Translated material
Right to shoot
Russia is against the UN Secretary General’s attempts to legitimize “humanitarian interventions”
The international community is trying to establish at the UN level the right to armed intervention from outside in those countries where human rights are grossly violated. This would allow leading world powers to carry out “humanitarian interventions” against unwanted regimes, without burdening themselves with the principle of respect for state sovereignty. As the discussion that unfolded at the meeting of the UN General Assembly showed, supporters of this approach are numerically superior, and their opponents, led by Russia, which is still widely accused of invading the territory of Georgia in August 2008, can only hope for the blocking role of the UN Security Council.The principle of the “responsibility to protect” civilians from genocide and other grave crimes was first recorded in the decisions of the UN World Summit in 2005. However, the mechanism for its implementation has not yet been worked out. For the current meeting of the General Assembly, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has prepared proposals requiring the organization to “translate the promise of the responsibility to protect into action” and provide a “timely and decisive response” to crimes like the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. He stressed that “complacency and cynicism often prevent the UN from acting as timely or as effectively as it should be.” Ban Ki-moon called on all major UN bodies to “play their clear and appropriate roles” in implementing the principle of “responsibility to protect.” According to him, this requires reaching a consensus of all UN member countries.
But so far there is no such consensus. Leading Western powers expressed solidarity with Ban Ki-moon, but Russia opposed the broad interpretation of the “responsibility to protect.” It was actively supported by Iran and Sudan - two states that are directly threatened by military invasion from outside. The United States and its allies accuse Tehran of seeking an atomic bomb, and the International Court of Justice issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir in March for war crimes in Darfur province.
Speaking at a meeting of the UN General Assembly, the head of the international affairs committee of the Russian Federation Council, Mikhail Margelov, called calls for expanding the right of the world community to “humanitarian interventions” “premature.” According to him, “the conditions for transforming existing ideas in this area into practical mechanisms and institutions have not yet developed.” “In situations where peaceful means are insufficient and a State is manifestly unable to protect its population from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, possible intervention by the international community must be exceptional and strictly consistent with international law, before everything with the UN Charter,” Mikhail Margelov is sure. Sudan's permanent representative to the UN figuratively compared the right of the UN Security Council to determine when the population of a country needs to be protected from genocide to “giving wolves the right to adopt lambs.”
“The problem of “humanitarian intervention” first became very acute ten years ago, not at the UN level, but within NATO - when NATO aircraft bombed Yugoslavia under the pretext of protecting the Kosovo Albanians,” the head of the department of history of Slavic languages reminded Vremya Novostey peoples of South-Eastern Europe in modern times Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences Alexander Karasev. “It later turned out that the reason for starting the operation was falsified. There were no thousands, much less tens of thousands, of Albanian victims in Kosovo. On the contrary, it was the bombing that led to a genuine humanitarian catastrophe in the Kosovo region. They created hundreds of thousands of refugees among the very Albanians whom NATO so wanted to help,” the expert noted. According to him, “the UN then took an ambivalent position, refusing to give a NATO mandate for a “humanitarian intervention”, but not trying to prevent the bombings that led to thousands of civilian casualties.” “The Yugoslav experience requires an extremely cautious approach to the issue of interference in the affairs of other countries, even under the most noble pretexts,” the expert believes.
At the height of the “humanitarian intervention” in Yugoslavia, Russia actively condemned the “double standards” of the West, which protected the Kosovo Albanians but denied the right to security to the Serbs. However, after the war in the Caucasus in August 2008, Moscow already had to explain its military intervention in the conflict in South Ossetia, which at that time was part of Georgia. It is no coincidence that Russia’s main opponent within the UN was the Georgian permanent representative to the UN, Alexander Lomaia, who accused Moscow of “ethnic cleansing during a unilateral military invasion.”
Russia's permanent representative to the UN, Vitaly Churkin, did not agree with this interpretation of events. According to him, “Russia saved the life, honor and dignity of the Abkhaz and South Ossetian peoples and other peoples of the Caucasus.” Vitaly Churkin recalled that Russia responded to the aggression against South Ossetia (the majority of whose residents have Russian passports) and Georgia’s attack on Russian peacekeepers and acted within the framework of Article 51 of the UN Charter. This article recognizes any country’s “inalienable right to individual self-defense” and today remains the only international legal basis for conducting hostilities.