Ever since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war, the word “genocide” has been tossed around like a political football. Notably, the U.N.’s International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled in January that South Africa’s charge that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza was “plausible” and that Israel must take actions to ensure they are not “deliberately inflicting on [Palestinians in Gaza] conditions of life calculated to bring about [their] physical destruction in whole or in part.”
Meanwhile, back at United Nations headquarters in Turtle Bay, Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide Alice Wairimu Nderitu has likewise become something of a political football herself. A longtime human-rights advocate who has mediated, and resolved, identity conflicts all over the world, Nderitu put out a statement on October 15 in which she called for both the release of Israeli hostages and an immediate cease-fire, as well as “all possible measures to protect those who are most vulnerable.”
“It is only through dialogue that the underlying issues that have led in the past to cyclical violence can be addressed,” she wrote.
To supporters of Israel, many of whom have long derided the U.N. for what they believe is its anti-Israel bias, Nderitu’s October statement stood out for its evenhandedness.
But on December 9, on the 75th anniversary of the U.N.’s adoption of the Genocide Convention, a group calling itself Concerned Citizens of the International Community posted a petition on Change.org demanding Nderitu’s resignation. The charge? That she had “failed to acknowledge Israel’s overwhelming violence against Palestinian civilians.” (The petition now has more than 21,000 signatures.)
Just two days later, a second anonymous group, Humans for Human Rights, filed its own petition on the site. “Since the Oct. 7 attacks, [Nderitu] has worked tirelessly to advance the release of hostages and the cause of peace in Israel and Gaza,” it reads. “She has faced unfair attacks by pro-Hamas sympathizers because she is doing her job—and she refuses to label Israel’s self-defense ‘genocide.’”
Then last month, on February 7, six Palestinian groups, including the Palestinian Human Rights Organization Council, wrote to U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to express “concerns regarding the impartiality of Ms. Alice Nderitu” and requested that the secretary-general open an inquiry with “publicly disclosed findings.” (No such inquiry has been announced.)
“They were baiting me,” Nderitu says of the group that filed the petition against her back in December, speaking publicly about the matter for the first time. “This office is the only office in the world with a mandate of preventing genocide, and my pronouncements are taken very seriously, so although I’d already issued a statement, you’ll find people saying, ‘She hasn’t said anything.’ But I had said something. But I probably didn’t say what they wanted me to.”
“My mandate is very clear: it’s early warning,” she adds. “And there are so many other things you do behind the scenes. You don’t have to be out there speaking, especially if you feel what you’ve said is enough.”
But last month, in response to unfolding events, Nderitu issued two more statements, in which she maintained her position that all hostages must be released while also decrying “the unbearable loss of life in the region, with allegations of violations of international law,” and expressed concerns about plans for a military incursion into Rafah. “The risk of the commission of atrocity crimes should [this] take place, is serious, real and high,” Nderitu wrote.
Amid talks about a potential deal for the release of some of the hostages and a cease-fire, Israel reported back to the I.C.J. this past Monday. Although its submission has not been made public, The Times of Israel reported that it enumerated “the steps [Israel] has taken to provide humanitarian aid to Gaza, as well as the measures being taken by senior legal and law enforcement officials against those who may have made comments inciting genocide.”
To be clear, neither Nderitu nor anyone else at the U.N. can determine what constitutes genocide. “We need to educate people that genocides can only be determined by courts of law,” she says.
Since the U.N.’s inception, in October 1945, international courts have ruled on three: the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis between 1941 and 1945; the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, in Rwanda, in which 800,000 Tutsi were murdered by the Hutu majority; and the Srebrenica massacre of 1995, in which 8,000 Muslim men and boys were murdered during the Bosnian war.
A group calling itself Concerned Citizens of the International Community posted a petition on Change.org demanding Nderitu’s resignation.
Srebrenica and Rwanda were determined to constitute genocide by international criminal tribunals established by the U.N. Security Council; the Holocaust, by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. (At Nuremberg, the indictments were for war crimes and crimes against humanity, with “genocide” used as a descriptive term; genocide was codified in international law in 1948.)
In all three instances, the trials only happened after the respective wars had already ended. “Genocides are difficult to prove,” says Nderitu. “You have to prove intent.... You have to prove it was planned.”
With the Tutsi in Rwanda, she says, “the plans had been there for a long time. They had been put out on the radio.... They called them ‘cockroaches.’ It was announced on the radio all the time, ‘We have to go out and kill the cockroaches.’ The population had been prepared for a year, so when it came to the actual killing it was very easy.... Sometimes in a family you’d find a man killing his wife. The Hutu and the Tutsi are the same people. They speak the same language.”
Several countries, including Argentina, Cambodia, and Ethiopia, have tried individuals for genocide. But individuals can also be tried for genocide at the International Criminal Court (I.C.C.). The reason for this is simple, says Nderitu. “Anybody can say, ‘I was tried in my country, and there was bias.’” The judges in the tribunals, she notes, come from a number of countries. “So it’s balanced.” (The I.C.J., by contrast, settles disputes between states, and cannot prosecute individuals.)
I met Nderitu at the U.N.’s Secretariat building, inside her spacious office, which features totems from all over the world, including a golden bud vase made of melted bullets from Bosnia. She is small in stature and wears dangling bronze earrings, a handmade brown cotton floor-length dress from her husband’s home country of Ghana, and a black-and-blue headwrap. But her most distinctive feature by far is her soft, quiet voice, which belies her strength and confidence.
The first woman to inhabit her role, Nderitu strongly identifies with the man without whom it might not ever have been created: Raphael Lemkin, the Jewish Polish refugee who coined the term “genocide” in his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, by combining the Greek word “genos,” meaning a species or race, with the Latin “-cide,” meaning a killer or killing. A lawyer by training, Lemkin was frustrated by the fact that while there was the word “murder” to mean the killing of one person, there was no word—or accountability—for the killing of a group based on its identity.
“He came here and started lobbying when the U.N. was completely new,” says Nderitu of Lemkin’s campaign to have genocide recognized as a crime and then codified in international law. In 1946, just one year after the U.N.’s creation, Lemkin found out that 49 members of his family had been murdered in the Holocaust, which made him that much more desperate to succeed.
Not having very much money, Lemkin was known for wearing worn-out shoes with taps on the soles. As a result, says Nderitu, people at the U.N. could hear him coming down the corridor. “They would pretend to be on the phone, and he would stand right there,” she says, moving behind a potted plant to demonstrate, “and wait for you to be finished.”
Nderitu says Lemkin talked of little other than genocide. And when he eventually became sickly, he said he had “genociditis.” Lemkin died in 1959 after collapsing at a bus stop on 42nd Street. “His story is so sad!” says Nderitu, but also “very beautiful.”
A Woman in “a Man’s Business”
When Nderitu was growing up in Kenya, back in the 1970s, there weren’t yet many national parks, and so, by necessity, she learned a lot about dealing with animals. “We had so many lessons about what to do if you meet an elephant, leopard, or lion.” To Nderitu, it is ironic that people often describe terrorists as behaving like animals. “Animals don’t even do the kinds of things humans do to each other,” she observes.
It was from her paternal grandfather, who lived well past 100, and who fought for the British in both World Wars, that she first learned of a genocide. “What’s the worst thing you ever saw during the wars?” she asked him when she was a child; he told her it was the Holocaust.
At school, she loved studying history, especially West African and European. “The history of the Balkans is incredible,” she says. A product of the British educational system in Nairobi, Nderitu did her O levels and A levels and then began teaching history, even before attending university.
During the 1980s and 1990s, there was a growing movement for human rights and democracy in Kenya, which had a one-party system. “It was natural that I would get into this human-rights space,” Nderitu says. But while Kenya had ratified various U.N. conventions, the conventions weren’t being implemented because the necessary domestic legal frameworks didn’t exist. “People would tell me, ‘Now we know our rights, but our rights are being violated.’ So I began to see the limits.”
When Nderitu would ask people what kinds of problems they had, she learned that many of their conflicts were identity-based. From then on, she resolved, not only would she work on human-rights issues but also on conflict prevention and resolution. “If you are working on human-rights violations,” Nderitu says, “it means also you are helping to solve the identity conflicts, and so it all came together.”
In 2012, as commissioner of Kenya’s National Cohesion and Integration Commission, Nderitu signed her first peace agreement, the Nakuru County Peace Accord, which brought an end to long-term violence between different Kenyan ethnic groups in the wake of the disputed 2007 presidential election, which resulted in the deaths of more than 1,300 people and the displacement of 600,000.
“Very few women in the world have their signatures on peace agreements,” Nderitu says, “because in many parts of the world, I’d say 98 percent, war-making is still considered a man’s business, and that translates into peacemaking as well.” Which is unfortunate, in her view. “As a woman, you solve, you mediate so many crises between your children all the time—you become more patient,” Nderitu says. “There’s an element in which I would say peacebuilding work, conflict-prevention work, mediation of armed conflict, really suits women.”
Nderitu has supported the Good Friday peace agreement in Ireland, done work in Sudan, negotiated agreements between 56 different ethnic communities in Nigeria, and worked with the Rohingya in Myanmar. At the time she went there, she says, “you couldn’t even say the word ‘Rohingya’ in Myanmar.” The Rohingya-Myanmar conflict has been before the I.C.J., which ruled, in 2020, that Myanmar must take measures to prevent genocide and preserve evidence; the case is ongoing.
“If you are working on human-rights violations,” Nderitu says, “it means also you are helping to solve the identity conflicts.”
According to Nderitu, the Rohingya have been continuing to flee Myanmar and have been arriving in India and Indonesia on hand-made rafts. Despite this, she says, “their story is no longer a big story.”
Why, I ask Nderitu, when there are so many horrible conflicts in the world, is there such an intense focus on the current conflict between Israel and Hamas? “It has to do with the media, and where the media takes us,” she says.
“Look at Ukraine and Russia. Many international media houses have dedicated pages for Israel and Hamas. They have dedicated pages for the Russia-Ukraine war,” she observes, “but no dedicated pages for Sudan. Do you know I’ve issued more than five statements on Sudan? The kinds of atrocities that have happened with Sudan are just incredible, but they’re not on our TV screens.”
Neither are they the subject of protests on our nation’s college campuses. “You don’t find people saying, ‘I’m for this side of Sudan or the other,’” Nderitu notes.
Nderitu has made a number of statements about the killings currently underway in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but they, too, have mostly gone unnoticed, she says. “Nobody would ever set up a petition about me for Sudan or the Democratic Republic of Congo.”
Nderitu works virtually nonstop, whether traveling the world for meetings or just having them here at the U.N. “When you’re in a position like this and you are the first woman, you do know that you have to work like maybe five times harder than everyone else,” she says. “Everyone is looking at you in terms of ‘So, what does she bring to this position? What does she know?’”
That said, Nderitu loves her work. “There is such a purpose to my life and to this mandate,” she says. “I’m in a space in which I can use all the knowledge I’ve gathered in my entire life.”
“Nobody would ever set up a petition about me for Sudan or the Democratic Republic of Congo.”
In order for a mediation to be successful, says Nderitu, people must be able to express their pain. But sometimes the pain is so great that the two sides cannot express it while they are in the same room. The challenge, according to Nderitu, is to nonetheless keep trying to find their commonalities. “‘You have a problem with internally displaced people? They also have a problem with internally displaced people.’ If you’re a skillful mediator, you’ll actually find that their stories are so similar.”
Complicating matters further in the case of a conflict such as Israel-Palestine is collective trauma. “It is actually impossible to find one person in Israel or Palestine who is not traumatized,” she says. “People with the deepest connections have the deepest divisions.”
Given all that, I ask, how likely is it that there will be a solution to this conflict that has dogged the region for more than a century?
“I’m 100 percent sure that there can be a solution,” Nderitu tells me. “I don’t even have a point-zero-zero of doubt…. For many people right now, they feel, how can I even think that? But I have seen enough to know that it’s actually possible to defuse these kinds of situations.”
Nderitu begins talking about her experience with the Gacaca courts in Rwanda. “All the villagers are sitting in a circle,” she says. “I say, Johanna, I killed your mother, and I also killed your brother. And then you say, How did you kill them? ‘I followed your mother.’ What did you do with her body? ‘I threw her into a pit latrine.’ Which latrine? ‘I will show you.’ And what do you have to say? ‘I am very sorry for what I’ve done.’ And the village makes a decision whether to forgive you or not.
“I actually know a man who confessed to a woman, ‘I killed your son,’” says Nderitu, “and he was so remorseful and he demonstrated it in so many ways for such a long time that she adopted him. Anything is possible. Human beings have the capacity to create, out of adversity and terrible tragedy, a way in which they see the humanity in each other and find a way to coexist.”
Mediators never discount any leaders when they are trying to negotiate the end to a conflict, Nderitu says. “You bring what’s called the bad people to the table because in one hand they have peace, and in the other hand they have war, and they make the decision what to wage.”
Johanna Berkman is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL. You can read her profile of Jumi Bello, which won the 2023 Deadline Club award for arts reporting, here