Book Notes

A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. By Samantha Power. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Pp. 384. $30.00, cloth.

A Problem from Hell is both a history of America’s reactions to the genocides of the twentieth century and a history of the American government’s understanding of genocide itself. Written by Samantha Power, a former war correspondent and executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, A Problem from Hell synthesizes interviews and documentary evidence into a readable narrative

about the American government’s unforgivable apathy in the face of genocide.

Power begins her story with the history of the conception of genocide itself. The hero is Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish lawyer from Poland who was obsessed with genocide long before he knew what to call it. As early as 1933, Lemkin drafted proposals to prohibit and punish the types of massacres committed against Christians in Nero’s Rome and Armenians in Turkey, but these proposals were ignored by interwar Europe. By 1941 Lemkin himself had faced annihilation in Nazi-occupied Poland, but he escaped—not only to warn of the imminent danger to European Jews, but also to encourage a broader recognition of the crime of eliminating entire ethnic, cultural, and racial groups.

Upon hearing Churchill describe Hitler’s atrocities as “a crime without a name,” Lemkin focused his efforts on naming this crime. Drawing upon linguistics, history, and moral philosophy, Lemkin settled upon the word “genocide,” derived from the Greek for “race” and the Latin for “killing.” Lemkin, however, did not believe that a group had to be exterminated for genocide to have occurred; instead, acts of genocide were defined as “aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the like of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.” Lemkin then set out on his most important quest: convincing the world to prohibit, prevent, and prosecute the crime of genocide.

After years of writing letters to the editor and pounding on diplomatic doors, Lemkin finally persuaded the United Nations to adopt the Genocide Convention in 1948. Lemkin had won his quixotic struggle, but the quest to ratify and implement the convention was only beginning. It took the United States almost four decades to ratify the Genocide Convention, and even then, it did so with significant reservations.

Both before and after ratification Power argues that the United States referred to and applied the concept of genocide selectively and narrowly. In the late 1970s, the United States could “distinguish” the situation in Cambodia from genocide because much of the population died from starvation, rather than more traditional tools of genocide. Moreover, Power argues that the United States government set the bar for genocide too high; in Bosnia, for example, the United States did not characterize forced deportations and executions of Muslim men as genocide until well into the conflict, arguing that the Serbs were not trying to kill all Muslims in their midst. Even the Genocide Convention does not set such a high bar for genocide because it would require intervention too late. Power demonstrates that the United States has often set the bar for genocide artificially high precisely to avoid incurring any legal or moral obligations to intervene.

Power offers her most fascinating insights when discussing the reasons proffered against United States intervention to halt genocide. Most commonly, policy makers argued that intervention did not align with American interests that were narrowly defined. In Cambodia and Iraq, these interests

required supporting our enemies’ enemies. In Bosnia and Rwanda, our interests, for the majority of the conflicts, simply did not involve either of these far-off lands. In each of these situations, the United States tried not to describe the atrocities as genocide until months into or years after the conflict. Thus, while the foreign policy machine argued against intervention, its public relations maneuvers demonstrate that when a spade is called a spade, genocide can become a vital concern of the American people.

When it is quite obvious that genocide has occurred, the United States has fallen back on theories that the killings are inevitable and on concerns about military intervention. In her analysis of the Rwandan genocide, Power effectively debunks these two excuses. United States officials argued that the Rwandan conflict was the result of “ancient tribal hatreds” and that in some sense that it was “typical” of the region. However, the State department knew that Hutu political leaders were strategically spreading anti-Tutsi propaganda by radio, carefully coordinating militias, and organizing massacres; the Hutus were plotting genocide in order to consolidate political power. The U.S. government recognized this, says Power, but its public spin on Rwanda—as an inevitable, unstoppable ethnic conflict—allowed the government to dismiss intervention as a real possibility.

United States officials were haunted by memories of Somalia; they did not want to sacrifice U.S. troops in a futile effort to stop genocide in Africa. Power criticizes the American tendency to examine and quickly dismiss the deployment of American ground troops as the only way to respond to genocide. She identifies several proactive measures the United States could have taken: jamming the signal of the murder-inciting radio station, sharing intelligence information with UN peacekeeping forces in Rwanda, or encouraging other nations to send more troops to strengthen the peacekeeping force. Power shows that even these small steps may have limited the extent of the slaughter. Unfortunately, the United States seems to have been trying so hard to avoid ground deployment that it failed to adequately consider other options.

Structurally, A Problem from Hell begins with the Armenian genocide and Lemkin’s story and then systematically examines five genocides perpetrated since World War II. Power divides her analysis of each genocide into the phases of the American response: recognition, response, and aftermath. This structure makes the book accessible to those unfamiliar with the genocides of the twentieth century. It also allows readers to more effectively compare each of the genocides to each other. On the other hand, the repetitive structure makes the book formulaic and at times prevents Power herself from engaging in more complex comparisons that might interest academic readers. For example, while Power notes the overlap in the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides, she does not thoroughly compare the United States’ limited involvement in Bosnia to the utter lack of intervention in Rwanda.

Overall, Power succeeds as both storyteller and commentator. She employs rich detail to bring readers into the American embassies and halls of

the State Department where responses—or non-responses—to genocide were formulated. She also clearly demonstrates that the United States did not fail in its responses to genocide; instead, it usually succeeded in projecting a tepid level of condemnation without intervention. A Problem from Hell offers an excellent introduction to America’s response to genocide in the twentieth century, and at its best the book offers ways to analyze genocides of the past and thoughts on how to respond to genocides of the future.

—Veena Iyer

Copyright © 2003 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
Harvard Human Rights Journal / Vol. 16, Spring 2003