Disarming Conflict

As the Burmese generals persisted in frustrating post-cyclone relief efforts, Mr. Kouchner suggested that the “responsibility to protect” (R2P) doctrine approved at the UN World Summit in 2005 be invoked to force authorities in Burma (also known as Myanmar) to cooperate: "We are seeing at the United Nations if we can't implement the 'responsibility to protect', given that food, boats and relief teams are there, and obtain a UN resolution which authorizes the delivery (of aid) and imposes this on the Burmese government."[i]

Reaction was swift, with most commentators rejecting The French Foreign Minister’s undue haste in seeming to reach for military action to respond to the extraordinarily complex challenges of trying to reach the many hundreds of thousands of Burmese left without food, shelter, and water. Some reports estimate the dead to be in excess of 100,000.[ii] Commentators warned that linking the "responsibility to protect" to the situation in Burma is a misapplication of the doctrine[iii] and that the doctrine will become more difficult to apply in legitimate cases “if it is abused and misused” in instances like the Burmese cyclone.[iv]

But it is surely not the application of the R2P framework that is the problem. That framework simply asserts that the international community has a responsibility to help protect people from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity when their own government is either unable or unwilling to do so. Of course, R2P is not relevant as long as Cyclone Nargis remains only a natural disaster, but if the Burmese authorities systematically prevent aid from reaching the cyclone victims, then the natural disaster also becomes the scene of criminality. Gareth Evans[v] rightly points out that “if what the generals [of Burma] are now doing, effectively denying relief to hundreds of thousands of people at real and immediate risk of death, can itself be characterized as a crime against humanity, then the responsibility to protect principle does indeed cut in.”[vi]

So, it is not the application of the R2P doctrine to the extraordinary situation in Burma that is counterproductive; it is the inappropriate resort to military force that would be counterproductive – and the two are not the same. When the World Summit decided that the international community has a responsibility “to help protect populations from…crimes against humanity” it in effect became a requirement that the international community apply the R2P framework to every global event that involves extreme human suffering, or that presents a serious potential for extreme human suffering, to assess whether that suffering or potential suffering is linked to threatened or actual “genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.”

To apply the R2P doctrine to the current situation in Burma in that way certainly does not presuppose that military action is warranted, the point is rather to test whether any of the crimes listed in the R2P doctrine are being perpetrated in Burma in the wake of the cyclone. It is not a simple matter to determine whether crimes against humanity are being committed, but the evidence is surely building.

The responsibility to protect principle obliges the international community to look carefully at such instances – that is, it obliges the international community to examine such a disaster through the R2P lens – and to come to a timely determination as to whether egregious crimes against humanity are being perpetrated.

If the conclusion is that they are, and that seems to be an increasingly tragic and credible conclusion in the case of Burma in the aftermath of the cyclone, it certainly does not follow automatically that the international community should then turn to military intervention. Professional humanitarian officials and workers have made important arguments against the resort to force, warning that it could undermine rather than hasten humanitarian relief to the victims of the cyclone in Burma.

The cautions are well taken, although that doesn’t mean they are not debatable, but they do not diminish the relevance of the R2P commitment. The international community has a responsibility to pursue peaceful means to meet its responsibility to protect and to end the regime’s perpetration of crimes against humanity. The point, of course, is that the R2P doctrine is not a military intervention doctrine; rather it is an intervention doctrine that relies heavily, as the Summit commitment put it, on “appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means.” But it is also a commitment to pursue other actions (possibly including military force) when such peaceful means “are manifestly failing to protect” affected populations, and if there can be reasonable confidence that military action will be effective and not simply make things worse.

The situation obviously warrants collective international action to encourage the Burmese authorities to provide the international community unfettered access to the cyclone’s victims.[vii] The Security Council has a particular responsibility to act when peaceful or non-coercive measures are manifestly failing. That is not to say that coercive military action is called for, but neither can it be automatically ruled out. It is obviously a call that must be made by those in charge of the humanitarian effort, assessing the extent to which Burma is finally cooperating and, of course, assessing what the likelihood would be that coercive would not do more harm than good in efforts to serve the welfare of the most vulnerable in Burma.

The R2P doctrine, in other words, is highly relevant to the situation in Burma and should be part of what guides the international community’s response.