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|  | | When you watch images of civil war, ethnic cleansing, and other horrible atrocities
in places like Rwanda, Sudan,
and Bosnia,
it is difficult to contemplate why there should be any debate about humanitarian intervention at all. To many people, when humanitarian emergencies like Darfur happen it seems almost baffling that other foreign
powers refuse to get involved.
On July 13 the Institute for Policy Studies organized a debate where retired, Yugoslavian diplomat Cvijeto Job and Dr. Marcus
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Raskin, Co-Founder of the Institute for Policy Studies discussed their views on this topic.
It’s important to point out that neither presenter in this
discussion was advocating that there should never be intervention during a humanitarian crisis, but rather questioning who should have the right to
intervene. Both Raskin and Job said that the UN should play a larger
role in humanitarian interventions around the world.
Job believes that the U.S. and NATO should also play a
larger role in humanitarian intervention because out of all the actors in the
international political arena the U.S. and/or NATO has a better ability
to effectively intervene. However, he conceded that there are
two types of intervention: good intervention meaning intervention with positive
motives, and negative intervention meaning intervention with nefarious or
selfish goals.
However, even with negative intervention, he believes that the intervention is usually necessary to stop genocide, as in the case of Yugoslavia
in the 1990s. When asked whether the U.S.
or other countries should intervene in other countries when a dictator
such as Saddam Hussein was brutalizing his own people, such as Saddam
Hussein, Job answered that humanitarian intervention should focus more
on stopping large scale genocides rather than simply stopping oppressive
dictators.
Raskin believed that the problem with having larger
countries such as the U.S. militarily intervening in other countries
is the power shift from the
legislative branch to the executive branch. This means that increasingly, the decision
to send in troops to intervene militarily is left to the hands of a single
chief executive and his advisers, with little to no oversight.
He also points
out that the U.S. has not always cooperated with the UN, when it comes to intervening in foreign countries, particularly when it is against its own
interest. Raskin also gave an example of the imperfections of intervention, such as a UN arms embargo on Serbia and Bosnia, in which the arms embargo was enforced much more strictly on Serbia then it was on Bosnia, thus exacerbating the problem rather then fixing it. He said that when countries intervene they usually do it for their
own selfish interests, instead of humanitarian interests.
Overall, I thought that event was informative, and gave me new insight about humanitarian intervention, and some of the controversy that still surrounds
military intervention. Instead of just focusing on the Balkans in the
1990s, I wish the presenters had talked about the best way to address
the current humanitarian crisis in Sudan. Although I agree more with Ambassador Job that there are good and bad interventions, I believe that an intervention in a humanitarian crisis situation is better than no intervention at all. Even when countries do intervene for their own selfish motives, I think one should look not just at the motives behind the intervention, but also at the outcomes of the intervention.
Share your thoughts by commenting below.
- What are your views on humanitarian intervention?
- Do you think the U.S. should intervene militarily in Darfur?
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