Back to the rack: Genocide & Non-Interference
Chuzzlewit, in one of your recent posts re the Kosovo issue, you raise the following question:
"How would the United States have reacted if a foreign nation attempted to interfere with America's racism that extended into the early 1960s?"
First of all, institutionalized racism (officially sanctioned & legitimated racism) did not exist everywhere in the United States -- only in the southern states that had apartheid laws. It was the federal government, after all, that ordered the integration of Little Rock schools.
Secondly, U.S. racism in the '50's and '60's did not reach the level of genocide -- the systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of a national/ethnic/religious group. (Lest you think I condone racism, let me note that I come of an old abolitionist family, and saw for myself, as a child in Alabama, what racism was really like.)
Besides, the United States did not sign the UN's 1948 Genocide Convention until ten years ago, so would not have considered itself bound by it, anyway. (To this day, only about 2/3 of the countries of the world have signed it.)
In any event, the Genocide Convention introduced a radical new concept into international law: the concept of genocide as a crime against the international community. It spells out clearly that it is the DUTY of Convention signatories to intervene in the internal affairs of any country that practices genocide, not only in order to stop it while it is in progress, but also in order to PREVENT it. See Article I:
The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.
Now, quite a number of people have been brought before tribunals for the crime of genocide. But they have usually been on the "losing" side. What do you do if they are the winners? And if a whole government, not just isolated individuals, is responsible for the crime? And, more importantly, how exactly do you PREVENT genocide?
And in the process, at what point do you decide that "ordinary" persecution and/or ethnic cleansing has crossed the line and has become outright genocide? Article 1 defines genocide very broadly and very loosely:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group.
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Practice has shown that statesmen are very reluctant to use "the g-word", because that would oblige them to take action (perhaps even military action). Visiting Kigali, in 1998, President Clinton apologized as follows for the international community's failure to move to end the massacre of Rwandan Tutsis in 1994: "We did not immediately call those crimes by their rightful name: genocide." (There was already a UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda, and the commander had begged -- in vain -- for 5,000 more men to stop the bloodshed.)
NATO's bombing action raises a whole host of questions in this regard:
1) Was genocide in progress before the bombing? Is it in progress now?
2) Should NATO have acted under the aegis of the UN Security Council, even though it was obvious from the outset that two members of the Security Council -- Russia and China -- would have opposed any such action? (After all, Article 1 does state that "contracting parties" are obliged to stop or prevent genocide, not that they can only do so if the Security Council agrees to it.)
3) Just how realistic -- or realizable -- is the Genocide Convention, anyway? Is this just another example of an international legal document that is observed only when it is convenient to observe, and ignored in other cases? How can you force countries that do not WANT to intervene in the affairs of another "sovereign country" to do so?
4) Does selective enforcement of the Genocide Convention only foster cynicism? For example, when my oldest son heard that NATO planes had flown off to bomb Yugoslavia, he asked (tongue-in-cheek, of course): "Are they going to kill two birds with one stone, and continue on to bomb Turkey?"
The obvious answer to that is, of course, No. Turkey is a member of NATO. NATO cannot bomb itself, as it were. But the question points to an inherent difficulty in all such actions: enforcing the "rules" in some places only draws attention to the failure to enforce them elsewhere. Does that mean they should never be enforced?
And so forth and so on....
Joan
|
