Yet Western governments were then foursquare behind Iraq as it fought a World War II type of conflict of attrition with its neighbor Iran, which the US could not forgive either for its fundamentalist stridency or for taking hostage the diplomats of the US embassy a few years earlier. The West simply turned a blind eye to Saddam's human rights violations, while it sold him increasingly sophisticated weapons of war.
Prevention work may be less newsworthy and more difficult to justify to the public than intervention in a time of crisis, argues Sane. "It requires the sustained investment of significant resources without the emotive media images of hardship and suffering". It's the hard day-to-day slog of human rights vigilance -- using diplomatic means to persuade governments to ratify human rights treaties and implement them at home. It means ensuring there is no impunity and that every time someone's rights are violated, the incident is investigated and those responsible brought to justice. Not least, it means the speeding up of the establishment of the International Criminal Court, meant to take over from the Yugoslavia War Crimes Court and to have universal jurisdiction, wherever there are crimes against humanity.
If the West had thought a little more about prevention in the early days of the Yugoslavian conflict, much of the subsequent horror could have been avoided. Now with Milosevic's trial in the offing the West stands of danger of being hoisted on its own petard. It will be good for it.
Jonathan Power is a freelance columnist based in London.
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