Speech by Dr. Gregory H Stanton
Looking Backward into The Future
Dr. Gregory H. Stanton
Founding President , Genocide Watch
Chair, Alliance Against Genocide
IAGS/Educators Institute for Human Rights/Alliance Against Genocide
Conference on Teaching About Genocide
April 26, 2024
During the twentieth century, over a hundred million people were murdered by their own governments. That is more deaths than from all wars combined. Deaths from genocide and political mass murder were only exceeded by deaths from diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, AIDS, and influenza.
Genocide is committed by people who have lost sight of our common humanity. All humans belong to one family. But we are born into thousands of ethnic groups that speak thousands of languages. We belong to hundreds of nations, and have scores of religions. Some think there are many races, but there is really only one race: the human race.
Genocide is committed by us because we become ethnocentric, racist, nationalistic, or religiously intolerant. Genocide is idolatry. We worship our ethnic group, or race, or nation, or religion instead of God. We build golden altars and sacrifice human beings upon them. Instead of blessing all humans as God’s creations, we bathe our weapons with their blood.
Looking Backward into the Future
The United Nations
World War Two was the deadliest war in human history. 85 million people perished. Military deaths totaled 25 million, including the deaths of five million prisoners of war. Civilian deaths totaled 55 million. The Soviet Union lost 27 million people. Nineteen million people died in China, including 8 to 9 million to famine and disease.
The victors in World War II were determined to prevent future wars. So they founded the United Nations in 1945. In 1948, the UN passed the Genocide Convention and chose the UN to enforce it. But the UN has failed to end war. And it has failed to stop genocides.
Since its founding, the UN has been crippled by the Perm-5 veto. In 1945, it was still the colonial era. The colonial powers, including the UK, France, Russia, and China wanted to keep their empires. The most powerful nation, the United States, wanted to maintain its military and economic dominance. These five nations insisted on having vetoes in the UN Security Council, the only UN body with power under the UN Charter to authorize the use of military force.
If even one of these Perm-5 nations vetoes, the UN cannot authorize military intervention. From the beginning, Soviet vetoes paralyzed the Security Council. The Perm-5 veto has paralyzed the UN ever since. It is a fatal flaw in the UN Charter.
In 1950, North Korea, with Soviet support, invaded South Korea. The USSR had made the mistake of walking out of the Security Council from January through July 1950 because the UN refused to recognize Communist China to take China’s seat in the UN. During its absence, the US, UK, and France pushed through creation of a UN Force to intervene in Korea.
To get around Soviet vetoes and to provide a future alternative to the Security Council, the US sponsored Resolution 377 A, the "Uniting for Peace" resolution, which states that in cases where the Security Council, because of a lack of unanimity among its five permanent members, fails to act as required to maintain international security and peace, the General Assembly shall consider the matter immediately and may issue appropriate recommendations to UN members for collective measures, including the use of armed force when necessary, in order to maintain or restore international security and peace. It was adopted November 3, 1950. The resolution provides the UN with an alternative avenue for action when at least one P5 member uses its veto to obstruct the Security Council from carrying out its functions mandated by the UN Charter.
To facilitate prompt action by the General Assembly in the case of a deadlocked Security Council, the resolution created the mechanism of the emergency special session. Emergency special sessions have been convened under this procedure on eleven occasions, with the most recent convened in February 2022, to address Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Although the US originally sponsored the Uniting for Peace Resolution, the US has become very reluctant to use it. When I was a Foreign Service Officer in the US State Department, State Department lawyers told me, “Oh, we don’t favor Uniting For Peace anymore. After all, In the General Assembly, the US has no veto.”
The US has again supported use of Uniting For Peace after Russia invaded Ukraine because Russia would have vetoed any UN action in the Security Council.
The US and other members of the Perm-5 should use Uniting For Peace much more often to authorize armed UN Peacekeeping Missions to stop genocides and arrest their perpetrators.
Our IRF/Alliance Genocide Working Group has written a letter to members of the UN Security Council urging reestablishment of a UN and AU Peacekeeping Force to stop the war in Sudan and to arrest the Generals who are fighting for power and committing genocide, killing thousands of Sudanese civilians. Please sign on to our letter to the UN Security Council. It is on the IAGS listserv and on the Genocide Watch website at www.genocidewatch.com.
The Precautionary Principle
In 2007, with my colleague, Dr. Elihu Richter, we submitted a proposal to the Albright- Cohen Commission considering establishment of the U.S. Atrocities Prevention Board. We told the Commission that The Precautionary Principle should be applied when risks of genocide appear.
The Precautionary Principle states that when there is uncertainty concerning the possibility of the occurrence of a major catastrophic event, the costs of inaction far outweigh those of anticipatory preventive action. The Precautionary Principle shifts the burden of proof from those suspecting a catastrophic risk to those denying it. In everyday terms, the Precautionary Principle states that it is better to be safe than sorry.
We were ignored. The default policy of diplomats and world leaders when there are warning signs of genocide remains: Do Nothing. Wait until the genocide is underway. Even then, because the cost will be so high, Do Nothing.
Statistical studies by Barbara Harff have outlined the political risk factors for genocide: ongoing civil or international war; past genocide that has gone unpunished and is still denied; rule by an ethnically exclusive elite; official exclusionary ideology; autocracy or totalitarianism; closure of relations with the outside world; massive human rights violations: torture and extrajudicial killings.
We know the risk factors. The anti-genocide movement should work against war and for punishment of perpetrators. We should press for broadly-based democratic governments. We should oppose ideologies of racial or class superiority. We should favor free trade and free speech. We should strongly oppose violations of fundamental human rights by any regime.
But these factors cannot tell us when genocide is likely to happen, and therefore are of limited use in prevention.
That is why I developed a model of the genocidal process, “The Ten Stages of Genocide.” I now regret choosing the word “stages” because it implies linearity in the model. In the first paragraph of the model, I state,” The process is not linear. Stages may occur simultaneously.”
I should just have called the “stages” processes. They are what structural anthropologists call a transformational structure – a system of transformations. The Ten Stages of Genocide provides the outline of a transformational grammar of genocidal processes. I owe these concepts of structure to Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky.
Genocide is a process that develops in ten stages that are predictable, but not inexorable. At each stage, preventive measures can stop it. The process is not linear. Many stages operate simultaneously. It is a logical model for thinking about the genocidal process and what we can do to prevent or stop it.
The Ten Stages of Genocide are Classification, Symbolization, Discrimination, Dehumanization, Organization, Polarization, Preparation, Persecution, Extermination, and Denial.
The original memo I wrote in 1996 was intended to educate State Department officers about the genocidal process and how to stop it. I knew it had to fit on one page, back and front, or it would not be read. Little did I know that it would become a paradigmatic model used by teachers and policy makers around the world.
Rethinking the Law of Genocide
I am a lawyer, trained by Myres McDougal and Michael Reisman at Yale Law School. They taught that law and policy are not two separate realms: that law is concretized policy, and law should be evaluated as policy. I am also a cultural anthropologist, trained by Victor Turner, Marshall Sahlins, and Leo Kuper. They trained me to look beneath the surface for the deeper structures and schisms that underlie societies and conflicts.
An anthropological analysis of lawyers may help us understand why the Genocide Convention has thus far failed to prevent genocide. The Genocide Convention was born toothless, and lawyers have kept it from ever outgrowing its baby teeth.
The training of lawyers creates a backward-looking, adjudication-oriented view of genocide. At a conference at Cardozo Law School in 2011, a colleague put it this way, “The convention was primarily meant to adjudicate an individual’s criminal responsibility.”
The State Department Legal Advisors Office and UK Foreign Office even say they can’t use the term genocide unless a court does. They are wrong. Nothing in the Genocide Convention requires that a court first declare that a genocide is about to happen or is underway before governments can warn or use the word genocide.
One purpose of the Convention is certainly to punish genocidists. But if that is all it is, we have forgotten the very name of the Convention: the “International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” The Convention was meant to be forward-looking and preventive, not just a law for punishment.
Why hasn’t the United Nations prevented genocide?
1. The United Nations has failed to prevent war and genocide because it is built on the old nation-state system. National governments still claim the right to commit crimes, even genocide, against their own citizens.
The Responsibility to Protect doctrine was supposed to overcome claims of national sovereignty. R2P says that sovereignty doesn’t come down from rulers, but rather rises up from the people. It’s the same view of sovereignty that framed the US Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. When a nation is tyrannized by its own government, its citizens have the right to overthrow that government.
Under R2P the United Nations and regional organizations have the right to intervene in nations that are murdering their own citizens. But very few nations are willing to sacrifice the blood of their own military troops to carry out such R2P interventions.
R2P has not yet become enforceable international law. Like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it is an aspirational doctrine. It is still rejected by all genocidal states. Many Asian and African nations as well as Russia and China see R2P as an attempt by Europe and the U.S. to reimpose colonial rule.
2. There is still no United Nations Military Force.
A UN Military Force consisting of forces from UN member states is authorized by Articles 43 through 47 of the United Nations Charter. The Military Staff Committee composed of Chiefs of Staff of Perm-5 Security Council members has never been established. The main reason is that none of the Perm-5 want a strong UN military force that could oppose their own armies.
Current UN Peacekeeping Missions are too weak to overpower national armies. They cannot stop genocides. It is time to create a UN Military Force like NATO’s, but without NATO’s requirement of unanimity to take military action.
3. The International Criminal Court has no police force to arrest people it charges. Courts cannot work without police forces.
Today, there is no effective international police force to arrest people charged with crimes by the International Criminal Court or by international tribunals. National police forces usually refuse to arrest genocidists because the police serve under the same leaders whom the ICC has charged.
The U.N. also lacks a police force to prevent genocide by arresting national leaders who are planning or perpetrating genocide.
We need international police. But injecting them into a nation-state is still considered a violation of national sovereignty by many governments, especially genocidal regimes.
The emerging international norm of The Responsibility to Protect may be invoked to answer such arguments. But how many nations are willing to send their army or police into other countries to face heavily armed national military forces determined to keep them out?
The answer can be seen in the difficulty the UN has in recruiting troops for its Peacekeeping Operations, especially from countries with powerful militaries like the US, UK, France, Russia, and China. If the UN can’t muster the forces, other means must be found.
One way to create an International Police Force would be to pass an Optional Protocol to the Treaty of the International Criminal Court to authorize one. It would have authority only to execute arrest warrants for persons charged by the ICC with genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. But even such a police force would face resistance from genocidal states. The fundamental problem is the persistent paradigm of national sovereignty.
Genocide Watch has proposed an Optional Protocol to the Genocide Convention that would reaffirm the authority of the UN General Assembly to approve the use of force when the UN Security Council is paralyzed by a Perm-5 veto. This authority already exists under the Uniting for Peace Resolution of 1950, and it has been used 11 times. It is currently being used to give the UN General Assembly jurisdiction over Russian aggression in Ukraine.
The Optional Protocol Genocide Watch has proposed would restate and define the power of Regional Organizations to act under Chapter 8 of the UN Charter, which gives Regional Organizations such authorization even before they receive a UN Security Council mandate.
4. Very few national educational systems aim to create anti-genocidal cultures.
Genocide requires popular participation. 200,000 people participated in the slaughter of 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. Churches in Rwanda could have played a powerful role in creating a culture resistant to genocide in Rwanda, because many Hutus and Tutsis are Roman Catholics and attended the same churches. But the church was as ethnically divided as the rest of Rwandan society. Some clergy even participated in the killings.
In re-thinking genocide prevention, we should pay special attention to the “bottom-up” dimension of genocide.
How can anti-genocidal cultures be built?
Religion has far too often been a cause of genocide. But what if every major religion regularly affirmed the core principle in all religions: that all human beings belong to one race – the human race? We need to spark the efforts of people at the grass roots in schools, universities, seminaries, churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples all over the world.
5. To end genocide and war, women must be empowered. Women resolve conflicts very differently than men.
When men have conflicts, they fight. When women have conflicts, they talk. Talking is a much better way to resolve conflicts than fighting.
Not a single genocide or war in human history has been planned by groups of women. That’s the elephant in the room that theorists of war and genocide try to ignore. It doesn’t mean that women don’t participate in wars or genocide. They do. But the wars or genocides are always planned by men, even when a queen is head of state.
The only possible exception to this rule was Queen Ranavalona I, the "Mad Monarch of Madagascar" who ruled from 1828 to 1861. Her use of warfare, forced labor, and trials by ordeal using poison, exacerbated by new infectious diseases, resulted in a mortality rate that reduced Madagascar's population from 5 million in 1833 to 2.5 million in 1839. But Mad Queen Ranavalona I is the exception that proves the rule.
Women do not plan wars or genocides.
Many more nations must elect women as their leaders.
6. We must create the political will to prevent genocide.
Many people have said that the problem in the Rwandan Genocide and in Bosnia and Darfur was not the absence of early warning of the coming catastrophe. It was the absence of political will to prepare for and prevent it.
Even when UN Peacekeeping Missions have been deployed, they are not given strong mandates to protect civilians by fighting and defeating genocidists. Yasushi Akashi, the pacifist head of UNPROFOR in former Yugoslavia would never authorize bombing of Bosnian Serb sniper nests. He was finally replaced after the Srebrenica genocide.
In Rwanda, there were 2500 UNAMIR troops on the ground when the genocide began. Rather than reinforce them as General Dallaire requested, the US, UK, and France led the UN Security Council to order withdrawal of all but 400 UNAMIR troops. Even the 400 Ghanaian troops who voted to stay saved hundreds of lives.
Meanwhile, two thousand French and Belgian troops were able to airlift all French and Belgians out of Rwanda with their pets. Not a single Rwandan was allowed to board the planes. The US embassy drove out to Burundi protected by Marine guards. Secretly, the US had ships filled with thousands of US Marines right off the coast of East Africa when the genocide began. But President Clinton never authorized their deployment to Rwanda.
Political will is not a mystery. It is not mystical mumbo-jumbo that is impossible to analyze and understand. Anyone who witnessed the triumph of the political campaigns of President Barack Obama should see that. political will can be built from the ground up.
It is time that we hold our leaders to account. We must no longer accept their excuses. President Clinton’s “we did not know” speech in Kigali after the Genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda was a lie.
Of course, President Clinton knew! I had top secret codeword clearance in the State Department in 1994 and read the same cables that were used to brief Pres. Clinton. A cable to the State Department and National Security Council from the Department of Defense on the first day of the genocide on April 7, 1994, called the mass killings genocide. Our Deputy Chief of Mission in Kigali, Joyce Leader, has told me she called the massacres genocide in her daily phone calls to the State Department from the first day, April 7 onward.
But the US Ambassador to Rwanda, David Rawson, who had grown up a missionary’s son in Burundi, didn’t know what genocide is. Neither did the State Department Office of the Legal Advisor They thought the killings were part of a civil war, rather than a genocide. They didn’t understand that most genocides occur during civil or international wars. Wars and genocides are not mutually exclusive. They usually go together.
7. Leaders of genocides must be arrested or killed.
I have always been perplexed by the unwillingness of the world’s leaders to send in heavily armed commandos to arrest the leaders of genocides and take them for trial to the Hague. The ICC should require preliminary hearings and an arrest warrant. But currently there are no international police to arrest the Omar al Bashir’s and General Hemedti’s who are leading genocides that murder thousands of people.
Indeed, why is it out of the question to send in commandos to kill such genocidal leaders if they resist and can’t be arrested. Why hasn’t Vladimir Putin been killed by a missile strike that precisely targets him in Russia? Dietrich Bonhoeffer was part of the plot to kill Hitler. Despite his dedication to non-violent resistance, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. concluded that Bonhoeffer was morally right.
8. It is time to build an international anti-genocide movement on the scale of the anti-slavery movement. We must build the political will for international intervention when genocide is imminent.
When I founded Genocide Watch in 1999, there was not a single organization in the world entirely devoted to the prevention of genocide. At the same time, we founded the Alliance Against Genocide to create the coalition necessary to mobilize a mass movement.
Now there are hundreds of anti-genocide organizations. The Alliance Against Genocide has over 120 member organizations in 31 countries with thousands of employees. There are many other anti-genocide organizations that are not yet members of the Alliance. We share the same vision.
It is especially vital to build anti-genocide organizations in countries at risk of genocide.
Empathy
Empathy is the ability to place oneself in the shoes of another. It is the measure of a person’s moral capacity. Empathy is the expression of Satyagraha, that great truth force that Gandhi rediscovered, and that was also taught by the Buddha, Amos, Jesus and Martin Luther King, Jr. Satyagraha is expressed in both justice and love. It has revolutionary power because justice and love flow from the same Force.
The more I have worked against genocide, the more I have become convinced that genocide must be defeated locally. It can be prevented only by teaching people the empathy for their neighbors that will make them "upstanders" who will oppose the dehumanization necessary for genocide.
Justice
By Gregory Stanton
Can justice come in courts?
Can a widow's tears be dried by trials?
Can a raped girl's shame be healed by ceremonies?
Can a fatherless child be consoled?
What is justice to a woman whose children were slaughtered just before she was raped?
What is justice to a bride whose husband's last caress was the last she will ever know?
What is justice to a woman who will never trust a man again?
What is justice to an orphan in a refugee camp?
What is justice to lawyers who still won’t call it Genocide?
Justice is the spirit of the law.
Without justice law is dead, like an empty skull.
Without justice there can be no reconciliation.
Without justice love cannot re-weave the social fabric.
Without justice hope dies.
Without justice death conquers life.
Justice reestablishes the truth.
Justice restores dignity to the victims.
Justice recognizes a widow’s grief.
Justice is digging up bones and giving them proper burial.
Justice is telling stories of suffering to someone who really listens.
Justice is confession that your country was responsible.
Justice is always having to say you’re sorry.
Justice struggles to understand why people do such evil.
Justice affirms that the rule of law is stronger than rule by force.
Justice says murderers cannot get away with Genocide.
Justice is the antidote to abandonment.
Justice is reconnection with the human race.
Justice restores the social order.
Justice rebalances the moral universe.
Justice is God’s force socially expressed.
Love is God’s force personally expressed.
With justice and love, hope returns.
Hope is the assurance that life will triumph over death.
Poem Copyright 2024 Gregory H Stanton
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