Toronto Star: UN breathes life into‘responsibility to protect’

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/957664--un-breathes-life-into-responsibility-to-protect


Doctors in besieged Benghazi called for a no-fly zone earlier this month.

For 350 years — from the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 until 1998 — sovereignty functioned as institutionalized indifference. R2P responds to the idealized UN as the symbol of an imagined and constructed community of strangers: We are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers.

On March 17, Security Council Resolution 1973 authorized the use of “all necessary measures” short of an invasion and occupation of Libya “to protect civilians and civilian-populated areas” — the first UN-sanctioned combat operations since the 1991 Gulf War. Resolution 1973 was passed by a 10-0 vote within 24 hours of being introduced, contrary to prevailing expectations that the moment for action had passed and the world once again had watched haplessly from the sidelines.

The game-changer was the juxtaposition of R2P as a powerful new galvanizing norm; the mass defection of Libyan diplomats who joined the chorus of calls for prompt and effective action to protect Libyan civilians, oust Moammar Gadhafi and promote democratic reforms; and the request for a no-fly zone by the Arab League on March 12. The key decision in Washington was made by President Barack Obama at a contentious meeting of top officials in the White House on March 15. The balance shifted in favour of military action when Hillary Clinton phoned in, influenced by what she was seeing and hearing in the region.

Resolution 1973 marks the first military implementation of the doctrine of “responsibility to protect” (R2P). Had the international community shirked this responsibility, Libya could have become R2P’s graveyard.

against a country with a history of ethnic cleansing.

Actually, not so funny, but rather, pathetic.

Where were the cheerleaders then?