The Cold War, the Cold War and Humanitarian Intervention

Peter Ricketts was a senior diplomat in the UK's foreign and Commonwealth office. In 1994, a genocide erupted in Rwanda - hundreds of thousands were slaughtered. The following year, at Srebrenica during the Civil War in the former Yugoslavia, UN peacekeepers stood by helplessly as Serbs massacred Bosnian Muslims. Tony Blair was at the forefront of the movement for what he called humanitarian intervention. He said: If we let an evil dictator range unchallenged, we will have to spill infinitely more blood and more treasure to stop him later.