And even military intervention is recognized to be in the power of UN Security Council. Of course the UN has yet to develop a comprehensive strategy and mechanism to deal with whole range of sanctions starting from political protest, economic sanction to military intervention.
It is especially where the UN has failed to intervene, that we recognize a sense of unfulfilled obligation, a betrayed duty. The two very prominent cases are Srebrenica and Rwanda. From 1998 to 1999, UN has produced two reports concerning these incidents. The Report on Srebrenica was produced by Secretary General Kofi Annan, and the Report on Rwanda was done by the independent Inquiry. The positions of these papers show the changing expectations about the role the UN Security Council should play in such cases. Kofi Annan's Srebrenica Report was still torn between the old UN image (impartiality, neutrality, non-coercive) and the new UN image. The Rwanda Report more forcefully stresses the new UN image: "The United Nations was founded at the end of a war during which genocide had been committed on a horrific scale. Its prime objective was to prevent such a conflict from ever happening again."18 This is more of a fiction than historical reality, but it does tell us something about the connection that is emerging between the UN and Human rights. "The United Nations should acknowledge its part of the responsibility for not having done enough to prevent or stop the genocide in Rwanda."19
This passage of the report was welcomed with applause from the media as a long-awaited statement. The United Nations―and in particular the Security Council and troop contributing countries―must be prepared to act to prevent acts of genocide or gross violations of human rights wherever they may take place. The political will to act should not be subject to different standards.20
This can be seen as a culmination of the rewriting of norms that occurred during the year 1999.
Of course realities would not catch up to the new norm for a long time to come. The real international politics will remain multi-standard instead of single standard as the Rwanda Report suggests. Still, the idea that the UN and especially the Security Council has the right and the responsibility to intervene in humanitarian crisis can be seen as becoming a kind of a norm during the year of 1999. Of course one can challenge this on the basis of lack of legitimacy or democratic control,21 but lacking alternatives, things are likely to remain this way for a while.
On this matter, it is important to start developing a comprehensive approach under chapter VII, including economic sanctions, legal persecution, threat of force and military intervention.22 That economic sanctions and inducements can sometimes be quite effective has been shown in recent cases of Croatia and Yugoslavia. Such cases should be more extensively studied and placed under single analyzing body. At the present, operations are scattered in different departments of the US system.
