Wfuna s Dag Hammarskjold symposium Caracas, venezuela Laura Spano R2P Program Officer INTRODUCTION Today, we will look at the philosophies of Dag Hammarskjold as a way to reflect on the emerging norm R2P. I will start by providing an overview of what the Responsibility to Protect norm is, how it has come to fruition, and the importance of people like you and I continuing to voice Dag Hammarskjold s ideals for peace by speaking out louder for our desire for the prevention of mass atrocities. We should endeavor to do so as a way to push for the political will to act in the face of such horrors. Before his untimely death, Secretary-General Hammarskjold was faced with a situation where the very intra-state problems we see today (warring factions within a state) were destabilizing a country (the Congo) and had the potential to lead the UN peacekeeping mission into a full-scale conflict. The last forty years have been scarred by the killing fields of Cambodia, the machetes of Rwanda, the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia, and the ongoing nightmare in Darfur. These conflicts, recently also seen in Kenya in 2008, in Libya last year and in Syria today, expose the tensions between the sovereignty of states and the international community intervening for the common good of its citizens as the conflicts threaten to not only destabilize their own country, but surrounding regions. It is due to such encounters that the international community came together to adopt the Responsibility to Protect as a norm in 2005. The Responsibility to Protect, known as R2P, refers to the obligation of states towards their citizens and towards all populations at risk of genocide and mass atrocities. While states continue to be the main controllers of political authority in the world, it has become clear that the international community cannot always rely solely on state action to uphold and achieve the ideals of the United Nations. The crimes of mass atrocity became real to me when I first landed in Rwanda. I was sitting in the back seat of the taxi, excited for the adventure to begin. A smiling young Rwandan girl, Patience, had come greet me at the airport. Patience had a bubbly personality and as we drove along she happily told me about her homeland, Rwanda. Suddenly it went silent and the mood in the car quickly changed as Patience proceeded to tell me her story. While she had escaped Rwanda alive in 1994, her father had not. Following a long silence she continued, Sometimes it is difficult when I have nothing to do I think of the day I laid under a pile of dead bodies and watched my father being slaughtered by my neighbour. I say I forgive the man, but do I? Patience was seven in 1994 17 years later, these are her daily memories. After Rwanda the international community, said never again would we allow such mass atrocities to take place. As I sat in the car...i thought about our empty promises - we had said those words after the extermination of 6 million European Jews, we had said never again after the death of Cambodians at the hands of their ruler Pol Pot. After Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Burma...We said Never Again... Despite these words never again as we speak Hundreds of human lives are being lost, homes are being burnt and destroyed and thousands of women are being raped in Sudan. In Democratic Republic of Congo and in Syria the story is sadly no different. THE NEED FOR CHANGE Despite our promise - All these atrocities have all occurred under the watchful eye of the international community; demonstrating our massive failure to prevent such mass atrocities. During Dag Hammarskjold s tenure as Secretary- General, conflicts generally took place between states rather than within them. Today, however, most conflicts today occur within states and the victims are civilian, not trained military personnel. By the end of the 90s, the urgency for civilian protection had never been more pertinent than before. There was a growing willingness of the UN Security Council, since the end of the Cold War, to authorize forceful and sometimes coercive actions inside rebellious or weak states; and a
profound sense of revulsion at the failure of the international community to act effectively in places Somalia, Rwanda, and Bosnia. All these changes questioned the relevance of and inspired debates over the definition and importance of state sovereignty and the role of the UN. Following the recognition that the international community had again failed in Rwanda, the former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan asked; When does the international community intervene for the sake of protecting populations? The problem was - in the face of these mass atrocities - much of the international community rested on the notion that state sovereignty the right of each state to have independent authority on its territory and not be subordinated to any other government - prevented the international community from intervening. And yet, while the blame can continue to be placed on the international community - what is also common in all these cases is the failure of individual governments to provide protection for their own civilians. BUILDING THE NEW FRAMEWORK Answering Mr. Annan's call for a strengthened international framework for civilian protection and a way to mediate the debate between sovereignty and the moral obligation to prevent mass atrocities, in 2001, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty released a report introducing the concept -The Responsibility to Protect. The Responsibility to Protect or commonly known as R2P refers to the obligation of states towards their own populations and towards all populations at risk of genocide and other large-scale atrocities. It seeks to ensure that the international community never again fails to act by expressing the world s responsibility to protect populations from such crimes. The Report introduced the notion that with sovereignty comes the responsibility of states to protect its citizens. Once a state fails to uphold its responsibility to protect its citizens, it loses its sovereign right -- and it is at this point that the international community must intervene. Peace and security experts argued that the idea of state sovereignty should be based not on the right of each state to do what it wishes without international interference, but rather, a state s sovereignty should be based on its protection of the people living within the state. Put simply, state sovereignty should be built upon the concept of sovereignty as responsibility. Therefore, the best way to protect state sovereignty is to protect your citizens and to be seen to do so by the international community. With a growing recognition that the international community must act when the state itself is either incapable of protecting or is itself inflicting harm on its populations most governments, with the except of a few, accepted R2P as a new international norm at the United Nations World Summit in 2005. The commitment is outlined in paragraph 138 and 139 of the 2005 World Summit Outcome Document. It is important to note here that at the Summit R2P was restricted to apply only to four mass atrocity crimes genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and ethnic cleansing. In January 2009 UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon released a report called Implementing the Responsibility to Protect which outlined the responsibility of states under three pillars. Pillar 1 states : The sovereign states have an obligation and carry the primary responsibility to protect their citizens from mass atrocities Under - Pillar 2: The International Community has the responsibility to assist states in capacity building to fulfill this responsibility to prevent mass atrocities before, during and after conflict
Finally - Pillar 3: If the state in question fails to act appropriately, the responsibility to do so in a timely and decisive matter either through diplomatic, humanitarian and peaceful means, and as a last resort by stronger measures such as military - falls to a larger community of states. THE SURROUNDING DEBATES At the UN General Assembly Debate on the Responsibility to Protect in July 2009, the 92 member states who spoke confirmed their commitment and interest in the norm. However, adopting R2P as a norm has not been without its challenges. Some countries, are concerned it infringes upon state sovereignty by giving the Security Council power to authorize military intervention. Adding to the fire was the belief that the norm gives powerful states the license to unilaterally intervene in a country. While others are concerned that the member states will only act when it is politically or economically advantageous and therefore call for a clear set of rules of when a decision to intervene by force must be made. Yet while it seemed R2P was seen as giving authority to Western intervention interestingly much of the government leadership pushing for the commitment to R2P came from the global south. Argentina, Chile, Mexico and Rwanda were some of the more influential governments who insisted on including the commitment in the World Summit Document. More so, the African Union was first to support the proposed recommendations of R2P by UN SG Kofi Annan by embracing the Responsibility to Protect before the World Summit. Much of the opposition to R2P has been from states focusing solely on the third pillar. However, it is important to note that R2P, in fact, rests on the foundation that prevention is the single most important dimension of the Responsibility to Protect: prevention options should always be exhausted before intervention is contemplated and more commitment and resources must be devoted to it. Further the third pillar, which refers to intervention, explicitly states that the international community should utilize diplomatic, humanitarian, and peaceful means to protect citizens and use force only when stronger measures are necessary. Put simply, R2P stipulates that ONLY when the state fails its sovereign responsibility - that the international community considers intervening as an option. Even then military intervention under R2P is applied strictly multilaterally through consensus in the Security Council. What the opponents of R2P are missing in the debate is that the principle of R2P is not new but rather it is a new framework bringing together a number of commitments already made by states. It is simply a restatement of governments commitment to the protection their populations commitments that are already embedded in international and domestic law. It is not a new idea for governments to have the responsibility to protect their people in the most part governments work to gain legitimacy from their populations through the provision of protection itself. What has changed is the reason why and when the international community sees it as important to act. Harming of citizens has progressively been seen more and more as a threat to international security and therefore has called into question these ideas of absolute sovereignty. Similarly since the signing of the UN charter which enshrines the notion of sovereignty ideas of what state sovereignty is, has evolved to be less about the right of a government to a focus on the responsibility of a government. The discussion on R2P should no longer be an argument between absolute sovereignty and military intervention, but move on to engage governments in a constructive dialogue. As Francis Deng said in his 2010 Dag Hammarskjold Lecture, the challenge then becomes one of how to negotiate sovereignty, how to engage governments in a constructive dialogue that would bridge sovereignty and responsibility that would turn sovereignty from being a barricade against the outside world, into a positive challenge of a state s responsibility for its people. Even with R2P, how we act through multilateral action authorized by the Security Council remains the same. R2P does not give the Security Council any more power than it had before. Nor does R2P replace non-interference. It just changes the balance of the debate and provides a framework to discuss the responsibility of governments and the international
community to protect civilians. Considering intervention at the Security Council was difficult in the 90s, yet times have changed where now the usual defenders of sovereignty and non-interference China and Russia are willing to offer solutions and hear the voice of concern. If it is not new then what is the purpose of R2P? R2P offers a policy for political mobilization, bringing a box of tools such as human rights law, early warning systems together under the one framework which can be used by advocates to lobby for government action to ensure the prevention of mass atrocities. More than anything, R2P gives the international community the power to turn around and ask the Security Council why it did not do anything in the face of mass atrocities - forcing it to explain why it did not act. R2P is a shaming tool in which, in the face of mass atrocity, we can stand united and ask why the international community AGAIN failed and allowed yet another Rwanda to happen. FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE MOBILIZING PUBLIC AND POLITICAL WILL Regardless of these debates To me, the question that remains is not whether the international community should act in the face of mass atrocities but HOW? In order to implement R2P, states and regional organizations need to have the necessary resources to prevent and halt mass atrocities such as early warning mechanisms and stand-by forces. Several steps have been taken within the UN system to enhance the R2P norm. In 2008, the Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appointed Edward Luck as the Special Advisor on the Responsibility to Protect, with a focus on the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanities. And in 2009, the SG s report Implementing the Responsibility to Protect outlined a number of measures necessary to move the norm from theory to practice and made recommendations on how states could uphold their responsibility in all three pillars. This includes ensuring the implementation of relevant international law treaties on human rights, working with civil society and international organizations to facilitate the development of the Responsibility to Protect, supporting sub-regional organizations which have mechanisms for dialogue, education and training on human rights and humanitarian standards, creating regional rapid-response civilian and military teams and considering UN rapid-response military capacity. In addition, the Secretary-General emphasized the need to improve early-warning capacities in a report in 2010 as crucial for R2P because the aim is to PREVENT mass atrocities before they begin. His recommendations included mainstreaming the principles of R2P throughout the UN system, developing mechanisms to ensure the flow of information and analysis and establishing interagency mechanisms was endorsed by member states. CIVIL SOCIETY AND R2P It is important to remember that the success of R2P depends on the willingness of individual states and the international community to act. Therefore, even more than resources, states need the political will to act and prevent mass atrocities It is here that we must also remember that when new situations arise that require preventive or reactive action by the international community, leaders will take real risks only if their citizens, people like you and I, demand it. Public demand, however, requires all of us to have an understanding of R2P. One major challenge in moving R2P from theory to practice is to ensure that the R2P norm is well understood in all parts of the world. It is a common evaluation of the current R2P community the discussions and awareness raisings - that the R2P debate has been centered in New York. Now outreach to regional areas, especially those impacted by conflict, is necessary and vital to push the norm forward. Many are calling for cooperation between like-minded individuals to build support for R2P across regional boundaries and upon NGOs to engage with the general public on the issue. This is because an informed and active civil society is essential to creating a culture of peace and pushing political will to commit to performing these key tasks. An aware and active civil society plays an important role in educating, raising awareness and
broadening the debate on R2P, can identify potential triggers for R2P situations early, hold governments accountable for promises made regarding R2P and push for action when needed. It is these civil society institutions that advocate their own governments to support conflict prevention and peace-building and respect human rights; acting as monitoring and evaluating outlets in response to individual government abidance to the R2P principle. It is, therefore, essential that efforts are made to raise their awareness and acceptance of R2P. VOICE FROM THE STREET Libya, demonstrates a case study when mobilising the public will caused the political will to act. In 2011 the world watched as the government of Libya declare WAR on its people - perpetrating horrific violence against unarmed civilians and so called rebels protesting the 42 year dictatorial regime which despite the abundance of oil has left its population in suppressed and in poverty. President Gaddafi threatened and made clear his readiness to commit mass atrocities on civilians in a bid to maintain power, stating that those challenging the government deserve to die and that he will fight those protecting his regime until the last drop of blood. Immediately following the eruption in Libya, the UN through Ban Ki-moon and the UN joint office on the Prevention of Genocide and the responsibility to protect and Libyan government dissents including staff at the permanent mission of Libya to the United Nations urged the international community to act.. Over the next few days it became clear that the widespread and systematic attacks against the civilian population may amount to crimes against humanity one of the four crimes that R2P seeks to banish forever. The Security Council passed the historic decision which effectively authorized the use of force in Libya to protect civilians from attack. Acting under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which provides for the use of force if needed, the Council adopted a resolution by 10 votes to zero, with five abstentions, authorizing Member States to take all necessary measures... to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack. A single nod from the Chinese or Russians would have stopped international efforts to protect the people of Libya from their government. However, Russia, China and India, three notorious champions of state sovereignty and non-intervention, abstained. This is not the first time the international community has used R2P but with that decision council sent a clear signal of its commitment to the responsibility to protect principle (or R2P) that state governments have a duty to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. Resolution 1973 was historic because it is surprising not one or more veto powers voted against the intervention into a functioning state Libya losing their right to non-interference given the Security Council is usually deadlocked over the use of force. It is important to note what made it easier was strong international consensus surrounding such military intervention. Since the intervention in Libya which the UN mandated to NATO, many questions have arose over the implementation of pillar 3 of R2P some countries question whether NATO overstepped their mandate and whether the mandate itself was too broad in scope. Some countries, such as Brazil who has recently introduced the concept Responsiblity while protecting, have called for further discussion on how Pillar 3 and more specifically how military intervention should take place arguing that the international community when intervening needs measures to ensure it does not do more harm than good. This along with the difficult to build consensus has prevented any resolutions to pass through the Security Council to place pressure of the government of Syria for not protecting its population from crimes against humanity. Now more than ever it is time to rally support for more conversations onr2p and how it can be implemented effectively and efficiently.. Despite progress as we speak conflict continues in other corners of the world in DRC women continue to be raped as a weapon of war and in Sudan children continue to be recruited to fight an adult war. These forgotten conflicts highlight the need for more advocates fighting to prevent mass atrocity. In these cases it is all too easy to blame governments but while we as individuals do not have the power to intervene and stop genocide and mass atrocities as members of civil society we do have a voice to advocate to governments to act in the face of mass atrocities and hold them accountable if they again fail to uphold the commitment they have made. Civil
society organizations, the state, regional organizations and international institutions all have a role to play in the operationalization of R2P. We too can make it our responsibility to ensure these crimes are prevented today and in the future. We are at a pivotal point of moving from theory and commitment on paper to real life action...and it seems appropriate to stop at this moment and reflect on Dag Hammarskjold s commitment to conflict prevention and civilian protection. Dag Hammarskjold took very seriously the legal restrictions imposed on the Organisation by national sovereignty, as recognised in the Charter. The UN existed to protect states from external attack with the task to keep peace between sovereigns. He rejected the ideas of great powers that could enforce peace or settle political disputes in favour of peacekeeping in the form of mediation and conciliation which respected equal sovereignty of states. Hammarskjöld believed the UN s main task was to keep the peace, peace which could be maintained through an enhanced respect for international law. SGH also recognised change when he stated that We had to improvise in the field of international law, in the field of military organization, in various fields where usually one does not really like to jump into col water and start swimming without having learned how best to swim (127, To Speak for the World). Over the century, since Hammarskjöld was Secretary-General, there has however been a change in the nature of armed conflict; we no longer live in a world where conflict is primarily between states but rather within states, and civilians now make up the vast majority of casualties. The changes to conflict over the past couple of decades and the introduction of the R2P norm has brought into question the relevance of and inspired debates over the definition and importance of state sovereignty an issue at the heart of Hammarskjöld s vision. What would Dag Hammarskjold think of R2P? R2P, under pillar 1 and 2, is aligned with Hammarskjöld s call for action to prevent conflict by resting on a foundation that prevention is the single most important dimension of the Responsibility to Protect: prevention options should always be exhausted before intervention is contemplated and more commitment and resources must be devoted to it (ICISS 2001). What is even more important to note, as I previously mentioned, R2P does not give the Security Council any more power to intervene than it already had. In 1959 Hammarskjold states Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter authorises, in certain circumstances, the Security Council to use military force to maintain peace The possibilities of the Organization to use military force are limited to acts of coercion in the name of the world community against a nation which violates the peace. I think it is fair to say at in times of mass atrocity GENOCIDE, ETHNIC CLEANSING, WAR CRIMES AND CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY clear violates of peace and failure to protect civilians Hammarskjold would support the Responsibility to Protect s pillar 3 of intervening militarily as a last resort. It is here that I end this presentation and turn to you to ask yourself not only what SGH would have thought of the UN s emerging norm R2P but what do you think of it. I hope that this presentation and the materials you have in front of you have given you the tools to explore how we might advocate for bridging the divide between sovereignty and responsibility..