Museum
INTRODUCTION:
Donatella Lorch, from the International Center for Journalists; and Ariela Blätter, from Amnesty International spoke about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda in comparison with the genocide in Darfur, Sudan. Lorch was a journalist with the Washington Post in 1994 and reported extensively on Rwanda. The presentations were followed by a discussion with the audience.
EVENT:
BRIDGET CONLEY: I want to welcome everyone today to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. I will just preface this program by commenting on the way that the Museum has seen the link between the history of the Holocaust that we focus on, and contemporary genocide. The President’s Commission on the Holocaust, chaired by Elie Wiesel, was tasked by President Carter to find the appropriate national response to the Holocaust. In their report they suggested a memorial, which you see at the end of the permanent exhibition; a museum, which is our permanent exhibition; an education department; and a Committee on Conscience.
In talking about the Committee on Conscience they introduced it by saying, “Of all the issues addressed by the Commission, none was as perplexing or as urgent as the need to ensure that such a totally inhuman assault as the Holocaust, or any partial version thereof, never recurs.” It is another way of saying what we have all heard and perhaps said so many times: “Never Again.”
Today’s program shows us the need to understand that cry for “Never Again” as a challenge, rather than a promise, and certainly not as a fact. We are here today in this Museum recalling the Holocaust, with this panel recalling what happened in 1994 in Rwanda, with the distinct purpose of trying to better understand how we can respond to what is happening today in the western region of Sudan, in Darfur.
The Committee on Conscience, where I work at the Museum, which is tasked with contemporary threats of genocide, has issued a genocide emergency for Darfur. We will be hearing more about that later on in our program.
We wanted to start today by giving you a little bit of background on the Rwandan genocide, by showing a short film that we produced two years ago. We invited General Roméo Dallaire, the head of the U.N. peacekeeping forces in Rwanda in 1994, to come speak with us. He was interviewed on our stage in our larger auditorium by Ted Koppel. He speaks about what it meant to be the alleged eyes and ears, and more importantly, the guns, of the international community while a genocide had unfolded and while his forces were reduced and he was left, not paralyzed, but severely handicapped, in the face of an increasing and incredible amount of violence.
We will show that video and then we will turn to our panelist and guests today to talk a little bit more about Rwanda and how it relates to Darfur.
(Recess)
BRIDGET CONLEY: Thank you. We would like to turn now to our two panelists today. We will be starting with Donatella. Donatella Lorch, since January of 2004 has been director of the Knight International Press Fellowships, a program that sends United States reporters abroad to share best practices of journalism. She brought a wealth of international experience to this position from her 17 years as a reporter. Previously, she was the Washington correspondent for four years at Newsweek magazine reporting from, among other places, Afghanistan, Africa, and Kosovo.
As a correspondent for NBC News based in London from 1996 to 1999, she reported on terrorism and conflicts in the Balkans, South Asia, and Iraq. From 1989 to 1996, Lorch was a reporter for The New York Times where she was also the East Africa bureau chief. While with the Times she reported extensively from Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation, taking more than a dozen trips with Mujahideen guerrillas, and covered the Gulf War as well, the United States and United Nations intervention in Somalia, the Rwandan genocide -- what we have asked her to speak about today -- and conflicts throughout Africa and South Asia. I will turn the table now to Donatella Lorch.
DONATELLA LORCH: It is a pleasure to be here today and to see so many people that are interested in wanting to hear about Rwanda and Darfur. Every single time I see Roméo Dallaire on television or in a film I always get the chills. He was my great hero in Rwanda when I drove into Kigali on the 10th of April, 1994. He was the one who came with one armored personnel carrier to rescue me from the Mille Collines hotel, the famous Hotel Rwanda. That started my whole experience over there.
It is good to see so many people here in terms of showing interest in that part of the world, because what I have found everywhere I have talked is that Africa is usually sort of a general mass. Africa is considered by many people to be like one country. You want to try to compare Rwanda and Darfur and those are two very different events, in very different countries. They are united by the horror of genocide. They have many things that keep them apart, and several things that bring them together. I am going to talk a bit about that, as well as the challenges that I faced as a journalist. I will also speak about the challenges that the American media faces right now in terms of covering something like Darfur at a time when there is a war going on in Iraq, a war going on in Afghanistan, and the horrors that come out everyday that we read about regularly over here.
Rwanda is a tiny, tiny country. It is the smallest country in Africa. It is the most populated country in Africa. As a matter of fact it is unique, anthropologically speaking, because there are no villages per se in Rwanda. It is so densely populated that people do not say “You are from village X or from village Y,” they will say, “Which hill are you from?”
Darfur is this sparsely populated semi-nomadic section of Sudan, this massive country in Africa. Both countries are hard to get in and out of, but Darfur is extremely difficult to get in and out of. It is difficult not only because of the repressive government, but because of the location. It is just hard to get in and out of that part of Sudan, or any part of Sudan for that matter.
Rwanda is tiny. It was considered in 1994 to be a microcosm for foreign aid in Africa because everyone who went there had their little project in Rwanda. It was so small and so populated that the feeling was that you could see how well your project worked in a limited amount of time. In Sudan, you are just overcome by the vastness and the difficulties of communicating and moving from one place to another.
Both genocides are extremely, were extremely -- and one is “are” and one is “were” -- difficult to cover. When the genocide happened in Rwanda I was, as the East Africa bureau chief for The New York Times, based in Nairobi and I was responsible for about 15 or 16 countries. My big relief of the moment was that I was down in South Africa covering a fun, happy story.
None of us expected Rwanda to happen, in large part because we had not really paid much attention to it. We had spent the past two years in and out of Somalia with the United Nations and United States intervention. I had southern Sudan to cover as well, there were problems in Uganda, there were the killings in Burundi, and Rwanda had just gone over my head, like it had gone over the head of many journalists based in Africa.
Explaining Darfur, versus explaining Rwanda, to an audience is much more difficult. It took me even a long, long time, having traveled extensively in Sudan, to figure out what was going on in Darfur. It is an extremely complex situation. I was surprised in the many talks that I have given on Rwanda where Darfur has come up to sophisticated American audiences whose first reaction was to try and understand Darfur under the same way that they understood the only other part of Sudan that anyone had really heard about, which was the problem in southern Sudan between the Muslim Arab north and the Christian black south. Was it a question of religion? I remember telling people, “The first thing we must know is it may be a question of ethnicity, but that is just one of about ten different problems in Darfur.” It is not a question of religion; everyone is Muslim.
There are two main reasons that Rwanda got more coverage than Darfur. First, Rwanda had pictures. When you are selling a story in the news, particular pictures make a story. Somalia was in our living rooms, day in, day out, and it was way more covered than Rwanda because Somalia was viewed as a famine. The world embraces natural disasters. Look at how we embraced the Tsunami. Everyone can open their hearts to what nature does to us, but when it comes to politics, taking sides, and saying what is good, what is evil, what is black, what is white, everything is gray. Rwanda, to a certain extent, had “good versus evil,” at least at the beginning. Since then it is debatable how the new government is doing, but it is so much easier to commiserate over a natural disaster.
The other thing that Somalia had over Rwanda, therefore, was that it was a natural disaster. Rwanda, though, had pictures. It was very difficult to get in and out of Rwanda during the genocide. It was extremely dangerous; you could not come in on your own because you could not get past roadblocks. I tried once on my own and had to be evacuated by Roméo Dallaire. The only way in was to come in under the auspices of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, like being embedded with the United States military except you got embedded with the Rwandan Patriotic Front, and they controlled you just as much as the United States military does. You came in through Uganda, you drove around with them, and they basically took you to see different massacre sites and to Kigali where you tried to gain access to their main general to talk to him and see what was going on.
It was very difficult to carry your own food and fuel. Most journalists, including myself, came down with cerebral malaria during the time we covered it. It was the rainy season; there were bodies everywhere. It was horrible. You could drive through villages, and all you had to do was roll down the window and you could guess where the bodies were; it just followed your nose.
Darfur, as far as media coverage, does not have the pictures. It does not have the fields of bodies of Rwanda. It does not have everyone starving to death like Somalia. It has refugee pictures, but as far as trying to bring across the horror or the impact of genocide or a holocaust, it does not have those pictures. When you look at the coverage, the European networks have done a pretty solid coverage of Darfur, even the BBC, but after a while it is always the same pictures. There is compassion fatigue of always seeing the same refuge camp. Tents and dust do not translate well in trying to arouse the interest of the world and trying to translate into, “This equals genocide, but we cannot show you bodies because we have not really found the bodies or we have only found certain bodies.” There is not the massiveness that we saw in Rwanda.
It comes down to the way journalism has changed in the United States and the world, in the past twenty years. When I started out in 1986, I was still using telegram and Telex machines to send in my story. I had a colleague in 1983 that used a carrier pigeon to send his story in, which I thought was pretty cool. It took him a while to figure out how to use it because he had to use two of them, kiss them on the head, and send them off at the same time. He had to keep rewriting the story because he had not figured that out. Look at where we stand right now. The Internet and 24-hour cable news has completely changed the way we view the world and how we report. We are on constant deadlines, whether it is television or even daily newspapers right now. There is very little time to take a week off and get into a country. You got to be in and out; it costs money. With the Iraq and Afghan war in particular, the television networks have invested so much money that they are bleeding; they are hemorrhaging funds for covering anything else in the world. Then there has to be the interest in it. The television networks are not owned by your local mom and pop store; they are owned by huge companies, and the bottom line is, where does the money come from? The focus groups tell you that is why we have so many reality shows. If we see one more Fear Factor, Twin Fear Factor; money could go elsewhere you would think. Why has NBC not even covered Darfur once yet? They have not sent a crew out. ABC did finally send a crew. It costs a lot of money, but it also shows the level of, “This is not going to sell to your public. We are only going to put this in for three minutes on the nightly news show.” It is 22 minutes of news. I am sure people would much rather see how that 14-year-old girl died from the shark attack than know what is happening in Darfur. Most people do not even know where Darfur is. It is one thing for all of our politicians to say, “Never Again.” Bill Clinton is going to go around saying “not on my watch.” His watch is not going to come around anytime soon again. It is wonderful for him to go to Rwanda. I saw footage recently of his going back to tell the Rwandans he is sorry, and I am sure that he felt he was sorry, but everyone is human. He had the power of the biggest, most powerful country in the world at his fingertips, and he did nothing. The Vatican did nothing. Nuns and priests were involved in saving people, but also in killing people. And you -- the whole world -- I remember the anger. I have never been so angry at the world, because story after story after story that I wrote, still there was not a reaction. People only started reacting to all of this when Goma happened and the cholera epidemic started. It is again natural disaster. It is so much easier to hate a disease than it is to hate a political situation, when you must understand who is good, who is bad, what is good, what is evil.
BRIDGET CONLEY: Thank you, Donatella. Let me introduce Ariela Blätter, who is a lawyer, lobbyist, and human rights advocate. She is the director of Crisis Preparedness and Response at Amnesty International, and in that position she manages Amnesty’s membership, staff, and allies, to respond to human rights crises around the world.
Her background is in human rights law and international affairs. She has a law degree from Trinity College, Dublin, and a Masters in human rights law from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
While in Ireland, she worked as director of human rights for ELSA, a European non-governmental organization, where she worked on the Northern Ireland peace process. While at the United Nations in New York and Rome she lobbied for the establishment of a permanent international criminal court and the protection of the rights of women and children. She has represented minority communities such as the Sikhs in London, Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, and the Greater Boston Jewish Community. We are very pleased to have her with us today.
ARIELA BLÄTTER: Thank you very much for having me today. Thanks, Donatella, for your remarks. I am going say some similar things. I prepared a bit of a longer presentation, so I will try to shorten it so we can really have an engaging conversation.
Watching Roméo Dallaire on the screen and hearing Donatella talk about Clinton and his remarks, I am reminded of when I was recently taking the laborious process of flipping through Clinton’s memoirs to look for as many Monica Lewinsky references as I could possibly find, discovering there were only a couple. All I found about Rwanda was one small quote where he said it was one of his biggest regrets of his presidency.
I do not know how many of you have been to see “Shake Hands with the Devil,” a new film about when Dallaire went back. You should see it; it is very good. They have a picture of Clinton at the airport in Kigali in 1998. Clinton had not been in Rwanda before 1998. At that point, as Dallaire describes, and they show the clip, he is seethingly angry about Clinton talking about how he just was not aware. He did not appreciate the depth and the speed of which the genocide engulfed the people there. No apologies at the time. He also said he just did not have the information, at which point Dallaire said he certainly had the information. He should know, he was the one sending the cables to New York, and he was the one giving all the media interviews he could possibly get. Still, the genocide occurred under pretty much a cover of darkness, at lighting speed. They say it happened faster than the Nazi extermination policy.
In looking at this I have come up with some lessons to look at from Rwanda and apply to Darfur. First, of course, is that genocide occurs when people are looking elsewhere. I do not want to go over Rwanda again too much, but just to add a couple of notes to Donatella’s remarks. Some of the interesting things about Rwanda were pre-1994, how many of the media outlets reduced their Africa editors, and those people who were involved in Africa at the time tended to be focusing on the first non-racial election of Nelson Mandela in South Africa. Then once the reports started to come out, a lot of the major news outlets -- Time magazine -- were characterizing Rwanda as African tribal carnage. You had a situation where The Economist did not put Rwanda on the front cover until June of 1994, though genocide largely started in April. After, they wrote that the passivity of the world community was not shameful in the case of tiny Rwanda. It was not going to blow up Africa the way the Balkans might blow up Europe.
I also think about something that Samantha Power wrote in her book, “A Problem from Hell.” She talked about how the United States administration looked at the op-ed pages of our major papers at the time. Conspicuously empty were real commentary on the genocide occurring in Rwanda. She talked about how they used that as part of a political calculation to not intervene in the genocide in Rwanda.
I think it is really important to look at Darfur. Unlike Rwanda, plenty of governments, including the United States, were focusing on Sudan. This was a focus on Sudan, not the killings in Darfur, because the United States government was determined to maintain positive attention on the Naivasha accords, their cornerstone efforts to broker a peace deal in the long-standing civil war between the north and the south. When the situation in Darfur looked like it was going to threaten the peace deal, Secretary of State Collin Powell went on the record calling for less pressure to be put on the Sudanese government about Darfur so as to not cause internal problems that might make the situation worse. Of course, this is before he called it genocide.
In April of 2003, Amnesty International, the organization I work for, pleaded for Darfur to be included in the human rights monitoring situation being set up in the north-south peace process, calling for the international community to not watch while another area of Sudan was dragged into disaster. With Western governments focused on Naivasha, and the United States media concentrating on the invasion of Iraq in 2003, there was not much attention on Darfur.
By March of 2004 the media really began to concentrate on Darfur, but the reporting was seriously derailed by the Tsunami in December. Some have speculated that under this large cover of darkness the Sudanese government and their proxy militia, the Janjaweed, used this as an opportunity to escalate their attacks against the rebels and civilian population.
Lesson number two, action without resources was not action at all. A lot of this, we saw in Rwanda on the film just now. In October of 1993, before Rwanda, we had a situation where eighteen United States soldiers were killed in a botched operation in Somalia. Many of you will remember that their mutilated bodies were dragged across the streets in front of the world’s eyes. The reaction of the American public was shock. Many did not know that the United States was engaged there, much less what was going on in Somalia. The Clinton administration, in response, passed the Presidential Decision Directive 25, which set out seventeen criteria that had to be met before United States troops could participate in United Nations missions, or even support other countries that were participating in United Nations missions. Through this directive, the United States was able to argue that the United Nations had little business being in Rwanda if the opposing sides were not committed to peace, and they left this small rag-tag team of peacekeepers led by General Dallaire to stop genocide in that country.
Dallaire, leading UNAMIR basically, in 1993, led this group of rag-tag troops to monitor the Arusha peace process. When he asked for 5000 troops, he was told, “You can have 2,500 well-trained troops.” Instead of 2,500 he gets 400 Belgians here, 800 Guineans here, some Bangladeshi troops. Meantime, he is frustrated, he is asking, as the genocide began, for batteries, bullets, equipment, support, et cetera.
The situation worsened after the ten Belgians were killed by the Hutu extremists. The Belgians began withdrawing, and shortly after, the Bangladeshis were withdrawing, and then there was the evacuation of the expatriates.
In the meantime, Dallaire asks for the United Nations Security Council to give him more troops, at which point they said no, and actually reduced the UNAMIR to 270, though some remained as volunteers. Over one hundred days, Dallaire and his skeleton team are reduced to watching the slaughter of 800,000 Tutsi and Hutu moderates.
Darfur is a different situation. Without any real “peace to keep” in the Darfur region, it has been pretty simple for the United Nations to avoid the issue of sending a dedicated United Nations mission to the region. The combination of no-state consent on the issue and the Khartoum government’s adamant refusal of a non-African intervention force have made this a non-starter. The solution in Darfur has been to employ a regional solution, use African Union ceasefire monitors, establishing the pretty tenuous ceasefire between the Khartoum government and the rebels, signed in April of 2004.
Currently, fewer than 3,000 monitors protect an area the size of France, and according to Amnesty International and public information, the monitors are finding their tasks hampered by logistical difficulties, lack of resources, government delays, and problems with their mandate. Kofi Annan, in his latest report to the Security Council stated that AMIS has been unable to provide the protection to civilians it badly needs.
Things on paper are looking up. In September there should be an increase in troops to about 7,700 and possibly up again to 12,000. Recently the African Union approached NATO for logistical and financial support, which the Khartoum government has no objection to. The international community has recently pledged about $300 million for the expansion of the force, which Annan has called a good beginning.
Lesson number three, defining the crime of genocide is key, or is it really? Genocide is widely considered to be the crime of all crimes, but the term is relatively new. It was crafted specifically to describe the Nazi extermination policy in World War II and was first used in 1945. Since then it has gotten harder and harder to fit the situations of genocide -- the square peg -- into the round hole -- the legal definition of genocide. For example, under the United Nations definition of genocide there are lots of elements that have to be present. There has to be the physical act such as killing, and the mental element or what is called the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a member of a recognized group, from a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.
Initially in Rwanda, it was felt that the genocide label did not apply. The Hutus and Tutsis were considered to be the same ethnic group. It was only through the colonization by the Belgians that they formalized their identity card system and other sort of societal differences into formal differences between the Hutus and the Tutsis.
The 1999 Appeals Chamber for the Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, however, was able to bend the rules a bit, allowing the Hutus and the Tutsis to be considered different, subjectively distinct and stable groups since birth, since they saw each other that way. And so it was considered to be genocide.
This is not the case with Darfur. Here there are killings, and there are definitely two distinct groups, which are colloquially known as the Arab African nomads and the black African sedentary farmers; it is complicated. In this case the United Nations failed to find the requisite mental element, the specific intent, so there was no crime of genocide. According to the United Nations Commission of Inquiry -- the independent body established to figure this out -- for every example of atrocities and racially motivated statements targeting the African tribes, there is evidence that an entire population was not targeted in the violence. For example, they cite cases where young men are killed in a village, while the elderly men, boys, and women of the same ethnic group were actively spared. There may have been a system in place by the government to rid themselves of the rebels in Darfur at all cost, but according to the Commission this constitutes every crime in the international book except genocide. They did, however, state that individuals may have committed genocide but they were not willing to fudge the law a bit, as we saw in Rwanda, to make the crime fit the law.
Probably even more complicated than fitting the square peg into the round hole is the question of whether the use of the term genocide gives rise to a duty to act for member states of the United Nations. In Rwanda, the United States government sideswiped this whole question by insisting that the United Nations Security Council not use the word genocide, and then later they resorted to the term “acts of genocide,” a much watered-down version by Secretary Warren Christopher in May of 1994. At the time the government feared that merely uttering the word gave rise to the need to respond militarily under the genocide convention.
Now, when you fast-forward to Darfur, you have a situation where the Secretary of State announced that “genocide” had and was occurring, but no new action by the Untied States was dictated by this determination. It begs the question, which is it? Can governments avoid intervening to stop genocide by not uttering the G word at all, or by using the label genocide liberally and claiming that their work is done?
Finally, there is another school of thought prescribed by Kofi Annan, General Dallaire, and some Non Governmental Organizations including my own: it is important not to get bogged down in the linguistics of genocide. Annan, when the United Nations Commission report came out on Darfur, stressed that what is vital is that these people are held accountable, no matter what the crime is called, so that they are not committed with impunity.
In conclusion, I think it is important to finish on prevention. The lesson is that prevention is key. By the time the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide came around there were a lot of people talking about the failures of Rwanda and making very common parallels with Darfur. Secretary General Kofi Annan used the opportunity to say that things had gone terribly wrong in Rwanda and that the risk of genocide still remains frighteningly real. What he said at the time was pretty startling to me. He said that we should not be focusing per se on stopping the genocide midstream, or acting after the fact, but preventing it. The kind of subtext was that we really were not going to stop genocide. He made an interesting point when it came to preventing genocide -- the need for early and clear warnings and signals. In doing that, the most important thing he pointed to was civil society, or the non-governmental organization sector, which I work in. He talked about the need for people to pay attention to reports that come out which indicate early warnings on situations such as Amnesty beginning its reporting on the Darfur crisis in late 2002 and early 2003, which in fact was widely ignored. We really need to do something to improve upon this.
Certainly Amnesty has improved since Rwanda. After Rwanda and the Balkans, Amnesty recognized that it needed to treat countries and peoples and crises the same way, with the same attention and success that it had in appealing for individual prisoners of conscience. They set up the program that I currently run at Amnesty, the Crisis Preparedness and Response Program. Now it has its headquarters in Washington, D.C., it has its researchers in London, and it has monitors that go in on the ground. It is uniquely situated to do early warning, monitoring, and get the information out.
At the same time we have almost a million members who -- I encourage you, if you are not already, to join up -- mobilize on these crises. We are also employing new technologies such as satellite imagery so that when a government -- such as the Khartoum government -- has this awful habit of doing, prevents us from access, we are looking through the skies. These are the same systems that governments use, the eyes and ears looking through satellite imagery. We did a project where we saw that 44 percent of all the villages many, many months ago were already burned in the Darfur region, using it as a clear indicator that ethnic cleansing was occurring.
Now from this satellite imagery, which sounds very technical, you can see groups of people being moved, such as internally displaced people, and you can see mass graves. I would say that this is a very important technology that Amnesty is starting to get engaged in. We know now, in hindsight, that satellite photography could have made a real difference in Rwanda. General Dallaire said at the time and then after, “I asked for satellite photos so I could see where the mass movement of people was occurring. They were hurting people before they killed them. But I got nothing. 800,000 people were killed, 300,000 of them were children.” I hope you will join us in our efforts. Thank you.
(Applause)
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS:
BRIDGET CONLEY: Thank you. If you have a question, please come down to the front; we have a microphone situated up here, and we welcome your questions. I will start. I first have a question for Donatella. You were specifically talking about the lack of television coverage, in particular, of Darfur. There has been a groundswell of interest in Darfur, maybe not as great as some other stories in the world, but pretty high for an African story and it has continued. A major difference from Rwanda is how long it has been spread out. It has been going on since 2003 really -- 2002 early warnings -- through to today. How does that groundswell of interest influence what the media will or will not cover, or does it have any influence at all?
DONATELLA LORCH: Let us compare it, first, with whether there was a groundswell of interest with Rwanda. The situation on the ground in Africa when Rwanda happened was that we had just gone through two years of very intense coverage of Somalia. Then it had been followed by very intense coverage on the massacres in Burundi. At that point it was almost like, (not to sound cynical about it), “Oh my God,” and we thought, “another massacre.” That was our first thought when we were sent up to Rwanda: another African massacre.
Darfur comes at a different time. One, it comes at a time when there has been a lot of reflection on Rwanda, and Rwanda had been elevated much higher, now acknowledged as a genocide. It also comes at a time, at least beginning pre-Tsunami and pre-Iraq crisis. It comes at a time when it could have been focused on as a major African story and as a major world story. There were not a lot of distracting events. Once you get your fingers on it, even if distracting events happen around you, there is that tempo that keeps up, and that reporters will keep on pushing their editors. Another thing is that you can be a reporter, and you can want to cover a story as much as you really, really want to, but you cannot go unless your editor gives you the green light. You cannot go unless your editor decides that he has the budget to cover it, and that it is a worthwhile story. Then once you are there, how many stories does your editor want out of that location once you have gotten there?
When I was based in Nairobi and I would pitch a story in Uganda or in Ethiopia, I had to justify my airfare and my hotel. In a week, I had to come up with at least three story ideas. When I went to Somalia, I would go there for six weeks. When you go to Darfur you have to justify the expense for going there, and it comes at a time that your editor has to decide whether he has the room -- whether on air or in a newspaper -- to put the story in there.
There have been cases like Time or Newsweek, where tens of thousands of dollars will be spent to send a reporter to Africa. As a matter of fact for the tenth anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda, as an example, Newsweek sent a reporter and a photographer there for two weeks, and they spent a lot of money, a lot of money, on that story. I do not even believe it ran in the domestic edition of the magazine. I believe it ran only in the overseas edition. When it comes down to it, even if the editor feels that the story should go in on the week that it is supposed to run or the week after that, there might just not be room in the magazine, newspaper, or space on air for it.
BRIDGET CONLEY: To follow up, do you think this groundswell here will help keep it alive in some ways?
DONATELLA LORCH: I am amazed by the groundswell. I think this is the only way to go at this point in time. When Rwanda happened, there was nothing like this, and this is the only way; it has to be from the grassroots up. It has to be, since the networks, more than the newspapers, rely so much on focus groups. There has to be interest from the United States for people who want this story covered. That is the only way that you will keep it alive. I say that because Iraq is going to be so much at the forefront of the news.
QUESTION: Hi, I am Miriam. I might detract a bit from Rwanda and Sudan because I just got back from Bosnia myself. I read a lot of reports about the Bosnian genocide, and what came up a lot was that there were resources there, unlike in Rwanda. The United Nations was involved, the OSC and other organizations, but nonetheless, there was no clear communication. Nothing was done; a lot of counterproductive work was being done. Recently I heard Kofi Annan on the news speaking about a reform at the United Nations -- or potential reform -- do you think anything will come of it? I am very skeptical.
QUESTION: My question relates to both Rwanda and the Sudan. While I am sympathetic to your statements about the United States needing to take responsibility and take action 10 years ago, and then again today, we are not the only country in the G8 and in NATO and in the Security Council. Why is it that all these other nations who potentially have the resources at hand (and are not pretending to fight wars and do bad things in the rest of the world), cannot take a stand and do something about genocide? It is a global problem, not just an American problem.
QUESTION: I want to make two short statements before my question. First of all, I am very excited and happy to see so many young people this afternoon here. I am hoping that that is a result of the Rwanda shock that so many people -- young people -- are spending their afternoon here. I want to thank all the young people who are involved. Donatella, I must tell you I have a collection of and have read all your stories from 1994. I would like to congratulate the media on the coverage of Darfur compared to Rwanda. I think the media are one section of our society that has done an amazing job in learning lessons from Rwanda. Darfur has been covered extensively, and that leads me to my question, and it is a question to the two of you, but also to the audience. I would like Amnesty International to start an initiative or a program called, “What Works,” instead of early warning and prevention. At this time, it is important for human rights groups, private citizens like us, and the media, to brainstorm and come up with what works to stop genocide. I think had Clinton known that you can call it genocide and still not act, he would not have been so worried about apologizing to Rwandans and so forth. I am very cynical because of Rwanda, and I do not believe that human rights organizations can stop genocide. We have to come up with a network of people -- maybe it takes money -- that works to stop genocide.
BRIDGET CONLEY: Thank you, Louise. I think we will take a pause now so that we can respond to these first three questions. The first one was sort of a response to Bosnia, and for those of you who have not heard, we are also coming on the 10th anniversary of the fall of Srebrenica, where 8,000 Bosnian men and boys were murdered. The main portion of the question, though, was how you feel about the prospects of United Nations reform, particularly in the aspect of protecting civilians.
DONATELLA LORCH: The United Nations does a remarkable job around the world, at one level. On the other level, it is just a larger image of what any government is. Multiply it by all its members. Look at the United States government; they do not exactly talk to each other. How often has the CIA not talked to the FBI, and to the DoD and to the White House? “Oops! We forgot about that. Were those planes coming in our direction or not?” You multiply that in the United Nations system, and you are presented with a massive amount of bureaucracy. Now is it capable of reform? It is admirable that they want to reform it, but the way they want to reform it, they themselves admit, will take at least ten years to come about. That is if they move on schedule. It is still a long way for it to be a fluid working bureaucracy. That said, where do we have a fluid working government? You can take the United States government as an example to that.
ARIELA BLÄTTER: Obviously I support the reform of the United Nations, other than just the navel-gazing part of it, but it is ironic, we are not talking about bringing someone in who does not want to see the United Nations under the auspices. Currently we are looking at someone who says they want to reform the United Nations, like Bolton. That discussion is very interesting. I am not so sure about that approach to reforming the United Nations. The lawyer in me looks at the agencies of the United Nations in terms of the positive element, the sort of International Criminal Court, The Permanent Courts of Justice, et cetera, even the ad hoc tribunals, which have been pretty controversial. Looking at the sort of agencies that are the extension of the talking heads always leaves me with pride and the feeling that something is actually being accomplished.
DONATELLA LORCH: We have agencies that respond to the natural disasters, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, UNICEF, the World Food Program. We could not exist without these agencies. The United Nations is an amalgam of the countries that it represents, and no more so than United Nations missions in Africa. That is the real sad part. The United Nations missions, military missions, peace keeping missions, are a creation of what governments want to give, and the United States is rarely part of them. The Senegalese, Nigerians, Bangladeshis, Indians, and Pakistanis bear the brunt of these missions. Their soldiers show up with barely the clothes on their backs in some cases, with no weapons or food. Often, as you will notice, the United States is not willing to send troops, but is willing to send logistical support to United Nations missions. In other words we will fly them in and out, provide food for them, provide weapons that they then can bring back home when they leave. The United Nations is a mirror of all the countries that are part of it.
BRIDGET CONLEY: That response partially addressed the second question as well: Why does the United States shoulders so much of the burden? What you were just saying is that, in fact we do not. We rely on other allies for peacekeeping troops. Could either of you talk about the role of the United States leadership in terms of responding to Darfur, Rwanda, or other humanitarian crises.
DONATELLA LORCH: I am so cynical.
ARIELA BLÄTTER: I am not that far behind you. I would back up for a second and focus on the question about the G8, and using the timeframe of the G8 now to talk about whether we are focused too much on the United States. Does the United States share all this burden, and United States leadership; I would take it all the same. In terms of a bit of marketing, I clearly only used United States examples for this audience, but I am bursting with them. I can talk about the role of the Belgians, the role of the French in this situation, the positive and the negative. I can talk about all the countries that are best placed. The United Kingdom was right there with the United States in terms of encouraging the United Nations Security Council to not use the term genocide.
There are positives and negatives in all these countries. We are speaking to the converted here. We all know that the United States needs to make some changes, and we also know that the United States is heavily resourced. When you are looking at a situation in terms of looking for donor governments to cough up funds, the United States tends to have an expectation of providing the most funds, and a very poor showing of contributing to the amount for which it has been asked. I do not know whether that the actual asking price is out of whack, but I do know that in comparison to other nations, the United States tends to give a much smaller percentage of what it is asked for by the United Nations.
DONATELLA LORCH: They are disgracefully far behind on the poverty index. The rest of the developed world gives way more than the United States to poor countries.
BRIDGET CONLEY: The third question started with congratulations or at least thanks to media for how they have covered Darfur. I wonder though, if we could get to some of the subtleties in the coverage. You mentioned that in Rwanda a lot of the conflict was described at the time as tribal or ancient ethnic hatreds, which has not been as much the case in Darfur. The one thing, however, and I think you already hit this, was that television has been noticeably shy on reporting on Darfur. I wonder if you could expand those, Donatella, and then maybe Ariela could take the second half of that question, which is what works.
DONATELLA LORCH: When I first started to move from print after ten years as a print journalist, and I moved as a correspondent to NBC, I remember I was handed over to a producer who was going to teach me how to do television. I had written this great text, we were going to do a story, and he read the text, and he said, “Well, this is worthless.” I said, “Why, look at these great lines,” and he said, “What is your opening picture? You do not have a single shot for half your piece. You do not have a piece unless you have a good opening picture. What is your opening shot?” If you are going to make it -- at least for American Television, even more so than the standard bearing of the BBC -- you have to have a sexy picture.
I remember when I did Rwanda, and at the beginning of Kosovo, the producer in New York told me, “We do not want any bodies because we do not want anyone to upchuck over their Cheerios in the morning.” How often have you seen major, serious news on The Today Show? We certainly know a lot about Michael Jackson. I heard that his mother was interviewed on an exclusive this morning. I missed it.
Compare that with trying to get Darfur on television. It costs a lot to move a television crew. You are talking about 5,000 pounds of excess baggage that have to travel business class to get on three different sets of flights to get from the United States, to Europe, or from Europe to get to Africa, to Chad, to get into Darfur. It is a huge amount of money that they have to invest for a three-minute piece, unless you have Nightline. The great shows like Nightline are soon to be deceased. The way American television is going right now, there is less and less of a push towards serious news, or long-term pieces such as was done at Nightline.
Now, what works? I do not think that there is a solution to have a grand plan for what works in stopping genocide. I think it has to be done in increments in all different types of professions, and at all different levels of civil society. There are all these think tanks here in Washington to prevent this, prevent that, and I think it is grand to bring all these people together in a room and say we will prevent the next genocide. What we do, for example, is take American journalists on an overseas fellowship; it is like the Peace Corps of Journalism. We have Americans, Canadians, and British. We send them overseas to train local journalists in developing countries or in countries that are just starting to democratize.
We worked extensively in Africa, and you have to think that one of the genocide promoters in Rwanda was the radio. The radio told people, “We have to kill the cockroaches. Your job is half done; your grave is half-full.” Training journalists, giving them a sense of self and empowerment is, teaching them what fact-based journalism is about and not to regurgitate press releases from the government, is a small little step in that small little corner of trying to work towards informing people on the ground in that country. It is our small little piece, and it is always this, a small little piece of what Amnesty does. You bring that all together as a mosaic and that is how you can hope to prevent genocide.
ARIELA BLÄTTER: What works? The $64,000 question.
BRIDGET CONLEY: You work. Only $64,000? It is less than that.
ARIELA BLÄTTER: Million dollar, I have to update that.
BRIDGET CONLEY: I think not only what works, but how can we better understand what works and convey that information?
ARIELA BLÄTTER: I am going to try to be positive. There are some things that work. There are a lot of negative parts, but I am trying to be positive. International pressure works. They used to call human rights the shame factor. I still firmly believe in that, and that takes all sorts of forms.
Cease-fire monitors are shame factors. I do not think belligerents are going to be as eager to pick up their guns, either knowing or not knowing the Geneva conventions, that there is simply somebody watching. I think one hundred troops in Rwanda can make a difference. I think cease-fire monitors can make an impact. I think the African Union can make an impact in this situation of Darfur. Sending in major diplomatic officials from world governments helps. I have not seen Secretary of State Rice go in a long time. It has been 140-some days since President Bush has actually said the word Darfur in a significant way. There are other countries that need to have equal internal audits about their role in past genocides, and what is going on right now. I think diplomats can work, the International Criminal Court works, and we have an interesting step with the United States not agreeing to the court, but not standing in its way on referring the case on Darfur. Universal Jurisdiction works; it is an astounding idea. The fact that anywhere, in any courtroom whether the United States adopts international human rights standards or not, in lots of different places in the world, you can prosecute torture, genocide, and core crimes in a regular old court. You can do that, and you are required to do it. We have seen it in the Pinochet case, and we have no idea where that is going to move forward, or how that is going to develop. I think joining Amnesty works. I have to say that one.
Being an Amnesty member before I became a staff member was important because I did not want to join or work for just a United States-based organization. That is fine and dandy, but we have 1.2 million activists worldwide, and we are not just focused on the United States. I want to stand with the global world in terms of trying to make an impact. That is something that I think can make a difference.
The other thing to note is sometimes it is just plain hard to see where we have made an impact and when we have prevented genocide. In the case of early warning, one of the best examples is Macedonia, which is also a little bit controversial, because it is hard to say what we prevented. There are many cases where our work is preventing things. What we see is a lot of our failures, where things have progressed, and the killings have occurred. Macedonia, however, is an example of an early intervention, in terms of civil society, and the United Nations, and a whole bunch of others in looking at the Balkans. We can use those examples to say, “Let us devote our resources.” We may not be able to say at the bottom line, “We can prove that we did something, but nothing actually happened, is that not worth something?”
BRIDGET CONLEY: President Bush has not mentioned Osama Bin Laden in a long time either.
ARIELA BLÄTTER: No, he says he is not worried about where he is.
BRIDGET CONLEY: Oh, okay.
ARIELA BLÄTTER: A lot of the things that you have brought up have worked in some cases and not worked in others. I assume the cumulative effect, indicting people, naming names, did not work in Bosnia. I have heard some reports that it is working in Darfur, with people who might consider themselves to be potentially on the list.
One of the benefits of having the new office in the United Nations., of the special advisor on preventing genocide, or the role that the crisis preparedness and response mechanism plays in Amnesty, or the Committee on Conscience is that many others have this mechanism. It is thinking about the common areas of crisis and trying to create a strategy that can be applied for each and every situation. A lot of people are regionally specialized, or they say, “What is happening in my country is not happening elsewhere.” Stepping out of that and looking at the situation is important, as is understanding that while you can pick common areas, you can say there are internally displaced in every crisis. You can say there is political instability, human rights abuses, et cetera. You still have to create an absolute unique strategy for every country.
I know I am saying opposite things, but you still have to delve into the history of a country and understand the unique instability. I was rereading Dallaire’s memoirs, and he talked about how nobody briefed him on what was going on between the Hutus and the Tutsis, which had been going on for generations. He had his Michelin map and a copy of the Arusha Peace Accords, but nobody thought to tell him that there were some ethnic problems going on. Maybe he would have potentially pushed harder on the onset, or maybe that was impossible, but it is looking at the situation and our education for what happens in every crisis, and then applying that to the specific country and trying to create a strategy for each country.
QUESTION: Good afternoon. I am from the ADL and CCNY. You mentioned unique instability, different areas. When there genocide is happening, you have to know exactly what is happening before you can get involved. In Sudan, it seems that it is not really a religious problem. Is it more ethnic? What do you think is the real root and essence of the problem in Sudan?
My second question is that we are all here today and I am assuming we are here because we are interested and want to get involved. What do you think is needed in Darfur, Sudan right now? What can we do, especially as young people who seem to be interested? I am a bit of a cynic myself because I have just returned from the Middle East. We all pledged “Never again.” We are here at the United States Memorial to the Holocaust saying that this is never going to happen again. What can we do to make a difference and to get involved? It is happening, so what are we going to do to stop it?
QUESTION: Ariela, you were talking about genocide and the acts under it. Were you saying that all the acts under the definition of genocide have to occur for it to be known or labeled as genocide? Also, what is the difference between genocide and hate crimes, and where is the line drawn between the two?
QUESTION: You discussed preventative measures, intervention. What do you do during the rebuilding process? Can you comment on bringing the society back together and having neighbors live next to each other?
BRIDGET CONLEY: The first question was if we could get a better understanding of the nature of the conflict in Sudan, and then what is needed to improve the situation in Darfur, and how specifically can young people help on that front?
ARIELA BLÄTTER: I think it was a question of the root of the problem, whether it was ethnic, basically clarifying what I said. This has been the root of the challenge for defining it as genocide. As I said, there are definitely distinct ethnic groups according to the letter of the law in Darfur, which was a problem in Rwanda. That does not mean that what is happening is necessarily an ethnic conflict, to meet that same definition. You have a situation where you definitely have distinct ethnic groups, and you definitely have some ethnic clashes happening in Darfur, but the question for the Commission of Inquiry was whether or not the preponderance of individual crimes or hate crimes were happening with an intent to annihilate an ethnic population
I am going to back up for a second. There is something interesting about genocide which I did not say. You can commit one act in a situation, and it would be genocide. Oftentimes people think that it has to be thousands or hundreds of thousands of actions. One will do it, as long as that individual action was committed with the intent to annihilate the entire population in part of a systematic policy by government. There has to be some other contextual things, but the way that the United Nations Commission of Inquiry, in my opinion, is looking at this, is kind of mathematical. There were not enough of those cases where they found that the right intent was there for them to be able to say, “Yes, this is happening with the intent to annihilate the ethnic group.”
The other thing to note is, none of the crimes -- Genocide is considered to be the crime of all crimes -- technically speaking, are ranked. All the crimes have the same maximum penalty --crime against humanity, war crime, etc. -- the maximum penalty you can have is life imprisonment under the General United Nations Legal System. Technically speaking, a crime against humanity is just as egregious as genocide. The crime against humanity includes some things that genocide does not: In Bosnia and to some degree in Rwanda, there is the forced impregnation factor. That is something that is starting to come into the genocide definition, but which is definitely accounted for in the crime against humanity.
All criminal law is based on the same principle; it is the act and the intent. In domestic law you have what is called a hate crime, which has that intent level. You commit a crime with the intent to hurt somebody because of their ethnic affiliation, their race, or their identification with a group. It is the same thing on the international level. I use the term, “crime against humanity,” but hate crime usually refers to the domestic jurisdiction only. It happens on the national level. It is a way of giving a crime more of a punishment or sentencing. On the international level, it is the difference between a crime against humanity, where you do not have to have that intent to annihilate one member of that group, and genocide, in which you do. It is the lawyer in me; you will have to forgive me.
DONATELLA LORCH: I do not think we should only look at the process of rebuilding after genocide, but the process of rebuilding after a civil war, or after a natural disaster. It is the trickiest part of what has happened. When you look at the Tsunami, Rwanda or Darfur, the world cares for the first fifteen minutes. Out goes the money, out goes the media attention; it is on the television screen at night for a very brief moment. Look at the amount of money that went to the Tsunami victims. It was amazing. I was floored by it. If only they had given some of that money to Africa, or to help rebuild post-conflict in Congo, or elsewhere. When the attention goes away, then everything bogs down, and that is the most sensitive, most important moment of rebuilding a society and that is not only for genocide, it is after any civil war.
There are certain basic building blocks. One, you have to keep the international attention in terms of money and projects coming into that area of the world. You have to make sure that there is a justice system in place, and that was a huge issue for Rwanda. Even eleven years after the genocide, it has not been totally resolved. You have to bring justice. Without justice, you cannot have peace. You have to maintain international pressure. You have to maintain international donations, which are like talking to the wind at times, because during emergency sessions everyone is willing to pledge, but when it comes right down to the wire, are they willing to give? That is very different.
If you want peace in a country, you have to make sure you do not have inflammatory media. One of the reasons that there were so many problems, and I take Burundi as an example, is in the first Clinton administration, there was this great desire to spread democracy everywhere, to anoint democracy in every African country. They may have been a dictatorship or a single-party government for the past thirty years, but now tomorrow, they are democratic, and because of that you can have as many newspapers as you want.
In Burundi, it happened in the space of six months. No one knew what it meant to be democratic, so everyone decided to publish their own rag under no rules. On one front page there was the fact that the Americans were going to invade in a submarine through Lake Tanganyika. Nice hippos, but I do not think that there are too many American submarines there. The fact that there was no control, no background, no knowledge of how to bring across news, it spread like wildfire; it served as a wildfire for ethnic hate. The media have that responsibility. If you want to help rebuild in a post-genocidal situation or a post-civil war situation, you have to have strong media, a strong justice system, and strong international support.
QUESTION: What can young people do?
BRIDGET CONLEY: Stay young. We have done a few things at the museum, and my colleague, Lisa Rogoff, who is here, has been spearheading our efforts with university students to try to get people more engaged. If nothing else, to spread the word, to stay informed themselves, to try to be in touch with their media. If you think your media are doing a good job covering this, tell them. If they are not, tell them that as well. Also, speak to your representatives. We do, for all intents and purposes, live in a democracy, which means that apparently we are ruled by the people for the people. Engage in that. The system is set up to be responsive to at least a certain extent.
Those are some of the things that we are doing to try to help foster people to not only be informed themselves, but to also help spread what they known to larger communities. If you think of your one self sending one letter, it can be very frustrating and feel very meaningless, but if you understand that you are part of one person, multiplied exponentially, then you can see that it is not simply one voice here, but a rising tide. A movement can influence the media, respond to the human rights groups and engage them increasingly, and support them. A movement can also influence our government. We have resources available on our website. There are lots of student activities.
DONATELLA LORCH: You have one great gift, which is you have energy. As you grow older, you will notice that you will become so assaulted by life in general, and by building your life and your career. This is your time where you can really make a difference. You do not have ties with immense amounts of family around you to worry about. You can go out and draw your friends together. You can go -- whether it is here in the United States or volunteering or working overseas -- and bring back the knowledge that you have and expand the knowledge of your friends. That is the most important thing. I used to go to parties in New York City, after Rwanda, and you would think that since New York City is a pretty cosmopolitan place that they would know where Africa is at least. They would be totally uninterested after five minutes. “Oh Rwanda, oh there were people killed there, okay, but have you seen the latest thing you can get at Sacks Fifth Avenue?” I look at the way young people now are focused. This is such a material world that we live in that it is a question of stepping a bit away from that, and trying to bring your friends and get involved in programs such as this, and in working overseas and working here.
ARIELA BLÄTTER: The other thing is not simply what you can do to change others, but to make a commitment yourself: “Not on my watch,” was for Clinton, but make that something that is personally meaningful.
How many of you are college students? Have you ever seen MTV University? It did not exist when I was in college.
BRIDGET CONLEY: MTV did not exist when I was in college.
ARIELA BLÄTTER: We have this partnership that I know that the Committee on Conscience also has with MTV University. If you do tend to go on their websites, or see their transmissions, all of our actions are cross-listed with MTV University.
Some practical things: Pictures speak a thousand words. On Amnesty’s website we have forty slides of pictures from Darfur and testimonies from the ground, which you can download. It costs $40, you can print it at Kinko’s, and you can set it up at your universities. We have a whole tool kit on activism. You can get a speaker from the Darfurian community by contacting Amnesty. There are many people on the list, we can come and talk with you, and I am available to talk about that afterwards.
The Darfur Accountability Act is currently in the Senate, which is something else to talk to your representatives about, push them on, annoy the administration, call the White House line -- I love doing this one -- and tell them you want Bush to talk about Darfur. Call Secretary of State Rice’s office and ask her why she has not been to Darfur personally, and ask when Darfur is going to become a priority for the administration again.
There is also a “stop violence against women” campaign in Amnesty, which is focusing on the need for a crime of rape. In International Law, many of you might not know, rape is still not a crime. It is always brought in as part of another crime, as in torture or genocide. The International Criminal Court needs to focus on the specific crimes going on against women in Darfur, and all that is happening through the “stop violence against women” campaign.
Right outside the door are the postcards, which you can pick up and take with you. I need you guys to actually go to all the independent music stores and bookstores where they have postcards up and you can take free postcards. We no longer have a contract where they will put those postcards up for us. So if you take those postcards and go to each store that you can think of and ask them to put them up, then those people who do not know anything about Darfur will pick up the materials, will send those postcards, and get the message out.
BRIDGET CONLEY: We have postcards too, so if you see the museum ones, please spread the word. We are a little tight on time. We will take these three questions and make the answers more concise, but hopefully just as informative.
QUESTION: This is in relation to what works and what not, what we were talking about earlier. I am wondering if you realistically believe the African Union can be and will be strengthened by the end of the year. I feel like the United States is hiding behind the African Union right now. We need to realize that genocide is not an African problem; this is a problem about humanity, and it is an international problem. How you would feel about advocating a Chapter 7 United Nations mandate, as far as an international intervention?
QUESTION: We have concentrated on the two egregious acts in both Rwanda and Sudan. Are there any common threads that you could see coming out of the Holocaust or Bosnia as well?
QUESTION: I was just curious if you felt that the governing bodies had given any thought to putting a commander in such situations as this, and giving them a freer hand to act on their own, rather than having to wait for decisions to be made through the long process of bureaucracy thousands of miles away?
BRIDGET CONLEY: The first question was in regards to the African Union. Can and will it be strengthened? Do you have an opinion about giving it Chapter 7, which would be peace-making authority?
DONATELLA LORCH: You have to define what it means to strengthen the African Union. You used the expression, “hiding behind the A.U. troops.” My God! There is only a handful out there, basically. Darfur is huge. When you send in just 100, 200, 300, 400 troops, they are not going to make a difference. What does it mean to strengthen? Does it mean to send in 5,000, 20,000, 30,000 troops? I do not think the African Union is capable of sending 30,000 troops somewhere right now. It does not have the manpower. It may have the physical manpower, but not the weapons to arm the manpower.
In terms of Chapter 7, that is my big question about Darfur. Everyone says to intervene, but how do you intervene? Do you have Chapter 7? Do you bring in tanks, helicopters? Chad is going to let you bring that in, and Khartoum is going to let you bring that in? So you are just going to airdrop them into the areas of Western Darfur, and who is going to pay for it? The only country that literally has the capability to do that is the United States, to bring in tanks, and helicopters, and airlifting. Certainly not the African Union. I do not think Chapter 7 is a reality or a possibility at this point in time.
ARIELA BLÄTTER: In the interest of time I will say, yes, the African Union can be strengthened. No, but side-stepping because of practicalities; I cannot really engage in the Chapter 7 discussion, because, as I said, I just cannot see it being possible. The political will not being there, a dedicated United Nations peacekeeping mission under a Chapter 7 mandate, I just do not see as a possibility.
BRIDGET CONLEY: Maybe we should jump then to the third question. We will come back to the second about essentially the rules of engagement, and why military forces on the ground for these international troops do not have more latitude in deciding how they will respond.
DONATELLA LORCH: I think any military has a system of accountability from the lower ranks up, and the upper ranks higher up than that, and when you bring something together like a United Nations peacekeeping force. You bring again as we talked about the United Nations -- all these countries coming together to create one force -- that there are incredible bureaucratic levels of accountability there, and there is never going to be the situation where they are going to say, “Feel free to do whatever you feel like doing,” because the Canadians may do one thing, and then the Americans or the French will scream bloody murder, “How come the Canadians did that and did not consult with us?” The United Nations is a group of countries. They all feel they all have a say in what goes on; that is why they have constantly go back and forth for approval to United Nations headquarters.
BRIDGET CONLEY: The final question: What common threads can we finally sort of pull out from this discussion, about commonalities between the Holocaust, Rwanda, and Darfur? I think this is essentially the question of: What is genocide?
ARIELA BLÄTTER: All of these cases are the ability for one individual or group of individuals to literally dehumanize someone. It is about whether the victim was part of an ethnic group, or a national, or a socially recognized group. It is the ability to look at someone and say, “You are not human, you are not worthy of being here, and I am going to annihilate you.” Honestly, I do not have an answer for why that happens, but it does happen. I know Samantha Power gave testimony in Congress. That talk was the same thing looking at Rwanda, and she said, “I hope in ten years you are not here asking me to say ‘looking back ten years later at Darfur.’” We are constantly saying “Never forget” about the Holocaust. I hope you get to the root of why humankind has the ability to dehumanize each other, and we really look at the developing human rights law standard as at least an aspiration for how we should treat each other.
DONATELLA LORCH: I remember what Dallaire said at the end of the film: “When it comes right down to it, there is no one human being that is more human than another human being.”
BRIDGET CONLEY: Thank you. I will just briefly invite everyone to join us for our next event on July 11th, on Srebrenica. We will be opening a new display just down the hallway, and will have a discussion beforehand. On July 20th we will be having a roundtable discussion on the African Union, which may be of great interest given some of the questions. Thank you for coming, and please join me in thanking our panelists.
