Remembering genocide

Inroads: A Journal of Opinion, Summer-Fall, 2008 by Don Cayo

For anyone who pays attention, it is impossible not to choke up at the site of Choeung Ek's notorious "killing tree"--the place where parsimonious Khmer Rouge thugs bashed babies' brains out to save the price of a bullet. You cannot overlook the vastness of Birkenau--a place built for the sole purpose of killing millions of "weak" Jews and housing hundreds of thousands of others for the short months it took to work them to death--without your stomach churning and your mind recoiling at the enormity of Nazi war crimes. You cannot contemplate the rough hole knocked in the wall of the tiny church at Ntarama without imagining that you can hear the Hutu mob running amok or that you can smell the fear of the 5,000 huddled here and in two even smaller outbuildings.

Tuol Sleng particularly touched me with its endless ranks of official photographs. These are just mug shots, not artistically remarkable in any way. But they are all that is left to mark the passing of the legions who died so pointlessly. Most looked despairing, some as if they had already died inside, though a few dared to stare at their captors in defiance. These institutional photographs somehow touched me even more than the crisper old portraits and snapshots of happier times--of lives that no one knew were soon to be snuffed out--that I saw in Washington, Poland and Rwanda.

In Auschwitz, what most disturbed me was the room full of human hair--a tiny percentage of what was "harvested" by the Nazis, who stooped so low as to steal the dignity of their victims and weave their tresses into blankets. In Rwanda, no one--certainly not I--got through the last display in the memorial building, a chronicle of the lives of children who died in the slaughter, without tears.

Never again?

With so many opportunities to stare evil in the eye, and still no answers to the big questions, you may think I have failed. And you may be right.

But the experiences did clarify at least one thing in my mind. I am resolved to speak out stronger and sooner. I shall henceforth be a lot less tolerant of the myriad excuses that the "international community" falls back on--that is, that we fall back on--to dither and delay when everyone knows a slaughter is under way. I have no more tolerance for splitting hairs to determine if this atrocity or that one is technically a genocide, or merely mass murder. I am not interested in debating whether 10,000 dead Kosovars or 250,000 Burundians are "enough" to warrant action by the world.

Some of the shameful inactions of the past are well known--the Allies' failure to bomb the railway tracks that took more than a million to their deaths at Birkenau, or the UN's refusal to stop the slaughter in Rwanda. Nor is the world doing better today in places like Darfur or Congo. We need a lower and simpler standard of when to say enough is enough, and we need the means and will to enforce it.

The idea of military intervention to protect a population at risk has taken an awful hit as a result of the postinvasion mess in Iraq. But like Paul Collier, the Oxford economist who wrote The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done about It, I still believe there is a potential that intervention can end evil. Collier refers to the example of the British in Sierra Leone. A few hundred troops were able to end, in short order, a decade-long war that killed at least 75,000, maimed tens of thousands more and made the country, for most of the 1990s, perhaps the worst place on earth to live.