JUSTICE - No. 66

16 No. 66 JUSTICE worst Serbian human rights offenders were tried and convicted, including Serb General Ratko Mladi ć . In 1994, the International Criminal Court for Rwanda was established following the Rwandan genocide. And in 2002, the International Criminal Court came into being, to which now over 120 nations (not including the U.S.) are parties. Radovan Karadzic, president of the Republic of Serbia, was convicted by the court, and 45 leaders, including Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, have been indicted by the court. There are other institutions today that did not exist during the Holocaust. Human rights NGOs, like Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders, and Amnesty International, highlight acts of genocide and war crimes. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for the Prevention of Genocide, to which I belong, thoroughly researches, and works with members of the U.S. government to highlight areas where genocide is occurring or where it is at risk of occurring. The Auschwitz Institute for the Prevention of Genocide has one of the largest education and training programs around the world to sensitize people to the dangers of genocide and mass atrocities through the lessons of the Holocaust. I chair the Defiant Requiem Foundation, which, with the vision of Murry Sidlin, an American conductor, has performed over 50 concert-dramas in the U.S., Europe and Israel, and increasingly in colleges and universities using student musicians and singers, to dramatize the power of cultural resistance through the arts and music in giving people hope in hopeless situations such as in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. We were scheduled to perform our landmark concert“Defiant Requiem: Verdi at Terezin”in Amsterdam in May 2020, which would have been broadcast nationwide on Dutch television. Because of COVID-19, this has been moved to May 2021. The internet and digital communications and aggressive journalists bring war crimes and acts of genocide directly into our homes to stir our conscience, something not possible during the Holocaust. For all its limitations, the United Nations, operating under a UN Security Council resolution since 1999, has numerous peacekeeping missions to protect civilians, providing some measure of protection Jews never had during the Holocaust. The limitations of international law are all too painful. Nation states are the key drivers of the treatment of their citizens. International human rights are regularly violated by brutal autocrats around the world, with little ability of citizens to mobilize international law to protect themselves, unless it touches on the interests of western nation states. The U.S. and NATO intervened in Bosnia and then in Kosovo because the West, in the end, could not tolerate another genocide on its soil after the Holocaust. But many other massacres and genocides around the world do not capture the attention of the western nations that could make a difference, for the simple reason that these events do not engage these nations’ strategic interests. A critical factor is the willingness of the president of the United States (along with Congress) to make human rights a key part of his foreign policy. I am proud that Jimmy Carter was the first to do so, applying it to Latin American dictators, reducing their arms shipments and using his position of authority to call for freedom and democracy in our hemisphere. Even while negotiating a nuclear arms agreement with the Soviet Union, President Carter championed the rights of Soviet Jews, leading to the doubling of Soviet Jewish emigration. Other presidents, from Nixon to Trump, gave little attention to how nations treat their citizens and focus on their external conduct. I believe President Biden will put human rights back into a central role in his foreign policy. Of course, all presidents have to carefully balance America’s interests against human rights concerns, as in dealing with China. But making human rights at least a significant part of foreign policy can help advance this cause and protect vulnerable people from genocide. The Holocaust has been a stimulant in beginning to build a world in which human rights violations and genocide gain greater opprobrium. The most meaningful way to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day is to pledge ourselves and to urge our governments to remember the lessons of the Holocaust and take effective action against hate, antisemitism, human rights violations, and genocide, where it occurs and against whomever it is perpetrated. n Stuart E. Eizen st at, former official in six U.S. adminis t rations, including Chief White House Dome st ic Policy Adviser to President Jimmy Carter; United States Ambassador to the European Union, Under Secretary of Commerce, Under Secretary of State, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury and Special Representative of the President and Secretary of State on Holocau st -Era Issues in the Clinton Admini st ration; and Special Adviser on Holocau st -Era Issues to Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry in the Obama Admini st ration; he served as Expert Adviser to the State Department on Holocau st -Era Issues in the Trump and Biden admini st rations.