In a New York Times op-ed, Simon Adams, executive director of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, discusses the potential for genocide to unfold in Syria. Adams warns that as the current conflict intensifies, the risk increases of a violent backlash against Alawites and other minorities. He calls on governments to take decisive action to prevent further crimes against humanity from being committed, and to put an end to impunity for such crimes by engaging the International Criminal Court to ensure that perpetrators are held accountable.

Read the op-ed.

A UN internal review panel released a report highly critical of the organization’s actions during the final five months of the conflict in Sri Lanka between the government and separatist rebels. During that period, January—May 2009, thousands of civilians were killed and wounded as government forces advanced on the stronghold of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)—a group designated as a terrorist organization by the US and other governments. The Sri Lankan Army’s advance and the LTTE’s use of civilians as human shields resulted in hundreds of thousands of people being caught between the warring parties. The report examines the failure of various UN bodies to adequately respond to the crisis as the human toll mounted, and evidence emerged of potential violations of international law by both parties.

The report delves into several areas where the UN efforts constituted a “grave failure” to fulfill its responsibility to protect civilians under threat. It is particularly critical of internal deliberations that proposed watering down public statements about the risks that civilians faced, by not releasing casualty figures or attributing deaths to the Sri Lankan army’s use of heavy weapons. While recognizing the extraordinary work and courage of a few outstanding staff members operating in-country, the report is unequivocal in stating that the UN system failed to develop an effective strategy to respond to early warning signs of mass violence and subsequent violations of international humanitarian law.

These events and the loss of 40,000 civilian lives in Sri Lanka underscore the continued need to develop effective early warning systems and coordinated responses to mass atrocity situations, both recommendations of the Genocide Prevention Task Force, a body that was co-convened by the Museum. The report specifically notes that the differing perspectives among member states on the meaning and implementation of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) mired discussions in debate rather than focusing them on action. This revelation highlights the need to understand the political and practical impediments to implementing R2P in difficult environments. This subject is currently under investigation by the R2P Working Group co-chaired former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and former Presidential Special Envoy to Sudan Richard Williamson. Its report is due out in early 2013.

Read the UN report.

Michael Abramowitz, director of the Museum’s genocide prevention program, recently sat down with US Permanent Representative to the United Nations Susan Rice to discuss the work the UN and the US government are doing to better prevent genocide and mass atrocities, and what is being done in places most at risk today.

Citing President Obama’s April 2012 speech at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum where he unveiled a new approach to preventing genocide and mass atrocities, USAID and Humanity United have launched the Tech Challenge for Atrocity Prevention, an initiative calling for innovative tech tools and solutions—big and small—to make advances in preventing atrocities.

They will award up to $10,000 for creative ideas and prototypes that respond to five specific challenges of preventing atrocities.

Watch the video below or visit www.thetechchallenge.org for more information and how to apply.

Over the past year and a half, a humanitarian crisis has been building in the border areas between Sudan and South Sudan, where the government of Sudan has been struggling to suppress a rebellion, in part by targeting and terrorizing civilian groups. Hundreds of thousands of civilians have fled the fighting, and aid groups are reporting on the dangers of widespread famine because the government of Sudan has been blocking aid from reaching peoples in the Nuba Mountains. The Museum asked Pete Muller, an experienced photojournalist who has lived in South Sudan for three years and traveled repeatedly to the border region, to share his photos and report on the crisis:

View Pete Muller's photo gallery of scenes from the region.

It has long been a flaw of the Sudanese state that its government, seated in the northern city of Khartoum and ruled by the National Congress Party (NCP), refuses to embrace the country’s vast racial, religious, and ethnic diversity. This dynamic was the crux of most Sudanese conflicts throughout the 20th century and underlay the country’s partition in the 21st. Today, along the remote borders of a truncated Sudan, identity politics and marginalization are again at the root of war.

Between 2009 and 2012, I lived in South Sudan, where I worked to document that country’s tense and precarious transition to independence. During my time there, I made numerous trips to border regions, where I observed various aspects of the conflicts between rebels and the government of Sudan. The government’s Sudan Armed Forces control the air space and use that advantage to carry out wildly inaccurate, albeit regular and frightening, aerial assaults on rebel territory, as well as to limit humanitarian assistance. The rebels, who are in and of the people, exploit the asymmetric nature of the fight by controlling the hinterlands, staging hit-and-run ambushes and fighting elusively.

While these dynamics are typical of insurgency and counterinsurgency operations, the context in which they are occurring is fraught with complexity. Following South Sudan’s independence in July 2011, the populations in Sudan’s Blue Nile State and the Nuba Mountains region of Southern Kordofan—elements of which have been mobilized against Khartoum for decades—found themselves in a precarious and frustrating position, isolated from their former southern allies and under the enduringly harsh and undemocratic rule of the NCP.

They started the rebellion with the stated hope of toppling the NCP and transforming government institutions in ways that will reflect the country’s diverse population. “We want to build a system in which citizenship, not ethnicity, is the basis for inclusion,” Malik Agar, the former governor turned rebel commander in Blue Nile State, told me during a tour of the battlefield. To achieve this goal, the rebellions in both Blue Nile and Southern Kordofan commenced and grew, as did the Sudanese government’s heavy-handed response. The intensification of fighting led to a mass exodus of civilians and a dire humanitarian emergency in refugee camps along the southern side of the new border between the two countries.

During my travels to the border region, I observed the terrible human consequences of this fighting in the gaunt bodies and upended lives of civilians caught amid the warring forces. Those remaining in the combat theaters cower in riverbeds and other lowland shelters, their eyes fixed on the skies from which Sudanese bombers sow terror. They are too frightened to cultivate their land and, as a result, face acute food shortages. Those who have fled into a matrix of squalid and overcrowded refugee camps along the southern side of the border gain little respite. There they face scarce access to food, water, medical assistance, and shelter. In recent weeks, humanitarian organizations have reported that more than four children per day are dying in the camps—well above the emergency threshold, according to the United Nations.

Despite the severity of the circumstances, I was moved on many occasions by the humility and resilience of those I encountered in this maelstrom. In April 2012, during a period of unusually high tension and violence along the border, I sat in the Pariang refugee camp inside a sweltering tent with a group of young Nuba women. They’d walked to Pariang from their homes across the border in South Kordofan, a journey that took nearly a week. They passed Yida, the largest camp for the Nuba people, opting instead to reach Pariang, a particularly desolate and isolated destination. They did so because they heard that Pariang would be the only refugee camp to offer secondary education. However, because of a spike in violence, Pariang’s teachers had fled, leaving hundreds of teenage Nuba with no access to education.

Inside their tent, with Sudanese bombers whining overhead, the girls braid each other’s hair and lament how the war interrupted their schooling, a pursuit they consider sacrosanct. “This war has got in the way of so many things for us,” says Kauser Mousa, 17. “We’ve come to Pariang hoping to continue our education. It is the most important thing for us. It is the only way for our people to make progress,” she adds, referring to the marginalization of the Nuba people by the Khartoum government. Between brush strokes, the girls speak in measured tones about the situation around them, often finding things to laugh about. As I collect my things, sweaty and disheveled, I ask the group if I may use their remarks in my reports. “You must,” Kauser exclaims. “The world must know what is happening here.”

Two thirds of Americans believe that genocide is preventable, and almost 70 percent think the United States should act to prevent or stop genocide and mass atrocities in other parts of the world, according to a new poll commissioned by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

These poll results were unveiled today in Washington D.C. at a symposium on ending genocide in the 21st century addressed by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, other senior government officials, experts on mass atrocities, and leading journalists. In her keynote address, Clinton said the United States and other governments had a responsibility to act to prevent genocide “before the match is struck” even though the course of action is not always clear.

“The questions of when and how to act are difficult,” Clinton told the gathering, organized by the Museum in cooperation with the Council on Foreign Relations and CNN. “There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Every situation requires a tailored and careful response.”

Clinton said that the Obama administration considered genocide prevention “a core national security interest” and moral responsibility, but this was “not code for military action.” She said that “force must remain a last resort” and listed a series of other, usually more appropriate foreign policy tools, including “diplomacy, financial sanctions, humanitarian assistance, [and] law enforcement measures.”

The poll on American attitudes towards genocide was conducted by the polling firm Penn Schoen Berland on the basis of a telephone survey of more than 1,000 Americans between June 30 and July 10, 2012. According to pollster Mark Penn it showed that 78 percent of Americans support U.S. military action to stop genocide, particularly if carried out in cooperation with other governments. Fifty-five percent are in favor of some kind of military action in Syria, where more than 10,000 people have been killed in an anti-government uprising over the last year.

“Americans believe that genocide is preventable,” Penn told the meeting. He said that the political and moral calculus for intervention to prevent genocide was changing “in an Internet society where everything can be captured on a cell phone.”

The poll suggested that six out of ten Americans approved military action to stop mass atrocities in Bosnia and Libya, and would have approved similar action in Rwanda and Darfur.

While the poll showed that 71 percent of Americans believe that it is “in the U.S. national interest” to prevent genocide, and 55 percent feel that international organizations have proven ineffective, a clear majority of Americans favor multilateral action over unilateral action. Fifty-three percent of those questioned said multilateral action was the most effective means of preventing or responding to genocide compared to only 10 percent who favored unilateral action.

Several speakers, including Secretary Clinton, called for the development of a long-term genocide prevention strategy, noting that it is difficult, if not impossible, to halt mass atrocities once they have already begun. The chairman of the National Intelligence Council, Christopher Kojm, said his analysts were working on the first-ever National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) to identify factors that play a role in mass violence, including scarce natural resources, economic crises, and rapidly changing technology.

Kojm said modern technology was proving to be a double-edged sword, providing ordinary citizens with the means of rapidly disseminating news about mass atrocities but also enabling governments to identify, detain, and otherwise harass dissidents. Modern information technology gives authoritarian governments “an unprecedented ability to monitor their own citizens,” he noted. “How this plays out will be one of the main topics we will be discussing in the NIE.”

Clinton took a more upbeat view of the impact of the new technology, saying it was changing the way the United States was detecting and responding to mass atrocities. She said the State Department was working on a project to detect the use of malicious software by foreign governments to target protestors “and then warn those being targeted.”

Other featured speakers included Holocaust historian Timothy Snyder and futurist Peter Schwartz who joined Kojm on a panel moderated by Washington Post Pulitzer-prize winner Dana Priest, examining the impact of economic, technological and demographic factors in causing genocide. CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer chaired a panel on new strategies for preventing genocide that included network entrepreneur Strive Masiyiwa, CNN Beirut correspondent Arwa Damon, military strategist Sarah Sewall, and former U.S. special envoy to Sudan Richard Williamson.

Watch Secretary Clinton's keynote address and Mr. Penn's presentation of the poll results.

This post was contributed by Museum fellow Michael Dobbs.

In a feature article in the July/August issue of Foreign Policy Magazine, Michael Dobbs, a research fellow at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, writes about former Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladic as he faces trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Mladic is charged with genocide and crimes against humanity carried out against Bosnia’s non-Serb population during the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s.

The mass killings and ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims that took place in Srebrenica allegedly on his orders resulted in what Dobbs calls “the greatest evil that has been perpetrated in Europe since World War II.” Dobbs seeks to answer the question of why such atrocities were able to occur.

Research for the trial has uncovered that Mladic “blamed the Muslims and the Croats for breaking up his beloved Yugoslavia,” allowing him to justify the mass killings as revenge. Dobb’s analysis of Mladic’s ascension to power and ordering of mass atrocities showed a man bred to fight a war, drunk with power and completely isolated from anything but distorted perceptions and propaganda.

Following his indictment for crimes against humanity in 1995, Mladic was able to survive openly without capture in Belgrade until 2002, at which time the Serbian government decided to cooperate with the war crimes tribunal. Mladic took refuge with his second cousin, known as Brane, whom Dobbs was able to interview. Brane describes Mladic’s waning health during the five years in which he resided secretly in the village of Lazarevo. During this period, Mladic declined from brutal general to “the fugitive who meekly surrendered to police.”

Read the article

Sixty-seven years after the Holocaust, genocide and crimes against humanity continue, as repressive regimes and cruel perpetrators target and kill innocent people around the world because of who they are. On July 24, 2012 the Museum will host a forward looking symposium to explore what can be done to prevent these atrocities in the future.

Join us for a live webcast of the event starting at 9 a.m. Eastern at act.ushmm.org/endgenocide.

The symposium will feature a keynote address by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Participants will include leaders from government, think tanks, business, academia, philanthropy, and the genocide prevention field, as well as the next generation of young leaders.

Search #endgenocide, for pre-symposium Twitter updates and live-tweets the day of the symposium or visit ushmm.org/endgenocide to learn more.

Watch this video to learn more about the symposium:

WASHINGTON, DC—On the first anniversary of the separation of Sudan into two sovereign states, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum registered deep concern over escalating cross-border violence as well as ongoing threats to civilian populations in both countries.

One year ago, the Museum joined with many others in the hope that the independence of South Sudan would usher in a new era for the peoples of Sudan and South Sudan, allowing them to live peacefully across a newly shared border. However, conflict persists on both sides of that border, amid continuing reports of atrocities and terror against civilian groups in both countries, particularly the Nuban people in Sudan.

“We are deeply concerned about the ongoing reports of indiscriminate violence against civilians in both Sudan and South Sudan,” said Michael Chertoff, chairman of the Committee on Conscience, which oversees the Museum’s genocide prevention efforts. “We had hoped that the independence of South Sudan might break the cycle of violence against civilians that has made this region among the deadliest in the world over the past three decades. However, the continuing failure of all parties to resolve their political conflicts is being borne on the backs of civilians.”

While both countries have launched deadly cross-border raids into the others’ territory, which have complicated efforts to reach a negotiated political settlement, the actions of the government of Sudan pose by far the greatest threat to civilians. The Khartoum-based government has a history of using brutal force against marginalized ethnic and racial groups along Sudan’s periphery. In particular, for the past 15 months, it has waged a vicious counterinsurgency campaign against rebels in the border states of Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile, in the course of which civilian noncombatants have also been targeted.

The Sudanese government’s tactics include indiscriminate aerial bombing intended to sow terror among the Nuban people, the obstruction of the delivery of medicines and foods and, according to human rights groups, extra-judicial killings of noncombatants. More than 500,000 people have been displaced or affected as a result of the fighting. The United Nations High Commission for Human Rights has alleged that war crimes have once again been committed by the government in this region, but efforts to monitor and document the crimes have been rebuffed by Khartoum.

“Unless the Sudanese government allows the uninterrupted flow of aid, tens of thousands of Nubans are at risk of starvation and disease. We call on the government of Sudan to allow international humanitarian access to the region,” said Chertoff.

These tactics recall previous efforts by the government of Sudan to suppress rebellion in Darfur, including scorched-earth campaigns against the Fur, Zaghawa, and Masalit peoples that reached their peak from 2003 to 2005. Over the past decade, some 2.5 million people have been displaced by the fighting, the overwhelming majority of whom are still unable to return home, fearing the threat of further atrocities or because their villages and livelihoods have been destroyed. Violence in Darfur continues and conditions for civilian populations remain dire.

A living memorial to the Holocaust, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum inspires citizens and leaders worldwide to confront hatred, prevent genocide, and promote human dignity. Federal support guarantees the Museum’s permanent place on the National Mall, and its far-reaching educational programs and global impact are made possible by generous donors. For more information, visit ushmm.org.

Watch a clip from this year's Aspen Ideas Festival, where Michael Abramowitz, Director of the Museum's genocide prevention program, discusses what role the U.S. and international community has in protecting civilians around the world from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing.

Abramowitz appears on a panel exploring the utility of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle that also features Yale Law School professor Stephen L. Carter, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dele Olojede, Princeton Professor of Politics and International Affairs Anne-Marie Slaughter and The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg.