William Shawcross Quotes

Violence in Darfur is cataclysmic.

Nearly 60 years ago, the international community made a commitment to put an end to the crime of genocide by ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

For most of history, genocide was just something governments did and nobody blinked.

Hard to believe that so nearby, just across the Channel, such atrocities could still occur in their supposedly civilized world, that one could wake up one morning and find oneself bereft of brothers, parents, friends, all with the slice of an ax.

Syria is bad enough, it's a pretty terrible atrocity. But there are much worse ones in the world. So for example, the worst atrocities in the past decade have been in the Congo, the Eastern Congo, where maybe 5 million people have been killed.

I certainly think that another Holocaust can happen again. It did already occur; think of Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia.

I don't think nations can stand aside for ethnic cleansing and genocide.

I believe the only time when we can call for intervention is when there is an ongoing genocide.

Once genocide is under way, it is unlikely that anything but military force will end the horror.

… government mass murder, what I call democide

Exterminate the 50 million Vietnamese... and purify the masses of the [Cambodian] people.

Saddam Hussein is a serial offender -- major crimes against humanity - it's calculated that he's killed about a million people in the Iran-Iraq war, the invasion of Kuwait; gassed tens of thousands of his own Kurdish Iraqi citizens because they happen to disagree with him. Everyone knows that the case against Saddam Hussein is utterly proven. He should be on trial in the international court for crimes against humanity.

Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.

There are no parallels to the life of the concentration camps. All seeming parallels create confusion and distract attention from what is essential. Forced labor in prisons and penal colonies, banishment, slavery, all seem for a moment to offer helpful comparisons, but on closer examination lead nowhere.

A process of genocide is being carried out before the eyes of the world.

'Never again' is the rallying cry for all who believe that mankind must speak out against genocide.

We have lived through the flood time of fascism and of the nazism which ran its meteoric course at a cost to mankind in suffering and waste beyond all computation.

When there are no gas chambers, no barbed wire, and no concentration camps, many don't recognize the perpetration of new genocides and other targeted mass atrocity crimes because they may not look the same.

So let us call genocide, genocide. Let us not minimize the deliberate murder of 1.5 million people. Let us have a moral victory that can shine as a light to all nations.

If there is something occurring that is so bad that it could be considered a crime against humanity, it has to be transmitted with anguish, with pain, and create an impact in people - upset them, shake them up, wake them out of their everyday routine.

When you think of the sort of things that happen when a genocide happens, it's again not people who are intrinsically evil.

Governments are mandated by international law to protect people from genocide.

Saddam Hussein wrote the book on human rights violations.

I killed Muslims by every means possible. Yet it is sometimes a pity to waste bullets for this. The best way is to gather all of these dogs and throw them into wells and then fill the wells with big and heavy stones. as I did. I gathered all of the women, men and children, threw big stones down on top of them. They must never live on this earth.

My mind revolts and my soul cannot support the weight of so much evil: theft, rape, pillage, deaths, and murders, fires and devastation; the virgin violated, the cry of the widow and the orphan; the father armed against his son and each one looking for his brother to kill him; of those who have migrated; of the thousands who have fled; of the bodies stretched out in the public streets; of the bones which cover the fields and of so much blood shed on Venezuela’s soil.