By Brian Steidle

Current events also fit under the umbrella of “not forgetting.”  It seems these days that we barely hear a word about the ongoing convulsions in Myanmar, the Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Somalia (except for the pirates). Where has the news coverage on these humanitarian crises gone? Where has international interest gone, including among diplomats? There may well be new pushes on some of these topics, but we aren’t hearing much about them  — and that’s a shame. Because they are all remote places and voiceless people whose plight includes struggling against international inattention and “other crises first.” I have long said that the world community — and that includes the global media — needs to be able to multi-task, and not tell the people of Myanmar that they will just have to wait until other crises are cleaned up first.

The Obama administration and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have gotten off to a strong start on repairing U.S. foreign relations and recasting the United States as a leader in human rights. But i’d like to hear more from them - and hear it loudly - on what they are doing in locales that are much easier to forget about even as great suffering goes on so many years after we should have learned our lesson from the Holocaust. 

For Immediate Release
December 8, 2008
Contact:  Andrew Hollinger, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.  202-488-6133
                Lauren Sucher, United States Institute of Peace.  202-429-3822
Genocide Prevention Task Force Delivers Blueprint for U.S. Government to Prevent Genocide and Mass Atrocities
Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of Defense William Cohen and other leading figures call on new administration and Congress to make preventing genocide and mass atrocities a national priority
(Washington, DC) – The Genocide Prevention Task Force today released its final report on the eve of the 60th anniversary of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.  The report makes the case for why genocide and mass atrocities threaten core American values and national interests, and how the U.S. government can prevent these crimes in the future.
Jointly convened by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, The American Academy of Diplomacy, and the United States Institute of Peace, the Task Force began its work last November with the goal of generating concrete recommendations to enhance the U.S. government’s capacity to recognize and respond to emerging threats of genocide and mass atrocities. 
“The world agrees that genocide is unacceptable and yet genocide and mass killings continue,” said Madeleine K. Albright, former Secretary of State and Co-Chair of the Genocide Prevention Task Force.  “We believe that preventing genocide is possible, and that striving to do so is imperative both for our national interests and our leadership position in the world.” 
“This report provides a blueprint that can enable the United States to take preventive action, along with international partners, to forestall the specter of future cases of genocide and mass atrocities,” said William S. Cohen, former Secretary of Defense and Co-Chair of the Genocide Prevention Task Force.  “There is a choice for U.S. policymakers between doing nothing and large-scale military intervention.  We hope this report will help us utilize those options.” 
Other Members of the Genocide Prevention Task Force include:  John Danforth, Thomas Daschle, Stuart Eizenstat, Michael Gerson, Dan Glickman, Jack Kemp, Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, Thomas R. Pickering, Vin Weber, Anthony Zinni, and Julia Taft who passed away earlier this year. 
The report, which is entitled “Preventing Genocide: A Blueprint for U.S. Policymakers”, asserts that genocide is preventable, and that making progress toward doing so begins with leadership and political will.  The report provides 34 recommendations, starting with the need for high-level attention, standing institutional mechanisms, and strong international partnerships to respond to potential genocidal situations when they arise; it lays out a comprehensive approach, recommending improved early warning mechanisms, early action to prevent crises, timely diplomatic responses to emerging crises, greater preparedness to employ military options, and action to strengthen global norms and institutions.
 “We are keenly aware that the incoming president’s agenda will be massive and daunting from day one,” Secretaries Albright and Cohen noted.  “But preventing genocide and mass atrocities is not an idealistic add-on to our core foreign policy agenda.  It is a moral and strategic imperative.”
The Task Force calls for the development of a new government-wide policy on genocide prevention, which would include the following specific actions designed to better equip the U.S. government to prevent genocide and mass atrocities:
Having the president himself demonstrate that preventing genocide is a national priority, for example by an early executive order, and continuing public statements on genocide prevention.
Creating an interagency Atrocities Prevention Committee at the National Security Council to analyze threats of genocide and mass atrocities and consider appropriate preventive action.
Making warning of genocide or mass atrocities an “automatic trigger” of policy review.
Developing military guidance on genocide prevention and response and incorporating it into doctrine and training.
Preparing interagency genocide prevention and response plans for high-risk situations.
Investing $250 million in new funds for crisis prevention and response, with a portion of this available for urgent activities to prevent or halt emerging genocidal crises.
Launching a major diplomatic initiative to create an international network for information-sharing and coordinated action to prevent genocide and mass atrocities.
Providing assistance to build capacity of international partners—including the UN and regional organizations—to prevent genocide and mass atrocities.
The report concludes that “a core challenge for American leaders is to persuade others—in the U.S. government, across the United States, and around the world, that preventing genocide is more than just a humanitarian aspiration, but a national and global imperative.”
The Task Force was funded by Humanity United and other private organizations.
About the Convening Organizations:
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, a living memorial to the Holocaust,
inspires citizens and leaders to confront hatred, promote human dignity and prevent genocide.  Federal support guarantees the Museum’s permanence, and its far-reaching educational programs and global impact are made possible by donors nationwide.
The American Academy of Diplomacy is dedicated to strengthening the resources and tools America brings to managing its diplomatic challenges, and accomplishes this through outreach programs, lectures, awards, and writing competitions. In doing so, the Academy promotes an understanding of the importance of diplomacy to serving our nation and enhancing America’s standing in the world.
The United States Institute of Peace is an independent, nonpartisan, national institution established and funded by Congress. Its goals are to help prevent and resolve violent international conflicts, promote post-conflict stability and development, and increase peacebuilding capacity, tools, and intellectual capital worldwide. The Institute does this by empowering others with knowledge, skills, and resources, as well as by directly engaging in peacebuilding efforts around the globe.
The report and a brochure about the report may be downloaded for free at: www.ushmm.org, www.academyofdiplomacy.org, www.usip.org.

June 26, 2008

I’ve seen humanitarian issues from both sides of the fence: as a journalist and as a humanitarian worker.

I’ll be focusing on Africa, but media stereotyping is true of impoverished countries around the world, especially when a crisis occurs.

There are levels or layers of stereotyping: Stereotyping countries, stereotyping poverty, stereotyping man-made disasters, including war, and, most of all, stereotyping people caught in disadvantaged circumstances.

I learned intimately about the stereotypes, not as a reporter, but when I worked outside the field. 

For my master’s thesis, I followed children who daily scavenged in the Phnom Penh, Cambodia garbage dump for recyclable materials they could sell. I went to the dump every morning before work. One day, a reporter came. I took enormous pride in the fact that I tromped through the piles of garbage right alongside the children, while the journalists stayed on this path that cut through the middle of the dump. I never saw their story, but I’d bet a week’s paycheck it was a predictable story line that followed the stereotypes of poor, miserable children who needed garbage to live. But did the stories reflect the children’s strategies they had cleverly developed for getting the best recyclables, for figuring out how to set aside a safe play area near the dump. Did the story note the children and their parents had rules to try to be as hygienic as possible at the dump, including not eating food they found in it?

In Macedonia, I managed a refugee camp for ethnic Albanian Kosovars who fled from the former Yugoslavian province of Kosovo. What are the stereotypes of refugees?

The Kosovars had their own stereotypes of refugees. They were poor Africans, dressed in rags, who lived in lean-to’s with blue plastic roofs. NATO helped reinforce a genuine class difference – raising the question of when are stereotypes truths created by other forces or reasons – by building the refugee camps for Kosovars because of NATO’s involvement in fighting Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic. Also inherent in this example is racism – these camps, built for white Eastern Europeans were nicer than any refugee camp I’ve seen in Africa or Southeast Asia. Why did NATO intervene in this crisis? Why did NATO nations help in emergency relief in a way they don’t for other crises?

The camp I managed had sturdy tents instead of lean-to’s, many with wooden floors rather than mud, and stoves with a chimney to keep people warm. They demanded, and got, fresh baked bread every morning. There was a Spanish nongovernmental organization providing free cell phone service anywhere in the world.

A few journalists came to my camp. They talked to camp residents and undoubtedly got stories about how they had fled the oppression of Milosevic. But they didn’t stay around long enough to get to know the Graincafamily, whose mother strove everyday to make the camp and their tent feel like home to her four children. They didn’t learn about the elderly mother who didn’t have the means to care for her grown, severely disabled son, so she just left him in an empty tent one day. They didn’t know about the refugees who preyed on other refugees – you’re not a pure, innocent and good just because you’ve been a victim of violence. There were those in the camp who victimized others, who stole, who assaulted, leaders who were corrupt. A camp is like a city with all that.

The camp I worked with in Rwanda didn’t get treated nearly so royally. The Rwandan government wanted to move some refugees away from the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the Interahamwe still operated, to deeper inside Rwanda. Fine, but the camp wasn’t ready. Refugees ended up having to build their own housing and dig latrines even as their families already were living there.

This brings us back to Africa, and media stereotypes of it. I’ve passed around a couple of essays on the topic written by Africans that are good synopses of problems in media coverage.

I also did a very quick, unscientific content survey of African news headlines from Google news searches.

I searched for “Ghana,” one of Africa’s success stories, and go about 10,000 hits. The top topic was 12 stories on Ghanaian politics, all written by Ghanaian newspapers. Nothing in the American press, even though the United Statesis supposed to be all about democratization around the world. Too inside-poitics? Maybe, but the U.S. media has consistently had a problem with figuring out how to report and write international topics in a way that is interesting to Americans.

My search for “Nigeria” drew 33,935 hits overall. There were 1,336 articles on Nigerian government army clashes with militants in the oil-rich Niger Delta. It’s on economics, which busts one stereotype that African countries don’t have economic successes or strengths, but reinforces another that coverage and concern (they go together) often are driven by oil. Most of those 1,336 stories incidentally, were in foreign or business-specific publications or shows. There was one story in a Lagos newspaper on a nationwide teachers’ strike – something that easily could have been of interest to Americans and told the story about education in another land. There also was one story, in the Christian Science Monitor, on Nigeria’s writes gaining a worldwide audience.

The hottest African news these days is about the political crisis in Zimbabwe. There were 4,976 stories on African nations pressuring Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe to postpone the runoff election tomorrow that the opposition is shunning after government-led violence against it.

Those stories bust another stereotype: showing other African leaders condemning one of their own and urging him to shape up, which connects to a point made in one of the articles I gave you, “Africa’s Road to Better Media Image” by Salim Lone, in which the point was made that Africa needs to “put its own house in order” to help improve the continent’s image in western media. But it reinforces the stereotype of African nations all being a mess.

Let me leave you with these thoughts: You can’t stereotype stereotyping. It’s not purely bad covering humanitarian catastrophes. Coverage informs people about dire situations in isolated pockets of the world, and builds public pressure and public aid to help. We have seen what happens, in Rwanda or in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, when the media is not there to shine an international spotlight on atrocities. Some stereotypes are borne of real situations and biases that help maintain imbalances or bad circumstances.

What’s needed when reporting on or teaching about foreign locales and people is a fuller knowledge and context, and a desire to look behind the sexiest news, information-gathering that the Internet makes much easier these days, and to figure out how to make the mundane interesting and vital – because it is.