A Visit To Carnegie Council

I was pleased to be invited recently to a dialogue entitled, "What It Means To Prevent Genocide" at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in New York.  The guest speaker was Tibi Galis of the Auschwitz Institute.  I enjoyed hearing Mr. Galis speak about the important work the international community is doing to prevent genocide and other mass atrocity crimes.

As I've mentioned in this blog, I feel it's important to not only acknowledge the great work being done, but also to challenge ourselves for continuous improvement.  Toward the end of the segment, I asked Mr. Galis some rather tough questions about why genocide still exists in the world today.  I applaud Mr. Galis' candor in answering my questions and agree that we need to start digging deeper into why governments choose to support human rights abuses.  I am meeting with Sudanese Ambassador Daffa-Alla Elhag Ali Osman this week and plan to ask him some tough questions as well.  Here's a video of the Carnegie Council event where I ask Mr. Galis my questions, followed by a transcript.

QUESTION: My name is Kate Coy, and I am here from the University of Oregon.

The University of Oregon's School of Law has recently launched a genocide initiative to raise awareness about preventing genocide. We had Gregory Stanton come and speak this past April. I'm here at the UN, and unfortunately I missed that talk.

But this looks very familiar. A lot of what's being said is something also that I heard at a talk earlier today at the UN, where Kai Brand-Jacobsen talked about basically these things. His talk was about preventing more violence and genocide, critical approaches to making prevention work. So I think there's a lot of buzz around the topic from a lot of places.

If I can really just kind of call out the elephant in the room, this morning on my way to work I heard about children in Syria being strapped to tanks to prevent them from being blown up. So there's something missing. We're doing a lot of great things, and I appreciate that, but what's the missing link?

TIBI GALIS: I think that the missing link is that we talk a lot about the things we are supposed to do and very often don't really do them. We end up in situations where governments are behaving just like they used to before we had started talking about genocide and mass atrocity prevention. I believe that shows a failure of us to reach out everywhere.

At the same time, looking from the other perspective, we have had the chance to influence the way governments operate and governments relate to their citizens so much more than we have had the capacity to do in the past, thanks to a genocide-prevention responsibility to protect agenda, that many mass atrocities, it can be argued, have been avoided.

I am the first one to call out how bad we are still at preventing mass atrocities and how many crimes happen around us. This is not to say, though, that the work that we need to take forward is not already being done. It takes time. It took time for the convention to become anything else than a piece of paper. It took so much time for it because of the Cold War. It took time for anything that approaches an international criminal justice system to come together. But we are there. We are making serious advances in this field.

But we need to continue pushing and, at the same time, realize that these atrocities that happen today are great indicators of how badly our governments are still doing their job and how much help they need in doing it better.

QUESTION: I think you're right. I think that it's wonderful to acknowledge what—I think it's hard to measure success when success is something that is prevented.

But something was brought up by Mark Simmons, whom you may know, who has done a lot of work in Sudan. He made the comment this afternoon that stuck with me. He said, "The Sudanese governmentdoesn't want peace." That's a real barrier, that state sovereignty issue, where if you have a government that has no interest in preventing genocide, how do you overcome that?

TIBI GALIS: Again, my response would be not a very radical one. Governments don't operate in vacuums. Governments operate in this world that is getting rather small. In order to operate, they have to interact with other governments, with other parts of society. It's time to actually engage with what makes a government change its mind about mass atrocity and genocide.

Mapping efforts beyond the actual mapping and gathering physical data are also expanding into mapping social relationships within each society to see which of the sectors of society can be mobilized to stop that society's government from committing mass atrocities.

At the same time, whenever a government fails to protect its citizens at home, that is a grand failure also of the other governments who were supposed to create an environment in which that failure to protect shouldn't have materialized.

So what I am telling you is it's about engagement, it's about engagement with each and every situation. It's not a small process, it's not an easy process, and it's a resource-intensive process.

But, you know, we have engaged with interstate conflict for centuries, dedicating huge resources for that problem—war. Our wars today don't look the same. It's time that we rededicate resources to the wars that affect us—internal wars, mass atrocities—and we dislocate resources from our defense budgets potentially. This is just an example, but there are so many ways to engage with a government that is criminal.

I hope this answers the question.