Taking stock of the responsibility to protect.

• Author: Mohamed, Saira
• Position: Interview

INTRODUCTION

Through ten years of contentious debate, the responsibility to protect has proven to be both one of the most promising recent developments in international affairs and one of the most disappointing. The concept of a responsibility to protect--the notion that states have a responsibility to protect their own people, and that the international community has a responsibility to step in when the state fails its responsibility--has unsettled traditional understandings of state sovereignty, destabilized the principle of nonintervention, and inspired a robust debate on the use of military force to protect human rights. The question of whether there is a responsibility to protect, and what the content of that responsibility should be, has preoccupied heads of state, civil society groups, and U.N. organs and has earned intense and sustained scholarly attention over the past decade.

In recent months, following on the decision of the U.N. Security Council to impose a no-fly zone in Libya in response to escalating violence against civilians, (1) observers have elevated the status of the responsibility to protect from notable development to triumphant achievement." (2) U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon declared that the decision to authorize military intervention "affirm[ed], clearly and unequivocally, the international community's determination to fulfill its responsibility to protect civilians from violence perpetrated upon them by their own government." (3) In an article entitled End of the Argument, Gareth Evans, one of the minds behind the responsibility to protect, announced that the world had reached an "overwhelming consensus, at least on basic principles," on the responsibility to protect. (4) In addition to this international significance, many have viewed the decision to intervene in Libya as a marker of the first time the United States has demonstrated a full-throated acceptance of a responsibility to protect. (5) The Obama Administration had expressed its support for the principle before, (6) but with the Libya intervention, it seemed that it was at last putting its words to action. (7)

U.S. government support for the principle of a responsibility to protect certainly has grown in recent years. But was the decision to intervene in Libya a manifestation of Washington's commitment to the principle? Perhaps, but without a look at internal government documents, or at the memoirs sure to be written in decades to come, the answer is not so clear. Indeed, the public remarks articulating a justification for the intervention suggest that the decision was driven far more by singular national interests than by any sense of responsibility. Based on an analysis of those remarks, this Essay argues that characterizing the U.S. decision to support intervention in Libya as a triumph of the responsibility to protect ignores both disputes over the content of the concept and the motivations expressed by the United States for supporting the intervention. (8) The Libya intervention shows an advancement of the principle, indeed; nonetheless, the decision to initiate military action remains far from a successful implementation of the responsibility to protect, and identifying it as such risks conflating an interest in intervention with a responsibility to intervene.

This Essay proceeds in three Parts. Part I explains the concept and evolution of the responsibility to protect, from its origins as an ambitious response to the horrors of the 1990s to its erosion in debates in the United Nations. This Part concludes that the core of the responsibility to protect is not merely a call to intervention, but rather a call to intervention regardless of narrow national interests. Part II examines the form that the principle has taken in the U.S. approach to the crisis in Libya. While the responsibility to protect originated as a way to realize individuals' right to be protected against genocide, crimes against humanity, and other massive abuses of human rights, the Libya intervention reveals a primary focus not on the rights and needs of oppressed populations, but rather on the needs and interests of the intervening state. The decision by the United States to support intervention in Libya represents at best a partial version of the responsibility to protect--a responsibility triggered only when state interests align with that duty. Instead of a triumph of the responsibility to protect, the decision should be viewed as an occasion on which national interests coincided with the principle, not one on which the principle of responsibility to protect moved a state to take action.

Part III explores the implications of characterizing the U.S. decision to support intervention as a triumph of the responsibility to protect. Because the responsibility to protect constituted only one part of the government's motivation to intervene, identifying the intervention as being driven by the responsibility to protect risks undermining the core of the responsibility to protect, mutating the principle into a new form that envisions a responsibility only when other state interests motivate intervention. This deference to state interests, however, was exactly what the responsibility to protect principle sought to overcome. Moreover, identifying an intervention motivated by interests as an exercise of the responsibility to protect risks equating the principle of responsibility with mere interest, thus confirming the fears of many states that the responsibility to protect provides political cover for powerful states' military adventurism and imperialism. Should proponents of the principle wish to further their goal of convincing otherwise uninterested states to take notice of foreign atrocities, and if they wish to avoid legitimating interventions based on narrow national interests, they should be careful not to conflate what motivated the Libya intervention with the responsibility to protect.

1. THE ORIGINS AND CONTROVERSY OF THE RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT

   The concept of a responsibility to protect has undergone significant debate since its inception. In order to assess whether the Libya intervention marked a triumph of the responsibility to protect, it is important to understand what the responsibility to protect is and what it is not. Explaining the different approaches to the responsibility to protect, this Part examines the key areas of dispute in the responsibility to protect and identifies the key area of agreement: the notion that regardless of states' singular interest or lack of interest in intervention, individuals should never be allowed to suffer at the hands of their governments.

   1. The Original Responsibility to Protect

      The responsibility to protect originated in the international community's failures to respond adequately to massive human rights abuses in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo. (9) Each of these crises raised unique concerns. Rwanda exposed the tragedy of inaction, the shame of a lack of political will to intervene. When genocide erupted in Rwanda in 1994, the Security Council was aware of the degree of violence and potential for escalation, but it feared for the security of the U.N. peacekeepers who had been stationed in Rwanda since 1993. (10) Instead of strengthening the U.N. presence in response to the crisis, the Council chose to cut the peacekeeping force from 2558 troops to a skeleton 270. (11) It was only several weeks later, after an estimated 500,000 individuals had been murdered in Rwanda, that the Council finally voted to authorize the deployment of a weak French military force. (12)

      Bosnia revealed the horror of inadequate intervention. In 1992 the United Nations established a peacekeeping force in the region, known as the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR). While its mandate in Bosnia, originally limited to securing the delivery of humanitarian aid, later expanded to deterring attacks against designated "safe areas," (13) it was given only limited resources that were "never ... sufficient" to adequately defend those vulnerable cities. (14) UNPROFOR was unable to stop the capture of Srebrenica by units of the Republika Srpska and failed to prevent the massacre of some eight thousand Bosnian Muslim men and boys in July 1995. (15)

      Kosovo, finally, focused attention on the legality and legitimacy of unilateral humanitarian intervention. In response to increasing violence against ethnic Albanians in the Kosovo region of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY), the Security Council imposed an arms embargo against the ruling Milosevic regime, (16) demanded an immediate end to violence, (17) and threatened "further action." (18) Those preliminary measures, however, marked the limit of agreement within the Security Council. While the United States, United Kingdom, and France pushed for an authorization of military action in the FRY, Russia and China threatened to veto any resolution approving the use of armed force. (19) The proponents of military intervention chose to act outside the Council, and NATO ultimately launched a seventy-seven-day bombing campaign on its own, (20) triggering heated debate on the relevance of the Security Council and the legal requirements for humanitarian intervention. (21)

      In the face of these questions--how to generate political will to intervene, how to structure effective interventions, and how to overcome the paralyzing force of the permanent-member veto in the Security Council--the notion of a responsibility to protect was born. Throughout the 1990s, scholars and practitioners had called for fresh thinking about sovereign states and nonintervention, and some advocated a duty to intervene in humanitarian crises, especially for the purpose of providing humanitarian aid to victims. (22) The most significant transformation in approaches to intervention in humanitarian crises took place in 2001, with the publication of The Responsibility to Protect, the report of the...