For too long 'war' has been defined and considered in terms of two armed groups of human beings fighting with each other; from the perspective of international law, it has been defined even more narrowly as the violent, organised conflict between sovereign states. Consequently, the United Nations' Security Council hesitated or failed to agree on the need for intervention when ethnic groups started 'ethnically cleansing' each other violently to create ethnically 'pure' areas in Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, when Hutus engaged in a mass killing of Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, and when Arab started raping and killing non-Arab populations in Darfur in 2003. Even though the UN's 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide engages the Contracting Parties to act to prevent (and punish) any occurrence of genocide, the tendency for states today is still to shirk intervention in the 'internal affairs' of a sovereign state.
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