The Foreign Service Journal, December 2003

D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 3 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 73 B OOKS A Moral Foreign Policy? A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide Samantha Power, Perennial/Harper Collins, 2003, $17.95, paperback, 620 pages. R EVIEWED BY P ETER F. S PALDING Despite its grim subject, A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide is compelling reading. One can readily see why it won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and attracted kudos from critics around the world. Samantha Power, a journalist and lawyer who currently teaches at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School, does not gloss over the horrors of her subject. She devotes separate chapters to the Turkish campaign against Armenians during World War I, the Nazis’ “Final Solution,” and the Khmer Rouge’s brutality, to name but a few of the book’s case studies. But her focus is on the consistent inertia of the United States government in respond- ing to each horror, the sole exception being President Clinton’s reluctant intervention on behalf of the Albanians in Kosovo. Power then chronicles the birth of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and its “founding father,” Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who lost 48 members of his family to the Holocaust. Lemkin, who invented the term “genocide” in 1944, dedicated his life to advocating the radical proposal that the world must ban genocide through international law, promulgat- ed in a convention signed by all the member states of the United Nations. Another hero in the birth of the agreement was Sen. William Proxmire, D-Wisc., who on Jan. 11, 1967, stood up in the Senate and announced that he would give a speech advocating the ratification of the Convention Against Genocide every day until it was rati- fied. Nineteen years and 3,211 Senate speeches later, the U.S. finally ratified the treaty. But it would be another decade before anyone was tried for genocide or before any country acted to prevent it. Despite the U.S. government’s apa- thy, many individual State Department “worker bees” have done their best over the years to raise the alarm. Consider Charles Twining, who, to the bemusement of his Foreign Service colleagues, spent 1974 at FSI as the lone student of Khmer. Subsequently posted to Thailand, he soon found himself on the Cambodian border interviewing refugees fleeing the Khmer Rouge atrocities. Twining’s reports were echoed by those of anoth- er young FSO, Ken Quinn (later ambassador to Cambodia), posted on the Vietnamese side of the border. Thanks to these two diplomats, Washington had its first warnings of one of the worst cases of genocide in history. Less than two decades later, America’s refusal to intervene in Bosnia prompted the largest number of Foreign Service resignations on principle in the history of the depart- ment, according to the author. Soon thereafter, FSO Prudence Bushnell, a deputy assistant secretary in the Africa Bureau during the 1994 Rwanda geno- cide, urged intervention only to be marginalized by her superiors for her efforts — despite the fact, as Power documents, that it represented the most clear-cut case for action since the Holocaust. Power’s extensive research, including access to previously classified cables, reveals that even a minimal commitment of “boots on the ground” by the U.S. and the U.N. could have saved many of the 800,000 Rwandan men, women, and children from being butchered and burned to death. To her credit, then-U.N. Amb- assador Madeleine Albright also raised concerns but, as she put it, “the global 911 was either busy or nobody was there.” For his part, Secretary of State Warren Christopher had to interrupt a meeting on Rwanda to pull an atlas off the shelf to find out where the country under discussion was located. Despite the U.S. government’s apathy about genocide, many individual State Department “worker bees” have raised the alarm.