Chomsky on the ‘Responsibility to Protect’

26Jul09

Earlier this week Noam Chomsky participated, along with Jean Bricmont, Gareth Evans (former Australian FM and long-time President of the International Crisis Group) and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, in a UN panel on the doctrine of ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P).

You can watch the three hour discussion here [.rm], and PlasticJesus341 has uploaded the video of the 1 hour press conference that followed it to YouTube:

Lots to be said about this, but for now, see this discussion by Anthony Fenton. Among other things, Fenton notes that the Economist, one of the few media outlets to cover the panel at all, “proved Chomsky’s repeated general point about the press’s ignorance of such matters, accusing d’Escoto Brockmann (or, as Reuters put it, “the radicals”) of a well-organized “campaign to sabotage R2P,” while ignoring the relative pervasiveness of the R2P Lobby [which Fenton has himself mapped, here], which they’ve never seen fit to report on.” Joe Emersberger has a fuller deconstruction of the Economist’s report.

One last point for now – the assertion is repeatedly made that the West “stood by” and did “nothing” in the face of the genocide in Rwana. I’m not sure this does justice to the actual historical record – see Richard Seymour’s The Liberal Defence of Murder and his blog for a discussion of the West’s active intervention in that conflict.

Update: Richard deals specifically with the ‘myth of non-intervention” here.

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Tags: Gaza, humanitarian intervention, Iraq, Jean Bricmont, liberal imperialism, Noam Chomsky, Palestine, R2P, Responsibility to Protect, Rwanda, UN, US