Online Edition: Spring, 1997
Genocide Forum: Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
Online Edition: Spring, 1997
Page 1 of 2
orceful, automatic, and universal intervention on behalf of human rights
protection is not a desirable activity. Restrained, case-by-case, selective
intervention is very desirable when it's done right. Systematic prevention of
the most heinous violation, genocide, is imperative. But it too must be done
right. And even anti-genocidal intervention works only under very, very special
circumstances, which I will try to develop.
ut before I do this I want to remind you of the six standard methods of
international intervention on behalf of human rights which are available. In
other words, the repertory of methods available. You know them all, I'm just
reminding you. Among the unilateral methods there is, first of all, the most
commonly used: that graduated scale of nonmilitary methods that range from
diplomatic pressure to the imposition of trade sanctions. Think of the United
States vis-à-vis China or the United States vis-à-vis apartheid
South Africa for examples. If that isn't good enough, you can always go one
step further and use military force. Think of Haiti recently where this was
done. And the most dramatic unilateral method available, used very rarely
because you've got to win a war first, is to take over the country you've
defeated and try to remake its institutions, which is what we did in Japan and
Germany after 1945.
hose are the unilateral methods available. Multilaterally, either through the
United Nations or some other international organization, there are also three,
varying in intensity from the simplest, which we call peacekeeping, which can
work only when the parties to a particular conflict have agreed to end it for
whatever reason. Peacekeeping involves lightly armed or unarmed military forces
designed to keep belligerents apart who've already agreed that they want to be
kept apart. More complicatedly, there is something now called peace enforcing,
which is what went on in Bosnia before NATO took over. Peace enforcement is
designed to compel the parties to a conflict to abide by an agreement to which
in principle they've committed themselves but didn't really mean it. And you
interpose military forces here in order to encourage them to abide by it, which
requires, in order to be effective, quite heavily armed military forces
operating under rules of engagement which allow them considerable freedom of
action -- more freedom of action than the United Nations forces enjoy in
Bosnia. There's a third method which was used in Central America effectively,
in Cambodia less effectively, and is being used in Mozambique even as we speak.
We don't have a name for that, so let's call it "resolving the underlying
conflict which gave rise to all the trouble in the first place." And this also
involves military forces, but it involves military forces in conjunction with
all kinds of civilian activity, not only police but administrative apparatus,
designed to address whatever conditions presumably led to the conflict in the
first place. This may involve land reform. This may involve finding employment
for demobilized soldiers. This may involve removing mines. This may involve all
kinds of activities which are not normally part of things international
organizations do. Peacekeeping, peace enforcement, and resolving the underlying
conflict. It's a scale from the less to the more complicated.
ith this reminder out of the way, let me get back to the argument. The
argument is that forceful, automatic, universal intervention on behalf of human
rights is not desirable. But a more restrained approach is. Now why do I argue
this thoroughly non - politically correct position? Well, number one, human
rights happen to be culturally specific. Human rights grow up in the particular
cultural area you are talking about, in response to the traditions of the
people involved. Human rights are not by definition universal, no matter how
often we pretend that they are. They are in fact not universal. And they
develop for historical reasons in particular cases and places, and naturally
they're not the same all over the world. To pretend that they're the same is to
impose our values on somebody else, as people from the Third World are not slow
to tell you usually. At the moment, no fewer than four different conceptions of
what is meant by the notion of human rights are actively competing in the
world. They're competing in legal circles, they're competing in political
circles. The four types are, first of all, the distinction between individual
rights and collective rights. Individual rights we're familiar with, that's
what we've got here. That's the kind of rights that you find mostly expressed
(not 100%) in American law. As opposed to collective rights, which are rights
for groups of people or classes of people, entitled by virtue of the fact that
they belong to that particular class of people. There's a further distinction,
a distinction between civil rights and social and economic rights. Civil rights
are of particular interest to the West. Social and economic rights are of
particular interest to the rest of the world. And consequently we have here a
two-fold division, two pairs of quite opposing concepts, all four of which have
inspired international legislation. All four of which have given rise to new
international institutions. And all four of which have their defenders and
their enemies.
Presentation by Naomi Roht-Arriaza | Presentation by Sir Brian Urquhart
© Copyright 1996, Regents of the University of California