How long will the international community stand by before it invokes the principle of Responsibility to Protect, known in diplomatic parlance as R2P, while the Syrian regime continues to butcher its people?
Last week, President Bashar Assad’s military aircraft deliberately and calculatedly targeted a bustling outdoor market in Aleppo, dropping missiles and barrel bombs on it that killed 33 civilians and wounded many others. News photos and videos of the aftermath showed horrific scenes of survivors carrying the remains of people who just earlier had been shopping for food.
And that attack came a day after a barrel bomb dropped by a government aircraft on an elementary school in another part of the city killed at least 20 people, including 17 children. When we contemplate atrocities this horrendous, inflicted on a people this innocent, we have to pause and ask where it all fits in our moral paradigm. We have to ask if we have become so inured to it all, so blaze about it, for its repetitiveness. Yet, even by the gruesome standards that the regime has set for itself in conducting this war, these are acts that never cease to make us turn away in nauseated disbelief at how far into barbarism Assad and his cohorts have descended.
These are also acts that never cease to make us wonder why the international community, including the US, its putative leader, continues to twiddle its thumbs, palavering with a war criminal like Assad, before invoking the norm of R2P and taking him on.
The Right to Protect implies not only that nations are obligated to protect their citizens from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing, but that they also are obligated to take action in order to help citizens of other nations whose governments cannot protect them, or whose governments are themselves implicated in the mayhem. Thus, R2P speaks the language of universal humanity, of international communion, in this global village that we all inhabit together at this time in history — a position that the Pulitzer Prize winning social critic and now the US Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, dubbed “the coalition of the concerned.”
And early in his career as an idealist president, Barack Obama reminded Americans of how he envisioned “an architecture of laws [where] nations thrive by meeting their responsibilities and facing the consequences when they don’t.”
In effect, he was calling for a morality-based foreign policy. It’s hard to see how after three years of unspeakable cruelty in Syria, that saw five million Syrians displaced and well over 150,000 slaughtered, the principle of R2P has not been invoked yet as a rationale for combating, and bringing to task, those behind acts of genocide in that tormented land.
The veto power that Russia and China wield in the Security Council should have been no impediment because R2P was introduced as a norm — not as a law — precisely to bypass
The idea that “sovereignty” prohibits countries from interfering in other countries’ internal affairs. Action against genocide, in other words the responsibility to protect those in need of protection from murderous assault, cannot be blocked by a veto in the Security Council.
If leaders of a nation fail to protect their own citizens, or in this case, are themselves the perpetrators of atrocities against them, a “coalition of the concerned” are then entitled or, if you wish, morally obligated, to independently intervene there through coercive measures, such as sanctions or military action. NATO’s intervention in Libya was clearly a case in point.
Throughout modern history, from the Concert of Europe in the early 19th Century to the establishment of the United Nations after World War II, international laws and institutions were as strong as the “great powers” of the moment allowed them to be. And that is why US inaction in Syria appears all the more inexplicable, even unpardonable.
And why is it, additionally, one asks, has the UN not set up a tribunal yet to indict and try Assad and his cronies for their war crimes in Syria? Surely not for lack of probable cause. In 1993, it established the International Criminal Court for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and a year later — to ward off criticism for its inaction in Rwanda — it set up a second tribunal for the genocide there. Both courts were busy for a long time, convicting more than 150 Serbs, ranging from ordinary soldiers to Slobodan Milosevic, the first sitting president indicted for crimes against humanity (he died in his cell in 2006), and equally convicting 53 for war crimes in Rwanda. If nothing else, the trials established the principle that perpetrators of atrocities will answer for their crimes, and provided a venue where survivors of those atrocities found closure.
What is galling here is that Assad appears unconcerned, not only snubbing the international community but in a way poking it in the eye, as it were, neither fearing it nor expecting any retribution from it. In fact, he appears so confident that that he has not only ignored a binding Security Council resolution last February that included demands that he halt his bombing campaign and allow humanitarian aid to reach displaced civilians, but he blithely announced recently that he would seek another term as president in an “election” scheduled for next month.
The long and short of it is that this brutal dictator will continue to kill his people and ravage his nation so long as he is convinced that there is no one out there prepared to confront him. Those in the international community who feel that they have no responsibility to protect, who remain indifferent, who turn a blind eye to the horrors in Syria, will be complicit, if only morally, in his crimes.
