Realities, not labels, should define response to genocide
By David Bosco
Washington Post
March 11 2005
On Feb. 1, the United Nations issued a finding that sounded like
hopeful news about one of Africa’s worst conflicts.
“U.N. report clears Sudan government of genocide in Darfur,” reported
Agence France-Presse.
“U.N. Panel Sees No Genocide in Darfur,” a St. Petersburg Times
headline on a Reuters wire story said the next day.
“Report on Darfur Says Genocide Did Not Occur,” read another in the
New York Sun.
The headlines said more about the mind-set of the people reading the
report than they did about the long-awaited investigation by the U.N.
commission of inquiry on the conflict in western Sudan. The 176-page
document provided a litany of misery and blamed the government in
Khartoum. But to many readers, it appeared to have let Sudan’s leaders
off the hook by not branding their actions as genocide, as the Bush
administration and U.S. Congress had already done.
It’s not as though the report gave Sudan a seal of approval. It
detailed extensive atrocities authorized by the Sudanese government
and carried out by Janjaweed militias. Its authors concluded that the
government and militias conducted “indiscriminate attacks, including
killing of civilians, torture, enforced disappearances, destruction of
villages, rape and other forms of sexual violence, pillaging and forced
displacement throughout Darfur.” They added that the government’s
brutal campaign had displaced more than 1.5 million people. But
for many news editors and readers, one conclusion overshadowed all
the rest: There was no genocide in Darfur, after all.
In considering whether and where to intervene, one question has assumed
talismanic significance: Is it genocide? In the words of judges on
the international tribunal for Rwanda, genocide is the “crime of
crimes.” Such a finding has become a signal for the world to act.
But as the Darfur report shows, genocide is an unreliable trigger.
For all its moral power, genocide is both hard to document and linked
to questions of race, ethnicity and religion in a way that excludes
other – similarly heinous – crimes. Intended as a clarion call,
the term itself has become too much of a focal point, muddling the
necessity for action almost as often as clarifying it.
Few issues have been more important in the last decade than reacting
to the bloody civil conflicts that still haunt many parts of the
globe. The film “Hotel Rwanda” hammers audiences with the tale of the
world’s shameful failure to stop the 1994 Rwandan massacres. Looking
to the genocide label to motivate international intervention in
places like Rwanda, however, overlooks two sad truths: Widespread
slaughter can demand intervention even if it falls outside of the
genocide standard. And the world is quite capable of standing by and
watching even when a genocide is acknowledged.
‘A Problem from Hell’
To a remarkable extent, the term genocide was the product of one man’s
work. As Samantha Power recounts in her recent book, “A Problem from
Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” Raphael Lemkin placed the term
into public discourse and international law through sheer willpower. A
Polish Jew who narrowly escaped the Nazis, Lemkin was instrumental in
drafting and winning support for the 1948 Convention on the Prevention
of Genocide. He wanted a law that captured the unique horror of a
concerted campaign to deny a specific group’s right to exist, and
that is what he got.
In international law, genocide is a crime of specific intent – it
requires that the guilty parties intended to destroy all or part of
an ethnic, racial, national or religious community. Identifying that
intent can be a struggle.
In 1995, Bosnian Serb forces killed 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the
besieged town of Srebrenica. It was Europe’s worst massacre since
World War II. But when the U.N. tribunal finally got hold of one of
the Bosnian Serb generals who had been at Srebrenica, it found him
guilty only of aiding and abetting genocide – not actually committing
it. “Convictions for genocide,” that court said, “can be entered only
where intent has been unequivocally established.”
If getting inside the mind of the killers is one complication,
identifying and classifying the victims is another. The commission
investigating Darfur immersed itself in the details of local tribal
structures as it tried to puzzle out whether the victims of that
conflict fit under the definition of genocide. “The various tribes
that have been the subject of attacks and killings,” the report
conceded, “do not appear to make up ethnic groups distinct from the
ethnic group to which persons or militias that attack them belong.”
Only after lengthy analysis did the authors conclude that the
victimized population in Darfur was a different tribe and therefore a
“protected group.” But they were still unable to identify the intent
needed to show genocide.
Documenting genocidal intent and determining whether the victims are
part of a protected group eats up time when time is of the essence;
a few weeks of concentrated violence killed more than 800,000 people
in Rwanda. Waiting for the lawyers to decide is perilous, as became
apparent once again when the Sudan commission released its report. To
many observers, it appeared that the U.N. experts were downgrading
the Darfur crisis when it was really struggling – in good lawyerly
fashion – to meet a very high evidentiary burden.
Beyond the ‘G-word’
The intense focus on genocide has allowed a U.N. report that
documents widespread atrocities to serve as moral cover for official
lethargy. The United States has been the leading player in diplomatic
efforts in the Sudan, but has not pushed as aggressively as it
could for sanctions. There is an alternative to this intense focus
on genocide. The category of “crimes against humanity” – first used
to describe the massacres of Armenians after World War I and then
codified at the Nuremberg trials – is simpler and broader but still
morally powerful. It encompasses large-scale efforts to kill, abuse
or displace populations. It avoids messy determinations of whether
the victims fit into the right legal box and whether the killers had
a sufficiently evil mind-set.
Do we really care, after all, whether the victims of atrocities are
members of a distinct tribe or simply political opponents of the
regime? Moving beyond what has by now become a warped diplomatic
parlor game (who will say the G-word first?) would have the added
benefit of shifting the debate from the abstract to the practical.
The word genocide may be too powerful for its own good.
And there are small but concrete steps that the United States could
take to fight the mass killings and crimes in Darfur, without sending
a U.S. combat force. The most critical step would be to bolster the
African Union force there now. For almost a decade, the United States
has sought to strengthen Africa’s ability to tend to its own crises.
That effort – and tens of thousands of lives – are on the line
in Sudan.
The A.U. has promised a force of almost 3,500 troops, but only about
half of them have arrived. Getting those soldiers to Darfur fast may
require airlift capacity that is a U.S. specialty. And the fragile
A.U., which is struggling to bear the costs of the Sudan operation,
needs immediate cash.
The Darfur Accountability Act, introduced in the U.S. Senate last
week, calls for increased aid to the A.U. force, as well as a military
no-fly zone and a tight arms embargo. It’s a start. If the government
in Khartoum gets in the way, the Security Council should impose tough
and targeted sanctions. And if China and Russia get in the way of
the Council, the United States and Europe should act without it. The
United States and Britain (which has gone furthest in discussing a
deployment) should send their own small tripwire force to accompany
the African monitors.
Some of these measures may require a U.S. policy that borders on
unilateralism. But this administration has not shown undue patience
with or deference to the often dysfunctional and amoral U.N. Security
Council – and there’s no reason to start now. Realities, not labels,
should define our response. When the world chooses to immerse itself
in terminology rather than take action, it does today’s very real
victims no good at all.