Twenty-First Century Atrocity Prevention: How Atrocities against the Rohingya Reveal an Unchanged Regime

This article was contributed to Forum-the edition's portfolio of thematic content-by GJIA's Human Rights & Development section.

The February 2021 military coup in Myanmar puts the countries' minorities, including the Rohingya, in even greater peril than during the ongoing campaign of violence under an elected government. The deposed leader Aung San Suu Kyi failed to protect these communities from harm, and in several instances at least tacitly supported their persecution. However, the military had a greater hand in actual acts of atrocity. The Rohingya, as well as other persecuted minorities, unfortunately, have no reason to expect any meaningful global effort to protect them from the manifest danger they face. The atrocity prevention regime lacks a mechanism to act when it is most needed.

The idea of a global atrocity prevention regime first took form with the United Nations (UN) Genocide Convention in 1948, although its implementation laid dormant throughout the Cold War. In the 1990s, (unprevented) atrocities in Rwanda and Bosnia revealed the in sufficiency of that Genocide Convention-based regime. Chastened—but also educated—by those two episodes, the international community responded in two ways. The first was a greater willingness to intervene where atrocities seemed imminent, as seemed to be the case in Kosovo (1999), Timor-Leste (also 1999), and Sierra Leone (2000). The second involved devising a better set of principles to undergird the goal of atrocity prevention, namely the doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect (or "R2P").

Despite sporadic "success" stories¹, however, the new regime essentially resembles the pre-Rwanda, pre-Srebrenica regime in its prescription and in its outcomes. The R2P era has not led to a world of greater ability to stop mass atrocities while they are unfolding. If anything, it has laid bare that the fundamental flaw in the post-Holocaust atrocity prevention regime is neither a lack of intelligence or responsive capacity, nor a matter of some doctrine-adjustable notion of "political will." Rather, the flaws in the regime are fundamentally institutional—which is to say the problems that prevent it from being effective are embedded in the structure and rules of the United Nations, which thus require significant institutional reforms.

R2P history and application

R2P was initially articulated by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, which UN Secretary General Kofi Annan created in 1999, as the then-head of the UN's peacekeeping department in 1994, Annan had personally played a role in the UN's failure to protect civilians during the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. As established in the Commission's report and subsequently elaborated upon in a series of reports issued from the Secretary General's Office², the doctrine provided two core fixes to the disfunctions that led to the tragedies in Rwanda and Bosnia, when every official national and multilateral military force in the world, including UN peacekeepers with boots on the ground, stood by and watched as genocide was perpetrated. The first was an affirmative duty on the part of sovereign states to protect their own populations. The second was a complementary affirmative duty on the part of other sovereign states to protect civilians in other states suffering under a failure in the first duty. The doctrine identified the United Nations as the legitimate arbiter of when the complimentary duty needed to be invoked.

R2P thus offered the promise of having established a regime that filled in the gaps of the Genocide Convention—and, indeed, expanded upon its coverage by addressing "crimes against humanity," "ethnic cleansing," and war crimes, alongside genocide.³ It is a potentially powerful tool for its breadth alone—drawing attention to what states can and must do for their vulnerable populations, creating a new field for international cooperation around civilian protection, and permitting proactive diplomatic involvement by the United Nations and other actors. Collectively, these realms encompass behind-the-scenes, generally upstream prevention and protection measures—what one might call "Little R2P." And indeed, both the doctrine and the new UN office of the special advisor for the doctrine can rightfully claim a...