More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
July 10 - July 27, 2019
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.
There was not much sense in disturbing or confusing him with facts. He had already made up his mind.
It seems inconsistent with our concepts of civilization that selling a drug to an individual is a matter of worldly concern, while gassing millions of human beings might be a problem of internal concern. It seems also inconsistent with our philosophy of life that abduction of one woman for prostitution is an international crime while sterilization of millions of women remains an internal affair of the state in question.4
One State Department official met a junior official’s appeal for action by asking, “Do you know of any official whose career has been advanced because he spoke out for human rights?”
“The true opponents to ratification in this case are not groups or individuals,” Proxmire noted in one of 199 speeches he gave on the convention in 1967. “They are the most lethal pair of foes for human rights everywhere in the world—ignorance and indifference.”
Lon Nol was pro-American, but like many U.S.-sponsored dictators of the period, he was also corrupt, repressive, and incompetent.
Violence was not an unfortunate byproduct of the revolution; it was an indispensable feature of it. But like so many targeted peoples before them, Cambodians were consoled by the presumption of reasonableness.
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. Of course, the public was unlikely to become outraged if the horrors were not reported.
“They were killing anyone who wore glasses,” Solarz remembers, “because if they wore glasses, it suggested they knew how to read, and if they knew how to read, it suggested they had been infected with the bourgeois virus.
In choosing between a genocidal state and a country hostile to the United States, the Carter administration chose what it thought to be the lesser evil, though there could hardly have been a greater one.
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.
“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.”
The Washington Post’s Jonathan Randal testily describes the tendency of journalists inexperienced in the region to generalize wildly and irresponsibly. “All journalists seem to believe that life begins when they arrive. They get off the plane and expect to be instant experts,” he says. “The parties on the ground know when our deadlines are and play us like violins.”
“What would the West be doing now if the religious convictions of the combatants were reversed, and a Muslim force was now trying to destroy two million beleaguered Christians and/or Jews?”
War that spread was deemed threatening to the United States. Regardless of how many civilians died, one that remained internal was not.
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.”
“Burundi had just blown up, and 50,000 had been killed in just a few days,” Dallaire explains. “So when the plane went down, we actually expected around 50,000 plus dead. Can you imagine having that expectation in Europe? Racism slips in so it changes our expectations.”
In the three days during which some 4,000 foreigners were evacuated, about 20,000 Rwandans were killed.
“The two plans had very different objectives,” Dallaire says. “My mission was to save Rwandans. Their mission was to put on a show at no risk.”
“If you run, you hit the bullet,” the Sarajevo saying went. “If you walk, the bullet hits you.”
The president of the United States does not have the right to make the people of the United States seem as indecent as he is. He has the power, but he does not have the right.69
When he had fought to get the genocide convention placed on the books, he was never so naive as to believe passage was a sufficient condition for enforcement. He was simply convinced that it was a necessary one.
As the writer David Rieff noted, “never again” might best be defined as “Never again would Germans kill Jews in Europe in the 1940s.”
The most common response is, “We didn’t know.” This is not true.
U.S. officials fear repercussions for their sins of commission—for decisions they make and policies they shape that go wrong. But none fear they will pay a price for their sins of omission. If everyone within the government is motivated to avoid “another Somalia” or “another Vietnam,” few think twice about playing a role in allowing “another Rwanda.”
In 1994 Rwanda, a country of just 8 million, experienced the numerical equivalent of more than two World Trade Center attacks every single day for 100 days. On an American scale this would mean 23 million people murdered in three months. When, on September 12, 2001, the United States turned for help to its friends around the world, Americans were gratified by the overwhelming response. When the Tutsi cried out, by contrast, every country in the world turned away.
