Corporate Social Responsibility for GenPrev [13 May 2013]

By SARAH EFRONSON and TIFERET UNTERMAN^[1]

Around the globe, corporations are fulfilling what have traditionally been government functions. For example, in some countries they provide infrastructure and utilities, and in all countries they influence government’s international policy agendas. In fact, 51 of the world’s 100 largest economies are corporations and 80 percent of world industrial output is produced by only 1,000 corporations. Because of their ever-increasing global power, corporations have become central players in international affairs and necessary partners in efforts to prevent genocide. As such, governments should implement policies that further motivate corporations in this arena.

One way to focus corporations on prevention efforts is through the lens of corporate social responsibility. Broadly, corporate social responsibility means that corporations should manage their businesses in a way that not only maximizes profits but also contributes to the resolution of environmental and social problems. Increasingly, corporations are recognizing a responsibility not just to shareholders, but also to other stakeholders such as customers, investors, governments, and local communities.

Many are familiar with the application of corporate social responsibility to the extraction or procurement of “conflict resources,” or to the protection of the environment in the midst of oil pipeline construction. Less explored is the application of corporate social responsibility to the specific task of genocide prevention.

The goal is for corporations to apply a genocide prevention lens to business practices. They can begin by recognizing that genocide is a process, not an event, with identifiable transitions from the point of societal stability to the point when atrocities occur. Genocide scholars Barbara Harff and Gregory Stanton offer the most widely accepted risk assessment and stages model that outline what the genocidal process often looks like. These approaches provide indicators of a potential genocide, or a genocide that is in its very early stages. Harff recognizes the following risk factors for genocide: prior genocide in the same polity, autocracy, ethnic minority rule, political upheaval during war or revolution, exclusionary ideology, closure of borders to international trade, and discrimination. Stanton establishes the following stages of genocide: classification of the targeted group, symbolization, dehumanization, preparation, polarization, organization, extermination, and denial. In addition to these risk factors, resource scarcity and conflict are also recognized as common precursors to genocide.

Corporate social responsibility has a role to play both in genocide intervention (after violence has started to occur) and prevention (prior to the outbreak of violence), the latter being preferable and most effective. To accomplish this task, corporations must aim to reverse the factors that can lead to genocide by:

• expanding the openness of markets,
• involving a multiplicity of stakeholders in the target country,
• increasing power-sharing among a diversity of political and social groups,
• helping to unify, rather than disenfranchise, different social groups,
• encouraging a more inclusive ideology through marketing and drawing on a diverse subcontractor base, and
• working to limit monopolies while encouraging increased international trade.

Governments can assist corporations by adopting policies and laws that encourage, if not compel, them to act in accordance with the above. This may be accomplished through combining a voluntary/incentive-based approach with a regulation-based approach.

The key to the voluntary/ incentive approach is to promote genocide prevention as a profitable venture for corporations. This approach has been successfully implemented with respect to environmental protection. In the movement to “go green,” corporations profited through brand differentiation by selling their product as environmentally-friendly and having more efficient operations while complying with environmental concerns. The focus on environmental protection has also brought smaller businesses and subcontractors worldwide into better compliance with the environmental goals and policies of their larger corporate purchasers. Similarly, governments should encourage corporations to use their genocide prevention activities as a brand differentiator and promote research and education into how corporations will profit from said efforts.

Regulations should also be adopted to foster corporate involvement in preventive measures. One approach is to mandate that companies participate in corporate social responsibility. Such a regulation has been adopted under Article 5 of the Chinese Company Law, which requires companies to “undertake social responsibility” in the course of business. Another approach is to require companies to give funds to corporate social responsibility. In India, there is a proposal under consideration that would require large corporations to allot a percentage of their profits toward socially responsible initiatives. A third approach is a disclosure regulation such as the United States Dodd-Frank financial reform law, which requires companies to publicly disclose their use of conflict minerals that originated in the Democratic Republic of Congo or an adjoining country. As a result, companies like Intel and Apple have created auditing programs and aid projects to help Congo develop a clean minerals trade and tracing projects to identify problems in their supply chains.

Government regulations could include mandatory auditing and disclosure of company activities that directly contribute to known factors that could lead to genocide, such as whether a corporation’s activities are involved with closing a country’s borders to international trade. Although an international scheme to regulate corporate activities would be best, individual national legislation often leads to international cooperation.

A successful example that demonstrates the combined use of the voluntary/ incentive approach and the regulation approach is the 1986 United States Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, designed to undermine the apartheid regime then existent in South Africa while simultaneously bolstering interracial development. The Act prohibited future investments and trade in South Africa, leading to austere economic measures. At the same time, it encouraged procurement of goods from businesses that had more than 50 percent beneficial ownership by non-white South Africans and exempted the Export-Import Bank from a certification requirement to encourage it to export or import from such businesses. This law provided procurement incentives and stopped harmful corporate investments in apartheid. Furthermore, this Act also addressed ethnic minority rule — one of the aforementioned genocide risk factors.

Applying the corporate social responsibility concept to genocide prevention is a new idea. With very little written on the subject and very little data to understand trends, it is still a nascent concept. There are therefore many challenges to overcome, and questions that remain:

• Oversight lapse: Self-reporting and voluntary fulfillment can lead to false claims and allows for corporations to appeal to consumers through branding as being socially responsible without meaningfully implementing genocide preventive measures.
• Lack of education about genocide prevention: Corporate social responsibility as it relates to genocide prevention is a new concept and many corporations are unaware of its benefits. They may even foster genocidal conditions if they deem it to be economically beneficial.
• No standard models to apply to genocide prevention efforts: Companies are more willing to adopt environmental and social policies and programs, since they have been previously modeled and can be replicated. But the novelty of corporate involvement in genocide prevention efforts means that new policies and programs need to be developed into replicable models.

In the international arena, states are no longer the only actor. Corporations have growing influence and are necessary partners with states in genocide prevention efforts. Corporate social responsibility has been successfully implemented in other fields and should be applied to genocide prevention as well. Governments have a vital role in incentivizing corporations to contribute to genocide prevention and should work to educate, regulate, and partner with corporations in genocide prevention efforts. Both governments and corporations should seize on this window of opportunity and cultivate positive steps to not just end genocide, but to stop it before the loss of life.

Image: industryplayer.com

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^[1] Sarah Efronson and Tiferet Unterman are law students participating in the Human Rights and Genocide Clinic at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City. In this capacity, they were invited to present their research on corporate social responsibility and genocide prevention at the Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation’s Raphael Lempkin Seminar for Genocide Prevention in Auschwitz, Poland in November 2012.

GenPrev in the News [2 May 2013]

Establishing a “Culture of Remembrance and Non-Recurrence”:

Regional Approaches to Genocide Prevention

Exterior of S-21 Prison in Phnom Penh, Cambodia

By MICHELLE EBERHARD

Genocide prevention requires a transnational commitment of states willing to collaborate and work together to recognize threats and identify means by which potential conflict can be avoided. In a similar way, reducing the risk of genocide necessitates a consistent sharing of ideas so that methods for prevention can be continually improved. One manner in which this dedication and cooperation is demonstrated is the Regional Forum on the Prevention of Genocide, co-organized by the governments of Argentina, Cambodia, Switzerland, and Tanzania. The Forum, which was first held in Argentina in 2008, has continued to meet annually since 2010 and brings together scholars, diplomats, and activists to discuss emerging ideas in the realm of genocide prevention. In addition, the journal Politorbis issued a 2009 publication on genocide prevention that addresses many of the topics covered in the Forums.

The 2013 Regional Forum took place in Phnom Penh on February 28 and March 1, 2013, and included over 20 distinguished speakers from around the world. The discussion was opened by Mr. Federico Villegas Beltrán, Director General for Human Rights, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and International Trade and Worship in Argentina; Ambassador Dr. Christoph Burgener of Switzerland; Ambassador Liberata Mulamula of Tanzania; and Deputy Prime Minister and Minister in charge of the Office of the Council of Ministers of Cambodia, His Excellency Dr. Sok An. Dr. An began by reminding the audience of the importance of genocide prevention in his own country, stating that “for Cambodia, the issue is not an abstract or theoretical one, but one that brutally and directly affected us, and still does today.” Dr. An also cited the importance of seeking justice for and remembering the victims, “to make sure such a tragedy will never recur,” emphasizing that “we regard remembrance of the past and of the victims as an essential prerequisite to non-recurrence.”

The Forum itself was comprised of five separate panels, the first of which was titled “What is genocide and how to prevent it?” During this segment, panelists discussed the definition of genocide and offered ideas on how to improve capacities to respond to early warning signs of violence. In particular, His Excellency Ouch Borith, Secretary of State, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of Cambodia, mentioned that “the narrow or shallow perception of genocide may lead to failure in preventing genocide from its budding stage,” referring to the oversimplified belief that genocide only entails the killing of individuals, when in fact the Genocide Convention enumerates five criteria for the commission of the crime. Borith also stated that there are “still a lot of controversies and difficulties in quantifying the scope of violence to be labeled as genocide,” and cited the need for greater preventive capacity, particularly at the national level in regards to education, and social and religious institutions.

This panel also featured Adama Dieng, United Nations Special Adviser for the Prevention of Genocide, and Alex Bellamy, Professor of International Security at Griffith Asia Institute in Australia. Dieng reiterated the importance of understanding the “root causes and dynamics” of genocide, and highlighted the important role that civil society has begun to play in making prevention and the concept of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) stronger.  Bellamy also outlined six specific points that would assist East Asia in its efforts to prevent genocide, including the development of what he calls an “atrocity prevention lens,” which “focuses on injecting atrocity prevention considerations into existing policies, programs, and capabilities and, when necessary, convening or coordinating these assets for prevention purposes,” as well as the creation of regional capacity for early warning and assessment through a collaborative effort between the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Secretariat, the ASEAN Institute of Peace and Reconciliation, and other relevant organizations.

The second panel, “Asian Experience and Visions for the Future,” included His Excellency Khuon Sudary, Second Vice-President of the National Assembly of Cambodia, and The Honorable Gareth Evans, Chancellor of Australian National University and Co-Chair of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect. Sudary emphasized the importance of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) in seeking justice for the victims of the genocide. He also underscored the role of education, particularly in regards to learning about the Khmer Rouge, noting that “young people need to grasp the value of human rights and learn to use them effectively in order to prevent genocide in the future.”

Evans, who was a primary contributor in the creation of R2P at the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) in 2001, discussed the development of a Brazilian proposal called Responsibility While Protecting (RWP). This supplemental protocol to R2P is comprised of “two key elements: a set of agreed criteria to be taken into account before the UNSC mandates any use of force…and a monitoring-and-review mechanism to ensure that the scope and limits of such mandates continue to be debated by the Council during the implementation phase.” Evans also reiterated the imperativeness of developing “effective capability to initiate action and mobilize political will,” by creating “focal points” that have “direct access to high-level decision makers,” as well as enhancing “broad-based civilian response capabilities” and “[ensuring] that effective military capability is available to meet needs as they arise.”

Later in the evening, the third panel, titled “Africa, Latin America and Europe – Experiences, Lessons Learned and Ways Forward,” was held. Nathan Byamukama, Program Officer of the International Conference of the Great Lakes Region (ICGLR) Committee on the Prevention of Genocide, spoke first.  He discussed some of the responsibilities of the ICGLR, including collecting and analyzing information to identify situations that might develop into genocide, recommending measures to safeguard victims, monitoring Disarmament, Demobilization, Repatriation, Reintegration and Resettlement (DDRRR) programs, and cooperating with civil society. Byamukama also cited several challenges that the ICGLR faces, like the politicization of the Committee and a funding deficit, but noted that it will continue to garner support from member states so as to strengthen its initiatives.

Byamukama was followed by Daniel Feierstein, Director of the Centre for Genocide Studies in Argentina. First, Feierstein turned the concept of prevention on its head, stating, “I would suggest to change the perspective from what the super-powers should do to prevent genocide (the interventionist approach) to what they should not do: how to establish a system of controls to prevent such powers from acting in ways that increase the possibility of genocidal events through direct intervention, arms trade, support for destabilization or coups d’état, and so on.” Secondly, he noted the important role of regional mechanisms in preventing genocide, providing the example of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), which is comprised of 12 Latin American nations and is charged with helping countries in the region mitigate conflicts.  Since its inception in 2008, UNASUR has assisted in Bolivia, Honduras, and Ecuador, as well as in the conflict between Colombia and Venezuela in 2010.

The second day of the conference opened with the fourth panel, “Preventing Genocide: Role and Responsibilities of State and International Actors and Ways Forward,” which featured David Scheffer, UN Secretary General Special Expert on United Nations Assistance to the Khmer Rouge Trials. Scheffer emphasized the role of the ECCC as a deterrence mechanism, noting that it “is critical to breaking the cycles of impunity and putting down at least a caution sign for political and military leaders who might contemplate human rights abuses or atrocity crimes to achieve political and strategic aims.”

In the fifth and final panel, “Preventing Genocide: Role and Responsibilities of Non-State Actors and Ways Forward,” Youk Chhang, Executive Director of the Documentation Centre of Cambodia (DC-Cam), discussed the role of civil society in the prevention of genocide. He explained the work of DC-Cam, which seeks “to establish a permanent presence and to play a leading role in this transformative effort” of policy change in post-conflict states. Chhang also stated that DC-Cam “has begun to build a permanent center to expand our work and ensure a long-term commitment to human rights and genocide prevention in Cambodia,” an initiative that centers on the belief that “genocide education is a key to liberating the victims of Khmer Rouge terror and transforming them into leaders in the global quest for human rights and dignity.” To increase genocide awareness, as well as the scope of the institution’s work, DC-Cam will also “promote memory and justice” by “[digitizing its] extensive archives and [making] them available to viewers at home and overseas.”

Given the variety of topics covered, as well as the global character of the dozens of panelists and speakers that offered remarks during the conference, the Regional Forum on the Prevention of Genocide exemplifies a collaborative approach to educating on the past so as to avoid the commission of mass atrocities in the future. By meeting on an annual basis, the four member states that comprise the Forum also reaffirm their commitment to what many speakers emphasized in their presentations – that is, the desire to create “a culture of remembrance and non-recurrence” that recognizes the importance of preventing genocide everywhere.

Photo: tuolsleng.com

GenPrev Podcast [24 April 2013]

In this edition of the Auschwitz Institute podcast, Jared Knoll speaks with Andrew Stroehlein, European Media Director for Human Rights Watch, former Director of Communications at the International Crisis Group, writer and speaker on a multitude of conflict issues, and avid watcher and participant in the world of social media. His writing has appeared in the Financial Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, and the International Herald Tribune, among others. He has also been an instructor for the Auschwitz Institute’s Raphael Lemkin Seminar for Genocide Prevention.

 

Welcome. I’m Jared Knoll with the Auschwitz Institute. Social media and the constantly evolving ways of instant, online reporting have dramatically changed the ways we communicate, and we see more and more how it plays into conflict situations. From Egypt’s spring rebellion to Iran’s so-called “twitter revolution” and all manner of human rights issues being brought to the digital forefront, social media demands our attention in the field of genocide and conflict prevention. Here to raise it with me is Andrew Stroehlein, European Media Director for Human Rights Watch and prolific author on the relationships between media and violent conflict for nearly two decades. Hello, Andrew. Wonderful to have you with us.

Thank you for having me.

As the media director for Human Rights Watch, how do you view the evolving role of social media, in terms of what they can do to prevent or transform violence?

Well, I think, as with all forms of media that have been developed over the ages, you see both positive and negative uses. I think we have to kind of be careful of sort of going to one extreme or the other, and you do see that, particularly with social media, that people say, ‘This is absolutely the greatest thing since sliced bread, this is going to solve all our problems,’ and another group of people saying, ‘No, actually, this is just horrific and this is just going to lead to mob violence or something.’ And the truth is both, and neither, and falling somewhere in the middle. Like a lot of things, social media has potential for being used for some good, and we’ve seen that, and it also has some potential to get quite ugly as well, and we’ve seen that too.

What are the biggest challenges to harnessing that potential for good, or for ameliorating the ways that it can cause harm?

Well, I think one of the things that has to be done is some kind of media monitoring. I think that’s always key, particularly in conflict or conflict-prone situations. You see good media monitoring happening in other media in conflict or post-conflict situations where conflict is likely to restart. Following closely in the vernacular languages what’s happening and how situations are being framed, what the narratives are that are developing, and who is really stoking things up, in terms of hate speech or even incitement to violence. And keeping, having multiple eyes on that is vitally important so you can catch things early — nip problems in the bud, as it were.

Do you see that as being a role taken up by coalitions of governments, or by the United Nations, or maybe by citizens’ advocacy?

Well, I think there’s always a danger when governments do it, isn’t there? But I think there should be multiple monitors on these things. The UN has done some good media monitoring in the past, in places, and there’s perhaps a role in some places for the UN. In some cases it’s NGOs that deal with media and media development that could take on this or at least advise on it. In other countries that role is also fulfilled, or maybe more likely fulfilled, by an independent media monitor made up of journalists and other media professionals who can create projects and create systems to keep an eye on things. Again, so you don’t have hate speech building and building, and so you don’t have incitement to violence developing. Before violence starts, you can always see these trends building in the media, and knowing when to jump in is also a very difficult question as well.

Is there a problem, or is there a challenge for us to evaluate the effectiveness in the end? The Boston Marathon bombing, maybe, as an example: There was a lot of Twitter — police using it, people sending photos and theories all over the internet — and it’s been kind of controversial as to whether they can actually tell if it helped or whether it hurt, making the picture more convoluted. Are there lessons we can take from that? Or is it always going to be a troubling thing to know whether or not it was good or bad?

Yeah, it will always be troubling to know whether something is good or bad, because you’re always working against what would have happened “if,” and you don’t really know, trying to play out what really happened, which is scenario A, against scenarios B, C, and D, which didn’t happen, and it’s impossible really to tell what was better or worse. But there are still lessons that can be learned in each of these cases. I mean, the Boston example is perhaps one of those that we would all hope would not be repeated in many ways. There was just some absolutely atrocious reporting, and you did see on the edges the development of some really nasty language. Even in some pretty mainstream media, you saw things that were really quite racist, bordering on hate speech. Then of course if you go a level or two down from that, into individual Twitter feeds and other social media, you saw some just appalling things, which was bordering on incitement to violence. But just the disinformation, or misinformation, I should say — because some of it must have been, I suppose, not intentional — that just spread. In a way it made a mockery of the idea that social media was going to be revolutionary. And honestly, it was a bit of a disaster, wasn’t it?

Do you find yourself optimistic that things will continue to improve, in terms of social media being used as a tool to prevent violence?

Well, I would hate to see people believe that it’s automatically going to be a force for good. I think there’s a serious potential for the kind of mass violence that is driven by social media in some part. It’s not revolutionary thinking exactly; we’ve seen it with every other form of media. We’ve seen mass atrocity crimes perpetrated with the help of posters, with newspapers, with radio — it’s almost inevitable that some kind of mob violence will come out of this. But it’s also inevitable that the tool will be used for good as well. And I think that’s why multiple NGOs and some international agencies perhaps, or associations of journalists, need to just be having systems in place in particularly tense areas to keep an eye on how the narratives are developing, and you know, to put it at its absolute most blunt, apply some kind of “cockroach rule” to this. You know, once people start talking about vermin and cockroaches, that’s just always the tip-off that something bad could and perhaps will go down. So I’m optimistic that these things can be used to help people who want to prevent mass atrocity crimes. I’m also very aware that these tools could be used to help perpetrate mass atrocity crimes.

Do you think that it’s likely that we’re going to have to make some compromises on protection of free speech, in order to prevent that kind of negative rallying using social media?

Well, there’s significant debates on this, and of course the sort of American approach to free speech is very different from, say, the European concept of free speech. I don’t think free speech includes being able to incite violence. And I think there are people who will disagree with that, but having seen how media plays into mass violence in places, it’s not just the yelling fire in a theater, it’s telling someone to start a fire in a theater. You don’t have that right. So I do think that keeping an eye on things — and there already have been cases where people are basically inciting violence using social media, and people don’t have a right to do that. Your free speech ends before that. And that will upset some free speech advocates, but that’s just how I see it.

How did you get started in the human rights field, and become involved with the Auschwitz Institute?

I was working at the International Crisis Group for many years, and I cannot actually remember who got in touch with me in the first place and how it actually came to be, but they essentially invited me out to one of the conferences, and it was fascinating — I mean, I’ve written about it in Foreign Policy magazine and elsewhere. I found the whole experience — it’s very enriching, you know, to go and talk about mass atrocity crimes in Auschwitz is obviously very powerful. But to take that lesson, and to get diplomats and military people and others, and realize that genocide and other mass atrocity crimes happen in places that look very different from Auschwitz. This one case is absolutely appalling, but the way it was done is not necessarily the way it’s going to be done the next time. And each genocide, the development of each sort of mass atrocity has its own specifics. And trying to find the warning signs through what’s going on. You know, not every genocide is the kind of industrial process that the Nazis did. There are other forms, and what people have to look out for, and in that, media monitoring generally is very crucial for that early warning.

What can people listening do in terms of prevention who are themselves connected to this very powerful system of social media communication?

Well, I think it’s very helpful when people call out others for hate speech and racist speech. I think that’s absolutely essential. When you’re on social media and you see others making comments that are just blatant hate speech — again, you don’t even have to get to sort of the “vermin and cockroach rule,” but even before that, you see hateful things being said, and you have to realize the power that those sorts of statements have — and simply calling people out.

Well, Andrew, I hope you’ll keep that keen eye on the media horizon, and continue to write and tell us about how we can do these sorts of things to watch out for negative aspects of this.

Thank you again for having me.

GenPrev in the News [18 April 2013]

“Goals and Dreams”:
Honoring Rwanda’s Memory and Looking to the Future

From left: Tibi Galis, Jonathan Schienberg, and Jacqueline Murekatete at New York University.

By MICHELLE EBERHARD

When a community gathers to commemorate a horrific occurrence like genocide, it does so not only to remember the victims, both living and deceased, but also to demonstrate a commitment to ensuring that others might never be made to endure similar atrocities in the future.  In this way, such events are particularly powerful because they underscore the belief that “never again” also means to “never forget.”

April marks the 19th anniversary of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, in which 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were savagely murdered by their Hutu extremist neighbors, who believed that a person’s ethnicity determined his or her right to life. Nearly two decades later, the legacy of these victims and their descendants is continually remembered throughout the world, as the darkness of those 100 days of slaughter has left an impermeable mark on humanity, along with a resolve to do better the next time we are faced with similar situations. In an effort to uphold this commitment, on April 14, Jacqueline Murekatete, a Rwandan genocide survivor and founder of MCW Jacqueline’s Human Rights Corner, organized “A Special Program Commemorating the 19th Anniversary of the Genocide Against the Tutsis in Rwanda,” at New York University Law School, co-sponsored by the Latino Law Students Association. Featured guests at the event were Auschwitz Institute executive director Tibi Galis and CBS 60 Minutes assistant producer Jonathan Schienberg.

Murekatete opened the program by reminding those in attendance that it is important to raise awareness and support for genocide survivors in Rwanda, as well as to remember those “whose lives were brutally and unjustly taken away.” She then offered a moment of silence for the victims in Rwanda as well, before turning the microphone over to Khalid Elachi of MCW, who explained that the organization’s goal is “to empower young people to become agents of change,” citing the building of a community center in Rwanda and the establishment of Jacqueline’s Human Rights Corner as examples of how MCW carries out its mission.

These remarks were followed by a short film entitled Jacqueline’s Journey, produced by Schienberg and shown publicly for the first time. In the video, Murekatete discusses her personal survival during the Rwandan genocide, despite losing her entire immediate family and many aunts and uncles, as well as how she eventually arrived in the United States and became inspired to start telling her own story. She emphasized the importance of enabling survivors to achieve their goals and dreams, and to “live a life that our families could be proud of, if they were here.”

The keynote address was then given by Galis, who began by discussing his personal journey to working in mass atrocity prevention.  Growing up in Romania, he said, “We were taught in school that all the tragic moments of humanity . . . were behind us,” admitting that in light of contemporary crises such as Syria and the Democratic Republic of Congo, “this hope is a bit baseless in today’s world.” As he explained, the prevalence of atrocities persuaded him and others of the need to move away from the idea that such catastrophes are accidents or anomalies, and instead to “try to understand where these mass atrocities come from.”

The Auschwitz Institute, Galis explained, was established to pursue this systematic approach to understanding genocide. In particular, he noted the historic dearth of governmental involvement in prevention, and identified this as the impetus behind AIPR founder and president Fred Schwartz’s motivation to establish the organization in 2005. The need to better understand the complexities and roots of such violence is exemplified in the Auschwitz Institute’s educational program for government officials, the Raphael Lemkin Seminar for Genocide Prevention, which centers on the process of genocide and an “inventory of what has been tried in recent times” to prevent such crimes. In this way, Galis explained, the goal has shifted from “[stopping] the worst from happening at the very last possible moment,” to developing the “restructuring of societies in a way that we see the signals of the bad to come, and we try to do something about that” right away.

The Auschwitz Institute further empowers its participants by offering “resources that they need to start their own” prevention programs domestically, as the organization firmly believes in assisting governments in any way possible to do their duty – “that being to protect and not to harm its citizens. We feel it cannot be more basic than this.” Currently, Galis stated that alumni of the Auschwitz Institute’s programs number more than 200 individuals from 60 different states. He concluded by noting the role that civil society plays in prevention, explaining that “most of the time, we prevent mass atrocities and genocide without even realizing it,” through education and our daily interactions with those in our communities.”

After giving his presentation, Galis was joined by Murekatete and Schienberg for a discussion moderated by Roberta Richin, a member of the Board of Directors Emeritus at MCW. Richin posed the initial round of questions, beginning with Galis and asking about challenges facing international organizations. Galis’s response included the need to educate the leadership of institutions on what an institution is expected to deliver and implement, as well as communication problems between organizations. He also stated that organizations like the Auschwitz Institute are “the beginning of the answer,” but that good intention requires money as well as words.

Richin’s question for Murekatete focused on the connection between the “small stuff,” such as schoolyard bullying, and the “big stuff,” specifically the genocide in Rwanda. Murekatete agreed that it is sometimes difficult for individuals to recognize the long-term process that culminates in genocide, and discussed in particular how what occurred in Rwanda was a result of years of escalating hostility, propaganda, and dehumanization.

Richin then opened the floor for questions from the audience. The first focused on seeking perpetrator justice years after atrocities have been committed, to which Murekatete stated simply: “There is no deadline to the suffering . . . the horrors . . . that [victims] endured,” and that efforts to find and hold killers accountable for their actions should reflect this limitlessness. The next was addressed to Schienberg, and asked him to talk about the hardest part of making Jacqueline’s Journey. Schienberg stated that he sought to depict “what [survivors] would want me to represent,” while at the same time respecting that “it’s a very personal thing that people experience,” and that we must be careful of not generalizing too much from story to story.

Another question, to which Schienberg also responded, centered on the role of the media. He discussed how media attention can be big, but that this doesn’t necessarily stop atrocities. In addition, he stated that “media still has an obligation, obviously . . . and [journalists] need to be persistent in trying to expose . . . the happenings in those countries where atrocities are being committed.” As the moderator Richin summarized at the discussion’s conclusion, “words have power; words have consequences” – and so does a lack of words.

Jeanne d’Arc Byaje, deputy permanent representative of Rwanda to the United Nations, spoke after the panelists, and offered a view of the progress Rwanda has made since the genocide. In particular, she noted the improvements the country has achieved in its justice sector reformation. She was followed by student Jessica Gatoni, who read two poems written in honor of Rwanda: one from the perspective of a survivor trying to guard the memory of those she had lost; the other about youth empowerment and the concept of agaciro, which means “dignity” in Kinyarwanda.

Murekatete closed the event with words she had echoed throughout the afternoon: “goals and dreams.” Indeed, it is this potential that was lost during the genocide, and it is this same potential that Murekatete and others hope to help cultivate in the descendants of survivors, as well as in all individuals in the generations to come. This cultivation, however, cannot be done from the sidelines. It must occur through the work of those actively committed to preventing opportunities for individuals, who would otherwise attempt to steal or destroy these dreams, from becoming a prominent voice in their society. As Galis eloquently stated earlier, “When we see a problem and look away, we are to a certain extent supporting the roots of evil.”

Photo: Alex Zucker

GenPrev Podcast [17 April 2013]

In this edition of the Auschwitz Institute podcast, Jared Knoll speaks with Dr. Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, a scholar and activist on the topic of gender and gender-based violence in the context of genocide and mass atrocities. Last year she published an article titled “Gender and the Future of Genocide Studies and Prevention” in the journal Genocide Studies and Prevention, and in addition to having been an instructor at the Auschwitz Institute’s Raphael Lemkin Seminar for Genocide Prevention, she will be contributing to a forthcoming volume on the prevention of mass atrocities, edited by the Auschwitz Institute.

 

Welcome, I’m Jared Knoll for the Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation. Today we’re looking at an often overlooked and under-discussed aspect of mass atrocities: gender. Joining me is Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, a prolific speaker on the subject and author of an article last year called “Gender and the Future of Genocide Studies and Prevention.” Hello, Elisa. Great to have you with us.

Thank you so much. Great to be here.

Why do we need to consider gender and gender-based violence as factors in the prevention of genocide and mass atrocities?

Well, there’s several ways to answer that. I think the primary reason it’s important that we look at gender-based violence when we’re thinking about the prevention of mass atrocities is that it is a very early warning signal when a conflict is underway. There are specific types of gender-based violence that I believe have a high correlation with genocide down the road, and when we see them used by a certain perpetrating group — whether it’s a state, or a political party, or a cadre within an armed force — when we see them using these specific forms of gender-based torture and patterns of killing, and sexual violence in particular, we can predict with some accuracy the spread of this sort of violence to greater and greater numbers of people down the road, if it’s left unchecked. And that is if there isn’t any diplomatic, political, economic, or, as a last resort, military intervention.

It isn’t talked about very much, rape and violence against women, or at least they aren’t much focused on. What do you think that says about our concerns?

There seems to be an intellectual block, in a sense, in the study of genocide to considering rape as an integral part of genocide. Of course there are many scholars who do. But in policymaking circles, frequently the widespread presence of rape or mass rape in a conflict, when it’s not attended also by co-ed massacre sites, is seen to be a special category that we call mass atrocity but not genocide. So in other words, you have several cases where the existence of gender-selective massacres of men, alongside the mass rape of women who were allowed by and large to continue living, you see that pattern used as a way to argue that genocide had not taken place, but rather war crimes, or crimes against humanity, or this much less specific term, “mass atrocity.”

What roles do you think that culture and religion play in these occurrences? Do you think there’s anything to arguments for cultural relativity, cultural sensitivity, or are we  dealing with human rights that transcend those borders?

Yeah, that’s a very interesting question, and I think it’s an important one. I see these as universals, simply because they occur in similar formats throughout most of the cases of genocide that I’ve looked at, and then also cases that aren’t commonly considered to be genocide that I would include within an understanding of genocidal processes, such as Sierra Leone, Liberia, or the current conflict in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. So there is a kind of a universal dimension to these, in that genocide expresses itself very similarly across cases. Where I think cultural sensitivity is really important, and where it becomes very interesting, is, you know, the differences in patterns. Why in certain places one kind of atrocity is more pronounced than another, for example. And what cultural factors lead to that, and whether or not those cultural factors then themselves have contributed to this genocidal process, or are they just being drawn on or implicated in the genocidal process because they exist. So those sorts of questions are very important.

I think genocide is a universal crime and that it is universally frowned upon, and should be, and so we can be safe to say that if there’s a culture that’s caught up in a genocidal logic over a long period of time that humanity needs to respond, that there needs to be some response to that. Where I think cultural relativism becomes problematic is when it treats different cultures in a kind of ossified and rigid way that actually shares some characteristics with genocidal thinking by imposing strict trenches between different groups that can’t be bridged through human conversation or dialogue. And I think that oftentimes one will find people retreating to that type of cultural relativism, when it appears, when the persons promoting the prevention of genocide are not investigating genocidal dynamics in their own societies. Where I’ve gotten questions related to cultural relativism is often in situations where it’s felt that Americans are always going around the world telling people to be aware of genocide and how to prevent genocide, without sufficient awareness of our own history of genocide and lingering patterns within our society that emerge from that history, as well as red flags that we have in this country. So to avoid that I think it’s very important that whenever we’re talking about genocide prevention, and in all of our studies of genocide, that we seek to be truly universal in the cases that we look at, right, and universal in the societies that we target for long-term prevention of genocide. And those should and have to include Western countries, including the United States.

In cases where we can identify those cultural causes that contribute toward genocide or can lead to that, do you think that it may be necessary, or do you think it may be justifiable, for the international community or for international actors to take a stand against those practices, against those factors?

Yeah, that’s a very interesting and sensitive question, and I’m glad you asked it. This question was very relevant of course to the debate about and the struggle against female genital cutting, right, or what’s often called female genital mutilation. And it was actually very harmful when there appeared to be a unidirectional command from on high that certain societies stop this practice. What was much more effective was when local NGOs — often aided by training or funding or dialogue with international bodies — but when local NGOs began initiatives to speak with the practitioners of this, to speak with parents, to speak with young people and leaders within communities to try and change the way that this practice was seen, and replace it with other practices that could ritually or culturally attain the same goals without actually harming young girls.

So I think that when we’re looking at long-term factors that contribute to genocide, one of the most important things we can do is be in dialogue with local human rights groups, local civics groups, local intellectuals, obviously — in a truly dialogic and equal fashion, where everybody’s laying out a set of ideas about what can lead to genocide. And so that you have, internally within a society, a genocide watchdog that is going to be much more sensitive and much more aware of the meaning of certain cultural practices and their potential dangers down the road than any outsider could ever be, unless of course they spent a great deal of time there and speak the language.

You’ve been talking a lot about Syria lately. There’s been a lot of concern in the international community about the possibility of genocide of the Alawites. Do you think that horse is already out of the stable?

Yes. I do. But it depends on how you look at it and how you’re defining things. Since we all agree, I think, that genocide is a process, I think we’re in the genocidal process. But perhaps we need to make a distinction between the process of genocide and the fact of genocide after the end of hostilities. It’s only of course in retrospect that we can be absolutely sure, right, or close to 100 percent sure, that something we would call a genocide happened. The Rwandan genocide looked very different at the beginning of the hundred days than it did at the end. And this was one of the problems with garnering international support for some kind of effective intervention there. And so it’s similar in Syria. However, what we do see in Syria is focused attacks on children. So not just killing by shelling, not that kind of impersonal killing, but very personalized, ritualized, torturous killing of children, both in front of their parents at the site of massacres, but also in detention, then I think that says something about the intent of the regime, or certain groups within the regime.

Can you tell us a little about your contribution to Deconstructing Prevention? Are there pertinent situations or issues you think we need to focus on that have cropped up since your 2012 article?

Yeah, that’s interesting. I think the rise of the use of the term “mass atrocity” is a very interesting thing, and it comes out of the despair that many felt during the genocide in Darfur, where it felt that a lot of the tension was taken away from the horror going on in Darfur and instead devoted to a very useless and highly politicized debate about whether or not this conflict conformed to the UN legal definition of genocide. So “mass atrocities” grew out of that sense of frustration. Who cares if it’s genocide, let’s just call it mass atrocities. But I think one of the reasons that could happen, that we needed to replace this powerful term “genocide” with “mass atrocity,” is that Darfur followed a very gender-selective pattern of genocide. And so you have men routinely massacred, whereas women were raped and allowed to continue living. And it was the fact of their continued existence that often was the reason that people were unwilling to call what was going on in Darfur genocide and instead wanted to call it ethnic cleansing, or civil war, or counterinsurgency. And so it’s out of a very gendered idea of what genocide is that this term “mass atrocity” has been created. So I think that we need to interrogate that. We need to look at why it is that we needed to create a term like “mass atrocity,” whether or not it’s effective to have an even more vague and debatable term, in a sense.

Gender and genocide was a long-term interest of mine. I didn’t know that’s what it was, but I’d always been interested in women’s Holocaust testimonies and the ways that the National Socialists sought to destroy women as women, and use children against them to do so, which is a common theme in testimonials and memoirs from the Holocaust. So I brought those two together and was doing work on gender and genocide, and then it was only through a fluke, in a sense, that Adam Jones, whose work I find to be wonderful and has been very influential on my own work, suggested me to the Auschwitz Institute to get involved in these genocide prevention — the Raphael Lemkin workshops and seminars that you guys hold. And so it was through that path, and it was really the Auschwitz Institute that got me thinking about how I can utilize my research on gender and genocide for genocide prevention.

Well, I hope you’ll continue to push our definitional outlooks on genocide and mass atrocities, and keep gender a part of the conversation. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you very much.

Photo: Courtesy Elisa von Joeden-Forgey

GenPrev in the News [11 April 2013]

Second Generation: Educating the Children of Genocide

From left: Panelists Ed Ballen, Eugenie Mukeshimana, and Sue Lob at the Museum of Tolerance in New York.

By MICHELLE EBERHARD

Nineteen years ago this month, Rwandans experienced genocide at the hands of Hutu extremists who sought to destroy the entire Tutsi ethnic population in the country, along with Hutu moderates who refused to support an agenda of extermination. The slaughter was incredibly efficient, as more than 800,000 individuals were murdered over roughly 100 days by their machete-wielding neighbors while the United Nations and the rest of the world looked on. For Rwanda, it seemed, the promise of “never again” did not apply.

While it is impossible to compare the suffering of individuals targeted for death because of their identity, the horrors that unfolded in Rwanda in 1994 are reminiscent of the horrific and calculated destruction associated with the Holocaust in 1940s Europe. In both instances, specific groups of individuals were singled out in a systematic and premeditated manner, resulting in catastrophic death tolls and leaving behind countless survivors who have endured assaults on both their dignity and their humanity. It is this parallel survivorship that has begun to resonate with victims of both genocides, and it is a relationship that has developed and continued to grow into the second generation of survivors and victims.

On April 4, this shared experience manifested itself in an event that joined the remembrance of the Holocaust with the commemoration of the 19th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. The panel discussion, which took place at the Museum of Tolerance in New York, was titled “Educational Challenges for the Second Generation and Beyond,” and featured five different speakers. As the title of the discussion indicates, the focus of the evening was on education and the imperative role it plays in helping the descendants of genocide victims and survivors understand the impact of their families’ suffering on their own lives. In this way, education can also be a tool for prevention, as it is centered on the belief that past hostilities and injustices can be overcome. As moderator Dr. Yael Danieli of the Group Project for Holocaust Survivors and Their Children stated in her opening remarks, the goal is to “try to prevent the transformation [of trauma] from generation to generation.”

The first panelist of the evening was Sue Lob, founder and executive director of the Voices of Women Organizing Project, whose father survived a year of internment at Mauthausen, and whose mother lived in hiding to escape the Nazi purge. Lob summarized the impact of the Holocaust on her family by referring to it as a “legacy of both trauma and resilience,” noting that her parents rarely discussed their experiences, indicating the lasting effects of what they had been made to endure. From a resiliency perspective, however, Lob affirmed that “what survivors bring to us is this real legacy of their ability to adapt,” along with a powerful sense of tenacity and stubborn will. Explaining that this was the first time she had chosen to speak about her family’s story in public, Lob concluded by offering her reasoning for finally doing so: “I didn’t want to stand by the way the world [had] stood by.”

Lob was followed by the organizer of the evening’s discussion, Eugenie Mukeshimana, a survivor of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and founder and executive director of the Genocide Survivors Support Network (GSSN). She began by stating that “it sounds very strange, but we remember [the genocide] as if it was yesterday,” referencing the unspoken issues that haunt survivors as constituting a “world they live in that is inside, not known.” In particular, Mukeshimana noted how children, impoverished and oftentimes orphaned after the genocide, were faced with these adult issues, but lacked access to resources like counseling that could have assisted them. While interventions have historically focused on the first generation – that is, adults and teenagers who were alive during the genocide and directly experienced its horrors – “the second generation is turning nineteen,” and such intervention initiatives cannot be sustained unless this second generation is taken into account. Specifically, Mukeshimana mentioned that many children attend school with the children of those who murdered their parents, which provides a platform for potential problems both now and in the future. As she aptly noted, “it takes much longer to get rid of the ideology that created [the genocide] in the first place,” and concluded by stating that “we need to begin looking at the way we can support education” in Rwanda.

Ed Ballen, a clinical social worker and the founder and executive director of the Rwanda Education Assistance Program (REAP), spoke after Mukeshimana. After visiting an orphanage in Rwanda in 2006, he stated that he felt a particular connection to the place, and in 2008 started the  nonprofit REAP by opening a public school where children from that orphanage could attend classes. Expressing his adherence to the notion that “education is a fundamental human right for all children,” Ballen explained that REAP’s mission is to enrich the environment to learn for these kids. This is accomplished through a five-pillar approach, comprising community, engagement, education outside the classroom, health and well-being, and the environment. Ballen also noted a few challenges that the REAP faces, such as a lack of clean drinking water for students, and the fact that most pupils have a long walk to and from the school each day. Teaching also poses problems, as a teacher in primary school only has a high school education, and is often devalued in society for having chosen that career path. Yet Ballen is hopeful, saying that “when I feel overwhelmed, what keeps me going is holding on to the face of the children of Rwanda. I can see the hope.” He concluded by echoing this sentiment in a paraphrase of Levinas, saying that “our ethical behavior begins with the human face” of the Other.

After Ballen was Barrett Frankel, the development and communications manager of Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village (ASYV), another education-based organization that serves Rwandan youth. Specifically, ASYV offers 500 Rwandan youth a holistic living, learning, and healing community, which they are a part of for four years. The mission of the organization is to help students realize their maximum potential, as well as to cultivate a sense of social responsibility, so that each student might become an “educator and an investor in the generation.” The main axioms of ASYV are the focus provided on the individual student, formal and informal education, health and wellness, and education on other genocides, such as what occurred in the Holocaust and Bosnia. In addition, Frankel talked about how instead of punishing students for misbehavior, ASYV has developed a “DNA” approach, which stands for discussion, negotiation, and agreement. As she explained, “life is about repair,” and the most important lesson one can learn from the incident is to understand the consequences of an individual’s actions on the whole community. In this spirit, Frankel also emphasized giving kids a voice, and instilling in them “the power to think for themselves, well beyond their four years” at ASYV.

The last panelist, Dr. Racelle Weiman, is the director of Global Education and Professional Training for the Dialogue Institute at Temple University. She also serves on the GSSN board, and underlined the importance of empowerment – that is, “how to help people help themselves.” In particular, Weiman promoted the ownership of Rwandans and all survivors of genocide in finding their voice and sharing their story, and that in doing so they should be cognizant of their audience. In other words, she asked, “What is the story that you want them to tell?” and repeatedly emphasized, “You are your own voice.”

Perhaps a few words from Dr. Danieli best capture how important education can be for survivors and the prevention of repeated trauma. As she states, education “must be embraced and contained within a healing environment” – “you don’t want successful people who can’t manage their heart.” Thus, the greatest opportunity education might provide is the chance to envision life differently, in harmony with one’s community, and in recognition of one’s individual agency to write a future that is different from the past, so as to ensure that “never again” means what it was always intended to.

Photo: Eugenie Mukeshimana

GenPrev Podcast [4 April 2013]

In this edition of the Auschwitz Institute podcast, Jared Knoll speaks with Jurgen Brauer and Charles Anderton about the role of economic factors in genocide and mass atrocities. Both of them have been instructors at the Auschwitz Institute’s Raphael Lemkin Seminar for Genocide Prevention. We spoke just two weeks before a panel at the World Bank on how to apply a mass atrocity prevention lens to economic development policy, co-organized and moderated by the Auschwitz Institute.

 

Welcome, I’m Jared Knoll with the Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation. Today we’re looking at an often-ignored element of genocide prevention: economics. Joining me to discuss this complex subject are Jurgen Brauer and Charles Anderton, two professors hoping to produce a handbook on the economics of genocide and mass killing. Both prolific authors, they work out of Georgia Regents University and Holy Cross College in Massachusetts, respectively, and have served as instructors for the Auschwitz Institute. Charles, Jurgen: Thanks for joining us today.

JB: Yes, thank you very much for the invitation. This is Jurgen Brauer. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about this.

CA: Jared, thank you very much for contacting us. We’re delighted to have the opportunity to share some thoughts.

Would you like to start by telling us a little about how you think we need to approach the ways economics and mass killing play into one another?

CA: Jurgen and I have been kind of going back and forth on what we see as critical interdependencies between genocide and mass killing, and economics. So we’ve highlighted several areas where they intersect, and one of those is that genocides and mass killings have huge economic consequences. A second way that they go together is that economic conditions, poverty and other types of economic conditions, are potentially risk factors for genocide and mass killing, and might affect the severity as well.

We also have seen cases, certainly the Holocaust and other cases, where there’s a kind of business organization to the genocide. They’re very systematic and they require leadership and logistics and coordination and hiring people to do certain terrible tasks that are involved. There’s a kind of business of genocide that needs to be better understood. And of course there’s looting that goes on in many genocides and mass killings, and that’s a form of wealth appropriation and a loss of wealth to the victims, and obviously security is undermined, and economists see security as a very fundamental service that every society should provide.

I think the last one that we thought about is this idea of genocides and mass killing being choices that people actually are choosing, are in some sense weighing costs and benefits when they’re thinking about perpetrating such things, and economics is a social science of people making choices. So those are the ways that we see the genocides and mass killings and economics being interdependent.

JB: What we would like to add, as we continue to think about the topic, is how one may use economics to generate insights into the prevention of genocide and mass killing. There’s an increasing amount of work done, several Nobel Prizes in fact have been awarded to think about how does one design a society, how does one design structures within which incentives for behavior are guided or changed to a beneficial social outcome, so that we avoid that which we do not want to have and foster that which we do want to have.

So do you perceive an omission or a gap in the literature and body of work in the economics of genocide and mass killing?

CA: There’s a need for multidisciplinary perspectives. We’re hoping to see economics step up and professional economists take more of a role in understanding genocides and mass killings. We think that the social psychologists, the historians, the sociologists, and the political scientists have been working really hard in this field for decades, but we economists have not really contributed what our share should be, in a sense.

Why do you think economic issues haven’t been tackled as much in academia, awareness campaigns and other efforts, compared to aspects of mass killing like social ideology, ethnic conflict, things like that?

JB: Well, I believe that part of it has to do with the public image of economics. Economics is about money, economics is about financial markets, economics is about the value of your home, economics is about how much money you get from your boss. But in fact the discipline of economics, I would say, money is 5 percent of what we do and the other 95 percent is really interesting stuff that the public doesn’t hear about. People ordinarily don’t think of economics as contributing to larger social issues beyond the finances of a household or a firm, or maybe the government. So I think it’s in part a perceptual issue. Economists over the years have made great contributions, in environmental economics, public policy, the evaluation of cost-benefit of, let’s say, publicly funded research and those sorts of things.

CA: The textbooks in economics focus on production and exchange and consumption, and of course this is what they should focus on. But of course in many parts of the world there can be serious degrees of insecurity and there can be what Paul Collier, an economist, has characterized as economic development in reverse. I think a lot of our economic textbooks look at economic progress and economic growth in societies where institutions are pretty strong and stable, but there of course are many parts of the world that have really serious forms of insecurity, and the standard textbook approaches don’t really fit well in those areas, and so I think economists have to step up and do more in thinking about issues of war and peace and insecurity. I think another issue here is that economics perhaps is the most quantitative of the social sciences. It can be very mathematical, very statistical-oriented, and that can present some obstacles in the sense of trying to communicate to a broader audience.

Is it just simpler to focus on things like ancient hatreds, in terms of public attention, instead of economic realities? Or do you think it’s also harder emotionally for people to look at cases as terrible as genocide through cold, but also I think very relatable financial terms? Does that relatability actually make it harder?

CA: You know, it’s very interesting. Right after the end of the Cold War there was a kind of ramp-up in the number of civil wars that were out there, and a lot of the media portrayal of these civil wars was that they were driven by ethnic animosities or some ancient animosities that now resurfaced at the end of the Cold War, and there probably were valuable insights into looking at it that way, but some economists also looked at problems of underdevelopment, of contests over resources within countries, and these other economic factors became important. It did become a kind of cold, cost-benefit analysis approach to looking at issues of underdevelopment and resource contestation, but there was some empirical weight that these economic factors mattered. So I think in a similar way we’ve got to try to bring economics to bear in thinking about cost and benefit issues regarding genocide and mass killing.

The World Bank and IMF, coming up, are going to be putting on a working group for developing a genocide prevention lens to incorporate into their development project criteria. How optimistic are you that efforts like these and the future of turning public attention have of getting to a point where addressing mass atrocities and genocides through that economic lens?

JB: I think the degree of optimism may depend on the expected time frame. Sometimes when these sorts of things are put in place in an institution and there’s a press communication made, people may have unrealistic expectations that things will be better in two years or five years, and in fact you’re just setting in motion a process, and that process may take 10 or 15 or 20 years to work out. It’s probably unrealistic, not optimistic, to say something will happen within a year or two, but it may be much more realistic and optimistic to say that over a longer time period, the process is put in place and measures are being taken, observations are made, discussions are held, and that aid and assistance ultimately will be tied through criteria that are presumably yet to be developed. So I think if you take a less urgent, urgent as the matter is, but a less urgent perspective, then perhaps in 10 years’ time we will have the result that we want.  

Well, I hope you keep making strides toward making the economic aspects of mass killing and genocide an important part of the discussion. Thank you so much, Charles, Jurgen, for speaking with me today.

CA: Thank you.

JB: Thank you very much.

Photos: Courtesy Charles Anderton and Jurgen Brauer

GenPrev Podcast [2 April 2013]

In this edition of the Auschwitz Institute podcast, Jared Knoll speaks with Andrew Feinstein, former South African MP for the anti-apartheid African National Congress, and a writer, speaker, critic and campaigner in the effort to better regulate the global arms trade. His most recent book, The Shadow World, looks at the connections between political corruption, the arms trade, and the atrocities that result. His work is especially relevant right now, as the UN is on the verge of adopting the first ever international arms trade treaty. 

 

Welcome. I’m Jared Knoll for the Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation. On Thursday, the United Nations began the process of adopting the first international treaty to regulate the global arms trade, a $70 billion business. It was blocked by Iran, Syria and North Korea, who complained the treaty failed to ban sales to rebel groups, and the General Assembly has plans to put the draft to a vote on Tuesday. What isn’t talked about much is how political corruption in wealthy, developed countries may be the most important factor involved, even half a world away from the mass atrocities it can lead to.

Joining me to speak on the complex issues and implications involved in the international arms trade, and where it all originates from, is Andrew Feinstein. He’s the founding co-director of Corruption Watch in London, and a former South African parliament member for the African National Congress. They’re the political party born out of the anti-apartheid movement; he was known as “Mr. Clean” when he was with them. He’s also a prolific author, speaker and critic on government corruption and the transnational arms trade. Hello, Andrew. So good to have you with us today. 

Hi, Jared. Great to be with you.

You have a tendency to tackle some pretty bold intellectual targets — government corruption, illegal arms trading, backroom bribery — pretty large, systemic issues. What has led you to take these “big” approaches?

Well, I think that what struck me while a member of parliament in South Africa, was that the trade in weapons has the ability to have effects not just on conflicts, on their brutality, sometimes their longevity — but also on issues of governance and the rule of law, in both buying and selling countries. And having experienced this first hand in a very young democracy like South Africa, just four years after our first democratic elections, I became interested in how this manifests globally, and was shocked to discover that South Africa was just one of countless examples of the iniquitous impact of the global trade in arms. But rather than looking at isolated cases, it’s really the way in which the trade works on a systemic basis that’s really important. So that meant looking at issues like the very highest levels of governance, global financial systems and money laundering, and how they work. So certainly not by choice, Jared, but by necessity.

What do you think the implications of that kind of approach can have for finding solutions and finding options for prevention?

I think the two approaches need to be married, to find solutions and to look at issues of prevention. The first is the systemic picture. I don’t think one can actually develop meaningful solutions without an understanding of how these things work, perhaps at the most exalted level, if one can call it that — the systems of governance, the systems of international trade. But at the same time the reality is that any particular circumstance will have a very unique context. So one has to look at both of those aspects to be able to develop solutions that could be meaningful and practical on the ground.

What have you found to be the relationship between government corruption, or the seeds of government corruption, the international arms trade, and the occurrence of mass atrocities?

Let’s deal with each of those, very quickly, on their own. The first is, in terms of levels of government corruption, one needs to understand the extraordinary figures that were extrapolated from information gleaned by a wonderful researcher called Joe Roeber, from national treasuries and intelligence agencies of the world’s most powerful nations. He calculated that with figures up to the end of 2003, the arms trade accounted for around 40 percent of all corruption, in all global trade. Which is an astonishing figure, and if one looks, for instance, at the world’s biggest arms deal to date — between the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia, a deal worth 43 billion British pounds — British police have estimated that 6 billion pounds of bribes were paid on that deal alone. And this included to some incredibly powerful individuals. So the scale of the bribery and corruption is massive. Those impacts, as I have mentioned, are not just on the exchequers of those countries, but on the way they’re governed and on the rule of law, because the corruption leads to decisions that are often not in the national interest, or even in the best defense interests of the buying country. So that’s the one dimension of it.

The second dimension, how does this feed into mass atrocities? Well, the other characteristic of the global arms trade that makes it fairly unique in world trade, is that everything that happens in the trade takes place behind a veil of national security-imposed secrecy. So even when there is criminal conduct or illegal conduct taking place, it is hidden from us, the public. I have made I don’t know how many hundreds of thousands of freedom-of-information requests around the world, and I never get any information from them because I’m always told that the matters fall under national security. So that secrecy allows extraordinary things to happen. Together with an academic from the University of British Columbia, I’ve managed to identify 502 violations of UN arms embargoes since they were introduced. Two of those have led to any legal action of any sort. One led to a conviction.

So, taking the corruption, taking the secrecy, this means that things can happen in the trade in weapons that we know nothing about, that can enable the commission and execution of mass atrocities and crimes against humanity. Let me give you just one example. You know, when we think of the tragedy of the Rwandan genocide, people have the sense of crazed citizens in a state, a mental state, that is inexplicable to us. Running around and murdering their fellow countrymen with machetes. The reality is far more complex than that. The reality is that for many years leading up to the genocide, the then-regime in Rwanda engaged in a massive, massive process of weaponizing and militarizing one ethnic group in the society, against all sorts of legal sanctions. But this weaponization — which led from Rwanda being a complete minnow in the African arms trade to, over a period of a couple of years, being amongst the highest spenders on weaponry — this took place clandestinely, but with the active facilitation of the governments of France, South Africa, and Egypt, amongst others, with the intimate involvement of large arms companies and individual arms dealers. And this happened in spite of arms embargoes, in spite of attempts to police what was going on in Rwanda. So the nature of the arms trade directly impacts the way in which situations or conflicts can be weaponized that increase the likelihood of those conflicts leading to mass atrocities or crimes against humanity.

So then with these things coming up from every aspect, from every angle — the individuals in the buying country, the systemic issue between countries, and the complete lack of any enforceable mechanisms for the selling countries — it sounds like the only way to tackle this is from a systemic approach, from that large-scale angle that you take it. How do we start to make headway with such a prolific situation?

The key at a systemic level is clearly regulation. Because the reality as we sit here today, and we are just a few days away from the United Nations trying to agree an international arms trade treaty, a process that has been fraught with difficulty because of a lack of political will amongst the biggest players in the arms trade to actually change the current regulatory regime, where the global trade in bananas is more highly regulated than the trade in weapons. So yes, the solution is dependent on creating a far tougher, strongly enforced regulatory regime for weapons of all kind, for ammunition of all kind. Because we’re fortunate in that advances in technology, which have as an unfortunate by-product made killing easier, also have the by-product of making the tracking of weaponry and ammunition far easier. So at not much additional cost, we could actually be tracking every single piece of ammunition, let alone every piece of weaponry, and where it is in the world at any time. What is lacking at this point is the political will to say, “This is what we have to do, every country has to do this, and the sanctions for not doing so are so profound that it will happen.” But the lead on that has to be taken by the biggest players in the weapons trade, bearing in mind that the United States of America currently buys and sells almost as much weaponry and ammunition as the rest of the world combined.

And before people get too depressed, let me repeat again — and this is really based on something that the American anthropologist Margaret Mead said many decades ago — it is small groups of committed, thoughtful citizens who change history. Never doubt that that is the case, and that it has always been so. So while the challenges are huge, I do believe that if enough people are prepared to engage on this issue, it is possible — and I say this as a former politician myself — it is possible to change political will. And on this issue that’s what we have to do.

Well, I’m inspired. I hope you’ll keep inspiring people with that very active approach to making people understand that they have the ability to effect some of that momentum.

Thanks, Jared. Thanks very much for your time in doing this.

Photo: http://www.scrapweapons.com

GenPrev Podcast [28 March 2013]

In this edition of the Auschwitz Institute podcast, Jared Knoll speaks with Dr. Ekkehard Strauss, who has published extensively on protection of minorities, prevention of human rights violations, post-conflict peacebuilding, and human rights responses to mass atrocities. Strauss has been an instructor at the Auschwitz Institute’s Raphael Lemkin Seminar for Genocide Prevention, and was a member of the Task Force on the EU Prevention of Mass Atrocities, which earlier this month released a report assessing Europe’s capabilities to respond to threats of genocide and other mass atrocities.

 

Welcome, I’m Jared Knoll for the Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation. In late 2011 the Budapest Centre for the International Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities established the Task Force on the EU Prevention of Mass Atrocities, to look at Europe’s capabilities to respond to threats of mass killings and genocide. They released a report a few weeks ago, which lists four core problems for the capacity to prevent, including issues with coordination and policymaking, and six recommendations to strengthen capabilities, like improving cooperation with other actors and applying a prevention mindset to trade and development policies.

Speaking with me today is a member of that task force, Dr. Ekkehard Strauss. He has worked with the OSCE in Bosnia-Herzegovina, served under the UN High Commissioner, and established himself as a mainstay in the development of peacebuilding, Responsibility to Protect, and atrocity prevention practices. He is currently working as a consultant and researcher in Rabat, Morocco. Hello, Dr. Strauss. Thank you for being here today.

Thank you very much.

Could you start by telling us about the Task Force on the EU Prevention of Mass Atrocities: where the idea came from, what its purpose is, who is on it, and how they arrived at their list of recommendations?

The idea of reviewing mass atrocity prevention capacities of the European Union really came at the time when the U.S. task force started to review the U.S. capacities. And there were different individuals and organizations who tried to convince them to actually undertake a similar exercise. People like David Hamburg, for instance, who was chairing the UN secretary-general’s advisory board on genocide prevention; the Budapest Centre, which was an initiative at that time; the Special Adviser on Prevention of Genocide; and other people. Unfortunately, none of us succeeded in convincing the European Union. So we basically took this initiative forward as a citizen initiative and initiated a process where we invited 12 people with very different experiences, from different European countries, to form a task force and to review these capacities using a methodology which was mixed. First, by a desk review of what is out there on reviews of EU capacity to react to conflict, violence and crisis. And the content you find in the report is basically an analysis of this task force, of the interviews, plus our own experience in crisis situations, and with different European institutions, and what is the state of play in the discussions on genocide prevention today.

How did you personally get involved in atrocity prevention? Can you tell us a little bit about your start in this?

I think one very important part for me was, while I was still undertaking my law studies, to start the basis of an internship with the UN and there being exposed to what it really means to be a victim of systematic violence and state-sponsored, large-scale violence. For me, this was a different dimension to the work on human rights violations due to individuals, due to exceptional situations, and so on. This is serious as well, it’s important to work on it from a human rights perspective, but for me, this other dimension, that states really systematically get after their own people, was like a new encounter. So I wrote a doctorate thesis on prevention of human rights violations, looking at legal standards and trying to look at how they are not reflected in the different institutions we were in the process of creating in the early ’90s, the international ad hoc tribunals and so on. We were basically hoping that some of them would have a preventive effect. And then I had the great opportunity of somehow field-testing many of the things I had worked on in Bosnia immediately after the war, and I moved on to Kosovo and Serbia while the crisis was unfolding there. Then in 2004 I had the great chance to work with Juan Méndez and support him in establishing the Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide. And this was somehow the coming full-round from my different theoretical and field experience to do something that I still find very fulfilling.

And how did you become involved with the Auschwitz Institute?

The Auschwitz Institute, actually Fred Schwartz came to see Juan Méndez, I think back in 2004 or 2005. And he presented his idea of having trainings in Auschwitz. And I think we were — at the beginning, after the first meeting — I think we were a little bit skeptical among ourselves whether this is something that would work and whether people wouldn’t just go home with a lot of overwhelming impressions about the Holocaust, an almost perfect system of destroying people that you are confronted with when you visit Auschwitz. Then when this idea evolved, and we got also our own experience with training of government officials, I think we got more and more fascinated by the idea. And I think it’s a fascinating experience. I think the concept has proven that our skepticism was unfounded. I think it’s a very good concept to actually have people making the transition from looking at the Holocaust, experiencing Auschwitz, experiencing being there and being exposed to this, and going through an experience where you think, “This is exceptional and it cannot happen anywhere else,” to then slowly making the experience of “No, it could happen somewhere else. No, these are average people who committed it. Yes, there was a lot of preparation, ideology, and anti-Semitism and so on that existed,” but I think that for me, this experience from an observer, and then from a teacher’s point of view, was fascinating how it worked for the people who participated.

Do you find yourself optimistic, based upon your experiences doing that and based upon your experiences in assessing the United Nations to stop genocide and mass atrocities, do you find yourself optimistic for the future?

I do. I mean, I’m very optimistic. But I have to say that I’m not optimistic that there will be a world free of genocide. From working on this for quite some time and having visited many of the countries which experience genocide, I think each time and each century has its own genocides, and we might witness genocides while we speak and we will only find out in a couple of years based on legal findings and so on, and say, “Okay, Darfur was a genocide,” and so on. So I’m not optimistic that we will prevent all of them, but I think we can be much better in detecting signs very early and taking them seriously, and intervening at a point where we still do not have these exceptional numbers of victims. I don’t think that long-term prevention will really work in all of the cases. We can educate and train and establish institutions and so on, and this will hopefully do a lot of good with regard to human rights. It might make it more difficult to convince people to participate in systematic killings of particular groups, but for each of those you find  historic examples where they had the same and they had a genocide nevertheless. But I think by making mass atrocities something that is possible, something that is a plausible conclusion to developments on the ground, I think we will contribute to preventing, hopefully, more of these cases. But still I think there are genocides in the making that we don’t even know about. There are situations that we will not capture with our early warning methodology, but nevertheless we should continue and learn, and I’m very optimistic that we get better every day and every month.

Well, I hope the recommendations that you and the task force have given will be a shot in the arm toward that improvement. Thank you very much for talking to me.

Thank you very much—and I’m so glad it finally worked out.

Photo: http://www.dvgn.de

GenPrev in the News [26 March 2013]

“When Hateful Speech Is Transformed Into Hateful Deeds”:
Examining Freedom of Speech, Hate Speech, and Incitement to Genocide

Panelists at “Hate Speech and Incitement to Genocide,” US Holocaust Memorial Museum

By MICHELLE EBERHARD

Human rights simultaneously create duties and establish a basis for claims – that is, they emphasize the responsibility that one entity, be it state or individual, has towards another entity, as well as how an individual might be able to enforce another entity’s guarantee of a particular provision. Given the wide spectrum of rights that have been codified in such documents as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Economic and Social Rights, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, one right can, under certain circumstances, restrict the complete fulfillment of an obligation provided under another right, by virtue of what each is attempting to protect. One example of this tension is the debate between the right to freedom of expression and the right to be free of attacks on one’s own rights and reputation that can potentially result from inflammatory speech.

When it comes to genocide prevention, the most important component of this debate is how to balance freedom of expression with speech that falls under the category of “direct and public incitement to genocide,” a crime listed under Article III of the Genocide Convention. Indeed, individuals like Julius Streicher of Germany, as well as Hassan Ngeze, Ferdinand Nahimana, and Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza of Rwanda, have all been convicted for public incitement to genocide. Despite these court cases, however, the issue of whether or not something qualifies as incitement remains open to interpretation and context. Indeed, not all inflammatory speech can or should be considered incitement, as freedom of expression is a necessary cornerstone of democracy. As the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) states on its website, “incitement to commit genocide [requires] a calling on the audience (be they listeners or readers) to take action of some kind. Absent such a call, inflammatory language may qualify as hate speech but does not constitute incitement.”

To further elucidate the distinction between these two sets of rights, as well as to elaborate on efforts being made to combat incitement, the USHMM, in conjunction with the United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression, held a panel discussion February 5 titled “Hate Speech and Incitement to Genocide.”

After opening remarks by Susan Bloomfield, director of the USHMM, five panelists guided by moderator Mike Abramowitz, director of the Center for the Prevention of Genocide, each spoke briefly on their area of expertise and then responded to questions posed by Abramowitz himself.

The first speaker tasked with answering Bloomfield’s question – “How we can counter dissemination of inflammatory speech while protecting the right to free expression?” – was the ambassador of Norway to the United States, Wegger Strømmen, who began by commenting on his personal introduction to human rights in the 1970s, which consisted of joining Amnesty International as an activist, accompanied by other young people who “thought we were going to change the world significantly.” Acknowledging that “we have a much more complex reality” today, particularly in regards to speech, as “more people have access to a microphone” than they used to, Strømmen offered this as a remedy to the struggle for balance between freedom of speech and avoiding incitement: “We should remember that the same tools that can be used to . . . cause incitement to violence can also be used to monitor them, to understand them.” In other words, he stated that “rational people” should be able to counter extremists with preventive measures that emerge from the same tools and tactics associated with incitement.

Strømmen was followed by Adama Dieng, the UN special adviser on prevention of genocide. Dieng pointed to preparations for the recently held Kenyan elections, indicating that “there have been numerous initiatives to develop ways to . . . counter the kind of hate speech that contributed to the incitement of that violence, in order to prevent a recurrence this time around.” Additionally, he mentioned that the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has held a series of expert workshops that led to the “identification of three main points to be considered when seeking to strengthen national and international efforts to curb incitement.”

First, the OHCHR acknowledged that Article 20(2) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which states that “any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law,” should only be invoked for exceptional or extraordinary circumstances. Second, Dieng stressed the importance of “acknowledging that the human sentiment of hatred and discrimination go deeper than the offenses of discrimination, hate crimes and incitement. We must recognize the limits of legislation to combat hate speech and incitement. We need to develop a multilayered approach to fight the root causes of hate speech, racism, and discrimination.” In this spirit, he indicated the role of the promotion of human rights and tolerance, though he hesitated to place all is faith in the latter, saying that “when we tolerate someone, we accept, but we don’t embrace.” Perhaps it is human rights, then, that can fill this gap and thus complement tolerance education. Finally, Dieng stated that “there is a need for increased national and international monitoring capacities for early warning purposes,” which could be achieved by creative new technologies and media.

Susan Benesch, project director for the World Policy Institute’s “Dangerous Speech on the Road to Mass Violence,” was next.  She presented her theory on dangerous speech, which she defines as “certain speech, some subset of speech within this large, vague universe of hate speech . . . [that  has] a special, terrible power . . . to move groups of people so that they will condone and eventually take part in atrocities.” Two hallmarks of this she mentioned are dehumanizing language that associates human beings with animals (for example, the Nazis’ reference to Jews as pests or vermin, and the Hutus’ reference to Tutsis as inyenzi, or cockroaches), and what she called “accusation in a mirror.” This occurs when an “inflammatory speaker tells his audience that the other group, the future victims, are coming to get them,” and thus creates an “analogue of the one iron-clad defense to murder in every single legal system: self-defense.” When this happens, violence becomes both acceptable and necessary. In addition, Benesch pointed to a set of five criteria for making an educated guess on the level of danger that particular speech might lead to: the speaker, the audience, the speech act itself, historical and social context, and means of dissemination of the speech.

After Benesch came Frank LaRue, who agreed on the importance of criminalizing incitement to genocide, but emphasized the importance of having a threshold for doing so. As he remarked, it is “very important to maintain the idea that when you’re limiting speech, you’re going to the exception of the rule; the norm should be the openness.” Importantly, he also identified benchmarks for determining this threshold, which include intent, severity and extent of the content, the feasibility and immediacy of harm being produced, and the context within a specific country. When prompted by Abramowitz on a follow-up question, LaRue added that “oftentimes governments are using limitations, which they try to justify as limiting hate speech . . . but they’re actually limiting legitimate debate and dialogue,” which underscores the necessity of remaining aware of country-specific context in evaluating hate speech and incitement.

George Weiss, founder of Radio La Benevolencija Humanitarian Tools Foundation (La Benevolencija), followed LaRue. He explained the work that his organization has done, particularly in Rwanda over the past 10 years, which began when psychologists were invited by the Rwandan government to teach comparative psychology in the country. Noting that studies generated by Yale, Princeton, and New York University had all evaluated the program and produced positive feedback, Weiss reiterated that when audiences like the Rwandan public are afraid of what they are not accustomed to – for example, democratic principles – you must “reach them by giving them virtual examples that they respect,” which are often archetypal or heroic in nature. One example of this is a soap opera titled “New Dawn,” which has run in Rwanda since 2003 and remains the most popular soap opera in the country. As Weiss acknowledged toward the end of his remarks, “You don’t only change knowledge. You embed knowledge, and that has to lead to attitude change.”  Indeed, this is the goal of programs like “New Dawn” and similar projects created by La Benevolencija.

The last panelist was Aidan White, director of the Ethical Journalism Network, who stressed a return to the traditional values of journalism. Citing political manipulation and economic and professional crises as having undermined these efforts in recent years, White emphasized that journalism is different from free expression, in that journalism is “constrained expression – you can’t just say what you want to say.” Instead, White argued, journalists must be motivated by “cardinal principles,” including truth, independence, impartiality, accountability, and “[showing] humanity” in the way they do their work.

A range of topics were further extrapolated on as the moderator Abramowitz facilitated discussion on some of the points made by the panelists. This included issues pertaining to particular countries like Libya, Syria, and Iran, as well as Greece, which Weiss pointed out is the first country where a neo-Nazi group has been elected to Parliament. Given that this group, Golden Dawn, has “openly said that the Nazis and Hitler are their role models, [and] that they only got elected into parliament to destroy democracy,” the future of what Weiss refers to as the “destructuralization of Greek society” is certainly in question. White also responded to this, stating, “We need journalism . . . to give us informed background, to give us context, and to give us really important analysis of the consequence of events and how that’s going to affect people’s lives.”

When the conversation moved back to solutions for the debate over freedom of expression, LaRue commented that “never should intervention be censorship,” and instead that “the intervention and the response has to be positive speech.” Benesch supported this statement when she answered a related question, from Abramowitz, on why it is potentially risky to limit speech. She responded by noting that doing so “is to shut down the opportunity to debate, to air grievances, legitimate or not legitimate . . . and if you shut that down, that may in fact increase the likelihood of mass violence itself.” Therefore, while the fine lines that demarcate hate speech, incitement, and freedom of speech remain malleable, advancements made at multiple levels within the international community have certainly added to a greater contextualization of how we might eventually determine more fixed guidelines for establishing each of these boundaries.

Photo: blogs.ushmm.org