Does the language of ‘genocide’ enable or hinder a more humane world? : Mukesh Kapila

 

Article shared by Niloufar Pourzand

Today is the annual remembrance for the victims of hashtag#genocide: 9 December marks the young UN's 1948 adoption of the Genocide Convention, in the aftermath of the hashtag#Holocaust.

It is a suitable moment to be honest: how successful have we been to punish and prevent this most heinous crime? The victims and survivors deserve no less than the brutal truth: the tragic reality is that we have failed time and again, even as we solemnly pledge: "never again".

I can personally testify to this through my own life of failure. I was present as a UK government official during the heat of the Rwanda genocide and presided over the Darfur genocide as Head of the UN system in Sudan. My preceding and subsequent positions over some 35 years in the world's most prestigious global institutions took me to the settings of genocides in Srebrenica, Cambodia, Northern Iraq, Myanmar as well as countless mass atrocities in dozens of countries across all continents. The global health and humanitarian chapters of my life were simply about picking up some broken pieces - mostly too few and too late.

That is why, overall, I consider my life to have been lived largely in failure. That one can even make a successful and well-remunerated career out of inhumanity - and even get medals and awards for it - is an illustration of perversity.

I am saying this not as some belated confessional in hope of redemption en route to meeting my Maker, but to seek to prick the bubble of complacency that surrounds so much of human rights advocacy and social activism nowadays.

That is not to undermine the concept and Convention of hashtag#genocide. What is troubling me most is the ease with which slogans of genocide are raised - without reflecting on whether or not that helps or retards the cause of relieving the pain and suffering of those affected. To them it does not matter if their rape, hunger, displacement, torture, disappearance, murder or worse is classified as genocidal or not. It hurts them just the same and it is little consolation to them whether or not their suffering is declared a genocide or it is just another ordinary atrocity. And all the while, we are so fixated on classifying the horror - to suit some political purpose - rather than curbing it. Labelling - or mislabelling - can actually harm the struggle to make the world more humane.

And hence my piece below, a shorter version of which appears as my usual column in The National News.

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