Mark Turner: UN Reflects On Genocide, Potential Future Interventions
In coming years, as historians reflect upon what was achieved at this week's United Nations summit in New York, one decision may stand out.
If all goes as planned, the world will vow today "to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity".
This promise, part of a new doctrine called the responsibility to protect, reflects a profound shift in international law, whereby a growing sense of global responsibility for atrocities is increasingly encroaching upon the formerly sanctified concept of state sovereignty.
While possibly never more than a convenient fiction, sovereignty has been the rock of international relations for 350 years, and the guiding framework around which the United Nations is organised. It remains deeply important to most UN member states.
That means that any efforts to interfere in domestic affairs have traditionally been given short shrift, and continue to face strong opposition from countries such as China and Russia. But massacres in Rwanda, Bosnia and most recently the killings in the Sudanese region of Darfur have created a growing sense that sovereignty should no longer remain inviolable when the worst abuses take place.
Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, gave a stark message to the summiteers. "Excellencies," he said, "you will be pledged to act if another Rwanda looms." Paul Kagame, the Rwandan president whose rebel army eventually halted the 1994 genocide in Rwanda after the international community stood by, issued a similar appeal:
"Never again should the international community's resolve to tackle these crimes be found wanting. Let us be sure preventive interventions are the rule rather than the exception."
Aid groups such as Oxfam International say the UN declaration, the latest manifestation of an emerging principle of the "the right to protect" is the most important result of the summit."
If all goes as planned, the world will vow today "to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity".
This promise, part of a new doctrine called the responsibility to protect, reflects a profound shift in international law, whereby a growing sense of global responsibility for atrocities is increasingly encroaching upon the formerly sanctified concept of state sovereignty.
While possibly never more than a convenient fiction, sovereignty has been the rock of international relations for 350 years, and the guiding framework around which the United Nations is organised. It remains deeply important to most UN member states.
That means that any efforts to interfere in domestic affairs have traditionally been given short shrift, and continue to face strong opposition from countries such as China and Russia. But massacres in Rwanda, Bosnia and most recently the killings in the Sudanese region of Darfur have created a growing sense that sovereignty should no longer remain inviolable when the worst abuses take place.
Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, gave a stark message to the summiteers. "Excellencies," he said, "you will be pledged to act if another Rwanda looms." Paul Kagame, the Rwandan president whose rebel army eventually halted the 1994 genocide in Rwanda after the international community stood by, issued a similar appeal:
"Never again should the international community's resolve to tackle these crimes be found wanting. Let us be sure preventive interventions are the rule rather than the exception."
Aid groups such as Oxfam International say the UN declaration, the latest manifestation of an emerging principle of the "the right to protect" is the most important result of the summit."