A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Samantha Power
initially at $5 million a year, this funding grew to $12 million by 1985, when Congress authorized up to $5 million in overt aid.
The Khmer Rouge coalition continued to occupy the UN seat as its guerrillas battled the Heng Samrin regime from the countryside. KR tactics changed little. KR soldiers captured and executed foreign tourists and inflicted terror upon those Cambodians who had the misfortune to live under KR control.175 The consequences of international recognition were significant. The legitimate KR coalition received international financial and humanitarian support, whereas the illegitimate Vietnam-installed regime in Phnom Penh was treated like a pariah. The Cambodian people who had so recently been isolated by the paranoid KR were now isolated by the United States and its allies.176
Ignoring all the evidence available in Cambodia and their commitments to punish genocide, UN member states continued to refuse to invoke the genocide convention to file genocide charges at the International Court of Justice against the Cambodian government. Indeed, official UN bodies still refrained even from condemning the genocide. Only in 1985 were bureaucratic inertia and political divides briefly overcome so that a UN investigation could finally be conducted. By then, because it had emerged that the Khmer Rouge had killed huge percentages of Muslim Chams, Buddhist monks, and Vietnamese as such, it proved relatively easy to show that the regime was guilty of genocide against distinct ethnic, national, and religious groups. Once the UN chair of the Subcommission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities had thoroughly documented the crimes, the 1985 final report described the atrocities as “the most serious that had occurred anywhere in the world since Nazism.” The subcommission noted that the horrors were carried out against political enemies as well as ethnic and religious minorities but found that this did not disqualify the use of the term “genocide.” Indeed, in the words of Ben Whitaker, the UN special rapporteur on genocide, the KR had carried out genocide “even under the most restricted definition.”177
Yet nothing changed as a result of the declaration. The Khmer Rouge flag continued to fly outside the United Nations, and KR foreign minister Ieng Sary continued to represent Cambodia at the UN as if the KR terror had never happened. Only with the thawing of the Cold War and the visit of Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev to former arch-enemy China in May 1989 did Cambodia cease to be a pawn on the superpowers’ chessboard. With the Chinese and the Soviets no longer interested in fighting a proxy war through the KR and the Vietnamese, the United States had no reason to maintain support for the KR. Not until July 1990 did Secretary of State James Baker write a letter to Senate majority leader George Mitchell laying out a new U.S. policy toward the KR at the UN. Henceforth, the United States would vote against the KR coalition at the United Nations and at last support the flow of humanitarian aid into Vietnam and Cambodia.178 Still, during negotiations in Paris aimed at brokering a peace deal among the rival factions, the United States sided with China and the KR in opposing the word “genocide” in the Paris peace accords. This led to an embarrassing moment in the midst of an all-night negotiation in which, according to U.S. officials present, Prince Sihanouk stood up and said, “I am for genocide, I am for genocide, I am for genocide.” Because the U.S. position again prevailed, the accords referred not to genocide, but to “the universally condemned policies and practices of the past.”179
Chapter 7 Speaking Loudly and Looking for a Stick
“We, as a nation, should have been first to ratify the Geno cide Convention…Instead, we may well be near the last.”
—U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren1
“One Hand Tied”
Senator Proxmire had enjoyed little success using his speech-a-day genocide convention ritual to draw attention to the Cambodia genocide. But he had even less luck generating support for the convention itself. A small group of extremists were unrelenting in their opposition to U.S. ratification. The Liberty Lobby, which the Anti-Defamation League called the “strongest voice of anti-Semitism in America,” published a weekly tabloid, the Spotlight, that claimed 330, 000 paid subscribers and boasted a radio network of 425 stations in forty-six states. The lobby slammed U.S. efforts to denaturalize and deport Nazi collaborators and war criminals living in the United States. It claimed that ratification of the genocide convention would allow missionaries to be tried before an international tribunal for genocide “on grounds that to convert cannibals in Africa to Christianity is to destroy a culture.” Other ultra-rightist groups chimed in. The John Birch Society called the convention a “vicious communist perversion.”2 Convention critics resurrected the old argument that the treaty’s passage would mean that “you or I may be seized and tried in Jerusalem or Moscow or somewhere in Punjab…if we hurt the feelings of a Jew or other minority.”3
What was surprising, at least at first glance, was the vast and disproportionate influence these groups were exerting on the legislative process. Proxmire said the groups criticizing the treaty were a “politician’s dream of what each of us dearly wish we could identify with our opponent.”4 In a fashion not unusual for Capitol Hill, the lobbies were making themselves more vocal and thus more effective in their opposition than mainstream American groups that supported the law in a passive way. “Let’s not kid ourselves,” Proxmire declared in 1986, the so-called discredited organizations can be “astonishingly effective.”
He identified the challenge:
Responsible, respected, prestigious supporters of the treaty rarely discuss it. When they do discuss it, they talk about it in factual, low key, unemotional, reasonable terms. This doesn’t excite anyone. The overwhelming majority of Americans agree with the treaty’s supporters but they aren’t excited about it. They are not moved emotionally. They rarely listen. So what’s the result? We go home to our States. The only time we hear the Genocide Treaty brought up, it’s brought up by intense, bitter people who know the treaty only through what they read in Liberty Lobby’s Spotlight or some publication of the John Birch Society.5
Human rights advocates had placed great hope in the presidency of Jimmy Carter. They expected him to galvanize a broader and more spirited base of support for the convention. Carter did attempt to resuscitate the law in a March 1977 speech before the United Nations. He was aided in 1978 when Proxmire and others used the airing of the Holocaust television series to spark a Senate debate. But the issue again dropped quickly out of public discourse. Carter opted to use his legislative leverage instead to secure U.S. ratification of the Panama Canal Treaty in 1977 and Start II in 1979. “Carter’s problem was that he had so many other problems,” says William Korey, the former director of International Policy Research for B’nai B’rith, who was then actively involved in the Ad Hoc Committee for the Ratification of the Human Rights and Genocide Treaties, which had been formed in the 1960s to raise support for the unratified UN treaties.
In the early 1980s, despite their exhaustion and exasperation, Proxmire, Korey, and other treaty supporters began to sense a newfound American receptivity to the convention. The American Bar Association, the most important longtime opponent of ratification, had dropped its opposition in 1976. Korey helped draw a short burst of attention to Lemkin’s life. In 1964, after writing a Saturday Review article (entitled “An Embarrassed American” ) about the U.S. failure to ratify, Korey had received a call from Robert Lemkin, a cousin of Raphael Lemkin, who lived and worked as a dentist and amateur sculptor in Hempstead, Long Island. Robert Lemkin turned over a treasure trove of his cousin’s belongings—his correspondence, notebooks, drafts of his genocide book, and a bust of the surly Polish American that