Do the right thing? Sensible is better

By Michael Birnbaum

NEW YORK (DPA): Maybe there is such a thing as a just war -- and if there is, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan's recent plea to the UN General Assembly to stop tolerating massive, systematic human rights violations and to give protecting civilians higher priority than respecting national sovereignty is nothing other than a call for a permanent readiness to fight the good fight and wage the just war.

Morally, Annan has right on his side. The genocide-like slaughter of nearly a million people in Rwanda in less than a hundred days, should never have been accepted so passively and placidly by the world community. But not everything that's morally right is politically sensible.

Annan's plea is dangerous. If the world's conscience wants to intervene everywhere that human rights are abused -- with no regard to national sovereignty -- then most of the world will have to become a UN protectorate.

International law specialists can argue until they're blue in the face about whether "humanitarian military intervention" needs the approval of the UN Security Council -- but the fact is, in the future as in the past, Realpolitic will decide who intervenes where and when they do it. China will never see a Kosovo-like intervention in Tibet and Russia won't see one in Chechnya -- and that's good. If nations and peoples heed Annan's call, the dawning century -- if not millennium -- would be one of permanent war in the name of righteousness and morality. And a just war, like any other war, is never bloodless.

Human-rights advocates still confront the old dilemma -- whoever wants to take on a dictator has to make the dictator afraid that he'll lose the fight. Every dictator and every state has to know he or it will have to pay a price for abuses and outrages at home. Anyone who violates human rights, who murders, uproots or persecutes people, has to understand that he won't be able to hold onto power and escape punishment by hiding behind the fence along his border.

At the same time, the world can hardly tolerate or live with a situation where the threat of war becomes a real shooting war automatically at the drop of a hat.

Annan has highlighted the contradiction between two principles -- the respect for a state's sovereignty and the universal significance of human rights. The debate on the subject has been simmering for a long time and now, perhaps, it will finally start picking up some steam again.

The principle of national sovereignty dates back to an era far earlier than the United Nations charter -- back to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. The American and the French Revolutions in the 18th century defined the principles of human rights.

Since the East-West stand-off ended a decade ago, the conflict between those principles has dominated the world of politics. In 1992, still wearing the badge of the world's moral sheriff, the United States intervened in Somalia, dragging the United Nations along behind it. But as soon as the Americans had to ship home a few body bags from Mogadishu, the world's sheriff called it a day and got out of Dodge. Two years later, when the butchery in Rwanda began, Washington hardly even looked in its direction.

The hopes and fears that the role of world sheriff brings with it have to be buried for good. International morality only plays at home for a short time, because -- especially in the case of humanitarian military actions -- the home audience only wants to see a bloodless war. Unfortunately, bloodless wars don't exist.

Kosovo proves that point. No American or western European pilots were hurt, but as soon as the bombs started taking out civilians, the support for the war, even though it may have been morally justified, began to shrink. But Kosovo was a unique case, initiated by the only remaining superpower but presented its role as basically little more than support for its NATO partners. The Europeans needed America's help to help settle one of their backyard disputes and get the rampaging Yugoslavian dictator Slobodan Milosevic back under control.

Essentially the same thing is going on in East Timor right now, and the United States has barely batted an eye at it. Indonesia's neighbor, Australia, has taken up the banner of human rights there and is leading the fight to protect those rights against the terror unleashed by Indonesia. But local "neighborhood patrol" actions like the Australian mission to East Timor are a far cry from the world-wide human rights crusade called for by Kofi Annan -- because anyone who lacks a strong and friendly neighbor would be just plain out of luck.