A Responsibility to Protect

Khmer Times
VIRAK PRUM

The Responsibility to Protect was a global commitment backed by the United Nations General Assembly in 2005. Reuters

When media outlets around the world were showing shocking picture of a Syrian child named Omran who, soaked in dirt and blood, had miraculously survived bombings in Aleppo, most of us couldn’t help feeling deeply troubled in spirit.

The child reminds us of millions of other miserable children who have been victims of armed conflicts on a daily basis. Just as children suffer, the grown-up five superpowers keep proving time and time again to be quite helpless, unable to collectively agree that saving lives ought to be the most urgent task.

Actually, the superpowers’ blatant failures have been noticeably chronic. History has taught you and me that some of them simply pretended to be blind and deaf toward the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal regime that was murdering the population in Cambodia, all because the Cold War politics forced them to behave so.

We know that politics – their politics – was at the center of everything because the same countries that continued supporting the Khmer Rouge’s legitimacy at the UN in the 1980s even after the world had confirmed about the possible genocide became the same countries that ardently demanded trials to condemn the Khmer Rouge leaders.

Why such a sudden shift in positions? Some said because the Khmer Rouge had turned their back on the UN-led electoral process. How interesting. Had the Khmer Rouge leaders duly participated in the UN-led elections back then, would those superpowers eagerly disregard the existence of the genocide then?

International politics will continue to be phony no matter what, and small countries cannot hope to be able to shape the politics of the most powerful states. But they can turn this inability into a position of strength if they begin to articulate their commitment and stick to it.

The sovereign Kingdom of Cambodia, now more than ever before, has a chance to do just that, indeed to even become a leading voice on the world stage when it comes to protecting people from harm. Building on our goodwill international contributions in securing peace, the government unequivocally declared last year that Cambodia would take steps toward appointing a focal point mechanism to advance the application of the so-called Responsibility to Protect (R2P).

Following years of discussions, the R2P concept was officially laid out in the World Summit Outcome Document in 2005, reminding the world of the urgency to address the issues of mass atrocities concerning genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing.

Of course, I am under no illusion that R2P isn’t a honeymoon topic for those behaving as guardians of the world. The liberals tend to think that laws and institutions can heal all wrongs, whereas the realists strictly put national interests first. The critical school of thought charges that R2P seems potentially counter-productive, whereas the feminists have been disappointed that R2P interventions still fall short in the protection of women and girls.

At their core, these four distinct theories seem to agree that military interventions are not the most preferable solution, while the success in micro-arms regulation and micro-disarmament is not that encouraging either.

The feminists have sufficient case studies to prove that economic sanctions actually made women even more disproportionately vulnerable. Just as the pursuit of justice, the promotion of human rights and democracy finds so much pleasure among liberals, the realists do not blindly believe that democracy is the best possible system.

Critical writers, for their part, continue to reject the idea that Western-style democracy can readily be planted on any soil. Their arguments go on and on.

Theorists can take pleasure in saying what they want, but that doesn’t necessarily change the reality on the ground.

When we reflect on Omran and countless other children who have been forced to suffer from acts of atrocities they don’t even understand, we’d realize that the fact that interventions cannot protect or rescue everyone isn’t as bad as the fact that everyone risks being killed in the absence of any interventions at all.

Cambodia, small though it is, has deep personal experience to make the biggest case for human protection in a way that no other neighboring countries can compare. This is why when the government declared in February last year our commitment toward appointing a Focal Point for the Responsibility to Protect, we felt a great sense of pride indeed – proud of the showing of leadership which no other Asean leaders had yet shown.

February 2015 was thus the moment when experience became greater than power, when strong determination defined our character.

Under the Khmer Rouge regime, although we were always hungry, we still shared whatever little food we had so that the next one could survive; when the Japanese became so poor after the war, we lovingly forgave their debts; when Africans needed assistance, we eagerly sent our troops.

We are a gracious nation, the direct descendants of the great Angkor Empire. We built the largest ancient city on earth beneath the mountain high. That’s who we are; that’s who we intend to be as a civilized nation.

All we need to do is show the world at the upcoming UN General Assembly our leadership once more in the Responsibility to Protect effort. We cannot lead the world by weapons, but we can help to govern it so that children will be protected from them.

Virak Prum, LLB, LLM, received a Ph.D. in international development from Nagoya University in Japan in 2006.