The world should do more to protect lives

Rohingya refugees from Rakhine state in Myanmar walk along a path near Teknaf in Bangladesh on September 2, 2017. Around 400 people most of them Rohingya Muslims have died in violence searing through Myanmar's Rakhine state

By the time you finish reading this, more people would be dead in Myanmar. So far 700 have died. This bloodletting is courtesy of the military junta that toppled the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi on February 1, 2021. Civilians have taken to the street. The military is responding with live bullets.

Sadly, there’s no concrete action from the international community. Only drab generic statement of “we’re gravely concerned” types.

Yet, this is not the first time that blood has flowed here. Recently, the Myanmar army launched a “clearance operation,” that displaced about 900,000 minority Rohingya Muslims. The UN described the displacement as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”. Today, the Rohingya are refugees living the most disgraceful lives.

Such atrocities are scandalous in a world where the United Nations has been around for more than seven decades. It is an affront to our collective humanity. But the collective global community has a contract. In any case, the UN is the custodian of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine. The framework, adopted in 2005 at the UN World Summit, allows intervention when a state is unable or unwilling to protect its citizens from genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The norm of R2P did not rise from the blues. The then UN Secretary – General Dr Koffi Annan, was still smarting from the disturbing genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia Srebrenica. In 2000, writing in the Millennium Report, Annan wondered “if humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica, to gross and systematic violation of human rights that offend every precept of our common humanity?”

Atrocities on Myanmar offend our common humanity, so are those of Syria.  Why is the world lacking the appetite to decisively invoke R2P?

Yet, in an increasingly multipolar world, strategic geopolitics and realpolitik, effective intervention is unfeasible. The comity of nations needs courage and leadership to confront the evil of rogue regimes and tame barbaric anarchy. If not, R2P will be rendered redundant; the weak will endure more pain.

@manjis