BRATTLEBORO — The recent revelations of genocide and the all-too-familiar accompanying atrocities in North Korea are obviously extremely disturbing, though not totally shocking given what we know about the leadership of that unfortunate state.
If history is an indicator, it is unlikely that the United States or other Western powers will intervene in a meaningful way, particularly with North Korea in possession of a nuclear arsenal.
The century's first genocide occurred in 1915 and was committed by Turkey against its Armenian minority, in response to a small segment of that population siding with Russia in World War I. Approximately one million Armenians were marched into the desert and starved, tortured, beaten, burned alive, and shot. Women and young girls were gang raped before being murdered, their loved ones forced to watch before they too were butchered.
The U.S., hoping to remain neutral, chose not to intervene and when we did enter the war in 1917, declined to declare war on Turkey.
Meanwhile, a young Polish Jew, Raphael Lemkin, horrified by the atrocities there, dedicated the rest of his life to fighting state-sponsored mass murder.
Lemkin spent the 1930s trying to convince European governments to draft a law to stop this still-unnamed form of butchery. (It was Lemkin who coined the term “genocide” after World War II.)
Eventually, Lemkin's human-rights treaty - or convention, as it was known - was adopted by the United Nations. However, it needed to be ratified, particularly by the U.S., the world's most powerful democracy.
Lemkin died penniless in 1959 with U.S. ratification of the law banning genocide still some 40 years away. Fifty years would pass before the international community would convict anyone of crimes against humanity.
The U.S. reluctance to ratify this convention was primarily based on a traditional hostility to any perceived challenge to sovereignty, but it was also based on reluctance to have our own genocidal behavior toward the Native peoples of this land, and our shameful history of slavery, exposed to global scrutiny.
William Proxmire, a Democratic senator from Wisconsin, took the baton from Lemkin and, starting in 1967, gave a speech every day on the floor of the U.S. Senate pleading for ratification of “Lemkin's Law.”
Proxmire gave 3,221 speeches before the U.S. Senate finally ratified the Genocide Convention Implementation Act in 1988. Ninety-two other countries had voted to ratify before the U.S. did.
* * *
Our non-response to the Turkish horrors set up a pattern that would be repeated as the century wore on.
In 1941, the underground Jewish Socialist Bund publicized the Nazis' murderous campaign against Europe's Jews. In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was apprised that two million Jews had been murdered and, by 1943, the allies were fully cognizant of the Nazi final solution to the “Jewish problem.”
Szmul Zygielbojm, a member of the Polish National Council, and others pleaded for the allies to intervene. They were told the aircraft were not available for the purpose.
In despair, Zygielbojm committed suicide.
In Cambodia in 1975, Pol Pot and his murderous Khmer Rouge toppled the U.S-supported government of Lon Nol and began an atrocity-laden campaign of genocide against the Cambodian people which resulted in two million deaths.
Reports reached the West of thousands buried alive, hacked to death with garden tools, children slaughtered. Not only did the West not intervene, but the U.S. actually found itself in the embarrassing position of backing the Khmers for a United Nations seat as the representative government of Cambodia, rather than see the Russian-sponsored Vietnamese invaders get the seat.
The U.S. hoped to curry favor with China, who backed the Khmers, and thus poke a stick in the eye of the Russian bear.
In the 1980s, the U.S. government found itself once again facing the international embarrassment of backing a tyrannical, genocidal regime. Choosing the lesser of two evils, the U.S. provided support to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in a brutal war against Iran which resulted in more than one million deaths.
Hussein ordered a campaign of genocide against Iraq's ethnic Kurds in retaliation for some of their men siding with Iran in the war. Entire villages were obliterated as the Kurds faced mass executions and chemical weapons attacks against women, children, and the elderly. Kurdish men were packed into cargo bins and left in the desert to roast alive.
The U.S. and the West in general chose to refuse to acknowledge what was happening until it became obvious that Iran would not emerge victorious in the war and thus potentially gain control over too much Middle East oil. A half million or so terrified Kurds on the border of U.S. ally Turkey finally created a humanitarian crisis too high-profile to ignore and led to limited Western intervention - too late, however, for hundred of thousands of Kurdish civilians.
In Bosnia, the U.S., Europe, and the rest of the world stood by for 3½ years while Serbia practiced “ethnic cleansing” against the Muslim and Croat population, replete with Nazi-like concentration camps and a litany of horrific atrocities: fathers and sons forced to castrate each other, pre-teen girls raped before their parents' eyes.
In the nightmare that was Rwanda, the U.S. did not actively consider military intervention. We blocked U.N. peacekeepers and even refrained from lighter forms of intervention. A Washington Post editorial summed up the U.S. position, stating, “in a world of limited political and economic resources, not all fires will be equally tended. Rwanda is in an unpreferred class.”
* * *
One argument regularly put forth by proponents of non-intervention is that the U.S. cannot be the world's police force, interfering in the internal affairs of other countries - a stance that seems a bit hypocritical given our government's penchant for rigging foreign elections and toppling governments deemed “unfriendly” during a long, destructive Cold War waged over global hegemony.
And so, the long North Korean nightmare is bound to continue without real interference from the West.
Historian Samantha Power, speaking of the U.S. response to Cambodia, noted, “For neither the first nor the last time, geopolitics trumped genocide. Interests trumped indignation.”