Editor's Introduction
“The Case for Intervention in the Ivory Coast” by Corinne Dufka. Foreign Policy. March 25 2011.
On 30 March 2011, the UN Security Council, acting under Chapter VII of its Charter, adopted Resolution 1975, which urged the defeated President Gbagbo to immediately step aside and declared the situation in the Ivory Coast to be a threat to international security. The resolution stated that the attacks currently taking place against the civilian population of this country could amount to crimes against humanity, and that perpetrators of such crimes must be held accountable under international law in accordance with the International Criminal Court. Against all the predictions of the international community, the UN Security Council mandated the use of “all necessary means” to protect the civilian population in the Ivory Coast, a decision that came only weeks after a similar resolution was enacted for the Libyan case. Most importantly, both resolutions referred to the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) as a justification for the international community to intervene in the face of a growing risk of massive human rights abuses. R2P finally began making its way from a principled idea—supported by the majority of states at the UN Summit in 2005—to a concrete international practice of responding to egregious violations of human rights.
In the case of the Ivory Coast, the country’s situation before the UN resolution demonstrated a serious risk of mass atrocities. As the Roundtable centerpiece from Corinne Dufka at Foreign Policy points out: “As incendiary threats pour in from both sides, the country is on the brink of a full resumption of armed conflict. As in the past, civilians will almost certainly bear the brunt of the bloodshed.” The Global Center for the Responsibility to Protect provides further evidence of the deteriorating situation in the Ivory Coast: “The ongoing post-electoral conflict between militant groups supporting the country’s two rival leaders is rapidly spreading. Already more than 440 deaths have been reported and more than 90,000 people have fled the country and sought refuge in neighboring Liberia and Guinea and an additional 350,000 others are internally displaced.” Other international actors including the African Union (AU) and the Economic Community of Western African States (ECOWAS) also responded with efforts to resolve the crisis through mediation and diplomatic pressure.
Beyond the specificities of the human rights violations in the Ivory Coast, the two recent UNSC resolutions bring up additional questions for scholars, policymakers, and transnational advocacy networks: Why did the international community decide to react in these two particular cases and not in other cases of mass atrocities? Under which conditions is the principle of the Responsibility to Protect more likely to be utilized as a legitimate practice in international politics? Once the risk of massive human rights abuses is not at stake, what is the responsibility of the international community?
This month’s Roundtable debates some of these concerns. In particular, Edzia Carvalho and Jonas Claes analyze the multiple and difficult transnational processes through which the discussion about humanitarian intervention takes place. As Claes so aptly puts it: “Those factors that affect the likeliness of a robust 'Libya-style' international response given a certain level of risk of atrocities are rarely acknowledged. The authorization of military force in response to imminent or ongoing mass atrocities is the product of a difficult diplomatic process, subject to numerous factors unrelated to the gravity of the humanitarian crisis.” Meanwhile, Devin Joshi and Brooke Ackerly engage with the broader causes that lead to international crises such as the one in the Ivory Coast. They deal with some of the alternatives available to the international community, not only for peace-building, but also for preventing massive human rights abuses and genocide from ever happening again.
Claudia Fuentes
Roundtable Editor
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
April 2011: Responsibility to Protect and Human Rights Protection in the Ivory Coast
A Rights-Based Approach to Global Injustice
by Brooke Ackerly, Vanderbilt University
“There has already been a military response to the Ivory Coast. Should we wait to reflect on global injustice until we see the graphic images of genocide and tragedy elsewhere, or can we use a rights-based lens to care about global injustice as part of our everyday lives?”
Is reflection on global injustice part of the everyday lives of those who live in global privilege? Or does privilege let us wait to raise concerns about justice only when the media bring the graphic images of genocide and tragedy to our family rooms?
In her opinion piece about the invocation of the Responsibility to Protect as a justification for intervening in the Ivory Coast, Corinne Dufka characterizes the issue as twofold: 1) the need of the democratic citizenry of Western powers to know about the injustice of a state to its citizenry and 2) the willingness of their states to act against it.
Dufka’s characterization of the problem of genocide echoes back to the work of Lemkin, the prime advocate for the genocide convention, whose story is retold by Samantha Power in The Problem from Hell: America in the age of genocide. The history’s two narratives – first, that Americans don't know about the extent or nature of genocides and second, that they know and are unwilling to act – are mutually inconsistent. Together these narratives have proven no match for another familiar American argument of the last century that recurs at the dawn of the new millennium: What would you have us do, play the “world's police force? These second, instrumental interest-based arguments carry the day.
While I share their horror at genocide and appreciate the moral view behind the arguments of Lemkin, Power, and Dufka, we could turn to another norm that emerged through the 20th century- that of human rights - and ask what a rights-based analysis of global injustice and a corresponding international political response would entail. It might mean focusing on the injustices we affect, not just those we observe from afar.
The human rights approach makes us look backward and forward to comprehend the context of human rights violations and to envision necessary action. However, we enumerate the list of universal human rights, these rights are indivisible, interrelated, and sustained or threatened through social, economic, and political institutions, values, practices, and norms. This means that labor rights and rights of political association are indivisible. We can support labor rights at home and around the world through economic agreements, fair trade practices, and code of conduct compliance. This means that the rights of journalists abducted while covering political movements, labor rights unrest, or political corruption of elites are interrelated with the rights of those in popular movements. Through the rights-based lens, genocide is one horrific manifestation of human rights violations. Other manifestations of global injustice include global poverty, inhumane working conditions, child labor, gender-based violence, and resource-extraction related oppressions.
In the Lemkin, Power, and Dufka account, moral responsibility is reactive, typically with military force. In a rights-based approach, the broader landscape of global injustice is visible.
Without threatening sovereignty or waiting for graphic images to provoke a willing use of military force, a rights-based approach to global injustice –be it genocide, gender-based violence, worker oppression, or poverty – goes beyond allowing our tax dollars to support military violence. Instead, we are called to support nonviolent popular movements, both directly through rights-based philanthropy, and indirectly through political and economic support of popular movements through local activism, letter writing campaigns, and decisions to support fair trade practices through purchasing choices.
In both models, citizens need to know about global injustice. In the Lemkin, Power, and Dufka model they need to know about acts of genocide and crimes against humanity. They need a media who are able and willing to broadcast images of genocide around the world and to offer analysis about its causes. In the human rights-based approach to crimes against humanity, citizens need to know about injustices that are more difficult to portray because they are hidden in the everyday familiar practices that support global poverty, global inequality in labor conditions, and other forms of global injustice that are invisible to all but those who suffer from them. Analysis of these is more difficult and they do not lend themselves to telling graphic images.
The rights-based approach to vulnerability defines vulnerability as the inability to be part-author of a political response to the injustice against which one struggles. Military intervention is inconsistent with a rights-based approach because it disempowers popular nonviolent social movements. Rather, a rights-based approach to injustice invites a long-term perspective that supports women's movements, labor movements, and other nonviolent popular movements. From this perspective, we should be informed not only about the violence taking place in the Ivory Coast, Libya, and Syria but also about the broadening popular movements (including youth, labor, and women’s movements) in these countries and in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and Syria.
There has already been a military response to the Ivory Coast. Should we wait to reflect on global injustice until we see the graphic images of genocide and tragedy elsewhere, or can we use a rights-based lens to care about global injustice as part of our everyday lives?
Professor Ackerly's research interests include democratic theory, feminist methodologies, human rights, social and environmental justice. She integrates into her theoretical work empirical research on activism. Her publications include Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism (Cambridge 2000), Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference (Cambridge 2008), and Doing Feminist Research with Jacqui True (Palgrave Macmillan2010). She is currently working on the intersection of global economic, environmental, and gender justice. She teaches courses on feminist theory, feminist research methods, human rights, contemporary political thought, and gender and the history of political thought. She is the winner of the Graduate Teaching Award and the Margaret Cuninggim Mentoring Prize. She is the founder of the Global Feminisms Collaborative, a group of scholars and activists developing ways to collaborate on applied research for social justice. She advises academics and donors on evaluation, methodology, and the ethics of research. She serves the profession through committees in her professional associations including the American Political Science Association (APSA), International Studies Association (ISA), and the Association for Women's Rights and Development. She has been a member of the editorial board for Politics and Gender (Journal of the APSA, Women and Politics Section) since its founding.
Pandora’s Box of Humanitarian Intervention
by Edzia Carvalho, University of Mannheim
“It seems that while states are often slow to react to egregious violations of human rights, they can be moved to action when the domestic and international costs and foreseeable risks of such interventions are low and the benefits are high. Domestic and international non-state actors, particularly NGOs and human rights lobbies, could help alter these calculations and make it more feasible for states to intervene to prevent human rights violations.”
“The Case for Intervention in the Ivory Coast” reminded me of the discussion that my undergraduate students had during the previous academic term on the conundrums surrounding humanitarian intervention. They innately responded to the intense suffering of individuals and groups facing gross human rights violations and initially argued that inaction in the face of suffering cannot be justified on any grounds. However, with their international relations hats on, many of them soon realized that putting an end to such a state of affairs is not as easy or straightforward as they had hoped. The question of who should intervene, in what form, and towards what end is often at the heart of this problem. After all, under the UN Charter Chapter VII, bilateral armed action against a state is an act of war unless it is undertaken in self-defense. Multilateral acts of aggression should be approved by the UN Security Council if they are to be deemed legal. Moreover, states have to consider not only the timeliness, logistics, and short-term impact of any potential intervention, but also the effect of these actions (or inactions) on the targeted state in the long run. Kuperman (2009)¹ suggests that armed humanitarian interventions may be characterized by the problem of moral hazard, as they may lead to unintended and further violations depending on the extent of force used and the perceived neutrality of the intervention.
The emerging norm of “Responsibility to Protect” suggests that states may have a legal obligation to intervene in situations that have led to widespread human right abuses and may continue to do so in the foreseeable future. The extent to which state action reflects the consolidation of this norm is interesting. The article under review rightly highlights the selective use of armed intervention by the international community when it comes to egregious human rights violations. In 1999, NATO launched air strikes against Serbia when it initiated a violent onslaught against Kosovar rebels and civilians that led to over 10,000 deaths; yet the international community did not intervene when, ten years later, Sri Lanka launched a massive military assault on Tamil rebels that resulted in the deaths of an estimated 20,000 civilians. The multilateral armed intervention to stop the crackdown by the authoritarian regime in Libya this year could be contrasted with the inaction of international actors in the face of the violent suppression of the Saffron Revolution in Burma in 2007. The UN recently intervened in the Ivory Coast when the dispute over the outcome of the recent presidential election threatened to engulf the country in civil war, yet it stayed its hand when the post-electoral violence following a similar dispute in Kenya in 2007-08 displaced an estimated half a million people.
Semb (2000)² argues that states intervene multilaterally under the auspices of the United Nations if the situation under consideration meets any of the following conditions: a) widespread violations of human rights are recognized in a target state; b) the government is unable to stop these violations as it no longer has control over the machinery of state; or c) the government has been “unlawfully constituted.” This does not explain why situations with similar conditions like the ones mentioned earlier merited opposite actions. Instead, much research in international relations has applied a neorealist or neoliberal perspective, focusing on the cost-benefit analysis and the risk-averseness of the intervening states. States are expected to be primarily concerned about the effect of their actions on domestic affairs, and to pursue national interest rather than the well-being of other populations across borders. The cynical view derived from the application of these approaches would attribute NATO’s intervention in Kosovo to its members being concerned about the spillover effect of a potential refugee situation in Europe, or to NATO’s efforts to stay relevant in a post-Cold War world. The Libyan case would be explained by the expectation that its oil reserves, which are prized for their high quality, would be easier to access after the disbandment of the Gaddafi regime. Yet in each of these cases, armed intervention was not an immediate response. The cost-benefit calculations of states may have been influenced by past successes and failures that affected how risk averse they were when faced with a human rights violation—in the case of Kosovo by the failure to act in Rwanda, and in Libya by the ongoing situation in Iraq.
It seems that while states are often slow to react to egregious violations of human rights, they can be moved to action when the domestic and international costs and foreseeable risks of such interventions are low and the benefits are high. Domestic and international non-state actors, particularly NGOs and human rights lobbies, could help alter these calculations and make it more feasible for states to intervene to prevent human rights violations. This may be that little bit of hope left for human rights protection when the Pandora’s box of humanitarian intervention is opened.
¹ Alan J. Kuperman, "Humanitarian Intervention," in Michael Goodhart, ed., Human Rights: Politics and Practice (Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 334-353
² Anne Julie Semb, “The New Practice of UN-Authorised Interventions: A Slippery Slope of Forcible Interference?”, Journal of Peace Research, July, 37(4), 2000, pp. 469-488
Edzia Carvalho is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Political Science at the Chair on Politics and International Relations in the University of Mannheim, Germany. She completed her Ph.D. in Government from the University of Essex in 2010. Her thesis was on degrees of democracy and public health expenditure in the Indian provinces. She has an MA in Human Rights (Essex 2007), and an MA in Politics (Mumbai 2003). She has worked for the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in Delhi, India and as research assistant on projects for the UNDP and the UK Department for International Development (DFID) on human rights indicators and democracy assessment. Her recent publications include Measuring Human Rights (with Todd Landman, Routledge, 2010) and contributions to the Essex Internet Encyclopedia of Human Rights and the International Journal of Children’s Rights. She is currently collaborating with Kristi Winters (Birkbeck College) on research on the Qualitative British Election Study (QES Britain) and foreign aid and human rights (with Laura Seelkopf, University of Essex). Her research interests revolve around human rights and democratization.
Double Standards Demystified
by Jonas Claes, U.S. Institute of Peace
“In an ideal world, these considerations would be subordinate to the urgency and gravity of a humanitarian crisis. But a world in which the risk of atrocities automatically triggers a strong response seems far off. Double standards are an unpleasant reality that sprout from the nature of international politics, and will remain part and parcel of the international response to man-made humanitarian crises in the foreseeable future.”
At the time Ms. Corinne Dufka’s op-Ed about the crisis in Côte D’Ivoire appeared, few would have predicted that three days later UN troops, with the support of the French military, would act forcefully to protect civilians and tip the balance in favor of the fighters loyal to Alassane Ouattara, eventually leading to the arrest of Laurent Gbagbo. The odds were not favoring this scenario.
As the initial excitement of “humanitarians” about the rapid action taken by the coalition and NATO forces in Libya slowly waned, analysts, including Corinne Dufka, increasingly lamented the selectiveness of the international community’s response to man-made humanitarian crises. If the international community is so concerned about civilian protection, then what about the people of Bahrain, Yemen, Syria, Darfur, or Côte D’Ivoire? Why prevent massacres in Benghazi, but not in Duékoué ? Few moved beyond their consternation about this cherry-picking.
Those factors that affect the likeliness of a robust “Libya-style” international response given a certain level of risk of atrocities are rarely acknowledged. The authorization of military force in response to imminent or ongoing mass atrocities is the product of a difficult diplomatic process, subject to numerous factors unrelated to the gravity of the humanitarian crisis.
The Power of the Target Country. The target country’s ability to resist external intervention through its political, military, or economic power is a key determinant of the international community’s eagerness to protect civilians. The threat of UN vetoes, retaliation, or economic embargoes of powerful repressive states may suffice to keep UN troops at a safe distance. The weak regimes of Libya and Côte D’Ivoire carried insufficient weight to deter the international community.
The Strategic Value of the Region. The level of political, economic, or national security interest in the region of decisive players within the international community is another key determining factor. Together with the power of the target country, traditional realpolitik best explains the international community’s selectiveness. Whereas the atrocities committed in Libya triggered a Kosovo-like heavy-handed response from NATO, strategically insignificant countries are simply less likely to grasp the world’s attention.
Consent. The decision to act collectively against atrocities is also contingent upon the consent of a significant part of the local population, regional hegemons, and regional organizations. Interventions are more likely welcomed when the central government is unable to halt atrocities committed by rogue elements within its own security forces, the opposition, or non-state armed groups. If the regime is directly or indirectly involved in the crimes, a consensual humanitarian intervention will be unlikely. In Libya, the requests for assistance from the Libyan opposition and the initial support for the operation from the Arab League allowed for a nonconsensual intervention to rapidly materialize.
Geopolitical Dynamics. Special ties or strategic relations between a repressive regime and powerful players may also reduce the likeliness of a multilateral intervention. Security Council members driven by geopolitical incentives, cultural affinities, or benign historical ties with the regime may play soft on the humanitarian record of their protectorates. This dynamic explains the lack of an international response to the recent atrocities committed in Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, or the Palestinian Territories.
Other factors that influence the international community’s decision to engage in an intrusive form of intervention include the level of international media coverage, as well as the international financial climate and military resource availability.
In an ideal world, these considerations would be subordinate to the urgency and gravity of a humanitarian crisis. But a world in which the risk of atrocities automatically triggers a strong response seems far off. Double standards are an unpleasant reality that sprout from the nature of international politics, and will remain part and parcel of the international response to man-made humanitarian crises in the foreseeable future. Multilateral military action on predominantly humanitarian grounds has been a rare occurrence with a mixed track record. But the absence or tardiness of firm action in some countries should not discredit the courageous decision the international community took to protect the people of Benghazi. As Nicholas Kristof noted in his New York Times column, “Isn’t it better to inconsistently save some lives than to consistently save none?”
Jonas Claes is program specialist at the U.S. Institute of Peace’s Center for Conflict Management, where he conducts research on conflict prevention, the Responsibility to Protect, and security issues in Central Asia. Claes is also co-author of a book chapter entitled ‘Leadership and R2P: From Principle to Practice’ in the forthcoming Routledge Handbook on ‘The Responsibility to Protect’, and a chapter on “Responsibility to Protect and Peacemaking” in a Praeger Volume on “Peacemaking: From Practice to Theory”. He holds an M.A. in Security Studies from Georgetown University, an M.A. in International Relations from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium).
A Structural Solution to Africa’s Wayward Presidents
by Devin Joshi, University of Denver
“Of course, any international response to this crisis should aim to restore and keep peace and to bring Laurent Gbagbo and other perpetrators of these atrocities to the International Criminal Court. Yet, it would also be wise to deal with some of the structural factors that have led to violent conflict in Cote d’Ivoire’s past and which continually plague the region. While there are many problems that need attention, one approach that should be given consideration is restructuring the government from a presidential to a parliamentary republic.”
The current crisis in the Ivory Coast unfortunately resembles a number of crises in Western and Central Africa over the last few decades. Whereas the international community has generally been more willing to intervene in Europe and the Middle East, there has been a tendency to “wait and watch” while humanitarian crises unfold in middle Africa. In the last several years, as in the Ivory Coast right now, however, global awareness of the brutality of such crises has expanded tremendously. Now information and communication technologies (cell phones, Internet, social media) are bringing the terror into living rooms around the world. The power of these new technologies should not be underestimated. Just as the historic and unprecedented Arab Democracy Movement of 2011 has spread like wildfire from Tunisia to Egypt and the rest of the Middle East and North Africa, we may see quicker action from African regional organizations and foreign powers than in the past due to growing awareness of the contagion effects (both positive and negative) of domestic struggles.
Of course, any international response to this crisis should aim to restore and keep peace and to bring Laurent Gbagbo and other perpetrators of these atrocities to the International Criminal Court. Yet, it would also be wise to deal with some of the structural factors that have led to violent conflict in Cote d’Ivoire’s past and which continually plague the region. While there are many problems that need attention, one approach that should be given consideration is restructuring the government from a presidential to a parliamentary republic. This would be one means of reducing the power and autocratic tendencies of the state’s chief executive. Presidential governments are often unstable because presidents want to stay in power longer than their people want them in power. In fact, several studies have documented how presidential regimes in Africa and elsewhere are more likely to collapse or revert to authoritarianism than parliamentary governments headed by a prime minister selected by the parliament.
Whereas presidentialism is conducive to adversarial politics (the USA is no exception), the structure of parliamentary government encourages a greater degree of power-sharing and consensus building, for example through the formation of multiparty cabinets. Parliamentary governments elsewhere in Africa (Botswana, Cape Verde, Mauritius, Namibia, and South Africa to name a few) have generally presided over more prosperous economies, invested more in the health and education of their populations, and improved human rights more than the presidents and dictators of most other African states. Of course, other political reforms are also needed, but the transition to parliamentary government is one that may bring long-term benefits to the Ivory Coast and its neighbors. When the Soviet Union collapsed and the states of Eastern Europe and Central Asia got to choose new forms of government, the former countries opted for parliamentary politics while most of the latter chose a presidential or semi-presidential system. The difference this has made is worth noting. Many of the Central Asian states have reverted back to authoritarianism, whereas Eastern European countries have witnessed a growing degree of democracy compared to their past.
That said, the Ivory Coast needs both immediate international attention and long-term support to develop a more effective and democratic government. Any plan to transform its governance should also consider political reform and power sharing throughout all West African countries, including nearby Nigeria, to develop political systems more like the relatively peaceful democracies of Mali or Namibia.
Dr. Devin K. Joshi is an assistant professor at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies where he teaches courses on democracy and development. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Washington, an M.A. from the East-West Center, and a B.A. from Stanford University. His research focuses on the relevance and application of democratic and good governance interventions to improving human development and human security in the developing world. His recent articles have appeared in Economic and Political Weekly, International Studies Review, Socio-Legal Review, and The Human Rights Dictionary.
Sunday, April 3, 2011
March 2011: Libya and the Responsibility to Protect
Editor's Introduction
“It’s Time to Intervene” by Shadi Hamid. Slate. February 23 2011.
The UN Security Council Resolution 1973 on March 17 marks a historical event: the first military implementation of the doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) since world leaders adopted at the United Nations World Summit in 2005 the collective responsibility to respond in a timely and decisive manner when governments are manifestly failing to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and/or crimes against humanity. Libya will be remembered as the test case for R2P, the initial step in transforming a principled idea—protecting people from mass atrocities—into concrete international action.
This Roundtable focuses on the international responses to the crisis in Libya and how the events unfolded domestically and internationally since the uprising started in the city of Benghazi in mid-February. The starting point for the debate is Shadi Hamid’s piece, written in the early stages of the Libyan conflict, in which he calls on the international community to promptly intervene to prevent further civilian casualties: “Aggressive international action is risky. But taking comfort in toothless denunciations of Qaddafi is riskier still. It is also a recipe for prolonged conflict. In the absence of alternatives, a responsibility to protect sometimes necessitates a responsibility to intervene. And, with the Libyan regime declaring, with unmistakable clarity, its intent to kill, the time for intervention is now.”
Only a couple of weeks later, and with considerable speed considering the slow pace and difficulties of reaching international consensus on these issues, the international community resorted to R2P as a formula to justify its intervention in Libya. The UN Security Council authorized member states "to take all necessary measures (notwithstanding the previous arms embargo) to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, including Benghazi.'' The Resolution explicitly condemns "the gross and systematic violation of human rights, including arbitrary detentions, enforced disappearances, torture and summary executions," and says the attacks against civilians "may amount to crimes against humanity" and pose a "threat to international peace and security." Most notably, this is the first UN-sanctioned combat operation since the 1991 Gulf War.
In a recent speech (March 28), US President Barack Obama explained his position largely in humanitarian terms and used the concept of responsibility to justify his decision to support such intervention: “To brush aside America’s responsibility as a leader and—more profoundly—our responsibilities to our fellow human beings under such circumstances would have been a betrayal of who we are. Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different. And as President, I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.”
Beyond the justifications for international action, the challenge today is to translate the remarkable international consensus reached within the Security Council into effective protection for the Libyan population. This month’s Roundtable discusses the multiple challenges ahead.
Claudia Fuentes
Roundtable Editor
Is it Really Time to Intervene in Libya?
by Christina Cerna, Organization of American States
“As heartbreaking as watching the crushing of the civilian uprising in Libya on nightly television broadcasts may be, it is not genocide. Intervention was authorized to protect civilians but the West’s expressed goal of Gaddafi’s ouster goes beyond the language of the Security Council Resolution.”
Shadi Hamid, in “It’s Time to Intervene,” suggests that the international community—specifically, the United States, the United Nations, and NATO—must intervene in Libya because Muammar Gaddafi has declared that he is ready and willing to slaughter his own people if his survival depends on it. The author considered Gaddafi’s speech otherwise “bizarre” and “incoherent.”
But what about the reaction of the international community, which normally means the US and Europe; has its reaction been anything but bizarre and incoherent? The New York Times editorial page criticized the Obama administration for “throwing out so many conflicting messages on Libya that they are blunting any potential pressure on the Libyan regime and weakening American credibility. It’s dangerous to make threats if you’re not prepared to follow through.” And French President Nicolas Sarkozy on March 10, 2011 recognized the Libyan opposition as “the legitimate representative of the Libyan people” (“le représentant légitime du peuple libyen”) while Alain Juppé, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, was in Brussels participating in a meeting designed to forge a common European position on the matter. And then there are the NATO Defense Ministers who said that “further planning was needed to initiate and enforce any potential air exclusion zone in Libya and that this could only happen with a ‘clear mandate’ from the United Nations—likely to need US, Chinese and Russian support.”
The United Nations Security Council did act on February 26, 2011 at the urging of the Arab League, the African Union, and the Organization of the Islamic Conference, all of which expressed concern about the serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law that are being committed in Libya. Security Council Resolution 1970, inter alia, recalled the Libyan authorities’ responsibility to protect its population, and acting under Chapter VII of the UN Charter demanded an “immediate end to the violence.” The Resolution urged the Libyan authorities to allow immediate access for international human rights monitors; to ensure the safety of all foreign nationals and to facilitate the departure of those seeking to leave; to ensure the safe passage of humanitarian and medical supplies and workers into the country; and to lift restrictions on all forms of media. The Resolution also refers the situation in Libya to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, despite the fact that Libya is not a party to the Rome Statute and consequently has “no obligation under the Statute.” It imposes an embargo on the “direct or indirect supply, sale or transfer” of arms to the Libyan authorities and, significantly, it imposes a travel ban and assets freeze on named Libyan authorities, notably on Gaddafi, his family, and his security and intelligence heads. Also, the EU leaders have now all agreed that Gaddafi “must go,” but how far they are willing to go to ease him out of power is still a question.
Two pillars of the UN Charter are articles 2(4) prohibiting the use of force and 2(7), which enshrines the principle of non-intervention. Under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, the UN Security Council may take measures when there is a threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression and shall make recommendations or decide what measures shall be taken to maintain or restore international peace and security.
Again, at the request of the Arab League, the African Union and the Organization of the Islamic Conference, alarmed at the serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law in Libya, on March 17, 2011 the UN Security Council, acting again under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, adopted Resolution 1973, which demanded an immediate cease-fire and end to the violence against civilians and which authorized UN members to “take all necessary measures … to protect civilians … under threat of attack… while excluding a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory” and to establish a ban on all flights in the Libyan airspace in order to help protect civilians.
Hamid invokes the “Responsibility to Protect (R2P),” the responsibility of the international community to intervene in situations where mass atrocities are being committed. Gareth Evans and the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), who coined “R2P,” revived the notion of humanitarian intervention in the face of repeated United Nations inaction. The international community should not sit back and watch the demand for freedom in Libya be quashed because the authorities have the money and the weapons to maintain themselves in power. But surely Libya is not the only country where massive human rights violations are occurring today. One has only to listen to the stories of the hundreds of thousands of foreign workers fleeing Libya for Tunisia and Egypt; these people would rather die than go back to Nigeria or Bangladesh or their other countries of origin.
In deciding which countries merit international intervention to protect people from atrocities, perhaps the only moral obligation to intervene can be found in a situation of genocide.
The goals of the international community continued to be incoherent as the West called for the removal of Gaddafi, while Amr Moussa, head of the Arab League, after the first US-European led airstrikes stated: “[W]hat is happening in Libya differs from the aim of imposing a no-fly zone. What we want is the protection of civilians and not the bombardment of more civilians.”
As heartbreaking as watching the crushing of the civilian uprising in Libya on nightly television broadcasts may be, it is not genocide. Intervention was authorized to protect civilians but the West’s expressed goal of Gaddafi’s ouster goes beyond the language of the Security Council Resolution.
When it was noted that some people called on Jimmy Carter to bomb Iran in retaliation for the fifty-two Americans who had been taken hostage, Carter said, “We went through four years. We never fired a bullet. We never dropped a bomb. We never launched a missile.” Why? Carter responded that he “felt that our country should be, as a superpower, the champion of peace.” Before leaping into another quagmire like Iraq and Afghanistan, in its attempt to make the Middle East an oasis of democracy, the United States should think about Jimmy Carter’s words and seek ways to mediate an end to this conflict before it degenerates into an all out civil war.
The author of this Roundtable article, Ms. Christina M. Cerna, is a staff member in the General Secretariat of the Organization of American States' Secretariat for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The opinions expressed in this note are the sole responsibility of the author in the author's personal capacity and are not to be interpreted as official positions of, and are not to be attributed to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the General Secretariat of the Organization of American States, or the Organization of American States.
Christina Cerna - B.A., New York University; M.A., Fulbright Scholar, Ludwig-Maximilian Universitat; J.D., Dean's Fellow, American University; LL.M., Columbia University. Ms. Cerna is Principal Human Rights Specialist at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) at the headquarters of the Organization of American States (OAS) in Washington, D.C.. She has been with the OAS since January 1979 and is currently in charge of certain special cases and systematizing the IACHR’s jurisprudence. She taught international human rights law as an Adjunct for the law schools at George Washington University, Penn State University and, since 2005, at Georgetown University.
Feminism and Democracy
by Louis Edgar Esparza, University of Denver, Josef Korbel School of International Studies
“Broad coalition movements create the space for other issue groups to bring up their grievances, allowing them to frame them as issues of inequality within the movement. In Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, women are asserting their political rights as citizens in a polity as well as their rights in their positions in their households.”
After work on December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks walked onto a bus that was to take her home that night. She ended up on a trip to jail instead, for refusing to give her seat to a white passenger. The event triggered resistance to bus segregation, the founding of the Montgomery Improvement Association, and the election of the then-unknown Dr. Martin Luther King as its leader. The success of the campaign is an integral battle in our historical retellings of the US African American Civil Rights Movement. Fewer recount the sexual harassment against black women by white men that occurred on these buses, the experience of which motivated those who sustained this movement: black women. While the stated goal and effect of the male-led organization was to desegregate the buses, the women-led grassroots movement had the effect of easing sexual harassment and violence against themselves and delivering the campaign’s ultimate success.
The faces displayed in the media of the Libyan pro-democracy movement are largely those of male rebels. Wielding rifles and clad in blue jeans, their loud gunfire, bloodied faces, and impassioned appeals draw nearly all of the public attention given to their movement. Still, in the sea of faces at many of the protests are many women, fighting on their own behalf. However, gendered divisions of labor in movements are real and are patrolled. Observers of revolutions and social movements often spend much of their focus on property destruction, violence, strikes, or other performances mostly carried out by men. Meanwhile, the inglorious everyday labor of sustaining such mobilizations—knocking on doors, public education, distributing resources—so often, rightly or wrongly, has depended on women.
Broad coalition movements create the space for other issue groups to bring up their grievances, allowing them to frame them as issues of inequality within the movement. In Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, women are asserting their political rights as citizens in a polity as well as their rights in their positions in their households. Many men stood down as thousands of women attended rallies and political events throughout the region, facing violent repression, injury, and death. However, as soon as Ben Ali departed Tunis and Hosni Mubarak fled Cairo, both capitals saw spikes in sexual assaults against women. This as if to say, “Thanks, now don’t take this too far.”
But women have created their own opportunities, seizing the pro-democracy frame to illustrate the gendered patterns contained therein. These approaches often lead to real and evidenced improvements in the quality of life for women. Social movements can lift many boats by opposing external authorities, but even these imperfectly address their internal inequalities.
This is at least in part due to forces external to these movements. Chip Perrow argues that the rise of corporations in the United States occurred because corporate hierarchies resembled existing power structures in the US government—a highly rationalized hierarchy with compartmentalized powers and clear lines of authority. Because of the organizational resemblance, the government could better understand the corporate form. The corporation, while challenging certain forms of government authority by privatizing goods, did not challenge authority itself. The government invested in the corporate form, even though it was less efficient at production than contemporary cooperative models. Those models were decidedly out-maneuvered with the bestowal of personhood to corporations in 1886.
Unfortunately, social movements that maintain hierarchies, such as patriarchy, are less threatening to governments because they challenge fewer forms of cultural and government authority. This should strengthen the resolve of movements to purge these from their structures rather than tempt them into adopting hierarchies to appear more palatable. This is the burden that feminist movements have carried at least through the last couple of centuries, and one that must be made central to all movements claiming to be pro-democratic.
Louis Edgar Esparza is Lecturer in Human Rights at the University of Denver, Josef Korbel School of International Studies. His work appears in Societies Without Borders, Qualitative Sociology and Sociological Forum. Dr. Esparza is writing a book on grassroots human rights movements in Colombia, where he completed ethnographic fieldwork in 2008. His research has attracted grants and awards from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Latin American Studies Association and Oxfam America.
I Will Survive
by Robert Funk, Institute for Public Affairs of the University of Chile
“But if there is one thing that has been striking about the events in Libya in recent weeks—and indeed looking back over decades—it is the sheer ability of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi to survive. He is, perhaps with Fidel Castro, the world’s greatest survivor.”
“But I spent so many nights
thinking how you did me wrong
I grew strong
I learned how to carry on”
-Gloria Gaynor
Academics do not often quote 70s disco tunes. At least not in print.
But if there is one thing that has been striking about the events in Libya in recent weeks—and indeed looking back over decades—it is the sheer ability of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi to survive. He is, perhaps with Fidel Castro, the world’s greatest survivor. He has indeed learned how to carry on.
There are several reasons for this, both domestic and foreign. Domestically, Gaddafi has set up a remarkable system, far less institutionalized than the one in Egypt. This not only implies that power is far more centralized and personalized than it was in Egypt, it also means that any future transition would be much more difficult. There are simply no institutions in Libya that could carry on with the task of governing, and no constitution to provide a roadmap for transition. Just a little Green Book, a kind maoist-islamic democracy self-help book Gaddafi published in 1975 and which includes phrases like, “The mere existence of parliaments underlies the absence of the people, for democracy can only exist with the presence of the people and not in the presence of representatives of the people.” Power, therefore, rests solely with “The Guide”, one of the colonel’s official titles.
Since (one assumes that) The Guide knows he is mortal, he has charged his sons with a few of the responsibilities of governing, such as heading the security services, running public companies, and putting a smiley, London School of Economics-trained face on foreign affairs. Often this kind of arrangement leads to in-fighting, especially in the face of domestic turmoil. The Gaddafi clan seems to have been able to avoid this.
Third, like Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi has been adept at exploiting his country’s tribal divisions. One of the results is that there appears to be no organized opposition, as any political opposition to the regime would descend into tribal bickering. The apparent military retreat of the rebels in recent days seems to confirm this lack of coordination. Still, the rebel forces are not merely a bunch of disorganized desert tribes: one of their leaders is Gaddafi’s just-resigned interior minister, Abdel Fattah Younis, who surely has some access to supplies, knows where the stockpiles and warehouses are, and has some firsthand knowledge of the regime’s contingency plans for this sort of situation.
The international reasons for Gaddafi’s survival are even more astonishing, as he has transmogrified from romantic 1960’s socialist revolutionary, to funder of anti-West terrorism in the 1980s, to repentant ally in the struggle against Islamic fundamentalist terrorism in the post 9-11 era. Today, he has returned to the role he plays best: crazy-like-a-fox autocrat.
The final reason that Gaddafi has managed to hold on, where some of his neighbors have not, pertains to Libya’s place in the international system. Whereas American aid to Egypt gave the US a good deal of leverage regarding whatever decisions President Mubarak took to deal with the protesters in Tahrir Square, in Libya the US has no such power. The main options available to the US, then, have been to support the rebels more directly, or to make declarations in favor of democracy.
Here President Obama has been reticent, to say the least. He does not wish to see the United States accused of yet another military intervention in a Muslim country. He has been unable to identify a reliable partner to support. He is unclear on what a post-Gaddafi Libya would look like, and how much US tutelage it would need. He is uneager to ask the already battered American taxpayer to foot the bill for this sort of adventure. And finally, besides America’s commitment to democracy and an increasing gas bill, there is no clear US interest—to paraphrase Churchill—to risk so much, for so little.
For these reasons, the president has so far declined to offer direct military aid, air cover, or a no-fly zone. As each day passes, it appears that forces loyal to Gaddafi are regaining control.
In the short term, if Muammar Gaddafi manages to hang on, he will be strengthened. In the battles to come, he will have eliminated some or all of his current opponents, and will have identified, through their defections, internal threats like Younis. As it appears, however, that the spirit of the Jasmine Revolution is not yet extinguished, different kinds of experiments in Arab (and, indeed, Persian) democracy may yet emerge. If this occurs, not only will Gaddafi have burnt the bridges he tried for so long to rebuild with the West, he will find himself isolated from the new governments in the neighborhood as well.
Robert Funk is Deputy Director and Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Institute for Public Affairs of the University of Chile. Dr Funk’s research areas include democratization, left and populist movements in Latin America, and political elites. Recent publications include “Parties, Personalities and the President: The Institutional Challenges of the Bachelet Government”, in The Bachelet Government: Conflict and Consensus in Post-Pinochet Chile, edited by Silvia Borzutzky and Gregory Weeks. From 2006 to 2008, Dr Funk served as president of the Chilean Political Science Association.
We Do Indeed Reap What We Sow
by Walter Lotze, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs
“The international community is responsible for entrenching the Gaddafi regime both internationally and domestically, allowing it to exercise disproportionate levels of power, and providing it with the weaponry to back this power up within its own borders.”
When violence first broke out in Tunisia in January 2011, few observers would have predicted that waves of unrest would engulf North Africa and the Arab world. When demonstrations swiftly spread to Algeria, Sudan, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, and Jordan, observers hastened to place bets on which regime would be the next to fall. That Hosni Mubarak would be felled next came perhaps as no surprise; Egypt had for years been on a knife’s edge, liberalizing and modernizing society while closing all space for political and social participation. Most analysts then turned their attention to Sudan, Yemen, and Bahrain, predicting that surely one of these three would be the next to falter. Yet almost no one expected that Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya would be the next domino in line. Having ruled the country for forty-one years and destroyed all semblance of a free media, of opposition politics, or of civil society, Libya was assumed to be ruthlessly stable.
Thus, when on 16 February violence erupted in Tripoli and Benghazi, most observers assumed that the Libyan security forces would react quickly and brutally deal with the demonstrators, as the regime in Algeria was doing. However, what had taken Gaddafi forty-one years of despotic rule to create unravelled within a matter of days. Demonstrations calling for democratic change evolved into bloody street battles, sometimes with the support of and sometimes against the state security apparatus, and confusion turned to chaos. The regime started to crumble as the rats jumped ship, claiming incredulously that it had been Gaddafi alone who had ruled the country with an iron fist for over four decades. The military structures too appeared to be rapidly collapsing.
While the international media and political analysts struggled to make sense of the developing situation, foreign governments fared even worse. The African Union’s Peace and Security Council declined to meet on the crisis, prompting the United Nations Security Council to take the lead, decrying the violence and the mounting evidence of the commission of abuses against the civilian population. Reluctantly, the African Union followed suit, but went only as far as to call on the protesters to demonstrate in a peaceful manner. The League of Arab States called on Gaddafi to leave, probably the first time in history that the organization has been united on any matter, yet failed to offer its support to the demonstrators, for fear of inciting further unrest elsewhere.
Initially, it seemed as though Gaddafi was destined to end his days on the rooftop of his palace in Tripoli, and the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America heralded the victory of the demonstrators and the end of the Gaddafi regime. Within days the situation had been reversed, however, with Gaddafi seeming not only to hold on to power, but indeed to be driving back the anti-Gaddafi movement. The international community then performed a remarkable feat: the “pro-democracy demonstrators” were re-branded as “rebels,” and the “democratization movement” as a “civil conflict.” Shortly before Gaddafi’s forces could exact their brutal revenge on the population of Benghazi, a motley coalition of the willing was hastily assembled, and with the passage of Resolution 1973, commenced an aerial bombardment on Gaddafi’s forces. While the international community was distracted by Libya, Saudi Arabia assisted the regime in Bahrain to brutally crush the opposition movement there, and security forces in Yemen and Syria started to gun down protestors there. Yet while we publicly deplore the violence all around, we should not be too quick to forget that we ourselves created this mess.
American support for the Saudi royal family has enabled one of the most repressive regimes to remain in power for decades, while in Bahrain, the home of the American Fifth Fleet, American and Saudi support has kept the ruling monarchy lingering decrepitly on. In Yemen, Western support has been key to ensuring that President Saleh clings to power, in the name of anti-terrorism measures. During Gaddafi’s initial rise to power, foreign governments were very happy to supply the regime in Tripoli with support, as long as the oil kept flowing. Following the Lockerbie bombing in 1988, the West imposed sanctions against Gaddafi and vilified Libya internationally, yet the oil kept on flowing. When two decades of sanctions had attained very little other than to exact hardship on the Libyan people, and during the height of the international war on terror, Libya was brought in from the cold by George W. Bush and Tony Blair. The dismantling of the Libyan weapons development programs and cooperation in the intelligence sector were rewarded with weapons sales and access to international financial transactions, allowing Gaddafi’s regime to strengthen its position both domestically and internationally. Gaddafi became a regular visitor to Italy, where he was entertained by Silvio Berlusconni and hundreds of hand-picked models at lavish feasts. Libya was elected to the United Nations Human Rights Council, enabling it to deflect criticism from human rights organizations and detractors. And Libya was given a prominent role in the League of Arab States and in the African Union. Indeed, Libya contributes a significant proportion of the annual operating budget of the African Union Commission, and exercises heavy influence over the Peace and Security Directorate of the organization.
The international community is responsible for entrenching the Gaddafi regime both internationally and domestically, allowing it to exercise disproportionate levels of power, and providing it with the weaponry to back this up within its own borders. When the uprising first commenced, foreign governments cheered on the protestors, hoping that they would be able to topple Gaddafi. When it became obvious that this was not possible without external support, they commenced bombing him out. Yet those who now vilify Gaddafi would do well to bear in mind that it was the West that created him and allowed him to remain in power for so long. Sadly, this is a story not quite unfamiliar. Even sadder is the fact that it is the Libyan people who must pay the ultimate price, and must be cut down by weapons paid for by European car owners.
Walter Lotze (South African) is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI) in Oslo, Norway. Prior to joining NUPI, Walter worked in the Peace Support Operations Division of the African Union Commission, prior to which he headed the Peacebuilding Division at the African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD), a non-governmental organization working in conflict situations across the African continent. Walter recently completed his PhD in International Relations with the University of St Andrews in Scotland.
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
February 2011: The Arab Revolutions and Human Rights
Editor's Introduction
“The Failure of Governance in the Arab World” by Simon Tisdall. The Guardian. January 11 2011.
The Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia, the people’s rebellion in Egypt, and the subsequent popular uprisings that are taking place across the Arab world from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf, remind us, scholars and policy makers alike, that order and stability must be based upon justice to be maintained. The current turmoil in the Arab world is the result of policies that have sought regional stability and regime security in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) at the expense of society and human security.
Human dignity, human rights, and human security—not Islam, hatred of Israel, or resentment against the West—are what is driving the young Arab women and men to the streets of Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, Bahrain, Libya, Yemen, and other Arab states at the dawn of 2011. These young people are calling for a new social contract based on human rights rather than oppression; human security rather than fear; and human dignity rather than humiliation. As Christina Cerna remarks, “The humiliation of not being able to provide for themselves and their families and for not having basic human rights, gave way to anger and frustration.”
While acknowledging the role of social media in helping activists to organize against the oppressive regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, Louis Esparza argues that the primary drivers of the Arab revolutions are the relevant political actors and their grievances and actions. The Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions are not “Twitter revolutions,” as some define them, but revolutions of the people. “Explaining political grievances using phenomena that distract from the actual content of the grievances de-legitimizes political actors. Whether it is Twitter in Tunisia or the printing press at the Battle of Peterloo, what is important is the decision to engage in risk and social disruption in order to achieve a political end.”
Robert Funk and Walter Lotze address the Arab revolutions from Latin American and African perspectives respectively. For Funk, one of the main lessons of US involvement in Latin America and the Arab world is that supporting foreign dictators threatens American national interest in the long term. As he says, “the supposed benefits of supporting anti-democratic strongmen…do not last a very long time, whereas the ill feeling amongst the population and the political fallout can last for many years.”
Whereas most commentators compare the 2011 Arab states to 1989 Eastern European states, Lotze interestingly compares Egypt and Tunisia in 2011 to the Southern part of Africa two decades earlier. He argues that the Northern part of Africa is experiencing what the Southern part went through during the last two decades of the twentieth century. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, it was Southern Africa that was the most unstable, autocratic, and conflict-prone region on the continent. “In a telling reversal of fortunes, it is now the Southern parts of the continent that are most stable and secure, and that display the highest commitment to democratic systems of governance, while the Northern regions of the continent are being shaken at their very foundations.”
These are some of the main insights in our February Roundtable on the Arab revolutions, which highlight the interdependent relations between human rights and human dignity on the one hand, and order and security on the other.
Raslan Ibrahim
Managing Editor HRHW
A Little Respect, Please
by Christina Cerna, Organization of American States
“It was not just the humiliation of that one slap that made her son commit suicide. The slap was the culmination, symbolic of all the humiliations and indignities Mohamed and so many others have experienced daily. The humiliation of not being able to provide for themselves and their families and of not having basic human rights gave way to anger and frustration.”
Simon Tisdall suggests that last month, when Mohammed Bouazizi (twenty-six years old), “an unemployed graduate, set himself on fire outside a government building in protest at police harassment,” his act became the “rallying cause for Tunisia’s disaffected legions of unemployed students, impoverished workers, trade unionists, lawyers and human rights activists.” The reaction to his act of self-immolation and death on January 4th led to the flight of President Ben Ali ten days later to Saudi Arabia and to the end of Ali's twenty-three-year rule of Tunisia. Time reported the event as follows: “When Mohamed Bouazizi set himself alight on Dec. 17, 2010, he sparked flames far greater than the ones that would ultimately kill him.” Others seeking to change the world have imitated Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Egypt, Algeria, Mauritania, and Yemen. With the intoxication of revolution at hand, what kind of desperation motivates someone to end his own life in a suicidal act of protest?
The international press has discovered Mohamed’s home town of Sidi Bouzid and journalists have gone to interview his family. We learned that his father died when he was three years old, that his mother remarried, and that her second husband suffers from poor health and does not work, probably because he cannot. Mohamed completed his baccalaureate exam in high school and “didn’t expect to study, because we didn’t have the money,” according to his mother. Although he wasn’t a “college graduate” as originally reported, he completed his high school diploma; and with so many unemployed college graduates in Tunisia, perhaps the media's error was intentional.
The press informs us that Mohamed was ten years old when he became the main provider for the family, selling fresh produce in the local market. He worked full-time in order to help his five younger siblings stay in school (an older brother moved away). He would take his wooden cart to the market and load it with fruit and vegetables, and then he would walk it more than two kilometers to the local souk. Another version of the facts says that he would sell the food on the roadside to earn five dollars a day.
At the souk he was harassed on almost a daily basis by the police, who would confiscate his scales and produce for running a stall without a permit. Six months ago the police fined him US$280, the equivalent of two months' earnings. On December 17th, a policewoman confronted him on the way to the market and tried to take his scales from him, but he refused to hand them over. The woman slapped him and, with the help of her colleagues, forced him to the ground. The officers took away his fruit and vegetables and his scale.
Publicly humiliated, he went to the local municipality building and demanded to meet with an official. He was told that it would not be possible; the official was in a meeting. Another version says that it was a female worker who slapped him at the town’s municipal offices when he went to complain about not being allowed to work. The only constant is that a woman slapped him. With no one willing to hear his grievances, he doused himself with fuel, returned to the street outside the building, and set himself on fire. For Mohamed’s mother, her son’s suicide was motivated not by poverty, but by humiliation. His mother reportedly said: “We are poor people in Sidi Bouzid. We don’t have money but we have our dignity, and his dignity was taken away with that slap and those wrong words.”
It was not just the humiliation of that one slap that made her son commit suicide. The slap was the culmination, symbolic of all the humiliations and indignities Mohamed and so many others have experienced daily. The humiliation of not being able to provide for themselves and their families and of not having basic human rights gave way to anger and frustration. As Mohamed’s mother knew, the attack on his dignity—the slap—was the spark that ignited his personal rage.
Tunisia under President Ben Ali officially took pride in its rising middle class, but failed to provide a mechanism whereby those in extreme poverty could find employment or benefit from some kind of social insurance. In addition, the non-responsiveness of a corrupt administration to the grievances of its people fueled the violent challenge to its authority.
What gave momentum to the uprising was the fact that Mohamed was well-known and popular because he would give free fruit and vegetables to very poor families. Why is it that the poor always have something to give away, whereas the Ben Ali clan, now accused of massive theft of Tunisian wealth, tried to flee the country with gold ingots?
Amr Moussa, the Secretary-General of the Arab League, warned of more Tunisia-style revolutions should their policies remained unchanged: “The Arab soul is broken by poverty, unemployment and general recession.” The Arab citizen has been driven to “a state of unprecedented anger and frustration” In response, Arab leaders committed to a proposed $2 billion program to boost the economies in the region. With thousands demonstrating over the economic situation in Egypt (not to mention Jordan, Oman, Libya, and Yemen) and calling for the ouster of their government, only time will tell whether reform programs will pacify the protesters.
The author of this Roundtable article, Ms. Christina M. Cerna, is a staff member in the General Secretariat of the Organization of American States' Secretariat for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The opinions expressed in this note are the sole responsibility of the author in the author's personal capacity and are not to be interpreted as official positions of, and are not to be attributed to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the General Secretariat of the Organization of American States, or the Organization of American States.
Christina Cerna - B.A., New York University; M.A., Fulbright Scholar, Ludwig-Maximilian Universitat; J.D., Dean's Fellow, American University; LL.M., Columbia University. Ms. Cerna is Principal Human Rights Specialist at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) at the headquarters of the Organization of American States (OAS) in Washington, D.C.. She has been with the OAS since January 1979 and is currently in charge of certain special cases and systematizing the IACHR’s jurisprudence. She taught international human rights law as an Adjunct for the law schools at George Washington University, Penn State University and, since 2005, at Georgetown University.
Abeyance and Spontaneity in Tunisia
by Louis Edgar Esparza, University of Denver, Josef Korbel School of International Studies
“Although the precipitating event is rarely predictable, these kinds of events are almost never random…Tunisia and Egypt are not the exceptions, but rather, illustrate the rule: step on your people and one day they will step on you.”
On August 16, 1819, tens of thousands of workers gathered in what is now St. Peter’s Square in Manchester to demand suffrage. Entire families, parishes, and townships assembled, fueled by increasing commodity prices and political disenfranchisement. They had spread the word from town to town, and from church to church, that this previously banned meeting was indeed to occur. It was the culmination of months of agitation on the part of common people to achieve economic and political reform. The government responded violently to the challenge of its authority, as governments so often do, leading to a score of deaths and hundreds of injuries. Survivors of the Peterloo Massacre, as it was later called, would have to wait another dozen years of intensified government repression before their original demands were ultimately met.
Also spurred by government recalcitrance, the people of Tunisia set off a fire that is spreading across the Arab world. Diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks illustrate the extent of the corruption in Ben Ali’s government, describing the former president as “sclerotic.” The documents also claim that “willingness to engage with ordinary citizens” is “an uncommon trait” in Tunisia amongst political leaders.
The media has been euphoric, even giddy, about the role of social networking sites. The Internet has been a strong medium that has helped spread information about developments in real-time. Social media is an additional institution through which activists stay connected. Social media websites have changed the location in which decisions are to be made. Peterloo rebels made their decisions in actual rooms, a physical space, in small and large batches of people. Tunisians did too, but relied heavily on Internet communications.
Nevertheless, the medium is not the message. Explaining political grievances using phenomena that distract from the actual content of the grievances de-legitimizes political actors. Whether it is Twitter in Tunisia or the printing press at the Battle of Peterloo, what is important is the decision to engage in risk and social disruption in order to achieve a political end. Governments and other authorities are already leveraging Internet tools to catch up with activists. Eventually, they will. Governments quickly learned that making it difficult for activists to physically meet, or making the meetings unproductive through spying and the insertion of an agente provocatore, were sometimes effective. Physical space is a worn battleground that both activists and governments have used to their advantage. The rules of battle on the Internet are still being written. Government attempts to “shut off” the Internet or to censor material have been only partially effective and will be less effective over time. As more citizens join the web, attacks against the Internet itself will have the effect of alienating de facto regimes from even more of its citizens.
The events in Tunisia have also been widely interpreted as being spontaneous in origin. Social movements are often thought to be spontaneous occurrences. There is something romantic about the idea that civic uprisings and their subsequent spread are spontaneous expressions of agency—universal expressions of a people yearning to be free. Nevertheless, events such as these always have social structures that undergird them, even if those social structures remain hidden to outside observers. They remain under the surface when the political environ is unsympathetic, only to be revealed when a precipitating event or other opportunity arises. In this case, Tunisian labor movement organizations, among others, played this role. These types of organizations do not lead, but instead act as a beachhead from which the movement can spread.
Natural disasters, too, reveal already-existing social cleavages by disproportionately affecting society’s most vulnerable. Eric Klinenburg’s devastating analysis of the 1995 Chicago Heat Wave, for instance, shows that ethnic minorities and the poor were the most likely to have perished in the calamity. This supposedly natural event exposed disparities in housing, amenities, and access to resources and information.
Such is the case in environments ripe for social unrest. High commodity prices certainly contributed to the unrest in Tunisia and Egypt, but such stressors reveal already-existing rifts. Societies with lower levels of income inequality that also experienced commodity price increases did not experience such overhauls. Although the precipitating event is rarely predictable, these kinds of events are almost never random. When the political climate is hostile to their message, social movement structures are held in abeyance until, in this case, there is a coming of age of an indomitable youth, economic pressure, and one self-immolation too many. Tunisia and Egypt are not the exceptions, but rather illustrate the rule: step on your people and one day they will step on you.
The Obama administration has been praising these pro-democracy movements. Ever since September 11, 2001, however, it has been difficult for US activists to help support pro-democracy organizations in this region. The US government has made it more difficult to give money to pro-democracy organizations in Northern Africa and the Middle East, even raiding the homes of Minnesotans and Chicagoans trying to do just that. US authorities would do well to stop persecuting US activists trying to help the region and quit tolerating autocrats for short-term political gain.
Louis Edgar Esparza is Lecturer in Human Rights at the University of Denver, Josef Korbel School of International Studies. His work appears in Societies Without Borders, Qualitative Sociology and Sociological Forum. Dr. Esparza is writing a book on grassroots human rights movements in Colombia, where he completed ethnographic fieldwork in 2008. His research has attracted grants and awards from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Latin American Studies Association and Oxfam America.
He's Our Son of a Bitch
by Robert Funk, Institute for Public Affairs of the University of Chile
“It is said that Franklin Delano Roosevelt defended the US tendency to support dictators by remarking, ‘He may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch’. The recent events in Tunisia and Egypt indicate that almost seventy years later, this unfortunate phrase seems to continue to guide US foreign policy.”
It is said that Franklin Delano Roosevelt defended the US tendency to support dictators by remarking, “He may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch.” The recent events in Tunisia and Egypt indicate that almost seventy years later, this unfortunate phrase seems to continue to guide US foreign policy.
The first question, then, is what determines whether a son of a bitch is “ours” or not. While in recent years the existential threat has revolved around the issue of terrorism and radical Islamic fundamentalism, for much of the twentieth century those who were considered allies stood shoulder to shoulder with the United States in the struggle against Communism. Cases come to mind in Africa (South Africa), Asia (Vietnam, the Philippines), and the Middle East (Iran), but nowhere was FDR's policy applied more readily or more regularly than in Latin America.
This raises a second question: after a century of supporting unsavory characters in favor of other supposed benefits (anti-Communism, stability, oil, access to canals, etc.), what lessons does the Latin American experience offer?
The benefits are short term; the costs are long-term. Perhaps the most recurrent lesson of US policy in Latin America is that the supposed benefits of supporting anti-democratic strongmen do not last a very long time, whereas the ill feeling amongst the population and the political fallout can last for many years. The most active period of US anti-Communist intervention in Latin America only lasted about thirty years. Yet throughout the region, it is the US support for authoritarian regimes, far more than its not unimportant efforts to support democratic movements in the 1980s, which remains in the public imagination. University students wear t-shirts emblazoned with images of Che Guevara, not Anastasio Somoza. This phenomenon is even more pronounced in the Middle East, where even the aspirational middle class that yearns to pursue postgraduate studies at elite American universities cannot appear to be pro-American because of US association with autocratic regimes and support for Israel.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend. The problem with having allies is that it almost invariably means having (or creating) enemies. In regions like Latin America, even if the dictators were relatively benevolent, it was more than likely that their enemies were pro-democracy activists, and that their friends were some pretty nasty types engaged in arms trafficking, drug smuggling, or worse. In these societies, the US has become known for allying itself to the latter and not the former, a reputation that not only stands in stark contrast to US foreign policy rhetoric, but that lasts for decades (see previous point). Important sectors of the center-left in Chile, for example, continue to be rather circumspect with regards to the United States, while still holding Cuba up to another standard for having stood by so many Chilean exiles.
Our son of a bitch, for better or for worse. How does the US disassociate itself from dictators with which it no longer wishes to be associated? It turns out it is actually rather easy. In the case of Egypt, President Obama decided that a few days of mass demonstrations were sufficient to warrant turning against an ally of thirty years. The problems, however, appear later. What message is being sent to current allies in Afghanistan, Iraq, or even Israel? Is US policy now to support democratic movements no matter their positions vis-a-vis the interests of the United States? If so, and especially after Mubarak's exit, it may be time to talk of an Obama Doctrine.
However, the Reagan administration, presiding over the “third wave” of global democratization, turned against Marcos (Philippines) and Pinochet (Chile) when it decided that it was no longer in US interests to continue supporting them. The great difference between those cases and the current one (and George W. Bush's earlier attempts at “democratizing” the Middle East): the United States had clearly identified new, viable, and democratic partners who enjoyed mass popular support. This included not only the existence of political groups that the United States felt it could at least deal (though not necessarily agree) with. It also implied the existence of a large and well-educated middle sector—academics, businesspeople, unions, teachers, journalists, and even Armed Forces—who after the transition would continue to work for the well being of the country. In cases as different as Venezuela and Iran, these groups fled. The nature of the Egyptian experience, so far, indicates that these middle sectors may stay on and build a new democratic Egypt. The minute that the more radical groups grab hold of the democratizing momentum, however, the middle class will head for Miami and Los Angeles. Good for the American real estate market; bad for the future of the Middle East.
Robert Funk is Deputy Director and Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Institute for Public Affairs of the University of Chile. Dr Funk’s research areas include democratization, left and populist movements in Latin America, and political elites. Recent publications include “Parties, Personalities and the President: The Institutional Challenges of the Bachelet Government”, in The Bachelet Government: Conflict and Consensus in Post-Pinochet Chile, edited by Silvia Borzutzky and Gregory Weeks. From 2006 to 2008, Dr Funk served as president of the Chilean Political Science Association.
Those Pesky Winds of Change...
by Walter Lotze, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs
“Yet while analysts decry the failure of governance in the Arab world, and while countries such as the United States of America, France, and Great Britain self-confidently reinterpret their foreign policies to reassure observers that in fact they were never acting in support of despotic regimes, in Africa many diplomats and analysts are quietly elated. Indeed, many whisper quietly in the corridors of power that the change which commenced in Southern Africa has finally reached the Northern regions of the continent.”
When a police officer slapped a fruit seller by the name of Mohammed Bouazizi in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, nobody could have anticipated that a revolution had commenced. Bouazizi, a twenty-six-year-old computer science graduate unable to find work, had resorted to selling fruit from a street cart in an attempt to support himself and his seven siblings. Slapped by the police officer and ordered to pack up his goods, Bouazizi himself snapped. He marched to the local governor’s office and demanded an appointment, threatening to set himself alight if the governor did not meet with him. In frustration, on December 17 2010 Bouazizi carried out his threat, and eighteen days later died from his injuries. Millions of young, angry, and despondent Tunisians had found their martyr. Two weeks later, Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, who had ruled Tunisia mafia-style with his extensive family for thirty years, had been toppled.
While analysts rushed to predict that the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia would spread like wildfire to other parts of the Arab world, most anticipated that the regimes in Yemen, Algeria, or Syria would surely be the next to fall. Protests and demonstrations appeared overnight in Libya, Algeria, Sudan, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Yemen. Regimes across the Arab world rushed head over heels to present cuts in food prices, national labor programs, and infrastructure development initiatives. Yet it was too little, too late. In the end, it was the regime in Egypt that would be the next to fall. During the African Union Summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia at the end of January, the Egyptian Foreign Minister quietly reassured his counterparts in other oppressive regimes that while the unrest in Egypt was proving problematic, he was confident that the government would soon gain the upper hand. Two hours later, he had been fired, and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, in power in Egypt for thirty years, was clinging to power by the skin of his teeth.
For weeks now, the media and commentators have rushed to argue that recent events in the world were quite inevitable, given what is labeled a general failure of governance in the Arab world as a whole. Indeed, in Syria, the Assad family has been in power for forty years, the current president having inherited the post from his deceased father. In Libya, the self-styled King of Kings Muammar Gaddafi has been in power for forty-one years, displaying no signs of readiness to hand over the reins of power, while both his sons appear to be grooming themselves to succeed him. In Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh has ruled for thirty-two years, and in Algeria, Abdelaziz Bouteflika has been in power for twelve years and plans to name his younger brother as his eventual successor. Yet while analysts decry the failure of governance in the Arab world, and while countries such as the United States of America, France, and Great Britain self-confidently reinterpret their foreign policies to reassure observers that in fact they were never acting in support of despotic regimes, in Africa many diplomats and analysts are quietly elated. Indeed, many whisper quietly in the corridors of power that the change which commenced in Southern Africa has finally reached the Northern regions of the continent.
In a telling reversal of fortunes, it is now the Southern parts of the continent that are more politically stable and that display the highest commitment to democratic systems of governance, while the Northern regions of the continent are being shaken at their very foundations. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, it was Southern Africa that was the most unstable, autocratic, and conflict-prone region on the continent. Conflicts in Angola, Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Zaire ensured the region was kept in constant turmoil, and autocratic regimes ruled in many of the countries in the region, where the hosting of free and fair elections with universal participation was quite unheard of. In the Northern regions of the continent however, despite the absence of democratic governance, peace and security were generally assured, and economic growth was rapid. Yet in the space of less than fifteen years, that situation mostly appears to have been reversed.
While Zimbabwe and Madagascar continue to blight the reputation of the Southern African Development Community, and while the development of good governance and democratic systems in Angola and in the Democratic Republic of Congo still have a long way to go, the latter still embroiled in a vicious conflict where atrocious human rights abuses, in particular directed against women and children, appear the order of the day, economic growth in the region has been rapid and generally sustained, and the overall incidence of violent conflict has diminished. Regular elections are held in all countries in the region, even in Zimbabwe, and transitions of power, though mostly from one leader of the ruling party to another, are generally peaceful. While opposition parties generally do not succeed in winning elections, their presence in political life is at least tolerated. In North Africa however, economies are stagnant, inflation is soaring, food prices are rising well above the means of the poor, and masses of youth are unemployed, with little hope of change in the near future. Opposition politics are not tolerated, press freedom is heavily restricted, and human rights are a matter of national reinterpretation as opposed to universal acceptance. With the majority of regimes in the region in power for between twenty and thirty years, angry North Africans have identified clear targets against which to direct their anger. Many leaders in North Africa now surely wish that British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan’s winds of change from the south had not blown north across the continent all that quickly.
Walter Lotze (South African) is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI) in Oslo, Norway. Prior to joining NUPI, Walter worked in the Peace Support Operations Division of the African Union Commission, prior to which he headed the Peacebuilding Division at the African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD), a non-governmental organization working in conflict situations across the African continent. Walter recently completed his PhD in International Relations with the University of St Andrews in Scotland.
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