When morality of intervention overrides sovereignty of nations

George M. Spencer, Author, 'Hope After Holocaust, A Layman's History Of The 20th Century', The Straits Times, Asia News Network, Singapore

There are two conceivable scenarios wherein a country's sovereignty might be justifiably disregarded.

One is where all central, legitimate authority has collapsed and the country concerned, like Somalia or Sierra Leone, has descended into hopeless chaos.

The second scenario is where the government of the country concerned has abdicated all moral responsibility for massacres of its own citizens, or ethnic or religious minorities, or for being the base of atrocities committed in other countries.

Once a certain stage has been reached, a country in a state of anarchy cannot put itself together again without outside intervention from the United Nations or a friendly power.

Britain was invited to prop up the beleaguered government of Sierra Leone against drug-crazed, mostly teenaged rebels with a speciality for chopping off people's arms and legs.

Britain did not intervene to control the diamond fields which are still in rebel hands and which fund movements which have destabilized not only Sierra Leone but Liberia and Guinea as well.

Even if, for argument's sake, the British did somehow steal all of Sierra Leone's diamonds, such a situation, almost any situation, could not be worse than the bloody chaos prior to intervention.

In any event, Britain is currently not the only country engaged in intervention at the request of a legal government in Africa; the South Africans are doing the same for Burundi.

Is this imperialism?

A far more opportunistic and cynical intervention in an African country, which positively stank, was the recent intrusion by Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Uganda and Rwanda into Zaire.

Secondly, there are countries with atrocious or irresponsible governments.

The Yugoslav government attempted to use force and massacre to keep its grip on initially the federation and finally Greater Serbia. Given the complex situation, the West for a long time simply dithered. It is not easy to commit a liberal democracy to war, let alone a whole alliance like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

The biggest single factor in bringing about intervention in Yugoslavia was public revulsion over the massacre of Muslims and, to a lesser degree, Croats, beamed onto home television screens and happening under the noses of United Nations forces, including NATO troops.

The same sort of public sentiment influenced the initial heavy Australian intervention in East Timor while the then Indonesian government stalled and lied, and while the Association of Southeast Asian Nations did nothing.

To disregard the force of this humanitarian sentiment in bringing about interventions would be as ridiculous as to deny the strength of Islamic feelings in the present crisis.

Implicit in our view of sovereign governments and their inviolability must be the assumption that they are staffed by rational, accountable people.

In a democracy, a government is accountable to the law, the Constitution and, periodically, an electorate.

Not every country in the world is a democracy, but most have governments which may be deemed approximating the rational, more or less well-intentioned and accountable in some measure. This includes Jordan's monarchy and China's Communist Party.

This is not an ideal situation but we do not live in an ideal world.

The United Nations, when first formed, included Stalin's Soviet Union, a grotesque tyranny. It had to, since that particular grotesque tyranny was needed to defeat another, Hitler's Third Reich.

Nonetheless, all power in the world, ultimately, has to be accountable.

Even irresponsible governments expect their underlings to be accountable to them. Only the criminal or the nutcase tries to evade all responsibility or accountability.

We live in a world in which increasingly all individuals, institutions, schools, industries and so forth are held to certain standards.

The governments of sovereign states which wield greater power than these institutions and individuals cannot be held less responsible. The greater the power, the greater must be the accountability.

A sovereign government cannot be the sole exception to this principle.

Some governments, ruled by dictators or despots, are patently not accountable to anything except the ruler's inner promptings, and, in the case of a religious extremist, to a highly-elastic, subjective conception of God.

Murderous dictators like Cambodia's Pol Pot had no conscience worth speaking of and died unrepentant.

No one can doubt the sincerity of belief of those who destroyed the World Trade Center in New York but their distorted conscience is not one we can tolerate.

We cannot have a world in which terrorists are free to pilot a 747 jet into a downtown office block in Singapore.

We cannot have a world in which such terrorists might obtain radioactive material or nuclear weapons because an irresponsible government has given sanctuary to their organization. These are all quite possible scenarios.

History is not going to be a re-run of the 19th century. No one is going to colonize Afghanistan, except the aid agencies and perhaps the United Nations for a period. This is not a question of East versus West, of imperialism or anything similar.

In a territorial sense, the only remaining imperial powers today are China and Indonesia, both of which retain the borders of earlier empires.

Russia and India may qualify too, if their intransigence over Chechnya and Kashmir, respectively, is taken into account.

This is primarily a statement about politics rather than economics, but it seems to me that Andy Ho's The stink of imperialism (The Sunday Times, Oct. 28), is as atavistic as the arguments that anti-globalization proponents use.

Things have changed, mostly for the better, in world economics. Things have improved since the UN was founded.

The principle of the sovereignty of independent governments has to be coupled with accountability and responsibility to their own citizens and to the world.

This is not a reversion to the malodorous imperialism of the past. It is aromatic progress. It is common sense.