iR2P

Ahuna Eziakonwa, UN OCHA, speaking at the seminar.

Through the African Union’s Constitutive Act of 2000, African leaders recognised the responsibility of the AU to intervene in the internal affairs of its member states to protect citizens during humanitarian crises. It is worth remembering that many prominent Africans have contributed to developing the responsibility to protect principle.

(The following extracts are taken from Africa’s Responsibility to Protect (pdf) a report of a seminar held in Capetown in November 2007):

Tanzanian former OAU Secretary-General and Chief African Union mediator in Darfur, Salim Ahmed Salim, said in 1998:

“We should talk about the need for accountability of governments and of their national and international responsibilities. In the process, we shall be redefining sovereignty.”

Egyptian UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali argued forcefully for humanitarian intervention in Somalia, Liberia, and Burundi; and castigated western powers for focusing disproportionate attention on rich mens wars in the Balkans while neglecting Africa’s more numerous conflicts.

His Ghanaian successor, Kofi Annan, was the most vociferous prophet of humanitarian intervention in recent times. As Annan noted in 1999:

“States are now widely understood to be instruments at the service of their peoples, and not vice-versa. Nothing in the UN charter precludes a recognition that there are rights beyond borders.”

Sudanese scholar Francis Deng, the current UN Special Adviser for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities, along with other colleagues, coined the idea of sovereignty as responsibility in 1996. He sought to operationalise the idea and to persuade African governments to protect populations in danger within the continent’s changing post-Cold War architecture. Deng argued that in situations of armed conflicts, countries are often so divided on fundamental issues of sovereignty and legitimacy that the validity of sovereignty must be judged by the views of the population rather than those of governments or warlords.

Finally, at the OAU summit in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, in 1998, Nelson Mandela told his fellow leaders:

“Africa has a right and a duty to intervene to root out tyranny –we must all accept that we cannot abuse the concept of national sovereignty to deny the rest of the continent the right and duty to intervene when behind those sovereign boundaries, people are being slaughtered to protect tyranny.”