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April 11, 2002
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| A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide |
Introduction
JOANNE MYERS: Good morning. On behalf of the Carnegie Council
I’d like to welcome members and guests to our Author in the
Afternoon.
Today our guest is Samantha Power. She will be discussing her
recently published book, A Problem from Hell: America and the
Age of Genocide. Her book is devoted to a century’s history
of unchecked genocide and the lack of response to it, especially
in the United States.
I would like to mention that, coincidentally, today the International
Criminal Court became a reality. This is the first permanent institution
designed to put an end to impunity by establishing individual criminal
responsibility for the worst crimes against humanity. Sixty countries
ratified the statute for the ICC. The United States was not one.
To introduce Samantha we are very pleased to have with us Michael
Barnett. Mr. Barnett is a professor of political science and the
director of International Studies Programs at the University of
Wisconsin. In 1993 Professor Barnett was a Council on Foreign Relations
International Affairs Fellow at the U.S. Mission to the UN. While
there he worked on peacekeeping operations, including Rwanda, and
was able to observe first-hand the U.S. reaction to the Rwandan
genocide.
His most recent book, Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United
Nations and Rwanda, tells of this experience. He is also the
author of Confronting the Costs of War: Military Power, State,
and Society in Egypt and Israel and Dialogues in Arab Politics:
Negotiations in Regional Order and the Security Community.
Thank you for being here.
MICHAEL BARNETT: My pleasure. I was thinking about where
I was eight years ago this week, and I asked Samantha where she
was, and it turns out that we were both covering two different genocides,
but coming to radically different conclusions. Samantha was a journalist
in Bosnia, on this day covering the fall of Gorazde, and wondering
why the United States and NATO were not getting more involved to
stop the genocide.
I, on the other hand, was at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations,
where I had been covering the Rwandan peacekeeping operation for
the previous several months. I was probably writing talking points
for the ambassadors in which I highlighted the need to withdraw
the peacekeepers and close down the operation because there was
no peace to keep, there was chaos on the ground, and, after Somalia,
everyone well understood that the UN could not risk another failure
in some forlorn part of Africa.
In short, Samantha and I were reporting on different genocides
and coming to radically different conclusions. She was cursing the
American officials whom I was defending, arguing that the United
States should not get involved in another genocide somewhere else.
About two years ago, we crossed paths for the first time. We were
thick in our books, and she had contacted me about my recollections
about U.S. policy on Rwanda. We quickly discovered that we were
coming at our subject matters in remarkably similar ways.
For the past few years, I had been thinking about my experiences
at the UN and had concluded that very decent, well-meaning people
at the UN at the time of the genocide believed fundamentally that
they should not intervene to stop crimes against humanity ¾ not simply that it was pragmatic, but rather that
it was the right thing to do to not get involved, to be a bystander
to genocide. For the last several years, I tried to work out that
central claim.
Samantha, who was not willing to let the trope of national interest
get in her way, had gone on to think about the belly of the beast
and how it is that the bureaucracy itself can become the incubator
of indifference.
I stopped my investigations of Rwanda. Samantha, being much more
bold, decided to cross the entire course of the century, to examine
American policy towards genocide. The result is a remarkable book.
After graduating from Yale and working at the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace, she decided, at the ripe age of twenty-three,
that she would be better off going to cover a war in Bosnia than
anything else. I can only imagine what her parents must have thought.
For three years she covered that war for The Economist
and U.S. News & World Report. Having seen the violence
up close gave her the courage to become a lawyer, and so she got
her J.D. from the Harvard Law School. And then, because law school
wasn’t challenge enough, she used her spare time to establish
the Carr Center for Human Rights.
She used all skills from all walks of life to produce this remarkable
accomplishment. She used the investigatory skills of a journalist
to uncover every single imaginable fact out there; she used her
lawyer’s analytic skills, and I suspect her ability to depose
hostile adversaries, to charm those who otherwise would not be charmed;
and then she used the human rights activist passion for the subject.
All three of those qualities of her work and her characteristics
come out and make the book A Problem from Hell quite the
tour de force that it is.
Remarks
SAMANTHA POWER: Thank you.
The problem with Rwanda
is that the only people who were working there at the time of the
genocide were low-level officials. So the only people who can come
out on the other side and reflect about the crisis and how it was
processed day to day, alas, are people who were at that level.
What Michael’s book so importantly shows is the way that
people can define day-to-day their tasks as deeply moral, fundamentally
humanitarian, and, the right thing to do, as if, in the case of
Rwanda, not sending additional peacekeepers to reinforce General
Dallaire, the commander on the ground, was the right and moral thing
to do.
We can understand that it is in the national interest perhaps,
because either it’s too expensive or too risky; but that it’s
the moral thing to do, is such a fundamentally important part of
understanding the story of American responses to genocide, societal
responses to genocide, that it is only after the fact that it becomes
deemed to be deeply immoral. This insight from somebody who was
within the system was very eye-opening for me as I tried to excavate
U.S. responses to genocide in the 20th century.
I would like to talk about the U.S. response to Rwanda and juxtapose
it with that to Bosnia.
Eight years ago, the Rwanda genocide broke out, the plane went
down, the killings began, and the Tutsi were exterminated.
Ten years ago that same day, the war in Bosnia broke out, and
Bosnian Muslims and Croats were herded into camps ¾ some call them concentration camps. Death was one
instrument among many to humiliate, degrade, and to ensure that
Bosnian Muslim life was purged and expunged from what then became
Serb-held territory.
So you have these two crises, genocides, that are unfolding contemporaneously.
I’d like to take you through descriptively and analytically
what the responses were in the United States. We can talk in the
question-and-answer period about European responses, but my particular
slice is the American slice, to look at what the responses were,
both as they overlapped and then looking at this as separate crises,
by people who, because they were on different continents, brought
in different officials, and who themselves brought to the table
different stories and narratives.
A plane crashed on April 6, 1994. During the next three days it
became increasingly clear to the U.S. officials who were still posted
at the Embassy in Kigali not that genocide was underway, but that
every Tutsi was vulnerable; that is, having “Tutsi”
on your ethnic identity card was enough to earn you a death sentence.
What was also obvious is that conventional war resumed between
the Hutu Government, which was also committing the genocide, and
Tutsi rebels. So when you heard on this side of the ocean “there
is civil war in Rwanda,” it was true. There was conventional
conflict between two armed parties.
But, under the cover of war, as so often happens, there was also
a genocide. Genocide very rarely happens in a vacuum. Usually there’s
a conventional conflict and then genocide, with war obscuring it.
The United States and the U.S. officials on the ground reported
back about both forms of violence, and were, in retrospect even,
surprisingly coherent and careful about these two separate forms
of killing.
Conventional conflict demands cease-fire negotiation, conflict
resolution. For the other form of violence, if it’s genocide
or if you’re systematically exterminating a certain ethnic
group ¾ which is how it was termed at that time ¾ a cease-fire isn’t necessarily the best way
to go. Given that the Tutsi who were being targeted were vulnerable
in the cities, townships and provinces, what they needed most was
an outside intervention force that would either forfeit its neutrality
or shirk it and confront and take sides. In negotiations, neutrality
is a good thing. But when you’re confronting genocide, you
need to take the side of the victim. There was a great reluctance
to do that.
Conflict resolution and cease-fires were the very instruments
that would aid the government that was committing the genocide.
The Hutu Government was all for a cease-fire to keep the people
who were going to stop the genocide away. So what you saw was this
pantomime.
The person who managed the U.S. response to the Rwanda genocide
in the early days was Prudence Bushnell, the Deputy Assistant Secretary
of State for African Affairs. She had been to Rwanda two weeks before
the genocide started to meet with senior Rwandan officials. She
understood the ethnic polarization and the ethnic dimension. She
knew just basic facts: 85 percent Hutu, 15 percent Tutsi; Tutsi
rebels outside trying to power share, having been purged and powerless
for some decades, having been privileged under Belgian rule. She
knew the basic facts. But, more importantly, she knew Rwandans.
So, while perhaps Michael and others, certainly myself in Bosnia,
read the newspapers or the wires and learned of tens of thousands
of Rwandans dead ¾ literally 10,000
in the first two days were reported in The New York Times ¾
no person came to my mind. But for Pru, she knew people personally.
She was thinking, “My God, they may be killed in Kigali.”
As a result of this personal encounter, she became one of the
more active U.S. diplomats ¾ not
advocating U.S. military intervention by any means, but urging moral
attention, urging that the U.S. Government take seriously these
atrocities, that they prioritize them, that they think creatively
about the policy tools at their disposal.
So the fact that she had Rwandans in her mind mattered; the fact
that she was tasked, that her portfolio was an African portfolio,
mattered; she wasn’t tasked with the world, as National Security
Advisor Tony Lake was, or even as Warren Christopher was. She was
tasked with Africa, and so she owned it day to day, at least for
the first five weeks of the genocide.
However, at a press conference on April 8th, two days
in, she focused very much on the fate of the Americans who were
in Rwanda ¾ which, again, is what
you would expect from a U.S. diplomat. First priority, take care
of your people – missionaries, people who were affiliated
with the United States, or citizens of the United States but weren’t
actually working for the U.S. Government. Journalists like myself
were asking: “Is it Hutu killing Tutsi or Tutu killing Hutsi?”
That is the level of society-wide ignorance that was pronounced,
and we can’t forget it.
Right now, because of Michael and Gourevitch and the President’s
apology and the prominence that Rwanda later achieved, we now have
a much broader societal understanding of what the ethnic dimension
was.
Pru answered these questions quite patiently. But as she reflects
now on this press conference, she says, “I felt pretty strongly
that my first obligation was to the Americans. I was sorry about
the Rwandans, of course, but my job was to get our folks out. Then
again, people didn’t know that it was a genocide. They were
very careful. The word genocide wasn’t used in the early days.”
She continued, “What I was told was, ‘Look, Prudence,
these people do this from time to time.’” The places
where genocide happens tend to have a history of ethnic violence,
so there is a sense of “business as usual,” up to a
point. It is sometimes difficult to discern just when something
has become qualitatively and quantitatively different.
At this point, the expectation of U.S. officials was that there
would be a killing spree, as there had been in Burundi six months
before, in which 50,000 people had been killed. Officials who worked
Africa knew that when it happened in Burundi, there was no long
Atlantic Monthly article about how we didn’t do enough
for these 50,000; there was no problem from hell and ad hoc accountability;
there was no presidential apology. We allowed 50,000 people to die
without doing anything about it, and nobody complained. So the expectation,
even of those who cared, was that many people could die without
generating much in the way of complaint.
Bushnell continued, “Look, we thought we’d be right
back, that the officials would come out, they would do their little
killing, and then they’d go back. It wasn’t thinking
800,000. It wasn’t thinking genocide of the scale we now know
it.”
She left the podium and was replaced by Michael McCurry, who was
then the State Department’s spokesman. McCurry, without missing
a beat, announced that Rwanda was done; that was an item checked
off the agenda ¾ and he began focusing on the next item on the agenda,
which was the failure of many foreign governments to screen Spielberg’s
film “Schindler’s List.”
McCurry is adamant, as adamant as Bushnell had been about the
dimensions of violence. He says, “This film movingly portrays
the 20th century’s most horrible catastrophe and
shows that even in the midst of genocide one individual can make
a difference.” He says that the film must be shown worldwide.
“The most effective way to avoid the recurrence of genocidal
tragedy is to ensure that past acts of genocide are not forgotten.”
None of the journalists, nobody on his staff, nobody anywhere,
including Bushnell, who had gone back to her office to man the evacuation
of the U.S. officials, made a connection between “Schindler’s
List,” between the Holocaust and the genocide that was unfolding.
Although everybody talked about the systematic killing and extermination
of the Tutsi, “G” was not bandied about in nongovernmental
circles until two weeks into the genocide. Most people who noticed
that extermination and cared about it were afraid that if they used
the “G” word, it was like crying wolf ¾
that somehow if it proved not to be genocide, you wouldn’t
get invited to the next meeting, that you would have exaggerated
your claim; it’s better to stick to the facts as they were
understood.
At the higher levels there was a reluctance to use the word for
fear of triggering American obligations under the Genocide Convention,
which were read, actually wrongly, to demand military intervention
in the face of genocide. In fact, what the Convention demands is
that the signatories undertake steps to prevent and punish.
So by “undertake steps,” you could have done many
things. We could have denounced at a high level, threatened prosecution,
frozen foreign assets, imposed an arms embargo, rallied troops from
other countries, created safeguards, done radio jamming. But the
fear was “use the word ‘genocide’ and you have
to go the whole way.”
In the coming weeks, there was a preference for diplomacy, for
negotiation, for cease-fire. That was the emphasis of the U.S. and
UN response ¾ and again, very appropriate
for one form of the violence that was underway; inappropriate, given
the nature of the perpetrators’ intent.
The same thing was true in Bosnia at the same time: a bias toward
negotiation, toward initially the Kurihara plan, then the Vance-Owens
plan, then the Owens-Stoltenberg plan and the Contact Group plan.
There was three and a half years of this negotiation and trusting
in one side that had set out to systematically purge its territory
of minorities. And, eventually, it was joined by another side that
tried to do exactly the same thing, but later in the war, more than
a year into the war, the Croatians began some of the same tactics
in their territory.
It was the ritual of “got to be seen to be doing something;
after all, it’s atrocities and it’s genocide, and we’ve
got to keep the paper trail, keep the peace process.”
Genocide prevention had not been taught at the Foreign Service
Institute, nor how to deal with perpetrators of crimes of this nature,
and there was the sense that Hitler was an exception and that that
kind of evil was passé.
In both Rwanda and Bosnia, we saw plenty of early warning ahead
of the beginning of the killing. In Bosnia, you had the war in Slovenia
and then in Croatia, where civilians had been systematically targeted
in Vukovar and Dubrovnik.
In Rwanda you had plenty of warning, but only to the level of
the African Desk officer. For people in the State Department, the
sense was: “Those people above us aren’t going to want
to hear these warnings. They’re not going to do anything about
it. Who would do something about Rwanda? What level of U.S. engagement
is ever going to be commanded by a country of this minuscule priority?”
While the warnings were heard and listened to in Bosnia, they
were heard at a low level, listened to, and not passed up the chain
in Rwanda. In both cases, however, when the killing took place,
there was a sense of the ethnic violence almost arriving on schedule,
so that those who cared the most and who were waiting and who had
heeded the warnings and were afraid, were almost numb when it arrived.
The warnings about Bosnia had been so bad after Dubrovnik and
Vukovar, given that ethnically Bosnia was more like a Jackson Pollack
painting than Croatia had been, that diplomats thought, “My
God, it’s going to brutal.”
But dissent in bureaucracy includes a sense of knowing what your
higher-ups want to hear, the language and discourse that’s
not just fashionable but appropriate ¾
that is, the language of realism and national interest, knowing
that you could not make an interest-based case for outright intervention
in Rwanda, and making the mistake of thinking that you couldn’t
make a case of any kind for softer forms of intervention.
So you get a self-muting, a kind of nightmare and internalization
of the atrocities ¾ a real revulsion
at what was going on and outrage, but not a sense that that was
in any way politically relevant outrage within a system that had
already made up its mind about where Rwanda belonged and where genocide
largely belonged.
And it did matter. They were saying, “If we can’t
get intervention in Bosnia, if Gorazde is about to fall in the middle
of Europe, how are we going to get something robust done about the
Great Lakes Region in Africa? That’s been on CNN every day
for two years. Rwanda, we don’t have that same pressure from
the outside.” So little dissent on Rwanda, much dissent on
Bosnia.
And contrast those in the State Department who worked in the European
Bureau with those in the African Bureau. Again, with all due respect
to the people in the room who worked Africa tirelessly for all these
years, Europeans had a sense of being on the fast track, that what
they had to say and feel was relevant, that their higher-ups would
be interested in hearing, because “it was Europe, after all.”
There was not self-censoring to the same extent, but rather protest,
working the dissent channel, eventually resigning, with more resignations
over Bosnia than over Vietnam. Again, cotemporaneous with no resignation
over Rwanda, where 800,000 people were killed and where the United
States did far less than they would do over the course of three
and a half years in Bosnia.
In Rwanda, there was not an editorial in any of the major papers
calling for intervention. There’s a lot of revisionism now
about where the Washington Post and The New York Times
were. They were nowhere. They were using what was unfolding in Rwanda
as a springboard to talk about other issues.
One of the editorials in the Washington Post mentioned
genocide ¾ they used the “G”
word very early ¾ “there is
genocide in Rwanda; this is proof yet again of the need for a rapid
reaction force.” But there was no talk about what should be
done about Rwanda, only a systemic analysis of what this revealed
about our screwed-up system.
The Congressional Black Caucus, which at that time was protesting
vocally and very effectively over the repatriation of Haitian refugees
¾ hunger strikes, Robinson arrested in front of the
White House ¾ was nearly mute, two
letters to the White House, on Rwanda. There was utter silence coming
from Capitol Hill.
The legacy of Somalia was not merely that one was squeamish about
peacekeeping in Africa or peacekeeping generally in the United Nations,
but it was feared that if troops from other countries of the United
Nations got involved anywhere, inevitably it would be incumbent
on the United States to go and bail them out when they got into
trouble.
And so the response to Rwanda was “get those peacekeepers
out.” That’s the only way we can insulate ourselves
from entanglement, “mission creep” and the “slippery
slope,” and all of the catch-phrases of the day.
Human Rights Watch was terrific. Alison Des Forges has written
a very important book documenting the nature of the genocide Leave
None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda. She had contact
with people in the field, avoided the word “genocide,”
documented, was careful about access at the elite level, and met
with the National Security Advisor two weeks into the genocide.
But when she got into the room, she realized very quickly that
she spoke only for herself and her organization. When she said to
Tony Lake, “Don’t just think in terms of military intervention;
think in terms of radio jamming and sending reinforcements to General
Dallaire,” the Canadian who was there pleading for help,he
nodded and took notes and seemed to be heeding it. She said, “What
can I do to make sure that this happens?” He said, “Make
more noise. The phones are not ringing. You’re speaking for
Human Rights Watch’s Board? That’s not going to get
you very far.”
It is crucial point that the grassroots elite were absent for
Rwanda. Contrast with Bosnia, where William Safire, Anthony Lewis,
Leslie Gelb were weighing in once or twice a week on the importance
of intervening to stop the Serbs, to lift the arms embargo.
Ironically, Rwanda was the case of genocide in the 20th
century that was most like the Holocaust, in that it was a systematic
attempt to exterminate every last person. It was also more efficient,
despite the use of primitive implements, than even Hitler.
However, the Holocaust analogy was very rarely used in the Rwanda
context by advocates who did care. But the skinny men behind barbed
wire who were captured in Bosnia evoked the image there.
Not only were the advocates loud and relentless, but they were
tapping into that was something that was more directly related to
the Mike McCurry lament and the importance of remembering, and to
the Holocaust Museum which had just opened on the Mall.
I have mentioned already that the response in Rwanda was distinctly
low level. There wasn’t a single Cabinet-level meeting the
entire duration of the genocide. Can you imagine that 800,000 people
could die and that the President wouldn’t summon his advisors
and ask, “What can we do diplomatically, what can we do politically?
What are we doing? Do we have technical resources? Are there other
troops from other countries who could go?” It never earned
a Cabinet-level meeting. Contrast with Bosnia, where you had numerous
Cabinet-level meetings.
It is important to note that there was no policy cleft over Rwanda.
There was a bureaucratic and a societal consensus. It was only later
that we all came back to lament what had been done, what might have
been done, how many troops it would have taken to stop the genocide,
or to at least deter significant portions of it.
There was fighting and crying and outrage, but it wasn’t
a constructive outrage. There was just a sense of despair.
On Bosnia we saw the largest policy cleft of the 1990s, a huge
division right down through the Cabinet into the State Department,
with those resignations.
Europe meant that the press was there legitimating. Press coverage
of genocide is necessary for generating high-level attention, but
not sufficient. Again, the killing wasn’t as quick as that
in Rwanda, and you would have seen society-wide noise, some bureaucratic
dissent, pressure.
When you’re in a bureaucracy and you see an editorial calling
for what you think is the right thing to do, you’re much more
prepared to say, “Did you see what Safire said today? I agree.”
And, vice versa, if you’re an editorial writer, you too inhabit
the land of the possible, and so your advocacy tends to be quite
derivative on what’s on offer within the government. You’re
playing to one side or the other.
Now, what’s the outcome? What happened in both of these
cases? You would think from what I’m saying that Bosnia would
be a no-brainer. You’ve got dissent, you’ve got press
coverage, you’ve got Europe, the self-esteem of the bureaucrats,
and you’ve got high-level attention.
Yet what one wanted didn’t happen. NATO planes flew overhead
for the better part of three and a half years, occasionally engaged
in pinprick air strikes, mainly to support the UN peacekeepers who
were on the ground there, deployed to deliver humanitarian aid and
to aid the peace and negotiation process.
But we should ask ourselves what Bosnia would look like today
if there had been no high-level denunciation, no day-to-day ownership
of the issue, even if it was ownership in order to fudge and defer;
if there had been no economic sanctions against Slobodan Milosevic,
and subsequently his cutoff of the Bosnian Serbs, depriving them
of petrol and resources.
We didn’t experience what we were doing in Rwanda as green
lighting, but the problem with the perpetrators of genocide is that
1) they think they are doing the world a favor by purging the undesirables;
and 2) thatAmerican leadership, sadly, is binary, in that we think
when we’re not leading we’re simply not leading; but
when we’re not leading, others around the world are usually
taking it as leadership not to act. It’s a hefty burden, and
not one that any of us especially enjoy carrying, but it is an important
part of understanding how perpetrators view Washington.
When they were looking to Washington on Bosnia, for a couple of
years they were scared that something was forthcoming and nervous
about what lines they could cross. And, even then, they killed 200,000
people over three and a half years.
But in Rwanda, when they looked, there was nothing. There was
silence, no high-level denunciation, no radio addresses, no radio
jamming ¾ nothing.
Two weeks into the genocide, Dallaire’s troops were withdrawn
from under him, which meant that those Tutsi who had gathered at
UN points seeking protection were then vulnerable to the militias,
and often murdered, after having relied on the promise of UN protection.
Peacekeepers were pulled out on Washington’s insistence,
again with the Somalia syndrome in mind. Then for the next six weeks,
there was a tortured effort by the UN Security Council to send reinforcements.
They realized as soon as the troops came out that maybe they should
be sent back, but that never happened. A Resolution was eventually
passed in mid-May, but it would be the Tutsi who would end the genocide
before the United Nations would ever see another troop deployed
in service or assistance.
So troops came out, no troops were sent back in, all the things
on offer that were discussed and debated at a low level in Washington
were vetoed for fear of “mission creep,” and with no
high-level attention to cut through the red tape. Thus, virtually
nothing was done along the continuum in Rwanda. In Bosnia, a lot
was done ¾ not military intervention,
not air strikes of any meaningful kind, not stopping the Serbs from
cleansing the territory, not taking back the territory once it was
seized and purged of its non-Serb inhabitants; but economic sanctions,
denunciation, dissent, daily attention. Peacekeepers on the ground,
20,000 of them throughout, who were mainly targets for snipers,
didn’t do much in the way of humanitarian aid, assistance;
but they could only go where the Serbs woulr allow because they
didn’t have a mandate to confront.
And then finally, in August-September 1995, there was finally
a mammoth NATO intervention, which brought the genocide in Bosnia
to a close within two weeks. Dayton was a couple months later. But
the intervention came about because of those forces that I’ve
identified.
The hero of my book is Bob Dole, the Senate Majority Leader. He
was operated on after his war injury by an Armenian doctor who regaled
him with stories of genocide as he was recuperating from his surgery.
He always kept an eye trained on the Balkans, always had a greater
sense of what genocide was and what it meant and why it mattered
than just about anybody else. He got Rwanda completely wrong.
His interest brought him there in 1989, and he happened to bear
witness to a Serb attack on some Albanians who had come out to cheer
him in Kosovo. That made an indelible impression on him, which,
again, like Bushnell, when he read then about Serb atrocities or
about Muslims being killed, meant that he had something in his mind
– tear gas and trenches.
He lobbied continuously against Bush and Clinton for lifting the
arms embargo against the Bosnia Muslims, allowing them to defend
themselves, and bombing the Serbs. He failed. He is not a terribly
effective advocate, nor an effective presidential candidate, as
we later learned.
But ultimately, when all the society-wide noise and dissent came
together, massacres were documented in the daily press and the editorials
came in full. It had been heavy throughout compared to other cases
in the 20th century, but there was a deluge after the
fall of Srebrenica in July of 1995, where Clinton felt that he was
under siege.
And then Dole went to Capitol Hill and got a veto-proof piece
of legislation that would lift the arms embargo against the Bosnian
Muslims, which in turn is going to precipitate a European peacekeeper
withdrawal, and in turn an American extraction mission to get the
European peacekeepers out, which in turn will get Clinton into Bosnia.
Clinton had been avoiding military intervention in Bosnia from
the day he got into office, which proved to be a disaster for him.
The climactic scene of the book is Clinton on the putting green,
with his deputy National Security Advisor Sandy Burger and Nancy
Soderberg, screaming expletives like there’s no tomorrow,
and saying, “I’m getting creamed. We have got to stop
the killing.”
This was the first time in the 20th century that a
political cost was created for doing nothing about genocide. That
is the lesson of my book: It’s all politics, politics, politics.
Questions and Answers
QUESTION: I believe that the reason for the lack of empathy,
the lack of genuine caring, was a manifestation of racism. I don’t
mean overt racism, but in the same way that there was discussion
about how it was easier to drop an atomic bomb on the Japanese than
it would have been on Europeans because it was a different race.
There is a similarity here, that in the abstract, “Yes, it’s
terrible to see these Africans, but they’re Africans.”
Whereas when you see Europeans behind barbed wire, emaciated, starving,
dying, there is an empathy because they are white and they are Western.
It’s an unconscious manifestation of racism.
SAMANTHA POWER: I agree with you, but I would agree a lot
more if I had only done the Rwanda case. I would agree resolutely,
I’m sure. But more than racism, is “otherism.”
We were very good at convincing ourselves that those skinny men
behind barbed wire weren’t like us in the most crucial way,
that they were Muslim. The real test would have been if it had been
Muslims killing Serbs.
We had had the Sarejevo Olympics. If we had had the Olympics in
Kigali at some point, that might have created a humanizing. The
racism, or the “otherism,” or the writing-off of provincial
places that are out of our sphere of influence, is a proxy for something
else, part of which is just “they’re not like us.”
But part of it is that we’ve never been there; we don’t
have a personal connection. There’s nothing that can take
them out of the realm of “the other” and make them human.
And the victims ¾ Armenian Christians, Jews, Tutsi, East Timorese, Cambodians,
Bosnian Muslims, potentially Chechyans – are people of all
kind of shapes, colors, sizes, geographic zones.
If you don’t want to do anything, if the risk of getting
involved on humanitarian grounds are so much greater than the non-costs
of staying out, then you’re going to be all the more prone
to see difference rather than similarity.
Whiteness had something to do with it, but I would argue that
there are other factors, and we did characterize those peoplewho
were dying as tribes. It was a problem from hell about which we
could do nothing. As Warren Christopher said, “It’s
almost unbelievable, it’s terrifying; they have been killing
one another for centuries.” That’s not a way you talk
about people who are like you.
QUESTION: My question is for both of you. What is the relationship
between morality and American foreign policy? The underlying theme
of your books is that genocide is the ultimate immoral act and that,
therefore, regardless of where it is happening in the world, the
moral responsibility to do something lies with the United States.
SAMANTHA POWER: Let me respond briefly – descriptively,
rather than normatively – and then I’d love to hear
from Michael.
I was at the University of Chicago last week with John Mearsheimer,
one of the great realists of our time, who believes that foreign
policy, descriptively and normatively, is and should only be made
on the basis of national interest. Descriptively, my book reinforces
his thesis, in that my conclusion is that values and morality alone
are never enough, that you have to find either values, in turn triggering
a shame, which creates political interest, as the Dole example would
illustrate; or the kind of strategic nexus that you could potentially
see in Sudan in the coming days, and that you did see more in Kosovo
and in northern Iraq. After the Kurds had revolted and spilled into
Turkey, we didn’t leave them there; we brought them back because
Turkey wanted them out. Turkey put pressure on Baker, and then Baker
did see the refugees and was moved.
But there was also in both the Kosovo the Kurdish cases, a prior
investment of U.S. credibility. We had intervened in Bosnia for
all these reasons and, thus, U.S. credibility was there in the neighborhood.
Milosevic was running rings around us, and we looked bad when again
he began purging the Albanians.
Similarly, we had invested in the Gulf War. For Saddam Hussein
to send all those Kurds into Turkey and into neighboring states
was just too much, and so we went back in to provide comfort in
a way that we hadn’t done in 1987 and 1988. There was also
more media there because the U.S. had been involved in both those
circumstances.
Normatively, I would make a moral case. But I would also note
simply that the weapons that Saddam tested on the Kurds in 1987–1988
are the very chemical weapons we’re now afraid he’s
going to use on us; that the person who governed northern Iraq when
he was killing between 100,000 and 200,000 Kurds in that period
was the leader who then was sent in to govern Kuwait, Ali Hassan
al-Majeed.
I would note that bin Laden traveled for the better part of the
last ten years on a Bosnian passport because he got into Bosnia.
We had the arms embargo imposed on the Bosnian Muslims there, and
there were people who said, “Come on, bring it on in, you’re
preaching that stuff. I’ll take it if guns come with.”
MICHAEL BARNETT: I have spent a lot of time puzzling over
how you decide to rank order your priorities. Think of it this way:
if the world is filled with suffering ¾
and this is the problem that the UN had to face in the early 1990s
¾ there is absolutely no way that
the UN can somehow assuage all the suffering that takes place at
any one moment.
As a consequence, what you had in the early 1990s, at least at
the UN, was the quip “the UN never met a peacekeeping operation
it didn’t like.” And, all of a sudden, it found itself
scattered into god-forsaken places, being asked to do things that
it could never do without the resources of the political will. So
it was bound to fail.
And we wanted the UN to do things that we ask all bureaucracies
to do, which is to somehow become more efficient, so that ¾
in Albright’s term at the time – it’s the right
tool for the job.
What you found people at the UN doing, in the way you’re
suggesting, is rank ordering their priorities, but doing it through
rules. They came up with a set of rules: when is peacekeeping proper,
when it is appropriate, and when is it right?
But what was fascinating was that by rank ordering these rules
in the way that you did, you also determined who would get your
attention and who would be ignored. It was summed up very well by
one of my bosses at the U.S. Mission at the time, that “we
establish these rules that said peacekeeping is only proper when
there’s a peace to keep.”
That means, then, that you are only likely to have peacekeepers
when you have a situation like Madison, Wisconsin, but not when
you have situations like Rwanda. And so, as he said at the time,
“If you really need us, we won’t be there.”
As a consequence, we haven’t established who will get your
attention. These rules are not simply there to be efficient, but
there is a moral division of labor, a moral distribution of attention.
So when Rwanda comes around and everybody falls back on these nice
little truisms, like “there’s no peace to keep,”
then you say, “We’ve got no business there; it’s
not my job.”
It’s a question of moral responsibility. It’s not
simply about the evil that’s possible, but what bystanders
do in the face of evil. There has been much hand-wringing and finger-pointing
over the last several years about whether the UN did enough, could
it have done more, could it have stopped the genocide, and people
can weigh in on all sides on that question.
Ultimately the UN does bear some moral responsibility because
there were things that it could have done, that were in its power,
that might have reduced the killing. It probably could not have
stopped the genocide, but it certainly could have reduced the killing
significantly.
In terms of the U.S., I find myself sympathetic with something
that Tony Lake says, which is “having the greatest amount
of power doesn’t give you the greatest amount of responsibility
—it doesn’t mean you’re the world’s policeman.”
I completely agree with that.
At the same time, though, one of the things that has to be understood
is that the U.S. was not the only one. The sidelines were crowded
with people who decided not to care. But what was different about
the U.S. is that when May came along and there were some plans that
were being proposed, we stood in the way. And so, even in the context
of Samaritanism, the U.S. blocked and it didn’t do what little
it could have done, for many of the reasons that Samantha suggested,
because of the fear of being swept under the undertow and of getting
caught into something it didn’t want to do.
On those grounds, then, the U.S. does bear some responsibility
¾ not for the genocide, but for
not doing what it could have done to have mitigated its awful consequences.
QUESTION: I was struck when you talked about some of the
reasons why we did not get involved and you used Somalia as an example.
Having been around in the late 1960s, when 500 Americans were being
killed every week in Vietnam, and having been struck by the horrors
of Rwanda from the very first days listening to the radio, I had
always assumed that the reason we didn’t get involved was
jungle. And not only was it a jungle, but also it was far from an
ocean.
Since most of the policy leaders in those days were roughly my
age, that was the subtext of what kept us from dipping the toe and
then being totally submerged.
SAMANTHA POWER: The syndrome, as it’s now known in
Washington is “Vietmalia.”
After all of my reporting, I have not found any evidence that
the subject of U.S. military intervention ever came up. It’s
true that there was some debate about how many troops it would have
taken and how they would have got in there. There was one plan that
was mooted at the time for U.S. peacekeepers to inhabit neighboring
countries and then make their way in. The other was take Kigali
airport and then go out. There was no ocean, and that was an issue.
But again, the real legacy of Vietnam, which was reinforced in
Somalia, was that, in the Pentagon especially ¾
and they were the ones who were blocking many of the softer sanctions
that were debated, like radio jamming ¾
there was the conception that if the UN or whomever got into trouble,
American politicians, specifically Democrats, would not give you
the means to do the job and would pull the rug out from under you.
What so many U.S. military officials said to me was, “The
only thing worse than eighteen U.S. Rangers dying on October 3,
1993, in Somalia was the President going on television within twenty-four
hours and saying ‘those troops are coming home’ and
not defending the mission, not giving the troops a way to reinforce,
not altering the mission so it was actually a doable mission or
the means matched the end.” We see the discrepancy between
means and end, and that suspicion from one branch of the government,
from the Defense Department, towards the White House, compounded
by gains in the military, draft dodging, and its being a Democratic
White House when the officer corps is mainly Republican.
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