Can Bracelets Help Stop the Killing?

A thick afternoon fog enveloped the trees and streetlights of The Hague, a placid city built along canals, a city of art galleries, clothing boutiques, Vermeers and Eschers. It is not for these old European boulevards, however, that The Hague figures in the minds of men and women in places as far apart as Uganda, Sarajevo and now Sudan. Rather, it symbolizes the possibility of some justice in the world, when the state has collapsed or turned into an instrument of terror. The Hague has long been home to the International Court of Justice (or World Court), a legal arm of the United Nations, which adjudicates disputes between states. During the Balkan wars, a tribunal was set up here for Yugoslavia; it has since brought cases against 161 individuals. It was trying Slobodan Milosevic — the first genocide case brought against a former head of state — until his unexpected death last month. And now the International Criminal Court has begun its investigations into the mass murders and crimes against humanity that have been committed, and are still taking place, in the Darfur region of Sudan.

The Hague has become a symbol of both the promise of international law and its stunning shortcomings. We have reached a point in world affairs at which we learn about genocide even as it unfolds, and yet it is practically a given that the international community will not use military intervention to stop it. Militias called janjaweed, recruited from Arab tribes in Darfur and Chad and supported by the Sudanese government, continue to attack, rape and kill villagers from African tribes — more than 200,000 people have been killed in Darfur, and two million have fled their homes. For more than two years, politicians and activists have been shouting to the world that a genocide is unfolding in Darfur, calling it a slow-motion Rwanda in the hope that the shock of remembering the nearly one million people slaughtered in that African country in 1994 would prompt action. Coalitions of students, religious leaders and human rights groups have lobbied in Washington, have set up SaveDarfur.org and have made green rubber bracelets, now worn all over the United States, that quote George Bush recalling Rwanda and promising, “Not on my watch.” Yet the killing rolls on, and no one intervenes to bring it to an end, as if the genocide in Darfur were already history.

Last year the United Nations Security Council referred the Darfur file to the International Criminal Court. And now the horrors of Darfur have become the preoccupation of an extraordinary international team of investigators in a plain and quiet Dutch town. They have no army, but they want to ensure that out of this history — this slow-motion genocide — they can wrest some justice.

Luis Moreno-Ocampo is the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. A veteran Argentine lawyer in his 50’s, he has a short, graying beard and Groucho Marx eyebrows that are almost always in motion — excited, alarmed, disappointed. Moreno-Ocampo knows how difficult his position is. “I’m a stateless prosecutor — I have 100 states under my jurisdiction and zero policemen,” he said when I visited him in The Hague in January. But he does not see his court as a token body. “No. No! Wrong!” he said, swinging his arms one Saturday afternoon as we strolled by The Hague’s medieval prison. He recounted how he had explained the court to his 13-year-old son: “My son is studying the Spanish conquerors in Latin America. Yesterday he says to me, ‘They killed 90 percent of the Indians, so today you’d put them in jail?’ I said: ‘Yes. Exactly. What happened to the native populations in the U.S. and Latin America could not happen today with the I.C.C. Absolutely. Absolutely. We are evolving. Humanity is not just sitting. There is a new concept. The history of human beings is war and violence; now we’re saying this institution is here to prevent crimes against humanity.”

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