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Here’s
my early pick to receive the Raphael Lemkin Award:
Samantha Power, author of a new and distinctly disturbing study of
America’s response to genocide in the 20th century.
Who is Lemkin, you
ask, and why is an award in his name annually conferred? A Polish-born
diplomat and jurist, Lemkin was appalled by the Turkish government’s
treatment of its Armenian population in 1915, and he tried to get European
governments to criminalize the mass murder of ethnic and religious groups.
He was regarded as an alarmist and largely ignored. The scope of the
violence perpetrated against six million Jews and millions of other
victims under the Nazi regime during the Second World War gave him new
energy, and he became an agitator of reform, someone who said, “Never
again,” and meant it. While in the employ of the U.S. War Department, he
invented a new word—genocide—to what is regarded as the ultimate crime and
the most serious violation of human rights. Genocide refers to a number of
malicious acts that are “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in
part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” (Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 1948).
Samantha Power is
the executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the
John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. “A Problem
From Hell” (the title comes from then-Secretary of State Warren
Christopher remarking on Bosnia in the 1990s) is a thorough and compelling
study of “the age of genocide.” Chapter by chapter, the landscape shifts,
from Armenia (1915) and Europe during the Second World War to Cambodia
(1979), Iraq (1988), Bosnia (1990s) and Rwanda (1994), but while the
actors and reactors in the historical drama change, the political response
in America remains (alarmingly) constant. The fact is, the United States
has been remarkably tolerant in the face of genocide.
We are not alone,
certainly, and Power makes clear that states bordering genocidal societies
as well as European powers have tended to look, or explain, away. Still it
is natural and appropriate to ask why: Despite the famously triumphalist
rhetoric of American politics, the solemn pronouncements of “never again,”
the theme of American exceptionalism that runs throughout our history, why
does our nation refuse to take risks?
One reason, Power
argues, is the strong affinity toward and investment by American politics
in diplomacy. “Instead of undertaking steps along a continuum of
intervention—from condemning the perpetrators or cutting off U.S. aid to
bombing or rallying a multinational invasion force—U.S. officials tended
to trust in negotiation, cling to diplomatic niceties and ‘neutrality,’
and ship humanitarian aid,” she writes in her conclusion.
Power’s book is a
valuable addition to any library in part because she clearly
contextualizes the many historical, ethnographic and political factors
that motivate perpetrators, bystanders and victims. There are many lessons
and warning signs to be learned from her study.
Raphael Lemkin’s
work was seminal—to a scale that he surely unintended. “Genocide” has
become such a legally and morally loaded term that the political class
handles the word very delicately, as if it were an unexploded bomb.
Spokesmen for the administration of George H.W. Bush, for instance, took
many weeks to determine if the campaign against the Kurds by Saddam
Hussein in the late 1980s (which included chemical attacks) legally
constituted genocide.
Iraq and the Kurds
Since last summer, the fact that Saddam Hussein
has gassed “his own people” has been presented as evidence that his
violent regime poses sufficient threat for U.S. military action. The Iraqi
dictator must, we’re told, either be disarmed or supplanted by a
Western-friendly government. In light of the historical moment, I will
confine my remarks on “A Problem From Hell” largely to Power’s
examination of genocide in Iraq.
Leaving aside the
over-casual language (isn’t it about time we allow that the people are not
“his”?), we find in Iraq patterns that are corroborated by genocidal
governments before and since: A strongman regime uses all the resources of
power and advantage available to it in order to plan mass violence, to
kill people, to relocate others, to wipe out evidence of the crimes and to
attempt to erase historical memory. The weapons range from crudely
efficient to elaborately technological. The motives? We speculate, we
study, and yet there remains the mystery of what in political and
theological shorthand we call “evil.”
Saddam Hussein
attempted to quash a rebellion of Kurds, who number almost one-fourth of
Iraq’s 18 million people, and under the guise of a “counter-insurgency,”
his government attempted to eliminate the Kurds altogether through a
campaign of resettlement, ghettoization and mass murder in late 1987 and
most of 1988. Most Kurds were killed not because they presented a security
threat but because of who they are; most were unarmed, and many of the
deaths were suffered by women and children.
No doubt the
American political calendar helped the Iraqi dictator’s campaign of
state-sponsored violence. By summer 1988, when the U.S. presidential
political campaign was in full bore, Kurds in rural Iraq had been
relocated, detained and then shot to death in large groups or,
particularly galling for U.S. politicians, gassed with a lethal mix of
sarin, VX and other chemicals. At about the same time, President Ronald
Reagan was lapsing into senescence and his successor was arguing whether
the Democratic challenger to the Oval Office was patriotic.
The Kurds, who are
perennially stymied by their own lack of unity, were left to slide into
the losing side of the ledger of political calculations. One, they lacked
a formal political lobby in the United States. By contrast, U.S. farmers,
who were responsible for many millions of dollars in exports of rice and
wheat to Iraq annually, had political muscle in the form of the U.S.-Iraqi
Business Forum. Thus it was possible that one politician could publicly
charge that American human rights activist Peter Galbraith was, through
his efforts to exact political and economic consequences on behalf of the
Kurdish cause, poised to commit genocide upon the farmers of Louisiana.
Two, the
pernicious pragmatism of Mafia films—which holds that the enemy of my
enemy is my friend—was put to work, says Power, as America considered the
prospects of the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. “The United States was aghast
at the prospect of Iraqi oil reserves falling into the Ayatollah
Khomeini’s hands; it feared that radical Islam would destabilize the
pro-American governments in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates. Thus, with
each Iranian battlefield victory, the United States inched closer to
Iraq—a warming that had tremendous bearing on the American response to
Hussein’s subsequent atrocities against the Kurds.”
Language and Perception
For me as a
teacher of English, Power’s book is about language itself. That vogue
euphemisms spill out of the mouths of diplomats and generals is to be
expected, and they rarely let us down. Most recently, even “pre-emptive
strike” has been dropped and “anticipatory self-defense” plugged in its
stead, a term which assumes high moral ground (self-defense being
inarguably justified) and soothes the ear with the balm of sibilant “s”-es.
Other phrases—“collateral damage,” “theater of war,” “regime change,”
“friendly fire”—have been worn smooth through overuse not only by the
politically powerful but by TV news anchors and reporters. Needlessly so.
In theater,
whether you’re on the stage or in the field of combat, timing is
everything, and it favors the killers, we find. A Vietnam-fatigued America
took little notice of genocide in Cambodia from 1976-79. The Tutsis of
Rwanda suffered grisly deaths in 1994 by a Hutu-led government that used
radio broadcasts to foment terror and to encourage slaughter.
Human rights in
Africa simply did not factor as highly as conflict spots in Europe, such
as Bosnia, or in our own hemisphere, as in Haiti, which in 1991 suffered
the overthrow of its first democratically elected leader in over 40 years,
precipitating a huge humanitarian crisis. Rwanda was marginalized in U.S.
politics doubtless in part because of the abortive mission in Somalia in
1993, when images the body of a dead American serviceman dragged through
the streets of Mogadishu received coverage. As British jurist Geoffrey
Robinson writes in Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle for Global
Justice, “The ‘Mogadishu factor’ entered American calculations at
every level thereafter, and explains why the Clinton administration
withheld US forces from Bosnia for the next two years and ordered that
Serbia and Kosovo be bombed from a height that ensured both the safety of
US pilots and the deaths of hundreds of innocents below them.”
Documenting her
findings with hundreds of footnotes, Power gives a lesson on the
diplomatic strategies of the political class as it confronts genocide, and
when I say I had to put down “A Problem From Hell” out of shock and
disgust, it wasn’t after coming face to page with disturbing accounts of
mass murder. These details come sparingly. Certain quotations just made my
eyes dilate: “Human rights and chemical weapons aside, in many respects
our political and economic interests run parallel with those of Iraq.”
I read this kind
of thing and think that yes, it is possible to lose my mind. That leathery
arrangement of words appeared in an unsigned internal memo drafted by the
Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs in 1988 (later published by the National
Security Archive in Iraqgate).
But then the eyes
refocus, and it becomes clear that the book calls on its readers to demand
more from our elected officials, or at least hold them to a standard of
discourse higher than the usual bureaucratic baffle-gab. The composite
picture Power draws should make any thinking person uncomfortable. Caution
and political “pragmatism” among politicians has led, time after time, to
moral torpor over faraway atrocities, but to decry U.S. timidity and
inaction is to make only part of the point.
Political activism
on behalf of victims, or would-be victims, of genocide becomes riskier the
higher one is situated in the hierarchy. The common responses begin with
reassuring caution (“We need more information”) and continue with
equivocation (Both sides are at fault”—or in the case of Bosnia, “all
three sides…”), fatalism (“The deaths are regrettable, sure, but [the
killers and their victims] have been killing each other for centuries”)
and infallible curtain-closers (“We can’t be the world’s policeman”).
For me as an
observer of the media, this book implicitly argues for reform of
journalism that does not seem to be soon in coming. There can’t be a
constituency that speaks—and votes—on behalf of a world free from
state-engineered mass killing unless said constituency obtains more and
better international news.
Power’s lucid
study penetrates well beyond the screen put up by the political class and
upheld through mainstreams TV news separating us from better knowledge of
our world. Without hyperbole, she credits the men and woman in
governments and non-governmental organizations who argued that silence in
the face of state murder is complicity. “Over the course of the last
century, the United States has made modest progress in its responses to
genocide. The persistence and proliferation of dissenters within the U.S.
government and human rights advocates outside it have made a policy of
silence in the face of genocide more difficult to sustain,” she writes.
Power holds onto hope for the International Criminal Court (which the Bush
administration has formally rejected) and the instruments of human rights
to deter the homicidal leaders of the future.
The attacks
against the United States on the 11th of September mark a
definitive turning point. Americans suffered 3000 civilian casualties for
no other reason than that they were Americans, and although it’s in bad
taste to engage in comparative suffering, it remains useful to point out
that we have now had direct experience with the minds that devise
collective punishments.
I don’t know yet whether as a nation we will become more or less sensitive
to genocide in the 21st century, but I do know that anyone who
reads Power’s remarkable book will
be moved. |
Reviewed by
Michael Kuelker
SCC English
Editor of
The Global Pages
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