Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Three years ago when Prime Minister Cameron, former President Sarkosy and President Obama joined forces to bomb Libya, the Government here thought they were doing the right thing. Will the Minister of State not admit at this stage that it was a serious mistake to intervene in the affairs of Libya because it has caused many more problems than it has solved? With regard to the notion of humanitarian intervention, unfortunately, world powers are pretty selective when they choose to act and not to act and, more often than not, they are guided by self-interest rather than out of concern for the local people.

When Serbia was bombed at the end of the 1990s, shortly afterwards the South Summit of 133 states convened in April 2000 and rejected "the so-called 'right' of humanitarian intervention, which has no legal basis in the United Nations Charter or in the general principles of international law", yet we see it being used time and again, in particular, by the US and Britain.

When NATO bombed Serbia, it argued that it was within its area of jurisdiction. It tried to disown what was going on in south-eastern Turkey in the 1990s, however, where Kurds were being slaughtered thanks to the military support of the Clinton Administration with the aid of other NATO powers.

The selective application of the responsibility to protect principle is stomach-churning. There was, of course, no thought of applying that principle to the Iraq sanctions administered by the Security Council, which were condemned as "genocidal" by two directors of the oil for food programme, Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, both of whom resigned in protest. Mr. von Sponeck's detailed study of the horrendous impact of the sanctions has been under a virtual ban in the United States and United Kingdom, the primary agents of the programme. Similarly, there is no thought today of protecting the people of Gaza - also a UN responsibility - who are being denied fundamental human rights.

In another domain, there is no thought of invoking even the most innocuous prescriptions of responsibility to protect in response to massive levels of starvation in poor countries. While the UN estimates that the number facing hunger has passed 1 billion, its World Food Programme has just announced major cutbacks in aid as a result of rich countries reducing their meagre contributions and giving priority to their continued support for the arms industry and the bailing out of banks. Ireland must take a different position on all of these matters, instead of aligning ourselves with these people.

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