THE G-WORD
Benjamin Bright
The Brown Daily Herald, RI
March 20 2007
Whether it’s "Save Darfur" posters in the New York City subway,
front-page revelations of Saddam Hussein’s massacre of the Kurds or the
never-ending controversy over the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians
90 years ago, escaping genocide-talk is an impossible task these days.
While it may seem that we are living in an age of unparalleled cruelty
and slaughter, frequent accusations of genocide and the outlawing of
genocide-denial in the international arena show that the term has
been politicized, cheapened into the most cynical of weapons for
attacking political opponents and mobilizing grassroots support.
For the most part, humanitarian intervention is only justified by
the international community when the conflict is defined as genocide.
Otherwise, it would just be imperialism. So perhaps we shouldn’t be
surprised when Western activists label virtually every conflict in
Africa as genocide.
Everyone agrees that the massacres in Rwanda in 1994 qualified as
genocide. Interestingly, the United Nations, European Union, Human
Rights Watch and Amnesty International tend to avoid the G-word in
reference to the conflict in Darfur, although that hasn’t stopped
anyone else. Many talk about the ongoing genocide in Uganda.
Similarly, the war in Liberia and the spreading of conflict from Darfur
to Chad have produced talk of "potential" genocides, introducing a
nifty hierarchical classification system for the G-word.
Genocide-mongering has had disastrous effects on civil conflicts
around the world. Johnathan Steele explains in the Guardian how the
Save Darfur campaign has replaced a complex regional issue with a
good versus evil scenario: "The complex grievances that set farmers
against nomads was covered with a simplistic template of Arab vs.
African, even though the region was crisscrossed with tribal and local
rivalries that put some villages on the government’s side and others
against it."
While it is true that the Sudanese government severely overreacted
to rebel attacks by arming the Janjaweed militias, most Western
activists have forgotten that rebel soldiers also committed grievous
atrocities. And so the conflict in Darfur has been simplified into a
black-and-white moral paradigm in order to drum up support for the
Save Darfur campaign, with the victims becoming celebrated martyrs
and the perpetrators ruthless villains.
Consequently, those victims are much less willing to resolve the
conflict or make compromises, thinking Western support will result
in a sweeter deal, while the "evil-doers" become embittered against
a torrent of Western criticism.
And that’s exactly what we see in Sudan, where "the rebels, much
weaker than the government, would logically have sued for peace long
ago. Because of the Save Darfur movement, however, the rebels believe
that the longer they provoke genocidal reaction, the more the West
will pressure Sudan to hand them control of the region," wrote Alan
Kuperman in the New York Times.
Indeed, rebel factions in Darfur initially rejected a peace treaty
last May in order to extract further concessions from the Sudanese
government and increase their dominion over tribal lands, needlessly
prolonging a brutal civil war. This gravely embarrassed both the
international community and the Save Darfur movement, who had
romanticized the rebels as noble freedom fighters.
It’s all part of the strategic logic of victimhood, which is repeated
over and over again when the West sticks its nose in civil conflicts
where it doesn’t belong. As Brendan O’Neill convincingly explains in
spiked, "By treating certain groups as worthy victims who deserve our
protection, Western campaigners encourage them to advertise and even
prostitute their victimhood in order to win that protection."
Charges have been leveled that Bosnian Muslim rebel groups massacred
their own people and blamed it on the Serbs in order to win more
Western support and sympathy. Violence in Bosnia was extended for
several months when the Clinton administration urged the rebels to hold
out for a better deal. The Israelis and Palestinians are constantly
one-upping each other over who is the "real" victim of genocide,
hoping to win over the hearts and minds of na’ve Westerner activists.
Throwing around the G-word as a political tool has become increasingly
popular in the international community, by states, activists and the
supposed victims of genocide, all of whom seek to lend their cause
some legitimacy in terms of hollow moral absolutes.
Not only does this denigrate the very concept of genocide, but it
also inflames civil conflicts around the world.
If the G-word is to serve any meaningful purpose in the modern world,
then steps must be taken to ensure that it serves as a failsafe
mechanism for alerting the world to the most egregious crimes against
humanity – and more than just a weapon to manipulate the international
arena by the most cynical of political actors.
Benjamin Bright ’07 holds office hours at Haven Bros.
/storage/paper472/news/2007/03/20/Opinions/Benjami n.Bright.07.The.GWord-2782032.shtml
http://media.www.browndailyherald.com/media