International Responses to Mass Atrocities in Africa. Kurt Mills

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СКАЧАТЬ At the same time, invoking the ICC can make the protection of people even more difficult. Yet it is difficult to fault the advocates of the ICC and similar mechanisms, for certainly we do want the purveyors of atrocity to be held accountable. But, again, we must be modest in our expectations.

      Military Protection

      R2P includes many activities, but if we are interested in keeping people from being killed in an atrocity situation, it is the reactive, or active, element that is crucial. While the term humanitarian intervention has fallen out of favor, this is the type of activity that could—possibly—protect people. While humanitarians can keep people alive—at least those to which they have access—if a group is intending to kill people in a refugee or IDP camp, for example, there is little they can do. Food will not stop the janjaweed in Darfur. Nor will all the international legal principles advocated by the committed people at the ICRC or UNHCR or, for that matter, the legal machinations and pronouncements emanating from The Hague. No, what is sometimes needed is a soldier (or a brigade) with a gun standing at the entrance to a refugee camp with a mandate and a will to use it against those who want to rape or kill the people in the refugee camp. And they must be there night after night, and at times they must go after the people intent on massacres and either bring them to justice or—and let’s be clear about what is required—kill them. We have seen instances where the international community has the will to countenance and support such activity. However, the overall record is dominated by abject failure, the Srebrenica massacre and the Rwandan genocide being only two of countless examples where those with the ability to intervene forcefully have not recognized and acted on their responsibilities.

      Further, the “hard edge” of R2P is hardly without problems. There are legal issues, although these are becoming less important, especially with regard to UN action. There are practical issues. You need to find the right people and the right equipment and get them to the right place at the right time. The people—and those commanding them—have to be willing to use that equipment. The resources deployed must be appropriate for the job at hand. And you need to make sure you do not make the situation worse, by inflaming the situation, killing the wrong people, or affecting, for example, the delivery of humanitarian assistance. These are not easy things to address, and there are constant prudential debates about the appropriateness of a particular response in a particular situation. And there may be situations where you just cannot do what is needed—or at least all of it. You need to recognize that not every situation can be addressed. In other words, there are limits. Too often, however, the international community has not demonstrated a willingness to explore those limits.

      Protection of Civilians

      R2P is an inherently political construct. It gets to the heart of core issues of sovereignty and war and peace and global power politics. And while it has been superficially accepted by the World Summit, the UN Security Council, and in other fora, it is still highly controversial. It attracts suspicion in parts of the world that have experienced colonialism and military intervention for less than humanitarian reasons—even if the notional balance in the relationship between sovereignty and human rights has changed. The use of humanitarian arguments to justify the war in Iraq in 2003 certainly does not help the depoliticization of R2P and does little to quell the suspicion. However, parallel with, and indeed prior to, the R2P debate has been another relevant discourse having to do with the protection of civilians (PoC). PoC partially, but not completely, overlaps with R2P. It aims to protect people in the midst of conflict, and has been included in Security Council resolutions mandating peacekeeping operations since 1999. It is separate from debates over military intervention and builds upon a growing consensus about the need to protect civilians from the effects of conflict. While it may contain a military element in the form of peacekeeping, it is very different from R2P since peacekeeping is (generally) more consensual, and PoC has a much wider array of (softer) tools at its disposal.

      PoC is understood as a conceptual and operational construct and has a complex relationship with R2P. Like R2P, it has its roots in the failures of the 1990s, but while its evolution has paralleled R2P, it has come to mean something somewhat distinct and more palatable for many countries than R2P.⁸⁷ In 1999, Secretary-General Annan stated in his Report of the Secretary-General to the Security Council on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict that PoC “is fundamental to the central mandate of the Organization.”⁸⁸ In 2004, the Secretary-General, noting that PoC had already been included in a number of peacekeeping operations, called for “the rapid deployment of a force to protect civilians.”⁸⁹ The connection to peacekeeping is key since it is the context of peacekeeping that makes PoC more palatable than R2P for many UN member states.

      The Security Council first engaged with the protection of civilians debate in 1999 when it passed Resolution 1265. It followed this up with Resolutions 1674 in 2006 and 1894 in 2009, which were much stronger in both their condemnation of violence against civilians and the stated willingness to act. The UN General Assembly’s Special Committee on Peacekeeping, known as the C-34, agreed to include a PoC subsection in its annual report.⁹⁰

      The debate over, and application of, PoC has been particularly prominent in the DRC. However, we must start with the multiple interpretations of PoC. The standard starting point is the definition of protection used by the ICRC, which has been adopted by the UN Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC), the body created by the General Assembly to coordinate UN and non-UN humanitarian actors: “Protection is defined as all activities aimed at obtaining full respect for the rights of the individual in accordance with the letter and spirit of the relevant bodies of law, namely human rights law, international humanitarian law and refugee law.”⁹¹ This is very broad and encompasses a wide variety of activities, which, according to the ICRC, include responsive activities—those which directly respond to an abuse; remedial action—restoring dignity and living conditions; and environment-building—creating an environment where individuals can enjoy their full panoply of rights. This is so broad as to be meaningless. It is, in one sense, coterminus with the global human rights project. How it is interpreted and implemented is key. The definition from the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance (OCHA) adapts this broad understanding:

      A concept that encompasses all activities aimed at obtaining full respect for the rights of the individual in accordance with the letter and spirit of human rights, refugee and international humanitarian law. Protection involves creating an environment conducive to respect for human beings, preventing and/or alleviating the immediate effects of a specific pattern of abuse, and restoring dignified conditions of life through reparation, restitution and rehabilitation.⁹²

      This definition was accepted by the UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) in the draft UNMIS POC Strategy-Security Concept.⁹³ The understanding of what this means for UNMIS is narrowed a bit in the Concept:

      The full gamut of POC is very wide. UNMIS is taking a layered approach to developing an UNMIS-specific POC strategy. Three layers of protection will be covered in the strategy: protection of civilians under imminent threat of physical violence; protection of civilians with regard to securing access to humanitarian and relief activities; and the longer-term aspect of protection in the context of Human Rights (HR) and Conflict Prevention and Management. This concept covers the inner layer of POC within the UNMIS POC Strategy—the protection of civilians under imminent threat of violence…. Sexual, gender or child violence will not be treated separately in this Concept as they are all forms of “physical violence.”

      Thus, while still broad, it focuses more on physical protection, but also on protecting humanitarian activities. It is also tied into broader political goals of conflict management and protection. At the end it also points to a key issue in the context of the development of PoC, namely that particular groups have also been singled out for protection treatment in various UN resolutions—for example, women⁹⁴ and children.⁹⁵

      PoC language was included in the mandate of ten⁹⁶ UN peacekeeping operations between 1999 and 2009, and an additional six⁹⁷ СКАЧАТЬ