In contrast, Paul Williams and others have pointed to the many downsides of UN peacekeeping in Afghanistan, including the absence of consensus within the UN Security Council, the lack of a peace agreement to implement, and the high risks to peacekeepers.
While these arguments offer insights into the potential risks of peacekeeping, I believe they start with the wrong question. Here, every effort should be made to let the Afghan people set the agenda. To understand what kind of international intervention might work in Afghanistan, the first step should be an analysis of the risks. Here, frankly, Western pundits have proven poor sources of accurate answers. Especially in the US, there is a worrying lack of bipartisan discussion on the issue of the Taliban see Ezra Klein on this.
Instead, the war on terror has meant that the Taliban has been treated monolithically as a terrorist threat, rather than as a political group playing many roles in Afghanistan. In some parts of the country, the Taliban is very popular, and it has grown its own legitimacy by feeding off anti-US sentiment and a deeply corrupt Afghan government over the past twenty years. As Shadi Hamid has pointed out , the West treated the Taliban as an enemy to be overcome rather than part of the political landscape of Afghanistan.
While recognizing the harsh, violent, and undemocratic nature of the Taliban, our collective analysis of the risks in Afghanistan should also account for its governance role in the country.
Like it or not, the Taliban is the government now, and it may well prove to be more efficient—and potentially more stabilizing—than the foreign-backed governments of the past 20 years. In fact, if one prerequisite for a UN peacekeeping mission is a threat to international peace and security, a threat of large-scale conflict may have actually decreased over the past few weeks as no group is likely to directly challenge Taliban rule over Afghanistan.
This does not mean we should ignore the staggering risks to Afghan civilians, the drastic loss of basic rights for women, and the potential for a resurgence of terrorism.
But we should not flatly equate Taliban control with instability, as many Western pundits tend to do. Like emergency food rations, this sort of protection is a stop-gap measure that saves lives until a political solution can be found. The one thing that has really worked in Darfur is emergency relief. It has kept millions alive. Humanitarian aid in wartime is an exercise in making a disaster just about tolerable.
Relief is now so proficient that death rates among Darfur's children have been brought down to pre-war levels. We should keep that aid effort going. But these measures are not enough for the advocates of the "responsibility to protect" - R2P in the jargon. They want military intervention, preferably by Nato, as in Kosovo. Let us have no illusions about what that would mean.
First, the Sudan government would close down the humanitarian operation. How many tens of thousands of lives might that cost before peace came? Some believe that threatening a Kosovo-style aerial attack would frighten Khartoum into surrender. That is a big gamble. In fact, it might make both sides fight harder and longer. Khartoum believes Nato peacekeepers are the camel's nose poking into the tent and the rest of the beast intends to follow.
President Omar al-Bashir fears the West's aim is regime change or secession for Darfur. And we are not disabusing them. American Congressmen are calling for Kosovo-like action. Quite logically, Khartoum is doing its best to stop the UN operating freely in Darfur. It is also destabilising Chad. Why make peace if you can have it all by hanging tough? The UN protests that it is not the vanguard of an invasion, just a poor overstretched peacekeeping force.
That it is, but the UN Security Council authorised it to use force to protect civilians. It is trying to chart a middle way between fighting and peacemaking. If the spirit of the concept is implemented by the United Nations, the question of whether to intervene in a genocidal situation would have been taken care of. At the judicial level, it is also expected that if states were to implement the provisions of the ICC in their domestic legislations, then genocidaires can always be hunted and prosecuted either domestically or at the ICC.
The language of Article I of the Genocide Convention suggests that a certain kind of action is required on the part of the parties to the convention to prevent and punish crimes of genocide. Observing the principle of pacta sunt servanda agreements must be kept , 19 one expects action in a situation of genocide. You do not put into effect the words of the Convention by sitting idle in the face of genocide. This does not however mean that the state is the one responsible for declaring the situation as genocide.
The Convention does not stipulate the action that needs to be taken in order to stop the genocide from continuing. While this might be true, literally, the implication of such genocidal actions constituting a threat to international peace and security exists and hence, requires a Chapter VII action. With the introduction of the responsibility to protect into the debate on civilian protection, it becomes obligatory for the international community to act in preventing and punishing those involved in perpetrating the act of genocide.
Invariably, what the victims of the atrocities in Darfur and elsewhere want is protection from the killings. No reasonable person would prefer that the authorities punish the perpetrator of a grave injustice rather than prevent such a person from inflicting such harm on the victim in the first place.
The logic, therefore, suggests that instead of the international community engaging in academic gymnastics of determining whether the killing fields of Darfur qualify as genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes or domestic crimes, the international community should strive to prevent further killings even if it later turns out that it made a mistake in its labelling of the situation.
The question, therefore, is what effect do threats of intervention have on a genocidal state? Does it deter or embolden such a regime set on a genocidal path? Five years after making international headlines, the international community is still at a loss on the best approach to preventing and putting a stop to the continued loss of lives in Darfur Agbakwa The question that international lawyers and international relations scholars need to address is whether the need to respect Article 2 4 of the Charter automatically trumps the global duty to prevent genocide Koh Put blandly, should the international community respect the letters of the law, that is, the so-called rule of non-intervention and use of force, while the spirit of the law — protection of civilians — is consigned to the dustbin?
Please note: This action will also remove this member from your connections and send a report to the site admin. Please allow a few minutes for this process to complete. By Simon Ben Okolo. Share on facebook. Share on twitter. Share on linkedin. Share on whatsapp. Share on email. Abstract The atrocities committed by the Government of Sudan backed Janjaweed militia in the ongoing conflict in Darfur have been labelled differently by analysts and scholars. Introduction The conflict in Darfur is in its 5 th year with no signs of abating.
The legal and normative framework of the crime of genocide The atrocities committed both by the government of Sudan and the Janjaweed militia in Darfur have led to many international law and international relations experts debating whether they fall under the category of the so-called crime of crimes — genocide.
Contextualising the Darfur Situation While the world is right in remembering the that lost their lives during the Rwanda genocide, a befitting memorial for the victims would also be that the world does not allow such fate to befall others. The Appeal Chamber in Prosecutor v Krsti captured succinctly the grievous nature of the crime of genocide when it stated: [A]mong the grievous crimes this Tribunal has the duty to punish, the crime of genocide is singled out for special condemnation and opprobrium.
Conclusion Invariably, what the victims of the atrocities in Darfur and elsewhere want is protection from the killings. Sources Books and articles Adisa, Jinmi In: Vogt, Margaret M. Lagos, Gabumo. Agbakwa, C. Shedrack Genocidal politics and racialization of intervention: From Rwanda to Darfur and beyond.
German Law Journal , 6 2. Andropolous, George ed. Genocide: Conceptual and historical dimensions. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press. Bryant, Bunyan Codification of customary international law in the Genocide Convention. Harvard International Law Journal , Chorbaijan, Levon In: Chorbaijan, Levon and George Shirinian eds.
Studies in Comparative Genocide. London, Palgrave. Dadrian, V. Genocide as a problem of national and international law: The World War I Armenian case and its contemporary legal ramifications. Yale Journal of International Law, The historical and legal interconnections between the Armenian genocide and the Jewish holocaust: From impunity to retributive justice.
Yale Journal of International Law , Ekwe-Ekwe, Herbert Biafra revisited. Dakar, African Renaissance. Fein, Helen Genocide, terror, life integrity and war crimes: The case for discrimination. In: Andropolous Flint, Julie and Alex de Waal Darfur: A short story of a long war.
London and New York, Zed Books. Graber, G. Caravans to oblivion: The Armenian genocide, New York. John Wiley and Sons. Horowitz, L. Irving Science, modernity and authorized terror: Reconsidering the genocidal state. Koh, Harold Hongju The spirit of the laws. Lefkow, Leslie Darfur in flames: Atrocities in western Sudan. Human Rights Watch , 16 5 A.
Lemkin, Raphael Genocide as a crime in international law. American Journal of International Law , Darfur: The ambiguous genocide. Ithaca, Cornell University Press. Schabas, William Genocide in international law. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Smith, W. Roger State power and genocidal intent: On the uses of genocide in the 20 th century. The crime of genocide: Terror against humanity.
Van der Vyver, Johan D. Punishment and prosecution of the crime of genocide. Fordham International Law Journal ,
0コメント