Humanitarian Intervention

Humanitarian Intervention

The term "humanitarian intervention" is a common buzzword in international law, to the point of being loosely used even by scholars and academics. It is thus essential to define the concept in the most concrete sense, before embarking on an in-depth study of it.

The United Nations, one of the primary agents of humanitarian intervention itself, defines the term as a "coercive action by an outside government or an authorized agent directed toward or within another State, for the purpose of alleviating or avoiding a mass humanitarian crisis." Events threatening a population's fundamental security on a wide scale, such as natural disasters, armed conflicts, or the systematic annihilation of people (genocide and ethnic cleansing), constitute humanitarian crises.

Humanitarian intervention can take on many forms, and is not solely confined to military force. A host of punitive options have been employed in the past, such as "economics and arms embargoes, international sanctions, and diplomatic pressure," (Stuart, 2001).

The different forms and agents of humanitarian intervention have given rise to different outcomes. This paper looks into two contrasting cases of intervention in history, one a success (Kosovo), and the other a failure (Sudan).

II. Introduction

Sudan

The largest country in Africa, Sudan's size is proportional to (if not significantly less than) the suffering its people had to endure for more than a century. Its history is rife with oppressive military dictatorships, civil war, ethnic cleansing, refugee spillovers, with only brief episodes of peace and freedom.

Despite several humanitarian interventions, Sudan is considered a failed case because such international operations can never fully sustain nor enforce themselves. A clear manifestation of this is the International Criminal Court's inability to arrest Omar-al-Bashir despite international consensus that he is guilty.

Kosovo

Kosovo is a self-declared independent state recognized by sixty-six UN countries. However, the country it seceded from, Serbia, has yet to recognize it considering it is a UN controlled territory within its borders. On October 8, 2008, Serbia (through the UN General Assembly) formally contested Kosovo's declaration of independence to the International Court of Justice. As of this writing, the case is still pending.

Kosovo is often considered to be an example of a successful humanitarian intervention as NATO's intervention in 1999 paved the way to Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic's downfall and ended the persecution of Albanian Serbs. Still, despite NATO's apparent success, its intervention has often been criticized for being careless,