The Fable Agreed Upon?

None of the appalling stories told in this article is a household name. Unlike the better known cases—the Holocaust, Armenia, Cambodia, and Rwanda—most have been consigned to oblivion, by design or by indifference. This is nothing new. For mass murders to be “airbrushed out of history,” in Milan Kundera’s pithy phrasing, is a common phenomenon, even for the most uncommon of crimes. “Who, after all, speaks today about the annihilation of the Armenians?” Hitler famously said in 1939 while addressing a group of Nazi followers. In a similar vein one might ask how many today remember the genocide of the Assyrians, simultaneous to that of the Armenians in Ottoman Turkey? Or the genocide of the Herero in what was then German-controlled South-West Africa (now Namibia) in 1904, at a time when the killings of Christian communities in Turkey had already reached alarming proportions? More recently how many in the West recall the wholesale massacre, code-named Anfal, of the Kurds by Saddam Hussein, during the Iran-Iraq war (1987–1988)? Or the systematic cleansing of Hutu refugees in eastern Congo in 1996–1997 by Kagame’s army? Or the 1972 extermination of tens if not hundreds of thousands of Hutu in Burundi, causing President Nixon to exclaim, in a response to the State Department’s subdued stance on the issue, “this is one of the most cynical, callous reaction of a great government to a terrible human tragedy I have seen!” Nixon’s outburst found little resonance outside the Oval Office.

The aim of this article, then, is to drag out of the shadows a number of searing human dramas in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, in hope that they will be remembered for what they are, that is, massive violations of human rights that, whether or not they fit into any particular definition of genocide, cry out for sustained attention. Not just because of the scale of the crimes, but because of the questions they raise about how and why the past is so often ignored, manipulated, or denied.

That there are theoretical dividends to be drawn from this exercise seems reasonably clear. Including such seldom-remembered tragedies in our field of vision expands the range of variance beyond the cases most frequently selected for analysis, what Scott Straus calls the Big Five (the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda).1 It brings into view a broad spectrum of contextual differences in space and time, suggesting that very different sets of historical circumstances may generate broadly similar outcomes.

Contextual Diversities

More than a century and a half separates the total genocide of the Aborigine population in Tasmania (the last woman of her race, as Shayne Breen reports, died in 1876) and the hunting down of Hutu refugees in eastern Congo. During this time, tens of millions of human beings were exterminated. To the extent that numbers can be trusted, and within the limits of this discussion, they vary widely—from about 6,000 in Tasmania to anywhere from one-half to a million Gypsies killed between 1940 and 1945, and 250,000 to 300,000 in the case of the Assyrians in Ottoman Turkey. So do the circumstances that determined their fates.

The murderous effects of colonial rule are nowhere more cruelly evident than in the total physical extermination of the indigenous people of Tasmania (to say nothing of the killings perpetrated in other parts of Australia) and the genocide of the Herero people in South-West Africa, which resulted in the deaths of about 60,000. Following the violent 1959 Tibetan uprising, the forceful incorporation of Tibet into the boundaries of Communist China clearly stands as another example of colonial genocide. Even though the cultural differences between colonizer and colonized are not as salient as between Europeans and “natives,” Chinese colonization has been no less repressive in thwarting the efforts of the Tibetan people to assert their cultural and political sovereignty.

About the time the genocide of the Herero revealed the full extent of colonial brutality, the rising tide of Turkish nationalism on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire was to prove even more lethal. The wholesale eradication of Christian minorities and Assyrians (or Nestorians) as well as Armenians and Greeks bears testimony to the appalling backlash provoked by the sudden disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, and the revanchist attitude generated by the violent expulsion of Muslim communities from many parts of the Balkans and the Caucasus. As Hannibal Travis’s contribution shows, the killings that took place in the 1890s and the first decade of the last century were harbingers of much worse to come. As the anti-Assyrian campaign reached its climax in the summer of 1915, its genocidal proportions had become clear: “ultimately about 250,000 Assyrians died in the massacres and related famines and outbreaks of disease. But the number of victims nears 500,000 once the massacres of the 1890s and the Yezidi communities are included.”

The 1988 Anfal campaign against Iraq’s Kurdish minority is illustrative of a very different context, where the war between Iran and Iraq, coupled with the collaborative ties between Iraqi Kurds and their kinsmen in Iran, led to the dreadful retribution exacted by the use of chemical gas against Kurdish civilians, killing some 100,000. Although the eradication of the Gypsies in Central Europe also occurred in wartime, and continued even after the cessation of hostilities, their tragic fate, as Michael Stewart compellingly demonstrates, had more to do with racial prejudice than security risks.

Security, on the other hand, was certainly a key consideration behind President Paul Kagame’s decision in October 1996 to send his army into eastern Congo to wipe out not just the remnants of the Rwandan génocidaires, but tens of thousands of innocent Hutu refugees. The same could be said of the motives behind the deliberate massacre of at least 200,000 Hutu in Burundi in the wake of a peasant insurrection that took the lives of many Tutsi. Fear of yet another Hutu-led uprising was a key factor, yet in both instances security concerns swiftly morphed into a wholesale eradication of civilian populations. What began as ethnic cleansing led inexorably to genocide.

Given this diversity of contexts and circumstances, sometimes referred to as “unit heterogeneity,” it is hardly surprising that the cases above fall into different analytic categories. The most useful for our purpose refers to the classic distinction drawn by Helen Fein between developmental, retributive, despotic, and ideological genocides having as their goals, respectively, “to acquire economic wealth, to eliminate a real or potential threat, to spread terror among real or potential enemies, and to implement a belief, a theory or an ideology.”2 While these are better seen as “ideal types” than mirrors of reality, they bring into relief the political dynamics at work in the cases at hand.

Although the mass murder of Aborigines and Herero clearly fits into the category of developmental genocides—their rationale was the acquisition of wealth and control over land—the ideological element is equally plain. Consider the Social-Darwinist arguments advanced by Paul Rohrbach, identified by Dominik Schaller as “an influential public intellectual at the time of the Empire and Weimar Republic,” to justify the killings of “Bantus”: “The idea that the Bantus would have the right to live and die according to their own fashion is absurd.” To proceed on that assumption, we are told, would scarcely be “an advantage for the evolution of humankind in general or the German people in particular.” Speaking of General von Trotha’s take on the disposition of natives, Schaller writes, “His view of history was straightforwardly Darwinist: Europeans, as member of a ‘superior race’ ought to conquer and populate the world.”

Genocides

a. The true number of victims in each case is impossible to determine. As a rule, the more disputed the genocide, the greater the likelihood of discrepancies in estimates. Burundi is a case in point, with conservative estimates claiming 100,000 dead as against 300,000 by some Burundi analysts. Even in the best of circumstances, the numbers vary widely. Consider the case of Rwanda: on closer inspection the standard figure of 800,000, sometimes inflated to more than one million, has been downsized to approximately 507,000. Again, the genocide of Assyrians is claimed by some to have taken the lives of 750,000 (Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa, vol. 1 [New York: Macmillan, 2004], p. 326) and from 20,000 to 30,000 by others (Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide [New York: Oxford University Press, 2005], p. 98). In many instances discrepancies hinge around differences between the direct and secondary effects of violence, that is, displacement, disease, hunger. The most reliable (though not infallible) guide to estimates of victims of genocide is Helen Fein, Human Rights and Wrongs: Slavery, Terror, Genocide (Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm Publishers, 2007), pp. 28–130.

b. Included in the victim group in eastern Congo were thousands of Hutu, also known as génocidaires or interahamwe in Kinyarwanda, involved in the Rwanda genocide, as well as a far greater number of civilian refugees, consisting mostly of women and children. Although the principal perpetrators were Rwandan soldiers, they were joined by a fair number of so-called Banyamulenge, that is, Tutsi-related elements indigenous to eastern Congo acting as auxiliaries to the Rwandan army. The number of Hutu victims may be largely guesswork, but there can be little doubt that the vast majority were unarmed civilians.

Echoes of the same theme resonate in Shayne Breen’s portrayal of “social-Darwinist myth-makers” in the context of nineteenth-century Tasmania. Tibet is another case of overlap. That there is every reason to view its coercive inclusion into China as a colonial genocide is made unambiguously clear by Claude Levenson, but she also shows the importance of strategic goals behind the control of mineral wealth and land. Nor can one leave out the ideological (i.e., anti-religious) underpinnings of the Chinese assault against the “feudalistic” forces of Buddhism. Some of the same ambivalence can be detected in the motivations that led to the killings of Assyrians combining despotic and ideological motives. Seen from another perspective, however, and in light of the massive violations of human rights among Muslim populations by czarist Russia’s expanding imperium in the Caucasus,3 the retributive motive in the form of a revanchist reaction against Christian minorities cannot be ignored. In other cases, notably Burundi and eastern Congo, this dimension is frighteningly clear. The wanton killings of Hutu in Burundi did not just happen. It came about in response to the threat posed to the Burundi state, and specifically to the Tutsi elites running that state, by a Hutu-led peasant revolt that took the lives of anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 lives. To an even greater extent, security concerns were paramount in Kagame’s mind as he unleashed his army against Rwandan Hutu in eastern Congo. 

Nonetheless, in both instances the perfectly legitimate objective of warding off security threats quickly morphed into genocidal butcheries. The tragic and continuingly precarious fate of the European Gypsies, by contrast, has evidently more to do with a straightforward ideological mass murder, where belief in the inherent inferiority of the victims was the motivating force behind the attempt to exterminate them.

With these considerations in mind, what new insights can one gain from the essays in this volume? Contrary to what is often assumed, genocide is not always state-sponsored. That the initiative may indeed come from below, with little or no pressure from above, emerges with striking clarity in the essays by Shayne Breen and Michael Stewart on the Aborigines of Tasmania and the Gypsies, respectively. As Breen explains, “random killings were apparently common…. ‘We shot them whenever we find them’ [one visiting missionary was told]…. Pursuit killings were perpetrated under order by official parties of troops and colonists, by groups of colonist who took matter into their own hands, and by groups of men who hunted and killed Aborigines for sport.” Unlike the Aborigines, the Gypsies were not killed for sport or at random or so overtly, but the fact remains that many were sent to their graves through what Michael Stewart describes as “local, individual” initiatives. He warns us against the danger of reading a central plan behind the “invisible” genocide. “If we try to read all the local initiatives and approaches as the unfolding of some central plan, or the inevitable consequence of structural features of Nazi rule we will never make sense of what happened.”

In other instances, the role of the state is undeniable, while its motives and strategies may change over time, as when the success of preemptive measures, however brutal, may inspire more drastic action. This is one of the conclusions to be drawn from the essays on Burundi, eastern Congo, and South-West Africa. As noted above in the first two cases, limited retaliation arising from security concerns swiftly evolved into a massive preemptive strike against all members of the victim group; in the third, as Dominik Schaller demonstrates, the German quest for Lebensraum overseas went far beyond the initial goal, in Lemkin’s words, of “settling the surplus of German population in Africa and turn[ing] it into a Ger man white empire.” Not content to use force against traditional authorities in order to appropriate their land and cattle, violent resistance led to a swift and ruthless retaliation. The failure of Governor Leutwein’s “divide and rule policy” quickly led to annihilation followed by concentration camps and slave labor. Elsewhere, while the motive remained basically unchanged, the methods varied. Breen’s gruesome depiction of “techniques of extermination” in nineteenth-century Tasmania makes the point in graphic terms: land seizure, abduction, murder, massacre, and war of extermination, along with capture, incarceration, and exile.

Viewed through the prism of history, the roles of victims and perpetrators become blurred. That these are sometimes assumed by the same communities, albeit in different settings and in different epochs, is indeed the subtext of several chapters. Illustrative of this paradox is the case of the Assyrians, the target of horrendous bloodletting before and during World War I, and whose reputation, Rummel reminds us, “would be transmitted down the ages as one of particular savagery.”4 The Kurds are another example. In view of the terrible punishment they suffered during the Iran-Iraq War for their pro-Iranian stance, it is difficult to imagine that members of the same ethnic group took an active part in the killing of Assyrians and Armenians in the early 1900s. Similarly double-edged has been the role of the Hutu in Burundi: the staggering toll exacted in 1972 did not prevent some of their members twenty years later from committing atrocious crimes against Tutsi civilians in response to the assassination of Burundi’s first elected Hutu president, Melchior Ndadaye. Only by reference to the historical context can one explicate such contradictions, which in the case of Burundi takes us back to 1972. The perverse logic at work here is not unlike the one described by Cathie Carmichael in her analysis of how the genocide of Muslim minorities by Christians in the Balkans paved the way for a replay of similar atrocities by Muslims against Christians in Ottoman Turkey.5

The notion of “genocide by attrition,” set forth by Fein to describe situations involving the “interdiction and social reproduction of group members,”6 though implicit in the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide (UNGC), has not received nearly as much attention by genocide scholars as it deserves. This volume helps reestablish its relevance. It is central to an understanding of the humanitarian catastrophes that have accompanied these genocidal massacres and helps account for the discrepancies between direct and indirect human losses. As several chapters, in particular those dealing with the Assyrians in Ottoman Turkey, the Herero of Southwest Africa, the Kurds of Iraq, Tibet, and the killings in eastern Congo, poignantly demonstrate, the terrible losses caused by the appalling conditions imposed on survivors are no less tragic than those resulting from the blows of the perpetrators.

A last point concerns social structure as an incubator of genocidal violence. Although the significance of ethnic stratification as an independent variable is open to debate, the evidence at hand, whether it be from Rwanda, Burundi, Australia, or Ottoman Turkey, , strongly suggests that where divisions among groups are vertically structured, standing in a ranked relationship to each other, the result is to greatly enhance the likelihood of genocidal violence once the existing social system faces a frontal challenge. One is reminded in this connection of Leo Kuper’s pioneering insights in his discussion of the plural context of genocide. Speaking of “the plural society in its extreme form,” where “the same sections are dominant or subordinate, favored or discriminated against, in the political structure, in the economy, in opportunities for education, in human rights, in access to amenity … these structural conditions,” he concludes “are likely to be conducive to genocidal conflict.”7 Despite the criticisms voiced by new generations of genocide scholars, there is much in this volume that would seem to substantiate his views.

Genocide, Mass Murder, or War Crimes?

The title of this Article raises another question: In what sense can one describe these massive human rights violations, horrendous as they are, as genocides? To this query there are no satisfactory answers. Much depends on one’s definition of what Churchill called “this crime without a name.” Long after Lemkin gave it a name as well as a definition—“A coordinated plan of action aimed at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups completely”8—disagreements persist about these and other attributes. Although the definition offered by the UNGC is widely accepted in international law, it is by no means problem-free.9 As has been noted time and time again by genocide scholars, it provides no quantitative threshold beyond which massacres mutate into genocides; it leaves out of the accounting collective identities other than racial, ethnic, or religious to describe the targeting of victims; and the question of intent behind the killings remains moot.10 These are by no means trivial issues. They show the limitations of a legal/normative definition and how the debates it has engendered over its applicability is likely to hamper policy initiatives to “prevent and punish.”11

One way of circumventing this problem is to expand the definition of genocide to make it more inclusive. An extreme example is the drastic recasting of the concept offered by Ben Kiernan in his weighty 724-page tome bearing the equally ponderous title of Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (2007) that draws from just about every conceivable intra- and interstate conflict from ancient Greece to modern Sudan.12 Exactly where to draw the line between genocide and other types of conflict is up to the reader. Much the same kind of definitional promiscuity afflicts Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s latest effort to reconsider the meaning of “eliminationism,” a catch-all concept to designate not just genocide, but “five forms of elimination,” namely “transformation, repression, expulsion, prevention of reproduction, or extermination.”13 Although there is much to be learned from his wide-ranging discussion of eliminationist violence, and no little to disagree with, the singularity of genocide ends up being the principal casualty of his all-embracing, moralizing discourse. No longer is genocide seen as a rare and distinctive phenomenon; it emerges as a quasi-ubiquitous trait of our past and contemporary universe.

The same criticism might be leveled on Benjamin Valentino’s suggestion that genocide be subsumed under the broader concept of mass crimes so as to take into account those groups that are left out of the UNCG because of their nonethnic characteristics. Although the rationale behind his argument is persuasive, more prob lematic is his somewhat arbitrary setting of the number of victims required before a massacre qualifies as a mass killing: only when a minimal number of 50,000 civilians are killed over a five-year period can one legitimately speak of mass killing. Just as puzzling is his explanation that “selecting these relatively high thresholds helps establish with a greater degree of confidence that massive violence did in fact occur, and that the killing was intentional.”14 Just how intention relates to the scale of the killings and why a threshold of 30,000 or 40,000 would not suffice to establish massive violence remains unclear. By this yardstick many of the massacres, including Tasmania and Srebenica, called genocides would fail to qualify even as mass killings.

No less problematic is Israel Charny’s effort to remedy “the ills of definitionalism,” which he describes as “a damaging style of intellectual inquiry based on a perverse, fetishistic involvement with definitions to the point at which the reality of the subject under discussion is lost,”15 through a “generic” reconceptualization that would include “all known types of mass murder and mass deaths that are brought about by the hand of man.”16 To sort out the wide range of crimes covered by his definition, Charny makes a laudable, though self-defeating, attempt to arrive at analytic clarity through a complex variety of subcategories. A limited sample would include such criminal acts as ethnocide, linguicide, and omnicide (“simultaneous intentional genocide against numerous races, nations, religions, etc.”), genocidal massacres, intentional genocide (specific and multiple), genocide as a result of ecological destruction and abuse, and war crimes against humanity. One wonders whether the gratuitousness of this semantic exercise is the most useful antidote to the ills of definitionalism.

Considering that four of the cases examined here occurred during wartime (Assyrians, Gypsies, Kurds, and eastern Congo), the concept of war crimes inevitably comes to mind as a substitute for genocide or mass murder. Article 1 of the UNGC stipulates that “genocide whether committed in time of peace or in time of war is a crime under international law.” Thus in describing the killings of Hutu refugees in eastern Congo in 1996–1997, the UN commission of investigation stated that the Rwandan army had committed large-scale war crimes and crimes against humanity,17 while at the same time recognizing that genocide could not be ruled out. The distinction between war crimes and genocide is by no means self-evident. In a number of cases, war becomes a pretext for eradicating a community that had already been identified as a potential target for elimination. This was certainly the case for the Armenians and Assyrians during World War I and the Kurds during the Iran-Iraq War. One can only agree with Fein’s observation that “although all poison gas attacks in war are war crimes, because they are attacks with a banned weapon, purposeful attacks on civilians (in this case civilians of the attacked state) they are more than war crimes—they are crimes against humanity if not genocide.”18 The same could be said of the wholesale eradication of Hutu refugees in eastern Congo, the Assyrians in Ottoman Turkey, and Gypsies in Germany during World War II.

Despite all its flaws, the UNGC definition still has considerable merit in helping us identify genocide as a crime unlike all others by its scale, intentionality, and target. No one has argued the case for its usefulness more convincingly than Fein, who writes, “I employ the UNGC definition because I believe that it is useful to maintain a common universe of discourse among genocide scholars, international lawyers and human rights monitors; to discriminate between victims of genocide and the violations of life integrity; and to recognize related violations in international law, such as war crimes and crimes against humanity.”19

Oblivion

That so few appear to remember the human dramas resurrected in this book is both disturbing and puzzling. Disturbing because, in George Santayana’s well-known aphorism, those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it; puzzling because there are no obvious answers as to why this should be so, except for the fact that some of these atrocities happened a long time ago in faraway places. This is certainly the case with regard to the fate that befell the Aborigines of Tasmania, to which might be added that of the Assyrians. But what of the more recent cases of genocide?

Endorsement, as distinct from enforcement, of human rights has a long pedigree, going back to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789 (massively violated four years later during the Terror). The emergence of human rights as an issue of international concern, legitimized by international jurisdictions and conventions, and backed by influential international NGOs, is a much more recent phenomenon, traceable to the last decades of the previous century. An early precursor was the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, founded in 1910, whose report on “the causes and conduct of the Balkan Wars” of 1912 and 1913 contributed in no small way to alert public opinion to the atrocities committed by all parties to the conflict. In a retrospective commentary on the Carnegie report, George Kennan ruefully noted that its warnings about “the megalomania of the national ideal” did little to alter the tragic course of events nearly a century later.20

Some of the most egregious cases covered in this book occurred at a time when the notion of human rights—as natural (inherent in human beings), equal (the same for all) and universal (applicable everywhere)—had yet to enter the conscience if not the consciousness of humanity. Reflecting on the history of human rights, Lynn Hunt convincingly argues that such rights “are best defended in the end by the feelings, convictions and actions of multitudes of individuals, who demand responses that accord with their inner sense of outrage.”21 The absence of this inner sense of outrage goes far to explain the ease with which past genocides tend to be forgotten.

A major contributing factor is the efforts made by criminal states to impede investigations. Invoking national sovereignty to keep the lid on the atrocities committed by the perpetrators has been a frequent occurrence, even where their claims to sovereignty seemed very much in doubt. The sinister comedy of Laurent Kabila, reluctantly playing the role of Kagame’s obedient client and leaning over backward to obstruct the UN investigation into “crimes against humanity” in eastern Congo, is one obvious example. Or take the case of Burundi in 1972, where every effort was made by what was left of the state to prevent journalists from traveling into the country. Tibet is even more cruelly pertinent. Very few outside observers were allowed into the country to observe firsthand the devastating retribution exacted by China in the wake of the 1959 rebellion, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands. Even as recently as 2008, when Tibetan claims for autonomy reached a new pitch of intensity, crippling restrictions were placed on travel to Lhasa and its vicinity.

Where the evidence is lacking or difficult to obtain, chances are that some genocides will claim a monopoly on public attention, ensuring that others will remain shrouded in obscurity. This phenomenon is brilliantly brought to light by Timothy Snyder’s discussion of why the atrocities of Auschwitz have all but eclipsed the even more appalling crimes committed in Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor in occupied Poland. He writes, “Auschwitz, generally taken to be an adequate or even a final symbol of the evil of mass killing, is in fact only the beginning of knowledge, a hint of the true reckoning with the past still to come.” He goes on to explain that “we know about Auschwitz because there were survivors, mostly West European Jews, who were able to write and publish as they liked, whereas East European Jewish survivors, if caught behind the iron curtain, could not.”22 In the same way that “Auschwitz as symbol of the Holocaust excludes those who were at the center of the historical event,”23 one might argue that Rwanda is a symbol of a “tropical Holocaust,” which, while giving due prominence to the Hutu perpetrators, all too often excludes those who were at the center of the historical event, the Tutsi refugee warriors who fought their way into the country from Uganda. In a more general sense what might be called the “Auschwitz effect” is directly relevant to the cases explored in this book.

Whereas some genocides have gained considerable public attention, others have not. The result has been to eclipse the latter. Thus while the Rwanda genocide continues to attract the concerns of journalists, social scientists, and policy-makers, its Burundi counterpart is largely ignored. The Armenian genocide is at the heart of the controversies raging among politicians, policy makers, and social scientists, which helps explain why it has been the subject of an enormous amount of outstanding academic research,24 but the systematic eradication of tens if not hundreds of thousands of Assyrians receives little or no attention. Again, consider the marginal attention paid to the martyrdom of the Gypsy victims of the Holocaust. How the Auschwitz effect reduced their agonies to near-footnotes is well described by the late Sybil Milton: “Despite the similarity and simultaneity of persecuting, the disparity between the vast quantity of secondary literature about Nazi Judeophobia and the limited number of studies about the fate of Roma and Sinti has inevitably influenced current historical analyses, in which Gypsies are at most an afterthought.”25

Explaining “Why Anfal has nearly fallen into oblivion” Choman Hardi notes a somewhat similarly elusive phenomenon: if so many have forgotten the mass extermination of the Kurds this is in no small part because “it is overshadowed in public opinion by the dramatic events that followed in the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq” and because “it is all too often seen as a sideshow in the larger drama of the Iran-Iraq War.”

That so many of these abominations have been consigned to oblivion is not just happenstance. As the preceding discussion suggests, it is rooted in a number of factors, some having to do with historical circumstances and moral indifference, others with the role of the state in obstructing the search for truth. But even more important to the concealing of their hideous reality has been the combination of denial and myth-making surrounding the debate about “what really happened.”

Denial and Myth-Making

All genocides have been contested. Each has found its Robert Faurisson or David Irving willing to deny the undeniable. The cases examined here are no exception, but few fit into the same mold. It is one thing for former Tasmanian Premier Ray Groom to assert that “there had been no killing in the island state,” thus making him, writes Colin Tatz, “Australia’s foremost genocide denialist in the 1990s,”26 and quite another to admit the existence of such killings while questioning their characterization as genocide. This is the position taken by Henry Reynolds, “the most prominent historian of Tasmania,” writes Shayne Breen, “[who] while unequivocally demonstrating the widespread destruction, has argued that genocide did not occur,” the reason being the absence of “demonstrable intent on the part of the state to exterminate.” If denialism is an extreme form of myth-making, mythologies can also promote revisionist assessments that stop short of denial. The distinction between revisionism and denial emerges with striking clarity from Breen’s discussion of the Tasmanian tragedy, to which might be adduced the cases of eastern Congo, Burundi, and the Gypsies. Rather than contesting the reality of violence, revisionism puts a radically new construction on the motivations and circumstances of genocidal violence. More often than not the presumed victims turn out to be the génocidaires, or else there are perpetrators on both sides, the result being a double genocide.

Reversing the roles of perpetrators and victims so as to shift blame to the victimized community has a long pedigree in the history of mass crimes. In Tasmania it is traceable to 1830, when an Aborigines Committee was set up to inquire into the causes of the natives’ hostility toward the colonists: “In a piece of blame-the-victims reasoning characteristic of génocidaires,” Breen informs us, “the Committee concluded that Aboriginal treachery and violence were the primary causes of violence against them.” And this, he adds, despite the fact that “three earlier governors had publicly warned colonists against their habit of wantonly killing and abduction of Aborigines.”

This blame-the-victims construction is one of the most bizarre aspects of the ongoing debate surrounding the multiple bloodbaths that have ravaged the Great Lakes region of Central Africa. As the chapter on Burundi shows, this role reversal is typical of the discourse of certain Tutsi intellectuals, who, to this day, insist that only the killings of Tutsi civilians by Hutu insurgents, the precipitating factor behind the 1972 bloodbath, qualify as genocide, whereas the far more devastating slaughter of Hutu can best be seen as a legitimate repression, excessive perhaps, but by no means genocidal. Something of the same reasoning can be detected in the official assessments offered by Rwandan authorities of the results achieved by the destruction of the refugee camps in eastern Congo and the follow-up search-and-destroy operations. The Rwandan army, we are told, was never involved in the killing of civilians; the purpose of its foray into eastern Congo was basically prophylactic in nature, aimed at cleansing the nests of Hutu génocidaires, an interpretation that, though deserving of the strongest reserva tions, was fully endorsed by the U.S. ambassador at the time. In both instances, the aim was to shift the onus of genocidal guilt to the victim group, and to view retribution as a strategy designed to stop further bloodshed.

The double genocide thesis introduces a major variation on this theme. It received a semblance of respectability from French President Fran?ois Mitterrand when he described the Rwandan bloodbath in precisely such terms, not without hurting many sensibilities in France and elsewhere, not least among them the Rwandan survivors. This thesis finds an echo in other contexts, some going as far back in history as the accusations launched against Russia at the time of the Armenian and Assyrian slaughters: if anything resembling a genocide had been committed against Christian minorities, presumably much the same atrocities had been perpetrated by Czarist Russia against Muslim minorities in the course of Russia’s imperial expansion into the Caucasus. Although the terrible price exacted by Russia cannot be ignored, to equate the killings of Muslims with the far more sustained and systematic elimination of Christian minorities of Anatolia is hardly convincing. It implies a symmetry in criminal behavior that, in fact, is wholly unwarranted. The same holds for other contexts in which the dogma of equivalence has been applied. As the Burundi chapter tries to explain, this is the main flaw behind the double genocide thesis adumbrated by French historian Jean-Pierre Chrétien and his co-author the Belgian journalist Jean-Fran?ois Dupaquier in a book misleadingly titled Burundi 1972: Au bord des génocides (Burundi 1972: On the brink of genocides [2007]). The implication, strange as it may sound to most Burundi scholars, is that the country experienced two “near genocides,” one by the Hutu and another by the Tutsi. Rather than reiterating the critique set forth elsewhere in this book, suffice it to note that the evidence marshaled by the authors leaves a great deal to be desired.

Denial, like revisionism, involves the manipulation of historical facts in order to promote a political agenda. The aim is to leave out some crucial episodes and magnify others so as to exonerate the butchers and denounce the victims as provocateurs. Nowhere is this sleight of hand more evident than in the relentless efforts displayed by Turkish authorities to deny responsibility for the geno cides of Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks. Turkish aspirations to join the European Union have given renewed urgency to this agenda. The “provocation thesis,” as Bloxham argues, has been the stock in trade of Turkish nationalists and pro-Turkish commentators eager to demonstrate the involvement of Armenians on the side of Russia during World War I so as to project the deportation of Armenians as a matter of military necessity.27 Much the same argument has been used to explain away the mass murder of Assyrians. As Travis points out, among the historical myths surrounding their extermination lies the “hoary notion that the Ottoman Empire was an innocent victim of the British and Russian empires during World War I” and that “there is no objective or verifiable evidence of an official policy to endorse massacres, enslavement, rapes, or cultural devastation.” As with the Armenian genocide, the reconstructed version of the Assyrian case is backed by an impressive display of propaganda and scholarly rewards for “willing interpreters.”

The provocation argument looms equally large in Kagame’s brief to explain his murderous incursion into eastern Congo. The reasoning in this case is not without foundation, at least as far as the initial phase of the intervention was concerned. No one familiar with the history of the region can deny the security threats posed to Rwanda by the presence of Hutu extremists at its doorstep. Just as plain, however, is Kagame’s skill in manipulating the facts when confronted with the mass slaughter of Hutu refugees. Although the argument can be made that there were plausible reasons of state to destroy the refugee camps, there were none for the mass murder of anywhere from 200,000 to 300,000 innocent Hutu men, women, and children. To do so with some pretence of justification, the official version of the facts ran as follows: (a) all civilians had walked back to Rwanda after the destruction of the refugee camps in late 1996, (b) those who remained behind were the murderers (interahamwe) and their supporters, and (c) the military operations of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) effectively cleansed the Congo of its génocidaires. On each of these counts the evidence plainly suggests otherwise, yet by twisting the evidence, Kagame was able to convince international public opinion, including the U.S. Ambassador to Rwanda, of the righteousness of his claims and eventually thwart a painstakingly planned international intervention designed to save innocent lives.

The less-than-edifying role played by the U.S. Embassy in Kigali during the “events” in eastern Congo finds a parallel of sorts in the U.S. government’s stance during the Anfal crisis. As Choman Hardi reports, while tens of thousands of Kurds were being wiped out by “Chemical Ali,” the stance of the U.S. government is best captured by Samantha Power’s terse formula, “official knowledge, official silence,” in effect denying what Peter Galbraith, in his 1998 report to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, described as an act of genocide. One only needs to remember that the United States was Iraq’s closest ally during the Iran-Iraq war (an alliance immortalized by the photo of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein) to grasp the principal motive, among many others, behind the deafening silence of the State Department. As for the Iraqi authorities, their official position was that the fate that befell the Kurds was amply merited; not only were they seen as religiously suspect and culturally different, but also and most importantly as a political liability.

Nor is China exempt from responsibility in manipulating historical facts. To conceal its genocidal role and strengthen its territorial claims to the “autonomous region” of Tibet, the Chinese version of history greatly magnifies the “ties that bind” the Roof of the World to the Middle Kingdom at the expense of their distinctive cultural differences. By the same token, undue lip service is paid by Beijing to the blessings of Chinese overrule. While the propaganda spotlight is turned on the social and economic benefits derived from the “liberation of Tibet from the constraints of its feudal past,” not the slightest mention is made of the extremely bloody repression visited upon the Tibetans in the wake of the 1959 uprising, the wholesale destruction of their temples and shrines, the severe restrictions placed on religious practice, and the massive transfer of Han Chinese to the autonomous region so as to hasten the pace of assimilation of the indigenous Tibetan population.

The propensity of genocidal states to mask or deny the evidence is not so much, as some might claim, a by-product of contested histories as it is the result of a deliberate attempt to rewrite history. The aim is to legitimize the present by falsifying the past. This political dimension is central to an understanding of why conflicting views of the past have a major stake in the continuing debate about who killed whom, where, and why.

Memory

Memory matters not just for what it says about the past, but for what it forgets to tell us. In his pioneering work on collective memory, Maurice Halbwachs goes to great lengths to stress the selectivity of individual and social memories.28 The same is true of official memory. Nowhere is this bias more obvious than in post-genocidal contexts. As many of the cases in this book demonstrate, what to forget and what to remember is a political choice, more often than not dictated by the need to erase the past to legitimize the present. A dominant narrative thus emerges that projects the victor’s version of history and silences dissenting voices.

It is not every day that an academic is taken to task by an African head of state for his erroneous take on how to heal the wounds of genocide, yet this is precisely what happened when President Kagame was impelled to turn a critical eye to my essay “The Politics of Memory in Post-Genocide Rwanda” in a recently published collaborative volume.29 Drawing on the insights of Paul Ricoeur and Eva Hoffman, I made a case for reconciliation between Hutu and Tutsi through the sharing of ethnic memories. Hutu memories, I argued, are “thwarted memories” that instead of being repressed by a pro-Tutsi dominant discourse, should be given voice and “equal time” with Tutsi memories. I went on to suggest a path to reconciliation, that is, a joint effort to undertake a shared memory project, what Ricoeur calls a travail de mémoire; this would involve sharing narratives about the sufferings experienced by both communities as a major step toward an understanding of the twofold relationship between history and memory and memory and recognition.30 In his preface to the Rene Lemarchand's Forgotten Genocides, President Kagame used the predictable argument that there is no such thing as a thwarted Hutu memory, much less a clash of memories, writing, “Lemarchand is wrong to suggest that the memory of the Hutu victims of genocide have been thwarted…. The premise on which Lemarchand’s chapter is based is mistaken…. It is also wrong for Lemarchand to assume that there has been a global criminalization of the Hutu community, etc.” This is not the place to challenge Kagame’s stance on ethnic memories, but suffice it to note that the validity of his claims will be difficult to test as long as references to ethnic identities are strictly forbidden by the Rwandan Constitution. What better way to erase the collective memories of a group than to deny its distinctive identity?

Kagame’s take on the subject reminds one of the remarks of the African American woman in Studs Terkel’s book on race relations in the United States. “They never let you forget their history, but they want you to forget yours.”31 Although Rwanda is an extreme case, it is not unique. Burundi is another example of a post-genocidal state where collective memories have been obstructed and manipulated. Unlike what happened in Rwanda, ethnic identities have never been legislated out of existence, yet much the same result was achieved out of fear during the years following the 1972 bloodbath. What the case of Burundi illuminates is the propensity of traumatized populations, in this case the Hutu, to greatly magnify the horrors they suffered at the hands of the Tutsi perpetrators, a phenomenon closely linked to the proliferation of what Liisa Malkki calls “mythico-histories.”32 As we tried to demonstrate, the recasting of mythico-histories through a political discourse aimed at mobilizing ethnic loyalties is a key element in the persistence of Hutu radicalism. To this day, however, and in spite of the coming to power of a Hutu president, ethnic memories have yet to find a proper outlet to engage in a constructive travail de mémoire. Herein lies yet another disquieting parallel with Rwanda.

Other examples can be cited of how collective memories are selectively retrieved. Consider how the history of the Aborigines, tragic as it is, has been virtually erased from the collective consciousness of white Australians. Shayne Breen shows how the “myth of inevitable extinction,” bolstered by “the theories of Social-Darwinist ideologues” helped propagate the idea of “a hybrid people with no history, no culture, and no future apart from total assimilation into mainstream Tasmanian society and culture.” Colin Tatz for his part perceptively notes the contrast between events that speak to the white Australians’ heroic past, notably their display of extraordinary valor at Gallipoli during World War I, and the silence surrounding the agony of native peoples. This is how he describes the symbolic meaning of Gallipoli: “Australians scrutinize, magnify, exhibit, venerate, and strive to remember every square inch of Gallipoli, every wound, act of valor and every death in that ‘birth of the nation,’” and then adds, “on matters concerning Gallipoli the striving is ever more toward ‘moving back.’ But on matters Aboriginal, the catch-phrase is that time has come ‘to move on.’”33

The Assyrians are another example of what Pierre Vidal-Naquet called “assassinated memories.”34 Their tragic destiny has been thoroughly excised from the record of crimes committed by the Ottoman Turks, and this, as in the case of the Armenians, with the active cooperation of Western intellectuals all too willing to succumb to the enticements of the Turkish state. Bloxham’s commentary on the part played by Turkey in promoting denial of the Armenian genocide applies equally well to the Assyrians. Denial in both instances has been backed “by the full force of a Turkish state machinery that has pumped substantial funding into public relations firms and American university endowments to provide a slick and superficially plausible defense of its position.”35 Perhaps to an even greater extent than the Armenians, the collective memory of the Assyrians has been “airbrushed out of history.” As Travis shows, specific measures by the governments of Turkey and Iraq also contributed to the memorial assassination: “They eliminated the Assyrian category from the census, replacing it with Christian Kurds, Turks, or Arabs. In Turkey even Assyrian personal names and towns and village designations were outlawed. The Turkish and Iraqi governments claimed Assyrian land, cultural monuments and artifacts as property of the state.” Meanwhile, “revisionist histories inverted every pertinent event between 1894 and 1925 to argue that the Turks were the victim and the tyrannical Christian nationalists were the aggressors.” Not until recently, thanks to the initiative of genocide scholars, has a concerted attempt been made to break the silence surrounding the planned extermination of the Assyrians and other forgotten minorities. Thea Halo’s commentary—in reponse to the International Genocide Scholars Association (IGSA)’s overwhelming approval of a resolution to recognize the genocides inflicted on Assyrian and Greek populations of the Ottoman Empire between 1914 and 1923—is worth quoting: “In a victory for historical accuracy and inclusion, the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), an organization of some of the world’s foremost experts on genocide, overwhelmingly affirmed that, between 1914– 1993, Christians, Assyrians and Pontian and other Anatolian [Asia Minor] Greeks, suffered a genocide that was qualitatively and quantitatively similar to the genocide suffered by the Armenian Christians.”36 Equally deserving notice, however, are the strong reservations to the IAGS initiative expressed by reputable scholars, for the most part on highly dubious grounds.

The claims of memory assert themselves in a variety of ways. One of these is restitution. The link between memory and restitution finds an intriguing illustration in the Herero Day ceremony described by Dominik Schaller: “Every last weekend in August the Herero gather in Okahandja to celebrate ‘Herero Day.’ They make a procession to the graves of their old chiefs and remember the murder of their ancestors by the German colonizers. In recent years ‘Herero Day’ has become the forum for restitution claims. Because of their iron-willed determination to survive, and their persistent demand for historical justice, the immense sufferings visited upon their ancestors are still widely remembered, enshrined as it were in their collective memory.” Unlikely though it is that the Herero demands for redress will be met in the foreseeable future, that they happen to be so insistently and formally articulated bears testimony to their determination to resist collective amnesia. That there are limits, however, to what restitution can accomplish is well captured by the German term Wiedergutmachung, “making good again,” as if the dead could be resurrected.

Restitution may assuage the consciences of those who have inherited the burden of guilt; it cannot make whole again what has been so thoroughly destroyed. Not just the lives of tens of millions of innocent human beings, but the trust that their surviving relatives and descendants may have had in humankind. Little wonder if, in many parts of the world where the earth has been soaked in genocidal blood, appeals to forgive and forget seem cruelly illusory. And yet, the way in which the past is remembered, how nar of their iron-willed determination to survive, and their persistent demand for historical justice, the immense sufferings visited upon their ancestors are still widely remembered, enshrined as it were in their collective memory.” Unlikely though it is that the Herero demands for redress will be met in the foreseeable future, that they happen to be so insistently and formally articulated bears testimony to their determination to resist collective amnesia. That there are limits, however, to what restitution can accomplish is well captured by the German term Wiedergutmachung, “making good again,” as if the dead could be resurrected.

Restitution may assuage the consciences of those who have inherited the burden of guilt; it cannot make whole again what has been so thoroughly destroyed. Not just the lives of tens of millions of innocent human beings, but the trust that their surviving relatives and descendants may have had in humankind. Little wonder if, in many parts of the world where the earth has been soaked in genocidal blood, appeals to forgive and forget seem cruelly illusory. And yet, the way in which the past is remembered, how nar

ratives are shared, how ethnic memories are filtered through the prism of common sufferings, all of this in may help the healing process. “Remembering to forget” is how one close observer of post-genocide Rwanda describes the path to ethnic coexistence.37 A more hopeful agenda is remembering to forgive.

Selected Maps

Cited Works

1. Scott Straus, “An Alternative Approach to the Comparative Study of Genocide,” paper presented at the American Political Science Association annual conference, August 31, 2007, p. 6.

2. Helen Fein, Human Rights and Wrongs, Slavery, Terror, Genocide (Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm Publishers, 2007), p. 136.

3. This is excellently analyzed by Cathie Carmichael in Genocide Before the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). “Russian expansion in the Caucasus,” she writes, “signaled a profound change in the balance of power and threatened existing communities, many of them Muslim. The forced exodus of Circassians to the Ottoman Empire, who were joined by Muslim Abkhazians, Chechens, Laz, Ajars and Ubykhs in the 1860s signaled what Brian Glyn Williams has called ‘the end of Islam on the northern Black Sea littoral’” (p. 14).

4. This is how Rummel describes their historic feats of valor: “They would reward their soldiers for every severed head they brought in from the field, whether enemy fighters or not. They would decapitate or club to death captured soldiers; they would slice off the ears, noses, hands and feet of nobles, throw them from high towers, flay them and their children to death, or roast them over a slow fire” (R. J. Rummel, Death by Government [New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1994], p. 46).

5. Carmichael, Genocide Before the Holocaust, pp. 2–19.

6. See Fein, Human Rights and Wrongs, pp. 133, 185.

7. Leo Kuper, Genocide: Its Political Uses in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 58.

8. Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment, 1944).

9. Article 3 of the UNGC reads: “In the present Convention genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious groups 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.” For a critical commentary, see Fein, Human Rights and Wrongs, p. 131.

10. On this last point see Benjamin Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), pp. 12–13.

11. Among several excellent contributions grappling with such issues, the following deserve special mention: Jacques Sémelin, Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of  Massacre and Genocide (London: Hurst, 2007); Alexander Laban Hinton, ed., Genocide: An Anthopological Reader (London: Blackwell, 2002); Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, second edition (London: Routledge, 2010); Samuel Totten and Paul Bartrop, eds., The Genocide Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 2009). For a brilliant exploration of the analytic problems involved in the comparative analysis of genocide, see Scott Straus’s path-breaking review article “Second-Generation Comparative Research on Genocide,” World Politics 59, no. 3 (April 2007): 476–501. In a different vein mention must be made of Jacques Sémelin’s highly personal, and hugely stimulating effort to grapple with the conceptual and analytic dimensions of mass murder, “La logique monstrueuse du meurtre de masse,” Le Débat (Paris), no. 162 (November–December 2010): 117–31.

12. Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).

13. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity (New York: Public Affairs, 2009). As Timothy Snyder persuasively argues this is only one of several flaws that raise serious questions about the author’s characterization and interpretation of genocidal events, including his tendency to “reiterate the reasoning of the killers in the guise of scholarly analysis (which) risks not only na?ve error but emulation of their thinking.” Timothy Snyder, “What We Need to Know About the Holocaust,” New York Review of Books, September 30, 2010, p. 80.

14. Valentino, Final Solutions, p. 12.

15. Israel Charny, “Toward a Generic Definition of Genocide,” in George J. Andreopoulos, ed., Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), p. 91.

16. Ibid.

17. The definitive work on the concept, and its relationship to war crimes, is by Sévane Garibian, Le crime contre l’humanité au regard des principes fondateurs de l’Etat moderne (Zurich: Editions Romandes, 2010).

18. Fein, Human Rights and Wrongs, p. 112.

19. Ibid., p. 132.

20. George Kennan, “Introduction,” The Other Balkan Wars: A 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1993), p. 11.

21. Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2007), p. 213.

22. Timothy Snyder, “Holocaust: The Ignored Reality,” New York Review of Books, July 16, 2009, p. 14.

23. Ibid.

24. In the vast amount of literature devoted to the Armenian genocide, passing reference must be made to Donald Bloxham’s outstanding contribution, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism and the Destruction of Ottoman Armenians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

25. Sybil Milton, “Holocaust: The Gypsies,” in Samuel Totten and William Parsons, eds., Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 163.

26. Colin Tatz, With Intent To Destroy: Reflecting on Genocide (New York: Verso, 2003), p. 133.

27. Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide, p. 209.

28. Maurice Halbwachs, Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (Paris: Mouton, 1976).

29. Phil Clark and Zachary D. Kaufman, eds., After Genocide: Transitional Justice, Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Reconciliation in Rwanda and Beyond (London: Hurst, 2008), pp. 65–76.

30. For a fuller discussion, see Lemarchand, “Genocide: Memory and Ethnic Reconciliation in Rwanda,” in S. Marysse, F. Reyntjens, and S. Vandeginste, eds., L’Afrique des Grand Lacs: Annuaire 2006–2007 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007), pp. 21–30.

31. Studs Terkel, Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession (New York: The New Press, 1993), p. 142. Quoted in Tatz, With Intent to Destroy, p. 142.

32. See Liisa Malkki’s illuminating discussion of “the mythico-history of atrocity” in her Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology Among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 91 ff.

33. Tatz, With Intent to Destroy p. 142–43.

34. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Les assassins de la mémoire (Paris: La Découverte, 1987).

35. Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide, p. 211.

36. Thea Halo, IAGS Newsletter, December 16, 2007. Available at https://www.-notevenmyname.com/2.html.

37. Susanne Buckley-Zistel, “Remembering to Forget: Chosen Amnesia as a Strategy for Local Co-existence in Post-Genocide Rwanda,” Africa 76, no. 2 (2006): 131–50.

Major Source

Forgotten Genocides:Oblivion, Denial, and Memory

Edited by René Lemarchand