Calling the Dead

I have enormous respect for Erna Paris and thank her for her review of my recent book, No Easy Fix: Global Responses to Internal Wars and Crimes against Humanity (“Are We Being Helpful?” July/August 2008). However, I discover that we have different understandings of the history of international action on human rights violations in post–World War II history and on what I was discussing in this book.

On history: Cambodia’s internal war occurred during, not after, the Cold War. That matters because the American war against Vietnam included massive bombing of Cambodia, turning a peasantry into an army for the Khmer Rouge. Hutu and Tutsi are not tribes and most ethnologists argue they are not even different ethnic groups — that is explicitly dealt with in the book. The Nuremberg trials did not save “civilization” by ensuring that “even the powerful leaders must be held accountable for their acts.” In fact, these trials were victors’ justice and none of the victors was ever prosecuted for war crimes, although they surely perpetrated their share of them. It is simply not true that because of Srebrenica the United Nations “remembered the judicial precedent of the Nuremberg trials.” The Security Council discovered it had seriously erred. None of the decision makers at the UN or NATO was obliged to account for the terrible errors of the UN “safe areas,” such as Srebrenica, where in fact the UN had no capacity to protect anyone. On another note, I can’t figure out why Paris accuses me to using the term “canard” in respect of state sovereignty: I can’t find the term anywhere, nor would it reflect my views.

I agree with Paris that I did not discuss Kosovo. I chose instead to discuss in seven lengthy chapters Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Serbia, chapters she has chosen to ignore. On Kosovo, mentioned in only a couple of pages, I’m flabbergasted that she claims I took an “old left” view of the situation — on the contrary, I mentioned in a single paragraph an argument by a neo-Marxist journalist, and made it clear that I did not take sides on that one because, without having done the research, I could not do so. Furthermore, the claim that my book is rooted in Marx and Durkheim dictums is simply not founded. Nowhere have I quoted or even considered their contributions to a literature that, frankly, is so far away from what either of them thought in the 19th century that I cannot understand how Paris arrives at this conclusion! What I did was consider the difficulties of international justice premised on the ideas of individual responsibility — with which I am in general agreement — and the obvious fact that many of the events that occur in genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity are committed by groups: armies, gangs and ethnic groups where individual responsibility is subordinated to a kind of group think. Far from prioritizing the collective over the individual, I went to some lengths to discuss the agonizing issue of individual responsibility where groupthink conditions pertain. On western justice, I argued that if we are serious about the Responsibility to Protect proposition then we must establish institutional capacity to undertake intervention, something we now lack. I praised the court system but pointed out — I’m hardly alone in this — that for all its other achievements, it has not shown a capacity to bring about reconciliation.

I do admire Paris and her work. I am, however, deeply puzzled by the unsubstantiated claims, the failure to discuss the larger part of the book and the fact that so much of the review is about her own version of history rather than a fair consideration of divergent views actually contained, and supported by evidence, in this book.

Patricia Marchak
Vancouver, British Columbia

I believe Professor Marchak doth protest too much. I liked many aspects of her book, especially her emphasis on the need for better cultural understanding during the planning of western interventions and her long-overdue account of the special plight of women in post-conflict situations. As for her list of presumed slights, I’ll leave it to the readers of No Easy Fix to decide for themselves, except to note that the word “canard” with regard to the argument of national sovereignty appears on page 63, and that several of her comments distort my meaning by narrowing the scope. For example, I would have thought my general observation that African countries were organized along tribal lines for millennia was a truism, not a trigger for a rebuttal about the presumed ethnicities of Hutus and Tutsis. Second, her argument that in creating international criminal courts the UN was not remembering the Nuremberg precedent, but merely responding to its failure at Srebrenica, misses the larger point about context and legal history, which was one of my general criticisms of the book. Finally, it is not a criticism to note that a work may be situated in an important intellectual tradition. The seminal influence of Marx and the great French sociologist Emil Durkheim, both of whom challenged entrenched attitudes to social structures, appeared evident to me in the reading, whether or not overtly stated by the author.

On a more substantive point, Marchak does discuss the issue of responsibility for international crimes thoroughly, but her statement that she does not prioritize the collective over the individual is not reflected in her book. This is not a criticism of her opinions or interpretations. My point is that starting with such theoretical premises seems problematic in a study set up to examine western-based interventions that are defined according to the opposite theoretical assumption: the primacy of individual responsibility. This observation was triggered by the argument of the book, not by my personal views.

Erna Paris
Toronto, Ontario