledge themselves to take joint and separate action in co-operation with the Organization for the achievement of the purposes set forth in Article 55”.

Then UK Prime Minister Tony Blair set out the case for that commitment to apply, also, to measures provided for under Chapter VII, the use of force, which the Security Council can approve in circumstances when - according to Article 42 - “international peace and security” are at stake. In a speech in Chicago, in April 1999, as Britain’s Royal Air Force was helping its American buddies to bomb and strafe the Serbs, Blair adumbrated what he called “the doctrine of the international community”. When “oppression produces massive flows of refugees which unsettle neighbouring countries”, he said, the UN’s basic principle of “non-interference” should be set aside.

Not long afterwards, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty began considering these issues. Its co-chairperson was Gareth Evans, the former Australian foreign minister. In his new book, he recalls a one-on-one “arm-wrestling” session with the US representative, Congressman Lee Hamilton, over one crucial issue: should such interventions require explicit UN approval, to be seen as legitimate? NATO’s attack on Yugoslavia was never put to a vote in the Security Council, where it would have run into a certain veto from Russia.

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In the event, the ICISS report, The Responsibility to Protect, hedged its bets. The Evans-Hamilton formula was, in effect, that the Security Council was the best authority for such interventions, but that it “should take into account in all its deliberations that, if it fails to discharge its responsibility to protect in conscience-shocking situations crying out for action, concerned states may not rule out other means to meet the gravity and urgency of that situation”. It could have been drafted to avoid ruling NATO’s attack on Yugoslavia “offside”: and, Evans’ book confirms, it was.

The R2P report set out four “precautionary principles” to govern such interventions. They must be primarily motivated by a desire to protect threatened populations, it says, even though other, more selfish aims might also be present. Military intervention must be a last resort, it must be proportionate and it must be likely to do more good than harm.

The NATO allies professed their humanitarian concern, but the massive refugee flows to which Blair referred were triggered by their own bombing, and then by its cessation, with a net exodus of some 200,000 non-Albanians from their homes in Kosovo.

The US had secretly armed and trained the KLA to take over from the LDK as the recognised representatives of the Kosovo Albanians, having adopted a strategy of “prevent[ing] the emergence of European-only security arrangements that would undermine NATO” in the post-Cold War era. The words are from a Pentagon memo, Defense Planning Guidance. Military problems would require the intervention of a military alliance, led from Washington, whereas purely political ones could be solved by the European Union, to the exclusion of the United States. For American influence to continue in Europe, conflicts had to be militarised: the US needed this to become a shooting war, and their diplomatic efforts only make sense if this is borne in mind.

By associating the responsibility to protect civilians and uphold human rights, with regime change and the re-drawing of international borders, Kosovo polarised opinion in the international community, creating a gap through which the Rajapaksa government could pass.

The UK’s calls for a ceasefire in Sri Lanka led to angry demonstrations outside the British embassy, with demonstrators making explicit, to journalists, the tacit message of their government’s geo-political positioning. We don’t need support from hypocritical liberal western countries, this line went, now China is our patron in the international community. Sri Lanka is, indeed, one country where Beijing has extended its “peaceful rise” policies, along with Sudan, Zimbabwe and sundry others.

China’s assiduity in cultivating such relationships is the counterpart and consequence of the “hub and spoke” doctrine of US foreign policy, where allied and friendly countries each have a “special relationship” with America. Few if any allies have been quite so candid as the Australian government has been recently in constructing China as a military foe. This year’s Defence White Paper says: “The pace, scope and structure of China’s military modernisation have the potential to give its neighbours cause for concern if not carefully explained, and if China does not reach out to others to build confidence regarding its military plans”.

The Rajapaksas of this world can cosy up to China and thumb their nose at the R2P doctrine. It has, in any case, been stripped of the “Lee Hamilton clause” since the version adopted at the UN General Assembly, meeting at Head of State and Government level in 2005, stipulates that the Security Council must give its approval for any humanitarian military intervention. Moves to intervene to protect Tamil civilians would have fallen foul of a veto from Beijing.

China is building up a “hinterland” of influence in the international community as a bulwark against destabilisation and possible attack; fears stoked by such episodes as Kosovo - when a NATO bombing “error” flattened the Chinese embassy in Belgrade - along with rapid military build-ups in such places as Australia, as the US raises the stakes in what is, in strategic terms, China’s backyard. Asia-Pacific was one of three key regions identified in Defense Planning Guidance where the US must forestall the emergence of alternative centres of power.

What can be done?

It was the invasion of Iraq that saw what Thomas Weiss calls “the sunset of humanitarian intervention”. By the time of the UN General Assembly vote, “blowback” from that episode, he says, had “preclude[d] serious discussion [of guidelines for humanitarian intervention] for the foreseeable future”.

The Sri Lanka case underscores the need for renewed discussion. Taking the responsibility for the protection and extension of human rights out of Chapter IX of the UN Charter and into Chapter VII automatically creates a problem. If the use of military force is to be contemplated, then the owners of that force inevitably import their own interests into any decision over its use.

The UN needs its own personnel to send in to places like that rapidly shrinking sliver of jungle and sand where Tamil families were reduced to cowering from artillery fire in makeshift trenches. Anyone entering such a situation would need the protection of a ceasefire, along with personal protection weapons, but they would also need to be decisively differentiated from the armies of member states.

This is not entirely wishful thinking - colleagues here at the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies are developing a proposal for a UN Emergency Peace Service (UNEPS), originally put forward by Global Action to Prevent War:

UNEPS would comprise 12 to 15,000 personnel … not just military staff and civilian police but also experts in conflict resolution, healthcare and the administration of justice. It would work within a single UN command structure ... for the first time in history, a UN agency could be deployed within 48 hours of UN authorisation.

What are its chances of being adopted? Regional responses have been largely positive, as long as it is not portrayed as yet another pretext for the West to interfere in the internal affairs of sovereign nations.

To read Gareth Evans’ book is to enter a world narrated in the first person plural. The end of the Cold War enhanced the prospects of, as he put it in an earlier volume, “cooperating for peace”. Developments since then have sown further divisions, however, and there needs, above all perhaps, to be some sense of reconciliation, before “we” could seriously contemplate a UNEPS or such initiatives.

Above all, perhaps, military spending needs to come down, starting with Australia. The country’s own Defence Intelligence Organisation argued that China should not be seen as a threat. Instead, its modest increases in arms spending came in response to America’s own plans, notably for a massive expansion of its military base on the island of Guam, the “tip of the spear” pointing at Beijing. However, the DIO lost out to arms lobbies in setting a military budget grotesquely in excess of Australia’s needs. It was a decision that contributed, through the series of connections I trace here, to the fate of thousands of civilian bystanders in Sri Lanka and elsewhere.

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First published by Transcend Media Service on May 25, 2009.



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About the Author

Associate Professor Jake Lynch divides his time between Australia, where he teaches at the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies of Sydney University, and Oxford, where he writes historical mystery thrillers. His debut novel, Blood on the Stone, is published by Unbound Books. He has spent the past 20 years developing, researching, teaching and training in Peace Journalism: work for which he was honoured with the 2017 Luxembourg Peace Prize, awarded by the Schengen Peace Foundation.

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