A most welcome development in Washington is a new approach to genocide prevention a task force that recommends a way to predict or halt genocides before they start, or seriously to retard a genocide that has begun.
This is radically unlike all previous approaches, which share this lugubrious quality: they are all after the fact. After the Holocaust Americans woke up to the fact that Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt could have done a lot, with a minimal expenditure of time, money and military resources, to save hundreds of thousands or perhaps even millions of Jews by bombing the rail lines to Auschwitz. After the Rwandan genocide in 1994, it was pointed out to Pres. Bill Clinton that he could have sent troops or, as the Economist pointed out, at least jammed the radio broadcasts that told the killers where to go and whom to kill. (Clinton could have known, if he had wanted to know, Samantha Powers retorted when Clinton claimed, again, after the fact, that he had not known enough what was going on in Rwanda). After the killing fields of Cambodia in the early 1970s, Sec. of State Kissinger and Pres. Nixon realized that they had not calculated the effect of their invasion of Cambodia on its genocidal killers. After the Armenian genocide of WW I well, even 90 years afterward, the Turks are still shamelessly and shamefully denying it. Astoundingly, the worst human crime has received the least effective human response.
But now, a genocide prevention task force, convened by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and others, has released a 147-page report that calls for, and describes, preventative action against potential or rising genocides.
We need no longer wait to cry and mourn afterwards, or, at best, prosecute the criminals small comfort to the dead and their surviving families. Rather, we may now stop the crime before it starts.
Chaired by former Secterary of State Madeleine Albright, the report concludes that the prevention of genocide is an achievable goal. All that is needed is $250 million less than $1 dollar per American and structures, strategies and partnerships, which should be put in place by Congress and the new president forthwith.
Among the recommendations:
- adoption of the proactive approach by the new president.
- making genocide-prevention a government-wide policy.
- reserving one-fifth of the $250 million for rapid allocation in support of urgent activities to prevent or halt emerging genocidal crises.
- incorporating the military response to genocide prevention into the national defense doctrine.
- preparation by the director of national intelligence of an early warning of worldwide risks of genocide and mass atrocities.
- making an acute warning of a potential genocide an automatic trigger of policy review.
- engaging leaders and institutions in high-risk countries.
- creating a new, American, high level interagency body an Atrocities Prevention Committee to respond to threats of genocide.
- creating an international network for information sharing and coordinated action.
It is difficult to think of a single item more important for President Obama to launch in his first 100 days than this genocide prevention program.
Kudos to the US Holocaust Museum for putting Holocaust remembrance into its appropriate public framework: prevention.
