The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

76 modernity’s edges
much depends on whether private companies, intergovernmental organizations,
states, and nongovernment organizations are willing to (a) come up with strict internationally
recognized human rights and environmental standards, (b) monitor
development and conservation activities as they are implemented, and (c) enforce
those standards.
Lawsuits have been filed by indigenous groups and their supporters against
multinational corporations. In 1993, a group of lawyers in New York filed a $1 billion
lawsuit against Texaco on behalf of the Huaorani Indians of Ecuador. In 1996
lawyers representing citizens of Burma filed a lawsuit in a U.S. federal court that
alleged complicity on the part of the oil company Unocal in human rights abuses
in an area of Burma where a natural gas pipeline was being built. The charges included
complicity in enslavement of people, forced relocation, torture, murder, and
intimidation of opponents of the pipeline (Strider 1995; Bray 1999). These lawsuits
could set a legal precedent whereby environmental and human rights violations
can be prosecuted under international law in the United States. What this would
mean, in effect, is that private companies could be held to the same standards as
governments. It may be necessary, in our opinion, to charge the chief executive
officers (CEOs) of some of the world’s major corporations with crimes against humanity
and try them in a duly constituted and independent international court.
Publicizing the names of companies involved in human rights violations is helpful,
and efforts are ongoing along those lines, with the assistance of a number of
nongovernment organizations, some of which publicize the actions of multinationals
on the worldwide web and in other forums. Nongovernment organizations
and stockholder groups have called for the organization of boycotts and the imposition
of sanctions on those companies involved in systematic human rights violations.
It is only when company profits and stock values begin to decrease that
efforts will be made to curb the kinds of systematic mistreatment of indigenous
peoples that are so commonplace in many parts of the world today.
GENOCIDE EARLY WARNING SYSTEMS
Over the past decade or so, numerous scholars have begun working on what are commonly
referred to as genocide early warning systems (GEWS) (Charny 1984, 1991,
1999:253–61; Kuper 1985:218–28, 1991; Whitaker 1985:41–45; Totten and Parsons
1991). These are systems that identify criteria for detecting conditions that increase
the possibility of genocide. Their goal is to bring world attention to a potentially genocidal
situation so that an objective outside agency can intervene. Such a system would
be useful in many ways, but for indigenous groups it would be especially important,
given that many of them are exposed to genocidal actions with little or no outside
monitoring and limited channels of communication to the outside world.
Totten (1991) has suggested that a key component of any early warning system
should be the collection and analysis of eyewitness accounts of events that might
be leading up to a genocide, or of particular genocidal acts themselves. As Totten