As Syrian Deaths Mount, World’s ‘Responsibility to Protect’ Takes a Hit
As Syrian Deaths Mount, World's 'Responsibility to Protect' Takes a Hit – Reuters
As civilians in the Syrian city of Aleppo are battered by air strikes, ground offensives and shelling, what has happened to the world's responsibility to protect populations under threat?
The Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Security Council were established after World War Two to maintain peace and protect people in conflict zones.
But a 21st-century U.N. doctrine called Responsibility To Protect (R2P), set up by the world body's member states to prevent mass killings, has only had limited success.
Although formalized in 2005, R2P came about largely in response to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, in which extremist Hutu militiamen slaughtered some 800,000 minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
The doctrine also stemmed from a desire to prevent a recurrence of atrocities like the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys by Serb forces in the town of Srebrenica.
It placed the onus on the international community to "use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other means" to protect populations from crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing.
Past examples include NATO's bombing of Serbia in 1999 as a means to protect the people of Kosovo and the U.N.'s administration of East Timor as Indonesian troops departed, experts say.
But now, R2P is a merely a "high moral aspiration" that has "floundered" on the complex realities of warfare today, according to Paddy Ashdown, a British lawmaker who served as high representative to Bosnia and Herzegovina 2002 to 2006…
