Things that Matter

7 april 2009

"Pray the devil back to hell." The devil sits just around the corner. This week, the opening film of the 'Movies that Matter' festival showed the pressure Liberian women brought to bear to achieve peace. Not far from the theatre, Charles Taylor awaits trial in the Scheveningen jail. The movie inspires hope that peace and justice is achievable. Next to Charles Taylor lives Devil No. 2. He features in another movie that matters. 'Resolution 819' is a hard hitting account of our failure to protect, resulting in the gruesome murder of thousands of Muslim men in Srebrenica. Radovan Karadzic, one of the masterminds of the killings, was arrested in Belgrade last year. Saturday night, national TV featured 'Hotel Rwanda,' demonstrating our failure to prevent the genocide, this week 15 years ago.

In response, what did we do? We developed a new concept: The Responsibility to Protect, also known as R2P, in short. R2P means that the international community has a responsibility to act when governments are unwilling or unable to protect their populations. "If we had had this concept," Lars van Troost of Amnesty International who moderated a debate following 'Resolution 819' asked me, "would things have been different in Rwanda, in Srebrenica, in all those other cases where we failed to act?" "No," I said, "probably not." A decision to intervene, also in the case of R2P, has to be taken by the Security Council, the highest decision-making body of the United Nations. This is a political body, made up of 15 Member States, which takes a political decision to act or not to act. Frequently a decision to act is blocked by China and Russia, as in the case of Darfur. But in Bosnia and Rwanda we did intervene. We had troops on the ground. Yet, they were not capable to prevent and protect. Have we done better in practice? We-currently almost 200.000 civilians and soldiers. We have robust mandates. We send naval ships to the Somali waters to ward off pirates and protect humanitarian convoys. We fight a counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. We declare enemies and actively pursue them. But have we been able to prevent, to protect? Most peace operations are seriously challenged by local political and military factors, demonstrating that they are powerless to act. In eastern Congo, rebel forces of Laurent Nkunda fighting former genocidaires from Rwanda overwhelmed the UN troops last fall. In Georgia, unarmed UN observers were pushed aside by the invasion of Russia. The EU in Kosovo is unable to patrol the streets of Serb-inhabited northern Kosovo which is still run from Belgrade. The UN in Darfur is helpless to stop attacks on villages and refugee camps. NATO troops in Afghanistan cannot stem the rise of the Taliban insurgency. We have come a long way from monitoring atrocities to full-fledged war fighting. NATO is currently commanding two fifth of 'peacekeepers' worldwide. But it is questionable whether we are better capable to prevent or protect. We need more women like the Liberian women: forcing their dictators and rebel leaders to sit down and talk peace. Or perhaps we need to look better, redirect our focus from fighting the enemy to identifying and strengthening those forces in society that want peace. Otherwise, we are fooling ourselves and deceiving others that we can prevent and protect.