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Interventions have made things worse

Written by Mark Lattimer

Sunday, 24 February 2008

Martin Kettle (Comment, February 23) allows his enthusiasm for Kosovo's hard-won independence to inspire a defence of western military interventions. He omits to mention the uncomfortable facts that Milosevic's human rights violations against Kosovar Albanians escalated massively following the start of the Nato intervention in 1999, and that Kosovo has become an even more ethnically divided society in eight years of international rule. But most of all he fails to present anything like an accurate balance sheet of other military interventions.

The invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq and most recently Somalia were of course not launched for humanitarian reasons, though civilian protection has been repeatedly invoked. In each case, ethnic or sectarian killing has increased and whole regions have been destabilised. In the rare examples with a positive outcome, a limited military intervention was either invited by the sitting government (Sierra Leone), undertaken in enforcement of an explicit multilateral agreement (East Timor) or both (Congo's Ituri district).

Belligerent interventions are not always wrong. The UN world summit in 2005 agreed a "responsibility to protect" populations from genocide or mass atrocities, which includes, as a last resort, the use of armed force. Today at the Foreign Office discussions are being held with Edward Luck, the new UN expert tasked with taking forward that agreement. Martin Kettle discounts the UN's role. But all the evidence suggests that stopping the killing requires more than just overwhelming force; it needs a sufficient degree of international consensus.

Mark Lattimer
Director, Minority Rights Group

Interventionism can be the only moral course of action

Britain was right to play its part in the Kosovo conflict and, however difficult, we have to stick with the consequences

By Martin Kettle

The Guardian,
Saturday February 23 2008

Sometimes even George Bush can get it right. "This is a moving place that can't help but shake your emotions to your very foundation," said the president as he toured the skull-decked memorial to the 1994 Rwanda genocide this week. "It reminds me that we must not let these kind of actions take place."

Everyone - but everyone - who visits Rwanda comes away saying that sort of thing. And with good reason. Fourteen years after 800,000 people were murdered there in the space of 100 days, no one departs from Rwanda saying: thank God we did nothing.

As Bush observed, Rwanda is a reminder of humankind's wider moral responsibility to help those who face utmost distress and peril. To say that is, of course, to say the easy bit. Something must always be done. But what? And how? By whom? Under what rules? Everywhere? Always?

A decade and a half after Rwanda, the answers to those questions are no easier to agree on than they were when the world of Bill Clinton, John Major, Boris Yeltsin and François Mitterrand failed to come to Rwanda's aid in 1994. Since then, humanity and the powers have been faced, among others, by Bosnia, East Timor, Chechnya, Congo, Kosovo, Darfur - and now Kenya. The record has been inconsistent, at best. The few successes are still as fragile as the list of failures is long. But the questions about intervention still bear down. Those questions will not go away just because we also find them hard to answer effectively when they matter most.

Serious people should recognise at the outset that these questions are very difficult. If they were easy, then every civil conflict on the globe would be quickly policed and tidily rectified with as little disturbance as when the emergency services clear up after a motorway accident. Maybe one day that will happen. After all, every humanitarian intervention rests on the same argument. As moral obscenities, what is happening in Darfur today and what happened in Kosovo or Rwanda and elsewhere in the recent past are on a par.

But we know that consistency will always elude us. We can't solve all problems. Common sense recognises that some are more urgent, more accessible, more solvable, closer to home or have fewer awkward implications than others. Common sense adds that things never turn out perfectly. But the best should not be made the enemy of the good, and the inescapable difficulties of all conflicts cannot permanently be deployed to justify not trying.

In liberal Britain, all these arguments - and the precedent failures in Bosnia - helped the interventionists to win the original debate over the Kosovo war. In 1999, the interventionists argued that the Kosovans should and could be defended militarily against the armed Serbian nationalism that was Slobodan Milosevic's post-Yugoslavia project. The anti-interventionists were defeated because they could not agree on the basis of their opposition. Some were pacifists; others were anti-American, pro-Russian or anti-Muslim. Some were liberal perfectionists, others were conservative pessimists.

Today, however, the interventionists are at some risk of losing the peace. Partly this is because memories fade or are superseded. Iraq - which was not a humanitarian intervention - casts a retrospective shadow over Kosovo, which was. Increased anti-Americanism and the growth of contempt for Tony Blair have reshaped the way some people look back on the Balkan conflict. A marked eruption of liberal legalism, itself a reaction against the Bush-Blair response to 9/11, leads others to hide behind the United Nations, rendered impotent though the organisation is by Russia and China, as the only legitimate source of interventions which, by the nature of the balance of power, will never happen.

The difficulties that have faced Kosovo in moving beyond intervention have certainly been dispiriting. The country is small, poor and scorned, even hated, by some of its neighbours. Nato troops have been there nine years and counting. The European Union, less loved than it once was by liberal Britain, does not speak with one voice, not least because of anti-Muslim feeling in parts of the organisation. But don't forget what 1999 came down to. In the end, as the ever-missed Hugo Young put it here at the time, it was a choice between appeasement of Slobodan Milosevic and intervention. And intervention in Kosovo, unless you seriously envisage returning Kosovo's 90% Albanian population to the control of Belgrade, meant independence. There wasn't a third way then. And there is not one now.

This bears regular repetition in view of the not-so-furtive retreat from support for Kosovo's quasi-independence now beginning to take place in some parts of the forest. Unless and until a very different Serbia becomes established - and the scenes in Belgrade on Thursday night suggest that could be a while yet - Kosovo will continue to be the nation that Milosevic created. It is a difficult solution but it is the only just one. And it is not a precedent. As Philip Stephens said in the Financial Times yesterday, the fact that Kosovo will forever be cited as a precedent by other secessionists does not make it one.

Surely British liberals have room for more than one idea in their heads at a time. How can a sense of shame over Iraq really justify getting into an anti-Kosovan menage a trois with Vladimir Putin - the Slav Ahmadinajad - and with the Islamophobic states of the southern Balkans? How can liberals from a country that was forced to concede the independence of Ireland, our very own Kosovo, less than a century ago - a move which their predecessors championed - now become ideological fellow travellers of Putin and Hu Jintao?

Britain was right to play its part in the Kosovo intervention. We have to stick with the consequences. And we have to uphold the difficult principle of humanitarian intervention now and in the future, as circumstances arise - as they well might under President Obama. Don't throw the interventionist baby out with the post-Bush bathwater. The world is a difficult place - but we don't make it any easier by pulling up the drawbridge, hoping it will all go away and then wringing our hands when the next call for justice goes unheeded.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/feb/23/kosovo.serbia

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