While it may be a cliché that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions,” it is also true that, as Alain de Botton writes, “the problem with clichés is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones.” Both of these concepts sprang to mind recently as I read various reports regarding gays and lesbians in Iraq being harassed and killed – becoming victims of “sexual cleansing,” to use the term the international press seems to favor – despite the US’s intervention in the country beginning earlier this decade. I’m usually the first to advocate for greater awareness and, when appropriate, intervention in international gay issues, but what happens when trying to help sexual minorities in another part of the world actually makes things worse for them?

As recently as last week, and going back for years since the invasion of Iraq, news has been leaking out that militias and gangs in and around Baghdad have specifically targeted sexual minorities and have tortured, raped and killed them. In some of the most horrific stories, a new method of execution seems to be favored which involves gluing shut the anuses of known or suspected homosexuals and then feeding them laxatives.

While these facts are troubling and shocking enough, it’s even more disconcerting to realize that this type of violence has become more common since the intervention of the West in the country in 2003. As noted British human rights activist Peter Tatchell wrote, “Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, homophobia and the terrorisation of LGBT people has got much worse. The western invasion of Iraq in 2003 ended the tyrannical Baathist dictatorship. But it also destroyed a secular state, created chaos and lawlessness and allowed the flourishing of religious fundamentalism. The result has been an Islamist-inspired homophobic terror campaign against LGBT Iraqis.”

Obviously, the main goal of this country’s intervention in societies like Iraq and Afghanistan was not to protect sexual minorities (especially considering the administration which was in power here at the time), and the responsibility for the deaths of these LGBT individuals in these countries can in no way be rested solely on the US’s shoulders. However, as I’ve mentioned in a previous column, the promotion of human rights is always implicit, and in this case explicit, in all of America’s foreign policy decisions. If you accept the (admittedly dubious) claim that the intervention into these countries was meant to protect all of their citizens, then the current situation can be seen as nothing less than an extremely negative side effect of an otherwise noble act.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the only example of this phenomenon of intentions not matching results that I can think of right off of the top of my head. The US is in a particularly prominent place to begin with when it comes to international queer issues. As Dennis Altman notes, whether or not it’s intentional or desirable, it is a fact that “American books, films, magazines and fashions continue to define contemporary gay and lesbian meanings for most of the world.”

A rather striking example of the problematic exporting of American gay values and definitions is how US HIV/AIDS activists working in Bolivia in the early 1990s essentially imposed a gay community on the Latin American country which didn’t exist before and in doing so inorganically created new societal divisions.

According to Timothy Wright, silence was the preferred mode of dealing with men-who-have-sex-with-men, or gente de ambiente, as they are called, in Bolivia and in some ways this silence actually accommodated homosexuals: “most choose to de-emphasize their deviant gente de ambiente identity . . . it is common for quiet familial accommodations, ‘conspiracies of silence’ . . . to allow sex-the-act to occur easily and frequently, so long as sex-the-deviant identity is kept hidden.” When HIV/AIDS groups from the US entered the country in order to fight the global epidemic in that country, an undeniably admirable cause, they immediately attempted to identify a gay community to work within.

Finding that one did not exist as they did in the US, they began to create one in order to target their efforts more effectively. In their attempts to create such a community, according to Wright, many individuals were left out: “in short, men-who-have-sex-with-men who were too rich or too poor or too masculine or too effeminate were unlikely to be attracted to the gay center or welcomed as members of the emerging ‘gay community.’” By doing this, these organizations actually created a situation of division and discrimination despite the fact that their attempts were to actually bring a group together and protect it.

So, is the situation totally bleak? As I mentioned in an earlier post about gay rights and Asian values, the need for cultural sensitivity should always be kept in mind, but how does one guarantee that in doing something good, something unintentionally bad doesn’t occur? At what stage in the process should such considerations be addressed? Do the above examples mean countries should never become involved on the behalf of sexual minorities elsewhere in the international community for fearing of making things worse? I know I’ve provided more questions than answers this week, but, as always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on these very complex issues.