The responsibility to protect : a critical analysis

A Textbook of International Law.

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The International Development Research Centre

Introduction: The Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarios de ColombiaEjercito del Pueblo (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People's Army-FARC-EP) is the most powerful and successful guerrilla army in the world confronting neoliberal regimes and their U.S. backers. It is the dominant political force in over 50 percent of the country's municipalities, fielding a guerrilla army of approximately 18,000 mostly peasant fighters. In addition, it has urban militia units in most major cities and towns and hundreds of thousands of sympathizers throughout the country. Led by Manuel Marulanda, it has been battling the Colombian oligarchy and its authoritarian two-party political system for over three decades. The FARC emerged in 1964 from a peasant movement that had sought five years earlier to establish rural self-governing communities in Marquetalia. The military invaded the peasant communities, destroying their villages and razing their crops. The peasants regrouped and, under the leadership of Marulanda, formed the nucleus of what is today the FARC. The FARC, which retains fraternal relations with the Colombian Communist party, has built its support by supporting agrarian reform (redistribution of land), nationalism (opposition to foreign control of strategic sectors of the economy), democratization (the end of the Liberal-Conservative monopoly of political power), and human rights (the dismantling of the military-landlord-controlled paramilitary groups that terrorize the countryside and the cities). It has taken a principled position against the narco-capitalist politicians and military officials. It protects cocagrowing peasants and taxes the dealers who purchase the leaf in their zones of influence. Contrary to the U.S. State Department propaganda, however, the FARC neither produces nor sells coca or drugs, as the present president of Colombia, Andres Pastrana, admits. From early 1998 to the end of 1999, the FARC has extended its field of operations and the size and scope of those operations: military confron-

The FARC Faces the Empire

Rethinking the Nation-State: The Many Meanings of Sovereignty

This multidisciplinary review links three areas of legitimate inquiry for practitioners of medicine and public health. The first is occurrences of mass violence or genocide perpetrated against vulnerable populations, with a focus on the failure of national and international mechanisms to prevent or predict such violence. The second is evolving concepts of national sovereignty and an emerging framework in which the imperative to assist vulnerable populations supersedes a state's right to self determination. The last is how medical, public health, and other systems of surveillance and rapid assessment of mass violence can accelerate public awareness and facilitate structured, consistent political decision making to prevent mass violence and to provide international humanitarian assistance.

Let no one be discouraged by the belief there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world's ills--against misery and ignorance, injustice and violence…. Each time he stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. Robert F Kennedy

The principles of medicine and public health may help decision makers determine the timing and level of intervention to protect vulnerable populations from mass violence. Mass violence occurs overtly through warfare and civil strife, or covertly through the creation of morbid conditions, and here refers not only to homicide and genocide through direct injury but also to the promotion of other threats to the survival of populations, such as famine, drought, communicable disease, migration, and imprisonment. Mass violence and genocide are not homogeneous: their manifestations are quite diverse.1 Vulnerable populations include peoples identifiable by common …

Humanitarian responses to mass violence perpetrated against vulnerable populations.

Something is always lost to the sovereign, democratic, liberal or otherwise. This is the very function of law, but in contemporary times of (anti) terror, when obedience demands obeisance and protection from terror includes torture, it is becoming increasingly difficult in the United States, Australia and Britain to imagine a `fair and free contract' with the sovereign. What is to be done? Purchasing freedom as cars, perfume and fries performs one evasion of the violence of the sovereign decision. The collapse of signification into the product is an effective gesture to enable a liberal democratic subject to imagine it is obtaining or ingesting freedom in the cloth or, as a food group. Similarly, offering freedom as a gift to the Middle East enacts a denial or even foreclosure that speaks of freedom as if it can be administered militarily. This article discusses the mirroring of the imagery in the Wachowski brothers' Matrix Trilogy with contemporary political rhetoric in the West on the War on Iraq and on...

The responsibility to protect : a critical analysis

Citations

A Textbook of International Law.

References

The International Development Research Centre

The FARC Faces the Empire

Rethinking the Nation-State: The Many Meanings of Sovereignty

Humanitarian responses to mass violence perpetrated against vulnerable populations.

Free Flesh: The Matrix, the War on Iraq and the Torture of Democracy

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