excerpts from the book

A Problem from Hell

America and the Age of Genocide

by Samantha Power

Harper Perennial, 2003, paperback

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The United States had never in its history intervened to stop genocide and had in fact rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred. -

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The Armenian genocide (1915-1916) was committed during World War I, before the United States had become a world leader. The Holocaust (1939-1945) took place just as the United States was moving into that role. The Cambodian (1975-1979) and Iraqi (1987-1988) genocides were perpetrated after the Holocaust but during the Cold War and after Vietnam. Bosnia (1992-1995) and Rwanda (1994) happened after the Cold War and while American supremacy and awareness of the "lessons" of the Holocaust were at their height.

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U.S. policymakers knew a great deal about the crimes being perpetrated [during specific genocides]. Some Americans cared and fought for action, making considerable personal and professional sacrifices. And the United States did have countless opportunities to mitigate and prevent slaughter. But time and again, decent men and women chose to look away.

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The sharpest challenge to the world of bystanders is posed by those who have refused to remain silent in the age of genocide. In each case a few Americans stood out by standing up. They did not lose sight of right and wrong, even as they were repeatedly steered to a "context" that others said precluded action. They refused to accept either that they could not influence U.S. policy or that the United States could not influence the killers. These individuals were not alone in their struggles, but they were not in crowded company either. By seeing what they tried to get done, we see what America could have done. We also see what we might ourselves have attempted. By seeing how and why they failed, we see what we as a nation let happen.

In 1915 Henry Morgenthau Sr., the U.S. ambassador in Constantinople, responded to Turkey's deportation and slaughter of its Armenian minority by urging Washington to condemn Turkey and pressure its wartime ally Germany. Morgenthau also defied diplomatic convention by personally protesting the atrocities, denouncing the regime, and, raising money for humanitarian relief. He was joined by former president Theodore Roosevelt, who went a step further, calling on the administration of Woodrow Wilson to enter World War I and forcibly stop the slaughter. But the United States clung to its neutrality and insisted that Turkey's internal affairs were not its business. An estimated 1 million Armenians were murdered or died of disease and starvation during the genocide.

Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew and international lawyer, warned about Hitler's designs in the 1930s but was scoffed at. After finding refuge in the United States in 1941, he failed to win support for any measure to protect imperiled Jews. The Allies resisted denouncing Hitler's atrocities, granting refuge to Europe's Jewry, and bombing the railroad tracks to the Nazi concentration camps. Undaunted, Lemkin invented the word "genocide" and secured the passage of the first-ever United Nations human rights treaty, which was devoted to banning the new crime. Sadly, he lived to see the genocide convention rebuffed by the U.S. Senate. William Proxmire, the quixotic U. S. senator from Wisconsin, picked up where Lemkin left off and delivered 3,211 speeches on the Senate floor urging ratification of the UN treaty. After nineteen years of daily soliloquies, Proxmire did manage to get the Senate to accept the genocide convention, but the U.S. ratification was so laden with caveats that it carried next to no force.

A handful of US. diplomats and journalists in Cambodia warned of the depravity of a sinister band of Communist rebels known as the Khmer Rouge. They were derided by the American left for falling for antiCommunist propaganda, and they failed to influence a U.S. policy that could not contemplate engagement of any kind in Southeast Asia after Vietnam. Pol Pot's four-year reign left some 2 million Cambodians dead, but the massacres elicited barely a whimper from Washington, which maintained diplomatic recognition of the genocidal regime even after it had been overthrown.

Peter Galbraith, a staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, drafted punishing legislation for his boss, Senator Claiborne Pell, that would have cut off U.S. agricultural and manufacturing credits to Saddam Hussein in retaliation for his 1987-1988 attempt to wipe out Iraq's rural Kurds. The sanctions package was defeated by a determined White House, State Department, and US. farm lobby, which were eager to maintain friendly ties and sell rice and wheat to Iraq. And so Hussein's regime received generous American financial support while it gassed and executed some 100,000 Kurds.

Romeo Dallaire, a Canadian major general who commanded UN peacekeeping forces in Rwanda in 1994, appealed for permission to disarm militias and to prevent the extermination of Rwanda's Tutsi three months before the genocide began. Denied this by his political masters at the United Nations, he watched corpses pile up around him as Washington led a successful effort to remove most of the peacekeepers under his command and then aggressively worked to block authorization of UN reinforcements. The United States refused to use its technology to jam radio broadcasts that were a crucial instrument in the coordination and perpetuation of the genocide. And even as, on average, 8,000 Rwandans were being butchered each day, the issue never became a priority for senior U.S. officials. Some 800,000 Rwandans were killed in 100 days.

A few diplomats at the State Department and several lawmakers on Capitol Hill relentlessly tried to convince an intransigent bureaucracy to bomb Serb ethnic cleansers in Bosnia. These men watched the sanitization of cables, the repackaging of the conflict as "intractable" and "ancient," and the maintenance of an arms embargo against Bosnia's outgunned Muslims. Several foreign service officers who quit the department in disgust then watched, from a no less frustrating perch outside the U.S. government, the fall of the Srebrenica safe area and the largest massacre in Europe in fifty years. Between 1992 and 1995, while the nightly news broadcast the Serb onslaught, some 200,000 Bosnians were killed. Only when US. military intervention came to feel unavoidable and Bob Dole, the Kansas Republican and Senate majority leader, had persuaded Congress to lift the arms embargo did U.S. policy change. By bringing the war in Bosnia home, Dole helped spur President Clinton to begin NATO bombing. By then, however, Bosnia's genocide had been largely completed, and a multiethnic state had been destroyed

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[The U.S.'s] consistent policy of nonintervention in the face of genocide offers sad testimony not to a broken American political system but to one that is ruthlessly effective. The system, as it stands now, is working! No US. president has ever made genocide prevention a priority, and no US. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence. It is thus no coincidence that genocide rages on.

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Henry Morganthau Sr., U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, in a July 10, 1915 cable to Washington

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.

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Henry Morganthau Sr., U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, in a July 10, 1915 cable to Washington

There seems to be a systematic plan to crush the Armenian race [by the Turkish government].

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Mehmed Talaat, former Turkish interior minister, to Henry Morganthau Sr., U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, in 1915

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 [Armenians] as we please?"

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Mehmed Talaat, former Turkish interior minister, to a German reporter, in 1915

We have been reproached for making no distinction between the innocent Armenians and the guilty. But that was utterly impossible, in view of the fact that those who were innocent today might be guilty tomorrow.

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Henry Morganthau Sr., U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, in a July 10, 1915 cable to Washington

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.

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New York Times headline, October 7, 1915

800,000 ARMENIANS COUNTED DESTROYED.

By December the paper's headline read

MILLION ARMENIANS KILLED OR IN EXILE.

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Henry Morganthau Sr., U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, left Turkey in 1916. He could no longer stand his impotence. "My failure to stop the destruction of the Armenians had made Turkey for me a place of horror - I had reached the end of my resources." More than 1 million Armenians had been killed on his watch. watch. Morganthau, who had earned a reputation as a loose cannon, did not receive another appointment in the Wilson administration. President Wilson, reflecting the overwhelming view of the American people, stayed on the sidelines of World War I as long as he could. And when the United States finally entered the conflict against Germany in April 1917, he refused to declare war on or even break off relations with the Ottoman Empire. "We shall go wherever the necessities of this war carry us," Wilson told Congress, "but it seems to me that we should go only where immediate and practical considerations lead us and not heed any others." In the end it was Turkey that broke off ties with the United States.

America's nonresponse to the Turkish horrors [Armenian slaughter] established patterns that would be repeated. Time and again the U.S. government would be reluctant to cast aside its neutrality and formally denounce a fellow state for its atrocities. Time and again though U.S. officials would learn that huge numbers of civilians were being slaughtered, the impact of this knowledge would be blunted by their uncertainty about the facts and their rationalization that a firmer U. S. stand would make little difference. Time and again American assumptions and policies would be contested by Americans in the field closest to the slaughter, who would try to stir the imaginations of their political superiors. And time and again these advocates would fail to sway Washington. The United States would offer humanitarian aid to the survivors of "race murder" but would leave those committing it alone.

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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 [Secretary of State] 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" he 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 up, 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.

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Mehmed Talaat, former Turkish interior minister

I admit that we deported many Armenians from our eastern provinces ... [but] the responsibility for these acts falls first of all upon the deported people themselves.

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Rafael Lemkin, a Polish Jew and a student of linguistics at the University of Lvov in Poland, arguing with a professor about the mass murder of Armenians in Turkey by the Turkish government in 1915

Sovereignty 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.

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[Rafael] Lemkin read about the abortive British effort to try the Turkish perpetrators [of the mass murder of Armenians in Turkey by the Turkish government in 1915] 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.

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[At an international criminal law conference in Madrid, Spain, in 1933, Rafael] 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 precursor 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.

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Rafael Lemkin's mother Bella told her son 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."

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Adolf Hitler to his military chiefs, August 1939

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?

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Adolf Hitler to his military chiefs, August 1939

The aim of war is not to reach definite lines but to annihilate the enemy physically.

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Adolf Hitler to his military chiefs, August 1939

Who today still speaks of the massacre of the Armenians?

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The prevailing wisdom in the United States was that the Nazis were waging a war against Europe's armies. When [Rafael] Lemkin told US. government officials that Germany was also wiping out the Jews, he was greeted either with indifference or incredulity.

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[Rafael Lemkin] was sure politicians would always put their own interests above the interests of others. To stand any chance of influencing U.S. policy, he would have to take his message to the general public, who in turn would pressure their leaders. "I realized that I was following the wrong path," he later wrote. "Statesmen are messing up the world, and [only] when it seems to them that they are drowning in the mud of their own making, [do] they rush to extricate themselves." Those Americans who had been so responsive to Lemkin in person were not making their voices heard. And most Americans were uninterested. Lemkin told himself

All over Europe the Nazis were writing the book of death with the blood of my brethren. Let me now tell this story to the American people, to the man in the street, in church, on the porches of their houses and in their kitchens and drawing rooms. I was sure they would understand me .... I will publish the decrees spreading death over Europe .... They will have no other choice but to believe. The recognition of truth will cease to be a personal favor to me, but a logical necessity.

As he lobbied for action in Washington and around the country in 1942 and 1943, he flashed back to a speech delivered by British prime minister Winston Churchill in August 1941, broadcast on the BBC, which had urged Allied resolve. "The whole of Europe has been wrecked and trampled down by the mechanical weapons and barbaric fury of the Nazis .... As his armies advance, whole districts are exterminated," Churchill had thundered. "We are in the presence of a crime without a name."

Suddenly Lemkin's crusade took on a specific objective: the search for a new word. He replayed in his mind the Churchill speech and the response of the lawyers in Madrid to his proposal. Perhaps he had not adequately distinguished the crime he was campaigning against from typical, wartime violence. Maybe if he could capture the crime in a word that connoted something truly unique and evil, people and politicians alike might get more exercised about stopping it. Lemkin began to think about ways he might combine his knowledge of international law, his aim of preventing atrocity, and his long-standing interest in language. Convinced that it was only the packaging of his legal and moral cause that needed refining, he began to hunt for a term commensurate with the truth of his experience and the experience of millions. He would be the one to give the ultimate crime a name.

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In late May 1942, when reports of Nazi terror were still branded "rumors," [Szmul] Zygielbojm, a member of the Polish National Council in London, released and publicized a report prepared by the underground Jewish Socialist Bund in Poland. For the previous two years, Zygielbojm had been traveling around Europe and the United States describing ghastly conditions in occupied Poland, but the Bund report offered the most complete, precise, and chilling picture of Hitler's extermination plot. The Nazis had dispatched Einsatzgruppen, or mobile killing units, to conquered territory in eastern Europe. In Lithuania and Poland in the summer of 1941, the Bund reported,

men, fourteen to sixty years old, were driven to a single place, a square or a cemetery, where they were slaughtered or shot by machine guns or killed by hand grenades. They had to dig their own graves. Children in orphanages, inmates in old-age homes, the sick in hospital were shot, women were killed in the streets. In many towns the Jews were carried off to "an unknown destination" and killed in adjacent woods.

The Bund report introduced readers to the gas vans that roamed around the Polish town of Cheimno, gassing an average of 1,000 people every day (ninety per van) from the winter of 1941 to March 1942. The report revealed that Germany had set out to "exterminate all the Jews of Europe?' More than 700,000 Jews had already been killed; millions more were endangered.

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Ignacy Schwarzbart, a Polish Jew, in a 1942 cable to the World Jewish Congress in New York

JEWS IN POLAND ALMOST COMPLETELY ANNIHILATED STOP READ REPORTS DEPORTATION TEN THOUSAND JEWS FOR DEATH STOP IN BELZEC FORCED TO DIG THEIR OWN GRAVE MASS SUICIDE HUNDREDS CHILDREN THROWN ALIVE INTO GUTTERS DEATH CAMPS IN BELZEC TREBLINKA DISTRICT MALKINIA THOUSANDS DEAD NOT BURIED IN SOBIBOR DISTRICT WLODAWSKI MASS GRAVES MURDER PREGNANT

WOMEN STOP JEWS NAKED DRAGGED INTO DEATH CHAMBERS GESTAPO MEN ASKED PAYMENT FOR QUICKER KILLING HUNTING FUGITIVES STOP THOUSANDS DAILY VICTIMS THROUGHOUT POLAND STOP BELIEVE THE UNBELIEVABLE STOP

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Jan Karski met with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter who graciously heard him out and then responded, "I don't believe you." When a stunned Karski protested, Frankfurter interrupted him and explained, "I do not mean that you are lying. I simply said I cannot believe you."' Frankfurter literally could not conceive of the atrocities Karski was describing. He was not alone. Isaiah Berlin, who worked at the British embassy Washington from 1942, saw only a massive pogrom. So, too, did Nahum Goldman, Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, and other leading Zionists.

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The Allies suppression of the truth about Hitler's Final Solution has been the subject of a great deal of historical scholarship. Intelligence on Hitler's extermination was plentiful in both classified and open sources. The United States maintained embassies in Berlin until December 1941, in Budapest and Bucharest until January 1942, and in Vichy France until late 1942. The British used sophisticated decryption technology to intercept German communications. The major Jewish organizations had representatives in Geneva who relayed vivid and numerous refugee reports.

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The intelligence was often played down. In June 1942, for instance, the London Daily Telegraph published the Bund report's claim that 700,000 Polish Jews and more than 1 million Jews throughout Europe had been killed. The New York Times picked up the Telegraph's reports but buried them deep inside the paper. When Riegner cabled word of Hitler's plot the following month, British and U.S. officials and journalists were skeptical about the veracity of "unsubstantiated information." In the words of one Swiss foreign editor, "We received no picture of photographic exactitude, only silhouettes."" In 1944, when John Pehle, the director of Roosevelt's War Refugee Board, wanted to publish the report of two Auschwitz escapees, Elmer Davis, the head of the U.S. Office of War Information, turned down his request. The American public would not believe such wild stories, he said, and Europeans would be so demoralized by them that their resistance would crumble. The U.S. ambassador to Sweden, Hershel Johnson, sent a cable in April 1943 detailing the extermination of Jews in Warsaw, but he ended his message by noting: "So fantastic is the story... that I hesitate to make it the subject of an official report." In the November 1943 Stalin-Roosevelt-Churchill declaration, reference to the gas chambers was deleted because the evidence was deemed untrustworthy. To paraphrase Walter Laqueur, a pioneer in the study of the Allies' response to the Holocaust, although many people thought that the Jews were no longer alive, they did not necessarily believe they were dead.

Why and how did people live in "a twilight between knowing and not knowing"? For starters, the threat Hitler posed to all of civilization helped overshadow his specific targeting of the Jews. Widespread anti-Semitism also contributed. It was not that readers' prejudice against Jews necessarily made them happy to hear reports of Hitler's monstrosity. Rather, their indifference to the fate of Jews likely caused them to skim the stories and to focus on other aspects of the war. Others did not take the time to process the reports because they believed the Allies were doing all they could; there was no point in getting depressed about something they could not control. Such knowledge was inconvenient.

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The vast majority of people simply did not believe what they read; the notion of getting attacked for being (rather than for doing) was too discomfiting and too foreign to process readily. A plot for outright annihilation had never been seen and therefore could not be imagined, the tales of German cremation factories and gas chambers sounded far-fetched... When tales of Nazi gas vans and extermination plots emerged, many people believed that such stories were being manufactured or embellished as part of an Allied propaganda effort.

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In April 1943, at the Bermuda conference, after twelve days of secretive and ineffectual meetings, the Allies rejected most of the modest proposals to expand refugee admissions, continuing to severely limit the number of Jews who would be granted temporary refuge in the United States and unoccupied Europe.

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Szmul Zygielbojm, a Polish Jew, in a letter to the president and prime minister of the Polish government-in-exile, prior to his suicide

The responsibility for this crime of murdering the entire Jewish population of Poland falls in the first instance on the perpetrators, but indirectly also it weighs on the whole of humanity, the peoples and governments of the Allied States, which so far have made no effort toward a concrete action for the purpose of curtailing this crime.

By passive observation of this murder of defenseless millions and of the maltreatment of children, women, and old men, these countries have become the criminals' accomplices .... I can not be silent and I can not live while the remnants of the Jewish people of Poland, of whom I am a representative, are perishing ....

By my death I wish to express my strongest protest against the inactivity with which the world is looking on and permitting the extermination of Jewish people. I know how little human life is worth, especially today. But as I was unable to do anything during my life, perhaps by my death I shall contribute to destroying the indifference of those who are able and should act.

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In his book 'Axis Rule', Rafael Lemkin wrote

The present destruction of Europe would not be complete and thorough had the German people not accepted freely [the Nazi] plan, participated voluntarily in its execution, and up to this point profited greatly therefrom... all important classes and groups of the population have voluntarily assisted Hitler in the scheme of world domination.

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The word that Lemkin settled upon was a hybrid that combined the Greek derivative ,geno, meaning "race" or "tribe:' together with the Latin derivative cide, 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 spines of those who heard it.

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[Rafael Lemkin] 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, but Genocide can destroy a culture instantly, like fire can destroy a building in an hour.

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With the end of war in Europe on May 8,1945, and the Allied liberation of the Nazi death camps, the scale of Hitler's madness had been revealed. Practically all that had sounded far-fetched proved real. Some 6 million Jews and 5 million Poles, Roma, Communists, and other "undesirables" had been exterminated. American and European leaders saw that a state's treatment of its own citizens could be indicative of how it would behave toward its neighbors. And though sovereignty was still thought to be sacrosanct, a few scholars had begun gently urging that it not be defined so al!] permit slaughter.

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Hans Frank, former German minister of justice, summed up a core Nazi premise

Law is that which is useful and necessary for the German nation.

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Rafael Lemkin in a letter to the New York Times

It seems inconsistent with our concepts of civilization that selling a drug to an individual is a matter 'of worldly concern, while gassing millions of human beings might be a problem of internal concern. It seems also inconsistent with our philosophy of life that abduction of one woman for prostitution is an international crime while sterilization of millions of women remains an internal affair of the state in question.

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In Nuremberg, Germany, the three victors (and France) had set up an international military tribunal to try the leading Nazi perpetrators. The Nuremberg court was placing important dents in state armor. Indeed, it was amid considerable controversy that the Nuremberg charter prosecuted "crimes against humanity," the concept the Allies had introduced during World War I to condemn the Turks for their atrocities against the Armenians. With Nuremberg going so far as to try European officials for crimes committed against their own citizens, future perpetrators of atrocities-even those acting under explicit state authority-could no longer be confident that their governments or their borders would shelter them from trial.

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The Nuremberg court treated aggressive war ("crimes against peace"), or the violation of another state's sovereignty, as the cardinal sin and prosecuted only those crimes against humanity and war crimes committed after Hitler crossed an internationally recognized border. Nazi defendants were tried for atrocities they committed during but not before World War II. By inference, if the Nazis had exterminated the entire German Jewish population but never invaded Poland, they would not have been liable at Nuremberg. States and individuals who did not cross an international frontier were still free under international law to commit genocide.

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The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide - defined 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.

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What mattered [1948 U.N. genocide convention] 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 crimes 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 committed aggression against another country or attacked only their internal "enemies." Peacetime or wartime, inside a country or outside, the 1948 treaty made no distinction.

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[Rafael] Lemkin thought December 9, 1948, would never arrive. When it did, 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

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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.

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Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide

Approved and proposed for signature and ratification or accession by General Assembly resolution 260A (111,1 of 9 December 1948 Entry into Force 12 January 1951, in Accordance with Article XIII

The Contracting Parties,

Having considered the declaration made by the General Assembly of the United Nations in its resolution 96 (1) dated 11 December 1946 that genocide is a crime under international law, contrary to the spirit and aims of the United Nations and condemned by the civilized world,

Recognizing that at all periods of history genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity, and

Being convinced that, in order to liberate mankind from such an odious scourge, international co-operation is required,

Hereby agree as hereinafter provided:

Article I

The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.

Article 2

In the present Convention, genocide means 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 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.

Article 3

The following acts shall be punishable: (a) Genocide; (b) Conspiracy to commit genocide; (c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide; (d) Attempt to commit genocide; (e) Complicity in genocide.

Article 4

Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.

Article 5

The Contracting Parties undertake to enact, in accordance with their respective Constitutions, the necessary legislation to give effect to the provisions of the present Convention, and, in particular, to provide effective penalties for persons guilty of genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III.

Article 6

Persons charged with genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III shall be tried by a competent tribunal of the State in the territory of which the act was committed, or by such international penal tribunal as may have jurisdiction with respect to those Contracting Parties which shall have accepted its jurisdiction.

Article 7

Genocide and the other acts enumerated in article III shall not be considered as political crimes for the purpose of extradition.

The Contracting Parties pledge themselves in such cases to grant extradition in accordance with their laws and treaties in force.

Article 8

Any Contracting Party may call upon the competent organs of the United Nations to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III.

Article 9

Disputes between the Contracting Parties relating to the interpretation, application or fulfillment of the present Convention, including those relating to the responsibility of a State for genocide or for any of the other acts enumerated in article III, shall be submitted to the International Court of Justice at the request of any of the parties to the dispute.

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On August 28, 1959, after a quarter-century battle to ban genocide, Lemkin collapsed and died of a heart attack in the public relations office of Milton H. Blow on Park Avenue, his blazer leaking papers at the seams. His one-room apartment on West 112th Street in Manhattan was left overflowing with memos prepared for foreign ministers and ambassadors, as well as some 500 books, each read, reread, and emphatically underlined. He had published eleven books, most of them on international law but one volume of art criticism and another on rose cultivation. At the time of his death, he was fifty-nine and penniless. A New York Times editorial two days later observed:

Diplomats of this and other nations who used to feel a certain concern when they saw the slightly stooped figure of Dr. Raphael Lemkin approaching them in the corridors of the United Nations need not be uneasy anymore. They will not have to think up explanations for a failure to ratify the genocide convention for which Dr. Lemkin worked so patiently and so unselfishly for a decade and a half... Death in action was his final argument-a final word to our own State Department, which has feared that an agreement not to kill would infringe upon our sovereignty.

Lemkin had coined the word "genocide?' He had helped draft a treaty designed to outlaw it. And he had seen the law rejected by the world's most powerful nation. Seven people attended Lemkin's funeral.

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After Lemkin's death, the genocide convention languished unattended in the United States until the mid-1960s. Bruno Bitker, a Milwaukee international lawyer, sparked a second wave of interest when he urged William Proxmire, the senator from Wisconsin, to take up the cause of the genocide ban. Nearly seventy countries had by then ratified the law, and Proxmire could not grasp what could be slowing the U.S. Senate.

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[William] Proxmire's speech-a-day approach to ratification was one of many rituals he observed in the Senate. He made a point (and a show) of never missing a roll call vote during his twenty-two years in the Senate, tallying more than 10,000 consecutively. A renowned skinflint, he became famous nationally for crusading against pork-barrel projects and passing out the monthly golden Fleece Awards to government agencies for waste in spending.

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Senator Claiborne Pell, Rhode Island

I am convinced... that there was an unwritten gentleman's understanding to ignore the Jewish problem in Germany, and that we and the British would not intervene in any particular way... We wrung our hands and did nothing.

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During the entire three months of the genocide [in Rwanda], [President Bill] 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.

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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 US. military intervention was never even debated. Indeed, the United States resisted even diplomatic intervention.

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The country best equipped to prevent the genocide planners from broadcasting murderous instructions directly to the population was the United States. Marley offered three possibilities. The United States could destroy the antenna. It could transmit "counterbroadcasts" urging perpetrators to stop the genocide. Or it could jam the hate radio station's broadcasts. This could have been done from an airborne platform such as the Air National Guard's Commando Solo airplane.

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The Clinton administration did not actively consider U.S. military intervention [in Rwanda], 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 op-ed 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.

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Randall Robinson of TransAfrica 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.

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UN Commander in Rwanda General Romeo Dallaire summed up his experience in UNAMIR in one of his parting cables

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 making a modicum of self-respect and effectiveness on the ground.

... 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.

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a U.S. official who kept a journal during the Rwandan genocide

... 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).

We have a foreign policy based on our amoral economic interests run by amateurs who want to stand for something ... but ultimately don't want to exercise any leadership that has a cost.

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What is most shocking about America's reaction to Turkey's killing of Armenians, the Holocaust, Pol Pot's reign of terror, Iraq's slaughter of the Kurds, Bosnian Serbs' mass murder of Muslims, and the Hutu elimination of Tutsi is not that the United States refused to deploy US. ground forces to combat the atrocities. For much of the century, even the most ardent interventionists did not lobby for U.S. ground invasions. What is most shocking is that US. policymakers did almost nothing to deter the crime. Because America's "vital national interests" were not considered imperiled by mere genocide, senior U.S. officials did not give genocide the moral attention it warranted. Instead of undertaking steps along a continuum of intervention-from condemning the perpetrators or cutting off US aid to bombing or rallying a multinational invasion force-U.S. 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.

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The real reason the United States did not do what it could and should have done to stop genocide [Turkish government against Armenians in Turkey, Khmer Rouge against their own people in Cambodia, Christians against Muslims in Bosnia, Saddam Hussein against Kurds in Iraq, Hutus against Tutsis in Rwanda] was not a lack of knowledge or influence but a lack of will. Simply put, American leaders did not act because they did not want to. They believed that genocide was wrong, but they were not prepared to invest the military, financial, diplomatic, or domestic political capital needed to stop it. The U. S. policies crafted in response to each case of genocide ... were not the accidental products of neglect. They were concrete choices made by this country's most influential decisionmakers after unspoken and explicit weighing of costs and benefits.

In each case, U.S. policymakers in the executive branch (usually with the passive backing of most members of Congress) had two objectives. First, they wanted to avoid engagement in conflicts that posed little threat to American interests, narrowly defined. And second, they hoped to contain the political costs and avoid the moral stigma associated with allowing genocide. By and large, they achieved both aims. In order to contain the political fallout, U.S. officials overemphasized the ambiguity of the facts. They played up the likely futility, perversity, and jeopardy of any proposed intervention. They steadfastly avoided use of the word "genocide;' which they believed carried with it a legal and moral (and thus political) imperative to act. And they took solace in the normal operations of the foreign policy bureaucracy, which permitted an illusion of continual deliberation, complex activity, and intense concern.

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The inertia of the governed can not be disentangled from the indifference of the government. American leaders have both a circular and a deliberate relationship to public opinion. It is circular because their constituencies are rarely if ever aroused by foreign crises, even genocidal ones, in the absence of political leadership, and yet at the same time U.S. officials continually cite the absence of public support as grounds for inaction. The relationship is deliberate because American leadership has not been absent in such circumstances. It has been present but devoted mainly to minimizing public outrage.

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In 1994 Rwanda, a country of just 8 million, experienced the numerical equivalent of more than two World Trade Center attacks every single day for 100 days. On an American scale this would mean 23 million people murdered in three months. When, on September 12, 2001, the United States turned for help to its friends around the world, Americans were gratified by the overwhelming response. When the Tutsi cried out, by contrast, every country in the world turned away.

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History has shown that the suffering of victims has rarely been sufficient to get the United States to intervene.

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