Gareth Evans, author of Responsibility to Protect, is an optimist who believes that good will triumph over evil and that the United Nations, the African Union and other multilateral organisations will save people when sovereign governments do nothing to protect their citizens against violence or become a threat themselves.
This book provides a roadmap for how to keep people safe when sovereignty gets in the way. Evans has been at the helm of the International Crisis Group, an international think-tank, for the past nine years, and his humanitarian involvement began during the Khmer Rouge’s mass killings in Cambodia. He became Australia’s foreign minister between 1988 and 1996 and has since served on numerous global bodies.
A grasp of his CV is critical to understanding Evans’s credibility when he speaks about what the world and individuals can do to ensure the killing fields of Cambodia, Rwanda and East Timor do not happen again.
I am sceptical about books written by senior members of the development set. Although the authors’ hearts are often in the right place, the world of non-governmental organisations and development agencies makes no claim to objectivity and there is often a clear agenda. Responsibility to Protect certainly does have an agenda, but it’s also one of the most balanced books I have read.
Evans recognises the weaknesses of the UN and its various agencies — the AU, the European Union and even Nato — but he also recognises the failures of sovereign states to provide basic governance to their citizens, from the former Yugoslavia to Zimbabwe.
When a sovereign state no longer takes care of its own, what follows? Most UN-member states agree that the ”responsibility to protect” then falls to neighbours and the international community. It is a good idea, but its difficulty lies in making it work.
Would 800 000 people have been killed in Rwanda had the international community acted on the warning signs sent to UN headquarters by General Romeo Dallaire, its force commander on the ground in Kigali? Probably not. And that is why this book, and the background leading up to it, are so important.
It is also a refreshing read. Despite being in charge of an organisation that does not mince words about what the international community should be doing in Sudan’s Darfur region, Evans presents the case for and against packing Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir off to The Hague to answer charges of war crimes. Is an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court in the interest of peace in Sudan? The answer is anything but simple, but Evans does well to outline the options.
Responsibility to Protect removes the semantic mystery surrounding the terms war crimes, mass atrocities, crimes against humanity and genocide. It has been a long hard struggle in the battlefield of the UN’s General Assembly but there is finally agreement on what these terms mean. Evans argues that if we can agree on defining the problem, we can certainly agree on implementing the solution.
In some cases sending in the troops seems to be the easiest solution, to put a quick stop to brutal violence in a sovereign state. But does an iron-fist approach lead to sustainable security? A quick look at the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan sheds some light on the effectiveness of such an approach.
Responsibility to Protect, both the book and the formula, requires a responsible world to read warning signs before killing gets out of hand and take preventative action.
But prevention continues to be the weak part of the formula. Evans argues eloquently that the military option should be the last one.
In what is perhaps particularly relevant to this continent, Responsibility to Protect makes it clear that there is no security without economic growth and there is no economic growth without security.
Good governance is part of that road to security.
Evans’s clear views on how diplomacy has played a significant role in reducing the number of African wars and war-related deaths also give one reason for hope.
Responsibility to Protect, by Gareth Evans, is published by the Brookings Institution and will be available in South Africa in October