One step forward, one step back

Last week: Britain and the US have condemned Russia and China for vetoing a draft UN Security Council resolution to impose sanctions on Zimbabwe’s leaders.

Particularly amusing was UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband saying the veto “would appear incomprehensible to the people of Zimbabwe” - surely they’re used to nobody charge to the rescue by now? The doomsayers railed against the inability of the United Nations to address human rights at all - a charge which has some legitimacy when you look at the charade that the Human Rights Council threatens to become, but has less credibility when you remember that the United Nations has usually been the vehicle for those rights in the first place; and it was the UN that approved the Responsibility to Protect, of which this would have been a fine outing.¹ The UN (unfortunately) is large, it contains multitudes; the truth is that the Security Council will never be able to address these issues without reforms that the permanent members will never agree to - the removal of the institution of permanent membership itself and the end of their veto.²

This week: The International Criminal Court’s (ICC) prosecutor charged Sudan’s president on Monday with masterminding a campaign of genocide in Darfur, killing 35,000 people and using rape as a weapon of war.

For discussion about Darfur, I can’t recommend Alex de Waal et al.’s Making Sense of Darfur blog highly enough and, sure enough, they’ve provided in-depth analysis of what this means. If you wish to understand the situation in Darfur, you will not find better on the web; and their coverage of the ICC decision is as usual excellent, although unfortunately it’s a temporary feature. The main point here is that - regardless of whether you agree with the decision or not (and tragically the blogosphere doesn’t have much more to offer in terms of commentary than those two) -  the ICC has taken a major step in advancing the status of human rights on the global stage by indicting a sitting head of state in an ongoing conflict,³ which is also an excellent counter-balance to the continuing bad news from Zimbabwe. It also shows that the future of human rights lies not with the old order - the Security Council, one of the oldest institutions available - but with more recent international institutions such as the ICC.

For what it’s worth, I come down strongly for sanctions against Zimbabwe, combined with more vigorous diplomatic pressure - not on Zimbabwe itself, which remains oblivious, but on Zimbabwe’s enablers, particularly South Africa. It is long past time for African governments to stop defending each others actions at the expense of the well-being of their peoples, and long past time for others to stop tolerating it. I come down weakly in favour of the Bashir indictment, because the threats that Sudan may descend into “mayhem” as a result ring slightly hollow when you look at the actual state of Sudan and wonder if “mayhem” would possibly be an improvement⁴ and I think the potential benefits outweigh the imagined disadvantages.

The reason that I support the indictment is mainly for the service it does in advancing the debate on human rights globally. While it may in itself be quite toothless, it changes the terms of that debate - and that may indeed be the strategic reasoning behind it. It’s only through these discussions that we advance the cause of human rights, which is after all a series of discussions between different groups about power and responsibility - even if part of the backdrop to those discussions is the deteriorating situation in Zimbabwe.

1. The irony meter goes off the charts when you realise that Mugabe himself was at that meeting. [↩]
2. On the other hand, there’s a case to be made that those two factors are what prevents the Security Council from descending into utter irrelevance. [↩]
3. Slobodan Milosevic and Charles Taylor previously, both in circumstances slightly but critically different. [↩]
4. Joke. [↩]