Sixty-one years ago today, still reeling from the horrors of the Holocaust, the international community boldly declared its opposition to the world’s worst crime by adopting the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Despite the hope inherent in that declaration, the six decades that followed witnessed again and again the deathly spectacle of humanity at its worst.
One year ago today, a bipartisan task force led by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Secretary of Defense William Cohen released the Genocide Prevention Task Force report, a comprehensive roadmap to guide U.S. policy through the long-overdue task of turning the ideals enshrined in the 1948 Genocide Convention into reality.
Sitting in that packed room at the National Press Club as Secretaries Albright and Cohen unveiled the report, an all too rare look of hope came over the assembly of familiar faces who likewise work on issues pertaining to genocide. It seemed that the world’s ongoing inability to end the genocide in Darfur had finally lent a sense of urgency to the oft-stated but seldom acted upon promise of Never Again. It seemed that the time was right for real change.
The 2008 elections had concluded and the Obama transition team was hard at work figuring out how to improve our national and economic security by changing international perception of U.S. foreign policy for the better. It seemed that a U.S. led effort to end the crime of genocide by helping to make the world better at prevention and response fit the bill perfectly. And perhaps more importantly, the details of the plan would save both political and actual capital – in addition to lives – in years to come.
The monetary costs of funding prevention and early response mechanisms are far lower than the costs associated with open-ended large-scale humanitarian operations such as we see in Darfur. The U.S. has rightly spent billions in Darfur, with no sign of stopping as the humanitarian conditions brought about by genocide continue. Additionally, the political costs of securing international agreement on prevention and response mechanisms in advance of a specific crisis are significantly lower than the high political costs inevitably levied by a criminal regime’s economic and political allies who are disinclined to risk their investments by suddenly pressuring their wayward allies once genocide is underway. Put simply, a strong U.S.-led international effort to end the crime of genocide by bolstering prevention and response mechanisms just makes sense. And thanks to the hard work of the Genocide Prevention Task Force and other complementary projects, we finally had a clear plan of how to do it.
So why then have those hopeful faces grown a bit grimmer over the last year? Because this critical and historic effort to help end genocide once and for all has lost its urgency, and may see its window of opportunity slip away. The politics of domestic and international crises has elbowed genocide prevention and response off of the President’s plate – it’s time for the broad but largely dormant anti-genocide lobby to start elbowing back. We must do everything we can to ensure that ending genocide is added to the President’s to do list before this moment of opportunity slips away.
President Obama has three years left in his first term – more than enough time to make history by beginning the process of adopting and enacting the reforms laid out in the Genocide Prevention Task Force report. As we have all learned from Darfur, however, important goals must also possess a sense of real political urgency if they are to be effectively pursued by our over-burdened government. Together, we must ensure that our Nobel-laureate President feels both the pressure and the support necessary to make the most of this chance to help end the world’s worst crime.
The opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Save Darfur Coalition.
Tags: genocide, genocide convention, genocide prevention, Genocide Prevention Month, Genocide Prevention Task Force Report, Task force
