Samantha Power - A Problem from Hell

I remember the shock and horror that my father suffered—he was a gentle man—at becoming aware of the horror and heinousness of what was going on…I am convinced…that there was an unwritten gentleman’s understanding to ignore the Jewish problem in Germany, and that we and the British would not intervene in any particular way…We wrung our hands and did nothing. 56

Backed by Pell, Proxmire pressed ahead in an effort to resurrect Lemkin’s law. Proxmire’s daily ritual became as regular and predictable as the bang of the gavel and the morning prayer. Yet it was also as varied as the weather. Each speech had to be an original. The senator put his interns to good use, trusting them, in weekly rotations, to prepare the genocide remarks. The office developed files like Lemkin’s on each of the major genocides of the past millennium, and the interns tapped the files each day for a new theme. Anniversaries helped. The Turkish genocide against the Armenians and the Holocaust were often invoked.

But sadly, Proxmire’s best source of material was the morning paper. In 1968 Nigeria responded to Biafra’s attempted secession by waging war against the Christian Ibo resistance and by cutting off food supplies to the civilian population. “Mr. President, the need of the starving is obvious. Indeed, it cries to high heaven for action,”Proxmire declared. “And to the degree that the nations of the world allow themselves to be lulled by the claim that the elimination of hundreds of thousands of their fellows is an internal affair, to that degree will our moral courage be bankrupt and our humane concern for others a thin veneer. Our responsibility grows awesomely with the death of each innocent man, woman and child.” 57But the United States stood behind Nigerian unity. Reeling from huge losses in Vietnam as well as the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the Johnson administration followed the lead of the State Department’s Africa bureau and its British allies, both of which adamantly opposed Biafran secession. Citing fears of further Soviet incursions in Africa and eyeing potentially vast oil reserves in Iboland, U.S. officials stalled effective famine relief measures for much of the conflict. The United States insisted that food be delivered through Lagos, even though Nigerian commanders were open about their objectives. “Starvation is a legitimate weapon of war,” one said. 58In the end Nigeria crushed the Ibo resistance and killed and starved to death more than 1 million people

Beginning in March 1971, after Bengali nationalists in East Pakistan’s Awami League won an overall majority in the proposed national assembly and made modest appeals for autonomy, Pakistani troops killed between 1 and 2 million Bengalis and raped some 200,000 girls and women. The Nixon administration, which was hostile to India and using Pakistan as an intermediary to China, did not protest. The U.S. consul general in Dacca, Archer Blood, cabled Washington on April 6, 1971, soon after the massacres began, charging:

Our government has failed to denounce atrocities…while at the same time bending over backwards to placate the West Pak[istan] dominated government…We have chosen not to intervene, even morally, on the grounds that the Awami conflict, in which unfortunately the overworked term genocide is applicable, is purely an internal matter of a sovereign state. Private Americans have expressed disgust. We, as professional civil servants, express our dissent.

The cable was signed by twenty U.S. diplomats in Bangladesh and nine South Asia hands back in the State Department. 59“Thirty years separate the atrocities of Nazi Germany and the Asian sub-continent,” Proxmire noted, “but the body counts are not so far apart. Those who felt that genocide was a crime of the past had a rude awakening during the Pakistani occupation of Bangladesh.” 60Only the Indian army’s invasion, combined with Bengali resistance, halted Pakistan’s genocide and gave rise to the establishment of an independent Bangladesh. Archer Blood was recalled from his post.

In Burundi in the spring and summer of 1972, after a violent Hutu-led rebellion, members of the ruling Tutsi minority hunted down and killed tens of thousands of Hutu. 61The rate of slaughter reached 1,000 per day, and, in their cables back to Washington, U.S. ambassador Thomas Patrick Melady and his deputy, Michael Hoyt, routinely reported “extermination,” a “vast bloodbath of Hutu,” and “thousands” of executions (some by “sledgehammer”). Embassy officials also supplied a running tally of the burial pits being dug and filled nightly near the airport. In one confidential cable in May 1972, for instance, Hoyt noted:

In Bujumbira we were able to see [when] shouting men surrounded Hutus and clubbed them to death in the streets. The army throughout the land and revolutionary youth groups arrested and executed educated Hutus, including secondary school students. After a month we can assume only a relative handful of educated Hutus…are still alive. The [killing] toll may be above tens of thousands…Trucks ply the road to the airport every night with a fresh contribution to the mass grave. 62

Despite these graphic reports, neither Ambassador Melady nor his superiors in Washington believed the United States should condemn the killings. And although the United States was the world’s main purchaser of the country’s coffee, which accounted for 65 percent of Burundi’s commercial revenue, the State Department opposed any suspension of commerce. 63Melady assured Washington that his response had been “to follow our strict policy of noninvolvement in the internal affairs and to associate ourselves with urgent relief efforts.” 64Secretary of State William Rogers cabled that embassy officials were right to “avoid any indication [the] USG [was] taking sides in [the] current tragic problem.” 65One State Department official met a junior official’s appeal for action by asking, “Do you know of any official whose career has been advanced because he spoke out for human rights?” 66

U.S. policymakers placed their hope in the Organization for African Unity (OAU) and the UN. “Our general prescription is that Africans should settle African problems,” 67Melady wrote. But the OAU pledged “total solidarity” with the genocidal Burundian government; the UN mustered only an ineffectual fact-finding mission; and the killings continued unimpeded. “So far, we have been able to maintain our two primary interests, that of not becoming involved and in protecting our citizens,” Melady reported, adding, “We cannot at this time say how many people have died…but figures of 100,000 no longer make us incredulous.” 68In fact, somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 Burundian Hutu were murdered between April and September 1972.

While the executive branch refrained from much public comment, Senator Proxmire criticized the OAU and the UN for failing to investigate and denounce the slaughter, and he called on the United States to do more to stop it. He noted that the genocide convention made clear that such a crime was not merely a matter of internal concern but a violation of international law that demanded international attention. “The United States has for too long blithely ignored the issues of genocide,” Proxmire said. “Evidence that genocide is going on in the 1970s should shake our complacency.” 69

Proxmire had no shortage of grim news pegs on which to hang his appeal. His staff drew upon a range of sources, but their creative juices sometimes dried up. Even the lugubrious Lemkin with his file folders on medieval slaughter would have struggled to devise a novel speech each day. One evening an enterprising intern in Proxmire’s office was struggling to prepare the next morning’s speech when a pest control team arrived to sanitize the senator’s quarters. The next morning Proxmire rose on the Senate floor and heard himself declare that the late-night visit of exterminators to his office “reminds me, once again, Mr. President, of the importance of ratifying the genocide convention.”As taxing as it sometimes was to diversify the ratification pitch, nobody on Proxmire’s staff considered slipping an old speech into Proxmire’s floor folder in the hopes he would not remember having seen it before. “Prox had a hawk-like memory, the sharpest mind I ever came across,” says Proxmire’s convention expert Larry Patton, “I never had the guts to try.”