A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (27 page)

What was surprising, at least at first glance, was the vast and disproportionate influence these groups were exerting on the legislative process. Proxmire said the groups criticizing the treaty were a "politician's dream of what each of us dearly wish we could identify with our opponent."' In a fashion not unusual for Capitol Hill, the lobbies were making themselves more vocal and thus more effective in their opposition than mainstream American groups that supported the law in a passive way. "Let's not kid ourselves," Proxmire declared in 1986, the so-called discredited organizations can be "astonishingly effective."

He identified the challenge:

Responsible, respected, prestigious supporters of the treaty rarely discuss it. When they do discuss it, they talk about it in factual, low key, unemotional, reasonable terms.This doesn't excite anyone. The overwhelming majority of Americans agree with the treaty's supporters but they aren't excited about it. They are not moved emotionally. They rarely listen. So what's the result? We go home to our States.The only time we hear the Genocide Treaty brought up, it's brought up by intense, bitter people who know the treaty only through what they read in Liberty Lobby's Spotli, Iit or some publication of the John Birch Society.'

Human rights advocates had placed great hope in the presidency of Jimmy Carter. They expected him to galvanize a broader and more spirited base of support for the convention. Carter did attempt to resuscitate the law in a March 1977 speech before the United Nations. He was aided in 1978 when Proxmire and others used the airing of the Holocaust television series to spark a Senate debate. But the issue again dropped quickly out of public discourse. Carter opted to use his legislative leverage instead to secure U.S. ratification of the Panama Canal Treaty in 1977 and Start II in 1979. "Carter's problem was that he had so many other problems," says William Korey, the former director of International Policy Research for B'nai B'rith, who was then actively involved in the Ad Hoc Committee for the Ratification of the Human Rights and Genocide Treaties, which had been formed in the 1960s to raise support for the unratified UN treaties.

In the early 1980s, despite their exhaustion and exasperation, Proxmire, Korey, and other treaty supporters began to sense a newfound American receptivity to the convention. The American Bar Association, the most important longtime opponent of ratification, had dropped its opposition in 1976. Korey helped draw a short burst of attention to Lemkin's life. In 1964, after writing a Saturday Review article (entitled "An Embarrassed American") about the U.S. failure to ratify, Korey had received a call from Robert Lemkin, a cousin of Raphael Lemkin, who lived and worked as a dentist and amateur sculptor in Hempstead, Long Island. Robert Lemkin turned over a treasure trove of his cousin's belongings-his correspondence, notebooks, drafts of his genocide book, and a bust of the surly Polish American that Robert had sculpted. Korey asked Vartan Gregorian, head of the New York Public Library, whether he might host an exhibit on Lemkin's unheralded life. Gregorian, who happens to be of Armenian descent, agreed. In December 1983 Kathleen Teltsch, Lemkin's old friend from their days together at the early United Nations, wrote a short New York Times story on the NewYork exhibition.' After the three-month exhibit, Korey published several op-ed pieces on the need for ratification in America's major dailies.'

With the Holocaust now a topic for public discussion and debate, convention advocates began doing what Cambodia advocates had done: They linked their efforts to the Holocaust. Proxmire did so frequently. He trumpeted the tales of ordinary Poles who had refused to "stand idly by" during the Holocaust. "Mr. President, can we do any less than the Chrosteks and the Walter Ukalos? They did what they could to stop the monstrous actions of the Nazis. Will we do what we can to prevent a future Holocaust? Are we willing, at long last, to join the other 96 nations which have ratified the Genocide Convention?"" He invoked the death of Anne Frank. On her birthday he declared,

Mr. President, no treaty signed by this country could ever make up for the loss of Anne Frank and 6 million others who perished in the Holocaust. But we have an obligation to join with the other nations that have already ratified the Genocide Treaty to make clear to them that we share their sorrow at the tragedy that claimed Anne Frank's life. We need to make clear, Mr. President, our intention to prevent such a tragedy from ever happening again. We need to make clear that we will bring those who would commit genocide to justice."

Around the fortieth anniversary of the Allied liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, Proxmire specifically highlighted America's wartime indifference. During Hitler's Third Reich, he noted, seventy-eight speeches had been made in the U.S. House of Representatives about the persecution of the Jews in Europe. "Yet despite the speeches and the resolutions," he said, "the killings went on, the cries of the dying went unheeded, and our immigration policies remained unchanged. Is it any wonder that Hitler dismissed foreign outrage with the quip, `Who remembers the Armenians?"'"' When Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel made his first trip to Germany, Proxmire linked it, too, to ratification. "How can we sympathize with Mr. Wiesel's cause without taking action? The Genocide Convention establishes the mechanisms for action....""

Although Proxmire cultivated the image of himself as apolitical, he made an acutely political case for passage. Neither he nor the other supporters of the convention relied primarily upon moral argumentation, which was slowly drifting out of fashion. Like Lemkin, they went out of their way to demonstrate that nonratification was damaging America's interests. If Lemkin had instinctively wooed government representatives by describing the cultural losses they would endure, Proxmire and other advocates argued that American nonratification was undermining U.S. Cold War diploniacy. "It's clear that our failure to ratify ... has been one of the most useful propaganda clubs the Soviet Union has ever had." Proxmire said in a 1986 speech, "and we've handed it to them on a silver platter." UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick had testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee the previous fall. "It is contrary to our national interest," Kirkpatrick said, to fuel anti-American propaganda by refusing "to reaffirm clearly and unequivocally U.S. support for the objectives of the Convention" Proxmire quoted Kirkpatrick and asked, "Is Ambassador Kirkpatrick some type of one-worlder internationalist? Is she easily duped by Soviet or Communist trickery?"'' The Soviet Union had ratified the genocide convention in 1954, an act the Neu, York Times described as analogous to Al Capone's joining the "anti-saloon league"'' Proxmire agreed that the Soviets were hypocrites who had no intention of heeding international law simply because they had agreed to it. Still, he believed the United States should not remain aloof from the international framework. It was the only major power that had not ratified the convention.

The Soviet representative at the UN Human Rights Commission and at the review conferences for the Helsinki accords frequently undercut U.S. criticisms by saying a country that had not even contracted to the genocide convention had no right to lecture the Soviet Union on human rights. "Why permit Communist nations, which all too often only give lip service to these obligations, to take the moral high ground in these debates?" Proxmire asked. The United States could use the convention in its diplomatic arsenal. "It is unlikely that genocide will be committed in any Western democratic nation. It is more likely that genocide will occur in non-democratic, totalitarian or Communist states," he said. "We cannot do moral battle against genocide with one hand tied behind our backs""

Proxmire's staff collected a running tally of embarrassing clashes between U.S. and Soviet representatives in international settings, which they showered upon senators. At one meeting of the UN Subcommission on the Prevention of Discrimination, Proxmire recalled that Morris Abrams, the U.S. member of the commission, had urged the need for "forceful measures of implementation" to confront racial discrimination. The Soviet delegate promptly turned to Abrams to inquire whether the United States had ratified the genocide convention, the most basic of all human rights treaties. Chastened, Abrams quietly stated his "regret, of course, that my country has not ratified the convention on genocide..""

Rita Hauser, President Nixon's delegate to the UN Human Rights Commission, had testified before the 1970 Senate Committee:

We have frequently invoked the terms of this Convention ... in our continued aggressive attack against the Soviet Union for its practices, particularly as to its Jewish communities, but also as to the Ukrainians, Tartars, Baptists and others. It is this anomaly ... [that] often leads to the retort in debates plainly put, "Who are you to invoke a treaty that you are not a party to?"

Although Proxmire had relayed many of these tales on the Senate floor and the Soviet tactic had long been publicized, he believed President Reagan, the renowned Cold Warrior, would be more annoyed by the Soviet debater's move than his predecessors had been. Reagan would not wish to allow the "Evil Empire" to claim any patch of moral high ground.

Proxmire was backed by the grassroots ad hoc committee, which tried to generate bottom-up pressure. With the November 1984 presidential election approaching, Korey worked behind the scenes to lobby the foreign policy advisers of the incumbent Reagan and challenger Walter Mondale. He struck out with the Mondale campaign, but in early September one of Reagan's foreign policy advisers casually called to say that the president was prepared to change his position on the genocide convention and support ratification. Korey was floored.

In each presidential election cycle, it had become a tradition that the candidates would use the B'nai B'rith annual convention as an opportunity to address the Jewish community. On the eve of the 1984 convention, State Department spokesman John Hughes publicly announced that President Reagan would endorse the genocide convention. "The commitment of our country to prevent and punish acts of genocide is indisputable;' Hughes said. "Yet our failure to ratify this treaty ... has opened the United States to unnecessary criticism in various international fora"" In his first term Reagan had not supported the convention. In fact, when Republican Senator Charles Percy, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, held hearings on the treaty in 1981, not a single representative of the Reagan administration had turned up to testify. But in his B'nai B'rith speech, thanks partly to the lobbying of nongovernmental advocates and the proven unwillingness of Proxmire to let the issue drop on Capitol Hill, the president (and candidate) changed course.The Soviet rebuttals irritated him. Reagan's advisers also believed that the president could gain at least a few Jewish votes by supporting the measure. But perhaps most crucial, with only three weeks remaining in the Senate session, the Reagan team knew that the treaty would not come up for passage until after his reelection. "This was a shrewd move by the Administration," a Senate aide said at the time. "There is no time for floor debate in which the President would have to take on the conservatives, but there is time for political benefits for the President.""

Reagan's belated shift was a small victory for convention advocates. But it actually only brought him into line with all previous American presidents except Eisenhower. The administration gave no signs that President Reagan was prepared to invest the political capital needed to bring about full Senate ratification. But that was before Reagan blundered at Bitburg.

Bitburg

In April 1985 the White House announced that President Reagan planned to lay a wreath at West Germany's Bitburg Cemetery the following month. Reagan's trip was meant to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the end of World War II. But when the press reported that forty-nine Nazi Waffen SS officials were buried at the site and that Reagan had declined requests to visit Holocaust memorials, the president was lambasted for his insensitivity. The Waslihi'Vton Post and New York Times demanded he drop the visit, calling it "one of the most embarrassing and politically damaging episodes of his Administration." The American Legion, which represented 2.5 million U.S. war veterans, said it was "terribly disappointed."' Some eighty senators in the Republican-controlled Senate called on Reagan to "reassess his itinerary."" Senate Republican leader Bob Dole issued his own public appeals for cancellation. More than 250 House representatives wrote German chancellor Helmut Kohl directly, asking him to spare the U.S. president humiliation by changing the venue. And Jewish organizations protested fiercely. The main pro-Israel lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, Jewish survivor organizations, and most prominent Jewish American leaders expressed anger and alarm. Holocaust survivor Wiesel said he had "rarely seen such outrage" among Jewish groups and condemned what he termed the "beginning ... of the rehabilitation of the SS"" At a White House ceremony coincidentally honoring Wiesel, Reagan tried to appease him by citing the "political and strategic reasons" for visiting Bitburg. But in his public remarks Wiesel rejected Reagan's defense. "The issue here is not politics, but good and evil. And we must never confuse them. For I have seen the SS at work. And I have seen their victims. They were my friends. They were my parents," Wiesel said."

Reagan defended the planned trip on a variety of grounds. He hoped to "cement" the German-U.S. friendship. He had to stand by his commitment to Chancellor Kohl. It was important to move beyond German guilt. In one interview Reagan claimed that the German soldiers were "victims" of the Nazis `just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.." In response to the outrage, Reagan tacked on a visit to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, but he refused to do the one thing that might have curbed the criticisms: cancel the visit. He preferred plunging poll ratings to the appearance of bowing to public pressure. "All it would do is leave me looking as if I caved in the face of some unfavorable attention," Reagan said, blaming the reporters for stirring the controversy. "They've gotten hold of something, and like a dog ... they're going to keep on chewing on it." The president plowed ahead, ignoring the predictions by his Republican strategists that the Bitburg visit would cost him Jewish support. On the day of Reagan's Bitburg stopover, May 5, 1985, protests were held in Boston, Miami, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Newark, West Hartford, and New Haven.