Vigilantism on a National Scale

So watching Boondock Saints got me thinking about the moral quandary that is vigilantism. For those who don't know, the movie is about two brothers who kill mafiosi, claiming to be justified by God in their actions. It poses a moral question: when something is obviously evil, is it right for a person to intervene and stop this evil from happening? And in the context of the class, is it right for a nation to violate the sovereignty of another nation on principle alone?

Both questions can be answered at once: yes, idealistically, with pragmatic restrictions. There are situations where evil is so pervasive that even the most morally flexible of individuals can see it for what it is. The Holocaust is the most obvious instance; most today would argue that intervention was a moral imperative. Others include such cases as the Rwandan genocide, the purges of Stalin, various religious extremes of the pre-Westphalian era, or even the Japanese internment. These were instances where evil was clear; the difficulty arises in naming a perpetrator.

The Rwandan genocide is a strong case of where defining an actual criminal is difficult. Juvenal Habyarimana, the president of Rwanda, and his wife Agathe, the two responsible for instigating much of the Hutu-Tutsi hatred, were dead early into the genocide. Defining an actual leader of the conflict remains difficult; various genocidaires have been tried over the years for their crimes. Yet in the end, no one can walk away and name one perpetrator, one evil, one target of hatred in the Rwandan genocide. This is what makes post-genocide Rwanda so interesting (in only the most morbid of senses). Many Tutsis are forced to live next to men and women who killed loved ones, as the government pardoned all Hutus for their actions. Few will deny that the vast majority of the Hutu population openly participated in the genocide. But do we blame the Hutu race for their role in the genocide? Often forgotten was the genocide next door in Burundi, where Tutsis slaughtered Hutus. The moral twists and turns of the Rwandan genocide create one of those instances where lashing out seems too abrupt. There is no focal point of evil, like in the Holocaust. No face behind the slaughter. There were those like Hassan Ngeze who enflamed the rage of the Hutu population, but he was merely a mouthpiece for the ideology that drove the slaughter.

So now we ask: in the case of the Rwandan genocide, how would a vigilante find a proper target? This creates a moral limbo in which defining who is to blame for a crime is nearly impossible due to the nature of the crime itself and the manner in which it was perpetrated. The action was beyond any kind of doubt evil. Yet who is accountable? Where is the line in which vigilantism is justified drawn?

This is obviously a question with no clear answer. As a result, I'm hoping to get comments on the topic answering these questions to get some good disussion going. Can a nation intervene in the affairs of another nation where the issue is not one of black and white?