Are Some Lives More Valuable than Others?

"Ending this tragedy is a moral imperative." So said President Bill Clinton on 24 March 1999 as he announced to the world that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization would respond to Slobodan Milosevic's assaults on Kosovo by bombing the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

In surveying the international community's response to humanitarian emergencies in 1999, we find two outstanding examples of intervention on explicitly humanitarian grounds: Kosovo and East Timor. They appeared, indeed, to show the international community responding to a moral imperative when less-obvious-than-usual economic or strategic interests were at stake. These interventions are all the more remarkable because they struck at the most fundamentally protected entitlement of state sovereignty: territorial integrity. In each case, the humanitarian rescue simultaneously strengthened the victims' political aspirations for independence from the governments that had been oppressing them.

Looking back on that period, we also see humanitarian disasters that elicited little or no response. At the very moment the international community was claiming the moral high ground in Kosovo and East Timor, actors in other humanitarian tragedies--in Sierra Leone, Sudan, and elsewhere--were killing, maiming, orphaning, and forcibly displacing civilians in measurably greater numbers. And neither President Clinton nor other world leaders declared a "moral imperative" to stop those tragedies. Many journalists, commentators, and aid workers noted the disparity and squirmed uncomfortably. Why this disparity of response? Are some lives more valuable than others?

Perhaps clues lie in the president's next words on 24 March: "It is also important to America's national interests. . . . Our children need and deserve a peaceful, stable, free Europe." True enough. But don't our children also need and deserve a peaceful, stable, free Africa, Asia, even world? Yet could anyone imagine the president making similar statements about Sierra Leone?

Disparity is neither necessarily illogical nor an indication of moral malady. After all, each of today's complex humanitarian emergencies really is unique. However, one person's "logical" disparity is often another person's "abandonment." Consider this prayer of Macrom Max Gassis, the bishop of El Obeid, Sudan:

We raise our voices and cry, "We are forgotten and marginalized." Is it because we do not live in Europe as the Kosovars? Is it because we have a different skin color and different physical features? Is it because we do not have any strategic importance?

Senior international political actors weigh many factors when deciding how to respond to complex humanitarian emergencies. Altruism does not translate readily into the international political sphere, where national interests predominate. A political leader's humanitarian instincts do not proceed unchecked by other considerations. This, again, suggests that all disparity is not unwarranted. However, it is specifically the humanitarian dimensions of such emergencies that require us to reduce the factors that distort the equal value of the human victims. In assessing the appropriate response, policy makers should strive toward equivalent response for comparable humanitarian need.

When international responses to humanitarian emergencies do differ, it is incumbent upon world leaders to explain that disparity. It is also the duty of the human rights community, even while applauding leaders for doing right by some victims, to question whether some instances of disparate response may result from prejudice--that reflects a perceived inequality of victims and an unwillingness to recognize that suffering is the most fundamental leveler of human beings.

Honest Disparities, Dishonest Disparities

Political leaders are not averse to using humanitarian rhetoric or rationales in order to layer moral gloss over interventions that have essentially Realpolitik motivations. In 1991, in Operation Desert Storm, for example, although there were undoubtedly humanitarian concerns that were more than rhetorical, the economic and strategic value of oil-rich Kuwait and the Persian Gulf were obvious as well. But at what point is the life of a Kuwaiti or a Kosovar weighed against the life of a Chechen or a Sierra Leonean? Do world leaders ultimately value some lives more than others?

At the height...