David Morse interviews Samantha Power, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of, “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,†and lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School.
Click here to listen to the audio of this show which aired on Talk Nation Radio December 1, 2006
David Morse is an independent journalist and novelist based in Connecticut. He is an activist on behalf of the Darfur cause, and is writing a book about Sudan. Morse has examined the role that oil plays in the conflict.
His novel, The Iron Bridge (Harcourt, 1998) predicts a series of petroleum wars in the early 21st century.
After interviewing Samantha Power and Alex de Waal, one of the lead negotiators during the last round of peace talks on Darfur, David Morse prepared an urgent message for the Connecticut Coalition to Save Darfur which you can read by clicking here.
Talk Nation Radio, air date November 23, 2006
David Morse: You talk in your book about the sequence by which the public becomes aware of genocide and there is that period of denial. What do you do with our sometimes failure to recognize a genocide for years? I mean we don’t even enter the period of denial exactly. And I’m thinking of what went on in South Sudan before it became front page news. In hindsight was that genocide?
Samantha Power: I don’t know. My understanding is that it is but I haven’t studied it at all but my understanding it that it is very similar to Darfur, which I know a bit better, where you have a government that feels threatened, that is threatened, and they respond to the threat by draining the swamp and they don’t make any distinctions. Either they don’t make any distinctions between rebels and civilians or they actually do make distinctions and believe as a matter of tactics that it’s a good idea to kill civilians in order to really get to the rebel mentality.
So my sense is yeah that that was slow a motion genocide as you say but when you are murdering and cleansing and raping people simply because of who they are, just because of racial or religious identity, mainly racial, that meets the terms of the genocide convention. It may not be Rwanda or the Holocaust. It may not be outright extermination of every last member of a group but it’s certainly comparable.
And what do you do? I mean I just think that those cataracts that impede our recognition, that regardless of whether something penetrates a little bit like Rwanda did in real time, a lot like Darfur has in real time – although it didn’t of course for the first year but eventually did, or not at all, like South Sudan – it’s all sort of rooted in some kind of continuum of calculation where in order for things to really penetrate, they penetrate as deeply as people feel empowered to affect the situation. And I think South Sudan suffered from its chronicness and it suffered from its largeness and it suffered from the association with war, which a lot of genocides suffer from, but the chronicness in particular made people, you know, if something has happened for fifteen years it’s pretty credulous for you to think that you can make a difference in stopping it tomorrow you know? It also makes responsibility feel more diffuse.
It’s the finiteness of Darfur. The fact that it has a start date is not only helpful because it equates news worthiness but also you get some sense of an identifiable group of perpetrators who exist in a world that we share. I think that by the time a culture of prevention, or by the time genocide was in the air, which didn’t really happen until the mid 1990s (or the earliest you could say it was happening was 1993), Sudan – the killing and those horrors – had already been underway for more than a decade. So it was just already harder to be like, ‘Oh by the way, news flash news flash, South Sudan’s on fire.’ Whereas, what you had was Bosnia creating inroads I think for other conflicts that one otherwise wouldn’t have paid attention to. Basically, you had the genocide in Europe and you had a decade of at least eight years of no serious threat to the national interest, which created a space for genocide to arrive on the map, on the policy map, in a way that it wouldn’t have, had it been Black people, I think, dying in the 1990s or had terrorism supplanted the Cold War immediately after.
David Morse: And [Bosnia] created a model other than Auschwitz.
Samantha Power: Yeah kind of, but it really dined out on Auschwitz; it really tapped Auschwitz. I’m not sure if you didn’t have concentration camps that looked so resonant with what with we’d resolved we wouldn’t again allow–I’m not sure. I mean, I think it was White people; it was Europe. There was a sense that the Continent had a future, had great hopes around it, in terms of Maastricht [Treaty] and the European Union and the Euro and everything, and so there were these really conflicting vectors: One of ethnic descent and hell and then the other, this kind of transcendental love-your- neighbor narrative about peace and economic prosperity. And I think that helped. There was this blemish that kind of had to be blotted out, or whatever, cleaned up, and so there was a lot going on there. But I do think that the kind of activism we saw in the United States back in the early to mid 1990s around Bosnia was very rooted in its Europeanness and in a sense of like, if NATO – given that the Cold War is over – what the hell is NATO for, if not this?
I’m not sure that Rwanda without Bosnia would have had that same, would have triggered that same; I mean eventually, presumably the Hotel Rwandas and the Gourevitches [author of "We Wish to Inform you That Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families," account of the Rwanda genocide] of the world would have drawn attention to it in its own right as the great affront to the culture of holocaust awareness, but it certainly I think got more attention quicker because it occurred while people were already being stirred about the mass murder of Whites in Europe.
David Morse: While we’re thinking in that stair step way it’s occurring to me that the intervention of NATO in Bosnia Herzegovina in some ways – and the counter part failure of the UN to do anything about Rwanda – prepares us now? Is that fair to say? Prepares us, sets the stage in a way for us to be aggressive in wanting the UN to take a role?
Samantha Power: Maybe, but I really think that a major rupture occurred. That actually things were happening, progress really was being made, and member states of the UN were really starting to take their responsibilities more seriously, partly because they recognized that these public constituencies were brewing you know that CNN would be there etcetera. And then two things happened: one 9/11, and then two, Iraq.
I mean, you look at the intervention in Bosnia in 1995, belated as it was – Kosovo in 1999, East Timor in 1999, Sierra Leone in 2000 – these are all incredibly a historic things for UN member states to be doing. And yet they were happening and they were relatively cost free. I mean, they certainly came with negative consequences, but for the most part they rendered those places better than they had been before, even for all of the perils of using military force.
And then 9/11 happened and I don’t think 9/11 was the fatal blow to that trend but it certainly rendered us more stingy about what we would put on the line abroad, because we had a new sense of being at threat. Whereas in the 1990s again there is a sense of we don’t get anything out of this but it’s not like we’ve got anything else going on in terms of our national security. So there was a vacuum that I think advocates could step into. But Iraq crushed the vector. Not only is the United States now so overstretched militarily and financially as a result of that war, not only is the specter of a quagmire now very present in everybody’s mind when one thinks about military intervention, but the United States can’t even go into international institutions and snap its fingers and summon troops and resources, political resources, economic resources, peacekeepers, etc., from other countries.
As I often say we are not the country that put the man on the moon anymore. You know we have people laughing at us in international institutions, and that means there is a real void. For all of America’s flaws over the years, if anybody was going to lead on these questions it was going to be the United States – in some back handed way, in a belated way, perhaps – but it wasn’t like there was any other contender for leader of the free world. And now that we are absenting ourselves from that role, or others are absenting us from it, there is nobody else really stepping up.
The reason I say all of this in response to your question is that I actually think Bosnia and Rwanda, that there was a response to them a backlash against them that was taking us to quite an interesting and very different place.
David Morse: Which would have gone where?
Samantha Power: First of all I think Sudan would be so scared of a military intervention that even if there had been none they would have seen the writing on the wall and would have allowed in, for instance, a UN force, but I even think that we might have seen countries step up maybe even including the United States. I mean the level of pressure in this country around Darfur is unprecedented. And it’s hard for me to imagine, again, if this were the 1990s and we didn’t have two live wars, both of which were going incredibly badly, you know I think we might have gotten involved and that may not have been a good thing because that would have been also misreading probably the Islamic world. Now we know we are hated in the Islamic world. There was a sort of ignorance about that prior to Iraq.
David Morse: There was. We were ‘innocent’.
Samantha Power: Yeah, the myth of American innocence. But that was an enabler in a way of intervention and now we are very aware of how incompetent we are and how hard it is and so that means that the perceived costs of getting involved on the ground certainly in any of these places is going to be estimated to be very high. And you know, appropriately. I mean the planning is going to be worst case planning rather than best case planning, and that an important lesson to take from Iraq is ‘Don’t go in assuming it’s going to be a cake walk’. That’s crazy, you know. What would it actually take to do the job if all of the worst case scenarios transpire? So that’s why you don’t hear me calling for a U.S. invasion of Sudan or anything idiotic like that. I just think it’s idiotic, but a lot of my colleagues are calling for that.
David Morse: If there were to be, not an invasion, but a multilateral peacekeeping force?
Samantha Power: It’s the same thing, though.
David Morse: It is? OK.
Samantha Power: That’s the thing. I think we have to be really careful. Ultimately there are two options. One is war – and war to send in a multilateral peacekeeping force, not war for its own sake; no one wants to make war just for the hell of it – but then the other scenario is Sudan invites us in. Those are the only two scenarios. There is no nonconsensual peacekeeping way of doing it. And I think that’s the euphemism that many people in the humanitarian community have sheltered under, is this idea that there is something between war and consent.
David Morse: Is it possible the Bush administration just hasn’t decided whether it wants regime change in Sudan?
Samantha Power: I don’t think that they are even close. Look, what administration in the history of American foreign policy has dealt with threats of the magnitude–the self-created threat of Iraq, arguably the self-compounded threat of Afghanistan, just by not doing the job at all properly? – North Korea nuclear tests and a crazy man now in the possession of a nuclear weapon and Iran, a truly crazy man in pursuit of a nuclear weapon there? I mean to be fair to the Bush administration, and again, one can’t be for very long because Iraq and Afghanistan are so self-inflicted, in some ways, but this is an incredibly troubled platter of items on the Things to Do list every time – to mix a thousand metaphors – every time the foreign policy establishment convenes.
Is regime change in Sudan even making it on the list of ‘Things To Do?’ I mean with that kind of slate? I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s about not having decided, or being torn. I just think it’s about Sudan and Darfur, in particular. Just that it’s on the list at all is a testament to domestic political pressure. But it is not a priority in this administration, nor will it be on its own given these competing [items].
David Morse: I can’t imagine peace in the region without it involving China, without aggressively pursuing a diplomatic economic rapprochement with China. Do you feel similarly?
Samantha Power: Yeah, no I agree, I agree completely. In fact, that’s sort of my point is that in the uni-polar moment, the United States – even if it weren’t itself going, you know, it wasn’t ever probably going to want to go to Darfur, but it would go into the UN Security Council to introduce a resolution and it could work behind the scenes; it could seduce, it could cajole, you know there was a tool box there that was open, that was employed again, when something was dear to us, very rarely on behalf of genocide prevention. But now China is wearing the pants in the relationship; they are not stuck in some quagmire of their own making. They are not hamstrung – interestingly, very interestingly – they are not hamstrung by the Congress like we are, like the Bush administration is, in that the Bush administration, parts of it, would like nothing more than to extract oil and invest in Sudan, but they are stuck because of sanctions, unable to even have economic leverage because of the sanctions. It’s not like you can take anything away if you are the United States [because of the trade sanctions imposed under the Clinton administration, on grounds that Sudan was sponsoring terrorism.]
So then the question becomes, OK, well since China is wearing the pants in the relationship and since China has the most leverage over Sudan, far more than the United States at present, what does the United States have to get China to take Darfur seriously? And that’s why again I say Iraq is so fatal because the U.S. obviously has leverage over China, but who has more leverage over whom? I mean we’re the borrower. They’re the lender. It’s a hell of a lot easier to be the lender than the borrower, and that’s again, Iraq, domestic choices that the President has made. But our ability to get other countries to use their leverage behind the scenes is grossly diminished. But I agree with you completely that that’s what’s required. And this announcement that was made at the end of last week, not announcement but the progress seemingly that was made, this tiny little baby step forward.
David Morse: The hybrid?
Samantha Power: Yeah. I mean that’s a very clear example of your point of China banging Khartoum on the head and Khartoum making this tiny concession which was just to allow UN advisors and it’s not for a hybrid force but its something, it’s a step, and that’s China; Kofi Annan, Umbeki, it’s players who have more standing locally than the United States. We don’t have much to play, to get those countries to do our bidding for us. That’s what’s unfortunate. We have probably more than I’m letting on.
David Morse: Well there may be things that we don’t know about, if Bush were willing to expend political capital? I don’t see that willingness.
Samantha Power: Well, but if – again, in fairness – I mean if you are going to expend your political capital on Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea, Iran, you know, I mean really it’s not like he has this bank of political capital that he can draw upon infinitely, or this store of it. And it is just so unfortunate for the people of Darfur that they have descended into their vortex at just the time the United States is descending into its – you know very different, less deadly – one but nonetheless a vortex in terms of its ability to help.
David Morse: I want to go back to something you said in mid-sentence. You suggested that an anti-insurgency government might want to drain the swamps, and then there comes a point where they decide that well they’d better kill civilians as well, and that crossing of that line is what I’m interested in. How do we name that, how do we get hold of it? How do we prevent it from happening, if we have any volition in the matter?
Samantha Power: Each case is different, of course, but in Rwanda, Alison de Forges [Senior Advisor, Human Rights Watch, Africa Program] I think has written so importantly about that line, that moment, actually less about the government because the faction or the government that was ascendant in Rwanda when the genocide started was bent on genocide and so there was no real tipping point. But what she talks a lot about are people at the regional level, at the provincial level, at the cellular level, who were holding on, holding on, holding on. Even to call them moderate would be to exaggerate their political sensibilities. They were just people, and they happened to be Hutu, and they happened to be getting orders from the central authorities to kill. But they were holding on, and then they tipped. And what she talks a lot about is how in their cost-benefit calculus that they were making every day, you had the Genocidaires, the leaders, saying, ‘Kill or you will be killed,’ and then the Genocidaire killing moderates first of course. And you had nothing on the other side of the ledger playing into that cost-benefit. So there was no kind of ‘If you’ve witnessed murder you will be amnestied, don’t worry, or you know, if you stand up we will be right there by your side.’ You know that incredible sense of isolation, that concrete knowledge of the cost of holding on; a knowledge of impunity if you kill, a knowledge of grave mortal risk if you don’t, because of what had been done to the moderates and no one saying, ‘If you don’t, we will join you or we will be with you.’
So what she describes, and it’s amazing, how detailed her look is, but she has interviewed perpetrators as well as victims and just talks about Gitarama and the Mayor of Gitarama and how long he hangs on and at a certain point he just picks up a machete and he just joins because he’s like ‘Screw it, I’m going to die. If this is the only way to live and protect my family I’m going to do it that way’.
That is slightly different from your question about the Sudanese Government. I mean with counter-insurgency and with governments in general, you tend to have diverse elements within governing structures. So some number of individuals I’m sure, even in Khartoum believe the best way to crush a rebellion is to actually discern combatants and noncombatants, so you don’t create war you know? Isolate the rebels, make the civilians know that the reason they are suffering is that their villages were inhabited by rebels who started the conflict, etc. Some individuals surely know that because it’s rational. But look at what the Israelis did in response to Hezbollah attacks, look at the U.S. Soldiers you know trigger-happy or trigger-scared at check points, how collective guilt takes over in a war. So that’s even the generous way of putting it. But look at the Sudanese Government. For the most part you meet the sort of wily insurgents with the blunt instrument of military power and you create tens of thousands more insurgents with your response. And then you start to see insurgents everywhere and you start killing civilians. So it’s certainly not something that only the Sudanese are falling prey to these days, but it’s incredibly destructive from their own standpoint of putting down a rebellion because it just creates a bigger monster than the one they were attempting to slay in the first place and of course the human consequences are catastrophic.
David Morse: I’m struck by the level of denial in Khartoum. Sudanese colleagues who have returned tell me that people in Khartoum don’t know about this. They don’t know what’s going on.
Samantha Power: Yeah it’s amazing. If you asked High School kids in this country about Darfur, you would have probably higher factual awareness than you would in Khartoum High Schools, even though people from Darfur are landing at the doorstep of their family members, and so on, in that area.
You explain it by pointing to the dictatorship, and it’s not a democracy. There’s no free press to speak of. It’s not a Saddam Hussein dictatorship so when you go there you can almost get seduced into believing that it’s a more open society and then you are like ‘Why does no one know’? And then you remember that just because you are not tortured and murdered for taking the President’s name in vain doesn’t mean that there is any free flow of information.
I think, look, I mean there’s a great skepticism about the U.S. advocacy on Darfur. It’s been branded in the State press and in the Arab press as a Zionist conspiracy. It’s nonsense. But I think that myth has taken hold. I mean most people in Sudan also believe that we did 9/11 to ourselves, as well, so one has to put denial on Darfur in that context, of believing through propaganda, and then through some truth here and there that the United States is an aggressive country interested in beating up on Arab nations that have not done anything to anybody. I mean the denial envelopes more than Darfur. But it needs to be punctured, certainly.
Morse: So there is, coming back to your earlier point, the risk of going in uninvited?
Samantha Power: Yeah.
David Morse: Does it risk Jihad?
Samantha Power: I think so. I mean you know I feel terrible saying that, because it means that you end up ultimately being in a position where you are dependent on the very entity that’s committing the genocide to stop the spigot of death. And to then admit a protection force. But for pragmatic, sort of prospective reasons, the war option is not a real option, in that you can barely get countries to contribute troops to a peacekeeping force. You will not get a single volunteer to make war against Sudan. So that’s just me being constrained by the politics that we have, but I tend, I don’t think that’s generally a good idea. I mean if that were the right thing to do, like in Bosnia it looked unlikely that intervention would occur for many years but it was still very important to take that stand and to move the debate into a push for it to happen, and eventually it happened. So apart from the pragmatic self-censoring that goes on, as an advocate, even if I could wave a magic wand and make it happen tomorrow, even if the politics weren’t what they were, and it wasn’t so unlikely, it’s very hard for me to believe that that would be good for the people of Darfur in the medium to long term.
Now it’s again a different scenario if you can imagine a million troops being gathered from principally Muslim countries that have more standing in the region: Turkey, Pakistan, Jordan, countries that aren’t as discredited among Muslim actors as the United States. But that’s not the world we are living in right now. So the world we are living in is one where we’ve got to peel away Sudan’s allies one by one, using economic and diplomatic levers, get their consent, and get a robust force of 25,000 to 30,000 people in there. Inevitably the Africans are going to be the backbone of that force simply because other countries really aren’t interested in going to Africa but rounding it out with some topnotch forces from middle powers, hopefully from countries like Canada, as well as some of the Muslim countries that I’ve mentioned.
David Morse: What about targeted sanctions against individuals?
Samantha Power: All for it, but very hard to get, unfortunately, through the Security Council. But I think that’s something that we should have done; we and Europe should have done, bilaterally, a very long time ago. I mean to have this kind of effort, you know, there’s a way in which the Security Council becomes an excuse even for Republicans. They are perfectly prepared to bypass it when it suits them but when they don’t want to do something they take advantage of the clog that exists in that setting. But there’s plenty that can be done bilaterally. It’s not as effective, but it just makes it that much more difficult for people, and its just other thumb-on-the-scale of pressure, and it’s unconscionable that those measures haven’t been taken. Plus it doesn’t give you anything: by not doing it, you don’t have anything to offer back. In other words it could be something that could be part of this. OK, if you let the protection force in, we will lift our asset freezes, and so on. We can’t even say that. We’re like ‘If you don’t let [the peacekeeping force] in, we will impose asset freezes, and they’re like, ‘No you won’t, you’ve been saying that for three years’.
David Morse: What advice would you give those of us who are trying to blow the whistle and trying to wake consciousness? What can you say to us and to the people in Khartoum who may be at the edge of blowing the whistle?
Samantha Power: I think there is a terribly perverse kind of paradox that is afoot at present in the international community. On the one hand citizens in this country, in the United States, have never been more aware and more active in banging the drum and in blowing the whistle, and in getting a government that would sooner look the other way to pay attention to genocide and inject regard for human consequences into policy. I mean that’s what this movement has produced. So in some ways I’ve never been more optimistic. I guess that’s the surprising thing about the cause of genocide prevention. And again minus Iraq, I think we would be seeing genuine dividends. Maybe the Bush administration would be backing into it, but nonetheless I think we would have many more partners abroad in isolating Khartoum and so on. But this movement has occurred apace with our implosion as a country in terms of our military performance and our political abdication of leadership and so on. So perversely, Iraq is seen as a disincentive to doing the right thing about Darfur, even though Iraq and Darfur are actually flip sides of the same coin, namely, not taking into account human beings in the conduct of our foreign policy.
So the irony of people in Khartoum denouncing the Zionist conspiracy and denouncing U.S. regard for Darfur and the U.S. invasion of Iraq in one breath is that they are exactly wrong. Darfur is in fact a sign that something different is going on and that Americans are taking their foreign policy seriously and are pushing the Bush administration to do things it doesn’t want to do. So that is encouraging.
David Morse: Thank you so much.
Samantha Power: You bet.
Samantha Power, Harvard profile and recent articles.
U.S. Prepared to Move to ‘Plan B’ on Sudan, By GEORGE GEDDA
The Associated Press Tuesday, November 21, 2006; 4:14 AM
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