Show Producer’s Blog: R2P

Before I was a show producer I was a reporter. My first overseas assignment was Kosovo in 1999. Since that experience, much of my reporting has revolved around war and its awfulness, and questions about humanitarian intervention, civilian protection, and justice for war crimes.

One influential book was obviously Philip Gourevitch’s We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda. I still look to him for wisdom on these issues so it was heartening to see his New Yorker post yesterday about the carnage in Syria.

I too have been watching the evolution of the R2P or “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine over the years and pondering its application to Syria. Much of what’s written about R2P tends to focus on its limitations but I’m still struck that the term has come as far as it has in our public discourse.

(For a really accessible and masterful treatment of R2P issues, check out Rebecca Hamilton’s Fighting for Darfur: Public Action and the Struggle to Stop Genocide.)

I won’t be writing much about any of this while I’m show-producing rather than reporting, but once you’ve delved into these questions they’re never far from your mind. Which is why I find myself still drawn to news from places like Rwanda and Sudan, even as I am tasked with a much broader mandate.

On the Rwanda front, there was an important, if little-reported, development this week—yet another investigation into the circumstances surrounding the plane crash that touched off the genocide. It’s noteworthy that Linda Melvern gives this latest report a lot of credence. She’s a British investigative reporter who has pretty much dedicated her career to chronicling the details of the genocide and the world’s failure to respond to it. Here’s her piece from the Guardian on Tuesday: “Rwanda: at last we know the truth.”

And then there’s today’s chilling front page story in the New York Times by Jeffrey Gettleman in South Sudan. He writes that “heavily armed militias the size of small armies are now marching on villages and towns with impunity, sometimes with blatantly genocidal intent.”

I am learning that I can’t fill a radio program with reports of atrocities every day. No one would listen. But this story reminds me that those atrocities are indeed unfolding out there and it is incredibly important to bear witness to them, as Gettleman has done for us today.