Stomping out the World’s Rogues,

One Despot at a Time

By Andrew Thomson

The Banqueting House still stands in central London, the only part of Whitehall Palace to survive the fire of 1698. It was here that English kings and queens ruled from 1530 to 1698. On Nov. 19, 2003 it played host to America’s royalty: President George W. Bush, giving a 40-minute address on foreign policy on his state visit to the United Kingdom. Discussing a variety of issues – Anglo-American relations, the United Nations, Iraq – Bush made mention of a “forward strategy of freedom” as being central to United States foreign policy.

“The deepest beliefs of our nations set the direction of our foreign policy. We value our own civil rights, so we stand for the human rights of others,” Bush told the audience. “We will help the Iraqi people establish a peaceful and democratic country in the heart of the Middle East. And by doing so, we will defend our people from danger.”

Bush received intellectual backup in the name of Michael Ignatieff, the renowned Harvard University human rights scholar. Ignatieff wrote in a Jan. 2003 New York Times Magazine essay that “the disagreeable reality for those who believe in human rights is that there are some occasions – and Iraq may be one of them – when war is the only real remedy for regimes that live by terror.”

The debate continues over America’s motives in invading Iraq one year ago. Skeptics bristle at the notion of Bush and his administration being overly concerned with the welfare of Iraqi citizens when so much of the world lives under similarly abhorrent conditions. Yet that opinion could be missing a more fundamental question that’s arisen from the fall of Saddam’s regime, which is whether the march on Baghdad is a precursor for future interventions in the name of human rights.

The problem is that there’s no firm answer on when and where the international community should intervene to protect human rights and foster democracy. Ian Hamilton, executive director of the Canadian Human Rights Foundation says, “We’re still trying to find the right formula.”

Even Amnesty International, the world’s best-known human rights organization, takes no official position on armed intervention. According to spokesman John Tackaberry, ther main concern is that all sides of a dispute respect human rights.

Where does the line between sovereignty and international principles blur enough to warrant outside action? The Oxford Dictionary of Politics interprets humanitarian intervention as the “entry into a country of the armed forces of another country or international organization with the aim of protecting citizens from persecution or the violation of their human rights.” Such armed intervention is the most serious policy option, though experts point to the continued importance of non-military measures such as diplomacy, education, and social networks.

If humanitarian concerns were indeed the reason for invading Iraq, it’s not hard to find similar examples of serious human abusers around the world. The difficult part is actually choosing one as the definitive worse case scenario, based on information in Amnesty International’s 2003 report.

Some examples are glaring, receiving the most media attention when it comes to human rights. At the top is China. Between crackdowns against spiritual and religious groups, political dissidents, and even Internet users, the Chinese regime has become a poster child for advocates who want Canada and other governments to peg human rights to political and economic agreements. Don’t forget Tianamen Square, where more than 1,000 dissidents died in 1989.

Next door, North Korea employs a totalitarian regime that doesn’t permit outside human rights observers. That doesn’t stop disturbing reports from filtering out – food shortages, inhumane prison conditions, public executions, crushed political opposition, and religious suppression.

Civil skirmishes in Myanmar (Burma) have led to political prisoners, forced labour camps in rural provinces, and reports of torture.

Another contender is Iran’s stifled attempts at political and religious reform.

Yet alongside these cases are countless situations that often fly under the radar screen of the developed world.

Take Turkmenistan. The former Soviet republic is almost comical under the bizarre rule of Saparmurat Niyazov, who renames months after his own family and forbids car radios, operas, long hair, and beards among other improprieties. More serious are allegations of political and religious suppression in the central Asian country, which includes Niyazov writing his own book of philosophy to replace the Koran.

Another is Uganda, where rebels – mainly the Lord’s Resistance Army – have wreaked havoc for years. More than one million people have fled homes, and thousands of children have been kidnapped into military and sexual slavery. The latest tragedy arrived last weekend when 200 people were massacred at a refugee camp in the country’s northern region. Government forces have also been accused of atrocities by human rights organizations.

The term “humanitarian intervention” could be used to describe armed responses to violent situations such as Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s. However, humanitarian intervention isn’t a child of the post-Cold War era alone.

Two incidents from the 19^th century are early examples of humanitarian intervention – English, French, and Russian forces protecting Greece from Turkish massacres and suppression in 1827, and French intervention to protect Maronite Christians in Syria in 1860.

The idea remains to this day as a tool for both international organizations and individual countries. In 2001 alone, France sent troops to restore order to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, and Côte d’Ivoire.

Ken Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, wrote in a Jan. 2004 report that the Iraq invasion was not a case of humanitarian intervention.

Regimes such as Baathist Iraq “are deplorable and worth working intensively to end, but they do not in our view rise to the level that would justify the extraordinary response of military force,” Roth wrote. “Only mass slaughter might permit the deliberate taking of life involved in using military force for humanitarian purposes.”

Even the UN Charter states that outside powers can’t “intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.” This provision leads to claims that intervention isn’t necessary unless the overall international community is under threat, according to Joanna Quinn, a University of Western Ontario political scientist who studies human rights.

That’s not to say that attempts aren’t being made to form a framework of when and where intervention is warranted.

The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), formed under the Canadian government’s leadership, undertook the most recent attempt. The commission’s report, “The Responsibility to Protect,” was presented to the UN in Dec. 2001.

The report said the international community has the responsibility to intervene in a country whose government is unwilling or unable to prevent its people from being harmed. The authors are careful to point out that military force should be a last resort, to be used only in the case of ethnic cleansing or other “large scale loss of life.”

“It’s not in any government’s interest to act in a futile way if there’s no possibility of both a concerted response and major support,” says David Black, a Dalhousie University political scientist who studies human rights and foreign policy. “If there’s a real prospect of genocide, providing an interventive response has to be balanced against the possibility of failure or making things worse”

The provisions from “The Responsibility to Protect” focus on countries that cross the line between sovereignty and international human rights standards – situations such as the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Experts say less confrontational approaches – namely education and trade – are the best ways to encourage democracy in places like China and Turkmenistan where armed intervention isn’t warranted or feasible.

Bringing human rights to other parts of the world is a long-term educational process that often requires a shift in values and attitudes, says Hamilton, whose organization works with groups in Asia, Africa, and Europe.

That long-term perspective is also evident in the voice of Quinn. She says that creating economic and social infrastructure is crucial for a shared sense of safety and trust in fledgling democracies.

Another method to promote human rights is through economic incentives. Even Bush said in his November speech that “by extending the reach of trade we foster prosperity and the habits of liberty.”

If its true that “soft power” approaches of education and trade are needed to promote human rights, it could require a shift in Western attitudes.

“There are lots of places that are critically important and would benefit from intervention,” Black says, “but the time and resources are much larger than we’ve been prepared to contemplate.”

Hamilton says armed intervention is warranted in some cases, but the world needs to stop looking for quick-fixes.

“The problem is that the international community doesn’t have the commitment to make sure (human rights) institutions are built. It’s a messy process, and there’s no clear blueprint,” he says.

That means it could be some time before the end of kidnapped child soldiers in Uganda, or La Bohème in Turkmenistan.

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