Originally,
I had intended to finish up a blog post on foreign aid to Africa. But I changed my mind earlier this evening after
hearing a lecture at the Illinois Holocaust Museum given by Mukesh Kapila, who was
the United Nations Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for the Sudan in 2003,
as the genocide in Darfur was beginning to unfold. One can only begin to imagine what that job
would have been like.
Kapila was
one of the first whistleblowers. He was among the first to plug in the GPS
coordinates of attacked villages into computers and to realize the disturbing
patterns. When he went to the Sudanese
government, he was given excuses. When
he went to the UN headquarters, he was met with silence. So he went to the world.
During
the question and answer period after the lecture, an audience member raised the
topic of the Rwandan genocide. Kapila mentioned a grim incident in which
altruistic intentions went horribly wrong:
Shortly
after calls for the annihilation of Tutsis surfaced on Rwandan airwaves, 5,000
Tutsis, fearing for their lives, sought refuge within the walls of a UN compound. The local UN peacekeeping force let the people
in and agreed to protect them. But about
a week later, the UN in New York ordered the local peacekeepers to leave. Within a few hours of the peacekeepers’ evacuation,
a Hutu mob had macheted to death each and every one of the 5,000 Tutsis and then
proceeded to bury them in a grave no larger than the room we were sitting in.
Kapila concluded
this story by making the point that it would have been better if the UN had not
allowed the Tutsis to enter the compound in the first place. Had these Tutsis
been denied entrance, they would have fled to another country, to the
wilderness, or to any variety of places, and perhaps some would have lived.
His
message was one of honesty: if the UN was unwilling to act, the UN should have
admitted that it was unwilling to act. The UN should have told the fleeing
Tutsis: “This is regrettable, but you’re out of luck. There’s nothing we can
do. Good bye.” In effect, the UN’s
half-baked altruism actually created a concentration camp – it concentrated a
group of people which facilitated their efficient murder, en masse (albeit
unintentionally).
Kapila
raised one other point that I thought was relevant to this blog: the United
States spends $300 million each year on a UN peacekeeping mission in Sudan
that, more or less, does nothing. (For this, he told the audience that we were stupid
Americans. Literally. He yelled at us.) He argued that this is actually harmful,
because it allows us to say to the human rights advocates that we are doing
something, while we are actually doing nothing.
So it seems that this $300 million is more self-interested than it is
altruistic.
Another
example of this, but one that he did not mention, is the 100 peacekeepers the
U.S. has deployed to Central Africa to provide logistical support to African armed
forces. Invisible Children pushed for
government action, and the intentions are certainly good on their part. But one really has to wonder what 100 peacekeepers
will do more: stop the LRA or discredit the arguments of human rights
activists.
Overall,
I thought the lecture was disturbing in many ways. If we cannot manage to be altruistic in the
face of genocide, who are we?
Very thought provoking. What, then, is the rationale for any Western intervention? If we can't determine the outcomes of our actions, how do we act at all? One of my instructors at debate camp talked about ridiculous cause and effect chains and the notion of signal. Let's say someone says, "if you go to the store and buy a gallon of milk, it will cause the extinction of all living things on planet Earth." You might ask, "Why?" (You might also ask, "Are you drunk?" or "Have you fallen down and hit your head on something hard?") The person might reply, "Well, if you buy that milk it will help the American dairy industry, which in turn is an important contributor to the overall American agricultural industry, which in turn helps feed large parts of Russia, which in turn means that the Russian agricultural sector will be undercut by American imports, which in turn prevents Russian diversification off of oil, which in turn makes them vulnerable to price shocks in the global crude market, which in turn makes eventual Russian economic failure likely, which in turn causes unpaid Russian defense personnel to sell nuclear weapons to terrorists, which in turn causes nuclear terrorism on the United States, which in turn causes American nuclear retaliation on Russia, which in turn causes a US-Russian nuclear war, which in turn causes nuclear winter and a smoke cloud that causes...extinction." Well, you might (but probably wouldn't if you are not insane) reply, "what if purchasing this gallon of milk resulted in you saving the money and instead spending it to help buy a new laptop which bolsters the American semiconductor sector which helps provide critical defense contractors with revenue in a time of budget cuts, which in turn enables them to better produce American combat equipment, which in turn heightens the perception of American deterrence in Asia, which in turn stop US-China tensions from escalating to war, which in turn would cause a nuclear conflict, which in turn would cause a nuclear winter....and extinction."
ReplyDeleteBoth of these scenarios are literally nonsensical, but the point is that given the complexity of our world, it is hard to judge what unintended consequences might lurk. I agree that we must thoroughly analyze what we are doing, what constitutes "sufficient altruism"? Any action could conceivably lead to something bad. While I agree it is important for the US and UN to be committed to seeing things through to the end, we can't be stymied by the remote prospect of unintended consequences.