In the Killing Fields

Samantha Power documents a century of atrocities – and excoriates the policymakers who refuse to stop the mass murders

By John Leonard

John Leonard, a contributing editor to New York magazine and The Nation, is the
author of “Lonesome Rangers: Homeless Minds, Promised Lands, Fugitive Cultures.”

July 7, 2002

A PROBLEM FROM HELL: America and the Age of Genocide, by Samantha Power.

Basic,
610 pp., $30.

Alexander Herzen, the gentleman-anarchist, once cautioned his bloodthirsty buddy, Mikhail Bakunin:
“We want to open men’s eyes, not tear them out.”

Samantha Power goes both ways. In one of her aspects – the journalist with the law degree who reported on ethnic cleansing in the Balkans for The Washington Post and then became executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government – she insists on our seeing the mass murders of the 20th century through her own wounded eyes, as scholars,
jurists and diplomats try to keep up with killers by establishing courts and naming crimes. But in another
aspect – angel of wrath – she would invade Cambodia or Rwanda all by herself: “When innocent life is being taken on such a scale and the United States has the power to stop the killing at reasonable
risk, it has a duty to act.”

She is so furious at policymakers who turn their backs on that duty, who spin silky extenuations out of their bowels like managed-health-care spiders, that she would smoke or smite them where they
bystand.

Warren Christopher, for instance, the former secretary of state who gave Power the title for her book when he described Bosnia as “a problem from hell” – and thus beyond mere mortal agency. During Christopher’s twiddle, the heretofore unheard of happened: Junior officers actually resigned from the foreign service on principle. Nor was the president, at whose pleasure Christopher served, such
a bargain. Candidate Clinton may have rattled sabers on the 1992 campaign trail, but President Bill let Serbs behave like Hutus and Hutus behave like Serbs, until it cost him in the opinion polls.

If Clinton seems Power’s least favorite president, she is not much kinder to his predecessor, George H.W. Bush, on whose watch Yugoslavia disintegrated in the first place while his secretary of state, James Baker, so colorfully explained: “We don’t have a dog in that fight.” Or Ronald Reagan, who didn’t care if Saddam Hussein nerve-gassed Kurds in 1987 and 1988, so long as Iraq continued to buy a million tons of American wheat a year. Or Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, who were not about to go back to Southeast Asia no matter what Pol Pot got up to, from 1975 to 1979, outside Phnom Penh. As negligent as Franklin Roosevelt might have been about European Jewry during the Nazi Holocaust, he had before him Woodrow Wilson’s example of choosing to ignore the very prototype of genocides to come –
Turkey’s massacre of a million Armenians in 1915.

“It is the smell of oil and the color of money that corrodes our principles,” said the Republican senator
from Maine, William Cohen, about our coddling of Iraq in 1990. Cohen, along with William Proxmire, Bob Dole and Claiborne Pell, is one of the few members of Congress to end up on Power’s list of valiant diplomats and journalists, troublemakers and whistleblowers who tried to stop a slaughter. Besides reminding us in searing detail just how it happened that 100,000 Kurds, 200,000 Bosnians,
800,000 Rwandans, 1 million Armenians, 2 million Cambodians and 6 million Jews were exterminated while we slumbered, she also wants us to honor those who couldn’t sleep, as well as men like Raphael
Lemkin, the refugee linguist who coined the word “genocide” and devoted his entire adult life to helping
get a law against it into a treaty among nations.

Still, the behavior of presidents
is what most infuriates her. From Dwight

Eisenhower on, they refused
even to sign the 1948 treaty against genocide till

Reagan did so in 1988 to
escape criticism for his visit to the Nazi cemetery at

Bitburg, Germany. Power
is convinced, from hundreds of interviews and thousands

of pages, that each administration
knew the dreadful worst and didn’t want to

talk about it. That each,
when it had to say something in public, cited

“national sovereignty” before
blaming “both sides,” “civil war” and “ancient

history” for what it called
a “tragedy” instead of an atrocity, a crime against

humanity or, of course,
a genocide. That each, for domestic political reasons,

chose to do nothing while
claiming that anything it might do would be “futile”

or counterproductive. “No
U.S. president,” she tells us, “has ever made genocide

prevention a priority, and
no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for

his indifference to its
occurrence.”

And she quotes the writer
David Rieff’s redefinition of the meaning of “Never

again” after his experience
in Bosnia: “Never again would Germans kill Jews in

Europe in the 1940s.”

As an anthology of horrors
from the equal-opportunity 20th century – Christians,

Muslims, Buddhists and Jews,
in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East – “A

Problem From Hell” has so
much ground to cover that it only nods in passing at

Pakistan and Bangladesh,
at Nigeria and Biafra, at Indonesia and East Timor. As

a pocket history of what
might be called the jurisprudence of the unthinkable –

how to get to Nuremberg
or The Hague – it might have wondered why the United

States

is so adamantly opposed to
the very idea of an international criminal court. And

as a fiery brief for our
intervention wherever there are killing fields, it

ought at least to mention
American meddlings in Latin America and

Southeast Asia that actually
upped the bloody ante.

But as an anguished reminder
that state violence is still the leading cause of

sudden death all over the
world, it is a much-needed corrective to our

generalized panic about
terrorism. However confounded and twitchy we’ve become,

looking over our shoulders
in fear of ambush by the lunatics of one idea and the

kamikazes of Kingdom Come,
we should never forget the worst thing about the

century just passed: What
we knew of war in 1900 was that 85 percent of its

casualties would be warriors
themselves – and only 15 percent civilians. But

according to the latest

United Nations figures, by
the end of the 20th century, that ratio had pretty

much reversed itself. More
than 80 percent of the damage is collateral. Which,

of course, is insane.