Why genocide is difficult to prosecute
Protesters in 35 nations and more than 280 US cities rallied Sunday for protecting those being killed in the Darfur war.
from the April 30, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 4
'An explicit call to action'
The word genocide raises deep legal and moral conundrums in a globalizing world, experts say: The term has gained popular usage in a media age to describe mass atrocities, as in Darfur, Rwanda, Bosnia. Yet prosecutors and world courts are ever more cautious about leveling the charge, even when it may apply – since it raises a requirement to intervene.
"Genocide is an explicit call to action under the 1948 treaty, a call to prevent and punish," says Diane Orentlicher at American University in Washington. Recent court rulings show that "if you wait until there is a legal certainty to prove genocide, you have waited too long," she adds.
That's where politics enter. A party or state charged with genocide will likely be isolated and stigmatized in the global community, perhaps even making the situation worse. This is disputed on Darfur. Some Darfur activists feel Sudan hasn't been charged with genocide because that would make it impossible for governments to deal with Khartoum.
The politics of genocide rose in a ruling on Bosnia this February. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague did not find Serbia guilty of genocide in the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims in the early 1990s. Rather, it found Serbia culpable in not preventing genocide in the Srebrenica massacre, and awarded no damages.
The ruling outraged scholars like Ruth Wedgwood of Johns Hopkins University who told the Monitor it "appeared to be a posthumous acquittal of [then President] Slobodan Milosevic for genocide. The court didn't look at a pattern of crimes in Bosnia, but selectively picked its evidence."
Early this month it came to light that ICJ judges did not read and did not seek to investigate a huge range of materials from Belgrade that were used as evidence by the UN-sanctioned Yugoslavia Tribunal, just down the street in this city.
New York Times reporter Marlise Simons wrote that the ICJ ruling "raised some eyebrows because aspects of Serbian military involvement are already known from records of earlier [Tribunal] trials.... In late 1993, for instance, more than 1,800 officers and noncommissioned men from the Yugoslav Army were serving in the Bosnian Serb Army, and were deployed, paid, promoted, or retired by Belgrade [and] given dual identities" through a secret office known as the 30th Personnel Center of the General Staff."
ICJ defenders say it is a civil not a criminal court, and that its purpose is to settle disputes between nations to keep amity and peace intact. Critics say the ruling seemed more about conciliation than justice.
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