Never Again

Historian Samuel Moyn has said that all countries speak the moral language of human rights. As you’ve read, there was international horror at Nazi brutality during World War II. Many historians say it led to the rise of human rights. As knowledge of the Holocaust spread, the world promised, “never again.”

Since the Holocaust, our species has walked on the moon and created the internet. However, we’ve made no progress stopping genocide. Since World War II, many people have committed genocide and mass violence against civilians. Civilians are innocent people who are not in the military. It has happened in Cambodia, Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, and many other places. Why does genocide still happen?

Genocide is organized murder. Leaders take advantage of unstable conditions in their country. Then, they start killing their own people, often minority groups. Other countries can step in, but many do not. These countries view the independence of a nation as more important than the lives of civilians.

There is a long global history of organized violence against groups of people. In the second half of the 1900s, 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 this was not enforced until fifty years later. Then the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda tried leaders of the Rwandan genocide. Cambodia, Iraq, Bosnia, and many other countries belonged to the convention. Meanwhile, these countries were all committing their own genocides.

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. The Cambodian genocide started with the Vietnam war. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. military bombed Cambodia. They wanted to kill North Vietnamese enemies in hiding. But Cambodian civilians died in the process.

Many survivors joined the rebel group known as the Khmer Rouge. They fought against the Cambodian government. At this time, the Cambodian government was supported by the United States.

In 1975, Pol Pot led the Khmer Rouge. The group seized control of Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital. They quickly sought out enemies of their revolution. Ethnic and religious minorities became targets.

Why did the UN not act to stop the killing? There are five members of the UN Security Council: the United States, Soviet Union, China, France, and Britain. These powers can step in to solve problems in other countries. However, the Soviet Union and China refused to get involved in Cambodia. They each had abusive governments in Eastern Europe and Tibet. If the UN stopped Cambodia, the Soviet Union and China could be next.

The United States and China both supported the Khmer Rouge. The United States’ former enemy Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1979 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, in 1975, the Khmer Rouge saw the U.S. as the enemy. Things change fast in war and politics.)

A few years later, Saddam Hussein, the leader of Iraq, launched a campaign to kill Iraq’s Kurdish population. The Kurds are a large ethnic minority. They 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 its attacks were aimed at Kurdish terrorists. They said these Kurds were helping Iran attack Iraq. Hussein’s military murdered and forced tens of thousands of Kurdish men, women, and children from their homes.

Both the Americans and Soviets provided aid to Iraq in its war against Iran. Then, 100,000 Iraqi Kurdish refugees entered Turkey. An ally of Turkey, Americans decided to work with the UN to protect civilians.

Bosnia and Rwanda: American indifference after the Cold War

The Soviet Union fell apart in 1991. It thrust Eastern Europe into a period of rapid change. The country of Yugoslavia erupted into violence in 1992. Serbian nationalists took advantage of the country’s religious and ethnic divisions.

Serbian generals shelled the Bosnian city of Srebrenica. Tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims died. The UN struggled to stop the violence. Western powers failed to support a UN peacekeeping force. During times of war, the UN will send trained peacekeepers into a country to restore security and peace. The new Russian government blocked UN action in Yugoslavia in the Security Council, placing the UN peacekeepers in danger. Serbian forces captured UN peacekeepers and used them as human shields.

Decolonization is when large empires break up and their colonies gain independence. In many African nations, decolonization increased tensions. Rwanda had endured a century of control under German and Belgian forces. This colonization divided people in Rwanda on ethnic lines.¹ In 1962, Rwanda became independent. Immediately, tensions broke out between the Hutu majority and Tutsi minority.

Hutu military groups roamed the countryside. They killed Tutsi and other minorities. Radios played racist messages to encourage normal civilians to kill their neighbors. This radio station was one of the most effective tools of the genocide.

Politicians often claim to not know about genocide. This is a lie. World leaders have detailed knowledge of horrors like those in Rwanda. The UN had a peacekeeping force on the ground in 1994. A UN general begged for more troops. But, as in Bosnia, other countries failed to step up. The American government actually tried to remove peacekeepers from Rwanda. It refused even to shut down the radio broadcasts. 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 first genocide of the 2000s 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. Civil wars resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. Millions more people have been abused, forced into military service, or forced to leave their homes.

Many nations pressured Sudan to end the killing. The American government declared a genocide in Darfur in 2004. But Russia and China refused to violate Sudan’s independence. And while American officials might speak out against the violence, they have not done much to stop the killing. A UN peacekeeping force was sent to Darfur in 2007. This force, however, is relatively small. It lacks proper funding and support.

In 2017, the military in Myanmar attacked the country’s Muslim Rohingya minority. Years of European takeover fueled ethnic tensions. Since 2017, the military and Buddhist majority have carried out a campaign of extermination. Millions of people have been brutally abused, murdered, and forced from their homes.

In 2018, the United Nations declared these killings a genocide. But a declaration isn’t enough to stop bullets. Lack of international involvement has resulted in the death, assault, and homelessness of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya people.

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 it to happen, without acting to defend those being attacked. At the international level, as well, genocides continue to happen because powerful states decide not to intervene to stop it. Or they don’t let the United Nations intervene.

Samantha Power, former U.S. Ambassador to the UN, argues that early action is critical to stop genocides. Power believes that the United States could have stopped the genocide. It had the most resources to take action outside the UN. In almost every case, the U.S. chose not to take action. Power argues that the American government’s inaction was not a failure of the American system. 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.”

Powerful nations of the world continue to ignore mass violence. Why? In each of the six cases above, a member of the UN Security Council held back UN action. Sometimes, powerful nations actually support genocidal leaders.

The veto power of the Security Council ensures that the UN cannot stop genocide. All it takes is one of the five members to disagree. Countries often decide to value national sovereignty or their own interests above the mass murder of civilians. The international system is not failing. It is operating exactly as it was designed.

If genocide continues to happen, what does that say about the value of human rights in the international community? Or about the overall morality of our global community?

1 This was a method used by most European imperialist nations in their colonies. They would highlight racial and ethnic differences in colonial nations. It was done to divide the people. Then the rulers could weaken the chances of an organized rebellion.