Iraq and the responsibility to protect.

Publication: Behind the Headlines

Publication Date: 22-SEP-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 Canadian Institute of International Affairs

THE TRIPLE DILEMMA OF COMPLICITY, PARALYSIS, OR ILLEGALITY

"Nation shall not lift up sword against nation" but shall rather "beat their swords into ploughshares" is the founding premise of international security within the traditional paradigm, which views security in relation to the absence of wars between countries who routinely flout the biblical injunction. National security puts the individual at the service of the state and includes the ultimate acts of killing others and being killed as and when called for duty by one's government. Human security puts the individual at the centre of debate, analysis, and policy. The individual is paramount; the state is but a collective instrument to protect human life and enhance human welfare. The fundamental components of human security--the security of people against threats to personal safety or to life itself--can be put at risk by external aggression, but also by factors within a country, including "security" forces where the state is too strong and, at the other end of the spectrum, structural anarchy under conditions of state failure.

The reformulation of national security into human security is simple, yet it has profound consequences for how we see the world, how we organize our political affairs, how we make choices in public and foreign policy, and how we relate to fellow human beings from many different countries and civilizations. It also raises fundamental questions about the responsibility that we have for the security and welfare of fellow human beings across political borders. In today's seamless world, political frontiers have become less salient both for international organizations, whose rights and duties can extend beyond borders, and for states, whose responsibilities within borders can be held to international scrutiny.

The worst act of domestic criminal behaviour by a government is large-scale killing of its own people; the worst act of international criminal behaviour, attack and invasion of another country. The international history of the 20th century was in part the story of a twin-track approach to taming, through a series of normative, legislative, and institutional fetters, the impulses to both internal and external armed criminality by states. Together these measures attempted to translate an increasingly internationalized human conscience and a growing sense of international community into a new normative architecture of world order. Saddam Hussein's record of brutality was a taunting reminder of the distance yet to be traversed before we reach the first goal of eradicating domestic state criminality; his ouster and capture by unilateral force of arms was a daunting setback to the effort to outlaw and criminalize wars of choice as an instrument of state policy in international affairs.

But what if the second failure is a response to the first, if one country is attacked and invaded in order to halt or prevent atrocities inside its sovereign territory by the "legitimate" government (which already indicates a troubling appropriation and corruption of the word "legitimate")? For answers to this painful dilemma, read The Responsibility to Protect: Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (R2P). (1) R2P is not an interveners' charter, any more than the United Nations charter is a tyrants' charter behind which tyrants can shield their acts of atrocity with impunity. Within the larger framework of human security, R2P concluded that where a population is suffering serious harm, as a result of internal war, insurgency, repression, or state failure, and the government in question is unwilling or unable to halt or avert it, the norm of nonintervention yields to the international responsibility to protect. But in order to ground international intervention in a more widely shared international morality, R2P reformulates "humanitarian intervention" as "the responsibility to protect" and identifies the conditions under which the principle of state sovereignty yields to the international responsibility to protect.

The 1990s were a challenging decade for the international community with regard to conscience-shocking atrocities in many parts of the world. We generally failed to rise to the challenge, and the price of our failure was paid by large numbers of innocent men, women, and children. The debate on intervention, reinvigorated by the Iraq war in 2003, was ignited in the closing years of the last century by the critical gap between the needs and distress felt in the real world in Somalia, Rwanda, Srebrenica, and East Timor, the growing acceptance of human security as an alternative framework for security policy in today's circumstances, and the codified instruments and modalities for managing world order.

The triple policy dilemma--complicity, paralysis, or illegality--can be summarized thus:

To respect sovereignty all the time is to risk being complicit in humanitarian tragedies sometimes.

To argue that the UN Security Council must give its consent to international intervention for humanitarian purposes is to risk policy paralysis by handing over the agenda either to the passivity and apathy of the council as a whole, or to the most obstructionist member of the council, including any one of the five permanent members determined to use the veto clause.

To use force without UN authorization is to violate international law and undermine world order based on the centrality of the UN as the custodian of world conscience and the Security Council as the guardian of world peace.

Under the impact of contrasting experiences in Rwanda and Kosovo, Secretary-General Kofi Annan urged member states to come up with a new consensus on the competing visions of national and popular sovereignty--reflecting national and human security--and the resulting "challenge of humanitarian intervention." Responding to the challenge, Canadian foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy set up the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty in September...

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