They share a deep sorrow: an idealistic American who tried to protect the Kurds of Iraq, a Canadian general who refused to follow orders in Rwanda, a French priest who fought for the soul of Cambodia.

Each one tried to focus the world's attention on the world's most heinous crime: genocide. Each time, they were shunned, ignored or told it was someone else's problem.

To understand why, CNN's Christiane Amanpour traveled to the killing fields of Europe, Africa and Asia for a two-hour documentary, "Scream Bloody Murder."

Having reported on mass atrocities around the world, this time Amanpour traced the personal accounts of those who tried to stop the slaughter.

The yearlong CNN investigation found that instead of using a U.N. treaty outlawing genocide as a springboard to action, political leaders have invoked reason after reason to make intervention seem unnecessary, pointless and even counter-productive.


Father François Ponchaud was a Catholic missionary in Cambodia when the Khmer Rouge guerrillas -- communist revolutionaries -- seized power in 1975. They expelled all foreigners from the country.

But working from France, Ponchaud gathered refugee accounts and monitored radio broadcasts to document the slave labor, torture and executions the Khmer Rouge were using to kill one-fourth of Cambodia's population.

He published his findings in a major French newspaper and wrote a book, "Year Zero." But even so, Ponchaud tells Amanpour, "No one believed us." Video Watch a behind-the-scenes look at the making of 'Scream Bloody Murder'


CNN found that intervention is often weighed against political and economic costs.

Declassified U.S. government documents show that while Saddam Hussein was gassing Iraqi Kurds, the U.S. opposed punishing Iraq with a trade embargo because it was cultivating Iraq as an ally against Iran and as a market for U.S. farm exports.

According to Peter Galbraith, then an idealistic Senate staffer determined to stop Hussein from committing genocide, the Reagan administration "got carried away with their own propaganda. They began to believe that Saddam Hussein could be a reliable partner." Read once-secret U.S. documents


Even extensive news coverage may not lead to intervention.

During the violent breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the media reported on the Bosnian Serbs' ethnic cleansing of Muslims: the siege of Sarajevo, the concentration camps, the use of rape as a weapon of war.

It was like watching "a color remake of the black-and-white scenes we'd seen in World War II," said U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke, whose Jewish grandfather fled Germany when Adolf Hitler came to power.

Holbrooke was an early advocate for a U.S.-led military operation against the Bosnian Serbs.

"I took a stand that I believed was correct," he told Amanpour. "I didn't think it was so controversial."

But it would take three years -- and the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the town of Srebrenica -- for Holbrooke to make his case within the Clinton administration.


In Rwanda, where Hutu soldiers and militias massacred their Tutsi countrymen, the Clinton administration tried to avoid characterizing the ethnic slaughter as genocide.

According to an internal memo, the State Department worried that under the 1948 Genocide Convention, using the term "genocide" could force the U.S. "to actually 'do something.'"

The head of the U.N. peacekeeping force in Rwanda, Canadian Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, begged for additional troops. Instead of reinforcements, Dallaire got an order to withdraw completely. He would not leave Rwanda.

"I refused a legal order," he told Amanpour, "but it was immoral." His tiny U.N. force was not enough to stop the slaughter of more than 800,000 people.


Some human rights advocates consider Darfur, the western region of Sudan, to be the scene of the first genocide of the 21st century.

The atrocities in Darfur grow out of a civil war between rebels from Sudan's African tribes and the country's Arab-led government.

In 2003, when the rebels attacked government outposts in Darfur, a U.N. human rights monitor warned that in the "escalating conflict," Sudan's government may be "engaged in ... ethnic cleansing aimed at eliminating African tribes from Darfur."

At the time, world attention was on Iraq, where the United States was fighting to overthrow Saddam Hussein. The early warning on Darfur "disappeared into a big hole," according to Mukesh Kapila, then the U.N.'s top official in Sudan.

Even when the U.N. Security Council put Darfur on its agenda, it took more than three years to authorize a robust peacekeeping force.

"There was no lack of information," says activist Eric Reeves. "There was a lack of will to stop genocide."

In July, the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court accused Sudan's president of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, charges Sudan denies. Read the ICC prosecutor's charges

How will history judge the world's response to Darfur?

No one teaches reporters how to cover a war, much less wars that include genocide. Most of us rely on the wisdom of experienced colleagues and a lot of on-the-job training.

My first war assignment -- Bosnia, in the 1990s -- included visits to the Sarajevo morgue to see the bodies. How else would a journalist know exactly how many Muslim children were cut down by Bosnian Serb snipers? How else could we put names to civilians left faceless by mortar shells from the surrounding hills? I learned what it means to bear witness.

I found my voice and my mission in Bosnia. I learned to seek the facts, to tell the truth no matter how difficult or unpopular. I learned that objectivity meant covering all sides and giving all sides their hearing, but never to draw a false moral equivalence when none exists. I learned never to equate victims with their aggressors. I learned that there are limits to the style of journalism that goes: "On the one hand, on the other hand."

Most of all, I learned that as reporters our words and our actions have consequences and that we must use this powerful platform, television, responsibly.

But how many times have people asked me, when I've come back from a place like Bosnia or Rwanda: Is it really that bad? I have found that many people want to believe that I am exaggerating. I guess they do not want to believe such evil can exist. Or perhaps they just do not want to be pushed into that moral space where they would have to take a stand and do something.

Genocide is hard to imagine -- despite all we know about the Holocaust. Or perhaps, ironically, as a result of it being the most documented event in modern history. Many people now believe that if the extermination is not done on the Nazis' industrial scale or is less than complete, it is not genocide.

They are wrong. Genocide is mass murder with the intent to wipe out a significant part of an ethnic, religious or national group. It means killing people not because of what they did, but because of who they are. It is the world's most heinous crime.

And it continues, despite an international treaty written 60 years ago this month. With a unanimous vote on December 9, 1948, the fledgling United Nations adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. The signatories committed themselves to act, although the convention does not say what intervention is required. And sure enough, instead of using the convention as a springboard to action, political leaders in the ensuing years have invoked reason after reason not to stop the bloodshed.

If there is any hopeful sign, it is in the voices of people with the emotional and intellectual courage to stand up and scream bloody murder -- often at personal or professional risk.

Some are members of the political establishment who believe that doing the right thing is also the pragmatic thing to do. Others are ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances. What makes them do it? Over the course of filming a two-hour documentary, I found a few common threads.

Unlike politicians who make policy from the detachment of their national capitals, these men and women have been on the front lines. Like Father François Ponchaud, a French missionary in Cambodia when the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975, they have seen the victims' suffering first hand.

Like Peter Galbraith, an idealistic staff member on the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee who wanted the U.S. to punish Saddam Hussein for using chemical weapons against the Kurds, they are convinced that the accounts of refugees are true.

And like Richard Holbrooke, a U.S. diplomat whose Jewish grandfather fled Germany when Hitler came to power, they see where action -- sometimes military action -- can make a difference.

None considered himself a hero. And some, like Canadian Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, who led a U.N. peacekeeping force in Rwanda, believe they did not do enough.

Dallaire was one of those good men who put on a uniform and felt that it meant something, that he was actually there to make a difference.

Unfortunately, he was sent to Rwanda with an impossible mandate and without the backing of the international community. He was helpless to stop the slaughter of 800,000 to 1 million ethnic Tutsis at the hands of their Hutu countrymen.

Imagine if that had happened to you or me? How would we be able to live with ourselves? iReport.com: Have a question for Amanpour? Send it in

In any single crisis, I can understand that political leaders are under pressure not to intervene. But stepping back to look at the consistent pattern, one must ask: Is it acceptable?

In the 1970s, the Carter administration touted human rights as a core value in U.S. foreign policy, but knew that military intervention against the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia was politically inconceivable after the disastrous war in Vietnam.

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration was courting Iraq as an ally against Iran and as a market for U.S. exports when Saddam Hussein was gassing the Kurds; a punishing trade embargo would have destroyed the budding relationship.

In the 1990s, the Clinton administration would not take military action against the Bosnian Serbs without backing from the European allies. Video Watch Bosnia's president discuss the 1991 U.N. arms embargo on the former Yugoslavia

And some U.S. officials even avoided characterizing the slaughter in Rwanda in 1994 as genocide lest it lead to a call for action under the U.N. Genocide Convention. Video Military force: The last resort? Or the first resort?

But three years into the Bosnian war -- after the massacre at Srebrenica -- the U.S. finally forged a coalition of previously reluctant allies to bomb the Bosnian Serb military positions. They stopped the war, then led the peace process and the peace enforcement that has survived to this day.

And because we the press, the storytellers, finally made it impossible for our Western democratic governments to tolerate mass murder of men, women and children in the age of 24/7 satellite TV, 3½ years later, the U.S. led its allies in a pre-emptive strike against genocide in Kosovo. NATO, established to protect the West during the Cold War, had launched its largest military strike -- for a purely humanitarian mission.

And today, there is a grassroots American movement that has brought the genocide in Darfur to such prominence.

We're always told that evil happens when good men do nothing. And the question -- my question as a reporter and as a witness to history is: Will we ever learn? Or will I or my children or my successors be reporting on this same kind of atrocity and inhumanity for years and years to come? This is what I don't understand about the human race.

So thank goodness for the few good men and women who summon the courage to do something in the face of evil, to stand up and confront it. They give me hope

About Christiane Amanpour