An amateur historian of mass slaughter from medieval times to the twentieth century, Lemkin knew that genocide would continue to occur with “biological regularity.” Moreover, he knew from reviewing the recent past that if it were left to political leaders to decide how to respond, they would inevitably privilege their short-term interests over both the moral imperative of stopping genocide and the long-term consequences of ignoring it.
In 1948, largely on Lemkin’s prodding, the UN General Assembly unanimously passed the United Nations’ first-ever human rights treaty, the Genocide Convention, which required signatories “to undertake to prevent and punish” genocide. The Convention’s language was vague on precisely how the UN member states would meet their obligations, making no mention of military intervention and trusting that domestic prosecution of future “genocidists” would deter massacres. Still, the lively debates over ratification that occurred in national legislatures testified to the seriousness with which delegates believed they were committing their country’s resources and prestige to banning targeted slaughter.
More than a half century has passed since the Genocide Convention came into effect, and genocide has proceeded virtually unabated. Press coverage of the atrocities has generated outrage, but it has generally been insufficient to prompt Western action. As the 1990s showed, particularly in the reactions of the United States and Europe to carnage in Yugoslavia and Rwanda (the scene, in 1994, of the fastest and most efficient genocidal campaign of the twentieth century), Western countries replicated the pattern established in their earlier responses to the rise and domination of Hitler—long after they had supposedly internalized the “lessons of the Holocaust.”
In order to understand this pattern—and by extension, put an end to it—we must first confront the grim record of international responses to genocide in the twentieth century. In 1915, the Turkish minister of the interior, Talaat Pasha, and the other Young Turk leaders set out to solve Turkey’s “Armenia problem” by murdering leading Armenian intellectuals and deporting the rest of the population into the desert, where many would be killed by local gendarmerie, by starvation, or by disease. Some one million Armenians died. Germany, which was aligned with Turkey in the war, actively covered up eyewitness reports of atrocities. Russia, Britain, and France, fighting against Turkey and Germany in the war, publicized ghastly massacre reports. The Allies also called upon the United States to use its leverage as a neutral power either to convince Turkey to mend its ways or to press Germany to squeeze its ally. Woodrow Wilson’s administration carefully guarded its neutrality, which was strongly favored by the American people, and resisted these calls for diplomatic intervention. With the exception of the U.S. ambassador in Constantinople (now Istanbul) Henry Morgenthau, Sr., and other consular officials in the field, U.S. officials remained mute. A nongovernmental organization known as the Armenia Atrocities Committee drew wide public attention to the murder of fellow Christians and even managed to raise money for humanitarian aid. But the group drew the ire of former president Theodore Roosevelt for simultaneously denouncing the Turkish slaughter and opposing U.S. military intervention with pacifist appeals to “put safety first.” In the end, despite heavy coverage of the Turkish horrors in the New York Times and elsewhere, Wilson took no measures that would have put U.S. neutrality in doubt. When the United States finally entered the war in 1917, it did not declare war on Turkey and did not join the Allies’ postwar efforts to prosecute Turkish war criminals.
The Nazi genocide, which followed two decades later, left six million Jews and five million Poles, Roma, homosexuals, and political opponents dead. Before the Holocaust, neither U.S. nor European diplomats uttered much protest when Germany passed the Nuremberg Laws and began destroying Jewish businesses, synagogues, and homes. Britain and France went to war with Germany after it invaded Poland in September 1939. But President Franklin Roosevelt, like Wilson, kept America neutral. Only after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and after Adolf Hitler declared war on the United States did the United States join the European battle. Together, the Allies did nothing directly aimed at impeding the Nazis’ extermination of the Jews. They feared that drawing attention to the murder of Jews or admitting additional refugees would undermine domestic public support for the war. Thus, they downplayed the numerous and graphic atrocity reports smuggled out of Nazi-occupied territory or intercepted by Allied intelligence officials. They took shelter in the utter inconceivability of what was being documented. To those who pressed for sterner measures, Western leaders argued that the Allies would achieve more by focusing their military resources on winning battlefield victories than on disrupting concentration camp traffic.
The Nuremberg and Tokyo trials prosecuted the leading perpetrators of crimes against humanity after the Second World War, but political leaders saw the real crime of the Axis powers as waging a “crime against peace.” Although the mere fact of prosecution represented a major inroad into state sovereignty, the wartime perpetrators were not prosecuted for crimes they committed before the Nazi invasion of Poland. The cardinal sin was not seen to be Hitler’s “genocide” (a term rarely used at Nuremberg), but the cross-border aggression, which was a permanent threat to international stability and, by inference, the strategic interests of the world’s leading powers.
The 1948 Genocide Convention, by contrast, made political leaders liable for genocide committed during peace or wartime, inside a state or outside it. Still, in 1969, Britain maintained active support for the Nigerian government while it starved and murdered the Ibo people of Biafra. Eyeing potentially vast oil reserves in Iboland, the United States and the other European powers followed the British lead, opposing Biafran secession and insisting that food be delivered through Lagos, even though the Nigerian government openly used starvation as a weapon of war. Two years later, the Western powers did not protest when Pakistan responded to a Bengali autonomy movement in East Pakistan by sending in its army and murdering more than a million people. The Nixon administration backed Pakistan, which was its intermediary with the People’s Republic of China, and, when the U.S. consul-general in Dhaka dissented, the State Department recalled him from his post. In 1972, when the Tutsi government in Burundi killed some hundred thousand Hutu, the Western powers downplayed the atrocities, treating them as an “internal affair.” In all three cases of genocide, the economic and strategic interests of the United States and its European allies caused them to side with the genocidal governments and to invoke “sovereignty” as an excuse for refraining even from complaint.
One might have expected a more spirited response to the Cambodian genocide that occurred from 1975 to 1979 because it was communist radicals (known as the Khmer Rouge, or Red Khmer) who murdered nearly two million of the country’s seven million people. But in the aftermath of Vietnam, Western governments paid little heed to bloodshed committed in a part of the world they were anxious to leave behind. President Gerald Ford denounced the Khmer Rouge’s massacres for a month, but then went completely silent. President Jimmy Carter, the first U.S. president to champion human rights, made no mention of Pol Pot’s slaughter for the first two years of his presidency. Although the United States had recently renewed diplomatic ties with China, U.S. officials did not ask China to use its influence with the Khmer Rouge. Once the Vietnamese had overthrown the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in January 1979, the Carter administration, Ronald Reagan’s administration, and all of the European powers maintained recognition of the regime rather than allow the Vietnamese-installed government to be seated at the United Nations or leave the UN seat empty. Pol Pot’s representatives occupied Cambodia’s seat at the UN for another decade.
In 1987-1988, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein set out to wipe out the country’s rural Kurdish population. Iraqi soldiers and police bulldozed several thousand villages, rounded up and executed men, women, and children who remained in homes that fell within Hussein’s “prohibited zones,” and turned chemical weapons against the Kurdish people, sending tens of thousands of civilians fleeing into neighboring Turkey and Iran. Several European states armed Hussein in this period, and the Reagan administration provided more than five hundred million dollars worth of annual agricultural and manufacturing credits. For the first year of the campaign, none of the Western powers condemned the atrocities, even privately. When Senators Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.) and Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) introduced sanctions legislation that would have suspended the generous U.S. credit program, the Reagan administration and the farm lobby blocked the measure, even though the human toll of Hussein’s gas attacks had earned front-page news coverage. The White House took the position it did because it had decided to maintain friendly relations with its Gulf ally (and enemy of its enemy, Iran) and to advance the interests of U.S. farmers and manufacturers. It was wholeheartedly supported by most lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
With the end of the cold war and the apparent rebirth of the UN (aided by the obsolescence of the superpower veto), one might have expected a greater readiness to prevent genocide. But the pattern of nonintervention established in 1915 proved durable. In 1992, when Bosnian Serbs began systematically deporting and murdering Muslims and Croats in Bosnia, the United States and Europe decided not to intervene with air strikes to protect civilians. They also opted not to lift a UN arms embargo against the Muslims, even though they knew the measure froze in place a gross imbalance between the outgunned Muslims and their Serb foes, who had inherited the arsenal of the Yugoslav National Army. Britain, France, and the Netherlands responded to public pressure by contributing peacekeepers, but the United States refused to risk its troops to deliver food or protect people under siege. European and American political leaders were unanimous in their belief that they had “no dog” in the Balkan fight. When Bill Clinton assumed the Oval Office in 1993, he contested his predecessor’s tendency to blame “all sides” for the violence, pointing out that the bulk of the atrocities were being committed by the Serbs. But he did not contest the prevalent policy of nonintervention. Fearing confrontation with his military, unsure of domestic political support, and determined to avoid “Americanizing” the war and endangering U.S. soldiers, Clinton avoided meaningful action. Some two hundred thousand people were killed in a three-and-a-half-year war.
The genocide in Rwanda, which occurred in 1994, two years after the beginning of the Bosnian War, left some eight hundred thousand Tutsi and moderate Hutu murdered in one hundred days. France armed and diplomatically defended the genocidal government. Belgium, which contributed troops to a UN mission meant to help usher in Hutu-Tutsi power-sharing, yanked its troops out of Rwanda despite its detailed understanding of the pace and scope of the early massacres. The Clinton administration, burned by a UN mission gone bad in Somalia, kept U.S. troops far from the scene of the crime. But, more egregiously, despite knowing that Tutsi were being systematically murdered, the Clinton team demanded that the full UN mission be withdrawn from Rwanda and then resisted U.S. involvement of even the mildest form. Senior U.S. officials wanted to reduce the likelihood of eventually being drawn into Africa, and they sought to show a U.S. Congress skeptical of the UN that they had toughened up their approach to peacekeeping and learned, in the president’s words, “to say ‘no.’” Just as they had done during the Bosnia War, U.S. and European officials went out of their way to avoid branding the carnage “genocide.” This was partly out of fear of triggering their obligations under the Genocide Convention, but mainly it was to avoid the moral stigma associated with allowing what Lemkin described as “the ultimate crime.”
In sum, the United States and its European allies have wholeheartedly endorsed the pledge of “never again,” while tolerating unspeakable atrocities that have been committed in clear view. The personalities, ideologies, and geopolitical constraints have shifted with time, but the major powers have consistently refused to take risks to suppress genocide. Whatever the growth in public awareness of the Holocaust and the triumphalism about the ascent of liberal democratic values, the last decade of the twentieth century was one of the most deadly in the grimmest century on record.
Genocide occurred after the cold war, after the growth of human rights groups, after the explosion of instant communications, and after the erection of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Perversely, public awareness of the Holocaust often seemed to set the bar for concern so high that citizens and statesmen were able to tell themselves that contemporary genocides were not measuring up. As the writer David Rieff once noted, “never again” might best be defined as, “Never again would Germans kill Jews in Europe in the 1940s.” Either by averting their eyes or attending to more pressing conventional strategic and political concerns, Western leaders have repeatedly denounced the Holocaust and allowed genocide.
What is most shocking about the reaction of what Lemkin called the “civilized world” to these twentieth-century genocides is not that the Western powers did not deploy their ground forces to combat the atrocities, but that they did little along a continuum of intervention—from the merely rhetorical to the aggressively military—to deter the crime. Because their “vital national interests” were not considered imperiled by mere genocide, military intervention was rarely even considered. But because it was not considered, high-level officials in the United States and Europe often were not involved in debating alternate policy options. Instead of giving genocide the moral attention it warranted and at least vigilantly denouncing the perpetrators, Western governments repeatedly trusted in negotiation, clung to diplomatic niceties and neutrality, and shipped humanitarian aid.
Indeed, on occasion, the Western powers directly or indirectly aided those committing genocide. Beginning in 1979 and continuing throughout the 1980s, the United States orchestrated the vote at the UN to favor maintaining recognition of the Khmer Rouge. The Western powers sided with and supplied credits, military intelligence, and arms to Iraq while Hussein was attempting to wipe out Iraqi Kurds. The major powers used their clout on the UN Security Council to mandate the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers from Rwanda and to block the deployment of reinforcements. They maintained an arms embargo against the Bosnian Muslims even after it was clear that the arms ban prevented the Muslims from defending themselves. And they made promises to the people of Srebrenica and Rwanda they did not intend to keep.
Nearly a century after the “race murder” of the Armenians and more than a half century after the liberation of the Nazi death camps, the crucial question is, why do decent men and women who firmly believe genocide should “never again” be permitted allow it to happen? The most typical response throughout the twentieth century was, “We didn’t know.” But this is simply untrue. To be sure, the information emanating from countries victimized by genocide was imperfect. Embassy personnel were withdrawn, intelligence assets on the ground were scarce, editors were typically reluctant to assign their reporters to places where neither Western interests nor Western readers were engaged, and journalists who attempted to report the atrocities were limited in their mobility. As a result, refugee claims were difficult to confirm and body counts notoriously hard to establish. Because genocide is usually veiled beneath the cover of war, when the killing began, some Western officials had genuine difficulty initially distinguishing genocide from conventional conflict.
But although Western governments did not know all there was to know about the nature and scale of the violence, they knew plenty. Well-connected ambassadors and junior intelligence analysts pumped a steady stream of information up the chain to senior decision makers—both early warnings ahead of genocide and vivid documentation during it. Much of the best intelligence appeared in the morning papers. Back in 1915, when communications were far more primitive, the New York Times managed 145 stories about the Turkish massacre of Armenians. During the Holocaust, though stories on the extermination of the Jews were not given anywhere near the prominence they warranted, they did regularly appear. In 1994, the Times reported just four days after the beginning of the Rwanda genocide that “tens of thousands” of Rwandans had already been murdered. It devoted more column inches to the horrors of Bosnia between 1992 and 1995 than it did to any other single foreign story.
With advances in technology and in the monitoring of human rights groups, Western leaders have begun relying on a second claim: “We didn’t fully appreciate.” This President Clinton said in an apology delivered in Rwanda four years after the genocide: “We did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed of the unimaginable terror which engulfed you.” This claim, too, is misleading. It is true that the atrocities that were known remained abstract and remote, rarely acquiring the status of knee-buckling knowledge among ordinary citizens. Because the savagery of genocide so defied our everyday experience, many of us failed to comprehend what we had never experienced first-hand. Armenian, Jewish, Cambodian, Tutsi, Bosnian, and other survivors and witnesses have had trouble making “the unbelievable believable.” The bystanders were thus able to inhabit what one Protestant theologian in the Second World War called the “twilight between knowing and not knowing.”
But we must take responsibility for our incredulity. The Holocaust is too present in Western schoolbooks and culture today for genocide to be “unimaginable.” We should have learned far sooner to trust even those accounts that could not be independently verified. The stories that emerge from genocidal societies are, by definition, “incredible.” Case after case of wishful thinking debunked should have led us to shift the burden of proof away from the harried refugees and to the doubting skeptics who should be required to offer persuasive reasons for disputing refugee claims. A bias toward belief would do less harm than a bias toward disbelief. Instead of aggressively hunting for knowledge or publicizing what was already known, Western officials took shelter in the fog of plausible deniability. In the face of genocide, the search for certainty frequently became an excuse for paralysis and postponement. In most cases of genocide, those who “did not know” or “did not appreciate” chose not to do so.
The second consoling response usually offered to the question of why the major powers did so little to stop genocide is that any intervention would have been futile. Each time states began slaughtering and deporting their citizens, Western officials claimed that the proposed measures would do little to stem the horrors, or that they would do more harm than good. Usually they cited this lack of capacity to ameliorate suffering as a central reason for staying uninvolved. If the hatreds were “age-old” and “two-sided,” as was usually claimed, and if the “parties” had in fact been killing one another “for centuries,” the implication was that they would kill one another for centuries more. Thus, there was little a well-meaning band of foreign do-gooders could achieve by meddling.
It is difficult, in retrospect, to ascertain what a determined diplomatic, economic, legal, or military intervention could have achieved or what it would have cost. All we do know is that the perpetrators of genocide were quick studies who were remarkably attuned both to the tactics of their predecessors and to the world’s response. From their brutal forerunners, they picked up lessons in everything from dehumanizing their victims and deploying euphemisms to constructing concentration camps and covering their tracks. And from the outside world, they learned the lesson of impunity. The Turkish minister of the interior, Talaat Pasha, was aware that Sultan Abdul Hamid II had gotten away with murdering Armenians in 1895. In 1939 Hitler was emboldened by the fact that absolutely nobody “remembered the Armenians.” Saddam Hussein noted the international community’s relaxed response to his chemical weapons attacks against Iran and his bulldozing of Kurdish villages. He rightly assumed he would not be punished for using poison gases against the Kurds. Rwandan gunmen deliberately targeted the Belgian peacekeepers at the start of their genocide because they knew from the U.S. reaction to the deaths of eighteen U.S. soldiers in Somalia that the murder of Western troops would likely precipitate their withdrawal. The Bosnian Serbs publicly celebrated the Mogadishu casualties, knowing that they would never have to do battle with U.S. ground forces. Slobodan Milosevic saw that he got away with the brutal suppression of independence movements in Slovenia and Croatia and reasoned he would pay no price for doing the same in Bosnia and Kosovo. Because so many individual perpetrators were killing for the first time and deciding daily how far they would go, the United States and its European allies missed critical opportunities to try to deter them. When they ignored genocide around the world, the Western powers were not intending to “green light” the perpetrators. But because the killers told themselves they were doing the world a favor by “cleansing” the “undesirables,” some surely interpreted silence as consent or even support.
Although it is impossible to know the impact of steps never taken, the best testament to what the Western powers might have achieved is what they did achieve. For all the talk of the futility of foreign involvement, in the rare instances that the United States and its allies took even small steps, they appear to have saved lives. After Senator Pell’s sanctions effort forced a reluctant Reagan White House to condemn Saddam Hussein’s gas attacks, the Iraqi dictator did not again use gas against the Kurds. In 1991, after the appeals of Turkey and the personal encounter of U.S. Secretary of State James Baker with Kurdish refugees, the allies succeeded in creating a safe haven for the Kurds in northern Iraq, enabling more than a million Kurds to return to their homes. On a smaller scale, a Rwandan hotel owner credits the mere phone calls of a U.S. diplomat with deterring militias from attacking Tutsi inhabitants of his hotel during the genocide. The 503 UN peacekeepers who remained in Rwanda throughout the genocide protected some 25,000 Rwandans. NATO bombing in Bosnia, when it finally came, rapidly brought that three-and-a-half-year war to a close. Although imperfect, NATO bombing in Kosovo in 1999 liberated 1.7 million Albanians from tyrannical Serb rule. And a handful of NATO arrests in the former Yugoslavia has caused dozens of suspected war criminals to turn themselves in to the UN war crimes tribunal. One cannot assume that every measure proposed would have been effective, but there is no doubt that even these small and tardy steps saved hundreds of thousands of lives. If the Western powers had made genocide prevention a priority, they could have saved countless more.
The real reason the United States and the European states did not do what they could and should have done to stop genocide was not a lack of knowledge or a lack of capacity, but a lack of will. Simply put, Western 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 policies crafted in response to each of the major genocides of the twentieth century were not the accidental products of neglect. They were concrete choices made by the world’s most influential decision makers after implicit and explicit weighing of costs and benefits. One of the most important and reluctant conclusions one must reach is that the record of the “civilized” world is not one of failure. It is one of “success.” The system worked.
To illuminate this point, let us look specifically at the goals of policy makers in the United States. The European responses have either tended to be driven by similar motivations as those of U.S. decision makers or the European allies have directly followed the U.S. lead. From the Armenia genocide forward, U.S. policy makers in the executive branch (usually with the passive backing of most members of Congress) have had two objectives. First, they wanted to avoid engagement in conflicts that posed little threat to American interests, narrowly defined. 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 over-emphasized the ambiguity of the facts. They played up the likely downsides of any proposed intervention. They steadfastly avoided use of the word “genocide,” which they believed carried with it legal and moral (and thus political) imperatives 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.
To understand why the United States did not do more to stem genocide, of course, it is not enough to focus on the actions of American presidents or their foreign-policy teams. In a democracy, even an administration disinclined to act can be pressured into doing so. This pressure can come from inside and outside. Bureaucrats within the system who grasp the stakes can patiently lobby or brazenly agitate in the hope of forcing their bosses to entertain a full range of options. Unfortunately, while every genocide generated some activism within the U.S. foreign-policy establishment, U.S. civil and foreign servants typically heeded what they took to be presidential indifference and public apathy. They assumed U.S. policy was immutable, that their concerns were already understood by their bosses, and that speaking (or walking) out would only reduce their capacity to improve the policy.
But the main reason American leaders can persist in turning away is that genocide in distant lands has not captivated American Senators, congressional caucuses, Washington lobbyists, elite opinion shapers, grassroots groups, and individual constituents. The battle to stop genocide has thus been repeatedly lost in the realm of domestic politics. Although isolated voices have protested the atrocities, Americans outside the executive branch were largely mute when it mattered. As a result of this society-wide silence, officials at all levels of government calculated that the political costs of getting involved in genocide prevention far exceeded the costs of remaining uninvolved.
Here, the exception that proved the rule was the NATO air campaign in Bosnia. Bosnia was the only genocide of the twentieth century that generated a wave of resignations from the U.S. government. It is probably not coincidental that this was the one case where the protests of American officials in the foreign service were legitimated daily by sustained public and press activism outside Foggy Bottom. NATO intervened with a heavy barrage of bombing in August 1995, when its assessment of the costs of intervening was lowered by the Croatian Army’s rout of Serb forces, and when its assessment of the costs of not intervening was raised by the U.S. Congress’s vote to unilaterally lift the arms embargo against the Bosnian Muslims. The lifting of the embargo embarrassed Clinton at home because foreign policy was being made on Capitol Hill by a future presidential challenger, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole. It also made it likely that European governments were going to pull their peacekeepers out of the Balkans, which would have required U.S. troop participation in a potentially bloody and certainly humiliating rescue mission. This scenario was one that President Clinton wanted to avoid on the eve of his bid for reelection.
With foreign policy crises all over the world implicating more traditional U.S. interests, the slaughter of civilians will rarely secure top-level attention on its own merits. It takes political pressure to put genocide “on the map” in Washington or in any of the European capitals. When Alison des Forges of Human Rights Watch met with National Security Adviser Anthony Lake two weeks into the Rwanda genocide, he informed her that the phones were not ringing. “Make more noise!” he urged. Because so little noise has been made about genocide, U.S. officials have opposed American intervention, firmly convinced that they were doing all they could—and, most important, all they should—in light of competing American interests and a highly circumscribed understanding of what was domestically “possible.”
Although U.S. officials have sometimes expressed remorse after genocide, none fear professional accountability for their sins of omission. In the 1970s, Senate hearings on Capitol Hill documented abuses committed by America and its cold war allies in Latin America, southeast Asia, and elsewhere. As a result of this public reckoning and some of the formal checks instituted in its wake, U.S. foreign policy decision makers now fear repercussions for their sins of commission—for decisions they make and policies they shape that go wrong. But while everyone within the U.S. government has the incentive to avoid “another Somalia” or “another Vietnam,” few think twice about playing a role in allowing “another Rwanda.”
Other countries and institutions whose personnel were actually present when genocide was committed have been forced to be more introspective. The Netherlands, France, and the UN have each staged inquiries into their responsibility for the fall of Srebrenica and the massacres that followed. The inquiries did not lead to any notable political reforms, but they at least “named names,” which might affect the behavior of bureaucrats the next time around. The United States has not looked back. When the UN’s Srebrenica investigators approached the U.S. mission in New York for assistance, their phone calls were not returned. In the end, the UN team was forbidden from making any independent contact with U.S. government employees. The investigators were granted access to a group of hand-picked junior and mid-level officials who knew or revealed next to nothing about what the United States knew during the Srebrenica slaughter.
The French, the Belgians, the UN, and the Organization for African Unity have undertaken investigations on the Rwanda genocide. But in the United States, when Cynthia McKinney and Donald Payne, two disgruntled members of the Congressional Black Caucus (which was itself quiet during the 1994 massacres), attempted to stage hearings on the U.S. role, they were rebuffed. Two officials in the Clinton administration, one at the National Security Council, the other at the State Department, conducted internal studies on the administration’s response to the Rwanda genocide. But they examined only the paper trail and did not publicly disclose their findings. What is needed are congressional inquiries with the power to subpoena documents and U.S. officials of all ranks and roles in the executive and legislative branches. Without meaningful disclosure, public awareness, and official shame, it is hard to imagine the U.S. response improving the next time around.
The September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States may have permanently altered U.S. foreign policy. The hope is that the attacks will make Americans inside and outside government more capable of imagining evil committed against innocent civilians. The fanatics targeting America resemble the perpetrators of genocide in their espousal of collective responsibility of the most savage kind. They attack civilians not because of anything the unwitting targets do personally, but because of who they are. To earn a death sentence, it was enough in the last century to be an Armenian, a Jew, or a Tutsi. On September 11, it was enough to be an American. Instead of causing Americans to retreat from global humanitarian engagement, the terrorist attacks could cause us to empathize with peoples victimized by genocide. In 1994, Rwanda, a country of eight million, experienced the equivalent of more than two World Trade Center attacks every single day for a hundred days. This was the proportional equivalent of two hundred and thirty thousand Americans killed each day, or twenty-three million Americans murdered in three months. When, on September 12, 2001, the United States turned for help to America’s allies around the world, Americans were gratified by the overwhelming response. When the Tutsi cried out, by contrast, every country in the world turned away.
The fear, after September 11, is that the United States will view genocide prevention as a luxury it cannot afford as it sets out to better protect Americans. Some are now arguing, understandably, that fighting terrorism requires husbanding America’s resources and avoiding “social work” such as humanitarian intervention, which is said to harm U.S. “readiness.” Many believe that NATO’s 1999 intervention in Kosovo and the current trial of Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, which were once thought to mark important precedents, will in fact represent high-water marks for genocide prevention and punishment.
Without U.S. leadership, the last century showed, others will be unwilling to step forward to act, and genocide will continue. If the United States treats the war on terrorism as a war that can be prosecuted in a vacuum, with no regard for genocidal terror, it will be making a colossal mistake. There are two main reasons that the United States and its European allies should stop genocide. The first and most convincing reason is moral. When innocent life is being taken on such a scale and the United States and its allies have the power to stop the killing at reasonable risk, they have a duty to act. It is this belief that motivates most of those who seek intervention. But foreign policy is not driven by morality; it is driven by interests, narrowly defined. And history has shown that the suffering of victims has rarely been sufficient to spark a Western intervention.
The second reason for acting is the threat genocide in fact does pose to Western interests. Allowing genocide undermines regional and international stability, creates militarized refugees, and signals dictators that hate and murder are permissible tools of statecraft. Because these dangers to national interests are long-term dangers and not immediately apparent, however, they have rarely convinced top Western policy makers. Genocide has undermined regional stability, but the regions the conflicts destabilized tended also to lie outside the U.S. and European spheres of concern. Refugees have been militarized, but they tended not to wash up on America’s shores. A key reason European leaders were more engaged in the Balkans in the 1990s than their American counterparts was that Bosnian refugees did land in Britain, France, and Germany. But generally dictators recognized that, provided the spillover costs were contained locally, their treatment of their own citizens would have little impact on Western leaders’ perception of their country’s military or economic security. Thus intervention only came about on the rare occasions when the shorter term political interests of Western policy makers were triggered.
American leadership remains essential for mobilizing local, regional, and international responses to genocide. But if it was difficult before September 11 to get U.S. decision makers to see the long term costs of allowing genocide, it will be even harder today when U.S. security needs are so acute. Nonetheless, the record shows that trying to build walls around genocidal societies almost guarantees trouble down the road. American security and security for Americans abroad is contingent on international stability, and there is perhaps no greater source of havoc than a group of well-armed extremists bent on wiping out a people on ethnic, national, or religious grounds.
States that murder and torment their own citizens almost inevitably target citizens elsewhere. Their appetites become insatiable. Hitler began by persecuting his own people and then expanded his campaign to the rest of Europe and, in time, the United States. Saddam Hussein wiped out rural Kurdish life and then turned on Kuwait, sending his genocidal henchman Ali Hassan al-Majid to govern the newly occupied country. The United States now has reason to fear that the poisonous potions Hussein tried out on the Kurds will be used next against Americans. Milosevic took his wars from Slovenia and Croatia to Bosnia and then Kosovo. The United States and its European allies are still paying for their earlier neglect of the Balkans by having to grapple with mounting violence in Macedonia that threatens the stability of southeastern Europe.
Citizens victimized by genocide or abandoned by the international community do not make good neighbors, as their thirst for vengeance, their irredentism, and their acceptance of violence as a means of generating change can turn them into future threats. In Bosnia, where the United States and Europe maintained an arms embargo against the Muslims, extremist Islamic fighters and proselytizers eventually turned up to offer succor. Some secular Muslim citizens became radicalized by the partnership, and the failed state of Bosnia became a haven for Islamic terrorists shunned elsewhere in the world. It appears that one of the organizations that infiltrated Bosnia in its hour of need and used it as a training base was Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda. And however high the number of Islamic radicals that were imported during or created by the Serb slaughter of Bosnia’s Muslims, the figure would have been exponentially higher if the United States and its allies had allowed the killing to continue past 1995. The current Bosnian government, one legacy of the U.S.-brokered Dayton Peace Agreement, is far from perfect, but it is at least a strategic partner in the war against terrorism. Without NATO bombing and U.S. diplomatic leadership, that same Bosnian government might today be an American foe.
For the foreseeable future, it will be up to the United States to take the lead in stopping and punishing genocide. Clearly, the United States does not have the resources to simultaneously defend itself from attack and deploy its troops to every trouble spot where the threat of ethnic violence lurks. It must be extremely cautious about deploying U.S. forces abroad. But U.S. policy options should not be framed in terms of doing nothing or sending in the marines. There will be times when the magnitude of the moral harm will demand risking U.S. military force. There will also be times when, owing to America’s past dealings in the region, U.S. intervention will be singularly inappropriate. There will be times when the risk to U.S. soldiers will outweigh the benefits a military intervention would likely bring to the victims. There will be times when even a good-faith presidential effort to convince the American people of the value of intervening will fail to create a political constituency for U.S. military action.
But in such circumstances, just because the United States might not deploy its troops, it does not mean that a U.S. leadership role is not required or that other forms of intervention should not be tried. U.S. officials must focus less on avoiding embarrassing the United States and more on accurately diagnosing and treating the atrocities underway. Deliberately calling genocide something it is not—“civil war” or “tribal violence”—in order to mute public pressure is not only dishonest; it is detrimental to sound policy. Handling atrocity as war has led to the deployment of conflict resolution experts, the misguided pursuit of cease-fires, and the spiraling investment in “peace processes” that too often become stalling devices that shield murder. Frankly labeling something genocide would build public support for using U.S. military force.
Instead of regarding intervention as an all-or-nothing proposition, the United States and its allies should respond to genocide by publicly identifying and threatening its perpetrators with prosecution, demanding the expulsion of representatives of genocidal regimes from international institutions such as the United Nations, closing the perpetrators’ embassies in Western capitals, and calling upon countries aligned with the perpetrators to ask them to use their influence. Depending on the circumstances, Western powers might establish economic sanctions or freeze foreign assets, impose an arms embargo, or, if warranted, lift an arms embargo. They might use their technical resources to jam inflammatory radio or television broadcasts that are essential to propaganda, panic, and hate. They might set up safe areas to house refugees and civilians, and enforce them with well-armed and robustly mandated peacekeepers, air power, or both.
Genocide prevention is an immense burden and one that must be shared. But even if U.S. troops stay home, American leadership will be indispensable in assembling “coalitions of the willing” to deploy ground troops, in encouraging U.S. allies to step up their capacities, and in strengthening regional and international institutions that might eventually carry more of the weight.
For most of the second half of the twentieth century, the existence of the Genocide Convention appeared to achieve little. The United States did not ratify the Convention for forty years. Those countries that did ratify it never invoked it to stop or punish genocide. And instead of making Western policy makers more inclined to stop genocide, ratification seemed only to make them more reluctant to use the “g-word.” Still, Lemkin’s coinage has done more good than harm. It is unlikely that the international tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda or the future International Criminal Court would have come into existence without the Convention’s passage. The punishment that takes place at these courts will help deter genocide in the long term. But more fundamentally, without the existence of the Convention, or Lemkin’s proselytizing around it, the word genocide would not carry the moral stigma it has acquired. Hope for enforcement of the Genocide Convention lies in the stigma associated with committing and allowing the crime of genocide—and paradoxically in the lengths to which Western policy makers have gone to vow never again to allow genocide and the comparable lengths to which they have gone, while allowing it, to deny its occurrence.
Because it is unlikely that Western leaders will have the vision to recognize that they endanger their countries’ long-term vital national interests by allowing genocide, the most realistic hope for combating it lies in the rest of us creating short-term political costs for those who do nothing.
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