“A Problem from Hell”
America and the Age of Genocide
Samantha Power
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction 2003
Winner of Robert F. Kennedy Book Award 2003
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Non-fiction
Winner of the National Magazine Award for her Atlantic Monthly article “Bystanders to Genocide”
Winner of the Raphael Lemkin Award (Institute for the Study of Genocide)
Winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for the Best Book on American Political or Social Concern That Exemplifies Literary Grace and Commitment to Serious Research
Short-listed for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for the Best Book in Current Interest
Short-listed for the Arthur Ross Book Award for the Best Book in International Affairs (Council on Foreign Relations)
Short-listed for the Lionel Gelber Prize for the Best Book in International Relations (Munk Center for International Studies, Canada)
Winner of the National Magazine Award for her New Yorker article “Dying in Darfur”
Table of Contents
Chapter 2 “A Crime Without a Name”
Chapter 3 The Crime With a Name
Chapter 5 “A Most Lethal Pair of Foes”
Chapter 6 Cambodia: “Helpless Giant”
Chapter 7 Speaking Loudly and Looking for a Stick
Chapter 8 Iraq: “Human Rights and Chemical Weapons Use Aside”
Chapter 9 Bosnia: “No More than Witnesses at a Funeral”
Chapter 10 Rwanda: “Mostly in a Listening Mode”
Chapter 11 Srebrenica:“Getting Creamed”
Chapter 12 Kosovo: A Dog and a Fight
Chapter 13 Lemkin’s Courtroom Legacy
A Conversation with Samantha Power
The Void: Why the Movement Needs Help
“Why Can’t We?” – A Commencement Address
Trial by Fire
On March 14, 1921, on a damp day in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin, a twenty-four-year-old Armenian crept up behind a man in a heavy gray overcoat swinging his cane. The Armenian, Soghomon Tehlirian, placed a revolver at the back of the man’s head and pulled the trigger, shouting, “This is to avenge the death of my family!” The burly target crumpled. If you had heard the shot and spotted the rage distorting the face of the young offender, you might have suspected that you were witnessing a murder to avenge a very different kind of crime. But back then you would not have known to call the crime in question “genocide.” The word did not yet exist.
Tehlirian, the Armenian assassin, was quickly tackled. As pedestrians beat him with their fists and house keys,he shouted in broken German, “I foreigner, he foreigner, this not hurt Germany…It’s nothing to do with you.”1 It was national justice carried out in an international setting. Tehlirian had just murdered Mehmed Talaat, the former Turkish interior minister who had set out to rid Turkey of its Armenian “problem.” In 1915 Talaat had presided over the killing by firing squad, bayoneting, bludgeoning, and starvation of nearly 1 million Armenians.2
The outside world had known that the Armenians were at grave risk well before Talaat and the Young Turk leadership ordered their deportation. When Turkey entered World War I on the side of Germany against Britain, France, and Russia, Talaat made it clear that the empire would target its Christian subjects. In January 1915, in remarks reported by the New York Times, Talaat said that there was no room for Christians