Humanitarian intervention: a history of perverse incentives

The result has been accurately described as a ‘slow motion genocide’, with 400 000 people killed and 3 million forcibly displaced as the Sudanese government tried to cleanse Darfur of its non-Arab population, bringing Kofi Annan to lament “we had learnt nothing from Rwanda”.

Al-Bashir had touched upon the festering wound left behind after Kosovo. However there was a second, and more enduring, legacy: pre-emptive interventions would never likely enjoy public support because, by definition, they stop the emergence of those same human rights abuses that would be required as justification for the intervention itself – this is the catch 22 of Just War Theory.

So it was that, as Indonesia renewed its historic genocide in East Timor, the international community fresh from intervening in Kosovo waited for clear and unavoidable proof that both mass atrocities were underway, and that Indonesia was responsible. As 800 000 Timorese were systematically terrorised from their homes, NATO forces, previously so assertive in Kosovo, suddenly showed an unwillingness to even commit to humanitarian aid drops.

It took a stand-alone commitment from the Australian government to halt the escalating violence and to play the role of peacekeepers. However, this only took place after Indonesian permission was both sought and received and, according to conflict scholar Alex Bellamy, “only after the worst of the violence was over”. Yet despite this, due to the diplomatic risks and lack of strategic interests, the Australian-led intervention in East Timor is still regarded as a high-water mark for humanitarianism – a sentiment captured by José Ramos-Horta, the first President of the newly independent East-Timor:  “Sometimes a war saves people”.

Briefly lost in the malaise of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, humanitarian intervention returned to the fore through the bluster of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. Threatening “rivers of blood” and to “cleanse Libya house by house”, the Gaddafi regime was explicit in its intentions towards anti-government protestors. And the international community, with the belated success of East-Timor still in their minds, and now empowered with a new institutional tool in the form of the Doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), were in this case quick to act.

Ratcheting up through the standard gears of intervention – from condemnation to arms embargoes, travel restrictions, asset freezes, International Criminal Court referrals, and finally on to military action – within only a matter of months a broad international coalition was imposing a no-fly zone over Libyan airspace (with the explicit support of the Arab League, the Organisation of Islamic Conference and the Gulf Cooperation Council).

However, what had briefly seemed like a renewed spirit of international cooperation, almost immediately turned sour once the military engagement was underway. Claims of mandate abuse and mission creep emerged, as the international coalition began directly targeting Gaddafi, and pursuing regime change rather than merely protecting civilians.

Nations which had previously expressed doubts about the intervention quickly rediscovered their concerns – with UN Security Council members China, Russia, India and Brazil pushing through an after-the-fact resolution questioning the humanitarian motivations for the Libyan intervention. These doubts later snowballed into public claims that the intervention both prolonged the war and increased the likely death toll – beyond this, it also opened the question: ‘if Libya, then why not Bahrain, Yemen or indeed, Syria?’

With the perception that the principle of humanitarian intervention was used in Libya as a cover for regime change, and with the major protagonists – Barak Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron – all personally stained by these accusations, it was always going to be hard to regather international cooperation for what was then an emerging humanitarian crisis in Syria. So as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad began violently suppressing peaceful protests, and then as civil war spread across the country, and later as Islamist groups began annexing territory and committing human rights abuses, the United Nations failed to pass a single resolution of any substance that might have brought an early end to the violence. The most that could be mustered was an agreement in the form of resolution 2188 ordering the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons – thereby limiting the style of the violence, whilst the scale and substance could remain unchecked.

It eventually took the rise of Islamic State, and particularly their expansion out of Syria and into Iraq to force an international coalition into a comprehensive bombing campaign. But this too said something disparaging: the aerial commitment came with the explicit caveat of ‘no boots on the ground’. The international community saw the unfolding humanitarian crises as important enough to warrant military intervention, but only if it came at zero human cost to themselves.

Yet, as it stood, there was never a reason to expect anything more – the Syrian crisis simply came at the wrong end of humanitarian history. The spirit of humanitarianism had been born anew in the aftermath of the Cold War: with decades of permanent tension and global division suddenly out of the way, the world was ripe for a new age of collective action and moral passion. This enthusiasm was immediately dampened by the deaths of American servicemen in the streets of Mogadishu, and then permanently crushed by the public relations disaster that followed.

The decision to try and militarily protect at-risk segments of humanity should ordinarily be a public relations boon for any given government or institution. Yet from that moment in Somalia, and up until the present crisis in Syria, the principle of humanitarian intervention has been accompanied by a malaise of inconsistent, and often contradictory, public outrage.

As much as humanitarian intervention ought to be a moral calculation, it is ultimately a political decision, and politically it has proven to be high risk with little reward. Maligned when it has been absent, maligned when it has been inadequate, and also maligned when it has been successful, the modern history of humanitarian intervention has been constantly undermined by a series of perverse and misleading incentives.