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On 4 August last year, President Obama announced a bold step to allow the United States government to respond quickly to instances of potential mass atrocities and genocide. As we approach Holocaust Memorial Day, I wanted to take a closer look at how the US approach could be replicated here.
The Presidential Study Directive on Mass Atrocities established a standing interagency Atrocities Prevention Board to coordinate the US government's response to situations where mass atrocities and genocide threaten. It has the potential to save countless lives. Obama has also appointed Stephen Pomper, an attorney from the State Department, as Director for War Crimes and Atrocities at the White House to focus resources on this enduring problem.
The British government should investigate how such mechanisms could be implemented here. Fortunately, a blueprint already exists.
The Directive is one of the recommendations made in 2008 by the Genocide Prevention Task Force (GPTF), co-sponsored by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the United States Institute of Peace and the American Academy of Diplomacy.
The GPTF was co-chaired by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen. It developed numerous policy recommendations to enhance the capacity of the U.S. government to respond to emerging threats of genocide and mass atrocities. The basic message of the GPTF report is that preventing mass atrocities is achievable but requires the same focus and oversight from governments who wish to prevent killings, to match the systematic organization which usually precedes mass murder.
By coincidence, I was visiting the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum when President Obama's announcement was made. I could not help but wonder how the events so skillfully and movingly documented in that Museum might have been different if a similar international commitment to preventing genocide had existed when Hitler rose to power. Indeed, rather than cooperating to prevent genocide, the international community almost uniformly bound together to prevent Jews from entering their countries, stranding them inside Germany and other European countries that would soon be under Germany's control. We all know what happened next.
The post-war years saw efforts to collectively prevent and respond to instances of genocide, the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide being the most far-reaching. Nevertheless, the genocide and mass atrocities continued in Cambodia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan and elsewhere.
While the moral case for stopping these crimes was clear, governments have lacked the political will and internal mechanisms to respond effectively to escalating violence. The Albright-Cohen GPTF report makes clear that prevention is both a moral and strategic imperative. The effects of massive crimes against humanity are rarely contained within national borders. Refugees flow into neighbouring countries and armed violence spills across regions. We see this today in the Democratic Republic of Congo where part of the ongoing violence is fuelled by the aftermath of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
But even where the moral and strategic implications are clear, governments require an infrastructure that provides a systematic way for government ministers to coordinate an effective response to threats of potential mass atrocities. And they need to dedicate resources and staff to give this infrastructure real meaning. Without such a system, our response to genocide and other mass atrocity crimes will continue to be ad hoc and ineffective.
The Obama Directive provides a mechanism to achieve these goals in the United States. Now the challenge for other governments, including here in the UK, is whether to follow suit and establish their own genocide prevention plans. A first step might be to create our own task force on atrocity prevention. We need to consider such reforms to give true meaning to the promise of "Never Again."
Mary Creagh is Shadow Environment Secretary and the Labour MP for Wakefield. She was All Party Parliamentary Group on the Prevention of Genocide in the last Parliament.
Follow Mary Creagh on Twitter: www.twitter.com/marycreagh_mp
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We agree. For years the Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation (AIPR) has been after the British government to take part in our genocide prevention seminars, held in the heart of the Auschwitz concentration camp. One of the lessons we teach the rising leaders who attend—over 150 of them so far, from 33 states around the world—is that no government can prevent genocide without a structure of accountability.
AIPR is also the leader in genocide prevention education for the U.S. military. Through our partnership with the U.S. government—based on the task force recommendations Mrs. Creagh cites—we bring U.S. Army majors to Auschwitz to learn how atrocity prevention is part of their work.
During World War II, as Mrs. Creagh notes, "the international community almost uniformly bound together to prevent Jews from entering their countries," in an act of what might be called immoral solidarity. Today, the alumni of the Auschwitz Institute's programs represent a growing international community bound together by a personal and professional commitment to prevent genocide. We hope the United Kingdom will soon join them.
Alex Zucker, Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation, New York City
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What? And how many staff are you thinking of to prevent, let us say, genocide in a country with a population of more than fifty million?
Are you assuming because of recent mass atrocities that future genocides will take place in countries of low population?
And what do you want to do? Talk nice or send in soldiers we do not have? the United States has a massive army and navy. We do not. Are you planning on punching above your weight or someone else's?
Bad things happen we can do nothing about and bad things happen we choose to do nothing about.
What is it going to be this year? Holidays for your family or money to preventing blindness?
Look up at the moral high ground. It is empty. You do not get there with silly, empty promises that mean nothing.
If Abu Qatada was sent back to Jordan and others were given the same justice that they dealt then maybe, just maybe, the message would get out that this type of behaviour is not acceptable and will not be tolerated. Whilst justice is weak and lawyers and judges protect the perpetrators then the VICTIMS will continue to suffer.
We talk about Holocaust Memorial Day and yet an SS camp guard could now hide, in this country, because he had a 'right' to a family life! What a sad memorial to those who suffered in Nazi concentration camps or Stalin's gulags!
He’s going to confine all US forces behind the Mason Dixon line.
"As we approach Holocaust Memorial Day"
Perhaps we should total up what has been invested in violent rather than peaceful resolution, in the middle East.
"Fortunately, a blueprint already exists."
Its call humanitarian morals. But do we really want to live by these?
"The basic message of the GPTF report is that preventing mass atrocities is achievable but"
not in recently liberated Arab counties. See events currently unfolding in freed Libya for further details.
"when Hitler rose to power."
Or when Iraq was illegally invaded?
"We all know what happened next."
They subsequently introduced the franchise to Palestine?
"Without such a system"
we are forever condemned to be selective in our condemnation.
"A first step might be to create our own task force"
Lets call it the UN. Then charge it with policing the world. Without fear of, or favor from, any and all political influence.
Although we're a long way off from seeing an independent international order, the International Criminal Court was created to act as an oversight to crimes against humanity and was a primary factor of the United States being voted off the Human Rights Commission because of opposition to its creation.
In the colonial empire where English socialism is pivotal to their black operational governments acting as the devil's advocate in creating patternized social attacks of religious anarchy through electronic and psychological warfare, we could see a future international intervention. For example, murder, extermination, torture, rape and political, racial or religious persecution and other inhumane acts are all pointed out by the Rome Statute as being crimes against humanity if they are systematic.
The ICC is a very positive direction for all religions in the fact that it factors theological tyranny as an independent political action that shouldn't be equated to any deity and the entire process shouldn't be allocated to much more than that of common witchcraft.