| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Samantha Power Interview: Conversations with History: Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Page 3 of 5
Before we talk about the substance of your book, I want to pick up two pieces. One is, you said that you had studied history as an undergraduate. I think in this narrative history becomes very important, in the sense that one of the ways that we lose sight of these problems, one of the reasons, in Sherlock Holmes's term, that the "dog doesn't bark," is that we forget the history. The other piece is that your book conveys a sense of immediacy. You mentioned that you had gone to Bosnia. Now, explain to us how you went from history at Yale and then you became a reporter and went to work for U.S. News and World Report.
U.S. News and World Report, a household name, the magazine that rolls off everyone's tongue. Well, I majored [in history] at Yale, and had these amazing teachers -- Paul Kennedy, Gaddis Smith, Jonathan Spence. It was eclectic, it was basically just learning how to read books in a critical way. And as I said, learning how to write. I got a job right out of college, working at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. It was the president of the Carnegie Endowment, Morton Abramowitz, who springs up as a character in many of the stories. He had been in the U.S. government for thirty-five years. I was terrified when I kept finding these documents with his name, that my mentor was going to end up implicated in one of these cases doing the usual paper-pushing, or saying, "Oh, let's not use the word 'genocide,' then we'd have to do something." But he actually comes across remarkably and refreshingly well, which didn't really surprise me, but certainly relieved me.
I should mention as an aside that he's one of the few, if not the only person who says to you, "I blew it."
Exactly. Right.
This is really important in this kind of narrative, that somebody actually, once seeing the evidence, is willing to say that.
I think that's a testament to his integrity. It's not an accident that the person who actually comes off relatively well in every case is the same person who can say in the case where he doesn't do quite as well, "I blew it," because he has the capacity to see right and wrong throughout, including his own culpability.
But, anyway, I worked for this man, not knowing those things, and his character and so on, until much later. But he was really outraged by what was going on in Bosnia. He had just left the U.S. government. He had been ambassador to Turkey and to Thailand, and Assistant Secretary for Intelligence, and a career State Department hand, and, thus, knew how government worked, which I had no idea of. He knew that this government, our government, should be doing more, and wasn't doing enough, and felt that from the outside, he now was unleashed to try to mobilize societal forces. So as his research [assistant] and sort of on-again/off-again writer and aide, coffee-pourer, or whatever, I, too, because it was my responsibility, began to internalize some of what had been going on in Bosnia. Unlike my Tiananmen Square moment that I described, with Bosnia, I had had a total glazed-eye reaction to what had gone on. It felt like [it was] a problem that was a civil war. I was your typical American who just listened to my political leaders who told me it was a certain way, and didn't see it as genocide, didn't know the difference. But only in working and in having to pay attention to it did I realize it was something completely different.
It was at that point that I said, "My God, how can I stay here and be some pathetic coffee-pourer in Washington, when I could be a pathetic coffee-pourer in Sarajevo or someplace?" So I went. It was actually a very easy journalist community to break into, very welcoming, not at all cutthroat, and people really helped me when I got there. I became a freelancer, and ended up being a special correspondent for U.S. News and for The Economist for a couple years, until September of '95, and then went back in '96 after Dayton.
Your book is about genocide. It's a word that has come to have a particular definition in international law, on the one hand, and a kind of an emotive quality about it. Help us understand what it is that we should know about what that means, and how it becomes the basis for your study.
Well, the foundational story in the book is about Raphael Lemkin, who invented the word ["genocide"]. Going into this project, I thought this was a word that had to have been with us for as long as the practice has been with us -- namely, from Genesis forward. In fact, the word was invented in 1944. This is a man who had lost forty-nine members of his family in the Holocaust. And, interestingly, because he had been, for lack of a better phrase, an atrocity buff as a child, and had been reading about historical cases of mass slaughter, he was adamant that the Holocaust, or what had been done to his people, not actually be the standard for concern. So when he invented the word, instead of using the language of the Holocaust, of a definition that could be derived from the Holocaust, such as "a systematic attempt to exterminate every last member of a group," which is what people think when they hear "genocide," Lemkin wanted it to be a preventive category that would be more expansive -- not too expansive so that it was meaningless, but more expansive than "extermination." Because by definition, to prove an intent to exterminate every last member, you would only know that that had happened after every last member had been killed. So the language in the Genocide Convention, which Lemkin then drafted after he had gotten his new-found word into Webster's and the OED, the Convention defines genocide as "a systematic attempt to destroy in whole or in substantial part a national ethnic or religious group as such." And so, again, the language of destruction can be "degradation," can be "ethnic cleansing," can be mass rape, combined with killing. But the idea is that you're wiping out the group, whether it's the Srebrenica Muslims or Muslims in Bosnia, or the Rwandan Tutsi in a particular region in Rwanda, or the Tutsi as a whole in Rwanda -- you could subdivide groups; but if your intent is to wipe out that group as a group, as such, then you're committing genocide.
[The word "genocide"] has, of course, both benefited from the association with the Holocaust, because that is what gives the word the stigma, and has suffered from it, in that, in a sense, we've set the bar at six million. So when Bosnia happened, we said, "Oh, you know, it's not quite like the Holocaust. I mean, some Muslims are able to get out. It's not like the Serbs are killing all of them." That's enough to say, "Well, that takes it outside the category of crime that we said we would 'never again' allow."
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