Month: March 2014

UN Human Rights Claim Security Council Is Bad Cop

The United Nations human rights advocates and investigators point their finger at both commanders on the ground and the Security Council, to blame all of them for the misery in Syria. In other more direct words, Security Council, you’re the cop on the world beat, and you suck! http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/05/us-syria-crisis-warcrimes-idUSBREA240RP20140305

Analysts at http://HamiltonFinanceServices.com go further to say that the UN seems useless as the world’s policeman, and maybe the idea was doomed from its beginning.

Easy targets for the International Criminal Court (ICC), where so-called “rules of war” (RoW) supposedly provide the logic for prosecutions, spring up on the battlefield sooner than victory, if the UN human rights sympathizers can be believed. The commanders of troops make tactical decisions in the context of broader strategic interests, so the beginning point for identifying RoW violations might appear to the uninitiated to be the battlefield. Wrong!

As Rules of Engagement (ROE) spring from theater and national strategy to comply with RoW, ground commanders focused on those ROE seek to fulfill strategic orders from superiors by mechanical execution of battle plans far from the decisions about RoW.  Most ground commanders only vaguely recall hearing of RoW, and they clearly do not consider them when complying with their orders. The only perpetrators of RoW end up, historically, as the defeated decision-makers behind the front; victorious decision-makers in contrast retire to comfortable estates with shiny medals on their chests. To prosecute the order-obeying field commanders misses the point of ICC’s jurisdiction and reason for existence under the Rome Statute of 2002 (by which the ICC was formed).

So the UN human rights criticism of the UN Security Council for being a bad cop, for shirking responsibility to send bad field commanders and their generals to the ICC, seems premature, to put it mildly. No one has clearly won or lost the war in Syria yet.

Nonetheless, one salient point offered in the bluster rings profoundly true. Paulo Pinheiro, a Brazilian RoW expert employed by the UN human rights bureau, charges not only field commanders and their generals with crimes but also “states which transfer weapons to ..” Syria. http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/IICISyria/Pages/PaulSergioPinheiro.aspx Does he mean the members of the Security Council, including, for example, the USA, Russia, China, France, or Great Britain? Does he mean that all the fighters in Syria will act as spoiled, violent children no matter what, so if they can find bigger, better guns, rockets, bombs, they will most certainly use them, and there is no meaningful way to stop such children except to stop giving them their preferred weapons? Does he mean that those in charge of the UN, when all is said and done, are the cause of the chaos they seek to control?

As noted, maybe the UN was doomed from its beginning.