Helen Fein 

For the past 14 years, the ISG has highlighted contemporary genocide, potential genocide and terrible violations of human rights crying for international attention. And regularly we have questioned US and international responsibility for tolerating these and encouraged reflection on humanitarian intervention.

The first issue of this Newsletter (Spring 1988) asked:  "Can We Save Endangered Species of Peoples?"-- Afghans and Baha'is. Michael Riesman and Charles Norchi (Yale Law School) made a legal case based on the UN Genocide Convention (UNGC) to show that what the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan and the Soviet Union were doing there was genocide: depopulation (through atrocities, destruction of food supplies, irrigation canals and wells), attacks on religion, forced removal of children, and strategic attacks on society.  Jan Goodwin, a journalist who had gone to Afghanistan under cover, agreed and observed that the involuntary shipment of children to the Soviet Union (outlawed under Article 2e of the UNGC was "no different from when blond, blue-eyed children from Slavic nations were shipped across Europe for the Nazi cause."   However, Barnett Rubin (then at Human Rights 
Watch), in an article entitled "Afghanistan: Over A Million Dead," did not call this genocide, writing that "The Soviet 
actions that caused these effects did not result from racial or ethnic hatred, although the experience of the war itself naturally generated such feelings among some Soviet soldiers.  The Soviet intention in invading Afghanistan and trying to subdue the resistance was not to destroy any group, in whole or in part.  Their goal, rather, was to subdue armed opposition to a regime they had imposed on the country."  The differences between Rubin and Riesman and Norchi appeared not to stem from the evidence but differences between their  construction of intent to destroy (UNGC, art. 2) a group.

The ISG  has discussed Iraq in at least three of its conferences and in  four issues of this Newsletter: Fall 1988 (#2) Vera Beaudin Saeedpour, "Iraq Attacks to Destroy the Kurds"; Fall 1989 (#4) Saeedpour, "Iraq Still Attacks the Kurds; the Reasons Why" (an expanded paper of Saeedpour's was printed in Genocide Watch 1991 based on the ISG 1989 conference); Spring 1991 (#7), a symposium on the crisis in Iraq and humanitarian intervention with Barbara Harff, Vera Saeedpour, and Samir al-Khalil [Kanan Makiya];  and Spring 1994 (#12), Michael Wood, "Destruction of the Marsh Arabs' Habitat in Iraq: Saddam's Latest War."
 

Yet such discourse on genocide and massacre has generally made little impact on the people who make foreign policy here and elsewhere. The "realists" who make foreign policy and dominate the security discourse presume national interest should alone motivate intervention and  have failed (and continue to fail) to take into account the link between totalitarian  governments prone to genocide and aggression. Both Iraq and Afghanistan (under the Taliban) embodied many characteristics of totalitarianism (as depicted by Hannah Arendt) although they were 
very different regimes--Iraq secular, Afghanistan militant Islamic; Iraq integrating women, Afghanistan segregating them.  

US indirect and direct interventions motivated by national interest occurred in both--to aid Afghan rebels in the 1980's, forcing the USSR to leave Afghanistan in 1989 and (leading a UN sponsored coalition) to reverse Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1991.  Yet the lack of American attention to what would happen later allowed competing  warlords vying for power in Afghanistan to reduce it to anarchy and Saddam Hussein to  remain in power in 
Iraq. Unforeseen but anticipatable consequences of these decisions have led to great suffering in both countries and a new intervention in Afghanistan.

The gross violations of human rights and disorder in Afghanistan prepared the grounds for the rise of the Taliban and its systematic denial of fundamental rights to half the population, "gender apartheid,"-- leading one of every eight women surveyed   to contemplate suicide according to a Physicians for Human Rights 2001 survey-- and persecution of minorities, imperiling many groups. The Taliban welcomed Osama Bin Laden and allowed him to 
train militants in techniques of destruction, facilitating  mass murder before and during September 11, 2001. The latter act triggered the recent  US intervention which led to the flight of the Taliban  and the installation of a new government.

After the Gulf War, the documentation of genocide against the Kurds gleaned from captured documents should have prompted states to indict Saddam for genocide (Human Rights Watch made the case in Iraq's Crime of Genocide, 1993) but they did not do so. His repeated incursions against the Kurds and a genocidal attack on 
the environment on which the Marsh Arabs depend have been mostly overlooked by the western media and the public who have focused on the media's magnification of the purported effect of sanctions.  What Milton Leitenberg shows in this issue is that the Iraqi public's endurance of any nutritional or public health deficiency is directly due to the decisions made by Saddam Hussein who has used his wealth to build up his outlawed stock of weapons of mass destruction which Iraq agreed to destroy in 1991 rather than for food, medicine, and public health. 

The reasoning many critics of sanctions make that Event A is the necessary cause of Event B (which follows A) is  not warranted. Amyarta Sen shows (in Development as Freedom, 1999, and earlier works) that famine and hunger are produced by the pattern of entitlements, not lack of food. Entitlements depend on political and economic decisions-- decisions on expenditures, imports of food, its distribution, pricing, and wages. Twentieth century famine have only occurred among undemocratic regimes (most often among communist states)  but never happened under self-governing democratic states in which the public has a voice to check government policies.

Channeling public attention to Iraqi suffering (which Saddam Hussein produces) enables Iraq to argue for annulment of the sanctions.  The west is falsely accused of genocide against Iraq while Iraq uses the funds accruing from illegal sales of oil in order to expand production of weapons of mass destruction rather than for food or medicine.

Now the issue of suffering of Iraqi citizens, misattributed by many well-meaning citizens to sanctions, has been used to deprecate the end-goal of sanctions, eliminating Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.  Why should we care if they have such weapons, many ask, who point out that many countries have nuclear arms now.  We should care for several reasons:
a) totalitarian states are much more likely to be aggressors than other states; b) Iraq has used chemical weapons against its citizens and its enemies and continues to produce them;
c) toleration of Iraq's defiance of sanctions diminishes the credibility of any arms-control regime that is negotiated; and
d) in the present condition created by global terrorism, weapons of mass destruction raise terrible risks and profound fears.

This is not to argue for or against any hypothetical intervention or for or against sustaining sanctions in Iraq but for  new requirements for interveners. While  intervention by the US before the end of the Cold War deservedly had a bad name, since the end of the Cold War the US and the west have been instigated by a new doctrine of humanitarian intervention to prevent genocide and massive violations of human rights. In such cases, the lack of sufficient force to restructure the government (or "nation-building") after interventions can lead to worse 
consequences than does minimal force.

What we must learn  is that  intervention -- for whatever reason -- and responsibility should go together.  It is not only humanitarian intervention, as the late Neal Riemer proposed, that requires the intervenor to help establish a "rights-protective" regime--but also interventions in the name of national security.  We did not fight World War 2 to deter persecution and genocide but we reconstructed the governments of Germany and Japan in ways that made sure such policies would not happen again, served their citizens well and protected many the US and other nations.  Values, human rights and national interest coincided.

Had we taken responsibility for reconstructing the government of Afghanistan in 1989 or in Iraq in 1991 (or facilitated the downfall of Saddam when there were rebellions in 1993 and 1996), the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq would  not have had to suffer the brutality, oppression and needless deaths over the last decade and we would be safer today.