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Preparing the Way for International Protection - Nations and States - Global Policy Forum Preparing the Way for International Protection
The Globe and Mail
December 19, 2001
The world changes by increments.
In 1942, the British Foreign Office and the U.S. State Department received cables warning of Nazi plans to annihilate millions of Jews using poisonous gas, but the Holocaust happened anyway.
More than 50 years later, as word spread in Rwanda of Hutu plans to wipe out the Tutsi minority, Canadian general Roméo Dallaire, heading up a small peacekeeping mission there, sent a stream of urgent messages to United Nations headquarters in New York. With 5,000 soldiers and a strong mandate, he said, he could head off the anticipated mass killings. The UN offered neither. In the end, 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were annihilated.
Sometimes you have to look closely to spot the increments. Fortunately, one occurred yesterday. And fittingly, after the courageous efforts of Gen. Dallaire, Canada was behind it, answering a challenge to the world from UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
"If humanitarian intervention is an unacceptable assault on sovereignty," Mr. Annan said last year, "how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica -- to gross and systematic violations of human rights that offend every precept of our common humanity?"
Canada responded by creating an independent international commission, with a research office in Ottawa and co-chairs from Algeria and Australia, to seek a global consensus on how to ensure the UN will act the next time a Rwanda looms. Its report, The Responsibility to Protect, presented yesterday to the UN, argues that an international duty to save civilians at risk trumps the sovereign rights of states.
It's not the first blow struck against the rights of sovereignty. In 1948, the three-year-old United Nations set out its Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. After the Nazi death camps, the sovereign rights of states could never again be seen as absolute. Article 8 gave the world body broad powers to "take such action" as it considered appropriate "for the prevention and suppression" of acts of genocide.
That sounded bold, but turned out to be a small step. As did the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, also in 1948, which limited the authority of sovereign states to bring harm to their own people. (More recent steps include progress toward an international criminal court, and Britain's extradition of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.) Most conflicts are now within individual states, rather than between them; and civilians make up nine in 10 victims, up from one in 10 a century ago.
What would trigger intervention? Only the most extreme situations involving large-scale loss of life -- actual or anticipated -- whether there were genocidal intent or not; or ethnic cleansing, be it carried out by killing, forced expulsion, acts of terror or rape.
Critics will say such interventions will be cruelly selective, based on Western self-interest or ethnocentrism. The possibility is real, but it's no argument against preparing the legal and political groundwork for a response to the next humanitarian crisis. The UN's stunning failures of the past decade, not only in Rwanda but in Somalia in 1992-93 and in Bosnia in 1995, where thousands were massacred in UN-designated "safe areas," underscore the need for such preparation.
It remains to be seen how the UN machinery would work. The veto power of its five permanent Security Council members is a major stumbling block. China, Russia and the United States are likely to oppose any weakening of sovereignty. The report's authors seem to be hoping that international political pressure will persuade them to change their minds.
How realistic is that? Even the authors seem skeptical. They refer to the UN's inner tension between political realism and international idealism. Not surprising for a report that originated with former foreign affairs minister Lloyd Axworthy, they side with idealism.
As we said, it's an increment.
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