You'd never know we said 'never again'

Despite the oath made after the Holocaust, no one seems that bothered about stopping the genocide in Darfur.
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There's a genocide going on in Darfur. That much is widely accepted. And although there is a lot of room for disagreement about what, exactly, to do about it, I'm rather puzzled at the large number of people who seem to think that no one should do anything at all.

Although upwards of 20,000 people marched in New York City on Sunday to protest against the Darfur genocide, the Guardian's editors tell me that only a handful turned out for protests the same day in London. And I can't help but notice that an awful lot of the commenters to the group post here at CiF seemed actively hostile to the very idea of doing anything, with many blaming the uproar over genocide on greedy oil companies. Why are Americans - who, with the whole "global war on terror" under way, surely have enough to worry about - more interested in Darfur than Britons are?

I'm not sure, but to the extent that the American view is exceptional, and the British view more typical - and I think that this is the case - it calls into question the entire notion of international efforts to prevent genocide. The international convention against genocide is all very well, but international agreements are merely resumé-padders for diplomats if no one is willing to actually enforce them, and that seems to be the case. So the international system seems unlikely to do anything. (And, as Nelson Ascher notes, NGOs are losing credibility, too.)

This would seem to make a mockery of the "never again" rhetoric that followed the Holocaust and the second world war. The "international community" doesn't seem to mind genocide all that much, really, as long as it's not either aimed at a favoured group, or practised by a disfavoured group. Intervention came too late in Rwanda, against powerful opposition in Bosnia, and not at all in Cambodia, to name just a few recent examples.

But the legitimacy of the United Nations and the entire post-second world war international apparatus was in large part based on that "never again" oath. Given that no one seems willing to follow up on that, what role remains for these organisations? And given that they've failed at perhaps their most important mission, how can they be trusted with any others?

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