Humanitarian Hypocrisy

Civilian Protection and the Design of Peace Operations

Andrea L. Everett

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781501714726
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In Humanitarian Hypocrisy, Andrea L. Everett maps the often glaring differences between declared ambitions to protect civilians in conflict zones and the resources committed for doing so. Examining how powerful governments contribute to peace operations and determine how they are designed, Everett argues that ambitions-resources gaps are a form of organized hypocrisy. Her book shows how political compromises lead to disparities between the humanitarian principles leaders proclaim and what their policies are designed to accomplish.

When those in power face strong pressure to protect civilians but are worried about the high costs and dangers of intervention, Everett asserts, they allocate insufficient resources or impose excessive operational constraints. The ways in which this can play out are illustrated by Everett's use of original data and in-depth case studies of France in Rwanda, the United States in Darfur, and Australia in East Timor and Aceh. Humanitarian Hypocrisy has a sad lesson: missions that gesture toward the protection of civilians but overlook the most pressing security needs of affected populations can worsen suffering even while the entities who doom those missions to failure assume the moral high ground. This is a must-read book for activists, NGO officials, and policymakers alike.

CHAPTER 1

Devil in the Details

Assessing Mission Design and State Policy

There is a fantastic gap between the resolutions of the Security Council, the will to execute those resolutions, and the means available to commanders in the field.

—Lieutenant General Francis Briquemont, UNPROFOR commander, New York Times, December 31, 1993

What do peace operations plagued by ambitions-resources gaps look like? How can we consistently distinguish them from more robust or limited missions despite variation among complex emergencies? And, given this book’s focus on state-level policy, how can we assess the contributions of individual great power democracies to these different outcomes? By answering these questions, this chapter builds a conceptual framework for structuring the book’s theoretical and empirical arguments. To do so, I build on studies of the military requirements for humanitarian military action and integrate them with an understanding of the security deficits that define complex emergencies and the unique capabilities of the great power democracies.

The chapter proceeds in three parts. First, I introduce definitions of three central concepts: complex emergencies, civilian protection, and peace operations. Because the policy and academic literatures do not always use these ideas consistently, it is important to be clear about how I use them in this book. Second, using the concepts of a peace operation’s ambitions and resources, I develop a simple three-part typology that describes the key differences between limited and robust missions and ambitions-resources gaps. Finally, I translate this typology into a set of discrete policies available to leaders of the states I focus on in this book. The same qualities that make these states especially influential for understanding broad patterns in the design of peace operations—their ability to lead robust operations and their influence over many others—also give them unique flexibility and a wide range of options for whether and how to contribute. As a result, we can think about their participation in these missions as mimicking the basic distinctions between limited and robust civilian protection and ambitions-resources gaps.

Definitions

COMPLEX HUMANITARIAN EMERGENCIES

While war and atrocities always threaten innocent people, sometimes the violence simply must be stopped to avert catastrophe for the civilian population. When the local government cannot or will not do so, international help may offer civilians’ best hope. Such help might involve diplomatic initiatives or targeted sanctions against perpetrators of violence. Yet this is also the type of security environment that creates the most compelling humanitarian case for military action to directly protect civilians and aid workers from ongoing violence, and, in the very worst instances, to compel human rights abusers to end their heinous crimes. It is in these conflicts that it makes the most sense to investigate such efforts.

To identify these situations, I rely on the concept of complex humanitarian emergencies, widely used by policymakers and the international humanitarian community to represent the conflicts of greatest concern to the UN, government agencies, and relief organizations. Most prominent definitions have been developed by and for this community and reflect its interests and prejudices, while sharing three key themes. First, complex emergencies result from political violence, not natural disasters. Second, they involve large-scale and intense civilian suffering, and a significantly heightened risk of death from the direct or indirect effects of violence. Third, this occurs at least in part because local authorities fail to meet the conflict-affected population’s needs, either alone or with help from relief organizations. Drawing on these ideas, I define a complex emergency as an episode of political violence that severely and extensively disrupts civilian life, and in which the government responsible for public welfare is unable or unwilling to shield the population (or facilitate outside efforts to do so).¹

Complex emergencies vary significantly in their political causes and characteristics, and may occur during various kinds of conflicts. First, both civil and interstate wars can be utterly devastating for civilians, even if they do not involve mass atrocity crimes like mass killing or ethnic cleansing.² When belligerents pursue military strategies that involve widespread theft of humanitarian aid or forced relocation of people away from homes and farms, for example, many thousands may die of starvation, disease, and exposure, as they have in places like Somalia and Mozambique.³ Second, atrocity crimes and severe communal violence also occur outside of war. The Indonesian-supported militia violence in East Timor in 1999, for instance, faced no armed resistance. Likewise, mass violence in places like Indonesia, India, and Nigeria attests to the upheaval and suffering the worst communal conflicts can cause.

Complex emergencies, then, include the worst wars, atrocity crimes, and instances of communal violence. Civilians may be threatened directly by violence, by a security environment that creates widespread starvation and disease, or both. As a group, complex emergencies resemble the descriptions of conflicts sometimes identified as possible candidates for military action to protect civilians from grave harm, even without the local government’s consent.⁴ Still, in practice, even ambitious protection missions may be able to get this approval. Thus, the concept of complex emergencies is well suited to represent those conflicts where military action to physically protect civilians beyond traditional peacekeeping seems most plausible on humanitarian grounds, recognizing that potential interveners may or may not insist on local government consent. This, in turn, makes them ideal for exploring the sources of variation in these operations.⁵

Finally, despite their diversity, there are important similarities in the threats civilians consistently face in these conflicts. Hallmarks include large-scale forced displacement as well as attacks on humanitarian operations that threaten civilians’ access to the basic necessities of life. Indeed, of the nearly 1000 major recorded attacks on aid workers between 1997 and 2009, at least 77% took place during conflicts I have identified as complex emergencies and an additional 11% occurred in places that later or previously experienced one.⁶ Thus, at the very least these conflicts typically create the need for an improved security environment for international relief operations and, often, direct physical protection for civilians threatened by violent attacks.

CIVILIAN PROTECTION

Civilian protection means different things to different people and in different contexts.⁷ In this book I use the term narrowly to refer to actions taken by military actors to shield civilians from physical threats created by others. These may include direct danger to people’s physical integrity and disrupted access to basic necessities such as food and shelter. While many other activities can also help save lives threatened by armed conflict and mass violence, this book looks at how military missions are or are not designed to do so. Even as applied narrowly to military actors, however, civilian protection can span a range of activities with the potential to provide more or less protection relative to the major needs created by complex emergencies.

Used in this way, “civilian protection” is distinct from several related concepts, including the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and the UN’s agenda on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict (POC). R2P deals with how international actors should respond to the most systematic and severe human rights abuses and can incorporate various diplomatic, economic, and military policies related to preventing, reacting to, and rebuilding in response to these situations.⁸ By contrast, civilian protection as used here is both broader and narrower since it applies beyond the worst atrocity crimes where R2P is typically discussed, but focuses exclusively on military actors.

Similarly, the UN’s POC framework is also much broader than my use of the term in this book. Since 1999 the UN has used it in reference to a wide variety of threats that may arise in virtually any conflict, and has advocated everything from sanctions to verbal shaming to address them.⁹ A key part of this POC agenda does focus on UN peace operations, but many activities—such as assisting with security sector reform and ensuring the safe return of displaced persons—deal mainly with the needs of a post-conflict environment.¹⁰ Still, the Security Council has also given increased emphasis to direct physical protection of civilians this century.

PEACE OPERATIONS

Military operations that respond to complex emergencies can vary dramatically, and range from forceful interventions to protect civilians from mass atrocities, on one end, to traditional consent-based peacekeeping, on the other. Yet although these missions may be, as Victoria Holt and Tobias Berkman point out, “fundamentally different” from one another, they do not always deploy in response to fundamentally different conflicts.¹¹ Indeed, for states with the capacity to provide robust civilian protection, very disparate kinds of policies are potential substitutes for one another depending on the costs and effort their leaders are willing to accept. Therefore, as discussed below, in the context of complex emergencies I treat missions designed to offer at best a little protection and those that are carefully tailored to civilians’ primary needs as two ends of a single spectrum.

I use the term “peace operations” to refer to the full range of international military operations that may fall along this spectrum and that aim to promote peace, deliver aid, or provide security for civilians and aid workers. They range from small cease-fire monitoring forces to the most ambitious humanitarian interventions and coercive protection operations.¹² Missions deployed exclusively to evacuate foreign nationals, protect national assets, or intervene on behalf of one side in a conflict are excluded, as are civilian peace support missions. Peace operations may or may not have the consent of all parties to a conflict, and may or may not be authorized by the UN. They may be led by the UN, regional organizations, or individual states. Finally, while they may begin during a complex emergency they may also deploy shortly afterward to support a peace process, as an alternative to earlier action to shield civilians from ongoing violence.

In defining peace operations broadly, this book departs from much of the literature on peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention. Most studies of peacekeeping address questions such as when the UN chooses to deploy peacekeepers, when individual states contribute to these missions, and whether and under what conditions they are able to help build sustainable peace after war.¹³ Understandably, such studies have focused narrowly on the missions most relevant to these questions. The humanitarian intervention literature, on the other hand, generally examines only missions that aim primarily to protect civilians and that lack the target state’s consent, even though operations that offer little protection and that may have host state consent are often deployed in response to similarly severe conflicts.¹⁴ While these literatures have good reasons to limit the missions they examine, my purpose here is different and justifies casting a wider net.

Ambitions, Resources, and a Protection Typology

Studies of the military requirements for humanitarian military action emphasize that robust protection requires political goals that match civilians’ security needs, military strategies suited to achieving these goals, and sufficient resources to implement these strategies effectively. To organize and distill these guidelines into their most important elements, I break peace operations into two main components: their ambitions and their resources for civilian protection. First, a mission’s ambitions reflect what the troops are told to do and how they are to do so, as defined by the force’s goals and the military strategies it employs. In effect, these ambitions determine the extent to which troops attempt to meet civilians’ security and protection needs, or the amount of protection they are asked to provide. Second, resources determine the level of protection that soldiers are physically able to deliver, which may be either more or less than the amount their ambitions imply. They reflect the number of troops deployed, the materiel and equipment at their disposal, and intangibles such as training and morale. Because civilians’ security needs vary from conflict to conflict, the ambitions and resources needed to address them depend on the circumstances of the complex emergency. Still, research on the requirements for effective protection suggests several rules of thumb to guide our judgments on the suitability of various goals, military strategies, and resource levels in different situations.

AMBITIONS

Operational Goals: Do They Address the Threat? A peace operation’s objectives are typically laid out in its authorizing mandate, if it has one. In order to offer the most protection possible these goals must address the key threats that civilians face in a complex emergency, but all too often they prove patently insufficient.¹⁵ As Michael Walzer puts it, for example, “it isn’t enough to wait until the tyrants, the zealots, and the bigots have done their filthy work and then rush food and medicine to the ragged survivors.”¹⁶ Similarly, deploying military observers during genocide or protecting aid operations when civilians are threatened by mass killing is clearly inappropriate.¹⁷ Still, such judgments about the appropriateness of operational goals are often ad hoc, and a systematic assessment will require some consistent metrics for what constitute suitable objectives across varied conflict situations.

The concept of complex emergencies offers a useful starting point. As noted above, despite their diversity there are key similarities in the protection needs civilians consistently face in these conflicts. A secure environment for relief operations can help ensure access to food, medical care, and shelter, while direct physical protection is often necessary to prevent large-scale assaults of civilians. Given these needs, a few simple guidelines—summarized in figure 1.1—provide a foundation for assessing the goals of peace operations in these conflicts.

First, numerous missions pursue goals that simply do not address these needs. A distinguishing feature of these operations is that troops are not expected to provide security directly for anyone aside from mission personnel. Many of these forces are UN-led and aim to help negotiate, observe, or keep a peace agreement or truce. Often this means deploying after the worst of the violence. For example, the UN Observer Mission in El Salvador (ONUSAL) aimed to verify implementation of a series of peace a...

Table of contents

• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Civilian Protection and the Design of Peace Operations
• 1. Devil in the Details: Assessing Mission Design and State Policy
• 2. Political Will, Organized Hypocrisy, and Ambitions-Resources Gaps
• 3. Quantitative Evidence
• 4. France in Rwanda
• 5. The United States in Darfur
• 6. Australia in the Southwest Pacific
• Conclusions and Implications
• Appendix A: The Data
• Appendix B: Statistical Tests
• Notes
• Index