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| You are here: 2004 / Workshops, Panels and Seminars / Plenary Panel 1: Identifying the Threats / Presentation by Professor Samantha Power | |||||||||
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Report from Plenary Panel 1: Identifying the Threats Presentation by Professor Samantha Power Presentation by Dr. Bernard Kouchner Presentation by Dr. Hans Blix Presentation by H. E. Minister Nana Akufo-Addo Presentation by Professor Samantha Power Power, Samantha Presentation by Professor Samantha Power I spent about 7 years looking into, specifically, the American response to genocide in the 20th century, looking at Armenia, the Holocaust, Cambodia; the killing fields there, Sadam’s genocide in Iraq against the Curds in 1987-88, Rwanda, Bosnia and one of the most striking conclusions that I came to, on a basis of nearly a thousand interviews and the declassification of US Government documents and alike and I do think the pattern established for the United States is replicable, I think you would see the same thing if you looked into the cronies of British or French or German, maybe even Swedish diplomacy and the most striking part of that pattern is really that early warning is not the issue...at all. I don’t mean to undermine the panel before it’s even begun and I will talk about warnings and issues with warnings but I just want to say that, straight up, the problem as I’ll talk more about later this evening, is ultimately a political calculus that is made by leaders in just about every western democracy and that calculus has them integrating concern for security, and concern for economic prosperity, buy rendering human rights and humanitarian issues as tertiary, as sidelights, soft sidelights for people like Mr. Kouchner and others to deal with but not the central purpose of statecraft. And in order for that default assumption, that realpolitik assumption to be overcome one of two things has to happen. You have to have serious political leadership of a kind we’ve never seen, which means not simply visiting the Holocaust Museum in DC or commemorating in worthy fashion the events of the Second World War, but actually signaling to your bureaucracy that actually there is career price to be paid for allowing genocide to happen on your watch. So, we know what leadership looks like when we see it, we’ve seen it in Iraq, for good and bad. That ‘s leadership, when you want something done you’ll even find reasons to go and do it. We’ve seen nothing comparable, nothing even close when it comes to genocide despite again all of the speeches and commitments to remembering the Holocaust. Now the second way the default assumptions that foreign policy is only about security and economic needs…the second way that that can be overcome is from political pressure from the outside. Where the rest of us on the outside succeed in creating the impression amongst our leaders that there is going to be a political cost to doing nothing about genocide. Unfortunately that has happened all too rarely. there are a couple of exceptions which we can talk about where eventually a very unlikely coalition of forces came together in my country and actually created the impression that a president was looking bad with his own people. This happened in Bosnia by the end, it actually had become humiliating to be doing nothing, to being a bystander. And you see an intervention follow that moment of despair, of lose of credibility, that feeling of humiliation. But it takes time to build those coalitions. And people in the NGO world have not succeeded in creating rapid-fire ability to make noise, and to create the impression of political cost. And that’s where we I think have to look at ourselves. But we must always remember ultimately, that our politicians are never really…it’s going to very, very difficult to convince them that the benefits of getting involved in these kinds of issues are greater than the potential risks and costs. Think of the cost they are obvious, right. Military intervention, if it happens can go badly wrong. Even diplomatic “ownership” of an issue can be humiliating, if the killing continues. financial resources have to allocated, usually diverted from something else. And again, once you start doing the little things, suddenly you end up “owning” a genocide. And who wants to “own” a genocide? Because then if you dip your toe in, the feeling is you have to go in all the way, and in my country we have something called the “VietMalia” syndrome, which will soon be amended soon to include some part of the word “Iraq”. Which means a deep, deep fear of nation- building and engagement in places where massive human rights abuses are occurring. The best example I can give of how unlikely citizens are to reward or penalize their leaders on the basis of how their leaders respond to genocide, is my own voting record. This is all I think about, I mean I did not make my decision in the 1996 elections in the United States about whether Pres. Clinton should be returned to office on the basis of his having allowed the Rwanda and Srebiniza genocides. And if I’m not voting that way, I can guarantee you that my fellow (citizens) aren’t doing so either. So, the reason I’ve spent time on an “early warning panel talking about leadership is because it has great bearing on what happens to the warnings that do exist. Warnings that we’ve had have not been perfect. I don’t want to suggest that we knew everything ahead of time about what was about to occur in Rwanda or any of the other cases, certainly that I’ve looked at in the 20th century. This goes without saying. Early warnings are not profits. They will tell you if you are lucky, that you are in the “red zone” or bordering the “red zone”. But they won’t tell you that 800,000 people are going to end up dead. At their best, what they will tell you is that present within a country is a will to kill on the basis of ethnic, national or religious grounds. And usually, what those warnings will tell you is that there are also the means to kill, and then some. That is, warnings are extensive in terms of arms trafficking and the kind of circulation of weaponry to militias and other forces within these countries. Second problem with warnings in addition to their inherent imprecision, is that genocide tends to happen in countries that have a history of ethnic conflict and violence. And usually in fact the warnings are so extensive that it is actually quite difficult to distinguish the onset of a massive killing spree as distinct from kind of “mere” ethnic violence “as usual”. Which is how it is sometimes branded. You saw this in the case of Rwanda. One of the Asst. secs of state on the American side that I spoke with said that she had been told that was, in effect, don’t worry about this. We are going to pull out our diplomats and “these people do this from time to time”. That was a quote. And if one can ignore the potentially racist and kind of tribal connotations of the quote, there is actually something to it. There had been killings and many massacres and things and warnings in Rwanda for quite some time. So what happens when we talk about the genocides in the 20th century that actually end up “earning” the capital “G” for genocide. Is that they follow a history of kind of trial balloons and tests that make it, at least initially, for the early days of these killing sprees which make it difficult to distinguish from the low- scale violence which has been of course allowed and never really remarked upon in the past. So these are a couple of the imperfections I think that exist with warning that I have found anyway. But I want to stress what I stressed at the beginning, from having looked at the cable traffic and the intelligence briefings given to a variety of officials and indeed open sources which are available to all of us. If you go back to the 1915, when the Armenian genocide occurred it may shock you, it shocked me to learn that in the year of 1915 the New York Times published 145 stores about the extermination of the Armenians. And this was before, needless to say, the internet. Let me know turn if I could to why politics and leadership tells you almost all you need to know about what will happen to warnings within a bureaucracy. Data gets clogged, it stops. It exists, its there, its available if leaders are there to seize upon it. But otherwise what it will does is to make its way, its merry way through the labyrinth of bureaucracy. And in the case of genocide, since genocide is more often than not is being carried out in places that are off the traditional national security beaten path. What tends to happens is that it will remain farmed out to “regionalists” and to people who don’t have much clout within the bureaucracy, who they themselves are for instance not capable of calling the president at home. In the case of Rwanda we are talking about desk officers, a Rwanda desk officer. Not someone who was on the fast-track, let’s say in the State Dept. bureaucracy. Your talking even about the asst. sec for African affairs. Someone who would think to himself…you know I know my president well enough and I’ve had a hell of a time getting a meeting on Africa. Why would he care whether or not whether there’s going to be ethnic violence in Rwanda. And again, he’s not thinking 800,000 all he’s doing is seeing that the violence is seems to be escalating , the plane has crashed, etc. So, one of the consequences of the lack of signaling from above is that these warnings tend to remain kind of relegated to the local expertise which exists in systems. Second point, is that there is actually a difference. As Elie Wiesel, Yehuda Bauer, and many other Holocaust historians and writers have noticed. There is a difference between information and knowledge. There really is a difference. And we all know it, we’ve all experienced it. The difference between reading about a place and going to a place. But one of the important things, again, this larger point I’m making about leadership and signaling is that the way in which information gets transformed into true knowledge, I mean that kind of knowledge where you then go home and can’t sleep at night without thinking about what you can do to make things different. The way that happens is conflicts within a system. And the tragedy again about the relegation of these issues to regional experts and others is that it never even rises to the level of high- level conflict. So Pres. Clinton, if you’ll recall his so-called apology in Rwanda. He said, it may surprise you, especially those of who lost members of your family is that–day after day after day people like me, sitting in our offices, and the language he used…”Who didn’t fully appreciate the depth and the speed of the unimaginable terror which engulfed you. So, didn’t fully appreciate…can’t say we didn’t know fifty years after the Holocaust, we have to say we didn’t fully appreciate it and it is unimaginable. Well, Pres. Clinton has done a lot of soul searching on this and his challenged those around him, and it may surprise to hear, to tell him, “Why didn’t I know? Why didn’t I appreciate?” And one of the ways he could have been made to appreciate, the responsibility lies entirely with him because he had signaled his bureaucracy in the way he handled the Bosnian genocide, that he wasn’t interested in hearing about a crises of this kind, a mere humanitarian crises. He had signaled by removing US troops within 48 hours of the firefight that Africa was not a place to risk American resources and American lives. But, where one has to take his point is that with these the responsibilities of his chief of staff and national security advisor, to do one very, very important thing and it wasn’t done. Amazing that it wasn’t done…to have a cabinet meeting. To convene a single meeting at one point, at any point while 800,000 people are being killed. A meeting should have been called, and was never called. There was not a single meeting at this level–a cabinet level meeting. And I mention this in the context of early warning because when people are in conflict, when you are discussing something up close and not just reading about it in your morning intelligence brief–that’s when you develop the kind of mental state you need and when information becomes knowledge, deep knowledge and becomes actionable. Third point, and then I’ll close with a few comments. The other issue with early warning related to leadership, is that the system–if it believes that this is something that let’s say the United States or other Western democracy doesn’t want to deal with–or an international organization doesn’t have the capacity to deal with, the system will run away from additional information. It doesn’t run towards the clarification of information. And since it is running away from specification and greater elaboration, it means that there is actually conflicting information that comes out of these societies, and you can always take refuge in that. As Mr. Blix will probably be able to speak about, you can seize upon the information that suits your political purpose. And if your desire is ultimately to do nothing, which is the default desire, you’ll have information to turn to. You’ll have people to tell you….”no, no it’s okay, everything will be fine. This is just a group of isolated extremists, just doing their thing. We are getting the situation under control.” One example of this of course occurred in Screbiniza, in late July the city fell on July 10, and July 11-15 the men were murdered, it looks like. Around in that week. In that period the men were gathered in football stadiums, in fields, they were forced to sit with their heads down, their hands tied behind their backs. And what happened was, the United States and our allies didn’t make much of a big deal about the fate of the men. We delegated the issue to the ICRC, and assumed they would ascertain their whereabouts. But one of the things we might have done if we were serious about ascertaining their fates was to employ intelligence assets into the region. My government in particular has great capacities in that regard, again recent events not withstanding in terms of what we’ve learned about the intelligence community, but the capacity to actually infiltrate, to use spy satellites, to determine whether there is a movement in populations. We have that capacity, and that capacity went utterly unexercised in this period. You will see ten days later however, when the policy had changed, and it changed as the result of three and a half years of constant pressure, and changed much too late. Suddenly, there was a desire to know what had become of the men. Suddenly you remember the use of spy satellites and the determination that graves had been created, that dirt had been overturned, these before and after pictures of fields that were put before the Security Council. Fields that were flat at one point and those with dirt overturned and where 8000 men lay buried. That’s what it looks like when you want to find out what has become of the men. But unfortunately because it was reactive, and very much again due to a change in the domestic political climate in the European countries and the United States. But not the product of a first order regard for the missing persons. Okay, let me be constructive now in closing. First of all we have so many representatives from governments, international institutions and NGOs, so I’ll just close with a few comments for each. For those of you who are here and who have made formal commitments to date to never again stand idly by. I certainly, and I’m sure all of us applaud you, the key, really, is to go back to your country, and to your government and to signal all of those who work with you and for you that you mean it. That is, it’s not enough to make a speech unfortunately in an international conference because it doesn’t change the nature of how bureaucracies work. It will have to seem so much more sincere than you can even imagine making it seem to overcome the default which is that stopping genocide, preventing genocide, doing early warning, diplomacy and so on is not what statecraft is for. To overcome that bias it takes a very, very spirited communications campaign. Second, international institutions which are here. I think one of the real tragedies of the 1990’s was the extent to which international institutions checked the weather, checked the climate among the member states, the most influential member states. And deferred to that, internalized the constraints that American unwillingness to get involved imposed upon them. They said, well, we know the Americans will never agree to put troops on the ground in Bosnia therefore why go to them yet again and ask them for something which we know won’t happen. We know after Somalia that the United States is not going to support sending General Dallaire reinforcements to Rwanda. Therefore, what’s the point of going before the Security Council and make a spirited request in that direction. Well, what the point is, is that one needs to externalize the constraints, let’s expose and shine a spotlight upon who it is that is unwilling to do what at whatever particular time. And this is especially true of early warning. I myself don’t have a whole lot of confidence about what might have happened if Kofi Annan had gone with the cable, in January 1994 that Gen. Dallaire sent from the ground. The cable which I’m sure all of you know that warned that Rwandan militias could exterminate at a rate of a thousand every 20 minutes. I don’t know what would have happened if Kofi Annan had gone with that cable to the Security Council and in some kind of relatively high profile fashion brought that before the Security Council. I know what he thought what would happen and he was probably right, that it wouldn’t have made much of a difference at all. I don’t know what would have happened if he had staged a press conference and said that, “you know, I didn’t have much luck with the Security Council but I’m here to tell you, the world that, that there are militias in Rwanda who can exterminate at the rate of thousands every 20 minutes. In all likelihood, maybe two of us journalists would have turned up at that press conference on Rwanda, and we have to reckon with that. BUT, I do know that what we all wish is that both of those options had been tried, and I think that’s what international institutions have to do, shine the spotlight on the failure of the media, on the failure of the member states. But don’t internalize the constraints that when you do, you will not alter. Thirdly, and finally, just a word about NGOs. Again, I really think that it is in part thanks to NGOs that early warning is not the issue. Things have changed dramatically. I mean, Amnesty International started out with a budget of 19000 dollars, Human Rights Watch next year will have a budget of 26 million (dollars)–shocking!. We have the methodology, it has become more rigorous, it is a growth industry, and incredibly important industry that has learned to team up with local actors who are documenting their own fates. But what we in the NGO community have not yet succeeded in doing is learning how to harness the ripeness which exists in our respective democracies for a principled foreign policy, to harness that ripeness and actually mobilize it when it matters, when we have the warnings. How can we actually use it to mobilize citizenry such that we create the impression that it will be noticed in western democracies, when we do in fact, if in fact we do stand idly by. So its about using information, using warning to create the impression of political cost, that’s what is going to make a difference for genocide prevention. Thank you >> Back to top |
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