William Shawcross: Deliver Us From Evil

(Bloomsbury $49.95)

Review: Terence O'Brien*

For a vivid, immediate account of the complex conflicts that confront our modern world inside so many countries, William Shawcross' book is unlikely soon to be bettered. The infinite capacity of humankind for violent, irrational aggression is sharply and comprehensively documented. The response of the so-called international community to the continuing rash of internal conflict is subjected to clinical appraisal.

Shawcross enjoys a reputation as a chronicler of the blemishes in modern international behaviour.

An earlier book, The Quality of Mercy, exposing the gravity of the genocide in Cambodia, was especially trenchant in its account and judgments.

In this book, he spends more time on analysing the nature of the problems, and the difficulties of dealing with them, than in denunciation.

Shawcross enjoys access to and the confidence of several leading figures, not the least of whom is Kofi Annan. He clearly believes Annan is one of the best UN Secretaries General. His eloquent account of Annan's negotiations with Saddam Hussein, of his exchanges with Madeleine Albright, his dealings with the Russians, the French and leaders in Rwanda, Bosnia, Sierra Leone and elsewhere, are based on access to official documents, records and personalities, and on first-hand impressions.

The book is basically an account of how the modern world is adjusting, or not, to an environment where the security and well-being of the individual has become a concern in international affairs.

The emphasis on human rights, the influence of television, the increasing role of non-government agencies are all democratising the conduct of international relations. The notion that murderous despots cannot tyrannise populations behind borders with impunity has more currency now.

But, as the book vividly portrays, translating such principles into rules for collective response is proving mighty hard.

Shawcross castigates double standards. Nato members bombed in Kosovo (from a safe altitude) but did nothing in Rwanda and procrastinated over East Timor. Hundreds of thousands suffered and died as a consequence.

For readers in this country, Shawcross' narrative assumes added interest because New Zealand was on the United Nations Security Council during 1993 and 1994, when crises in Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda and a host of other places deepened.

Shawcross is especially critical of Security Council behaviour at that time. He saves his heaviest criticism for the United States, but points his finger at France, Russia and others. He is gentlest in treatment of Britain, whose policy on Bosnia of ameliorate and contain (Shawcross' description) concealed strong aversion to confronting the Serbs militarily. His support for the original 1993 Vance-Owen peace plan, involving the cantonisation of Bosnia, cannot disguise the fact that the divisions envisaged in that plan constituted a reward for Serb ethnic cleansing.

Shawcross' account of Security Council negotiations behind the 1993 decision to establish safe havens in Bosnia, in which New Zealand was directly implicated, captures the determination of the major powers (for different reasons) to avoid any decision that would commit them automatically to respond by aerial bombardment to continued Serbian aggression against the havens.

For other council members, the designation and protection of the havens was intended to confront the major powers with a need to accept at long last their responsibilities for forcible response. The arguments about words and phrases in the private negotiations over the safe haven decision are well-captured by Shawcross.

Above all, the reader is left with an abiding impression of the coincidence of tumult in the world today.

As the Security Council agonises over one crisis, so it is constantly obliged to direct attention to another. Its inept work methods, the non-existence of consensus among the powerful and the absence of rules and means for protecting human security all point ineluctably to the need for reform. But it is clear that major powers are not yet ready to bestow resources, capacity or support for a more authoritative UN.

Yet it is interesting that in the end, after a catalogue of relative despair, Shawcross declares himself still hopeful.

Flawed and insufficient as international efforts remain, he believes the attempts to make the world a less horrible place mark progress by fits and starts. His knowledgeable account, which he describes as fragments of history, illustrates how much further there is to go.

* Terence O'Brien is a teaching fellow at Victoria University's school of politics and international relations, a former diplomat and Security Council representative.