CHAPTER 5: THE CREATION OF THE RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT DOCTRINE (R2P)
5.3 Liberal Support for Responsibility to Protect
The codification of R2P was a success owing to the support of influential liberal scholars and world leaders. These leaders include former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, former USA President, Bill Clinton, and former UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan. The support for humanitarian military intervention by these leaders and recommendations forwarded by different international panels culminated in the Canadian government constituting the ICISS which codified the R2P document in 2001.
The former UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, is arguably one of the influential sponsors of R2P. The former Secretary General used the UN pulpit to push for a change in how states can claim their sovereignty as a bulwark against intervention and encouraged the international community to view humanitarian military intervention as better than non-intervention in cases of extreme human suffering.
(Annan (2014) Annan (2000: 48) gave a widely quoted speech that, “…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?”
He implored world leaders to accept new developments in international relations which he said:
demand of us a willingness to think anew … about how the United Nations responds to the political, human rights and humanitarian crises affecting so much
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of the world; about the means employed by the international community in situations of need; and about our willingness to act in some areas of conflict, while limiting ourselves to humanitarian palliatives in many other crises whose daily toll of death and suffering ought to shame us into action (Annan, 1999).
Annan noted that while sovereignty was a cardinal pillar for international order (Annan, 2014: 194), it cannot be used as justification for failure to protect the civilians in need by both the claimers of sovereignty (Annan, 1998: 197) and members of the international community (Annan, 1998: 195-6).
However, while supporting intervention to defend the respect of human rights, Annan saw a major challenge in states conducting humanitarian military intervention without a clear mandate from the UN.
He concluded that while the interventions in Cambodia, Bangladesh and Uganda by Vietnam, India and Tanzania, respectively, during the Cold War had humanitarian outcomes, they were condemned by the international community because they were not approved by a competent authority (Annan; 1998: 199).
Annan (2014, 199) sarcastically questioned that,
Can we really afford to let each State be the judge of its own right, or duty, to intervene in another State’s internal conflict? If we do, we will not be forced to legitimize Hitler’s championship of the Sudeten Germans or Soviet intervention in Afghanistan?
The drawing of parallels between unauthorised interventions with Hitler’s invasion of Sudetenland shows how Annan abhorred any military intervention, even humanitarian, without UN authorization.
This abhorrence is understandable given that Annan grew in the UN and understood its centrality in maintaining international order. He therefore made the topic of humanitarian military intervention topical in the UN and in the academic arena which had an impact in the codification of R2P (Weiss, 2004: 38).
His battle for UN authorization was also important in giving any future intervention moral legitimacy against the challenges that faced international action in Somalia and Kosovo, as well as failure to act in Rwanda. Annan (1999) stated that he envisaged an international community that was not defined by the inactions on the Rwandan genocide and the divided world that rose from the Kosovo intervention (Annan, 1999). In a speech to the UN General Assembly that can arguably be viewed as one of the major shapers of R2P, Annan (1999) stated that, “The State is now widely understood to be the servant of its people, and not vice versa.”
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His calls for the reform of intervention rules in the UN found support in liberal world leaders, chief among them Bill Clinton of the USA and Tony Blair of Britain. Bill Clinton intensified the use of USA forces in humanitarian military interventions. Clinton defended the use of USA forces in humanitarian military intervention cases when he stated that the USA will intervene against gross human rights violations even when no direct threat has been posed on USA’s cardinal interest (Fyre, 2000: 76). Clinton during visit to USA soldiers under Kosovo International Security Forces Troops (KFOR) in 1999 stated that:
… But never forget if we can do this here, and if we can say to the people of the world, whether you live in Africa, or central Europe, or any other place, if somebody comes after innocent civilians and tries to kill them en masse because of their race, their ethnic background or their religion, and its within our power to stop it, we will stop it (Joyner, 2002: 598).
This became known as the Clinton Doctrine and it added weight to the calls for a transformation in international law to take aboard issues of human rights. During his tenure as the USA president, USA forces undertook military interventions in Bosnia, Haiti and Kosovo which were justified as humanitarian military interventions (Valentino, 2011: 62). The interventions were a clear testimony of the policy of intervention which the Clinton government had chosen for moral or national interests reasons.
As early as 1993, in his inaugural speech, Clinton gave signs of a Universalist policy when he stated that:
There is no longer a clear division between what is foreign and what is domestic.
The world economy, the world environment, the world AIDS crisis, the world arms race - they affect us all…America must continue to lead the world we did so much to make” (Clinton, 2004).
Clinton became a supporter of humanitarian military intervention as enunciated by his support for the intervention in Kosovo as well as his statements during the period of intervention. Such support coming from the leader of one of the most influential states was instrumental in the creation of the R2P. The influence of Clinton’s support to the formation of R2P was captured by Luttwak (1999/2000: 57) who argued that Annan’s speech (which ultimately led to the creation of the ICISS) to the UN General Assembly, was just an echoe of Clinton’s justification for military interventions. Whether it was true or false that Annan’s speech was an echo of Clinton’s speech, Luttwak’s argument illuminates the influence of Clinton’s support in the creation of R2P.
The then British Prime Minister, Tony Blair can also be argued to be one of the ‘proponents’ of R2P. In what came to be termed the “Blair Doctrine” by some scholars (Sloboda and Abbott, 2004: 1), Blair
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argued that everyone in the world has become an internationalist (Blair, 2009: 5). Sloboda and Abbott (2004: 2) state that the Blair Doctrine, which Blair preferred to call the ‘Doctrine of the International Community’ (Blair, 2009: 5) is based on the just war theory which called the international community to undertake wars based not, “on any territorial ambitions but on halting or preventing humanitarian disasters such as genocide or ethnic cleansing.”
Tony Blair (2009: 5) argued that intervention, including military intervention when necessary was justified
“not only when a nation’s interests are directly engaged; but also where there exists a humanitarian crisis or gross oppression of a civilian population.” Blair (1999: 5) stated that:
Non-interference has long been considered an important principle of international order. And it is not one we would want to jettison too readily…But the principle of non-interference must be qualified in important respects. Acts of genocide can never be a purely internal matter. When oppression produces massive flows of refugees that unsettle neighbouring countries then they can properly be described as “threats to international peace and security.
In Blair (1999)’s views, the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other states was important to maintain international order but it could no longer be considered to be sacrosanct. The observance of the principle had to be limited to governments and regimes that observed basic human rights. Any regime that did not observe the rights would automatically loose the ‘privilege’ of non-interference.
While internal strives may be seen as internal, they lead to influx of mass refugees into neighbouring countries which may create new conflicts. It is because of this reason that Blair (1999) further supported his argument arguing that when refugee influx affect outside countries, the conflict should not be considered as internal hence the need for international intervention. It must also be recalled that when India intervened in East Pakistan in 1971, it cited among its major reasons for intervention massive influx of East Pakistani refugees in its territories hence importing conflict into India (Secretariat of the International Commission of Jurist, 1972: 92).
The completion of the liberal support to R2P came from the new intervention rules got from the liberal Western states and scholars. Gareth Evans supported the moralization of humanitarian military intervention and called it “good international citizenship” (Weiss, 2004: 43), while the Danish and Dutch governments sponsored commissions to look into issues of human rights and intervention (Macfarlane, Thielking and Weiss, 2004: 981).
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The researches and recommendations that were brought forward by different commissions of inquiry that were commissioned to research on different cases which all were related to humanitarian military intervention culminated in the sponsoring of the ICISS by the Canadian government in 2000. This research argues that the most influential of the panels of inquiry was the Kosovo Commission. In its assessment of the Kosovo crisis and NATO intervention, the commission came up with a number of recommendations which could be summarized as recommending for the revision of the international rules of intervention and sovereignty to allow for the ethical protection of citizens in distress (Independent International Commission on Kosovo, 2000: 10-12).
The sum total of the push by a number of liberal world leaders led by Kofi Annan, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton led to the constitution of the ICISS. The commission crafted the R2P document that was accepted by world leaders formally at the World Summit of 2005. While the leaders at the summit accepted the
‘new rule’ they only agreed to follow them on a case by case basis, meaning that no concrete rules of intervention were approved by the UN. However, powerful state, specifically the P5 members of the UNSC continue to violate the new rules of the R2P because of the powers to determine cases for intervention given to them by the ICISS in the crafting of the document. Hence powerful states can intervene in cases they allege to warrant intervention even if there are no humanitarian justifications, or block interventions in areas where intervention is necessary if such interventions disturb their interests.