World Policy Journal
Volume XVIII, No 3, Fall 2001

 

A New Board Game

 

Like a tree adding a new ring, this journal from time to time restructures its editorial advisory board-an unpaid assemblage of qualified and interesting figures in the broad realm of international relations. The board members' duties are to convey at their discretion ideas for articles and authors, to monitor these pages and alert us when we slip into errors of fact or judgment, and to lend the weight of their names to our masthead. We are pleased to announce eight new advisors, who, as the saying goes, are not legally or morally responsible for any of the foregoing blunders, should they ever occur:

• Lisa Anderson, Dean, School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University. The former chair of Columbia's Political Science Department, Dean Anderson is the author of The State and Social Transformation in Tunisia and Libya, 1830-1980, and the editor of Transitions to Democracy. Her essay on the halting steps to political freedoms in the Arab world appears elsewhere in this issue.
• James Chace, Paul W. Williams Professor of Government and Public Law and Administration at Bard College, the former editor of this journal, and author of Acheson, the widely praised biography of the former secretary of state. He is currently completing a fresh appraisal of the pivotal three-way election in 1912 that saw Woodrow Wilson defeat William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt.
• Kate Doyle, Senior Analyst, National Security Archive at The George Washington University in Washington. Ms. Doyle lives presently in Mexico City, where she is preparing a study of U.S. policy south of the Rio Grande during the Cold War. She has previously contributed to our pages.
• Peter Osnos, Publisher and Chief Executive of PublicAffairs, which in two years has established itself as a major voice in the nonfiction publishing field. Formerly chief editor of Times Books at Random House, Mr. Osnos before then reported from Moscow and Vietnam, and served as foreign editor at the Washington Post. He is a longtime officer of Human Rights Watch.
• Nancy E. Soderberg, Vice President of the International Crisis Group, served during the Clinton administration as a senior official at the National Security Council, then as alternate U.S. representative to the United Nations, with the rank of ambassador. Her special concerns ranged from Northern Ireland to broad legal and political issues at the United Nations.
• Angela E. Stent, Director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. Professor Stent is the author of Russia and Germany Reborn as well as essays on Ukraine and Central Europe for this and other publications. She recently served as a member of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff.
• Shashi Tharoor, Interim Head of the Department of Public Information at the United Nations, and the author of India: From Midnight to the Millennium. A graduate of St. Ste-phen's College in New Delhi and of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and a U.N. civil servant since 1978, Mr. Tharoor is also a playwright and the author of a luminously witty work of fiction, The Great Indian Novel. It needs underscoring that any views he expresses as an advisor, or as author of two recent essays for this magazine, are not necessarily those of the United Nations.
• Ruth Wedgwood, Professor of Law, Yale University, Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, now commuting to Washington to teach at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. An authority on international law and peacekeeping, Ms. Wedgwood is the author of The Use of Force in International Affairs.

To all those above, our welcome, and to departing members of our revolving board, our thanks for their past help and support.

A New Crime We Dare Not Name

A century ago, the passion that dare not speak its name was homosexuality, the offense for which Oscar Wilde was sentenced to Reading Gaol, a crime so shaming that a new patronymic (Holland) was bestowed on his two sons. In a curious reversal, we can now speak openly and frankly about private sexual preferences, while our diplomats stammer incoherently about the wholesale slaughter of ethnic minorities. We owe this insight to an article in the September Atlantic Monthly by Samantha Power, executive director the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Ms. Power tried to discover why the United States became a bystander to genocide during a hundred days in 1994 when the Hutu regime in Rwanda came close to annihilating the country's Tutsi minority. Anxious not to be drawn into a potentially difficult and unpopular intervention, the Clinton administration (so the author found) sought to close its eyes and ears, and Secretary of State Warren Christopher went so far on May 21 of that year as to send these instructions to his U.N. team: "Delegation is not authorized to agree to the characterization of any specific incident as genocide, or to agree to any formulation that indicates that all killings in Rwanda are genocide." This led to the following verbal contortions by the State Department's press briefer, Christine Shelly:

Reporter:
How would you describe the events taking place in Rwanda?

Shelly:
Based on the evidence we have seen from observations on the ground, we have every reason to believe acts of genocide have occurred in Rwanda.

Reporter:
What's the difference between "acts of genocide" and "genocide"?

Shelly:
Well, I think the-as you know, there's a legal definition of this...clearly not all of the killings that have taken place in Rwanda are killings to which you might apply that label.... But as to the distinction between the words, we're trying to call what we have seen so far as best we can; and based, again, on the evidence, we have every reason to believe that acts of genocide have occurred.

Reporter:
How many acts of genocide does it take to make genocide?

Shelly:
Alan, that's just not a question that I'm in a position to answer.

The proximate cause of this allergy among officials to the "G-word" was the anxiety among lawyers that its use might have obliged the United States to act under the 1948 Genocide Convention. Or as a secret Defense Department discussion paper expressed it in blunt italics, "Genocide finding could commit [the United States] to actually "do something.'" It might be further noted that as this unseemly exegesis proceeded, the rivers of Rwanda were choked with bodies of Tutsis and moderate Hutus, a horror amply reported day in and out by the press. Let it further be noted that nothing was done to jam radio broadcasts that spread of the fires of hate, though there were repeated and urgent appeals to do so. But why go on? As Power found in her extensive interviews, "Since senior officials in the U.S. government hadn't felt responsible when the killings were actually happening, it should not be altogether surprising that most didn't feel responsible after the fact."

And now, as David Rieff relates elsewhere in this issue, the tinder of genocide in Burundi, Rwanda's neighbor and ethnic twin, only awaits a match. Should that nightmare materialize, how will President George W. Bush parse the offense that dare not speak its name?