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Security Council Better Luck Next Century
By Polly Toynbee
London,Guardian
December 10, 1999Genocide and ethnic cleansing fire the 30-odd civil wars raging. It's not a good day to celebrate human rights.
Today - the last Human Rights Day of the century - falls at a grim moment. Russia's ultimatum hangs over some 50,000 people - half-starved, old and wounded, women and children - in Grozny. Either they creep out of their cellars to be bombed or else they will be pounded to rubble where they are. Most of the rest of the Chechen population has now fled to freezing camps. We look on and do next to nothing because there is nothing we can do that won't make things worse. It's not a good day to consider human rights in the next century.
Around the world at least 30 conflicts rage, most of them exceptionally barbaric civil wars. The ending of the cold war has unleashed an atrocity that used to be kept in some control among the superpowers' client states. Now rampant genocide and ethnic cleansing fire most conflicts. Wars have become qualitatively worse. In the first world war 90% of casualties were soldiers but now 90% of casualties are civilians. Geneva conventions are forgotten.
In Sierra Leone there are villages full of children with no arms after rebels swooped through and mutilated every child they found. In these wars the number of child soldiers has proliferated in the last decade to an estimated 300,000, some as young as eight and nine. Kidnapped or sold, they make the most biddable recruits, quick to learn, willing to do untold horrors any adult would refuse. They are traumatised ever after. The kalashnikov, light and easy to use, could have been designed for them. The post-cold war spread of this gun to every village from Pakistan down through Africa came with the unpaid Russian army selling their weapons: they cost the price of a chicken. In just the last 10 years of this killer century 2m children have died in wars, with 6m seriously injured, 20m displaced as refugees and 800 a month killed by land mines.
In our rich, safe, small zone of the world these conflicts are too often dismissed with casual, blasé racism. The implied unspoken view is that all this is crude tribalism amongst bone-in-the-nose savages, wild people beyond the reach of civilisation or sanity. The dark continent does dark deeds and it will take aeons for them to catch up with the rest of us. Didn't we try in Somalia? It only showed that Angola, Sierra Leone, Sudan and all these far away places are beyond our civilising reach.
This ethno-centric view is conveniently amnesiac. The Germans and the Serbs were "civilised" white folk. Napalm fell on Vietnamese babies from US planes and the Russian troops about to slaughter Grozny civilians are white. The imperative to intervene in Kosovo but not Angola springs less from any local threat of the Balkan conflict, but from a gut racist sense of shock: white people-like-us can't be allowed to do this, but it's to be expected in Rwanda. The lesson of Hitler and Milosevic is that we all live a hair-trigger away from barbarism. The endemic racism which defines national identity can erupt into ethnic cleansing anywhere, anytime unless constantly, vigilantly kept down.
What hope for a better century? Some faint glimmers will need a lot of blowing to light a fire. The most optimistic spark is the onward march of democracy. For the first time over half the world's people live under democracy: mothers in democracies don't vote to send their sons to start aggressive wars. A fainter spark gleams in a new, inchoate belief in universal human responsibility. With anxiety about globalisation comes the tentative birth of a global conscience. Jubilee 2000's idealistic campaign against third world debt has had a surprising resonance in the corridors of power. The incoherent jumble of noise on the streets of Seattle may yet develop into a movement with power and meaning. Fair trade, environmental sustainability and human rights may be demands that grow into a crescendo. The powerful rich may find they cannot have it all their own way. Trade-offs will be required over energy and global warming: human rights may enter that global dealing room too.
A strong symbol of this new mood is the push to create an International Criminal Court. Sixty countries need to ratify it to create the global power to arrest those who commit genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, with no hiding place. The arrest of General Pinochet has been a turning point in making the world believe that every individual can be made accountable for human rights abuses, wherever, whenever. So far only six countries have signed, but 91 say they will sometime: Labour says we will sign, but with no commitment to do it now. If ethical foreign policy means anything, we should be out in the lead, while the US, China, Russia all refuse.
International law is on the move: it rightly creeps with the changing times. The shameful spectacle of UN peacekeepers helplessly observing massacres in Bosnia for lack of power to act must never happen again. A new duty to save racial minorities from genocide is one of the great human rights dividends of the ending of the cold war. It's a principle first used in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1991. Despite the best intentions, it failed miserably in Somalia and its legality in Kosovo is still disputed by lawyers: is intervention only permitted with the UN's permission or wherever international law is broken by genocide?
The law will follow political will: the question is whether the CNN effect - suffering transmitted instantly to the homes of the comfortable - has created a new and healthy impetus for the rich world to "do something" wherever it can. Blair's proposed EU force is intended to stand by ready to provide peacekeepers, who will need clearer international law to let them intervene. The next question is how much sacrifice will the rich world make to rescue distant people from atrocity? Will it just be the occasional brief sentimental spasm or will they risk troops, pay higher taxes and give generous aid and trade to create lasting peace in places most people can't point to on a map? Or was Seattle just an emotional impulse, a fun outing in turtle costumes, but soon home again in the gas guzzler to unthinking luxury, voting for low-tax, insular politicians?
Meanwhile, in Grozny civilians may still be blown to bits, the air sucked out of their lungs with vacuum bombs. Where, say NATO's critics, are the fine words of Kosovo now? Those who supported the Kosovo action - though wanted it done faster, bolder, with ground troops - still think it did more good than harm. But it's hard to find anyone who thinks more could be done in Chechnya that wouldn't harm vast numbers of people - and still not save those in the Grozny cellars. That's not cynical realpolitik or Kissingerism, it's just a plain and vile fact. The hope remains that NATO's high rhetoric over Kosovo did mark a growing sense that the world must do all it can, when it can, to stop the next century repeating this century's human rights horror. True, the spark of hope is dim indeed.
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