Responsibility To Protect: A Questionable Norm

This book will analyze the international community’s response to humanitarian intervention and crimes against humanities. The international community failed to respond to the horrific genocide of 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda and thus was passive in the face of continued loss of human life; The shameful unwillingness of UN peacekeeping forces to prevent the murderous ethnic cleansing of 7,000 to 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in Bosnia in July 1995; and the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo of Kosovo Albanians, which left 700,000 persons displaced and thousand killed. Because of the guilt emerging from Rwanda and Bosnia, NATO intervened in Kosovo in 1999 and later on in Libya in 2011 to redeem their moral conscience and to rescue innocent civilians from brutal crimes of violence and ethnic cleansing in the case of Kosovo. NATO’s action in Kosovo was a violation of the United Nations Charter due to the lack of Security Council authorization, whereas the intervention in Libya was legal because the Security Council in Resolution 1973 authorized the use of force.