WhatFinger


Samantha Power, Genocide Chick

Has “The Genocide Chick” Checked Out?



Because of the threatening and murderous actions of the Government of Sudan (GoS), thousands of people in the Nuba Mountains are suffering malnutrition. This is a well-known fact amongst UN personnel, U.S. officials, and human rights activists. At one and the same time, the GoS continues to bomb towns and villages at will in an effort to either subdue the Nuba Mountains people or altogether force them out of Sudan.
One would think that one of the most acclaimed anti-genocide activists, Samantha Power, would have had something to say about this, but she hasn’t, at least not publicly. Before joining the Obama Administration she was all about making public statements about such nightmarish events, and in doing so repeatedly goaded government officials to follow in her footsteps, if not take a lead in speaking up and out. Has she forgotten her own advice? In 2002, Samantha Power, who, she says, has been referred to as “the Genocide Chick,” is quoted as saying: "We do so little about violence when it's ongoing that we're often stuck in clean-up mode. We try to understand how you can both look out for security interests and protect the values that are the best long-term guarantees of your security. The vision would be to do for human rights policy what environmental scientists did for environmental policy." A goal of her now famous book, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide, she said, is to help readers learn to speak out in the face of gross violations of international human rights: "Don't be afraid to make moral arguments in a world that speaks principally of interests. As citizens, make noise."

Support Canada Free Press


If any noise is going to be made in regard to the plight, and possibly even the fate, of the Nuba Mountains people the time to do it is now, before an all out famine sweeps the Nuba Mountains. For seven long months, approximately 200,000 people have huddled in mountain caves seeking sanctuary from the ongoing attacks by the GoS, and each and every month they’ve had less and less to eat. Already, it is estimated that approximately twelve percent of the 200,000 people hiding are suffering from malnutrition. This number will only go up if humanitarian aid fails to reach these people in the very near future. There has been some talk within the Obama Administration about opening up a corridor to get food to those in need. But for now that is all it is: talk. Instead of talk, what is needed is action. In an article in the Atlantic Magazine, “Bystanders to Genocide,” Power asked a series of questions that could, and should, be asked today about the Obama Administration in regard to the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile, and for that matter, Darfur, as well: “Why did the United States [under Bill Clinton] not do more for the Rwandans at the time of the killings? Did the President really not know about the genocide, as his marginalia suggested? Who were the people in his Administration who made the life-and-death decisions that dictated U.S. policy? Why did they decide (or decide not to decide) as they did? Were any voices inside or outside the U.S. government demanding that the United States do more? If so, why weren't they heeded? And most crucial, what could the United States have done to save lives?” In relation to the ongoing GoS attacks in Darfur, the bombings in Nuba Mountains and the wholesale ethnic cleansing in the Blue Nile, one can only hope Ms. Power will recall and then act on her own words: “’Instead of marginalizing upstanders as soft and irrational, we have to send a message that there will be a political price to be paid for looking the other way. Unless regular people and not just human rights people start to identify with upstanders, we'll always be saying “never again.”’” (quoted in Kirst, 2002). Some within the Obama Administration have spoke up. Most notably, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice recently asserted that “If there is not a substantial new inflow of aid by March of this year, the situation in Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile will reach Stage 4 of an emergency, which is one step short of full scale famine.” Now it is time (indeed, past time) for Samantha Power to stand up and let the “regular people” hear what she has to say about the current crisis in the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile, including what she has done as a powerful official in the Obama Administration to move the U.S. to act to assist those who are facing a looming famine, if not mass starvation in the Nuba Mountains. One has to wonder, does she have it in her to heed her own advice? References Power, Samantha (2001). “Bystanders to Genocide.” Atlantic Magazine, September. Power, Samantha (2002). “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide. New York: Harper Perennial. Kirst, Bill (2002). “A Call to Nations to Prevent Genocide.” The Christian Science Monitor, June 20.


View Comments

Samuel Totten -- Bio and Archives

Samuel Totten, a genocide scholar at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, has conducted research in the Nuba Mountains. His latest book, Genocide by Attrition: The Nuba Mountains, Sudan


Sponsored