May 29, 2007
Project Report Summary
A key challenge facing the 21st century is the management of population movements, according to senior fellow Søren Jessen-Petersen. An increasing number of people are on the move either voluntarily or involuntarily, for an array of reasons including conflict, economics, politics, and, increasingly, the environment. Civilians on the move have also been caught up in the growing focus on state security following 9/11. In wars being fought with the declared goal of rooting out terrorists, innocent civilians are increasingly victims both as direct targets and collateral damage. They are also victimized in their search for protection when confronted with closed borders, which increasingly are designed to keep out the “unwanted.” Jessen-Petersen argued that a great need exists to create a better balance between state security and human security. The rights and duties of states to protect their citizens must be weighed against the responsibility to provide asylum to displaced people.
However, state security and human security represent two sides of the same coin. States cannot be secure if the individual human being is not protected. The overriding challenge in addressing the humanitarian consequences of political action must be to put the individual human being and victims of conflict, human rights violations, and oppression at the center of action to prevent and resolve conflict. Jessen-Petersen said that intervention operations must be performed comprehensively by integrating humanitarian, military, and development factions, and that movements of people be addressed in their regional context.
He also noted that the nature of conflict has changed after the end of the Cold War. While more and more conflicts are internal, their consequences are also external as globalization and mass communication allow for increasing movements of persons, goods, capital, and news. For the same reasons, states are finding it increasingly difficult to hide atrocities and human rights violations behind closed borders.
Between 1991 and 2001, seven conflicts in the former Yugoslavia caused the displacement of four million people, and the deaths of some 200,000 people. Despite the UN Security Council’s adoption of 140 resolutions, the conflicts raged on as the international community chose to purse humanitarian action rather than resolving conflicts through political means. The Dayton Peace Agreement and Security Council Resolution 1244 failed to address the root causes of the conflict in Bosnia and Kosovo, respectively. This has subsequently frustrated reconciliation because the agreements consolidated separation rather than integration among the different ethnic groups. According to Jessen-Petersen, a degree of coexistence requires clarity of status, and this will not occur without coalition-building around economic opportunities that are largely non-existent in the region today.
In the Great Lakes region of Africa, the international community consistently failed to intervene for the prevention and cessation of human suffering. First, in 1994 it ignored warnings of an impending disaster in Rwanda, and subsequently failed to stop the ongoing genocide in the country. Second, appeals from the UN Secretary-General for intervention in Zaire (Congo) to separate those responsible for the genocide from innocent civilians in refugee camps failed to create a response. Third, at the end of 1996, the international community neglected to protect hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing into the dense rainforests of Congo. Finally, it was slow to respond in dealing with issues of justice and post-conflict rebuilding in Rwanda. The tragedy of Rwanda demonstrated that no action occurs in the face of immense atrocities and loss of human life without the will to protect.
Jessen-Petersen also discussed forgotten crises including Burma, Afghanistan in the pre-9/11 era, Colombia, and Western Sahara. Forgotten crises arise for a diversity of reasons including the absence of strategic interests of foreign powers in the area, no sponsorship from a former colonial power, a lack of media attention, and the limited international capacity to deal with all the world’s crises. Each of these regions represents millions of victims who were either neglected by national authorities and the international community, or have continued to languish in destitution for decades.
The end of the cold war and of super power rivalry also opened up new possibilities for conflict resolution in the UN Security Council. Long standing conflicts in the Horn and Southern Africa, Cambodia, and Central America were brought to an end. At the same time, the Council recognized that violations of human rights, humanitarian crises and flows of refugees could constitute threats to peace and security. The Council judged that, as such, it had the power to get involved in internal conflicts despite strong reluctance by some member states of the Security Council, both those with or without the rights of veto.
Humanitarian action became prominent, and humanitarian work, often seen as heroic by the larger public, received a good deal of support. The prominence and popularity of humanitarian action did, however, have an adverse side-effect. As political bodies struggled with how to respond to and resolve the new type of ethnic, religious, social, and internal conflicts, they often resorted to a humanitarian and, at times, a military response as a substitute for decisive political action. As a result, humanitarian action became increasingly politicized and militarized with the risk of losing its essential impartiality. Humanitarian agencies were often seen as the extended arm of a political or military operation.
Jessen-Petersen concluded by noting that while the Security Council has the mandate, the information, and, in theory, support for the principle of responsibility to protect, the will to intervene consistently in the case of grave human rights violations is still absent. Hope primarily lies in cultivating public support for intervention via the media and civil society activism and through the strengthening of regional organizations.
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