The term "genocide" was coined in the mid-20th century by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew, who first became concerned with ethnic killing when the civilized world failed to hold Turkey accountable for the mass extermination of Armenians during World War I. After Germany invaded his homeland, Lemkin fled to the United States, where he continued his single-minded struggle to combat the deliberate and systematic efforts to destroy national, ethnic, racial, or religious groups of people. Since this crime did not have a name, he developed the concept "genocide," rooted in the Greek geno, meaning "race" or "tribe," and the Latin suffix cide, meaning "killing."

Based upon Lemkin's indefatigable efforts, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution in December 1946 condemning genocide "as contrary to moral law and to the aims and spirit of the United Nations." More importantly, the measure called for drafting a treaty that would ban this crime. Two years later the General Assembly approved unanimously the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Since the convention defined genocide as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group," it ironically omitted the most destructive source of mass, systematic killing in the 20th century—namely, violence inspired by politics and ideology. The omission of political and ideological violence was deliberate, however, since Lemkin wanted to develop an international legal concept that distinguished violence in war from the deliberate extermination of people groups. In 1967 Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin became convinced that the United States needed to become party to the genocide convention and vowed to address this topic daily until it was ratified—a vow that resulted in 3,211 senate speeches over 19 years! Although the Convention entered into force in 1950, the United States did not formally ratify it until 1988.

While the defense of justice permits states to undertake humanitarian intervention, states have been extremely reluctant to intervene solely for moral purposes. Even the United States—a country that has regarded itself as a beacon of human freedom—has been far more eager to undertake foreign intervention for ideological purposes than for the defense of human rights. "No U.S. president," Samantha Power writes in "A Problem From Hell," "has ever made genocide prevention a priority, and no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence."1

A former Balkan war correspondent and current head of Harvard University's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Power examines the role of the United States toward six major 20th-century genocides (all of the numbers that follow are rough estimates): the slaughter of 1-1.5 million Armenians by the Turkish Empire in 1914-15; the mass extermination of two million Cambodians by communist militants (Khmer Rouge) in 1975-79; the killing of 100,000 Iraqi Kurds by the troops of Saddam Hussein in 1987-88, including the massacre of 5,000 Kurds with chemical weapons; the l992-95 Serb genocide of Bosnian Muslims, resulting in 200,000 deaths and more than two million refugees; the l994 extermination of 800,000 Tutsis by Hutu extremists; and the 1999 Serbian killing and ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, a conflict that resulted in 8,000 deaths and the displacement of about 1.3 million Albanian Kosovars. Curiously, the book omits the genocide in Sudan—a conflict that has gone on for more than two decades and has resulted in the death of more than two million people.

The United States got involved militarily in only two of these six cases, and it did so only reluctantly and belatedly after much suffering had been inflicted on innocent persons. In the Bosnian war, the United States resorted to multilateral (NATO) action only after it was able to broker a peace accord in Dayton, Ohio, in 1995 that brought an end to the fighting among Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. And in the 1998-99 Kosovo political conflict between Serb forces and Kosovo Albanians (Kosovars), the United States waited until Serb forces had killed 3,000 Albanians and forced the expulsion of 400,000 of them. Only after Serb president Slobodan Milosevic had rejected the Rambouillet Peace Plan—a Western initiative to replace Serb army and police personnel with NATO forces in Kosovo—did the United States join its NATO allies in carrying out military action to halt Serb ethnic cleansing.2

Power shows that throughout the 20th century, the United States avoided engagement in major humanitarian crises with a variety of excuses, arguments, and denials. Using categories developed by economist Albert Hirschman (futility, perversity, jeopardy), she demonstrates that when confronted with foreign mass atrocities, U.S. decision-makers have historically justified inaction or even outright opposition to humanitarian intervention by claiming that military action was likely to be ineffective, counterproductive, or even downright harmful.

But the most fundamental reason for inaction was not lack of knowledge or lack of military and political resources to do something about it. Rather, the main reason the United States avoided humanitarian intervention was a lack of political will. "American leaders did not act because they did not want to," Power writes. "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." At stake is not simply the refusal to deploy ground troops to halt the atrocities: "U.S. policymakers did almost nothing to deter the crime. Because America's 'vital interests' were not considered imperiled by mere genocide, senior U.S. officials did not give genocide the moral attention it warranted."

The Rwanda Genocide

The most egregious moral failure in U.S. foreign policy toward mass killing is the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. The 1993 Arusha Accord had ended fighting between the ruling Hutus and the Tutsi opposition, the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RFP), and called for power-sharing, internationally supervised elections, and repatriation of refugees. To help oversee the agreement, the un had established an observer force of 2,500 peacekeepers, known as the un Assistance Mission to Rwanda, or unamir. But this fragile Hutu-Tutsi peace collapsed on April 6, 1994, when the country's president, Juvénal Habyarimana, was killed when his jet was shot down as it was landing in Kigali.

The downing of the presidential plane unleashed an immediate mass extermination campaign. Although the genocide was limited to the capital in the first few days, it quickly spread to other parts of the country through a systematic and well-orchestrated campaign led by Hutu extremists. At the height of the genocide, more than 8,000 Tutsis were being butchered daily—a killing rate that was higher than that of any other previous genocide, including the Holocaust. Much of the killing was carried out with machetes in a brutal and sadistic manner that defies comprehension. As Power notes, "the Rwanda genocide would prove to be the fastest, most efficient killing spree of the twentieth century."

A day after the violence broke out, the United States decided to close its embassy in Kigali and evacuate embassy personnel and other Americans from the country. At the same time, Belgian, French, and Italian soldiers intervened to evacuate 4,000 expatriates. Major General Romeo Dallaire, the head of unamir, sent several urgent messages to the United Nations, pleading for reinforcements to double his troop strength to 5,000. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Kofi Annan, the head of the un's Department of Peacekeeping Operations, however, not only failed to support Gen. Dallaire's request but did not even keep the Security Council informed of his reports and pleas.3 For its part, the United States—which was still recovering from the tragic death of l8 élite commandos in a peacekeeping operation in Somalia the previous October—was in no mood to get involved in another tribal or ethnic conflict in Africa. As a result, the United States not only opposed an expansion of unamir's mission but also called for a withdrawal of the un peacekeeping operation altogether.

The killing stopped only after the Tutsi RFP had defeated the Hutu army and militia in mid-July. Once the Tutsis took control of the country, many Hutus, fearing retribution, fled to neighboring Zaire, where two million refugees and Hutu soldiers and militia filled overcrowded camps. When 2,000 refugees began dying daily from cholera and dysentery, the Clinton administration deployed 4,000 troops to confront a perilous humanitarian situation. Ironically, a government that had opposed intervention to halt a brutal genocide subsequently authorized a major humanitarian operation to confront starvation and disease.

Why did the United States fail to act in Rwanda? For Power the answer lies in domestic politics—namely, the American people did not demand such action. When Tony Lake, Clinton's national security advisor, was asked why the United States did not make the mass killing of Tutsis a priority, he responded by saying that "the phones weren't ringing on Rwanda." While little domestic political pressure existed on Rwanda, significant congressional influence was being generated on Haiti after a military coup had toppled the government of elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991. Accordingly, the Clinton administration opposed military action to halt the Rwanda genocide but decided to send 20,000 troops to Haiti in September 1994 to restore democracy in that land.

Although public opinion is important in explaining the conduct of American foreign policy, a more compelling reason for foreign policy decisions is the political and moral commitments of leaders themselves. As Walter Lippmann observed long ago, public opinion is not sufficiently informed to provide a basis for governing. As a result, effective political leadership must initiate actions, explain and justify policies, and then marshal support for decisions. The question thus remains: why did the Clinton administration decide to intervene in Haiti to restore democracy when at roughly the same time it failed to act to save the lives of a half million persons in Rwanda?4

In March 1998, President Clinton traveled to Rwanda to pay his respects to the genocide victims and to apologize for the failure of the international community to halt the killing. In his comments

on the tarmac of the Kigali airport, he implied that the reason the United States had not responded to the slaughter was that he did not know. "It may seem strange to you here," he said, "but all over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror."

But for Power this excuse is unconvincing. Administration officials had ample data on the widespread, systematic killing of Tutsis soon after the massacres had begun. They were unwilling to define the killing as a genocide because of their reluctance to consider the plausibility of what they regarded as morally incomprehensible acts. Deferring action until still more knowledge on the situation in Rwanda had been gathered, U.S. government officials "used the search for certainty as an excuse for paralysis and postponement."

Reforming U.S. Foreign Policy

Power argues that if the United States is to maintain its credibility and moral authority in the international community, it will have to take more seriously the crime of genocide. The United States must be willing, as a last resort, to use its political and military power to deter and, if necessary, to halt the mass slaughter of civilians and to hold decision-makers accountable for genocide through trials.

Although Power's indictment of American inaction is lucid and authoritative, her call for a more humane foreign policy is not fully compelling for two reasons. First, she underestimates the difficulties in distinguishing genocide from war, especially wars of self-determination. When ethnic groups like the Chechens, Kurds, or Kosovars demand political autonomy and resort to violence to press their case, how should governments respond? When two ethnopolitical groups begin fighting over the partitioning of territory, how should the international community respond to such intrastate conflicts? To a

significant degree, the brutality of wars of national self-determination derives from the resort to terror, indiscriminate killing, rape and torture, and ethnic cleansing—tactics that are not only inconsistent with the codified laws of war but also are crimes against humanity.

Power chides Secretary of State Warren Christopher for his hesitation to CLASSify the Bosnian war as genocide. But his reluctance to define this war among Bosnian Croats, Muslims, and Serbs as genocide was based not on moral insensitivity but upon an empirical assessment of the fighting. Even though Serbs were thought to be chiefly responsible for ethnic cleansing and mass killings, senior government officials assumed that all parties were partly responsible for human rights atrocities. Thus, while the United States was prepared to acknowledge "acts of genocide" in Bosnia and later in Kosovo, the reluctance to CLASSify the war as genocide was based upon the perception that the quest for political autonomy, not ethnic and religious hatred, was the driving source of the fighting.

A second shortcoming in Power's call to action is the absence of a strategic perspective that balances power and morality, the pursuit of national interests with the demands of global justice. If the United States is to reform its foreign policy, more than moral condemnation and shame will be required. Remedying the moral poverty of U.S. inaction on genocide will require a careful analysis of the strategic constraints on foreign policy. As columnist Charles Krauthammer has noted, "To intervene solely for reasons of democratic morality is to confuse foreign policy with philanthropy. And a philanthropist gives out his own money. A statesman is a trustee." Thus, if the United States is to become more responsive to the threat of genocide, leaders must generate greater political will on behalf of peoples victimized by their ethnicity, religion, and nationality, and devise a more effective strategy for defending the innocent. Since foreign policy involves the pursuit of vital interests, the challenge in developing a more vigorous defense of human rights is to develop a strategy that will help distinguish between brutal civil wars from mass, systematic killings.

While Power may not offer a solution to the awful problem of systematic human rights atrocities, her powerful and persuasive study provides one of the most compelling accounts of 20th-century genocide available. Her deeply moving case studies remind us that, notwithstanding the significant technological, social, and economic progress of the past century, the world remains a dangerous place where radical evil arises from time to time. And if the extraordinary power of the United States is to be used in the service of global peace and justice, then American decision-makers must be prepared to confront radical evil with the use of force.

Mark Amstutz is professor of political science at Wheaton College.

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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1. The title of Power's book is taken from a statement made by Secretary of State Warren Christopher when he warned in 1993 of the dangers of U.S. involvement in the Bosnian conflict. Christopher said, "The hatred between all three groups—the Bosnians and the Serbs and the Croatians—is almost unbelievable. It's almost terrifying, and it's centuries old. That really is a problem from hell."

2. To try to halt the Kosovo war, the United States, France, and Britain sponsored a peace conference at a chateau in Rambouillet, France. The so-called Rambouillet Peace Plan called for Kosovars to temporarily give up on their quest for national self-determination and for Serb police and military troops to withdraw to Serbia. A NATO peacekeeping force of 40,000 soldiers would maintain peace.

3. For an excellent account of the un failure in the Rwanda genocide, see Michael Barnett, Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda (Cornell Univ. Press, 2002).

4. The number of persons who might have been saved from the genocide by U.S. military intervention is a hotly contested topic. In The Limits of Humanitarian Intervention: Genocide in Rwanda (The Brookings Institution, 2001), Alan Kuperman argues that the largest number of people that might have been saved is 125,000. But his estimate is inadequate because he makes three dubious assumptions: a) that 500,000 Rwandans died in the genocide, rather than 800,000; b) that the U.S. government did not know for sure that a massacre was underway until three weeks into the genocide—by which time it was too late to make a significant difference; and c) that the United States could not have acted swiftly because it did not have sufficient military forces and equipment readily available. A more realistic assessment, I believe, is that a swift and well organized U.S. military intervention early into the conflict would have resulted in 400,000 to 500,000 persons being saved from the genocide.