It is the time of year on Capitol Hill when lawmakers consider calling the first genocide of the 20th century what it was. This should be straightforward. The Ottoman Empire’s mass deportation of Armenians in 1915 led to over one million dead, eviscerating large traces of a people. The American ambassador to Constantinople provides a damning account in a caption to a photo showing scores of Armenian corpses:
"Scenes like this were common all over the Armenian provinces in the spring and summer months of 1915. Death in its several forms - massacre, starvation, exhaustion - destroyed the refugees. The Turkish policy was that of extermination under the guise of deportation."
But then again, some feel it more important not to embarrass an ally. Turkey is about as secular as they come in the Middle East and can help Iraq stagger to its feet. I am not sure how bad the diplomatic fall-out would be should Washington find its balls here. Perhaps the same spastic fits we see from China vis-à-vis the Dalai Lama and then back to business; maybe deeper consequences. But none of these possibilities scare me when silence on genocide is the alternative.
At the very least there have been six cases of genocide since the Holocaust. Chronologically, the chief perpetrators and victims are:
1) The Khmer Rouge on their own people
2) Saddam Hussein on the Kurds
3) Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic on the Bosniaks
4) The Hutus on the Tutsis
5) Slobodan Milosevic on the Kosovars
6) Omar Bashir and the Janjaweed on the Fur people
In all of these instances, thousands were slaughtered before the “international community” considered intervening, if it did at all. So benighted was Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge that it was several months into the bloodbath before eyewitness accounts emerged. The evidence was much swifter in implicating the Bosnian Serbs, but this did not prevent General Mladic’s men from digging mass graves that showed up on the satellite images of U.S. intelligence. Our ability to combat genocide has not improved with our means of documenting the crime.
During the Bush years, many liberals pined for the foreign policy of Bill Clinton. At least Clinton didn’t get us stuck in two wars, they said. But two genocides went unchecked on Clinton’s watch. He waited three years while civilians in Sarajevo were pounded with artillery before ordering a tepid bombing of Serbian military positions. And after the nightmare of Black Hawk Down, President Clinton did not fancy involving the American military in Rwanda’s inferno, where an average of 5,000 were butchered every day for three months.
Bosnia shocked the Western media more so than Rwanda or Darfur because it happened in Europe. Genocide had returned to the continent fifty years after the Third Reich. Banja Lunka was the new Auschwitz, Mladic the new Himmler. Here was mass murder in the backyard of a Europe reconciled. Franco-German relations were better than ever; dictatorships in Spain and Greece had given way to agreeable democracies; the European Union was on the march. But the Balkans were an inconvenient outlier for European mandarins punch-drunk with peace. For some, the words never again meant never again thinking that genocide was possible in Europe after the Holocaust.
Also clouding the Western conscience was the idea that the Balkans were hopelessly resigned to conflict. On President Clinton's nightstand was Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts, a book that paints ethnic strife in the region as routine and eternal. The Slavs and Muslims had been going at it for centuries, wasn't this all natural and beyond our control?
Politics pulled the strings for Clinton's Bosnia policy. In his 1992 campaign for president, Mr. Clinton blasted President George H.W. Bush for not deterring the Bosnian Serbs. One was led to believe that a President Clinton would be willing to use force to stop the killing. But the new administration did not move outside a policy of denial of the facts on the ground until the war was in its fourth year. Until then, it often laid blame on all sides (Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks) while using the charade of consultation with European allies.
The Clinton Administration went to great lengths to avoid the word "genocide" because using it might have suggested a responsibility to intervene. When Secretary of State Warren Christopher tiptoed up to Congress to testify on Bosnia, he went as far as to say that the atrocities committed by Bosnian Serbs were "tantamount to genocide". Apparently that word, "tantamount", was just enough of a face-saver for Christopher and the Administration. But what useless rhetoric for the hundreds of thousands terrorized by the Yugoslav Army, for the UN personnel taken captive by the marauding Mladic.
The tragedy in Bosnia reminds us of the limits of relying on a deeply flawed United Nations or a self-interested United States to prevent genocide. Mladic and Karadzic dared the West to stop them and the mass-murderers prevailed. There are many explanations for America's inaction. The simplest is a reluctance to call it genocide, a powerful word that changes the debate. A crime against humanity is one that cannot be countenanced by human beings. But it is a crime that won't leave us unless we are clear about its manifestation. Srebrenica was genocide. Al-Anfal was genocide. And yes, the Armenian Genocide was genocide.
*Samantha Power's A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of the Genocide was a source for this post. I strongly recommend it and so does the Pulitzer Prize committee.
**Update: The Swedish parliament voted to recognize the Armenian genocide, while the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs said as much in a non-binding measure. Turkey recalled its ambassadors to both countries and warned of "serious damage" to ties in the case of Sweden.
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