[kictanet] on sovereignty, peace talks and the "Responsibility To Protect" (R2P)

[saidimu apale]

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/02/20/opinion/edcohen.php ("A Change to
Believe in")

An intriguing article exploring current (fading?) notions of sovereignty
("that state sovereignty - the unfettered power of a state within its
own jurisdiction - was the inviolable basis of international law"), to
evolving ideas about sovereignty and international law ("R2P formalized
the notion that when a state proves unable or unwilling to protect its
people, and crimes against humanity are perpetrated, the international
community has an obligation to intervene - if necessary, and as a last
resort, with military force").

Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_to_protect) has a
good overview.

Makes for interesting reading in light of the brouhaha over the peace
talks.


Regards,

Saidi


-------
A Change to Believe In
by Roger Cohen

Fidel Castro has quit after a half-century in power. An African-American
has become a serious contender for the U.S. presidency, winning a 10th
consecutive victory over his rival for the Democratic nomination. A new
European state, Kosovo, has been born.

And that’s just in the last week.

Communist dictators don’t quit. Blacks don’t have broad U.S. electoral
appeal. European borders don’t shift without bloodshed. History has been
upended. Change, as Barack Obama would put it, is something you can
believe in.

After the cold war’s end, and close to one million dead in the genocides
of Bosnia (1992) and Rwanda (1994), and the digitally-induced
dissolution of barriers and distances and hierarchies, some governments
thought everything could remain the same.

They thought wrong, and not just in Havana and Pyongyang. They believed
that in the age of globalization the principles of the Treaties of
Westphalia, dating back to 1648, would be enough. In places like Moscow
and Beijing and Belgrade, they clung to the idea that state sovereignty
— the unfettered power of a state within its own jurisdiction — was the
inviolable basis of international law.

Boris Tadic, the Serbian president, took this line at the United Nations
this week, insisting that Kosovo’s independence ”annuls international
law, tramples upon justice and enthrones injustice.”

He’s wrong. Let’s set aside the fact that Kosovo held one of the eight
seats in the rotating presidency of a defunct state, Yugoslavia, and
other holders of those federal seats from Slovenia to Bosnia to
Macedonia all become independent.

At a deeper level, the story of little Kosovo is the story of changing
notions of sovereignty and international law.

After the above-mentioned genocides, one perpetrated by the late
Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, both revealing a U.N. Security Council too
divided to stop mass slaughter, NATO circumvented the council in 1999.
It waged war for the first time to prevent Milosevic doing his worst
again in Kosovo.

The war, in the words of Thomas Weiss, a political scientist at the City
University of New York, ”had legitimacy even if its legality was
questioned.” This legitimacy stemmed from an evolving consensus that, as
Tony Blair once put it, ”acts of genocide can never be a purely internal
matter.”

Sovereignty, after Bosnia, after Rwanda, in a globalized world, was more
than authority over territory and people. It was also responsibility.

When that responsibility to protect was flouted, when a government
abused the basic rights of its citizens through slaughter or ethnic
cleansing, sovereignty could in effect be suspended. As Kofi Annan, the
former U.N. secretary general, put it: ”State sovereignty, in its most
basic sense, is being redefined.” For Annan, as Weiss has noted, ”Human
rights transcended narrow claims of state sovereignty.”

Which brings us to ”R2P.” That’s not a rock band or a chemical compound.

In 2005, the World Summit adopted the ”responsibility to protect,” known
by that acronym. R2P formalized the notion that when a state proves
unable or unwilling to protect its people, and crimes against humanity
are perpetrated, the international community has an obligation to
intervene — if necessary, and as a last resort, with military force.

Member states declared that, with Security Council approval, they were
prepared "to take collective action in a timely and decisive manner"
when "national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations
from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against
humanity."

An independent Kosovo, recognized by major Western powers, is in effect
the first major fruit of the ideas behind R2P. It could not have
happened if the rights of human beings were not catching up at last with
the rights of states.

Appropriately, Kosovo’s emergence coincided with the establishment in
New York of the Global Center for the Responsibility to Protect,
directed by Weiss. Backed by the Canadian, British and Dutch
governments, among others, and with support from Ban Ki Moon, Annan’s
successor, the organization’s mission is the spread of R2P principles.

They need bolstering. The Iraq war has revived a 21st century
sovereignty fetish exploited by Sudan to stall U.N. efforts to stop
genocide in Darfur, where the government has failed utterly in its
”responsibility to protect” without provoking "timely and decisive"
international action.

Interventionism is increasingly seen in the Middle East and Africa as a
camouflage for Western interests.

But I believe the tide will eventually turn. R2P will be a reference. It
is part of what Lawrence Weschler has called ”the decades-long, at times
maddeningly halting, vexed, and compromised effort to expand the
territory of law itself.”

The ”territory of law” is now also the universal territory on which
human life is protected. Westphalian principles meet R2P. An R2P
generation is coming. The prizing open of the world is slow work, but
from Kosovo to Cuba it continues. 
-----------