This paper was produced by organizations working in the affected countries or advocacy groups with a long-standing commitment to resolving the LRA threat: Broederlijk Delen, Cafod, Christian Aid, Conciliation Resources, Cordaid, Danish Refugee Council, Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, Intersos, Norwegian Refugee Council, Oxfam, Pax Christi Flanders, Peace Direct, Refugees International, Resolve, Society For Threatened Peoples, Tearfund, Trocaire, War Child UK, World vision.

Here are just two examples:

• Three quarters of a million civilians were killed in conflicts in Darfur, Congo, Iraq, and Afghanistan in 2006 alone.
• At the end of 2008, more than 42 million people had to flee their homes due to more than 30 different conflicts around the world.

“The killing of civilians has become commonplace in modern conflict” says Raymond C. Offenheiser, President of Oxfam America. “Levels of impunity and lawlessness in conflict zones throughout the world have reached crisis levels.”

Violations of the laws of war are committed by governments and non-state actors, including terrorist and rebel groups. Many government forces are not equipped to protect civilians, or make decisions based on political considerations that endanger innocent people. And the United Nations Security Council has failed to take effective measures to protect millions of people in conflicts.

Oxfam America is working actively to promote more respect for international humanitarian law like the Geneva Conventions, and is recommending the following measures:

• The United States and the United Nations should publicly challenge violators of international humanitarian law, even if the violations are committed by allies.
• Impose timely sanctions against political and military leaders responsible for violations of humanitarian laws, and monitor them to deter future war crimes.
• Improve the effectiveness of UN peacekeeping operations to protect civilians.
• Work with the UN to monitor conflicts and quickly deploy mediation and diplomatic teams at the earliest stages of a crisis.
• Adopt an arms trade treaty that would reduce access to illegal weapons used to wage war and violate humanitarian laws.

In the DRC, increasing violence has forced people to flee from their homes, and led to the deaths of almost 1,500 people a day. Though no other conflict causes that kind of death rate, Oxfam's workers hear similar stories of murder, rape, and displacement from men and women from Colombia to Sudan every day. Sixty years after the main Geneva Conventions enshrined civilians' rights to protection, they are violated in every current conflict.

Some states and non-state actors choose to kill civilians, or pursue strategies in which civilians are too likely to die. Some governments choose to protect their citizens: to keep them safe. Some do not protect all of them, or not well enough. There are, however, successful examples of protecting civilians that show what governments and others can do when they choose to.

They have an interest in protecting civilians, because mass atrocities fuel the conflicts that, in an interdependent world, create security threats that cannot be contained. And an increasing number of governments have a "moral interest" too, because their electorates expect them to help prevent, not just condemn, the atrocities they see beamed around the world through modern information technology.

Governments and others can reduce the mass atrocities that blight the world in the early twenty-first century

To do so, they need to make four key changes.

• Make the protection of civilians the overriding priority in the response to conflicts everywhere—actively working to protect civilians, and upholding the Responsibility to Protect civilians from mass atrocities, agreed at the 2005 UN World Summit, as a cornerstone of policy;
• Adopt zero tolerance of war crimes—whether in counter-terrorism or elsewhere—applying the same standard of international opprobrium to war crimes committed by friends or foes alike;
• Act much more quickly to tackle the trends that threaten new or prolonged conflicts—including poverty and inequality, climate change, and arms proliferation—so that we can be better at preventing as well as reacting to conflicts;
• Join up effective action at every level, from local communities to the UN Security Council—so that international action works in conjunction with what works on the ground. To help achieve this, the way the UN Security Council works should be urgently reformed with greater transparency and accountability, in which the Council's members have to account for their performance in pursuing international peace and security, including their Responsibility to Protect civilians from mass atrocities. All permanent members of the Security Council should renounce the use of their veto when the Council is discussing situations of actual or incipient war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.

MONUC should not scale down its activities until the Congolese security forces--and in particular the army--stop posing a threat to their own populations and instead begin providing security and protection to the Congolese people.