Humanitarian Intervention

• According to Human Rights Education Associates (HREA), an international non-governmental organization devoted to providing education on human rights issues, humanitarian intervention is distinctly different from humanitarian aid. In the latter, the government of one nation will offer assistance to another nation in times of great need, typically after a natural disaster. Humanitarian intervention, however, occurs when a country or coalition of countries employs military force within another country's borders to protect that nation's civilians from the threat of death or injury due to an untenable situation in their own country. The concept of humanitarian intervention is contained in various aspects of international law although, as of May, 2011, there was no formal legal definition of humanitarian intervention.
  
  

Entebbe

• One of the most famous occurrences of humanitarian intervention occurred in 1976, when an Air France passenger jet was hijacked by terrorists and forced to land at Uganda's Entebbe airport. Realizing there were several Israeli citizens on board and that the Ugandan government actually supported the terrorists, the Israeli government sent a team of elite commandos to mount a rescue effort. Ultimately, the only casualties were Ugandan military personnel who were assisting the terrorists. Although several Third World and communist nations decried Israel's actions as unlawful aggression, the U.S. and several European nations declared Israel's actions to be lawful.
  
  

Somalia

• Another example of humanitarian intervention took place when a U.S.-led military operation entered Somalia in 1992 in response to a humanitarian crisis that erupted during the country's civil war. Although a 1996 article in the Council of Foreign Relations journal "Foreign Affairs" estimates that 100,000 lives were saved because of the American intervention, the operation is largely considered to be a failure that placed American soldiers in deadly situations, as typified by the dramatized film account in "Black Hawk Down."
  
  

Kosovo

• In 1999 several Western nations, under the auspices of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), mounted an attack on the Yugoslavian capital of Kosovo to prevent the genocide that was occurring due to Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milosevic's "ethnic cleansing" of the nation's Albanian population. The NATO bombing campaign was opposed by Russia and China, which prevented the United Nations Security Council from lending its full support to the effort.