New presidential initiatives launched during an election year often suffer from the curse of poor timing—being reduced to a punch line in attack ads or the victim of opposition research. But a critical issue has emerged during this 2012 campaign that should command bipartisan appeal.
Last August, President Obama, in announcing a directive to explore how to improve the US Government’s capacity to respond to genocide and threats of genocide, declared that genocide prevention was in the national security interest of the United States and one of our core moral responsibilities.
The US Holocaust Memorial Museum revoked Aung San Suu Kyi's Elie Wiesel Award on March 6, 2018. Read the Museum's letter to her about that decision. Learn more about the Museum's work on Burma. On Wednesday evening, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum presented the Elie Wiesel Award to Aung San Suu Kyi at its annual National Tribute Dinner. Established in 2011, the award is named in honor of its inaugural recipient, Nobel Peace laureate and Museum Founding Chairman Elie Wiesel. It is given annually to an internationally prominent individual whose actions have advanced the Museum’s vision of a world where people confront hatred, prevent genocide, and promote human dignity.
The last few weeks have brought more evidence of the power of individuals—whether movie stars like George Clooney in Sudan or the little known creators of the Kony 2012 viral video—to shine a light on the world’s worst crimes. This kind of attention is usually for the good, forcing government leaders to confront dire situations that do not typically get the kind of policy focus they deserve.
Marking a full year of violent suppression of anti-government protests in Syria, the United Nations Secretary-General's Special Advisers on the Prevention of Genocide, Francis Deng, and on the Responsibility to Protect, Edward Luck, released the following statement on March 15:
Yesterday, March 14, the International Criminal Court (ICC) found Thomas Lubanga Dyilo guilty of recruiting and using child soldiers between 2002 and 2003 during the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Lubanga was convicted of “conscripting and enlisting children under the age of 15 and using them to participate actively in hostilities.” This landmark decision is the ICC’s first verdict since its creation a decade ago.
Three months after presidential and parliamentary elections and despite new members of the National Assembly having assumed their posts, the Democratic Republic of Congo still faces its most significant political crisis since the 2002 end of its international and civil wars. Opposition leader and head of the UDPS party Etienne Tshisekedi and his supporters firmly believe that he won the disputed November 28 elections, in which victory was claimed by incumbent President Joseph Kabila despite widespread reports of electoral fraud and intimidation. Leaders of the country’s powerful Catholic Church are also backing Tshisekedi’s challenge to Kabila’s legitimacy.
In a recent paper, Scott Straus, a 2011 Museum Fellow with the Committee on Conscience, explains why it is important for those concerned about preventing genocide to understand what genocide is and what it is not, how we can recognize it in its early stages, and what distinguishes genocide from other forms of mass atrocity. This conceptual analysis, he argues, will provide a framework for decision making about when and how to engage in specific cases.
We know from history that genocide and related crimes against humanity do not just arise spontaneously. They often take place in the context of civil war, when leaders commit such crimes to advance their goals of eliminating opposition or perceived enemies. In the civil conflict now raging in Syria, reporting by independent journalists and the United Nations leaves little doubt that conditions are being laid for a dramatic escalation of violence against civilians, possibly based on their membership in religious sects. Right now the majority Sunni population, perceived by the Alawite-dominated regime to be leading the opposition, are the primary victims, but if conditions deteriorate, other groups—including Druze, Christians, and Alawites themselves—could also be targeted.
New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, on his latest reporting mission to Sudan this week, presents a stark reminder of an overlooked conflict where thousands of lives have already been lost and hundreds of thousands more remain at risk.