A Problem from Hell. Samantha Power
In 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.”60 Only 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.61 The 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.63 Melady 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.”64 Secretary of State William Rogers cabled that embassy officials were right to “avoid any indication [the] USG [was] taking sides in [the] current tragic problem.”65 One 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,”67 Melady 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.”68 In 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.”
Proxmire used his daily soliloquy to rebut common American misperceptions that had persisted since Lemkin’s day. Powerful right-wing isolationist groups would never come around. But most Americans, the senator believed, did not really oppose ratification; they were just misinformed. “The true opponents to ratification in this case are not groups or individuals,” Proxmire noted in one of 199 speeches he gave on the convention in 1967. “They are the most lethal pair of foes for human rights everywhere in the world—ignorance and indifference.”70 He used the speeches to educate. As critics picked apart the treaty and highlighted its shortcomings, he responded, “I do not dismiss this criticism or skepticism. But if the U.S. Senate waited for the perfect law without any flaw…the legislative record of any Congress would be a total blank. I am amazed that men who daily see that the enactment of any legislation is the art of the possible can captiously nit pick an international covenant on the outlawing of genocide.”71
Proxmire believed the United States could be doing far more in the court of public opinion to impact state and individual behavior. “The United States is the greatest country in the world,”he said. “The pressures of the greatest country in the world could make a potential wrongdoer think before committing genocide.”72 But the United States neither ratified the UN genocide convention nor denounced regimes committing genocide. U.S. military intervention was not even considered.
Initially, Proxmire thought it might take a year or two at most to secure passage. “I couldn’t think of a more outrageous crime than genocide, “he recalls.” Of all the laws pending before Congress, this seemed a no-brainer.” On the floor he listed other treaties that the Senate had endorsed in the period it had allowed the convention to languish:
Included among the hundred-plus treaties are a Tuna Convention with Costa Rica, a bridge across the Rainy River, a Halibut Convention with Canada, a Road Traffic Convention allowing licensed American drivers to drive on European highways, a Shrimp Convention with Cuba…a treaty of amity with Muscat and Oman, and even a most colorful and appetizing treaty entitled the “Pink Salmon Protocol.” I do not mean to suggest that any of these treaties should not have been ratified…But every one…has as its objective the promotion of either profit or pleasure.73
The genocide convention, by contrast, dealt with people. Because it did not promote profit or pleasure for Americans, it did not easily garner active support. Opponents of the treaty were more numerous, more vocal, and in the end more successful than Proxmire could have dreamed. Undeterred by failure, Proxmire would continue his campaign into the next decade. Indeed, nineteen years and