Former Foreign Minister Gareth Evans: Responsibility to Protect

Nayan Chanda: I am Nayan Chanda, Editor of YaleGlobal Online. We have with us in our studio someone who would be the best guide for us to understand what is going on in the Middle East, especially in Libya. Now, since the Libyan crisis broke, a new acronym has appeared in media reports. It is something that sounds like the robot in Star Wars: R2P, Responsibility to Protect. This is a principle that was actually converted into a UN Resolution in 2005. The person who was one of the chief architects of this Responsibility to Protect principle and subsequent bill is the former Australian Foreign Minister, Gareth Evans. Welcome Gareth.

Gareth Evans: Nice to be here Nayan.

Chanda: I would like for you to give your assessment on how R2P has been implemented so far. But before that, let’s step back and explain to us as to what this responsibility means, especially in the context of sovereign states, which came into existence in the concept of sovereignty in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia. Since then, sovereign states have been kind of sacrosanct – you cannot touch it. And now, this responsibility to protect gives the responsibility to protect not only to the sovereign states, but to other sovereign states. How did this process evolve?

Evans: What the issue is about is how the world reacts to mass atrocities crimes: genocide, major crimes against humanity, major war crimes, ethnic cleansing… And it’s important to realize that for centuries the world was fairly profoundly indifferent to such atrocities and catastrophes when they occurred behind the walls of a sovereign state. As you just indicated, the Westphalian system of nation states was a form of institutionalized indifference to what happened beyond state walls. You could almost say that sovereignty was a license to kill. That didn’t even change with the Holocaust and the Second World War. Yes, we had the Genocide Convention along with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Nuremberg Charter, creating a new category of crimes against humanity. Even with that, in the decades that followed the Second World War and with the creation of the United Nations, the dominant principle was still “thou shall not interfere” in the internal affairs of sovereign states. That was particularly reinforced by the number of new countries joining the UN, very conscious of their fragility, very proud of their sovereign independence and with a long history of interference…

Chanda: Of colonial domination.

Evans: Colonial domination and civilizing missions, mission civilisatrice, from the great powers. And they didn’t want any recognition or acknowledgement, even though, of course, they were unhappy of the news of these atrocities occurring from time to time. It was a consensus-free zone when it came to determining an international reaction. So the world stood by and watched the Cambodian genocide. The world stood by and watched Idi Amin perform horrible atrocities in Uganda. The world stood by while the West Pakistan army moved into what is now Bangladesh. When countries did intervene – Tanzania in the case of Uganda, Vietnam in the case of Cambodia – they were criticized for interfering in internal affairs. It did look as though we might be moving towards a more civilized approach to these things in the 90s at the end of the Cold War, but immediately there were new controversies.

Chanda: Why is the end of the Cold War the marker for this changing attitude?

Evans: Because that was a period in which it seemed possible for the Security Council to work as a collective whole rather than being fanatical about particular Cold War positions. It was perfectly understandable during the Cold War years; such were the tensions on the Security Council. It was just impossible to reach an agreement on how to respond to these situations. There was no consensus at all. With the end of the Cold War there is a degree of optimism that maybe this would change, but it didn’t. And so we had year after year after year…we can all remember in the 1990s problems in Somalia and ineffectual international intervention, then the catastrophic situation in Rwanda 1994 while the world stood by and watched while eight hundred thousand people were butchered in the space of a few weeks. And then almost unbelievably just a year later, in the Balkan Wars in Srebrenica, UN peacekeepers kind of standing by while seven or eight thousand young men and boys were taken out of the town of Srebrenica and butchered. Then we had the Kosovo situation, which was an international response to another mass atrocity, ethnic cleansing situation that was looming. But there was no agreement about how to respond to it because the Security Council couldn’t reach agreement and the Russians threatened to veto.

Chanda: But going a little deeper as to why the objection of some countries to intervene because they had some stake in that country or because they are so implicit that it could be applied to them?

Evans: Yeah, it was just the principle. The problem was in the way in which the issue was couched in the 1990s; there was this language of humanitarian intervention or the right to intervene with Bernard Kouchner, later French Foreign Minister and the droit d'ingérence, the right to intervene. And states said, look, we are not going to concede any such principle that there is a right to intervene in our affairs. We are conscious of sovereign independence, et cetera, et cetera. And even though these are occasions for concern, there is a greater principle here which we don’t want to acknowledge. So you had in the North this rallying cry of the “right to intervene” and in the South this great defensiveness about international sovereignty. So this is the context in which the Responsibility to Protect is born. And you have to understand the background to understand how significant of a change this is. Kofi Annan addressed the General Assembly of the UN in 2000 and said if humanitarian intervention is such a shocking assault on the principles of state sovereignty, how then should we react to these conscience-shocking crimes against humanity that we have all witnessed?

That challenge was one that the Canadian government picked up by establishing the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, which I co-chaired. That Commission, which Lee Hamilton, for example, was a member of. And that gave birth to this concept on the Responsibility to Protect; that was the title of our report. That is what we put into the public domain in 2001. The core concepts, if I can summarize them very briefly… The first big thing was the linguistic conceptual shift. Instead of talking about a right of anyone to throw their weight around or do anything, we talked of the responsibility of everyone, starting with the sovereign state itself. Instead of talking of intervention as the key concept, we talked about protection as the key concept. Because the way the right to intervene had been expressed was in “send in the marines” which do nothing. It was all about military intervention and no wonder that made people very neuralgic. That was the first thing. The second thing was to make clear that this was a multi-layered responsibility. The responsibility began with the sovereign state itself to protect its own people to do no harm. The second dimension of it was the responsibility of other states to assist that state, if it was in a mood to be assisted, with whatever resources it needed to deal with the situation if it was getting out of hand internally. And the third layer of responsibility was that of the wider international community to engage in whatever way was necessary to solve the problem if a state was manifesting failing to exercise that responsibility.

Chanda: The language there was pretty interesting because the word military was not used but the language was: “We are prepared to take collective action in a timely and decisive manner through the Security Council in accordance with the Charter, including Chapter VII, on a case-by-case basis, and in cooperation with relevant regional organizations as appropriate, should peaceful means be inadequate.” So these “peaceful means be inadequate” was [instead] of saying there should non-peaceful collective action.

Evans: You are jumping ahead to 2005. When we had a sequence of events, the Commission produced its report and came up with this concept and then, after another chain of things which we didn’t go into, in 2005, rather spectacularly and unexpectedly, the World Summit: 150 plus leaders, heads of state and government, actually signed up to this principle in the way in which I’ve expressed it. The third element of the principle, which is reflected in the language that you identified, is that military action under Chapter VII of the UN Charter is retained as an option but only in extreme circumstances. So the further contribution of this concept was not only turning the language upside down and re-conceptualizing it in a more acceptable language but it also made clear that the military dimension of it, while still needed to be there, was a last resort. There was only “should only peaceful means not be possible to resolve the situation”, and only if the UN Security Council should endorse it. So that’s where we got to in 2005 and I think it is important to appreciate just what a big conceptual breakthrough that was. The big question mark however was whether this was going to be just a rhetorical breakthrough or was it going to stick in terms of action.

Chanda: That’s why I think maybe we can just jump ahead to this year. I think in February, the organization that you headed, International Crisis Group, issued a report in mid-February calling for the international intervention on the principle of the Responsibility to Protect Libya. But it took more than a month for the UN to actually agree to pass the resolution.

Evans: I don’t think we ought to be unhappy about that. These are always going to be complex and difficult issues; this is always going to be a lot of argument. The immediate need was to get to the stage where there was a reflex response internationally not that this was nobody’s business – which was the reaction in the past – but that this was everyone’s business. How this response should play itself out – there are bound to be disagreements, arguments, caution… A lot of the international community is now prepared to accept this principle and then in successive UN debates they have accepted it, so that it is only a handful of countries now that deny it altogether. There will always be argument on how to do it.

Now what happened in the Libya case I think it is really a textbook example of how the principle should be applied. It started out with two resolutions. The first one in February was a strong call for the cessation by the Libyan government of all offensive action against its own civilians, a call for a condemnation of that, and the application of what by UN standards are very strong measures: targeted sanctions, an arms embargo, and a reference of the whole issue to the International Criminal Court, raising the specter of international criminal law action against Gaddafi and his senior henchmen. That was a major breakthrough itself because you had the Responsibility to Protect principle expressly invoked and you had a set of really strong measures agreed on to apply that. And that was a unanimous decision. However, of course, it didn’t work, it didn’t stop the violence. Gaddafi ignored the cease-fire calls, ignored any invitation to negotiate a political solution and kept up the barrage. Moreover, threatened, if he ever got hold of the rebels, the dissidents, to basically wipe them out, exterminate them. And then you had the beginnings of a movement of military action, tanks, armored personnel moving towards Benghazi and the east of the country. And so everybody was acutely conscious that here in the making, maybe two or three days away, was a catastrophic mass murder situation looming. Classic case for the application of the most extreme end of the Responsibility to Protect spectrum.

It is not surprising that it took some time for consensus to be reached about how to deal with this. The Americans, I think, are not to be blamed – President Obama is not to be blamed – for not wanting to move on this until he was confident that the voice of the region was supporting such strong action. So President Obama waited until he had expressed support from the Arab League. When it did come, the US moved very quickly. It was a difficult debate still because you had Russia, China, India, Brazil and Germany all abstaining. But an abstention was as good as an affirmative vote, particularly from Russia and China because they didn’t veto. And so we had this further resolution pass which authorizes all necessary measures, i.e. military measures, short of boots on the ground, short of an occupying force, but not only the imposition of a no-fly zone but also other necessary action which has taken, of course, the form of airborne assaults on tank movements and so on.

So here we had for the first time, not only an indication of the principle as in the first resolution, but its actual complete application in the forms of military action. That’s, I think, to be applauded because whatever else is going on, and whatever other difficult policy questions remain – and there are quite a few, we’ll no doubt talk about them – let’s remember, let’s pocket the fact that we stopped a massacre. The world agreed to stop what would certainly have been very catastrophic, a mass atrocity crime.

Chanda: The way the intervention has gone on, it seemed not to respect aerial sovereignty, that you can go over Libyan airspace and bomb and shoot at tanks, but you are not going to violate their territorial sovereignty on the ground. Now, this restriction on the intervention basically means what you said, that no boots on the ground means that Qaddafi has no changed his tactics – the army is not using tanks, they are using pickup trucks and SUVs to carry his troops and NATO is unable to identify them and shoot them. There is a concrete example of the limits of the Responsibility to Protect principle applied in Libya.

Evans: Well, I think what the international community was doing was really trying to neutralize the prospects of a major civilian massacre of the kind that would have occurred had he arrived in Benghazi. There were remaining civilian protection questions. I mean, what Qaddafi was doing to his own people in the areas under his control, in Tripoli for example, which were not going to be able to be addressed, as you say, but by a full scale invasion. What is clear is the mood of the region was not in favor of that. When you are applying these Responsibility to Protect principles, particularly at the extreme end of military action, you do have to apply not only a legal benchmark of Security Council approval, you also have to a prudential benchmark and one of the issues that you have to bring into the equation is whether more harm than good would be caused by taking the action in question.

And I think that right from the beginning there has been a very real acknowledged risk that if you have Western forces physically on the ground, engaged in not just stopping an easily definable civilian protection assault, but really engaged in a full scale ground war against a governing regime is a very real risk that that would be able to be portrayed in the Arab-Islamic world as “here come the Crusaders again, here are the Western armies, here are the infidels.” And the Arabs themselves didn’t want that and the rebels on the ground were, initially anyway, content with the proposition of taking out Qaddafi’s air superiority and they were particularly happening of taking out ground assault. What we have now got, frankly, is now much more like a familiar civil war situation. What the international community has got to decide is whether it is going to take full-scale sides in a civil war situation, treat it not just as a civilian protection, Responsibility to Protect, case but as an international peace and security issue of a familiar kind. It is going to make some tough decisions about this and it may be that we are in for a stalemate, a protracted stalemate. But remember that we still do have the targeted sanctions, remember we still have the threat of International Criminal Court prosecution, we still have a massive diplomatic effort going on, and we still have the pressure being applied by attacks on concentrations of Qaddafi’s forces. Now, by any familiar historical standard, that’s not a bad set of measures for the internationals to agree on. Hopefully over time this will encourage collapse from within of the regime, defections and so on, and a political solution to this. You can’t win all these things by military means.

Chanda: Yes, but I think that the situation in the way it is now… Today, we are talking here on a Friday the eighth of April; the Qaddafi forces have now basically thrown out the rebels from Brega and are actually heading towards Benghazi. So we might be seeing another replay of what happened when the first intervention took place.

Evans: Well, we may see multiple replays of this, and that is maybe just the way it will have to go. But I think if you start playing games with the language of that resolution and use it as an all-purpose authority to amount full-scale war, to achieve regime change, you are going beyond the consensus that is there in that resolution. Now, in terms of getting rid of Qaddafi, we might all agree that that would be a wholly desirable objective. We might also agree that that may well be the only way to completely be confident that there won’t be any more civilians at risk anywhere. But, if we want to preserve the integrity of the Responsibility to Protect principle, if we want to preserve the capacity for building consensus around this in the future so that if there is another Rwanda situation, another Srebrenica situation, another Kosovo situation, or if there is another Benghazi situation in another country in the future, we want to preserve the willingness to unite around a resolution. If we play, as an international community, too fast and loose with that language, without going back and getting refined language agreed, we are going to play into the hands of all those who say “Look, right from the beginning, this Responsibility to Protect thing has just been a cover for the old familiar Western imperial attitudes; they are just looking for an excuse to come in and throw their weight around.” It’s not what Responsibility to Protect is about, but it’s crucial that we keep it as tight and narrowly defined as we possibly can.

Chanda: So, if that is the next step in sort of refining this Responsibility to Protect, what would be your suggestion, in light of the experience that we have had so far?

Evans: In the Libyan case or more generally?

Chanda: More generally.

Evans: It’s a steady process of consolidation. I mean, we’ve come a long way. In 2005 was the rhetorical formal achievement. The period since then has been a slow, halting process of increasing the consensus about what is and what is not a Responsibility to Protect case. I think the high watermark before Libya in the use of the concept was Kenya in 2008, when a catastrophic violence erupted after a disputed election. We had church burnings, people being killed, tens of thousands of people were expelled from their homes and it looked like a replay of Rwanda. But everybody started talking about Responsibility to Protect and a diplomatic mission was mobilized, led by Kofi Annan which defused the situation, short of any military means. It was a classic example of the lesser persuasive measures being successful.

Chanda: And since then we have had Sri Lanka…

Evans: Then we’ve not only had the Sri Lankan case that you’ve mentioned, Darfur and the inadequacy of the response, the Congo case, but we’ve also had a misuse of the Responsibility to Protect principle by Russia when it invaded Georgia in 2008, claiming that it was protecting civilians when it clearly was doing nothing of the kind. This has been a halting process. The Libya case I think represents a high watermark of the application of this. It’s important that it not be the high watermark from which the tide now recedes. But for the future, we need to do a number of things. We need to continue to refine the principle conceptually, so everybody understands what it is about and recognizes that it is different from conflict situations generally and human rights violations situations generally; it’s only for the most extreme mass atrocity crimes. We need institutional preparedness, we need early warning and response centers in every major government and intergovernmental institution. We need to create civilian preparedness, negotiators, mediators, and police able to go into these situations. We need to rethink the kind of military configurations and doctrine and training that are needed for these fire brigade jobs which are short of traditional war fighting. And above all we need further effort to generate political consensus case by case as it arises. So there is a big task ahead but I’m very confident that step by step by step, as we go through this learning process, we will get more and more international consensus. The important thing is not to blow it by misusing the concept.

Chanda: One thing you did not mention, which I think is worth mentioning is the role of the media in bringing people to attention of the atrocities about to take place or which are taking place which are absent in a lot of past atrocities. Here people are sending their cell phone photographs to YouTube or to other social media.

Evans: The new social media in unquestionably playing a major role in ensuring that nobody has any excuses anymore for not knowing about these things. It’s not necessarily going to make it easier to generate the necessary consensus about how to respond. That’s always going to be tricky, always going to be difficult, always going to be argument, always going to be step by step, always going to be a question mark about whether the ultimate response really is effective enough. But when we compare where we got to in Kenya in 2008 to the absolute indifference of the international community to the unfolding tragedy in Rwanda just fourteen years earlier, when we compare the response to Libya with the response to Srebrenica and Kosovo in terms of the unanimity or the agreement that was achieved in the Security Council, we’ve come a very long way. And I think that if you stand back from this, it’s very hard to think in the history of our ideas and the history of international relations, any fundamental new principle that has caught on as quickly as this one has. Yes it is imperfect, yes there are still journalists who misunderstand it and misuse it, still there are academics who are living back in the days of humanitarian intervention and talking to each other about complex issues of interpretation which have got nothing to do with the real world that is going on of international political policy debate right now. Things have shifted; there is something close now to an international reflex response that when these situations arise, which everyone can recognize as catastrophic, we have to do something.

Chanda: That is very, very important to tell our viewers, that Libya does mark a high watermark and that the responsibility of the world today is to move on from there and not recede from there. And in order to give a better background to what happened and how it happened, nothing is better than this book, which Gareth Evans wrote and published in 2008. It is extremely relevant today to understand what is going on in Libya.

Gareth Evans, thank you so much for spending the time with us.

Evans: Thank you very much Nayan. I appreciate the opportunity to talk to you, as always.