Power, Samantha. “A Problem from
Hell:”America and the Age of Genocide. New
York: Basic Books, 2002
I'd
never thought about the 20th
Century as an “Age of Genocide,” but a reading of Power's book
makes it even clearer that the last 6 decades of that Century were
possibly the bloodiest 60 years in history. We begin with the
Holocaust in the 1940s followed by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge's
brutal purge of intellectuals, former officials and civil servants
and anyone not fitting their image of the worthy citizen of a
communist society. Then Power retells the stories of the gassing and
relocation of the Kurds of Northern Iraq by Saddam Hussein, the
brutal Bosnian Serb purging of the country's Muslims and
Croats (remember Srebrenica?), the slaughter of hundreds of thousands
of Tutsis by the Hutus of Rwanda and finally, the brutal murder and
eviction of the Muslim population of Kosovo.
Had
Power written this in 2015, we would no doubt have a chapter on ISIL
in Iraq and Syria.
But
“A Problem from Hell” isn't
primarily a history of the genocides of the last century. Power is an
Irish-American who teaches human rights and U.S. foreign policy at
Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. She reported on the
wars in the former Yugoslavia for the Boston Globe,
The Economist and The
New Republic from 1993-6. She is
well qualified, therefore, to focus on what is
her main thrust here, namely the U.S. responses (and non-responses)
to the genocides.
Not surprisingly, her country of adoption doesn't
fare well and the thrashing she gives the Bush and Clinton
administrations are at the core of her contentions that,
a) the U.S. is by its history and placement the obvious world leader
when it comes to foreign interventions and b), that the U.S. has
repeatedly abrogated its responsibility to exercise that leadership
when genocidal crises occur.
Obviously,
any decision to send troops and military equipment across oceans to
fight foreign wars is fraught with huge risks. In Power's assessment,
the U.S. experience of defeat in Vietnam added to the reluctance to
engage in Cambodia or Bosnia, for instance, and that's understandable
since American politics is a near-continuous struggle for re-election
and images of soldiers coming home in body bags don't function well
in presidential or senatorial campaigns.
This
represents the obvious risk.
But
the risk goes both ways: if politicians are seen to be callous in the
face of horrors occurring in, say Kurdistan or Kosovo, public opinion
has been known to turn on a dime so that the juggling of risks
becomes tricky to say the least. In Canada today, a single image of a
Syrian child washed up in Greece has put the Harper government in
danger of having its eyes blackened by public opinion.
Power
has hopes that the reluctance to engage to prevent or mitigate
genocides is not as marked as it once was, but that the interminable
delays in acting quickly and decisively have cost hundreds of
thousands of civilians their very lives. And if the moral,
humanitarian reasons aren't enough, Power offers two good reasons for
acting decisively when genocide looms its ugly head:
The United States should stop genocide for two reasons. The first
and most compelling reason is moral. When innocent life is being
taken on such a scale and the United States has the power to stop the
killing at reasonable risk, it has a duty to act . . . the second
reason: enlightened self-interest. [Experts] warned that allowing
genocide undermined regional and international stability, created
militarized refugees, and signaled dictators that hate and murder
were permissible tools of statecraft.(512)
In
support of the first reason, Power offers a startling illustration:
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.(512)
Reading
“A Problem from Hell”
turned out to be a project for me. With 516 pages of densely detailed
material plus 85 pages of notes, I had to renew the book at the
public library to get it done. The nature of the content didn't help,
but it's a dangerous world and I believe it's every citizens
responsibility to arm himself with a knowledge of history; our
collective futures depend on making wiser, timelier decisions.
If
you've never heard the story of Raphael Lemkin (whom I mentioned in a
post; click
here), then a reading of the first 5 chapters alone would make a
great project. Lemkin coined the word genocide
and spent most of his life pushing the UN to adopt what became a
convention on genocide, the foundation for legal interventions in,
and trial of perpetrators of, genocide. In a recent visit to the Human
Rights Museum in Winnipeg, I noted a small display honouring the work
of Raphael Lemkin.