Freedom's Battle
The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention
Chapter One
Humanitarianism or Imperialism?
"Powers Will Be Powers"
Mass murderers have a well-worn argument to defend themselves against outside intervention: that sending troops would be an act of imperialism, not of altruism. Sudan's dictatorial president, Omar al-Bashir, once bluntly rejected United Nations peacekeepers in Darfur: "We will not accept colonial forces coming into the country." He could have been echoing Aleksandr Lukashenko, the Belarusian despot, who told the UN General Assembly: "If there are no pretexts for intervention, imaginary ones are created. To this end a very convenient banner was chosen--democracy and human rights." Even Vladimir Putin, facing international criticism for smothering Russian democracy, retorted that this reminded him of how a century ago "colonial powers . . . cited arguments such as playing a civilizing role, the particular role of the white man, the need to civilize 'primitive peoples.'"1
Bashir and Lukashenko may be pretty quickly written off as self-serving. But there is a serious intellec ...
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