(Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 p.) Almost Full text?
In June 1915 Erzindjan, the hometown of Talaat's eventual assassin, was emptied. Soghomon Tehlirian, then nineteen, marched in a column of some 20,000 people, with his mother and siblings-two sisters of fifteen and sixteen, another of twenty- six who carried a two-and-a-halfyear-old child, and two brothers of twenty-two and twenty-six.The journey was harrowing. The gendarmes said to be protecting the convoy first dragged Tehlirian's sisters off behind the bushes to rape them. Next he watched a man split his twenty-two-year-old brother's head open with an ax. Finally, the soldiers shot his mother and struck Tehlirian unconscious with a blow to the head. He was left for dead and awoke hours later in a field of corpses. He spotted the mangled body of a sister and the shattered skull of his brother. His other relatives had disappeared. He guessed he was the sole survivor of the caravan.'
Recognition
The "international community," such as it was, did little to contest the Turkish horrors, which began nine months into World War I. Germany was aligned with the brutal regime and thus was best positioned to influence it. Instead, German officials generally covered up Talaat's campaign, ridiculing the Allied accounts of the terror as "pure inventions" and "gross exaggerations."The Germans echoed the Turks' claims that any harsh policies were a measured response to Armenian treason during wartime." The German chancellor met in person with German Christian missionaries who presented eyewitness testimony about the slaughter. But he rejected their appeals. Berlin would not offend its Turkish ally.
Armenian children at the Apostolic Church school in the village of Arapgir in the Ottoman Empire. Only four of the children survived the Turkish slaughter. (Caption for photo)
Britain and France were at war with the Ottoman Empire and publicized the atrocities. The British Foreign Office dug up photographs of the massacre victims and the Armenian refugees in flight. An aggressive, London-based, pro-Armenian lobby helped spur the British press to cover the savagery." But some had trouble believing the tales. British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey, for one, cautioned that Britain lacked "direct knowledge" of massacres. He urged that "the massacres were not all on one side" and warned that denunciation would likely be futile. Indeed, when Russia's foreign minister drafted a public threat that he hoped the Allies could issue jointly, Grey said he doubted that the message would influence Turkish behavior and might even cause Turkey to adopt more serious measures against the Armenians."' Since Britain was already at war with Turkey, other British officials argued that the most expedient way to end the killings would be to defeat the German-Austrian-Turkish alliance. On May 24, 1915, the Allied governments did deliver a joint declaration that took the unprecedented step of condemning "crimes against humanity and civilization." The declaration warned the members of the Turkish government that they and their "agents" would be held "personally responsible" for the massacres.'' Generally, though, the Allies were busy trying to win the war. At the same time the Turks were waging their campaign against the Armenian minority, the German army was using poison gas against the Allies in Belgium. In May 1915 the German army had torpedoed the Lusitauia passenger liner, killing 1,200 (including 190 Americans). The Germans had also just begun zeppelin attacks against London.
The United States, determined to maintain its neutrality in the war, refused to join the Allied declaration. President Woodrow Wilson chose not to pressure either the Turks or their German backers. It was better not to draw attention to the atrocities, lest U.S. public opinion get stirred up and begin demanding U.S. involvement. Because the Turks had not violated the rights of Americans, Wilson did not formally protest.
But in Turkey itself America's role as bystander was contested. Henry Morgenthau Sr., a German-born Jew who had come to the United States as a ten-year-old boy and had been appointed ambassador to the Ottoman Empire by President Wilson in 1913, agitated for U.S. diplomatic intervention. In January and February 1915, Morgenthau had begun receiving graphic but fragmentary intelligence from his ten American consuls posted throughout the Ottoman Empire. At first he did not recognize that the atrocities against the Armenians were of a different nature than the wartime violence. He was taken in by Talaat's assurances that uncontrolled elements had simply embarked upon "niob violence" that would soon be contained." In April, when the massacres began in earnest, the Turkish authorities severed Morgenthau's communication with his consuls and censored their letters. Morgenthau was reluctant to file reports back to Washington based on rumors, and the Turks were making it impossible for him to fact-check.
Although he was initially incredulous, by July 1915 the ambassador had come around. He had received too many visits from desperate Armenians and trusted missionary sources to remain skeptical. They had sat in his office with tears streaming down their faces, regaling him with terrifying tales. When he compared this testimony to the strikingly similar horrors relayed in the rerouted consular cables, Morgenthau came to an astonishing conclusion. What he called "race murder" was under way. On July 10, 1915, he cabled Washington with a description of the Turkish campaign:
Persecution of Armenians assuming unprecedented proportions. Reports from widely scattered districts indicate systematic attempt to uproot peaceful Armenian populations and through arbitrary arrests, terrible tortures, whole-sale expulsions and deportations from one end of the Empire to the other accompanied by frequent instances of rape, pillage, and murder, turning into massacre, to bring destruction and destitution on them.These measures are not in response to popular or fanatical demand but are purely arbitrary and directed from Constantinople in the name of military necessity, often in districts where no military operations are likely to take place.
Response
Morgenthau was constrained by two background conditions that seemed immutable. First, the Wilson administration was resolved to stay out of World War I. Picking fights with Turkey did not seem a good way to advance that objective. And second, diplomatic protocol demanded that ambassadors act respectfully toward their host governments. U.S. diplomats were expected to stay out of business that did not concern U.S. national interests. "Turkish authorities have definitely informed nie that I have no right to interfere with their internal affairs," Morgenthau wrote. Still, he warned Washington, "there seems to be a systematic plan to crush the Armenian race"
Local witnesses urged hint to invoke the moral power of the United States. Otherwise, he was told, "the whole Armenian nation would disappear"" The ambassador did what he could, continuing to send blistering cables back to Washington and raising the matter at virtually every meeting he held with Talaat. He found his exchanges with the interior minister infuriating. Once, when the ambassador introduced eyewitness reports of slaughter, Talaat snapped back: "Why are you so interested in the Armenians anyway? You are a Jew, these people are Christians.... What have you to complain of? Why can't you let us do with these Christians as we please?" Morgenthau replied, "You don't seem to realize that I am not here as a Jew but as the American Ambassador.... I do not appeal to you in the name of any race or religion but merely as a human being "Talaat looked confused. "We treat the Americans all right, too," he said. "I don't see why you should complain."
But Morgenthau continued to complain, warning that Talaat and other senior officials would eventually be held responsible before the court of public opinion, particularly in the United States. Talaat had a ready response: "We don't give a rap for the future!" he exclaimed. "We live only in the present!" Talaat believed in collective guilt. It was legitimate to punish all Armenians even if only a few refused to disarm or harbored seditious thoughts. "We have been reproached for making no distinction between the innocent Armenians and the guilty," Talaat told a German reporter. `But that was utterly impossible, in view of the fact that those who were innocent today might be guilty tomorrow."
U.S. ambassador Henry Morgenthau Sr. Instead of hiding his achievements, as later perpetrators would do,Talaat boasted of them. According to Morgenthau, he liked to tell friends, "I have accomplished more toward solving the Armenian problem in three months than Abdul Hamid accomplished in thirty years!"" (The Turkish sultan Abdul Hamid had killed some 200,000 Armenians in 1895-1896.) Talaat once asked Morgenthau whether the United States could get the New York Life Insurance Company and Equitable Life of NewYork, which for years had done business with the Armenians, to send a complete list of the Armenian policyholders to the Turkish authorities. "They are practically all dead now and have left no heirs,"Talaat said."The Government is the beneficiary now."
Morgenthau was incensed at the request and stormed out ofTalaat's office. He again cabled back to Washington, imploring his higher-ups to take heed:
I earnestly beg the Department to give this matter urgent and exhaustive consideration with a view to reaching a conclusion which may possibly have the effect of checking [Turkey's] Government and certainly provide opportunity for efficient relief which now is not permitted. It is difficult for me to restrain myself from doing something to stop this attempt to exterminate a race, but I realize that I am here as Ambassador and must abide by the principles of non-interference with the internal affairs of another country.
Morgenthau had to remind himself that one of the prerogatives of sovereignty was that states and statesmen could do as they pleased within their own borders. "Technically," he noted to himself, "I had no right to interfere. According to the cold-blooded legalities of the situation, the treatment of Turkish subjects by the Turkish Government was purely a domestic affair: unless it directly affected American lives and American interests, it was outside the concern of the American Government" The ambassador found this maddening.
The New York Times gave the Turkish horrors steady coverage, publishing 145 stories in 1915. It helped that Morgenthau and Times publisher Adolph Ochs were old friends. Beginning in March 1915, the paper spoke of Turkish "massacres," "slaughter," and "atrocities" against the Armenians, relaying accounts by missionaries, Red Cross officials, local religious authorities, and survivors of mass executions. "It is safe to say," a correspondent noted in July, "that unless Turkey is beaten to its knees very speedily there will soon be no more Christians in the Ottoman Empire."22 By July 1915 the paper's headlines had begun crying out about the danger of the Armenians"' extinction." Viscount Bryce, former British ambassador to the United States, pleaded that the United States use its influence with Germany. "If anything can stop the destroying hand of the Turkish Government," Bryce argued, as did the missionaries who had appealed to Morgenthau, "it will be an expression of the opinion of neutral nations, chiefly the judgment of humane America.."23 On October 7, 1915, a Times headline blared, "800,000 ARMENIANS COUNTED DESTROYED." The article reported Bryce's testimony before the House of Lords in which he urged the United States to demonstrate that there were "some crimes which, even now in the convulsion of a great war, the public opinion of the world will not tolerate."" By December the paper's headline read, "MILLION ARMENIANS KILLED OR IN EXILE."25 The number of victims were estimates, as the bodies were impossible to count. Nevertheless, governmental and nongovernmental officials were sure that the atrocities were "unparalleled in modern times" and that the Turks had set out to achieve "nothing more or less than the annihilation of a whole people."
Witnesses to the terror knew that American readers would have difficulty processing such gruesome horrors, so they scoured history for parallels to events that they believed had already been processed in the public mind. One report said,"The nature and scale of the atrocities dwarf anything perpetrated... under Abdul Hamid, whose exploits in this direction now assume an aspect of moderation compared with those of the present Governors of Turkey." Before Adolf Hitler, the standard for European brutality had been set by Abdul Hamid and the Belgian king Leopold, who pillaged the Congo for rubber in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Because the Turks continued to block access to the caravans, reporters often speculated on whether their sources were reliable. "The Turkish Government has succeeded in throwing an impenetrable veil over its actions toward all Armenians," a frustrated Associated Press correspondent noted. "Constantinople has for weeks had its daily crop of Armenian rumors. . . . What has happened ... is still an unwritten chapter. No newspapermen are allowed to visit the affected districts and reports from these are altogether unreliable. The reticence of the Turkish Government cannot be looked upon as a good sign, however"Z" Turkish representatives in the United States predictably blurred the picture with denials and defenses. The Turkish consul, Djelal Munif Bey, told the Neu, York Tilnes, "All those who have been killed were of that rebellious element who were caught red-handed or while otherwise committing traitorous acts against the Turkish Government, and not women and children, as some of these fabricated reports would have the Americans believe." But the same representative added that if innocent lives had in fact been lost, that was because in wartime "discrimination is utterly impossible, and it is not alone the offender who suffers the penalty of his act, but also the innocent whom he drags with him.... The Armenians have only themselves to blame." (Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 p.3-9)
Aftermath
When the war ended in 1918, the question of war guilt loomed large at the Paris peace conference. Britain, France, and Russia urged that state authorities in Germany, Austria, and Turkey be held responsible for violations of the laws of war and the "laws of humanity." They began planning the century's first international war crimes tribunal, hoping to try the kaiser and his German underlings, as well as Talaat, Enver Pasha, and the other leading Turkish perpetrators. But Lansing dissented on behalf of the United States. In general the Wilson administration opposed the Allies' proposals to emasculate Germany. But it also rejected the notion that some allegedly "universal" principle of justice should allow punishment. The laws of humanity, Lansing argued, "vary with the individual." Reflecting the widespread view of the time, Lansing said that sovereign leaders should be immune from prosecution. "The essence of sovereignty," lie said, was "the absence of responsibility."" The United States could judge only those violations that were committed upon American persons or American property."
If such a tribunal were set tip, then, the United States would not participate. In American thinking at that time, there was little question that the state's right to be left alone automatically trumped any individual right to justice.A growing postwar isolationism made the United States reluctant to entangle itself in affairs so clearly removed from America's narrow national interests.
Even without official U.S. support, it initially seemed that Britain's wartime pledge to try the Turkish leaders would be realized. In early 1919 the British, who still occupied Turkey with some 320,000 soldiers, pressured the cooperative sultan to arrest a number of Turkish executioners. Of the eight Ottoman leaders who led Turkey to war against the Allies, five were apprehended. In April 1919 the Turks set up a tribunal in Constantinople that convicted two senior district officials for deporting Armenians and acting "against humanity and civilization." The Turkish court found that women and children had been brutally forced into deportation caravans and the men murdered: "They were premeditatedly, with intent, murdered, after the men had had their hands tied behind their backs."The police conmianderTevfik Bey was sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor, and Lieutenant Governor Kemal Bey was hanged. The court also convicted Talaat and his partners in crime in absentia for their command responsibility in the slaughter, finding a top-down, carefully executed plan: "The disaster visiting the Armenians was not a local or isolated event. It was the result of a premeditated decision taken by a central body;... and the immolations and excesses which took place were based on oral and written orders issued by that central body."
Talaat, who was sentenced to death, was living peacefully as a private citizen in Germany, which rejected Allied demands for extradition. Conscious of his place in history,Talaat had begun writing his memoirs. In them he downplayed the scale of the violence and argued that any abuses (referred to mainly in the passive voice) were fairly typical if "regrettable" features of war, carried out by "uncontrolled elements." "I confess," he wrote, "that the deportation was not carried out lawfully everywhere.... Some of the officials abused their authority, and in many places people took the preventive measures into their own hands and innocent people were molested" Acknowledging it was the government's duty to prevent and punish "these abuses and atrocities," he explained that doing so would have aroused great popular "discontent," and Turkey could not afford to be divided during war. "We did all we could," he claimed, "but we preferred to postpone the solution of our internal difficulties until after the defeat of our external enemies" Although other countries at war also enacted harsh "preventive measures," he wrote,"the regrettable results were passed over in silence," whereas "the echo of our acts was heard the world over, because everybody's eyes were upon us" Even as Talaat attempted to burnish his image, he could not help but blame the Armenians for their own fate. "I admit that we deported many Armenians from our eastern provinces," he wrote, but "the responsibility for these acts falls first of all upon the deported people themselves"
After a promising start, enthusiasm for trying Talaat and his henchmen faded and politics quickly intervened. With the Turkish nationalist leader Mustafa Kemal (later Atatiirk) rapidly gaining popularity at home, the Ottoman regime began to fear a backlash if it was seen to be succumbing to British designs. In addition, the execution of Kemal Bey had made him a martyr to nationalists around the empire. To avoid further unrest, the Turkish authorities began releasing low-level suspects. The British had grown frustrated by the incompetence and politicization of what they called the "farcical"Turkish judicial system. Fearing none of the suspects in Turkish custody would ever be tried, the British occupation forces shipped many of the arrested war crimes suspects from Turkey to Malta and Mudros, a port on the Aegean island of Lemnos, for eventual international trials. But support for this, too, evaporated. By 1920 the condemnations and promises of 1915 were five years old. Kemal, who was rapidly consolidating his control over Turkey, had denounced as treasonous the 1920 Treaty of Sevres, which committed the Ottomans to surrender war crimes suspects to an international tribunal. The British clung for a time to the idea that they might at least prosecute the eight Turks in custody who had committed crimes against Britons. But Winston Churchill gave up even this hope in 1920 when Kemal seized twenty-nine British soldiers whose immediate fates Britain privileged above all else."
In November 1921 Kemal put an end to the promise of an international tribunal by negotiating a prisoner swap.The incarcerated Britons were traded for all the Turkish suspects in British custody. In 1923 the European powers replaced the Treaty of Sevres with the Treaty of Lausanne, which dropped all mention of prosecution. Former British prime minister David Lloyd George called the treaty an "abject, cowardly, and infamous surrender" 49 (Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 p.14-5)
Chapter 2
"A Crime Without a Name"
Soghomon Tehlirian, the young Armenian survivor, knew little of international treaties or geopolitics. He knew only that his life had been empty since the war, that Talaat was responsible, and that the former minister of the interior would never stand trial. Since the massacre of his family and injury to his head,Tehlirian had been unable to sleep and had been overcome by frequent epileptic seizures. In 1920 he had found a cause, enlisting in Operation Nemesis, a Boston-based Armenian plot to assassinate the Turkish leaders involved in targeting the Armenians. He was assigned to murder Talaat, a crime that earned him everlasting glory in the Armenian community and brief global notoriety.
While Tehlirian awaited trial in Berlin, Raphael Lemkin, a twentyoneyear-old Polish Jew studying linguistics at the University of Lvov, came upon a short news item on Talaat's assassination in the local paper. Lemkin was intrigued and brought the case to the attention of one of his professors. Lemkin asked why the Armenians did not have Talaat arrested for the massacre.The professor said there was no law under which he could be arrested. "Consider the case of a farmer who owns a flock of chickens," he said. "He kills them and this is his business. If you interfere, you are trespassing."
"It is a crime for Tehlirian to kill a man, but it is not a crime for his oppressor to kill more than a million men?" Lemkin asked. "This is most inconsistent."
Jewish boy being forced to write /udeon his father's store in Vienna, Austria, within days of Germany's Anschluss. (Caption for picture)
Lemkin was appalled that the banner of "state sovereignty" could shield men who tried to wipe out an entire minority. "Sovereignty," Lemkin argued to the professor, "implies conducting an independent foreign and internal policy, building of schools, construction of roads ... all types of activity directed towards the welfare of people. Sovereignty cannot be conceived as the right to kill millions of innocent people"' But it was states, and particularly strong states, that made the rules.
Lemkin read about the abortive British effort to try the Turkish perpetrators and saw that states would rarely pursue justice out of a commitment to justice alone.They would do so only if they came under political pressure, if the trials served strategic interests, or if the crimes affected their citizens.
Lemkin was torn about how to judge Tehlirian's act. On the one hand, Lemkin credited the Armenian with upholding the "moral order of mankind" and drawing the world's attention to the Turkish slaughter. Tehlirian's case had quickly turned into an informal trial of the deceased Talaat for his crimes against the Armenians; the witnesses and written evidence introduced in Tehlirian's defense brought the Ottoman horrors to their fullest light to date. The New York Tunes wrote that the documents introduced in the trial "established once and for all the fact that the purpose of the Turkish authorities was not deportation but annihilation"' But Lemkin was uncomfortable that Tehlirian, who had been acquitted on the grounds of what today would be called "temporary insanity," had acted as the "self-appointed legal officer for the conscience of mankind"' Passion, he knew, would often make a travesty of justice. Impunity for mass murderers like Talaat had to end; retribution had to be legalized.
A decade later, in 1933, Lemkin, then a lawyer, made plans to speak before an international criminal law conference in Madrid before a distinguished gathering of elder colleagues.' Lemkin drafted a paper that drew attention both to Hitler's ascent and to the Ottoman slaughter of the Armenians, a crime that most Europeans either had ignored or had filed away as an "Eastern" phenomenon. If it happened once, the young lawyer urged, it would happen again. If it happened there, he argued, it could happen here. Lemkin offered up a radical proposal. If the international community ever hoped to prevent mass slaughter of the kind the Armenians had suffered, he insisted, the world's states would have to unite in a campaign to ban the practice. With that end in mind, Lemkin had prepared a law that would prohibit the destruction of nations, races, and religious groups. The law hinged on what he called "universal repression," a precur sor to what today is called "universal jurisdiction":The instigators and perpetrators of these acts should be punished wherever they were caught, regardless of where the crime was committed, or the criminals' nationality or official status.' The attempt to wipe out national, ethnic, or religious groups like the Armenians would become an international crime that could be punished anywhere, like slavery and piracy. The threat of punishment, Lemkin argued, would yield a change in practice.
"Barbarity"
Raphael Lemkin had been oddly consumed by the subject of atrocity even before he heard Tehlirian's story. In 1913, when he was twelve, Lemkin had read Nobel Prize winner Henryk Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis? which recounts the Roman emperor Nero's massacres of Christian converts in the first century. Lemkin grew up on a sprawling farm in eastern Poland near the town ofWolkowysk, some 50 miles from the city of Bialystok, which was then part of czarist Russia. Although Lemkin was Jewish, many of his neighbors were Christian. He was aghast that Nero could feed Christians to the lions and asked his mother, Bella, how the emperor could have elicited cheers from a mob of spectators. Bella, a painter, linguist, and student of philosophy who home-schooled her three sons, explained that once the state became determined to wipe out an ethnic or religious group, the police and the citizenry became the accomplices and not the guardians of human life.
As a boy, Lemkin often grilled his mother for details on historical cases of mass slaughter, learning about the sacking of Carthage, the Mongol invasions, and the targeting of the French Huguenots. A bibliophile, he raced through an unusually grim reading list and set out to play a role in ending the destruction of ethnic groups. "I was an impressionable youngster, leaning to sentimentality," he wrote years later. "I was appalled by the frequency of the evil ... and, above all, by the impunity coldly relied upon by the guilty."
The subject of slaughter had an unfortunate personal relevance for him growing up in the Bialystok region of Poland: In 1906 some seventy Jews were murdered and ninety gravely injured in local pogroms. Lemkin had heard that mobs opened the stomachs of their victims and stuffed them with feathers from pillows and comforters in grotesque mutilation rituals. He feared that the myth that Jews liked to grind young Christian boys into matzoh would lead to more killings. Lemkin saw what he later described as "a line of blood" leading from the massacre of the Christians in Rome to the massacre of Jews nearby.
During World War I, while the Armenians were suffering under Talaat's menacing rule, the battle between the Russians and the Germans descended upon the doorstep of the Lemkin family farm.' His mother and father buried the family's books and their few valuables and took the boys to hide out in the forest that enveloped their land. In the course of the fighting, artillery fire ripped their farmhouse apart. The Germans seized their crops, cattle, and horses. Samuel, one of Lemkin's two brothers, died in the woods of pneumonia and malnourishment.
The interwar period brought a brief respite for Lemkin and his fellow Poles. After the Russian-Polish war resulted in a rare Polish victory, Lemkin enrolled in the University of Lvov in 1920. His childhood Torah study had sparked a curiosity in the power of naming, and he had long been interested in the insight words supplied into culture. He had a knack for languages, and having already mastered Polish, German, Russian, French, Italian, Hebrew, andYiddish, he began to study philology, the evolution of language. He planned next to learn Arabic and Sanskrit.
But in 1921, when Lemkin read the article about the assassination of Talaat, he veered away from philology and back toward his dark, childhood preoccupation. He transferred to the Lvov law school, where he scoured ancient and modern legal codes for laws prohibiting slaughter. He kept his eye trained on the local press, and his inquiry gained urgency as he got wind of pogroms being committed in the new Soviet state. He went to work as a local prosecutor and in 1929 began moonlighting on drafting an international law that would commit his government and others to stopping the targeted destruction of ethnic, national, and religious groups. It was this law that the cocksure Lemkin presented to his European legal colleagues in Madrid in 1933.
Lemkin felt that both the physical and the cultural existence of groups had to be preserved. And so he submitted to the Madrid conference a draft law banning two linked practices"barbarity" and "vandalism" "Barbarity" he defined as "the premeditated destruction of national, racial, religious and social collectivities." "Vandalism" he classified as the "destruction of works of art and culture, being the expression of the particular genius of these collectivities."' Punishing these two practices-the destruc tion of groups and the demolition of their cultural and intellectual lifewould occupy him fully for the next three decades.
Lemkin met with two disappointments. First, the Polish foreign minister Joseph Beck, who was attempting to endear himself to Hitler, refused to permit Lemkin to travel to Madrid to present his ideas in person."' Lemkin's draft had to be read out loud in his absence. Second, Lemkin found few allies for his proposal. In an interwar Europe composed of isolationist, nationalistic, economically ailing nations, European jurists and litigators were unmoved by Lemkin's talk of crimes that "shock the conscience" The League of Nations was too divided to make joint lawnever mind joint law on behalf of imperiled minorities. The delegates talked at length about "collective security," but they did not mean for the phrase to include the security of collectives within states. Besides, in the words of one delegate, this crime of barbarity took place "too seldom to legislate." Most of the lawyers present (representing thirty-seven countries) wondered how crimes committed a generation ago in the Ottoman Empire concerned lawyers on the civilized Continent. Although the German delegation had just walked out of the League of Nations and thousands of Jewish families had already begun fleeing Nazi Germany, they were also skeptical about apocalyptic references to Hitler. When Lemkin's plan was presented, the president of the supreme court of Germany and the president of Berlin University left the room in protest." As Lemkin put it later in his characteristically stiff style, "Cold water was poured on me." 12
Lemkin had issued a moral challenge, and the lawyers at the conference did not reject his proposal outright. They tabled it. Lemkin noted, "They would not say `yes; and they could not say 'no."' They were not prepared to agree to intervene, even diplomatically, across borders. But neither were they prepared to admit that they would stand by and allow innocent people to die.
Back in Poland, Lemkin was accused of trying to advance the status of Jews with his proposal. Foreign minister Beck slammed him for "insulting our German friends."" Soon after the conference, the antiSemitic Warsaw government fired him as deputy public prosecutor for refusing to curb his criticisms of Hitler."
Jobless and chastened by the reception of his draft law, Lemkin still did not question the soundness of his strategy. History, he liked to say, was "much wiser than lawyers and statesmen."The crime of barbarity repeated itself with near "biological regularity."" But Lemkin saw that people living in peacetime were clearly going to have difficulty hearing, never mind heeding, warning pleas for early action. The prospect of atrocity seemed too remote, the notion of a plot to destroy a collective too inhuman, and the fate of vulnerable groups too removed from the core interests of outsiders. Yet by the time the crimes had been committed, it would be too late for concerned states to deter them. States would forever be stuck dealing with the consequences of genocide, unable to see or unwilling to act ahead of time to prevent it. But Lemkin did not give up. Over the next few years, at law conferences in Budapest, Copenhagen, Paris, Amsterdam, and Cairo, Lemkin rose in his crisply pressed suit and spoke in commanding French about the urgency of the proposal.
Lemkin was not the only European who had learned from the past. So, too, had Hitler. Six years after the Madrid conference, in August 1939, Hitler met with his military chiefs and delivered a notorious tutorial on a central lesson of the recent past: Victors write the history books. He declared:
It was knowingly and lightheartedly that Genghis Khan sent thousands of women and children to their deaths. History sees in him only the founder of a state.... The aim of war is not to reach definite lines but to annihilate the enemy physically. It is by this means that we shall obtain the vital living space that we need. Who today still speaks of the massacre of the Armenians?"
A week later, on September 1, 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland. In 1942 Hitler restored Talaat's ashes to Turkey, where the Turkish government enshrined the fallen hero's remains in a mausoleum on the Hill of Liberty in Istanbul."
Flight
If Lemkin had been in a position to utter a public "I told you so" in September 1939, he would have done so. But like all Jews scrambling to flee or to fight, Lemkin had only survival on his mind. Six days after the Wehrmacht's invasion of Poland, he heard a radio broadcast instructing able-bodied men to leave the capital. Lemkin rushed to the train station, carrying only a shaving kit and a summer coat. When the train was bombed and set aflame by the German Luftwaffe, Lemkin hid and hiked for days in the woods nearby, joining what he called a "community of nomads." He saw German bombers hit a train crammed with refugees and then a group of children huddling by the tracks. Three of his traveling companions were killed in an air raid. Hundreds of Poles marching with him collapsed of fatigue, starvation, and disease. (Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 p.17-23)
Lemkin read widely in linguistic and semantic theory, modeling his own process on that of individuals responsible for coinages he admired. Of particular interest to Lemkin were the reflections of George Eastman, who said he had settled upon "Kodak" as the name for his new camera because: "First. It is short. Second. It is not capable of mispronunciation. Third. It does not resemble anything in the art and cannot be associated with anything in the art except the Kodak."
Lemkin saw he needed a word that could not be used in other contexts (as "barbarity" and "vandalism" could). He self-consciously sought one that would bring with it "a color of freshness and novelty" while describing something "as shortly and as poignantly as possible."
But Lemkin's coinage had to achieve something Eastman's did not. Somehow it had to chill listeners and invite immediate condemnation. On an otherwise undecipherable page of one of his surviving notebooks, Lemkin scribbled and circled "THE woke" and drew a line connecting the circle to the phrase, penned firmly, "MORAL JUDGEMENT." His word would do it all. It would be the rare term that carried in it society's revulsion and indignation. It would be what he called an "index of civilization."
The word that Lemkin settled upon was a hybrid that combined the Greek derivative getto, meaning "race" or "tribe," together with the Latin derivative tide, from caedere, meaning "killing." "Genocide" was short, it was novel, and it was not likely to be mispronounced. Because of the word's lasting association with Hitler's horrors, it would also send shudders down the spines of those who heard it.
Lemkin was unusual in the trust he placed in language. Many of his Jewish contemporaries despaired of it, deeming silence preferable to the necessarily inadequate verbal and written attempts to approximate the Holocaust. Austrian writer and philosopher Jean Amery was one of many Holocaust survivors estranged from words:
Was it "like a red-hot iron in my shoulders" and was this "like a blunt wooden stake driven into the base of my head?"-a simile would only stand for something else, and in the end we would be led around by the nose in a hopeless carousel of comparisons. Pain was what it was. There's nothing further to say about it. Qualities of feeling are as incomparable as they are indescribable. They mark the limits of language's ability to communicate.
The suffering inflicted by Hitler fell outside the realm of expression.
But Lemkin was prepared to reinvest in language. New to the United States and wracked by anxiety about his family, he viewed the preparation of Axis Rule and the coinage of a new word as a constructive distrac tion. At the same time, he did not intend for "genocide" to capture or communicate Hitler's Final Solution. The word derived from Lemkin's original interpretations of barbarity and vandalism. In Axis Rule he wrote that "genocide" meant "a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves""' The perpetrators of genocide would attempt to destroy the political and social institutions, the culture, language, national feelings, religion, and economic existence of national groups. They would hope to eradicate the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and lives of individual members of the targeted group. He continued:
Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain, or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and colonization of the area by the oppressor's own nationals.
A group did not have to be physically exterminated to suffer genocide. They could be stripped of all cultural traces of their identity. "It takes centuries and sometimes thousands of years to create a natural culture," Lemkin wrote, "but Genocide can destroy a culture instantly, like fire can destroy a building in an hour."
From the start, the meaning of "genocide" was controversial. Many people were receptive to the idea of coining a word that would connote a practice so horrid and so irreparable that the very utterance of the word would galvanize all who heard it. They also recognized that it would be unwise and undesirable to make Hitler's crimes the future standard for moving outsiders to act. Statesmen and citizens needed to learn from the past without letting it paralyze them. They had to respond to mass atrocity long before the carnage had reached the scale of the Holocaust. But the link between Hitler's Final Solution and Lemkin's hybrid term would cause endless confusion for policymakers and ordinary people who assumed that genocide occurred only where the perpetrator of atrocity could be shown, like Hitler, to possess an intent to exterminate every last member of an ethnic, national, or religious group. (Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 p.42-3)
As the language for the genocide resolution was batted around the special committee, some proposed using the word "extermination" instead of "genocide" But Judge Abdul Monim Bey Riad of Saudi Arabia, whom Lemkin considered the most sophisticated of all representatives, pleaded that "extermination" was a term that could also apply to insects and animals. He also warned that the word would limit the prohibited crime to circumstances where every member of the group was killed. Lemkin's broader concept, "genocide," was important because it signaled destruction apart from physical destruction and because it would require states to respond before all the damage had been done. The more expansive term "genocide" was preserved.
On December 11, 1946, one year after the final armistice, the General Assembly unanimously passed a resolution that condemned genocide as "the denial of the right of existence of entire human groups," which "shocks the conscience of mankind" and is "contrary to moral law and to the spirit and aims of the United Nations." More gratifying to Lemkin, who was no fan of declarations, the resolution tasked a UN committee with drafting a full-fledged UN treaty banning the crime. If that measure passed the General Assembly and was ratified by two-thirds of the UN member states, it would become international law.
A Neu, York Times editorial proclaimed that the resolution and the ensuing law would mark a "revolutionary development" in international law. The editors wrote, "The right to exterminate entire groups which prevailed before the resolution was adopted is gone. From now on no government may kill off a large block of its own subjects or citizens of any country with impunity."'' Lemkin returned to his run-down one-room apartment in Manhattan, pulled down the shades, and slept for two days."
Closing the Loophole:
Moving from Resolution to Law
At the behest of UN SecretaryGeneral Trygve Lie, Lemkin helped prepare the first draft of the UN genocide convention.'' When the official UN process kicked in, however, the Polish lawyer bowed out, knowing he could be more valuable on the outside. In 1947 Lemkin began work on a history of genocide and carried a thick file folder bulging with gruesome details on various cases. He took his cause and himself exceptionally seriously. Later, with full sincerity, he wrote that "of particular interest" to UN delegates were his "files on the destruction of the Maronites, the Herreros in Africa, the Huguenots in France, the Protestants in Bohemia after the Battle of White Mountain, the Hottentots, the Armenians in 1915 and the Jews, gypsies and Slavs by the Nazis. "h Many stuffy UN delegates would eventually agree to vote for the proposed convention simply in order to bring the daily litany of carnage to as rapid an end as possible.
This was a crucial phase. If he kept up the pressure, Lemkin believed the law would at last be born. Rosenthal often challenged Lemkin with the realist reproach: "Lemkin, what good will it do to write mass murder down as a crime; will a piece of paper stop a new Hitler or Stalin?" Lemkin, the believer, would stiffen and snap: "Only man has law. Law must be built, do you understand me?You must build the law!"As Rosenthal notes,"He was not naive. He didn't expect criminals to lay down and stop committing crimes. He simply believed that if the law was in place it would have an effect-sooner or later."27
For a legal dreamer, a man with no experience in Polish politics, and a newcomer to the American and UN political processes, Lemkin had surprisingly sharp political instincts. He had learned one lesson during the Holocaust, which was that if a UN genocide convention were ever to come to pass, he would have to appeal to the domestic political interests of UN delegates. By pestering the various national consulates, he obtained lists of the most important organizations in each of the UN member states and assembled a committee that spoke for groups in twenty-eight countries and claimed a remarkable joint membership of more than 240 million people. The committee, which was more of a front for Lemkin, compiled and sent petitions to each UN delegate urging passage of the convention. UN diplomats who hesitated received telegrams-usually drafted by Lemkin-from organizations at home. He used the letters to make delegates feel as if"by working for the Genocide Convention," they were "representing the wishes of their own people.' 12' Lemkin wrote personally to UN delegates and foreign ministers from most countries. In Catholic countries he preached to bishops and archbishops. In Scandinavia, where organized labor was active, he penned notes to the large labor groups. He cornered intellectuals like Pearl Buck, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, and Gabriela Mistral, who published an appeal in the New York Times on November 11, 1947. A Times editorial branded Lemkin "the man who speaks through sixty nations."
Although Lemkin was determined to see genocidal perpetrators prosecuted, he did not believe the genocide convention should itself create a permanent international criminal court. The world was "not ready," he said, as the court would mark too great an affront to state sovereignty. Instead, under the "universal repression" principle, genocidists should be treated as pirates had been in the past: Any country could try a genocide suspect, regardless of where the atrocities were committed.
In August 1948 Lenikin cobbled together the funds to fly to Geneva to lobby the UN subcommittee that was overseeing the drafting of the actual text of the genocide convention.' No longer working at the State Department or teaching, he lived off donations from religious groups and borrowed from a cousin who lived on Long Island. He found his stay in Geneva eerie, as it was the first visit he had paid to the former home of the League of Nations since 1938, when he had lobbied "paralyzed minds" to prohibit barbarity. With "the blood ... not yet dried" in Europe, he hoped his plea would be heard differently this time. He also knew that he had a distinct advantage operating in Geneva rather than New York because the UN delegates, away from their headquarters, were likely to be lonelier and more prepared to endure him. Lemkin knew he grated on people's nerves. Often, before entering a room, he would pause outside and make a pledge to himself not to bring up genocide and instead allow the conversation to drift from art to philosophy to literature, subjects in which he was fluent. If he could bring himself to hold his tongue, he told himself, eventually his companion would be better disposed to his campaign. When he delivered formal lectures on genocide in Geneva, he was less shy. "I did not refrain from reading aloud from my historical files in considerable detail," he wrote."' Indeed, he rarely censored his graphic tales of torture and butchery.
Wherever the law went, Lemkin followed. He decided to prepare for the September 1948 General Assembly session with a short rest near Montreux, France. Lemkin recovered some of the strength sapped by years of unceasing commotion. While visiting a local casino, he even invited a young lady to dance a tango. He was captivated by her beauty and recalled, "Every word the girl said was intelligent and meaningful." She told him she was of Indian descent, born in Chile. Lemkin saw his opening: He informed her that his work on mass slaughter would be of particular interest to her because of the destruction of the Incas and the Aztecs." This was one pickup line the young woman had probably never heard before. She soon departed.
When he returned to Geneva, Lemkin attended every single session of the Legal Committee. In between sessions he prepared memos for the delegates." He felt it essential that they draw upon historic cases of mass atrocity so the law would capture a variety of techniques of destruction. He ritually reminded the representatives of the old maxim that the "legislator's imagination must be superior to the imagination of the criminal"" The convention's chief opponent in Britain was Hartley Shawcross, who had prosecuted the Nazi defendants at Nuremberg and considered the genocide law a waste of time. Shawcross ran into Lemkin in the hall in the fall of 1948 and remarked, "The Committee is becoming emotional, this is a bad sign." Lemkin, who was so tired that he could hardly stand up, was heartened." The Legal Committee approved the draft and submitted it to the General Assembly, which scheduled a vote on the measure for December 9, 1948. After a bruising year of drafting battles, the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide settled on a definition of genocide as
any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such:
A. Killing members of the group;
B. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
C. Deliberately inflicting on the group the conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
D. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
E. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
For a party to be found guilty of perpetrating this new crime of genocide, it had to (1) carry out one of the aforementioned acts, (2) with the intent to destroy all or part of (3) one of the groups protected. The law did not require the extermination of an entire group, only acts committed with the intent to destroy a substantial part. If the perpetrator did not target a national, ethnic, or religious group as such, then killings would constitute mass homicide, not genocide.
Lemkin of course opposed all forms of state-sponsored murder, but his legal efforts were focused on the subset of state terror that he believed caused the largest number of deaths, was the most common, and did the most severe long-term damage-to the targeted groups themselves and to the rest of society. The perpetrator's particular motives for wanting to destroy the group were irrelevant. Thus, when Iraq sought in 1987-1988 to purge its Kurdish minority on the grounds that it inhabited a vital border area, it was still genocide. When the Rwandan government tried to exterminate the country's Tuts] minority in 1994, claiming that armed Tutsi rebels posed a military threat, it was still genocide. And when the Bosnian Serbs tried to wipe out the non-Serb presence in Bosnia after the Muslims and Croats had declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1992, it was still genocide. What mattered was that one set of individuals intended to destroy the members of a group not because of anything they did but because of who they were. If the General Assembly passed the convention, nobody would be immune from punishment-not leaders, public officials, nor private citizens.The treaty would enshrine a new reality: States would no longer have the legal right to be left alone. Interfering in a genocidal state's internal affairs as Morgenthau had tried to do was not only authorized but required by the convention. If a government committed or permitted genocide, signatories would have to take steps to prevent, suppress, and punish the crime, which no instrument had ever required before. States had considerable autonomy in deciding what steps to take, but they were expected to act.The convention could be read to permit military intervention. The law even implied its necessity by enshrining a legal duty to "suppress" the crime, but neither the law nor the law's drafters discussed the use of force. It was a large enough leap to convince a state's leaders to denounce or punish the cringes of a fellow state.
The genocide convention boldly closed many of Nuremberg's loopholes. It made states (and rebels) liable for genocide regardless of whether they trespassed across an internationally recognized frontier or committed aggression against another state. Peacetime or wartime, inside a country or outside, the 1948 treaty made no distinction.
The convention's enforcement mechanisms were more explicit about punishment than prevention. A state signatory would be bound to pass a domestic genocide law and to try any private citizen or public official for genocide committed on or outside its territory. Countries would try their own genocide suspects as well as those who wandered inside their borders. This left gaps. In the case of postwar Germany, for instance, it would have meant relying principally on former members of the Nazi Party to try Nazi criminals. Still, even if those responsible for genocide continued to hold power, they would be reluctant to leave their country and risk arrest. The basic idea, as the Washington Post noted in one editorial endorsing the criminalization of genocide, was that the law "would throw a sort of cor don sanitaire around the guilty nation." Genocide perpetrators would be trapped at home, and "the sort of persecution of helpless minorities which has hitherto gone unrebuked" would be stigmatized. "Genocide can never be the exclusive internal concern of any country," the editorial concluded. "Wherever it occurs, it must concern the entire civilized world."" If the convention were passed, genocide would become everybody's business.
Lemkin thought December 9, 1948, would never arrive. When it did, he stood in the press galley of the Palais de Chaillot in Paris and kept his eyes trained on the General Assembly debate, restraining himself from interjecting. Finally, the vote arrived. Fifty-five delegates voted yes to the pact. None voted no. Just four years after Lemkin had introduced "genocide" to the world, the General Assembly had unanimously passed a law banning it." Lemkin remembered:
There were many lights in the large hall. The galleries were full and the delegates appeared to have a solemn radiating look. Most of them had a good smile for me. John Foster Dulles told me in a somewhat businesslike manner that I had made a great contribution to international law. The Minister of Foreign Affairs of France, [Robert] Schumann, thanked me for my work and said he was glad that this great event took place in France. Sir Zafrullah Khan said this new law should be called the "Lemkin Convention."Then Dr. Evatt put the resolution on the Genocide Convention to a vote. Somebody requested a roll call. The first to vote was India. After her "yes" there was an endless number of"yeses"A storm of applause followed. I felt on my face the flashlight of cameras.... The world was smiling and approving and I had only one word in answer to all that, "thanks"
The world's states committed themselves, in the words of the convention preamble, "to liberate mankind from such an odious scourge" After announcing the result of the roll call, General Assembly president Herbert V. Evatt of Australia, whom Lemkin had befriended in Geneva, proclaimed the passage "an epoch-making event in the development of international law." He urged that the convention be signed by all states and ratified by all parliaments at the earliest date. In a sweeping ode to the promise of the United Nations and international law, Evart declared that the days of political intervention dressed up as humanitarianism were past:
Today we are establishing international collective safeguards for the very existence of such human groups.... Whoever will act in the name of the United Nations will do it on behalf of universal conscience as embodied in this great organization. Intervention of the United Nations and other organs which will have to supervise application of the convention will be made according to international law and not according to unilateral political considerations. In this field relating to the sacred right of existence of human groups we are proclaiming today the supremacy of international law once and forever.'"
It marked the first time the United Nations had adopted a human rights treaty.
Nobody who was familiar with the genocide convention was unfamiliar with the man behind it.The NewYork Tinies praised the success of Lemkin's "15 year fight." When reporters looked for Lemkin after the vote to share his triumph, they could not find him. "Had he been in character," remembered John Hohenberg of the New York Post, "he should have been strutting proudly in the corridors, proclaiming his own merit and the virtues of the protocol that had been his dream."" But he had gone missing. That evening journalists finally tracked him down, alone in the darkened assembly hall, weeping, in Rosenthal's words, "as if his heart would break.""' The man who for so long had insisted on imposing himself upon journalists now waved them off, pleading, "Let me sit here alone."" He had been victorious at last, and the relief and grief overwhelmed him. He described the pact as an "epitaph on his mother's grave" and as a recognition that "she and many millions did not die in vain"
Lemkin was struck that night with a vicious fever. Two days later he was again admitted to a Paris hospital, where he remained confined for three weeks. Although the doctors thought he was suffering complications stemming from his high blood pressure, they struggled to make a firm diagnosis. Lenikin offered his own account of his ailment: "Genociditis," he said, or "exhaustion from work on the Genocide Convention"
Unfortunately, though Lemkin could not know it, the most difficult struggles lay ahead. Nearly four decades would pass before the United States would ratify the treaty, and fifty years would elapse before the international community would convict anyone for genocide.
Chapter 5
"A Most Lethal Pair of Foes"
Lemkin's Lobby
Never in history had states even resolved to prevent atrocities. But enforcement was another matter entirely. Lemkin needed to make two things happen. First, twenty UN member states that had voted for the ban in the General Assembly had to ratify it domestically in order for the treaty to become official international law. And second, the United States, the world's most powerful democracy, would have to take the lead in enforcing the genocide ban. In the absence of U.S. participation, the League of Nations had been impotent, and the sponsors of all new initiatives at the nascent UN were determined to involve the United States at every turn. "This treaty is like a ship carrying survivors," Lemkin wrote to himself. "It cannot be permitted to sink"
When it came to tallying twenty domestic ratifications, Lemkin again became a one-man, one-globe, multilingual, single-issue lobbying machine. Sifting through Lemkin's papers, one is awed by the quantity of correspondence he maintained. He sent letters out in English, French, Spanish, Hebrew, Italian, and German. Long before computers or photocopiers, he handcrafted each letter to suit the appropriate individual, organization, or country. ..... (Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 p.54-60)
But some U.S. senators feared the expansive language would he used to target Americans. The law's most potent foe in the United States was the respected American Bar Association (ABA). Alfred T. Schweppe, chairman of the ABA's Committee on Peace and Law Through the United Nations, challenged the convention's definition of "genocide" before a U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing in 1950:
Certainly [the convention's definition] doesn't mean if I want to drive 5 Chinamen out of town, to use that invidious illustration, that I must have the intent to destroy all the 400,000,000 Chinese in the world or the 250,000 within the United States. It is part of a racial group, and if it is a group of 5, a group of 10, a group of 15, and I proceed after them with guns in some community to get rid of them solely because they belong to some racial group.... I think you have got a serious question.That is what bothers me.
Senator Brien McMahon (D.-Conn.), the chairman of the first Senate subcommittee, who himself supported ratification, wanted answers, and this often resulted in a quest to pin down numbers. He asked, "Let us assume there is a group of 200,000. Would that have to mean that you would have to murder 100,001 before a major part would come under the definition?" Lemkin stressed that partial destruction obviously had to be "of such substantial nature that it affects the existence of the group as a group" and wrote graphically that partial destruction meant that "by cutting out the brains of a nation, the entire body becomes paralyzed.."" In the end the McMahon subcommittee recommended including an "understanding" that the United States interpreted "in part" to mean "a substantial portion of the group concerned" Even though this should have satisfied the senators' need for reassurance, many ignored the proposed compromise language and continued to complain.' Years later, when the Khmer Rouge, the Iraqi government, and the Bosnian Serbs began eradicating minority groups, those who opposed a U.S. response often ignored the genocide convention's terms and denied genocide was under way, claiming the number of dead or the percentage of the group eliminated was too small.
The genocide convention also earned criticism for stipulating that a perpetrator could attempt to obliterate a group not only by killing its members but by causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting damaging conditions of life, preventing births, or forcibly removing children. But in order to constitute acts of genocide, these crimes could not be carried out in isolation. They had to be a piece of a plan to destroy all or part of the designated group. The aim of including acts besides murder was to ensure that the international community looked to-and reacted against-such "lesser" crimes as minimassacres, population transfers, and sterilization because they were evils in their own right and because they fell on a continuum that often preceded the physical elimination of a people. In criminal law an intent to commit a crime is generally hard to prove, and intent to commit genocide even harder. Only rarely would those planning a genocide record their intentions on tape or in documents. Proving an intent to exterminate an entire people would usually be impossible until the bulk of the group had already been wiped out.The convention drafters believed it would be better to act too soon rather than too late.When one group started expelling another group from its midst, as the Turks had done in 1915 and the Serbs would do in Bosnia in 1992, it could signal a larger plan of destruction.
The law's opponents ignored the reasoning that lay behind the ban's provisions. Instead they zeroed in on the possibility of stretching the new law's language to apply to practices too mild to warrant interference in another state's domestic affairs. Some suggested that U.S. ratification would license critics of the United States to investigate the eradication of Native American tribes in the nineteenth century." Southern senators feared that inventive lawyers might argue that segregation in the South inflicted "mental harm" and thus counted as genocide." Legislators warned that the convention would empower politicized rabble-rousers to drag the United States or the senators themselves before an international court.
Reckoning with American brutality against native peoples was long overdue, but the convention, which was not retroactive, could not be used to press the matter. And although the United States' dismal record on race certainly exposed it to charges of racism and human rights abuse, only a wildly exaggerated reading of the genocide convention left the southern lawmakers vulnerable to genocide charges. Lemkin himself addressed the issue: "In the Negro problem the intent is to preserve the group on a different level of existence," he said, "but not to destroy it.""' Eunice Carter, a spokeswoman for the National Council on Negro Women, agreed, testifying that "the lynching of an individual or of several individuals has no relation to the extinction of masses of peoples because of race, religion, or political belief."The council supported the convention because women and children were often the first victims of genocide and because minorities would be safe nowhere if genocide went "unchecked or unpunished"
Again, the 1950 Senate subcommittee had sought to soothe the senators' fears by attaching an explicit, legal "understanding" that shielded the southern states by stating clearly, "Genocide does not apply to lynchings, race riots or any form of segregation." The critics did not heed this (embarrassing) recommendation. Nor did they acknowledge that "trumped-up" charges could be filed regardless of whether the United States ratified the convention.The problem in the decades ahead would not be that too many states would file genocide charges against fellow states at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Rather, too few would do so. And as of late 2001 no state had yet dared to challenge the United States by filing genocide charges against it in the ICJ. The southern opposition was driven mainly by xenophobia and an isolationism that led it to try to exempt the United States from all international frameworks.
Lemkin himself became a target of xenophobic slurs. In 1950 Senate Foreign Relations Committee member H. Alexander Smith (R.N.J.) was aggrieved that the "biggest propagandist" for the convention was "a man who comes from a foreign country who ... speaks broken English." The senator claimed to know "many people ... irritated no end by this fellow running around." Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (R.- Mass.), who supported ratification, suggested that somebody tell Lemkin he had "done his own cause a great deal of harm." Much of the criticism was rooted less in Lemkin's tirelessness than in his Jewishness. Smith said that he himself was "sympathetic with the Jewish people," but "they ought not to be the ones who are propagandizing [for the convention], and they are"" Despite having invented the concept of genocide, Lemkin was not invited by the Senate subcommittee to testify in the congressional hearings on ratification.
Lemkin reflected upon congressional opposition to his convention by noting, "If somebody does not like mustard, he will always find a reason why he doesn't like it, after you have convinced him that the previous reason has no validity." Critics complained that the treaty was both too broad (and thus could implicate the United States) and not broad enough (and thus might not implicate the Soviet Union). Although it protected "national, ethnical or religious groups" that were targeted "as such," the law did not protect political groups. The Soviet delegation and its supporters, mainly Communist countries in Eastern Europe as well as some Latin American countries, had argued that including political groups in the convention would inhibit states that were attempting to suppress internal armed revolt." Behind the Soviet position was the fear that the convention would invite outside powers to punish Stalin for wiping out national minorities throughout Central Asia, as well as his alleged counterrevolutionary "enemies" Stalin, it came as no surprise, was not interested in creating a right of international intervention (or what he considered a right of unwanted meddling) to stop such practices. Because Lemkin recognized that including political groups would split the Legal Committee and doom the law, he, too, had lobbied for their exclusion." Instead of curing the law of its defects or supplementing it with other measures, American critics contended that a state had arguably committed genocide if it caused mental harm to five persons because of the color of their skin but had not committed genocide if it killed 100,000 people because of the color of their party membership card. The exclusion of political groups from the convention made it much harder in the late 1970s to demonstrate that the Khmer Rouge were committing genocide in Cambodia when they set out to wipe out whole classes of alleged "political enemies."
The core American objections to the treaty, of course, had little to do with the text, which was no vaguer than any other law that had not yet been interpreted in a courtroom. Rather, American opposition was rooted in a traditional hostility toward any infringement on U.S. sovereignty, which was only amplified by the red scare of the 1950s. If the United States ratified the pact, senators worried they would thus authorize outsiders to poke around in the internal affairs of the United States or embroil the country in an "entangling alliance." It was hard to see how it was in the U.S. interest to make a state's treatment of its own citizens the legitimate object of international scrutiny. Genocide prevention was a low priority in the United States, and international law offered few rewards to the most powerful nation on earth.
In May 1950 McMahon's Senate subcommittee reported favorably on the treaty, but the North Korean invasion of South Korea the following month caused the Foreign Relations Committee to postpone its vote.The war unleashed an antiCommunist panic. Republican senators Joseph McCarthy and John Bricker criticized the United Nations as a "world government" that had dragged the United States into war. They were champi ons of states' rights, which they said the federal government was trampling by joining international treaties. The genocide convention represented a stronger UN at the expense of American sovereignty and a stronger federal government at the expense of the states. Senator A. Willis Robertson, a conservative Democrat from Virginia and a Bricker supporter, wrote that he already had "enough trouble with do-gooders in our own country" who demanded a federal government role in regulating human rights. The American people certainly did not need the United Nations applying "that same type of pressure.."15 In 1952, hoping to limit the federal government's power and backed overwhelmingly by Senate Republicans, Bricker introduced an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would have reduced the president's authority to approve foreign treaties.
When Eisenhower succeeded Truman in 1953, Lemkin viewed the former U.S. general as a natural ally. After his troops had liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp, Eisenhower had fired off a cable to Army Chief of Staff George Marshall denouncing the Nazi savagery: "We are told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for," Eisenhower said, reflecting on the piles of corpses. "Now, at least, he will know what he is fighting against." But generals are taught to choose their battles, and Eisenhower quickly dropped the fight for the genocide convention. In 1953, in the hopes of appeasing Bricker's supporters, the president disavowed this and all human rights treaties. "' Secretary of State John Foster Dulles pledged that the administration would never "become a party to any covenant [on human rights] for consideration by the Senate" He also flatly abrogated the Nuremberg precedent, charging that the genocide convention exceeded the "traditional limits" of treaties by attempting to generate "internal social changes" in other countries. The United States would advance human rights through education, Dulles declared, not through law.
The genocide convention was far from perfect. But whatever its ambiguities, its ratification in the U.S. Senate would have signaled to the world and the American people that the United States believed genocide was an international crime that should be prevented and punished, wherever it occurred. It would have required the United States to prosecute genocide suspects who wandered onto American shores. And it would have empowered and obligated American policymakers "to undertake" to stop future genocide.
The Home Front
Just as he had earlier tried to drum up international support, Lemkin here tried to create a U.S. constituency for ratification with speaking tours, opeds, and mass mailings. Hoping to get Eisenhower to reverse his position, Lemkin borrowed stationery from supportive community organizations, applied for grants to pay for postage, and sent thousands of letters to absolutely anybody whose moral heartstrings he felt he might tug or on whose connections he might prey to get the ear of a U.S. senator. Although most of his letters contained a mix of flattery and moral prodding, he sometimes slipped into bluntly bullying his contacts and demanding that they acquire a conscience. Thelma Stevens, a volunteer at the Methodist Women's Council, was probably startled one summer to read this portion of an otherwise grateful letter from Lemkin urging her to coordinate a campaign on behalf of Senate passage:
This Convention is a matter of our conscience and is a test of our personal relationship to evil. I know it is very hot in July and August for work and planning, but without becoming sentimental or trying to use colorful speech, let us not forget that the heat of this month is less unbearable to us than the heat in the ovens of Auschwitz and Dachau and more lenient than the murderous heat in the desert of Aleppo which burned to death the bodies of hundreds of thousands of Christian Armenian victims of genocide in 1915.
Humorless though he was, Lemkin knew it was essential for him to win over elite opinion. He struck up his most fruitful correspondence with Gertrude Samuels of the Neu, York Times editorial board. Samuels's. editorials, which appeared in the paper throughout the ratification fight, often seemed to flow right from Lemkin's pen. At first they echoed his conviction; later they reflected his frustration. One editorial termed the criminalization of genocide "one of the greatest civilizing ideas of our century" and lambasted the Senate for its "indifference and delay." Another used the same words that Lemkin had penned to Samuels in a letter dated June 6, 1950: "Humanity is our client," the editorial proclaimed. "Every day of delay is concession to crime."" Lemkin was eager to be plagiarized. (Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 p.66-71)
Proxmire used his daily soliloquy to rebut common American misperceptions that had persisted since Lemkin's day. Powerful rightwing isola tionist groups would never come around. But most Americans, the senator believed, did not really oppose ratification; they were just misinformed. "The true opponents to ratification in this case are not groups or individuals," Proxmire noted in one of 199 speeches he gave on the convention in 1967. "They are the most lethal pair of foes for human rights everywhere in the world-ignorance and indifference.""' He used the speeches to educate. As critics picked apart the treaty and highlighted its shortcomings, he responded," I do not dismiss this criticism or skepticism. But if the U.S. Senate waited for the perfect law without any flaw... the legislative record of any Congress would be a total blank. I am amazed that men who daily see that the enactment of any legislation is the art of the possible can captiously nit pick an international covenant on the outlawing of genocide..""
Proxmire believed the United States could be doing far more in the court of public opinion to impact state and individual behavior. "The United States is the greatest country in the world," he said. "The pressures of the greatest country in the world could make a potential wrongdoer think before committing genocide .1117 But the United States neither ratified the UN genocide convention nor denounced regimes committing genocide. U.S. military intervention was not even considered.
Initially, Proxmire thought it might take a year or two at most to secure passage. "I couldn't think of a more outrageous crime than genocide," he recalls. "Of all the laws pending before Congress, this seemed a nobrainer" On the floor he listed other treaties that the Senate had endorsed in the period it had allowed the convention to languish:
Included among the hundred-plus treaties are a Tuna Convention with Costa Rica, a bridge across the Rainy River, a Halibut Convention with Canada, a Road Traffic Convention allowing licensed American drivers to drive on European highways, a Shrimp Convention with Cuba ... a treaty of amity with Muscat and Oman, and even a most colorful and appetizing treaty entitled the "Pink Salmon Protocol." I do not mean to suggest that any of these treaties should not have been ratified.... But every one ... has as its objective the promotion of either profit or pleasure.
The genocide convention, by contrast, dealt with people. Because it did not promote profit or pleasure for Americans, it did not easily garner active support. Opponents of the treaty were more numerous, more vocal, and in the end more successful than Proxmire could have dreamed. Undeterred by failure, Proxmire would continue his campaign into the next decade. Indeed, nineteen years and 3,211 speeches after casually pledging in 1967 to speak daily, Proxmire would still be rising in an empty Senate chamber, dressed in his trademark tweed blazers and his Ivy League ties, insisting that ratification would advance America's interests and its most cherished values. Photo of a Cambodian woman and her child, taken at the Tool Sleng torture center, shortly before they were murdered. (Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 p.83-5)
Richard Nixon became president in 1969. Although he had pledged to end the Vietnam War, Nixon in fact expanded it into Cambodia. Because North Vietnamese units were taking sanctuary in neighboring Cambodia, the country became a "sideshow" of some importance to the new administration.The United States invested heavily in the idea that the two bands of Communists, the Cambodians and the Vietnamese, were united. In March 1969 Nixon ordered American B-52s to begin bombing Cambodia." Code-named "Operation Breakfast" for the setting in which National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and U.S. military advisers drafted their bombing plans, the mission was kept top secret for fear of domestic protest. When the bombers failed to locate the Communists' bases, Nixon expand ed the mission. He authorized secret attacks on other sanctuaries and followed up Operation Breakfast with further unappetizing missions, named Operations Lunch, Snack, Dinner, Dessert, and Supper. In the first phase of the bombing campaign, which lasted fourteen months and was known as Menu, U.S. bombers flew 3,875 sorties."
President Nixon did not stop there. In April 1970, frustrated by the elusiveness of the North Vietnamese, he ordered U.S. ground troops to "clean out" North Vietnamese strongholds in Cambodia. Nixon warned, "If, when the chips are down, the world's most powerful nation-the United States ofAmericaacts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world." Some 31,000 American and 43,000 South Vietnamese forces surged into Cambodia, ostensibly to prevent the Communists there from staging "massive attacks" on U.S. troops in Vietnam.' ' The invasion, which Nixon insisted was only an "incursion," had nothing to do with the Cambodians and everything to do with the U.S. war with Vietnam. Defense Secretary James Schlesinger later testified to Congress, "The value of Cambodia's survival derives from its importance to the survival of South Vietnam"
The month before the U.S. ground attack on Cambodia, the United States had welcomed a coup by the pro-American prime minister, Lon Nol, against Cambodia's longtime ruler, Prince Norodom Sihanouk. Sihanouk, the father of independent Cambodia, had acquired the aura of an ancient Angkor deva-raj, or godking, since he had assumed the throne in 1941. A bon vivant, Sihanouk was a movie director, a gourmet, and a womanizer, as well as a popular head of state. But he had alienated the United States by striking up a friendship with China, America's foe at the time. He had also irritated President Nixon by trying to keep Cambodia neutral in the U.S. war withVietnani. U.S. officials believed [.on Nol would be far more malleable to American designs.
But the United States had backed a loser. Lon Nol was pro-American, but like many U.S.-sponsored dictators of the period, he was also corrupt, repressive, and incompetent. He secluded himself in his villa in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh and remained woefully out of touch with the affairs of his state. He depended on the mystical advice of a visionary monk named Main Prum Moni, or "Great Intellectual of Pure Glory."The only assertive moves Lon Nol made were those designed to increase his own power. He stripped citizens of basic freedoms, suspended parliament, and announced in October 1971 that it was time to end "the sterile game of outmoded liberal democracy." In 1972 he declared himself president, prime minister, defense minister, and marshal of the armed forces. The United States cared only that Lon Nol was a staunch antiCommunist. The United States spent some $1.85 billion between 1970 and 1975 propping up his regime-evidence, in President Nixon's words, of "the Nixon Doctrine in its purest form.."12
The U.S. ground invasion of April 1970 occurred at the beginning of Cambodia's five-year civil war, a merciless war that the genocidal Khmer Rouge would win. On one side were Lon Nol and the United States. On the other side stood the Vietnamese Communists and the small, mysterious group of radical Cambodian Communist revolutionaries. The leaders of the Khmer Rouge, or Red Khmer, had been educated in Paris, studied Maoist thought, and received extensive political and military support from China. They were youths who had been driven to Communist resistance out of frustration with Prince Sihanouk's earlier, authoritarian rule. Under the leadership of Saloth Sar, who later assumed the pseudonym Pol Pot, they had left Cambodia's cities in the 1960s to plot revolution from the Cambodian and Vietnamese countryside." It had been Sihanouk's tyranny that drove them to arms, but when Lon Nol seized power in the 1970 coup, the KR began fighting Lon Nol's government forces instead and made their former nemesis Prince Sihanouk the figurehead leader of an unlikely coalition. This earned them support from the millions of Cambodians who trusted Sihanouk, the likable man who had brought them independence. Although doubts emerged in 1973 and 1974 about whether the more moderate Sihanouk spoke for the KR, Cambodians trusted his judgment. "I do not like the Khmer Rouge and they probably do not like me," the prince said in 1973. " But they are pure patriots.... Though I am a Buddhist, I prefer a red Cambodia which is honest and patriotic than a Buddhist Cambodia under Lon Nol, which is corrupt and a puppet of the Americans."
Even backed by the United States, the Lon Nol regime did not stand much of a chance in battle. Its forces were equipped for parades, not warfare.'" In 1972 Lon Nol famously had airplanes sprinkle blessed sand around Phnom Penh's perimeters to ward off his ungodly Communist enemies. Lon Nol's officers exaggerated Cambodian army troop strength, listing phantom troops and using U.S. aid to pad their pockets, stuff foreign bank accounts, and build themselves glamorous homes. Regular army sol diers, by contrast, frequently went unpaid and deserted. And though the Cambodian army enjoyed a huge numerical edge over the rebels, many were unenthusiastic about fighting on behalf of Lon Nol.Those who did fight were dependent on U.S. bombing and, later, U.S. military aid.
U.S. interest in Cambodia during the civil war was completely derivative of U.S. designs on Vietnam. So when U.S. troops withdrew from Vietnam in January 1973, the bombing of Cambodia became harder to justify. In August 1973 Congress finally stepped in to ban the air campaign. President Nixon was furious. He blamed Congress for weakening regional security and "raising doubts in the mind of both friends and adversaries" about U.S. "resolve" All told, between March 1969 and August 1973, U.S. planes dropped 540,000 tons of bombs onto the Cambodian countryside."' The United States continued to supply military and financial assistance to Lon Not, warning that a "bloodbath" would ensue if the KR were allowed to triumph.
The U.S. B-52 raids killed tens of thousands of civilians.' Villagers who happened to be away from home returned to find nothing but dust and mud mixed with seared and bloody body parts. Lon Nol's ground forces used massive heavy artillery barrages to pacify areas or villages where some enemy activity was suspected. By 1973, inflation in Cambodia topped 275 percent, and 40 percent of roads and one-third of all bridges had been rendered unusable.' With the local economy dysfunctional, U.S. aid came to count for 95 percent of all of Lon Nol's income.
The U.S. bombing did little to weaken the Vietnamese or the Cambodian Communists. Instead, it probably had the opposite effect. Cambodians who resented America's demolition derby were captive both to the promise of peace and the antiAmericanism of the Khmer Rouge. British journalist William Shawcross and others have argued that the Khmer Rouge ranks swelled primarily because of the U.S. intervention. Chhit l)o, a Khmer Rouge leader from northern Cambodia who later defected, described the effect of U.S. bombing:
Every time after there had been bombing, they would take the people to see the craters, to see how big and deep the craters were, to see how the earth had been gouged out and scorched.... The ordinary people ... sometimes literally shit in their pants when the big bombs and shells came .... Their minds just froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days.Terrified and half-crazy, the peo ple were ready to believe what they were told.... That was what made it so easy for the Khmer Rouge to win the people over.... It was because of their dissatisfaction with the bombing that they kept on cooperating with the Khmer Rouge, joining up with the Khmer Rouge, sending their children off to go with them."
Prince Sirik Matak, once a Lon Nol ally, warned U.S. officials not to back the unpopular Lon Nol regime. "If the United States continues to support such a regime," he warned, "you help the Communists. "° American intervention in Cambodia did tremendous damage in its own right, but it also indirectly helped give rise to a monstrous regime.
The Unknowable Unknown
Before it begins, genocide is not easy to wrap one's mind around. A genocidal regime's intent to destroy a group is so hideous and the scale of its atrocities so enormous that outsiders who know enough to forecast brutality can rarely bring themselves to imagine genocide. This was true of many of the diplomats, journalists, and European Jews who observed Hitler throughout the 1930s, and it was certainly true of diplomats, journalists, and Cambodians who speculated about the Khmer Rouge before they seized power. The omens of imminent, mass violence were omnipresent but largely dismissed.
Before the fall of Phnom Penh in April 1975, Cambodia's Communists were well enough known to cause some Americans alarm. In June 1973 Kenneth Quinn, a thirty-two-year-old U.S. foreign service officer, was introduced to the Khmer Rouge quite by accident. For six years, he had worked in Vietnam as an American provincial adviser, and he had spent his last two years posted in Chou Doc, the Vietnamese province bordering Cambodia on the Mekong River. One day, Quinn hiked up a mountain outside Chou Doc that allowed him to survey the terrain for 10 miles around. In scanning the Cambodian horizon, he encountered a scene that both stunned and chilled him. "The villages in Cambodia are clustered in circles," Quinn recalls. "When I looked out, I saw that every one of these clusters was in flames and there was black smoke rising from each one. I didn't know what was going on. All I knew was that as far as the eye could see, every single village in Cambodia was on fire." (Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 p.191-6)
Twining pointed to a small milk can and asked the refugees to indicate the amount of rice the Khmer Rouge fed them each day. They said that they had been given rice that would have filled about half of this palmsized implement. When Twining argued that they would not have been able to live on such portions, they agreed but told him that anybody who complained was dragged away to what the KR called Angkar Loeu. Angkar was the nameless and faceless "organization on high," which prided itself on never erring and on having "as many eyes as a pineapple."" At first most Cambodians believed that those who disappeared were being taken to Angkar for reeducation or extra training and study. Despite the agony of daily life and the rumors of daily death, they had again hoped for the best. Often the truth became clear only when they stumbled upon a huge pile of bones in the forest. After encountering these concrete artifacts of evil, most accepted that a summons by Angkar meant certain death, a realization that was enough to cause only some to risk flight.
One refugee, Seath K.Teng, was only four years old when she was separated from her family. She later remembered fierce hunger pain as the KR forced four children to share one rice porridge bowl. "Whoever could eat the fastest got more to eat," she recalled:
We worked seven days a week without a break.The only time we got off work was to see someone get killed, which served as an example for us.... In the center of the meeting place was one woman who had both of her hands tied behind her. She was pregnant and her stomach bulged out. Before her stood a little boy who was about six years old and holding an ax. In his shrill voice he yelled for us to look at what he was going to do. He said that if we didn't look, we would be the next to be killed. I guess we all looked, because the woman was the only one killed that day. The little boy was like a demon from hell. His eyes were red and he didn't look human at all. He used the back of his ax and slammed it hard on the poor woman's body until she dropped to the ground. He kept beating her until he was too tired to continue.
By August 1975 Twining had heard enough of these stories to become a convert:
I remember there was one moment. I was in a place in Thailand called Chantha Buri, a province that borders the Cambodian town of Pailin. I was sitting in this little dark house on the border, and suddenly twenty or thirty Cambodians appeared like ghosts out of the forest. They told me stories of such hardship and horror that it just hit me. Somebody afterwards said to me, "you know they rehearsed their stories." But these Cambodians had just arrived from weeks on the road. They were lean, tanned. They had been wearing the same clothes for days. They were smelly, if I dare say it. And the one thing I knew was that they were genuine. Genuine. From that point on, I believed....
After he was jolted into belief by the smell of the distraught survivors, Twining filtered future testimony through the prism of the Holocaust. "My mind wanted, needed, some way of framing the thing," he recalls, "and the Holocaust was the closest thing I had.This sounded to me like extermination-you wipe out a whole class of people, anyone with glasses, anyone with a high school education, anyone who is Buddhist. I mean, the link was natural" Although there were similarities between the Nazis and the KR, he and others at the border gradually assembled an understanding of the specifics of KR brutality. They learned that in the new Cambodia freedom had become undesirable, dissent intolerable, and joy invisible. All facets of life had been mandated by Angkar, which made the rules. By the end of 1975, those who had once known enough to fear but had hoped enough to deny had come to accept the contours of the hell that had befallen Cambodia.
Refugees told them:
• Citizens could not move. Travel passes were required even to cross town. Cities were evacuated at gunpoint.
• They could not feed themselves. In most areas the state supplied a tin or less of rice each day.
• They could not learn what they chose. Only KR tracts were permitted. Libraries were ravaged. And speaking foreign languages signaled "contamination" and earned many who dared to do so a death sentence.
• They could not reminisce. Memories of the past life were banned. Families were separated. Children were "reeducated" and induced to inform on parents who might be attempting to mask their "bourgeois" pasts. "Cambodia," a colonial term, was replaced by "Democratic Kampuchea."
• They could not flirt. Only Angkar could authorize sexual relationships. The pairings for weddings were announced en masse at the commune assemblies.
• They could not pray. Chapels and temples were pillaged. Devout Muslims were often forced to eat pork. Buddhist monks were defrocked, their pagodas converted into grain silos.
• They could not own private property. All money and property were abolished. The national bank was blown up. Radios, tele phones, televisions, cars, and books gathered in the central squares were burned.
• And they could not make contact with the outside world. Foreign embassies were closed; telephone, telegraph, and mail service suspended.
Work was prized to a deadly extent. Cambodians were sent to the countryside, where an average day involved planting from 4 a.m. to 10 a.m., I p.m. to 5 p.m., and then again from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. Communist cadres transported annual harvests to central storage sites but refused to distribute the fruits of the harvests to those who had done the reaping. Health was superfluous to the national project, and starvation and disease quickly engulfed the country. Upon taking power, the Khmer Rouge terminated almost all foreign trade and rejected offers of humanitarian aid. (Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 p.115-8)
Caldwell, the Australian ideologue, was granted a separate interview with the supreme revolutionary leader. When he later traded notes with Becker, he delighted in describing Pol Pot's mastery of revolutionary economic theory. Before retiring for the evening, Becker sparred with her zealous colleague one last time about the veracity of refugee accounts, which he still refused to believe, and the worthiness of the revolution, in which he refused to abandon belief. She was awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of tumult and gunfire outside her room. A half dozen or more shots were fired, and an hour and a half of the longest, most terrifying silence of Becker's life passed. When she finally heard the voice of her KR guide, she emerged trembling into the hall. lludman was fine, she was told. Caldwell, the true believer, had been murdered.
Becker did not know why Caldwell had been killed, but she suspected that one faction wanted either to embarrass another or to plug the crack of an opening to the outside world before it widened. A murder would deter meddlesome foreigners from visiting again. On December 23, 1978, Becker and l)udman arrived in Beijing with the wooden casket containing Caldwell's body. Two days later Vietnam launched a fullscale invasion of Cambodia.
Aftermath
"Humanitarian" Rescue
Kassie Neou, one of Cambodia's leading human rights advocates today, survived Pol Pot's madness and the outside world's indifference. An English teacher before the genocide, he posed as a taxi driver, shedding his eyeglasses and working around the clock to develop a "taxidriver manner" He had to make the KR believe that he had not been educated. Captured nonetheless, Neou was tortured five times and spent six months in a KR prison with thirty-six other inmates. Of the thirtyseven who were bound together with iron clasps, only Neou's hope of survival was rewarded. The young guards executed the others but spared hint because they had grown fond of the Aesop's fables he told them as bedtime stories.When Neou discusses the terror today, he lifts up his trouser leg and displays the whitened, rough skin around his ankle where a manacle held hint in place.The revolutionaries' crimes were so incomprehensible that sonie part of hint seems relieved to be left with tangible proof of his experience.
During his imprisonment, though he had been highly critical of the earlier U.S. involvement in Cambodia, Neou was one of many Cambodians who could not help but dream that the United States would rescue his people. "When you are suffering like we suffered, you simply cannot imagine that nobody will come along to stop the pain;' he remembers. "Everyday, you would wake up and tell yourself, `somebody will come, something is going to happen.' If you stop hoping for rescue, you stop hoping. And hope is all that can keep you alive." Survivors of terror usually recall maintaining similar, necessary illusions. Without them, they say, the temptation to choose death over despair would overwhelm.
Neou had fantasized that the United States would spare him certain death, but it was Vietnam, the enemy of the United States, that in January 1979 finally dislodged the bloody Communist radicals. In response, the United States, which in 1978 had at last begun to condemn the KR, reversed itself, siding with the Cambodian perpetrators of genocide against the Vietnamese aggressors.
Vietnam's invasion had a humanitarian consequence but was not motivated by humanitarian concerns. Indeed, for a long time Vietnam and its Soviet backer had blocked investigation into the atrocities committed by their former partner in revolution. In 1978, however, as KR incursions into Vietnam escalated,Vietnam had begun detailing KR massacres.Vietnamese officials used excerpts from Ponchaud's book, Year Zero, as radio propogan- da. They called on Cambodians to "rise up for the struggle to overthrow the Pol Pot and leng Sary clique" who were "more barbarous ... than the Hitlerite fascists." Vietnam also began reindoctrinating and training Khmer Rouge defectors and Cambodian prisoners seized in territory taken from Cambodia. It crept ever closer to the Soviet Union, joining the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON), signing a twenty-five-year treaty of friendship and cooperation with the Soviets, and receiving ever larger military shipments from them. The Soviet Union Joined Vietnam's anti-KR campaign, condemning the KR "policy of genocide."
For the previous year, the United States had been flirting with restoring relations with Vietnam but was not keen on seeing it overrun its neighbor."' From the U.S. embassy in Bangkok, Ambassador Morton Abramowitz wrote in a secret August 1978 cable to the State Department: "Neither the Khmers nor the world would miss Pol Pot. Nonetheless, the independence of Kampuchea, particularly its freedom from a significant Hanoi presence or complete Hanoi domination, is a matter of importance to us.""' Far from encouraging the overthrow of the KR, as Neou and others would have hoped, U.S. officials urged the Vietnamese to think twice. In November 1978 Secretary of State Vance sent a message to the Vietnamese: "Don't you see what lies ahead if you invade Cambodia? This is not the way to bring peace to the area. Can't we try some UN instrument, use the UN in some way?"
The United States had its own reasons for frowning upon a Vietnamese triumph. It planned to restore diplomatic relations with China on January 1, 1979. China's hostility toward Vietnam and its Soviet military and political sponsor greatly influenced the U.S. reaction to the invasion. For neither the first nor the last time, geopolitics trumped genocide. Interests trumped indignation.
Aware of the Khmer Rouge's isolation and unpopularity in the West, Hanoi thought it would earn praise if it overthrew Pol Pot. It also concluded that regardless of the outside world's opinion, it could not afford to allow continued KR encroachments into the Mekong Delta. By December 22, 1978,Vietnamese planes had begun flying forty to fifty sorties per day over Cambodia. And on December 25, 1978, twelve Vietnamese divisions, or some 100,000 Vietnamese troops, retaliated against KR attacks by land. Teaming up with an estimated 20,000 Cambodian insurgents, they rolled swiftly through the Cambodian countryside. Despite U.S. intelligence predictions that the KR would constitute a potent military foe, McGovern's earlier forecast of rapid collapse was borne out. Lacking popular support, the Khmer Rouge and its leaders fled almost immediately to the northern jungle of Cambodia and across the Thai border.
The Vietnamese completed their lightning-speed victory with the seizure of Phnom Penh on January 7, 1979. (Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 p.139-42)
U.S. Policy: Choosing the Lesser Evil
The existence of the torture center testified to the depravity of the KR regime.'" Cambodia was not widely visited immediately following the KR overthrow, but enough evidence of KR brutality emerged for many Americans to know that they should celebrate their defeat. Senator McGovern, the new humanitarian hawk, learned of the Vietnamese victory and thought it offered the real irony. "After all those years of predictions of dominos falling and Communist conspiracies," he remembers, "it was Vietnam that went in and stopped Pol Pot's slaughter. Whatever their motivation, the Vietnamese were the ones who supplied the military force to stop the genocide. They should have gotten the Nobel Peace Prize" Foreign service officer Charles Twining, who by then had been transferred to the Australia-New Zealand desk at the State Department, was overjoyed at reports of the Vietnamese victory. He recalls, "I didn't see how else change would have happened. Those of us who knew about the Khmer Rouge cheered, but we quickly realized that everyone else just heard it as `Vietnam, our enemy, has taken over Cambodia."' Some prominent U.S. officials confessed publicly to being torn. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, told reporters in New York: "I almost always think it's always wrong for a country to transgress the borders of another country, but in the case of Cambodia I'm not terribly upset.... It is a country that has killed so many of its own people, I don't know if any American can have a clear opinion of it.... It's such a terribly ambiguous moral situation."
But rational, interest-based calculations led the United States to different official conclusions, which quickly overtook these isolated bursts of relief among Cambodia watchers. The Vietnamese victory presented President Carter with a difficult moral and political choice.Which was the lesser evil, a regime that had slaughtered some 2 million Cambodians or a Communist regime backed by the Soviet Union that had flagrantly violated an international border and that now occupied a neighboring state? After weighing the politics of the choice, Carter sided with the dislodged Khmer Rouge regime. The United States had obvious reasons for opposing the expansion of Vietnamese (and, by proxy, Soviet) influence in the region. It also said it had an interest in deterring crossborder aggression anywhere in the world. But this principle was applied selectively. In 1975, when its ally, the oil-producing, anti-Con munist Indonesia, invaded East Timor, killing between IOO,000 and 200, (1(10 civilians, the United States looked away.'" In the Cambodia case perhaps the most important factor behind Carter's choice was U.S. fondness for China, which remained the prime military and economic backer of Pol Pot's ousted government. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski saw the problem through the Sino-Soviet prism. Since U.S. interests lay with China, they lay, indirectly, with the Khmer Rouge. Slamming the KR might jeopardize the United States' new bond with China. Slamming the Vietnamese would cost the United States nothing.
With the policy decided and the tilt toward China firm, Secretary of State Vance called immediately for the Vietnamese to "remove their forces from Cambodia" Far from applauding the KR ouster, the United States began loudly condemning Vietnam. In choosing between a genocidal state and a country hostile to the United States, the Carter administration chose what it thought to he the lesser evil, though there could hardly have been a greater one.
The new government in Phnom Penh was led by Heng Sauirin and Hun Sell, two former Khmer Rouge officials who had defected to Vietnam in 1977. Meanwhile, the KR regrouped at the border, thanks to military and medical aid from Thailand, China, Singapore, Britain, and the United States.''" With the Soviet Union arming Vietnam and the Heng Samrin government, China opened up the Deng Xiaoping Trail for Chinese arms deliveries to the KR guerrillas through Thailand.''" Brzezinski told Becker: "I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. I encouraged the Thai to help the [Khmer Rouge].... Pol Pot was an abomination.We could never support him but China could."""' The military and political conflict took on the flavor of a Sino-Soviet proxy war.Vietnam and the states that made up the Soviet bloc argued that the will of the Cambodian people had been gratified and it was absurd to support a genocidal regime. On the other side were China, most members of ASEAN, and the jilted Khmer Rouge officials themselves, who argued that whatever the abuses of the past regime, nothing could excuse a foreign invasion.
The Khmer Rouge did their part, launching an image campaign of sorts. Khieu Samphan replaced Pol Pot as prime minister in December 1979 and invited journalists to hear his version of events. Rejecting charges of genocide, he said, "To talk about systematic murder is odious. If we had really killed at that rate, we would have no one to fight the Vietnamese. Yet now that the evidence of the horrors had surfaced, Samphan could not deny abuse outright. He shrewdly acknowledged some 10,000 executions under Pol Pot, and admitted "mistakes" and "shortcomings" Samphan swore that if the KR returned to power, they would not again evacuate the cities, restrict movement and religion, or eliminate currency. In pursuit of U.S. help, he also brushed aside mention of America's prior sins. "These things are in the past," he said, referring to Nixon's invasion of Cambodia, "and should not be brought Up. 11162 Well aware that it was American hostility toward Vietnam rather than any love of the KR that earned the KR U.S. support, he warned that without U.S. help and with the backing of Moscow, "The Vietnamese will go further-toward the rest of Southeast Asia, the Malacca Strait, toward control of the South Pacific and Indian oceans""' He spoke the fashionable language of falling dominoes.
The Carter administration's policy choice was made easier because at home no voices cried out to support Vietnam. America's most ardent antiCommunists were still angry at Vietnam for the U.S. defeat. American leftists were mostly disengaged. Die-hard Communists were befuddled by the seemingly sudden division of Southeast Asia into two rival and bitterly contested Communist camps. The mass protests in the United States in the 1960s were a reaction against American imperialism and the loss of American lives. With neither at stake in the 1979 Vietnam-Cambodia conflict, the activists who had once made it to the mainstream did not resurface. The administration was able to reduce its policy calculus to pure geopolitics without rousing dissent.
The issue was not simple. Cambodians themselves were elated to be rid of the KR but opposed to the Vietnamese occupation. The Vietnamese had brought about a liberation from hell, but they did not usher in the freedom for which Cambodians longed. Vietnam's claims to have invaded simply to stop atrocity and to defend its borders from Cambodian attacks were proven more hollow with the passage of time. Some 200,000 Vietnamese troops patrolled the Cambodian countryside, and Vietnamese advisers clogged the Cambodian governmental ministries. The Vietnamese-backed regime earned further criticism because of its mishandling of a potential famine. It initially dismissed as Western propaganda reports that Cambodians faced imminent starvation because of disruption of planting and poor cultivation. Then, when outside aid was clearly needed, the regime was more intent on using food as a political weapon than ensuring Cambodians were fed. Kassie Neou, the former English teacher who had long fantasized about rescue, remembers his reaction to the Vietnamese invasion: "My first response was raw. It was a simple, `Phew, we survived: My second thought, upon understanding that our land was occupied, was, `Uh-oh.' Basically, the Vietnamese saved us from sure death, and they deserved our thanks for that. But years later, we felt like saying, `We already said thank you. So why are you still here?"'
Prince Sihanouk, once the nominal leader of the KR front, had been placed under house arrest soon after the KR seized Phnom Penh. In the course of Pol Pot's rule, he had lost three daughters, two sons, and fifteen grandchildren. Sensing yet another political opening, he emerged from the shadows after the KR's ouster to criticize both the KR and the Vietnamese. "It is a nightmare." he said. "The Vietnamese, they are like a nian who has a very delicious piece of cake in his mouth-Cambodia-and all that man can do is swallow the cake""" For many Cambodians, the occupation by the Vietnamese quickly came to feel like a "liberation" similar to that of Poland by the Soviets after Nazi rule.
A Regime Less "Stinky"?
The UN Credentials Committee, an obscure nine-member body based at UN headquarters in New York, became the unlikely forum for the international debate on what to do about Cambodia. The Credentials Committee routinely met twice a year to determine whether states had the "credentials" to occupy their UN seats. In September 1979, when the committee convened, both the vanquished KR regime and the victorious Vietnamesebacked regime submitted applications. UN delegates from the Communist and nonCommunist worlds sparred over which regime should be recognized and which violation of international law was more egregious.
Three layers of geopolitics made it unlikely that the U.S. representative was going to favor stripping the Khmer Rouge of their UN seat. First, of course, the United States was determined not to condone the Vietnamese invasion. Second, it wanted to please China. And third, as a matter of standing policy, the United States wanted the Credentials Committee to remain a pro forma paperwork clearinghouse rather than a political body that would weigh in on the relative "goodness" or "badness" of a regime. If the committee moved away from ritual rubber-stamping and began judging the merits and demerits of member states, the United States feared, the committee might next strip UN credentials from Israel.
Robert Rosenstock was the lawyer who represented the United States on the Credentials Committee. The Secretariat tried to select people who would treat the granting of credentials as a technical issue, not a substantive one. They wanted people, he says, who would not "start carrying on if a government was obnoxious." Rosenstock did not find the Cambodia vote especially difficult:
We at the Credentials Committee ... don't make waves.... For us to go against our long-standing mode of operating, somebody in Washington would have had to call us up, and say, "Listen these Khmer Rouge guys really stink and the new guys, the Vietnamese, stink a little less so let's take away the credentials of the stinkier regime." That didn't happen. Washington looked at it as, "They all stink, so let's support the status quo"
Rosenstock duly argued that what was at issue was not the conduct of a government toward its own nationals. Since the KR credentials had been accepted at the 1978 session of the General Assembly, they should be accepted again.The committee had a "technical" task to perform and not a political one.
On September 19, 1979, after some heated debate and despite the submission by Congo of a compromise proposal that would have left Cambodia's UN seat open, the committee voted 6-3 to award UN credentials to the KR regime.The committee did not even review the credentials of the Vietnamese-backed Heng Samrin government.
"I was told to engineer the result on the Credentials Committee," says Rosenstock, "so I engineered the result." The happiest and most surprised man in New York on the day of the vote was the KR's leng Sary.'" He came bounding up to Rosenstock after the tally and extended his hand. "Thank you so much for everything you have done for us," leng said. Rosenstock instinctively shook the extended hand and then muttered to a colleague, "I think I now know how Pontius Pilate must have felt."
The battle was not yet won, as the debate over the two regimes' competing moral and legal claims simply shifted from the Credentials Committee to the General Assembly two days later. Here multiple critics spoke out against the Credentials Committee's recommendation that the KR regime be recognized. UN delegates, mainly from the Soviet bloc, argued that the KR's brutality was of such magnitude that they had forfeited their claim to sovereignty. These UN representatives contended that the new regime controlled Cambodia's territory, represented the people's will, and therefore earned the rank of legitimate sovereign. Some pointed to the Holocaust. The Grenada representative compared the Vietnamese liberators to the Allied liberators who administered Germany after defeating it. The Soviet and Byelorussian delegates cited the terms of the genocide convention, which they said required withholding recognition from the genocidal regime. Far from deserving to occupy the UN seat, they said, Pol Pot and leng Sary, who had fled to the Thai border, should be extradited back to Cambodia to be tried for genocide under the convention.
The debate was highly charged, as blistering condemnations of the old and new regimes were traded across the floor. Although the majority of the speakers supported the U.S. and Chinese view thatVietnani's invasion should not be recognized, none contested the atrocities committed by Pol Pot. Indeed, all were quick to preface their support for maintaining recognition of the KR with disclaimers that they "held no brief" for the Pol Pot regime, "did not condone their human rights record," and "did not excuse their abominable crimes" Their votes to seat the KR government, they stressed, "did not mean agreement with the past policies of its leaders"
The United States carried Rosenstock's arguments from the Credentials Committee to the General Assembly. "For three years," U.S. representative Richard Petree said, "we have been in the forefront of international efforts to effect fundamental changes in these practices and policies by peaceful means" In the absence of a "superior claim," however, the regime seated by the previous General Assembly should be seated again."" Moral values were at stake-a commitment to peace, stability, order, and the rule of law, as well as the insistence that states carry out their obligations under the UN charter. The UN charter had made noninterference in sovereign states a sacred principle. No doctrine of humanitarian intervention had yet emerged to challenge it.
Most of the arguments made by those who voted for seating the KR were internally contradictory. They first insisted that recognizing the Vietnamese-installed regime would mean condoning external intervention and licensing foreign invasions by big powers into small states, thus making the world a "more dangerous place." Yet they next claimed that maintaining recognition of the Pol Pot government would not mean condoning genocide or licensing dictators elsewhere to believe they could treat their citizens as abusively as they chose.
Nonetheless, the U.S. position prevailed. The first debate of many, on September 21, 1979, lasted six and a half hours, and the assembly voted 71-35 (34 abstentions, 12 absences) to endorse the Credentials Committee resolution.The KR's Khieu Samphan was quoted later on the front page of the Washington Post, saying, "This is a just and clearsighted stand, and we thank the U.S. warmly."
Although it would take years for Pol Pot to enter the ranks of the maniacs of our century, where he is ritually placed now, even by 1979 many grasped the depth of his terror. Those who visited were able to tour Tuol Sleng, witness the skeletal remains that lay stubbornly scattered throughout the country, tabulate death counts, and speak with their Cambodian friends, who would often simply burst into tears without a moment's notice. Rosenstock remembers, "I realized enough at the time to feel that there was something disgusting about shaking leng Sary's hand. I wasn't in the habit of comparing myself to Pontius Pilate. I mean, I felt like throwing up when the guy shoved his hand in my face. Oooh, it was awful." Yet not so awful as to cause him or his more senior colleagues to challenge U.S. policy, which was driven by U.S. distaste for Vietnam and its interest in pleasing China.
Even with the 1979 vote behind the United States, the presence of KR officials at the UN continued to upset many Americans. In advance of the Credentials Committee vote in 1980, ten U.S. senators signed a letter calling for the United States to abstain on the vote in order to "stand apart from both" brutal regimes. A Washington Post editorial urged the United States to hold the seat open, as nothing about the U.S. policy of recognizing the KR was working. "Geopolitically, it has brought the United States no evident gains," the editorial said. "Politically, it has been used by Hanoi to justify both its support of Heng Samrin and its suspicion of U.N. relief efforts. Morally, it is beyond characterization. A subsequent editorial, entitled "Hold-Your-Nose Diplomacy," noted, "There are many close calls in foreign policy, but this is not one of them..""' Yet no American lobby really pressed the empty-seat solution and, on the other side of the issue, the five ambassadors from the ASEAN countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and the Philippines) urged the White House to stand its ground. In an effort to win support for the Khmer Rouge claim to the UN seat, they also held a secret meeting with members of the House Asian and Pacific Affairs Subcommittee. 112 After a brief period of suspense, Secretary of State Edmund Muskie announced that since Vietnam continued to refuse to withdraw from Cambodia, the United States would again support the seating of Pol Pot's government. He stressed that the U.S. decision "in no way implies any support or recognition" of the Khmer Rouge regime. "We abhor and condemn the regime's human rights record," Muskie said."' The General Assembly voted 74-35, with 32 abstentions. By the following year, the debate over whether to recognize the KR had become pro forma.
In 1982, under ASEAN pressure, the Khmer Rouge joined in a formal coalition that included the nonCommunist forces, the so-called National Army of Sihanouk, and the Khmer People's National Liberation Front under Son Sann. This coalition shared the UN seat. At the request of the United States, China supplied Sihanouk and Son Sarin with arms, and in 1982 the United States began to provide nonlethal covert assistance. Estimated initially at $5 million a year, this funding grew to $12 million by 1985, when Congress authorized up to $5 million in overt aid.
The Khmer Rouge coalition continued to occupy the UN seat as its guerrillas battled the Heng Samrin regime from the countryside. KR tactics changed little. KR soldiers captured and executed foreign tourists and inflicted terror upon those Cambodians who had the misfortune to live under KR control."' The consequences of international recognition were significant. The legitimate KR coalition received international financial and humanitarian support, whereas the illegitimate Vietnaminstalled regime in Phnom Penh was treated like a pariah. The Cambodian people who had so recently been isolated by the paranoid KR were now isolated by the United States and its allies."`
Ignoring all the evidence available in Cambodia and their commitments to punish genocide, UN member states continued to refuse to invoke the genocide convention to file genocide charges at the International Court of Justice against the Cambodian government. Indeed, official UN bodies still refrained even from condemning the genocide. Only in 1985 were bureaucratic inertia and political divides briefly overcome so that a UN investigation could finally be conducted. By then, because it had emerged that the Khmer Rouge had killed huge percentages of Muslim Chains, Buddhist monks, and Vietnamese as such, it proved relatively easy to show that the regime was guilty of genocide against distinct ethnic, national, and religious groups. Once the UN chair of the Subcommission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities had thoroughly documented the crimes, the 1985 final report described the atrocities as "the most serious that had occurred anywhere in the world since Nazism" The subcommission noted that the horrors were carried out against political enemies as well as ethnic and religious minorities but found that this did not disqualify the use of the term "genocide" Indeed, in the words of Ben Whitaker, the UN special rapporteur on genocide, the KR had carried out genocide "even under the most restricted definition."
Yet nothing changed as a result of the declaration. The Khmer Rouge flag continued to fly outside the United Nations, and KR foreign minister long Sary continued to represent Cambodia at the UN as if the KR terror had never happened. Only with the thawing of the Cold War and the visit of Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev to former arch-enemy China in May 1989 did Cambodia cease to be a pawn on the superpowers' chessboard. With the Chinese and the Soviets no longer interested in fighting a proxy war through the KR and the Vietnamese, the United States had no reason to maintain support for the KR. Not until July 1990 did Secretary of State James Baker write a letter to Senate majority leader George Mitchell laying out a new U.S. policy toward the KR at the UN. Henceforth, the United States would vote against the KR coalition at the United Nations and at last support the flow of humanitarian aid into Vietnam and Cambodia. '7 Still, during negotiations in Paris aimed at brokering a peace deal among the rival factions. the United States sided with China and the KR in opposing the word "genocide" in the Paris peace accords. This led to an embarrassing moment in the midst of an all-night negotiation in which, according to U.S. officials present, Prince Sihanouk stood up and said, "I am for genocide, I ant for genocide, I ani for genocide" Because the U.S. position again prevailed, the accords referred not to genocide, but to "the universally condemned policies and practices of the past." 179 (Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 p.146-54)
Rita Hauser, President Nixon's delegate to the UN Human Rights Commission, had testified before the 1970 Senate Committee:
We have frequently invoked the terms of this Convention ... in our continued aggressive attack against the Soviet Union for its practices, particularly as to its Jewish communities, but also as to the Ukrainians, Tartars, Baptists and others. It is this anomaly ... [that] often leads to the retort in debates plainly put, "Who are you to invoke a treaty that you are not a party to?"
Although Proxmire had relayed many of these tales on the Senate floor and the Soviet tactic had long been publicized, he believed President Reagan, the renowned Cold Warrior, would be more annoyed by the Soviet debater's move than his predecessors had been. Reagan would not wish to allow the "Evil Empire" to claim any patch of moral high ground.
Proxmire was backed by the grassroots ad hoc committee, which tried to generate bottom-up pressure. With the November 1984 presidential election approaching, Korey worked behind the scenes to lobby the foreign policy advisers of the incumbent Reagan and challenger Walter Mondale. He struck out with the Mondale campaign, but in early September one of Reagan's foreign policy advisers casually called to say that the president was prepared to change his position on the genocide convention and support ratification. Korey was floored.
In each presidential election cycle, it had become a tradition that the candidates would use the B'nai B'rith annual convention as an opportunity to address the Jewish community. On the eve of the 1984 convention, State Department spokesman John Hughes publicly announced that President Reagan would endorse the genocide convention. "The commitment of our country to prevent and punish acts of genocide is indisputable;' Hughes said. "Yet our failure to ratify this treaty ... has opened the United States to unnecessary criticism in various international fora"" In his first term Reagan had not supported the convention. In fact, when Republican Senator Charles Percy, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, held hearings on the treaty in 1981, not a single representative of the Reagan administration had turned up to testify. But in his B'nai B'rith speech, thanks partly to the lobbying of nongovernmental advocates and the proven unwillingness of Proxmire to let the issue drop on Capitol Hill, the president (and candidate) changed course.The Soviet rebuttals irritated him. Reagan's advisers also believed that the president could gain at least a few Jewish votes by supporting the measure. But perhaps most crucial, with only three weeks remaining in the Senate session, the Reagan team knew that the treaty would not come up for passage until after his reelection. "This was a shrewd move by the Administration," a Senate aide said at the time. "There is no time for floor debate in which the President would have to take on the conservatives, but there is time for political benefits for the President."
Reagan's belated shift was a small victory for convention advocates. But it actually only brought him into line with all previous American presidents except Eisenhower. The administration gave no signs that President Reagan was prepared to invest the political capital needed to bring about full Senate ratification. But that was before Reagan blundered at Bitburg.
Bitburg
In April 1985 the White House announced that President Reagan planned to lay a wreath at West Germany's Bitburg Cemetery the following month. Reagan's trip was meant to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the end of World War II. But when the press reported that forty-nine Nazi Waffen SS officials were buried at the site and that Reagan had declined requests to visit Holocaust memorials, the president was lambasted for his insensitivity. The Waslihi'Vton Post and New York Times demanded he drop the visit, calling it "one of the most embarrassing and politically damaging episodes of his Administration." The American Legion, which represented 2.5 million U.S. war veterans, said it was "terribly disappointed."' Some eighty senators in the Republicancontrolled Senate called on Reagan to "reassess his itinerary."" Senate Republican leader Bob Dole issued his own public appeals for cancellation. More than 250 House representatives wrote German chancellor Helmut Kohl directly, asking him to spare the U.S. president humiliation by changing the venue. And Jewish organizations protested fiercely. The main pro-Israel lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, Jewish survivor organizations, and most prominent Jewish American leaders expressed anger and alarm. Holocaust survivor Wiesel said he had "rarely seen such outrage" among Jewish groups and condemned what he termed the "beginning ... of the rehabilitation of the SS"" At a White House ceremony coincidentally honoring Wiesel, Reagan tried to appease him by citing the "political and strategic reasons" for visiting Bitburg. But in his public remarks Wiesel rejected Reagan's defense. "The issue here is not politics, but good and evil. And we must never confuse them. For I have seen the SS at work. And I have seen their victims. They were my friends. They were my parents," Wiesel said."
Reagan defended the planned trip on a variety of grounds. He hoped to "cement" the German-U.S. friendship. He had to stand by his commitment to Chancellor Kohl. It was important to move beyond German guilt. In one interview Reagan claimed that the German soldiers were "victims" of the Nazis `just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.." In response to the outrage, Reagan tacked on a visit to the BergenBelsen concentration camp, but he refused to do the one thing that might have curbed the criticisms: cancel the visit. He preferred plunging poll ratings to the appearance of bowing to public pressure. "All it would do is leave me looking as if I caved in the face of some unfavorable attention," Reagan said, blaming the reporters for stirring the controversy. "They've gotten hold of something, and like a dog ... they're going to keep on chewing on it." The president plowed ahead, ignoring the predictions by his Republican strategists that the Bitburg visit would cost him Jewish support. On the day of Reagan's Bitburg stopover, May 5, 1985, protests were held in Boston, Miami, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Newark, West Hartford, and New Haven.
Harold Koh was a twenty-nine-yearold lawyer at the U.S. Department of Justice. In 1984 he had supplied the Reagan administration with a fiftypage legal analysis on why the United States could ratify the genocide convention with few risks to U.S. citizens. He had never heard back from the White House. "There was zero interest in getting the Convention passed," Koh recalls. "Proxmire was the only man in town talking about it" When the Bitburg storm clouds burst, however, Koh received a panicked phone call from a National Security Council (NSC) staffer who said the president planned to push for immediate ratification of the genocide law. "l3itburg wasn't a reason for the shift," Koh says; "it was the only 1, aeon" Koh stayed up all night to prepare the press guidance and drove it personally to the White House, where the NSC official, a uniformed military officer, came out to receive it. That man, Koh later learned, was Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North. President Reagan had become determined to ,appease his critics by bullying the treaty through Congress.This gave the convention its best chance of passage since 1948.
At an April 16, 1985, news conference in New York, Elie Wiesel expresses his "deep anguish" over President Reagan's plan to visit the Bitburg cemetery. He is accompanied by leaders of Jewish and veterans' groups. (caption for picture)
Through the years, many American presidents had supported the measure. But when Ronald Reagan did so sincerely, it undermined the longstanding Republican opposition on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "We couldn't have done it without Reagan," Proxmire says. "He cut the ground right out from under the right wing"
Reservations
Despite Reagan's support, the Republican critics of the convention did not disappear. They simply channeled their hostility in a different direction, stalling a full Senate vote and insisting upon a slew of conditions to U.S. ratification that they knew would weaken the treaty's force. Recognizing that President Reagan's support for the law made passage inevitable, Senators Jesse Helms (R.-N.C.), Orrin Hatch (R.Utah), and Richard Lugar (R.-Ind.) introduced a stringent Senate "sovereignty package" that included "RUDs," or reservations, understandings, and declarations. These interpretations of and disclaimers about the genocide convention had the effect of immunizing the United States from being charged with genocide but in so doing they also rendered the U.S. ratification a symbolic act.
One reason advocates lobbied for U.S. ratification was to give the United States the legal standing to do what it had been unable to do during the Cambodia genocide: file genocide charges at the International Court of Justice. The convention's reference to the ICJ was typical of the dispute resolution procedures stipulated in more than eighty bilateral and multilateral treaties and international agreements. But in April 1984 Nicaragua had sued the United States at the ICJ for mining its harbors. When the court sided with Nicaragua and accepted jurisdiction, the United States walked out of the case. Neither the Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee nor the president was prepared to see the United States judged by an international court, so they now conditioned their acceptance of the genocide convention on a potent reservation, an a la carte "opt-out" clause. The reservation held that before the United States could be called as a party to any case before the ICJ, the president would have to consent to the court's jurisdiction. Only the United States would decide whether it would appear before the World Court. It was the equivalent of requiring an accused murderer to give his consent before he could be tried. If the convention stood any chance of resembling, in John Austin's phrase, "law, properly socalled," states had to give the ICJ advance consent so that judges would be empowered to interpret and apply the genocide convention independently, without requesting a state's permission each time.
The legal consequence of the U.S. reservation was that if the United States henceforth suspected that another state was committing genocide and attempted to bring the matter before the ICJ, the accused country could assert the American reservation against the United States under something called the doctrine of reciprocity. The United States was effectively blocked from ever filing genocide charges at the court against perpetrator states."' Proxmire battled against the reservations in the same way he had fought on behalf of the convention. He took to the familiar floor, spelling out the consequences of the American position:
Under this reservation, the Pol Pots [and] the Idi Amins ... could escape any efforts we would make to bring them before the Court to account for their actions. Why? Because under international law, they could invoke our reservation against us. If we get to decide which cases go before the Court, so do they. It is that simple.
If this treaty had been drafted and signed before World War II, would Senator Helms and Lugar argue that Hitler should choose which cases go before the World Court? Does anyone in this Chamber really believe that? I doubt it.
Proxmire got strong support from Senator Pell, who, along with seven other senators, prepared a detailed critique of the reservations. "The [sovereignty] package as a whole taints the political and moral prestige that the United States would otherwise gain by ratification of this landmark in international law," Pell's report noted. The United States was "defensively embracing a shield that to date has largely been adopted only by countries that may well have reason to fear charges of genocide."
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee split largely along party lines. Nine Republicans and one Democrat voted for the treaty with the reservations; the eight remaining Democrats protested by voting only "present" One of the few avenues the genocide convention created for enforcement would remain completely off-limits to the United States.
On February 11, 1986, Senator Dole brought up the U.S. version of the genocide treaty for a full Senate vote, declaring, "We have waited long enough ... as a nation which enshrines human dignity and freedom.... We must correct our anomalous position on this basic rights issue."z" A week later, thirty-eight years since the unanimous UN General Assembly passage of the law and thirty-seven years after President Truman had requested the Senate's "advice and consent," the Senate finally and overwhelmingly adopted a ratification resolution-eighty-three in favor, eleven against, and six not voting. Ninety-seven nations had ratified the convention ahead of the United States.
Senate supporters gave credit where they believed it was due. Patrick Moynihan (D.-N.Y.) likened Proxmire's struggle to that of Lemkin and thanked him for an effort that was "without parallel" in the history of the U.S. Senate:
For 15 years [sic],William Proxmire has asked this body to do what in conscience it ought to have done nearly 40 years ago.... When it was not adopted immediately, the man who coined the word "genocide," Mr. Raphael Lemkin ... made it his business.... He succeeded in bringing about the adoption by the general assembly of the convention, and then he saw the Senate of his own country, his newly adopted country, refuse to agree to ratification. It broke his heart. He died alone and in poverty, and uncomprehending that we could not ratify the treaty. Indeed, we never would have done so were it not for the advent of William Proxmire in this body, who is a kind of person who says if something is worth doing, it does not matter to him that it takes 15 years to do it.
I would like to salute the Senator, and say to him that he has enlarged the quality of this body, and certainly has made this Senator prouder still to be a Member of it.
Proxmire had in fact been speaking daily for nineteen years, or 3,211 times. When we break down this figure into a year-by-year tally, the numbers are daunting. The following table illustrates the number of speeches the senator gave each year.
(table listing number of speeches from 1967-1986 with 131 to 208 for each complete year 16 for 1986)
Senators who had opposed the convention throughout its tortured floor history applauded the reservations that had so eviscerated U.S. ratification of the treaty. Senator Helms, who would later warn that the 1998 treaty to create an International Criminal Court to prosecute perpetrators of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity would be "dead on arrival" at the U.S. Senate, voted with eleven others against even the watered-down ratification package. Yet he applauded its toothlessness. Thanks to the reservations, he claimed, "the sovereignty of our Nation and the freedom of our people have been protected against assault by the World Court." He said, "We might as well be voting on a simple resolution to condemn genocide-which every civilized person does"
Some on Proxmire's staff were relieved. Howard Schumann, the senator's chief of staff, who worked for the senator for twenty-seven years, recalls his sense of gratification in 1988. "We worked so long-it felt like we were watching paint dry all those years," Schumann says. "When ratification finally came, it was a great event, like the birth of a first child." But for the staffer most intimate with the law, the victory was as bitter as it was sweet. Larry Patton had devoted a decade and a half of his life to meeting the legal objections, and he found the triumph tainted because the version that actually survived the committee was not the one he had fought for. "We lost the reservations fight," Patton remembers. "I thought that they took away one of the few mechanisms in place to make the Convention effective." Still, the Proxmire team decided to accept and support the flawed ratification resolution. "At least as a state that had finally ratified the law," Patton says, "we could henceforth use our diplomacy to denounce genocide and maybe even stop it."
Remarkably, though it seemed the long struggle was over, Senate critics continued to stall. Full ratification required the passage of "Implementing legislation" that would make genocide a crime under U.S. federal law. The months passed, and Proxmire grew angry as the treaty lay fallow. "Why do I rise today to speak on this subject?" Proxmire asked in February 1988."I rise because it is now two years since the Senate of the United States by an overwhelming 82 to 11 vote ratified the Genocide Convention. In that two-year period the Congress has failed to finish the job. This is incredible. In fact, it is a disgrace to this U.S. Senate" Proxmire noted that the implementing legislation had been drafted and the respective chairmen of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees had introduced the measure, but no hearings had followed. Indeed, Proxmire said he had heard "not a whisper indicating any concern or any action."The irony was bitter.The genocide convention had finally earned Reagan's sincere support in 1985. It had won the overwhelming backing of the Senate in 1986. And here it was 1988, and, in Proxmire's words, the Congress had gone "sound to sleep": "We should take a special international prize for gross hypocrisy. The Senate resoundingly passes the ratification of the Genocide Treaty. We thereby tell the world that we recognize this terrible crime. Then, what do we do about it? We do nothing about it. We speak loudly but carry no stick at all." 12
It was not until October 1988 that the Senate got around to passing the Genocide Convention Implementation Act, which was named the "Proxmire Act"The U.S. law made genocide punishable in the United States by life imprisonment and fines of up to $1 million. It passed only after Strom Thurmond (R.-S. Car.), a longtime opponent of the convention, gave up on his insistence that the death penalty be required. Thurmond dropped his objection only in exchange for the confirmation of Republican judges whose appointments had been stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
President Reagan signed the implementing legislation in Chicago, credited Lemkin for his role, and declared, "We finally close the circle today. I am delighted to fulfill the promise made by Harry Truman to all the people of the world-and especially to the Jewish people."" Proxmire says he was not invited to the signing.
The sovereignty package revealed a go-it-alone approach to treaty ratification and a hostility to international law that was not new, but that rubbed U.S. allies the wrong way. By December 1989, nine European countries (Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom) had filed formal objections to several of the conditions the United States included in its ratification resolution.
Although Proxmire believed that ratification of the genocide ban would spur Senate ratification of other human rights treaties such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights; the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women; the Convention on the Rights of the Child; and later the international treaty to ban land mines, none has passed.
On October 19, 1988, Proxmire stood up in a deserted Senate chamber to speak about the genocide convention one last time. He noted that the belated Senate passage had prompted New York Times columnist A. M. Rosenthal, the man whom Lemkin had hounded in the late 1940s and early 1950s at the United Nations, to write a column entitled, "A Man Called Lemkin" Proxmire, then seventy-two, rose a little more slowly than he had twenty-one years before, when he had pledged to carry forward Lemkin's crusade. Proxmire requested that Rosenthal's article be published in the Congressional Record. "It is a tribute to a remarkable man named Raphael Lemkin," Proxmire said, "one individual who made the great difference against virtually impossible odds.... Lemkin died 29 years ago.... He was a great man"
With the Reagan administration's support, the U.S. Senate had finally ratified the genocide convention. But when the president and the Senate got their first chance to enforce the law, strategic and domestic political concerns caused them to side with the genocidal regime of Saddam Hussein. Far from making the United States more likely to do more to stop genocide, ratification seemed only to make U.S. officials more cautious about using the term.
A Kurdish widow holding up photographs of family members 'disappeared" by Iraqi forces. (caption for picture)
Chapter 8
Iraq: "Human Rights and Chemical Weapons Use Aside"
In March 1987, a year after the U.S. Senate ratified the genocide convention, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein appointed his cousin All Hassan alMajid as secretary-general of the Northern Bureau, one of five administrative zones in Iraq.The Iraqi dictator vested in al-Majid supreme authority. "Comrade al-Majid's decisions shall be mandatory for all state agencies, be they military, civilian [or] security" Hussein declared. The new Northern Bureau chief set out to use these absolute powers, in his words, to "solve the Kurdish problem and slaughter the saboteurs."
Ever since Iraq had gone to war with Iran in 1980, Hussein had been especially concerned about his "Kurdish problem." Kurds made up more than 4 million of Iraq's population of 18 million. Although Hussein's security forces could control those in the towns, Baghdad found it difficult to keep a close watch on rural areas inhabited by Kurds. Armed Kurds used the shelter of the mountains to stage rebellions against Iraqi forces. Some even aligned themselves with Iran. Hussein decided that the best way to stamp out rebellion was to stamp out Kurdish life.
Al-Majid ordered Kurds to move out of the homes they had inhabited for centuries and into collective centers, where the state would be able to monitor them. Any Kurd who remained in the so-called "prohibited zones" and refused to resettle in the new government housing complexes would henceforth be considered a traitor and marked for extinction. Iraqi special police and regulars carried out al-Majid's master plan, cleansing, gassing, and killing with bureaucratic precision. The Iraqi offensive began in 1987 and peaked between February and September 1988 in what was known as the Anfal campaign. Translated as "the spoils," the Arabic term a1 fal conies from the eighth sura of the Koran, which describes Muhammad's revelation in 624 C.E. after routing a band of nonbelievers. The revelation announced: "He that defies God and His apostle shall be sternly punished by God. We said to them: `Taste this. The scourge of the Fire awaits the unbelievers."' Hussein had decreed that the Kurds of Iraq would be met by the scourge of Iraqi forces. Kurdish villages and everything inside became the "spoils," the booty from the Iraqi military operation. Acting on Hussein's wishes, and upon al-Majid's explicit commands, Iraqi soldiers plundered or destroyed everything in sight. In eight consecutive, carefully coordinated waves of the Anfal, they wiped out (or "Saddamized") Kurdish life in rural Iraq.
Although the offensive was billed as a counter-insurgency mission, armed Kurdish rebels were by no means the only targets. Saddam Hussein aimed his offensive at every man, woman, and child who resided in the new nogo areas. And the Kurdish men who were rounded up were killed not in the heat of battle or while they posed a military threat to the regime. Instead, they were bussed in groups to remote areas, where they were machine-gunned in planned mass executions.
Hussein did not set out to exterminate every last Kurd in Iraq, as Hitler had tried against the Jews. Nor did he order all the educated to be murdered, as Pol Pot had done. In fact, Kurds in Iraq's cities were terrorized no more than the the rest of Iraq's petrified citizenry. Genocide was probably not even Hussein's primary objective. His main aim was to eliminate the Kurdish insurgency. But it was clear at the time and has become even clearer since that the destruction of Iraq's rural Kurdish population was the means he chose to end that rebellion. Kurdish civilians were rounded up and executed or gassed not because of anything they as individuals did but simply because they were Kurds.
In 1987-1988 Saddam Hussein's forces destroyed several thousand Iraqi Kurdish villages and hamlets and killed close to 100,000 Iraqi Kurds, nearly all of whom were unarmed and many of whom were women and children. Although intelligence and press reports of Iraqi brutality against the Kurds surfaced almost immediately, U.S. policymakers and Western journalists treated Iraqi violence as if it were an understandable attempt to suppress rebellion or a grisly collateral consequence of the Iran-Iraq war. Since the United States had chosen to back Iraq in that war, it refrained from protest, denied it had conclusive proof of Iraqi chemical weapons use, and insisted that Saddam Hussein would eventually come around. It was not until September 1988 that the flight of tens of thousands of Kurds into Turkey forced the United States to condemn the regime for using poisonous gas against its own people. Still, although it finally deplored chemical weapons attacks, the Washington establishment deemed Hussein's broader campaign of destruction, like Pol Pot's a decade before and Turkey's back in 1915, an "internal affair."
Between 1983 and 1988, the United States had supplied Iraq with more than $500 million per year in credits so it could purchase American farm products under a program called the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC). After the September 1988 attack, Senator Claiborne Pell introduced a sanctions package on Capitol Hill that would have cut off agricultural and manufacturing credits to Hussein as punishment for his killing of unarmed civilians. Influenced by his foreign policy aide Peter Galbraith, Pell argued that not even a U.S. ally could get away with gassing his own people. But the Bush administration, instead of suspending the CCC program or any of the other perks extended to the Iraqi regime, in 1989, a year after Hussein's savage gassing attacks and deportations had been documented, doubled its commitment to Iraq, hiking annual CCC credits above $1 billion. Pell's Prevention of Genocide Act, which would have penalized Hussein, was torpedoed.
Despite its recent ratification of the genocide convention, when the opportunity arose for the United States to send a strong message that genocide would not be tolerated-that the destruction of Iraq's rural Kurdish populace would have to stop-special interests, economic profit, and a geopolitical tilt toward Iraq thwarted humanitarian concerns. The Reagan administration punted on genocide, and the Kurds (and later the United States) paid the price.
Warning
Background: No Friends but the Mountains
The Kurds are a stateless people scattered over Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Iraq. Some 25 million Kurds cover an estimated 200,000 square miles. The Kurds are divided by two forms of Islam, five borders, and three Kurdish languages and alphabets. The major powers promised them a state of their own in 1922, but when Turkey refused to ratify the Treaty of Sevres (the same moribund pact that would have required prosecution of Turks for their atrocities against the Armenians), the idea was dropped. Iraqi Kurds staged frequent rebellions throughout the century in the hopes of winning the right to govern themselves. With a restless Shiite community comprising more than half of Iraq's population, Hussein was particularly determined to neutralize the Kurds' demands for autonomy. (Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 p.159-174)
Halabja was the most notorious and the deadliest single gas attack against the Kurds, but it was one of at least forty chemical assaults ordered by al-Majid. A similar one followed that spring in the village of Guptapa. There, on May 3, 1988, Abdel-Qadir al-'Askari, a chemist, heard a rumor that a chemical attack was imminent. He left the village, which was situated on low ground, and scrambled up a distant hilltop so he might warn his neighbors of imminent danger. When he saw Iraqi planes bombing, he sprinted back down to the village in order to help. But when he reached his home, where he had prepared a makeshift chemical attack shelter, nobody was inside. He remembered:
I became really afraid-convinced that nobody survived. I climbed up from the shelter to a cave nearby, thinking they might have taken refuge there. There was nobody there, either. But when I went to the small stream near our house, I found my mother. She had fallen by the river; her mouth was biting into the mud bank.... I turned my mother over; she was dead. I wanted to kiss her but I knew that if I did, the chemicals would be passed on. Even now I deeply regret not kissing my beloved mother.
He searched desperately for his wife and children:
I continued along the river. I found the body of my nine-year-old daughter hugging her cousin, who had also choked to death in the water.... Then I went around our house. In the space of 200-300 square meters I saw the bodies of dozens of people from my family. Among them were my children, my brothers, my father, and my nieces and nephews. Some of them were still alive, but I couldn't tell one from the other. I was trying to see if the children were dead. At that point I lost my feelings. I didn't know who to cry for anymore and I didn't know who to go to first. I was all alone at night.
Al-Askari's family contained forty people before the attack and fifteen after. He lost five children-two boys, one sixteen, the other six; and three girls, aged nine, four, and six months. In Guptapa some 150 Kurds were killed in all. Survivors had witnessed the deaths of their friends, their spouses, and their children.
When word of the gas attacks began spreading to other villages, terrified Kurds began fleeing even ahead of the arrival of Iraqi air force bombers. Al-Majid's forces were fairly predictable. Jets began by dropping cluster bombs or chemical cocktails on the targeted villages. Surviving inhabitants fled. When they reached the main roads, Iraqi soldiers and security police rounded them up. They then often looted and firebombed the villages so they could never be reoccupied. Some women and children were sent to their deaths; others were moved to holding pens where many died of starvation and disease.The men were often spirited away and never heard from again. In the zones that Hussein had outlawed, Kurdish life was simply extinct.
Official Skepticism
In Washington skepticism greeted gassing reports. Americans were so hostile toward Iran that they mistrusted Iranian sources. When Iraq had commenced its chemical attacks against the Kurds in early 1987, the two major U.S. papers had carried scattered accounts but had been quick to add that that they were relaying Iranian "allegations" of gassing. Baghdad was said to have "struck back" or "retaliated" against Kurdish rebels." The coverage of Halabja in 1988 was initially similar. The first reports of the attack came from the Islamic Republic News Agency in Teheran, and U.S. news stories again relayed "Iranian accounts" of Iraqi misdeeds. They gave Iraqi officials ample space for denial. Two days after the first attack, a short Washington Post news brief read: "Baghdad has denied reports of fighting. It said it withdrew from Halabja and another town, Khormal, some time ago"
The Kurds, like many recent victims of genocide, fall into a class of what genocide scholar Helen Fein calls "implicated victims." Although most of the victims of genocide are apolitical civilians, the political or military leaders of a national, ethnic, or religious group often make decisions (to claim basic rights, to stage protests, to launch military revolt, or even to plot terrorist attacks) that give perpetrators an excuse for crackdown and bystanders an excuse to look away. Unlike the Jews of 1930s Europe, who posed no military or even political threat to the territorial integrity of Poland or Germany (given their isolation or assimilation in much of Europe), the Kurds wanted out-out of Hussein's smothering grasp and, in their private confessions, out of his country entirely. Kurds were in fact doubly implicated. Not only did some take up arms and rebel against the Iraqi regime, which was supported by the United States, but some also teamed up with Iran, a U.S. foe. As "guerrillas," the Kurds thus appeared to be inviting repression. And as temporary allies of Iran, they were easily lumped with the very forces responsible for hostage-taking and "Great Satan" berating.
The March 1988 Halabja onslaught did more than any prior attack to draw attention to the civilian toll of Hussein's butchery. In part this was because the loss of some 5,000 civilians made it the deadliest of all the Iraqi chemical assaults. But it was also the accessibility of the scene of the crime that caused outsiders to begin to take notice. Halabja was located just fifteen miles inside Iraq, and Western reporters were able to reach the village wasteland from Iran. They could witness with their own eyes the barbarous residue of what otherwise might have been unimaginable. Reporters had the chance to provide rare, firsthand coverage of a fresh, postgenocidal scene.
Iran, which was still struggling to win its war with Iraq, was eager to present evidence of the war crimes of its nemesis. European and American correspondents visited Iranian hospitals, where they themselves interviewed victims with blotched, peeling skin and labored breathing. The Iranians also offered tours of Halabja, where journalists saw corpses that Iranian soldiers and Kurdish survivors had deliberately delayed burying. The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times ran stories on their front pages on March 24, 1988, and U.S. television networks joined in by prominently covering the story over the next few days. The journalists were aghast, and the dispatches reflected it. Patrick Tyler's Washin,.yon Post story described "the faces of the noncombatant dead: four small girls in traditional dress lying like discarded dolls by a trickling stream below the small hamlet of Anap; two women cuddling in death by a flower garden; an old man in a turban clutching a baby on a door-step""' For the first time, Kurdish faces were on display. They were no longer abstract casualty figures or mere "rebels"
U.S. officials insisted that they could not be sure the Iraqis were responsible for the poisonous gas attacks. Western journalists, who had little experience with Iraq and none with the Kurds, hedged. The disclaimers resurfaced. "More than 100 bodies of women, children and elderly men still lay in the streets, alleys and courtyards of this nowempty city,"Tyler wrote, "victims of what Iran claims is the worst chemical warfare attack on civilians in its 7'/2-year-old war with Iraq."" The NewlbrkTimes March 24 story buried on page Al l was titled, "Iran Charges Iraq with Gas Attack." Newsweek wrote: "Last week the Iranians had a grisly opportunity to make their case when they allowed a few Western reporters to tour Halabja, a city in eastern Iraq recently occupied by Iranian forces after a brief but bloody siege. According to Iran, the Iraqis bombarded the city with chemical weapons after their defeat. The Iranians said the attack killed more than 4,000 civilians ."12 This was not fact; this was argument, and Iranian argument at that. The victims themselves could tell no tales. The journalists were privy to the aftermath of a monstrous crime, but they had not witnessed that crime and refrained from pointing fingers. Thus, the requisite caveats again blunted the power of the revelations.
Western journalists filming a Kurdish man and his infant son killed in the March 1988 Iraqi chemical attack on Halabja. (caption for picture)
The Iraqis further muddied the waters by leading their own tours of the region. The regime denied the atrocities and reminded outsiders that bad things happen during war. Around the time of Halabja, Iraq's ambassador to France told a news conference: "In a war, no one is there to tell you not to hit below the belt. War is dirty."`Yet "war" also implies two or more sets of combatants, and Hussein's chemical weapons attacks were carried out mainly against Kurdish civilians. But Iraq had its cover: Kurdish rebels had fought alongside Iranians, Iraq was at war with Iran, and the war, everyone knew, was brutal. The fog of war again obscured an act of genocide.
The U.S. official position reflected that of its allies in Europe. But whereas they were almost completely mute about Halabja, the State Department issued a statement that confined its critique to the weapons used. "Everyone in the administration saw the same reports you saw last night," White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater told reporters. "They were horrible, outrageous, disgusting and should serve as a reminder to all countries of why chemical warfare should be banned"
The United States issued no threats or demands. American outrage was rooted in Hussein's use of deadly chemicals and brazen flouting of the 1925 Geneva Protocol Against Chemical Warfare. The New York Times editorial page condemned the Iraqi gas attack and called upon Washington to suspend support to Baghdad if chemical attacks did not stop. On Capitol Hill Senator George Mitchell (D.-Maine) introduced a forceful Senate resolution decrying Iraqi chemical weapons use. Jim Hoagland of the GiWashin'ton Post condemned Iraq for calling out the "Orkin Squadron" against civilians. Hoagland, who happened to have been with Mullah Mustafa Barzani in the mountains of Kurdistan in March 1975 when the United States abandoned him, now urged America to use all the influence it had been storing up with Hussein to deter further attacks."
Human rights groups were more numerous, more respected, and better financed than they had been during Cambodia's horrors. Helsinki Watch had been established in 1978, and it added Americas Watch in 1981 and Asia Watch in 1985. But it did not have the resources to set up Middle East Watch until 1990. As a result, the organization refrained from public comment on the gassing of Kurds. "We didn't have the expertise," explains Ken Roth, who today directs an organization of more than 200 with an annual budget of nearly $20 million but who was then deputy director of a team of no more than two dozen people. "None of us had been to the region, and we felt we could not get in the business of saying things that we could not follow through on. We would only have raised expectations that there was no way we could meet." Amnesty International had researchers in London who had established contacts with Iraqi Kurds who confirmed the horror of the press reports, but Amnesty staff were unable to enter Iraq. Shorsh Resool, a thirty-year-old Kurdish engineer and Anfal survivor, had never been abroad but wondered why news of the slaughter was never reported on the BBC's Arabic service. He was told that people in the West did not believe the Kurdish claims that 100,000 people had disappeared. The figure sounded abstract and random. Resool resolved to make it concrete. Between October 1988 and October 1999, he walked through northern Iraq, dodging Iraqi troop patrols and systematically interviewing tens of thousands of Anfal survivors. He assembled a list of names of 16,482 Kurds who had gone missing. When he extrapolated his statistical survey, he concluded that between 70,000 and 100,000 Kurds had in fact been murdered. But when he presented this evidence to the Amnesty researcher in London, she asked, "Do you really expect people to believe that that many Kurds could disappear in a year without anybody knowing about it?"
Amnesty did circulate photographs of the victims as well as the names of those it could confirm had disappeared. But as Curt Goering, AmnestyUSA deputy director, says, "The problem then, as now, was getting our grassroots base to have any actual influence in Washington"
U.S. officials claimed that the proof of Iraqi responsibility was inconclusive and blamed "both sides."4f' U.S. officials cited "indications" that Iran had also used chemical artillery shells against Iraq, although they had to concede that the evidence was unconvincing. State Department spokesman Charles Redman issued a forward-looking, even-handed proclamation. He said, "We call upon Iran and Iraq to desist immediately from any further use of chemical weapons, which are an offense to civilization and humanity."47 Nearly three weeks after the Halabja attack, the Washington Post ran a frontpage story citing Defense Department claims that "it wasn't a one-way show"" At the UN Security Council, the United States blocked an Iranian attempt to raise the question of responsibility for the Halabja attack.
Whatever the surface confusion, Kurdish refugees were adamant about what they witnessed and experienced. David Korn, a State Department Middle East specialist who later interviewed dozens of Kurdish survivors, recalls, "The facts were available, but you don't get the full facts unless you want the full facts."The facts of the larger campaign of destruction were undeniable. A Defense Intelligence Agency cable, dated April 19, 1988, reported that "an estimated 1.5 million Kurdish nationals have been resettled in camps"; that "approximately 700-1000 villages and small residential areas were targeted for resettlement"; that "an unknown but reportedly large number of Kurds have been placed in `concentration' camps located near the Jordanian and Saudi Arabian borders.""' But these horrors captured no headlines. Thus, U.S. officials never hurried to gather details on the conditions in the camps or the welfare of the men they knew had been taken away.The story of Halabja died down as quickly as it had popped up, and the State Department maintained full support for Iraq.
Mass Executions
Iraqi gas attacks received the public attention, but most Kurds who died in the Anfal were killed in mass executions. U.S. officials knew throughout the 1987-1988 offensive that Iraqi men who were captured were led away and imprisoned. It is unclear when these officials learned of the ritualized mass killing. Senior Reagan administration officials had made it plain that the fate of the Kurds was not their concern, so it would not be surprising if U.S. intelligence officers did not attempt to track the prisoners' condition at the time the massacres were happening. Several Kurds who survived Iraqi firing squads later came forward to describe the horror that befell those who ended up in al-Majid's custody.
Some Kurds who were rounded up in the prohibited zones during the Anfal campaign were dumped at the sprawling Topzawa detention center near the oil-rich town of Kirkuk. Survivors said that some 5,000 Kurds occupied Topzawa at one time, but the turnover was rapid, as busloads of men were removed and arrived daily. Through the barred windows, women and children watched the men in the courtyard outside being handcuffed and beaten savagely. Usually after no more than a day or two, the guards read off a list of names, and the men were packed, stripped to their shorts, bound together, and forced into windowless green-and-white vehicles, which reminded many of ambulances. The elderly (those between fifty and ninety) were driven twelve to fifteen hours to the Pit of Salman, or Nugra Salman, an abandoned, lice-infested fortified prison, where an average of four or five men died each day from starvation, disease, and physical abuses' The men of fighting age met fates even more sinister.
In April 1988 Ozer, an unmarried, twenty-five-year-old construction worker, had ended up in Topzawa after Iraqi shelling and bulldozers forced him from his home for a second time. At about 8:00 one morning, he and several hundred others were dragged onto sealed vehicles that were thick with old urine and human feces and steamy hot. After a full day on the road, Ozer's nine-vehicle convoy made its way onto a dirt path, ahead of which he spotted only desert and darkness. Ozer and the other men knew the end was near and began to pray, to weep, and in keeping with the Islamic tradition, to ask one another for forgiveness.''- The prisoners could hear the steady melody of nearby gunfire, the sounds of screams, followed by the groan of bulldozer engines. The driver of Ozer's bus turned on his highbeams so the Iraqi police would have an easier time killing the men in the bus ahead. Ozer and his fellow prisoners watched as Kurdish men were dragged in front of the light, pummeled by a uniformed firing squad, and pulled into a freshly dug pit.
Confronted with the visual reality of their destiny and unable to take solace in wishful thinking, Ozer's busload did something quite unusual: They attempted forcibly to resist their execution, injuring one of the guards in a scuffle. But the prisoners were outnumbered, and the guards outside simply emptied their guns, again and again, into the bus. Ozer was grazed by a flying piece of shrapnel but lay coiled on the bus floor as dead bodies piled up around him and as he listened to the steady patter of blood dripping from the porous vehicle. Ozer eventually stole away into the safety of the dark desert night. Unable to see clearly, he stumbled into a trench with some 400 bleeding bodies. But he crawled out and found his way to the Kurdish quarter of Kirkuk.
The Iraqis tended to vary their methods. As Middle East Watch later found:
Some groups of prisoners were lined up, shot from the front and dragged into pre-dug mass graves; others were shoved roughly into trenches and machine-gunned where they stood; others were made to lie down in pairs, sardine-style, next to mounds of fresh corpses, before being killed; others were tied together, made to stand on the lip of the pit, and shot in the back so that they would fall forward into it-a method that was presumably more efficient from the point of view of the killers. Bulldozers then pushed earth or sand loosely over the heaps of corpses.51
In some areas women and children who had been removed from their homes also became targets. Taimour Abdullah Ahmad, a twelve-year-old, became the Kurds' most famous survivor. In April 1988 he lived with his parents; eleven-year-old sister, Gaylas; ten-year-old sister, Leyla; and nineyear-old sister, Serwa. Iraqi troops swept through their town and rounded up his family and brought them to Topzawa, where Taimour thought himself fortunate not to be housed with the nien. By peering through a small hole in the compound wall, he saw his father being stripped down to his underclothes, manacled to his nearest neighbor, and dragged out of the compound with the other men. Other women and families were competing for access to the same hole, and Taimour remembered wives, mothers, and daughters screaming, shouting, beating themselves, and pulling at their hair in agony.
Taimour remained in the compound with his mother and sisters for a month, living off a piece of bread per day, until one morning in late May the guards summoned them, checking their names off a list and hustling them onto the green-and-white buses. Tainiour drove with some fifty or sixty women and children who were seated the length of the bus. They drove in sweltering silence-three children died of dehydration on the way-until nightfall.When the guards threw open the rear doors,Taimour, who had removed his blindfold saw that each of the thirty or so vehicles in his convoy had been positioned next to its own desert burial pit, each of which was about fifteen feet square and a yard deep. A mound of mud was stacked precipitously on the far side of each pit. Before Taimour had time to process the grim scene, the guards pushed him and the others into the pits, separating him from his mother and sisters."
When Taimour was hit by a bullet in the left shoulder, he began to stagger toward the man who shot him, reaching out with his hands. He remembered the look in the soldier's eyes. "He was about to cry," Taimour said three years later, mechanically reciting a narrative he had learned to tell and retell, "but the other one shouted at him and told him to throw me back in the pit. He was obliged to throw me back""' The officer ordered the soldier to fire again, which he did, hitting Taimour for a second time, this time on the right side of his back, just above the waist. The boy lay still. When the guards had walked away, he felt a young girl move next to him. "Let's run," he whispered, but she declined, too frightened of the soldiers.
Taimour emerged from the pit and stole one last look behind him, spotting his mother, three sisters, and three aunts piled like cordwood. He inched his way away from the grave, avoiding the sweeping headlights of the guards' land-cruisers. With blood pouring from his wounds, he passed out behind one of the dirt mounds. When he regained consciousness, the pits had been filled and smoothed flat. He escaped and was sheltered by an Arab family for two years. Only with the Kurdish uprising in 1991 was he repatriated to the north. There he learned he had lost twentyeight relatives in the Anfal.
A Pair of Iraqi Victories
U.S. and European policyniakers had long refused to meet officially with Iraqi Kurdish leaders for fear of irritating Hussein. But the highprofile gassing of Halabja and the disappearance and suspected massacres of tens of thousands of unarmed Kurds caused Jalal Talabani, the leader of one of the Iraqi Kurds' two main political parties, to believe he might at last gain an audience with Western officialdom. In June 1988 Talabani, a fifty-fouryear-old former journalist and lawyer, decided to test his luck and left the Middle East for the first time in eight years. He traveled to London where, along with Latif Rashid, his party's representative there, he pored over a copy of the genocide convention. "We knew `genocide' was a very sensitive term, and we wanted to be very careful that we were using it correctly," Rashid remembers. After reviewing the text, debating its terms, and comparing it to the facts of the Anfal,Talabani announced publicly that Iraq was "waging a genocide campaign against our people through the daily use of poison gas ."
A few weeks later,Talabani visited Washington. He claimed that Iraq had destroyed more than 1,000 villages in the previous year alone and offered gruesome accounts of gassing. Wearing a pinstriped suit and a paisley tie, Talabani did not conform to the image of the pantalooned, bullet-laden Kurdish rebel. More politically savvy than expected, Talabani deftly made the case that Hussein's genocide was downright historic. "It's the first time in history a government has used chemical weapons against its own citizens who are not at the battlefront," he told Elaine Sciolino of the New York Times. He also defended the alliance that his forces had made with Iran on the grounds that "when you are facing a war of genocide, it is your duty to fight back in any way you can."
Larry Pope, the State Department's Iran-Iraq office director, favored the Reagan administration's chosen policy of engagement with Iraq. But he was sufficiently revolted by the images out of Halabja that he felt the United States should register its disapproval by agreeing to meet Talabani at the State Department. This meant ignoring the long-standing "self-denying ordinance" that required all contact with the Kurds to occur off U.S. government propertyTalabani was delighted. He and Pope met for an hour in the State Department's fortress at Foggy Bottom. The first burst of outrage came not from the Iraqis but from Turkish president Kenan Evren, who happened to be in Washington to meet with Secretary of State Shultz. Evren, who feared that any encouragement given Iraqi Kurds would embolden Turkey's 10 million Kurds, went ballistic. Shultz knew nothing of the Talabani-Pope meeting and demanded to know, "Who the hell had this bright idea?"The Iraqis, predictably, were also irate. Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz canceled his long-planned meeting with Shultz, accusing the U.S. government of interfering in Iraqi internal affairs. Iraq was most sensitive to U.S. statements and maneuvers. The State Department scrambled to appease Iraq by declaring publicly:"The United States does not interfere in the internal affairs" of those countries with a Kurdish minority"(' Pope was reprimanded, and the department reiterated its policy of meeting with the Kurdish leadership only off-site. "At first, we were so popular. Everyone was so gracious and interested," remembers Rashid, the Talabani aide. "Then suddenly, overnight, the doors closed and we were shut out" In the end Pope believes his gesture-tame as it was- backfired. "Rather than send a message of disapproval to Iraq, we sent the message that our relations with Iraq and Turkey were more important than anything Hussein did internally," he recalls.
Talabani had quickly learned the value the United States placed on its relationship with Iraq. Still, the trip paid some dividends. He got to know several members of Congress and became acquainted for the first time with Galbraith. He also helped nudge along Senator Mitchell's resolution condemning Iraqi chemical weapons use, which passed unanimously (910) on June 24, 1988.''' But because no sticks were attached to the resolution and because Hussein could be confident the White House was still on his side, he was not deterred. In late June and July the Iraqis staged chemical weapons attacks throughout Kurdish territory.
The United States had concentrated its diplomatic efforts in 1987-1988 on isolating and securing an arms embargo against Iran. It had also supplied concrete assistance to Iraq. Although it did not sell Baghdad weapons, the United States provided intelligence gathered from AWACS early-warning aircraft, which included damage estimates on Iraqi strikes and reports of Iranian troop movements.'` Partly as a result of U.S. support, Iraq turned the tide in its war with Iran. Iran may have blundered by highlighting the gruesome effects of Iraqi chemical weapons. Instead of mobilizing public opinion, the testimony of survivors convinced potential volunteers to steer clear of the recruiting offices. Khomeini agreed to a cease-fire in July 1988. Teheran radio broadcast a statement in his name that hinted at the role of the poisonous chemicals. "Taking this decision was more deadly than taking poison," the ayatollah said. "I have sold my honor. I have swallowed the poison of defeat.""' More than 1 million soldiers and civilians on both sides had died in the war. Not an inch of land had changed hands.
On August 20, 1988, Iran and Iraq signed an armistice ending their bloody struggle. Despite the vivid images from Halabja and the brief flurry of Western interest in the Kurds, their suffering had faded from public view. Al-Majid continued his ruthless drive to empty rural Kurdistan throughout the summer, dragging away any Kurd who dared remain in the prohibited areas. On August 25 Iraq launched a new attack on Kurdish villages, using aircraft, fixed-wing helicopters, tanks, and tens of thousands of Iraqi troops. It was the "final" offensive in al- Majid's six--month Anfal campaign.
After ignoring Iraqi attacks for so long, senior U.S. officials had to take notice of this one. Perched at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, Rankin remembers his reaction to the news:
We at the embassy thought that once the Iran-Iraq war ended, Hussein would bring his country and his people, who had so much potential and who had suffered for so long, out of oblivion. We told ourselves that if he no longer had to fight Iran, he could become the man we wished he could be. But when he signed the cease-fire with Iran and tI en gassed the Kurds, he lost his cover. It was clear he could never be that man. He was a nionster.These attacks had nothing to do with his Iranian security threat.They had to do with killing Kurds.
The final offensive against the Kurds was widely known. Two days after it began, the New York Times reported that in late July Iraq had dispatched at least 20,000 elite forces to the north and quoted one regional expert as saying, "We get the impression that the Iraqis wanted to finish the whole business" A long front-page story on September 1, 1988, described the deployment of more than 60,000 troops and led with the sentence," Iraq has begun a major offensive [meant to] crush the 40year-long insurgency once and for all"' The media gave this offensive more intensive coverage than previous Iraqi assaults because it quickly sent 65,000 Kurdish victims and survivors flooding into Turkey. The Turkish government was nonetoo-pleased by the destabilizing Kurdish influx, but it set up encampments along its border and refused to grant Iraq the reciprocal right of "hot pursuit" that Turkish forces had invoked so often to track down armed Turkish Kurds in northern Iraq. The Kurdish refugees did what Cambodians had done: They poured out their stories to journalists, who had full and free access to southern Turkey. These stories got Galbraith's attention immediately and that of the U.S. secretary of state eventually.
"Genocide"
Galbraith had kept his eye out for bad news from northern Iraq since March, when he had learned of the Halabja attack. There was no question that Hussein's recent deeds suggested a ruthlessness that boded extremely ill for the Kurdish people: the elimination of the Kurdish villages, the widespread disappearances (and probable execution) of Kurdish men, and Hussein's repeated, brazen use of chemical weapons. Galbraith had begun to wonder whether Hussein was committing genocide.
Galbraith saw a certain internal logic in Hussein's piecemeal campaign. He believed the Iraqi dictator might be husbanding the full might of his armed forces, knowing that a more gradual campaign against the Kurds would enable him to keep his soldiers committed, forestall a more spirited international reaction, and enable the local economy (fueled largely by Kurds) to remain afloat.
On Galbraith's trip to Iraq in 1987, he had seen dozens of villages and small cities demolished far from the sensitive border with Iran. He also knew that al-Majid's dragnet was sweeping up women and children as well. All Kurds in rural Kurdistan were vulnerable, regardless of their political sympathies. Loyalty to the Baghdad regime was no protection, as the Kurdish jash, those who worked for the Iraqi government, discovered. At a meeting in 1987, alMajid told one jash, "I cannot let your village stay... I will attack it with chemical weapons. Then you and your family will die"
But it was with Hussein's August offensive, launched after the end of his war with Iran, that Galbraith's worst suspicions were confirmed. On August 28, 1988, tucked away in Vermont for a relaxing Labor Day weekend, Galbraith came across a short Neu' York Times report buried back on page A15.The piece, "More Chemical Attacks Reported," described Iraqi Kurds crossing into Turkey and reporting gas attacks.'? He froze, as images of the rubbled remains of Kurdish life flashed into his mind. He read the same sixtythree words over and over again, draining the news item for any details that might be lurking between the lines.
Galbraith was sure that the reports of chemical attacks were true. Although he could not gauge precisely the breadth of the brutal campaign of gassing, execution, and depopulation under way, Galbraith believed Hussein's regime had set out to destroy Iraqi Kurds. It was genocide.
It was just one of those moments of recognition. I just knew it was true.... I knew then that we could never be fully certain that Hussein wanted to destroy the Kurds, but we would also never be more certain.
Unlike the Cambodia watchers of the late 1970s or most of Washington's Iraq watchers at the time, Galbraith knew that the genocide convention did not require an intent to exterminate every last Iraqi Kurd. Working for Senator Pell, one of Proxmire's co-conspirators in pushing for U.S. ratification of the convention, Galbraith had come to appreciate some of the nuances inherent in the law's notion of "destruction" He had surveyed Lemkin's writings and the drafting history of the genocide convention, and he knew that a perpetrator did not have to be executing attacks as holistic in scope as the Holocaust to qualify as genocide. The category of genocide was valuable because it described an ongoing or outstanding intent, where as the "Holocaust" described a singulary monstrous event that had already happened. "These things accelerate," Galbraith says. "Hitler, when he took power in 1933, did not have a plan to exterminate all the Jews in Europe. Evil begets evil." Hussein and Hitler were both fascist ideologues intent on destroying groups they found distasteful or, for their own reasons, threatening. Hussein's aims were clearly more limited than Hitler's. It was only Kurds in the "prohibited areas" who had thus far been marked for destruction. But Galbraith believed the million or more Kurds living in Baghdad would eventually be targeted as well: "While at that time the extermination campaign was focused on Kurds in rural areas and small towns, I thought that the logic of his program could culminate in the elimination of the entire Kurdish population of Iraq."
Galbraith raced back to Washington to begin making his case on Capitol Hill. He knew a great deal about Lemkin's law, but he knew almost nothing about his lobbying. Yet within days Galbraith had drafted a new law and begun pursuing its passage with all the blunt zeal of his Polish predecessor.
Response
Sanctioning Saddam
When word of the August offensive broke, the Reagan administration had a number of options available. It could have condemned the new wave of gas attacks. It could have demanded that its ally stop destroying rural Kurdish life. It could have urged that the men and women taken away in the previous offensives be released. And it could have threatened to suspend some of the economic perks it had been extending to Baghdad for the past five years.
Because Congress controlled the purse strings, Galbraith understood that legislators could have considerable influence on how the United States used its economic leverage abroad. Senate staffers were not permitted to speak on the record to the press. Nor could they publish articles under their own names.Yet with the backing of a powerful senator, they could do something far more influential: They could draft U.S. law. Most U.S. laws are proposed by the executive branch. Some are drafted by lobbyists and adopted by the Senate. And many more are drafted by House and Senate staff, especially the committee staff. Having worked for Pell on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for more than a decade, Galbraith knew that the senator, the son of the Roosevelt administration's representative to the Allied War Crimes Commission, would want to use U.S. law to take a stand. He was right.
After its month-long August recess, the Senate returned for its last weeks of business of the year on September 7, 1988. At the urging of his boss, Galbraith dashed off the draft law in an hour, writing in English that all could understand (a gift he attributed to avoiding law school)."This was not a deeply reflective process," Galbraith remembers. "I included every sanction that I could think of"; indeed, his bill contained harsher sanctions than those imposed against apartheid South Africa. The sanctions package barred Iraqi oil imports, worth $500 million per year; instructed U.S. officials to vote against Iraqi loans at the IMF and World Bank; eliminated $500 million in annual CCC credit guarantees to Iraq for the purchase of U.S. agricultural foodstuffs; terminated $200 million in annual exportimport credits for manufactured goods; and prohibited exports to Iraq of any item that required an export license (e.g., sensitive technology or any item with possible military use).
One of the boldest features of the bill was also one of its most novel. Instead of requiring the president to prove that genocide was being committed, which is always hard to do while atrocities are still under way and which an administration aligned with Hussein had no incentive to demonstrate, Pell's legislation reversed the burden: President Reagan was required to certify that Iraq was not using chemical weapons against the Kurds and that it was not committing genocide."' If Reagan wished to avoid sanctions, he would have to defend Iraqi conduct affirmatively.
Senator Pell asked the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jesse Helms, to cosponsor the bill, which he did. Helms had battled Pell and Proxmire over the genocide convention, but he often took a strong stand against flagrantly abusive regimes. In this instance he and his wife had been moved by an encounter with three Kurds who were on hunger strikes to protest the Iraqi atrocities, whom they met through their church, the First Baptist in Alexandria, Virginia." Four other senatorsProxmire, Al Gore (D.-Tenn.), Wendell Ford (D.-Ky.), and Senate majority leader Robert Byrd (D.W.Va.)-heard of the draft law and joined in introducing it. Pell and Helms were able to "hotline" the measure, bypassing the Foreign Relations Committee, which had already held its last business meeting of the year. This gave staff members and senators virtually no time to review the bill. Galbraith had named the law the "Prevention of Genocide Act," a title that he thought would resonate. "I wanted a title that would call attention to the crimes taking place and rally support for the legislation," Galbraith recalls. He also wanted to make it less likely that senators would in fact read the bill. If he had called the measure the "Iraqi Sanctions Act," he knew U.S. business lobbies would read and scuttle it. Additionally, because of the "moral hightone" of the label, senators might assume that this bill, like others in such a tenor, was merely hortatory.
Galbraith had something unseemly working in his favor. Since April 1987 Hussein had been purging and killing Kurds with a variety of weapons. But this most recent offensive involved chemical weapons, which killed in a more grisly way than machine guns and captured the imagination of U.S. lawmakers. Ensconced in a country attacked only once in the twentieth century, most Americans did not feel vulnerable when foreign slaughter was discussed. Before September 11, 2001, most Americans believed that the large-scale murder of civilians could only occur miles from home. But chemical weapons were different. They had crept into American consciousness because they did not respect national rankings and were unimpressed by geographic isolation. No matter how thick U.S. defenses, the gasses could penetrate. The horrors of gassing entered the Western imagination back in April 1915, when British soldiers were subjected to what Churchill called the "hellish poison" of German mustard gas. At the Battle of Ypres in Belgium, these gases wounded 10,000, killed some 5,000, and ushered in a tit-for-tat series of chemical attacks that left more than 100,000 dead. The gasses blistered the skin and singed the lungs. The deaths were slow; the last days of life ghastly. British poet Wilfred Owen, who was himself exposed to the chemicals, lived the horror of the trenches and brought it vividly home to postwar Britain with his wrenching "Dulce et Decorum Est." The poem describes the "helpless sight" of stricken soldiers, "guttering, choking, drowning," and "gargling from froth-corrupted lungs." Decades later, Owen's words remained artifacts of a substance to be abhorred and a weapon to be avoided. Gassing could happen to us because it had happened and because victims of gassing attacks, scientists, and artists have detailed the vomiting, blistering, choking, singeing, and peeling associated with chemical weapons.
U.S. senators knew that chemical weapons had become all too easy to acquire in the 1980s. Nuclear weapons required either plutonium or highly enriched uranium, which had few suppliers, and sophisticated chemical and engineering processes and equipment were needed to convert the fissionable material. Chemical weapons, by contrast, were cheap and said to take a garage and a little high school chemistry to make. They were the poor man's nuke.The news media were filled with accounts of rogue states and terrorist groups that had stockpiled deadly chemicals.
Galbraith recognized that generic fears about chemical weapons use and proliferation could he a kind of Trojan horse by which he could muster congressional support for punishing Iraq for its broader campaign of destruction aimed at the Kurds. Like Lemkin and Proxmire, he made a prudential, interest-based case for the Pell-Helnis bill, emphasizing the gassing more than Hussein's other means of killing. "Right now the Kurds are paying the price for past global indifference to Iraqi chemical weapons use," he wrote. "The failure to act now could ultimately leave every nation in peril.""' In private Galbraith worried that if a pro-sanctions Senate coalition were held together only because of Hussein's use of poisons, the Iraqi dictator might simply revise his tactics and massacre civilians in other ways. "Most of those senators were concerned not with the Kurds but with the instrument of death, the chemical weapons," Galbraith remembers. "I wasn't concerned with the use of chemical weapons as such but with their use as a way of destroying the Kurdish people.These weapons were not any more evil than guns" Nevertheless, he needed all the help he could get on the sanctions legislation, and he took it.
One week after the Kurdish refugees had begun pouring into Turkey. the sanctions bill, which kept the name "Prevention of Genocide Act," was introduced on the Senate floor. It passed the Senate the next day on a unanimous voice vote. Because senators did not hold a roll-call vote, they were not on the written record as having supported the bill, which would subsequently enable them to squirm more easily out of their commitments. On September 9, 1988, though, Galbraith noticed only the remarkable tally. It looked to him and most observers as if, to paraphrase Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, it was the good fortune of Iraqi Kurds to be attacked with chemical weapons. The bill needed only to clear the House before it became law.
A "Reorganization of the Urban Situation"
If Galbraith was relieved by the vote, the Reagan administration was alarmed. U.S. officials knew of Hussein's general designs. The State Department's cable traffic from the first week of September continued to report on Iraq's campaign of destruction against the Kurds. On September 2, 1988, a full week ahead of the passage of the Prevention of Genocide Act in the Senate, Morton Abramowitz, the former U.S. ambassador to Thailand who was then assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research, sent a top-secret memo to the secretary of state entitled, "Swan Song for Iraq's Kurds?" Abramowitz cited evidence that Iraq had used chemical weapons against the Kurds on August 25, writing, "Now, with cease-fire [with Iran], government forces appear ready to settle Kurdish dissidents once and for all .... Baghdad is likely to feel little restraint in using chemical weapons against the rebels and against villages that continue to support them."Abramowitz acknowledged that "the bulk" of Kurdish villages were vulnerable to attack." Hussein's forces would consider Kurdish civilians and soldiers alike fair game.
But this made little difference in a State Department and White House determined to avoid criticizing Iraq. A September 3 cable from the State Department to the U.S. embassy in Baghdad urged U.S. officials to stress to Hussein's regime that the United States understood the Kurds had aligned with Iran and that the problem was a "historical one." U.S. diplomats were told to explain that they had "reserve[d] comment" until they had been able to take Baghdad's view "fully into account"" Still, the conduct of Iraq's campaign was causing international outcry that was becoming embarrassing for the United States. In consultation with Iraqi foreign ministry undersecretary Nizar Hamdoon the following day, Ambassador April Glaspie warned that Iraq had "a major public relation problem." She noted that the lead story on the BBC that morning had been the gas attacks and said,"If chemical warfare is not being used and if Kurds are not herded into WWII concentration camps," then Iraq should permit independent observers access to Kurdish territory. Hamdoon denied chemical weapons use but said the access she requested was "impossible" just then. Besides, the fighting would be over "in a few days"The embassy "comment" on the meeting was that "it has been clear for many days that Saddam has taken the decision to do whatever the army believes necessary to fully pacify the north."
In public, State Department officials betrayed little of this behindthescenes grasp of Iraq's agenda. Picking up on wire reports of gas attacks that started running August 10, journalists had begun pressing State Department spokespersons for comment on the attacks on August 25. Day after day spokesperson Phyllis Oakley said she had "nothing" to substantiate the reports. Her colleague Charles Redman said on September 6 that he could not confirm the news stories. Sensing the reporters' exasperation, Redman did add a hypothetical condemnation. "If they were true, of course we would strongly condemn the use of chemical weapons, as we have in the past," he said. "The use of chemical weapons is deplorable. It's barbaric"
U.S. officials reluctant to criticize Iraq again took refuge in the absence of perfect information. They noted that the reports from the Turkish border were not unanimous. Bernard Benedetti, a doctor with Medecins du Monde, had found no chemical weapons cases. "That's a false problem," he told the Washington Post, referring to chemical weapons. "The refugees here are suffering from diarrhea and skin rash which are spreading because of overcrowding and unsanitary conditions " " Turkey likewise insisted that forty doctors and 205 other health personnel had found no proof of the atrocities. One Turkish doctor told the New York Times that the blisters on the face of a three-year-old Kurdish boy came from "malnutrition" and "poor cleanliness"" But neither source was reliable. Physicians with the international aid agencies had no expertise on diagnosing the side effects of exposure to chemical weapons, and Turkey got most of its oil from Iraq and conducted $2.4 billion in annual trade with its neighbor.' It also frequently partnered with Iraq to suppress Kurdish rebels.
Shaken refugees in Turkey found their claims rudely challenged. Clyde Haberman of the New York Tirnes described a "reluctant subject," thirteenyear-old Bashir Semsettin, who after suffering a gas attack and landing in Turkey found "his thin body pulled and prodded like an exhibit ... for the benefit of curious visitors." Bashir's chest and upper back were scarred in a "marbled pattern" of burns, with streaks of dark brown juxtaposed beside large patches of pink. While he was pent up in a Turkish medical tent, a Turkish MP arrived with an entourage of assistants and began poking at Bashir's wounds.
Turkish Bashir Semsettin, Kurdish survivor of an Iraqi chemical attack. (picture description)
"What are these?" the lawmaker asked.The Reagan administration had been conciliatory toward Iraq for years, always preferring double condemnations of Iraq and Iran and requests for additional fact finding.Yet at the time of the massive Kurdish flight in September, the State Department consensus at last began to crack. The State Department's Bureau for Near Eastern Affairs (NEA), run by Richard Murphy, and the Bureau for Intelligence and Research (INR), run by Abramowitz, took different positions. Within several days of the launching of the final Anfal, INR intercepted Iraqi military communications in which the Iraqis themselves confirmed that they were using chemical weapons against the Kurds. A pair of U.S. embassy officials also spent two days conducting interviews with refugees from twenty-eight villages at the Turkish border. The refugees and the intercepts together left little doubt. But Murphy's bureau, which managed the U.S. political relationship with Iraq, remained unconvinced. Murphy may have mistakenly trusted Iraqi denials of responsibility and thus discounted the overwhelming evidence of Iraqi poison attacks. Or he may have willfully cast doubt on the information because he believed the U.S.-Iraq relationship would be harmed if the United States condemned the gassing. "I certainly don't recall deliberate slanting," Murphy says today. "I think that we did what we are supposed to do with intelligence: We challenged it. We said, `Where did you get it?'; `Who were your sources?'; `How do you know you can trust those sources?"' Whatever the bureau's motives, NEA officials contested INR's findings long after the intelligence officers found the evidence of Iraqi responsibility overwhelming.
"Burns," replied the government physician.
"What sort of burns?" the MP pressed.
"Who can say?" the physician answered. "I know these are firstdegree burns from a heat source other than flames," he said. "If they were flames, his hair and eyebrows would also be burned. But I can't say if they're from chemicals.They can be from anything."
After nearly two weeks of heated internal debate, the INR view finally prevailed. It had been nearly eighteen months since al-Majid had begun his vicious counter-insurgency campaign. The United States had long known about the destruction of Kurdish villages and disappearances of Kurdish men. But only after the highprofile refugee flight and the deluge of press inquiries did Secretary of State Shultz decide to speak out. "As a result of our evaluation of the situation," spokesman Redman declared authoritatively on September 8, 1988, "the United States government is convinced that Iraq has used chemical weapons in its military campaign against Kurdish guerrillas.""' When he was challenged to account for why the United States had been so reticent about responding to chemical weapons attacks in the past, Redman noted, "All of these things have a way of evolving. And it's simply a matter of the course of events.""" Another official cited the Department's fear of crying wolf as it had done in the early 1980s when it charged that Soviet-backed forces had employed chemical weapons against guerrillas in Laos and Cambodia. U.S. officials had been embarrassed by the findings of independent biologists who said that the "yellow rain" that the United States had blamed on trichothecene mycotoxins was in fact pollen-laden droppings from bee swarms."
On the same day Secretary Shultz confirmed Iraqi chemical use, he raised the matter with Saddoun Hammadi, Iraqi minister of state for foreign affairs, delivering what Murphy and others present described as a fifty-minute harangue. Hammadi denied the U.S. charge three times during the meeting, calling the allegations "absolutely baseless."" But he said Iraq had a responsibility to "preserve itself, not be cut to pieces."The Iraqi perspective, like that of most perpetrators, was grounded in a belief that the collective could be punished for individual acts of rebellion. Baghdad had to "deal with traitors." Shultz suggested they be arrested and tried, not gassed .13 Britain, which up to this point had been mute, quickly followed the U.S. lead with a similar statement.
Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, too, vehemently denied allegations of wrongdoing. Aziz did not dispute that the Iraqi government was relocating a number of Kurds who lived near the Iranian border. But sounding an awful lot like Talaat Pasha, the Ottoman minister of the interior in 1915, he stressed, "This is not a deportation of people, this is a reorganization of the urban situation"
Iraq's defense minister, General Adrian Khairallah, was more revealing in his statements. Iraq was entitled to defend itself with "whatever means is available." When confronting "one who wants to kill you at the heart of your land," he asked, "will you throw roses on him and flowers?" Combatants and civilians looked alike: "They all wear the Kurdish costume, and so you can't distinguish between one who carries a weapon and one who does not."
The Iraqi regime was watching Washington carefully. Indeed, the September 9 Senate passage of the sanctions bill and the Shultz condemnation gave rise to the largest anti-American demonstration in Baghdad in twenty years. Some 18,000 Iraqis turned out in a rigged "popular" protest. The Iraqi media inflated the figure to 250,000, and said a "large group" of Kurds also attended. Each evening Iraq's staterun television broadcast clips of Vietnamese civilians who had been burned by U.S. napalm bombs, as well as images of Japanese victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki."' Baghdad media derided the sanctions as the handiwork of "Zionists" and other "potentates of imperialism and racism." The Reagan administration saw Iraq's propaganda as a testament to the peril to U.S.-Iraqi relations; Galbraith considered it proof of the potential for American influence.
Iraq had recently spent vast energy and resources fending off criticisms in Geneva, New York, and Washington. In 1985 the Iraqi embassy in Washington had hired a public relations firm, Edward J.Van Kloberg and Associates, to help it renovate its reputation. Ambassador Nizar Hamdoon agreed to pay the firm $1,000 for "every interview with [a] distinguished American newspaper" that could be arranged. The company had organized television interviews and succeeded in placing articles favorable to Iraq in the Washington Post, New York Times, Washington Times, and Wall Street Journal."" Desperate for foreign investment and reconstructive aid, Iraq was promoting the image of a "new Iraq." It cared about the outside world's opinion.
Iraq's ambassador to the United States, Abdul-Amir All al-Anbari invited any journalist to northern Iraq "to see for himself the truth."This was a typical delay tactic: Visitors are promised access but then denied it once the act of granting permission has deflated outrage. In some instances, after endless delays, independent observers are allowed to visit the prohibited territory, but then, like Becker in Cambodia, they are trailed at all times by a "security escort" handpicked by the regime. Iraqi officials who offered access to an impartial international inquiry quickly added that such a mission would have to be delayed until "active military operations" in northern Iraq had been concluded."' In late September twenty-four Western journalists were let in, but only on a carefully supervised government helicopter tour. The trip proved embarrassing for Baghdad: Iraq airlifted journalists to an outpost on the Iraq-Turkey border to witness the return of 1,000 refugees. But the Kurds failed to show, and the journalists spotted an Iraqi truck whose driver and passengers were hidden behind gas masks.
Unhappy with Shultz's September 8 condemnation, U.S. Middle East specialists tried to "walk the Secretary back" to a more conciliatory posi- tion.12 When Ambassador Glaspie met again September 10 with Hamdoon, she acknowledged that in 1977 in Cairo she herself had seen people with burns and nausea from mere tear gas. In a secret cable back to Washington, the embassy credited Iraq for the "remarkably moderate and mollifying mode of its presentation" and an "atypical willingness to gulp down their pride and give us assurances even after we publicly announced our certainty of their culpability."
In Search of "Proof"
Although Pell's Prevention of Genocide Act had sailed through the Senate, Pell came under immediate pressure to retreat. Those who criticized the bill initially said they were simply uncertain that Iraq was responsible. Galbraith was determined to put this excuse to rest and to expose the real reasons for U.S. opposition. On September 10, 1988, the day after the Senate unanimously cleared the stiff sanctions bill, he boarded a plane for Turkey and traveled to the crowded border with Iraq, where thousands of tents housing refugees had sprouted. He was accompanied by Chris Van Hollen, a younger colleague on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The two staffers scurried from camp to camp, interviewing witnesses. The Americans began tentatively, almost shyly. At each site a flood of arrivals quickly descended upon them, desperate to tell their stories. It is never clear just what refugees expect from their encounters with Western intruders. Some probably believe the foreigners will bring some form of salvation-that they will deliver the chilling accounts to the higher-ups and that justice will thus be dispensed, property retrieved, or, in this case, gassings forcibly suspended. Many traumatized civilians simply want to be heard. The Cambodian refugees who crossed into Thailand and spoke to Charles Twining, the Muslims who would survive the Serb concentration camps of 1992 or the Srebrenica massacre of 1995, all revealed that same intense desire to let people know what had happened to them. Only later, when the great white hopes returned again and again empty-handed, did the patience of these eager refugees wear thin.
Dazed Kurdish men and women clustered around Galbraith and Van Hollen.The refugees pointed with animation to the detailed U.S. government maps of the region and groped for the familiar to tell of their experiences. They compared their sensations to the everyday sights, sounds, and smells that they knew and that they knew the Americans would know. The mustard, cyanide, and nerve gases carried odors so distinct that survivors were desperate to describe them. Abdulressiak Salih described for Galbraith a smell "like garlic and cologne." Kahar Mikhail Mahmood remembered a whiff of" rotten apples." And most earnest but least helpful, Asiye Babir recalled "an unpleasant smell, like burnt nylon. Like burnt ants."
Survivors of Iraqi attacks had hidden in caves or plunged into nearby streams to avoid contamination. Although the frenzy of flight made it impossible for them to compare notes, their responses did not vary much by locale. Each remembered a haunting chain of events: Planes and helicopters overhead. Flares released to gauge wind direction. Bombs dropped from the sky. A popping sound.Yellow or brown fumes and mist. Birds falling and tumbling to the earth. Screams. Burning. Vomiting. Bleeding. Slow death of loved ones expedited only occasionally by a hail of followup machine-gun fire. Galbraith and Van Hollen documented chemical weapons attacks on forty-nine Kurdish villages, and they spoke only with Kurds who were lucky enough to have made it to Turkey.
Galbraith knew how skeptically "mere" testimony was received back in Washington. In March he had seen the way public outrage about Halabja had been muted when U.S. officials raised doubts about Iraq's responsibility. In this instance, although Secretary Shultz had recently condemned Iraq, the administration remained loathe to punish its ally. 'Thus they would likely seize upon the inevitable uncertainty surrounding survivor stories.
Galbraith hoped he could bring home physical evidence that would elevate the tales to fact. But it was difficult to find refugees who bore physical symptoms of the gassing. Most Kurds who were able to cross into Turkey bore few traces of the gasses. Some had fled not gassing but rumors of imminent gassing; in the five months since Halabja, the Kurdish Hiroshima had become notorious. Others had managed to avoid the deadly fumes but witnessed the result upon emerging from shelters or returning to their villages. "Most of the Kurds who were exposed to nerve gas died on the spot," Galbraith says, "and many of those who streamed into Turkey wanted to avoid that fate"
Around the same time Galbraith was puzzling over the dearth of physical evidence at the border, Assistant Secretary Abramowitz was explaining the evidentiary paradox to the secretary of state. In a September 17 memo, Abramowitz wrote:
It is prudent to point out that victims of immediate lethal doses of chemical weapons agents obviously would not have escaped Iraq.... There is a good chance that on-site inspection in northern Iraq could provide evidence of mustard agent attacks, but there is little chance of finding physical or medical evidence of attacks with non-persistent nerve agent or non-lethal agents.These agents dissipate rapidly, making it difficult to find residual traces in the soil, on a victim's body, or even on expended munitions.The U.S. Government is convinced that Iraq used chemical agents in the late August offensive against the Kurds, it recognizes it will be difficult in this case to provide physical and medical evidence that will be acceptable in the public arena.
Whereas Abramowitz had Iraqi military intercepts to draw upon, the two Senate staffers knew they would have to confirm and reconfirm accounts from as many disparate voices as possible. After they talked to the men, they attempted to speak alone as well with the women and children, who would have been less likely to have been organized in advance by camp leaders. The faces of the Kurdish refugees only rarely bore signs of emotion. "This was just days after the event. People were numb as they told the stories," Galbraith recalls. "They did not sob or break down" Virtually all had lost loved ones and had no prospect of returning home.
By coincidence, after joining the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Galbraith had taken his first official trip abroad in March 1980 to the ThaiCambodian border. There, he had heard refugees describe atrocities carried out by the Khmer Rouge. He had also heard skeptics claim that the refugees were exaggerating. Some foreigners probably brought an innate snobbery about the capacity of uneducated Kurds to truth-tell. "We tell ourselves these are people who are not thoughtful," says Galbraith. "There is a certain racism and classism here that tells us that we should not take seriously the words of peasants or that we should look down on them." But he had seen the doubters proven wrong once outsiders visited Cambodia in the early 1980s. "The real lesson of my experiences in these camps over the years is that refugees don't lie," Galbraith reflects. "This is not to say that we should accept one account from one refugee, but in the case of the Cambodians, the Kurds, and later the Bosnians, there were thousands and thousands of witnesses to the crimes. We must learn to believe them"
Amnesty International had learned its lesson in Cambodia as well. Whatever its internal skepticism about Kurdish claims, instead of publicly casting doubt on refugee reports, the organization did something no nongovernmental group had ever done: It appealed directly to the UN Security Council to act immediately to stop the slaughter of Kurdish civilians. It made what was then a radical, new argument: When a state committed massacres inside its borders, the killings constituted "a threat to international peace and security" and thus, according to the UN charter, became the responsibility of the Security Council. The organization did not invoke the genocide convention. It argued only what it could prove definitively. Researchers did not want a debate over the aptness of the genocide label to distract policymakers from crimes that were undeniable.
With the sanctions bill pending back in Washington, Galbraith went scavenging for proof besides the refugees' consistent oral accounts. One day, driving along the Turkish border, he and Van Hollen met some Turkish beekeepers who invited them to a dinner of homemade bread and homegrown honey. The beekeepers' Spartan settlement boasted a single electric wire that led directly to a 27inch television set, where the Americans were treated to an episode of All in the Family in Turkish. The beekeepers also supplied them with something that they were sure would prove Iraqi chemical weapons use once and for all-dead bees that they said had died as a result of Hussein's gas attacks nearby. Galbraith brought the bees back home for analysis. Realizing that clearing customs with Ziploc bags of bee corpses might be tricky, he secured special clearance from the secretary of agriculture himself. Galbraith found himself checking the "yes" box by "animal products" on the U.S. customs declaration for the first and last time. On the plane back to the United States, with plastic baggies of dead bees tucked into his briefcase, he happened upon a short blurb in the International Herald Tribune that reported the emergence of a mite that was killing southeastern European bees. Undaunted, Galbraith handed over several of the bags to the CIA. Not trusting the intelligence services, he kept one sample for himself, which he stored in the same refrigerator at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee where his colleagues stored their lunches. Only a year later, long after the CIA results had come back negative, did somebody throw out Galbraith's moldy bee corpses.
Assistant Secretary Murphy and others at the State Department who were highly critical of Galbraith's sanctions effort to begin with greeted the news of his bee corpses as proof that he had gone mad. "I never saw the bees myself," remembers Murphy, "but when we heard he had come back with these baggies, we all just groaned and thought, `There's Peter, at it again."'
On the plane back to the United States, Galbraith drafted a report on his trip, including testimony from some thirty-five refugees. He was haunted by his memory of the old men who stoically described the deaths of their children and grandchildren and the families seated by tiny bundles that now constituted the sum of their lives' possessions. Surely Congress would punish Hussein, even if it meant resisting the pressure of the State Department and White House.
Analogy and Advocacy
Galbraith was not without his supporters. As in Cambodia, the most outspoken U.S. officials were those on Capitol Hill not required to adopt the administration line. They, too, invoked Holocaust imagery. When Senator Pell, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, introduced the law imposing sanctions, he declared:
For the second time in this century a brutal dictatorship is using deadly gas to exterminate a distinct ethnic minority ....There can be no doubt but that the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein intends this campaign to be a final solution to the Kurdish problem. While a people are gassed, the world is largely silent.... Silence, however, is complicity. A half century ago, the world was also silent as Hitler began a campaign that culminated in the near extermination of Europe's Jews. We cannot be silent to genocide again.
The analogy was made all the more resonant by Hussein's choice of lethal weapon. The next day Pell noted that although the sanctions bill would hurt some American businesses, Americans should be prepared to make sacrifices for a "moral issue of the greatest magnitude":
To do the right thing the American people have in the past been willing to pay the price. After the holocaust that consumed Europe's Jewish population, the world said "never again." Sadly, it is happening again in Iraqi Kurdistan. We must do whatever we can to let the Iraqi dictatorship know that the United States will not stand idly by while they massacre the Kurds.This bill sends that message."
Having read Galbraith and Van Hollen's account of their interviews with refugees, Pell grew impatient with those still demanding physical evidence of the gassing. The senator mentioned the dead bees, but when reporters kept pressing, Pell snapped, "They did not bring back a corpse, if that's your question"
In the House, Representative James Bilbray (D.-Nev.) rejected the argument that because U.S. allies would not sanction Hussein, the United States should not do so either. He wondered aloud if his colleagues would have allowed Hitler to proceed just because others chose not to confront him. "Are we going to show our children and our grandchildren we sat by while an entire race was exterminated?"
Naturally, the bill also got some help from Senator Proxmire, who called upon colleagues to act on behalf of this "forgotten people" that had "little or no constituency in the West." Proxmire noted the double standard of U.S. policy and the importance of responding to genocide wherever it occurs:
Mr. President, if Nicaragua were using chemical agents against its own population or a neighboring state, the outcry by the public, politi cians, and our own Government would drown all other news. The president would be speaking out about such barbarity as would the Secretary of State and certainly the Defense Department would not remain silent. We would be pounding the doors of the United Nations and the world community. We should expect no less when genocide is being conducted against a people far away, of faint familiarity, who do not touch our daily lives, but who are no less victim to the inhumanity of chemical warfare. '110
Editorial writers teamed up with these outraged senators and representatives. The Kurdish people had acquired a few prominent friends in the media over the years. William Safire of the New York Times and Jim Hoagland of the Washington Post performed the role that syndicated columnists Jack Anderson and Les Whitten had played describing Khmer Rouge terror. Safire lambasted the United States government for its passivity. In a September 5, 1988, op-ed, Safire wrote angrily, "A classic example of genocide is under way, and the world does not give a damn." Singled out for special opprobrium were television journalists, who he knew would be indispensable to sparking and sustaining public support for American reprisals. Although some 60,000 Kurds had gathered in tent cities on the Turkish border and though Hussein "may yet pass Pol Pot in megamur- ders," Safire wrote, the media was absent. Film crews were ignoring a "genocidal campaign against a well-defined ethnic group that has been friendless through modern history and does not yet understand the publicity business." He argued that "inaccessibility" was "no excuse for ignoring the news." Indeed, he wrote, "the ability of color cameras to bring home the horror of large-scale atrocities imposes a special responsibility on that medium to stake out murder scenes or get firsthand accounts from refugees Safire was concrete. The United States should gather additional testimony from the refugees, launch a Security Council investigation, threaten to pull out American ships from the Persian Gulf, and if all else failed, "slip Stinger missiles to [Kurdish rebel leader] Massoud Barzani in the hills to bring down the gassing gunships.""" The New York Times editorial board agreed: "Not just a whiff but the stench of genocide" drifts from Kurdish territory, it said, "sovereignty cannot legitimize genocide.... Enough silence"
Hoagland's September 8 editorial in the Washington Post was entitled "Make No Mistake-This Is Genocide." Hoagland noted that the "Iraqi version of genocide ... does not have the maniacal pace or organization of Hitler's Germany or Pol Pot's Cambodia," but urged that the United States stop shrinking "from branding Iraq's actions with the horrible word." The State Department's low-key "expressions of concern" to the Baghdad government would do little to comfort the Kurds, who he wrote were being dynamited, bulldozed, and gassed to oblivion."" In a later editorial, Hoagland stuck with the Holocaust theme. Hussein's attack on the Kurds was "the most ghastly case of the use of poison gas since the Nazi death camps."The Reagan administration's endless search for "evidence" provided a familiar fig leaf for inaction. "Reports of massive gassing of Jews by the Nazis were regularly dismissed because they lacked `evidence,"' he wrote. "Those who did not want to know, or act, in World War I I were always able to find the lack of proof at the night moment""` The Washington Post editorial board followed Hoagland's lead. "In a world in which many things are muted, this one is clear," the Post said."If gas is not to be considered beyond the limits, then there are no limits.''
Galbraith maintained periodic contact with Safire and Hoagland during this period because he knew that a single editorial would be more valuable in the legislative fight than an entire committee report.
Galbraith also invoked the Holocaust when possible. He named the report from his trip "Iraq's Final Solution." But Gerald Christianson, staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wanted to shy away from the controversy that Galbraith seemed to court and insisted that the committee report title be changed to "Iraq's Final Offensive" Christianson thought that the Holocaust analogy would alienate some members of Congress and that those it moved would not need such blatant cues. He argued that the combination of gas, haggard refugees, and destruction would be enough to stir the association.
Special Interests, National Interest
Galbraith found bedlam on Capitol Hill on the day of his return from Turkey. Some eighty yellow message slips lay scattered on his desk. The sanctions bill faced steep opposition from the White House and State Department, which he had expected, but also from the House. Most disappointing, many of the senators who had supported the measure a week before had since been clued into its contents and consequences. They were now reconsidering.
Some of the opposition on the Hill was structural. The House Foreign Affairs Committee leadership tended to be more deferential than the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to the foreign policy prerogatives of the executive branch, which opposed sanctions in this case. Representative Bill Frenzel (R.-Minn.) testified to this concern, asking, "How can our government provide effective leadership, moral and otherwise, if the administration must always be second-guessed by a Congress which wants to make its own foreign policy with splashy headlines?"`7 The White House blanched every time Congress went about making foreign policy. Similarly, the House Ways and Means Committee, which has jurisdiction over trade, frowned upon using trade as a political tool and thus generally objected to sanctions bills.
But the real opposition derived from an excessive faith in diplomacy and, more fundamentally, from a desire to advance U.S. economic interests. First, the Reagan White House could not accept that years of investment in Iraq would not create a kinder, gentler dictator. "They were sure they were going to convert Saddain Hussein and make him `my fair lady,"' says David Korn, the former State Department Middle East specialist. Some genuinely believed carrots would achieve more than sticks.They spoke of Iraq's assurances as if they were reliable. Iraq was coming around. "If [our objective] is to prevent the further use of chemical weapons in Kurdistan in the immediate future, this may no longer be an issue," one analyst wrote on September 9, 1988. "We have been told in Baghdad that the campaign against the Kurds is coming to an end, and as a practical matter, there will be little or no need for continued Iraqi use of chemical weapons once the Kurdish insurgence has been suppressed""" Private overtures were paying dividends. Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz said on September 17 that Iraq "respects" its obligations under international law. In the weeks ahead, the administration repeatedly referred back to Aziz's single, incomplete statement as evidence that Washington's gentle persuasion was working. Aziz's credibility had apparently not suffered for having repeatedly denied that Iraq had used poison gas in the first place."" U.S. officials even filled in the blanks left open in Iraq's renunciation. "We take this statement to mean that Iraq forswears the use of chemical weapons in internal as well as international conflicts," State Department spokesman Charles Redman said.'"' The United States would neither punish past use of chemical weapons nor threaten punishment for future use. The farthest it went was to warn that additional attacks would cause the department to "reconsider" its opposition to sanctions."' Representative Tom Lantos (D.Calif.), a Holocaust survivor, declared: "I am intrigued by the logic which views a criminal act, sweeps it aside and focuses on the intent of the criminal to engage in further criminal acts"12
But the Reagan administration continued to act as though economic incentives and warm ties would influence Saddam Hussein's regime. James Baker, then secretary of the treasury, wrote later:
Diplomacy-as well as the American psyche-is fundamentally biased toward "improving relations." Shifting a policy away from cooperation toward confrontation is always a more difficult proposition particularly when support for the existing policy is as firmly embedded among various constituencies and bureaucratic interests as was the policy toward Iraq."'
The Defense Intelligence Agency was issuing predictions that Hussein would likely try to "defeat decisively" or crush "once and for all" the Kurds, but U.S. diplomats downplayed the campaign against the Kurdish minority and hoped for the best.
U.S. patience would have worn thin far sooner if not for American farming, manufacturing, and geopolitical interests in Iraq. The policy of engagement was virtually uncontested at the State Department and White House. Internal memoranda thus tended to lament Iraqi repression only parenthetically: "Human rights and chemical weapons use aside, in many respects our political and economic interests run parallel with those of Iraq."
One-quarter of the rice grown in Arkansas, Galbraith swiftly gathered, was exported to Iraq. Approximately 23 percent of overall U.S. rice output went there. One staffer representing Senator John Breaux of Louisiana actually appeared before Galbraith in tears and accused him of committing genocide against Louisiana rice growers. U.S. farmers also annually exported about I million tons of wheat to Iraq. As economist John Kenneth Galbraith, the father of the author of the sanctions package, mused to me years later, "The one thing you don't want to do is take on the American farmer. There aren't many left, but you've got to take care of them." The administration got immediate assistance from U.S. farm and industry lobbyists who had read the Congressional Record and were horrified that the sanctions bill had slipped quietly by their Senate friends. With a hideous lack of irony, several chemical companies also called to inquire how their products might be affected if sanctions were imposed to punish chemical weapons use. (Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 p.189-)
(Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 p.)
(Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 p.)
(Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 p.)
(Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 p.)
(Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 p.)
(Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 p.)
(Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 p.)
(Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 p.)
Murphy's NEA Bureau received support for this interpretation from Patrick E.Tyler in the Washington Post. On September 25, 1988,Tyler wrote a piece entitled simply, "The Kurds: It's Not Genocide" Although Iraq's "massive and forced relocation" of Kurds was "horrible and his- toric,"Tyler wrote, "genocide, the extermination of a race of people and their culture... is not an accurate term for what is happening in this part of Iraq.."'=' Tyler, too, ignored the legal definition of "genocide." He also extrapolated on the basis of a superficial, strictly supervised tour of several major Kurdish towns.The article was datelined Batufa, one of many Kurdish cities untouched by the Anfal campaign. Only the rural Kurdish population had been targeted for extinction, and Tyler did not visit rural territory. The Washington Post's Jonathan Randal testily describes the tendency of journalists inexperienced in the region to generalize wildly and irresponsibly. "All journalists seem to believe that life begins when they arrive. They get off the plane and expect to be instant experts," he says. "The parties on the ground know when our deadlines are and play us like violins." Western reporters saw bustling city life, but rural Kurds depended on their mountain life, which was off-limits. As one Kurdish spokesman said:
The Kurds have a saying: "Level the mountains, and in a day the Kurds would be no more" To a Kurd the mountain is no less than the embodiment of the deity: mountain is his mother, his refuge, his protector, his home, his farm, his market, his mate-and his only friend.... Kurds who settle in the cities outside the mountains-even those within Kurdistan proper-soon lose their true Kurdish identities."'
At no point during the eighteen-month Iraqi campaign of destruction did Reagan administration officials condemn it, and they did all they could to kill the Senate sanctions package. Still, the Near Eastern Affairs Bureau continued to claim it had the same ends as the human rights advocates. "We should balance all our interests in this increasingly important country in order to achieve what we all seek in terms of [chemical weapon] restraints and human rights performance," Murphy wrote.125 At a House hearing, he said, "Our opposition, I can assure you, is every bit as strong and outraged as your own.... We share the same goal, which is to end the use of chemical weaponry by Iraq [and] by any other state which has the capabilities. There is no daylight between us in what we are trying to accomplish.""' The difference, as always, was one of "means."
Defeat
When the Khmer Rouge starved and bludgeoned nearly 2 million people to death in Cambodia, journalists like Becker and Schanberg cared passionately about the place and the people, and U.S. diplomats like Twining and Quinn were revolted by the brutality of the new regime. But these journalists and diplomats had no hope that they could overcome the country's Southeast Asia fatigue and generate an American response to KR terror. They felt their wisdom would land like a snowflake on the Potomac. Thus, although they diligently documented the horrors, they did not really lobby for U.S. engagement. Deep down, they seemed to doubt that the United States could ameliorate conditions on the ground. After Vietnam and Watergate, Americans retained little faith in the system.
Galbraith began his crusade to have Saddam Hussein punished for genocide against the Kurds in 1988, nearly a decade after the KR ouster. In a short time much had changed on the international stage. The Cold War was thawing, and President Reagan had none of President Carter's shyness about throwing U.S. weight around the world. But the United States was no more likely to try to curb a strategic partner's human rights abuses, especially if doing so could harm U.S. economic interests.
U.S. politicians were notoriously captive to special interests. "Walter Lippmann once wrote of U.S. legislators, "They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding threatening elements in their constituencies. The decisive consideration is not whether the proposition is good but whether ... the active-talking constituents like it immediately:"
But Galbraith believed that the Senate was an institution that, for all of its horse-trading, could act on principle. It need not become a "mere collection of local potato plots and cabbage grounds." 12" The Senate's early vote for the Prevention of Genocide Act seemed to confirm that the body could do the right thing for the right reasons. But as the fallout from the bill's initial Senate passage intensified, Galbraith began to fear the wrong result for the wrong reasons.
The person most responsible for sabotaging the sanctions effort once it moved from the Senate to the House was Dan Rostenkowski (1).-Ill.), the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee who would later he brought down in a corruption scandal. Influenced by the storm of protests on Capitol Hill, Rostenkowski moved to have Galbraith's Prevention of Genocide Act "blue-slipped," or returned to the Senate as a money bill unconstitutionally originating in the Senate."'' Rostenkowski's argument was a weak one, but, as Lemkin had once said," If somebody doesn't like mustard, they will find a reason for opposing it" Rostenkowski did not like this brand of mustard, and he killed the Pell-Helnis Prevention of Genocide Act. Galbraith was stunned. "I thought the House would take this bill, mark it up, and make it law," he remembers. "I didn't think that business interests would kick in when such an abhorrent thing was taking place." The Senate bill, many Congressmen said, had "gone a little too far" For Galbraith, such euphemisms were code for criminal capitulation.
All was not lost. The House developed its own version of the law, which supporters called "a measured response" to chemical weapons use. The House sanctions bill shifted the burden of proof away from the White House and omitted any reference to genocide. After successive rounds of ravaging in committee, the only sanctions the law retained were the ban on exportimport credits used to purchase U.S. manufactured goods and the sale of chemicals that could be used in the production of chemical weapons. And lawmakers continued to object to these because they said U.S. manufacturers would be harmed.
Galbraith scratched the backs of those he thought could be swayed. But his aggressiveness and his single-mindedness did not charm all those who encountered him. "There was a lot of backlash against anything Peter did," Christianson, his boss at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, remembers. "He rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. They would pooh-pooh him as `emotional.' Whether it was out of jealousy or because they were disdainful of his aggressiveness, he was not their favorite person" Galbraith's message was also not one lawmakers or State Department officials wanted to hear, as he was proposing something that promised no conceivable material gain and several prospective tangible losses. "Peter was, ... well, Peter was Peter," remembers Larry Pope of the State Department. "He was a pain in the neck and a real thorn in the side of our policy of engagement"
Whatever the Reagan administration's objections, the half-measure soared through the House on September 27, 1988, with a huge bipartisan majority, 388-16. On October 1 1 the Senate approved, by a vote of 87-0, a revised bill almost identical to the one passed by the House. Although the bill was not very punishing, Galbraith thought it would signal at least some degree of disapproval of Hussein's brutality and force President Reagan into the awkward position of deciding whether he opposed punishing Hussein enough to veto the congressional measure. On October 21, 1988, however, Galbraith learned that in a lastminute round of parliamentary maneuvering before the autumn adjournment, Representative Dante Fascell (D.-Fla.) had removed the sanctions bill from a tax bill that was certain to become law. Instead, in an effort to preserve his committee's jurisdiction, Fascell put it into a freestanding bill that, because of its other provisions, had no chance of passage. The economic sanctions package never made it off Capitol Hill.
In keeping with the natural workings of the U.S. political process, the question of whether to denounce, punish, or attempt to deter chemical weapons attacks against a largely defenseless minority was never explained to the American people. It was settled, as it usually is, behind closed doors, where special interests ruled the day and where narrow versions of national interest helped rationalize inhumanity.
The trouble was not just that special interests spoke loudly against action; it was that, apart from these lobbies that were especially interested, there were no competing voices making phone calls on behalf of the Kurds. When the genocide convention had come up for ratification, a small group of vocal, isolationist, southern senators had managed to block its passage. During the Khmer Rouge's bloody rule in Cambodia, likewise, the loudest voices were those that cast doubt on the refugee claims. With Iraq, too, the major human rights organizations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, were still operating out of dingy offices on small budgets and focusing principally on jailed political dissidents, in the case ofAmnesty, and abuses committed in Latin America and Asia, in the case of Human Rights Watch. The loudest political support Galbraith received was from a group of steelworkers from Brownsville, Texas, whose plant was scheduled to be shut down and shipped to Iraq, costing them hundreds of jobs. When they learned that the sanctions bill would block the factory move, they were ecstatic. They phoned up the frazzled Galbraith and offered him enthusiastic moral support, which counted for little when measured against the potent U.S.-Iraqi Business Council. Representative Howard Berman (D.-Calif.) had been pushing legislation to limit trade with Iraq since the mid-1980s, but the deck was stacked in the wrong direction. "There was no grassroots campaign," he said. "The American people weren't aware of, or that interested in, our policy toward Iraq at that time." When the bill came up for passage, and hearing nothing from their constituents, most thought in terms of economic and strategic interests alone.
Some of the most potent lobbies in U.S. political life today are of course those that speak for various ethnic interests. The Armenian American community has lobbied for decades to secure a day of remembrance to conl- memorate the Armenian genocide and in November 2000, over Turkish objections, very nearly gained official U.S. recognition of the genocide. Jewish American groups have been extremely influential, helping secure the allocation of billions of dollars worth of aid to Israel and the establishment of the Holocaust Museum on the Mall in Washington, D.C. While the atrocities were actually being perpetrated in Turkey and Nazioccupied Europe, however, these lobbies did not exist. During the Cambodian genocide, similarly, few Cambodian expatriates or descendants lived in the United States. Those who did were not organized politically to attract much attention to the cause of their compatriots. In the case of the Kurds, when Galbraith's sanctions measure stood poised for passage in the Congress, neither Kurds nor Kurdish Americans had joined forces to set up a Washington lobby. When Talabani visited Washington in June 1988 for the first time, his party did not reinforce the trip by establishing a D.C. office or liaison. Latif Rashid, who ran the party's London office, remembers, "Because we had no representatives based in Washington, it was easy for American leaders to pretend the Kurds didn't exist."
The U.S. media can sometimes play a role in helping draw public attention to an injustice abroad or to the stakes of a legislative sequence. When it came to Iraq's repression of the Kurds, however, the March 1988 Halabja attack and the September 1988 exodus received some attention, but neither the larger Iraqi campaign to destroy Kurds in rural Iraq nor the legislative toing and froing around the Prevention of Genocide Act on Capitol Hill generated much press interest.This spotty reporting helped ensure that lawmakers and administration officials could oppose the sanctions bill without attracting negative publicity. (Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 p.225-30)
The Bush administration's guidelines revealed a worry that Iraqi transgressions would be harder to justify publicly now that its war with Iran had ended. "Clouding the issue, the immediate threat of Iranian expansion has faded, and with it the shield that protected Iraq from western criticism," the guidelines noted. "This has allowed human rights to become the battleground for those wanting to justify severing or greatly limiting relations with Iraq." The State Department maintained the view that the Kurds had earned repression with their rebellions. As the author of the guidelines advised, "In no way should we associate ourselves with the 60-year-old Kurdish rebellion in Iraq or oppose Iraq's legitimate attempts to suppress it.""' The U.S. official did not explain how legitimate suppression could be distinguished from illegitimate suppression, but the United States was under no illusion about the nature of the regime. "Saddam Hussein will continue to eliminate those he regards as a threat," the guidelines stated, "torture those he believes have secrets to reveal, and rule without any real concessions to democracy.... Few expect a humane regime [will] come to Iraq any time soon" But when twelve Western states joined together in 1989 at the UN Human Rights Commission and sponsored a strongly worded resolution that called for the appointment of a special rapporteur to "make a thorough study of the human rights situation in Iraq," the United States refused to join.
On October 2, 1989, a year after some 60,000 Kurds had tumbled into Turkey fleeing gas attacks, President Bush signed National Security Directive 26 (NSD-26), which concluded that "normal relations between the United States and Iraq would serve our longer-terns interests and promote stability in both the Gulf and the Middle East."Thus, the administration would "pursue, and seek to facilitate, opportunities for U.S. firms to participate in the reconstruction of the Iraqi economy."The devastation caused by the Iran-Iraq war would create vast opportunities. In other settings, such as South Africa and later China, the United States justified its support for economic engagement on the grounds that greater prosperity and Western contacts would eventually improve respect for the human rights of the South Africans and Chinese. But with Iraq the case for foreign investment was made with almost no reference to the "long-term human rights benefits" to Iraqi Arabs and Kurds. With Saddam Hussein in office, it was clear, there would be none.
In a brochure welcoming visitors to the U.S. pavilion at the 1989 Baghdad international trade fair, U.S. Ambassador Glaspie wrote that the embassy "places the highest priority on promoting commerce and friendship between our two nations" A number of major U.S. companies, including AT&T International, General Motors, Xerox, Westinghouse, and Wang Laboratories, participated in the fair and others worked to form the U.S.Iraq Business Forum, which lobbied in Washington to promote trade ties."
Certain members of Congress refused to let the issue of Hussein's brutality against his people rest. In 1989, thanks to the pestering of Representative Berman, Senator Pell's ally on the House side, Congress finally agreed to ban Export-Import Bank financing for exports to Iraq. It attached a waiver, however, allowing the Bush administration to ignore the ban if national security requirements dictated. The president took advantage of this loophole two months later. On January 17, 1990, Bush overrode congressional opposition and signed a directive authorizing an Export-Import Bank line of credit worth nearly $200 million. If the Congress and the Bush White House were driven by special interests, the administration justified its stand on the grounds of advancing the U.S. national interest. Neither the Bush nor the Reagan administration ever spoke out against the forced relocation of the Kurds.
Burn Israel, Burn Bridges
Hussein's behavior grew so bold in early 1990 that President Bush had to work to justify warm ties. In March Iraq executed a British journalist it claimed spied for Israel. Reports began pouring in that Iraq was strengthening its nuclear and chemical weapons capability. On April 2, 1990, Hussein crossed the Rubicon in a speech to the general command of his armed forces. He confirmed that Iraq possessed chemical weapons and warned that if Israel attacked Iraq, "By God, we will make fire eat up half of 117 This became known as the "Burn Israel" speech, and it earned Israel. him the special ire of American supporters of Israel, specifically, New York Republican senator Alphonse D'Amato. D'Amato hurriedly enlisted Galbraith to draft another sanctions package, this one known as the Iraq International Law Compliance Act of 1990.
The Bush administration continued to hope that Hussein would come around. He got backing from some powerful senators. A congressional delegation that included Bob Dole and Alan Simpson (R.-Wyo.) returned from Iraq in niid-April 1990 having met with Hussein for two and a half hours. They cheerily proclaimed him a leader with whom the United States could work."' In the meeting Hussein complained that "a large-scale campaign is being launched against us from the United States and Europe" Senator Dole assured him, "Not from President Bush," insisting that Bush would veto sanctions legislation if it ever passed both houses of Congress. Still, the challenges from Capitol Hill grew louder. At a House hearing Representative Lantos challenged Murphy's successor as assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, John Kelly. "At what point will the administration recognize that this is not a nice guy?" Lantos boomed. Kelly clung to the U.S. position: "We believe there is still a potentiality for positive alterations in Iraqi behavior."
The Senate opposition continued to cite futility, perversity, and jeopardy as grounds for remaining silent. But others had awoken to the humanitarian and national security implications of allowing Hussein to dictate the terms of the relationship. In 1990 they said what they had not said in 1988. Senator William Cohen (R.-Maine) decried U.S. timidity. "It is the smell of oil and the color of money that corrodes our principles," Cohen remarked."" To those senators who argued that unilateral sanctions would do no good, Cohen said that if the United States avoided penalizing Hussein because it feared its allies would not follow, "we are left with the argument that we must follow the herd, follow it right down the path of feeding Saddam Hussein while he continues to terrorize, attack, or simply threaten to do so" Cohen invoked Hitler: "At one point in our history we heard the tap, tap, tap of Neville Chamberlain's umbrella on the cobblestones of Munich," Cohen said, just before a July 27 Senate vote on the new sanctions bill."Now we are about to hear the rumble of the farm tractor on the bricks of Baghdad"
Senator Nancy Kassebaum hailed from Kansas, which exported 1 million tons of wheat annually to Iraq. But moved by Amnesty International's report about human rights abuses against children in Iraq and remorseful at the Senate's tardiness in confronting Hussein, she memorably declared that, farm state or not, Kansas should support the sanctions bill. "I cannot believe that any farmer in this nation would want to send his products ... to a country that has used chemical weapons and to a country that has tortured and injured their children," she said.1i2 The Senate passed the D'Amato amendment 88-12 on July 27,1990. It prohibited the United States from extending any sort of financial credit or assistance, including CCC guarantees, and from selling arms to Iraq, unless the president were to certify that Iraq was in "substantial compliance" with the provisions of a number of international human rights conventions, including the genocide convention.The Senate tabled an amendment put forth by Texas Republican Phil Gramm that would have allowed the Bush administration to waive its terms if it found that the sanctions hurt U.S. businesses and farmers more than they hurt Iraq.
A week after the sanctions bill finally cleared the Senate, Iraq invaded Kuwait, and Saddam Hussein named All al-Majid (aka "Chemical Ali") military governor of the occupied province.
Within hours of Iraq's invasion, Representative Berman's long-stalled proposal to deny export-import credits to Iraq passed the House, 416-0. At this point virtually nobody contested the measure. The cross-border invasion trampled the sovereignty of a U.S. ally and threatened U.S. oil supplies. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Fascell scrambled to attach an executive order just penned by President Bush, which called for a total embargo on Iraq and a freeze on its assets in the United States.
U.S. government-guaranteed loans had totaled $5 billion since 1983. The credits had freed up currency for Hussein to fortify and modernize his more cherished military assets, including his stockpile of deadly chemicals. American grain would keep the Iraqi army fed during its occupation of Kuwait.
The Kurdish Uprising
The U.S. bombing of Baghdad began on January 17, 1991. U.S. ground troops routed Iraqi Republican Guards soon thereafter. Galbraith received a phone call from Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani, pledging to relay intelligence on Iraqi troop movements. Galbraith arranged for these reports to be radioed out of northern Iraq to Damascus and then faxed in Kurdish to a dentist in Detroit, who translated them and faxed them to Washington. But Galbraith quickly learned there were no takers in the Bush administration. The United States may have been at war with Iraq, but the war had not made the Bush administration any more inclined to deal with the Kurds. State Department officials informed Galbraith that the intelligence the Kurds were gathering would be of little use. When Talabani visited Washington in person, the low-level State Department officials who agreed to see him insisted on meeting him not in the building but at a nearby coffee shop.
On February 15, 1991, however, President Bush did speak for the first time of changing the Iraqi regime. He gave a speech that Kurds to this day can quote verbatim. "There's another way for the bloodshed to stop," Bush said, "and that is for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.."15' The Kurds had wanted out of Iraq for so long that they heard the Bush speech as encouragement to launch a full-fledged revolt. On February 27, 1991, Bush declared a cease-fire only 100 hours after the ground war began. Alarmed at the prospect of "another Vietnam," Bush had deferred to the wisdom of General Colin Powell, chairman of the joint Chiefs of Staff, in calling off the war before sealing Hussein's doom. Iraq was left with some 300,000 combat-ready troops and 2,000 tanks. Trusting in allied support and underestimating Baghdad's resources, however, Iraqi Shiites began a rebellion in southern Iraq on March 2, and the Kurds rose up in the north on March 6.
Informed by Talabani of Kurdish plans for a revolt, Galbraith got the Senate Foreign Relation Committee's permission to tour the Middle East on a fact-finding mission. His main aim was to enter Kurdish territory to assess what Washington should be doing to aid the Kurds. But he kept that part of his itinerary to himself, knowing his supervisors would never approve such a dangerous scheme. More intimate than most Americans with the Iraqi dictator's brutality, Galbraith knew that the current was unpre dictable and that Hussein's fury could be pronounced.The day before he left Damascus, Syria, he scribbled a note to his thirteen-year-old son,Andrew:
Dear Andrew,
I hope you never receive this note, but if you do there are some things I want you to know.
First, I traveled to Kurdistan because I believe in helping the victimized. The Kurds are in rebellion against an evil regime and their people need help, including above all food and medicine. By going there I thought I could help convince the Congress to provide the help.
Second, I am most sorry I won't see you grow up. Your Mom and I divorced when you were a baby and so you and I never really were a family. But I love you very mulch and know you will be a fine, loving man. Live a good, kind, caring life.
Love,
Dad
Galbraith traveled the first part of the journey with a Newsweek journalist. The pair came under sporadic mortar fire as they crossed the Tigris River in a small boat. Galbraith filmed his ungraceful entrance and the vast destruction of Kurdish lands on a Hi8 video camera. He found a celebration among Kurds. It was March 30, 1991, and the Kurds had been in rebellion for nearly three weeks. They had taken control of nearly all of Iraqi Kurdistan. In Zakho the streets were crowded and loudspeakers pro- claimed,"We liberated Kurdistan!" Kurds used earth-moving equipment to drag abandoned Iraqi trucks into repair sheds.They brandished documents and videotapes they had captured from the Iraqi secret police archives. At an evening celebration with Talabani, Galbraith offered a toast, declaring, "President Woodrow Wilson promised the peoples of the world self-determination, and the Treaty of Sevres gave that right to the Kurds. I ani pleased to be the first American government official to stand on territory governed by the Kurds themselves." Yet at 6:15 a.m., Galbraith was awoken and told simply, "It's time to go." Hussein was crushing the rebellion.
The Kurds had banked on U.S. military support and overestimated the damage already inflicted on the Iraqi army by the allied attack. A brutal Iraqi counteroffensive involving tanks, armored vehicles, heavy artillery, and aircraft was under way, and virtually the entire Kurdish populace had taken flight.
When the United States had negotiated its cease-fire with Iraq earlier in the month, it had not insisted upon banning Iraqi military helicopter flights. U.S. commander Norman Schwarzkopf later said he had been "suckered" into permitting their limited use for liaison purposes only. It was these helicopters that now became Iraq's ultimate terror weapon against the Kurds. Because the helicopters had delivered poison gas against the Kurds in 1987 and 1988, many Kurds fled ahead of Iraqi counterattacks.
Although theirs was an oil-rich region, after eight months of economic sanctions and two months of war, the Kurds had little gasoline to fuel their flight. Most refugees walked in long, winding columns. Some 1.3 million Kurds streamed into the Iraqi mountains bordering Iran and Turkey. The Iraqis had systematically dynamited and bulldozed Kurdish villages along the way, so refugees could find no shelter en route. Galbraith met one man on the road who was carrying a bag of grain that had earlier been coated with rat poison.This was all his village had to eat, and he was attempting to wash the poison off the grain.
After a stay of only thirty-six hours in "liberated" Kurdistan, Galbraith made his way back to the Syrian border, which was under heavy artillery fire. As shells landed all around him, he dashed across the mudflats to a sandbagged position at the edge of the river. From there a small boat took him to Syria. The Iraqis seized the border crossing the next day.
Although Galbraith was teased for the unsteadiness of his camera work, his Hi-8 images, the first of the collapse of the Kurdish uprising, led U.S. news programs on April 1, 1991. It took Kurdish refugees several more days to reach the Turkish border, but Galbraith telephoned Morton Abramowitz, the former INR assistant secretary who had since become U.S. ambassador in Turkey, to warn him that close to a million people would soon be at his doorstep. On April 2 Galbraith prepared a detailed memo for Senators George Mitchell and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, reporting that the Kurds were in danger of being massacred. Perhaps the most significant outcome of Galbraith's unsuccessful 1988 effort to get sanctions imposed against Iraq was that by 1991, when the Kurds again faced slaughter, people in Washington had at least heard of the unlucky minority. Having raised the genocide issue in 1988, Senator Pell also had greater authority warning that if the allies did not act, the Kurds could be wiped out. (Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 p.233-9)
In entering Iraq without Senate approval, Galbraith had broken one of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's cardinal rules. After seeing what he saw in Kurdistan, he began breaking others. Staff members were not allowed to make media appearances, but Galbraith appeared on Nightline on April 1, April 4, and again on April 18. He also wrote a cover story for the New Republic on the failed uprising. Senator Moynihan spoke on Galbraith's behalf on the Senate floor on April 17. He urged that Congress should reward "service above and beyond the call of duty." Noting that members of the Senate staff usually went unrecognized, he said, "This is no dereliction on our part. It is simply that in two and more centuries we have not seen the likes of young Galbraith: The indifference to his own welfare and safety; the all-consuming concern for the welfare and safety of an oppressed people caught up in a ghastly travail."
Some 400,000 Kurdish refugees had reached Turkey by mid-April, and it was feared an additional half a million were en route.''' Galbraith's newfound cachet made him less rather than more tactful. He found Washington speaking as if humanitarian aid agencies would solve the problem. Responding to questions about the security of Kurds in Turkey, Secretary of State Baker said, "It is hoped that the presence of humanitarian relief workers will act as a deterrent to future harassment and persecution of these people""' At one relief meeting attended by forty to fifty crisis experts, Galbraith exploded. "Are you telling me that a bunch of unarmed Swedes at feeding stations are going to give the Kurds enough confidence to come down from the mountains to face a man our president has likened to Hitler? I suppose your solution to Auschwitz would have been to ensure that some Swedish girls in shorts would have been made available to give the Jews food!" His outburst was met with silence. This was not how business was done. Galbraith was told he had become too emotionally attached to the issue.
But Galbraith's proposed alternativeallied military intervention-was gaining support. Prime Minister John Major of Britain began urging the Bush administration to act. William Safire attacked the president for his "loss of nerve"15' He wrote, "People like the too trusting Kurds now know they can get killed by relying on Mr. Bush."159 Still, Bush held firm, responding by authorizing $10 million for relief. One top White House aide said, "A hundred Safire columns will not change the public's mind. There is no political downside to our policy." 160
But Turkey, a U.S. ally, vociferously disagreed. It needed U.S. help to get rid of the sprawling Kurdish presence in southern Turkey. Secretary of State Baker took a helicopter ride to the Turkish border on April 7 and in a sev enteen-minute stopover saw some 50,000 Kurds hugging the surrounding mountains. It was a public relations disaster that he feared would negate all the gains the Gulf War had brought the Bush White House. It was also a humanitarian catastrophe that moved him. Some 1,000 Kurds were estimated to be dying per day. "We can't let this go on," Baker said. "We've got to do something-and we've got to do it now."161
On April 16, 1991, the United States joined with its allies and launched Operation Provide Comfort, carving out a "safe haven" for Kurds north of the thirty-sixth parallel in northern Iraq. Allied ground forces would set up relief camps in Iraq, and U.S., British, and French aircraft would patrol from the skies.
Provide Comfort was perhaps the most promising indicator of what the post-Cold War world might bring in the way of genocide prevention. Under the command of Lieutenant General John M. Shalikashvilli, some 12,000 U.S. soldiers helped patrol the region as part of a 21,000-troop allied ground effort. This marked an unprecedented intervention in the internal affairs of a state for humanitarian reasons. Thanks to the allied effort, the Iraqi Kurds were able to return home and, with the protection of NATO jets overhead, govern themselves.
Justice?
Today women Kurdish survivors crunched into resettlement complexes cling to rumors that their male Anfalakan remain alive in secret jails in the desert. Some inquiries have been met with cold precision, others with evasion. On September 25, 1990, the following directive was issued by Iraqi authorities in Erbil: "The phrase `We do not have any information about their fate' will replace the phrase `They were arrested during the victorious Anfal operation and remain in detention"'163
The entrance to the ravaged town of Halabja is marked by a statue of a father dying as he tries to shield his two sons from the gas attack. More than 70,000 Kurds have returned to the town whereVX, sarin, and mustard gas were combined in deadly cocktails. Survivors remain blinded from corneal scarring from mustard gas burns."' Miscarriages and birth defects such as cleft palates and harelips recur in the maternity ward of the Martyrs Hospital. Christine Gosden, a British geneticist, has attempted to investigate and raise money to treat the ailments. "Not only do those who sur vived have to cope with memories of their relatives suddenly dying in their arms," Gosden noted, "they have to try to come to terms with their own painful diseases and those of their surviving friends and relatives..""' Gosden says infant deaths are more than four times greater than in neighboring Sulaymaniyah. Leukemia and lymphomas are ravaging the community at rates Kurdish doctors claim are four times higher than in unexposed areas. No chemotherapy or radiotherapy is available. More profound, Gosden believes, the congenital malformations in children born after the Halabja attacks suggest that the chemical agents have produced permanent genetic mutations in those exposed. Preliminary medical findings indicate that the occurrence of these mutations is comparable with those who were about one to two miles from the epicenter of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs. The Anfal technically ended in 1988, but Gosden calls it "the persistent genocide" Succeeding generations will pay a price.
In their failed revolt against Baghdad in 1991, the Kurds stormed secret police buildings and recovered huge piles of government records. The files had been stuffed randomly into plastic flour sacks, tea boxes, and binders. Others were tied loosely with staples, strings, laces, or pins. Handwritten ledgers were covered with flowered wallpaper, and some of the Arab titles had been penned in psychedelic, calligraphic script filled in with colored felt-tip pens by bored Iraqi bureaucrats.""' The Kurds who gathered the evidence were not thinking about prosecuting Iraqi officials or even documenting a genocide for posterity. Rather, they hoped to learn the identity of informers. Although many of the documents were destroyed or lost in the rebellion, Iraqis were so meticulous about their bureaucratized killing and cleansing machine that an abundance of evidence was recovered.
In May 1992 Galbraith helped negotiate the transfer of fourteen tons of captured documents to the National Archives in Washington for safekeeping. Human Rights Watch (HRW), the parent organization to all the regional "watch" groups, which itself secured the shipment of an additional four tons from the Kurdish Democratic Party, was granted exclusive access to the documents and launched an unprecedented investigation. The more than 4 million pages covered not only the Anfal but Iraqi repression from the 1960s forward. There were explicit shoot-to-kill orders, such as the June 14, 1987, order from the Ba'ath Party People's Command in Zakho. "Dear Comrades," reads the order, "The entry of any kind of human cargo, nutritional supplies, or mechanical instruments into the securityprohibited villages under the second stage [of the operation] is strictly prohibited.... It is the duty of the members of the military forces to kill any human being or animal found in these areas." 11,7 There were proud tallies of individuals and villages eliminated, minutes of meetings, arrest warrants, notes on phone surveillance, and decrees ordering mass execution.
Human Rights Watch dispatched its researchers to Iraqi Kurdistan in 1992 and 1993, where they interviewed some 350 survivors and witnesses to the slaughter. The organization exhumed mass graves and gathered forensic material, such as traces of chemical weapons found in soil samples and bomb shrapnel, as well as the skeletons of the victims themselves. Excavators found rope still tying the hands of the decomposed men, women, and children. One foray yielded a fully preserved woman's braid."
The eighteen-month investigation by Human Rights Watch into Iraqi atrocities was the most ambitious ever carried out by a nongovernmental organization. It was the kind of study that a U.S. government determined to stop atrocities might well have attempted while the crimes were under way. The human rights group legitimated the earlier estimate of Shorsh Resool, the amateur investigator into the operation. The group found that between 50,000 and 100,000 Kurds (many of whom were women and children and nearly all of whom were noncombatants) were executed or disappeared between February and September 1988 alone. Hundreds of thousands of Kurds were forcibly displaced.The numbers of those eliminated or "lost" cannot be confirmed because most of the men who were taken away were executed by firing squad and buried in unexhumed, shallow mass graves in southwest Iraq, near the border with Saudi Arabia. The Kurdish leadership claims 182,000 were eliminated in the Anfal campaign. Mahmoud `Uthman, the leader of the Socialist Party of Kurdistan, tells of a 1991 meeting at which the Anfal's commander, al-Majid, grew enraged over this number. "What is this exaggerated figure of 182,000?" he snapped. "It couldn't have been more than 100,000.." (Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 p.239-43)
According to Eagleburger, though he had supported the idea of a court for several months, it had been Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel who convinced him to speak out. Wiesel had visited the region in November, making stops in Belgrade, Sarajevo, and Banja Luka, including the Manjaca concentration camp. When Wiesel returned home, he had what he called a "long talk" with Eagleburger in which he convinced him that speaking out was a moral obligation. But Eagleburger made it clear he was not calling for the forcible seizure of the men he named. Karadzic, one of those just branded, freely wandered the halls outside the main conference hall in Geneva.`' He would remain a valued negotiating partner for two and a half more years. In addition, the United States did not follow up on Eagleburger's statement by assigning officials within the State Department or U.S. intelligence community to build legal cases against these leaders. According to Johnson, when the State Department finally began submitting evidence to the UN War Crimes Commission, it assigned the task to a foreign service officer in the Human Rights Bureau with no knowledge of Balkan affairs and to a short-term State Department intern just out of college."
The closest the Bush administration came to acknowledging genocide was on December 18, 1992, when the United States joined a long UN General Assembly resolution that held Serbian and Montenegrin forces responsible for aggression and for "the abhorrent policy of `ethnic cleansing,' which is a form of genocide"" The American voice was one of many. It was probably not heard and certainly not heeded.
Around the same time, Hooper and Johnson entered a second memo into the State Department dissent channel arguing for a legal finding of genocide. The memo was circulated on December 20, 1992. It quickly garnered signatures from the assistant secretaries of state for INR, legal affairs, European affairs, and International Organizations. With those signatures in place, however, the department practically shut down for the holidays until January 3, 1993.A memo that found that the Serbs were committing genocide sat unexamined for two weeks while State Department officials celebrated Christmas and the NewYear.When Secretary Eagleburger returned, he said at last that he agreed. But he also said that it would he unfair for the Bush administration to issue a finding of genocide just as the next administration was taking over. As Western put it: "The last act of the Bush administration was not going to be, 'Oh by the way, this is genocide. we haven't been doing anything about it. Oops. It's all yours!" On January 19, 1993, the last day of the Bush administration, Patricia Diaz Dennis, the assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs equivocated unintelligibly:
In Bosnia, our report describes widespread systematic atrocities, including the rapes and killings of civilian victims to the extent that it probably borders on genocide. We haven't yet decided whether or not it's a legal matter. The conduct in Bosnia is genocide, but clearly the abuses that have occurred there over the last year are such that they, as I said, border on that particular legal term.
Before leaving office, President Bush did something that woud have grave bearing on the Clinton administration's foreign policy: he sent 28,000 U.S. troops to feed starving civilians in Somalia. Although President Bush viewed the Somalia mission as purely humanitarian, National Security Advisor Scowcroft saw two national interests present that were "intimately connected with our decision not to intervene in Yugoslavia." He argued at the time, first, that the United States had to demonstrate that "it was not that we were afraid to intervene abroad; it was just that the circumstances weren't right in Bosnia." Second, Scowcroft believed that the United States had to show Muslim nations that the U.S. decision to stay out of Bosnia was not rooted in the victims' Muslim faith. "For me, Somalia gave us the ability to show they were wrong," he says. "It was a Southern Hemisphere state; it was black; it was non-Christian; it was everything that epitomized the Third World." When asked why the Third World mattered at all to U.S. vital interests, Scowcroft says, "The opinions of leaders in the Third World matter because to be a `world leader,' you have to convince people it is in their interest to follow. If everyone hates you, it is hard to be a world leader."
The Somalia intervention made it far less likely that the United States would do something to curb the killing in Bosnia. Bush had ordered a humanitarian intervention; U.S. troops were otherwise engaged.
Meanwhile, the war raged on in Bosnia. The only good news Bosnians received as they endured their first winter of war was that their interventionist ally Bill Clinton had won the U.S. presidential election. Help, they felt sure, was on the way. Response (Clinton)
"An Early and Crucial Test"
If Americans have learned to shrug off campaign pledges, the potential beneficiaries of those promises overseas are often less jaded. Clinton the presidential candidate had argued that the United States did have a dog in the Bosnian fight. And even though President Bush had used the bully pulpit to argue against action, by the time of Clinton's inauguration in January 1993, some 58 percent of Americans believed military force should be used to protect aid deliveries and prevent atrocities."' Clinton chose as his top foreign policy adviser Anthony Lake. Lake had earned a reputation as a man of conscience for resigning from the National Security Council to protest President Nixon's 1970 decision to send U.S. troops into Cambodia. In Foreign Policy magazine in 1971, Lake and a colleague had reflected on the process by which Americans of noble character could have allowed themselves to wage the Vietnam War, which had such immoral consequences: "The answer to that question begins with a basic intellectual approach which views foreign policy as a lifeless, bloodless set of abstractions," they wrote:
A liberalism attempting to deal with intensely human problems at home abruptly but naturally shifts to abstract concepts when making decisions about events beyond the water's edge. "Nations," "interests," "influence," "prestige"-all are disembodied and dehumanized terms which encourage easy inattention to the real people whose lives our decisions affect er even end.
When Lake and his Democratic colleagues were put to the test, however, although they were far more attentive to the human suffering in Bosnia, they did not intervene to ameliorate it. (Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 p.292-3)
Between the outbreak of war in April 1992 and July 1993, America's new breed of "conscientious objectors" had continued to believe in the possibility of changing policy from inside the U.S. govermnent. The interventionists within the ranks were not told to their faces that their ideas were off the wall. Bureaucratic ritual had become better at incorporating dissent, and they were shrewdly "domesticated" or assigned the role of "official dissenters." They argued positions that were predictable and thus easier to dismiss. Former National Security Council official James C. Thomson Jr., who resigned the NSC over Vietnam, described the ways the Johnson administration had once "warmly institutionalized" Undersecretary of State George Ball as the "inhouse devil's advocate" on Vietnam. Ball had been urged to speak his piece.Thomson remembered,
Ball felt good, I assume (he had fought for righteousness); the others felt good (they had given a full hearing to the dovish option); and there was minimal unpleasantness. The club remained intact; and it is of course possible that matters would have gotten worse faster if Mr. Ball had kept silent, or left before his final departure in the fall of 1966.
According to Thomson, the president greeted the arrival at meetings of Bill Moyers, his dissenting press secretary, with an affectionate, "Well, here comes Mr. Stop-theBombing.""" By the summer of 1993 the Bosnia dissenters in the State Department and on Capitol Hill, too, had been "heard" and discounted. In this case Clinton and his senior officials might well have greeted a hawk like McCloskey and Dole on Capitol Hill or Harris, Hooper, and Western in the State Department as "Mr. Start-the-Bombing"
Exit
The State Department is difficult to leave. As with most hierarchical institutions, rituals entrench the solidarity of "members." Stiff"initiation costs" include fiercely competitive foreign service exams, tedious years of stamping visas in consular offices around the world, and dull desk jobs in the home office. Because of the association of service with "honor" and "country," exit is often seen as betrayal. Those few who depart on principle are excommunicated or labeled whistleblowers. U.S. foreign policy lore is not laden with tales of the heroic resignee.
A further deterrent to exit is that the very people who care enough about a policy to contemplate resigning in protest often believe their departure will make it less likely that the policy will improve. Bureaucrats can easily fall into the "efficacy trap," overestimating the chances they will succeed in making change." Dropping out can feel like copping out.The perverse result is that officials may exhibit a greater tendency to stay in an institution the worse they deem its actions.
By August 1993, despite all of these factors weighing against exit, existence within the State Iepartment had become so insufferable for a small group of young officers that they took their leave.They found the U.S. policy so timid, so passive, and so doomed to fail that they chose to disassociate themselves from the administration and to go public with their discontent.
For Marshall Harris, the Bosnia desk officer and the lead author of the April 1993 dissent letter, there was nothing conscientious about objecting to a policy that would never change. In July Harris had drafted an "action memorandum" that outlined options for easing the siege of Sarajevo. By the time it had arrived on the seventh floor, however, the memo had been demoted to a "discussion paper" Christopher's "no national interests" pronouncement on July 21 was the last straw. On August 4, 1993, one year after the skeletal figures in the concentration camps had appeared on television and foreign service officer George Kenney had resigned, Harris followed suit. He quit only after he had lined up a job with Congressman McCloskey, who had turned criticizing the administration's Bosnia policy into a nearly full-time pursuit. "I was lucky," Harris recalls. "I could at least go straight to a job where I felt like I still had an official voice and might still influence policy." In a letter addressed to Secretary Christopher, Harris wrote, "I can no longer serve in a Department of State that accepts the forceful dismemberment of a European state and that will not act against genocide and the Serbian officials who perpetrate it"
Harris was tired of the hypocrisy of Clinton's rhetoric. The administration refused to lead either the American people or its European allies and then complained that its policy was constrained by a lack of support from both. Speaking at a press conference the day after his resignation, Harris, thirty-two, delivered his first public verdict on the administration:
If [President Clinton] were to lead, that would bring the American public along, that would bring along the congressmen who are reluctant to do anything, and it could inspire our European allies to do more. . . . I think the administration would be surprised what it could accomplish if it confronts this issue head on. When it adopts a defeatist mode ... its going to get defeatist results.
Like Kenney, Harris was quickly disparaged by his higher-ups. Some said he quit because he had been shut out of the policy loop. State Department spokesman Mike McCurry shrugged off the impact of the resignation, pointing out that Harris was easily replaceable and saying, "We will fill the position with someone who is interested in working on the Administration's more aggressive policy to save Sarajevo and Bosnia from demise."' But Harris's colleagues within the department congratulated him for his courage and thanked him for giving voice to their frustration. (Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 p.312-3)
During a September 15, 1993, hearing of the House Europe and Middle East Subcommittee, McCloskey pressed Assistant Secretary of State for European and Canadian Affairs Stephen Oxman, who stuck to the qualifier of"tantamount":
Rep. McCloskey: As you know, since April, I've been trying to get an answer from State as to whether these activities by the Bosnian Serbs and Serbs constitute genocide. Will I get a reply on that today?
Mr. Oxman: I learned, just today, that you hadn't had your response. And the first thing I'm going to do when I get back to the Department is find out where that is. We'll get you that response as soon as we possibly can. But to give you my personal view, I think that acts tantamount to genocide have been committed. Whether the technical definition of genocide-I think this is what the letter that you're asking for needs to address.
Rep. McCloskey: Right.
Mr. Oxman: And I think you're entitled to an answer.
Rep. McCloskey: This word tantamount floats about. I haven't looked it up in a dictionary, though. I'm derelict on that. I don't know how-I guess I have a subjective view as to how to define it, but it's an intriguing word. But I'll look forward to your reply."'
Behind the scenes soon thereafter, Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research (INR) Toby Gati sent Secretary Christopher classified guidance on the genocide question. Although Gati's memo left Christopher some wiggle room, its overall message was clear: Undoubtedly, the analysis stated, the Serbs had carried out many of the acts listed in the convention-killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction, imposing measures to prevent births-against Bosnia's Muslims because they were Muslims. What proved challenging, as always, was determining whether the Serbs possessed the requisite intent to "destroy, in whole or in part," the Muslim group. The memo noted that proving such intent without intercepting written policies or orders was difficult, but it suggested that intention could be "inferred from the circumstances." It noted several of the circumstances present in Bosnia:
• the expressed intent of individual Serb perpetrators to eradicate the Muslims
• the publicly stated Serb political objective of creating an ethnically homogeneous state
• the wholesale purging of Muslims from Serb-held territory, with the aim of ensuring ethnic homogeneity
• the systematic fashion in which Muslims, Muslim men, or Muslim leaders are singled out for killing
The "overall factual situation," the memo said, provided "a strong basis to conclude that killings and other listed acts have been undertaken with the intent of destroying the Muslim group as such." The secretary was informed that one of the understandings the U.S. Senate attached to its ratification of the genocide convention required an intent to destroy a "substantial" part of a group. The Senate had defined "substantial" to mean a sufficient number to "cause the destruction of the group as a viable entity." In Bosnia, the memo concluded, the "numbers of Muslims subjected to killings and other listed acts ... can readily be considered substantial." 142
Responding to the widespread perception that a finding of genocide would carry severe consequences for U.S. policymakers, the INR analysis observed that the convention's enforcement requirements were in fact weak. It relayed the legal adviser's judgment that a genocide finding would carry no "particular legal benefits (or, for that matter, legally adverse consequences)":
Some have argued that ... the United States is obligated to take further measures in order to "prevent" genocide in Bosnia, once and if it is determined to be genocide. In our view, however, this general undertaking ... cannot be read as imposing an obligation on outside states to take all measures whatsoever as may prove necessaryincluding the use of armed force-in order to "prevent" genocide."'
The United States was already meeting its obligations under the convention: "The United States and other parties are attempting to `prevent and punish' such actions," the memo said, adding sheepishly, "even though such measures may not be immediately wholly effective"
On October 13, 1993, a year and a half after the conflict began, Christopher finally approved the drafting of a letter by the assistant secretary for congressional relations acknowledging "acts of genocide" But Christopher pulled his approval several days later when Congressman McCloskey published an editorial in the New York Tirnes calling for his resignation."' Upon reading the editorial, Christopher reportedly picked up the memo authorizing a finding of genocide and wrote in large letters "O.B.E.," for "overtaken by events." In the culmination of a series of exchanges, the pair traded bitter words in a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing the following month. "'With the behindthe-scenes help of his new staffer, Marshall Harris, who had been uncorked to vent his frustration, McCloskey prepared a statement summing up the collapse of the administration's Balkan policy:
On February 10th, three weeks after president Clinton took office, Secretary Christopher stated that this administration had to address the circumstances as it found them in Bosnia. He further stated that the administration was resolved to do so. Just last month, however, he stated that the administration "inherited" the problem. Also on February 10th, Secretary Christopher stated that the United States [had] "direct strategic concerns in Bosnia." . . . When I heard those remarks, I was proud of my president, proud of this administration, proud and grateful to Mr. Christopher and proud of my country. Unfortunately, the administration began an about-face soon after that was ... abysmally shameful.
... It acquiesced to European objections to allowing the Bosnians to defend themselves, it signed on to ... a meaningless plan which called for safe areas that we all know-we all know-and two weeks ago I was in Sarajevo-we all know that Sarajevo and the other socalled safe enclaves to this day are still not safe. In fact, 50 years after Buchenwald and Auschwitz, there are giant concentration camps in the heart of Europe.
... On July 21st, Secretary Christopher said this administration was doing all it could in Bosnia consistent with our national interests. The very next day, consistent with that statement, the Serbs launched one of their largest attacks ever in the 17- month-old siege of Sarajevo. Last month, the Serbs resumed their shelling of Sarajevo and killed dozens more innocent civilians. Bosnian Serb terrorist leaders ... were quoted in the New York Times as saying that they renewed their bloody attacks because they knew after American fiascoes in Haiti and Somalia the Clinton administration would not respond. They were right. Our only response was another warning to Milosevic.
We've been warning these people, Mr. Secretary, for nearly two years, and I guess I appreciate your warnings, but I'd like to see some effect at some ;point. Unlike the shells raining down on innocent men, women and children in the Bosnian capital, these warnings ring absolutely hollow. Even now, we won't lift the sieges [of the safe areas], and I think this is very important.
... All these things happened or are happening on the Secretary's watch.The situation in Bosnia stopped being an inherited problem in January '93. Since then, several hundred thousand Bosnians have been driven out of the country or into internal exile, thousands of innocent civilians have been murdered, tens of thousands of ill-equipped Bosnian soldiers have been killed because we won't arm them, thousands more women have been raped as a systematic campaign by the Bosnian Serbs.
The administration continues to profess ... that it wants a negotiated solution to this war of aggression even if it means dismembering the sovereign U.N.-member state of Bosnia. It also says this is a tragic, complex situation with no easy answers. We all want a negotiated solution. We all know perfectly well that it's tragic and that nothing will come easily in addressing the crisis, but these are empty posturings in the administration's grievously inadequate foreign policy. Hundreds of thousands of lives hang in the balance as we say we support the enlargement of democracies and do little more.
Genocide is taking place in Bosnia, and I think it's very important-Mr. Christopher knows this, but Secretary Christopher won't say so. On at least two occasions of which I am aware, State Department lawyers and representatives of other relevant bureaus have recommended that he state this publicly, but we still do not have an answer. That request was first made publicly and in writing about 200 days ago.
Mr. Chairman, I won't go on. I appreciate the time. But when the history books are written, we cannot say that we allowed genocide because health care was a priority. We cannot say that we allowed genocide because the American people were more concerned with domestic issues. History will record, Mr. Secretary, that this happened on our watch, on your watch, that you and the administration could and should have done more. I plead to you, there are hundreds of thousands of people that still can die.... I plead for you and the administration to make a more aggressive-to take a more aggressive interest in this.
(Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 p.319-21)
In January 1994 an anonymous Hutu informant, said to be high up in the inner circles of the Rwandan government, came forward to describe the rapid arming and training of local militias. In what is now referred to as the "Dallaire fax," Dallaire relayed to New York the informant's claim that Hutu extremists "had been ordered to register all the Tutsi in Kigali." "He suspects it is for their extermination," Dallaire wrote. "Example he gave was that in 20 minutes his personnel could kill up to 1,000 Tutsis."
"Jean-Pierre," as the informant became known, said that the militia planned first to provoke and murder a number of Belgian peacekeepers, in order to "guarantee Belgian withdrawal from Rwanda" The informant was prepared to identify major arms caches littered throughout Rwanda, including one containing at least 135 weapons, but he wanted passports and protection for his wife and four children. Dallaire admitted the possibility of a trap but said he believed the informant was reliable. He and his UN forces were prepared to act within thirty-six hours. "Where there's a will, there's a way," I:)allaire signed the cable. "Let's go"" He was not asking for permission; he was simply informing headquarters of the arms raids that he had planned.
Annan's deputy, Igbal Riza, cabled back to Dallaire on behalf of his boss, rejecting the proposed arms raids. "We said,'Not Somalia again,"' Riza remembered later. "Now in Somalia, those troops-U.S., Pakistani-they were acting within their mandate when they were killed. Here, Dallaire was asking to take such risks going outside his mandate. And we said no.."" The Annan cable suggested that Dallaire focus instead on protecting his forces and avoiding escalation. The Canadian was to notify Rwandan President Habyarimana and the Western ambassadors in Kigali of the informant's claims. Dallaire contested the decision, battling by telephone with New York and sending five faxes on the subject. Even after I)allaire had confirmed the reliability of the informant, his political masters told him plainly and consistently that the United States in particular would not support such an aggressive interpretation of his mandate. "You've got to let me do this," Dallaire pleaded. "If we don't stop these weapons, some day those weapons will be used against us" In Washington Dallaire's alarm was discounted. Lieutenant Colonel Tony Marley, the U.S. military liaison to the Arusha process, respected Dallaire but knew he was operating in Africa for the first time. "I thought that the neophyte meant well, but I questioned whether he knew what he was talking about," Marley recalls.
Even a rise in political assassinations in the spring of 1994 could not attract mainstream attention to Rwanda. On February 21, 1994, rightwing extremists assassinated Felicien Gatabazi, the minister of public works. Martin Bucyana, president of the hard-line Hutu Coalition pour la Defense de la Republique (Coalition for the Defense of the Republic, or CDR), was killed in the southern Rwandan town of Butare the next day, giving outsiders the impression of tit-for-tat skirmishes rather than a trial balloon for something more ambitious. 5 Dallaire wanted to investigate these murders, but he could do little but watch as the feared Interahannve units became more conspicuous around town, singing, blowing whistles, wearing colorful uniforms, and toting weapons. Machetes hung from belts around their waists, as guns once hung in cowboys' holsters. Grenades were available at the market for next to nothing. On February 23 Dallaire reported that he was drowning in information about death squad target lists. "Time does seem to be running out for political discussions," he wrote, noting that "any spark on the security side could have catastrophic consequences."'
The Peace Processors
The United States was alarmed enough about the deterioration for the State Department's Bureau for African Affairs to send Deputy Assistant Secretary Bushnell and Central Africa Office Director Arlene Render to Rwanda in late March. The daughter of a diplomat, Bushnell had joined the foreign service in 1981, at the age of thirtyfive. With her agile mind and sharp tongue, she had earned the attention of George Moose when she served under him at the U.S. embassy in Senegal. When Moose was named the assistant secretary of state for African affairs in 1993, he made Bushnell his deputy. In meetings with President Habyarimana, the able Bushnell warned him that failure to implement Arusha might cause the United States to demand the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers, whose mandate was up for review on April 4. Bushnell ran through all of PDD-25's "factors for involvement." She described the congressional mood in the United States. Before leaving, Bushnell said, "President Habyarimana, your name will head this chapter of Rwandan history. It is up to you to decide whether it will be a chapter of glory or a chapter of tragedy."" Before she departed Rwanda, Bushnell received a handwritten note from the mercurial president in which he promised to comply with the Arusha agreement and set up the transitional government the following week. (Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 p.343-5)
The "G-Word"
The putrid smell in Kigali told Dallaire all he needed to know about the scale of the murders. Once he had made the mental leap from viewing the violence as war to viewing it as crimes against humanity, he had begun to employ the phrase "ethnic cleansing" to describe the ethnically motivated killing, a phrase he was familiar with from having presided over the dispatch of Canadian troops to the formerYugoslavia." He recalls his thought process:
I was self-conscious about saying the killings were "genocidal" because, to us in the West. "genocide" was the equivalent of the Holocaust or the killing fields of Cambodia. I mean millions of people. "Ethnic cleansing" seemed to involve hundreds of thousands of people. "Genocide" was the highest scale of crimes against humanity imaginable. It was so far up there, so far off the charts, that it was not easy to recognize that we could be in such a situation. I also knew that if I used the term too early, I'd have been accused of crying wolf and I'd have lost my credibility.
Two weeks into the killing, Dallaire telephoned Philippe Gaillard, who ran the International Committee for the Red Cross mission in Rwanda, and asked him for a book on international law. Dallaire leafed through the Geneva conventions and the genocide convention and looked up the relevant definitions." I realized that genocide was when an attempt was made to eliminate a specific group," Dallaire says, "and this is precisely what we saw in the field.... I just needed a slap in the face to say, `Holy shit! This is genocide, not just ethnic cleansing"'
Dallaire included the term for the first time in his situation report during the last week in April. Reuters quoted him on April 30 warning, "Unless the international community acts, it may find it is unable to defend itself against accusations of doing nothing to stop genocide"'' And he began using the term confidently in May. Even after he had adopted the label however, he left the semantic battles to others. "I didn't get bogged down in the debate over the genocide terminology," he remembers. "We had enough proof that it was genocide, and for those who didn't agree, we had crimes against humanity on a massive scale. What more did we need to know to know what we had to do?"
Even after the reality of genocide in Rwanda had become irrefutable, when bodies were shown choking the Kagera River on America's nightly news, the brute fact of the slaughter failed to influence U.S. policy except in a negative way. As they had done in Bosnia, American officials again shunned the g-word.They were afraid that using it would have obliged the United States to act under the terms of the 1948 genocide convention. They also believed, rightly, that it would harm U.S. credibility to name the crime and then do nothing to stop it. A discussion paper on Rwanda, prepared by an official in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and dated May 1, testifies to the nature of official thinking. Regarding issues that might be brought up at the next interagency working group, it stated, "1. Genocide Investigation: Language that calls for an international investigation of human rights abuses and possible violations of the genocide convention. Be Careful. Legal at State was worried about this yesterday-Genocide finding could commit [the US. government] to actually `do something."'
At an interagency teleconference in late April, Susan Rice, a rising star on the NSC who worked under Richard Clarke, stunned a few of the officials present when she asked,"If we use the word `genocide' and are seen as doing nothing, what will be the effect on the November [congressional] election?" Lieutenant Colonel Marley remembers the incredulity of his colleagues at the State Department. "We could believe that people would wonder that," he says, "but not that they would actually voice it." Rice does not recall the incident but concedes,"If I said it, it was completely inappropriate, as well as irrelevant."
The Clinton administration opposed use of the term. On April 28 Christine Shelly, the State Department spokesperson, began what would be a two-month dance to avoid the g-word, a dance that brought to mind Secretary Christopher's concurrent semantic evasion over Bosnia. U.S. officials were afraid that the use of the stinging term would cause demands for intervention that the administration did not intend to meet. When a reporter asked her for comment on whether Rwanda was genocide, she sounded an awful lot like her boss:
Well, as I think you know, the use of the term "genocide" has a very precise legal meaning.... Before we begin to use (the] term, we have to know as much as possible about the facts of the situation, particularly about the intentions of those who are committing the crimes.... I'm not an expert on this area, but generally speaking there-my understanding is that there are three types of elements that we look at in order to make that kind of a determination.
Shelly suggested that the United States had to examine "the types of actions" and the "kind of brutality" under way. It had to look at who was committing the acts and against whom (i.e., "whether these are particular groups, social groups, ethnic groups, religious groups"). And it needed to assess "extremely carefully" the intent of the perpetrators and whether they were trying to eliminate a group in whole or in part. "This one," Shelly said,"is one which we have to undertake a very careful study before we can make a final kind of determination."
It was clear that copies of the genocide convention had been circulating within the department, as Shelly possessed an impressive familiarity with its contents. In applying the convention's terms, Shelly said, "Now, certainly, in those elements there are actions which have occurred which would tit" She agreed that killings were being directed toward particular ethnic groups.The problem lay in gauging intent. Here she gave a largely indecipherable account and refused to commit herself or the U.S. government:
The intention;, the precise intentions, and whether or not these are just directed episodically or with the intention of actually eliminating groups in whole or in part, this is a more complicated issue to address. ... I'm not ab.e to look at all of those criteria at this moment and say yes, no. It's soniething that requires very careful study before we can make a final determination.
When asked whether a finding of genocide would oblige the United States to stop it, Shelly again referred back to the terms of the genocide convention, saying that the law did not contain an "absolute requirement ... to intervene directly." Pressed again to reveal whether the United States viewed events as genocide, Shelly stalled:
Well, I think it's-again, I was trying to get the point across that this is-in order to actually attach the genocide label to actions which are going on, that this is a process that involves looking at several categories of actions. And as I've said, certain of the actions very clearly fall into some of the categories that I've mentioned. But whether you can wrap this all up in a way that then brings you to that conclusion, I'm simply not in a position to make that judgment now."
The UN Security Council was becoming bitterly divided over whether to use the word. Czech Ambassador Karel Kovanda had begun complaining that 80 percent of the council's time was focused on whether and how to withdraw Dallaire's peacekeepers, the other 20 percent on getting a ceasefire to end the civil war, which he compared to "wanting Hitler to reach a cease-fire with the Jews "55 None of their energy was concentrated on the genocide. When the president of the Security Council drew up a statement that named the crime "genocide," the United States objected. The original draft read: "The Security Council reaffirms that the systematic killing of any ethnic group, with intent to destroy it in whole or in part constitutes an act of genocide.... The council further points out that an important body of international law exists that deals with perpetrators of genocide."
But the United States was having none of it. In a cable sent from New York to the State Department, a political adviser wrote:
The events in Rwanda clearly seem to meet the definition of genocide in Article II of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. However, if the council acknowledges that, it may be forced to "take such action under the charter as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide" as provided for in Article VIII."
On American (and British) insistence, the word "genocide" was excluded from the Security Council statement. In a gesture that testified to both Lemkin's success in imbuing the term with moral judgment and his failure to change the policymakers' political calculus, the final statement read:
The Security Council condemns all these breaches of international humanitarian law in Rwanda, particularly those perpetrated against the civilian population, and recalls that persons who instigate or participate in such acts are individually responsible. In this context, the Security Council recalls that the killing of members of an ethnic group with the intention of destroying such a group in whole or in part constitutes a crime punishable under international law.54
The testy genocide debate started up in U.S. government circles the last week of April, but it was not until May 21, six weeks after the killing in Rwanda began, that Secretary Christopher gave his diplomats permission to use the term "genocide"-sort of. The UN Human Rights Commission was about to meet in special session, and the U.S. representative, Geraldine Ferraro, needed guidance on whether to join a resolution stating that genocide had occurred. The stubborn U.S. stand had become untenable internationally.
The case for a label of genocide was the most straightforward since the Holocaust. The State Department's assistant secretary for intelligence and research, Toby Gati, who had analyzed whether Bosnian Serb atrocities were genocide, again undertook the analysis, which she summarized in a May 18 confidential memo: Lists ofTutsi victims' names and addresses had reportedly been prepared; Rwandan government troops and Hutu militia and youth squads were the main perpetrators; massacres were reported all over the country; humanitarian agencies were now "claiming from 200,000 to 500,000 lives" lost. Gati offered the Intelligence Bureau's view: "We believe 500,000 may be an exaggerated estimate, but no accurate figures are available. Systematic killings began within hours of Habyarimana's death. Most of those killed have been Tutsi civilians, including women and children."" The terms of the genocide convention had been met. "We can never know precise figures," Gati says,"but our analysts had been reporting huge numbers of deaths for weeks. We were basically saying, `A rose by any other name... "' The word-processing file containing the intelligence memo was titled "NONAMERWANDAKILLLGS " 60
Despite this matter-of-fact assessment, Christopher remained reluctant to speak the obvious truth.When he issued his guidance, on May 24, fully a month after Human Rights Watch had identified the killings as "genocide," Christopher's instructions were hopelessly muddied:
The delegation .s authorized to agree to a resolution that states that "acts of genocide" have occurred in Rwanda or that "genocide has occurred in Rwanda" Other formulations that suggest that some, but not all of the killings in Rwanda are genocide ... e.g. "genocide is taking place in Rwanda"-are authorized. Delegation is not authorized to agree to the characterization of any specific incident as genocide or to agree to any formulation that indicates that all killings in Rwanda are genocide.
Notably, Christopher confined permission to acknowledge fullfledged genocide to the upcoming session of the Human Rights Commission. Outside that venue State Department officials were authorized to state publicly only that "acts of genocide" had occurred.
State Department spokesperson Shelly returned to the podium on June 10, 1994. Challenged by Reuters correspondent Alan Elsner, she attempted to follow the secretary's guidance:
Elsner: How would you describe the events taking place in Rwanda? Shelly: Based on the evidence we have seen from observations on the ground, we have every reason to believe that acts of genocide have occurred in Rwanda.
Elsner: What's the difference between "acts of genocide" and "genocide"?
Shelly: Well, I think the-as you know, there's a legal definition of this.... Clearly not all of the killings that have taken place in Rwanda are killings to which you might apply that label.... But as to the distinctions between the words, we're trying to call what we have seen so far as best as we can; and based, again, on the evidence, we have every reason to believe that acts of genocide have occurred.
Elsner: How many acts of genocide does it take to make genocide?
Shelly: Alan, that's just not a question that I'm in a position to answer.62
The same day, in Istanbul, Warren Christopher, by then under severe internal and external pressure to come clean, relented: "If there is any particular magic in calling it genocide, I have no hesitancy in saying that"
Response
"Not Even a Sideshow"
Once the Americans had been evacuated from Rwanda, the massacres there largely dropped off the radar of most senior Clinton administration officials. In the situation room on the seventh floor of the State Department, a map of Rwanda had been hurriedly pinned to the wall when Habyarimana's plane was shot down, and eight banks of phones had rung off the hook. Now, with U.S. citizens safely home, the State Department chaired a daily interagency meeting, often by teleconference, designed to coordinate midlevel diplomatic and humanitarian responses. Cabinetlevel officials focused on crises elsewhere. National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, who happened to know Africa, recalls, "I was obsessed with Haiti and Bosnia during that period, so Rwanda was, in journalist William Shawcross's words, a `sideshow,' but not even a sideshow-a no-show." At the NSC the person who managed Rwanda policy was not Lake but Richard Clarke, who oversaw peacekeeping policy and for whom the news from Rwanda only confirmed a deep skepticism about the viability of UN deployments. Clarke believed that another UN failure could doom relations between Congress and the United Nations. He also sought to shield the president from congressional and public criticism. Donald Steinberg managed the Africa portfolio at the NSC and tried to look out for the dying Rwandans, but he was not an experienced infighter, and, colleagues say, he "never won a single argument" with Clarke.
The American' who wanted the United States to do the most were those who knew Rwanda best. Joyce Leader, Rawson's deputy in Rwanda, had been the one to lock the doors to the U.S. embassy for the final time. When she returned to Washington, she was given a small room in a back office and told to prepare the State Department's daily Rwanda summaries, drawing on press and U.S. intelligence reports. Incredibly, despite her expertise and her contacts in Rwanda, she was rarely consulted and was instructed not to deal directly with her sources in Kigali. Once an NSC staffer did call to ask, "Short of sending in the troops, what is to be done?" Leader's response, unwelcome, was "Send in the troops."
Throughout the U.S. government, Africa specialists had the least clout of all regional specialists and the smallest chance of affecting policy outcomes. In contrast, those with the most pull in the bureaucracy had never visited Rwanda or met any Rwandans.
The dearth of country or regional expertise in the senior circles of government not only reduces the capacity of officers to assess the "news" but also increases the likelihood-a dynamic identified by Lake in his 1971 Foreign Policy article-that killings will become abstractions. "Ethnic bloodshed" in Africa was thought to be regrettable but not particularly unusual. U.S. officials spoke analytically of "national interests" or even "humanitarian consequences" without appearing gripped by the human stakes.
As it happened, when the crisis began President Clinton himself had a coincidental and personal connection with the country. At a coffee at the White House in December 1993 Clinton had met Monique Mujawamariya, the Rwandan human rights activist. He had been struck by the courage of a woman who still bore facial scars from an automobile accident that had been arranged to curb her dissent. Clinton had singled her out, saying, "Your courage is an inspiration to all of us.."" On April 8, two days after the onset of the killing, the Washington Post published a letter that Alison Des Forges had sent to Human Rights Watch after Mujawamariya had hung up the phone to face her fate. "I believe Monique was killed at 6:30 this morning," Des Forges had written. "I have virtually no hope that she is still alive, but will continue to try for more information. In the meantime... please inform everyone who will care."" Word of Mujawamariya's disappearance got the president's attention, and he inquired about her whereabouts repeatedly. "I can't tell you how much time we spent trying to find Monique," one U.S. official remembers. "Sometimes it felt as though she was the only Rwandan in danger." Miraculously, Mujawamariya had not been killed; she had hidden in the rafters of her home after hanging up with Des Forges and eventually managed to talk and bribe her way to safety. She was evacuated to Belgium, and on April 18 she joined Des Forges in the United States, where the pair began lobbying the Clinton administration on behalf of those left behind.With Mujawamariya's rescue, reported in detail in the Post and the New York Tinies, the president apparently lost his personal interest in events in Rwanda.
It is shocking to note that during the entire three months of the genocide, Clinton never assembled his top policy advisers to discuss the killings. Anthony Lake likewise never gathered the "principals"-the cabinet-level members of the foreign policy team. Rwanda was never thought to warrant its own top-level meeting. When the subject came up, it did so along with, and subordinate to, discussions of Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia. Whereas these crises involved U.S. personnel and stirred some public interest, Rwanda generated no sense of urgency and could safely be avoided by Clinton at no political cost.
The UN Withdrawal
When the killing had begun, Romeo Dallaire expected and appealed for reinforcements. W ithin hours, he had cabled UN headquarters in New York: "Give me the means and I can do more" He was sending peacekeepers on rescue missions around the city, and he felt it was essential to increase the size and improve the quality of the UN's presence. But the United States opposed the idea of sending reinforcements, no matter where they were from. The fear, articulated mainly at the Pentagon, was that what would start as a small engagement by foreign troops would end as a large and costly one by Americans. This was the lesson of Somalia, where U.S. troops had gotten into trouble after returning to bail out the beleaguered Pakistanis. The logical outgrowth of this fear was an effort to steer clear of Rwanda entirely and he sure others did the same. Only by yanking Dallaire's entire peacekeeping force could the United States protect itself from involvement down the road. One senior U.S. official remembers,
When the reports of the deaths of the ten Belgians came in, it was clear that it was Somalia redux, and the sense was that there would be an expectation everywhere that the U.S. would get involved. We thought leaving the peacekeepers in Rwanda and having them confront the violence would take us where we'd been before. It was a foregone conclusion that the United States wouldn't intervene and that the concept of UN peacekeeping could not be sacrificed again.
"A foregone conclusion." What is most remarkable about the American response to the Rwandan genocide is not so much the absence of U.S. military action as that during the entire genocide the possibility of U.S. military intervention was never even debated. Indeed, the United States resisted even diplomatic intervention.
The bodies of the slain Belgian soldiers were returned to Brussels on April 14. One of the pivotal conversations in the course of the genocide took place around that time, when Willie Claes, the Belgian foreign minister, called the State Department to request "cover" "We are pulling out, but we don't want to be seen to be doing it alone," Claes said, asking the Americans to support a full UN withdrawal. Dallaire had not anticipated that Belgium would extract its soldiers, removing the backbone of his mission and stranding Rwandans in their hour of greatest need. "I expected the excolonial white countries would stick it out even if they took casualties," he remembers. "I thought their pride would have led them to stay to try to sort the place out. The Belgian decision caught me totally off guard. I was truly stunned."
Belgium did not want to leave ignominiously, by itself. Warren Christopher agreed to back Belgian requests for a full UN exit. Policy over the next month or so can be described simply: no U.S. military intervention, robust demands for a withdrawal of all of Dallaire's forces, and no support for a new UN mission that would challenge the killers. Belgium had the cover it needed.
On April 15 Secretary Christopher sent Ambassador Albright at the UN one of the most forceful documents produced in the entire three months of the genocide. Christopher's cable instructed Albright to demand a full UN withdrawal.The directions, which were heavily influenced by Richard Clarke at the NSC and which bypassed Steinberg, were unequivocal about the next steps. Saying that the United States had "fully" taken into account the "humanitarian reasons put forth for retention of UNAMIR elements in Rwanda," Christopher wrote that there was "insufficient justification" to retain a UN presence:
The international community must give highest priority to full, orderly withdrawal of all UNAMIR personnel as soon as possible.... We will oppose any effort at this time to preserve a UNAMIR presence in Rwanda.... Our opposition to retaining a UNAMIR presence in Rwanda is firm. It is based on our conviction that the Security Council has an obligation to ensure that peacekeeping operations are viable, that they are capable of fulfilling their mandates, and that UN peacekeeping personnel are not placed or retained, knowingly, in an untenable situation.
"Once we knew the Belgians were leaving, we were left with a rump mission incapable of doing anything to help people," Clarke remembers. "They were doing nothing to stop the killings."
But Clarke underestimated the deterrent effect that Dallaire's very few peacekeepers were having. Although many soldiers hunkered down, terrified, others scoured Kigali, rescuing Tutsi, and later established defensive positions in the city, opening their doors to the fortunate Tutsi who made it through roadblocks to reach them. One Senegalese captain, Mbaye Daigne, saved 100 or so lives singlehandedly. Some 25,000 Rwandans eventually assembled at positions manned by UNAMIR personnel. The Hutu were generally reluctant to massacre large groups ofTutsi if foreigners (armed or unarmed) were present. It did not take many UN soldiers to dissuade the Hutu from attacking. At the Hotel des Mille Collines, ten peacekeepers and four UN military observers helped to protect the several hundred civilians sheltered there for the duration of the crisis. About 10,00() Rwandans gathered at the Amohoro Stadium under light UN cover. Beardsley, Dallaire's executive assistant, remembers, "If there was any determined resistance at close quarters, the government guys tended to back off." Kevin Aiston, the Rwanda desk officer at the State Department, was keeping track of Rwandan civilians under UN protection. When Deputy Assistant Secretary Bushnell told him of the U.S. decision to demand a UNAMIR withdrawal, he turned pale. "We can't," he said. Bushnell replied,"The train has already left the station."
On April 19 the Belgian colonel Luc Marchal delivered his final salute to Dallaire and departed with the last of his soldiers. The Belgian withdrawal reduced UNAMIR's troop strength to 2,100. What was more crucial, Dallaire lost his best troops. Command and control among Dallaire's remaining forces became tenuous. Dallaire soon lost every line of communication to the countryside. He had only a single satellite phone link to the outside world.
The UN Security Council now made a decision that sealed the Tutsi's fate and signaled to the Hutu militia that they would have free rein. The U.S. demand for a full UN withdrawal had been opposed by some African nations as well as Albright, so the United States lobbied instead for a dramatic drawdown in troop strength. On April 21, amid press reports of some 100,000 dead in Rwanda, the Security Council voted to slash UNAMIR's force size to 270.`'' Albright went along, publicly declaring that a "small, skeletal" operation would be left in Kigali to "show the will of the international community."
After the UN vote, Clarke sent a memorandum to Lake reporting that language about "the safety and security of Rwandans under UN protection had been inserted by US/UN at the end of the day to prevent an otherwise unanimous UNSC from walking away from the at-risk Rwandans under UN protection as the peacekeepers drew down to 270." In other words, the memorandum suggested that the United States was leading efforts to ensure that the Rwandans under UN protection were not abandoned. The opposite was true.
Most of Dallaire's troops were evacuated by April 25. Although he was supposed to keep only 270 peacekeepers, 503 remained. By this time Dallaire was trying to deal with a bloody frenzy. "My force was standing knee-deep in mutilated bodies, surrounded by the guttural moans of dying people, looking into the eyes of children bleeding to death with their wounds burning in the sun and being invaded by maggots and flies," he later wrote. "I found myself walking through villages where the only sign of life was a goat, or a chicken, or a songbird, as all the people were dead, their bodies being eaten by voracious packs of wild dogs" 69
Dallaire had to work within narrow limits. He attempted simply to keep the positions he held and to protect the 25,000 Rwandans under UN supervision while hoping that the member states on the Security Council would change their minds and send him some help while it still mattered.
By coincidence Rwanda held one of the rotating seats on the Security Council at the time of the genocide. Neither the United States nor any other UN member state ever suggested that the representative of the genocidal government be expelled from the council. Nor did any Security Council country offer to provide safe haven to Rwandan refugees who escaped the carnage. In one instance Dallaire's forces succeeded in evacuating a group of Rwandans by plane to Kenya. The Nairobi authorities allowed the plane to land, sequestered it in a hangar, and echoing the American decision to turn back the USS St. Loris during the Holocaust, then forced the plane to return to Rwanda. The fate of the passengers is unknown.
Throughout this period the Clinton administration was largely silent. The closest it came to a public denunciation of the Rwandan government occurred after personal lobbying by Human Rights Watch, when Anthony Lake issued a statement calling on Rwandan military leaders by name to "do everything in their power to end the violence immediately." When he is informed six years after the genocide that human rights groups and U.S. officials point to this statement as the sum total of official public attempts to shame the Rwandan government, he seems stunned. "You're kidding," he says. "That's truly pathetic."
At the State Department the diplomacy was conducted privately, by telephone. Prudence Bushnell regularly set her alarm for 2:00 a.m. and phoned Rwandan government officials. She spoke several times with Augustin Bizimunpu, the Rwandan military chief of staff. "These were the most bizarre phone calls," she says. "He spoke in perfectly charming French.'Oh, it's so nice to hear from you,' he said. I told him,'I am calling to tell you President Clinton is going to hold you accountable for the killings' He said,'Oh, how nice it is that your president is thinking of me"' When she called Tutsi rebel commander Paul Kagame, he would say, "Madame, they're killing my people." (Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 p.358-69)
Society-Wide Silence
The Clinton administration did not actively consider U.S. military intervention, it blocked the deployment of UN peacekeepers, and it refrained from undertaking softer forms of intervention. The inaction can be attributed to decisions and nondecisions made at the National Security Council, at the State Department, in the Pentagon, and even at the U.S. mission to the UN. But as was true with previous genocides, these U.S. officials were making potent political calculations about what the U.S. public would abide. Officials simultaneously believed the American people would oppose U.S. military intervention in central Africa and feared that the public might support intervention if they realized a genocide was under way. As always, they looked to oped pages of elite journals, popular protest, and congressional noise to gauge public interest. No group or groups in the United States made Clinton administration decisionmakers feel or fear that they would pay a political price for doing nothing to save Rwandans. Indeed, all the signals told them to steer clear. Only after the genocide would it become possible to identify an American "constituency" for action.
At the height of the war in Bosnia, the op-ed pages of America's newspapers had roared with indignation; during the three-month genocide in Rwanda, they were silent, ignorant, and prone fatalistically to accept the futility of outside intervention. An April 17 Washington Post editorial asked "what if anything might be done" about the killings. "Unfortunately, the immediate answer to the last question," the editors wrote, "appears to be: not much":
The United States has no recognizable national interest in taking a role, certainly riot a leading role. In theory, international fireengine service is available to all houses in the global village. Imagine a fire department that would respond only to the lesser blazes. But in a world of limited political and economic resources, not all of the many fires will be equally tended. Rwanda is in an unpreferred class.'
An April 23 New York Times editorial acknowledged that genocide was under way but said that the Security Council had "thrown in the bloodied towel":
What looks very much like genocide has been taking place in Rwanda. People are pulled from cars and buses, ordered to show their identity papers and then killed on the spot if they belong to the wrong ethnic group.... It is legally if not morally easy to justify pulling out since the unevenly trained U.N. force was meant to police a peace, not take sides in a civil war. Somalia provides ample warning against plunging open-endedly into a "humanitarian" mission.... The horrors of Kigali show the need for considering whether a mobile, quickresponse UN force under UN aegis is needed to deal with such calamities. Absent such a force, the world has little choice but to stand aside and hope for the best.
A May 4 Nicthtlbne program began with anchorman Ted Koppel's asking: "Rwanda: Is the world just too tired to help?"The segment included a comment from President Clinton, who had been asked about Rwanda that day. Clinton invoked Somalia: "Lesson number one is, don't go into one of these things and say, as the U.S. said when we started in Somalia, `Maybe we'll be done in a month because it's a humanitarian crisis.' ... Because there are almost always political problems and sometimes military conflicts, which bring about these crises."
American newspapers included graphic descriptions of the atrocities, but although the coverage was steady, it was not heavy. In South Africa in early May 1994, some 2,500 reporters congregated for the historic elections that officially dismantled apartheid and brought Nelson Mandela to power. In Rwanda at the height of coverage of the killings, between April and June, the number of reporters present never exceeded fifteen." Editors make judgments about where, when, and why to deploy their "troops" in much the same way commanders-in-chief make theirs. And since U.S. or European military intervention in Rwanda was seen as highly unlikely, none of the major Western media outlets made coverage of the crisis a priority. Of course, as in Cambodia, because press coverage was light, public and elite pressure for military intervention remained faint.
Capitol Hill was likewise quiet. Some in Congress were glad to be free of the expense of another flawed UN mission. Senator Dole had introduced the Peace Powers Act in Congress in January and made his opposition to U.S. involvement widely known. Other members of Congress were not hearing from their constituents. On April 30 Representative Patricia Schroeder (D.-Colo.) described the relative silence in her district. "There are some groups terribly concerned about the gorillas," she said, noting that Colorado was home to a research organization that studied Rwanda's imperiled gorilla population. "But-it sounds terrible-people just don't know what can be done about the people."
Around the time of President Habyarimana's plane crash in Rwanda, Randall Robinson of TransAfrica started a hunger strike to protest the Clinton administration's automatic repatriation of Haitians fleeing the coup that had ousted jeanBertrand Aristide. Robinson was quoted in the Washington Post on April 12, 1994, a week after the Rwandan massacres had begun, talking about America's Haitian refugee policy: "I can't remember ever being more disturbed by any public policy than I am by this one. I can't remember any American foreign policy as hurtful, as discriminatory, as racist as this one. It is so mean, it simply can't be tolerated.."" Some 10,000 Rwandans had been killed that week in Kigali alone. On April 21 six members of the U.S. Congress were arrested in front of the White House for protesting the administration's decision to turn back the Haitian refugees."" Robinson was briefly hospitalized for dehydration on May 4; Clinton officially changed his policy on repatriation on May 9. (Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 p.373-6)
"Interventions"
In June, France, perhaps the least appropriate country to intervene because of its warm relationship with the genocidal Hutu regime, announced its plan to send 2,500 soldiers to set up a "safe zone" in the southwest of the country." Operation Turquoise was intended to serve as a "bridge action" until UNAMIR II arrived." French troops were deployed extremely quickly, entering Rwanda on June 23 and illustrating the pace at which a determined state could move. Although they undoubtedly saved lives, mop-up killings proceeded in the French protected zone. When the Hutu moved their Radio Mille Collines transmitter into the area, French forces seized neither the hatepropagating equipment nor the individuals responsible for orchestrating the genocide. Yet President Mitterrand was quick to claim credit, alleging the operation had saved "tens of thousands of lives." France bore no responsibility for events, he said, because the massacres happened after France left Rwanda and because France could not intervene during the genocide, as this was the job of the United Nations."'
It wasTutsi (RPF) rebels under the command of Paul Kagame who eventually brought the genocide to a halt. In so doing, they sent Hutu perpetrators, among an estimated 1.7 million Hutu refugees, fleeing into neighboring Zaire and Tanzania. On July 19, the day the RPF government of national unity was sworn in and nearly two months after the Security Council's rein forcements resolution, Dallaire commanded the same 503 soldiers as he had since late April. Not a single additional UN soldier had been deployed.
Only after the RPF had seized virtually all of Rwanda (except the French zone) did President Clinton finally order the Rwandan embassy in Washington closed and its assets frozen. Clinton said the United States could not "allow representatives of a regime that supports genocidal massacres to remain on our soil."" On August 25, 1994, the Security Council ruled that Rwanda would not take its turn as president of the counci1.`2
Clinton did in fact send U.S. forces to the Great Lakes region. Rwandan refugees, mainly Hutu fleeing the RPF advance, were ravaged by hunger, thirst, and cholera in neighboring Zaire. They had begun dying at a rate of 2,000 per day. President Clinton requested $320 million in emergency relief funds from Congress and announced the deployment of 4,000 U.S. troops to aid refugees in the camps in Zaire. The New York Times editorial on July 23, 1994, was titled: "At Last, Rwanda's Pain Registers" 3 On July 29 President Clinton ordered 200 U.S. troops to occupy the Kigali airport so that relief could be flown directly into Rwanda. Ahead of their arrival, Dallaire says he got a phone call. A U.S. officer was wondering precisely how many Rwandans had died. Dallaire was puzzled and asked why he wanted to know. "We are doing our calculations back here," the U.S. officer said, "and one American casualty is worth about 85,000 Rwandan dead."
These troops, Clinton administration officials insisted, would aid in the provision of humanitarian relief, they would not keep peace. Somalia was not the model. Indeed, peacekeeping had become a four-letter word. "Let me be clear about this," the president said on July 29, 1994. "Any deployment of United States troops inside Rwanda would be for the immediate and sole purpose of humanitarian relief, not for peacekeeping" He assured Americans, "Mission creep is not a problem here " 95
The U.S. Senate authorized only $170 million of the $320 million Clinton requested and wrote into the legislation that all forces be withdrawn by October 1 unless Congress specifically approved a longer stay. Although cost had been one of several factors behind U.S. opposition to sending UN reinforcements to Rwanda ahead of and during the genocide, its peacekeeping contribution would probably have hovered around $30 million; it ended up spending $237 million on humanitarian relief alone." In late August U.S. ambassador David Rawson held a press conference back in Kigali. Even after the deaths of 800,000 people, he remained committed to the Arusha peace process:
Since they all speak the same language, have basically the same culture and the same history, the reality of it is if they all want to live in Rwanda, then they have to at some point sit around a table and figure out the formulas that will make this happen. We believe that the Arusha formulas, negotiated over a very intense year of negotiations in Arusha, provide that kind of power- sharing formula that would make that happen. And the closer that, even with all the horror that has happened, the current arrangements can hew to the Arusha for- nmlas, we believe, the more chance there is for success.
In one of his parting cables, Dallaire summed up his experience in UNAMIR:
What we have been living here is a disgrace.The international community and the UN member states have on the one hand been appalled at what has happened in Rwanda while, on the other hand, these same authorities, apart from a few exceptions, have done nothing substantive to help the Situation .... The [UN] force has been prevented from having a modicum of selfrespect and effectiveness on the ground.... I acknowledge that this mission is a logistical nightmare for your [head- yuartersi, but that is nothing compared to the living hell that has surrounded us. coupled with the obligation of standing in front of both parties and being the bearer of so little help and credibility... Although Rwanda and UNAMIR have been at the centre of a terrible human tragedy, that is not to say Holocaust, and although many fine words had been pronounced by all, including members of the Security Council, the tangible effort ... has been totally, completely ineffective.
The Stories We Tell
It is not hard to conceive of how the United States might have done things differently. Ahead of the April killing, as violence escalated, it could have agreed to Belgian pleas for UN reinforcements. Once the killing of thousands of Rwandans a day had begun, the president could have deployed U.S. troops to Rwanda. The United States could have joined Dallaire's beleaguered UNAMIR forces, or, if it feared associating with shoddy UN peacekeeping, it could have intervened unilaterally with the Security Council's backing, as France did in June. The United States could also have acted without the UN's blessing, as it would do five years later in Kosovo. Securing congressional support for U.S. intervention would have been extremely difficult, but by the second week of the killing, Clinton, one of the most eloquent presidents of the twentieth century, could have made the case that something approximating genocide was under way, that an inviolable American value was imperiled by its occurrence, and that U.S. contingents at relatively low risk could stop the extermination of a people.
Even if the White House could not have overcome congressional opposition to sending U.S. troops to Africa, the United States still had a variety of options. Instead of leaving it to midlevel officials to conmiunicate with the Rwandan leadership behind the scenes, senior officials in the administration could have taken control of the process. They could have publicly and frequently denounced the slaughter. They could have branded the crimes "genocide" at a far earlier stage. They could have called for the expulsion of the Rwandan delegation from the Security Council. On the telephone, at the UN, and over the Voice of America, they could have threatened to prosecute those complicit in the genocide, naming names when possible. They could have deployed Pentagon assets to jam-even temporarily-the crucial, deadly radio broadcasts.
Instead of demanding a UN withdrawal, quibbling over costs, and coming forward (belatedly) with a plan better suited to caring for refugees than to stopping massacres, U.S. officials could have worked to make UNAMIR a force to contend with. They could have urged their Belgian allies to stay and protect Rwandan civilians. If the Belgians insisted on withdrawing, the United States could have done everything within its power to make sure that Dallaire was immediately reinforced. Senior officials could have spent U.S. political capital rallying troops from other nations and could have supplied strategic airlift and logistic support to a coalition that it had helped to create. In short, the United States could have led the world.
It is striking that most officials involved in shaping U.S. policy were able to define the decision not to stop genocide as ethical and moral. The administration employed several devices to dampen enthusiasm for action and to preserve the public's sense-and more important, its ownthat U.S. policy choices were not merely politically astute but also morally acceptable. First, administration officials exaggerated the extremity of the possible responses. Time and again U.S. leaders posed the choice as between staying out of Rwanda and "getting involved everywhere" In addition, they often presented the choice as one between doing nothing and sending in hundreds of thousands of marines.
Second, administration policymakers appealed to notions of the greater good. They did not simply frame U.S. policy as one contrived in order to advance the national interest or avoid U.S. casualties. Rather, they often argued against intervention from the standpoint of people committed to protecting human life. Owing to recent failures in UN peacekeeping, many humanitarian interventionists in the U.S. government were concerned about the future of America's relationship with the United Nations generally and peacekeeping specifically. They believed that the UN and humanitarianism could not afford another Somalia. Many internalized the belief that the UN had more to lose by sending reinforcements and failing than by allowing the killings to proceed.Their chief priority, after the evacuation of the Americans, was looking after UN peacekeepers, and they justified the withdrawal of the peacekeepers on the grounds that it would ensure a future for humanitarian intervention. In other words, Dallaire's peacekeeping mission in Rwanda had to be destroyed so that peacekeeping might be saved for use elsewhere.
A third feature of the response that helped to console U.S. officials at the time was the sheer flurry of Rwandarelated activity. U.S. officials with a special concern for Rwanda took their solace from minivictories, working on behalf of specific individuals such as Monique Mujawamariya or groups like the Rwandans gathered at the hotel and the stadium. "We were like the child in the ghetto who focuses all of her energy on protecting her doll," says one senior official. "As the world collapses around her, she can't bear it, but she takes solace in the doll, the only thing she can control." Government officials involved in policy met constantly and remained, in bureaucratic lingo, "seized of the matter"; they neither appeared nor felt indifferent. Although little in the way of effective intervention emerged from midlevel meetings in Washington or New York, an abundance of memoranda and other documents did.
Finally, the almost willful delusion that what was happening in Rwanda did not amount to genocide created a nurturing ethical framework for inaction. "War" was "tragic" but created no moral imperative.
One U.S. official kept a journal during the crisis. In late May, exasperated by the obstructionism pervading the bureaucracy, the official dashed off this lament:
A military that wants to go nowhere to do anything-or let go of their toys so someone else can do it. A White House cowed by the brass (and we are to give lessons on how the armed forces take orders from civilians?). An NSC that does peacekeeping by the book-the accounting book, that is. And an assistance program that prefers whites (Europe) to blacks. When it comes to human rights we have no problem drawing the line in the sand of the dark continent (just don't ask us to do anything-agonizing is our specialty), but not China or any place else business looks good.(Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 p.380-84)
We have a foreign policy based on our amoral economic interests run by amateurs who want to stand for something-hence the agony-but ultimately don't want to exercise any leadership that has a cost.
They say there may be as many as a million massacred in Rwanda. The militias continue to slay the innocent and the educated.... Has it really cost the United States nothing?
"The truth is that neither Clinton no Blair gives a damn about the Kosovar Albanians," said British leftist playwright Harold Pinter. "This action has been yet another blatant and brutal assertion of U.S. power using NATO as its missile. It set out to consolidate one thing -- American domination of Europe." (Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 p.462-3)
Bombing shames Britain, Pinter tells protesters 06/06/1999
The first postwar wave of enthusiasm for international war crimes trials came in 1990 after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Margaret Thatcher first mooted the idea of prosecuting the Iraqi dictator for war crimes because he seized Western hostages. The British prime minister ......
Saddam Hussein plundered a peaceful neighbor, held innocents hostage, and gassed his own people. And all . . . of those crimes are punishable under the principles adopted by the allies in 1945 and unanimously affirmed by ...(Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 p.480-1)
Conclusion
Over the course of the last century, the United States has made modest progress in its responses to genocide, the deliberate destruction of ethnic, national, or religious groups. The persistence and proliferation of dissenters within the US government and human rights advocates outside it have made a policy of silence in the face of genocide more difficult to sustain. As Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic learned, state sovereignty no longer necessarily shields a perpetrator of genocide from either military intervention or courtroom punishment.
But such advances have been eclipsed by America’s toleration of unspeakable atrocities, often committed in clear view. The personalities and geopolitical constraints influencing US decision-making have shifted with time, but the United States has consistently refused to take risks in order to suppress genocide. The United States is not alone. The states bordering genocidal societies and the European powers have looked away as well. Despite broad public consensus that genocide should “never again” be allowed, and a good deal of triumphalism about the ascent of liberal democratic values, the last decade of the twentieth century was one of the most deadly in the grimmest century on record. Rwandan Hutus in 1994 could freely, joyfully, and systematically slaughter some eight thousand Tutsi a day for one hundred days without any foreign interference. Genocide occurred after the cold war; after the growth of human rights groups; after the advent of technology that allowed for instant communication; after the erection of the Holocaust Museum on the Mall in Washington, D.C.
Perversely, America’s public awareness of the Holocaust often seemed to set the bar for concern so high that we were able to tell ourselves that contemporary genocides were not measuring up. As the writer David Rieff noted, “never again” might best be defined as “Never again would Germans kill Jews in Europe in the 1940s.”1 Either by averting their eyes or attending to more pressing conventional strategic and political concerns, US leaders who have denounced the Holocaust have themselves allowed genocide.
What is most shocking about America’s reaction to Turkey’s killing of close to a million Armenians, the Holocaust, Pol Pot’s reign of terror in which some two million died, Iraq’s slaughter of more than one hundred thousand Kurds, Bosnian Serbs’ mass murder of some two hundred thousand Muslims and Croats, and the Hutu attempt to eliminate the Tutsi is not that the United States refused to deploy its ground forces to combat the atrocities. For much of the century, even the most ardent interventionists did not lobby for US ground invasions. What is most shocking is that Washington’s policymakers did almost nothing to deter the crime. Because America’s “vital national interests” were not considered imperiled by mere genocide, senior US officials did not give genocide the moral attention it warranted. Instead of undertaking steps along a continuum of intervention—from condemning the culprits or cutting off US aid to bombing or rallying a multinational combat force—US officials tended to trust in negotiation, cling to diplomatic niceties and “neutrality,” and ship humanitarian aid.
Indeed, on occasion the United States directly or indirectly aided those committing genocide. It orchestrated the vote in the UN Credentials Committee to favor the Khmer Rouge. It sided with and supplied U.S. agricultural and manufacturing credits to Iraq while Saddam Hussein was attempting to wipe out the country's Kurds. Along with its European allies, it maintained an arms embargo against the Bosnian Muslims even after it was clear that the arms ban prevented the Muslims from defending themselves. It used its clout on the UN Security Council to mandate the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers from Rwanda and block efforts to redeploy there. To the people of Bosnia and Rwanda, the United States and its Security Council allies held out the promise of protection-a promise that that they were not prepared to keep. ....... In an age of instant information, U.S. officials have gone from claiming that they "didn't know" to suggesting -- as President Clinton did in his 1998 Rwanda apology -- that they didn't "fully appreciate." (Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 p.503)
(Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 p.503-5)
The executive branch has also felt no pressure from the second possible source: the home front. American leaders have been able to persist in turning away because genocide (Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 p.509-11)
One mechanism for altering the calculus of U.S. leadership would be to make them publicly or professionally accountable for inaction. Us.S. officials fear repercussions for their sins of ......
Even nongovernmental attempts at accountability might make a difference. In September 2001, the Atlantic Monthly published the results of my three-year investigation into the Clinton administration's response in Rwanda. ......
The September 11 attack on the United States will of course alter U.S. foreign policy. The attack might enhance the empathy of American's inside and outside the government toward peoples victimized by genocide. The fanatics who target the (Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 p.510-1)
Samantha Power "Bystanders to Genocide" September 2001
(Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 Third World Traveler
(Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" 2002 Raising the cost of genocide 04/01/2002 additional excepts although they may not be exact.
The Tricky Psychology of Holding Government Accountable 01/12/2017
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