Max Forte's List: HUMANITARIAN IMPERIALISM

Trudeau's Chance to Acknowledge the Libyan Catastrophe | The Tyee 9

Mar 19, 16

www.thetyee.ca/...Trudeau-Libyan-Catastrophe Libya Canada R2P sorties bombing humanitarian_imperialism lessons
- Trudeau's Chance to Acknowledge the Libyan Catastrophe
 
 Without recognizing this foreign policy failure, we will have learned nothing.
 
 By Murray Dobbin, Yesterday, TheTyee.ca
- The dystopian situation in Libya is so persistent that when we hear news of yet another slaughter, or the fragility of the new unity government, or ISIS taking over large swaths of the country, we just file it under "old news" and wait for the next story.
 
 We shouldn't. While accountability of politicians is also an old news story, this is one that's particularly disturbing in its history and its consequences for the Libyan people, who before the 2011 "humanitarian" intervention enjoyed the highest standard of living in Africa. That UN mission toppled the regime of Muammar Gadhafi, leaving a power vacuum that was filled by many competing armed factions and two separate groupings claiming to be the legitimate government.
 
 The Libyan story should provide foreign policy lessons for the West and for Canada, but without some kind of mea culpa and recognition of this catastrophic error, no one has to learn anything.
- Which is what makes U.S. President Barack Obama's recent admission that the Libyan intervention "didn't work" so interesting. This was Obama's singular intervention, even though European allies did most of the bombing. According to The Atlantic magazine, after reflecting on what went wrong in Libya, Obama told a former Senate colleague: "There is no way we should commit to governing the Middle East and north Africa. That would be a basic, fundamental mistake." No kidding.
 
 It seems that Obama wants to get out ahead of the legacy machine and admit this major foreign policy mistake early on. But what about Canada? Under the Harper government, Canada was one of the most eager participants in the elimination of the "madman" Muammar Gadhafi.
- But the Harper government is gone, and its foreign policy has been vigorously repudiated by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Trudeau has tied his star to a U.S. president able to take risks as his term comes to an end, and has boldly told the world "Canada is back." One way that he could prove that declaration would be to follow in Obama's footsteps and acknowledge Canada's missteps in the Libyan intervention.
 
  <script type="text/javascript"> GA_googleFillSlot("Tyee_In_Story_BigBox"); </script><script src="https://securepubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/ads?correlator=3016576118035843&output=json_html&callback=GA_googleSetAdContentsBySlotForSync&impl=s&ic=0&eid=108809087&client=ca-pub-2188005021510640&slotname=Tyee_In_Story_BigBox&page_slots=Tyee_House_Promo%2CTyee_Leaderboard%2CTyee_In_Story_BigBox&cust_params=Opinion%3DTrudeau-Libyan-Catastrophe&cookie_enabled=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thetyee.ca%2FOpinion%2F2016%2F03%2F18%2FTrudeau-Libyan-Catastrophe%2F&ref=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.google.com&lmt=1458420526&dt=1458420526104&cc=16&biw=1903&bih=896&adk=3393176230&adx=0&ady=0&ifi=3&oid=3&u_tz=-240&u_his=1&u_h=1080&u_w=1920&u_ah=1040&u_aw=1920&u_cd=24&u_nplug=5&u_nmime=52&flash=20.0.0&gads=v2&ga_vid=897411714.1458420525&ga_sid=1458420525&ga_hid=1003774151"></script>
 
 All the major parties in Parliament supported the UN mission, and not a single Canadian political leader who did so has ever acknowledged that the West's intervention was a colossal foreign policy failure. As admitted by Obama, there was no effective plan to establish an alternative government post-Gadhafi: "The degree of tribal division in Libya was greater than our analysts had expected. And our ability to have any kind of structure there that we could interact with and start training and start providing resources broke down very quickly."
 
 If they hope that it will go away and people will forget their complicity, what does that say about our democracy and responsible government?
- Getting worse every week
 
 The situation is actually getting worse by the week, as ISIS sweeps into areas that are completely ungoverned. According to a report by Martin Kobler, the UN special representative to Libya, the lack of political structure is risking "division and collapse" of the country. "Daesh [ISIS] takes advantage of the political and security vacuum and is expanding to the West, East and to the South. While Libya's financial resources are dwindling, the criminal networks, including human smuggling, are booming," he reported.
- ISIS now controls some 250 kilometres of coastline around Sirte, Gadhafi's hometown, and has established training camps, storage areas, fortification and "rudimentary institutions of governance referred to as 'Islamic courts' and 'Islamic Police.'"
 
 The horrific conditions apply not only to the people of Libya but also to its natural habitat. New Scientist magazine reported in its Feb 20-26 issue that because of the collapse of commerce, people are turning to the killing of wild animals for meat.
 
 "On the kill list are desert gazelles, but also migrating birds. Cranes, flamingos, bustards and herons are being shot in large numbers on the coastal wetlands that are no longer guarded," reads the report. The famous coastal juniper forests are also "under attack." Across the border in Mali, a "rare population of desert elephants" was slaughtered using weapons from Libya.
- Given the intermittent news coverage of the unfolding disaster in Libya, it simply becomes background noise. With no accountability demanded, and none likely to be offered voluntarily, our collective culpability is gradually diluted as our memories of how the thing started fade.
 
 It started, of course, with the rationale of the lofty principles enshrined in the 2005 United Nations Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine, which states that sovereignty is not a right, but rests on the responsibility of governments to protect their populations.
 
 One of its most vocal and respected proponents at the time of the Libyan intervention was former Liberal foreign affairs minister Lloyd Axworthy. When the Libyan mission -- initially a UN approved no-fly zone -- spiraled into regime change and the murder of Gadhafi, Axworthy still maintained that R2P was a valuable doctrine.
- Writing a year after the mission started, Axworthy said: "R2P should not be judged on the basis of the military response in Libya. Somewhere along the way, R2P has become synonymous with military intervention... The reality is that the original International Commission... made clear that the implementation of R2P is about the protection of civilians, should be considered primarily preventative and considers military action a very last resort."
 
 Unfortunately, Axworthy's defence of R2P simply underlines why it is a fatally flawed principle -- because it is not academics or humanitarians who decide when it should be used. It is a handy-dandy excuse for big power intervention whenever they have some geopolitical objective they can't achieve by simply bullying smaller nations.
- In fact, R2P should never have been applied to the situation in Libya at all. To be sure, there was armed conflict in Libya and a single horrific instance of Libyan troops killing some 300 protesters in Benghazi in mid-February, 2011. But soon after, the troops fled the city and it was declared free by the protesters. A month later, on March 19, the UN began its military intervention.
 
 But none of what had happened up until UN Security Council Resolution 1973 was passed met the standard for R2P intervention. R2P is triggered by evidence of any one of four "mass atrocity" crimes: war crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing. None of the actions of Gadhafi's troops fit any of these categories. And when the Libyan government offered a ceasefire, NATO and Canada declared that could only happen if Gadhafi was gone -- in violation of Resolution 1973.
 
 Perhaps the failed state that resulted from R2P in Libya will have laid to rest this flawed doctrine. And while Obama did not refer to R2P specifically, his declaration that the Libyan adventure didn't work highlights just how easily the principle can be abused. While some things might change, imperial hubris does not.
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About That Libya Thing 6

Mar 03, 16

www.balloon-juice.com/...about-that-libya-thing Libya humanitarian_imperialism R2P failed_solution model_intervention CONSEQUENCES AFTERMATH
- About That Libya Thing
 by John Cole|3:39 pm February 28, 2016
- Remember this:
 
 So, no. Libya is not Iraq, or Afghanistan, or any other country. Libya is Libya, and while I hope Gaddafi is gone and everything works out, I still do not think we should have been involved. I don’t care if you disagree, but I think I have some good reasons why we should have stayed out of this. Reasons that go beyond “You just hate Obama” or “You are just an idiot and Obama is smarter than you” or “You can’t tell the difference between Iraq and Libya.” Hell, I’m not even getting in the way of the pom pom waving and USA foam fingers- “OBAMA GOT BIN LADEN AND NOW GADDAFI,” mainly because I can’t grok the dissonance between the following statements:
 
 <script type="text/javascript">googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1446558504400-0'); });</script>
 
 “We’re really not involved in the Libyan hostilities” and “OBAMA JUST PWNED GADDAFI USA! USA! USA!”
- Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then:
 
 President Obama was deeply wary of another military venture in a Muslim country. Most of his senior advisers were telling him to stay out. Still, he dispatched Mrs. Clinton to sound out Mr. Jibril, a leader of the Libyan opposition. Their late-night meeting on March 14, 2011, would be the first chance for a top American official to get a sense of whom, exactly, the United States was being asked to support.
- Libya’s descent into chaos began with a rushed decision to go to war, made in what one top official called a “shadow of uncertainty” as to Colonel Qaddafi’s intentions. The mission inexorably evolved even as Mrs. Clinton foresaw some of the hazards of toppling another Middle Eastern strongman. She pressed for a secret American program that supplied arms to rebel militias, an effort never before confirmed.
 
 Only after Colonel Qaddafi fell and what one American diplomat called “the endorphins of revolution” faded did it become clear that Libya’s new leaders were unequal to the task of unifying the country, and that the elections Mrs. Clinton and President Obama pointed to as proof of success only deepened Libya’s divisions.
- Now Libya, with a population smaller than that of Tennessee, poses an outsize security threat to the region and beyond, calling into question whether the intervention prevented a humanitarian catastrophe or merely helped create one of a different kind.
 
 The looting of Colonel Qaddafi’s vast weapons arsenals during the intervention has fed the Syrian civil war, empowered terrorist and criminal groups from Nigeria to Sinai, and destabilized Mali, where Islamist militants stormed a Radisson hotel in November and killed 20 people.
- It was a bad idea then, it’s been proven to have been a disaster, and we are poised to nominate two people who possibly support aggressive intervention always as our policy of choice (Hillary maybe, whatever Republican definitely). That is something that should be talked about.
 
 <script type="text/javascript">googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1446558504400-2'); });</script>
 
 Also amazing is how much of the commentary here that was pro-invasion was basically ad hominem “You’re a fucking idiot who learned the wrong lessons from the Iraq war” and “Obama isn’t Bush this will go better. Ahh, partisanship. Read the archives- it’s all there for you to enjoy, just like all the ragingly stupid shit I said from 2000-2005.
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Eschaton: Remember Libya? 1

Mar 03, 16

www.eschatonblog.com/...remember-libya.html Libya humanitarian_imperialism R2P failed_solution model_intervention CONSEQUENCES AFTERMATH
- Thursday, February 25, 2016
  
  
  
  Remember Libya?
  
  I still get enraged about Libya. Probably not as enraged as actual Libyans who have a bit more reason to be enraged than I do, but I still get really pissed off about it. All of the humanitarian interventionist liberals informed me that we had to bomb the shit out of the country in order to save the poor people of Libya from the tyranny of the guy we supported 10 days ago, and that not wanting to bomb the shit out of them made me a bad person. Predictably, everything went to hell in Libya, and humanitarian concerns magically disappeared as well. Where are the impassioned pleas for aid? They seem to be missing from the blogs and newspaper columns. It's not about me, of course, but honestly there are people I will never talk to again because of the bullshit condescension I got about the need to bomb the shit out of Libya. Assholes.
  
  by Atrios   at 10:29
  179 Comments
In Their Own Words: The Libya Tragedy - The New York Times 20

Feb 28, 16

www.nytimes.com/...libya-quotes.html Libya regime_change humanitarian_imperialism Hillary_Clinton Obama myth-making media propaganda mythology myths nytimes NYT
- In Their Own Words:
  The Libya Tragedy
  
  Interviews by JO BECKER and SCOTT SHANE FEB. 27, 2016
  
  Highlights of interviews with decision makers involved in the Libya intervention about what went wrong. Read the series: Part 1 | Part 2
- Abdurrazag Mukhtar, a Transitional National Council member who is now Libya’s ambassador to Turkey
  
  Libya is like a ship that is sinking for no reason. It has wealth. It was a safe place. I want to find a way for the ship not to sink. I want to find a captain who can take the ship and bring it to shore and people can jump on the ship and have joy.
- Derek Chollet, former State Department, National Security Council and Defense Department official
  
  When I looked at Libya, I thought, all right, we’ve got a small population, six million people, we have tremendous energy resources that had been underdeveloped, we had the international community that is extraordinarily unified and invested in Libya’s success. I mean, this is the opposite of Iraq in every way. So by God, if we can’t succeed here, it should really make one think about embarking on these kind of efforts.
- Ali Zeidan, former prime minister of Libya
  
  The United Nations and Western powers hesitated to advise massively in any matter. … They didn’t want to appear to the Libyan people to be interfering or dictating anything. I don’t like that. Anyways, I asked them to be more close up — to try to give advice completely. To leave as soon as they did was a mistake.
- Gene A. Cretz, the American ambassador to Libya from 2008 to 2012
  
  They just weren’t in a position to absorb huge amounts of aid. And I think that was the reality. My own view is that I think we could have done more to help construct a security force, but even on that score, you know, they were just not ready. I don’t know how we would have overcome the strong — the obstinate positions of all the different militias that did not want to give a single inch of the authority that they had gotten from being, you know, the leaders of the revolution.
- Mohammed Ali Abdallah, an opposition member now in Libya’s parliament
  
  You are absolutely right in saying that if the West had been more engaged, Libya might be a lot better off today. But I can’t comfortably say that. Why? Because the problem starts with us. We screwed up. It’s really hard to believe that you were part of something good, something historical, and to have people now say what you guys did is terrible. Failure is not an option. Dying is. This is my life.
- M. Mustafa El Sagezli, deputy commander of one of the largest militias that helped to oust the Qaddafi regime
  
  To stabilize a revolution, to build a state, is much harder than tearing down an institution. We tore down a building. What we tried to do, which was the wrong approach, was to build out of the rubble. We needed to unite behind the vision of building a state. What happened is that we rushed into believing we have a state and holding an election.
- Abdel Hakim Belhaj, former head of an Islamist militia
  
  There’s a proverb. Someone falls from the back of the camel. Was it your fault, or did the camel buck you off? I say, whatever, now I’m on the ground. We must not regret adopting a democratic path because it’s what the people wanted and it’s what we should have.
- David H. Petraeus, retired general and former C.I.A. director
  
  It’s pretty easy in hindsight. In the wake of Qaddafi’s fall, we weren’t quick enough to get in there and try to do something and actually have a meaningful contribution that could help secure and stabilize the situation. … It’s very hard to say whether additional assets in a comprehensive manner would have been enough. But what we did was certainly not enough.
- Philip H. Gordon, assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs under Mrs. Clinton
  
  I’m not among the people who thinks there was a magical way we could have done this right. The ‘failure-to-follow-up’ critique in particular drives me crazy because it implies that if we’d only paid attention, et cetera, everything would be O.K. … We gave the Libyans a chance. It turned out that they weren’t up to it — or maybe we weren’t up to it. Maybe it was just too hard.
- Robert M. Gates, former defense secretary
  
  I think if we could have prevented a massacre in Benghazi and basically held there, that we would have been better off. There’s no doubt it would have been ugly — Qaddafi would have killed a lot of people elsewhere. But we wouldn’t have to worry about what happened to his arsenals, and maybe there would be some kind of an internal transition as part of the Arab revolutions in Libya and elsewhere — that some of his own generals would take him out.
- Michael T. Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency
  
  This was a disaster. This was not a failure. It was a disaster. … We made it worse. All I know is that in Libya we took a guy out — again not a great guy — but a guy who maintained stability in a bad neighborhood.
- Haig Melkessetian, a former American intelligence operative whose company, Argus Security Projects, provided security for European embassies in Libya
  
  Qaddafi was a bad guy, but by not supporting our secular allies in Libya, we paved the way for Islamic extremists to take over. Now, in a way, Qaddafi is laughing at all of us from his grave.
- Jean-David Levitte, former senior diplomatic adviser to President Nicolas Sarkozy of France
  
  The mistake was not to intervene. It was not to stay. It was a big mistake not to stay. We should have helped them create a proper police force. As Colin Powell used to say to President Bush, you break it, you own it.
- Jake Sullivan, Hillary Clinton’s top policy aide
  
  I think her take is that the primary driver of the conflict in post-Qaddafi Libya was the inability of the country to supply basic security, and that was something that was beyond the ken of the international community. And we had a little bit of this debate before — could we have just pushed harder and made it happen? And I think probably she thinks that’s a worthy question.
- James B. Steinberg, former deputy secretary of state for Mrs. Clinton
  
  So we had a chance of getting a better outcome, as opposed to a certainty or near-certainty of a bad outcome. We didn’t get what we wanted — nobody would argue that. But the question is, given the set of choices and what we believed was a decent chance of a better outcome, is it better to take that chance or simply resign yourself to what we thought would be an extremely bad outcome?
- Antony J. Blinken, former national security adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and now deputy secretary of state
  
  I think what we underestimated was how totally incoherent Libya was as a governing structure, especially in the absence of Qaddafi. And we probably underestimated the tribal and regional differences. As a result, what really happened after Qaddafi was gone was this huge exercise in frustration.
- Sarah Leah Whitson, director of the Middle East and North Africa division of Human Rights Watch
  
  Ultimately it’s a judgment call as to whether Libya is better off with or without Qaddafi. The more meaningful question or approach is: What is the obligation and duty to hold a country together once you have intervened? There’s no cheap, easy and fast, or whatever the cute term you want to use is, way to do that. If you are going to carry out a military intervention to decapitate the government, you are making a commitment and you should be making a commitment to the stability of that country over the long haul.
- President Obama in an interview with the New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman on Aug. 8, 2014
  
  I think we underestimated, our European partners underestimated, the need to come in full force — if you were going to do this, then it’s the day after Qaddafi’s gone, and everybody’s feeling good, and everybody’s holding up posters saying, ‘Thank you, America.’ At that moment, there has to be a much more aggressive effort to rebuild societies that didn’t have any civic traditions. You’ve had a despot there for 40 years in place — there are no traditions there to build on, unlike Tunisia, where there was a civil society and that’s why they’ve been more successful in transitioning. So that’s a lesson that I now apply every time I ask the question: Should we intervene militarily? Do we have an answer for the day after?
- Hillary Clinton at the Council on Foreign Relations on Nov. 19, 2015
  
  And with the developments in Libya, for example, the Libyan people have voted twice in free and fair elections for the kind of leadership they want. They have not been able to figure out how to prevent the disruptions that they are confronted with because of internal divides and because of some of the external pressures that are coming from terrorist groups and others. So I think it’s too soon to tell. And I think it’s something that we have to be, you know, looking at very closely.
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No nation should fight global atrocities alone - The Washington Post 11

Feb 23, 16

www.washingtonpost.com/...-fight-global-atrocities-alone R2P humanitarian_imperialism Libya
- No nation should fight global atrocities alone
- By Ramesh Thakur February 17
- Ramesh Thakur is a professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University and author of “The Responsibility to Protect: Norms, Laws and the Use of Force in International Politics.”
- Fifteen years ago, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (I was one of the 12 commissioners) presented the innovative doctrine of the responsibility to protect — widely known as R2P — as the principle around which the world could forge a new consensus on how to rescue civilians under threat of atrocities.
  
  No one would claim that the world has been free of mass atrocities since then. Yet no country has called for R2P to be rolled back, and it would be unlikely that such a call would be heeded by the United Nations. Those competing tensions sum up the indispensable attraction and considerable limitations of R2P.
- R2P both reflected and contributed to the shift from power competition between nations toward international norms as the pivot on which history turns. But it has not made this competition obsolete. Major powers will still try to muscle into regions and exploit one another’s weaknesses at the expense of small states in the world’s hotspots.
- One of the difficulties in mitigating the civilian slaughter in Syria is that regional rivals (Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia) and global powers (NATO and Russia) are wary of one another’s competing spheres of influence. A humanitarian disaster in Nepal or Myanmar would similarly see China and India dancing suspiciously around each other, and China would not trust any U.S. intervention to rescue trapped civilians in North Korea. The same logic of competitive interventions has played out on Russia’s periphery in Eastern Europe, from South Ossetia to Ukraine and Crimea. Whether the use of force is a U.N.-authorized R2P operation or unilateral intervention makes little difference to such jealousy among power rivals.
- But when major powers are not in direct competition with one another and do want to intervene in cases of atrocity, they can reduce transaction costs and enhance the prospects of a more acceptable outcome by going through the U.N. and using R2P as the normative instrument. The doctrine does not guarantee the world will act or that it will be successful when it does, but the chances of a better outcome when the world’s conscience is tested are higher with a consensual R2P mission than with unilateral military strikes acting as an assault on a rules-based order.
- For countries in Asia and the Pacific, binding China to global rules that enfetter its discretionary use of force is absolutely critical. Any use of force that escapes our normative restrictions weakens the principles under which international action can be taken. It also provides a convenient pretext for world powers to ignore inconvenient norms: Beijing already argues that the United States and NATO have shown the way that countries ought to behave, justifying China’s disregard for the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Seas. Similarly, when widely criticized for the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russia pointed to NATO’s bombing that helped Kosovo secede from Serbia in 1999.
- By developing Responsibility to Protect, the international community tried to identify when and how the use of force to save strangers could be both legal and legitimate under modern conditions, respecting state sovereignty and humanitarian ideals while preventing unilateral use of force for geopolitical gains or other self-interested purposes. This meant promoting a new norm that permitted us to protect civilians against atrocities — the enabling function of law — but proscribing unilateral interventions that hijacked the language of humanitarianism — the power-restraining attribute of law. The answer was to set the bar for intervention high and require U.N. Security Council authorization.
- Is this solution ideal? No, for often the U.N. will remain deadlocked, and its paralysis is no help to those facing mass murder. Thus, R2P does not guarantee collective U.N. action even when it is needed and justified. Nor, as Libya proved, does it guarantee success when the U.N. does approve military action to protect populations at risk of slaughter.
  
  But nothing in recent history suggests taking action without U.N. support ensures success either. The use of force today is inherently controversial and problematic. No humanitarian crisis is so grave that the plight of endangered civilians cannot be made even worse by outside military intervention. Good intentions do not guarantee good policy outcomes in faraway lands, not even by exceptionally virtuous powers: The swath of ungoverned territories from Afghanistan to North Africa is graphic evidence of that.
- The main focus therefore should be on improving R2P implementation to safeguard against abuses and failures while channeling individual outrage to rid the world of atrocities through collective action. In the post-unipolar world, it will be much easier to prevent unilateral rogue use of force by non-Western rising powers if the United States subjects its own interventionist instincts to the discipline of multilateral norms.
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Terrorism or genocide? We should be fighting both. - The Washington Post 10

Feb 23, 16

www.washingtonpost.com/...ide-we-should-be-fighting-both R2P humanitarian_imperialism terrorism sovereignty counterterrorism CT
- Terrorism or genocide? We should be fighting both.
- By Karen Attiah February 19
- Karen Attiah is deputy digital editor for The Washington Post’s Opinions section.
  
  The international norm of Responsibility to Protect — R2P for short — was devised to protect populations from atrocities, to reinforce that every state has the obligation to protect its citizens, and to guide the international community in helping them do so. In 2005, more than 150 United Nations member states formally endorsed by consensus the principles of the R2P and limited the focus of potential humanitarian intervention to four mass-atrocity crimes: genocide, major war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing.
- The past several years have shown that states do not have a monopoly on carrying out mass atrocities: Non-state actors and terrorist groups like the Islamic State, Boko Haram in West Africa and al-Shabab in the Horn of Africa region have also been perpetrators of heinous violence. However, R2P’s focus on the responsibilities and actions of states limits the international community’s ability to respond to these crimes. To fulfill the purpose it was meant for, the international responsibility to protect must evolve to also address populations that are suffering the brunt of terroristic, genocidal non-state actors.
- Take Boko Haram: The Islamist militant group claims a desire to establish a caliphate in northern Nigeria. Since its rise to international notoriety in 2009, the group evolved from carrying out crude, guerrilla-style attacks to overtaking massive swaths of territory at the height of its brutality in 2014. Boko Haram and its toll on human life and property have faded from the world’s attention as the Islamic State dominates the headlines. However, with 6,644 deaths in 2014, Boko Haram — not the Islamic State — is the world’s deadliest terrorist group.
- Since 2009, nearly 15,000 have died in the insurgency. Boko Haram has kidnapped and enslaved thousands of women and girls, used children as suicide bombers and destroyed scores of schools and hospitals, all acts that count as systematic crimes against humanity. Nearly 2 million people have been displaced due to violence. The group reportedly burned children alive in an attack on a village in the northeastern part of the country, and the carnage has spread to the neighboring countries of Cameroon and Chad. Yet Boko Haram’s violence is framed primarily as a problem of fighting terrorism rather than fulfilling the international responsibility to protect, despite the fact that the Nigerian military has failed in its R2P duties: not only to protect its citizens but also to prevent Boko Haram’s violence from spreading to neighboring countries.
- Alex Bellamy, director for the Asia-Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, points out that “in some situations . . . counter-terrorism and R2P are simply different ways of talking about the same problem: violent attacks on civilian populations.” The United States’ anti-terrorism agenda could actually be better served with R2P’s focus on protecting populations, as opposed to our current kill-them-there-so-they-don’t-kill-us-here approach, with its outsize focus on eliminating terrorist targets and enemy combatants.
- Adapting R2P to the current threats from violent non-state actors poses difficult questions: Should R2P require states to prevent terrorism? If the economic marginalization of communities, particularly in developing countries, counts as an early warning sign for terrorism — and, by extension, atrocities — what are governments obligated to do? How should governments respond to early signs of their citizens leaving to join foreign terrorist groups, as has happened in the case of the Islamic State, which is estimated to have nearly 30,000 foreign fighters, 250 of whom are American? How should R2P address state military forces committing heinous crimes against civilians while pursuing counterterrorism objectives?
- There are small signs that the Responsibility to Protect doctrine is being revisited, opening the door to address the threats posed by non-state actors. Last June an annual meeting on R2P, with senior-level government officials, R2P experts and U.N. officials, included discussions about the emergence of new players such as Boko Haram and the Islamic State. Last week, U.S. senators also introduced the bipartisan Genocide and Atrocities Prevention Act, which acknowledges “shocking acts of violence perpetrated by governments and non-state actors.” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), while commenting on the legislation, made sure to point out “the rise of terrorist cults like ISIL and al-Shabaab that are committing genocide.”
- These linguistic advances may seem small, but they are important steps in reframing the fight against terrorism as essential to the international community’s obligation to help prevent genocide and atrocities.
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How humanitarian intervention makes protecting the innocent more difficult - The Washington Post 11

Feb 23, 16

www.washingtonpost.com/...ng-the-innocent-more-difficult Libya R2P humanitarian_imperialism
- How humanitarian intervention makes protecting the innocent more difficult
- By James P. Rudolph February 20
- James P. Rudolph is an attorney in California and Washington, D.C. He has worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development as a democracy officer and the U.S. State Department as a human rights officer. Find him on Twitter: @JamesPRudolph
- The Responsibility to Protect, or R2P, is an emerging norm in international law. Although the idea can be amorphous, over time the norm has developed into a respectable — and worthwhile — endeavor. Yet its effectiveness remains hindered by its history, and its history is often re-invoked when the norm is put to the test.
- The Responsibility to Protect is the idea that states and the international community have a responsibility to build up the institutions that can promote and protect human rights, and when a state is manifestly failing in this responsibility, it is the duty of the international community, acting through the United Nations, to assist that state in fulfilling its obligations. But if the state rebuffs all efforts, as a last resort the international community is authorized to deploy military assets to protect the rights of those within the state. The norm itself is clear, but to understand where it came from, one must also understand its predecessor: humanitarian intervention.
- The argument for humanitarian intervention has a long — though checkered — pedigree. Strictly speaking, humanitarian intervention refers only to the use of military force on behalf of the citizens of another country being subjected to various atrocities. European countries intervened militarily in the Ottoman Empire because, among other things, Christians were being harassed. India’s intervention in East Pakistan in 1971, in response to West Pakistan’s brutal suppression of Bengali calls for self-determination, might also qualify. Over time, humanitarian intervention came to be seen exclusively as a martial response to human rights abuses. When the citizens of another country were being systematically abused, military forces were allowed and indeed called upon to intervene in the affairs of another sovereign state. Hence, humanitarian intervention, in addition to self-defense, came to be invoked (controversially) as a basis for the use of force in international relations.
- Yet accepting military intervention as a means of righting wrongs meant that states’ borders were not sacred. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, this proposition, especially for the states newly liberated as a result of decolonization, could not be borne. They had, after all, fought for their independence and all the trappings of sovereignty, most especially the exclusive right to control their territory and everything that happened within the confines of their states. They were not willing to be harangued by former colonialist powers about the virtues of human rights, liberalism, democracy and pluralism. They endorsed these ideas, to be sure, but they were going to do it their way. And thus the West, in an attempt not to appear overbearing, retreated from a full-throated promotion of these ideas.
- Yet there was still a strong sense that state sovereignty and human rights had to make peace. In the 1990s, atrocities in Africa and in the Balkans required some kind of response, but the U.N. Charter sanctioned the use of force only in self-defense or pursuant to Chapter VII of the Charter, which authorizes action only to maintain or restore international peace and security. How, then, could this tension be eased? Enter R2P.
- Proposed in 2005, R2P played up the idea that sovereignty included the primary responsibility of states to protect their own citizens from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing; if you wanted all the benefits of sovereignty, you had to also accept the obligations. Yet it continues to be stalked by the ever-present specter of humanitarian intervention and its one-track focus on the use of force.
- The only official invocation of R2P by the Security Council so far was to justify the military intervention in Libya. This has only solidified critics’ reservations about R2P’s claim to respect sovereignty. How, skeptics might point out, could R2P be solely about human rights when, in the case of Libya at least, it was also about regime change? And, moreover, the negative consequences of the intervention, both in terms of human rights abuses and regional instability, are still unfolding today. Witness the proliferation of weapons, many of which have crossed into Mali, Burkina Faso and Nigeria. This is the problem of using R2P as a pretext. If it is not being used for its intended purposes, it shouldn’t be used at all. Having ulterior motives discredits the entire enterprise of intervention.
- R2P is pregnant with possibility and hope. It has sparked a positive reframing of the historically hobbled notion of humanitarian intervention; it has placed more emphasis on how individual states and the international community can and must do more to recognize the early warning signs of trouble; and it has reminded us that we live in a community, not just a system. Yet skepticism remains: R2P’s advocates have not done enough to decouple R2P from its troubled historical antecedents.
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Is the international community failing to protect vulnerable civilians? - The Washington Post 10

Feb 23, 16

www.washingtonpost.com/...o-protect-vulnerable-civilians Libya R2P humanitarian_imperialism myth-making mythology media propaganda WaPo Washington_Post
- Is the international community failing to protect vulnerable civilians?
- By Christine Emba February 15
- In 2011, popular uprisings against repressive leaders were sweeping the Arab world. In Libya, then-President Moammar Gaddafi responded to challenges of his rule quickly and brutally — by attacking protesters and targeting citizens, threatening to “cleanse Libya house by house.” The United Nations sprang into action: Its Security Council authorized military intervention and a NATO-led force carried out airstrikes that ousted Gaddafi from power. The effects of this intervention are still being felt throughout the Middle East, but today even more crises are at hand.
- In Burundi, a country seemingly on the brink of civil war, watchdog organizations have found evidence of mass graves and extrajudicial killings. In Nigeria, Boko Haram extremists have killed about 20,000 people (recently firebombing refugees and children), with the government seemingly unable to stand against them. Even though a “cessation of hostilities” has been planned in Syria, conflict is very much ongoing and tens of thousands of civilians have died.
- Why intervene in Libya and not elsewhere?
  
  Libya has been the only military application of the Responsibility to Protect, a relatively new international norm endorsed by all of the U.N. member states in 2005. R2P, as it is known, is an attempt to prevent mass atrocities — genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity — from occurring in a time when large, structured interstate wars have been replaced by violent internal conflicts in which the casualties are mainly civilian. The international standard for intervention emerged after the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and the Srebrenica massacre of 1995, when the international community largely stood by as disaster occurred, seemingly due to limited peacekeeping mandates meant to preserve neutrality and state sovereignty.
- R2P rests on three pillars, each demanding a separate level of responsibility. First, governments carry the primary responsibility for protecting their populations from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and their incitement. Second, the international community has the responsibility to encourage and assist these governments in fulfilling that responsibility. Third — where the principle can become a source of conflict — the international community has a responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other means to protect populations from such crimes. If a government is “manifestly failing” to protect its populations, the international community should be prepared to take collective action, including military action, in accordance with the U.N. Charter.
- These norms are a fairly recent shift from the idea of “humanitarian intervention,” which Global South countries, still smarting from the wounds of colonialism, called an encroachment on their hard-won state sovereignty and a Trojan horse for great powers to pursue their own interests. R2P is an affirmation of self-determination with intervention as an agreed-upon and well-constrained last resort. Although it outlines grounds for military intrusion, R2P is meant to respect and encourage the role that states can and should play in resolving their own internal conflicts.
- Today, the doctrine is still universally affirmed, but its efficacy and application are questioned. Although the R2P framework has been the basis for both successful and disappointing action in the past, critics claim that it has not been able to provide an adequate response in crises that are currently occurring.
  
  Indeed, recent events pose a number of questions: Why does intervention happen in some countries and not others, or at a certain level of disorder and not before? When we do intervene, are our responses effective? Is a system predicated on the notion of international cooperation realistic, considering the geopolitical challenges of respecting sovereignty while also generating consensus among world players? How does the responsibility to protect hold up today?
- Over the next few days, we’ll hear from:
  
  Gareth Evans, chancellor of Australian National University and former co-chair of the U.N. International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty;
  
  Alex Bellamy, director of the Asia-Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect;
  
  Sarah Cliffe and Hanny Megally, of New York University’s Center on International Cooperation;
- Ramesh Thakur, professor at Australian National University and one of the principal authors of R2P;
  
  Evan Cinq-Mars, advocacy officer at the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect;
  
  Karen Attiah, deputy digital opinions editor at The Washington Post.
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Gay Imperialism Gender and Sexuality Discourse in the 'War on Terror'.pdf - Google Drive

Feb 17, 16

docs.google.com/...edit gay_imperialism LGBT
Gated Development - is the Gates Foundation always a force for good? | Global Justice Now 5

Feb 11, 16

www.globaljustice.org.uk/...s-foundation-always-force-good Bill_Gates Gates_Foundation globalization privatization Africa New_Alliance force_multipliers *2016
- Gated Development - is the Gates Foundation always a force for good?
  
  January 2016
- Every January, Bill Gates sets out his vision for a better world and the role the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation can play in achieving this in an annual letter to us all. With assets of $43.5 billion, the foundation is the largest charitable foundation in the world. It is arguably the most influential actor on issues of global health and agriculture, and distributes more aid for global health than any government.
- Gated Development demonstrates that the trend to involve business in addressing poverty and inequality is central to the priorities and funding of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. We argue that this is far from a neutral charitable strategy but instead an ideological commitment to promote neoliberal economic policies and corporate globalisation. Big business is directly benefitting, in particular in the fields of agriculture and health, as a result of the foundation’s activities, despite evidence to show that business solutions are not the most effective.
- Perhaps what is most striking about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is that despite its aggressive corporate strategy and extraordinary influence across governments, academics and the media, there is an absence of critical voices. Global Justice Now is concerned that the foundation’s influence is so pervasive that many actors in international development, which would otherwise critique the policy and practice of the foundation, are unable to speak out independently as a result of its funding and patronage.
- Download Gated Development (PDF)
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Gates Foundation accused of 'dangerously skewing' aid priorities by promoting 'corporate globalisation' | World Politics | News | The Independent 14

Feb 11, 16

www.independent.co.uk/...ing-big-business-a6822036.html Bill_Gates Gates_Foundation globalization privatization Africa New_Alliance force_multipliers
- Gates Foundation accused of 'dangerously skewing' aid priorities by promoting 'corporate globalisation'
  
  Controversial new report calls for Bill Gates' philanthropic Foundation to undergo an international investigation
  
  David Connett
  
  8 days ago
- They are among the richest people on earth, have won plaudits for their fight to eradicate some of the world’s deadliest and prolific killers, and donated billions to better educate and feed the poorest on the planet.
  
  Despite this, Bill and Melinda Gates are facing calls for their philanthropic Foundation, through which they have donated billions worldwide, to be subject to an international investigation, according to a controversial new report.
- Far from a “neutral charitable strategy”, the Gates Foundation is about benefiting big business, especially in agriculture and health, through its “ideological commitment to promote neoliberal economic policies and corporate globalisation,” according to the report published by the campaign group Global Justice Now. Its influence is “dangerously skewing” aid priorities, the group says.
- “The world is being sold a myth that private philanthropy holds many of the solutions to the world’s problems, when in fact it is pushing the world in many wrong directions,” the report claims. The Gates Foundation is “being allowed to speak too loudly, and too many actors in international development are falling into line with the foundation’s misguided priorities.”
- The group accuse the Gates Foundation of using its massive financial clout to silence international development experts and groups which would criticise its practices.
  
  Bill Gates, the report claims, “who has regular access to world leaders and is in effect personally bankrolling hundreds of universities, international organisations, NGOs and media outlets, has become the single most influential voice in international development.”
- At worst, the report’s authors claims, the Gates Foundation “often appears to be a massive, vertically integrated multinational corporation, controlling every step in a supply chain that reaches from its Seattle-based boardroom … to millions of end-users in the villages of African and south Asia.”
- Lauded for their work in eradicating polio and malaria, amongst other diseases, the report accuses the Gates Foundation of funding privatised health and promoting an increased role for private education providers. The danger, the report says, is that it “turns basic needs into commodities controlled by the market”; such services are likely to be accessed mainly by the rich. It is critical of emphasis on single diseases and points out that this is being done at the neglect of basic health care systems. It also points out that during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, basic healthcare collapsed completely in parts of the region.
- Foundation's focus
  
  
  The Foundation is the world’s biggest funder of GM crop research, the report claims. Huge corporations including Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer and Dupont, are major beneficiaries of its projects.
  
  “The Gates Foundation is, in effect, preparing the ground for them to access new profitable markets in hitherto closed-off developing countries, especially in Africa. The Foundation is especially pushing for the adoption of GM in Africa,” it warns.
  
  One project aims to bring GM vitamin A-enriched bananas to Uganda. But field trials have been branded “biopiracy” since the original gene being used to develop these ‘super-bananas’ was collected in Papua New Guinea.
- The report is critical of the close working relations between the Foundation and major international pharmaceutical corporations and points out many of the same firms have been criticised for their over-pricing of life-saving vaccines. It warns that philanthropic influence is skewing health priorities “towards the interests of wealthy donors (vaccines) rather than resilient health systems”.
- It accuses the Gates Foundation of promoting specific priorities through agriculture grants, some of which undermine the interests of small farmers. These include promoting industrial agriculture, use of chemical fertilisers and expensive, patented seeds, and a focus on genetically modified seeds. “Much of the Foundation’s work appears to bypass local knowledge,” the report claims.
  
  The criticism echoes the accusations made by the Indian scientist Vandana Shiva who called the Gates Foundation the “greatest threat to farmers in the developing world.”
- The Foundation’s emphasis on “technological solutions” often ignores real solutions involving social and economic justice, it argues. “This cannot be given by donors in the form of a climate-resilient crop or cheaper smartphone, but must be about systemic social, economic and political change – issues not represented in the foundation’s funding priorities.”
- It calls for the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development to carry out an inquiry into the foundation’s work on top of a British Parliamentary inquiry.
  
  The Gates Foundation said the report “misrepresented” its work. “Our mission is to improve quality of life for the world’s poorest people. This is a complex challenge, and solving it will require a range of approaches as well as the collaboration of governments, NGOs, academic institutions, for-profit companies and philanthropic organisations. Governments are uniquely positioned to provide the leadership and resources necessary to address structural inequalities and ensure that the right solutions reach those most in need. The private sector has access to innovations – for example, in science, medicine and technology – that can save lives. And we believe that the role of philanthropy is to take risks where others can’t or won’t.”
- All its work was guided by its partners, it insisted. It refuted claims that it was unaccountable, stating that it was one of the first to join the International Aid Transparency Initiative as well as reporting to the OECD.
  
  Gabriella Stern, spokeswoman for the foundation, said: “For us, results are measured in lives saved and so we will continue to work with governments, non-profits, businesses, and other philanthropists to tackle the complex issues surrounding extreme poverty.
- “The Gates Foundation has spent around $34.5bn since its inception, driven by its mission to help people around the world lift themselves out of hunger and extreme poverty. This report rehashes a series of unfounded claims that have been made by others and found wanting.
  
  “Much remains to be done but we are confident that the world is making progress. Working together over the last 15 years, the world has cut extreme poverty, child mortality and malaria deaths by half, reduced maternal mortality by nearly 50 percent, and driven new HIV infections down by 40 per cent.”
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WATCH: Edward S. Herman on “Humanitarian Imperialism” | Wrong Kind of Green 1

Feb 11, 16

www.wrongkindofgreen.org/...an-on-humanitarian-imperialism Edward_Herman humanitarian_imperialism Libya
- WATCH: Edward S. Herman on “Humanitarian Imperialism”
  Wrong Kind of Green Jan 26, 2016 Foundations, Humanitarian Agencies, Imperialist Wars/Occupations, Non-Profit Industrial Complex, The International Campaign to Destabilize Syria, The War on Libya - There Was No Evidence
  The Real News
  
  Video published July 1, 2012
  
  Excerpt:
  
  TRN: Which it’s all geopolitics: when it’s in your interest, you bring up that card, and when it’s not, you don’t.
  
  HERMAN: No, absolutely. And the lack of principle involved, the lack of as you say, there is a principle, a UN principle, that’s been overridden by this allegedly higher principle of the responsibility to protect civilians who are victimized by their government, so that we have to go in. And we did this in Libya. And a good chunk of the left fell for this, too, that we have the responsibility. We raised the question, I have raised the question, in the case of Libya, well, do you want to leave this in the hands of the United States, who’s engaging in drone warfare all over the world, has declared the whole world a free-fire zone, engaged in the most monstrous aggression in Iraq, and it’s got away with it. You want this imperial power to do the job in Libya on this incredibly selective basis? Isn’t that a bad principle in itself, to do it and to then let them do it, and to have faith that they’re going to do it, not engage in regime change, which they’ve been obviously pursuing? I mean, the naivete behind supporting that is again, it’s breathtaking.
The Dirty War on Syria | Global Research - Centre for Research on Globalization 26

Feb 02, 16

www.globalresearch.ca/...5491859 Syria BookReview humanitarian_imperialism demonization myth-making barrel_bombs recolonization *2016
- The Dirty War on Syria
  
  By Prof. Tim Anderson
  
  Global Research, November 27, 2015
- The following text is the introductory chapter of Professor Tim Anderson’s forthcoming book entitled The Dirty War on Syria
- Although every war makes ample use of lies and deception, the dirty war on Syria has relied on a level of mass disinformation not seen in living memory. The British-Australian journalist Philip Knightley pointed out that war propaganda typically involves ‘a depressingly predictable pattern’ of demonising the enemy leader, then demonising the enemy people through atrocity stories, real or imagined (Knightley 2001). Accordingly, a mild-mannered eye doctor called Bashar al Assad became the new evil in the world and, according to consistent western media reports, the Syrian Army did nothing but kill civilians for more than four years. To this day, many imagine the Syrian conflict is a ‘civil war’, a ‘popular revolt’ or some sort of internal sectarian conflict. These myths are, in many respects, a substantial achievement for the big powers which have driven a series of ‘regime change’ operations in the Middle East region, all on false pretexts, over the past 15 years.
- This book is a careful academic work, but also a strong defence of the right of the Syrian people to determine their own society and political system. That position is consistent with international law and human rights principles, but may irritate western sensibilities, accustomed as we are to an assumed prerogative to intervene. At times I have to be blunt, to cut through the double-speak. In Syria the big powers have sought to hide their hand, using proxy armies while demonising the Syrian Government and Army, accusing them of constant atrocities; then pretending to rescue the Syrian people from their own government. Far fewer western people opposed the war on Syria than opposed the invasion of Iraq, because they were deceived about its true nature.
- In 2011 I had only a basic understanding of Syria and its history. However I was deeply suspicious when reading of the violence that erupted in the southern border town of Daraa. I knew that such violence (sniping at police and civilians, the use of semi-automatic weapons) does not spring spontaneously from street demonstrations. And I was deeply suspicious of the big powers. All my life I had been told lies about the pretexts for war. I decided to research the Syrian conflict, reading hundreds of books and articles, watching many videos and speaking to as many Syrians as I could. I wrote dozens of articles and visited Syria twice, during the conflict. This book is a result of that research.
- Dirty wars are not new. Cuban national hero Jose Martí predicted to a friend that Washington would try to intervene in Cuba’s independence struggle against the Spanish. ‘They want to provoke a war’, he wrote in 1889 ‘to have a pretext to intervene and, with the authority of being mediator and guarantor, to seize the country … There is no more cowardly thing in the annals of free people; nor such cold blooded evil’ (Martí 1975: 53). Nine years later, during the third independence war, an explosion in Havana Harbour destroyed the USS Maine, killing 258 US sailors and serving as a pretext for a US invasion.
- The subsequent ‘Spanish-American’ war snatched victory from the Cubans and allowed the US to take control of the remaining Spanish colonial territories. Cuba had territory annexed and a deeply compromised constitution was imposed. No evidence ever proved the Spanish were responsible for the bombing of the Maine and many Cubans believe the North Americans bombed their own ship. The monument in Havana, in memory of those sailors, still bears this inscription: ‘To the victims of the Maine who were sacrificed to imperialist voracity and the desire to gain control of the island of Cuba’ (Richter 1998).
- The US launched dozens of interventions in Latin America over the subsequent century. A notable dirty war was led by CIA-backed, ‘freedom fighter’ mercenaries based in Honduras, who attacked the Sandinista Government and the people of Nicaragua in the 1980s. That conflict, in its modus operandi, was not so different to the war on Syria. In Nicaragua more than 30,000 people were killed. The International Court of Justice found the US guilty of a range of terrorist-style attacks on the little Central American country, and found that the US owed Nicaragua compensation (ICJ 1986). Washington ignored these rulings.
- With the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011 the big powers took advantage of a political foment by seizing the initiative to impose an ‘Islamist winter’, attacking the few remaining independent states of the region. Very quickly we saw the destruction of Libya, a small country with the highest standard of living in Africa. NATO bombing and a Special Forces campaign helped the al Qaeda groups on the ground. The basis for NATO’s intervention was lies told about actual and impending massacres, supposedly carried out or planned by the government of President Muammar Gaddafi. These claims led rapidly to a UN Security Council resolution said to protect civilians through a ‘no fly zone’. We know now that trust was betrayed, and that the NATO powers abused the limited UN authorisation to overthrow the Libyan Government (McKinney 2012).
- Subsequently, no evidence emerged to prove that Gaddafi intended, carried out or threatened wholesale massacres, as was widely suggested (Forte 2012). Genevieve Garrigos of Amnesty International (France) admitted there was ‘no evidence’ to back her group’s earlier claims that Gaddafi had used ‘black mercenaries’ to commit massacres (Forte 2012; Edwards 2013).
- Alan Kuperman, drawing mainly on North American sources, demonstrates the following points. First, Gaddafi’s crackdown on the mostly Islamist insurrection in eastern Libya was ‘much less lethal’ than had been suggested. Indeed there was evidence that he had had ‘refrained from indiscriminate violence’. The Islamists were themselves armed from the beginning. From later US estimates, of the almost one thousand casualties in the first seven weeks, about three percent were women and children (Kuperman 2015). Second, when government forces were about to regain the east of the country, NATO intervened, claiming this was to avert an impending massacre. Ten thousand people died after the NATO intervention, compared to one thousand before. Gaddafi had pledged no reprisals in Benghazi and ‘no evidence or reason’ came out to support the claim that he planned mass killings (Kuperman 2015). The damage was done. NATO handed over the country to squabbling groups of Islamists and western aligned ‘liberals’. A relatively independent state was overthrown, but Libya was destroyed. Four years on there is no functioning government and violence persists; and that war of aggression against Libya went unpunished.
- Two days before NATO bombed Libya another armed Islamist insurrection broke out in Daraa, Syria’s southernmost city. Yet because this insurrection was linked to the demonstrations of a political reform movement, its nature was disguised. Many did not see that those who were providing the guns – Qatar and Saudi Arabia – were also running fake news stories in their respective media channels, Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya. There were other reasons for the durable myths of this war. Many western audiences, liberals and leftists as well as the more conservative, seemed to like the idea of their own role as the saviours of a foreign people, speaking out strongly about a country of which they knew little, but joining what seemed to be a ‘good fight’ against this new ‘dictator’. With a mission and their proud self-image western audiences apparently forgot the lies of previous wars, and of their own colonial legacies.
- I would go so far as to say that, in the Dirty War on Syria, western culture in general abandoned its better traditions: of reason, the maintenance of ethical principle and the search for independent evidence at times of conflict; in favour of its worst traditions: the ‘imperial prerogative’ for intervention, backed by deep racial prejudice and poor reflection on the histories of their own cultures. That weakness was reinforced by a ferocious campaign of war propaganda. After the demonisation of Syrian leader Bashar al Assad began, a virtual information blockade was constructed against anything which might undermine the wartime storyline. Very few sensible western perspectives on Syria emerged after 2011, as critical voices were effectively blacklisted.
- In that context I came to write this book. It is a defence of Syria, not primarily addressed to those who are immersed the western myths but to others who engage with them. This is therefore a resource book and a contribution to the history of the Syrian conflict. The western stories have become self-indulgent and I believe it is wasteful to indulge them too much. Best, I think, to speak of current events as they are, then address the smokescreens later. I do not ignore the western myths, in fact this book documents many of them. But I lead with the reality of the war.
- Western mythology relies on the idea of imperial prerogatives, asking what must ‘we’ do about the problems of another people; an approach which has no basis in international law or human rights. The next steps involve a series of fabrications about the pretexts, character and events of the war. The first pretext over Syria was that the NATO states and the Gulf monarchies were supporting a secular and democratic revolution. When that seemed implausible the second story was that they were saving the oppressed majority ‘Sunni Muslim’ population from a sectarian ‘Alawite regime’. Then, when sectarian atrocities by anti-government forces attracted greater public attention, the pretext became a claim that there was a shadow war: ‘moderate rebels’ were said to be actually fighting the extremist groups. Western intervention was therefore needed to bolster these ‘moderate rebels’ against the ‘new’ extremist group that had mysteriously arisen and posed a threat to the world.
- That was the ‘B’ story. No doubt Hollywood will make movies based on this meta-script, for years to come. However this book leads with the ‘A’ story. Proxy armies of Islamists, armed by US regional allies (mainly Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey), infiltrate a political reform movement and snipe at police and civilians. They blame this on the government and spark an insurrection, seeking the overthrow of the Syrian government and its secular-pluralist state. This follows the openly declared ambition of the US to create a ‘New Middle East’, subordinating every country of the region, by reform, unilateral disarmament or direct overthrow. Syria was next in line, after Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. In Syria, the proxy armies would come from the combined forces of the Muslim Brotherhood and Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi fanatics. Despite occasional power struggles between these groups and their sponsors, they share much the same Salafist ideology, opposing secular or nationalist regimes and seeking the establishment of a religious state.
- However in Syria Washington’s Islamists confronted a disciplined national army which did not disintegrate along religious lines, despite many provocations. The Syrian state also had strong allies in Russia and Iran. Syria was not to be Libya Take Two. In this prolonged war the violence, from the western side, was said to consist of the Syrian Army targeting and killing civilians. From the Syrian side people saw daily terrorist attacks on towns and cities, schools and hospitals and massacres of ordinary people by NATO’s ‘freedom fighters’, then the counter attacks by the Army. Foreign terrorists were recruited in dozens of countries by the Saudis and Qatar, bolstering the local mercenaries.
- Though the terrorist groups were often called ‘opposition, ‘militants’ and ‘Sunni groups’ outside Syria, inside the country the actual political opposition abandoned the Islamists back in early 2011. Protest was driven off the streets by the violence, and most of the opposition (minus the Muslim Brotherhood and some exiles) sided with the state and the Army, if not with the ruling Ba’ath Party. The Syrian Army has been brutal with terrorists but, contrary to western propaganda, protective of civilians. The Islamists have been brutal with all, and openly so. Millions of internally displaced people have sought refuge with the Government and Army, while others fled the country.
  
  In a hoped-for ‘end game’ the big powers sought overthrow of the Syrian state or, failing that, the creation of a dysfunctional state or dismembering into sectarian statelets, thus breaking the axis of independent regional states. That axis comprises Hezbollah in south Lebanon and the Palestinian resistance, alongside Syria and Iran, the only states in the region without US military bases. More recently Iraq – still traumatised from western invasion, massacres and occupation – has begun to align itself with this axis. Russia too has begun to play an important counter-weight role. Recent history and conduct demonstrate that neither Russia nor Iran harbour any imperial ambitions remotely approaching those of Washington and its allies, several of which (Britain, France and Turkey) were former colonial warlords in the region. From the point of view of the ‘Axis of Resistance’, defeat of the dirty war on Syria means that the region can begin closing ranks against the big powers. Syria’s successful resistance would mean the beginning of the end for Washington’s ‘New Middle East’.
- That is basically the big picture. This book sets out to document the A story and expose the B story. It does so by rescuing some of the better western traditions: the use of reason, the maintenance of ethical principle and the search for independent evidence in case of conflict. I hope it might prove a useful resource. Here is a brief overview of the chapters.
  
  Chapter 2, ‘Syria and Washington’s ‘New Middle East’’ puts Syria in context of the US plans for a ‘New Middle East’, the latest chapter in a longer history of US attempts to dominate the region.
  
  Chapter 3, ‘Barrel Bombs, Partisan Sources and War Propaganda’ addresses the problem of reporting and reading the Syrian crisis. Media channels have shown a hyper-reliance on partisan sources, committed to the war and denigrating the Syrian Army. This is the key barrier to understanding the controversies around chemical weapons, civilian massacres and the levels of support for or opposition to President Assad.
- Chapter 4, ‘Daraa 2011: Another Islamist Insurrection’ reconstructs, from a range of sources, the Saudi-backed Islamist insurrection in Daraa in March 2011. Those armed attacks were quite distinct from the political reform rallies, which the Islamists soon drove off the streets.
  
  Chapter 5, ‘Bashar al Assad and Political Reform’ explains the political reform movement from the time Bashar assumed the presidency in the year 2000 to the beginning of the crisis in 2011. From this we can see that most opposition groups were committed to reform within a Syrian context, with virtually all opposing attacks on the Syrian state. The chapter then reviews the role of Bashar as a reformer, and the evidence on his popularity.
- Chapter 6, ‘The Empire’s Jihadis’ looks at the collaboration between Salafist political Islam and the imperial powers in the Middle East. Distinct from the anti-imperial Islamic currents in Iran and south Lebanon, Salafist political Islam has become a sectarian force competing with Arab nationalism across Egypt, Palestine and Syria, and drawing on long standing collaborative relations with the big powers. This history provides important background to the character of Syria’s Islamist ‘revolution’, and its various slogans.
  
  Chapter 7, ‘Embedded Media, Embedded Watchdogs’ identifies the propaganda techniques of media channels and the network of ‘human rights’ bodies (Human Rights Watch, Avaaz, etc) which function as megaphones and ‘moderators’ for the Washington agenda. Many have become fierce advocates for ‘humanitarian war’. A number of newer western NGOs (e.g. The Syria Campaign, The White Helmets) have been created by Wall Street agencies specifically for the dirty war on Syria. A number of their fabrications are documented here.
- Chapter 8, ‘The Houla Massacre Revisited’ considers in detail the evidence from the first major massacre designed (following success of the technique over Libya) to influence UN Security Council consideration of military intervention. While the first UN inquiry group, actually in Syria, found contradictory evidence on this massacre, a second UN group outside Syria and co-chaired by a US diplomat, tried to blame the Syrian Government. Yet more than a dozen witnesses blamed Farouq FSA Islamists, who killed pro-government villagers and took over the area, holding it for some months. Several other ‘false flag’ massacres are noted.
  
  Chapter 9, ‘Chemical Fabrications: the East Ghouta Incident’ details the second major ‘false flag’ incident of international significance. This incident in August 2013, which nearly sparked a major escalation involving US missile attacks on Syria, was used to accuse the Syrian Government of killing hundreds of civilians, including children, with chemical weapons. Within a fairly short time multiple sources of independent evidence (including North American evidence) disproved these accusations. Nevertheless, Syria’s opponents have repeated the false accusations, to this day, as though they were fact.
- Chapter 10, ‘A Responsibility to Protect and the Double Game’ addresses a recent political doctrine, a subset of ‘humanitarian intervention’ popularised to add to the imperial toolkit. The application of this doctrine in Libya was disastrous for that little country. Fortunately the attempts to use it in Syria failed.
  
  Chapter 11, ‘Health and Sanctions’ documents the NATO-backed Islamist attacks on Syria’s health system, linked to the impact of western economic sanctions. These twin currents have caused great damage to Syrian public health. Such attacks carry no plausible motive of seeking local popular support, so we must interpret them as part of an overall strategy to degrade the Syrian state, rendering it more vulnerable to outside intervention.
  
  Chapter 12 ‘Washington, Terrorism and ISIS: the evidence’, documents the links between the big powers and the latest peak terrorist group they claim to be fighting. Only evidence can help develop informed opinion on this contentious matter, but the evidence is overwhelming. There is little ideological difference between the various Salafi-Islamist groups, and Washington and its allies have financed and armed every one of them.
- Chapter 13, ‘Western Intervention and the Colonial Mind’ discusses the western cultural mindset that underlies persistent violations of the rights of other peoples.
  
  Chapter 14 ‘Towards an Independent Middle East’, considers the end-game in the Syrian crisis, and its implications for the Middle East region. At tremendous cost the Syrian Arab Republic, its army and its people, have successfully resisted aggression from a variety of powerful enemies. Syria’s survival is due to its resilience and internal unity, bolstered by support from some strong allies. The introduction of Russian air power in late September 2015 was important. So too were the coordinated ground forces from Iran, Iraq and Lebanon, in support of an independent Syria.
  
  When the attacks on Syria abate the Middle East seems set to be transformed, with greater political will and military preparedness on the part of an expanded Axis of Resistance. That will signal the beginning of the end for Washington’s 15 year spree of bloodshed and ‘regime change’ across the entire region.
- Notes:
  
  Edwards, Dave (2013) ‘Limited But Persuasive’ Evidence – Syria, Sarin, Libya, Lies’, Media Lens, 13 June, online: http://www.medialens.org/index.php/alerts/alert-archive/alerts-2013/735-limited-but-persuasive-evidence-syria-sarin-libya-lies.html
  
  Forte, Maximilian (2012) Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s War on Libya and Africa, Baraka Books, Quebec
  
  ICJ (1986) Case concerning the military and paramilitary activities in and against Nicaragua (Nicaragua v. United States of America) Merits’, International Court of Justice, Judgement of 27 June 1986, online: http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/?sum=367&p1=3&p2=3&case=70&p3=5
  
  Knightley, Phillip (2001) ‘The disinformation campaign’, The Guardian, 4 October, online: http://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/oct/04/socialsciences.highereducation
  
  Kuperman, Alan J. (2015) Obama’s Libya Debacle’, Foreign Affairs, 16 April, online: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/libya/2015-02-16/obamas-libya-debacle
  
  Martí, Jose (1975) Obras Completas, Vol. 6, Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, La Habana
  
  McKinney, Cynthia (Ed) (2012) The Illegal War on Libya, Clarity Press, Atlanta
  
  Putin, Vladimir (2015) ‘Violence instead of democracy: Putin slams ‘policies of exceptionalism and impunity’ in UN speech’, RT, 28 September, online: https://www.rt.com/news/316804-putin-russia-unga-speech/
  
  Richter, Larry (1998) ‘Havana Journal; Remember the Maine? Cubans See an American Plot Continuing to This Day’, New York Times, 14 February, online: http://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/14/world/havana-journal-remember-maine-cubans-see-american-plot-continuing-this-day.html
- Dr Tim Anderson is a Senior Lecturer in Political Economy at the University of Sydney. He researches and writes on development, rights and self-determination in Latin America, the Asia-Pacific and the Middle East. He has published many dozens of chapters and articles in a range of academic books and journals. His last book was Land and Livelihoods in Papua New Guinea (Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2015).
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U.N. says some of its peacekeepers were paying 13-year-olds for sex - The Washington Post 12

Jan 30, 16

www.washingtonpost.com/...5-8abc-d09392edc612_story.html UN peacekeepers child_molestation child_rape sexual_abuse
- U.N. says some of its peacekeepers were paying 13-year-olds for sex
- By Kevin Sieff January 11
  
  NAIROBI — The United Nations has been grappling with so many sexual abuse allegations involving its peacekeepers that Secretary General Ban Ki-moon recently called them “a cancer in our system.”
  
  Now, officials have learned about what appears to be a fresh scandal. Investigators discovered this month that at least four U.N. peacekeepers in the Central African Republic allegedly paid girls as little as 50 cents in exchange for sex.
  
  The case is the latest to plague the U.N. mission in the Central African Republic, whose employees have been accused of 22 other incidents of alleged sexual abuse or sexual exploitation in the past 14 months. The most recent accusations come in the wake of Ban’s efforts to implement a “zero tolerance” policy for such offenses.
- The United Nations maintains nine peacekeeping operations in Africa, employing more than 100,000 people on the continent, and the abuses threaten to erode the organization’s legitimacy. Other sex-crime cases have occurred in Mali, South Sudan, Liberia and Congo in recent years.
  
  Last month, the United Nations published a damning independent investigation that said that poor enforcement of policies in place to deter and report abuse meant that “the credibility of the U.N. and peacekeeping operations are in jeopardy.” Experts and officials say systemic problems still hinder the investigation
  and prosecution of alleged abusers, leading to a perception of impunity.
- The abuse “undermines everything we stand for,” said Anthony Banbury, the U.N. assistant secretary general for field support.
  
  The mission in the Central African Republic, where U.N. troops and civilians were sent in 2014 to help end a civil war and support a fledgling government, stands out for its record of sexual abuse and exploitation.
  
  “They are preying on the people they’ve come to protect,” said Parfait Onanga-Anyanga, the top U.N. official in the country.
  
  ‘Horrible, unacceptable’
  
  The most recent allegations involve at least four peacekeepers who are accused of paying girls as young as 13 for sex at a camp for the internally displaced next to the international airport in Bangui, the capital. The site, known as M’poko camp, is home to 20,000 people, mostly Christians. It is a vast agglomeration of white tents surrounding old, decaying airplanes, just yards from the airport runway.
- The United Nations has not publicly released the nationalities of the accused troops or provided details of the alleged abuse. But in interviews, U.N. officials said the peacekeepers were from Gabon, Morocco, Burundi and France. The prostitution ring they allegedly used was run by boys and young men who offered girls “for anywhere from 50 cents to three dollars,” according to one official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the ongoing investigation.
- Some officials say there may be many more cases of exploitation by peacekeepers that have gone unreported. Because there is no regular U.N. presence in M’poko, it has been difficult to gauge the scale of the problem.
  
  M’poko had already had a problem with sexual abuse before the recent cases were reported. Its population had grown sharply since September, when violence erupted between the warring parties in the Central African Republic.
  
  Human Rights Watch documented nine cases of sexual violence between September and December in and around the displacement camp. In several instances, Christian women were raped by members of the mostly Christian “anti-balaka” militia after being accused of interacting with Muslims. Across Bangui, the conflict has fallen largely along religious lines.
- “M’poko is a lawless zone run by anti-balaka thugs a few hundred meters away from the international airport. The camp is not being protected, and women are being raped,” said Lewis Mudge, a Human Rights Watch researcher focused on the Central African Republic.
  
  But this marks the first time that the United Nations has acknowledged the involvement of its employees in the camp’s underworld of commercial sex work, which is driven by abject poverty and a lack of law enforcement.
  
  “The M’poko camp is unfortunately a place where horrible, unacceptable things happen to women and children,” said Banbury, the assistant secretary general. “In some cases, we have credible allegations that there are U.N. personnel that have committed these crimes.”
- Banbury said U.N. troops plan to begin patrolling M’poko more frequently and will attempt to dismantle the prostitution ring.
  
  The U.N. mission in the Central African Republic has been plagued by sexual abuse allegations. The previous U.N. special representative there, retired Senegalese general Babacar Gaye, was fired in August over his team’s handling of the accusations. The organization has dispatched special investigators to Bangui to better understand what has gone wrong.
- The United Nations was also strongly criticized for failing to react to offenses by peacekeepers in the country. As many as 14 troops from France, Chad and Equatorial Guinea allegedly raped and sodomized six boys between the ages of 9 and 15 in 2013 and 2014, before the U.N. mission formally began. The United Nations took no action after learning about the cases until a whistleblower leaked an internal U.N. investigation to French authorities, according to U.N. officials.
  
  Last month, the report by a panel including former Canadian Supreme Court justice Marie Deschamps found that U.N. staff in Bangui had “turned a blind eye to the criminal actions of individual troops” in that case.
  
  In August, two women and one girl accused three U.N. peacekeepers of rape in the war-torn town of Bambari. That same month, a U.N. police officer allegedly raped a 12-year-old girl during an operation in Bangui’s main Muslim neighborhood. She had been hiding in a bathroom while peacekeepers searched her house, according to Amnesty International.
  
  “When I cried, he slapped me hard and put his hand over my mouth,” the girl told an Amnesty International researcher.
- Fractured enforcement
  
  For years, the United Nations has been trying to stop the sexual abuse perpetrated by its employees and troops under its command. It has ordered a series of reports to identify weaknesses in enforcement and mandated that a component on sexual exploitation and abuse be included in training for peacekeepers. Ban has also encouraged harsher penalties for the peacekeeping units to which the abusers belong.
  
  But the slow pace of investigations into abuse has “severely undermined enforcement,” according to a report last year from the U.N. Office of Internal Oversight Services. Even more problematic, some experts say, is that the prosecution of alleged offenders falls to the governments of the countries that provide the peacekeepers. In many cases, those governments conduct halfhearted investigations and fail to convict offenders.
  
  “To say that it is immensely frustrating is a tremendous understatement,” said Banbury.
- “The U.N. should stop tiptoeing around, trying not to offend governments, and instead put the victims of sexual exploitation and abuse at the heart of their policy,” said Sarah Taylor, an advocate in the women’s rights division at Human Rights Watch.
  
  Some argue that the lack of enforcement encourages a sense among U.N. employees that they can commit sexual crimes with impunity while based overseas.
  
  “They think ‘We’re in a special class,’ that sexual abuse is not that serious,” said Paula Donovan, who leads Code Blue, an advocacy campaign working to expose the issue of sexual abuse by U.N. personnel.
  
  The number of alleged cases of sexual exploitation and abuse committed by U.N. personnel declined from 2008 to 2014, dropping from 83 to 51, which U.N. officials say is evidence of increasingly effective intervention. But critics say that those numbers are incomplete and that many cases go unreported.
- “The data is not just porous. It’s a joke,” Donovan said.
  
  Other analysts say that getting civilians to report sexual crimes in war-torn environments, where there is a mistrust of authority and a lack of law enforcement, is an enormous challenge. The victims might “fear retaliation by the perpetrator, who in some cases carries a weapon,” said a report last year on U.N. abuses by the Stimson Center, a Washington-based research organization.
  
  In many other cases, impoverished girls and women accept food and money in exchange for sex.
  
  “This is already a society whose social fabric has totally collapsed, with youngsters left to fend for themselves,” said Onanga-Anyanga. “This is putting salt into an open wound.”
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UN Guilty for Failing Child Sexual Abuse Victims in CAR - The Global Feed 3

Jan 30, 16

www.theglobalfeed.org/...un-guilty-failing-victims UN peacekeepers child_molestation child_rape sexual_abuse
- UN Guilty for Failing Child Sexual Abuse Victims in CAR
 
 January 19, 2016
 
 
 Today, Anders Kompass has been successfully exonerated for exposing the sexual abuse of children by UN peacekeepers in Central African Republic. The director of field operations for the office of the high commissioner for human rights in Geneva was charged for disclosing confidential documents detailing the abuse to the authorities in Paris. When analysing the events that led Kompass to passing these internal documents, it is clear that his action was warranted to protect the child victims that the broken UN bureaucracy would not.
 Sexual Abuse cases have plagued the UN for decades. It was Kofi Annan who first announced a zero-tolerance policy in the UN, commissioned a report on the issue, and instituted a number of reforms in the UN. But the cases have continued with current Secretary General Ban Ki Moon calling them recently a “cancer in our system”. Most recently, all eyes have been on Central African Republic, but the extent of this ‘cancer’ is unknown.
 Based on the UN internal investigation, it seems that in CAR there was a pattern of impunity for these deplorable acts. This was due to a technicality that the UN did not directly employ the peacekeeping troops guilty of the abuse. This meant that the punishment triggers put in place could not be deployed. Because of this loophole, UN agencies and staff ignored the crimes. Fundamentally the UN staff and agencies were ignoring their basic mandate to preserve the human rights for the child victims, because of a little bureaucracy.
- A “Systematic Problem”
 Sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers and staff has been found at least since the 1990s. But the most recent mission to be plagued is the one in Central African Republic. In CAR, at least four UN peacekeepers paid girls as little as 50 cents in exchange for sex at a camp for internal refugees. Even before the mission formally began, 14 troops from France, Chad, and Equatorial Guinea were reported to have allegedly raped and sodomized six boys between 9 and 15. This was the case that went unreported until Kompass leaked the information to the French authorities. There were 22 more cases that had been reported in CAR alone.
 The head of the UN mission in CAR wrote in his resignation letter that the sexual abuse by peacekeepers may be a “systemic problem” that needs a structural response. The common cause of this problem is impunity. Virtually none of the suspected criminals face any real threat of prosecution. Most cases do not receive a full investigation, and even if a UN inquiry finds that there was a rape there is rarely any consequences. Perpetrators are often even sent home before any action can be taken and victims receive little justice.
 The UN agencies in CAR were seriously flawed in the way that they responded to the reports of sexual abuse. The head of the mission did not take any action following the reports, and did not report the abuse to his superiors at the UN. UNICEF also failed to properly oversee that the children victims received proper counselling and treatment.
 If the UN really wants to have a “zero tolerance” policy, then the whole UN system needs to view sexual abuse as a violation of human rights and not merely as a disciplinary matter. The new UN internal report calls for better leadership within in the UN about these allegations and a trust fund to provide the proper services to the victims. It also calls for UN troops to be carefully vetted before joining the mission. And at its heart, the UN must recognise that sexual abuse is a violation of human rights, and that peacekeepers are stationed to protect that very right.
- The Mandate to Protect
 One of the mandates of the UN’s mission in CAR is to protect civilians that have been affected by the conflict. In this case, it seems that not only the peacekeepers, but also the UN agencies themselves failed their mandate to protect the child victims.
 Two policy frameworks exist when sexual abuse by peacekeepers is reported to the UN. The first is to specifically respond to sexual exploitation and abuse that apply to UN staff, personnel and troops under UN command. This framework, called the SEA Policies, does not apply to the forces not under UN command, such as the Sangaris Forces. Additionally, the SEA Policies do not play any role in persecution, because it is the job of the troop contributing country to take action, which rarely happens. In the end, the alleged criminal troops are able to act with impunity.
 The second policy framework looks at the UN’s human rights mandate and focuses on the victim. This human rights policy framework comes into effect whenever the UN has received a report about a human rights violation, even if the perpetrator was UN staff or not. The UN has an obligation under the human rights policy to investigate and report the crime, and protect the victim.
 Because the troops in question did not directly work for the UN, the SEA policies did not apply. But the human rights policy should have still been in effect. It was the duty of the UN agencies and staff in CAR to report and respond to the crimes, no matter where the troops came from.
 It is up to the UN to end this cycle of impunity that destroys the UN’s credibility in its current and future peacekeeping missions. The SEA and human rights policies must be brought together in order to guarantee that UN staff respond to these crimes in all cases with the seriousness that it should inflict.
 “When peacekeepers exploit the vulnerability of the people they have been sent to protect, it is a fundamental betrayal of trust. When the international community fails to care for the victims or to hold the perpetrators to account, that betrayal is compounded.”
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From Libyans: ‘Thank You, America!’ - The New York Times 10

Jan 28, 16

www.nytimes.com/...libyans-thank-you-america.html Libya US_intervention model_intervention success humanitarian_imperialism R2P myth-making media propaganda NYT nytimes
- The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist
 
 ‘Thank You, America!’
 
 Nicholas Kristof AUG. 31, 2011
 
 
 
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 Inside
- TRIPOLI, Libya
 
 Americans are not often heroes in the Arab world, but as nonstop celebrations unfold here in the Libyan capital I keep running into ordinary people who learn where I’m from and then fervently repeat variants of the same phrase: “Thank you, America!”
 As I was walking back from Green Square (now renamed “Martyrs’ Square”) to my hotel on Wednesday morning, a car draped in the victorious Libyan flag pulled up and offered me a lift. “I just want you to feel welcome here,” explained the driver, Sufian al-Gariani, a 21-year-old salesman. He beamed when he heard where I was from and declared: “Thank you, Americans. Thank you, President Obama.”
- The hard work in Libya is only just beginning, and it’ll be a Herculean challenge to knit together tribal divisions and nurture democracy in a nation where all civil society has been squelched. The Libyan experiment could yet fail. Yet let’s also savor a historic moment: This was a rare military intervention for humanitarian reasons, and it has succeeded. So far.
- Nicholas Kristof Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times
- President Obama took a huge political risk, averted a massacre and helped topple an odious regime. To me, the lesson is not that we should barge into Syria or Yemen — I don’t think we should — but that on rare occasions military force can advance human rights. Libya has so far been a model of such an intervention.
- I drove to Tripoli from Tunisia, and the roads in some places are still insecure. Nervous rebels — occasionally child soldiers — operate frequent checkpoints, and there are long lines for gasoline.
 Yet there has been great progress in the last few days. More roads and shops are opening, and Tripoli now feels reasonably safe. The biggest menace comes not from Qaddafi militias but from rebels firing automatic weapons into the air in celebration.
 
 Nicholas Kristof
 
 Human rights, women’s rights, health, global affairs.
 
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 In Myanmar, a Wife’s Wrenching Decision
 
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 Most strikingly, there has been almost no looting, and little apparent retaliation against the families of loyalists to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. People have grabbed grenade-launchers from arsenals, but they haven’t helped themselves to private shops or homes (with rare exceptions, such as the homes of the Qaddafi family)
- Pro-Americanism now is ubiquitous. I was particularly moved by a rebel soldier near Zuwarah in the west who asked me if New York City was safe. When I looked puzzled, he explained: “Irene. The hurricane.” And he asked how he could help.
 
 “Without America, we would not be here,” Ismael Taweel, a businessman, told me as he stood by Martyrs’ Square with a huge grin on his face. “I hope there will be more relations between Libya and America now,” he added. That’s a common refrain: Libyans are hungry to rejoin the world.
 
 Belgassim Ali, a petroleum engineer, told me: “I would thank America for the stance to protect my people.” Without America, he added, “we would not be celebrating. We would be in the cemetery.”
 
 I told him that many Americans criticized Mr. Obama for the Libyan intervention, arguing that America should solve its own economic problems first. He looked pained and said: “Your money, we will give it back. We are a rich country.” He added that without American military backing, vast numbers of Libyans would have been massacred — that should count for something, he pleaded
- Some Libyans told me that they initially had distrusted the American intervention, fearing that it might turn Libya into something like war-torn Iraq. And Haithem Ahmed, a 24-year-old student with bullet wounds in his stomach and arm, disputed that the intervention was primarily humanitarian: “They didn’t do it for us,” he said. “They did it for oil.”
 But, in his next breath, he added: “I love America so much. It’s the land of freedom.” That warmth toward the United States seems to have replaced the early doubts. It’s coupled with huge appreciation for other foreign supporters such as Qatar, Tunisia, France and Britain.
- We Americans have seen military interventions go awry — we are still seared by Vietnam and Iraq — and caution is worthwhile, for the end of the Libya story has yet to be written. We can’t avert every atrocity, and there are legitimate arguments for investing in nation-building at home rather than abroad. In any case, our use of force will inevitably be inconsistent
- Yet to me Libya is a reminder that sometimes it is possible to use military tools to advance humanitarian causes. This was an exceptional case where we had international and local backing. The big difference with Syria and Yemen is that Libyans overwhelmingly favored our multilateral military intervention, while Syrians and Yemenis mostly don’t.
 The question of humanitarian intervention is one of the knottiest in foreign policy, and it will arise again. The next time it does, let’s remember a lesson of Libya: It is better to inconsistently save some lives than to consistently save none.
 
 •
 I invite you to visit my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook and Google+, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
 
 A version of this op-ed appears in print on September 1, 2011, on page A29 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘Thank You, America!’.
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Four Lectures on Ethics | Lecture 4: Troubled waters 72

Jan 14, 16

Fassin's selective quotations.
Uses classic, standard tropes of "the corrupted dictator"--without any question, and it is not even relevant to his argument
Produces a "conclusion" about ethics, ignoring political economy and geopolitics altogether.
Privileges France's role, shielding the US from criticism.

haubooks.org/...07_ch04 Libya R2P humanitarian_interventionism humanitarian_imperialism anthropology ethics propaganda Eurocentrism Didier_Fassin
- Four Lectures on Ethics Anthropological Perspectives. © 2015 HAU Books, Michael Lambek, Veena Das, Didier Fassin, and Webb Keane. ISBN: 9780990505075
  
  LECTURE FOUR
  
  Troubled waters
  
  At the confluence of ethics and politics
  
  DIDIER FASSIN
  
  What is the real relationship between ethics and politics?
  
  — Max Weber, “The profession and vocation of politics,” 1919
- For more than two thousand years, philosophers have tried to isolate the substance of ethics and morality, whether in terms of foundations or principles. For more than a century, social scientists have in turn also tried to do so, whether they called their object of investigation moral codes or ethical subjectivities. This endeavor has indeed taken numerous forms, both theoretical and empirical, from Aristotle’s virtue ethics to Immanuel Kant’s ethics of duty, from Adam Smith’s moral sentiments to Max Weber’s religious ethics, from Edward Westermarck’s study of the origin of moral ideas to Émile Durkheim’s analysis of the determination of moral facts, from the improbable trolley mental experiment to medieval monks’ mystical experiences. Evolutionary biologists, cognitive psychologists, and neuroimaging specialists have even attempted to identify the grammar of universal moral traits that could define human beings and locate a hardwired ethics within their brain.
- Latecomers in the field despite early attempts to characterize the moral grounds of the particular social worlds they studied, anthropologists have eagerly [176]explored it over the past two or three decades—and substantially renewed our understanding of it. As is well known, their inquiry has followed two major paths (Fassin 2014a). The first focuses on the social constraints of morality, the norms imposed by society, the values shared by its members, and the contribution of the moral order to the social order. The second insists, conversely, on the individual dimensions of ethics, the freedom each person has to deliberate and to decide, and the inner experience through which ethical subjects are formed. Thus outlined, the geography of the field, which reproduces the classical opposition between Kantian and Aristotelian philosophies, is certainly reductive, and multiple overlaps between the two approaches increasingly complicate the landscape I just depicted, the alternative between constraints and freedom being, for some, difficult to sustain empirically as well as theoretically. Yet, the distinction that it allows by contrasting the language of morality and the language of ethics, already proposed by Bernard Williams, remains a helpful convention, although it could also be argued that what anthropologists used to call “moral” is now phrased as “ethical” without strong justifications regarding the difference, but merely because of the appeal of the word. As for me, I associate both terms with only minor semantic inflections.
- Beyond their diverse and sometimes conflicting views, these delineations of domains alternately named the ethnography of moralities (Howell 1996) or the anthropology of ethics (Faubion 2011) logically have in common to single out what constitutes morality or ethics. It is this postulate that I would like to challenge. Not that I deem illegitimate the efforts deployed by philosophers and social scientists to extirpate their moral or ethical gems so as to be able to examine them, but I want to try instead to study them with their gangue and even in their vein in order to provide a distinct account and comprehension of their social meaning. Morality and ethics are, indeed, always embedded in historical contexts, cultural universes, and social practices. They are often intimately linked with economic and political dimensions. Except when they are inscribed in religious or ideological doctrines in which they may be clearly formulated, their identification by anthropologists or sociologists results from a reconstitution through the study of discourses and practices. Such a differentiation between what is moral or ethical and what is not can be assimilated to a form of purification through which moral codes and ethical subjectivities, for instance, are extracted from the course of human activities. This is a legitimate scientific operation that has made us aware of entire areas and particular issues in social life that were until then largely ignored or disregarded. However, by doing so, [177]social scientists, in particular anthropologists, have tended to reproduce what philosophers generally do when they isolate moral principles or ethical dilemmas. While this abstract operation might be justified by theoretical reasons as well as from a prescriptive perspective in the case of philosophy, its application to the social sciences leaves unexplored certain moral and ethical dimensions of human action that are empirically and normatively impure. Such an impurity is never as obvious as in the encounter between ethics and politics.
- In one of his late interviews, Michel Foucault ([1984] 2001: 1414) thus summarized his intellectual enterprise: “In a certain way, one could surely say that I try to analyze the relations between science, politics and ethics. But I do not believe it would be a quite accurate representation of what I want to do. Rather I seek to contemplate how processes possibly interfere with each other in the constitution of a scientific domain, a political structure, a moral practice.” This project, the genealogy of which can be traced back to Nietzsche, becomes increasingly present in Foucault’s last two series of lectures at the Collège de France entitled “The government of the self and others.” In line with this reflection, it is the interface between ethics and politics as apprehended through the lenses of social science that I want to study. I do not imply that all ethics is political or that politics only has to do with ethics but I believe that the intertwining of the two is a defining issue of the contemporary world that has been understudied.
  
  It is hardly a new concern, though. Almost a century ago, in his famous lecture “The profession and vocation of politics,” Max Weber ([1919] 1994: 357) asked, “Is it in fact true that any ethic in the world could establish substantially identical commandments applicable to all relationships, whether erotic, business, family or official, to one’s relationships with one’s wife, greengrocer, son, competitor, with a friend or an accused man? Can the fact that politics operates with a quite specific means, namely power, backed up by the use of violence really be a matter of such indifference as far as the ethical demands placed on politics are concerned?” The domain where ethics and politics intersect and interact is indeed profoundly influenced by power relations and power games at play. This is not to say that power would be absent from other human activities, including parental, conjugal, or sexual, but it is undoubtedly a dominant trait in the political realm, where it is potentially associated with the legitimate use of violence.
- In this essay, I will explore the encounter between ethics and politics through a series of case studies, a method that has been used before (Gutman [178]and Thompson 2006) but to which I intend to give a more general theoretical content. I will do so by moving from international relations to national issues to local scenes and by drawing mostly from previous studies I conducted in various contexts.
  
  Two methodological difficulties, partially related, arise from the case studies presented and, more generally, from the exploration of the interface between ethics and politics. The first one pertains to the individual aspect of ethics contrasted with the collective dimension of politics. The second one concerns the microsocial level of ethics as opposed to the macrosocial scale of politics. Certainly, these dichotomies exaggerate the characterization of the two fields but the tensions between them do exist in the interpretation of the cases, whether one explores “ordinary life,” through love stories across hostile religious groups in India (Das 2010) or linguistic variations in the evocation by a father of the murder of his son in Mexico (Keane 2010), or public life, as I will do in this essay—and it will become clear through the case studies that the boundaries between these two forms of life, ordinary and public, tend to be empirically blurred. How can one study ethical conflicts in the relations between states or nations? How can one approach ethical issues in the civic realm? How can one analyze ethical contradictions within institutions? These are some of the questions I will address.
- I will first examine the domain of humanitarian interventions, which is perhaps the most obvious global site of ethical debates, to discuss the three main philosophical theories: ethics of duty, virtue ethics, and consequentialism. I will then analyze the question of civil rights and the moral dilemmas that they may elicit, to distinguish between two ethics: conviction and responsibility. I will finally consider the issue of misconducts within professions and institutions, and their moral justifications by the agents, to illustrate the importance to analyze the full range of values and affects notwithstanding their positive or negative orientation.
  
  Developing and discussing these case studies, I intend to pursue the critical and fruitful dialogue with philosophy that I engaged in several essays, arguing for a respectful and loyal betrayal rather than a mere application of concepts (Fassin 2014b). More specifically, I will appeal to interpretations generally presented as distinct and even incompatible or contradictory to show that when they are considered in actual situations the lines between them tend to become blurred. Such an inquiry on the borders between disciplines and the boundaries between fields means venturing to perilous grounds where epistemologies are not stabilized but where, I hope, the reader will follow me.[179]
- ETHICAL QUESTIONING: ON THE LIBYAN CASE
  
  The intervention of French and British forces in Libya, which started with the support of the United States and seven other countries on March 19, 2011, has been considered the first real test for the Responsibility to Protect principle adopted by the United Nations in 2005 (Fassin 2013a). This principle, often abbreviated as R2P, is the response to the massacre of Srebrenica and the genocide in Rwanda, for which the organization had been left paralyzed as it passively watched the massive killings occur. Deemed a major advance in the ethics of international relations, it implies that in cases of genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, the member states of the United Nations have a responsibility to protect the victims using “all necessary measures,” from diplomatic pressures to military operations. For its promoters, it radically differs from previous tentative efforts to impose a “right to intervene” or even a “duty to intervene,” which would have definitely shaken the principle of state sovereignty inherited from the Westphalian agreement almost four centuries ago: when invoked under the Responsibility to Protect, military intervention is only a last resort after all other options have failed and as populations are in grave danger. For its critics, however, it is a mere continuation of “muscular humanitarianism,” in Anne Orford’s terms (1999): to declare that all other options have failed and that populations are in grave danger is for her a matter of judgment dependent on strategic interests. Indeed, in the end, the R2P principle legitimates armed action whenever powerful nations decide so.
- It was in Libya that the new doctrine served for the first time to engage in warfare. The Security Council adopted Resolution 1973 on March 17, with ten countries voting in favor of the text, while China, Russia, India, Brazil, and Germany abstained. The attack started two days later as the ceasefire announced by the Libyan government was not deemed credible. The announced objective was to impose a no-fly zone over a large part of the country. In Misrata and Benghazi particularly, populations were said to be imperiled by the progression of Muammar Gaddafi’s army and its airstrikes. The head of the National Transitional Council announced a catastrophe, predicting half a million deaths if the troops entered the cities held by the rebels. The French president and the British prime minister convinced the leaders of the other countries (members of the Security Council) to back up or at least not oppose the armed operation. Nine days after the beginning of the international intervention, Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron jointly rejoiced in a public statement, “hundreds of thousands [180]of people had been saved from a humanitarian disaster.” Despite the vagueness of the meaning of the sentence—were lives actually saved or was a potential disaster avoided?—no better justification could be invoked when resorting to force in the application of the Responsibility to Protect: menaced by their own government, the populations faced a grave danger unless immediate action was taken. The operation was, indeed, not depicted as military but as humanitarian.
- The case was, prima facie, relatively simple. Inspired by the Arab Spring that had resulted in the overthrow of two authoritarian presidents by civilian protesters in Tunisia and Egypt, a social movement developed in January 2011 against the corrupted dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who had been in power for more than four decades. As the demonstrations turned into confrontations with the police and as the security forces fired live ammunition against the demonstrators, the unrest rapidly evolved into a civil war. The rebels, who included civilians, defected police and military, and presumably Islamist groups, took control of large portions of the country but the governmental forces soon regained part of the territory lost and marched on the seceding cities. Public relations on both sides tried to depict their respective enemy as involved in killings and torture. The official army was accused of hiring foreign mercenaries and systematically raping women.
- In parallel, intense diplomatic activity was taking place under the aegis of France and Britain (in the European Union) to adopt a common position, as well as at Security Council (of the United Nations) in order to avoid the veto of Russia and China. Influenced by the French public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy who, having gone to Benghazi as a journalist and having met with the leaders of the rebellion, pleaded for a rapid intervention, Nicolas Sarkozy, without even informing his minister of foreign affairs, hurriedly recognized the National Transitional Council as the legitimate government of Libya and, with the active support of David Cameron, personally intervened with the fourteen other heads of state of the Security Council to convince them that a military operation was the only option. Two days later, Resolution 1973 was passed, and the bombings of the allied forces over Libya started. After seven months of ensuing naval attacks and airstrikes, of which the number of casualties remains unknown four years later, the end of the operation was announced as Gaddafi’s death was confirmed.
- Considered to be the main author of the Responsibility to Protect principle, former Australian minister of foreign affairs Gareth Evans had written in the Sydney Morning Herald on March 24, 2011: “The international military [181]intervention in Libya is not about bombing for democracy or Muammar Gaddafi’s head—let alone keeping oil prices down or profits up. Legally, morally, politically and militarily it has only one justification: protecting the country’s people from the kind of murderous harm that Gaddafi inflicted on unarmed protesters four weeks ago, has continued to apply to those who oppose him in the areas he controls, and has promised to inflict on anyone against him should his forces recapture Benghazi and other rebel ground.” Yet, speaking much less confidently at a conference in Melbourne on July 20, 2012, Evans deplored the loss of consensus behind the principle he had promoted, the result being the absence of international response to the massacres perpetrated at that time in Syria by the army of Hafez al-Assad, a situation comparable in many ways with that encountered earlier in Libya, although the “Gaddafi regime’s violence was much less than Assad’s,” according to the former Australian minister. “Consensus has simply evaporated in a welter of recrimination about how the NATO-led implementation of the Council’s Libya mandate ‘to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack’ was actually carried out. We have to frankly recognize that there has been some infection of the whole R2P concept by the perception, accurate or otherwise, that the civilian protection mandate granted by the Council was manifestly exceeded by that military operation”. So, how to explain Evans’ disenchantment? Why did the international consensus evaporate? What went wrong with the application of the principle for which he had pleaded?
- Before answering these questions—which have to do with the failure of the intervention to live up to the international community’s expectations—a preliminary interrogation should be formulated regarding the very grounds of the operation: Was it justified, as the promoters of the Responsibility to Protect principle assumed and as the vote at the Security Council seemed to indicate? The presentation of the situation by the media, many politicians, various nongovernmental organizations and, of course, the leaders of the rebels left little doubt about it: a massacre was on the verge of being perpetrated by one of the most brutal dictators of the continent, and only immediate preventive action could avoid it. However, some condemned this bellicose precipitation. Theorist of “just wars,” Michael Walzer (2011) wrote in The New Republic, as early as March 20, 2011, that the bombing was unjustified because its goals were unclear, the support of the Arab nations was missing, and the conditions of the application of the responsibility to protect were not met since no indication existed that massive killings of civilians would occur. But it is outside the Western [182]world, in Africa and the Middle East in particular, that the military operation, viewed as prompted by economic interests and imperialist motivations, received the widest opposition from intellectuals as well as the general public.
- Strikingly, probably more than in Britain, where the contested intervention in Iraq had left traces among the population, there was broad consensus in France behind the president’s bellicose stand, as opinion polls revealed. At the National Assembly, almost all representatives, from Conservatives to Socialists, maintained their support for the right-wing government’s military engagement during the whole campaign, the only exception being the Communists. But no less conspicuously, the largest French humanitarian organization, Doctors Without Borders, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was among the few criticizing the military intervention as “legal but illegitimate” since, according to them, it trivialized the use of force to settle internal conflicts. Analyzing the events at the end of the operations, the former president of the organization Rony Brauman went as far as to declare in Le Monde on November 25, 2011, that the supposed column of tanks progressing toward Benghazi and the announced destruction of the port of Misrata by airstrikes had been mere “propaganda” of the National Transitional Council, as were the presumed massacres of civilians, which were never authenticated. Actually, even the allegations of rape serving as a weapon of war (the Viagra boxes provided as proof were too well preserved considering they were said to have been found in charred tanks), of the use of foreign mercenaries (the Sub-Saharan Africans presented as such were actually undocumented migrants), and of the bombing of civilian protesters by helicopters, all accusations that had significantly contributed to the surge of indignation worldwide and the justification of the military operation, were contested by an independent report by Amnesty International in June 2011: no evidence of these claims was found. Although it is impossible to determine precisely what was the situation when Resolution 1973 was voted and what would have been the outcome of the attack against the rebels had the intervention not been undertaken, the decision to overthrow the regime—and not simply to protect the population—seemed to have been made several weeks before the counteroffensive by the French president who had declared that “Gaddafi must go.”
- Indeed, even those strongly in favor of the military intervention were troubled by its development into a “mission creep,” in James Pattison’s words (2011), with its main objective the deposition of the Libyan dictator instead of the announced imposition of a no-fly zone. To understand both the decision to intervene and what appeared to have been from the start the real objective of [183]the operation, domestic considerations have to be taken into account (Chorin 2012). For years, Gaddafi had been demonized in the West: his support of liberation movements blacklisted by the United States had been used as justification for airstrikes on Tripoli and Benghazi in 1986, killing the Libyan leader’s daughter; his suspected implication in terrorist attacks against two airplanes in 1988 and 1989 that caused the death of more than four hundred people, many of them British and French, led to international economic sanctions. But in the 2000s, things changed. The regime collaborated with the government of the United States in its war against Islamist terrorism, agreed to compensate the families of the victims of its attacks, and officially renounced its nuclear program, thus after 2004 obtaining a progressive normalization of its relations with Western countries, in particular the European nations eager to access Libya’s oil reserves, benefit from promising markets (including weapon sales in the case of Britain), and work out migration control at the southern borders of Europe, a major concern for the Italian government.
- Immediately after his election as president in 2007, Sarkozy engaged in negotiations with Libya for the liberation of five Bulgarian nurses and a physician of Palestinian origin accused of having caused HIV infections among children, missioned his wife and his general secretary for secret discussions in Tripoli, and after the deportation of the health workers, expressed his gratitude to Gaddafi (Zoubir 2012). As part of a series of official invitations to European capitals, the Libyan dictator was received in Paris with great pomp for what a New York Times reporter called on December 11, 2007 “a reward,” quoting the French president’s special advisor for foreign affairs as saying that Gaddafi had “a right to redemption.” However, Sarkozy had to endure the humiliation of his guest’s whims and provocations, such as the installment of his sumptuous tent near the Elysée Palace, the official presidential residence. As this visit by the newly rehabilitated autocrat had caused embarrassment and protests in France, including within the government, and as later media revelations about developments in the friendship between the two heads of state and their close collaborators had generated further abashment, the uncontrollable dictator had fallen into disfavor.
- In this context, the prospect of a Libyan Spring was regarded as an opportunity for the increasingly unpopular French president to redress his political mistakes, particularly after he had been criticized for his management of the previous Arab Spring and had to ask his former minister of foreign affairs to resign due to her too-close relationship with the Tunisian autocrat. According [184]to an analysis published by Forbes on March 29, 2011, although factually distinct, domestic considerations were not so different in substance for the British government as Tony Blair’s disturbing secret negotiations with Gaddafi in 2007 and 2008 had been made public, as the liberation of the principal perpetrator of the Lockerbie attack for humanitarian reasons in 2009 had caused emotions among the family of the victims, and as the prospective investments of British Petroleum in Libya were considered to be at stake. In sum, the noble humanitarian argument put forward by the French and British leaders as a justification for the attack was not without ulterior motives, which the reorientation of the mission uncovered. The rejection of several hundred refugees fleeing the conflict and the airstrikes, who were stopped and turned back at the southern border of France, later revealed the limits of the president’s compassion for the suffering of Libyans.
- But still more problematic than this drift, the evolution of the situation on the ground raised growing concerns about the consequences of the intervention both in the short and long term, as discussed by Alan Kuperman (2013). With NATO’s operation considered to have increased the duration of the war, the death toll is estimated by some experts to have been seven to ten times greater, with war crimes as well as crimes against humanity perpetrated on both sides, including the killing of Sub-Saharan African migrants accused of being mercenaries of the regime. Perhaps even more preoccupying, four years after the official end of the conflict, the country remains divided into four areas under the control of antagonistic organizations, including the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and Libya has become a geostrategic site for rivalries between Muslim governments in the Middle East, with Egypt and Emirates launching air raids against Islamist groups supported by Turkey and Qatar. Furthermore, the spillover of the conflict into the region, in particular Algeria and Mali, has been facilitated by the dissemination of military and militias as well as the scattering of weapons from looted arsenals, leading to the strengthening of rebel and jihadist groups in the Sahel and to further military interventions of France in the region. Ultimately, the Responsibility to Protect principle has been partially discredited, and the fragile consensus formed around it has been broken: governments that had been reluctant to join the military operation in Libya but had accepted not to veto it felt they had been deceived and later systematically opposed similar resolutions, notably in Syria.
- How to interpret the Libyan case in light of the relationship between ethics and politics? Humanitarianism has a long genealogy and a short history: the [185]former can be traced back to the eighteenth century and beyond as a political theology characterized by the alleviation of suffering and the saving of lives in the name of a common humanity; the latter rapidly expands at the end of the twentieth century at the interface between nongovernmental organizations, multilateral agencies, and states as a global policy of compassion and rescue (Fassin 2012). The Responsibility to Protect is both the continuation and the culmination of the humanitarian project from the perspective of international relations, since it substitutes the superior ethical obligation to defend populations whose survival is threatened and whose suffering becomes intolerable for the historic principle of national sovereignty, or rather renders the latter subsidiary to the former in extreme situations. Indeed, the Responsibility to Protect stipulates, first, that states maintain the primary responsibility for the protection of their population, second, that the international community has a responsibility to assist them in fulfilling this objective, and third, that it must consequently use all appropriate means to achieve this goal, including the use of force through the United Nations. According to the new doctrine, sovereignty can therefore be respected as long as the protection of the population is not imperiled by the very sovereign.
- The Responsibility to Protect clearly belongs to the Kantian tradition of the ethics of duty. It imposes a moral obligation on each state to protect its own population and, in case of default by one, on the United Nations to act by substitution. For Kant ([1785] 2005: 61–63), an action can be good but have no moral worth if it is done by interest or by inclination or in consideration of its consequences. Only “an action done from duty derives its moral worth, not from the purpose which is to be attained by it, but from the maxim by which it is determined, and therefore, does not depend on the realization of the object of the action, but merely on the principle of volition by which the action has taken place, without regard for any object of desire.” Thus, “duty is the necessity of acting from respect for the law.” But what is that law, which has no regard for the effects it produces? The answer is, notoriously, the categorical imperative: “I am never to act otherwise than so that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law.”The Responsibility to Protect can thus be viewed as the reverence to the universal law that commands to avoid the suffering and preserve the lives of people threatened by genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Both the formulation of the principle and its application pertain to duty. However, as the Libyan case shows, two elements interfere with the strict ethics of duty as pure reverence for the law.[186]
- The first one is what Kant describes as “inclination,” of which he gives as an example the fact of helping others for the pleasure felt at the sight of their happiness. In the context of humanitarianism, compassion in front of the distress endured by others is a crucial motive for action and has tactically been used by governments to justify military operations on humanitarian grounds. The Libyan rebels knew it as they produced narratives, testimonies, and images that elicited such response. And the public in the West, including politicians, could not avoid being moved as well as attracted by the spectacle of human affliction. Sincerely or not, such exposition contributed to the legitimation of the intervention in Libya. More generally, in the humanitarian realm, moral sentiments are intricately associated with the moral principles deriving from the universal law: affects and values are closely linked and the desire to act is inseparable from the will to act. But such an observation is not limited to humanitarianism, as Émile Durkheim ([1906] 2010: 36) emphasized in his effort to develop a sociology of moral facts: “Moral rules are invested with special authority by virtue of which they are obeyed simply because they command. Obligation is, then, one of the primary characteristics of the moral rule. In opposition to Kant, however, we shall show that the notion of duty does not exhaust the concept of morality. For us to become the agent of an act it must interest our sensibility to a certain extent and appear to us as, in some way, desirable.” In Durkheim’s view, if the philosopher can prescriptively decide how one ought to act morally, the social scientist should rather establish descriptively how one does act morally, under the empire of both principles and emotions.
- The second addition to the ethics of duty corresponds to “self-interest,” as Kant has it, providing as an illustration the merchant who does not overcharge an inexperienced customer because such a breach of trust would have negative effects on his business due to the competitive local market. In the Libyan case, the self-interest of the heads of state or government and their countries certainly played a role in the decision to intervene. As they assessed the situation, the French president and the British prime minister have included the expected benefits of the operation on their respective domestic situation, in terms of personal authority and popularity as well as geopolitical and economic implications for their countries and their companies. These links between morality and self-interest have long been discussed in the social sciences, and Bernard Mandeville’s fable of the bees ([1714] 1970) and its paradoxes provoked a scandal in his time. They are also part of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic capital[187] ([1994] 1998: 85): “Is a disinterested act possible?” he asks, and his answer is that “every field, in producing itself, produces a form of interest which, from the point of view of another field, may seem like disinterestedness” and that, reciprocally, it is always possible to uncover “interest in disinterestedness.” No need to be cynical, however, to integrate self-interest in the selective implementation of the responsibility to protect. Again, whereas the philosopher defines a moral act in normative terms, the social scientist contemplates its social logics, including the role of self-interest.
- Thus far, only the Kantian ethics of duty has been discussed, even if it has been challenged or enriched from the perspective of the social sciences by inclination and self-interest, that is, appealing to moral sentiments and recognition of realist motivations. Yet, humanitarianism should certainly not be reduced to this paradigm. On the one hand, one cannot discard Aristotelian virtue ethics, among fieldworkers as well as decision-makers, within nongovernmental organizations as well as state apparatuses, in Libya as elsewhere. Most agents do not only act according to what is their duty but also in part according to their intuition and reflection about what is good, as described by Peter Redfield (2013). The principle of the responsibility to protect threatened populations is not exclusive of the sense of feeling responsible with respect to the protection of people who are in danger. The emotional inclination and the rational selfinterest do not debar virtuous reflexivity regarding the best action to conduct. One would not grasp the ethical meaning of humanitarianism in its entirety if it were to be restricted to the accomplishment of an obligation, simply tempered by affects and nourished by calculation. Something of an ethics of care is simultaneously at work, at least among some of those involved or simply concerned. But on the other hand, one has also to take into account consequentialist ethics, which evaluates the morality of the act in consideration of its foreseeable effects. These effects, as David Kennedy argues (2004), are often quite remote from what one would guess. In light of what is known about the process of the decision to intervene in Libya, it is clear, however, that the sense of urgency to launch the military operation, for whatever reason or motivation, prevailed over the thorough analysis of what would happen next locally, regionally, and internationally. And in light of what is known about the outcome of the operation in terms of casualties and violations of human rights as well as insecurity and instability in the country and the region, it is obvious that the negative consequences of the intervention, although partially predictable from precedents in Afghanistan or Iraq, were largely overlooked.[188]
- Obligation, character, and anticipation, to which can be added sentiment and interest, thus constitute the complex intertwining of ethical threads involved in humanitarianism or, more specifically here, military intervention in the name of the Responsibility to Protect. Rather than a clear delineation of ethics of duty, virtue ethics, and consequentialism, it is the articulation of the three and the relative weight given to each of them that ultimately defines the intersection of ethics and politics. Anthropologists and sociologists who study international relations do not have to choose between the paradigms: based on their empirical research and theoretical interpretation, they must instead attempt to grasp the links, tensions, and contradictions between the logics of duty, virtue, and consequences, which are also affected by emotional impulses, influenced by expected advantages, and ultimately embedded in political stakes. Humanitarian intervention in general and its military avatar in particular are much more than the mere benevolent protection of populations in the name of which they are conducted. But other ways of accounting for the intersection between ethics and politics are possible as revealed by the controversies raised in the aftermath of a dramatic event that took place in Paris.
- ETHICAL ALTERNATIVE: ON THE CHARLIE ATTACK
  
  The shooting at Charlie Hebdo on January 7, followed two days later by the attack on a kosher supermarket, tragically inaugurated 2015 in France. But perhaps more than the acts themselves, it is the collective response they elicited in the population that has received international attention: four million people peacefully marched all over the country under banners reading Je suis Charlie, I am Charlie, on January 11, 2015. All political parties had called for the demonstrations, in which only the National Front had been declared unwelcome, with the battle cry: “Against barbarity, let us defend the values of the Republic!” Of these values, two were more specifically at stake: liberté and laïcité, since the shooting of people associated with the publication violated free speech and the fact that they would have been targeted because of the antireligious content of their work infringed secular principles (Fassin 2015). Indeed, the Kouachi brothers, who had killed twelve persons in the offices of the satirical magazine and nearby, including five famous cartoonists, wanted to avenge the offense of having represented the Prophet Muhammad, and especially of having done so in a debasing manner (for example, naked in the prayer prostration position uttering Brigitte [189]Bardot’s famous line in Jean-Luc Godard’s film Contempt: “And my butt, do you like my butt?”) and in an insulting way toward Muslims (for instance, in tears despairingly complaining: “It’s hard being loved by jerks!”). But these provocations were not isolated. They occurred within a broader context of rampant Islamophobia openly expressed in France (Hajjat and Mohammed 2013) and across Europe (Gottschalk and Greenberg 2007) by the far right, part of the right, and beyond. In this context, the two brothers, who had lived through difficult childhood and youth, ended up being prey of the proselytism of Islamist preachers and deciding to perpetrate their deadly attack.
- The January 11 march and more generally the Je suis Charlie movement, obviously focusing on the assault in the offices of the satirical magazine, tended to overshadow the other killing, that of Jews in a kosher store. Although anti-Semitism was firmly denounced by the government as well as Muslim leaders and painfully experienced by the Jewish communities, the mobilization never explicitly differentiated the murder of individuals for what they do and the murder of individuals for what they are. In a sense, the crimes against the Republic somewhat eclipsed the crimes against humanity. This was probably due to the popularity of the cartoonists, to the absence of precedent of such aggression, and to the sense that values essential to the French nation had been transgressed. In France, liberty and secularism are generally presented as two sacred pillars of the nation, the legacy of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen and the 1905 Law on the Separation of Church and State, respectively. The second of these principles, in particular, had been in the past two decades the object of a voluntarist politics of the French government and parliament targeting what was viewed as a threat posed by Muslims to secular democracy. As shown by Joan Scott (2007), the passing of the law banning the wearing of “signs or clothing which conspicuously manifest students’ religious affiliations” in public elementary, middle, and high schools in 2004, and the impassioned controversy that surrounded it, revealed that the “politics of the veil”—since the legislation aimed in fact at prohibiting headscarves—meant much more than a defense of secularism. More generally the radicalization of the promoters of laïcité has profoundly modified the spirit of its initial advocates and, according to Jean Baubérot (2014), has “distorted” its very principle.
- In fact, after the Charlie attack, the defense of liberty and secularism by state officials and civil society, however sincere it was for many, overlooked the numerous breaches already existing in the application of these principles. Indeed, on the side of free speech, denigration of the national flag or anthem, [190]denial or irreverence regarding a genocide, or calls for the trade boycott of a foreign country have become increasingly prosecuted under the French law, and on the side of secular practices, the state generously subsidizes private education systems for Christians and Jews, the teaching of religion is mandatory in public schools in Alsace Moselle, and the French presidents are granted by the pope the title of sole honorary canon of Saint John Lateran inherited from the ancien régime when France was deemed “the elder daughter of the Church.” Thus, not all discourses are protected by the freedom of speech and not all religious groups were imposed the same secular rule, but few commentators noted the double standards used by the state in the application of these foundational principles. Ironically, the mere fact of evoking publicly the unequal treatment of Islam raised suspicion and could even be severely punished—and has been when students have done so in the classroom, paradoxically after they had been invited to express their opinion by their professor. On January 14, the minister of education herself declared at the National Assembly, “these questions about double standards are intolerable to us, especially at school, which is charged with transmitting values.” Notwithstanding such contradictions, the creeds of both free speech and secular society benefitted from a broad national consensus in France.
- Former member of the Charlie Hebdo editorial team and well-known for her repeated criticisms of Islam, Caroline Fourest (2015) was on the forefront of the mobilization for free speech and radical secularism, going so far as to write a two-hundred-page “vindication for blasphemy.” One week after the attack, she was invited to speak on British television. During her Sky News interview, to the surprise of the journalist Dharshini David, she suddenly brandished a copy of the satirical magazine showing Muhammad. The broadcast was interrupted and the anchor apologized to the audience, regretting that some viewers “might have been offended” and reminding that her that the channel had made the “decision not to show this cover.” In the previous days, the French essayist had made similar attempts on the US cable news networks CNN and MSNBC, but since the interviews had been prerecorded, the image had been blurred before it was broadcast. Referring to the episode on Sky News, Caroline Fourest complained on the French media about the “treason of British journalists” and the “unprecedented violence and absolute hypocrisy” of the censorship of which she had been the victim.
- This anecdote is revealing of a broader phenomenon. While in France the medias have chosen to exhibit the cover of the magazine ostensibly and [191]insistently, in the United Kingdom and the United States they have generally decided not to do so. Many French commentators deemed the latter attitude complaisance, if not pusillanimity. Conversely, on the other side of the Channel and the Atlantic, the former stand was often regarded as uselessly insulting and stigmatizing. In fact, the ideological landscape was less homogeneous than it seemed, and each society was itself divided along these lines, as revealed by the protests of two hundred writers when in New York PEN American Center granted an award for “freedom of expression courage” to Charlie Hebdo in May 2015. Similar impassioned debates have taken place worldwide. Mutually exclusive, the two positions—to publish or not to publish—have often discredited each other, the radicals calling their adversaries indulgent of Muslims and the liberals considering their opponents to be intolerant of Islam. How can one provide some “moral clarity” (Shatz 2015) in this debate? Rather than opposing courage and cowardice, as was common in France in the aftermath of the killings, or liberality and bigotry, as was heard in Britain and the United States, I suggest viewing the two positions as alternative ethics.
- For Weber ([1919] 1994: 359–60), at the heart of the relationship between ethics and politics lies a conflict between “two fundamentally different, irreconcilably opposed maxims.” The first one is the “ethic of conviction,” which is absolutist. It is sometimes also translated as the ethic of ultimate ends. The individual who acts in function of this ethic will do so by following the principles of his religion or ideology whatever the cost may be. The second one is the “ethic of responsibility,” which is relativist. It pays special attention to the means used. The individual who acts according to this ethic will do so by anticipating the potential effects of the decision made. “If evil consequences flow from an action done out of pure conviction, this type of person holds the world, not the doer, responsible, or the stupidity of others, or the will of God who made them thus. A man who subscribes to the ethic of responsibility, by contrast, will make allowances for precisely these everyday shortcomings.” In a context of war, for instance, a “person of very firm socialist convictions” may have to choose between a few more years of conflict leading to a revolution or an immediate peace with a political status quo.
- But although his inclination is clearly toward the second option, Weber ([1919] 1994: 361–67) does not caricaturize the opposition: “It is not that the ethic of conviction is identical with irresponsibility, nor that the ethic of responsibility means the absence of principled conviction—there is no question of that.” Actually, the alternative is not easy to solve: “No ethic in the world can get [192]round the fact that the achievement of ‘good’ ends is in many cases tied to the necessity of employing morally suspect or at least morally dangerous means, and that one must reckon with the possibility or even likelihood of evil side-effects. Nor can any ethic in the world determine when and to what extent the ethically good end ‘sanctifies’ the ethically dangerous means and side-effects.” The implication is that there is no easy solution to this sort of dilemma: “Whether one ought to act on the basis of an ethics of conviction or one of responsibility, and when one should do the one or the other, these are not things about which one can give instructions to anybody.” In the end, “the ethics of conviction and the ethics of responsibility are not absolute opposites.” Rather, “they are complementary to one another.” This optimistic conclusion might not be entirely satisfying, though: there remains something practically unresolvable in this confrontation because the options are intellectually incompatible.
- The response to the Charlie Hebdo attack provides ample evidence of it: one has to decide whether or not to publish the caricatures of Muhammad. A choice has to be made. More generally, one cannot argue simultaneously for the absolute application of principles in the name of one’s conviction and the preferential attention to the consequences of such application in the name of one’s responsibility. But in this particular case, there is no perfect symmetry between the two ethics for two reasons: one is theoretical, the other empirical. From a theoretical perspective, the ethics of conviction emphasizes principles of democracy, here freedom and laïcité, which supposedly represent its French version named Republicanism, while the ethics of responsibility values the foundations of politics, that is, in Hannah Arendt’s terms (2005: 93), “the fact of human plurality” or “the coexistence and association of different men.” The latter can be regarded as less specific and more universal than the former. One could say that it is less historically bounded and has more anthropological depth. From an empirical perspective, the ethics of conviction is claimed by dominant groups and selectively applied to dominated ones, since Muslims occupy the lower segment of society and endure various forms of discrimination, as discussed by John Bowen (2015), whereas the ethics of responsibility tends to be inclusive of both groups by acknowledging the historical, cultural, and social context in which principles are formulated. The apparent neutrality of the call for abstract ideals of the former often conceals the actual inequality of their concrete application, to which the latter is more sensitive. One could argue that this asymmetry in power relations has ethical implications. Let us examine the two positions in more detail.[193]
- On the one hand, those defending the ethics of conviction invoke free speech and radical secularism, meaning in this case the right to blaspheme, which has become commonplace in France and even, in practice, a duty to blaspheme since even before the Charlie attacks refusing to show the caricature of the Prophet was presented as an ethical renouncement. Yet, the actual application of these principles seems to contradict them. First, although it has universal claims, such a posture is weakened by its relative inconsistency: the authorities that speak out for freedom of expression and defense of laïcité prosecute activists who manifest anti-Zionist opinions (the French state systematically brings to justice those who advocate for the boycott, disinvestment, and sanction campaign) and generously fund Catholic schools (which welcome one thousand times more students and receive five thousand times more public funds than Muslim schools, despite the fact that Muslims are only five times less numerous than Catholics). Second, although it is allegedly applied to all faiths equally, blasphemy focuses on one of them, whereas others are spared such profanity (if one defines it as irreverence with respect to what is regarded as sacred in a given social group, ridiculing the Prophet could be deemed equivalent to mocking the Holocaust, but the promoters of blasphemy accept the former while condemning the latter). In the end, the double standard and the symbolic domination that it reveals undermine the democratic promise.
- On the other hand, those defending the ethics of responsibility invoke the recognition of the sensibility of others, who feel insulted and discriminated by the representation and derision of the Prophet and the risk of generating social disorders, even on a global scale with the possibility of lives lost, and in both aspects, facts proved them true, since many Muslims all over the world were indignant, leading to violent protests and harsh repression. The issues raised by their contradictors against this position are twofold. First, they fear the development of censorship and self-censorship: this concern is legitimate but should be deemed so for all expressions of satire, criticism, and dissidence, whatever their target. Second, they worry about the place granted to religious beliefs by a secular state: this preoccupation is, again, comprehensible but reflects the hardening of secularism in the past decades in France even more than the shift in the public presence of religions. For those who argue in favor of the ethics of responsibility, these two risks, which should certainly not be overlooked, are however counterbalanced by the expected benefits: respect for the dignity of all citizens whatever their faith and integration of the various communities into the national collectivity.[194]
- But the analysis of the confrontation between the ethics of conviction and the ethics of responsibility, in the case under study, should not be limited to the exchange of arguments on both sides as if it were a pure intellectual dispute. Both historical and political contexts matter. Indeed, the publication of the caricatures occurred at a time when Islam was increasingly represented with negative traits in France and more broadly throughout the Western world and when Muslims were confronted with hostile and provocative attitudes in the European and North American countries where they lived. It was also a time in the history of the Middle East and more broadly the Muslim world when the radicalization of jihadist groups generated violent conflicts and when the sensitization of larger segments of the population facilitated extreme tensions. The cartoonists were conscious of their dangerous game. The preachers played with the frustrations of Muslims. All knew the setting of their actions. It is precisely the consideration of this historical and political background that inclines Weber toward the ethics of responsibility: for him, to be responsible is to take into account the context, from which one can derive foreseeable consequences and decide in favor of the least damageable option.
- But precisely because the context is so crucial for the interpretation of these ethical choices and because politics is so intimately linked to ethics in the public sphere, the signification and implication of each ethic vary depending on the circumstances. Whereas the expression of conviction (in the defense of freedom and secularism after the attacks) was consensual and therefore with little risk for those who professed it in France, it sometimes represents the ultimate and dauntless option for those who speak truth to power (by contrast with the cartoonists who mocked an already stigmatized social group). One can think of the Mauritanian engineer Mohamed Cheikh Ould Mohamed, a member of a lower caste of Black African origin, accused of apostasy and sentenced to death for an article denouncing the religious roots of social inequality in his country, or of the Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo, a human rights activist, accused of subversion and sentenced to eleven years in prison for his participation in a manifesto calling for the democratization of his society. Symmetrically, while the invocation of responsibility (against the call for absolute principles) was a way of resisting a largely accepted stance in the French context, it can turn into lenient acceptation of the status quo at whatever cost (by contrast with the uncomfortable position of those who did not associate with the collective momentum). One could evoke European leaders not willing to establish common policies to rescue endangered immigrants in the Mediterranean Sea or to grant asylum to [195]refugees from African and Middle Eastern countries at war, with the arguments of the need to control borders, prevent xenophobia, limit the expansion of the far right, and maintain the sustainability of welfare programs.
- Thus, the meaning of the opposition between ethics of conviction and ethics of responsibility depends on the field of forces in which it is embedded. Expressing one’s conviction to defend rights against powerful agents is different from doing so against dominated groups. Arguing in favor of responsibility is not the same when one represents the former or protects the latter. This does not imply that criticizing powerful agents is in itself good, or right, and that criticism is necessarily bad, or wrong, when it concerns dominated groups. I am simply arguing that the implications are different as is the signification. The leaks regarding the practices of spying on both domestic and foreign communications by the National Security Agency are a case in point. Whatever one thinks of his deeds, Edward Snowden acted in the name of an ethics of conviction, to shield citizens’ privacy and liberty. He did it at the peril of his reputation and even life. One can refer to the “courage of truth,” as Foucault ([2008] 2011) analyzes it, using Socrates as an example. And however one judges its response, the Obama administration justified it in the terms of an ethics of responsibility, arguing that maintaining the secret system and charging the whistleblower for espionage were necessary to ensure the protection of the national security. The cost was major infringements of civil and human rights for both the public and the accused, including, for the latter, violations of his right to a fair trial (since the case was to be presented behind closed doors) and to asylum (since pressures were exerted on other governments to avoid its granting). One can read this attitude as a compromise privileging security over liberty and sovereignty over rights, and one will then have to decide, in light of history, whether or not it is what Avishai Margalit (2010) calls a “rotten compromise,” giving the 1938 Munich agreement as a powerful illustration of the price paid in such case.
- In other words, Weber’s heuristic differentiation between the ethics of conviction and the ethics of responsibility needs to be assessed in each specific historical and political context, considering more specifically the power relations and power games in which they are inserted. They involve more than idealism, on the side of conviction, and pragmatism, on the side of responsibility. From the perspective of the social sciences, their interpretation cannot be made in the absolute. One has to take into account the structure of domination that is involved and the context in which it makes sense. Actually, Weber’s proclaimed preference for the ethics of responsibility over the ethics of conviction should [196]itself be understood in the historical and political moment of his famous 1919 lecture to the Free Students Union in Munich—that is, in the immediate aftermath of the Spartacist Uprising, which, as a public figure, he had strongly opposed: the revolution ended up in the bloodbath of the government’s repression.
- Hence, avoiding a value judgment on the two ethics would be probably more faithful to the German sociologist’s epistemological principles. It might be preferable to affirm instead the importance of the analytic distinction between them rather than of a normative hierarchy among them. The ethics of conviction and the ethics of responsibility have different cultural meanings and social implications, and may therefore be evaluated differently depending on the historical setting and the political stakes. This assertion is not only true of Weber’s two ethics; it applies to all ethical forms. It does not entail moral relativism but simply the recognition of the necessity for the social scientists to differentiate ethics (rather than rejecting as unethical any stance that does not correspond to one’s ethical position) and to contextualize their interpretation (rather than analyzing them in absolute terms). Such precautions become especially crucial when one analyzes what is generally viewed as deviant practices from an ethical perspective.
- ETHICAL TENSIONS: ON POLICE MISCONDUCT
  
  Although everyone would agree that it is not a novel phenomenon but rather an old reality only recently acknowledged, problems related to serious malpractice in law enforcement have become prominent over the past decades (Fassin [2013] 2015). In Britain the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993, in France the death of Zyed Benna and Bouna Traore in 2005, and in the United States the killing of Michael Brown and Eric Garner in 2014—only to mention a few events that generated collective awareness and urban unrest in the respective countries where these tragedies took place—have led to uncover more broadly the banality of racial discrimination, physical abuse, and illegal practices among police forces as well as the conspicuous impunity from which perpetrators benefited. Beyond the individual misdeeds, however, the institution and even the state itself have begun to be held responsible for such actions upsetting common moral sense. But how to connect the interaction between officers and their public and the functioning of law enforcement organizations and governmental bodies, and more generally how to link together the microsocial and the [197]macrosocial is a classic but difficult puzzle in the social sciences (Cicourel 1981). Here, the case is made even more complex since one has to consider how morality and ethics enter the picture, and more specifically, how the agents account for their misbehavior or, conversely, correct it, and how the state contributes to such deviance or, contrarily, regulates it.
- An illustration can shed some light on these issues. I take it from the ethnographic research I conducted between 2005 and 2007 in one of the largest French police districts situated in the outskirts of Paris (Fassin [2011] 2013). The 200,000-inhabitant conurbation has unemployment, poverty, and crime rates significantly higher than the rest of the region. The proportion of immigrants is substantially higher than the national average, and minorities are overrepresented in the many housing projects. During a fifteen-month period I have done fieldwork, accompanying in their daily activities uniformed officers in charge of public security as well as plainclothes agents belonging to the anticrime squads. These special units have been created in the 2000s as part of law-and-order policies developed by successive conservative governments. They are normally dedicated to catching criminals in the act but for lack of such cases they tend not to be very different from regular units, except that their members have the deserved reputation of toughness. Most of my observations were carried out accompanying the police during their day and night patrols across the conurbation, generally in cars, sometimes by foot. In order to exemplify ordinary misconduct rather than spectacular misdeeds involving brutality or even cruelty, which I also witnessed, I purposely choose a trivial and banal scene.
- One evening, during the 2005 riots, the police were informed that a primary school in a housing project was on fire, probably due to arson. The anticrime squad crew with which I was on patrol immediately headed toward the site where firefighters were already at work to extinguish the blaze under the curious gaze of the residents. A few minutes later, in the parking lot where we stood observing the scene, a small explosion was heard. It was a Molotov cocktail, the origin of which was difficult to determine. Scrutinizing the surroundings plunged into darkness, the officers noticed on the other side of the sports field that bordered the apartment blocks a small group of adolescents hardly distinguishable, some of them wearing light-colored hooded sweaters. They imagined that the culprit was among them and started to chase the shadowy figures, which fled and disappeared. The subsequent search in the neighborhood was not successful. After a while, we resumed the patrol. Three hours passed without any other significant occurrence but as we were driving around several blocks from the [198]site where the incident had taken place, the officers spotted three adolescents who were quietly chatting in front of an apartment block. They looked of North African origin. The car stopped, the agents harshly asked the youngsters for their documents and forcibly conducted a body search. One of the three, who did not have his papers with him, explained that he lived with his parents two floors above and proposed to run upstairs, possibly with an officer, and get his identity card. The police refused and took him in to the station. The adolescent was wearing a white hooded sweatshirt. Although it was quite common clothing among the youth, this made him a suspect (or rather an easy prey), the arrest of which could be formally justified.
- During the transit to the precinct, he was pestered and threatened. If he did not confess his crime, he was told, he would be detained. The adolescent said he did not understand what he was supposed to be guilty of. At the police station, one of the agents checked the national register of reported offenses and found a name similar to his associated with a previous misdemeanor. For a long while he aggressively interrogated the adolescent about his identity and made jokes about his Arab name, Abdelkrim, the last syllable of which is pronounced in French as the word “crime.” Obviously, the officer knew that the probability of this random arrest corresponding to the actual culprit was very low and that, were it to be the case, the chance of obtaining a confession was even lower. But he probably had other reasons for keeping the boy at the precinct. Indeed, when the adolescent was finally released, it was the middle of the night, and there was no more public transportation. He had to walk almost three miles back home.
- Such practices are not rare. Two official studies of the judicial treatment of minors (Delon and Muchielli 2007) and young adults (Mazars 2006) arrested during the urban unrest show that three-fourths of the former and one-third of the latter were discharged for lack of evidence. With regard to the adolescents, the authors note that most of those accused of resisting arrest were already known to the police, implying that the indictment might have been a form of targeted retribution. In an interview they conducted with a judge, the latter described these apprehensions followed by several hours of detention and harassment as common. This form of arbitrary punishment inflicted on a more or less random basis, depending on whether someone already identified as a troublemaker was at hand, was essentially directed at those whom anticrime squads’ agents disparagingly designated as “bastards,” a term that was difficult not to interpret in racial terms since it alluded to what most members of the special unit deemed illegitimate national status, most of them being French born in [199]France but of African ancestry. Although, for the majority, the youths did not end up being sentenced or even arraigned, the mere fact of having them tormented, humiliated, frightened, or simply annoyed sufficed to the police’s sense that the alleged offenders had received a just retribution. Indeed, albeit unethical by common standards, these acts, which infringe both legal and deontological norms of their profession, nevertheless receive moral justifications on the part of the officers, who rationalize them with two complementary arguments.
- First, the police generally consider their public to be either culprits or accomplices. The expression “their public” is meant to describe the residents of low-income neighborhoods, belonging for the most part to ethnic minorities (that is, blacks, Arabs and sometimes Roma people). They correspond to those designated by John Alan Lee (1981) as “police property,” in other words, categories of population that society regards as falling a priori within the jurisdiction of law enforcement organizations and that the authorities therefore leave to the officers’ discretionary power. This conflation of entire territories (public housing) or groups (project youths) and their mental association with criminal activities (often mere misdemeanors) have been described in various national contexts of law enforcement, but they are aggravated in the French case by the fact that 80 percent of police forces come from rural areas and small towns and their first posting is always in the most exposed and less valued districts—that is, the disadvantaged neighborhoods located in or around large cities (Pruvost, Coulangeon, and Roharik 2004). Nourished by the discourse of their professors at the academy and of their colleagues in their precinct who often depict the banlieues as a “jungle” and their inhabitants as “savages,” the sense of alienation experienced by young officers contributes to their lack of discernment: unable to establish differences among the residents of the housing projects, they see them all as probable delinquents and potential enemies. When an offense is perpetrated, people fall into two categories: those who committed it or helped commit it and those whose silence render them complicit. For the police, to arrest an adolescent knowing that there is a very thin chance that he would be the culprit and that, were it to be the case, there would be no way to prove it, is therefore morally justified: he pays not only for his social group but also for the times when he has not been caught while guilty.
- Second, such retribution is even more legitimate in their view since they are persuaded that magistrates are too lenient. We arrest criminals and indict them, they say, and the next day, the judge releases them without sentence. Such a belief reinforces their conviction that they should themselves dispense justice [200]in the street or at the precinct—and not infrequently on their way to the station as well. The complaint about the magistrates’ indulgence, which allegedly annihilates the officers’ valuable efforts to fight crime, is specific to neither a country nor a time, and Egon Bittner (1980: 26), among others, discussed the phenomenon for the United States several decades ago. Yet, in France, as in most Western nations, data shows the exact opposite. As a consequence of harsher legislation, stricter enforcement and more expeditious judiciary procedures, more accused are sentenced more often and more heavily than has been the case in recent decades (Timbart 2011). But for the officers—who notice the presence in public places of individuals they have arrested but ignore the fate of those who have been incarcerated—judges are never severe enough, and each time the police have a chance to punish either physically or psychologically suspected offenders while they are within their reach they take it.
- Thus, because they think they are dealing with a criminal population and because they presume that magistrates show too much clemency, law enforcement officers feel entitled to discipline their public and chastise their suspects, whatever evidence—or lack thereof—they may have against them. Retribution, whether it takes the form of the random punishment of a bystander as exemplified here or of a punitive expedition targeting a whole apartment block as described elsewhere (Fassin 2013b), is therefore regarded by the police as morally defensible. These people got what they deserve, they confidently affirm.
- A caveat might be necessary, here. When I happened to present this analysis to scholarly audiences, I had remarkably contradictory reactions: while some would manifest their indignation toward the officers and the way they justified their practices, others would state their discomfort with respect to what they thought was my approval of these justifications, and others still would express their irritation at what they deemed my partiality against the police. None of these reactions adequately reflect my endeavor to account for abuses in law enforcement. To analyze moral justifications is not to express a moral judgment in the form of either condemnation or excuse. It is an effort to render intelligible—including in the agents’ own moral terms—acts that appear to be purely unethical. Yet, my auditors’ reactions usefully unveiled a predicament to which social scientists are often confronted: the ethical tension between the first and third person—in this case, between the acknowledgment of the moral justifications of the police and the recognition of the moral deviance of their acts.
- How to reconcile or simply juxtapose the former and the latter without resorting to Jean-Paul Sartre’s simplistic explanation by the “bad faith” or [201]succumbing to Jean-Luc Godard’s provocative definition of objectivity as “five minutes for Hitler and five minutes for the Jews”? If we take seriously the fact that agents generally find moral arguments to explain to themselves and to others what is generally regarded as immoral acts, and if we think it is the social scientists’ task to account for such ethical contradiction, how can one proceed to avoid the dual pitfall of mere condemnation and indulgent excuses? To address this quandary, I suggest to proceed through three analytical steps: first, by expanding horizontally the range of what falls under the moral and the ethical; second, by integrating vertically individual actions into their institutional and political background; third, by identifying differences among agents with respect to misconduct.
- The first moment consists in including in the analysis of ethical issues moral dimensions that have nothing to do with the right, the good, and more generally the “positive” side of morality and ethics. This is a major conceptual shift since for the most part both philosophers and social scientists precisely define morality and ethics in terms of the right thing to do and the good life to live. Noticeably, however, the Scottish moralists had opened the path and, for instance, in his famous study of moral sentiments, Adam Smith ([1759] 1976) was not only interested in “sympathy,” “gratitude,” and “amiable and respectable virtues,” but also in “hatred,” “resentment,” and “selfish passions.” Neither the anthropology of morality nor the anthropology of ethics have paid attention to what is generally deemed negative dimensions and therefore disqualified. The problem is epitomized by the fact that the only available alternative to Joel Robbins’ “anthropology of the good” (2013) is David Parkin’s “anthropology of evil” (1985), as if the ordinary forms of “positive” ethics could only be contrasted with extraordinary forms of “negative” morality, not leaving a space for the study of trivial negative expressions. In fact, almost all contemporary anthropology of morality and ethics is turned toward the good.
- I would therefore plead for a demoralized anthropology, an anthropology not only focused on the bright side of morality and ethics but considering also their dark or, perhaps better said, dim side. In an insightful and profound analysis of his own moral emotions as he returns to Germany a few years after having been deported to Auschwitz, Jean Améry ([1966] 1980) explained the ethical roots of his “ressentiment,” using the French word in reference to Nietzsche’s famous interpretation of the genealogy of morals. Adapting his reflection to account for the expression of rancor and animosity I encountered in my fieldwork on AIDS in South Africa and policing in France, I have proposed[202] (Fassin 2013c) to distinguish ressentiment as related to a historical condition (that of the blacks who lived through the apartheid), and resentment as related to a sociological position (that of the police tasked to do the dirty work of society). Resentment is nourished, in the latter case, by the sociological proximity of the officers with their public (they are part of the lower class). The moral distinction they construct to differentiate themselves from the local population (they see their activity as the defense of the social order against the dangers represented by poor neighborhoods and their residents) often serves to cover up or render acceptable plain racism (most of them are whites and operate in areas where the majority of the inhabitants belong to minorities of color). But this resentment is not only self-reproduced; it is also fueled by discourses heard and policies implemented.
- The second stage implies, indeed, to decenter the analysis so as to integrate individual acts into the broader moral context of the institution, the state, and society as a whole. The ethical grounds on which agents justify their conduct are influenced by the moral climate of the time. Political discourses and public policies, in particular, can legitimate or even encourage deviant practices among the police (Mouhanna 2011). Since the 1990s, successive right-wing governments have marginalized and stigmatized immigrants and their children, whom a minister of the interior labeled as “scum”; harsher legislation has criminalized practices typically encountered in housing projects, such as loitering in the lobby of apartment blocks; police forces have been given extended prerogatives in terms of stop-and-frisks and have received special units like the anticrime squads, in order to exert stricter control over disadvantaged neighborhoods; last but not least, in the name of performance culture, high quotas of arrests have been established, which could only be reached by looking for easy prey such as marijuana users or even by provoking young men to prompt their reactions then qualified as insulting and resisting the police (these arrests are generally done via racial profiling in housing projects). Such convergent verbal, legal, organizational, and managerial targeting of certain populations and certain territories has largely contributed to facilitate or encourage violent, abusive, and discriminatory practices in law enforcement and to entitle officers already inclined to such practices, even more since the expectation of impunity authorizes the trivialization of deviance.
- To account for this moral climate underlying the politics and policies of law enforcement, I have borrowed but reformulated E. P. Thompson’s (1971) classical concept of moral economy and defined it as the production, circulation, and [203]appropriation of values and affects with regard to a given social problem (Fassin 2009). This definition takes into consideration both the dynamic of change in the moral space and the agents’ capacity to adopt, contest, or manipulate ethical objects. In the present case, what can be called the moral economy of insecurity, as it has developed in past decades with its fabrication of anxiety, anger, and intolerance, its creation of scapegoats, rejection of otherness, exaltation of nationalism, demand for order, expectation of intransigence, and consent to loss of rights, has definitely provided favorable conditions for the development of police misconduct and the generation of a collective ethical anesthesia. Yet, it is clear that even in such noxious context for democracy, not all officers act in the same way.
- The third approach consequently enlightens the ethical variations existing within the professional group and its institutional setting. Even when the internal (moral justifications) and external (moral economy) conditions are propitious to deviance, certain individuals commit misdeeds while others do not. There are various ways to interpret such differences. In a classic study, William Ker Muir (1977: 3–4) distinguished two “virtues,” which he called “tragic sense” and “moral equanimity,” the former having to do with the capacity to “grasp the nature of human suffering,” the latter referring to the “contradiction of achieving just ends with coercive means.” Such criteria may however evoke the social scientist’s idealistic vision more than the reality of police work. In the units I observed, differentiation among officers could be identified along two axes. One axis corresponds to the moral community imagined by the officers, that is, those with whom they considered themselves sharing a common humanity. This moral community could be inclusive, in the sense that it comprised, prima facie, everyone without distinction of color, culture, religion, or class, or be exclusive, in the sense that certain groups or categories were a priori rejected, generally on racial or ethnic grounds. The attitude toward the youths from minorities reflected rather accurately this distinction: civility and correctness in the first case, hostility and contempt in the second one. The other axis indicates the moral obligation the officers felt with regard to the code of conduct of their profession, particularly for the use of force and the respect for the law. This moral obligation could be strong, with what is often described as professionalism, or weak, with aggressive and unlawful practices.
- Empirical observation revealed a more frequent combination of exclusive moral community and weak moral obligation (racist and violent officers) than [204]of inclusive moral community and strong moral obligation (courteous law-abiding officers). Interestingly, the second scenario characterized the few agents who had grown up in urban areas comparable to the ones where they were assigned; by contrast their colleagues raised in small towns and rural areas embodied the first attitude. More rarely, discordant combinations were found: aggressive and unlawful behaviors indiscriminately directed at everyone or, symmetrically, racist beliefs not translated into discriminatory acts. These various configurations, which would of course need to be empirically refined to show how they concretely operate and also how the same individuals can move from one to another, may be interpreted in light of what Foucault ([1984] 1985) describes as moral subjectivities, through which the agents do not content themselves with the implementation of rules or reproduction of norms but develop their own capacity to assess people and situations and act accordingly. In the case of law enforcement, if the conformity to a work model that has often been described by criminologists in terms of police culture is the attitude most frequently encountered, those who are able to escape the habits of their organization, the prejudices of their profession, and the pressure of their peers are of particular interest to analyze how, often in a discreet and almost unnoticeable way, “subjects of virtue,” as James Laidlaw (2014) calls them in a different context, are—quietly—constituted.
- Anthropological attention to moral deviance—practices that offend common conscience—thus enriches our understanding of ethics by widening the scope of what counts as moral and ethical issues, while leading to uncertain terrains where it is difficult to be simultaneously acknowledging the agents’ moral justifications and recognizing objective ethical problems. Rather than trying in vain to solve such predicament, one can take a completely different approach by broadening and differentiating the perspective. On the one hand, moral economies underlie the conditions of possibility of such deviance, as the changing and often conflictive values and affects prevent or facilitate it, combat it, or legitimate it. On the other hand, moral subjectivities reopen the space of the possible for the individuals, who keep a certain leeway with regard to collective norms and rules and can therefore exercise a sort of ethical discretion. Whether they use this language or not, most analysts focus either on the macrolevel of moral economies or on the microlevel of moral subjectivities, as an eternal return of the metaphysical alternative between determinism and freedom. Dialectical thinking may allow for the analysis of the tensions between collective constraints and individual autonomy.
- CONCLUSION
  
  Following the path long explored by philosophers, anthropologists have recently attempted to identify the matter of morality and ethics in human action. Although I regard their endeavor as valuable, the approach I have adopted is diametrically opposed: I have considered that such moral or ethical matter cannot be isolated and that methodological reductionism might impoverish our understanding of the moral and ethical issues that are at stake. Rather than considering morality and ethics as a given that anthropologists would uncover, I have thus analyzed moral problems and ethical questions. To the potentially objectifying language of morality and ethics, I resolutely prefer that of moral and ethical issues, which indicates that moral problems and ethical questions emerge from human action and take shape through dilemmas, debates, decisions, conflicts, the interpretation of which remains subject to discussion and negotiation. What is morally or ethically at stake? This is the interrogation I try to address.
- The logical consequence of this critical approach is that the moral and ethical realms are not pure—and can only be purified artificially. Emotions, benefits, strategies, ulterior motives, power games, social relations interact with values, principles, and virtues. Nowhere is this complex interaction more visible than where ethics and politics intersect. To analyze the field thus defined, it is, however, necessary to forestall a possible misunderstanding. The language of ethics has been increasingly imported into the political realm over the past decades either to denounce “unethical practices,” such as corruption, embezzlement, influence peddling, violent repression, or to promote “ethical practices,” notably through legal guaranties and regulatory agencies. Although legitimate and sometimes useful, such a moralizing enterprise is clearly normative as well as largely rhetorical. By contrast, I defend a method that is descriptive and analytical. I do not—or try not to—condemn unethical deeds and foster ethical procedures. I have no intention—at least as part of this academic intervention—to make politicians and political activity better. My more modest objective is to clarify some of the moral and ethical stakes that arise from the practice of politics or within political arenas.
- This leads me to treat moral and ethical issues mostly at a collective rather than at an individual level, as is generally the case. I do not ignore, of course, that politics is produced through the action of men and women who are individuals and who, as such, can behave in a way that will be viewed as moral or ethical by [206]themselves and by others, including the social scientists who comment on their action. But the epistemic choice I make is to grasp moral and ethical issues in fields such as international relations, spaces such as the public sphere, or institutions such as the police. This choice is not arbitrary. It derives from the very object under scrutiny: politics. What distinguishes it from other dimensions of human activity is the centrality of power, and power cannot be described and analyzed only between individuals. How does power intersect with ethics, and how does ethics interfere with power? This is the question that I have attempted to answer.
- Interpreted on this basis, the three cases I have studied here—on military intervention, radical secularism, and police misconduct—lead, beyond their singularity, to a series of general observations. First, the ethical foundations of political action result from a complex combination of the various conflictive ethics proposed by philosophers. Indeed, duty, virtue, and utility are theoretically incompatible but empirically reconcilable albeit in tension. Besides, they are inextricably intertwined with affects and interests, tactical decisions, and social forces. In other words, these ethical foundations are heterogeneous both internally and externally. Second, the ethical signification of political stances is contingent on the historical setting, cultural background, and social context. The same act of truth-telling has a different meaning and impact depending on whether it is directed at the powerful or the powerless. Thus, conviction and responsibility do not occupy a fixed place in the ethical realm. However, such relativism should not be viewed as moral, suggesting that all values are relative, but as sociological, asserting that values and the emotions associated with them are not abstract concepts but situated entities that must be grasped in their relation to social positions. Third, the ethical evaluation of political practices has to account for the banality of misconduct and the discrepancy between the normativity of the first and third persons, in other words the aporia of the agents’ moral justifications and the observer’s moral interpretation. A major implication is the shift away from the common version of the anthropology of morality and ethics to account for the full range of moral sentiments and values, from compassion to resentment, from justice to cruelty, instead of limiting the inquiry to the bright side of morality and ethics. Such an endeavor thus expands the spectrum of relevant moral problems and ethical questions and allows for the interpretation of otherwise incomprehensible discourses or acts merely deemed immoral or unethical.[207]
- In the introduction of the collective volume he edited on ordinary ethics, Michael Lambek (2010: 1) raises an important paradox: while “ethnographers commonly find that the people they encounter are trying to do what they consider right or good, are being evaluated according to criteria of what is right and good, or are in some debate about what constitute the human good,” in contrast “anthropological theory tends to overlook all this in favor of analyses that emphasize structure, power, and interest.” To correct this inconsistency, he intends “to demonstrate the centrality of ethical practice, judgment, reasoning, responsibility, cultivation, and questioning in social life.” While I recognize the meaningfulness of this effort, I want to reconnect the two sides. What I have tried here is to envisage the possibility to hold together the sense of the human good and the leverage of the social forces, the recognition of others and the forms of domination, moral judgment and power relations, values and interests—and ultimately to restore an intellectual space of tensions, contradictions, and sometimes aporia: the troubled waters where ethics and politics meet.
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  
  I would like to thank Patrick Brown and Laura McCune for their close reading of a first version, as well as to my almost anonymous reviewer for his uncompromising and helpful criticisms. I want to express my gratitude also to Michael Lambek for having initiated this collective work, and to Veena Das and Webb Keane for having rendered this intellectual adventure pleasant and fruitful.
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  Timbart, Odile. 2011. “Vingt ans de condamnations pour crimes et délits.” Infostat Justice, Ministère de la Justice, n° 114.
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The Obama Administration Should Be Found Guilty of War Crimes in Yemen | Dan Kovalik 8

Jan 10, 16

www.huffingtonpost.com/...nstration-guilt_b_8916380.html Yemen Saudi_Arabia US_intervention warcrimes starvation *2016 humanitarian_imperialism Samantha_Power
- Dan Kovalik Become a fan
 Human & Labor Rights Lawyer, Adjunct Professor of International Human Rights Law
 
 
- Those of us who supported Barack Obama in 2008 in the hope that he was a man of peace must face the painful reality -- we were dead wrong. Nowhere is our folly better illustrated than in the ongoing human rights catastrophe now unfolding in Yemen with critical U.S. assistance.
 For months, those who bother to care about Yemen -- one of the poorest countries on earth -- have been criticizing President Obama for aiding and abetting the Saudi Coalition assault on that country. As Foreign Policy reported back in October, Obama was already being accused of committing War Crimes through his logistical assistance to the brutal Saudi air offensive against Yemen.
- Yet, undeterred, Obama doubled down on his crimes in November by approving the sale of $1.29 billion in smart bombs to Saudi Arabia -- a sale which, among other things, is intended to replenish Saudi Arabia's arsenal in attacking Yemen.
 Of course, as always, the U.S. mainstream media, which is in the most sorry state I have ever witnessed it, has been ready to lend a hand to Obama's crimes by (1) barely reporting on Yemen; and (2) reporting Yemen as a more or less equal battle between Houthi rebels and the Saudi-led coalition. To be clear, this is not a an equal fight, for it is the Saudis who are inflicting the disproportionate share of civilian casualties through a U.S.-backed air campaign against a country with no air defenses.
- Thus, as News Week recently reported:
 The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights told the U.N. Security Council . . . that a Saudi-led coalition's military campaign in Yemen appeared to be responsible for a "disproportionate amount" of attacks on civilian areas.
 Speaking at the council's first public meeting on Yemen since the Saudi-led bombing campaign began nine months ago, Zeid Ra'ad al Hussein said he had "observed with extreme concern" heavy shelling from the ground and air in civilian areas of Yemen including the destruction of hospitals and schools.
- The toll on Yemen's civilian population from the U.S.-backed conflict is great, with Human Rights Watch reporting back in October:
 The war, and particularly the numerous coalition airstrikes, has taken a terrible toll on civilians. As of late September, the U.N. had documented that the war had killed 2,355 civilians and wounded 4,862, the majority in coalition airstrikes. In the nearly two dozen strikes that we have investigated on the ground, we collected the names of more than 300 civilians who died, many of them children.
 And the civilian deaths continue. In the last few weeks local authorities and activists in Yemen have reported that coalition aircraft bombed two wedding parties, killing dozens of civilians. While a proper investigation is needed to establish the facts, our research shows that many coalition airstrikes that have killed civilians violated the laws of war.
- However, these numbers do not even begin to reflect the true extent of the humanitarian crisis in Yemen where literally millions of civilians are being brought to the brink of starvation by the conflict. As an obscure piece out of Australia entitled, "Yemen is the Crisis That the World Forgot," reports:
 Yemen, which is just south of Saudi Arabia, is one of the poorest countries in the Middle East. Even before the current conflict, it depended on imports for 70 per cent of its fuel, 80 per cent of its food and 100 per cent of its medicine. With its ports and airports closed by a military blockade, very little of anything is available to civilians now. Before the war, more than 10 million Yemenis were going hungry but now many are facing severe food shortages.
 Those numbers should be shocking. But the sad reality is they are easy to ignore in Australia and in other parts of the Western world. Yemen has a population of 24 million, roughly the same size as Australia.
 Now consider the fact that in Yemen there are 21 million people who are in need of humanitarian assistance.
- Yes, the Obama Administration is knowingly aiding and abetting the Saudis in murdering millions in Yemen. This is a fact. And, it is a fact which is quite ironic given that the current Obama-appointed U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. is Samantha Power -- an individual who came to prominence through her Pulitzer-winning book which condemned the West's failure to respond to genocide throughout the world. In the case of Yemen, however, the genocide is not happening due to the mere omissions of the West, and in particular the U.S. -- rather, it is taking place with the active support of the U.S., including Power's own intervention at the U.N. which prevented any independent investigation of the Saudi crimes in Yemen.
- In other words, the Obama team, including Samantha Power herself, have become exactly what Power herself once condemned -- co-conspirators in genocide. Indeed, Power's treachery at the UN looks a lot like the maneuvers carried out by the Clinton Administration in 1994 (maneuvers condemned by Power in her book on genocide) which resulted in UN troops being drawn down in Rwanda at the very time they were needed to prevent genocide.
 And again, the U.S. media bears great responsibility in all of this as well, for it is not true that the world has somehow "forgotten" about Yemen. Rather, the world has been shielded from the realities in Yemen by a media which has now become a mere mouthpiece for the U.S. State Department. Tragically, it is the poorest of the poor in Yemen who are paying the price for the immoral foreign policy of the White House and its compliant press.
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How the world can keep the promise it made in Paris | Toronto Star 7

Jan 09, 16

www.thestar.com/...-promise-it-made-in-paris.html Canada Lloyd_Axworthy Liberal_Party climate_change R2P sovereignty recolonization
- How the world can keep the promise it made in Paris
  
  Could a human rights norm designed to prevent genocides and war crimes be the key to enforcing international climate agreements?
- By:   Lloyd Axworthy Allan Rock Published on Thu Jan 07 2016
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  The landmark Paris Climate Accord has been hailed as a breakthrough, and with good reason. For the first time, all of the world’s nations have acknowledged the existential threat posed by the warming planet, and each has pledged to do its part to slow or reverse the deadly trend.
  
  But the agreement is not enforceable. And if the past is any indication, it will prove easier for governments to sign under the bright lights of television than to follow through in the cold light of day.
- An enforcement mechanism would, of course, have been a hard sell. Besides, how would it have worked? Hard to imagine a Global Emissions Police Force, or an International Climate Court. So for the moment, we shall have to rely on good will and best efforts.
  
  But what if that is not enough? What if non-compliance is widespread, and global emissions by 2025 do not decline sufficiently to save small island states, or major coastal cities? Or to address the consequences of climate change, like extreme weather events, mass migration and conflicts arising from shifting land uses? What then?
- If (or when) the world finds it necessary to add teeth to a global climate agreement, it may find a useful precedent in a doctrine adopted a decade ago for the protection of people, also by unanimous agreement of all UN member states: the Responsibility to Protect, or R2P.
  
  R2P grew out of the frustration and shame caused by successive atrocities in the latter 20th century: the killing fields of Cambodia; Rwanda; Srebrenica; Kosovo. Before its adoption, genocide and ethnic cleansing carried out behind the “shield” of state sovereignty lay beyond the reach of the international community, no matter the level of horror going on within a state’s borders.
- R2P changed all of that by imposing, for the first time since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1693, a limitation on state sovereignty. Where mass atrocity is imminent and a state’s government is unable or unwilling to protect its population, the international community will assume that responsibility and, through the United Nations, take steps to prevent an atrocity and protect the state’s population.
  
  But what has that to do with climate change? Well, perhaps a great deal. The differences are obvious (there will not be military intervention to enforce a climate commitment). But when the constituent elements of R2P are examined, we find a logic that can apply in a different context to encourage compliance by each state with its climate change pledges.
- A parsing of R2P discloses three essential elements: a universally supported goal; a recognition of the individual state’s primary role within its borders in achieving that goal; and an acceptance that if the individual state cannot or will not act to achieve it, the international community will take steps to do so.
  
  Applying that paradigm to the environment, the Paris Accord (or its successor agreements) recognizes our planet’s survival as a collective goal. Each member state’s pledge remains its own responsibility, and each is to be the “first responder” in its own jurisdiction. But should failure or refusal by individual states threaten the shared goal (and indeed the future of life on the planet), the R2P paradigm permits the international community to take steps. Those steps might include offers of help, like assistance in the buildup of adaptive capacities. But they might also involve steps intended to modify behaviour, such as political measures, economic sanctions, or targeted penalties aimed at those shown by forensic investigation to be profiting from inaction.
- And how fitting that a doctrine meant to prevent mass atrocities should be adapted to deal with equally threatening environmental risks. Climate change is often linked to large scale migration, instability and conflict, as we have seen in Darfur, South Sudan and the Middle East.
  
  In the few weeks since the Paris Climate Accord was signed, there has been a general feeling of relief and optimism. We all earnestly hope that each state will now do its part to address a clear threat to our future. But the past teaches us that we should also prepare for the worst. And if good will is not enough by itself to save the planet, we should be ready to take more effective measures.
  
  If that eventually leads to a discussion of binding obligations and effective enforcement, the R2P model may well provide the very mechanism we need.
  
  Lloyd Axworthy is a former foreign minister of Canada, former president of the University of Winnipeg and now Chair of CUSO International. Allan Rock is the President of the University of Ottawa, a former Attorney-General of Canada and former Canadian Ambassador to the United Nations.
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Kharkevic: "Neither humanitarian intervention nor R2P are fully developed norms of international law" - The Journal of Turkish Weekly 10

Jan 06, 16

www.turkishweekly.net/...ped-norms-of-international-law Libya R2P humanitarian_interventionism Russia UN
- Kharkevic: "Neither humanitarian intervention nor R2P are fully developed norms of international law"
- March 14, 2015
- Interview with Asst. Prof. Dr. Maxim Kharkevic
- What are current assessments of humanitarian intervention and responsibility to protect (R2P) in international law? Are there common approaches and applications for R2P in international relations?
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margin-top:5px!important; } .diigotb-body .colorCell{ float: left!important; margin: 0 1px 1px 0!important; border: 1px solid #5f92ff!important; width: 18px!important; height: 18px!important; } .diigotb-body .colorCell:hover{ border: 1px solid #FF9900!important; } .diigotb-body .colorCell.actived{ border: 1px solid #FF9900!important; } .diigotb-body .colorCell div{ width: 18px!important; height: 18px!important; cursor:pointer!important; margin:0!important; } .diigotb-body .capture-black{background-color:#000!important;} .diigotb-body .capture-white{background-color:#fff!important;} .diigotb-body .capture-gray{background-color:#808080!important;} .diigotb-body .capture-light-gray{background-color:#c0c0c0!important;} .diigotb-body .capture-red{background-color:#ff0000!important;} .diigotb-body .capture-cyan{background-color:#00ffff!important;} .diigotb-body .capture-orange{background-color:#ff9900!important;} .diigotb-body .capture-blue{background-color:#0000ff!important;} .diigotb-body .capture-yellow{background-color:#ffff00!important;} .diigotb-body .capture-purple{background-color:#9900ff!important;} .diigotb-body .capture-green{background-color:#00ff00!important;} .diigotb-body .capture-pink{background-color:#ff00ff!important;} .diigotb-body #diigotb-colorpanel{ background:transparent url(chrome://diigotb/skin/ann-bar-palette-bg-left.png) no-repeat scroll left center!important; display:block; height:55px!important; position:fixed!important; width:180px!important; z-index:11000022!important; margin:0!important; } .diigotb-body .diigotb-cbg{ background:transparent url(chrome://diigotb/skin/ann-bar-palette-bg-right.png) no-repeat scroll right top!important; height:55px!important; line-height:55px!important; padding-left:6px!important; width:180px!important; margin:0!important; } .diigotb-body #currentArrow{ background:transparent url(chrome://diigotb/skin/ann-bar-palette-arrow.png) no-repeat scroll 0 0!important; height:6px!important; left:0; position:relative!important; top:-5px; width:7px!important; margin:0!important; } .diigotb-body #currentArrow._istop{ background:transparent url(chrome://diigotb/skin/ann-bar-palette-arrow-down.png) no-repeat scroll 0 0!important; top:51px!important; } .diigotb-body #diigotb-text-area{ position:fixed!important; z-index:11000010!important; } .diigotb-body .diigotb-text-input{ font: 18px/22px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif!important; border:0px solid #5f92ff!important; z-index:11000011!important; } .diigotb-body #diigotb-editpanel{ background:transparent url(chrome://diigotb/skin/ann-bar-bg-right.png) no-repeat scroll right center!important; height:35px!important; position: fixed!important; z-index:11000022!important; margin:0!important; } .diigotb-body .diigotb-btn div{ cursor:pointer!important; width:18px!important; height:18px!important; margin:2px!important; } .diigotb-body .diigotb-btn{ width:23px!important; height:23px!important; } .diigotb-body #diigotb-editpanel .diigotb-bg{ background:transparent url(chrome://diigotb/skin/ann-bar-bg-left.png) repeat-x scroll left center!important; height:35px!important; padding-left:6px!important; line-height:35px!important; margin:0!important; } .diigotb-body div.diigotb-tip{ -moz-border-radius:4px 4px 4px 4px; background-color:#f1f2f7; border:1px solid #767676; color:black; display:none; -moz-box-shadow:5px 5px 5px -5px #767676; font:12px Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; margin:0 !important; padding:3px 6px !important; position:absolute; z-index:2147483647; } .diigotb-body #diigotb-editpanel div.diigotb-btn{ padding:0px!important; display:inline-table!important; margin-bottom:0 !important; margin-left:0 !important; margin-right:0 !important; margin-top:5px; } .diigotb-body #diigotb-editpanel div.diigotb-sep img{ padding:0!important; margin:0!important; } .diigotb-body #diigotb-editpanel div.diigotb-sep{ padding:4px 0!important; display:inline-table!important; margin:0!important; line-height:0 !important; } .diigotb-body #diigotb-editpanel div.diigotb-btn.enabled:hover{ background: transparent url('chrome://diigotb/skin/ann-bar-opt-current.png') no-repeat!important; } .diigotb-body #diigotb-editpanel #diigotb-undo.enabled div{ background: transparent url('chrome://diigotb/skin/ann-bar-opt-undo.png') no-repeat center center!important; } .diigotb-body #diigotb-editpanel div.diigotb-btn.actived{ background: transparent url('chrome://diigotb/skin/ann-bar-opt-current.png') no-repeat!important; } .diigotb-image-border{ border:1px solid #666 !important; } #diigotb-imagepanel{ height:22px!important; position: absolute!important; z-index:11000022!important; margin:0!important; } #diigotb-imagepanel .diigotb-btn{ cursor:pointer!important; width:20px!important; height:20px!important; margin:2px!important; float:left !important; background:transparent url(chrome://diigotb/skin/save-image-action-icons.png) no-repeat scroll!important; } #diigotb-imagepanel #diigotb-quick-save{ background-position:0 0!important; } #diigotb-imagepanel.processing #diigotb-quick-save{ background-position:0 -20px!important; cursor:default!important; } #diigotb-imagepanel.needpremium #diigotb-quick-save{ background-position:0 -20px!important; cursor:default!important; } #diigotb-imagepanel.hassaved #diigotb-quick-save{ background-position: -60px 0!important; cursor: pointer !important; } .diigotb-imagetip{ background:transparent url(chrome://diigotb/skin/notice-bar-bg-right.png) no-repeat scroll right center !important; height:21px !important; margin:0 !important; position:absolute !important; z-index:11000022 !important; width:106px; } .diigotb-imagebg{ background:transparent url(chrome://diigotb/skin/notice-bar-bg-left.png) repeat-x scroll left center !important; height:21px !important; margin:0 !important; padding-left:6px !important; width:90px; } .diigotb-imagetip-text{ padding-left:20px!important; font:11px/13px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif!important; color:white!important; line-height:20px!important; float:left; } .diigotb-imagetip.processing .diigotb-imagetip-text{ background:transparent url(chrome://diigotb/skin/processing-fb.gif) no-repeat scroll left center !important; } .diigotb-imagetip.hassaved .diigotb-imagetip-text{ background:transparent url(chrome://diigotb/skin/icon-done.png) no-repeat scroll left center !important; } .diigotb-border{ position: absolute!important; z-index:11000000!important; margin:0!important; background-color: #4b8cdc!important; } .diigotb-left{ width:1px!important; } .diigotb-right{ width:1px!important; } .diigotb-top{ height:1px!important; } .diigotb-bottom{ height:1px!important; } .diigotb-body #diigotb-rect div{ background: transparent url('chrome://diigotb/skin/ann-bar-opt-rectangle.png') no-repeat center center!important; } .diigotb-body #diigotb-round div{ background: transparent url('chrome://diigotb/skin/ann-bar-opt-ellipse.png') no-repeat center center!important; } .diigotb-body #diigotb-text div{ background: transparent url('chrome://diigotb/skin/ann-bar-opt-font.png') no-repeat center center!important; } .diigotb-body #diigotb-arrow div{ background: transparent url('chrome://diigotb/skin/ann-bar-opt-arrow.png') no-repeat center center!important; } .diigotb-body .diigotb-sep{ background: transparent url('chrome://diigotb/skin/ann-bar-bg-separator.png') no-repeat center center!important; } .diigotb-body #diigotb-undo div{ background: transparent url('chrome://diigotb/skin/ann-bar-opt-undo-disabled.png') no-repeat center center!important; } .diigotb-body #diigotb-capture-save div{ background: transparent url('chrome://diigotb/skin/ann-bar-opt-quickly-save.png') no-repeat center center!important; } .diigotb-body #diigotb-upload-resizer div { position: absolute!important; width: 9px!important; height: 9px!important; /*background-color: white;*/ z-index:11000002!important; margin:0px!important; background:transparent url(chrome://diigotb/skin/spot.png) no-repeat scroll left center!important; } .diigotb-body #diigotb-upload-resizer div.gleft { left: -9px!important; } .diigotb-body #diigotb-upload-resizer div.gtop { top: -9px!important; } .diigotb-body #diigotb-upload-resizer div.gright { right: -9px!important; } .diigotb-body #diigotb-upload-resizer div.gbottom { bottom: -9px!important; } .diigotb-body #diigotb-upload-resizer div.ghor { margin-left: auto!important; margin-right: auto!important; left: 0px!important; right: 0px!important; } .diigotb-body #diigotb-upload-resizer div.gver { margin-top: auto!important; margin-bottom: auto!important; top: 0px!important; bottom: 0px!important; } .diigotb-body{ padding-top: 31px!important; } .diigotb-body #diigotb-topbar{ background: url(chrome://diigotb/skin/topbar-bg.png) left top repeat-x!important; border-bottom: 1px solid #999!important; color: #555!important; font: 12px/18px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif!important; height: 30px!important; line-height: 30px!important; position: fixed!important; left: 0!important; top: 0!important; text-align:center!important; z-index:1999999!important; } .diigotb-body #diigotb-msg img{ margin:0 5px 0 0!important; vertical-align: middle!important; } .diigotb-body #diigotb-msg{ color:#333!important; } .diigotb-body #diigotb-msg a{ color: #0044cc!important; text-decoration: none!important; } .diigotb-body #diigotb-msg a:hover{ text-decoration: underline!important; } .diigotb-body #diigotb-escLink{ display: block!important; float: right!important; margin: 5px 5px 0 0!important; text-decoration: none!important; width: 50px!important; cursor:pointer!important; } .diigotb-body #diigotb-escLink:hover{ text-decoration: underline!important; } .diigotb-body #diigotb-escLink span{ background: url(chrome://diigotb/skin/esc-right.png) right top no-repeat!important; display: block!important; padding-right: 9px!important; } .diigotb-body #diigotb-escLink span strong{ background: url(chrome://diigotb/skin/esc-left.png) left top no-repeat!important; display: block!important; color: #fff!important; font-weight: 700!important; line-height: 20px!important; text-indent:7px!important; } /*highlight label*/ .diigoHighlight .diigoHighlightLabel sup { font:normal normal normal 8px/8px "lucida grande",tahoma,verdana,arial,sans-serif; text-decoration:none; background-color:inherit; cursor:default; } body.diigoHiPen.yellow{ cursor:url(chrome://diigotb/skin/highlighter-orange.cur), text !important } body.diigoHiPen.blue{ cursor:url(chrome://diigotb/skin/highlighter-blue.cur), text !important } body.diigoHiPen.green{ cursor:url(chrome://diigotb/skin/highlighter-green.cur), text !important } body.diigoHiPen.pink{ cursor:url(chrome://diigotb/skin/highlighter-pink.cur), text !important } em.diigoHighlight.type_0.commented { padding-left:30px; } /*float note*/ div.diigoHighlight.type_2 { position:absolute; width:29px; height:36px; text-align:center; background:transparent url('chrome://diigotb/skin/float_icon.png') no-repeat 50% 50%; z-index:9996; } div.diigoHighlight.type_2.mouseOvered { position:absolute; width:37px; height:31px; text-align:center; background:transparent url('chrome://diigotb/skin/float_icon.png') no-repeat; z-index:9996; } div.diigoHighlight.type_2 span { color:#000; font:bold 13px Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; cursor: default; line-height: 37px; text-shadow: #fff 0 1px 0; } div.diigoIcon.commented.TextIcon.diigoEdit{ background-repeat:no-repeat !important; background-position:right !important; } div.diigoIcon.commented.ImageIcon.diigoEdit{ background-repeat:no-repeat !important; background-position:right !important; } /*mouse over effect*/ /* .diigoHighlight.id_190e5778b533dc0fa1b1660653a4f6f5 {outline: 2px dotted green !important;} */ div.diigoIcon{ cursor:pointer !important; margin: 0pt; padding: 0px 0px 0px 0px; position: absolute; display:none; width: 24px !important; z-index:999999; height: 23px !important; background: transparent url('chrome://diigotb/skin/edit-highlight.png') no-repeat left; } div.diigoIcon span{ color:#000000; display:block; font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size:13px; font-weight:700; line-height:18px; text-align:center; text-shadow:0 1px 1px #FFFFFF; } div.diigoIcon.commented.ImageIcon{ display:block !important; background-color: transparent !important; } div.diigoIcon:hover{ background-color: transparent !important; background-repeat:no-repeat !important; background-position:right !important; } div.diigoIcon.commented.TextIcon{ display:block !important; left:0; bottom:0; } div.diigoIcon.commented.public{ background: #FFFFFF url('chrome://diigotb/skin/public-annotation.png') no-repeat left; } div.diigoIcon.commented.private{ background: #FFFFFF url('chrome://diigotb/skin/private-annotation.png') no-repeat left; } div.diigoIcon.commented.group{ background: #FFFFFF url('chrome://diigotb/skin/group-annotation.png') no-repeat left; } /*Clip video*/ div.diigoClipVideo{ float:left; height:16px; padding:0 16px 0 6px; background:#f5f5f5 url(chrome://diigotb/skin/toolbar-clip-bg.gif) no-repeat right 0; border:1px solid #ccc; border-bottom-width:0; font-family:"lucida grande",tahoma,verdana,arial,sans-serif; z-index:999; position:absolute; } div.diigoClipVideo.clipped { background-position: right -32px; left: 717px; top: 135px; } div.diigoClipVideo span{ font-weight:bold; font-size:10px; line-height:16px; text-decoration:underline; color:#03f; cursor:pointer; margin-right:6px } div.diigoClipVideo span:hover,div.diigoClipVideo span:active{ color:#00f } /*.diigolet input{ font-family:"lucida grande",tahoma,verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size:9px; }*/ /*-----------notice msg--------------*/ .diigotb-notice-img { float:left!important; height:16px!important; width:16px!important; margin-top:6px!important; margin-right:3px!important; } .success .diigotb-notice-img{ background:url("chrome://diigotb/skin/notice-icons.png") no-repeat scroll 0 0 transparent!important; } .failed .diigotb-notice-img{ background:url("chrome://diigotb/skin/notice-icons.png") no-repeat scroll -16px 0 transparent!important; } .info .diigotb-notice-img{ background:url("chrome://diigotb/skin/notice-icons.png") no-repeat scroll -32px 0 transparent!important; } .process .diigotb-notice-img{ background:url("chrome://diigotb/skin/processing.gif") no-repeat scroll left 0 transparent!important; } .diigotb-notice-msg-rt { background:url("chrome://diigotb/skin/notice-bar-2-bg-left.png") no-repeat scroll left bottom transparent!important; line-height:28px!important; padding-left:10px!important; height:30px!important; } .failed .diigotb-notice-msg-rt { background:url("chrome://diigotb/skin/notice-bar-2-bg-left.png") no-repeat scroll left top transparent!important; } .diigotb-notice-close{ float:right!important; height:16px!important; width:16px!important; margin-left:20px!important; margin-top:6px!important; cursor:pointer; background:url("chrome://diigotb/skin/notice-icons.png") no-repeat scroll -48px 0 transparent!important; } .diigotb-notice-close:hover{ background-position: -63px 0!important; } .diigotb-notice-msg { background:url("chrome://diigotb/skin/notice-bar-2-bg-right.png") no-repeat scroll right bottom transparent!important; float:right!important; height:30px!important; padding:0 11px 0 0!important; border: none!important; margin:0!important; position:fixed!important; font:12px/14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif!important; z-index:100000!important; } .diigotb-notice-msg a { color:#0044cc!important; text-decoration:underline!important; } .failed.diigotb-notice-msg { background:url("chrome://diigotb/skin/notice-bar-2-bg-right.png") no-repeat scroll right top transparent!important; } } @media print{ em.diigoHighlight.a, em.diigoHighlight.b, em.diigoHighlight.c { border-bottom:0.5pt dashed Black; } /*image highlight*/ /*no inline comments*/ img.diigoHighlight { border:0.5pt dashed Black } /*float note*/ div.diigoHighlight.type_2 { display:none } div.diigoHighlight.type_2 span { 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- I think that the “Right to Protect” (R2P) and “Humanitarian Intervention” should be regarded as two separate norms. They are not the same. Humanitarian Intervention preceded R2P and is associated with a very negative history, or at least it did not receive unilateral global support. R2P can be considered as a follow up to humanitarian intervention, or as an attempt to alleviate the grievances associated with humanitarian intervention.
- My assessment is that neither humanitarian intervention nor R2P are fully developed norms of international law. They are emerging norms. There are still many interpretations as to what they should be. Additionally, no personal or institutional entity has the legitimate right to act upon R2P or humanitarian intervention as fully developed norms under international law. In this way they are still debatable and the debates are ongoing, as seen in the fact that Brazil has its own approach, China has its own approach, Russia has its own approach, and so on.
- Are the UN and other international organizations effective enough to prevent humanitarian crises and mass atrocities around the world? If not, what can be done to make them more effective?
 
 I think that the UN, as with any other international institution, falls under the shadow of hierarchy. If there is a consensus and willingness among the great powers to solve an issue, then international institutions, including the UN, become very effective. The great powers add legitimacy to action taken by international institutions. Yet, if one or more of the great powers abstains from making a decision on an issue or refuses to get involved, then there are many mechanisms which they can use to make international institutions, including the UN, very ineffective. This is the main problem here, there needs to be consensus among the great powers for the UN to be effective, but if there is no consensus, then the UN is ineffective.
- What is Russia’s position on R2P?
 
 Russia’s position vis-à-vis R2P is quite cautious. Russia was very opposed to humanitarian intervention and now sees R2P as a probable reincarnation thereof, simply under another name. In other words, Russia believes that the meaning and the mechanisms of R2P are the same as those of humanitarian intervention in all but name. Considering this, if R2P is to be recognized as a political norm of international law, Russia contends that operations conducted within this framework must be sanctioned by the UN Security Council. The country believes that this is the only way to prevent R2P from becoming a neo-imperial tool imposed by the global North on the global South. Russia advocates the strengthening the position of the Security Council, as this is the only body which can sanction the implementation of the third (response) pillar of R2P.
- What is Russia’s response to new global challenges such as international terrorism, regional crises, mass migration, environmental issues, Ebola, etc.?
 
 All the challenges that you have mentioned belong to the so-called “new challenges”, not “classical challenges”, and they are priority in Russian foreign policy. In short, Russia strives to find solutions to these challenges by actively engaging with the international community, either by way of bilateral or multilateral efforts (such as with the help of international institutions). Russia believes that all existing structures and institutions should be used to their full potential to meet these new challenges emerging across the globe.
 
 *Maxim Kharkevic is an instructor at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations and a researcher at the Wilson Center.
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Max Forte

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All materials that do not specifically reference R2P, that are broadly on humanitarian justifications for imperialist intervention and domination.

Updated on Apr 02, 16
Created on May 14, 13

Category: Government & Politics

URL:

Max Forte's List: HUMANITARIAN IMPERIALISM

Trudeau's Chance to Acknowledge the Libyan Catastrophe | The Tyee 9

Trudeau's Chance to Acknowledge the Libyan Catastrophe

About That Libya Thing 6

About That Libya Thing

Eschaton: Remember Libya? 1

Thursday, February 25, 2016

Remember Libya?

In Their Own Words: The Libya Tragedy - The New York Times 20

In Their Own Words:The Libya Tragedy

No nation should fight global atrocities alone - The Washington Post 11

Terrorism or genocide? We should be fighting both. - The Washington Post 10

How humanitarian intervention makes protecting the innocent more difficult - The Washington Post 11

Is the international community failing to protect vulnerable civilians? - The Washington Post 10

Gay Imperialism Gender and Sexuality Discourse in the 'War on Terror'.pdf - Google Drive

Gated Development - is the Gates Foundation always a force for good? | Global Justice Now 5

Gated Development - is the Gates Foundation always a force for good?

Gates Foundation accused of 'dangerously skewing' aid priorities by promoting 'corporate globalisation' | World Politics | News | The Independent 14

Gates Foundation accused of 'dangerously skewing' aid priorities by promoting 'corporate globalisation'

WATCH: Edward S. Herman on “Humanitarian Imperialism” | Wrong Kind of Green 1

WATCH: Edward S. Herman on “Humanitarian Imperialism”

The Dirty War on Syria | Global Research - Centre for Research on Globalization 26

The Dirty War on Syria

U.N. says some of its peacekeepers were paying 13-year-olds for sex - The Washington Post 12

UN Guilty for Failing Child Sexual Abuse Victims in CAR - The Global Feed 3

A “Systematic Problem”

The Mandate to Protect

From Libyans: ‘Thank You, America!’ - The New York Times 10

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist

‘Thank You, America!’

Four Lectures on Ethics | Lecture 4: Troubled waters 72

Troubled waters

At the confluence of ethics and politics

ETHICAL QUESTIONING: ON THE LIBYAN CASE

ETHICAL ALTERNATIVE: ON THE CHARLIE ATTACK

ETHICAL TENSIONS: ON POLICE MISCONDUCT

CONCLUSION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

REFERENCES

The Obama Administration Should Be Found Guilty of War Crimes in Yemen | Dan Kovalik 8

How the world can keep the promise it made in Paris | Toronto Star 7

How the world can keep the promise it made in Paris

Could a human rights norm designed to prevent genocides and war crimes be the key to enforcing international climate agreements?

Kharkevic: "Neither humanitarian intervention nor R2P are fully developed norms of international law" - The Journal of Turkish Weekly 10

List Info

In Their Own Words:
The Libya Tragedy