Humanitarian Interventions

There are those countries of the world whose leaders stand guilty, and proud of it, of committing dread atrocities against their citizens. To counteract that reality the United Nations passed a resolution that would legalize the intervention of other nations into the territory and business of nations who brutalize their own people. Canada led the initiative in the United Nations to institutionalize the concept of "Responsibility To Protect" and give it legality.

It is without doubt a noble initiative, one worthy of support. But it exists in the realm of wishful thinking, of theoretical human advancement. Far more difficult to embark upon an international rescue attempt than it is to visualize it and give it the emphasis of lawful justice. A new watchlist has been released on the 60th anniversary of the United Nations' "prevention of genocide convention", identifying 33 countries where genocide and other atrocities are at risk of occurring.

The New York-based Genocide Prevention Project has collated five independent watchlists that identify such red-alert countries as Afghanistan and Iraq, along with Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burma, Pakistan, Somalia, Sri Lanka, North Korea, Zimbabwe and Iran. Other countries whose human rights abuses are viewed as somewhat less worrisome on the grand scale of violence degenerating toward genocide are China, Colombia, the Philippines and Indonesia.

Civilized countries of the world for whom the first order of business as government responsibility is the well-being and protection of their populations, look on with justifiable alarm at the unspeakable tragedies that unveiled themselves in Cambodia, Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Following on the first of its kind, where the world expressed its horror when the full extent of the state-sponsored genocide known as the Holocaust was revealed to have cost the lives of 6-million European Jews.

Vowing, collectively, that such unspeakable savagery could and would never be permitted to occur again. Yet, even the collective will of the world's nations expressed through the auspices of the United Nations has been incapable of preventing mass murder. The simple fact of the matter is, apprehension of intent to act is not seen as sufficient motivation to step in to prevent tragedy; it is only after the fact when the tragedy of mass homicides have occurred that the world reacts, and then too late.

Hand-wringing and pleading and toothless sanctions via the United Nations produces nothing but a snarling contempt by those leaders and militias busying themselves with getting on with their purposeful genocides, civilian slaughters and self-entitled grasping at international humanitarian aid. Attempting to intercede between the aggressors and their victims guarantees that White Knights will be sent packing in impromptu coffins known as body bags.

The conundrum that presents on interpreting the feasibility of action on Responsibility to Protect puzzles everyone. Most particularly those members of joint international troops that are handed opaquely-confusing mandates by the United Nations, leaving it to the intelligence and expertise of the military to figure out. And when those military leaders protest that the mandate handed them is insufficient to carry the day, that they need additional instructions and troops, they're left in the lurch.

The United Nations depends largely on an absent goodwill among its various constituent parts to enable it to come to reasonable conclusions in its ongoing attempts to manage its mandate to stabilize the world community. It tends to lean heavily on its diplomatic staff, sending them on feverishly inconclusive missions that accomplish little-to-nothing.

When push comes to shove, aggressive totalitarian governments still have the upper hand in claiming that it is their right and privilege to do as they wish within their borders with their populations. And there's another sad and simple fact; the international community lacks the organization and the capacity to effectively intervene to arrest determined incidents of mass carnage within the confines of a rogue nation.

Another simple fact: we're stretched too thinly. There are simply so many areas of the world where the governing agencies of impoverished and/or ill-ruled countries remain at the mercies of their totalitarian rulers that it is quite simply not possible for well-meaning intervenors to collect their perishable resources and act decisively. Sad, sad fact.

To our credit, we keep grappling with those facts, and we keep trying to do our utmost to protect. It's simply not possible to do otherwise.