''A PROBLEM FROM HELL''
America and the Age of Genocide.
By Samantha Power.
Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish linguist who escaped Nazi-occupied Poland in 1941, coined the term ''genocide'' as a kind of speech-act. He meant not only to name a crime whose magnitude, combined with its sweeping singularity of motive, distinguished it even in the annals of coldblooded mass murder. He meant for the crime's very name to be a call for universal opprobrium -- one that would inspire, if it did not mandate, punishment and prevention.
As Samantha Power recounts in '' 'A Problem From Hell': America and the Age of Genocide,'' it was Lemkin who devised and lobbied tirelessly for the Genocide Convention, which the United Nations adopted in 1948. Defining genocide as the commission of certain crimes with the ''intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such,'' the convention called for perpetrators to be punished and for contracting parties ''to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide.'' Nervous about its own record on race, however, the United States did not become a party to the Genocide Convention until 1986, when President Ronald Reagan backed it as a face-saving measure following his visit the previous year to Bitburg cemetery, where 49 Nazi SS officers are buried. Even then, three Republican senators -- Jesse Helms, Orrin Hatch and Richard Lugar -- attached so many reservations to the American signature that the convention would not meaningfully bind the United States to much of anything.
Yet those reservations could not prevent ''genocide'' from becoming the speech-act Lemkin intended in popular parlance. Associated above all with Nazi horrors, the term has become so powerful a talisman, and so unarguable a synonym for evil, that its very invocation seems an incitement to act. By the same token, it is a word loaded with demagogic potential. Paranoid tyrants, including perpetrators of genocide, are fond of manipulating public emotions by claiming that their own people are threatened with impending genocide. American political leaders go to great lengths to avoid uttering the word in cases where they hope to remain disengaged; they do not hesitate to use it, however, when they wish to stir up public outrage in support of military action. Hence, Serbian war crimes in Kosovo were quickly deemed genocidal, whereas in the more obvious case of Bosnia, State Department officials carefully picked their way around the g-word.
It will hardly come as a surprise to most Americans who follow foreign affairs that Bosnia, and not Kosovo, is the norm. In '' 'A Problem From Hell,' '' Power expertly documents American passivity in the face of Turkey's Armenian genocide, the Khmer Rouge's systematic murder of more than a million Cambodians, the Iraqi regime's gassing of its Kurdish population, the Bosnian Serbian Army's butchery of unarmed Muslims and the Rwandan Hutu militias' slaughter of some 800,000 Tutsi. (Power has room, in this substantial volume, for only passing mention of the massacres of similar and larger scale in Nigeria, Bangladesh, Burundi and East Timor, among other places.) This vivid and gripping work of American history doubles as a prosecutor's brief: time and again, Power recounts, although the United States had the knowledge and the means to stop genocide abroad, it has not acted. Worse, it has made a resolute commitment to not acting. Washington's record, Power ruefully observes, is not one of failure, but of success.
Self-interest trumps humanitarian concern in United States foreign policy with striking consistency, Power demonstrates. Cold-war calculations led the Nixon and Carter administrations first to pave the way for the Khmer Rouge's ascent to power, and then to continue to justify its right to rule Cambodia long after a Vietnamese invasion dislodged Pol Pot. Business interests and the desire to contain Iran's revolution induced the first Bush administration to support Saddam Hussein economically as he gassed and bulldozed Kurdish villages. Of Bosnia, former President Bush's secretary of state, James Baker, famously proclaimed, ''We don't have a dog in that fight.'' Rwanda, the subject of Power's most shattering chapter, lay even farther from any vital interest of the United States. There, the Clinton administration ignored early warnings of impending catastrophe, declined to intervene and, according to many, opposed United Nations peacekeeping efforts. When at last the Clinton White House was stirred to action in Kosovo, it was, Power writes, largely out of concern for NATO's credibility and the administration's own domestic image. ''I'm getting creamed,'' she quotes President Clinton as saying when the lobby of opinion makers calling for intervention in Bosnia had grown deafening. It would be too humiliating to go through that again.
Power, the executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, gives us a Washington that is vibrant, complex and refreshingly human. Within it, she finds an unlikely, bipartisan collection of men and women whose courage and moral commitment she admires. Among them are Henry Morgenthau, Charles Twining, Claiborne Pell, Madeleine Albright, Robert Dole and a group of junior State Department officials who resigned to protest American inaction in Bosnia. Senator William Proxmire regaled the Senate with a ''speech a day'' for 20 years, urging that the United States become a party to the Genocide Convention. Peter Galbraith, when he was a staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, fought fruitlessly for recognition and condemnation of the Iraqi Kurdish genocide, traveling at great personal risk to northern Iraq.
The same Washington, of course, is a place of defeatism, inertia, selfishness and cowardice. Warnings pass up the chain and disappear. Intelligence is gathered and then ignored or denied. The will of the executive remains steadfastly opposed to intervention; its guiding assumption is that the cost of stopping genocide is great, while the political cost of ignoring it is next to nil. President Bush the elder comes off as a stone-hearted prisoner to business interests, President Clinton as an amoral narcissist. Perhaps nobody looks worse than former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, on whose watch both Bosnia and Rwanda self-destructed. ''When innocent life is being taken on such a scale and the United States has the power to stop the killing at reasonable risk,'' Power writes, ''it has a duty to act.'' She objects not only to the fact that the United States declines to intervene militarily in genocidal conflicts, but also that frequently it declines to do anything -- even to rebuke perpetrators publicly.
Where are international institutions in this picture? They depend on the financing and political will of the United States. Unfortunately, like many observers of the Bosnian peacekeeping fiasco, Power appears to have given up on international institutions. She does not argue for empowering them, for liberating them from the narrow interests of the powerful or for altering their terms of engagement in genocidal conflicts. Instead, she presses for the United States to act like something other than the self-interested superpower it is.
The most utopian among us will have difficulty imagining a United States that functions as disinterested protector to the world's imperiled peoples. Outside its borders, the country is even less frequently perceived as the white knight it might imagine itself to be; rather, conflicts of interest, real or perceived, trail it wherever it intervenes. Power does not take such concerns seriously. If she did, she would not be so swift to dismiss the role of international institutions in favor of American unilateralism. Are the world's powerful the most trustworthy guardians of its powerless? Not on the evidence of this book. Could it be otherwise? Samantha Power might say that this is an empirical question, and it is on this ground that her idealism and her pragmatism meet. She believes that Washington is made of individual wills, and that these wills are open to suasion. Those who refuse cynicism, she insists, whether they are journalists, politicians or ordinary citizens like Raphael Lemkin, have the power substantively to alter our leadership's notion of what is, or isn't, in the American interest.
Drawing (Thomas Fuchs)
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