With a topic as weighty as preventing genocide, we don’t pretend to do it justice in a 24+ page e-zine. What we hope to do, however, is to give readers a broader understanding of the debate—both to examine what the international community has, and hasn’t, learned about stopping genocides once they are underway and the strategies being explored to prevent them from happening.

As the Holocaust Days of Remembrance are commemorated from April 23-30, 2006, many will recall a post-WWII era when close to 12 million Jews, Poles, and Soviet prisoners were butchered at the hands of the Nazi regime. A recent special in National Geographic on the topic goes on to claim that, in a century of mass murder, another 30 million Chinese, 20 million Russians, 1.7 million Cambodians, and 1.5 million Armenians have perished. More recently, the 1990s are stained with the blood of several genocides, such as in Rwanda and the Balkans. And, sadly, genocide is still happening today in Darfur, western Sudan.

With figures this staggering, how can one even begin to memorialize these innocent lives? For me, the greatest honor we can pay these many victims is to ensure that there are no more victims. In other words, how do we put the institutions and programs in place to make sure that millions more will not die on account of their race, religion, or ethnic identity? Ending impunity for war crimes is one answer and, happily, we are finally seeing more of a global trend to bring the perpetrators of atrocity crimes to justice. In the meantime, we could also use better fire brigades.

As several contributors to this e-zine note, there must be both the will and the means to prevent genocide. When fires are burning, the international community doesn’t have the firemen equipped with the tools they need to deal with the crisis. UN peacekeepers have not typically been “rapid responders,” or been given strong enough mandates to do an effective job. While there is plenty of talk about how to fix these problems, multiple political hurdles—especially concerns about infringements on national sovereignty—have prevented very much progress.

I’m not sure how many more crises it will take before such improved systems are put in place. Until that time, there are a variety of options in the policy toolkit, including lots of carrots and sticks to use with leaders who are committing grave abuses. More optimistically perhaps, there are more efforts being made—especially by the civil society sector—to prevent conflict in the first place. The long-term work of addressing the root causes of conflict, and building communities of hope and trust, receives far less attention and far less funding, but may just be vital to ensuring that conflicts don’t spin out of control in the first place.

Zarrin T. Caldwell
Editor, OneWorld Perspectives