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(Extract from a speech given at the 2006 Gandel Oration for B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission, University of New South Wales, Sydney on 30 April 2006)
Too often nations avoid, ignore, or palm off responsibility for human atrocities happening elsewhere in the world. In a speech delivered at UniSA last night, former Labor foreign minister GARETH EVANS, now head of the International Crisis Group, argues every nation has an obligation to act quickly in the face of large-scale tragedy.
"`Never again' we said after the Holocaust. And after the Cambodian genocide in the 1970s. And, then again, after the Rwanda genocide in 1994. And after the Srbrenica massacre in Bosnia. And now we're asking ourselves, in the face of more mass killing in Darfur, whether we really are capable, as an international community, of stopping nation states murdering their own people. How many more times will we look back wondering, with varying degrees of incomprehension, horror, anger and shame, how we could have let it all happen?"
These are the words with which I began a public address in Sydney nearly two years ago. To my shame, and what should be our collective global shame, they are just as applicable now as they were then.
It is not only in Darfur that crimes against humanity are being committed as we speak, and where the international response to those crimes has been manifestly inadequate. The crazed and horrifying reign of Joseph Kony's Lord's Revolutionary Army, which has seen the abduction of 25,000 children for fighters or sex slaves, continues in northern Uganda.
Even in Europe, justice for the perpetrators of crimes against humanity remains conspicuously incomplete. Slobodan Milosevic was brought to trial and no one can be blamed for his death in custody before it was complete but Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, the architect and implementer of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia remain at large, sheltered by the Serbian military and, with more than a little support, from the Belgrade government.
We have made some progress over the past decade or so but we certainly still cannot be confident the world will respond quickly, effectively and appropriately to new human rights catastrophes.
Overcoming global indifference means addressing four big recurring problems: perception (getting the story out and its gravity understood); responsibility (confronting taboos against international involvement in sovereign countries' internal affairs); capacity (having the appropriate institutional machinery and resources); and, as always, political will (effectively mobilising that capacity, in the face of competing priorities and preoccupations).
While genocide, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity were at the centre of international policy debate throughout the 1990s, since 9/11 attention has rather comprehensively shifted to a range of other issues: terrorism, Islamist extremism, nuclear proliferation, stability in the Middle East post-Iraq and post-Hamas, and, related in turn to most of these, global energy security.
That said, it is simply not acceptable for governments to look away, claiming more pressing engagements, when crimes against humanity are being committed or are manifestly about to be committed. We know, most recently from the global response to the tsunami disaster, that ordinary people throughout the world are deeply touched by human suffering wherever it occurs, irrespective of race, colour and creed, at least when it is brought home to them graphically.
The problem tends to be not so much what policy-makers do not know, or cannot know: it is what they do not want to know, or do not want to act upon.
There has been an increasing tendency in recent years to label situations as "genocide". The biggest legal difficulty and the show-stopper in Darfur is that it is extremely hard to establish the requisite intent to destroy, in whole or part, the targeted group.
The unhappy irony about calling Darfur a genocide, as the U.S. Congress and Bush administration now repeatedly have done, is that this has not translated in any way into an enhanced effort to "prevent and punish" the crimes being committed.
It Is hard to judge which is morally worse: not using the "g" word because you don't want to act (as with the Clinton administration on Rwanda in 1994), or (as now) using the word but not acting. Over and again we find the lawyers' issue of "genocide or not genocide" becoming the issue, when the real issue is the need to act to protect people from atrocities and to hold the perpetrators to effective account.
We should all just use the generic _expression "atrocity crimes" - or encourage general use of the familiar label "crimes against humanity" - and leave it to the prosecutors and judges in the international courts to work out which law has been breached.
The second step is to overcome the traditional view of states that, to put it bluntly, sovereignty is a license to kill. Undermining that view of the world has been a long, slow process but progress has been made in recent years.
The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty presented a report, The Responsibility to Protect, at the end of 2001. It outlined criteria for intervention: The seriousness of the harm being threatened (which would need to involve large scale loss of life or ethnic cleansing to justify military action); the purpose of the proposed military action; whether there were peaceful alternatives; the proportionality of the response; and the balance of consequences - whether more good than harm would be done.
It is one thing to develop a concept like the responsibility to protect but quite another to get any policymaker to take any notice of it. The most interesting thing about the Responsibility to Protect report is the way its central theme has continued to gain traction internationally.
The recognition of the responsibility to protect as a principle is one thing, its practical implementation quite another.
The present situation in Darfur is a classic demonstration of the problem of military implementation of the international responsibility to protect. There are all sorts of problems standing in the way of a full-frontal coercive intervention not only the huge resources that would be required and the difficulty in finding them but also the way in which this will be misinterpreted, because it could only happen with major support from the U.S. and European Union, as another chapter in the West's war on Islam.
Political will is not hiding in a cupboard or under a stone somewhere waiting to be discovered. It has to be painstakingly built.
All politics is in a sense local and the key to mobilising international support is to mobilise domestic support or, at least, neutralise domestic opposition.
International political will does not just mean the Security Council Permanent Five and the other major players. It means the middle powers and, indeed, any government which is seen as consistently principled and having a mind of its own, that has ideas, creativity and the energy with which to pursue them. Australia has played such a role in international conflict, human rights and humanitarian issues and it remains my fervent wish we play such a role again, consistently, credibly and constructively.
We are a country that has a tremendous amount to give. And nowhere more so than in ensuring when the world next says "never again" it really means it.
(Extract from a speech given at the 2006 Gandel Oration for B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission, University of New South Wales, Sydney on 30 April 2006.)
Reflections on the early disarray in Darfur
How has the international community acquitted itself since the beginnings of orchestrated violence in Darfur in early 2003? Why did it take so long to gear up and why were humanitarians so unequal to the challenges posed by the crisis?
Analysis of six evaluations provided by member agencies of the Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance (ALNAP) of their own performance helps provide some answers (1). Reviewing the six evaluations I was struck by the pervasive sense of frustration and failure. No agency viewed its own response or that of the system as adequate.
The slowness of the international response casts doubts on the capacity of the humanitarian system to deliver effective protection and assistance in major high-profile emergencies. It took some 12 to 18 months from the outbreak of the crisis in early 2003 for humanitarian operations to become firmly established. Programmes were slow off the mark due to the size and remoteness of Darfur, the delicate state of North-South peace negotiations, competition from higher profile emergencies elsewhere and, most significantly, access barriers created by the government of Sudan. As the number of the accessible population in need rose, agencies found themselves running to catch up, or even to stay in place. Aid was concentrated in areas under government control.
One positive development was that, from the outset of the crisis, agencies – energised by concern about violence against women – highlighted the need to prioritise protection. Médecins Sans Frontières- Holland noted that violence rather than malnutrition or ill health was the"overwhelming cause of death." That said, there was much confusion regarding responsibility for providing protection. The UNICEF study noted that"no UN agency has a clear protection mandate for IDPs" and in mid 2004 the UNHCR evaluators reported that there was"no consistent protection strategy" in and around refugee camps in Chad.
The experience of countless other crises was repeated in the Darfur response. The OCHA-led study commented on the"unsatisfactory performance" of a number of UN agencies and the"relatively small proportion of the NGOs [that are] regarded as effective in terms of their expertise and ability to take advantage of humanitarian access and fill gaps in challenging settings." Another study commented on the high percentage among its Darfur staff of first-missioners lacking previous field experience. Still another noted that the Darfur response typified the positive"shift in focus in the activity of 'humanitarian' agencies from delivery to human rights and protection advocacy." Aid workers today, it suggested, would rather talk to the Security Council than dig latrines.
The higher priority given to advocacy, however, did not produce the necessary reinforcing action on the political, diplomatic and military fronts. Even on the highly sensitive issue of genocide, parallels to the Rwanda experience drawn by humanitarian and human rights groups generated only limited momentum. In fact, the effort at aid agency headquarters to label what was taking place as genocide was viewed by some colleagues in the field as complicating their sensitive day-to-day work. Certainly the Sudanese authorities reacted negatively to the genocide debate, viewing it as part of a wider anti-Sudan, anti-Muslim campaign. As someone who has been involved in Sudan issues off and on since my initial posting there in 1972, l was struck by the a-historicity of the approach taken by the agencies to the Darfur challenge. Lessons from the Sudan itself and from other theatres have gone largely unrecognised. One of the UN studies expressed surprise at problems which should have been familiar from other contexts: siting of camps too close to the border, difficulties in enumeration of the refugee population, the need to protect women gathering firewood and problems related to decentralisation of decision making and staff morale.
The evaluations led me to offer the conjecture that after thirty years of high-profile international humanitarian initiatives in the Sudan, the belligerents have done a better job of learning how to manipulate and frustrate humanitarian action than the international community has of using its considerable assets creatively.
Larry Minear directs the Humanitarianism and War Project at the Feinstein International Famine Center in the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, Tufts University, Boston http://nutrition.tufts.edu. Email: Larry.Minear@tufts.edu
This article is based on a presentation made to the 18th ALNAP Biannual Meeting in December 2005, online at: www.odi.org.uk/alnap/meetings/pdfs/LMinear_darfur_dec05.pdf. The full text of the analysis is a chapter in ALNAP's Review of Humanitarian Action in 2004, www.alnap.org/RHA2004/pdfs/rha04_Ch3.pdf1. The evaluations were an interagency study led by OCHA and individual studies by UNHCR, Oxfam, CARE, MSF Holland and UNICEF/DFID.
Thirty-two teams from across the globe make up the field for the 2006 FIFA World Cup.
Qualified Teams
| Angola | Argentina | Australia | Brazil | Costa Rica |
| Côte d’Ivoire | Croatia | Czech Republic | Ecuador | England |
| France | Germany (Host) | Ghana | Iran | Italy |
| Japan | Korea Republic | Saudi Arabia | Mexico | Netherlands |
| Paraguay | Poland | Portugal | Serbia and Montenegro | Spain |
| Sweden | Switzerland | Togo | Trinidad and Tobago | Tunisia |
| Ukraine | USA |
Let the games begin!!!
Opening Match
Germany vs Costa Rica 09-Jun-06 Munich