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Jun 29, 2008 Features / Columnists, Ronald Sanders
By Sir Ronald Sanders
By the time this is read, Robert Mugabe would have proceeded with his farcical election for the Presidency of Zimbabwe and been declared winner by the Elections Commission he controls, despite the UN Secretary-General’s call for a deferment of the election, and the condemnation by the Security Council, including South Africa, of the violence and intimidation that characterised it.
The people of Zimbabwe, already brutalised and terrorised by Mugabe through the military and paid-thugs of his regime, now face increased suffering.
The economy of Zimbabwe will deteriorate even more than the desperate level to which it has already sunk. Zimbabwe’s closest neighbours will face increasing strain as Zimbabweans cross their borders in flight from the disastrous conditions in their country.
In a caring world concerned about the protection of people, there would have been international machinery to deal with this situation by United Nations intervention in Zimbabwe to end Mugabe’s tyrannical rule, establish a broad-based interim government, and establish institutions of good governance until free and fair elections could be held to elect a majority-supported government. There is no such machinery.
The notions of ‘sovereignty of states’ and ‘non-interference in the internal affairs of states’ continue to be the guiding principles of the UN Security Council even in light of overwhelming evidence of the disgust of the majority of the world’s peoples with the flagrant abuse of human rights in many countries.
Until governments confront the need to balance the importance of state sovereignty with the imperative of protecting people, international machinery to stop the kind of abuse that has been witnessed in Zimbabwe will not be established, and regimes such as Mugabe’s will continue with catastrophic consequences.
Zimbabwe is not the only case that cries out for international action to protect people from abuse, torture and death in their own countries. Mynamar and Darfur now, and previously, Rwanda and Kosovo, are all cases that cried out for international action authorised by an empowered international body.
Eight years ago in 2000, the then UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, posed the question: “If humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica — to gross and systematic violations of human rights that offend every precept of our common humanity?”
Unfortunately, any chance of the world’s governments acting on Annan’s distressing observation was dealt a mortal blow by the last eight years of the George W. Bush administration in the United States which has contributed mightily to the adherence by other governments to the primacy of state sovereignty and non-interference in the internal affairs of states.
Bush’s doctrine of “pre-emptive” strikes, his invasion of Iraq without authorisation by the UN Security Council, and his government’s fabrication of the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as a pretext for invasion, have made the world understandably wary of intervention.
The Bush administration’s actions have sufficiently scared other governments to back away from addressing the need for humanitarian intervention, lest it be used as an excuse for asserting the will of the powerful.
But, the international community’s responsibility to act in the face of the gravest of human rights violations while respecting the sovereignty of states, is now glaring. Despots, such as Mugabe and the generals in control of Mynamar, will continue to brutalize their people unabated unless the shield of non-interference in the internal affairs of states is torn away to make them accountable to global authority.
And, it is the international community that must act, not individual states, such as the United States or Russia or China. Recent history has amply demonstrated that governments of powerful states are prone to revert to the unilateral actions of the past to advance their own political ambitions, wrapping them in flimsy and false ‘national interest’ paper.
Cuba, for instance, would have every right to worry about intervention from a US administration that continues to impose a trade embargo and to spend tens of millions of dollars each year on propaganda that amplifies human rights violations rather than engaging in meaningful dialogue to end them.
In the same year that Kofi Annan made his cri de coeur to the governments of the world, the Canadian government established an International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty seeking to bridge sovereignty and non-interference with the “responsibility to protect”.
In 2005, the doctrine of “responsibility to protect” was incorporated into a UN document and accepted by Heads of state and government at the High-level Plenary Meeting of the General Assembly.
The leaders accepted not only that it is every state’s responsibility to protect its citizens from “genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity”; they also agreed that if a state fails to do so, it is then the responsibility of the international community to protect that state’s population.
But, the document is not legally binding. Therefore, it was easy for governments to sign it and promptly ignore it, safe in the knowledge that they had not actually empowered the international community to intervene.
The time has now come for governments everywhere to live up to their purpose as protectors of their peoples, not persecutors of them.
They should put in place the international authority to intervene when any government turns upon its populace to maintain itself in power.
In 1994, the Commission on Global Governance proposed that the UN Charter be amended to permit intervention, restricting such intervention to cases that constitute a violation requiring a response on humanitarian grounds.
Caribbean governments, who pride themselves in respect for democracy and upholding of human rights, are ideally placed to put the matter on the world’s agenda.
Next year, Trinidad and Tobago hosts both the Summit of the Americas and the Commonwealth Heads of Government Conference – they are both good events for Caribbean governments to take the lead in seeking an amendment to the UN Charter to allow for humanitarian intervention, and, in so doing, give the people of places like Zimbabwe and Mynamar hope of a better life.
(The writer is a business consultant and former Caribbean diplomat)
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