A Bureaucratic Step Towards a Genocide-Free World

April 19th, 2010 by Alex Meixner (Save Darfur)

Washington could accurately be described as a city built for the express purpose of breaking the world record for bureaucratic meetings per capita.  Just about everyone who works in our nation’s capital has at one time or another uttered a variation of “if it weren’t for all of these #@%&#* meetings, I could get some real work done.”  So the creation of a new bureaucratic governmental position tasked with the formation of yet another bureaucratic governmental working group would not usually be exciting news.  Luckily for untold millions of potential genocide victims worldwide, President Obama’s recent appointment of the National Security Council’s first-ever Director of Genocide and Mass Atrocities Prevention was not a case of bureaucracy as usual.

Following the failure of the international community to prevent or effectively respond to Darfur and the genocides of the 1990’s, the bipartisan Genocide Prevention Task Force led by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former Secretary of Defense Bill Cohen released a detailed report in December ’08 detailing how the U.S. government should go about making itself better able to anticipate, prevent, and if all else fails, respond to genocide.  One of the first recommended steps is the appointment of an NSC point-person on genocide and mass atrocities, who would in turn be tasked with the formation and coordination of a standing interagency working group on genocide prevention and response.  For readers from outside the beltway, interagency working groups consist of representatives from various departments, agencies, and bureaus within the Administration, in this case including folks from the Departments of State, Treasury, and Defense, as well as the intelligence community and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The President’s creation of this new bureaucratic genocide prevention infrastructure and the appointment of former State Department staffer and George Clooney advisor David Pressman to coordinate it is therefore a big step in the right direction.  That said, a beefed up genocide prevention bureaucracy is simply a means to better U.S. policy, and should not be mistaken for the desired end of that policy’s full adoption and implementation.  In short, there’s a lot of work left to do, including the building of a better early warning system, the growth of bilateral and multilateral leverage to help steer troubled states away from a course towards genocide, and the building of U.S. and international civilian and military capacity to respond to new atrocities and episodes of genocide with the goal of nipping them in the bud.

With the right political support and sufficient bureaucratic resources, this new NSC directorate and interagency working group could become the nucleus of a transformative government-wide effort towards creating a world as free from genocide as is humanly possible.  Without enough public and political support, it could prove to be nothing more than an isolated flash in the pan.  While only time will tell, one fact is abundantly clear: if we once again fail to learn the lessons of genocides past, we shall once again be doomed to repeat them.

(Original page located at: http://blogfordarfur.org/archives/3803)