Raising the Cost of Genocide
Power, Samantha
RAPHAEL LEMKIN, a Polish jurist who lost forty-nine members of his family in the Holocaust, invented the word "genocide" in 1944 because he believed that, in the aftermath of the Turkish...
...The Western powers sided with and supplied credits, military intelligence, and arms to Iraq while Hussein was attempting to wipe out Iraqi Kurds...
...As a result of this public reckoning and some of the formal checks instituted in its wake, U.S...
...The Bosnian Serbs publicly celebrated the Mogadishu casualties, knowing that they would never have to do battle with U.S...
...This was partly out of fear of triggering their obligations under the Genocide Convention, but mainly it was to avoid the moral stigma associated with allowing what Lemkin described as "the ultimate crime...
...In 1994, Rwanda, a country of eight million, experienced the equivalent of more than two World Trade Center attacks every single day for a hundred days...
...Usually they cited this lack of capacity to ameliorate suffering as a central reason for staying uninvolved...
...Bosnia was the only genocide of the twentieth century that generated a wave of resignations from the U.S...
...NATO bombing in Bosnia, when it finally came, rapidly brought that three-and-a-half-year war to a close...
...An amateur historian of mass slaughter from medieval times to the twentieth century, Lemkin knew that genocide would continue to occur with "biological regularity" Moreover, he knew from reviewing the recent past that if it were left to political leaders to decide how to respond, they would inevitably privilege their short-term interests over both the moral imperative of stopping genocide and the longterm consequences of ignoring it...
...It is probably not coincidental that this was the one case where the protests of American officials in the foreign service were legitimated daily by sustained public and press activism outside Foggy Bottom...
...For most of the second half of the twentieth century, the existence of the Genocide 94 n DISSENT / Spring 2002 COSTS OF GENOCIDE Convention appeared to achieve little...
...States that murder and torment their own citizens almost inevitably target citizens elsewhere...
...With the exception of the U.S...
...Handling atrocity as war has led to the deployment of conflict resolution experts, the misguided pursuit of ceasefires, and the spiraling investment in "peace processes" that too often become stalling devices that shield murder...
...He rightly assumed he would not be punished for using poison gases against the Kurds...
...One of the most important and reluctant conclusions one must reach is that the record of the "civilized" world is not one of failure...
...rOR THE FORESEEABLE future, it will be up to the United States to take the lead in stopping and punishing genocide...
...Genocide occurred after the cold war, after the growth of human rights groups, after the explosion of instant communications, and after the erection of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C...
...officials wanted to reduce the likelihood of eventually being drawn into Africa, and they sought to show a U.S...
...introduced sanctions legislation that would have suspended the generous U.S...
...And a handful of NATO arrests in the former Yugoslavia has caused dozens of suspected war criminals to turn themselves in to the UN war crimes tribunal...
...he urged...
...Belgium, which contributed troops to a UN mission meant to help usher in Hutu-Tutsi power-sharing, yanked its troops out of Rwanda despite its detailed understanding of the pace and scope of the early massaDISSENT / Spring 2002 n 87 COSTS OF GENOCIDE cres...
...Senior U.S...
...What is most shocking about the reaction of what Lemkin called the "civilized world" to these twentieth-century genocides is not that the Western powers did not deploy their ground forces to combat the atrocities, but that they did little along a continuum of intervention— from the merely rhetorical to the aggressively military—to deter the crime...
...leadership role is not required or that other forms of intervention should not be tried...
...In 1994, the Times reported just four days after the beginning of the Rwanda genocide that "tens of thousands" of Rwandans had already been murdered...
...Well-connected ambassadors and junior intelligence analysts pumped a steady stream of information up the chain to senior decision makers—both early warnings ahead of genocide and vivid documentation during it...
...Because their "vital national interests" were not considered imperiled by mere genocide, military intervention was rarely even considered...
...The hope is that the attacks will make Americans inside and outside government more capable of imagining evil committed against innocent civilians...
...When the United States finally entered the war in 1917, it did not declare war on Turkey and did not join the Allies' postwar efforts to prosecute Turkish war criminals...
...The first and most convincing reason is moral...
...THE SECOND consoling response usually offered to the question of why the major powers did so little to stop genocide is that any intervention would have been futile...
...Nonetheless, the record shows that trying to build walls around genocidal societies almost guarantees trouble down the road...
...troops far from the scene of the crime...
...If the hatreds were "age-old" and "two-sided," as was usually claimed, and if the "parties" had in fact been killing one another "for centuries," the implication was that they would kill one another for centuries more...
...To illuminate this point, let us look specifically at the goals of policy makers in the United States...
...It must be extremely cautious about deploying U.S...
...THE GENOCIDE in Rwanda, which Occurred in 1994, two years after the beginning of the Bosnian War, left some eight hundred thousand Tutsi and moderate Hutu murdered in one hundred days...
...Perversely, public awareness of the Holocaust often seemed to set the bar for concern so high that citizens and statesmen were able to tell themselves that contemporary genocides were not measuring up...
...Congress's vote to unilaterally lift the arms embargo against the Bosnian Muslims...
...Although isolated voices have protested the atrocities, Americans outside the executive branch were largely mute when it mattered...
...President Jimmy Carter, the first U.S...
...Deliberately calling genocide something it is not—"civil war" or "tribal violence"—in order to mute public pressure is not only dishonest...
...Secretary of State James Baker with Kurdish refugees, the allies succeeded in creating a safe haven for the Kurds in northern Iraq, enabling more than a million Kurds to return to their homes...
...In 1939 Hitler was emboldened by the fact that absolutely nobody "remembered the Armenians...
...The White House took the position it did because it had decided to maintain friendly relations with its Gulf ally (and enemy of its enemy, Iran) and to advance the interests of U.S...
...But if it was difficult before September 11 to get U.S...
...France armed and diplomatically defended the genocidal government...
...This pressure can come from inside and outside...
...Their appetites become insatiable...
...Some one million Armenians died...
...In 1991, after the appeals of Turkey and the personal encounter of U.S...
...The punishment that takes place at these courts will help deter genocide in the long term...
...Genocide," he hoped, would send shudders down the spines of those who heard it and oblige them to prevent, punish, and even suppress the carnage...
...Genocide has undermined regional stability, but the regions the conflicts destabilized tended also to lie outside the U.S...
...mission in New York for assistance, their phone calls were not returned...
...From their brutal forerunners, they picked up lessons in everything from dehumanizing their victims and deploying euphemisms to constructing concentration camps and covering their tracks...
...security needs are so acute...
...But even if U.S...
...It takes political pressure to put genocide "on the map" in WashDISSENT / Spring 2002 n 91 COSTS OF GENOCIDE ington or in any of the European capitals...
...It was wholeheartedly supported by most lawmakers on Capitol Hill...
...The Nuremberg and Tokyo trials prosecuted the leading perpetrators of crimes against humanity after the Second World War, but political leaders saw the real crime of the Axis powers as waging a "crime against peace...
...role, they were rebuffed...
...But U.S...
...This was the proportional equivalent of two hundred and thirty thousand Americans killed each day, or twenty-three million Americans murdered in three months...
...But he did not contest the prevalent policy of nonintervention...
...intervention will be singularly inappropriate...
...If the United States treats the war on terrorism as a war that can be prosecuted in a vacuum, with no regard for genocidal terror, it will be making a colossal mistake...
...First, they wanted to avoid engagement in conflicts that posed little threat to American interests, narrowly defined...
...The Nixon administration backed Pakistan, which was its intermediary with the People's Republic of China, and, when the U.S...
...government has the incentive to avoid "another Somalia" or "another Vietnam," few think twice about playing a role in allowing "another Rwanda...
...foreign-policy establishment, U.S...
...A bias toward belief would do less harm than a bias toward disbelief...
...It appears that one of the organizations that infiltrated Bosnia in its hour of need and used it as a training base was Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda...
...reaction to the deaths of eighteen U.S...
...policy makers in the executive branch (usually with the passive backing of most members of Congress) have had two objectives...
...The major powers used their clout on the UN Security Council to mandate the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers from Rwanda and to block the deployment of reinforcements...
...As a result, refugee claims were difficult to confirm and body counts notoriously hard to establish...
...ground forces...
...decision makers to see the long term costs of allowing genocide, it will be even harder today when U.S...
...it is driven by interests, narrowly defined...
...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...
...There will be times when the magnitude of the moral harm will demand risking U.S...
...A human rights lawyer and former war correspondent, her reporting from the Balkans, Cambodia, The Hague, and Rwanda has appeared in US News and World Report, the New Republic, and the Economist...
...Thus, there was little a well-meaning band of foreign do-gooders could achieve by meddling...
...Without NATO bombing and U.S...
...Genocide prevention is an immense burden and one that must be shared...
...In the face of genocide, the search for certainty frequently became an excuse for paralysis and postponement...
...Before the Holocaust, neither U.S...
...civil and foreign servants typically heeded what they took to be presidential indifference and public apathy...
...But while everyone within the U.S...
...In all three cases of genocide, the economic and strategic interests of the United States and its European allies caused them to side with the genocidal governments and to invoke "sovereignty" as an excuse for refraining even from complaint...
...Without U.S...
...Although imperfect, NATO bombing in Kosovo in 1999 liberated 1.7 million Albanians from tyrannical Serb rule...
...As a result of this societywide silence, officials at all levels of government calculated that the political costs of getting involved in genocide prevention far exceeded the costs of remaining uninvolved...
...There will be times when even a goodfaith presidential effort to convince the American people of the value of intervening will fail to create a political constituency for U.S...
...The 503 UN peacekeepers who remained in Rwanda throughout the genocide protected some 25,000 Rwandans...
...In 1915, the Turkish minister of the interior, Talaat Pasha, and the other Young Turk leaders set out to solve Turkey's "Armenia problem" by murdering leading Armenian intellectuals and deporting the rest of the population into the desert, where many would be killed by local gendarmerie, by starvation, or by disease...
...TO UNDERSTAND why the United States did not do more to stem genocide, of course, it is not enough to focus on the actions of American presidents or their foreignpolicy teams...
...The second reason for acting is the threat genocide in fact does pose to Western interests...
...Simply put, Western leaders did not act because they did not want to...
...government employees...
...Two officials in the Clinton administration, one at the National Security Council, the other at the State Department, conducted internal studies on the administration's response to the Rwanda genocide...
...Because it is unlikely that Western leaders will have the vision to recognize that they endanger their countries' long-term vital national interests by allowing genocide, the most realistic hope for combating it lies in the rest of us creating short-term political costs for those who do nothing...
...But although Western governments did not know all there was to know about the nature and scale of the violence, they knew plenty...
...When the Tutsi cried out, by contrast, every country in the world turned away...
...Iraqi soldiers and police bulldozed several thousand villages, rounded up and executed men, women, and children who remained in homes that fell within Hussein's "prohibited zones," and turned chemical weapons against the Kurdish people, sending tens of thousands of civilians fleeing into neighboring Turkey and Iran...
...Instead of aggressively hunting for knowledge or publicizing what was already known, Western officials took shelter in the fog of plausible deniability...
...During the Holocaust, though stories on the extermination of the Jews were not given anywhere near the prominence they warranted, they did regularly appear...
...response improving the next time around...
...The fanatics targeting America resemble the perpetrators of genocide in their espousal of collective responsibility of the most savage kind...
...Congress skeptical of the UN that they had toughened up their approach to peacekeeping and learned, in the president's words, "to say 'no.'" Just as they had done during the Bosnia War, U.S...
...officials have sometimes expressed remorse after genocide, none fear professional accountability for their sins of omission...
...THE NAZI GENOCIDE, which followed two decades later, left six million Jews and five million Poles, Roma, homosexuals, and political opponents dead...
...One cannot assume that every measure proposed would have been effective, but there is no doubt that even these small and tardy steps saved hundreds of thousands of lives...
...In order to contain the political fallout, U.S...
...The Holocaust is too present in Western schoolbooks and culture today for genocide to be "unimaginable...
...Milosevic took his wars from Slovenia and Croatia to Bosnia and then Kosovo...
...foreign policy decision makers now fear repercussions for their sins of commission—for decisions they make and policies they shape that go wrong...
...Thus intervention only came about on the rare occasions when the shorter term political interests of Western policy makers were triggered...
...On a smaller scale, a Rwandan hotel owner credits the mere phone calls of a U.S...
...Back in 1915, when communications were far more primitive, the New York Times managed 145 stories about the Turkish massacre of Armenians...
...Frankly labeling something genocide would build public support for using U.S...
...For the first year of the campaign, none of the Western powers condemned the atrocities, even privately...
...officials must focus less on avoiding embarrassing the United States and more on accurately diagnosing and treating the atrocities underway...
...DISSENT / Spring 2002 • 95...
...In 1987-1988, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein set out to wipe out the country's rural Kurdish population...
...But foreign policy is not driven by morality...
...In sum, the United States and its European allies have wholeheartedly endorsed the pledge of "never again," while tolerating unspeakable atrocities that have been committed in clear view...
...officials overemphasized the ambiguity of the facts...
...There will also be times when, owing to America's past dealings in the region, U.S...
...RAPHAEL LEMKIN, a Polish jurist who lost forty-nine members of his family in the Holocaust, invented the word "genocide" in 1944 because he believed that, in the aftermath of the Turkish "race murder" of the Armenians and of Hitler's extermination campaign against the Jews, the world's "civilized" powers needed to band together to outlaw crimes that were said to "shock the conscience...
...Thus, they downplayed the numerous and graphic atrocity reports smuggled out of Nazioccupied territory or intercepted by Allied intelligence officials...
...The fear, after September 11, is that the United States will view genocide prevention as a luxury it cannot afford as it sets out to better protect Americans...
...The cardinal sin was not seen to be Hitler's "genocide" (a term rarely used at Nuremberg), but the cross-border aggression, which was a permanent threat to international stability and, by inference, the strategic interests of the world's leading powers...
...The policies crafted in response to each of the major genocides of the twentieth century were not the accidental products of neglect...
...Here, the exception that proved the rule was the NATO air campaign in Bosnia...
...Those countries that did ratify it never invoked it to stop or punish genocide...
...It is true that the atrocities that were known remained abstract and remote, rarely acquiring the status of kneebuckling knowledge among ordinary citizens...
...From the Armenia genocide forward, U.S...
...We should have learned far sooner to trust even those accounts that could not be independently verified...
...It also made it likely that European governments were going to pull their peacekeepers out of the Balkans, which would have required U.S...
...Britain and France went to war with Germany after it invaded Poland in September 1939...
...It is unlikely that the international tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda or the future International Criminal Court would have come into existence without the Convention's passage...
...They attack civilians not because of anything the unwitting targets do personally, but because of who they are...
...forces abroad...
...After Senator Pell's sanctions effort forced a reluctant Reagan White House to condemn Saddam Hussein's gas attacks, the Iraqi dictator did not again use gas against the Kurds...
...Each time states began slaughtering and deporting their citizens, Western officials claimed that the proposed measures would do little to stem the horrors, or that they would do more harm than good...
...officials remained mute...
...A key reason European leaders were more engaged in the Balkans in the 1990s than their American counterparts was that Bosnian refugees did land in Britain, France, and Germany...
...The most typical response throughout the twentieth century was, "We didn't know...
...Although the mere fact of prosecution represented a major inroad into state sovereignty, the wartime perpetrators were not prosecuted for crimes they committed before the Nazi invasion of Poland...
...Press coverage of the atrocities has generated outrage, but it has generally been insufficient to prompt Western action...
...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...
...Unfortunately, while every genocide generated some activism within the U.S...
...But in the United States, when Cynthia McKinney and Donald Payne, two disgruntled members of the Congressional Black Caucus (which was itself quiet during the 1994 massacres), attempted to stage hearings on the U.S...
...They might set up safe areas to house refugees and civilians, and enforce them with well-armed and robustly mandated peacekeepers, air power, or both...
...To earn a death sentence, it was enough in the last century to be an Armenian, a Jew, or a Tutsi...
...They steadfastly avoided use of the word "genocide," which they believed carried with it legal and moral (and thus political) imperatives to act...
...When innocent life is being taken on such a scale and the United States and its allies have the power to stop the killing at reasonable risk, they have a duty to act...
...diplomatic leadership, that same Bosnian government might today be an American foe...
...Second, they hoped to contain the political costs and avoid the moral stigma associated with allowing genocide...
...The United States has not looked back...
...Case after case of wishful thinking debunked should have led us to shift the burden of proof away from the harried refugees and to the doubting skeptics who should be required to offer persuasive reasons for disputing refugee claims...
...With foreign policy crises all over the world implicating more traditional U.S...
...Without meaningful disclosure, public awareness, and official shame, it is hard to imagine the U.S...
...With the end of the cold war and the apparent rebirth of the UN (aided by the obsolescence of the superpower veto), one might have expected a greater readiness to prevent genocide...
...Although U.S...
...Although it is impossible to know the impact of steps never taken, the best testament to what the Western powers might have achieved is what they did achieve...
...leadership, the last century showed, others will be unwilling to step forward to act, and genocide will continue...
...readiness...
...The Clinton administration, burned by a UN mission gone bad in Somalia, kept U.S...
...But they examined only the paper trail and did not publicly disclose their findings...
...They also opted not to lift a UN arms embargo against the Muslims, even though they knew the measure froze in place a gross imbalance between the outgunned Muslims and their Serb foes, who had inherited the arsenal of the Yugoslav National Army...
...The bystanders were thus able to inhabit what one Protestant theologian in the Second World War called the "twilight between knowing and not knowing...
...On September 11, it was enough to be an American...
...They maintained an arms embargo against the Bosnian Muslims even after it was clear that the arms ban prevented the Muslims from defending themselves...
...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 Allies also called upon the United States to use its leverage as a neutral power either to convince Turkey to mend its ways or to press Germany to squeeze its ally...
...Although the United States had recently renewed diplomatic ties with China, U.S...
...As the 1990s showed, particularly in the reactions of the United States and Europe to carnage in Yugoslavia and Rwanda (the scene, in 1994, of the fastest and most efficient genocidal campaign of the twentieth century), Western countries replicated the pattern established in their earlier responses to the rise and domination of Hitler—long after they had supposedly internalized the "lessons of the Holocaust...
...president to champion human rights, made no mention of Pol Pot's slaughter for the first two years of his presidency...
...involvement of even the mildest form...
...Other countries and institutions whose personnel were actually present when genocide was committed have been forced to be more introspective...
...The inquiries did not lead to any notable political reforms, but they at least "named names," which might affect the behavior of bureaucrats the next time around...
...And however high the number of Islamic radicals that were imported during or created by the Serb slaughter of Bosnia's Muslims, the figure would have been exponentially higher if the United States and its allies had allowed the killing to continue past 1995...
...Britain, France, and the Netherlands responded to public pressure by contributing peacekeepers, but the United States refused to risk its troops to deliver food or protect people under siege...
...Some two hundred thousand people were killed in a three-and-a-half-year war...
...European and American political leaders were unanimous in their belief that they had "no dog" in the Balkan fight...
...Either by averting their eyes or attending to more pressing conventional strategic and political concerns, Western leaders have repeatedly denounced the Holocaust and allowed genocide...
...It is this belief that motivates most of those who seek intervention...
...And from the outside world, they learned the lesson of impunity...
...allies to step up their capacities, and in strengthening regional and international institutions that might eventually carry more of the weight...
...The Netherlands, France, and the UN have each staged inquiries into their responsibility for the fall of Srebrenica and the massacres that followed...
...But because the killers told themselves they were doing the world a favor by "cleansing" the "undesirables," some surely interpreted silence as consent or even support...
...They assumed U.S...
...The current Bosnian government, one legacy of the U.S.-brokered Dayton Peace Agreement, is far from perfect, but it is at least a strategic partner in the war against terrorism...
...Refugees have been militarized, but they tended not to wash up on America's shores...
...When Senators Claiborne Pell (D-R.I...
...The United States now has reason to fear that the poisonous potions Hussein tried out on the Kurds will be used next against Americans...
...Together, the Allies did nothing directly aimed at impeding the Nazis' extermination of the Jews...
...consul-general in Dhaka dissented, the State Department recalled him from his post...
...Only after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and after Adolf Hitler declared war on the United States did the United States join the European battle...
...The Turkish minister of the interior, Talaat Pasha, was aware that Sultan Abdul Hamid II had gotten away with murdering Armenians in 1895...
...foreign policy...
...Because genocide is usually veiled beneath the cover of war, when the killing began, some Western officials had genuine difficulty initially distinguishing genocide from conventional conflict...
...But the group drew the ire of former president Theodore Roosevelt for simultaneously denouncing the Turkish slaughter and opposing U.S...
...Eyeing potentially vast oil reserves in Iboland, the United States and the other European powers followed the British lead, opposing Biafran secession and insisting that food be delivered through Lagos, even though the Nigerian government openly used starvation as a weapon of war...
...lead...
...Because these dangers to national interests are long-term dangers and not immediately apparent, however, they have rarely convinced top Western policy makers...
...and European officials went out of their way to avoid branding the carnage "genocide...
...In a democracy, even an administration disinclined to act can be pressured into doing so...
...Citizens victimized by genocide or abandoned by the international community do not DISSENT / Spring 2002 9 3 COSTS OF GENOCIDE 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...
...Still, Lemkin's coinage has done more good than harm...
...This scenario was one that President Clinton wanted to avoid on the eve of his bid for reelection...
...They might use their technical resources to jam inflammatory radio or television broadcasts that are essential to propaganda, panic, and hate...
...Depending on the circumstances, Western powers might establish economic sanctions or freeze foreign assets, impose an arms embargo, or, if warranted, lift an arms embargo...
...officials did not ask China to use its influence with the Khmer Rouge...
...policy options should not be framed in terms of doing nothing or sending in the marines...
...Some are now arguing, understandably, that fighting terrorism requires husbanding America's resources and avoiding "social work" such as humanitarian intervention, which is said to harm U.S...
...But we must take responsibility for our incredulity...
...officials have opposed American intervention, firmly convinced that they were doing all they could—and, most important, all they should—in light of competing American interests and a highly circumscribed understanding of what was domestically "possible...
...It devoted more column inches to the horrors of Bosnia between 1992 and 1995 than it did to any other single foreign story...
...But President Franklin Roosevelt, like Wilson, kept America neutral...
...AMERICAN LEADERSHIP remains essential for mobilizing local, regional, and international responses to genocide...
...But generally dictators recognized that, provided the spillover costs were contained locally, their treatment of their own citizens would have little impact on Western leaders' perception of their country's military or economic security...
...But the main reason American leaders can persist in turning away is that genocide in distant lands has not captivated American Senators, congressional caucuses, Washington lobbyists, elite opinion shapers, grassroots groups, and individual constituents...
...But, more egregiously, despite knowing that Tutsi were being systematically murdered, the Clinton team demanded that the full UN mission be withdrawn from Rwanda and then resisted U.S...
...Woodrow Wilson's administration carefully guarded its neutrality, which was strongly favored by the American people, DISSENT / Spring 2002 n 8 5 COSTS OF GENOCIDE and resisted these calls for diplomatic intervention...
...Clearly, the United States does not have the resources to simultaneously defend itself from attack and deploy its troops to every trouble spot where the threat of ethnic violence lurks...
...The battle to stop genocide has thus been repeatedly lost in the realm of domestic politics...
...interests, the slaughter of civilians will rarely secure top-level attention on its own merits...
...The 1948 Genocide Convention, by contrast, made political leaders liable for genocide committed during peace or wartime, inside a state or outside it...
...Because the savagery of genocide so defied our everyday experience, many of us failed to comprehend what we had never experienced firsthand...
...For all the talk of the futility of foreign involvement, in the rare instances that the United States and its allies took even small steps, they appear to have saved lives...
...neutrality in doubt...
...But more fundamentally, without the existence of the Convention, or Lemkin's proselytizing around it, the word genocide would not carry the moral stigma it has acquired...
...farmers and manufacturers...
...The Convention's language was vague on precisely how the UN member states would meet their obligations, making no mention of military intervention and trusting that domestic prosecution of future "genocidists" would deter massacres...
...In most cases of genocide, those who "did not know" or "did not appreciate" chose not to do so...
...Saddam Hussein noted the international community's relaxed response to his chemical weapons attacks against Iran and his bulldozing of Kurdish villages...
...But in such circumstances, just because the United States might not deploy its troops, it does not mean that a U.S...
...I N ORDER TO understand this pattern—and by extension, put an end to it—we must first confront the grim record of international responses to genocide in the twentieth century...
...The European responses have either tended to be driven by similar motivations as those of U.S...
...soldiers in Somalia that the murder of Western troops would likely precipitate their withdrawal...
...What is needed are congressional inquiries with the power to subpoena documents and U.S...
...Prior to Lemkin's coinage, the systematic targeting of national, ethnic, or religious groups was known as "barbarity," a word that Lemkin believed failed to convey the unique horror of the crime...
...Whatever the growth in public awareness of the Holocaust and the triumphalism about the ascent of liberal democratic values, the last decade of the twentieth century was one of the most deadly in the grimmest century on record...
...Several European states armed Hussein in this period, and the Reagan administration provided more than five hundred million dollars worth of annual agricultural and manufacturing credits...
...soldiers will outweigh the benefits a military intervention would likely bring to the victims...
...The lifting of the embargo embarrassed Clinton at home because foreign policy was being made on Capitol Hill by a future presidential challenger, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole...
...officials of all ranks and roles in the executive and legislative branches...
...One might have expected a more spirited response to the Cambodian genocide that occurred from 1975 to 1979 because it was com8 6 n DISSENT / Spring 2002 COSTS OF GENOCIDE munist radicals (known as the Khmer Rouge, or Red Khmer) who murdered nearly two million of the country's seven million people...
...President Gerald Ford denounced the Khmer Rouge's massacres for a month, but then went completely silent...
...To those who pressed for sterner measures, Western leaders argued that the Allies would achieve more by focusing their military resources on winning battlefield victories than on disrupting concentration camp traffic...
...Hitler began by persecuting his own people and then expanded his campaign to the rest of Europe and, in time, the United States...
...In the end, despite heavy coverage of the Turkish horrors in the New York Times and elsewhere, Wilson took no measures that would have put U.S...
...Bureaucrats within the system who grasp the stakes can patiently lobby or brazenly agitate in the hope of forcing their bosses to entertain a full range of options...
...Russia, Britain, and France, fighting against Turkey and Germany in the war, publicized ghastly massacre reports...
...When Bill Clinton assumed the Oval Office in 1993, he contested his predecessor's tendency to blame "all sides" for the violence, pointing out that the bulk of the atrocities were being committed by the Serbs...
...When Alison des Forges of Human Rights Watch met with National Security Adviser Anthony Lake two weeks into the Rwanda genocide, he informed her that the phones were not ringing...
...The French, the Belgians, the UN, and the Organization for African Unity have undertaken investigations on the Rwanda genocide...
...When, on September 12, 2001, the United States turned for help to America's allies around the world, Americans were grati92 n DISSENT / Spring 2002 COSTS OF GENOCIDE fied by the overwhelming response...
...Indeed, on occasion, the Western powers directly or indirectly aided those committing genocide...
...Once the Vietnamese had overthrown the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in January 1979, the Carter administration, Ronald Reagan's administration, and all of the European powers maintained recognition of the regime rather than allow the Vietnamese-installed government to be seated at the United Nations or leave the UN seat empty...
...It is one of "success...
...But this is simply untrue...
...SAMANTHA POWER is the executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, the author of "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide...
...EARLY A CENTURY after the "race murder" of the Armenians and more than _ a half century after the liberation of the Nazi death camps, the crucial question is, why do decent men and women who firmly believe genocide should "never again" be permitted allow it to happen...
...and European spheres of concern...
...Make more noise...
...In 1992, when Bosnian Serbs began systematically deporting and murdering Muslims and Croats in Bosnia, the United States and Europe decided not to intervene with air strikes to protect civilians...
...Instead of giving genocide the moral attention it warranted and at least vigilantly denouncing the perpetrators, Western governments repeatedly trusted in negotiation, clung to diplomatic niceties and neutrality, and shipped humanitarian aid...
...But in the aftermath of Vietnam, Western governments paid little heed to bloodshed committed in a part of the world they were anxious to leave behind...
...Still, in 1969, Britain maintained active support for the Nigerian government while it starved and murdered the Ibo people of Biafra...
...Embassy personnel were withdrawn, intelligence assets on the ground were scarce, editors were typically reluctant to assign their reporters to places where neither Western interests nor Western readers were engaged, and journalists who attempted to report the atrocities were limited in their mobility...
...decision makers or the European allies have directly followed the U.S...
...In 1948, largely on Lemkin's prodding, the UN General Assembly unanimously passed the United Nations' first-ever human rights treaty, the Genocide Convention, which required signatories "to undertake to prevent and punish" genocide...
...Beginning in 1979 and continuing throughout the 1980s, the United States orchestrated the vote at the UN to favor maintaining recognition of the Khmer Rouge...
...government...
...policy was immutable, that their concerns were already understood by their bosses, and that speaking (or walking) out would only reduce their capacity to improve the policy...
...With advances in technology and in the monitoring of human rights groups, Western leaders have begun relying on a second claim: "We didn't fully appreciate...
...military force...
...Pol Pot's representatives occupied Cambodia's seat at the UN for another decade...
...If the Western powers had made genocide prevention a priority, they could have saved countless more...
...The United States and its European allies are still paying for their earlier neglect of the Balkans by having to grapple with mounting violence in Macedonia that threatens the stability of southeastern Europe...
...They took shelter in the utter inconceivability of what was being documented...
...As the writer David Rieff once noted, "never again" might best be defined as, "Never again would Germans kill Jews in Europe in the 1940s...
...They played up the likely downsides of any proposed intervention...
...The personalities, ideologies, and geopolitical constraints have shifted with time, but the major powers have consistently refused to take risks to suppress genocide...
...Instead of regarding intervention as an allornothing proposition, the United States and its allies should respond to genocide by publicly identifying and threatening its perpetrators with prosecution, demanding the expulsion of representatives of genocidal regimes from international institutions such as the United Nations, closing the perpetrators' embassies in Western capitals, and calling upon countries aligned with the perpetrators to ask them to use their influence...
...Armenian, Jewish, Cambodian, Tutsi, Bosnian, and other survivors and witnesses have had trouble making "the unbelievable believable...
...The system worked...
...Many believe that NATO's 1999 intervention in Kosovo and the current trial of Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, which were once thought to mark important precedents, will in fact represent high-water marks for genocide prevention and punishment...
...More than a half century has passed since the Genocide Convention came into effect, and genocide has proceeded virtually unabated...
...All we do know is that the perpetrators of genocide were quick studies who were remarkably attuned both to the tactics of their predecessors and to the world's response...
...NATO intervened with a heavy barrage of bombing in August 1995, when its assessment of the costs of intervening was lowered by the Croatian Army's rout of Serb forces, and when its assessment of the costs of not intervening was raised by the U.S...
...military action...
...To be sure, the information emanating 88 n DISSENT / Spring 2002 COSTS OF GENOCIDE from countries victimized by genocide was imperfect...
...There will be times when the risk to U.S...
...And instead of making Western policy makers more inclined to stop genocide, ratification seemed only to make them more reluctant to use the "g-word...
...Still, the lively debates over ratification that occurred in national legislatures testified to the seriousness with which delegates believed they were committing their country's resources and prestige to banning targeted slaughter...
...It is difficult, in retrospect, to ascertain DISSENT / Spring 2002 n 89 COSTS OF GENOCIDE what a determined diplomatic, economic, legal, or military intervention could have achieved or what it would have cost...
...nor European diplomats uttered much protest when Germany passed the Nuremberg Laws and began destroying Jewish businesses, synagogues, and homes...
...Instead of causing Americans to retreat from global humanitarian engagement, the terrorist attacks could cause us to empathize with peoples victimized by genocide...
...The United States did not ratify the Convention for forty years...
...military force...
...This President Clinton said in an apology delivered in Rwanda four years after the genocide: "We did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed of the unimaginable terror which engulfed you...
...When they ignored genocide around the world, the Western powers were not intending to "green light" the perpetrators...
...credit program, the Reagan administration and the farm lobby blocked the measure, even though the human toll of Hussein's gas attacks had earned frontpage news coverage...
...Because so many individual perpetrators were killing for the first time and deciding daily how far they would go, the United States and its European allies missed critical opportunities to try to deter them...
...Allowing genocide undermines regional and international stability, creates militarized refugees, and signals dictators that hate and murder are permissible tools of statecraft...
...But because it was not considered, high-level officials in the United States and Europe often were not involved in debating alternate policy options...
...troops stay home, American leadership will be indispensable in assembling "coalitions of the willing" to deploy ground troops, in encouraging U.S...
...Much of the best intelligence appeared in the morning papers...
...Hope for enforcement of the Genocide Convention lies in the stigma associated with committing and allowing the crime of genocide—and paradoxically in the lengths to which Western policy makers have gone to vow never again to allow genocide and the comparable lengths to which they have gone, while allowing it, to deny its occurrence...
...military intervention with pacifist appeals to "put safety first...
...When the UN's Srebrenica investigators approached the U.S...
...The stories that emerge from genocidal societies are, by definition, "incredible...
...THE REAL REASON the United States and the European states did not do what they could and should have done to stop genocide was not a lack of knowledge or a lack of capacity, but a lack of will...
...The investigators were granted access to a group of hand-picked junior and midlevel officials who knew or revealed next to nothing about what the United States knew during the Srebrenica slaughter...
...There are two main reasons that the United States and its European allies should stop genocide...
...Germany, which was aligned with Turkey in the war, actively covered up eyewitness reports of atrocities...
...This claim, too, is misleading...
...In the end, the UN team was forbidden from making any independent contact with U.S...
...Rwandan gunmen deliberately targeted the Belgian peacekeepers at the start of their genocide because they knew from the U.S...
...But the pattern of nonintervention established in 1915 proved durable...
...And they took solace in the normal operations of the foreign-policy bureaucracy, which permitted an illusion of continual deliberation, complex activity, and intense concern...
...Two years later, the Western powers did not protest when Pakistan responded to a Bengali autonomy movement in East Pakistan by sending in its army and murdering more than a million people...
...Because so little noise has been made about genocide, U.S...
...diplomat with deterring militias from attacking Tutsi inhabitants of his hotel during the genocide...
...They were concrete choices made by the world's most influential decision makers after implicit and ex90 n DISSENT / Spring 2002 COSTS OF GENOCIDE plicit weighing of costs and benefits...
...In 1972, when the Tutsi government in Burundi killed some hundred thousand Hutu, the Western powers downplayed the atrocities, treating them as an "internal affair...
...it is detrimental to sound policy...
...soldiers, Clinton avoided meaningful action...
...American security and security for Americans 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...
...and Jesse Helms (R-N.C...
...By and large, they achieved both aims...
...In the 1970s, Senate hearings on Capitol Hill documented abuses committed by America and its cold war allies in Latin America, southeast Asia, and elsewhere...
...They feared that drawing attention to the murder of Jews or admitting additional refugees would undermine domestic public support for the war...
...Slobodan Milosevic saw that he got away with the brutal suppression of independence movements in Slovenia and Croatia and reasoned he would pay no price for doing the same in Bosnia and Kosovo...
...A nongovernmental organization known as the Armenia Atrocities Committee drew wide public attention to the murder of fellow Christians and even managed to raise money for humanitarian aid...
...And they made promises to the people of Srebrenica and Rwanda they did not intend to keep...
...troop participation in a potentially bloody and certainly humiliating rescue mission...
...ambassador in Constantinople (now Istanbul) Henry Morgenthau, Sr., and other consular officials in the field, U.S...
...They believed that genocide was wrong, but they were not prepared to invest the military, financial, diplomatic, or domestic political capital needed to stop it...
...And history has shown that the suffering of victims has rarely been sufficient to spark a Western intervention...
...THE SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 attacks on the United States may have permanently altered U.S...
...Fearing confrontation with his military, unsure of domestic political support, and determined to avoid "Americanizing" the war and endangering U.S...
Vol. 49 • April 2002 • No. 2
