During the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, officials in the Clinton administration went to great lengths to avoid calling the unfolding tragedy “genocide.” Rather, they chose the term “acts of genocide” apparently in order to avoid any legal obligation under the 1948 Genocide Convention to take action to stop any activity deemed “genocide.” When asked how many acts of genocide it takes to make genocide, a State Department spokeswoman answered meekly, “I’m just not in a position to answer that question.” The semantic effort was largely successful as the Clinton administration did virtually nothing to stop the murder of 800,000 Rwandans.
Human rights scholars took from this experience the lesson that language mattered – because the Clinton administration was so intent on not saying “genocide,” the scholars concluded that had the word been uttered, action would have followed.
The wisdom of that lesson has been put to the test as another tragedy unfolds in Africa, this time in Sudan. Applying the Rwanda lesson, activists pushed strenuously for the Bush administration to classify as genocide the killing and looting of African tribes in Darfur by government-backed militias. On July 22, 2004, the U.S. Congress declared that genocide was occurring in Darfur. Two months later, the Bush administration agreed, as Secretary of State Colin Powell declared “genocide has been committed….and genocide may still be occurring.” The human rights community celebrated these declarations with the hopes that significant action would follow.
Two years have now passed since the congressional declaration and although the Bush administration has taken action, far more action than did Clinton in Rwanda, dreadful and dangerous conditions persist in Darfur.
The top United Nations enjoy to Darfur, Jan Pronck, recently observed that two months after a May 5 peace agreement among many of the parties involved, the situation is bad as it had been two months before the agreement. The UN has had to halt humanitarian assistance in some parts of Darfur because aid workers have been killed, and the violence is spilling into neighboring Chad. The implementation of the peace agreement has been generally nonexistent and the African Union force deployed in the region is set to run out of funding this fall, leaving a several month gap before UN forces take over no earlier than January 2007.
In short, the experience of Darfur has proven the limitations of the lesson of Rwanda that language matters. (Apparently, the UN did not get this memo as they have resisted declaring Darfur a “genocide,” instead asserting in Clinton-esque fashion “in some instances individuals may commit acts with genocidal intent.” This statement, of course, begs the question – how many acts with genocidal intent make genocide?) Further, the failure of states to take action to stop what has been labeled “genocide” reinforces the fundamental weakness of all voluntary international agreements, such as the Genocide Convention – enforcement. Unless there are consequences for failing to abide by a legal obligation to act under the Genocide Convention, tempered action like that taken in Darfur is the likely outcome.
Not that the Bush administration’s declaration of “genocide” didn’t matter. To be sure, it represented a turning point in American engagement on the issue and put the U.S. at the forefront of the effort to rein in the killing. However, it was far from the trigger to prompt action sufficient to stop the genocide, as the Clinton administration feared.
It seems that each time a new genocide unfolds, the lessons of genocides past are rendered obsolete. The world apparently has no shortage of ways to avoid effective intervention. What then are the lessons of Darfur?
The most important lesson is that publicity and an active mobilization of a constituency against genocide can happen and can move lawmakers to act. Heroic work by human rights activist turned Darfur into a somewhat mainstream topic and paved the way for the action that has been taken. Second, Darfur has shown an enormous variety of ways that non-government actors can act. The lesson that governments cannot be relied upon to act in genocidal situations has been internalized as a large group of aid organizations and volunteers have pushed the Darfur agenda further than any government would be willing to. Finally, the world has learned that semantics that arguably create legal obligations do not stop genocides. It is action that stops “genocide,” “acts of genocide,” “acts with genocidal intent,” and all things in between.
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