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News

Israel's political make-over
Experts discuss Ehud Barak's sweeping victory.
By Daryl Lindsey
[05/19/99]

Fireworks over Rabin Square
At the site of a tragic assassination, Barak supporters celebrate a return to the peace process
By Flore de Preneuf
[05/18/99]

From Bibi to Barak
One town's shift shows why Israelis voted for change.
By Flore de Preneuf
[05/18/99]

"Hardball" strikes out
Chris Matthews mistakenly identifies a Clinton friend on the air as the "jogger" who frightened Kathleen Willey.

[05/18/99]

Can we talk?
Steve Forbes takes a sharp right turn just as the Republican Party is looking for a centrist path.
By Joshua Micah Marshall
[05/17/99]

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With various human rights groups both defending and opposing the bombings for humanitarian reasons, clearly the rhetoric of human rights is already being exploited to meet political ends. Wayward allied bombing attacks, which have hit Yugoslav civilians buildings and killed Kosovar Albanian refugees, have only intensified the debate and worsened the cleavage between human rights organizations around the world.

"If we are bombing Serbia in the name of the human rights of the Kosovars, what about the rights of the Serbians whose rights are ignored by our bombs?" said Margot Light, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics and Politics. "Indeed, what are Kosovar rights if there are hundreds of thousands more refugees now, as a direct and indirect result of the airstrikes?"

International relations and human rights scholars like Light are worried that claims for universal human rights will be much harder to prove after the war. They are responding not only to a potential backlash against the NATO bombing but to a prominent 1990s debate launched by Asian governments and Western cultural relativists, who argue that human rights as defined by the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights are culturally specific and based upon Western traditions of Enlightenment philosophy, Christianity and individualism.

Also high on human rights defenders' worry list is whether the NATO campaign can be deemed a legal war, as it is being waged without the authorization of the U.N. Security Council or any other international governing body. "Now NATO has become a competing force that may circumvent the United Nations -- which includes China and Russia, the 'less friendly members'--in wars and interventions," said Micheline Ishay, human rights director of the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver.

The question of legality is complicated, however, by whether the NATO intervention can be deemed a just war, since the laws of the United Nations abetted bureaucratic wrangling rather than a stop to the bloodshed. "[W]hen the drafters of the U.N. Charter set its limits on state power, they responded to the crises precipitating World War II," University of California Davis Law Professor Michael Glennon wrote in the recent issue of Foreign Affairs. "The recurrent problem today is intrastate violence, which is not addressed effectively in the Charter."

Bryan Hehir, a professor at both the Harvard Divinity School and its School of International Affairs, agrees that the events of the late 20th century call for a reevaluation of the laws of war. He believes that atrocities in the former Yugoslavia and the failure of the international community to prevent them have obligated the United States and its allies to take action for moral and ethical reasons. "My support of Kosovo as a just cause is part of a larger argument, which calls for recasting the moral-legal-political calculus of policy in the direction of justifying some interventions for humanitarian reasons," he argued.

Yet many human rights defenders are convinced that the United States and its allies are not capable of this kind of humanitarian arbitration. Jan Olberg, director of the Swedish Transnational Foundation for Peace, has said: "One is increasingly led to believe that the whole catastrophe was caused by leading decision makers ignoring early warnings from the region and top-level military expertise, by the U.S. president being 'distracted' and by bad judgment and a gross underestimation of the complexity of what is at stake. Or, you may say, by a dangerous combination of hubris and human folly, of too much military power combined with too little intellectual power."

There is also fear that NATO's campaign may set a precedent for a dangerous and propagandistic form of military humanism. Noam Chomsky has warned: "The right of humanitarian intervention is likely to be invoked in coming years, now that the Cold War pretexts have lost their efficacy. There is no serious doubt that the NATO bombings further undermine what remains of the fragile structure of international law."

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