CHAPTER 3: AN HISTORICAL ANALYSIS OF HUMANITARIAN MILITARY INTERVENTIONS
3.4 Humanitarian Military Intervention after the End of the Cold War
3.4.1 Controversial Interventions, Kosovo (1999) and Iraq (2003)
In the post-Cold War era, many of interventions were undertaken by different powerful states in developing states across the globe. However, the Kosovo (1999) and Iraq (2003) interventions were regarded as controversial because of the lack of a mandate from the UNSC authorizing the interventions and the use of humanitarian and human rights justifications, in the case of Iraq, after the failure of the initially stated reason of looking for weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). With respect to Kosovo, Russia and China were against the intervention and contested it, with Russia sponsoring a UNSC proposed resolution to call off the intervention.
The Kosovo conflict threatened European peace and security, especially if weighed against the historical precedence that the Balkans had been the trigger of major European conflicts specifically the first world war (WW I). The crisis created massive refugees (Greenwood, 2002: 147) which had the capacity to threaten stability in other states. The UN, however, could not act due to tensions and disagreements and mistrust between the veto powers, specifically Russia which had already indicated that it would veto any resolution that sought to authorize military action (Greenwood, 2002: 172).
NATO states took it upon themselves and the organization went on to undertake military action against the Kosovo regime in March 1999. States who were against the intervention saw it not as a humanitarian mission to save lives, but as an invasion that was a trump on international law. Russia (supported by Belarus and India, which were not members of the UNSC) brought forward a draft resolution to the Security Council on 26 March 1999 that sought to prove that the intervention had no support of the international community and therefore was both immoral and illegal (Greenwood, 2002: 151-2). However,
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the resolution was defeated by twelve votes against three votes in favour of it. States which supported the intervention put forward that the results of the resolution was in fact a legal and moral support of the intervention by the Security Council (Greenwood, 2002: 155).
In support of the intervention as legal, the British Ambassador to the UN, Jeremy Greenstock, quoted by Greenwood (2002: 158), stated that, “In these circumstances, and as an exceptional measure on grounds of overwhelming humanitarian necessity, military intervention is legally justifiable.” Then British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, quoted by Stromseth, Wippman and Brooks (2006, 36: note 51), in his response to the House of Commons argued that NATO actions were legally legitimate when he stated that:
Under international law a limited use of force can be justifiable in support of purposes laid down by the Security Council but without the Council’s express authorization when that is the only means to avert an immediate and overwhelming humanitarian catastrophe. Any such case would in the nature of things be exceptional and would depend on an objective assessment of the factual circumstances at the time and on the terms of relevant decisions of the Security Council bearing on the situation in question.
Such justifications, whether be they taken from the British arguments or the post intervention resolution, are misleading and can set a wrong precedence in the international community. Greenwood (2002: 155) argues that the justification by NATO is misplaced because “non-condemnation is not the same as authorization”. As later stated by the Kosovo Commission, the intervention was illegal, even though it can be regarded as morally justifiable (Hardy, 2014: 3).
However, the morality of it should be weighed against the real reasons for the intervention, and the number of civilians killed by NATO aerial bombardments. NATO’s intervention could be read as more of muscle flexing than humanitarian given that it had issued threats to intervene had the Yugoslav government not complied with Security Council resolutions of which failure to act would have made it a toothless organization. However, the intervention, even though seen by some as a mission in pursuance of hegemonic interest, events on the ground satisfied the need for an intervention from its moral justification. The only major problem of the intervention was one that was lamented about by the then UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan (1999) that:
To those for whom the Kosovo action heralded a new era when States and groups of States can take military action outside the established mechanisms for enforcing international law, one might ask, Is there not a danger of such interventions undermining the imperfect, yet resilient, security system created after the Second
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World War, and of setting dangerous precedents for future interventions without a clear criterion to decide who might invoke these precedents, and in what circumstances?
The Iraq war of 2003 could not have been a controversial example of humanitarian military intervention had it not been justified by Tony Blair as such. The Iraq war was declared by the coalition of the willing led by USA and Britain on the basis that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction which posed a threat to USA and its allies including through sponsoring terrorism and terrorist groups like Al Qaeda (De Nevers, 2007: 7-8). After undertaking the invasion weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were not found and leaders of the invasion described the war as a humanitarian military intervention because Saddam Hussein was a dictator who oppressed his own people (Heinze, 2006: 20).
The problem with the Blair defined intervention in Iraq is that it fails to meet all the classical set rules for a humanitarian military intervention which are, “just cause, last resort, good over harm, proportionality, right intention and reasonable prospect of success (Wheeler, 2001: 5-11).” Basically for an intervention to be warranted, the leader should be in the process of grossly violating the basic rights of his/her subjects. There must be a willing by the oppressed to stop the oppression but failing due to the monopolization of the machinery of war by the ruler or leader (Walzer, 1977: 106), and the intervention should be called for by a legitimate authority, which in the current era is the UN through the UNSC (ICISS,2001: xii).
The intervention in Iraq was carried out when Saddam Hussein had long stopped to grossly violate the basic rights of the Iraqis.6 Saddam Hussein had grossly violated the rights of the Iraqis, specifically the Kurds in the aftermath of his defeat by the USA forces under the UN banner after he had invaded Kuwait in 1991, but was stopped by the intervention of the international community through the institution of a no fly zone and demilitarized zones as well as creating safe passages for international aid to the affected regions under the operation code-named ‘Provide Comfort’, (Rudd, 2004:42) through the international interpretation of the UNSC Resolution 688 of 1991. During the 2003 intervention, no evidence of gross violation of human rights was put forward and the major reason for the war as explicitly stated by the USA and Britain was the need to clean Iraq of WMD.
6 It should be stated here that there is no universal definition or classification of what can be termed basic human rights. In the light of this research, basic human rights refer to the right to life, food, shelter, and enjoying basic privileges provided for by the state.
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Given that Saddam Hussein’s government was not a ‘criminal regime’ or a regime practicing international criminal acts like genocide at the time of the invasion, the intervention, had it been warranted, should not have resulted in a direct regime change by the intervening powers because regime change falls in the realm of self-determination, and as such it is a preserve of the citizens of the country that is subject of intervention.
The justification of the invasion of Iraq as a humanitarian military intervention after the invasion, as with the case of the Kosovo intervention, specifically being undertaken by major powers, create a bad precedence which can be used in the future to justify non-humanitarian interventions. It is because of these reasons that the Kosovo and Iraq interventions are judged to be controversial.