Preventing and Responding to Internal Conflict: When is it Right for Others to Intervene?
Citigroup-Asia Society Global Issues Series

Gareth Evans
President, International Crisis Group and Co-Chair, International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty

Hong Kong, November 25, 2003

MR EVANS: My topic today is about preventing and responding to internal conflict: when is it right for others to intervene?

Let me say at the outset something that will be very familiar to all of you, and it is this: that around Asia there is really just a visceral discomfort, perhaps more than anywhere else in the world except possibly Latin America, with the idea of intervening in the internal affairs of any kind of other countries.

Any form of intervention tends to be routinely resisted, even when it is at the softest end of the scale when it comes to security issues, even if it involves mediation facilitation of the kind that has so often been offered to India, for example, over the Kashmir issue, or in the context these days of Indonesia’s response to any suggestion of that again in Aceh.

That is not a universal response. The Norwegians have played a very major role in Sri Lanka. The whole Cambodian peace process, which was mentioned before, is an example, I guess, of how the international community can come together and work co-operatively in a rather intrusive way in this region, but there is that anxiety.

That anxiety becomes very real indeed when the form of intervention takes a more coercive or intrusive form - for example, the application of sanctions - and the anxiety is palpably extreme when anyone starts talking about military intervention, however grotesque a situation might be, and which might appear to be crying out for it.

We can speculate why this phenomenon might be so, but whatever the reason, the reality is so. If the European Union countries are at one end of the kind of spectrum of states that have been prepared to embrace a whole variety of limitations and constraints on their sovereignty, and to move away from the traditional nationalist position that has occupied states responses and reactions and behaviour with each other for so many centuries, if the European Union is at one end of that extreme, I think it is fair to say that the Asian countries are really still at the other, with interstate rivalry, a rather fierce consciousness of national identity, very strong nationalism, very strong unwillingness to embrace any kind of limitations on sovereignty, that is very much the environment we are operating in.

But that said, people in Asia, no more than anywhere else in the world, cannot avoid – no one can – one of the big contemporary debates of our time, which has been about the circumstances in which it is appropriate, legitimate, necessary even, to intervene in an extremely intrusive way in the internal situation in other countries.

The issue, of course, was raised by the catastrophic series of cases in the 1990s, above all, Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda and then Kosovo, which involved between them everything from mass starvation, to ethnic cleansing, to outright genocide, and where in each case the international community’s reaction was in one way or the other anything from lamentable to pathetic, but certainly not much better.

The issue of the circumstances in which it is appropriate to engage in military intervention for the purpose of responding to an internal crisis or catastrophe has now bounced back after a couple of years of hiatus and preoccupation with terrorism. It has now bounced back into the centre of public discourse with the debate that is now raging, of course, about Iraq and the legitimacy of the intervention there, with the reality being that as the rationales for military intervention in Iraq in terms of fears of weapons of mass destruction possession and of terrorist associations drop away, as those rationales disappear, the only game in town in really for Tony Blair or anyone else to be able to justify that intervention is the one in terms of Saddam’s tyrannical behaviour towards his own people. It is in that context that the issue has come back again on the table.

I do not want to suggest for a moment that this is the only big issue in the international security debate. These problems about internal security threats, where what is primarily involved, what the subject of the debate is, is the threat of a régime to its own people, that has been subsumed in many ways in more recent times after the 1990s by three other issues that are now very much at the heart of the international security debate.

One, of course, of those big three issues is the proper response to states engaged in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and nuclear weapons acquisition, in particular, with North Korea being of course in this region, and globally the pre-eminent state of concern.

You have also got the issue of international terrorism and the question of the circumstances and when it is appropriate, for self protection purposes, to take military action against states harbouring or nurturing international terrorism.

And you have also got the issue of failed and failing states, not just in the context of the risk that it poses to their own people, which is the topic I will be talking about today, but you have also got an increasing concern about the way in which such states are operating as bases for the export of other problems, apart from internal ones, and exporting the problem of terrorism, exporting crime, drugs, exporting refugees, exporting health pandemics, and in some cases exporting environmental catastrophes.

So the issue has also arisen about - for self-protection purposes, if you like, by the international community - the appropriateness of taking robust measures against states in that condition.

So these are all subjects for lively international debate. I do not mind talking about them when it comes to question time, but what we do want to really talk about and focus on today is the issue of internal catastrophe and appropriate response to it, because the truth of the matter is that another Rwanda situation could come along at any minute, and it is the case that the international community is still woefully under-prepared in terms of having achieved consensus about what an appropriate response should be. The rhetoric is fine but the reality falls, I fear, somewhat short of that, and there is absolutely no guarantee that even the most conscience shocking situation that should come along will guarantee an appropriate result and an appropriate response.

The debate has been a very lively one in the United Nations. It has, like everything else, been subsumed a bit by terrorism since 911, but it is bouncing back in the context of Iraq, and certainly in 1999 and 2000 there were major debates in the General Assembly on this issue of the so-called humanitarian intervention with absolutely no consensus being evident at all in what the appropriate response should be, a very big division opening up between those states, mainly western on the one hand, who are arguing the case, at least in principle, for more robust intervention when certain criteria were satisfied; and a number of other states, mainly from the developing world being acutely sensitive about the issue of sovereignty invasion thus involved, and being very unwilling to acknowledge any general principles at all that should apply in this area.

This was, notwithstanding, a very moving series of challenges to the international community made by the Secretary General Kofi Annan asking that the General Assembly countries debate the issue seriously and try and find some consensus on it, because the lack of consensus in a case like Kosovo, for example, even which led to NATO taking action without the Security Council being on board, had led to a huge amount of division and tension within the international community, but the consensus was not evident.

It was in that context that I was asked by the Canadian Government to co-chair a big international commission on intervention and state sovereignty, this whole issue, and we presented our report called “The Responsibility to Protect”, which is basically the theme of what I will be talking about today. We presented that report to the United Nations Secretary General in December 2001, just a couple of months after 911, and it got rather submerged as a result, but it is coming back very much into prominence in the public debate, partly for the Iraq reason I mentioned, and partly because people are recognising that this is just an issue that the international community is going to have to wrestle with.

Another context in which it will be wrestled with, undoubtedly, in the next few months is that of a high level panel that the Secretary General has just appointed to advise him and the international community on a proper approach to a whole range of new threats and new security issues which the international community, and in particular the multi-lateral system the United Nations confronts as a result of recent developments and the disposition of certain countries to be rather willing to go it alone, and what the implications are of that for the whole future of multi lateral security co-operation.

That high level panel is one which I find myself a member, along with, among others, my old sparring partner, Qian Qichen, the former Chinese foreign minister with whom I had an enormous amount to do when we were negotiating the Cambodian solution. That panel will, of course, be wrestling with just these issues as well, and that will bring them I think right back to centre front in terms of international attention. So it is a big issue and we are going to have to address it.

Asian countries have tended to stay pretty much outside this debate; they have not been major players in the international debate so far, and that is partly I guess because none of the big cases of so called humanitarian intervention in the 90s or since have really involved Asia at all.

The case of the military engagement in East Timor is sometimes seen as an example of this humanitarian intervention, but really it is not, because that was a case where Indonesia actually agreed to the presence of the troops in question, and the case we are talking about here is of coercive intervention where there is no such agreement.

It is probably fair to say that the Indonesian agreement was not all that thrillingly voluntary. Insofar as Jakarta was concerned, there were a lot of people sitting on their hands, but nonetheless the truth of the matter is it was with the consent, with the acquiescence and with no hint of military resistance by the Indonesians when those troops went in.

There were two other big cases in Asia before the 90s that are sometimes characterised as humanitarian intervention or rescue type cases, and one of them was India, and then East Pakistan in 1971, and of course Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia in 1978. But what is interesting when you go back to look at those cases, even when you look at them today they would undoubtedly be argued out the justification for the interventions in terms of the need to protect populations at risk from their own governments or lack of government.

That was not the way the case was argued at all by anyone back in the 70s when these were running. In both cases, the argument was that some kind of national self-defence was involved. In fact, in the case of the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, there was not even a willingness to acknowledge that there were any Vietnamese troops in the country at all. So all these people these days who tend to say, “Well, Vietnam ought to be congratulated for its enterprise in rescuing the Cambodians from the scourge of Pol Pot,” which has a large measure of truth about it, nonetheless are rewriting history if you try to characterise this as in any way a case of humanitarian intervention that was perceived as such by anyone at the time or argued out.

Pretty much everyone in the world, it should be remembered, roundly condemned those interventions as indefensible intrusions on state sovereignty and an indefensible breach of Article 2.7 of the United Nations Charter which inhibits any intrusions of this kind in internal affairs.

But even though Asia has been, as I have said, outside this whole debate to a large extent, it is not impossible, of course, that some situations could arise around this wider region where people are put at extreme risk by the action or the inaction or the lack of capacity of their governing authorities.

I do not want to be taken, as I mention this list, as predicting that any of them are going to descend into this kind of chaos, or that if they do, military action will be an appropriate response, but I simply indicate the kinds of situations that it is possible to envisage getting completely out of hand and demanding at least attention to an appropriate response by the international community.

The cases that I have in mind - and in most of them the International Crisis Group has some involvement on the ground so I know how difficult they all are - is countries like Nepal, which is now in a hideously renewed round of violence.

We have got Sri Lanka, if the peace process really does fall apart there in the way that it is possible that it will, if this internal brawl on the part of the different arms of the government continues.

We have got the potential always for something catastrophic happening in Myanmar, Burma, if the repression there really becomes intolerable and people just rise up against it.

In Central Asia, it is not impossible that there will be some renewed outbreak of civil war in Tajikistan or an explosion eventually against what is a palpably extremely oppressive régime in Uzbekistan, in particular.

In North Korea, we have the prospect -- not the prospect but the possibility of again things deteriorating and falling apart, massive starvation; a régime manifestly ill-equipped to handle it, quite apart from the large issue of nuclear proliferation and the implications of that for the international response - I am talking about an internal situation.

Then of course within the larger countries themselves, you certainly have the prospect of things getting very ugly indeed in Aceh in Indonesia.

There is the possibility, admitted slight but nonetheless it is there, that the anxiety that the Chinese government feels about what is happening in Xianjiang province with the Uighurs, or I guess even less likely with the Tibetans, that that could become a situation that appears to demand at least some kind of international reaction.

And, of course, the ever present problem of Kashmir, and that is more an interstate cross border problem, but nonetheless the internal -- it can be also argued to be, and certainly would be argued by the Indians to be an internal matter.

There are lots of others as well that are also explosive around other parts of the subcontinent. So I do not want to again be taken amiss when I list these examples, and please understand all the conditions and qualifications, but I am just saying you cannot assume that for the next 10, 15, 20 years all will be sweetness and light around the region and this issue simply will not arise here.

So what should be the principles that should govern our responses as an international community if and when the situations come along, be they in Asia or anywhere else?

Now, to pose again the series of questions that were in that brochure that was put around: can states in Asia or anywhere else do what they like to their citizens within their own borders? When an internal catastrophe does loom because of state action or inaction or incapacity, do sovereign rights yield to some larger international “responsibility to protect”, ultimately by military action? Who decides? According to what principles? And who should act?

Well, as I said, although initially submerged by the separate issues that were thrown up by 911 and its aftermath, there is a report out on this whole subject of a commission which I co-chaired, which has been finding a steadily growing international audience, and I think it is fair to say that we did make four main contributions to the policy debate in that report, and that is what I want to now talk about.

The first and probably ultimately the politically most useful contribution was to invent a new way of talking about the whole issue of so-called humanitarian intervention. In that commission, we sought to turn around the whole weary debate about the right to intervene which had caused so much hostility and trench digging, to recharacterise it, not as an argument about anyone’s right to do anything at all, but rather about a responsibility; a responsibility to protect people at grave risk, the relevant perspective being not that of the prospective intervener and its right to throw its weight around, but a more appropriate perspective on those needing crying out for the support.

I think this new language -the “responsibility to protect” language - has been helpful already in taking some of the heat and emotion out of the policy debate. It has required a lot of the actors in that debate, particularly in the United Nations context, to change their lines, to think afresh about what the real issues are.

Our hope, and so far our experience, is that entrenched opponents will, simply through the change of language, find it easier to find new ground on which to constructively engage. There are precedents for this; there are examples of this kind of thing happening. I mean, just think of the brawls that used to be really impossible in the sense of the non engagement between the two sides, between greenies and developers before the Brundland Commission invented the concept of “sustainable development”.

Now, there are still brawls between developers and greenies about all sorts of specific issues, but they are far more constructively focused within a common frame of reference. They are sitting at the same table, and that is the beginning of wisdom when you are trying to wrestle with complex policy issues with different positions.

The second contribution of the commission, and I think perhaps the most conceptually significant one, apart from the idea of the “responsibility to protect” itself, was to come up with a new way of talking about sovereignty. We argued that its essence should now be seen not in terms of the traditional Westphalian several centuries old concept of sovereignty as control, but rather of sovereignty as responsibility.

The United Nations Charter’s explicit language emphasised the respect which is owed to state sovereignty in the traditional sense, but actual state practice has really evolved in the nearly 60 years since the Charter was signed with a new focus on human rights, and more recently on human security more generally. With that, the emphasis has been much more on the limits to sovereignty.

So what we did was analyse, pick up that trend, and re articulate it, spelling out its implications by arguing that sovereignty implies responsibilities as well as rights. To be sovereign means that the state authorities are responsible for the functions of protecting the safety and the lives of their own citizens, promoting their welfare. National political authorities are responsible to citizens internally. They are also responsible to the international community through the United Nations.

So the starting point in our approach to this was to recognise the reality of state sovereignty, not to try and undermine it, not to try and talk it away, but to say that sovereignty carried with it a responsibility, and indeed the primary responsibility in all these situations is of the state itself to protect the individuals within it.

But while that is the starting point of any analysis, it is not, as we said, the finishing point, because where the state fails in that responsibility, a secondary responsibility then cuts in, that of the international community to act appropriately through international organisations, particularly the United Nations, to address the situations in question.

As we put it, where a population is suffering serious harm as a result of internal war, of insurgency, of repression or state failure, and the state in question is unwilling or unable to halt or revert that harm, the principle of non-intervention yields to the international “responsibility to protect”.

The key point, and it is one that is very respectful of the concern in this region and elsewhere about protecting the concept of sovereignty, is that the “responsibility to protect” then lies on both the state and the international community as a whole.

The third contribution of the commission was to make clear that the “responsibility to protect” is about much more than just intervention and in particular the extreme form of intervention, military intervention. It extends to a whole continuum of obligations embraced in the very concept of the “responsibility to protect”.

It involves at one end of the spectrum the responsibility to prevent: to address both the root causes and the direct or immediate causes of internal conflict and other man-made crises putting populations at risk.

Then, if prevention fails, it becomes the responsibility to react, the second stage of the continuum: to respond to situations of compelling human need with appropriate measures, which may include lesser coercive measures like sanctions and international prosecutions, and in extreme cases military intervention.

But that is not where it stops, there is a third dimension which is also part of this umbrella concept of the “responsibility to protect”, and that is the “responsibility to rebuild”, to provide, particularly after a military intervention, full assistance with recovery, reconstruction and reconciliation, addressing the causes of the harm that the intervention was designed to halt or to avert and to ensure that no future intervention would ever again be required.

Of these three dimensions to the “responsibility to protect”, the commission made very clear our view that the prevention was the single most important. It is not the one that most of the attention publicly is focused on, or the debate has been about, but we think it is the most important.

We spend a lot of time spelling out preventive strategies -political, diplomatic strategies, legal and constitution strategies for the protection of minority rights and aspirations, economic development strategies to try and get rid of that sense of grievance or relative deprivation that is so often the source of conflict. Even military strategies like security sector reform falling short of the actual use of force.

We also made clear that as a matter of principle, the exercise of the responsibility to both prevent and also to react - and I will re emphasise this point in a moment when I come to reaction - should always involve less intrusive and less coercive measures being considered before more coercive and intrusive ones are applied.

But all that said, and even with all that emphasis on prevention, the question of military action does remain the central one in the public debate. Whatever else it encompasses, the “responsibility to protect” does above all imply a responsibility to react, where necessary coercively, and in extreme cases with military coercion, to situations where there is really a compelling need for human protection.

So the fourth contribution, and the last on my list, the fourth contribution of the commission was to come up with some guidelines for when military action is appropriate. We spelt out six guidelines which I think are now starting to become very much the currency of wider international debate, and not just in the context of responding to internal catastrophes but also when any kind of military intervention is involved, but let us leave aside the wider potential application of these six criteria and just indicate briefly what they are about.

The first criterion is just cause: is the harm threatened sufficiently clear and serious to justify going to war? We set the bar for military invention very deliberately high, very deliberately tight, excluding many kinds of unconscionable behaviour that would certainly justify other lesser forms of coercive response like sanctions or international war crimes or crimes against humanity, prosecution and so on, but we thought it was inappropriate to include gross human rights violations involving the imprisonment and torture of political opponents, the overthrow even of a democratically elected government as proper cases for treatment by military action.

What we did, we set a much more limited threshold. What we said is there must be serious and irreparable harm occurring to human beings, or imminently likely to occur, of either of the following two kinds: it must involve large scale loss of life, actual or apprehended, with or without genocidal intent, which is the product either of deliberate state action, or state neglect or inability to act, or a failed state situation.

The second element was large scale “ethnic cleansing”, actual or apprehended, even if not carried out by killing, but rather by forced expulsion, or by acts of terror, or by mass rape, designed to either terrorise or, even in extreme cases, to change the demographic character of a particular neighbourhood.

Well, how does this criterion apply? I will just stop for a second each time as I work through them to run this past. The Iraq case in 2003, which is, as I indicated, now being vigorously argued to be a suitable case for “responsibility to protect” type intervention, as other rationales for intervention drop away.

Well, if you try and apply this test to Iraq, it is really quite tricky, because the threshold test cuts both ways. It would certainly have been satisfied a decade or more ago in terms of Saddam Hussein’s massacre of his own citizens, the Kurds in northern Iraq, and a few years later in the early 90s the Shi’ites in southern Iraq.

Unquestionably, our criteria would be satisfied; unquestionably then a case for intervention, but much less obviously so in recent years. A tyrant, yes; a huge civil liberties violator, yes; a monster to his own people, yes; but mass killings, probably not; mass ethnic cleansing; no, you cannot argue it.

So that is a tricky one. If you say that something that happened 10 or 15 years ago can be brought out, dusted off and used as an intervention basis now, you have really got quite a complex argument on your hands.

At least just to take one current example, there is huge enthusiasm around the place for doing something about Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe for his grotesque violations of human rights and misuse of the land reform issue, and so on, and if you look back to just a little bit of history in the mid 80s, the Matabeleland massacres, you have almost certainly satisfied the conditions which we specified as appropriate just cause thresholds to justify military intervention.

But the west and the rest of the world stood by, looking on profoundly indifferent back in the 80s, just as they stood by looking on profoundly indifferently to Iraq 10, 15 years ago, and it does become quite tricky to justify using that as a rationale now.

So that is perhaps where the second test helps out, and that is the test of right intention: is the primary purpose of the proposed military action to halt or avert the threat in question, whatever other motives there may be in play?

There invariably are other motives, often economic ones, often things that are needed to justify the intervention to a domestic constituency which is profoundly skeptical of the utility of sacrificing blood and treasure for some crowd, in a country they have never heard, of a long way away.

But is the primary purpose of the proposed military action to avert the threat in question? In the case of Iraq, it is probably fair to say that that test was satisfied in the case of the UK and Tony Blair in particular. In the case of the United States, I think the jury, to put it gently, would have rather a harder time. Was the primary purpose of DC’s political decision, the governmental decision to go to war, really to halt or avert human suffering?

Perhaps I should add that in the case of the third coalition member, Australia, perhaps there was some other motive than following the leader and earning some more “Frequent Fighter Points”, but I have been out of the country and I just would not know.

The third criterion we identified was “last resort”. Has every non-military option for the prevention or peaceful resolution of the crisis been explored with reasonable grounds for believing that lesser measures than military action will not succeed?

It does not mean, this “last resort” business, that you have to actually work your way through all the non military options and wait months and months and months while each of them is tried and does not fail. It does mean, however, that you have got to have reasonable grounds for believing that the non military stuff will not produce the desired result.

Applying that to Iraq, obviously in the case of weapons of mass destruction, the “last resort” criterion certainly was not satisfied. If you accept the “tyranny as justification” approach, however, it probably was, because there is not much -- if you have a suitable case for treatment, there is not much point for waiting around, because at the end of the case, every régime change is made by what has already happened.

The fourth criterion is “proportional means”: is the scale, the duration, the intensity of the planned military action the minimum necessary to secure the defined human protection objective? Again, in the case of Iraq, the question has to be asked: whether some 3,500 civilian deaths and some 10,000 military deaths - the current estimates, assuming they are at least roughly accurate - it has to be asked: was that an appropriate trade from an Iraqi point of view for the end of Saddam Hussein’s capacity to persecute?

Well, it is an interesting question and a rather tough one, as a lot of these questions are, and there are no instant answers to a lot of these questions, but at least it concentrates the mind to put them within this framework I think.

The fifth criterion is a very important one, “reasonable prospects”: is there a reasonable chance of the military action being successful in meeting the actual threat in question, with the consequences of the action not likely to be worse than the consequences of inaction?

In the case of Iraq 2003, the “reasonable prospects” criterion is obviously one of the hardest for the defenders of the war to meet. We cannot finally answer that question until we know how long Iraq’s post war misery is going to last, whether it is going to become a democracy or some variation on a theocracy, whether the war really has concentrated the minds of other dictators around the place, and until we know just how many new recruits have been gained by al Qaeda and its offshoots and affiliates and imitators around the world as a result of the Iraq action.

But the auguries on most of these fronts, I have to say, are just as bad now, or even worse, then they were before the way, and it is of course before the war, before the military action that (.....tape A ends.....) apart from anything else, the logic of it is to effectively rule out military action against any one of the five permanent members of the Security Council, or indeed any other major power. It would rule out action against Russia over Chechnya, and on the face of it, it would rule out, without even thinking about it, action against China on some imaginable course of events internally, even if every other one of the criteria I have indicated were met.

The trouble is, of course, that in each of these cases, the reason military action is ruled out, is that external intervention would simply trigger a much larger conflict, multiplying the human catastrophe involved with absolutely no guarantee in the process that you would solve the original problem, but certainly knowing that you are creating a much bigger one.

All of this, of course, raises the familiar question of double standards. How can you possibly argue for rules or guidelines that have this in-built double standard character about them? Well, the truth of the matter is that the reality is that interventions may not be able to be mounted in every case where there is justification for doing so, but that is no reason for them not to be mounted in any case.

The final criterion is a very tricky one also, and that is the question of right “right authority”: is the military action actually lawful as a matter of international law? This is the hardest question of all for my commission to wrestle with, and I suspect it will be the hardest question for this high level panel to wrestle with.

The argument is compelling that when it comes to authorising any kind of military intervention, immediate self-defence apart, the United Nations, and in particular the Security Council, should be the first port of call. There is and there can be no better answer to the question of who decides whether these various criteria are satisfied.

The difficult question, which was starkly raised by the issue of Kosovo and now again by Iraq, is whether the Security Council should be the last port of call.

What if the Security Council does not go along with approving the intervention in a case where it really does seem to be justified? What if the Security Council fails to discharge its own “responsibility to protect” in a conscience shocking situation crying out for action, as I for one would argue Kosovo to have been?

A real question, you see, then arises as to which of two evils is worse: is it the damage to international order if the Security Council is bypassed, or is it in the damage to that order human beings are slaughtered while the Security Council stands by?

Our commission’s response to this dilemma was to give really a political message. We did not try and give a definitive legal answer, we certainly did not try to invent new institutions over and above the Security Council which have no change of practical real world implication; we just focused on the real world dynamics, as we understood them.

What we said was this: that if an individual state or an ad hoc coalition of states steps in in one of these situations, if it does fully observe and respect all the various threshold and prudential criteria that I have been mapping out, if it seems to have done so, this individual country or group of countries, if it seemed to have done so by world opinion, if it seemed to have observed these criteria and if it is actually successful in averting the threat or problem in question, then this - and here is the political message to the United Nations - this is likely in itself to have enduringly serious consequences for the status and credibility of the United Nations itself.

That is pretty much what happened with the United States and the NATO intervention in Kosovo where it was seen to be justified and where everybody scrambled immediately after the event to give, in effect, retrospective justification to it. The truth of the matter is the United Nations cannot afford to drop the ball too often in these sorts of cases.

The other side of the coin is where the Security Council is bypassed in a much more problematic situation, like Iraq in 2003. Here, the argument that was put forward, with some effectiveness, by the French and others is that the credibility of the United Nations would have been more at risk if it had gone along for the ride than if, as it did, it resisted. The jury is out on all of that.

Let me just conclude by saying this: that while the overall concept of the “responsibility to protect” has gained considerable traction, and while it is the case that the “no more Rwandas” battle cry is one to which just about everyone around the world is now paying lip service, it will obviously be a long haul to gain general acceptance in principle and in practice of the relevance in the utility of the particular criteria I have mapped out, and an even longer haul than having them accepted in principle to have them applied in practice by the Security Council in every case.

Efforts have been made within the Security Council and the General Assembly, led by the Canadians and supported by Kofi Annan, to win at least informal acceptance of these criteria and indeed the whole “responsibility to protect” approach. These efforts will continue and, as I said, I expect them to be picked up and get a run again in the context of this new high level panel exercise.

My final word is this: that the alternative to making a serious effort to enforce the international rules that we have and to supplement them with further principle guidelines and criteria where there are obvious gaps and hiatuses, as there are at the moment in relation to these internal affairs, to the alternative, is to abandon the field to those who are more comfortable with the ad hoc exercise of power, who do not really want to be limited by rules and principles and guidelines at all, who feel constrained by international process, and who see multi-lateral co-operation in very narrowly self interested terms.

But I think that a world that appeals to people like this is not one in which most people in the world, in Asia or anywhere else, want to live. Thank you.