MuseumDESCRIPTION:
Juan Mendez discusses the mandate of the Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide, the role of the Convention and the responsibility to protect vulnerable civilians. He addresses his activities concerning Darfur, including his findings and recommendations following his two trips to the area.
TRANSCRIPT:
NARRATOR: Welcome to Voices on Genocide Prevention, a podcasting service of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Your host is Jerry Fowler, Director of the Museum’s Committee on Conscience.
JERRY FOWLER: Our guest today is Juan Mendez, Special Advisor to the United Nation’s Secretary General on Genocide Prevention. He has a long and distinguished career as a human rights lawyer, scholar and activist. In the 1970s, his work representing political prisoners during the military dictatorship in his native Argentina resulted in his being arrested, tortured, and held in administrative detention for a year and a half. In addition to his position as United Nation’s Special Advisor, he also serves as President of the International Center for Transitional Justice. Juan, welcome to the program.
JUAN MENDEZ: It is a pleasure to be here Jerry.
JERRY FOWLER: Let us begin with the position that you have, Special Advisor to the Secretary General for Genocide Prevention. You were appointed to that position, and the position was created in July of 2004. How did it come about?
JUAN MENDEZ: It came about mostly as an act of self-criticism by the United Nations for having been unable to prevent the genocides in Srebrenica and in Rwanda in the 90s, and also because the Security Council, in the year 2001, had asked the Secretary General in a resolution to bring to its attention situations that if left unattended might lead to genocide in the future. For that reason, the Secretary General decided to create on a pretty much experimental basis this office that is called the Office of the Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide with the charge of tracking situations around the world, where populations are at risk, and they can be identified by their ethnicity, their race, their religion, or their national origin, and they are at risk of relatively serious loss of life. In that sense, I am supposed to track those situations and provide early warning to the Secretary General and through him to the Security Council on those situations and suggestions for early action as to what can be done to alter the course of events so that those catastrophic situations do not come about.
JERRY FOWLER: One issue that I know you have to deal with is this vexing question that often is posed about whether something is genocide or not, but you actually, in being responsible for preventing genocide, or helping to prevent genocide, how do you deal with that definition?
JUAN MENDEZ: Precisely, I think quite frankly many times the debate about whether something is genocide or not has substituted for the decision to act to prevent it, and that is a paralyzing, very sterile debate. In my case, my terms of reference specifically tell me not to qualify situations as holding under the definition of genocide or not, but I think that is specifically because of the preventative character of my function. For the most part you can only tell whether something is genocide or not after you obtain evidence about the massive nature of the killings, the displacement, etcetera, but also from that evidence you distill a certain intent to commit all these atrocities with the specific intent of eliminating in whole or in part a population because of its ethnicity—race, national origin, or religion. Evidently, if I wait until all those elements are in place and we can distill them from the facts, then we have not prevented them. I think that is why I am asked not to make determinations as to whether genocide is occurring or not.
JERRY FOWLER: I suppose at the same time, one might observe that the earlier you are calling for action, the more difficult it is to get governments to pay attention. Most governments—the United States government and other governments—are driven by crises, and trying to call attention to a situation before it is a crisis is very difficult.
JUAN MENDEZ: Yes exactly, but also experience shows us that if we wait too long then it also becomes impossible to act because the stakes are so high that the measures one takes, or the international community takes, are also more expensive, more difficult to obtain consensus for, etcetera. In a sense, what I am asked to do is to come up with ideas for early action that are relatively less costly, but also produces a result which is difficult to do anyway, because as you well put it, all international and political organs of the international community would rather wait than have to act on anything, and in a sense, the most difficult part of my job is coming up with ideas for early action that are reasonable, that are feasible, that are within the limits of the possible for the international community, and in particular, the Security Council to adopt.
JERRY FOWLER: Can you give an example of how you have tried to work a situation you have dealt with and the recommendations that you have made, and what has been the outcome of those recommendations?
JUAN MENDEZ: Early on I traveled to Darfur with the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and when we came back we were asked to brief the Security Council and we produced a joint report between the two of us, and we suggested for example, the deployment of police monitors as part of the African Union mission. That was done; unfortunately, it was done much later and at a very slow pace, and even today the police monitors that are in place are not enough to really substantially protect the many Darfurians who are at risk. That was one example.
We also called for accountability for the crimes already committed against the Darfurians. At that time, we called basically for pressure to be put on the Government of Sudan so that its judiciary would assume its responsibilities. Later on, six months later, because that was not happening, I called publicly for a referral of the case to the International Criminal Court which then did happen later on, on April 1, 2005.
JERRY FOWLER: You have been to Darfur a couple of times now, the first time, as you said, with the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and then again, this past September. Let me ask first, what kind of cooperation, if any, have you gotten from the Government of Sudan? They must not be very happy to have the Special Advisor on Genocide Prevention appear.
JUAN MENDEZ: No, I did meet at relatively high levels. Both times I met with the Foreign Minister, for example, with the Justice Minister, and in Darfur with all of the Walis, the regional governors and their cabinets. I would say, according to my experience of human rights investigations on the ground, formally, they were open and they did receive me and answered my questions. Substantially, their cooperation was not all that great. There was a lot of stonewalling, a lot of pretense about the things that they told me they were doing, when it was blatant that they were not. Maybe we should not generalize because some of these people that I interviewed were marginally better than others, but in general I would say that the government of Sudan is in denial about what the rest of the international community is concerned with; not only do they not think there is a risk of genocide in Darfur, they do not even think that what has happened already in Darfur is anything out of the ordinary, and if it is lamentable, it is not something of their doing, it is mostly the blame of everybody else.
JERRY FOWLER: I guess understanding that attitude is a little bit difficult because many of the thing that are occurring on the ground, if not most of them, are being committed by officials of the Sudanese government, or at their instigation. When you say they are in denial, is that one part of the government not accepting what another part of the government is doing or people lying about what they know to be the truth?
JUAN MENDEZ: No, I think they are in denial under this notion of plausible deniability. They say that the Janjaweed are not an instrument of their policy. They say that the Janjaweed are malicious and have armed themselves to protect themselves and that if they have committed atrocities, it is not with any cooperation from the government. That is belied by the facts on the ground so easily that it becomes almost a mockery of a serious answer, but that is the way that they stick to it.
JERRY FOWLER: Between your two trips, or I should say, comparing your two trips to Darfur, how did the situation appear on your second trip in relation to how it was the first time?
JUAN MENDEZ: I had gone in September of 2005 prepared to say that we have muddled through; we have stabilized it; we have more or less kept the situation from deteriorating, but the status quo is also unacceptable. We have two million people who are away from their lands and their places of origin, etcetera, so we now need to move on to revert the situation, rather than stabilize it. Unfortunately, on the ground, the situation was much more shocking and disturbing than I thought I would find, mostly because the half measures that the international community had taken during 2005 and that in fact, had improved the situation considerably, were beginning to break at the seams. They were evidently showing that they were unraveling. I think it is a combination of things. One, that the actors on the ground had tested the waters and now felt that they could push further, and so there were outbreaks of violence all over Darfur. Second, the rebels, who had been relatively patient, now they were fighting amongst themselves and they had splinter groups and spoiler groups that were not following orders and therefore, breaking the peace; and the government was reacting the same way it had when the insurgency had started in 2003; that is by unleashing the Janjaweed on them—some cases providing them with transportation, some cases letting them act on their own—and the situation is even worse now because there are many more displaced persons, and so the victims of the attacks are now the displaced persons themselves. Now we have people who have been displaced two, three and four times; and we have new displacements all the time, even now as we speak, the last couple of weeks, the United Nations estimates that something like 30 thousand new people have been displaced, or new plus displaced again, which means that the pressure on the elements of the measures that we have put in place in Darfur are now extraordinary. There is lawlessness all over Darfur, especially in the West to the point where the United Nations declares all roads in West Darfur off limits to United Nations personnel. The relief organizations that do not want to be escorted are subjects to attacks and banditry and looting all the time. The worst of all of that is that the population that they are serving is left much more vulnerable, and I think unless we decide that the situation is getting out of control again and act accordingly, we will not be able to avoid another major humanitarian catastrophe.
JERRY FOWLER: Just to make sure I understand, when you say thirty thousand people have been displaced, or re-displaced, in the last few weeks, that does not sound like sporadic violence. Thirty-thousand is a pretty huge number of people to be pushed out of wherever they are.
JUAN MENDEZ: Apparently a large number of those were the result of an attack on a relatively large population’s IDP camp and population center at the same time. All thirty-thousand were not attacked but the imminence of the attack was what motivated them to flee. That is the information that is coming from sources on the ground, so I do not have any reason to doubt it. I think the attacks are serious and they are becoming more serious. Around the time when we visited, there were the first attacks on IDP camps. That was early October, and now we are in February and there have been many attacks on IDP camps including some of the large and well-known ones. There attacks are indiscriminate; they are against the civilian population; they take the same kind of form as the original attacks on the villages. These people on camels or horseback just come in and start shooting indiscriminately; they destroy property, they loot and they rape women if they find them and they force a lot of people to take off.
JERRY FOWLER: You referred to the steps that have been taken with regard to Darfur as half measures, and it is these half measures that are becoming unraveled as you say. How is it that with as well as the situation is documented in Darfur, and the experiences which you alluded to at the beginning of the 1990s, how is that the so-called international community, specifically the Security Council, is still taking half measures when confronted with a catastrophe of this scope?
JUAN MENDEZ: I think it is because the Security Council is deadlocked around Darfur, and so all that it can come up with is half measures, but I think half measures are going to come back to haunt the United Nations and the Security Council if in fact they prove to be insufficient. I do not doubt that of course it is a lot better if you can control a situation and avoid a disaster by taking measures that are less intrusive; for example, deploying troops with the consent of the Sudanese government, rather than invoking Chapter 7—of course, if you can get the same result you should go for the less invasive form of action. The problem is that once you decide on that course of action, how long does it take for you to realize that it is not yielding the results that you are looking for? More than anything, I do not fault the Security Council for taking half measures as much as I fault it for not being able to be more flexible and more dynamic about adjusting the measures on the ground when the evidence is that they are not working, that they are actually failing to produce the desired results, or worse, are actually beginning to falter in what they had been able to achieve.
JERRY FOWLER: Looking beyond Darfur, you have worldwide remit obviously to look at places where there is potential for groups to be targeted for mass violence. In deciding the situations or countries that you will look at, what are the indicators that you are looking for?
JUAN MENDEZ: First and foremost, I look for populations at risk of massive, maybe imminent, human rights violations, not necessarily actual violence as it happens, but imminent, and the violations have to be severe and massive, and the populations at risk have to be identified by their ethnicity, race, religion, or national origin.
Then I look for factors like whether the government is democratic and if it has a democratic dispensation so that these populations at risk at least have some kind of recourse within the domestic jurisdiction, and if they do not, it is a warning sign.
There is also the question of whether the country has a history of violence, and particularly, genocidal violence against these groups. That is a major warning sign.
There is a question of whether there is an atmosphere of hate speech in the media or not, especially in the context of which the utterances can be expected to produce violence in the streets, etcetera.
There is also the question of whether there are armed groups, especially armed, unaccountable groups like militias, “self-defense groups,” because the lack of accountability is another factor. If there has already been violence against those groups, and nothing has happened around the investigation and punishment of the perpetrators, that is a warning sign.
JERRY FOWLER: I suppose that lack of accountability often suggests, not just a failure to enforce law, but that the powers that be, the government is actually responsible for the crimes.
JUAN MENDEZ: Yes, covering up the crimes or enforcing a policy of impunity. That is another serious factor. We also look for some decelerating or accelerating factors; for example, if there is going to be an election sometimes that is a good sign because the promise of change is in the air, but sometimes it is only exacerbates already existing tensions, so it can act both ways. Certainly, if there is an election and the election is free and fair, that alleviates tensions, so we look for things like that.
JERRY FOWLER: If I could just interrupt you for a second on this issue of elections, it would seem to me that elections could be free and fair and actually exacerbate tensions to the extent that leaders or would-be-leaders are appealing to ethnic, or religious, or racial identity as part of their electoral platform.
JUAN MENDEZ: Absolutely. That really depends on the context, and on what the election results are, but sometimes the election can result in the victory of a faction in the country that is actually more willing to engage in dialogue, in conversations, in peacemaking between the different communities. That is what I was thinking of, but you are absolutely right that the elections could have very aggravating results.
JERRY FOWLER: Were there other indicators?
JUAN MENDEZ: Yes. I think another indicator is denial. If the government refuses to accept that they have a problem when everybody else sees a problem there, that is probably because intend to go on the same way or worse, so that is a very serious indicator as well.
JERRY FOWLER: Taking those indicators into account, are there some places you are looking at that you can talk about? I know sometimes you try to work privately, but other times you obviously are working publicly.
JUAN MENDEZ: I think there are situations in which you can work through some means of quiet diplomacy as it were, have to do with situations in which the government may be guilty of serious violations, but not necessarily against that particular group. For example, in the case of Columbia, the Special Rappateur on Indigenous People has called publicly the attention of the government to small indigenous populations that are at risk of extinction because they are buffeted by different forms of violence in the Amazon basin area, and the violence can come from the guerillas, it can come from paramilitary groups, or it can come from drug traffickers, not necessarily from the government. In that case, rather than go to the Security Council and ask for some action that will almost certainly not be adopted and you will only incur the wrath of the government of Columbia, what I decided to do was approach the representation, the United Nations mission of Columbia in New York and tell them, “I am concerned about this. What can you tell me about what your government is doing to make sure that this small indigenous population does not become extinct?” And I also offered any services that I could bring to help them resolve the situation. We are waiting to hear more information from the government, but evidently the matter is still of my concern.
JERRY FOWLER: What would be other places that you are engaged with, if you can say?
JUAN MENDEZ: I can say that I am following the situations in various countries and in some cases, I have already written notes to the Secretary General, and through him to the Security Council. Those are Darfur, Ivory Coast and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but in other cases short of going to the Security Council, we have made our concerns known via the Secretariat, and they include, as I said, Columbia, but also Burma, with the situation of indigenous populations that have been in armed conflict with the government of Burma—there have been intrusions also—but recently, the government has acted militarily against them, and apparently affected the civilian population, so I want to be able to learn more about what is happening on the ground and hopefully have something to say. During the discussion at the Security Council about Burma, the Secretary General, at my request, in his briefing, included a reference to my concerns and to the fact that I am willing to work with the government of Burma in reaching a favorable solution to these indigenous peoples. I am also looking at the situation in West Papau, for example, under the government of Indonesia, Togo, Guinea Abiso in Africa, Northern Uganda, and Somalia. In all of those cases, basically we are trying to find good information, be able to track the information with a sense of either progress or deterioration, and then decide what measures we could suggest.
JERRY FOWLER: It certainly sounds like a full plate and I hope we can have you back on to talk further about some of those other situations, but in the meantime, let me thank you so much for being with us.
JUAN MENDEZ: No, it is my pleasure. Thank you for your invitation and I already also want to thank you for the support that the Museum has offered my office.
NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, a podcasting service of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about the Museum’s Committee on Conscience, visit our website at www.committeeonconscience.org.
