Online Edition: Spring, 1997
Genocide Forum: Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
Online Edition: Spring, 1997
Page 1 of 2
ell I must say that I think ground covered by the two previous speakers has
given us plenty to talk about. And I think it has answered, in my mind at any
rate, one question which I think Ernie Haas raised, which is the question of
whether we're optimistic or pessimistic. There is almost everything deficient
about the current mechanism, both national and international and
nongovernmental, to deal with genocide or with violations of human rights. But
everything that has been said has demonstrated, I think, a very enthusiastic
and hard-working effort to try to get into these unbelievably difficult
subjects, which nobody has ever managed in history to do anything about. Fifty
years ago, at the end of World War II, this kind of talk by either of the two
speakers would have been completely impossible. Human rights was simply not
regarded as an international standard. When I was growing up nobody ever talked
about human rights in relation, for example, to the Nazi regime in Germany. And
indeed when anybody ever tried it with the governments Britain and France they
said, "No, oh boy, we can't criticize the internal activities of a government
of a friendly power." "Friendly power," mind you. This was what happened to the
German Resistance in the 1930s when general after general, official after
foreign office official, came privately to London and tried to persuade the
British government that the time to deal with Hitler was then and not when he
became extremely powerful. It's a heartbreaking story. But I think one of the
reasons for that was that you couldn't have had this conversation then. So I'm
not all that defeatist about this. I think there has been a huge advance in the
last 15 years, but it's nothing like good enough. And of course it does take
time to change human behavior, governmental behavior, and the cultures of the
different parts of the world. It always has taken time, it always will. And
it's no use supposing that we're going to go fully armed into a completely new
and glorious period. We'd all like that but it's not going to happen. I think
that the important thing is, Dag Hammarskjöld once said the UN wasn't
created to take humanity to Heaven but to save it from Hell. And I think that
the most important thing to do is to try to build at least some foundation for
avoiding the worst happening in the future, and goodness knows we've had some
pretty horrendous lessons in the past five years, particularly in Rwanda and
Bosnia, about how possible genocide is in the world which we all think we've
made better in the last 50 years.
et me make, at the risk of being extremely banal, three or perhaps even four
general observations. And there's nothing original about any of them.
Governments are much more concerned with interests than they are with
principles or ethics. That is certainly true now, it was certainly true in the
past, and I suspect it's going to be true in the future. With the possible
exception of the Nordic countries and conceivably Canada and one or two other
countries around the globe, governments are overwhelmingly concerned with
interests. So, incidentally, is the private sector. If you read the story in
The New York Times this morning about the new oil field that's been
found off-shore in Nigeria and the amazing, wonderfully bland remarks of the
spokesman for Shell, you can see what I mean. There's no way that Shell is not
going to go on making money out of oil and natural gas, not at all. And they
even argue that if they do this, this will in some extraordinary way improve
the human rights record of the Nigerian government -- hard to see how, but
that's what they're saying.
nd of course nongovernmental organizations are more interested in principles
and ethics than in interests. That is very, very important, and I thank
goodness for it. And I think a fourth thing, which arises from something Ernie
Haas said: human rights in our society are not universal; but the UN
Declaration of Human Rights is universal. It's called the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights. And that has landed the UN in a very, very foggy middle ground
where it is a place where you declare principles and then proceed to ignore
them, and refer to this wonderful abstract body of the United Nations, which is
of course governments, as if it had failed. It's a very, very useful fig leaf
and scapegoat for moral failures, among others. I think it was Bismarck who
said that your principles should always be so high that you can walk
comfortably beneath them. And my goodness that's true now of governments.
here's a problem about the UN Charter because, depending on where you stand,
it's either basically a moral document, a declaration of principles, or a
political document, defending national sovereignty, or a sort of
forward-looking legal basis for an arrangement in the world which we haven't
got to yet but in our best moments we all think we ought to get to. The Charter
contains all sort of aims and objectives and principles, but in the end, the
clincher when the Charter is referred to or put into action in the UN or
elsewhere, is national sovereignty. That is what is decisive in the UN decision
making process and, incidentally, in the carrying on of UN operations. And
there's all sorts of talk about reference to principles and so on, but actually
it's national sovereignty and national interests that unfortunately are
overwhelmingly important. Under a lot of pressure from all sorts of
nongovernmental groups, and from public opinion, governments have signed up to
a great number of declarations of principle and regulation of behavior. I
mentioned the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the whole family of
human rights conventions. There's the Genocide Convention. And then in other
fields there's all sorts of others, the Law of the Sea Treaty, the Geneva
Conventions, and so on. None of them are enforceable. And that, I think, again
is where we get into trouble when we start making judgments about the UN. It
would be wonderful if the UN's decisions were enforceable. But can you imagine
what, not just Pat Buchanan would say, but a lot of far more moderate people.
There is an obsession with preserving natural rights against the dark forces of
world government. And that applies in the human rights field as much as it does
anywhere else.
here's the notion of impartiality, which has become a sort of albatross around
the neck of the UN in the last two or three years. But the thing about
impartiality is that it is the principle of the weak, of a weak organization.
If, for example, in Bosnia any government had wished and been willing to go and
fight the Serbs and prevent what was being called "genocide," that would have
been quite different. But it was precisely because not a single government was
prepared to do that that the UN was pitchforked into this situation without
either adequate means or an adequate mandate to deal in any serious way with
great human rights violations or genocide or ethnic cleansing. It was the
visible symbol of the concern of governments to be seen to be acting. But it
was absolutely nothing to do with a serious approach to the problem. And I must
say that it seems to me that the same thing may well prove to be true of the
much-touted NATO force there now, IFOR. I must say that I can't imagine what
would have been said about the United Nations if it had absolutely refused to
go after war criminals for the tribunal, or had absolutely refused, come to
that, to intervene in the suburbs of Sarajevo to prevent the kind of mayhem
that's been going on during this transfer period. Since it's a NATO force and
it's one-third the United States, everybody's extraordinarily kind about it.
But it isn't very impressive from the point of view of principle, I have to
say.
f course an impartial group in a war situation immediately can and will be
manipulated by all the fighting parties. That is what has tended to happen in
some of these UN operations, in Somalia for example, and certainly in Bosnia. I
think the truth is that governments are rather lukewarm on human rights in
relation to international policy, or even national policy. Indeed I think
they're pretty lukewarm, most of them, certainly the powerful ones, to
principles in general as having some importance in making policy or taking
action. There are two reasons for this, and certainly they apply to the human
rights field. One is that if you take action on principle it tends to cause you
a great deal of trouble and expense and may well complicate your more practical
interests. And the other of course, in the case of a lot of governments, is
that if you take action on principle in human rights cases, it may create a
precedent which will, in future, be invoked against you. And I think that for
this reason you do have this rather lackluster performance in the United
Nations about these extraordinarily important matters of human rights and even
on humanitarian intervention sometimes.
Presentation by Ernst Haas | Presentation by Naomi Roht-Arriaza
© Copyright 1996, Regents of the University of California