Category: Genocide

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Candidate positions on genocide

With the primary season in full swing, I thought it might be helpful to revisit the various candidates and see what they have to say about Darfur, genocide, and Africa.

Clinton

Edwards

McCain

Obama

Giuliani
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Giuliani has said the United States should focus its policy toward Africa on increases in trade. “U.S. government aid is important, but aid not linked to reform perpetuates bad policies and poverty,” he wrote in a September 2007 Foreign Affairs article. In that article, Giuliani also said the next president “should continue the Bush administration’s effort to help Africa overcome AIDS and malaria.”

In May 2007, Giuliani was informed that he held between $500,000 and $1 million in investments in companies that work in Sudan. His campaign spokesperson did not say whether he would be divesting (AP) from those companies.

Huckabee
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Huckabee has not made many public statements relating to U.S. policy toward Africa. His stance on U.S.action in Darfur is unknown. He has said foreign aid (Time) “should be limited to purely humanitarian efforts.”

Romney
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Romney’s positions on policy issues toward African countries are not well known. In a July 2007 Foreign Affairs article, Romney praised U2 singer Bono and other activists for their efforts to raise awareness of poverty in Africa and elsewhere. Romney said U.S. efforts to bolster the standing of moderate Muslims abroad by combating poverty and underdevelopment should be focused in Africa as well as the Middle East.

The Los Angeles Times reported on August 14, 2007, that Romney has investments in an oil company tied to the Sudanese government, which is accused of being partially responsible for the massacres in Darfur. Romney’s campaign spokesman told the Times that Romney’s attorney controls his investments and that he “had no influence over how his investments were handled.” His spokesman did not say whether Romney would divest these funds.

All position statements were drawn from the Council on Foreign Relations.

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Of foxes and henhouses

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Former Secretary of Defense Willian Cohen will be co-chairing a new task force to develop guidelines to prevent future genocides. Referred to as the Genocide Prevention Task Force, the group is being implemented by the U.S. Institute for Peace, the United States Holocaust Museum and the American Academy of Diplomacy.

“Because we live in this age of information … we can no longer live in a state of denial or willful indifference,” he said. “And so the purpose of this task force is to look to the past, to be sure, but to look forward to say, ‘What are the signs, what are the options that will be available to the United States as one of the leading forces to help shape multilateral action, to energize people of conscience, to say that this cannot happen, this is not tolerable?’ ”

The international community heaped a lot of criticism on the United States for not becoming involved in Rwanda’s 1994 internecine war and for again reacting too late to Sudan in 2004, when then-Secretary of State Colin Powell labeled the situation there a genocide. The Sudanese government has denied that label is accurate.

“Things haven’t worked,” Albright said. “And watching Darfur [Sudan], I think, is one of the things that has led us all to say, ‘OK, let’s give this all another try to see if there are some guidelines and if — speaking of the United States government — if there is some way to organize ourselves better to deal with it.’ ”

She said the idea for the task force came from the unfortunate history of failure of efforts to prevent genocide around the world.

“I would frankly say that this is as a result of frustration,” she said. “That no matter what we say, there are mass killings and genocide. And we want to see what we can do to make some reality to the words ‘never again’.”

At the time of the Rwandan genocide, Albright was serving as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations. She argued in a PBS interview (years later), that “in retrospect, it all looks very clear. But when you were [there] at the time, it was unclear about what was happening in Rwanda.” Later, as she served as Secretary of State, she was largely responsible for the United States position in the Balkans.

In addition, Albright and Cohen were both signers of a letter discouraging a U.S. declaration of genocide in Armenia, a fact that was the center of the Genocide Prevention Task Force’s first news conference:

Albright and Cohen spent much of the news conference’s question-and-answer session defending a letter they sent to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, earlier this year, in which they spoke against a House resolution that would have labeled as genocide the mass killings of Armenians in 1915 by what is now Turkey. The letter, signed by eight former Cabinet secretaries, including Albright, Cohen and Powell, stated that discussion of the bill on the floor could “strain our [United States] relations with Turkey, and would endanger our national security interests in the region, including the safety of our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

All of which opens the question, can officials trained in a climate of ignoring genocide for political reasons come together to create future policy that may impact nations in a positive way?

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Congress calls for charges against Ahmadinejad

On Wednesday, the House of Representatives passed a non-binding resolution that calls on the United Nations to charge Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with genocide. The bill states that:

…on October 27, 2005, at the World Without Zionism Conference in Tehran, Iran, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be “wiped off the map,” described Israel as “a disgraceful blot [on] the face of the Islamic world,” and declared that “[a]nybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation’s fury”

…on December 12, 2006, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad addressed a conference in Tehran questioning the history of the Holocaust and said that Israel would “soon be wiped out”

…on August 3, 2006, in a speech during an emergency meeting of Muslim leaders, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stated that the Middle East would be better off “without the existence of the Zionist regime,” called Israel an “illegitimate regime” with “no legal basis for its existence,” and accused the United States of using Israel as a proxy to control the region and its oil resources

The resolution passed the House with 411 votes and has been forwarded to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. You can read the entire resolution here.

I find it both sad and ironic that Congress is so easily moved to action against rhetoric, but lacks any strength of resolve to fight actual acts of genocide.

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RIP Kurt

“I have wanted to give Iraq a lesson in democracy—because we’re experienced with it, you know. And, in democracy, after a hundred years, you have to let your slaves go. And, after a hundred and fifty years, you have to let your women vote. And, at the beginning of democracy, is that quite a bit of genocide and ethnic cleansing is quite okay. And that’s what’s going on now.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

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Genocide Accountability Act

Since the end of World War II, the United States Department of Justice has actively pursued the prosecution of Nazi war criminals living within our borders through the Office of Special Investigations (OSI). Because of existing laws, the Justice Department doesn’t have the authority to try fugitives for genocide crimes, and instead deports them to their home country for prosecution.

However, a new bill that’s about to move before the full Senate would undo the precedent that keeps non-citizens from being charged with genocide in the United States.

Under current law, genocide is only considered a crime if it is committed within the United States or by a U.S. national outside the United States. The Genocide Accountability Act would close the current loophole by amending the Genocide Convention Implementation Act to allow prosecution of non-U.S. citizens for genocide committed outside the United States.

The Justice Department has identified individuals who participated in the Rwandan and Bosnian genocides and who are living in the United States under false pretenses. Under current law, these individuals cannot be arrested or prosecuted for genocide, because they are not U.S. nationals and the acts in which they were involved did not take place in the United States. In contrast, the laws on torture, material support for terrorism, terrorism financing, hostage taking, and many other federal crimes are still considered crimes when committed outside the United States by non-U.S. nationals.

Salah Abdallah Gosh, the head of security in the Sudanese government, has reportedly played a key role in the government’s genocidal campaign in Darfur. In 2005, Gosh came to Washington to meet with senior Administration officials. Under current law, the FBI could not even interview Gosh about his involvement in the Darfur genocide, much less charge him with a crime.

This is the first bill to be introduced by the subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law, which was officially established at the Senate Judiciary Committee’s first business meeting of the 110th Congress. The Human Rights subcommittee’s first hearing was held in February and focused on the genocide in Darfur and other parts of the world.

Even though the bill will likely aid in the prosecution of Sudanese and Rwandan ex-pats, there’s little doubt that cases like John Demjanjuk’s would have been better served if this loophole had been closed earlier. In fact, this will hopefully give the OSI the teeth it needs to pursue fugitive war criminals with greater effectiveness.