Intervention or Protection

A major policy initiative in the field of foreign affairs, the Will to Intervene Project, has now become a book and deserves Canadians’ serious attention. The project’s co-directors are Frank Chalk and Roméo Dallaire. Chalk comes from a family that suffered grievously in the Holocaust. Dallaire, now a senator, is an all-Canadian hero for his gallant actions to buck the tide of international indifference to the unfolding genocide in Rwanda. At the heart of the Will to Intervene Project, based at Concordia University in Montreal, is the despairing conclusion that there was a political will not to intervene in the 1994 Rwanda genocide. The goal is to study the lessons of that alongside the lessons of 1999 in Kosovo, when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization did intervene, in order to break the cycle of international indifference. The core of the research is interviews conducted with more than 80 policy makers and opinion leaders. On that basis, interrelated lessons are drawn on how to mobilize political will in Ottawa and Washington and to enhance institutional capacity: first to respond preventively to avert mass atrocities and, second, to stop them where prevention has failed.

Part One of Mobilizing the Will to Intervene: Leadership to Prevent Mass Atrocities, written by Frank Chalk, Roméo Dallaire, Kyle Matthews, Carla Barqueiro and Simon Doyle, describes in graphic detail drivers of deadly violence (poverty and inequality, population growth and the youth bulge, ethnic nationalism and climate change) and the security, financial and political costs of inaction in the face of mass atrocities. Part Two takes up Rwanda and Kosovo as exemplars of a failure to act and a strong will to act. Part Three spells out the policy recommendations for Canada and the United States to generate domestic political will through enabling leadership, enhancing coordination, building capacity and ensuring knowledge. Thus “all the instruments of soft and hard power” are to be deployed to reduce security risks “at home and abroad.”

The key to success is reconfiguring national interests to recognize the interdependence of threats across sectors (brutal civil wars can cause outbreaks of deadly diseases) and borders (in the modern age, diseases turn into global contagions very quickly). By undermining the foundations of political stability in entire regions, mass atrocities threaten our economic prosperity by shrinking markets and curtailing access to resources. Thus domestic and national security interests are inseparable from international humanitarian values: to help broken and failing states is to help and protect ourselves.

One cannot but admire the passion, energy and conviction that Chalk and Dallaire, along with their full team, bring to the cause of preventing mass atrocities through “cutting-edge scholarly research, concrete policy proposals, and responsible activism.” And this reviewer at least fully subscribes to the enlightened redefinition of national interests to include international humane values, to the claim that the rhetoric-action gap needs to be bridged by a policy shift in favour of prevention and to the assertion that “in a globalized world, isolationism is no longer possible and unilateralism is no longer effective.” But although there is much to admire and commend in this book, a work of explicit political advocacy, I felt a strong sense of unease by the end, for a number of reasons.

First, there are flaws within the project’s own frame of reference, and several of the project’s recommendations are an unpersuasive organizational solution to what are essentially political problems. For example, the authors rightly emphasize that “by continuing to drag our feet when prevention is required, we risk watching more crises turn into catastrophes.” From a policy maker perspective, the question remains how to prioritize. Not all crises turn into catastrophes, and we lack theoretical knowledge to determine in advance which will do so. We cannot as a matter of capacity, and we should not as a matter of prudence and humility, intervene everywhere. Canada is not the only western country to suffer from intervention fatigue even in the few cases where we have sent troops abroad, as in Afghanistan. This book fails to advance the debate on this critical question. As with Rwanda, as the book itself documents, one reason for the inertia in Washington was that predictions of looming mass killings had been made since 1992. Because wolf had been cried so often before, the famous Dallaire cable warning of the onset of preplanned genocide never did get through to key decision makers in the United Nations, United States or even Canada. How, then, to distinguish actionable intelligence from background noise?

At the end of the day, governments will make decisions on an ad hoc and contingent basis depending on the context, circumstances, domestic and international political equations, and so on—that is, on a case-by-case basis rather than in a predetermined mode using a rigid formula. The book’s recommendations that the U.S. president issue an executive order establishing the prevention of mass atrocities as a policy priority and that the Canadian prime minister appoint an international security minister as a senior member of the Cabinet sidestep rather than address this core political problem. The authors note the irony that the Genocide Convention, designed to encourage states to intervene, was subverted into supporting a policy not to intervene in Rwanda. There is a real risk that many of their recommendations, if adopted, could produce similar unintended and perverse consequences.

The authors are right to emphasize the dangerous role that media can play. As we saw recently, the ongoing war crimes trial of former Liberian leader Charles Taylor received more coverage for supermodel Naomi Campbell’s testimony than for the atrocities that were allegedly committed. Rwanda was ignored because genocide was misconstrued as tribal warfare, and what else can one expect of Africans? In the Balkans, Kosovo’s civil war was transformed “into a one-sided ethnic holocaust.” From start to finish, the English-language media portrayed Kosovo in one-dimensional terms with Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic demonized and the Kosovars turned into pure victims. Unfortunately, Chalk and Dallaire seem unable to go beyond exhortations about how the media problem can be remedied.

In the discussion of the Kosovo crisis, the authors follow mainstream western media in conflating the “international community” and NATO. The world was and remains divided on whether the NATO intervention provoked more ethnic carnage than it averted. NATO was set up to defend members against external attack by a foreign power. A majority of the world’s countries opposed any right to humanitarian intervention as justification of NATO’s decision to wage war on Serbia, which had not attacked any NATO country. Indeed, this is why the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty was needed and created, to re-establish a new consensus on the international use of force when confronted with humanitarian crises. Chalk, Dallaire and their colleagues note that geopolitical interests alongside humanitarian concerns were guiding NATO in the Balkans, but fail to appreciate the resulting cynicism in the rest of the world precisely because humanitarian considerations by themselves had proven spectacularly insufficient in Rwanda. And when they write that the Kosovo war was necessary, “to demonstrate NATO’s continued military prowess and prestige,” and that “NATO’s reputation would have suffered from a failure in Kosovo,” they fall into the trap of inverting cause and effect. We create military alliances to be able to engage in justified individual or collective self-defence. We should not go to war to justify the existence, credibility or continuance of an alliance.

For a Canadian-based advocacy group to make recommendations to the Canadian community and government makes sense. It seems presumptuous and pointless for it to make policy recommendations directed at Washington—that is surely a matter for Americans. The joint focus on Washington and Ottawa in both the project and the book just does not seem reasonable, and the symmetry of the analysis and recommendations is fundamentally flawed. The real task is to mobilize the international will to intervene. The locus of action for this, as per the ICISS report, is the UN: the Security Council in the first instance, and the General Assembly as a fallback option. The United States is indeed the tipping point actor when it comes to effective preventive and protective international action. But the other relevant countries are the four other permanent members of the Security Council. After that, the next real challenge is to forge a North–South consensus. The G20 leaders’ forum is potentially a very valuable conduit for the exercise of Canadian ideational and normative leadership in the group that will likely count the most in world affairs in the foreseeable future.

The real challenge for Canadians is to make sure that when the Security Council does authorize preventive, protective and reconstructive action, Canada is at the vanguard and not a laggard in responding to the call to action. And on those rare once-a-decade occasions when Canada is elected to two-year terms on the Security Council it has a modest role to assert international leadership. (Canada’s 2010 Security Council bid failed in large part because too many other countries have concluded that the Harper government is more interested in imposing its ideologically driven world views and policy preferences than in engaging in a serious and mutually respectful dialogue.)

More crucial than any of the above criticisms, however, is my concern that the Will to Intervene Project has been so conceptualized and framed that it may confuse the civilian protection agenda, reopening questions about the globally endorsed Responsibility to Protect doctrine and thereby undermining the shared goal of stopping atrocities, protecting victims and punishing perpetrators.

The book’s opening paragraph states boldly that “to implement the principles of the responsibility to protect (R2P) on the world stage, it is imperative that national strategies be developed for the generation of domestic political will.” Yet the very title of this worthy project—the Will to Intervene—will generate reflexive hostility and resistance in many parts of the world. There were compelling reasons why ICISS abandoned the language of humanitarian intervention in favour of the responsibility to protect. R2P was formulated and gained quick universal acceptance in the international community as an authoritative alternative to the divisive and discredited humanitarian intervention agenda. The Will to Intervene confuses the two and indeed conflates R2P into humanitarian intervention. The authors persist with the term “humanitarian intervention.”

“Humanitarian intervention” conveys to most western minds the idea that the principle underlying the intervention is not self-interested power politics but the disinterested one of protecting human life. But it conjures up in many non-western minds historical memories of the strong imposing their will on the weak in the name of the prevailing universal principles of the day, from the civilizing mission of spreading Christianity to the cultivation and promotion of human rights. The phrase loads the dice in favour of intervention before the argument has even begun, by labelling and delegitimizing dissent as anti-humanitarian.

Where humanitarian intervention raises fears of domination based on the international power hierarchy, R2P encapsulates the element of international solidarity. Moreover, it implies an evaluation of the issues from the point of view of those seeking or needing support, rather than those who may be considering intervention. It refocuses the international searchlight back onto the duty to protect the villager from murder, the woman from rape and the child from starvation and being orphaned.

Support for R2P in the global South is broad but not deep. Some of the opposition to it is simply cynical and deserves no respect. But there are many who remain genuinely suspicious of the R2P agenda. Their fears are grounded in collective memories of the historical encounter with European colonialism. Too often in the past the language of humanitarianism was invoked to camouflage geopolitical and commercial calculations to plunder colonies. The crisis over humanitarian intervention arose because too many developing countries concluded that, intoxicated by its triumph in the Cold War, a newly aggressive West was trying to ram its values, priorities and agenda down their throats. Advocates of the right to non–UN-authorized humanitarian intervention were, in effect, seen as insisting that the internal use of force by the rest of the world would be held to international account, but the international use of force by the West should be free of UN scrutiny.

R2P is mainly about protecting at-risk populations largely in developing countries. Because they will be the primary victims and potential beneficiaries, the conversation on R2P should be principally among their governments, scholars and civil society representatives. Their voices are largely absent in this book.

The authors seriously underestimate the extent to which many other countries’ respect for western democracies as exemplars of human rights has diminished as a result of abusive practices in the so-called war on terror. The West’s moral authority to preach to others has been compromised. A good example of this is the still-running saga of Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen, in which both Canada and the U.S. have refused to abide by international legal standards on child soldiers and return him to Canada. Khadr’s arrest as a child soldier was unjust; his detention has been unlawful; his trial has not matched Canadian or international standards of due process; and there have been credible claims of torture. (In a plea deal in October, Khadr was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment in return for pleading guilty and could perhaps serve his one remaining year of the sentence back in Canada.) Westerners have not fully registered the extent to which large numbers of non-westerners are far better educated today than in previous decades and, in this globalized world, are able to read about events around the world in real time. They are therefore well attuned to examples of double standards and hypocrisy. Of course, listening to them is not relevant for the mobilizing-the-Canadian-will agenda. But it is for persuading the Security Council to honour and not shirk its responsibility to act.

This, in turn, suggests that the gulf between the Will to Intervene and R2P should not be exaggerated. The differences lie in nuance, tactics and terminology. The project could make a triple change with relative ease in order to align itself more comfortably with R2P so that the undoubted passion and energy of the team are harnessed to the same goal and channelled into saving lives. First, change the name to the Will to Protect, which automatically resonates with R2P and embeds the in-conflict intervention agenda within pre-conflict prevention and post-conflict reconstruction. Second, instead of addressing itself to the U.S. policy community in Washington, focus instead on the international policy community in New York and hold the feet of the Security Council to the fire of an internationalized human conscience. The Canadian mission to the UN could perhaps be a first port of call for this purpose. Finally, raise awareness among the Canadian public and lobby the government and all other pressure points identified in this study to ensure that when the UN does issue a call for aid, diplomatic pressure, sanctions or military intervention as the last resort, Canada responds promptly, generously and effectively in complete solidarity with the international community.