Unspeak
Page 11
A further effect of the euphemisation of genocidal crimes under the heading ‘ethnic cleansing’ was, very cunningly, to imply that one kind of act not specifically mentioned in the Genocide Convention – mass deportation – was the only process that ‘ethnic cleansing’ denoted. In other words, if you first accept the covering up of murder and other violent acts by the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ and grant that phrase an autonomous legitimacy, you may later read back into the phrase ‘ethnic cleansing’ only a less violent kind of crime. Linguist Ranko Bugarski noted that ’ethnic cleansing[…] was replaced in some negotiations between Serbian and Croatian leaders with the improbable expression humane transfer of populations’ – which decision would seem to be an acknowledgement that ‘ethnic cleansing’ was understood by both sides to cover rather more actions than a simple ‘transfer’, humane or otherwise.95 As London School of Economics professor of international relations Fred Halliday points out:
The word ‘cleansing’ has a sinister polysemic character, appearing to stop short of killing or genocide, with mere displacement, but also echoing the twentieth-century word ‘purge’ – a euphemism, as in Soviet Russia, for mass murder. In all of these cases a significant proportion of those ‘cleansed’ were actually killed, not least to encourage the others to leave.96
Reading ‘ethnic cleansing’ only as displacement was the fallacy to which Brent Scowcroft, George H. W. Bush’s National Security Advisor, appealed when he described the situation in retrospect: ‘In Bosnia, I think, we all got ethnic cleansing mixed up with genocide. To me they are different terms. The horror of them is similar, but the purpose is not. Ethnic cleansing is not “I want to destroy an ethnic group, wipe it out.” It’s “They’re not going to live with us. They can live where they like, but not with us.”’97 In fact, in all too many cases, ‘ethnic cleansing’ really meant ‘They’re not going to live’, full stop.
Part of the problem may have been that ‘genocide’ itself was too successful a word. The man who coined it, lawyer Raphael Lemkin, had deliberately engineered it so as to sound as powerful as possible, to connect ‘the word’, as he wrote in one of his notebooks, inextricably to a ‘moral judgement’, to make it an ‘index of civilization’.98 And though it was subsequently defined by the UN so as to include crimes of much lesser scale than the Holocaust, its etymology kept alive the opposite implication: from genus (race, kind) and caedere (cut, kill), it seemed to picture the annihilation of an entire kind. Indeed this was how Lemkin himself had first defined it in 1944: ‘By “genocide” we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group.’99 This tension between what the word ‘genocide’ itself seemed to imply and its actual legal definition in the Genocide Convention, made genocide-denial eminently possible. Continuing arguments over the mass slaughter of nearly one million Armenians in Turkey in 1915,100 which had inspired Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’ (‘Who today still speaks of the massacre of the Armenians?’ he asked in 1939),101 followed the same pattern. Many decades later, the Turkish government would allow only talk of ‘incidents’102 or ‘events’.103 In 2004, historian Norman Stone wrote from Ankara to the Times Literary Supplement to deny ‘Armenian nationalist claims that a “genocide” as classically defined had taken place’.104 Of course there existed no ‘classical’ definition of this twentieth-century word. In fact, Lemkin had been inspired to begin his campaign for the criminalisation of genocide precisely by the suffering of the Armenians.105
In a kind of rhetorical pincer movement, meanwhile, recourse to the term ‘genocide’ had been discouraged in Serbia itself by a campaign to cheapen the word and render it empty through overuse:
The word genocide was bandied about so much in preparation for the revision of history that its meaning simply evaporated […] As a consequence it became possible to describe the death of a few soldiers as local genocide, and on Sarajevo TV a person was said to have committed genocide and even theft. Perhaps most tellingly, a poster at a Belgrade gathering of angry clients of a savings bank gone bankrupt appealed to ‘Stop the genocide over our pockets!’106
‘Genocide’ was thus stretched to breaking point in both directions: with some using it to denote small-scale crimes and others demanding it be reserved only for a new Holocaust, it became very difficult to use the word according to its true meaning. Thus was created the semantic space into which the brutal euphemisers and their apologists eagerly leapt with ‘ethnic cleansing’.
The phenomenon was to recur during international discussions about Rwanda, where in 1994, 800,000 people were murdered, mostly with machetes, in the space of a hundred days. US officials made lamenting noises about ‘ethnic cleansing’; again the word ‘genocide’ was avoided since it was thought to imply a duty to intervene. That a rapid enlightenment as to what was actually going on was possible is evident from the experience of Roméo Dallaire, commander of the UN peacekeeping forces in Rwanda at the time, whose repeated warnings were ignored by Washington. He told author Samantha Power:
To us in the West, ‘genocide’ was the equivalent of the Holocaust or the killing fields of Cambodia. I mean millions of people. ‘Ethnic cleansing’ seemed to involve hundreds of thousands of people. ‘Genocide’ was the highest scale of crimes against humanity imaginable. It was so far up there, so far off the charts, that it was not easy to recognize that we could be in such a situation.107
Then, Dallaire said, he looked up the text of the Genocide Convention itself. ‘I realised that genocide was when an attempt was made to eliminate a specific group, and this is precisely what we saw in the field … I just needed a slap in the face to say, “Holy shit! This is genocide, not just ethnic cleansing.”’ President Clinton and his advisers, however, either were not given such slaps in the face or were blessed with impressively thick skin.
Such confusion of terminology persists in those who lack the initiative displayed by Dallaire to find out for himself, or want deliberately to muddy the waters. In 2003, Michael Ignatieff administered a sorrowful slap on the wrist to a perpetrator of genocide by writing: ‘[Slobodan] Milosevic […] was wrong in believing that he could use any means, including attempted genocide and ethnic cleansing, to repress’ the Kosovars.108 First, ‘wrong’ reduces Milosevic’s crimes to the category of a mistake; second, the idea of ‘attempted genocide’ betrays the erroneous opinion that genocide is total destruction, and ignorance of the fact that any ‘attempt’ at such destruction already constitutes genocide; and third, the addition of ‘and ethnic cleansing’ perpetuates the euphemistic falsehood that this is a separate and lesser category of crime. In fact, ‘ethnic cleansing’ never became a recognised crime in international law. The 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court nowhere uses the vicious term, speaking only of ‘genocide’ and other ‘crimes against humanity’.
Nonetheless, the pattern seemed to be repeating itself once again in the international response to the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan. In April 2004, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, Jan Egeland, described the situation as one of ‘ethnic cleansing’.109 UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan was even more fastidious, claiming only that it was ‘bordering on ethnic cleansing’.110 But then a strange thing happened. A US Congress resolution in July stated explicitly that ‘genocide’ was happening in Darfur; then Secretary of State Colin Powell used the term; and George W. Bush himself called Darfur a ‘genocide’ in a speech to the UN.111
What happened next? Faced with an actually occurring humanitarian crisis of far greater gravity than had been invoked to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US did nothing. Sudan’s military-intelligence establishment was, after all, an ally of the CIA, who flew its chief to Washington for secret meetings.112 Noting that the US statements had not necessitated any forceful intervention, other officials, such as the German defence minister and the British Foreign Secretary, felt free to follow suit in deploring the ‘genocide’ so as to demonstrate their noble ethical standards.113 By early 2005, it was estimated th
at more than 300,000 people had died in Darfur;114 the international response had been to dispatch about 700 troops of the African Union, in order ‘to monitor a nonexistent ceasefire’.115
And so the word ‘genocide’, long taboo since it was thought to confer an automatic duty to act, was now shown to have no magical power. In finally using the word officially and denying any consequential obligations under the 1948 Convention, the West had perhaps killed ‘genocide’ once and for all.
Biblical proportions
The genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda, apart from being misdescribed in the most sinister and disingenuous manner as ‘ethnic cleansing’, were also blamed, in further handwashing rhetoric, on something dark and interior to victims and perpetrators alike. Bill Clinton alluded to the Yugoslavian crisis in his 1993 inaugural address with the phrase ‘ancient hatreds’.116 His Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, spoke the next month of a ‘cauldron of ancient ethnic hatreds’ in the Balkans;117 later that year, Clinton saw him and raised him by speaking of ‘many’ such ‘cauldrons of ethnic, religious, and territorial animosity’ in an address to the UN.118 What do you do with a cauldron? You certainly don’t jump in, since you would just be cooked along with its contents. You put a lid on it, perhaps, and hope it simmers down.
A cauldron is also often said to belong to a witch: it speaks of black magic, bubbling evil. It was therefore a metaphysical problem, not a political one. In a cauldron, too, the ingredients are all mixed up together, boiling away: thus one could avoid distinguishing between perpetrators and victims. Meanwhile, the concept of ‘ancient ethnic hatreds’ argued that such ‘hatreds’ could somehow persist in an entire people across centuries: passing down from one generation to the next, in the blood, in the very DNA. It is an image of racial disease, of contamination, and so fits right in with the hate-speech of ‘ethnic cleansing’. Racist connotations were even more blatantly in evidence when the genocide in Rwanda was ascribed to ‘ancient tribal hatreds’.119 In fact, numerous authoritative studies have shown that, in both the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, fear, racial hatred, and hysteria were deliberately and systematically whipped up by governments and the media.120 Bugarski comments: ‘[I]t was only through the protracted and vicious abuse of language in the service of propaganda and war that a sufficient amount of interethnic hatred could be generated to make traditionally good neighbors – indeed, frequently members of the same ethnically mixed family! – get at each other’s throats.’121 Never mind that, though. Sporadic battles and atrocities in the past could be knitted together into a homogeneous narrative of ‘ancient conflict’. Evidently, hatred coursed through the veins of entire peoples. ‘Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills […] The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.’122
Ancient, bloody and insoluble? It must be a ‘tragedy’. So indeed they spoke. Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, William Perry, said in 1995 that Bosnia was a ‘tragedy’, ‘a place where paradise and innocence ended long ago’.123 The remarkable language, alluding to the story of the Fall in Genesis, could mean nothing other than that the sufferings of those being murdered, raped, and tortured far away were their own fault: the result of some original sin, for which they had been expelled from the Garden of Eden. Similarly, Perry called the genocide in Rwanda ‘a human tragedy of Biblical proportions’.124 Surely it would be tragic hubris for mere humans to intervene in a Biblical tragedy, which plays out according to the mysterious plans of God himself. Only at the end of August 1995, after the renewed siege of Sarajevo and the massacre at Srebrenica had made inaction politically untenable, did Nato intervene forcefully in Bosnia.
Subsequently, the situation appeared to be repeating itself in Kosovo: this ‘tragedy’, it seemed, would not die. What kind of power could finally overcome its ancient, sacred, inexorable force? Only an even more sacred force. And so it was that, in an irony not lost on those who loathed the Milosevic regime but were not sure that long-range bombing which destroyed much civilian infrastructure was the best possible remedy,125 the 1999 Nato military action in Kosovo was christened ‘Merciful Angel’. Clearly, an ‘angel’ trumps any earthly debates about genocide or ‘ethnic cleansing’: the latter may safely be forgotten, while we bask in the radiating image of heaven-sent deliverance. All kinds of cognitive dissonance may be resolved, indeed, with a finely tooled operation name.
5
Operations
Just Cause
It was known by the planning nickname ‘Blue Spoon’. Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, formerly a valued employee of the CIA, had annulled the results of the May 1989 election and, in December, announced that a state of war existed with the US. The next day, Panama forces shot dead a US Marine not in uniform. President George H. W. Bush decided to invade the country. The attack began on 20 December. Noriega hid in the Vatican Embassy, at which US forces blasted deafening rock music. He surrendered on 3 January. The name for this little war, announced to the US public after it had begun, was Operation Just Cause.
Thus was inaugurated the contemporary strain of propaganda in which military adventures are given self-justifying public names. The original SOUTHCOM operation nickname, Blue Spoon, did not really mean anything. You might take a long spoon to sup with the devil, but why a blue one? In fact there was a whole series of military exercises and operations beginning with the term ‘blue’, including Blue Crab and Blue Tiger.1 But Just Cause was obviously different. No reasonable individual could be against a ‘just cause’: the question of whether the invasion of Panama really was a just cause would, it was hoped, be shut down in advance by its very name. Since no authorisation for the invasion had been sought or granted from the UN Security Council, it was perhaps even more necessary to describe it unilaterally as ‘just’. The stated objectives of the war included to arrest and extradite Noriega on drug charges (despite the Drug Enforcement Agency having praised him, just three years previously, for his ‘vigorous anti-drug trafficking policy’), and the old standby, to restore freedom to the citizens of the country being invaded. Some commentators, though, noticed that on 1 January 1990, a large part of the administration of the Panama Canal, so important to US trade, was due to be handed over to Panama itself, and wondered whether perhaps the US government’s action was driven by eagerness to install a government friendly to its own interests.2 However, American TV news programmes enthusiastically adopted the phrase ‘Just Cause’ to denote the events,3 and the pleasant sense of righteousness induced by this slogan worked to drown out criticism, which was dismissed irritably by one columnist as ‘this static on the left’.4
Operation Just Cause was the first US combat operation since the Korean War whose public name was chosen specifically ‘to shape domestic and international perceptions about the mission it designated’,5 according to military historian Gregory Sieminski. But the importance of the right mission name – and the negative publicity effects of the wrong one – had been known long before. In January 1966, the US 1st Cavalry Division began an operation in Vietnam that had the codename ‘Masher’, the idea being to sweep across a plain and crush the enemy against waiting Marines. Unfortunately the name ‘Masher’ was widely reported in the US media, and a furious Lyndon B. Johnson complained that it did not connote the right ‘pacification emphasis’. General William Westmoreland, who was two years later to convene a ‘nuclear study group’ to see if he could drop an atomic bomb on a North Vietnamese division,6 enlarged on Johnson’s reasoning, explaining that ‘the connotation of violence’ in the codename Masher ‘provided a focus for carping war critics’. The operation was rapidly renamed ‘White Wing’.7 Since white wings are traditionally supposed to belong to angels, or doves of peace, those annoying ‘connotations of violence’ were effectively whitewashed. The poignant hope that this little coup of Unspeak would quiet the carping war critics proved, however, to be a vain one. Similarly, the mere fact that Israel called its 1982 invasion of Lebanon by the name Operation Peace in Galilee did not succeed in persuading all onlookers
that peace was its true motive.
Winston Churchill is credited with naming the Normandy landings in the Second World War Operation Overlord, perhaps the most thrilling and morale-enhancing military nickname ever devised, for an invasion that had originally been planned under the far-from-inspirational name Roundhammer.8 The doubling of power terms – not just a lord but an over lord – perhaps conveyed the idea that, though the Nazis were currently ‘lords’ of Europe, they would have to submit to a superior authority. (The choice of a phrase that expressed the desired outcome was subsequently copied, less cleverly, in actions such as the 1993 US mission in Somalia, called Operation Restore Hope. A sort of magical thinking, according to which names are destiny, was severely injured in that operation’s disastrous end.) Churchill later set out his own rules for naming operations, among which is this: ‘Operations in which large numbers of men may lose their lives ought not to be described by code words which imply a boastful or overconfident sentiment.’9 Perhaps Overlord itself breaks that stricture, but it might be thought a forgivable instance.
Later givers of names, however, ignored Churchill’s warning against hubris altogether. For the first Gulf War, General Norman Schwarzkopf chose the boring name Peninsula Shield. Then someone noticed that this might imply that the intent was simply to protect Saudi oil rather than to liberate Kuwait, and so the name was changed to Desert Shield, and finally Desert Storm.10 With ‘Storm’, the US-led coalition painted itself as an irresistible force of nature before which all resistance would be annihilated, a posture that Churchill might well have called ‘boastful’. The second Iraq war, meanwhile, was for a time called Operation Iraqi Liberation,11 until an eagle-eyed functionary spotted that this spelled OIL. It certainly would not do to encourage a new generation of carping war critics to suppose that the opportunity to wean itself off dependence on Saudi oil figured in US strategic calculations. So the name was hastily changed to Operation Iraqi Freedom, thereby avoiding the link to black gold but keeping the handy implication that the only reason for the invasion was a purely philanthropic one. (The ramifications of exporting ‘freedom’ to Iraq will be examined more thoroughly in Chapter Eight.)