the human province

The French Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales, along with the French research institution, CNRS and Sciences-Po, have begun an Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence with the help of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. The project is under the direction of Jacques Sémelin, whose 2005 book on genocide (which I have but have yet to read) has recently been translated into English and published by Columbia.

The site's still pretty bare bones for the moment, but it's designed to provide information of mass violence based chronologically and geographically, so when it's done, you'll be able to click on any country you want to get information about mass violence in that country. There's also an encyclopedia of terms that looks to be pretty complete.

Strangely enough, for a French initiative, it's only available in English for the moment. The international advisory board includes scholars like Omer Bartov, Samantha Power, Frank Chalk, Antonio Cassesse, Ben Kiernen, René Lemarchand, William Schabas and Eric Weitz, just to name a few.

I spend a lot of time getting annoyed when people throw around the word "genocide" or "holocaust" when it's not warranted. This often means rebuking Lebanese and Palestinian friends who want to call the Israeli occupation a genocide. The occupation is a lot of things, none of them savory, but a genocide it is not, and calling it one cheapens the word.

So you can imagine my surprise when I saw last night that Israel's deputy defense minister, Matan Vilnai, had threatened Palestinians in Gaza with a "shoah":

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A senior Israeli defense official said on Friday that Palestinians firing rockets from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip would bring upon themselves what he termed a "shoah," the Hebrew word for holocaust or disaster.

The word is rarely used in Israel outside discussions of the Nazi Holocaust of Jews. Many Israelis are loath to countenance its use to describe other contemporary events. Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said the Palestinians faced "new Nazis."

Israeli air strikes have killed at least 33 Gazans, including five children, in the past two days. The army, which carried out additional air strikes on Friday, said most of those killed were militants.

I'm no Hebraist, but according to Reuters and common sense, "shoah," like "holocaust" isn't a word that's tossed around lightly in Israel. And whenever there's a comment by someone like Ahmadinejad, quoting Khomeini, saying that "the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time," we get Israel supporters clamoring for the world to denounce the genocidal intent of the Iranian regime. So will these same people condemn Israel's even more explicit language?

Just the other day on the Olin Institute's Middle Eastern Strategy at Harvard blog, Stephen Peter Rosen was making a fuss about a comment that Ahmadinejad made calling Israel a "black and dirty microbe," informing us that this change in discourse could be "associated with biological attacks or other unconventional mass killings." 

So since Rosen says that he's interested in tracking the discourse between Israel and Iran, I can imagine that the Harvard blog will soon have a post up warning of the impending "shoah" to be visited upon the Gazans. After all, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, right?

Of course not. If we look a the comments to Rosen's post, we're given the simple answer by Harvard's specialist on Armenia, James Russell, that "Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah are obviously murderous and crazy." I knew there was a simple answer!

UPDATE: Melanie Phillips at the Spectator is now claiming that "In Hebrew, the word ‘shoah’ is never used to mean ‘holocaust’ or ‘genocide’ because of the acute historical resonance." (Italics hers.) Someone should get Claude Lanzmann on the phone to let him know he's made a terrible mistake.

And for the record, the Israeli daily Ha'aretz has this to say about the remark:

Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai went as far as threatening a "shoah," the Hebrew word for holocaust or disaster. The word is generally used to refer to the Nazi Holocaust, but a spokesman for Vilnai said the deputy defense minister used the word in the sense of "disaster," saying "he did not mean to make any allusion to the genocide."

It's already unfortunate that the ADL had to be shamed into calling the Armenian Genocide by its proper name (and this only in a qualified and circuitous fashion). And I also find it disconcerting that what is ostensibly an American anti-racism organization should cite Turkey's status as a "staunch friend of Israel" as a reason why not to recognize the Armenian genocide. (The open letter that states this has since been removed from the ADL website and replaced with the new open letter that uses the word genocide. It can, however, be found in Google's cache.):

We believe that legislative efforts outside of Turkey are counterproductive to the goal of having Turkey itself come to grips with its past. We take no position on what action Congress should take on House Resolution 106. The Jewish community in Turkey has clearly expressed to us and other major American Jewish organizations its concerns about the impact of Congressional action on them, and we cannot ignore those concerns. We are also keenly aware that Turkey is a key strategic ally and friend of the United States and a staunch friend of Israel, and that in the struggle between Islamic extremists and moderate Islam, Turkey is the most critical country in the world.

But I'm somehow even more disappointed that people billed as serious historians of the Middle East like Michael Rubin, using rhetoric that is strikingly similar to Ankara's, have taken to reducing the historical reality of the Armenian genocide to "the narrative of Diaspora communities," giving the impression that the latter is at odds with the accounts of respected historians.

The Anti-Defamation League has decided to label the events surrounding the deaths of Armenians during World War I as 'genocide.'

There can be absolutely no argument that a million or more Armenians died during World War I.  But, on issue of whether genocide—a deliberate plan to eradicate a people—occurred or not, there is a big gap between the narrative of Diaspora communities and that of prominent historians.  The historical debate is more complex. 

It is a shame that Abraham Foxman has made such a decision on political rather than historical grounds.

It's then particularly ironic that Rubin laments that Foxman has made this decision on "political rather than historical grounds," when the stated reasons that Foxman originally gave for opposing the label were explicitly political in the first place.

Why is there no backlash from genocide scholars against people like Rubin? He has a prominent perch at the American Enterprise Institute and as editor of the Middle East Quarterly, which is published by Pipes's Middle East Forum. He should be publicly outed as a negationist, in the way that he would likely do to anyone who denied the Jewish genocide.

Raul Hilberg, one of the greatest Holocaust scholars, has died. Genocide scholars the world around are indebted to his tireless work.

The New Republic has an interesting piece out now about the battle in the US Congress about the Armenian genocide. The fight is over a piece of legislation that officially recognizes the Armenian genocide committed by the Ottomans in 1915.

From my research and the work of my colleagues who are specialists on the Armenian genocide, the historical record is pretty indisputable. Some of the details may not be, but the existence of the genocide itself seems fairly clear cut. This being said, I'm really wary of legislating history, particularly as it is done in Turkey and much of Western Europe. (In Turkey it is against the law to speak of the Armenian genocide, whereas in France, it is illegal to deny the Shoah, and Bernard Lewis has already been taken to court for denying the Armenian genocide.)

These questions should be debated in academic conferences and journals by historians, not in the halls of Capitol Hill by lobbyists. In any case, the Armenian question is very important to the US, given its strategic importance for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan:

Strange as it may be to find a World War I massacre on the 2007 Washington agenda, even more bizarre is the possibility that it may precipitate an international crisis. At one March House subcommittee hearing, Adam Schiff got a rare opportunity to grill Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Angry over the Bush administration's opposition to the Armenian genocide resolution, Schiff pressed Rice: "Is there any doubt in your mind that the murder of a million and a half Armenians between 1915 and 1923 constituted genocide?" Schiff even pointedly appealed to Rice's background in "academia." But the ever-disciplined Rice wouldn't bite. "Congressman, I come out of academia. But I'm secretary of state now. And I think that the best way to have this proceed is for ... the Turks and the Armenians to come to their own terms about this."

What Rice didn't say is that the Turks, should their lobbying firepower fail to stop the genocide bill from moving forward, have an even mightier weapon to brandish: the war in Iraq. As they did in 2000, the Turks are hinting they will shut down Incirlik, a far more dire threat now that Incirlik supplies U.S. forces occupying Iraq. Administration officials also fear Turkey might close the Habur Gate, a border point through which U.S. supplies flow into northern Iraq. In an April letter to congressional leaders, Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates bluntly warned that a House resolution "could harm American troops in the field [and] constrain our ability to supply our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan."

That prospect may even be dragging U.S. troops themselves into the Turkish counteroffensive. Or so says Frank Pallone, a New Jersey Democrat and lead co-sponsor of the genocide resolution. "[The Turks] have had American soldiers call members of Congress and say, Don't vote for this, because I am going to be threatened in Iraq,'" Pallone says. (A Turkish embassy spokesman denied knowledge of this.)

Of course, this is probably just a lot of Turkish bluster. Before France passed its own Armenian legislation, the Turks had threatened that the bill would cause relations between the two countries to be suspended, among other things. In the end though, nothing happened. I suspect that the Turks know what side their bread is buttered on and would find that the smug satisfaction of punishing the US for calling them on their genocide denial would be far outweighed by the consequences of pissing the US off in Iraq. For instance, the US is currently in a delicate balancing act between the Iraqi Kurds and Ankara, and if Turkey were to make the US an enemy, I imagine that Ankara wouldn't appreciate the consequent shift in American policy in Kurdistan.  

I still haven't read UNEP's report on Darfur (pdf), due to a lack of time (it's 358 pages) and a lot of other lengthy reading on my plate these days. I have, however, followed some of the press coverage, which makes it sound like the genocide in Darfur is the result of purely ecological factors, including desertification, water shortages and global warming. As it happens, I've worked with UNEP on a publication before, and I'm inclined to believe that their report is a lot more nuanced than the press coverage gives it credit for. But I'll have to save that final judgement for when I have the time to sit down and read it.

In any case, the fact that environmental concerns and competition for resources places a part in conflict is an obvious point, it's how much of an impact these concerns have that is at issue. Lydia Polgreen, whose coverage of Sudan in the Times has been very good, has a piece in this week's Week in Review that takes a quick look at the underground lake recently discovered in Darfur. She quotes Alex de Waal and John Prendergast, both of whom know a lot about Sudan, in order to illustrate her point that it's less the ecological strain that's to fault for conflict in Sudan and more how that problem is dealt with:

A scientific explanation for the problem (environmental degradation) along with a tidy technological solution (irrigation) gratifies the modern humanitarian impulse.

But the history of Sudan, a grim chronicle of civil war, famine, coups and despotism, gives ample reason to be skeptical.

“Like all resources water can be used for good or ill,” said Alex de Waal, a scholar who has studied the impact of climate variation in Sudan and who witnessed the 1984-85 famine that is often cited as the beginning of the ecological crisis gripping Darfur. “It can be a blessing or also a curse. If the government acts true to form and tries to create some sort of oasis in the desert and control who settles there, that would simply be an extension of the crisis, not a solution.”

The droughts that gripped Sudan in the 1980s, and the migrations and other social changes they forced, have doubtless played a role in the conflict by increasing competition for water and land between farmers, who tend to be non-Arab, and herders, many of whom are Arabs. But an environmental catastrophe cannot become a violent cataclysm without a powerful human hand to guide it in that direction.

“These wider environmental factors don’t have impact in and of themselves” in terms of fomenting conflict, Mr. de Waal said. “The question is how they are managed.”

[...]

“Climate change and the lack of rain are much less important than the land-use patterns promoted by the government of Sudan and the development policies of World Bank and I.M.F., which were focused on intensive agricultural expansion that really mined the soils and left a lot of land unusable,” said Mr. Prendergast, who has been studying Sudan for 20 years. “That was probably the principal impetus for a lot of intra-Darfur migration in the decades leading up to the conflict in Darfur.”

She then goes on to make a point that I've been harping on for a while now:

A report released last year by the Coalition for International Justice on the role that oil and mechanized farming have played in human rights abuses in Sudan concluded: “The predominant root of conflict in Sudan is the instability that results from the systemic abuse of the rural (and recently urbanized) poor at the hands of the economic and political elites of central Sudan.”

In this analysis, the heart of the Darfur conflict, as in all conflicts in Sudan, is the battle for control of resources and riches, but not between farmers and herders, northerners and southerners, Christians and Muslims, or Arabs and non-Arabs.

It is a conflict between those at the center of the country, the elites who have controlled Sudan and its wealth for the past century and a half, and the desperately poor people who beg for scraps from the periphery.

Until that equation changes, many analysts argue, nothing else will.

Here's another genocide-related event in the international community, which gives me the impression that something's rotten in, well, the Hague:

Serbia, the heir to Yugoslavia, obtained the tribunal's permission to keep parts of the archives out of the public eye. Citing national security, its lawyers blacked out many sensitive -- those who have seen them say incriminating -- pages. Judges and lawyers at the war crimes tribunal could see the censored material, but it was barred from the tribunal’s public records.

Now, lawyers and others who were involved in Serbia's bid for secrecy say that, at the time, Belgrade made its true objective clear: to keep the full military archives from the International Court of Justice, where Bosnia was suing Serbia for genocide. And they say Belgrade’s goal was achieved in February, when the international court, which is also in The Hague, declared Serbia not guilty of genocide, and absolved it from paying potentially enormous damages.

Lawyers interviewed in The Hague and Belgrade said that the outcome might well have been different had the International Court of Justice pressed for access to the full archives, and legal scholars and human rights groups said it was deeply troubling that the judges did not subpoena the documents directly from Serbia. At one point, the court rebuffed a Bosnian request that it demand the full documents, saying that ample evidence was available in tribunal records.

"It's a question that nags loudly," Diane Orentlicher, a law professor at American University in Washington, said recently in The Hague. "Why didn’t the court request the full documents? The fact that they were blacked out clearly implies these passages would have made a difference."

The ruling -- which was binding and final -- was in many ways meticulous, and acknowledged that the 15 judges had not seen the censored archives. But it did not say why the court did not order Serbia to provide the full documents.

The first-hand experience I've had at the UN and what I know of the tribunals in the Hague and Arusha have convinced me that it would be naïve to think that there are no deals being made in the smoke-filled hotel rooms.

This probably has something to do with Serbia's wishes to join the EU and the fact that a guilty verdict would probably ruin the country financially. But still, this seems unacceptable to me.

I've seen first hand how politics (office and international) can override common sense or even doing the right thing in a large bureaucracy. I shouldn't be surprised by stories like this anymore, and I guess I'm not.

But still. Shame on Ankara, and shame on the UN for kowtowing:

The United Nations dismantled an exhibit on the Rwandan genocide and postponed its scheduled opening by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Monday after the Turkish mission objected to references to the Armenian genocide in Turkey at the time of World War I.

The panels of graphics, photos and statements had been installed in the visitors lobby on Thursday by the British-based Aegis Trust. The trust campaigns for the prevention of genocide and runs a center in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, memorializing the 500,000 victims of the massacres there 13 years ago.

Hours after the show was assembled, however, a Turkish diplomat spotted offending words in a section entitled "What is genocide?" and raised objections.

The passage said that "following World War I, during which one million Armenians were murdered in Turkey," Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer credited with coining the word genocide, "urged the League of Nations to recognize crimes of barbarity as international crimes."

James Smith, the chief executive of Aegis, said he was told by the United Nations on Saturday night that the sentence would have to be eliminated or the exhibition would be struck.

...Mr. Smith said he was "very disappointed because this was supposed to talk about the lessons drawn from Rwanda and point up that what is happening in Darfur is the cost of inaction."

I never thought I'd be able to ask this question, but have you read Angelina Jolie's op-ed in The Washington Post today? The truth be told, it's not any better or any worse than most other pieces I've read in the mainstream press. And to her credit, she (unlike most people who have an opinion about Darfur, myself included) has actually been there.

Like most other proponents of intervention, she doesn't say exactly what she thinks that would entail, but she does come out as a strong supporter of the ICC accusations.

I think it was Bono who once said (more or less), "Celebrity is a currency, and I want to spend mine well." I have to say that I couldn't agree more, and if Angelina Jolie wants to spend hers on Darfur, then I say more power to her.

Here's some disconcerting but unsurprising news about human empathy and statistics, or "numbers and nerves":

Follow your intuition and act? When it comes to genocide, forget it. It doesn't work, says a University of Oregon psychologist. The large numbers of reported deaths represent dry statistics that fail to spark emotion and feeling and thus fail to motivate actions. Even going from one to two victims, feeling and meaning begin to fade, he said.

In a session Friday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science devoted to "Numbers and Nerves," Paul Slovic, a UO professor and president of Decision Research, a non-profit research institute in Eugene, Ore., urged a review and overhaul of the 1948 Genocide Convention, mandated by much of the world after the Holocaust in World War II. "It has obviously failed, because it has never been invoked to intervene in genocide," Slovic said.

Slovic is studying the issue from a psychological perspective, trying to determine how people can utilize both the moral intuition that genocide is wrong and moral reasoning to reach not only an outcry but also demand intervention. "We have to understand what it is in our makeup -- psychologically, socially, politically and institutionally -- that has allowed genocide to go unabated for a century," he said. "If we don't answer that question and use the answer to change things, we will see another century of horrible atrocities around the world."

...In Slovic's latest research, evidence is mounting for an even more disturbing 'collapse model' that he described in his talk. "This model appears to be more accurate than the psychophysical model in describing our response to genocide," he said. "We have these large numbers of deaths occurring, and we are doing nothing."

His new research follows up an Israeli study published in 2005 in which subjects were presented three photos. One depicted eight children who needed $300,000 in medical intervention to save their lives. Another photo depicted just one child who could be helped with $300,000. Participants were most willing to donate for one child's medical care. The level of giving declined dramatically for donating to help the entire group.

Slovic and colleagues Daniel Vastfjäll and Ellen Peters used the same approach but narrowed the focus. Participants in Sweden were shown a photo of a starving African girl, her individual story and the conditions of the nation in which she lives. Another photo contained the same information but for a starving boy. A third photo showed both children. The feelings of sympathy for each individual child were almost equal, but dropped when they were considered together. Donations followed the same pattern, being lower for two needy children than for either individually.

"The studies just described suggest a disturbing psychological tendency," Slovic said. "Our capacity to feel is limited." Even at two, he added, people start to lose it.

If we see the beginning of the collapse of feeling at just two individuals, "it is no wonder that at 200,000 deaths the feeling is gone."

The French Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales, along with the French research institution, CNRS and Sciences-Po, have begun an Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence with the help of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. The project is under the direction of Jacques Sémelin, whose 2005 book on genocide (which I have but have yet to read) has recently been translated into English and published by Columbia.

The site's still pretty bare bones for the moment, but it's designed to provide information of mass violence based chronologically and geographically, so when it's done, you'll be able to click on any country you want to get information about mass violence in that country. There's also an encyclopedia of terms that looks to be pretty complete.

Strangely enough, for a French initiative, it's only available in English for the moment. The international advisory board includes scholars like Omer Bartov, Samantha Power, Frank Chalk, Antonio Cassesse, Ben Kiernen, René Lemarchand, William Schabas and Eric Weitz, just to name a few.

I spend a lot of time getting annoyed when people throw around the word "genocide" or "holocaust" when it's not warranted. This often means rebuking Lebanese and Palestinian friends who want to call the Israeli occupation a genocide. The occupation is a lot of things, none of them savory, but a genocide it is not, and calling it one cheapens the word.

So you can imagine my surprise when I saw last night that Israel's deputy defense minister, Matan Vilnai, had threatened Palestinians in Gaza with a "shoah":

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A senior Israeli defense official said on Friday that Palestinians firing rockets from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip would bring upon themselves what he termed a "shoah," the Hebrew word for holocaust or disaster.

The word is rarely used in Israel outside discussions of the Nazi Holocaust of Jews. Many Israelis are loath to countenance its use to describe other contemporary events. Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said the Palestinians faced "new Nazis."

Israeli air strikes have killed at least 33 Gazans, including five children, in the past two days. The army, which carried out additional air strikes on Friday, said most of those killed were militants.

I'm no Hebraist, but according to Reuters and common sense, "shoah," like "holocaust" isn't a word that's tossed around lightly in Israel. And whenever there's a comment by someone like Ahmadinejad, quoting Khomeini, saying that "the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time," we get Israel supporters clamoring for the world to denounce the genocidal intent of the Iranian regime. So will these same people condemn Israel's even more explicit language?

Just the other day on the Olin Institute's Middle Eastern Strategy at Harvard blog, Stephen Peter Rosen was making a fuss about a comment that Ahmadinejad made calling Israel a "black and dirty microbe," informing us that this change in discourse could be "associated with biological attacks or other unconventional mass killings." 

So since Rosen says that he's interested in tracking the discourse between Israel and Iran, I can imagine that the Harvard blog will soon have a post up warning of the impending "shoah" to be visited upon the Gazans. After all, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, right?

Of course not. If we look a the comments to Rosen's post, we're given the simple answer by Harvard's specialist on Armenia, James Russell, that "Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah are obviously murderous and crazy." I knew there was a simple answer!

UPDATE: Melanie Phillips at the Spectator is now claiming that "In Hebrew, the word ‘shoah’ is never used to mean ‘holocaust’ or ‘genocide’ because of the acute historical resonance." (Italics hers.) Someone should get Claude Lanzmann on the phone to let him know he's made a terrible mistake.

And for the record, the Israeli daily Ha'aretz has this to say about the remark:

Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai went as far as threatening a "shoah," the Hebrew word for holocaust or disaster. The word is generally used to refer to the Nazi Holocaust, but a spokesman for Vilnai said the deputy defense minister used the word in the sense of "disaster," saying "he did not mean to make any allusion to the genocide."

It's already unfortunate that the ADL had to be shamed into calling the Armenian Genocide by its proper name (and this only in a qualified and circuitous fashion). And I also find it disconcerting that what is ostensibly an American anti-racism organization should cite Turkey's status as a "staunch friend of Israel" as a reason why not to recognize the Armenian genocide. (The open letter that states this has since been removed from the ADL website and replaced with the new open letter that uses the word genocide. It can, however, be found in Google's cache.):

We believe that legislative efforts outside of Turkey are counterproductive to the goal of having Turkey itself come to grips with its past. We take no position on what action Congress should take on House Resolution 106. The Jewish community in Turkey has clearly expressed to us and other major American Jewish organizations its concerns about the impact of Congressional action on them, and we cannot ignore those concerns. We are also keenly aware that Turkey is a key strategic ally and friend of the United States and a staunch friend of Israel, and that in the struggle between Islamic extremists and moderate Islam, Turkey is the most critical country in the world.

But I'm somehow even more disappointed that people billed as serious historians of the Middle East like Michael Rubin, using rhetoric that is strikingly similar to Ankara's, have taken to reducing the historical reality of the Armenian genocide to "the narrative of Diaspora communities," giving the impression that the latter is at odds with the accounts of respected historians.

The Anti-Defamation League has decided to label the events surrounding the deaths of Armenians during World War I as 'genocide.'

There can be absolutely no argument that a million or more Armenians died during World War I.  But, on issue of whether genocide—a deliberate plan to eradicate a people—occurred or not, there is a big gap between the narrative of Diaspora communities and that of prominent historians.  The historical debate is more complex. 

It is a shame that Abraham Foxman has made such a decision on political rather than historical grounds.

It's then particularly ironic that Rubin laments that Foxman has made this decision on "political rather than historical grounds," when the stated reasons that Foxman originally gave for opposing the label were explicitly political in the first place.

Why is there no backlash from genocide scholars against people like Rubin? He has a prominent perch at the American Enterprise Institute and as editor of the Middle East Quarterly, which is published by Pipes's Middle East Forum. He should be publicly outed as a negationist, in the way that he would likely do to anyone who denied the Jewish genocide.

Raul Hilberg, one of the greatest Holocaust scholars, has died. Genocide scholars the world around are indebted to his tireless work.

The New Republic has an interesting piece out now about the battle in the US Congress about the Armenian genocide. The fight is over a piece of legislation that officially recognizes the Armenian genocide committed by the Ottomans in 1915.

From my research and the work of my colleagues who are specialists on the Armenian genocide, the historical record is pretty indisputable. Some of the details may not be, but the existence of the genocide itself seems fairly clear cut. This being said, I'm really wary of legislating history, particularly as it is done in Turkey and much of Western Europe. (In Turkey it is against the law to speak of the Armenian genocide, whereas in France, it is illegal to deny the Shoah, and Bernard Lewis has already been taken to court for denying the Armenian genocide.)

These questions should be debated in academic conferences and journals by historians, not in the halls of Capitol Hill by lobbyists. In any case, the Armenian question is very important to the US, given its strategic importance for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan:

Strange as it may be to find a World War I massacre on the 2007 Washington agenda, even more bizarre is the possibility that it may precipitate an international crisis. At one March House subcommittee hearing, Adam Schiff got a rare opportunity to grill Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Angry over the Bush administration's opposition to the Armenian genocide resolution, Schiff pressed Rice: "Is there any doubt in your mind that the murder of a million and a half Armenians between 1915 and 1923 constituted genocide?" Schiff even pointedly appealed to Rice's background in "academia." But the ever-disciplined Rice wouldn't bite. "Congressman, I come out of academia. But I'm secretary of state now. And I think that the best way to have this proceed is for ... the Turks and the Armenians to come to their own terms about this."

What Rice didn't say is that the Turks, should their lobbying firepower fail to stop the genocide bill from moving forward, have an even mightier weapon to brandish: the war in Iraq. As they did in 2000, the Turks are hinting they will shut down Incirlik, a far more dire threat now that Incirlik supplies U.S. forces occupying Iraq. Administration officials also fear Turkey might close the Habur Gate, a border point through which U.S. supplies flow into northern Iraq. In an April letter to congressional leaders, Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates bluntly warned that a House resolution "could harm American troops in the field [and] constrain our ability to supply our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan."

That prospect may even be dragging U.S. troops themselves into the Turkish counteroffensive. Or so says Frank Pallone, a New Jersey Democrat and lead co-sponsor of the genocide resolution. "[The Turks] have had American soldiers call members of Congress and say, Don't vote for this, because I am going to be threatened in Iraq,'" Pallone says. (A Turkish embassy spokesman denied knowledge of this.)

Of course, this is probably just a lot of Turkish bluster. Before France passed its own Armenian legislation, the Turks had threatened that the bill would cause relations between the two countries to be suspended, among other things. In the end though, nothing happened. I suspect that the Turks know what side their bread is buttered on and would find that the smug satisfaction of punishing the US for calling them on their genocide denial would be far outweighed by the consequences of pissing the US off in Iraq. For instance, the US is currently in a delicate balancing act between the Iraqi Kurds and Ankara, and if Turkey were to make the US an enemy, I imagine that Ankara wouldn't appreciate the consequent shift in American policy in Kurdistan.  

I still haven't read UNEP's report on Darfur (pdf), due to a lack of time (it's 358 pages) and a lot of other lengthy reading on my plate these days. I have, however, followed some of the press coverage, which makes it sound like the genocide in Darfur is the result of purely ecological factors, including desertification, water shortages and global warming. As it happens, I've worked with UNEP on a publication before, and I'm inclined to believe that their report is a lot more nuanced than the press coverage gives it credit for. But I'll have to save that final judgement for when I have the time to sit down and read it.

In any case, the fact that environmental concerns and competition for resources places a part in conflict is an obvious point, it's how much of an impact these concerns have that is at issue. Lydia Polgreen, whose coverage of Sudan in the Times has been very good, has a piece in this week's Week in Review that takes a quick look at the underground lake recently discovered in Darfur. She quotes Alex de Waal and John Prendergast, both of whom know a lot about Sudan, in order to illustrate her point that it's less the ecological strain that's to fault for conflict in Sudan and more how that problem is dealt with:

A scientific explanation for the problem (environmental degradation) along with a tidy technological solution (irrigation) gratifies the modern humanitarian impulse.

But the history of Sudan, a grim chronicle of civil war, famine, coups and despotism, gives ample reason to be skeptical.

“Like all resources water can be used for good or ill,” said Alex de Waal, a scholar who has studied the impact of climate variation in Sudan and who witnessed the 1984-85 famine that is often cited as the beginning of the ecological crisis gripping Darfur. “It can be a blessing or also a curse. If the government acts true to form and tries to create some sort of oasis in the desert and control who settles there, that would simply be an extension of the crisis, not a solution.”

The droughts that gripped Sudan in the 1980s, and the migrations and other social changes they forced, have doubtless played a role in the conflict by increasing competition for water and land between farmers, who tend to be non-Arab, and herders, many of whom are Arabs. But an environmental catastrophe cannot become a violent cataclysm without a powerful human hand to guide it in that direction.

“These wider environmental factors don’t have impact in and of themselves” in terms of fomenting conflict, Mr. de Waal said. “The question is how they are managed.”

[...]

“Climate change and the lack of rain are much less important than the land-use patterns promoted by the government of Sudan and the development policies of World Bank and I.M.F., which were focused on intensive agricultural expansion that really mined the soils and left a lot of land unusable,” said Mr. Prendergast, who has been studying Sudan for 20 years. “That was probably the principal impetus for a lot of intra-Darfur migration in the decades leading up to the conflict in Darfur.”

She then goes on to make a point that I've been harping on for a while now:

A report released last year by the Coalition for International Justice on the role that oil and mechanized farming have played in human rights abuses in Sudan concluded: “The predominant root of conflict in Sudan is the instability that results from the systemic abuse of the rural (and recently urbanized) poor at the hands of the economic and political elites of central Sudan.”

In this analysis, the heart of the Darfur conflict, as in all conflicts in Sudan, is the battle for control of resources and riches, but not between farmers and herders, northerners and southerners, Christians and Muslims, or Arabs and non-Arabs.

It is a conflict between those at the center of the country, the elites who have controlled Sudan and its wealth for the past century and a half, and the desperately poor people who beg for scraps from the periphery.

Until that equation changes, many analysts argue, nothing else will.

Here's another genocide-related event in the international community, which gives me the impression that something's rotten in, well, the Hague:

Serbia, the heir to Yugoslavia, obtained the tribunal's permission to keep parts of the archives out of the public eye. Citing national security, its lawyers blacked out many sensitive -- those who have seen them say incriminating -- pages. Judges and lawyers at the war crimes tribunal could see the censored material, but it was barred from the tribunal’s public records.

Now, lawyers and others who were involved in Serbia's bid for secrecy say that, at the time, Belgrade made its true objective clear: to keep the full military archives from the International Court of Justice, where Bosnia was suing Serbia for genocide. And they say Belgrade’s goal was achieved in February, when the international court, which is also in The Hague, declared Serbia not guilty of genocide, and absolved it from paying potentially enormous damages.

Lawyers interviewed in The Hague and Belgrade said that the outcome might well have been different had the International Court of Justice pressed for access to the full archives, and legal scholars and human rights groups said it was deeply troubling that the judges did not subpoena the documents directly from Serbia. At one point, the court rebuffed a Bosnian request that it demand the full documents, saying that ample evidence was available in tribunal records.

"It's a question that nags loudly," Diane Orentlicher, a law professor at American University in Washington, said recently in The Hague. "Why didn’t the court request the full documents? The fact that they were blacked out clearly implies these passages would have made a difference."

The ruling -- which was binding and final -- was in many ways meticulous, and acknowledged that the 15 judges had not seen the censored archives. But it did not say why the court did not order Serbia to provide the full documents.

The first-hand experience I've had at the UN and what I know of the tribunals in the Hague and Arusha have convinced me that it would be naïve to think that there are no deals being made in the smoke-filled hotel rooms.

This probably has something to do with Serbia's wishes to join the EU and the fact that a guilty verdict would probably ruin the country financially. But still, this seems unacceptable to me.

I've seen first hand how politics (office and international) can override common sense or even doing the right thing in a large bureaucracy. I shouldn't be surprised by stories like this anymore, and I guess I'm not.

But still. Shame on Ankara, and shame on the UN for kowtowing:

The United Nations dismantled an exhibit on the Rwandan genocide and postponed its scheduled opening by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Monday after the Turkish mission objected to references to the Armenian genocide in Turkey at the time of World War I.

The panels of graphics, photos and statements had been installed in the visitors lobby on Thursday by the British-based Aegis Trust. The trust campaigns for the prevention of genocide and runs a center in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, memorializing the 500,000 victims of the massacres there 13 years ago.

Hours after the show was assembled, however, a Turkish diplomat spotted offending words in a section entitled "What is genocide?" and raised objections.

The passage said that "following World War I, during which one million Armenians were murdered in Turkey," Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer credited with coining the word genocide, "urged the League of Nations to recognize crimes of barbarity as international crimes."

James Smith, the chief executive of Aegis, said he was told by the United Nations on Saturday night that the sentence would have to be eliminated or the exhibition would be struck.

...Mr. Smith said he was "very disappointed because this was supposed to talk about the lessons drawn from Rwanda and point up that what is happening in Darfur is the cost of inaction."

I never thought I'd be able to ask this question, but have you read Angelina Jolie's op-ed in The Washington Post today? The truth be told, it's not any better or any worse than most other pieces I've read in the mainstream press. And to her credit, she (unlike most people who have an opinion about Darfur, myself included) has actually been there.

Like most other proponents of intervention, she doesn't say exactly what she thinks that would entail, but she does come out as a strong supporter of the ICC accusations.

I think it was Bono who once said (more or less), "Celebrity is a currency, and I want to spend mine well." I have to say that I couldn't agree more, and if Angelina Jolie wants to spend hers on Darfur, then I say more power to her.

Here's some disconcerting but unsurprising news about human empathy and statistics, or "numbers and nerves":

Follow your intuition and act? When it comes to genocide, forget it. It doesn't work, says a University of Oregon psychologist. The large numbers of reported deaths represent dry statistics that fail to spark emotion and feeling and thus fail to motivate actions. Even going from one to two victims, feeling and meaning begin to fade, he said.

In a session Friday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science devoted to "Numbers and Nerves," Paul Slovic, a UO professor and president of Decision Research, a non-profit research institute in Eugene, Ore., urged a review and overhaul of the 1948 Genocide Convention, mandated by much of the world after the Holocaust in World War II. "It has obviously failed, because it has never been invoked to intervene in genocide," Slovic said.

Slovic is studying the issue from a psychological perspective, trying to determine how people can utilize both the moral intuition that genocide is wrong and moral reasoning to reach not only an outcry but also demand intervention. "We have to understand what it is in our makeup -- psychologically, socially, politically and institutionally -- that has allowed genocide to go unabated for a century," he said. "If we don't answer that question and use the answer to change things, we will see another century of horrible atrocities around the world."

...In Slovic's latest research, evidence is mounting for an even more disturbing 'collapse model' that he described in his talk. "This model appears to be more accurate than the psychophysical model in describing our response to genocide," he said. "We have these large numbers of deaths occurring, and we are doing nothing."

His new research follows up an Israeli study published in 2005 in which subjects were presented three photos. One depicted eight children who needed $300,000 in medical intervention to save their lives. Another photo depicted just one child who could be helped with $300,000. Participants were most willing to donate for one child's medical care. The level of giving declined dramatically for donating to help the entire group.

Slovic and colleagues Daniel Vastfjäll and Ellen Peters used the same approach but narrowed the focus. Participants in Sweden were shown a photo of a starving African girl, her individual story and the conditions of the nation in which she lives. Another photo contained the same information but for a starving boy. A third photo showed both children. The feelings of sympathy for each individual child were almost equal, but dropped when they were considered together. Donations followed the same pattern, being lower for two needy children than for either individually.

"The studies just described suggest a disturbing psychological tendency," Slovic said. "Our capacity to feel is limited." Even at two, he added, people start to lose it.

If we see the beginning of the collapse of feeling at just two individuals, "it is no wonder that at 200,000 deaths the feeling is gone."

The French Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales, along with the French research institution, CNRS and Sciences-Po, have begun an Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence with the help of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. The project is under the direction of Jacques Sémelin, whose 2005 book on genocide (which I have but have yet to read) has recently been translated into English and published by Columbia.

The site's still pretty bare bones for the moment, but it's designed to provide information of mass violence based chronologically and geographically, so when it's done, you'll be able to click on any country you want to get information about mass violence in that country. There's also an encyclopedia of terms that looks to be pretty complete.

Strangely enough, for a French initiative, it's only available in English for the moment. The international advisory board includes scholars like Omer Bartov, Samantha Power, Frank Chalk, Antonio Cassesse, Ben Kiernen, René Lemarchand, William Schabas and Eric Weitz, just to name a few.

I spend a lot of time getting annoyed when people throw around the word "genocide" or "holocaust" when it's not warranted. This often means rebuking Lebanese and Palestinian friends who want to call the Israeli occupation a genocide. The occupation is a lot of things, none of them savory, but a genocide it is not, and calling it one cheapens the word.

So you can imagine my surprise when I saw last night that Israel's deputy defense minister, Matan Vilnai, had threatened Palestinians in Gaza with a "shoah":

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A senior Israeli defense official said on Friday that Palestinians firing rockets from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip would bring upon themselves what he termed a "shoah," the Hebrew word for holocaust or disaster.

The word is rarely used in Israel outside discussions of the Nazi Holocaust of Jews. Many Israelis are loath to countenance its use to describe other contemporary events. Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said the Palestinians faced "new Nazis."

Israeli air strikes have killed at least 33 Gazans, including five children, in the past two days. The army, which carried out additional air strikes on Friday, said most of those killed were militants.

I'm no Hebraist, but according to Reuters and common sense, "shoah," like "holocaust" isn't a word that's tossed around lightly in Israel. And whenever there's a comment by someone like Ahmadinejad, quoting Khomeini, saying that "the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time," we get Israel supporters clamoring for the world to denounce the genocidal intent of the Iranian regime. So will these same people condemn Israel's even more explicit language?

Just the other day on the Olin Institute's Middle Eastern Strategy at Harvard blog, Stephen Peter Rosen was making a fuss about a comment that Ahmadinejad made calling Israel a "black and dirty microbe," informing us that this change in discourse could be "associated with biological attacks or other unconventional mass killings." 

So since Rosen says that he's interested in tracking the discourse between Israel and Iran, I can imagine that the Harvard blog will soon have a post up warning of the impending "shoah" to be visited upon the Gazans. After all, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, right?

Of course not. If we look a the comments to Rosen's post, we're given the simple answer by Harvard's specialist on Armenia, James Russell, that "Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah are obviously murderous and crazy." I knew there was a simple answer!

UPDATE: Melanie Phillips at the Spectator is now claiming that "In Hebrew, the word ‘shoah’ is never used to mean ‘holocaust’ or ‘genocide’ because of the acute historical resonance." (Italics hers.) Someone should get Claude Lanzmann on the phone to let him know he's made a terrible mistake.

And for the record, the Israeli daily Ha'aretz has this to say about the remark:

Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai went as far as threatening a "shoah," the Hebrew word for holocaust or disaster. The word is generally used to refer to the Nazi Holocaust, but a spokesman for Vilnai said the deputy defense minister used the word in the sense of "disaster," saying "he did not mean to make any allusion to the genocide."

It's already unfortunate that the ADL had to be shamed into calling the Armenian Genocide by its proper name (and this only in a qualified and circuitous fashion). And I also find it disconcerting that what is ostensibly an American anti-racism organization should cite Turkey's status as a "staunch friend of Israel" as a reason why not to recognize the Armenian genocide. (The open letter that states this has since been removed from the ADL website and replaced with the new open letter that uses the word genocide. It can, however, be found in Google's cache.):

We believe that legislative efforts outside of Turkey are counterproductive to the goal of having Turkey itself come to grips with its past. We take no position on what action Congress should take on House Resolution 106. The Jewish community in Turkey has clearly expressed to us and other major American Jewish organizations its concerns about the impact of Congressional action on them, and we cannot ignore those concerns. We are also keenly aware that Turkey is a key strategic ally and friend of the United States and a staunch friend of Israel, and that in the struggle between Islamic extremists and moderate Islam, Turkey is the most critical country in the world.

But I'm somehow even more disappointed that people billed as serious historians of the Middle East like Michael Rubin, using rhetoric that is strikingly similar to Ankara's, have taken to reducing the historical reality of the Armenian genocide to "the narrative of Diaspora communities," giving the impression that the latter is at odds with the accounts of respected historians.

The Anti-Defamation League has decided to label the events surrounding the deaths of Armenians during World War I as 'genocide.'

There can be absolutely no argument that a million or more Armenians died during World War I.  But, on issue of whether genocide—a deliberate plan to eradicate a people—occurred or not, there is a big gap between the narrative of Diaspora communities and that of prominent historians.  The historical debate is more complex. 

It is a shame that Abraham Foxman has made such a decision on political rather than historical grounds.

It's then particularly ironic that Rubin laments that Foxman has made this decision on "political rather than historical grounds," when the stated reasons that Foxman originally gave for opposing the label were explicitly political in the first place.

Why is there no backlash from genocide scholars against people like Rubin? He has a prominent perch at the American Enterprise Institute and as editor of the Middle East Quarterly, which is published by Pipes's Middle East Forum. He should be publicly outed as a negationist, in the way that he would likely do to anyone who denied the Jewish genocide.

Raul Hilberg, one of the greatest Holocaust scholars, has died. Genocide scholars the world around are indebted to his tireless work.

The New Republic has an interesting piece out now about the battle in the US Congress about the Armenian genocide. The fight is over a piece of legislation that officially recognizes the Armenian genocide committed by the Ottomans in 1915.

From my research and the work of my colleagues who are specialists on the Armenian genocide, the historical record is pretty indisputable. Some of the details may not be, but the existence of the genocide itself seems fairly clear cut. This being said, I'm really wary of legislating history, particularly as it is done in Turkey and much of Western Europe. (In Turkey it is against the law to speak of the Armenian genocide, whereas in France, it is illegal to deny the Shoah, and Bernard Lewis has already been taken to court for denying the Armenian genocide.)

These questions should be debated in academic conferences and journals by historians, not in the halls of Capitol Hill by lobbyists. In any case, the Armenian question is very important to the US, given its strategic importance for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan:

Strange as it may be to find a World War I massacre on the 2007 Washington agenda, even more bizarre is the possibility that it may precipitate an international crisis. At one March House subcommittee hearing, Adam Schiff got a rare opportunity to grill Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Angry over the Bush administration's opposition to the Armenian genocide resolution, Schiff pressed Rice: "Is there any doubt in your mind that the murder of a million and a half Armenians between 1915 and 1923 constituted genocide?" Schiff even pointedly appealed to Rice's background in "academia." But the ever-disciplined Rice wouldn't bite. "Congressman, I come out of academia. But I'm secretary of state now. And I think that the best way to have this proceed is for ... the Turks and the Armenians to come to their own terms about this."

What Rice didn't say is that the Turks, should their lobbying firepower fail to stop the genocide bill from moving forward, have an even mightier weapon to brandish: the war in Iraq. As they did in 2000, the Turks are hinting they will shut down Incirlik, a far more dire threat now that Incirlik supplies U.S. forces occupying Iraq. Administration officials also fear Turkey might close the Habur Gate, a border point through which U.S. supplies flow into northern Iraq. In an April letter to congressional leaders, Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates bluntly warned that a House resolution "could harm American troops in the field [and] constrain our ability to supply our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan."

That prospect may even be dragging U.S. troops themselves into the Turkish counteroffensive. Or so says Frank Pallone, a New Jersey Democrat and lead co-sponsor of the genocide resolution. "[The Turks] have had American soldiers call members of Congress and say, Don't vote for this, because I am going to be threatened in Iraq,'" Pallone says. (A Turkish embassy spokesman denied knowledge of this.)

Of course, this is probably just a lot of Turkish bluster. Before France passed its own Armenian legislation, the Turks had threatened that the bill would cause relations between the two countries to be suspended, among other things. In the end though, nothing happened. I suspect that the Turks know what side their bread is buttered on and would find that the smug satisfaction of punishing the US for calling them on their genocide denial would be far outweighed by the consequences of pissing the US off in Iraq. For instance, the US is currently in a delicate balancing act between the Iraqi Kurds and Ankara, and if Turkey were to make the US an enemy, I imagine that Ankara wouldn't appreciate the consequent shift in American policy in Kurdistan.  

I still haven't read UNEP's report on Darfur (pdf), due to a lack of time (it's 358 pages) and a lot of other lengthy reading on my plate these days. I have, however, followed some of the press coverage, which makes it sound like the genocide in Darfur is the result of purely ecological factors, including desertification, water shortages and global warming. As it happens, I've worked with UNEP on a publication before, and I'm inclined to believe that their report is a lot more nuanced than the press coverage gives it credit for. But I'll have to save that final judgement for when I have the time to sit down and read it.

In any case, the fact that environmental concerns and competition for resources places a part in conflict is an obvious point, it's how much of an impact these concerns have that is at issue. Lydia Polgreen, whose coverage of Sudan in the Times has been very good, has a piece in this week's Week in Review that takes a quick look at the underground lake recently discovered in Darfur. She quotes Alex de Waal and John Prendergast, both of whom know a lot about Sudan, in order to illustrate her point that it's less the ecological strain that's to fault for conflict in Sudan and more how that problem is dealt with:

A scientific explanation for the problem (environmental degradation) along with a tidy technological solution (irrigation) gratifies the modern humanitarian impulse.

But the history of Sudan, a grim chronicle of civil war, famine, coups and despotism, gives ample reason to be skeptical.

“Like all resources water can be used for good or ill,” said Alex de Waal, a scholar who has studied the impact of climate variation in Sudan and who witnessed the 1984-85 famine that is often cited as the beginning of the ecological crisis gripping Darfur. “It can be a blessing or also a curse. If the government acts true to form and tries to create some sort of oasis in the desert and control who settles there, that would simply be an extension of the crisis, not a solution.”

The droughts that gripped Sudan in the 1980s, and the migrations and other social changes they forced, have doubtless played a role in the conflict by increasing competition for water and land between farmers, who tend to be non-Arab, and herders, many of whom are Arabs. But an environmental catastrophe cannot become a violent cataclysm without a powerful human hand to guide it in that direction.

“These wider environmental factors don’t have impact in and of themselves” in terms of fomenting conflict, Mr. de Waal said. “The question is how they are managed.”

[...]

“Climate change and the lack of rain are much less important than the land-use patterns promoted by the government of Sudan and the development policies of World Bank and I.M.F., which were focused on intensive agricultural expansion that really mined the soils and left a lot of land unusable,” said Mr. Prendergast, who has been studying Sudan for 20 years. “That was probably the principal impetus for a lot of intra-Darfur migration in the decades leading up to the conflict in Darfur.”

She then goes on to make a point that I've been harping on for a while now:

A report released last year by the Coalition for International Justice on the role that oil and mechanized farming have played in human rights abuses in Sudan concluded: “The predominant root of conflict in Sudan is the instability that results from the systemic abuse of the rural (and recently urbanized) poor at the hands of the economic and political elites of central Sudan.”

In this analysis, the heart of the Darfur conflict, as in all conflicts in Sudan, is the battle for control of resources and riches, but not between farmers and herders, northerners and southerners, Christians and Muslims, or Arabs and non-Arabs.

It is a conflict between those at the center of the country, the elites who have controlled Sudan and its wealth for the past century and a half, and the desperately poor people who beg for scraps from the periphery.

Until that equation changes, many analysts argue, nothing else will.

Here's another genocide-related event in the international community, which gives me the impression that something's rotten in, well, the Hague:

Serbia, the heir to Yugoslavia, obtained the tribunal's permission to keep parts of the archives out of the public eye. Citing national security, its lawyers blacked out many sensitive -- those who have seen them say incriminating -- pages. Judges and lawyers at the war crimes tribunal could see the censored material, but it was barred from the tribunal’s public records.

Now, lawyers and others who were involved in Serbia's bid for secrecy say that, at the time, Belgrade made its true objective clear: to keep the full military archives from the International Court of Justice, where Bosnia was suing Serbia for genocide. And they say Belgrade’s goal was achieved in February, when the international court, which is also in The Hague, declared Serbia not guilty of genocide, and absolved it from paying potentially enormous damages.

Lawyers interviewed in The Hague and Belgrade said that the outcome might well have been different had the International Court of Justice pressed for access to the full archives, and legal scholars and human rights groups said it was deeply troubling that the judges did not subpoena the documents directly from Serbia. At one point, the court rebuffed a Bosnian request that it demand the full documents, saying that ample evidence was available in tribunal records.

"It's a question that nags loudly," Diane Orentlicher, a law professor at American University in Washington, said recently in The Hague. "Why didn’t the court request the full documents? The fact that they were blacked out clearly implies these passages would have made a difference."

The ruling -- which was binding and final -- was in many ways meticulous, and acknowledged that the 15 judges had not seen the censored archives. But it did not say why the court did not order Serbia to provide the full documents.

The first-hand experience I've had at the UN and what I know of the tribunals in the Hague and Arusha have convinced me that it would be naïve to think that there are no deals being made in the smoke-filled hotel rooms.

This probably has something to do with Serbia's wishes to join the EU and the fact that a guilty verdict would probably ruin the country financially. But still, this seems unacceptable to me.

I've seen first hand how politics (office and international) can override common sense or even doing the right thing in a large bureaucracy. I shouldn't be surprised by stories like this anymore, and I guess I'm not.

But still. Shame on Ankara, and shame on the UN for kowtowing:

The United Nations dismantled an exhibit on the Rwandan genocide and postponed its scheduled opening by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Monday after the Turkish mission objected to references to the Armenian genocide in Turkey at the time of World War I.

The panels of graphics, photos and statements had been installed in the visitors lobby on Thursday by the British-based Aegis Trust. The trust campaigns for the prevention of genocide and runs a center in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, memorializing the 500,000 victims of the massacres there 13 years ago.

Hours after the show was assembled, however, a Turkish diplomat spotted offending words in a section entitled "What is genocide?" and raised objections.

The passage said that "following World War I, during which one million Armenians were murdered in Turkey," Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer credited with coining the word genocide, "urged the League of Nations to recognize crimes of barbarity as international crimes."

James Smith, the chief executive of Aegis, said he was told by the United Nations on Saturday night that the sentence would have to be eliminated or the exhibition would be struck.

...Mr. Smith said he was "very disappointed because this was supposed to talk about the lessons drawn from Rwanda and point up that what is happening in Darfur is the cost of inaction."

I never thought I'd be able to ask this question, but have you read Angelina Jolie's op-ed in The Washington Post today? The truth be told, it's not any better or any worse than most other pieces I've read in the mainstream press. And to her credit, she (unlike most people who have an opinion about Darfur, myself included) has actually been there.

Like most other proponents of intervention, she doesn't say exactly what she thinks that would entail, but she does come out as a strong supporter of the ICC accusations.

I think it was Bono who once said (more or less), "Celebrity is a currency, and I want to spend mine well." I have to say that I couldn't agree more, and if Angelina Jolie wants to spend hers on Darfur, then I say more power to her.

Here's some disconcerting but unsurprising news about human empathy and statistics, or "numbers and nerves":

Follow your intuition and act? When it comes to genocide, forget it. It doesn't work, says a University of Oregon psychologist. The large numbers of reported deaths represent dry statistics that fail to spark emotion and feeling and thus fail to motivate actions. Even going from one to two victims, feeling and meaning begin to fade, he said.

In a session Friday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science devoted to "Numbers and Nerves," Paul Slovic, a UO professor and president of Decision Research, a non-profit research institute in Eugene, Ore., urged a review and overhaul of the 1948 Genocide Convention, mandated by much of the world after the Holocaust in World War II. "It has obviously failed, because it has never been invoked to intervene in genocide," Slovic said.

Slovic is studying the issue from a psychological perspective, trying to determine how people can utilize both the moral intuition that genocide is wrong and moral reasoning to reach not only an outcry but also demand intervention. "We have to understand what it is in our makeup -- psychologically, socially, politically and institutionally -- that has allowed genocide to go unabated for a century," he said. "If we don't answer that question and use the answer to change things, we will see another century of horrible atrocities around the world."

...In Slovic's latest research, evidence is mounting for an even more disturbing 'collapse model' that he described in his talk. "This model appears to be more accurate than the psychophysical model in describing our response to genocide," he said. "We have these large numbers of deaths occurring, and we are doing nothing."

His new research follows up an Israeli study published in 2005 in which subjects were presented three photos. One depicted eight children who needed $300,000 in medical intervention to save their lives. Another photo depicted just one child who could be helped with $300,000. Participants were most willing to donate for one child's medical care. The level of giving declined dramatically for donating to help the entire group.

Slovic and colleagues Daniel Vastfjäll and Ellen Peters used the same approach but narrowed the focus. Participants in Sweden were shown a photo of a starving African girl, her individual story and the conditions of the nation in which she lives. Another photo contained the same information but for a starving boy. A third photo showed both children. The feelings of sympathy for each individual child were almost equal, but dropped when they were considered together. Donations followed the same pattern, being lower for two needy children than for either individually.

"The studies just described suggest a disturbing psychological tendency," Slovic said. "Our capacity to feel is limited." Even at two, he added, people start to lose it.

If we see the beginning of the collapse of feeling at just two individuals, "it is no wonder that at 200,000 deaths the feeling is gone."

The French Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales, along with the French research institution, CNRS and Sciences-Po, have begun an Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence with the help of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. The project is under the direction of Jacques Sémelin, whose 2005 book on genocide (which I have but have yet to read) has recently been translated into English and published by Columbia.

The site's still pretty bare bones for the moment, but it's designed to provide information of mass violence based chronologically and geographically, so when it's done, you'll be able to click on any country you want to get information about mass violence in that country. There's also an encyclopedia of terms that looks to be pretty complete.

Strangely enough, for a French initiative, it's only available in English for the moment. The international advisory board includes scholars like Omer Bartov, Samantha Power, Frank Chalk, Antonio Cassesse, Ben Kiernen, René Lemarchand, William Schabas and Eric Weitz, just to name a few.

I spend a lot of time getting annoyed when people throw around the word "genocide" or "holocaust" when it's not warranted. This often means rebuking Lebanese and Palestinian friends who want to call the Israeli occupation a genocide. The occupation is a lot of things, none of them savory, but a genocide it is not, and calling it one cheapens the word.

So you can imagine my surprise when I saw last night that Israel's deputy defense minister, Matan Vilnai, had threatened Palestinians in Gaza with a "shoah":

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A senior Israeli defense official said on Friday that Palestinians firing rockets from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip would bring upon themselves what he termed a "shoah," the Hebrew word for holocaust or disaster.

The word is rarely used in Israel outside discussions of the Nazi Holocaust of Jews. Many Israelis are loath to countenance its use to describe other contemporary events. Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said the Palestinians faced "new Nazis."

Israeli air strikes have killed at least 33 Gazans, including five children, in the past two days. The army, which carried out additional air strikes on Friday, said most of those killed were militants.

I'm no Hebraist, but according to Reuters and common sense, "shoah," like "holocaust" isn't a word that's tossed around lightly in Israel. And whenever there's a comment by someone like Ahmadinejad, quoting Khomeini, saying that "the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time," we get Israel supporters clamoring for the world to denounce the genocidal intent of the Iranian regime. So will these same people condemn Israel's even more explicit language?

Just the other day on the Olin Institute's Middle Eastern Strategy at Harvard blog, Stephen Peter Rosen was making a fuss about a comment that Ahmadinejad made calling Israel a "black and dirty microbe," informing us that this change in discourse could be "associated with biological attacks or other unconventional mass killings." 

So since Rosen says that he's interested in tracking the discourse between Israel and Iran, I can imagine that the Harvard blog will soon have a post up warning of the impending "shoah" to be visited upon the Gazans. After all, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, right?

Of course not. If we look a the comments to Rosen's post, we're given the simple answer by Harvard's specialist on Armenia, James Russell, that "Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah are obviously murderous and crazy." I knew there was a simple answer!

UPDATE: Melanie Phillips at the Spectator is now claiming that "In Hebrew, the word ‘shoah’ is never used to mean ‘holocaust’ or ‘genocide’ because of the acute historical resonance." (Italics hers.) Someone should get Claude Lanzmann on the phone to let him know he's made a terrible mistake.

And for the record, the Israeli daily Ha'aretz has this to say about the remark:

Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai went as far as threatening a "shoah," the Hebrew word for holocaust or disaster. The word is generally used to refer to the Nazi Holocaust, but a spokesman for Vilnai said the deputy defense minister used the word in the sense of "disaster," saying "he did not mean to make any allusion to the genocide."

It's already unfortunate that the ADL had to be shamed into calling the Armenian Genocide by its proper name (and this only in a qualified and circuitous fashion). And I also find it disconcerting that what is ostensibly an American anti-racism organization should cite Turkey's status as a "staunch friend of Israel" as a reason why not to recognize the Armenian genocide. (The open letter that states this has since been removed from the ADL website and replaced with the new open letter that uses the word genocide. It can, however, be found in Google's cache.):

We believe that legislative efforts outside of Turkey are counterproductive to the goal of having Turkey itself come to grips with its past. We take no position on what action Congress should take on House Resolution 106. The Jewish community in Turkey has clearly expressed to us and other major American Jewish organizations its concerns about the impact of Congressional action on them, and we cannot ignore those concerns. We are also keenly aware that Turkey is a key strategic ally and friend of the United States and a staunch friend of Israel, and that in the struggle between Islamic extremists and moderate Islam, Turkey is the most critical country in the world.

But I'm somehow even more disappointed that people billed as serious historians of the Middle East like Michael Rubin, using rhetoric that is strikingly similar to Ankara's, have taken to reducing the historical reality of the Armenian genocide to "the narrative of Diaspora communities," giving the impression that the latter is at odds with the accounts of respected historians.

The Anti-Defamation League has decided to label the events surrounding the deaths of Armenians during World War I as 'genocide.'

There can be absolutely no argument that a million or more Armenians died during World War I.  But, on issue of whether genocide—a deliberate plan to eradicate a people—occurred or not, there is a big gap between the narrative of Diaspora communities and that of prominent historians.  The historical debate is more complex. 

It is a shame that Abraham Foxman has made such a decision on political rather than historical grounds.

It's then particularly ironic that Rubin laments that Foxman has made this decision on "political rather than historical grounds," when the stated reasons that Foxman originally gave for opposing the label were explicitly political in the first place.

Why is there no backlash from genocide scholars against people like Rubin? He has a prominent perch at the American Enterprise Institute and as editor of the Middle East Quarterly, which is published by Pipes's Middle East Forum. He should be publicly outed as a negationist, in the way that he would likely do to anyone who denied the Jewish genocide.

Raul Hilberg, one of the greatest Holocaust scholars, has died. Genocide scholars the world around are indebted to his tireless work.

The New Republic has an interesting piece out now about the battle in the US Congress about the Armenian genocide. The fight is over a piece of legislation that officially recognizes the Armenian genocide committed by the Ottomans in 1915.

From my research and the work of my colleagues who are specialists on the Armenian genocide, the historical record is pretty indisputable. Some of the details may not be, but the existence of the genocide itself seems fairly clear cut. This being said, I'm really wary of legislating history, particularly as it is done in Turkey and much of Western Europe. (In Turkey it is against the law to speak of the Armenian genocide, whereas in France, it is illegal to deny the Shoah, and Bernard Lewis has already been taken to court for denying the Armenian genocide.)

These questions should be debated in academic conferences and journals by historians, not in the halls of Capitol Hill by lobbyists. In any case, the Armenian question is very important to the US, given its strategic importance for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan:

Strange as it may be to find a World War I massacre on the 2007 Washington agenda, even more bizarre is the possibility that it may precipitate an international crisis. At one March House subcommittee hearing, Adam Schiff got a rare opportunity to grill Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Angry over the Bush administration's opposition to the Armenian genocide resolution, Schiff pressed Rice: "Is there any doubt in your mind that the murder of a million and a half Armenians between 1915 and 1923 constituted genocide?" Schiff even pointedly appealed to Rice's background in "academia." But the ever-disciplined Rice wouldn't bite. "Congressman, I come out of academia. But I'm secretary of state now. And I think that the best way to have this proceed is for ... the Turks and the Armenians to come to their own terms about this."

What Rice didn't say is that the Turks, should their lobbying firepower fail to stop the genocide bill from moving forward, have an even mightier weapon to brandish: the war in Iraq. As they did in 2000, the Turks are hinting they will shut down Incirlik, a far more dire threat now that Incirlik supplies U.S. forces occupying Iraq. Administration officials also fear Turkey might close the Habur Gate, a border point through which U.S. supplies flow into northern Iraq. In an April letter to congressional leaders, Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates bluntly warned that a House resolution "could harm American troops in the field [and] constrain our ability to supply our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan."

That prospect may even be dragging U.S. troops themselves into the Turkish counteroffensive. Or so says Frank Pallone, a New Jersey Democrat and lead co-sponsor of the genocide resolution. "[The Turks] have had American soldiers call members of Congress and say, Don't vote for this, because I am going to be threatened in Iraq,'" Pallone says. (A Turkish embassy spokesman denied knowledge of this.)

Of course, this is probably just a lot of Turkish bluster. Before France passed its own Armenian legislation, the Turks had threatened that the bill would cause relations between the two countries to be suspended, among other things. In the end though, nothing happened. I suspect that the Turks know what side their bread is buttered on and would find that the smug satisfaction of punishing the US for calling them on their genocide denial would be far outweighed by the consequences of pissing the US off in Iraq. For instance, the US is currently in a delicate balancing act between the Iraqi Kurds and Ankara, and if Turkey were to make the US an enemy, I imagine that Ankara wouldn't appreciate the consequent shift in American policy in Kurdistan.  

I still haven't read UNEP's report on Darfur (pdf), due to a lack of time (it's 358 pages) and a lot of other lengthy reading on my plate these days. I have, however, followed some of the press coverage, which makes it sound like the genocide in Darfur is the result of purely ecological factors, including desertification, water shortages and global warming. As it happens, I've worked with UNEP on a publication before, and I'm inclined to believe that their report is a lot more nuanced than the press coverage gives it credit for. But I'll have to save that final judgement for when I have the time to sit down and read it.

In any case, the fact that environmental concerns and competition for resources places a part in conflict is an obvious point, it's how much of an impact these concerns have that is at issue. Lydia Polgreen, whose coverage of Sudan in the Times has been very good, has a piece in this week's Week in Review that takes a quick look at the underground lake recently discovered in Darfur. She quotes Alex de Waal and John Prendergast, both of whom know a lot about Sudan, in order to illustrate her point that it's less the ecological strain that's to fault for conflict in Sudan and more how that problem is dealt with:

A scientific explanation for the problem (environmental degradation) along with a tidy technological solution (irrigation) gratifies the modern humanitarian impulse.

But the history of Sudan, a grim chronicle of civil war, famine, coups and despotism, gives ample reason to be skeptical.

“Like all resources water can be used for good or ill,” said Alex de Waal, a scholar who has studied the impact of climate variation in Sudan and who witnessed the 1984-85 famine that is often cited as the beginning of the ecological crisis gripping Darfur. “It can be a blessing or also a curse. If the government acts true to form and tries to create some sort of oasis in the desert and control who settles there, that would simply be an extension of the crisis, not a solution.”

The droughts that gripped Sudan in the 1980s, and the migrations and other social changes they forced, have doubtless played a role in the conflict by increasing competition for water and land between farmers, who tend to be non-Arab, and herders, many of whom are Arabs. But an environmental catastrophe cannot become a violent cataclysm without a powerful human hand to guide it in that direction.

“These wider environmental factors don’t have impact in and of themselves” in terms of fomenting conflict, Mr. de Waal said. “The question is how they are managed.”

[...]

“Climate change and the lack of rain are much less important than the land-use patterns promoted by the government of Sudan and the development policies of World Bank and I.M.F., which were focused on intensive agricultural expansion that really mined the soils and left a lot of land unusable,” said Mr. Prendergast, who has been studying Sudan for 20 years. “That was probably the principal impetus for a lot of intra-Darfur migration in the decades leading up to the conflict in Darfur.”

She then goes on to make a point that I've been harping on for a while now:

A report released last year by the Coalition for International Justice on the role that oil and mechanized farming have played in human rights abuses in Sudan concluded: “The predominant root of conflict in Sudan is the instability that results from the systemic abuse of the rural (and recently urbanized) poor at the hands of the economic and political elites of central Sudan.”

In this analysis, the heart of the Darfur conflict, as in all conflicts in Sudan, is the battle for control of resources and riches, but not between farmers and herders, northerners and southerners, Christians and Muslims, or Arabs and non-Arabs.

It is a conflict between those at the center of the country, the elites who have controlled Sudan and its wealth for the past century and a half, and the desperately poor people who beg for scraps from the periphery.

Until that equation changes, many analysts argue, nothing else will.

Here's another genocide-related event in the international community, which gives me the impression that something's rotten in, well, the Hague:

Serbia, the heir to Yugoslavia, obtained the tribunal's permission to keep parts of the archives out of the public eye. Citing national security, its lawyers blacked out many sensitive -- those who have seen them say incriminating -- pages. Judges and lawyers at the war crimes tribunal could see the censored material, but it was barred from the tribunal’s public records.

Now, lawyers and others who were involved in Serbia's bid for secrecy say that, at the time, Belgrade made its true objective clear: to keep the full military archives from the International Court of Justice, where Bosnia was suing Serbia for genocide. And they say Belgrade’s goal was achieved in February, when the international court, which is also in The Hague, declared Serbia not guilty of genocide, and absolved it from paying potentially enormous damages.

Lawyers interviewed in The Hague and Belgrade said that the outcome might well have been different had the International Court of Justice pressed for access to the full archives, and legal scholars and human rights groups said it was deeply troubling that the judges did not subpoena the documents directly from Serbia. At one point, the court rebuffed a Bosnian request that it demand the full documents, saying that ample evidence was available in tribunal records.

"It's a question that nags loudly," Diane Orentlicher, a law professor at American University in Washington, said recently in The Hague. "Why didn’t the court request the full documents? The fact that they were blacked out clearly implies these passages would have made a difference."

The ruling -- which was binding and final -- was in many ways meticulous, and acknowledged that the 15 judges had not seen the censored archives. But it did not say why the court did not order Serbia to provide the full documents.

The first-hand experience I've had at the UN and what I know of the tribunals in the Hague and Arusha have convinced me that it would be naïve to think that there are no deals being made in the smoke-filled hotel rooms.

This probably has something to do with Serbia's wishes to join the EU and the fact that a guilty verdict would probably ruin the country financially. But still, this seems unacceptable to me.

I've seen first hand how politics (office and international) can override common sense or even doing the right thing in a large bureaucracy. I shouldn't be surprised by stories like this anymore, and I guess I'm not.

But still. Shame on Ankara, and shame on the UN for kowtowing:

The United Nations dismantled an exhibit on the Rwandan genocide and postponed its scheduled opening by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Monday after the Turkish mission objected to references to the Armenian genocide in Turkey at the time of World War I.

The panels of graphics, photos and statements had been installed in the visitors lobby on Thursday by the British-based Aegis Trust. The trust campaigns for the prevention of genocide and runs a center in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, memorializing the 500,000 victims of the massacres there 13 years ago.

Hours after the show was assembled, however, a Turkish diplomat spotted offending words in a section entitled "What is genocide?" and raised objections.

The passage said that "following World War I, during which one million Armenians were murdered in Turkey," Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer credited with coining the word genocide, "urged the League of Nations to recognize crimes of barbarity as international crimes."

James Smith, the chief executive of Aegis, said he was told by the United Nations on Saturday night that the sentence would have to be eliminated or the exhibition would be struck.

...Mr. Smith said he was "very disappointed because this was supposed to talk about the lessons drawn from Rwanda and point up that what is happening in Darfur is the cost of inaction."

I never thought I'd be able to ask this question, but have you read Angelina Jolie's op-ed in The Washington Post today? The truth be told, it's not any better or any worse than most other pieces I've read in the mainstream press. And to her credit, she (unlike most people who have an opinion about Darfur, myself included) has actually been there.

Like most other proponents of intervention, she doesn't say exactly what she thinks that would entail, but she does come out as a strong supporter of the ICC accusations.

I think it was Bono who once said (more or less), "Celebrity is a currency, and I want to spend mine well." I have to say that I couldn't agree more, and if Angelina Jolie wants to spend hers on Darfur, then I say more power to her.

Here's some disconcerting but unsurprising news about human empathy and statistics, or "numbers and nerves":

Follow your intuition and act? When it comes to genocide, forget it. It doesn't work, says a University of Oregon psychologist. The large numbers of reported deaths represent dry statistics that fail to spark emotion and feeling and thus fail to motivate actions. Even going from one to two victims, feeling and meaning begin to fade, he said.

In a session Friday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science devoted to "Numbers and Nerves," Paul Slovic, a UO professor and president of Decision Research, a non-profit research institute in Eugene, Ore., urged a review and overhaul of the 1948 Genocide Convention, mandated by much of the world after the Holocaust in World War II. "It has obviously failed, because it has never been invoked to intervene in genocide," Slovic said.

Slovic is studying the issue from a psychological perspective, trying to determine how people can utilize both the moral intuition that genocide is wrong and moral reasoning to reach not only an outcry but also demand intervention. "We have to understand what it is in our makeup -- psychologically, socially, politically and institutionally -- that has allowed genocide to go unabated for a century," he said. "If we don't answer that question and use the answer to change things, we will see another century of horrible atrocities around the world."

...In Slovic's latest research, evidence is mounting for an even more disturbing 'collapse model' that he described in his talk. "This model appears to be more accurate than the psychophysical model in describing our response to genocide," he said. "We have these large numbers of deaths occurring, and we are doing nothing."

His new research follows up an Israeli study published in 2005 in which subjects were presented three photos. One depicted eight children who needed $300,000 in medical intervention to save their lives. Another photo depicted just one child who could be helped with $300,000. Participants were most willing to donate for one child's medical care. The level of giving declined dramatically for donating to help the entire group.

Slovic and colleagues Daniel Vastfjäll and Ellen Peters used the same approach but narrowed the focus. Participants in Sweden were shown a photo of a starving African girl, her individual story and the conditions of the nation in which she lives. Another photo contained the same information but for a starving boy. A third photo showed both children. The feelings of sympathy for each individual child were almost equal, but dropped when they were considered together. Donations followed the same pattern, being lower for two needy children than for either individually.

"The studies just described suggest a disturbing psychological tendency," Slovic said. "Our capacity to feel is limited." Even at two, he added, people start to lose it.

If we see the beginning of the collapse of feeling at just two individuals, "it is no wonder that at 200,000 deaths the feeling is gone."

The French Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales, along with the French research institution, CNRS and Sciences-Po, have begun an Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence with the help of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. The project is under the direction of Jacques Sémelin, whose 2005 book on genocide (which I have but have yet to read) has recently been translated into English and published by Columbia.

The site's still pretty bare bones for the moment, but it's designed to provide information of mass violence based chronologically and geographically, so when it's done, you'll be able to click on any country you want to get information about mass violence in that country. There's also an encyclopedia of terms that looks to be pretty complete.

Strangely enough, for a French initiative, it's only available in English for the moment. The international advisory board includes scholars like Omer Bartov, Samantha Power, Frank Chalk, Antonio Cassesse, Ben Kiernen, René Lemarchand, William Schabas and Eric Weitz, just to name a few.

I spend a lot of time getting annoyed when people throw around the word "genocide" or "holocaust" when it's not warranted. This often means rebuking Lebanese and Palestinian friends who want to call the Israeli occupation a genocide. The occupation is a lot of things, none of them savory, but a genocide it is not, and calling it one cheapens the word.

So you can imagine my surprise when I saw last night that Israel's deputy defense minister, Matan Vilnai, had threatened Palestinians in Gaza with a "shoah":

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A senior Israeli defense official said on Friday that Palestinians firing rockets from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip would bring upon themselves what he termed a "shoah," the Hebrew word for holocaust or disaster.

The word is rarely used in Israel outside discussions of the Nazi Holocaust of Jews. Many Israelis are loath to countenance its use to describe other contemporary events. Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said the Palestinians faced "new Nazis."

Israeli air strikes have killed at least 33 Gazans, including five children, in the past two days. The army, which carried out additional air strikes on Friday, said most of those killed were militants.

I'm no Hebraist, but according to Reuters and common sense, "shoah," like "holocaust" isn't a word that's tossed around lightly in Israel. And whenever there's a comment by someone like Ahmadinejad, quoting Khomeini, saying that "the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time," we get Israel supporters clamoring for the world to denounce the genocidal intent of the Iranian regime. So will these same people condemn Israel's even more explicit language?

Just the other day on the Olin Institute's Middle Eastern Strategy at Harvard blog, Stephen Peter Rosen was making a fuss about a comment that Ahmadinejad made calling Israel a "black and dirty microbe," informing us that this change in discourse could be "associated with biological attacks or other unconventional mass killings." 

So since Rosen says that he's interested in tracking the discourse between Israel and Iran, I can imagine that the Harvard blog will soon have a post up warning of the impending "shoah" to be visited upon the Gazans. After all, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, right?

Of course not. If we look a the comments to Rosen's post, we're given the simple answer by Harvard's specialist on Armenia, James Russell, that "Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah are obviously murderous and crazy." I knew there was a simple answer!

UPDATE: Melanie Phillips at the Spectator is now claiming that "In Hebrew, the word ‘shoah’ is never used to mean ‘holocaust’ or ‘genocide’ because of the acute historical resonance." (Italics hers.) Someone should get Claude Lanzmann on the phone to let him know he's made a terrible mistake.

And for the record, the Israeli daily Ha'aretz has this to say about the remark:

Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai went as far as threatening a "shoah," the Hebrew word for holocaust or disaster. The word is generally used to refer to the Nazi Holocaust, but a spokesman for Vilnai said the deputy defense minister used the word in the sense of "disaster," saying "he did not mean to make any allusion to the genocide."

It's already unfortunate that the ADL had to be shamed into calling the Armenian Genocide by its proper name (and this only in a qualified and circuitous fashion). And I also find it disconcerting that what is ostensibly an American anti-racism organization should cite Turkey's status as a "staunch friend of Israel" as a reason why not to recognize the Armenian genocide. (The open letter that states this has since been removed from the ADL website and replaced with the new open letter that uses the word genocide. It can, however, be found in Google's cache.):

We believe that legislative efforts outside of Turkey are counterproductive to the goal of having Turkey itself come to grips with its past. We take no position on what action Congress should take on House Resolution 106. The Jewish community in Turkey has clearly expressed to us and other major American Jewish organizations its concerns about the impact of Congressional action on them, and we cannot ignore those concerns. We are also keenly aware that Turkey is a key strategic ally and friend of the United States and a staunch friend of Israel, and that in the struggle between Islamic extremists and moderate Islam, Turkey is the most critical country in the world.

But I'm somehow even more disappointed that people billed as serious historians of the Middle East like Michael Rubin, using rhetoric that is strikingly similar to Ankara's, have taken to reducing the historical reality of the Armenian genocide to "the narrative of Diaspora communities," giving the impression that the latter is at odds with the accounts of respected historians.

The Anti-Defamation League has decided to label the events surrounding the deaths of Armenians during World War I as 'genocide.'

There can be absolutely no argument that a million or more Armenians died during World War I.  But, on issue of whether genocide—a deliberate plan to eradicate a people—occurred or not, there is a big gap between the narrative of Diaspora communities and that of prominent historians.  The historical debate is more complex. 

It is a shame that Abraham Foxman has made such a decision on political rather than historical grounds.

It's then particularly ironic that Rubin laments that Foxman has made this decision on "political rather than historical grounds," when the stated reasons that Foxman originally gave for opposing the label were explicitly political in the first place.

Why is there no backlash from genocide scholars against people like Rubin? He has a prominent perch at the American Enterprise Institute and as editor of the Middle East Quarterly, which is published by Pipes's Middle East Forum. He should be publicly outed as a negationist, in the way that he would likely do to anyone who denied the Jewish genocide.

Raul Hilberg, one of the greatest Holocaust scholars, has died. Genocide scholars the world around are indebted to his tireless work.

The New Republic has an interesting piece out now about the battle in the US Congress about the Armenian genocide. The fight is over a piece of legislation that officially recognizes the Armenian genocide committed by the Ottomans in 1915.

From my research and the work of my colleagues who are specialists on the Armenian genocide, the historical record is pretty indisputable. Some of the details may not be, but the existence of the genocide itself seems fairly clear cut. This being said, I'm really wary of legislating history, particularly as it is done in Turkey and much of Western Europe. (In Turkey it is against the law to speak of the Armenian genocide, whereas in France, it is illegal to deny the Shoah, and Bernard Lewis has already been taken to court for denying the Armenian genocide.)

These questions should be debated in academic conferences and journals by historians, not in the halls of Capitol Hill by lobbyists. In any case, the Armenian question is very important to the US, given its strategic importance for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan:

Strange as it may be to find a World War I massacre on the 2007 Washington agenda, even more bizarre is the possibility that it may precipitate an international crisis. At one March House subcommittee hearing, Adam Schiff got a rare opportunity to grill Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Angry over the Bush administration's opposition to the Armenian genocide resolution, Schiff pressed Rice: "Is there any doubt in your mind that the murder of a million and a half Armenians between 1915 and 1923 constituted genocide?" Schiff even pointedly appealed to Rice's background in "academia." But the ever-disciplined Rice wouldn't bite. "Congressman, I come out of academia. But I'm secretary of state now. And I think that the best way to have this proceed is for ... the Turks and the Armenians to come to their own terms about this."

What Rice didn't say is that the Turks, should their lobbying firepower fail to stop the genocide bill from moving forward, have an even mightier weapon to brandish: the war in Iraq. As they did in 2000, the Turks are hinting they will shut down Incirlik, a far more dire threat now that Incirlik supplies U.S. forces occupying Iraq. Administration officials also fear Turkey might close the Habur Gate, a border point through which U.S. supplies flow into northern Iraq. In an April letter to congressional leaders, Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates bluntly warned that a House resolution "could harm American troops in the field [and] constrain our ability to supply our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan."

That prospect may even be dragging U.S. troops themselves into the Turkish counteroffensive. Or so says Frank Pallone, a New Jersey Democrat and lead co-sponsor of the genocide resolution. "[The Turks] have had American soldiers call members of Congress and say, Don't vote for this, because I am going to be threatened in Iraq,'" Pallone says. (A Turkish embassy spokesman denied knowledge of this.)

Of course, this is probably just a lot of Turkish bluster. Before France passed its own Armenian legislation, the Turks had threatened that the bill would cause relations between the two countries to be suspended, among other things. In the end though, nothing happened. I suspect that the Turks know what side their bread is buttered on and would find that the smug satisfaction of punishing the US for calling them on their genocide denial would be far outweighed by the consequences of pissing the US off in Iraq. For instance, the US is currently in a delicate balancing act between the Iraqi Kurds and Ankara, and if Turkey were to make the US an enemy, I imagine that Ankara wouldn't appreciate the consequent shift in American policy in Kurdistan.  

I still haven't read UNEP's report on Darfur (pdf), due to a lack of time (it's 358 pages) and a lot of other lengthy reading on my plate these days. I have, however, followed some of the press coverage, which makes it sound like the genocide in Darfur is the result of purely ecological factors, including desertification, water shortages and global warming. As it happens, I've worked with UNEP on a publication before, and I'm inclined to believe that their report is a lot more nuanced than the press coverage gives it credit for. But I'll have to save that final judgement for when I have the time to sit down and read it.

In any case, the fact that environmental concerns and competition for resources places a part in conflict is an obvious point, it's how much of an impact these concerns have that is at issue. Lydia Polgreen, whose coverage of Sudan in the Times has been very good, has a piece in this week's Week in Review that takes a quick look at the underground lake recently discovered in Darfur. She quotes Alex de Waal and John Prendergast, both of whom know a lot about Sudan, in order to illustrate her point that it's less the ecological strain that's to fault for conflict in Sudan and more how that problem is dealt with:

A scientific explanation for the problem (environmental degradation) along with a tidy technological solution (irrigation) gratifies the modern humanitarian impulse.

But the history of Sudan, a grim chronicle of civil war, famine, coups and despotism, gives ample reason to be skeptical.

“Like all resources water can be used for good or ill,” said Alex de Waal, a scholar who has studied the impact of climate variation in Sudan and who witnessed the 1984-85 famine that is often cited as the beginning of the ecological crisis gripping Darfur. “It can be a blessing or also a curse. If the government acts true to form and tries to create some sort of oasis in the desert and control who settles there, that would simply be an extension of the crisis, not a solution.”

The droughts that gripped Sudan in the 1980s, and the migrations and other social changes they forced, have doubtless played a role in the conflict by increasing competition for water and land between farmers, who tend to be non-Arab, and herders, many of whom are Arabs. But an environmental catastrophe cannot become a violent cataclysm without a powerful human hand to guide it in that direction.

“These wider environmental factors don’t have impact in and of themselves” in terms of fomenting conflict, Mr. de Waal said. “The question is how they are managed.”

[...]

“Climate change and the lack of rain are much less important than the land-use patterns promoted by the government of Sudan and the development policies of World Bank and I.M.F., which were focused on intensive agricultural expansion that really mined the soils and left a lot of land unusable,” said Mr. Prendergast, who has been studying Sudan for 20 years. “That was probably the principal impetus for a lot of intra-Darfur migration in the decades leading up to the conflict in Darfur.”

She then goes on to make a point that I've been harping on for a while now:

A report released last year by the Coalition for International Justice on the role that oil and mechanized farming have played in human rights abuses in Sudan concluded: “The predominant root of conflict in Sudan is the instability that results from the systemic abuse of the rural (and recently urbanized) poor at the hands of the economic and political elites of central Sudan.”

In this analysis, the heart of the Darfur conflict, as in all conflicts in Sudan, is the battle for control of resources and riches, but not between farmers and herders, northerners and southerners, Christians and Muslims, or Arabs and non-Arabs.

It is a conflict between those at the center of the country, the elites who have controlled Sudan and its wealth for the past century and a half, and the desperately poor people who beg for scraps from the periphery.

Until that equation changes, many analysts argue, nothing else will.

Here's another genocide-related event in the international community, which gives me the impression that something's rotten in, well, the Hague:

Serbia, the heir to Yugoslavia, obtained the tribunal's permission to keep parts of the archives out of the public eye. Citing national security, its lawyers blacked out many sensitive -- those who have seen them say incriminating -- pages. Judges and lawyers at the war crimes tribunal could see the censored material, but it was barred from the tribunal’s public records.

Now, lawyers and others who were involved in Serbia's bid for secrecy say that, at the time, Belgrade made its true objective clear: to keep the full military archives from the International Court of Justice, where Bosnia was suing Serbia for genocide. And they say Belgrade’s goal was achieved in February, when the international court, which is also in The Hague, declared Serbia not guilty of genocide, and absolved it from paying potentially enormous damages.

Lawyers interviewed in The Hague and Belgrade said that the outcome might well have been different had the International Court of Justice pressed for access to the full archives, and legal scholars and human rights groups said it was deeply troubling that the judges did not subpoena the documents directly from Serbia. At one point, the court rebuffed a Bosnian request that it demand the full documents, saying that ample evidence was available in tribunal records.

"It's a question that nags loudly," Diane Orentlicher, a law professor at American University in Washington, said recently in The Hague. "Why didn’t the court request the full documents? The fact that they were blacked out clearly implies these passages would have made a difference."

The ruling -- which was binding and final -- was in many ways meticulous, and acknowledged that the 15 judges had not seen the censored archives. But it did not say why the court did not order Serbia to provide the full documents.

The first-hand experience I've had at the UN and what I know of the tribunals in the Hague and Arusha have convinced me that it would be naïve to think that there are no deals being made in the smoke-filled hotel rooms.

This probably has something to do with Serbia's wishes to join the EU and the fact that a guilty verdict would probably ruin the country financially. But still, this seems unacceptable to me.

I've seen first hand how politics (office and international) can override common sense or even doing the right thing in a large bureaucracy. I shouldn't be surprised by stories like this anymore, and I guess I'm not.

But still. Shame on Ankara, and shame on the UN for kowtowing:

The United Nations dismantled an exhibit on the Rwandan genocide and postponed its scheduled opening by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Monday after the Turkish mission objected to references to the Armenian genocide in Turkey at the time of World War I.

The panels of graphics, photos and statements had been installed in the visitors lobby on Thursday by the British-based Aegis Trust. The trust campaigns for the prevention of genocide and runs a center in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, memorializing the 500,000 victims of the massacres there 13 years ago.

Hours after the show was assembled, however, a Turkish diplomat spotted offending words in a section entitled "What is genocide?" and raised objections.

The passage said that "following World War I, during which one million Armenians were murdered in Turkey," Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer credited with coining the word genocide, "urged the League of Nations to recognize crimes of barbarity as international crimes."

James Smith, the chief executive of Aegis, said he was told by the United Nations on Saturday night that the sentence would have to be eliminated or the exhibition would be struck.

...Mr. Smith said he was "very disappointed because this was supposed to talk about the lessons drawn from Rwanda and point up that what is happening in Darfur is the cost of inaction."

I never thought I'd be able to ask this question, but have you read Angelina Jolie's op-ed in The Washington Post today? The truth be told, it's not any better or any worse than most other pieces I've read in the mainstream press. And to her credit, she (unlike most people who have an opinion about Darfur, myself included) has actually been there.

Like most other proponents of intervention, she doesn't say exactly what she thinks that would entail, but she does come out as a strong supporter of the ICC accusations.

I think it was Bono who once said (more or less), "Celebrity is a currency, and I want to spend mine well." I have to say that I couldn't agree more, and if Angelina Jolie wants to spend hers on Darfur, then I say more power to her.

Here's some disconcerting but unsurprising news about human empathy and statistics, or "numbers and nerves":

Follow your intuition and act? When it comes to genocide, forget it. It doesn't work, says a University of Oregon psychologist. The large numbers of reported deaths represent dry statistics that fail to spark emotion and feeling and thus fail to motivate actions. Even going from one to two victims, feeling and meaning begin to fade, he said.

In a session Friday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science devoted to "Numbers and Nerves," Paul Slovic, a UO professor and president of Decision Research, a non-profit research institute in Eugene, Ore., urged a review and overhaul of the 1948 Genocide Convention, mandated by much of the world after the Holocaust in World War II. "It has obviously failed, because it has never been invoked to intervene in genocide," Slovic said.

Slovic is studying the issue from a psychological perspective, trying to determine how people can utilize both the moral intuition that genocide is wrong and moral reasoning to reach not only an outcry but also demand intervention. "We have to understand what it is in our makeup -- psychologically, socially, politically and institutionally -- that has allowed genocide to go unabated for a century," he said. "If we don't answer that question and use the answer to change things, we will see another century of horrible atrocities around the world."

...In Slovic's latest research, evidence is mounting for an even more disturbing 'collapse model' that he described in his talk. "This model appears to be more accurate than the psychophysical model in describing our response to genocide," he said. "We have these large numbers of deaths occurring, and we are doing nothing."

His new research follows up an Israeli study published in 2005 in which subjects were presented three photos. One depicted eight children who needed $300,000 in medical intervention to save their lives. Another photo depicted just one child who could be helped with $300,000. Participants were most willing to donate for one child's medical care. The level of giving declined dramatically for donating to help the entire group.

Slovic and colleagues Daniel Vastfjäll and Ellen Peters used the same approach but narrowed the focus. Participants in Sweden were shown a photo of a starving African girl, her individual story and the conditions of the nation in which she lives. Another photo contained the same information but for a starving boy. A third photo showed both children. The feelings of sympathy for each individual child were almost equal, but dropped when they were considered together. Donations followed the same pattern, being lower for two needy children than for either individually.

"The studies just described suggest a disturbing psychological tendency," Slovic said. "Our capacity to feel is limited." Even at two, he added, people start to lose it.

If we see the beginning of the collapse of feeling at just two individuals, "it is no wonder that at 200,000 deaths the feeling is gone."

The French Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales, along with the French research institution, CNRS and Sciences-Po, have begun an Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence with the help of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. The project is under the direction of Jacques Sémelin, whose 2005 book on genocide (which I have but have yet to read) has recently been translated into English and published by Columbia.

The site's still pretty bare bones for the moment, but it's designed to provide information of mass violence based chronologically and geographically, so when it's done, you'll be able to click on any country you want to get information about mass violence in that country. There's also an encyclopedia of terms that looks to be pretty complete.

Strangely enough, for a French initiative, it's only available in English for the moment. The international advisory board includes scholars like Omer Bartov, Samantha Power, Frank Chalk, Antonio Cassesse, Ben Kiernen, René Lemarchand, William Schabas and Eric Weitz, just to name a few.

I spend a lot of time getting annoyed when people throw around the word "genocide" or "holocaust" when it's not warranted. This often means rebuking Lebanese and Palestinian friends who want to call the Israeli occupation a genocide. The occupation is a lot of things, none of them savory, but a genocide it is not, and calling it one cheapens the word.

So you can imagine my surprise when I saw last night that Israel's deputy defense minister, Matan Vilnai, had threatened Palestinians in Gaza with a "shoah":

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A senior Israeli defense official said on Friday that Palestinians firing rockets from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip would bring upon themselves what he termed a "shoah," the Hebrew word for holocaust or disaster.

The word is rarely used in Israel outside discussions of the Nazi Holocaust of Jews. Many Israelis are loath to countenance its use to describe other contemporary events. Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said the Palestinians faced "new Nazis."

Israeli air strikes have killed at least 33 Gazans, including five children, in the past two days. The army, which carried out additional air strikes on Friday, said most of those killed were militants.

I'm no Hebraist, but according to Reuters and common sense, "shoah," like "holocaust" isn't a word that's tossed around lightly in Israel. And whenever there's a comment by someone like Ahmadinejad, quoting Khomeini, saying that "the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time," we get Israel supporters clamoring for the world to denounce the genocidal intent of the Iranian regime. So will these same people condemn Israel's even more explicit language?

Just the other day on the Olin Institute's Middle Eastern Strategy at Harvard blog, Stephen Peter Rosen was making a fuss about a comment that Ahmadinejad made calling Israel a "black and dirty microbe," informing us that this change in discourse could be "associated with biological attacks or other unconventional mass killings." 

So since Rosen says that he's interested in tracking the discourse between Israel and Iran, I can imagine that the Harvard blog will soon have a post up warning of the impending "shoah" to be visited upon the Gazans. After all, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, right?

Of course not. If we look a the comments to Rosen's post, we're given the simple answer by Harvard's specialist on Armenia, James Russell, that "Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah are obviously murderous and crazy." I knew there was a simple answer!

UPDATE: Melanie Phillips at the Spectator is now claiming that "In Hebrew, the word ‘shoah’ is never used to mean ‘holocaust’ or ‘genocide’ because of the acute historical resonance." (Italics hers.) Someone should get Claude Lanzmann on the phone to let him know he's made a terrible mistake.

And for the record, the Israeli daily Ha'aretz has this to say about the remark:

Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai went as far as threatening a "shoah," the Hebrew word for holocaust or disaster. The word is generally used to refer to the Nazi Holocaust, but a spokesman for Vilnai said the deputy defense minister used the word in the sense of "disaster," saying "he did not mean to make any allusion to the genocide."

It's already unfortunate that the ADL had to be shamed into calling the Armenian Genocide by its proper name (and this only in a qualified and circuitous fashion). And I also find it disconcerting that what is ostensibly an American anti-racism organization should cite Turkey's status as a "staunch friend of Israel" as a reason why not to recognize the Armenian genocide. (The open letter that states this has since been removed from the ADL website and replaced with the new open letter that uses the word genocide. It can, however, be found in Google's cache.):

We believe that legislative efforts outside of Turkey are counterproductive to the goal of having Turkey itself come to grips with its past. We take no position on what action Congress should take on House Resolution 106. The Jewish community in Turkey has clearly expressed to us and other major American Jewish organizations its concerns about the impact of Congressional action on them, and we cannot ignore those concerns. We are also keenly aware that Turkey is a key strategic ally and friend of the United States and a staunch friend of Israel, and that in the struggle between Islamic extremists and moderate Islam, Turkey is the most critical country in the world.

But I'm somehow even more disappointed that people billed as serious historians of the Middle East like Michael Rubin, using rhetoric that is strikingly similar to Ankara's, have taken to reducing the historical reality of the Armenian genocide to "the narrative of Diaspora communities," giving the impression that the latter is at odds with the accounts of respected historians.

The Anti-Defamation League has decided to label the events surrounding the deaths of Armenians during World War I as 'genocide.'

There can be absolutely no argument that a million or more Armenians died during World War I.  But, on issue of whether genocide—a deliberate plan to eradicate a people—occurred or not, there is a big gap between the narrative of Diaspora communities and that of prominent historians.  The historical debate is more complex. 

It is a shame that Abraham Foxman has made such a decision on political rather than historical grounds.

It's then particularly ironic that Rubin laments that Foxman has made this decision on "political rather than historical grounds," when the stated reasons that Foxman originally gave for opposing the label were explicitly political in the first place.

Why is there no backlash from genocide scholars against people like Rubin? He has a prominent perch at the American Enterprise Institute and as editor of the Middle East Quarterly, which is published by Pipes's Middle East Forum. He should be publicly outed as a negationist, in the way that he would likely do to anyone who denied the Jewish genocide.

Raul Hilberg, one of the greatest Holocaust scholars, has died. Genocide scholars the world around are indebted to his tireless work.

The New Republic has an interesting piece out now about the battle in the US Congress about the Armenian genocide. The fight is over a piece of legislation that officially recognizes the Armenian genocide committed by the Ottomans in 1915.

From my research and the work of my colleagues who are specialists on the Armenian genocide, the historical record is pretty indisputable. Some of the details may not be, but the existence of the genocide itself seems fairly clear cut. This being said, I'm really wary of legislating history, particularly as it is done in Turkey and much of Western Europe. (In Turkey it is against the law to speak of the Armenian genocide, whereas in France, it is illegal to deny the Shoah, and Bernard Lewis has already been taken to court for denying the Armenian genocide.)

These questions should be debated in academic conferences and journals by historians, not in the halls of Capitol Hill by lobbyists. In any case, the Armenian question is very important to the US, given its strategic importance for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan:

Strange as it may be to find a World War I massacre on the 2007 Washington agenda, even more bizarre is the possibility that it may precipitate an international crisis. At one March House subcommittee hearing, Adam Schiff got a rare opportunity to grill Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Angry over the Bush administration's opposition to the Armenian genocide resolution, Schiff pressed Rice: "Is there any doubt in your mind that the murder of a million and a half Armenians between 1915 and 1923 constituted genocide?" Schiff even pointedly appealed to Rice's background in "academia." But the ever-disciplined Rice wouldn't bite. "Congressman, I come out of academia. But I'm secretary of state now. And I think that the best way to have this proceed is for ... the Turks and the Armenians to come to their own terms about this."

What Rice didn't say is that the Turks, should their lobbying firepower fail to stop the genocide bill from moving forward, have an even mightier weapon to brandish: the war in Iraq. As they did in 2000, the Turks are hinting they will shut down Incirlik, a far more dire threat now that Incirlik supplies U.S. forces occupying Iraq. Administration officials also fear Turkey might close the Habur Gate, a border point through which U.S. supplies flow into northern Iraq. In an April letter to congressional leaders, Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates bluntly warned that a House resolution "could harm American troops in the field [and] constrain our ability to supply our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan."

That prospect may even be dragging U.S. troops themselves into the Turkish counteroffensive. Or so says Frank Pallone, a New Jersey Democrat and lead co-sponsor of the genocide resolution. "[The Turks] have had American soldiers call members of Congress and say, Don't vote for this, because I am going to be threatened in Iraq,'" Pallone says. (A Turkish embassy spokesman denied knowledge of this.)

Of course, this is probably just a lot of Turkish bluster. Before France passed its own Armenian legislation, the Turks had threatened that the bill would cause relations between the two countries to be suspended, among other things. In the end though, nothing happened. I suspect that the Turks know what side their bread is buttered on and would find that the smug satisfaction of punishing the US for calling them on their genocide denial would be far outweighed by the consequences of pissing the US off in Iraq. For instance, the US is currently in a delicate balancing act between the Iraqi Kurds and Ankara, and if Turkey were to make the US an enemy, I imagine that Ankara wouldn't appreciate the consequent shift in American policy in Kurdistan.  

I still haven't read UNEP's report on Darfur (pdf), due to a lack of time (it's 358 pages) and a lot of other lengthy reading on my plate these days. I have, however, followed some of the press coverage, which makes it sound like the genocide in Darfur is the result of purely ecological factors, including desertification, water shortages and global warming. As it happens, I've worked with UNEP on a publication before, and I'm inclined to believe that their report is a lot more nuanced than the press coverage gives it credit for. But I'll have to save that final judgement for when I have the time to sit down and read it.

In any case, the fact that environmental concerns and competition for resources places a part in conflict is an obvious point, it's how much of an impact these concerns have that is at issue. Lydia Polgreen, whose coverage of Sudan in the Times has been very good, has a piece in this week's Week in Review that takes a quick look at the underground lake recently discovered in Darfur. She quotes Alex de Waal and John Prendergast, both of whom know a lot about Sudan, in order to illustrate her point that it's less the ecological strain that's to fault for conflict in Sudan and more how that problem is dealt with:

A scientific explanation for the problem (environmental degradation) along with a tidy technological solution (irrigation) gratifies the modern humanitarian impulse.

But the history of Sudan, a grim chronicle of civil war, famine, coups and despotism, gives ample reason to be skeptical.

“Like all resources water can be used for good or ill,” said Alex de Waal, a scholar who has studied the impact of climate variation in Sudan and who witnessed the 1984-85 famine that is often cited as the beginning of the ecological crisis gripping Darfur. “It can be a blessing or also a curse. If the government acts true to form and tries to create some sort of oasis in the desert and control who settles there, that would simply be an extension of the crisis, not a solution.”

The droughts that gripped Sudan in the 1980s, and the migrations and other social changes they forced, have doubtless played a role in the conflict by increasing competition for water and land between farmers, who tend to be non-Arab, and herders, many of whom are Arabs. But an environmental catastrophe cannot become a violent cataclysm without a powerful human hand to guide it in that direction.

“These wider environmental factors don’t have impact in and of themselves” in terms of fomenting conflict, Mr. de Waal said. “The question is how they are managed.”

[...]

“Climate change and the lack of rain are much less important than the land-use patterns promoted by the government of Sudan and the development policies of World Bank and I.M.F., which were focused on intensive agricultural expansion that really mined the soils and left a lot of land unusable,” said Mr. Prendergast, who has been studying Sudan for 20 years. “That was probably the principal impetus for a lot of intra-Darfur migration in the decades leading up to the conflict in Darfur.”

She then goes on to make a point that I've been harping on for a while now:

A report released last year by the Coalition for International Justice on the role that oil and mechanized farming have played in human rights abuses in Sudan concluded: “The predominant root of conflict in Sudan is the instability that results from the systemic abuse of the rural (and recently urbanized) poor at the hands of the economic and political elites of central Sudan.”

In this analysis, the heart of the Darfur conflict, as in all conflicts in Sudan, is the battle for control of resources and riches, but not between farmers and herders, northerners and southerners, Christians and Muslims, or Arabs and non-Arabs.

It is a conflict between those at the center of the country, the elites who have controlled Sudan and its wealth for the past century and a half, and the desperately poor people who beg for scraps from the periphery.

Until that equation changes, many analysts argue, nothing else will.

Here's another genocide-related event in the international community, which gives me the impression that something's rotten in, well, the Hague:

Serbia, the heir to Yugoslavia, obtained the tribunal's permission to keep parts of the archives out of the public eye. Citing national security, its lawyers blacked out many sensitive -- those who have seen them say incriminating -- pages. Judges and lawyers at the war crimes tribunal could see the censored material, but it was barred from the tribunal’s public records.

Now, lawyers and others who were involved in Serbia's bid for secrecy say that, at the time, Belgrade made its true objective clear: to keep the full military archives from the International Court of Justice, where Bosnia was suing Serbia for genocide. And they say Belgrade’s goal was achieved in February, when the international court, which is also in The Hague, declared Serbia not guilty of genocide, and absolved it from paying potentially enormous damages.

Lawyers interviewed in The Hague and Belgrade said that the outcome might well have been different had the International Court of Justice pressed for access to the full archives, and legal scholars and human rights groups said it was deeply troubling that the judges did not subpoena the documents directly from Serbia. At one point, the court rebuffed a Bosnian request that it demand the full documents, saying that ample evidence was available in tribunal records.

"It's a question that nags loudly," Diane Orentlicher, a law professor at American University in Washington, said recently in The Hague. "Why didn’t the court request the full documents? The fact that they were blacked out clearly implies these passages would have made a difference."

The ruling -- which was binding and final -- was in many ways meticulous, and acknowledged that the 15 judges had not seen the censored archives. But it did not say why the court did not order Serbia to provide the full documents.

The first-hand experience I've had at the UN and what I know of the tribunals in the Hague and Arusha have convinced me that it would be naïve to think that there are no deals being made in the smoke-filled hotel rooms.

This probably has something to do with Serbia's wishes to join the EU and the fact that a guilty verdict would probably ruin the country financially. But still, this seems unacceptable to me.

I've seen first hand how politics (office and international) can override common sense or even doing the right thing in a large bureaucracy. I shouldn't be surprised by stories like this anymore, and I guess I'm not.

But still. Shame on Ankara, and shame on the UN for kowtowing:

The United Nations dismantled an exhibit on the Rwandan genocide and postponed its scheduled opening by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Monday after the Turkish mission objected to references to the Armenian genocide in Turkey at the time of World War I.

The panels of graphics, photos and statements had been installed in the visitors lobby on Thursday by the British-based Aegis Trust. The trust campaigns for the prevention of genocide and runs a center in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, memorializing the 500,000 victims of the massacres there 13 years ago.

Hours after the show was assembled, however, a Turkish diplomat spotted offending words in a section entitled "What is genocide?" and raised objections.

The passage said that "following World War I, during which one million Armenians were murdered in Turkey," Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer credited with coining the word genocide, "urged the League of Nations to recognize crimes of barbarity as international crimes."

James Smith, the chief executive of Aegis, said he was told by the United Nations on Saturday night that the sentence would have to be eliminated or the exhibition would be struck.

...Mr. Smith said he was "very disappointed because this was supposed to talk about the lessons drawn from Rwanda and point up that what is happening in Darfur is the cost of inaction."

I never thought I'd be able to ask this question, but have you read Angelina Jolie's op-ed in The Washington Post today? The truth be told, it's not any better or any worse than most other pieces I've read in the mainstream press. And to her credit, she (unlike most people who have an opinion about Darfur, myself included) has actually been there.

Like most other proponents of intervention, she doesn't say exactly what she thinks that would entail, but she does come out as a strong supporter of the ICC accusations.

I think it was Bono who once said (more or less), "Celebrity is a currency, and I want to spend mine well." I have to say that I couldn't agree more, and if Angelina Jolie wants to spend hers on Darfur, then I say more power to her.

Here's some disconcerting but unsurprising news about human empathy and statistics, or "numbers and nerves":

Follow your intuition and act? When it comes to genocide, forget it. It doesn't work, says a University of Oregon psychologist. The large numbers of reported deaths represent dry statistics that fail to spark emotion and feeling and thus fail to motivate actions. Even going from one to two victims, feeling and meaning begin to fade, he said.

In a session Friday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science devoted to "Numbers and Nerves," Paul Slovic, a UO professor and president of Decision Research, a non-profit research institute in Eugene, Ore., urged a review and overhaul of the 1948 Genocide Convention, mandated by much of the world after the Holocaust in World War II. "It has obviously failed, because it has never been invoked to intervene in genocide," Slovic said.

Slovic is studying the issue from a psychological perspective, trying to determine how people can utilize both the moral intuition that genocide is wrong and moral reasoning to reach not only an outcry but also demand intervention. "We have to understand what it is in our makeup -- psychologically, socially, politically and institutionally -- that has allowed genocide to go unabated for a century," he said. "If we don't answer that question and use the answer to change things, we will see another century of horrible atrocities around the world."

...In Slovic's latest research, evidence is mounting for an even more disturbing 'collapse model' that he described in his talk. "This model appears to be more accurate than the psychophysical model in describing our response to genocide," he said. "We have these large numbers of deaths occurring, and we are doing nothing."

His new research follows up an Israeli study published in 2005 in which subjects were presented three photos. One depicted eight children who needed $300,000 in medical intervention to save their lives. Another photo depicted just one child who could be helped with $300,000. Participants were most willing to donate for one child's medical care. The level of giving declined dramatically for donating to help the entire group.

Slovic and colleagues Daniel Vastfjäll and Ellen Peters used the same approach but narrowed the focus. Participants in Sweden were shown a photo of a starving African girl, her individual story and the conditions of the nation in which she lives. Another photo contained the same information but for a starving boy. A third photo showed both children. The feelings of sympathy for each individual child were almost equal, but dropped when they were considered together. Donations followed the same pattern, being lower for two needy children than for either individually.

"The studies just described suggest a disturbing psychological tendency," Slovic said. "Our capacity to feel is limited." Even at two, he added, people start to lose it.

If we see the beginning of the collapse of feeling at just two individuals, "it is no wonder that at 200,000 deaths the feeling is gone."