Human rights activists say that the international community has given up on intervention efforts to stop mass atrocities, leading to fears that such occurrences may become the norm around the world.
The warnings come on the 75th anniversaries this weekend of the Genocide Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, both signed in the aftermath of the Holocaust in the hope that the world would act in concert to prevent a repeat of such mass slaughter.
The United Nations’ “responsibility to protect” principle and the US efforts to build atrocity prevention mechanisms have, however, wilted in the face of a resurgence of atrocity crimes after a relative lull at the turn of the millennium.
The mass killing of civilians in Syria and Ukraine, and the internment of over a million Uyghurs and other Muslims in China, have been followed by war crimes in Ethiopia, and a resumption of ethnic cleansing in Sudan’s Darfur province, 20 years after the start of the genocide there.
The 7 October Hamas killing of 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, and the consequent Israeli invasion of Gaza, in which women and children have accounted for most of the estimated 16,000 dead, have added to the bloody chaos. The UN high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, has warned of “a heightened risk of atrocity crimes”.
“If you look around, you don’t need to be an expert in mass atrocity violence to recognise its prevalence,” said Kate Ferguson, the co-founding director of Protection Approaches, an NGO focused on prevention of and responses to identity-based violence. “We face the likelihood that this violence is going to characterise the next political era. In fact, I wonder if we’re not already in that era.”
In the face of the turmoil, the UN security council has been paralysed by rivalry among the veto-wielding great powers, who themselves have been implicated in the atrocities. Faced with deadlock over the Gaza war, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, invoked a clause in the UN charter that had not been used in decades to force a debate on a humanitarian ceasefire. The US refused to back the resolution on Friday.
A week early, the security council closed the UN political mission in Sudan despite the ongoing killings in Darfur – a reflection of the lack of appetite for international peacekeeping missions, and a final death knell for the principle that the international community had a “responsibility to protect” vulnerable civilian populations adopted by a UN world summit in 2005.
“I think the big difference this time is that, while Darfur attracted enormous attention at the UN and globally in the 2000s, the current war in Sudan is a tragic footnote to more strategically significant wars elsewhere. This sadly follows a pattern we saw in Ethiopia,” said Richard Gowan, the UN director at the International Crisis Group. “The responsibility to protect is at best a fading memory at the UN.”
The ambition to forestall genocide and other crimes against humanity and war crimes has also faded in US foreign policymaking, human rights advocates claim. The high point was the creation in 2012 of the Atrocities Prevention Board, chaired by Samantha Power, a close adviser to Barack Obama and the author of a book on the subject, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, which argued the US had sought to avoid confronting genocide, rather than address it head on.
Under the board, US intelligence agencies and diplomats were tasked with looking for early warning signs that populations were under threat, and an array of tools – military, diplomatic, legal and economic – were designed for early intervention, to deter would-be perpetrators and protect civilians.
The Obama administration’s record on atrocity prevention was mixed, at best. The 2011 intervention in Libya, initially to protect civilians in Benghazi from a threat of annihilation, turned into a regime-change mission and accelerated the country’s descent into chaos. Obama would later call it the “worst mistake” of his presidency.
In Syria, Obama was criticised for a failure to intervene when Bashar al-Assad’s regime breached the US “red line” on the use of chemical weapons. Defenders of the board’s record argue that it helped mitigate civilian harm in a host of other global crises, and that it elevated the priority given to the plight of vulnerable populations in policy discussions at the highest level.
Since then, Congress has passed the Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention Act, mandating training of US diplomats and concrete US responses to atrocity crimes, and last year, the state department adopted the first ever US “strategy to anticipate, prevent, and respond to atrocities”.
Despite these formal commitments, human rights activists say atrocity prevention has a significantly lower profile in Joe Biden’s administration. The atrocity prevention team, now a taskforce, has more junior leadership and no longer has a role in high-level policymaking.
Despite early warnings, activists allege the US had been slow in calling out atrocity crimes in Ethiopia and Sudan, and been paralysed over the Israel-Hamas war. According to sources familiar with the taskforce’s work, it had been blocked from convening to discuss risk factors on the West Bank. From presenting itself as a guardian of human rights, the administration found itself widely accused of complicity in potential Israeli war crimes in Gaza.
“Sudan has been a focus of the APTF [Atrocity Prevention Task Force],” a White House official said, pointing out that the administration had formally determined on Wednesday that both warring parties in Sudan had committed atrocities. “The APTF is the body that tasked out an atrocity risk assessment for Sudan and made the recommendation that a formal atrocity designation be issued for Sudan.”
On the issue of the Palestinian territories, the White House official said: “We have other mechanisms through which we are regularly coordinating on these concerns” including NSC meetings at various levels of seniority including top officials.”
“We have also taken steps like the visa ban that are the kind of thing the APTF would recommend,” the official said, referring to a visa ban imposed by the US state department this week on extremist West Bank settlers involved in violence or undermining stability.
“In the medium and short term, we are failing miserably to use the tools that everybody invested so much blood, sweat and tears to get finalised,” said Nicole Widdersheim, a former senior administration official who served on the Atrocity Prevention Board. “Now there is a whole new ballgame, as everything is affected by the prism of the Gaza crisis.”
“I’m disappointed in this administration’s inability or unwillingness to pursue its own strategy, let alone the laws and tools that are already on the books,” she added.
Stephen Pomper, who succeeded Power as the chair of the board, said that the ambition to stop atrocity crimes had “diminished in terms of its saliency within the administration as a guiding principle”.
But Pomper argued the seeds of the decline were in the original assumptions underlying the policy: that the UN and the international order would continue to function in the same way, the US would remain a unipolar power, “the world would tolerate a certain level of double standards by the US”, and atrocity prevention would not get in the way of conflict resolution.
“I think they’ve all been, to some extent, challenged by reality,” Pomper said.
