B002QX43GQ EBOK

by Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah

  Once they have initiated a war against humanity, the perpetrators remain in a state of war even if their eliminationist assault ends for whatever reason. The perpetrators would fall under the international legal doctrine Hostis Humani Generis, enemies of humanity, until now applied to pirates. This would mean the perpetrators would never have peace or immunity because, in a perpetual state of war, and as enemies of humanity, they could always be legally killed or captured, by open or covert means. Moreover, just as the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal held the members of the German cabinet, the Nazi Party Leadership Corps, the entire SS and SA (the Nazis’ paramilitary), the Gestapo, and the General Staff and High Command of the German armed forces “criminal” groups and organizations, so too this new anti-eliminationist international regime would recognize and define the offending country’s government, governing political parties, armed forces, police and security forces, and paramilitary forces (in their entirety or just their leaderships) as what they are: vast criminal organizations, and their members part of criminal conspiracies making “aggressive war,” in this case a war against humanity.21 This would make the perpetrating regime’s leaders and members of its governmental and state institutions legally culpable for their institutions’ mass-murdering, expulsion, and associated eliminationist acts, which they would know to be the case because they would have been forewarned of this, and of their duty to immediately resign from their state and governmental (now criminal) organizations upon eliminationist attacks’ initiation—in the aforementioned educational handbooks and other materials given to them in multiple forms upon taking office. This material would also inform them of additional perils they face, including the following.

  A further crucial measure of placing bounties on these leading perpetrators, namely all these institutions’ leaders and close subordinates, would ensure they would never again sleep peacefully. The sums, substantial enough to make a person in a poor society wealthy, would all be easily fundable for wealthy countries: something on the order of $10 million for killing or delivering the perpetrating regime’s leader or top leaders, $1 million for every cabinet minister, military or police general-staff member, $100,000 for their assistants would provide powerful incentives for others to hunt down or remove these people from power. How many political leaders, particularly of tyrannies, could be sure even their own bodyguards would not turn on them for such (or even lesser) sums? How many cabinet ministers, high-level advisers, and others, who would not even have the protection a regime’s leader enjoys, would feel or be safe? More important, all these measures, particularly the bounties, would prospectively bear heavily upon them, as the leaders, their staff, advisers, and high-level subordinates weigh initiating and implementing an eliminationist program against the substantial prospect of making themselves hotly sought-after, million-dollar targets? How many such people would choose to pass a high probability of a death sentence upon themselves? Power and the good life are typically paramount among political leaders’ and their lieutenants’ goals, so why would they guarantee any person in their country or in the world $100,000, $1 million, or $10 million for killing them?

  Singly or together, countries or international bodies, Germany, France, or Japan or the European Union or NATO, could offer such bounties. For the United States this would not entail a wholly new initiative but a small though enormously efficacious alteration in its current policy, as it has long had its Rewards for Justice program in place targeting those wanted for terrorism. The program, established in 1984 and further enhanced after 9/11, has led to the killing and apprehension of major terrorists, including Saddam’s mass murdering sons Uday and Qusay, and Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing in February 1993. Its payouts, as high as $1 million or $5 million for most major terrorists, and $25 million for Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, have totaled $77 million to more than fifty people. The program, which rewards information about impending terrorist attacks, has also led to the prevention of major attacks. The program has been expanded to cover certain people wanted for participating in the Rwandan and Yugoslavian genocides, and has led to major perpetrators’ apprehension, including Tharcisse Renzaho, Jean-Baptiste Gatete, and Yusuf John Munyakazi, currently awaiting trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Yet, for statutory reasons, the program applies only to those few people the Rwandan and Yugoslavian tribunals have already indicted, and not more generally to the many people wanted for participating in mass murder and elimination.

  The United States, the Europeans, and others could use this already effective program as a foundation, though they must expand it considerably to have the desired effects. From a program that, regarding mass murder and elimination, is retrospective and ad hoc (only to Rwanda and Yugoslavia) and narrow (targeting only people already indicted), it would need to resemble more the antiterrorism component, which targets those wanted for their crimes and promises to target future terrorists. But in working to prevent the much more massive eliminationist assaults, with many more masterminds and high-level participants, it must also go beyond the antiterrorist program by covering a much wider range of people and not only seeking their arrest but also authorizing their killing. And, unlike the International Criminal Court, it must not use law enforcement and criminal justice’s cumbersome and enormously difficult standards of criminal trial proof that has led the court’s prosecutor to take five years even to get to recommending an arrest warrant for al-Bashir, all the while—with every passing day—the Sudanese regime slaughtered and eliminated people, totaling millions. Thus, an anti-mass murder and elimination monetary prevention program would:1. Automatically apply to those perpetrating wars against humanity so all those considering mass murder and elimination know they will become targets.

  2. Target people wanted for such offenses, and not only those indicted.

  3. Substantially expand the program’s universe of people automatically deemed culpable and therefore wanted and therefore targeted to include all state or governmental institutions’ high officeholders, their subordinates, and prominent perpetrators.

  4. Pay the substantial rewards not only for information leading to the arrest or conviction of the culpable but also for killing them, which is necessary because many people would be able to kill perpetrators inaccessible to the international community.

  If such a program is justified (as it is) and cost effective (as it is) for preventing terrorist attacks that might kill a few dozen or hundreds, it is certainly justified and cost effective for preventing mass murders and eliminations of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, and that produce untold suffering for hundreds of thousands or millions more.o A further incentive to countries to establish such a program, and the other preventive measures proposed here, is that their costs are massively outweighed by the costs to the international community of even one humanitarian mission or nation-building endeavor or attempt to bring eliminationist perpetrators to justice after the fact, which often, as it does in Darfur, costs billions. (Just the U.S. government’s aid to pick up only some of the pieces after the Serbs’ eliminationist assault on just Bosnia was $1.35 billion in the first ten years. The cost of justice at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia alone has topped $1.5 billion.)22

  The state of war with the perpetrators would end only with their deaths, capture, or surrender to the International Criminal Court, where the only two sentences for conviction of war against humanity ought to be life in prison or death. People differ enormously on the death penalty’s morality and wisdom. I will not join the debate in full force. Philosophically, I am not opposed to it, though as public policy it has deeply problematic, often disqualifying aspects. Given current international jurisprudence, the death penalty’s abolition throughout the European Union and its absence from the current international tribunals’ and the International Criminal Court’s statutes, no international court will soon sentence people to death. So life imprisonment should be th
e default jurisprudential penalty for those conducting war against humanity.

  Whatever one’s stance toward a jurisprudential death penalty, it has no bearing (except for the rare philosophical pacifists) on the rightful-ness of killing those waging war against humanity so long as they do so, or are in the position to continue or renew such a war, and therefore an ongoing threat. So long as people wage war against humanity, killing those people is a defensive act that protects and preserves that part of humanity under attack or directly imperiled. Perpetrators could stop others from trying to kill them (and from attacking their country and their forces) and remove the bounty on their heads only by surrendering themselves unconditionally to the International Criminal Court or its agents.p

  No one should doubt such measures’ potential efficacy. No one wants to be “Wanted Dead or Alive.” Guaranteed punishment—the certainty you will be hunted until your last day, likely coming decades earlier than your natural end—would powerfully deter all but the most ideologically besotted. Bosnia and Herzegovina’s President Silajdžić was the country’s foreign minister and then prime minister during the Serbs’ eliminationist assault. He knew Milošević well. Agreeing that Milošević was a rational and cunning calculator of advantage, banking on attaining permanent territorial gains, Silajdžić said, when asked whether Milošević would have ever initiated the slaughter of Bosnians if Milošević had known for sure he would be hunted down till his last day: “I don’t think he would.”23 Rwandan Minister of Justice Tharcisse Karugarama has steeped himself, as much if not more than just about any of our time’s public figures, in the problems of genocide, including preventing and combating the scourge. When I asked him whether a guarantee that anyone initiating genocide would be hunted down until killed would have prevented the Rwandan genocide and would be effective in preventing future mass slaughters, he replied with enormous emphasis: “Definitely, definitely, definitely, definitely, many times definitely.”

  Haris Silajdžić, Srebrenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina, July 2008

  Tharcisse Karugarama, Kigali, Rwanda, May 2008

  Karugarama then explained, “If people knew that at the end of the day they’ll be the losers, they’d never invest in a losing enterprise. Because genocide as you correctly pointed out is a political enterprise, it’s a political game. But again, it’s a power play, it’s wealth, it’s everything. So if people involved knew at the end of the day they’d be the losers, they would not play the game. That’s for sure.”24

  Even if such a guarantee would not completely end eliminationist assaults—and it likely would not prevent every last one—it would reduce them substantially. That would save innumerable future victims’ lives and prevent the expulsion and brutalizing of countless more. It would prevent incalculable suffering of still so many others—relatives, friends, community members. It would prevent the deformation of so many countries’ polities, societies, and cultures. And it would lift the threat under which so many millions live. And if ever a country’s political leaders would not be warded off from implementing their eliminationist desires, and these political, legal, and martial countermeasures were triggered and put into effect, then all other potential mass murderers and eliminationist perpetrators would unmistakably see what awaits them should they war on humanity. One of the international arena’s most powerful, underappreciated influences is learning. This, of course, is understood for economic matters, but less so for politics. To date, about eliminationist politics, political leaders have learned they can kill, expel, or incarcerate hated or unwanted groups, including their children, with impunity. They must now learn the opposite, which they quickly will if it turns out to be true: Impunity is over, and the opposite—guaranteed, uncompromising punishment—prevails.

  The prevailing state of affairs, impunity for the perpetrators on the ground and in the halls of power, is illustrated poignantly in Guatemala. Despite the military and paramilitary’s vast participation in the “scorched earth” policy against the Maya, the government’s term for its eliminationist assault, to date only ten of the genocide’s material authors (as the actual killers are called) have been brought to justice. In Guatemala, I heard again and again from survivors that most of all they want Ríos Montt and the other “intellectual authors” of the “genocide” put on trial. In CALDH (Center for Human Rights Legal Action), the oldest, largest, and most prominent human rights organization in Guatemala, unofficial “wanted” posters of Ríos Montt adorn doors and hallways. Furthermore, Guatemala’s official Commission for Historical Clarification report named Ríos Montt as responsible for the “genocide,” and Guatemala is now a tolerably well-working democracy. So where is he, the mastermind of the eliminationist assault on the Mayan people? Where is Ríos Montt that he has eluded the punishment that should come to him as surely as the sun came today to Guatemala from the east? In Guatemala, untouched, free, and living the good life. What’s more, he is a member of Congress. What’s still more, as recently as 2005, twenty-three years after his stewardship of the mass murder and elimination ended, Ríos Montt was nothing less than the Congress’ president, having in 2003 been a losing candidate to be Guatemala’s president.

  Nun carrying unofficial Ríos Montt “wanted” poster in front of the Public Ministry, Guatemala City, Guatemala, June 2001

  Sitting across from Ríos Montt at one end of the horseshoe that is the seating arrangement in Congress is Otilia Lux de Coti, an author of the very Commission for Historical Clarification report that demonstrates beyond any doubt Ríos Montt’s authorship of Guatemala’s largest spate of exterminationist and eliminationist assaults on the Maya, making it clear he is among our time’s worst mass murderers. When I asked de Coti in her office how she, a Maya, feels having to see him every day in Congress, she did not answer the question as it was put about her feelings, but eloquently conveyed the reality of the impunity that contemporary politics offers the leaders guilty of exterminationist and eliminationist politics. “It is a political matter, Daniel,” she explained, setting the frame for her answer, the frame of politics. “I have to speak with God and the devil. To negotiate a law, I must speak with them all.”25

  In saying this, she revealed her bottled-up feelings and why they must remain corked. After talking to de Coti, I walked with her to Congress, where from the press gallery I watched Ríos Montt talk amiably with his fellow legislators, vote, occupy his honored place in the august chamber. There with a film crew preparing the documentary grounded in this book, I confronted him as he emerged from the chamber into the hallway and pursued him as he walked by without answering the question I posed. To my surprise, as we emerged from the passageway into the Congress building’s entrance hall, Ríos Montt stopped, turned to me, and indicated he would speak. I asked: “Was there genocide in Guatemala and were you responsible?” Ríos Montt tried to exonerate himself by falsely stating the genocide convention’s definition of genocide, which I immediately corrected, and then after he, somewhat flustered, accepted what I said, I asked him again whether he agrees he is responsible for the genocide. His reply, perhaps rhetorically powerful to the innocent, was to anyone informed, a laugher: “If I was responsible, I would be in jail.” As I laid out the charges against him, he said, “Show me the proof and accuse me before any court.” So I asked him whether he would go to Spain to face an indictment against him for genocide. He replied that his lawyers will not let him go. In this surrealistic discussion with the Hitler of Guatemala, I said, “There’s nothing preventing you from getting on a plane with a passport and going to Spain.” Telling me he has already lived in Spain long enough, Ríos Montt, the genocidal mastermind, knows that after more than a quarter-century of immunity he can thumb his nose at justice, even mocking it by saying that if he were guilty he would be in jail.26

  José Efraín Ríos Montt in discussion with Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Guatemala City, Guatemala, June 10, 2008

  Every democracy has laws, police forces, courts, and prisons to punish criminals and to deter it
s citizens and others within the country from committing crimes. Without these institutions, criminality would be far greater, so rampant as to render democracy, civil life, even society itself impossible. Everyone recognizes this explicitly or implicitly for his or her own society. Yet internationally, analogous robust institutions that potential exterminationist and eliminationist perpetrators know put them automatically in a determined international community’s crosshairs do not exist. No wonder eliminationist assaults have been so frequent. Anyone scoffing at efforts to create such analogous, effective international institutions to deter perpetrators—rulers of countries, state and governmental officials, and the killing fields’ executioners—from initiating and participating in exterminationist and eliminationist assaults, to deter them from conducting war against humanity, must be moved by something other than regard for future victims’ lives. He either does not genuinely want to reduce such colossal atrocities’ incidence or privileges his other priorities, such as safeguarding his own personal or parochial political or academic aspirations. To be sure, domestic institutions meant to prevent crime are imperfectly effective. Crime exists. The international institutions and measures proposed here to prevent eliminationist attacks would also sometimes fail. But there is every reason to believe such measures would often work, just as the analogous domestic institutions do that prevent the incalculably vast amount of crime people would commit without them. No one would opt to reduce his own society’s law enforcement to the crippled state of the international community’s means for preventing, stopping, and punishing genocide (let alone for eliminationism’s all but ignored other forms, including non-“genocidal” mass murders), so why should anyone pretend this current international state of affairs is anything but ineffective and undesirable—and scandalous?