Never Again

Historian Samuel Moyn has called human rights the “moral lingua franca” of the international community. That is, all countries speak the language of human rights. As you’ve read, the international horror at Nazi brutality during World War II led to the rise of human rights. As knowledge of the Holocaust spread, the world promised, “never again.”

Since the Holocaust, we have walked on the moon and created the internet, yet we’ve made no progress stopping genocide. As of 2019, the Myanmar military is committing genocide against the Muslim Rohingya people, a minority Myanmar. Since World War II, in Cambodia, Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, and many other places, people have committed genocide and mass violence against innocent civilians. Why does genocide still happen?

Genocide is organized murder. There are many conditions that leaders must take advantage of when they start killing civilians within the borders of their country. However, other countries allow genocide to continue by refusing to intervene. Protection of national sovereignty, or independence, has repeatedly been valued over the lives of civilians. In most cases, the great powers of the world have failed to act.

Organized violence against groups of people is common to most places and time periods. You’ve read about the Armenian genocide in the early twentieth century. But in the second half of the twentieth century, the international community reaffirmed “the dignity and worth of the human person” in the United Nations Charter. The UN passed a Convention on the Prevention and Punishment for the Crime of Genocide in 1948. But it was not enforced until 50 years later when the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda tried those responsible for the Rwandan genocide. Cambodia, Iraq, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda, Sudan, and Myanmar were all part of the convention. Meanwhile, genocides occurred within their borders.

Cambodia and Iraq: Genocide during the Cold War

In 1975, the Cambodian Khmer Rouge military government killed 1.7 million people. That was 21 percent of the country’s population. Political scientist Karl D. Jackson claims that the Cambodian genocide was “the greatest loss of life in a single nation in the twentieth century.”

To understand why the Cambodian genocide started and why no one stopped it, you must understand the American war with Vietnam. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. military bombed Cambodia in hopes of killing North Vietnamese enemies in hiding. In the process, Cambodian civilians died.

Many survivors joined the rebel group known as the Khmer Rouge, fighting against the U.S.-backed Cambodian government.

Led by a former school teacher who called himself Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge seized control of Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital, in 1975. They quickly looked to eliminate anyone named an enemy of the revolution. Ethnic and religious minorities were targeted.

The UN knew of these horrible acts early on. Why did no international force act to stop the killing? The five members of the UN Security Council —United States, Soviet Union, China, France, and Britain — had the power to intervene. However, the Soviet Union and China refused to violate Cambodia’s national sovereignty through UN intervention. These major powers had their own repressive regimes in Eastern Europe and Tibet. They feared this might set a standard that could eventually hurt their own interests.

Beyond the inaction of the UN, the United States and China both actively supported the Khmer Rouge. In 1979, Vietnam invaded Cambodia to end the genocide. In response, the United States provided aid to the Khmer Rouge. President Jimmy Carter said that the United States was choosing the “lesser evil.” (Yes, just three paragraphs ago in 1975, the Khmer Rouge saw the U.S. as the enemy, but things change fast in war and politics.)

Only a few years later, the Iraqi government, led by Saddam Hussein, launched a campaign to kill and subdue Iraq’s Kurdish population. The Kurds are a large ethnic minority who live in the land where Syria, Turkey, Iran, and Iraq border each other. In the 1980s, almost one-fourth of Iraq’s 18 million people were Kurds. The Iraqi government claimed to be attacking Kurdish terrorists supporting Iran. Hussein’s military murdered and displaced tens of thousands of Kurdish men, women, and children.

As in Cambodia, two members of the UN Security Council supported the state committing genocide. Both the Americans and Soviets provided financial and military aid to Iraq in its war against Iran. The Americans eventually worked with the UN to protect civilians. That was only after 100,000 Iraqi Kurdish refugees entered Turkey, an American ally.

Bosnia and Rwanda: American indifference after the Cold War

The end of the Soviet Union and the disintegration of its empire in 1991 thrust Eastern Europe into a period of rapid change. The country of Yugoslavia erupted into violence in 1992. Serbian nationalists exploited the country’s religious and ethnic divisions.

As Serbian generals shelled the Bosnian city of Srebrenica and murdered tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims, the UN struggled to stop the violence. Western powers failed to provide the necessary money and troops for a UN peacekeeping force. Thus, the violence escalated. To make matters worse, the new Russian government blocked any UN action in the Security Council. Inaction by the Americans and Europeans and obstruction by the Russians placed UN peacekeepers in danger. Serbian forces captured UN peacekeepers and used them as human shields.

Decolonization was a major shift in the global balance of power. This shift increased tensions in many African nations. A century of German and Belgian imperialism had divided people in Rwanda on ethnic lines.¹ When the country gained its independence in 1962, tensions broke out between the Hutu majority and Tutsi minority. In 1994, Hutu leaders tried to eliminate the Tutsi people from Rwanda.

Hutu militias roamed the countryside killing Tutsi and other minorities while radios broadcast racist propaganda to encourage regular civilians to murder their neighbors. This radio station was one of the most effective tools of the genocide. And it is a glaring symbol of an international failure to act.

When presented with evidence of genocide, politicians often say, “we didn’t know.” This is a lie. In one violent example after another, world leaders had detailed knowledge of horrors like those in Rwanda. The UN had a peacekeeping force on the ground in 1994, and a UN general pleaded for more troops. But, as in Bosnia, the UN failed to find the political will and funding for a larger peacekeeping force. The American government actually tried to remove peacekeepers from Rwanda. It refused even to shut down the radio broadcasts, arguing that it would be too expensive and ineffective. One Pentagon official went so far as to say, “Radios don’t kill people. People kill people.” In 1994, the Rwandan government and Hutu militias murdered 800,000 people in 100 days.

Darfur and Rakhine: Genocide in the twenty-first century

The twenty-first century is proof that we have failed to stop genocide. The first genocide of this century started in a western region of Sudan called Darfur in 2003. Like Rwanda, Sudan’s independence from Britain in 1956 worsened ethnic and religious divisions. The civil war resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. Millions more children, women, and men have been abused, forced into military service, or removed from their homes.

Many nations pressured Sudan to end the killing. The American government declared a genocide in Darfur in 2004. But Russia and China prevented serious action within the Security Council, refusing to violate Sudan’s independence. And while American officials might speak out against violence, not much has been done to stop the killing. A UN peacekeeping force was sent to Darfur in 2007, four years after the start of the genocide. But this force is relatively small and lacks proper funding and support.

In 2017, the military and Buddhist militias in Myanmar launched attacks against the country’s Muslim Rohingya minority. Like Rwanda and Sudan, years of European imperialism fueled ethnic tensions. Since 2017, the military and Buddhist majority have carried out a campaign of extermination. They have systematically and brutally abused, murdered, and displaced millions of people. The largest refugee camp in the world is a Rohingya camp in Bangladesh.

In 2018, the United Nations declared these atrocities a genocide. In the same year, investigators working for the U.S. State Department agreed, though declaration isn’t enough to stop bullets. International indifference has condemned hundreds of thousands of Rohingya to death, assault, torture, and homelessness.

Conclusion: Again, and again

Genocide happens because of the choices people make. Within a society, hatred makes some people decide to murder. Other people decide to allow this to happen, without acting to defend those being attacked. At the international level, genocides continue to happen because the leaders of powerful states decide not to intervene, or not to let the United Nations intervene, to stop it.

Samantha Power, former U.S. Ambassador to the UN, argues that early action is critical to stop genocides. Since the Second World War and the Holocaust, major states such as the Soviet Union and China have often voted against intervention to stop genocide. However, Power believes that the United States was the country most capable of stopping genocide. Of all the countries in the world, it had the resources to take action outside the framework of the UN. In almost every case, it chose not to take action. Power argues that the American government’s inaction was not a failure of the American system. The system, she says, with understandable cynicism, “is working” as it was intended. She makes the point that “no U.S. president has ever made genocide prevention a priority, and no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference.”

Again, and again, the powerful nations of the world have turned a blind eye to atrocities. Why? In each of the six cases above, a member of the UN Security Council restrained UN action. Sometimes, powerful nations—states with the money, power, and influence to prevent genocide—actually gave aid to those killing civilians.

Genocide still happens because the post-World War II international system was not only designed to protect human rights, it was also designed to ensure the powerful stay in power. The veto power of the Security Council ensures that the UN cannot stop genocide if even one of the five permanent members disagrees. Powerful countries decide to value national sovereignty or their own international agendas above the mass murder of civilians. The international system is not failing. It is operating exactly as it was designed.

If the common language of the international community is indeed human rights, and genocide continues to happen, what does that say about human rights? Or about the collective morality of our global community?

1 This was a tactic used by most European imperialist nations in their colonies. They would highlight racial and ethnic differences in colonial nations in order to divide the people. Therefore they could weaken the chances of an organized rebellion.