Discussion paper on the UN and military intervention

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The question of what is called "humanitarian" military intervention -- whether through the United Nations in the name of "peace enforcement" or through other bodies in the name of stopping slaughter -- is now a central and divisive issue for peace movements. Later this year, following discussion at our Council meeting in July, War Resisters' International hopes to issue a fuller document discussing this question. At this stage, however, we want to set the scene by posing certain questions for peace campaigners.

Much of the discussion around humanitarian military intervention is abstract; unclear about who would in practice do the intervening, and what form "peace enforcement" might take. Consequently this statement analyses the practice of the United Nations -- the global intergovernmental body invol¬ved -- before questioning the form military intervention would take.

WRI frankly acknowledges that pacifists face a dilemma in discussing military interventions when people call for it hoping to save lives, to separate warring parties or to protect suffering people from brutal warlords. At the same time, we fear a system of world order maintained by the willingness to mount military interventions; we do not regard intergovernmental forums as disinterested but rather as bodies in which particular interests prevail; and we warn that reliance on military intervention in itself will create more problems than it can possibly solve.

The role of the United Nations

Although other bodies -- such as NATO or the Western European Union -- might have an institutional interest in carrying out military intervention, and regional bodies -- such as the CSCE (Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe) or OAU (Organisation of African Unity) -- could play an expanded role, this discussion focuses on the United Nations.

The UN involves itself in conflicts in a variety of ways, most of them non-military. Some UN agencies have an impressive record, but the UN's work in situations of conflict is based on a top-down and rigid approach. There is a tendency to undermine rather than build up or even legitimise local structures for handling the crisis, and to look for centralised solutions, for instance in deciding which supply routes to use. The code governing UN procedures is often bureaucratic, concerned more with the safety of its own personnel than with contributing to peace, and with a concept of accountability which excludes those suffering and in fact encourages distrust of refugees. These sweeping criticisms can be substantiated by detailed reference to the experience of frustrated UN workers or non-governmental organisations working on the spot in many different situations.

In the past five years, the UN has dramatically stepped up its peacekeeping operations: since 1988, it has initiated 13 peacekeeping operations, the same number it initiated in its first 40 years of existence. And a new emphasis has been given to its potential for military engagement in peace enforcement and humanitarian intervention.

Even disregarding the US military operations approved by the UN, the UN's existing military peacekeeping needs critical scrutiny. These operations often draw on troops with little training for a peacekeeping role, and sometimes with downright inappropriate training, such as the Malaysian and Indonesian á,álite counter-insurgency troops now based in Cambodia. And invariably, wherever armed forces are deployed, "leisure industries" follow: prostitution, alcohol, and drugs, and of course the crime associated with these.

In WRI's view, the United Nations does not represent "world opinion" or "the international community". It is a forum of governments, and its ability to act depends upon such action suiting the interests of the most powerful governments. In particular, the peace enforcement operations now envisaged -- operations which are far larger than existing peace- keeping operations -- will depend on the participation of the governments with most military power.

UN military interventions are bound to be selective -- there are too many desperate situations for it to be otherwise -- and they are selected not according to moral criteria but according to interests. We have witnessed the USA manipulating, bribing, cajoling, and threatening other governments into line over the Gulf in a particularly shameful way. But in a world where there is only one military superpower, even the most benevolent and pacific superpower -- which the US is not -- would deploy its troops in its own strategic, political and economic interests.

War prevention

The world should not look away when there is war-created famine, where ¬ethnic strife turns into bloody war, where there are gross human rights abuses, where there is the wholesale repression of communities. Unfortunately, the world does look away, neglecting war after war, while the arms trade continues to fuel the slaughter.

"Early warnings" have been sounded for a host of conflicts around the world, but few have reached the international agenda. These warnings have come particularly from people in struggle in the situation or from non-governmental organisations monitoring human rights. They are rarely heeded in time by governmental bodies, despite the universal recognition of sayings such as "prevention is better than cure" and "a stitch in time saves nine".

Nonviolent or non-military forms of action are always more likely to make most impact early in the progress of a conflict, rather than once it has erupted into war, when every side is well-armed, and when grief, suspicion and vengeance distort each side's perception of the others. Unfortunately, both governments and assemblies of governments resort to military intervention after neglecting or failing to persist with non-military means of action. When Bosnia-Herzegovina was recognised, only one government gave any reality to that recognition by setting up a consulate in Sarajevo. When France began to consider action against the rape camps, it was not in terms of high-ranking investigators or even medical experts but of military forces. The US stopped air shipments to Somalia the first time one of their planes was endangered, only to return later with 30,000 troops and massive press coverage.

The sequence of half-measures over former-Yugoslavia, always taken too late, has served to strengthen the most criminal side of the conflicts. One lesson to be learnt from that is that it is vital to define the extent and the limits of international responsibility in a situation. Those who live in a region always have to find their own way to security, and no outside body should pretend to be able to act as a guarantor of that security if it is not prepared to fulfil that commitment.

The need for international protection

Many peace-minded people will accept that non-military forms of pressure should have been exerted at an early stage in the conflict, and recognise the cynicism of governments which have saturated a region in weapons later masquerading as "saviours". However, they argue that the time for non-military action has passed. Invariably they call for "limited" military action. Pacifists do not need to have a solution in this kind of emergency to warn that judging the consequences and limits of any military engagement is a hazardous exercise. There is no easy way out of a war, even though many people think that in a dead-end situation there is no other possible solution.

"Policing actions" have grown into wars, carrying on for far longer than anyone anticipated and escalating to levels of destructiveness nobody contemplated at the outset. Sometimes a well-intentioned intervention has even found itself repressing the very people it was sent to protect, as happened with British troops in Northern Ireland. In 1969, responding to the call of the predominantly Catholic Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement, the British government sent troops to Northern Ireland to defend Catholics from Protestant attack. Two years, later when internment was introduced, the vast majority of those arrested without trial were Catholics, and 24 years later there are 20,000 British troops on active duty in Northern Ireland, an area with a population of about 1.5 million. Who is to say that the Bosnians, the people supposed to be protected by intervention, would not find themselves in conflict with an intervention force? Already Bosnians have attacked UN posts, and they would have a natural desire to reclaim territory ceded to Croatian and Serbian forces.

Nor should an assessment of the consequences of military intervention be confined to the immediate situation or region in which it takes place. Armies themselves find participation in peacekeeping operations a source of prestige -- as with the Fijian troops who first tasted action in the Lebanon but went on to stage a coup after their return home -- while repressive governments lend their troops as a means of polishing tarnished reputations. At a time when military establishments have been threatened with post-Cold War cuts, and when arms industries face recession, the role of "peace enforcment" offers a new raison d'etre for bloated military budgets. NATO countries are already reshaping their force structures and strengths to facilitate rapid deployment and increase their effectiveness in military intervention. In the cases of Germany and Japan, the postwar constitutional restraints placed on the activities of their armed forces are already being eroded.

When a people is under threat, or a particular regime outrages humanity, or murderous feuding threatens whole populations, there does need to be concerted international action -- at all levels from citizens and small groups through to government. But this applies not just in former-Yugoslavia and Somalia, but also in East Timor and Haiti, in Nagorno-Karabagh and the Sudan, and in many more places besides. It requires the consistent applications of principles which can provide a basis for future international conflict management, and the determination and imagination to use the full range of non-military measures available in a situation.

WRI and its partner organisations have been pioneers of "civilian intervention", but we recognise the limited influence of citizens' peace movements and the shortcomings of our own efforts to develop dramatic nonviolent responses to catastrophes. However, we will continue to base our work on strengthening those social elements which can contribute to the restoration of peace: people acting in conscience, people monitoring human rights violations, people looking for opportunities for dialogue or defusing conflict, people seeking practical non-military methods to save lives. We do not want short-term calls for military intervention to undermine the real task now before the world security system: to devise structures which do not reflect the interests of the most powerful but exist to apply international standards; to find non-military methods for expressing the determination to resist aggression; to establish procedures for nonviolent intervention based on strengthening societies' own abilities to regulate themselves; to create and train voluntary intervention forces trained not in the use of weapons but in nonviolent methods.

War Resisters' International, February 1992