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CounterPunch
September
25, 2002
Naming Genocide
by JOANNE MARINER
Rafael Lemkin, the hero of Samantha Power's new
book, spent his life fighting against the systematic destruction
of national, ethnic, racial or religious groups. The word he
invented in 1944 - just in time for its use at the Nuremberg
Trials -- was "genocide." Or, as Lemkin, who lost forty-nine
members of his family in the Holocaust, preferred it: "Genocide,"
with a capital G.
Lemkin believed that naming the crime
of genocide was a first step, albeit a crucial one, toward making
the world commit to stopping the practice. A extremely persistent,
even relentless advocate, Lemkin was determined to establish
genocide as an international crime, one that all countries were
bound to prevent.
The Genocide Convention, passed by the
U.N. General Assembly in 1948, represents the world's stated
commitment to Lemkin's ideal. In its preamble, the convention
emphasizes the need for international cooperation to free humanity
of the "odious scourge" of genocide. Giving legal effect
to this duty, the terms of the treaty require each of its state-parties
to prevent genocide and punish the crime's perpetrators.
In A
Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, Samantha
Power describes how the world has failed to uphold these responsibilities.
Focusing on the conduct of the United States, in particular,
Power relates a number of case examples in which massive numbers
of people were killed without seeming to rouse the country's
conscience. Time and again, not only did the United States fail
to intervene to stop the slaughter, but officials ignored warning
signs of genocide, exaggerated the dangers of confronting the
situation, and minimized proof of the crime.
A Word Is a
Word Is a Word
Early on in her book, Power describes
Rafael Lemkin's almost naive belief in the power of words. While
the Holocaust taught others the utter impossibility of communicating
certain experiences via language, Lemkin believed that the right
term could be a deeply powerful tool. In crafting the word genocide,
he aimed to achieve a precise semantic meaning, but one that
communicated a larger sense of moral indignation.
In a painful irony, Lemkin's fixation
on the word genocide was mirrored, in later years, by U.S. officials'
strenuous efforts to avoid the term. Cognizant of the legal and
moral obligation to confront genocide wherever it occurs, they
opted to ignore genocide's occurrence. By this reasoning, if
the word genocide is never used - and, therefore, the existence
of genocide is never acknowledged - the obligation to take effective
action does not attach.
Accordingly -- and in pointed contrast
to the Bush administration's current rhetoric -- the U.S. government
played down Saddam Hussein's brutal suppression of Iraq's Kurdish
minority in the late 1980s. Concerned with preserving good relations
with Iraq (which it appreciated as an enemy of Iran), State Department
officials justified their lack of outrage by misreading the terms
of the Genocide Convention.
While making a few relatively timid criticisms
of Iraq's reliance on chemical weapons, they opposed draft sanctions
legislation that employed the term genocide. As one official
later explained, "you have to use the term 'genocide' very
carefully."
The U.S. government's inordinately "careful"
use of the term culminated in the grotesque verbal contortions
of Clinton administration officials during the 1994 slaughter
of Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda. Although, as Power points
out, the case for genocide in Rwanda "was the most straightforward
since the Holocaust," the Clinton administration was anxious
not to have to intervene to stop the killings - and thus, again,
desperate to avoid naming the crime.
One of the book's most compelling passages
is Power's lucid and unforgiving account of the government's
refusal to acknowledge the obvious: that the Rwandan violence
amounted to genocide. The story is an ugly one. At the end of
April 1994, a month in which hundreds of thousands of Tutsis
had been slaughtered, the United States insisted on excluding
the word genocide from a U.N. Security Council statement on the
violence. Later, when the evidence of genocide was indisputable,
the State Department would acknowledged that "acts of genocide"
had occurred, but remained unwilling, until well on in the slaughter,
to recognize the existence of genocide itself.
Power reserves especial contempt for
President Clinton himself, who never even thought it necessary
to convene his top policy advisors to discuss the Rwandan violence.
Avoiding action and dodging responsibility during both the Rwandan
and the Bosnia crises, Clinton seemed more preoccupied with opinion
polls than with the death of thousands.
Armenians,
Jews, Kurds and . . .
But not all cases of genocide are as
clear as in Rwanda. Indeed, there is a good deal of disagreement
and debate over which mass slaughters of the twentieth century
should properly be condemned as genocide. Power does an excellent
job of conveying what is at stake in such arguments - the political
advantages and disadvantages of employing the label of genocide
-- but she is less effective in analyzing the term's application
to specific cases.
Power nowhere explicitly lists the twentieth
century's genocides. Instead of attempting an exhaustive (and
necessarily controversial) accounting, she details seven case
studies, including the Turkish murder of Armenians, the Nazi
Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge terror in Cambodia, the repression
of Kurds in Iraq, the slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda, and the
"ethnic cleansing" of Muslims in Bosnia.
Power does not label Kosovo, the last
case described in the book, as an instance of genocide. She does,
nonetheless, defend the statements of public officials, journalists
and others whose eagerness to embrace the term mirrored their
desire to take the moral high ground in justifying the bombing
of Serbia.
One could question the inclusion or omission
of other cases as well, like Cambodia (which arguably falls outside
of the terms of the Genocide Convention, at least in large part),
or Guatemala. Characterized as a genocide by the country's U.N.-sponsored
truth commission, Guatemala's long civil war is not even mentioned
in Power's book. Because the responsibility of the U.S. government
is so direct in the Guatemalan case, it would provide an illuminating
counterpoint to the story, illustrated by Power's case studies,
of toleration of genocide.
Individual
Responsibility
Power ends her book with an assessment
of the ongoing trials of alleged perpetrators of genocide in
Bosnia and Rwanda, and of the possible trials of other human
rights criminals. Here, she examines individual responsibility
for atrocities, explaining the potential of genocide prosecutions
to deter future crimes, establish a historical record, and assuage
feelings of collective guilt.
Power's belief in individual responsibility
extends beyond the courtroom. Indeed, a central message of the
book is that all of us - government leaders, military officers,
journalists and ordinary citizens - bear responsibility for our
decisions, and that includes the decision not to act. This book,
in keeping with that message, is Power's own effort to hold people
to account: to praise the heroes, to shame the perpetrators and
their allies, and to goad the guilty bystanders into action.
Joanne Mariner
is a human rights attorney. She lives in New York.
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