T
Simon Bikindi was once
the most famous musician in Rwanda. Twelve years ago he
was also the most lethal.
In
1994, as Hutu militants slaughtered more than 800,000 of
Rwanda 's minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus, it was
Bikindi's inflammatory songs that dominated the
country's airwaves. Radio Milles Collines, which egged
on the death squads and coordinated their attacks,
"played Bikindi's music constantly during the 100 days
of killing," the New York Times recalled in 2002. "In
Rwanda, almost no one reads newspapers or owns a
television, and radio is king. According to eyewitness
reports, many of the killers sang Bikindi's songs as
they hacked or beat to death hundreds of thousands of
Tutsis with government-issued machetes and homemade
nail-studded clubs."
Today Bikindi is being
tried by the international tribunal created to bring
Rwanda's accused war criminals to justice. The central
charge against him is that he incited genocide with his
songs. He is not the only Rwandan to be put on trial for
incitement. Among those already convicted are a founding
director of Radio Milles Collines and the one time
editor of Kangura, a virulently anti-Tutsi newspaper.
Words can be deadly,
opening the door to murder on a vast scale. That is why
the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of
the Crime of Genocide unambiguously makes it as much of
a crime to incite acts of genocide with words as to
physically commit them with weapons. And if that is true
of words uttered by a singer or an editor, surely it is
even truer of exhortations to mass murder by a head of
state .
So if Simon Bikindi has
been charged with incitement to commit genocide, why
hasn't Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?
In New York last week, a
number of prominent lawyers and diplomats -- including
John Bolton, the outgoing American ambassador to the
United Nations -- called for making the indictment of
Ahmadinejad an international priority. The gathering was
organized by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs,
which issued a brief setting out in detail the legal
case for prosecuting the Iranian president and the
regime he represents.
There is nothing cryptic
about Iran 's genocidal intentions. Ahmadinejad has
called openly for Israel to be "wiped off the map." In
2005 he hosted a conference anticipating "The World
Without Zionism"; last week he convened another to deny
that the Nazi Holocaust ever took place. He vows that
Israel "will be purged from the center of the Islamic
world" and that "the elimination of the Zionist regime
will be smooth and simple." He demonizes Jews as
"bloodthirsty barbarians" and "very filthy people" who
have "inflicted the most damage on the human race." In
August he warned: "They should know that they are
nearing the last days of their lives."
These are not the ravings
of some obstreperous politician whom Iran's clerics
would be wise to muzzle. Ahmadinejad's words echo
genocidal threats made at the highest levels of the
Tehran regime.
"There is only one
solution to the Middle East problem," declares Iran's
supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, "namely, the
annihilation and destruction of the Jewish state."
Former president Hashemi Rafsanjani, routinely described
in the West as a "moderate," explains the asymmetrical
advantage of a nuclear attack on Israel: "The use of a
nuclear bomb against Israel will leave nothing on the
ground, whereas [any Israeli retaliation] would only
damage the world of Islam." Iran is aggressively
pursuing nuclear weapons; it already has the long-range
missiles needed to launch them. When those missiles are
paraded behind signs reading " Israel must be uprooted
and erased from history," it requires willful blindness
not to perceive what Ahmadinejad and the mullahs have in
mind.
For many months preceding
the Rwandan genocide, there was similar incitement to
mass-murder. Yet international authorities did nothing
to silence the inciters -- with catastrophic results.
The situation in Iran
today is frighteningly similar. But as the JCPA brief,
which was written by human-rights scholar Justus Reid
Weiner argues, there is one critical difference: "While
the Hutus in Rwanda were equipped with . . . machetes,
Iran, should the international community do nothing to
prevent it, will soon acquire nuclear weapons." At that
point Tehran would be poised to commit the first
"instant genocide" in history.
At the New York
symposium, Ambassador Bolton remarked that historians
looking back at horrific acts of evil often wonder how
responsible officials at the time didn't see them
coming. "How was it that they missed . . . clear signals
from the people who were about to commit acts of great
barbarity and atrocity -- who never made any effort to
conceal what their intentions were?"
Iran's intentions are
nakedly, malignantly clear. What is not clear at all is
what the civilized world will do about it. An indictment
of Ahmadinejad under the Genocide Convention would not,
by itself, eliminate the threat of a second Holocaust.
It would, however, make a good first step.
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