Präventive Außenpolitik braucht überprüfbare Strategien

In drei neuen Strategiedokumenten zur Krisenprävention formuliert die Bundesregierung hohe konzeptionelle Ansprüche an ihre Arbeit. Als Schwerpunkte sollen Sicherheitssektorreform, Rechtsstaatsförderung und Vergangenheitsarbeit unterstützt werden. Um diese Konzepte auch wirkungsvoll umsetzen zu können, müssen die Aktionspläne aber konkrete Maßnahmen enthalten. Auslandsvertretungen in fragilen Staaten kommt dabei eine besondere Bedeutung zu.

Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena visiting the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin in 2016. Germany has supported the transitional justice process in Sri Lanka.

Dieser Beitrag erschien als DGAP Standpunkt am 30.September 2019.

In seiner Rede vor der UN-Generalversammlung Ende September versprach Außenminister Heiko Maas eine „nachhaltige Außenpolitik“. Krisenprävention nehme darin eine besondere Stellung ein, sagte er. Am gleichen Tag stellte die Bundesregierung drei neue Konzepte vor, die zeigen sollen, wie präventives Engagement aussehen kann. Bei der ersten Jahrestagung des Beirats zivile Krisenprävention in Berlin stießen diese auf ein weitgehend positives Echo. Den Strategien sollten jedoch Aktionspläne mit konkreten Zielen für Personal, Ausstattung und Koordinationsmechanismen folgen.

Seit 2014 hat die Bundesregierung ihr Engagement in fragilen Staaten deutlich gesteigert. Allein die Projektmittel des Auswärtigen Amts für Krisenprävention, Stabilisierung und Friedensförderung haben sich seitdem etwa vervierfacht – auf 396 Millionen Euro im aktuellen Haushalt. 2017 verabschiedete das Kabinett die Leitlinien „Krisen verhindern, Konflikte bewältigen, Frieden fördern.“ Ein Ergebnis dieser Leitlinien sind drei themenspezifische Dokumente, die ressortgemeinsam abgestimmt und von einem öffentlichen Konsultationsprozess begleitet wurden. Diese beschäftigen sich mit Sicherheitssektorreformen (SSR), Rechtstaatsförderung sowie Vergangenheitsarbeit und Versöhnung.

Diese drei Bereiche prägen gesellschaftliche Transformationsprozesse. Heike Thiele, Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Zivile Krisenprävention und Stabilisierung im Auswärtigen Amt, nannte den Übergangsprozess im Sudan bei der Jahrestagung als aktuelles Beispiel: Die Richterbänke sind besetzt mit Leuten des alten Regimes. Armee, Polizei und Milizen müssten sich das Vertrauen der Bevölkerung erst verdienen und massive Gewaltanwendungen aus dreißig Jahren Diktatur müssten aufgearbeitet werden. Nur so könnten die Menschen in Sudan wieder anfangen, den staatlichen Institutionen zu vertrauen.

Gute Konzepte, zu wenig Strategie

In den Dokumenten sind zentrale Konzepte, Instrumente und Handlungsfelder aufgelistet. Damit wird das deutsche Verständnis für die Herausforderungen präventiver Arbeit in drei zentralen Bereichen aufgelistet. Um wirklich ihren Anspruch als Strategien zu erfüllen, muss jedoch noch jeweils klarer werden, wie sich die Arbeit der Ressorts in absehbarer Zukunft messbar ändern soll – außer einer neuen gemeinsamen Arbeitsgruppe.

Ein effektiver und bei allen Bevölkerungsgruppen legitimierter Sicherheitssektor ist Voraussetzung für langfristige Stabilität. In der SSR-Strategie erkennt die Bundesregierung an, dass es sich bei der Reform von Polizei und Militär nicht nur um technische, sondern machtpolitische Prozesse handelt. Denn die Sicherheitskräfte sind ein zentrales Instrument der Unterdrückung und Herrschaftssicherung in autokratischen Staaten. Unter ihnen gibt es zahlreiche Gegner von mehr Transparenz und Rechenschaftspflichtigkeit.

Internationale Hilfe für SSR ist stets mit dem Risiko verbunden, durch einseitige Unterstützung neue Vorbehalte zu schüren, wie auch die SSR-Strategie erwähnt. Allerdings legt die Bundesregierung nicht dar, welche genauen Mechanismen sie einsetzt, um diese Risiken zu managen. Dazu sollte auch die Überprüfung des menschenrechtlichen Hintergrunds der Teilnehmerinnen und Teilnehmer an von Deutschland finanzierten Maßnahmen zählen. Ein allgemeiner Hinweis auf konfliktsensibles Handeln reicht nicht. Die Zusammenarbeit mit nichtstaatlichen Gewaltakteuren wie Selbstverteidigungsmilizen stellt die Strategie allerdings zu Recht unter einen hohen Vorbehalt.

Die Beziehungen zwischen Staat und Gesellschaft beruhen auf Regeln. Die transparente, gleichmäßige und konsequente Einhaltung dieser Regeln berührt das Rechtsstaatsprinzip. Auch hier erkennt die Bundesregierung an, dass eine rein technische Unterstützung von Gerichten, Strafvollzug und Rechtspflege nicht ausreicht, sondern politisch flankiert werden muss. Hilfreich ist auch, dass die Strategie auch nichtstaatliche Quellen von Recht anerkennt und Bedingungen für deutsche Unterstützung von informellen, traditionellen oder religiösen Rechtssystemen nennt. Zu diesen Bedingungen zählt ihre Ausrichtung an Frauen- und Minderheitenrechten.

Gleichwohl liest sich die Strategie wie eine Liste von Instrumenten und Handlungsfeldern, deren jeweiliges Ambitionsniveau die Bundesregierung nicht ausreichend reflektiert. So nennt sie die Zusammenarbeit mit China und Vietnam als Beispiele für Rechtsstaatsdialoge. Während einzelne Gesetzesvorhaben durch die Dialoge entschärft werden können, bleibt das von Staatsparteien kontrollierte System jedoch bestehen.

Die stärkste Reflexion findet sich in der Strategie zu Vergangenheitsarbeit und Versöhnung. Nach Krieg und Gewaltherrschaft kann schwelendes Unrecht Auslöser neuer Konflikte sein. Wahrheitskommissionen, Sondertribunale oder Entschädigungskommissionen können einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Aufarbeitung leisten. Die Strategie der Bundesregierung spricht dabei offen mögliche Spannungen zwischen Wahrheitsfindung, Strafrecht und Versöhnung als auch zwischen den Erwartungen verschiedener Opfergruppen, staatlicher Stellen und internationalen Akteuren an.

Deutlich wird, dass die Bundesregierung auf internationalen Lehren im Bereich Vergangenheitsarbeit aufbaut. Die Strategie konzentriert sich nicht allein auf strafrechtliche Aufarbeitung, sondern betont die Bedeutung des jeweiligen Kontexts und die Beteiligung von Opfergruppen. Allerdings verwundert, dass die Arbeit von deutschen Strafverfolgungsbehörden unerwähnt bleibt, die nach dem Weltrechtsprinzip Verbrechen in Drittstaaten aufklären können. Zu Verbrechen in Syrien, Irak und der Demokratischen Republik Kongo hat es bereits Prozesse in Deutschland gegeben.

Deutscher Mehrwert und nächste Schritte

Deutschland bewegt sich in keinem der drei Bereiche allein. Umso wichtiger ist eine klare Vorstellung davon, welchen Mehrwert deutsche Unterstützung im Vergleich zu nationalen und anderen internationalen Akteuren leisten kann, und wo die Bundesregierung ihre eigenen Prioritäten sieht. Hier unterscheiden sich die drei Strategien stark.

Die Strategie zur Vergangenheitsarbeit zeigt die größte Kohärenz. Sie identifiziert vier Bereiche für eine eigene Schwerpunktsetzung und ordnet ihr einzelne Maßnahmen unter. Die Bundesregierung will Vergangenheitsarbeit in eine „Präventionsagenda“ von politischen Reformen einbetten, Opfergruppen stärken und einbeziehen, Geschlechtergerechtigkeit in diesen Prozessen fördern und die spezifischen Erfahrungen Deutschlands beim Umgang mit der eigenen Erfahrung aus NS- und DDR-Unrecht nutzbar machen.

Im Bereich der Rechtsstaatsförderung erwähnt die Strategie, dass die Rechtsbindung von Verwaltungen im Vordergrund stehen soll. Allerdings wird dies nicht weiter erläutert oder als ordnendes Prinzip genutzt. Die SSR-Strategie kommt sogar ganz ohne Schwerpunktsetzung aus. Dies überrascht insofern, da sich die parlamentarische Kontrolle der Streitkräfte und das Prinzip der inneren Führung in der Bundeswehr als Erfahrungen anbieten würden.

Nach dieser konzeptionellen Ausarbeitung sollte der nächste Schritt darin bestehen, Aktionspläne zu jedem der drei Handlungsfelder aufzustellen. Denn noch wird kaum klar, wie die Dokumente die Arbeit der Bundesregierung in Zukunft tatsächlich verändern werden und wie sich die Ziele zum gesetzten Datum 2025 überprüfen lassen. Gesellschaftliche Transformationsprozesse sind stets von Unsicherheit und Rückschlägen gekennzeichnet, aber zumindest für die eigene Arbeit sollte die Bundesregierung messbare Indikatoren aufstellen.

Die Bundesregierung sollte ihre Prioritäten klären, diese mit Mitteln unterlegen und ihr Personal weiterbilden und ausreichend ausstatten. Deutsche Auslandsvertretungen in fragilen Staaten verfügen oft über zu wenig politische Referentinnen und Referenten. Sie müssen aber in die Lage versetzt werden, die deutschen Stabilisierungsprojekte zu verfolgen, wie es die Strategien vorsehen. Die beteiligten Ressorts sollten weiterhin eng mit zivilgesellschaftlichen Akteuren zusammenarbeiten, die häufig seit Jahrzehnten in der Krisenprävention tätig sind. Über Indikatoren und Aktionspläne hinaus sollte der „gemeinsame Lernprozess“ weitergehen, wie bei der Jahrestagung des Beirats zivile Krisenprävention deutlich wurde.

Zudem muss die Bundesregierung auf ihre eigene Glaubwürdigkeit achten. Eine globale Handels-, Wirtschafts-, Klima- und Rüstungspolitik ist oft struktureller Konflikttreiber. Eine präventive Außenpolitik, die den Namen verdient, braucht nicht nur überprüfbare Strategien, sondern auch eine ganzheitliche Ausrichtung

Independent inquiry fails to answer important questions on the UN’s role in Myanmar

An independent inquiry into the UN system’s response to the mass violence against the Rohingya population in Myanmar found “systemic and structural failures”, echoing an earlier finding of a similar investigation on Sri Lanka. At the same time, the inquiry conducted by former Guatemalan diplomat Gert Rosenthal leaves important questions unexplored. Crucially, Rosenthal did not explore allegations that the UN Country Team in Myanmar was complicit in the regime’s discrimination against the Rohingya population. For the UN to learn from the past, it needs to have a more detailed record of the decisions taken.

This text first appeared on medium.com on 15 September 2019.

Learning lessons from past mistakes is important. That is true both on an individual level as well at the level of the United Nations. Rwanda, Srebrenica, Sri Lanka, Haiti, South Sudan: there have been many independent inquiries into the UN’s actions in a situation where serious human rights violations took place. They have spurred influential, albeit imperfect reform processes of the organization’s institutional architecture, processes and policies. Unfortunately, the latest such report, into the UN system’s response to the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar between 2010 and 2018, is too shallow and generic to allow for substantial learning to take place how the UN system could have used potential leverage to prevent the atrocities. It also fails to investigate allegations of the UN’s complicity in the systemic discrimination of the Rohingya population that are already part of the public record.

The Rohingya people have suffered from systemic discrimination by the Myanmar government for decades. In a Buddhist-dominated country, the government and many Buddhist citizens regard the Rohingya as foreign, rejecting even their name and calling them “Bengali”, i.e. belonging to neighboring Bangladesh. The Rohingya have lacked citizenship and associated rights since the 1982 nationality law. Amid the democratic reform process in Myanmar since 2012, discrimination against the Rohingya has increased, including restrictions on their freedom of movement. In reaction to an attack on police stations by a Rohingya armed group in August 2017, the Myanmar security forces engaged in indiscriminate violence against the civilian population, killing thousands and driving around 700,000 people across the border into Bangladesh. Former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein described these attacks as “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”. A fact-finding mission recommended that senior military commanders should be investigated for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. It found six indicators of “genocidal intent”, including in its most recent report evidence of sexual violence by the security forces, with hundreds of women and girls gang-raped.

Existing allegations: timidity or even complicity?

For several years, there have been serious allegations of misconduct by the UN Country Team based in Myanmar and senior UN officials elsewhere, including through leaked internal reports, statements by former employees, and investigative reporting. These allegations are complex, but essentially fall into either of two main points. The first concerns a lack of coherence both within the UN presence in Myanmar and among the UN leadership in New York. Even though the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and his deputy Jan Eliasson had spearheaded a reform to improve the UN system’s processes and internal mechanisms in the wake of the Sri Lanka inquiry, these reforms were not effective in Myanmar. Specifically, public reports charged that the Resident Coordinator, the highest UN official in the country, excluded critical voices from meetings and suppressed a report warning of a deterioration of the situation in early 2017. Mirroring differences between public advocacy and quiet dialogue at the country level, senior UN officials disagreed on the organization’s overall approach, with Eliasson and al-Hussein on one side, and the head of the UN Development Programme, Helen Clark, and Vijay Nambiar, special advisor for Myanmar, on the other side. Limited public or private criticism by the UN after an earlier massacre, “proved to the Myanmar government that it could manipulate the U.N.’s self-inflicted paralysis in Rakhine”, a UN official told the journalist Column Lynch. In other words, the activists allege that contradictory messages from different parts of the UN system and relative muteness on major human rights issues signaled to Myanmar’s security forces that it could get away with them.

The second point that those reports make goes even further. They allege that the UN Country Team was complicit in the discriminatory policies of the Myanmar government towards the Rohingya people. The UN and its international partners sustained displaced Rohingyas in internment camps, which the government did not allow them to leave, and collaborated with the government in the so-called Rakhine Action Plan. The plan, supposedly aimed at improving the humanitarian situation, included the registration of Rohingya as “Bengalis”, thus erasing their identity. Liam Mahony, an international consultant, spoke with representatives of the humanitarian community in Myanmar and observed in a critical report in 2015: “The State benefits not only from having the cost of minimally sustaining the population carried by others, it also gets a legitimacy benefit from having all these international organizations present (and better yet, present and quiet.)”

Explaining “systemic failure”

In his report, Gert Rosenthal largely confirms the first allegation, and ignores the second one. He identifies the tension between quiet diplomacy and public advocacy as the core challenge for the UN in dealing with the situation in Rakhine state, and “systemic and structural failures” in resolving them. In a chapter of just six pages, Rosenthal describes five reasons for these failures: lack of support from member states; the absence of a common strategy by the UN leadership; too many points of coordination; a dysfunctional country team led by a Resident Coordinator out of her depth but unable to receive more expert support from headquarters because of government opposition; and competing lines of reporting from the field, muddling information and analysis available in New York. Because the problems were systemic, no single entity or individual should be singled out, he concludes, pointing to the “shared responsibility on the part of all parties involved”.

The report’s observations are pertinent, and in mentioning the lack of executive decision-making by the Secretary-General go beyond the findings of the Sri Lanka inquiry that was published in 2012. As a new generation of UN Country Teams has started to deploy since the start of the year, extracting lessons for their engagement would be important. Rosenthal acknowledges that pushing for change in the government of Myanmar’s behavior towards the Rohingya while simultaneously working with it on humanitarian and development issues as well as supporting the democratic transition process was “a difficult balancing act”.

Diplomacy on human rights issues often involves such balancing acts for the UN. The restrictions present in Myanmar – a repressive government, divided member states, and lack of dedicated UN capacities on political and human rights issues – were not unheard of. The Resident Coordinator was in a very difficult position to engage in advocacy, as Mahony had already concluded in 2015: humanitarian organizations were “expecting UNHCR and the Resident Coordinator to do it all for them.” Yet it is difficult to conclude from Rosenthal’s synoptic account which kind of advocacy and at what points in time could have been successful in dissuading the security forces from their attacks.

Lack of detail, counterfactuals and potential leverage

A detailed narrative investigating incidents where the UN was faced with a concrete incident and needed to make a choice between advocacy and diplomacy would have been helpful. Which information did which UN entity have, how was it handled within the system, and who used it in which form in any engagement with the government? In which ways did the actions of the government, member states and the UN entities interact to inform decision-making in the UN Country Team and at UN headquarters? For example, the journalist and Myanmar expert Francis Wade writes about the way in which an incident in the village of Du Chee Yar Tan had instilled greater caution in the UN’s advocacy. Based on initial reports of a massacre, the UN had raised the issue with the government authorities, only to be rebuked and find out later from further sources that the alleged incident was apparently not as serious as initially assumed.

Closer attention to such incidents would have been important. But Rosenthal had very limited capacity, having to work on its own without support staff or colleagues. He did not travel to Myanmar. Investigating inflection points would have helped to persuade the reader of his conclusions. It would have also allowed to point out more counterfactual decisions, or the consequences of the choices that were made for the calculus of the security forces and for how events unfolded on the ground. The only benchmark that Rosenthal mentions is an observer mission in Rakhine state that could have monitored the actions of armed groups and the military. Such a mission could have investigated incidents such as the attacks on police stations in 2016 and 2017 that provided the excuse for the security services’ “clearance operations”. But, as he himself acknowledges, such a mission was impossible without the agreement of the government.

Lastly, Rosenthal hardly enquires into the potential leverage of the UN system, or any other actor to change the government’s behavior. He briefly mentions China, India, Indonesia and ASEAN as “privileged” partners of the UN, but does not discuss any specific efforts UN officials made to convince them to put pressure on the government, including for the failed upgrade of the UN presence in the country. Nor does he inquire whether the US gave in too quickly to Chinese opposition to dealing with Myanmar in the UN Security Council earlier on. Rosenthal observes that even when Guterres wrote a stern letter to the Security Council in early September 2017 after the start of the ethnic cleansing campaign, it did not lead the council “to respond in either a forceful or a timely manner.”

In contrast, Mahony’s 2015 assessment talks of the “uniquely privileged position” of the UN and member states in relation to a government that desperately sought international legitimacy for its democratic reform process and the “huge financial rewards that this new leadership brings”. It would have been essential to learn if UN actors felt the same and in what ways they used such leverage.

Why accountability matters

The shortcomings of such an internal review matter. Not only does the UN owe greater accountability to the Rohingya victims of the systemic discrimination, forced displacement, and indiscriminate killings, but also to its own staff, and to the wider public. The Secretary General’s Office is currently leading a follow-up process to the Rosenthal report. Its first task will need to be to expand on Rosenthal’s very short recommendations.

Even though Rosenthal does not say so explicitly, some commentators have drawn the conclusion that his report “assigns collective responsibility for the atrocities committed during the 2017 Rohingya crisis to both the UN civil service and UN member states.“ That is misleading – there is nothing in the report to suggest how a more coherent UN system supported by member states could have prevented the atrocities. Maybe more pressure could have emboldened the civilian government led by Aung San Suu Kyi to try and stand up to the military, or earlier and more widespread targeted sanctions could have influenced the military leadership. Without a more thorough analysis of international engagement, we can only guess.

In the meantime, the UN’s reputation further deteriorates, potentially undermining its work elsewhere as well as the reform of the country team system. No official, diplomat, or government representative has been held accountable for a responsibility that is shared collectively. More than one million Rohingya refugees continue to live in horrid conditions in Bangladeshi refugee camps.

Ausdauernde, aber sanfte Diplomatie nötig

In vielen Staaten Afrikas weht gerade ein Wind der Veränderung. Deutschland sollte die Übergangsprozesse unterstützen.

Dieser Text erschien am 19. August 2019 als Gastbeitrag in der Frankfurter Rundschau.

Es weht ein neuer Wind in den Regierungsgebäuden wichtiger afrikanischer Länder. Die Einigung auf eine Übergangsregierung im Sudan Anfang Juli ist nur das jüngste Beispiel für Regierungswechsel in scheinbar erstarrten Regimen. Auch Äthiopien, Algerien, Kongo, Angola und Simbabwe erleben politischen Wandel in den letzten Jahren. Diese Prozesse haben regionale Ausstrahlungswirkung, eint jedoch auch eine anhaltende Rolle von Herrschaftseliten, eine große Rolle des Sicherheitsapparats und der fragile Charakter der Veränderungen. Internationale Diplomatie muss einen Weg finden, sowohl die erneute Konsolidierung autoritärer Herrschaft als auch Bürgerkrieg und Massengewalt zu verhindern. Dazu sollte die Bundesregierung die Kräfte des friedlichen Wandels umsichtig unterstützen.

Die Regierungswechsel waren stets auch Versuche der herrschenden Elite, angesichts wachsender Demonstrationen und Unzufriedenheit im Land die Proteste zu besänftigen. Saubere Schnitte mit der Vergangenheit waren es nicht. Angesichts der engen Verbindung von wirtschaftlichen und politischen Interessen war dies keine Überraschung: es gibt viel zu verlieren für all diejenigen, die von den bisherigen Verhältnissen profitiert haben.

Gleichzeitig ist die Beteiligung existierender Machteliten auch eine Chance für den Übergangsprozess. Sie erlaubt mögliche Friedensstörer zumindest anfangs einzubinden. Wenn Reformfiguren dem Status Quo entspringen, können sie auf existierende Netzwerke zur Umsetzung ihrer Ideen zurückgreifen. Premierminister Abyi Ahmed hat beispielsweise angefangen, weitgehende demokratische Reformen in Äthiopien umzusetzen. Medien- und Versammlungsfreiheit sind gewachsen, tausende politische Gefangen wurden frei gelassen, und die Privatisierung staatlicher Monopole hat begonnen. Letztes Jahr schloss Äthiopien Frieden mit Eritrea und eröffnete damit die Hoffnung, dass auch dort die Jahrzehnte der Isolation und Militarisierung zu Ende gehen könnten.

Doch die schnellen Reformen bringen auch die inneren Spannungen Äthiopiens zu Tage. 2018 wurden im Land fast drei Millionen Menschen durch gewaltsame Auseinandersetzungen vertrieben; so viele wie in keinem anderen Land. Ende Juni versuchten staatliche Sicherheitskräfte, die Regierung zu stürzen und töteten dabei unter anderem den Armeechef. Währenddessen drohen die Übergänge in Algerien und Simbabwe in alte Muster zurückzufallen, bevor sie richtig begonnen haben.

Für Deutschland und Europa sind diese Entwicklungen von großer Bedeutung. Äthiopien und die Demokratische Republik Kongo gehören zu den größten Empfängerländern von deutscher Entwicklungszusammenarbeit in Afrika. Äthiopien und Algerien haben sich in den vergangenen Jahren als wichtige Friedensvermittler hervorgetan, im Sudan und Südsudan bzw. in Mali. Wenn die Bundesregierung die Ziele der afrikapolitischen Leitlinien, welche sie dieses Jahr neu fasste, umsetzen will, müssen diese Übergangsprozesse friedlich verlaufen und nachhaltig inklusive Herrschaft garantieren.

Die Diplomatie steht jedoch vor schwierigen Herausforderungen. Zwei andere Übergangsprozesse der letzten Jahre zeigen, wie internationaler Einfluss nicht enden sollte: in Ägypten konnte sich das Militär mit Präsident al-Sisi an der Spitze behaupten, ohne dass es langfristige Einbußen der US-Militärhilfe hinnehmen musste. In Libyen zerfiel der Staat nach der international forcierten Entmachtung Gaddafis im Streit bewaffneter Gruppen.

Deutsche Diplomatie sollte also auf glaubwürdige Reformschritte drängen und die Erwartungen auch an konstruktive Regierungen wie die von Abyi Ahmed in Äthiopien nicht aus falscher Rücksichtnahme senken. Gewaltakte wie das Massaker der friedlichen Demonstranten am 3. Juni in Khartum müssen aufgeklärt werden. Die Bundesregierung sollte innerhalb der Staaten die Akteure unterstützen, die für einen gesellschaftlichen Wandel stehen. Entsprechend sollten deutsche Diplomaten bei ihren Vermittlungsbemühungen im Sudan und anderswo auch zivilgesellschaftliche Bewegungen wie die Sudanese Professionals Association involvieren. Gleichzeitig sollten sie weiterhin regionale Prozesse wie die Mediation der Afrikanischen Union im Sudan unterstützen. Um ein glaubwürdiges Auftreten zu ermöglichen, muss sich die Regierung auch noch stärker um einen kohärenten Ansatz zwischen den Ressorts und mit den europäischen Partnern bemühen.

Die Bevölkerungen im Sudan, Algerien und anderen Ländern haben gezeigt, dass sie nicht länger auf langfristige Reformversprechen warten wollen. Pusten wir Wind in ihre Segel.

A Question of Leadership: Lessons from the UN’s Actions in Myanmar

The UN’s inquiry into its own actions in Myanmar since 2012 draws significant parallels with a similar exercise that focused on the UN’s role during the end of the war in Sri Lanka. Once again, the UN found itself in a situation where a government was committing atrocities, but the UN showed an incoherent, ineffective response. Without clear leadership adjudicating differences among key stakeholders in the UN system, the principled engagement to which Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had committed himself remained elusive.

This text first appeared on Strife Blog hosted at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London.

Engaging with severe human rights violations requires courage and coherence, setting clear principles and the readiness to stand by them if they are under pressure. An independent inquiry on the UN’s action during the Rakhine crisis in Myanmar, which came out in June, observed that the international organisation showed a “systemic failure” in dealing with the state’s repression of the Rohingya people between 2010 and 2018. Choosing his words carefully, its author, the former Guatemalan foreign minister Gert Rosenthal, echoed a similar exercise on the UN’s behaviour during the end of the war in Sri Lanka in 2008/09. Importantly, the UN system’s shortcomings were not a simple matter of failing to speak out, but of incoherence across the system, exacerbated by the lack of executive decision-making in Myanmar and at headquarters level. The lack of leadership by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, despite his strong rhetorical commitment to human rights and atrocity prevention, deserves further attention.

From the UN’s perspective, the situation in Sri Lanka and Myanmar showed uncanny parallels, despite all objective differences. In Sri Lanka, the armed forces pursued a relentless final assault on the Tamil Tigers’ last hold-outs in Sri Lanka in 2008-2009. In Myanmar, the security forces attacked Rohingya civilians repeatedly, culminating in full-scale ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya population in 2017. In both countries, governments were the major perpetrators of violence, the presence of armed groups notwithstanding. Both governments were opposed to a strong human rights presence by the UN, and frustrated efforts by the UN Secretariat to increase its relevant capacity.

Myanmar and Sri Lanka, though both at the time host to significant armed violence, had successfully objected to any political or peacekeeping presence. The Resident Coordinators (RC), the head of the UN Country Team, in both countries had been chosen at a time of relative peace and with a strong development focus, not a profile in international humanitarian and human rights law. There were even some personal overlaps: Vijay Nambiar, the special advisor on Myanmar between 2012 and 2016, had been one of the most important UN officials during the Sri Lanka crisis, as Ban’s chef de cabinet. Lastly, there were strong geopolitical divisions that manifested themselves in a reluctance of the UN Security Council to discuss the situation as an official agenda item. In short, they were among the most difficult situations for the UN to work in.

The central challenge, as identified by Rosenthal, is a familiar and highly pertinent one: “how the United Nations can maintain some type of constructive engagement with individual member states where human rights abuses are systematically taking place, while at the same time pressing for those states to uphold their international commitments.” In other words, the UN needs to find an adequate mix of “quiet diplomacy” and “outspoken advocacy”, approaches that are associated with different parts of the UN system. For such a mix, the UN needs an inclusive organisational structure to produce a coherent policy, communicated across the system, owned by the leadership, and based on current, on-the-ground information and analysis.

The failure in Myanmar, according to Rosenthal, was that none of those prerequisites were present. Both at country and at HQ level, there were stark differences of opinion regarding the most adequate modus operandi. These manifested themselves in an increasingly polarised working environment, as a function of the high stakes involved in the crisis in Rakhine state. Both sides of the argument thought that the other approach was not only wrong-headed, but potentially dangerous and counterproductive to de-escalate the violence and reduce discrimination. The emotionally charged atmosphere explains the reports about critical individuals being excluded from key meetings by Renata Lok Dessalien. The UN also had difficulty accessing the most volatile areas of Rakhine state and providing independent monitoring after alleged incidents.

Perhaps most importantly, there was a lack of strategic leadership, not just at the country level, but also at the highest level of the UN system. Differences between Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson, who pressed for advocacy, and Special Envoy Vijay Nambiar and UNDP Administrator Helen Clark, who stressed quiet diplomacy and development efforts, respectively, were never resolved by Secretary-General Ban. Rosenthal writes, “even at the highest level of the Organization there was no common strategy.”

These shortcomings are particularly salient because Ban and Eliasson had vowed to turn a page after the damning findings of the Sri Lanka inquiry. They launched the “Human Rights up Front” initiative in late 2013 with the aim to improve coordination, information management, engagement with member states, and the UN’s organisational culture. One of the new mechanisms established as part of the initiative was the so-called Senior Action Group (SAG). The SAG brought together the system’s most important parts at the top leadership level, including the UNDP Administrator, the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Emergency Relief Coordinator, and other high-level officials. It was chaired by Deputy Secretary General Eliasson.

In the SAG’s discussion of the crisis in Rakhine state, Helen Clark, then UNDP administrator, protected UNDP and her RC, insisting that investing in development would also benefit the Rohingya, which should not be jeopardised by an overly focus on human rights advocacy. Allegations of specific incidents required more investigation, she often insisted. According to a UN official familiar with these discussions that I interviewed, “any time there was a contentious issue, a dilemma between quiet diplomacy, public diplomacy and so on, the differences were simply discussed, and no executive decision was taken.”

While the UNDP administrator is appointed by the Secretary General, he or she also reports to the UNDP Executive Board. At the time, Clark had the final say on appointing or replacing RCs. The UN official that I interviewed described her behaviour as “territorial.” In any case, Ban could have insisted on a common position on the Rakhine crisis, not the least since Helen Clark had officially signed up to Human Rights up Front. Eliasson, who knew the destitute situation of the Rohingya from his time as Emergency Relief Coordinator in the early 1990s, had pressed for the replacement of the RC as early as 2015. Still, Ban did not overrule Clark nor did he “arbitrate a common stance between these two competing perspectives,” as Rosenthal writes.

The lack of leadership was highly problematic: the whole purpose of such high-level meetings as the SAG was to deal with questions that UN officials at the country level had not been able to agree on, and to create a common analysis and joint ownership of decisions. The different perspectives are ingrained in the distinct mandates and ways of working of the parts of the UN system; it falls to the collective leadership of the UN system to resolve tensions arising from the operational work. “Systemic failure” sounds like the reasons for incoherence lie mainly in structural differences. While these are important, ultimately responsibility for ensuring that the whole UN system works falls to its leadership, including the Secretary General and member states.

Clearly, the UN system is subject to the same cleavages and divisions that characterise the international system as a whole. As Renata Lok Dessalien herself points out in a paper written after her assignment in Myanmar, conceptual differences regarding the meaning and interpretation of basic principles are ingrained in the UN Charter, for example between the promotion of human rights and the respect for national sovereignty. No internal UN reform such as Human Rights up Front can do away with those tensions, or abolish geopolitical differences. What it can do, and it has done with some mixed success, is change the way the organisation works, improving communication, analysis and decision-making procedures.

If the UN can hope to influence events in situations like those in Rakhine state in Myanmar at all, a coherent and coordinated policy across the whole system is a prerequisite. Otherwise both governments and critical member states are always able to play different parts of the system against each other, muting their respective effectiveness.

Luckily and despite significant opposition from key member states, the UN has started to improve its coherence in dealing with the crisis in Myanmar. Shortly after he came into office, Secretary General António Guterres appointed a permanent monitoring group within the UN, and prioritised strategic dialogue with Myanmar’s government, including State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi. He also championed a reform of the RC system. When Myanmar’s armed forces began their military offensive that included ethnic cleansing in Rakhine state in August 2017, Guterres resorted to public diplomacy. In a rare step, he wrote to the UN Security Council, urging its members to take action. Also in 2017, Renata Lok Dessalien finished her position as RC in Myanmar. Her successor, the Norwegian Knut Ostby, emphasized communication and principled engagement, for example threatening to reduce all but essential aid to IDP camps in Rakhine state if the government did not improve the Rohingyas’ freedom of movement. At the same time, renewed fighting between the ethnic Rakhine Arakan armed group and the government as well as continued denial of citizenship have left around a million Rohingya refugees stranded in refugee camps in neighbouring Bangladesh.

UN diplomacy consists of difficult balancing acts, in particular in dealing with unrepentant governments committing atrocities against their own population. Faced with an increasing emphasis of state sovereignty, including by the United States, Guterres has, at times, appeared to waver on human rights. If his prevention agenda is to succeed, he needs to mobilise all pillars of the UN to support each other, not just in Myanmar.

Ein Besuch in Auschwitz

Rampe und Tor vom Lager Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Ein dunkles Augenpaar von einer alten Schwarzweißaufnahme blickt mich direkt an. Es ist Teil des Aufklebers, den jeder Besucher und jede Besucherin der Gedenkstätte von Auschwitz trägt. Mein Aufkleber ist hellblau. Oben steht groß „Deutsch“ drauf. Ich klebe ihn mir aufs Hemd an die Brust, gehe durch die Sicherheitsschranke und stehe in einem weiten Hof mit vielen anderen Menschen. Hinter einem Baum am anderen Ende des Hofs sehe ich bereits den Eingang mit den berüchtigten Worten: Arbeit macht frei.

Nacheinander kommen Menschen mit Namensschildern, halten Schilder hoch und sammeln so ihre jeweilige Gruppe um sich. „Wo kommen Sie her?“ fragt die Führerin, „Sind Leute aus Österreich, der Schweiz oder Holland dabei?“ Ich komme aus Deutschland, aus Berlin noch dazu. Dem Ort, an dem der Plan zur Vernichtung der europäischen Juden entworfen wurde.

***

Zuerst wollte ich gar nicht viel über meinen Besuch in Auschwitz sagen. Beiträge auf sozialen Medien wie Instagram, Facebook und Twitter, die ich sonst regelmäßig nutze, schienen mir nicht angemessen zu sein. Bilder von dem Tor und der Rampe des Lagers zwischen Reiseeindrücken und Schnappschüssen – ein Besuch in Auschwitz passt schlecht zur schnellen, oberflächigen Kultur des Likens und Teilens. Unsere Profile dort dienen zu einem erheblichen Teil unserer eigenen Selbstdarstellung, unsere Timelines der ständigen Zerstreuung. Auschwitz verlangt Konzentration und tiefste Demut, erst recht für einen Deutschen.

Aber wir müssen darüber reden, was in Auschwitz geschehen ist, immer und immer wieder. 2,1 Millionen Menschen besuchten die Gedenkstätte letztes Jahr, die meisten von ihnen Jugendgruppen. 76.000 Besucherinnen und Besucher kamen aus Deutschland. Jeder sollte diesen Ort einmal im Leben gesehen haben, höre ich hier mehrfach. Allein schon aus logistischen Gründen ist das kaum möglich – im Sommer gibt es jetzt schon Engen wegen der vielen Besuchergruppen. Umso wichtiger ist es, dass wir, die wir diesen Ort gesehen haben, davon erzählen, so gut wir können.

***

Ich besteige am Busbahnhof von Kraków einen Kleinbus nach Oświęcim, das die Nazis bei ihrer Ankunft in Auschwitz umbenannten. So viele Leute drängen sich in den Bus, dass die letzten im Gang stehen müssen. Ich bin der einzige mit einem Koffer. Der Bus hält an kleinen Orten und fährt durch dunkle Wälder und an weiten Wiesen vorbei. Welche Taten verübten Wehrmacht, SS und Einsatzgruppen in dieser Gegend? Von der ehemaligen Königsstadt Kraków beherrschte, plünderte und drangsalierte NS-Gouverneur Hans Frank das besetzte Polen.

In Oświęcim angekommen laufe ich noch ein Stück von der Haltestelle zu meinem Hotel. Dazu muss ich das abgesperrte Gelände des Stammlagers umrunden. Die SS räumte die gesamte Stadt und die Umgebung, die sie zum sogenannten Interessengebiet erklärte. Erst nach dem Krieg konnten die Bewohner zurückkommen. Auf der abgewandten Seite des Eingangs stehen Mietshäuser. In den Vordergärten spielen Kinder auf Gerüsten. Wie muss es wohl sein, hier zu wohnen? In der Ferne höre ich das Quietschen von Containerzügen.

Wir haben die Studientour gebucht, insgesamt sechs Stunden für das Stammlager und das ein paar Kilometer entfernte Lager Auschwitz-Birkenau, auch Auschwitz II genannt. Die Führerin erklärt, wo das Lagerorchester spielte, zu dessen Märschen die Gefangenen im Rhythmus laufen mussten. Wo der Appellplatz war, zu dem selbst während der Arbeit am Tag gestorbene Menschen gebracht werden mussten. Die Zahlen mussten stimmen, sonst gab es Strafen: stundenlanges Stehen in sommerlicher Hitze oder winterlicher Kälte. Die Stehbunker, in denen mehrere Gefangen in völliger Dunkelheit mit nur kleinen Luftschlitzen für kleinere Vergehen geschickt wurden. Die doppelten Stacheldrahtzäune, die Wachtürme in schwarz gestrichenem Holz und die Stoppschilder zeigen, dass es aus dem Lager kein Entrinnen gab.

Das Stammlager, das früher als Kaserne der polnischen Armee diente, ist praktisch komplett erhalten. Die roten Backsteinhäuser stehen in geraden Reihen, die Wege sind von erst in den letzten Jahrzehnten gepflanzten Bäumen gesäumt, wie schmale Alleen. Es ist herrliches Sommerwetter, nur wenige Wolken verdecken den blauen Himmel und die warme Sonne. Besuchergruppen drängen sich durch die Ausstellungen in den Baracken, und mehrfach müssen wir warten, bevor wir in den nächsten Raum gehen können.

Viele Besucherinnen und Besucher halten ihre Handys und Tablets beständig hoch, um Fotos zu schießen. Mehrmals muss unsere Führerin Leute ermahnen, auf dem Gelände des Konzentrationslagers nichts zu essen. Auch zwei Deutsche aus unserer Gruppe packen ihr Brot in einer Pause aus. „Menschen sind hier massenweise verhungert, wir müssen den Respekt waren,“ sagt sie. Auschwitz ist keine Touristenattraktion wie jede andere.

Von Station zu Station und von Ausstellung zu Ausstellung hören wir von den Verbrechen, welche die Nazis hier begingen. Von Zahlen, die wir längst kennen, und die dennoch unfassbar bleiben. 1,3 Millionen Menschen waren im Lagerkomplex bis 1945, etwa 1,1 Millionen von ihnen wurden ermordet, an einem einzigen Ort. Über 90% der Opfer waren Juden. Die Menschen litten unter den Unterbringungsbedingungen, der harten körperlichen Arbeit, dem Mangel an Nahrungsmitteln und Hygiene. Die kargen Rationen reichten nicht zum Überleben aus. Auch das Arbeitslager Auschwitz diente letztlich der Vernichtung.

Die wahrscheinlich wirkungsvollste Ausstellung im Stammlager kommt ohne viele Worte aus. Sie zeigt den industriellen Charakter der Todesmaschine Auschwitz. Ankommende Menschen mussten ihr Gepäck zurücklassen, das sie im Glauben, umgesiedelt zu werden, mit vielen Gegenständen des täglichen Bedarfs mitgenommen hatten. Ihr Haar wurde rasiert. Alles verwerteten die Nazis weiter. Mäntel schickten sie an die Ostfront für Soldaten, Haushaltsgegenstände zur Verteilung ins Reich, und aus Haaren ließen sie Matratzen anfertigen.

Große Glasvitrinen zeigen Berge von menschlichem Haar, links und rechts eines Ganges. Andere Vitrinen zeigen die Lederkoffer, die noch die Beschriftungen ihrer Eigentümer tragen, wieder andere Haufen von Schuhen, Brillen, Schuhbürsten und Emailletöpfe. Jeder Gegenstand steht für einen Haushalt und für Menschen mit Persönlichkeit, Erfahrung und Charakter. „Es sind nicht nur Zahlen“, betont die Führerin, die uns auch immer wieder Geschichten von einzelnen Gefangenen aus Auschwitz erzählt.

Hinter einer Glasscheibe liegen Dutzende leere Blechbüchsen. Sie enthielten Zyklon-B, das Gift der Gaskammern. Während die SS die Gaskammern und Krematorien in Auschwitz-Birkenau vor dem Verlassen des Lagers sprengte, ist die erste experimentelle Gaskammer im Stammlager erhalten bzw. rekonstruiert. Das frühere Munitionslager der Kaserne erhielt Öffnungen im Dach, durch die das Gift geschüttet wurde, und direkt daneben, Krematorien. Die Führung geht durch diesen Bau. Innen ist es dunkel, die Menschen drängen sich durch die Räume mit den bloßen Wänden. Nur fünfzig Meter weiter, in Sichtweite, wohnte Lagerkommandant Rudolf Höß mit Frau und Kindern.

Ein Shuttlebus bringt die Gruppen in das wenige Kilometer entfernte Lager Auschwitz-Birkenau. Um ein Vielfaches größer als das Stammlager, vermittelt der Ort einen Eindruck des Ausmaßes der Vernichtung. Schienen führen bis in die Mitte des Lagers, zwischen Baracken, die hier meist aus Holz waren. Ich muss an Fotos denken, die wir in einer Ausstellung gesehen hatten. Man sieht ankommende Juden nach oft tagelanger Fahrt in Viehwaggons mit schwerem Gepäck, das sie noch auf der Rampe zurück lassen mussten. Im Hintergrund zeigen zwei hohe Schornsteine, was sie hier erwartete. Ein anderes zeigt die Selektion noch auf der Rampe. Korrekt gekleidete Offiziere und Ärzte sortieren die Menschen innerhalb von Sekunden. Alte, Kinder, Schwangere, Kranke wurden sofort zu den Gaskammern geschickt.

Die Gaskammern mit angeschlossenen Krematorien hier in Birkenau waren nach dem neusten Stand der Technik mit Lastenaufzügen ausgestattet. Ofen grenzte an Ofen. Sie hatten eine deutlich größere Kapazität als das Krematorium im Stammlager. Es sollten so viele Menschen wie möglich getötet werden.

***

Wir sehen und hören viel, was hier geschehen ist. Und doch bleibt es unvorstellbar. Wir sehen die Rampe, die Barracken und die Öfen. Doch das Leid, das hier herrschte, sehen wir nicht. Wir hören von der Konstruktion der Gaskammern, aber die Schreie der Menschen hören wir nicht. Wie riechen auch nicht den Gestank der menschlichen Ausdünstungen in den Unterkünften. Wir fühlen nicht die Schläge der Aufseher und die Enge der hölzernen Pritschen.

Sich vorzustellen, was in Auschwitz passierte, geht gegen jede menschliche Vernunft. Wir kennen Rache oder Neid als Motive für Gewalttaten, auch Abschreckung und Kriegführung. Doch die Shoa lässt sich damit nicht erfassen. Die Shoa war nicht spontan oder aus dem individuellen Hass Einzelner geboren, sondern ein strategisch angelegter Plan zur Vernichtung der europäischen Juden, der auf der ganzen Macht des Staates und tausender von Tätern beruhte.

Das Verbrechen lässt sich nicht aufs Pathologische schieben. Das ist der ganze Abgrund von Auschwitz: dass Menschen dazu fähig sind, Morden zum System zu machen. Was bedeutet angesichts dieser Fähigkeit noch Menschlichkeit?

***

Am Ende der Tour zeigt uns die Führerin ein Foto mit zwei Kindern, beide Opfer von Auschwitz. Sie hatten ihr Leben noch vor sich, hatten Träume, Wünsche, Hoffnungen. Das Augenpaar auf dem blauen Aufkleber gehört einem von ihnen.

Preventive Diplomacy: Invest in the Skills of Frontline Diplomats

In conflict-prone countries, diplomats must employ a special skill-set that allows them to escape from biased conventional wisdoms and balance the personal and the professional in negotiations. Ministries and international organizations should foster mechanisms such as structured spaces for reflection and frequent exchange with fellow diplomats from relevant missions in the region.

This post summarizing some key insights from my PhD thesis was first published on the PeaceLab Blog on 4 July 2019.

European diplomats visiting Abyei, May 2019. Source: https://twitter.com/SWalshEU/media.

Conflict prevention is an important objective for international organizations as well as in many countries’ foreign policies. However, engaging in state-society conflicts presents a fundamental challenge for diplomats and United Nations (UN) officials posted in “at risk” countries – those on the precipice of violence. State-society conflicts are defined as those relating to the distribution of power between and within societal groups as well as their respective access to state resources; in other words, nothing could be more political. Diplomats, however, are supposed to refrain – by law and convention – from meddling in another country’s domestic affairs. At the same time, for a reform process to be credible and sustainable, it ultimately needs to be driven by local actors – not outsiders. In short: diplomats are caught in a conundrum of seemingly contradictory conventions and political objectives.

So, how do frontline diplomatic actors handle this fundamental challenge on a practical level? This question was central to my PhD research, in which I found that such situations require careful balancing acts. Engaging in state-society conflicts is always marred by trade-offs, e.g. between inclusion and exclusion or legitimacy and effectiveness. There is hardly ever a perfect combination of international objectives. It often falls to frontline diplomats posted in countries experiencing such conflicts to balance the trade-offs presented by those objectives. Trying to influence state-society relations also involves balancing the level of coerciveness and the level of intrusion in diplomatic interventions. Fostering this duality in a competent manner requires closer attention to the ways in which frontline diplomats make sense of conflicts, interact with national stakeholders, and coordinate with their diplomatic peers.

This analysis is based on an empirical analysis of diplomacy in South Sudan since independence as well as in post-war Sri Lanka, where I interrogated the views and everyday practices of frontline diplomats. In total, I conducted 165 semi-structured interviews with diplomats, UN officials, civil society representatives, policymakers, and experts.

Prevention needs to balance actors and structures

As the American academic Barnett Rubin poignantly observed in 2002, “all prevention is political”: Constraining the repertoire of elite actions is inherently disruptive. Preventive action rests on a forward-looking, proactive and conflict-sensitive attitude, requiring courage and close interaction with people in the target society. International influence, though, is heavily circumscribed, and may be subject to geopolitical interests, regional rivalries, economic priorities, and divergent political preferences of local elites. Prevention is also disruptive within bureaucratic organizations, as it often entails questioning established relationships and accepted analyses in addition to imagining scenarios and new ways of engaging. In short: Prevention is not a separate activity, but rather a normative objective that affects diplomatic interactions across conflict stages.

Politics in countries at risk of armed conflict is often highly personal and informal. A thorough understanding of the nature of elite bargains by national stakeholders must incorporate both psychological factors and an analysis of a conflict’s political economy. Leaders in state-society conflicts may be geared more towards immediate political survival than reputational concerns, which has consequences for preventive diplomacy. Standard diplomatic appeals to leaders’ legacy or long-term interests may thus be ineffective. Diplomats need to balance the respective roles of structures and actors operating within them. In my research, I discuss how they do so across three levels of the diplomatic process at the country level: Knowledge production, political engagement, and international coordination.

Frontline diplomats are exposed to cognitive short cuts

When analyzing the politics of their host countries, frontline diplomats are exposed to cognitive shortcuts. Knowledge production involves balancing countervailing interpretations. Organizational rules and professional conventions dispose frontline diplomats towards a bias favoring the legitimacy held by formal state institutions. Even beyond the state, external actors easily assume a strong link between national stakeholders and local sources of power, and patron-client relations are often difficult to identify for outsiders. Diplomats need to reconcile structural forces such as ethnicity, religion, economic inequality, and ideology with the agency of their local interlocutors: Is their behavior an aberration or an expression of the governing political economy? Diplomats with long-term expertise are often more adept at recognizing such structural forces – but may also fail to update their beliefs and perceptions with changing elite incentives. This was the case following the independence of South Sudan in 2011, when many long-term observers struggled to recognize how the creation of the state had exacerbated internal tensions in the ruling elite. Such changes can be difficult to identify in bureaucratic systems that talk to each other mainly in writing, and that value conformity over questioning an internal consensus.

Diplomatic engagement with national stakeholders is often most effective when it is based on dialogue and clear principles. Mediating the intra-party dispute in South Sudan before the start of the war, a seasoned diplomat insisted, was essential – but it was absolutely integral to ensure transparency and avoid even the impression of favoring one contestant over the other. When domestic leaders find themselves in a hole, external actors need to hand them a ladder to climb out rather than a shovel to dig deeper. If nationalist leaders insulate themselves, working through interlocutors can help to create space for constructive dialogue. At the same time, the risk of constructive engagement is abuse and impunity that normalizes extra-legal methods in political competition. Following the protocol of state-to-state relations is thereby no longer neutral, but may end up legitimizing the concentration of power in a central government. Informal politics often require personal engagement, using institutional networks and individual experience to gain access to key people and facts. When diplomats engage on a personal level, they may increase their risk of being dragged into domestic political fights.

Diplomatic coordination can provide the political cover for preventive diplomacy and reduce the exposure of informal engagement. This often poses a dilemma for principled engagement: Those international actors with the most influence may not be those with the most transformative approach. The Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD)-led mediation in South Sudan was a prime example of this phenomenon, with its member states deeply divided and opposed to freezing the assets of certain South Sudanese elites. At the same time, international pressure is more effective when there exists a broad consensus. Shifting geopolitical power structures mean that alternative sources of legitimacy are readily available, as China’s role in Sri Lanka and its close support for former President Mahinda Rajapaksa demonstrates. International organizations such as a UN Country Team may convene a range of diplomats, and maintain a long-term knowledge base of international engagement – if diplomats regularly share and reflect upon their experiences.

Promoting skills to balance trade-offs and creating spaces for reflection

As my research project demonstrates, the individuals engaged in preventive diplomacy matter. Governments and the UN, which have both committed themselves to conflict prevention, should promote mechanisms, policies, and skill-sets that foster diplomats’ ability to make judgements about balancing trade-offs, weighing countervailing interpretations, savvy engagement, and efficient coordination.

Bureaucratic organizations should establish mechanisms to regularly reflect on the disruptive nature of threats and preventive possibilities. Escaping conventional wisdom requires structured spaces for reflection within missions and across government and international organizations. Too often, missions and regional desks are too thinly stretched to be able to conduct structured conflict analyses regularly. External expertise, regular facilitation, and dedicated support mechanisms from capital/HQ can help overcome the limited capacity of missions in at-risk countries.

In situations with strong regional dimensions such as South Sudan, diplomats from all relevant missions in the region should hold frequent videoconferences and meet for internal workshops. Bureaucracies would do well to revamp human resources practices to ensure that diplomats with appropriate experience and skills are deployed where they are needed. At least for heads of missions, experience in a similar context and some basic country training should be compulsory. Top policymakers must give more weight to principled engagement in at-risk countries and foster an organizational culture that encourages individual responsibility, accepts risks, and allows dissent.

Frontline diplomats, in turn, can benefit from maintaining a detailed overview of national stakeholders, including possible agents of change and spoilers. They need to be prepared to combine personal and professional interactions, based on consistency, integrity, and transparency. For them, what matters is a clear-eyed awareness of risks and benefits, and the readiness to seize opportunities where they arise.

Don’t forget the role of the state in Sri Lanka’s violence

Attacks on minorities in Sri Lanka need to be seen in the context of an ethnocratic state and a climate of impunity for the incitement and mobilisation of mob violence.

The following appeared as a letter to the editor in Süddeutsche Zeitung on 5 June 2019, reacting to an article about incidents of anti-Muslim violence in the North-Western Province of Sri Lanka that had originally been published on 14 May 2019. The translation is mine.

A broken window in Gintota (near Galle in the South), where a mob attacked Muslim houses and mosques in November 2017.

As you report, after the terrorist attacks on Easter Sunday in Sri Lanka, there were riots against Muslims. It is important not to disregard the role of the state and of impunity in that regard. In contrast to your wording, there weren’t “clashes between Christians and Muslims” recently. More to the point, according to available reports, it was racist violence. In the past years, there have repeatedly been such acts of mob violence, including in Aluthgama in 2014, in Gintota in 2017, and in Ampara and Digana in 2018. Frequently these are violent acts that are organised and incited by radical Singhalese-Buddhist organisations . They use busses to carry groups of perpetrators to a location, where those people systematically attack Muslim shops, houses, and mosques. Sri Lankan security forces intervene only belatedly. Once arrested, many perpetrators are being released after protests.

Recently, the police arrested Amit Weerasinghe from the organisation Mahason Balakaya. Weerasinghe had already been arrested as one of those inciting the riots in March 2018, but during the constitutional crisis last autumn, he was released. Speaking about religious “clashes” between two communities obscures the one-sidedness and organisation of this violence. It is not spontaneous, but originates in a climate of impunity, structural discrimination, and negligence of security tasks by the authorities.

—

Since I submitted this letter, things have only got worse. President Maithripala Sirisena pardoned Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara Thero, a Buddhist monk and the General Secretary of Bodu Bala Sena, on 23 May 2019. Bodu Bala Sena, or BBS, is a radical Buddhist organisation, that has been implicated in many of the violent incidents mentioned above, including Gnanasara personally. In 2014, after initial tensions in the area, BBS held a rally in Aluthgama, where Gnanasara gave a speech threatening “If one Muslim lays a hand at a Singhalese, that will be the end of all of them.” During the violence, at least four people were killed, and many houses damaged. In 2016, he warned of “another Aluthgama”. In March 2018, Gnanasara was again at the scene just before mobs descended on the central towns of Digana and Teldeniya, although BBS claimed he wanted to clam things down. Gnanasara has a close partnership with Wirathu, a radical Buddhist monk inciting hatred in Myanmar.

For none of those events did Gnanasara, or BBS, face judicial consequences. Only in June 2018, Gnanasara was sentenced to six years in jail for contempt of court, after he had interrupted a hearing of a prominent case of an allegedly disappeared cartoonist, and intimitated the cartoonist’s wife, Sandya Eknaligoda. After Gnanasara was released, the president met him in person.

On 31 May, another Buddhist monk, Athuraliye Rathana Thero, began a fast unto death at Sri Lanka’s most sacred Buddhist temple in Kandy, to pressure a Muslim minister and two Muslim governors to resign from their positions, following his allegations about their possible links to the perpetrators of the Easter Sunday attacks. On 3 June, Gnanasara issued a deadline for their resignations. Shortly thereafter, the governors and all 9 Muslim MPs involved in the government, i.e. also those no involved in any allegations, resigned from their positions. More and more, events on the street dominate politics in Sri Lanka.

People and Politics: Fostering the Art of Conflict Prevention

This post first appeared on the “Strength through Peace” blog of the Council on Foreign Relations. I co-authored it with Christoph O. Meyer.

The centenary of the armistice that ended the First World War last week brought the destructive impact of war again to the attention of world leaders and people across the world. Since it was signed in Compiègne, some commentators maintain, we have learned a lot about how to prevent conflict. That may be true, but research and practice of conflict prevention today remain heavily biased towards technocracy and wishful thinking. Instead, both researchers and practitioners should pay greater attention to individual, informal, and reflexive forms of knowledge. We call it the art of prevention.

As we argue in a recent journal article for Global Affairs, there are three main conceptual approaches to the study and practice of prevention: science, craft, and art. Importantly, despite the labels, all three approaches form part of social sciences. Science and craft approaches are most widespread, but on they often display unacknowledged shortcomings and blind spots.

By science, we refer to an approach that essentially sees conflict like a disease and prevention like a medical intervention that can spot its signs early on to avoid its outbreak in society. Mainly using econometric models, such approaches aim for the probabilistic modelling of events. They are particularly prevalent in forecasting organized violence and often produce watch lists of “at risk” countries. However, decision-makers are frequently skeptical about the value of such rankings and look for more specific, actionable information about the nature, timing and scale of the expected harm than just in which country the next large-scale conflict might occur.

By craft, we mean the tendency among those in think tanks, NGOs and government to talk about the “tool box” of conflict engagement and organizational solutions to overcome the oft-cited gap between early warning and early action. This approach risks treating society like a broken car that needs the right spare parts and tools to fix it. What was required, authors in this tradition argue, is for the right instruments (such as targeted sanctions or the withdrawal of aid) to be applied in a coordinated fashion at the appropriate stage of a conflict. Officials are part of a political and organizational process, however. Certain career incentives (for identifying foreign policy “success stories,” for example) affect their approach to problem-solving. Getting to the heart of a conflict often requires difficult trade-offs that cannot simply be “fixed”.

What is required, therefore, is closer attention to the agency of the people involved in prevention. How do their career incentives impact their approach to domestic politics? Diplomats and UN officials craft specific policies, but they operate in an environment of compromise and uncertainty. Their own experiences, skills, and personalities matter in systems that are characterized by personalized networks and dysfunctional institutions.

This is what we mean by the art of prevention. Such an approach encourages reflecting on one’s own impact, weighing consequences, and constantly recalibrating strategies. Instead of pretending that “all good things come together” in prevention (as well as in peacebuilding), it embraces the explicitly political nature of prevention. The power-sharing strategy required to persuade an authoritarian leader to relinquish power in the wake of large-scale protests may hinder the transformation of the political system in the long term, and sow the seeds for renewed conflict. Stopping a leader from repressing dissent involves acknowledging legitimate grievances. Preventive diplomacy needs to seek face-saving ways for leaders to step down from the ladder of escalation.

What does this involve in practice? It means taking the political choices that external actors and national stakeholders make seriously. The recent UN and World Bank report on prevention is a welcome step in that direction. Moreover, an artful approach to prevention focuses on the human beings at the center of conflict politics—and the ways in which external actors can have an impact on them: their motivations, personality, interests, and capabilities. It also means that citizens need to hold their governments accountable in the way they translate their lofty commitments of “never again” into practice. It is a task for all of us.

Peace First at the Horseshoe Table

Germany brings diplomatic weight to the UN Security Council, to which it was elected on 8th June. The German government should use this advantage to support mediation and peace processes as priorities of its two-year membership. It should focus on three central instruments in this regard: refining sanctions, accountability of troop contributing countries, as well as the organization of more flexible visiting missions by Security Council diplomats.

This text was first published on the PeaceLab Blog. It is also available in German.

764925 German FM Maas after election to UNSC 2018.jpg — German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas at UN Headquarters after Germany’s election to the UN Security Council for 2019/2020, 8 June 2018 (c) UN Photo.

Every eight years, Germany joins the playing field of major powers at the United Nations. Newly elected members to the UN Security Council like Germany have to prove themselves vis-à-vis the five permanent members every time anew. In the midst of political quarrels about the use of chemical weapons in Syria and the daily management of peace operations, the attention on the core purpose of the Council, to maintain international peace and security, gets lost all too easily. Germany should thus strive to strengthen peace processes and mediation efforts through the Security Council.

Germany is an unusually resourceful non-permanent member

Non-permanent members of the Security Council only have limited influence. The veto power of China, France, Russia, the UK, and the USA is not the only reason for that. Those countries also possess continuous experience in the negotiations, issues, and countries that shape the Council’s agenda. In this game of major powers, smaller members might at most be able to build bridges, improve working methods, or make small substantial suggestions.

As fourth largest financial contributor to the UN’s regular budget and, despite deficits, an important actor on the diplomatic floor, Germany needs to aim higher. In a number of countries on the Security Council’s agenda, German diplomats already play a substantial role. In those cases, the German government should use its membership in the Council as an additional diplomatic forum, whose approaches and instruments have their own benefits. Together with its European partners Germany can, for example, promote the maintenance of the nuclear agreement with Iran, demand humanitarian access and accountability for war crimes in Syria, prepare a peace operation in Ukraine, support the negotiations with the Taliban in Afghanistan, and shape the reconstruction of liberated areas in Iraq. Germany already has a leading position in all these contexts due to its existing channels and contacts – this should be reflected in the Security Council.

Peace operations need to be guided by a political strategy

Reaching consensus among its members on the overarching political objectives that should guide its crisis management is probably the biggest challenge for the Security Council. The High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (HIPPO) already demanded in its seminal 2015 report that peace operations should always follow a political strategy. Otherwise they run the risk of being driven by military considerations, and of falling prey to the diverging interests of the conflict parties. In fragile contexts such as Mali, the Democratic Republic of Congo or South Sudan, there are incessant threats to the civilian population that can justify international protection measures, as the former UN staff member Ralph Mamiya observes. Yet without a political process, there can be no structuring priorities that could guide the strategic deployment of scarce resources and a foreseeable withdrawal of international troops.

Naturally, there are manifest reasons for the lack of political strategies in the UN Security Council. For one thing, these are genuinely difficult questions without obvious and easy solutions. Moreover, the work of the Council relies on hard-fought compromises, which result in frequently vague or complicated language. Furthermore, in some situations, such as in South Sudan, there is no functioning peace agreement that could guide the actions of a peace operation.

Germany should encourage strategic thinking in the Security Council

Germany cannot remove these structural deficits in two years. Neither does it have the diplomatic capacities to work out a strategy for each situation on the Security Council’s agenda . The German government thus needs to set clear priorities. German diplomats can encourage the Security Council to think more strategically. The more interactive and informal the discussions before the proper negotiations are, the more fruitful the latter are in many cases.

The German government could take its cue from Sweden, which, together with Peru, organized a retreat for all ambassadors in the Security Council this year. The Permanent Mission in New York can also organize events at the sidelines of official meetings and informal briefings in line with the Arria formula. This would bring the perspectives of civil society organizations of affected countries as well as experts on current mediation and negotiation processes to Manhattan. Lastly, Germany could organize a thematic debate on the contribution of the whole UN system to peace processes during one of its two monthly presidencies of the Security Council. This debate should address the limitations of the Security Council head on and tackle its cooperation with other UN entities such as special envoys, special rapporteurs, and the UN Development Program.

Using clear listing criteria for targeted sanctions

The improvement of the Council’s working atmosphere and quality of discussion aside, Germany should focus its “peace first” attention on three core instruments of the Security Council: refining targeted sanctions, the accountability of troop contributing countries, as well as the organization of more flexible visiting missions by Security Council diplomats.

The Security Council maintains 14 sanctions regimes, some of which explicitly aim to support peace and transition processes, for example in South Sudan, Mali, or Libya. Theoretically, such sanctions should not primarily punish individuals, but incentivize them to participate in peace processes in a constructive manner through travel bans and asset freezes. In reality, the restraints of those sanctions are often too slow and too backwards-oriented to actually influence mediation efforts substantially. Germany has contributed to the reform of UN sanctions since the late 1990s. As a member of the sanctions committees (and chair of some of them), it should promote the implementation of clear listing and delisting criteria in every single case.

Vetting troop contributing countries

Hardly anything is as damaging to the reputation of UN peace operations as incidents of sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA), as well as a lack of readiness to act decisively to protect civilians at risk in their vicinity. Secretary-General António Guterres has already introduced important reforms in this area. Yet, German Ambassador Christoph Heusgen, when asked about his plans to tackle the issue in the Security Council at a recent event in New York , could only think of the inclusion of more women in troop contingents. However, a more stringent and systematic vetting of all troop contingents regarding their previous human rights records in domestic settings, would be more important in this context. The deployment of 49 non-vetted Sri Lankan soldiers in Lebanon this year demonstrated that the current UN procedures are not sufficient.

Using its increased credibility as troop contributor in Mali, Germany should promote stronger accountability of all troop contributing countries. Based on an existing Security Council resolution, the UN secretary-general should ban states that do not sufficiently investigate allegations of sexual exploitations and abuse against their soldiers from future missions until they improve their procedures. Similarly, performance assessments of troop contingents, such as the ones requested by the Security Council for the UN Mission in South Sudan after a special review, should also be conducted for all other missions.

Make visiting missions more flexible and geared towards crisis management

German diplomats like to point out that they would prioritize conflict prevention in the Security Council. Rarely do they go into the details of the Council’s added value in political crises – and where it might be counterproductive. One important instrument for early crisis management are visiting missions of Security Council diplomats. Under the leadership of up to three members, representatives of all 15 member states fly to a region to talk to the relevant actors on the ground.

Germany should prepare and lead such a mission if the opportunity presents itself. Potential destinations could be Sudan or South Sudan, where Germany has supported dialogue and mediation processes. At the same time, Germany should strive for more flexible mission formats, which could deploy a small delegation of the Security Council and key UN officials more quickly.

Stand up for peace and prevention

A stronger focus on the promotion of peace and transition processes in the Security Council will meet resistance. China, Russia, and a number of member states from the Global South are quick to refer to state sovereignty in the context of international mediation efforts in authoritarian states. The Trump administration in the United States undermines diplomatic processes on Iran and Syria and moves to cut the budget of UN peace operations even in places where violence and conflict are on the rise as in the Democratic Republic of Congo. As former colonial powers, the UK and France hold back on Cameroon, while the conflict about the Anglophone areas is escalating.

With its ambition to promote peace and conflict prevention, Germany must not shy away from conflicts in the Security Council. At the same time, it should rely on stable partnerships and frequent exchange with its European partners as well as countries like South Africa. The latter will also be a member of the Security Council from 2019 and started pursueing more multilateral solutions under President Cyril Ramophosa.

At the end of its membership in the Council, the German government should order an independent evaluation of its diplomacy around the horseshoe table. The objective: learning lessons for its next candidacy to join the playing field of major powers.

Focus on atrocity prevention, not R2P

Written evidence to the UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee for its Inquiry on “Responsibility to Protect and humanitarian intervention”. The final report cites my evidence.

Executive Summary

The main value of R2P was as an impetus to conceptual and political debates as well as a tool for policy entrepreneurs to galvanize public attention, mainly in domestic contexts.
R2P has not substantially changed the existence of global power inequalities, domestic incentives for foreign policy making, or the proclivity of violent actors to use force indiscriminately if it suits their objectives.
There are no generalized exemptions from the prohibition on the use of force outside the UN Charter. Any General Assembly resolution could only provide an, albeit strong, political signal of legitimacy, not a legal one.
In UN debates and diplomacy, the concept of R2P should be retired and replaced by a more operational focus on atrocity prevention.
The UK can make use of the notion of “universal jurisdiction” to prepare cases against foreign individuals responsible for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. With the central position of the UK in the global financial system, it could also engage more forcefully in combating money laundering by elites that are responsible for such crimes.
The UK should include explicit assessments of atrocity risks, including identity-based violence, in its country strategies.

Introduction

I am a PhD candidate at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London as well as a non-resident fellow at the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi), an independent Berlin-based think tank. Between 2012 and 2015, I was involved in a major international research project entitled “Global Norm Evolution and the Responsibility to Protect”, which brought together seven international partner institutions from Europe as well as Brazil, China, and India and was coordinated at GPPi. The main objective of the research project was to investigate how the idea of a Responsibility to Protect (R2P) was faring in the context of a changing global order. All our academic and policy publications are accessible on the following website: http://www.globalnorms.net/.
This submission builds on that research, as well as my research on the diplomacy of conflict prevention and peacemaking in the context of my PhD project since then. While it builds on collaborative research, it only represents the views of the author and not necessarily any of the institutions that I am affiliated with. Taking the questions posed by the Committee as a starting point, the submission starts with a discussion of the concept of R2P and what (not) to expect from it. It then highlights a few issues with the implementation of the political commitment to R2P globally. Subsequently, the submission discusses the idea of a “humanitarian intervention”, before it concludes with ideas and recommendations for reform of the discourse and practice of R2P.

The concept of the Responsibility to Protect

The adoption of the three paragraphs on R2P in the World Summit outcome document of 2005 needs to be seen in its proper historical context (UN General Assembly 2005, para. 138-140). It was a response to the heated discussions of the preceding one and a half decades. These are well known and include the acknowledgement of catastrophic failures faced with genocide in Rwanda and ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s as well as the divisions in the Security Council regarding the situation in the Kosovo in 1999. The creation of R2P included an important conceptual shift from earlier debates about “humanitarian intervention”: instead of focussing on the rights of intervening powers, R2P highlighted the responsibilities of all UN member states to prevent atrocity crimes (International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty 2001). Instead of explicitly qualifying state sovereignty, it emphasized the sovereign responsibility of governments for the protection of their populations from atrocity crimes (Evans 2008).
R2P is a political commitment by UN member states, not a legal one. Endorsed by a then record number of heads of state and government, the World Summit outcome document has a high legitimacy, but does not constitute international legal obligations comparable to an international treaty. Notably, it does not change the existing legal context for the use of force under the UN Charter. The use of “timely and decisive action” remains firmly tied to the UN Security Council.
The main value of R2P was as an impetus to conceptual and political debates as well as a tool for policy entrepreneurs to galvanize public attention. After its adoption, UN officials sought to operationalize its meaning and implications for the UN system (Murthy and Kurtz 2016). The work by subsequent UN Special Advisors on the Responsibility to Protect as well as UN Special Advisors on the Prevention of Genocide is particularly pertinent in this regard. As a result of detailed interpretation and wide-ranging consultations, Edward Luck, the first UN Special Advisor on the Responsibility to Protect, developed the three-pillar framework of R2P: government responsibility, international assistance, and timely and decisive action (UN Secretary-General 2009). This framework has since structured conceptual debates among member states about R2P.
The three-pillar framework has allowed a comprehensive focus: by including the essentially uncontested responsibilities under pillars one and two, it made it easier to also discuss much more controversial policy options if governments are “manifestly failing” to protect their populations. Exactly because coercive measures are contested among UN member states, however, relatively few official debates and reports capitalized on that opportunity.
At the same time, controversies on the utility – and abuse – of the use of force could taint the overall concept. Nowhere has this been clearer than in the aftermath of the decision of the Security Council to mandate UN member states to use “all necessary means” to protect civilians in Libya in March 2011 (UN Security Council 2011). As the oral testimony to the committee also acknowledged, the interveners’ shift from a narrow focus on protecting civilians in Benghazi to a much wider demand for regime change in Libya (Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy 2011) seriously undermined the credibility of R2P in the eyes of a global audience (Brockmeier, Stuenkel and Tourinho 2016).
As a tool for policy entrepreneurs, R2P has allowed civil society organisations and members of parliament to refer to their respective government’s responsibility to engage in political debates about adequate action to respond to atrocity crimes – the current inquiry is a case in point. It has provided civil society organisations with a way to frame their demands for diplomatic, humanitarian, human rights, and judicial engagement by pointing to a political commitment that all governments have signed up to on a global level. The Global Center on R2P, for example, is a New York-based NGO dedicated to the implementation and promotion of R2P. The International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect brings together civil society organizations from around the world with a shared objective. The efforts of these organisations increase awareness among policymakers, officials, and the general public for atrocity crimes, they provide analysis and regular country monitoring, and organize training and capacity building events.
On the global level, our research found that R2P has not been an effective tool to mobilize action between 2004 and 2014. Where there was international agreement, visible through UN Security Council actions, the frame of “genocide” and historical analogies to Rwanda and Srebrenica were much more powerful than references to R2P – including in the decision by Western powers to intervene in Libya in 2011 (Kurtz and Rotmann 2016: 6). No draft Security Council resolution is more likely to be adopted by consensus just because it contains a reference to R2P.
R2P has not resolved geopolitical divisions in the UN Security Council, nor has it made international responses in the most protracted cases of atrocities more likely. The expectation, where it exists, that a political concept like R2P could in and of itself solve some of the most contested questions in international relations and drive political action, is too high. Any idea about an international legal obligation for member states to intervene in situations where atrocities are committed creates unreasonable expectations of international law and global politics. No government can be expected to commit troops on behalf of another country’s population without domestic considerations on a case-by-case basis. Furthermore, it is rarely clear which specific international actions would be effective and proportional to prevent atrocities in a given situation.

The implementation of R2P

Where the salience of a situation has been very high for the permanent members of the UN Security Council, consensus has remained difficult to achieve. The situation in Syria illustrates this dynamic well. Again, R2P has not substantially changed the existence of global power inequalities, domestic incentives for foreign policy making, or the proclivity of violent actors to use force indiscriminately if it suits their objectives.
The inclusion of R2P in the World Summit outcome document was a manifestation of a larger underlying normative change. This normative evolution has also been visible in related fields of the universality of human rights, the development of international criminal law, and in the debate about “protection” in humanitarian action and peacekeeping. R2P should be seen as an instrument in the promotion and contestation of these “norms of protection” (Kurtz and Rotmann 2016: 18). The carriers of this normative evolution have come from all corners of the earth, including from Africa, where most of today’s conflicts take place. As our research project on global debates about the meaning and interpretation of R2P has shown, there is a very wide acceptance of the fundamental normative tenet of R2P: atrocity crimes require international action. How such action may look like in practice, has remained less clear unfortunately (Benner et al. 2015).
The evolution of those norms does not follow a linear path, but they do shape the social context in which international politics takes place. Research has shown, for example, that the ratification of the Rome Statute and investigative actions by the International Criminal Court exerts a deterrent effect on the commission of atrocity crimes (Jo and Simmons 2016).
Inconsistency, hypocrisy, and contradictions undermine the evolution of norms of protection as well as the credibility of R2P. Policymakers should devote greater attention to the permissive effects of their statements and policies in this area. The focus on “red lines” on the use of chemical weapons in Syria, for example, by President Obama and, more recently, by President Macron, not only set their users up to follow through on their threats. They also gave the impression that atrocities committed by conventional means are somewhat more acceptable. Even if governments denounce the killing of civilians rhetorically, such ultimatums and threats send a contradicting message.
A similar permissive effect could be observed regarding narrowing action in Syria against ISIS/Da’esh, thus sparing the Syrian regime. In 2014, when the US government, in conjunction with its allies, took the decision to militarily intervene against ISIS/Da’esh, it may have been too late to broaden the intervention to include anti-regime actions (Yacoubian 2017: 27). A more detailed investigation of the permissive effects of this decision on the dynamics of the Syrian civil war notwithstanding, the focus on counterterrorism risked sending a signal that massive violence against civilians by the Syrian government did not attract the same kind of coercive punishment as the violence committed by ISIS/Da’esh.
Similarly, continuing support to the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, including by arms exports, undermines the UK’s credibility on atrocity prevention in Yemen. British military support to the Saudi-led coalition also undermines UK aid and diplomacy for a political solution in Yemen, as such support empowers a military approach to the crisis. As the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (2017) said in September 2017, “[c]oalition airstrikes continue to be the leading cause of civilian casualties, including of children.” The UK should immediately halt all arms exports to Saudi Arabia and all other members of the coalition involved in the war in Yemen.

The idea of a “humanitarian intervention”

The committee asked for evidence on the question whether the concept of a “humanitarian intervention” was recognized as an exemption to the general prohibition of the use of force under the UN Charter. I am not an international lawyer, but it seems to be very clear to me that there is no international consensus that the doctrine of “humanitarian intervention” could provide an exemption to Art. 2 (4) of the UN Charter. Indeed, the general prohibition of the threat and use of force remains an important achievement in international law. It cannot be incumbent on UN member states to create an exemption from this fundamental norm by themselves. The bar to any use of force outside the UN Charter is therefore very high, as it should be. Without the resort to any court of law that could interpret unilateral justifications for the use of force, the concept of “humanitarian intervention” opens the door to abuse. Furthermore, the concept is tainted with a very problematic history, including the French operation Turquoise during the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Framed as humanitarian intervention, it ended up helping perpetrators to escape into neighbouring Zaire.
If “humanitarian intervention” does not provide the legal justification for military action without UN Security Council mandate or in self-defence, what can? In any given situation, potential interveners should contemplate whether military force is really the last resort, urgently needed, and an effective and proportional instrument. If they conclude that military action fulfils these criteria, they should at least seek a wider international agreement in the UN General Assembly. Any resolution adopted by the General Assembly under such circumstances would not have the force of law, in my understanding. There are no generalized exemptions from the prohibition on the use of force outside the UN Charter – they would undermine the whole system. A political statement in the form of a resolution of the General Assembly would, however, provide a strong signal of legitimacy.[1] It cannot undo the fundamental power inequalities inherent in the international order, which are manifested by the authority of the UN Security Council and the power of its permanent members.

The need for reform

The concept of the responsibility to protect was developed to spur international action on atrocity crimes. On that score, its success is very limited. It has contributed to the specification of conceptual debates within the United Nations, and provided a helpful tool for policy entrepreneurs, mainly in domestic settings. On a global level, its utility has run its course. In UN debates and diplomacy, R2P should be retired and replaced by a more operational focus on atrocity prevention. Indeed, recent reports by the UN Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide already point in that direction.
Instead of focusing on issues of global order and intervention, as R2P inevitably does, atrocity prevention focuses on the role of victims, in particular civilians. Indeed, actors such as the UK that say they want to promote the global rule of law and prevent atrocities should embrace this civilian-centred perspective. They should ask themselves in diplomatic, development, humanitarian, and military engagements in political crises how their actions are going to affect the situation of civilian populations. Are there ways to empower the capacity of civilians to protect themselves by unarmed means? In contrast to R2P, atrocity prevention cannot be mistaken as legalistic justification for military interventions.
In cases where governments are directly responsible for atrocities, it is important to find ways to coerce them to stop these violations of fundamental human rights, including by targeted financial and judicial means. The UK can make use of the notion of “universal jurisdiction”, for example, to prepare cases against foreign individuals responsible for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. With the central position of the UK in the global financial system, it could also engage more forcefully in combating money laundering by elites that are responsible for such crimes.
Building on the Brazilian proposal of a “responsibility while protecting” in 2011, UN Security Council members, including the UK, should consider more rigorous monitoring arrangements for UN-mandated operations. These could include requirements for regular reporting by lead nations of such mandated operations to the Council via the Secretary-General. The Security Council could also create independent monitoring teams that report on the implementation of mandates by third-party forces, similar to panels of experts in the context of UN sanctions regimes. Such mechanisms would facilitate a higher quality of information and decision-making in the Security Council (Benner et al. 2015: 25-26).
In the specific case of chemical weapons use in Syria, it is questionable how one-off airstrikes such as those conducted by the US in April 2017 and by the US, France, and the UK in April 2018, would credibly deter the Syrian government. The UK government should focus on re-establishing an investigative mechanism that investigates culpability for chemical weapons incidents. If the Security Council remains blocked on this question, then the General Assembly should provide a new mandate for this mechanism, whose original mandate ran out in November 2017. Furthermore, the UK should hand over any evidence that is has collected through its own sources on chemical weapons use in Syria to the International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism on international crimes committed in the Syrian Arab Republic (IIIM). The UK should help the European Union to prepare targeted sanctions on individuals and companies involved in the chemical weapons programme in Syria, whether they are from Syria or not. Lastly, the UK should contribute to fund humanitarian appeals on Syria and accept a much larger share as part of the resettlement programme that the UN High Commissioner for Refugees operates.
Finally, the UK government should invest in consistent political engagement through diplomatic tools, including in its own diplomatic capacities and in multilateral capacities. As the United States is withdrawing diplomatic capacities on a large scale, Europeans need to step up to at least provide detailed analysis, monitoring and engagement in crisis areas around the world. The UK should include explicit assessments of atrocity risks, including identity-based violence, in its country strategies. It should exchange these risk analyses on a regular basis with like-minded states and create joint response strategies.

References

Benner, Thorsten, Sarah Brockmeier, Erna Burai, C.S.R. Murthy, Christopher Daase, Madhan Mohan Jaganathan, Julian Junk, Xymena Kurowska, Gerrit Kurtz, Liu Tiewa, Wolfgang Reinicke, Philipp Rotmann, Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, Matias Spektor, Oliver Stuenkel, Marcos Tourinho, Harry Verhoeven and Zhang Haibin (2015): Effective and Responsible Protection from Atrocity Crimes: Toward Global Action. Policy Paper. Berlin. Global Public Policy Institute.

Brockmeier, Sarah, Oliver Stuenkel and Marcos Tourinho (2016): The impact of the Libya intervention debates on norms of protection. Global Society 30:1, 113-133.

Evans, Gareth (2008): The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All. Washington, D.C.: Brookings

International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (2001): The Responsibilty to Protect. Ottawa. International Development Research Centre.

Jo, Hyeran and Beth A. Simmons (2016): Can the International Criminal Court Deter Atrocity? International Organization 70:3, 443-475.

Kurtz, Gerrit and Philipp Rotmann (2016): The Evolution of Norms of Protection: Major Powers Debate the Responsibility to Protect. Global Society 30:1, 3-20.

Murthy, C. S. R. and Gerrit Kurtz (2016): International Responsibility as Solidarity: The Impact of the World Summit Negotiations on the R2P Trajectory. Global Society 30:1, 38-53.

Obama, Barack, David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy (2011): Libya’s Pathway to Peace. The International Herald Tribune.15.04. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/opinion/15iht-edlibya15.html, 07.12.2012

The independent international commission on Kosovo (2000): The Kosovo report. Conflict. International response. Lessons learned. Oxford/ New York: Oxford University Press

UN General Assembly (2005): Resolution 60/1. 2005 World Summit Outcome. New York: A/RES/60/1. 24 October

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (2017): Darker and more dangerous: High Commissioner updates the Human Rights Council on human rights issues in 40 countries. Human Rights Council 36th session, Opening Statement.Geneva. 11 September. http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=22041&LangID=E, 6 May 2018

UN Secretary-General (2009): Implementing the responsibility to protect – Report of the Secretary-General. UN Doc. A/63/677. 12 January

UN Security Council (2011): Resolution 1973 (2011). New York: S/RES/1973 (2011). 17 March

Yacoubian, Mona (2017): Critical Junctures in United States Policy toward Syria. An Assessment of the Counterfactuals. Series of Occastional Papers. Washington, DC. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. August.

[1] As such, it would contribute to an assessment that the Independent International Commission on Kosovo (2000: 186) made with regard to the NATO-led intervention in 1999 when the commission qualified it as “illegal, yet legitimate”.