It’s about time

Agence France Presse – Getty Images

Now we’re talking.

World pressure intensified today to get relief into the Myanmar/Burma region devastated by the weekend cyclone.

“The situation in the delta sounds more and more horrendous,” Reuters quoted [an American diplomat] as saying. She said many people had died when the storm struck while they were sleeping, and they were either drowned or swept out to sea. Earlier in the day, the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, said that the United Nations should invoke its “responsibility to protect” civilians as the basis for a resolution to allow the delivery of international aid even without the permission of the military junta.

See the couple of posts below on this. The horrendous death toll is rising quickly while humanitarian relief is blocked by that junta.

Enough is enough.

“We are seeing at the United Nations if we can’t implement the responsibility to protect, given that food, boats and relief teams are there, and obtain a United Nations’ resolution which authorizes the delivery and imposes this on the Burmese government,” Mr. Kouchner, who co-founded the aid group Doctors Without Borders, told reporters in Paris…

In 2005, the United Nations recognized the concept of “responsibility to protect” civilians when their governments could or would not do it, even if this meant intervention that violated national sovereignty. But it has been rarely applied.

Pope Benedict cited that very responsibility in his address to the UN at the end of April, a citation picked up by much of the media at the time. Here’s what he said:

The principle of “responsibility to protect” was considered by the ancient ius gentium as the foundation of every action taken by those in government with regard to the governed: at the time when the concept of national sovereign States was first developing, the Dominican Friar Francisco de Vitoria, rightly considered as a precursor of the idea of the United Nations, described this responsibility as an aspect of natural reason shared by all nations, and the result of an international order whose task it was to regulate relations between peoples.

Now, as then, this principle has to invoke the idea of the person as image of the Creator, the desire for the absolute and the essence of freedom. The founding of the United Nations, as we know, coincided with the profound upheavals that humanity experienced when reference to the meaning of transcendence and natural reason was abandoned, and in consequence, freedom and human dignity were grossly violated. When this happens, it threatens the objective foundations of the values inspiring and governing the international order and it undermines the cogent and inviolable principles formulated and consolidated by the United Nations. When faced with new and insistent challenges, it is a mistake to fall back on a pragmatic approach, limited to determining “common ground”, minimal in content and weak in its effect.

Myanmar/Burma is an insistent challenge. Time is critical.

And the United Nations has stepped up its insistence. Its World Food Program wants to fly in 45 tons of high-energy biscuits. The junta resisted. The UN applied strategic diplomacy throughout the day.

“When we informed them that we wanted to transport these biscuits by air the initial response was okay, as long as you hand them over to us,” [Tony Banbury] said. “That’s not the way we operate. That turned into an all-day discussion. In the end they agreed that the World Food Program would be responsible for handing them out.”

Way to go.