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# Posted 7:17 AM by Ariel David Adesnik

RIGHTEOUS INDIGNATION: We all become so indignant when we hear that Libya and assorted other dictatorships have become members of the United Nations' Commission on Human Rights. But isn't it time to recognize that this sort of thing has been going on for thirty years and that the surprise is wearing thin?

While doing some research from my dissertation, I came across the following article in the April 1978 issue of Foreign Affairs. Its title is "Human Rights and Economic Power: The United States Versus Idi Amin." The author is Richard Ullman, a well-known liberal academic. Ullman writes that

In any contemporary lexicon of horror, Uganda is synonymous with state-become-slaughterhouse. The most conservative estimates by informed observers hold that President Idi Amin Dada and the terror squads operating under his loose direction have killed 100,000 Ugandans in the seven years he has held power. Some estimates run as high as 300,000...

The scale of official murder in Uganda, its ferocious brutality, and its terrible capriciousness all place Idi Amin's Uganda in category of its own in which the nearest analogues may be Hilter's Germany or Stalin's Russia...

Thus far, however, Uganda has escaped the kind of censure exemplified by the U.N. Security Council's vote last November to impose a mandatory arms embargo on South Africa...Previously, in March 1977, the U.N. Human Rights Commission -- on which Uganda sits -- shelved a proposal that it should conduct an investigation into Ugandan conditions.

The practical purpose of Ullman's article is to argue for sanctions against Uganda. But he also considers other options:

If the [US] Congress wants to bring down Idi Amin, it might be asked, why not use force to do it? The answer, of course, is that Congress does not wish to expend American lives in order to save Ugandans...

International consciousness of a shared humanity may some day reach a point where supranational authorities or states acting at their command will maintain stirke forces -- larger versions of the Israeli force that landed at Entebbe or the German force at Mogadishu, each to rescue its own nationals -- for use against regimes that brutalize their own citizens. But that day is nowhere in sight. Until it comes, today's prevailing general proscription agains the use of military force is best preserved intact. It is a proscription which, by consensus, applies especially to the two superpowers. Although each has flagrantly violated it, it ramians a bulwark of a "moderate" international order."

Plus ca change, eh? For as long as the United Nations accepts sovereignty as an absolute principle, this is what we can expect.

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