HAS SYRIA SCUTTLED SAMANTHA POWER’S ATROCITY PREVENTION BOARD?
APB for the APB
BY JOHN NORRIS | JULY 16, 2013
With the confirmation hearings of Samantha Power to be the U.S.
ambassador to the United Nations imminent, it is a good time to take a
look at one of her signature projects from her tenure at the National
Security Staff: the Atrocities Prevention Board.
A little more than a year ago, President Barack Obama announced the
creation of the Atrocities Prevention Board during an address at the
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, saying that this initiative would
make the deterrence of genocide and mass atrocities “a core national
security interest and core moral responsibility.”
Both the president and Power seemed acutely aware of the challenges
and risks of trying to develop an inter-agency atrocities prevention
mechanism while the humanitarian tragedy continued to unfold in Syria
— a conflict into which this administration has been reluctant to
wade. Indeed, in many ways, the creation of the Atrocities Prevention
Board, or APB, has felt a bit like trying to build a fire department
in the middle of a three-alarm fire.
The roots of the APB come from a bipartisan belief that the United
States, in places like Rwanda and Bosnia, simply did not do enough
to counter genocides and mass atrocities as they gathered force. The
2008 report from the Genocide Prevention Task Force, co-chaired by
former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former Secretary of
Defense William Cohen, recommended the creation of a new high-level
interagency body — what they called an Atrocities Prevention Committee
— to improve U.S. government crisis-response systems and better
equip Washington to mount coherent preventive responses.
As Obama’s special advisor for multilateral affairs, an outspoken
champion for human rights and genocide prevention, and the author of
a Pulitzer Prize winning book on the U.S. government and genocide,
Power was a natural fit to breathe life into the Genocide Prevention
Task Force’s concept while at the National Security Staff (NSS).
Power secured support for the APB through the August 2011 release
of the Presidential Study Directive on Mass Atrocity Prevention, or
PSD-10, of which she was the lead author. The directive called for
the establishment of an interagency atrocities prevention mechanism,
the APB, which would “coordinate a whole of government approach to
preventing mass atrocities and genocide.”
However, when the formation of the APB was formally announced in
2012 by the president, a number of Republican critics used it as an
opportunity to lacerate the president for inaction in Syria.
Commentator Charles Krauthammer, at best an episodic voice on the
importance of human rights, called the board an embarrassment,
and bemoaned, “The liberal faith in the power of bureaucracy and
flowcharts, of committees and reports, is legend. But this is parody.”
So what does the APB actually do? And what does the situation in Syria
say about its work? The APB consists of high-ranking representatives,
all originally hand-picked by Power, from 11 agencies, including
State, Defense, Treasury, Justice, the CIA and others. The board
has essentially split its functions between looking at long-term
structural issues — such as sanctions regimes and how government
personnel are trained — and a geographic focus on countries at risk
of mass atrocities, usually over the medium term.
On a weekly basis, a sub-APB made up of working-level staff from
the participating agencies meets to discuss the structural atrocity
issues, with the State Department and USAID having the largest
numbers of personnel involved. Once a month, the APB meets at the
assistant-secretary level, with each agency’s representative reporting
on important issues raised during the weekly discussions and following
up regarding assigned activities. Quarterly, deputy principals gather
for what has been termed a “deep-dive analysis,” with the assistance
of an intelligence community briefing, designed to drive a substantial
policy conversation regarding a country of potential concern. To date,
some of the countries featured in these discussions have included
Kenya, Burma, and Bangladesh. These conversations are designed to
mobilize attention and resources within the respective agencies in
an effort to avert atrocities in the countries under discussion,
and to pre-position resources and analysis so that each agency can be
better prepared. One imagines that most ambassadors don’t particularly
enjoy such a review, but such country-specific discussions certainly
help sensitize diplomats to the risk factors associated with mass
atrocities, and likely encourage more energetic efforts to avert
such crisis.
Finally, the nine principals involved at the assistant secretary
level also meet annually, and the APB presents an annual report on
its activities and successes to the president in January of each year.
Somewhat bafflingly, the APB has no signature public product, such as
the State Department’s annual human rights report, and one of the most
justified knocks on the board’s work to date has been the fact that
it has been almost invisible from public view — a strategic decision
within the administration that has one almost has to conclude has been
driven by the situation in Syria. As a result of its lack of outreach,
support for the APB remains very thin, particularly in Congress. As
one congressional staffer told me, its activities to date are a
“complete black hole.”
Perhaps the board’s most notable successes have come in getting
agencies that have traditionally paid little attention to atrocity
prevention, such as the departments of Treasury and Justice, to develop
new tools to pursue major human rights abusers. Directly as a result
of the APB’s work, the Department of Treasury has managed to place
sanctions on suspected human rights abusers in the Democratic Republic
of Congo, Zimbabwe, Iran, and Myanmar, and notably on 41 entities or
individuals in Syria or with ties to the embattled Assad regime. The
Department of Justice now has prosecutors working on human-rights abuse
cases; a fraud team is assisting in seizing assets of human-rights
abusers; and U.S. officials are helping train counterparts in other
countries on how best to prosecute human rights cases. These are
useful wins, as has been the improved coordination between agencies
and improved training on these issues at State and USAID. Making the
U.S. government better at atrocity prevention, by its very nature,
includes some stuff that is not very sexy.
This brings us back to the elephant in the room: Syria. Since the
uprising began in February 2011, the United Nations estimates that at
least 80,000 Syrians have been killed, roughly 4 million are internally
displaced, and at least 1.5 million have fled the country entirely. It
is exactly the kind of carnage for which the APB was created to help
prevent or diffuse.
Lanny Breuer, who represented the Justice Department on the APB until
recently, argued that it was “unrealistic for a new entity that has
no real authority to galvanize the government on Syria,” and added,
“But what it can do is to raise awareness.” Breuer’s comments may
be accurate, but if so, the administration surely oversold the APB’s
potential when it was rolled out.
On background, those affiliated with the APB argue that it has
functioned largely as it should during the crisis. They point out that
the APB was created to push decisionmaking and policymaking on mass
atrocities to the highest levels in government, and that the decisions
on how to respond to the situation in Syria have been rigorously
debated by the president and his core national security team. No board
can force a president’s hand, and most agree that the policy choices
in Syria run the gamut from bad to awful. Perhaps the APB is better
positioned to deal with crises that are over the horizon or for which
there are warning signs rather than ones that are directly unfolding.
But, all that said, the APB was created with the express intent to
prevent the next Rwanda or Bosnia, and Syria is looking an awful
lot like one of those tragedies for which the phrase “never again”
keeps getting repeated.
Much of Power’s career as an author and an activist was absolutely
illuminated by her incandescent willingness to speak truth to power
— which helps explain why the APB’s sotto voce approach has felt so
dissatisfying with regard to Syria. The APB is doing good, important,
and long-overdue work, but that legacy will surely be obscured if
Syria continues to burn.
Alex Wong/Getty Images
SUBJECTS: DISASTERS, OBAMA ADMINISTRATION, SYRIA
John Norris is executive director of the Sustainable Security program
at the Center for American Progress.
From: A. Papazian