A Problem from Hell
America and the Age of Genocide Samantha Power
620 pages, including notes and index
published in 2002

According to A Problem from Hell, the typical reaction of the United States government to reports of genocide is to do nothing. From the Armenian genocide in 1916, through the Holocaust up to the genocides in Ruanda and Bosnia, the United States has been on the sidelines, despite having had ample warning in most cases that genocide was occuring and despite possesing a wide range of measures that could enable it to put pressure on any regime engaged in genocide. The only time the US did respond to threats of genocide was in Kosovo in 1999, when NATO started bombing Serbian military targets after Serbian forces had committed (relatively small scale) atrocities there. It was not an undivided success, as NATO's interference triggered exactly the kind of ethnic cleansing it had hoped to prevent.

This then is the central thesis of A Problem from Hell; the bulk of the book gives examples by focusing on the five biggest genocides of the 20th century: Armenia, the Holocaust, Cambodia under Pol Pot, Bosnia and Ruanda. This does not make for easy reading, as in one account after another you read about how the genocide unfolds, how American observers on the scene raise the alarm and try to get the US to stop it, only to be denied.

In all cases described, the US government remained deliberately neutral, basing its non-intervention in a succesion of excuses. When the first reports of genocide in process come out, they're not believed or seen as propaganda by the victims of the genocide. This is not in itself an inexcusable attitude; extraordinairy claims call for extraordinairy evidence, but Power makes it clear that this skepticism is present long after overwhelming evidence is present.

The next excuse is that the United States would be powerless to intervene, that any intervention only would make things worse for the victims or that the US has no leverage on the perpetrators to cause them to stop, or that this would need a full scale military intervention, something the US has never been keen on when not in the "national interest". Again, Power makes it clear this is an excuse: there are things the US could do to pressure genocidal nations that do not involve large scale military measures. Witholding aid, denying military equipment, strong diplomatic pressure, publically condemnation and such could all play a part. US officials however are largely reluctant to use any of them. Part of this reluctance is a fear of another Vietnam or Somalia, partially it is calculated cynicism: preventing genocide is rarely in the national interest --in some cases this cynicism even led the US government to defend genocidial regimes; the best example being the US's support for the Khymer Rouge after Vietnam invaded Cambodia.

Samantha Power puts this history of American (non-)involvement with genocide in context by also showing the growth of genocide awareness during this time. The word "genocide" did not even exist until Raphael Lemkin coined it in 1944 to describe the holocaust. Lemkin was the driving force behind the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide; he devoted his entire life to combatting genocide. Though this convention was adopted in 1948 and came in effect in 1951, the US only ratified it in 1988.. This late ratification fits comfortably in the pattern Power lays out, of the United States being reluctant to get involved with genocide prevention.

There is hope however, as this stance slowly changed under the impact of the Ruanda and Bosnia genocides. Especially in the later case it becomes clear that allowing genocide to happen damages US interests more than preventing it would do: allowing genocide shows the US as weak and hypocritical, damaging its prestige and standing. At the same time, human rights organisations, traditionally opposed to US military interventions, have become more willing to call for their use where appropriate. These two trends found their high mark in the Kosovo campaign, where the NATO went to war against Serbia over the Serb preparations for genocide in its province of Kosovo. As I said above, the results of this campaign were mixed.

In all, A Problem from Hell is a critical look at the United States' foreign policy on the subject of genocide, offering a criticism that a lot of people will find hard to swallow. However, I think it still was not critical enough. Though Power is harsh in her criticism, you can tell she's still convinced the United States at heart remains a force for good, a benign superpower, which just needs to use its power slightly more wisely. The truth may be more complicated by that....

The US itself is after all founded on the genocide of the native Americans, something that is entirely omitted from A Problem from Hell by the simple method of starting the book with the genocide in Turkish Armenia, long after the ethnic cleansing of America had happened. Nor is any mention made of the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, which lead to a genocide (60,000 dead in three months) of the East Timorese, with the full knowledge and support of the United States government!

The truth is that it just might be that the United States, far from being just reluctant to get involved in situations of genocide, has in fact used genocide itself and is willing to support its allies in genocide if it is in the national interest. It is in this context that I'm skeptical this about face of Washington in the late nineties regarding genocide prevention stems from any noble motives rather than realpolitik. As we have seen with the war on Iraq, humanitarian concerns can be a good shield to hide real motives behind...