A fair foreign policy:
Can the UK do more to protect civilians around the world?
The UK’s foreign policy affects millions of poor and vulnerable people in the war zones where Oxfam works.
Any future Prime Minister and government must be global leaders in helping to solve the world’s conflicts and protecting civilians caught up in them. The UK must become more consistent in challenging war crimes — and fulfilling its responsibility to protect civilians threatened by abuses.
Any future Prime Minister and government must say ‘never again’ – as much to repeating the UK’s past failures to stop genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda, as to repeating a misadventure on the scale of Iraq.
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Summary
The UK‘s foreign policy does not matter for the UK only. It matters for millions of poor and vulnerable people caught up in the conflicts where Oxfam works around the world. In diplomacy, as well as development, the UK can have a real impact on men, women, and children struggling to survive in the world’s war zones.
UK foreign policy is at a crossroads, as one Prime Minister hands over the reins to another. For four years, foreign-policy discussions have been dominated by the debacle in Iraq. That is understandable – but dangerous. The danger is that, after Iraq, UK foreign policy could lurch to a much more cautious approach, turning away from trying to solve the world’s worst crises, with potentially catastrophic consequences for people in them. And by refusing to acknowledge some of the failings and inconsistencies of recent years, the UK could undermine many of the more positive steps it has taken.
In 1994, the UK government not only sat on its hands, but actively worked to block the UN Security Council intervening to stop the genocide in Rwanda. It was one of the first to tell the UN to withdraw peacekeepers, rather than act to stop the killing. In part, this was because it was afraid of repeating the Western intervention in Somalia, which ended in disaster and humiliation in 1993.
One million people died in the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia, to which the previous UK government failed to respond effectively. Tony Blair came to office determined that the UK would never again allow such mass murder to be perpetrated. He pursued what could arguably be described as a relatively successful foreign policy until the misadventure in Iraq.
Now, that failure poses the danger that the foreign-policy pendulum will swing back again. Will a future Prime Minister, aware of the damage done by the Iraq war, stand back from trying to help to resolve the world’s most difficult crises – just as a previous Prime Minister, after Somalia, stood back from Rwanda?
The true lesson from Iraq is that the wrong policy can make a bad situation worse. But this government has been right to pursue an active foreign policy. The UK must do more, not less, to seek multilateral solutions to the world’s conflicts, and find ways to protect civilians caught up in them.
