Day One, Panel One: What Will the Next War Look Like and What Will the International Community Do About It?

Moderator/Discussant: Michael Ignatieff, Author

b) International Responses
Aryeh Neier, President, Open Society Institute

ARYEH NEIER: Thank you. I'm very tempted to engage with Colonel Peters in a discussion of borders and whether that's the issue that is most significant in these difficult problems we have to face. But my assignment was to talk about international responses, and I will try to follow the directions I received from Roy Gutman.

In talking about international responses, it seemed to me appropriate to read the first sentences from the most recent annual report of my former organization, Human Rights Watch, because I think they are indicative of the international responses that are taking place.

The report begins, "Sovereignty loomed less large in 1999 as an obstacle to stopping and redressing crimes against humanity. Governmental leaders who committed these crimes found a greater chance of prosecution and military intervention. The lesson sent is that leaders risk their freedom and control of territory if they commit the most severe human rights abuses."

I think it's fair to say that sovereignty loomed less large, not only during 1999, but also during the entire last decade of the 20th Century. We had a number of military interventions and we had a number of legal interventions of a variety that were largely unknown previously. If you think of the interventions by the Western powers, militarily, during the last decade, they include Iraqi-Kurdistan in 1991. That is when the Kurdish uprising took place after the Gulf War. The west repatriated the Kurds to Iraq from Turkey and from Iran essentially by establishing a security zone and made Kurdistan an international military protectorate. We haven't formally abrogated Iraq's sovereignty over Kurdistan, but to all intents and purposes, Kurdistan is autonomous today and Saddam Hussein's writ does not run to Kurdistan.

The following year we had the intervention in Somalia for humanitarian purposes, but one could also say that it was for human rights purposes in the sense that the famine was created by the conflict between warring clan leaders and the crimes that they committed.

We had the intervention in Haiti in 1994, and the United States in leading that under UN auspices was, perhaps, motivated primarily by concern about the number of Haitians coming here seeking asylum. But the way in which we dealt with the problem was to say that we would restore democratic government and in that fashion undercut their asylum claims. They would no longer be fleeing persecution because we would remove the military regime that was committing the abuses.

And then, of course, we had NATO's decisive intervention in Bosnia in 1995, bringing about the Dayton peace accords. We had Kosovo in 1999. We had East Timor in 1999. Also, if we think of interventions not led by western governments, we had the west African interventions in Liberia at the beginning of the decade and Sierra Leone at the end of the decade, and there were a lot of things done wrong. But essentially they were to put an end -- they were intended to put an end to conflicts and to stop the severe human rights abuses taking place.

If you think in terms of legal intervention, we had the establishment of the Yugoslavia tribunal in 1993, the Rwanda tribunal in 1994, and the Rome Treaty for the International Criminal Court in 1998. And then, of course, while there had been many cases previously in which national courts exercised universal jurisdiction, we didn't have them do so in the cases of heads of state previously, but the Pinochet case in 1998 and the Habré case in Senegal this year suggest that heads of state are now vulnerable to prosecutions by courts in other countries in which they seek refuge.

There are, I think, quite significant limitations on sovereignty that have been part of the international response to crimes against humanity and in a way they are a logical outgrowth of the underlying ideology of human rights. That is, to the extent that human rights is conceived of as universal human rights and it is conceived of in terms of global responsibility to protect human rights. It does seem logical that over time that responsibility would be exercised in the manner in which is was exercised during the last decade of the 20th Century.

Probably the reason that the extension of the human rights ideology in that way did not take place earlier was twofold. Both because of the cold war, which made it impossible to get actions of that sort, and also because the human rights impulse, the human rights movement, did not acquire the political strength in an earlier period to have the impact on public policy that it did have during the last decade of the 20th Century.

Today, governments are responsive to the human rights impulse. And when they don't respond, as when they didn't respond in Rwanda, you have a phenomenon such as President Clinton traveling to Kigali and apologizing for the failure of the United States to respond effectively to the genocide in Rwanda. And we've had a series of efforts by public bodies to look back at their own failures in Rwanda. The Belgian senate has conducted an inquiry on the failures of Belgium. The French government has conducted an inquiry on its failures; published a five-volume report on its failures with respect to Rwanda. The United Nations has had an inquiry into its own failures with respect to Rwanda. It doesn't mean that if a Rwanda happened again, the response would be any different, but at least there's a high level of guilt in governmental bodies and intergovernmental bodies about their failure to respond.

So I think that the international response is significantly motivated by the human rights impulse. And I have to say that as a sort of career long professional in advocating human rights, I have been one who has espoused legal intervention for the protection of human rights, and in certain circumstances and in certain ways, military intervention for the protection of human rights.

I want, however, to register some doubts, and I'm not raising questions because I want to say that the interventions that have take place were mistaken. My concern is, however, that there may be some unintended consequences. I don't want to exaggerate the significance of this reduction in the idea of sovereignty that I think has taken place during this past decade. But I do want to suggest that sovereignty may not be altogether a bad thing and there may be ways in which the idea of sovereignty itself should be looked to as a means of protecting rights. And I'm borrowing here to an extent from the thoughts that Steven Holmes expressed in an essay in the American Prospect entitled "Weak State, Weak Liberties." And Holmes was expressing concern particularly about Russia, and his argument was that the Russian state is too weak to protect rights. Previously we thought that the enemy of rights was the excessively powerful state, and that in the contemporary world it's often the too weak state that is the enemy of rights.

It seems to me that the concern that Holmes expressed about Russia could be transferred to other states, which are in danger of fragmentation today. And the states that I'm thinking of which could be the site of some of the wars that Colonel Peters talked about are Nigeria and Indonesia. These seem to be states that could suffer, even more than they are suffering at present, from ethnic and religious conflict. And the question I raise is whether a decline in sovereignty is a good thing in such circumstances when we, in fact, would like states to be the guarantors of rights.

It happens that both Indonesia and Nigeria this moment have heads of state who are much more committed to the protection of rights than anything those countries had previously. They have endured decades of corrupt, brutal military rule and now you have democrats who have come into office and they face the possibility of the fragmentation of the states and the horrendous consequences for rights that we could see in those states.

There's a passage in Machiavelli's Discourses in which he is talking about the states, and he says: "it is only the most vital of states that can survive, not only a change in government, but a change in the form of government." And clearly the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia were not such vital states. They really were able to survive a change in the form of government. And it may be that Indonesia and Nigeria are not such vital states that they can survive a change in the form of government. And therefore, we get the irony that at the time when corrupt, brutal military rule is ended in Nigeria and Indonesia it should, in fact, turn out to be the most dangerous moment in the histories of those countries.

The question I have is whether the idea of sovereignty is in part an expression of the sense of community, the sense of solidarity, the sense of a civic spirit that is vital in holding a diverse country together.

Part of my difficulty with Colonel Peters and his idea about borders is if you look at countries, they're all so incredibly diverse, with a handful of exceptions. But once you start by saying our problem is borders, the question is where do you stop in the fragmentation of states that may take place, and stuck with the borders we have, it is important that those countries should hold together.

At any rate, all I'm suggesting is that there is a trend that we have seen during the past decade, very much driven by the international human rights movement, to intervene militarily and to intervene legally for the protection of rights. But I think we do need to be mindful that it is still states that above all have to protect rights. We have to try to limit our interventions in ways in which we don't undermine the idea of the state to the point where we exacerbate the weakness that states have in actually
protecting human rights.

Thank you.

MICHAEL IGNATIEFF: Thank you, Aryeh Neier, for that in some sense surprising defense of the sovereignty which is usually seen as the alibi of rogues and tyrants. We now have it redescribed, I think persuasively, as potentially the defense of human liberty in certain circumstances.

So that gives us lots to think about, and the issue has already been joined between Colonel Peters and Aryeh Neier about borders, and we should follow that up in discussion. But before we do, I want to give the floor to René Kosirnik of the ICRC.

Aryeh Neier, Bio.
President, Open Society Institute

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