A Meaningless Pledge

September 15, 2005

(Editor’s Note: The Carpetbagger Report, as regular readers know, has joined the Coalition for Darfur, a bi-partisan online initiative created to raise awareness and resources to address the crisis. This is the latest in a series of posts from the Coalition.)

Some are hailing the inclusion of language regarding a “responsibility to protect” in the draft declaration on UN reform to be discussed during the three-day summit being held in New York.

The “Responsibility to Protect” is, according to the seminal report on the topic:

[T]he idea that sovereign states have a responsibility to protect their own citizens from avoidable catastrophe, but that when they are unwilling or unable to do so, that responsibility must be borne by the broader community of states.

The report, and the idea, were generated by the international community’s ignominious failure to intervene in situations such as the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The thinking was that it was necessary to shift the debate away from a “right to intervene,” which carries serious implications for the cherished idea of national sovereignty, and toward a “responsibility to protect” those people in danger.

After much debate, compromise and rewriting, the final text included in the draft declaration came out looking like this:

The international community, through the United Nations, also has the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means, in accordance with Chapter VI and VIII of the Charter, to help protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. In this context, we are prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council, in accordance with the UN Charter, including Chapter VII, on a case by case basis and in cooperation with relevant regional organizations as appropriate, should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities manifestly failing to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. We stress the need for the General Assembly to continue consideration of the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity and its implications, bearing in mind the principles of the Charter of the United Nations and international law. We also intend to commit ourselves, as necessary and appropriate, to help states build capacity to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and to assist those which are under stress before crises and conflicts break out.

Nowhere has the Security Council or the UN member states actually pledged to do anything. This section carries no legal obligations; rather, it merely reiterates that the UN has a responsibility “to help protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity,” which something they already an obligation to prevent under the Genocide Convention.

Note also that it doesn’t say that the UN has a “responsibility to protect” but rather a responsibility … to help protect” those at risk. That is a big difference.

As such, it is a little difficult to share Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin’s excitement.

But a Canadian-inspired initiative highlighting the world’s responsibility to protect threatened people and prevent genocides is a clear move forward, Martin said.

The doctrine “essentially says that if Rwanda occurred today that the United Nations would act,” he said, referring to the genocide that took an estimated 800,000 lives in the African country in the mid-1990s.

Considering that there is “another Rwanda” currently taking place in Darfur, why are we to expect that suddenly the UN is going to take seriously its “responsibility to protect”? Has the UN failed to act thus far solely because it lacked this one resolution? The UN has resisted acting on Darfur for two years and there is absolutely no reason to believe that this recognition of a theoretical “responsibility to protect” will have any impact on the legal or political concerns that have thus far prevented action.

If the UN and its members truly believed in the “responsibility to protect,” they would be protecting the people of Darfur, not writing resolutions vaguely promising to act when Darfur-like situations arise in the future.

The UN seems very like the Democratic Party in the US. Ritual blab, no action.

And the US, which takes little enough interest in African-Americans, takes even less (i.e., zero) in African-Africans.

  • Ed,

    Normally, I agree with you and am impressed with both your vast font of knowlege as well as the way you weild the words. I respectfully, however, disagree with you here.

    The United Nations has no power to act, but only may do so through its member nations. To the extent that the UN is all “ritual blab, no action” the blame must be placed — in great part — on the contstituant nations, especially those on the Security Council. That’s the equivalent of blaming the car (or the manufacturers) used to bomb downtown Baghdad rather than blaming the driver and the makers of the IEDs.

    Does the UN suffer from poor leadership? Probably. That, though, is a SYMPTOM and is not even close to the real problem. The leadership could be changed IF the member nations really gave a damn about effective changes in both the leadership practices AND in the actions taken by the UN.

    To my way of thinking, the problem seems to boil down to two issues:

    (A) Sovereignty — the notion that territorial borders ought to be inviolable to other nations or international agencies such as the UN, except as may be required under the Geneva Conventions (e.g., the Red Cross/Red Crescent must be given entry into nations to carry out their humanitarian activities); and

    (B) A sense of NIMBY-type anxiety, that the definition of “genocide” and whether a genocide is occurring might (or even likely will) become subjective POLITICAL determinations rather than objective HUMANITARIAN conclusions, thereby subjecting the target nation to outside governance, possible sanctions, and maybe even war crimes/crimes against humanity charges at the International Criminal Court. Most political leaders will not have enough “trust” in the goodness and decency of their fellow world leaders to surrender their political fortunes and maybe their personal lives and liberty in that manner. It is natural that politicians are reluctant to accede this much authority, where the other nations get to decide if and when the rules will apply and in what manner and to what extent; nationalism is as hard to ignore as is the need to breathe.

    With this specific resolution, however, it became even more than the usual blather once John Bolton got his hands on it and all of the other pieces of the UN’s bold initiative that is the reason for this summit. I did a simple calculation that Bolton made an average of 20 proposed changes on each and evey one of the approximately 36 pages of these bold UN initiatives. The net effect was to water down to the point of uselessness of many if not most of the initiatives designed to address poverty, nuclear proliferation, environmental damage, and economic and social justice.

    So, Bush got what he wanted in HIS United Nations Ambassador (I refuse to call him America’s ambassador to the UN): someone who will destroy the poor and the planet, but all around the world in addition to here in the States.

    Lying.Fucking.Bastards.

  • Understood, A.L., but if countries can’t bring themselves to open themselves up to outside intervention—military and otherwise—to counter genocide against their own citizens, than we’ve got a dismally long way to go before the UN gets any teeth at all. What a pity.

    I can’t help but think back to Gort, and how a universally agreed upon standard of behavior could be enforced if the political will were only there. If we can’t even bring overt genocide into such a paradigm, we’re a lot farther from Klaatu’s world than we ought to be 54 years later.

  • Countries are never going to open themselves up to protect their own citizens from genocide, mainly because, almost by definition, genocide requires state involvement – or at least complicity.

    The Genocide Convention is inherently flawed, as it makes illegal the crime of genocide, but any state that is willing to commit genocide and violate that law does obviously does not care. On top of that, they know that there are not going to face much of a threat of intervention.

    That is supposed to be where the responsibility to protect comes in. Theoretically, the UN can already intervene under Chapter VII of the charter in cases of genocide, but it has never done so. The responsibility to protect is designed to address the UN’s unwillingness to act, but the UN and its member states don’t want to act and thus are not going to legally bind themselves to do so.

    They are, in fact, legally bound, at least in theory, to prevent genocide under the Genocide Convention.

    The responsibility to protect would not really be necessary if the UN and its members took seriously their obligations under the Genocide Convention. But they don’t – but they can’t say that, and that is why we see the adoption of legally meaningless but noble-sounding passages like the responsibility to protect language above.

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