by Susan Burgess-Lent
July 9, 2003
After fifteen years in television news, I imagined I knew a thing or two about world events. The Red Cross convinced me I was a mere babe in the woods.
My two-year stint in International Services coincided with the genocide in Rwanda. The grisly facts rattled through my working days like Abrams tanks: Kigali hospital shelled; corpses line the streets, children are slashed by young men with machetes, working for their kill quotas alongside neighbors and clergy; they slaughter one million people in one hundred days; a million refugees surge across the border into Zaire (now Congo) in one 48-hour period; they settle without shelter on a god-forsaken volcanic plain with no drinkable water.
In the relief business, it was called a Complex Humanitarian Emergency. Western leaders knew — for months in advance — that it would happen. Only years after the event did they admit that Rwanda’s cataclysm of planned killing had been a genocide. By then, they were off the hook politically. Most of their citizens did not even know where Rwanda was. But, on their watch, a small African country nearly succeeded in extinguishing itself.
The nations of the world agreed over fifty years ago that genocide is a crime against humanity that can be prevented and must be punished.1 Nonetheless, scores of modern genocides have continued energetically for months or years without intervention. Only a handful of perpetrators have been brought to justice for an estimated 119,400,000 genocide deaths2 in the past century.
For a journalist, covering a genocide usually means a final and brutal loss of illusions about human nature. The bizarre landscape of planned mass murder makes extraordinary demands on a journalist’s capacity to collect and integrate information. Genocides are spawned from a complex interplay of historical animosities, political power plays, cultural and religious antagonisms, chronic poverty and greed. The Internet allows a persistent researcher to ramp up as quickly as their toleration of bad news will allow. Some of the most reliable genocide data and analyses can be gotten from The International Crisis Group, The Committee on Conscience, Human Rights Watch and NGOs operating in the affected region.
In order to verify and integrate all this disparate information, a journalist usually needs to show up -- get close to the killing fields. Eric Reeves, a Sudan specialist who traveled throughout Sudan in early 2003, relied on a variety of sources. “There are certain NGOs” he says, “that are quite reliable, and I have access to on-the-ground intel from various highly confidential and extremely authoratative sources. I’m now sufficiently well known for moving information (about Sudan) very widely that my roster of sources only increases — success breeds success on this score.” 3
While war tends to make borders porous, genocide often shuts down a country, isolating it from scrutiny. Risks to personal safety increase exponentially. The arrival of any transport feels like a miracle. Rumors flood conversations. Under such field conditions, an unusual assortment of sources will provide a tether to the “truth.” Each pose ethical challenges.
Refugees at border camps often have been eyewitnesses to atrocities. Their accounts can provide vital evidence to argue the existence of genocidal strategies. How far should a reporter “push” the questioning of a traumatized individual? If the source speaks out, will s/he need protection? How can it be provided? What is required in an encounter with an unaccompanied minor or the injured? These questions — and more — assail a journalist at about the time when their own survival becomes a preoccupation.
Military personnel will always be under “security constraints” but sometimes they fill in key chunks of information. How much they reveal probably is directly related to their level of frustration with operations. Relief workers associated with NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) often can help interpret confusing developments because of their long, intimate exposure to the civilian population they serve. Given the helping nature of their work, they tend not to be neutral parties. Sometimes they request anonymity before they reveal anything. Their sit reps (situation reports) are usually the most current, but can be compromised by organizational politics.
Sooner or later, everyone caught in the whirlwind of a genocide seems to take a position. Recently, the U.S. government warned NGOs: that relief and reconstruction contracts will now depend on how effectively NGOs promote U.S. foreign policy. InterAction, a network of 160 NGOs, says the demand “makes NGOs look like they cannot speak about what they see and think.”4 Mercy Corp and Save the Children (U.S.) have been among those to raise strong objection to the demand that all communication with journalists by USAID-fund NGOs be channeled through USAID.5 These developments do not bode well for the free movement of emerging intelligence about critical areas.
The political foot dragging of the last 50 years has informed many regimes that they can act with impunity toward those living within their national boundaries. The horrific nature of genocidal behavior makes it easy for outsiders to doubt or to deny accounts of it. Still, how can 21st Century mainstream media, so energetic in covering a war in which a few hundred died, ignore the systematic destruction of thousands — or millions — of civilians by rogue regimes. That horror has been a matter of course in Sudan for the past 20 years. Who knows much about it?
In an op-ed piece for the Washington Post, Lynne Duke, the Post’s Nairobi-based reporter from 1996-1999, claimed that “Washington’s and the rest of the world’s tolerance for mass African death has been quite high.” Referring to the violence in the Congo, she asked “How bad does it have to get this time?”6
One could ask the same question of the dozen ongoing genocides in other parts of the world.” Years of dogged lobbying by Raphael Lemkin resulted in the drafting and signing of the first international human rights treaty, the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes of Genocide. More than 3,200 speeches in the U. S. Congress during a 20-year period by Senator William Proxmire finally helped win congressional ratification of the Convention — forty years after the treaty signing.7 Recent masterworks of investigative journalism by Samantha Power, Philip Gourevitch, and others have exposed the dismal failures of the world’s governments to enforce the provisions of the Genocide treaty.
How long can this trend of delay and failure continue before we lose too much of what makes us human?
What will it take to “front burner” genocide in kitchen of public debate?
© 2003 Susan Burgess-Lent
NOTES
1. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide www.preventgenocide.org/law/convention/text.htm#VIII 2. Rummel, R.J.,
2. Democide in Totalitarian States, Mortacracies and Megamurderers An Annotated Bibliography www.hawaii.edu.powerkills.charny.chap.htm
3. Eric Reeves mailing list: ereeves@smith.edu
4. “Bush to NGOs: Watch Your Mouths” by Naomi Klein, The Globe and Mail (Canada) June 20, 2003 pg A15
5. HRW, “Natsios Lays Down the Law: NGO’s will be an Extension of American > Foreign Policy” July 7, 2003
6. “Whispers of Genocide, and Again, Africa Suffers Alone,” Lynne Duke, Washington Post June 29, 2003 pg B1
7. A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide, Samantha Power, HarperCollins, NY 2002
RESOURCES
• National legislation on genocide (pursuant to Genocide Convention)
• Web Genocide Documentation Centre www.ess.uwe.ac/uk/genocide/wgdcfl.html
• Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice Geoffrey Robertson, The New Press, NY., 1999
• The International Crisis Group www.crisisweb.org
• Human Rights Watch www.hrw.org
Susan Burgess-Lent has worked in television news for twenty-five years. She has published a novel, "In the Borderlands," (Xlibiris, 2000). Contact her at lentx2@aol.com.
