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Conflict
Resolution: Tamil Eelam - Sri Lanka
The Limits of State Sovereignty:
The Responsibility to Protect in the 21st Century
Gareth Evans,
President, International Crisis Group
& Former Australian Foreign Minister
Eighth Neelan Tiruchelvam Memorial Lecture
at International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES),
Colombo, 29 July 2007
 Comment
(1) by tamilnation.org
The
one question that Mr.Gareth Evans signally failed
to address was the content of the strategic
interests of the so called 'international community' (including
Australia) in the island of Sri Lanka and in the
Indian Ocean region - a question made all the more
relevant by his passing reference to
"various
foreign states" who "bear some of the responsibility
for allowing the Tigers to build up their power over the
years".
One of the
matters that both
Washington
and
New Delhi
(and for that matter,
China) may want to address is whether the approaches
that each of them have adopted in relation to the
conflict in the island of Sri Lanka will lead to a
resolution of the conflict between their own
strategic interests (in the context of the
two geopolitical triangles juxtaposing on the Indian
Ocean's background: U.S.-India-China relations and
China-Pakistan-India relations) - and whether there is a
need for each of them to re-evaluate these strategic
interests, if the conflict in the island is to be
resolved. After all, it will be fair to say that there
are two conflicts in the island - one the conflict
between the Sinhala nation and a
Tamil Eelam nation seeking freedom from alien Sinhala
rule, and the other the conflict between the
international actors in the
Indian Ocean region seeking, (amongst other matters)
control of the Indian Ocean sea lanes - whether
through a string of pearls or
by other means. All of us (including Mr.Evans)
may gain by paying more attention to the words
Marcus Aurelius, some 1800 years ago in A.D.169
: 'Look back over the past, with its changing
empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the
future, too.' Struggles for freedom and justice are not
easily demonised and/or suppressed..." [see also
Comment
(2) and Comment
(3)
and
Comment (4)
by tamilnation.org]
[see also
Australia's Expansive Asian Security Footprint
"The (Australian 2007) Defence Update is a deeply flawed policy
document... Double standards on core issues abound...In East
Asia, Australia supports "Japan's more active security posture
within the US alliance and multinational coalitions". But
Chinese military modernization "could create misunderstandings
and instability in the region .... (Then there) ...is the
elephant in the room problem: the obvious and undoubted
perceived interest -- a perceived benefit to Australia from
western access to oil -- cannot be mentioned in polite
company... even when the dirty secret is admitted, even if only
in only in conclaves of trusted experts, it is soon clear that
it is not at all certain that the security of the Australian
people can be shown to be affected by who owns the oil fields of
Iraq.."
more]
 Today
more than ever, on this eighth anniversary of his assassination, Sri
Lankans and those in the wider international community need to
remember and be re-inspired by Neelan Tiruchelvam's life and
achievements. While we can no longer benefit directly from his
remarkable intelligence and learning, his boundless energy, his
politic commitment, and his optimism, we do still have his spirit
living among us in the ideas and institutions he gave us, and in the
example he set for us of an engaged intellectual and a principled
politician.
Neelan was an extraordinary institution builder. The best known of
those he helped found are our host institution tonight, the
International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES), so ably and
imaginatively now led by Dr Rama Mani, and the Law and Society Trust
(LST) � both of which continue to make their intellectual and
political mark not only in Sri Lanka and South Asia, but across the
globe. Beyond that Neelan played an important role in creating the
Official Languages Commission, the Human Rights Task Force and later
the Human Rights Commission, as well of course as his own
distinguished law firm, Tiruchelvam Associates, now led by his wife
Sithie. His ability to build and maintain institutions was the
product not only of good ideas and hard work but also of his ability
to inspire others � particularly young people � to see, believe in,
and work for otherwise hidden possibilities.
Of course the institutions he believed above all worth building were
effective, decent states � protecting the rights and interests of
all their peoples, with conflicts and disputes being resolved
through law, democratic process and effective government structures,
not violence. Probably best known internationally as a brilliant
constitutional lawyer, Neelan was closely involved in
constitution-making processes in Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, and Nepal,
but above all he will be remembered as a central architect of the
then Sri Lankan government's groundbreaking constitutional proposals
of the mid- and late-1990s, which while unhappily never ratified,
continue to inspire hope that a consensus on a just constitutional
and political settlement is, in fact, within reach should only the
political will be there.
Neelan knew that political will is never waiting in a cupboard to be
found: it has to be nurtured and generated, campaigned for
persistently and relentlessly. He was an impressive scholar � with
academic interests and writings spanning a remarkable range of
topics from South Asian culture and ethnicity, to gender, political
theory and of course constitutional law. But he refused to limit
himself to mere scholarship, believing the obvious risks and
challenges of politics were necessary for the ideas he believed in
to be brought to life, to be made real in people's lives. And it was
his willingness to engage in electoral politics as a member of the
TULF and his work in parliament and through other government
mechanisms that ultimately, tragically for him, his family and all
of us, cost him his life.
There is one other celebrated aspect of Neelan Tiruchelvam's life
and character that is directly relevant to my main topic tonight,
and that is his cosmopolitanism. Neelan's sense of community and
attachment went beyond ethnicity, beyond religion, beyond nation,
and beyond region. He didn't ignore or reject any of those
particular attachments in the name of an empty universality, but
rather attempted to connect them all in a more vibrant, integrated,
and just whole. He argued that developing states not only had
something to learn from the richer, developed states but also
something to teach them, arguing for instance, that the
individualist discourse of human rights born in the West "needs to
be enriched by explicit reference to the religious and cultural
traditions of South Asia." And he argued strongly, too, that it was
only if Western states themselves actively tried to live up to their
own professed principles, and applied them in evenhanded ways, that
their concern with human rights in non-Western countries could begin
to be taken seriously.
Approaching issues in this integrated way, confident of the
contributions his own country and culture and region could make to
wider international discourse, led Neelan to have no fear of
international involvement designed to assist countries like his own
extricate themselves from particular crises, or cycles of violence
and counter-violence in which they seemed to be trapped. What
mattered was whether that involvement was not only effective, but
principled and consistent.
This leads directly into my subject tonight: the limits of state
sovereignty, and the proper role of the international community in
responding to catastrophic human rights violations � genocide and
other mass killing, large-scale ethnic cleansing and crimes against
humanity � occurring within the boundaries of a single country.
There is a widespread concern that involvement of countries in the
affairs of others, and in particular the involvement of developed
countries in the internal affairs of developing ones, has not always
been principled or consistent in the past. It is an article of faith
around a good deal of the global South that Article 2 (7) of the UN
Charter is to be read as an all-embracing prohibition when it says
that "Nothing should authorise intervention in matters essentially
within the domestic jurisdiction of any State".
It is understandable that sovereignty should be a very sensitive
subject indeed with the many states who gained their independence
during the decolonisation era � states in all cases proud of their
new identity, in many cases conscious of their fragility, and
generally inclined to see the non-intervention norm as one of their
few defences against threats and pressures from more powerful
international actors seeking to promote their own economic and
political interests.
But the trouble with this approach, like anything taken to extremes,
is that it has had a terrible downside, one which came to a head in
the 1990s in the international response to the series of
conscience-shocking man-made catastrophes that erupted in the
Balkans and Central Africa � most horribly the genocide in Rwanda in
1994, followed by the almost unbelievable default in Srebrenica just
a year later. Over and again, when situations seemed to cry out for
some response, the international community reacted erratically,
incompletely, counterproductively or not at all. And when killing
and ethnic cleansing started all over again in Kosovo in 1999, and
the international community did in fact intervene militarily as it
probably should have, it did so without the authority of the
Security Council in the face of a threatened veto by Russia, raising
anxious questions about the integrity of the whole international
security system.
The great debate throughout the 1990s was about the competing claims
of intervention and state sovereignty. One side of the argument was
the concept, coined by Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Medicines
Sans Frontier and now France's Foreign Minister, of 'droit
d'ing�rence' � the 'right to intervene', or, more fully, the 'right
of humanitarian intervention'. But while, from many perspectives
this was a noble and effective rallying cry � with a particular
resonance in the global North � around the rest of the world it
enraged as many as it inspired. On the other side, equally
vehemently claims, mostly coming from the global South, were made
about the primacy and continued resonance of the concept of national
sovereignty. Battle lines were drawn, trenches were dug, and verbal
missiles flew: the debate was intense and very bitter, and the 1990s
finished with it utterly unresolved in the UN or anywhere else.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan at one stage made his own effort to
resolve the conceptual impasse at the heart of this debate by
arguing that national sovereignty had to be weighed and balanced in
these cases against individual sovereignty, as recognised in the
international human rights instruments. But this fell on deaf ears,
being seen not so much as resolving the dilemma of intervention but
restating it. In his report to the General Assembly in 2000, the
Secretary-General brought the issue to a very public head, saying in
language that was both moving and agitated, and which resonates to
this day: If humanitarian intervention is indeed an unacceptable
assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a
Sebrenica, to gross and systematic violations of human rights?
The task of meeting this challenge fell, in the event, to
International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty
(ICISS), sponsored by the Canadian Government, which I had the
privilege of co-chairing, along with the Algerian diplomat and
veteran UN Africa adviser Mohamed Sahnoun. We presented our report,
entitled The Responsibility to Protect, at the end of 2001. The
Commission made what are generally now acknowledged to be two
critical conceptual contributions to resolving this increasingly
ugly and sterile debate.
The first was to invent a new way of talking about 'humanitarian
intervention'. We sought to turn the whole weary � and increasingly
ugly � debate about the 'right to intervene' on its head, and to
recharacterise it not as an argument about the 'right' of states to
anything, but rather about their 'responsibility' � one to protect
people at grave risk: the relevant perspective, we argued, was not
that of prospective interveners but those needing support. The
searchlight was swung back where it should always be: on the need to
protect communities from mass killing and ethnic cleansing, women
from systematic rape and children from starvation. We very much had
in mind the power of new ideas, or old ideas newly expressed, to
actually change the behavior of key policy actors. And a model we
very much had in mind in this respect was the Brundtland Commission,
which a few years earlier had introduced the concept of 'sustainable
development' to bridge the huge gap which then existed between
developers and environmentalists. With a new script, the actors have
to change their lines, and think afresh about what the real issues
in the play actually are.
The second big conceptual contribution of the Commission, linked
with the first, was to insist upon a new way of talking about
sovereignty itself: we argued, building on an earlier formulation by
Francis Deng (the Sudanese scholar and diplomat now named by UN
Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon as his Special Adviser for the
Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities) that its essence should
now be seen not as 'control', as in the centuries-old Westphalian
tradition, but, again, as 'responsibility'. The starting point is
that any state has the primary responsibility to protect the
individuals within it. But that is not the finishing point: where
the state fails in that responsibility, through either incapacity or
ill-will, a secondary responsibility to protect falls on the wider
international community. That, in a nutshell, is the core of the
responsibility to protect idea, or 'R2P' as we are all now calling
it for short.
After laying these foundations, the Commission spelled out what the
responsibility to protect should mean in practice. Certainly it
means reacting effectively in situations where genocide, ethnic
cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity are currently
occurring or imminent. But it also means preventing situations, not
yet at that conscience-shocking stage but capable of reaching it,
from so deteriorating. And it means rebuilding societies shattered
by such catastrophes to ensure they do not recur.
The action required by R2P is overwhelmingly, preventive: building
state capacity, remedying grievances and ensuring the rule of law.
But if prevention fails, R2P requires whatever measures � economic,
political, diplomatic, legal, security, or in the last resort
military � become necessary to stop mass atrocity crimes occurring.
As to who should in practice bear the responsibility in question,
for individual states, R2P means in the first instance the
responsibility to protect their own citizens from such crimes, and
to help other states build their capacity to do so. For
international organizations, including the United Nations, R2P means
the responsibility to warn, to generate effective preventive
strategies, and when necessary to mobilize effective reaction. For
civil society groups, R2P means the responsibility to force the
attention of policy-makers on what needs to be done, by whom and
when.
It is one thing to develop a concept like the responsibility to
protect, but quite another to get any policy maker to take any
notice of it. The most interesting thing about the Responsibility to
Protect report is the way its central theme has continued to gain
traction internationally, even though it was almost suffocated at
birth by being published in December 2001, in the immediate
aftermath of 9/11, and by the massive international preoccupation
with terrorism, rather than internal human rights catastrophes,
which then began.
In just five short years, a remarkably brief time in the history of
ideas, the responsibility to protect concept evolved from a gleam in
an international commission�s eye, to what now has the pedigree to
be described as a broadly accepted international norm, and one with
the potential to evolve further into a rule of customary
international law.
The concept was first seriously embraced in the doctrine of the
newly emerging African Union, and over the next two to three years
it won quite a constituency among academic commentators and
international lawyers. But the big step forward came with the UN
60th Anniversary World Summit in September 2005, which followed a
major preparatory effort involving the report of the 2004 High Level
Panel on new security threats (of which I was, rather conveniently,
a member) which fed in turn into a major report by the
Secretary-General himself. Both these reports emphatically embraced
the responsibility to protect concept, and the Summit Outcome
Document, unanimously agreed by the more than 150 heads of state and
government present and meeting as the UN General Assembly,
unambiguously picked up their core recommendations.
A further important conceptual development has occurred since the
September 2005 Summit: the adoption by the Security Council in April
last year of a thematic resolution on the Protection of Civilians in
Armed Conflict which contains, in an operative paragraph, an express
reaffirmation of the World Summit conclusions relating to the
responsibility to protect. And we have now begun to see that
resolution in turn now being invoked in subsequent specific
situations, as with Resolution 1706 of 31 August 2006 on Darfur. A
General Assembly resolution may be helpful, as the World Summit�s
unquestionably was, in identifying relevant principles, but the
Security Council is the institution that matters when it comes to
executive action. And at least a toehold there has now been carved.
But, for those of us who believe in R2P, this is just about where
the good news ends. We are deluding ourselves if think the battle is
won, in the sense that when the next R2P situation comes along,
involving large-scale killing, or ethnic cleansing, or other crimes
against humanity, or all of the above, within a sovereign state's
borders � as surely some such situation will, some time, some where,
and maybe sooner than we think � there really will be a shared,
instinctive, reflex global response. A response not only of horror
that something which we have all said should happen 'never again' is
in fact happening again. But a response which makes something
happens � mobilizing effective international action to actually stop
the threat.
As someone who has been speaking and writing on this subject around
the world for several years now, I have been well aware that the
consensus reached at the World Summit was based on fairly fragile
foundations. In 2005, a fierce rearguard action was fought, almost
to the last, by a small group of developing countries, joined by
Russia, who basically refused to concede any kind of limitation on
the full and untrammeled exercise of state sovereignty, however
irresponsible that exercise might be. What carried the day in the
end was not so much consistent support from the EU and U.S. �
support which after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was not
particularly helpful, it has to be acknowledged, when it came to
meeting these familiar sovereignty concerns. The support that
mattered, rather, was persistent advocacy by sub-Saharan African
countries, led by South Africa; a clear � and historically quite
significant � embrace of limited-sovereignty principles by the key
Latin American countries; and some very effective last minute
personal diplomacy with major wavering-country leaders, including
India in particular, by Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin.
In my travels since 2005, I have become fairly accustomed to hearing
suggestions from the representatives of a number of countries, not
least in Asia � and not excluding diplomats from Sri Lanka � that
while they had not been prepared to break consensus and oppose R2P
language outright in 2005, they had been less than pleased to see
its inclusion in the World Summit Outcome Document. R2P, I have been
told more often than I like to recall, is simply another name for
humanitarian intervention, providing a means for powerful countries,
and in particular the West, to intervene in the internal affairs of
smaller countries.
But I have to say that, even having been immunized to this extent, I
was more than a little taken back when the head of the Crisis Group
office in New York reported to me a conversation two weeks ago, in
which the head of mission of a major country in the Arab-Islamic
world said to him: 'The concept of the responsibility to protect
does not exist except in the minds of Western imperialists'.
What has gone wrong here? Why is there so much continuing resistance
to a principle which has seemed to so many others to be an important
breakthrough, capable of resolving an age-old debate in a practical
and principled way? Is there anything that we of a cosmopolitan
mindset � to pick up my earlier reference to Neelan Tiruchelvam's
extraordinarily decent, civilized and balanced approach to these
kinds of issues � can possibly do to get this debate back on the
rails and generate the kind of response that this haunting issue of
preventing genocide and mass atrocity crimes demands?
I think what we need to do is address and clearly answer four big
misunderstandings about R2P that exist to some extent everywhere,
but are particularly prevalent in the global South.
Misunderstanding One. The first is that R2P is only about military
intervention, that it is 'simply another name for humanitarian
intervention'. This is absolutely not the case, and that cannot be
said too often. R2P is above all about taking effective preventive
action � recognizing those situations that are capable of
deteriorating into mass killing, ethnic cleansing or other
large-scale crimes against humanity, and bringing to bear every
appropriate preventive response: political, diplomatic, legal and
economic. The responsibility to prevent is very much that of the
state itself, quite apart from that of the international community.
And when it comes to the international community, a very big part of
its preventive response should be to help countries to help
themselves. Paragraph 138 of the World Summit Outcome Document makes
that very clear:
Each individual State has the responsibility to protect its
populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes
against humanity. This responsibility entails the prevention of such
crimes, including their incitement, through appropriate and
necessary means. The international community should as appropriate
encourage and help States to exercise that responsibility.
So does Paragraph 139 of the document, in which the world's leaders
said, again unanimously:
We also intend to commit ourselves, as necessary and appropriate, to
helping States build capacity to protect their populations from
genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity
and to assisting those which are under stress before crises and
conflicts break out.
Of course there will be situations when prevention fails, and
reaction becomes necessary. But reaction does not have to mean
military reaction: it can involve political and diplomatic economic
and legal pressure, all measures which can themselves each cross the
spectrum from persuasive to intrusive and from less to more
coercive� something which is true of military capability as well. As
the ICISS Commission insisted, 'the exercise of the responsibility
to both prevent and react should always involve less intrusive and
coercive measures being considered before more coercive and
intrusive ones are applied'.
Coercive military action is not excluded as a last resort option in
extreme cases, when it is the only possible way � as nobody doubts
was the case in Rwanda or Srebrenica, for example � to stop
large-scale killing and other atrocity crimes. But it is an absolute
travesty of the R2P principle to say that it is about military force
and nothing else.
Misunderstanding Two. The second misunderstanding, at the opposite
end of the spectrum, is that R2P is about the protection of everyone
from everything. I remember first thinking that this might become
something of a problem when a distinguished international statesman,
who had been much involved in the intervention versus sovereignty
debate in the 1990s, asked me a few months ago whether I agreed that
the international community had a 'responsibility to protect' the
Inuit people of the Arctic Circle from the consequences of global
warming! Of course, linguistically, one can argue that there is
indeed a responsibility to protect of some kind in this case � and
in the case of HIV/AIDS, or the proliferation of nuclear weapons,
and much more besides. But 'human security' is much more appropriate
umbrella language to use in these cases than 'R2P'.
To use the R2P concept in any of these ways is to dilute to the
point of uselessness its role as a mobiliser of instinctive,
universal action in cases of conscience-shocking killing, ethnic
cleansing and other such crimes against humanity: the whole point of
embracing R2P language is that it is capable of generating an
effective, consensual response in extreme, conscience shocking
cases, in a way that 'right to intervene' language was not.
The trouble is, of course, that if you stretch the R2P concept to
embrace what might be described as the whole 'human security'
agenda, you immediately raise the hackles of those who see it as the
thin end of a totally interventionist wedge � as giving an open
invitation for the countries of the North to engage to their hearts
content in the missions civilisatrices that so understandably raise
the hackles of those in the South who experienced it all before.
That trouble is compounded when it is remembered that coercive
military intervention, while absolutely not at the heart of the R2P
concept � as I have just been saying � is nonetheless a reactive
response that cannot be excluded in really extreme cases. So any
understanding of R2P as a very broad-based doctrine, which would
open up at least the possibility of military action in a whole
variety of policy contexts, is bound to give the concept a bad name.
The short point, which cannot be repeated too often, is that R2P is
not about protecting everybody from everything. It's about
protecting men, women and children from large-scale killing, ethnic
cleansing and crimes against humanity � either occurring now, or
imminently feared likely to occur, or readily capable of so
occurring if a situation deteriorates through want of effective
preventive action.
Misunderstanding Three. The third misunderstanding, and it's really
a subset of the second, is the notion that R2P is about responding
to conflict and human rights abuses generally. The problem here is
not so much R2P being stretched to deal with all the world's ills �
from HIV/AIDS to climate change � but being too indiscriminately
applied to a narrower group of those ills. But as much as people
need protection from the horror and misery of any violent conflict,
and from the ugliness of tyrannical human rights abuse, 'R2P
situations' have to be more narrowly defined.
If they are perceived as extending across the full range of human
rights violations by governments against their own people, or all
kinds of internal conflict situations, it will be difficult to build
and sustain any kind of consensus for action: we will find ourselves
rapidly back in the area of North governments worrying about how to
justify foreign entanglements where no vital national interests seem
to be immediately involved, and South governments being concerned
about their sovereignty being at risk of interventionary over-reach.
To say it again, 'R2P situations' must be seen only as those
actually or potentially involving large-scale killing, ethnic
cleansing or other similar mass atrocity crimes � situations where
these crimes are either occurring or appear to be imminent, or which
are capable of deteriorating to this extent in the absence of
preventive action � and which should engage the attention of the
international community simply because of their particularly
conscience-shocking character.
Looked at in this way, for example, Iraq at the time of the
coalition invasion in 2003 was not an R2P situation, because
although there were clearly major human rights violations continuing
to occur (which justified international concern and response, for
example by way of censure and economic sanctions), and although mass
atrocity crimes had clearly occurred in the past (against the Kurds
in the late 1980s and the southern Shiites in the early 1990s) such
crimes were neither actually occurring nor apprehended when the
coalition invaded the country in early 2003. By contrast, it would
be proper to characterize the situation in Iraq now, in July 2007,
as an R2P one, because there is every reason to fear � particularly
in the context of a precipitate withdrawal of foreign forces from
the centre of the country � that the present situation, bad as it
is, will rapidly deteriorate into massive outbreak of communal and
sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing beyond the capacity of the
Iraqi government to control, and from which it would be
unconscionable for the wider world to stand aloof.
Burundi since the early 90s is a good example of what can properly
be described as an 'R2P situation', although nobody has really
badged it as such. It is one, moreover, which has not at any stage
involved coercive military action � just a lot of hard, grinding
preventive action to ensure that the worst which everyone feared did
not in fact happen. The situation there was certainly capable of
deteriorating into the kind of large scale genocidal violence that
wracked neighbouring Rwanda, and it arguably only the intense
engagement of many international actors � including among others
Nelson Mandela with his mediation, South Africa with its troop
presence, the International Crisis Group with our analysis and
advocacy, and the new Peace building Commission with its making of
Burundi its first case � that has prevented that occurring.
Misunderstanding Four. The last big misunderstanding is that R2P
justifies coercive military intervention in every case where
large-scale loss of life, or large-scale ethnic cleansing, is
occurring or apprehended. What needs to be understood much more
clearly than it has been is that not just one criterion but multiple
criteria must be satisfied if coercive, non-consensual military
force is to be deployed within another country's sovereign
territory: it is not just a matter of saying that if a threshold of
seriousness is crossed, then it�s time for the invasion to start.
As the ICISS Commission said in its 2001 report, and the High Level
Panel in its report to the UN before the 2005 World Summit, and UN
Secretary-General Kofi Annan in his pre-Summit report, and as every
serious supporter of R2P has made abundantly clear, military
intervention for human protection purposes is a desperately serious,
exceptional and extraordinary measure, which has to be judged by not
just one but a whole series of prudential criteria.
The first of those criteria is the seriousness of the threat to
people which is occurring or apprehended: this would need to involve
large scale loss of life or ethnic cleansing to prima facie justify
something as extreme as military action. But there are another four
criteria, all more or less equally important, which also have to be
satisfied: the motivation or primary purpose of the proposed
military action (whether it was primarily to halt or avert the
threat in question, or had some other main objective); last resort,
viz. whether there were reasonably available peaceful alternatives;
the proportionality of the response; and, not least, the balance of
consequences � whether overall more good than harm would be done by
a military invasion.
Even if one stretched the threshold criterion, as to seriousness of
human rights threat, to its absolute limit in the case of Iraq in
2003, it doesn't take much analysis � even looking just at what we
knew then, not now � to generate grave doubts as to whether the
balance of consequences of an invasion could possibly be positive.
One of the many disappointments of the World Summit is that although
guidelines for the use of force of just this kind were argued for in
all the reports I have mentioned, in the hope that this would lead
to their adoption by the Security Council, they were not adopted by
the Summit � caught in a diplomatic pincer movement between the US,
who wanted no such restrictions to affect any decision to use force,
and some in the South who, I think very misguidedly, argued that to
adopt guidelines purporting to limit the force would in fact, by
recognizing its legitimacy in at least some cases, on the contrary
encourage it.
Of course no prudential criteria of this kind, even if agreed as
guidelines by the Security Council, will ever end argument on how
they should be applied in particular instances, for example Darfur
right now. But it is hard to believe they would not be more helpful
than the present totally ad hoc system in focusing attention on the
relevant issues, revealing weaknesses in argument, and generally
encouraging consensus.
While answers are readily available to all the misunderstandings I
have described, and others as well, there is no doubt that a
considerable effort of analysis and advocacy will be necessary to
keep the flame of R2P alive, and to create a global environment in
the 21st century, like no other before it, where we can be confident
that the Holocausts and Cambodias and Rwandas and Bosnias of the
past, and the Darfurs of the present, and maybe the Iraqs of the
near future, really will happen never again.
One of the efforts in which I and Crisis Group and a number of other
major global NGOs have recently been involved, and in which I hope
wonderful institutions like ICES will become involved shortly, is
putting together a project to fund and establish a new 'Global
Centre for the Responsibility to Protect', based in New York, but
with a strong North-South character and outreach, to work on just
these issues � to be a resource base and catalyst for ongoing
activity worldwide by NGOs, like-minded governments and
international organizations. Although there will be some in this
country and this region who will certainly differ, I hope there will
not be too many in this audience who would think this whole effort
misguided.
It has taken the world an insanely long time, centuries in fact, to
come to terms conceptually with the idea that state sovereignty is
not a license to kill � that there is something fundamentally and
intolerably wrong about states murdering or forcibly displacing
large numbers of their own citizens, or standing by when others do
so. Now that we have at last won recognition of that in this new
century, with the unanimous acceptance of the principle of the
responsibility to protect by the world's assembled heads of state
and government in 2005, it seems to me � and I hope to all of you
here � that it would be a tragedy now for there to be any
backsliding. I don't think there will be, but it's going to take a
lot of effort and energy from men and women of goodwill all round
the world to ensure not only that R2P continues to be accepted in
principle, but is effectively operational in practice.
This leads me to ask finally � as I guess a number of you in this
audience will have already been asking yourselves, and are about to
ask me � what has all this to with Sri Lanka, here and now? Is this
horrible, apparently intractable conflict � that took Neelan
Tiruchelvam's life, and has taken the lives of so many scores of
thousands of others � properly described as an R2P situation? And if
so, what follows from that? Whose responsibility is it to do what?
Since the resumption of hostilities last summer, both the government
and the LTTE have been careful to keep their military actions, and
their terror and counter-insurgency operations, within certain
limits. While more than 4,500 have been killed over the last 20
months, and both government and LTTE forces have repeatedly violated
international humanitarian law, the recent violence has not crossed
the boundary into mass atrocity or obvious genocide, war crimes,
ethnic cleansing, or crimes against humanity. The violence has been
contained just this side of full-scale disaster and
internationally-recognized catastrophe. We
know, nonetheless, that for those who directly experience the war it
is brutal and devastating. Hundreds of thousands � three hundred on
UNHCR's figures, two hundred on the government's � have survived the
Tiger shelling and bombing, or the government's aerial attacks and
multi-barrel rocket launchers, only to face months of constant
displacement � in jungles, in camps, or in the overcrowded houses of
family or friends.
And we know, from recent history as well as informed analysis of
present political dynamics, that there are plenty of reasons to fear
that things can get much worse, especially if the war turns from the
east to the north, as it appears may already be happening. Recent
Sri Lankan history offers all-too-many examples of large-scale
atrocities, mass graves, serious war crimes and ethnic cleansing.
And there are disturbing signs that the restraint on both sides �
such as it has been � could be eroding. The rhetoric and threats
from both sides are increasingly dire and suggest the next round of
fighting could well be extreme even by Sri Lanka's standards.
Should the war move into the LTTE-controlled areas in the north, it
is likely to be much more fierce than the recent fighting in the
east, and the impact on civilians is almost certain to be
devastating. As the war grows more vicious, it could well spill over
into areas outside the north � perhaps through deliberate attacks on
civilians designed to provoke excessive, and politically damaging,
replies from the other side. Such attacks and the communal tensions
they are sure to increase, could well lead to the further erosion of
the remaining elements of the rule of law.
All this makes it hard to argue that Sri Lanka is anything but an
R2P situation. It may not be one where large-scale atrocity crimes �
Cambodia-style, Rwanda-style, Srebrenica-style, Kosovo-style � are
occurring right now, or immediately about to occur, but it is
certainly a situation which is capable of deteriorating to that
extent. So it is an R2P situation which demands preventive action,
by the Sri Lankan government itself, but with the help and support
of the wider international community, to ensure that further
deterioration does not occur.
So what would an effective preventive strategy, featuring
cooperation between the Sri Lankan government and the international
community, actually look like? This is not the occasion for me to
offer any kind of comprehensive analysis or prescriptions, covering
all the necessary issues in all the necessary detail: we in Crisis
Group have only been here on the ground for a year, and we are still
feeling our way. And I have been talking to you, I suspect, quite
long enough already. But let me try to sketch just in outline what
in our judgment the main elements of that strategy � legal, military
and political � should involve.
First, as to the legal element. Recognizing that the government's
primary responsibility, like that of any state, is to protect all
its citizens, it must take steps to ensure that all its citizens are
accorded the equal protection of the laws. The record in this
respect leaves a great deal of room for improvement. As Crisis Group
has documented in our most recent report on Sri Lanka, there have
been hundreds of abductions, disappearances, and killings, both by
the Tigers and by security forces that are part of or linked to the
government. These have taken place with virtually complete impunity.
To date there has been only a single indictment announced for an
identifiable human rights violation committed by government
personnel.
The priority need is effective prosecutions. This means disciplining
those members of the police and security forces who are known to
have intimidated witnesses; setting up an effective witness
protection program, with active assistance from other governments
concerned with supporting Sri Lanka's justice system; providing an
adequate and independent budget to the Presidential Commission of
Inquiry headed by Justice Udalagama; and making full use of the
resources of the International Independent Group of Eminent Persons
rather than challenging its legitimacy and trying to limit its
mandate.
In a recent letter to members of the US Congress, Sri Lanka's
ambassador to the United States has rejected the need for United
Nations help in monitoring the human rights situation, while calling
rather for technical assistance to strengthen the government's
policing and judicial capacities. But these should not be either-or
options. As the recent experience in Nepal shows, UN human rights
monitoring can play an important role in supporting and developing
the state�s capacities to protect its citizen�s rights. The Sri
Lankan government should not see UN monitoring as punitive, or
invasive. Instead, it's designed to help government authorities do
their job better, in part by increasing the confidence of witnesses.
Secondly, as to the military element. The government's sovereign
responsibility is not to put its own citizens at undue risk. For
this reason, the government must resist the temptation to continue
its military campaign into the areas of the Northern Province held
by the LTTE. Here, too, the international friends of Sri Lanka have
a role to play.
Sri Lanka's conflict presents a particularly difficult situation for
would-be peacemakers in part because of the very real difficulty of
containing and taming the LTTE. Given the deliberately provocative
manner in which the Tigers attacked government forces in late 2005
and early 2006, and given their past willingness to target civilians
and the brutal nature of their rule in north, the government clearly
has legitimate security concerns to which it must respond.
Sri Lanka's international supporters can
assist the government's legitimate need to defend itself and protect
its people by strengthening the global crackdown on Tigers
fundraising, arms procurement and coercive control of the Tamil
diaspora outside Sri Lanka.
Various foreign states bear some of the responsibility for allowing the
Tigers to build up their power over the years, in part on the
misguided belief that they were a legitimate national liberation
movement.
Comment (2) by
tamilnation.org
It would seem that Mr.Gareth Evans who served as
Australian Foreign Minister for a number of years would have his
audience believe that he was unaware of something that Indian
Foreign Secretary said in 1998:
"The rise of Tamil militancy in Sri Lanka and the
Jayawardene government's serious apprehensions about this
development were utilised by the US and Pakistan to create a
politico-strategic pressure point against India, in the
island's strategically sensitive coast off the Peninsula of
India. ...Tamil militancy received support both from Tamil Nadu
and from the Central Government not only as a response to the
Sri Lankan Government's military assertiveness against Sri
Lankan Tamils, but also as a response to Jayawardene's
concrete and expanded military and intelligence cooperation with
the United States, Israel and Pakistan..."
J.N. Dixit on India's Role in the Struggle for Tamil Eelam, 1998
It's time to make amends for that by
making it harder for them to wage war and to carry out terror
attacks � by better enforcing existing restrictions on the LTTE's
ability to raise money, buy weapons and propagate its message of
violence.
All that said, and done, the probability remains, on all available
historical and analytical evidence that it is highly unlikely that
the Tigers can be defeated militarily. Some argue, however, that
while the outright defeat of the Tigers may be out of reach,
weakening them militarily would help persuade them to negotiate
seriously. It is true that some means must be found to force the
Tigers to start negotiating in a serious way, after repeated
refusals to do so over the years. But attempting to regain control
of the territory they control in the Wanni does not seem to be the
way to do this. Even assuming the Tigers can be significantly
weakened, the past thirty years teaches us that this is not likely
to encourage them to negotiate: the more probable LTTE response in
these circumstances is retreat to unconventional warfare, and
possible attacks designed to provoke government or Sinhalese attacks
on Tamil civilians.
Thirdly, as to the political element. The government's
responsibility is to seriously seek an ultimate political settlement
that is responsive to such justice as there is in the Tamil cause.
If it can work at all, the "fight now in order to negotiate later"
strategy will work only if the government is ready with a package of
political and constitutional reforms that appeal to non-separatist
Tamils and non-LTTE Tamil parties, and were at least capable of
discussion by the LTTE itself.
In the end, the only pressure to which the Tigers are likely to
respond is political pressure. This will have to be a combination of
domestic pressure � based on the two major political parties finally
coming to some consensus on constitutional reforms that address
Tamil grievances � and international pressure that limits the
Tigers' ability to raise funds to wage war and maintain their grip
on the north. International pressure on the Tigers without
corresponding political moves by the government will be ineffective
and perhaps even counter-productive, to the extent that it served to
further isolate the Tigers and push them into extremism, and drive
more moderate Tamils into their arms. At the very least, then, until
the government comes up with a constitutional offer that at least
non-separatist Tamil leaders can take seriously, there should be no
international support for offensive operations in the north.
The All-Party Conference, headed by Minister Tissa Vitharana,
provides a ready-made process through which the SLFP and parties
both within and out of government can come to terms on such an
offer. The majority and minority reports of the expert committee
offer excellent starting points for a final consensus. The
government needs to do everything it can to encourage the APRC
process, beginning with a clear public statement that the SLFP is
not wedded to its own particular proposal to the APRC and will not
veto a consensus plan that offers more extensive devolution at the
provincial level. Meanwhile, the opposition parties � in particular
the UNP � need to become active and enthusiastic members of the
process, willing to assist in the development of a meaningful
proposal that could form the basic of a lasting settlement.
I hope it will be apparent from what I have said about the R2P
principle, including how it might be applied to the present
traumatic situation here in Sri Lanka, that this is a complex,
multi-dimensional concept, which is genuinely aimed at helping
countries find their way, with international support, through
apparently intractable internal situation � and that it is simply
grotesque to describe it as a tool of Western imperialists.
I don't think Neelan Tiruchelvam, were he alive today, would have
any difficulty in grasping this. His loyalties weren�t to any
closed, static version of state or nation or community. He
understood very well what were the limits of state sovereignty, and
the nature of sovereign state responsibilities.
Comment (3)
by tamilnation.org
The peoples in the island of Sri Lanka are hopefully
becoming increasingly aware that
in the
end, it is for the Tamil people and the Sinhala people (and not
for the international community) to have a continuing, open and
honest conversation with each other and commit themselves
to secure justice and democracy - a democracy where no one
people rule another. An independent Tamil Eelam may not be
negotiable but an independent Tamil Eelam can and will
negotiate. Tamils who today live
in many lands and
across distant seas know only too well that sovereignty
after all, is not virginity.
But if the the peoples in the island of Sri Lanka are not
persuaded by all that has happened during the past several
decades, then yet again conflict resolution will take the form
of war - directed to change minds and hearts. And then the role
of symposiums and 'peace talks' - and so called
'disinterested' international intervention (which is not
transparent about its own strategic interests) may prove
m-i-n-i-m-a-l."
His central intellectual and political
struggle was to help reinvent Sri Lankan politics beyond competing
and defensive nationalisms, whether Tamil or Sinhalese, and his
perspective in this was that of a
genuine cosmopolitan, alive to the possibilities of what such a
polity could contribute to the wider world, and to what the wider
international community, provided it acted in a principled and
consistent way, could contribute to peace and stability and
development within this country.
Comment (4) by tamilnation.org
"To
those
who would advocate cosmopolitanism for
others, whilst holding fast to their own nation, that
which
Sun Yat Sen, wrote more than 80 years ago,
will serve as a continuing reminder of the political reality -
and the need to match their own words and deeds:
"At present, England and France are advocating a new idea
which is proposed by the intellectuals. What is that idea? It is an anti
nationalist idea which argues that nationalism is narrow and illiberal; it is
simply an idea of cosmopolitanism.. Cosmopolitanism will cause further decadence
if we leave the reality, nationalism, for the shadow, cosmopolitanism....
First let us practise nationalism; cosmopolitanism will follow." (The
Triple Demism of Sun Yat Sen, 1924)
A true trans-nationalism will emerge, not by
the suppression of nations but when nations flower and mature.
To work for the flowering of nations is to advance the emergence
of a true trans-nationalism. It is true that no people are an
island unto themselves. But
nationalism is not chauvinism - it becomes so only when it
takes exaggerated forms and is directed to the subjugation of
one nation by another."
Neelan's belief in the
power of words
and of ideas, his
devotion to pluralism and democracy, his
active defence of human rights and the rule of law, and his
tireless work towards a peaceful, negotiated binding of his
country's agonizingly
self-inflicted wounds, made him not only a great Sri Lankan, but
a great international citizen � whose memory we celebrate on this
day. His beliefs and principles, and his capacity to translate them
into action; have never been more sorely needed, both here in Sri
Lanka and in the wider global community. |
