| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Samantha Power Interview: Conversations with History: Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Page 4 of 5
When Philip Gourevitch was here, talking about the origins of his study on Rwanda, he talked about an experience that he had going to the Holocaust Museum, and realizing that in some ways the culture was saying, "Well, now that we've built the museum, it's a way to remember, and then that's it." So it actually becomes, in some ways, a substitute. I'm paraphrasing what he said. But there's an interesting idea that relates to the definition that you've just given us. You're saying that the definition [of genocide] opens up possibilities for action that would not be the case if, as you said, everybody would have to be wiped out before we could decide there had been genocide. So it's a call to action before it's consummated.
In principle, that's what it is, yes. But in the very vagueness of the language, it's an opportunity for action, as you say, [but] it's also an opportunity for denial.
Right.
So you move the bar ever higher if what you're interested in doing is actually suppressing public outrage. This sounds very Machiavellian, but ultimately, because we have made a cultural commitment to remembering the Holocaust -- we do that well, we actually remember the Holocaust very impressively, and I will agree with all of Philip's critiques about the museum, I'm sure -- but, ultimately, in terms of remembering those victims, alerting people to the evil of the Nazis, specifically, we've done a remarkable job, especially considering the small minority of our country that was actually directly affected by the Holocaust, considering it took place a continent away, etc.
But what we've never made a priority out of doing is stopping genocide. They don't go naturally together. I think is part of what Philip is saying is that [we built] a museum in service of remembering the past, [but] we didn't build a genocide museum. That would have been little risky because we would have to have included some of our own nastiness in that. We built a Holocaust Museum, and we built it with a forward-looking, can-do American spirit -- "Never again! Never again!" You know, "Bah-bah-bah ... " But there was nothing that complemented that in the White House, where a president actually went before the American people and said, "Genocide is not happening on my watch. Here's the contingency military plan that we're doing for X country, Y country. Here's the consultation with our allies that we're going to do to see how this very hefty burden can be shared among nations. Here are public speeches I'm going to make to bring the American people on board, and to introduce them to the definition of genocide actually as its drafted in the wall, and what we're obliged to do, and what even if we're not obliged to, we're going to do, both because it's the moral thing to do and because if we don't do it, it will come back to haunt us later." And the whole set of arguments that would be made. Nothing. Our policy in the abstract toward genocide: silence. And our policy case by case, is, in fact, not coincidentally, silence.
And in this book, which is rather comprehensive, I must say, you look at the Turkish actions against the Armenian people, you look at the Holocaust, you look at a number of contemporary cases, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, what was done by the Hutus to the Tutsis in Rwanda, and so on. What was the big shock for you? In other words, were you taken aback by not only how little we had done, but, in fact, -- let me summarize it this way -- you're not really talking about sins of omission, you're also talking about sins of commission.
It depends. For the most part, senior officials rarely adopt the mental state to own a set of policies. So in the Rwanda case, the president, shockingly -- this shocked me -- when 800,000 people were being murdered in a 100-day period, he never had a cabinet-level meeting. The president never actually assembled his advisors to say, "Okay, let's talk about what Somalia means for our response to what ... "
You mean Rwanda ... ?
No, "Let's talk about what the implications of Somalia, what happened in Somalia ... "
Black Hawk Down, right.
" ... for our policy in Rwanda. Let's actually have a conversation about that, and see how far we can go. If we're not going to go all the way because of Black Hawk Down, what are we going to do?" No. So the president is nowhere on the issue. His National Security Advisor is nowhere. The Secretary State is nowhere. And so in that sense, they are sins of omission, with colossal human consequences. But that usually masks decisions not to decide. Ultimately there is a level of agency, and in fact, that administration, even though it didn't have any high level discussion about it and just really didn't pay much attention at all, did proactively insist that the peacekeepers in Rwanda who were there under General Dallaire, who were there allegedly protecting the Tutsi before the genocide started, once the killing began, and even though U.S. cables described "the systematic destruction of the Tutsi," the U.S. position, the Clintonian position, was to yank the peacekeepers.
So there's an instance where it's not merely as if we're leaving the peacekeepers where they are, the 2500, [saying,] "Make do, and good luck to you. It's not our problem. It's not in our national interest," or whatever. What we do is instead we say we actually don't want peacekeepers there because if they get into trouble, people are going to turn to us, and we are going to become implicated in this. So better to make the whole thing go away by making the Western presence specifically go away. So we went to the Security Council, in, I think, the most shameful hour in Security Council history, and said, "Yes, we're sorry about the killing, the ethnic war, the tribal blah-blah-blah that's going on in Rwanda, but we demand a full UN withdrawal." And what this meant -- the U.S. only got 90 percent withdrawal -- but what it meant was that the peacekeepers would be yanked through one gate by Washington and by [the other] capitals, and the Tutsi who had come to rely on them were left inside these UN observation posts with no protection, and the militia would enter through the other [gate] and murder everybody inside. So that's commission.
You're suggesting that oftentimes it would take very little to stop the genocide. In this particular case, the Canadian general [Dallaire] has said that if he had had a few thousand more troops, he could have stopped them, and if he had been allowed to stay. In this particular genocide, also, you talk about we could have jammed the radios that were giving the orders and so on.
As I read the book and I listen to you, I think one of the elements that helps us understand why we refuse to act is the weight of history. So in the case of the Clinton administration, they were burned by taking over the engagement in Somalia, and the incident now portrayed in the movie Black Hawk Down occurred on their watch. And so the notion that we might lose some American lives was more important in the scales and had actually come to define the administration's policies towards certain parts of the world.
Yes, "there's always something." In fact, there are always many more good reasons not to get involved than to get involved. The only reason to get involved is a moral reason, really. At least that's how it's experienced at the time. It turns out there are actually very good national security reasons to get involved, too, in that allowing this kind of hate, and legitimizing this kind of genocide as a tool of statecraft, usually comes back to haunt us. Given that we allowed the Bosnian Muslims to die for the first half of the 1990s, it's not a surprise to hear, though it was very disappointing to hear, that bin Laden got in there and traveled for the better part of the last decade on a Bosnian passport. Similarly, Saddam, who you mentioned, used chemical weapons against the Kurds in 1987, and yet we were giving him substantial economic aid at the time, in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, Sr. The chemical weapons that he tested out on the Kurds that we refused to denounce -- indeed we doubled our aid program to him the following year -- these are the very chemicals we're now afraid he's going to use against American citizens.
So there are long-term security risks, but the short-term imperative is a moral imperative. As you say, that's on one side of the ledger. And morality doesn't go very far in Washington. If you start talking about values, you're not going to get invited to the next meeting, for the most part. You have to be very careful. So everybody is trying to make these long-term systemic interest reasons, even if they're motivated by more inspiration.
On the other side of the ledger are these things that have just happened in history. So in the case of Cambodia, as Pol Pot is killing two million of his own people, we are completely haunted by Vietnam. In the case of Iraq, we are filtering everything Saddam does through our experience in 1979 in Iran, and feel like almost no matter what Saddam does, he's got to be better than them. Well, no, as a matter of fact, he really isn't better than them; I think we've learned that over time. With Rwanda, as you say, Black Hawk has just gone down.
The filtering, the tendency to fight the last war and process everything through the recent historical experience; all of that just means that there is a perception that there will be a cost to engagement. But fighting the last war, distorting the lessons of history and over-applying them, or applying them in the wrong context, without seeing what made particular historical circumstances unique, raises the perception that you will pay a price when you act. The real tragedy of the last hundred years is that politicians can, in good reasonable conscience, calculate that they will pay no price by doing nothing. You [can] see, "Oh, my God. That's what happened when we did that. And that's what happened when we did that," and you look back in history and [see that] nobody's ever paid an electoral price for allowing genocide.
The book is told through these upstanders, not the bystanders, but through these people who try to take a stand. A number of elections that have been lost by people who have, particularly, made stopping the genocide in Bosnia, their daily business. The voters penalize them. And look at Dallaire, the Canadian commander, the price that he has paid for taking a stand. Looking at the resignees -- more resignations over Bosnia than over Vietnam -- and the way that they were marginalized and demonized. When you're delivering the message to your higher-ups that genocide has to be stopped, you're going to be [attacked] on all fronts because it's not just delivering a message that nobody wants to hear because they don't agree with it, it's delivering a message that nobody wants to hear because it challenges their self-identity. The tendency is to unleash ferocious attacks against the people who stand up. So it's overall determined in favor of doing nothing.
What it would take to overcome that would be either presidential leadership, or the rest of the outside doing more, quicker, to create the perception that there would be a political cost to doing nothing.
This is very important, this point about how to educate the public, how to create the political basis for making genocide a real concern.
But let me understand a little more about these leaders. If we look at the Reagan and Bush administrations towards Saddam, one of the pressures there was domestic economic interest with regard to continuing aid, because the farm lobby wanted it and the manufacturers who were benefiting because Saddam was using our credits to buy their products. So political interests are sometimes at work. Now, you seem to be suggesting that this combination of political interests and short-term perspectives prevent [leaders] from seeing our long-term interests. Because you are suggesting, for example, that, looking at Bosnia, if Secretary of State Baker had not said, "We don't have any dogs in that fight," very early in the process, then this whole genocide issues might never had arisen.
Yes. A stitch in time saves nine. The problem, though, of course, is that if something is prevented, we don't know, so nobody ever gets any credit for it. I think Kosovo is the best illustration of this. People who are critics of the Kosovo intervention (and I think that the majority is critical of the Kosovo intervention, so it's important to address that), should ask themselves, if we had listened to General Dallaire in Rwanda, who in January of 1994 sent a famous cable to Kofi Annan in New York, who was then the head of peacekeeping, saying, "The militias can exterminate at a rate of a thousand every twenty minutes"-- if we had listened to Dallaire and actually acted on that cable, instead of ignoring it as we did, and gone in -- like, let's say, the United States would have seen Somalia as being a case [of intervening] in time, and Rwanda as being something separate and important and potentially genocidal -- had we intervened preemptively, probably 500 civilians would have been killed, something like that, as in Kosovo. Probably Hutu would have been put on one side of the country, Tutsi on the other; and the ACLU and all the human rights groups would [object], and Dallaire would be seen as a crackpot, and none of us would ever know about the 800,000 [actually killed]. So there's a real structural problem, in that sense, as well.
Democratic administrations might be just a wee bit more likely to take the humanitarian concerns more seriously and to contemplate doing social work, let's say, domestically and abroad; while the Republicans are more capable of seeing good and evil, but eschew the notion that it's government's job to do social work. Then what Democratic administrations have to reckon with is the extent to which they will be criticized for intervening, because one of their most potent constituencies would say, "Never assume a good motive when a bad motive will do." The reality is that when intervention does come about -- I mean, military intervention, because there are lots of softer forms of intervention, as you mentioned, that I think should be employed -- but when military intervention happens, the critics come out in droves. [Intervention] is always motivated by values, yes, but marginally; you need something else. In the case of Bosnia, it was political interest, it was President Clinton's finally paying a domestic political price for doing nothing about Bosnia. He was seeing himself getting dragged in, regardless. I think he said, "Enough! I have to own this, I'm humiliated." That was domestic political interest, it wasn't mere humanitarianism.
Operation Provide Comfort, in Northern Iraq after the second Kurdish crisis -- not when Saddam was gassing his people, but after the Gulf War, when they rose up and were quashed -- there, Turkey called on the Bush administration and said, "You don't have a dog in this fight either, but help us. We do. We don't want a million Kurds in Southern Turkey." And there, our deference to that relationship and also the prior investment of American credibility in the region, such that when those Kurds came over, unlike the ones three years before, when they came across the border, that tragedy was Americanized, because we had just fought the Gulf War, and we were humiliated by the exodus.
So, again, there's always something else going on, and unsurprisingly, because it requires those other [interests], when intervention of any kind takes place, there's a tendency to assume that it's cynical and in service of other ends. What I would say is that it is in service of other ends, but that often it will still do more good than harm. We have to be prepared to throw some of our weight in the interest of saving people, to recognize that American leadership, unfortunately, remains essential in motivating multilateral interventions, in freeing up the UN to do what it should be doing. Indeed, even diplomatically, [we must use] the leverage and the strength of America's normative power, which [surprisingly] still exists, rather than bypass leadership. I've come to realize is that leadership is binary: when America doesn't lead, everyone else sees it as leadership not to act.
So in other words, if America doesn't act first, then they don't act.
It's been the pattern across time. No democratic country wants to do anything about this problem. So if they can point to the United States and say, "Well, the U.S. is blocking us," or "The U.S. doesn't want to do anything," or "Did you hear? The U.S. says it's a 'problem from hell,' it's not genocide." No sitting American president has ever used the word genocide to describe a genocide under way. But the same is true of Western European leaders, and the neighboring countries around these genocidal regimes. They're usually in bed or at war, or they have too many dogs in the fight, essentially. The United States is hardly alone, but everyone else can [then] point to American apathy or American powers of dissuasion, which is what happened in Rwanda: the United States tried to convince other countries not to act, and, indeed blocked them, because multilaterally, of course, the United States is going to pay for just about a third of whatever gets done. And so at that point, the U.S. is saying, "Not only do we not want to go, we don't want anyone else to go either. We don't want to get dragged in à la Somalia," as you say, "and we don't want to pay."
One of the criticisms leveled at your book, in a review that generally praised the book, was made by Brian Urquhart in the New York Review. He said there wasn't enough of a focus on international organizations, and international mechanisms for responding. You've just suggested that if America doesn't lead, then nothing happens. Talk a little more about that. Do you see entrée points for leadership occurring elsewhere in the system?
This criticism of the book -- I've heard it now in a number of places, not only in Urquhart's otherwise generous review in the New York Review, but also in the New York Times review -- I'm a little puzzled by it, because, number one, nobody knows better than Brian Urquhart the extent to which the United States has interfered with the development of a more robust and independent United Nations. Nobody knows better than anybody who has spent any time within the United Nations, how, unfortunately, beholden the very narrow sliver called the Secretariat is. In a sense, what you have is the Security Council, then you have the General Assembly making noise around the margin, and then you have this tiny little sliver that is meant to be the part of the UN that has a mind, and eventually, one hopes, an army and a bank account of its own. I'm all for making that a more robust entity, so that Kofi Annan can actually do something instead of just going with tin cup in hand to the member states. But the world we live in is one in which he has to go with tin cup to the member states, and the member state that I have focused on is the United States.
You could take any Security Council power and write the other problem from hell, "Russia and the Age of Genocide," and the third problem from hell, "France and the Age of Genocide." I mean, we have a problem, in that the people who control our international institutions have never made stopping genocide the priority. Indeed, a couple of the countries on the Security Council in recent years, including Russia today vis-à-vis Chechnya, have either committed genocide or come very close. And the likelihood that they are going to open up that body and enhance its capacities to interfere in the internal affairs of a sovereign state is just not practical in the moment. It doesn't mean we can't aspire to it, and I'm the first person to acknowledge that any response to genocide has to be multilateral. The burden of preventing it, even diplomatically/economically, is hefty, it's huge. But what we see again and again is that the United States controls the United Nations, fundamentally. Especially in the post-Cold War world, we're lying a little lower. And so without dealing with the problem of each individual member state, to talk about the UN as if it has a mind of its own, it's just not the world we live in at the moment.
What I'm hearing is a very subtle understanding of both power and idealism at the same time, and that's kind of rare. I think the idealists often don't have a sense of power, and the people who know power talk idealism, but they don't do both. So this is kind of intriguing. Let's take two of the principals that you talk about, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, both in their ways highly moralistic, on the left side of the equation and so on, and one would believe that both could understand the kinds of issues you raise and their normative importance. But in the end, they're trapped. In the case of Carter, with regard to Cambodia and Khmer Rouge, he had other things that his administration thought were more important, namely relations with China, primarily, that prevented them from turning against the Khmer Rouge; and also remembrances of wars past, the Vietnam War. And in the case of Clinton, we've already talked about that. So I guess the question becomes, at what point do we have to move people like that when they're in office, or is that never going to happen?
Well, I think, again, the intervention in Bosnia is an illustration of how it can happen when it happens. I went into this project, as I said, wanting to understand why the Bosnians were the exception to the rule of genocide prevention. It took me five minutes to realize that, in fact, they were the norm; and then it took me five years to realize, no, they were the exception. They were the exception because we did more to help them than we did any other victim of genocide in the twentieth century. It was shocking to me, but why was that? Well, it was because The New York Times gave it two full pages every day, with a little box, Summary/Update, for people who were just coming new to it, because you had more resignations over Bosnia than over Vietnam, because you had significant power players in Congress, including Bob Dole, Joe Biden, John McCain, Joseph Lieberman -- people who were establishment players, who owned it, who weren't afraid, who have a lot less to lose, mind you, than the executive.
That shows you how the domestic political calculus can be shifted if you can get the politics right. But it also took three and a half years. I wouldn't count on America. We haven't seen an American leader, yet, anyway, who has the vision and the courage, the fortitude, to take the American people into a situation like this, to make the case that it's a long-term security threat, to make the case that reality isn't a dirty word in foreign policy. And that it doesn't mean that you're leading a crusade, it means you're actually just trying to suppress genocide, and that when we said "never again," that's what we mean. It doesn't mean that you're being the world's policeman, it means you're teaming up with others and strengthening other institutions, so that you don't have to shoulder the burden. Because the United States sabotages the UN's development in a way, and then points to the UN when something like this happens, and says, "Go UN, you take care of this." And the UN responds, "Couldn't you have thought of that five minutes ago, when you were deciding whether you were going to pay us your dues or not?"
So I think Carter and Clinton indicate in their manners just how difficult it is for somebody who has made it through a system where they've put their political fortunes, obviously, pretty high on their list of things to do. But how rare it is that you would see that kind of personal fortitude that would withstand all of the political pressures, and all the good reasons to do nothing, where they would just say "I don't care about the good reasons to look away, I care about the reason to look." And once they've looked and ceased to call it a "problem from hell," then it's actually very difficult for them. I think Clinton, after he went to Rwanda, genuinely had a more difficult time looking away from the Balkans. I think if Kosovo had happened prior to that trip to Rwanda, we would still be waiting and Milosevic would still be in power, and the Albanians would still be under Serbian rule. But Clinton really felt, "My God, I have two genocides on my watch. I'm going to have a third now? No, better to deal with the grief from the Left of intervening, even if imperfectly, than to live with the legacy" -- he was a legacy guy, after all -- "of having a third genocide." But he had made the mistake of looking, in a sense, and then it became much, much harder for him to tell himself the stories that both he and President Carter, and every other president in the twentieth century, had told themselves in order to justify looking away.
Next page: Lessons Learned
© Copyright 2002, Regents of the University of California