INTRODUCTION

What is the role of bystanders on denialism in situations of gross human rights violations? Not the denials of the perpetrator as the usual approach but the role of denials by the bystanders will be addressed in this chapter. It is, in particular, the bystander who can play a crucial role in allowing to continue the perpetrator with these crimes but it is also the bystander that has the ability to prevent, stop or end the atrocities of the perpetrators towards the victims. When the gross human rights violations are very severe the repression makes opposition and resistance from the direct targeted victims in that society almost impossible.

Denying of the gross human rights violations by the bystanders precludes any action to prevent or stop the atrocities and makes for the rescue of the victims by any third party impossible. The bystander matters and the external international bystanders matter very much.

The theoretical elaboration by Irene Bruna Seu in this volume is my reference. What she has described for the individual and group level of analysis will here be applied to actors at the international level. Her study focuses on knowledge and action and she has put forward the question of how much people know about human rights violations and what they do in response to that knowledge. I replace ‘people’ with ‘international bystanders’. The questions in my research were who received what messages at what time, to whom the messages were forwarded, and which (non-)decisions were taken in response to the alarming reports on atrocities. The focus is on the knowledge and action of the international bystanders as the important decision makers in situations of genocide. The use of denial as a defence mechanism to turn away from the events by international bystanders with disastrous consequences in situations of genocide will be demonstrated from our studies on Rwanda (1994), Srebrenica (1995) and Darfur (since 2003).

We will elaborate the crucial role of bystanders at different levels of analysis in the second section. The role of the UN – as the worldwide international bystander making use of the mechanism of denialism for failing to act or taking limited action – is put forward in section 3.