EX-CABINET OFFICIALS TO CO-CHAIR TASK FORCE TO PREVENT GENOCIDE
Silvio Carrillo
CNN
Nov 14 2007
WASHINGTON (CNN) — Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and
former Secretary of Defense William Cohen announced Tuesday they
will co-chair a task force to develop guidelines to help future
U.S. governments deal with genocide.
Madeleine Albright said the idea for the task force came from the
failure of genocide prevention worldwide.
"What we know is that the world for a long time has said that genocide
is unacceptable," Albright said at a news conference. "And yet,
genocide continues and mass killings continue, and our challenge
basically is to match the words with deeds and actions to stop these
kinds of unacceptable acts."
The Genocide Prevention Task Force will be jointly convened by the
U.S. Institute for Peace, the Holocaust Museum and the American Academy
of Diplomacy. It will focus on early warning, pre-crisis engagement,
preventive diplomacy, military intervention, and international
institutions in affected countries or regions.
A report will be issued in December of next year with the first
high-level assessment of U.S. policies and practices in the area
of genocide prevention. Organizers are calling it an "operational
blueprint for preventing and responding to genocide and mass
atrocities."
It is a need that has recently arisen, according to Cohen, because
of the speed at which information is disseminated.
"Because we live in this age of information … we can no longer live
in a state of denial or willful indifference," he said. "And so the
purpose of this task force is to look to the past, to be sure, but to
look forward to say, ‘What are the signs, what are the options that
will be available to the United States as one of the leading forces
to help shape multilateral action, to energize people of conscience,
to say that this cannot happen, this is not tolerable?’ "
The international community heaped a lot of criticism on the United
States for not becoming involved in Rwanda’s 1994 internecine war and
for again reacting too late to Sudan in 2004, when then-Secretary
of State Colin Powell labeled the situation there a genocide. The
Sudanese government has denied that label is accurate.
"Things haven’t worked," Albright said. "And watching Darfur [Sudan],
I think, is one of the things that has led us all to say, ‘OK, let’s
give this all another try to see if there are some guidelines and if
— speaking of the United States government — if there is some way
to organize ourselves better to deal with it.’ "
She said the idea for the task force came from the unfortunate history
of failure of efforts to prevent genocide around the world.
"I would frankly say that this is as a result of frustration,"
she said. "That no matter what we say, there are mass killings and
genocide. And we want to see what we can do to make some reality to
the words ‘never again’."
Albright and Cohen spent much of the news conference’s
question-and-answer session defending a letter they sent to House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, earlier this year, in which they
spoke against a House resolution that would have labeled as genocide
the mass killings of Armenians in 1915 by what is now Turkey. The
letter, signed by eight former Cabinet secretaries, including Albright,
Cohen and Powell, stated that discussion of the bill on the floor could
"strain our [United States] relations with Turkey, and would endanger
our national security interests in the region, including the safety
of our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan."
Neither backed down, stating that it is a complicated issue, especially
with regard to the war.
"There’s an element of pragmatism," Cohen said. "If someone else’s son
or daughter is in harm’s way, that is a factor that I, as a citizen
and I as a former secretary of defense, have to take into account
and would. And I think anyone serving in public office necessarily
has to have a set of balancing factors to take into account."
Albright concurred.
"Ultimately, when you’re in the government, as we both have been,
and you have to make very tough decisions, you have to look at the
overall picture. I think we have to admit that."