The Washington Post

Sunday, May 4, 1997

Editorial

To Prevent More Genocides

AT THE HOLOCAUST Memorial Museum, whose mission is to

supply the moral impetus to prevent further genocides, the United

Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Sadako Ogata, did exactly that

in an address last week. She offered a compelling report on a

world environment in which terrible deeds that were not supposed

to happen anymore are in fact happening on a routine and continuing

basis -- with too little being done about it. Mrs. Ogata knows

something about the subject. Her work is to anticipate and limit the

killing and, when that fails, to care for the survivors. Currently her

office is responsible for more than 26 million refugees and other

uprooted victims of wars and persecution. Her Washington text is

published on the opposite page today.

Why, Mrs. Ogata dared to ask, have large-scale atrocities

been permitted to unfold in recent years in Bosnia, Rwanda and

Zaire? She suggests that in the prevailing post-Cold War climate the

major powers perceived no strategic interest at stake, or their

interests did not converge. Her proposed remedies center on improving

the capabilities of the U.N. system, for instance, in relief, in

attention to human rights and in establishing an INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL

COURT. All are things that need to be done.

The end of the Cold War, she notes, has broken the link

between refugee protection and strategic imperative. No longer do

refugees from communist repression automatically go to the head of

the queue of those to be saved. But local conflicts having nothing to do

with communism still generate large numbers of refugees, and

asylum must be made more serviceable and available in the countries in a

position to offer haven to them. Mrs. Ogata draws useful attention to

recent cruel changes in American law requiring arriving applicants for

asylum, under pain of exclusion, to have a full sheaf of appropriate

papers in hand. The responsibility of Americans is to make sure their

immigration procedures reflect traditional humane American

values.

The possibilities of INTERNATIONAL cooperation are still

too little appreciated. At a time when many nations hesitate to

take on large new refugee burdens, the obvious answer for these

nations is to support an INTERNATIONAL mechanism and to share in the

obligations of care. In a context where all nations were lending a hand,

no single nation would have to carry an unfair portion of the load.

This seems obvious and elementary but it is a truth still dimly

perceived, and it is Mrs. Ogata's urgent message.