In an interview on Human Rights

Your next book is by Samantha Power, 'A Problem from Hell': America and the Age of Genocide.

This is another wonderfully written book. All these books we're talking about are about very different things, but they’re beautifully written. So this one is by a very brave, and very principled Harvard professor and reporter, who has done great reporting from everywhere from Bosnia to Darfur to Zimbabwe, at enormous personal risk, and who is now working in the Obama White House. It’s very impressive that Obama brought her in, because this is a book that is incredibly tough on the way that foreign policy is made in Washington.

Her basic point is that the United States denounces genocide and says genocide is a terrible thing, but almost never actually acts when it counts. And she knocks down a lot of the standard excuses for that inaction. She says it’s not that people didn’t know about what was happening, say, in Rwanda. Because people often did have a lot of information. And It’s not that people couldn’t do anything, because she shows that there were lots and lots of steps that could have been taken, even without taking military action. There are diplomatic steps, there are economic sanctions -- we could, for example, have jammed the hate radio in Rwanda, which played an active role in coordinating the extermination. And these steps weren’t taken either. So her tough conclusion is that the American non-intervention in the face of genocide is not about the American political system being broken, and if only the system was working better then the US would do more to stop genocide. She says this is how the system is supposed to work, this system is doing what it’s supposed to do.

So her view is that these genocides could have been prevented, but the US government couldn’t be bothered to do anything about them?

Yes. From the Armenian genocide, to the Holocaust, to Cambodia, to Rwanda, she looked at all of these examples where there were military and non-military things that could have been done. And weren’t done. In Rwanda you actually have a UN force on the ground, and Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian general who is in charge of that force, is begging for a larger force to stand up against the genocide. And the Clinton administration does almost nothing to back it up. Some people in the Clinton administration are worried about the UN beefing up its presence by finding troops elsewhere — for example there are Belgian reservists in Nairobi. After Somalia, some people worry that if you send in these non-US troops, and they get into trouble, then it’s going to be the Americans who are going to have to come in and bail them out.

When she looks back to World War II, is she making the point that while these days it seems as if it was all about the Holocaust, at the time the US was pretty indifferent to the fate of European Jews?

She’s deeply aware of that. She knows a huge amount about the Holocaust and sees it as part of this overall trend. Woodrow Wilson finally got into World War I, not because of the Armenian genocide, but because of German aggression against US ships. America finally gets into World War II, not because of the Holocaust but because of Pearl Harbor. And even during the Holocaust the US does very little to try to rescue European Jews. What is done comes along very, very late in the extermination. Even on something simple like immigration of Jews fleeing Europe, 90% of the relevant pre-war immigration quotas are left unfilled during the war.

I know that in 1939 the US turned away a ship filled with nearly 1,000 Jewish refugees fleeing from Germany. Is it because of that kind of thing that the quotas were left unfilled?

The notorious example is the St. Louis, which was a ship from Europe that came close to Florida and to Cuba, close enough to see the lights of Miami, and is turned back. But more generally the part of the State Department that dealt with immigration was being run by a nativist, anti-Semitic official, named Breckinridge Long. And he did everything he could to throw bureaucracy in the way of letting in European Jews. That’s the kind of thing Samantha Power is looking at, and she’s looking at all these historical examples all the way up to Bosnia and Rwanda.

So do you think Obama has brought Power into the administration to change that non-interventionist approach?

Well, I don't know what he's thinking, but Obama is going to face some of these kinds of tests, the tests that she lays out in the book. He is likely to face some version of genocide or mass atrocity in his time in office. And he has brought in one of the people in the world who is most likely to get in his face and make it really hard for him just to do the politically expedient thing and ignore it. It shows a real self-confidence, and hopefully a real moral center to Obama that he has brought her in.

In an interview on Human Rights

Life in the Soviet bloc was brutal enough. But compared with Rwanda in the 1990s, it counts as positively genteel. Your next book, “A Problem From Hell”, by Samantha Power, asks, in effect, why the West did nothing to stop the genocide there. Does she find an answer?

When Power was writing, the Rwandan genocide had already happened, but Darfur was still to come. The sub-title of her book is ‘America and the age of genocide’, and she started work expecting to investigate how American foreign policy had coped so badly. Terrible events, including the mass killing of Armenians in Turkey early in the 20th century, and Pol Pot’s mass killings in Cambodia 60 years later, had gone completely unconfronted by the American and other governments. Then came the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Western governments turned away again. The UN Security Council only finally acknowledged it as genocide when the killing was basically all over – after what Power calls ‘a two-month dance to avoid the g-word’. Power found herself forced to the conclusion that American foreign policy hadn’t failed on all of these occasions. It had done exactly what it meant to do – which was to keep America’s hands out of the very worst stuff.

Power went on to show with forensic brilliance what that moral failure meant. Along the way, she brought back into prominence the work of Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who, as a student in 1921, was upset by the fact that somebody could be prosecuted for murdering one person – in this case, the Turkish interior minister in Berlin, held to be responsible for mass killings of Armenians – but that if you killed a million people, there was no crime for which you would be held responsible. He found that ‘most inconsistent’. When the Nazis invaded Poland, he fought in the Polish army, then escaped to Sweden and later the U.S. The rest of his family perished. Understandably, he became still more obsessed with the crime to which he gave the name ‘genocide’ – that is, the killing of a nation.

As a law professor in America, he lobbied successfully for the UN to adopt a convention against genocide, which it did in 1948. He believed that international justice should count for something. That’s what Samantha Power believes, too. Since her book was written, almost as a continuation of her argument, the International Criminal Court started work in 2002.

In an interview on Genocide

What is Samantha Power’s thesis in her 2002 book A Problem from Hell?

This was an extremely important and timely book in calling attention to the deep-seated hypocrisy that lay at the heart of American policies when facing genocide over the past century. Power’s criticism of the devastating combination of American timidity and wishful thinking in face of mass killing, especially in the mid-1990s in Bosnia and Rwanda, is palpable throughout the book. Through historical and political analysis, she sought to mobilise American citizens to place pressure on the US government to act. I think she made a genuine contribution to the heightened awareness of genocide in the US, and to the emergence of an array of NGOs that pay close attention to genocide issues.

Power was a senior adviser to Obama during his campaign, and is now both on his staff and a director at the National Security Council. How have her convictions influenced her work in Obama's administration?

I am sure she is fighting the good fight inside the White House. She is very able, very convincing and deeply committed to genocide prevention and interdiction.

What future genocides do we risk witnessing in the 21st century?

One never knows, of course, what the future holds. Something unanticipated will certainly happen. That said, I worry most about sub-Saharan Africa and the continuing tensions and ongoing killing in the Rwanda-Congo-Burundi corner of the continent. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – and the fighting in Pakistan – could also trigger episodes of mass killing and even genocide. Parts of Central Asia also remain, in my mind, areas of great concern for the future. Who can be sure that the forces unleashed by the Arab Spring will turn out to guarantee the rights of minorities and groups of "others"? We continue to live in an unstable world.

Finally, I’m going to give you a chance to respond to the view of some in Turkey (including Norman Stone in this interview) that the Armenian genocide should not be described as such.

I think there is no question that the Armenian genocide of 1915-16 should be considered as precisely that – a genocide. There are already a number of Turkish intellectuals and academics who have made it clear that they believe so as well. I also think we will see changes in the views of the Turkish government on this issue in the coming years. The most recent scholarship, based on increasingly broad access to essential Ottoman Turkish archival materials – notably A Question of Genocide and a forthcoming new book by Taner Akçam called The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity – has made it impossible to defend the denialist position.