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Record W2102057832 · doi:10.1353/gsp.2011.0040

The Endless Debate over the 'G Word'

2006· article· en· W2102057832 on OpenAlexaffvenueabout
Brent Beardsley

Bibliographic record

VenueGenocide Studies and Prevention · 2006
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicGlobal Peace and Security Dynamics
Canadian institutionsRoyal Military College of CanadaCanadian Armed Forces
Fundersnot available
KeywordsGenocideOfficerLawCriminologyCrimes against humanitySociologyPolitical scienceWar crimeInternational law

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The Endless Debate over the ‘G Word’ Major Brent Beardsley Canadian Forces Leadership Institute, Royal Military College of Canada I am an infantry officer in the Canadian Army of the Canadian Armed Forces. In 1993–1994, I served as the personal staff officer to then Major-General Roméo Dallaire, the Force Commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR). As such, I was a witness, a bystander, and an occasional rescuer and helper to what the Organization of African Unity labeled ‘‘the Preventable Genocide.’’ One of the major reasons the genocide in Rwanda was not prevented or stopped was the endless debate in April, May, and June 1994, when the majority of attention and effort was focused on debating whether or not genocide was taking place in Rwanda instead of on preparing and conducting a multi-disciplinary (including military) intervention to stop the killing. For days, weeks, and months the discussions went back and forth between those who labeled the catastrophe a genocide, and demanded that the international community live up to its obligations under the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (UNCG) and intervene to suppress the genocide, and those who argued that the situation in Rwanda was not a genocide but ‘‘just gross violations of human rights, crimes against humanity and war crimes’’ (as if these were acceptable crimes to ignore). The failure to intervene permitted the genocide to largely run its course, consuming between 500,000 and 1 million innocent men, women, and children. On too many occasions, especially during the genocide in Rwanda and the current genocide in Darfur, the organs of the international community have been far more focused on conducting some form of academic or legal debate over the use of the word ‘‘genocide’’ to describe these catastrophes than on focusing our attention and efforts toward actually doing something to stop the killing. Never were we more frustrated and saddened in Rwanda during the genocide than when we were informed on a Friday that the Security Council had adjourned for the weekend, without decision. We knew that while the diplomats and bureaucrats would be enjoying the culinary delights of Manhattan, another 10,000 to 20,000 innocent men, women, and children would die while the world discussed, debated, contemplated, and, inevitably, let the genocide run its course. While the determination of genocide is not a matter to be taken lightly, it must also not become an excuse to procrastinate while thousands are dying. As a witness to the events of 1994, I have had to live with the failure of the international community to identify the catastrophic killings in Rwanda as genocide in a sufficient matter of time in order to intervene to stop the killing and save Rwandan lives. I have also had to live with my own role as a member of UNAMIR for our failure, for my failure, to prevent or stop the genocide. I do not wish to see the same mistake made again, and, therefore, I appreciate the opportunity the editors of this new professional journal have given me to presenting this opinion piece on the current situation in Darfur. I do not claim to be a genocide scholar or an expert in anything other than my chosen profession, and I do not consider my opinions any more valid Major Brent Beardsley, ‘‘The Endless Debate over the ‘G Word’.’’ Genocide Studies and Prevention 1, 1 (July 2006): 79–82. ß 2006 Genocide Studies and Prevention. than others’. I approach this topic with the experience of a witness to a genocide, and a witness to the failure of humanity to stop the Rwandan genocide; I only wish to offer some ideas, which I hope will spark a far greater debate among better men and women than I and a greater effort in developing a more effective response to the ongoing genocide in Darfur. In 2004, on the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, leaders from across the world or their representatives, scholars, activists, and survivors gathered in Kigali, Rwanda, to commemorate the genocide and lament the failure of humanity and the international community to prevent or stop it in 1994. The sacred...

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.379
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0020.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.019
GPT teacher head0.322
Teacher spread0.303 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations6
Published2006
Admission routes3
Has abstractyes

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