It’s time for the United States
to examine how its own foreign policy promotes genocide, and take the actions
necessary to curb it.
The 65th anniversary of the international Genocide Convention offers an occasion to review Washington’s dismal record of failing to prevent–and in fact, sometimes abetting–genocide. (Image: LKEM / Flickr)
By Jeff Bachmann
December 9, 2013
Today marks
the 65th anniversary of the Genocide Convention, the groundbreaking United
Nations document that declared genocide to be an international crime.
The
anniversary provides an ideal opportunity to look at the United States’ record
in preventing genocide around the world. That record is dismal.
Why?
The most
frequent explanations for America’s failure to prevent genocide concern a lack
of national interest or political will. Both have indeed been influential. But
a more honest account would acknowledge the United States’ own complicity in
backing genocidal regimes.
It’s time for
the United States to examine how its own foreign policy promotes genocide, and
take the actions necessary to curb it. These include making clear assessments
of when genocide is occurring or about to occur — regardless of whether it is
perpetrated by its friends or foes — and granting jurisdiction to the
International Court of Justice (ICJ), the body designated by the resolution to hear
“disputes between the Contracting Parties relating to the interpretation,
application, or fulfillment of the present Convention, including those relating
to the responsibility of a State for genocide.”
A Convention
against Genocide
The United
Nations General Assembly adopted the resolution — formally called theConvention for
the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide — in
1948, and the law entered into force in 1951.
The
convention defines genocide as actions taken with the “intent to destroy, in
whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.” In
contrast to the designation of “crimes against humanity,” which were at that
time understood to happen only during war, the convention broke new ground in
noting that genocide can also occur in peacetime — thus opening a broader
set of acts of violence to international condemnation. The convention
identified genocide as a crime under international law, outlined the specific
criminal acts that constituted it, and called for cooperation among ratifying
nations to stop it.
Eventually,
cases for the Genocide Convention came to be tried before the ICJ in The Hague,
Netherlands.
The United
States became a signatory to this convention in 1948, but resisted passing thelegislation to implement it until
1988. Moreover, the United States is one of only five parties to the Genocide
Convention that refuse to recognize the
jurisdiction of the ICJ. Although it had signed on 40 years earlier,
the United States withdrew its agreement to compulsory jurisdiction by the ICJ
in 1986, when Nicaragua brought a case against the United States for sponsoring
an insurrection against the Nicaraguan government. The United States’ lack of
participation in the full authority of the ICJ directly diminishes the court’s
ability to hold states accountable for violations of international laws and
norms, and diminishes the world’s ability to prevent genocide.
National
Interest and Political Will
Two main
reasons have been given for the United States’ failure to prevent genocide:
national interest and political will.
Although
awash in lofty rhetoric about human rights and democracy, the United States
often pursues what it sees as its own best interest. Frequently this amounts to
a calculation based on its relations with individual members of the
international community: When enemy states commit massacres, the United States
responds with condemnation, sanctions, and possibly military intervention. In
contrast, when the perpetrator of serious human rights violations is a U.S.
client state, the United States remains silent — or, at most, issues an
occasional rhetorical condemnation.
The “political will” narrative suggests that
the country’s heart is in the right place but that policymakers are prevented
by domestic political considerations from taking the necessary action to stop
genocide. In their 2008 report on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of
the Genocide Convention, “Preventing Genocide: A Blueprint for U.S.
Policymakers,”Madeleine Albright
and William Cohen made this argument forcefully, repeatedly
calling for improved leadership and political will.
But the story
of America’s relationship with genocide is far more than a case of purposeful
negligence. The United States has had close ties with numerous genocidal
regimes, despite being a signatory to the Genocide Convention.
Selective
Outrage and Complicity
Years of
massacres around the world demonstrate Washington’s selective outrage:
condemnation of certain atrocities and silence or complicity toward others.
One of the
most famous cases of the United States remaining silent occurred in 1971. On
March 25, the regime based in West Pakistan launched “Operation Searchlight,” which
initiated its genocide against Bengalis in East Pakistan (present day
Bangladesh). Acting with the courage to challenge his own government, Arthur
Blood, at the time the U.S. general consul in Dhaka, sent what came to be known
as the “Blood Telegram.” In it, he and others
criticized the U.S. government for failing to denounce Pakistan’s “genocide”
and for choosing “not to intervene, even morally.”
This silence
in the face of massacre can be explained by geopolitics. At the time, the
United States and China were using Pakistan as an intermediary in their attempt
to open and improve Sino-American relations. Despite Blood’s passionate
insistence that genocide was taking place, the Nixon administration refused to
use the word “genocide” to describe the atrocities. Doing so would have implied
an obligation to intervene under the Genocide Convention and undermined the
administration’s geopolitical goals.
Halfway
around the world and a decade later, the United States not only fell silent,
but actively supported a government while it was committing genocide. Following
Efrain Rios Montt’s military coup in March 1982, the Guatemalan army massacred
indigenous Mayan villagers deemed sympathetic towards leftist rebels. The
suppression of left-wing activity fit squarely with U.S. goals during the Cold
War. When the Commission for Historical Clarification presented its final
report, Guatemala: Memory of Silence,
in 1999, it found that 83 percent of the victims had been Mayan and concluded
that “agents of the state committed acts of genocide against groups of Mayan
people.”
The Reagan
administration had been no passive bystander in this crime. During Rios
Montt’s recent trial on charges of genocide,
award-winning journalist Allan Nairnreminded us that “U.S. military
attachés in Guatemala, the CIA people who were on the ground aiding the G2
military intelligence unit, [and] the policy-making officials back in
Washington…were direct accessories to and accomplices to the Guatemalan
military. They were supplying money, weapons, political support, intelligence.”
Far from standing silently by, the United States directly supported those
committing the atrocities in order to achieve its own Cold War goals.
A mere six
years later, the Reagan administration once again gave support to a genocidal
regime—this time Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Despite the fact that Washington had
facilitated arms transfers to Iran during the Iran-Contra affair, the Reagan
administration did not want Iraq to lose in its war with Iran, which raged
throughout the 1980s and claimed over a million lives. Despite knowing full well that
the Iraqi leader had used chemical weapons to commit genocide against Iraq’s
Kurdish population, U.S. government officials continued to support Hussein.
According to journalist Mike Shuster, in the 1980s the United
States “play[ed] a key role in all of [Hussein’s] actions, military and
political.” Hussein, according to Shuster, “was meeting with senior U.S.
diplomats. They were looking the other way when he was using chemical weapons
and developing other unconventional weapons. He couldn’t have helped but to
think that the United States was behind him.” And so once again, geopolitical
considerations led the United States to back a dictator engaged in genocide.
Over two
decades later, the Obama administration has similarly maintained relations with
genocidal regimes. In 2010, a leaked UN report alleged that Rwanda,
under current president Paul Kagame, may have committed a reprisal genocide
against ethnic Hutus who had taken refuge in the neighboring DRC. More
recently, Rwanda has been accused of having direct control over the
Congolese M23 rebel group, which UN High
Commissioner for Human Rights Navy Pillay called “among the worst
perpetrators of human rights violations in the DRC, or in the world.” But Paul
Kagame has maintained close relations with the United States ever since the
1994 genocide, and Rwanda remains a strategic ally for the United States in
central Africa.
A similar
drama may be unfolding in Myanmar, where Muslim Rohingya villagers have been denied
their right to citizenship and targeted by Buddhist mobs and sympathetic
security forces as part of a campaign to ethnically cleanse Myanmar of its
Rohingya population. According to Human Rights Watch, “An
ethnic Arakanese campaign of violence and abuses since June 2012 facilitated by
and at times involving state security forces and government officials has
displaced more than 125,000 Rohingya and Kaman Muslims in western Burma’s
Arakan State. Tens of thousands of Rohingya still lack adequate humanitarian
aid – leading to an unknown number of preventable deaths – in isolated, squalid
displacement camps.”
The
systematic nature of these abuses — and the involvement of Myanmar officials —
constitutes crimes against humanity as defined by the Rome Statute of the International
Criminal Court. Further, if the intent behind the policy of isolating Rohingya
in camps and denying them access to humanitarian aid is their eventual death,
Myanmar’s crimes could elevate to genocide under Article 2 of the Genocide Convention, which includes
“deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring
about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
Ahamed Jarmal, Secretary General of the
Burmese Rohingya Organization, recently warned that “the situation is getting
really desperate. Mobs have attacked our villages, driving us from our homes,
children have been hacked to death, and hundreds of my people have been killed
by members of the majority. Thugs are distributing leaflets threatening to
‘wipe us out’ and children in schools are being taught that the Rohingya are
different.” Yet minor democratic reforms and the
release of some political prisoners were rewarded with the lifting of sanctions
and visits to Myanmar by then Secretary of State Clinton, as well as President
Obama. More recently, President Obama welcomed Myanmar president Thein Sein to
the United States.
In November
2012, prior to President Obama’s visit to Myanmar, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power wrote glowingly of the
Obama administration’s support for human rights in Myanmar and the reforms
already underway. Yet Power also tempered the praise, warning that “We are
clear-eyed about the challenges that Burma faces. The peril faced by the
stateless Rohingya population in Rakhine State is particularly urgent, and we
have joined the international community in expressing deep concern about recent
violence that has left hundreds dead, displaced over 110,000, and destroyed
thousands of homes.”
More than a
year later, conditions for the Rohingya have worsened. Yet U.S. policy stays
the course, a classic exemplification of the foreign policy of selective
outrage. Myanmar is committing crimes against humanity, yet is rewarded with
the lifting of sanctions and presidential visits. The good treatment is no wonder:
resource-rich Myanmar holds economic opportunities for the United States and is
strategically located on China’s southwestern border.
The United
States does not have a policy of disengagement when it comes to the prevention
of genocide. Rather, U.S. policy is far worse: it operates on a principle of
direct engagement with — and sometimes support of — genocidal regimes when
Washington’s geopolitical goals demand it.
Prevention
The Genocide
Convention requires not only that perpetrators of genocide be held to account,
but also that countries prevent genocide from occurring in the first place.
In 2007, the
ICJ ruled in the case of Bosnia v. Serbia that Serbia failed
to fulfill its obligation under the Genocide Convention to prevent genocide.
According to the ICJ, “In view of their undeniable influence,”
the Yugoslav federal authorities should “have made the best efforts within
their power to try and prevent the tragic events then taking shape, whose
scale, though it could not have been foreseen with certainty, might at least have
been surmised.” The ICJ ruled that Serbia had the necessary influence over the
Bosnian Serbs to at least attempt to use that influence to deter the Bosnian
Serbs from committing genocide against Bosnian Muslims.
What about
the United States? Did it wield the necessary influence over the Pakistani,
Guatemalan, and Iraqi governments to have failed to fulfill its own obligation
to prevent genocide? Does the Obama administration hold the necessary influence
in Rwanda and Myanmar today?
Vera
Saeedpour, the late Kurdish specialist, once lamented that “Until the
priorities of the international community are reordered to place human life in
a loftier position, I fear that our efforts will be largely relegated to
recording atrocities in history books.” The universal eradication of genocide
and other mass atrocity crimes requires a revolutionary change in philosophy ¾
one that elevates human life above the national interest.
A good first
step would be to redefine protecting human life as a national interest.
President Barack Obama intimated as much two years ago when he presented his “Presidential
Study Directive on Mass Atrocities.” He said at the time,
“Preventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core national security interest
and a core moral responsibility of the United States. Our security is affected
when masses of civilians are slaughtered, refugees flow across borders, and
murderers wreak havoc on regional stability and livelihoods. America’s
reputation suffers, and our ability to bring about change is constrained, when
we are perceived as idle in the face of mass atrocities and genocide.”
Obama went on
to create an “interagency Atrocities Prevention Board” to “coordinate a whole
of government approach to preventing mass atrocities and genocide.” Human
rights groups have generally welcomed this development, but have recommended that the administration
publicly state what the comprehensive strategy for preventing atrocities is,
improve transparency, consult with civil society groups and Congress,
coordinate its efforts internationally, address actual emergencies in the
world, and make sure the board has the resources to be effective.
But the problems
go much deeper. To have true effect, such a task force would need to recognize
when genocide has been — or is about to be — perpetrated by countries
the United States considers allies. Even further, it would need to take
seriously the United States’ own complicity in genocide — and commit to
preventing it by transforming U.S. foreign policy.
Nothing can
excuse the outrageous failure to prevent genocide. The United States needs to
stop selectively condemning countries only when it is in its own supposed
interest to do so. It needs to create a uniform standard for condemning human
rights violations. And it needs to recognize the jurisdiction of the ICJ, as
well as the International Criminal Court. If that means taking responsibility
— and risk — for being held to account for its own violations of
human rights, then all the better.
Jeff Bachman is a professorial lecturer in Human Rights and Co-Director
of Ethics, Peace, and Global Affairs at the School of International Service at
American University.
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