CHAPTER 3: AN HISTORICAL ANALYSIS OF HUMANITARIAN MILITARY INTERVENTIONS
3.3 Humanitarian Military Intervention during the Cold War
The two world wars diverted the international attention from human rights issues to issues of power politics among different countries. The First World War (WW I) intensified issues of power politics among European powers. International politics was centred on managing the balance of power among European countries, specifically the need to curb the increase of power among the Axis powers (Germany and Italy).
There has not been any military intervention that has been explicitly claimed by the intervening state to be humanitarian during the Cold War era except for the Indian case which gave a quasi-humanitarian justification to its intervention in East Pakistan (Bangladesh). However, scholars like Wheeler, Annan and Weiss have pointed to three main cases as classical examples of humanitarian military interventions during the Cold War era. These cases are; “the Indian intervention in East Pakistan in 1971, Vietnam intervention in Cambodia in 1978 and Tanzania’s intervention in Uganda in 1979” (Hylan, undated, http,//www.kcdme.com/Humanitarian20Intervention1.pdf).5
5 Colonel John Chinyanganya is of the opinion that HMI is a “virgin land” as he argues that HMI started after the end of the Cold War. In his opinion those interventions that were previously undertaken by
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Annan (1998) in a Ditchley Foundation Lecture XXXV stated that:
Even during the Cold War, when the UN’s own enforcement capacity was largely paralysed by divisions in the Security Council, there were cases where extreme violations of human rights in one country led to military intervention by one of its neighbours. In 1971 Indian intervention ended the civil war in East Pakistan, allowing Bangladesh to achieve independence. In 1978 Vietnam intervened in Cambodia, putting an end to the genocidal rule of the Khmer Rouge. In 1979 Tanzania intervened to overthrow Idi Amin’s erratic dictatorship in Uganda.
However, given that any act of morality or humanitarian gesture should be initiated by a humanitarian intention, one ought to question the argument that such actions could be classified as humanitarian military interventions.
It is from this line of thinking that the three military expeditions classified as classical cases of humanitarian military interventions during the Cold War should not be classified as such. In all the three cases, only India gave a partial justification on humanitarian grounds (Alexandrov, 1996: 208), even though from its argument, the major justification was self defence against what it termed “civil invasion”
(Secretariat of the International Commission of Jurist, 1972: 92) and “military aggression” (UNSC 1606th Meeting, 1971, Articles 153, 154, 161, 163 & 175). Vietnam and Tanzania, which are the other examples cited as humanitarian military intervention cases, justified their interventions in Cambodia and Uganda, respectively, on self defence (Benjamin, 1992: 134).
3.3.1 Indian Intervention in East Pakistan
In the Indian intervention in Bangladesh (East Pakistan), the Indian government argued that it had generally intervened because of civil and military acts of the Pakistani government in East Pakistan (Secretariat of the International Commission of Jurist, 1972: 92 and 98). India’s intervention in East Pakistan was prompted by a number of reasons (Walzer, 1977: 105), the major one being the influx of an estimated 10 million refugees from East Pakistan into India (Secretariat of the International Commission of Jurist, 1972: 92), which threatened economic and political security in India (Benjamin, 1992: 132). Wheeler (2000: 59) notes that Indian Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi informed Western leaders
powerful countries in weaker one are simply military intervention driven by the realist notion of the pursuit of national interests.
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that, “The refugee situation was intolerable, the problem was not of India’s making, but if necessary India would take action”.
While “refugee aggression” was the major cause of the intervention, specifically due to the instability that it threatened in India, India also noted that it also intervened out of humanitarianism at the UNSC. The Indian ambassador to the UN cited in Wheeler (2000: 63) pointed out that, “Pakistani government’s repression of the East Pakistanis was on a sufficient scale to shock the conscience of mankind.” Such a selection of vocabulary clearly shows that India was trying to justify its actions under the concept of humanitarian military intervention.
However, one can argue that the Indian intervention was not based on humanitarian reasons given the fact that humanitarianism was only raised as a need to buttress what India argued to be its primary objective of self defence. Pakistan and India had a turbulent relationship since gaining independence from Britain in 1947. The two countries had fought against each other on the question of which country should ‘annex’ Kashmir with the final war before the 1971 conflict, in 1965 ending in a stalemate (Schweers, 2008: 1). This stalemate has not been resolved to this date.
Pakistan and India had been major enemies in the region specifically because of the reasons for the separation of the two countries, with India being predominantly Hindu and Pakistan being predominantly Muslims (Schweers, 2008: 1). Due to this history of antagonism, it is not hard to understand how India could fight not only to, geographically, break up Pakistan, which saw India being between the two areas under Pakistani control, but also to dismantle it militarily and diplomatically by creating a new country in the region that would be aligned to itself (India).
3.3.2 Vietnam Intervention in Cambodia
In 1978, Vietnam found itself faced with the Pol Pot government that refused to accept the boundaries that were left by the French during the colonial era and called for the cession of Mekong Delta and the area around Saigon to Cambodia (Wheeler, 2000: 80). The Vietnamese government made overtures of peace and pacific settlement of the dispute by engaging the Cambodian government into a dialogue to resolve the border disputes, but the peace initiatives failed due mainly to the negative response by the Cambodian government (Wheeler, 2000: 81).
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Boosted by its alignment to the Chinese government, the Cambodian government invaded Vietnam in 1977. This military invasion was pushed back by the Vietnamese but did not pursue the Cambodians to oust the government from power. The decision to finally invade was made and executed in late 1978 due to the militant nature of the Cambodian government. The Vietnamese invasion resulted in the change of government ushering in a new government that was aligned to Vietnam (see Deth, 2009: 9 - 19).
The defeated Khmer Rouge party was responsible for an estimated massacre of between one and two million Cambodians during its less than four year rule (Pruit-Hamm, 1994: 187). Pruitt-Hamm notes that the Khmer Rouge was described as the worst after Hitler’s Nazi by a special rapporteur of the UN.
The Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia was, however not influenced or driven by the need to save the Cambodians from a ‘genocidal’ government. The Vietnamese government was driven by the desire to protect themselves from attacks by the Cambodian government hence the war was based on self defence (Hilpold, 2001: 444). Faced by the need to justify its actions to the international community, Vietnam denied responsibility for the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia but an internal uprising by the opposition National Salvation Front hence arguing that there were two wars which took place concurrently (Alexandrov, 1996: 209). This defence was dismissed by the international community given the fact that there were approximately 150 000 Vietnamese soldiers fighting alongside the National Salvation Front when the Khmer Rouge was overthrown (Deth: 2009, 9 and 19). The arguments that were brought forward by the Vietnamese government show that the government’s intervention was not motivated by humanitarian reasons but self defence.
3.3.3 Tanzania’s Intervention in Uganda
The Tanzanian government justified its intervention in Uganda on self defence (Hilpold, 2001: 444).
Tanzanian war against Uganda was in retaliation to an October 1978 Ugandan invasion of Tanzania, which on the other hand had been provoked by the alleged Tanzanian support to anti Amin forces that were using Tanzania as a launching pad to oust Idi Amin (Cooper and Hubers, 2003). Both customary international law as well as the UN law agrees that in the case of an invasion, a state has a right to self defence conducted through forceful means.
However, with respect to this study, one ought to question whether Tanzania was compelled to end the war soon after driving back Idi Amin’s forces across the border or still had the right to topple him on the same reasons of self defence. Given that aggression is recognized as the major crime which any state
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can commit against another state, Tanzania had a right to pursue Amin even in Uganda and bring him to justice.
However, scholars have classified the Tanzanian intervention as a humanitarian military intervention besides the fact that it was a counter aggression war. Acheson-Brown (2001: 2) asserts that, “whereas the first stage of the war was characterized by Tanzania exercising its right to self-defense, the second phase extended the war with the rationale of humanitarian intervention.” This classification, as with the other two cases of Vietnam in Cambodia and India in East Pakistan, is based on the fact that the governments in the intervened states had committed and were in the process of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity that would warrant an intervention if weighed against the justification of humanitarian military intervention by Grotius.