Lessons from Rwanda
I was reading Moju this morning and it got me thinking about international collective action in the field of international security. Hotel Rwanda is a good film, it makes a good stab at portraying humanity at its worst. But more than the film production it’s the true story that is shockingly awesome. Moju suggests that it is Rwanda’s lack of international political leverage that saw the genocide (or should I say “Acts of genocide”) continue without external intervention. And Moju is right.
At this point it is quite natural to jump up and down and complain about American intervention in Iraq, (Operation Iraqi Liberation) and highlight the natural acronym. I did that in the comfort of my living room while watching the film. But, the issue is a very complex one. Think for a moment if Sri Lanka was The international superpower, with the grand musthache at the helm. Would we have sent soldiers to Rwanda? I think not. After the initial good will, there would have been plenty of domestic political backlash once the body count of “our boys” started to rise. The political gain is miniscule compared to the political loss. In politics ppl tend to remember the bad stuff and forget the good stuff, I mean ppl still talk about America’s cock up in Vietnam. Look at Iraq today, just over 3 years after the invasion and GWB continues to lick his political wounds. The reality of the world today (and well anyday really) is that you can not expect altruistic behaviour when the costs are high. If the Rwandan crisis could have been solved by humanitarian aid, everyone would have rushed in to give the bucks. But bucks are a lot less costly than lives, as soon as your soldiers’ lives are at stake there jolly well ought to be something tangible to show your voters.
So while it is easy and quite natural to blame the States, I don’t think any other superpower would have behaved differently. So what we need is a strong international solution. There are two ways of doing this. 1) As a club good, like NATO, or 2) as an international public good like the UN peace keepers. The obvious problem with the latter is free riders. It would be unfair to make economically weaker nations like Sri Lanka and Rwanda to supply vast resources for this international army. And yet it is in these economically smaller, less powerful nations that internal conflict is rife. So there is a problem of free riding. Altruism would be required, and this is not always forthcoming. This would severely hamper the implementation of a significant international security force. International collective action is difficult at the best of times. I mean, just look at the WTO, and that’s dealing with dollars and cents. An international security force would be dealing with lives, a far tougher proposition. Option 1 sounds more plausible, but think of this, a Sub-saharan Treaty Organization, strikes fear into one’s heart. But a fragmented system sees duplication of resources, smaller isolated countries left out and the same collective action problems though on a smaller scale.
Noting these difficulties, it is important to remember that international intervention into domestic issues is not always a good thing. I don’t know much about the IPKF action in Sri Lanka, but from what i’ve heard it wasn’t all rosy. Furthermore, what if the internal conflict is government sanctioned, and the government does not request external help. Does the international community watch while massacre takes place, or do they intervene nonetheless. If the option is the latter the implications are potentially undemocratic and there is an allowance for paternalism. It is in response to such concerns (among others) that the UN peace keepers are peace keepers and not peace makers. So there is a case for the argument that domestic problems require domestic solutions.
So where does this leave us. Despite the difficulties of international collective action, incidents like Rwanda ‘94 can’t be ignored with shrugged shoulders. A tentative answer would be to have an international body overseeing regional groupings. So for instance Asia could have her own version of NATO, and if there is some scene in Colombo requiring international intervention, the force would be made up by military support from India, Pakistan etc. but overseen by an international body to ensure there aren’t too many cockups. So if for instance the Sub-Saharan treaty organization is exceedingly weak, the international body can boost it with assistance. The international body I refer to would require less resources than one that is supposed to police the whole world, and therefore collective action problems would be less. Domestic voters would be less averse to mutual protection within a region than their soldiers fighting in some little village in the Ivory Coast. Using the regional input is also important since it is more likely that the government of India would be sensitive to the nature of the conflict and the culture of the people in Sri Lanka than the government of Canada would. The two tiers of power, viz. regional and international, makes the system less prone to blatant abuses of power as there are added checks and balances.
This solution is far from perfect, but it does make some headway in countering the difficulties of the more conventional methods of international collective action.
