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.

Nadeem Aslam, The Blind Man's Garden

Aslam, Nadeem. The Blind Man's Garden. Toronto: Bond Street Books, 2013

“The West has dared to ask itself the question, 'What begins after God?'” (p. 319)
“'No one from here can know what the Westerners know,' the man says. 'The Westerners are unknowable to us. The divide is too great, too final. It's like asking what the dead or the unborn know.'” 
(p. 350)

Set in Afghanistan and Pakistan during the “War on Terror” following 911, Aslam's superb novel takes us into the land that no Westerner can know, “the divide is too great, too final.” We are on the ground in the land of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, militant arms of Islam running for cover as American helicopters roar overhead. It's a land also of moderate Muslims, lapsed Muslims, Christians. The faithful see the world through the eyes of ingrained belief and the others have placed their confidence in bullets and bombs.

As much as no resident of Heer in Pakistan can understand what makes Westerners tick, so the pilots in those helicopters, the raiding, bombastic American soldiers blindly trespass among the peoples of cultures about which they are effectively clueless.

For the “ordinary” citizen of Pakistan and Afghanistan, the violent turmoil succeeding 9/11 is unfathomable. Loyal to the idea of a brotherhood under attack, young men sneak off to battle zones to fight the infidel, there to be killed in battle action or captured and sold to the Americans for a ransom by warlords with their private agendas. In such a place and time, it's difficult knowing who is brother, who is traitor, who is collaborator. Speaking becomes dangerous; who knows where the words will go to come back through the barrel of a gun?

The story revolves around Rohan who suffers daily with the loss and guilt over his beloved Sofia whose last words to him were that she had lost her faith. Rohan has a son, Jeo, who makes an ill-advised journey toward Kabul to practice his newly acquired medical skills in aid of wounded soldiers. Jeo leaves behind his young wife, Naheed, who was married by arrangement to Jeo while she was deeply in love with Jeo's foster brother, Mikal. In the family also are Yasmin and Basie whose lives are made more than normally precarious by their employment in a Christian school, a place viscerally detested by jihadists and a handy target for hostage taking and attack.

Rohan and Sofia founded a school in Heer meant to be progressive in a regressive society. But since Sofia's death and Rohan's retirement, darker forces have taken it over and turned it into a training ground for what the West calls terrorists, but whom its students would call freedom fighters. Rohan and his family have been allowed to remain living in their house nearby, a house that adjoins a wonderful garden from which the title derives. It's Aslam's sensitive and poetic depiction of the garden and what it means to live among the trees, birds and flowers that forms a fitting counterpoint to the chaos and murder all around.

A poignant interlude in a fast-moving, changing story of the family has Tara—a seamstress and Naheed's mother—taking on the job of sewing an American flag “. . . large, about the size of four bedsheets” so that it can be burned in a demonstration. “'It's for after the Friday prayers next week . . . make sure that it's of a material that doesn't burn too fast or too slowly? The flames have to look inspiring and fearsome in the photographs.” (p. 99) As she sews, Tara wonders about the meaning of the red, white and blue and the complicated design. “Are the white and red stripes rivers of milk and wine, flowing under a sky bursting with the splendor of stars? Or are they paths soaked with blood, alternating with paths strewn with bleached white bones, leading out of a sea full of explosions.” (p. 100)

I am, of course, a Westerner. To the people on the streets of Kabul, Peshawar or Heer, my faith, my culture, my motivations must be as inscrutable as theirs are to me. Westerners need to read Aslam's book, if only to give them a little more of the feeling of what it's like to live in a place where every disagreement with the rest of the world looks like an attack on Islam. Ignorance breeds contempt for the unknown; in The Blind Man's Garden, this tendency is illustrated best when an American soldier is rescued from death in the desert and found to have the Arabic for INFIDEL tattooed on his back. To a devout Muslim, this pride in being an unbeliever is a slap in Allah's face, a thing that cannot possibly be explained or excused.

Like me, you might come away from Aslam's book wondering: what in God's name have we done and are we doing in the Arab world?