Stopping genocide and securing "justice": learning by doing - International Justice, War Crimes, and Terrorism: The U.S. Record

Social Research, Winter, 2002 by Samantha Power

IN this paper I will examine the United States record in responding to genocide, drawing from my research over the last six years and highlighting a few larger lessons. I will then look specifically at the international tribunals. Instead of plunging into the debate about whether those tribunals have lived up to an undefined standard of justice, I will begin by spelling out some of the metrics that we might use to gauge achievement. Only by deciding on the criteria by which we want to judge these tribunals and future courts can we measure improvements and setbacks and think constructively about what might be done differently--and better--at the International Criminal Court.

First, the United States record. Clearly the best way to punish war crimes, war criminals, crimes against humanity, and genocidaire is to stop them. And this is something that we in the United States have never managed to orient our system or our leaders to do. The United States record is strikingly consistent across time--irrespective of the personalities involved in shaping American policy, irrespective of the geopolitical standing of the United States, irrespective of the political ideology of American decisionmakers. The American response to genocide, again and again, is what might be termed "all systems shutdown." This is true at the macro level--if we look at what comes out of the black box of the United States government. But it is also true at a micro level--in how individuals within or outside the Beltway perceive atrocities while they are under way. The tendency among all of us is to look away, to cast doubt on horror stories, to take refuge in what I call the "do not compute" aspects of genocide. It is a crime that defies belief. And we refuse to let the magnitude of the atrocities or the moral imperative seep in. With this happening at a micro level, it is unsurprising that bureaucracies, which notoriously insulate individuals from notions of personal responsibility, amplify the propensity for denial and inaction.

The record is the same across a vast time span, from the 1915 Armenian genocide--though the crime was not then called "genocide" because the word was not invented until 1944--up until Bosnia, Rwanda, and the other egregious atrocities of the 1990s. In normal circumstances policymakers have at their disposal a toolbox containing all kinds of tools that can be deployed at various times, depending on the threat to United States interests. The tools might include "soft" sanctions on the diplomatic side, such as high-level denunciation, with senior officials like the president himself calling the crime "genocide." United States officials might threaten prosecution in international courts or in national courts after regime change. They might expel officials representing a genocidal regime from the United States, closing down their embassies in Washington or teaming up with UN Security Council allies to deny such officials diplomatic credentials at the UN. They might freeze the regime's foreign assets--genocidaire tend to care a lot about money. They might use United States technical assets to jam hate radio, or hate television, which is often exploited to demonize the would-be victims--"Sanitize the cockroaches!" Hutu militants chanted on Radio Mille Collines in Rwanda, "Kill or be killed!"--and to pass instructions to the killers: "So and so is traveling in a red car, license plate XYZ1234." They might rally peacekeeping (or genocide-stopping) troops from other countries, and then use America's unique airlift and logistic support capacities to ferry those willing troops into the region. They might create "safe areas" that are actually safe (unlike those in Bosnia), patrolling these refugee havens from the sky with NATO or US air power that is actually prepared to retaliate against those who disobey American or UN Security Council demands.

When genocide happens, one might imagine taking any one or all of these steps. Indeed, in light of the domestic constituency behind the postwar pledge of "never again," one might even send American troops into battle to stop genocide. What is shocking about the United States record in the twentieth century is that, out of all these tools that I have mentioned--tools that are deployed regularly on behalf of more conventional United States security and economic interests--the only genocide of the twentieth century that prompted senior American decisionmakers to open the toolbox and move along that continuum from soft sanctions to hard military intervention was Bosnia.

Why there? Western diplomatic and economic sanctions were deployed in Bosnia because of the "noise" that was generated at home. Bosnia was reported graphically in the New York Times every day; with two full pages often allocated, Bosnia secured almost as much space for itself as our own "war on terror." The Times included a little box with a map and a historical chronology to give readers context, in case we had not kept up or could not keep straight who was who. Church groups mobilized at home. Jewish groups who saw television images of emaciated men behind barbed wire said, "There but for the grace of God went I." Human rights groups grappled internally with whether they should call for the use of force for the first time in their histories. Many who had mistrusted state power, like those at Human Rights Watch, recommended a variety of forms of governmental intervention. The prescriptions were concrete. They did not just say, "Do something." They said "do A, B, and C." And in so doing, they were joined by an elite advocacy community, a kind of "grasstops" lobby composed of all kinds of strange bedfellows: Republicans and Democrats, hawks and doves--the cause of closing down concentration camps in Europe united them. Their motives were often different. Some wanted military action because Bosnia was Europe--this was enough of a historic, strategic, and moral summons. Some saw American credibility as being greatly undermined by the occurrence of this crime under NATO's nose. Some said genocide had to be stopped wherever it occurred and that was that. The clamor from influential segments of American society was loud. And it was this clamor that helped give rise to the creation of the ad hoc criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.