Can the world stop genocide?

BBC
2007/10/13

A conference in the Canadian city of Montreal has been discussing ways
to prevent genocide. BBC world affairs correspondent Mark Doyle,
attending the meeting, asks whether this can be done.

The 75-year-old woman sat on stage in front of hundreds of United
Nations officials, legal experts and academics.

The day before, Marika Nene had travelled from Hungary to Canada – the
first plane she had ever taken on her first journey outside Hungary.

She was not intimidated by the gathering. Her long hair was lit up by
a stage light and her facial features were strong.

But the strongest thing about Marika Nene, a Roma – or Gypsy – woman
who was trapped in the anti-Gypsy pogroms during World War II, was her
determination to tell her story.

"I had no choice. I had to give myself up to the soldiers," Marika
Nene said through a translator.

"I was a very pretty little gypsy woman and of course the soldiers
took me very often to the room with a bed in it where they violated
me. I still have nightmares about it".

Many members of Marika Nene’s Roma family died in the work camps and
the ghettos.

She had travelled to Montreal to give a reality check to the experts
and UN officials at the "Global Conference on the Prevention of
Genocide".

She was joined by other survivors – from Rwanda, Cambodia and the
Jewish holocaust. They all told their horrific stories bravely.

But there was something especially extraordinary about the elderly
Roma who had transported herself from a village in eastern Hungary
into the glare of an international conference in one of the most
modern cities in the world.

It was an example of what Nigerian Nobel Prize-winning author Wole
Soyinka would later describe to me as one of those points where people
meet each other in a spirit of "egalitarian awareness".

Six million Jews or one million Tutsis are just numbers. But this
strong Roma woman was a human being who was not ashamed to tell her
story.

Betrayal

The Montreal conference drew personalities from the UN, academia and
the legal profession.

The general aim was to build pressure on politicians to take mass
killings – even in far-off places about which we know little and
sometimes care less – far more seriously.

If that sounds like a fuzzy and vague ambition, Canadian Gen Romeo
Dallaire, who commanded a UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda during the
1994 genocide, begged to differ.

Gen Dallaire led a force in Rwanda which was betrayed by UN
headquarters in New York – his mission was starved of resources and so
forced to observe genocide rather than stop it.

Since that failed mission, he has made a career out of lobbying
politicians to do better on issues like peacekeeping, abolishing the
use of child soldiers and nuclear disarmament.

"This conference is aimed especially at young people," said Gen
Dallaire from a hotel surrounded by the campus buildings of McGill
University, which organised the conference.

"If these young people became politically active," he continued, "they
could dictate a whole new concept of what national interest should be
and what humanity should be."

What is genocide?

Payam Akhavan, professor of international law at McGill and a former
prosecutor at the UN war crimes tribunals for the former Yugoslavia
and Rwanda, said defining genocide mattered from a legal point of view
– but that analysing how it could be prevented was the real point.

"The legal definition of genocide is contained in the 1948 Genocide
convention," he told me.

"In simple terms, it is the intentional, collective destruction of an
entire human group based on national, racial, religious or ethnic
identity."

"But the key point", Mr Akhavan continued, "is that we do not need to
have a legal finding that genocide has been committed in order to take
preventive action."

That is because, of course, by the time the lawyers have decided a
mass killing fits their definition, it is usually too late to act.

The Iranian-born professor said it was necessary to think about the
ingredients of genocide, which he listed as:

* incitement to ethnic hatred
* demonisation of the target group
* radicalisation along ethnic or religious lines
* distribution of weapons to extremist groups
* preparation of lists of those to be exterminated

Similarities

As someone who personally witnessed and reported on the Rwandan
genocide, I found it quite disturbing to read about other mass
killings.

It was not the details which I found shocking, but the spooky
similarities that kept cropping up across the world.

The lists prepared by the Hutu extremists in Rwanda, for example, were
mirrored by the obsessive recording of the details of victims by the
Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

The yellow identity stars Jews were forced to wear in World War II
were the equivalent of the ethnic identity cards every Rwandan had to
carry.

This is the grim opposite of Wole Soyinka’s "egalitarian awareness".
It is the social science of genocide, which appears to have common
features across history.

The conference aimed to isolate and analyse Mr Akhavan’s "early
warning" factors to raise awareness.

But what to do with the information?

As speaker after speaker reminded the Montreal conference, the US
government, among others, has asserted that genocide is being
committed right now in the Darfur region of Sudan.

It was continuing even as we sipped our coffee in softly carpeted
rooms and nibbled our Canadian canapes.

Everyone has known about it for several years but virtually nothing
had been done to stop it.

A dissident voice

So all the talk about "early warnings" and "United Nations
peacekeeping forces" and "the will of the international community"
could be said to amount to little.

At this point, a controversial scholar intervened with comments which
challenged the entire conference.

French author Gerard Prunier, like the proverbial ghost at a wedding,
said genocides could not be prevented by the international community.

"When you see a dictatorial regime heating up, everyone starts
talking, talking, talking … and by the time the talking stops,
either matters have quietened down or they have happened."

And that is the crux of the matter, according to Mr Prunier – it is
difficult for politicians or the military to intervene in a situation
that has not yet evolved into a crisis.

Give war a chance?

So what is Mr Prunier’s solution?

"Genocides can only be stopped by the people directly involved – and
usually that means people involved in the war that accompanies most
mass killings."

And if it is the government committing the genocide, the solution is
"arm the rebels", he says.

"It won’t be clean – it will be messy," the French author said, "but
it is more likely to stop the mass killing than international
intervention."

To a large extent, Mr Prunier has history on his side. The Holocaust
only ended when the allies destroyed Hitler’s regime.

The killing fields of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge were only stopped when
the Vietnamese army moved in. And the genocide in Rwanda only ended
when the Tutsi rebels overthrew the extremist Hutu regime.

Against this, it could be argued that some interventions have worked –
for example the Nigerian intervention in Liberia, which was followed
up by a UN peacekeeping mission.

It seems that resolving dramatic human rights abuses may require some
of the diplomacy and the "international good will" that flowed so
freely in Montreal.

But as well as what Winston Churchill called "Jaw Jaw", some
situations, it seems, may only be resolved by "War War".

Published: 2007/10/13 18:25:03 GMT

(c) BBC MMVII

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