A New application for "responsibility to protect?"

In the wake of the Rwandan Genocide, a guilt-racked world struggled to come to terms with its responsibility for populations at risk of violence and mass slaughter. Canadian Romeo Dallaire, who had served as a blue helmet in Rwanda and watched helplessly as people were slaughtered around them, assisted in developing this concept of "Responsibility to Protect," essentially a dialogue around policy change internationally that would allow the UN, or another multilateral body to forcibly enter a situation and act to preserve the lives of populations in danger from which their governments refuse to protect them.

The New York Times headline today was:Myanmar Faces Pressure to Allow Major Aid Effort

By SETH MYDANS

Published: May 8, 2008

BANGKOK — As hungry, shivering survivors waited among the dead for help after a huge cyclone in Myanmar, aid agencies and diplomats said Wednesday that the delivery of relief supplies was being slowed by the reluctance of the country’s secretive military leaders to allow an influx of outsiders. (...)

Despite the emerging scale of the disaster, the Myanmar government has let in little aid and has restricted movement in the delta, aid agencies say. It has not granted visas to aid workers, even though supplies are being marshaled in nearby countries like Thailand.

In response, the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, suggested that the United Nations should invoke its “responsibility to protect” civilians as the basis for a resolution to allow the delivery of international aid even without the junta’s permission.

With a death toll in just one country that could rival the death toll of all of the countries affected by the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004, Cyclone Nergis has dealt Burma's junta an almost impossible situation: let go of a paranoid delusion and deal with an influx of foreign aid so that people can be saved (there is no food and no clean water in many areas, and growing areas are flooded. Mass deaths are expected due to starvation and water-borne disease), or leave harmless citizens to die in favour of a deeply paranoid, superstitious regime buried deeply in denial of world opinion.

How could this NOT be a "responsibility to protect" situation?

Fact 1) Burma's citizenry have been at the mercy of the Junta, essentially as a vulnerable population in their own nation, since the Junta took power.

Fact 2) Poverty, chronic lack of services and a poor economy have increased the risk that Burma's citizens will be victimized further by their government.

Fact 3) The Global community has a history of ignoring the Junta's crimes against their people. The Saffron Revolution, in 2007, garnered only verbal chastisements and sanctions (of an already desperately poor country) from world powers, despite the countless deaths of unarmed protesters and a Japanese photojournalist.

Fact 4) Burma's Junta has powerful friends with shady backgrounds of citizen neglect, oppression and denial. China has endorsed Burma's unelected government - putting the citizens at the mercy of the world's next major superpower. In 2007 when the Security Council was to vote on whether to enact the R2P agreement on Burma, China and Russia used their veto under the guise that Burma was not a threat to world security (which seems to miss the point entirely).

Fact 5) Burma's Junta, while spending more on military than any other single category of expenditure, simply is no match for what the world has - a "forcible entry" of Burma for these purposes might actually lead to citizens welcoming the visitors in the streets... unlike another situation we know of...

Support the effort to impose help on Burma's Junta for the sake of the citizens there.