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It contained no prevention regime, which is not surprising, as no serious thought was given to what laws, institutions, and practices might reduce mass murder’s incidence, aside from the toothless genocide convention. There was manifestly little genuine care about preventing mass murder, and for that matter, given the international community and its institutions’ nature, little ability to act even had the care existed. Effectively, no intervention regime existed at the international level, and none was coming from individual states either. This second period saw an enormous number of mass murders and eliminations across the world, each met with inaction or approval, depending on the identity of the bystander states, the perpetrator state, and the victims. In principle, namely on the books, a punishment regime based on the law created at Nuremberg existed. But its implementation required a court and legal institutions to be created ad hoc for each mass murder. Given the general neglectful international environment—at times, each superpower’s active encouragement of mass murder—this policy provision failed. More important, it was always unlikely to happen for the next exterminationist assault, and surely every political leadership contemplating mass murder knew this. Effectively, the punishment regime barely existed either.
Most of all, the cold war’s paralyzing and murderous politics governed this period. Each superpower shielded its clients’ exterminationist and eliminationist practices, and tread lightly in the other’s sphere for fear of local conflicts becoming general and going nuclear.
This second period saw some progress. A body of law and an international institution, the United Nations, emerged that in principle could address or become the forum for addressing mass murder. It also saw certain publics recognize mass murder as a problem needing redress, and by the international community. Countries could not be left to police themselves. So this period’s developments, though anemic and self-condemning, created a slender foundation for a better international regime.
The third period commenced during the twentieth century’s last decade with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the cold war, a prerequisite for serious progress in fashioning an international environment inhibiting rather than encouraging exterminationist and eliminationist domestic politics. This was for two related reasons. As long as the Soviet Union existed, international law and international politics (as practiced, among other places, in the United Nations) could not develop an effective legal and political regime against genocide and eliminationist politics. The Soviet Union, the world’s leading tyranny, impeded such change, even if Western-aligned states also perpetrated mass murder and practiced eliminationist policies. Any antigenocide regime must include legal bases for the international community and outside states to intervene in actual or potential mass-murdering and eliminationist countries. This was anathema to the Soviet Union because of all its abuses and because, as a tyranny ruling a multiethnic and restless empire, it always potentially needed such destructive policies. Second, the cold war blinded American and other Western political leaders, not to mention Western publics, to moral considerations and political practices’ unacceptability that they pursued, supported, or tolerated in the anticommunist global struggle. While nothing could excuse such stances and conduct, it is nevertheless hard to believe that absent the cold war, the United States would have supported or so willfully turned a blind eye to the mass murdering its Latin American and other client states or, for that matter, any anticommunist regime perpetrated during the postwar period, such as the Indonesian regime’s slaughter of communists and the Guatemalan regime’s murderous and eliminationist anti-insurgency campaign against leftists and mainly Maya. The cold war’s end returned the United States and other Western countries to their natural, mainly cynical neglectful state, which, however inexcusable, is far preferable to acceptance, connivance, and encouragement of eliminationist practices. Media and publics could expand their capacities to see more accurately and respond more (if still inadequately) appropriately to the horrors of world’s eliminationist politics.
This third period, still taking shape, can be called the United Nations- International Criminal Court regime (which perhaps will become the Responsibility to Protect-International Criminal Court regime). Depending on perspective, its practical differences from the second period can be judged to be substantial or minimal. Media and the public are more aware of mass slaughters and eliminationist violence, which sometimes pressures politicians to act. NATO’s intervention to stop the Serbs’ expulsion and mass murdering in Bosnia and then again in Kosovo, long after the assaults began—three years in Bosnia and a year in Kosovo—were qualified successes. Halfheartedly carried out with bombing, allowing the Serbs’ assault in Kosovo to intensify and continue unabated for three months, the interventions eventually succeeded, the one in Kosovo halting the Serbs’ string of eliminationist assaults. (During the second period, this intervention never would have occurred.) The establishment of ad hoc international tribunals, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 1993 and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in 1994, with broad international support and legitimacy (for all the tribunals’ considerable failings) was a highly visible and positive development for punishment. The International Criminal Court’s subsequent creation in 2002 is a significant step toward creating a working punishment regime. The court is permanent. It can receive referrals from the UN Security Council or member states and can initiate its own prosecutions. It has quickly established its legitimacy and function, having opened, as of March 2009, investigations in four countries: the Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, and Uganda. In July 2008 it began to consider issuing an arrest warrant for Sudan’s President al-Bashir, which it issued in March 2009. This initiative highlights the court’s potential and limitations. Following the much-too-late precedent of the Yugoslavia tribunal, which waited six years before indicting Milošević, the International Criminal Court tries to bring to justice an ongoing exterminationist and eliminationist assault’s mastermind. If successful, it likely would have some deterrent effect on political leaders considering mass murder. But this arrest warrant is five years too late, after al-Bashir has orchestrated the mass murder of hundreds of thousands and expulsion of more than two million, which itself followed his even larger, more devastating eliminationist assault in Southern Sudan, about which the international community has done nothing to punish him. From the time the court’s prosecutor opened an investigation in June 2005, three years elapsed until he issued an indictment. The court then took the better part of another year to issue an arrest warrant. The arrest warrant, moreover, is only for al-Bashir himself and not the many other political and military leaders helping to organize and implement the devastating carnage (perhaps a few such indictments will follow), and does not include the charge of genocide, being for crimes against humanity and war crimes. The UN Security Council can still quash the arrest warrant. Even if the Security Council lets it stand, the court has no enforcement capacity to apprehend al-Bashir. These substantial failings notwithstanding, the court’s initiative is a beneficial new development. But for all the fanfare celebrating it, during the almost four years the court’s creaky machinery took to issue the arrest warrant, and not even for genocide, the Political Islamists have killed, raped, and expelled the Darfurians on a vast scale. And because the court and the international community (which so far has relied almost exclusively on the court for action) have loud barks with no real prevention or intervention bite, al-Bashir’s reaction to the arrest warrant has been that of a leader with impunity. He has expelled aid-workers and continues to attack the Darfurians. In the name of anti-imperialist solidarity, Arab and African leaders have flocked to his side and risen in his defense.
This third phase’s evident progress over the previous two phases holds out considerable potential for more progress. Nevertheless, it falls far short of what is needed. Even NATO’s intervention to stop or mainly reverse the effects of the Serbs’ mass expulsion of Koso
vars (and forestall probable subsequent Serb assaults in the region) came many years, deaths, lives ruined, and mass eliminations late. The failures of the international community, its institutions, and member states in Burundi, Rwanda, Iraq (prior to the American invasion), East Timor for two decades, Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, and elsewhere have been all but total, as great or greater than the second period. Perpetrators have expelled, tortured, and slaughtered hundreds of thousands and millions of defenseless men, women, and children. The whole world, especially the United Nations, the United States, and the Europeans, has watched and done nothing, and France even abetted the Rwandan slaughter. The genocide convention, all but worthless—indeed counterproductive—remains the world’s guiding document, and the United Nations, with all its built-in, disqualifying problems, the leading institution. The United States, fearing indictments of its own soldiers and citizens, has not ratified the International Criminal Court, leaving the world’s most powerful actor at odds with the court (though how the United States will de facto aid the court’s work is evolving and will likely vary case by case). With all its pathologies, the international state system continues to operate at arm’s length from eliminationist politics, much as before.
A practically nonexistent prevention regime prevents little. An institutionally and politically extremely weak intervention regime produces few interventions. A considerably improved punishment regime institutionally is, in practice, cumbersome and partial, and, in its appalling record of a few paltry prosecutions, almost mocks justice. The international community’s stance toward mass exterminationist and eliminationist politics has been so limited, weak, and ineffective that it actually permits, tolerates, and encourages eliminationist politics.
If political leaders, based on their own country’s domestic political landscape alone, had wanted to opt for eliminationist, including exterminationist, politics, what aspects of the international system in any of these three periods would have deterred them from going forward? What in the international system then or today would prevent them from setting their policies in motion? What in the international system would have stopped, or would today stop, them from carrying them out? What about the international system would have made, or would make, punishment certain, so that it even approximated justice, not the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia’s four-year (and unbelievably costly) charade of Milošević’s trial (which ended inconclusively with his death)? In each case the answer is, effectively, nothing.
Crafting a new international political environment to reduce eliminationist and exterminationist politics’ incidence and scope requires that we consider such an environment’s various possible features, and the mechanisms to bring them about. Of course, any such changes depend upon states and their leaders in some fashion reforming themselves—admittedly a tall order. But, as we now know, our time has seen unforeseeable progress in other enormously difficult areas, including domestic civil and human rights, war, and imperialism. Such advances show that if the proper policies are designed with a realistic view of the current international community, taking its manifold weaknesses into account, then progress in combating eliminationist politics is also possible.
Stopping Eliminationist Politics
How do we break out of this suffocating, mass murder-abetting cynicism and inertia? In principle, it should not be difficult. The world’s non-mass-murdering countries are wealthy and powerful, having prodigious military capabilities (and they can band together). The countries perpetrating mass murder and eliminationist politics, or tempted to do so, are overwhelmingly poor and weak (and each stands alone). Many could easily be stopped with a little military power and probably with other available, easily employable means. The powerful countries seriously applying their resources would radically change potential perpetrators’ cost-benefit calculus, heavily tilting the scales toward noneliminationist political options.
What might a world standing against eliminationist and exterminationist politics look like? Of a political and legal response to mass murder and eliminationist politics’ three components—prevention, cessation or intervention, and punishment—the international community should focus on prevention. For three reasons: First, ideally eliminationist assaults would never begin (precluding the need for intervention and justice). We also know—or at least can strongly presume—that prevention works. It is manifestly so that our era’s mass murders and eliminations do not constitute the full set that would have happened had no deterrents—no domestic or international preventive structures—been in place. The simple fact is that democratic political institutions, in contrast to nondemocratic or tyrannical political institutions, radically reduce eliminationist politics’ incidence. This fact alone shows prevention’s feasibility and, in principle, easy achievability. Prevention works in many other realms internationally (war—how many countries would attack others if there were no military deterrence?) and domestically (crime) to reduce undesired and proscribed deeds. Second, developing an effective prevention regime, whatever the difficulty, is substantially easier than an interventionist one, which the world’s countries and their international institutions have shown no willingness to create—and, with the Americans’ (and their allies’) difficulty in Iraq and Afghanistan, will be still less likely to want, at least for the foreseeable future. External intervention’s recent successful instances, though heartening insofar as any such intervention is better than what came before, are less auspicious than they may seem. East Timor was a rare instance today of imperialist eliminationism, so it probably has little relevance for domestic eliminationist assaults and, even there, two decades of inaction preceded the intervention. The former Yugoslavia was the closest to some kind of proximity to Western consciences and interests causing huge refugee problems and destabilizing the region, yet even there only after colossal human tolls did NATO—but not the United Nations—mobilize itself to act. So the status quo continues: Eliminationist politics, with few exceptions, stop either when the perpetrating regime finishes its job or decides for other internal reasons to halt the assault, or when the perpetrating regime is defeated in war for reasons having little if anything to do with the eliminationist politics itself. Finally, establishing a preventive regime is also preferable to relying on a justice regime, which operates after the mass extermination and elimination have taken their toll. Furthermore, instituting a preventive regime is easier than developing a regime meting out genuine justice (to all perpetrators and not just a select few), i.e., justice that includes some certainty of timely punishment and that fulfills the extensive requirements of perpetrators’ political, material, and moral repair to right the wrongs and to repair the harm as best they can.
In thinking about prevention, we should bear in mind eliminationist campaigns’ frequent unpredictability. We need general measures that by their ordinary functioning will reduce mass slaughters and eliminations. In certain instances, an eliminationist assault, including mass murder’s potential imminence, becomes obvious, as it was in Rwanda and Kosovo. In such cases specific interventionist measures ought to be taken (just as intervention can occur immediately, or any time, after the slaughtering begins). But in general, and this is most relevant for crafting anti-eliminationist policies, we cannot count on foreknowledge or, in instances we acquire it, assume the relevant outside actors will decisively act to forestall the assault.
Thinking seriously about prevention should build upon the analysis of the critical political and nonpolitical factors generally producing mass murder and eliminationist politics: (1) features about modernity itself and the modern state; (2) structural relationships of certain states; (3) the international context (or environment); (4) beliefs about certain groups and understandings of politics and society that lead political leaders and their followers to think eliminating those groups desirable; and (5) proximate factors producing the political opportunity and will to turn eliminationist desires into eliminationist onslaughts.
In principle, prevention can take place and therefore target any or all of these factors. But as a practical matter, all these factors are not equally susceptible to alteration. If altered, not all would be equally efficacious in reducing eliminationist politics’ incidence and destructiveness. And not all are as easily or likely to be targeted with the necessary measures. Still, examining each one, at first briefly, can help point the way toward thinking more seriously about crafting effective and adequate policies.