By Eric Wamanji
By the time you finish reading this, more people would be dead in Myanmar. So far 700 have died. This bloodletting is courtesy of the military junta that toppled the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi on February 1, 2021. Civilians have taken to the street. The military is responding with live bullets.
Sadly, there’s no concrete action from the international community. Only drab generic statement of “we’re gravely concerned” types.
Yet, this is not the first time that blood has flowed here. Recently, the Myanmar army launched a “clearance operation,” that displaced about 900, 000 minority Rohingya Muslims. The UN described the displacement as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”. Today, the Rohingya are refugees living the most disgraceful lives.
Such atrocities are scandalous in a world where the United Nations has been around for over seven decades. It’s an affront to our collective humanity. Ideally, the ASEAN countries should be leading pacification and intervention efforts here. But they can’t. The trouble with the ASEAN is in its philosophy of cultural relativism. It downplays the universality of human rights. Further, ASEAN rigidly subscribes to the principle of self-determination and non-intervention. Such a philosophical construct precludes interventionist ideals.
But the collective global community has a contract. In any case, the UN is the custodian of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine. The framework, adopted in 2005 at the UN World Summit, allows intervention when a state is unable or unwilling to protect its citizens from genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The norm of R2P did not rise from the blues. The then UN Secretary – General Dr Koffi Annan, was still smarting from the disturbing genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia Srebrenica. In 2000, writing in the Millennium Report, Dr Annan 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?”
Atrocities on Myanmar offend our common humanity, so are those of Syria. Why is the world lacking the appetite to decisively invoke R2P? In Syria, the Bashar al-Assad regime has deployed chemical weapons on its citizens. Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons reported the use of such chemicals as Sarin and Chlorine in total contravention of the 1925 Geneva Protocol. But then, the worst Syria could get was a coordinated air strike by US, France, and Britain what former US President Donald Trump described as to “establish a strong deterrent against the production, spread and use of chemical weapons.”
Yet, in an increasingly multipolar world, strategic geopolitics and realpolitik, effective intervention is unfeasible. Take the example of Myanmar. After the coup, General Min Aung Hlaing hosted generals and state officials from countries like Russia. In Syria, Russia is an active participant supporting the Assad regime. In fact, China has its own bunker of horrific atrocities against the Uighurs in Xinjiang. Diverse independent investigation report of mass incarceration, indoctrination, and sterilization of the Uighurs. Pissed, activists are calling for boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics. Interestingly, the paradox of the UN system is that China and Russia are permanent members of the Security Council charged, at least in principle, as a guarantor of international peace.
This is the challenge of a multipolar world. More so when competing great powers lack in the moral and philosophical sensibilities supportive of human rights and dignity. Still, the comity of nations needs courage and leadership to confront the evil of rogue regimes and tame barbaric anarchy from taking root as a norm in the world. If not, R2P will be rendered redundant; the weak will endure more pain.
Mr Wamanji is a Communication expert wamanjipr@gmail.com Twitter: @manjis