Do The Right Thing: Sarah’s Sewall’s Take on Genocide Policy

By | September 17, 2009 at 7:47 am

In the September/October edition of the Boston Review, Sarah Sewall discusses the roadblocks that face the Genocide Prevention Task Force, chaired by Madeleine Albright and William Cohen, on the way to creating an effective genocide policy.

Sewall needs hardly to mention the necessity of such a policy. In the 20th century, genocides and other mass murders killed more people than all wars.

In the 21st century, the United States has responded to genocide with fits and starts. President Barack Obama, before visiting a World War II-era concentration camp in Germany in June, said the world has an obligation to stop genocide, even when it’s inconvenient.

Sewall asks: “The President is sympathetic [to the issue of genocide], but how will he rank the objective of preventing mass atrocity in the context of other foreign policy goals?”

While running for president, Obama promised to recognize the Armenian Genocide. On January 19, 2008 Obama voiced his conviction “that the Armenian Genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion, or a point of view, but rather a widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence.” However, he avoided the term during a speech in Turkey in April, despite an open letter addressed to the President published by the International Association of Genocide Scholars, urging him to refer to the mass slaughter of Armenians.

Turkey and Armenia have recently agreed to start political negotiations. The two countries have never had diplomatic relations, and their border has been closed since 1993, when Armenia and Azerbaijan, both former Soviet republics, went to war over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. Marc Ambider—an associate editor at the Atlantic—believes that this step in the right direction would have been jeopardized “if the U.S. took the rhetorical step of calling the genocide a genocide,” Ambider writes: “For the sake of historical memory, it might have been a bad call, but for the sake of the lives of people in Turkey and Armenia today, it probably was the right call. Neutrality, of course, implied a de facto endorsement of the Turkish version of events, but behind the scenes, officials say, it was made clear to Obama that getting Turkey to come to terms with the genocide would require a lighter touch.” In response to genocide, should we follow a consistent policy or should we approach genocide with a lighter, more nuanced, “touch,” and on a case-by-case basis?

Another question concerns rhetoric. Sewall begins her article with a basic assumption: we will recognize genocide when we see it. This is not necessarily the case. Historically, Turkey has resisted the label of genocide, arguing that the Armenians were killed in warfare. If most of the rest of world argues that the Ottoman government tried to exterminate its Armenian population, why does Turkey disagree? In an October 12, 2007 aricle for the New York Times, Sabrina Tavernise wrote in response to this question, “The answer is hidden deep inside the Turkish psyche, and to a large extent, printed on the pages of Turkish history books.”

For one, even if we do recognize mass killing, we might not jump to label it as a “genocide.” Former secretary-general of Doctors Without Borders, Alain Destexhe, believes the word genocide has fallen victim to “a sort of verbal inflation, in much the same way as happened with the word fascist.” Because of that, he says, the term has progressively lost its initial meaning and is becoming “dangerously commonplace.”

The newest rhetorical (albeit not so new historically) debate concerning a case of genocide is the conflict in the Middle East. It has become increasingly difficult to characterize. In 2002, Bulent Ecevit, Prime Minister of Turkey (Israel’s longstanding and sole Muslim ally) accused Israel of genocide against the Palestinians. Ecevit made the denunciation as he was addressing his political base, the Democratic Left Party. “A genocide is being carried out against the Palestinians before the eyes of the whole world,” Ecevit said. In August 2006, President Hugo Chavez recalled his envoy to Israel and described the Jewish state’s campaign in Lebanon as a “new genocide”. On September 9, 2009, Chavez accused Israel of genocide against the Palestinian people, telling a French newspaper that the bombing of Gaza late last year was an unprovoked attack. Boston Review published an article on the uses of anti-Semitism in Chávez’s Venezuela, and one reader posted in a thread: “The Arabs have launched one genocidal war against Israel after another.”

Perhaps the first step in creating a genocide policy is deciding on a clear definition. Clearly, the rhetorical debate cannot be sidestepped on the way to an effective genocide policy.

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