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The Genocide Doctrine

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President Clinton was morally disgraced at home only to become a moral crusader abroad four months after being impeached. His newly discovered moralism, however, began to emerge two months after the Drudge Report broke the Lewinsky liaison.

Who expected such a turnaround from Bill Clinton? Even more surprising, who thought that it would be rooted in steps taken by Ronald Reagan and George Bush? Did anybody think that such a domestic-oriented president would usher in the most ambitious U.S. foreign-policy doctrine since Harry Truman? What was predictable, however, was that any Clinton doctrine would be as morally ambiguous as its author.

The ensuing tension of the Lewinsky crisis did not stop Clinton from making an unprecedented trip to Africa. In March 1998 in Kigali, Clinton became America’s first leader to apologize to foreigners, in this case Rwandans. In doing so, he was admonishing his own administration’s failure back in 1994 to call Rwanda’s then-ongoing ethnic slaughter of up to 1 million people –or well over half Rwanda’s minority Tutsis– genocide.

Last week President Clinton finally expressed his contrition about Rwanda at home. In a May 13 speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, he said about the situation in Kosovo: “I think the only thing we have seen that really rivals that, rooted in ethnic or religious destruction, in this decade is what happened in Rwanda. And I regret very much that the world community was not organized and able to act quickly there as well.”

Saying I’m Sorry

The United States has been legally obligated to stop crimes of genocide since President Ronald Reagan’s last year in office. Though few people have ever heard of it and there is no enforcement mechanism, the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide obligates all its signatories to “undertake [measures] to prevent and to punish” genocide whenever it occurs. The United States ratified it in 1988.

Although it took America 40 years to agree to it, the genocide convention preceded by one year the four Geneva conventions that the international community developed in response to the many war crimes including the Holocaust of six million Jews by Germany during World War II.

In June 1998, Clinton articulated another piece of his doctrine at home. In response to a reporter’s question about Kosovo during a general press conference, he said: “I am determined to do all that I can to stop a repeat of the human carnage in Bosnia and the ethnic cleansing” that occurred there before.

On Feb. 26, this year, in a speech hosted by San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, Clinton articulated a big nugget of his doctrine: “It’s easy, for example, to say that we really have no interests in who lives in this or that valley in Bosnia, or who owns a strip of brush land in the Horn of Africa, or some piece of parched earth by the Jordan River. But the true measure of our interests lies not in how small or distant these places are, or in whether we have trouble pronouncing their names. The question we must ask is, what are the consequences to our security of letting conflicts fester and spread. We cannot, indeed, we should not, do everything or be everywhere. But where our values and our interests are at stake, and where we can make a difference, we must be prepared to do so.”

Two weeks later, Clinton took a rare step that was consistent with the same general theme. He expressed regret to Guatemalans in Guatemala City for the contribution that the CIA and other U.S. agencies had made to their military’s war crimes during and even after the Cold War.

Clinton made his third act of foreign contrition the evening he informed the nation that he was leading NATO into attacking Yugoslavia: “The world did not act early enough to stop” abuses in Bosnia back in 1995, he said, even though “[t]his was genocide in the heart of Europe.” By admonishing the world for its inaction then, Clinton was pointing his finger again at himself — and again at the United States.

The road less taken

The United States has long avoided intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign nations, especially when they involve messy secessionist issues, irrespective of any human-rights concerns. But Clinton has developed a bold new doctrine that urges intervention to stop crimes of genocide when we can or “where our values and our interests are at stake.” The doctrine has so far been accompanied by no further guidelines to assess future situations.

The Clinton doctrine builds upon previous foreign-policy measures. Besides following a course that occurred under Reagan, the Clinton doctrine follows the lead of President George Bush.

Bush took two initiatives during his last year in office that pushed the United States in its current direction. He established the precedent of U.S.-led humanitarian intervention by deploying U.S. troops in 1992 to Somalia to help feed its starving people. Later that year, he warned Yugoslavia’s Serbian leader, President Slobodan Milosevic, that the United States would bomb Yugoslavia if Milosevic went ahead with his plans then to attack Kosovo.

After Clinton assumed office in 1993, the Somalia intervention failed, and U.S. troops were withdrawn after the killings of 19 U.S. servicemen by well-armed Somali clans. Nonetheless, the bipartisan effort undertaken there marks the beginning of a rising trend. The following year the Clinton administration, after several false starts, sent U.S. troops to Haiti to force the reinstatement of its deposed, but elected president, Jean Bertrand Aristide. The Clinton administration later sent U.S. troops to Bosnia in a peacekeeping capacity along with European allies to enforce compliance of the Dayton accords.

Realists have opposed most of America’s interventions in the 1990s on the grounds that the United States has had no national interests at stake. In fact, not even the radical critic Noam Chomsky — no foreign-policy realist, he — writing in Harper’s sees a hidden economic agenda in NATO’s current intervention over Kosovo.

In search of consistency

A moralist creed, the Clinton doctrine is unprecedented in its full-body embrace of human rights. Either it marks a clear break, or it contradicts certain U.S. practices of the Cold War, while it remains in contradiction with several ongoing U.S. practices. In 1947, the Truman doctrine made the case for the United States to embark on a prolonged strategy of containment of the Soviet Union.

In Vietnam, Chile, Guatemala and elsewhere, the United States backed Cold War practices that involved serious human-rights abuses. Today, NATO and the United States now all accept the premise that national sovereignty is no protection against perpetrators of egregious human-rights crimes, though the United States still is only doing so selectively. Even as it crusades for human rights in the Balkans, the Clinton administration is continuing to provide military and intelligence assistance to countries including Turkey and Colombia, irrespective of their ongoing gross human-rights abuses in their prolonged campaigns against ethnic Kurds and Marxist guerrillas, respectively.

But who expected Bill Clinton to be consistent? And does anybody now expect him to keep his word? One danger of the Clinton doctrine is that it will discredit the notion of humanitarian intervention as well as the credibility of both NATO and the United States. Another is that it will come to place more burdens on America than Americans are prepared to take. However noble his doctrine’s objectives, Clinton still lacks the moral authority he needs to accomplish them.

Frank Smyth, a freelance journalist, is a contributor to the forthcoming book, Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know, edited by Roy Gutman and David Rieff.

Limp Willy?

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As the Clinton administration escalates NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia to a level not seen in the Balkans since World War II, the worst humanitarian disaster in Europe since that war is likewise emerging, as Yugoslavia’s Serbian troops attack ethnic Albanians in the southern province of Kosovo.

Clinton himself has referred to “genocide” in defending his decision to bomb Yugoslavia. “The world did not act early enough to stop” abuses in Bosnia back in 1995, even though “this was genocide in the heart of Europe,” Clinton said last week. This week State Department spokesman James Rubin went even further. “There are indications that genocide is unfolding in Kosovo,” Rubin said Monday. “We can clearly say that crimes against humanity are being committed.”

But even as the State Department calls the Kosovo situation “genocide,” the administration and its NATO allies are resisting what seems to be the only option to stop the slaughter: The use of ground troops to protect the remaining Kosovar Albanians.

Human rights advocates are frantic over the escalation of the carnage in Kosovo, but they are divided over whether to openly call for ground troops. Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbian forces “have decapitated the community leaders” and “destroyed civil society” in Kosovo, says an anguished Holly Burkhalter of Physicians for Human Rights in Washington. Burkhalter and others observe that scenes from Kosovo are disturbingly reminiscent of the 1995 massacres at Srebrenica, when at least 8,000 men and boys were marched out by Serbian forces in long lines. Only to be killed and dumped into mass graves. The initial refugees fleeing Kosovo were “mostly elderly [people along with] women and children,” says Fred Abrahams of Human Rights Watch. “That makes us wonder what happened to the men.” Lines of men and boys, he adds, have been seen marching out of Kosovo in some places.

A self-described “humanitarian interventionist,” Burkhalter insists Clinton “can’t wait” to act to save Kosovo’s people. She says the Clinton administration is obligated to resolve the Kosovo crisis by sending ground troops, pointing out that the United States signed (in 1988) the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. “You don’t have to kill everybody for it to be a genocide,” says Burkhalter. The language of the convention she mentions includes “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” — including “killing members of the group” and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Physicians for Human Rights “is calling this one genocide,” Burkhalter adds.

“A year ago, I was in favor of early intervention with a lot of force to stop abuses” in Kosovo, including “ground forces,” she says. But she points out that she speaks only for herself; neither Physicians for Human Rights nor Human Rights Watch has officially endorsed sending ground troops. “I’m still in favor of [ground troops],” she says. Besides deploying ground forces, Burkhalter thinks the United States and other NATO member states should indict Yugoslavia’s Milosevic himself as a war criminal.

But Fareed Zakaria, author of “From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America’s World Role” and managing editor of Foreign Affairs, favors humanitarian intervention only in far more limited cases. “I don’t rule out all humanitarian assistance or intervention,” says Zakaria. But he sees the Kosovo crisis as a messy secessionist issue, as the province’s relatively new and weak guerrilla group, the Kosovo Liberation Army, along with many of the province’s civilians, is seeking Kosovo’s independence from Serbia.

Zakaria is in favor of the Clinton administration cutting its losses now and pulling out of Kosovo. Most observers believe that further intervention to defend Kosovo could make it a NATO protectorate for years to come. “It is a thorny political problem to get involved in backing a secessionist province [of any country],” Zakaria says. “Is this political objective in our strategic interest?” President Clinton “says it is strategic [for us to intervene] because it is in the heart of Europe,” but “to say the fate of Kosovo is vital to our national interest seems to be a stretch,” he continues.

Many human rights advocates maintain that the time is long overdue for the United States to adopt clear guidelines for humanitarian intervention. So far, President Clinton has actually remained fairly consistent, in that he has consistently drifted into one foreign policy crisis after another, rather than steering a clear course. The Clinton administration never took the time to present a strategic argument to justify the current need for humanitarian intervention, or outline how this intervention would achieve its goals. And those looking for a “Clinton Doctrine” will be disappointed. The administration has certainly never articulated a set of guidelines on when to intervene and when not to.

Genocide has not been a reason to intervene before. The Clinton administration has stood by while genocide occurred at least twice. In 1994, by Clinton’s own belated admission last year, the administration watched by satellite as at least 500,000 people were slaughtered in Rwanda’s genocide. And in 1995, as he acknowledged last week, the United States and other NATO member states did nothing to stop the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica.

One place the Clinton administration did intervene to stop a mass tragedy was in Somalia, and that 1993 experience is one reason the president resists deploying ground troops anywhere. The Somalia intervention began under President Bush, who in 1992 ordered U.S. military forces to the clan-split African country, trying to provide order for a besieged relief effort. Bush even visited U.S. forces there near Christmas as one of his last official acts. But Clinton paid the price months later when Somalia clansmen killed 29 U.S. Marines and Army Special Forces “Green Berets.” The tragic loss still limits the Clinton administration’s options.

Surprisingly, Zakaria, the de facto dean of the contemporary realist school of thought about the use of U.S. power, says that Somalia should stand as a model for future intervention. “It was in and out,” he says, with the modest objective of trying to help distribute food to starving people, rather than intervention in an internal crisis.

But even among Clinton’s fractious critics, who disagree with each other about what to do next in Kosovo, there’s consensus that the current policy is failing fast. Bombing alone is “too little, too late,” says Bianca Jagger — who has long advocated for intervention to stop Serbian aggression in the Balkans — by telephone from London. Zakaria says the current policy is “futile.” And Burkhalter worries that ground troops might be too late, as Milosevic “may have already accomplished his goal” of driving out most of the ethnic Albanian population of Kosovo.

Frank Smyth, a freelance journalist who has also served as an investigative consultant for Human Rights Watch as well as Amnesty International, is a contributor to Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know, edited by Roy Gutman and David Rieff.