Dithering over Darfur? A preliminary review of the international response

The extreme violence against civilian communities in the Sudanese province of Darfur has coincided with the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. This article makes a preliminary assessment of the international response to Darfur to see how it compares to the denial and delay of ten years ago. The slow evolution of the international community's response is charted from early Chadian efforts at mediation in 2003, the eventual involvement of the UN Security Council in July 2004, the increasing role of the African Union and the US government's conclusion in September 2004 that the violence constitutes genocide. The international community has certainly been too slow and divided in its response in the face of competing political priorities. There were also significant misgivings about a US-led military intervention and considerable Sudanese intransigence and diplomatic skill. Nevertheless, there are important signs that key parts of the United Nations and the international community have worked with a definite post-R wanda consciousness. Important developments have also been made in combining humanitarian and political negotiation while a committed African Union is now in a position to make a real difference. Although late to gather force, international political will and US leadership have been strong. But, like many tragedies before it, Darfur shows that political will is not enough. The choices facing even the most wilful politicians still remain intensely difficult and 'doing something' is not as easy as most NGO press releases imply.     

Dealing with ‘genocide’: the ICRC and the UN during the Nigeria–Biafra war, 1967–70

This article examines how international and humanitarian organizations participated and positioned themselves in relation to discourses on genocide during the Nigeria–Biafra war (1967–70). During the first half of the conflict, the powerful Biafran propaganda regularly accused the Nigerian government of genocide against the Biafran population. The article looks at the way in which the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), one of the main humanitarian organizations present on the ground, reacted to Biafran accusations. In doing so, it analyses how information received from delegates in the field were apprehended and used—or not—by the headquarters. It shows that the ICRC attitude towards public denunciation was more nuanced than is often presented. Furthermore, the article sheds light on the involvement of the UN in the promotion of the counter-discourse developed by the Nigerian government to deny the genocide accusations. With a focus on the outcomes in the field, it fathoms the leeway the organization had in this situation—a civil war—and how it used it. The limits of the counter-discourse, illustrated by the persistence of the accusation of genocide by groups like the French doctors, reveal the complexities involved in the usage of this term by relief workers. Finally, in studying the way in which these international and humanitarian organizations dealt with genocide claims, this article contributes to the history of the violence that took place during the war.     

Humanitarian Intervention After Kosovo: Emergent Norm,Moral Duty or the Coming Anarchy?

In March 1999 NATO justified the use of force against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia on the grounds that it was necessary to avert an impending humanitarian catastrophe. This action was so controversial because it was the first time since the founding of the United Nations that a group of states, acting without explicit Security Council authority, defended a breach of the sovereignty rule primarily on humanitarian grounds. This article reflects on the legality and legitimacy of humanitarian intervention in international society by reviewing five books that explore the strengths and weaknesses of the contemporary legal and moral framework governing humanitarian intervention. The article identifies three broad positions: first, there is an emergent norm of humanitarian intervention; second, humanitarian intervention is seen as a moral duty; and finally, the claim that humanitarian intervention outside Security Council authority should not be legitimated because it threatens the principles of international order. Books reviewed: Danesh Sarooshi, The United Nations and the development of collective security: the delegation by the UN Security Council of its Chapter VII powers Francis Kofi Abiew, The evolution of the doctrine and practice of humanitarian inter‐vention Neal Riemer, (ed.) Protection against genocide: mission impossible? Stephen A. Garrett, Doing good and doing well: an examination of humanitarian inter‐vention Albrecht Schnabel and Ramesh Thakur, (eds.) Kosovo and the challenge of humanitarian intervention: selective indignation, collective action, and international citizenship     

‘And starvation is the grim reaper’: the American Committee to Keep Biafra Alive and the genocide question during the Nigerian civil war, 1968–70

The American Committee to Keep Biafra Alive (ACKBA) was the largest and most influential organization in the United States that formed in response to the Nigerian civil war. While historians have pointed to the committee as an important source of activism that pushed the American government towards supporting more vigorous humanitarian relief, this is the first article to explore the development of the group from its inception and to look specifically at its claims of genocide. Not everyone at the time agreed that the Nigerian government was committing genocide against the people living in the secessionist state of Biafra, and that debate continues today. The ACKBA, appealing to genocide prevention and human rights, argued that the debate about the semantics of genocide got in the way of actually helping those that were suffering from famine as a result of the war. In the process, the committee offered a redefinition of genocide that wedded conceptions of Biafran identity to the Biafran state, which made the maintenance of ‘one Nigeria’, in the eyes of committee members, an act of genocide. In the end, this redefinition of genocide failed to bring more people in the United States towards supporting Biafran secession and might have, in the end, led to more confusion about genocide during the conflict. An analysis of the committee's activism highlights the often tenuous relationship between self-determination and genocide in the developing world and illustrates the growing limits of American political intervention in the global south.     

Righting the course? Humanitarian intervention,the war on terror and the future of Afghanistan

The US‐led post 9/11 ‘intervention’ in Afghanistan was, by definition, not a humanitarian intervention. The intervention in Afghanistan was defined as an act of self‐defence by the US and it was one of the first steps in the ‘war on terror’ by the US and its allies: it had no intention or clear strategies for long‐term stabilization, state‐building or development. The US‐led international coalition failed to ‘find’ Al‐Qaeda in the short term and new arguments had to be made to justify continued international presence. The initial agenda was quickly blurred by a mismatch of intentions including those of long‐term stabilization and state‐building. The ideas developed through the Bonn Agreement (2001–5) and continued through the Afghanistan Compact (2006–10) have focused on building a centrally governed state (sometimes defined as democratic) that has a monopoly on the use of force. Their shortcomings are already well‐documented: the urgency of the Bonn Conference and of the adoption of the Bonn Agreement ostensibly meant trading expediency and stability for accountability and a clean slate, which is not to say that there were no good intentions at Bonn from stakeholders, but that Afghans and the international community put power‐sharing before progress. The choices made at Bonn may have contributed to the culture of impunity and the entrenched poverty that is gripping Afghanistan today. This article responds to the claims that state‐building and all that goes with it are not the responsibility of the ‘international community’ by addressing the accountability and humanitarian paradoxes. The question remains, however, about who should be responsible for reform and politically accountable in the aftermath of non‐humanitarian (and indeed even humanitarian) interventions?     

Humanitarianism,genocide and liberalism

The international response to genocide and human rights violations has received increasing attention by scholars in the humanities and social sciences. This article explores the history of the response to mass atrocity by assessing recent work on humanitarianism as an idea and in practice in the West. It argues that the impulse to defend the rights of others historically has been tied up with geopolitical and imperial concerns that shaped European politics. The current embrace of the responsibility to protect, or ‘R2P’, and debates over whether or not to recognize and prosecute perpetrators of past atrocities from the Armenian genocide to Rwanda remain embedded in this longer history of humanitarianism and geopolitics. As recent work on humanitarian intervention, the anti-slavery movement and humanitarianism and foreign policy demonstrates, the pressing need to understand the response to atrocity has called scholars to more fully participate in the contemporary conversation over human rights by exploring its roots in humanitarian practices of the recent and not so recent past. Understanding the history of humanitarianism as it connects both with the history of human rights and liberal ideals offers an important way of reassessing the role of the nation-state and international institutions in responding to human rights crisis. The article concludes by suggesting that scholars move away from the question of the origin of human rights as an idea to focus on historicizing the response to humanitarian crisis in order to problematize the story of the rise of western-led human rights regimes.     

The influence of Operation Allied Force on the development of the jus ad bellum

Some have argued that NATO's air campaign against Serbia in 1999 was manifestly unlawful, others that it was an entirely legitimate humanitarian intervention. A third position suggests that the intervention while unlawful, in the strictest sense, was nonetheless legitimate. Here, a customary law right to intervene was seen as emerging, permitting action to prevent a mass atrocity crime, even when UN Security Council authorization was absent. Did Operation Allied Force, then, add to the case for the emergence of this new customary norm? While the 1990s was a decade of humanitarian intervention, the decade since has been dominated by international action against terrorism and, of course, the effects of the highly controversial US and British led invasion of Iraq. In this context, there is scant evidence that a customary right or obligation to intervene for humanitarian reasons has crystallized since 1999. But if Kosovo achieved anything, it was to prompt greater attention to the merits of the argument in favour of a ‘responsibility to protect’. If NATO's 1999 action were repeated today in a similarly unauthorized manner it would still be unlawful, but it would perhaps be seen as a legitimate means to preventing a mass atrocity crime.     

‘The realities of power’: David Stoll and the story of the 1982 Guatemalan genocide

ABSTRACT

In a short opinion piece published in late 2013, anthropologist David Stoll claimed that genocide did not occur in Guatemala under the military dictatorship of José Efraín Ríos Montt (1982–83), that the charges against the former general and his subsequent conviction were unsubstantiated, and that human rights conditions for the country’s Indigenous peoples, including the Ixil population of northern Quiché department, actually improved under his government. By looking at the definition of protected groups under the United Nations Genocide Convention, and such basic notions as perpetrator motives and intent in international humanitarian law, this article will address Stoll’s latest contribution to a ‘counter-narrative by Guatemalans who perceive that their side of the story [was] left out’ of the 2013 genocide trial.     

India's response to the 1971 East Pakistan crisis: hidden and open reasons for intervention

Based on recently declassified materials from the Indian government archives and on the private papers of the principal secretary to the Indian prime minister, this article investigates how India formulated its response to the 1971 East Pakistan genocidal crisis that culminated with the third Indo-Pakistani war. India's victory changed the balance of power in South Asia: Bangladesh emerged as a new independent state, while Pakistan was significantly reduced. The 1971 war is cited in the international literature as one of the first cases of humanitarian intervention in world history. The Indian official position, recently reinforced by a new major publication, highlights the ‘humanitarian’ character of the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war, depicting a reluctant India compelled to intervene by international inactivity towards the atrocity. This article contests this interpretation and argues that humanitarian considerations were only one side of the picture. Clear political interests drove the actions of New Delhi, which autonomously formulated a specific strategy aimed at making capital out of the dramatic humanitarian crisis. In advancing this argument, this article contributes to the complex debate about humanitarian intervention by observing that the inability of the UN system to intervene is bound to open the way to two possible outcomes: one is the continuation of the genocidal massacres; the other is the unauthorized humanitarian armed intervention by a regional power, which is likely to act according to its own interests. The specific case under review demonstrates that unauthorized armed intervention cannot per se always be branded as deplorable, since in certain cases such a scenario is better than no intervention at all.     

Revisiting the Linkage: PDD 25, Genocide in Rwanda and the US Peacekeeping Experience of the 1990s

After the successful US–UN action in Operation Desert Storm in 1991, by the mid-1990s Washington's enthusiasm for multilateral action had already faded away. This was evident after the ‘Black Hawk Down’ disaster of the US Mission in Somalia in October 1993 and the release of a much more restrictive peacekeeping policy in May 1994 (PDD-25). The US inaction during the following Rwandan genocide in spring 1994 was then seen as the obvious consequence of the American ‘trauma’ in Somalia, as well as the symbol of Washington's withdrawal from peacekeeping commitments. However, in the light of new archival documents a different scenario emerges. This article shows that the consequential link, often stressed by the literature, between the Somali disaster, the release of PDD-25 and American inaction in Rwanda is much less straightforward. This suggests that the policy in Rwanda was not just a consequence of the Somali debacle and that the reasons for US inaction toward the genocide must be gauged within a broader set of factors. The study of Washington's policy in Rwanda thus becomes a significant case to investigate some broader patterns of post-Cold War American foreign policy and to re-evaluate the US peacekeeping experience of the 1990s.     

From humanitarian relief to humanitarian intervention: victims, interveners and pillars

Current humanitarian crises are bedeviling the United Nations, relief agencies and governments. Efforts to provide food and other basic supplies to traumatized populations are frequently stymied by uncooperative regimes, violent militias, remote locations, high costs and complicated operations. As a result, humanitarian relief operations that have focused primarily on food distribution must be radically revised to encompass the much broader agenda of humanitarian intervention, which entails an aggressive, multilateral role within states. Five ‘pillars’ are proposed—basic needs, public security, political dialogue, human rights/justice and sustained economic development—on which to base future humanitarian interventions.     

‘Just and lawful war’ as genocidal war in the (United States) Northwest Ordinance and Northwest Territory, 1787–1832

This article focuses on the United States Northwest Ordinance of 1787's profession of ‘utmost good faith’ towards Indians and its provision for ‘just and lawful wars’ against them. As interpreted by US officials as they authorized and practised war against native communities in the Northwest Territory from 1787 to 1832, the ‘just and lawful wars’ clause legalized wars of ‘extirpation’ or ‘extermination’, terms synonymous with genocide by most definitions, against native people who resisted US demands that they cede their lands. Although US military operations seldom achieved extirpation, this was due to their ineptness and the success of indigenous strategies rather than an absence of intention. When US military forces did succeed in achieving their objective, the result was massacre, as revealed in the Black Hawk War of 1832. US policy did not call for genocide in the first instance, preferring that Indians embrace the gift of civilization in exchange for their lands. Should Indians reject this display of ‘utmost good faith’, however, US policy legalized genocidal war against them.     

Realist Thought and Humanitarian Intervention

This article seeks to test the assumption that realism is completely hostile to the ethical and political notions of humanitarian intervention. The popular understanding of realism states that the national interest and international order will always trump the moral impulse to assist those suffering gross human-rights abuses at the hands of their government. The article makes the argument that this understanding of realism emerged from a particular period of history and under the pens of specific individuals reacting to these conditions. By affording a much deeper historical scope to the term ‘realism’, this article shows how realism cannot be damned uniformly by those writing and thinking about humanitarian intervention in the present period, and the role it holds in contemporary debates on humanitarian intervention.     

Innovation and precedent in the Kosovo war: the impact of Operation Allied Force on US foreign policy

The 1990s was a period of strategic innovation in US foreign policy. Operation Allied Force in particular represented an important step in the contorted evolution of America's attitude towards the use of force in the post-Cold War period. That operation demonstrated the growing influence of humanitarian concerns and the extent to which America was willing to reconsider Cold War criteria on the prudence and utility of force in support of its foreign policy. In its decision to intervene in Kosovo, the Clinton administration also divided opinion among the military. This, in effect, reduced the premium placed on the counsels of the armed forces and made it easier for the Bush administration subsequently to ignore their advice. Furthermore, having fought the war multilaterally through NATO, Operation Allied Force made America more wary of doing so again. In other words, the intervention set a number of precedents and left a significant legacy for the way in which US foreign policy was pursued in the decade that followed. This legacy is considered in two parts: the first analyses those issues associated with the use of force debate; the second considers how the Kosovo experience affected US attitudes to coalition warfare.     

War without end? Military humanitarianism and the limits of biopolitical approaches to security in Central America and the Caribbean

In 2008, the U.S. Southern Command launched Operation Continuing Promise as an ongoing mission to provide humanitarian aid and assistance to vulnerable populations in the Caribbean and Latin America. Conceived as a means of fostering regional security, the Operation's humanitarian aim was designed to improve regional security by ensuring life against the risk of a range of disasters. Much as that mission reflects biopolitical analyses of humanitarianism that emphasize the ability to protect life as the basis for sovereignty, closer attention to the timing and location of SOUTHCOM's efforts offers a more contextual understanding. That approach is developed here through an analysis of Operation Continuing Promise's stop in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, contrasting SOUTHCOM's focus on biophysical vulnerability with intended recipients' sense of their condition as a historical and political outcome. That contrast frames a contextual understanding of Operation Continuing Promise, placing it within broader efforts to construct Puerto Cabezas as vulnerable. That approach also points up the limits of biopolitical analyses of humanitarianism, suggesting the ways in which vulnerability is never merely a biological condition. The narrow humanitarian focus of Operation Continuing Promise can therefore be assessed in terms of its inability to address political and historical factors shaping vulnerability. So long as vulnerability persists, the potential for intervention persists indefinitely, making humanitarianism into a means of waging war without end.     

Seeing Red: Baghdad and the event-ful city

In late modern war visuality plays a vital role in both the conduct and the rationalization of military violence. This essay explores the techno-cultural apparatus of US military operations and media briefings in occupied Baghdad from 2003 to 2007. It traces the visual reconfiguration of the city as a space of events rather than purely objects. These digital mappings were an intrinsic part of the US Army’s counterinsurgency strategy, and their performances were punctuated by a dialectical interplay of geopolitical and biopolitical imaginaries that was focal to the abstraction and legitimation of American military intervention.     

The Responsibility to Protect and the problem of military intervention

The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) has come a long way in a relatively short space of time. From inauspicious beginnings, the principle was endorsed by the General Assembly in 2005 and unanimously reaffirmed by the Security Council in 2006 (Resolution 1674). However, the principle remains hotly contested primarily because of its association with humanitarian intervention and the pervasive belief that its principal aim is to create a pathway for the legitimization of unilateral military intervention. This article sets forth the argument that a deepening consensus on R2P is dependent on its dissociation from the politics of humanitarian intervention and suggests that one way of doing this is by abandoning the search for criteria for decision‐making about the use of force, one of the centre pieces of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty 2001 report that coined the phrase R2P. Criteria were never likely to win international support, the article maintains, and were less likely to improve decision‐making on how best to respond to major humanitarian crises. Nevertheless, R2P can make an important contribution to thinking about the problem of military intervention by mitigating potential ‘moral hazards’, overcoming the tendency of international actors to focus exclusively on military methods and giving impetus to efforts to operationalize protection in the field.     

A total extinction confidently hoped for: the destruction of Cape San society under Dutch colonial rule, 1700-1795

San (Bushman) society in the Cape Colony was almost completely annihilated during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a result of land confiscation, massacre, forced labour and cultural suppression that accompanied colonial rule. Whereas similar obliterations of indigenous peoples in other parts of the world have resulted in major public controversies and heated debate amongst academics about the genocidal nature of these episodes, in South Africa the issue has effectively been ignored aside from passing, often polemical, references to it as genocide. Even recent studies that have approached the mass killing of the Cape San with sensitivity and insight do not address it as a case of genocide. This article sets out to redress this imbalance in part by analysing the dynamic of frontier conflict between San and settler under Dutch colonial rule as genocide. It demonstrates both the exterminatory intent underlying settler violence as well as the complicity of a weak colonial state in these depredations, including its sanctioning of the root-and-branch eradication of the San.     

Genocide documentary as intervention

Gifted filmmakers such as Joshua Oppenheimer, director of The act of killing, are attempting to use the power of documentary to provoke social and political change in post-conflict settings. What roles do interventionist filmmakers play in processes of national reconciliation and transitional justice? Can The act of killing really be a catalyst for change in Indonesia? This article contends that the genocide documentary is a form of antagonistic intervention that warrants systematic and critical re-evaluation. It holds that claims regarding the remedial impact of documentaries such as The act of killing are difficult to substantiate, the main problem being attribution, cause and effect. Intervention in the mind of the director seems to follow the logic of a synchronous circuit, where trauma based on revealed truth leads to transitional justice. Each component in the circuit has a corresponding political argument. This article will examine three interrelated arguments linking genocide documentary and political intervention: (1) re-traumatization, (2) power-laden truths and (3) the narrowing of impunity gaps. This article contributes to debates about genocide and intervention by presenting evidence from Indonesia, including rare interviews with the protagonists in Oppenheimer's award-winning film, surveys of Indonesian audiences and data gathered from a global online petition as well as Chinese microblogs in order to better understand how audiences respond to genocide documentaries and why it is so difficult to generate political action outside the theatre.