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How should the world deal with violations of human rights? Consider two tests of that question.
 

In the early 1990s, Serbian forces, carrying out what they called ethnic cleansing, raped and tortured and murdered thousands of Muslims in Bosnia. Serbian snipers in the surrounding hills picked off children on the streets of Sarajevo. The world did nothing meaningful to stop the savagery. West European countries sent troops and promised to protect declared ‘safe areas’ – a promise whose emptiness was exposed when Serbian forces entered the ‘safe area’ of Srebrenica and killed seven thousand Muslim men. Two U.S. presidents, the first Bush and Clinton, rejected proposals that America intervene with force. But the shame of Srebrenica finally forced President Clinton to act. He called for the NATO bombing of Serbian military targets. The Serbs quickly agreed to a cease-fire, and then accepted the Dayton agreements that ended the fighting.

In December of 2002, the British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, published a dossier of human rights violations by the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein: systematic rape, torture, gassing, public beheadings, mass executions. All were designed to suppress any resistance to the Saddam government, which the British dossier called a “regime of unique horror.” That Saddam had engaged in inhumanities on a gross scale could not be doubted. He used chemical weapons against Halabja, a Kurdish town in northern Iraq. He has killed more people than the two hundred thousand who died in the Bosnian war. Yet many supporters of human rights who had pressed for international intervention to stop the atrocities in Bosnia strongly opposed President Bush’s idea of war on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Amnesty International accused Foreign Secretary Straw of “cold and calculated manipulation” of human rights violations in Iraq to advance the cause of war.

The two cases show that whether and how to intervene on behalf of human rights is a complicated question. What was right in Bosnia does not provide a sure answer for other times, other places. And the two cases show something else: The presidency of George W. Bush has drastically changed the terms of the discussion on international human rights.

The essays in this issue of ��æ�岹���ܲ� explore fundamental aspects of the human rights question. Martha Nussbaum’s discusses a human trait that underlies much of the cruelty that human beings have inflicted on each other over the ages: our ability to believe that people of a different race or nation or color or religion are less human than ourselves. The Holocaust might have been expected to shock us out of such thinking. But its lesson did not prevent genocide in Bosnia or Rwanda, or make the supposedly civilized countries of the world act against it in a timely way. There seems to me to be a tinge of despair in Professor Nussbaum’s prescription that “an education in common human weakness and vulnerability should be a very profound part of the education of all children.” Athenians and Trojans, Hutus and Tutsis: If you prick us, do we not bleed?

At the other end of the problem from its origins is the question of how international society in the twenty-first century can control the base instincts of man. The essays range from the vision of Stanley Hoffmann – a world with institutions to investigate abuses and punish the abusers – to the skepticism of Jack Goldsmith and Stephen D. Krasner, their warnings about political realities and the dangers of utopianism.

The discussion of whether and how to intervene comes in a remarkable historical context. Consciousness of the problem – of the possibility of international intervention – developed slowly, then suddenly accelerated and became a major strand of policy in the world.

What might be called the beginning came in 1876, when Gladstone, the great Liberal British prime minister, then out of office, published a pamphlet on what he called the “Bulgarian Horrors,” the reported Turkish massacre of thousands of Bulgarians in what was then the Ottoman Empire. Disraeli, Gladstone’s longtime political opponent, said the pamphlet was “vindictive and ill-written,” adding with characteristic Disraeli mockery that the pamphlet was “of all the Bulgarian horrors perhaps the greatest.” But the British public bought two hundred thousand copies.

The idea that outsiders should stop a government from mistreating its own citizens was blocked then, and for nearly a century after, by the concept, in international law and politics, of inviolate national sovereignty. The U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau Sr., made that plain in a cable to the State Department during the Armenian genocide in 1915. “It is difficult for me to restrain myself from doing something to stop this attempt to exterminate a race,” he said, “but I realize that I am here as ambassador and must abide by the principles of non-interference with the internal affairs of another country.”

After World War II the United Nations adopted the Convention Against Genocide, giving the phenomenon a name and committing all the ratifying powers – including, eventually, the United States – to act if and when there was another mortal assault on a population group. But the convention was not enforced. Samantha Power tells the story in her chilling book A Problem From Hell. The title comes from a comment by Warren Christopher, President Clinton’s first secretary of state. It was what he called the genocidal situation in Bosnia, where America did not act for years because Clinton thought no serious American interest at stake. Or, to put it more realistically, he thought the American public might not support a risky venture in a far-off country of which it knew little. The same lack of political will led the U.S. and other governments to ignore warnings of genocide in Rwanda. Extremist Hutus were left free to kill eight hundred thousand of their fellow citizens in one hundred days.

But the failed response to genocide was paralleled, in the last third of the twentieth century, by a development of quite a different character: the rise of private organizations that took up the cause of international human rights and had an enormous impact on public opinion and official policy. Amnesty International, then Human Rights Watch, and many other groups achieved far more than nearly anyone expected.

The human rights organizations publicized individual cases of tyranny, capturing the public imagination with the stories of Soviet dissidents and the victims of Latin-American dictatorships. At their urging, Congress passed legislation limiting U.S. relationships with governments that violated human rights. President Carter created the new position of Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights.

The growing concern about human rights had a powerful effect – a quite unexpected one – on the Soviet Union. Soviet leaders pressed for years for a Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which they wanted to legitimize the division of the continent between East and West. Western governments reluctantly agreed to hold the conference at Helsinki in 1975. The Helsinki Act, agreed there, included passages protecting human rights – among other things forbidding punishment for political beliefs. That ‘basket’ of the act, as it was called, was considered unimportant. It turned out otherwise. Soviet and East European dissidents set up what they called Helsinki Watch Committees. In the words of Michael Ignatieff, director of the Carr Center on Human Rights Policy at Harvard, “They created an alternative pole of moral legitimacy.”

In the West, Professor Ignatieff wrote, the idea of human rights went “from being the insurgent creed of dissidents and activists to something like the ruling ideology.” It happened in the time of a generation: an astonishing event.

The concept of inviolate national sovereignty yielded to new mechanisms for the international enforcement of human rights. One is regional systems of protection, the notable example being the European Covenant on Human Rights, enforced by a commission and a court; Britain, for instance, has been forced to change a number of its laws after they were found in violation of the covenant. Another is the exercise of jurisdiction by national courts against wrongdoers from other countries; the dramatic case was the decision by Britain’s highest court, the House of Lords, that Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean tyrant, who was in Britain as a visitor, should be delivered up to a Spanish judge investigating him for violations of the international convention against torture.

War crimes have been dealt with by various methods. Military intervention was used in Bosnia and then Kosovo to stop the brutality. Perpetrators were tried in special war crimes courts: not only to bring them to justice but, by holding them accountable, to meet the feelings of the victims and break the cycle of violence. The United Nations set up war crimes tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. And then almost all the countries of the world agreed to create an International Criminal Court to try those charged with genocide and crimes against humanity. It was the capstone of the new structure of human rights enforcement.

An International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty,¹ established by the government of Canada and several foundations, produced a report in 2001 that stated with admirable clarity the contemporary view on these issues. The report was entitled “The Responsibility to Protect,” and that was its message: All states have a responsibility to protect their citizens; if their leaders are unable or unwilling to do so, they render their countries liable to military intervention – authorized by the Security Council or, failing that (as in the case of Kosovo), by individual countries in “conscience-shocking situations.”

That was the framework, the international state of mind, in which this issue of ��æ�岹���ܲ� was conceived. Though there would be sharp differences over the wisdom of acting this way or that in particular situations, there was a general sense that human rights had become a prime concern of the international order. National governments, most of all the U.S. government, were under public pressure to act against what Gladstone long ago called horrors – to act unilaterally if need be.

But President Bush has shaken that framework. He set out to destroy the International Criminal Court, on the ground that somehow, some day, an American might be prosecuted before it. He took a dim view generally of treaties and other international obligations limiting American freedom of action; he rejected the Kyoto Agreement on climate change and withdrew from the Anti- Ballistic Missile Treaty.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, might have been met by a U.S. call for international justice. Gary Bass, in his essay, makes a compelling case for treating the World Trade Center massacre as a crime against humanity. By seeking an international tribunal of some kind, the Bush administration could have focused the minds of people around the world on the criminal nature of the enterprise.

Instead, President Bush opted for the metaphor, and the reality, of war. His course has turned millions from sympathy with America to hatred. But it was never likely that George W. Bush would look to law, least of all international law, as one way of answering terrorism. Indeed, his administration has followed the events of September 11 with repressive domestic legal measures – including the claim of a right to hold anyone termed an “enemy combatant” indefinitely without access to counsel. With that course, his administration has lost the great moral and political advantage of being able to hold up the United States as an exemplar of respect for law in contrast to the violent lawlessness of the terrorists.

In another way, too, the framework of thinking on human rights has been drastically affected by President Bush’s course of action since September 11. He quickly shifted his emphasis from a war on terrorism to a proposed war on Iraq. And he claimed a right to launch that war unilaterally if it was not authorized by the un Security Council.

Mr. Bush’s unilateralism raised hard questions for those of us who argued strongly for unilateral intervention, if necessary, to stop the savagery of human rights violators – who called specifically for American intervention against Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia. The disquiet caused by Mr. Bush is indicated by the reaction of Amnesty International to Foreign Secretary Straw’s dossier of human rights outrages by Saddam Hussein.

Professor Stephen Holmes of New York University, writing in the London Review of Books,² blames the supporters of human rights intervention for laying the groundwork for President Bush’s imperial view of American power and right: “The 1990s advocates of humanitarian intervention . . . have helped rescue from the ashes of Vietnam the ideal of America as a global policeman, undaunted by other countries’ borders, defending civilization against the forces of ‘evil.’ By denouncing the U.S. primarily for standing idly by when atrocity abroad occurs, they have helped repopularize the idea of America as a potentially benign imperial power. They have breathed new life into old messianic fantasies. . . . By focusing predominantly on grievous harms caused by American inaction, finally, they have obscured public memory of grievous harms caused by American action.”

The human rights movement, in its swift rise to influence, did present a danger of utopian overreaching. But the occasional, and hard-won, instances of American intervention seem to me a long way from what Stanley Hoffmann calls President Bush’s “boastful unilateralism.” There was no great world public recoil from the tardy effort to stop the slaughter of Bosnians; it was seen, rather, as a rare example of a great power acting for unselfish, largely moral reasons. That is hardly ‘imperial’ in the same sense as President Bush’s assertion that America has the duty and right to initiate preemptive war when it perceives a threat.

The essays in this issue explore the pros and cons, the advantages and dangers of taking human rights seriously. For me, one thing is certain. We should not want the twenty-first century to be what Hannah Arendt called its predecessor: “this terrible century.”

– December 6, 2002

ENDNOTES

1 The commission’s co-chairmen were Gareth Evans of Australia and Mohamed Sahnoun of Algeria. Members included Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa, Klaus Naumann of Germany, and Michael Ignatieff.

2 The issue of 14 November 2002. He was reviewing Samantha Power’s book and one by David Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton and the Generals.