To protect and defend

Leader
Saturday September 17, 2005
The Guardian

Not much can be said in praise of the UN world summit, which has ended with little more than a heavily spun restatement of its loftiest ambitions. It was clear in advance that issues as vital as the millennium development goals were not going to progress very far. It was a "disgrace", as Kofi Annan put it bluntly, that disarmament was too controversial to agree on, while reform of the security council was put off. But there was one real shift: recognition that the world body has a "responsibility to protect" - to ensure that genocide, ethnic cleansing and other war crimes should not be ignored in the name of state sovereignty.

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Like other issues on the summit agenda, this was subject to much battering as the final document was negotiated. Egypt, Algeria, Pakistan, India, Russia, Cuba, Iran, and Syria tried to block it. And for all its rhetoric about freedom, the US did not want to be obliged to act in all such cases, preferring a reference to "moral responsibility". Happily, a majority of states, including many in Africa, the EU and Japan, backed Canada's initiative - producing what amounts to a significant advance in international humanitarian law and a clear break with the UN's tradition of non-intervention.

Cynics and UN-bashers will counter that the 1994 Rwandan genocide - when nearly a million died in 100 days - took place despite the strictures of the 1948 genocide convention, itself a response to the Nazis' industrial-scale extermination of Jews in the second world war. It would be right too to point to sterile semantic debates over what has happened in Darfur, where there have been planned mass killings of people on the basis of their ethnic identity, but a shameful failure to act because of national interests such as China's close ties with Sudan. Nato's intervention in Kosovo in 1999 went ahead without a UN mandate because Russia, an ally of Serbia, blocked agreement in the security council. Yet no one who has followed the cases being tried at the UN tribunal in the Hague - including the Srebrenica massacre - can doubt the nature of the crimes committed in the Balkan wars.

Every state is committed to protecting its people from mass killings and crimes against humanity, and to intervening when necessary - though it will doubtless prove easier to act in Liberia, say, than in Tibet or Chechnya. At the end of an otherwise bleak summit it is some small consolation that an organisation founded to save future generations from the scourge of war has pledged to ensure that never again really means never again.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/leaders/story/0,3604,1572089,00.html