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January 1 - April 17, 2017
in 1933, Lemkin, then a lawyer, made plans to speak before an international criminal law conference in Madrid before a distinguished gathering of elder colleagues.5 Lemkin drafted a paper that drew attention both to Hitler’s ascent and to the Ottoman slaughter of the Armenians, a crime that most Europeans either had ignored or had filed away as an “Eastern” phenomenon. If it happened once, the young lawyer urged, it would happen again. If it happened there, he argued, it could happen here.
Hitler met with his military chiefs and delivered a notorious tutorial on a central lesson of the recent past: Victors write the history books. He declared: It was knowingly and lightheartedly that Genghis Khan sent thousands of women and children to their deaths. History sees in him only the founder of a state…The aim of war is not to reach definite lines but to annihilate the enemy physically. It is by this means that we shall obtain the vital living space that we need. Who today still speaks of the massacre of the Armenians?16 A week later, on September 1, 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland.
More than 700,000 Jews had already been killed; millions more were endangered. Its authors called upon the Polish government-in-exile to press the Allies to retaliate against German citizens in their countries.
believe what they read; the notion of getting attacked for being (rather than for doing) was too discomfiting and too foreign to process readily. A plot for outright annihilation had never been seen and therefore could not be imagined. The tales of German cremation factories and gas chambers sounded far-fetched. The deportations could be explained: Hitler needed Jewish slave labor for the war effort. During the Turkish campaign against the Armenians, this same propensity for incredulity was evident, but it was even more pronounced in the 1940s because of a backlash against the hyped-up
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A group did not have to be physically exterminated to suffer genocide. They could be stripped of all cultural traces of their identity.
What mattered was that one set of individuals intended to destroy the members of a group not because of anything they did but because of who they were.
The 1961 film Judgment at Nuremberg, starring Judy Garland and Spencer Tracy, jarred millions of viewers by including actual graphic footage from the camps, but the film contained few references to the specific victim groups.26 When a major network sponsor, the American Gas Association, objected to the mention of gas chambers in the 1959 teleplay version of the film, CBS caved in to pressure and blanked out the references.27 The word “holocaust” did not appear in the New York Times until 1959.
Lemkin had coined the word “genocide.” He had helped draft a treaty designed to outlaw it. And he had seen the law rejected by the world’s most powerful nation. Seven people attended Lemkin’s funeral.
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?”66 U.S. policymakers
“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.
In 1972 Lon Nol famously had airplanes sprinkle blessed sand around Phnom Penh’s perimeters to ward off his ungodly Communist enemies.
Before it begins, genocide is not easy to wrap one’s mind around. A genocidal regime’s intent to destroy a group is so hideous and the scale of its atrocities so enormous that outsiders who know enough to forecast brutality can rarely bring themselves to imagine genocide. This was true of many of the diplomats, journalists, and European Jews who observed Hitler throughout the 1930s, and it was certainly true of diplomats, journalists, and Cambodians who speculated about the Khmer Rouge before they seized power. The omens of imminent, mass
Alarming reports of atrocities are typically met with skepticism. Usually, though, it is the refugees, journalists, and relief workers who report the abuses and U.S. government decision-makers who resist belief. Some cannot imagine. Others do not want to act or hope to defer acting and thus either downplay the reports or place them in a broader “context” that helps to subsume their horror.
Because the perpetrators of genocide are careful to deny observers access to their crime scenes, journalists must rely on the eyewitness or secondhand accounts of refugees who manage to escape. Reporters trained to authenticate their stories by visiting or confirming with multiple sources thus tend initially to shy away from publishing refugee accounts. When they do print them, they routinely add caveats and disclaimers: With almost every condemnation or citation of intelligence that appeared in the press about Cambodia in 1975 and 1976, reporters included reminders that they had only
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September 1977 Pol Pot said in Phnom Penh that “only the smallest possible number” out of the “1 or 2 percent” of Cambodians who opposed the revolution had been “eradicated.” Conceding some killings gave the KR a greater credibility than if they had denied atrocities outright, and many observers were taken in by these concessions.
apathy became justified by what journalist William Shawcross later called “propaganda, the fear of propaganda and the excuse of propaganda.”
With the policy decided and the tilt toward China firm, Secretary of State Vance called immediately for the Vietnamese to “remove their forces from Cambodia.” Far from applauding the KR ouster, the United States began loudly condemning Vietnam. 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.
American groups that supported the law in a passive way. “Let’s not kid ourselves,” Proxmire declared in 1986, the so-called discredited organizations can be “astonishingly effective.” He identified the challenge: Responsible, respected, prestigious supporters of the treaty rarely discuss it. When they do discuss it, they talk about it in factual, low key, unemotional, reasonable terms. This doesn’t excite anyone. The overwhelming majority of Americans agree with the treaty’s supporters but they aren’t excited about it. They are not moved emotionally. They rarely listen. So what’s the result?
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Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, too, vehemently denied allegations of wrongdoing. Aziz did not dispute that the Iraqi government was relocating a number of Kurds who lived near the Iranian border. But sounding an awful lot like Talaat Pasha, the Ottoman minister of the interior in 1915, he stressed, “This is not a deportation of people, this is a reorganization of the urban situation.”
Internal memoranda thus tended to lament Iraqi repression only parenthetically: “Human rights and chemical weapons use aside, in many respects our political and economic interests run parallel with those of Iraq.”
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.
As remarkable as the existence of this faith is its durability. In Cambodia even those subjected daily to the rigors and horrors of Khmer Rouge rule persisted in hoping that those who were hauled away were only being reeducated. In Bosnia, even two years into the war, when more than 100,000 of their neighbors had been killed and the bloodiest of displacements had taken place, thousands of Muslims and Croats refused to leave Serbheld territory. Some had no money, and by then the Serbs had begun charging an “exit tax” of nearly $1,000. But most who remained found the fear of death preferable to
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I argued that we should intervene because it was “the right thing to do.” This is an argument you almost never make in government if you know what you are doing. It virtually guarantees that you don’t get invited to the next meeting and that you gain a reputation for moralism.
A few weeks later she finally chose to file a more detailed story told to her by a man who was able to escape from a Serbrun camp with the help of a Serbian Orthodox priest. The camp, in the northwestern Bosnian town of Brcko, was situated in a slaughterhouse. The same machines formerly used to kill cattle were used to kill his fellow prisoners, the witness said. Pitter’s news agency, United Press International, refused to run the story, saying there was not enough proof and citing legal concerns.
One Muslim, Selma Hecimovic, took care of Muslim and Croat women in Bosnia who had been raped at camps the Serbs established specifically for that purpose. She recalled the ways journalists and human rights workers pressed the victims and witnesses of torture: At the end, I get a bit tired of constantly having to prove. We had to prove genocide, we had to prove that our women are being raped, that our children have been killed. Every time I take a statement from these women, and you journalists want to interview them, I imagine those people, disinterested, sitting in a nice house with a
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President Bush himself never paid much attention to the conflict in Bosnia. National Security Adviser Scowcroft remembers that about once a week Bush would turn to him and say, “Now tell me again what this is all about?”This was at a time when some 70,000 Bosnians had been killed in seven months.
In his Foreign Policy article “The Human Reality of Realpolitik,” written in 1971, two decades before he became national security adviser, Lake had complained that the human dimensions of a policy were rarely discussed. “It simply is not done,” Lake wrote. “Policy—good, steady policy—is made by the ‘tough-minded.’…To talk of suffering is to lose ‘effectiveness,’ almost to lose one’s grip. It is seen as a sign that one’s rational arguments are weak.”
those who are suffering genocide are deemed to be biased and unreliable.
The UN Security Council was becoming bitterly divided over whether to use the word. Czech Ambassador Karel Kovanda had begun complaining that 80 percent of the council’s time was focused on whether and how to withdraw Dallaire’s peacekeepers, the other 20 percent on getting a cease-fire to end the civil war, which he compared to “wanting Hitler to reach a cease-fire with the Jews.”
the United States opposed the idea of sending reinforcements, no matter where they were from. The fear, articulated mainly at the Pentagon, was that what would start as a small engagement by foreign troops would end as a large and costly one by Americans. This was the lesson of Somalia, where U.S. troops had gotten into trouble after returning to bail out the beleaguered Pakistanis. The logical outgrowth of this fear was an effort to steer clear of Rwanda entirely and be sure others did the same.
“The failure was not an intelligence failure,” says Assistant Secretary Gati. “Ethnic cleansing was not a priority in our policy…When you make the original decision that you aren’t going to respond when these kinds of things happen, then, I’m sorry, but these things are going to happen.”
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
