The New York Times

Thursday, September 23, 1999

Wars Without End?

By DAVID RIEFF

(David Rieff is the author of "Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West)

Secretary General Kofi Annan's speech opening the 54th meeting of the United Nations General Assembly offered a sober and persuasive analysis of the contradictions the world faces in this era of humanitarian emergencies.

He rightly noted that to intervene without Security Council sanction, as NATO did in Kosovo, is to flout international law. At the same time, pointing to the shameful inaction in Rwanda, he took pains to acknowledge that leaving matters up to the Security Council is inviting future Rwandas and Kosovos. There is, after all, no consensus among the permanent members on the need to intervene in the case of gross human-rights violations or even genocide.

Laying out this dilemma was extremely valuable, especially in the aftermath of the United Nations' failed diplomatic efforts in East Timor and its subsequent recourse to armed force.

Unfortunately, as he has so many times in his tenure, Mr. Annan showed himself to be far better at describing problems than at offering solutions that amount to more than pious hopes for some utopian transformation in world affairs.

He called for "a new commitment to intervention" -- one that would be consistent and thus presumably applied not just occasionally but "in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, in East Timor and in Angola." Of course, were such a policy to be put into effect, the world would enter an age of humanitarian war with no historical parallel.

Worse still, by equating East Timor, whose rightful independence was usurped by the Indonesian invasion in 1975, or Kosovo, where the Milosevic regime was trying to eradicate an entire people, with the Angolan and Sierra Leonean conflicts, which are authentic civil wars, Mr. Annan oversimplifies the problem the world faces at a moment when the ability to make distinctions between crises is more important than ever. No matter what one thought of the Chechen separatist war against Russia, for example, it was an internal conflict that could not be compared to the horrors of the Rwandan genocide.

Then there is the Secretary General's insistence on the effectiveness of "early warning, preventive diplomacy, preventive deployment and preventive disarmament" as alternatives to direct military intervention. Early warning of potential crises is rarely a factor. To know something and to know what to do about it are not the same thing. The United Nations was well aware that things were likely to go wrong in East Timor after the plebiscite on independence.

Preventive diplomacy is a very unreliable instrument, as the inability of the original peace talks to stave off the crisis in Kosovo demonstrated. And since preventive deployment and preventive disarmament will generally require putting peacekeeping troops at risk, they are in fact subsets of military intervention.

If Mr. Annan really believes that "massive and systematic violations of human rights -- wherever they make take place -- should not be allowed to stand," then his speech is nothing less than a call to war and, given the sad realities of our world, virtually to war without end.

Perhaps the kinds of horrors now taking place all over the world make such a future morally imperative. There have been times when this has seemed to be the view of some human rights groups.

But it would be a dangerous crusade precisely because, in principle at least, there are no limits to it.

Given these concerns and the sheer unreality of the Secretary General's suggestion that the Security Council could become "the defender of the common interest" (or even that it might find enough common ground to support interventions on any kind of just or consistent basis), interventions would be better left to states or coalitions of the willing.

Despite Mr. Annan's call for "a new, more widely conceived definition of national interest," national interest construed in the traditional sense offers much more promise in curtailing the worst disasters of our era.

East Timor provides a good example. No peacekeepers would have gone there without Australian pressure and leadership. Yet Australia, while certainly motivated by moral concern, was also acting in its interest in stopping conflict in a neighboring state and preventing a flood of refugees to its shores. Similarly, NATO's action in Kosovo should be viewed not as some morally dubious Eurocentric exercise, but as Europe's putting out a fire in its own backyard.

It is wrong, at least absent a world government or a United Nations army, to expect the people far away from a crisis to be willing to make great sacrifices to stop it. But it is not unrealistic to expect neighbors to help neighbors. That course offers a realistic prospect of peace.