A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (38 page)

The Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs had conducted its own internal review of the genocide question and concluded that Iraq was putting down a rebellion and not committing genocide. "The Iraqi military campaign, brutal as it was, sought to reclaim territories occupied for years by rebels closely allied with, and financed, armed and reinforced by, Iran as a second front," Assistant Secretary Murphy wrote. He insisted that since there was no evidence that Hussein intended to exterminate the Kurds, the genocide claim was far-fetched. "We see no evidence of an attempt to wipe out the Kurds as a whole," Murphy proceeded. He has not changed his mind. "Genocide is something different," he argues. "We knew he was doing brutal things to the Kurds, but you have to use the terns `genocide' very carefully, and it was clear to me that Hussein had no intention of exterminating all Kurds" Murphy had never read the genocide convention and thus equated genocide with Hitler's holistic campaign to wipe out every last Jew in Europe.

Murphy's NEA Bureau received support for this interpretation from Patrick E.Tyler in the Washington Post. On September 25, 1988,Tyler wrote a piece entitled simply, "The Kurds: It's Not Genocide" Although Iraq's "massive and forced relocation" of Kurds was "horrible and his- toric,"Tyler wrote, "genocide, the extermination of a race of people and their culture... is not an accurate term for what is happening in this part of Iraq.."'=' Tyler, too, ignored the legal definition of "genocide." He also extrapolated on the basis of a superficial, strictly supervised tour of several major Kurdish towns.The article was datelined Batufa, one of many Kurdish cities untouched by the Anfal campaign. Only the rural Kurdish population had been targeted for extinction, and Tyler did not visit rural territory. The Washington Post's Jonathan Randal testily describes the tendency of journalists inexperienced in the region to generalize wildly and irresponsibly. "All journalists seem to believe that life begins when they arrive. They get off the plane and expect to be instant experts," he says. "The parties on the ground know when our deadlines are and play us like violins." Western reporters saw bustling city life, but rural Kurds depended on their mountain life, which was off-limits. As one Kurdish spokesman said:

The Kurds have a saying: "Level the mountains, and in a day the Kurds would be no more" To a Kurd the mountain is no less than the embodiment of the deity: mountain is his mother, his refuge, his protector, his home, his farm, his market, his mate-and his only friend.... Kurds who settle in the cities outside the mountains-even those within Kurdistan proper-soon lose their true Kurdish identities."'

At no point during the eighteen-month Iraqi campaign of destruction did Reagan administration officials condemn it, and they did all they could to kill the Senate sanctions package. Still, the Near Eastern Affairs Bureau continued to claim it had the same ends as the human rights advocates. "We should balance all our interests in this increasingly important country in order to achieve what we all seek in terms of [chemical weapon] restraints and human rights performance," Murphy wrote.125 At a House hearing, he said, "Our opposition, I can assure you, is every bit as strong and outraged as your own.... We share the same goal, which is to end the use of chemical weaponry by Iraq [and] by any other state which has the capabilities. There is no daylight between us in what we are trying to accomplish.""' The difference, as always, was one of "means."

Defeat

When the Khmer Rouge starved and bludgeoned nearly 2 million people to death in Cambodia, journalists like Becker and Schanberg cared passionately about the place and the people, and U.S. diplomats like Twining and Quinn were revolted by the brutality of the new regime. But these journalists and diplomats had no hope that they could overcome the country's Southeast Asia fatigue and generate an American response to KR terror. They felt their wisdom would land like a snowflake on the Potomac. Thus, although they diligently documented the horrors, they did not really lobby for U.S. engagement. Deep down, they seemed to doubt that the United States could ameliorate conditions on the ground. After Vietnam and Watergate, Americans retained little faith in the system.

Galbraith began his crusade to have Saddam Hussein punished for genocide against the Kurds in 1988, nearly a decade after the KR ouster. In a short time much had changed on the international stage. The Cold War was thawing, and President Reagan had none of President Carter's shyness about throwing U.S. weight around the world. But the United States was no more likely to try to curb a strategic partner's human rights abuses, especially if doing so could harm U.S. economic interests.

U.S. politicians were notoriously captive to special interests. "Walter Lippmann once wrote of U.S. legislators, "They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding threatening elements in their constituencies. The decisive consideration is not whether the proposition is good but whether ... the active-talking constituents like it immediately:"''"'

But Galbraith believed that the Senate was an institution that, for all of its horse-trading, could act on principle. It need not become a "mere collection of local potato plots and cabbage grounds." 12" The Senate's early vote for the Prevention of Genocide Act seemed to confirm that the body could do the right thing for the right reasons. But as the fallout from the bill's initial Senate passage intensified, Galbraith began to fear the wrong result for the wrong reasons.

The person most responsible for sabotaging the sanctions effort once it moved from the Senate to the House was Dan Rostenkowski (1).-Ill.), the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee who would later he brought down in a corruption scandal. Influenced by the storm of protests on Capitol Hill, Rostenkowski moved to have Galbraith's Prevention of Genocide Act "blue-slipped," or returned to the Senate as a money bill unconstitutionally originating in the Senate."'' Rostenkowski's argument was a weak one, but, as Lemkin had once said," If somebody doesn't like mustard, they will find a reason for opposing it" Rostenkowski did not like this brand of mustard, and he killed the Pell-Helnis Prevention of Genocide Act. Galbraith was stunned. "I thought the House would take this bill, mark it up, and make it law," he remembers. "I didn't think that business interests would kick in when such an abhorrent thing was taking place." The Senate bill, many Congressmen said, had "gone a little too far" For Galbraith, such euphemisms were code for criminal capitulation.

All was not lost. The House developed its own version of the law, which supporters called "a measured response" to chemical weapons use. The House sanctions bill shifted the burden of proof away from the White House and omitted any reference to genocide. After successive rounds of ravaging in committee, the only sanctions the law retained were the ban on export-import credits used to purchase U.S. manufactured goods and the sale of chemicals that could be used in the production of chemical weapons. And lawmakers continued to object to these because they said U.S. manufacturers would be harmed.

Galbraith scratched the backs of those he thought could be swayed. But his aggressiveness and his single-mindedness did not charm all those who encountered him. "There was a lot of backlash against anything Peter did," Christianson, his boss at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, remembers. "He rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. They would pooh-pooh him as `emotional.' Whether it was out of jealousy or because they were disdainful of his aggressiveness, he was not their favorite person" Galbraith's message was also not one lawmakers or State Department officials wanted to hear, as he was proposing something that promised no conceivable material gain and several prospective tangible losses. "Peter was, ... well, Peter was Peter," remembers Larry Pope of the State Department. "He was a pain in the neck and a real thorn in the side of our policy of engagement"

Whatever the Reagan administration's objections, the half-measure soared through the House on September 27, 1988, with a huge bipartisan majority, 388-16. On October 1 1 the Senate approved, by a vote of 87-0, a revised bill almost identical to the one passed by the House. Although the bill was not very punishing, Galbraith thought it would signal at least some degree of disapproval of Hussein's brutality and force President Reagan into the awkward position of deciding whether he opposed punishing Hussein enough to veto the congressional measure. On October 21, 1988, however, Galbraith learned that in a last-minute round of parliamentary maneuvering before the autumn adjournment, Representative Dante Fascell (D.-Fla.) had removed the sanctions bill from a tax bill that was certain to become law. Instead, in an effort to preserve his committee's jurisdiction, Fascell put it into a freestanding bill that, because of its other provisions, had no chance of passage. The economic sanctions package never made it off Capitol Hill.

In keeping with the natural workings of the U.S. political process, the question of whether to denounce, punish, or attempt to deter chemical weapons attacks against a largely defenseless minority was never explained to the American people. It was settled, as it usually is, behind closed doors, where special interests ruled the day and where narrow versions of national interest helped rationalize inhumanity.

The trouble was not just that special interests spoke loudly against action; it was that, apart from these lobbies that were especially interested, there were no competing voices making phone calls on behalf of the Kurds. When the genocide convention had come up for ratification, a small group of vocal, isolationist, southern senators had managed to block its passage. During the Khmer Rouge's bloody rule in Cambodia, likewise, the loudest voices were those that cast doubt on the refugee claims. With Iraq, too, the major human rights organizations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, were still operating out of dingy offices on small budgets and focusing principally on jailed political dissidents, in the case ofAmnesty, and abuses committed in Latin America and Asia, in the case of Human Rights Watch. The loudest political support Galbraith received was from a group of steelworkers from Brownsville, Texas, whose plant was scheduled to be shut down and shipped to Iraq, costing them hundreds of jobs. When they learned that the sanctions bill would block the factory move, they were ecstatic. They phoned up the frazzled Galbraith and offered him enthusiastic moral support, which counted for little when measured against the potent U.S.-Iraqi Business Council. Representative Howard Berman (D.-Calif.) had been pushing legislation to limit trade with Iraq since the mid-1980s, but the deck was stacked in the wrong direction. "There was no grassroots campaign," he said. "The American people weren't aware of, or that interested in, our policy toward Iraq at that time." When the bill came up for passage, and hearing nothing from their constituents, most thought in terms of economic and strategic interests alone.

Some of the most potent lobbies in U.S. political life today are of course those that speak for various ethnic interests. The Armenian American community has lobbied for decades to secure a day of remembrance to conl- memorate the Armenian genocide and in November 2000, over Turkish objections, very nearly gained official U.S. recognition of the genocide. Jewish American groups have been extremely influential, helping secure the allocation of billions of dollars worth of aid to Israel and the establishment of the Holocaust Museum on the Mall in Washington, D.C. While the atrocities were actually being perpetrated in Turkey and Nazi-occupied Europe, however, these lobbies did not exist. During the Cambodian genocide, similarly, few Cambodian expatriates or descendants lived in the United States. Those who did were not organized politically to attract much attention to the cause of their compatriots. In the case of the Kurds, when Galbraith's sanctions measure stood poised for passage in the Congress, neither Kurds nor Kurdish Americans had joined forces to set up a Washington lobby. When Talabani visited Washington in June 1988 for the first time, his party did not reinforce the trip by establishing a D.C. office or liaison. Latif Rashid, who ran the party's London office, remembers, "Because we had no representatives based in Washington, it was easy for American leaders to pretend the Kurds didn't exist."

The U.S. media can sometimes play a role in helping draw public attention to an injustice abroad or to the stakes of a legislative sequence. When it came to Iraq's repression of the Kurds, however, the March 1988 Halabja attack and the September 1988 exodus received some attention, but neither the larger Iraqi campaign to destroy Kurds in rural Iraq nor the legislative toing and froing around the Prevention of Genocide Act on Capitol Hill generated much press interest.This spotty reporting helped ensure that lawmakers and administration officials could oppose the sanctions bill without attracting negative publicity.

Senator Pell delivered a postmortem on the Prevention of Genocide Act:

Occasionally our legislative process works in a way the American people can understand and appreciate. September 9, 1988, was such an occasion. On that day the Senate unanimously passed sweeping sanctions against Iraq in response to its poison gas attacks on its Kurdish minority.... Now we are in a situation where a ... couple of senior members in the House of Representatives were able to thwart the overwhelming majorities in both the House and Senate that favored taking a stand against Iraq's use of poison gas. This is ... the sort of thing that makes so many Americans skeptical about our legislative process."'

The United States did not summon a special meeting of the UN Security Council, as advocates urged, but instead joined nine other nations in calling on the UN to send a team of experts to Iraq to investigate, urging that the fact-finding mission be modeled on past UN chemical weapons inquiries (which had confirmed Iraqi use against Iran). U.S. officials made this recommendation without noting that these prior investigations offered staunch testimony to the ineffectiveness of a policy of inquiry alone. Such UN teams had "concluded" in 1986, 1987, and 1988 that Iraq had used chemical weapons against Iran.'"