This fratricidal strife produced such terrible carnage, and such harrowing scenes of misery and death, that outsiders felt bound to intervene. The year is ending with foreign troops attempting to restore order in Somalia so that food can safely be distributed to a starving population. There are mounting demands for intervention in Bosnia, too, to stop Serbs from persecuting Muslims with a campaign of “ethnic cleansing,” the year’s grotesque euphemism for killing a people or driving them into exile. And so the world is being forced to contemplate what is essentially a new type of military campaign, an invasion not to repel aggression or defend national security but to halt another country’s internal violence. Despite the purity of motive-perhaps because of the purity of motive-the practical complications of these humanitarian police actions are only beginning to be perceived.
What produced such a spasm of human nastiness at this particular moment? No single cause is adequate to explain it all, but surely the main one was the collapse of Soviet communism and, with it, the cold war. No empire has declined and fallen with such speed as the one that Lenin and Stalin built. Millions of people within its borders went through a wrenching transformation: after years of life in a police state, they suddenly found themselves with what amounts to no state at all. Sheer anarchy accounts for much of the violence of the past year. So does the sudden economic insecurity of people tossed from a planned econmy into a competitive one.
Given the breakdown of authority in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, it is little wonder that people coalesced into the national groups that communist governments had so long tried to suppress. This happened in the Baltic states, in Moldova and Central Asia, where ethnic Russians found themselves regarded as aliens-what’s more, as aliens identified with the oppression of the past. The same phenomenon lay at the heart of the year’s fierce battles in the former Yugoslavia. Serbs had been the dominant ethnic group in the federal state. But as the country crumbled into individual republics, the Serbs living outside Serbia-in Bosnia and Croatia, primarily-feared that they would be driven out. So they used the military muscle of their ethnic allies in Belgrade to try to attach their own territory to a Greater Serbia, and thus ethnic cleansing was born. In Czechoslovakia, communal tension didn’t erupt into warfare but was irreparable nevertheless: the Czechs and Slovaks will divide into separate nations on New Year’s Day.
The very onset of political freedom has caused some of this year’s trouble. The word “democracy” has been much in the air since communism fell, and one-party rule has suddenly gone out of fashion, though the process can be either relatively smooth (as in Zambia) or extremely messy (as in Kenya, Liberia and Zaire). Democracy is a messy business-especially in its early stages before legal protections for minorities and a stable middle class are firmly in place. One of its risks has always been that political parties will divide along ethnic or tribal or religious lines, reinforcing antagonism instead of building compromise. This is one of the excuses that authoritarians have always given for restricting political freedom. It is a problem that India now faces, with the rise of a Hindu nationalist party threatening its strictly secular Constitution. The Hindu-Muslim carnage in December showed how communal splits can fracture a young democracy, just as the Los Angeles riots last spring showed how racial tension still divides an old one.
A year like 1992 gives new prominence to some old questions about human nature. These divisions-neighbor against neighbor, race against race, nationality against nationality-are something we have always been prone to, and this year’s events raise doubts about whether we are getting any better at bridging these gaps. It is true that government authorities sometimes stir up communal hatreds to try to show that the country would disintegrate under democratic rule. That is happening in Kenya, where President Daniel arap Moi has played on tribal rivalries to delay political pluralism. In South Africa, too, the security forces have occasionally instigated trouble between the two main black factions, the ANC and Inkatha. But these communal antagonisms are not simply manufactured. They are very deep-seated.
That is not to say that they can’t, in time, be assuaged, even forgotten. A nation of immigrants like the United States, where new arrivals tend to leave old grievances at the doorstep, has a long though spotty experience of this process-currently reflected in the buzzword “multiculturalism.” Americans and Europeans tend to regard discussion of racial or ethnic distinctions as a major taboo; the Nazi persecution of Jews and the long denial of equal rights to black Americans loom large in the national consciousness. They may sometimes find it hard to realize that this taboo doesn’t apply with the same force everywhere in the world, and this makes the mayhem of 1992 seem all the more shocking.
It is even more difficult to sort out the moral and practical issues surrounding military intervention to try to stop this mayhem. Even for people who are leery of sending armed forces into foreign lands, an operation like Restore Hope in Somalia seems irreproachable: the objective is clearly humanitarian, and shooting can probably be kept to a minimum. For Americans in particular, many of whom feel uncomfortable if U.S. foreign and military policy doesn’t serve some higher moral purpose than national self-interest, the Somalian mission seems attractive.
The problems start to emerge when one looks beyond Somalia. Should Bosnia be next? There a shooting war is already in progress. Foreign troops would swiftly be drawn into it, and not as a neutral force; they would almost surely do battle against the Serbs. Are the people of the countries that might send troops comfortable with such prospects, and would the humanitarian aura over such an operation long survive?
What of other countries where tremendous misery prevails? Should international forces be deployed in “failed nations” such as Liberia and Mozambique, where rebellious warlords hold sway? Should they intervene to put down military dictatorships like the one now ruling Burma, where a democratic election was simply ignored and where ethnic persecution has led to a pathetic tide of refugees? The world is full of political-disaster areas like these. How to choose where to respond?
And who is to respond? Right now, only a few countries possess the capability to join such operations, and only one-the United States-has the massive air-and-sea delivery systems needed to respond quickly and with overwhelming force. U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali has called for creation of an intervention force under United Nations command, but it defies belief that, at least in the foreseeable future, member states will be willing to transfer the required quantities of men and equipment to the control of an international body. That leaves the United States as the likely leader of humanitarian intervention forces, and it would be surprising if either Americans or non-Americans were entirely happy with that prospect. Already phrases like “the new colonialism” and “the white man’s burden” are being used to describe these circumstances, and one has only to utter such words to realize what a reaction they will cause.
Finally, there is the crucial question of how to bring a humanitarian mission to a close. Peacekeeping eventually has to turn into peacemaking, and it’s not clear that military forces are well suited for the latter. In fact, the very presence of peacekeepers may delay a political settlement. U.N. troops have been in Cyprus, separating the Greek and Turkish communities, for nearly 20 years. Safe behind this screen of U.N. protection, neither side has had the slightest incentive to compromise with the other.
How and when do you leave a place like Somalia, where there will probably always be another mouth that needs feeding and another hospital that needs help? This is a military operation with a very real difference. With wars, there’s a general assumption that they should be stopped as soon as possible. With humanitarian missions, there’s a general assumption that they should last as long as possible.
Certainly the world should not avoid the appeals of humanity. Indeed, one lesson of 1992 is that it cannot. But we do need a clearer sense of what we are getting into. Open hearts are not enough.
