Global solidarity, it seems, is in retreat. We thought we’d established a minimal sense of international responsibility, but Europeans and Americans have caught “compassion fatigue.” And so the polls measure the resistance of public opinion to the surgical strikes proposed by President Barack Obama and supported by the French President, François Hollande; and our closest friends, the British, on whom we had counted, refused in a parliamentary vote at Westminster to punish Bashar al-Assad.
Not long ago, at the turn of the century, in the face of the horrible spectacle of children suffocating and dying in the streets of Damascus, defenders of human rights would have taken to the streets and laid siege to the Syrian embassy. Then, when confronted with the bombardment of civilian populations, people got angry and claimed a “right of intervention” against crimes committed by others elsewhere. A universal demand for action was born which forced politicians to respond.
Today, no one marches in the streets of western capitals. The war in Iraq, with its falsifications and its uncertain outcomes, looms large in everybody’s memory: Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brandishing a vial that could have contained anthrax in order to convince the United Nations of the necessity of war against Saddam Hussein; George W Bush urging a crusade against terrorism—these lies have neither been forgotten nor forgiven, even though Saddam is dead and the Kurds are building, in the north of Iraq, an oasis of peace and economic development.
The civil war in Syria has not aroused public sympathy. Enough, people say, with these entanglements in the Middle East that require sacrifices on the part of those who intervene and seem to benefit only extremists. Menaced by unemployment and fearful for their children’s futures, the majority of Europeans will no longer countenance military risks being taken. Why is it, they ask, that we seem to be permanently preoccupied with the wars and barbarities of others? Have we become global nurses tending to victims for whom we are not responsible?
Back in the late 1960s, there were a handful of us who didn’t remain inactive in the face of others’ misfortune. We were doctors and could work anywhere, across borders and in the name of a universal ethic. From Biafra to Kurdistan, if the patients called us, we came—especially if it was forbidden and often where it seemed impossible.
During the past 50 years, I have only ever gone to a war zone or famine area to take care of the sick and wounded. And if, as a doctor, I constructed first the notion of a duty to intervene and then a right to do so, this was only ever with the aim of reducing the number of civilian victims of these conflicts. We helped to ensure that these victims were recognised as the subjects of international law— the victims, and not the governments who spoke in their name.
It was a long and arduous task to get the United Nations to recognise the responsibility of the international community to care for the victims of natural disasters and conflict situations. We ran up against the same ferocious opposition as the proponents of intervention in Syria do today. In 1988, on a French initiative, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted a resolution declaring the principle of “freedom of access for organisations to victims of natural disasters and other emergency situations,” and in 1990 it endorsed the creation of “humanitarian corridors.”
Noting that the intervention of the international community almost invariably came too late, we sought to define a “responsibility to protect” (“R2P”) that imposed an obligation to act as early as possible in protection of human rights. International rescue organisations proliferated and would come to constitute a powerful interventionist lobby, a humanitarian machinery that would eventually lead to the UN’s adoption of R2P at the World Summit in 2005.
Had a combination of political and humanitarian action finally overcome nationalism, indifference and the taint of colonialism? Was international law going to triumph at last over the deniers and those who ignored the suffering of others? There were fierce debates in every case—from the Vietnamese boat people in the South China Sea to the death squads in El Salvador, from the Kurds threatened with genocide by Saddam Hussein to Rwanda, where genocide was televised, and from Lebanon, mired in eternal war, to Kosovo. Public opinion followed in our wake, and while governments dragged their feet and tried to maintain the divisions of the past, they nevertheless allowed their foreign policy to be coloured by a humanitarianism that had become an ideal for young people around the world.
It was in Libya in 2011 that, for the first time, the UN authorised a military action—in this case carried out by France and Britain—in the name of the doctrine of responsibility to protect. And now a difficult period is ahead of us. To take reprisals against the Syrian regime or not? Targeted strikes within days or the abandonment of the entire operation?
There are more fundamental questions to consider. Should we prefer a secular dictator to Islamist rebels? What will the effects of a military intervention be on the neighbouring countries? There are no good solutions in a civil war in Syria that has been accumulating atrocities for more than two years. And since there is an awful competition in excesses and outrages taking place on both sides, why favour one over the other?
Despite the misgivings of public opinion, both in France and the United States, the American and French governments remained ready to launch cruise missiles against designated military targets in Syria. And then suddenly came a proposal from Russia to place Syria’s chemical weapons under UN control. Was this in fact a last throw of the dice by the Russians and a victory for the west? The Russian gambit redounds to the credit of the US, France and the other countries which backed the use of force against Assad and were not prepared to countenance an evasion of responsibility this time.
Perhaps we should have intervened right at the beginning of the popular rebellion against Assad, at the moment when the rebels seemed to be authentic democrats preparing for yet another Arab spring? I thought that we should and I said as much at the time. But I also think that the movement of Arab peoples, after periods of retreat and despite the threats posed by Islamism, will, sooner or later, ensure the advance of democracy and a withering away of the influence of extremism. I have chosen which side I am on.
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