美国国家公共电台 NPR Global Powers' Commitment To Intervene In Genocides May Be Waning

DAVID GREENE, HOST: 

The Responsibility to Protect is a doctrine 1 in the United Nations calling on world powers to step into countries and stop atrocities 2. But in places like Syria and South Sudan, it is clear the concept is just an aspiration 3, as NPR's Michele Kelemen reports.

MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE 4: At his final news conference as U.N. secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon described Syria as a gaping 5 hole in the global conscience. He said South Sudan's leaders betrayed their people in a country now on the brink 6 of genocide. And the fires are still burning in Yemen, Mali and Central African Republic.

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BAN KI-MOON: The reason, clearly - lack of solidarity 7, global solidarity.

KELEMEN: Ban says he's sorry to leave so many unresolved conflicts to his successor, and he blames world powers for failing to work together.

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BAN: Unfortunately, member states have shown some stepping back from their firm agreement on Responsibility to Protect.

KELEMEN: The Obama administration was an early advocate of the concept that world powers need to step in to save civilians 8 from genocide when governments are unable or when they're the ones carrying out the atrocities. President Obama set up an atrocities prevention board and made this pledge to the U.S. Holocaust 9 Memorial Museum back in 2012.

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BARACK OBAMA: Preventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core national security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States of America.

KELEMEN: The Obama administration invoked 10 the Responsibility to Protect in Libya in 2011, when the then-leader, Moammar Gadhafi, was threatening a massacre 11 in the city of Benghazi. But the fallout was not what the U.S. wanted, says Cameron Hudson, who runs a genocide prevention center at the Holocaust Museum.

CAMERON HUDSON: Those interventions 13, they drag on, and they often morph, and they often change. So in the case of Libya, what became an intervention 12 to save civilians in Benghazi morphed into what essentially 14 became regime change and now essentially the dissolution of the Libyan state.

KELEMEN: And he fears the Obama administration, in his words, overlearned the lessons from Libya, where terrorism is now a major threat. It has been hesitant to get drawn 15 into Syria, even to stop mass atrocities there. President Obama told reporters earlier this month that he spent many hours in meetings with his advisers 16 on Syria but ultimately came to this conclusion.

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OBAMA: Unless we were all-in and willing to take over Syria, we were going to have problems.

KELEMEN: The U.S. has intervened to fight ISIS in Syria and in Iraq. And in some ways, that started as a humanitarian 17 intervention, says Hudson of the Holocaust Memorial Museum. The U.S. saw ISIS carrying out a genocide against Yazidis and other religious and ethnic 18 minorities.

HUDSON: In the case of ISIS, we've seen an intervention to save Yazidis on a mountaintop morph into a much broader effort to roll back an ISIS threat all across northern Iraq and Syria.

KELEMEN: And some Yazidis say the world isn't paying much attention to their plight 19 now. Nadia Murad, who was held as a sex slave by ISIS, has been urging the U.N. Security Council to launch an international investigation 20 to document war crimes.

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NADIA MURAD: (Through interpreter) I don't understand how there is no court that can prosecute 21 the perpetrators of the crimes against the Yazidis or an independent body to investigate them. I don't understand why the corpses 22 of my murdered mother and brothers still lie in mass graves, unprotected and un-examined.

KELEMEN: She worries that evidence is disappearing while Security Council members focus more on the terrorism threat to them than on the fate of religious minorities.

Michele Kelemen, NPR News, Washington.