The Power of Human Rights

 

Samantha Power, The Education of an Idealist:

A Memoir 

By almost any measure, Samantha Power should be considered an extraordinary American success story. An immigrant from Ireland who fled the Emerald Isle with her mother and brother at a young age to escape a turbulent family situation, Power earned degrees from Yale University and Harvard Law School, rose to prominence in her mid-20s as a journalist covering civil wars and ethnic cleaning in Bosnia and the Balkans, won a Pulitzer Prize for a book on 20^th century genocides, and helped found the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where she served as its executive director — all before age 35.  Then she met an ambitious junior Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, and her career really took off.

Between 2009 and 2017, Power served in the Obama administration almost continually, first on the National Security Council and subsequently as Ambassador to the United Nations.  In both capacities, she became the administration’s most outspoken and influential voice for prioritizing human rights, arguing regularly for targeted United States and multi-lateral interventions to protect individuals from human rights abuses and mass atrocities, perpetrated in most cases by their own governments.  In what amounts to an autobiography, The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir, Power guides her readers through  the major foreign policy crises of the Obama administration.

Her life story, Power tells her readers at the outset, is one of idealism, “where it comes from, how it gets challenged, and why it must endure” (p.xii).  She is quick to emphasize that hers is not a story of how a person with “lofty dreams” about making a difference in the world came to be “’educated’ by the “brutish forces” (p.xii) she encountered throughout her professional career.  So what then is the nature of the idealist’s “education” that provides the title to her memoir?  The short answer probably lies in how Power learned to make her idealistic message on human rights both heard and effective within the complex bureaucratic structures of the United States government and the United Nations.

But Power almost invariably couples this idealistic message with the view that the promotion and protection of human rights across the globe is in the United States’ own national security interests; and that the United States can often advance those interests most effectively by working multi-laterally, through international organizations and with like-minded states.  The United States, by virtue of its multi-faceted strengths – economic, military and cultural – is in a unique position to influence the actions of other states, from its traditional allies all the way to those that inflict atrocities upon their citizens.

Power acknowledges that the United States has not always used its strength as a positive force for human rights and human betterment – one immediate example is the 2003 Iraq invasion, which she opposed. Nevertheless, the United States retains a reservoir of credibility sufficient to be effective on human rights matters when it choses to do so.   Although Power is sometimes labeled a foreign policy “hawk,” she recoils from that adjective.  To Power, the military is among the last of the tools that should be considered to advance America’s interests around the world.

Into this policy-rich discussion, Power weaves much detail about her personal life, beginning with her early years in Ireland,  the incompatibilities between her parents that prompted her mother to take her and her brother to the United States when she was nine, and her efforts as a schoolgirl to become American in the full sense of the term. After numerous failed romances, she finally met Mr. Right, her husband, Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein (who also served briefly in the Obama administration). The marriage gave rise to a boy and a girl with lovely Irish names, Declan and Rían, both born while Power was in government.  With much emphasis upon her parents, husband, children and family life, the memoir is also a case study of how professional women balance the exacting demands of high-level jobs with the formidable responsibilities attached to being a parent and spouse.  It’s a tough balancing act for any parent, but especially for women, and Power admits that she did not always strike the right balance.

Memoirs by political and public figures are frequently attempts to write one’s biography before someone else does, and Power’s whopping 550-page work seems to fit this rule.  But Power provides much candor  – a willingness to admit to mistakes and share vulnerabilities – that is often missing in political memoirs. Refreshingly, she also abstains from serious score settling.  Most striking for me is the nostalgia that pervades the memoir.  Power takes her readers down memory lane, depicting a now by-gone time when the United States cared about human rights and believed in bi- and multi-lateral cooperation to accomplish its goals in its dealings with the rest of the world – a time that sure seems long ago.

* * *

Samantha Jane Power was born in 1970 to Irish parents, Vera Delaney, a doctor, and Jim Power, a part-time dentist.  She spent her early years in Dublin, in a tense family environment where, she can see now, her parents’ marriage was coming unraveled.  Her father put in far more time at Hartigan’s, a local pub in the neighborhood where he was known for his musical skills and “holding court,” than he did at his dentist’s office.  Although young Samantha didn’t recognize it at the time, her father had a serious alcohol problem, serious enough to lead her mother to escape by immigrating to the United States with the couple’s two children, Samantha, then age nine, and her brother Stephen, two years younger. They settled in Pittsburgh, where Samantha at a young age set about to become American, as she dropped her Irish accent, tried to learn the intricacies of American sports, and became a fervent Pittsburgh Pirates fan.

But the two children were required under the terms of their parents’ custody agreement to spend time with her father back in Ireland. On her trip back at Christmas 1979, Samantha’s father informed the nine-year old that he intended to keep her and her brother with him.  When her mother, who was staying nearby, showed up to object and collect her children to return to the United States, a parental confrontation ensued which would traumatize Samantha for decades.  The nine year old found herself caught between the conflicting commands of her two parents and, in a split second decision, left with her mother and returned to the Pittsburgh. She never again saw her father.

When her father died unexpectedly five years later, at age 47 of alcohol-related complications, Samantha, then in high school, blamed herself for her father’s death and carried a sense of guilt with her well into her adult years. It was not until she was thirty-five, after many therapy sessions, that she came to accept that she had not been responsible for her father’s death.  Then, a few years later, she made the mistake of returning to Hartigan’s, where she encountered the bar lady who had worked there in her father’s time.   Mostly out of curiosity, Power asked her why, given that so many people drank so much at Hartigan’s, her father had been the only one who died. The bar lady’s answer was matter-of-fact: “Because you left” (p.192) — not what Power needed to hear.

Power had by then already acquired a public persona as a human rights advocate through her work as a journalist in the 1990s in Bosnia, where she called attention to the ethnic cleansing that was sweeping the country in the aftermath of the collapse of the former Yugoslavia.  Power ended up writing for a number of major publications, including The Economist, the New Republic and the Washington Post.   She was among the first to report on the fall of Srebrenica in July 1995, the largest single massacre in Europe since World War II, in which around 10,000 Muslim men and boy were taken prisoner and “seemed to have simply vanished” (p.102). Although the United States and its NATO allies had imposed a no-fly zone over Bosnia, Power hoped the Clinton administration would commit to employing ground troops to prevent further atrocities. But she did not yet enjoy the clout to have a real chance at making her case directly with the administration.

Power wrote a chronology of the conflict, Breakdown in the Balkans, which was later put into book form and attracted attention from think tanks, and the diplomatic, policy and media communities.  Attracting even more attention was  A Problem for Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, her book exploring  American reluctance to take action in the face of 20th century mass atrocities and genocides.  The book appeared in 2002, and won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.  It also provided Power with her inroad to Senator Barack Obama.

At the recommendation of a politically well-connected friend, in late 2004 Power sent a copy of the book to the recently elected Illinois Senator who had inspired the Democratic National Convention that summer with an electrifying keynote address.  Obama’s office scheduled a dinner for her with the Senator which was supposed to last 45 minutes.  The dinner went on for four hours as the two exchanged ideas about America’s place in the world and how, why and when it should advance human rights as a component of its foreign policy.  Although Obama considered Power to be primarily an academic, he offered her a position on his Senate staff, where she started working late in 2005.

Obama and Power would then be linked professionally more or less continually until the end of the Obama presidency in January 2017.   Once Obama enters the memoir, at about the one-third point, it becomes as much his story as hers. The two did not always see the world and specific world problems in the same way, but it’s clear that Obama had great appreciation both for Power’s intelligence and her intensity. He was a man who enjoyed being challenged intellectually, and plainly valued the human rights perspective that Power brought to their policy discussions even if he wasn’t prepared to push as far as Power advocated.

After Obama threw his hat in the ring for the 2008 Democratic Party nomination, Power became one of his primary foreign policy advisors and, more generally, a political operative. It was not a role that fit Power comfortably and it threatened to be short-lived.  In the heat of the primary campaign, with Obama and Hilary Clinton facing off in a vigorously contested battle for their party’s nomination, Power was quoted in an obscure British publication, the Scotsman, as describing Clinton as a “monster.” The right-wing Drudge Report picked up the quotation, whose accuracy Power does not contest, and suddenly Power found herself on the front page of major newspapers, the subject of a story she did not want.  Obama’s closest advisors were of the view that she would have to resign from the campaign.  But the candidate himself, who loved sports metaphors, told Power only that she would have to spend some time in the “penalty box” (p.187).  Obama’s relatively soft reaction was an indication of the potential he saw in her and his assessment of her prospective value to him if successful in the primaries and the general election.

Power’s time in the penalty box had expired when Obama, having defeated Clinton for his party’s nomination, won a resounding victory in the general election in November 2008.  Obama badly wanted Power on his team in some capacity, and the transition team placed her on the President’s National Security Council as principal deputy for international organizations, especially the United Nations.  But she was also able to carve out a concurrent position for herself as the President’s Senior Director for Human Rights.   In this portion of the memoir, Power describes learning the jargon and often-arcane skills needed to be effective on the council and within the vast foreign policy bureaucracy of the United States government.  Being solely responsibility for human rights, Power found that she had some leeway in deciding which issues to concentrate on and bring to the attention of the full Council.  Her mentor Richard Holbrook advised her that she could be most effective on subjects for which there was limited United States interest – pick “small fights,” Holbrook advised.

Power had a hand in a string of “small victories” while on the National Security Council: coaxing the United States to rejoin a number of UN agencies from which the Bush Administration had walked away; convincing President Obama to raise his voice over atrocities perpetrated by governments in Sri Lanka and Sudan against their own citizens; being appointed White House coordinator for Iraqi refugees; helping create an inter-agency board to coordinate the United States government’s response to war crimes and atrocities; and encouraging increased emphasis upon lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender issues (LGBT) overseas.  In pursuit of the latter, Obama delivered an address at the UN General Assembly on LGBT rights, and thereafter issued a Presidential Memorandum directing all US agencies to consider LGBT issues explicitly in crafting overseas assistance (disclosure: while with the Department of Justice, I served on the department’s portion of the inter-agency Atrocity Prevention Board, and represented the department in inter-agency coordination on the President’s LGBT memorandum; I never met Power in either capacity).

But the Arab Spring that erupted in late 2010 and early 2011 presented  anything but small issues and resulted in few victories for the Obama administration.  A “cascade of revolts that would reorder huge swaths of the Arab world,” the Arab Spring ended up “impacting the course of Obama’s presidency more than any other geopolitical development during his eight years in office” (p.288), Power writes, and the same could be said for Power’s time in government.  Power was among those at the National Security Council who pushed successfully for United States military intervention in Libya to protect Libyan citizens from the predations of their leader, Muammar Qaddafi.

The intervention, backed by a United Nations Security Council resolution and led jointly by the United States, France and Jordan, saved civilian lives and contributed to Qaddafi’s ouster and death.  ButPresident Obama was determined to avoid a longer-term and more open-ended United States commitment, and the mission stopped short of the follow-up needed to bring stability to the country.  With civil war in various guises continuing to this day, Power suggests that the outcome might have been different had the United States continued its engagement in the aftermath of Qaddafi’s death.

Shortly after Power became US Ambassador to the United Nations, the volatile issue of an American military commitment arose again, this time in Syria in August 2013, when proof came irrefutably to light that Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad was using chemical weapons in his effort to suppress uprisings within the country.  The revelations came 13 months after Obama had asserted that use of such weapons would constitute a “red line” that would move him to intervene militarily in Syria.  Power favored targeted US air strikes within Syria.

Obama came excruciatingly close to approving such strikes.  He not only concluded that the “costs of not responding forcefully were greater than the risks of taking military action” (p.369), but was prepared to act without UN Security Council authorization, given the certainty of  a Russian veto of any Security Council resolution for concerted action.   With elevated stakes for “upholding the international norm against the use of chemical weapons” Power writes, Obama was “prepared to operate with what White House lawyers called a ‘traditionally recognized legal basis under international law’” (p.369).

But almost overnight, Obama decided that he needed prior Congressional authorization for a military strike in Syria, a decision taken seemingly with little effort to ascertain whether there was sufficient support in Congress for such a strike.  With neither the Congress nor the American public supporting military action within Syria to save civilian lives, Obama backed down.  On no other issue did Power see Obama as torn as he was on Syria,  “convinced that even limited military action would mire the United States in another open-ended conflict, yet wracked by the human toll of the slaughter.  I don’t believe he ever stopped interrogating his choices” (p.508).

Looking back at that decision with the passage of more than five years, Power’s disappointment remains palpable.  The consequences of inaction in Syria, she maintains, went:

beyond unfathomable levels of death, destruction, and displacement. The spillover of the conflict into neighboring countries through massive refugee flows and the spread of ISIS’s ideology has created dangers for people in many parts of the world. . . [T]hose of us involved in helping devise Syria policy will forever carry regret over our inability to do more to stem the crisis.  And we know the consequences of the policies we did choose. For generations to come, the Syrian people and the wide world will be living with the horrific aftermath of the most diabolical atrocities carried out since the Rwanda genocide (p.513-14).

But if incomplete action in Libya and inaction in Syria constitute major disappointments for Power, she considers exemplary the response of both the United States and the United Nations to the July 2014 outbreak of the Ebola virus that occurred in three West African countries, Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.  United States experts initially foresaw more than one million infections of the deadly and contagious disease by the end of 2015.  The United States devised its own plan to send supplies, doctors and nurses to the region to facilitate the training of local health workers to care for Ebola patients, along with 3,000 military personnel to assist with on-the-ground logistics.  Power was able to talk President Obama out of a travel ban to the United States from the three impacted countries, a measure favored not only by Donald Trump, then contemplating an improbable run for the presidency, but also by many members of the President’s own party.

At the United Nations, Power was charged with marshaling global assistance.   She convinced 134 fellow Ambassadors to co-sponsor a Security Council resolution declaring the Ebola outbreak a public health threat to international peace and security, the largest number of co-sponsors for any Security Council resolution in UN history and the first ever directed to a public health crisis.  Thereafter, UN Member States committed $4 billion in supplies, facilities and medical treatments.  The surge of international resources that followed meant that the three West African countries “got what they needed to conquer Ebola” (p.455).  At different times in 2015, each of the countries was declared Ebola-free.

The most deadly and dangerous Ebola outbreak in history was contained, Power observes, above all because of the “heroic efforts of the people and governments of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone” (p.456). But America’s involvement was also crucial.  President Obama provided what she describes as an “awesome demonstration of US leadership and capability – and a vivid example of how a country advances its values and interests at once” (p.438).  But the multi-national, collective success further illustrated “why the world needed the United Nations, because no one country – even one as powerful as the United States – could have slayed the epidemic on its own” (p.457).

Although Russia supported the UN Ebola intervention, Power more often found herself in an adversarial posture with Russia on both geo-political and UN administrative issues.  Yet, she used creative  diplomatic skills to develop a more nuanced relationship with her Russian counterpart, Vitaly Churkin.  Cherkin, a talented negotiator and master of the art of strategically storming out of meetings, valued US-Russia cooperation and often “pushed for compromises that Moscow was disinclined to make” (p.405).  Over time, Power writes, she and Churkin “developed something resembling genuine friendship” (p.406). But “I also spent much of my time at the UN in pitched, public battle with him” (p.408).

The most heated of these battles ensued after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2014, a flagrant violation of international law. Later that year, troops associated with Russia shot down a Malaysian passenger jet, killing all passengers aboard.  In the UN debates on Ukraine, Power found her Russian counterpart “defending the indefensible, repeating lines sent by Moscow that he was too intelligent to believe and speaking in binary terms that belied his nuanced grasp of what was actually happening” (p.426). Yet, Power and Churkin continued to meet privately to seek solutions to the Ukraine crisis, none of which bore fruit.

While at the UN, Power went out of her way to visit the offices of the ambassadors of the smaller countries represented in the General Assembly, many of whom had never received  a United States Ambassador.  During her UN tenure, she managed to meet personally with the ambassadors from every country except North Korea.  Power also started a group that gathered the UN’s 37 female Ambassadors together one day a week for coffee and discussion of common issues.  Some involved  substantive matters that the UN had to deal with, but just as often the group focused on workplace matters that affected the women ambassadors as women, matters that their male colleagues did not have to deal with.

* * *

Donald Trump’s surprise victory in November 2016 left Power stunned.  His nativist campaign to “Make America Great Again” seemed to her like a “repudiation of many of the central tenets of my life” (p.534).  As an  immigrant, a category Trump seemed to relish denigrating, she “felt fortunate to have experienced many countries and cultures. I saw the fate of the American people as intertwined with that of individuals elsewhere on the planet.   And I knew that if the United States retreated from the world, global crises would fester, harming US interests” (p.534-35).  As Obama passed the baton to Trump in January 2017, Power left government.

Not long after, her husband suffered a near-fatal automobile accident, from which he recovered. Today, the pair team-teach courses at Harvard, while Power seems to have found the time for her family that proved so elusive when she was in government.  She is coaching her son’s baseball team and helping her daughter survey rocks and leaves in their backyard.  No one would begrudge Power’s quality time with her family. But her memoir will likely leave many readers wistful, daring to hope that there may someday  be room again for  her and her energetic idealism in the formulation of United States foreign policy.

Thomas H. Peebles

La Châtaigneraie, France

April 26, 2020

Exuberance That Failed to Last

Robert Worth, A Rage for Order: The Middle East in Turmoil,

From Tahrir Square to ISIS 

            The upheaval known as the Arab Spring began on December 17, 2010, when a Tunisian street fruit vendor, Muhammed Bouazizi, doused his body with gasoline and burned himself.  The 26-year old had been distraught over confiscation of his cart and scales by municipal authorities, ostensibly because he lacked a required work permit. Pro-democracy protests throughout Tunisia began almost immediately after Bouazizi’s self-immolation, aimed at Tunisia’s autocratic ruler Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.  Bouazizi died 18 days later, on January 4, 2011. On January 14, 2011, Ben Ali, who had fled to Saudi Arabia, resigned the office he had held since 1987.

          In less than two weeks, pro-democracy demonstrations against Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s strongman president since 1981, took place on Cairo’s Tahrir Square.  On February 11, 2011, Mubarak too resigned his office. By that time, protests against ruling autocrats had broken out in Libya and Yemen. On March 14, 2011, similar protests began in Syria.  Before the end of the year, Yemen’s out-of-touch leader, Ali Abdullah Saleh, President of North Yemen since 1978 and of Yemen since the North’s merger with South Yemen in 1990, had been forced to resign; and Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, who had ruled Libya since 1969, was driven from office and shot by rebels. Of the region’s autocrats, only Syria’s Bashar al-Assad still clung to power, and his days too appeared numbered.

           The era of dictators and despots was over in the Middle East, or so it seemed. The stupefying departures in a single calendar year of four of the Arab world’s seemingly most firmly entrenched autocrats prompted many exuberant souls, myself included, to permit themselves to believe that finally, at last, democracy had broken through in the Middle East.  Some went so far as to compare 2011 to 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and countries across Central and Eastern Europe were suddenly out from under Soviet domination.

          But, as we now know, 2011 was no 1989: the euphoria and giddiness of that year have turned to despair. Egypt’s democratically elected president, Muhammad Morsi, was deposed by a military coup and the current government seems as ruthlessly autocratic as that of Mubarak. Assad holds on to power in Syria amidst a ruinous civil war that has cost hundreds of thousands lives and shows few signs of abating.  Yemen and Libya appear to be ruled, if at all, by tribal militias and gangs. Only Tunisia offers cautious hope of an enduring democratic future. And hovering over the entire region is the threat of brutal terrorism, represented most terrifyingly by the self-styled Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, ISIS.

         For those wondering how such high initial hopes could have been so thoroughly dashed, and for those simply seeking to better their understanding of what happened, Robert Worth’s A Rage for Order: The Middle East in Turmoil, From Tahrir Square to ISIS, should be prescribed reading. A former Middle East correspondent for the New York Times, Worth takes his readers on a personally guided country-by-country tour of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria, places that seemed so promising in early 2011, with roughly half the book devoted to Egypt.  As his title indicates, Worth also addresses the rise of ISIS to become what he terms the “great menace of a new age . . . capable of inspiring people as far away as France or even California to murder in the name of God” (p.231).

        Not least among the many virtues of Worth’s perspective upon the various iterations of the Arab Spring is that he does not seek to wrap them into a grandiose overall theory that would explain how the hopeful vision of 2011 unraveled. Although the early message of the Arab Spring now “appears to have been wholly reversed,” Worth writes, each country he treats “fell apart in its own way” (p.4).   Worth focuses on the indigenous forces that propelled the uprisings of 2011, rather than the “mostly secondary” (p.12) role of the United States and European powers. His book is not intended to be a comprehensive history of the Arab Spring but rather, as he puts it, a “much more selective effort to make sense of the fallout”(p.12). He argues that the Arab world had “never built a peaceful model for political succession” and that the pro-democracy activists of 2011 were “spectacularly unprepared for upheaval” (p.8).

      Worth’s perspective sustains its momentum through personal stories of  individuals who experienced the Arab Spring, in a manner reminiscent of Adam Hochschild’s account of the Spanish Civil War, Spain in Our Hearts, reviewed here last month. But unlike Hochschild, Worth portrays men and women he had met and worked with: his professional contacts, acquaintances and, in some cases, personal friends. Their stories humanize the regional upheaval, underscoring its complex and tragic character.

* * *

         Worth was present almost from the beginning of the January 2011 anti-Mubarak demonstrations on Cairo’s Tahrir Square, and he writes about them more as a participant than as a journalist observer. He recounts his experience through the eyes of Pierre Siaufi, a 49 year old, 300 pound “slacker and bohemian . . . a benevolent Arab version of Allen Ginsberg” (p.17-18). Siaufi turned his disheveled apartment near Tahrir Square into “ground zero,” the nerve center of the largely leaderless anti-Mubarak protests.  The demonstrators included groups and classes that had previously viewed one another with distrust: Facebook and social media savvy youth, middle class liberals and intellectuals, secularists, Christians and Muslims – including the long suppressed Muslim Brotherhood – even, Worth notes, street vendors from Cairo’s slums and some notorious soccer hooligans.

          For a short period, the unlikely grouping on Tahirir Square seemed almost impossibly united:

There was an emotion in the air that encompassed all of us, made us feel we’d shed our old skins and the past was irrelevant . . . [There was] a sudden shift in perspective, as if Earth had tilted on its axis, allowing you to miraculously see truths that had been hidden from you all along. The tyrant, once vast and august, was now revealed as a laughable old fool . . . Most of all, there was the passionate insistence that the revolution would triumph, that justice would replace injustice, that the country’s problems – its sectarian hatreds, its corruption, its terrorist gangs – were all artificial, trumped up, the cynical props of the old regime. All of it would fade away now that the people were empowered (p.19-20).

Yet Worth’s gut feeling was that this exuberance could not last. He summarizes in italics the views of those around him, which seem to be his own as well: “I know these things are not true. But perhaps, if we will them with enough conviction, they will come true someday” (p.20).

      Worth’s gut proved right. The heady moment on February 11, 2011, when Mubarak stepped aside, led to an Islamic ascendancy, resulting in the election and disastrous presidency of Muhammad Morsi.  Morsi represented Egypt’s infuriatingly complex Muslim Brotherhood, a “religious movement seeking democracy” but including a “more secretive element – with radical spin-offs – bent on implementing Islamic law” (p.132). Under Mubarak, the Brotherhood operated in a “legal shadowland” (p.132), subject to periodic mass arrests.

         After Mubarak’s resignation, the Brotherhood indicated that it would not proffer a candidate for president. But with unexpected success in parliamentary elections in late 2011, it reversed itself.  Morsi, a stubborn organization man with few political skills, was elected president in June 2012. Worth contrasts Morsi with Brotherhood member Muhammad Beltagy, a thoughtful medical doctor in Cairo’s slums, with skills at mediation and conciliation far exceeding those of Morsi.  Beltagy “always looked as if he’d been up all night negotiating a truce and emerged victorious at dawn” (p.128), Worth writes. He suggests that Beltagy might well have avoided the catastrophic consequences of the Morsi presidency had he been willing to serve.

          A decree which Morsi issued in November 2012, granting him broad powers above the courts as the “guardian of the revolution,” precipitated large scale protests and set the stage for the bloody military coup orchestrated by General Abdelfattah al Sisi that deposed Morsi in July 2013, with the support of many secularists and liberals who had previously joined with the Brotherhood in opposing Mubarak. Once in power, Sisi brutally suppressed pro-Islamist demonstrations and arrested most of the Brotherhood leadership.  Almost overnight, the Brotherhood went from the “summit of power to the status of a terrorist group” (p.167). Many Brotherhood members fled the country, with some joining ISIS to fight in Syria and Libya. Beltagy’s daughter was killed in one of the demonstrations and Beltagy found himself jailed and sentenced to death under the military regime.

        Worth places responsibility for the failure of Egypt’s democratically elected government squarely upon Morsi and his “pigheadedness” (p.152), which alienated even his own cabinet ministers.  When faced with organized opposition to his regime, Morsi “sounded as brittle and intransigent as any ancient regime tyrant. He blamed it all on a ‘fifth column’ and refused to give any ground. He wrapped himself in the flag just as Mubarak had, warning against hired thugs and saboteurs, never acknowledging the depth of the anger he had provoked” (p.147).

* * *

         By mid-2011, Tunisia, where the Arab Spring had begun, appeared to be heading in the same calamitous direction as Egypt. In the first parliamentary elections since the uprising, Ennahda, an Islamist party led by Rached Ghannouchi, won a plurality of seats. As in Egypt, the Islamist ascendancy in Tunisia caused alarm throughout the country. But Ghannouchi was the polar opposite of Egypt’s Morsi, a “philosopher-king” (p.207) within Tunisia’s Islamist movement who had lived abroad, spoke several languages, and was reluctant to demonize his political opponents.  In August 2013, Ghannouchi began meeting secretly in Paris with the primary opposition leader, Beji Caid Essebsi.

          Essebsi was Tunisia’s “ remaining elder statesman” (p.200), a rigorous secularist who had served as Interior Minister under Ben Ali’s predecessor, Tunisia’s post-World War II anti-colonialist leader Habib Bourguiba.  Worth provides an affecting fly-on-the-wall account of the discussions between Tunisia’s “two grand old men” (p.221) — Ghannouchi was then 72, Essebsi 86. Although from opposite ends of the social spectrum and opposite sides of Tunisia’s sectarian divide, Ghannouchi and Essebsi found common ground and a way forward. By September 2013, they agreed that Ennahda would cede power to a caretaker government, while a new constitution could be considered.

          In January 2014, Ennahada suffered major loses in parliamentary elections, with Essebsi’s secularist party winning a parliamentary majority. Essebsi was elected president and formed a coalition government with Ennahda. Two deadly terrorist attacks later in 2014 all but destroyed Tunisia’s critical tourist industry and threatened the coalition government, which bent but did not break. By mid-2015, the coalition government was “coalescing and planning reforms, albeit slowly. Most of the Islamists seemed to have come around to the belief in compromise and reconciliation. Leftists spoke optimistically about a working relationship with the people they’d once hoped to eradicate” (p.221).

          The legacy to be granted to Tunisia’s two grand old men, Ghannouchi and Essebsi, remains to be determined, Worth concludes: “The idea that they achieved a historic synthesis, a reweaving of the country’s Islamic and Western ancestries, is an appealing one. And in many ways, Tunisia did seem to have pulled back from the crater’s edge in mid-2015” (p.221). But, five years after Mohamed Bouazizi’s death had set the Arab Spring in motion, most Tunisians “still hoped that their small country could be a model, spreading its dream of reconciliation across a region troubled by war and tyranny. They also knew the same winds could blow in reverse and smash everything they had built” (p.221).

* * *

            Protests against Yemen’s leader, Ali Abdullah Saleh, began in the summer of 2010, but gained momentum after the events in Tunisia and Egypt in the winter of 2011.  Saleh was a ruler who, as Worth puts it, brought corruption and manipulation to a “whole new level of cynicism and mastery” (p.98). In the Arab world’s poorest country, he managed to “rake off tens of billions of dollars in public funds for himself and his family” (p.98), becoming richer than Hosni Mubarak. Elevating blackmail into a “tool of the state,” Saleh’s greatest talent was for “corrupting other people . . . He made sure that every potential opponent had dirty money or blood on his hands, or both” (p.98-99).

         By June 2011, anti-Saleh rebels had captured large portions of the country. When Saleh himself was injured in a bombing at a mosque, he fled to Saudi Arabia for treatment, leaving the country rudderless.  In November, he officially resigned his office in exchange for a diplomatically brokered agreement providing him with immunity from prosecution. But the agreement failed to end the fighting among tribal factions. Tribal warfare, “widely viewed as a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran” (p.240), continues to this day. Worth tells the story of Yemen through the eyes of Saeed, a grizzled and battered activist who had been fighting the Yemeni regime for four decades and provides the book’s best single line quotation. “I don’t want an Islamic state, I don’t want a Socialist state, I don’t want a one-party state,” Saeed said. “I just want a modern state” — which Worth defines as a “state where citizenship meant something, where the rule of law was respected” (p.100).  Yemen is not there yet.

* * *

            Protests against Muammar Qaddafi in Libya began on February 15, 2011, four days after Mubarak’s fall. The protestors were “met with truncheons, and then with bullets; they picked up weapons almost at once” (p.38-39). Within days, the rebels had driven Qaddafi’s forces out and laid claim to almost half the country. By August 2011, Qaddafi was forced to flee Tripoli. He was captured and killed in October 2011. In a country where clan solidarity and the tradition of blood feuds run deep, Qaddafi left his countrymen with a void: “no army, no police, no unions, nothing to bring them together” (p.38).  ISIS filled part of the void, founding a mini-state in portions of the country, amidst a civil war between competing militias that Worth describes as “so fragmented and mercurial that it defied all efforts to distill a larger meaning” (p.226-27). Libya had become an “archipelago of feuding warlords” (p.38).

* * *

          With Saleh’s resignation and Quaddafi’s death, Syria’s Bashar Assad was — and remains to this day — the last tyrant still standing, with a shaky hold on power amidst a civil war that has destroyed his country and produced one of the 21^st century’s most severe humanitarian crisis.  Anti-Assad demonstrations in Syria began after both Mubarak in Egypt and Ben Ali in Tunisia had been forced out of office, but was triggered by police mistreatment of teenagers arrested in the southern Syrian town of Daraa for writing antigovernment graffiti. Assad determined early on that he would not go down as easily as his Egyptian and Tunisian counterparts.

       Worth presents the sectarian underpinnings to Syria’s civil war through the pairing of two bright women, both in their 20s from opposite sides of the country’s sectarian divide: Naura Kanafani, a Sunni Muslim; and her long-time best friend Aliaa Ali, an Alawite, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, and supporter of fellow Alawite Assad.  Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority, approximately 70% of its population, looks down on the impoverished Alawais as heretics and crude mountain people, Worth explains. But Assad’s father, Alawi military officer Hafez al Assad, became Syria’s autocrat-in-charge in 1971. When Hafez died in 2000, his son Bashar, described by Worth as “tall and angular. . . with a birdlike watchfulness and an elongated neck and head that made him look as if he’d been painted by El Greco” (p.67), succeeded him.

          Bashar responded to the March 2011 protests by unleashing his “foot soldiers,” essentially Alawi thugs from the mountains, to counter the protesters. By the end of 2011, forces loyal to Assad were “using tanks and fighter jets to pound whole neighborhoods to rubble. . . [They were] massacring Sunni civilians in the their homes and leaving scrawled sectarian slogans on the doors” (p.68). Best friends Naura and Aliaa, for whom religious differences had previously been irrelevant, began to see the same events differently. Naura was aghast that the regime appeared to be killing innocent people wantonly, while Aliaa attributed such reports to “fake news.” Little by little, Naura and Aliaa began to define each other as the enemy. Their prior friendship “belonged to a world that no longer made sense” (p.95).

          Throughout 2012, the Syrian conflict “spun outward. . . drawing in almost every country in the region and many beyond it” (p.86). The Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah and Shiite Iran supported Assad, with Russian backing. ISIS came into its own in Syria fighting Assad, and seized control of substantial portions of Syrian territory. Western-backed factions also fought Assad, finding themselves uncomfortably on the same side as ISIS. The first wave of anti-Assad rebels, the “urban young men and women who spoke of democracy,” gave way to “legions of young zealots who slipped across the border with holy war and martyrdom and on their minds” (p.80). These zealous migrants, including eager volunteers for suicide missions, helped ISIS become what Worth terms the “most powerful jihadi group in history” (p.175).

      In mid-2013, Worth returned to Syria, where he had previously spent considerable time and nurtured numerous contacts.  This time he barely recognized the country. “Half the country was behind rebel lines, in a zone where Western hostages were bought and sold and beheaded. Most of my Syrian friends had fled and were living in Europe or Beirut or Dubai” (p.87). By the end of 2014, the death toll in Syria exceeded 200,000, with huge waves of migration out of Syria, making their way through Turkey on “rickety boats to Greece and onward to Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary, Austria, and Germany” (p.230). As a Sunni Muslim, Naura Kanafani was among the hundreds of thousands forced to flee Syria, escaping into Turkey on foot with her mother.

* * *

         Readers convinced that democracy cannot take hold and flourish in the Arab world – or in the Middle East, or in Muslim-majority countries – will have to dig deeply into Worth’s book to find support for their convictions, and they are unlikely to come up with much.  Despite the dashed expectations of 2011, Worth’s dispiriting yet riveting account leaves his readers thinking – or maybe just hoping – that the yearning expressed by his Yemeni contact Saaed for a modern state is unlikely to recede across the Middle East.

Thomas H. Peebles

Aubais, France

September 26, 2017

 

Do Something

Zachary Kaufman, United States Law and Policy on Transitional Justice:

Principles, Politics, and Pragmatics 

             The term “transitional justice” is applied most frequently to “post conflict” situations, where a nation state or region is emerging from some type of war or violent conflict that has given rise to genocide, war crimes, or crimes against humanity — each now a recognized concept under international law, with “mass atrocities” being a common shorthand used to embrace these and related concepts. In United States Law and Policy on Transitional Justice: Principles, Politics, and Pragmatics, Zachary Kaufman, a Senior Fellow and expert on human rights at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, explores the circumstances which have led the United States to support that portion of the transitional justice process that determines how to deal with suspected perpetrators of mass atrocities, and why it chooses a particular means of support (disclosure: Kaufman and I worked together in the US Department of Justice’s overseas assistance unit between 2000 and 2002, although we had different portfolios: Kaufman’s involved Africa and the Middle East, while I handled Central and Eastern Europe).

          Kaufman’s book, adapted from his Oxford University PhD dissertation, centers around case studies of the United States’ role in four major transitional justice situations: Germany and Japan after World War II, and ex-Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War. It also looks more briefly at two secondary cases, the 1988 bombing of Pan American flight 103, attributed to Libyan nationals, and atrocities committed during Iraq’s 1990-91 occupation of Kuwait. Making extensive use of internal US government documents, many of which have been declassified, Kaufman digs deeply into the thought processes that informed the United States’ decisions on transnational justice in these six post-conflict situations. Kaufman brings a social science perspective to his work, attempting to tease of out of the case studies general rules about how the United States might act in future transitional justice situations.

          The term “transitional justice” implicitly affirms that a permanent and independent national justice system can and should be created or restored in the post-conflict state.  Kaufman notes at one point that dealing with suspected perpetrators of mass atrocities is just one of several critical tasks involved in creating or restoring a permanent national justice system in a post-conflict state.  Others can include: building or rebuilding sustainable judicial institutions, strengthening the post-conflict state’s legislation, improving capacity of its justice-sector personnel, and creating or upgrading the physical infrastructure needed for a functioning justice system. These latter tasks are not the focus of Kaufman’s work. Moreover, in determining how to deal with alleged perpetrators of mass atrocities, Kaufman’s focus is on the front end of the process: how and why the United States determined to support this portion of the process generally and why it chose particular mechanisms rather than others.   The outcomes that the mechanisms produce, although mentioned briefly, are not his focus either.

          In each of the four primary cases, the United States joined other nations to prosecuted those accused or suspected of involvement in mass atrocities before an international criminal tribunal, which Kaufman characterizes as the “most significant type of transitional justice institution” (p.12). Prosecution before an international tribunal, he notes, can promote stability, the rule of law and accountability, and can serve as a deterrent to future atrocities. But the process can be both slow and expensive, with significant political and legal risks. Kaufman’s work provides a useful reminder that prosecution by an international tribunal is far from the only option available to deal with alleged perpetrators of mass atrocities. Others include trials in other jurisdictions, including those of the post-conflict state, and several non-judicial alternatives: amnesty for those suspected of committing mass atrocities, with or without conditions; “lustration,” where suspected persons are disenfranchised from specific aspects of civic life (e.g., declared ineligible for the civil service or the military); and “doing nothing,” which Kaufman considers tantamount to unconditional amnesty.  Finally, there is the option of summary execution or other punishment, without benefit of trial. These options can be applied in combination, e.g., amnesty for some, trial for others.

         Kaufman weighs two models, “legalism” and “prudentialism,” as potential explanations for why and how the United States acted in the cases under study and is likely to act in the future.  Legalism contends that prosecution before an international tribunal of individuals suspected or accused of mass atrocities  is the only option a liberal democratic state may elect, consistent with its adherence to the rule of law.  In limited cases, amnesty or lustrations may be justified as a supplement to initiating cases before a tribunal. Summary execution may never be justified. Prudentialism is more ad hoc and flexible,with  the question whether to establish or invoke an international criminal tribunal or pursue other options determined by any number of different political, pragmatic and normative considerations, including such geo-political factors as promotion of stability in the post-conflict state and region, the determining state or states’ own national security interests, and the relationships between determining states. Almost by definition, legalism precludes consideration of these factors.

          Kaufman presents his cases in a highly systematic manner, with tight overall organization. An introduction and three initial chapters set forth the conceptual framework for the subsequent case studies, addressing matters like methodology and definitional parameters.  The four major cases are then treated in four separate chapters, each with its own introduction and conclusion, followed by an overall conclusion, also with its own introduction and conclusion (the two secondary cases, Libya and Iraq are treated within the chapter on ex-Yugoslavia).  Substantive headings throughout each chapter make his arguments easy to follow.   General readers may find jarring his extensive use of acronyms throughout the text, drawn from a three-page list contained at the outset. But amidst Kaufman’s deeply analytical exploration of the thinking that lay behind the United States’ actions, readers will appreciate his decidedly non-sociological hypothesis as to why the United States elects to engage in  the transitional justice process: a deeply felt American need in the wake of mass atrocities to “do something” (always in quotation marks).

* * *

          Kaufman begins his case studies with the best-known example of transitional justice, Nazi Germany after World War II. The United States supported creation of what has come to be known as the Nuremberg War Crimes tribunal, a military court administered by the four victorious allies, the United States, Soviet Union, Great Britain and France. The Nuremberg story is so well known, thanks in part to “Judgment at Nuremberg,” the best-selling book and popular film, that most readers will assume that the multi-lateral Nuremberg trials were the only option seriously under consideration at the time. To the contrary, Kaufman demonstrates that such trials were far from the only option on the table.

        For a while the United States seriously considered summary executions of accused Nazi leaders. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill pushed this option during wartime deliberations and, Kaufman indicates, President Roosevelt seemed at times on the cusp of agreeing to it. Equally surprisingly, Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin lobbied early and hard for a trial process rather than summary executions. The Nuremberg Tribunal “might not have been created without Stalin’s early, constant, and forceful lobbying” (p.89), Kaufman contends.  Roosevelt abandoned his preference for summary executions after economic aspects of the Morgenthau Plan, which involved the “pastoralization” of Germany, were leaked to the press. When the American public “expressed its outrage at treating Germany so harshly through a form of economic sanctions,” Roosevelt concluded that Americans would be “unsupportive of severe treatment for the Germans through summary execution” (p.85).

          But the United States’ support for war crimes trials became unwavering only after Roosevelt died in April 1945 and Harry S. Truman assumed the presidency.  The details and mechanics of a multi-lateral trial process were not worked out until early August 1945 in the “London Agreement,” after Churchill had been voted out of office and Labor Prime Minister Clement Atlee represented Britain. Trials against 22 high level Nazi officials began in November 1945, with verdicts rendered in October 1946: twelve defendants were sentenced to death, seven drew prison sentences, and three were acquitted.

       Many lower level Nazi officials were tried in unilateral prosecutions by one of the allied powers.   Lustration, barring active Nazi party members from major public and private positions, was applied in the US, British, and Soviet sectors.  Numerous high level Nazi officials were allowed to emigrate to the United States to assist in Cold War endeavors, which Kaufman characterizes as a “conditional amnesty” (Nazi war criminals who emigrated to the United States is the subject of Eric Lichtblau’s The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men, reviewed here in October 2015; Frederick Taylor’s Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and Denazification of Germany, reviewed here in December 2012, addresses more generally the manner in which the Allies dealt with lower level Nazi officials). By 1949, the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West undermined the allies’ appetite for prosecution, with the Korean War completing the process of diverting the world’s attention away from Nazi war criminals.

          The story behind creation of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, designed to hold accountable accused Japanese perpetrators of mass atrocities, is far less known than that of Nuremberg, Kaufman observes.  What has come to be known as the “Tokyo Tribunal” largely followed the Nuremberg model, with some modifications. Even though 11 allies were involved, the United States was closer to the sole decision-maker on the options to pursue in Japan than it had been in Germany. As the lead occupier of post-war Japan, the United States had “no choice but to ‘do something’” (p.119).   Only the United States had both the means and will to oversee the post-conflict occupation and administration of Japan. That oversight authority was vested largely in a single individual, General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of the Allied forces, whose extraordinarily broad – nearly dictatorial — authority in post World War II Japan extended to the transitional justice process. MacArthur approved appointments to the tribunal, signed off on its indictments, and exercised review authority over its decisions.

            In the interest of securing the stability of post-war Japan, the United States accorded unconditional amnesty to Japan’s Emperor Hirohito. The Tokyo Tribunal indicted twenty-eight high-level Japanese officials, but more than fifty were not indicted, and thus also benefited from an unconditional amnesty. This included many suspected of “direct involvement in some of the most horrific crimes of WWII” (p.108), several of whom eventually returned to Japanese politics. Through lustration, more than 200,000 Japanese were removed or barred from public office, either permanently or temporarily.  As in Germany, by the late 1940s the emerging Cold War with the Soviet Union had chilled the United States’ enthusiasm for prosecuting Japanese suspected of war crimes.

           The next major United States engagements in transitional justice arose in the 1990s, when the former Yugoslavia collapsed and the country lapsed into a spasm of ethnic violence; and massive ethnic-based genocide erupted in Rwanda in 1994. By this time, the Soviet Union had itself collapsed and the Cold War was over. In both instances, heavy United States’ involvement in the post-conflict process was attributed in part to a sense of remorse for its lack of involvement in the conflicts themselves and its failure to halt the ethnic violence, resulting in a need to “do something.”  Rwanda marks the only instance among the four primary cases where mass atrocities arose out of an internal conflict.

       The ethnic conflicts in Yugoslavia led to the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY), based in The Hague and administered under the auspices of the United Nations Security Council. Kaufman provides much useful insight into the thinking behind the United States’ support for the creation of the court and the decision to base it in The Hague as an authorized Security Council institution. His documentation shows that United States officials consistently invoked the Nuremberg experience. The United States supported a multi-lateral tribunal through the Security Council because the council could “obligate all states to honor its mandates, which would be critical to the tribunal’s success” (p.157). The United States saw the ICTY as critical in laying a foundation for regional peace and facilitating reconciliation among competing factions. But it also supported the ICTY and took a lead role in its design to “prevent it from becoming a permanent [tribunal] with global reach” (p.158), which it deemed “potentially problematic” (p.157).

             The United States’ willingness to involve itself in the post-conflict transitional process in Rwanda,   even more than in the ex-Yugoslavia, may be attributed to its failure to intervene during the worst moments of the genocide itself.  That the United States “did not send troops or other assistance to Rwanda perversely may have increased the likelihood of involvement in the immediate aftermath,” Kaufman writes. A “desire to compensate for its foreign policy failures in Rwanda, if not also feelings of guilt over not intervening, apparently motivated at least some [US] officials to support a transitional justice institution for Rwanda” (p.197).

        Once the Rwandan civil war subsided, there was a strong consensus within the international community that some kind of international tribunal was needed to impose accountability upon the most egregious génocidaires; that any such tribunal should operate under the auspices of the United Nations Security Council; that the tribunal should in some sense be modeled after the ICTY; and that the United States shouldtake the lead in establishing the tribunal. The ICTY precedent prompted US officials to “consider carefully the consistency with which they applied transitional justice solutions in different regions; they wanted the international community to view [the US] as treating Africans similarly to Europeans” (p.182). According to these officials, after the precedent of proactive United States involvement in the “arguably less egregious Balkans crisis,” the United States would have found it “politically difficult to justify inaction in post-genocide Rwanda” (p.182).

           The United States favored a tribunal modeled after and structurally similar to the ICTY, which came to be known as International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). The ICTR was the first international court having competence to “prosecute and punish individuals for egregious crimes committed during an internal conflict” (p.174), a watershed development in international law and transitional justice.  To deal with lower level génocidaires, the Rwandan government and the international community later instituted additional prosecutorial measures, including prosecutions by Rwandan domestic courts and local domestic councils, termed gacaca.

          No international tribunals were created in the two secondary cases, Libya after the 1998 Pan Am flight 103 bombing, and the 1990-91 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. At the time of the Pam Am bombing, several years prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks, United States officials considered terrorism a matter to be addressed “exclusively in domestic contexts” (p.156).  In the case of the bombing of Pan Am 103, where Americans had been killed, competent courts were available in the United States and the United Kingdom. There were numerous documented cases of Iraqi atrocities against Kuwaiti civilians committed during Iraq’s 1990-91 invasion of Kuwait.  But the 1991 Gulf War, while driving Iraq out of Kuwait, otherwise left Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in power. The United States was therefore not in a position to impose accountability upon Iraqis for atrocities committed in Kuwait, as it had done after defeating Germany and Japan in World War II.

* * *

         In evaluating the prudentialism and legalism models as ways to explain the United States’ actions in the four primary cases, prudentialism emerges as a clear winner.  Kaufman convincingly demonstrates that the United States in each was open to multiple options and motivated by geo-political and other non-legal considerations.  Indeed, it is difficult to imagine that the United States – or any other state for that matter — would ever, in advance, agree to disregard such considerations, as the legalism model seems to demand. After reflecting upon Kaufman’s analysis, I concluded that legalism might best be understood as more aspirational than empirical, a forward-looking, prescriptive model as to how the United States should act in future transitional justice situations, favored in particular by human rights organizations.

         But Kaufman also shows that the United States’ approach in each of the four cases was not entirely an ad hoc weighing of geo-political and related considerations.  Critical to his analysis are the threads which link the four cases, what he terms “path dependency,” whereby the Nuremberg trial process for Nazi war criminals served as a powerful influence upon the process set up for their Japanese counterparts; the combined Nuremberg-Tokyo experience weighed heavily in the creation of ICTY; and ICTY strongly influenced the structure and procedure of ICTR.   This cumulative experience constitutes another factor in explaining why the United States in the end opted for international criminal tribunals in each of the four cases.

         If a general rule can be extracted from Kaufman’s four primary cases, it might therefore be that an international criminal tribunal has evolved into the “default option” for the United States in transitional justice situations,  showing the strong pull of the only option which the legalism model considers consistent with the rule of law.  But these precedents may exert less hold on US policy makers going forward, as an incoming administration reconsiders the United States’ role in the 21^st century global order. Or, to use Kaufman’s apt phrase, there may be less need felt for the United States to “do something” in the wake of future mass atrocities.

Thomas H. Peebles

Venice, Italy

February 10, 2017

 

Global Hubris

Stephen Hopgood, The Endtimes of Human Rights 

      In The Endtimes of Human Rights, Stephen Hopgood delivers a scathing critique of the practices and institutions associated with present day global human rights. Over the course of two introductory sections and five subsequent chapters, Hopgood argues forcefully that today’s global human rights machinery is unsustainable and on the verge of collapse, as the word “endtimes” in his title suggests.  Hopgood uses initial capital letters, “Human Rights,” to describe this broken system, which he contrasts with “human rights” without initial capital letters.

     Lower case human rights refer to ground level, indigenous movements to be free from human rights abuses, which Hopwood wholeheartedly endorses. The endtimes “can never come for this form of ’human rights,’” he argues, “in the same way that nothing can stop people banding together to demand their own freedom or justice in whatever language they prefer” (p.viii).  Upper case Human Rights, by contrast, consist of a “global structure of laws, courts, norms, and organizations that raise money, write reports, run international campaigns, open local offices, lobby governments, and claim to speak with singular authority in the name of humanity as a whole” (p.ix).

    For Hopgood, upper case Human Rights are based on an elitist, one-size-fits-all approach, “overambitious, unaccountable, alienated and largely ineffectual” (p.182).  In their hubris, Human Rights advocates have sought, and have largely succeeded, in arrogating to themselves and the institutions they represent the authority to define the fundamental global norms that are “applicable always, without discretion” (p.122).  The tension between Human Rights and human rights, he argues, is “exactly” the “tension between top-down fixed authority and bottom up (spontaneous, diverse, and multiple) authorities.” (p,x).  The forthcoming collapse of (upper case) Human Rights means that locally inspired (lower case) human rights movements will have space to flourish.

    Hopgood’s arguments against Human Rights focus primarily upon international criminal justice, the process which seeks to hold accountable those who violate international norms against, for example, torture and arbitrary arrests and killings, occurring in the context of what we often term mass atrocities, war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.  International criminal justice institutions of concern to Hopgood include the war crimes tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia and, especially, the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, along with non-governmental organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, gatekeeper organizations dedicated to identifying and publicizing human rights abuses and advocating for accountability for abusers.  Human Rights also embraces humanitarianism — the treatment of military and civilian personnel in wartime and crisis situations — and, more recently, has included efforts to secure equal treatment for women and for lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and trans-gender (LGBT) individuals.  These strains of Human Rights, although mentioned in Endtimes, are of less concern to Hopgood, a professor of international relations at the University of London and the author of Keeper of the Flame, Understanding Amnesty International.

     Readers may be surprised to discover that very little of Hopgood’s work involves a direct critique of the day-to-day practices of Human Rights. Readers need to look elsewhere if, for example, their interest is whether hearsay evidence should be admissible before the ICC.  Hopgood addresses Human Rights from a far broader perspective.  His core argument is that although contemporary international criminal justice seeks to secure accountability for human rights abusers through what purports to be a judicial process, the process is almost entirely political.  Hopgood’s interest is in exposing the political underpinnings of this process. A crucial portion of his argument against contemporary Human Rights lies in his elaboration of its European origins.

* * *

     Today’s Human Rights may be traced to what Hopgood terms 19th century European humanism, when progressive, middle class Europeans created a “secular replacement for the Christian god” (p.x) which borrowed heavily from Christian values and concepts, especially the need to alleviate suffering.  Of particular importance was the International Committee of the Red Cross, ICRC, the “first international church” of secular humanism (p.25). The ICRC, founded in 1863 in very Protestant Geneva, Switzerland, was a neutral organization dedicated to providing assistance to soldiers wounded in war.  The ICRC gave rise to the Geneva Convention of 1864, which established standards for the provision of relief in armed conflicts.

      A decade later, the Geneva-based Institut de Droit International (International Law Institute),  came into being as a supplement to the ICRC. The institute, a standing council of international jurists charged with providing expert commentary on the laws of war, served as the first step toward international war crimes tribunals, Hopgood contends.  The League of Nations, created in the aftermath of World War I and also based in Geneva, constituted an “epiphany” for secular humanism, the “first truly international organization authorized explicitly by the idea of humanity, not the Christian god” (p.41).  The League was to be a “permanent, transnational, institutional, and secular regime for understanding and addressing the root causes of suffering” (p.41-42).

      This phase of global secular humanism “came crashing to the ground in 1939. The Holocaust and the Second World War destroyed the moral legitimacy and political power, if not the ideological ambition and cultural arrogance, of Europe” (p.xi).  But the Holocaust and World War II gave rise to a perceived need to create institutions better equipped to preserve and advance secular humanism across the globe.  The creation of new institutions began in 1945 with the United Nations and the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal, which served as a model for future war crimes tribunals.  The years 1945-49 were the “last time Europe held such a central place in the design of world order. It was a last moment to embed the humanist dream before the empires were gone” (p.49), Hopgood argues.  The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN’s Anti-Genocide Convention, both dating from 1948, along with a revised 1949 Geneva Convention, were products of this era and remain key instruments of global Human Rights.

       Echoing a theme which Barbara Keys developed in Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s, reviewed here in November 2015, Hopgood goes on to argue that Human Rights gained impetus in the 1970s when the United States began to prioritize human rights abroad as a key consideration in its foreign policy.  More than any other single factor, Hopgood argues, American power turned lower case human rights into upper case Human Rights, with the “secular religiosity” of European humanism giving way to a “more political, openly pro-democratic form of advocacy” that embraced the “logic of money as power” and “made explicit what had been implicit within international humanism: Human Rights and liberal capitalism were allies, not enemies” (p.12-13).  Human Rights thus became “intimately tied to the export of neo-liberal democracy using American state power” (p.xii).

     The apogee of Human Rights was from 1991 to 2008, the “unipolar moment” of American post-war dominance, with the fall of the Soviet Union and the creation of international tribunals to investigate and prosecute mass atrocities in the ex-Yugoslavia and Rwanda.  During this period, moreover, 120 countries approved the Rome Statute of 1998, the founding charter for the ICC, which Hopgood terms the “apex of international criminal justice” (p.129; the United States was one of just seven states to vote against the Rome statute, along with China, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Qatar and Yemen).  The ICC began hearing cases in 2002. The period also witnessed the emergence of an international “responsibility to protect” victims of human rights abuses, often shortened to R2P, now a recognized basis for humanitarian interventions authorized by the United Nations Security Council.

     But at the very moment when the notion of Human Rights was at its apogee, the “foundations of universal liberal norms and global governance [were] crumbling” (p.1), Hopgood argues.  The United States no longer retains the power it enjoyed after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 to foist its neo-liberal vision upon the rest of the world.  Nationalism and religious conviction have reasserted themselves throughout the world, and competing world powers, particularly China and Russia, are not proponents of liberal democracy.  Neither the United States nor any other entity is today capable of speaking and acting on behalf of the international community.

     Rather, we are entering what Hopgood terms a “neo-Westphalian world,” a reference to the 1648 peace treaties which ended Europe’s Thirty Years War and established a system of political order in Europe based on state sovereignty and non-interference in the internal affairs of other states.  The neo-Westphalian world is one of “renewed sovereignty, resurgent religion, globalized markets, and the stagnation or rollback of universal norms about human rights” (p.166).  The “core modernizing assumption” of Human Rights, Hopgood argues, that “history brings secularism, a sense of oneself as an individual rights holder, and the erosion of collective beliefs and loyalties” is “fracturing alongside the Western power that sustained it” (p.166). Neo-Westphalia means “more politics, less morality, and less Europe,” in which the notion of genuine global solidarity becomes little more than a “conceit of human rights advocates in Geneva, New York, and London” (p.177).

    Hopgood looks with favor at the forthcoming collapse of Human Rights, its “endtimes,” much as many Christians look forward to an eschatological endtimes that culminate with the second coming of Jesus.  As Human Rights declines with declining American power, “local interpretations of what rights are and which rights might be sustainable will be essential if human rights are to flourish” (p.xv).  Once lower case human rights replace upper case Human Rights “other alliances can grow” (p.22), with “more international funding and expertise in areas like public health, disease, communication, and mediation – the Médecins Sans Frontières approach—which is more conducive to longer-lasting and effective change than are the often symbolic efforts of large-scale global institutions” (p.21).

     In the endtimes, only “issues of security, natural resources, and trade will excite multilateral engagement” (p.20), along with “very practical but time-limited relief work in logistics, search and rescue, medicine, disease control, and food and shelter” (p.21).  International Human Rights organizations will “turn increasingly to self-promotion. They will be concerned more than ever with themselves” (p.20). The one area where Human Rights seems likely to retain some clout is sub-Saharan Africa, precisely because this is the globe’s single area where Europe retains at least limited influence. “Africa will remain a laboratory for European moral spectatorship, although given Europe’s’ relative global decline, self reliance and church support will likely be the future for the poor and the suffering south of the Sahara” (p.21).

     Despite his searing rhetorical assault on contemporary Human Rights, Hopgood’s specific criticisms of the ICC and, by extension, international criminal justice, are tepid and hardly unconventional: the ICC’s prosecutions have been primarily against lower level state actors, rather than heads of state; they have focused almost exclusively on Africans, with few actions against persons from other regions; and the United States, having refused to ratify the Rome convention, remains an “embarrassing outlier for claims about liberal global norms” (p.129). The “true tragedy” of the ICC is that it is a court that “cannot conceivably exercise political jurisdiction over great powers, creating a permanent two-tier justice system in which strong states use global institutions to discipline the weak” (p.167).

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     Hopgood’s polemical and passionately argued case against modern Human Rights is problematic in several respects.  He offers maddeningly few specifics to support his broad theme that international Human Rights elites, in their hubris, have foisted “universal” and “secular” norms upon unwilling local populations.  The scattered examples he provides are drawn from efforts to secure greater rights for women and LGBT individuals in certain non-Western cultures, difficult and delicate exercises to be sure but well removed from his primary focus on international criminal justice.  Further, it is facile to argue that “renewed sovereignty” threatens international criminal justice. Nationalism and state sovereignty have always been, and are likely always to be, challenges to the aspirations and objectives of international institutions and organizations across the board, not simply to those of international criminal justice — just ask the mavens in Brussels charged with trying to hold the European Union together.

     Hopgood stops short of explicitly recommending abolition of the ICC and other publicly financed international criminal justice institutions and organizations, but his arguments lead inescapably to this recommendation. His contention that the resources presently applied to these institutions and organizations should be redirected to humanitarian relief means that any process seeking accountability for human rights abusers will have to be locally driven.  Given the weak state of domestic justice systems in much of the world, this means still less accountability for those who commit war crimes and mass atrocities than is the case with today’s admittedly imperfect international criminal justice machinery.

Thomas H. Peebles
La Châtaigneraie, France
March 4, 2016