The UN and Burma
Posted by Matt Zeitlin on May 12, 2008
It seems like whenever something goes wrong in the developing world, it’s the UN’s fault. And, as usual, we hear this cascade of criticism from those who aren’t particularly interested in strengthening the institution and/or actually recognizing those areas in which it is effective (real peacekeeping, for instance).
Fred Hiatt seems to think that the UN has somehow abrogated the “responsibility to protect” in failing to get large amounts of aid into Burma:
Nearly three years ago, the United Nations announced an answer to that question: It would. At a summit celebrating the organization’s 60th birthday, 171 nations agreed that they would intervene, forcefully if necessary, if a state failed to protect its own people. The action was seen as both a sign of remorse for the failure to stop genocide in Rwanda and a rebuke to the United States and its unilateral ways.
…
Since then the United Nations has averted its gaze as Sudan’s government continues to ravage the people of Darfur. It has turned away as Zimbabwe’s rulers terrorize their own people. Now it is bowing to Burma’s sovereignty as that nation’s junta allows more than a million victims of Cyclone Nargis to face starvation, dehydration, cholera and other miseries rather than allow outsiders to offer aid on the scale that’s needed.
Although the actions of the junta are detestable, and I sure wouldn’t mind seeing some sort of indigenous regime change, Hiatt is seriously wrong when he says that the UN and the inernational community isn’t upholding the “responsibility to protect” by forcing aid into Burma.
That’s because the “responsibility to protect” as enshrined by the UN security council, explicitly does not apply in cases of negligence, no matter how large the scale. Instead, the R2P applies in four specific instances,”genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.” Now one could argue from a theoretical, almost Sennian stand point, that the junta’s extreme negligence and seeming disregard for the welfare of its people is tantamount to a crime against humanity, but that is pointedly not what the R2P addresses.
And although the situation in Burma is depressingly dire and grim, one could imagine why the UN would not adopt an R2P for negligence in more structural issues like disaster preparedness or underdevelopment. Would it be good, for instance, if there was an obligation for the international community to forcibly intervene in China, where thousands have recently been killed by a massive earthquake, or in Iran when 26,000 were killed in a quake? Surely not. It’s certainly disappointing that there’s no one-off solution to the tragedy in Burma, but that’s not the fault of the UN.
