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From: Myint Zan
Remote Name: 144.120.16.209
Date: 03 Jun 2002
Time: 12:04:35 +1100
Below is the transcript from a recent radio program on National Public Radio (in the United States), which comments on the recent cases of genocide in the world and the global reponse (or lack thereof) to these crises.
The guests on the show include: Samantha Power, author of "A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" and Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government; and Elizabeth Neuffer, author of the book "The Key to My Neighbor's House: Seeking Justice in Bosnia and Rwanda" and foreign affairs correspondent for the Boston Globe.
For the full text of the radio program, see below.
National Public Radio (NPR) SHOW: Weekend Edition Saturday (1:00 PM ET) - NPR
May 25, 2002 Saturday
HEADLINE: Samantha Power and Elizabeth Neuffer discuss the world's views on genocide in modern times ANCHORS: SCOTT SIMON
SCOTT SIMON, host:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Scott Simon. After World War II the world vowed never to permit another Holocaust, and yet it's happened again and again: in Rwanda, in Bosnia, Cambodia, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Burundi, East Timor, and possibly other places, while the world looked on without getting involved until thousands had died. There are two new books out that look at how the world addresses, or ignores, genocide today. Samantha Power has written "A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide." This is a book that analyzes why many US leaders have failed to apply this country's power and influence to halt crimes against humanity. Ms. Power directs the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, and joins us from the studios of WBUR in Boston.
Ms. Power, thanks for being with us.
Ms. SAMANTHA POWER (Author, "A Problem From Hell"): Thank you.
SIMON: And Elizabeth Neuffer is author of the book "The Key to My Neighbor's House: Seeking Justice in Bosnia and Rwanda," which chronicles the experiences of some victims of genocide and the world's effort to punish the perpetrators. Ms. Neuffer covers foreign affairs for The Boston Globe, and she joins us from our studios in New York City.
Thank you very much for being with us.
Ms. ELIZABETH NEUFFER (Author, "The Key to My Neighbor's House"): It's good to be here.
SIMON: Ms. Neuffer, let me begin with you and "The Key to My Neighbor's House," which refers to the relationship between Muslims and Serbs in central Bosnia before that conflict began. You know, this is a question that I suspect we'll be asking for decades: How is it that neighbors, friends, or at least people who live in amity, become adversaries willing to kill over it?
Ms. NEUFFER: You know, there are sort of two answers to that question, Scott. One comes, in fact, in the voice of one of the characters in the book, a guy named Hamdo Karmanovic(ph), in testimony before the UN War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. And he's standing in front of Judge Gabrielle McDonald, an American, who asks him this very question: 'How did it happen, Hamdo? Can you explain it to me?' And, in fact, that's where the title of the book comes from, is his answer. And he says, 'I find it very difficult to explain. All I can tell you is that before the war, I had the key to my neighbor's house and he had the key to mine.'
What I read in his answer was, in fact, that it wasn't that people turned on each other overnight. What happened was that the war was imported, to a large degree. It was imported by the propaganda. It was imported by mercenaries. And it was imported by the greater dreams of Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia, who had a dream of cleansing Bosnia as part of his greater Serbia.
SIMON: My question was posited in terms that suggested the destruction was equal on both sides. We should remind ourselves that's not the case.
Ms. NEUFFER: Right. It wasn't the case. While there were victims on all sides and there were certainly acts of violence on all sides, when we look back at the Bosnian war we can largely lay blame at the feet of the Bosnian Serbs and Milosevic himself, the Serbian leader.
SIMON: Ms. Power, let's focus on your book a little bit and the question of US responsibility. You have written very memorably about the fact that at least you found the protestations of the Clinton administration that they just lacked the knowledge and wherewithal to become involved in Rwanda to be unconvincing. Ms. POWER: Well, I had the advantage of being able to look through some thousands of pages of declassified documents working with The National Security Archive there in Washington, and you see what is transmitted from the field, from Kigali, from the UN mission there, in public sources as well, like The New York Times and The Washington Post. And the claim of an absence of knowledge is just really proven hollow by those facts and by those cables and memos, and by the debates which involved relatively seniors of midlevel--actually, assistant-secretary-level officials--saying, 'You know, we can't use the word "genocide"; then we might actually have to do something.' But there was a real awareness that what was going on on the ground qualified; it just was a question of fearing generating a kind of spike in public interest if you called it genocide.
SIMON: Fearing that public interest would force them to do something?
Ms. POWER: Yeah, that because there is a sort of abstract, vague consensus in this country that genocide is wrong and that, you know, we wouldn't stand idly by if it happened again, that if you call it civil war, if you call it two-sided, then, you know, the public will stay mute. But if you call it genocide and then do nothing, there is a fear among policy-makers that there'll actually be a cost to being a bystander. And there's never been a cost to being a bystander to genocide until, actually, interestingly, the Bosnian war, where finally, in the summer of 1995, thanks to sustained editorial support for intervention, sustained press coverage and fierce congressional pressure on the executive branch, on the Clinton administration to do more, finally, the costs of staying uninvolved were greater than those of actually getting involved.
SIMON: For example, you write about Jimmy Carter. President Jimmy Carter, then, sanctioned the UN vote on massacres by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia; Ronald Reagan supporting the regime in Iraq while Saddam Hussein was using chemical weapons on his own people. George Herbert Walker Bush is not considered an enemy of human rights, yet he was president when US involvement in Bosnia was vetoed. What is it that restrains not just American presidents but, demonstrably, people with decent instincts from becoming involved?
Ms. POWER: I think the answer is, none of those presidents has ever come into office and said, 'Not on my watch.' All of the ones you've mentioned did a great job remembering the Holocaust, but they've never said, 'Up there with American short-term and long-term security interests stands genocide intervention.' And as a result, it's simply not a coincidence that when a case confronts an administration, the geopolitics and short-term strategic interests are going to trump. And in the Carter case, it was the sort of all-systems shutdown after Vietnam. In the Reagan case, it was that Iran was a greater enemy than Iraq, and so what difference did it make how Iraq treated its citizens internally? In the 1990s it was the simple fear that if you get entangled, you will pay a domestic political price, where again, if you say on the sidelines, there is no price to be paid.
What's so extraordinary about a century of bystanding is the extent to which there have been upstanders, whether it's Henry Morgenthau, the US ambassador in Constantinople back in 1915, simply trying to get permission from the Wilson administration to condemn the Turks for what they were doing to the Armenians, or whether it's the State Department dissenter--Scott, you'll remember--from the 1990s who resigned to protest the Bush...
SIMON: Yeah.
Ms. POWER: ...administration and then the Clinton administration policy. There are always individuals...
SIMON: In Bosnia, you're talking about, I gather.
Ms. POWER: In Bosnia...
SIMON: Yeah.
Ms. POWER: ...yeah, who objected to standing idly by, who felt that we did have a dog in that fight. Again and again you see...
SIMON: You're casting back to Secretary of State Baker then--said, 'We don't have a dog in that fight.'
Ms. POWER: Yeah, and there was serious dissent within the administration, as there has been in virtually every case of genocide. And what's interesting about the American upstanders, if you will, is that they end up being so demonized by their colleagues as being emotional, soft, irrational; you know, they're not speaking the language of Washington.
SIMON: Yeah.
Ms. POWER: And when we look back, though, on the century, you know, how many of us don't wish we were like them?
Ms. NEUFFER: Scott, that's one of the things that makes the creation of the two UN War Crimes Tribunals so very, very fascinating, because one could read that, in fact, as a response to genocide, a response provoked by guilt and by shame and the very sort of public uproar that had sprung up over the lack of American action, the American administration took a lead in pushing for the creation of both the UN War Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, based in The Hague, and the UN War Crimes Tribunal for Rwanda, which is based in Tanzania. And I often think that part of what spurred that was, you know, partly a kind of romantic vision of Nuremberg and, you know, the movie and Spencer Tracy and sort of this great dream of international justice. But I also think part of what spurred it along was an American administration under pressure to do something in a way that made them appear to be doing something in which they didn't have to get militarily involved, they didn't have to pay a price on the ground. They could do something abstractly and at a distance.
SIMON: Some of the people that you talk about in Bosnia and Rwanda--to what degree are the societies we're talking about in a position to accept responsibility for what happened in their societies?
Ms. NEUFFER: Well, I think they're a long way from that acceptance. And one of the things I learned while working on the book is that this process is one that takes a great deal of time, and it takes a great deal of sort of local action as well as international action. You need sort of the overarching guidance of something like an international war crimes tribunal that helps, sets out the facts of what happened in a way that, you know, people see them and realize for the first time, stripped of propaganda, what happened in their own back yard. With that and with that knowledge, they can then begin to sort of sit down and talk to their neighbors or, you know, get together with old enemies and try to sort of swap tales and try to figure out what happened.
And one of the things that is so amazing is how few Bosnians and how few Rwandans really do understand exactly what led to the genocide in Rwanda or the war in Bosnia. And the person they may blame down the street may have just been a pawn in a much larger game. Now these trials are beginning to paint a picture that makes that much clearer for people, and I think with that, you take the first small step towards reconciliation and moving on.
SIMON: Let me ask this of you both: In light of the work you do, in light of what you've seen around the world, do you believe in evil?
Ms. NEUFFER: You know, I talk about when you see a murder, what you really see is yourself. And what I meant by that was that, as I went around and interviewed indicted war criminals and, you know, as I met people with blood on their hands in Rwanda and, more recently, Afghanistan, I think that one of the things I realized is that it's a very normal, human sort of temptation to go down that road, to be consumed by jealousy, anger, to be swept away by propaganda. And the very hard part is the part to say no. And I had great admiration for the people I met on all sides who actually said no--the Hutus I met in Rwanda who said, 'No, I'm not going to take part and I will pay the price. I'm not going to do what everybody else is doing.' Bosnian Serbs I met who put their foot down and said no.
One of the things that's so interesting about discussions of having, for example, a truth commission in Bosnia, something that's been discussed for many years, is that people want very much to have that process look at people who tried to halt crimes as well as those who tried to commit them.
Ms. POWER: Well, that's why we, I think, have to look at ourselves. I think, unfortunately, from Genesis forwards we can take genocide as a fact of life, and the question is, what are we on the outside going to do about it? How are we going to incentivize people on the inside standing up and legitimate that way of behaving? And how are we going to punish the perpetrators of these crimes after the fact?
Ms. NEUFFER: Which is why punishment is so important. Which is why the two War Crimes Tribunals and, more recently, the creation of the International Criminal Court, of which the United States is not going to take part, I think is so very, very important. One of the things that does send a message is when perpetrators like Slobodan Milosevic can be brought into the dock and made to account for their crimes. The Milosevic trial has had an extraordinary impact, and one of the things that's so extraordinary about it is it's, in a sense, become a part of day-to-day life. You know, people sort of tune in to the broadcast, watch a little bit of the trial, and snap it off. It isn't an extreme moment. It is an ordinary moment. And for the first time in their history, the fact that someone who perpetrated a crime is being held accountable is being seen as part of regular civil society. That's never happened before.
SIMON: Ms. Power?
Ms. POWER: One of the central protagonists in my book is a man named Raphael Lemkin, who, in fact, invented the word 'genocide' in 1944 and spent the first--prior to losing 49 members of his family in the Holocaust, spent his 20s and 30s trying to convince the pre-Holocaust world that such crimes could take place, that there was such a thing as a crime against humanity. And he was ignored. He moved to the United States, joined the War Department, drafted the first-ever UN human rights treaty, the Genocide Convention.
And the lesson of his experience, I think, was that you think that you can just build a wall around these crimes, but they do come back to haunt you, not just on moral grounds, but when Saddam Hussein uses gases against his own people, these are the chemical weapons that we're now afraid he's going to use against American citizens. When we allow the Bosnian Muslims to die in Europe in 1992, 1993, 1994, who gets into Bosnia to radicalize those Muslims? Bin Laden gets in. And Lemkin obviously didn't know about Saddam Hussein or bin Laden or the modern world--he died in 1959--but he was a prophet. He understood that allowing genocide, allowing these crimes, is not only bad for the victims, but it's bad for all of us.
SIMON: I want to thank you both very much.
Ms. POWER: Thank you, Scott.
Ms. NEUFFER: Thanks, Scott.
SIMON: Elizabeth Neuffer is author of "The Key to My Neighbor's House." She covers foreign affairs for The Boston Globe. She joined us from New York. And Samantha Power in Boston; her book is "A Problem From Hell." Ms. Power's executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
And you're listening to WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News.