Dr Carol Rittner: Our guest lecturer today, retired US Army Brigadier General and now an adjunct
professor teaching in our undergraduate program in Holocaust and genocide
studies, is Richard O'Meara. The Richard Stockton College is really pleased to
have Professor O'Meara be with us today and he'll begin our 2007 - 2008 lecture
series with what I know will be a thoughtful provocative and informed
lecture on a topic that should be of immediate interest to all of us. Darfur:
should we use the G word (genocide) when we think about, discuss, or teach about
Darfur? Is Darfur a genocide? That is the question on our agenda today and not
just our question but it is America's question, it is the European Union's
question, it is the United Nations question. Is Darfur a genocide?What we do
know is that what is going on in Darfur is one of the pressing issues facing
genocide scholars, humanitarian workers, politicians, and even military personnel
today. It is a crisis that erupted in early 2003 and continues today, even as I
speak and as you sit here in this classroom. It is a crisis in which the
government of Sudans' troops and the Janjaweed (the
of militia) are responsible for the mass murder of literally thousands and
thousands of black Africans, primarily from the Zaghwa, Fur, and Masali
tribal groups and possibly several hundreds of thousands of others
as a result of depriving them and depriving more than two million
internally displaced persons of adequate food water shelter and medical care. Is
Darfur a genocide? That is the question. It is certainly, in Elie Wiesel's words,
"Today's world capital of human pain, suffering, and agony, do we not have some
obligation as human beings to do something to relieve that pain, to try to
stop that suffering, to hold accountable in an international tribunal those who
are responsible for inflicting these horrors on our fellow human beings or is
our responsible abrogated because we don't know what to do?" I do not know if
Richard O'Mara can answer any or all of these questions but what I do know is
that this retired military officer, this international lawyer who has journeyed
to many of the areas of the world where conflict and horror hold sway or held
sway, thinks about such issues and none more than whether or not Darfur is a
genocide. I'm pleased to welcome professor Richard O'Meara to share his
insights and questions with it Dr. Richard O
Meara: Thank you, let me make a couple apologies
before I get started, always a good thing to do first of all.
I've got a massive cold I've been honking for a week so I'll be honking at
you for the next 20 minutes to half an hour. Sorry, but I did get out of bed this
morning and I am here so that's good. I think I'm on the right end of
this cold at this point. Second is, I've been playing around with
technology here which is always bad thing for me to do personally, so we'll
see whether we have any problems with regard to some of the things that I that
I hope to put up here. Hopefully it won't mess up the presentation too much. Let me
get a sense of who's in the room. Do we have anybody who has been involved as an
NGO or participant in Darfur first? Or, any of those organizations that are on
college campuses these days? Well it's that's one of them, sure.
Nobody. Okay. Are you all on the masters program side from the faculty? Are you
all in the master's program? You just wandered in here? You're kidding...
forced to be here. So you've been graduates of the master's
program so many of you arr teachers, I take it. A couple of teachers,
good. When I talk about Darfur... and the reason I'm checking this is
because very often, many people know more about Darfur than I do so I want to make
sure that I don't step up myself. I want to know who's in the room, it's
always a good thing for a teacher to know that right.
My subject here really isn't specifically Darfur, right. Another sense
of apology. My subject is a genocide, so I'm using Darfur as a tool
to get to the discussion, which I hope we will have at the end, is it a genocide?
And I'd become... I was telling Carroll over the last couple years, probably
as a function of age, a real contrarian. I mean I always take the opposite side of pretty much any
position and being an attorney, I also take the position that probably
there's not a genocide going on in Darfur. At least from what I... and that to
my mind, my lawyer's mind specifically, it makes a difference what we call it.
I was at the Association for Genocide Scholars with Steve Jacobs actually, who
has summer in Seba Nica in Sarajevo and that
presented the paper there on tribunals and there was another couple lawyers
there who ended and I looked around for the whole week. Those were the only two
panels, the ones that we did on tribunals and then this other panel that dealt
with a specific case. When I got off the wind and when the dutch
attorney, who had been involved in a particular case and hadn't won the
entire case, when he got off the day as I asked him, "Am I missing the point here?
Are these people hating you for a reason?"
And the reality was... I mean you could feel the tension in the room. Scholars,
and lawyers were there...We know this
is a genocide, why can't you deal with it, okay? And the lawyer I was looking at said,
"You know, there are laws of a very specific drill. It's a very
constrained environment, only certain evidence goes in there you have to prove
certain things and if you don't, justice isn't done. Truth isn't found." And
indeed, there's no genocide. That's the vehicle within which we play and
I've tried cases for many years and it's a very small world. Scholars just
couldn't get that. Lawyers think different than scholars do. It was a
rule. And he said, "no, I can't." He walked out and discussed and he was
tired: he's couldn't do it. It was a real disconnect, massive
disconnected that conference between the genocide piece from a lawyer's point of
view and the genocide piece from a scholarship point of view. That kind of
what I'm going to be talking about here and that's really my teaching point for
the day. I suppose the discussion ought to be, and what you should leave with and
have the discussion about, is does it make any difference? We have
this disconnect: what's the purpose of concerning ourselves with the solemnity
of the work? Does it make a difference? I think it doesn't. Take the position that
I'm in but then I'm with the Raphael Lumpkin on this and he's a lawyer
...You use the word for very specific things and only for those
things and then it has made carries meaning that's kind of the argument.
There are other very well articulated arguments from the opposite of that.
Having said all that, let me just get back into the presentation.
First of all, let me begin again by introducing myself. I come from a number
of different perspectives with regard to this issue and I always tell people
where I come from because in the law specifically, we're very much interested
in opinions but only those opinions that have weight to the gravity -gravitas,
whatever- so that we check. A judge will tell a jury very often, "You can listen to
this individuals opinion or you don't have to listen to it at all if you don't
want to." And these are the things you should consider when you listen to
this opinion. First of all, the individual is qualified to give the
opinion (gone to school, whatever) and secondly, whether or not he or she's done
his homework, they actually study the documents, looked
into things and if you find that, for example, a doctor is giving an
opinion in a court case about how to run a store, well probably not qualified.
Nice education, not for the opinion he wants to get or that the doctor is
given the opinion about a medical case but he didn't read the records
well, didn't do his homework so throw that opinion out. I like to find out
when I listen to people where they come from and I do that by
clinic, giving and sharing a little bit of my own background. So again, as Carol said,
I'm a retired military officer of 35 years, visiting around the world various
places. I'm also a retired trial attorney, had a law firm for a number of years. My
academic training is in history and international relations and ultimately I
tend to look at things from the point of view of a lawyer, if you haven't figured
that out by now, which is frankly fairly, as my wife tells me, a fairly
strange way to think about things but but it is a little bit different.
I haven't been to Sudan personally - not yet, anyway. I have spent time in Chad
and Kenya, Rwanda Sierra Leone, Cambodia, El Salvador, Bosnia, Iraq, and Vietnam
amongst other countries. Most of the time that I was in those countries I was
working generally in military uniform and I was
working pretty much working for the State Department as an attorney, either
teaching or putting together institutions that were broke as a result
of one of the traumas that occurred in one of these places. It's been
pretty interesting work. My sense is that what is occurring in Darfur probably
does not fall within the useful definition of genocide. My argument is
that no matter how horrendous the violence, arguing over whether a genocide
has occurred is simply not helpful. Professor Raphael Lemkin dreamt that the
mere uttering of the word would mobilize the international community to action
simply is not materialized. The realist in me is informed by the fact that
states intervene and the activities of other states over issues of power and
prestige, not over issues of justice. The idealist in me frankly is not concerned
about a legal formulation that rates the conduct of States according to the
stated intention of the mass murderers as they go about disappearing people and
populations. I personally prefer the term crimes against humanity.
It speaks to the victim of the crime, all of humanity, and it speaks to those who
are responsible to do something about it, not necessarily nation states as part of
treaty obligations. That's what the Genocide Convention is, it is a treaty, but
rather each member of the human race has a responsibility to deal with the genocide,
crime against humanity. And yet there is something compelling about the genocide
formulation. Samantha Powers (you may have read her book, A
Problem from Hell") remembers the extraordinary efforts of Lemkin to
create a legal standard to once and for all end the crime with no name. There is
something particularly dangerous about the ability of a man or men to harness
the power of the modern state in the project of mass murder. Industrialized
killing, Omar Bartoff has called it "impersonal yet efficient in the extreme."
Lemkin's faith was in the law. The ability of rules -even international rules- to
determine the crime, to deter the crime, Hannah Aaron's smock explanation to Adolf
Eichmann regarding the justification for his death
rings through and yet there's something about it that is extra legal, not really
illegal and I quote her "And just as you supported and carried out a policy of
not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number
of other nations as though you and your superiors have any right to determine
who should and who should not inhabit the world, we find that no one -that is no
member of the human race- can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This
is the reason and the only reason you must hang." In order to consider the
question of genocide more specifically, let me take some time to review the
tragedy which is occurring today in the western Sudan Darfur. No one can disagree
that the violence is horrendous. Once again, a state government attempting to
break the economic, social, and political will of a minority through the
infliction of pain and terror. I have some slides which I would like to
show you as we go over the facts. Let me say before we get started that I'm very
sensitive to the commoditization these people suffered. John Lennon and Malcolm
Foley call it "dark tourism, the commodification of death and disaster"
and surely that is so. The Internet provides the information, we invade the
privacy of these poor, suffering people and display their worst moments
across our discussions like so much confetti. I'm not aware of any other
way to have a serious conversation about a serious subject without at least
recognizing the reality of the subject: real people, real kids, real death, real
destruction. First, the map. Sudan is South. I went to
the CIA Factbook. You've got a bunch of facts with regard to this place because
I was going to ask the question which is, what do you see? And when you look at
that map and these various pictures and what many of you will see as I see
injustice, I see pain, I see horror, I see agony and the human rights guy in me,
social justice guy, and he sees those things as well but I also see (the
military guy in me sees) a nightmare in terms of doing peacekeeping. So you got a
look at the map. What is a map showing? There is no friendly country to move
troops into. Where do you go? You set up in Libya, set up in Egypt? Yeah maybe, but
probably not. I have been to Chad. I've actually trained
with the French Foreign Legion in Chad. In theory, you can
could go to Chad. Chad's got its own problems and having said that, Chad's a
tough place to setup anyway: no water there, either.
And Kongo certainly no good, Ethiopia no good
and what I mean by setup I mean taking a bunch of soldiers, putting them in a
particular place for a long period of time, making sure they have refrigeration
and food and mail and all the stuff you need to do and moving moving oil and gas
and all the stuff to move those vehicles and then getting an Air Force together, a
bunch of helicopters to fly in and out of Darfur so that your stuff can be used.
Massive undertaking. If you don't like Halliburton because of Iraq, they're
the only people qualified to do this job. So what you would do is you would hire
Halliburton to do this at zillions of dollars zoom. They'll do it.
They'll set up anywhere for you pay them enough money. They've got the people. This
isn't something... we say, I will send the peacekeepers. This is a nightmare
and indeed what occurs when you send ten, fifteen thousand young men to a
sub-saharan country for six months, you think those young men are going
to be looking for young women. You think any of those young men are going to wind
up with AIDS as a result of hanging out in one of these countries. You think their
moms and dads are going to be real happy that you sent them, or you can keep
them on campus. Keep them on post, lock them down: no alcohol, no women. Then
you've got a revolt in your hands where there are a million reasons why you
don't want to do peacekeeping in Darfur. This is why the French don't want to do it,
nobody wants to do it. Certainly not a western country. I'm not saying don't do
it but at it ain't easy is my point. The map tells us that. Sudan is an Arabic country,
apparently it means country of blacks. It is the largest African and Arab country by
area in the world. It is situated at a crossroads between the Horn of Africa
and the Middle East and also between
Sahara Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, so there's a lot of traditional
tension (hundreds of years of tension). It is bordered by Egypt, to the
north the Red Sea, to the Northeast Eritrea, and Ethiopia to the east. Kenya
Uganda to the southeast, Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central
African Republic to the southwest, Chad to the West, and Libya to the Northeast.
It is the tenth largest country in the world; important, big. Then the geography
is in most parts of Sudan unforgiving. Again, problem in peacekeeping also causes
that tension which you may have something to do with what's going on
there in terms of the violence. The north is home to approximately 22
million Arabs speaking Sudanese is the most prosperous. Connected as it is
to the Nile River, major cities and a lot of oil, which is now being mined
taken out of the ground and refined and sent eighty percent of it goes to China.
China is the great mentor of the Sudanese government. The South,
excuse me, is predominantly rural and has a population of around six million
Sudanese or predominantly non-Muslim and non-Arab speaking. The West, centrally
Darfur, has a population which has been variously estimated as between six and
seven million. Nobody's really sure. People divided
roughly between pastoralists and farmers which again is the other issue.
I teach a course of nationalism and ethnic conflict and one
of the points that I make is everybody's got ethnicity in their heads. We've all
got our tribe in the back of our minds. Primortalist sociologists say with all
born with i,t we've got it. Question is, when you put pressure on those then
those primordial instincts come out. Tom Friedman calls it the "Lexus in the
olive tree and" and people start swinging, throwing hands,
when you put pressure. Well, there's about 18 kinds of pressure and what we study
in the course is all the different pressures that exist in various places.
This place has got it all: it's got everyone. It's got ethnic stuff,
certainly. It's got a classic... the one that I find personally, intellectually
the most fascinating is the is the the pastoralist farmer issue. It's something
that runs through American history. You guys watch a Western recently? What do
have? You have you have the Cowboys and they're the guys who are on
the range and they're freedom-loving Desperados. They not fenced-in, have
no walls, no fences and they just they range on.
Then you have the "civilization," the civilized guys. They're the farmers
and they come and they build the towns and they bring their women. Next thing
you know, they're setting up a church in there and they're
shutting down the bars and they hire a sheriff and all westerns are about
that battle between those two groups.
William McNeill, a historian, calls it... I mean that's where that tension
and friction between the barbarians if you will and the people in town,
that's where civilization comes from and that's where energy comes from but it's a lot of
tension. I got that, cute. In other words, what the Janjaweed talked about
are essentially these individuals who roam and range across Darfur so
that's one of the issues floating around. Again there it hasn't really been
developed that much. It's been used a lot but it hasn't really been developed
that much. I don't think well the idea of this Saharan versus sub-saharan issue,
which is to say it pops up, percolates up in a lot of ways. You have
the Arab Union. Who's in charge of the Arab Union? Well Arabs obviously, but
Omar Qaddafi from Libya loves the Arab and he's essentially Arabic
and often fundamentalist in terms of Islamic culture and speaks to
ethnicity as well, in terms of Arabic stuff. And then you have sub-Saharan
Africa and essentially we'll call it, although it's a bad way to think
about it. It's not totally correct, black
Africa, sub-Saharan Africa. Reality of the matter is everybody in Darfur
thinks, speak Arabic and everybody in Darfur is Muslim but that's still
floating around. It percolates up on occasion. You see it (point I'll make later)
with regard to aid. The Arab Union doesn't want you to come in and deal
with Darfur, the African Union and us.
The only thing we don't really have going on here too much is that you
tend to see in African politics all the time is the battle between the French
and the English language, the anglophones and the francophones which in most countries...
In in Rwanda, that was a big deal for example. Those have been trained in
an Anglophone country (like Uganda for example), for lawyers it's common law
versus inquisitorial law and it's just a difference completely. You don't really see
too much of that in Sudan. One of the languages, Sudanese, because it was colonized
by the British through the Egyptians is English but there is not a huge cultural
battle between the French and the English.
The West again has a population of 67 million of the report of the
International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur to the United Nations
secretary-general (just done in 2005,) which is a document, if you do Darfur
work, constantly look at that document to refer to a lot. It notes that the various
tribes that have been...this is a quote: "the various tribes that have been
the object of attacks and killings cheaply the Zaghwa, Fur, and Masalit
tribes, do not appear to make up ethnic groups distinct from the ethnic group to
which persons or militias that attack them belong. They speak the same language,
Arabic, and embrace the same religion, Islam," so the ethnic issue I think is
splitting hairs there but we all know from studying these subjects that issues of
ethnicity are definitional problems, think sliding scales. Julie Flint
announced the war on Darfar, "A short History of a Long War", it is a pretty good book on
the subject describe the terrain as follows (I found this pretty interesting):
"Northern Darfur is a forbidding place. It has landscapes of elemental simplicity:
vast sandy plains, jutting mountains and jagged ridges, and occasional ribbons of
green along the all-too-rare seasonal watercourses. Village sometimes
compromising no more than a cluster of huts made from straw and branches ,maybe
a day's ride from its neighbor. Every place, however humble, counts. A hand-dug
well in a dry riverbed can be the difference between life and death for a
camel herd trekking from the valleys of Central Darfur to the desert edge
pastures. Nomads move 300 miles or more twice a year ranging even further in
exceptionally wet or unusually dry years. Settled people move also, migrating to
open up new areas of farmland in the dry sandy areas of Eastern Darfur, especially
villages. Villages grow and die with their water supplies and
the fertility of their soils. In the far south along the forest edge, the frontier
of cultivation creeps southward every year. Mobility and distance make it
difficult to maintain authority. Those in power must always contemplate their
objects, their subjects option of simply moving ironically." Excuse me.
Ironically Sedan, by most indicators, is booming economically. It's got lots of
money. "1999 sedan began exporting crude oil. In
the last quarter of 1999, it recorded its first trade surplus. Currently oil is
Sudan's main export, reviving light industry and with rising oil prices the
Sudanese economy has recorded a growth rate of 7% in 2005." What do we run in the
United States? 2.5, 3%? And China runs 10%. They're running at 7%. It's huge. "The economy is
one of the fastest growing in the world. Little of this growth occurs or benefits
Darfur," mostly along the Nile River.
The numbers are staggering. They get to the point when you do this kind of work
where they don't mean anything anymore. It's appalling, that's true.
"The United Nation's estimates that the
conflict is as many as 450,000 dead since 2003." 450,000
dead as a result of ethnic violence. Nobody really
knows. You can get a lot of different numbers. I look at all kinds of
numbers and frankly a lot them are inflated. A lot of people have an interest
in inflating the numbers. You need to watch that when you look at the numbers.
450,000 seems to be a given. The number is used a lot, the United Nations uses it.
Perhaps the biggest problem though is,t believe it or not, 450,000 dead
people (and we're talking men, women, and children) but rather the two million or
so that're displaced and they're not just displaced inside of
Darfur anymore. They're indeed.. there are large camps in Chad now and in a Central
African Republic. What does it mean to be in a camp?
It means you walked there, number one. So maybe you walked two, three, four miles
with minimal food and water, etc.. Nobody there to help you and indeed for many,
harassment along the way. It means when you've got there that camp might be well
organized and it might be some aid for you if oxygen is doing their job well
for example or it might be a place where a bunch of people stopped going. Now they
just stopped moving. That's called a camp and they set up
shacks, huts, and maybe Oxfam or some other
agency shows up start with water, etc.. Now what happens when large
numbers of people are all in one place and they just walked 400 miles, 300 miles,
290 miles and they haven't eaten much and there are lot of kids. What happens?
Disease, huge and inevitable. You put a bunch of people in the army will have a
problem in the winter time. We have basic training in the army put a bunch
of young men who are healthy together in one place and they all get sick. We
all know, for those of us who have children, send your kids to school in September
everybody winds up with a cold. The parents wind up with a cold. Imagine what
it's like in one of these camps. I mean ,this is not a place you want to go and
something else that I saw, specifically in the Rwandan camps in the Congo, is
the issue of security. Nobody talks about this but what occurs inside the camp's
is somebody takes over know. Somebody's got a weapon, they take over so now
they're selling stuff. Everything gets buggered so now you're in the camp, you
think you've made it to the camp. You don't have malaria. yet that's good. Oxfam
showed up and gave you but Oxfam doesn't have any weapons. There's no
police, Chad could care less, all right? They want you out of Chad. So some guy
wanders down the street and Chad knocks you over the head and rapes you. Who cares?
Nobody in the camp. No security in the camps and that's usually important,
obviously for the women involved. Frankly these camps also have issues in regard
to pedophiles. Camps aren't good. You don't want to be in a camp and
you certainly don't want to stay in a camp for long periods of time.
So we say they made it to the camp. The reality of the matter is that the camp can be
almost worse than the trip to the camp and this, in the face of the fact
that the Sudanese government is running the 7% growth rate every year
and has therefore plenty of money, unlike many countries politically where
the dominant power who's doing the mass killing is really doing it to get
everybody's mind off the fact that they can't run the country. These guys
got money. They're not going anywhere. They've got sponsors at the very least.
They have China and we've taken some steps to do something. Certainly we were
involve. The United States was involved with that portion in south Sudan.
We were definitely involved in that and getting that stopped but that's coming
back unfortunately.
So that's the politics, let me attempt...
We'll do something, I'll just show you these pictures..
Good, I am good.
We'll run through these fairly quick and again, I'm appalled that I would say that
about people whose suffering they represent. The facility with what you can get
this information scares me. It's like an invasion of privacy and this is essentially
camps. One of the camps, this is a aerial taken in 2004, an aerial picture of various towns.
There's something like 150 super towns (big word, small villages) that have been
destroyed essentially but what the Janjaweed do is they ride up on one of their
camels or whatever and they will literally burn everything down. Take the
man off one place, kill them, send the women walking or kill them and the
kids but what they've essentially done is another word that's come into our
policy since Bosnia: ethnic cleansing. I find that to be a fascinating
modern word construct as well. Ethnic cleansing is about what? It's
about disappearing you from the earth. I don't even need to kill you, ethnic
and cleanse you. All I need to do is, as in Bosnia, take all your documents away
from you. Take all your ID cards and your driver's license and your mortgage and
every other document you have and make you go away.
When you come back, you say "that's my house, I want it." Show me your documents.
Who are you anyway? "I'm Joe." Yeah, prove it. You are non person because your
documents are gone. Very modern stuff. We don't operate without documents.
And that's essentially what they're doing here, although it's not a document
issue as much as it is we not only move you, we destroy your property as
well. First bunch of photographs deal with this. Again the conflict, let's see
conflict in the forest result of multiple pressures: again economic, social,
cultural. One side of the conflict again as we're aware composed mainly of the
Sudanese military in the Janjaweed, a militia group. We recorded mostly from the
Arab Megarb tribes and then there are revolutionaries, who indeed Darfurians
of the Fur tribe. Darfur means essentially country of the
four. Essentially what has occurred is those individuals politically because
they were ostracized and marginalized completely really since
independence (1956) and indeed before that as well, they
revolted. Said we want to be part of Sedan and indeed now, given the oil,
there's something to be part of it and there's a benefit to
being partisan.
But as we say this thing started in 2003, the reality of the matter is it's going
on a whole lot longer than that.
We've got young soldiers, child soldiers. I don't know whether any of you were
involved in the review of the book by Ismail (last name) in regard to child
soldiers, drugs, etc.
Refugee camps....
these pictures tend to be the good news stories because they get taken mostly
off a BBC website. Generally, they're government pictures
meaning the American government pictures or Doctors Without Borders, some NGO
takes the pictures like USAID.
Revolutionary soldiers with Darfurians.
I mean the the political facts are plenty of irrelevant to this discussion.
I won't go on them specifically but there has been an African Union force.
They're 7,000 troops, unmanned, unfunded ect. for the last year or so. The
matter is (which people don't realize with regard to peacekeeping) is it has passed us
on. They have no responsibility for (nor are they capable of) protecting people.
Peacekeeping is not peace protecting and peacemaking and peacekeeping
are two different things. Peacekeeping under the UN mandate as a
general rule was a situation like in the Sinai where essentially you put a
company of troops in between two parties who want them there and you say to them,
"If anybody breaks the peace, report it to the UN Security." We'll do that
presently today. Some kid from Idaho probably got up on the tower,
drinking a coke, looked around, nobody's doing anything. The Sinai today and
that's what he reported. That's peacekeeping. You don't need weapons
or anything. You can't get hurt. You're not doing any violence.
So to send these 7,000 guys to Darfur and tell them to do peacekeeping
when the government doesn't want them there and often the
Darfurians don't want them there either. And then the public believes they're
not doing their jobs. We're not supposed to be protecting people, they have no
mandate to do that. Indeed, they're not allowed to use their weapons except in
self-defense.
So it's a fouled up system at the least. Future looks like maybe they'll be
20,000 with a bit more robust rules of engagement but again are they going to
be able to shoot back at the Sudanese army. Do we want the shooting back at the
Sudanese? Is the UN going to go to war against Sudan? I don't know. If you're going to
do that then send tanks; send all the good stuff. You need to go to have a war,
otherwise I don't want to go.
There's a tough issue. Very often in the press we know we don't talk about these things.
Some of these pictures are taken by Doctors Without Borders. Of course, it is a
Western constructed NGO and it works there.
Others are... There's a picture here that demonstrates a guy with a bag from Saudi
Arabia (Saudi Arabia released forces). If you don't think there's not a clash
of cultures going on with regard to getting credit for that bag of goods for
these people, they're missing the point. There's a whole war going on of ideas, if
you will, which is a shame because it's certainly not efficient. We tend to see
that in the camps...
tough place to soldier.
So just in summary with regard of this area, the politics are convoluted,
unbelievably complex, really not relevant to what we're talking about that much.
The rebels appear to want some participation in the country. The
Janjaweed are supported by the government which is apparently
interested in the ability to dominate the region and manipulate the economic
windfall that are the resources. Islamists are looking to dominate non-Arab
Muslims. Libya looks to manipulate the domestic politics of resource-rich
Sudan. Chad seek security from Libya and Sudan and over all of this is an
economic and cultural pressure of ever increasing desertification, which is to
say that Sahara Desert scum itself... like two feet every year and when the desert
moves south, there's no water. So people think of Africa as a massive
jungle. Very little of Africa is a jungle actually and that desert scum itself and
this is a classic example where it affects everything. Alex Doall
kind of sums this up: "The serial war criminals at the heart of Sudan's
present government once saw absolute control in pursuit of an Islamic state.
Now they seek power for its own sake. Today, as yesterday, the people that
perceive to be challenging that power count for nothing. They can be subjugated,
shot or starve without compunction. If local allies have different axes to
grind, they are free to grind them no matter how much blood they shed. Mass
killing has become so routine that it no longer needs conspiracy or deliberation.
It is simply how the security elite does business. It is ingrained intent-"
interesting term for whether it's genocide ingrained intent "-atrocity by
force of habit. The government and Janjaweed are doing more than destroying
groups, whether in whole or in part. They are destroying the very soul of Darfur,"
which might be another type of proof, it occurs to me in a trial for genocide
to wipeout, if you will, a culture of a group an ethnic group. Well maybe you're
indeed wiping out the group even if they're alive at the end of the day. They
don't know who they are. You've disappeared them as an ethnic group.
turning neighbors against each other and dismembering limb by limb a
society that once thrived in diversity. "The shockwaves of this crime is not
reversed will blight the lives of future generations blown,
outlasting the bloodshed, hunger, and grief of today." The question of the day is this
genocide. Now you don't have enough of these. I made ten copies, maybe you can
share them. For those of you who've never read the Genocide Convention... we pass
these around...because I'm going to refer it to
some of the language. I just want to point out a couple things and
then I will shut up.
Genocide convention is often quoted but but rarely does anybody read, certainly
not in our news media. It reports according to those who use it
to require states to do something when they recognize a genocide,
and even states think there's a problem. That's why people are scared to use the
G word. The reality of the matter is: what is the Genocide Convention? It is
a treaty between nation states. It's international law, says so right in here.
It's a treaty, so it's a contractual
obligation to do only the things that are in the treaty. It defines what a
genocide is and it also says what you do when indeed you see one, which is essentially
nothing. States have no obligation to do anything at all with regard to
unobserved genocide. Nation states,
probably a good idea to report to the Security Council, as if the Security
Council in this age of globalization doesn't already know about. So no legal
responsibility. What it does do very quickly is it finds the term so that
it requires States to try people that are alleged to be genocide genocidaires,
as they say in Rwanda, perpetrators of genocide to try them in
local courts (domestic courts) and indeed now that we have an International
Criminal Court (you can refer them there) as well which is of course
what has occurred with regard to the Sudan Darfur. There have been
a couple referrals so then the prosecutor gets together and says,
"Alright, I want to put this guy in jail for genocide. What do I gotta do to prove it?"
he says all, "right first thing gotta prove is the following Act" (it was an act,
something) he's actually not something who's thinking about something, he actually
did something... committed the following things and and the things include:
killing members of the group, causing serious bodily harm or mental harm,
deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring
about its physical destruction. Put in camps might qualify for that.
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, that's the
logic of rape, which is a genocidal act. For example, it's been found in the Rwandan courts.
Essentially. what you're doing is you're disqualifying (culturally) the
woman from having an active, normal life because there is cultural
consideration now that she's been raped and secondly, very often the child of
the rape lineage follows the father. So in Bosnia for example, you're making
little Serbs as opposed to little Muslims
by raping the Muslim woman. Unfortunately, transferring children of
the group to another group so you've got to be doing one of those things
and it's got to be with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or
religious group. That's the kicker... that's where everybody's founders because
you're doing these really bad things for other reasons than
genocide. Essentially what those who would like to expand the
definition want to do is essentially make genocide seems to me is to make genocide a really
horrendous category of crime against humanity. Genocide would be the
worst crime against humanity and it could be for political reasons or any
other kind of innocence right, so it gets rid of that intent thing. The
other arguments for expanding it may come up when we have questions, I don't
know but I think I will end there given the above. Again, my position... I haven't
read anything or very little. There is a black book floating around in Darfur
that apparently provides some proof that indeed the government wants to
marginalize Darfurians. I'm not sure I know whether that qualifies as genocide.
Yes, you said the Genocide Convention isn't really obligated to do anything.
Nation states, the lawyer... but you didn't talk about development which, for example the
document on the responsibility to protect, which I don't know if it has the same
importance of international law and the Genocide Convention does but it
certainly did to develop thinking about the responsibilities of nation-states to
do something, so I wonder can you comment on that?
This issue deals with a real big problem with international law and the real big
problem is the issue of sovereignty. You guys have probably seen this, we already had. But
essentially in international relations, international law, sovereign states under
international get to pretty much do anything they want within their borders
so even Nuremberg... Nuremberg is about punishing, killing the Jews
after the war starts outside of Germany and it has an international legal conundrum:
we couldn't mess with it citizens inside inside Germany
because it wasn't during a war so it wasn't a war crime and they didn't have a genocide law then but
sovereignty says he gets to do what he wants inside and there's some good reasons for that.
Put them aside. The problem is of course if it states very often are the ones who do
the genocide and do really bad human rights things and they're very
efficient at it. They've got all the tools and the resource. States can
be (really very often are) really... governments are really ugly, right? What do
you do with that and international law and up until Casabell frankly,
international law stood for the proposition and couldn't be anything. It
couldn't enter... Other states could not enter your state to stop you from
hurting your citizens. Kosovo was the first time the internationally got together and said we're
going to stop this, something's going on inside and essentially the logic
of it is, well, the logic we use Kosovo is really sloppy. International lawyers were
jumping out of windows. Nobody knew what the legal justification. Nobody. There
wasn't anyone.
It is a violation of UN charter to do Kosovo. The logical they
kind of used was, "this is the humanitarian disaster. It's messing with
a piece of security of the world cause all the people are going to all the corners of Europe so
therefore it's spilling over the borders and that's what they did but there is
developing an international law. It is this idea that if you are a nation-state, you get
the privilege of being a nation state which is to say you'll get to do things
within your borders and nobody gets the message.
What do you owe as a nation state? What're your responsibilities? Your responsibility is to
not do bad things. If you do really bad things (genocide, crimes against humanity
whatever particularly heinous human rights records) they you forfeited the
right to be a nation-state and the international community can then cross
your borders and throw you out. That's where we are going,
internationalists are going. What's the problem with that?
The nation-states got a vote on them. There are 192 at the UN moment. You got to vote on it. No nation safe wants to
say, "oh yeah, come on it!" I mean ten years ago, Mr. Milošević
would have to say, "Yeah, that's a good idea, let's do it." Is he going to do that?
You provided a wealth of information, visual & verbal. I'm going to
put a scenario to you if you don't mind. Absolutely, give me your best shot.
Everybody in consensus said that Richard, we're entrusting you morally, ethically with
your judgments. There needs to be something done. What is your solution? You
just mentioned time. What's the problem? You know, this country goes... you
don't have to worry about that. No vast amount of time for diplomats. What
is your... To this stuff? So to answer specifically, to the next 'Sudan?' might be?
How would you solve it?
I'm a big believer in the United Nations. I think it's broke and it's a precipice
of disaster. It's about the ball and if it does, we're really in trouble.
I think the international community needs a vehicle to do these things. The fact that the UN
can't do this...Nobody wants to blame the U.S., the U.N. can't do it.
They don't have the moral persuasion, if you will. There were problems and we know
that the UN is made up of nation-states but to ,me, it is the only vehicle.
I don't necessarily think we automatically need a police force of
essentially UN mercenaries, mercs, blackborders/UN and blackborder
indeed at the present time. You know that is essentially the
company that works in Iraq just got in Iraq are about to get thrown out of Iraq.
They're firing up.
Lot of causalities, essentially civilians.
They actually have submitted contact bids to do peacekeeping and people thinking about it
and from an international law point,history tells us, "this is really a bad
idea" that essentially, if you called your history, "Treaty of Westphalia in 1648" is
essentially when the nation state system (that sovereignty) was recognized in the
international system and one of the other things, let's get rid of the mercenaries.
We will all have our own armies that we can control. Mercenaries are
worse ... I was in Ukraine one time, and they couldn't
wait to be peacekeepers. They wanted to be certified peace keepers. The only army
they got is an army of peace keepers. They want to go so they're available but
all that stuff keeps breaking down at the UN for some reason. I am not sure but that's got
to be fixed or none of this will work.
I have a personal issue. I come from Africa (from Nigeria in West Africa) and I believe the UN is
a ticking bomb waiting to explode and this as a result (in my
opinion) from their own Security Council which the U.S.
seems to be part, as well as Britain, China and all that and if these nations who
happen to be the Security Council, if they happen to be especially inefficient,
as historians have proved, then why can't there be a
motivation? I don't want to say impeachment because the UN is not a country for years
but isn't there a way that this Security Council
can be dissolved for a new integration of obligations who can think in
an objective manner? The Security Council is very suspicious
....they have strategies and all of that so
they're not very objective. That's one of the issues. The second thing I have
regarding Sudan is, why should the UN make laws
and then you or some people break the laws? For instance why
talk about intervention bring to notions...
In case of Rwanda, the pros and cons we're not even weighed so
that strategy was not implied and humanitarian visas was not enough for
them to go back so in this case, I don't know if you know the personal
strategy has been raised for an establishment humanitarian act. I don't think
it's good enough because when it comes to strategy,
I think this is a good enough reason knowing that the Security Council
wants money, oil and stuff like that, so I want to know why
they're not acting even though you've given me your personal opinion. I want to
know from a bigger global context.
Well, you gotta remember that the United Nations is a group of nation states. It was created
after World War II and it fixed the world in the politics of 1945, so the more
important powers in 1945. Frankly, there were only two but we added more.
But at the time the idea was...and took a
League of Nations, which is the first round of attempting to do collective work,
and played around with it an attempt to make it better. So we wind up with
China,
USSR, United States for instance. What's happened since the 45 or 48
countries that signed the charter showed since 1945. Well now you got 192 countries
(all the colonies became countries) and indeed since the end of the
Cold War, there have been even more countries. Everybody wants to be their own country which is
fine but now you've got a United Nations with 192 using a
framework and a set of processes that were created for 50, that's an issue.
Who should be in charged anymore?Should the United States and Russia, China be in
charge? What happened to Brazil, Japan and Inida?
Maybe you have representatives from all the different continents, that is another
approach. It sounds good on paper but at the end of the day the reality of the matter is the
most powerful want the most say in a collective organization.
So that's a problem. I think UN gets fixed or or falls apart when the superpowers feel
that it's in their personal best interests to have an efficient way.
In other words, If I am the the State Department and I say, "God, I don't want to do to Sudan."
Well wouldn't it be great to Sudan and fixed this thing? Let's go call the UN, send them
some money in go in and work it out. If the UN could officially deal with that and then
indeed the UN... we would support it so every now and then people would make
decisions in UN that we didn't like. It's better that we have the UN then we don't.
But the end of the day, we in international
relations do things for their own national interests
only, whether it's Nigeria or the United States. So that's how
the UN operates. In here, we have China on one side in terms of supporting the
government of Sudan because 80% of the oil,
when it comes out goes to China. China has 10% economic growth and they need more and more
oil and gas. They're not real interested in sanctioned and beating up
up the government of Sudan. I think part of the problem that we're having as an
audience is with the lawyer side of things and to be precise,
if we always argue whether or not the definition of genocide will be met while the
violence is going around, at the end of the day the only less steady will be definition
And then you have a thousand people that died and so I think the tension with people in
genocide scholar prospective, or from other prospectives,
is that we feel frustration with
legalistic side of this argument and that's what you run into in Sarajevo as well.
Absolutely, and I don't disagree but my response to that is
always what are we going to respond? My response is that we ought to be
talking about crimes against humanity. They're unbelievably important. Why do we
need the wait for genocide to go do something? I don't care what this is. This
is terrible and if we have a moral obligation (we
don't have one because we use the G word), there are moral
obligations. This is bad stuff. We assume that human beings are responsible. I'm gonna have to step in and say thank
you very much. There's much more that we could talk about, as you said.
I could tell there a lot of questions that weren't answered, more questions raised and
equally raised the question of the different views
so there's lots more than to be discussed here.
I want to thank you, professor Richard O'Meara for being with us this afternoon.
you
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