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Essay on Humanitarian International Intervention in Burundi in the 1990s: Prevention or Palliative Cure?
For the purposes of this paper I will struggle between the arguments that humanitarian international intervention in Burundi in the 1990s is prevention or palliative Cure and also define humanitarian intervention as multilateral military action and operations encompassing relief, both with the objective of protecting basic human rights in a situation of crisis, conflict, or disaster. This paper will seek to examine different types of international intervention in Burundi and assess their effectiveness during the 1990s.
Due to the rise in intrastate conflict in 1990s, the nature and politics of humanitarian intervention have changed. The image of armed peacekeepers protecting refugees from genocidaires, both citizens of the same state, is very different from the traditional image of food being handed out to victims of a famine or inter-state conflict mediation. These conceptions of humanitarian intervention are of course oversimplified, and even famine is rarely devoid of politics, but it remains clear that the nature and motivations of intervention have dramatically changed.
Humanitarian interventions were and are rarely based solely on humanitarian objectives. They are driven rather by the interests of states. Prior to the end of the Cold War, major powers in Europe and the US intervened and sent aid to Africa for the political objective of containing Communism. Following the Cold War, economic and security concerns have become the dominant stimuli for intervention on the continent. While we might like to imagine ourselves coming to the rescue of the hungry and the threatened, many examples of genocide in the 1990’s demonstrate the reluctance of the international community to intervene when a conflict is not perceived as directly affecting Western powers. Since independence, Burundi has suffered undemocratic military regimes brought to power through successive coups. The struggle for power over the state and its resources produced multiple rounds of ethnic massacres and reprisals......
