By Jean-Jacques Roche
Translation: Davina Durgana
Passage au crible n°48
The National Council of Transition announced that the former Libyan leader, Mouammar Kadhafi, was killed on October 20th, 2011 and was buried that Tuesday in a secret location somewhere in the Libyan Desert. His son, Mouatassim was buried at the same ceremony.
> Historical background
> Theoretical framework
> Analysis
> References
After he had just received the Sakharov Prize, the Arab Spring did not seem to be only the result of peaceful demonstrations. This was certainly the case in Tunisia and Egypt where power was given up due to the pressure from the street demonstrations. However, the recourse to force was necessary to liberate Libya from an old tyrant of forty years.
These revolts took a new dimension when disproportionate repression led to an intervention in the name of the responsibility to protect. Put into effect yesterday by NGOs, the duty to intervene must from now on support the armed forces, which – in the name of Just Causes – engage in new just wars that they fail to finish because they have anticipated what could be a Just Peace.
This question is not new and has been nourished by debates since Cicero and St. Thomas Aquinas. The opposition between Realists and Liberalists returns today, in the domain of theories of International Relations, an argument, which has become very classic and is divided into two lines of thought.
1. Realists would fall more on the side of the opponents of tyrannicide for two reasons. They recall that the Six Books of the Republic by Bodin was published four years after St. Bartholomew. They emphasize as well that the state actor remains the principal instrument of pacification of a civil society, which is naturally violent. When the violence of the tyranny aggregates factors of internal division, such that the chances of implosion of the country are realized because only the State allows “the avoidance of the explosion of animosity into pure passion and brutality without restriction” in the words of Aron. Secondly, it is not the place of States to interfere in the domestic affairs of other states. To the contrary, peace and international security exist, according to the Charter of the United Nations, by the development of amicable and peaceful relationships between its members, founded primarily on non-intervention. A reminder of this requirement may be seen in the recent ASEAN charter in 2007, which attests in this regard to the permanence of this rule.
2. As for liberals, they defend the principle of the necessary right to consider the domestic affairs of a country for two reasons. In the first place, when the tyrant has stopped being the legal representative of his citizens, he has violated his mandate. To eliminate a despot is consequently not undermining the Social Pact because it predates the Political Pact. In other words, the real sources of law naturally exist in the heart of social structures (families, clans, tribes….) and precede the emergence of the public power: the tyrant cannot thus pose as the protector of this single source of law. Secondly, liberals find themselves supporting the principle of responsibility to protect to be incumbent on all actors when sovereignty has proven ineffective in accomplishing this mission. Considering that sovereignty is conditional – the powers, which it creates remain dependent on its capacity to protect its citizens; they retain the natural right to create justice when the State can no longer fulfill its mission – liberals advocate the emancipation of civil society when facing state supervision. Especially when they are repressive or are simply incapable of responding to the transnational issues with which they are presented.
The emergence of civil societies in the international arena disturbs traditional landmarks and forces the rethinking of the mechanisms of international pacification in the framework of intrastate conflicts, which have today become internationalized. While some State intends to intervene in the name of Just War, they do so without having anticipated the failure of these operations and benefitting from a reflection on Just Peace.
The dismantling of authoritarian States which have imposed until then an appearance of unity and weak credibility of imported structures renders the rapid installation of rule of law, promised by its initiators as illusionary. Even if elections could be quickly organized, the polarization among the ethnic communities and religious devotion, in the best of cases, reinforce the most powerful group, to the detriment of minorities who will contest very quickly the verdict of the ballot box. In a situation of open or latent civil war, the organization of general elections is not a guarantee of peace. Sometimes the prospect of an elective process can trigger fighting, such as was the case in Congo-Brazzaville in 1997. Moreover, even if international observers provide a good report of the overall election process, they seem to fear that the new leaders – too inexperienced after being out of power for decades – can be overly influenced by outside forces or may succumb to the temptation of corruption. In either of those two cases, their opponents would be happy to denounce the foreign intervention or the venality of new government leaders to justify the return to fighting. If, as in the case of Iraq, the old structures of power – the political party and the army – were dismantled, the insurgents may freely equip themselves with arsenals that the occupying forces have not completely secured and then these former military members may challenge, through guerrilla warfare, the occupying forces. They are much less at ease in facing this type of combat than all of the other alternatives to adapt to revolutionary wars, conflicts of low-intensity, asymmetrical exchanges or to the counter-insurgency as they are limited by legal constraints such as their adversaries use the legal pretext of their numerical and material inferiority to ignore these rules. It is, in effect, always difficult to confront the Mao guerrillas “at ease among the people like a fish in water” in the destruction of a stock of arms stored in a school or to eliminate an entire community on the roof of a hospital. The interpretative guide of the ICRC of 2009 deals with the direct participation in hostilities, which seem incapable of eliminating the menace of a Taliban insurgent who quietly cultivates his land for nine months of the year as it is to neutralize a hacker who can interfere with the systems of observation and communication from thousands of miles away.
The fragility of new imported structures, corruption, the spread of weapons, the capacity of harm to specific minorities constitute some of the factors, which radically transform the crisis. In fact, it has taken the form of a test of imposed force by the vanquished, which they have believed to carry an easy victory in justifying the conduct of a Just War. However, they have been revealed as incapable of negotiating a Just Peace, which would allow them to pass the stalemate.
Allan Pierre, Keller Alexis, What is Just Peace, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006.
Badie Bertrand, Un Monde sans Souveraineté, les Etats entre Ruse et Responsabilité, Fayard, 1999.
Commission Internationale de l’Intervention et de la souveraineté, 2001, http://www.iciss.ca
Kaldor Mary, Global Civil Society: An Answer to War, Wiley-Blackwell, 2003.
