Paul Cullen meets an author who says we must take seriously the promises to end genocide
Never again, we will not stand idly by, not on our watch - the world has many ways of promising it will intervene to prevent the commission of evil. But as Samantha Power's compelling account of the last 100 years of crimes against humanity, A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide, shows, the truth is very different.
Power, an Irish-born journalist-turned-human rights researcher, takes her readers on a tour of 20th century genocides, in the process demonstrating that the Western powers knew about the horrors being perpetrated but chose not to take any meaningful action.
A light touch and a sense for a good story makes her book a lot easier to read than might first be imagined, and even heavy footnoting can't stop the 600 or so pages passing at a rapid rate. Her Pullitzer Prize-winning debut is part reportage, part academic study, but never loses sight of the core humanity of those who suffer and struggle against genocide.
The US and its leaders bear the brunt of Power's attack, but to some degree the stain of moral failure attaches to any one of us who have ever read a newspaper or seen a television report about Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia, Kurdistan or any other genocidal conflict.
In Dublin this week to speak at a conference and holiday with her Irish relatives, Power explained how her world is divided into "bystanders" who knew but chose to do nothing about genocide and "upstanders" who struggled to tell the world about what was happening. Men like Raphael Lemkin, a lonely Polish Jew who haunted the corridors of the United Nations for years in his quest for a convention on genocide, or Romeo Dallaire, the tragic figure who headed the tiny contingent of UN troops in Rwanda at the time of the genocide in 1994, when over 800,000 people were killed in 100 days.
Then there is Sen William Proxmire, who gave 3,211 speeches on the floor of the US Senate, one a day for 19 years, urging the US to ratify the genocide convention. Another unlikely hero is Republican leader Bob Dole, whom she credits with "the tipping point in creating a political cost for doing nothing about genocide".
Power herself brings something of the sensibility of the lonely world-traveller to her work. She grew up in Ballsbridge, the daughter of a doctor and dentist, and attended Mount Anville school. But at nine the girl with the Dublin accent and the pleated convent skirt moved to the land of the pom-pom and the cheerleader. Her mother, a transplant physician, left as part of the "brain drain", though it was also "a divorce thing", she says.
The rest of her childhood was spent in relative affluence in Pittsburgh and Atlanta, as her mother and Irish stepfather moved from job to job. "You couldn't say I was from the Irish-American ghetto, more the medical ghetto, and my parents were never part of that network."
A tall, willowy woman with an Irishwoman's freckles and an Italian's gift for hand gestures, Power studied at Yale and later at Harvard Law School. But she came back to Ireland frequently and often holidays with relatives in Kerry.
Her fascination with the subject of genocide was sparked by experiences as a cub reporter in Bosnia between 1993 and 1996. In her early 20s, with little more than reports of the Yale women's volleyball team in her cuttings file, Power headed off to report on the Balkan war for what she describes as "the experience of a lifetime".
"I was so young and impressionable ... I managed to write for all the people I would ever want to write for, but I saw nothing change. The policies remained so fixed and immobile, so I just left, I felt so defeated."
Whereas other war reporters drifted on to new conflicts or desk jobs back home, Power tried to think of new ways of influencing policies. "To see that nothing that we were doing there was making a difference, I just thought: 'isn't there something better to be done?'"
With hindsight, she now realises that the press coverage from Bosnia was all that was keeping the issue alive. "Media noise", she says, is essential to get politicians thinking about a conflict. "However, the only thing that gets you military intervention is cost, the perception that there's actually a price to be paid, whether in security or economic terms, for doing nothing."
Back in the US, she embarked on the exhaustive research that would culminate in the book. "The first draft was more angry. It had an ortatory tone and my frustration dripped off the pages. But with time, I got myself out of the way, so you don't find yourself as annoyed with me as with the people featuring in the debate." Power deliberately set out to "inoculate" her book against the attacks she anticipated.
A charge of anti-American bias doesn't work, she asserts, because the book is centrally rooted in a faith in America. "I have an immigrant's acceptance of the litanies as they're handed to you. Thus, the book takes the claim of 'never again' seriously, and it takes the promise of America and the spread of liberty seriously. It's not a cynical book at all, nor angry."
But she has also been criticised by left-wingers who see the book as "an edict for Rumsfeldian intervention", a charge she denies as "the kind of argument made by someone who hasn't read the book". "It doesn't deify the UN, and recognises the world is made up of individual states. I'm also very careful to identify the right tool to respond to genocide."
Noam Chomsky and his acolytes, with their constant opposition to American intervention, even in conflicts such as Kosovo, hold no fascination for Power, who describes herself as "an equal opportunity critic" of left and right.
Key to her philosophy is the "toolbox instead of the all-or-nothing approach" or "the continuum of measures where the tool gets beefier and more spirited as the atrocities escalate".
It would have made no sense to argue for US intervention in Pol Pot's Cambodia, for example, in the immediate aftermath of the departure of US troops from neighbouring Vietnam.
"There are many things we can do to stop the killing: diplomatic denunciations at high levels, freezing foreign assets of perpetrators, arms embargoes, radio jamming, rallying troop from other countries, creating safe havens or no-fly zones. After all this, send in the Marines if that's what it comes down to."
Yet politicians are reluctant to move along this continuum for fear of having to go all the way. Over 8,000 people a day were dying in Rwanda, yet Bill Clinton never even devoted a single cabinet meeting to the killings. One US official expressed satisfaction with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, "human rights and chemical weapons use aside".
Power acknowledges there are many "cautionary tales" of armies that responded to calls for intervention and then found themselves mired in difficulties - the British in Northern Ireland, perhaps the US army in Iraq. But the decision to intervene is essentially "a balancing act". "There are no occupying powers, no matter how baby blue and white the flag is, that are not going to be resented. But you have to do a 'compared-to-what' assessment."
A Problem from Hell was completed in January 2002, a few months after 9/11 changed the world, at least as Americans see it. The attack posed massive challenges for the author as the US came out of its shell and embarked on a series of foreign wars. "I worried after September 11th that people would view the book as being too critical of US foreign policy, or see it too narrowly as being about genocide, which is viewed by some as passé, whereas it's about America's role in the world. It's about liberty and security, and how we inject the values that Americans enjoy at home into other parts of the world."
Since 9/11 she has been sucked into all the arguments that have raged over US interventions in the "war against terror". The invasion of Afghanistan was "a good thing, a great liberation for the Afghan people" though the follow-through was "pathetic". Power opposed the war on Iraq, arguing convincingly that the time to depose Saddam was 1988, when the Kurds were being systematically murdered and chemical weapons were being used.
Military intervention is justified only in extreme cases to prevent large numbers of deaths, because these interventions will themselves result in deaths, she says. "I know this sounds very crass and crude but it has to be."
A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power is published by Flamingo, price £9.99 sterling