TED 2008: Samantha Power on American responses to mass atrocities and genocide
(I'm liveblogging from TED 2008, in Monterey, CA)
Samantha Power, author of A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, is a global leadership and public policy professor at Harvard. She's talking about American responses to mass atrocities and genocide.
Rwandan genocide in 1990s: 700,000 people died. The 1994, the NYT reported between 200k and 300k people had already been killed. Patricia Schroeder, US Rep from Colorado, told the paper that hundreds of US citizens were calling about ape and gorilla deaths in Rwanda, but nobody was calling about the people who were dying. "There wasn't an endangered people's movement."
Today, universities and high schools have started an endangered people's movement. Anti-genocide groups. These student driven groups have launched divestment campaigns, launched a 1-800-Genocide number. Type in your zip code and it will refer you to your representative. Genocide grades for members of congress. This movement has put bottom up pressure on Bush leadership to take action Rwanda, and it's working.
the latest
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So, taking action in Iraq was "criminal" and should result in impeachment hearings, but let's go pressure Bush to intervene in Rwanda. Gotcha.
excuse me? 800,000 died in Rwanda due in large part to American sabotage of UN efforts to intercede. Just because of the Somalia embarrasment being fresh in American voter minds.
Oh sure, couldn't be those African people killing each other who are accountable. Gotta be 'merica to blame.
make up your mind, are you trying to excuse the mass invasion and total destruction of Iraq on false pretences, or are you making the usual argument that Africa raped herself for the past hundred years and GAVE the first world all that stuff?
Oh God. Just lame.
Is that an epistemological 'lame' or a phenomenological 'lame'?
Saddam's genocide and murder is a false pretense, but Rwandan genocide and murder is actionable. There we have it.
Oh, and "total destruction" ... good one.
yes sethie, uncle bushie invaded Iraq to punish the bad mans.. from your other posts , well, there you have it.
There's a few differences between the two situations. One was a UN action, one was a unilateral US action. In one case, a major genocide was underway and could have been prevented; in the other, a smaller genocide had occurred in the past (with the tacit approval of the US).
Also, it wasn't 'Merica's fault that Africans were killing Africans, but it makes sense for Americans to have an internal discussion about the appropriate response.
No situation in a foreign country should be 'actionable' to the United States acting alone, unless US national security is actually, seriously threatened--for honest.
Defensive much?
I think it was The Tipping Point where the author mentioned that nearly the entire young male population of Rwanda was unable to find work at the time of the genocide.
Do people in economically stable situations ever commit genocide? Is it entirely due to rising panic over limited resources?
So you see nothing hypocritical about the fact that the push into iraq was justified as america preventing the genocide of the kurds and other ethnic minorities but its ok to do it in africa because it's somehow a good cause?
Charlie Wilson's War anyone?
Now its the kurds who are armed, among many other militia and its payback time..
If a soldier dies in iraq he died for oil (which is bad) but if he dies in sudan he died for a good cause...How 'bout just letting the soldier come home and not die at all?
This applies just as well to any other country where intervention is "the only way".
"In the case of Vietnam, we didn't know them well enough to empathize. And there was total misunderstanding as a result. They believed that we had simply replaced the French as a colonial power, and we were seeking to subject South and North Vietnam to our colonial interests, which was absolutely absurd. And we, we saw Vietnam as an element of the Cold War. Not what they saw it as: a civil war."
"Mr. McNamara, You must never have read a history book. If you'd had, you'd know we weren't pawns of the Chinese or the Russians. McNamara, didn't you know that? Don't you understand that we have been fighting the Chinese for 1000 years? We were fighting for our independence. And we would fight to the last man. And we were determined to do so. And no amount of bombing, no amount of U.S. pressure would ever have stopped us." - Thach, former Foreign Minister of Vietnam, 1995, as recalled by McNamara.
"of the Progressive, Sam Gejdenson, chairperson of a Congressional subcommittee investigating US exports to Iraq, disclosed that from 1985 until 1990 “the US government approved 771 licenses [only 39 were rejected] for the export to Iraq of $1.5 billion worth of biological agents and high-tech equipment with military application …
“The US spent virtually an entire decade making sure that Saddam Hussein had almost whatever he wanted… US export control policy was directed by US foreign policy as formulated by the State Department, and it was US foreign policy to assist the regime of Saddam Hussein.”
A 1994 US Senate report revealed that US companies were licenced by the commerce department to export a “witch's brew” of biological and chemical materials, including bacillus anthracis (which causes anthrax) and clostridium botulinum (the source of botulism). The American Type Culture Collection made 70 shipments of the anthrax bug and other pathogenic agents.
The report also noted that US exports to Iraq included the precursors to chemical warfare agents, plans for chemical and biological warfare facilities and chemical warhead filling equipment. US firms supplied advanced and specialised computers, lasers, testing and analysing equipment. Among the better-known companies were Hewlett Packard, Unisys, Data General and Honeywell."
I'm also interested in why Setharian thought the American response to these two situations was inconsistent. Setharian's argument seems to be that we should treat them similarly, and that people who argue for intervention in Rwanda would be against the intervention in Iraq. Does he or she think we should intervene in both? Or neither? What is Setharian's criteria?
Setharian is anti-interventionist. That's his entire point. Too many bad things happen in the name of "we mean(t) to do good."
His second comment is also true in that 800,000 people don't just die because someone didn't do enough to stop it. 800,000 people died because someone killed them and its them who are directly responsible.
You don't wanna go down the road of blaming everyone who wasn't there for not being there.
Isn't it slightly racist to say if we don't do anything these savage wogs are never going to stop killing each other?
Coulda, woulda, shoulda. If a frog had side pockets he'd carry a handgun.
Tuesday, October 05, 2004
Roméo Dallaire, "Looking at Darfur, Seeing Rwanda" (New York Times)
Roméo Dallaire, a former Canadian general, was in charge of the UN "peacekeeping" troops in Rwanda at the time of the 1994 genocide. He repeatedly warned his superiors that a massacre was coming, and remains convinced that, with very small reinforcements and an authorization to act forcefully, he could have prevented the genocide or nipped it in the bud. Instead, the "world community" (including the US, it is important to emphasize) turned its back on Rwanda. (Except for France, which actively aided the genocidaires.)
"Never again"?
Cheers,
Jeff Weintraub
One or the other. I've read the same people who classify our efforts in Iraq as criminal arguing that it's criminal for not doing anything in Rwanda. Takuan challenged me to make up my mind, but, that's what I wish a lot of other people would do. Personally, I think we should be involved in both. When governments/powers-that-be turn on their own people and begin to murder them, that's worth fighting. But, the majority of people in the U.S. (and most other places in the world) view our involvement in Iraq as a mistake or worse. Why would Rwanda/Sudan/Somalia/Kenya be any different? Is there a particluar criteria I'm unaware of that decides whose genocide qualifies for intervention? Are the Iraqi Kurds and Shiites particularly undeserving? I'm not seeing the agenda here (outside of petty partisan politics).
July 11, 2000
The Rwanda Genocide: How Does Madeleine Albright Live with Herself?
An independent panel commissioned by the Organization of African Unity charged this weekend that the United States, France and Belgium, as well as the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches, actively prevented peacekeepers from moving in to stop the mass killing of as many as 800,000 Rwandans in 1994. It concluded that the three governments should provide “a significant level of reparations” to the Central African country.
The 318-page report challenged President Clinton’s claim that the United States’s failure to act in Rwanda was due to ignorance of the extent of the atrocities unfolding there. And it accused Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who represented the United States in the U.N. Security Council at the time, of using “stalling tactics” to prevent a military rescue mission.
The Organization of African Unity ... uh huh ... I would just love to hear their explanation for not stopping it themselves.
why is America in Iraq?
Oil.
why are Iraqis dying?
Oil.
why are Americans dying?
Oil.
Worth noting, Samantha Power is Obama's Senior Policy Advisor:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/02/18/samantha_power/index.html?source=search&aim=/news/feature
(You may need to watch a short ad to view the article. Or, better yet, subscribe.)
seems an interesting woman. I sincerely hope she and Obama are permitted to live.
Humans are not an endangered species. In fact, the human population has exploded worldwide and some argue that there are too many humans.
That might be why they're fighting all the time.
It seems like to me anywhere in the world where you find groups of people holding on to an outdated and barbaric notion of "Tribes" they wage genocide against eachother.Maybe this cycle of Genocide amougnst tribes must continue untill the wake up and join the 21st century! If people want so badly to kill each other off NO ONE can stop them. It can be halted but will start up again. Not having any work is no reason to commit mass murder. The USA can't clean up everybody messes, some people just have to stop using this cave man type logic and enlighten themselves a little bit!
anywhere in the world where you find groups of people holding on to an outdated and barbaric notion of "Tribes"
Is there someplace on earth where this doctrine is not operative? Because I'll move there.
the Neolithic Ethic
anyways, this Brotherbear talks like a witch. I say we burn him
I don't know. I'm fond of bears.
Wrong. Nobody can stop them, but there sure as hell is enough first world power going around to slow things down. If you look at Rwanda it was a situation that was arguably a result of Imperialism. Israel and Palestine coexist under a threat of terror, but armed forces prevent all out war. The same level of presence could have been installed in Rwanda to break up the Hutu and Tutsi fighting, and saved lives. Is saving lives ever a bad thing?
The thing about Rwanda is that it exposes all the humanitarian reasons to be in Iraq for what they are: fake rhetoric to justify a war for oil and profits.
As a child of World War II Holocaust survivors, looking at this posts comments is largely sickening.
How about this for an idea: Without a true groundswell of people in the U.S. urging elected officials to do anything, you really have no right blaming this politician or that politician or any politician.
The reason why this stuff never gets stopped when it happens is people in America are such a bunch of coddled babies nowadays that real news about real issues terrifies them. People killing each other? Too disturbing! Let me know what celebrity is drunk right now!
When public opinion changes, politicians change. When you sit back and say/do nothing then expect nothing.
I guess I'm a military isolationist, because I don't think the blood and treasure of America should be expended across the world for lost causes like preventing or, more likely, delaying, genocide in Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, wherever. Unless you are going to be a colonial power and stay there forever (which the colonial powers were unable to do, because it's economically unsustainable) eventually you'll have a generation of jackasses who will want to avenge the wrongs done in the 19th century, or whenever.
So, instead of saying "send in the Marines!!!!", why not put your money where your mouth is and, you know, go there yourself. Get your injections, pack some gear, wait until you are in-country to buy guns and ammo (I recommend a nice AK-47, they're everywhere and easy to care for) and fight the genocide yourself. Barring that, feel free to raise money to field a mercenary company or fund other eager beavers who want to fight genocide. Just think, if the Tutsis had a militia with AKs with mercenary advisors, the Hutus would never have come after them with machetes.
America should not be the world's policeman. America should mind it's own damn business.
Put down the white man's burden, and walk away quickly.
I wouldn't mind non-intervention as a policy, long as we no longer hear the pieties about how much we supposedly care about human rights. Keep in mind that by making non-intervention a policy, you've just given a green light to every would-be Pol Pot on the planet. Long as they're not dumb enough to take a swing at the US, they can kill to their heart's content.
That probably doesn't sit right with you.
We can't help ourselves - there will always be the strongly-worded press release, the condemnation of the latest atrocity in the strongest possible terms, and perhaps even a conference if things are really bad.
"Never again" is a promise. Don't make that promise if you're not willing to put some teeth into it.
Can we save everybody? No. The combined might of the part of the world that likes to call itself "civilized" couldn't have stopped Stalin or Mao. But it doesn't then follow that we should save nobody.
So how to decide who gets saved and who doesn't?
It'll come down to what's doable and where is it most in our interest to be stopping a genocide.
In other words, Rwanda was preventable, but the Congo genocide was probably going to be too much to handle no matter what we threw at it.
Which brings us to Iraq. At any time during Saddam's reign it would have been perfectly defensible to say that it's in the world's interest not to have a genocidal loose cannon sitting on all that oil, so let's take him out and solve two problems at once - but Clinton was trigger-shy and the Bush administration stupidly decided to frame the guilty party and went with the WMD angle.
It would have left the west in a stronger position to do something sooner elsewhere in the world.
Pat Schroeder, of course, continued her work for the "endangered people's movement" by becoming the head of the copyright-maximalist Association of American Publishers, because apparently librarians are a greater menace than genocidalists.
Sheesh. While Albright lobbied other countries to not stop the genocide in Rwanda, she was also overseeing an embargo and no-fly zone in Iraq that killed over a half million children under the age of five (and many more aged five to eighteen and adults and artists and moms and dads and regular iraqis). While the bloodshed in the Sudan happened, America's Darfur, Baghdad, has sent millions of refugees across the middle east and killed hundreds of thousands. At what point are we going to lose the false "we want to be the good guys, but we don't always help out" and get to the point of recognizing "we're often the bad guys."
Yes, I would like to know which celebrity is drunk right now. Its why people work their butts off, so the only thing to really worry about is stupid celebrities and not which one of your children will live to adulthood. There is nothing wrong with being selfish and isolationist. What's so wrong with not wanting to be involved in someone else's problems?
Why do people immigrate to other countries? Is it so selfish of them to want a better life? Better to care about yourself than your religion/tribe/peoples/race etc.
Non intervention was our policy until that jackass Woodrow Wilson who left office after WW1 with a massive recession. Gee..sounds familiar..
Where was America when my homies in India were getting slaughtered by the British? Where was america when people were dying by the millions (YES millions) in Central India?
"When an El Niño drought destituted the farmers of the Deccan plateau in 1876 there was a net surplus of rice and wheat in India. But the viceroy, Lord Lytton, insisted that nothing should prevent its export to England. In 1877 and 1878, at the height of the famine, grain merchants exported a record 6.4m hundredweight of wheat. As the peasants began to starve, officials were ordered "to discourage relief works in every possible way". The Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877 prohibited "at the pain of imprisonment private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain prices". The only relief permitted in most districts was hard labour, from which anyone in an advanced state of starvation was turned away. In the labour camps, the workers were given less food than inmates of Buchenwald. In 1877, monthly mortality in the camps equated to an annual death rate of 94%.
As millions died, the imperial government launched "a militarised campaign to collect the tax arrears accumulated during the drought". The money, which ruined those who might otherwise have survived the famine, was used by Lytton to fund his war in Afghanistan. Even in places that had produced a crop surplus, the government's export policies, like Stalin's in Ukraine, manufactured hunger. In the north-western provinces, Oud and the Punjab, which had brought in record harvests in the preceeding three years, at least 1.25m died."
From the Gaurdian.
12-29 million people dead. Who weeps for them? Oh, that's right, there's no museum or teary eyed film to make everyone aware of this genocide.
We ain't superheroes, and we ain't the fucking police. So stop calling us and take care of your own troubles. As for the Pol Pots, there's a lot more of us than there's of them, so stop being an idiot by saying if we don't do anything those uncivilized bastards would immediately drop their pens and shovels and pick up AK-47s.
[quote]I wouldn't mind non-intervention as a policy, long as we no longer hear the pieties about how much we supposedly care about human rights. Keep in mind that by making non-intervention a policy, you've just given a green light to every would-be Pol Pot on the planet. Long as they're not dumb enough to take a swing at the US, they can kill to their heart's content.
That probably doesn't sit right with you.[/quote]
Sits fine with me.
Why should I care about someone half a world away?
Tell them to keep their hands the hell off my business and I'll keep mine off theirs. Why should I care if their business is killing their own subject?
I'm not the ruler of the world, and until The World collectively appoints me to the position, and gives me powers commensurate to the position, I don't see how I'm morally justified in interfering in another culture's internal behavior.
Might I deplore it personally, sure, but I'm a product of Western Morality. To me concepts like collective responsibility seem barbaric, punishing a family for the actions of one of it's members seems completely asinine to me. To people raised in a different culture the cult of the individual that we in the West espouse seems equally barbaric.
Basically, since I am a complete cultural relativist I do not think that interfering in the behavior of another culture is a right action. So like I said, chalk me up as an isolationist and let Pol Pot do whatever he wants to his own people as long as keeps his grubby mitts off my people. For that matter if Moteuctzoma was still around I'd say let him keep sacrificing humans to his gods too, also not my place to interfere with.
And if that makes me a bad person, whatever.
-abs
You bring up Pol Pot; would the Cambodian genocide have been possible without US intervention in SE Asia, especially in the Vietnamese Civil War? Doesn't it give one pause to consider unintended consequences?
I don't like genocide, but I stand by my earlier remarks: don't say, "the government should do something." Be empowered, go there and kill bad guys. If you don't like that idea, tough, because all those Marines and/or soldiers you would send also have mommies and daddies and would regret their dying, too.
It's what galls me the most about neocons and liberals with a neocon attitude toward military power. American military personnel are citizens who have chosen to serve their country with their lives. There is an implicit contract that we should not risk those lives, spend those lives unless it is absolutely necessary for the good of the nation. I think too many view them as dumb grunts, pawns of national purpose. "You are soldiers in order to die and we are sending you where you can die."
I can say that as an ex-military sort myself the whole lack of value that politicians placed on our lives has something to do with my general isolationism. Congress and Presidents are far too willing to kill our men and women in uniform for reasons other than defending our nation.
Our military should defend the US. Only.
No, "let's invade some place to stop WMD." No, "let's invade to save lives." No, "let's invade to stop (or start) a civil war." No, "let's invade to further our War on Some Drugs."
Mae war only when a formal Declaration of War has been voted on by Congress, and passed. And only pass such a thing when the US has been attacked. Then bring the troops home the second we're done with the war and the concommittant reconstruction.
(yes, that does imply I approved of Afghanistan in the same way it implies I don't approve of Iraq)
-abs
It is very clear that many Americans have no grasp of their own history.
America is in Iraq for the same reasons as fifty years ago; oil and private plunder.
I find it ironic that Pat Schroeder -- of the worldview that gave us animal rights and group identity politics is shocked -- SHOCKED! -- that people are more concerned for silverback gorillas than about Tutsis being macheted. What to expect from a Democrat Prez, a Democrat Congress and the United Nations? I'm not saying we should or should not have gone in because to go in would raise cries of occupation and colonialism from some of the same folks in here who are part of the McChimpyBushHitler lunacy. and hindsight is as the saying goes....
@Takuan,
Oh, I totally agree. Oil and treasure (in the form of non-bidding government contracts) are clearly the real reason we're in Iraq today.
But they're not the reason that was used to sell the war to the American public.
But we are a, regrettably, stupid people collectively. There may be smart Americans, but as a mob the American People are low-grade, easily manipulated, morons at best.
Wish I was wrong, ashamed I'm not.
-abs
have a smile then
http://www.guardian.co.uk/cartoons/0,,337484,00.html
I love how, in #15, Anangbhai projects his own anti-interventionist position onto Setharian, who actually holds the opposite position.
Setharian, Iraq and Rawanda are not the same case. In Rawanda, people who support intervention are arguing that we should have intervened to stop genocide as it was occurring. People who use the 1988 al-Anfal Campaign justify the 2003 invasion were advocating intervening to punish genocide 15 years after the fact. Preventing an action is not the same as punishing it afterwards. Someone can hold different opinions on the two cases without being logically inconsistent.
There's also the case of effectiveness. I haven't read much on Rwanda, so I don't know if UN intervention would have actually worked. It's pretty clear to me that our intervention in Iraq has done more damage than Saddam's continued presence would have. If you believe that the practical outcome of intervention is likely to be different in two cases then it's also not logically inconsistent to hold different opinions on the cases.
I'm just stating what I believe in.
So we should interfere with Darfur because the gubmint helped Pol Pot with his genocide. Isn't that a little after the fact atonement?
Abs, I thought the very nature of individualism would be anti-cult, but I get what you're saying and I totally agree with the family analogy.
I'm just stating what I believe in.
Okay, now you're just invoking Godwin's Law.
I can understand the wish for more isolation from world conflicts in the US. Until recently Germany's army was not allowed to do anything but defend the country, no ifs and buts.
For most of the time after WW2 that sat pretty well with every other country, but obviously that's changed and now the Bundeswehr participates in Afghanistan due to internal and external pressure - although their contribution has been questioned quite regularly in recent times.
Anyway, ideally the UN would be stronger and more decisive body, so the US wouldn't get unilaterally involved at all. That means countries would need to stop hijacking the whole thing for their own gains (or prevent others).
As has been pointed out above, Rwanda and Iraq are not a very good comparison...
I really liked the movie Hotel Rwanda...it depicted pretty well how frustrating it must have been for the UN troops to see a genocide boiling up right under their noses with plenty of possibilities to prevent it, but being rendered useless by people on the other side of the world.