So wrote Armin T. Wegner in 1933, in an open letter to Adolf Hitler to express his deep misgivings about recent measures to boycott Jewish businesses in Nazi Germany. Wegner had previously been arrested for documenting evidence of the Armenian genocide while serving with the German army in World War I. This time he was tortured by the Gestapo and sent to the concentration camps. He was eventually released and fled the country.

Wegner’s photographs and letters are cited as an important inspiration in an essay by Nina Krieger, Education Director at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. Hers is one of a collection of essays paying tribute to the works of art and media that influenced the authors’ engagement with genocide and crimes against humanity in a new book called Evoking Genocide, edited by Adam Jones. Selected essays, including Nina Krieger’s, can be read on the book’s website (link above).

Gerald Kaplan’s endorsement is interesting:

“Those who spend their lives studying genocide in order to prevent its recurrence are by definition a curious breed. These very personal and often moving essays reveal the disparate sources that have motivated otherwise ‘normal’ women and men to immerse themselves in trying to fathom the most egregious examples of man’s inhumanity to man (and yes, it’s mostly men). Readers may be surprised to find themselves wanting to join the cause.”

Building a genocide monitoring and alert system is one of 16 top ideas shortlisted by Google’s ‘10 to the 100‘ initiative, after reviewing more than 150,000 ideas submitted by people in 172 countries. Google will give $10 million to organisations in the best position to help implement the five ideas that receive the most votes by Thursday 8 October.

The alert system is introduced as follows: “Much of the necessary technology and data-gathering methodology already exists both for general crisis mapping and for early warning systems capable of preventing mass atrocities. A key remaining step is to make this data more widely available to strengthen international aid agency coordination, improve resource allocation, develop timely policy and help evaluate current humanitarian practices.”

Early warning is a crucial component of an effective prevention strategy. Pooling and making available relevant information from diverse sources would lay the foundation for more credible, independently verifiable assessments and timely decision making by UN and regional bodies. It might also help people in  societies at risk to evaluate their own situation and judge their best course of action.

So please take a look at all the ideas, vote now, and pass on some news about this rare opportunity to help change the world in a few seconds and a couple of clicks.

It's good to talk: UN/African Union peacekeepers meet Arab nomads in Sudan (UN photo by Stuart Price)

The UN General Assembly is not an easy place to find consensus on anything, so it came as a welcome surprise to hear that its member states have agreed to work to further international understanding on effective collective action to prevent and (failing that) to halt mass atrocities. During the debate in July, numerous statements from all over the world called for implementation of the R2P doctrine as a fundamental challenge in keeping with the purposes of the United Nations, dismissing an attempt by the President of the General Assembly to present aspects of the doctrine as somehow at odds with international law. Representatives of countries with experience of large-scale violence called on the wider membership not to allow others to suffer their fate.

A minority continued to equate R2P with ‘humanitarian’ military intervention, warning of the risk of misuse of the doctrine to justify the use of force. In contrast with this narrow reading, here is a selection of specific measures proposed by various member states:

• good governance and the rule of law
• periodic risk assessment
• national policies fostering inclusion and protection of religious, racial and ethnic minorities
• prosecution of perpetrators, and cooperation with the International Criminal Court
• education and public awareness programmes
• improving and better coordinating early warning systems
• building mediation capacities
• developing standby/rapid reaction capabilities
• regional peer review mechanisms

The development of independent academic disciplines over the past century has resulted
in isolation and overspecialisation. Economists, for example, have learned very little
from sociologists about human motivation, and generally maintain simplistic
assumptions about human nature. Political scientists primarily focus on institutional
processes, and rarely draw on the insights of social psychologists about the determinants
of individual and group behaviour. Some disciplines have focused on quantitative
research, and consider qualitative research to be lacking in rigour and objectivity. Others
engage mainly with current, observable phenomena, and do not possess the long view
encountered among historians. Experts in one discipline frequently find it impossible to
understand the abstruse language or mathematical formulae in the journal articles of
another. The lack of conversations between disciplines has limited our understanding of how change happens.

However, in the past two decades there has been a growth of cross-disciplinary research
that attempts to draw on what has been learned across a range of scholarly traditions.
Crossing the boundaries between disciplines has yielded some of the most significant and
original approaches to how change happens. Here I would like to highlight two of them.

Tipping points
What causes rapid change in human societies? The best-known recent analysis is
Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (2000),
based on research in diverse fields such as social psychology, marketing, media studies,
criminology, and epidemiology. Using a threshold model of collective behaviour familiar
in the social sciences, he argues that some phenomena spread rapidly when they reach a
‘tipping point’ of social participation or popularity. One of his examples concerns Hush
Puppies, a brand of shoes. Having become unpopular in the USA, the tipping point came
in 1994 and 1995 when sales suddenly shot up. This wasn’t through an advertising
campaign. It was because a few kids in New York’s East Village and Soho began wearing
them, and the fad spread so that Hush Puppies became a cultural icon.

The important issue is how this rapid spreading takes place. Gladwell bases his argument
on several ideas. First, that some people are better than others at making something
spread, such as by having better social connections or more enthusiasm (The Law of the
Few). Second, that there are specific ways to present or structure information to make it
more memorable and effective (The Stickiness Factor). Third, that human behaviour can
be changed through very small changes in people’s immediate environment, for instance
removing graffiti from walls in subway stations can cut crime (The Power of Context).

Personal relationships and mutual understanding
In books such as An Intimate History of Humanity (1995) and Conversation (1998), historian
Theodore Zeldin argues that the most important changes in human history have not
occurred through the imposition or evolution of new political institutions, economic
systems, or laws, but rather through individuals developing deeper understanding of the
perspectives and experiences of others, and changing the way they treat one another on a
personal level. For instance, western governments began introducing legislation to
ensure greater equality between men and women over a century ago. Yet new laws have
not eradicated discrimination against women in the workplace or domestic violence. The
real changes, according to Zeldin, have come through men and women learning to talk
with each other, and with men learning how to empathise with the experiences of
women.

For Zeldin, fundamental social change requires overcoming misunderstandings and
ignorance about people from different cultures, occupations, genders, generations, and
social backgrounds. A method of doing so is to create one-to-one conversations between
strangers where they get beyond superficial talk and speak about their lives on a personal
and emotional level. This would be a microcosmic, personal, and long-term form of social
change.69 A similar approach to change has been promoted through ‘empathy training
programmes’ in prisons (see the section on sociology), ‘immersion programmes’ run by
development agencies, and grassroots peacebuilding and reconciliation projects based on
developing personal connections between participants. These initiatives suggest that society can change by creating and encouraging empathy.

In my defence, I can only cite a baby and a couple of demanding day jobs. Anyway, here’s a bumper edition to make up for lost time.

The UN has just published a report in the name of the Secretary General describing ‘the efforts of the United Nations system to prevent genocide and the activities of the Special Advisor to the Secretary General on the prevention of genocide’, aka Francis Deng (link | pdf). The report focuses on efforts to improve the UN’s information gathering, analysis and early warning for this purpose, and offers a set of eight criteria to aid identification and analysis of situations of concern.

Also doing the rounds - but remaining somewhat obscure, for reasons that are equally obscure, and shared with you on a strictly ’need to know’ basis - is this report on efforts to implement the Responsibility to Protect. Hearteningly, it contains several references to individual responsibility, in reference to the need to do more to bring perpetrators to justice, to encourage and support survivors, and “to foster individual responsibility”:

One of the keys to preventing small crimes from becoming large ones, as well as to ending such affronts to human dignity altogether, is to foster individual responsibility. Even in the worst genocide, there are ordinary people who refuse to be complicit in the collective evil, who display the values, the independence and the will to say no to those who would plunge their societies into cauldrons of cruelty, injustice, hatred and violence. We need to do more to recognize their courage and learn from their actions. States that have suffered such traumas, civil society and international organizations can facilitate the development of national and transnational networks of survivors, so that their stories and lessons can be more widely heard, thus helping to prevent their reoccurrence or repetition elsewhere.”

The report furthermore acknowledges,

States and intergovernmental organizations, of course, are hardly the only influential actors in situations relating to the responsibility to protect… The multiple roles of domestic or transnational civil society in advocacy, early warning, monitoring, research, training and education are well known and are readily and repeatedly acknowledged in the present report. Less well known is the role of individuals, advocacy groups, women’s groups and the private sector in shaping the international response to crimes and violations relating to the responsibility to protect. Like the United Nations itself, international civil society learned lessons from the relatively muted, slow and scattered public response to the genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda. The mass, well organized and highly visible transnational campaigns against the violence in Darfur have demonstrated both the power and the limitations of such movements. They have shown the depth and breadth of public concern over ending the violence against the beleaguered population of Darfur, even as they have highlighted how inadequate our policy tools are and how fleeting is the political will to use them.

Back in January, the Obama Administration (the phrase hasn’t lost its charm), having said very little on the subject of R2P during the campaign, declared its support for the doctrine. Susan Rice, US Ambassador to the UN, reportedly told the Security Council,

“As agreed to by member states in 2005 and by the Security Council in 2006, the international community has a responsibility to protect civilian populations from violations of international humanitarian law when states are unwilling or unable to do so. But this commitment is only as effective as the willingness of all nations, large and small, to take concrete action. The United States takes this responsibility seriously.“

Michelle, writing for the Stop Genocide blog at Change.org, remains unimpressed by mere words, and has rewritten the relevant paragraphs of the Millennium Summit Outcome Document to better reflect the story so far.

This satellite picture from UNOSAT is one of a series showing the destruction by arson and shelling of over 2,170 buildings and tent structures in three camps for displaced people in the Rutshuru area of North Kivu (as originally reported by the UN refugee agency). Information from human rights observers is that the camps were destroyed by Laurent Nkunda’s CNDP.

A large group of Congolese civil society organisations wrote a letter to the UN Security Council to call attention to ongoing atrocities including summary executions, rapes and forced recruitment:

While we wish to thank you for [recent] supportive visits and for your concerns about the tragedy here in eastern Congo, we also urge you to move from theory to practice, by transforming your kind speeches and messages into action. Diplomacy always takes time, and we understand this, but unfortunately we do not have time. The population of North Kivu is at risk now; with each day that passes, more and more people die…

We therefore urge you to immediately send EU troops which can deploy quickly to provide protection and security for civilians as you did for our brothers and sisters in Bunia, Ituri, in June 2003 [and] to increase the number of MONUC troops…

The Security Council has agreed to additional troops for MONUC (partly financed by the UK). The next question is where they will come from and whether the EU will deploy reinforcements in the interim. The UK’s position on this is likely to be decisive, which is why a new coalition of NGOs has published full-page ads in several newspapers with the following open letter to the British Prime Minister. (Note the R2P references.)

It’s time for a bold decision, Mr Brown. Prime Minister, your Government must act today to get more peacekeeping troops into the Democratic Republic of Congo.

As we write this letter, a humanitarian catastrophe in eastern DRC is unfolding before our eyes. Hundreds of thousands of people have been forced from their homes by violent clashes. Attacks on civilians are occurring daily. Women and girls are being raped on a horrific scale. The situation is deteriorating every day.

The current peacekeeping troops are overstretched and UN reinforcements will take months to arrive. The EU promised that troops would be available to act in conflicts like this. The UK has a responsibility to ensure this promise is met. The people in eastern DRC cannot wait any longer for protection.

The UK Government has said we must “never again” stand by in the face of wide scale atrocities. Over the past five years some five million people have died in the DRC. Now is the time for your Government to uphold its promise. Swift deployment could save thousands of lives.

Prime Minister, we know you are as appalled as we are by the catastrophe in the DRC. But we also know you have the means to act. Today is the day to show courageous leadership.

Earlier this week, Rob Crilly, a freelance journalist in Goma warned in his blog that “There are pirates off Somalia doing their thing and most news outlets can only cope with one Africa story at a time. The charities are launching a big appeal but I suspect this will be a last headline before we let the country sink back into obscurity.”

To be reminded of the human impact of this crisis, you can read four individual stories gathered by ActionAid.

Update: Gordon Brown has replied to the open letter, stating that the UK is focusing its efforts on “making sure that MONUC is deployed as effectively as possible, and that it has the additional capability it requires, as quickly as possible…”:

“We are looking at what additional logistical support we can offer MONUC/troop contributors (e.g. helping them get to the DRC). We are ready to offer candidates to bolster the command and intelligence functions of MONUC, if requested…

“While the EU maintains a battle group, this is designed to deploy to a new crisis where no international force is present. It is not a convenient way to generate additional forces to an existing mission. Some EU member states are already saying they are ready to send troops and would do so through the UN force.”

He emphasises the importance of constructive engagement and collaboration with states, subregional organisations and civil society to encourage “the constructive management of diversity”:

“Wherever there is exclusion and marginalisation, there is a risk of reaction to injustice, leading to a clampdown that can become genocidal. This is a problem that could affect any country in the world: all our countries have identity differences.”

He sums up the essence of the Responsibility to Protect in the phrase, “sovereignty as responsibility”, which Deng himself coined some time ago while working to improve the protection of the 25 million internally displaced people around the world.

(The video may take a few moments to load. Don’t worry about the weird Thunderbirds beeps at the start. If it doesn’t appear, please try this link instead.)

“Hundreds of thousands of people are on the run, fleeing a war that rages in eastern Congo, in the provinces of North and South Kivu. They are frightened. Many are sick or wounded. Others have been harassed or raped, or have had everything they own stolen. The people of the Kivus are in a critical condition. The destiny of everyone in this region is shaped by the war. The story of their struggle to survive needs to be told.

“Starting November 20, 2008, MSF will help the people of the Kivus speak out through a new web site: Condition: Critical“

“In speech after speech, the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, talks up human rights and his concept of “civilian surges”… Even if Britain feels it cannot act decisively and boldly in the DRC, it should at least not be blocking other EU member states from doing so. MONUC desperately needs reinforcements of troops and equipment. Some EU members are apparently ready to act. The UK should immediately support that initiative, at least politically and preferably by offering some of its much-vaunted military expertise as well.”

(Marker shows Kanyabayonga)

Underlining the continued instability of the situation, Congolese troops have gone on the rampage again, this time looting and raping in Kanyabayonga, after news of a rebel advance.

In an open letter to the UN Security Council, respected figures including Jan Egeland (former UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs), Gareth Evans (President of the International Crisis Group) and Juan Méndez (President of the International Center for Transitional Justice and former UN Secretary-General’s Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide) have made explicit reference to the obligation to respond under the ‘Responsibility to Protect’:

“Human rights violations currently committed by the parties in conflict in North Kivu have clearly crossed the thresholds laid out by the responsibility to protect norm adopted by the General Assembly at the 2005 World Summit. The violations include: forced displacement that is not for clear military objectives or to protect civilians; rape as a weapon of war; and the killing of civilians including on the basis of ethnicity.

“Yet the situation could get even worse… The risk of Nkunda resuming the offensive and occupying Goma, now defended only by a small contingent of UN troops, and of the Congolese government mobilizing Rwandan Hutu rebels to regain lost ground, presents the real possibility that the campaign of violence could threaten the lives of hundreds of thousands more. It could lead to ethnic violence against Tutsis in South Kivu and north Katanga, and a campaign of revenge killings by Nkunda’s forces. Escalation of the conflict may also draw neighboring Rwanda into the conflict once again, reignite the regional war, and lead to a major humanitarian catastrophe among a population that already lacks essential food, adequate shelter and medical care.

“…in cases where a state “manifestly fails” to protect its populations, the international community must be prepared to act in a timely and decisive action. The failure of the Congolese government to effectively protect its population has made this one of the most desperate situations on earth.

“It is past time that the responsibility to protect norm be applied meaningfully in DRC. The Security Council must now deliver on the UN’s commitment to act in a timely and decisive manner to save people and avert the risk of mass atrocity crimes.

“It is essential that the Council use the full range of applicable measures at its disposal.

“A step change in political engagement is required from the Security Council to press Nkunda and the Congolese to sustain the ceasefire, and to insist to the Rwandan and Congolese governments that they uphold existing obligations and commitments to stop supporting Nkunda’s insurgency and Rwandan Hutu rebels, respectively.

“The Special Representative of the Secretary-General in Congo has called for reinforcements for the UN mission which is struggling to fulfill its mandate to support the Congolese government to protect its citizens. There is widespread consensus on the urgent need for increased international military presence in Goma, to provide better protection for the civilian population, to deter the parties from breaking the ceasefire, and to provide space for the essential political dialogue. The Security Council must take [a] swift decision on this point.

“…It is essential that there be effective disarmament and disbanding of all armed groups and militias in north Kivu, both foreign and national, and the restoration of sustainable civilian state authority in North Kivu…

“The Security Council must also apply other measures at its disposal to avert these crimes. It must enforce compliance with the sanctions regime it has put in place, involving an arms embargo and targeted sanctions, including against those that recruit child soldiers or use rape as a weapon of war.

“And it must recognize the centrality of tackling the impunity of those responsible for Rwanda’s genocide, as well as war crimes and crimes against humanity in DRC - including widespread sexual violence and recruitment of child soldiers - which has made the region so vulnerable to further mass atrocity crimes.

“The Council should express support for ongoing trials by the International Criminal Court of militia leaders in the DRC, and encourage the Office of the Prosecutor to renew and reinvigorate investigations that may lead to new indictments of figures involved in the current violence.

“The 2005 agreement on the responsibility to protect was meant to mean never again to atrocity crimes. Eastern DRC is a test of international resolve to save lives - now.”

[Link to the full statement (pdf), from the Global Center for the Responsibility to Protect.]

The Security Council discussed the Democratic Republic of Congo today (11 November). After “probably the most interactive luncheon” with the UN Secretary-General this year, the Council was briefed on the military situation and discussed options, noting that there is currently just one peacekeeper per thousand inhabitants of North and South Kivu. No decision has been taken, but according to the Costa Rican Ambassador to the UN, who chaired the meeting, “a large majority” of the Council agree that MONUC needs to be strengthened [Video]. The head of UN peacekeeping warned that if additional troops are authorized, it could take two months to mobilize them [Video].

The Security Council will hold meetings with representatives of MONUC (the peacekeeping force in the Congo) on 26 November, by which time it will have received formal reports from the UN Secretary-General and from the Group of Experts assigned to monitor sanctions banning any form of assistance to illegal armed groups and the recruitment or use of child soldiers in in the DRC.

Members of the Security Council are fully aware that a new humanitarian emergency is engulfing eastern Congo (where there were already chronic problems), posing a clear and present danger of further mass atrocities and a threat to international peace and security. Nor can they ignore the impressive degree of consensus and clarity that has emerged from diverse advocates concerned about the Congo. International resolve to end mass atrocities is on the line, and so is the credibility of the Security Council.

The Security Council is currently composed of the five permanent members: China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States, plus Belgium, Burkina Faso, Costa Rica (who hold the Presidency this month), Croatia, Indonesia, Italy, Libya, Panama, South Africa and Vietnam. The links are to each country’s mission in New York: please write to them today!

(Many thanks to Security Council Report for making it possible to report accurately on these developments.)

Avaaz (a bold new campaigning organisation with over 3 million members worldwide) is collecting a million messages of congratulation to display on a wall in the heart of Washington DC, in the hope that the site will become a focus for US media reporting on global reactions to Obama’s election success. Add your own voice here. Here is my tuppence-worth:

Eastern Congo and the ‘Responsibility to Protect’

On this tremendous occasion, I feel as much relief as excitement and hope that a more United States offers good prospects for a more United Nations.

On that note, I trust you and your team will consider what needs to be done to implement the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ doctrine that world leaders signed up to at the 2005 World Summit.

Most people across the world are appalled by mass atrocities - too often in retrospect - and wish to help prevent them in the future. We urgently need a credible mechanism to clearly voice, reinforce and realise those convictions in time to save lives.

The individual Responsibility to Protect initiative (iR2P) engages individuals as agents of change, transforming popular concern into tangible action. By joining the dots across geographical, social and institutional barriers, and by re-imagining activism to include policy ‘insiders’, the iR2P network fosters stronger connections between those with most influence, those immediately affected by crises such as those ongoing in Darfur and eastern Congo, and those who ask, “What can I do?”

The US government is already actively engaged in diplomatic efforts to help stabilize and resolve the situation in eastern Congo. A huge test of international resolve to support democracy and peace where these fundamentals are all too elusive, it is hard to overstate the significance of the outcome for Africa as a whole, and the people of the Great Lakes region in particular. We have collected analysis and 10 policy recommendations on the iR2P website.

In continued hope, and with heartfelt congratulations,

Fred (on behalf of all who have signed the iR2P Pledge)

Update from Avaaz: “In just 24 hours, over 150,000 people from 189 countries have signed and sent a message for Barack Obama to our huge global wall in the centre of Washington DC, and it has been covered on CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera and in the US on front pages of two of the biggest newspapers and on the evening news.”