Team America: Genocide Prevention?

Introduction

Genocide can be defined as a complex process of systematic persecution and annihilation of a group of people by a government. In the twentieth century, approximately 40 to 60 million defenseless people became victims of deliberate genocidal policies. The twenty-first century did not begin much better, with genocidal episodes going on in Darfur and the Congo. We can speak of genocide when individuals are persecuted and murdered merely on the basis of their presumed or imputed membership in a group rather than on their individual characteristics or participation in certain acts. Although it makes little sense to define genocide by a specific number of victims affected by it, we can state that a genocidal process always concerns a society at large and that genocide destroys a significant and often critical part of the affected community. It can be argued that genocidal processes are particularly malicious and destructive because they are directed against all members of a group, most often against innocent and defenseless people who are persecuted and killed regardless of their behaviour. Genocide always denotes a colossal and brutal collective criminality. For this reason, genocide has been studied as a modern phenomenon that is distinct from other forms of mass violence. After Raphael Lemkin died in 1959, the term seemed to be a dead letter. But in the 1970s historians and social scientists rediscovered the concept and published the first academic work on genocide. Since then, the number of publications has grown and today genocide studies, with journals and research institutes in North America and Europe, is a respectable intellectual specialism.¹

Three questions are central in this research field. First, what are the causes of a genocidal process? Or, put another way, how does the systematic destruction of a group of people begin? Second, how does a genocidal process develop? There are strong indications that, when such a process has been put in motion, it develops its own dynamic. How does that process evolve from the individual to the collective level? Finally, it is important to investigate the consequences of genocide. How are perpetrators, victims, and third parties affected by genocide? How do they process, if at all, the traumatic events? In the growing, interdisciplinary field of genocide studies much useful research has been conducted into the evolution of separate genocides such as the destruction of Ottoman Armenians in 1915, the Holocaust, and the genocides in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, Rwanda in 1994, and Bosnia during the Yugoslav civil wars. A significant amount of knowledge about certain aspects of genocide exists as well. Both separate and comparative research has been conducted, for instance, on the turn of a fairly "normal" civil society into a persecutory one, the motives of the ordinary people who are involved in mass murders, the power and effect of charismatic leaders, and aspects of violence as they relate to gender. From time to time, publications appear trying to understand the causes of genocide in order to integrate that knowledge into policy mechanisms aimed at the prevention of genocide. Such a report, MARO: Mass Atrocity Response Operations; A Military Planning Handbook, was published by the US army and attempts to build on this tradition.

MARO: Fallacies, Missteps, Naiveté

It is important for military personnel across the world to understand genocidal situations. Clusters of perpetrators need to be told that they can be held accountable for their actions and that the old excuse of "orders are orders" (Befehl ist Befehl) is not exculpatory. It is crucial for intervention forces to recognize a genocidal situation because of the nature and purpose of their work. For example, during the separation of Muslim men from women and children in Srebrenica, the Dutch UN officials should have immediately understood that this action was a pernicious omen if not a direct indicator of mass murder to come. Historically, the gender segregation of groups of unarmed civilians has not led to the containment or de-escalation of the conflict; in fact, it has served little other purpose than further destruction. For this reason, in principle, a handbook such as MARO is a laudable effort...