Why Genocide Is The Responsibility Of The Entire World

Hello, welcome back to Conversations with Stephen Kamugasa. This is the second of six podcast episodes on genocide. Today's guest is Dr. Omar McDoom, a comparative political scientist and associate professor at the London School of Economics Department of Government. Dr. McDoom holds law degrees from King's College London and the Université de Paris, a master's degree in international development studies from George Washington University and a PhD in development studies

from the London School of Economics. He is also a non-practicing attorney at the New York Bar. Before joining the LSE, Omar completed research fellowships at Harvard University at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and then at Oxford University in the Department of Politics and International

Relations. His professional experience outside of the academia includes work as a policy officer for the World Bank, as a legal officer for the government of Guyana, and on electoral missions for the Organization for Security Cooperation in Europe and the United Nations. He also co-founded a non-profit organization in 2004, which develops leadership potential in children who were affected by the civil war in Northern Uganda. Oma is the author

of The Path to Genocide in Rwanda. In this episode, we discuss the topic of why genocide is the responsibility of the entire world. Dr. Omar Makdoon, welcome. Thank you, Stephen, and thank you for the opportunity to talk about my work and also for the comprehensive and flattering introduction. I appreciate it.

In the acknowledgement section of your book, the path to genocide in Rwanda. You write, and I quote, I dedicate the book to my father, who passed away before he could see it completed. Please share with us your favorite childhood memory of your father. And specifically, in light of your work, how did the relationship with your father affect how you see reality as an adult?

That's a nice question. It's an opportunity, I suppose, for someone to sit back and reflect on the legacy or the lasting influences that your parents have on you and how it's marked and shaped you today. So maybe you'll be of use to some of your listeners to hear how I think my father, though it's not, of course, only my father, my mother also had a profound impression on who I am as a person today. Well, my father, I mean, he obviously would have had both positive and less positive

influences on me. But since you asked me about my favorite memory, I suppose the influences that stayed with me were maybe a very strong sense of the importance of getting ahead in life on merit, so through hard work and independence, and also a very strong commitment to social justice, which probably reflected in why I spent so much time studying law. He also gave me some confidence as well. So, you know, my father's background is interesting because he was a first-generation immigrant.

He'd never been to university. He came to the UK from Guyana, a small British colony, in the 1960s, late 1970s. And he had some aptitude, academic aptitude, and in those days it was possible to study law without having gone to university, become a lawyer without having gone to university. So he sat the professional examinations in the UK and became a solicitor, one of the two

types of lawyers in the UK. So he was quite good at law, but he was also the time, remember, it is a time in the UK when there was still overt discrimination against people of colour. And, you know, I suppose my most powerful memory, I say it's more powerful than it is a favourite memory, but my most powerful memory of my father is a time when we One weekend, I think I was about 10 or 11, and we went to, we were building a rabbit hutch together. And my father took me to a local

DIY store. And it was there that he was wrongfully accused and also arrested for shoplifting

very publicly and very, very overtly. And what had happened is that we had been followed in the store by a security guard. I won't mention the company that this person was employed by. And as my father was exiting the store, he was apprehended by a group of security officers and taken in front and full view of everybody up to the manager's office. I went with him as I was quite young and couldn't be by myself. And there he was accused of stealing a tape measure of all

things. And my father at that time was dressed in somewhat shabby clothing because it was his work clothes. We were building a rabbit hutch together. And they were surprised when he said, well, I should tell you that I'm a lawyer and I'm now going to start to make notes about everything that happens to me. And he took out a pen and paper and started writing down. at the time and everything that was happening. This seemed to infuriate the security officer, I suppose because my

father was standing up for himself. And she then decided it was a woman. She said, I'm actually going to make a citizen's arrest. And for me, it was eye-opening because the woman said to my father and to the manager and the other security officers there that she had witnessed my father take the tape measure out of its packaging. which was patently untrue. The manager called the police. The police came. The police had a look at the inspector of the tape measure, realized that

this could not be a new tape measure. It was old and had marks on it. and said, well, my father is free to go. The manager was apologetic, duly so, and offered my father some money as compensation. And my father said, no, I think the right thing to do here is that I think the security officer has made a mistake. And she has profiled me. And I think the right thing to do is for this person to apologize in public in front of the very same people in front of whom

he was arrested. And he insisted on this public apology. She refused. The manager had to make the apology instead on her behalf. But I mentioned that story because it stayed with me and it gave me, as I said, a very strong sense of social justice and standing up for oneself when you have been taken advantage of or when you've been discriminated against. And it's given me a strong sense of wanting

to help the other underdog. And my father, more generally, I suppose, always felt a very strong sense of solidarity with people who come from similar backgrounds to himself, from former colonies in the global south, come to the UK to build a better life for himself. But he's a little bit different, though, from, I think, many other first-generation immigrants. He didn't really feel this sense of debt or gratitude that he needed to demonstrate to the United Kingdom for allowing him to

build a life there. He saw it quite differently. He saw and argued that, well, much of the UK's wealth and position in the international system is because it had successfully colonized and conquered countries such as his own and extracted wealth from it, whether resources or, and built itself on slave and in his case indentured labour. So he didn't feel that that he needed to sort of be grateful and to integrate and assimilate in society. He was very proud of his identity as a Guyanese

and also as a Muslim. And so he thought he had a right to build his life on the same terms as the indigenous British, as it were. All that to say is that, you know, it had an impact on me. made me very interested in issues around inequality and social justice. I started studying law. I went on then to study development, moved to Washington, where I worked for the World Bank for many years. And it was there, actually, at the World Bank that I first got interested in the Rwandan

genocide. I read a book by Peter Uvin, a professor at the time at Tufts University, in which he had accused the aid industry of being complicit in the genocide, or at least creating the conditions that facilitated the genocide. And I actually decided to engage in a PhD and have him as one of my supervisors to look at this question of the genocide in Rwanda.

On page 13 of your book, you write, and I quote, the words of the foreign visitor reproduced above appear in the guest book of a former church belonging to the rural community of Nyamata, located in the small Central African state of Rwanda. In April 1994, some 5,000 people sought refuge here for the same reason. They were members of Rwanda's Tutsi ethnic

minority. Over three days, April 14th, 15th and 16th 1994, the men, women and children crammed inside the brick, the building's brick walls were killed without distinction. Their killers comprised many of their neighbours as well as a smaller number of militiamen and soldiers alongside whom they worked. Overwhelmingly, the assailants were drawn from Rwanda's Hutu ethnic majority. Their

objective was clear, to kill them all. Omar, please talk to us about the visitor whose words you mentioned, and why were the foreign visitor's words so poignant?

Yeah, so I mean, I chose to use the words of that foreign visitor because the person was doing something different, I suppose, to what many people when they hear about the genocide or if they visit Rwanda do. So the tendency, the instinct, I suppose, is to sort of distance oneself from the people who committed such atrocious violence, who did such terrible things. I think that's

easy. I think it's easy to revile, to feel this revulsion against for what had happened and to sort of say, well, I would never have done that. I could never do that. And to fail to understand how anybody could do that. But that visitor will do something different. He was, and it was a man, he was empathizing with the perpetrators, in this case, mostly the Hutu population in Rwanda, and was making an effort to understand the circumstances in which they found themselves and that led

them to do what they did. And it ties in, in the field of, you know, the study of perpetrators of genocide and atrocity crimes, with this idea that, well, they're very often ordinary people caught up in very extraordinary circumstances. And also with this idea that, well, killers, you're not born, very rarely are people born

killers, they're made into killers. So I felt that that statement tied into these two ideas about the ordinariness of being a killer and the idea that you are made into a killer through the circumstances that you live in your life. I think that those were important and I wanted, and as you see if you read the book, that those ideas underpin the arguments that I make in the book. But it set me on this path to try to understand how and why so many Rwandans came to do what

they did in that time in 1994. There's this very complex interaction, I think, between innate characteristics, who you are as a person that might predispose you towards such violence, But it isn't only that, there is this interaction with the environmental, the things outside of you, right? The social community, the political circumstances that put people on a path, that put them into situations where they feel that this is what

they have to do. To be clear, though, I mean, I don't think that this in any way excuses or justifies or exculpates individuals from their moral responsibility for killing. To understand is not the same thing as to excuse. But I think it is still important to understand. And I think this is what that individual, that visitor was trying to do, was trying to understand how and why individuals came to do what they did. And that's important.

Well, that's important for two reasons. It's important first because you know, from the perspective of preventing future atrocity for the recurrence, it's important to understand the journey or the pathway that led people to that point. So I think it's important

from that perspective. But it's also important to understand how people do what they do from the perspective of life after the atrocity as well, from the perspective of reconciliation or coexistence at least, this idea of restoring communities to some or some sort of restorative justice. So how people come to learn to live together once more, you need to understand how it is and why it is that they did what

they did. So I think that that phrase sort of evokes all of those thoughts that underlie the motivation for writing the book. On page 23 of your book, you write, and I quote, one of the main reasons for why the range of theories is so broad is the lack of consensus on the concept of genocide. The 1948 United Nations Convention on Genocide defines genocide as acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national,

ethnical, racial, or religious group. Almost every element in the juridical definition has been the subject of intense scholarly debate. The victim groups protected, the perpetrating agents recognized, the modes of extermination permitted, and the intention required. Why is there such debate over what constitutes genocide? And please give us your best effort at defining genocide in terms that the average man on the street can understand?

Yeah, well I think the debate exists because genocide is widely seen as the crime of crimes. It is the most morally egregious, heinous action that can be committed by a state or people against another people. So It's a very strong stigma to escape from once a state or once a people have been accused of committing genocide. It's very hard to come back from it. Just look at Germany's sense of shame in the public psychology since

the Holocaust. So there's going to be very strong contention around what is a genocide because people will want to resist the use of that term in relation to themselves or to their country. But the other reason why it's debated is because it's used in different contexts for very different reasons. So lawyers use it obviously for the purpose of holding individuals or states accountable for what they have done. So there's the rationale

of accountability. But scholars also use the term genocide and they have departed from the legal definition because they want to understand and explain the causes of genocide or to compare genocides in some way. And then there were, I suppose, the popular usage of the term genocide, and that's often made by communities, sometimes communities who are the victim communities, because they want to draw political attention to what's

happening to them. They want to mobilize resources, perhaps to intervene, to help them. And they also wish to delegitimize their opponents, their enemies as well. So you have all those different reasons and different communities that use the term genocide. You know, the meaning varies across them. So for lawyers, I would say the legal definition is the most restrictive of all of the ways

in which genocide is conceptualized. And I would say that sort of the popular usage is probably the most loose definition of genocide. But I would say though, maybe to just highlight how I use the term in the book as a scholar, and I think maybe to talk a little bit about how genocide scholars have moved on from the very limited, very restrictive definition of genocide in the

Genocide Convention. So there are three ways I think in which the conceptualization or the definition of genocide has expanded in the 70 years or so since the phrase was encapsulated in the genocide convention. The first is that the focus on intent. So the convention sets a very high bar for establishing genocide because it requires an intent and a very specific intent. It has to be an intent to destroy a group. So it's not enough to murder tens of thousands of people who are from

the same group. you have to show that those murders were committed with the intent to destroy in whole or in part that group. So it's entirely possible to murder many people but still be not guilty of genocide. So the scholarly definition has moved away from this focus on this emphasis on intent and focuses now on just the idea of, well, is it deliberate? Is it organized? Is it rather than, you know, is the intent to destroy?

The second way in which I think scholars now use the term more expansively is that they don't limit themselves to the groups that are recognized in the genocide convention, ethnic, racial, religious or national. They say that it's a group that could be defined along different boundaries, for example, members of a political group. So if you think about Indonesia's actions in the 1960s, where it was the communists who were targeted, they were targeted because of their political

beliefs. So that might be a genocide for scholars, but not for lawyers, for example. And then the third and final way in which scholars have moved on and expanded the definition is that they don't limit genocide solely to the physical destruction of a people, which is what the legal definition in the convention does. They, for example, now also consider the social destruction of a group to be genocide as well. So if, for example, the state or the people are targeting the

infrastructure of a community. So if you're targeting the schools and the universities and the hospitals and the religious establishments, then this is an attempt to destroy the society, the social infrastructure of the group, and that also can be considered genocide. So you asked what's the best way for, in simple

terms, for a person who's not a specialist to understand what genocide is, I would say this. I say, I would say that, well, violence generally is a behaviour that tries to communicate something. And we have many different types of violence that try to communicate many different types of things. Some violence is communicating a wish to control a group, or to punish a group or to discourage a group. But with genocide, the type of violence envisaged is not to communicate. In fact, that violence

in genocide is violence that seeks to end communication with another group. And I think that's the best way to think of the difference between genocidal violence and other types of political violence, is that there is a wish to end communication, to end the relationship. There's no desire to regulate or to control or to deter. It is to end communication. On page 41 of your book, under the heading Research Design, the evidence and methods You're right, and I quote, genocide is an

empirically complex phenomenon. No single study can account for all aspects of its violence. It is also a highly politicized and deeply emotional subject. On certain issues, the findings may always be disputed, and some people may never be persuaded. Researchers may find they themselves rather than their research. are the object of scrutiny and criticism. Accusations of revisionism, minimalism, and denialism are among the risks genocide scholars, including those working on Rwanda,

face. Omar, since the victims were once actual living people, I must wonder, given the current tragic situation in the Holy Land, Why are you interested in researching genocides? Why the Rwandan genocide in particular? Well, since you've brought up the situation ongoing in Gaza, anyone who wages into the debate, into the rights and wrongs of what Netanyahu's government is doing in Gaza at the moment, you know, it's his choices in how to conduct the war since October 7th.

Well, anybody who's done that will know what I mean when I say that it is an occupational hazard to work on genocide. That situation is extremely politically sensitive and very

emotionally charged. And people who offer views on this run the risk of being accused of being anti-semitic and we have such a definition of anti-semitism in how it's being used at the moment that it is very difficult or there's very little space to be able to be critical of Israeli government policy or critical of the ideology of Zionism without

being accused of being anti-semitic. So when I say that as a genocide scholar you run these occupational risks, I think that's true not just in the case of Israel but also in the case of other genocides including the Rwandan genocide. But since you've asked about the situation or brought it up at least, I often get from individuals who are supportive or defensive of Israel and specifically of Netanyahu's government, I always get the question, well, why are genocide, why are

scholars being critical of Israel? Why are they singling Israel out? Because why are they not speaking about what's happening against the Rohingya in Myanmar or what's going on in the Sudan at the moment or what that atrocities committed in Syria? Why has Israel been singled out? And maybe you're biased because you're picking on Israel and that makes you, maybe that bias is also anti-Semitic.

Well, I don't think so. I think there are two good reasons why it is justifiable to speak up if, as a genocide scholar, when one sees atrocities being committed by both sides in that situation in Israel and Gaza.

The first is simply because in my case I'm a UK citizen and I pay UK taxes and it is my government that is providing both material and diplomatic support to Netanyahu's government and that government is committing some very serious atrocities in Gaza that would require investigation and legal qualification at

some point. So as a citizen I feel I have an obligation, not just as a genocide scholar, but also I think a second reason is that, well, In the case of like Sudan and Myanmar and Syria, these are not countries that we call democracies and do not call themselves democracies. And they do not say they are committed to liberal values such as justice and equality and freedom. They also do not say that they have the most moral army in

the world. Israel does. So I think if Netanyahu's government says that and if my country and other western countries provide support to Netanyahu on the basis that Israel is seen to have similar liberal values in common, moral values in common, then I think then it does raise the question of whether it is okay then to then call out if they are acting inconsistently with those moral values.

But OK, and the case for genocide, by the way, in Israel, I won't offer a determination, but I would say that there are the two strongest arguments. The first is in relation to the bombing and drone attacks, which when coupled with the statements from the senior leadership, from the president, the prime minister and the minister of defense, Well, it begs the question of why choose to use such destructive

weaponry? Why so many two ton bombs? At the very least, I think in the case of the bombing argument, it shows an extreme disregard for the value of Palestinian life. whether that's strong enough to infer an intent to destroy. Well, I think that's a legal determination. But I think the stronger case is the humanitarian siege in that's ongoing in Gaza. So why we

are seeing the Israeli defense forces making it so difficult for humanitarian aid, food, fuel, water, medicine to get into Gaza, and that we now have a UN reports of famine being imminent, it does beg the question of what the motivation is for making it so difficult for humanitarian aid to come in. And of course, what's happened most recently with the targeting of the convoy, the aid convoy in which seven aid workers were killed because the IDF believed that there was a single Hamas combatant in

that convoy turned out to be untrue. But even if that were true, that there were a single Hamas combatant there, it does beg the question again about the extreme disregard for the civilian lives, for civilian life, and in this case, foreign civilians. You asked the question, well, why Rwanda? Why did I choose to work on Rwanda? Well, Rwanda's genocide, genocide, I mean, is fortunately

a very rare occurrence. Rwanda's genocide, though, stands out even among rare occurrences, not just because it's tragic and shocking, but there are some features of the Rwandan genocide that I think that are quite distinctive. and puzzling at the same time. And it is these distinctive features, I think, that drew me to wish to understand what happened in Rwanda. So it is the fact that so many ordinary Rwandans participated in the violence.

It's the fact that this violence happened in almost every part of Rwanda where Tutsi lived. It's the fact that it happened so quickly, in less than a hundred days, this genocide was executed, and that it resulted in the deaths of so many. We estimate nearly two-thirds of the Tutsi population were killed

in that time period. So, for me, the motivation for the Rwanda genocide is not unusual, it's quite similar to the motivations for other genocides, largely around threat and opportunity, and the Hutu population and the Hutu government invoking security fears saying that they were defending themselves. These are logics that we see in other instances of genocides which often occur in the context of wars. But in Rwanda's case, it was the answer to the question of why was it so distinctive?

Well, it's because I discovered that Rwanda has a very unusual set of features as a country. It's a very unusual baseline against which

the war operates. So the high population density, very small territory, an unusual topography where it's very difficult for people to hide, very high road density which made it very easy for resources including soldiers and militia to be able to move around, and the ethnic settlement pattern that you have not separate Hutu lands and Tutsi lands but actually Hutu and Tutsi living separate

at side by side next to each other. So I think all of those very unusual socio-demographic and socio-political characteristics actually explain why it is that Rwanda has those unusual features. But it was those unusual features that made me want to study it in the first place. On page 121 of your book, you write, and I quote, political liberalization was the second macro-political factor in conjunction with the civil war that pushed Rwanda closer

to genocide between 1990 and 1994. As in many parts of Africa, Rwanda took preliminary steps away from autocracy and towards democracy. This move did not, ineluctably or by itself, lead to mass ethnic violence. 39 other African nations underwent democratic transitions at the same time as Rwanda, yet none of these ended in genocide. In Rwanda, however, the push for political freedom and usually coincided

with a civil war. Rwanda's ruling elite faced twin challenges to its power, an external threat from a rebel army and a domestic challenge from new opposition parties. The interaction of the war with liberalization escalated elite contestation and brought ethnicity to the foreground of Rwanda's politics. It

enabled the rise of ethnic extremism. Do I understand you correctly when you say that democratization and other forms of political liberalization are not the silver bullet that would solve all of Africa's, all of the complex problems brought on by ethnic conflict in Africa? And if yes, why? Well, yes, yes, you are correct. And that

is what I am saying. But I should begin by saying that, well, this is not a new critique, or even a radical critique among political scientists that competitive politics that

liberal democracy can be destabilizing. If one goes back to the end of the Cold War in 1989, the established accepted wisdom for how one deals with civil wars reflected this belief that, you know, it is the triumph of liberal democracy over communism that leads to the belief that, well, if you want to end a civil war, what you do is that you have some sort of temporary power sharing agreement a transition period and then some elections to legitimize a government, competitive

elections to legitimize a government. But this end of history model, liberal internationalist model has proved to be problematic as we have seen and I think Rwanda is just one of these countries that has illustrated the risks of competitive politics So the critique has been, well, liberal democracy or competitive politics, well, that should only really be promoted once you have strong institutions

in place in the country. But if you bring in a liberal model which has at its core the idea that competition is good, competition in markets in the economic realm and competition in politics in the political realm, so elections, that if you do that before you've got strongly embedded institutions, so independent institutions that can resist being captured by private

actors. So it means that in the context of competitive politics, it means that you need to have an independent electoral commission, you need to have an independent judiciary to be able to adjudicate on disputes around the elections and campaigning in elections.

You also need to have an independent police force and army that act neutrally in election periods, if you don't have those institutions that are independent and you bring in elections, then it destabilizes the country because those institutions are captured by either the incumbent or perhaps sometimes even challengers and the country destabilizes under the competition.

But I would go one step further and say that it's not just that you need to institutionalize before you liberalize, which is a common critique. I would say you also need to have a mature and responsible civil society. in addition to strong institutions. So this means that you would have an independent media and it means that you would also have

a mature NGO sector as well. So and these are actors then that have strong sense of professional ethics and professional responsibility and that they know what is appropriate to publish, what it is appropriate to say, so that you do not fan the flames of ethnic divisionism. These two conditions were clearly not met in Rwanda in the 1990s. They were not strong institutions and there was not

a mature and responsible civil society. Much of the civil society had been co-opted by the state and the media certainly did not act, many elements of the media did not act with that sense of responsibility and restraint that you would expect in a more mature democracy. And this view, by the way, is also shared by the current Rwandan government. They have explicitly eschewed competitive politics and opted for consensus democracy instead,

because they also say that the two time periods in Rwanda's history in which they have experienced competitive elections, in the period immediately around independence, and then in the period after the end of the Cold War. Both of those resulted in violence, a revolution in 1959, and then a genocide in 1994. So there is no love lost for the absence of competitive elections in Rwanda. On page 182, You write thus, it again warned that the killings may be crimes punishable

under international law. However, it was not until June 8th that the Security Council finally adopted a Resolution 925 that mentioned acts of genocide and strengthened the mandate of Unema II to include the protection of displaced persons, refugees, civilians at risk. It was too little, too late, however. Most of the killing had occurred in the first two weeks. It would take another month for the peacekeepers and the resources needed to operationalize UNIMOD II, even to reach

Rwanda. Omar, there have been several military confrontations in the 21st century, many of them verging on genocide. Is the United Nations Security Council still needed in a new multipolar world and what proactive measures can we take to stop the escalation of armed conflict and improve the management of it globally within the UN Security Council? Well that is a big question, the subject I suppose of several books. The answer is yes. I think, in my view, that the UN Security

Council is still needed. But I guess I would obviously acknowledge the anachronistic nature of the Security Council, the permanent members. It reflects the balance of power at the end of World War II, so that we end up with countries that today are not as internationally or militarily or economically as significant as they were in 1945. So there's that, the anachronistic nature of the balance of power that's been institutionalized in the permanent

membership of the Security Council. There's also the more general issue that the capabilities that the UN, well the expectations that the UN greatly exceed the UN's capabilities. And much of the critique that I heard, for example, when I was in Rwanda talking to Rwandans, much of the hostility does come from this idea that, well, the UN failed us and they had this expectation that the

UN should have done more and so forth. And then also the fact that the veto that each permanent member has means that it's very hard to get resolutions passed, as we have seen, I suppose, until recently with this resolution to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. with the US having vetoed earlier resolutions, and this time abstaining with the most recent one. So it's very hard to end that, to kind

of change that architecture. But I still think despite all of those problems, you know, the capabilities problem, the veto problem, etc. I still think that there is a very important role for the CUN Security Council in matters of international peace and security and for preventing genocide as well. Because it is the only truly supranational architecture that we have. It's still the only space that we have in which these issues can come to be debated and potentially acted

upon. And even if there isn't action, if there's inaction, because there is veto, because there is paralysis, well, at least there's a record that these things are happening have happened. And there's a record of the inaction as well. And that that's important when it comes to assessing historic responsibility as well. So yes, I still think there's a

need for the UN Security Council. Your second question is even bigger, I think. What can we do about this? Well, I think there's no silver bullet to deal with the scourge of armed conflict in the world. If you were to look at the post-World War II history, I would say that there was a great power conflict largely ended with 1989, with the end of the Cold War. and then we entered a period in history where we saw much of the armed conflicts that we saw were intrastate

rather than interstate conflicts. These were civil wars fought within countries and this of which Rwanda's genocide is the combination of one such civil war. I say we're now entering possibly a new phase, which perhaps is the return of interstate conflict and maybe even

great power conflict. So looking at Russia and Ukraine, Armenia and Azerbaijan, looming conflict perhaps between Israel and Iran, or even China and the United States, and also in my own home country, Guyana, with Venezuela over Guyana's newly found oil wealth.

So, but, you know, if I were to say and to try to pick on one thing that I think could help reduce the incidence of armed conflict, I would say it would be continue support for a rules-based system, of which the UN Security Council is one very important element. We need to ensure that there is not impunity for violations of the international legal

order. But I actually think the institution that needs the greatest political support and has the greatest potential for preventing war and atrocity is actually the International Criminal Court. Unfortunately, we seem to be moving in the opposite direction rather than strengthening it. The world seems to be taking steps to weaken it. But I do think it is the institution that is best equipped. for deterring war and atrocity, because it

means individual accountability. And that means that the people at the top, the leaders, it changes their calculus. If they know that if they start a war, or if they engage in a bombing campaign that results in the mass killings of individuals, that there is potentially a reckoning to be had, then I think that would mean that they would think much more deeply about engaging in such actions. But the ICC obviously has some severe constraints.

It's largely seen as an institution that targets politically and internationally weaker countries in the global south, rather than coming after or starting investigations into the actions of politically more important countries. But I think that the greatest testament to the capabilities of the ICC is to look at the record of the countries who have refused either to sign or to ratify the Rome Statute. because they fear and they know what could potentially happen and how

it would limit their range of actions. So the United States, Russia, China, so great powers, India, Indonesia, Israel, these are all countries which have refused to either sign or ratify the Rome Statute because the ICC would so severely limit what it is that they felt that they could do.

The title of our podcast is, Why Genocide is the Responsibility of the Entire World. On September 27th, 2022, you published a powerful paper in a journal, Africa Affairs, entitled, Securocratic State Building, the Rationales, Rebattles, and Risks Behind Extraordinary

Rise of Rwanda After the Genocide. You wrote the following, and I quote, In a striking example of this polarization and these differing priorities, the British government's decision in 2022 to ask Rwanda to process and settle asylum seekers to the UK drew starkly divergent reactions on the day the new policy was announced.

The government justified its decision by pointing to Rwanda's international recognition for its safety strong governance, law corruption, gender equality, and as one of the fastest growing economies across Africa. Human Rights Watch, in contrast, challenged the decision by pointing to Rwanda's known track record for extrajudicial killings, suspicious deaths in custody, and lawful or arbitrary detention, torture, and abusive prosecutions particularly

targeting critics and dissidents. On November 15th, 2023, the UK Supreme Court in a landmark decision found the UK Rwanda asylum scheme unlawful. Omar, please explain to our audience why the problem of genocide is and should be the responsibility of the entire world in the context of a podcast theme and in the light of the ongoing controversy surrounding the genocide in Rwanda and its aftermath? And how important is telling the truth with special reference to the Rwanda safety bill?

30, it's 30 years, this year, since the genocide, for the record, I think that the decision to the wish to make Rwanda a place to process and settle asylum seekers to the UK, I think that that's a that's a bad decision. And how important is it to tell the truth, I think it's very important to tell the truth about the record of a country. But at the same time, you know, the UK has has a real problem. And Rwanda presents in the minds of the current conservative government a

solution to that problem. So the problem is that the post-World War II system for dealing with refugees is under strain. There is simply more refugees than governments feel capable of being able to manage. And the UK has a point. There are many people who are coming on small boats to the United Kingdom, and they are choosing the United Kingdom to seek asylum. And the Conservative government makes the point that, well, the reason for asylum is that you face persecution

in your home country. That doesn't give you necessarily an unconditional or unfettered right which country you can seek asylum in, you should simply be able to seek asylum in a country where you would not face this persecution. Why are you coming to Europe? Why are you coming to the United Kingdom? There are other countries where you could

also feel safe and escape persecution. So the Conservative government believes that people are coming to the UK not only because they wish to escape persecution, but because the UK provides economic opportunities for them and a political environment that is better in other countries. And So they want to discourage this. They think they shouldn't be able to shop. Refugees shouldn't be able to shop for the country that they wish to seek asylum in. So they want to create it

less attractive. They think, well, Rwanda is less attractive economically, but might be able to provide asylum seekers with safe haven. So dealing with the political issue,

but not with the economic issue. And, you know, from the Rwanda perspective, it's great because the Rwanda government really wishes to establish a reputation internationally and to be recognized as a place where the UK government feels it is safe for asylum seekers to be settled, well, that sends a very powerful signal to the rest of the world and to Rwanda's critics. So it's a win-win from the UK government perspective and the

Rwandan government perspective. The losers, the refugees, are the asylum seekers themselves. because it's very clear from the human rights

organisations, independent human rights organisations, that Rwanda is not a safe place for asylum seekers and that many Rwandan citizens themselves flee Rwanda seeking asylum elsewhere. So it's hard to understand how then a country that has people fleeing, it can also be a place that can be safe for other asylum seekers. The response to that you cited in that article to this Rwanda safety bill is polarized and it mirrors the polarization, the wider polarization

about Rwanda after the genocide. So and that polarization, you know, we're coming up to and, you know, views on Rwanda are still polarized, not just among Rwandans, but among those who observe Rwanda and follow Rwanda. And, you know, the part of this polarization is simply a consequence of the civil war and genocide, but part of it is also simply a consequence of what do you think is more important when you try to evaluate a country.

So, you know, if you think that, you know, the Rwanda is a country which has visionary leadership, it's technologically very forward-looking, and it has strong, effective state institutions, it has political stability, it's a good environment to do business in, then yes, Rwanda, if those are your normative priorities, then Rwanda

is a very attractive country. But if your normative priorities are different, if you think, well, democracy is important and civil and political liberties are important and justice and reconciliation are important, well then no, Rwanda is not such an attractive

country to live in. And this reflects the polarization in the academic views on Rwanda as well as some governments as well. So both of those views are potentially correct. I published that article that you mentioned in African Affairs because I thought that these polarized views, neither of them truly captures or does justice to what Rwanda's post-genocide government is doing in the country. They're too characterized, right? On the one hand, Rwanda is this great developmental

state with high modernist ambitions. On the other hand, it's this dictatorship and ethnocracy and repressive regime. So neither of those fully captures what Rwanda is doing. So I developed this idea of a securocratic state builder, of which I think the Rwandan government is an exemplar of. And the Rwandan model, it's important, Rwanda has, the fate of Rwanda has more to do with just, you know, what

happens to Rwandan citizens. There are international organizations, there are other African leaders and countries who are looking at Rwanda and asking, will this model succeed? Because we'd like to see if it does, because maybe it's one that we should copy. So it has an impact far beyond the borders of Rwanda. So what about the Securitatec state building model? So it's neither liberal nor illiberal.

Rwanda is essentially the only principle that I think that the Rwandan government as a securocratic state builder follows is simply the principle that security comes first all the time. Security trumps liberty. Security trumps equality. It's not that we are against liberty. It's not that we are against equality. It's simply that security is much more important. And that's reflected in the grand strategic choices that the Rwandan government has made since the genocide, right?

In terms of the political system and political philosophy, it said no to competitive politics and yes to consensus democracy, because it thinks that competition is destabilizing. So it's a security risk. It said no in the social realm. It's an undertaken social engineering. It said that we are going to eliminate in the public sphere the identification along ethnic lines because the history of ethnicity is that it's divisive and leads to conflict.

And then lastly, in the realm of the state and the economy, its ambition has been to modernize both the state and the economy, to have strong, effective institutions and to generate high levels of growth. None of those choices is a bad choice in itself, but none, I'm afraid, in my view, is sustainable in the long run. And I don't hold much hope that the model will not end in some dramatic... I fear that it may end in some dramatic way

that is not peaceable. And the reason for that is that each of those three grand strategic choices that Rwanda made in respect of the political system, well, you can't really have consensus if you coerce people and don't let them to have a choice. You can't really talk about consensus if there is no choice. And in terms of engineering, you know, eliminating ethnicity, well, you can't really eliminate ethnicity if your policies reflect your fear that ethnicity is still a socially and politically

powerful force in the country. So you know these laws outlawing genocide ideology, its recognition that it is a genocide of the the Tutsi, this memorialization of the genocide. These all, you know, institutionalize ethnicity and they all reflect the fear, the government's fear that ethnic extremism still exists somewhere inside Rwanda. So you can't really talk about outlawing it and trying to be kind of post-ethnic

if you still fear that it is there. And then you can't lastly have strong independent institutions if you're going to control all of the appointments to government offices.

It's not enough for the Rwandan government that you're competent, that you appoint individuals who are competent, you also have to be loyal. to the regime. And that, I think, is problematic. You can't really have independent institutions that can survive a change of political party, a turnover of government, if loyalty has been baked into the appointment process. So fundamentally I think there is this strategic contradiction at the heart of the securocratic

state building model. It's that it emphasizes security at the expense of unity and that's why I don't think it's sustainable in the long run. As an academic studying genocide and armed conflict, what scares you the most? Well let me talk about genocide. I think two things that I worry about and these are first an under-appreciation of the effect, the long-term effect on the behavior of the victim group, once they are in power, if

they come to power. And then the second is an under-appreciation again, but this time of the long-term impact on the behavior of the perpetrator and the bystander group. So it's about the long-term effects of genocide, underestimated or under-recognized long-term effects of them. And the two countries that I have in the back of my mind here are Rwanda and Israel, because the Tutsi and the Jews have similar experiences. They're not perfect parallels, but there are some similarities

here. So both are people who have experienced persecution and exclusion, Both are people who have had to leave their homeland and become refugees. And both are people who have returned to their homeland and also ascended to power in their homeland as well. So they've come to rule in their homelands. And when I talk then about effect on the

behavior of the victim group? Well, what I worry about is that we fail to recognize just how profoundly strong is the sense of victimhood among the victim group itself. So this sense of that we are always the victims of everything, very pronounced sense of victimization. I also think it makes the victim group very sensitive, hyper sensitive as well to criticism. And because it's motivated by this fear that

we need to defend ourselves. And indeed, that's the third thing is that there is this willingness to always invoke their security fears or this need to defend themselves against an enemy out there. It's very strong. And it can lead then to extreme repression, to extreme actions to defend themselves, and so potentially to further wrongdoings, to further even atrocities. So I worry about not recognizing how victim groups, when they come to power, behave once they're in power.

They have these They have this set of characteristics, I think, that could lead to further atrocities. And then from the perpetrator or bystander perspective, I think there were impacts on their behavior as well that we do not fully recognize. So I think the perspective is one of guilt and shame. for both perpetrators

and bystanders, right? So in the case of the Jews, it would be Germany's very pronounced sense of public shame and remorse for the Holocaust and how that's impacted German foreign policy vis-a-vis Israel to make it so strongly an ally of Israel, potentially at the expense of preserving its own liberal values around liberal and moral values. And then with bystanders, so in the case of Rwanda, it would be the international community or external actors who failed to act and who

let the genocide happen. So their guilt and shame enables the Rwandan government to do things because there's a unwillingness to speak out and criticize because, well, who are they to speak out and criticize? Because where were they in 1994? And it means then that the Rwandan government can get away with things that perhaps other governments could not. And then lastly, I would say this has a long-term impact in the other countries. So it could have an impact on civil liberties.

and free speech. If you think about, take the case of Israel and what's happening at the moment, this overly expansive definition of anti-Semitism. Let me just take a sip of water. It's made it very difficult to have legitimate dissent on Israeli government policies. And it's led governments to outlaw

criticism of Zionism. It's led to making even peaceful dissent difficult, outlawing boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns. France, for example, banned marches that are considered to be supportive of Palestinians. The UK has led to a redefinition of what is extremism in the UK. So I worry about also the impact on civil and political liberties in our own countries as well that are allies with these victim groups that have come to

power. More generally, I think it reinforces a very strong sense of zero-sum thinking, them versus us, when victim groups come to power and see themselves only as victim groups and not as representative of something more. Finally, Omar, please advise our listeners where they may find your book, The Path to Genocide, in Rwanda. Sure. It's available on Amazon, and it's also available on the Cambridge University website as well, both in paperback and in hardback and as an e-book as well.

Dr. Omar MacDoon, thank you very much for being a guest on this podcast. It was my pleasure, Stephen. Thanks for the invitation. This podcast was brought to you by the Kamgassa Challenge in partnership with Democracy in Africa. Democracy in Africa is a platform dedicated to building a bridge between academics, policymakers, practitioners and citizens. The third episode in the series is entitled Genocide. How to challenge identity politics

in the 21st century. An interview with Dr Jochen Lingelbach, postdoctoral research assistant at the Chair of African History in the Cluster of Excellence. at the University of Bayreuth. The podcast will go live on June 10th, 2024. If you enjoyed this podcast, please support us by subscribing to Conversations with Stephen Kamgasser through your favorite podcast app. Thank you very much for taking the time to listen to this podcast. Until next time, goodbye.