September
2003
Never
Again
Book Review by Beth Gould
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A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide by
Samantha Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002). New in paperback—$17.95.
656 pages.
During the Holocaust, 11 million people were systematically killed
by the Axis powers. With the Allied powers facing the real possibility
of defeat, action on behalf of Germany’s victims remained a low
military priority. In the war’s aftermath, the true horror of
the Holocaust came to light, and it became a shame on the whole world
that millions of people were exterminated, six million in Poland alone.
This was not the first genocide. When Adolf Hitler prepared to embark
upon this horrible initiative, he scoffed at the notion that the world
would rebel in revulsion. His response was “Who remembers the
Armenians?,” a reference to the systematic murder of 1.5 million
Armenians by the Ottoman Empire in 1915. The world reeled when details
of the Holocaust became widely known, and measures were initiated to
prevent a repeat of “the crime with no name.” But, despite
the vow of “never again,” there has been a proliferation
of genocidal incidents since, and Hitler’s chilling question
could well be asked today.
From 1975-1979, approximately 1.7 million people were killed in Cambodia.
In 1987-88 more than 100,000 Iraqi Kurds were killed by Saddam Hussein’s
government; entire villages “disappeared.” More than 200,000
people were killed in Bosnia from 1992-1995, and tens of thousands
of
women raped. More than 7,000 Muslims were killed during July, 1995
in Srebrenica. In 1994, approximately 800,000 Tutsi Rwandans were slaughtered
by their Hutu countrymen.
A Problem from Hell is a well-researched look at the incidences
of genocide since World War II, and the reactions of the international
community. Samantha Power, who won a Pulitzer Prize for this book, is
the executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at
the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Individual chapters examine
the genocides that took place in Cambodia, Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda
and Srebrenica. Not only does Power describe the situations that culminated
in tragedy, but also the litany of warnings that could have helped prevent
them.
A Problem from Hell offers a clear indictment against a hypocritical
international body that has promised to shield the world’s citizens
from genocide, but has consistently and tragically failed in that objective.
Power reserves her most potent invective for the U.S., and she is not
alone among foreign policy observers. The U.S. is the country most culpable
for allowing genocide to continue, the argument goes, because it is
the only country with the resources to stop it. Ideally the UN would
be at the forefront of international missions to prevent conflicts from
escalating to genocide, but in its weakened state and without the full
support of its most powerful members, it is able to do little. Power’s
argument is illustrated well by Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic,
in A Problem from Hell:
“The United States seems to be taking a sabbatical from historical
seriousness, blinding itself to genocide and its consequences, fleeing
the moral and practical imperatives of its own power… You Americanize
the war or you Americanize the genocide. Since the U.S. is the only
power in the world that can stop the ethnic cleansing, the U.S. is
responsible
if the ethnic cleansing continues.”
The “Do Nothing” Approach
In hindsight, genocide does not happen suddenly. There are usually
warnings: in Cambodia, borders were closed and foreigners expelled;
in Iraq, U.S.
military advisors witnessed Hussein’s efforts to silence the Kurdish
“insurgents.” In the Balkans, foreign observers and journalists
reported the daily atrocities throughout the three major genocides;
and in Rwanda, the UN ignored one of its own commanders, Romeo Dallaire,
who urgently warned of the deteriorating situation.
Bill Clinton, in a speech given in Rwanda in 1998, stated: “It
may seem strange to you here, especially the many of you who lost members
of your family, but all over the world there were people like me sitting
in offices, day after day after day, who did not fully appreciate the
depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable
terror.” In fact, the U.S. government had full knowledge of what
was transpiring in Rwanda in the early summer of 1994, as did the UN.
In the course of a hundred days the Hutu government and its extremist
allies very nearly succeeded in exterminating the country’s Tutsi
minority. Using firearms, machetes, and a variety of garden implements,
Hutu militiamen, soldiers, and ordinary citizens murdered some 800,000
Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu in the fastest, most efficient
killing
spree of the century.
In the same speech, Clinton continued: “We come here today partly
in recognition of the fact that we in the United States and the world
community did not do as much as we could have and should have done to
try to limit what occurred” in Rwanda. This implied that the U.S.
had done a good deal but not quite enough. In reality the U.S. did much
more than fail to send troops. It led a successful effort to remove
most of the UN peacekeepers already stationed in Rwanda. It aggressively
worked to block the subsequent authorization of UN reinforcements. It
refused to use its technology to jam radio broadcasts that were a crucial
instrument in the coordination and perpetuation of the genocide. And
even as a daily average of 8,000 Rwandans were being butchered, U.S.
officials shunned use of the term “genocide,” for fear of
being obliged to act, under the recently adopted International Convention
on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The U.S.
in fact did virtually nothing “to try to limit what occurred.” Indeed,
staying out of Rwanda was an explicit U.S. and UN policy objective.
Romeo Dallaire was a major general in the Canadian army who was the
commander of the UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda during the upheaval.
He saw support for his mission and the Rwandans fade after ten Belgian
peacekeepers were killed by Hutu forces. At the time, the UN was posting
70,000 peacekeepers on 17 missions around the world. The U.S., stung
by the ambush and deaths of its peacekeeping forces in Somalia, was
extremely reticent to commit any more troops abroad—particularly
in Africa. Further complicating the situation, Congress was holding
up over half a billion dollars in overdue membership dues to the UN.
Dallaire futilely attempted to tell the story of Rwandan genocide to
the world, but was met with delays, disbelief and resistance. The UN
thought he was overstating the danger, and the U.S. seemed to put a
lower premium on genocide in Africa than Europe. The result was a complete
peacekeeping failure, each international hesitation serving only to
embolden the Hutu extremists. When French forces finally arrived in
southern Rwanda to stop the slaughter, there were few Tutsis left to
save.
A Treaty Created and Thwarted
The story of the creation of the Genocide Convention Treaty serves
as a good example of the contradiction between the incredible potential
in the U.S. for moral and ideological leadership, and the failure in
many cases to follow through. Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who lost
72 of the 74 members of his family in the Holocaust, created the term “genocide” in 1944 to describe the Nazis’ systematic
annihilation of the Jews of Europe. A lawyer and scholar, he escaped
Warsaw when the Germans invaded Poland. He eventually immigrated to
the U.S., where he became the driving force behind the drafting and
adoption of the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment
of the Crime of Genocide, adopted unanimously by the United Nations
General Assembly in Paris on December 9, 1948, and brought into force
in 1950, when it was ratified by the required number of countries.
Ironically, the U.S., which took a leading role in the creation of
the Convention, was one of the last countries to ratify it. Not until
1988,
40 years after its adoption, did the Senate give its consent. Why did
it take so long? Fearful of foreign entanglements with no definable
end in the wake of the Vietnam War, and mistrustful of the UN, the
Senate
was loath to commit American soldiers to peacekeeping missions. The
Genocide Convention would require the U.S. to deploy military and humanitarian
aid to any country where the UN deemed that genocide was occurring,
or about to occur. The Senate was simply unwilling to put American
lives
in the hands of an international body. Even after ratification, the
U.S. pressured the UN not to use the word ‘genocide’ in
regard to the violence occurring in Rwanda or the Balkans, in order
to avoid the terms of the treaty. Our country, which has often been
a leader in the arenas of human rights and freedom, has repeatedly
faltered
when the stakes are highest.
Pointing Fingers
Who should take responsibility for stopping mass murder and human rights
abuses? The question—largely unasked by Samantha Power and of
vital importance to the world community—is whether it is appropriate
and in the best interests of the world community to depend on the U.S.
to enforce what can only be viewed as a moral imperative. It seems to
be inviting misuse of power and American hegemony to give one country
free reign to take sides and act as a judge and enforcer over all others.
People want their rights and safety protected by the governments and
diplomats who represent them, not through the goodwill of the richest
country in possession of military might, no matter how virtuous its
intentions. Placing responsibility for preventing genocide on the shoulders
of the U.S. is inviting a kind of global feudalism. Without input from
an international body to decide what countries and groups are aggressors
the U.S. could arbitrarily initiate military control, and concentrating
on its own self interests, fall prey to corruption. If the citizens
of the U.S. would be willing to shoulder such a burden—which is
unlikely—the world would possibly regret a loss of autonomy. Such
power without limit brings to mind Tacitus, writing about the hegemony
of the Roman Empire, “They create a desert, and they call it peace.” The
mistrust and animosity that assertive power inspires might make the
world less, rather than more, safe. Disenfranchised people, living
under the gauntlet of a governing body that they neither elected nor
endorse, will often turn to drastic measures to rid themselves of people
they see as oppressors. The repercussions of such actions could cause
unforeseen worldwide strife.
Instead, where genocide is concerned, the responsibility of the U.S.
lies in helping to build a stronger UN. As the strongest country on
earth and the most stable democracy, it is imperative that the U.S.
stop undermining the power of the UN and work to bolster it as a body
with the ability to meet challenges such as preventing genocide. It
would be a measure of the greatness of the U.S., and a true affirmation
of its highest ideals, to practice the humility necessary to let an
international body grow to the stature necessary to meet these challenges.
The central role of the UN is to provide a framework for international
law and discussion among member nations. If the UN were given real power
within the world to arbitrate conflicts, then some, if not all, of these
situations would never have become as horrible as they did. One of the
strongest arguments for the U.S. taking a leadership role in strengthening
the UN is the continued presence necessary after an initial military
operation. Once soldiers land on the ground, the problems do not disappear,
as illustrated by the current quagmire in Iraq. There is peace to keep,
governments to set up, people to feed, and population (that in at least
one case would have liked to literally hack itself to death) to manage.
Operations of this nature are better suited to an international body
than to one country acting alone. Only with an international body of
peacekeepers, armed with both the necessary military power and the authority
of all member nations, can we hope for a lasting peace.
It is naïve to think that the world will not see more genocide.
Right now, Liberia stands on the brink of a disaster that would rank
alongside the horrors of Rwanda and Kosovo. As long as the ideals we
purportedly value—democracy, freedom, liberty—are sacrificed
to the sort of insular and isolationist planning prevalent in recent
years, nothing is ensured but the continued dominance of our own interests,
often at the expense of the rest of the world. If we do not aspire to
the realization of those ideals then the answer to Hitler’s question—“Who
remembers the Armenians?”—is not, in fact, the United States
of America or the United Nations.
And the vow of “never again” means nothing.
