R2P and Humanitarian Action
Edmund Cairns
Oxfam GB
Abstract
The responsibility to protect was not the only concept that grew out of the
world’s failure to tackle the mass atrocities of the 1990s in Rwanda, Bosnia
and elsewhere. So too did a new approach to humanitarian action which
placed a higher priority on protecting civilians, and on advocacy to do so,
than had hitherto been common. Oxfam’s role in the campaign to persuade
the 2005 World Summit to adopt the responsibility to protect was one
prominent example, but, to different degrees, this broad approach has
become widely shared among many international humanitarian agencies.
Since 2005, however, even Oxfam has made little use of the responsibility
to protect to frame its own work to help protect civilians, or to advocate to
prevent mass atrocities in specific crises. This is partly because of the fear
that R2P can be misapplied to justify military intervention where the benefits
do not clearly outweigh the risks. But it is also because of the continuing
suspicion around R2P among many governments. This seems to reflect
the wider limits of what largely Western-based humanitarian agencies and
governments can do to develop new international norms and put them into
effect. When R2P was first developed, humanitarian agencies played a part
in broadly similar alliances to ban landmines, establish the ICC and so on.
Some of these have already had a substantial effect, while it may be a
generation before the value of R2P and others can be fairly evaluated.
Looking ahead, humanitarian agencies will have to put an increasing
emphasis on influencing emerging powers and other Southern governments,
while alliances between governments and ngos, to be effective, will have
to be genuinely global.
The responsibility to protect (R2P) was not the only concept that grew out of
the world’s failure to tackle the mass atrocities of the 1990s in Rwanda, Bosnia
and elsewhere. So too did a new approach to humanitarian action which
placed a higher priority on protecting civilians, and on advocacy to do so,
than had hitherto been common. In April 1994, Oxfam’s country director in
Rwanda, Anne Mackintosh, was hiding as machete-armed men ‘flushed out
and killed seven members of the Tutsi nurse’s family.’ The victims, she later
wrote, ‘included a three-year-old boy [and] a pregnant woman whose belly
was split open and the unborn baby exposed. We heard the groans, and
later the death-rattle, of the elderly mission cook who had been clubbed
to the ground.’1
Oxfam was as shocked as so many others by what was happening
in Rwanda, and by the world’s failure to stop it. As a young adviser in its
policy department, I wrote a paper called ‘Genocide in Rwanda’ that April,
arguing for a new un force to intervene to end the bloodshed. Oxfam’s
Director, David Bryer,2 and I flew to Geneva to put that case to the un
Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, before a depressing week I spent
in New York wandering around the national missions to the un Security
Council arguing for them not only to authorise that new force, but to make it
happen. In May, they did authorise such a force, but certainly did not
make it happen, and the genocide was only ended, eventually, by the
advance of the then-rebel Rwanda Patriotic Front.
David Bryer later wrote, in September 1994, that ‘the tragedy of Rwanda has
demonstrated more clearly than ever before that the international community
lacks the capacity to respond effectively to such crises.’3 But he also
recognised that it fitted into a wider experience for humanitarian agencies in
the early and mid-1990s, disillusioned that the post-Cold War world was not
as peaceful as it was meant to be, and frustrated that water, sanitation and
the other relief that we traditionally provided did not, of course, stop violence.
As well as Rwanda, Somalia and particularly Bosnia were formative crises in
the development of that thinking – in asking what more the world, including
humanitarian agencies, could do to protect civilians. Long before Srebrenica in
July 1995, aid workers in the Balkans spoke of delivering relief to the men,
women and children
1 Anne Mackintosh, ‘International aid and the media’, Contemporary Politics, 2/1 (1996), p. 39.
2 Bryer was Director of Oxfam uk and Ireland, the predecessor of today’s
Oxfam gb and Oxfam Ireland, two of the 17 members of the
confederation of Oxfam International: see Oxfam International, ‘About
Us’, http://www.oxfam.org/en/about, accessed 23 October 2013.
3 Guy Vassall-Adams, Rwanda: an Agenda for International Action (Oxford:
Oxfam Publications, 1994), p. 2.
who would become the ‘well-fed dead’4 as they were left unprotected from the
violence that had engulfed Bosnia since 1992.
By 1994, that the world had dreadfully let down such victims of atrocities
was a widely shared feeling among aid workers, journalists and diplomats
across the world. In Australia, an NGO called Community Aid Abroad
(CAA) shared that concern, and in July 1994 organised a conference in
Melbourne to look at, as it was entitled: ‘un Interventions in Conflict
Situations: the rhetoric, the reality and the possibilities’. CAA would later
evolve to become Oxfam Australia, and its leader, Jeremy Hobbs to become in
2001 Oxfam International’s Executive Director. In 1994 he invited one
Gareth Evans, then Australia’s Foreign Minister, to give the conference’s
keynote speech, and Evans used it to call on his audience to ‘[rethink] some
of the conceptual foundations of inter- national security [and] develop a new
and more sharply focused sense of inter- national responsibility when it comes
to dealing with deadly conflict’.5
That call chimed with what many in Oxfam wanted to hear. In 1995,
‘protection from violence’ became one of the ten ‘basic rights’ Oxfam
adopted as, in common with many other ngos, it saw itself as an increasingly
‘rights-based’ organisation.6 At the same time, Oxfam joined a process, led
by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), to consider how
agencies without any for- mal mandate to protect civilians, should
nevertheless do so. This was a conscious response to Rwanda and
Bosnia. The result of such thinking was no sudden change, but the rest of
the decade saw Oxfam becoming gradually more systematic in looking at
threats to civilians’ protection when designing its programmes. At the same
time, its campaigning capacity was growing, and it focused a significant part
of it onto the need to protect civilians in a wide range of crises. If not R2P,
a strong focus on the protection of civilians had already begun. In 1997, its
new ‘Conflict Campaign’ was launched with the statement that aid
agencies had ‘sometimes implied that the best thing individuals can do is
give money to us to provide more aid. Oxfam believes that an even more
valuable contribution is to tell their governments to find a better
4 Richard Dowden, ‘Leaving them dead but fed’, The Independent, 15
December 1994, http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/leaving-them-deadbut-fed-1387562.html, accessed 22 October 2013.
5 Gareth Evans, ‘Cooperating for Peace: the un role in conflict situations’,
address to Community Aid Abroad seminar, Melbourne, 18 July 1994,
http://www.dfat.gov.au/archive/speeches_old/
minfor/geuncaa.html,
accessed 22 October 2013.
6 Edmund Cairns, A Safer Future: reducing the human cost of war (uk and
Ireland:
Oxfam
gb,
1997),
p.
8,
http://policypractice.oxfam.org.uk/publications/a-safer-future-reducing-the
-human-cost-of-war-121034, accessed 22 October 2013.
way of tackling the scourge of war’.7 Around the turn of the millennium, that
spirit infused Oxfam’s advocacy around a long list of crises including Kosovo,
Sierra Leone and the country that would come to new prominence after the
terrorist attacks of 9/11, Afghanistan.
In October 2001, after 9/11, the fear that drove Oxfam’s advocacy was that the
us invasion of Afghanistan could fatally disrupt the distribution of food ahead
of the particularly harsh winter that was then predicted. When the anti-Taliban
forces entered Kabul on 12 November, it was surprised as anyone at the
speed of the Taliban’s apparent collapse, and the end of at least the first
stage of Afghanistan’s latest war. None of that meant, however, that 9/11
had not changed the world, and when the concept of R2P was launched in
December, by the International Commission on Intervention and State
Sovereignty,8 Oxfam realised as much as anyone that the weeks since
September had changed the discourse on military action. On the one
hand, the prospect of invading Iraq was already on the horizon. On the
other, the invasion of Afghanistan may or may not have been right, but it
certainly was not the deadly inaction that R2P had been developed to
prevent. And so Oxfam like many others allowed the ICISS report to pass
without much notice in the heated days of December 2001 – despite its
resonance with much of the humanitarian history of the 1990s, and its careful
presentation of the multiple responsibilities to prevent, rebuild and react, and
how to react short of military action as well as, occasionally, with it.
Then Iraq dominated so much in the following two years. Oxfam had not
worked in the country since 1996, but had seen at first hand the
devastating destruction of water and sanitation facilities during the first Gulf
War in 1991. In 2002, it became increasingly concerned as the invasion of
Iraq seemed to become more and more likely, partly out of a fear that that
history of infra- structure destruction would be repeated (which it largely was
not), but primarily out of fear for the invasion’s consequences on the wider
Middle East. To little avail, Oxfam therefore argued strongly against the
impending invasion.9 After it happened, Oxfam deployed staff for a tragically
short time before they were evacuated in August 2003 after the murder of
more than 20 un humanitarian workers. And it was really only after that period,
heavily focused on Iraq, that the responsibility to protect was much discussed
in the organisation again.
7 Cairns, A Safer Future, p. 108.
8 International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (iciss),
The Responsibility to Protect (Ottawa: idrc, 2001),
http://responsibilitytoprotect.org/ICISS%20Report.pdf.
9 Oxfam International, Protecting Iraq’s Civilians, Oxfam Briefing Paper 40,
March 2003, http:// www.oxfam.org/en/policy/pp030310-Iraq-civilians,
accessed 22 October 2013.
One of the clichés of humanitarian advocacy is that the world is divided
between humanitarian crises that suffer from too little international attention
and those that suffer from too much – the ‘forgotten’ or ‘neglected’ crises out of
the political or media spotlight that receive a fraction of the aid that they need;
and those very much in that spotlight where political priorities may trump the
humanitarian. In the 1990s, most of the key crises, including Bosnia and
Rwanda, had suffered from too little, and R2P responded primarily to that
failure. Iraq and Afghanistan were different. And in the early 2000s it was
those two countries that dominated attention, alongside the seemingly
endless conflicts in Sudan and northern Uganda.
By 2004, however, Oxfam was out of Iraq, and the conflict in Darfur, which
had begun the previous year, was becoming ever more urgent.
Oxfam International, with Hobbs at its helm, now saw itself as a ‘global
campaigning force’ as well as a humanitarian and development network. In
2002, it opened a new un advocacy office in New York headed by Nicola
Reindorp, who had grown up as an Oxfam policy adviser on the seminal
Great Lakes crises of the 1990s, and had done more than most to popularise
the idea of ‘forgotten crises’, neglected by the world, with a much-read
paper on that subject in 1999. Perhaps not by coincidence she would go
on, after Oxfam, to become the Advocacy Director of the Global Centre on
R2P.
In 2005, Oxfam chose the responsibility to protect as one of its headline
goals to promote ahead of the un World Summit that September – not just
as a means to prevent the dreadful failures of Rwanda and Bosnia, but
because R2P’s multiple responsibilities to prevent, rebuild and react fitted so
well with Oxfam’s dedication to long-term development as well as
humanitarian action. In the months before the Summit, Oxfam then
worked with the other ngos campaigning for R2P’s endorsement, as well as
the governments of Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, the UK and
others. When the Summit eventually came in September, it filled a New
York plaza near the un with hundreds of symbolic gravestones emblazoned
with the words ‘never again’. And when the Summit ended, endorsing R2P in
its final outcome document, Oxfam declared it a ‘significant stride towards
ending the obscene levels of civilian suffering in today's conflict zones’.10
In the next few years, Oxfam’s global advocacy to protect civilians was
strongly framed in R2P terms, even though the difficulty of turning the World
Summit’s outcome into reality was already becoming clear. In 2008, Oxfam
relaunched its humanitarian campaigning with a report, ‘For a Safer Tomorrow’,
10
Oxfam International, Oxfam International Annual Report 2005, p. 8, http://cid.bcrp.gob
.pe/biblio/Papers/Oxfam/annual_report_2005.pdf, accessed 22 October 2013.
which berated the fact that ‘one leading member of the Security Council after
another prioritises its narrow interests and alliances over its Responsibility to
Protect.’11 Despite that, Oxfam was still very optimistic about R2P, arguing
strongly that ‘in a world where security threats are global, upholding the
Responsibility to Protect is the rational [as well as ethical] choice’.12 In 2009, it
became one of the founding members of the International Coalition for the
Responsibility to Protect13 (alone among major humanitarian organisations).
In the same years after 2005, Oxfam’s programmes and advocacy around
the world were continuing to work on the protection of civilians, in some
cases more than ever before. In 2007, Oxfam GB reviewed how it had
gradually increased its focus on protecting civilians since those landmark
crises of the 1990s, and decided to mainstream protection into all its
humanitarian work. In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), it created a
network among existing civil society organisations in North and South Kivu, to
survey the threats facing local communities,14 and to support what became
56 ‘protection committees’ to lobby the Congolese authorities to meet them.
In its high-profile enthusiasm for R2P, Oxfam was unique among leading
humanitarian agencies. But this protection work on the ground was part of the
wide trend among humanitarian agencies to accept that they did in fact all
have some responsibility to protect, or at least to do what they could to protect
civilians. In 2009, most of the largest international networks, gathered together
in the Steering Committee for Humanitarian Response,15 agreed their first
common guidance on protection, and in 2011, the internationally-recognised
Sphere standards for humanitarian response – yet another child of the
Great Lakes crises of the 1990s – were revised to include, for the first time,
a substantial
11
12
13
14
15
Oxfam International, For a Safer Tomorrow: protecting civilians in a
multipolar
world
(Oxfam
International,
2008),
p.
12,
http://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/
for-a-safertomorrow-0809.pdf.
Ibid, p. 8.
International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect (icrtoP),
‘Home Page’, http:// www.responsibilitytoprotect.org/, accessed 23
October 2013.
These annual assessments have continued ever since. For the latest,
please see: Oxfam International, Commodities of War: communities
speak out on the true cost of conflict in eastern drc, Oxfam Briefing
Paper 164 (Oxfam International, November 2012), http://
www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/bp164-commodities-of-wardrc-protection
-201112-en.pdf, accessed 23 October 2013.
The Steering Committee for Humanitarian Response (schr) is an
alliance of act Alliance, Care International, Caritas Internationalis, the
International Committee of the Red Cross, the International
Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Lutheran World
Federation, Oxfam International, Save the Children and World Vision.
section on protection.16 Their responsibility to protect (note small case) had
entered the humanitarian mainstream, after the wide spectrum of
humanitarian agencies had been developing for more than fifteen years,
intellectually and programmatically – with a stronger and stronger focus on
protection – out of the same searing experience of the 1990s from which
the Responsibility to Protect (large case) also developed. That does not of
course mean that many humanitarian agencies have ever given R2P overt
support; they have not. And, sadly, it was around the time that the new Sphere
and SCHR guidance on protection was emerging that even R2P’s most
enthusiastic supporters were finding it difficult to point to practical changes, in
real crises, that the principle was bringing about.
In common with many humanitarian ngos, a large part of what Oxfam had
done to try to protect civilians had always been advocacy. To begin with at
least, in the years following 2005, this advocacy on a number of crises
specifically invoked the responsibility to protect of the relevant government,
international community or both. In February 2007, Oxfam authored a
paper for a coalition of 65 Ugandan and international ngos, the network of
Civil Society Organisations for Peace in Northern Uganda. The paper
called on Uganda’s government to provide ‘properly trained security’ for
the thousands of displaced people returning to their homes after two
decades of conflict – specifically ‘as part its government’s responsibility to
protect its citizens.17
In the same month, February 2007, Oxfam lobbied the un Security Council
on the crisis in DRC. It argued against any premature withdrawal of the
un peacekeeping mission (then called M O N U C ) in the country, and
reminded Council members that the mission was ‘an expression of their
responsibility to protect’ (words that the Council had signally not used about
MONUC itself).18
At the same time, however, it was painfully obvious in 2007, as it always had
been, that R2P was actively supported by only a small number of
governments, and open to misuse even by them. In 2008, that became even
clearer when the
16
17
18
The Sphere Project, The Sphere Handbook: Humanitarian Charter and
Minimum Standards in Humanitarian Response (Geneva: Sphere
Project, 2011), http://www.sphereproject.org/ handbook/, accessed 23
October 2013.
Civil Society Coalition for Peace in Northern Uganda (csopnu),
‘Between Hope and Fear in Northern Uganda: Challenges on the
ground and urgent need for peace’ (Joint Agency, February 2007), p.
5, http://policy-practice.oxfam.org.uk/publications/between-hope
-and-fear-in-northern-uganda-challenges-on-the-ground-and-urgent-ne111963,
accessed 23 October 2013.
Oxfam International, A Fragile Future: Why scaling down monuc too soon
could spell disas- ter for the Congo, Oxfam Briefing Paper 97 (Oxfam
International, February 2007), p. 7, http://www.oxfam.org/fr/node/760,
accessed 23 October 2013.
French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner suggested that the world not only
had a responsibility (sic) to help the victims of cyclone Nargis in Burma, but
that the Responsibility to Protect reinforced this.19 Along with many others,
Oxfam was highly sceptical that R2P had been developed for crises like Nargis
(and of the idea that military airdrops might be the best way to get aid to its
victims). By the end of the decade, Oxfam did not have the ‘buyer’s remorse’
that R2P’s supporters identified among a number of governments.20 But it
found virtually no occasions where its advocacy on specific humanitarian
crises – as opposed to broad global calls – could invoke R2P for any positive
purpose. And this was before the controversy and dissension over Libya,
even among R2P supporters,21 fuelled this caution further, and seemed
to make international action to uphold R2P – and perhaps even the
protection of civilians as well – more contested concepts than ever before.
As outlined above, the difficult terrain for R2P existed long before 2011; in
that sense, the challenge to implementing it now is far more than the
media cliché of the ‘shadow of Libya’. But two years on there is little doubt that
Libya has made international action to uphold R2P a less accepted
concept, not because the un Security Council invoked it, but because
the Council was widely seen to lose control of how the ensuing military
action seemed to morph from protecting civilians to helping to topple a
government, that the connection between those two aims was far from clear,
and that, two years on, the fate of Libya is decisively precarious.
Since 2011, international dissension on Syria has done nothing to
suggest that R2P has yet become a powerful argument to change most
government’s policies. As a result, it plays no part in Oxfam’s specific advocacy
to see civilians better protected in real crises. Tragically, this caution does not
reflect any lack of mass atrocities or violations of the R2P crimes agreed at
the World Summit. The brutal carnage in Syria is testament to that. Oxfam still
works in almost all the countries where the Global Centre for the
Responsibility to Protect identifies that ‘populations are experiencing, or are
at risk of, genocide, war crimes,
19
20
21
M. Bernard Kouchner, article published in Le Monde newspaper, 20
May 2008, http:// www.ambafrance-uk.org/Bernard-Kouchner-onBurma-disaster.html, accessed 23 October 2013.
Ramesh Thakur, ‘Should the un invoke the ‘Responsibility to Protect’?’, The Globe and Mail,
8 May 2008,
http://www.responsibilitytoprotect.org/index.php/component/content/
article/172-asia-pacific/1666-ramesh-thakur-should-the-un-invoke-theresponsibility
-to-protect, accessed 23 October 2013.
Simon Adams, Libya and the Responsibility to Protect, Global Centre for
the Responsibility to Protect Occasional Paper No. 3, October 2012, p.
3, http://www.globalr2p.org/media/ files/libyaandr2poccasionalpaper1.pdf, accessed 23 October 2013.
crimes against humanity or ethnic cleansing.’22 Nor does it reflect any
existential contradiction between humanitarianism and R2P. Little could
be more humanitarian than to protect civilians from mass atrocities. R2P’s
endorsement in 2005 was, as Oxfam wrote shortly afterwards, ‘the most
important reaffirmation’ of some of international humanitarian law’s basic
principles,23 and that remains true.
Humanitarian advocacy, however, is about seeking practical impact as well
as upholding principles, as indeed all humanitarian action must be. That is
why, since 2008 at least, even Oxfam has made little use of the responsibility to
protect to advocate in specific crises (or indeed to frame its programmes to
help protect civilians on the ground). The early attempts after 2005 to do so
have essentially dwindled away.
At the same time, the protection of civilians remains at the heat of Oxfam’s
humanitarian advocacy. At the United Nations, it actively lobbies on that
theme, including around the Security Council’s bi-annual protection of
civilians debates, most recently in February 2013. But rather than invoke R2P
as part of that lobbying, it – like others including the un Secretary-General
himself – has been careful to distinguish R2P from the wider agenda to
protect civilians in armed conflicts. This is not only because of differences in
concepts or processes (the un having focused on the protection of civilians
for years before the World Summit endorsed R2P in 2005) but also for fear
of ‘doubling the controversy’ since both R2P and the protection of civilians
arouse suspicion in some governments’ eyes.
In humanitarian crises around the world, Oxfam advocates for better
protection of civilians, probably more than ever before. In the Kivu provinces
of eastern DRC, for example, it stresses the responsibility of both the
Congolese state and the international community to protect civilians, but
none of that has recently been framed in terms of R2P. In 2011 and 2012,
Oxfam’s country team did not even talk about it as they planned their
advocacy, according to Sam Dixon, one of Oxfam’s policy staff based in
Goma, the eastern Congolese city that M23 rebels took in November 2012.24
Wherever Oxfam advocates to protect, that same caution now applies,
and is likely to apply for as long as the governments that advocacy is
seeking to persuade are (in large part) suspicious of R2P. In the same
month, November 2012, that the M23 rebels took Goma, the un review of its
role in Sri Lanka in
22 Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, ‘Populations at Risk’, http://www
23
24
.globalr2p.org/regions/, accessed 23 October 2013.
Oxfam International, For a Safer Tomorrow, p. 6.
Interview with the author, Oxford, 1 February 2013.
2008-9 summed up an attitude towards R2P that seems now shared far
beyond that country. It had become – in the closing stages of Sri Lanka’s longrunning war – so contentious as ‘to nullify its potential’.25 The un and others
have drawn many lessons from that experience, but most humanitarian
workers around the world, even those who put a high priority on protecting
civilians, continue to be cautious about invoking R2P in their work, because of
two principal concerns. Firstly, that invoking R2P on specific crises may
deliver few positive results. And secondly that, in some countries at least, it
could simply fuel the hostility to Western aid workers and Western-based
humanitarian agencies that many now feel.
It would be wrong to apply such caution to advocating for the protection of
civilians itself. That broad advocacy is central to the kind of humanitarian
organisation that Oxfam wants to be. It would be impossible to advocate for
the protection of civilians without using that discourse – the ‘protection of
civilians’ – even if it too can provoke suspicion among some. R2P is not
indispensable in the same way, and its use must be justified by the practical
results doing so is likely to produce.
R2P’s true potential is not the subject of this article. Indeed it may be a
generation before anyone can fairly evaluate it. But while seldom if ever
mentioning R2P in specific crises, Oxfam continues to support it as an
important international norm. And this combination of global support on the
one hand, and caution on specifics on the other, is not extraordinary but typical
of a multi-mandate organisation that seeks to combine operational
humanitarian work on the ground with advocacy to tackle both immediate
suffering and the longer-term causes of humanitarian crises. Over the same
years that R2P has been a live concept, Oxfam’s approach to the
International Criminal Court has evolved in rather the same way. One the one
hand, it continues to support the Court, while on the other it has become
increasingly cautious about any association with its specific investigations.
The idea of the icc was yet another product of the liberal internationalism of the
1990s. In 1997, a year before the Rome Statute agreed that the Court should
come into existence, Oxfam described its ‘vitally important’ purpose ‘to send a
clear message to those who commit appalling acts, in their quest for
economic or political gain, that such crimes will be punished.’26
But since the I’CCs first investigations begun in 2004 Oxfam became
increasingly aware of the risks of being associated with them, as the Court
tried to
25
26
United Nations, ‘Report of the Secretary-General’s Internal Review Panel
on United Nations
Action in Sri Lanka’, November 2012,
http://www.un.org/News/dh/infocus/Sri_Lanka/
The_Internal_Review_Panel_report_on_Sri_Lanka.pdf, accessed 24 October
2013.
Cairns, A Safer Future, p. 98.
bring to justice suspects from where Oxfam was working on the ground. In
2010 – by when investigations had been launched in DRC, Uganda, Kenya
and elsewhere – Oxfam set out a new position to make clear that it did ‘not,
how- ever, cooperate with the ICC’s specific investigations or
prosecutions, pass information to the ICC Prosecutor’s Office, or comment
on any specific investigations or prosecutions.’ The reason it gave was that
‘[s]uch cooperation could compromise Oxfam’s ability to provide life-saving
humanitarian assistance wherever it is needed. In today’s current conflicts, it
poses too great a risk.’27
In a somewhat similar way, Oxfam has campaigned for global rules on the
use and trade in arms since 1993, when it first accepted the ICRC’s invitation
to join its humanitarian campaign to ban landmines. Since 2003, it has
been a leading light among the ngos that have pressed for the
international arms trade treaty,28 which the un General Assembly
eventually agreed in April 2013.29 This has been very much based on
Oxfam’s experience of how uncontrolled arms sustain the armed violence
at the heart of many humanitarian crises. And on some occasions, Oxfam
has highlighted that impact on particular crises, such as the devastating
consequences in Mali and beyond of the exodus of Libyan arms following
the fall of Qadhafi.30 But by and large arms control plays little part of
Oxfam’s advocacy on specific crises, and Oxfam’s programmes on the
ground include no work directly connected to controlling arms.
In other words, Oxfam’s relationship with R2P – global support combined
with specifics caution – reflects a wider approach to managing the tensions
inherent in multi-mandate organisations. Global calls to build new
international norms are not only an attempt to reduce the suffering
witnessed in humanitarian crises on the ground. They also reflect a vision
of a world in which international humanitarian law and international norms
like R2P are
27
28
29
30
Oxfam International, oi Policy Compendium Note on the International
Criminal Court
(Oxfam International, April 2010), p. 1,
http://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/
oi_hum_policy_icc_270510.pdf, accessed 24 October 2013.
Debbie Hillier and Brian Wood, Shattered Lives: the case for tough
international arms con- trol (London and Oxford: Amnesty International
and Oxfam International, 2003), http:// controlarms.org/wordpress/wpcontent/uploads/2011/02/Shattered-lives-the-case-for
-tough-international-arms-control.pdf, accessed 24 October 2013.
United Nations News Centre, ‘un General Assembly approves global
arms
trade
treaty’,
2
April
2013,
‘http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=44539&Cr=arms+trade
&Cr1=#.UV1ozKKmiJY, accessed 24 October 2013.
Martin Butcher, ‘Hunger in the Sahel and international arms control:
what’s the link?’, blog on Oxfam’s From Poverty to Power pages, 26 April
2012, http://www.oxfamblogs.org/
fp2p/?s=Martin+Butcher&x=0&y=0,
accessed 24 October 2013.
better respected. In both those senses, they are as humanitarian as
anything humanitarian agencies can do.
But building international norms are long-term goals that do not, and
should not compromise humanitarian agencies’ ability to relieve suffering
here and now – both through humanitarian advocacy that invokes the
language it needs to achieve results, and other humanitarian work. In 2012,
Oxfam defined its ‘personality’ as that of a ‘practical visionary’,31 and this
sometimes challenging combination can be seen in its approach to R2P as
much as any- thing else. It is humanitarian and visionary, in its judgement,
to advocate for global changes that could help build a world in which
international humanitarian law is respected more than it now is. Oxfam’s
support for R2P, the ICC, banning landmines and controlling arms have all
manifested that basic idea. But to be humanitarian and practical – and
perhaps to be humanitarian at all – means never putting a global ideal,
however noble, before what will reduce real human suffering now. When it
supports the ICC, for example, in general while distancing itself from
anything it does in a particular country, that is not a contradiction, but a
choice.
The practical judgement on whether to invoke R2P or not in specific
advocacy is also similar, to some extent, to that the eternal dilemma of
multi- mandate organisations: whether to ‘speak out’ or not in the face
of mass atrocities. Since 1996, most recently revised in 2009, Oxfam has
developed a series of guidelines to try to weigh up when the humanitarian
result of that is likely to be lesser or greater than that of the operational
work that might be threatened. That means weighing the possible
consequences of different and perhaps mutually exclusive courses of
action. How many lives could be saved, for example, by providing safe water?
How many of them could not be saved by another agency if Oxfam is expelled?
How many could be saved if speaking out encouraged, for instance, the un to
take effective action? And what is the evidence that speaking out could help
achieve that result? There are few questions that both have to be answered
– to explore every possible way to achieve humanitarian results – and are at
the same time so difficult to do answer, or to get right.
In Darfur, for example, Oxfam GB chose not to speak out, or at least not
as powerfully as it could, and decided to limit its direct advocacy specifically
in order to protect its operational work. That caution did nothing to prevent
it being expelled in 2009, along with twelve other international ngos
including the US and UK branches of Save the Children, and the French
and Dutch ones
31
Oxfam Great Britain (gb), ‘Oxfam’s new Brand’,
http://www.oxfam.org.uk/what-we-do/ about-us/content/new-brand,
accessed 24 October 2013.
of Médecins Sans Frontières. It seems indeed that the Sudanese
government had different complaints against different ngos, accusing
several (not including Oxfam) of gathering intelligence on the ground, with little
evidence to suggest how much NGOs’ advocacy provoked the government’s
response.
The practical judgement on R2P, however, is probably far simpler than that
perennially painful choice on speaking out. It may be difficult to judge the
repercussions a humanitarian agency may face if it challenges a
government, for example, to uphold its responsibility to protect, be they
restrictions, obstacles to access those in need, or perhaps nothing. But it is
probably far easier to judge whether invoking R2P is likely to have any positive
effect – influencing a government to change its behaviour (whether that is
the government of the country affected, of a neighbour, a regional
organisation, or the wider international community). And that is the practical
judgement that has to be made, for ethical humanitarian advocacy does not
start by asking how to ‘operationalise R2P’ or any other global idea. It
starts from identifying the practical actions that must be taken so that
vulnerable people get the assistance and protection they need; who has
the power to take them; and how to influence them to do so.
If invoking R2P would seem to make it more likely to persuade them,
humanitarian agencies should do so. If not, not; for while building an
international norm is important, it can never be as important as influencing an
action that can protect people from atrocities here and now. And, for now
at least, that sadly seems the case with almost all governments of crisisaffected countries, their often-crucial neighbours, and the increasingly
relevant emerging powers. Western governments, the un Security Council
and others can achieve much, and certainly could do far more to help
prevent mass atrocities – as in Syria today – than they do. Their
responsibility to protect is therefore crucial. But the limits of Western and
international action has also become increasingly clear in a world where
many affected states may be ‘fragile’ in some respects – particularly their
willingness and ability to protect their civilians – but robust and assertive in
other respects, including their resistance to international pressure. And
where almost every government (except Qadhafi) will have international
allies that may undermine united international action.
Those limits of international influence are also relevant to the final question
that this article will seek to explore: what the development of R2P says for
building other new international norms. The achievement of securing
endorsement at the 2005 World Summit should certainly not be
underestimated. Oxfam approached the Summit working with a large
number of ngos campaigning on many different issues over the Summit’s
dizzyingly wide agenda. None of them apart from the R2P campaign was
successful. International NGO
campaigns have achieved some spectacular results, but – R2P apart –
the World Summit stands as a reminder that pressing disunited
governments to agree on anything radically useful can often be depressingly
difficult.
But the challenges in establishing R2P since then suggest the limits of what
disproportionately Western alliances of ngos and governments can achieve
in the current state of international relations. When R2P was being
developed in the late 1990s, it seemed that broadly similar alliances to ban
landmines, set up the ICC and save child soldiers could change the world.
Some of them have had a very significant impact.
From 2009 to 2011, the annual incidence of landmine casualties was about
a third the level it had been a decade before, though the 2012 Landmine
Monitor had to report that ‘steady decreases in annual casualty rates
continued in some of the most mine-affected countries, such as Afghanistan
and Cambodia’ had been offset by increases in, for example, Pakistan, South
Sudan, and Syria.32
For years, it seemed that the ICC was taking far longer than the
landmine ban to have a demonstrable impact, but after its first conviction in
2012 (for conscripting child soldiers in DR Congo) it may eventually be
coming of age. Both the landmine ban and ICC, however, were agreed in a
very different world from today. In 2000, the ICISS’s main research
consultant, Don Hubert (who coordinated the wide range of research
papers on which R2P was developed) looked back on the context in which
both the landmine ban and ICC had been achieved. ‘It has been argued’, he
then wrote:
[T]hat the 1990s can be characterized as a neo-idealist period with
strong parallels to the decades preceding each of the two world wars.
Although the lone superpower remains one of the persistent
opponents of recent humanitarian campaigns, there is no doubt that
the overall post-Cold War environment has been highly conducive to
effective humanitarian advocacy.
Less happily he added: ‘[w]hether this will be the case in the years to come
remains to be seen,’ and foresaw ‘a less hospitable world order’ for
humanitarian advocacy in the years ahead.33
32
33
Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor, ‘Major findings: global
landmine overview
2011–12’,
2012,
http://www.themonitor.org/index.php/LM/Press-Room/Landmine
-Monitor-Media-Kit/LM12-Major-Findings-EN2, accessed 24 October 2013.
Don Hubert, The Landmine Ban; a case study in humanitarian
advocacy, Occasional Paper 42 (Providence, RI: Thomas J. Watson Jr.
Institute
for
International
Studies,
2000),
pp.
70–71,
http://www.watsoninstitute.org/pub/op42.pdf, accessed 24 October 2013.
Hubert sadly was right. In 2001, the ICISS report he helped produce fell initially
on stony ground. Four years later, the World Summit agreement did not dispel the
sense that the first decade of this century was very different from the 1990s.
International relations had become more divided, over the ‘global war on terror’,
the invasion of Iraq, and what to do or not to do on crises such as those in Darfur.
The United States’ ‘unipolar moment’ seemed already to be over, replaced by an
amorphous, emerging ‘multipolar world’ in which a number of countries were
more willing to challenge Western leadership, but not necessarily to lead
international action to prevent mass atrocities themselves. In 2011, UN Security
Council Resolution 1973 on Libya did not really signal that the world was
more united against mass atrocities in most crises than before. Libya was a
particular case; Qadhafi was unusually internationally isolated, at least after the
uprising against him began. Since then, the divergent reactions to how that
un resolution was implemented, and subsequent divisions over Syria, are sad
reminders of how elusive effective international unity often is. In April 2013, when
154 nations agreed the world’s first Arms Trade Treaty at the un General
Assembly, it was a rare triumph – at least in terms of new international
agreements – for the kind of alliance between ngos and governments that had
worked on landmines and the ICC.
During the same multi-polar decade, many humanitarian agencies
have become nervous about their Western heritage as well. They have seen
a rising number of attacks on aid workers (though the reasons for this have
not been entirely clear) and what has seemed like an increasing
assertiveness of governments more willing to put obstacles in their way to
reach people in need. While Sudan was expelling ngos in 2009, for example,
Sri Lanka was placing many restrictions on their ability to reach civilians
fleeing the closing stages of the country’s 25-year civil war.34 And beyond
both such extremes, international agencies seem to have faced a rising
challenge to their legitimacy, to operate on the ground and to advocate,
perhaps part of the trend ‘towards increasing legitimacy of the local and
decreasing legitimacy of the international’ that a recent Ditchley
Foundation conference on the protection of civilians accurately
identified.35 In an everyday way, this means the constant bureaucratic
obstacles thrown in the way of humanitarian workers in so many countries –
or the Congolese colonel who sat me down in North Kivu, to harangue me
about Oxfam exaggerating (in his view) the suffering in his country to justify
34
35
Ban Ki-moon, ‘Report of the Secretary-General on the protection of
civilians in armed conflict,’ S/2009/277, 29 May 2009, para. 24.
Ditchley Foundation, ‘Protecting civilians in armed conflict’, A note by the
Director,
16-18
May
2013,
p.
4,
http://www.ditchley.co.uk/conferences/past-programme/2010-2019/2013/
protecting-civilians, accessed 24 October 2013.
our continued existence.36 At the same time, one crisis evaluation after
another over the last ten years has criticised international humanitarian
responses for taking too little notice of local partners, be they state or civil
society. After the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, this was said yet again.37 Partly
as a result, a ‘new business model’ for humanitarian action has become
widely suggested, ‘[with a] greater role for Southern as well as national and
local ngos’.38
In short, in the years since R2P was first developed, international relations
are more splintered, the Western governments that have been R2P’s
greatest (though not only) supporters are relatively weaker, and international
humanitarian agencies are increasingly conscious of the need to engage with
Southern governments and civil society, and in global not largely-Western
alliances. And despite its supporters’ continued efforts, R2P is still widely
seen as a concept primarily linked to military intervention.
Over twenty years, humanitarian agencies’ advocacy for protection in
general, and Oxfam’s support for R2P in particular, has been driven, in part at
least, by a determination never again to be the ‘humanitarian alibi’ for political
inaction as the humanitarian community was in Bosnia. That
determination is equally matched however now with the determination not
be an alibi for the abuse of R2P to justify inappropriate military action – for
example, no-fly zones over Syria. Not because military action to protect
civilians is inherently wrong, but because military action where the benefits
do not clearly outweigh the risks is too easily justified by loose talk of both
‘R2P’ and ‘humanitarian’, and that is true in Syria as in countless crises
before.
What does that say for the future? When R2P was agreed at the
World Summit in 2005, one wise Canadian diplomat said to me that it was, of
course, a twenty-five year project. In other words, we should not expect it to
end mass atrocities now. He was obviously right. R2P may indeed still have a
transformational effect on international relations. In 2013, with atrocities in so
many crises, the only honest conclusion is that we do not know. But what
we can be more certain of is that in developing any new international
norm, governments and ngos alike will want to be substantially more
grounded in the South than most of us have been in the past.
36
37
38
Interview with the author, north of Goma, January 2010.
Michael Delaney and Jacobo Ocharan, ‘Local Capacity in Humanitarian Response:
Vision or Mirage?’, Oxfam America Research Backgrounder series (Boston, MA: Oxfam,
May 2012), http://www.oxfamamerica.org/publications/local-capacity-in-humanitarian
-response, accessed 24 October 2013.
Ahmad Faizal Mohd Perdaus, ‘Doing it Better: transforming human efforts’, mercy
Malaysia’s International Humanitarian Conference, Kuala Lumpur, 24–26 November 2011,
http://www.mercy.org.my/ihc2011/index.php.