Offering advice about promoting U.S. government efforts to end genocide in the world, Samantha Power, author of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winning book “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” closed her lecture Saturday in 182 Lillis by paraphrasing the comments of former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
“It’s essential that we work with the democracy we have, and not the democracy we wish we had,” she said, to the laughter and applause of the overflowing-capacity crowd.
The Oregon Humanities Center opened a three-day symposium Saturday, entitled “Witnessing Genocide: Representation and Responsibility,” with the inaugural Tzedek Lecture presented by Power, a former war correspondent and professor of human rights and U.S. foreign policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Speaking to a crowd of more than 300, nearly 50 of whom watched the lecture on a closed-circuit television in another room on the second floor, Power stated that the American government, despite rhetoric to the contrary, is too often unwilling to intervene in genocidal campaigns for fear of being dragged into a political and military quagmire. Even taking basic steps to prevent rogue regimes from slaughtering civilians, such as jamming radio frequencies to block calls for ethnic violence in Rwanda, for example, puts countries “on the hook” to continue and even escalate their commitments, she said.
“There is something pathetically incommensurate between denouncing genocide on the one hand, and proposing radio jamming on the other, when you are the most powerful country in the history of mankind,” she said.
This fear of involvement, according to Power, results in the inaction so often seen in America, as well as nations of western Europe, in the face of known atrocities.
Because of previous military and foreign policy failures in Vietnam and Somalia, American leaders especially have come to believe “that there’s no such thing as a small engagement, and that if you are the United States… people are going to look to you to go all the way,” she said.
Power detailed the pressures on American foreign policy that have stopped American leaders, regardless of party, from committing national resources to ending genocides in the past. Unless atrocities overseas can be brought to bear on national interest, politicians here at home will not feel pressure to act, she said. Members of the Bush Administration especially refuse to deal with issues of genocide, she said, as resources and international goodwill continue to be drained by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other diplomatic crises in Iran and North Korea.
“The Bush Administration’s foreign policy neurons, whatever number there are… are very consumed by hard-core, national security interests,” she said.
Nevertheless, coalitions of political activists, celebrities and wealthy influential community leaders, which she referred to as the “grassroots and grasstops,” have proven surprisingly effective in crossing party lines and generating action, she said. Power said grassroots pressure led to U.S. involvement in Bosnia in the 1990s, and is keeping the situation in Darfur on the political agenda. These popular movements, by appealing to both American and foreign governments and businesses, can force the hand of an administration whose influence worldwide has been drastically diminished in the past four years, she said.
Ultimately, Power said, this pressure must continue to be placed on America’s leaders in order for genocide to be stopped in the 21st century.
“We just have to continue making noise,” she said. “A country that has this much money, and still considerable diplomatic clout… there’s still a whole lot more that it can do.”
From 1993 to 1996, Power reported on the wars in the former Yugoslavia for U.S. News & World Report, the Boston Globe, and The Economist. Power was also the founding executive director, from 1998 to 2002, of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
According to the Oregon Humanities Center, the symposium was organized to commemorate the 1996 conference, “Ethics After the Holocaust,” which led to the creation of the Harold Schnitzer Family Program in Judaic Studies at the University.