Regrets Only: An Africa Journal: Genocide: Never Again, Maybe…

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Genocide: Never Again, Maybe…

President-elect Barack Obama is being urged to make the prevention of genocide and mass atrocities a top foreign policy priority. The appeal comes from a special task force headed by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Former Defense Secretary William Cohen. The panel also recommends establishing an early warning system to prevent genocide in the future. (See the VOA report on this here.)

Albright and Cohen both served in President Bill Clinton's cabinet. During Clinton's presidency, atrocities were committed in Bosnia and the genocide in Rwanda occurred.

The two former secretaries teamed up to work with other national leaders to draw up a blueprint to prevent genocide. Albright said the paradox is that the world agrees genocide is unacceptable, and yet mass killings and genocide continue.

"The central premise of our report is that genocide is unacceptable and that we can and should do more to prevent it. The United States does not bear this burden alone, but we have both a duty and a profound interest in helping to show the way," she said.

Cohen said "We can't sit on the sidelines while this is taking place. We have to develop, as Madeleine says, as Secretary Albright says, the leadership, from the president on down, through the Congress. We have to develop institutions."

The panel recommends creating an inter-agency early warning system to analyze threats of genocide, and investing $250 million in new funds for crisis prevention and response.

Note: My thinking on this was shaped by having been in Rwanda while the Clinton administration refused to acknowledge what was happening was genocide. Frankly, I don’t see the need for new institutions or additional budget outlays to assess whether genocide is occurring. What the United States and other countries need is the political courage to live up to their obligations as civilized nations to intervene and stop such killing wherever and whenever it takes place. But real action is much more difficult than gestures that convey the appearance that governments are doing something. I would have hoped for better.

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Why?

It is October, 1997. I am standing in a rubble-strewn Brazzaville street as the city returns cautiously to life after a bloody civil war. Armed men are all around me, most of them looting, occasionally firing off bursts of bullets in celebration. But I am not concentrating on this anymore. Instead, with the hand holding my microphone limp by my side, my tape running senselessly. I am looking at another corpse -- this one of a man, perhaps in his 20's, his legs charred. I know there will be no voice to record. But his lips are apart, his arms outstretched, fingers together, as if in prayer. It seems another one of Africa's dead is trying to speak to me. And I feel I owe him this one last consideration. I think maybe he wants to share his anguish, his despair, his pain. Or maybe a last word to a parent or a wife or a child. I feel badly -- because I do not know for sure. I do know though that I have seen corpses like this before -- victims of war, or of genocide, or of famine, or of sickness. A symbolic path of the dead now runs through my mind -- a personal collection reflecting the real path their corpses have left across much of Africa: from arid Somalia in the northeast, across Sudan and into northern Uganda, down through steamy Rwanda, Burundi and Congo in the center of the continent. Some have been young men in uniform, their bodies shattered by a bullet or a shell. Some have been old men, thin beyond belief, weakened by hunger or disease. Some have been women, their dresses in tatters, their faces etched with silent agony. Some have been children, too young to die, their skulls cleaved in half. Some I have met in battle-scarred streets, some in burned-out buildings. Some I have seen sprawled amidst flowers in an open field, some floating, limbs bound, in muddy water. Some I have found in groups thrown into a dirt pit, some alone in the aisles of a gutted church. I have, at times, had imaginary conversations with these dead of mine -- their unrecorded voices playing on endlessly inside my head, sometimes loud, sometimes just a whisper. I tell them I am sorry and if it were in my power, I would restore them to life. But I can't. It's not in my power. Perhaps the only help I can give is to try to tell their story.

The Reporter

Alex Belida has been in international broadcasting since 1971. He spent nearly eight years in sub-Saharan Africa as a correspondent for the Voice of America, based first in Nairobi (1993-1996) and then in Johannesburg (1996-2000). He covered conflicts and humanitarian crises in Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, Burundi, Congo-Kinshasa and Congo-Brazzaville, northern Uganda, Angola and Lesotho as well as political unrest in Zimbabwe and catastrophic flooding in Mozambique. He suffered gunshot wounds while reporting in Somalia.
While in Africa, he was elected Chairman of the East Africa Foreign Correspondents Association in Nairobi and served as Treasurer of the Foreign Correspondents Association of Southern Africa during his Johannesburg assignment.
Before going to Africa, he served as VOA's Senior White House reporter for four years following stints as coordinator of the 1988 Presidential Election coverage and as National News Editor. Before those Washington assignments, he was based in Germany, where he served as Soviet affairs, East-West security and German affairs correspondent (1982-1985).
Following Africa, he served as Pentagon correspondent. In 2004 he was named Managing Editor and in 2007 became Senior Advisor for News at VOA. He retired in 2011.
Before joining VOA, he worked for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in both New York and Munich, rising from reporter to Assistant News Director. He has a BA from Trinity College, Hartford, Conn., and a MS in Journalism from Columbia University in New York. In 2006, he received the prestigious Alumni Achievement Award from Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. He also has an honorary doctorate in communications from the Somali National University.

The views expressed here are his own.

Regrets Only: An Africa Journal

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Genocide: Never Again, Maybe…

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