Resurrecting R2P in a fresh avatar

But the only way to stop the Israelis is a non-starter

Beginning with 400 dead, of which two thirds were Palestinian women and children, the toll went past 1000 in the week since Israel reneged on the ceasefire in Gaza. Humanitarian aid stands held up since.

Alongside, Israel continues pounding Lebanon and usurping Syrian territory on the Golan.

Arab neighbours, as usual, stand by, askance. The Saudis busy themselves patching the Americans up with the Russians, over leisurely peace deals on Ukraine. Egyptians held a meeting for an alternative to the Trump-proposed promenade along the Gaza’s waterfront.

In panic, the Europeans contemplate upping military expenditures in anticipation of Trump pulling the rug on collective security and their nuclear umbrella. The Russians await Trump pulling their chestnuts out of the fire for them in Ukraine. The Chinese brace up for escalation in Trump’s tariff wars.

On their part, the Americans provide Israelis covering fire in their bombing of the hapless Houthis, even as they message Iran through the bombing to ‘remain down and out’. For good measure, the Americans also clobbered Islamic State fighters holed up in some caves in remote Somalia; besides deporting dissident international students.

Though the abhorrent mass atrocity in Gaza continues, no one is holding their breath on a verdict from the World Court if it’s an ongoing genocide, even with the death toll crossing 61000.

What’s certain from Israeli self-declaration on expanding the buffer zone along the Gaza border is that an ethnic cleansing is on.

This is self-defence on steroids, but has precedence in their patron, the United States (US), likewise stretching Charter Article 51 beyond recognition.

The resulting Holocaust of our times must be stopped.

Ironically, the only way is wishful: peace enforcement under a Responsibility to Protect (R2P) rationale.

Humanitarian interventions

Both terms have controversial pedigree.

Peace enforcement with a humanitarian aim – humanitarian intervention – got a bad name at the very outset.

At Cold War’s end, an opportunity in Bosnia could not be converted into a splendid start for humanitarian intervention. The Serbs held up humanitarian aid for besieged Bosniaks and went on to take out United Nations (UN) designated ‘safe areas’.

The international commitment awaited the leverage of peace enforcement with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s (NATO) Operation Deliberate Force launched to bring the Serbs to the negotiation table at Dayton.

In his lame-duck year, taunted over the West’s fixation on the Balkans, President Bush, Sr., launched a humanitarian intervention in Somalia in support of the initial UN mission there held up by warlords.

The Americans, unknown to the successor Chapter VII UN mission, unilaterally went after warlord Farah Aidid. His militia brought down a couple of Black Hawks, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Despite Bill Clinton’s subscription to liberal internationalism and the unipolar moment reaching its zenith, enthusiasm for humanitarian interventions fizzled out.

So, when the Rwandan genocide unfolded, there was no appetite to bring it to a close.

To be sure, the French – and the US - did intervene, but the former only to assist former allies and recent genocidaires, the Hutus, and the latter safely across the border in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The after-effects slosh around the Great Lakes till today.

Next, the NATO launched an aerial intervention in Kosovo, with some 70 days of bombings. The intervention only made its excuse - ‘humanitarian’ – more compelling, with the numbers displaced tripling during the period of the bombing.

The intervention was legitimate to some, including the then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. However, lacking Security Council backing, it was wanting in legality.

In contrast, the intervention in East Timor was luckier, the new Indonesian president succumbing to US pressure that it would turn off the Bretton Woods tap.

The way humanitarian interventions played out turned the Third World skeptical, with developing states fearful of ending up as site of such interventions.

Mostly post-colonial, most were apprehensive of handing over to the West an excuse to step into their problems, prone to aggravation. Subject to simultaneity of political incapacity, economic fragility and social brittleness, geopolitics could pull them apart.

Humanitarian interventions could then serve the national interest of those with a dual capacity: the capacity to covertly manufacture a carnage and to intervene ostensibly sort it out.

R2P concept

Getting the international community to sign on to a concept close to his heart, Kofi Annan lent his weight to a Canadian-led attempt to write up a doctrine.

At the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, as the deputy and at its head through the troubled nineties, Annan was best positioned to know – and feel – the need for forceful intervention.

Two thrust-lines were at play: doctrinal and structural.

The doctrinal thrust-line pursued by the Commission tackled the question:

if humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica – to gross and systematic violations of human rights that affect every precept of our common humanity?

Its answer was in ‘re-characterising’ the organising principle of the world order, sovereignty, from ‘sovereignty as control’ to ‘sovereignty as responsibility in both internal functions and external duties.’

Its problematic argument was that evolution of the concepts of human rights and human security loosened Sovereignty’s traditional state-centricity.

It risked sovereignty being made mutable and, at one remove, unrecognisable.

An Annan-appointed High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change followed-up in its chapter on internal threats and R2P in its report, Our Shared Responsibility:

while sovereign Governments have the primary responsibility to protect their own citizens from such catastrophes, when they are unable or unwilling to do so that responsibility should be taken up by the wider international community….

Annan in his In Larger Freedom, written in preparation for the World Summit on the 60^th anniversary of the UN, reinforced its findings thus:

state sovereignty carries responsibilities as well as rights, including the responsibility to protect citizens from genocide or other mass atrocities. When states fail to live up to this responsibility, it passes to the international community, which, if necessary, should stand ready to take enforcement action authorized by the Security Council.

States, understandably possessive of their turf, only partially endorsed R2P at the World Summit, with its outcome setting the guardrails:

we are prepared to take collective action… through the Security Council, in accordance with the Charter, including Chapter VII, …should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities are manifestly failing to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. We stress the need for the General Assembly to continue consideration of the responsibility…

Even as this proceeded, the Darfur conflict was projected by use of the G-word as yet another area calling out for R2P attention. That the conflict was aggravated by outside interference in pursuit of an ulterior aim of pressuring Khartoum to concede in principle on secession of southern Sudan was elided.

Structurally, the primary accountability mechanism meant for atrocity crimes, the International Criminal Court (ICC), was birthed by adoption of the Rome Statute.

Though an advance, it did not initially explicate on the ‘crime of aggression’.

Understandably, the principal aggressor in the Global War on Terror that raged alongside, the US, did not sign up.

The resulting fate of Iraq shows that wars of aggression can only lead up to atrocity crimes and cannot be delinked from root causes. Indeed, the flattening of Fallujah earlier, and of Mosul later, are direct forerunners of Gaza.

In the war on Gaza, the ICC has ineffectually issued warrants of arrest for Netanyahu and his then defence minister, Yoav Gallant, but little has changed. Even this activism owes to a liberal interpretation of an existing mandate dating in 2014 when Israel last ‘mowed the grass’ in Gaza.

The second structural innovation was the Peacebuilding Commission (PBC), to handle the ‘prevent’ and ‘rebuild’ portions of R2P, the third being ‘respond’. It has since seen one decadal architectural upgrade, with a second one imminent.

The gutting of the UN’s humanitarian prong by US’ withholding of finances and its backing of Israeli defenestration of the Relief Works Agency shows up an impending departure from the tenet ‘rebuild’.

R2P in practice

Annan could not have imagined how prophetic his early persuasive pitch for R2P would turn out: “This developing international norm… will no doubt continue to pose profound challenges to the international community.”

The norm largely conceded, R2P got off to a worse start than humanitarian intervention, faltering when first trotted out in Libya.

The Indian permanent representative in those years at the Security Council, Hardeep Puri, has since put together a book with the critique that he presciently voiced at the horse-shoe table.

Though the West used the R2P argument, the two resolutions of the Security Council authorizing ‘all necessary means’ decidedly do not spell regime change.

The West’s over-reach with the ‘no fly zone’ authorization was despite Ban Ki-moon’s stipulations on how to implement R2P, thoughtfully tendered precisely to ‘discourage States or groups of States from misusing these principles for inappropriate purposes.’

With others wiser after-the-fact, the West faced the double-veto when it attempted another regime change, this time of Assad in Syria.

Though R2P has had an unpromising beginning, it wouldn’t do to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Taking R2P further

In light of Gaza, there is clear need to resurrect the R2P norm, even if the practice may not quite follow suit in light of the fractures across the international community.

The problems with R2P are with both the concept and its practice.

The problem with the practice is easily spotted: selectivity. The risk of appropriation of the concept for pursuit of parochial interest by actors that have the capacity, individually or collectively is ever present.

As seen retrospectively in Libya, it can well be in an individual’s self-interest. Wanting to eliminate the trail of illicit Libyan financing of his political trajectory, French President Sarkozy was rather keen on NATO’s Operation Unified Protector. In his memoirs, Ban Ki-moon informs of Sarkozy’s unseemly hurry to start bombing Gaddafi’s forces at Benghazi.

This should alert - if any such alert is still needed - on Netanyahu’s individual interest in continuing the egregious violence in Gaza: to escape the dragnet of domestic law for malfeasance.

There are two problems with the concept.

One is that the scenario need not necessarily of be actors acting against their own citizens. (Note the italicisation in the extracts above.)

Instead, as in Gaza, it could be to preserve another people from those in whose power they are - which is the case of Palestinians in Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), Gaza and West Bank.

This elision in concept has kept R2P from relevance in discussions on the ongoing mass atrocity.

Secondly, whereas States are chary of (ab)use of R2P as a red-herring within their borders, R2P needs to have an afterlife breathed into it by extending the concept to occupied territory – outside borders.

By this yardstick, a call to R2P is relevant to OPT.

Of necessity, any R2P ministration would have to be preceded by peace enforcement.

Quite obviously, it would have to be outside the Security Council, where the US has vetoed multiple resolutions for its client, Israel.

However, if the Council betrays the Charter by remaining in such dead-lock, does it mean nothing must be done?

Again, equally obviously, there will be no takers for peace enforcement. The internally divided League of Arab States, the natural bearer of the onus, has historically been dysfunctional.

At the very least, let the international community be reminded that thirty years since Rwanda, it has been supine yet again even though it now has a dusted-up R2P norm at hand.