Getting Beyond Hypocrisy on Humanitarian Intervention

This article originally appeared on Znet.

Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin gave a moving speech at the United Nations on September 22, 2004. “Tens of thousands have been murdered, raped and assaulted,” he said. “War crimes and crimes against humanity have been committed.”

A courageous act, to say such things about US foreign policy in Iraq. Even though reports of rape in prisons like Abu Ghraib are widespread, the word “rape” is never used in the mainstream US media. Neither is the word “torture”, though Martin didn’t mention torture in his speech. The US invasion of Iraq, as straightforward international aggression (not a “pre-emptive” or even “preventive” strike) definitely counts as a “crime against humanity”, although again, to say such things in public, especially on US soil at the United Nations, would have major implications for a country’s foreign policy and a politician’s career. To be sure, sniper attacks, aerial bombardments, and the use of helicopter and other gunships against civilians are “war crimes”, and “tens of thousands have been murdered” in this way in Iraq, but again, in the current political climate, no Western politician could be expected to say so.

It would therefore have been quite impressive if Paul Martin had actually been talking about the US in Iraq. But he was not.

Nor was he talking about Palestinian refugees when he said: “They are hungry, they are homeless, they are sick and many have been driven out of their own country.” This would have been particularly true for Palestinian refugees in Gaza, for example, where the UN special rapporteur for food said last year Israel is deliberately starving the population through its policy of closures, resulting in over a fifth of children being malnourished. Israeli policy hasn’t changed. Instead, attacks on civilian infrastructure in the occupied territories have continued, as have the sieges and closures. Malnutrition causes brain damage so that even when a child has been restored to a proper diet he or she may continue to suffer developmental problems.

Talk about Palestine or Iraq would not have earned Paul Martin kudos from US Secretary of State Colin Powell, who praised him as “a good friend and neighbor” and declared him “such a leader in the field.”

What field? Not the killing fields of Haiti, where corpses of Lavalas activists and Aristide supporters have been piling up in morgues and graves, some three thousand, and ongoing, since “good friends and neighbors” and “leaders in the field” Canada and the United States sent their troops to guarantee the February coup against Haiti’s democratically elected and massively supported President.

No, Paul Martin was not talking about Iraq or Palestine or Haiti. He was talking about Sudan.

Martin’s concern about mass murder, starvation, and ethnic cleansing in Sudan, like Powell’s, might seem inconsistent, given their eager championing of such deeds elsewhere. The same could be said of US politicians like Republican Senator Bill Frist and Iraq invaders like Tony Blair. These notables are either lying about their indignation about what is happening in Sudan, or they are racists, who just can’t summon indignation for dead third-worlders when the killers are from the first world or acting on behalf of it.

In fact the consistency is of a different kind. For it is the selective indignation of the likes of Martin, Blair, and Powell, and their ilk to the atrocities unfolding under the auspices of what they term “rogue states” or “failed states” that leads to the atrocities unfolding under Western occupations. In Haiti, for example, the formula was clear: first, help a state to “fail” by denying it aid, applying vicious sanctions and conditionalities, and arming paramilitary killers to invade and slaughter their way to the capital. Then call it a “failed state,” oust its leaders, and occupy the place. Whatever atrocities occur in response to Western occupation can then be used as proof of the need for more occupation and intervention. In Iraq, a genuinely tyrannical and dictatorial state was made to “fail” by a process of bombing, bleeding by sanctions, and murderous invasion and occupation. Now, as Blair and Bush’s armies slaughter Iraqis at will, interventionists argue that the West needs to “stay the course” lest Iraq, the “failed state,” descend into “civil war.” Israel’s ongoing massacre, ethnic cleansing and deliberate starvation program is justified by the interventionists as necessary because Palestinians can’t find leaders that will recognize Israel’s security needs.

The Sudan crisis has provided the interventionists with an opportunity to simply change the subject: “if you care so much about the Palestinians,” they can ask, “why don’t you care about Sudan? If you care so much about Iraqis, then why don’t you support intervention to save people in Sudan?” The next step, of course, is to accuse those who talk about Western murders and crimes as “anti-Semites,” “anti-Americans,” or racists. To this, anti-occupation people can reply by calling the liberal interventionists hypocrites, citing liberal indifference or contribution to crimes in the above cases as evidence.

Mutual cries of hypocrisy, however, even when true, won’t help those who are actually being “murdered, raped and assaulted,” who are actually “hungry… homeless… sick and… have been driven out of their own country.” In the specific case of Sudan and Darfur, for example, the hypocrisy of gangsters like Martin, Powell, and Blair does not make atrocities in the region any less real, or the crisis any less urgent.

Lansana Gberie, an Africa expert who has studied numerous interventions and conflict situations in the continent, cites liberal interventionists in his recent paper arguing for intervention in Sudan. But he also cites very important and credible human rights organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the UN, whose estimates of deaths are in the tens of thousands and displaced people in the hundreds of thousands. These organizations have sometimes been wrong (Amnesty International, for example, picked up the phony story about Iraqis murdering Kuwaiti babies in incubators, helping the propaganda machine of the US devastation of Iraq in 1991) or disproportionate (some of Human Rights Watch’s material on Venezuela, for example, has condemned the Chavez government in disproportionately harsh terms, helping the US campaign against that government). Their record overall, however, is quite good, and the evidence they presented in the cases where they have turned out to be wrong was rather thin and later discredited. The evidence they have presented on Darfur, however, is solidly documented. Not to prove “genocide,” but certainly to prove massive suffering.

The story is also quite plausible on its face (unlike stories of Saddam Hussein’s al-Qaeda links or imminent nuclear threat). For example, as US-backed paramilitaries in Colombia know, civilian massacres to drive whole populations into refugee camps can be a highly effective counterinsurgency strategy, cutting insurgents off from their support and supply base and terrifying the population away from them.

Gberie’s paper cites Sudan expert Alex de Waal’s excellent July 2004 article from the London Review of Books for background on Darfur. That background is too extensive to summarize in a short article. Those concerned about Darfur should read it, and carefully. But suffice it to say that similar dynamics exist in Darfur’s crisis as exist in so many other conflicts that plague the third world today: a legacy of colonial destruction; a postcolonial state that acts like the colonial state did; an elite that uses the state as its own private estate to dole out privileges and power; mobilization along ethnic lines using racist ideologies; interference from outside powers; closed political spaces leading to armed insurgencies, and a state that responds to armed insurgencies with vicious counterinsurgency.

De Waal’s recommendations might strike both anti-imperialists and liberal interventionists as unsatisfactory: