The Identification and Prevention of Genocide
Peter S
not seem to have this paper.
The Identification and Prevention of Genocide by Ross Johnson - Fort
Huachuca, Arizona - 24 October 2000
Introduction
The analysis of patterns is fundamental to the prediction of future
events. It is a process that is used with great effect in everything
from political science to medicine to weather forecasting. This paper
will show that the analysis of patterns can be applied to the study of
the worst of the crimes against humanity – genocide.
The Twentieth Century was a century of mass death.
According to Professor R.J. Rummel of the University of Hawaii, as
well as recent press reports from the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda,
governments worldwide murdered approximately 130 million men, women
and children. The label for this, genocide, was not even invented
until almost half way through the century, and has since spawned
endless debate about what it means. Although many examples of genocide
were found in researching this paper, only five will be examined in
depth. They were chosen because they all share some commonalties, but
they are also different in important ways. They are also fairly
representative of the genocides of the Twentieth Century, although
their selection is also based on the availability of sufficient
research material. They are:
1. The Enslavement of the Congolese People, 1890-1920. King Leopold II
of Belgium seized the Congo River Basin for himself and, through his
militia, plundered it for wild rubber. The occupation was so vicious
that ten million Congolese died, and the twentieth century's first
international human rights campaign was begun;
2. The Armenian Genocide of 1915-1923. The Armenians had several
things in common with the European Jews, but the method of their
destruction was substantially different;
3. The Holocaust of 1933-1945. This paper could not be considered
complete without including the group whose destruction brought about
the invention of the word 'genocide';
4. The Khmer Rouge of Cambodia 1975-1979. Because of the group
attacked and the method by which many died, considerable argument
exists on whether or not what happened in Cambodia qualifies as
genocide. Because the victims belonged to the same racial group as the
killers, some refer to it as an autogenocide; and
5. The Rwandese Genocide of 1959-1994. The Rwandese Genocide is often
compared to the Holocaust, but in its execution was different to it in
almost every way except for one - the outcome. The contrast between
the two is instrumental in determining the essential elements of
genocide.
This paper will conclude with a look at the NATO action in Kosovo and
a strategy to prevent genocide.
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The Definition of Genocide
A Polish-Jewish immigrant to the United States named Raphael Lemkin
coined the word genocide in 1944. Before undertaking to study
genocide, we must attempt to understand what it is. Lemkin's
definition follows: "Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily
mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished
by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to
signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the
destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups,
with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of
such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social
institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and
the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the
personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the
individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the
national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed
against individuals, not in their individual capacity but as members
of a national group."
According to Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, genocide is
defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial,
political, or cultural group". The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines
it as the "deliberate extermination of a race, nation, etc". The
definitions show that genocide is more than just mass murder. All
definitions point towards the destruction of the group, as opposed to
the destruction of all the individuals that make up the group. The
distinction is important - this opens up the definition of genocide to
include those activities that can destroy the group short of the
individual murders of all the members. This expanded scope is
reflected in Article 2 of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide as:
In the Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed
with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical,
racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated
to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Simply put, genocide is the attempt to destroy a group through the
death or dispersal of its members. The 1948 Convention makes no
mention of political groups in its definition of genocide, although
Webster's does. This is because the Soviet representative to the
Convention fought, along with some others, to limit the meaning of
genocide to the groups mentioned. The Soviets wanted political groups
and opponents excluded. A prior 1946 resolution of the United Nations
specifically included political groups, though. The definition of
genocide used by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is:
"Deliberate, systematic destruction of a racial, cultural, or
political group." For the purposes of this paper, the definition of
genocide used will be that of the 1948 Convention, but in deference to
the 1946 resolution, Webster's, and the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum, political groups are included in the definition of
groups.
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Background
There are two basic motivations for genocide.
The first, utilitarian genocide, is defined as genocide "motivated by
desire to eliminate a real or perceived enemy, to forestall a real or
perceived threat, or to acquire and possess economic wealth that could
not simply be carried off by the perpetrators". These genocides shared
several common factors, such as occurring in the founding or expansion
of empires, they victimized people outside the society of the
perpetrators, and they were nearly always successful. These genocides
were common in the third millennium before Christ, but gave way to
slavery a thousand years later when the perpetrators realized that it
was more profitable to take slaves than to kill the already conquered.
In the thirteenth century Genghis Kahn offered his opponents a choice:
submit to Mongol domination without a fight, and pay a huge tribute,
or risk losing your entire population to massacre. He was convinced by
a slave to spare the Chinese so they could be taxed annually, so here
the profit motive intervened favorably as well.
The modern era has seen a shift in genocides from utilitarian to
ideological in motivation. In these genocides, the state attacks
'racial, ethnic and ideological deviants'. They are performed 'in
order to implement the imperative of a belief, ideology, or theory,
and they victimize the perpetrators own citizens'. Although these
genocides are almost always failures in that they do not achieve the
intended goal, the prognosis is for an increasing number of them as
countries try to change themselves into ethnically and politically
homogenous nations.
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Genocide in the Twentieth Century
The Twentieth Century saw the greatest deliberate slaughter of
civilians in history. Governments deliberately killed almost one
hundred and thirty million men, women and children. This does not
include 35,654,000 combatants and 35,868,000 non-combatants killed in
wars both domestic and international. Although the definition of
genocide includes more than mass murder, it is the one aspect of the
crime that is the most widely reported on. For that reason, a number
of examples of genocide through mass murder of populations are listed
in Table 1.
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Table 1
Serial - Dates - Victims - Killers - Death Toll
1 1890-1910 Congolese (Forced slavery to support the rubber trade)
Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company 5,000,000 to 8,000,000
2 1904 Herero Tribe, (German South-West Africa) Germany 60,000
3 1917-1922 (Russian Civil War) Russian Bolsheviks 3,284,000
4 1915-1923 Armenians Turks and Kurds Over 1,000,000
5 1923-1928 (New Economic Policy) Russians Soviet Government 2,200,000
6 1929-1935 (The Collectivization Period) Kulaks (rich peasants),
Cossacks, Ukrainians, Kalmyks, Kazakhs, Russians Soviet Government
11,400,000
7 1931-1976 Chinese Chinese Government under Mao Zedong 45,000,000
8 1933-1945 (The Holocaust) Jews, Gypsies, Poles and other Slavs,
people with physical or mental disabilities, Jehovah's Witnesses,
homosexuals, dissenting clergy, Communists, Socialists, asocials, and
other political enemies. Germany 11,000,000
9 1936-1938 (The Great Terror) Russians Soviet Government 4,345,000
10 1939-1941 (Pre-World War II Period) Estonians, Latvians,
Lithuanians, Bessarabians/Bukovians, Poles Soviet Government 5,104,000
11 June 1941-1945 (World War II Period) Russians, Crimean Tatars,
Georgian Meskhetians, German-Soviets, Greeks, (Black Sea and Crimean),
Ukrainians, Reich Germans, German-Rumanians, German Yugoslavs,
Hungarians, Japanese, Poles, Prisoners of War Soviet Government
13,053,000
12 1945-1953 (Postwar and Stalin's Twilight Period) Russians,
Bulgarians, Germans, Moldavian-Rumanians, Poles, Yugoslavs, Balts,
Rumanians, Hungarians, Japanese, North Koreans, Czechs, Armenians,
Greek-Soviets, Greeks (Caucasian), Georgian Muslims, Kurds/Khemshins,
Estonians, Latvians, Ukrainians/Byelorussians Soviet Government
15,613,000
13 1954-1962 (Algerian War) Algerians France 36,000
14 1954-1987 (Post-Stalin Period) Russians, Hungarians, Czechs,
Afghans Soviet Government 6,872,000
15 1959-1994 Rwandese Tutsi and moderate Hutu Rwandese Government 800,000
16 1971 Bengalis Pakistan 1,000,000 to 3,000,000
17 1972 Hutu Burundian Government 100,000
18 1975 Persons accused of being 'communist' Indonesia 600,000
19 1975-1979 Cambodians Khmer Rouge 1,200,000
20 1975-1986 East Timorese Indonesia 100,000
21 1988 (Anfal Campaign) Iraqi Kurds Iraqi Government 50,000 – 100,000
22 July 1995 Srebrenica and five other UN Safe Areas,
Bosnia-Herzegovina Bosnian Serbs 20,000
23 Minimum Total 127,497,000
24 Maximum Total 132,547,000
Table 1: Genocide in the Twentieth Century
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Five Case Studies
Case Study 1: The Enslavement of the Congolese People
In the 1880s two seemingly unrelated events took place that set the
stage for the destruction of half the population of the Congo. King
Leopold II of Belgium, hungering for colonial conquest, gained the
Congo as a personal (as opposed to a state) possession. The other
event was John Dunlop's discovery that rubber tires would smooth the
ride of a bicycle without the need for metal springs. With the advent
of the automobile, there was a sudden increase in demand for rubber
for tires. The wild rubber of the Congo River Basin was seen as a
means to fill the demand for rubber until the commercial rubber
plantations came into production. The Congolese people were used to
harvest the rubber.
The Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company, through the Force Publique
militia, imposed a harsh servitude on the population that killed half
of the population of twenty million in twenty years. Inhabitants of
villages that refused to participate in the collection of wild rubber
or provide food for the Force Publique were shot or decapitated.
Penalties imposed on Congolese men who failed to achieve their quota
of raw rubber production included beatings, murder, amputation of the
hands or feet of themselves or of their children, or rape and
imprisonment of their wives.
In King Leopold's Ghost, the author argues that the killing 'was not,
strictly speaking, a genocide' because the primary aim was collecting
rubber, not destroying the Congolese. The Belgians knew that the price
of accelerated rubber harvesting was a high proportion of deaths
amongst the rubber gatherers, yet chose to trade their lives for quick
profit. The rubber terror would seem to fit the definition of a
utilitarian genocide in the definition given by Jonasshon. As is the
case with much of history, the victors wrote the history of the Congo.
There was little publicly available documented evidence or discussion
until Adam Hochschild's work, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed,
Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. The Belgian Foreign Ministry
Archives possessed important Commission of Inquiry papers on the
treatment of the Congolese, and as late as 1975 they were still
stamped: "Ne pas à communiquer aux chercheurs" (no access for
researchers).
What the Belgian Government could not suppress was Joseph Conrad's
extraordinary novel of the Congo, Heart of Darkness. Conrad spent six
months in the Congo beginning in August of 1890, and left it deeply
troubled by the greed he saw in his fellow white men. Conrad reveals
the white treatment and opinion of the Congolese people in such brutal
and horrifying detail that few people that read it realize that it is
based on actual events, and choose to search it for deeper
philosophical meaning. Conrad himself said, "Heart of Darkness is
experience too; but is experience pushed a little (and only very
little) beyond the actual facts of the case for the perfectly
legitimate, I believe, purpose of bringing it home to the hearts and
minds and bosoms of the readers."
One of the enduring images of Heart of Darkness is Kurtz's collection
of heads. The real-life model of Kurtz, a station chief at Stanley
Falls named Leon Rom actually ringed his flowerbed with human heads.
In another passage, the protagonist, Marlow, reveals his thoughts
about a Congolese man whom has been trained to operate the boiler on a
river steamboat. It reads: "And between whiles I had to look after the
savage who was fireman. He was an improved specimen; he could fire up
a vertical boiler. He was there below me and, upon my word, to look at
him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a
feather hat walking on his hind legs."
After this same fireman dies in an ambush, Marlow tries to reconcile
his emotions and at the same time places him in the context of the
larger Congolese society: "Perhaps you will think it passing strange
this regret for a savage who was no more account than a grain of sand
in a black Sahara."
It is clear from this text that Conrad was trying to convey the
message that the Congolese were not perceived to share a common
humanity with their Belgian masters. This made it easier to justify
murder, torture, rape and the amputation of the hands or feet of the
children of laborers who failed to meet their quotas.
Case Study 2: The Armenian Genocide
The origins of the Armenians date back to the Indo-European migrations
of the third and second millennia Before Common Era. Historical
Armenia covered an area of 100,000 square miles, and Mount Ararat, in
northeastern Turkey, was seen as the spiritual centre of the Armenian
culture. Armenia was also the first nation to accept Christianity, a
fact that the Armenians are very proud of. The geographical location
of Armenia served as the land bridge between East and West, which
forced the Armenians to endure many invasions and occupations. They
were held together as a people by their religion, the Apostolic
Church, and their language. Their culture also has a prohibition
against marrying outside of their community, which helped to preserve
the distinctness of the Armenian people. The Ottoman Turks ruled the
Armenians from the sixteenth century onward. The Armenians were
allowed to practice their religion and they had much autonomy in civil
matters, but they were still treated as second-class citizens. They
did not enjoy the same legal status as Turks, and they paid special,
often extreme, taxes.
The majority of Armenians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
were employed as peasants or sharecroppers. Armenians also had a
significant presence in banking, finance, business and trade. They
were well positioned to benefit from industrialization, and they
became a major economic presence in Turkey. By 1915, Armenians
controlled sixty percent of imports, forty percent of exports, and 80
percent of commerce in Turkey. Attacks on Armenians by Kurds and Turks
were not uncommon. Their winter stores were often plundered, and they
paid extra fines, taxes, and bribes. These attacks had the effect of
polarizing the relationship between the Armenians and the Turks and
Kurds. Armenians in Sassun refused, in 1894, to pay taxes to a Kurdish
chieftain. Turkish soldiers and Kurdish cavalry units were sent to the
area and destroyed twenty-six to forty villages, and killed somewhere
between 900 and sixteen thousand Armenians. Pograms continued for
another two years, and more than one hundred thousand Armenians were
murdered. Irregular Kurdish units called the Hamidiye, who had been
armed with new repeating rifles by the Turkish government, did much of
the killing. The Armenians were placed in an untenable position by the
1914-1918 War. The Turks expected them to side with them against the
British, French and Russians, however with over a million Armenians
living in Russian territory they were unenthusiastic and suggested
neutrality instead. This angered the Turkish government.
The Turkish government followed a three-track approach to set up the
Armenian community for genocide. The first track was the conscription
of Armenian men of fighting age. This stripped the Armenian community
of the means to defend itself. Although these men served as loyal
soldiers of the Ottoman army, in early 1915 they were disarmed and
reorganized into labor battalions. They were kept weak through
starvation and overwork, and eventually they were shot to death in
groups of 50 to 100. The second track was the disarming of the
Armenian community. The government 'requisitioned' their weapons,
claiming they were needed for the war effort. The Armenians complied,
and photographs of the surrendered weapons were displayed as proof of
the treasonous intent of the Armenians. This appeared to justify later
extreme action against the Armenians. The third track was the arrest,
torture and killing of the remaining leaders of the Armenian
community. This worked well because of the poor communications caused
by the difficult terrain of the regions populated by the Armenians.
With no leadership, men of fighting age, or weapons, the Armenian
community found itself defenseless when the mass deportations began.
In May of 1914 the Temporary Law of Deportation was enacted.
This law was allowed deportation of anyone suspected of espionage or
treason. This law was used as the basis for the deportation of the
Armenian community from Turkey. Deportation was the chosen method of
murder. Typically, Armenians would be ordered to report on a certain
day for deportation. They would be formed up, and ordered to march
under gendarme escort. When they left their community, the men would
be split away from the families and murdered. The elderly, the women,
and the children would be forced to march without food and water for
days. The routes were circuitous, through mountain passes and deserts.
The destination was Aleppo in Syria, but the aim was death through
murder, exhaustion, or exposure. The deportation marches were
dangerous enough, but to be sure that the intent was achieved the
government raised a militia of sadists and criminals called the
Special Organization. They raped women, murdered families, and stole
what few possessions the victims owned. Kurds were also encouraged to
raid deportation caravans. Through this means, the government of
Turkey destroyed one and a half million people - fully half of their
Armenian population, or one-third of the worldwide population.
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Case Study 3: The Holocaust
Antipathy between the Jews and Christian Europe was nothing new. The
isolation of the Jews in Europe was the inevitable result of a process
that began almost two thousand years earlier. Richard Rubenstein
argues in The Age of Triage: Fear and Hope in an Overcrowded World
that the roots of the conflict between the Jews and the rest of
Christian Europe stem from the contradictory nature of the two
religions. Christians believe that Jesus Christ was the Savior and the
Son of God. Jews believed that he was only a prophet. Belief in one
religion automatically implies disbelief in the other. A common tactic
used to discredit unwelcome opinion is through an argumentum ad
hominem (abusive) attack - to literally attack the credibility of the
person voicing the opinion. Ad hominem attacks were, in this case,
used against a whole religion. Simply put, anti-Semitism is an attempt
to discredit the Judaic model of Christ by ascribing negative or even
satanic motives and characteristics to the Jews. The tension between
the two religions created a weak minority within a society dominated
by a strong majority.
Up until the 16th Century, Jews provided an essential service as the
agents of a money economy (merchants, traders, moneylenders, etc.)
when the rest of society was engaged in subsistence farming. The
emergence of a capitalist economy replaced the feudal economy, and the
Jews found themselves competing with a stronger middle class. They
gradually lost ground, and the Jews migrated from Western and Central
Europe to the more economically deprived Eastern Europe, where they
could practice their traditional role in society. Land reform in
Poland and Russia in the mid-19th Century brought about the same
economic problems for the Jews that had driven them out of Western
Europe two hundred years earlier. Pograms launched against the Jews
after the assassination of Czar Alexander II on March 13, 1881 marked
the beginning of the emigration of Jews back to Western Europe. By
1933 there were 500,000 Jews in Germany and 3,250,000 Jews in Poland.
The modern isolation of the Jews in Germany was accomplished through
several methods over a 6-year period. After taking power in 1933,
Hitler ordered that Jews could not work in the civil service,
universities and law courts. In 1935, the Nazis passed the Nuremberg
Laws, defining Jews in terms of their grandparent's ethnicity, banning
marriage between Aryan Germans and Jews, and stripping German Jews of
their rights of citizenship. From 1937 to 1939 Jews were forced out of
the economy by seizure or forced sale of their businesses, barred from
attending public schools, theatres, cinemas, vacation resorts, and
even forbidden from walking in certain areas of German cities. In
November of 1938 widespread physical attacks against synagogues and
Jewish-owned stores commenced. After this event, called Kristallnacht,
the mass arrests of Jews began.
By the end of 1938, thirty thousand men were deported to concentration
camps like Dachau, and several hundred women were sent to local jails.
The actual decision to exterminate all of the remaining 11 million
Jews of Europe was not taken until the Wannsee Conference of January
20, 1942, when the decision was made to abandon attempts to force Jews
to migrate from Europe and pursue a 'Final Solution' instead. The fact
that the decision to exterminate European Jewry was not taken until
1942 is a crucial point. Isolation of a target population does not in
itself lead to its physical murder. Isolation creates the conditions
within which mass murder can take place.
The German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 marked the
beginning of the attacks on the remaining Eastern European Jews.
Mobile death squads called Einsatzgruppen conducted many of the mass
executions, and eventually killed 1.2 million Jews. The isolation of
these communities was already a fact of life in Eastern Europe, which
clearly identified the victims to the killers. The Nazis were not
concerned with severing the few remaining ties of society slowly,
though, as they did not care about an outcry from the occupied
countries and the background of warfare gave them license to act.
The most organized killing took place in death camps in Poland. There
were six of them: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Chelmno, Treblinka,
Belzec and Sobibor. Victims, told that they were being 'resettled in
the East' to a labor camp, were transported to the camps by train.
Upon arrival the children were usually taken from their parents and
gassed immediately. Old people met the same fate. Others were
warehoused, used as slave labor, and when their usefulness had
expired, killed. By the time the war ended in 1945, two-thirds of
Europe's 9 million Jews had been murdered. Most died in the death
camps of Poland, where the industrial age met mass murder. Over one
million victims were children and infants.
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Case Study 4: The Khmer Rouge and Cambodia
In March of 1970, General Lon Nol overthrew Prince Norodom Sihanouk,
ruler of Cambodia. Sihanouk had for years kept his country out of the
conflict swirling around them; his successor, ailing and incompetent,
had no such ability, and soon Vietnamese and Cambodian Communist
forces were seizing Cambodian territory. Lon Nol retreated to Phnom
Penh and relied on American bombers to slow the advancing Communists,
and in five years of fighting nearly half a million Cambodians were
killed or wounded. The Khmer Rouge was led by Saloth Sar, the
Paris-educated son of a minor Cambodian official. While in Paris, Sar
developed his dangerously incomplete notion of an agrarian utopia
mixed in with the Chinese Mao Zedong concept of perpetual revolution.
When he returned to Cambodia Saloth Sar adopted the nom de guerre, Pol
Pot, a name that sounded good but meant nothing.
Phnom Penh fell to the Communist Khmer Rouge on 17 April 1975, after
three and a half months of siege and five years of civil war. As they
did whenever they captured a town, the Khmer Rouge immediately ordered
the full evacuation of Phnom Penh. This action was seen at first as an
attempt to reduce the economic pressure caused by swelling refugee
populations, but a Khmer Rouge official, in an interview, explained
the logic of the tactic while contrasting Cambodian Communists with
Vietnamese Communists: "The Khmer methods do not require a large
personnel; there are no heavy charges to bear because everyone is
simply thrown out of town. If we may take the liberty of making a
comparison, the Khmers have adopted the method which consists in
overturning the basket with all the fruit inside; then, choosing only
the articles that satisfy them completely, they put them back in the
basket. The Vietnamese did not tip over the basket, they picked out
the rotten fruit. The latter method involves a much greater loss of
time than that employed by the Khmers.
The entire population of Phnom Penh, approximately 2,500,000 people,
fled into countryside ill prepared to receive them. Hundreds of
thousands died of disease, starvation, exhaustion and murder on the
evacuation marches. As time went on, the Khmer Rouge established slave
labor projects, torture chambers, and prison camps, where
'intellectuals' - identified by their spectacles or their ability to
speak a foreign language - were murdered. Military soldiers and
officers, students, engineers, and government officials of the old
regime were targeted as well. By the time the Vietnamese had invaded
and stopped the slaughter in late 1978, as many as two million
Cambodians had been murdered.
Case Study 5: The Rwandese Genocide
The conflict in Rwanda has been cast as an ethnic conflict, with two
tribes, (Hutu and Tutsi) fighting for control of the nation. That is
an oversimplification, though, as a closer look reveals the problems
in Rwanda have their roots in economic class and demagoguery. Rwanda
is ethnically composed of one tribe, the Banyarawada, differentiated
into three groups: the Tutsi, or cattle-herders, the Hutu, or
peasants, and the Twa, or pygmies. The origins of modern Rwandese
society began twenty generations ago with the domination of one Tutsi
clan, the Nyiginya, in central Rwanda. They formed the nucleus of the
state that since has expanded within the borders of what is now the
modern state of Rwanda. As the Nyiginya control expanded, they
assimilated the Hutu chiefs into the ruling class and conferred upon
them the status of Tutsi.
With this, the distinction between Tutsi and Hutu began to drift away
from ethnic lineage and became an economic or political distinction.
An individual could move between Hutu and Tutsi classes much the same
way that someone could move between economic classes today.
Occupations in pre-nineteenth century Rwanda conformed to patterns
within the single tribe, the Banyarawanda. Tutsi held the positions of
cattle-herders, soldiers, and administrators. Hutu were usually
farmers. Twa were sub-divided into two groups - hunter-gatherers and
potters.
The beginning of the polarization between the groups that finally lead
to the 1994 genocide can be found in the reign of the Tutsi king
Rwabugiri from 1860-1895. Rwabugiri confiscated the land of the
remaining semi-autonomous Hutu and Tutsi lineages and destroyed their
political power. He created a feudal system of labor, called the
uburetwe, which traded access to land for work. The Tutsi were exempt
from this system, which was only applied to Hutu peasants.
Furthermore, cattle were the medium of exchange for economic
transactions, and the cattle chiefs, Tutsis all, dominated Rwanda.
Raising armies requires capital, and the Tutsi controlled it.
Rwabugiri also introduced an ethnic differentiation between Hutu and
Tutsi that was based on 'historic social positions'. Through
Rwabigiri's policies, ethnicity became politicized and polarized in
Rwanda prior to the advent of the colonial period.
The colonial period in Rwanda lasted from 1899 to 1916 under the
Germans and 1916 to 1961 under the Belgians. The colonial period
strengthened the position of the minority Tutsi as the dominant group
in Rwandese society. In 1933 compulsory identity cards were issued,
which accelerated the polarization of society through the bestowing of
privilege on the Tutsi. The rise of the anti-colonial movement
influenced the Belgian colonial administration and Catholic Church,
who changed their support from the minority Tutsi to the majority
Hutu. This tied in with the Hutu Revolution of 1959, which in three
years drove Rwanda from a Tutsi-dominated society to one dominated by
Hutu. The transformation was a violent one, and in 1959 alone,
approximately ten thousand Tutsi were murdered. Tens of thousands of
Tutsi were forced as refugees into neighboring states, from where,
starting in the 1960s, they launched armed raids back into Rwanda as
insurgents known to the Hutu as Inyenzi (Kinyarawanda for
'cockroaches'). In 1963, another ten thousand were murdered, and 1967
and 1973 saw further massacres of Tutsi. Within the polarized Rwandese
state lay extraordinary central control. In 1975 the government
ordered a weekly day of indentured service to the state, called the
umuganda. It was tax in the form of work, and was used to dig
irrigation ditches, improve roads, and build health centers and
schools.
The umuganda cohorts were called interahamwe, which was Kinyarawanda
for 'those who work together. (The name interahamwe gained notoriety
during the genocide, where militias of that name were instrumental in
killing Tutsi.) Compulsory work on umuganda cohorts (the alternative
was imprisonment) trained the Hutu peasants to obey orders from their
superiors. This combined with a society bereft of Non-Governmental
Organizations and with a missionary clergy underscoring the importance
of obedience to authority, left the Hutu peasants no obvious choice
but to obey orders from above. Although the orders grew less benign as
time passed, the degree of obedience did not.
By the 1990s, Rwanda's problems had begun to pile up. In October 1990,
the Rwandese Patriotic Front attacked from its base in Uganda,
creating a simmering war of insurgency. The umuganda labor system was
failing. There was a shortage of land and problems in the transfer of
land from the older to the younger generations. There was a high
unemployment rate among the young men, which, combined with the
difficulty in obtaining land, meant that they could not marry or
advance in social status. There was a collapse in the world price of
coffee, which constituted seventy-five percent of Rwanda's export
earnings. Democratization and multi-party politics threatened the
patronage system that the civil service was based on.
By 1993, there were nearly a million Internally Displaced Persons
(IDPs) from the fighting with the Rwandese Patriotic Front, which in
itself was an economic disaster, as the areas abandoned represented
some of Rwanda's most productive farmland. The leadership of Rwanda
had no intention of taking responsibility for the position they found
themselves in. In 1992 government propaganda sought to differentiate
the Hutu as the 'true' Rwandans and the Tutsi as 'invaders'. In
September of 1992 a commission of senior military officers published a
report titled, "Definition and identification of the enemy',
describing the Tutsi.
In February of 1993 the Rwandese Patriotic Front launched an attack
towards Kigali, which was stopped only with the help of France. This
started another round of negotiations, which ended with the Arusha
Accords, a five-part treaty that spelled out the power-sharing
arrangements in a new Rwandese political landscape. Power sharing and
an end to privilege were unacceptable to the extremists surrounding
President Habyarimana, and they set about to destroy the Accords.
On 6 April, 1994 the aircraft carrying the Presidents of Rwanda and
Burundi back from Arusha, Tanzania was shot down on its approach to
Kigali airport. Within minutes roadblocks were established in Kigali,
death squads were dispatched, and the destruction of the Tutsi began
in earnest. In one hundred days approximately 800,000 Tutsi and
moderate Hutu were dead. The genocide only ended when the Rwandese
Patriotic Front defeated the Rwandese government and drove them into
exile, taking two million refugees with them.
---------------
The Pattern of Genocide
Author Raul Hillberg described a pattern of genocide in his book
Destruction of the European Jews.
He writes, "A destruction process has an inherent pattern. There is
only one way in which a scattered group can effectively be destroyed.
Three steps are organic in the operation: Definition; Concentration
(or seizure); Annihilation
This is the invariant structure of the basic process, for no group can
be killed without a concentration or seizure of the victims, and no
victims can be segregated before the perpetrator knows who belongs to
the group."
Hillberg's model is descriptive of the Holocaust, but differs from the
process used in other genocides of the Twentieth Century.
In other examples of genocide, such as Armenia, Cambodia and Rwanda,
the killing was done at the local level with little concentration of
the victims.
---------------
An alternative process is proposed by [in] this paper, which expands
on Hillberg's model. The stages are: Isolation; Destruction; and
Dispersal
Denial
Each stage may be comprised of several components as follows:
Stage - Component - Remarks
Isolation - Identification (of target population) - Reinforced through
registration or identity cards
Denial of citizenship and rights - Important in countries with a
strong legal system.
Denial of political representation
Denial of employment where they could interact with the general public
- Reduces exposure and diminishes contribution to the economy.
Denial of education
Confiscation of lands, property, and businesses - Encouraged
emigration of targeted population - Genocide may begin as an effort to
force an outgroup to emigrate.
Banning of intermarriage with between members of the in-group and out-group.
Confiscation of firearms - In societies were private ownership of
firearms is normally allowed. May be preceded by weapons registration.
Incidents of violence against target population - Will include
beatings, rape, torture, murder and on occasion mass murder. Done to
teach the general population that socializing with the target
population is dangerous, encourage emigration or refugee flight, and
by not prosecuting killers show that abusing or killing members of the
targeted population is not considered a crime. May include widespread
rape to isolate targeted women from their own communities and add to
climate of terror
Stage - Component - Remarks
-----
Destruction and Dispersal (Centralized Model)
Secrecy in planning - Secrecy in execution - The speed of the killing
is limited by the need for secrecy
Formation of special militias or death squads - The bulk of the
killing is done by specially-trained personnel
Deception campaign - Victims are not told of plan to kill them to
ensure their cooperation
Existence of concentration camps.
Transportation of victims to centralized killing facilities - Use of
mass-transportation methods such as rail, truck, foot
Disposal of the dead - Cremation
"Ethnic cleansing" - Encourages refugee flight, terror, and further
isolation of targeted population
-----
Destruction and Dispersal (Decentralized Model)
Secrecy in planning - No secrecy in execution - Speed of killing
accelerated by knowledge that time before international intervention
may be limited
Formation of special militias or death squads - Killing will be done
by death squads; they may also direct public to assist in killing -
Victims killed as close to their homes as possible - Killing done at
local level, probably by other locals
Disposal of the dead - Mass graves, cremation, dumping bodies in
rivers, septic tanks, wells, etc.
Starvation - Achieved through manipulation of the food supply.
"Ethnic cleansing" - Encourages refugee flight, terror, and further
isolation of targeted population
Stage - Component - Remarks
-----
Denial - Denial of the facts - "It never happened"
'Rationalization' - They were casualties of war
'Discredit accusers' - You are just a puppet for the so-called victims
'Moral Equivalency/ Self-Defense' - They have committed genocide against us too
'Blame the victims' - They brought this on themselves'
Table 2: The Pattern of Genocide Isolation
---------------
The Definition of Isolation
Isolation refers to the systematic disengagement of a victim group
from the society of the perpetrators. This stage is crucial to the
success of the genocide: a victim population must have all of its
bonds of society, commerce and friendship with the rest of society
broken before the destruction stage commences or the perpetrators risk
an outcry and backlash from the rest of the population. Raphael Lemkin
understood the significance of the isolation of a targeted population,
and referred to the process in his definition of genocide. Returning
to his definition, Lemkin said, "The objectives of such a plan would
be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of
culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic
existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal
security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the
individuals belonging to such groups."
---------------
The Sociology of Isolation
An explanation of the dynamics between dominant majorities and weaker
minorities can be seen in the relationship between ingroups and
outgroups. The definitions of these groups are:
Ingroup - A group with which people identify and to which they feel
closely attached, particularly when that attachment is founded on
hatred from or opposition toward another group.
Outgroup - A group toward which members of an ingroup feel a sense of
separateness, opposition, or even hatred.
The concept of ingroups and outgroups can apply to many relationships
between groups.
Military cohesion depends on a sense of commonality obtained through
contrast with the rest of civilian society. Sports teams and their
fans form their own ingroup; members of other teams and their fans
form their outgroup. In a situation where the ingroup and outgroups
are differentiated by trivial matters, or are balanced roughly equally
in size or power, the tension between the two groups may be of little
consequence. The dynamic of ingroups and outgroups can be carried to
the political arena. Politicians seek support from groups because it
is more efficient and cost-effective than approaching an electorate
one voter at a time. The extreme application of this is the demagogue:
a 'political agitator appealing to the desires or prejudices of the
mob.'
Genocides are all about ingroups and outgroups. In the Holocaust, the
ingroup was the German people, the outgroup was composed of Jews,
Gypsies, and homosexuals. In Rwanda the ingroup was the Hutu, the
outgroup was the Tutsi and moderate Hutu. In Cambodia, the ingroup
were the Khmer Rouge, the outgroup the professionals, army officers,
and government officials.
Isolation can take a very long time. In Rwanda, isolation of the Tutsi
population began with the rise of the Hutu Power movement in 1959. The
large-scale killing of Tutsi began in April of 1994, fully 35 years
later. As the life expectancy of the average Rwandese is only 41.31
years, this means that most of the citizens of Rwanda were born after
the isolation phase had begun. The isolation of the Jews of Europe
began in Rome in the fourth century Anno Domini when Christianity
became the state religion, with its aggressive policy of conversion.
===============
The Components of Isolation
---------------
Selection and Identification
The first step in the process of isolation is selection of the target
population. Criteria can include economic class, skin color, language,
political affiliation, education, and ethnicity. When the target
population has been selected, a form of identification is required to
differentiate them from the rest of society. The identifying feature
may very well be the cause of selection, such as economic class, but
if the possibility of confusion exists then a more overt method of
identification is required. The public marking of a target group
facilitates isolation by clearly pointing out to all who the outgroup
is. Any public sanctions or loss of privileges intended for the
outgroup can then be applied without fear of accidentally
inconveniencing a member of the ingroup. The Belgians in the Congo had
the easiest job, as skin color denoted ingroup and outgroup status.
Armenians lived in ethnic enclaves, which made their identification
dependent on where they lived. In Nazi Germany, the identification of
the outgroup was legislated through the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. The
public or overt identification of Jews was accomplished by forcing all
Jews to wear a yellow Star of David while in public. The Khmer Rouge
treated all with suspicion until they proved themselves as being of
true peasant background. In Rwanda the citizens carried identity cards
that stated their lineage, and when this failed the killers relied on
identification by the neighbors of the victims.
---------------
Denial of Citizenship
Denial of citizenship to members of the outgroup is a logical step for
a society seeking ethnic homogeneity centered on the ingroup. Rights
can be removed through action and precedent, such as in Rwanda and
Cambodia, or legislatively, as in the Holocaust. Legislative denial of
rights add a veneer of respectability to the isolation of the
outgroup. Nazi Germany passed the Reich Citizenship Law, which tied
citizenship not to individual rights but to membership of the Volk.
Membership in the Volk required the person to be both racially 'pure'
and able to serve the German people and the Reich, which by definition
excluded the Jews. The ingroup was thus defined as the Volk, and the
rights of citizenship were denied to members of the outgroup.
Eventually, four hundred laws and decrees were enacted regulating the
Jews in Germany, each designed to restrict rights and privileges.
---------------
Denial of Political Representation
With the loss of rights comes the loss of political representation.
Political representation of the outgroup is tantamount to allowing an
advocate in the halls of government around which an opposition can
coalesce. In the absence of accepted international human rights laws,
the Congolese only had those rights that King Leopold of Belgium was
willing to extend to them. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 removed
political rights from the Jews, which now left them outside the
protection of the state and at the mercy of the secret police.
---------------
Denial or Restrictions on Employment
One of the most effective methods of isolation lies in restricting or
regulating employment. Employment defines our role in society, and
through pay and compensation establishes the value of our
contribution. Denying employment to members of the outgroup that would
place them in the public eye, such as teachers, administrators, and
public officials serves to reduce their visible contribution to
society. This will drive them underground and back into their own
group. It also reduces the number of interfaces between the ingroup
and the outgroup. Breaking any bonds that exist between the ingroup
and the outgroup is critical to the success of the isolation effort.
The Third Reich promulgated the very first anti-Jewish law on 7 April
1933. It was called the 'Law for the Restoration of a Professional
Civil Service', and ordered the elimination of Jews from the civil
service. Laws prohibiting Jews from employment as lawyers, jurors,
commercial judges, dentists or physicians in state-run institutions,
professors, lecturers, notaries, patent lawyers and lay assessors
followed swiftly. By October 1933 Jews had been excluded from 'public
life, government, culture and the professions'. Rwanda followed a
similar pattern. During the 1970's and 1980's the Tutsi were removed
from government service, which later gave a powerful incentive to the
Hutu elite to defend their privilege.
---------------
Denial of Education
Denial of education will swiftly isolate an outgroup. Education
prepares the student to participate in society, and gives them choices
about what form that participation will take. Education also breaks
down barriers in society and promotes tolerance, as children learn
more about individuals in other ethnic groups through observation and
interaction. Removing the right of education from an outgroup will
also reduce the range of skill sets available within the group, which
will make them less employable. Reducing the outgroup's participation
in the economy to the most menial jobs only increases the sense of
superiority of the ingroup. On April 25 1933 the 'Law Against the
Overcrowding of German Schools and Institutions of Higher Learning'
was promulgated, with the aim of reducing 'non-Aryan' attendance to
just five percent of the school populations. The laws limiting the
options of and isolating the adults were now extended to the children.
On 15 November, 1938 Jewish children were banned from the general
education system. All schooling of Jewish children was banned in the
summer of 1941. In Rwanda, the rights to much of the available
education was removed from the Tutsi in the 1970s and 1980s.
---------------
Confiscation of Property
Confiscation of property, businesses and assets are a clear indication
to the outgroup of their loss of status. It can also provide financial
incentives for some members of the ingroup, whose support can then be
counted on. The Third Reich promulgated the 'Hereditary Farm Law' on
29 September 1933 which ordered that the only farmers that could keep
their land were those that had no Jewish blood in their lineage as far
back as 1800. From 1937 to 1939 many Jews lost their businesses
through seizures or forced sales. The Nazis were not the only ones to
deprive an outgroup of property – in early 1942 the Canadian
Government ordered the internment of all Japanese-Canadians in British
Columbia and the sale of their property for a fraction of its value.
---------------
Encouraged Emigration
The very methods of isolation encourage the most mobile of the
targeted population to leave. Emigration supports the aim of the
dominant majority, so is rarely opposed. In 1915 the method chosen to
kill the Armenians was forced deportation, with conditions so harsh
that the few survivors made it out. Between 1933 and 1939, half of
Germany's Jews emigrated to Palestine, the United States, China, Latin
America, or Western Europe. Many Cambodians fled the approaching Khmer
Rouge by crossing the border into Thailand. Tutsi were encouraged
through violent repression to leave Rwanda from 1959 onward.
Emigration was not a factor in the Congolese rubber terror.
Banning of Intermarriage
Marriage between members of an ingroup and an outgroup are living
demonstrations that the two groups can coexist. Banning of
intermarriage between the ingroup and the outgroup accomplishes three
objectives: it reduces the displays of inter-group harmony, it
discourages assimilation (often the best defense of the outgroup), and
it reduces the ties of family between the two groups. A prohibition
against intermarriage of Turks and Armenians was a cultural defense
mechanism of the Armenians designed to protect them from the very
assimilation that would have saved them individually, if not as a
culture.
In September of 1935 the German government promulgated the 'Law for
the Protection of German Blood and Honor'. Simply put, marriage
between Jews and German nationals was outlawed, as was extramarital
relations between the two groups. Marriage between Hutu and Tutsi was
common in Rwanda, although as the isolation of the Tutsi population
continued pressure was put on mixed couples.
---------------
Violence Against the Target Population
The most visible and effective method of isolation of a target
population is through state-sanctioned violence and terrorism.
Physical attacks against the outgroup serve many complimentary
purposes: it encourages emigration or refugee flight, it clearly
teaches any sympathetic members of the ingroup that association with a
member of the outgroup can be dangerous, and it hastens the
disintegration of the outgroup. When the attackers escape punishment,
it is a signal to the criminal fringe of society that raping, robbing
or killing members of the outgroup is encouraged, which in turn can
increase the level of violence. This in turn raises the pressure on
the outgroup to flee or emigrate.
The Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company and the Force Publique
committed terrible atrocities against the Congolese to ensure their
servitude during the rubber terror. The atrocities were so dramatic
that one of the judges appointed in a Commission of Inquiry tasked
with investigating the charges broke down and wept during testimony of
a succession of witnesses to and victims of torture. The Armenians
were treated as second-class citizens as early as the 16th Century.
The 19th Century saw increasing violence directed against them. The
Third Reich institutionalized violence against the Jews through
several methods. They formed two special militias, the SA
(Sturmabteilung, or Brownshirts) and its offshoot, the SS
(Schutzaffel). Part of the militias' mandates was violence against the
Jews. In November of 1938, thousands of Jewish homes, Jewish
businesses and synagogues were destroyed and many Jews beaten or
murdered in a pogrom that became known as Kristallnacht. By the time
of the Wannsee Conference in January of 1942, the people of Germany
had become so desensitized to the violence directed against the Jews
that the Final Solution was seen a reasonable alternative. Violence
and murder were directed at the Tutsi in Rwanda from the rise of the
Hutu Power movement in 1959 until the overthrow of the government in
1994. Violence against Tutsi has continued since through guerilla
action by the remnants of the interahamwe living in the Democratic
Republic of the Congo.
---------------
Confiscation of Firearms
Genocide is about extermination, not fair play. Before a government
can destroy a group, it must remove from it any means it may have to
defend itself. Firearms offer the outgroup an opportunity to protect
itself, and so the government will normally legislate against
ownership, at least by members of the outgroup. In the case of the
Congolese Rubber Terror, there were no firearms within the target
population, so self-defense was limited to what could be accomplished
by primitive weapons. There were a number of rebellions against the
Force Publique in some parts of the Congo, some lasting for years. In
February of 1915, the Turkish Government ordered all Armenians to
surrender their weapons. In some areas, they were given quotas of
weapons to turn in, and if they did not have enough they were forced
to buy weapons from their Turkish neighbors. When The Armenians turned
in the weapons, they were displayed as proof of treasonous activity,
which helped to legitimize the inhumane treatment of Armenians in the
eyes of the public.
In 1928 the freely elected government of Germany enacted a major
gun-control bill. The law required everyone to obtain a permit to own,
carry or purchase ammunition for a firearm. Firearm and ammunition
dealers were required to obtain permits to remain in business. The
police had a great deal of input in who could obtain permits – in the
town of Northeim only 9 hunting permits were issued in a community of
10,000 people. The Nazis utilized the list of registered weapons when
they took power to locate and confiscate weapons from persons they
deemed opponents. On 18 March 1938 the Nazis passed their own firearms
law. Among other things, a special permit was introduced for handguns,
extra controls were placed on ammunition, Jews were barred from
businesses that were involved with firearms, and Nazis were exempt
from the firearms permit system. On 11 November 1938, Hitler decreed
that Jews could not possess firearms, knives or truncheons under any
circumstances, and further ordered that any possessed by Jews be
immediately surrendered.
Cambodia had firearm laws as a legacy of the years of French colonial
occupation. A series of Royal Ordinances were passed out of fear of
communist and anti-colonial insurgencies taking place in other parts
of Southeast Asia. The first law was passed in 1920, and dealt with
the carrying of guns. The last law was passed in 1938, and imposed a
strict licensing system. Within Cambodian civil society, only hunters
could have guns, and then only one. The laws remained in place after
Cambodia was granted independence. The civil war in Cambodia from 1970
to 1975 would have presented opportunities for Cambodians to arm
themselves, so the Khmer Rouge disarmed the populace again. The
limited numbers of legal weapons were confiscated, their locations
being known from the registration lists. The other weapons were found
by searching towns and villages.
Information on gun confiscation in Rwanda was not available. Kopel
does include additional case studies of weapons confiscation
legislation being passed prior to mass murders in the Soviet Union,
China, Guatemala, and Uganda.
---------------
Destruction and Dispersal (Common Elements)
Within this stage, there appears to be two basic models. The first
model we will examine is the Centralized Model, of which the Holocaust
is a good example. The second model is the Decentralized Model.
Examples of this model are the Congolese, Armenian, Cambodian and
Rwandese genocides. Both models share several common traits, but have
important differences. The Centralized Model concentrates the victims,
while still alive, and murders them in large groups. The Decentralized
Model sees the victims murdered closer to their homes, with little
attempt to concentrate the victims on any more than a local scale. The
largest impacts of the difference between the two models lie in the
areas of secrecy, publicity and speed of killing.
Secrecy in Planning
A lack of secrecy in the planning stage could interfere with the
killers' intentions by inviting unwanted scrutiny from foreign
governments, opposition groups, and Non-Governmental Organizations.
Formation of Special Militias
The formation of special militias is common to all the cases studied
in this paper except for Cambodia. In that case the Khmer Rouge army
was so brutalized from five years of fighting and privation that they
were capable of great cruelty and no extraordinary militia needed to
be created. The fighting also reinforced the chain of command, giving
the political leadership great control over the actions of the
soldiers. The Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company used its militia, the
Force Publique, to enforce the quotas set on the Congolese. Shortfalls
in rubber sap collection were met with extreme cruelty. The Turkish
Ministries of Justice and the Interior created a militia of 'criminals
and murderers' recruited from prisons, called the 'Special
Organization' to handle the bulk of the murder of the Armenians. The
Germans created two organizations, the SA and the SS in part, to
persecute the Jews. They also created an organization dedicated solely
to the murder of Jews, the Einsatzgruppen. The Force Armees Rwandaise
(FAR) worked with the Interahamwe to murder Tutsi. The FAR would fix
the Tutsi in place, and send the Interahamwe in to do much of the
killing. An important question emerges: why would a state feel the
need to create a special organization to carry out a task that could
be just as easily carried out by established army units? The obvious
answer seems to be that military units, especially those with a sense
of honor, cannot be relied upon to murder innocent men, women and
children. There is, unfortunately, ample evidence to refute this
theory.
When Lieutenant Calley was convicted in 1971 for his part in the My
Lai massacre in Vietnam, there was a public outcry in the United
States. In one Gallup Poll at the time, 79% of respondents disapproved
of the conviction, while only 9% approved. That such a huge majority
of Americans would disapprove of the conviction of a man accused of
involvement of a war crime seems extraordinary, but they seem to have
concluded that his defense of 'following orders' was acceptable. The
importance of obedience was deemed by the public to be more important
than the lives of non-combatants. This attitude was dramatically
demonstrated by another survey done after the Calley conviction.
Seventy percent believed that, (assuming that he had been ordered to
do so), Lieutenant Calley should have killed the Vietnamese civilians;
only 36% believed that what he did was actually right. If the old saw
that armies are a cross-section of the societies they serve is true,
then it is reasonable to expect that the US Army held a similar view
at the time.
Between 1960 and 1963 Stanley Milgram of Yale University carried out a
series of experiments on obedience to malevolent authority. The
experiments were designed to measure the willingness of the unwitting
subject to comply with an order that he believed would result in the
discomfort and possible death of a research subject through an
electric shock administered when the research subject failed to answer
a question properly. Prior to conducting the experiment, Milgram
polled psychologists, college students, and middle-class adults to
find out what they predicted the outcome would be. They all said that
the unwitting subjects would refuse to obey orders when the
consequences became dangerous to the research subject. What Milgram
found through experimentation was shocking – 65% of the unwitting
subjects obeyed orders to carry on the experiment when they had reason
to believe their compliance would lead to the death or grave injury of
the research subject. Remember that the unwitting subjects were all
civilians, not soldiers trained to obey orders.
Based on the results of this experiment, it is reasonable to expect
that armies might participate in massacres if ordered. So if the
compliance of soldiers can be reasonably counted on, why do states
that seek to commit genocide create special organizations to do the
killing? The answer may lie in political control. As stated earlier,
the Ministries of Justice and the Interior, not the Ministry of War,
raised the Special Organization in Turkey. Later in Germany, the SA
and SS were troops of the political entity, the National Socialist
Party. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge had fought a five-year war, living
in the jungle apart from society when their attentions were turned to
the town and city dwellers. The lengthy war would have had the effect
of strengthening the chain of command, ensuring that orders from the
top are carried out with little local modification. The interahamwe
was under the control of senior Rwandese government and military
officials close to the President, ensuring that presidential control
can be exerted without being filtered by local officials. In genocide,
the killing is done at the individual level, and the level of the
footsoldier in any army is far removed from the political leadership.
In order to control events on the ground, the perpetrators must
shorten the distance between the political leadership and the events
that they seek to control.
Ethnic Cleansing
The term ethnic cleansing was introduced into the vernacular by the
events in the Former Yugoslavia. Simply put, ethnic cleansing occurs
when people of one ethnic group are forced to flee their homes by
violence. Through this action, an area can be 'cleansed' of a group.
The United States State Department, in its report on ethnic cleansing
in Kosovo, defines ethnic cleansing as follows: "The term "ethnic
cleansing" generally entails the systematic and forced removal of
members of an ethnic group from their communities to change the ethnic
composition of a region… reports of human rights and humanitarian law
violations … fall under seven broad categories: Forced expulsions…
Looting and burning… Detentions… Summary execution… Rape… Violation of
medical neutrality… (Destruction of medical infrastructure.) Identity
cleansing… (Confiscation of passports, identity papers, deeds, etc.)"
It will be recalled from earlier in this paper that the primary method
of killing the Armenians was through the privations and dangers
associated with forced deportation. In this case, ethnic cleansing was
the method of genocide, not just a symptom of it. Ethnic cleansing
also was widespread in the Holocaust, as the Germans cleared much of
Poland of Jews and Poles alike to allow for additional living space
for Germans, called 'Lebensraum'. Jews where also concentrated in
approximately 400 urban ghettos prior to shipment to death camps.
A form of ethnic cleansing was used in Cambodia as well, as the
advancing Khmer Rouge emptied towns of bourgeois and foreign
influences.
---------------
Destruction and Dispersal (Centralized Model)
The Holocaust was unusual as far as genocides go. It was an
ideological genocide that employed a highly centralized killing and
disposal component. Instead of killing Jews at their homes and local
neighborhoods, the Germans for the most part collected them together
into over 400 urban ghettos, after which they shipped them by rail to
one of six death camps in Poland. Even the work of the Einsatzgruppen
in Eastern Europe reflected this centralized control, as although the
killing may have been done at the local level, it was done by
specialized and centralized troops. At the center of the centralized
model is secrecy. Victims must be moved to the death camps in an
orderly fashion, and if they knew without doubt that death awaited
them it is likely that they would not cooperate. In the Holocaust a
deception plan was used to reinforce this lie. The words 'Arbeit Macht
Frei' (Work Makes You Free) were written above the gates of the death
camps. Even the terminology was vague – the 'final solution of the
Jewish question'. The euphemism for the entire death camp operation
was 'the East' (as in sending someone to the East). A specific death
camp was referred to as an Arbeitslager (labor camp) or
Konzentrationslager (concentration camp). Secrecy was reinforced
through an oath of secrecy that all camp personnel took.
Camps killed by two methods. The primary method was the gas chamber,
part of an evolving conveyor of death that began with the train, and
went through unloading, selection of victims, removal of valuables,
(including, in Auschwitz, the hair of females) gassing, removal of
gold teeth and search of body cavities for valuables, and cremation.
(There were a number of variations on the method of killing, but the
process remained essentially the same.) The other method was less
efficient, and was a byproduct of the terrible living conditions the
inmates of the camps had to exist in. Death through exposure, disease
and starvation was common. Bodies were initially disposed of through
burial, but this proved unworkable. In the summer of 1942 in Birkenau,
the ground over the mass graves heaved and a black, foul-smelling ooze
leaked out and polluted the groundwater. The same thing happened at
Sobibor. Bodies were eventually dug up and burned in open pits.
Eventually, proper crematoria were installed in Birkenau, and that
became the typical method of disposal. By the time the death camps
ceased to operate, they had been used to kill 5 million Jews, plus
Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, and homosexuals.
The centralized model proved to lend itself to secrecy and therefore
long-term operation. Destruction and Dispersal (De-Centralized Model)
The other ideological genocides of the Twentieth Century employed a
more common process, referred to here as the De-Centralized Model. In
this model, the mechanism of killing differs significantly from the
method used in the Holocaust. People are either killed as close to
their homes as possible, as in Rwanda or Cambodia, or during a
deportation march, as was seen with the Armenians. They are disposed
of locally, usually through mass graves, or in rivers and wells. The
graves are often shallow, so remains will be exposed through erosion
and farm tilling for years. Because of the widespread nature of this
model, there is no attempt at secrecy on the part of the perpetrators
once the killing begins. This type of genocide can be very swift, as
the killing is done concurrently throughout a region instead of
sequentially within death camps. Fear of outside intervention may also
hasten the pace of killing. One of the hallmarks of this model of
genocide is refugee flow. As secrecy is not an issue, word about the
killing can spread faster than the killing itself. This will prompt
members of the targeted outgroup to flee for the closest border. In
the past, people have looked upon the testimony of refugees as
suspect, as it is felt that they are obviously biased and therefore
not objective. But if the only witnesses are those who have suffered
horrendous personal loss, then it is unfair to expect objectivity, and
this does not make their story any less likely.
Marie Sykin did research on the accuracy of victim testimony after the
end of the 1939-1945 war. She sailed to the Middle East with survivors
of some of the death camps and interviewed them enroute. Her results
were issued in 1947, and updated and re-released thirty years later.
The findings of her research were that victims soon after their escape
were essentially reliable witnesses. A trend in decentralized killing
that should be noted is the use of starvation.
The use of starvation to defeat an enemy is nothing new; that was the
purpose of the siege in older times. Famine has several advantages: it
is a low-technology solution, and it is easily misinterpreted as
occurring through natural causes. A good example is the 1984-85 famine
in Ethiopia. Ethiopia is a fertile country that should be able to feed
itself. The policies of a communist government that sought to
nationalize the property of the peasants, combined with the loss of
territory to several liberation armies and the effects of drought
combined to create a massive famine that was only ameliorated by an
international relief effort. No one seemed to notice that neighboring
Kenya suffered the same drought, but because of responsible government
action no one starved. Government policies have created famine
elsewhere in the last century. In the collectivization period of
1929-1935 five to seven million Ukrainians starved in what was
described as the breadbasket of the Soviet Union. Hitler followed a
priority for food allocation: the Germans were well fed, and the
collaborating occupied nations received enough food to allow them to
maintain a degree of labor efficiency. Enemy nations were deprived of
food so as to reduce the will to resist, and Jews were starved. The
policies of the Khmer Rouge created famine in Cambodia.
Denial
The final stage in the process of genocide is denial.
In the premodern era of utilitarian genocides, denial was unnecessary
as the completeness of the killing closed the chapter on its history.
Furthermore, Jonasshohn says: "…until the middle of the twentieth
century, there appears to have existed a sort of conspiracy of
"collective denial" whereby the disappearance of a people did not seem
to require a comment or even a mention."
Genocides in the Twentieth Century occurred in a climate more
sensitive to international opinion, and therefore governments could
not afford to be so open. King Leopold of Belgium vigorously denied
that his Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company was killing large numbers
of Congolese. He was not even above visiting a newspaper personally to
try and persuade them not to run articles critical of human rights
abuses in the Congo. Before Leopold turned over control of the Congo
to Belgium, he ordered the State archives burned. Leopold told his
military aide: "I will give them my Congo, but they have no right to
know what I did there." Adolf Hitler understood the importance of
forgetting. On 22 August 1939, Hitler said in a speech, "I have issued
the command and I'll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism
executed by a firing squad – that our war aim does not consist in
reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy.
Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formations in readiness – for
the present only in the east – with orders to them to send to death
mercilessly and without compassion, men, women and children of Polish
derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain living space which we
need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the
Armenians?
Nations speak of the annihilation of the Armenians today at their
peril. The present-day government of Turkey denies vehemently that
genocide took place, saying instead that it was a civil war. The most
recent activity in Turkey's denial was the subject of a 20 October
2000 Reuters wire report:
"Friday October 20 1:03 PM ET Turkey Hails Scrapping of U.S.
'Genocide' Vote By Elif Unal
ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey Friday praised the U.S. Congress'
abandonment of a resolution accusing Turks of genocide against
Armenians 85 years ago, saying it had removed a major threat to
Turkish-U.S. relations.
Local observers, however, said Turkey should fully open Ottoman
imperial archives, sponsor investigations into the accusations and
improve ties with eastern neighbor Armenia to forestall further
criticism over the treatment of Armenians during a controversial
episode in the country's history.
Ankara had threatened retaliation against Washington, including trade
sanctions and withdrawal of military co-operation, if the House
approved the motion pushed by the Armenian lobby.
But President Clinton's intervention averted a vote Thursday following
warnings that passage of the measure at a time of crisis in the Middle
East ``could have far-reaching negative consequences for the United
States.´´
Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit told reporters he had sent a
letter to Clinton thanking him for his intervention. ``This will give
new impetus to Turkish-U.S. strategic solidarity,´´ Ecevit said. ``You
will always be remembered as the best of friends of Turkey,´´ he
quoted the letter to Clinton as saying.
The non-binding measure outraged NATO member Turkey. It had threatened
to exclude U.S. companies from lucrative defense tenders and hinted at
withdrawing permission for U.S. warplanes to use a Turkish base for
policing a no-fly zone in northern Iraq."
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It is extraordinary that in the year 2000 the recognition of the
wrongful deaths of 1.5 million people 85 years ago can be bartered
away because it has become inconvenient. This serves as a good example
of the use of economic blackmail and bully tactics to compensate for
unfavorable history, and demonstrates the challenges involved in
getting nations to accept responsibility for their actions. There are
two genocides in the twentieth century that have been openly
recognized by the successor governments in the countries where they
took place - the Holocaust and the Rwandese genocide. The Holocaust
has its share of deniers, though, as any search of the Internet will
reveal. A major Holocaust Denial organization in the United States is
the Californian Institute for Historical Review (IHR) and its Journal
for Historical Review (JHR). In Canada, the most infamous denier is
Ernst Zundel, whose ideas are available on the Internet at the
Zundelsite.
According to an analysis done by Benseon Apple, Holocaust deniers
concentrate on three main points: There was no overall deliberate,
coordinated policy to exterminate European Jewry; the "Final Solution"
involved deportation, not extermination; Gas chambers were not for
extermination, but only for delousing and to dispose of bodies that
had succumbed to other forms of death, especially disease; and Six
million Jews were not killed: the more likely number is from 300,000
to one or two million.
Holocaust denial organizations find fertile ground among