Some New World Insight Sorely Needed

Into the ditch have gone the ambitious hopes for preventive diplomacy and conflict resolution that flourished at the end of the Cold War. Overwhelmed by the eruption of nasty little wars across the globe, the international community is practicing a silent triage.

Russia still receives intensive care as it wages its Chechen campaign. Bosnia is reduced to low-level life support, getting some food and bandages but no strong medicine. At death’s end of the tent lies Africa. The withdrawal of United Nations peacekeepers from Somalia this month marks it as a casualty beyond saving. Warring Somali clans will be left to fight it out. The most vicious thugs among them will emerge to claim a U.N. seat. But their bloodstained excellencies will be welcomed in the world’s foreign ministries.

Rwanda’s case is more chilling: The next eruption of tribal warfare and genocide is being prepared openly in Hutu-inhabited refugee camps the United Nations and humanitarian organizations oversee on Rwanda’s borders. Yet no country responded when U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali tried to form a small force to head off the next, predictable round of bloodletting. At least in Somalia there was an effort. In Rwanda, as Boutros-Ghali has said, “We have failed … and thus have acquiesced in the continued loss of human lives.” Somalia represented a mismanaged good intention. Rwanda represents a cold calculation to take no chances.

This is a far cry from the hopes that preventive diplomacy would be a growth industry for the 1990s. The Clintonites promised to spare Americans new foreign involvement by detecting crises early on and heading them off. At the United Nations plans proliferated for a rapid reaction force that could intervene to prevent the next Bosnia or Rwanda from turning again into a giant killing ground.

Those hopes sank in the sands of Somalia and the snows of Sarajevo. Conflicts that superpower bloc rivalry would have stifled in the past are not deterred or affected by unwieldy international coalitions lacking common political aims. Led by the United States, the governments of the major powers have turned inward, run out of ideas and resources for international action. They have become, in a word, callous toward the most savage of these conflicts.

The time has come for a serious rethinking of international relief and humanitarian programs in a world with the closed horizons of a Jean-Paul Sartre drama: a world where there are no exits and the cavalry will never come. Relief groups increasingly care for populations that cannot be protected. These populations become the “the well-fed dead.”

Smart nongovernmental organizations are beginning to ask if their efforts in fact help prolong the conflicts they try to resolve.

This is clearly the case now in the Rwanda crisis, where in the words of Canadian diplomats Gary Soroka and Christopher Cooter, “the humanitarian rationale for the refugee camps is gone.” Their carefully worded but clear message is that the Hutu-controlled camps in Zaire should be closed, by turning off the flow of food and services if necessary, before the Hutus use the camps as launching pads to attack the Tutsi-dominated government. The Hutu refugees would then be forced to abandon the camps run by warlords, return to Rwanda and cooperate with the new government to get relief supplies.

Soroka acknowledges that this proposal, offered by the Canadian Foreign Ministry, puts the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and other relief organizations working in the camps “in a box. Their mandate is to help refugees. This would represent a major philosophical departure for them.”

Another clarion call for new thinking comes from the International Crisis Group, formed in London two weeks ago with the financial support of financier George Soros and the intellectual stimulus of Morton Abramowitz, head of Washington’s Carnegie Endowment. The group expects to spend $10 million a year to stimulate a new coordinated approach to humanitarian relief that will recognize current political realities.

“Humanitarian assistance, however important in saving lives, unfortunately can serve as a palliative and a substitute for governments taking more decisive, politically difficult measures to solve the crisis itself,” the Crisis Group’s organizing proposal states.

These two documents are must reading for Congress as it considers cutting or ending U.S. participation in international peacekeeping and relief operations. They show the time is ripe for pragmatic, even radical reform of these operations. But that cannot be accomplished by turning America’s back on the world’s wounded.