Responsibility to Protect (R2P): State sovereignty and international responsibility after Kosovo

March 8th, 2008

by Rajan Philips

Last week I dealt with the internal failure of the Serbian State that led to Kosovo’s declaration of independence and placed this failure in the context of the overall disintegration of Yugoslavia. Here, I turn to the external side of the Kosovo conflict that has caused some exercising in Sri Lankan political circles. The government has expressed unreserved opposition to Kosovo’s declaration of independence, while its plenipotentiary in Geneva has warned the government to be vigilant against the undermining of Sri Lankan state sovereignty by Tamil separatism within and Western hegemonism from without. On the other hand, Tamil political websites have been giving self-serving publicity to Kosovo’s declaration of independence.

Colombo’s fears after Kosovo coincided with the furor over the actions of one of the premier Sri Lankan NGOs, the International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES), in undertaking a reportedly well funded R2P project. R2P, or Responsibility-to-Protect, is the controversial formulation of state and inter-state responsibility to protect vulnerable populations from “avoidable catastrophe” such as mass murder, rape, starvation etc. The R2P framework first emphasizes the responsibility of states to protect their own vulnerable citizens, and transfers that responsibility to a “broader community of states” when a state fails to fulfill this fundamental responsibility.

R2P: the genesis and the controversy

How did R2P come to be formulated? What is the connection between Kosovo and R2P? How did Sri Lanka get in between?

The NATO intervention in the Serbia-Kosovo crisis that began in March 1999 with the aerial bombardment of Belgrade created new problems even as it put an end to the mindless carnage that was then swallowing Kosovo. Remarkably, it was the first time NATO had resorted to any military action since it was created in 1949 as a deterrent against attacks from the Soviet Union and its satellites, and its only action ironically took place in parts of a former country (Yugoslavia) that had not been part of the Soviet Bloc. Although the intervention was not unilateral because NATO is a multimember organization, it betrayed a surprising penchant for militarism and cowboy vigilantism among Western social democrats and liberals. Leading the pack was Britain’s Tony Blair, Germany’s Gerald Schroeder and US Secretary of State Madeline Albright. President Bill Clinton was reportedly a reluctant campaigner in the whole exercise. The military action also meant that NATO had failed in its primary objective of deterring Milosevic and his government. More importantly, it was undertaken without any UN authority. In effect, NATO had usurped the UN, unlike in East Timor where that same year a UN peace keeping force successfully began guiding the transition from Indonesia’s withdrawal to East Timor’s eventual independence in 2002.

Despite its flaws, the NATO intervention had broken the path for international intervention for humanitarian reasons, especially for those who had been dismayed by the massacres of Cambodia and Rwanda and the inability of the international community to stop them. For supporters of international intervention, NATO’s foray into Kosovo was a new opening. In September 1999, came the then Secretary General Kofi Annan’s “challenge of humanitarian intervention” to the world community. He was not speaking out of a sudden inspiration but was challenging the world community in the new millennium to find a framework that would balance state sovereignty with the responsibility of the world community in protecting defenseless people in troubled areas. Annan’s call provoked a backlash of condemnation by many governments and status quo sovereignists, but an Independent International Commission sponsored by Canada and supported by funding foundations set out to respond to the challenge. The result of the Commission’s efforts was the 91-page report entitled The Responsibility to Protect that was released in December 2001.

[UN Human rights team in Bogoro investigates the 2003 Lendu militia crimes committed against civilians in the area. UN photo Martine Perret]

By then the world had become a different world, to recall the description by President Bush of the aftermath of 9/11. The Forward to the Commission’s Report notes the difference between what R2P was trying to achieve and what was brought about by the 9/11 attacks in the US. The latter situation is adequately covered by the UN Charter which allows Member States under attack to retaliate either individually or collectively and report such retaliation to the Security Council. The R2P report, on the other hand, is “aimed at providing precise guidelines for states faced with human protection claims in other states”, such as the NATO intervention in Kosovo. But the main consequence of 9/11 was that the release of the R2P report was hardly noticed outside the esoteric circles involved in its production.

The R2P guidelines would have avoided the big-power vigilantism that was clearly present in the NATO intervention in Kosovo. But the R2P effort was given a huge body blow by the biggest big-power vigilantism of our time: the invasion of Iraq. The R2P approach has since been struggling to take-off, but seems to have got mired in the NGO-civil society universe without gaining much support among established states whose sovereignty R2P is trying to redefine. The controversy involving the ICES in Colombo suggests that Sri Lanka is straddling both sides of the R2P divide-the NGO side advocating R2P and the governmental side assailing R2P. Indeed, it would seem that the ICES has been buttering both sides of the R2P bread as well-with ICES, Colombo, promoting R2P and those associated with the ICES, Kandy, railing against it. It is also fair to say that the furor over ICES, Colombo, has been well orchestrated and the fears after Kosovo have been cleverly articulated by the government to buttress its current military policy.

[Villagers going to the local market in Bogoro walk past a Bangladeshi patrol unit of the United Nations Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC). UN photo Martine Perret]

R2P: good idea, bad process

To my mind, the concept and the framework of R2P are perfectly defensible, but the process through which the R2P approach is being advanced leaves much to be desired. For an approach that strikes at the heart of the current world order, namely, the building block of the sovereign state, the process of promoting it relies too much in the NGO universe and too little in the state sector. The very status of the R2P approach has come under question. It is claimed that R2P received endorsement by a summit of world leaders in 2005, the 60th anniversary of the UN. Koffi Annan who some thought would not last long at the UN after his 1999 “challenge of humanitarian intervention”, is said to have described R2P as “one of his most precious achievements.” On 14 February this year, three days before the Kosovo declaration of independence, a new Global Centre for R2P was established at the UN headquarters in New York. The question, though, is how many UN member states have individually endorsed this and are seriously supporting it.

In bureaucratic terms, the reference to R2P is buried in two out of 178 paragraphs in the 2005 UN General Assembly Resolution. But the record of individual endorsement is not overwhelming. Many non-Western countries have not endorsed R2P, India seems not to have taken a position, while Sri Lanka appears to have endorsed it while requiring clear language in regard to the appropriate use of action associated with R2P. The language of the two paragraphs provides for the application of R2P under the authority of the UN, a requirement that was breached by the NATO intervention in Kosovo.

But as I pointed out last week, NATO intervention was precipitated by the level of violence in Kosovo and has been vindicated by the subsequent restoration of law and order, the restoration of democratic governments in Kosovo and Serbia, and their recent peaceful separation. The Iraq invasion, on the other hand, is a clear violation of every formal international tenet and has had no material justification either before or after the invasion. The search for Weapons of Mass Destruction was a spurious reason to begin with and is now thoroughly unsubstantiated. US President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair who led the war on Iraq are now spurned by their own people for totally misleading them.

Those who criticize R2P as nothing more than “a license for the white man to intervene in the affairs of dark sovereign countries,” should not overlook the fact that the application of R2P is clearly placed under the authority of the UN. As well, the preparation of the R2P report was undertaken by a representative cross-section of experts and advisers from both Western and non-Western countries and through a consultative process that touched many non-Western cities including Cairo, Maputo, New Delhi, St. Petersburg and Santiago. But the process does not seem to have made any penetration into the state sector in these countries. So while consultations were held in Cairo and Delhi, the governments of Egypt and India have not come forward to endorse R2P.

The core principles of R2P are unexceptionable and they stress that state sovereignty implies responsibility to protect its people and that when a state fails to fulfill this responsibility, the principle of non-intervention between states gives way to the international responsibility to protect the same people. But this international responsibility can only be exercised under strict guidelines involving the responsibility to prevent, the responsibility to react and the responsibility to rebuild. They also involve the role of member states, regional organizations, the UN agencies and the Security Council.

These principles are consistent with the direction of changes in the global building blocks that have for too long been fixated on the nation-state. As a concept, R2P privileges the more fundamental and less reducible principles of justice, freedom, equality and humanity, from which the categories of state, sovereignty and self-determination are derived and whose protection and enhancement they are intended for. A state that does not guarantee and provide justice, freedom and equality to all its citizens regardless of ‘pre-political’ differences loses its reason for being. Equally, an organization that claims to exercise the right of self-determination of a people becomes abominable and insupportable if its actions violate the very principles that are both the reason for and the purpose of self-determination.

While the R2P concept is supportable, ‘operationalizing’ it is to walk through a political minefield. The current attempts to promote R2P without sufficiently engaging state agencies are proving to be counterproductive. Sri Lanka supported the 2005 UN Resolution including the two R2P paragraphs during the last days of the Kumaratunga presidency, and before the election of Mahinda Rajapakse as President. Since then it has been downhill for the Sri Lankan peace process and its support by international NGOs. It is therefore puzzling that ICES, Colombo, decided to undertake an R2P related project in Colombo’s current political climate. Whether it is misplaced idealism or simple revenue motivations, by undertaking the R2P project in a hostile climate, ICES, Colombo, has shot itself in the foot and given the island’s political scoundrels another stick to attack everyone who opposes the present government’s stubborn insistence on a military solution.

(Note: An earlier version of this article published elsewhere, erroneously indicates that the present Sri Lankan government supported the UN Resolution including the two paragraphs on R2P. The error is regretted.)

Related:

-Tragic Crisis Surrounds The Colombo I.C.E.S, by D.B.S. Jeyaraj
- The Attacks on Civil Society Organizations - by Sumanasiri Liyanage

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