William Shawcross
at Edinburgh International Book Festival
15 August 2000

Ravi Bali

William Shawcross, the well-known writer and broadcaster on conflicts around the globe, was promoting his new book Deliver Us From Evil: Warlords and Peacekeepers in a World of Endless Conflict.

Shawcross is one of the prominent media figures arguing the need for humanitarian intervention by Western powers in various post-Cold War, developing world troublespots to prevent oppression and genocide. As an insider he has a wide experience of covering various peace initiatives brokered by the UN, having worked closely with its secretary general Kofi Annan. Shawcross is part of the consensus that there is a moral imperative upon us to use whatever means necessary to stop mass killings and mutilations of innocents wherever they might occur.

He laments that there are barriers to doing this as often or as effectively as he would wish. Examining the reluctance of governments to risk the lives of their troops in conflict zones, he argued that this made the maintenance of peace much harder, if not impossible. The solution often required was an army of occupation, and this can be hindered by either technical/logistical problems or by political considerations.

The case of the Democratic Republic of the Congo was cited as a logistical nightmare for possible intervention - a landlocked mass the size of Western Europe with no roads. To put soldiers there would require that everything would have to be flown in by helicopter; in such a hot country each soldier would need five litres of water a day; before even considering the military equipment, this becomes a very expensive venture. On political barriers to intervention, the examples of Tibet and Chechnya were used as places that were too sensitive due to the risk of upsetting China or Russia respectively. This meant that in practice, UN interventions tended to be against relatively politically isolated small-power nations such as Yugoslavia.

Shawcross is a good example of a liberal imperialist who has updated the outlook of Rudyard Kipling's 'the white man's burden' defence of the British Empire as an altruistic force to civilise those it dominated. In Shawcross' worldview, difficult though it is, we have a responsibility to save these countries from themselves. He is interesting for the way he takes up one of the critics against his kind of outlook. Edward Luttwark, the American conservative, argued in an article for Foreign Affairs called 'Give War A Chance' that outside intervention in many post-Cold War conflicts had actually prolonged them and it would have been better to allow them to run their natural course.

Shawcross thinks this argument is a conceit, but goes on to say that it does have a kernel of truth in it. In Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo there were great problems created by intervention, but he argues that to have refused to intervene would have led to even worse. It is not very convincing of him to dismiss Luttwark's argument, which had some powerful points, simply because they are put forward by a conservative. It would have been more interesting to see how he would respond to the distinctly unconservative Noam Chomsky.

Chomsky, in looking at Kosovo, suggested that when considering whether to intervene we should first observe the Hippocratic ideal of 'do no harm'. Shawcross obviously has a wealth of direct experience in conflict resolution. It makes his uncritical assumption that it is our duty to do something about the evil in the world all the more dangerous that he never dwelled on whether we have the right. Combine this with the fact that despite perhaps the best of intentions, UN interventions around the world so often make matters worse, and his instinctive defence of these interventions show him to be somebody ideologically driven. Blind faith in your own mission is not a sound basis on which to understand the root of problems in a real world of conflict.