Originally published on the CGS blog on May 17, 2014.
Nearly 300 young girls are still missing in Nigeria where they were kidnapped nearly a month ago by a murderous group of extremists calling themselves Boko Haram. They have claimed credit for this crime and intend to sell the young girls as sex slaves to help pay for future murders and crimes.
There are many contributing factors to this mass kidnapping, but the primary reason these girls were not rescued immediately or shortly thereafter is the world’s persistence acceptance of “national sovereignty” as the dominant paradigm of global governance.
In other words, humanity still accepts the right of every national government to do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, to whomever it wants within its own borders. This barbaric paradigm was established nearly 400 years ago by the Treaty of Westphalia and remains today as the primary agreement between nations.
President Obama recently claimed there is nothing we can do about this crime against humanity because Nigeria is a Sovereign state. We offered some help once that government responded to our diplomatic cries, but that took weeks. Now it will be infinitely harder to find these girls and return those that are still alive to their grieving mothers.
The mind-numbing reality is that even if the UN had decided to take action immediately, it couldn’t have done so without first getting a decision by the UN Security Council. And, even with it, the UN has no established police force or SWAT team with a mandate or the capacity to protect innocent lives on short notice. National governments, including the US, has made sure of that. That is how strongly we still believe in the supremacy of nations’ sovereignty.
The government of Syria murders thousands using conventional weapons and even internationally “outlawed” chemical weapons, and all we or the world can do is draw red lines and ask that the mass murdering stop. Which it hasn’t now for nearly three years. The Rwanda Genocide, the most efficient mass murder in human history, was essentially the same story.
Protecting the rights of nations is more important than protecting the lives of innocent people. Similar or worse mass atrocities will continue until “we the people” of the world organize and demand a world constitution with a bill of rights that effectively puts the protection of human beings above the rights of national governments to do as they please.
We have a long way to go.
