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Obama Announces Atrocities Prevention Board: ‘Sovereignty Is Never A License To Slaughter Your Own People’

By Guest Blogger on Apr 23, 2012 at 3:02 pm

By Sarah Margon

(Photo: AP)

Earlier today, on the heels of Holocaust Remembrance Day, President Obama gave a long-awaited speech on the U.S. government response to genocide and atrocities prevention. It was a remarkable speech that illustrated the unprecedented attention this administration — and this President in particular — has paid to addressing atrocities around the globe. Specifically, Obama’s speech illustrated the central role civilian protection has played within his foreign policy by noting that “national sovereignty is never a license to slaughter your own people” — whether in Libya or Cote D’Ivoire.

The President outlined a number of important initiatives geared toward creating a more cohesive and effective government-wide strategy to combat atrocities. Some of these initiatives have been underway for some time — including the creation of the first-ever White House position dedicated to preventing and addressing war crimes and atrocities or the visa-ban issued to ensure human rights abusers do not enter the United States.

One of the newer initiatives the President announced today was the formal establishment of the Atrocities Prevention Board, or APB, created under the 2010 Presidential Study Directive which declared mass atrocities and genocide to be a “core national security interest and core moral responsibility.” The APB, comprised of senior government officials across nearly a dozen government agencies, will meet regularly to help identify and address atrocity threats. It will also help manage the governmental bureaucracy — and recommend any necessary changes –- to ensure a more effective and cohesive response. With its inaugural meeting later today, the APB emphasizes the centrality of atrocities prevention within President Obama’s foreign policy agenda.

Another notable new initiative is an executive order that authorizes sanctions and visa bans against those who commit or facilitate grave human rights abuses through information technology. For now this executive order is specifically related to the ongoing brutality in Syria and Iran but there is great potential for expansion, particularly because these sanctions target not just governments but companies who enable such abuse.

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Alyssa

Viola Davis, ‘Ender’s Game,’ and the Giant’s Drink

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Feb 10, 2012 at 11:08 am

Not only is Viola Davis going to be in Ender’s Game, but they’re creating a role that’s not in the books, or at least is split off from Colonel Graff’s duties, for her: “Davis will play a military psychologist who oversees the emotional welfare of young trainees. She also helps design the games that test their skills and resilience.” This sounds terrific to me, honestly. In the novels, the characters that Graff argues with about Ender’s well-being aren’t really fleshed out at all—it’s more a conversation between him and Valentine. So giving Graff a clear adult partner in trying to figure out how to calibrate Ender’s training makes a lot of sense, particularly given that Harrison Ford, who’s playing Graff, has essentially regressed into a single cantankerous emotional range in recent years.

And even as someone who didn’t grow up playing video games, the Fantasy Game in the novel has always been one of the literary devices from that period of my reading life that stuck with me most strongly. In the novel, it’s a computer that keeps expanding the game for Ender after he beats what should have been its highest-level, overcoming a no-win scenario through a burst of unexpected violence. In the world of the novel, particularly given the way artificial intelligence evolves and the roles it plays in the subsequent books, it makes sense that an AI would be able to create a detailed psychological response to Ender’s pain. But I think in the movie it makes more sense to give us a person who’s designing the game, to personify that exploration of Ender’s psyche and the creative process that leads to its most stunning revelations.

It also makes the ending of the novel, in which the aliens Ender’s exterminated build a replica of the game to communicate with him after they’re gone, even more poignant. In the novel, Ender and the Hive Queen have learned their way towards reconciliation and forgiveness, and Ender takes on the task of making up for his crime after he’s reached that place of understanding. But by putting a person behind the fantasy game, Ender becomes a point of convergence for humanity as a whole and the Buggers: he’s someone they both need to understand, and he becomes them the first thing they truly have in common. In the novels, Ender’s xenocide set the stage for regret and a too-late desire for reconciliation, and he provided the intellectual framework for those emotions. But personifying the Fantasy Game plants the seed of that framework even earlier. Now, if only the movie or a sequel will give us a sense of the Hive Queen.

Security

Don’t Blame Human Rights Activists for Crimes Against Humanity

By Guest Blogger on Jul 24, 2008 at 2:30 pm

Our guest blogger is David Sullivan, Research Associate at the ENOUGH project.

This weekend, human rights contrarian David Rieff’s op-ed in the LA Times castigated activists for “human rights triumphalism” after the International Criminal Court’s move to indict Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and argued “it would make more sense to try to restart negotiations in a serious way with Bashir and his government than to indulge in ‘Count of Monte Cristo’-like fantasies of the wicked getting their comeuppance.”

Rieff’s timing could not have been worse: the very next day, Serbia captured indicted war criminal Radovan Karadzic, the man most responsible for the crimes against humanity in Bosnia that Rieff lambasted western governments for failing to stop in his book Slaughterhouse. Someone apparently forgot to tell Karadzic, former Liberian President Charles Taylor, and the late Slobodan Milosevic that The Hague was just a “Count of Monte Cristo”-like fantasy. Humor aside, Rieff’s argument is particularly galling because he directly denigrates the popular mobilization of Americans to stop genocide and crimes against humanity. In this regard Rieff joins former United States Special Envoy for Sudan Andrew Natsios who wrote in Foreign Affairs that “moral outrage is no substitute for practical policies aimed at saving lives and promoting stability.” This is a false choice that is as incorrect as it is condescending.

For all their expertise, Rieff and Natsios come off as more naïve than the average activist in repeatedly arguing that peace and justice are incompatible, despite so much evidence to the contrary. As with the charges against Milosevic in 1999 and Charles Taylor in 2003, the ICC’s move to charge Bashir presents an opportunity for the U.N. Security Council to exert leverage with his government. Article 16 of the Rome Statute (pdf) (the document that governs the ICC) allows the U.N. Security Council to suspend ICC investigations on an annual basis, creating an ongoing point of leverage that can be used to pressure Khartoum not just to sign peace deals, but to implement them. Read more

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