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WASHINGTON — President Obama, looking for ways to strengthen the American response to genocide and other mass atrocities, on Thursday will announce a ban on visas for people who the State Department finds have been involved in human rights violations, White House officials said.
Mr. Obama will also issue a presidential directive establishing an Atrocities Prevention Board — made up of officials from the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon and other agencies — aimed toward forming an early-warning system of potential genocide and other politically driven humanitarian catastrophes. The panel, administration officials say, will also be assigned with coming up with a range of American responses to atrocities.
Decades after the Holocaust and 17 years after the Rwanda genocide, “the United States still lacks a comprehensive policy framework and a corresponding interagency mechanism for preventing and responding to mass atrocities and genocide,” according to a fact sheet provided by the White House. “This has left us ill-prepared to engage early, proactively and decisively to prevent threats from evolving into large-scale civilian atrocities.”
While American law already bars certain human rights violators from the United States, the visa ban will fill in gaps, White House officials said, by expanding the grounds for denying entry to include war crimes, crimes against humanity and other serious human rights violations like prolonged arbitrary detention, forced disappearances, slavery and forced labor.
The addition of prolonged arbitrary detention to the list of violations could prove diplomatically nettlesome as the United States deals with authoritarian governments like China, and it was unclear whether, and how often, the State Department would seek to use the expanded grounds to prevent people from getting visas.
A senior White House official said one reason Mr. Obama wanted to set up the Atrocities Prevention Board was to avoid a situation in which the president is presented with only two options to respond to a mass atrocity: intervening militarily or doing nothing, the official said, as was the case with former President Bill Clinton and the Rwanda genocide.
“Governmental engagement on atrocities and genocide too often arrives too late, when opportunities for prevention or low-cost, low-risk action have been missed,” a White House statement on the directive said. “By the time these issues have commanded the attention of senior policy-makers, the menu of options has shrunk considerably and the costs of action have risen.”
Mr. Obama’s action comes as American policy makers are struggling to determine how to handle the worsening situation in Syria, where the government of President Bashar al-Assad has engaged in a bloody crackdown on democracy protesters. Mr. Obama is facing intensifying calls to punish Syria more forcefully; a group of senators introduced legislation on Tuesday that would impose even stronger economic sanctions than those already imposed against Mr. Assad and his senior aides.
Mr. Obama has not called publicly for Mr. Assad to resign, nor has he withdrawn the American ambassador to Syria. Administration officials say they plan to expand on sanctions against the Assad government, but have not yet done so.
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By: Helene Cooper
Source: The New York Times, Aug. 4, 2011
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