International Responses to Mass Atrocities in Africa. Kurt Mills
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of the ICC. All the prosecutions by the ICC to date have taken place in Africa. The practice of humanitarianism has been significantly affected by experiences in not only Rwanda, but also Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia and elsewhere. Furthermore, except for Europe, Africa has been the region that has developed most substantially in the area of peacekeeping activities, although even those developments have fallen significantly short at times. Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), among others, have been the site of significant innovations and failures in the practical application of peacekeeping.
As to why these four countries—Rwanda, DRC, Uganda, and Sudan (Darfur)—the answer is many-faceted. Geographically, they are contiguous, with the DRC and Uganda bordering all three other countries, and Rwanda and Sudan having common borders with two of the others. They all have colonial histories that have significantly affected their modern development, although the experiences and legacies are different, with Sudan and Uganda having experienced British colonialism and the DRC and Rwanda having a Belgian legacy (with resulting French influence). Central and East Africa have been the focus of widespread gross violations of human rights since the end of the Cold War. Burundi, the Central African Republic (CAR), DRC/Zaire, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, and Uganda have all seen a mixture of significant civil conflict, genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, as well as significant humanitarian catastrophes. The conflicts have spread across borders and in many instances become interrelated, affecting neighboring countries like the CAR, Chad, and Tanzania. The conflict focused on the Rwanda-Congo-broader Great Lakes nexus has witnessed untold human suffering and devastation and has pulled in an even wider array of participants. The northeastern corner of the DRC, which borders Rwanda, Uganda, and Sudan, perhaps exemplifies the multinational, multi-actor, interrelated nature of conflict in Africa today. These four countries have each had their own internal conflicts, which have become internationalized as refugees and combatants flow unimpeded across borders, bringing their fighting and suffering to new countries and populations.
Kevin Dunn argues that Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has created a cross-border “insecurity complex …. transform[ing] a microregional conflict into a macroregional zone of insecurity.”9 One could expand this further to say that multiple dynamics have contributed to a regional insecurity complex that involves a dizzying array of state and nonstate actors and transcends sovereign boundaries even as those boundaries play a significant role in structuring multiple conflicts and widespread political and human insecurity. As will be seen, the Rwandan genocide and lack of international response led directly and inexorably to two decades of war in eastern DRC, millions dead, and the intervention of around a dozen countries, even as internal Zairean/Congolese dynamics proved fertile breeding ground for conflict. The spread of the LRA beyond Uganda pulled Uganda into the DRC and southern Sudan, as well as the CAR. Uganda was also the staging ground for the Tutsi invasion of Rwanda that ended the genocide. Sudan endured civil war for two decades—and used the LRA as part of its war against the south—before a relative peace was established and a new country was born in South Sudan. But it was the conflict in Darfur—in the western part of the country—that brought issues related to the responsibility to protect and international criminal justice to the fore, posing some of the first real tests for both R2P and the ICC—and the AU.
The conflicts are directly related, but they have all served, in a sense, as part of an African proving ground for the global responsibilities and responses at the core of this book. The international community has dealt with these conflicts in varying ways, which perhaps reflects partly the particular internal and regional dynamics of the conflicts, but also the broader geopolitical perspectives and interests of the main global powers. The response has ranged from apathy to a range of innovative, but not necessarily completely satisfying, actions. Rwanda highlights the dangers of ignoring genocidal situations and trying to use nonstate actors—humanitarian organizations—for activities that states and state-based organizations like the UN should be undertaking. It illustrates the vast unintended consequences humanitarians can have as they carry out their humanitarian imperative. And it was a testing ground for newly resurgent international criminal justice norms. The DRC was a reflection of those unintended consequences, but also of the inability of the international community to adequately respond to a fiendishly complex set of conflicts that spread across vast ungoverned spaces and borders. The UN slowly ratcheted up its response, declaring the protection of civilians its highest priority, and, in a very uneven, punctuated fashion, it tried to put this determination into effect. Even with millions dead, there was nary a whisper of the highly politicized responsibility to protect, even as the UN undertook proto-R2P activities. The DRC also puts in high relief the politicized nature of the ICC, as cases were chosen and narrowed to fit the specifications of the state. Uganda highlights the dangers, yet again, of the unintended consequences of unreflective humanitarian imperatives. But, most prominently, the very conundrums of inserting a global judicial body into the middle of an on-going conflict became apparent, with an asserted—if not always easily locatable—stark trade-off between peace and justice, as well as between local, traditional justice mechanisms and global, supposedly universal judicial authorities. Darfur also demonstrates this peace versus justice dynamic, although on a more global, geopolitical stage. Darfur was also the first post-R2P conflict, although the eventual international reaction would not have been recognizable to the original authors of R2P, given its tepid implementation and refusal to stand up to the government in Khartoum. Darfur also illustrates how humanitarians could become pawns in larger conflict dynamics.
R2P3
Each of these conflicts will be analyzed through a matrix which examines how the three sets of human rights related norms and practices identified above—protection, prosecution, and palliation (R2P3)—are understood, are implemented and may interact with each other. Chapter 1, which outlines and critiques the responsibilities and the actors who have taken on the responsibilities, develops the matrix, highlighting the major conundrums and tensions inherent in each of the responsibilities and their interactions. At the end of each of the subsequent case studies, the matrix for that case is presented, providing a summary of the main issues identified in the case.
While all four cases have elements of the R2P3 triumvirate, each case has a different focus and illustrates a somewhat different set of concerns and dynamics. Rwanda illustrates quite starkly the complex nature of humanitarian action, the trade-offs humanitarians are faced with, and the very difficult situation they can find themselves in when states and the UN refuse to act. It also demonstrates the potential for disaster when an adequate response to mass atrocities is not forthcoming. The DRC was this disaster. The particular focus here is the very slow development of military responses to widespread atrocities via peacekeeping and the protection of civilians concept. In only very rare instances did action that resembled R2P take place. Rather, most activities began with, and developed from, more classical understandings and practices of peacekeeping evolving into what Gareth Evans calls “peacekeeping plus.”10 The conundrums facing the ICC as it finds its feet and tries to gain state cooperation also feature. In Uganda, the story starts with the very ambiguous role of humanitarians in ultimately supporting state-sponsored forced displacement, but soon moves into a discussion of the proper role of the ICC in on-going conflicts. Central is the ongoing debate about whether there is a trade-off between peace and justice. Darfur, too, features the role of the ICC in ongoing conflict and its place in the increasingly complex arena of international security. We see tensions mount between the ICC and an increasingly assertive AU. Darfur also served as the first real test for R2P—a test it failed. In each of these cases, we further see conundrums and trade-offs as multiple responses are deployed simultaneously, illustrating, for example, the potential conflict between humanitarian action and civilian protection, or how the presence of the ICC may endanger humanitarian action.
A significant focus and element of the story of each of the cases will be the role of major Western states and the UN Security Council. This is because it is these states that have been pushing to a significant extent the responsibilities agenda and, indeed, are its political and financial patrons. They fund humanitarian action and peacekeeping, and, as in the case of Libya, have the requisite capabilities to engage in the most robust action to protect civilians—even if they have been reluctant to actually use those