Samantha Power, Syria and the Issue of Genocide

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

President Barack Obama has nominated Samantha Power to be the American ambassador to the United Nations. Her appointment, if confirmed by the U.S. Senate, will be quite timely, given the widening war in Syria - especially with the intervention of Hezbollah.

Power is probably best known for her book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, published in 2002, following her years covering atrocities in the Balkans as a journalist.

"No U.S. president has ever made genocide prevention a priority, and no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence," she wrote. "It is thus no coincidence that genocide rages on."

More recently, she served as senior director of the Office of Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights at the National Security Council and as chair of Obama's Atrocities Prevention Board. She is also a professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Will her appointment usher in a more robust - and interventionist - foreign policy by the Obama administration? Her writings would suggest so. "Outside powers cannot wait for confirmation of genocide before they act," she wrote in "Remember Rwanda, but Take Action in Sudan," an April 6, 2004 article in the New York Times. " In 1994 the Clinton administration spent more time maneuvering to avoid using the term ‘genocide' than it did using its resources to save lives."

In the case of Darfur, she continued, "American officials need not focus on whether the killings meet the definition of genocide set by the 1948 Genocide Convention; they should focus instead on trying to stop them."

Three years after the end of World War II, the United Nations General Assembly passed the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Absolute state sovereignty, including the "right" to engage in the mass murder its own or other peoples, would be a thing of the past.

The man most responsible for this was a Jewish lawyer from Poland, Raphael Lemkin, who fled Poland ahead of the Nazis in 1939 and came to the United States. But 49 members of his family were killed in the Holocaust.

In 1944, he published Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, where he coined the term "genocide," defining it as "a co-ordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves."

But Lemkin, who died in 1959, would be saddened by what has transpired since then, in places such as Cambodia, Chechnya, the Congo, Rwanda, and the Sudan. Little was done to stop mass killings in these places.

Like much of what passes for international law, genocide, as one lawyer recently said to me, is now just a concept that you shape to suit your politics. The term has become politicized and contentious: "what you call genocide is my defensive reaction," some might respond.

Many Turks make that claim, for instance, when rationalizing the more than one million Armenians killed by the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. They contend that the Armenians were supporting the country's enemies, the Russians, in a time of conflict.

The term has also become terribly vague and malleable. We now even hear of "cultural genocide," referring to oppressed people who are deprived of their languages, religions, or traditions - even if no attempt is made to actually physically murder them.

If the killing of some 8,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in 1995, or Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic's actions in Kosovo in 1999, were considered acts of genocide, why doesn't the slaughter of at least 80,000 Syrians, most of them unarmed civilians, also amount to genocide?

Does the fact that this is a civil war, and the Syrian rebels have guns, nullify that definition? But the disparity in weaponry between them and the Assad regime is still immense - as was the case in Kosovo, until NATO stepped in.

And even when the international community does in large part agree that certain mass murders and war crimes have risen to the level of genocide, then what? It's been years since the Darfur atrocities were declared to be genocide, but Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir is still thumbing his nose at Samantha Power - and us.

And by the way, since no one wants to confront Russia, the 160,000 dead in the two Chechen wars have also been ignored.

Power has been credited with convincing Obama in 2011 to push for a UN Security Council resolution to authorize a coalition using military force to protect Libyan civilians during the uprising against Moammar Gadhafi.

But she's also aware of the limitations of multilateralism. In "Full Force," published in the New Republic, March 3, 2003, she admitted that "The UN Security Council is anachronistic, undemocratic, and consists of countries that lack the standing to be considered good-faith arbiters of how to balance stability against democracy, peace against justice, and security against human rights."

So, given the veto power exercised on the Security Council by Russia, Bashar al-Assad's backer, there may not be all that much the U.S. can do, unless it organizes a ‘coalition of the willing', outside United Nations auspices.