Military Humanitarianism: Too Much or Too Little?
This column by Thomas G. Weiss is part of Global Policy’s e-book, ‘Lessons from Intervention in the 21st Century: Legality, Legitimacy and Feasibility', edited by David Held and Kyle McNally. Contributions from academics and practitioners will be serialised on Global Policy until the e-book’s release in the summer of 2014. Find out more here or join the debate on Twitter #GPintervention.
There hardly has been too much but rather too little deployment of military force for human protection purposes. The UN Security Council approved the March 2011 international action against Libya, the first such use of military muscle since the contested 1999 operation in Kosovo by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). In between an essential norm broke new international public policy ground, namely the “responsibility to protect” (or R2P) whose development has proceeded apace since the 2001 publication of a report with that title by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS).
Until Libya, the sharp end of the R2P stick had been replaced by skittishness from diplomats, UN staff, scholars, and policy analysts. Libya was a new high-water mark for R2P, but with high tides come high risks. International action forestalled a massacre in Benghazi and resulted in regime change in Tripoli. Yet subsequently a predictable chorus sang a tune of buyer’s remorse—especially in the Third World with Brazil taking the lead in calling for “responsibility while protecting” (RwP).
Much ink and printer toner customarily are spilled about legality and legitimacy, but feasibility (measured by the existence of political will and military capacity) ultimately determines whether, when, and where to protect and assist vulnerable populations. However shocking to the conscience a particular emergency and however hard or soft the applicable public international law, when political will and a military capacity exist, humanitarian space will open and civilians will be assisted and protected.
In Libya the moral, legal, political, and military dimensions dovetailed nicely under the responsibility to protect. Rather than speaking truth to power, R2P’s value-added was speaking truth with power. In Syria only the moral dimensions of R2P were apparent. Hence, unlucky civilians were slaughtered while the lucky ones fled.
Security Council paralysis over Syria illustrated the clear controversy of international legality and so-called legitimacy. In comparison with Muammar el-Gaddhafi’s version, the bloodshed and suffering inflicted by the Bashir al-Assad regime were far worse—we are still counting but upwards of 135,000 dead and almost 10 million displaced (inside and outside the country). It was not the R2P norm that explained action in Libya and inaction in Syria but rather geopolitics and collective spinelessness, respectively. “The permanence of inconsistency” is Aidan Hehir’s description for the politics of R2P—actually, for the politics of anything.
The World Summit Outcome should be labelled “R2P lite” because unlike the original ICISS recommendations, the September 2005 summit made Security Council approval a sine qua non rather than merely highly desirable. The baby of potential international action was thrown out with the holy water of legality and legitimacy. Yet Canada had convened the ICISS precisely because Rwanda and Kosovo, in different ways, had demonstrated the futility of being held hostage to the lowest common denominator of Security Council decision-making in the face of mass atrocities. Instead of doing too little too late (in Rwanda) or too much too early (according to some, in Kosovo), a concept was needed to finesse stooping to the lowest-common-denominator in the council.
The ICISS of course stressed the central role of the UN Charter and urged the Security Council to act to halt mass atrocities. But if it does not, the World Summit decision leaves humanitarians and victims where former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan was in September 1999 when he shocked his diplomatic audience in the General Assembly Hall. He asked about what their reactions would have been had there actually been a state or a group of states willing to act in April 1994 amidst the ongoing mass murder in the Great Lakes region without the Security Council’s blessing. “Should such a coalition have stood aside,” he asked rhetorically, “and allowed the horror to unfold?”
In UN diplomatic circles, answers remain equivocal. However, the answer would have been a resounding “no” from any of the 800,000 dead Rwandans—or by murdered Sudanese or Sri Lankans, Syrians or Congolese.
The responsibility to protect is a principle and not a tactic. Friends and foes point to the commission’s central conceptual contribution and value added in reframing sovereignty as contingent rather than absolute. And that principle remained intact in Syria even if international action was regretfully absent.(1)
In fact, the transformation of international attitudes is remarkable if we contrast the deafening silence that greeted the 1982 massacre by Hafez al-Assad of some 40,000 people in an artillery barrage of Hama with the steady stream of hostile condemnations about his son’s murderous machinations: the UN’s Joint Office on the Prevention of Genocide and R2P called for a halt to crimes against humanity; the Human Rights Council condemned the crimes by a crushing vote and published a report detailing extensive crimes; the United States, the European Union, and other states imposed sanctions; the Arab League condemned the actions, formulated a peace plan, and sent human rights monitors; and the UN General Assembly initially condemned the violence and supported the peace plan with a two-thirds majority and on subsequent occasions even more overwhelmingly (only 12 of 193 states voted against the resolutions) condemned Assad’s unbridled crackdown and mass atrocities and specifically called for his resignation.
Dilemmas remain as Libya—a weak state with no history of democracy and plenty of evidence of feuds and bitterness, as well as 200,000 militia—hurtles headlong into a new era without the kind of post-intervention support that the West provided in Kosovo. We should be clear: military force is not a panacea, and its use is not a cause for celebration. That said and despite substantial ongoing transitional problems in Libya, at least concerted international action in 2011 halted Col. Gaddhafi’s campaign of mass atrocities.
Meanwhile Syria continued to hemorrhage until the use of chemical weapons in August 2013 led to threats of force and ultimately accelerated international diplomacy to dismantle them.
That deployment may have been a game changer. The threat of US air strikes—despite the lack of support worldwide among populations and parliaments—seems to have catalyzed a frenzy of diplomacy, Russian engagement, and a hasty but seemingly successful agreement to dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons stock under the auspices of the United Nations and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. In terms of crimes against humanity and war crimes, what could be more abhorrent and less discriminating than the use of chemical weapons?
While they could have well justified an R2P response, they did not. Again, geopolitical calculations trumped the protection of civilians.
While of little solace to Syria’s victims and their families, clarion calls have reaffirmed the R2P principle. In comparison with Libya, the “why not” in Syria was clear: the politics in the country and at the United Nations were totally different—demonstrated by several actual or threatened double vetoes from Russian and China—as well as the geography and the demography; the military challenge was far tougher; and the potential costs by 2013 appeared to outweigh the benefits of coercion as insurgent atrocities gradually replicated the regime’s. (2) Syria was distinctly more complicated, chancy, and confused than Libya.
Does this mean that we have heard the death knell of R2P? Hardly, because in late 2013 the Security Council authorized a combined French and African Union R2P action to counter the Central African Republic’s genocidal chaos. In case anyone was uncertain, Syria demonstrated that a robust R2P response is never automatic. Widespread diplomatic and public lamentations were audible along with vocal rejections of action to counter government-deployed tanks, warships, and heavy weapons against civilians.
Hopefully, Libya was not an aberration. Indeed, we should hope that NATO’s action in Kosovo—appropriately characterized as “illegal but legitimate” by the Independent International Commission on Kosovo as a justified departure from the Charter regime (3) —also was not the last of its kind when the Security Council confronts predictable paralysis. Both were feasible and both were legitimate although Kosovo suffered from the lack of a Security Council legal imprimatur.
Human abattoirs are not inevitable. We are capable of uttering no more Holocausts, Cambodias, and Rwandas—and occasionally mean it.
Thomas G. Weiss is Presidential Professor of Political Science at The CUNY Graduate Center and Director Emeritus of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, and research professor at SOAS, University of London. Past president of the International Studies Association (2009-10) and past chair of the Academic Council on the UN System (2006-9), he also was research director of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. He has written extensively about multilateral approaches to international peace and security, humanitarian action, and sustainable development. On this topic, his latest authored books are Humanitarian Business (2013), Humanitarian Intervention: Ideas in Action (2012), and Humanitarianism Contested? (2011); and his latest edited volumes are Rallying to the R2P Cause? The International Politics of Human Rights (2014) and Responsibility to Protect: Cultural Perspectives in the Global South (2011).
Notes
(1) For interpretations by commissioners, see Gareth Evans, The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All (Washington, DC: Brookings, 2008); and Ramesh Thakur, The United Nations, Peace and Security: From Collective Security to the Responsibility to Protect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). See also Alex J. Bellamy, Responsibility to Protect: The Global Effort to End Mass Atrocities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009); Anne Orford, International Authority and the Responsibility to Protect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and Aidan Hehir, The Responsibility to Protect: Rhetoric, Reality and the Future of Humanitarian Intervention (Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: PalgraveMacmillan, 2012). The author’s interpretation is Humanitarian Intervention: Ideas in Action, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012).
(2) For a comparison, see Thomas G. Weiss, “Humanitarian Intervention and US Policy,” in Great Decisions 2012 (New York: Foreign Policy Association, 2012), 59-70.
(3) Independent International Commission on Kosovo, Kosovo Report: Conflict, International Response, Lessons Learned (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). A minority of international lawyers see an emerging customary law on humanitarian intervention; but most disagree because the Charter regime and international society are threatened by ignoring the Security Council. See Christopher Greenwood, Humanitarian Intervention: Law and Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Michael Byers and Simon Chesterman, “Changing Rules about Rules? Unilateral Humanitarian Intervention and the Future of International Law,” in Humanitarian Intervention: Ethical, Legal and Political Dilemmas, ed. J. F. Holzgrefe and Robert O. Keohane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 177-203.
