global responsibility to protect 9 (2017) 203-210 brill.com/gr2p Special Forum on Hardeep Singh Puri’s Perilous Interventions: The Security Council and the Politics of Chaos. New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2016, 280 pp. ∵ Perilous Interventions and the Responsibility to Protect Ian Hall Griffith University, Australia [email protected] Abstract This article analyses Perilous Interventions: The Security Council and the Politics of Chaos by Hardeep Singh Puri, a retired senior diplomat and India’s former Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York. It outlines the structure and argument of the book, which addresses foreign interventions in various conflicts over the past three decades, including those in Libya, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine, and Sri Lanka, and the emergence of the concept of Responsibility to Protect. It argues that Perilous Interventions is a significant, if problematic, book insofar as it signals that deep scepticism about r2p persists in important sections of the policymaking elite in New Delhi, despite India’s rising power, growing capabilities, and changing relationships with major powers, including the United States. It also introduces the remaining three articles in this special section. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi 10.1163/1875984X-00902005 204 Hall Keywords Hardeep Singh Puri – Perilous Interventions – India – Indian foreign policy – Responsibility to Protect Hardeep Singh Puri was India’s Permanent Representative (pr) to the United Nations (un) in New York from 2009 to 2013. That appointment was the pinnacle of a very distinguished career. After studying history at the University of Delhi, Puri joined the Indian Foreign Service (ifs) in 1974. He rose to hold a series of important posts, including those of Ambassador to the United Kingdom and to Brazil, Permanent Representative to the un in Geneva, and Permanent Secretary for economic relations at the Ministry of External Affairs (mea).1 He also spent several years in the 1990s on secondment to the Ministry of Defence. After his retirement from the ifs, he became Vice-President of the International Peace Institute and Secretary General of the Independent Commission on Multilateralism. During Puri’s time as pr to the un, from 2011 to 2012, India was a nonpermanent member of the Security Council (unsc).2 His book, Perilous Interventions: The Security Council and the Politics of Chaos, draws on that experience. It is part memoir, part manifesto, and – it has to be noted – part exculpation of the stance Puri and India took on a number of significant international issues during that period. More broadly, it seeks to provide an explanation for how the world entered what Puri calls our present ‘vicious cycle of terrorism and chaos’.3 It also tries to explain how that cycle might be brought to an end, as well as what he thinks ought to be India’s view of the ‘politics of chaos’ that currently prevail. Puri argues that ‘perilous interventions’ are largely to blame for bringing about the ‘politics of chaos’. These are interventions conducted by powerful states in various locations around the world, generally (but not always) without unsc authorisation. They are, for Puri, the products of ‘whimsical and reflexive decision-making’ that takes insufficient account of the consequences 1 Ambassador Puri’s brief biography is available at http://hardeepsinghpuri.com/about/. 2 For an excellent account of that period, see Rohan Mukherjee and David M. Malone, ‘India and the un Security Council: An Ambiguous Tale’, Economic and Political Weekly 48/29 (2013), pp. 110–117. 3 Hardeep Singh Puri, Perilous Interventions: The Security Council and the Politics of Chaos (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2016), p. 7. global responsibility to protect 9 (2017) 203-210 Perilous Interventions and the Responsibility to Protect 205 for the target societies and for the international system more broadly.4 While the ‘stated intentions’ for such interventions are ‘always laudable and noble’, in Puri’s opinion they often involve settling scores or simply the defence of ‘vested interests’.5 Moreover, they leave destruction and destabilisation in their wake, leaving Puri to wonder if leaving local despots in place, regardless of the crimes they may have committed against their own peoples, might be preferable to intervention by outside powers.6 To make his argument, Puri explores a series of cases: Libya, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine, and Sri Lanka. Libya gets the most extensive treatment, partly because the 2011 uprising that led to the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi took place during India’s first year on the unsc. Puri was intimately involved in the negotiations that led to two unsc resolutions (1970 and 1973) that attempted to address the Libyan crisis, so his analysis is highly personal, coming from a protagonist. It also aims to set out his – and, by extension, his interpretation of India’s – reasons for its scepticism about the unsc’s approach to the crisis, especially its authorisation of armed intervention, carried out by nato forces. On Libya – and in hindsight – Puri observes that Gaddafi was ‘evil’ and that unscr 1973 did indeed authorise the use of force by Western states, but argues that the Libyan leader should have been handled more sensitively, rather than demonised and threatened with referral to the International Criminal Court (icc), and unsc authorisation for military action to protect was translated into an attempt at regime change.7 India, he thinks, was right to abstain in the voting on that resolution, along with Brazil, China, Germany, and Russia; its caution, Puri argues, was vindicated by the chaos that followed nato intervention.8 On Syria, Yemen, and Ukraine, Puri takes – if anything – a harder line. The unsc’s ‘inaction’ on the first has, he thinks, amply demonstrated the institution’s ‘ineffectiveness’ and ‘compete irrelevance’ in the context of emerging threats to international peace and security.9 He criticises Russia’s intervention in the Syrian conflict, in particular, as well as Western and Arab efforts to arm and train anti-government forces. He castigates Saudi Arabia too, for its campaign against the Houthis in Yemen, and rails against the un for taking a ‘kid-glove approach’ to Riyadh that has helped to render it ‘helpless and incapable’ of bringing the conflict to an end.10 Puri is just as harsh about Russia’s 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 5 and p. 19. Ibid., p. 19 and p. 56. Ibid., p. 64. Ibid., p. 90. Ibid., p. 101. Ibid., p. 148 and p. 151. global responsibility to protect 9 (2017) 203-210 206 Hall annexation of Crimea and infiltration of forces into parts of eastern Ukraine, comparing the former to Nazi Germany’s seizure of Sudetenland.11 The assessment of India’s intervention in Sri Lanka in the 1980s is more muted, though Puri’s conclusion is unambiguous: New Delhi should neither have aided the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (ltte) nor sent its army to keep the fragile peace when it would and could not play the role of neutral broker.12 The lessons drawn in Perilous Interventions are clear – even if, as I will argue in a moment, the implications are less so. Armed interventions, Puri thinks, almost always make things worse for target societies rather than better, in terms of the ‘chaos, destruction and destabilisation’ caused by the interveners and the forces they unleash from within those societies.13 Struggles for power break out; political violence, including terrorism, used by the protagonists. And the un, Puri thinks, is ill equipped to deal with the consequences. The perilous interventions of the past decade have shown the un – especially the unsc – incapable of coping with the challenges of the contemporary world. His language, as I have already noted, is uncompromising on this point: he calls the un ‘helpless and incapable’ regarding the ongoing crisis in Yemen and equally ‘helpless’ when it comes to Ukraine.14 What, then, should be done? Puri calls for a shift in attitudes, as he implies these will produce a shift in behaviour. For a start, the international community needs to acknowledge that human rights violations occur in many states – ‘in the us, in India, in Sri Lanka and elsewhere’.15 But only a few of these violations, he thinks, can and should be equated to ‘mass atrocities’. And where violations become so ‘egregious’ as to appear to qualify as ‘mass atrocities’ or something worse, like genocide or crimes against humanity, Puri argues, there is an agreed process for addressing them: they should be reported to the un Human Rights Commission and, if the charge has grounds, the state concerned should be ‘named and shamed’ in Geneva.16 States should not use these human rights violations as pretexts for armed intervention, since such action will only make things worse. When it comes to the concept of Responsibility to Protect (r2p), Puri is deeply sceptical, especially when it comes to Pillar Three, which is ‘problematic because it has lent itself to strong views and, to an extent, some amount of misuse as well’.17 Pillar Three was contentious in 2005 and remains so today, 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 Ibid., p. 162. Ibid., p. 171. Ibid., pp. 23–40. Ibid., p. 151. Ibid., p. 199. Ibid., p. 6. See also p. 199. Ibid., p. 200. global responsibility to protect 9 (2017) 203-210 Perilous Interventions and the Responsibility to Protect 207 he thinks. He highlights then French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner’s remarks at the close of the World Summit to the effect that r2p is a ‘doctrine of humanitarian intervention’. This statement, Puri argues, ‘confirmed the worse fears of most developing countries’ about Pillar Three and the ways in which it might be interpreted by ‘those countries which were once colonial powers’.18 For them, in 2005, r2p seemed merely to provide ‘an opening for the reordering of societies from outside using military force’, something which most of them had already encountered, at the hands of Europeans. For good reason, they preferred what Puri calls the ‘Westphalian system’ put in place sixty years earlier, in 1945, a system that emphasised a stronger interpretation of sovereignty and non-intervention.19 Experience since the World Summit has demonstrated, Puri thinks, that these concerns were amply justified. The urge to intervene has grown among the powerful. The arguments for intervention are ‘always couched in moralistic terms and the need to protect civilians’.20 Western guilt over episodes like the Rwandan genocide and the Srebrenica massacre has provided further fuel to the flames. But those interventions that have been undertaken have produced ‘long-term adverse consequences’ and polarized global opinion.21 Indeed Puri argues that arguments about intervention and r2p have unnecessarily ‘politicized’ the un, making it harder for the institution to do its job effectively.22 For all these reasons, Puri contends that deeper agreement needs to be forged on r2p between the developed world and the developing world, and between the states prone to intervene and the sceptics. He thinks its relationship to traditional conceptions and practices of peacekeeping should be clarified. He also thinks r2p ought to be modified by taking seriously the idea, originally proposed by former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, of ‘Responsibility while Protecting’ (RwP). To Puri, merging the two is necessary if the adverse consequences of ill-judged interventions are to be avoided, and the un to retain its relevance and effectiveness.23 The West – and the Russians – cannot be allowed simply to intervene and then leave the target society to pick up the pieces; they must also shoulder the responsibility to rebuild and they must be held to account if they do not. Perilous Interventions is important not so much because of the originality or otherwise of these arguments, but because it is the first sustained, book-length 18 19 20 21 22 23 Ibid., pp. 200–201. Ibid., p. 201. Ibid., p. 202. Ibid., p. 202. Ibid., p. 204. Ibid., pp. 205–208. global responsibility to protect 9 (2017) 203-210 208 Hall attempt by an Indian analyst to assess the emergence and application of r2p, as well as its relationship to the other interventions of the past decade.24 It is also significant not just because it provides some insights into the negotiations within and around the unsc over the Libyan crisis, but also because of what it may tell us about Indian official attitudes to that episode and to intervention and r2p more broadly.25 Those attitudes matter not just to scholars of contemporary history and foreign policy. India is a rising power with growing influence. And at least part of its elite aspires to making India a ‘leading power’ in international relations, drawing on its extraordinary civilizational inheritance to help shape a more peaceful and just international order.26 It must be observed the arguments Puri advances in Perilous Interventions about interventionism and r2p do not deviate in substance, however much they diverge in tone, from the Indian official position he presented at the un. Well prior to the Libyan intervention, in the General Assembly debate that followed the publication of the Secretary-General’s report on Implementing the Responsibility to Protect (on 24 July 2009), Puri highlighted both India’s reservations about Pillar Three and the ‘deep intellectual acrimony’ concerning r2p that he perceived was developing. At that point, and in a subsequent unga debate in August 2010, Puri also challenged the notion that r2p should be used as a ‘pretext for humanitarian intervention’.27 And his presentation of India’s stance during the Libyan crisis and its aftermath, as well as the early stages of the Syrian crisis, did not depart far from these points. Of course, India voted in favour of Resolution 1970, apparently persuaded by the United States, which condemned Gaddafi and referred him to the International Criminal Court, a 24 25 26 27 This is not to say that Indian analysts have not tackled this topic in journal articles or book chapters. See, for example, Satish Nambiar, ‘India: An Uneasy Precedent’, in Albrecht Schnabel and Ramesh Thakur (eds.), Kosovo and the Challenge of Humanitarian Intervention: Selective Indignation, Collective Action, and International Citizenship (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2000), pp. 260–279; M.S. Rajan, ‘The New Interventionism?’, International Studies, 37/1 (2000), pp. 31–40; Satish Nambiar, ‘The Emerging Principle of the Responsibility to Protect: An Asian Perspective’, Strategic Analysis, 35/6: 955–965 (2011), pp. 963–964. See also Alan Bloomfield’s meticulous book, India and the Responsibility to Protect (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015). Ian Hall, ‘Narendra Modi and India’s Normative Power’, International Affairs 93(1) (2017), 113–131. Statement by Ambassador Hardeep Singh Puri, Permanent Representative of India to the United Nations at the General Assembly Plenary Meeting on Implementing the Responsibility to Protect, a/63/pv.99, 24 July 2009. See also Intervention By Ambassador Hardeep Singh Puri Permanent Representative at the Informal Interactive Dialogue of the un General Assembly on the Secretary General’s report ‘Early Warning, Assessment and the Responsibility to Protect’, a/65/877 – S/2011/393, 9 August 2010. global responsibility to protect 9 (2017) 203-210 Perilous Interventions and the Responsibility to Protect 209 body that India – like the us – does not support, having not signed the Rome Statute.28 India abstained, however, from unscr 1973, with Puri arguing as pr – as he does in the book – that there was insufficient information available to justify military action and that such action may have adverse consequences.29 More broadly, Perilous Interventions suggests that India’s political and diplomatic elite remain conflicted about humanitarian intervention and about r2p.30 While it may have opposed a number of Western humanitarian interventions, Gary Bass notes – and Puri acknowledges in his book – that India has engaged in the practice itself, in East Pakistan in 1971 and then in Sri Lanka in the late 1980s, and justified its actions in terms of protecting civilian populations from harm inflicted by their governments.31 As Kudrat Virk observes, India is more than merely rhetorically supportive of some elements of r2p – in practice, it contributes aid and technical assistance, advancing a capacity-building and good governance agenda, to a number of states, notably Afghanistan, in line with Pillars One and Two.32 These apparent contradictions have given rise to the accusation that India’s stance on humanitarian intervention and Pillar Three of r2p is, at times, simply ‘craven and cynical’, manifesting a ‘tendency to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds’, as the veteran strategic analyst Manoj Joshi put it in the midst of the Libyan crisis.33 Others, notably Sumit Ganguly, have argued that the critical stance taken by India’s political and diplomatic elite towards r2p reflects a deep insecurity about the country’s ‘myriad domestic infirmities and its inability to uphold and protect the rights of its vast minority populations’, which gives rise to a concern that India might one day be the target of some form of international intervention.34 More generally, it could be argued that India’s position – and Puri’s arguments – display a certain ‘reluctance’, to use Sandra Destradi’s useful term, to take the lead on major global issues, to 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 Sumit Ganguly, ‘India and the Responsibility to Protect’, International Relations 30/3 (2016), p. 368. Ian Hall, ‘Tilting at Windmills? The Indian Debate on Responsibility to Protect after unsc 1973’, Global Responsibility to Protect 5(1) (2013), p. 98. This point is well made by M.M. Jaganathan and G. Kurtz, ‘Singing the Tune of Sovereignty? India and the Responsibility to Protect’, Conflict, Security and Development 14/4 (2014), pp. 461–87. Gary J. Bass, ‘The Indian Way of Humanitarian Intervention’, The Yale Journal of International Law, 40 (2015), pp. 227–294. Kudrat Virk, ‘India and the Responsibility to Protect: A Tale of Ambiguity’, Global Responsibility to Protect 5(1) (2013), pp. 56–83. Manoj Joshi, ‘Dodgy Stand on Libya Crisis’, India Today, 24 March 2011, http:// indiatoday .intoday.in/articlePrint.jsp?aid=133200. Ganguly, ‘India and the Responsibility to Protect’, p. 367. global responsibility to protect 9 (2017) 203-210 210 Hall move from oppositional and critical modes of behaviour in forums like the un towards more positive and constructive actions.35 Perilous Interventions is useful, then, as a provocation to wider discussion about Indian attitudes to its evolving global role and to the future of r2p as a normative agenda and set of practices. It suggests that engaging this rising power on Pillar Three, at least, is going to be difficult.36 It makes plain that the ethical, as well as the practical, arguments for intervention in Libya and elsewhere are not widely accepted in the Indian political and diplomatic elite, even among the less ideologically committed members of that group, to which Puri is sometimes argued to belong.37 In that way, it provides at least some suggestion of how rising power India might respond, at the un and elsewhere, to further humanitarian crises. The essays that follow – by James Pattison, Sandra Destradi, and Kudrat Virk – analyse these issues in more detail. Pattison argues that Puri underplays the dangers of what he calls ‘perilous nonintervention’ and criticises the lack of a plausible alternative to r2p in the book. Perilous Interventions suggests that India has become, he suggests, a ‘silent power’ on these key questions of global governance, rather than a responsible one, advancing constructive answers. For her part, Destradi thinks that India is better characterised as a ‘reluctant power’, prone to display both hesitation and recalcitrance when it comes to r2p, as it does when faced by other major issues. But rather than being the product of diplomatic sagacity, as Puri suggests, Destradi argues that Indian reluctance may also be a function of clashing domestic and international political priorities, conflicts over different conceptions of Indian identity, or tensions between contrasting role conceptions for India as a global actor. Finally, Virk suggests that Perilous Interventions can and should be the starting point for a wider debate – in India and beyond it – about r2p that moves beyond post-colonial anxieties about Western interventionism and appreciates the dangers of inaction in the face of humanitarian emergencies stemming from internal conflict as well as the consequences of action. 35 36 37 Sandra Destradi, ‘Reluctance in international politics: A conceptualization’ European Journal of International Relations (2016) doi: 1354066116653665. See also Sandra Destradi, ‘India: A Reluctant Partner for Afghanistan’, The Washington Quarterly 37/2 (2014), pp. 103–117. For a wider discussion of the challenges, see Ramesh Thakur, ‘r2p after Libya and Syria: Engaging Emerging Powers’, The Washington Quarterly, 36/2 (2013), pp. 61–76. On the ethical arguments, see James Pattison, ‘The Ethics of Humanitarian Intervention in Libya’, Ethics & International Affairs 25/3 (2011), pp. 271–277. On the argument that Puri was less ideological than others in the mea, notably his predecessor at the un, Nirupam Sen, see Ganguly, ‘India and the Responsibility to Protect’, p. 366. global responsibility to protect 9 (2017) 203-210