ASEAN's Responsibility to Protect?

Amitav Acharya

The French Foreign Minister, Bernard Kouchner, who co-founded the humanitarian group Doctors without Borders, has stirred controversy by suggesting that the UN should invoke its responsibility to protect principle to force international humanitarian assistance to the victims of Nargis which struck Myanmar on 2 May 2008. Some have argued that the R2P in its “original” formulation does not apply to Myanmar, because its was meant to respond to the kind of ethnic cleansing of the kind that occurred in Somalia, Rwanda and Burundi, Bosnia and Kosovo. It raised the bar of humanitarian intervention high, excluding political reasons (i.e. to effect regime change), or rescuing the civilian nationals of other countries stranded in another in the event of conflict. It does not make humanitarian assistance obligatory when natural disasters strike.

On the other hand, the main source of the R2P doctrine, the report of the International Commission on Humanitarian Intervention and State Sovereignty, did mention the need for international action in the event of “serious and irreparable harm” to human beings by a crisis or large-scale “large-scale” loss of life. A flexible interpretation, as befits a norm which is not a legal doctrine, would certainly justify international action on Myanmar.

ASEAN does not need to quibble about the finer points of the responsibility to protect principle to take serious and decisive action to respond to the tragedy in Myanmar. No one in ASEAN disputes the scale of this human tragedy. No one also disputes (although some ASEAN members may be shy to say so for the fear of offending Myanmar’s government) the fact that the government of Myanmar might have worsened the crisis by refusing to accept humanitarian assistance offered to it by the international community. No reasonable person can doubt that this might have cost thousands of lives and put more at risk. Hence can ASEAN be a bystander?

There are two things AESAN must do collectively and urgently. The first is to do its best to persuade the Myanmar government to accept aid from the international community, including the US, French and India, which have naval forces on the standby ready to move in a matter of hours.

If this fails, ASEAN should offer to act as a conduit of international aid by mobilizing its own capabilities and assets which are not inconsequential. Not so long ago, Thailand had justified its purchase of a helicopter carrier by saying that it would be used for humanitarian aid. And Singapore’s considerable capacity for humanitarian aid was demonstrated in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean Tsunami.

While ASEAN has a “responsibility to assist”, Myanmar has a “responsibility to accept”. The latter has refused to accept Western aid because of perceived political risks to its regime. But it should have less hesitation from accepting aid from ASEAN, which would never conspire against the regime.

ASEAN may not have a Good Samaritan Law of its own, so failure to act would not bring about punishment of the kind that the Seinfeld foursome (in the finale of the famous American sitcom of the 1990s) received for failing to come to the aid of the victim of a carjacking. But the loss of respect and the ridicule of the international community that its failure to act would bring about would be a more severe punishment for a regional group whose standing has already been challenged by a series of setbacks over Myanmar.