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“Would you vote in favor of a treaty allowing individual prosecution for war crimes if it meant an American citizen might be a defendant?”by the University of Nebraska Lincoln(Source #10)

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international covenant on civil and political rights

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convention on the elimination of racial discrimination

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convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women

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Human Rights in the US & the International Community - Foundation: Unit III. Human Rights in International Law - A Case to Consider

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In this unit, you'll learn how states attempt to collaborate to protect human rights at home and internationally.

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“Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide”by The U.N. (Source #7)]

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\“Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide”byWilliam A. Schabas (Source #6)

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“The Only Way to Prevent Genocide”by Tod Lindberg (Source#5)

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Have you ever found yourself in the position of asking, on your own behalf or on behalf of others, how many or precisely which people it would be useful to kill in order to secure a benefit for yourself or your cause? And just how to do it? No? Others have. Their answers have ranged from Cain's original "Abel, with my bare hands" to Hitler's "all the Jews, mainly by gas," and the widespread Hutu view in the Rwanda of 1994, "the Tutsis, with machetes." The question burns today for the government of Sudan and in the Congo.

Humanity will never be able to solve the problem of Cain, of fratricidal rage born of jealousy or some equivalent passion, nor of the more calculating retail impulse to profit in some way from doing someone in. Thus, for individuals, we maintain a system of laws, police forces, courts, prisons, mental hospitals, and, for extreme cases, the apparatus of the death penalty to punish those whom an impulse or cold calculation has led to murder-thereby deterring (so we hope) at least some others from embarking on a similar course of action. But we understand that our system is no solution to the problem of murder.

It is not obvious, however, or should not be, that because the human condition gives us no prospect of ridding the world of murder, we must be similarly pessimistic about our ability to rid the world of murder on the scale of populations. Mass atrocities, up to the point of genocide, are not simply collective acts of individual murder. Though genocides are not uniform in character, they are all political. Genocide constitutes the most extreme possible terms for settling differences: a stronger party's decision to annihilate or extirpate the weaker. Genocide is organized. It entails a project, which in turn requires leaders with a purpose in mind and their acquisition of the means of death, including followers to do the dirty work.

We simply do not have to put up with this. By "we," let me be clear. I do not mean "humanity," although I would welcome the collective conclusion of mankind that genocide is unacceptable. I do not mean the "international community," although a decision on the part of all national governments to refrain from engaging in mass atrocities at home or abroad would be most welcome, as would a collective intention to stop and punish leaders or would-be leaders seeking to deviate from the norm. What I really mean by "we" is "we who are strong enough to stop the murderous bastards before they can get away with it."

This "we" is an inclusive group; everyone with a will and a way is welcome. But its purpose must go far beyond declaratory well-wishing. It is not a bad thing but a grossly insufficient thing to join in choruses of "never again," the familiar refrain after something really bad has happened-say, 6 million dead Jews, 2 million dead Cambodians, or 800,000 dead Tutsis. No, we must act to stop the malefactors.

And by "we," in the last analysis, I mean the United States.

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We have the privilege to live at a time of unprecedented prosperity, and we know how to generate more of it. Anybody who thinks the present financial crisis has changed these fundamental facts is engaged in the time-honored human propensity for self-dramatization. Our prosperity is accompanied by a likewise unprecedented confluence of power and moral sensibility-or at least it seems to be. With regard to atrocities on a mass scale, we have the means at our disposal to stop what we and all right-thinking people know is wrong. It comes down to the choice of whether to act or not.

If we are unable to muster the political will to prevent or halt genocide and mass atrocities, the long-term consequences are truly chilling to contemplate. This is of course especially true with regard to future victims: the terror of being rounded up and held at gunpoint, especially in the final few seconds, as the shooting starts; of feeling the first slash of a swinging machete, knowing that more are coming. But it is also true for us. Future generations more committed to the principles we espouse but fail to act on may look back with disdain or disgust on our failure. Or, more horrifying still, future generations will conclude that all moral reasoning in political matters is sentimental superstructure that should be jettisoned in the interest of clarity about the first and only true principle of politics: the strong take care of themselves and the weak are on their own.

The progress of politics and civilization itself is nothing other than the long, difficult, incomplete struggle to overcome the original political principle of self-regard by instilling in the strong an empathetic regard for others. The first successes came in the mists of prehistory in the form of small groups ceasing to fight among themselves-clan, tribe, city. With the spread in terms of territory and clout of rights-regarding nation-states in recent centuries, it became possible to imagine cooperative efforts among such states to extend a principle of regard for others across international boundaries, indeed globally. In 1998, the NATO alliance-led, of course, by the United States-went to war against Serbia to stop ethnic cleansing and atrocities in Kosovo, averting a potential genocide in close proximity to NATO territory. But in 2004, after the U.S. Secretary of State, Colin Powell, declared that atrocities in the Darfur region of Sudan amounted to genocide, the response of the United States and others was uncertain and halting at best. Hundreds of thousands of lives were lost and millions evacuated their homes for refugee and displaced-persons camps. There they remain.

So, in recent memory, "we" have acted effectively, showing that we can, and "we" have failed to act effectively, revealing a gap between our professed moral sense and what we are prepared to do to vindicate it. The test of progress for this generation is whether we will be able to extend the principle of regard for others by acting when necessary to prevent or halt genocide.

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Words are not enough; however, words matter. All things considered, when it comes to the importance of preventing genocide and mass atrocities, we talk a pretty good game. First there are American words. It is (or should be) a point of pride for believer and atheist alike that our founding national document, the Declaration of Independence, affirms that people are endowed by their Creator with, first of all, a right to life. The right to live can be especially difficult to vindicate. There is no one to whom a drowning man can appeal; it is not wrong for the water to drown him. But it surely is wrong if governments, wholly the creations of people, deny or violate this basic right. The Declaration sets forth the correct aspiration. True, certain historical conduct-the treatment of Native Americans in particular-miserably fails to measure up to the stated aspiration. But should we therefore abandon the aspiration? Of course not. We discredit only ourselves when we fail to live up to our ideals. The ideals themselves are not discredited.

Then there are words inspired by America's founding that, in their drafting, sought to extend those ideals to the rest of the world, words in the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These documents affirm the rights of the individual against states or other actors that violate those rights. But the affirmation is more theoretical than actual, since the UN Charter also embraces a doctrine of sovereign right according to which states may not interfere in the internal affairs of others.

This aspect of the Charter gives states so inclined a ready cloak behind which to repress their people-including by commission of mass atrocities. This is what I mean when I say that words matter but are not enough. The UN's universalist human-rights creed is honored far more in the breach than in the observance. At the same time, the UN Security Council is also charged to act in the interest of peace and security, which can create an opening in response to extreme situations in which large numbers of lives are at risk.

In 1946, with the dimensions of the horror of the Holocaust still unfolding, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution declaring genocide a crime under international law. Genocide "shocks the conscience of mankind," the resolution memorably declared. This effort to "internationalize" the crime of genocide might have been the world body's finest hour. The ensuing Genocide Convention of 1948 provides for "the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide" whether "committed in time of peace or time of war" and elaborates a definition, which includes "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group."

The Convention isn't self-executing, in that it doesn't compel its signatories to take any particular action if the terms of the treaty are violated. But it does provide an international legal and, more important, moral framework for preventive action in response to the risk of genocide.

Breakthrough though it was, one unintended consequence of the Genocide Convention has been a serious problem. The definition of genocide is good as far as it goes, and the prevention mandate seems to allow latitude for timely action against would-be perpetrators. But whether "genocide" as defined in the treaty is actually occurring or about to occur is a complicated question both epistemologically and legally. For if you act to prevent genocide and succeed, there is no genocide-and so you cannot prove you have prevented one. Moreover, those you act against can claim you have violated their sovereign rights, and the argument will carry weight.

If, on the other hand, there is a legal finding of genocide, then it is too late for prevention. All that is left is mitigation. Moreover, if "genocide" is the trigger for action, then the bar is rather high: Atrocities short of genocide may somehow end up as tolerable, or at least tolerated. In 2005, a year after Colin Powell announced the U.S. finding of a genocide in Darfur, a UN special inquiry issued a report saying that while criminal atrocities had taken place in Sudan for which perpetrators needed to be held accountable, it lacked the basis for a conclusion that those crimes amounted to genocide. The bloodstained rulers in Khartoum were delighted to characterize the report as a vindication.

A further attempt to "internationalize" the Declaration's "right to life" came in 2005, when the World Summit at the United Nations embraced in its "Outcome Document" the principle of the "responsibility to protect." The doctrine of "responsibility to protect," known colloquially as "R2P," holds that a state has an obligation to protect those living on its territory from atrocities (specified in the Outcome Document as "genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity"). If a state is unable or unwilling to fulfill this requirement, the protection function falls to the international community, which can take measures up to and including the use of force in order to protect populations. With sovereign right comes sovereign responsibility. The principle of noninterference gives way in circumstances of mass atrocities.

I had a small role in the adoption of R2P. Congress (principally in the person of Frank Wolf, a Republican member of the House of Representatives from Virginia) chartered a bipartisan task force on UN reform run by the U.S. Institute of Peace and co-chaired by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell. I ran the Task Force's expert group on human rights. Not without difficulty, we were able to include in the June 2005 consensus report a strong endorsement of the "responsibility to protect." This was the first major bipartisan statement on behalf of R2P, which before had mainly been the province of liberal internationalists and human-rights groups on the Left.

The Task Force recommendation in turn influenced the Bush State Department to back the concept at the World Summit. In the absence of the Gingrich-Mitchell recommendation, the State Department's traditional institutional wariness as well as ideological conservative skepticism would likely have led to U.S. opposition, which would have doomed the project.

As for the objections, the main concern has been (and remains) that the United States, by embracing R2P, will subject itself to the whims of the "international community" on whether and when to intervene in fulfillment of the protection function. Thus Steven Groves of the Heritage Foundation has expressed alarm that "the United States would cede control-any control-of its armed forces to the caprice of the world community without the consent of the American people." In the extreme case, in this view, the U.S. might incur a legal obligation to go to war whether it wants to or not. The latter concern is so far down a trail of speculation piled on intemperate inference on top of worst-case hypothesizing that it hardly bears consideration. In its less extreme form, this is the question of how much the U.S. should engage with others to find common ends or interests and pursue them jointly.

Power is power, and the United States has more of it than any other state. But international political support is of value, and the U.S. does benefit from seeking it in fora that others regard as legitimate. We will never give the UN Security Council the last word. Other countries don't like that, but then a Kosovo comes along, Russia blocks Security Council action, and people of good will realize that the price of calling off war because the Security Council hasn't authorized it will be several hundred thousand dead Kosovars.
In other words, one should try one's best at the UN for the simple reason that one might succeed. But failure at the UN does not end the discussion, as the U.S. determination in the months leading up to the war in Iraq demonstrated, and certainly should not when a genocide is brewing.

A more practical concern is that R2P would simply be used against Israel. This is true, but no more of R2P than of everything else, alas. Given bad will, any principle can be distorted almost into its opposite in the application. Vladimir Putin's Russia cleverly cited the responsibility to protect as a reason for its invasion of Georgia in 2008-it was just acting to protect Russians in the breakaway Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, don't you see! It fell to the Swedish foreign ministry to inform the Russians that the "responsibility to protect" here was Georgia's, since it was on Georgian territory that the supposed offense against Russian ethnics was taking place-and that in case Georgia failed, the responsibility would fall to the "international community."

All of these documents, from the Declaration to the UN Charter to the R2P language in the Outcome Document, are subject to the criticism that, again, they are mere words on paper. Whom have these words actually protected? The answer is that these words are tools of moral suasion. The principles they espouse represent some of our best conclusions about how the world should be and what we should do in pursuit of such a world. They are, of course, works in progress and remain subject to refinement. But we can't say we haven't really thought about genocide and mass atrocities, whether they matter to us or what we should do when confronted with them. By now, we know.

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Institutions cannot respond effectively to the threat of genocide and mass atrocities in the absence of political will on the part of their members. Nevertheless, institutions can be more or less adroit, responsive, and effective. Here, we have a long way to go, though a range of promising steps has been taken.

Let me offer two snapshots of the problem and the response. The first comes from 2005, during work on the Gingrich-Mitchell report. The second comes from work I did last year on the Genocide Prevention Task Force, which issued a report in December 2008 with recommendations to the U.S. government on forestalling the threat of atrocities. The institutional change over the course of three years has been staggering.

In 2005, all was confusion, and the Darfur situation in particular was a frustrating daisy chain of inaction: Everybody who was potentially in a position to do something useful-from the Secretary General's office at the United Nations to the UN Security Council to the European Union to NATO to the African Union mission on the ground in Darfur to the United States government itself-was full of explanations about why somebody else had to do something first.

In 2004, the African Union (AU) deployed a small number of troops to Sudan to protect outside monitors of a cease-fire agreement. They were able to do little to contain the depredations Sudanese government forces were inflicting on Darfur in conjunction with the Janjaweed militia, irregular forces of nomadic Arabic-speaking tribes at odds with the sedentary population of Western Sudan. As was well known to everyone involved in early 2005, the AU force was too small and woefully underequipped and unprepared. To be even minimally effective, the African Union needed a package of assistance that would include communications and intelligence assets, lift, planning and headquarters help, and training. Where to get it?

Well, maybe a military alliance with serious capabilities along those lines, like NATO. Or maybe NATO acting in conjunction with the European Union, which was already providing the main funding for the AU mission. Or maybe the European Union itself, if it could get its act together on its desire for a "common foreign and security policy." Or maybe just the United States, leading a coalition of the willing or even acting on its own, if necessary.

It turned out that in the previous year, in the summer of 2004, the NATO military command under General James Jones (now Barack Obama's national- security adviser) had begun a "prudent planning" exercise on Darfur-essentially, an inquiry into what might be done to help out the AU. It was undertaken without the authorization of the North Atlantic Council, NATO's political decision-making body.

That exercise was interrupted when several allies, notably France, objected to NATO assigning itself a role in Africa. Some saw in the objection an effort to protect the EU's turf. The planning didn't cease, but it moved out of NATO auspices to the U.S. European Command, our military's headquarters on the continent. As matters stood, there was no prospect of a NATO mission-but it seemed to us that matters need not have stood there.

We knew that UN Secretary General Kofi Annan had given a couple of speeches urging NATO to assist the African Union's Darfur efforts. One ambassador at NATO told us he thought this represented an opening. The Europeans who were reluctant to involve NATO would not change their minds based merely on a speech by Annan, but if the Secretary General actually sent a formal letter to NATO asking for alliance help, that might change the debate. It would be one thing to say NATO shouldn't insert itself into Africa, quite another to decline a UN request for help.

Does this sound ridiculous? Hundreds of thousands of lives potentially at stake over whether the contents of a speech are transferred to a letter? It does, and this is an indication of just how ill-equipped the "international community" as a whole was to deal with an emergency on the scale of Darfur.

Skeptics at the European Union's headquarters in Brussels, meanwhile, informed us that the African Union would be reluctant to accept assistance from the West's military alliance, since doing so would smack of neo-imperialism and colonialism. A better avenue would be through the European Union, according to the European Union-not that the EU actually had a plan.

So why not have Annan send a letter? We asked that question at a meeting with senior UN officials on the top floor of the organization's building in New York. The answer was that Annan's representatives had sounded out NATO and determined that there was simply no support for the alliance's involvement in Africa. Annan couldn't possibly ask for help only to be rebuked, explained Mark Malloch Brown, Annan's top adviser (now an intimate of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown).

I found myself, to my surprise, shouting at Malloch Brown from the staff seats in the second row: Their information was simply wrong, there was substantial will at NATO to do just that. What was needed was a letter-Annan had already given speeches saying the same thing, all he needed to do was send a letter, just a letter. My importuning, though impolitic, got Malloch Brown's attention and drew an invitation for follow-up on the matter. On the train on the way back to Washington, we drafted an e-mail explaining the situation as we had found it, why everything was so horribly stuck, and how it might at last get unstuck.

We quickly heard through intermediaries that though Annan was favorably disposed to the idea of a formal request, he didn't think he had the authority to write such a letter-he didn't want to get out too far in front of the Security Council on a matter that was subject to difficult ongoing negotiations there.

So now what? Another avenue to change the debate in NATO would be a letter directly from the African Union asking for assistance in Darfur-notwithstanding the patronizing assurance we had received that the African Union could not conceivably accept the neocolonialist assistance of monstrous Americans who had invaded poor Iraq.

Success. For what Annan could not write personally, he evidently could get written. After days of back-channel exchanges with Annan's office, a letter arrived at NATO headquarters on April 26, 2005 from African Union chairman Alpha Konare specifically requesting NATO's help in Darfur. Hard upon it, NATO's North Atlantic Council-the same body that had insisted on an end to the previous year's "prudent planning" exercise on how the genocide might be interrupted-formally approved the assistance.

I make no claim about the efficacy or adequacy of that NATO assistance. The best one can say about it is that things could have been worse. More than a million people in displaced-person and refugee camps are better than more than a million dead. The presence of peacekeepers, though woefully inadequate, seems nevertheless to have had some deterrent effect on the monstrous Janjaweed militia and the government.

The chief fact we found as we tried to manage the rules of the international system in 2005 was a high level of dysfunctionality. Nobody really knew what was on the minds of the key players in the African Union. The United Nations Secretary General didn't know what was possible at NATO. NATO itself was uncertain about getting involved in Africa. Some Europeans seemed more interested in protecting their African turf than in action that might help those at risk. Meanwhile, the only organization that seemed genuinely interested in taking action, the African Union, was hobbled by a grievous lack of resources and capacity, and didn't know how or whom to ask for help.

So what do you need to deal with a situation like Darfur? You need soldiers, and they had better be well trained and well led, otherwise you can end up (as the UN unfortunately has on more than one occasion) with peacekeepers who also dabble as sexual predators on the populations they are supposed to be protecting. You need equipment, like armored personnel carriers, and better still, helicopters. You need a mandate that enables your soldiers to take effective action, so they're actually able to protect the locals in danger (not just to protect, as was notoriously the case in Darfur, the cease-fire monitors). Above all, you need the political will to take action.

And you really need to have figured out how to put together all of the above before a crisis spirals out of control. That means you've got to do the tedious work of getting people, governments, and institutions to think about what they need and plan in advance on how to get it. It means a hundred different letters and memorandums of understanding. The machinery of international politics was not developed to address problems such as Darfur. If we want to address them, and we must, then we have to retool and refine what we've got. To that end, the Gingrich-Mitchell report included a number of recommendations on things like "capacity-building," an unlovely bit of foreign policy jargon, but one that nonetheless captures the imperative to close the gap between what you have and what you need.

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Fast forward a few years later: Making the fact-finding rounds again, this time with the Genocide Prevention Task Force, I was astounded to see that all of the things we recommended in Gingrich-Mitchell were starting to happen. I don't say these changes occurred because Gingrich-Mitchell recommended them. But we had clearly been onto something in terms of identifying the gaps and roadblocks in the international system.

Far from resisting American or European assistance on neocolonial or any other grounds, the African Union and other organizations on the continent welcome help. They are increasingly finding the political will to confront the continent's malefactors. They have been working to develop "early warning" systems. They have the troops, but they need training and equipment before they will be fully prepared to act swiftly in response to trouble, and that's where the developed world can be useful.

NATO, meanwhile, is in the process of figuring out how to do more in partnership with others and is favorably disposed to helping out with peace building and peacekeeping missions conducted under UN or other auspices. A deputy secretary general at NATO now has the responsibility to serve as the focal point for engagement with other organizations and institutions. A document outlining how NATO will work with the UN has been approved. And there is now a NATO liaison officer to the African Union.

The emphasis on Africa is obvious, but mass atrocities are not, of course, a problem unique to Africa. For the first time, the charter of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations now includes a provision on human rights. The UN Secretary General now has a special adviser on the "responsibility to protect" as well as a special adviser on the prevention of genocide. These offices are small, and they necessarily view their subjects from a UN perspective, which is too limiting for U.S. policymakers. But again, the more constructive the UN can be, the better.

One could go on. The point is that governments and international and regional organizations have made a beginning of taking the problem of preventing genocide and mass atrocities with the level of seriousness the subject demands. On the home front, the Genocide Prevention Task Force offered a large dose of specific guidance on internal government reform that holds out the promise of more effective and timely policymaking. This is no place for a discussion of the specifics of the interagency process and military planning procedures. Suffice it to say that better internal organization is within reach.

The missing institutional piece on the international scene now, it seems to me, flows from the absence of coordination and mutual awareness among the various parties that are now taking the issue seriously. The Task Force recommended that the U.S. government undertake a "major diplomatic initiative" whose purpose would be to put together a formal network linking all the parties that engage on the issue-governments, non-governmental organizations, and regional and international institutions. The idea would be to share information and strategize responses to emerging threats.

The report does not quite say so, but it would be prudent to have someplace to go where people with a record of taking the issue seriously and with genuine moral authority gather, in the all-too-likely event that the UN Security Council finds itself paralyzed once again in the face of mass atrocities. Such a network would have no legal authority, but it might well have moral authority of the sort that contributes to the generation of political will.

In the end, unsurprisingly, effective action may come down to U.S. power and will. Those of us who see an imperative for action in these cases should welcome encouragement to that end from wherever it may come. And realistically, it would most likely be due only to very poor diplomacy if the United States found itself without supporters and allies in preventing or stopping genocide.

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The response to Darfur has to be judged a failure. But it has perhaps been a constructive failure that has galvanized people to think about how to make the system more nimble in response to gathering dangers. Those with a profound distaste for "nonconsensual military intervention"-that would be an "invasion" to the plain speakers among us-should be all the more concerned about timely action to identify the gathering danger of mass atrocities and nip the problem in the bud. Those with a will to argue for whatever is necessary to halt a slide into mass slaughter must realize that they will be most effective in galvanizing a response if they amass a chorus of the like-minded to speak as one on the moral imperative.

But we cannot assure ourselves that our best planning will always enable us to act early, nor can we count on having a phalanx of the like-minded alongside us. In the extreme case, halting or failing to halt genocide has come down to whether the political will exists within the United States to act. We will not be spared from such decisions in the future. If we are serious, we have to be willing to take upon ourselves the burden of providing the leadership, the arms, the troops, and the resources, and of bearing the casualties, the reversals of fortune, and the inevitable complaints and second-guessing.

Because the would-be genocidaires are out there, thinking about it: whom to kill; how many; how to do it. Whether they can get away with it.

The Task Force, chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former Secretary of Defense William Cohen, was a joint project of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and the American Academy of Diplomacy.

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The Only Way To Prevent Genocide - Commentary

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Have you ever found yourself in the position of asking, on your own behalf or on behalf of others, how many or precisely which people it would be useful to kill in order to secure a benefit for yourself or your cause? And just how to do it? No? Others have.

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“Bodies Count; A definition of genocide that makes sense of history.” by Aaron Rothstein(Source #4)

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Stalin's Genocides

by Norman Naimark

Princeton, 176 pp., $26.95

In his biography of Stalin, Leon Trotsky wrote that "the twentieth century .  .  . has returned us in many respects to the ways and methods of the Renaissance." Stalin's world, Trotsky proclaimed, had deteriorated into "the most cruel Machiavellism," where a ruler's success depended not on his morals but on his ability to retain power.

Trotsky was right; he was even one of the victims when Stalin had him murdered. But Trotsky underestimated the extent of the cruelty. The numbers of those murdered are so enormous that it is still a struggle to comprehend their scale. One way has been to introduce the concept of genocide, a term that has been much more readily applied to Hitler than to Stalin. In 1933, Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish intellectual shocked by the mass slaughter of the Armenians by the Turks in 1915-1918, unsuccessfully attempted to convince the League of Nations that anyone who tries to exterminate a "racial, religious, or social collectivity" is "liable for the crime of barbarity." But in 1944, recognizing the enormity of Hitler's crimes, he gave that barbarity a name: He coined the word "genocide" and argued that it included the "practices of extermination of nations and ethnic groups."

In Stalin's Genocides, Norman Naimark, the Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of East European Studies at Stanford, wonders why Lemkin, and those who followed his analysis at the United Nations in writing the Genocide Convention, created a concept that incorporated Hitler's killings-the attempt to extirpate the Jews was an attempt to exterminate an ethnic group (and nation)-but did not extend as far as Stalin's murders. Naimark points out that Lemkin's 1933 argument, unlike his 1944 book, included a reference to the extermination of a "social collectivity." Such collectivities include political parties or groups organized around particular ideas; they could be almost any group considered to be a political opponent. In Lemkin's earlier analysis, the attempt to exterminate such groups would also have been considered genocide. But not in 1944. And not in 1948, either, when Lemkin's work influenced the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. That document also leaves out social and political collectivities, stating that genocide includes the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such."

Naimark suggests that the reason for this alteration in the concept was simple, but it has had large consequences: Lemkin did not want to upset Stalin who, despite brutally exterminating political groups in the Soviet Union, was vital to the Allied war effort against Hitler. For similar defensive reasons after World War II, the Soviets refused to include social and political groups in the U.N. definition of genocide. They opposed a permanent U.N. tribunal for genocide, fearing what Aron Trainin, a leading Soviet specialist in international law, argued would be "unjustifiable interference in the internal life, in the justice system of individual states."

It was ironic, too, that, although the United States was the Soviet Union's nemesis, it took a similar position and also refused to ratify the convention. In A Problem from Hell (2002), Samantha Power argued that "American opposition was rooted in a traditional hostility toward any infringement on U.S. sovereignty." Many politicians and lawyers worry that the convention would give carte blanche to the international community to violate the sanctity of U.S. sovereignty. So on December 9, 1948, the U.N. General Assembly compromised and adopted the convention without including political collectivities, thus protecting the Soviet Union from any recriminations while also making the United States uneasy about future interference.

This was the history of how genocide has been treated. On the one hand, as Naimark argues, the concept was made too narrow to encompass many crimes, but the early unease of the United States indicated that it was too broad as well. As far as the history of Stalin is concerned, Naimark shows that any reasonable concept of genocide should include Stalin's crimes. And although much of what Naimark covers here has been explicated many times in many volumes, Naimark neatly summarizes the horrific history.

In 1929, Stalin began an aggressive program to collectivize the Soviet Union, which placed peasants on communal farms and socialized agriculture. But because many of the peasants, known as kulaks, refused to give up their land, Stalin ordered 10 million of them forced from their homes between 1929 and 1932, and declared that the kulaks "were to be eliminated as a class." In total, Stalin had more than 30,000 kulaks killed outright and around two million deported to labor camps in the far north, Siberia, and Central Asia. Half a million of those deported to the camps had died by 1932.

As Stalin shipped off kulaks to their death, he also targeted Ukrainians for deportation. Part of the process of collectivization required the state to collect grain after it had been harvested as a way to pay for rapid industrialization, leaving peasants hopelessly underfed. In total, three to five million people died in Ukraine due to hunger. And as Naimark reminds us, Stalin encouraged this: Soviet authorities set up roadblocks to prevent Ukrainians from entering urban centers where food was available, refused shipments of food from abroad, and exported grain despite shortages. Stalin commanded that grain be obtained from Ukrainians "at all costs" and wrote that the Ukrainians "deliberately tried to undermine the Soviet state. It is a fight to the death." Stalin, in other words, saw Ukrainian peasants as a political entity intent on undermining the revolution, and he sought to exterminate them.

There were also cases in which Stalin could have been condemned using the narrower concept of genocide as the murder of national enemies, particularly the Poles. One Soviet official, for example, declared that the Poles were to be "completely destroyed," and Stalin commanded one bureaucrat to "dry up and purge this Polish espionage mud in the future as well. Destroy it in the interest of the USSR." Stalin had 144,000 Poles arrested and 111,000 of those killed. Additionally, in what Naimark calls one of the clearest cases of genocide, Red Army soldiers removed Polish officers from detention camps and killed 4,400 of them in the Katyn Forest. This went beyond a simple political purge: "There is good reason to think that these actions," Naimark writes, "derived from deeply embedded Russian and Soviet prejudices of anti-Polonism."

But omitting political and social exterminations from the U.N. convention, Naimark argues, still weakened the concept of genocide. Samantha Power claims that because political groups were excluded from the convention, international lawyers had a difficult time accusing the Khmer Rouge of committing genocide in Cambodia when they "set out to wipe out whole classes of alleged 'political enemies.' " A redefinition of the convention, Naimark believes, might allow for a more successful prosecution of genocidaires. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have passed their own laws which "have broadened the definition of genocide to include specific crimes .  .  . such as forced deportation and the execution of a group of resistors and their supporters," and have convicted the first Soviet officials of genocide.

Naimark's case is compelling: Who, after all, would want to leave loopholes for mass murderers to escape punishment they rightfully deserve? But one important problem with Naimark's argument is his failing to consider the mixed consequences of such a major shift in the law. It is worth wondering what the immediate pragmatic results of such a change would be, given the failures of international law to pursue clear cases of racial and ethnic genocide. In places such as Rwanda and Sudan the international community failed to act even though the mass killings committed there fell under the old definition of genocide. A wider definition wouldn't necessarily alter things.

A broader legal definition could also be a double-edged sword, making things worse for Western democracies who value human rights. In a U.N. Human Rights Council meeting in 2009, Libya and Iran both accused Israel of committing genocide in the Gaza Strip, while Yemen's representative referred to Israel's military response to Gaza rocket fire as the "Gaza Holocaust."

Naimark's new definition makes the most sense in principle. It would be right to include oppressed political groups in our definition of genocide, especially if it allows us to make a stronger legal case against genocidaires. But broadening the convention's definition will not make any difference in preventing genocide, and may multiply the accusations against countries, such as Israel or the United States, defending themselves against terrorism.

Aaron Rothstein is a writer in New York.

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Stalin's Genocides by Norman Naimark Princeton, 176 pp., $26.95 In his biography of Stalin, Leon Trotsky wrote that "the twentieth century .  .  . has returned us in many respects to the ways and methods of the Renaissance." Stalin's world, Trotsky proclaimed, had deteriorated into "the most cruel Machiavellism," where a ruler's success depended not on his morals but on his ability to retain power.

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Wiesel, Elie. “Hope, Despair and Memory.” The Nobel Peace Prize Lecture, December 11, 1986.

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Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1986

Hope, despair and memory

A Hasidic legend tells us that the great Rabbi Baal-Shem-Tov, Master of the Good Name, also known as the Besht, undertook an urgent and perilous mission: to hasten the coming of the Messiah. The Jewish people, all humanity were suffering too much, beset by too many evils. They had to be saved, and swiftly. For having tried to meddle with history, the Besht was punished; banished along with his faithful servant to a distant island. In despair, the servant implored his master to exercise his mysterious powers in order to bring them both home. "Impossible", the Besht replied. "My powers have been taken from me". "Then, please, say a prayer, recite a litany, work a miracle". "Impossible", the Master replied, "I have forgotten everything". They both fell to weeping.

Suddenly the Master turned to his servant and asked: "Remind me of a prayer - any prayer ." "If only I could", said the servant. "I too have forgotten everything". "Everything - absolutely everything?" "Yes, except - "Except what?" "Except the alphabet". At that the Besht cried out joyfully: "Then what are you waiting for? Begin reciting the alphabet and I shall repeat after you...". And together the two exiled men began to recite, at first in whispers, then more loudly: "Aleph, beth, gimel, daleth...". And over again, each time more vigorously, more fervently; until, ultimately, the Besht regained his powers, having regained his memory.

I love this story, for it illustrates the messianic expectation -which remains my own. And the importance of friendship to man's ability to transcend his condition. I love it most of all because it emphasizes the mystical power of memory. Without memory, our existence would be barren and opaque, like a prison cell into which no light penetrates; like a tomb which rejects the living. Memory saved the Besht, and if anything can, it is memory that will save humanity. For me, hope without memory is like memory without hope.

Just as man cannot live without dreams, he cannot live without hope. If dreams reflect the past, hope summons the future. Does this mean that our future can be built on a rejection of the past? Surely such a choice is not necessary. The two are not incompatible. The opposite of the past is not the future but the absence of future; the opposite of the future is not the past but the absence of past. The loss of one is equivalent to the sacrifice of the other.

A recollection. The time: After the war. The place: Paris. A young man struggles to readjust to life. His mother, his father, his small sister are gone. He is alone. On the verge of despair. And yet he does not give up. On the contrary, he strives to find a place among the living. He acquires a new language. He makes a few friends who, like himself, believe that the memory of evil will serve as a shield against evil; that the memory of death will serve as a shield against death.

This he must believe in order to go on. For he has just returned from a universe where God, betrayed by His creatures, covered His face in order not to see. Mankind, jewel of his creation, had succeeded in building an inverted Tower of Babel, reaching not toward heaven but toward an anti-heaven, there to create a parallel society, a new "creation" with its own princes and gods, laws and principles, jailers and prisoners. A world where the past no longer counted - no longer meant anything.

Stripped of possessions, all human ties severed, the prisoners found themselves in a social and cultural void. "Forget", they were told, "Forget where you came from; forget who you were. Only the present matters". But the present was only a blink of the Lord's eye. The Almighty himself was a slaughterer: it was He who decided who would live and who would die; who would be tortured, and who would be rewarded. Night after night, seemingly endless processions vanished into the flames, lighting up the sky. Fear dominated the universe. Indeed this was another universe; the very laws of nature had been transformed. Children looked like old men, old men whimpered like children. Men and women from every corner of Europe were suddenly reduced to nameless and faceless creatures desperate for the same ration of bread or soup, dreading the same end. Even their silence was the same for it resounded with the memory of those who were gone. Life in this accursed universe was so distorted, so unnatural that a new species had evolved. Waking among the dead, one wondered if one was still alive.

And yet real despair only seized us later. Afterwards. As we emerged from the nightmare and began to search for meaning. All those doctors of law or medicine or theology, all those lovers of art and poetry, of Bach and Goethe, who coldly, deliberately ordered the massacres and participated in them. What did their metamorphosis signify? Could anything explain their loss of ethical, cultural and religious memory? How could we ever understand the passivity of the onlookers and - yes - the silence of the Allies? And question of questions: Where was God in all this? It seemed as impossible to conceive of Auschwitz with God as to conceive of Auschwitz without God. Therefore, everything had to be reassessed because everything had changed. With one stroke, mankind's achievements seemed to have been erased. Was Auschwitz a consequence or an aberration of "civilization" ? All we know is that Auschwitz called that civilization into question as it called into question everything that had preceded Auschwitz. Scientific abstraction, social and economic contention, nationalism, xenophobia, religious fanaticism, racism, mass hysteria. All found their ultimate expression in Auschwitz.

The next question had to be, why go on? If memory continually brought us back to this, why build a home? Why bring children into a world in which God and man betrayed their trust in one another?

Of course we could try to forget the past. Why not? Is it not natural for a human being to repress what causes him pain, what causes him shame? Like the body, memory protects its wounds. When day breaks after a sleepless night, one's ghosts must withdraw; the dead are ordered back to their graves. But for the first time in history, we could not bury our dead. We bear their graves within ourselves.

For us, forgetting was never an option.

Remembering is a noble and necessary act. The call of memory, the call to memory, reaches us from the very dawn of history. No commandment figures so frequently, so insistently, in the Bible. It is incumbent upon us to remember the good we have received, and the evil we have suffered. New Year's Day, Rosh Hashana, is also called Yom Hazikaron, the day of memory. On that day, the day of universal judgment, man appeals to God to remember: our salvation depends on it. If God wishes to remember our suffering, all will be well; if He refuses, all will be lost. Thus, the rejection of memory becomes a divine curse, one that would doom us to repeat past disasters, past wars.

Nothing provokes so much horror and opposition within the Jewish tradition as war. Our abhorrence of war is reflected in the paucity of our literature of warfare. After all, God created the Torah to do away with iniquity, to do away with war.Warriors fare poorly in the Talmud: Judas Maccabeus is not even mentioned; Bar-Kochba is cited, but negatively. David, a great warrior and conqueror, is not permitted to build the Temple; it is his son Solomon, a man of peace, who constructs God's dwelling place. Of course some wars may have been necessary or inevitable, but none was ever regarded as holy. For us, a holy war is a contradiction in terms. War dehumanizes, war diminishes, war debases all those who wage it. The Talmud says, "Talmidei hukhamim shemarbin shalom baolam" (It is the wise men who will bring about peace). Perhaps, because wise men remember best.

And yet it is surely human to forget, even to want to forget. The Ancients saw it as a divine gift. Indeed if memory helps us to survive, forgetting allows us to go on living. How could we go on with our daily lives, if we remained constantly aware of the dangers and ghosts surrounding us? The Talmud tells us that without the ability to forget, man would soon cease to learn. Without the ability to forget, man would live in a permanent, paralyzing fear of death. Only God and God alone can and must remember everything.

How are we to reconcile our supreme duty towards memory with the need to forget that is essential to life? No generation has had to confront this paradox with such urgency. The survivors wanted to communicate everything to the living: the victim's solitude and sorrow, the tears of mothers driven to madness, the prayers of the doomed beneath a fiery sky.

They needed to tell the child who, in hiding with his mother, asked softly, very softly: "Can I cry now?" They needed to tell of the sick beggar who, in a sealed cattle-car, began to sing as an offering to his companions. And of the little girl who, hugging her grandmother, whispered: "Don't be afraid, don't be sorry to die... I'm not". She was seven, that little girl who went to her death without fear, without regret.

Each one of us felt compelled to record every story, every encounter. Each one of us felt compelled to bear witness, Such were the wishes of the dying, the testament of the dead. Since the so-called civilized world had no use for their lives, then let it be inhabited by their deaths.

The great historian Shimon Dubnov served as our guide and inspiration. Until the moment of his death he said over and over again to his companions in the Riga ghetto: "Yidden, shreibt un fershreibt" (Jews, write it all down). His words were heeded. Overnight, countless victims become chroniclers and historians in the ghettos, even in the death camps. Even members of the Sonderkommandos, those inmates forced to burn their fellow inmates' corpses before being burned in turn, left behind extraordinary documents. To testify became an obsession. They left us poems and letters, diaries and fragments of novels, some known throughout the world, others still unpublished.

After the war we reassured ourselves that it would be enough to relate a single night in Treblinka, to tell of the cruelty, the senselessness of murder, and the outrage born of indifference: it would be enough to find the right word and the propitious moment to say it, to shake humanity out of its indifference and keep the torturer from torturing ever again. We thought it would be enough to read the world a poem written by a child in the Theresienstadt ghetto to ensure that no child anywhere would ever again have to endure hunger or fear. It would be enough to describe a death-camp "Selection", to prevent the human right to dignity from ever being violated again.

We thought it would be enough to tell of the tidal wave of hatred which broke over the Jewish people for men everywhere to decide once and for all to put an end to hatred of anyone who is "different" - whether black or white, Jew or Arab, Christian or Moslem - anyone whose orientation differs politically, philosophically, sexually. A naive undertaking? Of course. But not without a certain logic.

We tried. It was not easy. At first, because of the language; language failed us. We would have to invent a new vocabulary, for our own words were inadequate, anemic.

And then too, the people around us refused to listen; and even those who listened refused to believe; and even those who believed could not comprehend. Of course they could not. Nobody could. The experience of the camps defies comprehension.

Have we failed? I often think we have.

If someone had told us in 1945 that in our lifetime religious wars would rage on virtually every continent, that thousands of children would once again be dying of starvation, we would not have believed it. Or that racism and fanaticism would flourish once again, we would not have believed it. Nor would we have believed that there would be governments that would deprive a man like Lech Walesa of his freedom to travel merely because he dares to dissent. And he is not alone. Governments of the Right and of the Left go much further, subjecting those who dissent, writers, scientists, intellectuals, to torture and persecution. How to explain this defeat of memory?

How to explain any of it: the outrage of Apartheid which continues unabated. Racism itself is dreadful, but when it pretends to be legal, and therefore just, when a man like Nelson Mandela is imprisoned, it becomes even more repugnant. Without comparing Apartheid to Nazism and to its "final solution" - for that defies all comparison - one cannot help but assign the two systems, in their supposed legality, to the same camp. And the outrage of terrorism: of the hostages in Iran, the coldblooded massacre in the synagogue in Istanbul, the senseless deaths in the streets of Paris. Terrorism must be outlawed by all civilized nations - not explained or rationalized, but fought and eradicated. Nothing can, nothing will justify the murder of innocent people and helpless children. And the outrage of preventing men and women like Andrei Sakharov, Vladimir and Masha Slepak, Ida Nudel, Josef Biegun, Victor Brailowski, Zakhar Zonshein, and all the others known and unknown from leaving their country. And then there is Israel, which after two thousand years of exile and thirty-eight years of sovereignty still does not have peace. I would like to see this people, which is my own, able to establish the foundation for a constructive relationship with all its Arab neighbors, as it has done with Egypt. We must exert pressure on all those in power to come to terms.

And here we come back to memory. We must remember the suffering of my people, as we must remember that of the Ethiopians, the Cambodians, the boat people, Palestinians, the Mesquite Indians, the Argentinian "desaparecidos" - the list seems endless.

Let us remember Job who, having lost everything - his children, his friends, his possessions, and even his argument with God - still found the strength to begin again, to rebuild his life. Job was determined not to repudiate the creation, however imperfect, that God had entrusted to him.

Job, our ancestor. Job, our contemporary. His ordeal concerns all humanity. Did he ever lose his faith? If so, he rediscovered it within his rebellion. He demonstrated that faith is essential to rebellion, and that hope is possible beyond despair. The source of his hope was memory, as it must be ours. Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair. I remember the killers, I remember the victims, even as I struggle to invent a thousand and one reasons to hope.

There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest. The Talmud tells us that by saving a single human being, man can save the world. We may be powerless to open all the jails and free all the prisoners, but by declaring our solidarity with one prisoner, we indict all jailers. None of us is in a position to eliminate war, but it is our obligation to denounce it and expose it in all its hideousness. War leaves no victors, only victims. I began with the story of the Besht. And, like the Besht, mankind needs to remember more than ever. Mankind needs peace more than ever, for our entire planet, threatened by nuclear war, is in danger of total destruction. A destruction only man can provoke, only man can prevent. Mankind must remember that peace is not God's gift to his creatures, it is our gift to each other.

1. The Torah is the Hebrew name for the first five books of the Scriptures, in which God hands down the tablets of the Law to Moses on Mt. Sinai. In contradistinction to the Law of Moses, the Written Law, the Talmud is the vast compilation of the Oral Law, including rabbinical commentaries and elaborations.

2. Judas Maccabeus led the struggle against Antiochus IV of Syria. He defeated a Syrian expedition and reconsecrated the Temple in Jerusalem (c. 165 B.C.). Simon Bar-Kochba (or Kokba) was the leader of the Hebrew revolt against the Romans, 132-135 A.D.

To cite this section
MLA style: Elie Wiesel - Nobel Lecture. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Media AB 2020. Thu. 8 Oct 2020. <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1986/wiesel/lecture/>

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Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1986 A Hasidic legend tells us that the great Rabbi Baal-Shem-Tov, Master of the Good Name, also known as the Besht, undertook an urgent and perilous mission: to hasten the coming of the Messiah. The Jewish people, all humanity were suffering too much, beset by too many evils.

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“Why Genocide?” by Fred Edwords (Source #2)

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Over the past fifteen years United Nations tribunals have addressed genocide issues associated with conflicts in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur. The most recent development in this connection is the arrest on July 18, 2008, of Radovan Karadžić, a man who had been indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia on charges that he, "acting individually between 1 July 1991 and 19 July 1996, or in concert with others," committed acts of "genocide; crimes against humanity; violations of the laws or customs of war and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949." Four days before this, on July 14, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court pursued an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir on ten counts of "genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes" allegedly committed in Darfur since July 1, 2002.

That such legal actions can prove effective is demonstrated not only by the media publicity generated worldwide but by a recent track record of prosecutorial success. For example, Jean Kambanda was sentenced to life imprisonment for genocide and related crimes committed while he was prime minister of Rwanda in 1994. This action was taken by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda on September 4, 1998. Of special interest is the fact that Kambanda pleaded guilty to the offense. And the tribunal has so far completed twenty-one trials, resulting in the convictions of twenty-eight people for various crimes in connection with the Rwandan genocide.

So the machinery for indictment, arrest, trial, and conviction is not only in place but its reach and influence are expanding. This is because the world has grown increasingly impatient with both nations and individuals that commit such crimes.

With the existence of such worldwide interest in stopping genocide, the question naturally arises: why do mass killings and genocide occur in the first place? What could possibly motivate human beings to visit such inhumanity, such extreme levels of violence and murder, upon their fellow humans-even a portion of the population of their own country? How do people get past normal human empathy and the natural promptings of conscience so as to even be able to carry out such horrors?

Are such people mad? That would be a difficult case to make, given the large number of human beings who have, throughout history, abetted mass killings and genocide.

Are they driven by poverty and competition for scarce resources necessary for survival? Such a reason may explain a number of examples, but it can't explain the European and American war on the Indians of the Western Hemisphere or many other conquests.

Is it due to lack of education? Not necessarily. Leading up to World War II and the Nazi genocide, Germans were among the most highly educated people in the world.

Is it due to the power of an absolutist ideology: be it religious, philosophical, or political? Such has been used to explain the Muslim conquests of the Middle Ages, the Christian Crusades and Inquisition, the French Revolution's "Reign of Terror," and the pogroms of Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin. But it doesn't explain all the mass killings and genocide associated with history's many wars of pure conquest. Consider the actions of the consul Marius during the Roman invasion of Numidia in North Africa in the year 107 BCE. Here the Roman historian Sallust calmly relates what the Roman army did after the town of Capsa surrendered without a fight:

The town, however, was burned. The Numidians, such as were of adult age, were put to the sword. The rest were sold, and the spoil divided among the soldiers. This severity, in violation of the usages of war, was not adopted from avarice or cruelty in the consul, but was exercised because the place was of great advantage to [the enemy], and difficult of access to us, while the inhabitants were a fickle and faithless race, incapable of being influenced either by kindness or terror. ( Jugurthine War, Chapter 91, translated by John Selby Watson.)

Also, ideology can't be claimed as an influence on nonhuman animals, such as our closest zoological relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos. Raiding parties of these animals have been known to cross briefly into other territories and deliberately seek out and kill members of another group. Most dramatically, Jane Goodall observed chimpanzees in Gombe methodically, over a three-year period, wipe out a neighboring chimpanzee group.

So what's the explanation? Philosopher Peter Singer, in One World: the Ethics of Globalization, offers an answer using the Bible story of how Moses, in Numbers 31:1-18, makes war for no apparent reason against the Midianites, burning all their cities and killing all the adults and male children. "But all the women children that have not known a man by lying with him," Moses orders, "keep alive for yourselves." A growing number of scholars today doubt that this war ever happened, but its description fits nonetheless with practices that have been used by many peoples, from ancient times to the present (as the quotation from Sallust shows). It also fits the behaviors of chimpanzees and bonobos.

So, using the biblical story simply for illustrative purposes, Singer writes that if God "had given Moses a modern genetics textbook and commanded him to do whatever would maximize the number of Israelite descendants, then Moses might have acted exactly as he is portrayed as doing in Numbers." This is because killing off all the men and boys eliminates the genetic competition. And killing off all non-virgin women ensures that none survive who might be pregnant with Midianite children. By this means no one of full Midianite descent can survive to the next generation. Then, allowing the Israelite males to impregnate the virgin Midianite females leads to more Israelite descendants. In sum, this practice of ethnic cleansing confers actual genetic benefits on the victors.

Given this uncomfortable fact of nature, of human history, and of the modern world, what can we do? Well, we certainly don't wish to live in a Darwinian jungle where survival of the most genocidal is the rule of life.

That's where a human invention called civilization comes in. What is civilization, after all, but humanity's effort to repeal the law of the jungle? It is, in a sense, a conspiracy of the weak against the strong for the benefit of all. And it has proven itself extremely effective.

The key to ending modern outbreaks of mass murder and genocide, then, is to first realize that these practices do normally benefit those who use them. Second, the world community needs to become so structured that these benefits are clearly outweighed by new liabilities. In other words, humanity has to consciously decide that mass murder and genocide are unacceptable and then vigorously and consistently act in ways that discourage their practice as well as lead to their elimination.

Toward this end, there are numerous peaceful courses of action that have been developed in recent years. One has been the World Court and the International Criminal Court, which have brought leading perpetrators of such crimes to justice and hence served as a deterrent against future actions of this type. The case of Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia shows that even a head of state can be brought by his own country to the bar of international justice. There are also economic sanctions. And, however feeble it may seem at times, the power of the media or organizations like Amnesty International to mobilize international opinion against such atrocities has created enough pressure in certain instances to bring about amelioration or change.

Nonetheless, there are occasions when all these efforts fail. In such circumstances, "rules of engagement" or valid and workable "criteria for humanitarian intervention" are needed for guiding nations in deciding precisely when and how to intervene in the internal affairs of another country. Military action to stop crimes against humanity or genocide can be warranted. But safeguards are needed, since noble justifications have frequently been claimed for unwarranted invasions. Examples exist as far apart in history as Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars and George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq.

But in 2001, Canada's International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty issued a report entitled The Responsibility to Protect. It takes the position that, when two criteria are met, there isn't merely a right to intervene but a responsibility to do so. The criteria offered are:

A. large-scale loss of life, actual or apprehended, with genocidal intent or not, which is the product either of deliberate state action, or state neglect or inability to act, or a failed state situation; or

B. large-scale "ethnic cleansing," actual or apprehended, whether carried out by killing, forced expulsion, acts of terror or rape.

Currently the most appropriate body to decide when and where these criteria have been met would be the United Nations rather than any individual nation acting alone or in coalition with partners.

Applying these criteria to specifics, the situation in Darfur exemplifies the need for a swift, strong, and just international response, though not an invasion at this time. In order to recognize the inherent worth and dignity of every human being, universal investigation and prosecution of those responsible for the current atrocities are necessary. In the short run, these actions can reduce further violence in Darfur; in the long run, justice and accountability will be served-not only to the benefit of the victims but toward building long-term peace in the region.

Of course there's much more to all of this. But the general nature of the problem and the general nature of the solution should be clear. The details-including considerations of pitfalls and safeguards associated with military intervention in any crisis of this sort-need to be worked out over time by the best minds that can be brought to the task. Overall, the international motivation should be a strong determination to so restructure global society that massive atrocities and genocide no longer profit their perpetrators.

We must establish power disincentives. And we must say, and mean, "never again," not merely in response to the genocidal example of the Holocaust but in response to all such actions: past, present, and future.

Fred Edwords is director of communications for the American Humanist Association

Published in the January / February 2009 Humanist
Tags: genocide Fred Edwords, a former executive director of the American Humanist Association and immediate past editor of the Humanist, is now retired and devoting time to writing and speaking on humanism and volunteering in the secular movement.

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Over the past fifteen years United Nations tribunals have addressed genocide issues associated with conflicts in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur. The most recent development in this connection is the arrest on July 18, 2008, of Radovan Karadžić, a man who had been indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia on charges that ...

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“After Rwanda’s Genocide”by The New York Times Editorial Board (Source #3)

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On Monday, Rwanda commemorated the victims of a genocide unleashed 20 years ago by Hutu extremists in power then. More than 800,000 people, mostly Tutsi men, women and children, were systematically hunted down and brutally murdered over a period of just 100 days. The world stood by and let the blood bath happen.

Over the past two decades, Rwanda has done an impressive job of rebuilding its institutions and economy. To bring perpetrators of the genocide to justice, the United Nations has conducted more than 70 tribunal cases, Rwanda's courts have tried up to 20,000 individuals, and the country's Gacaca courts have handled some 1.2 million additional cases. Incredibly, Tutsis and Hutus, survivors and former killers, now live side by side. The government of President Paul Kagame has transformed Rwanda into an island of order and relative prosperity in a poor and politically volatile region.

Despite this, the genocide has left a legacy of unanswered questions and uncorrected failures. It is time to face them. The international community cannot hide behind euphemisms. The reluctance to use the word "genocide" because of the moral horror it carries and the intervention it demands does not change realities on the ground. It did not spare the United States accusations of shameful paralysis during the Rwandan genocide, and it will not protect the international community from the judgment of history for mass murder now or in the future. Recognizing the need to respond appropriately to such situations, President Obama created the Atrocities Prevention Board in 2012. But as events in the Central African Republic, Syria and Sudan make clear, the United Nations, regional organizations and allied countries also need to set up international contingency plans to deal with mass atrocities.

It is time for France to open its records to public examination. France had close relations to the Hutu-dominated government that planned and incited the genocide. A lack of clarity about France's role has poisoned its relationship with the Kagame government and hampers France's actions in Mali and the Central African Republic.

Mr. Kagame must also be held accountable for abuses in Rwanda and outside its borders, where he has gone after critics in Uganda, Kenya, South Africa and Europe. Civil and political rights in Rwanda are severely restricted. Dissidents and opposition political leaders are subject to harassment, detention and torture. Several have disappeared or been killed.

Addressing the poisonous legacies of Rwanda's genocide is the only way to avert future tragedy, and it is the best way to honor Rwanda's dead.

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On Monday, Rwanda commemorated the victims of a genocide unleashed 20 years ago by Hutu extremists in power then. More than 800,000 people, mostly Tutsi men, women and children, were systematically hunted down and brutally murdered over a period of just 100 days. The world stood by and let the blood bath happen.

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“Why Do We Look the Other Way?” By Gregory Stanton (Source #9)

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“The Ten Stages of Genocide.” By Gregory Stanton (Source #8)

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“When the U.N. Fails, We All Do” by Fareed Zakaria(Source #1)

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You have never heard of Paul Rusesabagina. But if you watch the stunning new movie "Hotel Rwanda," you will never forget him. The movie tells the true story of Rusesabagina, an "ordinary" Rwandan, a hotel manager, who was able to shelter and save more than 1,200 people--Tutsis and Hutus--in the midst of the Rwandan genocide. He is a Rwandan Schindler, who in a series of amazing improvisations--using contacts, skills and herculean effort--managed to keep his flock alive.

In the movie, as in real life, the world does nothing. Actually, perhaps worse than nothing. Belgian peacekeepers, under the United Nations flag, watched as the carnage unfolded. In the 100 days beginning April 6, 1994, Hutu gangs, aided by the Hutu Army, killed almost 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus--the fastest genocide in human history.

Rwanda was a failure at almost every level, but certainly it was a failure of the United Nations. But let us be clear what we mean by that. It was the major powers--the United States, Britain, France--that determined the exact nature of the peacekeeping mission. It was they who insisted that the force stay neutral. (France's actions were even less edifying, since it was reportedly a big supplier of the Hutu Army.) The United Nations failed in Rwanda because we failed.

This logic holds even in the messy scandal over the Oil-for-Food Program, a badly managed affair surrounded by corruption. But who designed the Oil-for-Food Program? The United States and Britain. They wrote the rules that allowed Saddam Hussein to choose his trading partners, banks and consultants. They vetted every one of the 30,000 contracts that passed through the program. They held up 5,000 over concerns about materials that could be used for weapons of mass destruction, but not one over concerns about corruption. Saddam's major revenues actually came from smuggling, which was an activity the United Nations was not mandated to stop. The only ones who could have stopped it were the ones with military force in the region--the United States and Britain. The truth is that Washington--during both the Clinton and the Bush years--cared little about Iraq's corruption. It cared only about its weapons.

And yet and yet. The United Nations is not simply a reflection of its major members, but a vast organization with a distinct culture and code--one in desperate need of repair. If the major powers have cynically tossed tasks over to the U.N. that they do not want to do--and yet want to seem to be doing something--the U.N. has happily taken them, eager to prove its relevance and importance. Given the enormous expansion of its responsibilities since the end of the cold war, it has not structured itself to provide professional and competent management. It has some remarkable successes to its credit--Mozambique, East Timor, El Salvador--but also real failures. Oil-for-Food and the sexual scandals in Congo are examples of abysmal management, and there must be consequences. Kofi Annan has been the most reform-minded secretary-general in the U.N.'s history, but he needs to do much more, and fast; otherwise he will find himself doing too little, too late. For its part, the United States should stop sitting on the sidelines, enjoying the U.N.'s troubles. Only an active American involvement with reform will make it happen. And when the U.N. works well--from Gulf War I to Afghanistan to East Timor--it is a great asset to the United States.

But real reform means realistic reform, not more fantasies. U.N. peacekeeping in particular needs fundamental rethinking. If countries will not sanction a force robust enough to do the job, then the U.N. should have the courage to refuse the mission. Otherwise its forces will always remain, as the old saw goes, too big to hide and too small to succeed. This sounds cruel but, really, how is it different from what is happening right now? What exactly are U.N. forces doing in Congo? At least in Sudan, where the U.N. is largely uninvolved, there is no pretense of an international effort to stop the savagery. And people can point the finger where they should, at countries near and far that are doing little about it.

Whatever the U.N. might say about the rules of engagement and who drew them up, the reality on the ground is that when the U.N. goes into these grim parts of the world, people see the blue helmets and U.N. flag and believe that help has arrived. By its very presence the United Nations is offering hope--and it is cruel to offer false hope. "In a sense, things got better after the peacekeepers left," the real Paul Rusesabagina said to me after the movie. "People realized that no one was going to help them and took matters into their own hands." If we will not help men like Rusesabagina, let us at least not lie to them.

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You have never heard of Paul Rusesabagina. But if you watch the stunning new movie "Hotel Rwanda," you will never forget him. The movie tells the true story of Rusesabagina, an "ordinary" Rwandan, a hotel manager, who was able to shelter and save more than 1,200 people--Tutsis and Hutus--in the