The Battle Between Humanitarian Interventions and Sovereignty
“There is no future for a regime that has systematically threatened and attacked its own population. The Libyan people deserve to decide their own future within a sovereign, independent and united Libya.” (NATO, 2011)
These were NATO’s closing remarks on Operation Unified Protector in 2011, a multi-national intervention established in response to the Libyan Civil War to oust leader Muammar Gaddafi and protect the Libyan people from state-imposed human rights violations.
But the operation in Libya is nothing new; it is among the numerous humanitarian interventions undertaken in modern history. In today’s post-cold war, globalised world landscape, they have re-emerged, taking on a new form through the emergence of supranational institutions.
In the last two centuries, the so-called era of ‘Global Governance’ (Murphy, 2016) has arisen alongside the emergence of supranational international organisations (Oji & Ozioko, 2011). While its roots can be traced back as early as the Congress of Vienna in 1815, where European powers discussed how to deal with conflict within the continent (Murphy, 2016), the current epoch of globalisation began in the latter half of the 20th century. Established in 1945, the United Nations’ primary goal was to ensure the horrors of World War II were never repeated. Since its inception, it has helped form international law, facilitate negotiation between nations and launch peacekeeping missions to maintain international security.
While maintaining global peace is a seemingly faultless ideology, it comes at a price; the infringe- ment of state sovereignty. In adherence to the international standards established by supranational organisations (Oji & Ozioko, 2011), nations today have less control over their systems of governance, laws, political ideology and citizens (Bhatnagar, 2016). Human rights are no longer the exclusive concern of a particular state, but that of the world community as a whole (Hehir, 2005).
These two important components of the post-WWII international system (Daswani, 2021), global human rights and sovereignty, are incompatible with one another. Thus, we arrive at some pressing question: Which should take priority? When is intervention justified? Should we re-examine the ‘benevolent’ intentions of humanitarian missions of today’s world?
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The Battle Between Humanitarian Interventions and Sovereignty
Source : NATO bomb in 2011 (BBC, 2011)
The intervention was the first to be launched under the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine. The international committee’s failure to intervene in the Rwandan Genocide in 1994 (Aja Agwu, 2014), arguably the worst atrocity in post-war history, changed the tone of discussion on interven- tion. “Never again, not on our watch,” – Kofi Annan, former secretary general of the UN famously declared (Aja Agwu, 2014). In response, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) created the R2P which was subsequently endorsed by member-states at the 2005 high-level UN World Summit meeting (Aja Agwu, 2014). At its core, the R2P “embodies a political commitment to end the worst forms of violence and persecution.” (United Nations, 2019) attempting to reconcile the seemingly incompatible ideals of sovereignty and human rights, by insisting that the modern definition of sovereignty should also encompass the responsibility to protect its own people (Hornung, 2015).
Thus, The NATO-led operation picked off where the UN had left, attacking sites associated with Gaddafi and his cronies and using air strikes. The main contributors of personnel and equipment were the US, UK and France. In the ensuing months, member-states of the coalition took on a “Warlike approach” (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2019) sending their own military advisors, financial aid and arms and ammunition to rebel fighters and bombing pro-regime forces (Miller, 2022), which often resulted in mass civilian casualties.
After the rebels established effective control over the capital in September, Gaddafi– who had been in hiding– was located and killed a month later; signalling the end of the civil war (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2019). According to estimates, the operation resulted in 30,000 killed and 50,000 wounded and cost NATO USD 52.3 million (Libya, n.d.).
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Chaiti Maheshwari
Justified?
“A historic victory for the people of Libya” - Ivo H. Daalder US permanent representative to NATO and Adm. James G. Stavridis, Supreme Allied Commander, Europe
(Daalder and Stavridis, 2011)
For many, while sovereignty is undoubtedly an important principle, it has “never been as sacrosanct as its defenders claim” (Matthewman, 2012, 3). In cases which require it, human rights take unques- tionable precedence because states that are that is unaligned with humanitarian values should be nullified and lose their right to sovereignty (Aja Agwu, 2014). Humanitarian intervention protects the sovereignty of the people against the tyranny of the government in question (Keely, 1995).
In the case of Libya, there was a clear moral imperative to intervene, and Operation Unified Protector has been widely praised as ‘The right way to run an intervention” (Daalder and Stavridis, 2011) – one which successfully rescued the Libyan people and overthrew one of the longest-ruling dictatorships.
From the beginning of his rule, Gaddafi has persistently violated universal human rights. Rising to power through a military coup in September 1969, he promptly began his rule by abandoning Libya’s constitutional monarchy and embarked on a totalitarian style of governance. From then on, crackdowns on state opposition were commonplace, carried out by burning books deemed unsuitable to the regime (Kafala, 2011), criminalising the formation of political parties, arresting and publically hanging so-called ‘enemies of the revolution’, which included lawyers, academics, students, journalists and communists (Reuters Staff, 2011).
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The Battle Between Humanitarian Interventions and Sovereignty
“It’s going to be a massacre if the international community doesn’t step in and do something about it.” – “Samir,” 27, a medical student in Tripoli.
(Crumley, 2011)
During the February 2011 revolts, which began as peaceful demonstrations, security forces retaliated with repressive force against civilians. According to a report from Amnesty International, this included “rockets, mortars and artillery shells as well as cluster bombs into residential neighbourhoods, killing and injuring scores of residents... live ammunition or heavy weapons, including tank shells and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), at residents who were fleeing” (Green, 2019, 2). By February 21st, an estimated 233 Libyans had been killed (Terry, 2015, 164). Thus, the Gaddafi government’s human rights abuses met the criteria of the ICISS test which qualified for an intervention (Green, 2019)– breaching Libya’s national sovereignty was the only way to prevent the death of thousands of innocent civilians.
Responsibility to Protect?
While the breach of Libya’s sovereignty is moralised by the R2P commitment, the doctrine’s alleged motivations– a commitment to protect the human rights of citizens– have been challenged. Counterarguments claim that the extent of Gaddafi’s draconianism and the number of deaths at the hand of his regime has been exaggerated by Western powers (Brimbal, 2022). In a Pentagon press conference in June 2011, many of the press reports alleging the use of force against protestors were found to be highly exaggerated and supported by scanty evidence (Gates & Mullen, 2011)
Furthermore, NATO refused to engage in peace agreements with the Libyan government, which would have likely prevented the country from plunging into post-war instability as seen after the end of the intervention in October 2011. On March 10, 2011, the African Union, consisting of the 55 member states in the continent, drafted a ‘roadmap’ for Libya, which consisted of an immediate ceasefire facilitated through negotiations between the ‘Ad Hoc High-Level Committee on Libya’ and Gaddafi. (Cheikh, 2013) the AU was met with silence. As described by Jean Ping, former chairman of the AU, “Nobody talked to us, nobody consulted us” (Cheikh, 2013, 157). This brings into question whether other motivations may have driven Operation Unified Protector.
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Chaiti Maheshwari
Ulterior Motives
Source: Map showing oil reserves in Libya (Wikipedia Contributors, 2019)
Possessing the largest oil field in Africa, Libya is of key strategic interest to Western powers (Nwakanma, 2021). From the beginning of his rule, Gaddafi’s nationalist policies, Arab-socialist and anti-imperialist ideology and affiliation with the ‘Non-Aligned Movement’ threatened the West (Pothier, 2022). After a brief period of opening up markets, Gaddafi once announced plans to renationalise Libyan oil in 2009 and its existing deals with the UK and US (Pothier, 2022). In light of this, foreign-orchestrated regime change for self-interest– an unjustifiable infringement on Libyan sovereignty –was the primary intention behind the intervention. To the West, Gaddafi was a volatile leader unfavourable to their interests. Thus, the unstable domestic situation provided a useful oppor- tunity to remove him from power and regain access to Libyan oil.
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The Battle Between Humanitarian Interventions and Sovereignty
“It is the 19th century all over again” (Nwakanma, 2021).
Finally, Author Mahmood Mamdani criticises the R2P’s ideals of a “Bifurcated System of Sover- eignty”, where sovereignty is contingent on a nation’s adherence to “globalised standards of Western liberal governance” (Bhatnagar, 2016) perpetuating a form of neocolonialism. As a whole, many have contested the alleged ‘Universality’ of human rights. In the Bangkok Declaration of 1993, Asian states argued that the ideals endorsed by intergovernmental organisations are fundamentally Western and thus, fail to acknowledge differences in cultural and political systems, with which they may be incompatible. (Oji & Ozioko, 2011). This undermines the legitimacy of humanitarian intervention as a reimagined ‘White Man’s Burden’, (Bhatnagar, 2016) where Western powers have the duty to export their values to uplift ‘lesser’ parts of the world to the superior, European standard.
To intervene?
In the future, the world will likely see countless more ‘Libya’ situations– where both proponents and critics of humanitarian operations voice their arguments without coming to a consensus on the legit- imacy of intervention. Furthermore, as military operations become increasingly carried out through technological and cyber warfare, the ethical debate will inevitably become increasingly complex.
As of now, the paradox between humanitarian intervention and state sovereignty is yet to be resolved. On the one hand, humanitarian intervention may set a dangerous precedent for unjust violations of state sovereignty and the re-establishment of a Eurocentric world order in the future. Alternatively, as seen in the example of Rwanda, the violation of human rights by nation-states is a problem which should not be taken lightly. Equally important to consider is the nature of the UN Security Council, where the five permanent members (China, France, Russia, the USA, and the UK) have the power to veto resolutions, and thus, may place their political self-interests ahead of human rights.
Living in both a decolonised world where all nations have the right to self-determination and a globalised world where human rights are standardised and to be followed by all countries–we should question whether one of these concepts should be re-examined and whether they can ever be reconciled.
