David J Simon. Journal of International Peacekeeping. Volume 22, Issue 1-4. 2018.
Introduction
The 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda elicited consternation about the hollowness of the post-Holocaust commitment to the mantra “Never Again.” It also ushered in volumes of genocide studies scholarship and efforts at public policy reforms. Yet in the quarter century that has passed since the genocide in Rwanda, genocide and mass atrocity have continued. The genocidal persecution of the Rohingya in Burma/Myanmar stands as a recent example, and one of the best to illustrate both the changes in the global atrocity prevention regime and, ultimately, the shortcomings of those changes in terms of leading to a better result.
The Rwandan crisis unfolded in the immediate wake of the cold war, with norms and institutions in flux, and with no precedent of hewing to the commitments seemingly required through the Genocide Convention. The United Nations (UN), its peacekeeping forces, and powerful states—both as members of the UN and its Security Council and as policy-making governments in their own right—all lacked the imagination to recognize genocide as a possibility even as it unfolded before their eyes; they also lacked the courage to commit troops and other resources protect threatened civilians.
In the wake of Rwanda, and in recognition of the failure of the system to respond accordingly to the crisis of genocide, the global atrocity prevention regime evolved. In 1994, at the dawn of the post-cold war era, the global atrocity prevention regime consisted of nothing more than the thought of a fifty-year old, seldom-invoked convention. The new regime, under the rubric of the Responsibility to Protect, embraced a more proactive approach involving an affirmative commitment to intercede when civilian populations face threats their own states cannot or will not abate on their own. The new dedication to atrocity prevention, buttressed by new global norms and institutions, inspired the hope that there is a lower likelihood that an attempted atrocity campaign could succeed. Yet the failure of norms of protection-oriented intervention illustrates otherwise.
In this essay I examine the international response to the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, the nature of the changes to the international atrocity prevention regime that ensued, and then the global response to the genocide against the Rohingya in Myanmar. I conclude with a discussion of why the current regime still falls short of what is necessary to prevent genocide.
The Global Response to Genocide in Rwanda
The global response to the crisis and genocide in Rwanda, which is covered extensively elsewhere in this volume, can be broken into three chronological segments that highlight its shortcomings. The first segment covers the eight months prior to the onset of genocide, beginning with the August 1993 signing of the internationally brokered Arusha Peace Accord between the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF—its army was known as the RPA) and the parties that comprised Rwanda’s government—a group led by President Juvenal Habyarimana’s Rwandan National Movement for Democracy and Development (MRND), but which also included several others that had been granted seats in the immediately preceding years. Those accords called for the presence of a UN peacekeeping force to provide security and prevent defections during the time required to pull together a coalition government featuring all the Accord’s signatories. In October, the Security Council authorized the deployment of a 2500-troop force—about half the size that had initially been requested—which would come to be known by the acronym UNAMIR. The force helped bring representatives of the various parties together for negotiations, but was unable to stem resistance to the deal. Such resistance was particularly acute from the wings of government parties (and a few not in government) known as “Hutu Power.”
The second phase was the 100 days of genocide which began following the assassination of Habyarimana in April 1994. During this phase, the inability of the UNAMIR peacekeepers to protect the civilian population became the defining characteristic of the UN’s mission to the country. The peacekeepers took some measures to protect Hutu and Tutsi politicians who supported the peace accord plan, as well as other civilians facing danger. However, in the face of overwhelming strength on the part of government and government-allied forces, and with little support from DPKO or the Security Council, they were unable to do so meaningfully or consistently. Two weeks after Habyarimana’s assassination, with attacks on Tutsis having taken thousands of lives already, the Security Council voted in Resolution 912 to evacuate all but 270 UNAMIR troops.
The third phase of international involvement in Rwanda in 1994 consisted of confused re-engagement. The Security Council voted in May to authorize a re-imagined peacekeeping force, known as UNAMIR II, with more robust rules of engagement. However, disagreements of strategy, procurement snafus, and an inability to source troops from member states prevented UNAMIR II from putting boots on the ground until August. By that time, the RPA had seized Kigali, forced the genocidal interim government to flee into Zaire, and effectively ended the genocide against the Tutsis.
Meanwhile, under the authority of a Security Council Resolution under Chapter VII of the UN Charter on 22 June 1994, France sent in its own troops in a venture known as Operation Turquoise. With an apparent inclination to support Hutu control of the government, Turquoise soldiers were cheered by Hutus and only acted to protect Tutsis after witnessing—to their surprise—attacks on Tutsi civilians. Meanwhile, in controlling two provinces, the French operation prevented the RPA from chasing down the interim government, which had been orchestrating the genocide, and allowed the latter to make its escape. Once in Zaire, the ousted government took military control over refugee camps and declared itself to be the Rwandan-government-in-exile—a source of instability for both Rwanda and Zaire that serves as the point of origin for the two-and-a-half decades of conflict in eastern Zaire/DRC that have ensued.
How did the international community get so much so wrong? Almost all of the action involved the UN, so one line of critique naturally focuses on the international organization’s disfunctions. Indeed, the UN failed to appreciate the nature of the threat of violence before the genocide began and the nature of the violence itself once it did. Much of the blame lies with the DPKO, then headed by future UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. It was the DPKO that denied the UNAMIR commander’s request to act upon an informant’s tip regarding genocidal preparations in January 1994, and DPKO that signed off on using UNAMIR troops and vehicles to assist in the evacuation of expatriates, abandoning large numbers of Tutsis they had been protecting, as the genocide was just getting underway.
Another problem involved the lack of engagement from the Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who downplayed the urgency—or even the possibility—of intervening to protect civilians in Rwanda. The Secretary-General’s briefing to the Security Council in advance of its meeting that would lead to Resolution 912 “reflected the views of the interim government,” focusing on civil war rather than genocide and blaming “unruly soldiers” for “anarchy and spontaneous slaughter”. Boutros-Ghali’s special representative in Rwanda, Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh from Cameroon, failed to recognize the genocidal dynamics as they were unfolding. As a matter of policy, he favored a negotiation process that involved the genocidal interim regime, and presumably projected for it to maintain at least a partial hold on power. UNAMIR Commander Roméo Dallaire depicts Booh-Booh as “overwhelmed and uncertain about what to do” (265) at the outset of the genocide, and generally more concerned with trying to resurrect the peace deal than trying to protect civilians.
But the largest share of blame goes to the Security Council, which failed to authorize an adequately sized peacekeeping force in the first place. In debates about the possibility of extending UNAMIR’s mandate, the Security Council portrayed UNAMIR as a privilege that Rwandans were at risk of losing—ignoring the fact that extremists were explicitly maneuvering to effect UNMIR’s departure. And, of course, it was the Security Council that withdrew most of the force during the bloodiest days of the genocide.
There are three sets of reasons for the Security Council’s Rwanda myopia. The first is ignorance, stemming from the gaps in the flow of information from the Secretariat to the Council. For example, the Security Council never discussed the situation on the ground in terms of a possible (indeed, actual) genocide as it debated Res. 912. A more thorough description would not have omitted the term. To the extent that those gaps reflected willful under-informing on the part of people like Booh-Booh and Boutros-Ghali, these are errors that originate with the Secretariat as noted above. But UNAMIR commander Dallaire has also suggested that the French, Belgian, and American embassies likely maintained their own intelligence operations, which they did not share with the UN.
The second set of reasons involve deception within the Security Council. The primary culprit is the somewhat anomalous occurrence that Rwanda held a non-permanent seat on the Council in 1994. The Rwandan representative, Jean-Damscene Bizimana had been appointed by the Habyarimana regime and served at the behest of the genocidal interim government after Habyarimana was killed. He was treated with deference and allowed to present an account of the situation in Rwanda as a conflict initiated by the RPA from outside the country. In fact, Bizimana called for the strengthening of UNAMIR, provided its focus would be on helping to protect the interim government from the RPA. While the rest of the Security Council did not endorse the implications of this perspective—i.e., a call for support to the interim government and perhaps sanctions against states seen as assisting the RPA—there is little in the public record that indicates anyone on the Council directly rebuked or censured the Rwandan representative. France may also have been somewhat deceptive, allegedly coaching Boutros-Ghali to avoid making a case for a more robust involvement, and “doggedly (holding) the line that only a ceasefire”—and not intervention or action taken against the perpetrators of the unfolding genocide—”would end the conflict in Rwanda.
The final, and most consequential set of explanations for the Security Council’s behavior is cowardice. The Security Council kept UNAMIR weak and later ordered UNAMIR’s retreat because it was scared: scared of taking casualties, scared of losing, scared of bad publicity. Barnett writes that “when the Secretariat proceeded to reject the possibility of intervention at the outset of the crisis, it cited not only pragmatics, but also principles and the need to use peacekeepers only when there was a workable ceasefire” and that “[k]nowing the [Security] Council was in no mood to authorize reinforcements, the Secretariat might have concluded that the only way to protect the peacekeepers was to remove them from danger.” After ten Belgian peacekeepers were killed by Rwandan forces shortly Habyarimana’s assassination, Belgium unilaterally withdrew the rest of its contingent within UNAMIR. Belgian officials lobbied Belgium’s allies, included the United States, to follow suit with the rest of the force. The United States, still feeling the burn from the deaths of 19 American soldiers working with UN peacekeepers in Somalia the previous October, eagerly agreed. There was practically zero support among the P5 for more robust UN peacekeeping engagement. Russia and China were tepid, at best, towards the very concept of multilateral interventions, wary of allowing operations that seemingly allowed Western powers to challenge global norms of sovereignty. For their part, the U.S. and the U.K. had little tolerance for putting lives (or even resources) at risk, and France overly inclined to trust Hutu political power (if not Hutu Power more specifically).
The Global Response to the UN’s Failure in Rwanda
In the wake of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, as well as the murder of approximately 8000 Bosnian men who had nominally been under UNprotection in Srebrenica, the United Nations and several national governments reconsidered their approach to atrocity prevention. The most potentially consequential reforms took place at the multilateral level, within or centered on the United Nations. Now Secretary-General, Kofi Annan created the Office of the Special Adviser for the Prevention of Genocide, a body that would operate within the Secretariat with access to the Security Council, charged with making sure the possibility and risk of genocide are not overlooked in the course of UN policy-making. The point of the new office was to ensure that UN decision-makers could not claim ignorance of genocide risks in a given situation, as well as to identify (and ideally preempt situations that might have the potential to develop more acute genocide risks.
Annan also convened the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), which developed the concept of “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) to guide decision-making when a risk of genocide and other atrocities are present. Specifically, as articulated in the 2005 World Summit Outcome document and later elaborated upon in an annual series of Secretary-General’s reports, the doctrine establishes 1) that states have a responsibility to protect all populations under their control from genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and ethnic cleansing; but 2) that when states abjure that responsibility, the international community has a responsibility to do what it can—whether through intervention or otherwise—to protect populations that are at risk of facing atrocity. To avoid a situation in which powerful countries twist the doctrine to attain for themselves a right to intervene, the elaboration of the doctrine specifies that the Security Council bears primary responsibility for identifying atrocity risk situations wherein the international community has a responsibility to become involved. The U.N. General Assembly is granted an underspecified measure of secondary responsibility should the Security Council become paralyzed.
Regional organizations could serve as delegates for R2P actions so long as they are coordinated with the U.N. In the late 1990s and throughout the 2000s, regional organizations also made an effort to be more ready to confront and stop atrocities. Most notably, the Organization for African Unity, notoriously a “dictator’s club” at which sovereignty concerns invariably rose above all others, was refashioned as the African Union. The new version’s charter explicitly gave the organization the right to intervene in its own members’ affairs when there might be a risk of genocide, war crimes, or crimes against humanity. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) remains more outwardly focused on preserving and promoting the sovereignty of its members, but even its 2007 charter features the clause “ADHERING to the principles of democracy, the rule of law and good governance, respect for and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Finally, many national governments pursued reforms designed to make them responsive to mass atrocity risks abroad. Several established “R2P Focal Points”—essentially offices within national governments mirroring the role of the Office of the Special Advisor for the Prevention of Genocide within the UN. In 2011, the United States established the Atrocities Prevention Board, similarly designed to serve as an interagency watchdog that would ensure that national policy was undertaken with an awareness of the attendant consequences for atrocity risks.
In theory, these reforms should have led for a more robust response to mass atrocities in what was hoped would be a strictly hypothetical analogous situation to Rwanda. The international environment would appear to be have changed substantially between 1994 and 2017. The struggles of meeting that ideal became apparent repeatedly in the 2010s (by which the new regime was, at least on paper, in place). In case after case—most notably including Libya, Côte d’Ivoire, South Sudan, Burundi, Iraq, Syria—the application of the R2P doctrine proved to be anything but straightforward, and amid some relative successes, more frequently an outright failure. The persecution—and genocide—of Myanmar’s Rohingya population illustrates most starkly the shortcomings of the post-Rwanda atrocity prevention regime.
The Responses of the United Nations to Genocide in Myanmar
As in Rwanda, the conflict that spiraled into genocide had been percolating for several years (even discounting the notional expulsion of the Tutsi and Rohingya, respectively, that had been ongoing for decades). In Rwanda, “percolation” took the form of the civil war between the RPA and the government, which began in 1990. In Myanmar, it was the periodic episodes of pogrom-like anti-Rohingya violence that erupted in June 2012 and October 2016 (following several more distant precedents, 1978-9 and 1991-2). In 2017 in Myanmar, though, unlike Rwanda in 1994, there was no peacekeeping force on the ground when genocidal violence erupted in Rakhine state. As a result, the most obvious lesson from Rwanda—that peacekeepers on the ground should intercede and not retreat—had no application. Instead, the international community (primarily in the form of the UN) struggled to gain access to the arena of persecution and lacked leverage over the government of Myanmar. R2P, while invoked, thus faced a heavy lift in Myanmar. In the end, it can scarcely be said to have been acted upon, raising the issue of whether the post-Rwanda anti-atrocity regime has any heft at all.
To understand the international community’s passivity at the point of the 2017 violence, it is helpful to note the UN’s reaction to the 2012 episode. In 2012, attacks on civilians led to as many as 100,000 Rohingya to flee their home villages and take refuge in displacement camps. At the time, several UN officials raised concerns about the violence, and especially the prospects that ethnic cleansing and torture might be occurring. ReliefWeb documents 14 different occasions when the UN’s special rapporteur on the human rights situation in Myanmar, Tomás Ojea Quintana, called out the Myanmar government on human rights concerns, and 15 occasions when New York-based UN statements (whether from the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Special Advisor for the Prevention of Genocide, the General Assembly, or a report of the Secretary-General) questioned or condemned the violence against the Rohingya between June 2012 and January 2014.
UN scrutiny led the government of Myanmar to develop a counter-offensive, of sorts, on the ground. It began to target international organizations, including the UN and non-governmental organizations. At least 5 UN employees and nine NGO workers were jailed in 2012 on charges of fomenting ethnic hatred. Human Rights Watch reported that after the June 2012 flare-up had prompted an evacuation, the government refused to permit officials back into the region. Meanwhile, local animus towards the UN hindered the delivery of badly needed humanitarian relief. A Human Rights Watch report observed
…widespread animosity among the local Arakanese community towards UN agencies and international humanitarian organizations providing relief to displaced Muslim populations. Local Arakanese, in some cases led by Buddhist monks, have publicly protested against and physically obstructed aid to Rohingya, issued threats against aid workers, and distributed pamphlets calling on the Arakanese community to attack staff and supporters of specific organizations.
The threats to the UN, initially made to the agencies and officials active in Rakhine state, soon had the effect that security forces and the government had presumably desired: a more pliant UN that seemed reluctant to raise concerns about violence against the Rohingya. By 2013, in-country UN officials were avoiding pressing the government on human rights issues related to the persecution of the Rohingya. Aung San Suu Kyi had only recently risen to power, and her international backers feared that her hold on power was tenuous. Prominent diplomats inside and outside the UN feared that to challenge her on human rights would weaken her, leading the military to resume full control over the state.
Ultimately ‘constructive engagement’ meant ‘willful ignorance.’ Charles Petrie, author of the UN’s highly critical self-examination of its inaction and accommodation of an atrocity-committing force in Sri Lanka, diplomatically expressed concern that similar dynamics were in play in Myanmar after 2012:
I think the key lesson for Myanmar from Sri Lanka is the lack of a focal point. A senior level focal point addressing the situation in Myanmar in its totality—the political, the human rights, the humanitarian and the development. It remains diffuse. And that means over the last few years there have been almost competing agendas.
An internal UN document reportedly concluded that “the UN team in Myanmar [was found to be] ‘glaringly dysfunctional’ with ‘strong tensions’ between different parts of the UN system.” Officials concerned with human rights issues effectively had to do battle with officials focused on democracy (who desired to coddle the new democratically elected regime) and development (who saw a good relationship with the state as essential for economic planning and results). The resident coordinator, Renata Lok-Dessallien was left to sort out the competing priorities, and seemed to have chosen the global story of democratic revival over what must have been deemed a relatively local one of ethnic cleansing. Per a BBC journalist, “UN officials who did try to insist on addressing human rights issues were “humiliated” and “isolated.” According to one staffer, “publicly talking about the Rohingya became almost taboo. Many UN press releases about Rakhine avoided using the word completely,” which played directly into the government stance that it would be impossible to persecute the Rohingya since—in its eyes—the category does not meaningfully exist.
By August 2017, when violence targeting the Rohingya population returned with a much greater intensity than at any previous point, the UN was more prepared to challenge the Myanmar government directly. The government, however, was also more prepared, taking several steps to prevent the United Nations from bearing witness to the violence. Following the October 2016 spate of violence, the UN Human Rights Commission authorized a three-person fact-finding mission (FFM). The government denied entry visas to the FFM, forcing its member to conduct research primarily from refugee camps in neighboring countries. Yanghee Lee had replaced Quintana as the special rapporteur, but was denied access to crucial communities in July of 2017 and then to the country as a whole in January 2018. The government requested that she be replaced.
Lee, following Quintana before her, unequivocally condemned the Myanmar government for its inability to prevent (and possible complicity in) the violence against Rohingya in Rakhine state. The FFM strongly condemned the military’s role in the violence, suggested that the legal criteria for classification of the violence as genocide against the Rohingya had likely been met, and called for further Security Council action, including the recommendation of an International Criminal Court investigation.
Back in New York, UN officials also ratcheted up their condemnations of Myanmar’s treatment of the Rohingya, perhaps reflecting some measure of internalization of the lessons of Rwanda. In October 2017, not long after the initial outbreak of violence against the Rohingya that year, the Special Advisors for Genocide and R2P declared that “the Government of Myanmar has failed to meet its obligations under international law and primary responsibility to protect the Rohingya population from atrocity crimes.” In March 2018, the Special Adviser for the Prevention of Genocide, Adama Dieng—who had also been denied access to Myanmar proper—declared that
[i]nternational crimes were committed in Myanmar. Rohingya Muslims have been killed, tortured, raped, burnt alive and humiliated, solely because of who they are. All the information I have received indicates that the intent of the perpetrators was to cleanse northern Rakhine state of their existence, possibly even to destroy the Rohingya as such, which, if proven, would constitute the crime of genocide.
Despite also having been denied access to Myanmar, the FFM completed its work, and came to a similar conclusion. Its September 2018 report called for the Security Council to refer the situation, and specifically the roles played by several military officials, to the International Criminal Court, arguing that the violence against the Rohingya met the criteria for the commission of genocide (as well as those for war crimes and crimes against humanity). One of the FFM commissioners added that as of May 2019, there remained “no evidence that the Myanmar government is acting in good faith to resolve the crisis.”
To an extent, the lessons of Rwanda had been applied: concerned parties authorized observers on the ground to assess the existence and extent of atrocities. Those observers did not shy away from labeling the violence as atrocities for which the predominant share of the responsibility lay with the military and its government and civilian allies. The Secretary-General himself was completely aware of the atrocity dimensions of the conflict. These reports and statements illustrate the changes in the global atrocity prevention regime since the genocides in Rwanda and Srebrenica. Designated actors within the UN system (and also outside, to take into account the atrocity monitoring NGOs like the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect that had also called for the application of R2P) raised the possibility that atrocity crimes were taking place, and that appropriate measures ought to be pursued to suppress them.
However, beyond that point, the “new” atrocity prevention regime was unable to differentiate itself from the old one. While strong words were spoken, strong actions were not taken. Aside from supporting refugee camps in neighboring countries, the UN undertook no concrete action to protect the Rohingya from genocidal persecution—even as the failure of the Myanmar government to “protect” its population became manifest.
Blame for this lies at the level of the Security Council and with the member states who have prevented a more robust response. Following the outbreak of violence in August 2017, the Security Council has issued a sum total of one presidential statement and—despite the calls for action from other UN bodies—zero resolutions addressing the situation in Myanmar. The Presidential Statement, from November 2017, notes the Council’s concern with the outbreak of violence, the blame for which it allocates to both ARSA and state security forces. The report takes pains to “[reaffirm] its strong commitment to the sovereignty, political independence, territorial integrity, and unity of Myanmar” and emphasizes (per the fundamental tenet of the R2P doctrine) that the state bears primary responsibility for protecting its own citizens. However, it makes no mention of any path towards intervening should the state continue (at that point) to fail to exercise its responsibilities.
The United States and the United Kingdom pressed for action to follow up on the Special Advisors’ and FFM’s conclusions. In December 2018, a resolution framed around stipulating a process for the return of Rohingya refugees included language that would advance the prospects of holding those responsible for atrocity crimes accountable—presumably via some process invoking international criminal justice. China and the Russian Federation expressed their opposition, however, and the resolution never came to a vote.
Similarly, when the Security Council devoted its agenda to the Rohingya crisis for one day in February 2019—a year-and-a-half after the breakout of genocidal violence—no resolution and no meaningful action came out of it. (Although the Council did agree to investigate whether UN offices had been too accommodating of the Myanmar regime from 2012 to 2017). While several Security Council members called for an international accountability mechanism, and at least one (Belgium) echoed the FFM’s effective charge of genocide, no resolution came up for a vote. Instead, the focus on the UN’s attention became pledging to assist Bangladesh in managing the burden of hosting almost 800,000 Rohingya refugees, with little attention paid to the role or responsibility of the government of Myanmar.
The veto is clearly at the heart of the problem. In situations where a veto was not applicable—that is, procedural votes rather than actual resolutions—actions in the spirit of R2P have gone through. China and Russia tried unsuccessfully to block the FFM chair Mazuki Darusman from addressing the Security Council in October 2018, when the decision was made via an un-vetoable procedural vote. Again, in December 2018, a majority vote preserved funding for the UN Human Rights Council’s work on Myanmar. Yet on matters involving a direct (as opposed to merely rhetorical) challenge to Myanmar’s sovereignty, no progress could be made. Yanghee Lee, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, expressed her frustration on the failure to pursue accountability for the perpetrators of atrocity crimes in an interview with Radio Free Asia:
The roadblock is, of course, the U.N. Security Council. China is backing the Myanmar government [by] objecting to a Security Council resolution for referral to the ICC [International Criminal Court]. China and Russia often work together in this kind of situation, which I think is shameful, so that the Security Council cannot move beyond this. I really wish China and Russia would revisit their decision.”
Whether they are protecting sovereignty at a conceptual level or promoting economic interests at a national one, China and the Russian Federation have been able to keep the UN’s critiques of the Myanmar state and security forces at the level of rhetoric, without consequences for the government or for the government’s approach to resolving what it sees as its “‘Bengali’ problem.”
In sum, then, the core lesson from the UN’s failure in Rwanda was not learned: that the current structure of the Security Council, which remains unaltered since 1994—indeed since the UN’s inception in 1944—is unlikely to authorize either a protection-driven intervention mission or a punitive procedure. So long as the country in question can claim a measure of friendship with one of the five veto-holding permanent members, it will neither be prevented from nor held accountable for the commission of atrocity crimes. As much as the R2P framework attempts to spell out criteria and procedures for intervention, it does nothing to address the issue of will. It fails to produce a case for a country to subsume even relatively minor national interests to a logic of joint collective action in the name of civilian protection.
What, at this point, can be done? Critics seem to be increasingly frustrated with the principle of R2P, noting how its establishment appears to have failed to have abated the pace of atrocities being perpetrated across the globe. This view is unduly skeptical: R2P has indeed been invoked widely, and may deserve some credit for establishing a basis for avoiding or punishing atrocity crimes in several cases. And some of the criticism of R2P may be offered disingenuously, by opponents of the idea of intervention for civilian protection seeking to tar the best instrument for justifying that idea as ineffectual.
In reality, there is no alternative to R2P as an idea, save for giving up upon the enterprise of protecting civilians from atrocities altogether. What is needed are refinements to the doctrine that enable it to become more effectively self-actualizing. A greater role for the General Assembly, or an iron-clad commitment to abjure the use of the veto in atrocity cases could serve as a start. Certainly, in the latter case, opponents could still try to prevent the declaration of a given case as one in which atrocity concerns are invoked. But even then, objection would mean going on record as such in the face of specific bodies of evidence establishing the risk or existence of atrocity. For a Security Council power to do so would entail a potentially higher political cost than it would face from undermining an anti-atrocity effort at a procedural level, or pre-empting a vote on an R2P action to be negotiated within Council deliberations.
Tweaking the costs and payoffs for different courses of action—or of inaction—is an imprecise and remote strategy for improving powerful countries’ buy-in to the responsibility to protect. Roméo Dallaire, seeking to find a path to more responsiveness in the face of atrocity threats, told an audience at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2002 (paraphrasing Kofi Annan), “we have entered a millennium where in fact humanity, the human race, is to become the dominant factor, not the self-interest.” Yet close to two decades of the Responsibility to Protect era tells us that neither the new millennium nor the new doctrine has been sufficient to realize such an idealistic vision. Since neither can be discarded, proponents of a more robust atrocity prevention regime must chip away, slowly but steadily, at the sovereignty’s vice grip on collective decision-making in times of atrocity threats.