Responses to genocide

Overview

✤ Let’s investigate four domains of responses to genocide:

✤ before - prevention

✤ during - intervention

✤ after - post-con ict accountability/prosecution

✤ long-term - transitional justice

✤ Cross-cutting issues - what are the common dif culties/risks with responding to genocide?

✤ How does this relate to individual case studies? How can we apply what we learn here?
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Prevention ( ) - ideals

✤ Prevention as the ‘holy grail’ of responses to genocide, better than cure:

‘such crimes cannot be reversed, such failures cannot be repaired [and] the
dead cannot be brought back to life’ (Annan, 2004)

✤ Intervention problematic - not effective vs. slow, drawn-out killing OR fast-

onset killing - so better to intervene early.

✤ ‘through empirical and scienti c observation of operationally de ned cases

of genocide [and] isolat[ing] the variable and causal mechanisms at work,
one can prevent genocide at an early stage’ (Cushman, 2003)
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Prevention ( ) - theory

✤ (Woocher, 2006) – attempts to identify models that provide early warning of genocide.

✤ periodic global risk assessment (to winnow down)

✤ ongoing situation monitoring (to generate warnings)

✤ communication of early warning information (to promote preventive action)

✤ UN - Framework of Analysis for Atrocity Crimes

✤ False positives? Expensive, ‘boy who cried wolf’.

✤ False negatives? Disastrous, decrease con dence in project.

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Prevention ( ) - issues
✤ Is the theory any good?

✤ How do you justify spending money on a preventive measure?

✤ How do you measure success when you’re successful when a rare

event doesn’t happen?

✤ How do you avoid it being abused?

✤ The Minority Report ‘pre-crime’ effect.

✤ ‘We think there’s a very strong risk of your country turning genocidal, so
we’re just going to intervene now.’

✤ Who decides whether or not to act? Is the analysis reliable? Who

chooses which analysis to look at, if there are different opinions?
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Prevention and individual case studies?

✤ For Topics 1 - 5:

✤ At what point would your favoured early warning tools have ‘detected’ a high risk of
imminent genocide?

✤ What could have been done if you’d seen it coming?

 https://southeastasiaglobe.com/vietnams-forgotten-veterans/

Intervention to
prevent genocide?
✤ 20th century, anti-genocide military intervention
has typically been subordinate to war aims

✤ Armenian genocide - condemnation of

enemy power; Holocaust - saving Jews low
on Anglo-American agenda; Cambodia -
Vietnamese invasion to stabilise border);
Rwanda - RPF intervene to take power rather
than out of sense of humanitarianism

✤ ‘Humanitarian intervention’ - tarnished concept,

especially since Kosovo in 1999 (NATO: ‘illegal
but legitimate’, widely seen as product of state
interests)
R P - origins ( )

✤ Attempt to develop a new, more convincing approach: the ‘responsibility to protect’.

✤ International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (2001) – multilateral organisation.

✤ Unanimous approval at 2005 UN World Summit

✤ Referenced in UNSC Resolution 1674 - Reaf rms the provisions of paragraphs 138 and 139 of
the 2005 World Summit Outcome Document regarding the responsibility to protect populations
from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity

✤ African Union – ‘It is important to reiterate the obligation of states to protect their citizens, but
this should not be used as a pretext to undermine the sovereignty, independence and territorial
integrity of states’. Cautious support, but worried about it being used as a pretext.
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R P - pillars and responsibilities ( )
✤ Pillars
✤ Pillar I emphasises a state’s obligations to protect all populations within its own borders;
✤ Pillar II outlines the international community’s role in helping states to ful l this obligation;
✤ Pillar III identi es the international community’s responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian,
peaceful or coercive means to protect civilian where a state manifestly fails to uphold its obligations. populations

✤ Responsibilities
✤ The responsibility to prevent: addressing root causes of internal con ict. (As seen in the last section - generally
supported internationally, but not much actually done to realise it)
✤ The responsibility to react: responding to situations of compelling human need with appropriate measures that
could include sanctions, prosecutions, or military intervention. (This is what most people mean by R2P)
✤ The responsibility to rebuild: providing full assistance with recovery, reconstruction, and reconciliation. (Almost
entirely ignored - Keranen, 2016)
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R P - criticism ( )
✤ But who can act on R2P?
✤ Is it consistently applied?
✤ Is it vulnerable to abuse?

✤ Libya intervention
✤ UNSC approves
✤ Criticised as NATO effectively supports anti- Gadha forces
✤ Leaves Russia and China wary of future interventions.

✤ Syria – no intervention
✤ Russia - expressed alarm that compliance with Security Council resolutions on the situation in Libya had been considered a
model for future actions that could include the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
✤ Chinese - The Council should encourage those objectives while respecting Syria’s sovereignty’s and territorial integrity.

✤ How to disentangle national interests from this?

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Intervention and individual case studies?

✤ Broader criticism - c.f. Barnett - dif culty in ensuring the bureaucratic and
political practicalities of atrocity response.

✤ What kind of intervention might have helped in your case study? Who by?
What would they do? How long would they stay? etc.
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Prosecution ( )

✤ Longstanding issue in int’l law - how

to prosecute state leaders for crimes
committed against their own people
(i.e. ‘how do you go beyond the
notion of ‘war crimes’, which take
place between two countries)

✤ Breaks in WWII - Pell (UNWCC),

Nuremberg Trials (genocide
prosecutions), Genocide Convention,
1948
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Prosecution - ‘Cold War, cold storage’? ( )

✤ Very little international action on genocide/war crimes/crimes against humanity

✤ Little in the shadow of Cold War power struggles e.g. Soviet Union blocked by China, NAM over
Bangladesh genocide.

✤ Domestic prosecutions from the Genocide Convention being transferred into domestic law:
✤ Cambodia - 1979
✤ Equatorial Guinea - 1979
✤ Bolivia - 1986-1993
✤ Romania – 1989

✤ Not particularly encouraging examples, but not nothing either … (positive complementarity, see Owen,
2016, 2020)

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Prosecution - ad hoc courts ( )
✤ Courts established by UNSC Resolution (ICTY – Res. 827; ICTR – Res. 977)
✤ ran (especially later in their operation) in parallel with domestic processes
✤ International Criminal Tribunal for the Former ✤ International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
Yugoslavia
✤ established 1994
✤ established 1993
✤ 96 indictments
✤ 161 indictments
✤ only addressed Hutu génocidaires –
✤ mix of Yugoslav defendants (though more
Serbian? also controversial that no NATO
didn’t touch the (admittedly controversial
personnel examined) and dif cult) issue of Tutsi vs. Hutu
violence
✤ slow, hampered by limited cooperation by
former Yugoslav states

✤ Controversy - what level of people get prosecuted, given that only a small % of people get
brought to trial?
✤ Controversy: many Hutus convicted considered for early release by non-Rwandan leaders.
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Prosecution - the ICC ( )

✤ Enters into force 2002

✤ Powers to prosecute individuals for:

✤ Genocide

✤ Crimes Against Humanity

✤ War Crimes

✤ (Crimes of Aggression come into play later)

✤ Supposed to complement national courts – court of ‘last resort’ when they are unwilling/unable to
prosecute.
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 Prosecution - the ICC
( )
✤ Criticism - only ever prosecuted African defendants

✤ Racism of the court (Mamdani) or the only place

it has its hands free (Bloxham)?

✤ Many non-member countries/threats of withdrawal

✤ US repeatedly signalled intention not to take part in

the process.

✤ Article 98 agreements

✤ ‘Invading the Hague’ Act

✤ Sanctions vs. Staff

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Prosecution and individual case studies?

✤ Was anyone prosecuted for your particular case study of genocide?

✤ Who were they/what role did they play?

✤ Who wasn’t prosecuted?

✤ What issues did prosecutions face/might they have faced in the event that
prosecutions had occurred?
Transitional justice ( )

✤ How to encourage populations to rebuild

society, comfort grieving, re-establish trust?

✤ Domestic/hybrid prosecutions - blend with

transitional justice (Clark, 2018).

✤ Truth-seeking

✤ Community catharsis and healing

(Clark, 2010)

✤ Establishing record of what happened,

record of truth, closure (Brett, 2018)
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Transitional justice ( )

✤ Examples

✤ Gacaca, Rwanda - community justice projects. Criticised for not

following due process; praised for allowing justice at scale.

✤ Historical Clari cation Commission, Guatemala. Largely nulli ed by

supporters of genocidal movement still in power.

✤ ECCC, Cambodia. Not particularly successful as a trial, but offers a place

for survivors to be heard.
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Transitional Justice - how it can go wrong ( )

✤ Failures (or failures to apply) transitional justice

✤ Yugoslavia - post-WW2, Titoist attempt to suppress Yugoslav identity/memory

of genocide by Croatia, Nazis. Denich, 1994 - Serb leaders literally unearth the
bones of the dead to say ‘look, this was never dealt with, and because it was
never dealt with, it’s going to happen again [and we are going to be the ones
doing it before you can]’.

✤ Sometimes even imagined historic genocides used to ‘justify’ contemporary

violence (Owen, 2020), e.g. ‘Tutsi Colonisation Plan’ past and future; ‘counter-
jihad’ movement against Muslims in the West.

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Transitional justice and individual case studies?

✤ Have the case studies you looked at been through a TJ process?

✤ Did the genocidaires in question claim to be avenging or averting a historic

wrong?
Conclusion

✤ A whistlestop tour of the eld - we’ve moved too quickly through a lot of material!

✤ What’s the context of genocidal violence?

✤ External actors and their interests - few powerful organisations and countries
willing to act to prevent mass violence unless they have an interest …

✤ Bureaucratic and practical limitations in the process of actually stopping genocide

✤ Intrinsic issues to genocide - what aspects of mass killing make it dif cult to
respond to it politically?
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