Humanitarian Intervention - The non-interventions in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia

This post will briefly examine the development of the notion of humanitarian intervention during the 1990s, focusing particularly on the non-interventions of the middle of the decade. No example illustrates this period of international relations more clearly than the failure of the international community to intervene in Rwanda. As a consequence 1 million Rwandas were slaughtered in the most horrific genocide since the Holocaust. The failures of the humanitarian mission in Somalia had led to a reluctance to intervene in Rwanda and this was disasatrously exploited by Hutu extremists within Rwanda to conduct a systematic genocide against Tutsi's and even Hutu moderates. The middle of the decade also saw a failure of the international community to act in the former Yugoslavia as the Bosnian Serbs, Croats and Muslims began to fight each other in a brutal civil war. It was only after the conflict had led to many thousands of deaths and vast numbers of displaced people that NATO intervened, but the civil war in Balkans certainly represented another black mark against the record of the international community from the perspective of liberal interventionism.

For further related blog entries please see http://irblogger655.xanga.com/758074759/humanitarian-intervention-in-somalia-unosom-i--unosom-ii/