The first concern of true humanitarian intervention would be the safety and well-being of people, the protection of human life. True a humanitarian intervention would attempt to bring justice, peace, co-operation and understanding to people. It would offer neutral mediation. It would work in the spirit of true concern for all the people involved of in a conflict. It would aim to prevent violence, stop the flow of arms, arrest those believed to be perpetrating violence.

It would bring suspects to trial in a genuinely neutral criminal court. It would bring medical and economic assistance and offer help with psychological counselling and reconstruction work.

It might develop peace plans and administrative structures in discussion with the people concerned in a conflict, encouraging these people to develop their own solutions rather than impose a solution worked out by faraway experts.

Humanitarian intervention should only be started if there is a reasonable chance of improving the situation.

A humanitarian peacekeeping force would need to be under the control of a body like the United Nations, and totally separate from the control of one or more powerful nations. (There should not be any significant forces outside UN control.) Such a force would ensure that it would be protective of human life, conducive to reducing conflict, environmentally benign, use minimum force and operate in compliance with international law. The peace keeping force would have to be neutral and attempt to stop violence on both or all sides in a dispute. The arresting of criminals and the prevention of the flow of arms to killers would be part of the work of a peace keeping force.

Peace-keeping should not be undertaken for the benefit of militarists and arms manufacturers, nor for the benefit of big business or new-world-order imperialists. To express the obvious, peace keeping is in the interest of the entire world because peace developed anywhere in the world helps to make the world safer.

In carrying out humanitarian intervention civilian experts and non-governmental organisations may have much to offer and be more appropriate and more cost-effective agencies than the ministers and military of concerned countries.

In recent conflicts it has sometimes been the case that one side has employed a particularly energetic public relations team to present horror stories about the actions of their enemy to the media and to minimise accounts of their own violence or to blame it on the behaviour of their enemy. Sometimes, they have stooped to the depths of cynicism and criminality by carrying out atrocities against their own people and laying the blame on their enemies.

Too often the media have shown themselves willing to accept, at face value, accounts of events provided by the public relations departments of belligerents.

Many news organisations need to place integrity and accuracy in their reporting above the need for a good story or the easy use of ready-made accounts and unchecked statistics. The emotive language of press handouts should be considered critically not simply used verbatim.

A certain amount of self-reform urgently needs to take place. The media should view information provided to them in war situations with mature scepticism, be concerned to tell the truth, and carry out their own independent research into stories provided to them. They should be sufficiently self-aware to avoid a constant stream of racially biassed information. If the media do not do a better job the risk for them is that readers and viewers will desert them and go to more truthful sources of information. Western media told a different story from the rest of the world and the intellectual weakness of western media has been widely noted. (39)

NATO’s intervention in Kosovo, the bombing of Yugoslavia, the international criminal tribunal which sits in the Hague, and the conduct of the media during the last decade of war in Yugoslavia fail on all the basic requirements set out above.