R2P's Relevance in Africa is Growing

By: Samuel M. Gebru

September 8, 2011

Dr. Mahmood Mamdani, Professor at Makerere University, Kampala, and Columbia University, New York, recently authored an opinion article entitled What does Gaddafi's fall mean for Africa? on Al Jazeera.

Dr. Mamdani's article essentially criticized the "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P), a crucial United Nations principle that sovereignty is a responsibility and not a privilege.

Following the 2001 R2P report released to the international community, the set of principles became a pivotal norm in the fight to protect civilians. The reality that Dr. Mamdani has failed to articulate is that monstrous thugs rule some African states.

Dr. Mamdani has also failed to articulate the main objectives of R2P, effectively demonizing it as a form of foreign control:

• States have a responsibility to protect their citizens from mass atrocities, including genocide and crimes against humanity.
• States that are unable to protect their own population will receive support from the international community in capacity building efforts.
• States "manifestly failing" to protect their own population from mass atrocities will become subject to the international community's efforts to broker peace, first diplomatically, and then more coercively.

R2P points that military force is only a last resort option for the international community when a state fails to protect its own population. In the case of Libya, Colonel Muammar Gadhafi was using his own air force to indiscriminately kill his citizens.

Gadhafi and his likes have failed to protect their citizens and have resorted to intentional and indiscriminate mass atrocities; nothing here warrants their continuity in power.

If R2P was around a few decades ago, African thugs like Siad Barre of Somalia, Mengistu Hailemariam of Ethiopia, Idi Amin Dada of Uganda and Charles Taylor of Liberia would have been removed much quicker.

Nowadays, leaders like Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Teodoro Obiang of Equatorial Guinea and Omar al-Bashir of Sudan will share the same fate of Muammar Gadhafi and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia. Be it through R2P or internal revolutions, such as with Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, Africa's leaders have a tendency to overstay their welcome.

Dr. Mamdani does a great job in highlighting the serious concern of growing external influence on Africa, especially on the part of powerful states. The West, quite frankly, is looking to stop Asian influence in Africa and promote the same neoliberalism that has failed in their homelands.

Africa's leaders need to become very cautious and must always put the future of Africa's people in the foreground of their discussions with external leaders—from the East and West. The fear of growing foreign influence in Africa, whether real or perceived, does not excuse Africa's leaders from the responsibility to protect their civilians, however.

The unspeakable crimes against humanity committed by many African leaders clearly violate R2P and on a moral, commonsense level they are actions that no leader should take on his own civilians regardless of what the international community or law says.

Force is no longer a sustainable way to maintain power while people are rising in masses fighting for their inalienable rights.

Samuel M. Gebru is President of the Ethiopian Global Initiative and a B.A. Political Science candidate at Concordia College. Views expressed here are his.