Eating humanitarian food meant for the hungry .....Ojuku's Biafra and Gowon's

#BringBackOurGirls: A
History of Humanitarian
Intervention in Nigeria
#BringBackOurGirls has become ubiquitous on
the internet, with a wide gamut of politicians and
celebrities taking up the cause of the nearly 300
Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped by the terrorist
organization Boko Haram. While the efficacy of
this sort of hashtag activism, or slacktivism, has
been questioned by scholars —and openly
mocked by some conservatives—there can be
little question that more people are aware of the
plight of the captured Nigerian girls than before.
Public awareness is no doubt a good thing, but
that alone won’t bring the Nigerian girls back
home. This has left many Americans asking
what they and their government can do to help.
Under public pressure, President Barack Obama
has already sent a group of U.S. officials to
Nigeria to aid the search. The United States has
even sent drones to patrol Northeastern Nigeria,
although it’s unclear how useful the unmanned
aircraft will be.
But some very influential Americans are calling
for more. “If they knew where they were,”
Senator John McCain said when discussing the
crisis in Nigeria on May 14, 2014, “I certainly
would send in U.S. troops to rescue them, in a
New York minute, without permission of the host
country.” This is a “crime against humanity,”
the senator continued, and the United Nations
Charter “gives any nation the license if they can
stop a crime against humanity.” The United
States, McCain is arguing, has both the legal
and moral power to intervene in Nigeria in order
to find the missing children.
The United Nations Charter actually doesn’t
provide that kind of unilateral authority. After all,
the words “crime against humanity” are
nowhere to be found in the document, and it is
unclear whether appealing to human rights, or
the even vaguer notion of dignity, would win him
any more supporters on the side of unilaterally
involving the American military in Nigeria.
Still, the senator raises an important issue: the
historical relationship between state sovereignty
and humanitarian intervention. The concept of
state sovereignty was codified into international
law at the end of the Thirty Years’ War. By
creating a system in which states agreed not to
interfere in the internal affairs of other states, the
Westphalian Peace acted as a humanitarian
safeguard. In addition to ending countless years
of religious wars, it provided protection to the
citizens and subjects of sovereign states.
But Senator McCain’s understanding of
sovereignty and humanitarian intervention in
Nigeria is a product of a much more recent
past. It was during another conflict in Nigeria—
the Nigerian Civil War—that the moral and legal
framework for violating state sovereignty in the
name of humanitarian relief came to the
forefront of international politics.
The Nigerian Civil War was a thirty-month
struggle that became famous, or perhaps
infamous, in the summer of 1968 because of the
images of starving women and children and the
concomitant accusation that the Nigerian
government was committing genocide against
the people living in the secessionist state of
Biafra. As in the current situation unfolding in
northeastern Nigeria, many Americans saw
those pictures and asked how they could help
people living half a world away. Their efforts
were stymied, however, because both sides of
the war wanted to control the relief effort — in
effect to claim sovereignty over humanitarian
aid — which meant that large stock piles of food
never reached the neediest until the war ended
in January 1970.
Protest in New York City in 1969 calling for
international intervention in Nigerian Civil War
(Photos by Maury Englander and Brad
Lyttle, Swarthmore College Peace Collection)
The historical comparisons between the Nigerian
Civil war and the present crisis are of course not
exact. No one, for example, discussed placing
American boots on the ground during the
Nigerian Civil War and the conditions that
created the civil war were different than the
present problems. We can nonetheless draw
three broad parallels about how Americans
viewed themselves in relationship to
humanitarian intervention then and now.
The first is that state sovereignty has become
largely viewed as an impediment to
humanitarianism rather than a fulfillment of a
humanitarian promise. During the Nigerian Civil
War, with relief at an impasse, Americans
founded over 200 non-governmental and
voluntary organizations that pressured the
United States government to intervene. Like
many other groups, the American Committee to
Keep Biafra Alive argued that the United States
had a right to intervene in the civil war. In
September 1968, committee members presented
a brief to State Department officials that argued
the violation of sovereignty had a long legal
tradition that could be invoked in the case of the
Nigerian Civil War. In the end, however, the
committee offered not a legal justification for
humanitarian intervention but a moral one: “If
we cannot perfect, as a minimum, a system of
humanitarian intervention, we have lost our
humanity. If we sit passively by while the
[Biafrans] suffer genocide, we have forfeited our
right to regain it.”
This might sound good, but then as now
American leaders were skeptical about how this
would work in practice. Even if we all agreed
that in certain cases sovereignty should be
violated for humanitarian relief, who makes that
determination? Individual governments? Surely
not. The United Nations? Maybe, but even then
the violation of sovereignty for the noblest of
purposes would be a tough sell to the
international community, especially to the
developing world who for centuries had been
victims of European imperialism. In the 1960s,
U.S. officials dismissed the idea of humanitarian
intervention in the Nigerian Civil War precisely
because it would set an uncontrollable
precedent. “One requires no Calvinist
predilections to see that governments are not
essentially good enough to be trusted with a
rule which allows them to exercise force against
another country when they believe it would
serve the ends of human rights to do so,” one
State Department representative said. Senator
McCain, for his part, said “I wouldn’t be waiting
for some kind of permission from some guy
named Goodluck Jonathan,” referring to the
current Nigerian president, before sending
American troops. There is no doubt that
President Obama would receive President
Jonathan’s permission before the United States
does anything more in Nigeria.
President Goodluck Jonathan (2nd from left) on
a state visit to South Africa (Photo: GCIS via
Flickr)
The second conclusion builds on the first, which
is the unquestioned assumption that American
humanitarian intervention has a long past and is
always welcomed. During the Nigerian Civil War,
Senator Edward Kennedy demanded that
President Lyndon Johnson create a special
coordinator to facilitate relief in Nigeria. Kennedy
offered the examples of two Herberts, Hoover
and Lehman , as Americans who had gone to
Europe and had broken through diplomatic
logjams to feed starving people. “The United
States has always found a way to make its
weight felt in the affairs of others when our
political self-interest and national security have
been at stake,” Kennedy wrote to the president.
“In the historic tradition of our nation, I would
also hope that we can still exert our powerful
influence when great human tragedy strikes our
fellow man.”
There is little doubt that McCain feels the same
way today about finding the kidnapped girls as
Kennedy did about using American resources
and manpower to save lives in Biafra. “I would
not be involved in the niceties of getting the
Nigerian government to agree,” McCain said,
“because if we did rescue these people, there
would be nothing but gratitude from the
Nigerian government.” Yet in the 1960s, Roger
Morris, a staff member on the National Security
Council, warned against this type of thinking.
“Here I think we have to remind [Kennedy] once
more that black post-colonial Nigeria is not
white post-war Europe.” In the era of
decolonization, Morris said, Nigerians “regard
the Hoovers and Lehmans as unwanted alien
intruders, rather than angels of mercy.”
American-led humanitarianism, regardless of
motive, undermines the authority of
governments and wasn’t welcomed during the
Nigerian Civil War. It certainly wouldn’t be
welcomed today in the way that Senator McCain
believes.
Finally, McCain’s response to the kidnapped
girls demonstrates the historical link between
modern neo-conservative foreign policy and the
liberal moral foreign policy reawakening that
occurred during the 1960s. Supporters of
humanitarianism in Biafra—liberals being the
most prominent and vocal—claimed that a
vision of morality should infuse and guide
American foreign policy. Norman Cousins, editor
of the Saturday Review , said that for too long
the United States misplaced its priorities in
pursuit of winning the Cold War. “Why is the
national interest so often associated with power
plays and not with those great thrusts of the
moral imagination that in then end determine a
people’s place in history?” Cousins asked.
Indeed, humanitarianism during the Nigerian
Civil War was not just a guiding light for the
future but a way of atoning for the Cold War
sins of the past.
While McCain doesn’t explicitly mention
morality and American foreign policy in relation
to the current Nigerian situation, we can see
how his opinion has been shaped by a unique,
neo-conservative view of the past that has its
origins in the 1960s. Whether in Iraq, Syria , or
Ukraine , McCain has repeatedly called for the
use of American power to enforce moral norms
—a “ weaponization of human rights ” put forward
most openly by current U.N. Ambassador
Samantha Power. Of course, these ideas have
been challenged, and since the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan Americans have been favoring a
less interventionist foreign policy. Nevertheless,
humanitarianism as a guide for American
foreign policy historically emerges during
periods when the soul of American foreign
policy seems in flux, and in many ways the
same conditions that allowed for the emergence
of humanitarianism and human rights to
become attractive alternatives to the foreign
policy status quo during the late 1960s and
1970s have reemerged in the aftermath of the
wars Iraq and Afghanistan.
It is still unclear what new alternatives will
emerge. Perhaps human rights will again
provide a path toward a utopian future. The
problem, as I see it, is that appealing to
normative legal and moral standards have so far
produced mixed results at best. For the United
States, however, the greatest factor limiting
American foreign policy in enforcing
humanitarian and human rights is the gap
between its rhetoric and its intentions. Even if
we can give Senator McCain the benefit of the
doubt and believe that he has nothing but pure
and altruistic motives for violating Nigerian
sovereignty, the real history of American
intervention in the world is one of using moral
language and rhetoric to serve its own
geopolitical interests. Nigerians would be right
to be skeptical of American motives here,
especially the kind of unilateral intervention
envisaged by Senator McCain. Let’s hope that
Nigerians are peacefully able to bring back their
own girls. And if the United States does help,
let’s hope it’s because President Obama first
received the request from President Goodluck
Jonathan.