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Nineteen ninety-three marked an evolution in the human rights movement. For many years, the preoccupation has been marshaling the collective will to uphold human rights. This year, with the expansion of multilateral operations in the name of human rights, an additional concern emerged: ensuring that the collective defense of human rights remained true to the principles that stirred it to action.

It has long been tempting to assume that the protection of human rights was simply a matter of collective will. So rarely had a common response been mustered to the horrific crimes of this century, it had been possible to hope that abuse might end and freedom might prevail if only the international community would rally to the human rights cause.

Several times in 1993 a common defense of human rights was mounted or continued, but the results were disappointing. A punishing embargo was imposed on Haiti, a massive humanitarian operation was pursued in Bosnia, a military intervention was continued in Somalia, yet the killing of civilians persisted. Blockades, airlifts and assaults were undertaken, yet the murderers' guns still pounded. Despairing at the failure to stop these atrocities, many began to question the utility of collective action.

Yet the tragedies of Bosnia, Haiti and Somalia reflect less the limits of collective action than a failure of collective vision. The fault lay not in the impetus to stop extreme cruelty, but in the tendency to abandon human rights principles, particularly concerns with justice, once joint action began. The lesson of Mogadishu, Sarajevo and Port-au-Prince is not the futility of collective action, but the importance of justice remaining central to the cause. Until the rule of law is understood as essential to peace, until the end to murder and torture is seen as lying in accountability rather than accommodation, the growing number of states willing to join a collective defense will remain insufficient to secure respect for human rights.

In this introduction, we also address other themes that emerged in our review of events from December 1992 to November 1993. We devote particular attention to a less visible but extremely dangerous challenge to the human rights cause, a conceptual attack launched by abusive governments against such basic principles as the indivisibility and universality of human rights, and the duty to ensure that international assistance does not underwrite repression. We address the governmental role in the spreading plague of communal violence. We note nine human rights monitors who were killed during the year and two who forcibly disappeared. Finally, we discuss the trends apparent in the Clinton administration's emerging human rights policy: its strong theoretical defense of human rights; the mixed message it has sent on the issue of accountability for gross abuses; its expansion of the terrain of human rights activism, sometimes qualified by wavering resolve in pressing human rights concerns; its neglect of human rights in several countries where the U.S. government could be particularly influential, especially in Mexico and the Middle East; and its troubling record toward therights of migrants and refugees seeking to enter the United States.

The Absence of Justice in Multilateral Action

The quest for justice has long been central to the human rights cause. The goal is to ensure that those responsible for gross abuse face, at minimum, dismissal from their official positions and, whenever possible, criminal prosecution and punishment. The human rights movement seeks justice out of respect for the victims of abuse and their families, as a step toward redressing the wrongs they have suffered, and to deter future abuse, by sending a message that one cannot victimize others without suffering severe consequences oneself.

The new collective resolve on behalf of human rights in Bosnia, Somalia and Haiti has shown an unfortunate neglect for justice. The oversight is hardly coincidental. The extraordinary human cost of an embargo or military intervention naturally discourages the patience and commitment needed to subject abusive forces to the rule of law. Particularly when U.N. troops are at risk in hostile territory, the temptation is tremendous to opt for the quick fix, to settle for a superficial peace or political accord that neglects the problem of impunity.

But the absence of justice makes its mark in heightened passions for revenge and undeterred impulses to abuse. Peace without justice is a perpetual source of discontent for victims of abuse and their families. And once troops have literally gotten away with murder, they are tempted to try again when they perceive new threats to their interests. The continuing human rights disasters of 1993 are illustrative.

· After international intervention halted the devastating famine in Somalia, U.N. forces seemed to abandon concern with human rights as they moved to the difficult stage of building a stable political order. They went to extraordinary lengths for several months to arrest Gen. Muhammad Aideed for the alleged role of his forces in ambushing U.N. troops. Yet they made no effort to establish any form of accountability, whether current or prospective, for the devastation and mass starvation that Aideed and other warlords had visited upon Somalia. Nor did the U.N. publicly scrutinize its own forces' compliance with international standards, continuing a disturbing tradition prominently displayed during the Persian Gulf War. The U.N.'s preoccupation with justice on behalf of its own dead, and its apparent indifference to justice on behalf of Somali victims, reduced U.N. peacekeepers to the level of another fighting faction. A principled defense of human rights would have signaled the importance of the rule of law to any lasting political order. Instead, the impunity tolerated by the U.N. inspired those willing to use arbitrary violence for their own political ends.

· A disregard of justice also plagued U.N. action toward Haiti. The abbreviated deployment of international monitors reflected the recognition that human rights would be central to any lasting political accord. But when it came to trying to break the impasse in Port-au-Prince, the U.N., and primarily Washington, quietly backed an amnesty, not only for the army's crimes against the state, such as the act of rebellion, but also for crimes against individual Haitians, such as murder. Similarly, under the guise of crafting a broad consensus government, Washington endorsed the army's attempts to control the Defense and Interior Ministries, an obvious impediment to dismissal of the officers responsible for mass murder. Because of divisions within the army and a growing split with the country's traditional elite who financed the original coup, the army's leadership at the end of November was under considerable pressure to negotiate an orderly transition out of the current stalemate. But Washington's willingness to compromise the principle of accountability had emboldened the army to hold out for guarantees of impunity, and prolonged the suffering of the Haitian people.

· In the former Yugoslavia, the U.N. took painfully slow steps to establish a functioning war crimes tribunal. The torpid pace reflected British and French fears that the active pursuit of justice would delay the opportunity to withdraw their U.N. troops-an ironic twist on a deployment that was meant to serve the residents of that embattled territory. An institution of potentially monumental significance, the tribunal is supposed to indict, try and punish those responsible for such crimes as rape, torture, execution, indiscriminate shelling and forced starvation. But nine months after the Security Council vowed to create it-and, in this case, despite constructive pressure from Washington-the man chosen to serve as chief prosecutor, Ramón Escovar Salóm of Venezuela, had yet to assume his duties or to hire a staff, and the U.N. had yet to provide the necessary funding. The separate war crimes commission established in 1992, an investigative but not a prosecutorial body, tried to compensate for this lethargy, but had to beg for funds from private sources to make up for the U.N.'s lack of financial commitment. This visible indifference to the pursuit of justice was particularly troubling once the U.N. declared certain "safe havens" in Bosnia, since by doing so it effectively assumed the responsibilities of a state toward the local population, including the duty to seek justice for gross abuse. The devaluation of justice also squandered an unprecedented opportunity to draw the line on the growing scourge of communal violence.

These three prominent cases were not alone in reflecting a tendency to devalue justice in the course of multilateraloperations. In Liberia, for example, the West African peacekeeping force known as ECOMOG met a serious rebel challenge by teaming up with forces tied to the highly abusive army of former President Samuel Doe, the same forces it should have been seeking to exclude from Liberia's political future. In Cambodia, despite success in sponsoring an election, repatriating refugees and building a rudimentary legal system, the U.N. neglected its explicitly delegated power to take "corrective action" to remedy abuses, leaving a troubling precedent of impunity for political and ethnic killings.

The case that best proves the importance of U.N. operations being guided by a concern with justice is El Salvador, where an effort to establish accountability for human rights abuse was central to the U.N.-sponsored peace plan. In March 1993, the Truth Commission issued its report on the atrocities of the prior twelve years-an important formal acknowledgment of responsibility for these abuses. The report also heightened the pressure to comply with the December 1992 recommendations of the Ad Hoc Commission for the purge of 103 senior officers of the Salvadoran army, including the Minister and Vice-Minister of Defense. The Truth Commission named Defense Minister René Emilio Ponce as having ordered the 1989 murders of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter. Ponce and several other senior officials who had resisted the Ad Hoc Commission's recommendations finally stepped down in July 1993. Because a broad amnesty for political and common crimes was enacted shortly after the release of the Truth Commission's report, justice remains incomplete, and there was a troubling increase in death squad activity in late 1993. Still, the important steps taken toward establishing accountability for the most serious human rights crimes have left El Salvador with a relatively solid foundation for a lasting peace.

The lesson, we believe, is that peace is likely to be elusive without justice, despite the extraordinary attention of the international community. The festering wounds of victims and their families, coupled with the message that there is no price to be paid for complicity in slaughter, makes a volatile combination. Until the international community recognizes that troops and blockades cannot substitute for structures of accountability, its massive rescue operations risk failure.

We believe the disregard for justice shown in 1993 highlights the urgent need for a U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights-a senior official who, among other important duties, would ensure that human rights considerations are not neglected once the U.N. launches major operations. The U.N.'s inattention to matters of justice also reinforces the importance of the much-studied but long-neglected permanent international tribunal to try those responsible for gross abuses, as a mechanism to avoid the short-term political calculations that tend to thwart the quest for justice.

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