How to rid the world of genocide

No one thought it was going to be easy. Ending mass atrocities once and for all
had been high on the global rhetorical agenda for decades. Never again, we all said,
and meant it: No more Holocausts! No more Cambodias! But when it came to
effective international action, the world was a consensus-free zone. And among those
who paid the price were the 800,000 men, women and children massacred in Rwanda in
1994, and the 8,000 men and boys slaughtered in Srebrenica, Bosnia, in 1995.
Throughout the 1990s, there was plenty of enthusiasm in the Global North (at
least in principle) for sending in the Marines to exercise the right of humanitarian
intervention. But countries across the Global South with long memories of imperial
civilizing missions, and determined to protect their hard-won sovereignty utterly
refused to acknowledge any such right, however conscience-shocking the atrocities
might be.
This is why it was such a huge breakthrough when the U.N. General Assembly
in 2005 unanimously endorsed the principle of the responsibility to protect, or R2P,
as it is now universally known: the standard of the whole international community to
prevent and halt genocide and other atrocity crimes behind sovereign borders. This
conceptually bridged that North-South gap, changed the language of the debate from
right to responsibility and laid new foundations for effective practical action. The
British historian Martin Gilbert described it, a little breathlessly but not without reason,
as the most significant adjustment to sovereignty in 360 years.
But how much difference has R2P actually made? A decade later, plenty of
skeptics can be heard saying none at all. But that is much too pessimistic a reading.
R2Ps failures are all too obvious: the inability to stop the carnage in Sri Lanka in 2009;
to bring Sudans President Omar Hassan al-Bashir to heel over Darfur; to stop the
persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar; to meet the continuing threats posed by Boko
Haram in the Lake Chad basin; and above all to overcome the catastrophic international
paralysis over Syria since 2011.
But there have also been plenty of successes. R2P-driven reactions, both
diplomatic and military, have stopped massacres in their tracks in Kenya in 2008 and
in Ivory Coast and Libya at least initially in 2011. There has also been some partial
success in curbing ongoing violence can be claimed for the new or revitalized U.N.
peacekeeping operations in Congo, South Sudan and the Central African Republic.

R2P-driven preventive strategies, as often as not unnoticed, have also averted

new crises in Kenya and Cote dIvoire and stopped others occurring in Sierra Leone,
Liberia, Guinea and Kyrgyzstan. In Burundi, constantly on the verge of volcanic ethnic
conflict, intense international diplomatic engagement has at least so far helped contain
further eruptions. Most U.N. peacekeeping operations now have strong mandates to
protect civilians, and most are preventing simmering conflicts from escalating.
The back story to all of this is the steady consolidation of R2Ps status as an
accepted norm, and the corresponding increase in supporting institutional mechanisms.
The annual General Assembly debates show no desire at all to tear up, or even revisit,
the 2005 consensus. And in the Security Council, R2P language has now been used in
resolutions more than 40 times, including recently in response to atrocity threats in
Yemen, Libya, Mali, Sudan, South Sudan and the CAR.
Institutionally, more than 50 states and intergovernmental organizations have
now established R2P focal points designated high-level officials whose job is to
analyze atrocity risk and mobilize appropriate responses. Civilian response capability is
receiving much more organized attention from a number of governments, as is the need
for militaries to rethink their force configurations, doctrines, rules of engagement and
training to better respond to mass atrocity.
That said, there is plenty of unfinished business. Embedding the norm into
global political consciousness not just that of U.N. officials will require political
leaders everywhere to talk it up: the strange reluctance of U.S. leaders to use R2P
language outside the U.N. corridors is manifestly unhelpful. Institutional support could
be much stronger still, not least within the U.N. system itself. And there needs to be
even stronger emphasis by R2P advocates on the norms universality: It is not a
Western fixation, and there is no room for selectivity or double standards in its
application.
At the top of my wish list is recreating consensus in the U.N. Security Council
about the proper scope and limits of military force when responding to extreme
atrocities. This broke down badly after Libya in mid-2011, when the Western powers
were perceived I think rightly as stretching a limited civilian-protection mandate
into a regime-change crusade. It has led to a recurring unwillingness disastrous in the
case of Syria to agree on even strong condemnatory resolutions lest they lead to the
slippery slope of military intervention and overreach.

Bringing skeptical nations such as China and Russia back on board will be
difficult, but is not impossible. The way forward has been mapped by Brazils
responsibility while protecting proposal, which would require all council members to
accept close monitoring and review of any coercive military mandate throughout such a
mandates lifetime.
Still, getting governments across the world to embrace not only in principle,
but in practice a fundamental new norm of international behavior is a slow and
painstaking business. In this respect, responsibility to protect is still in its infancy. But
the world is, and will remain, a better place for its birth.

Fonte:

EVANS,

Gareth.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-

theory/wp/2016/02/15/how-to-rid-the-world-of-genocide/. 15 de fevereiro de 2016.