Annan Calls on Humanity to Be Ready to Fight Genocide

Ten years after the slaughter in Rwanda, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Wednesday that the world must be prepared to take decisive action -- including the use of force -- to prevent genocide from happening again.

Speaking to the U.N. Human Rights Commission to launch an international warning system, Annan said the world now must act in Congo and Sudan to avoid mass killing and “ethnic cleansing.” He said that he would appoint a special advisor on genocide to monitor potentially explosive situations, and that an envoy would go to Sudan next week.

“Anybody who embarks on genocide commits a crime against humanity,” he said. “Humanity must respond by taking action in its own defense.”

President Bush echoed Annan’s call for the Sudanese government to stop Arab militias from committing atrocities against its black communities and to allow access for aid agencies. Bush added that the U.S. would not normalize relations with Khartoum until there was peace in the country.

“I condemn these atrocities, which are displacing hundreds of thousands of civilians, and I have expressed my views directly to President [Omar Hassan Ahmed] Bashir of Sudan,” he said in a statement from his ranch near Crawford, Texas. Bush did not suggest any military involvement to stop the violence.

The warnings represent an evolution in the decade since the Rwanda massacre, said Samantha Power, who chronicled the reasons behind the world’s paralysis on Rwanda in her book “A Problem From Hell.”

“President Bush called Bashir, which is one more phone call than Clinton made to Rwanda in 1994,” said Power, a lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “At least he’s not saying, ‘We’re not going to send troops, so let’s stay mute,’ which is what happened before. That’s a version of progress.”

Annan’s action plan to prevent genocide is built around an early warning system to prevent the wars and ethnic conflicts that have the potential to escalate into genocide, and to sound the alarm when intervention is necessary to halt it.

“One of the reasons for our failure in Rwanda was that beforehand, we did not face the fact that genocide was a real possibility,” he said in Geneva.

“And once it started, for too long we could not bring ourselves to recognize it, or call it by name.”

Annan, who was head of the U.N.’s peacekeeping department during its failures in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina, said that he wanted to make the eradication of genocide part of his legacy as secretary-general.

In 1999, he made the case for “humanitarian intervention” to protect people subjected to wide-scale human rights abuses by their rulers. Last September, he cited the need for criteria for “coercive action” -- an obligation to intervene with force if necessary.

But the concept of humanitarian intervention has become entangled with the Bush doctrine of preemptive action, making some concerned that a U.N.-authorized intervention could mask a pretext for aggression.

“That is not something the Security Council ever envisaged when it was established, and it makes many of its member states very nervous,” said Anne-Marie Slaughter, the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. “But Rwanda is simply a stain on our collective conscience. The only possible response is to take preventive measures, even when it means using force.”

Using coercion suggests the creation of a U.N.-authorized rapid reaction force, an idea that was included in the original charter, but never created because of fears about a “world army.” Currently, U.N. peacekeepers are only authorized to maintain peace, not to stop a war, and it usually takes months to muster a force from nations willing to contribute troops.

“There’s been progress in the thinking but no improvement in our tools, in that we’re still dependent on states to supply the forces,” Power said. “It’s really hard to move states to act, and then you have to go with the begging bowl in hand.”

But for survivors of the Rwandan genocide, like Jacqueline Murekatete, 19, who spoke at a U.N. ceremony Wednesday, such complexities mean nothing. She described how almost all of her extended family was hacked to death by machete-wielding Hutu neighbors. She said she had heard the explanations of how no one wanted to term what was happening in Rwanda “genocide” because it would mean they would have to do something, and about President Clinton saying he just didn’t know how bad it was.

Murekatete told diplomats gathered at the General Assembly that if the world had heeded warnings and taken action a decade ago, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children would be alive today, “among them, my parents, my six siblings, my uncles, aunts, cousins and numerous relatives.”

Her voice breaking after descriptions of growing up with many other orphans and how some survivors were condemned to a slower death by HIV/AIDS after repeated rapes, she said she had a wish: “As we leave here today, I want each of us to make a resolve and a vow to do all that we can that events such as that which occurred in Rwanda in 1994 will never again occur either in Rwanda or elsewhere in the world.”