U.S.-British Group Formed to Combat Genocide

A group of British and American officials, describing genocide as a growing threat around the world, announced Monday that they have formed a new organization whose goal is to prevent, where possible, the mass murder of peoples on account of their religious, racial and ethnic backgrounds.

The organization, named International Alert, will be based in Los Angeles and London and will work closely with Amnesty International, the London-based human rights group, the officials said. Announcing formation of the group at a press conference were Britain’s Lord Michael Young, Los Angeles County Supervisor Edmund D. Edelman and Los Angeles City Councilman Marvin Braude.

“We didn’t know what was going on back in the 1930s as the Holocaust began,” said Young, chairman of International Alert. “But the world is a closer place today. Because of the media, we are able to learn what is going on in different corners in the world . . . and yet nobody has even attempted to make a dent in this, one of the world’s worst problems, in a hardheaded way.”

Young, a member of the British House of Lords, said the organization will attempt to stave off mass murder through government pressure, the issuance of “red alerts” in countries where genocide is threatened and “any channel we can find that works.”

The organization hopes to raise $1 million in the next few months, according to Edelman, who is conducting fund-raising efforts here.

“It is particularly fitting that this organization be established partly in Los Angeles,” Edelman said. “We have people from all over the world here, unfortunately many of them refugees from genocide in their own countries.”

The institution will gather data from such refugees here for its publications, he added.

The first country targeted by the new organization will be Uganda, Young said. He estimated that about 200,000 members of the Baganda tribe have been killed, mostly by government soldiers opposed to them because of their association with previous rulers.

Leo Kuper, a retired UCLA professor and an authority on genocide who helped found the group here, estimated that genocide has claimed more lives since World War II than the 6 million Jews who were exterminated by Nazi Germany. Most of those slayings have been in Bangladesh, Cambodia, East Timor and several African and Asian nations, he said.

Instead of despairing over what seems an impossible task, Kuper said, the organization plans to monitor what he called “the early warning signals” of impending genocide and try to pressure governments to avert it.

Indications of impending genocide, he said, include propaganda against a religious or ethnic group, detention without trial, martial law, individual assassinations and “disappearances.”

Kuper and Young said that genocide is increasing because of diminishing resources, growing population and the strains of decolonization in developing countries.