What are we waiting for? Where now is liberal interventionism? More than
100,000 people are dead after a cyclone in the Irrawaddy delta and the
United Nations has declared that up to 2m people, deprived of aid for a
week, are at risk of death. Barely 10% are reported to have received any
help. The world stands ready to save them. The warehouses of Asia are
crammed with supplies. Ships and planes are on station. Nothing happens.
Anyone who has visited this exquisite part of the world will know how
avoidable is further catastrophe to the delta people. They are resourceful,
peaceable and hugely resilient. Like those of lowlying Bangladesh next door,
they are used to extreme weather. Their agriculture is fertile and they are
self-sufficient in most things. But no one can survive instant starvation
and disease.
They need not wait. There are three giant C130s loaded and ready in Thailand.
There are American and French ships in the area, fortuitously on a disaster
relief exercise, with shelters, clothing, latrines, medicines and water
decontamination equipment. Above all there are helicopters, vital in an area
where roads are impassable by flooding and fallen trees.
The aid agency World Vision has 600 staff in Burma and tons of supplies
waiting in Dubai. The world cannot prevent natural calamities, but since the
tsunami of 2004 it has learnt how to cope with their aftermath.
Nothing can be done because the Burmese military regime refuses to permit it.
Instead it is wasting time this weekend holding a nationwide referendum,
devoid of open debate, to legitimise its hold on power and exclude the
opposition, led by Aung San Suu Kyi.
The regime last week impounded the only two UN relief planes that managed to
land in Rangoon, forcing the UN to suspend further flights. The regime’s
leader, hiding in his jungle “capital”, refused even to take a call from the
secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon. Visas are denied to doctors and logistical
experts. What has been allowed in from China, Thailand and Indonesia is a
trickle and must be distributed by the Burmese army, which cannot cope.
Where 40 relief planes a day should be landing at Rangoon there is barely
one.
Hundreds of thousands of people are thus condemned to death by one thing
alone, the viciousness of a dictatorship more concerned with its pride and
xenophobia than with the wellbeing of its citizens. Like Soviet regimes of
old, the Burmese government would rather pretend that disasters have not
occurred than admit it cannot handle them. When the cyclone tore off the
roof of Rangoon’s Insein jail and part of it caught fire, the guards opened
fire and killed 36. An aid worker told the BBC: “They are murdering their
own people.”
I have opposed many of the macho military interventions conducted by the West
over the past decade. Their justifications have been obscure, their motives
mixed and their morality situational, especially those aimed at “regime
change”. Those in Afghanistan and Iraq had the additional defect of built-in
failure.
On the other hand the West did intervene to try to stop humanitarian
catastrophes in Bosnia from 1992, Somalia in 1993, Kosovo in 1998 and Sierra
Leone in 2000. The failure to intervene in Rwanda in 1994 and more recently
in Sudan’s Darfur province was attributed not to timidity but to the
logistical difficulty of deploying power in the African interior.
These interventions were not ideological, whether “liberal” or “neocon”. They
were to save lives from being lost by the thousand. They were covered by
international law (possibly not Kosovo) because the UN charter’s respect for
territorial integrity also stipulates it “shall not prejudice the
application of enforcement measures” to avert a humanitarian crisis.
This was reinforced when the security council in 2005 and 2006 imposed a
responsibility on the international community to protect people whose
governments failed to do so. It castigated in particular the “intentional
denial of humanitarian assistance”. Such an extension of the concept of
military intervention was advocated by Tony Blair in his Chicago speech of
1999, when it was dismissed by the Americans (pre9/11) as irresponsible.
Today it is widely regarded as legitimate, even by those opposed to the
belligerent militancy that ensued under Blair and George Bush.
It is hard to think of a more glaring application of the humanitarian
principle than today’s Burma. In none of the above interventions was
anything like the same number of lives at risk as the 2m now threatened in
the Irrawaddy delta. This is eight times the 230,000 reckoned to have died
in the 2004 tsunami.
In Burma, the airlifting of supplies from offshore vessels to stricken areas
would indeed be an offence against the sovereignty of Burma. But the
intervention would not constitute an attack on a government or occupy its
territory. Indeed it would be occasioned strictly because of the lack of
government in a particular territory. It would be to save the lives of
people abandoned to their deaths by their rulers.
Yet where today are the brave rattlers of sabres against the Iraqis, the
Afghans and the Iranians? The American ambassador to the UN, Zalmay
Khalilzad, says he is “outraged by the slowness of the response” of the
Burmese authorities. His outrage will bring scant comfort to those dying in
the delta.
On Friday the British and French foreign ministers, David Miliband and Bernard
Kouchner, announced that “we look to the regime” to lift restrictions on aid
distribution. Nobody “looked to” Slobodan Milosevic to stop slaughtering
Kosovans or the rebels to stop the killing in Sierra Leone. We intervened.
The Foreign Office remarked last week that there was “no excuse” for delay and
then thought of one. The British chairman of the UN security council, John
Sawers, claimed that the 2006 resolution referred only to “acts of genocide,
war crimes and crimes against humanity . . . rather than government
responses to natural disasters”. But in 2001 there was no evidence that the
Taliban were committing such acts, yet Britain intervened. And what is
happening in Burma if not an “intentional denial of humanitarian
assistance”?
The option of sending in relief supplies by air may well face logistical
objections. Ships and heavy-lift equipment must be in position, with air
cover to ensure the safety of the operation. There must be some sense of
order on the ground to ensure that drops are other than random, though at
some point a starving and dying population would welcome any help rather
than none.
It may be the case that diplomatic pressure on the regime might soon force it
to reverse its negligence - though at present this is unlikely. Indeed the
West’s policy of merely hurling abuse at it looks counterproductive. A
regime that turns away the Red Cross or even listen to a friendly
superpower, China, seems immune to pressure.
There is no justification under the UN charter for intervening to topple the
Burmese military regime. That task would rightly be opposed by other powers
in the region and must one day be performed by the Burmese themselves. But
aid drops over the Irrawaddy delta are nothing to do with that case. The
outside world has waited a week, and protested to no effect.
Either way some enforced intervention must surely be planned. The British aid
minister, Douglas Alexander, said last week it would be “incendiary”. He did
not explain why a “dump-and-run” of emergency supplies in the delta would be
incendiary - compared, for instance, with his antics in Afghanistan.
He cannot hold to the thesis that Burma is not ripe for “liberal intervention”
because the loss of life is the result of a natural disaster rather than
political or military oppression. What is this fine distinction between a
massacre and what the military are now inflicting on the Burmese people? A
corpse is a corpse.
This catastrophe is not past but continuing. A western world adept at
intervening elsewhere on a humanitarian pretext is suddenly inert. Why? I
suspect the reason is that it has too much intervention on its plate
already. The Burmese must die because we are too busy pretending to save
Afghans and Iraqis. To such cynicism has liberal intervention sunk.
simon.jenkins@sunday-times.co.uk
