Second, independent experts like those from international human rights organizations used this opportunity to release extensive reports detailing the Iraqi regime’s past human rights violations, including the Anfal campaign. They linked ongoing Iraqi repression to its past genocidal behavior.84 At the very time that Saddam Hussein’s military was indiscriminately attacking Iraqi Kurds in northern Iraq, Middle East Watch presented compelling evidence to the international public of his past genocidal efforts to destroy the Kurdish minority. Middle East Watch chastised the allied powers and in particular the United States for failing to assist the Kurds of Halabja in 1988 or to punish the Iraqi regime until after it had invaded Kuwait.85 The pressure exerted on the U.S. and European states was twofold: they were criticized for past failures to prevent or punish human rights abuses against the Kurds in Iraq, and they were pressured to stop the Iraqi regime’s abuses against the Kurds in the present and punish it for those abuses. In short, these advocacy groups publicly urged Security Council members to make their foreign policy behavior consistent with their professed values.
Third, the eyewitness testimony of U.S. secretary of state James Baker, who visited the refugee encampments along the Turkish border, was crucial for gaining Bush administration support for Operation Provide Comfort and the creation of the no-fly zones. In early April 1991, Baker witnessed the precarious situation of the displaced Kurds after being urged by then assistant secretary of state Margaret Tutwiler to make a personal visit to the camps. Baker was hesitant to go but Tutwiler had argued that it was necessary to demonstrate in a dramatic way that the U.S. had not abandoned the region at the end of the war.86 Baker’s motives for the visit were shaped primarily by domestic and foreign policy interests. Yet these interests were threatened by the administration’s perceived failure to live up to the normative expectations of domestic and international publics who believed the U.S. had a responsibility to protect human rights and to respond to the suffering of the Iraqi population.
Talking with a delegation of Kurdish refugees who had survived Saddam Hussein’s repression and had witnessed the slaughter of family members had a visceral impact on the secretary of state. Baker later said that he had “witnessed the suffering and desperation of the Iraqi people and that their experiences of cruelty and human anguish defied description.”87 He identified his personal experience of meeting Kurdish refugees as the principal motivation for the subsequent U.S. approach to Iraq policy:
My experience on that rugged hillside was not only the catalyst for a huge expansion of American and international relief to the Kurds that came to be known as Operation Provide Comfort: it also galvanized me into pressing for a new policy, announced by the President on April 16, of establishing safe havens for the Kurds in northern Iraq-refugee camps secured by U.S. forces and administered by the United Nations…. It was the largest military relief operation ever undertaken, and delivered millions of dollars in food and supplies to more than 400,000 refugees.88
It is clear that political and military interests merged with human rights values and humanitarian concerns to produce an unprecedented U.S. and ultimately Security Council response. Compelling expert testimony, graphic television and photographic imagery, and their impact on international public opinion had a particularly strong influence on the Security Council.
The character of the military intervention itself demonstrates that both material interests and humanitarian considerations shaped Security Council decision making. If the three permanent members had been solely concerned with Turkish sovereignty and stability, sealing the Iraqi border to protect its neighbors from the negative effects of Iraq’s repression would have been sufficient. Relative to sovereignty and stability, it was unnecessary to undertake a far-reaching humanitarian relief effort deep within the borders of Iraq. Further, the initial preoccupation with the situation of the Kurds and the establishment of the no-fly zone in the north but not the south betrays the underlying national security interests of those three permanent members, yet material interests cannot explain the decision to extend that same protection to the southern Shi’as over a year later when they did not pose a cross-border security threat. Moreover, while domestic pressure and international media attention were significant factors in the establishment of the no-fly zone in the north in 1991, they were not significant factors in the decision to extend the no-fly zone to the south in 1992. Indeed, in August 1992 there was little international attention devoted to the plight of the unprotected Shi’a relative to the focus on humanitarian tragedies happening in Somalia and Bosnia-Herzegovina at that same time. Nonetheless, the Security Council expanded its protection to the southern Iraqi Shi’a. In sum, domestic security interests were necessary to produce humanitarian action by France, the UK, and the U.S.; but humanitarian values and human rights norms in turn helped to constitute those national interests.
The Competing Normative Demands of State Sovereignty and Human Rights
Defining human rights violations as a threat to international peace and security has the potential to expose Security Council members to competing normative demands. The council is charged with two principal tasks: regulating state sovereignty and maintaining international peace and security. Protecting the norm of state sovereignty often leads to a policy of nonintervention in the domestic affairs of sovereign states. Maintaining international peace and security often involves enforcement action under Chapters VI, VII, and VIII of the Charter. When human rights violations are defined as a threat to international peace and security, the protection of human rights may require enforcement action within the sovereign boundaries of a state without its permission, bringing sovereignty norms and human rights norms into conflict. Norm research shows that when two norms come into conflict, the stronger, more institutionalized norm generally wins out over the newer, less established norm.89 As a result, it is expected that when these two sets of norms conflict in a place like the UNSC, sovereignty norms should trump human rights. This did not happen in Iraq in 1991 and 1992 because Security Council members had temporarily suspended Iraqi sovereignty and discursively constructed the protection of human rights as complementary to the preservation of Turkey and Iran’s sovereignty, eliminating the tension between the two norms.
Although Resolution 688 was unprecedented for redefining international security interests to include the protection of human rights, it also reaffirmed the principle of noninterference in the internal affairs of member states, despite demanding immediate and unfettered access to Iraq’s sovereign territory and the end to human rights violations against its citizens. The UNSC reconciled this inherent tension between sovereignty and human rights norms by reasoning that the internal human rights situation extended beyond the border of Iraq, moving it beyond the realm of domestic affairs, and thereby justifying an international response.90 In effect, Resolution 688 reaffirmed the domestic jurisdiction of states over their peoples and territories while portraying the human rights situation as no longer an internal matter of the Iraqi state. Thus the resolution cited Article 2.7 of the Charter of the United Nations (which protects state sovereignty), the preamble of the Charter (which identifies the protection of human rights as a function of the United Nations), and Chapter VII (which authorizes enforcement action to protect international security) simultaneously.
The prior reversal of Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait by Coalition forces acting under UNSC authority created the unusual conditions necessary for a small group of powerful members to extend enforcement action to include the protection of human rights in northern and southern Iraq. Iraq was viewed as a pariah state because it had violated the highly internalized norms of state sovereignty and territorial integrity when it invaded Kuwait. Since Iraqi sovereignty had already been temporarily suspended for its breach of international norms, it was easier to garner political support in the Security Council for an expansion of its mission for humanitarian purposes. The promotion of human rights norms in Iraq occurred within the context of a conventional war in which the sovereignty of the aggressor state had been temporarily suspended, removing the tension between the protection of state sovereignty and the promotion of human rights norms.91 In this sense, the promotion and protection of human rights