“Things the World Should Never See” Lord David Alton on What We Must Do to Combat Genocide Nanovic Forum Lecture February 15 , 2022
The Nanovic Forum Lecture, 2022 “Things the World Should Never See”: Lord David Alton on What We Must Do to Combat Genocide* BY GRÁINNE MCEVOY
“This failure to recognize past genocides for what they are is not insignificant. Such denialism and associated impunity for the crimes committed inevitably results in further atrocities.” —David Alton The Nanovic Institute for European Studies was privileged to welcome David Alton, Professor Lord Alton of Liverpool, to deliver the 2022 Nanovic Forum Lecture. A long-serving British parliamentarian, Alton has made campaigns for human rights and the sanctity of human life in Britain, Europe, and around the world the centerpieces of his long public service. A devout Catholic who started his career as a teacher in socially disadvantaged neighborhoods in his native Liverpool, Alton came to Notre Dame to “share [his] experiences as a European and British policymaker and to share a European perspective on what is often called the crime above all crimes: genocide.”
*During his lecture, David Alton quoted a letter from a victim of the Armenian Genocide, written after she had been deported to Brazil. She wrote: “These eyes saw things that the world should never see.” The letter is on display at the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute in Yerevan, Armenia.
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In his introductory remarks, Clemens Sedmak, director of the Nanovic Institute and professor of social ethics, welcomed Alton to the University of Notre Dame. Sedmak explained that the Nanovic Institute was established to build bridges between Europe and the U.S. He noted that Alton’s insights as a leading European parliamentarian who legislates and campaigns to prevent atrocity crimes dovetail with the joint mission of the Nanovic Institute and the Keough School of Global Affairs, a mission captured in the term integral human development. “It is an approach to social and political realities,” Sedmak explained, “that puts the dignity of each human at the center. Lord Alton’s reflections will shed light on the fragility of the recognition of human dignity and on what it takes to protect the dignity of each human person.” Outlining his lecture, Alton named just some of the atrocities he would touch upon, including those against the Herero and Namaqua people of south-west Africa, Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, and, of course, the slaughter of Europe’s Jews in the Holocaust. He explained that he would address the subsequent and repeated failures to prevent genocide in the Balkans, China’s Xinjiang province, Darfur, Burma, North Korea, Northern Iraq, and Ethiopia, and would outline the ways in which authoritarian regimes, like Russia and China, have been undermining international mechanisms designed to obstruct and prosecute those responsible for this most heinous of crimes. Alton expressed his hope that “by the time I have finished, I will have convinced you that genocides, in the legal and technical sense, remain frequent occurrences and that our responses and the mechanisms that inform our responses are wholly, wholly inadequate.”
A fatal chain of events Alton began his lecture by describing genocides that occurred in the first decades of the 20th century, including the slaughter of seventy thousand Herero and seven thousand Namaqua by German colonial forces in south-west Africa between 1904 and 1908, and the ten million Ukrainians killed in the Holodomor, the famine engineered by Joseph Stalin’s government in 1932-33. Alton
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focused in particular on the genocide of one million Armenians, along with Assyrian and Greek Christians, at the hands of the Turkish Ottoman Empire during the First World War. For Alton, the responses to these atrocities have proven tragically instructive. Firstly, examining these histories helps demonstrate how quickly atrocity crimes can escalate. Alton referred to the Jewish Austrian writer Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) who, in The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European, “describes how quickly a relatively civilized and humane society and a seemingly permanent golden age can be ruthlessly and swiftly destroyed, and charts the rise of visceral hatred, how scapegoating and xenophobia cultivated by populist leaders can rapidly morph into genocide and culminate in the hecatombs of the extermination camps.” Alton then argued that the international community’s failure to act in response to evident genocidal activity in the early 20th century generated a belief on the part of subsequent perpetrators that they could carry out similar or worse atrocities with impunity. “The belief that no one really cares,” he explained, “always encourages the tyrant.” There is ample evidence, Alton argued, that the Armenian genocide convinced Adolph Hitler that he could destroy Europe’s Jews with impunity because, as he wrote, “who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” The same rationale, ideology of a purified master race, and culture of impunity that underpinned the slaughter of Armenians also led to industrialized murder in the Nazi concentration camps. The case of the Armenian Genocide, Alton explained, also demonstrates the lethal consequences of failing to respond to such persecution and abuse. The Turkish slaughter of Armenians, committed over a century ago, have become part of a fatal chain of events that includes Hitler’s concentration camps, Stalin’s Gulags, Mao’s cultural revolution, and the atrocities of the 21st century, a chain of events that is perpetuated by repeated failures to respond adequately to evidence of brutality. This cycle continues even within that same region, aided by the Turkish government’s unflinching denial of the Armenian genocide. Alton shared a comment from Archbishop Bachar Warda of the Chaldean Catholic Archdiocese of Erbil who said that “this slow burn genocide [of
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Christians] that began with the Armenians hasn’t ended yet.” Alton explained that the Christian population of Syria has declined from 1.7 million in 2011 to less than 50,000 today, and that in Iraq from 1.3 million in 2003 to just 120,000 today, declines we cannot attribute to emigration alone. It is for this reason that Alton insisted that “this failure to recognize past genocides for what they are is not insignificant. Such denialism and associated impunity for the crimes committed inevitably results in further atrocities.”
Defining and codifying the “crime without a name” Alton re-introduced a man mentioned previously in the lecture: the Polish Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959) who, in the 1940s, first gave genocide its name. Although Lemkin escaped Nazi-occupied Europe, settling in the U.S. in 1941, 49 of his relatives perished in the Holocaust. Alton described how Lemkin was at the fore of the valiant effort that was made after the Second World War to end the repeated cycles of atrocities. Over a decade before he witnessed the horrors of the Holocaust, Lemkin’s interest in mass atrocities had been piqued by his research on the Armenian Genocide. By the early 1930s, he was working on defining other international crimes and barbarities committed against racial, religious, or social groups “with the goal of extermination.” His work took on a new urgency in the face of Nazi atrocities through the 1930s and into the 1940s, and Lemkin recalled that he began to seek a word to capture the severity of Nazi crimes after hearing a radio broadcast in which Churchill said that the Nazis had “committed a crime without a name.” Naming that crime, Lemkin realized, was essential to preventing its repetition. In devising a new word to “denote an old practice in its modern development,” Lemkin expanded the concept beyond the act of mass killings and the immediate destruction of a people. Instead, genocide would “signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of the foundation of the life of national groups with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.” The objectives would include the disintegration of political and social institutions, culture, language, Nanovic Institute for European Studies | Keough School of Global Affairs | University of Notre Dame
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national feelings, religion, economic existence, personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and the lives of individuals within national groups. As Alton explained, creating a definition was one thing, ensuring acceptance and codification of this definition across the international community was another. In 1948, Lemkin began to draft the United Nations Genocide Convention. Responding to the immense loss of life during the Second World War, the UN formally adopted the “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide” in December of that year.
“A macabre game of pass-the-parcel” Despite Lemkin’s success in securing an internationally agreed-upon definition for the “crime above all crimes,” Alton lamented that acts of genocide and atrocity crimes have continued to be perpetrated in the decades since. The response to genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur, Northern Iraq, and now in China, Burma, Nigeria, and Tigray (which, Alton emphasized, is an inexhaustive list) has been consistently inadequate. Alton argued that this demonstrates that Lemkin’s noble ideals are insufficient on their own and that “we need to revisit and revamp the convention.” Not only have promises to break the cycle of atrocities not been kept, but, Alton argued, things have gotten worse. He listed a sequence of atrocities committed in quick succession in the last decade. This litany includes: genocide unleashed by Daesh against religious minorities in Syria and Iraq, by the Burmese military against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, and by the Chinese government against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. Although the word genocide should not be used lightly or for purely rhetorical purposes, Alton insisted that in these cases, the high legal bar has been met. And yet, he said, the world’s response has been “utterly inadequate, making little difference to the people in those situations.” As has been the case historically, Alton explained, the frequency of atrocities only escalates when the perpetrators are confident that they can act with impunity. He asserted: “our failure to act inevitably results in further mass atrocities.”
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For Alton, these atrocities highlight how urgently we must revisit the questions raised by Lemkin and recalibrate our responses to atrocity crimes. As a first step, he argued, we should act when we see any evidence of genocidal actions: it should be applied whenever and wherever all elements of the crime are established, and, in cases where all elements haven’t been established, further scrutiny should be applied. This is the canary in the coalmine, Alton warned: “there are other categories of atrocity crimes—crimes against humanity, war crimes—that are often harbingers of worse to come.” Despite the promises made in the UN Genocide Convention to predict and prevent genocide, punish its perpetrators, and protect its victims, Alton argued that signatory nations have repeatedly refused to act upon evidence of genocide and atrocity crimes. He explained that many countries, including the UK, insist that declarations of genocide can only be made by the international judicial system and yet they have failed to refer any of the evidence of genocide presented by politicians to any international body. For Alton, this “macabre game of pass-the-parcel” forces us to ask “searching and impertinent questions about our alliances, our trading partners, our values, and how we respond.”
“The watchdog and the burglar have assumed the same identity” Alton presented two explanations for this failure to first recognize genocide or its harbingers and then act to prevent further suffering. Firstly, he argued, authoritarian regimes, including Russia and China, have “undermined the Genocide Convention, the upholding of the rule of law, the international community’s ability to bring to justice the perpetrators of atrocity crimes.” The Chinese government, Alton explained, has inserted itself as “an improbable member of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC).” This is despite ample evidence of the brutal treatment of the Uyghur population in Xinjiang by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), including the use of slave labor, mass incarceration, reports of forced organ harvesting, as well as China’s dismantling of democracy and the rule of law in Hong Kong, Nanovic Institute for European Studies | Keough School of Global Affairs | University of Notre Dame
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threats to Taiwan, and atrocities committed in Tibet. Alton described an emerging understanding shared by legislative bodies in Australia, Britain, Canada, the Netherlands, and the U.S., and by global communities of academics and lawyers “that the CCP’s ambition is to create a world safe for authoritarianism and that genocide or crimes against humanity will not be an obstacle in its path.” With its seat on the UNHRC, Alton warns, the Chinese government will prevent that body from ever taking any action against it. In this way, “the watchdog and the burglar have assumed the same identity.” Alton next argued that signatory nations to the Genocide Convention have failed to keep their promise because “craven and duplicitous governments place a higher premium on business, on trade, and on diplomatic links with genocidal states, rather than on their duty under the 1948 convention.” In this regard, he vigorously criticized global corporations such as Coca-Cola and others who sponsored the Beijing Olympics, Germany, with its massive trading relationship with China and gas dependency on Russia, and his own government. Various branches of the British government, Alton insisted, have been presented with a wealth of evidence proving that the Chinese government is committing atrocities against the Uyghur people. High-ranking members of that government have also publicly accepted that, in the words of then British Foreign Secretary Dominic Rabb, what is afoot in Xinjiang is “on an industrial scale and beyond the pale.” And yet, Alton described how key witnesses before a 2021 House of Lords International Relations and Defence Select Committee, including a former Chancellor of the Exchequer and National Security Advisor, declined to say whether trade should continue with a state accused of genocide. One witness rejected the suggestion saying “I see no British prosperity without a trading relationship with China.” Alton argued that this position ignores the moral obligations that underpin international trade. Britain, Germany, the U.S., and all countries require a stable business environment for their potential trading partners. A genocidal state, disrupted by internal conflict and likely violating other international laws (around property and copyright, for example), is not a stable trading partner. The
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British government, he insisted, owes a duty of care to British business people and taxpayers to not pretend that trading with a state that carries out such crimes is not without risks. Crucially, Alton rejected the idea that free trade helps to spread liberal democratic principles and quoted Richard Cobden (1804-1865), a leading English champion of free trade during the Industrial Revolution, who said that “free trade is not more important than our duty to oppose both the trade in human people and the trade in opium.”
An appeal to Proxmire’s successors Alton brought his lecture to a close by returning to Lemkin’s Genocide Convention and its champion in the U.S., a persistent senator from Wisconsin named William Proxmire. By the late 1960s—almost 20 years since the convention had been formally adopted by the UN—not a single U.S. voice had called for its ratification in the Senate. Introduced to Lemkin’s work by a friend in the 1950s, Proxmire made the case for the convention’s ratification every day that the Senate was in session from 1967 until 1986—a total of 3,211 times. His efforts came to fruition in the Proxmire Law, signed on February 11, 1986. Alton noted that, although Proxmire was often caricatured as “an irritating gadfly,” the issue demanded vocal and dogged advocacy. “There’s a lot to be said,” he noted, “for the awkward squad in politics.” When wondering what we can do and how we can act, Alton said “Proxmire’s successors— perhaps some of them here at Notre Dame—need to return to the fray.” He urged the audience to consider the futility of a field of policymaking in which parliamentarians passed critical legislation that they never sought to use or ensure was implemented. Rather, he insisted, we must create architecture that effectively deals with perpetrators of genocide and atrocity crimes. Responding to Lemkin’s hope for humanity in this way, he concluded, “will require a recalibration of our policies, a recalibrating of resources, and a much stronger, greater political will in concluding the unfinished business of 1948.”
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The Nanovic Forum, facilitated by the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, deepens Notre Dame’s rich tradition of connections to Europe by bringing prominent figures to campus in a wide range of fields to explore, discuss, and debate the most pressing questions about Europe today. Generously sponsored by Robert and Elizabeth Nanovic, the Forum invites its distinguished guests to interact with Notre Dame in ways they most wish, which can be surprising.
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