To stop genocide, we first need to recognise it when it’s happening

 In September 2017, I often found myself standing on the banks of the Naf River, the border between Bangladesh and Myanmar, in tears and in utter despair, feeling absolutely powerless. Tens of thousands of Rohingya refugees streamed past me, and I could see their villages burning across the river.

For weeks, survivors told me the most horrific accounts: mothers had seen their husbands shot in front of them, their children clubbed to death so the army could save on bullets, and were then raped and beaten unconscious, left to die in their homes set alight. Over 700,000 Rohingya fled their homes in just a few weeks, and thousands were brutally murdered by the Myanmar military.

There is a legal term for what I was witnessing: the crime of crimes, genocide. Myanmar’s rulers made no secret of their intention to rid the country of its Muslim Rohingya minority, only they refused to even use the name Rohingya. They prohibited United Nations officials and diplomats from using the term, because they claimed the Rohingya didn’t even exist. According to them, the Rohingya were Bangladeshi invaders, most of them terrorists, a pest that needed to be eradicated.

As a war crimes investigator for nearly twenty years, I had seen and documented atrocities and crimes against humanity across the world, including other genocides and atrocities in places such as Kosovo, Darfur, and the Central African Republic. But the reason for my despair and feeling of hopelessness at the Naf River was that despite the clear evidence of what was happening, despite all of the reports and evidence, no one apart from the Rohingya themselves and the organisation I currently work for, Fortify Rights, was willing to call what was happening a genocide, let alone take any significant action to stop it. In the midst of all the slaughter, the world was literally looking away.

Of course, such reluctance to call a spade a spade is not unprecedented: the Clinton administration infamously engaged in all kinds of word games to avoid calling the mass killings of some 800,000 people in Rwanda a genocide, claiming that “acts of genocide” may have occurred, but that they weren’t sure it was a genocide. The same happened in Darfur in 2005. Governments have repeatedly treated the word “genocide” not as a legal alarm bell, but as a political trapdoor. Even the world’s main human rights organisations – Human Rights Watch, where I worked as Emergency Director for nearly two decades and Amnesty International – are often reluctant to determine that a genocide is taking place.

There is a political reason for this reluctance. Following our common commitment to “Never again” allow a genocide to take place after the Holocaust, which killed six million Jews and millions of others, the world adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948, which places a legal obligation on states to act to prevent genocide when there is a serious risk of it occurring. After he failed to act during the Rwandan genocide, President Clinton did intervene in the Bosnian conflict to stop acts of genocide, albeit too late to save the more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims massacred at Srebrenica in July 1995.

Over the long term, long after the killings, international courts have often determined that genocide took place. The ad hoc International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the Former Yugoslavia convicted some of the main commanders of genocide, and the International Court of Justice is currently considering state responsibility for genocide in cases concerning Myanmar and Gaza.

Rohingya refugees gather to play football at the Kutupalong refugee camp in Ukhia. ‘Governments have repeatedly treated the word “genocide” not as a legal alarm bell, but as a political trapdoor’ (AFP/Getty)

But what the world needs is an impartial, non-political way to determine when genocide is taking place, while it is taking place, so the world can act to stop the killings and save lives. That was the very objective of the Genocide Convention, and it is why the word “prevention” appears in its title. History has shown that we cannot leave this decision in the hands of policymakers and politicians, who will too often shy away from a genocide determination for political expediency, economic reasons, or simply in order not to be obliged to act.

This is why the UK’s Genocide Determination Bill, introduced by Lord Alton and due for second reading on July 17, is of such momentous importance. The Bill establishes an independent judicial process to determine whether genocide is taking place, has taken place, or whether there is a serious risk of genocide in a particular context, providing the British government with a determination grounded in evidence, not political convenience. It will also then require – by law – that the Government act upon that determination, to do what it should under the Genocide Convention: prevent genocide from continuing and punish the perpetrators.

We live in a dangerously unstable world full of conflict, from the Middle East to Ukraine to Sudan. The people of Darfur are currently suffering what may be their second genocide in two decades, and our international institutions built to prevent mass atrocities and world war are under threat. Lord Alton’s Genocide Determination Bill is a crucial step forward in reasserting our commitment to international justice, and our pledge to never again allow a genocide to take place.

Peter Bouckaert is a Senior Director at Fortify Rights, an award-winning human rights organisation that has worked at the forefront of the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar.