Haiti and holocausts

No one wants to say the truth: we have willingly let thousands, if not millions of people die at the hand of their governments because we don't care enough. We don't care enough about the individuals who are being murdered by their government. We didn't care enough to galvanise mass action to stop the killing in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur.

Those people, over there, in those countries, are victims of some inexplicable force far removed from our daily lives. It is their countries, their governments, their problem. Not ours. And so down comes the veil that separates us forever from the Anne Franks of this world, the children who need our, however imperfect, efforts to save them.

I would be remiss in suggesting that America did nothing to help the victims of the Armenian Genocide. There was the ever-persistent voice of US Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, and more than 250 articles in the New York Times. There were the eyewitness accounts of many foreigners in Turkey, the equivalent of today's NGOs, who reported on what they saw. And there were the copious diplomatic dispatches of Turkey's foes and allies alike. There were even the actions of some ordinary Turkish people who tried to help their fellow citizens who were the target of mass murder. All of this was a form of intervention - but it was not enough.

A law professor, citing the case of the Armenian genocide, once told his students, there was no international law to stop a mass murderer killing every citizen of his country. "A farmer has his chickens," he said. "It's his right to kill them. That is sovereign law - we cannot intervene." One of his students did not agree. "I object," he said. "On what grounds?" asked the professor. "The Armenians are not chickens." The student was Raphael Lemkin, who later coined the word "genocide" and was the force behind the 1948 UN Genocide Convention.

There was a scary moment right after the earthquake in Haiti. One of the major cable news networks in the US decided that covering the earthquake was, in fact, a vote of support for President Obama. And so, while the other cable channels were scrambling to get the news out 24-7, this news channel decided the death of what, at that early stage, looked to be close to half a million people, did not merit serious attention. The news vacuum lasted maybe two days. What were they waiting for, I wondered? The voice of the "people"? To say … what? "Do a whip-around somewhere else - we are suffering far too much here in America to care about those people." Instead, something else happened. People were walking around, talking to their friends and neighbours, saying the same thing, "Isn't it terrible? Those poor families, those poor people." Instead of indifference there was "What can we do?" And so, in that crucial space of time, where the critical mass of public opinion could go either way, the balance tipped in favour of action. The power was unleashed.

I won't easily forget those two days of silence. Because if the cynics had succeeded with turning their backs on Haiti - a natural disaster of almost biblical proportions - what hope for that most horrible of disasters - genocide? That silence has lasted years, decades - that silence has been deafening.