A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide

by Samantha Power

The United States had never in its history intervened to stop genocide and had in fact rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred.

I have found that in fact U.S. policymakers knew a great deal about the crimes being perpetrated. Some Americans cared and fought for action, making considerable personal and professional sacrifices. And the United States did have countless opportunities to mitigate and prevent slaughter. But time and again, decent men and women chose to look away. We have all been bystanders to genocide. The crucial question is why.

It is in the realm of domestic politics that the battle to stop genocide is lost. American political leaders interpret society-wide silence as an indicator of public indifference. They reason that they will incur no costs if the United States remains uninvolved but will face steep risks if they engage. Potential sources of influence—lawmakers on Capitol Hill, editorial boards, nongovernmental groups, and ordinary constituents—do not generate political pressure sufficient to change the calculus of America’s leaders.

It is daunting to acknowledge, but this country’s consistent policy of nonintervention in the face of genocide offers sad testimony not to a broken American political system but to one that is ruthlessly effective. The system, as it stands now, is working.8 No U.S. president has ever made genocide prevention a priority, and no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence. It is thus no coincidence that genocide rages on.

Talaat once asked Morgenthau whether the United States could get the New York Life Insurance Company and Equitable Life of New York, which for years had done business with the Armenians, to send a complete list of the Armenian policyholders to the Turkish authorities. “They are practically all dead now and have left no heirs,” Talaat said. “The Government is the beneficiary now.”19 Morgenthau was incensed at the request and stormed out of Talaat’s office.

Lemkin was intrigued and brought the case to the attention of one of his professors. Lemkin asked why the Armenians did not have Talaat arrested for the massacre. The professor said there was no law under which he could be arrested. “Consider the case of a farmer who owns a flock of chickens,” he said. “He kills them and this is his business. If you interfere, you are trespassing.” “It is a crime for Tehlirian to kill a man, but it is not a crime for his oppressor to kill more than a million men?” Lemkin asked. “This is most inconsistent.”

There was not much sense in disturbing or confusing him with facts. He had already made up his mind.19

The Allies’ suppression of the truth about Hitler’s Final Solution has been the subject of a great deal of historical scholarship.13 Intelligence on Hitler’s extermination was plentiful in both classified and open sources.

the notion of getting attacked for being (rather than for doing) was too discomfiting and too foreign to process readily.

In Axis Rule he wrote that “genocide” meant “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.”40 The perpetrators of genocide would attempt to destroy the political and social institutions, the culture, language, national feelings, religion, and economic existence of national groups. They would hope to eradicate the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and lives of individual members of the targeted group.

A group did not have to be physically exterminated to suffer genocide. They could be stripped of all cultural traces of their identity. “It takes centuries and sometimes thousands of years to create a natural culture,” Lemkin wrote, “but Genocide can destroy a culture instantly, like fire can destroy a building in an hour.”42

Because of his prior lobbying efforts, the third count of the October 1945 Nuremberg indictment had stated that all twenty-four defendants “conducted deliberate and systematic genocide, viz., the extermination of racial and national groups, against the civilian populations of certain occupied territories.” This was the first official mention of genocide in an international legal setting.

Lemkin recovered some of the strength sapped by years of unceasing commotion. While visiting a local casino, he even invited a young lady to dance a tango. He was captivated by her beauty and recalled, “Every word the girl said was intelligent and meaningful.” She told him she was of Indian descent, born in Chile. Lemkin saw his opening: He informed her that his work on mass slaughter would be of particular interest to her because of the destruction of the Incas and the Aztecs.31 This was one pickup line the young woman had probably never heard before. She soon departed.

They will not have to think up explanations for a failure to ratify the genocide convention for which Dr. Lemkin worked so patiently and so unselfishly for a decade and a half. . . . Death in action was his final argument—a final word to our own State Department, which has feared that an agreement not to kill would infringe upon our sovereignty.47

It would have been politically unthinkable to intervene militarily and emotionally unpleasant to pay close heed to the horrors unfolding, but it was cost-free to look away. And this was what two U.S. presidents and most lawmakers, diplomats, journalists, and citizens did, before, during, and after the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror.

History is replete with conflicts between regular armed forces that unleash and fuel the passions that give rise to campaigns to eliminate certain “undesirables.” War legitimates such extreme violence that it can make aggrieved or opportunistic citizens feel licensed to target their neighbors.

The key ideological premise that lay behind the KR revolution was that “to keep you is no gain; to kill you is no loss.”84 Liberal societies preach a commitment to individual liberty embodied in the mantra, “Better ten guilty men go free than one innocent man be convicted.” Khmer Rouge revolutionary society was predicated on the irrelevance of the individual. The KR even propagated the adage, “It is better to arrest ten people by mistake than to let one guilty person go free.”

Iraq used chemical weapons approximately 195 times between 1983 and 1988, killing or wounding, according to Iran, some 50,000 people, many of them civilians.11 One Iraqi commander was quoted widely saying, “for every insect there is an insecticide.”

Hussein, by contrast, did know how the world worked. Having seen how effective chemical weapons could be against his external foe, Hussein turned them next against his chief internal enemy. In May 1987 Iraq became the first country ever to attack its own citizens with chemical weapons.

The Kurds, like many recent victims of genocide, fall into a class of what genocide scholar Helen Fein calls “implicated victims.” Although most of the victims of genocide are apolitical civilians, the political or military leaders of a national, ethnic, or religious group often make decisions (to claim basic rights, to stage protests, to launch military revolt, or even to plot terrorist attacks) that give perpetrators an excuse for crackdown and bystanders an excuse to look away.

“There is a certain racism and classism here that tells us that we should not take seriously the words of peasants or that we should look down on them.” But he had seen the doubters proven wrong once outsiders visited Cambodia in the early 1980s. “The real lesson of my experiences in these camps over the years is that refugees don’t lie,” Galbraith reflects. “This is not to say that we should accept one account from one refugee, but in the case of the Cambodians, the Kurds, and later the Bosnians, there were thousands and thousands of witnesses to the crimes. We must learn to believe them.”

With a hideous lack of irony, several chemical companies also called to inquire how their products might be affected if sanctions were imposed to punish chemical weapons use.

U.S. politicians were notoriously captive to special interests.126 Walter Lippmann once wrote of U.S. legislators, “They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding threatening elements in their constituencies. The decisive consideration is not whether the proposition is good but whether . . . the active-talking constituents like it immediately.”127

War that spread was deemed threatening to the United States. Regardless of how many civilians died, one that remained internal was not.

The Serbs were systematically killing and expelling Muslim and Croat civilians from territory they controlled. The talk of “ancient hatreds” implied a degree of inevitability and spontaneity belied by the carefully coordinated, top-down nature of the killing, which was better signaled by the term “genocide.”

As one senior U.S. official remembers, “The first response to trouble is, ‘Let’s yank the peacekeepers.’ But that is like believing that when children are misbehaving the proper response is, ‘Let’s send the babysitter home,’ so the house gets burned down.”

Be Careful. Legal at State was worried about this yesterday—Genocide finding could commit [the U.S. government] to actually ‘do something.’”

satisfy her self-righteousness while disengaging her responsibility.”

As the writer David Rieff noted, “never again” might best be defined as “Never again would Germans kill Jews in Europe in the 1940s.”1 Either by averting their eyes or attending to more pressing conventional strategic and political concerns, U.S. leaders who have denounced the Holocaust have themselves repeatedly allowed genocide.

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