The Year in Review

by Roger P. Winter

Looking back on 1999, U.S. Committee for Refugees Executive Director Roger Winter observes the disparities in the international community's response to humanitarian emergencies in Kosovo, East Timor, Sierra Leone, and Chechnya, among others.

"Ending this tragedy is a moral imperative." So said President Bill Clinton on March 24, 1999 as he announced to the world that NATO would respond to Slobodan Milosevic's assaults on Kosovo by bombing the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

In surveying the international community's response to humanitarian emergencies in 1999, we find two outstanding examples of intervention on explicitly humanitarian grounds: Kosovo and East Timor. They appeared, indeed, to show the international community responding to a moral imperative when less-obvious-than usual economic or strategic interests were at stake. These interventions are all the more remarkable because they struck at the most fundamentally protected entitlement of state sovereignty: territorial integrity. In each case, the humanitarian rescue simultaneously strengthened the victims' political aspirations for independence from the governments that had been oppressing them.

Yet, looking back on 1999, we see other humanitarian disasters that elicited little or no such response. At the very moment the international community was claiming the moral high ground in Kosovo and East Timor, other humanitarian tragedies—in Sierra Leone, in Sudan, and elsewhere—were killing, maiming, orphaning, and forcibly displacing civilians in measurably greater numbers. And neither President Clinton nor other world leaders declared a "moral imperative" to stop those tragedies. Many journalists, commentators, and aid workers noted the disparity, and squirmed uncomfortably. The year is over, but the troubling question lingers: Why this disparity of response? Are some lives more valuable than others?

Perhaps clues lie in the President's next words: "It is also important to America's national interests. Our children need and deserve a peaceful, stable, free Europe."

True enough. But don't our children also need and deserve a peaceful, stable, free Africa, Asia, even world? Yet could anyone imagine the President making similar statements about Sierra Leone? In the months after Kosovo, this question no doubt crossed the minds of many Sierra Leoneans. But I wonder how many Americans asked.

All disparity is neither illogical nor an indication of moral malady. After all, each of today's complex humanitarian emergencies really is unique. However, one person's "logical" disparity is often another person's "abandonment." Consider this prayer of Macrom Max Gassis, the Bishop of El Obeid, Sudan:

We raise our voices and cry, "We are forgotten and marginalized." Is it because we do not live in Europe as the Kosovars? Is it because we have a different skin color and different physical features? Is it because we do not have any strategic importance?

There it is. The world must forthrightly ask itself: Why do we let some populations die, while for other populations we jump to the rescue?

Senior international political actors weigh many factors when deciding how to respond to various complex humanitarian emergencies. Altruism, while the highest ideal of personal morality, does not translate readily into the international political sphere, where national interests predominate. A political leader's humanitarian instincts do not proceed unchecked by other considerations. This, again, suggests that all disparity is not unwarranted. However, it is specifically the humanitarian dimensions of such emergencies that require us to reduce the factors that distort the equal value of the human victims. In assessing the appropriate response, policymakers should strive toward equivalent response for comparable humanitarian need.

When international responses to humanitarian emergencies do differ, it is incumbent upon world leaders to explain that disparity. It is also the duty of the human rights community, even while applauding leaders for doing right by some victims, to question whether some instances of disparate response may result from prejudice—on the perceived inequality of victims, and on an unwillingness to recognize that suffering is the most fundamental leveler of human beings.

Before considering the elements that might properly or improperly account for different responses, it would be useful to review events in 1999 in Kosovo, East Timor, Sierra Leone, Chechnya, Somalia, and Sudan—places whose very names evoke images of fear and flight, suffering and death.

Let me add one more caveat. No one should misinterpret this critique of disparate response by suggesting that the international community ought to have done less for Kosovars, Timorese, or others because it did not do more for other victims. The proper answer to criticism of disparate treatment is not to seek the lowest common denominator. This, however, is all too often the response. Witness the reaction of the U.S. government to the U.S. Committee for Refugees and other critics who pointed out disparate treatment by U.S. authorities of Haitian and Cuban asylum seekers. Instead of treating Haitians better, U.S. policy changed and began treating Cubans worse. Needless to say, that was not the proper solution.

"Sierra Leone's agony had no high profile among international political leaders and no timely or effective attempt by the UN to halt the violence." Two children, ages 13 and 4, whose hands were hacked off by rebels, sit outside a camp for war wounded and amputees in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Photo: AP/B. Linsley

Kosovo: Bombing in the Name of Humanity

The deterioration of relations between Belgrade and Kosovars was no surprise. It was widely anticipated and specific: a decade of apartheid-like suppression of Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority; Milosevic's track record for targeting non-Serb civilian populations in Croatia and Bosnia; and war-making provocations by Belgrade authorities during 1998, including massacres, interdiction and destruction of food stocks, and the forced displacement within Kosovo of more than a quarter-million people. All this happened before the events of early 1999.

Throughout the run up to the NATO bombing, the United States and the EU, as principal architects of the Rambouillet accords, were intimately involved in the mediation effort to contain the conflict. At the highest political level, international leaders voiced their concerns and threats. And, too, the international humanitarian entities—including the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—were active inside Kosovo.

In explaining the NATO military action, Clinton said, "Kosovo is a small place but it sits on a major fault line. Eventually, key U.S. allies could be drawn into a wider conflict, a war we would be forced to confront later, only at far greater risk and greater cost."¹ Although Clinton compared Milosevic to Hitler, no one suggested that Milosevic had the power to threaten the world that Hitler had in his day. Clinton's warnings of a wider conflict could hardly have conjured reasonable fears of another world war. More modestly, and more to the point, Clinton added, "A strong U.S. European partnership is what this Kosovo thing is all about." ²

Thus some of the key elements to note regarding Kosovo prior to military action were: the prior engagement of high-level international political leaders in diplomatic efforts to resolve the issue (thereby putting their credibility on the line, forcing them to take the next step); a relatively important strategic location (including the proximity of the conflict area to key countries that might be affected by refugee flows); and heightened public awareness, including a perception of Milosevic as an aggressive tyrant who needed to be stopped.

Public awareness—what has come to be known as the "CNN factor"—appears to weigh more and more heavily on policymakers' calculations. The media, advocacy organizations, and members of the general public had roundly criticized Clinton himself, among other Western politicians, for his failure to respond quickly and effectively to ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. The public perceived the UN system, as well as NATO, as having been tested in Bosnia and coming up short. Now, it appeared, Milosevic was challenging them again. Another feeble response was politically untenable.

The whims of public opinion cut two ways. The same public that demands intervention to prevent widespread human rights abuses is as likely to demand withdrawal if the intervention goes sour, if international forces suffer excessive casualties, or become bogged down in a conflict perceived as someone else's war.

The legacy of the humanitarian intervention in Somalia still haunts us. The memory of dead American soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu in 1993 is seared in our collective consciousness. Despite this ugly tragedy, despite the intervention coming later than it should have, we often lose sight of the enormous good that it achieved: It kept hundreds of thousands of innocent people alive at a time of chaotic desperation. But the good is not remembered. And, although the Clinton Administration inherited the intervention from the Bush Administration, the killings took place early in Clinton's tenure, fostering his later caution, especially in Africa.

That caution was also exhibited in Kosovo, arguably the international community's most robust humanitarian intervention. Especially in hindsight, the tactic of intervening exclusively from 30,000 feet above the ground to prevent door-to-door ethnic cleansing seems patently absurd. NATO's military strategy and timetable were completely out of sync with the unfolding situation on the ground. Bombing the military-industrial infrastructure is a long-term strategy assuming a war of attrition. It left essentially untouched the low-tech, lightly armed Serb paramilitary and police forces directing their fire against civilians.

NATO's intervention in Kosovo also raises important questions about interventions that are not sanctioned by the UN Security Council, and whose authorization under international law is unclear. What prevents a state or an alliance of states from purporting to intervene for humanitarian purposes, but yet to pursue a political agenda? In Kosovo, to what degree was the Western response dictated by NATO's need to prove itself and to establish its post-Cold War credibility? On the other hand, how does the international community act collectively to prevent genuine humanitarian emergencies when permanent members of the Security Council can and do exercise their veto power to prevent interventions that they see as counter to their interests (such as Kosovo), or in situations where they are themselves parties to the conflict (as in Chechnya)?

Once NATO bombing began on March 24, Serbian security forces violently uprooted hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians. By the end of May, about 1.4 million Kosovars had been uprooted, including 442,000 in Albania, 250,000 in Macedonia, more than 600,000 displaced within Kosovo, and more than 67,000 displaced into Montenegro. This displacement was rapidly reversed when a cease-fire agreement was reached in June (and, in a tragic irony, this end to the uprooting of Kosovo's ethnic Albanian population caused the forced displacement of nearly a quarter-million Serbs, Roma, and other non-ethnic Albanian minorities from Kosovo, as some among the returning refugees began their own campaign of ethnic cleansing).

To confront the Kosovo emergency, the international community was involved in all dimensions—humanitarian, political, and military. UN appeals came in rapid and escalating succession: April 1, $70.8 million for 350,000 refugees; April 5, $138.4 million for 650,000; April 22, $265.4 million for 950,000. Two Kosovo donor conferences resulted in pledges in excess of $3 billion, one-third for the humanitarian programs through the year 2000 and the rest for reconstruction, civil administration, and internal security.

Neighboring states accepted large numbers of Kosovar asylum seekers, and the international community undertook a large-scale, rapid humanitarian evacuation program and even permanent resettlement (in the United States) of Kosovar refugees from Macedonia to preserve first asylum there.

The suffering of the Kosovars was real and must not be dismissed, though the civilian death toll was significantly lower than originally reported. Nevertheless, the scale of the international response overall led some experienced aid workers, particularly with Africa experience, to call the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on Kosovo refugees and the crush of aid agencies eager to spend it "almost an obscenity." ¹

East Timor: Democratization and Displacement

Despite its close political and economic ties with Western powers, including the United States, Indonesia's 1975 annexation of East Timor never sat well with the international community. For more than two decades, however, Indonesia's extension of its sovereign power over East Timor, and its suppression of the East Timorese people, was never meaningfully challenged.

In May 1998, after 30 years in power, President Suharto was forced to resign. In January 1999, Suharto's hand-picked successor, B.J. Habibie, stunned his own military and political advisors, as well as the international community, by announcing that he would consider granting independence to East Timor. Under pressure for reform both from within and outside Indonesia, Habibie agreed to a UN-monitored referendum to determine whether East Timorese favored remaining within Indonesia with some form of autonomy. A vote against autonomy essentially meant a vote for complete independence from Indonesia. The Indonesian military and paramilitary militias opposed independence, and began a campaign of intimidation. As the referendum neared, violence escalated; more than 50,000 persons were forcibly displaced from their homes before the voting began.

Defying the intimidation, nearly 99 percent of East Timorese turned out for the August 30 vote, and more than 78 percent voted to reject autonomy, thus favoring independence. When the ballots were announced, the militias went on a rampage, destroying entire villages and decimating city centers, including that of Dili, the provincial capital. On September 7, Indonesia placed East Timor under martial law; the next day, the UN announced its total pullout from East Timor.

A massive displacement followed: an estimated 650,000 of East Timor's pre referendum population of 890,000 fled their homes. Long-time observers of East Timor warned that, in the absence of international protection, widespread killing was a genuine threat.

Although no international forces, armed or unarmed, were able to provide protection to civilians on the ground in East Timor for the next two weeks, the diplomatic community remained active, and by September 20, the first international peacekeeping troops, backed by a UN Security Council resolution, entered East Timor.

It is highly unlikely that such an intervention would have occurred without the consent of Indonesia. In fact, that President Habibie acquiesced largely resulted from international pressure, including threats of economic sanctions. He finally relented not only to the deployment of international peacekeepers, but even agreed to the formation of a commission of inquiry to investigate human rights abuses, and to the phased withdrawal of Indonesian troops.

Certainly the humanitarian interventions in Kosovo and East Timor were high-water marks indicating the international community's willingness to challenge state sovereignty and to come to the defense of victims of persecution. They exhibited, quite specifically, a commitment to defend the principle that forcibly displaced people have a right to return to their homes. In both cases, in a relatively short period, hundreds of thousands of refugees and internally displaced people were able to return to their homes. While there might be much to criticize and to lament, we should at least savor the joy, and, yes, feel some satisfaction, that the people we defended actually returned to their homes. We rejoice that 40 years from now Timorese and Kosovars will not be living in Palestinian-like camps because they were never able to go home.

Sierra Leone: The Backwater

But joy and satisfaction are rare and short-lived in this business. Sierra Leone's humanitarian crisis is distinctly different, and engenders neither joy nor satisfaction. Sierra Leoneans' aspirations for democracy and peace were no less than those of Kosovars or Timorese. At stake in Sierra Leone was a democratically elected government beset by unspeakable violence.

During 1999, and for the second consecutive year, Sierra Leoneans constituted the largest group of newly uprooted people in Africa, about a half-million refugees and up to one million internally displaced people. This eight-year conflict has also caused more than 20,000 civilian deaths and many other casualties. Several thousand people were purposefully mutilated, their limbs macheted; three-quarters of them bled to death. Of the women abducted by rebels, 80 to 90 percent were raped. Thousands of children were abducted. Almost one-third of the Sierra Leonean population was uprooted, some for years.

Sierra Leone's war stirred little international interest at high levels. Successive peace agreements in 1996 and 1997 resulted in various proposals for an international peacekeeping force. Donors balked at footing the bill and ultimately opted instead to provide logistical support to a Nigerian-led peacekeeping operation known as ECOMOG. The United States, United Kingdom, and Netherlands covered the majority of that logistical support at an approximate cost of $10 million, which proved inadequate.

A major rebel military offensive in January 1999 sacked the capital, killed an estimated 5,000 civilians, and resulted in the abduction of 4,000 children, all in a single month. A controversial peace accord signed in July 1999 included amnesty for atrocities and powersharing between a democratically elected government, rebels, and mutinous government soldiers, a horrible choice between peace or justice.

Sierra Leone's agony had no high profile among international political leaders and no timely or effective attempt by the UN to halt the violence. However, several months after the peace accord was signed, the Security Council approved deployment of the largest UN peacekeeping force currently existing anywhere in the world ⁴ (6,000, many of these the same ECOMOG forces already on the ground) at a cost much greater for peacekeeping forces than had been proposed earlier. (Note that costs usually increase substantially the longer an effective international response is delayed.) As 1999 ended, peacekeepers were beginning to arrive in Freetown, but very slowly despite the increasing potential for a total breakdown of the peace agreement.

Some of the key factors to note in the failed international response to Sierra Leone are: the strategic unimportance of Sierra Leone, by some UN measures the least developed country in the world; the lack of attention by senior international policymakers; the lack of a U.S. constituency and thus limited advocacy for a proactive international response; and the attenuated time schedule for fielding the peacekeeping force, despite the horrible nature of the preceding violence and the threat of its resumption.

Chechnya: Hands off

Strategic unimportance—or perhaps more accurately, the continuing power of the claim of sovereignty (especially by a permanent member of the UN Security Council) and big-power hegemony—has kept the international community at arm's length from the conflict in Chechnya. In the months leading up to the outbreak of hostilities in August 1999 when Islamic militants made several cross-border raids into Dagestan, the international community showed little interest in performing a mediating role in Chechnya before the conflict escalated further.

The OSCE had helped broker cease-fire agreements between the warring parties in Chechnya in 1995 and 1996. The August 1996 cease-fire agreement between Russia and Chechnya stipulated that the two sides would resolve their dispute and Chechnya's status by 2001. But after the guns fell silent, the international community's interest in further engagement began to wane. There was no offer of help in negotiating the normalization of Chechnya's relationship with Russia.

The international presence on the ground in Chechnya has been close to non existent since the December 1996 murder of six international Red Cross workers. Most NGOs pulled out of Chechnya at that point. Reconstruction from the 1994-96 war never happened. After Vincent Cochetel, UNHCR's former head of office in Ingushetia, was kidnapped in January 1998, UNHCR pulled its international staff out of Ingushetia and the other Russian republics adjacent to Chechnya. In December 1998, continued kidnappings and murders of expatriates forced the OSCE, then the only international organization remaining in Chechnya, to pull out its international staff. Local OSCE staff remained in Chechnya after international staff pulled out but were evacuated during the most recent fighting.

Funding shortages are no doubt a problem for the northern Caucasus, but security concerns for staff of international humanitarian organizations, coupled with both Russia and Chechnya's lack of receptiveness to outside involvement, largely account for the lack of relief and development assistance.

According to a March 22, 1999 Russian press report, Chechnya was opposed to the OSCE playing a mediating role in its dispute with Russia. The Chechen position underwent a 180-degree shift in August 1999 when the Russian army retaliated against Islamic militants in Dagestan, foreshadowing the current Russian offensive in Chechnya itself. At that point, the Chechen government called for the UN Security Council to intervene to prevent the fighting from spreading into Chechnya. The request was met by silence from UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and members of the Security Council. In the days leading up to the Russian offensive, the United States, standing not just on the sidelines but in the bleachers, merely called for both sides to refrain from the use of indiscriminate force that might hurt civilians.

The key factors to note that have paralyzed the international community in the face of immense suffering in Chechnya include: the deference the international community continues to pay to the idea of sovereignty and non-interference in another country's internal affairs, particularly when it involves a powerful country; the sense of a lack of leverage to affect the situation positively; and fear for the safety of international humanitarian actors.

Somalia: How Many Chances?

Ever since the international military intervention in Somalia in the early 1990s, the international community has consigned Somalia to the diplomatic dustbin. Much of the country remains a chaotic killing ground for Somali warlords. Round after round of peace conferences have failed. Violence actually escalated in 1999 compared with recent years.

The international community does not pretend to have a solution for Somalia. There is no pretense of interest. Humanitarian organizations provide assistance on the fringes of the chaos, but even the NGOs seem to be at a loss.

An African country in distress typically receives only one or, in rare cases, two chances to harness the power and attention of the international community to resolve its internal suffering. The major international powers are convinced that Somalia blew its assigned opportunity seven years ago. Precious few outsiders are knocking on the door to help again.

The key factors to note, therefore, in the international community's lack of response in 1999 to endemic conflict and chronic suffering in Somalia include: the lack of a roadmap to solve the causes of misery in Somalia; the awareness of past failures; and, perhaps, the lack, perceived or real, of responsible local leaders committed to attending to the needs of the Somali people.

Sudan: War without End?

The international community's response to the war and suffering in Sudan was disjointed in 1999, as it has been for the past 16 years. Even calloused world leaders now acknowledge that they cannot ethically ignore a country that has suffered two million war-related deaths and more than four million uprooted people. But a unified international response was lacking, especially on the political front.

In 1999, donors continued to pour hundreds of millions of dollars of humanitarian aid into war-torn southern Sudan for the second consecutive year, finally ending the latest famine. It was, at its peak in late 1998 and early 1999, the largest food airlift since Berlin.

Despite the commendable humanitarian largess, the world community still had no strategy for how to respond when the Sudan government blocked food deliveries to starving people—as it does every year in selected parts of the country. On the diplomatic front, policymakers were more divided than ever in 1999 about whether to isolate the Sudan government as a terrorist state and one of the world's most egregious violators of human rights, or whether to take a more conciliatory tack. The United States and other key countries finally provided greater material support last year to the peace negotiation process between Sudan's combatants, and the United States appointed a special envoy to push for progress in Sudan.

In short, the international community did not ignore Sudan in 1999, but the scope and nature of its response are influenced by various factors, including: whether international leaders can coordinate their peace and justice efforts; whether they have the staying power to remain engaged as progress remains slow; whether leaders in Sudan actually want a just peace; and whether any of the international efforts, to date, have even made a dent in addressing the Sudanese people's immeasurable need for humanitarian assistance and justice.

Honest Disparities; Dishonest Disparities

Political leaders are not averse to using humanitarian rhetoric or rationales for placing a moral gloss on interventions that have essentially realpolitik motivations. In 1991, in Operation Desert Storm, for example, although there were undoubtedly humanitarian concerns that were more than rhetorical, the economic and strategic value of oil-rich Kuwait and the Persian Gulf were obvious as well.

But at what point is the life of a Kuwaiti or a Kosovar weighed against the life of a Chechen or a Sierra Leonean? Do world leaders ultimately value some lives more than others? Their explanations for the discrepancies in response sometimes seem remarkably self-serving, defensive, or arrogant. The explosion of violence in East Timor followed quickly on the heels of Kosovo. The latter created high expectations that the United States would lead the international community in defending a group that seemed to be under similar threat. At the time, Clinton's National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, went out of his way to douse that expectation. When reporters asked him if the United States would intervene in East Timor, Berger said, "You know, my daughter has a very messy apartment up in college. Maybe I should intervene to have that cleaned up. I don't think anybody ever calculated a doctrine which said we ought to intervene wherever there's a humanitarian problem." ⁵ After a storm of criticism, Berger retracted the comment as "stupid" the next day. It was stupid. It was also revealing.

At the height of post-Kosovo expectations, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Richard Holbrooke did for Africa what Sandy Berger initially had done for East Timor, highhandedly dismissing the possibility that the United States would ever intervene under similar circumstances in Africa. In early December 1999, during a tour of Africa's "hot spots," he announced, "Whatever course the Security Council chooses [in Africa], there will be no American troops for another African mission." ⁶ Holbrooke then announced a $1 million contribution to the Democratic Republic of Congo's Joint Military Commission, the international community's "military" commitment to resolving the DRC conflict, one that was occurring in the most genocide-prone region of the world.

The next day, rationalizing his categorical rejection of a U.S. military intervention under any circumstances, and the token U.S. donation to the Congo crisis, Holbrooke said, "In every crisis in every part of the world, we are told: 'You are ignoring us and paying attention to other regions of the world.' The complaints that we have heard here on our trip and in the States about neglect of Africa are word-for-word identical to those we heard in Indonesia and East Timor, and that I have heard for the last few years in Bosnia and Kosovo. They are not unique to Africa." ⁷

Holbrooke's African audience must have been dumbfounded. However delayed, the international community did militarily intervene in Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor. At some point, usually too late, the complaints of Bosnians, Kosovars, and Timorese were heard; the international community paid attention and responded. But at critical times the international community has studiously avoided paying attention to African crises; refusing not just to listen, but even to hear, its "see no evil, hear no evil" approach serving as rationalization for its failure to respond. Put simply, international intervention on the scale seen recently in the Balkans and Asia is not an option in Africa. ⁸ Holbrooke says so.

But he doesn't say why.

What factors did U.S. policymakers consider before deciding to reject any future military intervention in Africa for any reason? How could they have come to such a conclusion based on a rational and balanced weighing of pros and cons, of actual or imagined humanitarian emergencies?

Worldwide, what then are the factors that actually bear on world leaders' decisions to intervene in humanitarian emergencies? Below, are a few to consider. As crises arise, we ought to assess how the decision-makers weigh one factor against another. Those of us who advocate on behalf of refugees and other victims of conflict need also to find our role and work to convince decision-makers of the relevance and importance of humanitarian factors in their calculations. Most importantly, we need to identify the illegitimate factors that must be taken off the balancing scales entirely.

• The Human Vulnerability Factor: While not always the most decisive of factors to government leaders, it is the fundamental guiding factor for the humanitarian and human rights communities. It is, we insist, critically—essentially—important in most situations. It may sound trite, but political leaders are human too, and are not untouched by human vulnerability and humanitarian need.

• The Strategic Interests Factor: While the spectrum of interests is very broad, most usually include markets, resources, and investments in the economic sphere. This factor also includes the extent to which the country whose interests are being considered perceives a security threat from the conflict. The potential for a mass refugee influx weighs increasingly in calculations for intervention, and the desire to prevent such an influx appears to have been the primary motivation for more than one international intervention in recent years.

• The Mechanisms for Action Factor: The UN is the most universally respected legal mechanism for ensuring that a humanitarian intervention will be suitably authorized and restrained. Yet, by its very nature, the UN often is frozen because of political division, particularly within the Security Council. Other regional mechanisms exist—NATO, the Organization of African Unity, and the Organization of American States—but their authority and their effectiveness are debatable. How does the international community respond, as in Chechnya, when mechanisms for response are unavailable or inadequate?

• The Military Factor: Is a proposed action militarily possible within the parameters of acceptable risk? What is acceptable risk? In Kosovo, the answer seemed to be: zero U.S. deaths. What are the implications of risk-free interventions? Might such interventions do more harm than good? On the other hand, is there a clear military goal and an exit strategy? Confronting organized states or militaries is less intimidating than taking on chaos. Failed states with little internal coherence, capability, or accountability are an especially problematic factor in today's complex humanitarian emergencies. Do the combatants (states or rebels) have no interest in peace or successful humanitarian efforts? Do they regard civilian deaths as the objective of their violence rather than an ancillary consequence? Do the combatants respect international humanitarian workers or are they likely to attack or abuse them as well?

• The Bottomless Pit Factor: There is understandable reluctance to commit resources, and possibly lives, to situations perceived as intractable. At one time, both Afghanistan and Somalia did grab the world's attention. For good or ill, the superpowers were involved. But long after the proxy battles ended, the conflicts sputtered on. Leadership has changed faces, ideologies too, but misery stays the same, and the suffering goes on and on. On the one hand, the bottomless pit factor becomes an easy excuse for inaction, for self-fulfilling prophecies about the intractability of problems, particularly in deeply impoverished and undeveloped places. On the other hand, compassion fatigue is not exclusively a rationale for inaction by those far away who had little compassion in the first place. In the case of both Afghanistan and Somalia, many humanitarian workers living and working closest to these tragedies despair of the situation, and, ultimately of their work. For me, this is the saddest and hardest factor to face.

• The Ripeness for Change Factor: Outside forces are understandably reluctant to intervene if they can't see a way to influence a positive outcome. It could be argued that one reason the U.S. government remained essentially on the sidelines during the first three years of war in Bosnia was because the situation had not played out sufficiently for the United States to think its involvement would tip the balance to resolve the conflict. The Serbs' July 1995 ethnic cleansing of Muslims from the eastern Bosnian enclaves of Srebrenica and Zepa, the Croats' ethnic cleansing of Serbs from the Krajina region of Croatia, and the combined Muslim-Croat sweeping of Serbs from western Bosnia-Hercegovina simplified the Bosnian map. The balance of power had shifted, allowing a U.S. show of force to have a decisive impact. That the international community did virtually nothing about East Timor for nearly 25 years until the government changed in Jakarta exemplifies the importance of this factor.

• The Legality Factor: Is the intervention lawful? Is it consistent with the UN Charter and properly sanctioned under principles of international law? If lacking a firm foundation in law, an intervention risks becoming reduced to a might-makes-right equation that allows the stronger country or alliance of countries to dictate terms to weaker states. A less than firm legal foundation for an intervention also risks establishing dangerous precedents in other situations that might not have the extenuating circumstances that led to circumventing legal obstacles. These troubling questions certainly apply to the humanitarian intervention in Kosovo, but clearly this factor was not sufficient to deter the United States and its NATO allies from their course of action.

• The Public Support Factor: Public awareness and support are critical to the engagement of Western leadership. The media role can be key. NGOs and other advocates, including ethnic constituencies, seek to create a domestic political rationale for political leaders to confront particular humanitarian emergencies. This factor gains importance as elections loom, especially if particular ethnic groups are adamant about a response. Propaganda is an element of this factor that risks inviting demagoguery. It is easier to act when one of the combatants, justifiably or not, is demonized (the Milosevic/Saddam Hussein/Hitler imagery), or a victim population is considered innocent or garners great sympathy (as in East Timor). Occasionally, the good guys and bad guys are clear. But often as not, the tables turn and today's victims become tomorrow's persecutors. The Serbian people have been stigmatized as aggressors, war criminals, and unyielding hypernationalists. Today, they are in retreat. Serbia hosts more than 700,000 refugees and displaced people from its failed policies in Kosovo, Bosnia, and Croatia. The overwhelming majority are innocent victims whose aspirations for a peaceful life are no different than yours or mine. They are homeless, but the world shuns them. It also fails to hold accountable the ethnic cleansers on the other sides who forced them from their homes. The public support factor is an essential tool for refugee advocates, but it is also fickle, and has inherent dangers.

• The Race Factor: The other factors listed above are legitimate to varying degrees when considering humanitarian intervention. Race is not. Yet, I am convinced that, other factors being more or less equal, the world community is more likely to intervene on behalf of lighter skinned victims than victims of a darker hue. Can I prove such a damning allegation? No. Let me at least try to explain it.

Former President Jimmy Carter's sense that racism was afoot in the disparities in response to the humanitarian crises of 1999 is similar to Rangel's sense that racism was, indeed, a factor that weighed in the balance in U.S. Policymakers' response to the Haitian crisis. Carter observed that "formal commitments are being made in the Balkans where white Europeans are involved, but no such concerted efforts are being made by leaders outside of Africa to resolve the disputes under way there. This failure gives a strong impression of racism." ⁹

Unless dealing with a Hitler who wears the racist label proudly, it is rarely possible to pin the racism charge on political actors who deny the influence of race in their decision making. My point here is not to try to sort out all of the psycho-social components that relate to racism as a subjective influence, but rather to suggest that, at a minimum, race does correlate with assigning a lower priority when policymakers consider international engagement in complex humanitarian emergencies.

This has particular implications for Africa. Yes, genuine post-colonial traumas still plague Africa and, in part, explain its predicament. Yes, Africans themselves must take the lead in reducing conflict in African societies. These are relevant factors. But these realities should not alter the balance in the normal decision-making process of international political leaders or institutions.

Africa finds itself on the short-end of any accounting of international response. In 1999, UNICEF pleaded for money for its programs in Uganda, a country beset with political, health, and economic problems affecting children. It received less than one fifth of the needed donations; UNICEF said that Uganda was one of its most under funded programs worldwide. Likewise, the World Health Organization and the World Food Program had to scale back their programs drastically in Uganda because of poor donor response—in WFP's case, donors provided half of food aid needed for that country in 1999. In Ethiopia—with signs of another devastating famine looming—donors supplied WFP with half of the necessary food aid that it requested. In September, WFP announced a shortfall of 16,000 tons of food aid for Ethiopia; in October, it suspended food distributions because its coffers were basically empty. This picture was repeated again and again throughout the continent last year. The Washington Post's Karen De Young offers a number of indices of this disparity:

• With international foreign assistance overall dropping 21 percent from 1992 to 1997, "the principal loser in this equation has been Africa."

• By one estimate, the international community spent $1.50 per day per Kosovar refugee where, with respect to Sierra Leone the equivalent figure was 11 cents.

• Donor responses to UN requests for its humanitarian emergency programs in Africa are dropping. The WFP curtailed its feeding program for two million uprooted people in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea after receiving less than 20 percent of the requested funding.

• Africa has largely been bypassed by mushrooming flows of private investment funds.

• Of the 13 countries cited by aid critic Doug Bardoner as "foreign aid failures," 12 were in Africa. The other was Haiti. ¹⁰

In the aftermath of the 1994 Rwanda genocide, those senior political leaders who were architects of not responding at all (President Clinton, Madeleine Albright, and Kofi Annan) were re-elected or promoted. And in the United States, where knowledge of and interest in African humanitarian issues is limited, the African American community, the most marginalized major population in U.S. society, has a leadership preoccupied with the priorities of that domestic reality. As a community, it is largely disengaged from addressing humanitarian issues in Africa.

That race correlates with lower priority should alarm us all. In a world visibly lacking adequate mechanisms for dealing with civil conflict, Africa's low priority increases the probability that its massive humanitarian emergencies will continue, its civilian death tolls grow, and de-development will continue to plague major portions of the continent and its people.

Africans, their leaders, and their institutions will need to organize to address this inequity. Africans must position themselves to play a productive role in redressing fault where warranted and to represent well to the rest of the world community the needs of the continent's most vulnerable people. But for those of us outside Africa who are alarmed about that continent's second-class position at the international table, the task is to ensure that our home countries respond more effectively to Africa's humanitarian emergencies. This means, in part, creating a well-informed and mobilized constituency to hold our own leaders accountable politically for their decisions to act or not to act.

Morality in the Equation

In strictly moral terms, we should always intervene wherever we see human suffering. Nothing else should trump or divert rescue. However, in practical terms, in this world we live in, we do not and cannot intervene all-out in each and every case. In our own work at the U.S. Committee for Refugees, we made the decision last year not to send our staff to assess conditions in Chechnya—not because the human need was any less than places we did visit, but because we weighed the safety of our staff and assessed, we think realistically, that our visit would not have a significant impact on that situation that warranted the risk. We decided that our "interventions" on Chechnya would remain at the letter-writing and press-release level—from a distance—and that our limited human and financial resources would be better expended elsewhere.

This essay is about making hard choices. It is about going from the moral absolutes that create the comfort of self-righteousness at the cost of irrelevancy, to an engagement in the political process: an engagement that seeks to introduce moral responsibility into decision making in a way that speaks realistically to policymakers whose calculations are based only in part on the moral rightness of the response. Too often, human vulnerability is not weighed on the scale at all.

While acknowledging that governments and intergovernmental entities do not base their decisions to intervene on morality alone, we will insist that human vulnerability should always weigh, and weigh heavily. While acknowledging that those who make the decisions are not per se less honorable or ethical because they have responsibilities to set priorities that may result in unequal response to the world's humanitarian needs, we also recognize that they may well be.

Our job is to be on the alert; to hold decision-makers accountable. At times—for example, when groups are threatened with genocide—this means we will insist that moral considerations do, in fact, surpass all others. But accountability also means recognizing that neither our own government nor the international community will respond equally to every humanitarian crisis, and that, even when we would like them to do more, there are often reasonable and legitimate reasons for those discrepancies.

I don't suggest a scientific process, something akin to quantifying the factors and arriving at neatly measurable comparisons to determine precisely which factors legitimately weigh more heavily than purely humanitarian considerations under what circumstances. But I do insist that the record of disparity is clear enough that everyone—our leaders themselves, the general public, and those of us who advocate for the downtrodden—should carefully examine the mix of factors, including ones I have failed to identify, in an effort to reduce the equation to its most human components.

Putting all the factors on the table would make for more transparent decision making and would allow healthy scrutiny of the international community's actions—and inactions. The goal of the exercise is this: to ensure that when international leaders weigh lives in the balance—and they do—they eliminate extraneous or illegitimate factors, and that when the legitimate factors are weighed, the scales are calibrated such that one human life is not regarded as fundamentally more precious than another.

Endnotes

1 Charles Babington, "Clinton: Goal is To Contain Milosevic; No Time Limit Set on NATO Airstrikes," Washington Post, March 25, 1999, at A.1. Back to text

2 Charles Babington, "President Pleads for Support; Clinton Cites Hitler 'Ethnic Cleansing'," Washington Post, March 25, 1999, at A.1.Back to text

3 Karen De Young, "Generosity Shrinks in an Age of Prosperity," Washington Post, November 25, 1999, at A.11. Back to text

4 Although KFOR, in Kosovo, is larger, it is not a UN force, but rather operates under NATO. Back to text

5 Cited in Andrew J. Glass, "Getting the UN Act in High Gear," Cox News Service, September 15, 1999. Back to text

6 Barbara Crossette, "Holbrooke To Unveil Series of Initiatives for Dealing with Africa," New York Times, December 6, 1999. Back to text

7 "Holbrooke Outlines New U.S. Policy," IRIN, UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, December 7, 1999. Back to text

8 After the close of the year, the United States, led by Ambassador Holbrooke, did in fact exhibit a greater effort to put the crisis in Sierra Leone, and Africa generally, on the international agenda, but still nowhere near on the scale recently shown elsewhere. After devoting a "month on Africa" at the UN, Holbrooke complacently declared, "We aimed to put to rest the canard that Africa doesn't matter; to refute the belief that the international community has one set of rules for Europe or Asia and another for Africa. On this objective, we can say we have succeeded." (United States Mission to the United Nations press release, January 31, 2000). Back to text

9 Jimmy Carter, "As a Peacemaker, America is Blundering Badly," International Herald Tribune, May 28, 1999. Back to text

10 Karen De Young, op. cit., p. A.11. Back to text

Source: World Refugee Survey 2000