| Photo by S. Beth Atkin |
John Shattuck Interview (1997): Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by S. Beth Atkin |
Page 5 of 7
This period that we've been going through recently has presented a lot of challenges and has clearly helped define what the work of human rights is now for the US, for the US government, and for someone in your position. Let's talk a little about that. It seems that one of the lessons of Rwanda and the genocide that occurred there is that we need systems of early warning about these new kinds of gross human rights violations that are occurring. Tell us about what you've learned from that experience and what our government is trying to do.
Well, I think there are three big areas of development in the human rights field, which we've learned out of Bosnia, Rwanda, Zaire, Burundi, Somalia, Haiti, all of these human rights crises of recent years. First, we know we've got to do more to get early warning, and we're doing that. That's why these field missions that I described earlier are so important. But not only those: we need to watch more closely refugee flows -- what's happening, where are the people going, why are they going, and is that an indication of human rights abuse? We need to strengthen the understanding between military activities and civilian activities. In many parts of Latin America we've been working with new democracies to try and get a much closer understanding, through training and other kinds of things, that the military really has no role to play when it comes to basic political activities.
The second thing we need to do is actually intervene when it becomes clear that there is a genocide in progress or imminent. We didn't do that early enough in Bosnia. We didn't do that early enough in Rwanda. And the painful lessons about those places are that traditional forms of peacekeeping, which is where you send in a few international troops to watch over the situation and hope it doesn't get out of hand, doesn't work. In fact, in Bosnia those kinds of peacekeepers were taken hostage by the worst human rights violators. So we need a more active form of peacemaking and a more effective means of intervening. That's why the United States is supporting the creation of an African regional force that would do peacekeeping work. That's why we're so actively working with NATO in Bosnia to have a much more aggressive form of peacemaking, in terms of the NATO mission that's there right now. So when these active interventions occur -- and there shouldn't be that many -- we should be prepared to move into them.
Third, we've learned a lot about how you can't ultimately resolve these conflicts without some form of justice. Somebody underneath it all started it. Somebody is responsible for war crimes. You can't simply say that all the Serbs were responsible for the crimes that were committed against the Muslims in Bosnia or all the Hutus were responsible for the crimes committed against the Tutsis in Rwanda. That's absurd. We need to figure out a way of lifting this cloud of collective guilt that settles on a whole people after a conflict by pointing a finger at those who really instigated it. That's why the two international war crimes tribunals that have been created are so important.
So these three elements of dealing with the worst kinds of human rights abuse -- early warning, active intervention, and justice -- are the basic building blocks of a human rights policy.
Let's look at those three and raise some of the problems that come to mind. In the early warning situation, let's look at Bosnia. Wasn't it the case that the countries really knew but there was a political situation in which the U.S. wanted to defer to the Europeans while the Europeans couldn't get their act together or were divided? It wasn't a problem of early warning, it was more of a problem of the lack of a political settlement.
Sure. In fact I would say that the Bosnia issue moved quite rapidly to Stage Two, which is that it was necessary then to take action to intervene effectively. Intervention occurred in 1992 with the establishment of the UN peacekeeping force, but we now know in retrospect that it wasn't effective. We probably didn't know enough at the time about how that force would operate. It became hostage itself to the crisis and to the conflict.
And the political stalemate.
That's right. Major mistakes were made along the way in moving through that early warning process. Some governments recognized some of the breakaway states in the former Yugoslavia and they just fanned the flames of the conflict by doing that. I think there was insufficient attention paid, early on, to the issue of war crimes. That happened a little bit later. I think the world was taken a lot by surprise in both Bosnia and Rwanda. These were new post - Cold War situations. I don't think that in any way excuses the failure of the world to act, but I don't think it knew how to act. I don't think it put this formula together that I'm talking about. We've learned a lot more, and I think the fact that there is a much more aggressive international intervention diplomatically in Zaire now to try to head that off, and the fact that there is a more aggressive military intervention in Bosnia, is a fruit of what we've learned.
Now, looking back at your background and coming out of the Vietnam experience, one of the interesting things that I'm hearing is that dealing with some of these human rights issues requires intervention. And that then leads to a series of questions ("Will American troops be involved?"), which, in situations like Somalia, demonstrate that there's still a very great reluctance to lose one American life, even though there are paramount issues such as the stopping of genocide. Comment a little on this change of perspective in the human rights community. How do you address this problem of the fear that American lives will be lost?
Well, looking first at the change in perspective of the human rights community, I think this is one of the ways in which the very definition of human rights has changed in recent years. There used to be a focus primarily on reporting, advocacy, publicity. Now, as I say, the emphasis is on institution building and much more active use of all of the tools of foreign policy in order to address these human rights issues. The good news is that for the first time ever, human rights have moved into the central decision making process in some of our major foreign policy priorities. Haiti and Bosnia are the two best examples that come immediately to mind. I personally was never of the view that military force would not be an appropriate means of enforcing human rights obligations. You can't look at the genocide of the Holocaust in the Second World War and the origins of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in that very conflict, which of course involved a major response by the international community to try to stop it -- you can't look at that without saying yes, that's got to be part of the response. I think what happened is that we got side-tracked during the Cold War. Human rights, with the exception of a short period during the Carter administration, was seen to be largely a kind of political squabbling rather than a real response to underlying major, major abuses. And so I think that's why this is an appropriate position to take.
Next page: Implementing Justice
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