As the international community continues to struggle with how to respond to the ongoing violence in Syria, the Pentagon has developed a new doctrine on how to use military force in preventing and ending mass atrocities.

In August 2012, the Department of Defense updated its doctrine on “Peace Operations,” dictating the recommended procedures for participating in multilateral peacekeeping or peace-enforcing efforts. While the doctrine’s update was completed last year, it remained completely hidden from the public, until the Federation of American Scientists obtained it through a Freedom of Information Act request. In revising Joint Publication 3-07.3, the Pentagon opted to create a new appendix on what they refer to as “Mass Atrocity Response Operations” (MARO).

Going beyond the normal scale of fighting seen in civil wars and other conflicts, mass atrocities according to DOD consist of “widespread and often systematic acts of violence against civilians by state or non-state armed groups, including killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, or deliberately inflicting conditions of life that cause serious bodily or mental harm.”

The document stresses that the military can and should incorporate MARO considerations into its planning and operations whenever appropriate. To facilitate this, the doctrine lists a variety of considerations military planners and strategists should keep in mind when developing operations, including the requirement for a high degree of situational understanding — knowing precisely who the actors are in the conflict, how they interact, and what other forces are at play — and designing a strategic communications plan to both explain the situation and influence the perpetrators.

It also determines five phases that MARO goes through and provides planners with seven approaches that can be mixed and matched in ending atrocities:

1. Area Security — secure a large area with sufficient force deployed in unit sectors.

2. Shape-Clear-Hold-Build — systematically secure limited areas and expand when able.

3. Separation — establish a DMZ or similar buffer zone between perpetrators and victims.

4. Safe Areas — secure concentrations of vulnerable populations such as IDP camps.

5. Partner Enabling — provide advisors, equipment, or specialized support such as deployment or airpower to coalition partners, host nation, or victim groups.

6. Containment — influence perpetrator behavior with strikes, blockades, or no-fly zones.

7. Defeat Perpetrators — attack and defeat perpetrator leadership and/or capabilities.

Joint Publication 3-07.3 makes clear that the decision on whether a situation should be categorized as “an actual or potential” mass atrocity is one that should be left up to national level leadership. It also includes several warnings about the ways in which any military intervention, even when conducted for the best of reasons, can have unpredictable second- and third-order effects.

“MARO may create moral dilemmas for the PO [Peace Operations] force, including whether potential courses of action to halt a mass atrocity that might assist a perpetrator’s long-term aims,” it warns. Even something as basic as protecting civilians could prove to be detrimental, as if “seen to be defending civilians who are linked to only one of the parties, without adjusting to ensure protection for all civilians, both victims and perpetrators will perceive the PO force as anything but impartial.”

The timing of the release means it comes just as the international community prepares to meet once again in Geneva to determine a course of action in ending the civil war in Syria. So far, the conflict has cost the lives of at least 80,000 Syrians, with the vast majority dead at the hands of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s security forces.
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What was hailed as a landmark ruling in Guatemala has been thrown out, as the country’s high court ordered a former dictator’s case on charges of genocide return to a lower court.

Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt was just less than two weeks ago convicted of committing genocide against his own people during his time in power. According to the charges against him, Rios Montt was aware of the slaughter of at least 1,771 Ixil Mayans during the country’s lengthy civil war, and did nothing to stop it. As punishment, the 86-year old former dictator was sentenced to eighty years in prison, the first time a national court had convicted a former head of state for committing genocide.

Instead of sitting in a cell for the rest of his life, however, the Guatemalan Constitutional Court has overturned the conviction and ordered that the trial jump back down to the tribunal that originally tried the case. Additionally, the trial has to rewind to where it stood back on April 19, to cover what Rios Montt claimed were violations of due process. As a result, it seems that Rios Montt will likely be released from custody in the near future, while many involved with the prosecution have already fled the country for fear of reprisals from those who sought to have the conviction reversed.

When it was first announced, Human Rights Watch called Rios Montt’s guilty verdict an “unprecedented step toward establishing accountability for atrocities.”

“The conviction of Rios Montt sends a powerful message to Guatemala and the world that nobody, not even a former head of state, is above the law when it comes to committing genocide,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch, at the time.

The overturning of the ruling should be particularly disappointing for Americans, given the role that the United States played in enabling Rios Montt’s rule and subsequent abuse of power at the height of the Cold War:

When General Ríos Montt was installed in a coup in March 1982, Reagan administration officials were eager to embrace him as an ally. Embassy officials trekked up to the scene of massacres and reported back the army’s line that the guerrillas were doing the killing, according to documents uncovered by [Kate Doyle, a Guatemala expert at the National Security Archive].

Over the next two years, about $15 million in spare parts and vehicles from the United States reached the Guatemalan military, said Prof. Michael E. Allison, a political scientist at the University of Scranton who studies Central America. More aid came from American allies like Israel, Taiwan, Argentina and Chile. In the 1990s, the American government revealed that the C.I.A. had been paying top military officers throughout the period.

President Bill Clinton in 1999 traveled to Guatemala to apologize for the U.S.’ support for the dictator, saying that “support for military forces or intelligence units which engage in violent and widespread repression of the kind described in the [Commission for Historical Clarification] report was wrong, and the United States must not repeat that mistake.”

No one could call it a happy anniversary: roughly ten years ago, the Sudanese government embarked on a genocidal campaign in the Darfur province against local non-Arab ethnic groups, a decision which the U.N. estimated as taking around 300,000 lives. Today, violence is still ongoing in Darfur (albeit at a lower level) and, to make matters worse, the government in Khartoum is escalating a murderous military campaign against rebels and local civilians in two other provinces — South Kordofan and Blue Nile. While many experts will likely weigh in this week with detailed and knowledgable assessments of the violence in Sudan past and present (CAP’s Enough Project, for example, is doing a ten-day commemoration event), it’s also worth exploring the values at work in anti-genocide campaigns. Because a concern with protecting international human rights, and legal accountability for their violation, has deep roots in the American liberal tradition — a point that should remind us why the suffering in Sudan today should be a critical issue for progressives today.

First, we must understand what’s actually happening in Sudan today. In June of 2011, the Sudanese central government attacked the southern province of South Kordofan, home to a series of ethnic groups collectively referred to as the Nuba. The incursion spread to nearby Blue Nile in September. In a sense, the offensives were outgrowths of the semi-settled conflict with the recently independent South Sudan: the anti-government forces in both provinces, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N), began as part the original SPLM, now better known as the South Sudanese Army. The government’s move into South Kordofan and Blue Nile was an attempt to destroy the SPLM-N and exert total control over the provinces.

The government’s murderous tactics in these fights have proven its leaders have learned the most terrible lesson of Darfur: you can kill civilians with impunity. Khartoum indiscriminately drops dumb bombs from Antonov cargo planes on heavily populated areas in both states. Human Rights Watch has found that “vast majority of bomb victims” in South Kordofan are civilians, largely “women, children, and the elderly.” Government forces, who particularly target the ethnically distinct Nuba people, in the province have routinely “shelled and bombed residential neighborhoods, looted and burned down homes and churches, shot at civilians, killed civilians including UN staff, and arrested scores of people suspected of links to the SPLM.” The story is the same in Blue Nile: one observer describes the government strategy as “controlling the population and its movement: sometimes by creating the conditions of famine; sometimes by forcing people to flee; and most insidiously, by encircling them to prevent them from moving into rebel-controlled areas or escaping to neighboring countries offering sanctuary.” “The result,” he writes,”has been immense suffering and slow death.”

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By Sarah Margon

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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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