Warning signs of Genocide. We ignored these signs in Rwanda, HOW DARE we ignore them again in Darfur.

We have always said never again whether it was Rwanda, Bosnia or certainly the holocaust, but the genocide in Darfur is happening now and it’s happening before our very eyes. In this paper, I want to explore the signs of genocide that I believe we as the people have despondently ignored.  As a Student,  my inquisitive mind   has led  me on a quest to further understand genocides in depth.    What I’ve  noticed from my analysis of genocides  is that there was a predictable sequence of events. Using that sequence, it could be very helpful to policy makers to prevent Genocide by seeing Genocide coming and knowing what steps could be taken at each of the signs to do something to stop it.

The first sign is classification. Now of course all human beings classify; there’s always us and there’s them, there’s our group and there’s the others. This is not necessarily of course a genocidal step, but its absolutely necessary for genocide because if we don’t have a way to say some people are “other” and they are not part of us, then there is no way you can have a Genocide. The way to counteract genocide at that very early stage is to appeal to transcendent identities, i.e. we are all Sudanese or Rwandans.

The second sign is symbolization, where we have words or symbols that express those classifications. We call people Tutsi or Hutus. The best way to counteract symbolization is when you see physical symbols being applied to groups,  e.g. Yellow pieces of cloth that the Taliban tried to put on Hindus in Afghanistan, you raise the human cry because that kind of symbolization is a pre cursor for genocidal activity. When you see people’s religion or other types of distinguishing identity that could be used for prosecution on their identity cards, you oppose that, i.e. you try and get that taken off the identity cards. In 1998 in Rwanda, they needed to take those ethnic identities off the identity cards of the Hutu’s and Tutsi’s, but of course it was too late.

The third sign is dehumanization. It’s  where we equate the group that is targeted as being a cancer or microbes in the system. In other words,  It’s where we begin to treat one group as somehow less than human. The way this is often expressed is using language for instance calling people vermin or cockroaches as they called the Tutsis in Rwanda. In Darfur, Western Sudan, non Arab Africans are often referred to as “zurga,” which translates as” Black” but is thought of more as a slur. When such dehumanizing words are used , you know you have a very serious dehumanization process going on in that society that has to be fought very vigorously.

The fourth sign of genocide is organization. If a hate group is formed that is organizing to carry out hate crimes, that group must be outlawed and the people who are part of that group need to be arrested because they are in fact engaging in essentially organized crime. That was the way the SS was treated in Nirenberg and it should have been  the way the Interhamway should have been treated in Rwanda.

The fifth sign of Genocide is Polarization, in which the hate groups try to drive the society apart. Basically they try to drive out all the moderates who could stop the process. The first people who are always attacked in every genocide are the people who are moderates who may oppose it. For instance, in Germany the first people to be arrested by Hitler were the Social democrats and liberals who were though to oppose the Nazi regime. These people are also bound to be the first people to be killed. Another example is in Rwanda where the Prime minister who was Hutu was among the first person to be killed on the first day of the genocide. Whenever there’s evidence of such  Polarization, you have to get international pressure to be put on the regime that is attempting to do that. Unfortunately, we are seeing this exact strategy being used in Iraq right now. On many sides of Iraq, Polarization is going on. As a matter of fact, in many cases what people call “ethnic cleansing” is actually very much pre genocidal type activity.

The sixth sign is what I call preparation. It is the stage were people are armed and  militias are trained to carry out  genocide. It’s also the stage at which even sometimes concentration camps are built. When such  kind of preparation is evident , the International community has to cry out. The leaders of that kind of “massacre preparation” need to have sanctions placed upon them as individuals. It must become impossible for them to travel and they need to have their finances frozen. They basically need to become International outlaws.

The seventh sign is what I call Genocide, “legally”. The reason why I use this term is because the people who commit Genocide are very frequently people who believe what they are doing is good for their Society. They actually think that they are purifying their society. The Nazi’s for instance thought that by eliminating the Jews from Europe, it was going to actually make a better Europe. The Soviet Union thought that by eliminating class enemies, they would be able to create a perfect society… a classless society. In Rwanda the thought was, if we could just get rid of all these Tutsi’s, then we would have a perfect Hutu run country. I am convinced that at the point where Genocide is actually going on, so much international pressure has to be placed on the Government to stop it . Unfortunately the international community does not yet have the standing police forces and international army to do that kind of intervention, so probably the most common type on intervention at this point is going to be by regional organizations, i.e. by NATO, ECOWAS (The Economic Community of West African States) and other groups of that kind that can in fact intervene to actually bring a halt to Genocide. That was what happened for instance in Sierra Leone and in Liberia.

There is a strange and unusual 8th sign of every of Genocide. When I first realized that there was this 8th sign, I thought to myself whether this was quite the same thing because it actually begins all the way right from the beginning. The eighth sign is denial. All the way through this whole process, the people who are committing Genocide Deny that they are doing it. They will lie, they will dissimulate and  do what the Sudanese UN Ambassador, Abdalmahmood Mohamed just did in Washington…he actually said that genocide isn’t happening in Darfur. I mean he completely denied the facts and found other sorts of excuses for denial. What’s amazing about denial is that unless there are actual trials and courts that can bring to Justice the people who have committed the genocide, the denial can last for 100 years. That’s still what’s going on for example with the Armenian genocide and the Turkish authorities are still denying that it was actually genocide.

So those are the eight signs of Genocide and what I’m convinced is that at each of the signs, there are steps that can be taken to halt this deadly process. In Darfur, each of these signs is evident. The classification is the population by the Sudanese authorities who are Arab looking Darfurians who consider themselves lighter skinned and a superior race  and the Black non Arab Darfurians… basically the people who are blacker and belong to the Fur, Massalit, and Zanghawa tribes. The classification in Darfur is not one that was imposed by the perpetrators, but it was always there in the past in  society. The only difference now is the murderous kind of classification that we are seeing now that wasent there in the past.

The symbolization of course is the kind of symbolization you get when for example  a  Janjaweed soldier  utters  to  a Darfurian woman, “I’m raping you so that you will  have  lighter skinned child “. It’s basically  this symbolization of race. Of course with that you have dehumanizing words where Darfurians are called “Abid” (slaves) by the Arab leaders. They are basically considered to be properly in the state of slavery in society. That part of dehumanization is apart of this genocide.

The organization has been one where the Sudanese Government has given arms and the spoils of pillage to the Janjaweed Militias. Instead of using the Sudanese army directly in most of these raids, although they are partially  involved (the Sudanese army is involved … they do use tanks and missile shooting helicopters and so forth), the Janjaweed are essentially the local policing militia who ride on horsebacks and carry out most of the murders. So that’s the form of organization in this genocide.
The Polarization is very clear. What the Janjawed are attempting to do is drive all of the Black non Arab darfurians into internally displaced persons camps, where they can be separated. There’s  also the systematic killing of any moderate Arab Darfurians who stands  in their way. Local tribal chiefs are even not allowed to govern as they are supposed to do.

The preparation stage was one in which the Sudanese Government had already committed multiple genocides in other places. It was a well practiced genocidal regime having already committed Genocide in the Nuba Mountains in 1992 and In the South for over 20 years, where over 2 million people died. The preparation in Darfur had been one which they had systematic prosecutions and discrimination against Black non Arab darfurians. When the darfurians demanded their rights with rebel movements formed, at that point the whole situation moved into sign 7…”actual genocide”. That’s when the Sudanese air force started bombing villages and helicopter gunships came in and strafed the villages, with the janjaweed militia following up later to murder and rape the rest of the live civilians. This is genocide. People can argue all they want about whether the term Genocide aught to be applied in this case, frankly I don’t really care whether it’s genocide or politiside or crimes against humanity, the point is PEOPLE ARE BEING MURDERED. In my own view, there is so much evidence of specific intent by the Sudanese Government in initiating genocide. The Sudanese Government does not need to have orders that are written down somewhere that says” Go out there and kill all the black non Arab darfurians”, although apparently such orders have been given and there are witnesses willing to testify to that. In fact one of the major human rights organizations came up with papers that they had found in Khartoum that shows direct connection form the Sudanese government to the janjaweed and to this genocide.

Denial has been going on from the beginning. The Sudanese Government has been denying their responsibility in the initiation of the genocide. They use excuses such as ” oh its a tribal conflict “, or ” oh dont worry it’s just a conflict between pastoralist and farmers.” In other words its ancient enmities. I believe that’s absolutely false and pathetic at the same time; I mean common,  these people have lived together for hundreds of years and they have never committed genocide against each other. That has not happened until 2003. Another maneuver  the sudanese government uses in denial  is to minimize the statistics. They claim that it’s just a few thousands of people that have died, when in fact it’s more like 400,000 people that have died. They will even sometimes blankly deny that anything is going wrong at all, such as the Sudanese UN ambassador’s speech in Washington to the national press club. There was this marvelous article on the Washington post that shows how ridiculous in fact his arguments were. The article even goes further and states that the Sudanese UN Ambassador Abdalmahmood Mohamed  is an embarrassment to Sudan  because of his severe lack of knowledge in international affairs. Anyway, you also have denial in the form of what could be called the “how could you point your fingers at us when you are doing bad things in Iraq “argument. It’s the clean hands doctrine that is often used in international law. Now of course it’s no defense against the Sudanese crimes against genocide. Whatever bad thing that the United States government has done at one time is no defense for the Sudanese government to be committing genocide against its own people.

All of the types of denial are very evident in Darfur, now of course the question is” what can we now do”. I am convinced that there has to be first of all an increase in peacemaking,  it has to be placed much higher in the priority of the United States government as well as other major powers around the world. We have to get china involved in this as well as France. Having a common objective and pushing the Sudanese government towards ending this, like the US did in the South of Sudan is very essential. Secondly I think there has to be protection for the civilians of Darfur. We have to keep up the humanitarian relief effort as much as we can. We also have to cry out when UN and AU forces are murder but we also have to cry out when people are murdered from Darfur. That has to be put in the news every night if it’s possible. The best right now that’s doing that is BBC news. The third and last thing that is needed is PUNISHMENT. The people who are committing these crimes need to be told in uncertain terms that they will be punished. The referral by the UN Security Council to the International Criminal court was a major step forward in that effort because genocide is expect impunity, if you can stop the expectation of impunity, you have gone some distance towards keeping people (Omar al-Bashir and some members of his Government) from continuing their crimes.

Is the arrest and detention of Mikhail Khodorkovsky in Russia abhorrent to common sense, rule of law and any standard of decency?

There is so much in the criminal system and in the civil system when it comes to politically sensitive cases which take you back to some of the worst days, even to some extent to Stalin. The Khodorkovsky trial was a classic show trial. A show trial defines itself in a number of ways. One of which is that it has absolutely very little to do with he reality of law and everything to do with the appearance of law. It is in fact the fiatrics of show trial that are incredibly important. The appearance of a court, the legitimizing nature of an adversarial system, is something that seemed to be lacking and thus unjust in the Khodorkovsky case. What also seemed to be unjust unfortunately was the scenario whereby Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky was taken to court everyday as if he was the brother of Osama Bin laden, literally in chains, with special troops bringing him strapped….his jeans soaked in urine because he had been kept without facilities for hours and hours, having missed breakfast and eventually also been brought back too late to have dinner. He was brought into court, put into a cage, sat into a bench which was 5 inches wide and uncomfortably made to seat there through the entire day of absolutely surreal proceedings. And then at the end of the day, and this was everyday, the photographers would come in at the 11th hour to take his picture, in attempt to break him. And I don’t know if you people saw the emblematic photo of him smiling through the cage in the internet, but it was an incredible measure of the man, that through this whole period he never broke. When they made his father who was an elderly gentleman, a lovely gentleman, a man who had dedicated himself after working under 40 years of a factory to build an Orphanage, when they made his father on Russian television appear to be involved in a murder, attempting to sell to the public on the idea that the father was a criminal such as the son, it was the only time that he showed the hint of emotion as he attempted to communicate something to his father. So the trial, when you are talking about this kind of “show trial” the message to everyone was that if we can get Khodorkovsky, we can get anyone. The intent was not to anyway demonstrate due process, just the reverse, the intent was to demonstrate the impunity of the power. And to develop that impunity Khodorkovsky had to be taken down. He was in Puttins’ mind an alternative centre, a magnet around which opposition could congeal. Remember the timing of his arrest, just before the elections.