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From Poverty to Power Green, Oxfam 2008 - weman

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5 THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM HUMANITARIAN RELIEFthe international community had a responsibility <strong>to</strong> supportgovernments <strong>to</strong> do this and in extreme cases, with the authority of theUN Security Council, <strong>to</strong> intervene <strong>to</strong> do it themselves. 192When the UN Security Council authorised a limited militaryintervention for humanitarian reasons in northern Iraq in 1991, fewpeople realised that it would open up a debate lasting 15 years. Thatdebate was galvanised by the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 – when,even though a small UN peacekeeping force was in the country, theinternational community was unwilling <strong>to</strong> act <strong>to</strong> prevent the massacreof some 800,000 civilians over a period of six weeks. Many Africangovernments concluded that the lack of Western intervention in thewars raging in Liberia or the Democratic Republic of the Congo(DRC) was not a belated recognition of Africa’s independence, butrather evidence that Africans simply did not count.Developing-country governments remained suspicious until theformer foreign ministers of Algeria and Australia, Mohamed Sahnounand Gareth Evans, turned the argument on its head in their landmark2001 UN report ‘Responsibility <strong>to</strong> Protect’. Rather than arguing therights and wrongs of Western states intervening, they zeroed in ontheir responsibility <strong>to</strong> do so, based on their obligation under internationallaw <strong>to</strong> uphold the rights of people under threat – and, evenmore importantly, the prime responsibility of states themselves <strong>to</strong>protect their own citizens.They made it clear that states could not just exercise the responsibility<strong>to</strong> s<strong>to</strong>p war crimes once they had already started. They also had <strong>to</strong>prevent those crimes, and help prevent the conflicts in which suchsystematic violence against civilians is all <strong>to</strong>o common. They pointedout that military intervention must be the last resort. In the greatmajority of cases, peaceful measures like diplomacy, includingcoercive but peaceful means such as asset freezes, travel bans, andsuspensions from regional organisations, are more likely <strong>to</strong> succeed,and at far less cost. Any of these sanctions must be carefully targeted atthe political and military leaders responsible for the war crimes thatthe international community is concerned about, not at a wholepopulation as was the case with the discredited blanket sanctionsagainst Iraq and other countries.393

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