Non-Intervention: An Alternative Way for Modern Conflict Resolution?
It has become a cliché that the end of the cold war marked a significant change in the paradigm of conflict resolution, or perhaps, conflict ‘accommodation’. Humanitarian intervention - simply the coercive (or non-coercive) use of force (or the threat of its use) to prevent and/or protect serious violations of human rights - has become a tool of choice and first resort by the international community.
It has become a cliché that the end of the cold war marked a
significant change in the paradigm of conflict resolution, or perhaps,
conflict ‘accommodation’. Humanitarian intervention – simply the
coercive (or non-coercive) use of force (or the threat of its use) to
prevent and/or protect serious violations of human rights – has become a
tool of choice and first resort by the international community. This
has especially followed ‘humanitarian ceasefire agreements’ that are
neither comprehensive nor substantive, just for the sole objective of
giving peace a chance.
As part of this norm building, the international community has been
quick to underscore the ‘responsibility to protect’, or R2P, as an
inseparable element of humanitarian interventions. In an attempt to
mitigate the vagaries of an emerging normative principle, the
international community has denominated R2P by such high-sounding
conditionalities as ‘within capability, within range and under imminent
threat of physical danger, without prejudice to the primary
responsibility of the host government in protecting civilian
populations’.
This piece posits that notwithstanding its arguable impact, there is
need to ask such questions as: what has been the real impact of
humanitarian interventions; have they really proved the panacea to the
massive population displacement and the gross violations of human rights
by state- and non-state actors (that accompany post-cold war
conflicts); and do they really address the deep-seated social,
political, economic and other inequalities that serve as the root causes
of such post-cold war internecine conflicts?
This piece only seeks to highlight the need for continued, scientific
debate about non-intervention as an alternative to humanitarian
interventions in complex emergencies within Africa.
Humanitarian interventions became more fashionable in post-cold war
Africa where, in sharp contrast with the much-anticipated dividends of
peace, stability and development, the continent was being ravaged by a
cycle of devastating conflicts, disease and poverty. Given western
disengagement, Africa tended to review the political rhetoric of
‘African solutions to African problems’ and started to evolve the
politics of ‘non-indifference’ to violent armed internecine conflicts.
This heralded the historic interventions by the Economic Community of
West African States (ECOWAS) in the Mano River Union region conflicts
in Liberia (1990) and Sierra Leone (1991 and 2003), and subsequently in
Côte d’Ivoire (2003). At the continental level, the African Union
redeemed the poor image of the Organisation of African Unity by
launching unprecedented interventions in Darfur and Burundi in 2004, and
subsequently in Somalia in 2008.
Spineless multidimensional integrated missions, largely shorn of
western army capabilities, have carried out such ‘robust’ mandates,
short of enforcement action. These capabilities have rather been
packaged within the frameworks of external initiatives, hybrid and
parallel operations, for African mandated missions. The best-known
external initiatives within the continent are ACOTA (the African
Contingency Operations Training Assistance) by the USA, and RECAMP
(Reinforcing African Peacekeeping Capabilities) by France, as well as
support from the African Peace Facility (APF) by the EU.
Outside of the African Union and United Nations systems, other
protection (or nation-building) missions have been deployed in the
Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan by USA-led coalitions.
Generally speaking, in Africa, these interventions were undertaken to
facilitate humanitarian access, as well as protect civilians and create
conditions for a peace to keep by a derelict United Nations system. This
objective also included creating conditions for the withdrawal of
occupation forces after contentious invasion of other regional
countries.
On the surface, all these interventions have been deemed to impact on
the humanitarian situation simply because of the subsequent deployment
of complex peace operations by the United Nations. In that regard, the
fragile peace that now prevails in many of these countries have been
attributed as direct outcomes of the humanitarian interventions.
But is such a view a scientific or political one? This question is
critical to the debate, given a number of factors, including but not
limited to the following:
-
The absence of rapid deployment capabilities, and the slow force
generation and deployment of operations that heightened expectations of
quick fixes
-
The inability of the humanitarian missions or the difficulties
that accompanied their capacity to achieve appreciable or desired levels
of protection of civilian populations
-
The low levels of credibility of humanitarian interventions as a
result of a combination of the foregoing factors, coupled with the fact
that the missions were themselves targets of sometimes avoidable attacks
and fatalities resulting from violations of weak ceasefire agreements
-
The peace that prevails in these countries is not only fragile,
but comparatively has lasted far less than the duration of the conflicts
that preceded the respective humanitarian interventions
-
In many instances, the plight of displaced populations was rather
exacerbated by the pendulum swings in the course of conflicts in which
the protagonists did not wield substantive military superiority
-
To the contrary, the humanitarian interventions by missions
without comparable capabilities to the operational re-requisites of the
robust mandates seemingly served to create truce conditions for weaker
sides to rearm and re-strategise
-
In consequence of these factors, displaced populations grew in
number and/or suffered repeated movements that further aggravated their
situation
Without going into any further detail, it is obvious also that
humanitarian intervention is being used in all situations of conflicts
from self-determination by minorities, to bringing down dictatorship and
ushering in democracy, and ending occupation by invading armies, even
where such counter-occupation struggle employs the use of terrorism as a
weapon.
These factors serve strongly to suggest that it is more scientific
not only to assess the extent to which humanitarian interventions have
facilitated humanitarian access, but also to what extent they have
helped to stem widespread, systematic violence and whether the absence
of such interventions would have helped to limit the numbers of affected
populations, even though the violent armed conflict might have
continued as long as the humanitarian interventions did.
Empirically, therefore, the view that humanitarian interventions are
having the right or desired impact towards conflict resolution may be
faulted. It is arguable that in spite of the significant paradigm shift,
humanitarian interventions may not be the only tool for conflict
management and resolution by the international community. Some
alternative tools that are worth considering in this short piece are:
-
Non-intervention to allow the conflict to run its course and
yield a military victory to one or the other side, especially in
situations where the conflict arises from a ‘just cause’ for
self-determination by nations suffering inequalities
-
Political intervention in extending diplomatic, material and
other support to ‘keep the sovereign state one’ subject to internally
supported post-conflict peacebuilding
-
Credible protection missions by coalitions of willing states,
with the right capabilities and armed with appropriate sanction by the
United Nations Security Council, especially to contain and/or defeat
aggression in an inter-state conflict
That war is a horrible thing is a well-known reality to human
society, including those of Africa, which have suffered centuries of
injustice. But borrowing from the idea of Karl von Clausewitz, the 19th
century Prussian military thinker, the fact that war is horrible should
not be the predominant rationale why we must hasten towards humanitarian
interventions, willy-nilly, as a modern conflict resolution tool.
Rather, especially because of the devastating impact of war and
conflict on Africa, we must as modern society devote a great deal of
resources towards dealing with their root causes, and preventing them as
anti-social human activities arising not only from a clash of
interests. We must also deal with the incidence of wars and conflict as a
result of the deep inequalities within society, bad governance and lack
of respect for human rights by those mandated to protect them.
The modern wisdom of undertaking humanitarian interventions in all and
any situations may not be more expedient than the ancient wisdom of
allowing protagonists to fight to the bitter end. That perhaps may yield
better lessons and create more durable peace.
Festus B Aboagye
Senior Research Fellow,
Training for Peace Programme, ISS Tshwane (Pretoria)
