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A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide
"A Problem From Hell": America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power Basic Books, 2002 640 pp.; $24 |
The term "genocide" was coined in the mid-20th century by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew, who first became concerned with ethnic killing when the civilized world failed to hold Turkey accountable for the mass extermination of Armenians during World War I. After Germany invaded his homeland, Lemkin fled to the United States, where he continued his single-minded struggle to combat the deliberate and systematic efforts to destroy national, ethnic, racial, or religious groups of people. Since this crime did not have a name, he developed the concept "genocide," rooted in the Greek geno, meaning "race" or "tribe," and the Latin suffix cide, meaning "killing."
Based upon Lemkin's indefatigable efforts, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution in December 1946 condemning genocide "as contrary to moral law and to the aims and spirit of the United Nations." More importantly, the measure called for drafting a treaty that would ban this crime. Two years later the General Assembly approved unanimously the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
Since the convention defined genocide as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group," it ironically omitted the most destructive source of mass, systematic killing in the 20th century—namely, violence inspired by politics and ideology. The omission of political and ideological violence was deliberate, however, since Lemkin wanted to develop an international legal concept that distinguished violence in war from the deliberate extermination of people groups. In 1967 Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin became convinced that the United States needed to become party to the genocide convention and vowed to address this topic daily until it was ratified—a vow that resulted in 3,211 senate speeches over 19 years! Although the Convention entered into force in 1950, the United States did not formally ratify it until 1988.
While the defense of justice permits states to undertake humanitarian intervention, states have been extremely reluctant to intervene solely for moral purposes. Even the United States—a country that has regarded itself as a beacon of human freedom—has been far more eager to undertake foreign intervention for ideological purposes than for the defense of human rights. "No U.S. president," Samantha Power writes in "A Problem From Hell," "has ever made genocide prevention a priority, and no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence."1
A former Balkan war correspondent and current head of Harvard University's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Power examines the role of the United States toward six major 20th-century genocides (all of the numbers that follow are rough estimates): the slaughter of 1-1.5 million Armenians by the Turkish Empire in 1914-15; the mass extermination of two million Cambodians by communist militants (Khmer Rouge) in 1975-79; the killing of 100,000 Iraqi Kurds by the troops of Saddam Hussein in 1987-88, including the massacre of 5,000 Kurds with chemical weapons; the l992-95 Serb genocide of Bosnian Muslims, resulting in 200,000 deaths and more than two million refugees; the l994 extermination of 800,000 Tutsis by Hutu extremists; and the 1999 Serbian killing and ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, a conflict that resulted in 8,000 deaths and the displacement of about 1.3 million Albanian Kosovars. Curiously, the book omits the genocide in Sudan—a conflict that has gone on for more than two decades and has resulted in the death of more than two million people.
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