Televised genocide

UNESCO Courier, Oct, 1998 by Rony Brauman

Fifty years after the Second World War, the international community is watching crimes against humanity in Rwanda and Yugoslavia

Between the Leninakan earthquake in December 1988 and the Gulf War in 1991, the world seemed to have undergone a fundamental change. A global society was said to be emerging with a "new international humanitarian order". The United Nations General Assembly adopted its earliest resolutions on humanitarian assistance just a few days before the first intervention of this kind on Soviet soil after the deadly tremor in Armenia. The following year opened a new era, with the fall of the Berlin wall, the rising number of pro-democracy movements in Africa and Security Council resolutions imposing the help of humanitarian organizations to save the Kurds of Iraq. The end of the Cold War was supposed to usher in an epoch of peace and democracy made possible and strengthened by the information revolution.

The possibility of "seeing" world events unfold live on television fulfilled the dream of both postwar periods. As in 1918 and in 1945, the cry "never again" rang out in the 1990s. But it did happen again. Even as international organizations were celebrating the advent of a world re-united, fascistic militias began dismembering Yugoslavia along ethnic lines while a racist government in Rwanda unleashed death squads, setting off a frenzy of genocidal killing. Then there were the deadly implosion of Somali society, civil strife in post-Soviet Afghanistan and the war that has ravaged southern Sudan for 15 years, to mention just a few of the most devastating conflicts.

Could the new world order prevent these crimes from reoccurring - crimes against humanity which the international community had long thought banished at Nuremberg after the Second World War? Certainly not, unless we assume that they were just consequences of the East-West conflict or the results of obscure misunderstandings. These assumptions ignore the central importance of local political factors. And yet this is precisely the illusion maintained by a Western conception of the world which is constantly presented as universal.

This same denial of politics continued, although in different forms, in the crises of Bosnia and Rwanda. These conflicts were not a local stage for a global power struggle. They were about battling tribes driven by obscure ethnic impulses that seemed to date from another age. They were no longer represented as geopolitical conflicts in which peoples were held hostage in a rivalry that had nothing to do with them. Instead, they were presented by images of chaos and furor, in which tribes in the grip of primitive passions slaughter each other for enigmatic gains.

However, this perspective forgets that the world wars started as fires ignited and stoked by Europe to the point of suicide. Other people's wars, like those raging today, are always considered insane. It also forgets that technology, including communication technology, is morally neutral. In other words, it can be used for high-minded as well as evil purposes. Lastly, it also disregards the fact that while Western countries, and more broadly the international powers, cannot be held accountable for all the horrors of the world, they bear part of the responsibility - one that this metaphysical and moralizing vision conveniently avoids.

We live in virtual and widespread proximity due to technological progress that has supposedly turned the world into a "global village". Everyone is everyone else's neighbour. But the possibility of learning about our contemporaries' misfortunes as they happen seems to be more overwhelming than stimulating, probably because it insidiously undermines our capacity for indignation. Perhaps most importantly, it underscores our weakness all the more cruelly. We are simultaneously "giants" in terms of information and "dwarfs" in terms of action.

The utopian dream of a world made transparent by technology as well as the pseudo-realism underlining the political actions and reasons of states represent two symmetrical ways of denying politics. We need to move beyond these two tactics used to retreat from the world. Every day, we must re-invent politics in constructing a common world and a forum for deliberation. This is by no means a recipe for overcoming destructive impulses, but the only way we can predict and prepare for them. It may also be called responsibility.