Kerry: quick to respond to the Ukraine hoax, but silent on the crisis in the CAR

The US secretary of state insists the threat of genocide is intolerable – and it should be intolerable everywhere

Sabrina Hersi Issa

Americans too often fail to remember the humanity at stake when our speed to denounce human rights abuses is not intrinsically linked to our current political interests, or historical and racial ties. While one country – the Central African Republic – currently unravels on the edge of genocide and struggles to receive basic humanitarian support, an unconfirmed and ultimately fake anti-Semitic incident in another country – Ukraine – triggers global outrage and dominates headlines.

The uneven outrage focused on injustice, perceived or real, falls in parallel with America's shameful history in Rwanda, which we cannot afford to repeat. At what point can we set aside politics in favor of our responsibility to protect human lives from mass atrocity?

Last week, US policymakers quickly condemned anti-Semitic leaflets calling on Jews in the eastern Ukrainian town of Donestk to register with pro-Russian political authorities, despite questions about the letter's sources and authenticity. Nobody took responsibility for the leaflets, while the Donestk People's Republic chairman – the separatist whose signature appears on the document – denied any connection to it, and NPR's Ari Shapiro even tried, and failed, to register. The town's rabbi stated: "I think it is a provocation. I don't think it is real, but the police need to do something about it."

If the goal was provocation, the leaflets achieved exactly that. The story reverberated around the world late last week – and the uncertainty around the provenance of the documents did not slow senior US officials from condemning the leaflets. Secretary Kerry addressed them from Geneva in a statement:

"In the year 2014, after all of the miles traveled and all of the journey of history, this is not just intolerable; it's grotesque. It is beyond unacceptable. And any of the people who engage in these kinds of activities, from whatever party or whatever ideology or whatever place they crawl out of, there is no place for that."

It is, indeed, intolerable; it is intolerable to prey upon the fears of genocide, to politicize faith ... and to move to condemn a leaflet campaign more swiftly than the absolute horrors unfolding in Central African Republic. This is a country that Archbishop Desmond Tutu sahs "stands on the brink of genocide; some would say it has already commenced". It is a country with mass killings unfolding, which United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon referred to as a "crisis of epic proportions".

While Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the United Nations, has become the administration's point person on the CAR response, no official press statements from Secretary Kerry have been made sincelate January, when he threatened sanctions but made no additional commitments to support the international peacekeeping troops that have failed to stop the "grotesque" violence. Then as now, the Obama administration has left the ball in the international community's court, but the ongoing bloodshed continually undermines security and limits access for humanitarian aid.

The conflict is taking a devastating humanitarian toll. There is no official death count, but an Amnesty International report from December placed the unofficial total at more than 1,000. The efforts to stabilize conditions in CAR have rapidly turned into a race against time in the face of famine and unending violence that has shattered the country and driven more than 630,000 people to flee their homes. Nearly 2.2m people – half the population – are in need of humanitarian relief, and until recently, substantive support and commitments have been slow.

Currently, there is a 5,000-person, African Union-led peacekeeping mission which has experienced 25 casualties – and it is woefully understaffed, out-gunned and overwhelmed. Some AU troop units reportedly lack basic body armor.

The calls for support from the international community for peacekeeping support and humanitarian assistance have been made for months. Last summer, Kristalina Georgieva, European Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Response, wrote in the Guardian, "How bad does it have to get before we act? Have we not learned by now from other conflicts that the longer they are ignored or neglected the harder and costlier they become to solve?"

Earlier this month, the UN Security Council unanimously approved a peacekeeping force for the CAR to supplement and relieve the AU-led force – but the UN troops are not scheduled to deploy to CAR until September 2014.

Seventy years ago, Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew, first coined the term genocide, a hybrid word consisting of the Greek prefix "genos", meaning race, and the Latin suffix "-cide", meaning killing. He was trained as a lawyer and a linguist in Ukraine, immigrated to the United States and, in the shadows of the Holocaust, worked tirelessly until his death in 1959 to criminalize genocide and crimes against humanity. Power, prior to her role in the administration, wrote of Lemkin and his work to put a word to "a crime without a name" in her book, A Problem from Hell:

"Maybe if he could capture the crime in a word that connoted something truly unique and evil, people and politicians alike might be more exercised about stopping it."

We should have learned from humanity's past crimes and, as Georgieva wrote, from other conflicts. The question of the moment – "How bad does it have to get before we act?" – is not a question I thought we would need to contemplate, again, in 2014. This is the same year we sit in remembrance of the Rwandan genocide, 20 years ago starting this month, and still reckon with failure to properly stabilize Somalia before a power vacuum mired the nation in decades of regional instability and humanitarian strife.

I do not believe the absence of United States humanitarian leadership in CAR is based on a lack of will, but I also believe that credible threats of genocide have been dwarfed by the geopolitical fight unfolding in Ukraine and other regions where US political interests reign supreme. Gradually, CAR has faded from our policymakers' priorities, our headlines and, in turn, from our collective conscience.

As Secretary Kerry stated, the threat of genocide is intolerable – and it should be intolerable everywhere. Beyond outrage, politics and rhetoric remains our duty to act, our responsibility to protect and the recognition that, in the Central African Republic, this is a moment of crisis we cannot ignore.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/22/kerry-ukraine-hoax-crisis-central-african-republic