The fig leaf of humanitarianism

By Uditha Devapriya

As each day passes and the death toll rises in Gaza, the West’s complicity in Israeli atrocities becomes clearer and sharper. South Africa’s case against Israel is a clear indictment of the Global North’s inaction regarding those atrocities. Israel’s defence team has attempted to rationalise what Israeli forces are doing in Gaza, but this has effectively been undermined by the Israeli government itself: each day, its official social media channels tweet or post one ridiculous claim against not just South Africa, but also the ICJ.

Against this backdrop, it makes very little sense to continue defending a country against which half the world has rallied in solidarity. Even Sri Lanka’s decision to send vessels to the Red Sea and local youths to Israel does not diminish its continuing support for Palestine at the United Nations, and the Foreign Ministry’s support for a two-state solution, an end to all hostilities, and a humanitarian ceasefire.

By supporting Israel so persistently, the West has more or less absconded from the moral high ground it once thought it occupied. This signals a pivotal shift in the way human rights and international law are being implemented and looked at. The Global South has taken over the role that the West once had. The latter, for all intents and purposes, no longer calls the shots on such topics. The West’s hegemony on humanitarianism is fading away. In the short run, this serves the interests of its geopolitical rivals, primarily China and Russia. In the long run, it empowers the Global South and amplifies their voice.

There is nothing to regret about these developments. They were bound to happen, sooner or later. As Ramindu Perera notes in a perceptive recent piece, the West’s narratives of humanitarianism and humanitarian intervention were driven by post-Cold War geopolitical agendas which benefited the West. This was rooted in a condescending and, one could say, neo-colonialist attitude to the Global South.

The situation got so out of hand that Western governments began invoking liberal tenets to justify what its critics today call the West’s forever wars.

When the US invaded Iraq on completely trumped-up charges, it used otherwise progressive tenets like women’s empowerment to sugar coat its campaign against Saddam Hussein. Yet as women’s activists there have pointed out, the US invasion empowered fundamentalists at the cost of women’s freedom and erased what little secularism that Hussein, for all his authoritarian tendencies, had inscribed in Iraqi society.

Indeed, while the likes of US First Lady Laura Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice infamously declared that the invasion would ensure freedom and autonomy for women, prominent Iraqi activists such as Haifa Zangana wrote that women were being besieged by clerics and religious fanatics, who were being actively helped by US officials eager to remove Saddam’s allies from the new administration. However much they were being constricted, though, these female voices were not loud enough for Western officials to hear. In the end they were all ignored, not unlike the people of Gaza today.

Reflecting on the invasion in a Lowy Institute article last year, Paul Bremer, who served as the head of State of the Iraqi government from 2003 to 2004, compared Hussein’s Ba’ath Party to Hitler’s Nazi Party, forgetting that after 10 years of US intervention, Iraq remains throttled by fundamentalist voices far worse than anything Hussein could conjure. The same goes for Libya after Gaddafi, and Egypt after Mubarak.

To be sure, these were hardly benign political figures. But the West, in its rush to rid such countries of such leaders, have consistently failed to follow up in the day or morning after their intervention. The invasion of Libya, for instance, faced opposition even from within Washington. More than 10 years later, the country remains riddled by chaos and anarchy, not to mention religious fundamentalism. The intervention did benefit certain interests, like oil companies, but it clearly has not benefited the Libyans themselves.

Meanwhile, some of the loudest advocates of humanitarian intervention have chosen to go quiet. In a recent piece to The Intercept, Jon Schwartz asks why Samantha Power has not yet followed the US State Department official who resigned last October over Washington’s silence over Israeli atrocities. Fittingly, he cites the Pulitzer Prize citation on her book A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide: “Samantha Power poses a question that haunts our nation’s past: Why do American leaders who vow ‘never again’ repeatedly fail to marshal the will and the might to stop genocide?”

Held against the backdrop of atrocities in Gaza, the citation reads like an indictment of the inaction and complicity that Power critiques in her book.

What is one to make of all this? The simplest and most charitable explanation is that the US has always followed a specific and not altogether altruistic agenda in its enforcement of liberal democratic tenets in the Global South. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, it sought to create a world after its own image. For a while, the world accepted its version and vision of things. That it no longer does should not come as a surprise, least of all to the Global North: it has been so selective in its application of humanitarian norms in this part of the world, that the Global South will no longer swallow its line.

The West’s biggest tragedy has been its failure to call out on its allies and to hold them accountable when they breach international norms. In Israel as in Gaza, it is this failure that will challenge the legitimacy of the values the West has dominated for so long. There is nothing remotely justifiable about these failures. Those who think otherwise have chosen to remain blind to what is happening in the world. That too is tragic.

Uditha Devapriya is a writer, researcher, and analyst based in Sri Lanka who contributes to a number of publications on topics such as history, art and culture, politics, and foreign policy. He can be reached at .