Lord Hannay of Chiswick
Main Page: Lord Hannay of Chiswick (Crossbench - Life peer)
Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)
My Lords, I would like to begin by paying a tribute to my noble friend Lord Montgomery, whose valedictory speech saddens me because we shall not be seeing him in this Chamber. But it gives me great pleasure to be here to have heard his speech and to pay tribute to one part of his work in particular, which was the emphasis he has placed in so many of his contributions to the House’s debates on Latin America. British foreign policy has been pretty forgetful about Latin America over many decades and the noble Viscount has prevented that becoming a complete vacuum. For that we should thank him.
I hope the noble Baroness, Lady Hooper, will forgive me for pointing out that it is not in fact the case that there has never been an instance of the responsibility to protect in Latin America, at least if one expands that phrase to cover the Caribbean, because the UN interventions in Haiti in the 1990s—which was, of course, before the responsibility to protect was called that—were in fact precisely responsibility to protect. When the United Nations moved in to help remove a dictator who was oppressing, torturing and murdering his own citizens, that was a very important step down the road which included also our own involvement in the safe havens for the Kurds in Iraq in 1991. This moved on later to the fully fledged doctrine.
The noble Lord, Lord McConnell, is certainly to be congratulated on securing this debate on what he himself has said is almost the exact 10th anniversary of the endorsement by the Heads of State and Government of all UN member states of what was undoubtedly a ground-breaking new doctrine: the international community’s responsibility to protect those whose Governments were either unwilling or unable to protect their own citizens themselves. I should perhaps declare an interest as having served as a member of Kofi Annan’s High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, which put forward that new doctrine. We were between the Canadian panel, which was not a fully fledged UN one, and Kofi Annan’s own championship of the new doctrine and its endorsement by the Heads of Government at the New York summit in September 2005.
Like others who worked on that panel, I was personally strongly motivated and influenced by my experience during the course of two appalling genocidal massacres, which have been mentioned by other speakers—that in Rwanda in 1994, and that in Srebrenica in 1995—and by the pressing need to find a way of preventing any repetition of those terrible events. We have just passed the 20th anniversaries of those massacres, and we surely must not let them fade from our memories. In that respect, I have to say that there have been few Security Council vetoes as shameful as the one wielded last week by Russia when, in what can only be described as genocide denial, it vetoed a resolution to try to draw some lessons from Srebrenica 20 years on.
With the new doctrine available, how sure can we be that the prospect of any repetition of those terrible events is behind us? The honest answer is that we cannot. The potential for genocidal killing exists today in Burundi. Gross abuses of international humanitarian law are being perpetrated against the Muslim inhabitants of Burma. More than 200,000 Syrians have died in a civil war while the UN Security Council has been paralysed by Russian and Chinese vetoes and by the timidity of western Governments. The so-called Islamic State is waging a war that respects none of the international conventions that we had hoped would be universally observed, and which in fact rides roughshod over the Geneva Conventions on the rules of war and over the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Still, the responsibility to protect has not been a complete failure. In Libya, it proved possible to protect the population of Benghazi and the rest of western Libya from the vengeance of Colonel Gaddafi, and the subsequent failure of the international community to support sufficiently the transition and the consolidation of the move away from his regime should not obscure the fact that many thousands of lives were saved by that intervention. In Côte d’Ivoire that same year, an attempt to overthrow a democratic election by force and civil war was prevented; the country is now growing at 9% a year and is preparing to hold its next democratic presidential election. In Mali, the Central African Republic and South Sudan, the United Nations and the African Union are protecting many thousands of citizens of those countries whom their own Governments cannot hope to do that for. In Democratic Republic of the Congo, the UN is applying the doctrine of the responsibility to protect, day in and day out, albeit imperfectly. So this is no time to be giving up on the responsibility to protect, unless we wish to see ourselves again cast as helpless spectators of mass killings.
What can and should be done to make the responsibility to protect more effective and less contentious? Here are four suggestions to which I would welcome the reaction of the Minister when he winds up the debate. First, I suggest that we really must rid the public debate of the idea that the responsibility to protect is just shorthand for justifying western military intervention in a particular country. Both the supporters and the detractors of the responsibility to protect have sometimes fed that misconception. Rather than trying to parse the text that was agreed in 2005 governing the exercise of the responsibility to protect, I suggest that we should strengthen the non-coercive instruments for conflict prevention, and there I join others who have called for that.
Secondly, we should put to better use the UN’s Peacebuilding Commission, which, interestingly enough, is also celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. This body has so far been grossly underused and underresourced. I suggest that we remove the constraints that were put on it when it was set up and which limit it to post-conflict peacebuilding, and re-equip it to co-ordinate international efforts at conflict prevention in fragile states. It could do a lot in that field. Thirdly, I suggest we should be promoting the preventive, pre-conflict deployment of peacekeepers, both military and police, and should be ready to contribute ourselves, thus boosting our current, pitifully small contribution to international peacekeeping.
Fourthly, we should surely be supporting the French in their initiative that the five permanent members forswear the use of a veto when instances of genocide or gross abuses of international humanitarian law are at stake. I simply cannot understand why the Government have not given the French full support. Is it even faintly conceivable that Britain would veto a resolution when genocide or humanitarian law was being threatened? Of course the answer is: it is absolutely unthinkable. Then why on earth can we not say so? Why can we not join the French? It may not happen. It may be that the Russians, the Chinese and the Americans will be unwilling to do this, but surely our position should not be ambiguous, as it is now.
Of course, supporting the responsibility to protect does not come cost free in lives or resources, but nor does allowing the responsibility to protect to wither on the vine. Britain, as a middle-ranking power with global interests and a permanent member seat on the Security Council, can influence the way that the doctrine develops. If we turn our backs on it or limit ourselves just to warm words, why on earth should those with less influence and fewer resources than us be willing to make a serious contribution?
I conclude with a somewhat wider observation. It really is important not to regard the responsibility to protect as a stand-alone, solve-every-problem doctrine. It is none of those things. Rather, it must be considered and shaped as an essential part of the UN’s toolbox for the future—a tool that must be used sparingly and with great care but one without which that toolbox will be sadly, and perhaps quite disastrously, deficient.