International Responses to Mass Atrocities in Africa. Kurt Mills
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highlights a significant change in global outlook as humanitarian arguments are given much more consideration today, such that states attempt to use humanitarian arguments for very unhumanitarian reasons—as well as for more evidently humanitarian purposes.
The post-Cold War world of the 1990s brought about conceptual and practical challenges to understandings of sovereignty and nonintervention. A raft of “new wars”65 erupted in the aftermath of the Cold War as the Soviet Union fell apart and developing states lost their patrons. The first post-Cold War (or perhaps end of Cold War) intervention took place in Liberia as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) intervened in the civil war, which featured mass human rights violations and threatened regional stability. It did not have the initial approval of the UN Security Council, although it did receive the general approval of the international community afterwards. More important, however, was a declaration by the secretary-general of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), Salim A. Salim, who said that African governments who engaged in human rights abuses could no longer hide behind sovereignty.66 This was a radical suggestion in 1990, and while still controversial, would attract much more support in Africa today. The 1991 creation of “no-fly zones” by the United States, UK and France in Iraq was intended to protect populations that were being persecuted by the Saddam Hussein regime. Operation Provide Comfort reflected a partial normative change as France argued that widespread human rights violations could legitimate UN Security Council action even if not identified as a threat to international peace and security, the traditional justification for forceful UN action.67 Other interventions did see human rights and humanitarian concerns cited as threats to international peace and security, thus initiating an ideational change in Security Council practice.68 In 1992–93 the United States undertook Operation Restore Hope in Somalia, taking over from a failed UN mission. The Security Council justification made the direct connection between humanitarian crises and international peace and security. However, the actual level of commitment to humanitarian objectives was demonstrated when the United States pulled out after only a few months when its forces suffered more—and particularly humiliating—casualties than expected.
I have already mentioned the international failures in Bosnia and Rwanda. Although the intervention in Bosnia began as a rather lackluster affair, the massacre of 8,000 people in Srebrenica spurred NATO to action. It engaged in a bombing campaign that eventually led to an end to the war. But, overall, the UN experience in Bosnia was rather ignominious. This should not have been surprising, however, given that a year before the UN allowed 8,000 people to be killed in Srebrenica, it allowed 800,000 to be killed in Rwanda. The issue in Rwanda was not sovereignty. Rather, it was that no country (except for France, late in the day, and very ambiguously) had any interest in sending in troops to stop the slaughter. European states found the interest five years later in Kosovo when NATO intervened to protect Armenian Kosovars from Serbia. This, too, was an ambiguous intervention, given that the larger Serbian human rights abuses seemed to come after the intervention started.69 And, the intervention occurred in the absence of UN Security Council approval, since any Security Council resolution would have been vetoed by Russia, given its ties to Serbia. As with Bosnia, there were traditional state interests involved—the general stability of the region, as well as the prospect of yet more refugees flowing into Western Europe. However, Kosovo also represented an assertion of a new doctrine on the part of some states that justified (unilateral) military intervention on humanitarian grounds.
Recognizing Responsibilities
During the 1990s, and in the context of changing ideas about human rights and the above mentioned interventions (or noninterventions), a number of authors addressed the balance between sovereignty and human rights.70 They argued that rather than being in opposition, human rights were constitutive of state sovereignty. If a government abused its people, it could lose legitimacy and the state might lose its immunity to nonintervention. Further, there was discussion about whether there was a right or a duty to intervene, and under what conditions. The developing norm of a right and, indeed, a duty to intervene to protect gross violations of human rights was given voice in 2001 by the Canadian-sponsored International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) in a report entitled The Responsibility to Protect.71 It recognized a shift in the human rights versus state sovereignty discourse by arguing that claims to sovereignty entailed responsibilities. It also moved the debate away from discussing a right to intervene to a responsibility to protect those who might be threatened by gross violations of human rights or humanitarian crises. The ICISS noted three main responsibilities: to prevent genocide and other humanitarian catastrophes, to react when such situations occur, and to rebuild after a complex humanitarian emergency has ended.
This norm was endorsed by the UN Secretary-General’s High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change,72 and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan highlighted and affirmed this developing norm intended to set the agenda for the 2005 World Summit.73 He also called on the Security Council to develop principles for the use of force. The 2005 World Summit Outcome document stated that the international community has a responsibility to address widespread gross violations of human rights, even if it means using force. However, the World Summit endorsed a somewhat different and watered down version of the ICISS proposal.74 The norm has been more forcefully recognized by the African Union in its Constitutive Act. Article 4h states the following principle: “the right of the Union to intervene in a Member State pursuant to a decision of the Assembly in respect of grave circumstances, namely: war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.” While there is ongoing rhetoric in Africa regarding the neocolonial character of humanitarian intervention, and much debate about the proper balance between human rights and sovereignty, this was still a stunning reversal—three years before the World Summit—of the unflinching support for absolute sovereignty and nonintervention, and indicates continuing global normative development, even if it has yet to be invoked.
Prevention
The ICISS identified prevention as one of the three main elements of R2P. The World Summit recognized the responsibility of the international community to prevent genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. However, of the twenty mentions of prevention in the outcome document, more than half were focused on preventing conflict. There is a significant connection between conflict and human rights abuses, since the crimes listed above generally occur within the context of war. Yet this is not a new responsibility for the international community. Indeed, the UN was founded to prevent war. That it has failed spectacularly many times in its more than six decades does not negate that this is a well-established responsibility on the part of states. Further, such prevention can include a wide variety of activities, such as development, which, while plausibly related to preventing the conditions under which genocide might occur, are also conceptually distinct from the core idea of protecting people from the most heinous of mass crimes.75
Alex Bellamy argues that there are four main tasks that the international community can engage in to prevent such atrocities: early warning, preventive diplomacy, ending impunity, and preventive deployments.76 While these are all worthwhile activities, the first two are already well-used, if not always effective, tools. Ending impunity has already been recognized through the creation of the International Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and the creation of the International Criminal Court. However, the protective value of such measures is still in doubt. While indicting a head of state or rebel leader might serve as pressure or an inducement to stop fighting, it may also create conditions where the reverse inducements are created. Such leaders and others may have an incentive to continue fighting because otherwise they might be vulnerable to capture and transfer to the Hague. We have a very small sample of such actions taking place before or during a conflict from which to generalize. And, so far, the latter dynamic seems more prevalent. Lord’s Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony was reluctant to sign a peace agreement in Uganda as long as there was an ICC arrest warrant for him, and Omar al Bashir of the Sudan has, so far, been defiant of the ICC since an arrest warrant was issued for him. Similarly, Qaddafi demonstrated little interest in ending his human rights abuses and stepping down before he was forcibly removed from power. Thus, such international criminal justice measures do not, at present anyway, properly fall under the heading of prevention. The fact that the Rwandan genocide might have been