President’s Corner: Our Responsibility to Help Burma’s Cyclone Victims
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
The arrival in Burma of one U.S. cargo plane carrying relief supplies and an American admiral is good news for survivors of the May 2nd cyclone and great PR for the U.S., but it shouldn’t obscure the totally inadequate world response to a humanitarian disaster.
A week and a half after the Cyclone Nargis, which killed more than 100,000 people by some estimates, displaced more than 1.5 million, and created conditions that could lead to the death of thousands of survivors, very little aid has reached the storm victims.
Burma’s military regime--paranoid, xenophobic, and heartless—deserves most of the blame for the lack of response; the generals have erected barriers to flows of humanitarian aid and the workers needed to distribute it. Yesterday, UN Secretary Ban Ki-Moon said: "I want to register my deep concern and immense frustration at the unacceptably slow response to this grave humanitarian crisis." But for 10 days the world has stood by, bemoaning and criticizing the regime's disregard for life, but doing little to help.
In a column in the The Washington Post yesterday (5/12), Fred Hiatt blames the United Nations for “bowing to Burma’s sovereignty as the nation’s junta allows more than a million victims of Cyclone Nargis to face starvation, dehydration, cholera and other miseries, rather than allow outsiders to offer aid on the scale that’s needed.”
In 2005, the UN adopted a doctrine called “the responsibility to protect,” that gives the UN the right to intervene to protect civilians from mass atrocities caused by “genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.” If a regime’s refusal to provide medical assistance, food, clean water and other aid to more than a million people doesn’t constitute a crime against humanity, what does?
Shortly after the cyclone struck, Bernard Kouchner, the foreign minister of France, called on the UN to invoke the responsibility to protect by authorizing the UN to bring food and workers to Burma over the government’s opposition. According to news reports, China and Russia, both of whom have the power to veto UN Security Council resolutions, blocked the action.
That shouldn’t be the end of the story. I think that France, the U.S. and other countries with planes, helicopters and ships in the region should begin airdrops and possibly airlifts of food and medicine into the Burma, whether or not the regime agrees. Yes, there is a risk that the Burmese military would oppose humanitarian flights, but forceful efforts to interfere with relief deliveries would turn the responsibility to protect into a right to protect.
Negotiations with the regime by the UN and others have opened windows for small shipments of aid, such as the U.S. plane that landed Monday, but the slow trickle of humanitarian goods falls far short of what is necessary, and the aid is arriving more than a week after it was needed. Obviously, a decision by the regime to allow adequate aid to enter the country is the best solution to the current crisis, but it doesn't seem likely that the junta will lower obstacles to assistance in time, either because it's afraid of an increased foreign presence or because it's indifferent to the suffering of its people. There is considerable evidence to support the indifference theory; according to reports in the British press, the regime has continued to export rice to Bangladesh while cyclone victims face possible starvation.
Imposition of the responsibility to protect is not an easy decision. Although the first steps to pressure a sovereign nation to protect its own people are political, diplomatic and economic, the doctrine does allow for military action as a last resort and under carefully defined conditions. But as the death toll threatens to rise in the face of continued government obstruction to international relief efforts, I think it is fair to ask: Does sovereignty mean that a government has the right to let its own people die in large numbers and have we already waited too long to act?
--Ken Bacon
For more of RI's work in Burma please visit: www.refugeesinternational.org/Burma
A week and a half after the Cyclone Nargis, which killed more than 100,000 people by some estimates, displaced more than 1.5 million, and created conditions that could lead to the death of thousands of survivors, very little aid has reached the storm victims.
Burma’s military regime--paranoid, xenophobic, and heartless—deserves most of the blame for the lack of response; the generals have erected barriers to flows of humanitarian aid and the workers needed to distribute it. Yesterday, UN Secretary Ban Ki-Moon said: "I want to register my deep concern and immense frustration at the unacceptably slow response to this grave humanitarian crisis." But for 10 days the world has stood by, bemoaning and criticizing the regime's disregard for life, but doing little to help.
In a column in the The Washington Post yesterday (5/12), Fred Hiatt blames the United Nations for “bowing to Burma’s sovereignty as the nation’s junta allows more than a million victims of Cyclone Nargis to face starvation, dehydration, cholera and other miseries, rather than allow outsiders to offer aid on the scale that’s needed.”
In 2005, the UN adopted a doctrine called “the responsibility to protect,” that gives the UN the right to intervene to protect civilians from mass atrocities caused by “genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.” If a regime’s refusal to provide medical assistance, food, clean water and other aid to more than a million people doesn’t constitute a crime against humanity, what does?
Shortly after the cyclone struck, Bernard Kouchner, the foreign minister of France, called on the UN to invoke the responsibility to protect by authorizing the UN to bring food and workers to Burma over the government’s opposition. According to news reports, China and Russia, both of whom have the power to veto UN Security Council resolutions, blocked the action.
That shouldn’t be the end of the story. I think that France, the U.S. and other countries with planes, helicopters and ships in the region should begin airdrops and possibly airlifts of food and medicine into the Burma, whether or not the regime agrees. Yes, there is a risk that the Burmese military would oppose humanitarian flights, but forceful efforts to interfere with relief deliveries would turn the responsibility to protect into a right to protect.
Negotiations with the regime by the UN and others have opened windows for small shipments of aid, such as the U.S. plane that landed Monday, but the slow trickle of humanitarian goods falls far short of what is necessary, and the aid is arriving more than a week after it was needed. Obviously, a decision by the regime to allow adequate aid to enter the country is the best solution to the current crisis, but it doesn't seem likely that the junta will lower obstacles to assistance in time, either because it's afraid of an increased foreign presence or because it's indifferent to the suffering of its people. There is considerable evidence to support the indifference theory; according to reports in the British press, the regime has continued to export rice to Bangladesh while cyclone victims face possible starvation.
Imposition of the responsibility to protect is not an easy decision. Although the first steps to pressure a sovereign nation to protect its own people are political, diplomatic and economic, the doctrine does allow for military action as a last resort and under carefully defined conditions. But as the death toll threatens to rise in the face of continued government obstruction to international relief efforts, I think it is fair to ask: Does sovereignty mean that a government has the right to let its own people die in large numbers and have we already waited too long to act?
--Ken Bacon
For more of RI's work in Burma please visit: www.refugeesinternational.org/Burma
Labels: Burma, President's Corner
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
<< Home