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SIERRA LEONE: Why Britain Stays - What a difference a bit of nuclear paranoia makes.
In Britain, the Conservatives and Labour used to know their support bases clearly. Upper and middle class were blue, working class and academia red. But nowadays many of the working class vote Conservative because they are a more nationalistic Party, whilst the middle classes no longer fear left wing subversives and share a greater sense of social justice, vote Labour. In fact, traditional right versus left has transformed so greatly that in many more cases it has swapped over.
The same people who were demanding that the US stop interfering with Nicaragua in the 1980's spent much of the 90's wishing that they did in the former Yugoslavia. Those around the world who campaigned for the US to get out of Vietnam wanted them to get in to Rwanda. And the Western left wingers who used to argue that military intervention was a sign of the evils of Western imperialism now want Western involvement in Sierra Leone.
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However this argument is as widely minded as what the definitions of national interests are. The two serious arguments against intervention for humanitarian and not political purposes, are that
- a) it could make the situation worse (President Mugabe would love Britain to invade Zimbabwe just so he could mobilise his support), and
- b) it could lead to a disastrous backlash (a Western invasion of Tibet would probably result in China starting World War Three).
As the majority of Sierra Leone's citizens want Western intervention and the country is not sensitive to a nuclear-armed superpower, what is stopping the West backing the UN up with further troops?
Britain should, as the old colonial power, feel obliged to intervene. But more importantly, the rest of the developed world should as well. People, through no fault of their own are suffering and want and need Western help. They trust the West and feel that they would be responsible if they had the logistic means to be.
How can the international system be improved if the West does what it did in the Seventeenth Century when mercenaries ravaged Prussia, an identical scenario, which was precisely nothing? Surely the West needs to show Foday Sunkoh's rebel RUF that its moral regard for others is not limited to territorial boundaries.
Human rights are not confined to members of a particular group but are possessed by individuals as autonomous moral agents. Ideology, location, culture or a value system should have no bearing on the application of human rights. Yet if the West withdraws or even continues to deploy the scarce amounts of UN troops in Sierra Leone as many Western shadow foreign secretaries have hinted at, it is in essence telling the RUF that claims to human rights should only be made if they are committed in more prosperous areas.
Finally, we must not look at other forms of intervention, see problems and therefore stay away. Yugoslavia, a totally different political story anyway, may be in a state of crisis now, but it would surely have been much worse if the Western armies had not intervened, in some way, a year ago. In this light, exactly the same applies to Sierra Leone.
RDR RECOMMENDED SITE OF THE DAY: We're not all sturm und drang, you know. We do appreciate a little satire from time to time. You can find some here at HarvardNews.
