 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
||||||
|
|
Samantha Power After Hutu militant forces begin massacring Tutsi
after the death of Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana in 1994,
a Hutu mother decides to leave her Tutsi husband to save her 11
children, who, as Tutsis, are in grave danger. The authorities promise
her that her children will be spared if they accompany her. But
when the woman steps out of the house, she watches Hutu militants
wielding machetes butcher 8 of her 11 children. She then watches
as her three-year-old pleads for his life, crying out, “I’ll
never be a Tutsi again.” But the soldiers kill him too. In “A Problem from Hell,” America and
the Age of Genocide, Samantha Power, executive director of the
Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, draws
from numerous declassified documents and exclusive interviews to
reconstruct U.S. responses to the major genocides of the last century.
The acts of mass murder — performed in the name of ethnic cleansing
and self-preservation — stagger the imagination. Early in the
century, 1 million Armenians are slaughtered or die of disease at
the hands of the Turks. Between 1939 and 1945, German Nazis kill
6 million Jews and 5 million Poles, Communists, Roma, and other
undesirables. Between 1975 and 1979, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge
kills 2 million Cambodians, and from 1987 to 1988, Saddam Hussein
oversees the murder by firing squad and chemical weapons attack
of 100,000 Iraqi Kurds. In just 100 days in 1994, 800,000 Rwandan
Tutsis are killed, and between 1992 and 1995, Serbs eradicate 200,000
Bosnians. Power, who covered the former Yugoslavia as a reporter
in the early to mid-1990s, interviewed hundreds of victims, perpetrators,
and bystanders and pored over thousands of pages of declassified
documents to understand how the United States stood by while these
acts of barbarism occurred. What she found was that U.S. policy
responses to genocide were “astonishingly similar across time,
geography, ideology, and geographic balance.”Administration
after administration, she writes, were highly inventive in excusing
their noninvolvement. Imperfect information, civil war, ancient
rivalries, state sovereignty were all used to explain away the barbarous
acts and to justify why the United States should not interfere. Power brings to life the stories of indivduals throughout
the 20th century who fought against disbelief and indifference to
expose the human costs of denial. Henry Morgenthau, Sr., ambassador
to the Ottoman Empire under President Woodrow Wilson, begged for
U.S. diplomatic intervention to stop the “race murder”
of the Armenians. Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew and international
lawyer whose family perished in the Holocaust, worked for decades
to secure U.S. ratification of a treaty outlawing genocide, a word
he had coined. After Lemkin’s death, U.S. Senator William Proxmire
of Wisconsin took up his cause, beginning in 1967 to speak before
the Senate (he spoke a total of 3,211 times) for passage of the
treaty, and not stopping until 1986 when the U.S. ratified the UN
genocide convention. There was also Canadian Major-General Romeo
Dallaire, commander of the UN peacekeeping forces in Rwanda, who
grew increasing despondent as his pleas for support went unheard. “Before I began exploring America’s relationship
with genocide,” writes Power in the preface to her book, “I
used to refer to U.S. policy toward Bosnia as a ‘failure.’
A Big Puzzle “If you asked
someone in the abstract, what would you do if 8,000 people a day
were being murdered, the answer would not be ‘I would delegate’,
or ‘I would tell myself a story that what was happening was
not genocide,’ or ‘I would defer to the United Nations,’
an institution that is really only the sum of its members and is
incapable of responding on its own,” Power says. The 516-page book,
which Power began in 1996 and examines each of the major 20th-century
genocides, was like a big puzzle, she says. Each case had its own
little mystery. Each one had its own separate context. In Cambodia,
for example, to ask the question, how could it happen, says Power,
and not take the Vietnam War into account would be a big mistake.
She wanted to make sure, she says, not to bring faulty, anachronistic
expectations to the cases. Despite the horrors that “A Problem from Hell” reveals, Power says she is not without hope. “There are extraordinary human rights advocates out there. You are inspired by the people who take a stand. It’s shocking that we’ve done nothing, but it’s also shocking that so many people have done something. I see hope that there were more resignations from the State Department over Bosnia than there were over Vietnam. People take signs of omission seriously, and again and again at least some Americans have been willing to put their careers and lives on the line.”
Pippa Norris As Samuel Morse’s electric telegraph, Alexander
Graham Bell’s telephone, and Gugielmo Marconi’s wireless
radio generated exaggerated hopes about the ability of machines
to transform society and democracy, so too does the Internet today.
How can we determine the effect of the Internet on the way we relate
to our governments in the years ahead? Will the spread of Internet
technology spread democracy to the four corners of the globe? Or
will the advent of this new technology merely serve to deepen the
gulf between the haves and the have-nots? In Kennedy School Lecturer Pippa Norris’s recent
book called Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty,
and the Internet Worldwide, she reveals the results of her extensive
research of Internet use and access in 179 nations around the world.
Divided into three distinct parts, this book focuses on the theoretical
debate between cyber-optimists, examines the virtual political system
and the way that representative institutions around the world have
responded to the new opportunities available on the Internet, and
analyzes public reaction to these developments in the United States
and Western Europe, while developing the civic engagement model
to explain patterns of participation via the Internet. She asks how we can strike a balance between the fears
of the luddites and the visions of the technophiles. “Yet it
remains difficult,” says Norris “to silence the voice
of the skeptical devil on our left, muttering warnings to mistrust
glib promises of easy shortcuts for solving intractable social inequalities
and civic ills.”
One Scandalous Story Marvin Kalb In 1963, as a correspondent for CBS News, Marvin Kalb
saw something he was not meant to see: Secret Service agents whisking
a beautiful woman into the elevator of the New York hotel where
President John F. Kennedy was staying. Instead of rushing back to
CBS with the scoop, he did nothing; at the time, such incidents
were simply not considered newsworthy, recalls Kalb, now executive
director of the Washington office of the Shorenstein Center on the
Press, Politics and Public Policy. Thirty-five years later, another president’s
indiscretions would be handled quite differently. In One Scandalous
Story: Clinton, Lewinsky, & 13 Days That Tarnished American
Journalism, Kalb offers a story-behind-the-story look at how
the media reacted when presented with the tempting fruit of “an
X-rated presidential sex scandal.” Zeroing in on the period
of January 13 to 25, 1998, his account gives readers a frame-by-frame
picture of the reporting on Clinton’s affair with a young White
House intern, from the earliest rumblings of Whitewater and Paula
Jones to a 24-hour “mediathon” and open speculation on
the possibility of impeachment. Kalb examines how new technology — namely, the
Internet — affected how the story broke. Newsweek reporter
Michael Isikoff was first on the scent of a story, but when his
editors decided to delay publication in favor of uncovering more
substantive information, Isikoff’s sources turned to a gossipy
Web site called the Drudge Report to get out their story. Although
Newsweek in this case maintained its editorial values, Kalb notes
that the competitive pressure resulting from a story being “out
there” — no matter how shaky its sources — can erode
journalism’s standards of professional conduct as media outlets
race to take part in the feeding frenzy. While the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal is a fascinating
case study, Kalb emphasizes that it cannot be held entirely responsible
for the changes in American journalism. “Watergate,” he
writes, “fostered a climate of skepticism and cynicism about
the political process, affecting not only the public but the press.”
The relationship between reporters and politicians became more adversarial
and less objective as each side lost respect for the other. By the
time Bill Clinton became president, “Everything was considered
fair game, from the trivial to the towering, from underwear to impeachment.” Despite this enmity, the line between reporters and
their subjects has blurred as former government officials join the
growing ranks of columnists, correspondents, and talking heads.
Once considered a low-profile profession, journalists, Kalb observes,
“have become both the observers and the observed, emerging
as instantly recognizable celebrities.” The growing pressures of a profit-driven economy has
taken its toll on quality as well, with the 1996 Telecommunications
Act accelerating the trend toward mergers responsible for media
Goliaths such as AOL/Time Warner. “In this brave new world,
NBC has begun to manufacture news in much the same way that GE manufactures
light bulbs,” writes Kalb. As a result of this transformation
of news into a “profit center,” many venerable media institutions
made questionable decisions in their reporting on “Monicagate,”
relying on secondhand information and televising essentially newsless
bulletins for the sake of keeping up with competitors. “The incentives in the news business, as currently
arranged, run in the direction of a further maximization of corporate
profits and minimization of interest in
Truth v. Justice Edited by Robert I. Rotberg and Dennis Thompson PhD
Public Policy 1968 What is the purpose of truth commissions? Is it to
mete out justice to victims? Is it to recognize what the guilty
have done? Truth v. Justice, a compilation of articles that wrestles
with the morality and ethics of truth commissions, focuses mainly
on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa.
According to the authors, the TRC, the most well-known group responsible
for searching for truth and justice after years of atrocity, serves
as a model against which future truth commissions will be measured. The current conditions in Bosnia, Cambodia, Palestine,
and East Timor reveal that there are many areas of the world where
truth commissions might have a valuable role in looking at the past,
examining what took place, and determining how to say “Never
again!” to repressive or strife-ridden regimes. The authors
of Truth v. Justice look at how truth commissions can be
structured to confront injustices, and they decide that restorative
justice — justice that rehabilitates perpetrators and victims
and (re)establishes relationships based on equal concern and respect
— provides positive gains. Alex Boraine, deputy chairperson of the South African
TRC and a contributor to this book, believes that providing a forum
for people to seek the truth “made it possible to contemplate
restoring the nation’s moral order.” Boraine supports
the idea that deeply divided societies cannot rely on punishment
to heal and reconcile their several communities. Far from all singing the same tune, the contributors
to this book — who include South African TRC participants,
respected academics, and a human rights lawyer — weigh the
virtues and failings of truth commissions. They examine, among other
issues, the use of reparations as social policy and the granting
of amnesty for This book is about both truth commissions as a genre
and the practice of “truth commissioning” as performed
specifically in South Africa. Rotberg believes that the South African
commission’s mandate and procedures will become the starting
point for all future truth commissions.
Governance and Politics of China Tony Saich Contemporary China is a country of multiple realities,
where the seemingly contradictory forces of political power, popular
religion, and private capital thrive in the course of everyday life.
But what are the historical factors contributing to this condition,
and how does the world’s most populous nation function on a
day-to-day basis? In Governance and Politics of China, Tony
Saich, professor of international affairs, explores the country’s
past, present, and future, tracing the social, economic, and political
shifts that have occurred since 1949, the year Mao Zedong established
the People’s Republic of China. In his examination of modern Chinese political history,
the makeup of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and the intricacies
of state and local government, Saich reveals a country of stunning
complexity and diversity. With 55 “official” minorities
(and hundreds more unrecognized groups), dozens of dialects, and
numerous religious movements (including the persecuted Falungong),
an understanding of China today must begin by encompassing a dizzying
confluence of cultures. Saich, who has traveled extensively throughout the
country, guides the reader through these fascinating subtleties,
using revealing anecdotes from the field while also offering a solid
grounding in China’s economic, social, and foreign policies.
The common themes of his analysis include the success of China’s
economic reform program, its lagging social policy, and the ongoing
lack of government accountability. “The CCP still rules as
an autocratic elite often out of touch with the consequences of
its own economic policies,” he writes. “As good Marxists
they should recognize that substantive change in the economic base
must impact on the political superstructure.” This tension between the state and its citizens is
explored further in a section on political participation and protest,
as Saich traces the phenomenon of enforced mass participation under
Mao to the student protests in Tiananmen Square to the growing popularity
of nongovernmental social service organizations. The frequency of
open protest in China has increased over the last 20 years, he notes;
as in other authoritarian regimes, writers and other intellectuals
have created a public discourse outside the party’s accepted
linguistic phrases. “With faith in the orthodox eroded and
alternatives presented, protest becomes more acceptable,” Saich
observes. In considering China’s future, Saich outlines the issues it faces in the 21st century, including environmental damage caused by years of exploitive policies, internal party corruption, and the difficulty of managing revolutionary information technologies such as the Internet. The CCP’s foremost challenge, however, will be to embrace political reform. Doing so could actually solidify the legitimacy of the party’s rule, provide a more stable economic environment, and mediate social unrest. As the pressures of globalization increase and China’s outdated political mechanisms become less effective, an open, more accountable system of governance will offer the strongest foundation for a country that continues to seek its place in the international community, Saich concludes.
|
||||||
