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| Author: | Siddharth Mohandas |
|---|
June 7, 2002
American Prospect
"A Problem from Hell" America and the Age of Genocide By Samantha Power. Basic Books, 610 pages, $ 30.00
EARLY IN 1942 JAN KARSKI, A young Polish diplomat, smuggled himself into the Warsaw ghetto, where he witnessed Nazi atrocities in progress. He saw mass graves, starving children, and the killing of Jews in broad daylight. He then made his way to Belzec, a death camp near Poland's border with Ukraine. When he escaped later that year, he carried miniature microfilm documents describing the horrors he had seen. Karski, a Roman Catholic, joined international efforts to spread news of what was taking place -- to get the rest of the world to "believe the unbelievable," as one urgent telegram put it. Traveling to the United States, Karski managed to get a meeting with Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, who responded to his eyewitness accounts by saying, "I don't believe you." He then clarified: "I do not mean that you are lying. I simply said I cannot believe you." This became the position of the U.S. State Department, which noted that it had information about concentration camps but "no ability to confirm the reports." As the war dragged on and the evidence became harder to ignore, the United States still did too little, refusing to bomb railway tracks leading to the death camps lest this move "provoke even more vindictive action by the Germans." It was not until the end of the war that skeptics were forced to believe the unbelievable. The United States and its allies resolutely declared that the Nazis' crime -- for which a new name, "genocide," emerged -- would never happen again.
The searing conclusion of "A Problem from Hell" is that the simplicity of "never again" is matched only by the consistency with which this promise has been abandoned by the United States. Samantha Power argues that the disbelief, obfuscation, and inaction that characterized the American response to the Holocaust is part of a pattern that existed before World War II and that has repeated itself with alarming regularity since.
Power's compelling account of the genocides of the twentieth century begins with the slaughter of the Armenians in Turkey during World War I. Despite warnings about what was happening, this time from the American ambassador in Turkey, the U.S. government looked the other way, in a manner prefiguring the response to nearly every subsequent instance of mass killing. The book then focuses on the sometimes quixotic Raphael Lemkin, a Polish refugee and international lawyer who coined the term genocide to describe the attempted destruction of a people and their culture. Beginning in the 1930s, Lemkin labored for years, alone and uncompensated, to secure the passage of an international law outlawing genocide, which the United Nations finally adopted in 1948. But the United States was not one of the countries that signed the resolution, and Power chronicles the efforts of Senator William Proxmire over nearly 20 years to persuade the United States to ratify the treaty. The rest of her work examines the major postwar genocides -- in Cambodia, Iraq, Bosnia, and Rwanda, as well as the sole instance of an early intervention against genocide, in Kosovo.
The case studies of genocide are the core of the book. It is in these retellings that Power's argument comes through most forcefully. While the narratives tell us little that is new about what happened on the ground -- indeed, her accounts draw primarily on an exhaustive trawling of published media reports -- she puts the reporting skills she honed as a correspondent in Bosnia to excellent use in unveiling what American officials did while the killings raged. Her studies are extended answers to the questions, "What did the U.S. government know, and when did it know it?" And the results are not pretty.
POWER DOES GIVE SOME CREDENCE to the claim that policy makers often did not understand that genocide was occurring. A depressing but nevertheless fascinating theme in "A Problem from Hell" is the failure of imagination that outsiders and even victims display in reckoning with evil. One might understand how Frankfurter could tell Karski that he could not conceive of Nazi atrocities, but how to explain such reluctance in the decades after the Holocaust? U.S. officials have time and again taken at their word despots who deny genocide is happening. Slobodan Milosevic's polish and apparent reasonableness as he claimed not to know of massacres by Serbs charmed numerous Western emissaries. And when survivors managed to get out and tell stories of their suffering, the reports were discounted as uncorroborated or exaggerated. For most people, genocide is simply an abstraction, merely a word that is thrown about, and so they are unprepared to believe it when they hear of it. Only such an utter lack of comprehension could allow a U.S. State Department official to say that "these people do this from time to time" at the start of the Rwandan genocide.
Most often, though, U.S. officials at some level have known about mass killings. During the Serb advance in Bosnia, State Department desk officers and CIA analysts not only documented in overwhelming detail the aims and methods of Serb paramilitaries, but even predicted massacres before they happened. Yet senior officials strove to stay uninvolved, initially only issuing appeals for "both sides" to reduce the violence. Power recounts internal debates about why the United States would not invoke what came to be known as the "g-word." Elaborate exchanges took place on Capitol Hill in which State Department officials spoke of "acts tantamount to genocide" in response to persistent questioning by members of Congress.
The dissembling was motivated in part by a fear that admitting the occurrence of genocide would force the United States to actually do something. This fear of getting involved manifested itself in Rwanda, where the U.S. government refused to jam radio signals broadcasting the names and addresses of Tutsi citizens to the murdering I lutu mobs. Moreover, the United States insisted on reducing the peace-keeping force already there and prevented other countries from sending troops -- all out of a concern that any problems with another nation's intervention could drag the United States into the conflict. In short, Power castigates the American government for its unwillingness to take even the most elementary steps -- far short of military action -- to try to stop genocide.
At the end of Power's narrative, the reader is left wondering, what can we do? The author has produced a towering history of the inadequacy of American responses to genocide, one with which all further studies of the subject will have to contend. It is a troubling story not just for its description of repeated failure, but also because it offers precious little guidance as to how America can break this dismal cycle. This, of course, is the hardest question of all, and answering it could easily fill another book. But Power's slim concluding section reveals how difficult it is even to begin. She acknowledges that American politicians do not demand a halt to genocide because there is no domestic political cost for allowing it to occur. This should come as no surprise. Indeed, a foreign policy "realist" may be tempted to say that the question is not why America hasn't stopped genocide, but why it ever would. Such realism is perhaps too clever by half, because, as Power argues, the United States affords a unique importance to values in its foreign policy and "because we happen to be the leader of the world," in the words of Bob Dole, no starry-eyed liberal. America's ideological self-conception and its immense power create an expectation both among its own citizens and around the world that it will act to stop the gravest assaults on humanity.
BUT EVEN ON POWER'S OWN TERMS the direction for action is unclear. Her goal is to raise the domestic political price for U.S. leaders who fail to stand against genocide. She notes that America finally moved in Bosnia when President Clinton -- hounded by Dole and others for his inaction -- grew uneasy over dropping approval ratings. Yet can public pressure be counted on? In contemporary American politics there are no natural constituencies that will stand up for distant strangers. Power points to the role that nongovernmental organizations and the press can play in raising public consciousness, but no obvious strategy emerges for translating outrage into action. The challenge is to make genocide real for the American public. Power's own work is an important contribution to that effort, and deserves a wide reading for that reason alone. But ultimately it is hard to see how things can change when the political costs are in fact so low for ignoring genocide, and potentially so high for intervening.
Power does not concede that intervention necessarily means the loss of American lives. She is entirely correct to excoriate the U.S. government for dancing around the term genocide and for refusing to issue simple condemnations of mass slaughter. And she is right to say that there are nonmilitary actions that America could take to try to give pause to murderers -- the United States could have frozen Serbian foreign assets or jammed Hutu hate radio, for example. But when full-scale efforts are under way to eliminate an ethnic group, it is difficult to imagine any successful intervention short of military action.
Power suggests that genocide can often be stopped militarily at relatively little cost. That argument, however, hinges on the definitions of "relatively," "little," and "cost." A hotly and legitimately contested question is how many soldiers the United States can -- and should -- be expected to sacrifice to save potentially thousands of Rwandans or Bosnians or Kurds. Power, for instance, feels that the U.S. campaign in Kosovo was less effective than it could have been because of its insistence on zero casualties, but there is no indication of how this priority could shift; indeed, Osama bin Laden may have escaped from Afghanistan precisely because of worries about losing ground troops. Chroniclers of recent military interventions, such as William Shawcross in Deliver Us from Evil, have shown them to be a messy, bloody business. We must therefore take seriously Shawcross's warning that the first step to effective action is for Western political leaders to tell their publics honestly that intervention cannot be painless.
It may not be long before they are again called on to do so. One of the most chilling observations in "A Problem from Hell" was made by Lemkin, who pointed out that mass killing takes place with "biological regularity." Genocide will happen again. What, if anything, the United States will do remains unclear. Samantha Power's book, however, at least makes it harder for us to fool ourselves when the killing begins.
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