A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (82 page)

The trials at the ad hoc tribunals have also affirmed the ghastly claims of survivors, refugees, and Western journalists. The courts were set up, as the Nuremberg court was before them, to verify "incredible events by credible evidence.." So far they have given some acknowledgment to victims who were once taunted that their suffering would go unnoticed, unremembered, and above all unredressed. Although the crimes under discussion were eventually documented by journalists in Western countries, the local media in the Balkans and Rwanda usually dismissed the reports as "Western lies."Thus, many citizens still refuse to accept the nature or scale of the crimes committed in their name.

During the Krstic trial, again, a former Bosnian Serb soldier took the stand on behalf of the defense and said, "As a human being, I cannot believe." A former officer in the Drina Corps agreed, noting, "I do not wish or want to believe." He claimed that the "Muslim media" had wildly exaggerated the number of men killed, calling the figure of more than 7,000 murdered Muslims "incredible." It would have been noticed, he said, if "7,000 sparrows had been killed, let alone people.""

But the prosecution team presented vivid color photos of mass graves and the clothed skeletons within them. They screened satellite photos of the men gathered in fields awaiting execution.They ran Bosnian Serb television footage of the Serbs hauling men from the woods into buses and firing antiaircraft guns into the forests where the Muslims were scrambling for their lives. A lower-level Bosnian Serb soldier testified that the execution squads fired "over and over ... until their fingers hurt." And perhaps most damning, the prosecution played intercepted telephone conversations between senior Serb officials. After weeks of denying his own role, General Krstic could only sit stunned and motionless when the prosecution played a recording from July 15, 1995, in which a Serb colonel and Krstic discussed the murder and disposal of their Muslim captives. The colonel asks whether he can have more troops because "there are still 3,500 parcels that I have to distribute." "Parcels" was code for Muslim men and "distribute" code for murder. "Fuck it," Krstic is heard saying, "I'll see what I can do.' 140

Krstic grew visibly agitated in the courtroom as the recording was played, but he recovered quickly, denying his own involvement. Still, it was significant that Krstic's legal team never contested that more than 7,000 men had been murdered. When Krstic was cross-examined as to why he did not report these crimes, he claimed he had "intended" to do so but "feared for my security and that of my family."" Not in my wildest dreams was I able to take steps," Krstic said, confirming the savage event and the cover-up.'' Serbs had been the original aggressors in the wars in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, but their local leaders had emphasized only their suffering. Gradually, thanks in part to The Hague's refusal to go away, Serbia's population began to face the atrocities carried out in their name. Many even recognized that because the UN tribunal was establishing individual responsibility, it could do a great deal to rehabilitate Serbia in the eyes of the rest of the world.

It was not just the perpetrators or the ordinary Serb civilians who needed to hear evidence of what had occurred. It was also, alas, the victims, many of whom still clung to hope. In November 2000, a Muslim woman testified about the fall of Srebrenica and the disappearance of her husband and two sons. Before stepping off the stand, she asked the judges if she could herself pose a question to General Krstic. One of her sons was thirteen when Serb soldiers pulled him away from her outside the Dutch UN base. "I plead that you ask Mr. Krstic if there is any hope," she said to the judge, as she choked on her grief. "At least for that child which they took alive from my hands. I dream about him. He speaks to me. Does Mr. Krstic know if he is somewhere, alive?" Krstic sat frozen, his head down."

Chapter 14

Conclusion

Over the course of the last century, the United States has made modest progress in its responses to genocide. The persistence and proliferation of dissenters within the U.S. government and human rights advocates outside it have made a policy of silence in the face of genocide more difficult to sustain. As Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic learned, state sovereignty no longer necessarily shields a perpetrator of genocide from either military intervention or courtroom punishment.

But such advances have been eclipsed by America's toleration of unspeakable atrocities, often committed in clear view. The personalities and geopolitical constraints influencing U.S. decision-making have shifted with time, but the United States has consistently refused to take risks in order to suppress genocide. The United States is not alone.The states bordering genocidal societies and the European powers have looked away as well. Despite broad public consensus that genocide should "never again" be allowed, and a good deal of triumphalism about the ascent of liberal democratic values, the last decade of the twentieth century was one of the most deadly in the grimmest century on record. Rwandan Hutus in 1994 could freely, joyfully, and systematically slaughter 8,000 Tutsi a day for 100 days without any foreign interference. Genocide occurred after the Cold War; after the growth of human rights groups; after the advent of technology that allowed for instant communication; after the erection of the Holocaust Museum on the Mall in Washington, D.C.

Perversely, America's public awareness of the Holocaust often seemed to set the bar for concern so high that we were able to tell ourselves that contemporary genocides were not measuring up. As the writer David Rieff noted, "never again" might best be defined as "Never again would Germans kill Jews in Europe in the 1940s."' Either by averting their eyes or attending to more pressing conventional strategic and political concerns, U.S. leaders who have denounced the Holocaust have themselves repeatedly allowed genocide.

What is most shocking about America's reaction to Turkey's killing of Armenians, the Holocaust, Pol Pot's reign of terror, Iraq's slaughter of the Kurds, Bosnian Serbs' mass murder of Muslims, and the Hutu elimination of Tutsi is not that the United States refused to deploy U.S. ground forces to combat the atrocities. For much of the century, even the most ardent interventionists did not lobby for U.S. ground invasions. What is most shocking is that U.S. policymakers did almost nothing to deter the crime. Because America's "vital national interests" were not considered imperiled by mere genocide, senior U.S. officials did not give genocide the moral attention it warranted. Instead of undertaking steps along a continuum of intervention-from condemning the perpetrators or cutting off U.S aid to bombing or rallying a multinational invasion force-U.S. officials tended to trust in negotiation, cling to diplomatic niceties and "neutrality," and ship humanitarian aid.

Indeed, on occasion the United States directly or indirectly aided those committing genocide. It orchestrated the vote in the UN Credentials Committee to favor the Khmer Rouge. It sided with and supplied U.S. agricultural and manufacturing credits to Iraq while Saddam Hussein was attempting to wipe out the country's Kurds. Along with its European allies, it maintained an arms embargo against the Bosnian Muslims even after it was clear that the arms ban prevented the Muslims from defending themselves. It used i-s clout on the UN Security Council to mandate the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers from Rwanda and block efforts to redeploy there. To the people of Bosnia and Rwanda, the United States and its Security Council allies held out the promise of protection-a promise that that they were not prepared to keep.

The key question, after a century of false promise, is: Why does the United States stand so idly by?

Knowledge

The most common response is, "We didn't know." This is not true. To be sure, the information emanating from countries victimized by genocide was imperfect. Embassy personnel were withdrawn, intelligence assets on the ground were scarce, editors were typically reluctant to assign their reporters to places where neither U.S. interests nor American readers were engaged, and journalists who attempted to report the atrocities were limited in their mobility. As a result, refugee claims were difficult to confirm and body counts notoriously hard to establish. Because genocide is usually veiled under the cover of war, some U.S. officials at first had genuine difficulty distinguishing deliberate atrocities against civilians from conventional conflict.

But although U.S. officials did not know all there was to know about the nature and scale of the violence, they knew a remarkable amount. From Henry Morgenthau Sr., the well-connected U.S. ambassador in Constantinople in 1915, to Jon Western, the junior intelligence analyst on Bosnia in 1993, U.S. officials have pumped a steady stream of information up the chain to senior decision-makers-both early warnings ahead of genocide and vivid documentation during it. Much of the best intelligence appeared in the morning papers. Back in 1915, when communications were primitive, the New York Times managed to publish 145 stories about the Turkish massacre of Armenians. Nearly eighty years later, the same paper reported just three days after the beginning of the Rwanda genocide that "tens of thousands" of Rwandans had already been murdered. It devoted more column inches to the horrors of Bosnia between 1992 and 1995 than it did to any other single foreign story.

In an age of instant information, U.S. officials have gone from claiming that they "didn't know" to suggesting-as President Clinton did in his 1998 Rwanda apology-that they "didn't fully appreciate." This, too, is misleading. It is true that the atrocities that were known remained abstract and remote, rarely acquiring the status of knee-buckling knowledge among ordinary Americans. Because the savagery of genocide so defies our everyday experience, many of us failed to wrap our minds around it. We gradually came to accept the depravity of the Holocaust, but then slotted it in our consciousness as "history"; we resisted acknowledging that genocide was occurring in the present. Survivors and witnesses had trouble making the unbelievable believable. Bystanders were thus able to retreat to the "twilight between knowing and not knowing."

But this is not an alibi. We are responsible for our incredulity. The stories that emerge from genocidal societies are by definition incredible. That was the lesson the Holocaust should have taught us. In case after case of geno tide, accounts that sounded far-fetched and that could not be independently verified repeatedly proved true. With so much wishful thinking debunked, we should long ago have shifted the burden of proof away from the refugees and to the skeptics, who should be required to offer persuasive reasons for disputing eyewitness claims. A bias toward belief would do less harm than a bias toward disbelief.

U.S. officials have been reluctant to imagine the unimaginable because of the implications. Indeed, instead of aggressively hunting for deeper knowledge or publicizing what was already known, they have taken shelter in the fog of plausible deniability. They have used the search for certainty as an excuse for paralysis and postponement. In most of the cases of genocide documented in this book, U.S. officials who "did not know" or "did not fully appreciate" chose not to.

Influence

A second response to the question of why the United States did so little is that it could not have done much to stop the horrors. Although Albert Hirschman's categories (futility, perversity, jeopardy) helped classify the main U.S. justifications for inaction, they do not help us determine what the United States could have achieved, or at what cost. The only way to ascertain the consequences of U.S. diplomatic, economic, or military measures would have been to undertake them. We do know, however, that the perpetrators of genocide were quick studies who were remarkably attuned both to the tactics of their murderous predecessors and to the world's response. From their brutal forerunners, they learned lessons in everything from dehumanizing their victims and deploying euphemisms to constructing concentration camps and lying about and covering up their crimes. And from the outside world they learned the lesson of impunity.

If anything testifies to the U.S. capacity for influence, it is the extent to which the perpetrators kept an eye trained on Washington and other Western capitals as they decided how to proceed. Talaat Pasha frequently observed that no one had prevented Sultan Abdul Hamid from murdering Armenians. Hitler was emboldened by the fact that absolutely nobody "remembered the Armenians." Saddam Hussein, noting the international community's relaxed response to his chemical weapons attacks against Iran and his bulldozing of Kurdish villages, rightly assumed he would not be punished for using poison gases against his own people. Rwandan gunmen deliberately targeted Belgian peacekeepers at the start of their genocide because they knew from the U.S. reaction to the deaths of eighteen U.S. soldiers in Somalia that the murder of Western troops would likely precipitate their withdrawal. The Bosnian Serbs publicly celebrated the Mogadishu casualties, knowing that they would never have to do battle with U.S. ground forces. Milosevic saw that he got away with the brutal suppression of an independence movement in Croatia and reasoned he would pay no price for committing genocide in Bosnia and Kosovo. Because so many individual perpetrators were killing for the first time and deciding daily how far they would go, the United States and its allies missed critical opportunities to try to deter them. When they ignored genocide around the world, U.S. officials certainly did not intend to give the perpetrators the go-ahead. But since at least some killers thought they were doing the world a favor by "cleansing" the "undesirables," they likely interpreted silence as consent or even support.

Although it is impossible to prove the outcome of actions never tried, the best testament to what the United States might have achieved is what the United States did achieve. For all the talk of the likely futility of U.S. involvement, in the rare instances that the United States did act, it made a difference. After Secretary of State George Shultz's condemnations and Senator Claiborne Pell's abortive sanctions effort in 1988, Saddam Hussein did not again use gas against the Kurds. After the appeals of Turkey and the personal encounter of Secretary of State James Baker with Kurdish refugees, the United States joined its allies in creating a safe haven in northern Iraq, enabling more than a million Kurds to return to their homes.A Rwandan hotel owner credits a U.S. diplomat's mere phone calls with helping convince militias not to attack the Tutsi inhabitants of his hotel during the genocide. NATO bombing in Bosnia, when it finally came, rapidly brought that three-and-a-half-year war to a close. NATO bombing in Kosovo in 1999 liberated 1.7 million Albanians from tyrannical Serb rule. And a handful of NATO arrests in the former Yugoslavia has caused dozens of suspected war criminals to turn themselves in. One cannot assume that every measure contemplated by U.S. officials would have been effective, but there is no doubt that even these small or belated steps saved hundreds of thousands of lives. If the United States had made genocide prevention a priority, it could have saved countless more.