Genocide Awareness and Prevention Month

Floor Speech

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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague, the gentlewoman from Missouri, for her leadership. I am honored to join her and other distinguished colleagues this evening in recognition of Genocide Awareness and Prevention Month.

Preventing genocide and mass atrocities is a moral imperative that deserves to be at the very top of our priority list. Mass atrocities are large-scale, deliberate attacks against civilian populations. They include genocide but also crimes against humanity, war crimes, and ethnic cleansing.

After the Holocaust--the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of 6 million Jews and members of other persecuted groups by the Nazi regime and its collaborators between 1941 and 1945--people all around the world vowed to never again stand by in the face of genocide; but since then, mass atrocities, including genocide, have been committed in Indonesia, Cambodia, Guatemala, East Timor, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sudan, and South Sudan, among other places. Hundreds of thousands of people have been murdered, tortured, disappeared, or suffered sexual violence; and millions more have been forced to flee with profound humanitarian, political, and national security consequences.

I don't believe the world's failure to prevent atrocities is because no one cares. In this era of instant communication powered by social media, most people I meet have seen and passionately condemn the ongoing atrocities in Syria and elsewhere. Nor is it because no one knows what is happening. Many, many people warned us for years about the potential for genocide against the Rohingya in Burma.

The problem is that we have not been very good at turning knowledge and moral indignation into action to prevent a bad situation from worsening. We must do better. We must do more. This year, in the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, which I co-chair along with my colleague Congressman Randy Hultgren, we are looking at the tools we have as U.S. policymakers to prevent mass atrocities and asking how we can strengthen them.

We are asking what it would mean to institutionalize an atrocity prevention's lens so we don't wait until it is so late and the problem is so big that all we can do is lament the immorality and the inhumanity and then provide humanitarian aid to the victims and survivors. As we undertake this effort, we know that there is a lot of good work already underway in both Chambers of Congress and on both sides of the aisle to find new ways forward.

One example is H.R. 3030, the Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention Act of 2017, led by Representative Ann Wagner and cosponsored by both myself and Representative Hultgren. We also recognize that government officials cannot do this work alone. We need civil society, in all its diversity, to help us. We need community associations, churches, synagogues, mosques, schools, and businesses to take a stand against hate speech, to teach and live tolerance, to document and denounce human rights violations, to open their hearts to reconciliation based on justice. We need to get to the point where our societies recognize and honor every person's innate human dignity.

And I want to take this opportunity to salute one of the many organizations that are doing just this kind of work. STAND is a student-led movement to end mass atrocities and genocide by organizing and educating their peers and communities. I first met student leaders of STAND in 2005 and 2006, when they were part of the national movement that brought the genocide happening in Darfur, Sudan, to public awareness. They were my teachers during that time.

Tonight, representatives of STAND are here listening to this debate. They push us to do better, and I thank them for their commitment and their vision.

Mr. Speaker, mass atrocities are human rights violations on a grand scale. We must find new strategies to prevent them from happening and more effective strategies to interrupt and stop them at the very earliest stages, should they begin to unfold.

Mr. Speaker, all of us in this Chamber, all of us in this country, need to do more, because I believe, if the United States of America stands for anything, we stand for human rights. We need to be better. We need to be more effective in preventing these mass atrocities and these genocides.

So I am very proud to stand with my colleagues in these efforts. I want to thank the gentlewoman from Missouri for her incredible leadership, and I am honored to participate in this Special Order with her.

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