Quiet Quiet Heart

I came across an interesting article in the back of the April 2004 edition of the Amnesty International newsletter - Human Rights Defender - It's written by William Schulz, the Executive Director of Amnesty International USA and is apparently an extract from a book he has written. Schulz (speaking for himself rather than Amnesty) writes about his views on how it is possible to disagree with the manner in which the current intervention in Iraq was initiated and carried out and yet be not be inherently opposed to military intervention in the service of human rights. Schulz dishes it out on more than one front.

" Just because George W. Bush, like virtually all presidents before him, uses human rights like a bad cook uses a spice - to cover up the taste of otherwise unpalatable policies - doesn't mean that human rights do not sometimes require a big stick in addition to soft speaking. The Europeans, for all their righteousness about human rights, did virtually nothing to stop the slaughter in Bosnia. Human rights are not for the faint of heart; they are not the province of wimps, but of the stubborn and the robust.

That the United States has been giving the struggle against terrorism a bad name of late does not mean that the fears that motivate that struggle are not legitimate and clear."

For me personally, I suspect that if intervention in Iraq had been a result of a considered UN effort to identify and agree on those countries that were beyond the pale in terms of human rights, and UN approval was given for international intervention, then I may have been able to support intervention (of course it may also be true that international politics and the structure of the UN might prevent the inclusion of some deserving countries on any list arrived at by consensus). But despite the posturing since, human rights was an also-ran in terms of the justification for the war. There was never any consideration as to why Iraq deserved intervention any more than a number of other nations, and that, I think, is simply because the protection of human rights was never the key issue.

I was also interested in something Jose Ramos-Horta had to say this week on Andrew Denton's Enough Rope :

"Sometimes I believe that we should ban wars, there should be no wars whatsoever in humanity, ever again. But then I ask, if we say no wars of any sort, then what you do when a people is subjected to genocide? No force was used in Rwanda in '94. The UN was there, sitting, watching. New York wouldn't give the orders. So 700,000 to 800,000 people died in 100 days - in this day and age! And so should I be like the Dalai Lama and say no violence, no war ever? So I always struggle with these conflicting sentiments."

Going back about ninety years I find another thought from the diary of British General Ian Hamilton March 1914
"Once in a generation, a mysterious wish for war passes through the people. Their instinct tells them that there is no other way of progress and of escape from habits that no longer fit them" (from Gallipoli, by Les Carlyon).

Les Carlyon portrays Hamilton and a number of other senior British officers and leaders as men of the 19th century about to command armed forces in a war of the new century, a war that they did not understand. It makes me wonder which of today's' leaders are like Hamilton, their actions in part influenced by their inability to understand what this new century will bring us, and therefore unable to lead us to success.

War itself is certainly not confined to any one century. Yet when our democractically leaders have seemed so willing to take us down that path again, I causes me to wonder, can't we expect, in this time, that those who would be our leaders could find and propose something better, some more palatable solution?