Maduro’s misrule is no excuse to force regime change in Venezuela

The campaign by the US and many of its allies to remove the government led by Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro raises an important question in international relations: in what circumstances, if any, should a national government be forced out of office by external influence where it is not engaged in armed conflict with those seeking its overthrow?

There is no doubt that the ­regime in Venezuela, like its predecessor under president Hugo Chavez, is a study in incompetence and has squandered the country’s substantial revenue from oil production. It is hardly tolerant of dissenting opinions, although the opposition forces have been able to conduct large-scale public rallies without disruption and these events have been recorded by the international media. Nevertheless the US and a sizeable group of ­European and Latin American countries, along with Australia, have supported sanctions against the present regime and have formally recognised the Venezuelan National Assembly president, Juan Guaido, as acting president of the country in place of Maduro.

When a country makes war on its neighbours and loses, it is ­obviously likely that its regime will be removed by the victorious powers and a new administration substituted, often one conducted by those powers for a period of time. But it has been relatively rare over the period of modern history for a national government to be displaced in any other circumstances, no matter how oppressive it may be in the treatment of its own ­citizens.

As an example, it would be hard to think of a more oppressive ­regime than North Korea during the postwar years. The plight of its people was exemplified by a famine in the 1990s that resulted in the deaths of somewhere between 250,000 and 400,000 of its inhabitants. It is true that North Korea has been the subject of sanctions designed to deter its nuclear weapons program but there has never been any suggestion outside forces would intervene and remove its longstanding regime.

An even more dramatic example was the conduct of the Rwandan government that encouraged and allowed the killing of between 500,000 and a million of its people in 1994. The government was overthrown by invading rebel ­forces in the aftermath of the killings but neither major outside powers nor the UN ­intervened while the massacres were taking place.

One of the few instances where a national government has been deposed by outside forces, if only in part of its territory, ­occurred in 1999 when Serbian control of its province of Kosovo was ended by a NATO campaign of aerial bombing of Serbian regions. Although part of Serbia, Kosovo had an ­Albanian majority that wan­ted independence and Western intervention brought this about.

Another example from the postwar years took place in 1971 when India intervened militarily in what was then East Pakistan to halt a campaign of terror by the Pakistani government against its political opponents in this part of the country. The result of the ­Indian intervention was the establishment of the independent ­nation of Bangladesh.

The US ­invasions of Granada in 1983 and Iraq in 2003 also ­resulted in the removal of the ­existing regimes.

But the problem in inter­national relations with the forced removal of established regimes, however unattractive they may be to some members of the global community, is that this notion can be easily extended to a whole range of countries.

Why not, for example, intervene in Myanmar to stop its government’s persecution of the Rohingya minority that has resulted in almost 750,000 from that group fleeing to Bangladesh? No one has suggested that such a course of action occur. Nor has anyone proposed ­action against Spain to stop the trials of the Catalan separatists that will take place soon. Why should the Kosovans have their own country separate from Serbia but not the Catalans one separate from Spain?

National sovereignty is a principle at the heart of international relations and there is a danger in treating it too lightly. The Venezuelan people would almost certainly be better off under a different regime but there is a real question whether that should be achieved from inside or outside their borders.

Michael Sexton SC is the author of several books on Australian history and politics.