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The Duty to Protect

In commenting on the massacre in Srebrenica, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan noted that a “deliberate attempt to terrorize, expel or murder an entire people must be met decisively with all necessary means.” These means can include a variety of political carrots and sticks, public condemnation, economic sanctions, or, as a last resort, some form of military intervention.

© Refugees InternationalWhile some NGOs, like the American Friends Service Committee, advocate a nonviolent approach to such conflicts, others believe that military—or at least policing—solutions may sometimes be necessary. Refugees International has recommended to the U.S. government, for example, that it should prepare “for the necessity of taking a hard line against perpetrators of genocide.”

This stance underlies a growing recognition in international circles that there is “a responsibility to protect” civilians from terrible atrocity crimes. An independent International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty—established by the Canadian government in 2000—tried to forge a consensus on these ideas. They also proposed clear guidelines to ensure that interventions—military or otherwise—were not politically motivated. Among others, crimes have to be widespread and systematic to warrant intervention, said their report.

Although international law has traditionally supported a “hands off” policy regarding a state’s domestic affairs—and states continue to accept few limits on their “national sovereignty”—humanitarian intervention has occasionally been justified in exceptional circumstances, such as interventions in Somalia and Kosovo. Human rights law has also evolved a great deal over the past 50 years, with far more attention paid to protecting individuals from violations committed by erring governments.

And, as International Crisis Group President Gareth Evans noted in August

The number of people killed each year in violent armed conflicts has significantly declined from a high point in the late 1980s and early 1990s

2004, “There has been an increased willingness to challenge the ‘culture of impunity’ through new international criminal courts,” a “greatly increased reliance on peacemaking initiatives and negotiated peace agreements,” an “equally dramatic increase in complex peace operations focusing on post-conflict peace building,” and “a significantly greater Security Council willingness to authorize the use of force, which has helped deter aggression and sustain peace agreements.” He adds that these efforts have made a difference and that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the number of people killed each year in violent armed conflicts has significantly declined from a high point in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Calling All Leaders

Governments have a lot of options at their disposal to step in to stop mass atrocities, including drawing from a range of political, legal, economic, and military sanctions. The reality is, however, that they are not always willing to employ these options in deference to their own perceived interests. Absence of political will and resolve among UN member states, combined with a lack of effective and centralized enforcement, has generally been a recipe for inaction. Responses usually end up being very ad-hoc in nature—or, in the words of some commentators, the international community simply “muddles through.”

Speaking at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2004, Samantha Power, author of the

Discover worthy campaigns to stop genocide

Pulitzer Prize-winning book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, offered several prescriptions for addressing genocide more effectively. Among these were avoiding the semantic debate, for governments to apply a much broader range of options from the policy toolbox, equipping decision makers to see the human faces involved, and to have more of a conversation across borders about alleviating such tragedies.

In reference to the role of citizens, she added “for the most part, we haven’t

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succeeded in convincing our policy makers and our politicians that they would pay a political price for being a bystander to genocide....A non-response to genocide doesn’t occur in a vacuum. A non-response is affirmed by societal silence. It becomes an excuse. It is the excuse that political leaders point to.”

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