Eight years ago, Power had a vision of a serious history that would examine why good people averted their gaze when genocide was happening. Why is it that after the Holocaust, when the world said “never again” — human beings would never be butchered in their millions or even in their hundreds of thousands — it has happened, time and again? But in particular, why did the world’s greatest power, the United States, stand by on almost every occasion? Why did it not use its power to prevent mass murder?
Power’s idea was rejected by publishers. One major company suggested an alternative: that she write a polemical first-person essay-style book on the subject.
A war correspondent and human rights advocate, Power, however, didn’t relish the role of provocateur. She believed that would end up preaching to the converted, if she was lucky. Instead, she wanted to write a substantial, annotated book about the response of policymakers to genocide. It would be based on exhaustive research and interviews with key players.
“The more moral the stakes, the more important it is to get out of the way,” she said. “I knew that it was the right book for the subject.”
And it would also be the book of an Irish writer — narrative-driven, character-driven and, she hoped, lyrical. “I hate to use that word in the context of genocide, but it’s an account not of the genocides themselves but of the struggles of people trying to stop them,” said Power, who was born in Dublin in 1970.
Finally, she got the backing of a smaller company, Basic Books. After five years work, ” ‘A Problem from Hell’: American and the Age of Genocide,” was published in the spring of 2002. “I don’t think I could have done it without completely immersing myself in the way that I did. It was not a healthy five years,” she recalled.
It was soon clear that Power’s rigorous and relatively detached approach was devastatingly effective. The reviewer in the New York Times Book Review wrote: “President Bush the elder comes off as a stone-hearted prisoner to business interests, President Clinton as an amoral narcissist. Perhaps nobody looks worse than former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, on whose watch both Bosnia and Rwanda self-destructed.” (It was Christopher who’d used the term “a problem from hell.”)
That was but one of scores of glowing reviews and features articles about the book and Power herself. Certainly, she’d won a moral victory over the big-time publishers who turned her down.
But the author has learned that the most important opinion-making publications, read by millions of Americans, have less clout that the official imprimatur of the Pulitzer committee.
“It’s unfortunate that it takes that,” Power said.
But it’s an important break for her work and her ideas that she’s happy to go along with.
“If the book stood any chance of actually making a difference in policy in America, it actually had to be read or at least there had to be the impression that it was being read,” she said.
No former president, she believes, has yet picked up the book. And, generally, she doesn’t expect people at any level who are seen as bystanders to genocide to welcome it. However, Clinton is a special case, someone who has intervened when genocide was happening and who might be won over to the more general principle of humanitarian intervention by Western powers.
“Clinton is the one I would most want to read the book and the one I would most expect to — he’s such an avid reader,” said Power, who teaches at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and is the director of its Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.
“Upstanders”
Samantha Power came to the United States when she was 9. Her parents had separated and divorce was not available for her mother, who’d formed a new relationship.
“Things were very difficult between her and my father,” she said.
Power, her younger brother, mother and stepfather settled first in Pittsburgh. The family then moved on to Atlanta, where Power went to high school. After her father’s sudden death in 1983, she returned to Ireland for annual summer vacations with her paternal grandfather in County Wicklow. She retained close links with her native city and become close in later years to her stepfather’s four children, who’d remained in Ireland.
She graduated from Yale University and later, as a recent graduate of Harvard Law School, set out to Bosnia to cover the war there as a freelance journalist. She went with the reluctant blessing of her mother and stepfather, who now live in Yonkers. She dedicates the book to both Vera Delaney and Eddie Burke and concludes its acknowledgements section by saying: “Apart from being my parents, my teachers, and my closest friends, they are quite simply the two most extraordinary people I have ever met.”
The heroes in the main body of the work are the “upstanders,” the people who believed that U.S. foreign policy didn’t simply have to be about economic and security interests. Inevitably, almost all of them are American. But the most important person in the story, Rafael Lemkin, who invented the word “genocide,” was born in Poland.
When Lemkin was 12, the year World War I began, he read Nobel Prize winner Henryk Sienkiewicz’s “Quo Vadis?”, which dealt with Nero’s massacres of Christians. He became preoccupied with the subject of mass murder as a student, reading widely in particular about the killing of a million Armenian Christians during World War I. Lemkin, who had a gift for languages, was hired as a prosecutor but worked in his spare time on an international law that would later form the basis of the genocide convention.
He failed to arouse much interest in his idea at international conferences in the 1930s. And when his country was occupied at the outset of World War II, he couldn’t persuade his parents and brother that, as Jews, they had to leave in order to survive. He fled, escaping to the United States. His family perished at the hands of the Nazis.
Lemkin was the driving force behind the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which cleared the UN General Assembly in 1948 and by 1950 was ratified by 20 countries. When he died in his New York City apartment in 1959, he was penniless and relatively obscure, and still campaigning for his adopted country to sign the convention.
The torch was taken up later by William Proxmire, a Democrat from Wisconsin, who made a speech every day in the Senate in protest at America’s refusal to sign the convention. He spoke on the floor 3,211 times about genocide from 1967 until 1986, when the Senate made a commitment to the international treaty, albeit in a watered-down form.
A handful of other courageous politicians feature in Power’s story. One is Congressman Frank McCloskey, the Indiana Democrat, who was a fierce critic of the Clinton administration’s non-interventionist policy on the Bosnian conflict and who directly took on Secretary Christopher. McCloskey lost his seat in 1996 to a Republican party opponent who said the incumbent was “more concerned about Bosnia than Evansville.”
But again and again it was officials down the line, unknown to a broader public, who tried to make the case for intervention when it was clear people were being murdered on a massive scale. They were up against a State Department culture was focused entirely on American national interests and labeled as “soft” those who brought humanitarian concerns into the equation.
Resignations
“The most gratifying reaction [to the book] is from those in the U.S. government who stood up and who were really marginalized, who were really discredited, who sometimes lost their jobs and who sometimes lost their marriages,” Power said. “”For those who’ve been unsung and unnamed, the book has been an extraordinary validation.”
Quitting was also very much against State Department culture and tradition, yet the Balkans war provoked the resignation of several middle-ranking officials who were disgusted at America’s unwillingness to prevent the genocide of Bosnia’s Muslims.
When U.S. military intervention did happen in the Balkans, it was in Kosovo to shore up NATO’s credibility and to stop the conflict spreading. Nonetheless, many human rights organizations, breaking with tradition, had called for action and Power uses that war to show the complicated pros and cons of military intervention for humanitarian purposes. Ultimately, she believes the war against the Bosnian Serbs was justified.
However, she argued against the proposed war in Iraq in 2003 on the grounds that it “would make the world a more dangerous place, just in terms of legitimating pre-emptive intervention and fueling vitriolic anti-Americanism that I think just has to make a little bit easier for terrorists to operate.”
There is no cookie-cutter solution, she stressed, when it comes to genocide and intervention. But the aim should be to move away from a political and bureaucratic system that sees no downside to inaction when mass murder is happening in other parts of the world.
Power believes that the neutrality of Ireland, Canada, the Scandinavian countries and others is important because they have a foreign-policy model that can incorporate humanitarian concerns.
But it’s her adopted country that she’s most focused on: the United States. “I’m blessed in a way by being an immigrant because, to some extent, immigrants take more seriously the promise of new countries,” she said.
The text of ” ‘A Problem from Hell’ ” is prefaced with a quote from Abraham Lincoln: “We — even we here — hold the power, and bear the responsibility.”
“There’s been no form of accountability in the past for being a bystander to genocide,” Power said.
She hopes that ” ‘A Problem from Hell’ ” and works like it will make individuals “feel that their own personal prestige and long-term reputations [were] actually at stake.”
She added: “If there was a perception in Washington . . . that people were getting to know the names of the upstanders and the bystanders who are documented in the book, then there is a chance, and a good chance, that people in Washington would be afraid of ending up in a book like this someday.”