By Judith Miller
April 18, 1999
United Nations -- At the century's last session of the Commission on Human Rights, Secretary-General Kofi Annan of the United Nations unveiled a doctrine with profound implications for international relations in the new millennium. The airstrikes against Yugoslavia, he said on April 7, showed that the world would no longer permit nations intent on committing genocide to "hide" behind the U.N. charter, which has traditionally safeguarded national sovereignty.
The protection of human rights, he said, must "take precedence over concerns of state sovereignty." "As long as I am secretary-general," said Annan, the United Nations "will always place human beings at the center of everything we do." This was not the secretary general acting alone. He was, he acknowledged, only embracing an "evolving" international norm. He also acknowledged that using force to protect human rights poses "fundamental challenges" to the United Nations.
In fact, an erosion of sovereignty when it conflicts with human rights standards is reflected in many events of the last decade: the creation of international tribunals to try individuals accused of crimes against humanity in Yugoslavia and Rwanda; Spain's effort to extradite the former Chilean leader, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, from Britain for trial on charges of crimes against humanity, and the impending trial of two Libyans before a Scottish court in the Netherlands over charges that they bombed an American jetliner over Lockerbie, Scotland.
To a certain extent, analysts agree, Annan's own stance is a reaction to his own searing experience as the head of peacekeeping in Rwanda, when more than half a million people were slaughtered as the Security Council withdrew U.N. forces.
Some argue that Annan has merely blessed a "given" of the political climate today: the growing importance of human rights to the United Nations and many of its 185 members. This was most evident in the Security Council's overwhelming rejection two weeks ago of a resolution condemning NATO's airstrikes as illegal on grounds that the Security Council had not authorized them. Only Namibia joined Russia and China, the co-sponsors of the motion, in arguing that Serbia's treatment of its Albanian minority was essentially an internal matter.
Annan's doctrine, predictably, has won praise from the burgeoning human rights community. But others argue that though well-intentioned, it is naive, dangerous and likely to increase tensions and paralysis within the Security Council.
And at least one close adviser to Annan worries that intervening to save white Europeans (albeit Muslims) in Kosovo, after having ignored even worse massacres in Rwanda and elsewhere, leaves the United Nations open to charges of selective morality and double standards. Others argue that in a world with some 40 million refugees and displaced people, Annan's stance risks stretching U.N. resources to unbearable limits.
Herbert S. Okun, a former American diplomat and U.N. adviser on narcotics, warns that going to war to protect people is also perilous. "The use of force," he warns, "is a very blunt instrument on behalf of human rights."
Still others worry that respect for sovereignty has often been a barrier to the expansion of internal conflicts, and has served as a rallying point for collective action against aggressors.
In speeches and articles last year, Annan addressed some of these worries even as he signaled his growing anxiety about the violations of rights occurring in Kosovo. Nation-states are not going to disappear, he wrote in the journal "Humanitarian Intervention." Respect for the "fundamental sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political independence o
Even China, said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, has not uniformly blocked humanitarian intervention by the United Nations. For instance, it did not object to the creation of "no-fly zones" in Iraq to protect the Kurdish minority in the north and Shiite Muslims in the south against Saddam Hussein's furious repression. The grosser the oppression (or, more to the point, the less directly it resembled China's own actions in Tibet) the greater Beijing's willingness to tolerate humanitarian intervention. "So even for China the door is not completely shut," Roth said.
There is, as well, a link between the idea of stopping atrocities and preserving the general peace, another key goal for the United Nations. Roth argues that failure to respond to brutal internal repression often emboldens a would-be aggressors. "Our failure to punish Iraq for its brutal repression of, and use of chemical use of chemical weapons against, the Kurds in 1988 led Saddam to conclude he could get away with invading Kuwait," he said.
The resort to force, of course, need not be the first or preferred means of intervention. Patiently applied, targeted economic sanctions against Libya eventually prompted Moammar Gadhafi, the Libyan leader, to surrender the two men charged with bringing down Pan Am 103 over Scotland. On the other hand, almost a decade of harsh sanctions against Iraq have failed to persuade Saddam Hussein to disclose information about his quest for unconventional weapons.
"The military intervention in Kosovo reflects to some extent the lessons of Iraq," said one senior diplomat, "and of Rwanda." The case for humanitarian intervention in Kosovo was persuasive for both Europe and the United States for different reasons, one senior diplomat asserted. America, an "idea" nation whose national identity derives more from a "value-driven agenda" than from traditional bonding notions of blood, religion or soil, has long been an aggressive promoter of human rights. Also at stake for America is NATO's very purpose and effectiveness as an alliance.
And for Europe, the question of appearing indifferent to repression and brutality was especially evocative. Even Germany, which since World War II has resisted the use of force to solve political problems, did not want to end the century by appearing cold toward an echo of the atrocities it caused 60 years ago. Paraphrasing Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer of Germany, the diplomat said the decision for Germany was between "no more wars" and "no more Auschwitzes." It, like the rest of NATO, chose to go to war this time.
