Archive for 2011
Posted on: February 22nd, 2011 by Ernie Regehr
By all accounts a “mass atrocity event”[i] is unfolding in Libya. There is less certainty as to whether the international community will find the means to respond.
A group of NGOs under the leadership of UN Watch has issued an urgent appeal (see endnote for a link to full statement)[ii] to world leaders for international intervention in Libya: “We urge you to mobilize the United Nations and the international community to take immediate action to halt the mass atrocities now being perpetrated by the Libyan government against its own people. The inexcusable silence cannot continue.”
The NGOs describe a grim picture: “Snipers are shooting peaceful protesters. Artillery and helicopter gunships have been used against crowds of demonstrators. Thugs armed with hammers and swords attacked families in their homes. Hospital officials report numerous victims shot in the head and chest, and one struck on the head by an anti-aircraft missile. Tanks are reported to be on the streets and crushing innocent bystanders. Witnesses report that mercenaries are shooting indiscriminately from helicopters and from the top of roofs. Women and children were seen jumping off Giuliana Bridge in Benghazi to escape. Many of them were killed by the impact of hitting the water, while others were drowned. The Libyan regime is seeking to hide all of these crimes by shutting off contact with the outside world. Foreign journalists have been refused entry. Internet and phone lines have been cut or disrupted.”
They describe conditions and events that they say are “systematic violations” of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as well as “crimes against humanity” as defined by the Explanatory Memorandum to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. They refer to the Responsibility to Protect commitment made by the World Summit in 2005: “Because the Libyan authorities are manifestly failing to protect their population from crimes against humanity, should peaceful means be inadequate, member states are obliged to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council, in accordance with the UN Charter, including Chapter VII.”
There have been several other calls for limited intervention to enforce a no-fly zone. Such a zone would be designed to end airborne attacks on civilians, and also to “prevent mercenaries and weapons from being shipped in.”[iii] The Libyan Ambassador, at least one of them, joined the call – referring to “genocide.”[iv] Enforcement forces mentioned include NATO and the Egyptian Air Force.
In his Foreign Affairs blog, Marc Lynch also calls for enforcement of a non-fly zone:[v] “This is not a peaceful democracy protest movement which the United States can best help by pressuring allied regimes from above, pushing for long-term and meaningful reform, and persuading the military to refrain from violence. It’s gone well beyond that already, and this time I find myself on the side of those demanding more forceful action before it’s too late.”
In a strong appeal issued before the current Libyan crisis, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called in general for “timely and decisive” responses. “How many children,” he asked, are in places of peril today and asking: “Is the world listening? Will help arrive in time? Who will be there for me and my family?”[vi]
Who, indeed?
Later on Feb 22, two additional statements were issued.
Francis Deng and Edward Luck, the UN Secretary-General’s advisers respectively on genocide the responsibility to protect, issued a statement which said in part: “We remind national authorities in Libya, as well as in other countries facing large-scale popular protests, that the heads of State and Government at the 2005 World Summit pledged to protect populations by preventing acts of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity, as well as their incitement. We join Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in urging all parties to exercise utmost restraint and to seek peaceful means of resolving their political differences.”[1]
The UN human rights chief, Navi Pillay, also called for an immediate end to the human rights violations in Libya and for an independent international investigation. “The callousness with which Libyan authorities and their hired guns are reportedly shooting live rounds of ammunition at peaceful protestors is unconscionable. I am extremely worried that lives are being lost even as I speak,” Pillay said. She referred to the reported use of machine guns, snipers and military planes against demonstrators, calling such acts brazen violations of international law. “The state has an obligation to protect the rights to life, liberty and security,” she said. “Protection of civilians should always be the paramount consideration in maintaining order and the rule of law.”[2]
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eregehr@uwaterloo.ca
Notes
[i] The term is used by Mark Leon Goldberg, “The Perils of a ‘No Fly Zone’ for Libya,” 21 February 2011. http://www.undispatch.com/the-perils-of-a-no-fly-zone-for-libya. A “mass atrocity” is usually defined as a minimum of 5,000 civilians killed intentionally. The Stanley Foundation, “Mass Atrocities and Armed Conflict: Links, Distinctions, and Implications for the Responsibility to Prevent, appendices to, Alex J. Bellamy, “Mass Atrocities and Armed Conflict: Links, Distinctions, and Implications for the Responsibility to Prevent,” Policy Analysis Brief, The Stanley Foundation, February 2011. http://www.stanleyfoundation.org/publications/pab/BellmayAppendices22011.pdf.
[ii] UN Watch, 20 February 2011. http://blog.unwatch.org/index.php/2011/02/20/urgent-ngo-appeal-to-world-leaders-to-prevent-atrocities-in-libya/.
[iii] “Calls for Libya ‘no-fly zone’,” AFROL News, 21 February 2011. http://www.afrol.com/articles/37390.
[iv] “Libyan Envoy to Ask UN Security Council to Impose No-Fly Zone,” Bloomberg, 22 February 2011. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-22/libyan-envoy-to-ask-un-security-council-to-impose-no-fly-zone.html.
[v] Marc Lynch, “Intervening in the Libyan tragedy,” Foreign Policy, 21 February 2011. http://lynch.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/02/21/the_libyan_horror.
[vi] “Secretary-General sets out broad agenda for strengthening human protection,” UN News Centre, 2 February 2011. http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=37454&Cr=responsibility+to+protect&Cr1=#.
[1] Statement by the UN Secretary–General’s Special Advisers on the Prevention of Genocide and the Responsibility to Protect on the situation in Libya, 22 February 2011. http://responsibilitytoprotect.org/UN_Secretary-General’s_Special_Advisers_on_the_Prevention_of_Genocide_and_the_Responsibility_to_Protect_on_the_Situation_in_Libya].pdf.
[2] “Pillay calls for international inquiry into Libyan violence and justice for victims,” 22 February 2011, Office of the High Commissioner of Human rights. http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/Media.aspx?IsMediaPage=true.
Posted on: February 14th, 2011 by Ernie Regehr
It seems impertinent, so soon after the extraordinary unity displayed through the independence referendum, to ask whether South Sudan is likely to face renewed armed conflict. Unfortunately, the question is both appropriate and timely. The recent clashes in Jonglei point to conditions for war that are prominently present and to prevention strategies that are urgently needed.
The roots of war of are myriad and context specific. Last week’s fighting in Jonglei state involved a complex set of personal and public factors specific to that north-eastern area of South Sudan, but it also reflects a country structured for more of the same.
The renewal of ongoing armed conflict is certainly not inevitable, but a wealth of research data correlates armed conflict with certain structural realities in South Sudan. When the following conditions are present, war tends to follow:
- Intergroup competition and conflict;
- Deeply felt political, economic, and social grievances;
- The capacity to take up arms;
- The absence of trusted mechanisms for national decision-making and mediating political conflict.[i]
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All of these conditions are present in abundance in South Sudan.
First, intergroup suspicion and conflict are definitely present now, as they have been historically.[ii] To say that ethnic conflict is present is, however, not to say that ethnic enmity is the reason. It is to recognize, rather, that ethnic and regional divisions (sometimes manifested in conflicts between tribal groups, sometimes within tribal groups and between clans) have become the focus of conflict even though the roots of conflict are elsewhere – for example, in scarce resources and the absence of public institutions to mediate disputes. There is a danger of conflating the symptom of tribal conflict with its external causes,[iii] but it is present[iv] and is one important predictor of armed conflict.
Relations between the Dinka and Nuer communities were deeply fractured, and led to a number of schisms, throughout the South’s decades-long war with Khartoum. And the same fracture is present in the clashes between a break-away militia led by George Athor, a former commander in the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) and the SPLA itself in Jonglei, killing more than 100 people, more than a third of them civilians, over two days of fighting last week.
Second, that there are deeply felt political, economic, and social grievances in South Sudan is hardly news. In the most immediate sense South Sudan faces a humanitarian crisis, as was confirmed in the most recent report of the UN Secretary-General on the situation there: “While good harvests are expected in 6 of the 10 States of South Sudan, food security remains precarious, especially in the greater Bahr El Ghazal region and Jonglei State, where hundreds of thousands of people are at risk. In six States in South Sudan, malnutrition rates are above the emergency threshold set by the World Health Organization.”[v]
Beyond that are the understandably high expectations among South Sudanese that independence, self-rule, access to oil revenue, and peace itself should yield immediate and tangible benefits – expectations that will transform into even more deeply felt grievances if change isn’t soon demonstrated.
Third, the capacity for dissident groups to take up arms is not in question. Five decades of almost uninterrupted warfare have left a legacy of small arms and well established supply chains for ammunition. Furthermore, that same half century of conflict has built a political culture of legitimacy for armed resistance to mistrusted authorities.
And fourth and finally, it should not be a surprise that the absence of trusted public institutions for mediating disputes and promoting economic equity defines South Sudan. A decade ago the the OECD Guidelines on Conflict, Peace and Development Cooperation reflected the findings of peacebuilding research when it concluded that “sustainable development must …be underpinned by institutions capable of managing socio-political tensions and avoiding their escalation into violence.”[vi] South Sudan is building public institutions from scratch. It won’t happen quickly, and the danger is that it might not happen soon enough.
War prevention obviously involves attention to all four categories of conditions that are conducive to war. The need for attention to inter-group confidence building, tobasic grievances, and to small arms control is obviously recognized and relevant efforts are underway, but those are generations-long projects. To have confidence in the future South Sudanese need to see evidence of such effort, and that in turn will help with addressing what is really the most urgent requirement – that is, addressing the fourth condition by building the institutions or mechanisms capable of managing socio-political tensions and expectations.
In other words, for a real change, the people of South Sudan need a credible alternative to fighting for change.
eregehr@uwaterloo.ca
Notes
[i] Alex J. Bellamy, “Mass Atrocities and Armed Conflict: Links, Distinctions, and Implications for the Responsibility to Prevent,” Policy Analysis Brief, The Stanley Foundation, February 2011. http://www.stanleyfoundation.org/publications/pab/BellamyPAB22011.pdf.
[ii] Jaimie Grant, “Sub-Ethnic Division is Being Embedded into the DNA of South Sudan’s Emerging State,” Think Africa Press, 11 January 2011. http://thinkafricapress.com/article/sub-ethnic-division-being-embedded-dna-south-sudan%E2%80%99s-emerging-state.
[iii] Mareike Schomerus and Tim Allen, research team leaders, South Sudan at odds with itself: Dynamics of conflict and predicaments of peace, Development Studies Institute, London School of Economics, 2010, p. 8. http://www2.lse.ac.uk/businessAndConsultancy/LSEConsulting/pdf/SouthSudan.pdf.
[iv] International Crisis Group, Jonglei’s Tribal Conflicts: Countering Insecurity in South Sudan, Africa Report No. 154, 23 December 2009. http://www.crisisgroup.org/en/regions/africa/horn-of-africa/sudan/154-jongleis-tribal-conflicts-countering-insecurity-in-south-sudan.aspx.
[v] Report of the Secretary-General on the Sudan, United Nations Security Council, 31 December (2010S/2010/681). http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N10/708/16/PDF/N1070816.pdf?OpenElement
[vi] DAC Guidelines on Conflict, Peace and Development Co-Operation, The Development Assistance Committee of the OECD, Paris, 1997 (p. 9). http://www.fas.org/asmp/campaigns/smallarms/eguide.pdf.
Posted on: February 7th, 2011 by Ernie Regehr
A sharp increase in war deaths in Afghanistan during 2010 again confirms the incalculable human cost of war. It’s also an occasion to acknowledge a debt to those who try to count the victims – in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the more than two dozen other wars – and to offer at least some minimal public recognition of loss.
The Kabul based Afghanistan Rights Monitor has just issued a new report on civilian casualties in Afghanistan, showing 2010 to have been the deadliest year yet, with at least 2,421 Afghan civilians killed.[i]
That trend was confirmed by the UN late last year. “Civilians continued to bear the brunt of intensified armed conflict,” according to the Secretary-General in his most recent report. There were 2,412 civilian deaths recorded by the UN in the first 10 months of 2010, a 20 percent increase over the same period in 2009.[ii]
On average, civilian deaths make up almost 50 percent of all Afghan combat deaths, according to numbers collated from multiple sources at Unknown News.[iii] In Iraq the numbers cover a much wider range, from about 100,000 violent deaths recorded at Iraq Body Count[iv] to the 800,000 range in a widely quoted, and debated, study reported in the British medical journal The Lancet in October 2006.[v]
The broad variation in numbers obviously indicates that counting war deaths is an imprecise enterprise. Most studies of direct combat or violent deaths rely on public reports of violent incidents, but such reports are far from systematic. In the 2009 reports on casualties in the fighting that climaxed in Sri Lanka ranged from 7,000 to 40,000 combat deaths that year. And it is at least intuitively obvious that many clashes and deaths that occur in remote places are never reported.
Epidemiological surveys do not count individual deaths through incident reports but measure excess deaths in war by comparing pre-conflict mortality rates with mortality rates during and after conflict as well as population surveys in order to estimate direct deaths by combat and indirect deaths due to war.
However difficult it is to measure war deaths, the victims are owed at least that much. After September 11, 2001, the New York Times ran photographs and personal accounts of all the victims, at least momentarily rescuing all those who had died from anonymity, putting a face on the statistic and giving public acknowledgment to loss. To similarly honour all those who die due to current wars (direct deaths by violence and indirect deaths due to the deprivations of war) would require upwards of 1,000 photos and brief biographies each and every day.
Most victims of contemporary wars will never be featured in the New York Times. Their loss will be felt by those closest to them, but they should also be publicly acknowledged, counted, in the name of public recognition and accountability.
The 2008 report on the Global Burden of Armed Violence (GBAV)[vi] tried to do just that and put the average annual death toll from armed combat, actual combat deaths (combatants and civilians), at 52,000, or 1,000 per week. That figure is roughly confirmed by the informal count maintained by Project Ploughshares[vii] (Ploughshares does not publish combat death figures due to the fact that it is impossible to be comprehensive, nevertheless it maintains tabulations from public sources in order to give a broad assessment of the severity of each conflict). Ploughshares’ unpublished figures from 2006 through 2009 also indicated about 45,000 to 50,000 direct war deaths per year.
These are no doubt conservative estimates. The GBAV report, in reviewing epidemiological surveys done in the DRC, concludes that combat deaths there alone could be averaging 50,000 per year. If extraordinary events like the genocide in Rwanda and the invasion of Iraq are taken into annual averages, the numbers are much, much higher.
It is therefore likely that the global estimate of an average of 1,000 war combat deaths per week is a low estimate, but even at that it is only about one-quarter of the total annual death toll due to war. That estimate is also at the conservative end of the scale inasmuch as the GBAV report, while indicating that some 200,000 people die annually due to the extraordinarily harsh conditions of war, also notes that surveys in the DRC, where people in the fighting zones are subjected to the most heinous of conditions, estimate that it is more likely that about 400,000 people have died each year in recent years due to war.
The Canadian Human Security Report disputes the latter figures. It doesn’t dispute the high mortality rates in the DRC, [viii] but it says that the pre-conflict mortality rate was already high so that it is not possible to say that the current abnormally high mortality rate is war-related.[ix]
What of course is widely agreed is that wars are extraordinarily costly, and that the human cost of war is not found in deaths alone. To them must be added the consequences for the survivors. There are the injured, many of whom suffer lifelong physical disabilities and psychological scars. War displaces people from their homes – in southern Sudan the majority of the population was internally displaced. Indeed, prior to the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement with southern Sudan it was the deliberate strategy of the government of Sudan to bomb villages and IDP camps for the purpose of inducing people to flee – to keep the population unhinged and dependent on international assistance.
The relatively low level of direct combat deaths (compared with the high levels of indirect deaths) reflects the nature of most contemporary wars. The objective, with the obvious and tragic exception of Rwanda, is not to maximize the number of deaths but to maximize the level of terror and social upheaval. That is accomplished even by relatively low levels of combat deaths, as well as through the forced displacement of people. The UN reports that at the end of 2009 there were 43.3 million people that had been forcibly displaced, as refugees and internally displaced, due to conflict – the highest number since the 1990s. More than a million people were newly displaced during the course of 2009.[x] The top source countries are the scenes of the world’s most prominent wars: Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, DRC, Myanmar, Colombia, and Sudan. For example, in late October, fierce factional fighting in Somalia near the border with Kenya forced an estimated 60,000 people from their homes in a matter of a few days.[xi]
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eregehr@uwaterloo.ca
Notes
[i] ARM Annual Report: Civilian Casualties of War, January-December 2010. Afghanistan Rights Monitor, Kabul, Afghanistan. February 2011. http://www.arm.org.af/.
[ii] “The situation in Afghanistan and its implications for international peace and security: Report of the Secretary-General, UN Security Council, 10 December 2010 (A/65/612–S/2010/630), para 55. http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N10/667/78/PDF/N1066778.pdf?OpenElement.
[iii] http://www.unknownnews.org/casualties.html.
[iv] http://www.iraqbodycount.org/.
[v] Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy, Les Roberts, “Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey.” www.thelancet.com Published online October 11, 2006 DOI:10.1016/S0140-6736(06)69491-9. http://www.brussellstribunal.org/pdf/lancet111006.pdf.
[vi] Global Burden of Armed Violence, a detailed study of armed violence in all its form, is a 2008 publication of the “Geneva Declaration.” The Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development is a diplomatic initiative by more than 100 countries aimed at addressing the interrelations between armed violence and development. http://www.genevadeclaration.org/fileadmin/docs/Global-Burden-of-Armed-Violence-full-report.pdf.
[vii] Armed Conflicts Report 2010. http://www.ploughshares.ca/libraries/ACRText/ACR-TitlePage.html.
[viii] The Canadian Human Security Report undertakes a detailed analysis of war death toll estimates in the DRC and questions the reliability of the data and methodology used in some studies. Accordingly the Human Security Report concludes that the number of deaths attributed to war have been significantly overstated. That the death toll in the DRC is extraordinarily high is not disputed; rather the point is that the pre-war death rate was already much higher than the African average, so it is not appropriate to describe the current high rate of death as being a consequence of war. Human Security Report 2009, “Shrinking Costs of War,” The Human Security Report Project (an independent centre at Simon Fraser University), Chapter 3: The Death Toll in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. http://www.hsrgroup.org/docs/Publications/HSR2009/2009HumanSecurityReport_Pt2_3_DeathTollDemocraticRepublicCongo.pdf
[ix] The Canadian Human Security Report says of the GBAV estimates: “More recently, the wide-ranging Global Burden of Armed Violence report published by the Geneva Declaration Secretariat estimated that for every person who died violently in wars around the world between 2004 and 2007, another four died from war-exacerbated disease and malnutrition. 4The report did not claim there was a consistent ratio between the two, simply that on average, the indirect-to-direct war death ratio was 4:1. This ratio is certainly not implausible, but the evidence base used to calculate it is far too narrow and uncertain to place any confidence in its accuracy.” Human Security Report 2009, “Shrinking Costs of War,” The Human Security Report Project (an independent centre at Simon Fraser University), Chapter 1, “Deadly Connections: Wartime Violence and Indirect Deaths.” http://www.hsrgroup.org/docs/Publications/HSR2009/2009HumanSecurityReport_Pt2_1_DeadlyConnectionsWartimeViolenceIndirectDeaths.pdf
[x] “2009 Global Trends: Refugees, Asylum-seekers, Returnees, Internally Displaced and Stateless Persons,” UNHCR (The UN Refugee Agency), 15 June 2010. http://www.unhcr.org/4c11f0be9.html.
[xi] “Tens of thousands displaced by clashes in Somalia,” UNHCR news release, 26 October 2010. http://www.unhcr.org/print/4cc6f6d29.html.
Posted on: January 31st, 2011 by Ernie Regehr
This month and next, Canada shoulders one of the least coveted leadership posts within the United Nations system – the presidency of the Geneva-based Conference on Disarmament (CD).
The travails, frustrations, and abject failure of the CD, the UN’s only disarmament negotiating forum, have become legendary over 15 years of regular meetings that have produced not a single agreement. That includes especially the failure to agree even on a working agenda – a simple list of issues to be negotiated or debated.
The fruitless travails of the CD have centred for a decade and a half on a futile search for agreement on an agenda; the frustrations are heightened by the fact that, even though 64 of the CD’s 65 member States agree on a critically important four-part agenda or program of work, consensus continues to elude them; and the abject failure of the CD owes to a perverse convention that defines consensus as unanimity, meaning that a single “no” vote can block the work that every other member state wants to pursue.
And that’s the CD that Canada must now lead for a brief two months. In his first speech as the CD President, Canada’s Geneva-based UN Ambassador, Marius Grinius, recalled the frustrations voiced by one of his Canadian predecessors when opening the first session of the CD in 2001 – already then Canadian diplomats were descrying the disheartening waste of opportunities and waste of time and professional energies of delegations to that body.[i]
There is a proposed agenda that enjoys overwhelming support. Indeed, on 29 May 2009, a red letter day in recent CD history, unanimous agreement was reached on a program of work.[ii] It consisted of the four key items that have been acknowledged all along as needing primary attention: 1) negotiations to halt production of fissile materials for weapons purposes; 2) a working group to address nuclear disarmament more broadly; 3) a working group on measures by which nuclear weapon states promise not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapon states; and 4) a working group on preventing an arms race in outer space.
The first three of these items were affirmed in 1995, essentially as conditions for the indefinite extension of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
The May 2009 action also agreed to the appointment of three “special coordinators” to advance discussions within the CD respectively on emerging weapons technologies, a “comprehensive programme of disarmament,” and “transparency in armaments.”
It was a short-lived agreement when Pakistan, which is fundamentally opposed to a Treaty mandated halt in fissile materials production because it fears that India has much more extensive existing stocks, subsequently withheld consent for the work to commence.
Now, in 2011, the frustrations and sense of waste are even more intense, even as Pakistan’s opposition to negotiating on fissile materials also becomes more deeply entrenched. Pakistan has a point, as its Ambassador argued at the CD last week: “Over the last two years, Pakistan has clearly stated that it cannot agree to negotiations on a FMCT [fissile material cut-off treaty] in the CD owing to the discriminatory waiver provided by the NSG [Nuclear Suppliers Group] to our neighbour for nuclear cooperation by several powers, as this arrangement will further accentuate the asymmetry in fissile materials stockpiles in the region, to the detriment of Pakistan’s security interests.”[iii]
Pakistan has watched its principle rival, India, being courted by the international community through an exemption from Nuclear Supplier Group prohibitions on civilian nuclear cooperation. India’s rehabilitation as an acknowledged nuclear weapon state continues, even though, as the Arms Control Association’s Daryl Kimball put it, “U.S. support for Indian membership in the NSG undermines U.S. efforts to shore up the global nonproliferation system, prevent the transfer of sensitive nuclear technologies, and makes it far more difficult to slow the South Asian nuclear arms race.”[iv]
Pakistan agrees and essentially announced an accelerated nuclear arms race to the CD: “Apart from undermining the validity and sanctity of the international non-proliferation regime these measures shall further destabilize security in South Asia. Membership in the NSG will enable our neighbour to further expand on its nuclear cooperation agreements and enhance its nuclear weapons and delivery capability. As a consequence Pakistan will be forced to take measures to ensure the credibility of its deterrence. The accumulative impact would be to destabilize the security environment in South Asia and beyond or to the global level. From our perspective in the CD, this would further retard progress on non-proliferation, arms control and disarmament measures.”[v]
Meanwhile, the stalemate continues. But there may yet be a positive outcome to these growing frustrations – also voiced by the UN Secretary-General.[vi] And that is in the growing interest in taking negotiation of a fissile materials Treaty out of the CD. Washington’s Rose Gottemoeller, the US Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control, was s bit more direct. Given that the CD is “dead in the water,” she said, “if we cannot find a way to begin these negotiations in the Conference on Disarmament, we will need to consider other options.”[vii]
Canada has been among the most direct in pushing for an alternative. Ambassador Grinius issued the challenge almost a year ago: “If we truly care about disarmament, Canada believes we must be ready to look for alternative ways forward outside of this body.”[viii]
He referred in particular to a 2005 proposal in which Canada joined five other states – Brazil, Kenya, Mexico, New Zealand, and Sweden – in putting forward a resolution in the UN General Assembly asking it to mandate, by simple majority vote, four special committees to work on the four priority disarmament issues (listed above).
The point was to take these four crucial issues out of the “consensus prison” of the CD. Working as Committees of the General Assembly, they would not be bound by consensus rules and thus states would finally be allowed to deal substantively with these key issues. The drafters of the resolution were careful not to strip the CD of its function, and so built into their resolution a commitment to transfer the results of the work of these four ad-hoc committees back to the CD as soon as it finally agreed on its proposed agenda of work and was actually prepared to start negotiating. [ix] Ironically, if there are to be negotiations on fissile materials, and eventually they will begin, it will be in Pakistan’s interests to have them conducted in the CD, where the consensus rule will guarantee that its concerns are taken seriously.
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For now there is still time for the CD to make itself relevant; but let’s all hope that time is running out.
eregehr@uwaterloo.ca
Notes
[i] Marius Grinius, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Canada, “President’s Statement,” 25 January 2011. Available at the NGO disarmament monitoring group, Reaching Critical Will: http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/political/cd/2011/statements/part1/25Jan_Canada.pdf.
[ii] “Decision for the establishment of a Programme of Work for the 2009 session.” Conference on Disarmament (CD/1864, 29 May 2009).
[iii] Ambassador Zamir Akram, Statement at the Conference on Disarmament, 25 January 2011. http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/political/cd/2011/statements/part1/25Jan_Pakistan1.pdf.
[iv] Daryl G. Kimball, “Obama’s Message to India: Proliferation Violations Don’t Have Consequences,” US Arms Control Association Blog, 6 November 2010. http://armscontrolnow.org/2010/11/06/obamas-message-to-india-proliferation-violations-dont-have-consequences/.
“In a statement Saturday from Mumbai, Mike Froman, the Deputy National Security Advisor for International Economic Affairs said ‘…the United States will support India’s full membership in the four multilateral export control regimes. These are the Nuclear Suppliers Group; the Missile Technology Control Regime; the Australia Group; and the Wassenaar Arrangement.’”
[v] Ambassador Zamir Akram, Statement at the Conference on Disarmament, 25 January 2011. http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/political/cd/2011/statements/part1/25Jan_Pakistan1.pdf.
[vi] “Remarks delivered by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to the Conference on Disarmament,” 26 January 2010, available at the NGO disarmament monitoring group, Reaching Critical Will: http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/political/cd/2011/statements/part1/26Jan_SG.pdf.
[vii] Rose E. Gottemoeller, “2011 Opening Statement to the Conference on Disarmament,” 27 January 2011. Available at: http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/political/cd/2011/statements/part1/27Jan_US.pdf.
[viii] March 23, 2010 speech to the Conference on Disarmament. http://www.unog.ch/80256EDD006B8954/(httpAssets)/501328AAB0863E3BC12576EF003CD2C9/$file/1180_Canada.pdf.
[ix] Elaborated in this space: “It’s time to sideline the Geneva disarmament conference,” 18 February 2010. http://www.cigionline.org/blogs/2010/2/it%E2%80%99s-time-sideline-geneva-disarmament-conference.
[x] Marius Grinius, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Canada, “President’s Statement,” 25 January 2011. Available at the NGO disarmament monitoring group, Reaching Critical Will: http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/political/cd/2011/statements/part1/25Jan_Canada.pdf.
Posted on: January 19th, 2011 by Ernie Regehr
Limiting or banning the operations of nuclear attack submarines in the Arctic Ocean is not disarmament, but it could advance efforts toward a nuclear-weapon-free Arctic and world.
The proposal to convert the Arctic region into a Nuclear Weapons Free Zone[i] is generally understood as a long range objective. Building declaratory support in principle for the idea is a constructive pursuit and, perhaps more to the point, exploring the details, opportunities, and obstacles to achieving the denuclearization of the Arctic is an essential part of the process toward the now near-universally accepted objective of a world without nuclear weapons.
In the context of such explorations it is appropriate and useful to also consider specific changes to Arctic nuclear deployments and operations that would serve to reduce short-term risks of nuclear escalation or miscalculation.
Fortunately, of course, such risks are not now high in the Arctic Ocean, but neither are they non-existent. Furthermore, risk reduction measures are not disarmament, but they can make the world marginally safer and, in the long term, they can contribute to the emergence of a political and security climate more conducive to nuclear disarmament in the Arctic region and beyond.
The presence and patrols of nuclear armed submarines (that is, SSBNs capable of launching long-range nuclear missiles) in the Arctic have been substantially reduced from Cold War levels. US SSBNs do not operate in the Arctic. Part of the reduced Russian SSBN force operates out of the Kola Peninsula region (Russia is now understood to operate no more than six SSBNs in its northern fleet, each of which can be loaded with 16 ballistic missiles, and each of those could deliver at least three warheads).[ii]
Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists, a pre-eminent researcher on nuclear arsenals and deployments, considers the reasons for the sharp reduction in Russian SSBNs and SSBN patrols: “Perhaps the Russian navy is still not over the financial and technical constraints that hit it after the collapse of the Soviet Union. SSBNs can launch their missiles from pier side if necessary, although such a posture essentially converts each SSBN into a very soft and vulnerable target. Russia might simply have decided that it’s no longer necessary to maintain a continuous nuclear retaliatory force at sea, and that a few training patrols are all that’s needed to be able to deploy the SSBNs in a hypothetical crisis if necessary.”[iii]
At the same time, the Russians appear to be putting out stories designed to highlight their continuing commitment to under ice patrols. [iv]
As Kristensen notes, there is a negative, risk expansion, implication to Russian SSBNS staying in port while still being maintained as missile launch platforms. The practice abandons them to first-strike scenarios, making them tempting targets for American pre-emption, setting them up as a potential Russian pre-emptive force, or putting them in a launch-on-warning, “use ’em or lose ’em,” mode. In a climate of minimal Russian-America security tensions these are not high-probability scenarios, but should the political climate change the implications would be rather more serious.
For a small northern Russian SSBN force to be regarded as a second strike deterrent force, at least some of the boats need to be at sea and, significantly, not hunted by US attack submarines.
But when the Russian SSBNs are on patrol, they are invariably tailed by US attack submarines (SSNs) – notably, since the early years of the post-Cold War era neither US nor Russian attack submarines carry nuclear weapons. Wallace and Staples make the point that US fast-attack submarines continually “stalk” the Russian northern fleet. Of course, Russian attack submarines also get involved in tracking US subs and the result is an intricate nuclear-armed “cat and mouse” game played out in the sub-surface waters of the Arctic.[v]
Again, the risk that these “games” could escalate into real confrontations and risk the exercise of deliberate nuclear use options is very low, but, given that it is not non-existent, it is worth revisiting risk reduction measures advanced during the Cold War. Such measures could also, in the present climate of general political and security amity, be relatively simpler to implement.
There are three primary measures that the arms control community has repeatedly posed for lessening sea-based risks in general and in the Arctic in particular:
1. Both the US and Russia should reduce the launch readiness of their submarine-based ballistic missiles;
2. Both should refrain from deploying their SSBNs close to each other’s territories; and
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3. The two countries should agree not to track and thus threaten each other’s SSBN’s with attack submarines in agreed exclusion areas for attack submarines.
The 1987 Murmansk Initiative of then Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev proposed an expansive set of military and civilian measures to reduce tensions in the north and to begin “transforming the northern part of the globe from being a sensitive military theatre to becoming an international ‘zone of peace’.”[vi] One element of the proposal was to limit Western anti-submarine warfare operations against the Soviets in the home waters of their Northern and Baltic fleets.
A recent report by Anatoli Diakov and Frank Von Hippel proposes again that Russia agree to confine its northern SSBN fleet to the Arctic and that the US agree to keep its attack submarines out of the Russian side of the Arctic.[vii] Expanding that proposal to exclude all attack submarines from all areas of the Arctic would have to address the reality that some Russian attack subs are based in the Kola Peninsula area – but measures to restrict anti-submarine warfare operations in the region are to be commended.
Promoting the Arctic as an area from which attack submarines are excluded is not a disarmament measure. It is, however, a realistic risk reduction proposal and, if implemented, would be an important confidence building development which would in turn be supportive of nuclear disarmament broadly, including in the Arctic .
eregehr@uwaterloo.ca
Notes
[i] Michael Wallace and Steven Staples, Ridding the Arctic of Nuclear Weapons: A Task Long Overdue, Canadian Pugwash Group, March 2010. www.ArcticSecurity.org.
[ii] Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, “Russian Nuclear Forces, 2010,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 1 January 2010, vol. 66 no. 1, pp. 74-81. http://bos.sagepub.com/content/66/1/74.full.
[iii] Hans Kristensen, “Russian Nuclear Missile Submarine Patrols Decrease Again,” Federation of American Scientists Strategic Blog, 28 April 2008. http://www.fas.org/blog/ssp/2008/04/russian-nuclear-missile-submarine-patrols-decrease-again.php.
[iv] “Russia will continue under-ice nuclear submarine patrols in the Arctic,” India Daily, 2 October 2010. http://www.indiadaily.com/editorial/21683.asp.
[v] Michael Wallace and Steven Staples, Ridding the Arctic of Nuclear Weapons: A Task Long Overdue, Canadian Pugwash Group, March 2010. www.ArcticSecurity.org.
[vi] Kristian Atland, “Michail Gorbacheve, the Murmansk Initiative, and the Denuclearization of Interstate Relations in the Arctic.” Cooperation and Conflict: Journal of the Nordic International Studies association, Vol. 43(3), pp. 289-311. NISA 2008 www.nisanet.org.
[vii] Anatoli Diakov and Frank Von Hippel, Challenges and Opportunities for Russia-U.S. Nuclear Arms Control, A Century Foundation Report, The Century Foundation (New York, Washington, 2009), pp. 15-16.
Posted on: January 14th, 2011 by Ernie Regehr
On January 17, 1961 President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned Americans that an emerging “military-industrial complex” would wield unhealthy and unwarranted influence – “economic, political, and even spiritual”—0ver their political life if it was left unchecked.
The warning came in Eisenhower’s extraordinary farewell address to the nation, days before John F. Kennedy entered the White House. He described the unprecedented “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry.”[i]
A half century later it is clear that Eisenhower’s warning was both prescient and ignored. For what was unprecedented then remains unmatched today in the resources it consumes and the policy options it forecloses.
A globalized military-industrial complex now boasts more than 20 million men and women in uniform (another 54 million reservists are available), and with the arms and equipment they use, military forces cost some $1.5 trillion annually – spending that, adjusted for inflation, is now well over the highest levels of the Cold War era.[ii] Military industries, though concentrated in a few countries, are literally spread around the planet and sustained by, and in many cases dependent on, capital budgets of at least $400 billion annually.[iii]
But, as Eisenhower predicted, it is in the United States where this complex is most entrenched. US military spending, including the costs of current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, is expected to reach at least $712 billion in 2011 – in real term a post-World War II high. If nuclear and other defence-related programs in other departments of government are added, including $122 billion for veterans, US military-related spending will reach $861 billion this year.[iv]
The Pentagon supports a network of suppliers and contractors to the tune of about $300 billion per year, and the industry relies on another $25 to $50 billion annually in export sales to other countries.
One arrangement that helps to assure a continued convergence of military and industrial interests and world view is the high incidence of retiring senior military officials signing on as senior executives of corporations doing mega-business with the Pentagon. Many, while working with Pentagon suppliers, also serve as paid consultants to the Pentagon. A recent major investigation by The Boston Globe elaborates at length on this “revolving-door culture,” pointing out that “from 2004 through 2008, 80 percent of retiring three- and four-star officers went to work as consultants or executives.”[v]
The influence of that melding of military and industrial interests comes most clearly into public focus when, as is currently the case, there are prominent calls for spending to be brought under control and reduced. Eisenhower was not a conspiracy theorist, but he understood that when the gargantuan US military establishment became allied through shared interests to industrial elites, and was then supported by an intellectual army of strategic analysts and a national messianic spirit that understood America as destined to lead, it would have a profound impact on shaping American values and ambitions, and on models for global interaction.
So even though the US can already claim as much military capacity, measured in resources and technology, as all of the rest of the world combined, and even though its top military “rival,” China, spends only a fifth of what the US does on military preparedness, calls for military spending restraints in the US are predictably met with dire warnings of American vulnerability and the loss of American leadership in the world.
Newsweek headed its look at US Defense budget prospects with the heading, “The Risky Rush to Cut Defense Spending” – adding a tagline that “no one has figured out how to make cuts without jeopardizing security.”[vi] Polls show majority American support for defense spending cuts, but any “rush” to act on that has yet to materialize. Even after the recent announcements of cuts by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, spending on the core defence budget will continue to expand, if modestly, over the next few years[vii] — indeed some analysts assume that Gates is using heavily publicized pre-emptive cuts (to the rate of growth) to forestall actual and significant cuts which he said would be “potentially calamitous.”
Much of mainstream commentary in the US continues to lament “pressures across the board to reduce our level of expenditure at precisely a time when our challenges, at the very least, are getting more complicated.” They invoke everything from the dangers of North Korea, to the continuing gap in missile defence, to the political threats from Wikileaks to dramatize US vulnerability. Spending cuts are themselves understood as “attacks” – the Financial Times, speculating on the impact on defence industry stock prices of any cuts (by which they really mean slowed increases), referred to the need for debate on “the why, where, what and (against) whom” of defence spending cuts.[viii]
And when the tabloid press get involved the silliness is boundless. A new York Post column, referring to the Gates restraint package, put it this way: “Call it President Obama’s ‘conditional-surrender Pentagon budget’ – and bad news for the US economy.” And the Post ran it all under the headline, “Don’t let O disarm our military.”[ix]
As to the policy options that the military-industrial complex forecloses, we can again turn to Eisenhower and a speech from the early days of his presidency: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. [x]
The truth of that lament is confirmed in the current Republican House “principle” that any new spending must be paid for, not by tax increases or even closing tax loopholes, but by cuts to spending in other government programs. Since security spending is largely exempt from austerity measures, the cuts will be focused on discretionary social programs. Furthermore, any savings in defence spending are to be “reinvested” in other defence programs. The costs of tax cuts, on the other hand, are exempt from this pay-as-you-go rule.[xi]
The cost to other urgent programs is illustrated by the continued impoverishment of climate change programs. Increasingly identified as having serious security implications, US spending on climate change responses is increasing significantly – even so, defence spending dwarfs it at a ratio of 41 to 1.[xii] What the ratio should be is hard to say, but the comparison does have something to say about priorities – or at the very least it confirms that the environment-industrial complex has yet to infiltrate the centres of power in Washington.
Perhaps the most telling comment on priorities comes from New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof. Referring to “a billionaire military and a pauper diplomacy,” he says that “the U.S. military now has more people in its marching bands than the State Department has in its foreign service.”[xiii]
To say that military spending is sacrosanct is simply to acknowledge the truth of Eisenhower’s 1960s confession that the influence of the military-industrial complex is felt in every city, state, and federal government office, not to mention in every Congressional office and in quite a few University and Think Tank research offices.
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(A shortened version of the above appeared in The Record of the Waterloo Region, 14 January 2011.)
eregehr@uwaterloo.ca
Notes
[i] Eisenhower’s Farewell Address to the Nation, January 17, 1961. Available at: http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/ike.htm.
[ii] The Military Balance 2010, The International Institute for Strategic Studies (London, 2010), p. 462f.
[iii] SIPRI Yearbook 2010: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security, p. 268.
[iv] Todd Harrison, “Analysis of the FY 2011 Defense Budget,” Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. http://www.csbaonline.org/4publications/publibrary/r.20100629.analysis_of_the_fy/r.20100629.analysis_of_the_fy.pdf.
[v] Bryan Bender, “From the Pentagon to the private sector,” the Boston Globe, 26 December 2010. http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2010/12/26/defense_firms_lure_retired_generals/?page=full.
[vi] Douglas Schoen, “The Risky Push to Cut Defense Spending,” Newsweek, 8 January 2011. http://www.newsweek.com/2011/01/08/the-risky-rush-to-cut-defense-spending.html.
[vii] Gprdon Adams and Matthew Leatherman, “A Leaner and Meaner Defense,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2011, available at The Stimson Center. http://www.stimson.org/summaries/a-leaner-and-meaner-defense/.
[viii] John McDermott, “Defence stocks on the defensive against budget cuts,” Financial Times, 10 January 2011. http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2011/01/10/453876/defence-stocks-on-the-defensive-against-budget-cuts/.
[ix] Arther Herman, “Don’t let O disarm our military,” New York Post, 10 January 2011. http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/don_let_disarm_our_military_Vg8BTKN1WuODmeW4fCfumL.
[x] Dwight D. Eisenhower, from a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1953. Available at: http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Dwight_D._Eisenhower/.
[xi] Robert Greenstein and James R. Horney, “House Republican Rule Changes Pave the Way For Major Deficit-Increasing Tax Cuts, Despite Anti-Deficit Rhetoric,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 5 January 2011. http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3359.
[xii] Miriam Pemberton, “Military vs. Climate Security: The 2011 Budgets Compared” (Washington, DC: Foreign Policy In Focus, October 25, 2010). http://www.fpif.org/reports/military_vs_climate_security_the_2011_budgets_compared.
[xiii] Nicholas D. Kristof, “The Big (Military) Taboo,” The New York Times,” 25 December 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/opinion/26kristof.html.
Posted on: January 6th, 2011 by Ernie Regehr
The Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect warns that “an escalation in the situation [in Côte d’Ivoire] could easily lead to the commission of mass atrocities….”[i] Protection is far from guaranteed, but the international effort to date is serious.
All the ingredients for long-term strife punctuated by explosive violence are in abundant supply in the Ivory Coast: north-south regionalism that reflects an economic divide, ethnic conflict, a north-south Muslim/Christian divide, xenophobia borne out of a history of illegal immigration, and most recently of course a contested presidential election in which each of the final two contestants has access to partisan armed forces.
The current crisis, in which the descent into major fighting has thus far been avoided, has already imposed huge costs on the people of a country still trying to recover from the last civil war. The UN reports that violence has claimed the lives of nearly 200 people and investigators have found evidence of extrajudicial executions, torture and arrests.[ii] A week ago NGOs working in northeastern Liberia estimated that some 30,000 refugees had arrived from Côte d’Ivoire, many of whom were “reporting widespread violence and intimidation from both Ivoirian government troops and soldiers from the former rebel Forces Nouvelles operating in the west.”[iii] In the midst of deeply entrenched poverty, the crisis is putting food prices on the rise – doubling in some cases.[iv] The public unrest and political chaos are currently blocking a nationwide vaccination drive against yellow fever.[v]
A National Post columnist, in another run at the failures of the UN, complained that “once again the UN finds itself with a problem that has no apparent solution”[vi] – but that is exactly where the most intractable problems are taken. The UN and the international community are indeed already deeply involved in the crisis: through the presence of UN peacekeeping forces, a succession of Security Council resolutions, the African Union,[vii] the regional Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS),[viii] and most especially a declared commitment to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity, when their own governments fail to do so.
Protection from that list of crimes means preventing them, which is the point emphasized by Francis Deng and Edward Luck, special Advisers to the Secretary-General respectively on the prevention of genocide and the responsibility to protect. In a public statement on the crisis in Ivory Coast they said the protection responsibility “entails the prevention of those crimes, importantly including their incitement,” and they warned all the involved parties “that they are accountable for their actions under international law.”[ix]
The UN Security Council similarly reminded Ivorian leaders that they “bear primary responsibility for ensuring peace and protecting the civilian population” and called on the UN peacekeeping forces to assist local authorities in that mission and to “implement [their] protection of civilian mandate.”[x]
There is inevitably reluctance to formally invoke the “responsibility to protect” (R2P), not least because it is taken by some as code for military intervention. The UK Independent newspaper launched a pre-emptive headline against military action with the declaration that “the last thing Ivorians need is an invasion”[xi] – which is a sentiment that could be appropriately applied to all states virtually all the time, but which offers rather slight help in sorting out the means by which the international community might best act on its R2P obligations.
To date, it is worth noting, the international community has been pursuing its responsibility cautiously but seriously in the spirit of the R2P doctrine approved by the UN in 2005.
International intervention or assistance is already partly military, inasmuch as UN peacekeeping force of over 9,000 international military and police personnel are already deployed there through the UN Operation in Côte d’Ivoir (UNOCI),[xii] including a few hundred seconded from UNMIL in Liberia. More may be added, but the primary focus is on the diplomacy envisioned under Chapter VI and non-military coercion under Chapter VII of the UN Charter.
In Chapter VI diplomacy the international community has been united in calling for the election results to be respected, for President Laurent Gbagbo (a southerner) to step down, and for election winner Alassane Quattara (a northerner) to assume that role. Measures under Chapter VII include a military embargo, a ban on diamond exports, frozen bank accounts and other assets, and travel bans against key individuals.
Louise Arbour of the International Crisis Group reflects the general wariness of the international community when she says “a military solution to the crisis in Côte d”Ivoir is unlikely.”[xiii] ECOWAS and the AU have clearly put military intervention, beyond the UN forces already there, on the table, but neither is keen, or has the ready means, to go that route. So, for now, we are seeing R2P in a prevention mode in Ivory Coast, along the lines envisioned by the framers of the 2005 R2P commitment.
The outcome is far from certain, and it is an uncertainty that holds the well-being of millions of people in the balance.
eregehr@uwaterloo.ca
Notes
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[i] “Open Statement on the Situation in Côte d’Ivoire,” Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, 17 December 2010. www.globalr2p.org.
[ii] BBC News, 28 December 2010. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-11916590.
[iii] “Back to square one?”, IRIN, 30 December 2010. http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportID=91496.
[iv] “Political impasse sparks food price hikes,” IRIN, 28 December 2010. http://www.irinnews.org/PrintReport.aspx?ReportID=91472.
[v] “Chaos blocks yellow fever vaccination drive,” IRIN, 5 January 2011. http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportID=91530.
[vi] Kelly McParland, “The UNs dilemma in Ivory Coast,” National Post, 2 January 2011. http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/01/02/kelly-mcparland-the-uns-dilemma-in-ivory-coast/.
[vii] Communique, African Union, 9 December 2010. http://www.africa-union.org/root/au/index/index.htm.
[viii] Extraordinary Session of the Authority of Heads of State and Government on Cote D’Ivoir, 24 December 2010. http://www.africa-union.org/root/au/Conferences/2010/december/situation/Final%20Communique_Eng.pdf.
[ix] “UN Secretary-General’s Advisers on the Prevention of Genocide and the Responsibility to Protect on the situation in Côte d’Ivoire,” United Nations press release, 29 December 2010. http://unclef.com/preventgenocide/adviser/pdf/Special%20Advisers’%20Statement%20on%20Cote%20d’Ivoire,%2029%20.12.2010.pdf.
[x] Resolution 1962, United Nations Security Council, 20 December 2010 [S/RES/1962 (2010)]. http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N10/702/17/PDF/N1070217.pdf?OpenElement.
[xi] Adrian Hamilton, “The last thing Ivorians need is an invasion,” The Independent, 30 December 2010. http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/adrian-hamilton/adrian-hamilton-the-last-thing-ivorians-need-is-an-invasion-2171654.html.
[xii] Annual Review of Global Peace Operations 2010, A Project of the Center on International Cooperation (Lynne Reinner Publishers, Boulder and London, 2010), pp. 89-94.
[xiii] Louise Arbour, “Open Letter to the United Nations Security Council on the Situation in Côte d’Ivoir. 20 December 2010. http://www.crisisgroup.org.
