Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

vention as a humanitarian act. As the crisis deepened in Kosovo, and Serbian President
Slobodan Milosevic’s (1941–2006) Kosovo campaign led to the expulsion of almost
1 million Kosovar Albanian refugees, NATO leaders came to a consensus that military
action was imperative. Hence, the bombing of Belgrade and other locations between
March and June 1999 was designed to force Milosevic to abandon his genocidal policy.
The decision to intervene was an unprecedented break with all previous international
action under the Westphalian states system. This new rationale for intervening, which
stemmed from humanitarian motives, would increasingly receive support provided it had
United Nations sanction under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. The 1999 Kosovo Intervention
by NATO, which did not have such a sanction, was justified by Western leaders
such as U.S. president William Jefferson Clinton (b. 1946) and British prime minister
Tony Blair (b. 1953) on the grounds of sheer human necessity.
As to why the international community sat by and watched as 500,000 to one million
Tutsi and moderate Hutu were slain in one hundred days by extremist Hutu but reacted
with military might in the former Yugoslavia has resulted in great debate among scholars
and policy analysts. Some claim it was because NATO’s responsibility is to ensure peace
in Europe, but not Africa, and thus it stepped into the breach in the former Yugoslavia.
Others have asserted that the choice to act in the former Yugoslavia but not in Rwanda
was due to the fact that none of the great powers in the West had important interests or assets
in Rwanda. Still others have reflected on the fact that the United States, for example, was
still wary of becoming involved in violent conflicts in Africa due to having been embarrassed
by the relatively recent fiasco in Somalia in which numerous U.S. troops were
killed, a U.S. helicopter was shot down, and a U.S. soldier was dragged through the streets
of Mogadishu. And, finally, some said they believed it was due to racism: the people in
danger in the former Yugoslavia were white, whereas the victims in Rwanda were black.
All that said, a recently developed concept in international relations, “the responsibility
to protect,” began evolving in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Its aim was (and is) to
provide a legal and ethical basis for humanitarian intervention, whereby intervention can
take place, preferably with United Nations sanction, in order to prevent or stop genocide
and/or other massive human rights violations. According to the International Commission
on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), this can be broken down into three
parts: the responsibility to prevent; the responsibility to react; and the responsibility to
rebuild. The principle of nonintervention thus having been cracked, precedents now exist
for further actions to save humanity in peril—though, it must be said, the tendency will
undoubtedly remain strong for nonintervention to remain the norm in international
affairs, and for its opposite to be invoked only in rare cases of the most extreme kind (and
sometimes, as in the case of Darfur, Sudan, since 2003, not even then).
Non-Refoulement. This concept, which is at the heart (and constitutes the key principle)
of refugee law, prohibits States from sending refugees back to the countries or territories
from which they have fled out of a fear for their lives (i.e., a threat to their lives and/or a
deprivation of their basic freedom[s]). The principle of non-refoulement is considered a part
of customary international law; this, in turn, means that it is binding on all states, whether
or not the states are parties to the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951).
North Atlantic Treaty Organization. See NATO
Nostre Aetate (Latin, In Our Time). This “Declaration on the Relation of the Church
to Non-Christian Religions” was proclaimed by Pope Paul VI (1897–1978) on October
NOSTRE AETATE
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