Never Again?

It's difficult to trace the anti-genocide motto "Never Again" to a particular person, but general consensus attributes it to the events following World War II. In the wake of the Holocaust, the worst recorded genocide in history, the newly created United Nations and the world adopted this informal slogan.\nAt the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the term "genocide" was officially defined and deemed a crime. The United Nations confirmed that "genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish." \nThe resolution defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."\nWhere were these glorified cheerleaders shouting "Never Again" when Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge Party butchered 1.7 million Cambodians in the 1970s?\nWhere were they when the Pakistani military killed 1.5 million Bangladeshis in the former East Pakistan in 1971? \nWhere were they when 1.6 million North Koreans were being slaughtered via "purges," executions and forced labor camps during Kim Il-Sung's regime?\nThe list goes on, but my column space is limited.\nMore recently one can ask, what took these great diplomats, these defenders of humanity, so long to intervene in the war-torn Balkans? Why did they stand by as 800,000 people were raped and murdered in Rwanda over the course of 100 days? If Saddam Hussein committed genocide against the Kurds beginning in the late 1980s, why did America intervene to "free Iraq" in 2003? \nI suppose one could also ask, why is it that, after failing to adequately prevent or intervene on behalf of the victims of these crimes, the United Nations and the leaders of the free world couldn't prevent their soldiers and "peacekeepers" from further terrorizing already traumatized people? Forgive me, but I just assumed that U.N. peacekeepers and western aid workers should not have been forcing women and underage girls to work as sex slaves in brothels in Bosnia, Somalia, Cambodia and Ethiopia. I also assumed that they shouldn't be raping and impregnating young girls in the Congo. \nEvery once in awhile, usually in their apology speeches after failing to intervene to prevent genocide, the United Nations and the leaders of the free world give speeches interspersed with "Never Again," pat each other on the back for their humanitarian consciousness and go to bed feeling good about themselves. \nAs you are reading this, hundreds of thousands of people in Sudan's Darfur region have been killed and 2 million are displaced, the victims of systematic rape, murder and starvation by the government. As you are reading this, world powers are standing by, failing again to take any strong action. \nThe dead cannot be brought back, the horrifying memories cannot be erased, but where we have failed to act before, let us act now. \nNever Again.