Summary

One night in March 2007, soldiers arrived in the village of Buramba in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). By the time they left at least 15 people were dead. ‘At 5.30 in the morning’, one survivor said, ‘I saw the soldiers coming to our house…They kicked down the door, and killed eight people inside. Only my four grandchildren survived. [They] continued firing in the village. I fled into the bush. I returned three days later to see the bodies of my children and my mother. The bodies were in latrines; I could see the feet of my mother sticking out.’

The point about this story is not that it is shocking, but that in many parts of the world it is unexceptional. In the DRC, the violence that has increased since that incident has forced even more people to flee from their homes, and led to the deaths of almost 1,500 people a day. Though no other conflict causes that kind of death rate, Oxfam’s workers hear similar stories of murder, rape, and displacement from men and women from Colombia to Sudan every day. That is why Oxfam is publishing this report. Sixty years after the main Geneva Conventions enshrined civilians’ rights to protection, they are violated in every current conflict. Many people sympathise with those who suffer these atrocities, but feel impotent to do anything about it. Many governments feel the same. They think that there is little that can be done. That is wrong.

Some states and non-state actors choose to kill civilians, or pursue strategies in which civilians are too likely to die. Some governments choose to protect their citizens: to keep them safe. Some do not protect all of them, or not well enough. This report will argue that this is far from inevitable – that successful examples of protecting civilians show what governments and others can do when they choose to. It will argue that they have an interest in doing so, because mass atrocities fuel the conflicts that, in an interdependent world, create security threats that cannot be contained. And an increasing number of governments have a ‘moral interest’ too, because their electorates expect them to help prevent, not just condemn, the atrocities they see beamed around the world through modern information technology.

Governments and others can reduce the mass atrocities that blight the world in the early twenty-first century. To do so, they need to make four changes that this report will explore. They need to:

• make the protection of civilians the overriding priority in the response to conflicts everywhere – actively working to protect civilians, and upholding the Responsibility to Protect civilians from mass atrocities, agreed at the 2005 UN World Summit, as a cornerstone of policy;
• adopt zero tolerance of war crimes – whether in counter-terrorism or elsewhere – applying the same standard of international opprobrium to war crimes committed by friends or foes alike;
• act much more quickly to tackle the trends that threaten new or prolonged conflicts – including poverty and inequality, climate change, and arms proliferation – so that we can be better at preventing as well as reacting to conflicts;
• join up effective action at every level, from local communities to the UN Security Council – so that international action works in conjunction with what works on the ground. To help achieve this, the way the UN Security Council works should be urgently reformed with greater transparency and accountability, in which the Council’s members have to account for their performance in pursuing international peace and security, including their Responsibility to Protect civilians from mass atrocities. All permanent members of the Security Council should renounce the use of their veto when the Council is discussing situations of actual or incipient war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.

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Date of original publication: September 2008

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