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CIAO DATE: 03/02
Volume XVIII, No 2, Summer 2001
The subject of humanitarian intervention has come into vogue in recent years, following a remarkable series of speeches made in 1998 and 1999 by the secretary general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan. Since the phrase "humanitarian intervention" is increasingly falling into disfavor, it is important to note that the secretary general never used it himself, speaking rather of "intervention" pure and simple. At Ditchley Park in June 1998 he stated: "Our job is to intervene....State frontiers...should no longer be seen as a watertight protection for war criminals or mass murderers. The fact that a conflict is `internal' does not give the parties any right to disregard the most basic rules of human conduct." The following year, at the U.N. General Assembly, he asserted that "the core challenge to the Security Council and to the United Nations [is] to forge unity behind the principle that massive and systematic violations of human rights-wherever they may take place-should not be allowed to stand." Referring to the U.N. Charter's declaration that armed force should only be used in the common interest, he then posed the key questions: "But what is that common interest? Who shall define it? Who will defend it? Under whose authority? And with what means of intervention?"
There is no agreement on the answers to these questions, not even on whether they are the right ones to ask. Indeed a debate has been raging in international circles ever since Kofi Annan spoke those words. The debate over humanitarian intervention is largely between two sides, both claiming to be committed to the rule of law in world affairs. One upholds a notion of the rule of law based on the rights of states, and the other speaks of the rule of law based on the rights of ordinary individuals. Each of these positions is set out in different but equally vital U.N. documents, the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The tension between these principles is reflected in different articles of the charter itself. Part of the challenge before the United Nations is to reconcile them.
But we must begin by acknowledging that the term "humanitarian intervention" is itself contentious. To its proponents, it marks the coming of age of the imperative of action in the face of human rights abuses, over the citadels of state sovereignty. To its detractors, it is an oxymoron, a pretext for military intervention often devoid of legal sanction, selectively deployed and achieving only ambiguous ends. As some put it, there can be nothing humanitarian about a bomb.
The violent clashes between Palestinians and Israelis in Gaza and the West Bank last October, which quickly ripened into a new and sustained intifada, effectively ended the Oslo peace process and made crisis management rather than conflict resolution the watchword for the Middle East. Subsequently, in fall 2000, restive demonstrations against Israel in several Arab capitals raised the specter of a unified Arab front, while attacks on the U.S.S. Cole in Aden and the British embassy in Yemen suggested that the unrest in the Palestinian territories could provide a convenient pretext for heightened radical Islamic terrorism aimed at Israel's allies. Through the first half of 2001, Palestinian terrorism and Israel's tough retaliatory policy and aggressive rules of engagement sustained tit-for-tat violence. By June, more than 550 people -over 450 of them Palestinian-had been killed, and hostilities continued.
Despite these sobering developments, Lebanon-becalmed by virtue of the Israeli withdrawal from southern part of the country in May 2000-has remained relatively tranquil. The degradation of security in Israel and the territories due to the intifada, however, makes maintaining Lebanon's comparative stability all the more important for preventing military escalation in the Middle East. Should Israel be drawn back into Lebanon, military tensions with Syria could reignite, increasing the risk of wider regional war. Keeping Lebanon cool turns on controlling Hizbullah (meaning "Party of God"), the militant Lebanese Shi'ite Muslim political and military organization backed by Syria and Iran. Armed Hizbullah guerrillas number no more than a thousand, but the wider political organization is several thousand strong. Hizbullah's energetic participation and strong showing in the Lebanese elections last August and September suggest that it has been inclined to turn its attention toward helping its constituents prosper in a new, viable Lebanon.
Buses in Sarajevo make long, winding climbs up the mountains that surround the city for spectacular views of the urban bowl where 400,000 people reside. Glimmering in the twilight, the lighted homes and shops look so wondrously busy and alive that one has to shake oneself to remember that, in the early 1990s, from where one stands, Serbian guns and rifles pummeled this city for almost four years, killing 1,500 children and 11,000 adults in the Bosnian war that took at least 200,000 lives, uprooted half of the country's four million people, and destroyed hundreds of thousands of their modest homes.
For Serbian political leaders bent, in 1992, on incorporating Bosnian land and Bosnian Serbs into "Greater Serbia," Sarajevo was a prime ideological as well as political target. Not only was it the capital city of Bosnia, but like Bosnia as a whole it came closer to being a multiethnic society than any of the neighboring Balkan states. To "rescue" their fellow Serbs in the city, Serbian paramilitaries had to rend Sarajevo's multiethnic fabric. "If you were a troublemaker who wanted to destroy a city that, more than any other in Europe, was a symbol of integration and tolerance, you would do well to pick Sarajevo," wrote Peter Maass, in his history of the Bosnian war. "You could find, on virtually the same block, a Muslim mosque, Roman Catholic cathedral, Christian Orthodox church and Jewish synagogue. The people of Sarajevo-Muslims, Serbs, Croats, Jews, Albanians, Gypsies, and a kaleidoscope of mixtures therein-lived in Europe's truest melting pot." Before 1992, some 40 percent of the population of Sarajevo was Muslim; with the forced and voluntary removals of many of their neighbors since then, Muslims now make up 80 percent of the city's population.
The Dayton Accords, signed in 1995, have presumably given Bosnians a stable atmosphere in which to recover from the years of strife. Dayton substituted United Nations peacekeeping troops-the so-called Stabilization Force (SFOR)-for the warring armies of Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. Tragically, the accords virtually ratified the gains of Serbian forces by permitting the establishment of Republika Srpska as a Serb enclave within Bosnia's borders, setting a precedent that has led to agitation for a "Republika Croatia" in and around Mostar to the south.
Bosnia may be off the screen for many Western news-watchers; but it holds a great attraction for anyone interested in one of the great questions of human history: Is "identity politics" compatible with peaceful politics? In the hierarchy of powerful cultural values that make up a society, must ethnicity give way to other means of defining citizens' rights and responsibilities? It was this question and a desire to see whether the tattered fabric of a multiethnic culture was being mended that drew me to Sarajevo this past March for a week of interviews with some two dozen civic and religious leaders.
We Americans are usually ready to treat the latter question as rhetorical, given our immigrant history, our identity as a composite of nations. The grandchildren of almost any of our immigrant citizens are unlikely to tag themselves as more Italian or Chinese than "American." We pride ourselves in this fact, in contrast to others who celebrate their deeply embedded ethnic and religious identities. Some years ago, a lay representative of the Romanian Orthodox Church asked me if my family-with its German name-still spoke German. "Probably not for the last 200 years," I answered. "Too bad," he said. Soon we got around to the topic of the ongoing emigration of many German-speaking people from Transylvania to West Germany, and he commented: "I think they should all go back to Germany. They have been here only 500 years." I thought he was joking. In fact, he was not. For him "real" Romanians were the descendants of the Romans who occupied Dacia in the first century. Nobody else could truly belong to Romanian society.
American astonishment at such sentiments must not prevent us from appreciating their depth and their political power. Among modern illustrations of that power, none is more sobering than the four Balkan wars of the past decade. Whether the peoples of the Balkans can become reconciled to one another in the wake of the terrible atrocities that they perpetrated against each other is the question that took me to Sarajevo.
Reflections
The second day of the school year in Istanbul was a good one to be indoors. The air was cool without being fresh and the leaden skies threatened rain. And surely no school, I thought, could look more attractively impressive than the one where I had an appointment with the headmaster that morning. The Special "Rum" (originally, the Arabic word for Byzantine; nowadays the colloquial Turkish word for a Greek of Turkish citizenship, literally meaning "Roman") High School was a palatial edifice of red brick drawn up steeply against the hills of Istanbul's Fener (Phanar) district overlooking the Golden Horn. The front gate was painted fire-engine red. Inside, the pastels on the molded ceiling and pillars looked as fresh as the cheeks of a turn-of-the-century Levantine bride. The foyer had the proportions of a fancy hotel lobby. In an office big and elegant enough for a government minister, the headmaster looked smart in a sport coat and tie as he chatted animatedly with young, bright-eyed teachers. At around eleven o'clock, I heard a small commotion and poked my head into the main hall. A half dozen boys and girls in uniforms were talking quietly. There was no sound of over-excited young voices, no tardy boys tearing around corners. All the students were at their appointed places-all 62 of them.
The "Great School"-to this day Greeks always refer to it as the "Great School of the Nation" (I Megali tou Yenous Scholi)-of which the current state-governed institution is a direct continuation, was probably founded in the mid-sixteenth century-some say even as early as 1456. For centuries, it was the training ground for the sons of the wealthy and powerful Phanariot Greeks. Originally merchants and shipowners, these families dominated the international trade that made Istanbul one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world until the First World War. By special arrangement with the Sublime Porte, Phanariots also served as Haspodars of Moldavia and Wallachia, and as senior officials at the Ottoman court and for the Ecumenical Patriarch, who was entrusted with both the spiritual and worldly guidance of the Ottoman Empire's Orthodox Christian subjects. Even amid the slow collapse of the empire-from economic torpor and secessionist violence in its Balkan provinces-the Phanariots were still powerful and wealthy enough in the decades following the recognition of an independent Greek state (1832) to fund construction of the current building in 1881. In the 1930s-again, despite the horrendous upheavals visited upon Anatolian Greeks in the wake of the Greco-Turkish war of 1919-22-some 400 Constantinopolitan Greek boys still studied there.
In 1987, the boys' school merged with its equally diminished sister girls' school. The current institution, where children rattle around this relic of a disappeared world, is a sad monument to the pride and stubbornness of both Greeks and Turks. Some Greeks have told me that when the school was private and students paid tuition, it used to be the best in the city, but that under Turkish control it has become mediocre. Yet for unknown reasons, it has what surely must be one of the best teacher-student ratios in the world, with 15 teachers for its 62 pupils. Many of the teachers are former graduates. A young instructor of Greek literature who showed me around had graduated in the mid-1980s. The current headmaster had been his biology teacher. And, as if to kill the school with kindness, the state mandates that students recognize all Turkish holidays and all Greek ones as well. In one semester this adds up to over 30 days off.
Today, the school looks like a citadel whose outer perimeter has already been overrun by the enemy while the defenders have retreated to the innermost keep. The magnificent foyer on the ground floor is dominated by a shrine to Kemal Ataturk, with pictures, quotations, and a table covered with books by and about the man who drove the invading Greeks into the sea in 1922 and modeled the Turkish Republic on the ethnically homogenous nation-states of Western Europe. Against another wall stands a collection of creations from the school's home economics class, including a plate painted with a child's vision of a city in paradise-labeled "Athens" in Greek. Upstairs, unused by students, the floor is covered with a mosaic spelling out, in Greek, the philosopher Thales' famous admonition, "Know yourself." On the top floor is an auditorium whose ceiling is graced by darkened oil paintings of saints of the Orthodox Church. Just outside the window, a small cross faces a forest of mosques and minarets bristling like spears. And rising above the top floor is a tower with a telescope and a window in the rounded ceiling through which young Greeks could gaze toward the heavens, where, their leaders told them, lay their reward for preserving the True Faith amid the indignities of the post-1453 Turkish yoke.
The remaining two to three thousand Greeks of Istanbul-all that is left of a community of 100,000 souls who were allowed to stay even following the 1923 internationally mandated exchange of Greek and Turkish populations-most of them in their dotage, are headed toward one of two almost equally hard-to-imagine futures. One possibility is that, somehow, despite appearances, the community will perdure. If there is any chance for this to happen, it will require the Turkish government to relax its death grip on the heart and head of the Greek community in Istanbul-who is also the most senior prelate in the entire Orthodox world- the Ecumenical Patriarch.
But perhaps, if only because for so long now Turks have felt themselves under siege by hostile foreign powers, the upholders of Kemal's secularist vision in Ankara do not seem to realize that the Patriarchate could be an invaluable ally in the battle against religious fanaticism of the sort that has ravaged the Balkans for the past ten years and a bridge to moderates in Greece and the wider world of Orthodox Christianity. And so, at this point, the scenario that looks far more likely is that in the next few years, after well over two millennia of unbroken residence along the shores of the Bosphorous, the Greeks will finally disappear completely from the city they made great.
Reportage
The mountain sun beats down on the nearly empty town plaza of San Pedro Jocopilas, just outside the small city of Santa Cruz de Quiche on a sleepy Saturday morning. The faint sound of folk music wafts from the massive white church on the corner of the square. Despite frequent trips to Guatemala, this was my first visit to the heart of the conflict zone since 1996. The town was one of the most heavily militarized in Quiche, a largely Mayan province.
The province, in Guatemala's remote northwestern highlands, saw the decimation of entire populations in the 1970s and early 1980s. "Beans and Bullets," dictator Efrain Rios Montt's genocidal counterinsurgency program, led to the recapture of guerrilla territory but at an enormous cost in civilian casualties: Guatemala's Commission for Historical Clarification reported 344 massacres here. But the stolen children, displaced and exiled families, and cultural destruction wreaked by the U.S.-supported regime of terror cannot be quantified. Today, however, not a solider is in sight.
We have traveled three hours from Guatemala City on a winding road, past green terraces that seem to fade into the mist against the azure sky. Mayan women, men, and children are walking along the highway, some with baskets and bundles of firewood balanced on their heads. The women wear embroidered blouses-a mingling of intense blues, greens, oranges, and reds-reviving a traditional art dormant during long years of war when Mayans donned polyester to keep the military from identifying residents of villages accused of guerrilla sympathies.
We pass the cross on the road where the newspaper publisher and politician Jorge Carpio was murdered in 1993, most likely for opposing an amnesty for the military. The murder-still unpunished-was said to have been orchestrated from San Pedro Jocopilas. We chose to visit the village for that reason, and also because there, in 1998, Rigoberta Mench, the activist and Nobel Prize winner, had chosen to marry and, at the same time, bury her baby, Tz'unun-a name that means hummingbird in Quiche. Her child does not lie alone.
Behind the central church, a cross and some wilting flowers have been placed on a mound of dirt. The grave is in one of five clandestine cemeteries in the region that await permission from government authorities for exhumation. Twenty-two victims, including the church sacristan, are buried here. They were rounded up by the army, shut inside the chapel, and massacred. That happened roughly two decades ago. Yet, only now have the families of the victims, who lived for all these years alongside those who committed the massacre, begun to speak out about the bodies hastily thrown into an anonymous grave in the back of the house of worship.
As with so much in Guatemala, what is lacking is a sense of completion, or of healing. Five years after a peace accord was signed, the wounds of war still fester and hopes for reconciliation are mocked by a return to influence of leaders responsible for horrors past. How this came about, and what it signifies, will be the focus for what follows.
Docket
"The United States has a long history of commitment to the principle of accountability, from our involvement in the Nuremberg tribunals that brought Nazi war criminals to justice to our leadership in the effort to establish the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Our action today sustains that tradition of moral leadership." So declared President Clinton in signing the Rome Treaty on the permanent International Criminal Court (ICC). Concluded in July 1998, the treaty provided that until December 31, 2000, it was open to signature. After that date, states could become party to the treaty only by the formal step of ratification. Thus the president's action on the last day of 2000. It is now apparent that the court will soon come into existence, probably some time in 2002. Sixty ratifications are required for the treaty to become effective. As of January 2001, 27 states had ratified the treaty and 139 had signed it.
In signing, the president made clear, the United States was not abandoning its concerns over "significant flaws" in the treaty, flaws that led the United States to vote against it initially and that prevented him from recommending that his successor submit the treaty to the Senate for advice and consent. But signature was nonetheless the "right action" at this point, the president argued. "I believe that a properly constituted and structured International Criminal Court would make a profound contribution in deterring egregious human rights abuses worldwide, and that signature increases the chances for productive discussions with other governments to advance these goals in the months and years ahead."
Books
The European Unity movement has always been tinged with an almost religious fervor. Eurocrats Jean Monnet, Walter Hallstein, and certainly Jacques Delors, wrote and spoke about the quest for greater economic and political integration as if it were a profound moral duty rather than a matter for astute bargaining between states. Romano Prodi's Europe as I See It carries on this proselytizing tradition. Prodi's "vision for Europe" is one that envisages almost total integration of the European Union's nation-states, but unlike Delors, he does not enjoy the luxury of having the major European governments behind him. Germany, France, Britain, and Spain are divided over the future they want for Europe; even reliably Europhile Italy may display unwonted skepticism under the economically expansionary leadership of the newly elected Silvio Berlusconi. Unsurprisingly, Prodi, whose excellent performance as prime minister of Italy from 1996 to 1998 boosted expectations that he would perform well in Brussels too, has made an uncertain start to his presidency of the European Commission. He has been the victim of a whispering campaign in both the French and German press, and it is widely rumored that he will not be renominated for a second term in 2003.
The central problem for federalists like Prodi is that the Maastricht Treaty (1992) largely completed the economic unification of Europe. The European Union (EU) now boasts a single market that is served by a single currency, clear judicial procedures, and broadly harmonized standards of social provision. Any further steps toward integration, therefore, have to come in the thorny areas of defense, foreign policy, taxation, or institutional centralization. As the troubled Nice summit of the EU heads of state and government showed in December 2000, reaching agreement in these areas will not be straightforward.
The questions raised by greater political integration are fairly obvious. Does the European Union really need a defense policy distinct from NATO's? Does it need a common foreign policy on anything other than trade? Does it need to harmonize the tax regimes of the individual member states and thus hamper them from developing competing economic models? Should its central institutions take on the aspect of a federal government rather than remain, in effect, an arrangement that facilitates the joint decision making of governments? One will only answer "yes" to these questions if one believes that Europe is an entity greater than the sum of its individual parts that ought to be playing a greater role in world affairs by virtue of its geopolitical position, economic strength, and superiority of its civilization.
Prodi does believe this. In a modern, centrist, unbellicose way, he is a European nationalist who believes that Europe is being diminished by its present failure to emulate the achievements of the United States as a global power, economic powerhouse, and cultural influence.
To take the last of these first, Europe, he says, despite being able to draw upon the "greatest wealth of culture and knowledge amassed by humanity," has slipped behind the United States in the sphere of education. "One of the clearest and most alarming developments of the last generation is that training for the world's elite has increasingly shifted from European universities to the American ones." The would-be leaders of South America, Asia, and Africa are being educated at Princeton and Chicago, not at Oxford or the Sorbonne. Europe, in short, is becoming a backwater and is losing its cultural influence.
Prodi makes the revealing remark that "there is the risk that European culture and values will go the way of the financial markets." By this he means that just as American merchant banks and finance houses have been the main actors in unifying the single market, so American culture might prove to be the "only force capable of helping Europe to find its own soul." Prodi is quick to add that there is nothing "improper" in this development, since "the future equilibrium of the world" depends upon America and Europe sharing common values, but it is clear that he rather regrets it.
Coda