HOME | ARCHIVES |

Issue 27: September-October 2003

COMMENT

It's time to redefine a 'just war'

The 1990s was a challenging decade. Our consciences were shocked by atrocities from Rwanda to Bosnia and beyond, and by the price that innocent men, women and children paid because of the world's failure to rise to such challenges.

Though the terrorist attacks of 9/11 shifted attention to the war on terrorism, the debate about the need to intervene in sovereign countries for the purpose of human protection has not gone away. Indeed, since coalition forces in Iraq have failed to find any weapons of mass destruction, human protection has become the only remaining significant justification for the U.S.-led war on the dictator Saddam Hussein.

But does Iraq meet the test of "humanitarian intervention"? See for yourself by taking a look at the report The Responsibility to Protect, by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (dubbed "R2P"). Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien tried valiantly to promote this report at the recent Progressive Governance Summit in England. He ran into difficulty because some at the conference feared that the concept could be used to justify the war on Iraq.

This is ironic, for most ICISS commissioners (I was one) would argue that the Iraq war would not have met our criteria for justifying intervention.

Because it's easy to label a war as a "humanitarian intervention" – deflecting critics who don't want to be cast as "anti-humanitarian" – we recommended a change in terminology. It's important to focus attention on needs of victims, including the prevention and follow-up assistance components of external action (issues that are becoming major concerns in post-war Iraq).

As such, we found it useful to reconceptualize sovereignty, viewing it not as an absolute term of authority but as a kind of responsibility. State authorities are responsible for the functions of protecting the safety and lives of citizens, and accountable for their acts of commission and omission in international as well as national forums. While the state has the primary responsibility to protect its citizens, the responsibility of the broader community of states is activated when a particular state either is unwilling or unable to fulfill its responsibility to protect; or is itself the perpetrator of crimes or atrocities; or where populations living outside a particular state are directly threatened by actions taking place there.

We sought to define thresholds when atrocities are so grave, they clearly require armed international intervention. Such thresholds are crossed when large-scale loss of life or ethnic cleansing is occurring or is about to occur (this rule is not retroactive, and does not justify intervention now for atrocities committed years ago).

As well, we argued that all military interventions must be subject to four precautionary principles: right intention, last resort, proportional means and reasonable prospects. Iraq would likely have failed on all four principles.

Intervention for human protection purposes occurs so that those condemned to die in fear may live in hope instead. The goal is not to wage war on a state in order to destroy it and eliminate its statehood, but to protect victims of atrocities inside the state, to embed the protection in reconstituted institutions after the intervention, and then to withdraw all foreign troops.

Given the enormous normative presumption against the use of deadly force to settle international quarrels, who has the right to authorize such force?

Even if we agree that military intervention may sometimes be necessary and unavoidable in order to protect innocent people from life-threatening danger, key questions remain about the international authority that can override national sovereignty.

R2P came down firmly on the side of the central role of the UN as the indispensable font of international authority and the irreplaceable forum for authorizing international military enforcement. While its work can be supplemented by regional organizations acting within their own jurisdictions, only the UN can build, consolidate and use military force in the name of the international community.

Our choice is no longer between intervention and non-intervention, but between ad hoc, or rules-based, intervention. If we are going to get any sort of consensus in advance of crises requiring urgent responses, including military intervention, the principles outlined in Responsibility to Protect point the way forward. If hostile governments and critics can move beyond their reflexive suspicion of the very word "intervention," they'll find that R2P contains the safeguards they need with respect to threshold causes, precautionary principles, lawful authorization, and operational doctrine.

Ramesh Thakur is UNU Vice Rector and director of the Peace and Governance Programme. This commentary first appeared in the July 22 edition of the The Globe and Mail. These are his personal views.

HOME

Copyright © 2003  United Nations University. All rights reserved.