A human rights activist and a scholar clashed yesterday in a discussion at the Law School on humanitarian intervention in Iraq, Bosnia and Somalia.

Director of the Arms Project at Human Rights Watch Kenneth Anderson, who will be a guest lecturer at the Law School this fall, told a group of 75 that his organization supports the enforcement of the "no-fly zone" in Iraqi Kurdistan.

"Based on what had earlier gone on [in the area], it seemed over-whelmingly probable that a retaking of the area by Iraq would result in genocide," Anderson said. "There is a duty to intervene where genocide is imminent or happening."

But Law School visiting professor Philip Alston, chair of a United Nations human rights committee, called the Human Rights Watch overly legalistic.

Before turning to intervention, "we have to ensure that other possibilities are exhausted," Alston said. "The current mania of interventions doesn't do that."

Anderson said Human Rights Watch supports "armed protection of necessary delivery of humanitarian aid" in Bosnia.

"Where sovereignty is dissolved sufficiently, it devolves on the international community," Anderson said of Somalia. He said the use of starvation as a weapon and the dissolution of civil society justify intervention in that nation.

Anderson warned against appealing too much to human rights, saying it could lead to a legalistic view and could "lead very, very mistakenly into the idea that we are doing police work."

Alston said each of the three instances of intervention could be presented in a "very cynical light" to which he was partly sympathetic.

Incidents in Iraq can be seen as purely Western interest at work, with the no fly zone only established because of Western embarrassment over the handling of the Kurdish plight, Alston said.

Similarly, the Somalian situation can be viewed as President Bush's "valedictory performance," Alston said. And he described Bosnia's crisis as a non-third world event with consequences for all of Europe.

Alston expressed concern that unilateral intervention by the U.S. sets a dangerous precedent for other na-tions. But before international organ-izations undertake multilateral intervention, he said, they must consider "practical feasibility."

Alston said he felt people were carried away with military solutions. "Another Vietnam, which Bosnia could be, will unwhet appetites for intervention," he said.