A throwback to the age of monsters

IT was in 2005 that the United Nations, celebrating its 60th anniversary, adopted, by consensus, a resolution on the principle of Responsibility to Protect (R2P). The initiative was a response to the international community’s failures to prevent the genocides in Rwanda and the massacre at Srebrenica in the 1990s. The principle established that sovereignty is not absolute and that states have a primary responsibility to protect populations everywhere from mass atrocity crimes: genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.

If a state failed in this responsibility, the international community had the duty to take collective action. Despite its adoption by consensus, there were fears among developing countries that this principle would be used selectively to intervene in their domestic affairs. R2P was used by the West to intervene with military force against Muammar Gaddafi in Libya in 2011, ostensibly to prevent large-scale violence against those opposing the regime. The assumption was that a regime change would lead to a stable and humane political dispensation. Instead, it spawned a violent civil war that still rages on, fuelled by external forces.

The problem with such interventions is that the “morning after” is never part of the intervention. The violence continues, perpetrated by a different set of actors. Libya gave R2P a bad name. While it has been invoked in several UN resolutions since then, it has not resulted in coercive intervention sanctioned by the UN Security Council.

There have been recent instances of horrific violence against, and displacement of, innocent men, women and children. Think of civil wars in Ethiopia, Sudan and the Central African Republic and now the genocide in Gaza — there has been unprecedented and barbaric violence against civilians. There may be pockets of popular outrage and reluctant condemnation by some governments, but it is difficult to avoid the feeling that we are indeed in an era ominously not unlike the turbulent interregnum between the two World Wars (1918-39), described thus by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

Hitler’s Holocaust against the Jews was only the most extreme example of monstrosity. There were several others often cloaked in patriotic impunity.

Far from accepting the internationalist obligation to protect populations against indiscriminate violence and genocide, even the readiness to call the perpetrators to account is half-hearted and selective. It is the US political shield and unstinting economic and military support which has enabled Israel to act with impunity. A reverse holocaust is taking place in Palestinian lands and the conscience of the world is barely shaken. The pervasive outrage one may have expected has failed to manifest itself and this has implications far beyond the current instances. Is geopolitics in a transitional era enabling another “time of monsters”?

There have been several violent conflicts and immense human suffering in the post Second World War period. Recall the indiscriminate violence unleashed upon the people of Vietnam in the US-led war in Indochina. Millions died of starvation and utter deprivation in Mao’s pursuit of a Great Leap Forward in China (1959-63). Apartheid in South Africa took its own horrific toll until it came to an end in 1994. The birth of Bangladesh in 1971 occurred in the wake of violent suppression and genocide by Pakistani forces against their compatriots in then East Pakistan.

What distinguishes the present are the muted voices and the absence of people’s and civil society protest movements, which could confront the perpetrators of violence. There are courageous individuals and committed groups who do keep the flame of dissent alive and call the powerful to account. But the State everywhere is shrinking the space for conscience-keepers.

The dawn of the nuclear age in 1945 brought with it the danger of human extinction. This mobilised both states and civil society across the world to promote nuclear disarmament and oppose doctrines of deterrence based on the dystopian concept of Mutually Assured Destruction. In the 1980s, there was a worldwide Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and non-nuclear weapon states were very active and vocal in demanding a world free of nuclear weapons.

While the world is fortunate that it has not been incinerated so far in a nuclear Armageddon, the threat from nuclear weapons has only increased, intertwined as it is with advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and remote sensing and targeting. There is little popular concern and the UN is unable to go beyond rhetorical flourishes. Silicon Valley icons talk glibly about the ‘singularity’ that AI will achieve in our lifetime, surpassing and dominating humanity. If what makes us human — our emotions, our creativity and unique aesthetic sense — is replicable in machines, then defences against crimes against humanity would become feeble and eventually vanish. That’s because having a moral centre is uniquely human.

In a landscape of competing states, it is unlikely that there will be a renewed commitment to multilateral processes overseen by empowered institutions of global governance. There is a surfeit of nationalist chest-thumping and no sense of international solidarity without which multilateralism cannot work.

It is a paradox that precisely at a time when the salience of cross-border and global challenges, such as climate change, pandemics and cyber security, has increased, the readiness to collaborate has diminished. The world has leaders galore. It has no statesmen who go beyond the nation to embrace humanity, no country that stands for something more than itself.

What is the answer to this dilemma? It can only come from the people of the world whose present and future are being threatened by a descent into another “age of monsters”, whose end is too horrifying to contemplate. There are green shoots of reason and occasional flashes of wisdom that should make one hopeful. If these coalesce together into a powerful global movement for peace and shared humanity, the age of monsters will recede from this blighted century of ours.

Shyam Saran is former Foreign Secretary.