Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

NONGOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS
308
In the early 1990s, NATO established no-fly zones over the so-called safe areas in the
former Yugoslavia (various locations protected by the United Nations Protection Force in
Former Yugoslavia (UNPROFOR) in the contested territories of the former Yugoslavia)
in response to Serb attacks on the Muslim populations residing therein.
Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs). An NGO is, as the name suggests, an
organization independent of any government—national or international—that addresses
and works on an issue of its choice. Among some of the hundreds of issues NGOs work
on germane to the issue of genocide are: the protection of international human rights;
conflict resolution among hostile groups in a state; the prevention of genocide; the intervention
and prevention of genocide; the protection of internally displaced peoples; the
protection of refugees; and hunger and starvation.
Nonintervention. A concept that springs from the doctrine that one state’s sovereignty
may not be violated by another in any circumstance. It stems from the Treaty of Westphalia
(1648), by which states would henceforth agree not to interfere in the domestic
affairs of other states. With the Treaty of Westphalia, nonintervention became the most
sacrosanct and unbreakable of rules in international affairs, and as such it took (and, in
theory, takes) no cognizance of how a state treats (or mistreats) its population. More
specifically, the essence of state sovereignty rests firmly on the fundamental principle that
how a state controls its population is its own affair, and that, in view of this, no other state
may intervene in its internal arrangements. To do so is regarded, in international law, as
state-to-state aggression and is to be condemned. Thus, with the Treaty of Westphalia a
clear differentiation was made between the national and the international.
After World War II, there was much soul-searching about the rectitude of this principle
of international conduct, but no discussions were strong enough to lead to the revocation
or modification of the absolute nature of the doctrine of state sovereignty. During the Cold
War years, the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in considerable criticism of
each other’s “suppression” and “exploitation” of their minority populations, though nothing
was done actively other than rhetorical denunciations and propaganda. There was at
no stage physical intervention in the “internal affairs” of the one by the other.
During this same period, whenever one state or a human rights organization (e.g., Amnesty
International) did criticize a state for its ill treatment of a specific group of individuals, the state
being criticized often declared the matter to be a case of “internal affairs” that was no one else’s
business but its own. Over time, though, the pressure applied by international human rights
organizations, which made ample use of the many new human rights documents and declarations
that had come into existence with the advent of the United Nations in 1948, began to
slowly pare away at the notion of so-called internal affairs when it came to the vile mistreatment
of human beings anywhere for any reason. Further cracks in the nonintervention stance
was the intervention to assist the Kurds of Northern Iraq in 1991, when NATO forces imposed
a “no-fly zone” against the Iraqi military that was about to carry out a mission against the
Kurds, who, years earlier, they (the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein) had already committed
genocide against. But then, in 1994, the international community reverted to its old ways and
virtually sat by and watched as the Rwandan genocide unfolded before its very eyes.
That said, while Rwanda became mired in genocide, there was some movement by the
international community in response to the Yugoslav crisis, first in Bosnia (1992–1995),
and then in Kosovo (1998–1999). Once the violence or feared violence was adjudged to
be genocidal in scope, the international community began to contemplate military inter-