Genocide

THIS IS THE SEASON for intoning ''Never again!'' But what if ''again'' happens again and again to others, and the world does little to stop it? That is why the conviction of Dusan Tadic by the U.N. tribunal investigating war crimes in the former Yugoslavia matters.He was nobody important, who managed to get himself identified and arrested in Germany in 1994 for having killed and tortured Muslim and Croat prisoners in camps near Prijedor in Bosnia two years earlier. But he was convicted of 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Despite his efforts to stave off his long-overdue date with justice, indicted war criminal Ratko Mladic appeared before a panel of judges at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague on Friday. Soon he will stand trial for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, atrocities he planned and executed throughout the 1992-1995 war, from the siege of Sarajevo to the concentration camps of Prijedor and the genocide at Srebrenica. Mr. Mladic's last request before his transfer was to visit the grave of his daughter, Ana, who committed suicide in 1994 with her father's pistol.

The Clinton administration failed to muster the necessary support in Europe and Congress for its preferred solution to the Yugoslav problem, limited intervention on Bosnia's side. Therefore, it redefined the problem so that intervention is not the remedy.Previously, Mr. Clinton thought what was going on in Bosnia was aggression and atrocities perpetrated mostly by Serbs. That called for a range of responses.Now, according to Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Bosnia is a ''morass,'' a ''war of all against all'' and a ''problem from hell.

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.

ANKARA, TURKEY -- A court has ordered the cancellation of a conference where Turkish academics were expected to challenge the official version of events surrounding mass deaths among the nation's Armenians during and after World War I. The gathering scheduled to be held today in Istanbul was seen as a first and important step in this nation's efforts to confront its troubled past as it seeks membership of the European Union. The case to block the conference was brought by the Turkish Lawyers Union and other lawyers.

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.

Whoever saves one life, it is as if he has saved the world. (Talmudic saying)For the Kurds, the world is not a place worth living in.Even as we bear witness to history's first televised genocide, the images are at once exquisitely poignant and horrifyingly ineffective. Babies crying for food -- unaware that their mothers can provide none, much less that governments haven't -- should be enough to make us all weep in dismay.Instead, we are reduced to muttering sympathetic pieties or intoning inedible platitudes -- force-feeding political science to empty-eyed innocents dying on godforsaken mountainsides.

The CIA finding that 90 percent of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia was perpetrated by Serbs is not news.Nor is the conclusion that ''the systematic nature of the Serbian actions strongly suggests that Pale [Bosnian Serb capital] and Belgrade exercised a carefully veiled role in the purposeful destruction and dispersal of non-Serb populations.''The news was that the United States government had this report based on aerial photography and precise technical analysis.Since the Clinton administration was not planning to act on any such understanding, three government sources leaked the report to the New York Times.

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.

Sen. Barack Obama says preventing genocide isn't a good enough reason to stay in Iraq. "By that argument, you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now - where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife - which we haven't done," the Illinois Democrat told the Associated Press. "We would be deploying unilaterally and occupying the Sudan, which we haven't done. Those of us who care about Darfur don't think it would be a good idea." It's worth pointing out a key difference between the potential genocide in Iraq and the heart-wrenching slaughters in Congo and Sudan: The latter aren't our fault.

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.

Finding Beauty in a Broken World by Terry Tempest Williams Pantheon Books / $26 / 416 pages Renaissance art, endangered prairie dogs and Rwandan genocide are the compelling triptych in Terry Tempest Williams' quest to piece together the shards of a fractured and fractious world and find meaning within the broken bits. Finding Beauty in a Broken World is a meditation on what in Yiddish is called tikkun olam - repairing the world. Williams repeatedly pairs violence and beauty in escalating examples while positing that beauty's healing grace can resonate in the darkest of places, be it a dying ecosystem in the Southwest desert or in a nation recovering from genocidal mass murder.

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.

PARIS -- The U.N. tribunal investigating war crimes in the Balkans charged the Serbian commander of a concentration camp in Bosnia with genocide yesterday, using a term for the mass killing of Bosnian Muslims that the United States and other Western governments have sought to avoid.The tribunal indicted Zeljko Meakic, the overall commander of the Serbian-run Omarska camp in northwestern Bosnia, on charges of "genocide and crimes against humanity." It also charged 20 other Serbian commanders, guards, and visitors at the camp with war crimes.

ANOTHER AFRICAN genocide is gathering pace in the far western Darfur region of Sudan just as the grim 10th anniversary of the slaying of perhaps 800,000 people in Rwanda is being commemorated. The United States, the United Nations and the rest of the international community failed to halt the slaughter by Hutu militants of Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus in Rwanda in April 1994. It was an unforgivable moral failure. And yet a lesson has not been learned. Despite the current vast civilian destruction in Darfur that is directed against African tribal groups of the region, the world is unprepared to intervene.

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.