September 2009 Building an Anti-Genocide Regime Dr. Gregory H. Stanton First published in 2011, updated in 2026 When the Genocide Convention was passed by the United Nations in 1948, the world said, "Never again." But the history of the twentieth century instead proved that "never again" became "again and again." The promise the United Nations made was broken, as again and again, genocides and other forms of mass murder killed at least 170 million people, more than all the international wars of the twentieth century combined (Rummel, 1994).[2] Genocide, the devil on horseback, still rides unchecked, armed not with a scythe but with a Kalashnikov. Why? Why are there still genocides? Why are there genocidal massacres being perpetrated in 2006 against the Fur, Massalit, and Zaghawa in Darfur; and the the Banyamulenge, Hutus, Hema, and Lendu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo? Why does ethnic and religious hatred still divide Côte d'Ivoire and Iraq and threaten to erupt again in genocidal violence? There are two primary reasons why genocide is still committed in the world: 1. The world has not developed the international institutions needed to predict and prevent it; and 2. The world's leaders do not have the political will to stop it. In order to prevent genocide, we must first understand it. We must study and compare genocides and develop working theories about the genocidal process. There are many centers for the study of genocide that are doing that vital work in universities and research institutes in Europe, North America, Australia and Israel. But studying genocide is not enough. Our next task should be to create the international institutions and political will to prevent it. Three institutions, in particular, are needed: (1) politically effective centers for genocide prevention; (2) rapid response forces for non-violent prevention and armed military response; and (3) effective international courts for punishment. To create political will, an international movement to end genocide must be built, requiring a massive educational, media and political campaign. Creation of a Genocide Prevention Office at the UN The U.N. Security Council and key governments need strong, independent early warning systems to predict where and when ethnic conflict and genocide are going to occur, and to present options for prevention and intervention to policy makers. When the International Campaign to End Genocide (ICEG) (now the Alliance Against Genocide), a coalition of human rights organizations, attempted to contact officials at the UN about the genocidal massacres in East Timor in 1999, we discovered that no one had responsibility for receiving information or coordinating action about genocide. Therefore, in 2002, the Genocide Watch and the ICEG recommended that the UN create a Special Adviser to the Secretary General for the Prevention of Genocide with a small permanent staff at the highest level that would receive information about risks of genocide and coordinate UN responses. Despite negative reactions by some member states to previous proposals for a UN preventive capacity, the idea was discussed and refined. It gathered support from high ranking UN officials like Danilo Turk and Edward Mortimer, who recommended it to Secretary General Kofi Annan. The result was a proposal made at the Stockholm Forum on the Prevention of Genocide in 2004 by Gregory Stanton of Genocide Watch (Stanton, 2004a), which recommended appointment of a Special Adviser to the Secretary General on the Prevention of Genocide and creation of an independent Genocide Prevention Center. The Secretary General announced his support for the proposal at the Stockholm Forum, and in July 2004, he created the new post and named Juan Mendez as his first Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide. Establishment of a Genocide Prevention Center Realizing that the United Nations has limited resources, the ICEG also recommended creation of an independent Genocide Prevention Center to support the work of the Special Adviser. The Center would be located in New York and staffed with full-time early warning, political and operational planning specialists who have direct access to an international network of government officials, country experts, human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and the Special Adviser's office. It would be funded by governments, foundations, corporations, and private donors. It would work closely with the UN Special Adviser's Office, but would not be subject to funding by the UN itself. (Stanton, 2004a) The Brahimi Report of the Panel on U.N. Peace Operations (U.N. Doc. A/55/305 S/2000/809: 2000) suggested such an office (the Information and Strategic Analysis Secretariat) at the U.N., but its recommendations were blocked by states (mostly from the G-77 developing nations plus India and China) that considered such a function to be "intelligence-gathering." That is precisely why a Genocide Prevention Center must be independent of the U.N., but on the U.N.'s periphery, and considered by the Special Adviser to be a trusted source of reliable information. If the Center is not independent, it will be unable to issue opinions that displease member states, particularly states at risk or that are committing genocide. Yet it must have the confidence of the Special Adviser and develop a close informal relationship with him. Several human rights groups, notably Human Rights Watch and the International Crisis Group (an ICEG member), currently have such relationships with the Secretary General. The Genocide Prevention Center would become a clearing house and validator for reports from human rights groups and open sources around the world. It would operationalize those reports into options and plans for preventive action, and the Special Adviser and the Secretary General would use them to formulate recommendations to the U.N. Security Council. One problem such a Center would face immediately is the closed nature of both government and U.N. information systems. Reports from UN field officials and government intelligence agencies are classified "confidential" or secret. Access to the country desk officers and top officials of the U.N. system would thus probably be indirect, through the Special Adviser. Access to government intelligence reports remains unlikely. However, the open secret of the new information age is that policy-makers would get better information if they ran a daily algorithm of world news media for early warning signs, and regularly read leading newspapers, magazines, and human rights groups' reports, than if they counted on their embassies' classified cables. Several such open source, unclassified reporting services (IRIN, Reliefweb) provide daily collections of articles to the U.N. and others interested in reading them. However, none currently focus on potential genocide. Even before a Genocide Prevention Center is established, coalitions of NGOs and genocide studies programs should establish independent early warning networks that can provide daily reports and regular policy options papers to the U.N.'s Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, to the Security Council and to individual governments. Even after a Genocide Prevention Center is established, NGOs should continue to provide reports independently to the Special Adviser, UN agencies, and member governments. The Center is not intended to be a unique source. Regular briefings should be given to the Security Council by the Special Adviser. The first attempt by the Special Adviser to give such a briefing on Darfur was blocked by objections from the U.S., China, Russia and Algeria (Reuters, 10 Oct. 2005.) But the Secretary General, himself, could exercise his prerogative under Article 99 of the UN Charter to mandate direct reports by the Special Adviser to the Security Council and the General Assembly. Early Warning Models Early warning models matter. They must be comprehensible to policy makers, and provide specific guidance. The U.N. Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency have each had contracts with social scientists who use multi-variate, statistical models to predict the likelihood of genocide and other forms of violence. The models assign country scores to a large number of abstract risk factors ("level of democracy, trade openness, history of armed conflict, ethnic diversity") and then assess the risk of genocide from their sum (Harff, 2003; Krain, 1997). These statistical models are useful to the extent that they demonstrate the benefit of promotion of democracy and other general policies. But statistical models do not describe the intentional process by which political leaders push a society toward genocide. They therefore are not sufficient to formulate specific counter-measures at each stage of the genocidal process. To provide immediate early warning signs, Harff (1998) has identified accelerators and triggers that may lead to genocide. They include refugee and internally displaced persons flows, compulsory visible identification of targeted groups, arming of ethnic militias, hate speech, killing of opposition leaders, and other political factors. But they are not continuous, event driven models that can predict when a genocide will happen. They fail to predict how close a genocide may be and do not suggest specific tactics to prevent it. Genocide Watch uses a process model of genocide, that breaks down the genocidal process into predictable stages that all genocides follow. It is not a linear model because the stages often occur simultaneously or out of order. It exposes the logic of the genocidal process so that policy-makers can recognize early warning signs and plan specific counter-measures at each stage to stop the process. The Ten Stages of Genocide 1. Classification : Underlying most social scientists' theories of genocide is an image of "ethno-centric man." Because all people grow up and live in particular cultures, speaking particular languages, they identify some people as "us" and others as "them." This fundamental first stage in the process does not necessarily lead to genocide. Genocide only becomes possible with another common human tendency -- considering only "our group" as human, and "de-humanizing" certain others. Thus, we not only develop cultural centers, we also create cultural boundaries that shut other groups out -- and the latter may become the boundaries where solidarity ends and hatred begins. "Us versus them" can be converted by political elites desiring to gain or retain power into ideologies of purity, exclusion, and destruction. Regimes bent on genocide take great pains to classify their populations. The main preventive measure at this early stage is to develop universalistic institutions that transcend ethnic or racial divisions, that actively promote tolerance and understanding, and that promote classifications that transcend the divisions. 2. Symbolization : Names or other symbols are assigned to the classifications. People are named "Jews" or "Gypsies", or distinguished by colors or dress. When combined with hatred, symbols may be forced upon unwilling members of pariah groups: e.g. yellow stars for Jews. To combat symbolization, hate symbols can be legally forbidden (swastikas) as can hate speech. If widely supported, denial of symbolization can be powerful, as it was in Bulgaria, when many Jews refused to wear the yellow star and were not turned in by their Christian neighbors, depriving the yellow star of its significance as a Nazi symbol for Jews. 3. Discrimination : Laws are passed or cultural practices exclude targeted groups from their civil rights. Group members may be excluded or fired from jobs. They may be prohibited from marrying members of the dominant group. They may be forced to live in ghettos or prohibited from entering areas controlled by the dominant group, except with passes to perform domestic labor. They may be prohibited from voting or holding public office. They may be excluded from leadership positions in government, the civil service or companies. They may be stripped of their national citizenship. They may be denied access to courts and rights of citizens. They may be denied the right to speak their own language in public, to meet in groups, and to bear arms for self-defense. The best defense against discrimination is passage and enforcement of laws prohibiting it. Religious and minority leaders may organize demonstrations against laws and practices that discriminate against targeted groups. Public media may be used to make racism and discrimination culturally unacceptable. 4. Dehumanization : One group denies the humanity of the other group. Members of it are equated with animals, vermin, insects or diseases. Dehumanization overcomes the normal human revulsion against murder.At this stage, hate propaganda in print and on hate radios is used to vilify the victim group. In combating dehumanization, incitement to commit genocide should not be confused with protected speech. Genocidal societies lack constitutional protection for countervailing speech, and should be treated differently than democracies. Hate radio stations should be shut down, and hate propaganda banned. Incitement to commit genocide should be outlawed and prosecuted. Hate groups should be infiltrated, arrested, and broken up. 5. Organization : Genocide is always organized, usually by the state, though sometimes informally (Hindu mobs led by local RSS militants) or by terrorist groups. Special army units or militias are often trained and armed. Plans are made for genocidal killings. To combat this stage, membership in such militias should be outlawed. Their leaders should be arrested and denied visas for foreign travel. The U.N. should impose arms embargoes on governments and citizens of countries involved in genocidal massacres, and international commissions should investigate crimes against humanity. 6. Polarization : Extremists drive the groups apart. Hate groups broadcast polarizing propaganda. Laws may forbid intermarriage or social interaction. Extremist terrorism targets moderates, intimidating and silencing the center. Prevention may mean security protection for moderate leaders or assistance to human rights groups. Assets of extremists may be seized, and visas for international travel denied to them. Coups d'état by extremists should be opposed by international sanctions. 7. Preparation : Leaders of the perpetrator group plan the genocide. Military forces are armed and incited to kill the targeted group. Ethnic militias are recruited, armed, and organized. Officials often claim killings are being committed by these militias, not by the army, in an effort to deny official culpability. The population is propagandized to believe that the targeted group is a threat that must be eliminated. In what genocide scholars call "mirroring," the targeted group is accused of planning a genocide against perpetrator group. Genocide is then justified as self-defense. When national and international leaders learn of plans to commit genocide, they should warn potential genocidists that they will be arrested and put on trial for their crimes. Nations should impose global Magnitsky sanctions on leaders who violate international laws for human rights. Their visas to travel should be revoked. Their finances held abroad should be seized. Opposition leaders and parties should be financed and protected. 8. Persecution : Victims are identified and separated out because of their ethnic or religious identity. Death lists are drawn up. Members of victim groups are forced to wear identifying symbols. They are often segregated into ghettos, forced into concentration camps, or confined to a famine-struck region and starved. At this stage, a Genocide Emergency should be declared. If the political will of the the U.N. Security Council or NATO can be mobilized, armed international intervention should be prepared, or heavy assistance given to the victim group to prepare for its self-defense. Otherwise, at least humanitarian assistance should be organized by the U.N. and private relief groups for the inevitable tide of refugees. 9. Extermination : Extermination quickly becomes the mass killing legally called "genocide." It is "extermination" to the killers because they do not believe their victims to be fully human. When it is sponsored by the state, the armed forces often work with militias to do the killing. Sometimes the genocide results in revenge killings by groups against each other, creating the downward whirlpool-like cycle of bilateral genocide, as in Burundi. At this stage, only rapid and overwhelming armed intervention can stop genocide. Real safe areas or A multilateral force authorized by the U.N., led by NATO or a regional military power, should intervene. Militarily powerful nations should provide the airlift, equipment, and financial means necessary for the intervention. 10. Denial : is the stage that always starts when a genocide begins and continues long after a genocide ends. It is among the surest indicators of further genocidal massacres. The perpetrators of genocide dig up the mass graves, burn the bodies, try to cover up the evidence and intimidate the witnesses. They deny that they committed any crimes, and often blame what happened on the victims. They block investigations of the crimes, and continue to govern until driven from power by force, when they flee into exile. There they remain with impunity unless they are captured and a tribunal is established to try them. The best responses to denial are public hearings by national truth commissions, and punishment by international tribunals or national courts. There the evidence can be heard, and the perpetrators punished. (Stanton, 2005.) Rapid Response Forces Early warning is not enough. What if the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution to implement a peace agreement, and sent in peace-keepers, but then genocide began? That is what happened in Rwanda. There were plenty of early warnings. The U.N. Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR) commander, General Roméo Dallaire learned of the plans for the genocide three months before it began, had conclusive evidence of massive shipments of half a million machetes to arm the killers, and knew of the training camps for the Interahamwe killers. Yet, when he cabled the U.N. Department of Peacekeeping Operations requesting authorization to confiscate the machete caches, Undersecretary for UNAMIR's mandate. When the genocide actually began in April 1994, Dallaire desperately asked for a mandate and reinforcements to protect the thousands of Tutsis who had taken refuge in churches and stadiums. Led by the U.S. and U.K., the Security Council instead voted to pull out all 2500 UNAMIR troops. General Dallaire has since said that even those troops could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, had they remained (Stanton, 2004c). Among the problems with U.N. peacekeeping forces is that they are composed of national troop contingents voluntarily contributed by risk-averse national governments, and may even take their orders from those governments rather than their U.N. commanders. Such forces take months to organize and are seldom composed of the world's best-trained and equipped soldiers.[3] One regional military alliance lacks these drawbacks -- NATO. It has a coordinated command structure, extremely well-trained troops, and major resources. It proved to be quite effective once it was mobilized in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s. But it has only begun to contribute to peace-keeping operations outside of Europe. The Standing High Readiness Brigade organized by Denmark, Austria, Canada, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland and Sweden in 1996 (since expanded to include Finland, Italy, Ireland, Lithuania, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, and Spain) was organized to provide a rapid response force of 5,000 heavy infantry and support personnel to the U.N. Security Council on thirty days' notice. It assisted Chapter VI (peacekeeping with the consent of the host country) monitoring missions in Ethiopia/Eritrea, Liberia, and Sudan. The European Union (EU) is organizing thirteen 1,500 person battle groups ready to respond within ten days to decisions by the EU. However, the EU is likely to be hamstrung by the requirement for unanimity in its foreign policy decision making. The United Nations needs a standing, volunteer, professional rapid response force that does not depend on member governments' contributions of brigades from their own armies. A standing U.N. force would need the support of some of the major military powers. It must be large enough to effectively intervene in situations like Rwanda. It should be composed of volunteers from around the world, the best of the best, who train together specifically for U.N. peace-keeping. Its capabilities and training would need to include many non-military functions, including policing, administration of justice, and conflict transformation. Although the U.S. and other Permanent 5 members of the Security Council do not currently support creation of such a standing U.N. force, it is an idea whose time will come. Non-violent Intervention We must build institutions to intervene non-violently before genocide begins. Every church, synagogue, mosque, and temple should teach peace-making, and inter-religious leaders' councils should be formed wherever there is religious division. In ethnically divided societies, radio and television and educational systems should be used to advocate tolerance and to humanize the other groups in the society, to show that they are like "us." The 2005 report of the U.N. High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change (U.N. Doc. A/59/565 (2005)) recommended creation of a U.N. Peacebuilding Commission to be tasked with prevention of conflict and state failure. The problem with the recommendation is that most genocide does not arise out of state failure or conflict. It is the result of unchecked state power. The Carnegie Commission Report on Preventing Deadly Conflict (1997) is the best known example of the common assumption that conflict prevention will also prevent genocide. Conflict prevention is often a laudable goal, and sometimes it will contribute to genocide prevention. But it often will not. Jews had no conflict with Germans, nor did Armenians with Turks. In Rwanda, Kuperman (2001) argues that the Arusha Accords actually increased the likelihood of genocide when the Hutu Power elite realized they would lose their grip on power if the Accords were implemented. Faced with the negotiated reduction in their power, they instead decided to kill every Tutsi in Rwanda. Diplomats believe in conflict prevention, so it is the default position of most foreign ministries. But in cases of genocide, forceful intervention to overthrow a dictator or stop mass killing may be much more effective than a peace agreement. Negotiations with genocidists may result in appeasement that encourages their will to power, as it did with Hitler, Stalin, and Habyarimana -- and, currently, with al-Bashir in Sudan. The International Criminal Court The world needs and finally has an International Criminal Court (ICC). Impunity for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity must end. The ICC must be backed by the will of nations to arrest those it indicts. The ICC may not deter every genocidist, but it will warn every future tyrant who believes he or she can get away with mass murder. Despite the opposition of the U.S. government, which is still advocating impunity for U.S. officials (a position that would have immunized every tyrant of the last century), the ICC is now a reality and will be able to try perpetrators of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Through referral by the U.N. Security Council, the ICC Prosecutor has undertaken investigations and prosecutions of crimes against humanity and genocide in Darfur, Sudan. Building a Mass Movement Against Genocide These institutional changes will not be enough to end genocide in the twenty-first century. Eventually we must return to the problem of political will. It was not for want of U.N. peace-keepers in Rwanda that 800,000 people were murdered. They perished because of the complete lack of political will by the world's leaders to save them. Indeed, it was their political will to actually withdraw the U.N. peace-keepers and leave them to their murderers. Neither the U.S. nor any other member of the U.N. Security Council had the political will to risk one of their citizens to rescue 800,000 Tutsis from genocide. There is something profoundly wrong about that. The wrong stems from the problem of ethno-centrism. The US, UK, France, Russia, China and the UN drew a circle, that shut Rwandans out of our common humanity. In October 2000, the second debate of the candidates for President of the United States demonstrated that neither candidate had learned the lessons of Rwanda. Then Governor George W. Bush said the U.S. was right not to send in U.S. troops because Rwanda is not in the sphere of America's national interests. Then U.S. Vice President Al Gore tried to excuse the Clinton administration's policy failure by saying the U.S. had no allies to go in with, as it did in Bosnia; ignoring the fact that 2500 U.N. peace-keepers were already on the ground in Rwanda. Evidently, he dismissed the use of the U.N. as a multi-lateral peace-keeper. We must create a world-wide movement to end genocide, like the movement to abolish slavery in the nineteenth century. National leaders must learn that if they do not stop genocides, they will be voted out of office.The Alliance Against Genocide was organized at the Hague Appeal for Peace in May 1999 to mobilize the international political will to halt genocide once and for all.The Alliance envisions a world-wide network of organizations working together and separately toward that common goal. The first job in preventing and stopping genocide is getting the facts in clear, indisputable form to policy makers. Some of that job is done by the news media. But conveying the information is not enough. It must be interpreted so that policy makers understand that genocidal massacres are systematic; that the portents of genocide are as compelling as warnings of a hurricane. Then options for action must be suggested to those who make policy, and they must be lobbied to take action. Policy makers act when they feel public pressure to act. If the international campaign is to be effective, it must build an international mass movement that will exert the political and cultural pressure on world leaders necessary to create political will. Only fifty years ago, segregation was still the law in the southern United States and less than twenty years ago apartheid still ruled South Africa. But in both the U.S. and South Africa, mass movements created the political will to change the laws and gradually the cultures of racism are changing as well. Non-violent resistance finally broke up the Soviet communist empire, once thought to be frozen forever in tyranny. Mass movements must mobilize the religious leaders, the celebrities and stars, the churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples. We must make indifference to genocide culturally unacceptable and politically impossible. We must educate and advocate, demonstrate and legislate. Just as the nineteenth century was the century of the movement to abolish slavery, let us make the twenty- first the century when we abolish genocide. Genocide, like slavery, is caused by human will. Human will -- including our will -- can end it. References Carnegie Commission Report on Preventing Deadly Conflict (2001), Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Harff, Barbara (2003). Assessing Risks of Genocide and American Political Science Review (February) 97(1): 57-73. Harff, Barbara (1998).In Preventive Measures: Building Risk Assessment and Crisis Early Warning Systems, ed. L. Davies and T.R. Gurr. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Krain, Matthew (1997). -Sponsored Mass Murder: The Onset and Severity of Genocides and Crimes Against Humanity. Journal of Conflict Resolution 41: 331-360. Alan J. Kuperman (2001). The Limits of Humanitarian Intervention. Genocide in Rwanda, The Brookings Institution Press, Washington, D.C. Rummel, Rudy (1994). Death by Government. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.Stanton, Gregory (1998) Stanton, Gregory (1998) The Ten Stages of Genocide. Yale Genocide Studies Series, GS01, February, 1998. updated at https://www.genocidewatch.com/tenstages Stanton, Gregory (2004a) The UN Needs a Genocide Prevention Center, Stockholm International Forum on Genocide Prevention, Proceedings, January 2004. Stanton, Gregory (2004c) Could The Rwandan Genocide Have Been Prevented? Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 6, No. 2, June 2004, 211- 228. updated at https://www.genocidewatch.com/_files/ugd/df1038_f7be8c52217e42a98836121318b7d146.pdf Stanton, Gregory (2005). in Apsel, ed., Darfur: Genocide Before Our Eyes, Institute for the Study of Genocide, 43 - 47. U.N. Doc. A/55/305 S/2000/809 (2000). The Brahimi Report of the Panel onU.N. Peace Opereations. New York: United Nations. U.N. Doc. A/59/565 (2005). A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility: Report of the High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change. New York: United Nations. Endnotes [1] Forthcoming in Totten, ed. Genocide: An Annotated Bibliographic Review. Routledge, 2006. [2] Rummel has recently revised his estimate of the death toll from twentieth century genocide, politicide and other mass murder to 262 million. (personal communication) [3] It is worth noting that The Military Staff Committee envisioned by Article 47 of the U.N. Charter has never been formed. It was meant to be a permanent military command that would assist the Security Council in planning application of armed force under Chapter VII (peacemaking without host country consent.)

What is Genocide? By Dr. Gregory H. Stanton President, Genocide Watch The crime of genocide is defined in international law in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. The Genocide Convention was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 9 December 1948. The Convention entered into force on 12 January 1951. By 2020, 152 nations have ratified the Genocide Convention and over 80 nations have provisions for the punishment of genocide in domestic criminal law. The text of Article II of the Genocide Convention was included as a crime in Article 6 of the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. “Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. Article III: The following acts shall be punishable: (a) Genocide; (b) Conspiracy to commit genocide; (c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide; (d) Attempt to commit genocide; (e) Complicity in genocide.” The crime of genocide has three elements: 1 . acts of genocide, committed with 2. intent to destroy, in whole or in part, 3. a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group The following are genocidal acts when committed as part of a policy to destroy a group, in whole or in part: a. Killing members of the group includes direct killing and actions causing death. b. Causing serious bodily or mental harm includes inflicting trauma on members of the group through widespread torture, rape, sexual violence, forced or coerced use of drugs, and mutilation. c. Deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to destroy a group includes the deliberate deprivation of resources needed for the group’s physical survival, such as clean water, food, clothing, shelter or medical services. Deprivation of the means to sustain life can be imposed through confiscation of harvests, blockade of foodstuffs, bombing of hospitals, bombing of civilian housing, detention in camps, forcible relocation or expulsion into deserts. d. Prevention of births includes involuntary sterilization, forced abortion, prohibition of marriage, and long-term separation of men and women intended to prevent procreation. e. Forcible transfer of children may be imposed by direct force, removal of children to schools where their language or culture is prohibited, or through fear of violence, duress, detention, human trafficking, psychological oppression or other methods of coercion. The Convention on the Rights of the Child defines children as persons under the age of 14 years. Genocidal acts need not kill or cause the death of members of a group. Genocide does not require killing. Causing serious bodily or mental harm, inflicting unlivable conditions, prevention of births, and transfer of children are acts of genocide when committed as part of a policy to destroy a group’s existence. It is a crime to plan or incite genocide, even before destruction starts, and to aid or abet genocide. The crime includes conspiracy, direct and public incitement, attempts to commit genocide, and complicity in genocide, through provision of arms to perpetrators, and blocking of aid to victims. Civil or international war is often accompanied by genocide. War, including defensive war or counter-insurgency against terrorism, is not an excuse for genocide. Euphemisms such as "ethnic cleansing" or "atrocities" are terms often used for genocide denial. Neither is outlawed by treaty in international law. "Ethnic cleansing" is a term introduced by Slobodan Milosevic during the Bosnian and Kosovo genocides. It is also a euphemism for "deportation or forcible transfer of population," which is a crime against humanity under Article 7 of the Statute of the International Criminal Court. "Atrocities" is an umbrella term to cover genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, without specifying which crimes have been committed. It was intended to avoid legal debates and to motivate preventive action, but it has failed to do so. Instead it has become a term used by politicians, diplomats and human rights organizations to avoid legal precision. Element 1: Acts of GEnocide Element 1 “Intentional” means purposeful. Intent can be proven directly from statements or orders. But more often, it must be inferred from a pattern of coordinated acts. Intent is inferred from the consequences of those acts. Intent is different from motive. Whatever the motive for the crime (land expropriation, national security, territorial defense), if the perpetrators commit acts intended to destroy a group, even part of a group, it is genocide. The phrase “in whole or in part” is important. Perpetrators need not intend to destroy the entire group. Destruction of only part of a group (such as its educated members, or members living in one region) is also genocide. A common error of genocide deniers is denial that genocide has occurred because only part of a group, rather than the whole group, is targeted for destruction. Some national laws require intent to destroy a substantial number of a group’s members. But in international law and the International Criminal Court, an individual may be guilty of genocide even if he commits an act of genocide against only one person, so long as he knew he was participating in a larger plan to destroy a protected group. Element 2: Intent to Destroy (Dolus Specialis ) Element 2 The law protects four groups – national, ethnical, racial or religious groups. A national group means a set of individuals whose identity is defined by a common country of nationality or national origin. An ethnic group is a set of individuals whose identity is defined by common cultural traditions, language or heritage. A racial group means a set of individuals whose identity is defined by physical characteristics. A religious group is a set of individuals whose identity is defined by common religious creeds, beliefs, doctrines, practices, or rituals. Element 3: Protected Group Element 3 Raphael Lemkin's Definition of Genocide Raphael Lemkin in his masterpiece “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe” (1943) invented the term “genocide,”by combining “genos” (race, people) and “cide” (to kill). Lemkin defined genocide as follows: “Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.” When Lemkin proposed a treaty against genocide to the United Nations in 1945, he defined it as follows: “The crime of genocide should be recognized therein as a conspiracy to exterminate national, religious or racial groups. The overt acts of such a conspiracy may consist of attacks against life, liberty or property of members of such groups merely because of their affiliation with such groups. The formulation of the crime may be as follows: “Whoever, while participating in a conspiracy to destroy a national, racial or religious group, undertakes an attack against life, liberty or property of members of such groups is guilty of the crime of genocide.” Raphael Lemkin would have included protection for political, economic, social, and cultural groups in the Genocide Convention. But nations that in the past or present had committed crimes against humanity in their territories or their colonial empires, including the Soviet Union, the USA, the United Kingdom, France, Brazil, Venezuela, Peru, the Philippines, the Dominican Republic, Iran, Egypt, Belgium, and Uruguay voted to exclude those groups from the Genocide Convention. Copyright 2020 Genocide Watch, Inc. Genocide Watch proposed Optional Protocol to the Genocide Convention Read it in English or French along with a Fact Sheet/Explication about the proposed Protocol. Optional Protocol to the Genocide Convention (English ) (French ) Questions about the Optional Protocol to the Genocide Convention (English ) (French ) Resources The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Genocide Convention) UN Factsheets on the Genocide Convention: ( English )( French )( Spanish ) Map of State Parties to the Genocide Convention

Colombia Country Overview CIA World Factbook Targeted Groups Perpetrators Alert Status Genocide Stage(s) Indigenous and rural communities Human rights activists Non-state armed groups Warning Stage 5: Organization, Stage 8: Persecution Details Armed groups are carrying out massacres and targeted killings of civilians, indigenous communities, and human rights leaders. The Colombian government is seriously lacking in protecting these communities. Read Report Page last updated: 05/06/2026 Resources Videos Show the Violent, and Deadly, Ways Colombian Police Quell Protests Left Undefended: Killings of Rights Defenders in Colombia’s Remote Communities Informe de Masacres en Colombia Durante el 2020 y 2021 (Report of Massacres in Colombia during 2020 and 2021)

Latest News Reshaping Europe Through Parliament By: Alexander Smith Far-right Patriots for Europe group meets in Madrid, February 8-9, 2025. (X/Viktor Orban). The far right has resurged across Europe. Over the past decade, the United Kingdom left the European Union (EU) after a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment; the National Front in France took more than 100 seats in the French parliament; Germany's right-wing became the second largest party in its parliament; dissatisfaction with mainstream governments surged across the c Genocide Watch 5 minutes ago 1 min read West Africa Monthly Report: July 2026 West Africa in July 2026 saw worsening political repression, conflict, human-rights abuses and drug-related crises, alongside severe flooding and health challenges, while some countries made progress in healthcare and vaccination. Genocide Watch 18 hours ago 5 min read Nigeria and the Sahel: A growing security divide A widening diplomatic rift is complicating efforts to confront a shared cross-border security threat. Al Jazeera 22 hours ago 4 min read TTPS on alert after 11 bomb threats in 40 minutes By Anna-Lisa Paul, Senior Reporter, anna-lisa.paul@guardian.co.tt August 20, 2026 Valpark Plaza, Valpark (Source: Trinidad & Tobago Guardian) Chaguanas Magistrates' Court (Source: Trinidad & Tobago Guardian) Security agencies across Trinidad and Tobago, including the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service (TTPS) and the Trinidad and Tobago Fire Service (TTFS), were placed on high alert yesterday, after a series of 11 bomb threats targeted several courts, a shopping plaza and a go Trinidad & Tobago Guardian 3 days ago 3 min read Ecuador intelligence chief & 5 Americans killed in crash By Basillioh Rukanga, Thomas Mukhwana, Reporting fromin Nairobi, Henry Moore and Vanessa Buschschluter Published August 19, 2026 Rescue officials at the crash site in a remote area of Samburu County by Mount Ololokwe (Source: Kenya Red Cross/Handout via Reuters) Ecuador's intelligence chief and his wife have been killed in a helicopter that crashed at Mount Ololokwe in central Kenya. Michele Sensi-Contugi, 44, and his wife, fashion designer Stephany Hollihan, 42, were among t BBC News 3 days ago 3 min read Death and torture of a man spark protests in Syria Picture showing White Helmets volunteer unconscious and with bruises on his body went viral By William Christou Mourners carry the coffin of Mohammad Ghamira for burial in the village of al-Haffah, in Latakia province, Syria on Monday. Photograph: AP Syrians have protested over the death of a man who was arrested and allegedly beaten by security forces, sparking widespread anger at a practice thought to have ended with the fall of Bashar al-Assad. A crowd gathered in the city The Guardian 3 days ago 3 min read Israel strikes Idlib airbase; US, Türkiye condemn escalation By Al Jazeera Staff, AP and Reuters August 18, 2026 Eight air strikes hit an airbase in northwestern Syria's Idlib governorate, state TV reports [Al Jazeera] Turkiye rejects Israeli allegations that it posed a threat by preparing to send troops to airbase in Syria’s Idlib. Israel has bombed an airbase in Syria’s Idlib, according to Syrian media, with Turkiye denouncing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “expansionist” policies and the United States criticising what i Al Jazeera 3 days ago 3 min read Explosion in Kabul school injures at least 42 children By Mohammad Yunus Yawar August 18, 2026 Members of the Hazara community pray outside a mosque on the outskirts of Kabul, Afghanistan in October 2021 (AAMIR QURESHI / AFP - Getty Images) KABUL, Aug 18 (Reuters) - An explosion at an education centre in Kabul injured at least 42 children on Monday, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan said on Tuesday, calling for an "investigation to establish the circumstances of this incident." The blast occurred on Monday ev AFP, AP and Reuters 4 days ago 2 min read Brazil Demarcates Land for Isolated Amazon Indigenous Group Brazil marks borders for isolated Indigenous group in the Amazon after decades. Shanna Hanbury August 19, 2026 The first sign demarcating the Rio Pardo Kawahiva Indigenous Territory. Image courtesy of FUNAI. Agents of Brazil’s Indigenous agency, FUNAI, spent 60 days in June and July 2026 physically marking the borders of the Rio Pardo Kawahiva Indigenous Territory. The 411,000-hectare (1 million-acre) area in the Amazon biome of Mato Grosso state is home to the Kawahiva, an i Mongabay 4 days ago 2 min read How Pakistan Crushed Protests in Kashmir By Aqil Shah August 17, 2026 Protestors burn tyres along a road after clashes with police in Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-administered Kashmir on July 31, 2026. (Sajjad Qayyum-AFP via Getty Images) Irish poets and American presidents have long spoken of Kashmir: its beauty and its dangers. The question of Kashmir has shaped the trajectories of India and Pakistan since the end of British rule and their birth as nation-states in August 1947. Both countries claim Kashmir in its enti TIME 5 days ago 7 min read Country Report: Belarus August 2026 By Sophia Khan Belarus opposition supporters lay flowers near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester, died on Aug. 10, 2020, during a protest in Minsk. (Sergei Gapon/AFP via Getty Images) Although Belarus was a founding republic of the Soviet Union, the 1988 discovery of mass grave sites from Stalin-era targeting prompted calls for independence. Belarus declared independence on August 25, 1991, after the dissolution of the Soviet U Genocide Watch 6 days ago 2 min read The Illegal Abduction of Ukrainian Children Special Report, August 2026 By Sophia Khan, Beth Paul, Alexander Smith, and Emily Mullin Ukrainian children fleeing Russian aggression (Mirek Pruchnicki from Przemyśl, Sanok, Polska, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons) The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Parliamentary Assembly has publicly presented its 2026 report by the Special Envoy on Russian Abductions and Deportations of Ukrainian Children. The report stresses that the situation on the return o Genocide Watch 6 days ago 8 min read Trump Extends His Military Reach into Latin America August 13, 2026 By Luis Doncel and Carlos S. Maldonado (EL PAÍS) Hegseth announces that he has not ruled out a military option in Havana and proposes operations on Colombian soil. Trump’s strategy to control the region is met with resistance from Mexico and submission from Central America. Pete Hegseth attends the exercises that are part of PANAMAX 2026 in Panama City on August 13. Photo: Aris Martínez / Reuters The Trump administration can be accused of many things, but not El País 7 days ago 6 min read First Nations call to outlaw residential school denial Assembly of First Nations calls for criminalization of residential school denialism Jackie McKay July 15, 2026 'It is a shame to live in a country that will not protect our people from hate crimes,' says MKO grand chief Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak Grand Chief Garrison Settee speaks at a news conference in Ottawa on Wednesday. (Pierre-Paul Couture/Radio-Canada) The Assembly of First Nations (AFN) has passed an emergency resolution that calls on Canada to criminalize reside CBC News Aug 13 3 min read Protests Clash over Private Property Bill in Buenos Aires Protesters clash with police in Buenos Aires over Private Property Bil August 07, 2026 Thousands rally against Milei-backed legislation as unrest leaves at least three injured and 10 arrested. A demonstrator holds a national flag amid tear gas during protest outside the National Congress in Buenos Aires on August 6, 2026, as senators debate a bill on the inviolability of private property. | Luis ROBAYO / AFP Thousands of people marched in Buenos Aires on Thursday to protest a Buenos Aires Times Aug 13 3 min read Trinidad & Tobago signs US deals paving way for data centers By Anselm Gibbs Updated 10:10 PM BST, July 11, 2026 Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar stands at the State Department in Washington, Sept. 30, 2025. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File) PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad (AP) — Trinidad and Tobago has signed agreements paving the way for U.S. companies to begin groundwork for installing large data centers in the Caribbean nation, sparking concerns about potential energy consumption and environmental impacts. The mem AP News Aug 13 2 min read Mexico & Peru restore diplomatic relations after asylum row By Rorey Bosotti August 07, 2026 Former Peruvian PM Betssy Chávez was granted asylum by Mexico in November 2025 (Source: Reuters) Mexico and Peru have agreed to re-establish diplomatic relations following a row over the granting of asylum to a former Peruvian prime minister who was charged for a 2022 coup attempt. In a joint statement released on 7 August, Lima and Mexico City said "historic ties of brotherhood, friendship and cooperation" prompted the reconciliation. The two BBC News Aug 13 2 min read Ecuador charges ex-minister over candidate’s murder By Aleks Phillips August 09, 2026 Fernando Villavicencio was shot dead at a campaign event in the capital, Quito, days before the election in 2023 (Source: Getty Images) Prosecutors in Ecuador have charged a former interior minister and six others on suspicion of being involved in the assassination of a presidential candidate in 2023. José Serrano and the head of cartel Los Lobos, Wilmer "Pipo" Chavarria, were implicated in the murder of Fernando Villavicencio at a campaign e BBC News Aug 13 2 min read Country report: Russia August 2026 By Alexander Smith A firefighter works at a site in a residential area damaged during a Russian missile strike amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Kyiv, Ukraine. September 21, 2023. Image: Reuters/Valentyn Ogirenko. Russia has a long history of documented persecution of ethnic minorities and societal dissidents. Imperial Russia organized anti-Jewish pogroms. According to the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium, the Soviet Union committed a genocide against Ukrainians dur Genocide Watch Aug 11 3 min read Houthi Missile and Drone Attacks Kill Seven in Yemen By Al Jazeera Staff, AFP, Reuters and the Associated Press August 10, 2026 The latest Houthi attacks come less than 24 hours after an earlier barrage struck al-Makha (Mocha) and its commercial port. Smoke rises during Houthi missile and drone attacks on the Red Sea port city of al-Makha, Yemen, on August 9, 2026. Credit: Reuters in Al Jazeera Yemen’s Houthis have launched a new wave of missile and drone attacks on the Red Sea port city of al-Makha (Mocha), extending an assaul Al Jazeera Aug 11 3 min read Pakistan-administered Kashmir Votes Amid Civil Unrest By Abid Hussain August 10, 2026 Voting postponed in seven of 11 Poonch division constituencies as boycott calls and violence mar the region’s legislative elections. A man casts his ballot at a polling station during the second phase of elections for the regional Legislative Assembly in Muzaffarabad, Pakistan-administered Kashmir, on August 2, 2026. Credit: Amiruddin Mughal & EPA in Al Jazeera Islamabad, Pakistan – Voting is under way in the third and final phase of Pakistan-a Al Jazeera Aug 11 2 min read Ousted Sheikh Hasina Announces Return Following Exile By Sheikh Saaliq and Julhas Alam August 5, 2026 Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina arrives to attend The Queen’s Dinner during the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) at Buckingham Palace in London on April 19, 2018. Credit: Daniel Leal-Olivas and Pool Photo in AP News NEW DELHI (AP) — Ousted former Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina said Wednesday that she plans to return to her country from exile in India in December despite facing a death sentence i AP News Aug 11 2 min read India uses Tear Gas and Batons Against Youth Protests By Reuters August 11, 2026 Students and unemployed youth in Jharkhand, one of India’s poorer states, launched the protests late last month over the alleged wrongdoing including recruitment test paper leaks. Police used water cannon to disperse demonstrators during a protest in Ranchi, India, on Monday. Credit: Rajesh Kumar and AFP via Getty Images in NBC BHUBANESWAR, India — Police in eastern India used tear gas, batons and water cannon to disperse thousands of youth proteste NBC News Aug 11 2 min read Country Report: Costa Rica July 2026 By Juliana Girotto Migrants at the Paso Canoas refugee camp in Puntarenas, Costa Rica, on August 9.Ezequiel Becerra/AFP/Getty Images/FILE Costa Rica is historically regarded as one of Latin America's strongest countries in terms of defending human rights and political stability. Over the past few years, however, several trends have drawn concern from United Nations (UN) agencies and regional human rights groups, such as strain on migrants and refugees, a rollback of protectio Genocide Watch Aug 10 3 min read Country Report: Japan July 2026 By Genocide Watch Image by Bloomberg via Getty Images Japan has long practiced historical revisionism regarding their Empire-era atrocities. From the late 1800s to 1945, the Japanese Empire committed numerous war crimes against multiple peoples across the Asia-Pacific region. Often referred to as the Asian Holocaust, these atrocities included genocide and other mass atrocities during the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II. Its actions included, starvation, forced assim Genocide Watch Aug 10 3 min read 1 2 3 4 5

< Back Nigeria Team Report: July 29th, 2025 Photo credit: A uniformed civilian guard volunteer bravely leads his team protecting a civilian gathering in Bokkos on September 21. Credit: Masara Kim. On the night of July 15, 2025 , armed men, suspected Fulani militants, attacked Bindi, a Christian farming village in Plateau State. Over 100 assailants descended on the community from multiple directions, killing at least 27 civilians, including women and children. Despite being stationed just two miles away, soldiers from Operation Safe Haven reportedly failed to respond to urgent calls for help. This attack mirrors a broader and escalating pattern of violence across Nigeria’s Middle Belt, where well-armed Fulani militia groups repeatedly target Christian-majority communities in Benue, Plateau, and Kaduna States. Just weeks earlier, in Yelwata (Benue), more than 200 civilians were killed in coordinated night raids. In many cases, churches are burned, homes razed, and survivors displaced. Despite the scale of violence, Nigeria’s federal government has not designated these groups as terrorists, nor launched a coordinated national response. Officials often refer to the attacks as “farmer-herder clashes,” a term that minimizes their organized, religiously targeted nature of the attacks. Between 2019 and 2023, Fulani militants were responsible for more civilian deaths than Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) combined, according to the Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa. This brings us back to the persistent denial of what is, in reality, a targeted campaign of violence, too often dismissed under the cover of climate change narratives. As Genocide Watch has documented through interviews with Nigerian journalists on the ground, this is not about environmental conflict. These are deliberate, organized attacks. Communities are being terrorized, abandoned by those meant to protect them, and left to live in fear while the international community looks the other way. Survivors and community leaders accuse the military of repeated inaction. In multiple attacks, including Bindi, military units in proximity either arrived late or not at all. Some villagers resort to defending themselves with homemade weapons, risking arrest for doing so. The violence has displaced tens of thousands and destabilized agricultural output. Experts warn that climate pressure, land scarcity, and impunity are intensifying the crisis. Calls for stronger military accountability, counter-terrorism designations, and civilian protection mechanisms have so far gone unanswered. As the death toll rises, Nigeria’s Christian communities are left increasingly exposed, and unheard. Previous Next

Life Conditions Destruction *For older content until April 2016, please refer to our archival websites We're Entering a Terrifying New Era of Genocide. Child in Gaza. Source: The International Rescue Committee I’m a Scholar of Genocide. We’re Entering a Terrifying New Era. The New York Times July 21, 2026 By Omer Bartov Dr. Bartov is a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University. How do genocides end? In most cases, there are two options. Either the perpetrators accomplish their goal, or a military force stops them, and accountability ensues. In 1904 the Imperial German Army began a campaign that nearly w Deadly Ethnic Violence Spreads in India’s Manipur State Deadly Ethnic Violence Spreads in India’s Manipur State New York Times May 26, 2026 By Hari Kumar Three years after riots tore apart Manipur, the state remains in disarray. Barbed wire and armed checkpoints made it difficult for Times reporters to cross, even before the recent clashes. Security personnel at a buffer-zone checkpoint between Imphal and Churachandpur in Manipur, India, in March. .Credit:..All Photographs by Atul Loke A fresh outbreak of ethnic conflict is rocki Urgent Threat of Genocidal Massacres in El Obeid, Sudan Genocide Emergency July 2026 By Grace Harris The Sudanese city of El-Obeid, where a drone strike killed 10 people including seven children on Monday, a medical source told AFP. (Credit: Reuters/File) Genocide Watch is issuing a Genocide Emergency Alert for Sudan. The besieged city of El Obeid, Sudan is at immediate risk of genocidal massacres as Rapid Support Forces (RSF) surround the city now held by the Sudan Armed Forces. El Obeid, the capital of North Kordofan, lies

Genocide Watch issues countries at risk reports for various countries around the world in danger of mass killing or genocide. GENOCIDE WATCH STATEMENTS "Ethnic Cleansing" is a Euphemism Used for Genocide Denial | Dr. Gregory H. Stanton Declaration on the 50th Anniversary Commemoration of the Bangladesh Genocide Hope Died In Afghanistan | Dr. Gregory H. Stanton Genocide Watch Rejects Conspiracy Theories About COVID Vaccines The "Stolen Election": Trump's Big Lie | Dr. Gregory H. Stanton QAnon is a Nazi Cult, Rebranded | Dr. Gregory H. Stanton White Genocide is NOT underway in South Africa | Dr. Gregory H. Stanton Call it Genocide: Myanmar's Genocide Against the Rohingya | Dr. Gregory H. Stanton Could the Rwandan Genocide Have Been Prevented? | Dr. Gregory H. Stanton Watch Dr. Gregory Stanton's Tedx Talk, "The Call" Genocide Watch Statement on Forced Family Separation, Detention and Deportation

The Call By Gregory H. Stanton Published in Samuel Totten & Steven L. Jacobs Pioneers in Genocide Studies © Transaction Publishers 2002 I probably have human rights in my family unconscious, if there is such a thing. I am a descendant of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a founder of the woman’s liberation movement, and of Henry Brewster Stanton, an ardent abolitionist. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s portrait hung over my great grandfather’s mantel in Johnstown, New York. I grew up in the home of Howard Stanton, a Presbyterian pastor, and Alison Stanton, an English teacher. While my father was a student at Oberlin in 1942, he led one of the first sit-ins in the United States, to integrate the town barbershop. In the small Illinois town where I grew up, Dad was the pastor of the elite church in town. When community leaders asked him to head the campaign to raise funds for a new swimming pool, his barber tipped him that they intended to exclude Negroes. Dad went to them and quietly told them that he would not only refuse to raise the money if they did so, but would denounce a segregated pool from the pulpit. The leaders backed down, Dad raised the money and the town got an integrated swimming pool. The secret of Dad’s influence was that people knew he loved them. He persuaded the manager of the largest factory in town, a member of his church, to give African-Americans jobs other than janitor. He formed an inter-racial council to get realtors to stop confining African-Americans to the other side of the tracks, bringing housing integration long before it was mandated by law. Sometimes it took courage. We once had a brick thrown through our front window after Dad preached a sermon denouncing Senator Joseph McCarthy’s politics of character assassination. My parents taught us that true meaning in life comes from service to God and to other people, not fame or fortune. Just before I began high school, I committed my life to God. It was a conversion experience, the sort William James writes about, and it changed my life. Like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Pope John 23rd, my theology is “personalist.” I have had a personal relationship with God and also believe that it is between persons that God’s presence can be most palpably experienced, through love and justice. I have prayed about every important decision in my life. In the final judgment, I believe that we should not be concerned about our own salvation, but about the suffering of others, about healing the sick, clothing the naked, and feeding the hungry. That is what Jesus and the prophets taught, and their teaching is what guides me. I was a voting rights worker in Leake County, Mississippi in 1966 and still think it was the most dangerous place I’ve ever worked, including Cambodia and Rwanda. Two of my friends were wounded one night when the Ku Klux Klan shot up the house the group was staying in. I joined the Peace Corps after college and then attended Harvard Divinity School to prepare for a secular ministry. But my personal call to work against genocide came only after I had completed my Ph.D. course-work in cultural anthropology at the University of Chicago and enrolled at Yale Law School. Learning About the Cambodian Genocide First-Hand In 1980, while in my second year at Yale Law School, Church World Service (CWS), the relief arm of the National Council of Churches, U.S.A., called me and asked me to become the Phnom Penh Field Director for a consortium of American relief groups that included CWS, CARE, and Lutheran World Relief. I was to plan and set up a relief and rehabilitation program that would not only bring in immediate food aid, but also provide longer-term assistance to Cambodian recovery, including veterinary medicine, irrigation engineering, rice seed production, and primary school education. I had not sought the job. CWS called me because my college roommate was in charge of the CWS program in New York and figured I was tough enough to take the assignment. At first I asked CWS to try to find someone else. My wife, Mary Ellen, and I hoped to start a family, and thought that service in Cambodia would postpone our dream. Little did we know! Six weeks later, CWS called back and asked again, and I promised that I would pray about it. It was a fateful promise. I don’t hear voices or see visions, but I do believe in God’s inspiration. The response to my prayers was consistent and clear. As my favorite Labor Law professor, Jack Getman, who is Jewish, told me, “Greg, you have to go. You’ve been called.” What I did not expect was that I had been called to witness the aftermath of the Cambodian genocide. It was a call that changed my life. In the months before I left for Cambodia, I read the accounts of the Khmer Rouge killing fields. Haunting images of Cambodian refugees were appearing on the covers of magazines, and tales of the Khmer Rouge atrocities were finally being told to a world that had not wanted to believe them. Books like Murder of a Gentle Land by John Barron and Anthony Paul and Cambodia Year Zero by Francois Ponchaud had been dismissed as “anti-communist propaganda” by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in After the Cataclysm. Now, as the weight and consistency of the refugee stories became overwhelming, and as the mass graves were opened, the world saw that the bloodbath predicted by “anti-communists” was a fact. As a student of international law, I realized that because Cambodia was a state-party to the Genocide Convention and because the Khmer Rouge still held Cambodia’s seat in the United Nations, a compelling case could be taken against Cambodia to the World Court for breach of the Genocide Convention, and the very people who committed the crimes would still be legally required to answer the charges. It was a unique opportunity. A well-organized group of human rights investigators, preferably an already existing, well-financed group like the International Commission of Jurists, could gather the evidence of genocide because the Khmer Rouge no longer controlled Cambodia, and then find a state-party to the Genocide Convention to charge Cambodia with violation of the Convention before the International Court of Justice. I discussed the idea with Yale Law Professors Myres McDougall, Michael Reisman, and Burke Marshall and all thought my idea sound. In June, 1980 on my way into Cambodia, I met David Hawk (the former executive director of Amnesty International U.S.A.) who was then working for the World Conference on Religion and Peace in Bangkok, and proposed my plan to him. It was the first time he had heard the idea, and he encouraged me to contact leaders of human rights organizations in New York about it when I returned to the U.S. In Cambodia, I discussed my idea with government officials. Ben Kiernan, currently professor of history at Yale University and director of the Yale Genocide Studies Program, was in Cambodia doing research for his Ph.D. dissertation on the Khmer Rouge, and we also discussed the plan. Ben proved to be enthusiastic about it. Ben and I have worked together ever since to document the crimes of the Khmer Rouge and to bring their leaders to justice. Ben and I were among the first Westerners to see the newly opened mass grave at Choeng Ek, where the Khmer Rouge buried over 7,000 victims of the Tuol Sleng extermination prison in Phnom Penh. There were so many bodies in the mass graves that the decomposition was not yet complete. Flesh still clung to human bones. The stench of death seared my nostrils. The stories of survivors still haunt me. Every Cambodian had lost family members, and their stories crushed my soul. In our interviews in Cham Muslim villages, Ben Kiernan and I learned that the Chams and other minorities were singled out for extermination. Sop Pidas, a Cham Muslim grandmother told me through her tears how she had lost her entire family when the Khmer Rouge on one terrible night in 1977 beat 5,000 Chams to death. Her husband, a leader in the Cham community, was singled out and soaked with gasoline before he was set on fire. Her infant grandchild was murdered by dashing her brains out against a tree. Gai Marianne, another Cham woman, told me that she had helped her sister-in-law suckle her new-born infant. Both women and their babies were moved to a new commune, but the sister-in-law fell behind, leaving Gai Marianne to care for both babies. A Khmer Rouge cadre took the sister-in-law’s eight-week-old baby and threw him into the jungle to die. “You have no need for two small babies,” he explained. Cham children were taken away from their parents, put into youth communes, and all Chams were forbidden to speak the Cham language. This intentional destruction of the Cham ethnic and religious group was clear genocide under the Genocide Convention. Daily I saw the beggars in Phnom Penh, the maimed victims of American cluster bombs and Khmer Rouge mines. Lars Salemark, a Swedish Red Cross surgeon, told me of operating on a boy who was born with congenital defects in his right leg and left hand. While taking his water buffalo to pasture, he stepped on a newly laid Khmer Rouge landmine that destroyed his left leg and right hand, leaving him crippled in all four limbs. The stories of the orphans were the hardest to drive out of my mind. Chuan Phalla, a fifteen-year-old orphan, told me how she had managed to survive only by hiding under the body of her dead sister in a mass grave. The orphaned son of the Phnom Penh train station-master had watched the Khmer Rouge disembowel his parents before his eyes. They left a hole in his heart that couldn’t be filled by all his tears. At the Choeng Ek mass grave, I wept when I found a Mickey Mouse T-shirt on a tiny skeleton. Who, I asked, could commit such monstrous crimes? Returning to Yale in 1981, I should have been elated to come home. A mission accomplished. A bright future. But instead I slid into a deep depression. I finally consulted a doctor who told me, “Depression is repressed anger. What are you angry about?” “I’m angry at the Khmer Rouge — about the terrible injustice in Cambodia. They have gotten away with mass murder.” It was then that I realized that instead of turning the anger destructively upon myself, I should carry out my plans to bring the Khmer Rouge to justice. And so The Cambodian Genocide Project was born. What that doctor at Yale told me about repressed anger has also helped me understand many of the experiences I have had in the human rights field since. If we do not convert our anger into constructive action, it can leak out sideways, so to speak, and be displaced upon the very people with whom we should be working. The result is a phenomenon that is paradoxical: that people in the human rights movement can be even more turf-conscious, back-stabbing, and self-righteous than people in other fields. The internecine battles among Cambodia scholars and human rights advocates are among the bloodiest cases of academic fratricide I have ever experienced. The attacks on Ben Kiernan by Stephen Morris, the Wall Street Journal, and Congressman Campbell were an extreme example of such vicious character assassination. Claiming that Kiernan had supported the Khmer Rouge in an undergraduate article in 1975, they attacked his credentials to lead the Cambodian Genocide Program at Yale. They ignored the fact that in 1978, Kiernan had publicly said he was wrong (something many have yet to do) and has spent the past twenty years documenting the crimes of the Pol Pot regime. Ben was untenured at the time of the attacks, and they were aimed not only at his work to document the crimes of the Khmer Rouge, but also at wrecking his professional career. Fortunately, he withstood them, and they did not succeed. It may be that such vicious personal attacks are indirect reflections of the evil we confront (see Kiernan, 2000, April/June). The Cambodian Genocide Project In the spring of 1981 after returning to the U.S., I went to New York lawyer William Butler, Chairman of the Board of the International Commission of Jurists, headquartered in Geneva, and asked his organization to document the Khmer Rouge crimes and call for a nation to take the case to the World Court. I was surprised when he sent me a reply saying that he had subsequently discussed the idea with the U.S. State Department, which opposed the plan, and he questioned whether the killings in Cambodia constituted “genocide.” Such “definitionalism” has plagued the anti-genocide movement since Stalin got political mass murder removed from the Genocide Convention in 1948. It has paralyzed the will of thousands of lawyers. Stalin’s ghost must snicker that he again used the appearance of law to deny justice. We were again to see “definitionalism;” this time, as grotesque denial in the State Department’s refusal to use the word “genocide” to describe the mass murders in Rwanda. Personally, I accept the definition of genocide in the Genocide Convention, “the intentional destruction, in whole or in part, of a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such.” But I am equally horrified by political mass murder, one more form of mass killing because of group membership. Debating whether mass killing fits the conventional definition of genocide is most often an excuse for non-action, as it was in the Jurists’ refusal to investigate in Cambodia and in the West’s failure to stop the Rwandan genocide. It is true that most of the Khmer Rouge killings were political, so not technically genocide. But they also singled out the Muslim Cham, Buddhist monks, Christians, and ethnic minorities, thus committing classic “genocide.” One point many “definitionalists” often overlook about the definition is the “in part.” The mass killing does not have to be with the intent to kill an entire group for it to be genocide. They also often confuse “intent,” which is what a reasonable person would conclude to be the consequences of his acts, and motive – the motive of genocide may be to seize property or power, but the only intent a prosecutor has to prove is the intent to kill part of a group because of their national, ethnical, racial, or religious identity. In late 1981, David Hawk called me, and asked me to solicit a contribution from CWS so that we could travel together to Phnom Penh to begin the project I had proposed to him in 1980. I was delighted, wrote the letter to CWS, which gave us funding, and then I obtained visas that enabled us to travel through Vietnam to Cambodia. We traveled to Phnom Penh together in the spring of 1982, and obtained the permissions necessary to collect the evidence we needed. That summer I incorporated the Cambodian Genocide Project, Inc. as a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt, non-profit organization. (Hawk later established his own separate Cambodian Documentation Commission.) I eventually became a law professor at Washington and Lee University School of Law. And Ben Kiernan finished his Ph.D. and became a history professor at the University of Wollongong in Australia, and then at Yale University. We continued to work together through the 1980’s and 1990’s, doing research together in Cambodia under the auspices of the Cambodian Genocide Project, Inc. with a grant from the Lewis Law Center of Washington and Lee University. In 1986, we worked together in Australia to get the Australian government to take the case. In the U.S. in the 1990’s we worked on the Campaign to Oppose the Return of the Khmer Rouge. Since 1980 we have read and commented on each others’ papers (though Ben is a far more eminent and prolific scholar than I could ever be), defended each other against scurrilous attacks, celebrated each others’ children, and enjoyed the fullest and warmest professional relationship. In 1986 we discovered the Cambodian equivalent of the yellow star. The Khmer Rouge had evacuated the entire Eastern Zone in 1977-1978 because, according to their ideology, the population had “Khmer bodies but Vietnamese minds.” At the end of a hard day of interviewing and videotaping witness testimony in a Cham village, as we sat on a bamboo floor above the squawking chickens of a house where we would spend the night, Ben began to ask about the evacuation of the Eastern Zone, when the Khmer Rouge had forced everyone in Eastern Cambodia to leave for labor camps in central Cambodia. Being a cultural anthropologist with a keen sense of the importance of symbols, I asked what people wore during the evacuation. Black clothing and head scarves, we were told. But then I asked, “What color were the head scarves?” Everyone said, “They were blue and white.” I asked if the Khmer Rouge cadres wore the same color. “No.” was the reply. “Blue and white scarves were reserved for the evacuees.” “What did the color signify?” I asked. “It was the killing sign.” A cold chill of recognition shot through us. We had discovered the equivalent of the Nazi yellow star. We learned that evacuees from the Eastern Zone received the scarves near Phnom Penh, evidence of the Communist Party Central Committee’s direction, and were required to wear them at all times in public, just as Jews had been in the Third Reich. Chris Munger, a professional filmmaker, accompanied me on one of my trips in the summer of 1986, and his steady hand on the video camera produced tapes that I hope will someday be made into a documentary film about the Cambodian genocide. The Cambodian Genocide Project won a grant from the United States Institute of Peace to produce a rough cut of a film, but we have never secured adequate funding to complete the film. I have turned over all the videotape to the Cambodian Genocide Program at Yale, and also have originals, so I still hope a documentary filmmaker will be able to use the witness testimony we collected. Leo and Hilda Kuper became the most important influences on my thinking about genocide. I first got to know them through their books, particularly Leo’s seminal work on genocide, but we soon began to correspond, and they invited me to come out to Westwood (in Los Angeles County) to visit them on numerous occasions. Leo was not only a great sociologist and lawyer, but also a wonderful mentor. I loved to go for walks with him and their dog in the California sunshine. Hilda, a fellow anthropologist, also shared my love of poetry, which she wrote beautifully both in English and in Siswati (I was later told in Swaziland). Hilda and I discussed Swazi rituals, and I later became a Fulbright Professor of Law in Swaziland, where I was able to help arrange an invitation for Hilda to make a triumphal return to her anthropological homeland, where she was quite literally royally received. Leo invited me to become the American vice president of International Alert Against Genocide, an organization based in London that he had helped found. Leo became disappointed that International Alert mostly held academic conferences and had never issued an International Alert against a genocide. He was convinced that a new organization was needed for early warning and political action to prevent and stop genocide. In the late 1980’s, Leo and I made a futile trip together to New York to try to convince Human Rights Watch to establish a special project to be called Genocide Watch, but the Executive Director was too busy to meet with us, so we had coffee with an intern. I never gave up the idea and established Genocide Watch in 1998, though it would be far more effective if it were part of Human Rights Watch. It was created in order to organize the International Campaign to End Genocide, which I will describe in more detail below. In 1986, I spent part of the summer in Australia attempting to convince the Department of Foreign Affairs to take the case to the World Court. Australia was a good choice because it had no reservations to the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice. Many countries, including the U.S., require consent to the ICJ’s jurisdiction under the Genocide Convention’s Article 9, a reservation that could have been invoked reciprocally by the Khmer Rouge to get the case thrown out on technical grounds. Australian citizens had been murdered at Cambodia’s infamous Tuol Sleng prison. Australian Foreign Minister Hayden announced his support for a tribunal to try the Khmer Rouge the day after my first appearance on Australian television and radio. I lived at Wesley College of the University of Sydney, and acted as a consultant to the Department of Foreign Affairs in Canberra. But the Australian government finally declined to take the case on the erroneous ground that to do so would be to “recognize” the Khmer Rouge — even though cases in the World Court are brought by states against other states, not by governments as governments. I also later learned that the Australians had consulted the U.S. State Department, which remained opposed to the prosecution because it might legitimize the Vietnamese-backed regime in Phnom Penh and undermine the opposition coalition backed by Washington, a coalition that included the Khmer Rouge. Neither David Hawk, who took the case to Sweden, nor I could convince any other government to take the case to the World Court. I had learned lesson number one about the struggle against genocide: Genocide continues and its perpetrators escape with impunity because of failure of political will to enforce the law. The Genocide Convention is international law. But law is not effective until there is the authoritative decision to enforce it. So a group of Cambodia activists centered in Washington D.C., New Haven, and Virginia set out to change the political will of the U.S. government. Since the State Department was opposed to prosecuting the Khmer Rouge, we had to take the battle to the U.S. Congress. Sally Benson, a veteran Washington peace activist, Ben Kiernan, and others formed a coalition called the Campaign to Oppose the Return of the Khmer Rouge (CORKR), and we hired Craig Etcheson to run it. Etcheson, a political science Ph.D., had written The Rise and Demise of Democratic Kampuchea, one of the first analyses of the Pol Pot regime. Jeremy Stone, president of the Federation of American Scientists, provided us with office space. I served as Co-chairman of CORKR’s Justice Committee. Working with the staff of Senator Charles Robb (D – VA) the Cambodian Genocide Justice Act was drafted and attached to the State Department’s appropriation, which forced the State Department to establish an Office of Cambodian Genocide Investigations by July 1, 1994. (The State Department predictably opposed the Act because it earmarked funds for investigation of the Cambodian genocide.) Passed by overwhelming votes in both the House and Senate and signed by President Clinton, the Act declared that it is U.S. policy to support creation of a tribunal to try the leaders of the Khmer Rouge for genocide and other crimes against humanity. In 1992, I joined the State Department Foreign Service, and, in 1994 was assigned to work on the steering committee of the Office of Cambodian Genocide Investigations, under the superb leadership of Al LaPorta, who was rewarded for this service with the Ambassadorship to Mongolia. The act earmarked $800,000 for the project, and a competition was held to allocate $500,000 of it to conduct the main investigation in Cambodia. I recused myself from the decision about who would win the competition, but Yale’s Cambodian Genocide Program, led by Ben Kiernan and Craig Etcheson, unanimously won the contract to carry out the work of the Cambodian investigation. The Cambodian Genocide Program established the Documentation Center in Phnom Penh, which is ably headed by Youk Chhang, a university-educated Cambodian citizen who is tri-lingual in Khmer, English, and French, and who, more importantly, has the courage to ignore political pressures from the government and to carry on the investigation in spite of many threats to his life from the Khmer Rouge. Within the State Department, when it became evident that we knew the exact location of Pol Pot and could possibly encourage a commando raid from Thailand to seize him, several members of the War Crimes Working Group and Southeast Asia Bureau met to consider the matter. We jokingly referred to ourselves as the “Pol Pot Posse.” I wrote a paper entitled, “Options to Try Pol Pot,” on international or U.N.-assisted Cambodian tribunals to try the Khmer Rouge. The paper was cleared at the top levels of the Asian, Legal, Human Rights, U.N., International Organizations, Political, Deputy Secretary’s, and Secretary of State’s offices and became U.S. policy. The U.S. took that policy to the U.N., which created a commission of experts to recommend how to bring the Khmer Rouge to justice. The U.S. supported creation of an international or mixed international/Cambodian Tribunal, a policy adopted by the U.N. Security Council. The political will of the U.S. and the U.N. has finally been changed. At the time of this writing (January, 2001), the Cambodian National Assembly finally passed the legislation to establish the tribunal. It still remains to be seen whether the current Cambodian leadership will allow the timely establishment of the tribunal to try the Khmer Rouge leaders. Pol Pot is already dead; the others are old men protected by amnesty deals. If the tribunal is finally established it will be, for me and for many Cambodians, a dream long denied, but finally realized after twenty years of very hard work. The Rwanda Tribunal Creating the political will and establishing an international tribunal to try the perpetrators of genocide was much faster for Rwanda. Unfortunately, the political will to prevent the genocide came too late to save the 800,000 people who were murdered. In July 1994, I was assigned to the State Department’s Bureau of International Organization Affairs as the Africa officer in its Office of U.N. Political Affairs. I was responsible for coordinating and writing U.N. Security Council resolutions on Africa, and also became a member of the Interagency War Crimes Working Group. The latter group was formed in the aftermath of the Bosnian massacres to establish the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and to coordinate U.S. assistance to that tribunal. In the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, Rwanda was added to its agenda. It was composed of representatives from the Legal, Human Rights, U.N., and International Organizations Bureaus at the State Department, the Peacekeeping and Legal Offices at the Pentagon, and key officials at the Justice Department, and the National Security Council (NSC). By the time I came to Washington from Thailand in July 1994, the Rwandan genocide was nearly over. The appalling cowardice in the State Department in April 1994, particularly in the Legal Adviser’s Office by Joan Donoghue, Ted Borek, and George Taft in the Africa section and others higher up, who denied that the Rwandan mass killing met the legal definition of “genocide” is well known. Worse yet, and little known, was the decision of the Interagency Peacekeeping Core Group, led by the National Security Council’s Susan Rice and the State Department International Organization Affairs Bureau’s Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary George Ward, to recommend withdrawal of the 2,500 UNAMIR peacekeepers in Rwanda. (Dr. Rice was later promoted to Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, and Mr. Ward became U.S. Ambassador to Namibia. He is now director of the training program at the U.S. Institute of Peace.) In the fall of 1994, The War Crimes Working Group decided to undertake an inquiry into why the U.S. had made such terrible policy mistakes so they would happen “never again.” I was warned by the desk officer for Rwanda, “The State Department doesn’t make mistakes. You will be ending your career if you do this.” He was right. For my work that year, I won the American Foreign Service Association’s W. Averell Harriman Award for “intellectual courage and creative accomplishment,” while that same year, my supervisor, Ann Korky, wrote an evaluation designed to be fatal to my Foreign Service career, recommending against granting me tenure. What I learned was that Secretary of State Warren Christopher had received a call from the Belgian government saying that Belgium was withdrawing its contingent after ten of its peacekeepers had been murdered and mutilated. Belgium called on the U.S. to support withdrawal of all UNAMIR peacekeepers so the Belgian withdrawal would not appear to be the act of cowardice that it was. The Peacekeeping Core Group was convened by Dr. Rice and Mr. Ward in the conference room of the Bureau of International Organization Affairs. There, without dissent, it was decided that the U.N. Peacekeeping Operation in Rwanda could not stop the killing in Rwanda without exceeding the mandate given to it by the U.N. Security Council. Burned by the “mission creep” that resulted in the deaths of 18 American troops in Somalia, the group never considered changing the mandate. In an informal session of the U.N. Security Council on April 18 attended by the representative of Rwanda, which sat on the Security Council, U.S. Ambassador Carl Inderfurth announced that it was “inappropriate” for UNAMIR troops to remain in Rwanda. The next day, the interim Rwandan cabinet met and decided to extend the genocide to southern Rwanda. An instruction cable was dispatched by the State Department to Ambassador Madeleine Albright to vote on April 21 for U.N. Security Council Resolution 912 to order the 2,500 UNAMIR peacekeeping troops to leave Rwanda. The UNAMIR troops should have been reinforced and their mandate strengthened to defend the thousands of Tutsis who had gathered in churches and stadiums for protection. General Roméo Dallaire, commander of UNAMIR, begged for such a mandate, and estimated that the troops already on the ground could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. When I invited General Dallaire to Washington to speak at the invitation of the War Crimes Working Group, George Ward came into my office shaking with rage, and my supervisor, Ann Korky, tried to block the visit up to the last moment when General Dallaire was at the Montreal airport. In August 1994, I was lent to the United Nations Commission of Experts on the Rwandan genocide and contributed to its first report, which recommended creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR.) Returning to the State Department, I drafted U.N. Security Council Resolution 955, which created the ICTR, and U.N.S.C. Resolution 978, which called on all U.N. members to turn over suspects to the tribunal. The way for the Rwanda Tribunal had been cleared in 1993 by the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The two tribunals are joined at the head, with a common appeals chamber, and common chief prosecutor. In the Statute attached to Resolution 955, several problems were corrected that had arisen in the ICTY Statute. We eliminated the requirement that war crimes be committed in the course of an international conflict, and we incorporated Common Article 3 and Optional Protocol 2 of the Geneva Conventions as crimes within the jurisdiction of the tribunal. Common Article 3 criminalizes war crimes that are not committed during an international war, a point that was overlooked in the statute for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and that was especially important for a civil conflict like Rwanda. Optional Protocol 2 broadens the prohibitions of the Geneva Conventions, applies them to non-state armed forces, and extends further protections to civilian populations. These were significant advances in international humanitarian law. Some of the lawyers in the legal adviser’s office questioned whether we could do this, since this was not yet accepted international law and the U.S. is not even a party to Optional Protocol 2. I simply pointed out that law is made by authoritative decision, in this case by the U.N. Security Council. The Security Council could make new law. Getting the Rwanda Tribunal up and running was another matter. The State Department Legal Adviser’s office wanted a common prosecutor for the ICTY and ICTR, and even talked about having both tribunals sit in The Hague. I insisted that the trials be held in Africa as near to the site of the genocide as possible, so that witnesses could be available, and the tribunal would not be seen as “white man’s justice.” I also recommended separate prosecutors, because I doubted that a single prosecutor in The Hague could devote himself or herself adequately to both tribunals equally. The unity of international criminal law could be maintained simply with a common appeals chamber for the ICTY and ICTR. When I was advising the U.N. Commission of Experts, I visited the U.N. compound near Nairobi, which has huge, well-equipped hearing rooms already wired for simultaneous translation, as well as adequate office space. I recommended that the ICTR be located there. But Kenya did not want it, due to connections between President Moi and the former Rwandan regime. So Arusha, Tanzania was chosen instead, requiring years of preparation of courtrooms, offices, and prison cells. An ineffective Deputy Prosecutor, a retired judge from Madagascar, was sent to Kigali, and in a nearly fatal mistake, a U.N. legal officer was chosen as tribunal Registrar and sent to an area near his ethnic homeland, where all the pressures of nepotism came to bear, and he soon padded the payrolls with his Luo (ethnic group) compatriots. The Tribunal judges did not arrive in Arusha until 1996. In 1996, I was sent by the State Department to investigate the ICTR’s problems, wrote a terse three page list of necessary reforms, including replacing the Deputy Prosecutor and Registrar, and forwarded it to the U.N. Office of Internal Oversight Investigations. Changes soon followed. The Rwanda Tribunal holds some of the top leaders of the Rwandan genocide. It has succeeded in capturing many of the “big fish” such as Interim Prime Minister Jean Kambanda, and the main propagandist and arms procurer for the genocide, Theoneste Bagasora. But meanwhile, over 100,000 prisoners rot in Rwandan jails without being formally charged because the Rwandan justice system lacks the personnel and resources to process them. The huge cost of the ICTR should be more than equaled by investment in rebuilding the Rwandan judicial system, a policy I proposed as the Great Lakes Justice Initiative. It was adopted by the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development (U.S.A.I.D.) and announced by President Clinton on his trip to Africa in 1998. It has become a cornerstone of U.S. assistance in the region and has disbursed over thirty million dollars to date. In 1996, I moved to the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor in the Department of State, but remained actively involved in U.S. policy on central Africa. I strongly advocated sending a U.N. force to drive the ex-Rwandan Army andInterahamwe militias from control of the Rwandan refugee camps, so the refugees could return to Rwanda. Otherwise, I had predicted in a memo written in 1994, we were “drifting toward Cambodia,” and doomed to repeat the mistake of allowing a group of genocidists to hold hundreds of thousands of refugees hostage and providing them with base camps at huge expense to the international community. In 1997, the Rwandan Patriotic Army invaded the camps instead, and hundreds of thousands of Rwandans came home. Other thousands fled into the jungle. I was in Kigali when the Rwandan Army invaded Zaire. During this period, I had driven up to Gisenyi to see Rose Carr, an American who ran an orphanage and had lived in Rwanda for many years, when our car was engulfed by the human tide of refugees that was flowing back into Rwanda. Having been freed from their Interahamwe captors, they were finally going home, with hope and exhaustion engraved on their faces. It was a human flood of biblical proportions. Among the refugees was an eleven-year-old orphan who was lame. He begged for help. There were many others who were sick. Although a skittish U.S.A.I.D. official I was with would not let me stop to take pictures and protested when I stopped for the boy, I nevertheless gave him and a sick pregnant woman a lift to the Ruhengeri Hospital where they could be cared for. That night at the American Club in Kigali, Ambassador Richard Bogosian, U.S. Coordinator for the African Great Lakes, was having dinner with Ambassador Robert Gribbin, U.S. Ambassador to Rwanda. Bogosian joshingly said to me, “Well, Greg, do you still think we need that U.N. force?” I could only reply, “No, Ambassador, it’s too late now.” As more and more reports came in of slaughters of Hutu refugees by the Rwandan Army and the forces of Joseph Kabila, I began to ask for more information from American intelligence about what was going on. In spite of my Top Secret Codeword security clearance, I could never get an answer. So I decided to find $50,000 outside the normal Human Rights Bureau budget and hire private investigators through human rights groups who would find out what was going on. They confirmed my worst fears—a revenge genocide was in progress. Working with colleagues from other countries–particularly Australia, Canada, and New Zealand–we put together a resolution for the U.N. Commission on Human Rights to establish a Commission of Inquiry to investigate the reports of human rights violations in what had now become the Democratic Republic of the Congo under President Joseph Kabila. Kabila refused to cooperate with it. The U.S. waffled and a new U.N. commission with a different chairman was appointed. Kabila wouldn’t cooperate with the new chairman either. So the mass murders at Mbandaka and south of Kisangani and throughout the Kivus have remained uninvestigated and unprosecuted. The Rwandan Army soon broke with Kabila and a deadly civil war has ensued, drawing in most of the Congo’s neighbors. An estimate by epidemiologist Dr. Les Roberts, a consultant for the International Rescue Committee, is that the war has cost 1.7 million lives. When there is no force of law, the world will be ruled by the law of force. Current Projects (2000) The International Criminal Court Ann Korky’s recommendation against tenure finally had its effect. Tenure was denied, and my contract with the State Department ended. So I left the State Department in 1999 and went to work on initiatives that are either being opposed by or cannot be accomplished by the U.S. government. Enforcement of the Genocide Convention has long been frustrated by the lack of the international institutions needed to enforce it. For two years both the Clinton administration and Congress opposed, rather than supported, the creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The U.S. wants no international institutions created in which it lacks a veto. In July 1998, the U.S. was one of only seven nations to vote against the Rome Treaty to create the ICC. We were in illustrious company—Iraq, Sudan, and China. The real reason is that as the sole remaining super-power, the U.S. wants to be able to use its power with impunity. The U.S. wants no one to judge its actions, its leaders, or its troops. The U.S. even wanted immunity for official acts of government officials, a position that would set international humanitarian law back fifty-five years, to before the Nuremberg Tribunal. It would allow any tyrant to simply declare his mass murders “official acts” in order to become immune from judgment. It is a preposterous policy– more fitting for a nineteenth-century imperial power than for a twenty-first century advocate of democracy and the rule of law. From January 1999 to March 2000, I served as Coordinator of the Washington Working Group on the International Criminal Court, a coalition of human rights, religious, legal, and veterans groups that support creation of the ICC. Our objectives were to educate policymakers and the public about the ICC, and to defend the ICC from retrograde views like those of Senator Jesse Helms. We also aimed to secure the signature of the United States on the Rome Treaty by December 31, 2000, the final date for signatures without simultaneous ratifications. We were successful. The U.S. dropped its insistence on “official acts immunity.” In 2000, Congress did not consider Senator Helms’ misnamed “American Servicemembers Protection Act,” which Congressman Patrick Kennedy said should be retitled the “War Criminals Protection Act,” because it would make the U.S. a haven for war criminals. And President Clinton authorized Ambassador David Scheffer to sign the Rome Treaty on December 31, 2000. I worked closely with David for years and knew privately how much he wanted the U.S. to sign. It was a sweet victory. Unfortunately, even when the ICC comes into existence, the U.S., China, and India will not sign–nearly half the world’s population. (India abstained, rather than voted against the treaty in 1998, but is unlikely to sign.) Most of the worst genocide perpetrators (Sudan and Iraq, for example) won’t join. The ICC will not have universal jurisdiction unless the U.N. Security Council refers a case to it. So the court will lack jurisdiction over crimes committed in the territories of Sudan or Iraq unless the Security Council grants it. The ICC will have no retroactive jurisdiction over crimes committed before the ICC is created. But the ICC is an important step toward a world ruled by law. Eventually the U.S. must join the rest of the civilized world and ratify the Rome Treaty. A Standing, Volunteer U.N. Rapid Response Force Currently, there is no powerful international Rapid Response Force that could intervene quickly when genocide threatens or begins. I assisted Don Kraus of the Campaign for U.N. Reform in drafting the McGovern-Porter U.N. Rapid Deployment Peace and Security Act of 2000, which supports creation of such a force. It has two dozen co-sponsors, and it is an idea whose time will come. America should not and cannot be the unilateral policeman of the world. A step toward this standing rapid response force is the Danish and Canadian proposal for a U.N. Standing High Readiness Brigade (SHIRBRIG) of 5,500 light infantry troops ready to fly to any place on earth within three weeks of orders by the U.N. Security Council. The command center in Copenhagen is already operational. “SHIRBRIG” will be made up of national units, so it suffers from the weakness that nations may decide not to participate at the crucial time when they are most needed. Such a force needs to be enlarged and its mandate extended to Chapter Seven operations (mandatory, forceful peacekeeping without the consent of all parties) as well as Chapter Six operations (pacific settlement of disputes, with the consent of the country where peacekeepers will be stationed). But it is progress toward ending genocide. Genocide Early Warning The United Nations needs an effective early warning system for genocide, ethnic cleansing, and political mass murder that will daily keep track of incidents in countries with potential ethnic and religious conflicts and that will forecast long-term problems. The U.N. Secretariat now holds monthly meetings of the Interdepartmental Framework for Coordination to keep watch on regions of special concern. From March to July 2000, I worked with the Open Source Solutions Genocide Early Warning Project (a private consulting firm) that provided daily and monthly reports to the Interagency Genocide Working Group led by Ambassador David Scheffer of the State Department’s Office of War Crimes. We are now working with the United Nations to extend this Early Warning capability to U.N. agencies and the U.N. Security Council. In August 2000, a U.N. Commission on Peacekeeping Operations led by Lakhdar Brahimi recommended creation of just such an Early Warning operation in the U.N. Secretariat. The International Campaign to End Genocide Currently, there is no international movement on the order of an Amnesty International dedicated to ending genocide in the twenty-first century. At the Hague Appeal for Peace in May, 1999, a coalition of ten organizations from the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, and Israel co-founded a new coalition called the International Campaign to End Genocide. The coalition included Genocide Watch (USA), The World Federalist Association (USA), the Campaign for U.N. Reform (USA), the Cambodian Genocide Program (USA), International Alert, Physicians for Human Rights (UK), The Leo Kuper Foundation (UK), The Committee for an Effective International Law (Germany), The Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide (Israel), and Prevent Genocide International (USA). Our first major action was in the East Timor crisis, when we worked together with other human rights, religious, and relief organizations to lobby the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, and Australia to put pressure on Indonesia to stop the rampage of militias and Indonesian troops in East Timor following the referendum for independence. We were quite successful in talking with leaders of these countries, who, in turn put direct pressure on the leaders of Indonesia. The U.N. authorized the extremely rapid deployment of the Australian-led multi-national force that stopped the bloodshed. Catholic Relief Services sent in tons of food and medicines. Amnesty International succeeded in getting a Special Session of the U.N. Human Rights Commission convened, only the fourth in its history. I wrote an options paper, (“War Crimes, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity in East Timor: Options for an International Criminal Tribunal”) calling for the creation of a tribunal to try those who were committing crimes against humanity. The day after our members presented it to Foreign Secretary Robin Cook in London, he publicly called for creation of an international tribunal. The paper was also shared with the U.N. Commission, which made the same recommendation. My employer, the World Federalist Association, U.S.A. had agreed to act as coordinator of the international coalition, but in March 2000 the new CEO of the World Federalist Association – U.S.A., John Anderson, reversed the decision that the WFA-USA Executive Committee had passed in July 1999. He claimed that a national branch (WFA-USA) could not coordinate an international coalition, ordered me to work exclusively with U.S. organizations, and to terminate my work with overseas groups. It seemed shortsighted for an organization whose very name denies the primacy of divisions created by national boundaries. I therefore resigned from my job with the World Federalist Association, U.S.A. in order to continue the international coalition’s work. I hope the movement the coalition was building around the world will not be lost. Genocide Watch, which I founded in 1998, has taken over coordination of the international coalition. The International Campaign’s Steering Committee met in London in October 2000 to plan future directions and outreach to other groups. The Aegis Trust, a new think-tank on genocide prevention based in Nottinghamshire, England, joined the International Campaign. The Campaign’s Steering Committee agreed that I would continue as coordinator, that we would assemble a prestigious board of advisors, and we would undertake a fundraising effort. What Is to be Done? 1.5 million Armenians. 3 million Ukrainians. 6 million Jews. 260,000 Roma (Gypsies). 10.5 million Slavs. 25 million Russians. 25 million Chinese. 1 million Ibos. 1.5 million Bengalis. 1.7 million Cambodians. 250,000 Burundians. 500,000 Ugandans. 2 million Sudanese. 800,000 Rwandans. 2 million North Koreans. 200,000 Bosnians. Genocides and other mass murders killed more people in the twentieth century than all the wars combined. “Never again” has turned into “Again and again.” Again and again, the response to genocide has been too little and too late. During the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust, the world’s response was denial. In 1994, while 800,000 Tutsis died in Rwanda, State Department lawyers debated whether it was “genocide”, and the U.N. Security Council withdrew U.N. peacekeeping troops who could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Genocide is the world’s worst intentional human rights problem. But it is different from other problems and requires different solutions. Because genocide is almost always carried out by a country’s own military and police forces, the usual national forces of law and order cannot stop it. International intervention is usually required. But because the world lacks an international rapid response force, and because the United Nations has so far been either paralyzed or unwilling to act, genocide has gone unchecked. The International Campaign to End Genocide is an international coalition dedicated to creating the international institutions and the political will to end genocide forever. The International Campaign to End Genocide has four goals: 1. The early and effective functioning of the International Criminal Court. 2. The creation of an effective early warning system to alert the world and especially the U.N. Security Council to potential ethnic conflict and genocide. 3. The establishment of a powerful United Nations rapid response force in accordance with Articles 43-47 of the U.N. Charter. 4. The provision of public information on the nature of genocide and creation of the political will to prevent and end it. This Campaign is a de-centralized, global effort of many organizations. In addition to its work for institutional reform of the United Nations, it is a coalition that will bring pressure upon governments that can act on early warnings of genocide through the U.N. Security Council. The Campaign will establish its own NGO early warning system and has its own website (http://www.genocidewatch.org/ ). Bypassing the secrecy of government intelligence services, the Campaign hopes to facilitate establishment of truly confidential communication links that will allow relief and health workers, whistle-blowers, and ordinary citizens to create an alternative open source intelligence network that will warn of ethnic conflict before it turns into genocide. The International Campaign to End Genocide covers genocide as it is defined in the Genocide Convention: “the intentional destruction, in whole or in part, of a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” It also covers political mass murder, ethnic cleansing, and other genocide-like crimes against humanity. It will not get bogged down in legal debates during mass killing. Building the political will for action is the major task. Among the defense mechanisms used to justify non-action is denial of the facts. So the first job in preventing and stopping genocide is getting the facts in clear, indisputable form to policy makers. Most of that job is done by CNN and the news media. But conveying the information is not enough. It must be interpreted so that policy makers understand that genocidal massacres are systematic, or that the portents of genocide are as compelling as warnings of a hurricane. Then options for action must be suggested to those who make policy, and they must be lobbied to take action. The International Campaign to End Genocide works to create political will through: 1. Consciousness raising — maintaining close contact with key policy makers in governments of U.N. Security Council members, providing them with information about genocidal situations. 2. Coalition formation –working in coalitions to respond to specific genocidal situations and involving members in campaigns to educate the public about solutions. 3. Policy advocacy–preparing options papers for action to prevent genocide in specific situations, and presenting them to policy makers. The International Campaign to End Genocide concentrates on predicting, preventing, stopping, and punishing genocide and other forms of mass murder. It brings an analytical understanding of the genocidal process to specific situations. It does not simply study genocide or hold conferences, but attempts to prevent genocide, and build institutions that can end genocide forever. The International Campaign’s headquarters location in Washington, D.C. permits it to influence U.S. foreign policy, a key to forceful humanitarian intervention when genocide threatens. But it is also an international effort that will work with governments of other U.N. members to create the political will for United Nations, rather than unilateral, intervention. The Importance of Our Call I believe the International Campaign to End Genocide in the twenty-first century will someday be seen in the same way we see the anti-slavery movement of the nineteenth century. It is time in human history to end genocide, the worst of all crimes against humanity. There were those in the nineteenth-century who said that slavery couldn’t be ended because the economic forces that supported it were too great, that it was human nature, or even worse, that it was ordained by religion. There will be similar defeatism about the movement to abolish genocide. There has always been genocide, so it must be part of human nature. The world political order is not yet developed enough to prevent and stop it. Or, worst of all, genocide is ordained by jihad or ethnic purity or religion. But those who say we cannot abolish this curse upon mankind are no more right than those who said slavery could not be defeated. It is a matter of human will. And we make that human will. As Archbishop Tutu is fond of saying, “God is a God of justice. But to do justice, God depends on us.” God depends on us. It was a call to do justice that I answered in 1980 when I went to Cambodia. I had no idea what paths that call would lead me down. And I do not yet know where this call to do justice will lead me in the future. But neither did the Wise Men when they were called. There’s an old evangelical saying, “God has a wonderful plan for your life.” I’ve always been tempted to reply, “Yes, but I wish God would show me the map.” A map would have been a much easier way to find Bethlehem than a star. But it wouldn’t have required any faith. Ultimately, reaching our goal, fulfilling our call, depends on our faith. I have faith that we will succeed in our struggle whenever I look at our daughter. Birth On November 16, 1980, a month before we left Cambodia, a newborn baby was abandoned at the entry to the National Pediatric Hospital. The chief doctor couldn’t keep her at the hospital where an epidemic of hemorrhagic fever was raging, and at the orphanages, newborns had only a fifty percent chance of survival. So the doctor brought her back to our hotel, walked into our prayer service that Sunday morning, and laid her in my wife’s arms. She asked us to care for the child until the government could determine what to do. We had told no one of our hopes to start a family, and certainly didn’t expect to adopt a baby in Cambodia, which no foreigner had done since 1975. We were the wrong nationality, wrong religion, wrong ideology, and wrong race. Our own country still had Cambodia on its “enemies list,” under the Trading With the Enemy Act. All the barriers known to man stood between us. But there is a personal force in the world that changes hearts and that can also change the course of history. I knew from my study of the personalist theology of Martin Luther King, Jr. that if we took that baby to the Foreign Ministry, and if we ourselves went in person, our request to adopt her would become an entirely different issue than if we simply wrote a letter, which I had also done. So we bundled her up in a zip-open Grasshopper suitcase made into a bed, and took her to the Foreign Ministry. The Deputy Foreign Minister strolled in and when he saw her, he was clearly moved. We explained what had happened, and our desire to adopt her. Then he began to speak to her in Khmer, “You are in God’s hands. I will pray for you.” The decision could not be made by the Foreign Ministry alone. It had to go to the Revolutionary Council. Five weeks later the Revolutionary Council itself gave us permission to adopt her. (The permission was the first official act of that government ever recognized in a U.S. court.) We named her Elizabeth Chantana, which means “gift of God.” We returned to the United States on Christmas Eve, 1980, and she was baptized by my father, Reverend Howard Stanton, at the Christmas Eve service in the First Presbyterian Church, Racine, Wisconsin. When I went back to Cambodia in 1982 to found the Cambodian Genocide Project, I asked the officials at the Foreign Ministry, “Why did you let us adopt her?” They said, “Because we knew that she needed you. And we knew that you needed her.” That is love. Love is God’s force personally expressed. Justice is God’s force socially expressed. Evil and death and genocide are not the most powerful forces in Cambodia or Rwanda or anywhere else. Love and life and justice are. Through love outstretched across thousands of miles, across political, ideological, religious, and ethnic boundaries, Cambodia and Rwanda have come back to life. And to us a child has come, our gift of God, a testimony to the ultimate power of a love that transcends all boundaries. REFERENCES Brahimi Report on UN Peacekeeping Operations (2000, August), UN Doc A/55/305 – S/2000/809, 21 August 2000. (Available at Kiernan, Ben (2000). “Bringing the Khmer Rouge to Justice,” Human Rights Review, 1(3): 92 – 108. Roberts, Les, (forthcoming). Mortality in Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo: Results from Five Mortality Surveys. New York, New York: International Rescue Committee. See Dr. Stanton's TEDx talk, The Call, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vi6k9XKbQec

Chad alert status : Genocide Emergency Genocide stage: 8-persecution 9-Genocidal massacres affected groups: fur zaghawas nuba massalit lake chad basin groups Current situation: sudanese janjaweed raiders attack refugees and the groups listed above BOKO HARAM Terrorists KILL civilians and Kidnap children Download Reshaping Europe Through Parliament West Africa Monthly Report: July 2026 Nigeria and the Sahel: A growing security divide TTPS on alert after 11 bomb threats in 40 minutes Ecuador intelligence chief & 5 Americans killed in crash Death and torture of a man spark protests in Syria Israel strikes Idlib airbase; US, Türkiye condemn escalation Explosion in Kabul school injures at least 42 children Brazil Demarcates Land for Isolated Amazon Indigenous Group How Pakistan Crushed Protests in Kashmir Developments

iran alert status : Genocide WARNING Genocide stage: 3: Discrimination, 4: Dehumanization, 5: Organization, 8: Persecution, 9: Extermination, and 10: Denial. AffECTED GROUPS: BAHA'IS SUNNIS LGBTQIA+ Human Rights Defenders Current situation: Iranian civilians live under a strict and repressive regime, with minorities being targeted and severe human rights abuses being committed daily. Developments Download US hits civilian infrastructure In Iran How Iranians Protest: 2025-2026 Anti-Government Protests How Iranians Protest: The Women, Life, Freedom Movement How Iranians Protest: The 2019 Gasoline Protests Last-minute ban of Iranian opposition rally in Paris Iran: Musicians sentenced to 74 lashes for not wearing hijab Special Report: Civilian Harm in the U.S.–Israel–Iran War Afghan Deportations by Pakistan and Iran Catastrophe Is Emerging in the World’s Most Vulnerable Places The Iranian Economic and Political Protests of 2017-2018

June 2004 Building an Anti-Genocide Regime Dr. Gregory H. Stanton First published in 2011, updated in 2026 When the Genocide Convention was passed by the United Nations in 1948, the world said, "Never again." But the history of the twentieth century instead proved that "never again" became "again and again." The promise the United Nations made was broken, as again and again, genocides and other forms of mass murder killed at least 170 million people, more than all the international wars of the twentieth century combined (Rummel, 1994).[2] Genocide, the devil on horseback, still rides unchecked, armed not with a scythe but with a Kalashnikov. Why? Why are there still genocides? Why are there genocidal massacres being perpetrated in 2006 against the Fur, Massalit, and Zaghawa in Darfur; and the the Banyamulenge, Hutus, Hema, and Lendu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo? Why does ethnic and religious hatred still divide Côte d'Ivoire and Iraq and threaten to erupt again in genocidal violence? There are two primary reasons why genocide is still committed in the world: 1. The world has not developed the international institutions needed to predict and prevent it; and 2. The world's leaders do not have the political will to stop it. In order to prevent genocide, we must first understand it. We must study and compare genocides and develop working theories about the genocidal process. There are many centers for the study of genocide that are doing that vital work in universities and research institutes in Europe, North America, Australia and Israel. But studying genocide is not enough. Our next task should be to create the international institutions and political will to prevent it. Three institutions, in particular, are needed: (1) politically effective centers for genocide prevention; (2) rapid response forces for non-violent prevention and armed military response; and (3) effective international courts for punishment. To create political will, an international movement to end genocide must be built, requiring a massive educational, media and political campaign. Creation of a Genocide Prevention Office at the UN The U.N. Security Council and key governments need strong, independent early warning systems to predict where and when ethnic conflict and genocide are going to occur, and to present options for prevention and intervention to policy makers. When the International Campaign to End Genocide (ICEG) (now the Alliance Against Genocide), a coalition of human rights organizations, attempted to contact officials at the UN about the genocidal massacres in East Timor in 1999, we discovered that no one had responsibility for receiving information or coordinating action about genocide. Therefore, in 2002, the Genocide Watch and the ICEG recommended that the UN create a Special Adviser to the Secretary General for the Prevention of Genocide with a small permanent staff at the highest level that would receive information about risks of genocide and coordinate UN responses. Despite negative reactions by some member states to previous proposals for a UN preventive capacity, the idea was discussed and refined. It gathered support from high ranking UN officials like Danilo Turk and Edward Mortimer, who recommended it to Secretary General Kofi Annan. The result was a proposal made at the Stockholm Forum on the Prevention of Genocide in 2004 by Gregory Stanton of Genocide Watch (Stanton, 2004a), which recommended appointment of a Special Adviser to the Secretary General on the Prevention of Genocide and creation of an independent Genocide Prevention Center. The Secretary General announced his support for the proposal at the Stockholm Forum, and in July 2004, he created the new post and named Juan Mendez as his first Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide. Establishment of a Genocide Prevention Center Realizing that the United Nations has limited resources, the ICEG also recommended creation of an independent Genocide Prevention Center to support the work of the Special Adviser. The Center would be located in New York and staffed with full-time early warning, political and operational planning specialists who have direct access to an international network of government officials, country experts, human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and the Special Adviser's office. It would be funded by governments, foundations, corporations, and private donors. It would work closely with the UN Special Adviser's Office, but would not be subject to funding by the UN itself. (Stanton, 2004a) The Brahimi Report of the Panel on U.N. Peace Operations (U.N. Doc. A/55/305 S/2000/809: 2000) suggested such an office (the Information and Strategic Analysis Secretariat) at the U.N., but its recommendations were blocked by states (mostly from the G-77 developing nations plus India and China) that considered such a function to be "intelligence-gathering." That is precisely why a Genocide Prevention Center must be independent of the U.N., but on the U.N.'s periphery, and considered by the Special Adviser to be a trusted source of reliable information. If the Center is not independent, it will be unable to issue opinions that displease member states, particularly states at risk or that are committing genocide. Yet it must have the confidence of the Special Adviser and develop a close informal relationship with him. Several human rights groups, notably Human Rights Watch and the International Crisis Group (an ICEG member), currently have such relationships with the Secretary General. The Genocide Prevention Center would become a clearing house and validator for reports from human rights groups and open sources around the world. It would operationalize those reports into options and plans for preventive action, and the Special Adviser and the Secretary General would use them to formulate recommendations to the U.N. Security Council. One problem such a Center would face immediately is the closed nature of both government and U.N. information systems. Reports from UN field officials and government intelligence agencies are classified "confidential" or secret. Access to the country desk officers and top officials of the U.N. system would thus probably be indirect, through the Special Adviser. Access to government intelligence reports remains unlikely. However, the open secret of the new information age is that policy-makers would get better information if they ran a daily algorithm of world news media for early warning signs, and regularly read leading newspapers, magazines, and human rights groups' reports, than if they counted on their embassies' classified cables. Several such open source, unclassified reporting services (IRIN, Reliefweb) provide daily collections of articles to the U.N. and others interested in reading them. However, none currently focus on potential genocide. Even before a Genocide Prevention Center is established, coalitions of NGOs and genocide studies programs should establish independent early warning networks that can provide daily reports and regular policy options papers to the U.N.'s Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, to the Security Council and to individual governments. Even after a Genocide Prevention Center is established, NGOs should continue to provide reports independently to the Special Adviser, UN agencies, and member governments. The Center is not intended to be a unique source. Regular briefings should be given to the Security Council by the Special Adviser. The first attempt by the Special Adviser to give such a briefing on Darfur was blocked by objections from the U.S., China, Russia and Algeria (Reuters, 10 Oct. 2005.) But the Secretary General, himself, could exercise his prerogative under Article 99 of the UN Charter to mandate direct reports by the Special Adviser to the Security Council and the General Assembly. Early Warning Models Early warning models matter. They must be comprehensible to policy makers, and provide specific guidance. The U.N. Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency have each had contracts with social scientists who use multi-variate, statistical models to predict the likelihood of genocide and other forms of violence. The models assign country scores to a large number of abstract risk factors ("level of democracy, trade openness, history of armed conflict, ethnic diversity") and then assess the risk of genocide from their sum (Harff, 2003; Krain, 1997). These statistical models are useful to the extent that they demonstrate the benefit of promotion of democracy and other general policies. But statistical models do not describe the intentional process by which political leaders push a society toward genocide. They therefore are not sufficient to formulate specific counter-measures at each stage of the genocidal process. To provide immediate early warning signs, Harff (1998) has identified accelerators and triggers that may lead to genocide. They include refugee and internally displaced persons flows, compulsory visible identification of targeted groups, arming of ethnic militias, hate speech, killing of opposition leaders, and other political factors. But they are not continuous, event driven models that can predict when a genocide will happen. They fail to predict how close a genocide may be and do not suggest specific tactics to prevent it. Genocide Watch uses a process model of genocide, that breaks down the genocidal process into predictable stages that all genocides follow. It is not a linear model because the stages often occur simultaneously or out of order. It exposes the logic of the genocidal process so that policy-makers can recognize early warning signs and plan specific counter-measures at each stage to stop the process. The Ten Stages of Genocide 1. Classification : Underlying most social scientists' theories of genocide is an image of "ethno-centric man." Because all people grow up and live in particular cultures, speaking particular languages, they identify some people as "us" and others as "them." This fundamental first stage in the process does not necessarily lead to genocide. Genocide only becomes possible with another common human tendency -- considering only "our group" as human, and "de-humanizing" certain others. Thus, we not only develop cultural centers, we also create cultural boundaries that shut other groups out -- and the latter may become the boundaries where solidarity ends and hatred begins. "Us versus them" can be converted by political elites desiring to gain or retain power into ideologies of purity, exclusion, and destruction. Regimes bent on genocide take great pains to classify their populations. The main preventive measure at this early stage is to develop universalistic institutions that transcend ethnic or racial divisions, that actively promote tolerance and understanding, and that promote classifications that transcend the divisions. 2. Symbolization : Names or other symbols are assigned to the classifications. People are named "Jews" or "Gypsies", or distinguished by colors or dress. When combined with hatred, symbols may be forced upon unwilling members of pariah groups: e.g. yellow stars for Jews. To combat symbolization, hate symbols can be legally forbidden (swastikas) as can hate speech. If widely supported, denial of symbolization can be powerful, as it was in Bulgaria, when many Jews refused to wear the yellow star and were not turned in by their Christian neighbors, depriving the yellow star of its significance as a Nazi symbol for Jews. 3. Discrimination : Laws are passed or cultural practices exclude targeted groups from their civil rights. Group members may be excluded or fired from jobs. They may be prohibited from marrying members of the dominant group. They may be forced to live in ghettos or prohibited from entering areas controlled by the dominant group, except with passes to perform domestic labor. They may be prohibited from voting or holding public office. They may be excluded from leadership positions in government, the civil service or companies. They may be stripped of their national citizenship. They may be denied access to courts and rights of citizens. They may be denied the right to speak their own language in public, to meet in groups, and to bear arms for self-defense. The best defense against discrimination is passage and enforcement of laws prohibiting it. Religious and minority leaders may organize demonstrations against laws and practices that discriminate against targeted groups. Public media may be used to make racism and discrimination culturally unacceptable. 4. Dehumanization : One group denies the humanity of the other group. Members of it are equated with animals, vermin, insects or diseases. Dehumanization overcomes the normal human revulsion against murder.At this stage, hate propaganda in print and on hate radios is used to vilify the victim group. In combating dehumanization, incitement to commit genocide should not be confused with protected speech. Genocidal societies lack constitutional protection for countervailing speech, and should be treated differently than democracies. Hate radio stations should be shut down, and hate propaganda banned. Incitement to commit genocide should be outlawed and prosecuted. Hate groups should be infiltrated, arrested, and broken up. 5. Organization : Genocide is always organized, usually by the state, though sometimes informally (Hindu mobs led by local RSS militants) or by terrorist groups. Special army units or militias are often trained and armed. Plans are made for genocidal killings. To combat this stage, membership in such militias should be outlawed. Their leaders should be arrested and denied visas for foreign travel. The U.N. should impose arms embargoes on governments and citizens of countries involved in genocidal massacres, and international commissions should investigate crimes against humanity. 6. Polarization : Extremists drive the groups apart. Hate groups broadcast polarizing propaganda. Laws may forbid intermarriage or social interaction. Extremist terrorism targets moderates, intimidating and silencing the center. Prevention may mean security protection for moderate leaders or assistance to human rights groups. Assets of extremists may be seized, and visas for international travel denied to them. Coups d'état by extremists should be opposed by international sanctions. 7. Preparation : Leaders of the perpetrator group plan the genocide. Military forces are armed and incited to kill the targeted group. Ethnic militias are recruited, armed, and organized. Officials often claim killings are being committed by these militias, not by the army, in an effort to deny official culpability. The population is propagandized to believe that the targeted group is a threat that must be eliminated. In what genocide scholars call "mirroring," the targeted group is accused of planning a genocide against perpetrator group. Genocide is then justified as self-defense. When national and international leaders learn of plans to commit genocide, they should warn potential genocidists that they will be arrested and put on trial for their crimes. Nations should impose global Magnitsky sanctions on leaders who violate international laws for human rights. Their visas to travel should be revoked. Their finances held abroad should be seized. Opposition leaders and parties should be financed and protected. 8. Persecution : Victims are identified and separated out because of their ethnic or religious identity. Death lists are drawn up. Members of victim groups are forced to wear identifying symbols. They are often segregated into ghettos, forced into concentration camps, or confined to a famine-struck region and starved. At this stage, a Genocide Emergency should be declared. If the political will of the the U.N. Security Council or NATO can be mobilized, armed international intervention should be prepared, or heavy assistance given to the victim group to prepare for its self-defense. Otherwise, at least humanitarian assistance should be organized by the U.N. and private relief groups for the inevitable tide of refugees. 9. Extermination : Extermination quickly becomes the mass killing legally called "genocide." It is "extermination" to the killers because they do not believe their victims to be fully human. When it is sponsored by the state, the armed forces often work with militias to do the killing. Sometimes the genocide results in revenge killings by groups against each other, creating the downward whirlpool-like cycle of bilateral genocide, as in Burundi. At this stage, only rapid and overwhelming armed intervention can stop genocide. Real safe areas or A multilateral force authorized by the U.N., led by NATO or a regional military power, should intervene. Militarily powerful nations should provide the airlift, equipment, and financial means necessary for the intervention. 10. Denial : is the stage that always starts when a genocide begins and continues long after a genocide ends. It is among the surest indicators of further genocidal massacres. The perpetrators of genocide dig up the mass graves, burn the bodies, try to cover up the evidence and intimidate the witnesses. They deny that they committed any crimes, and often blame what happened on the victims. They block investigations of the crimes, and continue to govern until driven from power by force, when they flee into exile. There they remain with impunity unless they are captured and a tribunal is established to try them. The best responses to denial are public hearings by national truth commissions, and punishment by international tribunals or national courts. There the evidence can be heard, and the perpetrators punished. (Stanton, 2005.) Rapid Response Forces Early warning is not enough. What if the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution to implement a peace agreement, and sent in peace-keepers, but then genocide began? That is what happened in Rwanda. There were plenty of early warnings. The U.N. Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR) commander, General Roméo Dallaire learned of the plans for the genocide three months before it began, had conclusive evidence of massive shipments of half a million machetes to arm the killers, and knew of the training camps for the Interahamwe killers. Yet, when he cabled the U.N. Department of Peacekeeping Operations requesting authorization to confiscate the machete caches, Undersecretary for UNAMIR's mandate. When the genocide actually began in April 1994, Dallaire desperately asked for a mandate and reinforcements to protect the thousands of Tutsis who had taken refuge in churches and stadiums. Led by the U.S. and U.K., the Security Council instead voted to pull out all 2500 UNAMIR troops. General Dallaire has since said that even those troops could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, had they remained (Stanton, 2004c). Among the problems with U.N. peacekeeping forces is that they are composed of national troop contingents voluntarily contributed by risk-averse national governments, and may even take their orders from those governments rather than their U.N. commanders. Such forces take months to organize and are seldom composed of the world's best-trained and equipped soldiers.[3] One regional military alliance lacks these drawbacks -- NATO. It has a coordinated command structure, extremely well-trained troops, and major resources. It proved to be quite effective once it was mobilized in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s. But it has only begun to contribute to peace-keeping operations outside of Europe. The Standing High Readiness Brigade organized by Denmark, Austria, Canada, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland and Sweden in 1996 (since expanded to include Finland, Italy, Ireland, Lithuania, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, and Spain) was organized to provide a rapid response force of 5,000 heavy infantry and support personnel to the U.N. Security Council on thirty days' notice. It assisted Chapter VI (peacekeeping with the consent of the host country) monitoring missions in Ethiopia/Eritrea, Liberia, and Sudan. The European Union (EU) is organizing thirteen 1,500 person battle groups ready to respond within ten days to decisions by the EU. However, the EU is likely to be hamstrung by the requirement for unanimity in its foreign policy decision making. The United Nations needs a standing, volunteer, professional rapid response force that does not depend on member governments' contributions of brigades from their own armies. A standing U.N. force would need the support of some of the major military powers. It must be large enough to effectively intervene in situations like Rwanda. It should be composed of volunteers from around the world, the best of the best, who train together specifically for U.N. peace-keeping. Its capabilities and training would need to include many non-military functions, including policing, administration of justice, and conflict transformation. Although the U.S. and other Permanent 5 members of the Security Council do not currently support creation of such a standing U.N. force, it is an idea whose time will come. Non-violent Intervention We must build institutions to intervene non-violently before genocide begins. Every church, synagogue, mosque, and temple should teach peace-making, and inter-religious leaders' councils should be formed wherever there is religious division. In ethnically divided societies, radio and television and educational systems should be used to advocate tolerance and to humanize the other groups in the society, to show that they are like "us." The 2005 report of the U.N. High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change (U.N. Doc. A/59/565 (2005)) recommended creation of a U.N. Peacebuilding Commission to be tasked with prevention of conflict and state failure. The problem with the recommendation is that most genocide does not arise out of state failure or conflict. It is the result of unchecked state power. The Carnegie Commission Report on Preventing Deadly Conflict (1997) is the best known example of the common assumption that conflict prevention will also prevent genocide. Conflict prevention is often a laudable goal, and sometimes it will contribute to genocide prevention. But it often will not. Jews had no conflict with Germans, nor did Armenians with Turks. In Rwanda, Kuperman (2001) argues that the Arusha Accords actually increased the likelihood of genocide when the Hutu Power elite realized they would lose their grip on power if the Accords were implemented. Faced with the negotiated reduction in their power, they instead decided to kill every Tutsi in Rwanda. Diplomats believe in conflict prevention, so it is the default position of most foreign ministries. But in cases of genocide, forceful intervention to overthrow a dictator or stop mass killing may be much more effective than a peace agreement. Negotiations with genocidists may result in appeasement that encourages their will to power, as it did with Hitler, Stalin, and Habyarimana -- and, currently, with al-Bashir in Sudan. The International Criminal Court The world needs and finally has an International Criminal Court (ICC). Impunity for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity must end. The ICC must be backed by the will of nations to arrest those it indicts. The ICC may not deter every genocidist, but it will warn every future tyrant who believes he or she can get away with mass murder. Despite the opposition of the U.S. government, which is still advocating impunity for U.S. officials (a position that would have immunized every tyrant of the last century), the ICC is now a reality and will be able to try perpetrators of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Through referral by the U.N. Security Council, the ICC Prosecutor has undertaken investigations and prosecutions of crimes against humanity and genocide in Darfur, Sudan. Building a Mass Movement Against Genocide These institutional changes will not be enough to end genocide in the twenty-first century. Eventually we must return to the problem of political will. It was not for want of U.N. peace-keepers in Rwanda that 800,000 people were murdered. They perished because of the complete lack of political will by the world's leaders to save them. Indeed, it was their political will to actually withdraw the U.N. peace-keepers and leave them to their murderers. Neither the U.S. nor any other member of the U.N. Security Council had the political will to risk one of their citizens to rescue 800,000 Tutsis from genocide. There is something profoundly wrong about that. The wrong stems from the problem of ethno-centrism. The US, UK, France, Russia, China and the UN drew a circle, that shut Rwandans out of our common humanity. In October 2000, the second debate of the candidates for President of the United States demonstrated that neither candidate had learned the lessons of Rwanda. Then Governor George W. Bush said the U.S. was right not to send in U.S. troops because Rwanda is not in the sphere of America's national interests. Then U.S. Vice President Al Gore tried to excuse the Clinton administration's policy failure by saying the U.S. had no allies to go in with, as it did in Bosnia; ignoring the fact that 2500 U.N. peace-keepers were already on the ground in Rwanda. Evidently, he dismissed the use of the U.N. as a multi-lateral peace-keeper. We must create a world-wide movement to end genocide, like the movement to abolish slavery in the nineteenth century. National leaders must learn that if they do not stop genocides, they will be voted out of office.The Alliance Against Genocide was organized at the Hague Appeal for Peace in May 1999 to mobilize the international political will to halt genocide once and for all.The Alliance envisions a world-wide network of organizations working together and separately toward that common goal. The first job in preventing and stopping genocide is getting the facts in clear, indisputable form to policy makers. Some of that job is done by the news media. But conveying the information is not enough. It must be interpreted so that policy makers understand that genocidal massacres are systematic; that the portents of genocide are as compelling as warnings of a hurricane. Then options for action must be suggested to those who make policy, and they must be lobbied to take action. Policy makers act when they feel public pressure to act. If the international campaign is to be effective, it must build an international mass movement that will exert the political and cultural pressure on world leaders necessary to create political will. Only fifty years ago, segregation was still the law in the southern United States and less than twenty years ago apartheid still ruled South Africa. But in both the U.S. and South Africa, mass movements created the political will to change the laws and gradually the cultures of racism are changing as well. Non-violent resistance finally broke up the Soviet communist empire, once thought to be frozen forever in tyranny. Mass movements must mobilize the religious leaders, the celebrities and stars, the churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples. We must make indifference to genocide culturally unacceptable and politically impossible. We must educate and advocate, demonstrate and legislate. Just as the nineteenth century was the century of the movement to abolish slavery, let us make the twenty- first the century when we abolish genocide. Genocide, like slavery, is caused by human will. Human will -- including our will -- can end it. References Carnegie Commission Report on Preventing Deadly Conflict (2001), Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Harff, Barbara (2003). Assessing Risks of Genocide and American Political Science Review (February) 97(1): 57-73. Harff, Barbara (1998).In Preventive Measures: Building Risk Assessment and Crisis Early Warning Systems, ed. L. Davies and T.R. Gurr. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Krain, Matthew (1997). -Sponsored Mass Murder: The Onset and Severity of Genocides and Crimes Against Humanity. Journal of Conflict Resolution 41: 331-360. Alan J. Kuperman (2001). The Limits of Humanitarian Intervention. Genocide in Rwanda, The Brookings Institution Press, Washington, D.C. Rummel, Rudy (1994). Death by Government. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.Stanton, Gregory (1998) Stanton, Gregory (1998) The Ten Stages of Genocide. Yale Genocide Studies Series, GS01, February, 1998. updated at https://www.genocidewatch.com/tenstages Stanton, Gregory (2004a) The UN Needs a Genocide Prevention Center, Stockholm International Forum on Genocide Prevention, Proceedings, January 2004. Stanton, Gregory (2004c) Could The Rwandan Genocide Have Been Prevented? Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 6, No. 2, June 2004, 211- 228. updated at https://www.genocidewatch.com/_files/ugd/df1038_f7be8c52217e42a98836121318b7d146.pdf Stanton, Gregory (2005). in Apsel, ed., Darfur: Genocide Before Our Eyes, Institute for the Study of Genocide, 43 - 47. U.N. Doc. A/55/305 S/2000/809 (2000). The Brahimi Report of the Panel onU.N. Peace Opereations. New York: United Nations. U.N. Doc. A/59/565 (2005). A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility: Report of the High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change. New York: United Nations. Endnotes [1] Forthcoming in Totten, ed. Genocide: An Annotated Bibliographic Review. Routledge, 2006. [2] Rummel has recently revised his estimate of the death toll from twentieth century genocide, politicide and other mass murder to 262 million. (personal communication) [3] It is worth noting that The Military Staff Committee envisioned by Article 47 of the U.N. Charter has never been formed. It was meant to be a permanent military command that would assist the Security Council in planning application of armed force under Chapter VII (peacemaking without host country consent.)

Angola Country Overview Britannica Targeted Groups Perpetrators Alert Status Genocide Stage(s) Cabindans Indiginous groups Religious minorities Angolan government Watch Stage 3: Discrimination, Stage 6: Polarization Details Since the Angola gained independence in 1975, a struggle for power remains prevalent between the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). In this conflict, the reigning MPLA has posed many attacks against protestors and threats to their power, including Cabindans. Civil liberties are also at risk as unregistered religious minorities are unable to assemble and practice. Recently, the Angolan government imposed restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, which security forces have implemented using excessive force and brutality. Read Report Page last updated: 07/29/2021 Resources Angola jails 17 activists for anti-government rebellion Angola: Police Fire on Peaceful Protesters Authorities escalate use of excessive force to crack down on dissent - Amnesty International