“The Cost of Doing Nothing: The Price of Inaction in the Face of Mass Atrocities”
This is the title of a new report published by the Policy Exchange.
The report examines the history of British intervention – militarily and from a humanitarian perspective – arguing that it has been an irreducible part of British foreign and national security policy for over 200 years. It says that while the recent lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan must be learned, a retreat from playing a proactive role in world affairs heightens the risk of further global instability.
The paper points to recent examples of where intervention has been successful:
- The establishment of a no-fly zone in northern Iraq in 1991 successfully protected the Kurds from Saddam Hussein’s genocidal air attacks.
- The 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo protected tens of thousands of civilians threatened by Slobodan Milosevic’s campaign of ethnic cleansing.
- The British intervention in Sierra Leone in 2000 helped repel the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) advance, paving a path to peace
The paper also highlights examples of where failure to intervene has had devastating consequences:
- In 1994, the international community’s slow response to the breakdown of peace in Rwanda was unable to prevent the genocide of up to 1 million Tutsis.
- The inadequacy of UN missions in the former Yugoslavia meant they did not have a mandate to prevent ethnic cleansing in Croatia and Bosnia including the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995.
- Most recently, the British government’s defeat in a House of Commons vote in 2013 meant that Western governments did not intervene in the earlier stages of the Syrian Civil War; it is estimated that half a million people have now died and two million been displaced in the ongoing conflict.
You can access the report here.