You don't have to be cynical to do foreign policy, but it helps. A sigh of relief rose over the West's chancelleries on Monday as it became clear that the Sichuan earthquake was big — big enough to trump Myanmar’s cyclone.
To add to the relief, Beijing was behaving better than it has over past calamities. Since this might have been thanks to the West’s “positive engagement” with China’s dictators — even awarding them the Olympics — we could possibly take credit from the week’s tally of disaster. Sorry about that, Burma.
The cyclone of 11 days ago has already slid into liberal interventionism’s recycle bin, a purgatory called Mere Abuse. The regime’s refusal to aid some 1.5 million people reportedly facing starvation in the Irrawaddy delta has been subjected only to a “shock and awe” of adjectival assault.
ILLUSTRATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
In the UK, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called the refusal “utterly unacceptable” (which means accepted). British Aid Minister Douglas Alexander professed himself “horrified.” Foreign Secretary David Miliband used the words “malign neglect ... a humanitarian catastrophe of genuinely epic proportions.” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon registered “deep concern and immense frustration.” French President Nicolas Sarkozy found the inaction “utterly reprehensible” and German Chancellor Angela Merkel found it “inexplicable.” US President George W. Bush declared the regime “either isolated or callous.” As Rudyard Kipling would have said, if Kruger could be killed with words the Myanmar regime would be dead and buried.
What is it about Myanmar? The very same politicians who spent the past seven years declaring the virtue of intervening wherever the mood took them are now, if not tongue-tied, then hands-tied. Where are the buccaneers of Bosnia, the crusaders of Kosovo, the bravehearts who rescued Sierra Leone from its rebels, the Afghans from the Taliban and the Iraqis from former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein? Where are the gallants who sent convoys into Croatia in 1992 to relieve human suffering in conditions of chaos and hostility?
Overnight they have become signed-up members of the “you can’t solve all the world’s problems” party. Those who claim the lunatic Afghan adventure “a good war” and remark that “we cannot just leave these people to their fate,” find no problem in “leaving” hundreds of thousands to die, abandoned by their rulers in Myanmar. It is said to be a long way away, a matter of national sovereignty, very difficult, a harsh environment, not covered by international law.
The same legal experts who burned midnight oil trying to justify invading Iraq are now doing overtime to justify not sending relief into Myanmar. In 2005, the West’s leaders boasted the UN’s “responsibility to protect” principle, claiming that this “R2P” justified the UN Security Council in authorizing action against negligent states. It would provide cover for intervention if, for instance, a government in Kabul or Islamabad or Khartoum was experiencing domestic massacres but denying access to aid workers.
Legal opinion now asserts that this meant only cases of genocide, ethnic cleansing and “crimes against humanity.” It did not embrace deliberate negligence following a natural disaster, but rather acts of overt violence. The R2P doctrine is, I am told, “an immensely delicate instrument” that would be better tested somewhere other than Myanmar. Myanmar’s dead, in other words, are just the wrong sort of corpses.
All the UN’s fine print was not needed for a contested humanitarian intervention in Kosovo in 1998. It was not needed to topple the Taliban or Saddam when political retribution demanded it. Anyone who wants to help the Burmese within the law need only summon former British attorney-general Lord Goldsmith from retirement. He does exonerations to order.
Regular readers know I do not favor inappropriate interventions in the affairs of foreign states. They usually breach the UN charter on national sovereignty without meeting any of the tests legalizing such breaches, including the informal one that a breach must at least work.
Myanmar validates any breach. If ever so-called humanitarian intervention were justified, it is now. Just as many civilians may have already died as were lost in the entire 2004 tsunami, when 230,000 were unaccounted for. Over a million civilians are at risk as a direct result of decisions made by a dictatorial government that places pride and security ahead of the care of its people.
On the most optimistic estimates, only 30 percent have yet received any help at all.
As veteran French aid worker Pierre Fouillant of Comite de Secours Internationaux said on Tuesday, “It’s like they are taking a gun and shooting their own people.”
Yet there are ships, planes, helicopters, supplies and doctors aplenty waiting offshore. They do not want to topple any regime. The US commander aboard the one relief plane allowed into Yangon at the weekend offered three ships and two dozen helicopters that could land supplies and leave Myanmar’s territory for Thailand each day by nightfall. Myanmar soldiers could be on the planes. He was sent packing.
I am not in Myanmar and I am not an aid worker. For that reason I am ready to be convinced that there are logistical reasons why dump-and-run operations from ships offshore are impractical, even if Yangon airport remains closed. I am less persuaded by the Pentagon’s reluctance to extend possibly hostile activities this far into Southeast Asia, or by some aid agencies that value their relations with odious regimes too much to welcome unauthorized drops.
After days of hand-sitting and abuse-hurling, the thesis that “diplomatic pressure” is going to burst the dam of Myanmar’s hostility seems naive. I have read not one observer who believes this regime will admit aid workers, while many accept that it would be unlikely to contest a dump-and-run airlift under appropriate air cover. If the West refuses even to plan such an operation, it would be more honest to admit to doing nothing and stop counterproductive abuse of the regime.
What is sickening is the attempt to squeeze a decision not to help these desperate people into the same “liberal interventionist” ideology as validates billions of dollars on invading, occupying, destabilizing, bombing and failing to pacify other peoples whose governments also did not invite intervention.
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