Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Has Syria Scuttled Samantha Power's Atrocity Prevention Board?

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Has Syria Scuttled Samantha Power's Atrocity Prevention Board?

    HAS SYRIA SCUTTLED SAMANTHA POWER'S ATROCITY PREVENTION BOARD?

    APB for the APB

    BY JOHN NORRIS | JULY 16, 2013

    With the confirmation hearings of Samantha Power to be the U.S.

    ambassador to the United Nations imminent, it is a good time to take a
    look at one of her signature projects from her tenure at the National
    Security Staff: the Atrocities Prevention Board.

    A little more than a year ago, President Barack Obama announced the
    creation of the Atrocities Prevention Board during an address at the
    U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, saying that this initiative would
    make the deterrence of genocide and mass atrocities "a core national
    security interest and core moral responsibility."

    Both the president and Power seemed acutely aware of the challenges
    and risks of trying to develop an inter-agency atrocities prevention
    mechanism while the humanitarian tragedy continued to unfold in Syria
    -- a conflict into which this administration has been reluctant to
    wade. Indeed, in many ways, the creation of the Atrocities Prevention
    Board, or APB, has felt a bit like trying to build a fire department
    in the middle of a three-alarm fire.

    The roots of the APB come from a bipartisan belief that the United
    States, in places like Rwanda and Bosnia, simply did not do enough
    to counter genocides and mass atrocities as they gathered force. The
    2008 report from the Genocide Prevention Task Force, co-chaired by
    former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former Secretary of
    Defense William Cohen, recommended the creation of a new high-level
    interagency body -- what they called an Atrocities Prevention Committee
    -- to improve U.S. government crisis-response systems and better
    equip Washington to mount coherent preventive responses.

    As Obama's special advisor for multilateral affairs, an outspoken
    champion for human rights and genocide prevention, and the author of
    a Pulitzer Prize winning book on the U.S. government and genocide,
    Power was a natural fit to breathe life into the Genocide Prevention
    Task Force's concept while at the National Security Staff (NSS).

    Power secured support for the APB through the August 2011 release
    of the Presidential Study Directive on Mass Atrocity Prevention, or
    PSD-10, of which she was the lead author. The directive called for
    the establishment of an interagency atrocities prevention mechanism,
    the APB, which would "coordinate a whole of government approach to
    preventing mass atrocities and genocide."

    However, when the formation of the APB was formally announced in
    2012 by the president, a number of Republican critics used it as an
    opportunity to lacerate the president for inaction in Syria.

    Commentator Charles Krauthammer, at best an episodic voice on the
    importance of human rights, called the board an embarrassment,
    and bemoaned, "The liberal faith in the power of bureaucracy and
    flowcharts, of committees and reports, is legend. But this is parody."

    So what does the APB actually do? And what does the situation in Syria
    say about its work? The APB consists of high-ranking representatives,
    all originally hand-picked by Power, from 11 agencies, including
    State, Defense, Treasury, Justice, the CIA and others. The board
    has essentially split its functions between looking at long-term
    structural issues -- such as sanctions regimes and how government
    personnel are trained -- and a geographic focus on countries at risk
    of mass atrocities, usually over the medium term.

    On a weekly basis, a sub-APB made up of working-level staff from
    the participating agencies meets to discuss the structural atrocity
    issues, with the State Department and USAID having the largest
    numbers of personnel involved. Once a month, the APB meets at the
    assistant-secretary level, with each agency's representative reporting
    on important issues raised during the weekly discussions and following
    up regarding assigned activities. Quarterly, deputy principals gather
    for what has been termed a "deep-dive analysis," with the assistance
    of an intelligence community briefing, designed to drive a substantial
    policy conversation regarding a country of potential concern. To date,
    some of the countries featured in these discussions have included
    Kenya, Burma, and Bangladesh. These conversations are designed to
    mobilize attention and resources within the respective agencies in
    an effort to avert atrocities in the countries under discussion,
    and to pre-position resources and analysis so that each agency can be
    better prepared. One imagines that most ambassadors don't particularly
    enjoy such a review, but such country-specific discussions certainly
    help sensitize diplomats to the risk factors associated with mass
    atrocities, and likely encourage more energetic efforts to avert
    such crisis.

    Finally, the nine principals involved at the assistant secretary
    level also meet annually, and the APB presents an annual report on
    its activities and successes to the president in January of each year.

    Somewhat bafflingly, the APB has no signature public product, such as
    the State Department's annual human rights report, and one of the most
    justified knocks on the board's work to date has been the fact that
    it has been almost invisible from public view -- a strategic decision
    within the administration that has one almost has to conclude has been
    driven by the situation in Syria. As a result of its lack of outreach,
    support for the APB remains very thin, particularly in Congress. As
    one congressional staffer told me, its activities to date are a
    "complete black hole."

    Perhaps the board's most notable successes have come in getting
    agencies that have traditionally paid little attention to atrocity
    prevention, such as the departments of Treasury and Justice, to develop
    new tools to pursue major human rights abusers. Directly as a result
    of the APB's work, the Department of Treasury has managed to place
    sanctions on suspected human rights abusers in the Democratic Republic
    of Congo, Zimbabwe, Iran, and Myanmar, and notably on 41 entities or
    individuals in Syria or with ties to the embattled Assad regime. The
    Department of Justice now has prosecutors working on human-rights abuse
    cases; a fraud team is assisting in seizing assets of human-rights
    abusers; and U.S. officials are helping train counterparts in other
    countries on how best to prosecute human rights cases. These are
    useful wins, as has been the improved coordination between agencies
    and improved training on these issues at State and USAID. Making the
    U.S. government better at atrocity prevention, by its very nature,
    includes some stuff that is not very sexy.

    This brings us back to the elephant in the room: Syria. Since the
    uprising began in February 2011, the United Nations estimates that at
    least 80,000 Syrians have been killed, roughly 4 million are internally
    displaced, and at least 1.5 million have fled the country entirely. It
    is exactly the kind of carnage for which the APB was created to help
    prevent or diffuse.

    Lanny Breuer, who represented the Justice Department on the APB until
    recently, argued that it was "unrealistic for a new entity that has
    no real authority to galvanize the government on Syria," and added,
    "But what it can do is to raise awareness." Breuer's comments may
    be accurate, but if so, the administration surely oversold the APB's
    potential when it was rolled out.

    On background, those affiliated with the APB argue that it has
    functioned largely as it should during the crisis. They point out that
    the APB was created to push decisionmaking and policymaking on mass
    atrocities to the highest levels in government, and that the decisions
    on how to respond to the situation in Syria have been rigorously
    debated by the president and his core national security team. No board
    can force a president's hand, and most agree that the policy choices
    in Syria run the gamut from bad to awful. Perhaps the APB is better
    positioned to deal with crises that are over the horizon or for which
    there are warning signs rather than ones that are directly unfolding.

    But, all that said, the APB was created with the express intent to
    prevent the next Rwanda or Bosnia, and Syria is looking an awful
    lot like one of those tragedies for which the phrase "never again"
    keeps getting repeated.

    Much of Power's career as an author and an activist was absolutely
    illuminated by her incandescent willingness to speak truth to power
    -- which helps explain why the APB's sotto voce approach has felt so
    dissatisfying with regard to Syria. The APB is doing good, important,
    and long-overdue work, but that legacy will surely be obscured if
    Syria continues to burn.

    Alex Wong/Getty Images

    SUBJECTS: DISASTERS, OBAMA ADMINISTRATION, SYRIA

    John Norris is executive director of the Sustainable Security program
    at the Center for American Progress.

    http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/07/16/apb_for_the_apb_syria_atrocities_prevention_board_ samantha_power?page=full




    From: A. Papazian
Working...
X