The Responsibility to Protect

“Never again” we said after the Holocaust. And after the Cambodian Ngenocide in the 1970s. And then again after the Rwandan genocide in 1994. And then, just a year later, after the Srbrenica massacre in Bosnia. And now we’re asking ourselves, yet again, in the face of more mass killing and dying in Darfur, whether we really are ever going to be capable, as an international community, of stopping nation-states from murdering their own people. How many more times will we look back wondering, with varying degrees of incomprehension, horror, anger, and shame, how we could have let it all happen?