Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell"

Power, Samantha. “A Problem from Hell:”America and the Age of Genocide. New York: Basic Books, 2002

I'd never thought about the 20^th 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.