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The Armenian Weekly; Volume 74, No. 10; March 15, 2008
Features:
1. An Interview with Samantha Power
2. Complicity with Evil: An Interview with Adam LeBor
By Khatchig Mouradian
3. Only the Good Die Young . and Outside the Green Zone
Samantha Power's New Book Canonizes One of the UN's Saints
By Andy Turpin
***
1. An Interview with Samantha Power
Samantha Power is professor of practice of global leadership and public
policy at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, where she was the
founding executive director (1998-2002). She is the recent author of Chasing
the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (see our
review on p. 10). Her book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of
Genocide (New Republic Books) was awarded the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for
General Non-Fiction.
Power's article in the New Yorker on the horrors in Darfur won the 2005
National Magazine Award for Best Reporting. In 2007, Power became a foreign
policy columnist at Time magazine. From 1993-96, she covered the wars in the
former Yugoslavia as a reporter for the U.S. News and World Report, the
Boston Globe and the New Republic.
She remains a working journalist, reporting from such places as Burundi,
East Timor, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan and Zimbabwe, and contributing to the
Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. Earlier
this month, Power resigned from her position as senior political advisor to
presidential candidate Barack Obama.
The following interview with Samantha Power was conducted for the
documentary film "The Armenian Genocide," directed and produced by Emmy
Award-winning producer Andrew Goldberg of Two Cats Productions
(www.twocatstv.com). Short segments of the interview appeared in the
documentary. It is published here, in the Armenian Weekly, for the first
time and in its entirety.
The Weekly would like to thank Andrew Goldberg and Two Cats TV for this
collaboration.
Q-Can you discuss where the actual word "genocide" comes from, it's Greek
and Latin origins and so forth?
Samantha Power-"Genocide" is a hybrid between the Greek genos for people or
tribe, and the Latin cidere, cide, for killing.
Q-Could you go into the history of the word and Raphael Lemkin?
S.P.-The word "genocide" was invented by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jew, who
in the interwar period tried to mobilize states and statesmen to care about
what he saw as the imminent destruction of ethnic, national and religious
groups. He was partially concerned about the Jews but he also had concerns
about other groups that he felt were threatened around the world. So he
tried to get the League of Nations to take this issue seriously and to ban
this crime, which at the time he called "barbarity"-the crime of the
destruction of groups. He was ignored and in some cases laughed and yawned
out of the conference. He went back to Poland and, six years later, Hitler
invaded Poland, allegedly declaring, "Who now remembers the annihilation of
the Armenians?"
Lemkin lost 49 members of his family in the Holocaust. He spent his days
during the Holocaust trying to understand why in the build up to World War
II, he had been so unsuccessful in convincing states and statesmen to care
about what to him looked like the imminent destruction of the Jews. He told
himself that his number one failing was that he didn't have a word that was
commensurate to the gravity of what would become Hitler's crime. And so his
notebooks were filled with his efforts to find that word. He struggled to
find a word that was commensurate with the horrors that had occurred against
the Armenians in 1915, and then the ones that were ongoing in World War II
against the Jews. In 1941, he came up with the word "genocide."
Q-Why is it necessary to use the word "genocide" to describe what happened
to the Armenians in 1915?
S.P.-What the word "genocide" connotes is a systematic campaign of
destruction. If you simply call the horrors of 1915 "crimes against
humanity" or "atrocities," it doesn't fully convey just how methodical this
campaign of slaughter and deportation really was. There are very few
paradigmatic cases of genocide where you can really see either through the
words of the perpetrators or through the policies undertaken in pursuit of
the goal to annihilate a certain group-in this case, the Armenian community
in the Ottoman Empire. I think that's why Armenians and other historians
look at the record and can come to no other conclusion than this word
"genocide" applies to this methodical campaign of destruction.
At the time the atrocities were being carried out, the perpetrators boasted
about what it was they were trying to do: They were going to solve the
Armenian problem by getting rid of the Armenians. In the aftermath of the
atrocities of 1915, perpetrators were prosecuted for the crimes that they
committed. Now, the word "genocide" did not exist then. It wouldn't come
into existence for another 25 years. But there was widespread knowledge that
what had been attempted was a campaign of destruction, hence, genocide.
What is so tragic is that in the wake of the Armenian horrors and in the
wake of the trials of Turkish perpetrators, a blanket of denial has
smothered Turkey and there's no willingness to acknowledge what was boasted
about at the time.
Q-What impact did the suffering of the Armenians have on Lemkin?
S.P.-In the 20's and the 30's, Lemkin became a kind of amateur historian of
mass slaughter, and the case that really moved him was that of the
Armenians. He spent months and months just going through the archives and
trying to understand how such a crime could have been committed in Europe.
He was a great believer in European civilization, and what he encountered in
the record was what would later become known as an orientalist framing of
what had occurred: The perpetrators were these Turks and they weren't really
Europeans. They were tribal savages, Muslim hordes, and Europe would never
suffer from anything quite like that, it was argued. But as he studied the
records he understood that the Armenian case offered great insight into how
genocides occur. He understood the way in which the Armenians were branded
by the Turkish government at the time, and he saw the dehumanization of
Armenians as a community and indeed how they lacked some of the perks of
people of Turkish ethnicity and Muslim fate.
All this became very much a part of his effort to understand what the
signals would be when a regime was intent on wiping out part of its
population. In terms of the genocide itself, he was struck by the way in
which the Turkish government first went after the intellectuals and the
local leaders of the Armenian communities in the towns. He also made
frequent reference to the way in which the deportation of Armenians became
as effective an implement of genocide as those executions in the town
squares. He saw that you could destroy a group not simply by rounding up the
men or the leaders of the community and hanging them or machine-gunning
them, but by actually deporting a group from a country and, especially in
the Armenian case, sending them into conditions where there was no way that
they could survive. So, you were actually going to achieve the same results
with a machine gun but it was going to be much cheaper and it was going to
draw much less attention.
Q-What is the effect of genocide denial?
S.P.-I think denial is devastating both for the victims or descendents of
victims on the one hand and for the descendents of perpetrator societies on
the other. For victims or their family members, there just can't be anything
worse than living through the loss, the obliteration of your livelihood,
your home, and the systematic extermination of your family-extermination
that is accompanied by the taunt of "no one will ever know," "no one will
ever remember," "no one will ever believe you, even if you make it out of
here, no one will believe you."
So you live through all of that, you make it out, you've lost everything and
then you tell your story, just the story you can best remember through all
the trauma. The details stick and are sort of inexorably planted in the
backs of the eyes so you can't see anything else that goes on in your life
without sort of filtering it through the prism of death. But however you
come to deal with the trauma, you tell your story and you're told not only
by the Turkish government or by Turkish citizens, but also by the American
government and other Western governments that what you lived through didn't
really happen quite that way. You are told that it wasn't a plot to destroy
you or your family and it wasn't an assault on civilian life. It was a war,
there was a rebellion, and it was just a counter-insurgency campaign by the
Turks. And, you know, unfortunately some civilians got caught up in that
counter-insurgency campaign. In war, bad things happen.
Imagine what that would feel like. You survive and you live with those
memories, you tell your truth, a truth you were told you would never get to
tell, and then you're told that your truth is inadequate or is subjective or
is overly emotional and inaccurate.
The other community that I think denial has affected in a very harmful way
is of course the community in whose name these horrors were committed.
Turkish officials and citizens today had nothing to do with the acts that
were perpetrated, with the forced marches, the executions and the hangings
that took place in public squares. But because all that information is
acquirable, because the genocide is manifestly knowable, they are complicit
in denying a truth. As a result, they are asked to go back to their history
and to scrutinize it carefully, they are thus asked to learn what there is
to be learned about why the genocide was carried, and thus of course asked
to incorporate lessons from that period.
No state is immune to excesses and many states, including the United States,
are liable to these kinds of excesses. The key is to revisit what has been
done in your name by your state as a way of trying to inoculate yourself
>From future excesses. The Turkish government is nowhere close today to
committing atrocities of the scale that were carried out in 1915, but human
rights is a big issue in Turkey and I think by kind of closing their ears
and their eyes to what has gone on in the past and by spending such
resources to ensure that this climate of denial persists, they're really
missing an opportunity to create more amicable ties with their neighbors.
But they're also missing an opportunity to understand their history and to
apply the lessons so that those kinds of atrocities don't ever get carried
out again.
Q-So, specifically in the Turkish case, how should one respond to denial? Do
you debate history? How do you respond to denial?
S.P.-Denial is very hard to respond to. It's almost like little kids who
block their ears and say, "I'm not listening, I'm not listening." It's very
hard to have a rational conversation because every set of facts that is
presented in defense of the truth is met with a whole series of claims about
the future threat posed by those Armenians to Turkish existence. You know,
there's an awful lot of extrapolation that is done in order to justify the
deportations. So you end up having a very fruitless and very frustrating
debate in which they say, "Well, yes, but the Armenians would have become a
threat had they not been removed, had the problem not been solved."
Sometimes you can make headway talking to genocide deniers by pointing out
that by using the word "genocide," you're not saying that Talaat, the
Minister of Interior in Turkey in 1915, was intending to put Armenians into
gas chambers and exterminate every last one of them as the Nazis did.
Sometimes you can make headway by simply saying you know genocide does not
mean the Holocaust. What it means is a campaign of destruction that includes
extermination or execution but also can entail outright ethnic cleansing and
deportation. They think that when we say "genocide," we're saying that
Talaat intended to exterminate every last member of the Armenian group. What
genocide actually means, what Lemkin actually intended, was that you create
a definition around destruction and not around outright extermination
because if you make the definition of genocide extermination of everyone, if
you make Hitler the standard, then you'll inevitably act too late, you'll
inevitably act only when you have proof that every last member of the group
has been destroyed or has been systematically murdered. So sometimes you can
make some headway by explaining what it is you have in mind when you use the
word. But generally the barriers and the cataracts that have given rise to
this denial for so many decades are pretty impenetrable. So what I have
suggested to Armenian friends and colleagues is that the focus be on
building a kind of fortress of fact and truth that gets salient and gets
picked up by communities other than the Turks of Turkey or the Turkish
government or even the U.S government.
So if every scholar referred to the Armenian genocide as a precursor to the
Holocaust, if in talking about the Holocaust they talked about the ways in
which Hitler learned from what had been done by the Turks to the Armenians
and made reference to that kind of community of perpetrators that really has
existed throughout time, it would be an immensely effective way of building
a record that no amount of Turkish government denial would be able to blot
out.
When I wrote A Problem from Hell and included the Armenian genocide, I
actually expected in city after city to have to defend the inclusion of that
case-because I understood how much controversy there was about use of the
term "genocide"-and what amazed me was that the people who raised their
hands were always either Turkish officials or individuals who had been sent
out by the Turkish embassy in order to stack the meetings. Not even on one
occasion did I have anybody who wasn't affiliated in some way with the
Turkish cause challenge the inclusion of the Armenian genocide among the
major genocides of the 20th century.
That's a sign that already Turkish deniers are becoming the
equivalent-socially and culturally-of Holocaust deniers. Where you hear
somebody raise their hand in the back of the room and say "the gas chambers
didn't exist" or "Hitler wasn't intending to exterminate the Jews," you know
you look at them like they've lost their minds. You know that they've missed
that History 101 course or that they have some kind of ulterior agenda. The
very same is true now of people who deny the Armenian genocide. So you can
argue that even though official recognition remains elusive for
Armenians-and that's incredibly tragic for those who survived the genocide
and who are now passing away, that they haven't seen the Turkish government
give them the recognition that they deserve-on the other hand, through their
efforts and the efforts of their descendants, there is now a historical
record that shows that this genocide did occur and that it has rendered
deniers the equivalent, almost, of Holocaust deniers. And I think
strengthening that historical record, strengthening public awareness through
film, through art, through literature, through course syllabi at
universities and elementary, middle and high schools, is the way that this
genocide is going to become official fact. And ultimately, the day will come
when neither the Turks nor the American government is going to be able to
deny it any longer.
Q-So when you did engage them, was it in terms of the history or the larger
aspects? Getting into the debates is, it seems, not dangerous but
problematic. Isn't it possible that that seed of doubt is still planted in
this context much more so than the Holocaust?
S.P.-Well, there's certainly more doubt and ignorance around the Armenian
genocide among ordinary non-Armenian citizens than there is around the
Holocaust, there's no question. But if you had talked to American citizens
in the 50's or even the 60's, you would've seen an awful lot of ignorance
about the Holocaust as well. The difference is that because we finally got
involved in World War II to defeat Hitler, the basic narrative about
American foreign policy was that we had gotten involved to stop a monster
and therefore it was perfectly plausible to believe that the monster had
committed the Holocaust.
In the Armenian case, because we hung back, because the U.S government hung
back and didn't get involved on the basis of the atrocities or even on the
basis of the threat to European stability and European welfare, and because
we got involved so late, it's easier for Americans to think of World War I
as a much more confused time in which everyone seemed to be fighting
everybody else. So, it's easier for Turkish deniers to deny the genocide
because there's less of a historical foundation in public consciousness in
Western countries.
Having said that, I think the Armenians have been more successful than they
are willing to give themselves credit for in building an awareness of the
genocide. But part of the problem with the Armenian recognition campaign is
that it has been led almost exclusively by Armenians. Now, that shouldn't
make a difference; nobody knows better what was done to the Armenians than
the Armenian community in this country or the Armenian survivors spread
throughout the world. But, for example, one of the things that had great
credibility at the time of the Armenian genocide was the reporting of Henry
Morgenthau, the U.S. Ambassador in the Ottoman Empire, who reported back
about what was occurring, and it was his reports that then got picked up by
the New York Times. A lot of books have been written about the Armenian
genocide by Armenians, but I think one of the reasons Turks in particular
have latched on to the first chapter of my book is that I'm not Armenian and
I didn't come into this with some "big bias" toward the Armenian community,
and I think that is very threatening to a denier community.
If somebody from the outside comes in and says, I've looked at the Turkish
claims and I've looked at the Armenian so-called claims and I've decide that
a genocide did occur, that is very problematic for the Turkish government
and perhaps very gratifying-I hope-for the Armenian community. But there
should be many more people from the outside making the films, drawing
attention to the art that was produced in the aftermath of the genocide,
writing the books and pouring over the sources.
Q-Why do particular nations deny genocide and then why does Turkey deny the
genocide? Is it about pride? Is it about not wanting to be labeled
internationally as another Germany? Is it about the reparations and the
issue of money?
S.P.-Deniers in general have several ways of evading responsibility. One
very characteristic response is "They started it," "they rose up." The
"they," of course, is a whole group that rose up, the implication is that
any abuse that was carried out was in excess of what was ordered but it was
very much in response to this sort of first-order sin which was the
rebellion. And in the case of the Turks, that's what they say about the
Armenians. That the Armenians teamed up with the Russians, that Turkey was
at war, and that it had to get rid of any traitors within their midst
because of the security threat that was posed, the existential threat to
Turkey as a country and to the lives of Ottoman citizens. So "they started
it" is sort of recourse number one. The second recourse is uncontrolled
elements. They say, "We as a state didn't have any intention of harming
Armenian civilians or citizens, but again once you get involved in
counter-insurgency campaigns, bad things tend to happen. It's really
unfortunate, but name a war in which torture, the killing of civilians, the
raping of women, hasn't occurred."
Denier communities, I think, deny for lots of good, sound, totally immoral
but prudential reasons. Denier communities deny atrocities carried out not
even by them but by their predecessors for prudential reasons and for
emotional reasons. Prudentially, they really don't want to have to deal with
the claims of the descendants to this alleged genocide, they do not want to
have to pay reparations for crimes, and more fundamentally, they don't want
the rights of return to be established, they don't want to have to manage
property claims.
Another factor is just plain old unwillingness to wrap your mind around
atrocities carried out by people like you. I think it's again the same
factors that made Americans very unwilling to believe reports of torture in
Guantanamo, in Bagram, in Afghanistan or in Abu Ghraib in Iraq. They're the
same factors you see at work when it comes to Turkish disbelief to this day
that their kin could have rounded up civilians, executed them in public
squares, and sent whole families out into the desert with no provision made
for them, and that most Turks as a whole could have stood by while their
neighbors were being systematically butchered. I think it's really hard to
wrap your mind around that and to admit the crime. Turkey is not alone in
denying abuses carried out long ago. The difference is that the Armenian
community has mobilized in a far more effective way than many other victim
groups and survivor groups.
Q-Do you think that recognition brings emotional or otherwise closure to the
victim group? Or is that an exaggeration or a fantasy? Is that something
that you think will happen?
S.P.-To a certain extent, once a surviving community decides that something
is important, it is important. I mean, the fact that so many Armenian
survivors, many of whom have passed away, pinned their hopes on recognition
as a form of closure, means that they were denied closure. Had they said,
"My goal is to make it into an American text book," then they would've been
able to achieve some form of closure.
In my experience with other victim groups, closure is a little bit like an
oasis in the desert. It's out there as the place to sort of strive to get
to, but the closer you get, the further away it seems. So I don't know that
closure should be the criteria for demanding recognition. The reality is
that the genocide happened, and it is tremendously destructive to the
descendants of Armenians and to the few survivors who are left to be told
that it didn't happen. Whether being told that it did happen gives them the
closure they need is not relevant. What's relevant is it happened.
The question over whether or not recognition will bring closure or won't
bring closure is a purely academic one. We're nowhere close to seeing the
Turkish government or the U.S government at an official level recognizing
what was done. The best reason for recognition is probably not closure
because most of the people who needed it most are no longer with us. But the
reason for recognition is that the genocide happened and denying that it
happened has incredibly painful, ongoing consequences for the few survivors
who are left and for the descendants who made only one promise to their
dying predecessors: that they would not die without seeing this genocide
recognized. And so for those reasons alone, regardless of whether closure
makes anybody feel whole-How can you feel whole after you know between one
and two million people were systematically taken from this earth?-just on
truth grounds and on deterrence and prevention and in a way punitive
grounds-that is, when you do something bad, you should be known to have done
something bad-for those reasons alone, recognition is essential.
Q-How would you respond to someone saying that a documentary, like this one,
"should be objective and tell both sides of the story, in this case, the
Turkish and Armenian"? What would your response be to that?
S.P.-I think that any journalistic or historical record needs to be
objective, but being objective is not the same as being neutral. You know,
you don't need to bend over backwards to be neutral on whether Hitler had a
good argument for exterminating the Jews. There's no neutrality on Hitler
possible. And for the same reason, I don't think that neutrality with regard
to the truth of what happened in 1915 is required. We don't meet every
Jewish survivor's claim about the Holocaust with a German revisionist claim
about how there were no gas chambers. And I think in the Armenian case, as
long as those of us who come to the issue are fair-minded and do review the
claims of Turkish government officials, of Turks at the time, as long as we
do our best to go into it with our eyes open, if our objective conclusion is
that a genocide occurred, I don't see why the Armenian genocide should be
held to a different standard than any other massive crime against a people
that has occurred throughout history.
----------------------------------------- --------------------------
2. Complicity with Evil: An Interview with Adam LeBor
By Khatchig Mouradian
BOSTON, Mass. (A.W.)-Adam LeBor is an author and journalist based in
Budapest, Hungary. He writes for The Times (of London), the Economist, the
Jewish Chronicle and the New York Times. He is the author of six non-fiction
books, including Milosevic: A Biography, City of Oranges: An Intimate
History of Arabs and Jews in Jaffa and Complicity with Evil: The United
Nations in the Age of Modern Genocide (reviewed in the Feb. 16, 2008 issue
of the Weekly).
In this interview, conducted by phone, we talk about the role the UN
played-and oftentimes failed to play-when genocide and crimes against
humanity were committed.
Khatchig Mouradian-In Complicity with Evil, you call on the UN to return to
its founding principles and set the agenda of the Security Council instead
of following the lead of the great powers. Do you think such a drastic shift
in the UN's approach would be possible under current circumstances?
Adam LeBor-It would be difficult, that's for sure. That's the ideal that I
think should happen. The problem with the UN is that the powers on the
Security Council follow their own national interests more than the interests
of the UN, but one place where there is room to maneuver is within the
Secretariat. And if the Secretary General and other Secretariat officials
don't just follow the whims of the great powers but actually say, "Look, the
UN is here to safeguard human rights, prevent genocide, that's why it was
founded, not to be used to pursue your national interests," if the
Secretariat kept making that point, it could, perhaps, have an effect.
This sounds very general, but let's look at, for example, what happened in
Bosnia. Many UN officials focused primarily on preserving the UN's
impartiality and also following the interests of the great powers. Those UN
officials did have an effect on the ground, but it wasn't a good effect.
K.M.-You mentioned the issue of UN impartiality. In the book you highlight
the UN's "reluctance to distinguish victim from aggressor" and "continued
equal treatment of the parties" as the biggest blows to the credibility of
UN peacekeeping. Can you explain?
A.L.-We saw that in Bosnia, we saw it in Rwanda, and we are still seeing it
in Darfur. In Bosnia, at the Sarajevo airport, UN soldiers were shining
spotlights on people who were trying to run across the airfield to get out
of the besieged city, and the Serbs would fire on them. The airport was
controlled by the UN, and the UN believed it had to be neutral.
You have this obsession with neutrality. You have the main UN political
official, Yakushi Akashi, who refuses to authorize air strikes against the
Bosnian Serbs because he believes that it would weaken Slobodan
Milosevic-and the latter was needed to make a peace deal.
You see the same thing in Rwanda, where the UN, under pressure by the
Clinton Administration-in what was surely one of the Administration's most
shameful moments-actually pulled out 90 percent of the troops that were
there.
You see the same situation now in Darfur. Sudan is treated as an honored
partner in negotiations. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon meets the Sudanese
president and talks about how he believes the Sudanese president is
committed to ending the carnage in Darfur, and then, a few weeks later,
another 12,000 people are displaced and hundreds of more people are killed.
All this is because no one seems to be willing to say that the UN is not
founded to give a platform of membership to regimes carrying out genocide.
There's a mentality that we can't get involved in what's going on. We just
have to always be these impartial arbiters. But there comes a point when
impartiality means siding with the aggressor.
K.M.-How do you think this false notion of impartiality can be changed?
After all, some would argue that the UN is the organization that brings all
countries together and once the concept of impartiality is left open to
different interpretations, member states could raise the argument that the
UN is, in fact, taking sides.
A.L.-This is the great question: How can the organization protect human
rights when the people carrying out the human rights abuses are members of
the UN? I would argue there are means and methods by which UN member states
that carry out egregious violations can be suspended or expelled-there's a
provision for that in the UN Charter. Also, the agenda can be set. Look at
what's happening now on the new Human Rights Council. We have a spectacle of
countries refusing to take any action against Sudan and Zimbabwe, obsessing
about what Israel is doing. Now, to be sure, there are human rights issues
in Israel and Palestine, but there are also many other human rights issues
going on in the world. But you have member states of these organizations
focusing only on their own interests, rather than having any actual
interests in human rights violations. That's one area that needs a lot of
attention.
K.M.-This is also a problem in the media. How do you feel about bringing up
human rights violations elsewhere to "justify" or divert attention from
other human rights abuses? Wouldn't a universal approach to human rights
help all sides?
A.L.-The media in countries often reflects their country's interests,
especially in non-democratic regimes. For example, most Arab regimes and
much of the Arab media hasn't engaged over Darfur. Some of them don't
believe it's happening, some of them say it's another Western plot to
dismember another Arab country, same as in Iraq. You see a kind of selective
judgment. But until there are absolute standards applied, it weakens the
whole cause of human rights. If, for example, the Arab media is always
talking about Gaza and the West Bank-and of course, I say again, there are
human rights violations that need to be addressed there-but the same media
never says anything about what's happening in Darfur or refugees in the
Western Sahara or the lack of human rights in most Arab countries or the
fact that there's no free press and bloggers are arrested, then it becomes
very difficult to share outrage over other issues. We need less selective
judgment, and clearer, absolute judgments over what's wrong, whether or not
it is convenient to look at a certain issue.
K.M.-I want to return to the issue of the Secretariat. Wouldn't you agree
that the hands of the Secretariat are tied when it comes to setting the
agenda as long as members of the Security Council are not willing to make
concessions?
A.L.-I think it would demand a concession by the countries on the Security
Council, especially the five permanent members, to accept that Secretariat
officials should have more power and should be able to set the agenda of the
UN. But at the moment, it just doesn't seem to be happening. Look at how the
political establishment in the U.S., for example, views the UN. They see it
as an anti-Western organization, and so why would we hand over any
diplomatic power to an organization like this? We go back to the problem of
selective judgment here. The General Assembly and the new Human Rights
Council are refusing to engage on Zimbabwe or on Sudan but only engages on
things that interest it. This actually helps the people who want to keep the
UN weak. The Republicans can say, look at these people, they are not
concerned about human rights, they are concerned about their own short-term
politically expedient interests. So, that selective judgment does a lot of
damage.
K.M.-Talk about why the UN is, as you say, "passively complicit with evil."
A.L.-The reason I called my book "Complicity with Evil" is because it's
actually the UN's own words. In 2000, the UN released its report on
peacekeeping failures in Bosnia, Rwanda and some other places. The UN's own
words were that its continued obsession with impartiality, with not engaging
while human rights abuses were going on in front of UN peacekeepers, has
arguably made the organization guilty of being "complicit with evil." And it
has been. There are people in the organization that realize this and want to
change it.
K.M.-What role do you see for the UN today in Darfur?
A.L.-When people talk about Darfur, especially the U.S and Britain, they say
that we can't do anything in Darfur because of Iraq. But there are many
things that can be done without sending the 101st Airborne Division in. You
can have serious, meaningful sanctions on the Sudanese government, on the
president and the people organizing the genocide and the human rights
abuses. You can have sanctions on the oil industry. You can have a more
active International Criminal Court (ICC). You can see the contempt Sudan
holds the UN in when one of the four people indicted by the ICC is actually
promoted after the indictment and made the minister in charge of refugee
affairs. You can see that a country like Sudan has no fear of the UN
whatsoever, couldn't care less what it does. The way to address that is also
to start focusing on the individuals that are actually running these regimes
and to seriously target them in terms of sanctions, travel bans and freezing
their assets. This had quite strong effects during the Milosevic regime,
when the genocide was going on in Bosnia, because people started to get
nervous that they'd never get their money or be able to leave the country.
They started to turn on each other and started to reach out to the ICC
saying that they had information and were ready to make a deal. All this
makes the regime crack.
K.M.-Do you think the U.S.'s use of the term "genocide" to describe the
killings in Darfur has helped in any way?
A.L.-I thought the whole U.S. position on the use of the term "genocide" in
Darfur was completely bizarre. Clearly, it is genocide. Genocide does not
necessarily mean mass extermination, as it happened in the Holocaust or
Rwanda. It means the intention to destroy a group. And that is exactly what
is happening in Darfur in terms of the communities that are being targeted
and destroyed as a group. There's a lot of furor over the use of the word
and this furor distracts from what's going on. America says it is genocide,
but then refuses to take any action to stop this genocide. The UN says it's
not a genocide, although some acts have been committed that resemble
genocide. You have this, in some way, irrelevant debate over the word, while
the slaughter continues.
K.M.-How do you see the future of UN peacekeeping?
A.L.-I think a lot of lessons have been learned from Rwanda, where UN troops
evacuated places and left the Tutsis there to be slaughtered by the Hutus
who were waiting outside the front door. And from what happened in
Srebrenica, where Dutch peacekeepers literally forced Muslim men and boys
into the arms of the Bosnian Serbs who then took them away and slaughtered
them. I think important lessons have been learned, unfortunately at the cost
of a lot of human lives and suffering.
Now, where there is a meaningful peacekeeping force, like in Congo and
Liberia, it is more robust and muscular. The Department of Peacekeeping
Operations has a sub-department called Best Practices, which looks at each
mission and works out how to make it work better.
But the problem is when the troops aren't there. If you look in Darfur,
there's supposed to be 26,000 troops, but there's only a fraction of them
there. Sudan is insisting that only peacekeepers from African countries be
deployed. It is doing that because African countries don't have the
experience and the logistics to mount effective peacekeeping operations.
They simply don't have the capability that Western countries have. So it's
all very clever, very convenient.
I would say that where peacekeepers are properly deployed, they are making a
difference. But they need to get there.
------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------
3. Only the Good Die Young . and Outside the Green Zone
Samantha Power's New Book Canonizes One of the UN's Saints
By Andy Turpin
WATERTOWN, Mass. (A.W.)-Samantha Power's new book, Chasing the Flame: Sergio
Vieira De Mello and the Fight To Save the World (Penguin Press, 2008) is a
triumph.
Its title sounds more akin to that of the upcoming Indiana Jones sequel than
it does the biography of a lifelong UN troubleshooter. But well it should
when one takes the time to read about the exploits and follies of the most
dynamic and womanizing adventurer to don a blue helmet and label pin.
Vieira De Mello, who was killed in the Iraq Canal Hotel bombing in 2003, was
a Brazilian national working as the UN Secretary General's special
representative in Iraq at the time of his death.
Described in the book as a cross between "James Bond and Bobby Kennedy" in
his persona and dealings, Vieira De Mello was a primary UN player involved
over the past 30 years in solving human rights and refugees crises in the
Congo, the 1980s war in Lebanon, the Vietnamese Boat People, Cambodian
demilitarization, the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
>From his "embassy brat" childhood in the capitals of Europe as the progeny
of a mid-level Brazilian diplomat, to his rebellious acts of student protest
as a Sorbonne-educated anti-De Gaulleist in 1960s Paris before his UN
career, Power's work should serve as a Little Red Book-and given Vieira De
Mello's exploits, a little black book-for those looking for a profile in
courage for the millennial age.
At a time when anti-UN feelings worldwide are growing, yet in global
election campaigns people are clamoring for policy change, Vieira De Mello's
flawed story of diehard loyalty and faith to UN principles of universal
dialogue-even at the cost of his own life-is succor and inspiration to tired
political activists the way the Confessions of St. Augustine are to lost
priests.
An agnostic philosopher at his core, Vieira De Mello over the course of his
career asked himself constantly through the works of Kant, Espinoza and
others whom and what he served as much as any good cleric does of scripture.
As an example of Vieira De Mello's character, in Bosnia he taught UN
peacekeeping force commander and former-SAS officer Sir Michael Rose a
lesson in courageous equality by attending all UN meetings without body
armor to live by example like the populous.
Just prior, in Cambodia, he was the first UN official to lead a team into
the jungle and negotiate with the Khmer Rouge in their own land-mined
compound.
Contrastingly, Power comes through in creating a picture of Vieira De Mello
that doesn't paint him as a flawless superman all the time, but also as a
man that sacrificed his family life and strained marriage for his UN tasks
and in his off hours kept a virtual harem of women in every war zone,
expensive bottles of Black Label Scotch for hard days, and a penchant for
Gaullist snobbery and overdone personal hygiene.
A testament to the kind of Herculean resolve it takes to put up with a life
of UN bureaucracy and red tape, the underline of Chasing the Flame is
nonetheless a much-needed gauntlet throw down and reality check to those who
want to evoke real change in a world gone mad.
It is also a warning to those that would promote genuine political dialogue
that, as with Hrant Dink, Anna Politkovskaya and Benazir Bhutto, the proverb
"No good deed goes unpunished" is both a truism and a blood oath.
80 Bigelow Avenue
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http://www.a rmenianweekly.com
The Armenian Weekly; Volume 74, No. 10; March 15, 2008
Features:
1. An Interview with Samantha Power
2. Complicity with Evil: An Interview with Adam LeBor
By Khatchig Mouradian
3. Only the Good Die Young . and Outside the Green Zone
Samantha Power's New Book Canonizes One of the UN's Saints
By Andy Turpin
***
1. An Interview with Samantha Power
Samantha Power is professor of practice of global leadership and public
policy at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, where she was the
founding executive director (1998-2002). She is the recent author of Chasing
the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (see our
review on p. 10). Her book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of
Genocide (New Republic Books) was awarded the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for
General Non-Fiction.
Power's article in the New Yorker on the horrors in Darfur won the 2005
National Magazine Award for Best Reporting. In 2007, Power became a foreign
policy columnist at Time magazine. From 1993-96, she covered the wars in the
former Yugoslavia as a reporter for the U.S. News and World Report, the
Boston Globe and the New Republic.
She remains a working journalist, reporting from such places as Burundi,
East Timor, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan and Zimbabwe, and contributing to the
Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. Earlier
this month, Power resigned from her position as senior political advisor to
presidential candidate Barack Obama.
The following interview with Samantha Power was conducted for the
documentary film "The Armenian Genocide," directed and produced by Emmy
Award-winning producer Andrew Goldberg of Two Cats Productions
(www.twocatstv.com). Short segments of the interview appeared in the
documentary. It is published here, in the Armenian Weekly, for the first
time and in its entirety.
The Weekly would like to thank Andrew Goldberg and Two Cats TV for this
collaboration.
Q-Can you discuss where the actual word "genocide" comes from, it's Greek
and Latin origins and so forth?
Samantha Power-"Genocide" is a hybrid between the Greek genos for people or
tribe, and the Latin cidere, cide, for killing.
Q-Could you go into the history of the word and Raphael Lemkin?
S.P.-The word "genocide" was invented by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jew, who
in the interwar period tried to mobilize states and statesmen to care about
what he saw as the imminent destruction of ethnic, national and religious
groups. He was partially concerned about the Jews but he also had concerns
about other groups that he felt were threatened around the world. So he
tried to get the League of Nations to take this issue seriously and to ban
this crime, which at the time he called "barbarity"-the crime of the
destruction of groups. He was ignored and in some cases laughed and yawned
out of the conference. He went back to Poland and, six years later, Hitler
invaded Poland, allegedly declaring, "Who now remembers the annihilation of
the Armenians?"
Lemkin lost 49 members of his family in the Holocaust. He spent his days
during the Holocaust trying to understand why in the build up to World War
II, he had been so unsuccessful in convincing states and statesmen to care
about what to him looked like the imminent destruction of the Jews. He told
himself that his number one failing was that he didn't have a word that was
commensurate to the gravity of what would become Hitler's crime. And so his
notebooks were filled with his efforts to find that word. He struggled to
find a word that was commensurate with the horrors that had occurred against
the Armenians in 1915, and then the ones that were ongoing in World War II
against the Jews. In 1941, he came up with the word "genocide."
Q-Why is it necessary to use the word "genocide" to describe what happened
to the Armenians in 1915?
S.P.-What the word "genocide" connotes is a systematic campaign of
destruction. If you simply call the horrors of 1915 "crimes against
humanity" or "atrocities," it doesn't fully convey just how methodical this
campaign of slaughter and deportation really was. There are very few
paradigmatic cases of genocide where you can really see either through the
words of the perpetrators or through the policies undertaken in pursuit of
the goal to annihilate a certain group-in this case, the Armenian community
in the Ottoman Empire. I think that's why Armenians and other historians
look at the record and can come to no other conclusion than this word
"genocide" applies to this methodical campaign of destruction.
At the time the atrocities were being carried out, the perpetrators boasted
about what it was they were trying to do: They were going to solve the
Armenian problem by getting rid of the Armenians. In the aftermath of the
atrocities of 1915, perpetrators were prosecuted for the crimes that they
committed. Now, the word "genocide" did not exist then. It wouldn't come
into existence for another 25 years. But there was widespread knowledge that
what had been attempted was a campaign of destruction, hence, genocide.
What is so tragic is that in the wake of the Armenian horrors and in the
wake of the trials of Turkish perpetrators, a blanket of denial has
smothered Turkey and there's no willingness to acknowledge what was boasted
about at the time.
Q-What impact did the suffering of the Armenians have on Lemkin?
S.P.-In the 20's and the 30's, Lemkin became a kind of amateur historian of
mass slaughter, and the case that really moved him was that of the
Armenians. He spent months and months just going through the archives and
trying to understand how such a crime could have been committed in Europe.
He was a great believer in European civilization, and what he encountered in
the record was what would later become known as an orientalist framing of
what had occurred: The perpetrators were these Turks and they weren't really
Europeans. They were tribal savages, Muslim hordes, and Europe would never
suffer from anything quite like that, it was argued. But as he studied the
records he understood that the Armenian case offered great insight into how
genocides occur. He understood the way in which the Armenians were branded
by the Turkish government at the time, and he saw the dehumanization of
Armenians as a community and indeed how they lacked some of the perks of
people of Turkish ethnicity and Muslim fate.
All this became very much a part of his effort to understand what the
signals would be when a regime was intent on wiping out part of its
population. In terms of the genocide itself, he was struck by the way in
which the Turkish government first went after the intellectuals and the
local leaders of the Armenian communities in the towns. He also made
frequent reference to the way in which the deportation of Armenians became
as effective an implement of genocide as those executions in the town
squares. He saw that you could destroy a group not simply by rounding up the
men or the leaders of the community and hanging them or machine-gunning
them, but by actually deporting a group from a country and, especially in
the Armenian case, sending them into conditions where there was no way that
they could survive. So, you were actually going to achieve the same results
with a machine gun but it was going to be much cheaper and it was going to
draw much less attention.
Q-What is the effect of genocide denial?
S.P.-I think denial is devastating both for the victims or descendents of
victims on the one hand and for the descendents of perpetrator societies on
the other. For victims or their family members, there just can't be anything
worse than living through the loss, the obliteration of your livelihood,
your home, and the systematic extermination of your family-extermination
that is accompanied by the taunt of "no one will ever know," "no one will
ever remember," "no one will ever believe you, even if you make it out of
here, no one will believe you."
So you live through all of that, you make it out, you've lost everything and
then you tell your story, just the story you can best remember through all
the trauma. The details stick and are sort of inexorably planted in the
backs of the eyes so you can't see anything else that goes on in your life
without sort of filtering it through the prism of death. But however you
come to deal with the trauma, you tell your story and you're told not only
by the Turkish government or by Turkish citizens, but also by the American
government and other Western governments that what you lived through didn't
really happen quite that way. You are told that it wasn't a plot to destroy
you or your family and it wasn't an assault on civilian life. It was a war,
there was a rebellion, and it was just a counter-insurgency campaign by the
Turks. And, you know, unfortunately some civilians got caught up in that
counter-insurgency campaign. In war, bad things happen.
Imagine what that would feel like. You survive and you live with those
memories, you tell your truth, a truth you were told you would never get to
tell, and then you're told that your truth is inadequate or is subjective or
is overly emotional and inaccurate.
The other community that I think denial has affected in a very harmful way
is of course the community in whose name these horrors were committed.
Turkish officials and citizens today had nothing to do with the acts that
were perpetrated, with the forced marches, the executions and the hangings
that took place in public squares. But because all that information is
acquirable, because the genocide is manifestly knowable, they are complicit
in denying a truth. As a result, they are asked to go back to their history
and to scrutinize it carefully, they are thus asked to learn what there is
to be learned about why the genocide was carried, and thus of course asked
to incorporate lessons from that period.
No state is immune to excesses and many states, including the United States,
are liable to these kinds of excesses. The key is to revisit what has been
done in your name by your state as a way of trying to inoculate yourself
>From future excesses. The Turkish government is nowhere close today to
committing atrocities of the scale that were carried out in 1915, but human
rights is a big issue in Turkey and I think by kind of closing their ears
and their eyes to what has gone on in the past and by spending such
resources to ensure that this climate of denial persists, they're really
missing an opportunity to create more amicable ties with their neighbors.
But they're also missing an opportunity to understand their history and to
apply the lessons so that those kinds of atrocities don't ever get carried
out again.
Q-So, specifically in the Turkish case, how should one respond to denial? Do
you debate history? How do you respond to denial?
S.P.-Denial is very hard to respond to. It's almost like little kids who
block their ears and say, "I'm not listening, I'm not listening." It's very
hard to have a rational conversation because every set of facts that is
presented in defense of the truth is met with a whole series of claims about
the future threat posed by those Armenians to Turkish existence. You know,
there's an awful lot of extrapolation that is done in order to justify the
deportations. So you end up having a very fruitless and very frustrating
debate in which they say, "Well, yes, but the Armenians would have become a
threat had they not been removed, had the problem not been solved."
Sometimes you can make headway talking to genocide deniers by pointing out
that by using the word "genocide," you're not saying that Talaat, the
Minister of Interior in Turkey in 1915, was intending to put Armenians into
gas chambers and exterminate every last one of them as the Nazis did.
Sometimes you can make headway by simply saying you know genocide does not
mean the Holocaust. What it means is a campaign of destruction that includes
extermination or execution but also can entail outright ethnic cleansing and
deportation. They think that when we say "genocide," we're saying that
Talaat intended to exterminate every last member of the Armenian group. What
genocide actually means, what Lemkin actually intended, was that you create
a definition around destruction and not around outright extermination
because if you make the definition of genocide extermination of everyone, if
you make Hitler the standard, then you'll inevitably act too late, you'll
inevitably act only when you have proof that every last member of the group
has been destroyed or has been systematically murdered. So sometimes you can
make some headway by explaining what it is you have in mind when you use the
word. But generally the barriers and the cataracts that have given rise to
this denial for so many decades are pretty impenetrable. So what I have
suggested to Armenian friends and colleagues is that the focus be on
building a kind of fortress of fact and truth that gets salient and gets
picked up by communities other than the Turks of Turkey or the Turkish
government or even the U.S government.
So if every scholar referred to the Armenian genocide as a precursor to the
Holocaust, if in talking about the Holocaust they talked about the ways in
which Hitler learned from what had been done by the Turks to the Armenians
and made reference to that kind of community of perpetrators that really has
existed throughout time, it would be an immensely effective way of building
a record that no amount of Turkish government denial would be able to blot
out.
When I wrote A Problem from Hell and included the Armenian genocide, I
actually expected in city after city to have to defend the inclusion of that
case-because I understood how much controversy there was about use of the
term "genocide"-and what amazed me was that the people who raised their
hands were always either Turkish officials or individuals who had been sent
out by the Turkish embassy in order to stack the meetings. Not even on one
occasion did I have anybody who wasn't affiliated in some way with the
Turkish cause challenge the inclusion of the Armenian genocide among the
major genocides of the 20th century.
That's a sign that already Turkish deniers are becoming the
equivalent-socially and culturally-of Holocaust deniers. Where you hear
somebody raise their hand in the back of the room and say "the gas chambers
didn't exist" or "Hitler wasn't intending to exterminate the Jews," you know
you look at them like they've lost their minds. You know that they've missed
that History 101 course or that they have some kind of ulterior agenda. The
very same is true now of people who deny the Armenian genocide. So you can
argue that even though official recognition remains elusive for
Armenians-and that's incredibly tragic for those who survived the genocide
and who are now passing away, that they haven't seen the Turkish government
give them the recognition that they deserve-on the other hand, through their
efforts and the efforts of their descendants, there is now a historical
record that shows that this genocide did occur and that it has rendered
deniers the equivalent, almost, of Holocaust deniers. And I think
strengthening that historical record, strengthening public awareness through
film, through art, through literature, through course syllabi at
universities and elementary, middle and high schools, is the way that this
genocide is going to become official fact. And ultimately, the day will come
when neither the Turks nor the American government is going to be able to
deny it any longer.
Q-So when you did engage them, was it in terms of the history or the larger
aspects? Getting into the debates is, it seems, not dangerous but
problematic. Isn't it possible that that seed of doubt is still planted in
this context much more so than the Holocaust?
S.P.-Well, there's certainly more doubt and ignorance around the Armenian
genocide among ordinary non-Armenian citizens than there is around the
Holocaust, there's no question. But if you had talked to American citizens
in the 50's or even the 60's, you would've seen an awful lot of ignorance
about the Holocaust as well. The difference is that because we finally got
involved in World War II to defeat Hitler, the basic narrative about
American foreign policy was that we had gotten involved to stop a monster
and therefore it was perfectly plausible to believe that the monster had
committed the Holocaust.
In the Armenian case, because we hung back, because the U.S government hung
back and didn't get involved on the basis of the atrocities or even on the
basis of the threat to European stability and European welfare, and because
we got involved so late, it's easier for Americans to think of World War I
as a much more confused time in which everyone seemed to be fighting
everybody else. So, it's easier for Turkish deniers to deny the genocide
because there's less of a historical foundation in public consciousness in
Western countries.
Having said that, I think the Armenians have been more successful than they
are willing to give themselves credit for in building an awareness of the
genocide. But part of the problem with the Armenian recognition campaign is
that it has been led almost exclusively by Armenians. Now, that shouldn't
make a difference; nobody knows better what was done to the Armenians than
the Armenian community in this country or the Armenian survivors spread
throughout the world. But, for example, one of the things that had great
credibility at the time of the Armenian genocide was the reporting of Henry
Morgenthau, the U.S. Ambassador in the Ottoman Empire, who reported back
about what was occurring, and it was his reports that then got picked up by
the New York Times. A lot of books have been written about the Armenian
genocide by Armenians, but I think one of the reasons Turks in particular
have latched on to the first chapter of my book is that I'm not Armenian and
I didn't come into this with some "big bias" toward the Armenian community,
and I think that is very threatening to a denier community.
If somebody from the outside comes in and says, I've looked at the Turkish
claims and I've looked at the Armenian so-called claims and I've decide that
a genocide did occur, that is very problematic for the Turkish government
and perhaps very gratifying-I hope-for the Armenian community. But there
should be many more people from the outside making the films, drawing
attention to the art that was produced in the aftermath of the genocide,
writing the books and pouring over the sources.
Q-Why do particular nations deny genocide and then why does Turkey deny the
genocide? Is it about pride? Is it about not wanting to be labeled
internationally as another Germany? Is it about the reparations and the
issue of money?
S.P.-Deniers in general have several ways of evading responsibility. One
very characteristic response is "They started it," "they rose up." The
"they," of course, is a whole group that rose up, the implication is that
any abuse that was carried out was in excess of what was ordered but it was
very much in response to this sort of first-order sin which was the
rebellion. And in the case of the Turks, that's what they say about the
Armenians. That the Armenians teamed up with the Russians, that Turkey was
at war, and that it had to get rid of any traitors within their midst
because of the security threat that was posed, the existential threat to
Turkey as a country and to the lives of Ottoman citizens. So "they started
it" is sort of recourse number one. The second recourse is uncontrolled
elements. They say, "We as a state didn't have any intention of harming
Armenian civilians or citizens, but again once you get involved in
counter-insurgency campaigns, bad things tend to happen. It's really
unfortunate, but name a war in which torture, the killing of civilians, the
raping of women, hasn't occurred."
Denier communities, I think, deny for lots of good, sound, totally immoral
but prudential reasons. Denier communities deny atrocities carried out not
even by them but by their predecessors for prudential reasons and for
emotional reasons. Prudentially, they really don't want to have to deal with
the claims of the descendants to this alleged genocide, they do not want to
have to pay reparations for crimes, and more fundamentally, they don't want
the rights of return to be established, they don't want to have to manage
property claims.
Another factor is just plain old unwillingness to wrap your mind around
atrocities carried out by people like you. I think it's again the same
factors that made Americans very unwilling to believe reports of torture in
Guantanamo, in Bagram, in Afghanistan or in Abu Ghraib in Iraq. They're the
same factors you see at work when it comes to Turkish disbelief to this day
that their kin could have rounded up civilians, executed them in public
squares, and sent whole families out into the desert with no provision made
for them, and that most Turks as a whole could have stood by while their
neighbors were being systematically butchered. I think it's really hard to
wrap your mind around that and to admit the crime. Turkey is not alone in
denying abuses carried out long ago. The difference is that the Armenian
community has mobilized in a far more effective way than many other victim
groups and survivor groups.
Q-Do you think that recognition brings emotional or otherwise closure to the
victim group? Or is that an exaggeration or a fantasy? Is that something
that you think will happen?
S.P.-To a certain extent, once a surviving community decides that something
is important, it is important. I mean, the fact that so many Armenian
survivors, many of whom have passed away, pinned their hopes on recognition
as a form of closure, means that they were denied closure. Had they said,
"My goal is to make it into an American text book," then they would've been
able to achieve some form of closure.
In my experience with other victim groups, closure is a little bit like an
oasis in the desert. It's out there as the place to sort of strive to get
to, but the closer you get, the further away it seems. So I don't know that
closure should be the criteria for demanding recognition. The reality is
that the genocide happened, and it is tremendously destructive to the
descendants of Armenians and to the few survivors who are left to be told
that it didn't happen. Whether being told that it did happen gives them the
closure they need is not relevant. What's relevant is it happened.
The question over whether or not recognition will bring closure or won't
bring closure is a purely academic one. We're nowhere close to seeing the
Turkish government or the U.S government at an official level recognizing
what was done. The best reason for recognition is probably not closure
because most of the people who needed it most are no longer with us. But the
reason for recognition is that the genocide happened and denying that it
happened has incredibly painful, ongoing consequences for the few survivors
who are left and for the descendants who made only one promise to their
dying predecessors: that they would not die without seeing this genocide
recognized. And so for those reasons alone, regardless of whether closure
makes anybody feel whole-How can you feel whole after you know between one
and two million people were systematically taken from this earth?-just on
truth grounds and on deterrence and prevention and in a way punitive
grounds-that is, when you do something bad, you should be known to have done
something bad-for those reasons alone, recognition is essential.
Q-How would you respond to someone saying that a documentary, like this one,
"should be objective and tell both sides of the story, in this case, the
Turkish and Armenian"? What would your response be to that?
S.P.-I think that any journalistic or historical record needs to be
objective, but being objective is not the same as being neutral. You know,
you don't need to bend over backwards to be neutral on whether Hitler had a
good argument for exterminating the Jews. There's no neutrality on Hitler
possible. And for the same reason, I don't think that neutrality with regard
to the truth of what happened in 1915 is required. We don't meet every
Jewish survivor's claim about the Holocaust with a German revisionist claim
about how there were no gas chambers. And I think in the Armenian case, as
long as those of us who come to the issue are fair-minded and do review the
claims of Turkish government officials, of Turks at the time, as long as we
do our best to go into it with our eyes open, if our objective conclusion is
that a genocide occurred, I don't see why the Armenian genocide should be
held to a different standard than any other massive crime against a people
that has occurred throughout history.
----------------------------------------- --------------------------
2. Complicity with Evil: An Interview with Adam LeBor
By Khatchig Mouradian
BOSTON, Mass. (A.W.)-Adam LeBor is an author and journalist based in
Budapest, Hungary. He writes for The Times (of London), the Economist, the
Jewish Chronicle and the New York Times. He is the author of six non-fiction
books, including Milosevic: A Biography, City of Oranges: An Intimate
History of Arabs and Jews in Jaffa and Complicity with Evil: The United
Nations in the Age of Modern Genocide (reviewed in the Feb. 16, 2008 issue
of the Weekly).
In this interview, conducted by phone, we talk about the role the UN
played-and oftentimes failed to play-when genocide and crimes against
humanity were committed.
Khatchig Mouradian-In Complicity with Evil, you call on the UN to return to
its founding principles and set the agenda of the Security Council instead
of following the lead of the great powers. Do you think such a drastic shift
in the UN's approach would be possible under current circumstances?
Adam LeBor-It would be difficult, that's for sure. That's the ideal that I
think should happen. The problem with the UN is that the powers on the
Security Council follow their own national interests more than the interests
of the UN, but one place where there is room to maneuver is within the
Secretariat. And if the Secretary General and other Secretariat officials
don't just follow the whims of the great powers but actually say, "Look, the
UN is here to safeguard human rights, prevent genocide, that's why it was
founded, not to be used to pursue your national interests," if the
Secretariat kept making that point, it could, perhaps, have an effect.
This sounds very general, but let's look at, for example, what happened in
Bosnia. Many UN officials focused primarily on preserving the UN's
impartiality and also following the interests of the great powers. Those UN
officials did have an effect on the ground, but it wasn't a good effect.
K.M.-You mentioned the issue of UN impartiality. In the book you highlight
the UN's "reluctance to distinguish victim from aggressor" and "continued
equal treatment of the parties" as the biggest blows to the credibility of
UN peacekeeping. Can you explain?
A.L.-We saw that in Bosnia, we saw it in Rwanda, and we are still seeing it
in Darfur. In Bosnia, at the Sarajevo airport, UN soldiers were shining
spotlights on people who were trying to run across the airfield to get out
of the besieged city, and the Serbs would fire on them. The airport was
controlled by the UN, and the UN believed it had to be neutral.
You have this obsession with neutrality. You have the main UN political
official, Yakushi Akashi, who refuses to authorize air strikes against the
Bosnian Serbs because he believes that it would weaken Slobodan
Milosevic-and the latter was needed to make a peace deal.
You see the same thing in Rwanda, where the UN, under pressure by the
Clinton Administration-in what was surely one of the Administration's most
shameful moments-actually pulled out 90 percent of the troops that were
there.
You see the same situation now in Darfur. Sudan is treated as an honored
partner in negotiations. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon meets the Sudanese
president and talks about how he believes the Sudanese president is
committed to ending the carnage in Darfur, and then, a few weeks later,
another 12,000 people are displaced and hundreds of more people are killed.
All this is because no one seems to be willing to say that the UN is not
founded to give a platform of membership to regimes carrying out genocide.
There's a mentality that we can't get involved in what's going on. We just
have to always be these impartial arbiters. But there comes a point when
impartiality means siding with the aggressor.
K.M.-How do you think this false notion of impartiality can be changed?
After all, some would argue that the UN is the organization that brings all
countries together and once the concept of impartiality is left open to
different interpretations, member states could raise the argument that the
UN is, in fact, taking sides.
A.L.-This is the great question: How can the organization protect human
rights when the people carrying out the human rights abuses are members of
the UN? I would argue there are means and methods by which UN member states
that carry out egregious violations can be suspended or expelled-there's a
provision for that in the UN Charter. Also, the agenda can be set. Look at
what's happening now on the new Human Rights Council. We have a spectacle of
countries refusing to take any action against Sudan and Zimbabwe, obsessing
about what Israel is doing. Now, to be sure, there are human rights issues
in Israel and Palestine, but there are also many other human rights issues
going on in the world. But you have member states of these organizations
focusing only on their own interests, rather than having any actual
interests in human rights violations. That's one area that needs a lot of
attention.
K.M.-This is also a problem in the media. How do you feel about bringing up
human rights violations elsewhere to "justify" or divert attention from
other human rights abuses? Wouldn't a universal approach to human rights
help all sides?
A.L.-The media in countries often reflects their country's interests,
especially in non-democratic regimes. For example, most Arab regimes and
much of the Arab media hasn't engaged over Darfur. Some of them don't
believe it's happening, some of them say it's another Western plot to
dismember another Arab country, same as in Iraq. You see a kind of selective
judgment. But until there are absolute standards applied, it weakens the
whole cause of human rights. If, for example, the Arab media is always
talking about Gaza and the West Bank-and of course, I say again, there are
human rights violations that need to be addressed there-but the same media
never says anything about what's happening in Darfur or refugees in the
Western Sahara or the lack of human rights in most Arab countries or the
fact that there's no free press and bloggers are arrested, then it becomes
very difficult to share outrage over other issues. We need less selective
judgment, and clearer, absolute judgments over what's wrong, whether or not
it is convenient to look at a certain issue.
K.M.-I want to return to the issue of the Secretariat. Wouldn't you agree
that the hands of the Secretariat are tied when it comes to setting the
agenda as long as members of the Security Council are not willing to make
concessions?
A.L.-I think it would demand a concession by the countries on the Security
Council, especially the five permanent members, to accept that Secretariat
officials should have more power and should be able to set the agenda of the
UN. But at the moment, it just doesn't seem to be happening. Look at how the
political establishment in the U.S., for example, views the UN. They see it
as an anti-Western organization, and so why would we hand over any
diplomatic power to an organization like this? We go back to the problem of
selective judgment here. The General Assembly and the new Human Rights
Council are refusing to engage on Zimbabwe or on Sudan but only engages on
things that interest it. This actually helps the people who want to keep the
UN weak. The Republicans can say, look at these people, they are not
concerned about human rights, they are concerned about their own short-term
politically expedient interests. So, that selective judgment does a lot of
damage.
K.M.-Talk about why the UN is, as you say, "passively complicit with evil."
A.L.-The reason I called my book "Complicity with Evil" is because it's
actually the UN's own words. In 2000, the UN released its report on
peacekeeping failures in Bosnia, Rwanda and some other places. The UN's own
words were that its continued obsession with impartiality, with not engaging
while human rights abuses were going on in front of UN peacekeepers, has
arguably made the organization guilty of being "complicit with evil." And it
has been. There are people in the organization that realize this and want to
change it.
K.M.-What role do you see for the UN today in Darfur?
A.L.-When people talk about Darfur, especially the U.S and Britain, they say
that we can't do anything in Darfur because of Iraq. But there are many
things that can be done without sending the 101st Airborne Division in. You
can have serious, meaningful sanctions on the Sudanese government, on the
president and the people organizing the genocide and the human rights
abuses. You can have sanctions on the oil industry. You can have a more
active International Criminal Court (ICC). You can see the contempt Sudan
holds the UN in when one of the four people indicted by the ICC is actually
promoted after the indictment and made the minister in charge of refugee
affairs. You can see that a country like Sudan has no fear of the UN
whatsoever, couldn't care less what it does. The way to address that is also
to start focusing on the individuals that are actually running these regimes
and to seriously target them in terms of sanctions, travel bans and freezing
their assets. This had quite strong effects during the Milosevic regime,
when the genocide was going on in Bosnia, because people started to get
nervous that they'd never get their money or be able to leave the country.
They started to turn on each other and started to reach out to the ICC
saying that they had information and were ready to make a deal. All this
makes the regime crack.
K.M.-Do you think the U.S.'s use of the term "genocide" to describe the
killings in Darfur has helped in any way?
A.L.-I thought the whole U.S. position on the use of the term "genocide" in
Darfur was completely bizarre. Clearly, it is genocide. Genocide does not
necessarily mean mass extermination, as it happened in the Holocaust or
Rwanda. It means the intention to destroy a group. And that is exactly what
is happening in Darfur in terms of the communities that are being targeted
and destroyed as a group. There's a lot of furor over the use of the word
and this furor distracts from what's going on. America says it is genocide,
but then refuses to take any action to stop this genocide. The UN says it's
not a genocide, although some acts have been committed that resemble
genocide. You have this, in some way, irrelevant debate over the word, while
the slaughter continues.
K.M.-How do you see the future of UN peacekeeping?
A.L.-I think a lot of lessons have been learned from Rwanda, where UN troops
evacuated places and left the Tutsis there to be slaughtered by the Hutus
who were waiting outside the front door. And from what happened in
Srebrenica, where Dutch peacekeepers literally forced Muslim men and boys
into the arms of the Bosnian Serbs who then took them away and slaughtered
them. I think important lessons have been learned, unfortunately at the cost
of a lot of human lives and suffering.
Now, where there is a meaningful peacekeeping force, like in Congo and
Liberia, it is more robust and muscular. The Department of Peacekeeping
Operations has a sub-department called Best Practices, which looks at each
mission and works out how to make it work better.
But the problem is when the troops aren't there. If you look in Darfur,
there's supposed to be 26,000 troops, but there's only a fraction of them
there. Sudan is insisting that only peacekeepers from African countries be
deployed. It is doing that because African countries don't have the
experience and the logistics to mount effective peacekeeping operations.
They simply don't have the capability that Western countries have. So it's
all very clever, very convenient.
I would say that where peacekeepers are properly deployed, they are making a
difference. But they need to get there.
------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------
3. Only the Good Die Young . and Outside the Green Zone
Samantha Power's New Book Canonizes One of the UN's Saints
By Andy Turpin
WATERTOWN, Mass. (A.W.)-Samantha Power's new book, Chasing the Flame: Sergio
Vieira De Mello and the Fight To Save the World (Penguin Press, 2008) is a
triumph.
Its title sounds more akin to that of the upcoming Indiana Jones sequel than
it does the biography of a lifelong UN troubleshooter. But well it should
when one takes the time to read about the exploits and follies of the most
dynamic and womanizing adventurer to don a blue helmet and label pin.
Vieira De Mello, who was killed in the Iraq Canal Hotel bombing in 2003, was
a Brazilian national working as the UN Secretary General's special
representative in Iraq at the time of his death.
Described in the book as a cross between "James Bond and Bobby Kennedy" in
his persona and dealings, Vieira De Mello was a primary UN player involved
over the past 30 years in solving human rights and refugees crises in the
Congo, the 1980s war in Lebanon, the Vietnamese Boat People, Cambodian
demilitarization, the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
>From his "embassy brat" childhood in the capitals of Europe as the progeny
of a mid-level Brazilian diplomat, to his rebellious acts of student protest
as a Sorbonne-educated anti-De Gaulleist in 1960s Paris before his UN
career, Power's work should serve as a Little Red Book-and given Vieira De
Mello's exploits, a little black book-for those looking for a profile in
courage for the millennial age.
At a time when anti-UN feelings worldwide are growing, yet in global
election campaigns people are clamoring for policy change, Vieira De Mello's
flawed story of diehard loyalty and faith to UN principles of universal
dialogue-even at the cost of his own life-is succor and inspiration to tired
political activists the way the Confessions of St. Augustine are to lost
priests.
An agnostic philosopher at his core, Vieira De Mello over the course of his
career asked himself constantly through the works of Kant, Espinoza and
others whom and what he served as much as any good cleric does of scripture.
As an example of Vieira De Mello's character, in Bosnia he taught UN
peacekeeping force commander and former-SAS officer Sir Michael Rose a
lesson in courageous equality by attending all UN meetings without body
armor to live by example like the populous.
Just prior, in Cambodia, he was the first UN official to lead a team into
the jungle and negotiate with the Khmer Rouge in their own land-mined
compound.
Contrastingly, Power comes through in creating a picture of Vieira De Mello
that doesn't paint him as a flawless superman all the time, but also as a
man that sacrificed his family life and strained marriage for his UN tasks
and in his off hours kept a virtual harem of women in every war zone,
expensive bottles of Black Label Scotch for hard days, and a penchant for
Gaullist snobbery and overdone personal hygiene.
A testament to the kind of Herculean resolve it takes to put up with a life
of UN bureaucracy and red tape, the underline of Chasing the Flame is
nonetheless a much-needed gauntlet throw down and reality check to those who
want to evoke real change in a world gone mad.
It is also a warning to those that would promote genuine political dialogue
that, as with Hrant Dink, Anna Politkovskaya and Benazir Bhutto, the proverb
"No good deed goes unpunished" is both a truism and a blood oath.