Why Did World Community Fail to Stop Genocide?
Archbishop Celestino Migliore, Vatican nuncio to the United Nations, on Jan. 27 called for the international community to examine why it has failed to prevent the new acts of genocide that have occurred in recent years. Speaking in Sweden to the fourth Stockholm International Forum, he said that genocide remains “a constant menace,” and the world is too interconnected to “plead ignorance” of “what is happening on the other side of the global village.” The nuncio said the international community had legal instruments that could be used to “nip genocides in the bud…. What we need most now is a greater and more courageous will to implement them,” he said. Events in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia were “especially shameful” because the international community had the capacity to prevent the genocide but “lacked the will,” he said.
