The Libyan Crisis is in some respects a turning point in the ‘history’ of the responsibility to protect doctrine (RtoP). The case suggests that the international community is beginning to mobilize against rulers who conquer or purchase statehood to gain impunity.
Many international relations commentators are heralding the Western bombing of Libya as marking a return to the 1990s era of humanitarian intervention. The debate is largely over whether this return is to be welcomed or regretted. But a return of the moral or ethical understandings of the humanitarian interventionist 1990s is not a possibility.
There is a cycle developing in American post Cold War foreign policy that is not very different from a financial investment cycle. First, there is a cautious military action which, if successful, leads quickly to the hubris of distant military interventions, which then produces over-reach and disaster, the bubble and the burst if you will, and finally, the resolve into timidity.
The Libyan opposition has shown great courage and serious miscalculation. Principally, they failed to take into account the loyalty, training, and resources of Colonel Ghaddafi’s forces. They also failed to realize that revolutions such as theirs depend on non-violence. Influenced perhaps by calls for no-fly zones and other forms of foreign military intervention in Egypt, they have failed to understand both the importance of non-violence and the importance of self-reliance.
Western countries need to redefine their security agenda so as to return to basic core values which were seen in the 1990s. If we forsake such basic tenets, then we risk losing our sense of self; a fact which could have far worse ramifications than any specific terrorist threat or oil shortage.
One year ago Cyclone Nargis struck southern Burma. This ‘natural’ disaster brought about the death of at least 140,000 people, made homeless 800,000 more, and caused severe hardship for the inhabitants of much of the Irrawaddy Delta. The land of the Delta is Burma’s (and once the world’s) ‘rice bowl’, and so the destruction wrought here a year ago has been greatly damaging to food security amongst the poor throughout the country.
Proponents of “responsibility to protect” or “R2P” have been linking their concept in recent weeks to the waning civil war in Sri Lanka. Are they right to do so? Talk of R2P may well distract from what should be a clear and unified demand to both sides: Cease fire.
Burma is ruled by one of the world’s most brutal military regimes, guilty of every possible human rights violation. Known as the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) and led by Senior General Than Shwe, Burma’s junta is not only brutal, but illegitimate. Elections held in 1990 were overwhelmingly won by the National League for Democracy (NLD) led by Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. The world has an undoubted responsibility to protect the Burmese people from their leaders.
Where collective security avenues are blocked, could a State, or States acting jointly, lawfully intervene militarily in another State’s territory without the permission of the Government of that State to halt or prevent it from committing atrocities against its own people? What about intervention where the territorial Government is unable or unwilling to provide basic humanitarian assistance to its people in the face of natural or human-made disaster?
The dilemmas surrounding international intervention into the domestic affairs of brutal regimes such as Burma or Zimbabwe are often discussed. Nevertheless, there is also room for the less-examined question of the legitimacy of international pressure in cases where the violating state is a liberal democracy. Should this influence the set of considerations that other democratic states take into account when they decide whether or not to interfere in their domestic affairs?
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