Responsibility to Protect and Myanmar
The UN Security Council is going to meet Wednesday on the situation in Myanmar. Myanmar’s Special Envoy to the UN Dr. Sasa has argued that the UN should activate responsibility to Protect (R2P) in response to the Tatmadaw’s (Myanmar’s military) coup after the last election and the current human rights abuses being carried out by the Tatmadaw. I agree with Dr. Sasa but first I am going to explain what R2P is and some of the problems of R2P in the past which I don’t think will be a problem for invoking R2P in this case.
What is R2P?
R2P is an attempt by the UN to lay out when and why international intervention that violates a state’s sovereignty is justifiable. R2P focuses on the idea of protection and the responsibility of all states to protect vulnerable populations. Under R2P states still remain sovereign in their own borders but governments also have the obligation to protect their population from crimes such as genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. Governments have a responsibility to protect their civilian populations and intervention can only happen if the local government fails to protect their civilians because either they can’t, are unwilling to protect civilians or are the perpetrators themselves. If a local state fails to meet its obligations to protect their civilian populations, the responsibility is transferred to the international community which can respond with military intervention as a last resort.
Criticisms of R2P
The biggest problem with R2P is that the host country has the primacy responsibility to protect their own population and this responsibility only transfers to the international community if the host country has failed to do so for whatever reason. The criteria for when a state has failed to meet their obligations under R2P is unclear and opponents of intervention have used this to their advantage. The result of this is that the host country can use the language of protecting and the pretense of protecting their population as a way of both delaying or preventing international action. Alex J. Bellamy has persuasively argued that the language of protection in R2P enabled the Sudan government to argue that the international community should not respond to the Darfur genocide. The Sudan government argued they still had the primary responsibility to protect:
It enabled opponents of intervention to legitimate their actions by reference to the prevailing normative order. In effect, it allowed traditional opponents of intervention to replace largely discredited ‘sovereignty-as-absolute’-type arguments against intervention in supreme humanitarian emergencies with arguments about who had the primary responsibility to protect Darfur’s civilians[1]
I don’t think that the Tatmadaw will be able to do a similar strategy because unlike the Sudan Government the Tatmadaw is not the legitimate government. The Tatmadaw has illegitimately sized power in a coup and is in no way the legitimate government which makes any bad faith argument about who has the primary responsibility to protect much weaker. Even if the Tatmadaw are inclined to protect their civilian population (they aren’t they are the perpetrators) they wouldn’t be able to because they don’t have control over most of the country or population which views them as illegitimate. Under R2P even if the state, or in this case the military, are not the perpetrators if they can’t protect their population the responsibility to protect is transferred to the international community.
Why R2P Should Be Activated in Response to the Situation in Myanmar
R2P should be invoked to allow for a military intervention in Myanmar for two reasons. First, the Tatmadaw has overthrown the legitimate and elected civilian government and thrown in jail the legitimate leaders of the country. The coup was motivated in large part because the Tatmadaw thought their behind-the-scenes control of the government was threatened by the National League for Democracy (NLD) winning the last election. There was growing support within the NLD for democratic reform that would begin to end the “deep state” in the government, for example ending the reserved seats for the Tatmadaw in the parliament. The Tatmadaw should not be allowed to get away with overthrowing the legitimate civilian elected government in a coup. This is in no way a defense of the NLD which I think is a bad party with a bad leader, but the fact remains they won the election and are the legitimate ruling party.
Secondly, the Tatmadaw will massacre protesters and will rule through a reign of terror which is not a surprise to anyone who knows the history of military rule in Myanmar. They have already killed at least 500 peaceful protesters and they will kill many more if they are allowed to do so. The Tatmadaw has already began to specifically target ethnic minorities and anyone in Myanmar that is not Burmese/Buddhist will be targeted. Terrorist and insurgency groups, for example the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, are already responding to protect their ethnic groups from attacks from the Tatmadaw. The situation in Myanmar could easily become a civil war or humanitarian disaster which we can prevent by the international community taking action under R2P.
However, I doubt R2P will be activated. Myanmar is geopolitically irrelevant for the major western powers which means that the most they will do is strong sounding rhetoric. This can be seen with the strong sounding rhetoric from both Biden and Blinken which has not come with any arguments for activating R2P or any real effort to organize an international response. Even if the US was going to push for R2P, China would likely use its veto like it did with the efforts to respond to the Rohingya genocide.
Bellamy, Alex J. “Responsibility to Protect Or Trojan Horse? the Crisis in Darfur and Humanitarian Intervention After Iraq.”, 52.
Biography
Bellamy, Alex J. “Responsibility to Protect Or Trojan Horse? the Crisis in Darfur and Humanitarian Intervention After Iraq.” Ethics & International Affairs 19, no. 2 (2005): 31–54.
