Operationalising the "Responsibility to Protect"

Emma Birikorang*

 

In September 2000, the Government of Canada, together with a group of major foundations, announced at the UN General Assembly the establishment of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS). The Commission was asked to ‘wrestle with the whole range of question—legal, moral, operational and political—rolled up in this discourse, to consult with the widest possible range of opinion around the world, and to bring back a report that would help the Secretary-General and everyone else to find a common ground.’ The report referred to above is ‘The Responsibility to Protect.’ The core principles underlying the Responsibility to Protect are that state sovereignty implies responsibility, and the primary responsibility for the protection of its people lies with the state itself. Another basic principle is that where a population is suffering serious harm, as a result of internal war, insurgency, repression or state failure, and the state in question is unwilling or unable to halt or avert it, the principle of non-intervention yields to the international community’s responsibility to protect.

 

In the ICISS report, military intervention for civilian protection is an exceptional and extraordinary measure. To be warranted, there must be serious and irreparable harm occurring, or imminently likely to occur to civilians, under the following circumstances:

1. large scale loss of life, actual or apprehended, with genocidal intent or not, which is the product either of a deliberate state action, or state neglect or inability to act, or a failed state situation; or
2. large scale ‘ethnic cleansing’, actual or apprehended, whether carried out by killing forced expulsion, acts of terror or rape.

 

The 1994 genocide in Rwanda represents a typical case of the international community’s [ir]responsibility to protect innocent civilians from genocide, in a situation where the state was unwilling and unable to perform this basic function.
Humanitarian intervention in Africa has usually focused on emergency relief to the affected population and at the political level, through the brokering of cease-fire agreements. Once an agreement has been signed by the parties involved, a peacekeeping mission is sent to keep the peace and enforce the cease-fire agreement. However, the process becomes tenuous when the belligerents and the state do not uphold the human rights of the citizens, and the state itself is unwilling and sometimes unable to protect its own citizens. In more serious cases, peacekeepers have been found to abuse their powers and the human rights of the affected population. As a result, in the last few years, emphasis has been placed on training of peacekeepers on human rights, international humanitarian law, sexual exploitation and abuse and other vices which tarnish the image of peacekeepers around the world. However, protection issues have always been a challenge for peacekeepers. In 2004, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimated that there are over one million internally displaced persons in the Darfur region of Sudan. This figure has since risen to about two million. These IDPs have been fleeing attacks from the armed militias in the region. At least 200,000 people are estimated to have been killed since the crisis started. The African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) Force of about 7,000 troops has generally been unable to curb the fighting or the attacks against civilians, and have themselves come under attack from the rebels and other militia. The AMIS is under-resourced and ill-equipped to handle the security challenges and political responsibilities.

 

It was therefore proposed that the UN will take over the mission. Security Council Resolution 1706 authorised a UN mission to Darfur with a force of 20,600 troops and police to deploy to Darfur with a Chapter VII mandate, allowing the use of force to protect vulnerable populations, UN personnel, humanitarian workers and enforce the Darfur Peace Agreement. However, strong objections to the UN force were raised by the Sudanese Government. The ruling government of Sudan has resisted the notion of a transition to the UN, insisting instead to partly finance the AU mission and proposing deployment of a hybrid tripartite force comprising of troops from its own army, the rebels and the AMIS. It is also arguing that all forces should come under AU command and control. In the midst of these political disagreements, civilians are still being killed in the IDP camps and their shelters razed down by the militias.

 

The Darfur crisis has become the latest test case for the Responsibility to Protect agenda. With the ruling government refusing to consent to a UN mission, and the continuous suffering of the population at the hands of government-backed militias, and the inability and unwillingness of the state to protect its own citizens from attacks; what better time than now to invoke the principles of this report and intervene in the Darfur region of Sudan?

 

Victoria Holt (in a Humanitarian Policy Group Research Briefing) argues that the language of the United Nations Security Council mandates that direct missions to protect civilians has tended to refer to protecting civilians ‘under imminent threat’, ‘within capabilities’ and ‘within areas of responsibility.’ With a region the size of Darfur having only 7,000 AU peacekeepers on the ground, protecting civilians under imminent threat is almost impossible. Holt posits that military actors may also lack clear guidelines from their political and military leaders on how and when to use force. Others may fear an escalation of violence against themselves, other international actors and the civilian communities they are aiming to protect. Holt concluded that military missions should involve protection, whether as a central goal, a task within the mission, or the overall result of acting to provide security. These are relatively definable and are potentially positive roles for the military.

 

In the face of these challenges and the potential for peacekeepers to become more engaged and focused on protection issues and the centrality thereof to the mission, what could peacekeeping training centres contribute to the operationalisation of the responsibility to protect concept? Just as sexual exploitation and abuse by peacekeepers was highlighted and measures taken to address the issue, equally peacekeeping training centres have an obligation to ensure that the Responsibility to Protect is highlighted as a critical component of peacekeeping missions.

 

To start, peacekeepers need to be aware of the fact that protection of civilians is an integral part of their mission. It is therefore important that the peacekeeping training centres grasp the concept and integrate protection issues into their curricula. Peacekeepers need to be given adequate pre-deployment training on the dangers that civilians face and their vulnerability to attacks from armed factions. Just as peacekeepers need to be properly informed of their responsibility to protect civilians, this responsibility has to be reflected in the mission mandate. Most importantly, there have to be adequate resources in order to be able to meet this huge undertaking. Equally, there needs to be adequate troops on the ground in order to cover a greater geographical area.

 

In a book published in September 2006 titled, ‘The Impossible Mandate? Military Preparedness, the Responsibility to Protect and Modern Peace Operations’, Victoria Holt and Tobias Berkman differentiated between the conventional peacekeeping mission and a full-scale ‘responsibility to protect’ military intervention. The authors stressed that ‘it is not enough to deploy forces and hope that they figure out an effective protection strategy once they arrive. Civilian protection requires an operational concept to guide troops in facing up to questions on the ground and a strategic framework for addressing these questions quickly and effectively. It requires, in short, that we operationalise the responsibility to protect by addressing how both types of missions (peace operations with protection tasks and full-scale responsibility to protect military interventions) should be conducted.’

 

Peacekeeping training centres also have a role to play in ensuring that enough political will is garnered to promote the Responsibility to Protect in Africa. On 25 and 26 October 2006, three organisations collaborated to hold a high level symposium on garnering political will for the promotion of the Responsibility to Protect in Africa. This High-Level Symposium which was hosted by the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre (KAIPTC) forms part of a 15-month research project being conducted by the South African-based Institute for Security Studies (ISS) and the UK-based Institute for Public Policy Research (ippr). The overarching theme of the research is to think through how the Responsibility to Protect principle—as set out by the ICISS and endorsed by the UN Millennium Review Summit in September 2005—could be operationalised in Africa. The project is looking at four specific areas: 1) Direct prevention (focused on those non-violent policy instruments that are available in circumstances when gross human rights abuses appear imminent or are already underway); 2) Enhancing capacity for effective intervention in Africa; 3) Rethinking the legitimising framework for intervention and; 4) Strengthening political will for intervention in Africa.

 

Such symposium as the ISS/IPPR one should be designed to reflect on ways and means of garnering the political will for intervention to protect civilians in Africa. While laudable steps were taken in September 2005 when the principle was accepted as part of the UN reform package, much more needs to be done to bridge the gap between rhetoric and the reality of responses on the ground.

 

A potential approach will be to include the responsibility to protect as part of the mandate of the standby brigades to ensure that civilians are protected even at the initial stages of the conflict.

 

The African Peace Support Trainers’ Association could potentially contribute to operationalising the Responsibility to Protect concept by encouraging its member organisations to focus on activities and programmes aimed at popularising the concept and to make it an integral part of their training programmes. The KAIPTC is indeed taking this recommendation a step further, by collaborating with the Henry L. Stimson Centre to organise a workshop in Accra titled ‘Halting Systematic, Large-Scale Attacks on Civilians: Military Strategies and Operational Concepts.’ The workshop, which took place from 13-16 February 2007, brought together a small group of senior military and civilian mission leaders, and other experts, in operations (UN, regional, or national) where large-scale violence threatens or threatened civilian lives. The workshop aimed to identify specific examples of past successes and failures, at the strategic and operational levels, in those missions where there was a clear need (if not also a mandate) to protect civilians at risk from genocide, massacre, or serious and systematic human rights abuses.

 

The main aim of the workshop was twofold:

• To glean lessons from past (and present) operations about the requirements, challenges, and operational realities that military leaders face/d in the field when carrying out their missions; and
• To generate operational and strategic concepts, based on field experience for, military roles in halting or mitigating large-scale attacks on civilians

 

During the workshop, lessons were shared by former mission force and contingent commanders from the UN missions in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, East Timor, Kosovo, Sierra Leone and DR Congo. Some of the major challenges that the commanders enumerated were:

• The disconnect between UN DPKO and the forces on the ground, which sometimes led to confusion
• That although the mandate of the force included protection roles, it was primarily to protect humanitarian agencies, mission personnel and equipment and not the vulnerable population.
• In situations where the mission mandate had to change from Chapter VI to Chapter VII, commanders would usually refer to their countries for guidance before taking action. In other cases, contingents seemed to lack experience in and capacity for Chapter VII missions.

 

In the face of the sometimes restrictive UNSC mandates, when protection issues were not stressed, commanders were expected to take appropriate decisions and action on the basis of the imperatives of international humanitarian and human rights laws.

 

The lessons derived from the first day’s exercise were then used as a point of departure for a day and a half long scenario/gaming exercise aimed at using past experiences to inform thinking on new strategies and operational concepts for protecting civilians in future missions.

 

Operationalising the Responsibility to Protect concept will be an important step towards ensuring that civilians living in war-effected societies are spared further suffering as a consequence of the inability or unwillingness of the state to protect them. To operationalise the concept will also demand that peacekeepers be given appropriate and sufficient levels of support in terms of personnel and equipment so that they are capable of meeting any protection challenge in the mission area.

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