Unofficial transcript 

PROF. NORM CHOMSKY (UNITED STATES):  Thank you.  The discussions about R2P or its cousin, humanitarian intervention, are regularly disturbed by a skeleton in the closet -- history to the present moment, not past history.  Throughout history to the present moment, there are a few principals of international affairs that apply quite generally.  One is the maxim of Thucydides that the strong do as they wish while the weak suffer as they must. 
A corollary is what Ian Brownlie, distinguished international legal specialist, what he calls the hegemonial approach to lawmaking.  The voice of the powerful sets precedence.  
Another principal derives from Adam Smith’s account of policy-making in England.  As he put it, the principal (?) architects of policy, in his day the merchants and manufacturers, make sure that their own interests are most peculiarly attended to, however grievous the effects on others, including the people of England, but far more so those who are subject to what he calls the savage injustice of the Europeans, particularly in conquered India, Smith’s own prime concern.
A third principal is that virtually every use of force in international affairs has been justified in humanitarian terms, including the worst monsters.  Just to illustrate a standard scholarly study of humanitarian intervention, Sean Murphy (?) sites only three examples of humanitarian intervention between the Kellogg-Briand Pact and the UN Charter; Japan’s attack on Manchuria, miscellaneous invasion of Ethiopia and Hitler’s occupation of parts of Czechoslovakia all accompanied by lofty rhetoric and factual justifications.  And the basic pattern continues to the present moment.  
The historical record is worth recalling when we hear R2P or its cousin described as an emerging norm in international affairs.  In reality, it has been considered a norm as far back as we want to go.  So the founding of this country is an example.  In 1629, the Massachusetts Bay Colony was granted its charter by the King of England, stating that rescuing the natives from their bitter, pagan fate is the principal end of this plantation.  The great seal of the colony depicts and Indian saying, “Come over and help us.”  
So the English colonists were thus dedicated to their responsibility to protect as they proceeded to extirpate and exterminate the indigenous population, in their words, and for their own good, as their honored successors explained.
In 1630, John Winthrop delivered his famous sermon depicting the new nation ordained by God as a city on the hill.  That’s inspirational rhetoric that is regularly invoked to this day to justify any crime as at worst a deviation from the noble mission.
There is no difficulty adding similar examples from other great powers in their day in the sun.  The powerful are free to say that we should forget history and look forward.  For the weak, it’s not a wise choice.  
The skeleton in the closet made its appearance in the first case considered by the International Court of Justice 60 years ago, the Corfu Channel case.  The court determined, quoting that “It can only regard the alleged right of intervention as the manifestation of a policy of force such as has in the past given rise to the most serious abuses and such as cannot, whatever be the defects in international organization, find a place in international law.”
From the nature of things, intervention would be reserved for the most powerful states and might easily lead to perverting the administration of justice itself.  The same perspective informed the first-ever meeting of the South Summit of 133 states.  It convened in April 2000.  Its declaration surely with the bombing of Serbia in mind, rejected what it called the so-called right of humanitarian intervention which has no legal basis in the United Nations charter for the general principles of international law.
The wording has been repeated since, among others by the ministerial meeting of the non-aligned movement in Malaysia in 2006, again representing the traditional victims.  The same conclusion was drawn in 2004 by the high-level UN panel on threats, challenges and change.  The panel adopted the view of the ICJ and the non-aligned movement, concluding that Article 51 needs neither extension nor restriction of its long understood scope.
The panel added that for those inpatient with such a response, the answer must be that in a world full of perceived potential threats, the risk to the global order and the norm of non-intervention on which it continues to be based is simply too great for the legality of unilateral preventive action to be accepted.  Allowing one to act is to allow all, which is, of course, unthinkable.  
The same position -- same basic position -- was adopted by the World Summit in 2005.  The Summit also asserted the willingness to take collective action through the Security Council in accordance with the charter should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities are failing -- manifestly failing to protect their populations from serious crimes.
Now that phrase sharpens the wording of Article 42 at most in clarifying the conditions for the Security Council to resort to force, and it keeps the skeleton in the closet.  If -- and it’s a large if -- we can regard the Security Council as a neutral arbiter not subject to the maxims of Thucydides and Adam Smith come back to that.
There have been some departures from the Corfu Channel restriction and its descendants.  The constitutive act of the African Union asserts the right of the Union to intervene in a member state in respect of grave circumstances.  Now that differs crucially from, the Charter of the Organization of American States which bars intervention from any reason whatever in the internal or external affairs of any other state.  
The reasons for the difference are clear.  The OAS charter seeks to deter intervention by the colossus of the North and, of course, has failed to do so up to the present.  But after the collapse of the Apartheid states, the African Union faced no comparable problem.  Now if the African Union doctrine were to extend to the OAS or NATO, then its members would be entitled to intervene within their own alliance.  Now that idea yields interesting and revealing conclusions, which I don’t have time to go into.  But they would be inoperative in any event thanks to the maxim of Thucydides.  
Now there is a high-level proposal to extend R2P beyond the African Union doctrine.  It’s in the report of the International Commission, which advocates action within area of jurisdiction by regional or subregional organizations under chapter eight of the charter.  That skeleton in the closet rattles rather loudly at this point.
The powerful unilaterally declare their area of jurisdiction.  So for NATO, it includes the Balkans and now Afghanistan and beyond.  The Secretary General, Jaap de Hoop Sheffer, informed a NATO meeting in June 2007, quoting him, that “NATO troops have to guard pipelines that transport oil and gas that is directed for the west and more generally have to protect sea routes used by tankers and other crucial infrastructure of the energy system.”
The expansive rights accorded by the International Commission are restricted to the powerful, radically violating the principals of Corfu Channel and its descendants and opening the door for potential use of R2P as a weapon for imperial intervention at will.
The Corfu Channel principal, which runs right through the World Summit, provides considerable insight into the selectivity and timing of R2P and its cousin.  The alleged normative revolution, as it’s described, took place in the 1990s immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had in earlier years provided an automatic pretext for intervention, however frail the argument.
The Bush administration -- senior Bush administration -- reacted to the fall of the Berlin Wall with an official exposition of Washington’s new course.  In brief, everything will stay the same, but with no pretext, so we still need a huge military system.  Look for a new reason -- what they called the technological sophistication of Third World powers.  We have to maintain the defense industrial base.  It’s a euphemism for state-supported high-tech industry.  We must maintain intervention forces directed at the Middle East energy-rich regions where -- I’m quoting -- “Where the threats to our interests that required military intervention could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door, contrary to decades of pretense.”  So new pretexts for intervention were needed and the normative revolution soon took place.  
The national interpretation of the timing gained support from the selectivity of application of R2P and its cousin.  There was, of course, no thought of applying the principal to the Iraq sanctions administered by the Security Council, condemned as genocidal by the two directors of the oil for food program, the respected international diplomats, Dennis Halliday and Hanz Von Sponeck, both of whom resigned because of their genocidal character.  
Van Sponeck’s detailed study of the horrendous impact of the sanctions has been under a virtual ban in the US and the UK, the primary agents of the programs, though they were administered by the Security Council.  There is no thought today of protection of the people of Gaza.  That’s another UN responsibility, along with the rest of the protected population under the Geneva Conventions, also denied fundamental human rights.  
In these and numerous other cases, the selectivity conforms with considerable precision to the maxim of Thucydides and the expectation of the ICJ 60 years ago.  
Now perhaps the most striking illustration of the radical selectivity was in 1999 when NATO bombed Serbia.  That’s an attack featured in western discourse as the jewel in the crown of the normative revolution, the emerging norm.  That was when the US was at the height of its glory and leading the enlightened states -- leading the enlightened states -- the leadership in the hands of an idealistic new world bent on ending inhumanity everywhere, to cite just a few of the flood of accolades by western intellectuals.
There are a few difficulties confronting this flattering self image.  One problem is that the traditional victims of western intervention vigorously objected.  I have already quoted the stand of the non-aligned movement.  Nelson Mandela was particularly harsh in his condemnation.  Well, that problem was easily overcome.  The views of the unworthy are easily ignored, as indeed they were.
Furthermore, the bombing plainly violated the UN charter.  That problem too was easily put to rest.  As the Goldstone Commission determined, the bombing was illegal but legitimate.  They reached that conclusion by reversing the chronology of bombing and atrocities, which leads to a third problem, the facts, which happen to be very richly documented in this case from impeccable western sources. 
And what they reveal is unequivocal.  The NATO bombing did not end the atrocities but rather precipitated by far the worst of them as had been anticipated by the NATO command and the White House.  The conclusions that are so richly documented by the western records are reinforced by the indictment of Milosevic, issued by the international tribunal at the height of the bombing.
With a single exception, the crimes charged followed the bombing.  And we can be confident that the one pre-bombing charge, the Ra

a (?) massacre, was of little principal concern to the US and Britain, if only because at the very same time they were not only condoning but supporting -- actively supporting much more serious crimes in East Timor where the background of atrocities was i
ncomparably more grotesque than anything that had happened in the Balkans.  
This, incidentally, is only one of many examples right at that time.  Well, this problem too was overcome quite simply by virtual suppression of the ample record.
The case of East Timor is particularly instructive.  Just to add a personal note, I testified about it at the fourth committee in 1978 when atrocities reached the level -- I’m quoting -- “of extermination as a crime against humanity committed against the East Timorese population.”  That’s the words of the later UN-sponsored Truth (?) commission.  
And 1978 was also the year in which Britain and France joined the United States in support extermination as a crime against humanity and continued to do so right through 1999 as atrocities sharply mounted once again.
After the final paroxysm of state terror in September 1999, which destroyed most of what remained of the country, National Security Advisor Sandy Berger said that the United States would continue its support of the aggressors, explaining that, “I don’t think anybody ever articulated a doctrine which said we ought to intervene whenever there is a humanitarian problem.”  So R2P vanished in the standard way.
To end the atrocities in this case would not have required any action, not bombing, not sanctions, any other act beyond withdraw of participation.  And that was demonstrated shortly after Berger’s reaffirmation of US policy, when under strong domestic and international pressure, President Clinton formally ended US participation.  The invaders immediately withdrew and a UN peacekeeping force was able to enter facing no army.  That could have been done at any time in the preceding quarter century.
Astonishingly, this horrendous story has since been reinterpreted as a vindication of R2P.  It’s a reaction so shameful that words fail.
We mentioned that the consensus of the World Summit adheres to the Corfu principal and its descendants only if we assume that the Security Council is a neutral arbiter.  It plainly is not.  The Council is controlled by its five permanent members and they’re far from equal in operative authority.  One indication of the difference is the record of vetoes.  That’s the most extreme form of violation of a Security Council resolution.
Now the relevant period is from the mid-1960s when decolonization and recovery from wartime destruction gave the UN at least some standing as representative of world opinion.  Since that time, the US is far in the lead of vetoes.  Britain is second.  No one else is even close.  
In the past quarter century, China and France have vetoed 3 resolutions, Russia 4, the United Kingdom 10 and the United States 43, including even resolutions calling on all states to observe international law.  This skeleton in the closet nods in recognition as the maxim of Thucydides strikes again.  
Now American public opinion brings up a further consideration.  The maxims that -- actually one way to mitigate this defect in the World Summit consensus -- and it’s a serious one -- would be to eliminate the veto.  That’s incidentally in accord with the will of the majority of Americans.  They believe that the United States should follow the will of the majority and that the UN, not the United States, should take the lead in international crises.  But that’s not on the political agenda because we run up again, against Adam Smith’s maxim, which ensures that such heresies are unthinkable, as much so as applying R2P to those who desperately need protection but are not on the favored list of the powerful.
Well, American public opinion brings up an important consideration.  The maxims that largely guide international affairs and practice are not graven in stone.  In fact, they have become considerably less harsh over the years as a result of the civilizing effect of popular movements.  For that continuing and essential project, R2P can be a valuable tool, much as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is, even though states do not adhere to the UD and some formally reject much of it.  Nonetheless, it serves 
as an ideal that activists can appeal to in educational and organizational efforts often effectively.  And my suspicion is that a major contribution of the discussion of R2P may turn out to be rather similar.  Thanks.  








Responsibility to Protect Panel
Prof. Norm Chomsky (United States) 
General Assembly – 07-23-09 AM	1