International Responses to Mass Atrocities in Africa. Kurt Mills
appropriate, although perhaps appropriate in different ways and circumstances.
The first response—the use of military force to protect civilians and stop atrocities—is a core part of what has come to be known as the responsibility to protect (R2P). It follows from previous debates over humanitarian intervention, but is a reflection of a radical shift in the perceived balance between sovereignty and human rights. The second response I call the responsibility to prosecute, since it stems from an expanding recognition that those who commit atrocities should be punished. The third response I call the responsibility to palliate, because although there are significant humanitarian urges to help people in the middle of conflict, this particular response usually can do little more than treat the symptoms of a much more complicated situation. Taken together, these three sets of norms and practices are identified as R2P3—responsibility to protect, prosecute, and palliate. These responses, even though they are all rooted in an urge to stop human suffering, are very different types of actions. They accomplish very different things, over different timescales, and on different orders of magnitude, and are accomplished by very different types of actors. But the big question is whether they accomplish these different things in a mutually supporting way, where all the elements of the broad human rights edifice work seamlessly together to underpin this edifice. It will be obvious that the answer to this question is that there may be very significant trade-offs in using these responses—political trade-offs, practical trade-offs, normative trade-offs—and that they may not always be mutually supporting.
Policymakers are thus faced with a series of conundrums as they try to figure out how to protect people and keep them alive in the midst of conflict, while also preventing and ending conflicts and bringing perpetrators to justice. Military intervention might facilitate the delivery of humanitarian assistance—or it might endanger it. Issuing an arrest warrant might bring combatants to the negotiating table—or it might undermine a peace process. Providing humanitarian assistance might keep people alive in the midst of conflict—or it might contribute to the continuation of the conflict. Yet the international community has agreed that it has a responsibility to do each of these things to protect people and end suffering. So how does one prioritize responsibilities? This book provides no easy formula—the dynamics are fiendishly complex. However, by clearly delineating these manifold conundrums, and exploring how they play out in a variety of circumstances, the job of implementing these international responsibilities and stopping mass atrocities becomes a little clearer.
Defining Atrocities
The term mass atrocities is not unproblematic, given that language is employed to support action, prevent action, or cover up inaction in the face of widespread grave human rights abuses. I use the term “mass atrocity” here to include genocide, crimes against humanity, some war crimes, and ethnic cleansing. Genocide appears to have the most straightforward definition—“acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,”1 although the devil is in the detail, and in particular the assertion of the intent. Crimes against humanity are defined in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) as including murder, extermination, forcible transfer of populations, torture, rape and a number of other acts undertaken in attacks against civilian populations (Article 7).
War crimes may be understood as
serious violations of international humanitarian law directed at civilians or enemy combatants during an international or internal armed conflict, for which the perpetrators may be held criminally liable on an individual basis.2
Ethnic cleansing has been defined as “a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.”3 Although there is no recognized crime of ethnic cleansing, it is against international law and would involve grave breaches of international humanitarian law, as well as potentially genocide and crimes against humanity.4
The term mass atrocity is preferred for its simplicity in avoiding having to write out “genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and ethnic cleansing,” although there will be instances where one must be specific about the crimes being discussed to communicate the magnitude of the crimes and the interests of humanity in responding.5 As to a formal definition, I draw on the definition used by the Mass Atrocity Response Operations project: “widespread and systematic use of violence by state or non-state armed groups against non-combatants.”6 On the one hand, it elides the use of the emotive term “genocide,” which cries out “never again” and demands action—that “somebody” should do “something”—and thus will be controversial. It appears to undermine gravity and immediacy. Yet all too often scholars, journalists, and diplomats get caught up in language that obfuscates rather than illuminates a situation. In Rwanda, western leaders fell over themselves with awkward linguistic constructions to avoid calling what was happening genocide—referring instead to “acts of genocide”—while in Darfur, there was much discussion about whether to call what was happening genocide or crimes against humanity. But in the end it did not matter whether President Bashir of Sudan or the Hutu leadership in Rwanda could be positively identified as having the intent to wipe out a specific group of people. The same people were dying—even though such language may be strategically deployed at times, I doubt that the victims or their families cared what those on the UN Security Council called it. Thus, mass atrocities7 will be used as an analytic category to indicate situations where large numbers of people are dying or otherwise being widely affected as a result of genocide, crimes against humanity, widespread war crimes, or ethnic cleansing. “Mass atrocities and associated humanitarian crises” may also be used to signal a recognition that most humanitarian crises are political in nature and tied into larger patterns of human rights abuse.
Conflict in Africa
The international responsibilities in mass atrocity situations discussed above are embedded within evolving political, geostrategic and normative realities. Globally, human rights norms and machinery are expanding and spreading, although ambiguously. The UN Security Council has become increasingly involved in human rights issues even as there is increasing tension between the traditional powers on the Security Council and a restive developing world, with emerging powers demanding more representation at the apex of global power, bolstered, again, by charges of neocolonialism. The responsibility to protect has been affected by the same charges, but there is hardly unanimity. Other global developments, such as the ICC, further underpin an expanding institutionalization of human rights, even as there is pushback against its focus to date on Africa and its problematic relationship to the Security Council. But Africa also serves as a stage for the post-9/11 global war on terror and the belief “that ‘failed states’ are ideal staging and breeding grounds for international terrorists.”8
Africa has seen both advances and retreats in normative and practical human rights developments. The African Union (AU) Constitutive Act recognized an even more robust responsibility to protect three years before the UN did, although it has failed to implement this in any significant way. The responsibility to protect has found its voice in the norm of “non-indifference” in Africa, but exactly how such a double negative normative construction will be implemented is unclear. Thirty-four African countries are members of the ICC, yet the AU has repeatedly accused the ICC of being biased against Africa and called for it to suspend ongoing cases against Africans. Africa has high hopes for an African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) and the development of an African Standby Force (ASF), but implementation has lagged far behind the hopes. And although the AU can present a public united front, there are still divisions among African countries and, at times, a reversion to Westphalian notions of sovereignty and anticolonialism that serve to prevent criticism of human rights abuses. Africa wants a larger say in global politics, demanding, for example, more seats on the Security Council, and a more even partnership between the AU and UN.
Africa was chosen as the focus of this book for a number of reasons. From a continental perspective, Africa has been the crucible for much normative development and practical application of norms. The genocide in Rwanda was one of the driving forces for the development of the responsibility to protect, but was also