Why can't the UN prevent genocide?

You'd think the one thing the UN might do is prevent preventable genocide. But they don't. Here are some thoughts in a review about books about Darfur and Rwanda.

Rwanda to Darfur: a mockery of 'never again' -- by Gerald Caplan

Review: Rwanda's Genocide: The Politics of Global Justice by Kingsley Moghalu
Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide by Gérard Prunier

'In 2004," Kingsley Moghalu writes in the very first sentence of his thoughtful study of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), "exactly 10 years after the Rwanda genocide, the conflict in the Sudanese province of Darfur focused minds yet again on the question of genocide."

Gérard Prunier, a Paris-based ethnographer and renowned Africa expert, is author of a dense new analysis of the crisis in Darfur. He is universally known as one of the world's leading authorities on the utterly preventable 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Although UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan failed to attend Rwanda's 10th-anniversary commemoration of the genocide, he did set aside that day to make a major statement on genocide prevention; in it, he said that the world must not allow Darfur to become "the next Rwanda."

Noble Rwanda: Ten years after being abandoned and betrayed by everyone in the world, it had become the poster child for Never Again. Noble Darfur: If anyone is left alive there in 10 years, the hypocrites' chorus will tell the world that we must not let (fill in the blank) become the next Darfur.

It's quite a phenomenon. No matter how cynical and jaded you become, the so-called "international community" can sink you to depths never previously glimpsed. As Prunier implies, comparing the U.S. invasion of Iraq to its reaction to Darfur tells us all we need to know about the honourable R2P (responsibility to protect) formula that Canada pushes with such earnestness. In the real world, those with power and resources virtually never act on the basis of their moral responsibility to protect the vulnerable. Often as not, they have been in part responsible for the crisis demanding intervention. The will to intervene is invariably driven by self-interest, however dishonestly spun, and most interventions have been illicit. When they are morally justified, they don't happen.

Prunier is properly cynical about the fate of Darfur. But I wish he had dissected the role of the Permanent Five members of the Security Council more closely, to give a better sense of their utter callousness in the face of the enormous suffering in Darfur. The competition of brazenness that characterizes the behaviour of China, Russia, France, Britain and the United States staggers the imagination.

The most astounding role has been played by the Bush government. Whereas the Clinton administration tied itself in knots in order not to call the Rwandan catastrophe a genocide, Bush and Colin Powell and the Republican-dominated Congress could hardly wait to hang the label on Darfur. And yes, they've been modestly generous with humanitarian aid. Yet at the same time, since 9/11, Washington has embraced the Sudan government as an important ally in the "war on terrorism." Bush needed what Prunier mockingly calls "good Arabs," and the mass murderers, war criminals, genocidalists and shameless liars who run the Khartoum government were only too happy to oblige.

Earlier this year, we learned that a CIA plane had flown to Khartoum to pick up the head of the Sudanese intelligence service, dropping him in Washington, where he had high-level consultations with his U.S. peers. At the same time, the United States went to the Security Council and insisted that the conflict in Darfur be resolved. The upshot: The genocide label has been profoundly devalued for crass reasons of political opportunism, its use, as the Guardian put it, "a sop to the [U.S.] Christian right and anti-Islamist neo-cons."

Darfur is a disaster for its inhabitants, but is it a genocide? The "ambiguity" in Prunier's subtitle is never quite clarified. He offers a typical Prunier-ism: " Everything does not make sense " (emphasis in original), and then proceeds to demonstrate it. Sudan is infinitely more complex and difficult to follow than Rwanda, as this dense little book only too clearly demonstrates; often it's hard to follow Prunier's exposition of the multiplicity of players and nuances, in Darfur, in Sudan, in the region, in the world.

The determination of genocide is equally complex. Another Prunier-ism: If we use the definition of genocide laid down in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, "it is obvious that Darfur is a genocide, but if we use my definition [from his work on Rwanda], it is not."

Kingsley Moghalu's short but extremely lucid study of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda casts light on the question -- the problem, I should say -- of defining genocide. Modelled on (and often seen as the junior version of) the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia, the ICTR was created by the Security Council to try those responsible for planning and leading the genocide in Rwanda. Since its inception, the tribunal has been the object of widespread scorn and derision by just about everyone involved.

Until now, I have been at least skeptical of the tribunal's world. Moghalu, who has been ICTR's special counsel and spokesman, makes a far more persuasive case than I thought possible that, overall, the tribunal has been a great success. He describes it as "a pioneering judicial institution that has recorded landmark achievements and become an effectively functioning institution, overcoming many obstacles."

By the middle of this year, the ICTR had completed the trials of 25 defendants, many of them "Big Fish," i.e. the political, military and civil-society leaders who had launched the genocide. Twenty-two have been convicted (including the prime minister of the genocidaire government, who confessed everything) and three acquitted. This is an impressive record of work given the great and largely unappreciated complexity of an international war crimes trial, and Moghalu argues convincingly that the tribunal's greatest contribution lies in its "precedent-setting judgments for the crime of genocide."

First, the international judges who served the ICTR had to reconstruct Rwandan history to determine whether a genocide had actually occurred. Given their extensive history lesson, they had little trouble finding that the 1994 tragedy constituted a genocide under the 1948 genocide convention. Genocide scholars worry greatly that many of the convention's sections are highly problematic, and the tribunal spent much time interpreting the proposition that genocide requires the "intent to destroy in whole or in part" certain defined groups. How do you determine "intent"? And how small could "a part" be and still constitute genocide?

The ICTR judges wrestled conscientiously with these questions, but the truth is that in Rwanda, the answers were easy and obvious. In Darfur, they're complicated and messy, which is why even genocide specialists are divided on the matter. That's why the ICTR's answers won't help Gérard Prunier overcome his ambiguity. And why they're ultimately irrelevant to Darfur. Genocide or not, terrible things are happening in that vast, remote part of Africa, the government of Sudan is up to its eyeballs in treachery and collusion, and the "international community" is once again allowing hundreds of thousands of innocent Africans to die miserable deaths.

(Gerald Caplan is author of Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide and founder of the informal advocacy group Remembering Rwanda. He teaches a course on the genocide to Rwandans in Rwanda.)