 |
|||||||||
     |
|||||||||
 |
|||||||||
| You are here: 2004 / Workshops, Panels and Seminars / Plenary Panel 3: The Next Step Towards Genocide Prevention / Presentation by Mr. Gareth Evans | |||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
Participants Countries and organizations Conference documentation Conference programme 
|
|
|
|
Presentation by Dr. Elisabeth Rehn Presentation by Mr. Gareth Evans Presentation by Ambassador Jan Eliasson Presentation by Professor Carol Rittner Presentation by Mr. Gareth Evans Evans, Gareth Presentation by Gareth Evans The theme that resonated most for me throughout the conference was responsibility: of all of us – governments, intergovernmental organizations, non-government organizations and individuals – each in our own way and to the extent of our capacity to do everything to ensure that the horrors of the last century are once and for all behind us. Our responsibility is to ensure that the slogan ‘never again’ – to which everyone paid lipservice after the Holocaust, after the Cambodia genocide, after the Rwanda genocide, and, just one year later, all over again, after the Srebrenica genocide, really does become reality. For years now, and in the first three conferences in this series, we have been looking back – wondering, with varying degrees of incomprehension, horror, anger and shame, how we could have let it all happen. The point of this conference has been to look forward – to focus on what we need to do now, to ensure that in another year, or two, or three we are not looking back once more with incomprehension, horror, anger and shame. What is the nature of our responsibility? Above all it is to prevent, through all the measures, all the strategies, both structural and operational – whether diplomatic or legal or economic or military or educational – about which so many here have spoken so eloquently. But it is also to react – when prevention fails to bring to bear coercive measures: non-military if possible, because war even in a just cause is always ugly, but military if that is the only way to halt or avert a major catastrophe. And then it is to rebuild – to follow through with recovery, reconstruction and reconciliation, with resources not forgetfulness, to ensure that the whole horrifying cycle of grievance to violence doesn’t start all over again. The report of the Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect, is about all of these things: not just about when it’s right to fight, but about the responsibility to prevent, to react and to rebuild. Who bears this responsibility? First and foremost, the responsibility to protect is that of sovereign states themselves. State sovereignty is not a license to kill. It carries with it the responsibility to protect the state’s own people. And, when others fail in their responsibility, it carries an obligation to act to meet that responsibility for them – not to turn away in indifference, saying it is none of our business. The responsibility to protect is also the responsibility of intergovernmental organizations, above all the United Nations – the Secretary General and the only fully empowered international organization we have, the Security Council, and within that the Permanent Five, who don’t always have the capacity to make things happen but certainly can ensure they don’t – as was the case, so tragically, with Rwanda in 1994. The responsibility extends to all the other global organizations and agencies with preventive or reactive roles; the regional organizations; and the courts, the new instruments of not just retributive but deterrent justice. That these courts, and in particular the new International Criminal Court, have become such potentially important players has been, unhappily, not through any positive contribution from the United States - whose representatives went so far at this conference, I am told, to demand the exclusion of any reference to the International Criminal Court from the final Declaration of this conference. The responsibility to protect is also that of non-governmental organizations, the media and civil society more generally. It is to prevent through all the strategies laid out for us by Sandra Malone and Brigalia Bam and so many others; it is to analyse, to warn to alert in the way done by my own International Crisis Group, and organizations like Amnesty and Human Rights Watch; and it’s to mobilize and ring alarm bells when the occasion demands. And all that means a need to work together constructively and collaboratively, to submerge the egos and clamour for recognition, and just get on with the job; And ultimately the responsibility to protect is that of all of as individuals – whether we be civil servants, with all the temptation and opportunity in the world to claim that a problem is someone else’s business, or ordinary members of the public, who can make our voices heard if we want them to be heard. What are the primary areas in which we should be focusing our efforts? From a long potential list I would single out just these things. We need, first, to get our understanding right of the rules and principles involved - thinking in terms not of the ‘right to intervene’ but the ‘responsibility to protect’; not being deterred by the apparent bias in the UN Charter against any intervention in internal affairs, but recognizing that state sovereignty has its limits, and allowing the butchery of one’s own citizens well and truly exhausts them. And we need to operationalise those understandings, at the very least in the form of accepted informal guidelines which can gradually acquire the status of customary international law. And secondly, we do need to make some structural changes, to the way governments handle these issues internally, and more particularly internationally. A Special Rapporteur for the Prevention of Genocide, as suggested by Kofi Anan, would be helpful, as would – perhaps even more so – the creation of an International Centre for Genocide Prevention ( or ‘Atrocity’ Prevention, as David Scheffer usefully suggested, to avoid definitional nitpicking). Such a centre could act as a clearing house for the work of all the NGOs and other national and international organizations working on these issues, and a focal point for bringing pressure upon policy makers to act when circumstances demanded this. Many governments have the credentials to initiate or participate in such an enterprise, as evidenced from their speeches here, but perhaps none more so than our Swedish hosts – who might like to consider now harnessing he energy and momentum of this conference, and applying some of the resources that might otherwise have been spent on more of the same in the future, on creating a new sharply focused, well-organised and well-resourced centre of this kind. Rallying cries are fine as far as they go, but when it comes to making ‘never again’ the reality it must become, rhetoric is no substitute for action. >> Back to top |
|
|
|
Introduction Opening Session Plenary Sessions Workshops, Panels and Seminars
Other Activities |
|
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
| For information about this production and the Stockholm International Forum Conference Series please go to www.humanrights.gov.se or contact Information Rosenbad, SE-103 33 Stockholm, Sweden | |||||||||