Others react in the opposite way, and call for decisive military action to halt the killing and the ethnic cleansing whose grim effects they are left to deal with. Some insist that they must concern themselves only with the immediate suffering, and not get drawn into the calculus of how today's relief may lead to suffering tomorrow. Others may say such an approach is na ve and irresponsible, and humanitarian aid should be made conditional on the observance of some minimum standards of behaviour by the recipients and their leaders. The humanitarians will tell us they cannot do that. Of course, there are no easy answers, and in real life there is probably no such thing as a wholly neutral humanitarianism.
Man is a political animal, and politics affects all human activities.
But I hope in this symposium you will help us to preserve the specific role of humanitarianism, and not allow it to be too much confused with other things. But you referred to humanitarian intervention last year . Of course military intervention can be undertaken for humanitarian motives. I myself believe, and I think it is implicit in the Charter, that there are times when the use of force may be legitimate and necessary because there is no other way to save masses of people from extreme violence and slaughter. I hope such cases will be very rare, and I strongly believe it is our job to make them rarer.