NEWSBYMIKE ABRAMOWITZ AND SAM BELL

This is a guest post by Mike Abramowitz, Director, US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Committee on Conscience, and Sam Bell, Executive Director, Genocide Intervention Network.

It’s been said that the bookshelves of Washington think tanks are littered with commission reports gathering dust. That must not be the case with the recommendations of the Genocide Prevention Task Force, issued a year ago on the eve of the anniversary of U.N. approval of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

The Task Force, convened by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and the American Academy of Diplomacy and co-chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and former Defense Secretary William S. Cohen, sought to remedy one of the most vexing problems of modern statecraft: six decades after the approval of the convention, the world’s governments have failed to institute reliable mechanisms for preventing the recurrence of genocide and other forms of mass atrocities, as anyone familiar with the sad stories of Cambodia, Rwanda and Darfur, Sudan is well aware.

The Albright-Cohen report powerfully made the case that genocide is preventable; it does not stem from irrational, ancient hatreds. Preventing it is not simply a humanitarian imperative; it is in the national security interest of the United States. The failure to halt genocide in places like Rwanda has badly hurt American credibility in the world and invited the kind of extremism that has stoked widespread violence and other transnational threats.