We have a duty to protect Zimbabwe

Ten years ago the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan set out a new international doctrine. Annan declared that the world was looking forward to what he called ‘a new century of human rights’.

For the United Nations, declared Annan, this meant an entirely new way of doing things. ‘No government,’ he declared, ‘has the right to hide behind national sovereignty in order to violate the human rights or fundamental freedoms of its peoples.

‘Whether a person belongs to the minority or the majority, that person’s human rights and fundamental freedoms are sacred.’

This statement was revolutionary. Inter-national relations, since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, have been conducted on the basis of formal respect for national boundaries. Annan, responding to globalisation and prompted perhaps by Tony Blair, was asserting that these borders should no longer be immune and that intervention was always appropriate when governments waged warfare against their own citizens.

Kofi Annan expressed the spirit of the age, or so it seemed. Humanitarian intervention was the great fin de siècle theme. In Kosovo and East Timor this doctrine was used to justify cross-border excursions to confront brutal actions by repressive regimes. Even where more self-interested motives were at work, as in Iraq, it was still used as the overriding vindication for invasion.

But there are now overwhelming signs that the ‘responsibility to protect’, as Kofi Annan’s doctrine has come to be known within the United Nations, has ceased to apply. Within the past few months there have been two terrible cases which cry out for exactly the kind of action for which Annan called so eloquently.