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This book presents the case of humanitarian intervention within a discursive theory of international law. It identifies and examines the philosophical and legal concepts which inform the case of humanitarian intervention and scrutinises the pertinent practice. The book explores how legal rules which vie to control humanitarian intervention are moulded by theory and how they inform the relevant practice in cases such as Kosovo, Rwanda or Somalia. It presents the legal and theoretical narrative and its agonising attempts to produce objective, true arguments, to introduce a modicum of morality when faced with hard cases but also to concede a leeway for moral or political relativists. For instance, humanitarian intervention within natural law appeals to modes of justification springing from theistic assumptions such as the moral standing of humans as God's mirror or Kantian ones as partakers of universal reason. The cases of Uganda and Kampuchea should be evaluated in the same way, not according to their effects on the governmental structures but according to how they secured human dignity. Kampuchea was not totally propitious in this regard. Humanitarian intervention stopped widespread massacres at a genocidal level and in this way secured human dignity, but the ensuing situation did not correspond to the standards of human dignity. Following the position developed, cases such as Entebbe and Liberia are included within the concept of humanitarian intervention. Operation 'Restore Hope' for Somalia is marked by the disagreements between the United Nations and the participant states concerning its purposes and means.
2 The ignorant bystander? ‘Rwanda was the classic small country far away of which we knew and wished to know nothing ... The country was poor, overcrowded, French speaking and offered no obvious attractions to us.’1 These were the words of Edward Clay, Britain’s non-resident ambassador to Rwanda, in 1995, succinctly summing up the UK’s relationship with Rwanda before the genocide. Rwanda could not be said to have been at the top of Britain’s foreign policy priority list – it did not even make the top 100. In the decades before the genocide Britain’s relations
1 History of the crisis European colonisation came late to Rwanda. Its remote location and limited resources meant that it was not until 1885 that Germany gained colonial rights to what was then known as Ruanda-Urundi at the Berlin Conference (this territory included modern-day Rwanda, Burundi and parts of Uganda). It was nearly ten years later, in 1894, that Count Gustav von Götzen became the first German, and probably only the second European, to visit the new colony. Unfortunately, von Götzen left no accurate records of what he observed in Ruanda-Urundi; we
9 Bury or display? The politics of exhumation in post-genocide Rwanda Rémi Korman The practices and techniques employed by forensic anthropologists in the scientific documentation of human rights violations, and situations of mass murder and genocide in particular, have developed enormously since the early 1990s.1 The best-known case studies concern Latin American countries which suffered under the dictatorships of the 1970s–1980s, Franco’s Spain, and Bosnia. In Rwanda, the first forensic study of a large-scale massacre was carried out one year before the
113 5 (Re)cognising the corpse: individuality, identification and multidirectional memorialisation in post-genocide Rwanda Ayala Maurer-Prager Leontius … saw some dead bodies lying near the executioner, and he felt a desire to look at them, and at the same time felt disgust at the thought, and tried to turn aside. For some time he fought with himself and put his hand over his eyes, but in the end the desire got the better of him, and opening his eyes wide with his fingers he ran forward to the bodies, saying, ‘There you are, curse you, have your fill of the
In 1994 and during the years that followed, humanitarian workers found themselves first-hand witnesses to genocide and mass killings, not only in Rwanda but also in those countries with which it shares a border. Unprecedented in the history of humanitarian action since decolonisation, the experiences of these aid workers remain just as much of an exception now as they were in the
the holder’s ethnic origin from 1931 onwards. While these representations of the Tutsi body formulated in the colonial era remained throughout the twentieth century, the meanings they carried changed over time. An idealized ‘Tutsi beauty’ became a mark of stigma following the fall of the Tutsi monarchy and the establishment of the first exclusively Hutu Rwandan republic at the beginning of the 1960s. However, it was at the beginning of the 1990s that these representations underwent a radical shift. With the emergence of economic tensions at the end of the 1980s, the
5 The responsible bystander? Despite the ODA’s claims in September 1994 that it had no intention of developing a long-term relationship with Rwanda, that is exactly what has happened. Britain’s relationship with Rwanda could not now be more different from it was before the genocide.1 Whereas before 1994 politicians would have struggled to find Rwanda on a map, now each summer Kigali airport arrivals hall teems with visiting MPs. Since the genocide all-party parliamentary groups have visited Rwanda almost annually, and trips to the country have been de rigueur
late July the situation on the ground would be quite different: the RPF finally defeated FAR and the crisis in Rwanda shifted from being genocide to become the world’s worst refugee crisis. As the nature of the crisis changed so too did the West’s reluctance to become involved; from late July Britain, and other Western nations, significantly increased the level of aid flowing to the region and finally sent troops. The professor of international relations Sir Adam Roberts describes this response as ‘too little too late’;1 as he points out, nearly a million people had
In 1995, the leaders of the Tutsi genocide had free reign in Zaire and set about marshalling their partisans in the refugee camps. Embarking on a combat strategy, they launched increasingly frequent and murderous incursions into Rwanda where they targeted civilians. In October and November 1996, the RPA, with the help of Zairian rebels, destroyed all the camps set up in North