After months of delay, a transitional council for Haiti has picked a president and prime minister. The interim appointments pave the way for deployment of an international security force, led by Kenyan police. Its job is to restore order and retake the capital, Port-au-Prince, from armed criminal gangs that control most of it and have already killed thousands. The ultimate goal is an election for a permanent government.
The mission faces a raft of challenges. Though authorized by the United Nations and funded by the United States, the deployment is unpopular in Kenya, where police have a reputation for human rights abuses. It’s unclear that the planned 1,100-man force is large and capable enough to take on hundreds of heavily armed gangs. Will the Kenyans be expected to disarm them? Or just provide a “static” presence at key buildings and infrastructure?
The Haiti deployment represents a comeback for the “responsibility to protect.” This is the principle, born two decades ago — amid bloody wars in the Balkans, famine and anarchy in Somalia, and genocide in Rwanda — that the international community can, and should, intervene to save civilian populations in failed states. Since the United Nations General Assembly endorsed “R2P” in 2005, however, it has only been invoked once: the NATO-led military mission in Libya in 2011, which began with the goal of preventing massacres and ended with the toppling of Moammar Gaddafi amid anarchic factional fighting.
The Libya intervention not only went awry; it led China, Russia and nations of the Global South to denounce civilian protection as a pretext for the United States and Europe to engage in self-interested regime change. Yet even staunch proponents of R2P also looked at Libya and argued that it was, in hindsight, a misapplication of the concept. Libya helps explain why, in 2012, President Barack Obama hesitated to enforce his “red line” against the Syrian regime’s atrocities, despite urgings from R2P advocates in his administration. U.S. airstrikes might have toppled the regime — creating a power vacuum that the Islamic State could have exploited.
Haiti’s predicament, however, shows that the problem R2P meant to address remains real and that discarding the concept altogether would be a mistake. It needs to be applied more carefully and consistently. Gareth Evans, a former Australian foreign minister and president of the International Crisis Group, has identified five criteria for doing that.
First, the threat of mass civilian casualties must be serious and imminent. Second, while an intervention can never be free of geopolitical motivations or consequences, its primary goal must be to save civilians. Third, opportunities for diplomatic and economic pressure must be exhausted first. Fourth, the military force used must be sufficient to deal with all threats on the ground. Fifth, and crucially, intervention must be reasonably certain to do more good than harm.
These standards can help the U.S. public sort through its inevitably competing impulses: the decent wish to do something — anything — to stop the suffering and the skeptical concern that a given crisis is too complicated, remote and, for a nation with problems of its own, costly.
Such doubts are understandable regarding Haiti, where the record of interventions is lengthy and mixed — from the Marine Corps’s often-abusive 1915-1934 occupation to the cholera epidemic and accusations of sex trafficking during a 2004-2017 U.N. peacekeeping mission.
Also understandable are questions about selectivity: Why a U.S.-backed mission to Haiti but not, say, Sudan, where a two-year battle between dueling warlords has killed at least 15,000 people, displaced 9 million more, left millions on the brink of famine and led to a likely genocide in Darfur? Or Myanmar, whose military, bent on crushing a popular insurgency, has killed more than 6,000 people in almost three years and displaced 3 million more?
Mr. Evans’s criteria provide answers. The slaughter in Sudan and Myanmar is clear, but not the chances intervention could do more good than harm. Also, the Haiti mission meets a sixth criterion we would add to Mr. Evans’s list: If intervention is warranted, it is crucial to assemble the broadest possible coalition, including countries from the region. The proposed Haiti mission is backed by a U.N. Security Council resolution and Kenyan police; the Bahamas, Barbados, Benin, Chad and Bangladesh have offered additional personnel. It did not trigger Russian and Chinese vetoes at the U.N., as more geopolitically sensitive missions elsewhere might have.
The main lingering uncertainty relates to Mr. Evans’s fourth criterion: force sufficiency. Gen. Peter Cosgrove, who commanded Australian troops in a humanitarian intervention in East Timor in 1999, memorably attributed his success to telling local militias, “there’s only one military force allowed to posture here, and that’s my force.” If the Haiti operation cannot say the same to that country’s gangs, it could fail. With enough U.S. help, though, the mission could save Haitian lives and breathe much-needed new life into the responsibility to protect.
