Mass slaughter : We Always Forget !
By Mark V. Vlasic
We were supposed to learn our lesson. We promised ourselves that, after the Holocaust, genocide would never happen again. But time after time, the United Nations turns its back on victims of mass slaughter.
The July helicopter crash that killed Sudanese vice president and peacemaker John Garang evoked a sense of dread and déjà vu around the world. The news was a dangerous echo of Rwanda in 1994, when the plane carrying President Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down as he returned home from a peace conference. His murder led to the Rwandan genocide in which 800,000 people were killed. There are now fears that Garang’s death may spur further slaughter in Sudan, where hundreds of thousands have already been murdered, and millions have been displaced from their homes.
Every year, international diplomats pause to remember the world’s most recent genocides. Yet, at this very moment, people are being ethnically cleansed in Sudan. While dignitaries repeat their promises to “never forget,” Sudanese are being rounded up and executed for no other reason than because they belong to a particular national, religious, ethnic, or racial group.
It was never supposed to be like that. In the wake of World War II, after 6 million Jews were slaughtered in the Holocaust, the world united to form the United Nations, an international institution that would serve to protect against the dark side of humanity. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish lawyer who coined the term “genocide,” worked within this new institution to expose this kind of mass murder as the most heinous crime of crimes. In 1948, his efforts were rewarded when the U.N. General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Within a generation, however, after the self-congratulatory applause of international diplomats died down, much of the United Nations stood by and watched as the history of the Holocaust repeated itself-not just once, but twice-first in Rwanda and then in Srebrenica, Bosnia.
In 1994, the United Nations was already on the ground in Rwanda on the day President Habyarimana’s plane fell from the sky, sparking the very genocide that Lemkin had hoped to prevent. But the U.N. leadership already knew that Rwanda was on the verge of disaster. Three months before the slaughter commenced, U.N. force commander Lt. Gen. Roméo Dallaire sent an urgent cable to U.N. Peacekeeping Operations, which was led at the time by now Secretary-General Kofi Annan. In his message, Dallaire warned of a possible extermination, in which Hutu forces could kill up to 1,000 Tutsis in 20 minutes.
The anxious plea fell on deaf ears. Rather than spurring Annan and the United Nations into action, Dallaire’s specific requests for assistance were denied. In the hundred days after Habyarimana was killed, Rwanda became a bloodbath. Rwandan Tutsis, seeking protection, found impartiality and excuses from the U.N. bureaucracy, and were instead left to machete-wielding Hutus. Eight-hundred-thousand people died, and the United Nations only returned in force when it was time to unearth the bodies.
A year after the Rwandan genocide, history repeated itself. Again, the United Nations was already on the ground in Bosnia. A battalion of Dutch U.N. peacekeepers were responsible for protecting the first U.N.-declared “safe area” in Srebrenica. As the Bosnian Serb Army advanced on the city, U.N. officials declined to allow NATO warplanes to intervene until it was too late. The Serbs took Srebrenica without a fight and thousands of Bosnian Muslims fled to what they thought was the protection of the U.N. base in Potocari.
Rather than offering a safe haven, the United Nations expelled fearful Muslims from their base and watched as another genocide unfolded. In a scene evocative of Schindler’s List-a case of life imitating art, imitating life-families were torn apart under the watchful eyes of the international community. Men and boys were separated from women and small children, never to be seen again. More than 7,500 males were summarily executed after the United Nations failed to protect the Srebrenica “safe area.” Many of their bodies still lie blindfolded, with their hands tied behind their backs, decomposing in mass graves in Eastern Bosnia. As in Rwanda, the United Nations did not return in force to the scene of the crime until long after the slaughter was over.
I was one of those U.N. employees involved in the world’s belated response to that massacre. In 2001, I worked as an attorney assigned to a U.N. team investigating the Srebrenica genocide. There, I met with survivors who had two hopes. The first, naturally, was to be reunited with their loved ones. The second, however, was to see criminal prosecutions-not just of the perpetrators of genocide, but of the U.N. officers that abandoned them to the Serbs.
The tragedy of Rwanda and Srebrenica is not that they were missed opportunities or chance events that occurred outside the reach of international institutions. Rather, they happened right under the nose of the very international institution that was supposed to prevent such atrocities. The United Nations is the preeminent organization entrusted with the world’s conscience. Despite its unique role, the United Nations’ leadership stood by and watched the Rwandan and Srebrenica genocides unfold.
We say we will “never forget” genocide and mass murder. But each time we turn our backs to the current slaughter, we intentionally forget the horror that humans can inflict upon their neighbors. We forget the richness of humankind that is sacrificed to hate-and perhaps even worse, that which is sacrificed to inaction.
It is time for the U.N. leadership to remember the past and stand as a uniting voice for action. Much of the world celebrated the opening of the International Criminal Court in 2002, but the slaughter in Sudan continues. Having another international court in The Hague does not alone stop ethnic cleansing. Only by stopping the mass slaughter of humanity do we honor the memory of those who have perished in past genocides. Only by standing up to evil may Kofi Annan and the United Nations truly state, “We will never forget” without being seen as hypocrites by those still lying in mass graves.
Mark V. Vlasic served on the Slobodan Milosevic and Gen. Radislav Krstic (Srebrenica) trial and investigative teams at the U.N. War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague and was adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University. He is now in private practice at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP.