A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis by Rieff David

Author:Rieff, David [Rieff, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2013-06-04T00:00:00+00:00

SECTION THREE

The Death of a Good Idea

* * *

CHAPTER 6

Kosovo

IT WAS IN KOSOVO in the spring of 1999 that the battle for an independent humanitarianism was probably lost. The Bosnian experience had been scarifying enough. But if humanitarianism had served in Bosnia as a pretext for the refusal of the great powers to intervene, in Kosovo the misuse of humanitarian action was taken a step further. In Bosnia, the great powers refused to intervene because, they claimed, to do so would be to imperil the humanitarian effort. In Kosovo, humanitarian efforts were deployed for the opposite purpose, as a pretext for what was essentially a political decision by the great powers—taken in haste and as much in the interests of restoring their credibility, which had been so damaged in Bosnia, as out of any higher principle—to put an end militarily once and for all to Slobodan Milosevic’s fascist rebellion in the European backlands. By the time the NATO military campaign was over, and Serb forces had withdrawn from the rebellious province, Milosevic’s days were indeed numbered. But the political instrumentalization of humanitarianism was also nearly complete.

This is not to oppose what the West did in Kosovo. Almost no one now doubts that had NATO intervened as the Yugoslav Federal Army laid waste to eastern Croatia in 1991, the Bosnian genocide with its 250,000 people dead and its millions displaced would not have occurred. Even wars that have been fought successfully in the name of far less just causes—here the British campaign to retake the Falklands comes to mind—often have had the salutary consequence of forcing tyrants from power. Had NATO not acted in Kosovo, it is entirely possible that Milosevic would have remained in control in Yugoslavia for many years and, even had he been replaced by another leader, that the apartheid state he had created in Kosovo would have continued. For that reason, many humanitarians supported the war on moral grounds. But just because individual humanitarians and, for that matter, some humanitarian NGOs were for the war, this did not make what took place a humanitarian intervention, although that was precisely what the major NATO powers tried to claim it to be.

“It is clear,” said Clare Short, the British secretary of state for international development, “that [in Kosovo] our political and military objectives are completely intertwined.” In making such a claim, and linking it to the humanitarian operations her own department was undertaking in collaboration with the British military, she probably only meant to inject into the language of humanitarian action the pseudo-Churchillian rhetoric of her boss, Prime Minister Tony Blair, who had said that, for the first time in NATO’s history, its powers had gone to war “in defense of our values, rather than our interests.” Blair’s statement was in fact entirely defensible, whereas only in the context of a humanitarianism that was no longer pledged to maintain the divide between itself and political and military action was what Short said even partly defensible.

There was ample reason finally to put an end to Milosevic’s depredations.

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