The Washington Post
March 6, 2005 Sunday
Final Edition
Crime of Crimes; Does It Have to Be Genocide for the World to Act?
by David Bosco
On Feb. 1, the United Nations issued a finding that sounded like
hopeful news about one of Africa’s worst conflicts.
“UN report clears Sudan government of genocide in Darfur,” reported
Agence France-Presse.
“UN Panel Sees No Genocide in Darfur,” a St. Petersburg Times
headline on a Reuters wire story said the next day.
“Report on Darfur Says Genocide Did Not Occur,” read another in the
New York Sun.
The headlines said more about the mindset of the people reading the
report than they did about the long-awaited investigation by the U.N.
commission of inquiry on the conflict in western Sudan. The 176-page
document provided a litany of misery and blamed the government in
Khartoum. But to many readers, it appeared to have let Sudan’s
leaders off the hook by not branding their actions as genocide, as
the Bush administration and U.S. Congress had already done.
It’s not as though the report gave Sudan a seal of approval. It
detailed extensive atrocities authorized by the Sudanese government
and carried out by Janjaweed militias. Its authors concluded that the
government and militias conducted “indiscriminate attacks, including
killing of civilians, torture, enforced disappearances, destruction
of villages, rape and other forms of sexual violence, pillaging and
forced displacement throughout Darfur.” They added that the
government’s brutal campaign had displaced more than 1.5 million
people. But for many news editors and readers, one conclusion
overshadowed all the rest: There was no genocide in Darfur, after
all.
In considering whether and where to intervene, one question has
assumed talismanic significance: Is it genocide? In the words of
judges on the international tribunal for Rwanda, genocide is the
“crime of crimes.” Such a finding has become a signal for the world
to act.
But as the Darfur report shows, genocide is an unreliable trigger.
For all its moral power, genocide is both hard to document and linked
to questions of race, ethnicity and religion in a way that excludes
other — similarly heinous — crimes. Intended as a clarion call, the
term itself has become too much of a focal point, muddling the
necessity for action almost as often as clarifying it.
Few issues have been more important in the last decade than reacting
to the bloody civil conflicts that still haunt many parts of the
globe. The current film “Hotel Rwanda” hammers audiences with the
tale of the world’s shameful failure to stop the 1994 Rwandan
massacres. Looking to the genocide label to motivate international
intervention in places like Rwanda, however, overlooks two sad
truths: Widespread slaughter can demand intervention even if it falls
outside of the genocide standard. And the world is quite capable of
standing by and watching even when a genocide is acknowledged.
To a remarkable extent, the term genocide was the product of one
man’s work. As Samantha Power recounts in her recent book ” ‘A
Problem From Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide,” Raphael Lemkin
placed the term into public discourse and international law through
sheer willpower. A Polish Jew who narrowly escaped the Nazis, Lemkin
was instrumental in drafting and winning support for the 1948
Convention on the Prevention of Genocide. He wanted a law that
captured the unique horror of a concerted campaign to deny a specific
group’s right to exist, and that is what he got.
In international law, genocide is a crime of specific intent — it
requires that the guilty parties intended to destroy all or part of
an ethnic, racial, national or religious community. Identifying that
intent can be a difficult struggle.
In 1995, Bosnian Serb forces killed 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the
besieged town of Srebrenica. It was Europe’s worst massacre since
World War II. But when the U.N. tribunal finally got hold of one of
the Bosnian Serb generals who had been at Srebrenica, it found him
guilty only of aiding and abetting genocide — not actually
committing it. “Convictions for genocide,” that court said, “can be
entered only where intent has been unequivocally established.” Try as
they might, the prosecutors in that case could not document the Serb
officer’s intent.
If getting inside the mind of the killers is one complication,
identifying and classifying the victims is another. The commission
investigating Darfur, for example, immersed itself in the details of
local tribal structures as it tried to puzzle out whether the victims
of that conflict fit under the definition of genocide. “The various
tribes that have been the subject of attacks and killings,” the
report conceded, “do not appear to make up ethnic groups distinct
from the ethnic group to which persons or militias that attack them
belong.” Only after lengthy analysis did the authors conclude that
the victimized population in Darfur was a different tribe and
therefore a “protected group.” But they were still unable to identify
the intent needed to show genocide.
Documenting genocidal intent and determining whether the victims are
part of a protected group eats up time when time is of the essence; a
few weeks of concentrated violence killed more than 800,000 people in
Rwanda. Waiting for the lawyers to decide is perilous, as became
apparent once again when the Sudan commission released its report. To
many observers, it appeared that the U.N. experts were downgrading
the Darfur crisis when it was really struggling — in good lawyerly
fashion — to meet a high evidentiary burden.
Perversely, the intense focus on genocide has allowed a U.N. report
that documents widespread atrocities to serve as moral cover for
continued official lethargy. The United States has been the leading
player in diplomatic efforts in the Sudan, but has not pushed as
aggressively as it could for sanctions. Europe — and France, in
particular — has talked a good game but done little. Russia and
China, both U.N. Security Council members, have made only the weakest
gestures of concern. And so staunching the bloodshed in Darfur has
been left to a small, ill-equipped force from the African Union
(A.U.), a regional economic and security organization.
There is an alternative to this intense focus on genocide. The
category of “crimes against humanity” — first used to describe the
massacres of Armenians after World War I and then codified at the
Nuremberg trials — is simpler and broader but still morally
powerful. It encompasses large-scale efforts to kill, abuse or
displace populations. It avoids messy determinations of whether the
victims fit into the right legal box and whether the killers had a
sufficiently evil mindset. Do we really care, after all, whether the
victims of atrocities are members of a distinct tribe or simply
political opponents of the regime?
Moving beyond what has by now become a warped diplomatic parlor game
(who will say the G-word first?) would have the added benefit of
shifting the debate from the abstract to the practical. The word
genocide may be too powerful for its own good. It conjures up images
of a relentless and irrational evil that must be confronted
massively. It is almost paralyzing. We are used to fighting crime;
genocide seems to require a crusade.
There are small but concrete steps that the United States could take
to fight the mass killings and crimes in Darfur, without sending a
U.S. combat force. The most critical step would be to bolster the
African Union force there now. For almost a decade, the United States
has sought to strengthen Africa’s ability to tend to its own crises.
That effort — and tens of thousands of lives — are on the line in
Sudan.
The A.U. has promised a force of almost 3,500 troops, but only about
half of them have arrived. Getting those soldiers to Darfur fast may
require airlift capacity that is a U.S. specialty. And the fragile
A.U., which is struggling to bear the costs of the Sudan operation,
needs immediate cash infusions. Both the United States and Europe
have pledged funds, but they have been slow in coming.
The Darfur Accountability Act, introduced in the U.S. Senate last
week, calls for increased aid to the A.U. force, as well as a
military no-fly zone and a tight arms embargo. It’s a start. If the
government in Khartoum gets in the way, the Security Council should
impose tough and targeted sanctions. And if China and Russia get in
the way of the Council, the United States and Europe should act
without it. The United States and Britain (which has gone furthest in
discussing a deployment) should send their own small tripwire force
to accompany the African monitors.
Some of these measures may require a U.S. policy that borders on
unilateralism. But this administration has not shown undue patience
with or deference to the often dysfunctional and amoral U.N. Security
Council — and there’s no reason to start now. As Defense Secretary
Donald H. Rumsfeld put it in another context, “the mission defines
the coalition.” And the mission of fighting crimes against humanity
must be a central one, as it was in Bosnia and Kosovo and should have
been in Rwanda and at an earlier stage in Sierra Leone.
Realities, not labels, should define our response. The word genocide,
rightly, has a unique moral impact. But the concept — and the
interminable debate about its boundaries — must not become the
issue. When the world chooses to immerse itself in terminology rather
than take action, it does today’s very real victims no good at all.
Author’s e-mail:
dbosco@carnegieendowment.org
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress