On March 14, 1921, a 24-year-old Armenian named Soghomon Tehlirian assassinated the retired interior minister of Turkey, Mehmed Talaat. It was Talaat who determined and then administered the most effective way to kill almost 1,000,000 Armenians in 1915. Soghomon Tehlirian, who lost his family to the Turkish slaughter, was only one of his victims. But it was a report of his trial that led to the naming of the previously unnamed crime of genocide.
Until 1945, mankind did not even have a name for the practice of destroying an entire race, ethnicity, or religion. We called them, for lack of anything better, crimes against humanity, or slaughter, or massacre. But none of those words really captured the vastness of the wrong. Samantha Power, before she became the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, wrote about a man named Raphael Lemkin, a linguist and lawyer from Poland who lost his family to the Holocaust.
Twenty years before, he had questioned his linguistics professors about why it was so wrong for Tehlirian to kill one man who had killed almost a million. Why was one a crime, and the other not? The answer was that there was no law against the mass execution of a people by their government. Lemkin devoted his adult life to changing that.
But first he had to define the crime in a manner that would catch the attention and stir the anger of people and politicians around the world.
His word would do it all. It would be the rare term that carried in it society’s revulsion and indignation. It would be what he called an “index of civilization.”38
The word that Lemkin settled upon was a hybrid that combined the Greek derivative geno, meaning “race” or “tribe,” together with the Latin derivative cide, from caedere, meaning “killing.” “Genocide” was short, it was novel, and it was not likely to be mispronounced. Because of the word’s lasting association with Hitler’s horrors, it would also send shudders down the spines of those who heard it.
His story, and the stories of Americans who either ignored the crime or fought futilely to prevent it, are included in Samantha Power’s book, A Problem from Hell.
“A Problem From Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide
By Samantha Power
Published by Basic Books, a division of Hachette Book Group
February 20, 2003
620 Pages
Born in Ireland, and raised in the United States from the age of 9, Samantha Power became a war correspondent who covered the genocide in Bosnia during the 1990s. Appalled by what she saw there, when she returned to the States she went to Harvard for her law degree. She also wrote the book on genocides of the 20th century and our reaction, or lack thereof, to them. Beginning with the Armenian Genocide of 1915, she includes the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge murders in Cambodia, Saddam Hussein’s attack on the Kurds in Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda, Srebrenica, and Kosovo. And throughout her survey of 20th-century genocide, she traces the efforts of Raphael Lemkin to create an international law that would ban the practice.
As most tyrants do, the Turks began their Armenian massacre with intellectuals, teachers, and the professional classes. And then they slaughtered the rest:
Henry Morgenthau Sr. was the U.S. ambassador to Turkey at the time, and for all his attempts at raising the alarm back home, he could not even get the Woodrow Wilson administration to “issue a direct government-to-government appeal on ‘behalf of humanity’ to stop the killings.” Since Americans weren’t involved and since the actions of the Turkish government did not impact America’s national interests, there was no help coming from the White House.Armenian men in rural areas were initially enlisted as pack animals to transport Turkish supplies to the front, but soon even this was deemed too dignified an existence for the traitorous Christians. Churches were desecrated. Armenian schools were closed, and those teachers who refused to convert to Islam were killed. All over Anatolia the authorities posted deportation orders requiring the Armenians to relocate to camps prepared in the deserts of Syria. In fact, the Turkish authorities knew that no facilities had been prepared, and more than half of the deported Armenians died on the way. “By continuing the deportation of the orphans to their destinations during the intense cold,” Talaat wrote, “we are ensuring their eternal rest.”4
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The atrocities were carried out against women, children, and unarmed men. They were not incidental “by-products” of war but in fact resulted from carefully crafted decisions made by Turkey’s leaders.
After twenty-six months in Constantinople, Morgenthau left in early 1916. He could no longer stand his impotence. “My failure to stop the destruction of the Armenians,” he recalled, “had made Turkey for me a place of horror—I had reached the end of my resources.”42 More than 1 million Armenians had been killed on his watch.
Nor have the Armenians found any help from the current administration, which still refuses to recognize that what happened to the Armenians was genocide. (This is no doubt in obedience to the dictates of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan with whom Lindsay Graham met just prior to killing the bipartisan bill that would have finally recognized the 1915 Armenian Genocide.)
America’s nonresponse to the Turkish horrors established patterns that would be repeated. Time and again the U.S. government would be reluctant to cast aside its neutrality and formally denounce a fellow state for its atrocities. Time and again though U.S. officials would learn that huge numbers of civilians were being slaughtered, the impact of this knowledge would be blunted by their uncertainty about the facts and their rationalization that a firmer U.S. stand would make little difference. Time and again American assumptions and policies would be contested by Americans in the field closest to the slaughter, who would try to stir the imaginations of their political superiors. And time and again these advocates would fail to sway Washington. The United States would offer humanitarian aid to the survivors of “race murder” but would leave those committing it alone.
After World War II, Raphael Lemkin worked to get the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide adopted by the United Nations General Assembly. He succeeded on Dec. 9, 1948. Although the Convention entered into force on Jan. 12, 1951, the United States did not ratify the convention until Ronald Reagan agreed to its terms, with reservations, in a political move to cover his blunder at Bitburg, Germany. On May 4, 1985, in honor of the 40th anniversary of the end of World War II, President Reagan planned a stop at the cemetery in Bitburg. Whether he knew in advance or not, the cemetery contained the final resting places of some 49 Nazi Waffen SS officers, which created a major public relations nightmare for Reagan. In order to distract, he agreed to the treaty. By the time we agreed to the Convention, Democratic Sen. William Proxmire of Wisconsin had spoken in favor of its passage on the floor of the Senate a total of 3,211 times over 19 years.
Meanwhile, we kept ignoring genocide. When the Khmer Rouge moved into Cambodia, our policy makers determined that the execution of members of the old government was simply a result of its overthrow. And then Pol Pot turned all of the Cambodians out of the cities and towns into the countryside. And we stood by, not wanting to once again venture into Southeast Asia, while Vietnam rescued the Cambodian people.
Our response to Saddam Hussein’s chemical warfare against the Kurds of Northern Iraq was little more than bluster. It wasn’t until he moved against Kuwait that the United States felt its interests were threatened enough to take action.
It is clear that Samantha Power respects some American diplomats and politicians more than others. While men like Lemkin, William Proxmire, James Kenneth Galbraith, and Henry Morgenthau fought against the inaction of the United States government and the world at large, others silently retreated. That includes men like Warren Christopher, who served as secretary of state under Bill Clinton; President Clinton himself; and the administration of George H.W. Bush. A prime example of their inaction was the genocide in Rwanda between April 7 and July 15, 1994.
In 100 days, some 800,000 Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu were murdered. The United States did almost nothing to try to stop it. Ahead of the April 6 plane crash, the United States ignored extensive early warnings about imminent mass violence. It denied Belgian requests to reinforce the peacekeeping mission. When the massacres started, not only did the Clinton administration not send troops to Rwanda to contest the slaughter, but it refused countless other options. President Clinton did not convene a single meeting of his senior foreign policy advisers to discuss U.S. options for Rwanda. His top aides rarely condemned the slaughter.
Samantha Power’s passion comes across most strongly when she writes about the Bosnian genocide, about the refusal of America, under presidents from both parties, to do anything to prevent the Serbian “ethnic cleansing” of Bosnia or the massacre at Srebrenica. This Pulitzer Prize-winning work does more than just present our shameful tolerance of genocide: It also attempts to understand why. Why would a nation that promises “never again” keep allowing genocides to happen again and again?
She suggests some possible reasons:
A lack of knowledge. We didn’t know, we had no way to verify the facts on the ground, and had no idea of the scope of the problem. The belief that there was little we could have done that would have changed the situation. Finally, we lacked the will to take action:The real reason the United States did not do what it could and should have done to stop genocide was not a lack of knowledge or influence but a lack of will. Simply put, American leaders did not act because they did not want to. 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.
Not a dry dusty academic study, A Problem from Hell is an engaging work of nonfiction which poses some real questions that still need to be answered more than 15 years after it was written.
Late in 2004, after listening to Barack Obama’s electrifying speech to the Democratic National Convention, Power sent a copy of the book to him. Five months later they met for dinner and she joined his Senate staff as a foreign policy fellow. The story of their dinner meeting and her work in his presidential administration, as well as the story of her early life, are in The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir. Next week’s essay will be a review of that book and a discussion of what happens when an activist becomes a member of the political establishment.