Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

GALEN, BISHOP CLEMENS AUGUST GRAF VON
mated fifty thousand to one hundred thousand deaths. The Kurds, themselves, claim that
about one hundred eighty-two thousand people were killed. To a large degree the international
community, already war-weary after the short war that led to the liberation of
Kuwait, appeared to turn its back on the Kurds. More specifically, while the United States
had encouraged the Kurds to rise up against Iraq, the United States failed to support the
Kurds when the Iraqi government began to carry out a scorched earth policy against the
rebels. Fearing that the uprisings would destabilize the area, the United States even
refused to provide the rebels with the Iraqi weapons captured during the Gulf War. Only
after the Kurds had suffered devastating losses did the U.S. deign it reasonable to establish
safe areas and no-fly zones over those areas where the Kurds were huddled.
In May 1992 Galbraith was instrumental in the transfer of some fourteen tons of documents
to the United States regarding the Iraqi repression of the Kurds, including the
gassing of the Kurds in northern Iraq in the late 1980s. Ultimately, the documents were
housed in the U.S. National Archives in Washington, D.C.
Later still, now as U.S. ambassador to Croatia (1993–1998) during the Clinton administration
(1993–2002), Galbraith was actively involved in helping to negotiate the peace
settlements involving Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. He made a point of being outspoken
over a host of issues relating to the violent conflict in the former Yugoslavia, refusing
to let them fall by the wayside. More specifically, in a meeting with Mate Boban
(1940–1997), a Bosnian Croat leader, Galbraith broached the issue of war crimes being
perpetrated in a Croat prison camp, as well as the shelling of civilian targets in Mostar.
Though Boban initially denied both charges, the very next day he immediately released
some seven hundred prisoners. Galbraith then went on the BBC and claimed that Boban
was possibly responsible for war crimes. The interview with Galbraith was rebroadcast in
Croatia, and shortly thereafter conditions in various prison camps suddenly improved in
significant ways—including a change in the leadership of some camps and the release of
some of the innocent people from the camps.
Between January 2000 and August 2001, Galbraith served as a senior official in the
United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET), and later as a
Cabinet Minister in the first transitional government in that country. Since leaving the
diplomatic service, he has been a professor at Harvard University and the National War
College in Washington, D.C. He is generally credited with being the diplomat who kept
the U.S. Government’s attention focused on the plight of the Kurds, at a time when other
concerns—notably, the end of the Cold War—were distracting U.S. policy from humanitarian
issues.
Galen, Bishop Clemens August Graf von (1878–1946). Cardinal-archbishop of
Muenster, Germany during the period of the Third Reich. He began his career in the
Catholic Church in 1904 as bishop’s chaplain in Muenster, was ordained as a priest in
1919, and became archbishop of Muenster in 1933. He was an outspoken opponent of Nazi
racial doctrine, and set himself up as a key opponent of Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg
(1893–1946). As a Catholic religious leader, his creed prevented him from condoning the
Nazi euthanasia program, in which people with incurable diseases, mental illness, or disabilities
were killed in accordance with state policy. In a public denunciation of the program
in 1941, he ran afoul of the Nazi authorities and was subject to virtual house arrest
until the end of the war in 1945. In 1944 after the attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler
(1889–1945) in the so-called July Plot, von Galen was arrested by the Gestapo and
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