Mass Atrocities, the Responsibility to Protect and the Future of Human Rights

'If Not Now, When?'

Simon Adams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367551292
• eBook ISBN: 9781000330724
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Genocide & War Crimes
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book ambitiously weaves together history and politics to explain all of the major situations where mass atrocities have occurred, or been prevented, over the 15 years since the 'Responsibility to Protect' (R2P) was adopted at the 2005 UN World Summit.

The author provides a history of human rights, mass atrocities and the principle of the R2P from the perspective of someone whose day job has been to work with the UN Security Council, various governments and civil society to help ensure the international community does not fail those who face the threat of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity today. It examines the implementation of the controversial principle of R2P since 2011 and how we end the politics of impunity, indifference and inaction once and for all. Using case studies from Iraq, Syria, Myanmar and Libya, the book offers a unique perspective regarding how we make 'never again' a living principle, rather than a cliché and how we end the politics of impunity, indifference and inaction once and for all.

It will be of especial interest to scholars, students and policymakers working in the fields of international politics or concerned about human rights, atrocities, the United Nations and international justice in the world today.

1

WHY HUMANS COMMIT ATROCITIES AND HOW SOCIETIES CAN CHANGE

Contents

Genocide genesis

Those who kill and those who don’t

Killer apes?

Kofi Annan and the responsibility to protect

Kenya and R2P in practice

Conclusion

In January 2016, the fossils of twenty-seven humans from a Stone Age culture were unearthed at Nataruk in northern Kenya, in what is now semidesert but was once a fertile lagoon on the southern fringe of Lake Turkana. The skeletons belonged to primitive human ancestors who met grisly deaths approximately 10,000 years ago. Examining the site, paleoanthropologist Marta Mirazón Lahr’s team concluded that the group of hunter-gatherers had been murdered before being dumped in the lagoon, where their bones were preserved in sediment. The researchers who excavated the skeletons described ‘extreme blunt-force trauma to crania and cheekbones, broken hands, knees and ribs, arrow lesions to the neck, and stone projectile tips lodged in the skull and thorax of two men’. One woman, who was pregnant, had been tied up before being clubbed to death.¹

The reason for the massacre is a mystery. These early human bands in Africa were made up of groups of extended families who hunted animals, foraged for plants and fished. While their lives were far from utopian or pacific, internal group dynamics tended towards cooperation and collaboration. The idea that a group could be deliberately exterminated therefore challenges our conception of prehistory.

Twenty-one of the skeletons belonged to adults and six were children. Perhaps, the scientists hypothesised, the massacre was the result of a conflict over resources, as the band expanded or accidentally roamed into another group’s territory. Alternatively, perhaps this group was wiped out by invaders intent on seizing their hunting grounds. Or maybe the victims were simply humans who had become an unwelcome burden on a small group of primitive people with too many mouths to feed?

The evidence pointed to premeditated mass murder by a rival group. The Nataruk lagoon area was rich in food resources ten millennia ago, and Lahr pointed out that the killers used weapons that they would not have normally carried around with them just for hunting or fishing. Also, the remains of two arrow or spearpoints and a crude blade that were embedded within the skeletons were made from obsidian, a black volcanic rock that was worked to deadly sharpness. Lahr noted, ‘Obsidian is rare in other late Stone Age sites of this area in West Turkana, which may suggest that the two groups confronted at Nataruk had different home ranges.’ She argued that the ‘Nataruk massacre’ therefore stands as potentially our earliest scientific evidence of prehistoric deadly group conflict.²

Is there a historic blood trail that links the Nataruk massacre to our modern world? The widely held idea that all human beings have a potential mass murderer inside us contributes to the assumption that our societies are also innately cruel and murderous. It follows, therefore, that attempts to end atrocity crimes are futile. Unfortunately, events over the last century have seemed to confirm the view that extraordinary advances in science, technology and civilisation have not made our species more tranquil but have instead inspired us to more efficiently pursue the extinction of rivals and outsiders. The Holocaust, in particular, necessitated the creation of a whole new word – genocide – to explain the nature of the evil that humans do to one another. However, the development of human rights norms and laws indicates that it is possible to end mass atrocity crimes once and for all.

Genocide genesis

It was not until 1944 that Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer and refugee, formulated the term genocide while intellectually grappling with the magnitude of the Nazis’ destruction of European Jewry. Lemkin combined the Greek word for race or tribe, genos, with the French suffix for killing, Latin suffix. Lemkin wrote that the crucial thing was to capture the essence of the crime – the systematic and intentional destruction of a people.³ Less than a year later, on 27 January 1945, the Red Army liberated the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was not the first Nazi concentration camp to have its gates prised open – that had happened six months earlier, when a group of soldiers liberated Majdanek, also in Poland. But Auschwitz was clearly unique in the scale and scope of its industrialised mass killing.

Human rights would never be the same again. The end of the war, combined with revulsion regarding the Holocaust, helped make possible the creation of the United Nations. While its predecessor, the League of Nations, had collapsed in ignominy at the start of the Second World War, the UN was to prove successful in mediating the interests of the major powers and avoiding a direct armed conflict between them over the rest of the century. Another great achievement of the early UN was the 10 December 1948 adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which articulated every human being’s right to life and liberty, to privacy and freedom of movement, to a nationality, to freedom of conscience and religion and to an education, work and leisure. The declaration also proclaimed that all human beings have a right not to be subjected to arbitrary arrest or exile, or to be held in slavery or tortured. These rights were declared to be universal, that is to say, they were innate, unalterable and intrinsic to all the people of this planet.⁴

Lemkin’s term also rose to prominence. The word genocide appeared in the indictment against Nazi war criminals by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremburg, and at the main trial between November 1945 and September 1946 it was invoked by several of the prosecutors. Lead prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz also mentioned genocide four times during his opening statement at the Einsatzgruppen Trial in September 1947 as a means of explaining how the ‘extermination of whole categories of human beings, was a foremost instrument of the Nazi doctrine’.⁵

Genocide officially became an internationally recognised crime via the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. That convention was adopted, not inconsequentially, on 9 December 1948, the day before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article I confirmed that genocide, ‘whether committed in time of peace or time of war, is a crime under international law’ that the convention’s signatories were committed ‘to prevent and punish’.⁶

Lemkin’s definition of genocide, outlined in Article II, included ‘any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part’, members of a religious, ethnic, racial or national group. These acts included the obvious – ‘killing members of the group’ and ‘inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction’ – but also the policy of ‘forcibly transferring children of the group to another group’.⁷ In this regard, what was essential was not the lethality or injustice of the measures imposed but the intention to destroy the targeted group as a group.

That winter in Paris, after the UN General Assembly adopted the Genocide Convention, Lemkin checked himself into hospital. He joked that he was suffering from a new disease: ‘genociditis: exhaustion from the work on the Genocide Convention’.⁸ Lemkin, who lost 49 members of his extended family in the Holocaust, was also acutely conscious of past diplomatic failures. When he visited Geneva, he described walking through the hallways of the former League of Nations building as being like taking a stroll through a ‘cultured cemetery of a dead world’.⁹ Lemkin saw the Genocide Convention as an antidote to the meaningless diplomacy that had failed to prevent both the war and the Holocaust. What he most desired was practical action.

In the decades following Lemkin’s untimely death in 1959, 149 states have ratified or acceded to the Genocide Convention. Other atrocity crimes – crimes against humanity and war crimes – were outlawed under the Geneva Conventions, prosecuted at Nuremburg, further defined via the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and codified in the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC).¹⁰ However, despite legal progress, in the half century after 1948 the international community’s ability to make good on the post-Holocaust promise of ‘never again’ was dismal. From the killing fields of Cambodia to the gassing of Iraqi Kurds during the Anfal campaign of 1988, signatories to the Genocide Convention failed to uphold or enforce it when it was needed most.

Rwanda marks a notoriously dark chapter of this ignoble history. Over 100 days between April and July 1994, a million people were systematically murdered at roadblocks, in the streets and even in churches where thousands sought sanctuary. Crucially, there was no determination at the UN Security Council in New York to forcibly halt the genocide. Instead, as the killing intensified, the small peacekeeping force in Rwanda, UNAMIR – commanded by the indomitable Canadian general Roméo Dallaire – had its resources depleted and many of its troops withdrawn. The Security Council provided polite excuses for inaction and retreat, ignoring Dallaire’s pleas for reinforcement. As a result, when the genocide ended in July 1994 it was not because of an international intervention to protect people from machete-wielding killers, but because a rebel army led by Paul Kagame marched into Kigali and deposed the Hutu Power regime.

In Rwanda the génocidaires had loudly stated their intention to exterminate all ethnic Tutsi. The 1994 genocide was the culmination of a long process of systematic persecution. Genocidal intent was unequivocal. Not so in many other cases, where specific intent or the nature of the atrocities altered and deepened over time. And while the ‘g-word’ has talismanic power, other atrocity crimes – war crimes and crimes against humanity – are just as heinous and prohibited under international law. Determining the extent, intent and outcome of all atrocities therefore remains a question of evidence, argument and judgment.

Just as importantly, while Lemkin gave genocide a name, he left it to us to figure out how to prevent it. In the aftermath of Rwanda and a decade of war crimes and other atrocities in the former Yugoslavia, a number of international diplomats sought to do just that. In this undertaking they were not only challenging decades of inaction and indifference to atrocities around the globe, they were also inadvertently disputing our scientific understanding of human nature and society.

Those who kill and those who don’t

Dutch sociologist Abram de Swaan escaped the Holocaust without even knowing it. He was just a baby when the Germans invaded the Netherlands and his Jewish parents gave him to a Christian family in their native Amsterdam to look after. Thus, Abram lived through the war with a surrogate family, just streets away from the secret hiding place of the most famous Jewish child of the Holocaust – Anne Frank. Seven decades later, de Swaan’s book The Killing Compartments grapples with the social psychology of the atrocity perpetrator.

De Swaan deconstructs two widely held notions about mass killers. The first is the idea that only monsters commit genocide. De Swaan points out that scholarly studies of Nazi war criminals reveal that only about five percent displayed any serious psychopathologies. But he also rejects the countervailing argument that most perpetrators were just ‘ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances’ and that ‘ordinary individuals, like you and me, under the same conditions would do the same thing’.¹¹ This he utterly rejects.

De Swaan attributes the genesis of this ‘situationist argument’ to Hannah Arendt and the famous subtitle to her book on the 1961 Adolf Eichmann trial, ‘the banality of evil’. In de Swaan’s words:

Arendt and many others who reported on the trial were enthralled by the fashionable notion of the time that the Nazi (and the Soviet) state was a mighty machine, manned by countless nameless, faceless bureaucrats and soldiers who were no more than cogs in the apparatus, obediently and unthinkingly doing whatever they were told, without much conviction of their own, except for loyalty to the system.¹²

In Eichmann’s case, this was ‘an expedient masquerade’, albeit one that failed to save him from the Israeli hangman. Nevertheless, the banality of evil became possibly ‘the greatest bêtise in the small but widely quoted repertoire of clichés about the Holocaust and about genocide in general’.¹³

Genocide, crimes against humanity and other atrocity crimes, de Swaan emphasises, are neither banal nor ordinary. And n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: It wasn’t supposed to be this way
• 1 Why humans commit atrocities and how societies can change
• 2 Regime change in Libya
• 3 Moments on the margins of Syria’s civil war
• 4 Terrorism, genocide and the Islamic State
• 5 Climate change and mass atrocities
• 6 The fate of the Rohingya and the future of human rights
• 7 Conclusion: The mass graves that were not dug
• Epilogue
• Selected bibliography
• Index