In the international community

The Bush Administration's pullout from the international community last year, temporarily suspended by the events of Sept. 11, should be scrapped permanently by a commitment to international security and cooperation. \nCommitment to Humanitarian Missions\nMissing from the Bush team's list of objectives is our commitment to humanitarian and peacekeeping missions. That's because the Bush Administration continues to deny that the richest country in the world has a responsibility to render assistance in other parts of the world where it could save countless lives and prevent millions from needless suffering.\nLike it or not, the United States has a role to play in the international community in nation building, humanitarian and peacekeeping missions. And that commitment should not be undermined, as many in the Bush Administration seek to do. \nOddly enough, the United States. just "built" a new Afghan nation and instituted a government in it and peacekeepers might be deployed in Afghanistan by the same president who railed against peacekeepers during the 2000 election and before Sept. 11. On the humanitarian side, who would have thought that the United States would have even provided the pittance of food it has?\nSuccess Story: Kosovo\nKosovo is a recent example of how effective our involvement -- alongside our allies -- can be in humanitarian missions. Several weeks of NATO bombing forced former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to yield, withdrawing his repressive military and police forces from the southern province populated mainly with ethnic Albanians. International monitors and journalists confirmed what human rights activists had feared in Kosovo: Several thousand ethnic Albanians murdered, thousands more reportedly raped and hundreds of thousands of Kosovar refugees overflowing into and destabilizing neighboring countries -- all at the hands of Serbian forces under Milosevic's command.\nMr. Milosevic is now being held under indictment before a war crimes tribunal, and a democratically elected government is seated in Yugoslavia.\nThat's what our nation's presence in humanitarian missions can do. \nLost Opportunity: Rwanda and Burundi\nIt's what we should have done in Rwanda and Burundi several years ago, when the carnage was hundreds of times worse. It was Western influence during colonial domination over Africa that ethnic Tutsis, a small minority of the population, used to solidify their grip over the much more numerous ethnic Hutus. Tutsi control over the dirt-poor Hutu peoples went unquestioned for many years, until in Rwanda the Hutu population had had enough of their wealthy Tutsi rulers. In 1994, ethnic cleansing became a stark reality in the central African state. The goal was simple: To kill every Tutsi. Milosevic sought only to expel ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, with many being raped and murdered in the process. Hutu leaders sought to rid Rwanda of their rivals by seeing to it that they were all dead. \n America stood by and watched millions of people on both sides of the African conflict be slaughtered. The richest country in the world and its Western allies did nothing. \n Is it because people in central Africa are inherently of less worth to us than people with white skin in Eastern Europe? Is it because a destabilized African makes little economic impact on Western markets? Is it because the thought of American soldiers being sent to Africa after the Somalia fiasco is too politically risky for an American president? Are millions of African lives not worth one American's?\nOr is it because we just don't care? \nAs we continue in our debate over the course of American defense, we should remember our responsibility to the rest of the world. We can afford to render aid in many instances. And we should give careful consideration to doing just that as events arise that may require Western humanitarian assistance.