Genocide. Talk About the Politics

¶ … genocide." Talk about the politics involved or branch out to include new interpretations.

The Cold War represented a crucial time in the development of the historical context of international affairs. However, following the breakup of the communist system, and the rearrangement of the political scene, international law also developed a new perspective on the traditional principle of noninterference in the internal matters of a sovereign state. Therefore, humanitarian intervention is a term used nowadays to justify international intervention in areas in which genocide is considered to be ongoing. However, there are numerous cases in the last decade which proved such approaches to be at least a subject for heated criticism and limited success.

Most often, the rightfulness of the political scene is determined in relation to the norms instituted by international law. From this perspective, for most of the 20th century, the UN Charter was the legal basis for decisions taken by democratic countries as it took into consideration the basic "principle of the sovereign equality of all its members." (Schlesinger, 2003, p 296) This automatically determins a refrain for any actions that member states of the UN did not agree upon. After the end of the Cold War however, the new historical context imposed a certain restructuring of international law and thus, the notion of humanitarian intervention became available for justifying any possible political and military reactions to the phenomenon of genocide.

According to the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, genocide is defined as "any act committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group" (Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 1951) Despite the fact that such provisions existed during the Cold War years, due to a lack of political will and capability they were rarely taken into consideration.

Although there have been attempts to address this issue throughout time, "after 1990 the operations from Northern Iraq in favor of the Kurdish population, those from Somalia, former Yugoslavia and Rwanda were not deployed on the basis of UN humanitarian resolutions (...) but rather on the obligation of the member states to take on such operations" (Russbach, 1994) From a purely political perspective, this strategy is meant to surpass the principle of sovereignty in order to help especially those subject to ethnic cleansing.

This approach is not however very popular among leading states. Although at a declarative level, genocide is considered to be one of the greatest crimes against humanity, few countries are actually wiling to become actively involved in stopping it. In the last decade there have been numerous examples of the UN failing to prevent the death of millions of people throughout the world. Maybe the most significant example is Rwanda; there was a general trend among the Security Council members to limit the commitment of national troops for a consistent UN presence in Kigali. The arguments against a humanitarian intervention to stop the fighting between the Hutu and Tutsi revolved around the implications such actions might have had on the neighboring countries and their undermining of authority in the region, as well as the on the inability to assure security for the UN personnel. (Graybill, 2002) Taking into consideration the failure of the UNSOM I and UNSOM II and the difficult financial crisis of the organization which was dealing with serious lack of funds for the ongoing peace operations, the decision was not to send combat troops in the region. This in turn led to a humanitarian crisis which is visible even today.