This is an enormous honour. It is more than that: it is a shocking example of noble leadership.

Before I begin, I would like to say a word about a forgotten segment of humanity that is gathered in this august hall. Much has been made, and quite rightly, about the presence of 60 official delegations, the presence of so many heads of state, the presence of Secretary General Kofi Annan, the presence of a pair of cherished Nobel Laureates, Elie Wiesel and Bernard Kouchner. But I would like to recognize those who have not been mentioned: the genocide scholars and advocates who have labored for decades in anticipation of a moment like this: a moment when people of influence and power, when governments, stand up and at last recognize what the genocide community has been saying for years: we have got to stop standing idly by.

The genocide community is small but relentless. It is filled with men and women who have often risked their lives in countries racked by genocide, and who have opted for truly unlucrative, unglamorous, and –until very recently–seemingly futile careers: in documenting and understanding history’s most awful horrors. These are people who have labored in church basements, who lick their own stamps on their own handwritten newsletters, who talk about Raphael Lemkin noon and night, who have to explain to their spouses again and again why this line of work is worthwhile, despite all evidence to the contrary.

My book and this conference owe their existence to men and women like Yehuda Bauer, Israel Charny, Greg Stanton, Barbara Harff, Ted Gurr, Helen Fein, Frank Chalk, Kurt Johansson, Eric Marcusson, Steven Smith, James Smith, Milt Leitenberg, David Hamburg, Jerry Kaplan.

It is they and many other who aren’t here who kept the flame burning while the world was unready. Well, the world says it is ready now, and we have them to thank.

I. Before we can understand how we can prevent and suppress genocide, we have to understand why we have allowed and, at times, even abetted it.

A) We have been bystanders not because we lacked information.

The intelligence intercepts, the cables, the press, the interviews, all show that saying “we didn’t know” is nonsense.

Now, having said that, it is of course worth asking, what is knowledge? There is a difference between knowledge of facts and deep, visceral knowledge – the kind that hits you like a punch in the tummy, the kind that makes you cry, the kind that makes you – if only for an instant – imagine your daughter being forced into round the clock service in a Serb rape camp, or your little boy being reduced to pleading to a machete wielding Rwandan extremist, “Please don’t kill me. I’ll never be Tutsi again,” or to imagine you yourself so desperate to feed your children that, in order to earn the favor of a Khmer Rouge overlord, you informed on two of your neighbors for carrying out an illicit love affair – a confession that would result in the certain death of the young lovebirds, but which would mean your child would not starve to death.

Yes, not many of us bring this kind of imagination to the office every morning. Most of us, when confronted with the facts, which are plentiful, prefer to inhabit the “twilight between knowing and not knowing,” between surface knowledge and deep knowledge.

But having said that, we have known. Now it is important to note that knowledge of full-scale genocide can not be the threshold for action. It can not be an on/off switch – where before genocide we can look away and wait for it to hit some mark, a mark we all know nobody can agree upon, and only then spring into action. What we must respond to is human rights abuses. Period. And our involvement – diplomatic, economic and even military – should ratchet up commensurate to the horror.

B) We have been bystanders not because we lack the resources to achieve anything.
NATO is the most powerful alliance in the history of the universe.

The recent Afghanistan and Iraq wars, whatever your view of them, offer testament to how a nation responds when it wants to do something. The Bush Administration wanted Saddam Hussein gone. Saddam Hussein is now gone.

And of course it is crucial to see the response to genocide on a continuum. Military force is not the only option, and indeed it is a very undesirable option. Member states have a tool box at their disposal:

They can name names, threaten prosecution at the new ICC, impose arms embargos, lift arms embargos, freeze the foreign assets of perpetrators, jam hate radio, which in Rwanda was used not only to preach hate but to broadcast the names and addresses of those Tutsi who had termporarily escaped butchery. “Alexis Mazimba is travelling in Red Van, license plate XDR156.” They can establish no fly zones, or safe areas patrolled from the sky. They can send peacekeepers with the mandate, machinery and will to offer a refuge to those who might flee violence within a state. They can rally troops from neighboring countries. And yes they can make war in the long term interests of peace.

There is so much we can do. And yet lets be clear. Our failure is not merely a failure to send troops.We have failed to do even the little things, even the things that carried no risk, but that required us to abandon our neutrality and stand up for what we believe in.

C) Ok, so it isn’t that we didn’t know and it isn’t that we couldn’t do much. The question remains then, why are we bystanders? Why have we not stopped genocide?

The answer is embarrassingly simple:
We haven’t wanted to.

We want genocide stopped. Of course, of course. Who doesn’t? we want never again to see it. But we don’t want to take the risks required of all of us to stop it.

The system that we live in is not broken. The system is working. It is a system that responds to leadership and public pressure and both have been lacking.

III. Now lets reflect briefly on what we are proposing at this conference.

It is extremely radical. The surprise is perhaps not that we haven’t acted. It is that we are here claiming to be serious about doing so in the future.Wow.We could redefine all the models for international statesmanship. We would be redefining what states are for (the pursuit of the economic and security interests of their citizens alone, defined in the short-term (usually in election cycles)) rather than the long term investment in the global order.

But let me say something far more sobering that we must consider in the two days ahead. What we are proposing is also unwelcome.

Many, many people in the developing world – in Africa, in the Middle East, in Southeast Asia, in Latin America – heads of state, public intellectuals, ordinary citizens – many, many people don’t believe there is any such thing as humanitarian intervention.

And how can we blame them? Every war, coup, and covert operation in history has been carried out in the name of righteous ends. Even Hitler entered the Sudetenland in the name of human rights.

Even if we are able to succeed in changing the western appetite for taking risks on behalf of distant minorities, we have a second burden to carry: winning the support and, crucially, the participation of developing world states. The muscle of trust in the developing world has grown weak for lack of use. This can not remain a Transatlantic conversation. It must become a global conversation. Just as the rich states must carry out their “responsibility to protect,” so, too, those in the vicinity of these crimes must eventually carry out their “responsibility to encourage” and their “responsibility to contribute.”

How can it be that only the east Timores, the Kosovars, and the Sierra Leonneans are thankful for the Australian, NATO, and British interventions, while those elsewhere in the world assume there must have been something else going on!

Winning back their trust will require three things:

1) Not an ounce of condescension or paternalism. But the beginning of a true collaboration that includes reform of regional bodies.

2) Far greater consistency on the part of my government and others in application of our principles. It is no wonder people think we are lying when we say we are acting to advance human rights, when we do so very, very rarely? And, crucially,

3) We must show that when something is humanitarian, it won’t simply be done on the cheap, which is the signal we have sent in the last decade. Part of what lies behind the suspiciousness about humanitarian intervention is an understandable attitude: “if you aren’t going to do something right, don’t do it at all.”

– We must not send peacekeepers to a war torn country so as to lure petrified citizens out of hiding to take shelter at UN bases – peacekeepers that we then withdraw as soon as the going gets tough, rendering the country’s civilians more vulnerable than they would have been if we had never sent peacekeepers and raised false hopes.

– We must stop spending literally billions of dollars on missiles in the war portion of our operations and then spend only a measly fraction of that sum on the hard part – the long, unflashy slog of nation-building that follows. This is what we did in Kosovo, East Timor, and Afghanistan. It is unforgivable to rescue people from tyranny and then leave them in the lurch in the period most essential to prevent the return of tyranny.

IV. Conclusions

Sweden’s leadership is encouraging. Sometimes it takes only one state, one leader, to change the world. And this conference could not be more timely.

During the so-called “war on terror,” the United States and many of its allies are distracted. As one U.S. official said to me, “genocide is so, so, passé. It’s so 90s.” This conference reminds the world that the crime has been with us from Genesis in the Bible on forward, and it will be with us again tomorrow.

Moreover, in Chechnya, Zimbabwe, Indonesia, and elsewhere state authorities are crushing dissent and killing or abusing minorities under the guise of stamping out terrorism.

We here know the necessary war is not just a war on terrorism, but a far more all encompassing diplomatic, economic, social, war on terror. And that means rolling up our sleeves and showing – not telling – but showing the world’s would-be perpetrators just how serious we are.

Thank you.