A Problem From Hell

by Samantha Power

  Thus, even those driven by a sense of America’s moral responsibility have tried to make the case by appealing to the second reason: enlightened self-interest. They warned that allowing genocide undermined regional and international stability, created militarized refugees, and signaled dictators that hate and murder were permissible tools of statecraft. Because these threats to U.S. interests were long-term dangers and not immediately apparent, however, they rarely swayed top U.S. policymakers. Genocide did undermine regional stability, but the destabilized areas tended to lie outside the U.S. sphere of concern. Refugees were militarized, but they tended not to wash up on America’s shores. Dictators everywhere were signaled, but how they treated their own citizens was seen to have little impact on American military or economic security. Thus humanitarian intervention came about only on the rare occasions when the shorter term political interests of U.S. policymakers were at stake.

  If it was difficult before September 11 to get U.S. decision-makers to see the long-term costs of allowing genocide, it will be even harder today when U.S. security needs are so acute and visible. But security for Americans at home and abroad is contingent on international stability, and there is perhaps no greater source of havoc than a group of well-armed extremists bent on wiping out a people on ethnic, national, or religious grounds.

  Western governments have generally tried to contain genocide by appeasing its architects. But the sad record of the last century shows that the walls the United States tries to build around genocidal societies almost inevitably shatter. States that murder and torment their own citizens target citizens elsewhere. Their appetites become insatiable. Hitler began by persecuting his own people and then waged war on the rest of Europe and, in time, the United States. Saddam Hussein wiped out rural Kurdish life and then turned on Kuwait, sending his genocidal henchman Ali Hassan al-Majid to govern the newly occupied country. The United States now has reason to fear that the poisonous potions Hussein tried out on the Kurds will be used next on Americans. Milosevic took his wars from Slovenia and Croatia to Bosnia and then Kosovo. The United States and its European allies are continuing to pay for their earlier neglect of the Balkans by having to grapple with mounting violence in Macedonia that threatens the stability of southeastern Europe.

  Citizens victimized by genocide or abandoned by the international community do not make good neighbors, as their thirst for vengeance, their irredentism, and their acceptance of violence as a means of generating change can turn them into future threats. In Bosnia, where the United States and Europe maintained an arms embargo against the Muslims, extremist Islamic fighters and proselytizers eventually turned up to offer succor. Some secular Muslim citizens became radicalized by the partnership, and the failed state of Bosnia became a haven for Islamic terrorists shunned elsewhere in the world. It appears that one of the organizations that infiltrated Bosnia in its hour of need and used it as a training base was Saudi terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda.3

  The United States should not frame its policy options in terms of doing nothing or unilaterally sending in the marines. America’s leadership will be indispensable in encouraging U.S. allies and regional and international institutions to step up their commitments and capacities. Given the immensity of the harm caused by genocide, its prevention is a burden that must be shared. At the same time, the United States should do certain things in every case. It must respond to genocide with a sense of urgency, publicly identifying and threatening the perpetrators with prosecution, demanding the expulsion of representatives of genocidal regimes from international institutions such as the United Nations, closing the perpetrators’ embassies in the United States, and calling upon countries aligned with the perpetrators to ask them to use their influence. When the dynamics on the ground warrant it, the United States should establish economic sanctions, freeze foreign assets, and use U.S. technical resources to deprive the killers of their means of propagating hate. With its allies, it should set up safe areas to house refugees and civilians, and protect them with well-armed and robustly mandated peacekeepers, airpower, or both. Given the affront genocide represents to America’s most cherished values and to its interests, the United States must also be prepared to risk the lives of its soldiers in the service of stopping this monstrous crime.

  For most of the second half of the twentieth century, the existence of the genocide convention appeared to achieve little. The United States did not ratify the treaty for forty years. Those countries that did ratify it never invoked it to stop or punish genocide. And instead of finally making U.S. policymakers more inclined to stop genocide, the belated U.S. ratification seemed only to make them more reluctant to use the “g-word.” Still, Raphael Lemkin’s coinage has done more good than harm. The international tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the future International Criminal Court may not have come into existence without the convention’s passage. The punishment that these courts dole out may help deter genocide in the long term. In addition, thanks to the existence of the convention and Lemkin’s proselytizing around it, the word “genocide,” which was not even named until 1948, has acquired a potent moral stigma. The vows of U.S. policymakers to never again allow the crime and the lengths to which they have gone, while allowing genocide, to deny its occurrence is in itself testament to the stigma. Hope for the convention’s enforcement lies in this opprobrium and in the determination of those who helped push the United States to live up to its promise.

  Few of those who attempted to get the leaden machinery of the U.S. government to respond to genocide began as crusaders or even messengers. Most experienced some moment of recognition that improved their vision and moved them out of a state of denial. Often they were transformed by firsthand exposure to a crime scene—Lemkin and Dallaire, certainly, but also Morgenthau, Karski, Becker, Twining, Quinn, Galbraith, Dole, McCloskey, Holbrooke, and hundreds of unnamed others. They saw something that haunted them, that turned the daily press accounts into vibrant cries from the grave, cries that broke through the cordon sanitaire that deflects unwelcome news.

  During World War II, Arthur Koestler described those frustrated few who spoke up in the newspapers and public meetings against Nazi atrocities as “Screamers.” The Screamers succeeded in reaching listeners for a moment, Koestler wrote, only to watch them shake themselves “like puppies who have got their fur wet” and return to the blissful place of ignorance and uninvolvement. “You can convince them for an hour,” Koestler noted, but then “their mental half-defense begins to work and in a week the shrug of incredulity has returned like a reflex temporarily weakened by shock.”4

  Most of those who protested U.S. policy initially believed that if they could only succeed in conveying the horrors to those who had not borne witness, the community of listeners (local, national, international) would act. They possessed faith in the institutions to which they had offered allegiance. Lemkin, the immigrant, believed in the United States. There was no doubt in his mind that this country would adopt his crusade and ratify and enforce the genocide convention. William Proxmire, the quixotic senator, believed the convention had not been ratified because of some quirk in the legislative process. When he pledged to give a speech a day in the Senate, he thought Senate backlogs would mean a yearlong campaign at most. Although Peter Galbraith was aware of the potency of special interests on Capitol Hill, he believed that there were certain lines that U.S. lawmakers would not see crossed. Romeo Dallaire believed in the promise and nobility of the United Nations, which would never abandon citizens it had promised to protect. And the State Department protesters believed in the department. They were prepared to utilize the dissent channel, to speak out in the open forum, and to send heartfelt memos to the secretary of state. They believed that “never again” would the United States allow men and women to be herded into concentration camps in Europe where they would be starved, raped, and murdered.

  All of the latter-day Screamers treated silence as if it were a further crime against human
ity. They invoked the Holocaust analogy because they thought it would help them link a current crisis with a past tragedy and a current decision to abstain with a past decision to appease. Most of them saw opportunity and alternative where others felt trapped by inevitability and “reality,” a reality they did not probe and therefore ultimately would not alter. They knew that it was individuals who would have to make a difference, which was not the same as believing that they would. They were usually branded “emotional,” “irrational,” “soft,” or “naive.” Many of them saw their careers destroyed by the stands they took. Some crumbled. A few, like Dallaire, may never recover.

  Because of the way the stories turned out, and indeed because of the way genocide keeps turning out, it is easy to view these individuals as overly credulous or politically obtuse. But how many of us who look back at the genocides of the twentieth century, including the Holocaust, do not believe that these people were right? How many of us do not believe that the presidents, senators, bureaucrats, journalists, and ordinary citizens who did nothing, choosing to look away rather than to face hard choices and wrenching moral dilemmas, were wrong? And how can something so clear in retrospect become so muddled at the time by rationalizations, institutional constraints, and a lack of imagination? How can it be that those who fight on behalf of these principles are the ones deemed unreasonable?

  George Bernard Shaw once wrote, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” After a century of doing so little to prevent, suppress, and punish genocide, Americans must join and thereby legitimate the ranks of the unreasonable.

  Notes

  Preface

  1. “Statement by President Clinton Regarding Proposals to Deal with Situation in Bosnia,” Federal News Service, February 9, 1994.

  2. Warren Christopher on Face the Nation, CBS, March 28, 1993.

  3. “President’s Commission on the Holocaust: Remarks on Receiving the Final Report of the Commission,” September 27, 1979, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Jimmy Carter, 1979 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1979), p. 1773.

  4. “Remarks at the International Convention of B’nai B’rith,” September 6, 1984, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan, 1987 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1987), p. 1244.

  5. “Remarks of President George Bush at the Simon Wiesenthal Dinner, Century Plaza Hotel, Los Angeles, California,” Federal News Service, June 16, 1991.

  6. Clifford Krauss, “U.S. Backs Away from Charge of Atrocities in Bosnia Camps,” New York Times, August 5, 1992, p. A12.

  7. “Remarks at the Dedication of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum,” April 22, 1993, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton, 1993 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1994), p. 479.

  8. See Leslie Gelb and Richard Betts, The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1979).

  Chapter 1, “Race Murder”

  1. Edward Alexander, A Crime of Vengeance: An Armenian Struggle for Justice (New York: Free Press, 1991), p. 10; Jacques Derogy, Resistance and Revenge: The Armenian Assassination of the Turkish Leaders Responsible for the 1915 Massacres and Deportations, trans. A. M. Berrett (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1990), pp. xix–xxi.

  2. Estimates of the number of Armenians who died in 1915–1916 vary widely. Some Turkish historians claim just 200,000 Armenians were killed, mainly in the legitimate suppression of rebellion. See, for example, Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 315–316. Armenian sources often place the figure at more than 1.5 million; see Ronald Grigar Suny, Looking Toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 114; Robert F. Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 147. British historian Martin Gilbert estimates that some 600,000 Armenians were killed in massacres committed in Anatolia and an additional 400,000 died as a result of the brutalities and starvation inflicted upon them during the forced deportations from Anatolia into the deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia; some 200,000 Armenians were forcibly converted to Islam. See Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), p. 167.

  3. “Says Turks Advise Christians to Flee,” New York Times, January 11, 1915, p. 2.

  4. “A People Killed Twice,” Guardian Weekend, January 27, 2001, p. 35.

  5. State Department translation of law of deportation presented by the Turkish governor of Trebinzond to U.S. consul Oscar Heizer, June 28, 1915, reproduced in the appendix to Leslie A. Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province: An American Diplomat’s Report on the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917, ed. Susan K. Blair (New Rochelle, N.Y.: A. D. Caratzas, 1989).

  6. Russia was home to around 1.7 million Armenians before the war; some 2 million Armenians lived under harsh Ottoman rule. When the Young Turks seized power in Turkey in 1908, the Armenians lobbying for constitutional reform won some early concessions, but periodic massacres continued and the ethnic chauvinism of the ruling triumvirate led to a burst of “Turkification.” Turkey aligned with Germany and Austria in World War I, allowing Germany to control the Dardanelles, Russia’s lone warm-water lifeline, and causing Russia to declare war on Turkey in 1914.

  7. Alexander, A Crime of Vengeance, pp. 69–70.

  8. “Armenian Atrocities Scouted by Bernstorff. Calls Reports ‘Pure Inventions’— Says the Catholics Wrote Under Pressure,” New York Times, September 28, 1915, p. 2; “Armenians’ Own Fault Bernstorff Now Says. They Brought Reprisals on Themselves by Trying to Stir up Rebellion Against Turkey,” New York Times, September 29, 1915, p. 1. Count Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff was the German ambassador to the United States.

  9. The Friends of Armenia, the Anglo-Armenian Association, and the British Armenia Committee secured meetings with senior British policymakers. Just beginning his scholarly career, British historian Arnold Toynbee joined the British Armenia Committee’s propaganda subcommittee and published a pamphlet in 1915 that accused the Ottomans of planning “nothing less than the extermination of the whole Christian population within the Ottoman frontiers.” Arnold Toynbee, Armenian Atrocities: The Murder of a Nation (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1915), p. 27. See also Arnold Toynbee, “A Summary of Armenian History up to and Including the Year 1915,” in Arnold Toynbee, ed., The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915–16: Documents Presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, by Viscount Bryce, with a Preface by Viscount Bryce (London: Sir Joseph Causton and Sons, 1916).

  10. Sir Edward Grey to Sir Francis Bertie, British ambassador to France, May 11, 1915, cited in Gary Jonathan Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 115, 348–349.

  11. “Allies to Punish Turks Who Murder,” New York Times, May 24, 1915, p. 1. The concept of crimes against humanity had its roots in the Roman concept of offenses against jus gentium, or the laws of all nations. Most Europeans identified with the Armenians’ suffering because they were fellow Christians. But when the Russians suggested condemning “crimes against Christianity,” it seemed too parochial, and the phrase “crimes against humanity and civilization” was chosen instead.

  12. Jay Winter, “Under Cover of War: Genocide in the Context of Total War,” paper presented at the National Holocaust Museum, Washington, D.C., September 28, 2000.

  13. Henry Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story (Reading, England: Taderon Press, 2000), p. 217. Ambassador Morgenthau was the father of Henry Morgenthau Jr., who subsequently authored the famous pastoralization plan (or “potato patch” solution) that would have suppressed German industry after World War II.

  14. Henry Morgenthau to Secretary of State Robert Lansing, July 10, 1915, cited
in Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance, p. 346.

  15. Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story, p. 218.

  16. Ibid., p. 222.

  17. Ibid., pp. 220, 223.

  18. Ibid., p. 227.

  19. Ibid., p. 225.

  20. Henry Morgenthau to Secretary of State Robert Lansing, August 11, 1915, cited in Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance, p. 346.

  21. Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story, p. 218.

  22. “Turks Are Evicting Native Christians,” New York Times, July 12, 1915, p. 4.

  23. “Bryce Asks US to Aid Armenia. Says That All Christians in Trebizond, Numbering 10,000, Were Drowned,” New York Times, September 21, 1915, p. 3.

  24. “800,000 Armenians Counted Destroyed,” New York Times, October 7, 1915, p. 3.

  25. “Million Armenians Killed or in Exile,” New York Times, December 15, 1915, p. 3.

  26. “500,000 Armenians Said to Have Perished. Washington Asked to Stop Slaughter of Christians by Turks and Kurds,” New York Times, September 24, 1915, p. 2; “Says Extinction Menaces Armenia; Dr. Gabriel Tells of More Than 450,000 Killed in Recent Massacres,” New York Times, September 25, 1915, p. 3.

  27. “Armenian Officials Murdered by Turks. Confirmation from Cairo of the Wholesale Atrocities That von Bernstorff Belittles,” New York Times, September 30, 1915, p. 2. Leopold’s crimes were mammoth, but unlike Abdul Hamid’s, they were not aimed at wiping out one particular ethnic group. Any and every African slave was vulnerable. When a village failed to meet its rubber quota, Belgian soldiers or rubber company “sentries” often murdered whole communities or chopped the hands off the slaves, leaving them powerless to care for themselves or their families. Piles of severed hands and full skeletons littered Leopold’s vast empire. The local people who fled ahead of the Europeans’ arrival found their villages burned down when they returned. Exhausted, malnourished laborers were vulnerable to disease, which spread rapidly. All told, according to Jan Vansina, a historian and anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, the Congo population was cut “by at least half” between 1880 and 1920. Some 10 million people died as a result of Leopold’s presence. Cited in Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), pp. 225–234.