| 18th
May, 2007
KEITH
SUTER
The situation in Darfur remains grim. Veteran United
Nations observer Rene Wadlow has just produced a detailed
assessment of what is happening at the international level.
The UN Human Rights Council established in December 2006 a
High Level Mission of five persons to assess the situation.
There
is a high level of destruction, millions of people
displaced, a large number of people killed, refugee
flows to Chad, and the danger of the conflict spreading
to Chad and the Central African Republic.
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The
High Level Mission confirmed what is already well known from
other UN reports. There is a high level of destruction, millions
of people displaced, a large number of people killed, refugee
flows to Chad, and the danger of the conflict spreading to
Chad and the Central African Republic. The most innovative
aspect of the Mission’s report was the use of the new
principle: “the responsibility to protect”.
In a landmark decision at the UN-sponsored World Summit in
September 2005, governments embraced the principle of the
responsibility to protect. The World Summit declared that
every state has the responsibility to protect its population
from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic
cleansing. When a state is unable or unwilling to do so, it
is the responsibility of the international community to take
action to ensure effective protection.
The responsibility to protect grew out of the experiences
of governments and the UN system as a whole in Rwanda, in
ex-Yugoslavia (especially the killings at Srebrenica which
had been designated as a UN-protected “safe haven”)
and the 1999 Kosovo conflict.
However the moral outrage provoked by widespread human rights
violations and humanitarian atrocities was feared by some
states as being an open door to foreign intervention for power
politics rather than for humanitarian reasons. The NATO intervention
in Kosovo in 1999 remains hotly disputed as to its motivations
and its consequences.
When the UN faces a difficult intellectual issue, it helps
set up an independent commission to study the issue. Thus
on the issue of the “right to intervene” - with
finance and secretariat help from the Canadian government
- the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty
was set up in 2000 and made its report to the UN in December
2001.
One of the commission’s two co-chairs was Gareth
Evans, who as Foreign Minister of Australia (1988-1996) had
played an active role in UN issues. As the commission report
notes: “This report is about the so-called ‘right
of humanitarian intervention’: the question of when,
if ever, it is appropriate for states to take coercive - and
in particular military - action against another state for
the purpose of protecting people at risk in that other state.
The issue of intervention for human protection purposes has
been seen as one of the most controversial and difficult of
all international relations questions.”
The skill of the commission is seen in its reversal of the
‘right to intervene’ to the ‘duty to protect,’
a duty which falls first of all to the state to protect its
own people. The commission’s report The Responsibility
to Protect moves the discussion away from a narrow focus
on the use of military force for humanitarian protection to
look at the role of the broader international community to
react when states are unable or unwilling to protect.
Wadlow says that Darfur illustrates the difficulties in converting
the principles of the responsibility to protect into a programme
of action. The goal should be to “operationalise”
the responsibility to protect by building the UN’s capacity
to respond early and effectively. Australia should take an
active role in this new era and help save the people in Darfur.
Dr Keith Suter
is a consultant on social policy with Sydney's Wesley Mission.
~ www.wesleymission.org.au.
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