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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (21252)	6/29/2003 1:44:38 PM
From: Karen Lawrence	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

Humanitarian Intervention: "An International Rescue Committee Report estimates that 3.3 million people have died over the past four and a half years of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Yet no significant center of power or opinion is calling for a "humanitarian intervention" in Congo." Mahmood Mamdani An International Rescue Committee Report estimates that 3.3 million people have died over the past four and a half years of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Yet no significant center of power or opinion is calling for a "humanitarian intervention" in Congo. Behind the continuing humanitarian tragedy in Congo are a combination of forces--local, regional and global--that profit from this conflict in various ways. So long as the beneficiaries of the Congo war outweigh millions of its victims in influence, there will be no humanitarian intervention--other than the small international force with a limited mandate recently sent to Bunia. Congo confirms the lesson many Africans drew from the genocide in Rwanda a decade ago. The withdrawal of UN forces took place in the face of overwhelming evidence of growing and massive human rights violations. Having withdrawn the UN forces, the Security Council authorized a French "humanitarian" intervention. Operation Turquoise saved many Tutsi lives, but it also rescued the political and military leadership of the genocide. To date, neither the UN nor any other international forum has held the French accountable for that intervention. Operation Turquoise fits neatly into a history of imperial interventions over the modern period. Not surprisingly, every imperial intervention claims to be humanitarian, but calling an intervention "humanitarian" cannot strip it of its politics. Whether in Congo or Rwanda, Kosovo or Iraq, every intervention--and nonintervention--has its politics. To understand the politics of the Iraq war, we should first consider two aspects: the willingness to target civilian populations and the refusal of those who wield this enormously destructive power beyond their borders to be accountable to those who may suffer its consequences. In a globalized world of highly unequal states, humanitarian intervention will in practice turn out to be a big-power intervention. Every intervention will serve a complex of interests, general and specific. There can be no such thing as an unambiguous humanitarian intervention. It is curious that those who support humanitarian interventions assume that these interventions must be military, and that they will differ from other military interventions in their benign, indeed humanitarian, intent and effect. If these assumptions go unchallenged, humanitarian intervention will become a soothing name for unilateral and unaccountable exercises of power. I make no such assumption. I suggest we place political accountability at the center of the discussion. The Iraq war has given us a terrifying demonstration of the technological and military capacities that the world's single superpower is capable of wielding. It has also given us a rare instance of a solid majority in the UN first refusing to authorize a US-led "humanitarian" intervention, and then disintegrating in its face. Earlier, this same majority had set up an International Criminal Court but only by conceding provisions that guaranteed temporary impunity for American power. These developments confirm the need to strive for an international legal and political arrangement that is representative and effective in holding accountable those who wield such destructive capacity. They underline both the political limits of the current international state system, based on sovereignty, and the potential for antiwar movements demanding that power whose reach is international should indeed be internationally accountable. Unless all interventions (both military and nonmilitary) by all powers are subject to review by some organization of international law, we will not be able to determine the justness of a particular intervention (or nonintervention). Mahmood Mamdani is Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and director of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University. He is author of Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton), When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism and Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton) and Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: Terror, "Ours" and "Theirs," in the Late Cold War (forthcoming from Pantheon in 2004). www.thenation.com