The current situation in Libya has the power to make me doubt about the human capacity of learning from previous errors. The “responsibility to protect” is emerging in the world of international relations but when the time comes to take action, hesitation wins and thousands of people pay the price.
I cannot recall when the debate about a “no-fly” zone started, but probably very quickly after the repression itself, however no decision has been taken yet. I thought that events like Rwanda would have made things change but it seems like not. As mentioned by this article, it is not event clear if a no-fly zone is the solution and it might clearly be insufficient but it looks like countries took it as a pretext to debate endlessly. People are being killed on the ground.
Because of abuses of “humanitarian interventions” or fights for democracy that have made big breaches of sovereignty and let western powers appears as imperialist like in Iraq, when the international community really needs to take urgent action to prevent a potential genocide, nobody or almost nobody wants to take the risk of the initiative.
I feel sorry for the people who believed that we supported democracy no matter the price. I know that it’s hard to have clear rules of what to do when something like that happens but I always feel that when people are getting killed there is no time to go over discussion of principles.
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