Martin LeFevre: Can Humanity End Genocide?

Probably the single greatest test of the so-called international community is whether it can prevent or stop genocide and ethnic cleansing. By that measure over the last 20 years, the states that collectively comprise the United Nations have failed miserably.

In scarred but recovering places like Bosnia and Rwanda, and in suppurating wounds like Congo and Sudan, the madness of intra-state slaughter continues with a cold, internal logic, impervious to external constraint.

Working with existing structures, can humankind put an end to genocide? Are genocide and ethnic cleansing ‘Western constructs,’ as many maintain? Does national sovereignty trump all considerations, even genocide?

Clearly, butchery and systematic slaughter by nations against their own or other peoples have universal actuality. Clearly, genocide and ethnic cleansing have a shared human meaning.

Genocide is the mutual, suicidal expression of man’s death wish on this planet, the self-directed corollary of the mass extinction of animals now underway. At the root of genocide (whether intentional with ‘other’ groups of humans, or unintentional, with ‘other’ species of animals), is the cancerous tendency in human consciousness to fragment the earth, and human society, beyond the breaking point.

Unspeakable rage lurks in the human heart, the malevolent accretion of millennia of grievance, the sum total of hidden hatreds and incalculable repression. That content can erupt at any time, either in the individual (as we’ve seen in the last week in the United States, where thirteen were massacred on the East Coast by a Vietnamese immigrant; and on the West Coast, where five children were slaughtered by their father), or in the mob under the cool, calculated direction of evil (through the likes of Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir).

It is cold-bloodedly absurd to maintain, as al-Bashir and his supporters do, that the ‘Western’ outrage over atrocities committed in the Sudan is the product of the same desire for ‘regime change’ that motivated the American invasion of Iraq. And it crosses over into complicity with evil to assert that al-Bashir’s eviction of 13 aid organizations after his indictment by the International Criminal Court was rightful and rational, purportedly because the Obama Administration is using a ‘humanitarian pretext’ for invasion.

The invasion of Iraq has addled many people’s minds, and not just in the 22-nation Arab League, which last week unanimously issued a formal declaration rejecting the ICC charges against al-Bashir, and supporting his defiance of UN Security Council resolutions.

Even the African Union, whose members have more reason to fear popular uprisings and international sanctions, have backed Security Council resolutions against Sudan, and have provided troops to the UN mission to halt years of ongoing rape and murder on a mass scale in Darfur.

This is the true legacy of Bush-Cheney. They not only eroded whatever moral authority the United States had left when they took power, but also blinded millions of progressives to the glaring difference between invasion by the most powerful nation-state, and international intervention to prevent or halt genocide and ethnic cleansing. By this logic, the failure of the UN to act in Rwanda, blocked in the Security Council by the Clinton Administration, was a virtuous act.

In 1948 the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 260, under which Article I states: “Genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which [member states must] undertake to prevent and to punish.”

Because the most powerful nations are not subject to intervention does not mean that a UN pronouncement of genocide is inherently prejudicial, and irredeemably false and flawed.

The invasion of Iraq, and acts of torture and rendition by the US government and its allies, did not just violate the values and principles of America with regard to human rights. More importantly, these illegal and immoral acts by the most powerful nation--formerly a promoter and defender, at least nominally, of human rights--have seriously eroded the possibility that the worst scourges of man may be put behind us.

Nonetheless, viewing genocide and ethnic cleansing through the warped prism of recent history, much less the corrupt lenses of the governments in the Arab League (many of whom have been in bed with the US government for decades) leads to a heartless disregard of the indescribable suffering of millions of people at the hands of evil regimes.

National sovereignty as the highest political principle is a dead letter in a global society. Maintaining it is reactionary, from whichever side of the political spectrum, and contributes to genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net . The author welcomes comments.

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