Humanitarian Intervention and the Use of Force

Michael C Williams (UNHCR)

Much has been written on the subject of ‘Humanitarian Intervention and the Use of Force’ in the 1990s and much has been published in the pages of the journals represented around this table today. It is somewhat invidious to pick out some of those for praise but we in the policy world have learnt much from the contributions of Stanley Hoffman in Foreign Affairs and Survival, of Tom Weiss in the Washington Quarterly and Adam Roberts again in Survival are only some of the memorable contributions to the burgeoning literature on this subject. I suspect that the current crisis with regard to Kosovo will spark new contributions seeming to raise as it does the possibility for the first time of a meaningful reversal of ‘ethnic cleansing’. When I wrote a short piece for the current issue of ‘World Today’ on this subject I was tempted to draw a comparison with the 1950s talk of a ‘roll-back’ of communism. Of course as the Hungarians found to their misfortune in 1956 there was no assistance from the West, let alone humanitarian intervention. Indeed, the sole assistance provided was that given by UNHCR, and other humanitarian agencies, to resettle the 200,000 refugees who fled in the West. It was in that much over used phrase, a defining moment, for UNHCR, hitherto an agency that had not shown much initiative, or been strongly supported by the international community.

Several decades later in the 1990s as the West again stumbled in its reactions to another crisis in Eastern Europe, UNHCR was once more the vehicle for humanitarian intervention. There, as in Hungary earlier, UNHCR found itself propelled into the front line, literally the front line in the case of Bosnia. Far too frequently UNHCR as well as other humanitarian actors have had to make up for political inaction on the part of the international community.

In many respects, political and humanitarian actors are uncomfortable bedfellows. Some humanitarian actors argue strongly that the principles of humanity, neutrality, and impartiality should be strictly adhered to. Others are of the opinion that in the face of massive human rights violations – ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and the genocide in Rwanda – humanitarian agencies can and should no longer maintain their neutrality. There are others who argue that humanitarian action has de facto become an effective form of political action. Referring to Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Great Lakes region of Africa, they argue that the provision of relief assistance and the protection of civilians – wherever possible – were the principal response in the absence of effective policies to intervene to end the conflict and to agree on a peace settlement.

There are, however, more important differences between humanitarian and political action. The fundamental objective of humanitarian action is to alleviate suffering and save lives. Humanitarian action focuses on people and is rights based. Political action focuses on states and is guided by national interests and respect for sovereignty. These are two different starting points – the individual and the state - and they are not always compatible. How to balance the rights and ensure the protection of the individual with the interests of the state is a challenge that any concerted strategy among humanitarian and political actors must seek to overcome.

Conflict situations and humanitarian crises

Until recently, and with the notable exception of the International Committee of the Red Cross, most humanitarian agencies did not work in conflict situations. In the days of the Cold War, the work of humanitarian agencies matched the geopolitical environment. Refugees, for example, crossed international borders that were also ideological boundaries - Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Vietnam. Polarisation made political solutions difficult to achieve. Humanitarian action was needed to save lives, and it was relatively easy for humanitarian work to be perceived as neutral.

Then the Berlin Wall came down. In humanitarian terms, the crisis in Northern Iraq, less than two years later, was a turning point. The Kurds brought a new dimension to the concept of displacement. They did not cross an ideological line - they massively fled an internal conflict. The interest of the international community was for them to return home, and most of them indeed did. Operation Provide Comfort gave rise to the illusion that in the New World Order there would be space for a New Humanitarian Order.

This illusion was short lived. The end of Cold War polarisation allowed countless internal conflicts to explode - confused, violent, in which human displacement was not only the consequence of conflict, but also often its very objective. In Somalia, troops sent in to support humanitarian operations found themselves mired in a civil conflict of unexpected complexity. Rightly or wrongly, they were perceived as taking sides. The failure in Somalia undermined subsequent efforts to mobilise military interventions in support of humanitarian action. The subsequent trend has been toward small, low-risk operations after a peace settlement has been agreed upon.

Humanitarian action by itself cannot resolve the fundamental social and political root causes of conflicts. When humanitarian agencies are left alone with problems requiring political and military response, they might even unwittingly compound such problems. They risk being identified as party to a conflict, and eventually becoming the scapegoat for political inaction.

The experiences of Bosnia and eastern Zaire were particularly shocking and traumatic for humanitarian agencies. As a consequence, many suggested that in such extreme cases, humanitarian agencies should withdraw, or refuse to intervene. I do not agree. Non-intervention is in contradiction with the fundamental objective of humanitarian action - saving lives. Rather than limiting our analysis to the purely humanitarian sphere, therefore, I think we should examine it in a much broader context, which includes political and - if necessary - security action, to protect the neutrality and ensure the effectiveness of humanitarian agencies.

At the political level, growing awareness exists of the causes and consequences of massive refugee movements. The threat to regional peace and security of large-scale forced population movements and massive human rights violations has been recognised. On an almost daily basis the Security Council discusses issues which deal with internal conflicts withgrave humanitarian concerns and implications. Likewise, regional organisations have taken on increasing responsibilities in the area of peace-making and peace-settlements.

This increasing awareness and readiness by international and regional organisation presents opportunities as well as challenges to humanitarian agencies: It leads to the mobilisation of peace efforts, provides greater opportunities for harmonising policies and actions, and facilitates information sharing, consultations and decision-making. Particularly, it allows the incorporation of humanitarian concerns in peace making and peace-keeping arrangements. The return of refugees was an integral part of the Paris Accord on Cambodia as well as the Dayton Peace Agreement on Bosnia and Herzegovina. Many peace-keeping missions - UNTAC, UNIMOZ and UNAMIR -included provisions for humanitarian assistance and protection of civilians in their mission.

To build the momentum for peace, it is essential that a framework guiding political and humanitarian action is established early on. During the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina this quite simply did not happen before 1995 - hence we had the UN deployed when there was war and NATO when there was peace.

That the primary objective of humanitarian action is to save lives is a widely accepted, almost tautological statement. However, hard questions are being asked about humanitarian operations in the 1990s. Some of these questions grow from the perception that humanitarian efforts have come too little and too late, or have missed their intended targets, or have caused more harm by unwittingly prolonging war. We know that the reality is different. We know that humanitarian efforts have too often been left to stand alone, disconnected from the political and diplomatic action needed to end the crises that have placed people in danger.

Saving lives is a moral impulse, not a legal doctrine. In the international context, that impulse must be translated into reality through a system in which states are still the major actors. Under international law the sovereign state is the protector and guarantor of its own people, and of its fundamental rights. In reality, states very often fail to fulfil this obligation. UNHCR, acting as facilitator, setting norms, providing support, and often operating on the ground - has two basic ways to rescue those at risk: facilitate their escape from danger and protect them in exile, or intervene to end the danger in their home countries. Asylum or intervention? National governments have become more and more reluctant to open their doors to asylum-seekers, especially when large numbers of people are involved. In the richer countries, exclusion and control measures meant to counter illegal immigration are making it extremely difficult for people in genuine need of protection even to make a claim for asylum. Poor countries subject to refugee flows from neighbouring states have become increasingly unwilling to bear the economic, environmental, political, and security costs of hosting large refugee populations.

Despite, or rather because of the narrowing of the asylum option, we must continue to defend it. On the other hand, the intervention alternative is not promising. The prohibition against intervention in the internal affairs of a state remains very strong. The record of actual interventions to suppress violence and restore peaceful relations among peoples at war within their own societies is not encouraging. Intervention is costly, in financial, political and human terms. And so the will to intervene, even in the face of horrific violations of human rights, seems to have faded as the decade has progressed. Will Kosovo reverse this trend - doubtful, cf, for example,East Timor.

The number of people in need of rescue, however, has not diminished. In fact it has grown. One should be deeply concerned about the diminishing observance of humanitarian principles by governments in many parts of the world. Many of the poorest countries, particularly in Africa, have long traditions of hospitality toward refugees. But even in some of these, thepast two years have seen refugees forcibly turned away from the borders of states where they sought asylum, or forced to return home to unsafe conditions. We have seen humanitarian agencies denied access to people in great need, governments unwilling to separate fighters from refugees, and wanton disregard for the civilian character of refugee camps.

Despite this, the humanitarian impulse remains strong in public sentiment throughout the industrialised democracies. Increasingly, it finds expression through civil society. Ordinary people are often far out in front of their leaders in this respect, as the Kosovo crisis has consistently shown Most are not trying to be heroes, or even have the chance to be. But many are actively engaged as citizens and members of churches, advocacy groups, professional organisations, academic institutions, think tanks, political parties, neighbourhood or ethnic associations, and so forth, all promoting human rights and the humane treatment of people at risk.

This commitment of citizens, and their willingness to organise and support networks and institutions, have made non-governmental organisations a central pillar of humanitarian response. NGOs have exerted enormous influence on humanitarian doctrine in the post-war period. From the late 1960s, prominent NGOs increasingly have refused to accept the strictures of the Westphalian doctrine of non-intervention, if the consequences were to deny access to people in desperate need of humanitarian assistance. During the Nigerian civil war, the French NGO Medecins Sans Frontiereswas formed as a protest against the Nigerian government’s prohibition of humanitarian aid deliveries to Biafra (and other aid agencies’ willingness to abide by that prohibition). Over time, states and intergovernmental organisations have come to accept the gradual erosion of the sovereignty barrier against humanitarian assistance. UN Security Council Resolution 688 of 1991, which opened the door of northern Iraq to humanitarian intervention, is probably the most explicit formulation to date. Humanitarian agencies, including UNHCR and - very prominently - many American NGOs, are frequently intervening to protect and rescue people whose lives are in acute danger, negotiating access sometimes with hostile governments, sometimes with rebel forces.

Humanitarian intervention alone, however, does not and cannot eliminate the root causes of the problems it addresses. In spite of its increasing "sophistication", if I may use this term , it remains a curative measure, unless it is part of a more comprehensive approach which includes, in particular, a political dimension. Operation Provide Comfort, in northern Iraq,gave rise to the illusion that the New World Order would include a New Humanitarian Order. We know, of course, how history challenged the overall concept of New World Order. Somalia, in particular, represented the failure of its humanitarian ambitions.

Former Yugoslavia and the Great Lakes region of Central Africa defined the contours of this "humanitarian crisis" in the following years. In both, the combination of humanitarian intervention and political abstention was conspicuous. Proximity to the West, however, prompted the major powers, and the US in particular, to finally overcome this gap in the formerYugoslavia. Dayton, despite all its shortcomings, remains a very important model of comprehensive response to a crisis which is "humanitarian" in its effects, but not in its causes.

On the contrary, in Central Africa, the major powers did not see it as part of their responsibility (nor of their interests) to use force to prevent the 1994 Rwandan genocide, nor - later - to separate refugees from the military and political elements in the Zairean and Tanzanian camps, nor - in 1996 - to help humanitarian agencies rescue hundreds of thousands of refugees scattered in the rainforest during the Zairean civil conflict. Despite its repeated recognitions of its own multiple failures, and despite dramatic public apologies, the international community has yet to engage in an intensiveand comprehensive effort to resolve the dangerous political and ethnic tensions that have caused the genocide, the controversial refugee exodus, and the Zaire conflict.

Academics and statesmen have often supported the idea of limiting humanitarian intervention only to situations in which vital national interests are at stake. I believe the Great Lakes region of Africa, like the former Yugoslavia, teaches us a vital lesson: that the national interest of a great power is broad and can in fact be undermined by too narrow a conceptionof what national interest is. Today's complex emergencies usually require large-scale relief programmes or military interventions. They require not individual acts of conscience but public outcry and political decisions. The resources involved will be collective ones - political will, tax dollars and national defence assets. Add to this that the issues surrounding any humanitarian crisis are rarely simple or obvious; in fact, they are usually complex and almost always subject to dispute.

Humanitarian action often involves agonising dilemmas. In the former Yugoslavia, we faced excruciating choices: to be an accomplice to ethnic cleansing by helping persecuted groups flee their areas, or to refuse an involuntary complicity, but let these people be killed. In the former Eastern Zaire, the only choice we could give to refugees whom we could find inthe rain forest was to either leave them at the mercy of killers, or help them return to Rwanda, to deeply divided, and sometimes hostile communities.

The complexities of humanitarian disasters dictate that, while the impulse to save people in danger may be simple, the act of rescue is not. Our actions may -in fact almost certainly will -have unintended consequences. At times, they may end up harming some of the very people they were intended to help. Humanitarians have often been charged with naivete, and worse - with allowing themselves to be manipulated by parties to a conflict. If the disasters of this decade have had any positive outcomes, dispelling this kind of naivete may be one of them. But it would be futile if naivete were replaced by cynicism or paralysis.

Humanitarianism has to be smart, effective as well as compassionate. This may mean at times confronting painful trade-offs between short-term and long-term goals. In my view, however, the presumption must be strongly in favour of helping people to survive - when choices are limited, as for Rwandans in the Zairean forest - in order that they may beable to make their own choices later. Because humanitarian organisations have developed considerable expertise in providing food, water, sanitation and shelter, saving lives at least offers the morality of a relatively sure option. As much as humanitarians must guard against over-reach, we should also guard against over-caution, and not be afraid to do what we can.