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The challenge of global justice now.

Article Excerpt
How should the world deal with violations of human rights? Consider two tests of that question.

In the early 1990s, Serbian forces, carrying out what they called ethnic cleansing, raped and tortured and murdered thousands of Muslims in Bosnia. Serbian snipers in the surrounding hills picked off children on the streets of Sarajevo. The world did nothing meaningful to stop the savagery. West European countries sent troops and promised to protect declared 'safe areas'--a promise whose emptiness was exposed when Serbian forces entered the 'safe area' of Srebrenica and killed seven thousand Muslim men. Two U.S. presidents, the first Bush and Clinton, rejected proposals that America intervene with force. But the shame of Srebrenica finally forced President Clinton to act. He called for the NATO bombing of Serbian military targets. The Serbs quickly agreed to a ceasefire, and then accepted the Dayton agreements that ended the fighting.

In December of 2002, the British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, published a dossier of human rights violations by the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein: systematic rape, torture, gassing, public beheadings, mass executions. All were designed to suppress any resistance to the Saddam government, which the British dossier called a "regime of unique horror." That Saddam had engaged in inhumanities on a gross scale could not be doubted. He used chemical weapons against Halabja, a Kurdish town in northern Iraq. He has killed more people than the two hundred thousand who died in the Bosnian war. Yet many supporters of human rights who had pressed for international intervention to stop the atrocities in Bosnia strongly opposed President Bush's idea of war on Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Amnesty International accused Foreign Secretary Straw of "cold and calculated manipulation" of human rights violations in Iraq to advance the cause of war.

The two cases show that whether and how to intervene on behalf of human rights is a complicated question. What was right in Bosnia does not provide a sure answer for other times, other places. And the two cases show something else: The presidency of George W. Bush has drastically changed the terms of the discussion on international human rights.

The essays in this issue of Daedalus explore fundamental aspects...