I: After the world's learning the Modern History lesson of Nazi extermination camps and their inassimilable horrors, one would think that genocide could never recur, yet my generation sees it on an ongoing basis (Biafra, Dafur, Rwanda, ex-Yugoslavia).
II: How is it, despite the long span of time and space between one another, that people who are independent of one another express so similar a response to genocide of some four fundamental components when they encounter an instance of it:
1. How motivate oneself now for work and the earning of one's daily bread with a genocide taking place?
2. How can there be both a God and a genocide?
3. If there can be both a genocide and a Divine Principle, then the arithmetic of life is false, i.e., the continuum between one's existence, one's conception of life and work, and the world itself, is a lie.
4. Precious to our health though diversion be, the industry of entertainment has the power (on a chronic basis) to divert one too much from serious basic concerns and activities regarding human existence.
Reader, is it possible that we have been blaming God for a responsibility that falls on human shoulders?
III: Genocide has a debilitating effect on observers, yet friendships, family, wisdom and accomplishment prove it erroneous to let an instance of it completely derange one. Better to turn to action, to find a way or ways to respond that preclude ruination of self, and to help develop a better world. The idea of helping to develop a better world is a real hope now that never existed before, for the development of international law on genocide and mass killings of other specific legal definitions is a recent, twentieth century phenomenon. It was only in 1944 that the term "genocide" was coined by a Polish legal scholar of Jewish descent named Raphael Lemkin, and only 1948 that it was considered to be a criminal charge (under the United Nations' Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide). Why is this important? It is important because they who would commit mass murder on a grand scale have no incentive to refrain if their actions will go unpunished. In a recent Grecian radio broadcast, an announcer said the Holocaust might never have happened had the Armenian genocide of 1915 not gone unpunished.
IV: Consider the role of the foreign observer in speaking out against genocide and other supreme crimes. Foreign observers such as we here in the U.S. who observe from the comfort of our homes horrific and unjustifiable brutality on international news reports are fortunate to have the power to express outrage and anger with less restraining fear of retaliation than targeted groups.
V: Genocide has the negative side effect of shaming hence weakening the social status of the community or group whence the perpetrators originate. This is a important weapon though it is not a preventative. We observe the moral burden of supreme crimes create the turning point in the War in Iraq by the eventual distancing of Iraqi insurgents from AQI (al-Qaeda in Iraq). We can also observe it in the distancing of Afghan Taliban from the universally loathed techniques of mass killings and beheadings, from mid-2009 onward. Reports from Kabul say that Mullah Omar has issued The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan Rules for Mujahideen to his warriors, a new booklet calling for a change in modus operandi.*
Intellectual weapons against genocide we the concerned public bear in our feelings, reflections and notes. Observing, reading about and viewing political matters are meant to lead to speaking out, posting a comment, writing a letter or joining in action with others. Such methods of political improvement require no great effort on our part individually, but the sum of little efforts is a great deal. Civic duty fits in easily with daily responsibilities, and by bringing the world into our living rooms, the media make international activity close to civic activity.
VI: Genocide in tending to eradicate the creativity and brilliance of the human race is easily a potential threat to the future of humankind. That is the "projected expense" of crimes of this nature.
I believe that the immeasurable human cost of World War I, Nazism and World War II, which never fail to evoke incredulity, may be one cause of the intellectual and moral degeneration that have afflicted contemporary society. Many thinkers in the West perceive a link between those wars and a subsequent if not consequent laxity in society's general morals. It is a piece of wisdom to take into consideration, to reflect upon the truth value of.
Genocide is the lowest of humankind's vices, in my humble opinion. It is a vice potentially and a sin in execution. No excuse for it can possibly justify the cost, for along with the death and suffering die possible cures and remedies for excessive wars, cancer, malaria, ignorance, nuclear catastrophe- any of the mental, physical, social or environmental ills that beset us and which we may confidently assume ourselves to have the power to alleviate or eradicate.
VII: Even though the outsider would like to reach across borders and smash a genocide to obliteration with inevitable success, there is no legal support for such path of action because the legal principles of the sovereignty of nations and of non-interference prohibit it.
Yet, I sometimes hear from journalistic circles and from individuals who survived or otherwise observed a genocide that governments and/or organizations composed of them who have a legal inroad to confront a genocide sometimes lack the will to do so. This is another important notion to examine with the tools of logic and facts and then to address intelligent action towards when it is called for.
VIII: Humanitarian intervention and peace enforcement mechanisms have to be maintained in world organizations and supported: by us, ordinary folk in all walks of life who read newspapers, watch TV and do the simple duty, in being concerned about the world we live in, of forming and supporting activist groups, or speaking out to our media of preference and to our elected officials. International law is an exciting subject but it takes work to support, understand and maintain the relativity young organisations that embody it.
Why staying aware and involved matters can be shown in two recent events. Event one: Unremitting public outrage against the destruction to and the massive losses of life of non-combatants in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, expressed through organized action since 1991, led to UN Security Council Resolution 827 in 1993 that created the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia a mere month upon the heels of the establishment of safe areas in Bosnian towns, including Srebrenica. Nonetheless, a defiant Bosnian Serb Army ignored world opinion and the United Nations to proceed with what turned into the Srebrenica genocide of 1995. Event two: Such outrage also led to the elevation of mass rape or rape as a tool of war from a violation of the laws and customs of war to a crime against humanity, by the International Criminal Court in February 2001.
IX: One of the current developments in genocide law concern the standing legal definition (see the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 2) which is narrow enough for perpetrators to evade by committing mass killings under conditions that deliberately preclude classification as genocide. Indeed, the original conception of genocide arose from immediate, empirical exigencies involving Dr. Lemkin. He acted under moral pressure of the Holocaust happening around him, the Assyrian massacre in Iraqi in 1933, and the Armenian genocide in 1915 during World War I (which event Prime Minister Erdogan has recently invited the international community to investigate, in Turkey's claim that the facts disallow the event from being classified as genocide). A practical need for immediate action denied Dr. Lemkin a definition based on purely speculated instances such as, for example, entire populations' annihilation over control of natural resources in the land they inhabit, or of their rebelling against a standing government and attempting to secede as a state and take their region's wealth of a whole nation for themselves. Such possibilities have thus for been excluded from genocide litigation on technical grounds, therefore new denotations are proposed, like "democide" and "politicide".
X: A myriad of declarations, laws and conventions exist now on all levels (international, regional and national) that urge and support prosecuting perpetrators of and accomplices to acts of or acts leading to genocide or any other supreme crime. Work is constantly going on behind the scenes, not merely when the indictment or prosecution of a sitting head of state like Slobodan Milosevic former President of Serbia, or Omar al-Bashir current President of The Sudan or of a notorious war criminal like Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb politician accused of the Srebrenica genocide, makes world headlines.
*Aljazeera. "Taliban issues code of conduct." Aljazeera.net 28 July 2009. http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2009/07/20097278348124813.html (7 May 2010).
Christine Despardes is an independent strategy consultant and business analyst who works out of New York.
