"A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide *ePub
In 1993, as a 23-year-old correspondent covering the wars in the Balkans, I was initially comforted by the roar of NATO planes flying overhead. President Clinton and other western leaders had sent the planes to monitor the Bosnian war, which had killed almost 200,000 civilians. But it soon became clear that NATO was unwilling to target those engaged in brutal "ethnic cleansing." American statesmen described Bosnia as "a problem from hell," and for three and a half years refused to invest the diplomatic and military capital needed to stop the murder of innocents. In Rwanda, around the same time, some 800,000 Tutsi and opposition Hutu were exterminated in the swiftest killing spree of the twentieth century. Again, the United States failed to intervene. This time U.S. policy-makers avoided labeling events "genocide" and spearheaded the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers stationed in Rwanda who might have stopped the massacres underway. Whatever America's commitment to Holocaust remembrance (embodied in the presence of the Holocaust Museum on the Mall in Washington, D.C.), the United States has never intervened to stop genocide. This book is an effort to understand why. While the history of America's response to genocide is not an uplifting one, "A Problem from Hell" tells the stories of countless Americans who took seriously the slogan of "never again" and tried to secure American intervention. Only by understanding the reasons for their small successes and colossal failures can we understand what we as a country, and we as citizens, could have done to stop the most savage crimes of the last century. Read more
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Why Must Read "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide?
Greetings Amazonians, Samantha Power’s “A Problem from Hell” is a good read. It is concerned with the history of genocide in the twentieth century and in particular the role that the United State has played in the efforts to deal with the problem. There is a lengthy and interesting discussion of Raphael Lemkin who coined “genocide” and worked for the abolition of genocide and the adoption of the Genocide Convention throughout his adult life. The book provides detailed discussions of the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust and genocide of the Slavs during WWII, the Cambodian genocide of the late 1970's, the genocide of the Kurds in Iraq in late ‘80s and early ‘90s, the Rwandan genocide of the ‘90s, and the genocides associated with the Balkans of the ‘90s. I was surprised to learn that the Carter administration was disinterested in and unresponsive to concerns about the events in Cambodia even to the point of choosing to support recognition of the KR regime in the UN as opposed to the Vietnamese invaders who had ended the genocide and forced the KR into the mountains. In a very similar fashion, the Reagan and Bush administrations ignored events in Iraq until it suited the purposes of the US to do otherwise. The Clinton Administration ignored the genocide in Rwanda and even derailed an early agenda coming from the ground which suggested a genocide was being planned and might be prevented. The Clinton Administration eventually responded to the Serbs’ genocides first under Warren Christopher after much blood had been spilled and considerable political pressure applied by Congress, and finally with Madeleine Albright as Secretary of State the US and other Western powers effectively stopped a genocide before it started. Warren Christopher ends up looking pretty bad in this narrative. And, until Albright, the US looks like a nation motivated by financial and diplomatic interests to such an extent that we are more than willing to spend days, weeks months, and years splitting hairs over whether or not this or that is genocide while innocent people are raped and murdered by the thousands by way of an established policy. This is a good read….by the end one is inclined to think we might have made a little progress. Bob Dole looks pretty good in the course of the story and so does George Soros. Enjoy.
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