Intervening when a massive abuse of human rights is the essence of the conflict is still a hard sell, especially when the lives of our soldiers are on the line and the end of the mission is not in sight. It seems that governments (and most individuals, too) are prone to act only when there is a threat to themselves. As a result we need to demonstrate that abuses of human rights elsewhere have ramifications in our own lives, too. They clearly do, no matter how we attempt to turn a blind eye. As Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution, wrote, “Inhumanity, when it is systematized as it is in dictatorial and genocidal regimes, is not only an outrage against common human values, but it also carries very real security implications.” Gareth Evans, past-president of the International Crisis Group, spelled it out even more plainly: “States that cannot or will not stop internal atrocity crimes are the kind of states that cannot or will not stop terrorism, weapons proliferation, drug and people trafficking, the spread of health pandemics, and other global risks.” As we’ve seen more and more, all of the threats Evans listed do not respect borders.
Despite the evidence of change all around us, we have a tendency to view our political “verities” as unchangeable and timeless. For roughly three centuries, national sovereignty has been held to be above all other principles and laws of humanity. Hiding behind this powerful, fundamental and long-standing international respect of nation states’ autonomy—which is also enshrined in the UN Charter—world leaders have freely abused their own populations within their borders while other nations bowed to their sovereignty. But as Gary J. Bass argues in Freedom’s Battle, the very idea of national sovereignty grew out of European reaction to the devastating Thirty Years War, in which “perhaps 40 per cent of the population of central Europe perished in the name of competing versions of universal truth.” In other words, the idea of the nation state was created in large measure as a response to an annihilating assault on the lives of individual citizens and was actually designed to better protect them.
By the late twentieth century, though, the concept of national sovereignty could not contain our outrage any longer. The genocide in Rwanda and other horrific crimes against humanity around the globe demonstrated that armed conflicts within a single country, not between nations—and with mainly civilian casualties—were the new standard for warfare. And it was clear we needed to invent a new doctrine that could engage the political will of nation states to prevent future massive abuses of human rights and destruction of human life on the scale of Cambodia, Rwanda, East Timor, Kosovo, Bosnia, the Congo and Darfur.
In response, Gareth Evans led an international group, funded mostly by Canada, that conducted a seminal study on the interrelationship between sovereignty, massive human rights abuses and the impact of those abuses beyond national borders. (I was asked to provide input to that group.) The year-long study, the results of which were published in 2001, produced a paradigmshifting concept: nations have a “responsibility to protect” suffering humanity in any country on the planet.
The doctrine of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) states that no sovereign state or its authorities can deliberately abuse the human rights of its citizenry and claim that no other state has a right to interfere. It says that should such a scenario present itself, or in the case where a government cannot stop such massive abuses of innocent civilians, then the international community has a responsibility to protect those civilians under a mandate from the UN. In other words, the protection of individual citizens is paramount over the sovereignty of a nation state. The doctrine contends that if innocent people are being abused, we do not have a choice about whether or not to intervene; we have a fundamental responsibility to humanity to intervene in extremis, even with force.
The principle of R2P, endorsed at the UN World Summit in New York in 2005, continues to be controversial. Smaller developing countries at first feared—citing historical example—that world powers would abuse such a doctrine and simply invade at whim to depose regimes that were dictatorial, or even rogue. And, as I mentioned above, using the example of the Rwandan genocide, world powers are reticent to embrace the concept of R2P, which they perceive to be a near-open door to involving them in trouble spots in which they have no compelling interest—beyond the saving of human life. The old attitudes and reflexes and excuses linger, exacerbated these days as NATO in Afghanistan and the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq try to figure out ways to responsibly exit from conflict zones that the major powers had deemed to be within their national interests.
Concurrently with my work on eradicating the use of child soldiers, I was also nominated by the UN secretary general to his advisory board on the prevention of genocide, mass atrocity and abuse of human rights, which was designed to assist him in moving the UN, its agencies and member states into prevention mode when it came to genocide. Having embraced such a doctrine doesn’t mean that we have worked out how to apply it or how it should be integrated with other radical initiatives of the last decade, such as the ICC, which has been establishing jurisprudence for prosecuting crimes against humanity and even indicting heads of state. We are on a steep learning curve when it comes to applying these new international tools and figuring out the resources we need to use them effectively.
For instance, the 2008 indictment for genocide of the president of the Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, was designed to bring a halt to the slow-acting ongoing slaughter in Darfur. But when the ICC brought down the charges, al-Bashir immediately threw a large number of foreign NGOs and humanitarian support out of the Sudan, depriving millions of his own people of the means of survival. That act should have been enough to further indict him, but where does the escalation end?
Glen Pearson, a Canadian member of Parliament with deep humanitarian ties to the Sudan, wrote in A Land of Designs: The Saga of Darfur and Human Intentions: “Before any nation or group of nations can intervene, there must be a full and proper humanitarian assessment undertaken to determine the effects on the citizens of that nation.” Every indictment, every sentencing, he continues, “carries stupendous recriminations; for one or a few brought to justice, thousands could be consigned to their deaths. No decision that could result in the privation of hundreds of thousands, even millions, can be truly just unless the people making the ultimate decision provide for the full protection of those who will surely endure terrible consequences of such a complex choice.” If we are going to indict the leader of the Sudan, we have to be ready to step in so that the Sudanese people don’t suffer repercussions. Who is ready, however, to go in and arrest a serving president and bring him to trial, along with the other fifty-two members of his government, his military and police, in order to break the back of an evil regime and stop a genocide that is already seven years old?
I have been doing operational research on this very question with colleagues at Montreal’s Concordia University: the will to intervene based on the principle of R2P. I felt that I needed to bring rigorous thought and options to the UN Advisory Committee on Genocide Prevention on top of the in-the-field knowledge gleaned from my experience in Rwanda. I approached Dr. Frank Chalk of Concordia’s Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies to strategically develop the will to intervene (W2I) in international humanitarian crises. What became clear to us, as we wrote in our 2010 report, is that we can’t wait for our leaders to take action: “When leadership at the top is absent, civil society … must strongly pressure governments to broaden their concept of ‘national interest.’”
This is our responsibility, as much as our leaders’. For the most part, we continue to watch the world passively and permit our leaders to respond with no response. By not raising our voices, we as citizens allow the political elite to get away with inaction even after they have signed on to the concept of R2P. I believe our governments cling to their own sovereign status and allow others to do the same so that one day they do not find themselves being accused of crimes against humanity by fellow members of the UN.
Because of this fear we continue t
o not only witness immorality in action in those countries that allow the use of child soldiers and other abuses of human rights within their own borders, we also continue to participate in immoral inaction, either standing on the sidelines or paying lip service by donating hundreds of millions of dollars in an attempt to wash our hands of these complex problems.
Clearly, we need to become individually engaged in influencing the decision makers of our own countries to actively participate in the R2P doctrine to which they have formally agreed. This is an instrument of enormous power in the hands of the populations of the world, of the citizen juries of the world, of the NGOs of the world, to go forward and pressure the political decision makers to take the action they committed to on our behalf in front of the international world body. It responds to a crying need. It is the essential requirement for protecting millions of human beings from being abused, mutilated, raped, killed, slaughtered, displaced from their own homes and turned into refugees in other countries for the rest of their lives with absolutely no hope of a future for their children.
Some people mistakenly blame international failures and inaction on the UN. But the UN is only as effective as its member states allow it to be, by approving robust mandates, providing multidisciplinary and progressive mission leaders (civilian and military), contributing sufficient funding up front and guaranteeing the logistics essential to sustain the mission in the field for the length of the mandate. Effective action depends on the political will of sovereign states, and on those countries acting according to the will of their populations. The failure is ultimately not the fault of the UN but of sovereign member states whose peoples choose not to act.
As we bore down to what each individual citizen can do, we have to figure out how to compel our politicians to act. The way to drive the political will to intervene here at home is to find inventive ways to describe the impact that the conflict abroad will have on our lives here, making the risk-taking more palatable and easier to explain. We must help our politicians—who ultimately are the ones who must make the difficult decisions of investing resources and the human lives of soldiers, diplomats, humanitarians and police—establish clear objectives, reasonable means to achieve them and clear exit routes if the situation turns completely sour. The more an intervention seems manageable and limited, the easier our leaders will find it to commit. They are the ones who bear the electoral heat for unpopular decisions, who need to take pragmatic, tactical and short-term action to survive in their positions. We need to help them do it.
There are two goals you must keep in mind as you venture forth on your mission to eradicate the use of child soldiers and to encourage our political leaders to accept the responsibility to protect. You must be a leader, and you must influence leaders. There are many ways to do both. But two important places for you to start are in the voting booth and with the media.
In my home, Canada, people between the ages of eighteen and thirty make up about 35 per cent of the population. But voting patterns show that barely 15 per cent of them exercise their right to vote. What a waste, to fail to use this peaceful political process to shape the great democracy we live in. If young people coalesced around key issues and voted, they would change the face of Canadian politics in one election. Why? Because you hold the balance of power in this country. Each young person represents a brand-new vote that has never been counted. It is tragic that Canada’s young voters, the eighteen- to thirty-year-olds, have never stepped up to the democratic challenge of influencing the path they believe this country (and humanity) will take into the near future. Voting patterns in the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe don’t vary much from Canada’s.
Don’t tell me you’re not being heard—it’s that you’re not speaking. You may roll out to the streets of Toronto to protest G20 meetings or travel to Copenhagen to voice your opinion on the climate change conference, but overall your age group is letting political leaders off easily because you aren’t forcing them to craft a vision of how we are going to move the country forward. So far as I can tell, you aren’t consistently demanding your rightful place in the political process. The political elite thrive on the non-participation of the vast majority of citizens and end up being driven more by the media than by the individuals that comprise a country.
You have been allowing traditional media (television, radio, newspapers, magazines) to speak for you and to influence you rather than the other way around. Governments are strongly influenced by the media—and largely define what they perceive as important based on coverage in the press. You need to make the media report on youth-led priorities.
Through voting, through affecting media priorities, through activist commitment and constant engagement with political leaders, public opinion will jell into a solid front that can influence public policy and garner political leadership and action. Without your voices and leadership, the political will to intervene in the world’s toughest and most intractable hot spots will simply not materialize.
As the great American philosopher Yogi Berra once said, “The future ain’t what it used to be.” He was right, but I’d add a significant qualifier: it is a lot closer than it was.
When I was graduating from military college, a very senior officer asked me what I wanted to achieve during my career. I immediately assumed that we were talking about a future twenty years down the road. It was a given that I would have a lengthy, demanding period of apprenticeship upon which I could establish my credentials, build my experiential base, hone my skills and acquire the knowledge I required to be an evolving asset to my organization and the community.
This slow and predictable progression is no longer a given for young people today, born into a wide-open and limitless world. When we speak of your future, we’re speaking three, four, five years down the road, because we’re not in an era of evolution or even in an era of change or reform. We’re actually in an era of revolution. There’s nothing static or stable about the status quo anymore. It’s shifting all the time. The future will be in your face so soon that you will wonder how you got left behind.
In the decades to come, it will require more of your time and intellectual efforts to keep up and survive, let alone master and lead. Your challenge, then, is to lead in a time of perpetual and rapid change. You need a vision that will inspire others to maximize their potential, not just survive by sitting on the sidelines. There are no sidelines anymore. And you need to do this, even as you understand that eradicating a horrific abuse such as the use of children to fight dirty civil wars may take decades of steady effort.
To lead must be your aim, and you also have many more tools than did past revolutionaries to enable you to achieve it. You don’t have twenty years to work out your priorities, dreams and passions in the comfort of your milieu. Everything is changing, and you must participate in that change so that it does not happen at your expense, or at the expense of the rest of humanity.
You are looking at a future that is not only very near but one that is within your power to affect. The Internet seems to have no limit on providing you with information, and you seem to feel there is no limit in moving toward all the knowledge and awareness of the world, the whole of humanity, and all that it has produced in thought, research and development, and accomplishments, good and bad.
Just think back for a moment to the last communications revolution, which your parents witnessed and which you may regard as a birthright: television, which brought the world’s wars, famines and natural disasters into people’s living rooms. Michael Ignatieff, in The Warrior’s Honour, describes the impact of television on the concept and practice of humanitarianism:
Television is … the instrument of a new kind of politics. Since 1945, affluence and idealism have made possible the emergence of a host of non-governmental private charities and pressure groups … that use television as a central part of their campaigns to mobilize conscience and money on behalf of endangered humans and their habitats around the world. It is a politics … that
takes the human species itself rather than specific citizenship, racial, religious, or ethnic groups as its object. It is a “species politics” striving to save the human species itself… . It is a politics that has tried to construct a world opinion to keep watch over the rights of those who lack the means to protect themselves. Using the medium of television, many of these international organizations have managed to force governments to pay some degree of attention to the public-relations costs of their exercises in domestic repression.
But as Ignatieff also points out, “television’s morality is the morality of the war correspondent, the veteran who has heard all the recurring justifications for human cruelty advanced by the Left and the Right, and who learns in the end to pay attention only to the victims.” But it’s not the correspondents’ morality that rules what gets on the air. When the international community effectively abandoned UNAMIR, I turned to journalists and their cameras and tape recorders, helping them as best I could to film and record the unfolding genocide and get the tapes to their producers at home in London, Paris, New York and Toronto. I figured that if what was happening could be seen, my calls for support might trickle up to the political elite, who couldn’t then ignore the slaughter. My soldiers risked their lives to get the tapes out, but much of the video, film and audio tape ended up on the cuttingroom floor when other stories were deemed more immediate and interesting for the audience. It was censorship by ratings in the service of making money.
The Internet and social media are not run by that particular profit model, and information over the Net cannot be stomped on by media bosses who assume that people won’t be interested. In this new era of social media and YouTube you decide what to disseminate and how to do it in order to achieve our ends.