Crisis and response - part one

The “responsibility to protect,” or R2P, endorsed by world leaders at the United Nations in 2005, is a call to action - not the opening lines of a Socratic dialogue by diplomats. Its origins lie in our collective failure to prevent or halt mass killings and ethnic cleansing in Rwanda, the Balkans and East Timor in the 1990s.

The goal of the innovative formulation by the Canadian-sponsored but independent international commission was to increase the chances that in future, such calls to action to protect populations at risk of atrocity crimes would be answered: rapidly, effectively and properly. To that end, we restricted the circumstances under which R2P would apply, setting the bar for military intervention very high, and outlined tight political and operational safeguards against its abuse.

The mix of recent cases of inter-group armed violence and untended victims of natural disasters confirms the need for R2P, the risks of straying too widely from it and the difficulties of activating it even when warranted.

The death toll from Cyclone Nargis could surpass 100,000. The numbers of displaced, homeless, in desperate need of immediate humanitarian relief, is as high as two million. The military junta balked at opening Burma’s borders to supplies of international humanitarian aid and skilled humanitarian relief personnel. Reflecting his humanitarian background, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner suggested that the Security Council should invoke R2P.

At first blush, this is a strange call. R2P’s provenance is protecting at-risk populations from genocide, war crimes and ethnic cleansing. Broadening it to cover contingencies like nuclear proliferation, environmental vandalism, HIV-AIDS and natural disasters may have the perverse effect of weakening support for R2P when we face the next Rwanda tomorrow - without materially helping the needy today.

In our original report, we identified “overwhelming natural or environmental catastrophes, where the state concerned is either unwilling or unable to cope, and significant loss of life is occurring or threatened” as among the conscience-shocking situations justifying international intervention. This was not included in the 2005 UN document, but “crimes against humanity” was and would provide the necessary legal cover to sidestep the recalcitrant generals and give help directly to the afflicted people.

While the legal case is powerful, the politics against it are compelling, which explains why it was dropped in 2005. Unless the Western powers want another war in the jungles of South-East Asia, a war of relief delivery that will quickly turn into one of national liberation against foreign occupiers, it is better not to speak this language at all.

John Holmes, the top UN humanitarian official and a former British ambassador to France, described Kouchner’s call as unnecessarily confrontational. The British cabinet minister for international development, Douglas Alexander, rejected it as incendiary. Britain’s UN ambassador, John Sawers, said R2P did not apply to natural disasters.

Invoking R2P will make the generals, who are beyond shame, dig in their heels even more firmly. It will antagonise the South-East Asian countries, whose political support is vital to communicating with the generals and persuading them to open up. It will alienate China, India and Japan, the three big Asian powers whose backing is essential for delivering any meaningful relief in Burma. It will prove divisive within the UN, reintroducing the North-South polarisation over “humanitarian intervention” that the R2P formula transcended.

Faced with firming opposition at all these levels, will the Western powers, already overstretched militarily in Afghanistan and Iraq, and increasingly despised around the world for belligerent machismo as their default mode of engagement with regimes that don’t kowtow to them, be prepared to use military force? If not, they will damage their own political credibility and that of R2P by invoking it ineffectually. Analysts who pride themselves on intellectual toughness are surprisingly limp in following through the logic of the after-effects of their calls to arms, a syndrome we saw in the lead-up to the Iraq war.

Darfur remains everyone’s favourite poster-case for R2P intervention. An R2P-type situation arose in Kenya earlier this year, when international attention and African reaction was engaged after the killings inside the church very much along R2P lines. A potential R2P situation might arise in Zimbabwe, with the army taking charge and liquidating opponents. Possible R2P scenarios can be imagined also in Nepal, Sri Lanka and North Korea. Yet even in Darfur, military intervention against the government could trigger an even worse humanitarian carnage: there is no crisis so dire that a war cannot make it worse.

Our responses continue to be ad hoc and reactive, rather than consolidated, comprehensive and preventive. Actually acting in time and effectively when governments are guilty of mass killings should - must - form the intervention agenda of R2P.

Sins of omission during natural and environmental disasters can be better handled under the prevention, persuasion and reconstruction formulations. When Burma’s regime claims to be the “legitimate” government, the very concept is corrupted and highlights the international community’s lack of courage in confronting the illegitimacy. Hand-wringing in the aftermath of a natural or human catastrophe is proof of earlier, not post-disaster, intellectual laziness and political cowardice.

We need a “paradigm shift” from a culture of reaction to one of prevention and rebuilding which would pre-empt the need for military intervention. Millions lost their lives during the Holocaust and in Cambodia, Rwanda, Srebrenica and Darfur. After each we said “never again”, and then looked back each next time, with varying degrees of incomprehension, horror, anger and shame, asking ourselves how we could possibly have let it all happen again.

There’s another consideration. The global South, led by China, India, Brazil and South Africa, is united and negotiating for the first time from a position of strength on many global issues. Get used to it. The major Northern powers must accommodate this new reality in global negotiations like the Doha round and climate change.

The trans-Atlantic commentariat - the chattering champions of illiberal interventionism - seems to have trouble adjusting to the rise of the rest beyond the West, pontificating as if the virtuous West has divine dispensation to set the moral compass for the evil rest while refusing to give voice to their opinions.

The West should get real. If R2P can be applied to force aid at the point of guns into Burma, can it be extended to protect the Palestinians from the serial collective punishments and hardships imposed by Israel? If our sense of justice and moral outrage is to trump political calculations, then should those who waged a war of aggression in Iraq be sent for criminal trial in an international court? Like the call to invoke R2P in Burma, the net result would be, not the criminal trial of powerful leaders, but the destruction of embryonic and fragile international institutions.

In short, first do more good than harm. Invoking R2P in Burma is a three-way lose-lose option. It will complicate, not ease, the delivery of relief; fracture the delicate consensus on R2P at the UN; and diminish the chances of protecting victims of atrocity crimes, which should be the primary focus of R2P. Maybe, after the humanitarian emergency has ended and if the action seems practicable, the Burmese generals could be tried for “crimes against humanity” at the International Criminal Court.