Has international intervention trying to end violent ethno-national conflict had successful outcomes - Essay Example

He did by calling out to the man, “No one shall dare beat you again.” As if these remarks were not incendiary enough, he proceeded to say, “This is your land, your fields, your gardens; your memories are here”. A decade later, under Milosevic’s watch, in defense of fields, gardens and memories, Serbian forces unleashed ethnic cleansing in Kosovo -- resulting in the massacre of thousands of ethnic Albanians and the forcible displacement of around 800,000 more. The retaliation of the ethnic Albanians on the few Serbs that have been left behind still continue to this day, pointing to the cyclical nature of the violence.

The ethnic divides in the conflict-torn and poverty-ridden ex-Yugoslav region have cut deep and painful wounds, and generations of distrust and hatred fuelled in large part by nationalist myth-making, have created a situation where according to Anastasijevic (2004:105) “the prevalent mode of interaction has been traditionally one of dominance, rather than coexistence or assimilation.” Allegedly to prevent further use of force by Slobodan Milosevic, the US-led military intervention of NATO charged in, conducting air strike upon air strike, cloaked by Resolutions 1160 and 1199 of the United Nations Security Council.

The military intervention had been nothing if not controversial, with the main problematic stated most elegantly by Chomsky, who stated: There is at least a tension, if not an outright contradiction, between the rules of world order laid down in the United Nation Charter and the rights articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UD). The charter bans force violating state sovereignty; the UD guarantees the rights of individuals against oppressive states … . The issue of humanitarian intervention arises from this tension (Chomsky 1999: 73) This leaves us in a precarious position on course of action where a government persistently violates the human rights of its citizens as engaging in one set of commitment might involve violation of other international laws.

Humanitarian intervention as a process therefore, shall imply a third party militarily invading an independent state without consent of the ‘legitimate’ government to rescue people from grossly violations of their human rights by their government. As Archibugi (2004: 2-3) observed, these interventions could be machineries for the extension of liberal ideas of the West in countries of the South controlled by ‘undemocratic governments with weak military capacities and economies. Ethics and moral justification concepts in humanitarian intervention gained prominence after the cold war in international relations when these interventions went side by side with armed forces for the first time.

Viewed through ethical lens, the interventions are in a quagmire of conflict between the world’s responsibility to protect and promote fundamental human rights which are universal and the obligation to respect state sovereignty, the basis for international order (Hoffman in Chesterman et al. 2001:277). Humanitarian intervention parse has continued to be a disputed concept in the contemporary world of politics (see Chandler 2004: 60) largely informed by events following Operation Allied Force (OAF) in Kosovo by North Atlantic Treaty Organisation forces (NATO) in 1999 and the Operation Freedom (OF) of 2003 in Iraq (Bellamy 2006: 12) all led by the United States (US) and