A humane force?
The United Nations Security Council, stung by criticism that it didn't intervene to stop the mass slaughter of Tutsis and anti-Interahamwe regime Hutus in Rwanda in 1994, is pushing for a rapid-response "peacekeeping" force.
The proposal is still at the discussion stage and three options are being considered by a UN committee: a standing UN army; member states commit troops to UN peacekeeping forces but retain the right to decide whether or not to participate in each operation, as happens now; and member states to nominate which troops serving in their national armies would be available for a UN peacekeeping force at short notice.
The Australian government's submission to the UN committee, as quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald on February 21, approves the idea of a rapid-response force. It states, "There are circumstances where regional countries acting collectively outside the organisational framework of the UN, but with the authority of the Security Council, are better placed to contribute in a timely and effective way to the resolution of regional conflicts".
Regardless of which party has been in power, Australian governments have long supported the idea of a rapid-deployment force which could intervene in regional "hot spots".
Some right-wing newspaper columnists, who have previously supported proposals for rapid-response forces, are now nervous about the idea. After East Timor, they fear that public pressure might force the Australian government to intervene in support of human lives instead of economic interests.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States and other imperialist powers have been caught in a contradiction. They have had to use the pretext of "humanitarian concern" or "peacekeeping" to justify wars and military interventions. That was the case in Somalia, Kosova and Haiti. Even the Gulf War and the US invasion of Panama were described as "humanitarian".
This has created the expectation amongst their populations that military interventions should be to save human lives, rather than to defend exploitative economic interests. Such expectations came to the fore last year when public pressure forced the Australian government to temporarily act against its economic and strategic interests by sending troops to East Timor.
Some people might be persuaded that a rapid-response peacekeeping force could be a means of preserving human lives. However, the Australian government's proposal, if adopted by the UN, would ensure that a rapid-response peacekeeping force would not have a humanitarian purpose.
For a start, it would be accountable only to the UN Security Council, rather than the General Assembly. The Security Council, whose five permanent members (US, France, Britain, Russia and China) each have the right of veto, would ensure that a rapid-response force would, without exception, protect the interests of the strongest imperialist powers.
This is why UN General Assembly resolutions opposing human rights violations are rarely, if ever, acted upon. The lack of a rapid-response peacekeeping force was not the reason for the slaughter in Rwanda. The slaughter occurred because the French government backed the dictatorial Rwandan Interahamwe regime, putting its economic interests ahead of the Rwandan people.
Given Australian governments' support for the Suharto regime's slaughter of more than 1 million Indonesians in 1965 and massacres in West Papua and East Timor, it would be foolhardy to think that the Australian government would use a rapid-response force to protect ordinary people's lives.
Instead, the Australian government would try to use such a force to protect the investments of Australian capitalists in the region, such as the Freeport mine in West Papua, the Ok Tedi and Lihir mines in Papua New Guinea, and mines in Fiji and the Philippines. Humanitarian foreign policy can be achieved only when public pressure is so overwhelming that it begins to counteract the brutal economic interests that normally dictate Australia's foreign policy.