A Problem From Hell Read online

  —Amnesty International UK

  “Stunning narrative . . . Samantha Power has written one of those rare books that will not only endure as an authoritative history, but is a timely and important contribution to a critical policy debate. Washington officials would be wise to heed its lessons.”

  —Hoover Institution

  “[A Problem from Hell] challenges our conscience and should influence what we do in the future.”

  —Lawrence H. Summers, President Emeritus, Harvard University

  “One of those rare books that can change one’s thinking . . . very painful reading, but it has to be read.”

  —Former UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke

  “A PROBLEM

  FROM HELL”

  America and the Age of Genocide

  Samantha Power

  BASIC BOOKS

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  New York

  Copyright © 2002, 2003, 2007, 2013 by Samantha Power

  Published in 2013 by Basic Books,

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  Previously published in paperback by HarperCollins in 2003 and 2007.

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  A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  ISBN: 978-0-465-05089-5 (e-book)

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Mum and Eddie

  “We—even we here—hold the power, and bear the responsibility.”

  — ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  Contents

  Preface

  1“Race Murder”

  2“A Crime Without a Name”

  3The Crime With a Name

  4Lemkin’s Law

  5“A Most Lethal Pair of Foes”

  6Cambodia: “Helpless Giant”

  7Speaking Loudly and Looking for a Stick

  8Iraq: “Human Rights and Chemical Weapons Use Aside”

  9Bosnia: “No More than Witnesses at a Funeral”

  10Rwanda: “Mostly in a Listening Mode”

  11Srebrenica: “Getting Creamed”

  12Kosovo: A Dog and a Fight

  13Lemkin’s Courtroom Legacy

  14Conclusion

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Preface

  My introduction to Sidbela Zimic, a nine-year-old Sarajevan, came unexpectedly one Sunday in June 1995. Several hours after hearing the familiar whistle and crash of a nearby shell, I traveled a few blocks to one of the neighborhood’s once-formidable apartment houses. Its battered façade bore the signature pockmarks left from three years of shrapnel spray and gunfire. The building lacked windows, electricity, gas, and water. It was uninhabitable to all but Sarajevo’s proud residents, who had no place else to go.

  Sidbela’s teenage sister was standing not far from the entrance to the apartment, dazed. A shallow pool of crimson lay beside her on the playground, where one blue slipper, two red slippers, and a jump rope with ice-cream-cone handles had been cast down. Bosnian police had covered the reddened spot of pavement with plastic wrapping that bore the cheery baby blue and white emblem of the United Nations.

  Sidbela had been known in the neighborhood for her bookishness and her many “Miss” pageants. She and her playmates made the best of a childhood that constrained movement, crowning “Miss Apartment Building,” “Miss Street Corner,” and “Miss Neighborhood.” On that still morning, Sidbela had begged her mother for five minutes of fresh air.

  Mrs. Zimic was torn. A year and a half before, in February 1994, just two blocks from the family’s home, a shell had landed in the main downtown market, tearing sixty-eight shoppers and vendors to bits. The graphic images from this massacre generated widespread American sympathy and galvanized President Bill Clinton and his NATO allies. They issued an unprecedented ultimatum, in which they threatened massive air strikes against the Bosnian Serbs if they resumed their bombardment of Sarajevo or continued what Clinton described as the “murder of innocents.”

  “No one should doubt NATO’s resolve,” Clinton warned. “Anyone,” he said, repeating the word for effect, “anyone shelling Sarajevo must . . . be prepared to deal with the consequences.”1 In response to America’s perceived commitment, Sarajevo’s 280,000 residents gradually adjusted to life under NATO’s imperfect but protective umbrella. After a few cautious months, they began trickling outside, strolling along the Miljacka River and rebuilding cafes with outdoor terraces. Young boys and girls bounded out of dank cellars and out of their parents’ lines of vision to rediscover outdoor sports. Tasting childhood, they became greedy for sunlight and play. Their parents thanked the United States and heaped praise upon Americans who visited the Bosnian capital.

  But American resolve soon wilted. Saving Bosnian lives was not deemed worth risking U.S. soldiers or challenging America’s European allies who wanted to remain neutral. Clinton and his team shifted from the language of genocide to that of “tragedy” and “civil war,” downplaying public expectations that there was anything the United States could do. Secretary of State Warren Christopher had never been enthusiastic about U.S. involvement in the Balkans. He had long appealed to context to ease the moral discomfort that arose from America’s nonintervention. “It’s really a tragic problem,” Christopher said. “The hatred between all three groups—the Bosnians and the Serbs and the Croatians—is almost unbelievable. It’s almost terrifying, and it’s centuries old. That really is a problem from hell.”2 Within months of the market massacre, Clinton had adopted this mindset, treating Bosnia as his problem from hell—a problem he hoped would burn itself out, disappear from the front pages, and leave his presidency alone.

  Serb nationalists took their cue. They understood that they were free to resume shelling Sarajevo and other Bosnian towns crammed with civilians. Parents were left battling their children and groping for inducements that might keep them indoors. Sidbela’s father remembered, “I converted the washroom into a playroom. I bought the children Barbie dolls, Barbie cars, everything, just to keep them inside.” But his precocious daughter had her way, pressing, “Daddy, please let me live my life. I can’t stay at home all the time.”

  America’s promises, which Serb gunners took seriously at first, bought Sarajevans a brief reprieve. But they also raised expectations among Bosnians that they were safe to live again. As it turned out, the brutality of Serb political, military, and paramilitary leaders would be met with condemnation but not with the promised military intervention.

  On June 25, 1995, minutes after Sidbela kissed her mother on the cheek and flashed a triumphant smile, a Serb shell crashed into the playground where she, eleven-year-old Amina Pajevic, twelve-year-old Liljana Janjic, and five-year-old Maja Skoric were jumping rope. All were killed, raising the total number of children slaughtered in Bosnian territory during the war from 16,767 to 16,771.

  ***

  If any event could have prepared a person to imagine evil, it should have been this one. I had been reporting from Bosnia for nearly two years at the time of the playground massacre. I had long since given up hope that the NATO jets that roared overhead every day would bomb the Serbs into ceasing their artillery assault on the besieged capital. And I had come to expect only the worst for Muslim civilians scattered throughout the country.

  Yet when Bosnian Serb forces began attacking the so-called �
��safe area” of Srebrenica on July 6, 1995, ten days after I visited the grieving Zimic family, I was not especially alarmed. I thought that even the Bosnian Serbs would not dare to seize a patch of land under UN guard. On the evening of July 10, I casually dropped by the Associated Press house, which had become my adopted home for the summer because of its spirited reporters and its functional generator. When I arrived that night, I received a jolt. There was complete chaos around the phones. The Serb attack on Srebrenica that had been “deteriorating” for several days had suddenly “gone to hell.” The Serbs were poised to take the town, and they had issued an ultimatum, demanding that the UN peacekeepers there surrender their weapons and equipment or face a barrage of shelling. Some 40,000 Muslim men, women, and children were in grave danger.

  Although I had been slow to grasp the magnitude of the offensive, it was not too late to meet my American deadlines. A morning story in the Washington Post might shame U.S. policymakers into responding. So frantic were the other correspondents that it took me fifteen minutes to secure a free phone line. When I did, I reached Ed Cody, the Post’s deputy foreign editor. I knew American readers had tired of bad news from the Balkans, but the stakes of this particular attack seemed colossal. Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic was not dabbling or using a petty landgrab to send a political signal; he was taking a huge chunk of internationally “protected” territory and challenging the world to stop him. I began spewing the facts to Cody as I understood them: “The Serbs are closing in on the Srebrenica safe area. The UN says tens of thousands of Muslim refugees have already poured into their base north of the town center. It’s only a matter of hours before the Serbs take the whole pocket. This is a catastrophe in the making. A United Nations safe area is going to fall.”

  A new contributor to the Post, I had been advised that Cody, a veteran of carnage in the Middle East, would not be one to get easily rattled. In this instance he heard me out and then posed a few incisive questions—questions that led me to believe he had understood the severity of the crisis unfolding. Then he stunned me: “Well, from what you are telling me, even if things proceed, the Serbs are not going to take the town tonight.” I grimaced in anticipation of his next sentence, which duly followed. “It sounds like when Srebrenica falls, we’ll have a story.”

  I protested, but not strenuously. I was half sure the Serbs would back down and was reluctant to cry wolf. By the following afternoon, however, Srebrenica had fallen, and the petrified inhabitants of the enclave were in the hands of General Mladic, a suspected war criminal known to have orchestrated the savage siege of Sarajevo.

  I had worked in Sarajevo, where Serb snipers took target practice on bundled old ladies hauling canisters of filthy water across town and where picturesque parks had been transformed into cemeteries to accommodate the deluge of young arrivals. I had interviewed emaciated men who had dropped forty and fifty pounds and who bore permanent scars from their time in Serb concentration camps. And I had only recently covered the massacre of four schoolgirls. Yet despite my experiences, or perhaps because of them, I could only imagine what I had already witnessed. It never dawned on me that General Mladic would or could systematically execute every last Muslim man and boy in his custody.

  A few days after Srebrenica fell, a colleague of mine telephoned from New York and said the Bosnian ambassador to the UN was claiming that the Bosnian Serbs had murdered more than 1,000 Muslim men from Srebrenica in a football stadium. It was not possible. “No,” I said simply. My friend repeated the charge. “No,” I said again, determined.

  I was right. Mladic did not execute 1,000 men. He killed more than 7,000.

  ***

  When I returned to the United States, Sidbela and Srebrenica stayed with me. I was chilled by the promise of protection that had drawn a child out of a basement and onto an exposed Sarajevan playground. I was haunted by the murder of Srebrenica’s Muslim men and boys, my own failure to sound a proper early warning, and the outside world’s refusal to intervene even once the men’s peril had become obvious. I found myself flashing back to the many debates I had had with my colleagues about intervention. We had wondered aloud—at press briefings, on road trips, and in interviews with senior Bosnian and American officials—how the United States and its allies might have responded if the same crimes had been committed in a different place (the Balkans evoke age-old animosities and combustible tinderboxes), against different victims (most of the atrocities were committed against individuals of Muslim faith), or at a different time (the Soviet Union had just collapsed, no new world vision had yet replaced the old world order, and the United Nations had not oiled its rusty parts or rid itself of its anachronistic practices and assumptions). In 1996, with some distance from the field, I began exploring America’s responses to previous cases of mass slaughter. It did not take long to discover that the American response to the Bosnia genocide was in fact the most robust of the century. The United States had never in its history intervened to stop genocide and had in fact rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred.

  As I surveyed the major genocides of the twentieth century, a few stood out. In addition to the Bosnian Serbs’ eradication of non-Serbs, I examined the Ottoman slaughter of the Armenians, the Nazi Holocaust, Pol Pot’s terror in Cambodia, Saddam Hussein’s destruction of Kurds in northern Iraq, and the Rwandan Hutus’ systematic extermination of the Tutsi minority. Although the cases varied in scope and not all involved the intent to exterminate every last member of a group, each met the terms of the 1948 genocide convention and presented the United States with options for meaningful diplomatic, economic, legal, or military intervention. The crimes occurred in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. The victims covered a spectrum of races and religions—they were Asian, African, Caucasian, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, and Muslim. The perpetrators operated at different stages of American might: The Armenian genocide (1915–1916) was committed during World War I, before the United States had become a world leader. The Holocaust (1939–1945) took place just as the United States was moving into that role. The Cambodian (1975–1979) and Iraqi (1987–1988) genocides were perpetrated after the Holocaust but during the Cold War and after Vietnam. Bosnia (1992–1995) and Rwanda (1994) happened after the Cold War and while American supremacy and awareness of the “lessons” of the Holocaust were at their height. U.S. decisionmakers also brought a wide variety of backgrounds and foreign policy ideologies to the table. Every American president in office in the last three decades of the twentieth century—Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton—made decisions related to the prevention and suppression of genocide. Yet notwithstanding all the variety among cases and within U.S. administrations, the U.S. policy responses to genocide were astonishingly similar across time, geography, ideology, and geopolitical balance.

  In order to understand U.S. responses to genocide, I interviewed more than 300 Americans who had a hand in shaping or influencing U.S. policy.* Most were officials of varying ranks at the White House, State Department, Pentagon, and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Some were lawmakers and staff members on Capitol Hill. Others were journalists who covered the carnage or nongovernmental advocates who attempted to ameliorate it. A grant from the Open Society Institute enabled me to travel to Bosnia, Cambodia, Kosovo, and Rwanda, where I spoke with victims, perpetrators, and bystanders. I also visited the international war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague in the Netherlands, as well the UN court for Rwanda, located in Arusha, Tanzania. Thanks to the National Security Archive, a nonprofit organization that uses the Freedom of Information Act to secure the release of classified U.S. documents, I was able to draw on hundreds of pages of newly available government records. This material provides a clearer picture than was previously discernible of the interplay among people, motives, and genocidal events.

  People have explained U.S. failures to respond to specific genocides by claiming that the United States didn’t know what was happening, that it knew but didn’
t care, or that regardless of what it knew, there was nothing useful to be done. I have found that in fact U.S. policymakers knew a great deal about the crimes being perpetrated. Some Americans cared and fought for action, making considerable personal and professional sacrifices. And the United States did have countless opportunities to mitigate and prevent slaughter. But time and again, decent men and women chose to look away. We have all been bystanders to genocide. The crucial question is why.

  The answers seemed to lie in the critical decisions—and decisions not to decide—made before, during, and after the various genocides. In exploring a century of U.S. reactions to genocide, I asked: Were there early warnings that mass killing was set to commence? How seriously were the warnings taken? By whom? Was there any reason to believe the violence expected would be qualitatively or quantitatively different from the “run-of-the-mill” killings that were sadly typical of local warfare? Once the violence began, what classified or open intelligence was available? What constraints operated to impede diagnosis? How and when did U.S. officials recognize that genocide was under way? Who inside or outside the U.S. government wanted to do what? What were the risks or costs? Who opposed them? Who prevailed? How did public opinion and elite opinion diverge? And finally, how were the U.S. responses, the genocides, and the Americans who urged intervention remembered later? In reconstructing a narrative of events, I have divided most of the cases into warning, recognition, response, and aftermath sections.

  Contrary to any assumption I may have harbored while I traveled around the former Yugoslavia, the Bush and Clinton administrations’ responses to atrocities in Bosnia were consistent with prior American responses to genocide. Early warnings of massive bloodshed proliferated. The spewing of inflammatory propaganda escalated. The massacres and deportations started. U.S. policymakers struggled to wrap their minds around the horrors. Refugee stories and press reports of atrocities became too numerous to deny. Few Americans at home pressed for intervention. A hopeful but passive and ultimately deadly American waiting game commenced. And genocide proceeded unimpeded by U.S. action and often emboldened by U.S. inaction.