A Problem From Hell

by Samantha Power

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Colossus. Oxford University Press, 2001.

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  Genocide

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  International Justice

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  Acknowledgments

  The list of those who have aided and abetted this project, while they inspired its author, is long.

  The book is very much the product of energy and insights generated at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School of Government. Greg Carr’s vision produced the Center, and his commitment sustains it. I am grateful to him and to Graham Allison, who brought me on board. Center director Michael Ignatieff offered constant encouragement, even when it meant enduring a distracted executive director. Jill Clarke somehow managed to keep the Center afloat and the trains running early, while ensuring that I never missed an interview. Serge Troie, my brilliant research assistant, dug so deep that he could now write his own multi-volume encyclopedia on U.S. responses to genocide. Jeremy Freeman stepped in heroically to supply crucial research support and commentary in the book’s hectic, final days. Ingrid Tamm Grudin supplied sage advice through the project’s multiple incarnations. Camilla Catenza, Jim Fleming, Jasmine Friedman, Jess Hobart, and the peerless Sarah Sewall have helped build a first-class institution that will produce cutting-edge policy analysis for years to come.

  A grant from George Soros’s Open Society Institute enabled me to interview hundreds of men and women from Cambodia, Kurdistan, Rwanda, and Bosnia. Many of these survivors were willing to relive their trauma because they thought their stories might play a small role in sparking rescue for others. Their testimony, combined with their resilient faith in the United States, were constant motivators. I am grateful also to the current and former U.S. government officials who opened themselves up, revisiting experiences that most had hoped would remain forgotten. A few appeared as characters in this book, but most are visible only indirectly in the narratives reconstructed or the perspectives conveyed. I have tried to portray the logic behind their decisions and non-decisions fairly. If I have strayed in fact or in tone, I hope that they will step forward and offer their own accounts.

  More detailed and more international examinations of these cases and new studies of others are needed. An organization that will galvanize future research is the National Security Archive, the invaluable Washington non-profit organization that uses the Freedom of Information Act to secure the declassification of U.S. government documents. When I interned at the Archive as a college sophomore, I had no idea how much I would later benefit from their work. Will Ferroggiaro, director of their Rwanda project, deserves special thanks. Many senior officials in the U.S. government agreed to speak with me only because he granted me access to documents that bore their signatures.