Unofficial transcript 

PROF. JEAN BRICMONT (BELGIUM):  Thank you Mr. Chairman.  Excellencies and distinguished delegates, I thank the President of the General Assembly for the opportunity to address this assembly.  I will try to incorporate in my talk a reply to the previous ones, so it changes a bit what I prepared.
My talk may shock some of you, for which I apologize in advance, because I want to challenge some of the intellectual assumptions lying under the whole rhetoric of the R2P.  In a nutshell, my thesis will be -- even though it looks paradoxical, let’s listen to it -- my thesis will be that the main obstacle to the implementation of a genuine and acceptable R2P are precisely the policies and latitudes of the countries that are most enthusiastic for R2P, mainly the western countries, and in particular the United States.
During the past decade, the world has looked on helplessly as innocent civilians were murdered by American bombs in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.  It has been a helpless bystander of the murderous Israeli onslaught on Lebanon and Gaza.  Previously, we have seen millions of people perish under American fire power in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, and many of us have died in American proxy wars in Central America or Southern Africa.  In the name of those victims, shall we say, “Never again.  From now on the world, the international community will protect you.”  
Our humanitarian response is yes, we want to protect all victims.  But how and with which forces?  How are the weak ever going to be protected from the strong?  The answer to this question must be solved not just in humanitarian and legal terms, but first of all in political ones.  The protection of the weak always depends on limitations of the power of the strong.  The rule of law is such a limitation, so long as it is based on the principal of equality of all before the law.  Achieving that requires clear-headed pursuit of idealistic principals accompanied by realistic assessment of the existing relationship of forces.
Before discussing in particular the R2P, let me stress that what is at issue are not these diplomatic or preventive aspects, but the military part of the so-called ... [00:03:31] decisive response and the challenge that it represents for national sovereignty.  
R2P is an ambiguous doctrine.  On the one hand, it is being sold to the United Nations as something essentially different from the right of humanitarian intervention; the notion that was developed in the west after the 1970s after the collapse of the colonial empires and the defeat of the United States in Indochina.  This ideology has been relying on the human tragedies of the newly colonized countries to end the moral justification to the failed policies of intervention and control by the western powers over the rest of the world.
Awareness of this fact exists in most of the world.  The right of humanitarian intervention has been universally rejected by the south, as Professor Chomsky has illustrated in several meetings.  The R2P is an attempt to fit this rejected right into the framework of the UN charter so as to make it appear acceptable by stressing that military actions are to be the last resort and must be approved by the Security Council.
But then there is nothing really legally new in ... [00:04:40] and I refer you to the concept made to the office of the president of the General Assembly from a prior discussion of the legal aspect of the problem.
On the other hand, R2P has been sold to public opinion in the west as a new norm in international relation, one that authorizes military inventions on humanitarian grounds.  Just to give you one example, when President Obama at the recent G8 meeting stressed the importance of national sovereignty, the influential French newspaper La Monde (?) called it a step backward since R2P has been accepted.
However, in a post-World II history that includes the Indochina wars, the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, of Panama, even of tiny Grenada, as well as the bombing of Yugoslavia, Libya and various other countries, it is terribly credible to maintain that it is international law and respect for national sovereignty that prevented the United States from stopping genocide.  If the US had had the means and the desire to intervene in Rwanda, it would have done so, and no international law would have prevented that.
If a new norm is introduced within the context of the current relationship of political and military forces, it will not save anyone anywhere unless the United States is free to intervene from its own perspective.  Moreover, it is beyond belief that the supporters of R2P speak of an obligation to reconstruct after a military intervention.  How much money exactly did the United States pay as reparations -- and insist on the world reparations for the devastation it inflicted on Indochina or in Iraq or that was inflicted on Lebanon and Gaza by a power it notoriously arms and subsidizes, or to Nicaragua as President D’Escoto has just reminded us.  Why expect R2P to force the powerful to pay for what they destroy if they do not do so under current legal arrangements?
If it is true that the 21st Century needs a new United Nations, it does not need one that legitimize such interventions by novel arguments, but one that gives at least moral support to those who try to construct a world less dominated by the United States and its allies.  The very starting point of the United Nations was to save mankind from the scourge of war with references to the two world wars.  This was done precisely by strict respect by national sovereignty in order to prevent hate bias from intervening military against weaker ones regardless of the pretext.  
The wars waged by the United States and NATO show that despite some significant accomplishment, the United Nations has not yet fully achieved its primary goal.  The United Nations need to pursue its effort to achieve its founding purpose before setting a new, supposedly humanitarian priority which may in reality be used by the great powers to justify their own future wars by undermining the principal of national sovereignty.
When we are told not to mess up -- is there is a new Rwanda, I could ask, “Are we not going to mess up if there is a new Vietnam or a new Iraq?”  When NATO exercises its own self-proclaimed right to intervene in Kosovo, when diplomatic efforts were far from being exhausted -- and I could give you examples if I have more time -- it was praised by the western media.  
When Russia exercised what it regarded as its R2P in South Ossetia [?] it was uniformly condemned in the same Western media.  When Vietnam intervened in Cambodia or India in what is now Bangladesh, the actions were also heartily condemned in the west.  This indicates that western governments, media and NGOs, calling themselves the international community, may judge the responsibility for human tragedy quite differently depending on whether it occurs in a country where the west, for whatever reason, is tied to the government or in a friendly state.  
The United States in particular will try to pressure the United Nations into endorsing its own interpretation.  The United States may not always choose to intervene, but it may nevertheless use non-intervention to denounce the United Nations as ineffective and to suggest that it should be replaced by NATO as international arbiter.  
National sovereignty is sometimes stigmatized by promotors who maintain intervention or of R2P as a license to kill.  We need to remind ourselves why national sovereignty should be defended against such stigmatizations.  Again, I don’t want to defend it as an abstract principal, as an absolute principal, but as a principal given the present relationship of forces in the world.
First of all, national sovereignty is a partial protection of weak stages against strong ones.  Nobody expects Bangladesh to interfere in the internal affairs of the United States or force it to reduce its CO2 emissions.  Because of the catastrophic human conditions that the latter may have on Bangladesh, the interference is always unilateral.
US interference in the internal affairs of other states is multifaceted but constant and always violates the spirit and often the letter of the UN charter.  Despite claims to be had -- claims to act on behalf of principals of just freedom and democracy, US intervention has repeatedly had disastrous consequences in human terms.  Not only the millions of deaths caused by direct and indirect wars that I mentioned before, but also the lost opportunities, the killing of hope, as one might say, for hundreds of millions of people in the world who might have benefitted from progressive social policies initiated by people like Arbens (?) in Guatemala, Gular (?) in Brazil, Alliendi (?) in Chile, Numumbai in the Congo, Musadek in Iran, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, or President Chavez now in Venezuela, who have been systematically subverted, overthrown or killed with full western support.
But that is not all.  Every action by the United States creates a reaction.  Deployment of an anti-missile shield produces more missiles, not less.  Bombing civilians, whether deliberately or so-called collateral damage, produces more armed resistance, not less.  Trying to overthrow or subvert governments produces more internal repression, not less.  Encouraging succession of minorities by giving them the often false impression that the sole superpower will come to the rescue in case they’re repressed leads to more violence, hatred and death, not less.
Surrounding a country with military bases produces more defense spending by that country, not less.  The possession of nuclear weapons by Israel encourages other states of the Middle East to acquire such weapons.
To take the most extreme example, to which North America Chomsky has referred -- has mentioned, an example which is a favorite example of the ... [?] [00:11:35] cited by the advocates of R2P, it is most unlikely that the Khmer Rouge would ever have taken power in Cambodia without a massive secret bombing following by US-engineered regime change that left that unfortunate country totally disrupted and destabilized.
The ideology of humanitarian intervention is part of a long history of western attitudes toward the rest of the world.  When western colonialists landed on the shores of the Americas, Africa or Eastern Asia, they were shocked by what we would now call violations of human rights and which they call barbaric morays.  Human sacrifices, cannibalism, women forced to bind their feet.  Time and again, such indignation, sincere or calculating, has been used to justify or to cover up the crimes of the western powers, the slave trade, the extermination of the indigenous people and the systematic stealing of land and resources.
This attitude of righteous indignation continues to this day and it’s at the root of the claim that the west has a right to intervene or a right to protect while turning a blind eye to oppressive regimes considered our friends, to endless militarization and rules and to massive exploitation of labor and resources.  The learn -- the west should learn from its past history.  What would that mean completely?
Well, first of all, guaranteeing the strict respect for international law on the part of western powers, implementing UN resolutions concerning Israel, dismantling the worldwide US empire of bases as well as NATO, seizing all threats concerning the unilateral use of force, lifting natural sanctions, in particular the embargo against Cuba, stopping all interference in the internal affairs of other states, in particular all operations of so-called democratic promotion, ... [?] [00:13:23] evolution and the exploitation of the politics of minorities.
Next, we could use overblown military budgets.  Yes, overblown.  Don’t forget that 70% of military spending in the world is in NATO countries.  These overblown budgets could be used to implement a form of global Keynesianism.  Instead of demanding balanced budgets in the developing world, we should use the resources wasted on our military to finance massive investments in education, healthcare and development.  
If this sounds utopian, it is not more so than the belief that a stable world will emerge from the re-occurrent [sic] war on terror is being carried out.  
Defenders of R2P may argue that what I say is besides the point or needlessly politicizes the issue, since according to them it is the international community and not the west that will intervene with, moreover, the approval of the Security Council.  But in reality, and that’s the main point, there is no such thing as a genuine international community.  NATO’s intervention in Kosovo was not approved by Russia and Russian in South Ossetia was condemned by the west.  There would have been no Security Council approval for either intervention.  
Presently, the African Union rejected the indictment by the international criminal court of the president of Sudan.  Any system of international justice or police, whether it is R2P or the ICC, needs a relationship of equality and trust.  Today, there is no equality and no trust between west and east, between north and south, largely as a result of past US policies.
If you want some version of R2P to work in the future, we need first to build a relationship of quality and trust, and what I said before goes to the heart of the matter.  The world can become more secure only if it becomes first more just.  
The promotors of R2P present it as a beginning of a new era, but in fact, it is the end of an old one.  From interventionist viewpoint, the R2P backtracks with respect to the old right of humanitarian intervention, at least in words, and that all hides what’s itself a step back from traditional colonialism.  
The major social transformation of the 20th Century has been decolonization.  It continues today in the elaboration of a genuinely democratic world, one where the sun will have set on the US empire, just as it did on the utopian ones.  There is some indication that President Obama understands this reality.  It is something to be hoped that his action will match his words.
I will end with a message for the representative and for the populations of the global south.  The viewpoint expressed here are shared by millions of people in the west.  It is unfortunately not reflected in our media.  Millions of people, including American citizens, project war as a means to settle international disputes and strongly oppose the blind support of their country for Israeli apartheid.  They adhere to the goals of the non-aligned movement of international cooperation within the strict respect for national sovereignty and equality of all peoples.  They risk being denounced in the media of their home countries as being anti-western, anti-American or anti-Semitic.  Yet they are the ones who by opening their minds to the aspiration of the rest of mankind carry on what is generally valued in the western humanist tradition.  
Thank you. 









Responsibility to Protect Panel
Prof. Jean Bricmont (Belgium)
General Assembly – 07-23-09 AM		1