Newsday, NY
May 29 2005
Recommended reading
AMERICA AND THE WORLD
BY BRIAN PALMER
Brian Palmer is a writer in Brooklyn.
Two recent movies, the blockbuster “Hotel Rwanda” and HBO’s
“Sometimes in April,” drove me to my bookshelf for a reality check.
“Hotel Rwanda” was moving, but it seemed to turn the 1994 Rwandan
genocide, a slaughter of monumental proportion – 800,000 people
systematically murdered in 100 days – into an uplifting Hollywood
tale. “Sometimes in April,” a devastatingly powerful film shot in
Rwanda, evoked the depth of the horror, but I still hungered for
facts.
How did it happen? Why didn’t any nation keep the universal promise
made after the Holocaust to “never again” turn away from such slaughter?
Samantha Power’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “A Problem From Hell:
America and the Age of Genocide” (Perennial, $17.95) provides answers.
Power dissects Rwanda and other instances of 20th century genocide:
the Turkish onslaught against the Armenians; the Nazi death machine;
the Khmer Rouge’s decimation of Cambodia; Saddam Hussein’s murderous
campaign against the Kurds; Serbian “ethnic cleansing” in the former
Yugoslavia. Power is especially concerned with the United States’
response to each of these. Her findings are not pretty.
“Indeed on occasion the United States directly or indirectly aided
those committing genocide,” Power writes. “It orchestrated the vote
in the UN Credentials Committee to favor the Khmer Rouge. It sided
with and supplied U.S. agricultural and manufacturing credits to Iraq
while Hussein was attempting to wipe out the country’s Kurds. Along
with its European allies, it maintained an arms embargo against the
Bosnian Muslims even after it was clear that the arms ban prevented
the Muslims from defending themselves. It used its clout on the UN
Security Council to mandate the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers from
Rwanda and block efforts to redeploy there.”
U.S. leaders have turned away from slaughter because they have
defined “national interest” too narrowly and fixated on domestic
politics. They do so at our peril, Power tells us, because the
poisonous effects of genocide radiate across borders. She shows how
even small steps short of military intervention can stop or limit
genocide, and she concludes that it is in U.S. self-interest to play
a role early
– with allies and regional actors – rather than waiting for bodies to
pile up.