SOMALIA HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION 1992-1993 by G. P. ...

660 G. P. Valladares
"When Mi Amin killed a thousand civilian a week, the Security Council
didn't assume any course of action. When Pol Pot made two million people die
from forced labour or by shooting them in Cambodia the Security Council didn't
act. When Mengistu caused massive starvation in Ethiopia ... the Security Council
didn't act either. All these cases were considered purely internal affairs. Only South
Africa, considered a legitimate state, witnessed how the Security Council
scrutinized and condenned the treatment of its own nationals". (o)
From the UN practice during the last three years concerning humanitarian
interventions (Liberia, Former Yugoslavia, Somalia, and so on), it's seen that both
the Organization and the States have changed their actitude towards this kind of
action.
8.c. Balance between sovereignty, non intervention in the Internal affairs of states
and humanitarian intervention.
Let's discuss the balance between sovereignty, non-intervention in the
internal affairs of states and humanitarian intervention.
In the face of the many conflicts which have arisen in the post Cold War and
which imply the need to intervene in sovereign states so as to deliver humanitarian
assistance and relief, many different opinions have been given either in favour such
a kind of action or simply against it.
The latest actions taken United Nations in Irak, Former-Yugoslavia, Haiti,
Cambodia and Somalia had led experts to question about what has remained of that
concept of sovereignty stated by Bodino.
It seems that events of this new age move us to rephrase the concept of
sovereignty, so that a part of its attributes should be dropped, thus it will deal with
the new change more adequately.
In the process of evolution which this concept has undergone, for instance it
is undeniable that the removal of the issue of Human Rights the exclusive field of
the state competence affects and, consequently, modifies the concept of
sovereignty, whenever this is defined as something belonging to the exclusive field
of the state.
On the other hand, if the concept of sovereignty is seen as related to the
autonomy of decision and the exercise of power in a context in which many
different states coexist separately due to great ideological differences and other
differences as well but which, at the same time, are states linked by a number of
needs and ambitions which make them dependent one upon the other, them, this