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By Eric Wamanji
If there is a principle so sacred in the international system, it is that of sovereignty. It fires passion among citizens. It triggers states to war. It has ignited fervent philosophical and scholarly exploits. Sovereignty and the spirit of territorial integrity are tangled and for the modern state, cemented in the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia and three centuries later in the 1948 Charter of the United Nations.
Yet, the concept of sovereignty and non-interference with other state’s internal affairs also pauses complex legal, moral and philosophical challenges to the world order. In the spirit of honoring territorial integrity, too often, the international community has sat on the fences as states committed atrocities against their own populations.
Any interventionist thoughts against such atrocities have always been dicey. States shied from such interventions for fear of rebuttal and of being accused of offending norms of non-interference. Interventions have since been marked as crimes of aggressions that are heavily frowned at, strongly so by the UN Charter. Of course the Security Council has the powers to invoke Chapter IV of the Charter to allow for interventions including militarily.
But even with that window, ideally, the spirit of shared protection of humanity’s dignity and life, especially the “weak” has been unsystematic.
It took the reflections of the late Dr Kofi Annan, the former UN Secretary General, who passed on recently, to robustly, return the debate into the international system. And at the end, unto the world, was introduced a new norm called the Responsibility to Protect or R2P.
In 2000, writing in the Millennium Report, Dr Annan challenged the international community to rethink more profoundly of the principle of sovereignty.
Annan was still smarting from the disturbing genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia’s Srebrenica. He wondered: “if humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica, to gross and systematic violation of human rights that offend every precept of our common humanity?”
These insights jolted the Canadian government. Soon, Canada sponsored the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) whose principal brief was to explore mechanism of state interventions amidst a specter of a humanitarian crisis vis a vis state’s sovereignty. The commission came up with the aptly titled report ‘Responsibility to Protect.’ The report was overwhelmingly adopted in 2005 at the UN World Summit Meeting.
At its core, the R2P appreciates that states have the primary obligation to protect their populations. However, the international community has a duty to intervene when states are inept, either by design or by default, to protect their citizens from genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Such interventions are diplomatic through negotiation or sanctions and in extreme cases, militarily.
Thus R2P radically reconfigured international norms on humanitarian interventions and sovereignty. Anchored on moral grounds in pursuit of rights and dignities inherent to humanity, R2P has provided the international community the impetus and clout to swing to action and forestall humanitarian catastrophe.
Saved from Armageddon
It is through the doctrine of R2P that Kenya was saved from the Armageddon that the 2007-2008 post-election anarchy promised to produce. In the Kenyan case, Mr Bernard Koucher, the French Foreign Minister, was the first to request for intervention. He urged the UN Security Council to invoke the principle of R2P. It was not long before envoys descended here to pacify Kenya. And it was no person of less stature than Dr Annan himself who spend days in Nairobi seeking to mollify a smoldering Kenya through what came to be known as the ‘Serena Talks’. The talks produced historic shifts of paradigms including the 2010 constitution.
By every measure, the Kenyan intervention was mild. Libya’s case was on the extreme end. Applying the doctrine of R2P, the UN, under resolution 1973, triggered military action against the sovereign state of Libya, eventually ousting Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Gaddafi had earlier sworn to crash an uprising in the city of Benghazi.
There are a dozen or so other cases where R2P has been invoked around the world.
It is not clear though why R2P has not been considered for notorious hotspots like Syria and Myanmar that have recorded mass atrocities against civilians. In the case of Syria, cases of chemical weapons deployed by the Bashar al-Assad regime are well documented. Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has reported the use of such chemicals as Sarin and Chlorine in total contravention of the 1925 Geneva Protocol. But then, the worst Syrian could get was a coordinated air strike by US, France and Britain what President Donald Trump described as a way to “establish a strong deterrent against the production, spread and use of chemical weapons.”
Then there is the worst case of atrocities against a population in Myanmar. It is reported that the Myanmar army launched a “clearance operation,” that has since seen over 900, 000 minority Rohingya Muslims fleeing to Bangladesh. No ground breaking international intervention, in the sprit of R2P has been invoked.
Still, Dr Annan’s reflections helped to firm up the philosophical underpinnings that jolts consciences of the international community as much as reformatting global perspectives on the doctrine of sovereignty which is not as absolute.
Mr Wamanji is a Public Relations and Communication adviser ewamanji@yahoo.co.uk Twitter: @manjis