2014 was another productive year for Genocide Watch.
• Genocide Watch does not spend much money because it has had no paid employees, but what it does spend is absolutely necessary to carry on its work. Interns who do much of the work of Genocide Watch receive academic credit at their home universities. The President has never received a salary because he has earned his living as a university professor. All honoraria he receives for speaking and royalties for his publications go directly into the Genocide Watch budget.
• In 2014 Genocide Watch interns designed and launched a new website, http://www.genocidewatch.net. It is the most widely read anti-genocide website on the internet, and is read daily by many policy makers because it is succinct and kept up to date daily. Our archive website, http://www.genocidewatch.org , is the most heavily consulted website on genocide on the internet, with over 55 million hits since 2000.
• Genocide Watch maintains close relationships with key US and UN policy makers, including the Special Advisor to the UN Secretary General on the Prevention of Genocide and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights concerning crisis situations such as those in Syria, Iraq, the Central African Republic, Sudan, South Sudan, Nigeria, and Myanmar.
• Genocide Watch has actively participated in US and global anti-genocide coalitions, including the Protection and Prevention Working Group, the Genocide Prevention Advisory Group, the International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect, the International Coalition for the International Criminal Court, and the International Association of Genocide Scholars.
• Genocide Watch has conducted classes on genocide prevention at the Foreign Service Institute of the State Department and at the Pentagon.
• The President of Genocide Watch gave keynote addresses at the 20th anniversary commemorations of the genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda in Washington, DC and in Kigali, Rwanda, and has also spoken at many other conferences on genocide prevention.
• Genocide Watch has drafted an Optional Protocol to the Genocide Convention that has been embraced by the Special Advisor to the UN Secretary General on the Prevention of Genocide, who intends to work it through the UN system and get it ratified by States-Parties to the Genocide Convention to make it part of international law. The Special Advisor believes it will be the one of the most significant contributions to international law since the Genocide Convention itself. The Optional Protocol will revitalize the preventive aspects of the Convention by reasserting the roles of the UN General Assembly and Regional Organizations in preventing and stopping genocide.
• Genocide Watch established an official affiliation with George Mason University. Genocide Watch’s university affiliation has strengthened its fund-raising credentials and organizational base. George Mason’s School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (S-CAR) provides a home for Genocide Watch. It provides Genocide Watch with office space, communications connectivity, computer equipment, and space for meetings and conferences. S-CAR’s faculty includes twenty-six experts on conflict in all parts of the world.
• Genocide Watch will continue to expand the International Alliance to End Genocide and to develop strong relationships with the Alliance’s fifty other members. The Alliance will remain loose, since each organization will develop its own programs and raise its own funds. The International Crisis Group is the largest member of the Alliance with over one hundred employees in more than thirty countries. Genocide Watch relies on its reports, making it unnecessary to send our own fact-finders into the field. Other members with which Genocide Watch works closely are the Aegis Trust, Survival International and the Minority Rights Group, located in the UK; and Act for Sudan in the US.
• Prof. Stanton is writing a short basic textbook for secondary school students, The Ten Stages of Genocide. It is much needed in the many states that now require students to take a unit on genocide during their secondary school careers. There is currently no basic textbook for these courses. He plans to publish the textbook as both an e-book and as a printed text at low cost, so it can be adopted by school districts in the US, Canada, the UK, and other English speaking countries. The genocide prevention programs in both Cambodia and Rwanda have already promised to translate it into Khmer and into Kinyarwanda for use in their secondary schools. The translations will be published online free.
• Genocide Watch has a Board of Advisors with most of the prominent genocide experts in the world. Prof. Stanton will remain Chair of the Board of Directors of Genocide Watch. Genocide Watch plans to strengthen its Board of Directors to make the Board a bipartisan, international working Board to govern Genocide Watch, assist Genocide Watch in making contacts with key governments that can take action to prevent genocide, and build the International Alliance to End Genocide’s program of genocide education around the world. Genocide Watch also plans to recruit a Board of Trustees to help Genocide Watch raise money and oversee Genocide Watch’s financial future.
December 17, 2014
Respectfully submitted,
Dr. Gregory Stanton
Founding President
Genocide Watch, Inc.