The Syrian civil war has been marked by crimes against humanity so undeniable that they could have leapt into existence from a textbook, yet the world has remained largely idle. Reports suggest that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad presided over the systematic murder of more than 11,000 prisoners between 2011 and 2013. The United Nations has confirmed nine intentional massacres of Syrians since the beginning of the conflict — eight perpetrated by the government and one by the opposition. Al-Assad’s government has openly confined, tortured and killed thousands of civilians it considered a threat during the course of a war that has caused millions to flee. Both sides have engaged in siege warfare: setting up blockades around populated areas, preventing humanitarian aid and starving the areas’ populations. An imam in Damascus was so desperate that he issued a fatwa — an Islamic religious ruling — that allowed people in refugee camps to eat dogs and cats, which the Quran otherwise prohibits consuming. In some cases, people in besieged cities have resorted to eating grass.
As these atrocities have flickered across screens worldwide, global authorities have debated how to address the escalating crisis, yet they have come to no firm conclusion. For cases like Syria, the UN has a set of standards — “Responsibility to Protect,” or R2P — to guide humanitarian intervention. While the severity of crimes against humanity in Syria demanded such intervention by the UN, political arm wrestling between Russia, China and the United States prevented it from occurring. These machinations are rooted not in the Syrian conflict itself, but in the history of botched intervention that echoes profoundly across international policy today.
R2P and the body of international law that supports it attempt to redefine sovereignty as contingent on a nation’s ability to protect the welfare of its people. This principle allows the international community to intervene in a nation that has either steamrolled or actively ignored the well-being of its citizens. It contains three foundational pillars: 1) Every state has the responsibility to protect its population from genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and other mass atrocities; 2) The international community has a responsibility to encourage and assist states in this task; and 3) Should a state fail to protect its population, the international community has the responsibility to use diplomatic and humanitarian collective action in accordance with the UN Charter. Unanimously adopted during the UN’s 2005 World Summit, R2P arose from the onslaught of mass atrocities that occurred towards the end of the 20th century — from the massacre in Bosnia to the Khmer Rouge to the Rwandan genocide. The principle, as first conceived, attempted to guarantee the basic right to life for citizens of every nation.
In 2011, bloody events in Libya required the UN Security Council to authorize its first military intervention under the auspices of R2P. Prior to the intervention, protests aimed at ousting Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi’s government resulted in a bloody civil war. After repeatedly pressuring Qaddafi’s government to stop its human rights violations, the Security Council passed a resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire while authorizing member states to take all necessary measures to protect civilian lives. Russia and China — often opposed to any UN intervention within a sovereign state — did not oppose the resolution. NATO forces, along with Jordan, Sweden, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, then launched a military intervention, imposing a no-fly zone over Libya and striking Qaddafi’s forces. Within months, Qaddafi’s government crumbled, and the rebels launched an offensive, taking back territory before eventually claiming Tripoli, Libya’s capital. The UN recognized the anti-Qaddafi government — the National Transitional Council — as the legal representative of Libya, and the new government then captured, tortured and murdered Qaddafi.
Western governments lauded the humanitarian intervention in Libya as a successful mission that saved thousands and carried out R2P’s principles. But many other governments disagreed. As more than a hundred prominent African intellectuals wrote in an open letter, “NATO went beyond what was predicted in the Resolution, declar[ed] the Qaddafi government illegitimate, pursued regime change, supported opposition rebels and proclaimed the Benghazi-based Transitional National Council as the legitimate governing body in Libya.” Critiques of the operation raised accusations of sinister paternalism: Many nations argued that Libya’s conflict was a straightforward civil war with relatively few human rights atrocities. Because of this, they claimed that the West exaggerated the existence of war crimes as an excuse to intervene for the sake of their own oil interests in the country. Moreover, NATO did not engineer any sustainable exit strategy after initiating the strikes, leaving Libya with its infrastructure in tatters and an incompetent government tasked with picking up the pieces. All of this combines to color NATO’s intervention as an operation designed to install a pro-Western government in an oil-rich nation, rather than as a humanitarian mission designed to protect a helpless population.
The support for this claim is mixed, but the truth in this case is less important than the perception of Western actions. Qaddafi’s soldiers did shoot protesters and deny medical care to rebel combatants. On the other hand, the rebels engaged in racial targeting of black Africans during the conflict. The lack of clarity in who was committing more atrocities should have tempered NATO action, but instead the West wholeheartedly embraced the revolutionary crusade. Unsurprisingly, the perception that the West was simply furthering its geopolitical interests garnered a seething critique not just in Africa, but also among other great powers including Russia, China and India. Abuse of R2P by NATO damaged the legitimacy of the principle and jeopardized its future use to the detriment of countries like Syria.
Much like the Libyan conflict, the Syrian civil war arose from the Arab Spring, when President Bashar al-Assad and his army responded to nationwide protests with brutal crackdowns. In a matter of months, the national uprising evolved into an armed conflict. Since then, the Syrian civil war has become one of the most violent and destructive conflicts of the past decade. Besides the severe violations of human rights committed by both the government and the rebels, the conflict has created almost three million refugees, four million internally displaced persons and 800,000 civilians under siege — many of whom are now dying of starvation and disease. Currently, the death toll is estimated to be over 190,000.
These numbers make Libya’s atrocities pale in comparison. But years of unilateral Western intervention and abuse of R2P have kept the UN out of the conflict. The Security Council’s inability to agree on Syrian intervention arose from a battle of political gamesmanship between Russia and the United States, both of which hold powerful energy interests in the region. Russia and Iran both transferred weapons to the Syrian army and supported Bashar al-Assad’s government, while the United States, along with Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, supported and supplied the rebels. The United States is deeply invested in ousting al-Assad’s government in favor of a more Western-friendly one that would act as a political and economic ally in the Middle East — a relative necessity given continual tensions in US-Iran relations and the destabilizing force of ISIS, which will undoubtedly have long-term effects on the progress of the Middle East. Not one to pass up an opportunity to secure its own interests in the region, Russia has been doing everything in its power to swing Syria’s political allegiance away from the West. When the United States first called on the Security Council to intervene in Syria in 2014, China and Russia vetoed every proposal, with both governments issuing statements expressing concern that the West would abuse R2P in Syria as they did in Libya. The improper action taken by the United States in Libya thus gave Russia a legitimate reason to veto the proposed interventions.
But Russia would have had strategic reasons to avoid the intervention anyway; misuse of R2P was a handy excuse. The country has exploited the principle to further its own interests: Russian President Vladimir Putin invoked it to justify his military intervention in Crimea earlier this year. This use of R2P in a situation with no realistic threats of mass atrocities even further delegitimized the emerging norm. It also underscores an important point: It’s not just the West that uses the hazy line between civil war and governmental abuse to twist international law.
Nonetheless, the UN has made some progress in Syria. This spring, Russia agreed to a UN resolution that compelled both the Syrian government and the rebels to allow humanitarian aid to civilians and to lift the sieges on a few Syrian towns. In addition, the Syrian government has agreed to give up its chemical weapons under the threat of US military intervention and Russian pressure, although barely five percent of the stockpiles have currently been turned over. The resolution does not address the main atrocities at hand: By the time the international community took action, the tolls of war were already too high.
According to Columbia University professor Stuart Gottlieb, “the enormous damage caused by the over-zealous Libya intervention” created Russia and China’s “new red line: There will be no more R2P-style missions authorized by the UN.” Indeed, the NATO intervention in Libya created a “get out of intervention free” card for China and Russia to wave in the face of the West whenever it attempts to invoke R2P. Originally a norm born of good intentions and optimism, protecting vulnerable populations from abuse has unfortunately become a tool that major states use in pursuit of their self-interested goals. NATO’s overreaching embrace of R2P in Libya has been compounded by failure: The reemerged conflicts that continue to rage in Libya only bolster the arguments of skeptics. As Russia continues to shield the al-Assad government from international pressure — and thereby protects Russian political and economic interests — NATO should rethink its policies on R2P in order to avoid handing ammunition to geopolitical rivals.
Despite R2P’s faults, we should not write it off entirely. The principle still has the potential to emerge as a powerful norm and prove critical to preventing mass atrocities. But in order to restore R2P and prove its legitimacy, all nations must stop abusing the principle to justify their self-serving actions. In their battle to globalize their political values and advance their economic positions, the great powers should not invoke R2P as a tool. Instead, these countries must use the Responsibility to Protect for just that — to safeguard populations suffering at the hands of atrocities too terrible to ignore.
Art by Kwang Choi.