A Problem from Hell

Accused of fighting the whole world, Lemkin used to insist, “I am not fighting the whole world. But only against an infinitely small part of the world, which arrogates to itself the right to speak for the whole world. What you call the whole world is really on my side.” If American critics of the genocide convention actually believed they had the American people on their side, he argued, they would freely admit that they opposed the genocide treaty and permit the measure to come before the full Senate for debate.

On August 28, 1959, after a quarter-century battle to ban genocide, Lemkin collapsed and died of a heart attack in the public relations office of Milton H. Blow on Park Avenue, his blazer leaking papers at the seams. His one-room apartment on West 112th Street in Manhattan was left overflowing with memos prepared for foreign ministers and ambassadors, as well as some 500 books, each read, reread, and emphatically underlined. He had published eleven books, most of them on international law but one volume of art criticism and another on rose cultivation. At the time of his death, he was fifty-nine and penniless. A New York Times editorial two days later observed:

Diplomats of this and other nations who used to feel a certain concern when they saw the slightly stooped figure of Dr. Raphael Lemkin approaching them in the corridors of the United Nations need not be uneasy anymore. They will not have to think up explanations for a failure to ratify the genocide convention for which Dr. Lemkin worked so patiently and so unselfishly for a decade and a half…Death in action was his final argument—a final word to our own State Department, which has feared that an agreement not to kill would infringe upon our sovereignty.47

Lemkin had coined the word “genocide.” He had helped draft a treaty designed to outlaw it. And he had seen the law rejected by the world’s most powerful nation. Seven people attended Lemkin’s funeral.48

“Successors”

After Lemkin’s death, the genocide convention languished unattended in the United States until the mid-1960s. Bruno Bitker, a Milwaukee international lawyer, sparked a second wave of interest when he urged William Proxmire, the wiry senator from Wisconsin, to take up the cause of the genocide ban. Nearly seventy countries had by then ratified the law, and Proxmire could not grasp what could be slowing the U.S. Senate.49

Unlike Lemkin, Proxmire had led a privileged life, graduating from Yale, receiving two master’s degrees from Harvard, and marrying Elsie Rockefeller, a great-granddaughter of oil baron William A. Rockefeller, the brother and partner of John D. Rockefeller. But like Lemkin, Proxmire was a loner who had a habit of breaking with convention. Reared in a staunch Republican family in Illinois, he declared himself a Democrat in the late 1940s and moved to Wisconsin, home of the iconoclastic populist Robert La Follette and a state that columnist Mary McGrory likened to “a portly Teutonic old lady, full of beer and cheese, with a weakness for wild men and underdogs.”50

When he lost the race for Wisconsin governor in 1952, 1954, and 1956, Proxmire turned up at Milwaukee factories the next morning to pass out “We lost, but…” cards to groggy workers.51 In 1957, when he ran for the late Joseph McCarthy’s Senate seat, instead of distancing himself from prior races, Proxmire embraced the “three-time loser” label. “Let my opponent have the support of the man who has never proposed to a girl and lost,” Proxmire declared in one radio broadcast. “I’ll take the losers…If all those who have ever lost in business, love, sports or politics will vote for me as one who knows what it is to lose and fight back, I will be glad to give my opponent the support of all those lucky voters who have never lost anything.”52

If Proxmire intended to pick a loser on the legislative front, he could not have done any better then the genocide convention. Ever since Eisenhower had struck his 1953 deal with Senator Bricker agreeing to drop the pact from consideration, nobody in the Senate had cared to rein-troduce the measure. On January 11, 1967, Proxmire stood up on the Senate floor to deliver his first genocide speech. He casually announced his intention to begin a campaign that would not cease until the United States had ratified the pact. To a largely uninterested, deserted Senate chamber, he declared: “The Senate’s failure to act has become a national shame…I serve notice today that from now on I intend to speak day after day in this body to remind the Senate of our failure to act and of the necessity for prompt action.”53

Proxmire’s speech-a-day approach to ratification was one of many rituals he observed in the Senate. He made a point (and a show) of never missing a roll call vote during his twenty-two years in the Senate, tallying more than 10, 000 consecutively. A renowned skinflint, he became famous nationally for crusading against porkbarrel projects and passing out the monthly Golden Fleece Awards to government agencies for waste in spending. The first award in 1975 went to the National Science Foundation for funding a $84, 000 study on “why people fall in love.” Later recipients were “honored” for a $27, 000 project to determine why inmates want to escape from prison; a $25, 000 grant to learn why people cheat, lie, and act rudely on Virginia tennis courts; and a $500, 000 grant to research why monkeys, rats, and humans clench their jaws. The award infuriated many of Proxmire’s colleagues in the Senate, who deemed it a publicity stunt designed to earn Proxmire kudos at their expense.54

Although Proxmire alienated some colleagues by “fleecing” them, a few joined him in fighting for the genocide convention. Claiborne Pell, a fellow Democrat from Rhode Island, was one who endorsed Proxmire’s pursuit.55 Pell’s father, Herbert C. Pell, had served during World War II as U.S. representative to the War Crimes Commission, which the Allies established in 1943 to investigate allegations of Nazi atrocities. The elder Pell had hardly been able to get senior officials in the Roosevelt administration to return his calls. In late 1944 he was informed that the war crimes office would close for budgetary reasons. The Roosevelt team rejected Pell’s offer to pay his secretary and the office rent out of his own pocket, reversing the decision only when Pell publicized the office’s closing. When the younger Pell spoke publicly on behalf of the genocide convention decades later, he recalled those years in which he watched his father come to terms with the outside world’s disregard for Nazi brutality:

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.”57 But 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.58 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 3,211 speeches after casually pledging in 1967 to speak daily, Proxmire would still be rising in an empty Senate chamber, dressed in his trademark tweed blazers and his Ivy League ties, insisting that ratification would advance America’s interests and its most cherished values.

Chapter 6 Cambodia: “Helpless Giant”

On April 17, 1975, eight years after Proxmire began his campaign to get the United States to commit itself to prevent genocide, the Khmer Rouge (KR) turned back Cambodian clocks to year zero. After a five-year civil war, the radical Communist revolutionaries entered the capital city of Phnom Penh, triumphant. They had just defeated the U.S.-backed Lon Nol government.

Still hoping for a “peaceful transition,” the defeated government welcomed the Communist rebels by ordering the placement of white flags and banners on every building in the city. But it did not take long for all in the capital to gather that the Khmer Rouge had not come to talk. After several days of monotonous military music interspersed with such tunes as “Marching Through Georgia” and “Old Folks at Home,” the old regime delivered its last broadcast at noontime on the 17th.1 The government announcer said talks between the two sides had begun, but before he could finish, a KR official in the booth harshly interrupted him: “We enter Phnom Penh not for negotiation, but as conquerors.”2

The sullen conquerors, dressed in their trademark black uniforms, with their red-and-white-checkered scarves and their Ho Chi Minh sandals cut out of old rubber tires, marched single file into the Cambodian capital. The soldiers had the look of a weary band that had fought a savage battle for control of the country and its people. They carried guns. They gathered material goods, like television sets, refrigerators, and cars, and piled them on top of one another in the center of the street to create a pyre. Influenced by the thinking of Mao Zedong, the Khmer Rouge leadership had recruited into their army those they deemed, in Mao’s words, “poor and blank,” rather than those with schooling. “A sheet of blank paper carries no burden,” Mao had noted, “and the most beautiful characters can be written on it, the most beautiful pictures painted.”3

Upon arrival, the only burden the KR cadres carried was that of swiftly executing orders from their higher-ups, who were removed from sight. Over the radio and mobile megaphones, they began blasting their demand that citizens leave the capital immediately. As a rationale, the militant newcomers claimed that American B-52 bombers were about to “raze the city.” The KR insisted that only a citywide exodus would guarantee citizens’ safety. Purposeful Communist soldiers filed into the city on one side of Phnom Penh’s leafy boulevards, while on the other side hundreds of thousands of ashen-faced Cambodian civilians tripped over one another to obey the KR’s inflexible orders. Over the next few days, more than 2 million people were herded onto the road. KR soldiers slashed the tires of cars around the capital, and citizens trundled along on foot, moving no quicker than a half a mile an hour. In scenes reminiscent of the Turkish deportation of the Armenians in 1915, unwieldy crowds clogged the roads, leaving in their wake stray sandals, clothing, and in some cases expired bodies. The first sign for most Cambodians and foreigners that this revolution would be like no other was the sight of the city’s main Calmette Hospital being emptied at gunpoint. Scattered among the anxious citizenry were patients dressed in wispy hospital gowns, wheeling their own IVs, carrying fellow patients in their arms, or being pushed in their hospital beds by their trembling loved ones. The infirm collapsed for lack of water, babies were born at the side of the road, heat-struck children squealed for maternal succor, and fathers and husbands cowed before the guns in command. Some Cambodians made their way to the French embassy and pleaded for asylum, hurling themselves against the barbed wire that ringed the compound and flinging their suitcases and even their children over the walls. But most Cambodians meekly trudged away from their homes.

Although the symptoms of the Khmer Rouge evacuation of Phnom Penh bore a superficial resemblance to the symptoms of what we now know as “ethnic cleansing,” the KR did not really discriminate on ethnic grounds. The entire capital was to be emptied.

All but a few American citizens had already departed. One week before, on April 12, 1975, as the KR closed in on the capital, U.S. ambassador John Gunther Dean had led the evacuation of the embassy staff and American nationals. Lon Nol, the U.S.-backed head of state, fled with a tidy sum of U.S. money in his pocket for “retirement” and bought a home in an upper-middle-class suburb east of Honolulu. Prince Sirik Matak, a former Lon Nol ally and premier who had recently been placed under house arrest because of his criticisms of the corrupt Cambodian regime, was released and tapped to become the official head of state. At 7 a.m. on the morning of the evacuation, Ambassador Dean offered Matak a place on a departing U.S. helicopter. Matak, whose apartment was decorated with photographs of President Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew, idolized the United States. At 9 a.m. Dean received a handwritten note from Cambodia’s new leader, who thanked Dean for his offer of transport but said, “I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion.”The letter continued:“As for you and in particular for your great country, I never believed for a moment that you would [abandon] a people which has chosen liberty. You have refused us your protection and we can do nothing about it…If I shall die here on this spot in my country that I love…I have only committed this mistake of believing in you, the Americans.”4 Dean, himself a childhood refugee from Hitler’s Germany, boarded a helicopter carrying the U.S. flag folded under his arm. Matak took shelter at the French embassy, where foreigners had already begun to gather, and hoped for the best.

On April 20 and 21, 1975, as the final hours of the foreign presence in Cambodia ticked away, the Cambodians at the French embassy were turned out into the street. French vice-consul Jean Dyrac had fought in Spain in the International Brigade against Francisco Franco and in the French Resistance against the Nazis, who captured and tortured him. The KR now told him that the 1,300 people gathered in the compound would be deprived of food and water if the Cambodians among them did not leave. The departures were wrenching, as parents and children, husbands and wives, and close friends were separated. The Cambodians who had hoped for reprieve at the embassy no longer stood any chance of disappearing into the thicket of evacuees and burying their past identities. They were alone to meet fates worsened by the taint of their association with the capitalist West. Senior Cambodian government officials stood no chance, and vice-consul Dyrac accompanied several members of the toppled regime to the gate. Premier Sirik Matak walked out proudly, but former national assembly president Hong Boun Hor, who carried a suitcase of U.S. dollars, was so agitated that he had to be sedated with an injection. As Dyrac turned the men over to the Khmer Rouge, he leaned his head against a pillar and, with tears streaming down his face, repeated again and again, “We are no longer men.”5 The officials, including Sirik Matak, who had trusted earlier American assurances, were taken away in the back of a sanitation truck and executed.