Taner Akcam’s talk tonight on his book, A Shameful Act, was very interesting and powerful.  If you know little or nothing about the Armenian genocide and late Ottoman history, you should all read this book.  If you know a fair amount or even a lot about these things, you should read this book. 

Having read the first part of the book, I was already familiar with many of the main lines of what he was presenting about the role of the CUP (Committee on Union & Progress) and the state apparatus in organising the genocide of the Armenians.  Then he made an impressive argument–which I assume will appear in later parts of the book–that illuminated the single greatest problem of ensuring justice for all such episodes of states committing atrocities against their peoples.  As in the Turkish case immediately following the war, so it is today in various parts of the world: the refusal of some states to hold war criminals and genocidaires accountable is normally closely tied to the political threats being made against that state by outside powers.  In these cases, claims of atrocities or genocide past or present become immediately bound up with the fears of the government and the majority in the state that the security of their state is in jeopardy if they conform to outside demands to stop whatever repressive or destructive policies they are employing.  This has two perverse effects of accelerating whatever destructive policies aimed at the targeted groups there are and almost guaranteeing that later governments of that state (except in rare instances, such as Rwanda, where the army of the targeted ethnicity seizes power) will never pursue those engaged in those policies and will probably also never acknowledge the crimes that took place under previous administrations as crimes.  Indeed, the more intervention targets the existence of a regime, the stronger the refusal to acknowledge any atrocities committed by that regime or its immediate predecessors.  Indeed, the impulse will be to justify, rationalise or even ennoble the murderous acts done by earlier leaders as being essential to the existence of the state (whether or not this is even remotely plausible).  

Because humanitarian interventionists very often frame their pleas for intervention in explicitly anti-regime and often regime-change terms, they all but ensure that the policy they seek to halt will continue and they absolutely guarantee that there will be no justice for those who have been killed or those who manage to survive (barring an invasion, occupation and victors’ justice).  Sanctions regimes fail for much the same reason, though they tend to be less dramatic and obvious in their failures, because they play into the hands of whatever regime outsiders are trying to punish.  Likewise, virtually every humanitarian intervention allows the regime to redouble its efforts against its targeted victims and may actually provoke the regime to harsher measures than it would have otherwise done, while it uses foreign meddling as yet another justification for the repression of a minority, whose loyalty to the state comes under question each time a foreign power demands that a regime treat these minorities better.  The majority will tend to rally to the state and any preexisting hostility to the minority will seem to them to be vindicated by the linkage of the minority-as-enemy and minority-as-foreigner and the foreign interventionist.  It is therefore almost always the case that intervention will make things worse and will ensure that later there will not even be the possibility of justice or accountability barring a foreign occupation of the country in question. 

This is true during such mass atrocities and also true after.  Dr. Akcam cited examples where the Turkish nationalists in the immediate post-WWI period agreed that the individuals responsible for the killings of Armenians should be brought to justice–that is, they agreed until the Allies made clear that partition of Anatolia and punishment of entire Turkish people because of the genocide would go forward.  At that point, denial of the genocide and defense of the new national state became intertwined: to acknowledge the killings as a crime, and therefore punishable by both trial and partition, was to accept the claim of the Allies to divvy up what was left of the Ottoman Empire in Anatolia.  By tying justice to the political aspirations of the powers that are objecting to the atrocities, which occurs in virtually every such intervention, I would argue that humanitarian interventionism always sabotages itself even when the objections are principled and genuine rather than excuses for projecting power.  Like so many other well-intentioned government exercises in do-gooding, it fails to achieve its goals and typically exacerbates the problem it set out to solve.