Overcome evil with good

Tim Miller Dyck

Editor/Publisher

The international community has been wrestling with the question of moral responsibility when facing atrocity and evil for a long time. What do we do when faced with hundreds of thousands of dead in Rwanda in the mid-1990s and in the Darfur region of Sudan in the last few years?

It’s been a real accomplishment just to have the question considered as seriously as it has been. During the Cold War years, western governments ignored or supported all kinds of vicious rulers as long as they were on “our side.”

In this issue, we bring you an in-depth examination from a Mennonite perspective on what could become the biggest change to international law in this area since the prosecution of genocide and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights shortly after the end of the Second World War. That change is the idea of “Responsibility to Protect” or R2P (see pages 4-12). After the non-intervention in Rwanda and the NATO intervention in Kosovo (which included Canadian bombing flights) without a UN Security Council authorization, there was a strong push for some kind of international agreement on if, when and how genocide should be prevented.

It was Canada that stepped forward to address this need. In 2000, it was the Canadian government, along with a group of foundations, that announced the establishment of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. This group was to come up with a new policy for the world to consider on how to respond to genocide and ethnic cleansing. That policy was the R2P principle, and it was passed by the Sept. 2005 summit of world leaders at the UN General Assembly and by the Security Council in April 2006.

How our larger society understands the moral implications of violence is an important topic for Mennonites to address. Just to agree that everyone has a moral responsibility to respond when the vulnerable are killed and abused by those more powerful is a great step forward towards God’s vision of justice for the powerless.

Saying that everyone’s life and dignity is worth protecting—not just the ones who are white or have oil or mineral wealth)—lines up with Jesus’ love and death for the whole world. Stating that there are more important moral principles than not interfering with other governments is in agreement with the church’s view that it is more important to obey God’s teachings than human law, if the two are in conflict.

I’m glad to see these things recognized in secular society, and I hope these principles are more influential in the future than in the past, because of the Responsibility to Protect initiative. Nations of every kind have for too long ignored moral principle if it was in conflict with what they wanted to do.

But, as a church, we need to remember that before we are citizens of Canada or another country, we are first citizens of God’s holy nation, “a people belonging to God,” as I Peter 2:9 says. Our Confession of Faith states, “Even at its best, a government cannot act completely according to the justice of God because no nation, except the church, confesses Christ’s rule as its foundation.”

This is why it is not surprising to see that, in addition to many admirable statements, the R2P doctrine turns to violence as its final method of bringing about change. In any system that does not turn to Jesus as its ultimate example—the one who refused violence and harm to others through to his death—those that have more power will see it as right to kill others who disagree with them.

This is one of our particular Mennonite gifts to the world. Our belief that we will follow Christ in not using violence to get our way is so simple, so profound and so far-reaching. With this, so many sins of the church would have been avoided: no crusades, no killing of Jews or Muslims or Mennonites, no Inquisition. We cannot accomplish the goals of heaven using the tools of the world. Romans 12 tells us, “No, ‘if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.’ Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

There is much that we can and must do to prevent injustice and genocides, but more violence will never solve the problems of violence.