Murder Most Foul

To stop genocide, the U.S. must learn to intervene more carefully.

Charles Peña from the November 2002 issue

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When does "genocide" begin? This is a particularly difficult legal issue, because there must be some explicit criteria on which to base a decision to take action, especially U.S. military intervention. But there is no consensus, and probably never can be, on how many people have to be murdered (or, given the broader definition, expelled from their homes) for such acts to be considered genocide. Establishing such a number (or a percentage of the population) would invite perpetrators to kill up to the limit. We are left with determining genocide amorphously: You know it when you see it.

How many people have to be killed to warrant intervention? Is it 100, 1,000, 10,000, or 100,000? Prevention would dictate the earliest possible intervention. But the fewer people killed, the less the evidence of genocide. Does genocide have to have occurred before one can recognize it as such and take action against it?

If genocide can't be adequately defined by the number of people killed, how else are we to know when action should be taken to stop it? Power points out that genocide is just as much about intent as it is about action. But how do you establish the intent to exterminate a group, especially in the absence of action? In the extreme, intervention should be pre-emptive. But does that mean committing military forces and possibly changing a regime based on declarations that may or may not signal intent? When it comes to intervention, genocide presents us with a vast gray area.

Genocide is by definition ethnic. It is about a ruling ethnic group that is unwilling to share the same territory with another (usually minority) ethnic group. One solution would be to separate the different ethnic groups so they don't come into direct contact or conflict. Yet this is in direct opposition to the traditional U.S. approach to such problems, which has focused on "nation building." The goal of such efforts is always to try to get different groups to share power within a prescribed geographic boundary. The latest instance of this is the U.S.-led effort to build a representative, multi-ethnic government in Afghanistan.

Trying to force different peoples to live and govern together, however, may not be a solution. Attempts to build a multi-ethnic Bosnian nation in the wake of Serbian atrocities have simply resulted in a Bosnia-Herzegovina that is divided into Serb, Muslim, and Croat enclaves. The only thing keeping the sides from killing each other is the indefinite presence of several thousand peacekeepers. On the other hand, ethnically "pure" states (or statelets) serve only to draw the distinctions even sharper; if such states become the objective, ethnic groups might engage in genocidal action as a way to hasten their creation.

Herein lies an essential problem in the contemporary discussion of genocide: Genocide is a moral issue, but U.S. intervention using military force should be reserved for protecting vital American national security interests. The temptation to intervene in humanitarian crises on moral grounds is understandable, especially when outrageous crimes are being committed against innocent persons to further political or ideological aims. But giving into that temptation when there are no vital U.S. national security interests at stake is likely to result in exacerbating the very criminality that intervention is intended to resolve.

Genocide is the one instance -- a rare exception -- where U.S. action is warranted, even if U.S. vital interests are not directly threatened.

The problem is that advocates of humanitarian intervention often equate any killings of innocents with genocide and sometimes overinflate the numbers to make their case. Power, for instance, claims 200,000 Bosnians were killed, but this number is provided by Bosnia's Muslim government and includes all Bosnians killed by Serbs, Croats, and Muslims as part of ethnic civil war.

According to more reliable sources, such as the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and the Red Cross, the number of Bosnians killed is estimated to be 55,000 to 75,000 -- and even these numbers cannot separate out casualties of war vs. mass killings of innocent civilians. As tragic and abhorrent as tens of thousands of deaths are, the hard truth is that such killings neither constitute genocide nor warrant U.S. intervention.

Power acknowledges that U.S. intervention has often helped create the conditions that led to her claims of genocide, but she does not seem to grasp the full implications of that deadly fact. For example, the U.S. supported the Lon Nol regime in Cambodia because it was anti-communist. But it was also corrupt, repressive, and incompetent, fueling support for the Khmer Rouge. Later, concerned about Vietnamese incursion into Cambodia, the U.S. orchestrated a vote in the U.N. Credentials Committee to favor the murderous Khmer Rouge regime. In the case of Iraq, the U.S. sided with and supplied agricultural and manufacturing credits to Saddam Hussein to support his war against the fundamentalist, anti-American regime in Tehran.

Rather than asking the United States to intervene to fix the problems it exacerbated by intervening in the first place, it would be better to break this vicious circle and adopt a less interventionist American foreign policy. While this does not guarantee that ethnic groups will not engage in genocidal actions, neither will constant U.S. intervention. Indeed, the appalling evidence suggests that an interventionist United States is likely to create more problems than it will solve.

Power is critical of "vital American interests, narrowly defined" as an excuse for American inaction against genocide. But the primary concern of U.S. policy must be U.S. interests; the United States cannot and should not be the world's policeman. The Constitution was established for the common defense, not to establish a new world order or to rid the world of evil. American policy makers must make decisions about what is vital to U.S. national security and what isn't. If the United States is constantly involved around the world for reasons that are not vital, it could be difficult to muster the necessary political will to act when national interests demand action.

If one knows genocide when one sees it, then Rwanda is a perfect example. Power admits that "no genocide since the Holocaust has been completely black and white," but of all the cases in A Problem from Hell, Rwanda is the one unambiguous case of genocide, and presents the strongest argument that the United States should have intervened. Although no U.S. national interest was at stake there, Rwanda presented an unambiguous moral imperative.

The killings in Rwanda began almost immediately following the downing of Rwandan President Juvénal Habrayimana's jet on April 6, 1994. Hard-line Hutu tribesmen used the incident as a pretext to attack rival Tutsis. The Hutu-controlled army, the gendarmerie, and the militias worked together to round up and kill Tutsi men, women, and children.

This was not a case of ethnic cleansing (expelling an ethnic group to create an ethnically pure enclave) that might involve mass killing, which was more what happened in Iraq and Bosnia. Nor was this the same as Pol Pot's killing of fellow Cambodians to eliminate political opponents in the way that communist regimes in the Soviet Union and China had done.