Table of Contents About the Authors ................................................................................................................................... 2 Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................................. 3 Executive Summary ................................................................................................................................ 4 Introduction ............................................................................................................................................. 8 Chapter 1. US Foreign Policy and Atrocity Prevention .......................................................................... 11 Chapter 2. Atrocity Prevention Policy Tools and Policy Advances from 2012 to 2016 ......................... 33 Chapter 3. Country Cases ..................................................................................................................... 44 Burundi .............................................................................................................................................. 44 Central African Republic .................................................................................................................... 55 Democratic Republic of the Congo .................................................................................................... 64 Iraq .................................................................................................................................................... 72 Kenya ................................................................................................................................................ 80 Libya .................................................................................................................................................. 88 Myanmar .......................................................................................................................................... 100 South Sudan .................................................................................................................................... 108 Syria ................................................................................................................................................ 121 Chapter 4. Assessment of US Atrocity Prevention Efforts and the APB ............................................. 132 Chapter 5. Recommendations ............................................................................................................. 143 Works Cited ......................................................................................................................................... 146 1 About the Authors Tessa Alleblas is a researcher at The Hague Institute for Global Justice. She holds a bachelor’s degree in International and European Public Law from Tilburg University. During her second master’s degree, Tessa specialized in international criminal law at the University of Amsterdam and Columbia University in New York. Next to her studies, Tessa assisted the Karadzic defense team with the evaluation of evidence at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). She has published in St. John’s Law Review as well as in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage and OpenDemocracy. Dr. Eamon Aloyo is a senior researcher at The Hague Institute for Global Justice and a director of policy engagement at the European Center for the Responsibility to Protect. Trained as a political scientist, he works on policy relevant topics at the intersection of political theory and international relations. His interests include the responsibility to protect (R2P), just war theory, global justice, and related issues. He has published in the journals Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Ethics & International Affairs, Global Constitutionalism, Global Society, and International Theory as well as the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage and OpenDemocracy. Sarah Brockmeier is a project manager at the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) in Berlin. She works on German foreign policy, UN peacekeeping, and mass atrocity prevention. She has previously published on the global politics around the NATO intervention in Libya in 2011, Europe and the responsibility to protect and Germany’s policies on mass atrocity prevention, including Germany’s role during the Rwandan genocide. Sarah studied international politics and history at Jacobs University Bremen and Sciences Po Paris and holds an MPhil in international relations from the University of Cambridge. From 2010 to 2015, Sarah served as a board member and deputy director of Genocide Alert. Philipp Rotmann is associate director of the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) in Berlin, where he leads the work on peace and security in a changing world. His most recent projects covered the global politics of protecting populations from mass atrocities, the conceptualization of stabilization, support to local conflict management by UN peace operations, and the politics of security sector reform. He has served as a senior political adviser with the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force and worked in the German Federal Foreign Office on the Afghanistan-Pakistan task force. Philipp holds an MPA from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Professor Jon Western is Mount Holyoke College's Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of Faculty and the Carol Hoffmann Collins '63 Professor of International Relations and Five College Professor of International Relations. His teaching and research interests focus on U.S. foreign policy, international security, human rights, and humanitarian affairs. He is the author of Selling Intervention and War: The Presidency, the Media, and the American Public. Previously, he served as a Balkans analyst in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the U.S. Department of State. His articles appear in Foreign Affairs, Security Studies, International Security, Ethno-politics, Harvard International Review, Perspectives on Politics, and Political Science Quarterly. 2 Acknowledgements We would like to thank former Hague Institute President Dr. Abiodun Williams, and Head of Research, Dr. David Connolly, for their support and commitment to this cause and project. Some chapters draw heavily on previous work conducted by Sarah Brockmeier and Philipp Rotmann with Gerrit Kurtz as part of a German-language study co-funded by the Heinrich Böll Foundation. We thank Sergey Lagodinsky for permission to reuse that work for the present study. We are grateful to the numerous individuals we interviewed who generously gave their time and shared their expertise with us. Thanks to former Hague Institute for Global Justice intern Basma Salama who helped with background research. For excellent research assistance, Sarah Brockmeier and Philipp Rotmann would like to thank Francesco Bosso, Aurélie Domisse, Valérie Künzler, Carl Michaelis, Mario Schulz, Max Weckemann and Florian Winkler. Jon Western would like to thank James Finkel and members of the Washington-based Atrocity Prevention Study Group for their comments and suggestions. He also would like to thank the generous financial support from Carol Hoffman Collins and Mount Holyoke College for supporting portions of his research. Thanks also to Anneke Veltman for her help with finalizing and formatting the report. Cover image: UN Photo/Sylvain Liechti 3 Executive Summary Mass atrocities planned and orchestrated by individuals continue to cause death, pain and destruction for millions of people in Syria, Iraq, South Sudan, the Central African Republic (CAR) and elsewhere. Large-scale, systematic and indiscriminate violence against ethnic or religious groups have led tens of millions of people mostly from the Middle East to seek refuge in Europe. The resulting political shock of the so-called “refugee crisis” will still shape this year’s elections in several EU member states. As an international community and as individual states, we have yet to learn how to prevent or stop atrocities with any regularity. Despite individual cases of relative success (some of which we analyze in this study) and larger political and legal advances, such as the International Criminal Court (ICC), the Human Rights Up Front initiative of the United Nations (UN), and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), leaders and governments are failing all too often to live up to their commitment to assist individual states to meet their obligation to protect their own population from atrocities, and if a state manifestly fails to do so, to implement the international community’s subsidiary responsibility to protect threatened populations. The US experience in atrocity prevention and its institutional reform initiatives aimed at improving its capacity to prevent atrocities provide an excellent opportunity to study efforts at the national level with a view to realizing states’ commitment to R2P and mass atrocity prevention. In 2011, President Obama declared that “preventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core national security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States of America.”1 This review of the atrocity prevention toolkit across the US government found that the established tools and procedures were unable to meet this level of ambition despite the important and hard work of many, including in previous administrations. The Obama administration chose two primary means to meet his goals on mass atrocity