Sixty years ago this week, the United Nations General Assembly adopted two documents that were meant to change the world—the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

We are still working to realize the promise of those two seminal commitments to human security and dignity.  Today we moved one step closer.  The Genocide Prevention Task Force released a report that recommends a top-down government focus on preventing genocide and mass atrocities.  Preventing Genocide:  A Blueprint for U.S. Policymakers asserts that genocide is a preventable crime if the U.S., working with its allies and the United Nations, moves quickly and early to marshal intelligence, diplomatic, economic, and, if necessary, military assets to head off mass atrocities. 

The task force, which was chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and former Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen, argues that the U.S. government must abandon the current ad-hoc response to genocide, as characterized by our different reactions to genocide in Rwanda, the Balkans and Darfur.  Instead, the government from the president on down should make prevention of genocide a mainstream issue.  The report urges the next president “to demonstrate at the outset that preventing genocide and mass atrocities is a national priority.”  It urges the incoming Obama administration “to develop and promulgate a government-wide policy to this end.”

It recommends the creation of a high-level Atrocities Prevention Committee that will monitor conditions that could lead to genocide, as well as new training for intelligence, foreign service and military officers to make genocide prevention a priority backed up by strategies that can be employed quickly. 

Task force reports are a dime a dozen in Washington, and most of them don’t succeed in provoking significant change.  However, Preventing Genocide should make a difference for four reasons:

1. The report makes it clear that genocide is both a national security and a humanitarian issue.  “Failed states become breeding grounds for terrorists,” Secretary Cohen noted as he and Secretary Albright released the report.
2. President-elect Barack Obama, as well as prominent members of his incoming administration, spoke of genocide during the campaign and made it clear as recently as last week that fighting genocide is a foreign policy priority.
3. There is a growing national constituency that opposes genocide and wants the U.S. to take a more pro-active and effective role in stopping it.  The most obvious sign of this are the new organizations—Save Darfur, the Genocide Intervention Network and Enough—that have helped organize students, religious groups and human rights advocates into a nationwide anti-genocide movement, amplifying the work of Refugees International, Human Rights Watch and other watchdog groups.
4. The report’s recommendations fit well with changing international efforts to stop genocide.  At the world summit in 2005, the UN General Assembly adopted the “responsibility to protect.”  That doctrine holds that sovereign nations have a responsibility to protect their citizens from war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity.  If they fail to protect their own people the international community has a responsibility to provide protection by using diplomatic and other tools.  This report outlines what the U.S. must do to get the tool box ready.

I served on one of the so-called “expert groups” that contributed to the report.  There was a real sense of excitement that this report, targeted for publication during the presidential transition, could make a difference.  I think it will, because 60 years after the Genocide Convention the public is making it clear that “never again” should mean what it says.

--Kenneth H. Bacon

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