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Humanitarian intervention

By Jake Lynch - posted Friday, 29 May 2009


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.

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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.

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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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