Burma and R2P: Will barriers break down?

For more background on Burma, see previous post. For background on the Responsibility to Protect ("R2P"), click here.

As has been widely discussed in the press, Burma has experienced an unexpected tragedy that led the military regime to slightly alter its isolationist foreign policy. Up to 100,000 people have died and masses of people have become homeless and are suffering as a result of a catastrophic cyclone that hit Burma's coasts. Countries around the world, including the US, have taken the necessary steps to initiate relief efforts and have expressed they are anxious to help. However, the Burmese regime continues to disallow foreigners to enter its borders and has been delaying the granting of visas to UN relief agencies and aid workers. The victims that are perhaps suffering the most are those whose villages have been wiped out in the remote areas of ethnic states, where the Burmese regime has been conducting military campaigns of repression and committing mass atrocities for over a decade.

Amidst the widespread global response to this crisis, the NY Times caught something that is of particular interest to this blog -- the French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner invoked the Responsibility to Protect ("R2P") doctrine and argued that it should be used as the rationale for a UN resolution to have invade Burmese sovereignty to deliver international aid to Burmese civilians that have been affected by the disaster.

The R2P doctrine was born out of a report commissioned by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan challenging policymakers to address the various obstacles that exist regarding military interventions into sovereign states at times of crises (ie: humanitarian intervention). R2P findings suggest that if a state is unwilling or unable to halt measures that are causing serious harm to its citizens, "the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect." In other words, it is up to the international community to uphold what would be the state's responsibility to protect its citizens from harm.

Usually, activists and policymakers invoke R2P in cases where armed peacekeepers need to be sent into sovereign countries when the states, themselves, are committing mass atrocities. For example, UN Resolution 1769, which authorized the deployment of the UN-African Union hybrid peacekeeping force in Darfur, cited R2P as a rationale to protect the citizens that were suffering by the hands of the Sudanese government's genocidal campaigns.

This is most likely the first time that a state official has cited R2P as a basis for humanitarian aid to be delivered. Though Kouchner's statement does spark widespread controversy, this may be a step towards establishing that the concept of R2P is slowly becoming accepted as an international norm. Coalitions of NGOs and advocacy groups have been working hard to raise awareness of what R2P means and the Stimson Center has published a comprehensive volume on how to operationalize the concept.

To do justice to the other end of this debate, the Heritage Foundation just published a controversial report that advocates for how the US should keep to protecting its national interests and reject the R2P doctrine. This argument encapsulates the cause of perennial debate over whether evolving international norms of protecting human rights around the world can overcome states' national interests at times of crisis - a debate that is a constant headache for decision-making bodies such as the UN Security Council.

If R2P is invoked in a UN Security Council resolution for the current situation in Burma (even if it is just to send in relief efforts), it may lead to the barriers of the isolationist regime breaking down to finally allow some progress towards investigating, stopping, and bringing to justice the military regime in committing mass atrocities against innocent civilians. Thus far, the UN has been able to do very little in combating the stubborn policies of the Burmese government.