called all the banding military strikes against syria and he didn't invoke our tippy formally but in his speech to the american people he talked a lot about america's responsibility in this world and i wonder what do you have a country or a set of countries that are prepared to do that on. ultimately make are to pete totally redundant what's the point of even trying for a collective action and why in the united states will do it alone anyway what if the united states will i think the united states is listening to world opinion and listening to domestic opinion and it sure as hell not to go going to go down a military intervention unless there is very strong and compelling reasons for doing so unless it has a very strong and compelling measure of international and domestic support and i think that's not an unreasonable position to adopt. we've been there before back in the ninety's standing idly by watching these terrible massacre with the rest of the

world saying it's none of our business we've been there before in the nine hundred ninety s. with the fundamental argument being out there a consensus freeze between the global north and the global south and go in there with all guns blazing under no circumstances we do i think have a sensible new way of looking at these issues through the lens of the responsibility to protect and it's very important that we work together cohesively internationally to respond effectively to these situations as they are doing nothing is no longer an option but that mr adams had on that i don't think there is much appetite in the world now for doing nothing i think the question as how to did and the united states just a couple of days ago was ready to again go along with the military strikes and hopefully those military strikes have been avoided now that the russian proposal on

the table but also likely that calls into question whether or not all of the other means diplomatic means have been exhausted just a couple of days ago when suddenly all that persuasive evidence that the united states claim to have is no longer suppressed ways therefore could be put aside while the world works on this new proposal well what the u.s. was responding to the last couple of weeks was something that changed the whole way in which we're looking at the situation in syria yes there have been a series of catastrophic atrocity crimes already perpetrated by during the syrian conflict and yes the world is agonized about how to respond to that and has up until now taken the view all the key players that military intervention was more likely to do more harm than good but when you got the. use of chemical weapons on the scale that we saw on the outskirts of damascus in late august i think the game

did change the use of these weapons does read the whole debate up to a completely different level because the very nature of weapons of mass destruction destruction is that they are so indiscriminate totally incapable of distinguishing between combatants and civilians essentially let me bring in the heavy. council because this is the main issue at stake here and i think the world absolutely it agrees that the use of chemical weapons is unacceptable i think that this agreement at this point is who we use that those weapons and for what purpose and those issues are still unresolved but in the meantime as one of the main architects of the responsibility to pretend they think it's helpful to have certain powers who still reserve an option as you know a lateral option in their sleeve and therefore on their mind i would argue that it is actually undermining and half arsed to come to these international consensus when you ultimately when you have an option of doing it alone you know electoral

action or coalition of the willing action is not remotely defensible if there is a chance of delivering the right result the credible result the moral result the result of most of the will want to through the security council of course we all want the security council to be the guardian all of the rule based international system but look at the record all the security council on syria going all the way back to the middle of twenty eleven there may be reasons for this which we can debate in the context of libya but just look at the record we have not had any serious willingness to grapple with the issues by the security council in particular the russians role in it since the middle of twenty eleven forget about military action that is not playing on the table until very very recently where have been the security council condemnations where have been the security council willingness to apply sanctions where has been the security council willingness to see. the perpetrators i think it's. all there but i think it's been impossible to

get any consensus on the security but it's made a real man it's possible that this is because there is a lot of disagreement not only on the course of action but also on the very promise of that war. who is fighting and that's war who are the victims who are more you can know they can order all those major disagreements and claiming that the u.n. security council was doing nothing i think is a bit of a stretch perhaps you can tell me i mean why the security council failed even last week to condemn the use of chemical weapons and there are eventually issues about who precisely was responsible within the syrian forces but does have a. responsibility to the u.n. security council this is the precise reason why the security council hasn't done that because those evidence have not been released my preference would be and i made that point to a very senior american officials just this morning and before we meeting is every conceivable bit of evidence including intercept evidence to be put on the table the

answer is that some of it is just sensitive and revealing the sources and the methods used that they just do it but this man is going in a military intervention of a date isn't that a serious enough matter it's here actually take aside the issues of class classification and am presented as evidence this is the higher the biggest question average that you can address the issue of war and peace so maybe the stakes are pretty high for for you know classified reasons to be thought to. some of the evidence has been good enough to flush out a concession for the syrian government that they actually possess chemical weapons which up until now has been denied or in a stool waffled about it's been enough to flush out a serious effort which we all hope and believe is serious the russian government to actually removed. of those chemical stocks and the potential use of chemical weapons from the equation altogether what has happened has been

a game changer. some hundreds of people have been killed whether it's six hundred or whether it's a live one hundred there's going to be disagreement i guess there's going to be disagreement about the precise details of who would have watched and when with or it came right out of the presidential office or with or was low down in the compound. there is no doubt there's no doubt about that look there's no doubt about it there's no doubt about the fact that we use i would like more as much more evidence if humanly possible to be out there on the table to put that beyond doubt because nobody wants a repeat of the debacle in iraq in two thousand and three absolutely nobody that was a shocking you know misuse of the international system nobody wants a repeat of unilateral action without the strongest possible cause being established to do just that and without every possible avenue of security council consensus being exhausted agreement here i'm very very much in favor of trying to

trying to reach trying to recreate that consensus on the security council which we did have back in two thousand and eleven of the time of the time of libya it's critical for the sanity and the peace of the world that we do get this united international response and don't get the kind of backing and weaving and feeling and obstruction that we've had a serious serious crimes being committed before me can i recreate that international consensus i think one of the major issues that needs to be addressed is randomly talk about invocation of the responsibility to protect who do you think needs protecting in theory as well as the civilians the noncombatants those people who just want to get on with their lives the seven million people who are already displaced inside and outside the country because they fear for their lives if this conflict continues that's what the responsibility protect is all about is not about political change it's not about regime change it's not about coleman and human rights violations. the responsibility to protect is all about is protecting ordinary people you me ordinary men this is the main bone of contention here and

the main reason why our t p couldn't be involved in the syrian case is at least as far as russia is concerned and that is. i would argue deliberate effort on the part of western governments to lump valuables and civilians together and to try to present the armed militarized a position as just civilians with guns and to argue that those civilians with guns are entitled to the very same protections to the very same assistance as unarmed civilians but i wonder if it's really fair whether there is indeed no distinction between women and children fleeing across the border and all those bearded man running around with kalashnikovs not once you're a combatant you're no longer a civilian whether a combatant in the form of an informal issue for maloney no we're talking about with the responsibility to protect is simply

a new conceptual approach to trying to find consensus where it was spectacularly lacking in the one nine hundred ninety s. will was unfolding a horrible situations in the balkans in rwanda and elsewhere and to address those situations where governments are attacking their own people or some civil wars exploited in which each side is attacking their own people and seeing the perpetration of crimes against humanity or major war crimes that's what that's what responsibility to protect. to join the war on one side or the other from the very beginning it's well documented the rebels committed atrocities not only against government institutions but also against civilians and i would like to ask you as a lawyer under the responsibility to protect the pillar one as you call it does this syrian state does the acid government have the. to use military force against armed rebels of course the government has the right to address. against it

just as the sri lankan government had that right against the tamil tigers which should exercise but it makes a sizing that right it must not itself to the atrocities it must not commit crimes against humanity it must not commit war crimes enormous the other side but remember we didn't have two sides in this at the beginning we simply had a one sided violence we had the regime gunning down essentially peace and justice are not the diameter of a. point and there is a lot of documented evidence those crowds of protesters included aren't people people who are doing the kidnappings the people who are doing the provocations people who are doing assassinations and to pretend that that didn't happen i think was one of the main reasons why the responsibility for that attack never materialized and the case that's the area we all acknowledge those of us who've been following this that there was very very soon enough to the initial explosion

of violence that it did morph into something resembling much more of the civil war which is now a full scale civil war and i think we do all acknowledge that in the course of that civil war there's been some terrible atrocities perpetrated by both sides what we need is strong international pressure to try to diffuse the situation to produce basically a political solution is not. new

york london. the whole world is on the. other one on the end there are five the two you hang up the coins that building at the end of the street another one the more transparent society gets the money or the puppet tears become we see military and state and police forces mobilized against people who blend into the city who inhabit the city the more people trust electronic devices the more defenseless they are. fear that has a thousand on. our r.t. . the main competitor girl on the market is mother nature. may customers struggle with to. fight for each drop from an old turkey supplier. let people think i am

prices pure want to. live on t.v. . they use it up there and wash their hands. and flush their toilets with the same water that this series is selling and spraying water. three. three. three. three. four your media project free video r t dot com. welcome back to worlds apart where we are discussing the use and misuse of the

responsibility to protect with one of its main architects former australian foreign minister gareth evans and mr evans just before we went to break we were discussing this major a game changer in the syria and war of reaches the russian proposal that syria. transfers its chemical weapons to the international community and i know that during your term as the foreign minister you were quite instrumental in bringing to three the international chemical weapons convention sorry seeing this issue is very close to your heart and i think we would both agree that if that proposal is implemented that would be a very good thing for the for the entire world but i wonder how do you think it may change the course of this war i'm not sure that it will change the course of the war if we can simply deter the future use of chemical weapons that will stop things getting even worse than they are at the moment by itself it won't change the underlying dynamics the hope is of course is that if diplomacy works in getting

agreement on a strategy a process to rid the place of chemical weapons that that will enable more diplomacy to really get some traction and for us to get moving on the geneva conference proposal which has been on the table but which is full of course into abeyance as a result of the conflict with the evidence if assad agrees to that proposal then all indications are that the government is willing to accept it. i think the successful implementation of this plan will depend a great deal on the western ability to secure cooperation on the rebel side making sure that the x. parents can operate safely in syria that the chemical weapons convoys are not attacked by the rebels do you think that part of the deal can be secured by the west at this point of time given the unflinching support for the militarized the

position that western countries have demonstrated so far was going to be incredibly difficult to implement from every possible point of view including that which you've just described and it clearly is going to require. military people on the ground to protect those inspectors and to protect the process. of getting syrian agreement to that is going to be a crucial precondition for that whole enterprise to proceed there are so many hurdles as you've sink about them just accessing the stocks making sure there is complete disclosure being confident that all the material is accounted for there are so many hurdles to discuss there's going to be a nightmare in practice i think to make this go food and i just hope that the serious intent on the russians on the syrian government to make this actually. once again even if there is a serious intent on both the part of russia and on the part of the syrian government the question is whether the western government can indeed secure the

participation and the culebra ration and compliance on the part of the syrian rebels because we can discuss the possibility of geneva conference or we can discuss this new chemical weapons proposal but ultimately if the opposition of the militarized opposition that is openly aided by a number of western and arab countries continues on its powers there would be absolutely no political or any sort of solution to this war. we can continue the blame game backwards and forwards it's not a great game and i just ask you whether it's obvious that. obviously obviously obviously there are real problems on the rebels because there's very bad guys mixed up there with what we would say are quite good guys and the difficulty of distinguishing between them and the difficulty of controlling the behavior of the bad guys on the rebels it is really really acute and that's one of the reasons why there's been resistance to using any military means in the past because you just

don't know you know where this stuff will lead and whether it could possibly make things better but if we are going to go down the diplomatic path which the russian government says that it wants to pursue the problem of dealing with all these disparate forces is just going to be as acute in that context as in any other that you mention that's a problem that has to be addressed and that has to be maximum pressure from was capable of applying it externally on all relevant players to resolve the situation and that is going to require concessions and compromises to be made on both sides which i think we all know about but let's just try to get the process started and if the chemical weapons issue is a way of cracking open the door which is being close to that political solution we should try very hard to weaponize well let's try to open it but i think there is the ball is in there on the western side at this point let me turn to the. libyan case i think you would agree with me that one of the reasons why there are so many so much skepticism with regards to our two people in syria was because of the

libyan intervention and before we even get into these all mission creep debate let me focus on the promise of that and i heard hearsay on many occasions and i think it's an unfairly widespread assumption in the wires that if nader and didn't intervene back than they got off the government to get off the army would have exterminated the city of benghazi but i wonder if we can really take that for granted in the first part we argued a lot about. how the syrian conflict began and i think now it's pretty clear how the libyan conflict began because amnesty international. intervention conducted a series of investigations into all those claims of atrocities you know mass rape and the use of. firing on and on protesters and the fact that protesters were on on that point of time and most of that claims turned out to be false although lacking

sufficient evidence that's what amnesty international said at the time so i wonder whether that makes our two peak concept extremely dangerous because ultimately it is based on their hypothetical it's aimed at preventing a hypothetical massacre but as was demonstrated in the case of libya about that ickle was based on false evidence your government the russian the russian government did not think the risk was hypothetical. you can only debate these things you can and the result and decide these things at the time as you see them on the basis of the evidence in front of you on the basis of the behavior of the gadhafi regime the way in which it had with. the russian government along with everybody else unanimously endorsed that resolution condemning the libyan government's behavior introducing a. threat to criminal prosecution and three weeks later in the context of the seed threats on being. the players on the security council acknowledged believed in

to go back over that and to challenge the basis for that decision making and to suggest that that was somehow made in bad faith the without evidence or without sufficient understanding the facts on the ground is just to defy history we can argue about and there's many things are probably agree with you about about the subsequent course of that libyan intervention and the way in which it did involve mission creep which was not justified by the explicit terms of the mandate but don't forget. sake let's argue about the circumstances. for months one who knows really i suppose this is the. history of the reasons you cannot be applied in syria is precisely because of the libyan experience because the rest of there have been tired was misled about the scale of violence that was perpetrated by the cut off in government back then and many countries are now asking whether all this reports that we are hearing about their trial cities of the syrian government now whether

they are accurate and let me just quote something that the international crisis group that i know the e.u. left for a number of years sat on the on the issue of lee bandy actually said that from the very beginning the coverage of all of the libyan affair was extremely one sided western coverage was based on the promise of indiscriminate use of force but it got off the army and the fact that protestors were unarmed to reach we know at this point of time wasn't true those protestors were tax relief soldiers that are saying publicly. weapons so ultimately our disagree with the position was taken by the international crisis group after a little. grievances. i also believe that if the international community ahead responded as quickly and as robustly as it did in the libyan case there would be eight thousand men and boys

still alive today in srebrenica and i believe there would be eight hundred thousand rwandans still alive i think it's very very very important that the international community reacted in the decisive way that it did we can argue about what happened afterwards but we should not about the evidence which was there in front of our eyes about what was anticipated to happen in benghazi on the basis of what had already happened in tripoli and elsewhere but we can. do for him right to me i could tell you that you know if the international community didn't intervene if gadhafi stayed in power there would be would have been a lot of leverage that the international community would have with his government and put pressure on all and he's a system to make sure that he treats protesters humanely that he changes his institutions that he opens up his country but the their point is that nowadays you can put absolutely no pressure on the libyan authorities and the libyan people are

still in need of protection murder rate in the past in the last two years has increased five hundred percent faster rate has increased four hundred percent people are still being raped they're still being executed they're still being kidnapped they're still being assassinated they're absolutely no system of justice education house care economy is in tatters but they. did the need for protection is there but then the possibility of protection is absent the still problems in libya everybody. still is. libyan mandate was exercised whether there are issues as to whether or not the civilian protection mandate was strictly by the nato forces or with the reach themselves i happen to agree with you and other. including the russians although with a for the russian government this is really an explanation was just an excuse for syria let's put that to one side i had. stretched beyond insurance i

happen to believe the mandate was strange beyond insurance that it should not have been. made by the gadhafi government and the south africans among others should have been seriously pursued and i happen to believe that if there was any tool old the issue of being resolved without regime change but the fighting stopping and the killing stopping then that's the path that should have been going down and i also happen to believe and i agree probably with you in this respect that because of the perception that that mandate was reached in libya that was an important reason why so many countries became very suspicious of the hostile to the use of the similar approach in the case of syria when it came along so quickly and i think that's a tragedy because i think we got it right in libya just as we got it right in case which you have not mentioned but which happened at the same time we got it right they will did react appropriately on the evidence as it existed at the time the russian government was part of that decision making process we got it right what

happened after that went off the rails and we're still bearing the pain all that we need to get back on the rails but not by throwing the baby out with the bath water and saying this is a ridiculous we're in a political concept this responsibility to protect we do have the intellectual framework the political framework the conceptual framework the moral framework to make this work let's just get together and make it work mr evans i greatly appreciate your being on this let me just quote from ban ki moon who sat back in two thousand and. you know everybody tell me that they need to protect civilians but the main point the main bone of contention here is how to did and i think it applies to syria probably even more than to any other case but unfortunately this is all we have time for to our viewers please join us again same claim. same time here in a while the part. the

interview. cut loose.

lips. live. live live. live . ok. i dave across you welcome you

to ted you're all a virgin it's a little while in the middle of the chesapeake bay on the virginia. county. page you're all in the chesapeake bay probably one of the best areas in the town hall for us. there's an old picture of ten year island before the channel was cut oh here. we go way up there. there's go all right here are some of the headstones from the graves it for you this is a fruits that's that's what we don't want to happen to change your all and we want to get some protection and make sure that we don't go into the chesapeake bay like uppers did in other communities.

this year and on the un's day extremists reign of terror in the christian the village of my lula correspondent witnesses government troops regaining control of the historic settlements. the use of force with a conscious traffic i'm not just a syrian presentation dresses america's public and politicians as diplomats nice to find a way to deal with damascus chemical weapons. and does the trip trip of edward snowden's leaks continue to unveil the scale of n.s.a. surveillance which is kind of the spy program in the studio with kevin mitnick one of the walls funston most wanted from the one nine hundred ninety.