Ban Ki Moon & R2P

Ban Ki Moon and R2P

Ian Williams | August 3, 2009

Editor: John Feffer

Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org

Kofi Annan's greatest achievement as UN secretary general was his deft steering of the UN General Assembly to accept the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine at the 2005 World Summit.

Rather than attempting the impossible task of rewriting the UN Charter, Annan got the assembled delegates to reinterpret it. The assembled government leaders declared that the threats to international peace and security that came under the organization's remit included crimes against humanity, even when committed by a sovereign state within its borders.

Annan's successor Ban Ki Moon is a staunch supporter of the concept of R2P. The report he delivered last week, as requested in 2005, framed the discussion in a way that precluded reopening the principle. But opponents at the General Assembly and their ideological allies outside were sedulously determined to weaken R2P in practice as much as possible.

The Chinese delegate, for instance, stood the whole concept on its head by declaring that the UN must not waver from "the principles of respecting state sovereignty and non-interference of internal affairs." In contrast, Ban's report referred with more nuance to the "abiding principles of responsible sovereignty."
Debating R2P

To avert attempts to reverse the 2005 declaration R2P's proponents, not least the UN secretariat, are keeping to a tightly written script. R2P isn't the same as humanitarian intervention, they argue. Its three pillars are the responsibility of sovereign states to prevent crimes against their people, the responsibility of the international community to detect and avert such criminal situations, and the responsibility to apply varying degrees of coercion against the perpetrators from monitoring to sanctions to, if necessary, military intervention.

Proponents of R2P stress that only the UN Security Council can authorize such intervention. Ban Ki Moon's report, however, does mention the General Assembly's Uniting for Peace procedure, which the United States originally invoked to fight the Korean war in spite of the Soviet veto in the Security Council. Washington has since dismissed the procedure after the Palestinians used it to bypass the U.S. veto for Israel.

Humanitarian intervention — invoked by Hitler in the Sudetenland and Japan in Manchuria — is indeed a slippery and easily abused concept. Most recently, Tony Blair's attempt to justify the invasion of Iraq as humanitarian intervention and Moscow's attempt to invoke in Georgia the principle it denied in Kosovo show the dangers.

Of course, expediency is a global disease. Cuba, which sent Che Guevara to lead rebellions across the globe, is a determined advocate of national sovereignty. Ironically, some of the most determined upholders of state sovereignty are heirs to the Leninist tradition which, in the name of proletarian internationalism, took the Red Army variously to Warsaw, Budapest, and Hungary. One of the most vocal opponents is Hugo Chavez's government, which has hardly been reticent to interfere in the politics of the neighbors.
Chomsky's Intervention

The president of the General Assembly invited noted critic of U.S. foreign policy Noam Chomsky to address the audience on the issue of R2P. Chomsky quite rightly raised the question of why there was no intervention in East Timor or why the UN stood by as Israel attacked Lebanon and Gaza. However, he claimed that the NATO air raids on Serbia actually precipitated the worst atrocities in Kosovo. This latter claim isn't only untrue but morally unpalatable in its spurious causality, like claiming that the British air raids on Germany precipitated the Nazi gas chambers. But at least Chomsky admitted that atrocities had taken place in Kosovo, which is much farther than some of his would-be acolytes have gone.

It also begs the question: Does Chomsky want international action to stop atrocities in Gaza, the Congo, or situations like Timor, or is he only opposed to "Western" interventions? Indeed, the astute delegate from Ghana took him to task for failing to address the principle of "noninterference." The African Union's charter specifically adopted "non-indifference." Its charter includes the organization's obligation to intervene.

Chomsky is quite right to point out the core weakness of the R2P proposals, which puts the onus of decision-making on the Security Council. The permanent five members of the Security Council (P5) use their veto power to protect their friends even as they accuse others of doing likewise. China protects Sudan, North Korea, and Zimbabwe, in the latter case following in British footsteps, since Britain vetoed resolutions on Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in times past. France covers for Morocco in Western Sahara. The United States has until now automatically covered for Israel, and Russia for Serbia. Britain and the United States were confident that they could use their vetoes to prevent their invasion of Iraq from appearing on the Security Council agenda just as Beijing ensures the exclusion of Taiwan from the UN and the issues of Tibet and the Uighurs from its agenda.

This expediency has given opponents of the R2P plenty of ammunition, even if their high-minded declarations about the sacredness of sovereignty tend to conceal an ugly, oligarchic self-interest. In effect, apologists for authoritarian sovereignty imply that they would happily let all murders go unchecked because some states get away with it. This argument boils down to saying that if the United States can do something, everybody else can as well, an anti-imperialism that ends up playing into the hands of leaders like Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Fidel Castro, and Kim Jong Il. Despite their disparate ideologies, these authoritarian leaders share a deep rhetorical attachment to their countries' national sovereignty combined with a cavalier disregard for the sovereignty of others, including their own citizenry.
The Problem of Implementation

While the 2005 summit overturned the principle that what governments did within their national borders was no one else's concern, it has some way to go before achieving practical implementation. In fact, despite Bolivarian bluster from Venezuela and a few others, the real problem is not the possibility of a complaisant Security Council authorizing dubiously humanitarian interventions. The problem remains the paralysis of the body in the face of humanitarian disasters. In fact, conditioning the principle on reform of the Security Council is tantamount to making it contingent on pigs flying in formation past UN headquarters.

The possibility, the probability, and even better the certainty, of retribution would surely give pause to future leaders. The R2P principle will in the end come to life because of global public opinion forcing action. For example, even China was forced to moderate its support of Sudan in the face of international public opinion.

But Ban Ki Moon, who is tougher than his mild diplomatic manner may suggest, strongly reminded delegates that the "Secretary-General has an obligation to tell the Security Council — and in this case the General Assembly as well — what it needs to know, not what it wants to hear." His report says that the Secretary General "must be the spokesperson for the vulnerable and the threatened when their Governments become their persecutors instead of their protectors or can no longer shield them from marauding armed groups," and he singles out the P5, who "bear particular responsibility because of the privileges of tenure and the veto power they have been granted under the Charter. I would urge them to refrain from employing or threatening to employ the veto in situations of manifest failure to meet obligations relating to the responsibility to protect...and to reach a mutual understanding to that effect."

Ban can do a great deal to foment that global opinion, and is giving every appearance of wanting to do so. While the U.S. press treats Ban as invisible, the rest of the world has leant him their ears. In a recent global poll, he was the second most trusted global figure after Obama. Only global public opinion can force the P5 to live up to their responsibilities — the first of which is to ensure that no regime, not even their close friends, has a guaranteed veto against international action.

The single most significant step the United States could take to disarm some of the critics is to reverse John Bolton's dubiously legal "unsigning" of the Rome Treaty on the International Criminal Court. Washington can hardly call upon the Sudanese to respect the indictment of a court that it has refused to accept itself. To ensure greater global public support for R2P — and answer some of the legitimate charges of the doctrine's critics — the United States must end its own double standards on international treaties and military intervention. Obama is more likely than any president in 40 years to make moves in that direction, so R2P has more of a future than it did a year ago.

Senior Foreign Policy In Focus analyst Ian Williams is a journalist and author. Much of his work can be found on his blog, Deadline Pundit.

Intervention and indifference

Ian Williams: Intervention and indifference
Tribune
August 3, 2009

Two centuries ago, at the height of a war for its survival against Napoleon, the Royal Navy diverted ships to West Africa for the anti-slavery patrol. Those who wanted the trade to continue – which was pretty much every other nation except Haiti – attacked British motives as sordid, commercial and imperialist. In fact, it was the result of a huge upswelling of public opinion, strong and evangelical enough to overcome some of the most powerful commercial interests in the country.

Similar cynical accusations were bruited last week at the United Nations when the UN General Assembly debated Ban Ki-moon’s report on the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P), which was Kofi Annan’s greatest achievement as UN Secretary General. He had steered 150 heads of states, and their representatives present, to accept unanimously the concept at the 2005 World Summit.

Rather than the impossible task of rewriting the UN Charter, Annan persuaded the assembled leaders to reinterpret it and declare that the threats to international peace and security which come under the organization’s remit include crimes against humanity, even when committed internally by a sovereign state.

Annan’s successor, Ban Ki-moon, is a staunch supporter of the concept and his report framed the discussion in a way that precluded overturning the principle. However, opponents at the General Assembly and their ideological allies outside were determined to undermine R2P and weaken its implementation as much as possible. In this, they were helped by the President of the General Assembly, the Nicaraguan Sandinista foreign minister Miguel D’Escoto, who questioned the document’s undermining of the state sovereignty on which he claimed the whole UN system was based.

Much less subtly, the Chinese delegate stood the whole concept of R2P on its head by declaring that there must be no “wavering of the principles of respecting state sovereignty and non-interference of internal affairs”. In contrast, Ban’s report referred with more nuance to the “abiding principles of responsible sovereignty.”

Humanitarian intervention – invoked by Hitler in the Sudetenland and Japan in Manchuria – is indeed a slippery and abusable concept. Tony Blair’s attempt to justify the invasion of Iraq as humanitarian intervention, and Moscow’s attempt to invoke in Georgia the principle it denied in Kosovo show the dangers.

Noam Chomsky, invited to speak by D’Escoto, raised the question of why there was no intervention in East Timor or why the UN stood by as Israel attacked Lebanon and Gaza, but claims the Nato air raids on Serbia actually precipitated the worst atrocities. This latter claim is not only untrue, but also morally unpalatable in its spurious causality. It is like claiming the RAF raids on Germany precipitated the gas chambers.

It also begs the question: does he want international action to stop atrocities in Gaza, the Congo or situations like Timor? Or is he only opposed to “Western” interventions? Would he have opposed the slave patrol that rescued hundreds of thousands from bondage on the grounds that imperialist Britain was hypocritical?

It probably did not impress him that Britain was again on the side of the angels, as Mark Malloch Brown spoke firmly in favour of the concept – and forbore to mention that, as UN Deputy Secretary General and unlike most of the current British Cabinet, he had publicly cast doubts on the Iraq war.

The astute delegate from Ghana took Chomsky to task for failing to address the principle of “non-interference” – the practice of countries’ standing by in the face of horrors across a sovereign border. The African Union’s charter specifically adopted “non-indifference.” It includes the obligation to intervene.

As enunciated by the UN, the R2P principle puts the onus of decision-making on the Security Council, which leads to further accusations of double standards, since the permanent five sit in judgment on others armed with vetoes to protect themselves. However, the problem with the Security Council has rarely been vigorous interventionism but active indifference.

Even so, there is plenty of finger pointing to do. China protects Sudan, North Korea and Zimbabwe, in the latter case following in British footsteps, since Britain once vetoed resolutions on Rhodesia. France covers for Morocco in Western Sahara, while the United States has until now automatically covered for Israel and Russia for Serbia. Equally Britain and the US were confident that their vetoes would stop their invasion of Iraq being on the Security Council agenda, just as Beijing ensures that Taiwan is excluded from the UN and Tibet and the Uighurs from its agenda.

This expediency has given opponents of the R2P plenty of ammunition, even if their high-minded declarations about the sacredness of sovereignty barely camouflage the ugly self-interest underneath. In effect, apologists for authoritarian sovereignty imply that they would happily let all murders go unchecked because some states get away with it.

Maybe it is time for Britain, perhaps with France, to set an example, and either renounce or set strict limits on any future use of the veto. It could also resume voting for Middle Eastern resolutions instead of abstaining to cover for US vetoes. It may be just what Barack Obama wants to help him with his new Middle East policy. After all, the old one, more than anything else, has made a mockery of Western pretensions to global values.

Sublime Intervention!

Here's the full text: check the Guardian Comment is Free to see the Care in the Commentary it evoked.

Sublime intervention
It is difficult for some people to accept that sometimes countries do a good deed because it is actually the right thing to do.

Ian Williams

Those who make a fetish of opposition to "liberal interventionism" would have probably defended the slave trade.

As sundry public figures engage in "we are sorrier than you are" competitions about the slave trade to commemorate the 200th anniversary of its abolition in the British empire, it is worth looking at the significance of what followed. It was perhaps the first clear example of humanitarian intervention in modern history.

At the height of a war for survival with Napoleon - who was incidentally fighting bloody wars in the Caribbean to reintroduce slavery to Martinique and Guadeloupe - popular pressure forced the Royal Navy to send ships to West Africa to set up the anti-slavery patrol.

The Royal Navy, which incurred heavy casualties from disease, spent decades trying to suppress the trade, within the constraints of international law, and with varying degrees of active resistance from the French, Americans, Spanish and Portuguese. This happened despite the sugar and slavery lobby in parliament, and even though the British government at home was one of the most repressive ever - think of the Peterloo Massacre in 1919.

Tony Blair devalued the concept of "humanitarian intervention" with his retrospective invocation of it to justify the invasion of Iraq.

But that is no excuse for the anti-Samaritans of the so-called left who sneer at "liberal interventionism" as if there was something shameful at wanting to stop mass mayhem against people in foreign countries.

It is a difficult idea for some people to accept that sometimes people and countries do good deeds - like fight against the slave trade - because it is the right thing to do.

Looking at some of the guff we still see about the intervention over Kosovo, for example, I can imagine some of our current wannabe commissars' reaction if they had been around in 1807. They would have denounced the anti-slavery patrol as imperialist intervention in west African kingdoms' sovereign affairs. They would have denied that anyone died in the trade, or maybe excused the trade as a necessary step to economic development and questioned the motives of the anti-slave trade movement, filled as it was with protestant evangelists.

In fact, the modern concept of humanitarian intervention was invoked when Saddam Hussein was attacking Kurdistan after the Gulf war. When I asked the UN legal department at the time what the legal basis was, they muttered that Hitler had invoked it to invade Czechoslovakia, citing maltreatment of the Sudeten Germans. It was easy to see that, as precedents went, this one was not going far.

It was probably Blair's abuse of the concept in Iraq that led to the international commission set up by the Canadian government to rename it "the responsibility to protect", which was adopted by the UN in 2005.

Their formulation took account of the possibilities for expediency inherent in the idea.

The commission stressed that the international community - not a self-selected state - should only override state sovereignty to stop continuing or anticipated killing. It should be clear that the operations had a real chance of success and would not make things worse. Despite Blair's invocation of humanitarian reasons, his invasion of Iraq failed on almost every test of the principles - while Kosovo passed most of them.

Although the Kosovo intervention was tainted by Clinton's refusal to let it go to the UN, the support of every country in western Europe went some way to meeting that principle - and when the Russians tried to raise the issue, they were trounced in the voting. Darfur would clearly pass most of them - except for the UN security council mandate, and even there, a quarter of the diplomatic effort expended on rounding up a posse against Iran would surely get a resolution against Sudan.

Humanitarian intervention is like brain surgery: sometimes essential, but only to be used as a very last resort, and then only in the most careful way. Progress is slow. Two hundred years after the British attempt to outlaw the slave trade, the Jinjaweed are riding with impunity. But I hope it's not for much longer.

When it comes to damming rivers of blood, I would rather be a sneered at as a liberal interventionist than be a Leninist Pontius Pilate washing his hands of mass murder anywhere else in the world, defending the "sovereignty" of any mass murderer who happens to claim to be anti-imperialist.