Easier said than done.

A Problem from Hell
America and the
Age of Genocide
Samantha Power
Basic Books, $30, 610 pp.

Genocide is the problem from hell. Right behind it is the problem of getting anyone to do anything about it. Samantha Power surveys the horrors of the twentieth century, beginning with the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians in 1915 and ending with Serb efforts to cleanse Kosovo of Albanians in 1998. The bloodshed in the years between--of Jews, of Cambodians, of Iraqi Kurds, of Rwandan Tutsis, and of Bosnian Muslims--offers grim testimony to the truth of her title. But it is the subtitle that shapes her text. For the book is not so much a history of genocide as an indictment against those, especially the United States, who did little or nothing to impede its carnage. At points in the text, Power's rhetoric seems to treat those who failed to act as more reprehensible than those who carried out these crimes.

A cub reporter in Bosnia in the mid-nineties, a graduate of Harvard Law School, and now executive director of the Carter Center for Human Rights at the Kennedy School, Power is a passionate advocate of intervention against genocide. As her book shows, however, intervention has rarely been attempted, and if her analysis is correct, it is unlikely to happen except in very particular circumstances.

The "invention" of genocide, that is, the conceptual and legal language that describes these mass murders, is key to her theme. She tells the story of Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term, "genocide," in 1943. Until then, there was strictly speaking no Armenian genocide, but "mass murder" by the Turks. A Polish Jew and lawyer whose parents died in the Holocaust, Lemkin worked his whole life to have the crime named and embodied in law, finally succeeding with the United Nations Convention against Genocide in 1948. The Convention defined genocide as: "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such."

Lemkin's firm conviction was that naming this evil, passing laws, and lining up the international community against it would make the promise "never again" a reality. But has the "invention" of genocide helped to end genocide? Not yet, as Power's book amply demonstrates. It also illustrates, sometimes inadvertently, how Lemkin's achievement may have had the opposite of its intended effect. In an ironic twist of his conviction, recent efforts to call atrocities "genocide" elicit resistance rather than calls to action. Power is dismayed that the United States with its Holocaust consciousness and memorials should be so little inclined to make the connection between the genocide of European Jews and genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda. But none of the atrocities she studies is quite like the Holocaust, either in scale or in purpose (some Holocaust scholars, in fact, hold that there is an important distinction to be maintained between the Holocaust and genocide). Aside from the sheer resistance to recognizing or acknowledging genocide, other obstacles can obscure the purpose and scale of atrocities. Sometimes "the event" doesn't fit the legal criteria of genocide; sometimes the very force of the term, "genocide," would seem to require a dramatic, usually a military response that no one is willing to make; sometimes other "nongenocidal" factors, such as long-standing ethnic antagonisms, and war, civil and international, are at the forefront of public attention and obscure the question of genocide.

For example, in Cambodia in 1975, Cambodians began murdering other Cambodians. Was this genocide? To the outside world, questions of Cambodian sovereignty loomed large, as did a fog of confusion concerning Pol Pot's goals in what was considered a civil war. Was he simply "reeducating" the middle class and bureaucrats as Mao had done? Only when the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia in 1979, stopped the slaughter, and exposed the number of dead did international groups concede the point. The Kurds of northern Iraq present different aspects of the problem. They have always exercised a degree of autonomy and expressed this during Iraq's 1980s war with Iran by cooperating with the enemy. In response to what it deemed traitorous acts, the regime of Saddam Hussein removed Kurds from border areas with Iran; soon thereafter the Kurds were attacked with chemical and possibly biological weapons by the Iraqi air force. This was clearly against international law represented in treaties that Iraq had signed. Few were willing to call it genocide.

Today most accept that the Hutu slaughter of the Tutsis constituted genocide, but in May 1994, the United States government would only concede late in the game that these were "acts of genocide." Power quotes the congressional testimony of Secretary of State Warren Christopher carefully crafted to evade the "g" word. Christopher is made to look the fool, yet he accurately represented Clinton administration policy, which included the well-founded calculation that the Pentagon was unalterably opposed to military action. Calling what was going on in Rwanda genocide would have required action. Nor was the American public likely to support a call for intervention, even if they had paid attention to Rwanda.

Power calls this a vicious circle: political leaders do not inform and lead their people, and the people, because they are not informed and led, do not pressure political leaders to act against these atrocities. She writes that she once considered U.S. policy a "failure" in the case of Bosnia, but now she concludes that the policy was "ruthlessly effective: No U.S. president has ever made genocide prevention a priority, and no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence."

Power proclaims that "we are all bystanders to genocide," and perhaps she is right. Yet it is unlikely that the guilt-invoking strategy implied in that statement will launch many people into action. It is hard to say why, however. Certainly the prospect of famine, natural disasters, and other calamities call forth a generous response in the United States as around the world. Democracies may face especially daunting obstacles in carrying out a foreign policy that requires military action, especially for humanitarian purposes. Possessing the most powerful military in the world is no help either: the United States is less, not more, likely to act in Rwanda, Bosnia, or Kosovo simply because the political and military stakes are so much higher than they would be if, for example, Power's native Ireland were to act. Vietnam could sweep down on Cambodia's "killing fields," because its Communist leaders had to consult few and answer to no one. The word "quagmire" evokes powerful inhibitions in Washington, especially in officials like Anthony Lake and Colin Powell who were on watch during the Rwandan and Bosnian killings.

The United States-led NATO attacks on the Serbs in the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo were the singular exception to inaction. This was not because Serb actions were deemed genocide, but because President Bill Clinton, having failed to act early enough in Bosnia after making campaign promises to do so, was forced to act and prevent ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Equally important, he had crucial allies in the government. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and General Wesley Clark, who led the NATO forces, knew the Balkans and knew what the Serbs and Slobodan Milosevic' could do. The depth of Albright and Clark's knowledge and the force of their personalities led the United States into a struggle that few wanted at the time and that, for all her passion on the subject, even Power finds reason to criticize. (Another subject for another book, of course, is the general skepticism human rights groups bring to U.S. interventions, and the inevitable double bind for any military that, having intervened, is almost immediately criticized for one human rights violation or other.)

Those who share Power's view that these atrocities, genocide or not, demand vigorous international response, and I count myself one, are unlikely to agree that the United States must necessarily be the primary actor in ending genocidal killings. That is simply not going to happen. Nor will her final conclusion bring many ready takers: it is, she says, the "screamers," those who spend themselves unstintingly in efforts to call the world's attention to genocide, who are the models for progress in bringing about intervention. To this point, the book ends with a quote from George Bernard Shaw: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." Power comments, "after a century of doing so little to prevent, suppress, and punish genocide, Americans must join and thereby legitimate the ranks of the unreasonable." The testimony of the book is otherwise; the "screamers," noble and passionate as some have been, send officials running. Furthermore, it was not "the unreasonable," who stopped the Serbs in Kosovo, it was the astute, knowledgeable, and energetic Madeleine Albright who led the political battle, and General Wesley Clark who won the battle against the Serbs and the Pentagon alike. They did this with the support, if not the enthusiasm, of Bill Clinton. This is called politics and this is what is needed on an international scale to prevent, to stop, and to end mass atrocities whether or not they are called genocide.

Margaret O'Brien Steinfels is editor of Commonweal.