The world's media has been to slow to show Haitians helping each other recover from the earthquake
If Haiti was visited by an “apocalypse” or “Dantean” horror in the aftermath of the earthquake of 12th January, then there was one news story that perfectly captured it.
The streets of Port-au-Prince, the devastated capital, were littered with roadblocks made of corpses. Earthquake survivors, out of either anger or trauma, or perhaps Caribbean voodoo superstition, had piled bodies high across the streets, in protest at their neglect.
The story made headlines around the world. Oddly, though, for such a visceral image, the headlines didn’t appear to be accompanied by photos of the scene. Still more oddly, then, the story was attributed to a photographer, Time magazine’s Shaul Schwarz. Schwarz had told a Reuters reporter he had seen two such roadblocks on his travels across the city, and Reuters sent the story global.
By the time the story reached the Independent, it had acquired the further authority of being attributed to (nameless, but apparently numerous) “eyewitnesses,” rather than to a solitary photographer. Many papers distorted Schwarz’s comments to give the impression of these roadblocks being widespread, even as Schwarz himself was telling the BBC that he had seen one such roadblock, and hoped it might have been a “once-off.” The story fostered the impression of a city reverting to savagery in response to the savagery of nature visited upon it.
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Maidan Shar, the provincial capital of Wardak province, 30 miles south of Kabul, is now on the frontline in Afghanistan. Physically, it has changed little since the Taliban were in power between 1996 and 2001. A frequent visitor to Afghanistan during that time, I only noticed the town because it was where the tarmac ended on the road to Kandahar, which lies a further 250 miles and 16 hours of ferociously uncomfortable driving to the south. Today the road is too risky for travel.
Until two years ago, the Taliban were restricted to the provinces around Kandahar and some isolated central highland districts. Not any longer. On my last visit in August 2008 I was shocked to find how much the situation had deteriorated. Maidan Shar now lies on the watermark left by the wash of the inexorably rising Taliban tide towards Kabul. A well-informed local judge told me not to spend more than 20 minutes in the town and never to stray beyond its limits. The governor of Wardak then spoke to me at length about how the media was exaggerating the problems. But on leaving his well-guarded office I learned that his counterpart from an adjacent province had been ambushed on the main road, only a few miles away, during the course of our interview.
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A debate related to this article, between Phillip Bobbitt and David Hannay on the wisdom of supplanting the UN with a “League of Democracies,” can beread here.
I woke up in a cold sweat. I used to think that Hollywood exaggerated such post-nightmare scenes. That was before I started working for the largest, most incoherent and, ultimately, most corrupt humanitarian operation in UN history. Sitting bolt upright in bed, I patted around in the darkness to figure out where I was. My pillow was moist. My clock marked five-something am. It was 28th April 2004.
The “responsibility to protect” is the doctrine that the victims of civil war or humanitarian disaster have a right to foreign succour and, in extremis, the protection of international troops, should their own government, either from incapacity or malice, fail to do the job. The principle of the responsibility to protect—”R2P” in diplomatic shorthand—was adopted unanimously by the UN general assembly in September 2005. It was a mantra for Blair’s personal foreign policy. The R2P is a noble concept, an example of progress in global moral standards. But it is impractical except in the tiniest of dysfunctional nations, such as Sierra Leone, Kosovo and East Timor, and even then at great difficulty. In a middle-sized country, the burdens and risks would tax the capability of a superpower.
Since early 2004, columnists and advocates have called for armed intervention to “save” Darfur from “genocide.” Gareth Evans, former Australian foreign minister and president of the International Crisis Group (ICG), heralded Darfur as the test case for R2P. While flirting with outright military intervention, Evans’s focus has been on what is known in the trade as “coercive protection”—a UN peacekeeping force that can enforce its will by UN mandate and sufficient firepower. This tries to split the difference between traditional peacekeeping and outright intervention, but as Evans and his comrades-in-rhetoric have rattled their sabres over Darfur, it has become clear that the sober advice of professional peacekeepers was right all along: there is no middle way.
International policies towards Darfur have failed. The world didn’t stop the immense army-Janjaweed offensives of 2003 and 2004, which killed tens of thousands, plus perhaps a further 150,000 through starvation and disease, and displaced 2m. There’s no working peace agreement, and a few hundred people are killed each month in local conflicts. A UN force of 26,000 with a limited protection mandate (it is allowed to use force to protect civilians) is only now on its way and will be operational early next year. The accepted script is: blame world leaders’ lack of political will for their failure to stand up to Khartoum’s evil designs.
Earlier this week, the security council officially nominated Ban Ki-Moon, South Korea’s foreign minister, to become the next secretary-general of the United Nations. Ban’s nomination will shortly be rubber-stamped by the general assembly, and his term will begin on 1st January 2007.
But the new secretary-general will inherit an organisation in deep trouble; and much of the blame for this can be laid at the door of the outgoing secretary-general, Kofi Annan. Six months ago, Annan’s waning credibility was dealt a death blow by the UN general assembly. By an overwhelming majority, including most developing countries, the member states rejected his last reform proposal, aimed at placating a hostile America.
Following the vote, the African daily Fraternité Matin called Annan “the African who tries to please his white masters.” For Annan it was a watershed. Having reaped the resentment of the Bush administration for not having supported the war in Iraq and the hostility of the Arab world for not having opposed it, Annan had now achieved the ultimate indignity; the scorn of the continent he represented.
It is striking that over the last few years, almost all of the world’s global and regional governance institutions have weakened—the UN, EU and Nato chief among them. In the 1970s, political scientists warned us of a “crisis of governability” in the advanced democratic world. Governments, they said, were losing the ability and public confidence to confront the hard tasks of economic management, crime and welfare. But now it looks as if the crisis has gone global.
Even in the best of times the collective management of the international system is work in progress. But today, summits and global gatherings of leaders appear to be empty rituals rather than acts of hard bargaining and compromise. Sixty years ago last April, President Harry Truman told the founding UN conference in San Francisco that “the essence of our problem here is to provide sensible machinery for the settlement of disputes among nations.” His generation went on to build a postwar international order around an array of institutions and frameworks for co-operation that bound democratic states together and launched an era of security and prosperity.
Today the machinery of the postwar era is in disrepair. No leader, international body or group of states speaks with authority or vision on global challenges. The Bush administration champions the spread of democracy but pays little regard to the rules or machinery of international politics. Nationalism is back in fashion in most of the world.
For more than a decade, the question of intervention has been the most important issue in international politics. When if ever is it right to attack a state that has not itself attacked another state? And is the explicit authorisation of the UN security council essential before such an attack can be legitimate? Since the US carved out a safe area for the Kurds in northern Iraq in April 1991, theory and practice have shadowed each other through actions taken and not taken in Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo, East Timor, Afghanistan and most recently Iraq again and Sudan.
Armed intervention in such circumstances is controversial – as Robert Skidelsky wrote in last month’s Prospect – because it is seen as a departure from the ground rules of the international system as envisioned in the UN charter. Skidelsky says that the UN system does not provide an adequate framework for assessing when intervention is appropriate in today’s world, and proposes that we supplement it with guidelines drawn from the venerable tradition of just war theory.
Of course, it is desirable for any country that is about to attack another to ask itself whether recourse to war is truly justified. But when has anyone set out to make the case for an unjust war? All wars fought by modern liberal states (and not only by them) are represented by their advocates as morally justified. Skidelsky makes a plausible case that the Iraq war failed to meet the just war threshold, but there were also some just war theorists on the other side. The neoconservative Catholic Michael Novak was so persuaded that an attack on Iraq was justified that he tried to win over the Pope.
In the spring of 2000, Kofi Annan entrusted Lakhdar Brahimi, his current special envoy in Iraq, with conducting a wide report into improving UN peacekeeping operations. Brahimi, a former foreign minister of Algeria, pulled no punches. In his report he outlined three main issues. First, the UN should not accept unclear mandates. Second, the UN was not functioning as a meritocracy: staff were hired, assigned and promoted on the basis of personal and political contacts rather than on ability. Third, as a result of the above, a small number of outstanding officers were given “unreasonable workloads” to cover the shortcomings of the others. Brahimi concluded that these issues, if not addressed, would make any “lasting reform of the UN impossible.”
The Brahimi report was lavishly praised and then forgotten. Three years later, the Baghdad bomb – which killed 23 staff, including UN special representative Sergio Vieira de Mello – and the inquiry into the bombing that followed confirmed most of the deficiencies Brahimi had identified.
After the fall of Saddam, most of the relevant political actors concluded that some sort of UN presence in Iraq was desirable. The UN was desperate to reaffirm its relevance. For the US, a UN presence, albeit not one with a dominant role, was seen as providing a veneer of legitimacy for the occupation. And several countries which had been instrumental in denying UN endorsement for the US invasion did not wish to aggravate further their already strained relations with the US and thus did not raise objections to a UN role post-invasion.
The small UN observer force was isolated, and largely forgotten. Intelligence was weak, but reports were coming in of massacres, and of much worse things that could unfold in the coming months. Refugees, many of them bearing the scars of machete cuts, began to seek shelter around UN camps. So many, in fact, that there was a real threat of cholera. The security council, divided among itself by other conflicts, and tired of operations in Africa, was largely focused on other problems.
This much of the story describes two cases: Rwanda in 1994, which led to genocide, and Ituri in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2003, which did not.
With Rwanda, it was not just that the warnings were not given proper attention by UN headquarters or member states. Much worse is what happened once the killings had actually begun. Western governments vigorously insisted that UN documents should not even use the word “genocide” to describe events. And, when the small UN force on the ground took casualties, governments called them home, leaving the genocidaires to themselves.
“It is easy for an outsider to be cynical about the UN.” David Rieff should know. He has been more cynical than most. His article (Prospect, October) contained a number of familiar jibes, but overall it marked a welcome departure from his previous tone. He thinks UN officials, including Kofi Annan, are acknowledging for the first time that everything is not OK. From our perspective, Rieff is acknowledging, for almost the first time, that we are not self-deluding hypocrites but people who have chosen to work in an imperfect institution, in the hope of being able to improve its performance.
Few UN officials today – and certainly not Annan – would defend the UN’s record in Rwanda and Bosnia in the mid-1990s. On the UN’s role in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Annan commissioned and accepted an independent report, which flayed the secretariat, including Annan, for ignoring warnings from its commander on the spot, but said remarkably little about the behaviour of members of the security council, notably the US and Britain, who manoeuvred to avoid even using the word “genocide” lest it be held to give them a legal obligation to intervene under the 1948 genocide convention.
On the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia, Annan was required by the general assembly to produce his own report, which Rieff accurately describes as “self-lacerating.” What Rieff does not mention is Annan’s words when he handed over responsibility to the Nato-led implementation force in Sarajevo in December 1995: “Each of us as an individual has to take his or her share of responsibility. No one can claim ignorance of what happened. All of us should recall how we responded, and ask: What did I do? Could I have done more? Did I let my prejudice, my indifference, or my fear overwhelm my reasoning? Above all, how would I react next time?”
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the UN system does not provide an adequate framework for assessing when intervention is appropriate in today’s world, and proposes that we supplement it with guidelines drawn from the venerable tradition of just war theory.
