“What Did We Know — and When Did We Know It?” (by Michael Dobbs, who is following the Mladic trial for the Committee on Conscience at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum) looks closely at about 1 minute of video footage shot by a Serbian journalist on July 13, 1995, during the genocide of Bosnian Serbs in Srebrenica.

The first part of the video (repeated subsequently in slow motion) shows prisoners gathered in a field, guarded by soldiers in uniform. The second part was taken by Petrovic as he drove back toward Srebrenica through the village of Kravica while the massacre was underway. You hear shots ring out, mingled with the throbbing beat of music from the car radio. In addition to the crumpled bodies (more visible in the slow motion part of the video that begins at 0:50), you see the bullet-spattered façade of the warehouse and empty white buses (used to transport the prisoners).

This footage aired the next day on the Belgrade TV station Studio B, with the murdered Bosnian Serbs described as “dead Muslim soldiers.” One journalist—Robert Block, Belgrade correspondent for the Independent in London—saw the footage and immediately suspected a massacre. He went to the television station and asked to see the footage in slow motion. The next day he published a story titled “Bodies pile up in horror of Srebrenica.”

As Dobbs points out:

If a lone reporter was able to reach such conclusions on the basis of examining a few seconds of video footage, think what a powerful intelligence agency would have been able to do had it been explicitly tasked to gather evidence of war crimes. We now know that the CIA had additional imagery of the Kravica events that was captured in real time, but not analyzed for many weeks.

Given that massacres in the area continued for another week after the footage was broadcast, if intelligence analysts had been paying attention, many lives might have been saved.

From a prevention point of view, what’s important is for intelligence agencies—and journalists—to be on the lookout for signs of atrocity crimes, especially when there is violent conflict going on.

Dobbs will be writing more articles about the use of intelligence in genocide prevention, which you can follow here.

Fighting in Karen State flared on election day on November 7, 2010. Conflict between government forces and ethnic Karen insurgents has displaced more than 10,000 civilians . . . All parties to the conflict make widespread use of anti-personnel landmines. Abuses by the Burmese army in Karen State since November 2010 include forced labor, targeting of civilians, attacks on livelihoods, and the longstanding practice of using convict porters . . . prisoners were used as “human shields” to trigger landmines, draw fire during ambushes, or protect soldiers. Injured porters were left to die, and many were summarily executed for failing to carry heavy loads of munitions and supplies. Many of these abuses are war crimes under international humanitarian law.

Because of these grave violations, and given the fact that this is the sixth such cease-fire agreement to be signed between these two groups, Karen Communities Worldwide is calling on the government to engage in dialogue beyond the cease-fire in order to solve the conflict’s underlying political problems. Specifically, they are requesting:

• A nationwide cease-fire
• Dialogue for a political solution that guarantees ethnic rights and culture.
• Stop military actions in ethnic areas
• Stop human rights violations
• Free all political prisoners, including ethnic leader Mahn Nyein Maung

According to McClatchy correspondent Alan Boswell,

Online forums and private conversations are filled with vitriol aimed at the Murle, a small, politically marginalized group that numbers  between 100,000 and 150,000 and is neighbored by both the Dinka and the Lou Nuer, South Sudan’s two dominant tribes.

During the long civil war in which South Sudan won its independence from Sudan, the Murle were seen as traitors. They’re accused regularly of abducting their neighbors’ children, a practice not uncommon across South Sudan.

Chris Chapman, Minority Rights Group’s Head of Conflict Prevention, explained,

The attacks, which on the face of it appear to be cattle raids, have deeper underlying causes related to poverty, competition for scarce resources, the ubiquity of small arms left over from a decades-long war and marginalization of ethnic minorities. In addition, the conflict between the Lou Nuer and Murle is taking on a dynamic of repeated revenge attacks, highlighting the need for the government to take urgent action to protect innocent civilians.

Former U.S. Ambassador to Ethiopia and to Burkina Faso David H. Shinn offers further explanation by saying that the conflict is deeply rooted in cattle raiding and the fact that young men are culturally required to pay a bride price in cattle.

While the fighting is currently at a standstill, threats of genocide are pervasive in the area and many fear a reprisal of violence. South Sudan is on the precipice of a humanitarian disaster, as Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir has been launching border attacks for months, killing civilians and members of the armed forces alike.

Photo: theepochtimes.com

Ryback’s article focuses on the impact mid- to low-level officials can have on government policy, an idea the Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation has made a cornerstone of its genocide prevention programs. In documenting the ripple effects of such a “small fish” in the Nazi government, Ryback exposes the fallacy that many to this day continue to believe: that genocidal governments are monolithic, void of dissenters, and impossible to change from within.

On April 12, 1933, “four Jews — Arthur Kahn, Ernst Goldmann, Rudolf Benario and Erwin Kahn — were executed in precisely that order at a Nazi camp in the obscure Bavarian hamlet of Prittlbach.” Ryback marks this as the first genocidal killing of Jews by the Nazis, and notes that the main characteristics of the process by which these four men were killed — intentionality, chain-of-command, selection, and execution — mirrored (scale and efficiency aside) the distinguishing traits of the Holocaust.

Hartinger was the lawyer assigned to investigate the men’s death, and instead of accepting the initial statement from his superiors — that the four men were shot trying to escape a detention facility — he initiated a formal inquiry. To Hartinger’s suggestion that a serial killing of Jews had taken place, his boss said even the Nazis wouldn’t do such a thing, and terminated the case. Hartinger persisted, launching indictments against the commanding officer and three other SS men at Prittlbach.

Surprisingly, the commandant was removed, and the killings of Jews temporarily stopped. To Hartinger, this revealed the weakness of the still evolving Nazi regime. At the time the Nazis were still very sensitive to international opinion, and had not consolidated power in Germany enough to ignore the orders of the president, Paul von Hindenburg, who possessed the constitutional authority to dissolve the Nazi government and dismiss Hitler as chancellor. Hartinger included all of this in his memoirs, which Ryback uses to pinpoint “that tenuous phase of an emerging genocidal process when intercession could have disrupted and derailed the horrific and now seemingly inevitable outcome.”

For would-be genocide preventers, this story is important because it shows that even genocidal governments are not monolithic. Their goals may not be universally accepted or even known, which leaves them open to undermining in the early stages of their consolidation of power.

With this in mind, the Auschwitz Institute encourages the mid-level government and military officials from around the world who take part in our programs to be on the lookout for opportunities like the one Joseph Hartinger had, so when the time comes, they too can help halt the genocidal process.

Photo: Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation

In the capital city of Kinshasa, electricity was cut off and the food supply was disrupted. According to the New York Times,

[Congo] is last on the 2011 Global Hunger Index, a measure of malnutrition and child nutrition compiled by the International Food Policy Research Institute, and has gotten worse. It was the only country where the food situation dropped from “alarming” to “extremely alarming,” the institute reported this year. Half the country is considered undernourished.

Assistant Secretary of State Johnnie Carson said the United States was Congo’s largest donor with a commitment of over $900 million for peacekeeping, humanitarian and development initiatives in the past fiscal year. Many Congolese activists are now calling for some of this aid to be suspended until credible elections take place.

Photo: telegraph.co.uk

Photo: euronews.net

Photo: prensalibre.com

We know from the past that reprisals against a regime that has committed genocide may themselves often lead to a new genocide. In Syria’s case there has not been a genocide, but a report issued last month by the International Crisis Group makes it clear that because of “the Alawites’ conspicuous role in putting down protests, disseminating propaganda and staging pro-regime demonstrations,” there is now a high risk of violence targeting the Alawites as a group. [See pages 2, 3, 4, and 8.]

In a section of the conclusion titled “Protection,” the report says:

“Ironically, and however difficult it may be to admit, the Alawite community ultimately might need the kind of protection the protest movement long has strived to obtain for itself. As seen, risks of massacres in the early stages of a transition are very real; should they occur, chances of success could be fatally imperilled. It is not too soon for the opposition to address these fears head on; it might consider possible mechanisms – for example coordinating the swift dispatch, once the regime falls, of observers from local and perhaps international human rights organisations – to minimise this risk.”

In other words, if Syria is viewed only as a state committing violence against its citizens, it obscures the additional risk of genocide or mass atrocities against supporters of the regime itself. If the situation is viewed through a genocide-prevention lens, the risk becomes clear and there is a possibility of taking steps to address it.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Eleven candidates ran for president, including incumbent President Joseph Kabila. Kabila originally came to power in 2001, after his father’s assassination, and was democratically elected in 2006. Currently he is an unpopular figure, especially in western Congo. Eastern Congolese voters are also disillusioned with Kabila’s rule, as he has failed to deliver on his 2006 promises of greater stability and improved infrastructure. As such, many voters were unconvinced that Kabila could win fairly. Moreover, the voting process was widely perceived as fraudulent and irregular.

According to the Carter Center:

“[We find] the provisional presidential election results announced by the Independent National Election Commission (CENI) on Dec. 9 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to lack credibility. CENI results point to the re-election of incumbent President Joseph Kabila with 49 percent of the vote followed by Etienne Tshisekedi with 32 percent and Vital Kamerhe with 7.7 percent.  Voter turnout was 58 percent.

[. . .] the quality and integrity of the vote tabulation process has varied across the country, ranging from the proper application of procedures to serious irregularities, including the loss of nearly 2,000 polling station results in Kinshasa . . . it is also evident that multiple locations, notably several Katanga province constituencies, reported impossibly high rates of 99 to 100 percent voter turnout with all, or nearly all, votes going to incumbent President Joseph Kabila. These and other observations point to mismanagement of the results process and compromise the integrity of the presidential election.”

Anti-riot policemen and members of the elite presidential guard were deployed into the streets of Kinshasa to confront Tshisekedi’s supporters in the immediate aftermath of the election. It has now been confirmed that police killed four people in post-election violence, three of whom were looters and one who was hit by a stray bullet. Human Rights Watch received reports not only of shootings, but of abductions as well. The country’s last civil war, which claimed approximately 6 million lives, ended in 2003. The United Nations’ Human Development Index—the indicators of which are health, education, income, inequality, poverty, gender, and sustainability—ranks the DRC last out of 187 countries. Given these conditions and the DRC’s recent history, it is widely believed that this controversy could escalate into yet another civil war.

Photo: globalpost.com

According to Human Rights Watch, the North Korean dictatorship is guilty of “the widespread and systematic use of torture, arbitrary detention, abduction and public executions.” And in the last 16 years, more than four million North Koreans have died of starvation. Though the country has received billions of dollars in humanitarian aid, money and food alike are diverted to the military and the party elite. Political prison camps abound, in which, according to current Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in North Korea Marzuki Darusman, “as many as 250,000 political prisoners, one-third of whom are children, are at present being forced to perform slave labor on starvation rations and are subject to brutal beatings, systematic rape and torture, and execution at the whim of prison guards.”

Robert Park, writing in the Harvard International Review (HIR), believes the time has come, or is overdue, for the international community to invoke the Responsibility to Protect doctrine. Park also argues for increased financial support for North Korean refugees, many of whom send money to family and friends remaining in the country through illicit channels. In addition, he says South Korea must take decisive action, given that the South Korean constitution extends citizenship to all North Koreans, giving it leverage to exercise its right of diplomatic protection over defectors in China. To this end, Park calls on “the highest branches of South Korea’s government . . . to vouch more persistently and forcefully for the North Korean defectors on the grounds that these refugees are their nationals by law.” If these steps are not taken, says Park, North Korea will continue to bear witness to one of the most horrific genocides in modernity.

Photo: wilgpacific.org