CENTRE POINT

This is the moment for the intervener to act on principle

SIMON JENKINS

Iam baffled that nobody has yet demanded a peace-keeping force for Yemen. The lesson of Bosnia and Rwanda, we are told, is that civil wars must be stopped before they get out of hand. For- eign intervention must not be 'too little and too late'. Surely, then, we should all be off to Yemen? We should go now.

Yet I hear only silence. The intervention- ists sit on their hands. This week the civil war in Yemen set off down a road much- travelled. It starts with attempts to get white residents out of the firing line. Tele- vision shows brave expatriates at Gatwick and stock footage of artillery firing and `rebel troops' in training camps. There is no film of casualties, no ruined houses, no crying old women, no emaciated refugees. These images are all to come. To the out- side world, this is still a phoney war.

Soon the worm will turn. The Red Cross will plead for money and speak of untold horror, if only cameramen will be got to the war zone. Envoys will pop up at the United Nations and damn the West for its neglect and culpability for the conflict. Everyone will nod. Some old Yemen hands will declare the rightness of the North and other old Yemen hands will declare the rightness of the South. Already this week I read that President Saleh's northerners represent the `anti-Marxist tradition of Arab conservatism' while the South's Salim al-Baidh is a progressive 'descendant of the Prophet Muhammad'. You pays your aca- demic and you takes your choice. Who will get to Sir Tim Bell first?

Yemen is an interventionist's dream. Here is a lethal conflict in a new oil state at the gateway to the East. Any international lawyer worth his salt could prove that Yemen is a 'fundamental western interest'. Aden was a British colony until 1967. Thousands of expatriates live and work there. Here was a war the CIA and MI6 must have seen coming. The defence min- istry must have multi-force contingency plans for Yemen coming out of its ears.

Surely this is the moment for the inter- vener to act on principle. He must be seen to 'clo something' before wailing Yemeni children cram our screens, before refugees pack the Red Sea beaches, before 20 histo- rians write to the Times deploring the bombing of ancient Sanaa. This is the moment for Lord Carrington and Henry Kissinger to check into the Sanaa Sheraton. The USS New Jersey should be cruising the

Gulf of Aden and Lord Owen cruising the quays of Hodeida and the souks of Ibb. British officers should be at checkpoints shouting four-letter words at recalcitrant Arabs. Noel Malcolm should be penning a history of North Yemen's plucky indepen- dence. All this need not await the arrival of a CNN Hercules or a blood-curdling speech from Paddy Ashdown.

Instead there is silence from the inter- vention lobby. There is no speech from Mr Ashdown, no flip-flop from Mr Clinton, no harangue from the Guardian or Indepen- dent. The reason is that in international morality the media is the message. All the above may come to pass, but only when the requisite pictures have appeared on televi- sion. That is what happened in Beirut and Bosnia, Kurdistan and Somalia.

Even then there will be some anguish. Bosnia was open and shut. The victims were white Europeans and had to be saved from their own worse natures. Rwanda has been almost as clear-cut. Civil war there is termed 'endemic'. Perhaps Rwanda was once a European responsibility — indeed more so than Bosnia — and perhaps Euro- pean aid did corrupt its economy. But the corpses are black — even before they are burned. No sane person, apart from Boutros Boutros Ghali, really wants to go to war in Rwanda. Besides, we tried it in Somalia and got hurt.

The interventionists, I am tempted to conclude, will not advocate a Yemeni expe- dition until they have seen the colour of the victims on television. I can save them time. The Yemenis are light-skinned, as light as the Lebanese and the Kuwaitis and the Kurds, whose troubles we also sent troops to resolve. The Yemenis have no right to be left to sort out their own affairs. They are too close to civilisation for that. They are natural subjects for the moral meddlers of London and New York.

The old maxim holds good: foreign poli- cy is about interest or it is about nothing. As a signed-up liberal, I would love it to be otherwise. Something inside us yearns to make the world a better place, and to hell with national sovereignty. When Woodrow Wilson suffered his famous attack of morality after the first world war and con- ceived the League of Nations, he spoke to the Great Meddler in us all. 'Something has to be done' had an ancestry from the First Crusade to Gladstone's Turkish atrocities. But at least those adventures mostly had ulterior (or inferior) motives: conquest, trade, loot or domestic political advantage. Margaret Thatcher went to the Falklands to save her own skin, as George Bush went to Kuwait.

Today's moral imperialists have no inter- est beyond their own comfort. They thus lack staying power. Bill Clinton had no interest in Somalia, any more than Ronald Reagan had in Beirut. Both adventures were passing gestures, disastrous to the peoples concerned. Bosnian intervention is equally gesture-led, caught up in the poli- tics of Europe and. Nato. Three months ago, British and French governments were told by their advisers either to pull their troops out or commit massive reinforce- ments. They had no guts to do either. They were trapped by their lack of commitment. They will only leave when the embarrass- ment of staying outweighs the embarrass- ment of cut and run.

To send foreign troops to 'do something' in Rwanda would simply kill more people. Now that aid is less available to prop up the corrupt leaders of black Africa, parts of the continent are sinking into political primi- tivism. The consequence is intense suffer- ing. This merits the mass humanitarian relief seen in Ethiopia. But that relief must be pacifist. The world cannot stop suffering by trying to stem its political source. The world does not have the right, even when it says otherwise. It certainly has no will.

The only way to make Third World poli- tics truly acceptable to western television viewers would be to restore imperialism. No country is prepared for that, nor is the Unit- ed Nations. There is no money in it, and no thanks. Rwandan interventionists might recall the last UN peace-keeping in this part of Africa, in Katanga in 1961. It not only failed, it killed Dag Hanunarskjold and split the Security Council in two.

I fear Yemen is a more tempting target for such adventurism. Yemen has a superfi- cial significance — Left versus Right, fun- damental versus progressive, ugly Aden versus lovely Sanaa. It has a sea border and is surrounded by western military hardwear itching for a post-Kuwait 'role'. It has weak western leaders desperate for distraction. I can hear the disc-drives whirring already. They are waiting for one televisual atrocity to send the world off to war. I am sure a bomber somewhere will oblige.

Simon Jenkins writes for the Times.