Genocide

The ongoing crisis in Darfur is no genocide. In an age of 24-hour news channels, short attention spans and a long list of world crises, "genocide" remains headline-grabbing. But the term's application to Darfur is flawed in legal terms and unhelpful in resolving the crisis, and ultimately undermines worldwide efforts to prevent genocide. Genocide is one of the most disturbingly evocative terms in our vocabulary, and the gravest crime humanity knows. The 1948 Genocide Convention states that two criminal elements - physical and mental - must be proved: There must be actions aimed at or resulting in the deaths of members of a national, religious or ethnic group, and perpetrators of such acts must also have the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the targeted group.

Serbia, acquitted last week of the charge of genocide, has been handed a unique opportunity. If Serbia was not complicit in the effort to exterminate Bosnian Muslims in the first half of the 1990s - as the International Court of Justice ruled Monday - Serbia should have no reason to keep on protecting the two Bosnian Serb leaders who did have genocide in mind: Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic. If Serbia's hands are clean, it should turn these two men over to the international tribunal in The Hague.

An organization called the "Holocaust Foundation of Iran" has asked Austria, Germany and Poland to supply documentary evidence of the deaths of Jews during World War II. It's a provocative move, because the purpose of this foundation is to propagate the argument that the Holocaust never happened. And it's easy to see that when the three European countries decline to cooperate, as they surely will, Holocaust deniers in Iran and elsewhere will be quick to argue that they asked for proof of the genocide and none was forthcoming.

Conventional wisdom says that the youth vote is fickle, that in a world of limited budgets, campaign managers are smart to direct resources elsewhere. But new trends in youth political engagement challenge this long-standing belief. And for presidential candidates seeking to exploit these new developments, the message of 2008 may well be, "It's the genocide, stupid." For the past three years, a stunning number of young people have been active at all levels of the democratic process for the sake of civilians in Darfur, Sudan.

So, what's going on with you? Nothing much? Wish I could say the same. As you may know if you've seen CNN or read the paper, yours truly has lately been the target of death threats and harassment from the ranks of the not-so-tightly wrapped. This, after a column last month about the torture murder of a young white couple, allegedly by five black people. My column took on white supremacists and far-right bloggers who contend that this "genocide" - their word - goes unremarked by news media too politically correct to report black-on-white crime.

WASHINGTON -- The grainy, often badly focused black-and-white photographs from the Eastern front are of Jews and others being tormented, humiliated, shot and hanged, of corpses in mass graves -- the workaday world of genocide.Such has been this century's dark side, these photographs might have scant power to shock, but for the significance of their amateurishness: Eighty percent of the photos in the exhibit were taken by ordinary soldiers in the German army, and most record actions by the regular army, not the SS, Waffen-SS or the Einsatzgruppen killing squads.

THE OVERDUE indictment of Slobodan Milosevic by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia is based on facts and law. It also disturbs the peace process that must come in Kosovo.The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide became world law in 1951. It outlaws acts with intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.This is not a meaningless gesture. A war crimes court sitting in Tanzania last September sentenced a former Rwandan prime minister to life in prison.

PRESIDENT Clinton's two-day trip to visit troops and allies in Europe restored the appearance of resolve to U.S. policy that an irresponsible House of Representatives had dissipated April 28. The House vote for funds on Thursday corrected an earlier image of a divided Washington, while still playing party games for the pork barrel.Meanwhile, the Group of Eight foreign ministers meeting in Bonn brought Russia into a large measure of agreement to NATO's demands. It is not total acquiescence but does strengthen Russia's role as the channel of communication to Serbia's dictator Slobodan Milosevic.

WASHINGTON -- Political language can infuse its own logic into events. President Clinton says Serbian atrocities in Kosovo constitute "genocide."If so, then what can realistically be said to remain of the premise on which NATO went to war?: The appropriate conclusion of this crisis would leave Serbia diminished and chastened, but retaining sovereignty over Kosovo.Serbia's atrocities are not genocide -- a campaign to exterminate an entire category of people -- but they are patent war crimes intended to terrorize a people into flight.

"Blood and Vengeance: One Family's Story of the War in Bosnia," by Chuck Sudetic. W.W. Norton. 400 pages. $29.95. The physical mechanisms of genocide have never been much of a mystery. Line up the unfortunates and open fire. Shove the bodies into a ditch. The Nazis industrialized the process, but the results were the same.It is the mental mechanisms that remain indecipherable, or else genocide would not keep recurring throughout the world. In "Blood and Vengeance," Chuck Sudetic comes about as close as possible to reaching the heart of the matter.

ALISON DES FORGES, 66 Scholar chronicled Rwanda's genocide Alison Des Forges, a human rights activist who drew the world's attention to the killings of hundreds of thousands of innocent people in Rwanda in the 1990s and chronicled the massacre, died Feb. 12 in the crash of a Continental Airlines passenger plane in Clarence Center, N.Y., near Buffalo. After April 6, 1994, when an airplane carrying Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down, members of the politically dominant Hutu group suddenly began to attack the Tutsi minority in an uncontrolled rampage of violence.

City policeman, charged in assault, is suspended Anthony M. Stevenson, a Baltimore police officer who lives in Abingdon, has been charged with second-degree assault and reckless endangerment and suspended from the force after a man was struck in a Bel Air bar a week ago. The man was conversing with friends at Looney's Pub sometime after 1 a.m. Feb. 7, Bel Air police said, when Stevenson, who was off-duty, made a series of unwelcome remarks to two women...

U.S. immigration authorities have begun deportation proceedings against a Rwandan academic who was suspended by Goucher College amid allegations that he had participated in the African country's 1994 genocide. Leopold Munyakazi, 59, was arrested Tuesday afternoon at his home in Towson. Immigration officials said only that he was "in the country illegally," though he had arrived with a valid visa, said Brandon A. Montgomery, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Munyakazi was released on condition he wear a monitoring device and remain at home, Montgomery said, adding that "removal proceedings" have begun.

Goucher College has suspended a visiting professor from Rwanda after being told he stands accused of participating in the 1994 genocide that killed some 800,000 people in the African nation. Leopold Munyakazi, who taught French last semester, was removed from teaching duties in December after school officials learned of an indictment by a prosecutor in Rwanda. Among the charges is that he revealed hiding spots of ethnic Tutsis who were targeted by machete-wielding Hutu militias. Munyakazi denies the allegations.

NAIROBI, Kenya - The ringleader of the 1994 Rwanda genocide was sentenced yesterday to life in prison for his role in the early days of an ethnic slaughter that eventually killed an estimated 800,000 people. Theoneste Bagosora, 67, was the highest-ranking military officer convicted at the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. The former colonel's prosecution was viewed as a significant step in efforts to punish war crimes. "This victory sends a message to people like the warlords in Darfur or those committing horrendous rapes and killing in Congo," said Barbara Mulvaney, a Southern California attorney who served as chief prosecutor.

KIGALI, Rwanda - Today I will be celebrating the Fourth of July in a different context than ever before. In Rwanda, July 4 is a holiday that commemorates the liberation of the country from the genocidal regime that murdered 1 million Tutsis and tens of thousands of Hutu political moderates who were committed to freedom and democracy, from April to July of 1994. It is a celebratory day, for it marks the end of the genocide and the establishment of a nonracist state that upholds the principles of liberty, equality and the peaceful coexistence of all Rwandans.

Darfur killings meet tests for genocide Jonathan Kolieb's insistence that "Darfur horrors aren't `genocide'" (Opinion*Commentary, Dec. 16) rests on a misunderstanding of the difference between intent and motive. He is right to insist that the 1948 Genocide Convention states that the mental element of the crime must be proved. This mental element, as defined in Article 30 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, is comprised of intent and knowledge. According to the statute, "A person has intent where: a)

The ongoing crisis in Darfur is no genocide. In an age of 24-hour news channels, short attention spans and a long list of world crises, "genocide" remains headline-grabbing. But the term's application to Darfur is flawed in legal terms and unhelpful in resolving the crisis, and ultimately undermines worldwide efforts to prevent genocide. Genocide is one of the most disturbingly evocative terms in our vocabulary, and the gravest crime humanity knows. The 1948 Genocide Convention states that two criminal elements - physical and mental - must be proved: There must be actions aimed at or resulting in the deaths of members of a national, religious or ethnic group, and perpetrators of such acts must also have the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the targeted group.

They range from Luis Moreno-Ocampo, prosecutor of the Hague-based International Criminal Court, to Adam Sterling, a grass-roots organizer first seen hawking leaflets to apathetic strollers in Santa Monica, Calif. Success and failure in Darfur's life-or-death context generate excruciating tension. In this movie, the attempt of a World Food Program director, Pablo Recalde, to run delivery trucks through volatile territory sparks more nail-biting anxiety than any starship battle in a space opera.

With all the problems facing this country, both in Iraq and at home, why is Congress spending time trying to pass a resolution condemning the massacre of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire nearly a century ago? Make no mistake about it, that massacre of hundreds of thousands - perhaps a million or more - Armenians was one of the worst atrocities in all of history. As with the later Holocaust against the Jews, it was not considered sufficient to kill innocent victims. They were first put through soul-scarring dehumanization in whatever sadistic ways occurred to those who carried out these atrocities.