R2P and Gaza

Despite R2P's mandate, the UN's selective response to global atrocities like Gaza and Libya exposes its flaws.

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It's an irony that with all it protocols of Just War and Ethics of War, the UN still needed the R2P - Responsibility to Protect - that was finally endorsed in 2005 after long debates.

Already the UN had been formed on the mandate of maintaining world peace, preventing wars through its collective security, its disarmament process and its vow to settle international disputes through negotiation and arbitration, but all this was not enough for the UN to actually deliver on anything. All this did not already mean the responsibility to maintain peace and protect humanity from mass atrocities and genocides!

So, the UN endorsed R2P, as humanity's responsibility to prevent genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity - as in humanity may be a force beyond and above the UN.

The basic idea of R2P is that a state's sovereignty entails its responsibility to protect its populations from mass atrocity crimes and human rights violations; but if the state fails, humanity has right to intervene. As a first step, international assistance would be offered in the form of dialogue or capacity-building; but if that doesn't work, there will be a timely and decisive collective response.

The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) has also stressed that such a 'timely and decisive response' is an 'extraordinary measure', so it must meet criteria of Just Cause, Right Intention, Last Resort, Proportional Means, Reasonable Prospects and Right Authority. Right Authority here again means the UN itself!

So, let's take a reality check on this. The UN was formed in 1947, and the debate on R2P began after the 1994 Rwanda Genocide. As if humanity had not already learned enough from the two World Wars and uncountable wars and conflicts after them. Let's suppose humanity had no history of war before that nor the civility or maturity to understand such delicate ideas; let's suppose that the genocide featuring the killing of 800,000 Tutsis and raping of 500,000 others was the moment when the great Western powers suddenly came up with the R2P idea at the UN.

Could that be the plain truth when, throughout the conflict and the month leading to the genocide, France sided Hutu leadership. The French, in their frenzy for power and influence in this African state, gave military assistance and kept selling lethal weapons to the Hutus. All this to mitigate Anglophone influence in Rwanda. Because the US was supporting the Tutsi and supplying weapons via Uganda. And all this while Israel was selling weapons to the Hutu. Just imagine, the US, France, Britain and their allies supporting both sides of the war, prompting them to kill and butcher. They did not retreat their support even when the genocidal killings were taking place straight through April to July. And the R2P debate begins.

Let's move on to Libya, the first case where the Security Council authorised a military intervention citing R2P. The UN was observing 'gross & systematic violation of human rights' by Gaddafi - the same Gaddafi under whom, 'price controls and subsidies over oil and food remained in place, and state-provided benefits such as free education, universal healthcare, free housing, free water and free electricity remained in place'. So, what were his 'gross & systematic violation of human rights'? They were actually his Pan-Arabism, Pan-Africanism and his socialist policies, all of which were a danger to Western interests and power.

And how did R2P play out in Libya?

Just Cause was absent from the onset, nor was there a Right Intention to deliver to the people of Libya from Gaddafi's iron hand control into an era of freedom and progress. It was not a Last Resort, as there was no process of dialogue or any offer of capacity-building. There was no Proportional Means as NATO, led by France and the US, indiscriminately bombed the whole country from the air, in 9,600 strikes completely razing military facilities and state institutions. There were no Reasonable Prospects of bringing any good to Libya, which is still in a state of chaos and ruins to this day. And Right Authority of the UN had only been exploited by the US and France, both of whom consider Africa as their hereditary right.

There has been an absence of any invocation of R2P in the debate for the response to Israel's genocidal assault on Gaza at the UN. R2P's insularity and detachment from reality is clear. It is clear that humanity has no responsibility to the people of Gaza. There will be a lot of words, resolutions will be thrown up, courts will give their orders, but practically, no one will recognise the genocide, no one will come to help. John Mearsheimer's words resonate here when he says: we are living in an anarchic global system, where everyone is for one's self; there is no overarching power that can protect the oppressed - in other words, the UN is a façade!

So, Gaza is alone for itself, along with its handful of allies. Whole of the Global North is not feeling the slightest burden of R2P for Gaza. The only people who are feeling this burden are Hezbollah and Ansarullah - non-state actors, not states. And as for the US, the presumptuous superpower has only offered another $8 billion of weapons deal to Israel, perhaps in the praise of how impeccably it brought the entire Gaza down and set a new exquisite model of genocide in the 21st century; and how superbly it completed the destruction of Syria's state and defence machinery, making it as toothless as Libya was made after Gaddafi.

Nations should ask themselves. Humanity should ask itself. But no, only those whose hearts feel the pain of unjust mass atrocities inflicted upon other sections of humanity, should at least ask themselves - upon whose shoulders is the responsibility to protect those who are being killed, maimed and displaced just to fill the greed of power players! Whose R2P is it when terror, rape and hunger are used as weapons of war!

And we should ask which of the ten stages of genocide Israel has not fulfilled upon the people of Gaza. It has completely discriminated and dehumanized Gazans by keeping them trapped in the World's Largest Open-Air Prison, denying them of food and medicine as well as the right to communicate with the rest of the world. It has persecuted and exterminated them. And it remains in a constant denial of its extreme crimes upon a besieged people.

Yet the West feels R2P for Israel and not for Gaza!