Nation Topics - Clinton administration | The Nation

From its inception, the AIDS pandemic has generated extraordinary expressions of sadness and anger. The sadness is easy to understand.

American policy-makers may be divided into two schools of thought on the Arab-Israeli conflict: the evenhanded and the Israel-first.

This clutch of books offers
an excellent retrospective on the recent stock-market crash, which
wiped out $8.5 trillion in market value.

Most Americans take their system of government for granted, as if Moses himself had delivered the Constitution engraved on marble tablets.

Research support was provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation
Institute.

The man behind the "Jeffords Jump" is aiding Democratic efforts to stay on top.

It is probably safe to say that the war crimes trial in The Hague of the
former Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic is not going well. At least
so far. No credible witnesses have come forward to testify against the
man who is credited with starting four Balkan wars. No documentary
evidence has been advanced to prove his "command responsibility" for
murderous ethnic conflicts. The prosecution's bungling has turned what
was once touted as a "water-tight case" into a battle of wits, allowing
Milosevic to mount a fifth war--legal and psychological--against the
court itself.

It is, of course, an uneven battle. The court is supported by the might
of the United States and its vast eavesdropping and
intelligence-gathering facilities. Behind the scenes, Americans have
tried to induce some of Milosevic's former henchmen to testify against
him. (That includes the notorious paramilitary leader known as Arkan,
who was gunned down inside the Belgrade Intercontinental two weeks after
he lunched there with an American intermediary for the CIA.) Publicly,
the United States has linked all financial assistance to Serbia to the
extradition of suspected war criminals; the hope is that some of them
may provide the needed information about Milosevic's "command
responsibility."

The former dictator, on the other hand, has to rely mainly on himself,
his wife and a few supporters. The image of a solitary individual
standing up against the world not only appeals to his vanity but also
seems to energize him. His defense strategy is brilliantly cunning,
designed to play on Serbia's psychological vulnerabilities and continued
Serb resentment of the 1999 NATO bombing. From the outset he has said
that the court is illegal, that it is NATO's victors' justice and that
he would not accept its judgment. Yet, acting as his own defense
attorney, he has used the tribunal as a stage for his antics, playing
the role of a defiant David to NATO's Goliath, the victim of powerful
foreign enemies, and in the process doing all he can to make his a trial
of the whole Serbian nation.

Opinion polls suggest that his strategy is working in Serbia. Even
though four out of five Serbs want to see Milosevic tried
in a Serbian court for crimes committed against his people, a majority
applaud his stand at The Hague.

This is unfortunate. This public perception is likely to discourage
potential witnesses from coming forward. In the absence of compelling
evidence against him in court, Milosevic's political rehabilitation becomes a distinct
possibility. More significant will be the impact on the world's first
permanent court--which is to be established also in The Hague--to
replace ad hoc courts like the one sitting in judgment of Milosevic. But
it is up to the ad hoc tribunal to come up with the precedent-setting
legal standard of "command responsibility" (the conditions under which a
tyrant, even if not directly involved, can be held responsible for
crimes committed by his subordinates).

This raises several broader questions: What sort of justice, exactly, is
being served in The Hague? Why is it that the prosecution, having
claimed to have a water-tight case, appears to be flailing in the dark?
Was the court manipulated by the Clinton Administration? What exactly
was the secret intelligence that the United States and British
governments supplied during the 1999 Kosovo war to prompt the court to
indict Milosevic?

Louis Sell is one of those rare anonymous State Department officials who
venture to write books in their retirement. He was highly regarded by
his superiors and held the rank of political counselor in two major
embassies: Belgrade and Moscow. His tour in Belgrade, from 1987 to 1991,
coincided with Milosevic's rise to power and the outbreak of war in
Yugoslavia. This has placed him in the middle of things. Scores of
secret cables, sensitive intelligence reports, raw National Security
Agency telephone intercepts and even satellite photos landed on his desk
each day. He not only had access to everything the analysts and spooks
produced on the Yugoslav crisis but was one of the few people capable of
placing such material
in the proper context. (He had served in
Yugoslavia in the 1970s and is fluent in Serbo-Croatian.) He returned to
the region in 1995 as political deputy to former Swedish Prime Minister
Carl Bildt, then the European Union's chief negotiator for the former
Yugoslavia. After the Kosovo war, Sell served as director of the
International Crisis Group in Kosovo.

By background and experience, Sell is a bureaucratic insider. Unlike the
more senior officials--Richard Holbrooke or Gen. Wesley Clark--he has no
need to defend his reputation. Nor is he a man prone to
self-glorification. His twenty-eight years in the State Department
conditioned him to shun the limelight. This may be why he could
apparently not bring himself to give the reader his own take on events.
Instead he has chosen a journalistic format, relying mainly on published
sources--news dispatches, opinion columns and books. This was a poor
choice. He knows far more than most authors he quotes in his Slobodan
Milosevic and the Destruction of Yugoslavia.

Indiscriminate reliance on Western press reports is risky. For example,
Sell reproduces a German tabloid story about Milosevic's alleged
involvement in drug trafficking. Far too often he resorts to "Western
journalists" as the only source of this or that information; far too
often the phrase "everybody knew that..." crops up in the narrative as
the sole source for a given Serbian crime. Although he tries to write
dispassionately, his anti-Serb bias gets in the way from time to time.
In one instance, he writes that the high command in Belgrade sanctioned
the July 1995 attack on Srebrenica; the source for the assertion is a
book published in 1994. Is this sloppy writing? Careless editing?

Sell does offer a shrewd assessment of the former dictator. He sees him
as someone "without any core beliefs or values other than his own
political survival." Milosevic, he writes, "was not very good at using
power for anything other than keeping it." He was an enormously
destructive figure. Obsessed with power, he deliberately impoverished
not only Serbia's economy but also its intellectual and social fabric
"in order to eliminate the very capacity for independent alternatives to
emerge."

The book follows familiar lines; I doubt whether it contains anything
that has not been said before. One does come across interesting tidbits:
Washington took an almost instant dislike to Carl Bildt, because he "had
not developed the habit of deference to Washington" and was unwilling
"to take direction." Needless to say, Bildt did not last long in the
job.

There is, of course, nothing surprising nowadays in high-level American
officials expecting deference from little nations or their
representatives. But this is only a part of America's post-cold war
attitude toward the rest of the world. It also permeates US policy in
the Balkans. Despite the rhetoric about justice and eagerness to help
the people of Serbia, the book suggests that the United States was
interested in the Hague court as a political tool rather than a
mechanism that would add another dimension to international law by
holding individual leaders responsible for war crimes and crimes against
humanity. Everything that would detract from Washington's
policy--whatever that policy is at any given moment--must be dismissed
out of hand or ignored. With a sleight of hand, Sell dismisses British
and French experts who found conclusive proof that Muslim snipers had
fired on their own people in order to stimulate sympathetic media
coverage for their plight. He ignored Canadian Gen. Lewis MacKenzie, who
said he had personally seen a similar incident. Sell also ignores the
fact that Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger accused Milosevic of
war crimes in Bosnia and Croatia in December 1992; Eagleburger's speech
in Geneva no longer fits the official narrative.

Within a year, Milosevic had reinvented himself as a born-again
peacemaker. By 1995 he was the "guarantor" of peace in Bosnia. (He was,
indeed, most responsible for the successful outcome of the peace talks
at Dayton, Ohio.) He shared the stage with Bill Clinton during the
signing ceremonies in Paris. Clinton flattered him. "It's nice to hear
your voice," Clinton told the dictator. The American President, aboard
Air Force One to visit US troops in Bosnia, chitchatted with the Serbian
dictator about the Dayton agreement. "I know it cannot go ahead without
you," Clinton said, according to a recently published transcript of the
conversations monitored by Croatian intelligence.

So, even though "it had long been clear that Milosevic was responsible
for ethnic cleansing and other crimes...in Croatia and Bosnia," Sell
tells us, he was not indicted, because the Clinton Administration was
unable to find a "smoking gun" that would directly link him to the
misdeeds. We are led to conclude that the Administration did not assign
high priority to the task.

On the eve of the Kosovo war, however, the US government became active
in seeking to tie Milosevic to war crimes in Kosovo in early 1999. The
State Department's war crimes intelligence review unit was given a
boost: The number of its analysts and the urgency of its task were
increased. Having no diplomats or spies in Serbia, Sell reports,
analysts used satellite photos to study troop movements inside Kosovo.
The outcome was "precisely the kind of evidence needed to indict
Milosevic on the basis of 'imputed command responsibility'" for ordering
ethnic cleansing or failing to stop it. Canadian jurist Louise Arbour,
the chief prosecutor at the time, must have known that the intelligence
she was given did not meet the standards of proof required in a court of
law. She traveled to Washington, London and Bonn apparently seeking a
policy context for the tribunal's action against Milosevic; but she got
"totally ambiguous" responses. As NATO planes continued to bomb
Yugoslavia, the flow of intelligence material reaching the tribunal
increased, but most of it was part of NATO's massive propaganda campaign
against Milosevic. This must have preyed on the minds of the
prosecutors, leading them to believe that they had a substantial case
that would hold up in court. Indeed, the initial indictment was confined
to war crimes committed in Kosovo in 1999.

The tribunal may indeed have been manipulated by outside forces, as some
of its officers feared. As is frequently the case in the Balkans, a
story always seems clear at a distance, but the closer you get to the
scene of events the murkier it becomes. The drafters of the
indictment--somewhat to their surprise later--had not taken into account
the fact that Kosovo was a secessionist province that had declared
independence in 1991, as a result of which it was placed under Serbian
police rule. The province remained quiet as long as the Albanian
struggle was confined to peaceful means. However horrific the Serbian
repression, it did not include ethnic cleansing. But by 1997, the
Albanians had taken up arms. Milosevic had an armed insurrection on his
hands. Moreover, when the Kosovo war ended, the liberated Albanians had
lost their moral high ground; they embarked on a killing spree of the
defeated Serbs under the noses of NATO peacekeepers.

Once Milosevic was deposed, the legal weaknesses of the Kosovo
indictment became painfully obvious, and the prosecutors moved to
include Croatia and Bosnia, the latter being the prime stage for the
charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. Like Sell, I too have
no doubt that Milosevic is guilty as charged, at least with respect to
most counts dealing with Bosnia. I witnessed a good deal while covering
his wars from 1990 to 1996. But it is crucial that this be established
in a court of law. Although the pool of Milosevic's partners in crime
has been shrinking (most recently with the suicide of his former police
minister), a number of them are still at large. The tribunal needs these
former Serbian officials; some should be offered immunity from
prosecution in exchange for their testimony. The prosecutors should work
with local Serbian authorities and hire local private investigators
rather than depend on the might of the United States to force the
extradition of suspected criminals. Without such witnesses and in the
absence of spectacular documentary evidence, the tribunal is heading for
disaster.

On late-night television the other day I watched Spencer Tracy and
Marlene Dietrich in the 1961 movie Judgment at Nuremberg, about
the trials of Nazi war criminals. It was a riveting courtroom drama. The
evidence against the accused was overwhelming. By comparison, the Hague
tribunal is more like the trial of Al Capone, the Chicago mobster who
was responsible for a series of gangland murders. Although everybody
knew Capone was guilty, police could not prove it. Eventually he was
sent to jail for tax evasion. One way or another, I suspect, Milosevic
will end up spending many years in jail. Let's hope this will be done
for the right reasons.

It was an early November morning when I met Gairam Muminov on the steps
of a courthouse on the outskirts of Tashkent, the sprawling capital of
Uzbekistan. He was leaning against a white stone banister, nervously
smoking a cigarette. His thin, sunburned face was carved with deep
furrows and strained by even

deeper worries, which seemed to manifest themselves most intensely
around his dark gray eyes. Inside the courthouse, local authorities were
keeping his son, Abdulvali, locked up for participating in a forbidden
religious group. Although Muminov's job as a builder prevented him from
attending the trial, the 57-year-old father had come that morning to
find out firsthand how long his son would be imprisoned. Abdulvali's
sentencing was scheduled to begin at 10 am.

When the time came, we entered the Akmal Ikramov District Court, a
rundown edifice of cheap marble and concrete located on a dusty road
beside the city's Police Station No. 2. Inside it was dim. On the first
floor, an unusually large, bone-dry fountain and a portrait of Uzbek
President Islam Karimov were visible beneath the few fluorescent lights.
The sentencing was to be held in a room on the second floor. Standing by
the door, in a gloomy hallway, were the families of nine other young
convicts who had been tried with Abdulvali. They waited in an atmosphere
of tense anticipation. Some mothers smoothed out their brightly
patterned dresses in silence; others explained why they thought this
case might be different: With the US-led war on terrorism under way and
renewed international attention brought to the Karimov regime's harsh
crackdown on independent religious expression, they hoped the usually
unforgiving Uzbek justice system might--just this once--tilt toward
leniency.

It was, in many ways, a farfetched hope. The ten men were arrested for
participating in the pan-Islamic group known as Hizb ut-Tahrir, what
Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid in his new book calls "the most
popular, widespread underground movement in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and
Tajikistan." The movement shuns violence but is no less radical because
of that. As Rashid explains, Central Asian acolytes of Hizb ut-Tahrir,
which was founded by dispossessed Palestinians in Saudi Arabia and
Jordan in 1953, foresee "a moment when millions of its supporters will
simply rise up and topple the Central Asian governments--particularly
the Karimov regime--by sheer force of numbers." In place of the region's
various secular states, the movement seeks to fashion a single
Taliban-style Islamic republic stretching from the Caspian Sea to
western China and beyond. It's a threat that the local autocracies, as
well as Washington, take seriously. According to its leadership, Hizb
ut-Tahrir has already attracted tens of thousands of members in the
region. And while two years ago the Clinton Administration narrowly
concluded that the movement did not sponsor terrorist activities, Rashid
argues: "The fear is that young [members]... may soon ignore their
elders' advice and turn to guerrilla warfare."

That fear may be somewhat hasty. But for the government in Tashkent, it
has been amplified by the activities of a much more militant insurgency
known as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, or IMU, whose leaders made
just such a transformation from nonviolence roughly ten years ago. Since
1998, when the IMU officially came into being, it has clashed with the
government forces of three states, engaged in kidnappings and the drug
trade, and engendered an atmosphere of distrust and hostility among the
region's strongmen. The movement's leadership has established close
links with Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network and even moved the IMU
headquarters to northern Afghanistan when the more welcoming Taliban
regime was in power. Uzbek President Karimov blames the IMU, among other
opposition groups, for detonating a series of car bombs in Tashkent in
February 1999. The explosions killed thirteen people, injured more than
a hundred and touched off the latest and harshest in a series of
government campaigns against independent religious expression and
political dissent. Following the bombings, Karimov announced that even
the fathers of sons who participated in IMU activities would be
arrested. "If my child chose such a path," he said, "I myself would rip
off his head."

However, again and again, Rashid rightly argues in Jihad: The Rise of
Militant Islam in Central Asia that the growing popular support for
groups like the IMU and Hizb ut-Tahrir are largely a response to the
corrupt Karimov government's inability to bring even a modicum of
economic prosperity or democracy to Uzbekistan, the region's natural
axis of power. Central Asia has known harsh leadership and violent
upheaval before. Prior to the Soviets there were the czars, and prior to
the czars there were the local khans, who ruled brutally. However, when
the republics of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and
Kyrgyzstan fell into independence following the collapse of Communism,
they not only experienced a crisis of national identity (none had ever
existed before as an independent state), they also joined a more
integrated world, where political and economic expectations for open and
fair governance are arguably higher than they have ever been. All this,
at a moment of religious reawakening across the region.

In this context, Central Asia's radical Islamic movements were very much
forged in a modern political pressure cooker. "In a series of crackdowns
in 1992, 1993, and after 1997, Karimov arrested hundreds of ordinary
pious Muslims for alleged links with Islamic fundamentalists, accusing
them of being Wahhabis"--converts to the strict brand of Islam embraced
by the Taliban--"closing down mosques and madrassahs, and forcing
mullahs into jail or exile," Rashid writes. "The result of these
repressive policies has been the growth of exactly what Karimov feared:
extremist Islamic militancy."

A visit to Uzbek courts is a good way to see this machinery in motion:
the steady spinning of the gears that wind moderate Muslims into
radicals. Here too, the display is one of the precarious fragility of
Uzbekistan's current order, and I can think of no better corollary to
Rashid's careful descriptions of a region approaching the edge of chaos
than the observations of Bill Berkeley, a journalist who has spent
numerous years reporting from Africa. "Many suppose that tyranny and
anarchy are at opposite ends of a linear spectrum," Berkeley has
written. "But often they are side by side on what might better be
described as a circle: the one is a product of the other, and vice
versa." For a number of Central Asian states, that circle has been
getting tighter and tighter over the past decade, and the ouster of the
Taliban regime from Afghanistan has done little to prevent it from
shrinking toward its explosive focal point.

The anarchy of tyranny is starkly evident in a place like the Akmal
Ikramov District Court. After Gairam Muminov and the other families had
waited for several hours, frustration and impatience set in. A few
splintered off to find a bailiff or clerk, but no one was able to find
out when, exactly, the sentencing was to occur. An Uzbek journalist
waiting with me explained: "The authorities do this on purpose. They
want to wear people down; they are counting on people like you and me to
get tired, hungry. Maybe we will have to leave for business or lunch,
and then suddenly the doors will open and court begins. This way they
can say they are being open but attract the minimum amount of
attention." However, at 3 pm, when Judge Nizom Rustamov, a stout and
smug man in a shiny sharkskin suit, finally ambled up the courthouse
steps, a slightly different picture emerged--that of the unaccountable
bureaucrat who probably decided against rushing to work simply because
he could. Matilda Bogner, Uzbekistan's Human Rights Watch
representative, described the judge this way: "Rustamov is known to have
sentenced someone to the death penalty for possessing fertilizer at home
because fertilizer can be used as an ingredient in the making of
explosives."

Such capricious power infests Uzbekistan's neighboring governments as
well. As the Soviet Union began to implode, none of the five Central
Asian republics rushed to embrace independence, democracy or economic
reform. Indeed, leaderships in a number of the republics actively
plotted to stymie the demise of the Communist system, however rotted,
because it had been nourishing them so well. As Rashid demonstrates,
this reluctance to break away was to a large degree ironic, given the
region's vast reserves of natural resources--primarily in oil, gas and
minerals--and its potential for prosperity (not to mention the potential
to funnel that prosperity into the hands of local elites). Moreover, as
he points out, "the Soviet policies of closed borders, forced cotton
agriculture, farm collectivization, population relocation and--most
significant--Stalin's redrawing of the map of Central Asia to create
five incongruous states had left the region economically hard-pressed,
[and] ethnically and politically divided."

Ten years on, much of Central Asia remains mired in its Soviet
inheritances: petty and sometimes not-so-petty corruption are a part of
everyday life; news is censored, often heavily; dissidents are
imprisoned, exiled or caused to disappear; resources are squandered;
environmental damage continues unabated. Yet, as the region remains
politically and in many ways economically stagnant, it is experiencing a
demographic surge. "The population gets younger," Rashid notes. "More
than 60 percent of the region's 50 million people are under the age of
25. This new generation is unemployed, poorly educated, and hungry--how
long will it continue to tolerate the decline in living standards and
the lack of rudimentary freedoms?"

There is no easy answer to this question. And Rashid is shrewd enough to
avoid offering one. Just as he is sensitive to the dangers that could
well belong to the region's future, he shows with great nuance that
important differences among the five republics have already led to a
diversity of outcomes. Turkmenistan, for instance, is now ruled by a
bizarre hermit-dictator who had himself decreed President for Life, a
position he plans to hold until 2010, when he intends to retire.
Meanwhile, Kyrgyzstan, the only country of the five not to become an
immediate heir to its Soviet-era leader, has shown a promising
willingness to reform, even if that willingness has waned over the past
several years. However, if these two countries sit at the region's
political poles, the most intriguing case among them may be Tajikistan,
which in Rashid's eyes serves as both a warning and a potential model
for its neighbors.

Not long after the Soviet collapse, mountainous Tajikistan fell into a
five-year civil war that appeared to mirror the conditions in
neighboring Afghanistan. From 1992 to 1997 the multiparty conflict,
which primarily cut across clan lines but also included Islamic rebels,
democrats and former Communist bosses as the main combatants, claimed
the lives of more than 50,000 people and forced roughly 750,000 people
from their homes. In Rashid's view, the primary engine of that conflict
was the Islamic Renaissance Party, or IRP--Central Asia's first popular
Muslim fundamentalist movement--which led a unified band of rebel groups
from headquarters based in Afghanistan and Russia. The fighting might
have ground on indefinitely (or remained frozen in stalemate), but in
1996 "the regional equation changed dramatically when the Taliban
captured Kabul," says Rashid. Fear that the Taliban regime would project
its influence into Afghanistan's post-Soviet neighbors pushed the rest
of Central Asia and Russia to force the Tajik government into making the
necessary concessions for peace. A year later, the parties signed an
agreement that legitimized the IRP and brought it into Tajikistan's new
coalition government.

The complexity of Tajikistan's civil war makes it difficult to summarize
neatly, and perhaps for this reason, coupled with its remoteness, it
received scant attention in the West. For Rashid, though, the outcome is
one that must not be ignored, not only because the peace agreement held
the country together over subsequent years but also because the radical
IRP has seen a dramatic loss in popular support since its inclusion in
government. "In many ways," Rashid argues, "Tajikistan is the key to
peace and stability in Central Asia--something the international
community must recognize, and soon." The logic being: Bringing
fundamentalist Islamic groups into the light rather than driving them
underground is the best way to show that their platforms are unworkable
and at odds with the region's traditionally moderate religious
sentiments.

This may be true, but Tajikistan's civil war is an unlikely example to
prove it, primarily because the conflict was largely one of regionally
based clans vying for political and economic power. Although radical
Islam colored the conflict, it was by no means the driving force. The
coalition government, if anything, was a joining of competing warlords
dressed in various ideologies and beliefs rather than a bridging of
deeply held convictions on secular and Islamic fundamentalist
state-building. This difference must be obvious to Rashid, who awkwardly
suggests the coalition government is an instance of the latter while
acknowledging the former, sometimes in dramatically confusing ways. At
one point, he writes that Soviet "collectivization...had fragmented the
clan structure.... Thus, many Tajiks saw the Islamic revival as a means
to cement a Tajik identity and ensure Tajikistan's development as a
unified state." Then, later, he writes that "most Tajiks identified with
their regions and clans rather than with their country." And later
again: "The civil war had quickly become a battle between clans rather
than an Islamic jihad." This last statement is by far the more realistic
and complete assessment--one echoed by Central Asia scholar Martha Brill
Olcott, who has argued that the "larger issues contested in Tajikistan's
civil war were clearly those of economic and political control."

In fact, the weakness of the government--its inability to protect
Tajikistan's borders and control its rugged territory--has made the
country an ideal base for the region's most extreme militants and best
organized drug traders (often one and the same). Today, roughly 70
percent of the world's heroin funnels through Tajikistan from
Afghanistan, and since the early 1990s Tajikistan's Tavildara Valley has
been an important training area for the IMU's charismatic military
leader Jumaboi Khojaev, a former Soviet paratrooper who later assumed
the name Juma Namangani after his hometown, Namangan, Uzbekistan. The
kind of detailed portrait Rashid has sketched of Namangani, who was
recently reported killed alongside Al Qaeda and Taliban units during the
latest war in Afghanistan, is unparalleled. This is where Rashid is at
his best, especially when he shows how the secretive Central Asian rebel
makes unusual company with Osama bin Laden, despite their close ties.
During one of Rashid's many exclusive interviews in the region, a former
Namangani compatriot explained how the notorious rebel was "shaped by
his own military and political experiences rather than Islamic ideology,
but he hates the Uzbek government--that is what motivates him above all.
In a way, he is a leader by default because no other leader is willing
to take such risks to oppose Karimov."

This in many ways appears to be a capsule characterization of militant
Islam in Central Asia, where religious extremism is primarily harnessed
to the cause of political and military aims, whether in internecine clan
warfare, in insurgencies acting against repression or in the meddling of
outside empires. As readers of the great historian Peter Hopkirk might
recognize, Namangani's pragmatism situates him in a long-running Central
Asian tradition in which strategic objectives rather than fundamentalist
religious ones ultimately lie behind the call to jihad. It was a move
even the Soviets tried. In 1920 Grigori Zinoviev, a close associate of
Lenin, called the Muslims of Central Asia to battle at a weeklong rally
in Baku, Azerbaijan. "Brothers," Zinoviev boomed to a wildly fervent
crowd brandishing swords and revolvers, "we summon you to a holy war, in
the first place against English imperialism!" This display fell in with
a briefly held plan Moscow had at the time: fomenting a chain of
uprisings and establishing an "Army of God" that would penetrate India
through Afghanistan and trigger enough Muslim unrest there to subvert
Britain's hold over South Asia. However, as Hopkirk notes in Setting
the East Ablaze (and as the United States learned painfully after
aiding militants in Afghanistan in the 1980s), cultivating pan-Islam
"could be double-edged." Religious and nationalist sentiments could just
as easily flow against Moscow. The Basmachis, Central Asia's homegrown
mujahedeen, resisted Soviet power for more than a decade after the
Russian Revolution--and with a good deal of support from the British,
who slipped them caravans of arms and munitions from India.

Today, although the spirit of jihad has largely been unhinged from the
machinations of outside empires intent on controlling the region, its
proponents see themselves very much as bearers of the Basmachi
tradition, as Rashid demonstrates. But his book is also instructive in
pointing out differences between the region's Islamic groups of then and
now. Hizb ut-Tahrir's growing popularity suggests that outside
influences of a very different kind are leaking into Central Asia.
(Along with the IMU, Hizb ut-Tahrir's adherents subscribe to the strict
Wahhabist brand of Islam, which originated in Saudi Arabia, rather than
the more indigenous Sufism, which tends toward mysticism rather than
millenarianism.) This time it's happening at the grassroots--and feeding
off the criminality of local regimes.

There is probably no way to know whether Gairam Muminov's son,
Abdulvali, was truly a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir or was simply caught
praying in the wrong place, or listening to the wrong person, or
carrying the wrong leaflet. I'm sure even his lawyer doesn't know. When
one of the accused suggested that they had been tortured to confess (to
"anti-constitutional crimes"), Judge Rustamov would not hear of it. The
next day, I watched Muminov's hands shoot up to his face when Rustamov
sentenced his son to ten years of imprisonment. And as the father slowly
drew his shaky fingers away, his mouth fell open, his eyes turned blank.
I wondered: Earlier, this man shrugged off my criticisms of Uzbekistan's
ironfisted approach to dissent, saying he had all the freedom in the
world--limitless choices in the marketplace, among whichever apples and
oranges he desired. Was that still good enough for him?

That is a question the United States must begin asking if it intends to
become more active in fostering stability in the region. Rashid's
book--which follows his bestseller, Taliban--was rushed to
publication after September 11, so it is understandably short on
evaluating current US Central Asia policy. But it is the first good,
hard look at the region's Islamic movements and deserves the attention
of policymakers and interested everyday readers alike. The careful
consideration Rashid has given the grassroots causes that set these
insurgencies into motion will keep this book relevant for a long time to
come. As Rashid argues: "The Clinton administration policy of helping
Central Asia's repressive governments combat terrorism whilst mildly
lecturing them on their human-rights violations did not constitute a
strategic vision for the region." It still doesn't. Under the George W.
Bush Administration, military and economic aid to the region has
increased; so too, it seems, has the repression.

The twentieth century was arguably the bloodiest in modern history,
earning from one commentator the moniker of the Age of Barbarism. From
the Nazi genocide, to the killing fields of Cambodia and Rwanda, to the
"ethnically cleansed" areas of the former Yugoslavia, the twentieth
century was one of unprecedented horror for many.

Mass slaughter of civilians is, of course, much older than these
horrors. The modern world brought about by European expansionism, the
famed Pakistani intellectual Eqbal Ahmad once observed, is a time of
extraordinary unrecorded holocausts. How many of us, for instance, are
familiar with the deaths of upward of 10 million in the
Belgian-controlled Congo in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries? Or how about Australia's extermination of the indigenous
population of Tasmania? The decimation of inferior races in settler
colonies, brought about by Western imperialism and the associated
legitimizing ideologies, in fact, contends Sven Lindqvist in his
brilliant Exterminate All the Brutes, ostensibly laid the
groundwork for Hitler's crimes by creating particular habits of thought
and political precedents.

What was unique to the twentieth century--and thus the subtitle of
Samantha Power's very impressive "A Problem From Hell": America and
the Age of Genocide--was the invention of the very word "genocide"
and its establishment as a legal construct outlawing one of the most
egregious forms of state terror. That represents a great advancement in
the construction of international law and associated political and
juridical mechanisms, but the fact that genocide continues to occur and
to go unpunished speaks to the difficulties of giving life to a legal
regime.

While the parties most responsible for this shortcoming are those that
perpetrate genocide, Power focuses much of her opprobrium on the party
that is in her estimation best positioned to put an end to or at least
significantly curb such horror: the US government. "No US President has
ever made genocide prevention a priority," she writes, "and no US
President has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its
occurrence. It is thus no coincidence that genocide rages on."

The myriad horror stories of this age of genocide have many ugly
characters, several of whom Power profiles in her well written and
extensively documented book. But there are also many heroes, namely
those within and without the US government who have spoken the
proverbial truth to power with the goal of making Washington appreciate
or acknowledge--and thus take appropriate action--that genocide was
taking place in the various case studies that Power carefully details.

Perhaps the biggest hero in Power's book is Raphael Lemkin. A Polish Jew
who as a young boy had a fascination with the history of mass
slaughters, Lemkin became a lawyer and international legal scholar. He
set out to ban the destruction of ethnic, national or religious groups,
to end the national sovereignty-granted impunity of state actors
who perpetrate such atrocities and to insure universal jurisdiction for
their prosecution.

Forced to flee his homeland when the Nazi army invaded in 1939, Lemkin
ended up in the United States soon thereafter. He worked indefatigably
to bring attention to and to record Hitler's extermination of Jews,
while urging Americans to do everything they could to put a stop to it.
At the same time, he endeavored to invent a word to characterize such
slaughters, one that, in Power's words, "would connote a practice so
horrid and so irreparable that the very utterance of the word would
galvanize all who heard it." When he coined the term "genocide" in 1944,
Western governments and political pundits quickly embraced it. This led
Lemkin to assume that actions to codify the term and fight the practices
comprehended in it would quickly follow. He soon learned that he had a
long fight on his hands--one that he waged incessantly until he died,
penniless, in 1959.

Before his demise, however, Lemkin saw the United Nations General
Assembly pass the genocide convention on December 9, 1948, the body's
first passage of a human rights treaty. And less than two years later,
the necessary twenty countries had ratified the convention, making it
international law. But he did not live to see the United States ratify
it, a necessary step, Lemkin thought, to insure its enforcement, given
American power. Indeed, it would not be until 1988 that the Senate did
so, but not before attaching a set of reservations, understandings and
declarations that insured that the United States itself could never be
charged with the crime, thus rendering American approval largely
symbolic.

The architects of the convention understood the danger of making
Hitler's crimes the standard by which to determine future genocides.
States must be able to identify as genocide acts aimed at destroying "in
whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group"--the
legal definition of the crime--well before they have the chance to reach
such a scale in order to trigger appropriate actions. (The convention
enjoins its signatories to take measures to prevent and punish the
crime.) Despite such intentions, the link between genocide and Hitler's
so-called Final Solution "would cause endless confusion for
policy-makers and ordinary people who assumed that genocide occurred
only where the perpetrator of atrocity could be shown, like Hitler, to
possess an intent to exterminate every last member of an ethnic,
national or religious group."

While the Hitler-standard problem did help to undermine effective
responses by American officials and opinion-makers to various
post-World War II genocides, there were other dilemmas as well,
including the difficulty of believing reports of horrific slaughter.
Even in the face of extensive and graphic media coverage, Power writes,
"American policymakers, journalists and citizens are extremely slow to
muster the imagination needed to reckon with evil." In addition, there
is a tendency to assume, before the fact, that the would-be perpetrators
of genocide are rational actors who will not engage in horrific terror;
that traditional diplomacy can resolve the crisis; and that civilians
who keep a low profile during the conflict will survive. At the same
time, cold geopolitical calculations underlie official reactions, and
they often spin the violence as two-sided, a result of age-old hatreds
and thus inevitable, while arguing that any type of serious intervention
would be futile and even counterproductive. Thus, not only does
Washington abstain from sending troops but it also takes very few steps
along a continuum of potential interventions to deter genocide.

This nonresponse, Power demonstrates, is not something unique to the
presidencies of George Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton, who emerge looking
especially bad. It manifested itself to varying degrees in all the cases
she examines, beginning with the Ottoman Turks' slaughter of almost a
million Armenians in 1915. The United States under Woodrow
Wilson--despite being well informed of Turkey's crimes--did not support
the Allies' condemnation of Turkey's crimes against humanity, lest such
support undermine American neutrality. Disregarding the pleas of
Washington's ambassador, Henry Morgenthau, the Wilson Administration
refused even to issue a direct government-to-government appeal to cease
the killings or to pressure the Turkish authorities to allow
humanitarian aid deliveries to Armenians driven from their homes and on
the brink of starvation. For Power, Wilson's nonresponse "established
patterns that would be repeated."

But as Power illustrates, it was not simply that the United States did
nothing. Often Washington indirectly and directly aided the
genocidaires. In Cambodia, for example, the US bombing that
preceded Pol Pot's seizure of power "killed tens of thousands of
civilians." While horrific in its own right, "it also indirectly helped
give rise to a monstrous regime" responsible for the deaths of upwards
of an estimated 2 million Cambodians. And in the case of Iraq's
slaughter of the Kurds, the Reagan White House dismissed reports of
Saddam Hussein's gassings and other atrocities while maintaining aid to
his regime, preferring to maintain its unholy alliance with Iraq in its
war with Iran. The year after Saddam's forces decimated several thousand
Iraqi Kurdish villages and killed close to 100,000 Kurdish civilians
(1987-88), Washington, now under Bush Sr., actually doubled the
amount of agricultural credit it had been providing to Saddam's regime,
increasing it to more than $1 billion.

In other cases, the United States helped to undermine effective
international responses to genocide. Perhaps the most shameful case was
that involving the Clinton Administration during the 1994 slaughter in
Rwanda, which involved the killing of approximately 800,000 Tutsis and
moderate Hutus in the span of 100 days, making it the fastest, most
efficient killing spree of the twentieth century. Clinton, whom Power
inexplicably refers to as "a committed multilateralist," one with "faith
in the United Nations," did everything he could to avoid doing something
constructive. Throughout, and similar to their conduct through much of
the Serb-perpetrated atrocities in Bosnia, Administration officials
feigned ignorance of what was going on. US intelligence reports had
warned Washington of the likelihood of mass killings in Rwanda.
Nevertheless, Clinton refused Belgium's request to reinforce the small
UN peacekeeping mission to the country. And once the killing started,
the Administration denied almost until the end that genocide was taking
place, despite full knowledge to the contrary. To do otherwise would
have required that Washington take appropriate action. Instead, the
Administration insisted that UN peacekeepers withdraw from Rwanda and
then refused to authorize the deployment of a stronger UN force. It was
not until the Rwandan Patriotic Front had driven most of the
perpetrators out of the country and seized power in the capital that
Clinton ordered the closing of the Rwandan Embassy in Washington and the
seizure of its assets.

In her investigation, Power justifies her choice of case studies by two
key criteria: that each meets the terms of the 1948 genocide convention;
and that it presented the United States with the options for meaningful
diplomatic, economic, legal or military intervention. But as we shall
see, it is questionable whether all her cases satisfy the criteria.

In terms of the first, to suggest that what took place in Kosovo was a
genocide, or would have been had NATO not intervened, is a highly
contentious issue in the international legal and human rights community.
As for the Khmer Rouge, while they were guilty of killing large
percentages of the country's Muslim Chams, Vietnamese and Buddhist
monks, the bulk of their human targets were alleged political enemies.
In this regard, these killings would not form part of a genocide, at
least through the narrow criteria of the 1948 convention.

As Power explains, the architects of the genocide convention made the
explicit decision to exclude political groups--a move actively supported
by Lemkin. They did so in order to insure the support of many countries,
largely those of the Soviet bloc and some from Latin America as well,
that feared the inclusion of political groups would inhibit the ability
of states to suppress armed rebellions within their boundaries. It
appears that Lemkin was sympathetic to neither the underlying
assumptions nor the implications of such an argument but supported it
for pragmatic reasons--a position that Power seems to share. This might
explain why she has no problem including the horrors inflicted by the
Khmer Rouge under the general rubric of genocide. But given this more
flexible notion of what constitutes genocide, it begs the question of
why Power chose the cases she did in laying out her argument and ignored
other possible instances.

This question also relates to the second criterion for her choices,
namely that the United States had a variety of options available for
meaningful intervention. Here, Power is treading on even weaker ground
in some instances.

On Rwanda and Bosnia, Power makes her most convincing case that there
were concrete steps the United States could have taken that would have
had significant effects in lessening the bloodletting. In other
instances she examines, however, such as those of the Nazi and Khmer
Rouge holocausts, she is less convincing. Regarding Cambodia, for
example, she contends that the Khmer Rouge were less immune to outside
criticism than was claimed by American authorities. In this regard, she
argues that "bilateral denunciations by the United States may well have
had little effect on the Khmer Rouge's internal practices.
Unfortunately, because so few US officials spoke out publicly against
the genocide, we cannot know." In terms of the Nazis, Power appeals to
conventional wisdom and suggests that Washington could have done things
to prevent Hitler's crimes, but makes no serious effort to persuade the
reader or to engage the literature that has called such arguments into
question. As Peter Novick argues in his much-acclaimed The Holocaust
in American Life, the various ex post facto proposals for rescuing
Jews from Nazi clutches ignore what were very real constraints at the
time and often would have been of little practical use. Substantial
rescue efforts, Novick contends, would have had a marginal effect at
best. (Nevertheless, he asserts, it would have been worthwhile to carry
out the proposed actions; but they would have saved 1, or perhaps 2
percent at most, of those who died.)

Power applauds US action loudly in the case of Kosovo. Indeed, she
argues that hundreds of thousands of lives would have been lost had the
United States and its NATO allies not engaged in the bombing campaign
against the Serbs. She offers no substantiation for this claim. And, of
course, how could she? Perhaps the greatest weakness of the Kosovo
chapter, however, is that she does not engage any of the critiques put
forth by the likes of Noam Chomsky and other commentators--many writing
in this magazine--that there were alternatives to the NATO action, ones
that would have been consistent with international law and might have
actually lessened the killings and expulsions that increased
dramatically after the start of the bombing, to say nothing about its
effects on Serb civilians. At the very least, Power should have
presented and grappled with such arguments. Hardly anyone contends that
Milosevic & Co. were not capable and guilty of enormous brutality.
Indeed, Power graphically shows how Serb forces put this capacity to
horrific and massive use in Bosnia and the fatal consequences of the
failure of the West to acknowledge the bloodshed and respond
appropriately. In this regard, mass killings in Kosovo were arguably a
distinct possibility. But the question remains, Were there courses of
action other than that taken up by Washington and its NATO allies?

Power understandably feels outrage at international and, more
specifically, American inaction in the face of mass killing. With an
American audience in mind, she challenges the reader to do
something--whatever is in her power--to suppress and/or bring to justice
those responsible for the slaughter of innocents. She makes a compelling
case for a collective moral, as well as an international legal,
obligation for the US government to do so. But this also raises what is
perhaps the biggest problem with "A Problem From Hell": Even
though she acknowledges that the United States sometimes directly and
indirectly aids genocidal regimes, the overall effect of her examples
and the manner in which she frames the book is to situate Washington as
an outsider to such horrors. In the book's final pages, for example, she
asks, "Why does the United States stand so idly by?" In this sense,
Power's choice of cases is quite safe. Had she looked beyond the
parameters of the conventional and examined instances in which the
American role in mass slaughter has been less that of a bystander and
more that of a partner-in-crime perpetrator, her call for greater levels
of US intervention would seem at best unpersuasive and at worst
hypocritical and potentially dangerous. Three cases--those of Indonesia,
East Timor and Guatemala--illustrate this point.

Led by General Suharto, the Indonesian military and the civilian militia
that it armed and directed engaged in one of the worst bloodlettings of
the postwar era. Over the course of several months in 1965-66, they
slaughtered members of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) along with
members of loosely affiliated organizations (women's groups, labor
unions, etc.). While Indonesia's holocaust does not meet the strict
guidelines of the genocide convention, the scale and nature of the
killing spree were undoubtedly genocide-like, similar to the bulk of the
Khmer Rouge's crimes in Cambodia. Amnesty International estimated "many
more than 1 million killed." The head of the Indonesian state security
system approximated the toll at half a million, with another 750,000
jailed or sent to concentration camps. The American political
establishment welcomed the slaughter and the emergence of Suharto's New
Order, with Time hailing it as "the West's best news for years in
Asia."

The United States had effectively helped to lay the groundwork for the
military's seizure of power through its interference in Indonesian
affairs and support for the military over the years. Washington had also
long urged the military to move against the PKI. Accordingly, it
supplied weaponry and telecommunications equipment, as well as food and
other forms of aid, to the Indonesian Army in the early weeks of the
slaughter. The American embassy also provided the military with the
names of thousands of PKI cadres who were subsequently killed.

About ten years later, the Indonesian Frankenstein that Washington had
helped to create decided to invade Indonesia's tiny neighbor of East
Timor. Rather than just looking away, as Power incorrectly reports in
her one reference to East Timor, Washington aided and abetted an
international crime of aggression. While this has long been alleged, the
recent release of formerly classified documents by the Washington-based
National Security Archive now proves that then-President Gerald Ford and
Henry Kissinger, his foreign policy czar, gave Suharto the green light
for the December 7, 1975, invasion while meeting with him the previous
day. Over the following quarter-century, various US administrations
provided billions of dollars in weaponry, military training and economic
assistance to Jakarta during its more than two decades of occupation.
And in the early years of the slaughter, a time described by an
Australian government body as "indiscriminate killing on a scale
unprecedented in post-World War II history," Washington took
concerted steps to insure that the UN did not take effective action to
end Indonesia's annexation. The result was the death of well over
200,000 East Timorese, about one-third of the preinvasion population.

And, finally, Guatemala. There, more than 200,000, most of them
indigenous Mayans, lost their lives in the context of a brutal conflict
between a US-backed military oligarchy and a guerrilla force during the
1970s and '80s. The 1999 report of the internationally supported
Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification concluded that the
state was responsible for over 90 percent of the deaths and had
committed "acts of genocide." The commission also found that American
training of members of Guatemala's intelligence apparatus and officer
corps in counterinsurgency "had significant bearing on human rights
violations."

Because Samantha Power excludes cases like these from her analysis, she
seems to have little problem endorsing American global dominance and, on
the basis of such, calling for the United States to take the lead in
battling genocide. At the very end of an excellent chapter on the grisly
slaughter by Bosnian Serbs at Srebrenica, for example, Power lets
Senator Bob Dole explain why the United States finally became involved
in helping to end the terror in Bosnia. "Because we happen to be the
leader of the world," Dole stated.

Clearly there is a problem with Washington taking the lead in fighting
something it has helped to perpetrate on numerous occasions, and for
which it has never atoned, apart from a halfhearted admission of
wrongdoing (but not an apology, by Clinton in the case of Guatemala).

Simply because the United States has been complicit in gross atrocities
in the past does not mean, of course, that it is therefore incapable of
doing good, if even for the wrong reasons. But it does mean that we
should remain extremely skeptical of American leadership on the global
stage. As the current Palestinian-Israeli conflict painfully
demonstrates, what Washington calls American leadership is, as often as
not, unilateralist, bullying, obstructionist. All of these manifest
themselves in Washington's acceptance of Israel's flouting of
international law regarding its ongoing occupation and dispossession of
the Palestinian people. The United States has long been a principal
obstacle to an internationally acceptable solution, and it has done what
it can to prevent a multilateral approach to resolving the conflict.
Such antipathy toward international law and political institutions means
that "genocide prevention" could turn out to be just another instrument
in Washington's empire-maintenance tool kit.

If one of the main objectives of Power's book is to get the United
States to take a more active role in ending mass slaughter, surely it
would seem to be more efficacious--as well as principled--to begin by
scrutinizing cases in which the United States has been directly
involved. In this regard, her appeal to the American political
establishment on the basis of morality and enlightened self-interest
(genocide, she argues, causes regional and international instability,
something bad for the United States) is ill conceived. Ending
Washington's role in the slaughter of innocents requires struggling
against American militarism and unilateralism, as well as against
Washington's refusal to submit to international security and legal
mechanisms that would have even a remote possibility of holding US
officials accountable. The US refusal to sign on to the recently
established International Criminal Court and to cooperate with efforts
by a number of countries to question Henry Kissinger regarding various
international crimes is merely the latest manifestation of such
obstructionism.

This is not to suggest that if we could get the American house in order,
the world would be fine. As Power's book shows, there are plenty of
"evildoers" to go around. Something must be done to stop them, yes, but
it should be a truly international project. The best place to start is
at home, but not by first and foremost asking Washington to intercede
abroad. Demanding a US foreign policy consistent with international law
and human rights standards, as well as international accountability for
American officials who may have engaged in war crimes and crimes against
humanity, is the first step. Doing so will also increase the likelihood
of international cooperation in cases championed by Washington.

Finally, it is not obvious why mass killing that falls under the rubric
of genocide should be paramount in terms of international prevention and
adjudication. Power does not claim this explicitly, but it is a fair
conclusion to draw given that she does not discuss other terrible crimes
against humanity that result in massive loss of life. Why, for example,
should Serbian crimes in Bosnia be more worthy of scrutiny and demands
for accountability than, say, the US war against Vietnam, which caused
the deaths of 2-3 million civilians? In this regard, we must be
careful that the need to suppress and seek justice for genocide does not
prevent us from seeing all mass killings of civilians, no matter who
commits them, as unacceptable, and from acting accordingly.

The Bush Administration, urged by the oil industry, has embraced a corrupt regime.