A Fight to Protect

The Thin Blue Line: How Humanitarianism Went to War
By Conor Foley
256 pages, London: Verso, 2008

On June 28, 1992, French President François Mitterrand and Bernard Kouchner, the minister of state for humanitarian affairs, arrived by helicopter in the war-ravaged capital of Yugoslavia. It was a daring and dangerous bid to break the chokehold that Bosnian Serb militias were applying to Sarajevo's Muslim population. And it worked: Mitterrand reached a deal with Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader, to reopen the airport and to permit relief agencies to serve the city's besieged citizens. The U.N. Security Council swiftly approved the dispatch of peacekeepers as a humanitarian protection force, and crucial supplies began flowing into the capital.

The helicopter ride was a high water mark for Mitterrand, for the adventurous Kouchner, and for the idea, still quite new at the time, of a politically engaged, rather than rigorously neutral, humanitarianism. But in retrospect, it's also clear that the humanitarian corridor to Sarajevo sent the United Nations, and those it hoped to protect, down a disastrous path. Peacekeepers stood by helplessly while Serbian gunners in the hills mowed down Bosnian civilians. The peacekeepers became, quite literally, hostage to their own mission: Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic was able to ward off a NATO attack by threatening to capture or kill the lightly armed blue helmets. And the Balkan calamity plunged toward the Götterdämmerung of Srebrenica.

Humanitarianism engagé sounds tremendously noble, not to mention very exciting, until you try it in practice. Conor Foley is a veteran of what he would say are too many such misbegotten missions. He has worked for the United Nations and for human rights and humanitarian organizations in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and post-tsunami Indonesia, among other places. The experiences left him quite chastened about the limits of foreign intervention, whether in the form of military action, nation-building, or emergency assistance -- and quite critical of humanitarian heroes like Kouchner. In his provocative new book, The Thin Blue Line, Foley writes, "The broader lesson from a range of international interventions in recent years is that it will always be difficult to impose governance and assistance mechanisms from the outside."

Like the journalist David Rieff, author of A Bed for the Night, and the scholar Alex de Waal, Foley has come to view the history of humanitarian intervention as one long episode of hypocrisy and failure. Thus while "liberal interventionists" argue that the international community failed the people of Bosnia by offering a humanitarian response to what was, in fact, a military challenge, and has done so once again in Darfur, Foley advances the opposite argument. He claims, first, that humanitarian actors have made themselves the handmaiden -- and the pretext -- of military interventions; second, that by doing so, humanitarianism has sacrificed its precious neutral stance; and finally, that the sacrifice has been largely for naught, since external attempts to impose good governance or halt atrocities are likely to fail.

In his catalog of humanitarian interventions, Foley passes over those by non-Western states, such as India in what is now Bangladesh in 1971, or Vietnam’s in Cambodia in 1979, perhaps because they don’t implicate humanitarian actors or a specifically Western view of human rights (or perhaps because they more or less succeeded). Humanitarian intervention, for him, is a creature of Western activism, largely channeled through the United Nations, in the years immediately following the end of the Cold War. Thus he begins his history with the colossal and unprecedented U.S.-led mission to protect the humanitarian effort in Somalia.

Foley observes that agencies like CARE and Oxfam America, whose aid was being stolen and whose workers were being killed, pressed for a military force. These were the blithe and palmy days of interventionism -- the new U.N. force was just then assembling in Bosnia -- and few could have imagined the consequences of such a commitment. U.S. Army Rangers wound up chasing a murderous warlord through the streets of Mogadishu; the "Black Hawk Down" nightmare, in which the corpses of American soldiers were dragged through the dust, brought those consequences home to Americans all too brutally. Foley views the Somali intervention as an unmitigated debacle, not only for the country but for his own profession. In Somalia, he asserts, humanitarianism began to surrender to the logic of armed intervention.

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