I found this podcast series on the Holocaust Memorial Museum on the prevention of genocide. Every week they interview different human right's defenders, experts, advocates and other government officials on their opinion of how it could be prevented. The first step in preventing anything is to know what it is you are trying to prevent. Genocide, dictionary.com defines it as the deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group. In 1948 Ronald Regan signed the UN convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Many countries signed this document and from that point on many atrocities were later re-associated as genocides. In former Yugoslavia the events that occurred were officially considered genocide. The events in Rwanda were also classified as genocide in a similar but separate tribunal from Yugoslavia. The first conviction on the crime of genocide was for the atrocities that occurred in Rwanda. 1998 marked the first year that an actual court was established to prosecute war crimes, acts of genocide, and crimes against humanity.
In 2004 former Secretary of State Colin Powell said, “Genocide has been committed in Darfur.” Many other countries that signed the UN convention of the Crime of Genocide agreed that the scale of the savagery that has occurred there, but it is still not considered a true genocide. What will it take for the leaders of the free world to classify these monstrous events as genocide?
No comments:
Post a Comment