Military Intervention

For the past decades major conflicts have increasingly become internal in some ways, and were stopped by invasions of foreign forces, such as, Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, which declared war on its own people and committed extraordinary attack on the urban culture of its country, killing anybody who lived in a city, anybody who had education or profession. And then the Vietnamese stopped it – not entirely for humanitarian reasons – they had strategic goals, but they stopped it.

There was similar case in East Pakistan (Bangladesh) where India had to intervene, and in Uganda where Tanzania had to intervene. In all those cases there were murderous regimes and external interventions. However there must be workable thinking on political reconstruction of the after math of intervention, which is best administered or regulated by the UN or similar international bodies. UN or communities of democracies should elaborate some universal principles of intervention that is backed by some kind of international military forces. There is of course UN Charter which explains the circumstances under which it is right or not right to use force across the boundary. But the problem is with the workability of the UN as an enforcer of these rules. For example, the UN would not have authorized anybody to go into Cambodia, it would not have authorized India to invade East Pakistan and create Bangladesh; and it would not have authorized the Tanzanian invasion of Uganda. More examples are Srebrenica in Bosnia, or Rwanda or Darfur in Sudan. Therefore no political leader in his right mind would limit the fate of his people into the framework of the UN. And all of these are not because the principles are not there. It is because there is no readiness; there is no real commitment to live by these principles, to enforce them.

It is important to think about alternatives and how to create a more effective global body. Ideally there should be a UN police force, which is not composed of military forces of different countries but individuals recruited by the UN for the purpose of enforcing the law and avoiding the state to commit genocide or crime against its own nation. To reform the UN it can be possible to move it closer to a global state and a global government. However it is difficult to come to any consensus, in today’s world make up, any willingness in the contemporary society of states to allow that to happen. A Security Council police force might work in some situations and it is obviously not going to work in lot of other situations. It is not going to work where there is a great power determined to have its way, like the Chinese in Tibet. Nobody is going to stop it.