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December 24, 2019 - April 13, 2020
those with the most at stake are in fact often the least prone to recognize their peril.
I don’t care which side wins.”29 What mattered to Cambodians was that the fighting stop.
Having watched their leaders cozy up to the United States and the United States repay them by bombing and invading their country, Cambodians longed for freedom from outside interference.
But few trusted the warnings. The Nixon and Ford administrations had cried wolf one time too many in Southeast Asia.
American editors and producers were simply not interested, and in the absence of photographs, video images, personal narratives that could grab readers’ or viewers’ attention, or public protests in the United States about the outrages, they were unlikely to become interested.
Without ever having visited the country, they rejected atrocity reports.
Even when they had reliable evidence in hand, Amnesty officials operated very much like the committees the United Nations had established to monitor human rights: They avoided public shaming when possible and approached governments directly.
Twining filtered future testimony through the prism of the Holocaust. “My mind wanted, needed, some way of framing the thing,”
The key ideological premise that lay behind the KR revolution was that “to keep you is no gain; to kill you is no loss.”
Those who argued that the number of Cambodians killed was in the hundreds of thousands or those who tried to generate press coverage of the horrors did so assuming that establishing the facts would empower the United States and other Western governments to act.
Because the treaty excluded political groups and so many of the KR murders were committed against perceived political enemies, it was actually a harder fit than one would expect.
Economist Albert Hirschman observed that those who do not want to act cite the futility, perversity, and jeopardy of proposed measures.
advocates of U.S. engagement tried to jar decisionmakers and ordinary citizens by likening Pol Pot’s atrocities to those of Hitler.
For neither the first nor the last time, geopolitics trumped genocide. Interests trumped indignation.
“Carter’s problem was that he had so many other problems,”
Reagan tried to appease him by citing the “political and strategic reasons” for visiting Bitburg. But in his public remarks Wiesel rejected Reagan’s defense. “The issue here is not politics, but good and evil. And we must never confuse them.
Although Proxmire believed that ratification of the genocide ban would spur Senate ratification of other human rights treaties such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights; the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women; the Convention on the Rights of the Child; and later the international treaty to ban land mines, none has passed.
Despite its recent ratification of the genocide convention, when the opportunity arose for the United States to send a strong message that genocide would not be tolerated—that the destruction of Iraq’s rural Kurdish populace would have to stop—special interests, economic profit, and a geopolitical tilt toward Iraq thwarted humanitarian concerns. The Reagan administration punted on genocide, and the Kurds (and later the United States) paid the price.
The U.S. refusal to bar the genocidal Khmer Rouge from the United Nations during the 1980s was an explicit outgrowth of U.S. hostility toward Vietnam. So, too, in the Middle East, the U.S. response to Iraq’s atrocities against the Kurds stemmed from its aversion toward revolutionary Iran.
During the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, and the Khmer Rouge terror, the United States had been neutral or, eventually, in World War II, at war with the genocidal regime. Here, the United States ended up aligned with one.
the accounts continued to be processed as if they were an ordinary feature of war.
Nothing in U.S. behavior signaled Hussein that he should think twice about now attempting to wipe out rural Kurds using whatever means he chose.
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.
“These things accelerate,” Galbraith says. “Hitler, when he took power in 1933, did not have a plan to exterminate all the Jews in Europe. Evil begets evil.”
Most U.S. laws are proposed by the executive branch. Some are drafted by lobbyists and adopted by the Senate. And many more are drafted by House and Senate staff, especially the committee staff.
Pell noted that although the sanctions bill would hurt some American businesses, Americans should be prepared to make sacrifices for a “moral issue of the greatest magnitude
“Those who did not want to know, or act, in World War II were always able to find the lack of proof at the right moment.”
One-quarter of the rice grown in Arkansas, Galbraith swiftly gathered, was exported to Iraq. Approximately 23 percent of overall U.S. rice output went there. One staffer representing Senator John Breaux of Louisiana actually appeared before Galbraith in tears and accused him of committing genocide against Louisiana rice growers. U.S. farmers also annually exported about 1 million tons of wheat to Iraq. As economist John Kenneth Galbraith, the father of the author of the sanctions package, mused to me years later, “The one thing you don’t want to do is take on the American farmer. There aren’t
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The United States had tremendous leverage with Iraq. Apart from supplying hefty agricultural and manufacturing credits, the United States was Iraq’s primary oil importer. But the Reagan administration viewed U.S. influence as something to be stored, not squandered.
For the first time in its history, Human Rights Watch found that a country had committed genocide. Often a large number of victims is required to help show an intent to destroy a group. But in the Iraqi case the confiscated government records explicitly recorded Iraqi aims to wipe out rural Kurdish life.
Diplomats initially argued that Iraq had not committed genocide. “They would say, ‘Gee, this doesn’t look like the Holocaust to me!’” Dicker recalls. But once they became familiar with the law, most officials dropped that objection and worried out loud about the consequences of scrutinizing a fellow state in an international court.
American policymakers have often fallen prey to wishful thinking in the face of what they later recognized to be genocide. But history has shown that this phenomenon is more human than American.
U.S. inaction over Bosnia could not be compared with the U.S. failure to bomb the railroads to the Nazi camps. Still, he acknowledged that “ethnic cleansing is the kind of inhumanity that the Holocaust took to the nth degree,”
The Clinton White House deplored the suffering of Bosnians far more than had the Bush White House, but a number of factors caused Clinton to back off from using force.
The State Department is difficult to leave. As with most hierarchical institutions, rituals entrench the solidarity of “members.” Stiff “initiation costs” include fiercely competitive foreign service exams, tedious years of stamping visas in consular offices around the world, and dull desk jobs in the home office. Because of the association of service with “honor” and “country,” exit is often seen as betrayal. Those few who depart on principle are excommunicated or labeled whistle-blowers. U.S. foreign policy lore is not laden with tales of the heroic resignee. A further deterrent to exit is
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Mr. Chairman, I won’t go on. I appreciate the time. But when the history books are written, we cannot say that we allowed genocide because health care was a priority. We cannot say that we allowed genocide because the American people were more concerned with domestic issues. History will record, Mr. Secretary, that this happened on our watch, on your watch, that you and the administration could and should have done more. I plead to you, there are hundreds of thousands of people that still can die. . . . I plead for you and the administration to make a more aggressive—to take a more aggressive
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in the Bosnian war, the truth had never been in short supply. What was missing was U.S. willingness to risk its own soldiers on the ground or to convince the Europeans to support NATO bombing from the air. As a result, the ethnic cleansing and genocide against the country’s Muslims proceeded apace, and more than 200,000 Bosnians were killed.
Jim Hooper, who had worked within both administrations and had chosen not to resign, juxtaposes the struggles: The Bush administration did not have to be persuaded it was OK to intervene. They had done so in the Gulf. They just had to be persuaded that this was the right place to do it. With the Clinton administration we had to convince them that it was OK to intervene and that this was the right place to do so. Their starting point was that military intervention was never OK. This made it doubly difficult.
The United States did almost nothing to try to stop it. Ahead of the April 6 plane crash, the United States ignored extensive early warnings about imminent mass violence. It denied Belgian requests to reinforce the peacekeeping mission. When the massacres started, not only did the Clinton administration not send troops to Rwanda to contest the slaughter, but it refused countless other options. President Clinton did not convene a single meeting of his senior foreign policy advisers to discuss U.S. options for Rwanda. His top aides rarely condemned the slaughter. The United States did not deploy
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When Woods of the Defense Department’s African affairs bureau suggested that the Pentagon add Rwanda-Burundi to its list of potential trouble spots, his bosses told him, in his words, “Look, if something happens in Rwanda-Burundi, we don’t care. Take it off the list. U.S. national interest is not involved and we can’t put all these silly humanitarian issues on lists. . . . Just make it go away.”
For all the concern of the U.S. officials familiar with Rwanda, their diplomacy suffered from several weaknesses. First, it continued to reveal its natural bias toward states and negotiations.
An examination of the cable traffic from the U.S. embassy in Kigali to Washington, between the signing of the Arusha agreement and the downing of the presidential plane, reveals that setbacks were perceived as “dangers to the peace process” more than as “dangers to Rwandans.”
The second problematic feature of U.S. diplomacy before and during the genocide was a tendency toward blindness bred by familiarity:
“The general attitude,” remembers Beardsley, “was, ‘Shut up. You’re a soldier. Let the experts handle this.’” But within weeks the “experts” had vanished, and Dallaire was on his own.
the precise nature and extent of the slaughter was obscured by the civil war, the withdrawal of U.S. diplomatic sources, some confused press reporting, and the lies of the perpetrator government.
I was self-conscious about saying the killings were “genocidal” because, to us in the West, “genocide” was the equivalent of the Holocaust or the killing fields of Cambodia. I mean millions of people. “Ethnic cleansing” seemed to involve hundreds of thousands of people. “Genocide” was the highest scale of crimes against humanity imaginable. It was so far up there, so far off the charts, that it was not easy to recognize that we could be in such a situation. I also knew that if I used the term too early, I’d have been accused of crying wolf and I’d have lost my credibility.
Around the time of President Habyarimana’s plane crash in Rwanda, Randall Robinson of TransAfrica started a hunger strike to protest the Clinton administration’s automatic repatriation of Haitians fleeing the coup that had ousted Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Robinson was quoted in the Washington Post on April 12, 1994, a week after the Rwandan massacres had begun, talking about America’s Haitian refugee policy: “I can’t remember ever being more disturbed by any public policy than I am by this one. I can’t remember any American foreign policy as hurtful, as discriminatory, as racist as this one. It
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Holly Burkhalter of Human Rights Watch acknowledges the CBC’s lethargy but notes, “We can’t forget that the White Caucus, which is a lot bigger, wasn’t very effective either.”
by the second week of the killing, Clinton, one of the most eloquent presidents of the twentieth century, could have made the case that something approximating genocide was under way, that an inviolable American value was imperiled by its occurrence, and that U.S. contingents at relatively low risk could stop the extermination of a people.
administration officials exaggerated the extremity of the possible responses.
