Crisis and response - part one

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.