Genocides keep recurring despite UN convention’s dire proscriptions

Tribunals have proliferated but genteel brutalities of diplomacy bedevil adequate and appropriate intervention

Abeautifully bronzed Danish-Argentinian girl and I climbed a rutted track through the mist and hissing sulphurous vents, up the side of the dormant volcano of Santiaguito in highland Guatemala. Our destination was Fuentes Georginas, where we would spend the day alone, lolling in the hot springs that jetted straight out of the rock face into progressively cooling pools that fell through the lush rainforest.

But that night my companion’s boyfriend, having hiked to the other side of the same volcano, told us in hushed tones how his party had found the Mayan hamlet they had gone to visit a smoking ruin, with no-one left alive but members of a swaggering army patrol, who sarcastically told them, “We burnt out a sickness here.”

Hiking the highlands was a foolhardy thing to do in those days, for Guatemala, where I still have family, was then in the grip of a genocidal uncivil war, mostly visited on the indigenous Mayans, that would eventually kill about 200,000 people.

During my 1996 visit, two British tourists were executed just outside the town I was living in, and a milkman tried to assassinate the president. It was the first genocidal landscape I had walked, and it marked me as deeply as internecine massacres had back home in the rolling hills of KwaZulu-Natal, and so shaped my career.

Since Guatemala, I have worked in several such benighted liminal zones while genocides were ongoing, from the parched outback of Darfur to the crowded Rohingya refugee camps of Kutupalong. I have consulted to truth commissions in Sierra Leone and the Solomon Islands, and have examined postgenocide memorialisation from Berlin to Butare.

Over these decades, as an investigative journalist I developed a narrative method that I call forensic meditation, which combines detailed factual reconstruction of atrocity with a deep dive into the emotional atmospherics of tainted landscapes, because the extremity of experiences of mass murder cannot be understood by bald facts alone.

But like all genocide investigators I am appalled that genocides keep occurring before our very eyes, despite the dire proscriptions of the UN’s Genocide Convention of 1948, which even renders verbally promoting the “intent to destroy” a targeted group “in whole or in part” equivalent to the global crime of genocide itself.

Actually stopping such zero-sum societal obliteration while it is under way has proved far more difficult than the facilities of this age of citizen-driven information sharing and satellitebased verification would suggest. The Rohingya genocide case, which had both, is instructive.

After my return from Kutupalong, Bangladesh, in 2018 I organised a panel debate with judge Richard Goldstone and human rights activists David P Kramer and Shabnam Mayet at the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre. Our topic was how the international community could act in time to prevent a genocide escalating, or even occurring in the first place.

But, as our panel agreed, the genteel brutalities of diplomacy bedevil adequate and appropriate intervention, time and again. The convention itself was at the outset compromised by the deletion of the proposed “political” category from the “national, ethnical, racial or religious group” target population definitions, in deference to Joseph Stalin, who had the blood of tens of thousands of political opponents on his hands.

Tribunals have proliferated since the end of the Cold War, with the sea-change now reactivating activists’ and jurists’ interest in pursuing genocide charges in deserving cases. Yet the case of the Rohingya, which by some perverse humour of the universe in terms of lost territory and scale of migration mirrored the flight of the Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba (“Disaster”), attracted no formal charges of genocide until four years after the slaughter commenced.

Sure, great powers such as the US fulminated against the “ethnic cleansing” taking place. But they did so knowing full well that the term, which gained popularity during the ghastly implosion of Yugoslavia, is not encoded in the Genocide Convention, so compels no-one to act.

Goldstone stressed that the Genocide Convention obliges any signatory country — including SA, which acceded in 1998 — “to take any steps necessary to prevent genocide”.

SA’s move on January 11 to charge Israel at the International Court of Justice with the intent to commit, and failure to prevent genocide in the war on Gaza — which is estimated to have killed 26,000 people in disproportionate response to Hamas’ killing of 1,200 and the hostage-taking of 253 on October 7 — is technically, and it argues morally, an obligation.

Of course, diplomacy is seldom ethically unalloyed. Many observers have linked SA ’ s charge to its geostrategic alignment with its Brics partners against the old Western powers, and so have compared its robust stance against a belligerent Tel Aviv with its servile appeasement of an equally bellicose Moscow, which has also been accused of genocide committed against Ukraine.

Yet there is a more glaring comparison that should be made, notable for its awful vacuum of international concern: the genocidal Tigray War in Ethiopia, which claimed perhaps 600,000 lives over 2020-22, according to University of Ghent researchers.

No European gas pipelines were involved. No significant geostrategic interests were enmeshed. Very few videos of the horrors of ethnic targeting and the weaponisation of hunger did the rounds. Global protests were mainly mounted by small Tigrayan expat communities. One British politician raised questions in parliament.

And the man directing the genocide, Ethiopian prime minister Abiy Ahmed, as unfortunate a Nobel Peace Prize recipient as Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi, who was revealed by the Rohingya genocide to have feet of clay, is of course a hero of African democratisation. Yet Pretoria remained silent.

London has meanwhile pooh-poohed SA’s charges against Israel as “nonsense”, just as Washington called them “meritless”, and Tel Aviv accused Pretoria of “weaponising” the Genocide Convention itself.

Meanwhile, there is a move under way to get the UN General Assembly to agree to expand the application of the convention to the great powers themselves, by making it impossible for the UN Security Council’s five permanent members to veto any investigation into claims of genocide.

If successful, that will go a long way to enabling international responses to be timely and potentially robust enough to stop the bloodletting before it gains momentum.