The Cambridge World History of Genocide: Volume 3, Genocide in the Contemporary Era, 1914–2020 [3] 1108487076, 9781108487078

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the cambridge world history of

GENOCIDE

Volume III examines the most well-known century of genocide, the twentieth century. Opening with a discussion on the definitions of genocide and ‘ethnic cleansing’ and their relationships to modernity, it continues with a survey of the genocide studies field, racism and antisemitism. The four parts cover the impacts of racism, total war, imperial collapse, and revolution; the crises of World War Two; the cold war; and globalisation. Twenty-eight scholars with expertise in specific regions document thirty genocides from 1918 to 2021, in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America. The cases range from the Armenian genocide to Maoist China, from the Holocaust to Stalin’s Ukraine, from Indonesia to Guatemala, Biafra, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda, and finally the contemporary fate of the Rohingyas in Myanmar and the ISIS slaughter of Yazidis in Iraq. The volume ends with a chapter on the strategies for genocide prevention moving forward. Ben Kiernan is the Griswold Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University and was founding Director of Yale’s Genocide Studies Program. His book Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (2007) won numerous awards, including a gold medal for the best work of history, awarded by the Independent Publishers Association. Wendy Lower is the John K. Roth Professor of History and Director of the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at Claremont McKenna College. She is also Chair of the Academic Committee of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Her book Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (2013) was a finalist for the National Book Award, and has been translated into twenty-three languages. Norman Naimark is the Robert & Florence McDonnell Chair in East European Studies at Stanford University. He is also Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution and of the Institute of International Studies. He is the author of the acclaimed book Genocide: A World History (2016). Scott Straus is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent books Fundamentals of Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention (2016) and Making and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership, and Genocide in Modern Africa (2015) won awards from the American Political Science Association and the International Studies Association.

t h e ca m b r i d g e w o r ld h i s t o r y o f

GENOCIDE General Editor Ben Kiernan, Yale University

Split into three volumes, The Cambridge World History of Genocide offers an analytical survey of genocide across six continents from prehistory to the twenty-first century. Combined, they compare and contrast cases in multiple different cultures and contexts, demonstrating common themes and sharp variations that have developed over time. By examining the long-term and immediate causes of genocide, these essays emphasize that genocidal intent has historically been shaped by structural factors and human decision-making. Featuring over 80 essays from experts across the field, together they cover ancient Carthage, the Holocaust, medieval Crusader massacres, Mongol conquests, the extermination of Indigenous peoples in European settler colonies in the Americas, Africa and Australia, as well as prehistoric mass graves from the Alps to the Andes, and the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. A much-needed addition to genocide studies, these volumes reveal how genocide is a world historical phenomenon that has operated under different names and capacities, but possesses similar key characteristics. VOLUME I Genocide in the Ancient, Medieval and Premodern Worlds EDITED BY BEN KIERNAN, T. M. LEMOS AND TRISTAN S. TAYLOR VOLUME II Genocide in the Indigenous, Early Modern and Imperial Worlds, from c.1535 to World War One EDITED BY NED BLACKHAWK , BEN KIERNAN , BENJAMIN MADLEY AND REBE TAYLOR

EDITED BY BEN

VOLUME III Genocide in the Contemporary Era, 1914–2020 KIERNAN , WENDY LOWER , NORMAN NAIMARK AND

SCOTT STRAUS

THE CAMBRIDGE WORLD HISTORY OF

GENOCIDE *

VOLUME

III

Genocide in the Contemporary Era, 1914–2020 *

Edited By

BEN KIERNAN Yale University WENDY LOWER Claremont McKenna College NORMAN NAIMARK Stanford University SCOTT STRAUS University of California-Berkeley

University Printing House, Cambridge C B 2 8B S, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, N Y 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, V I C 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108487078 D O I: 10.1017/9781108767118 © Cambridge University Press 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2023 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Limited, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. A Cataloging-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Three-volume set I S B N 978-1-108-75973-1 Hardback Volume I I S B N 978-1-108-49353-6 Hardback Volume I I I S B N 978-1-108-48643-9 Hardback Volume I I I I S B N 978-1-108-48707-8 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

the cambridge world history of

GENOCIDE

Volume III examines the most well-known century of genocide, the twentieth century. Opening with a discussion on the definitions of genocide and ‘ethnic cleansing’ and their relationships to modernity, it continues with a survey of the genocide studies field, racism and antisemitism. The four parts cover the impacts of racism, total war, imperial collapse, and revolution; the crises of World War Two; the cold war; and globalisation. Twenty-eight scholars with expertise in specific regions document thirty genocides from 1918 to 2021, in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America. The cases range from the Armenian genocide to Maoist China, from the Holocaust to Stalin’s Ukraine, from Indonesia to Guatemala, Biafra, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda, and finally the contemporary fate of the Rohingyas in Myanmar and the ISIS slaughter of Yazidis in Iraq. The volume ends with a chapter on the strategies for genocide prevention moving forward. Ben Kiernan is the Griswold Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University and was founding Director of Yale’s Genocide Studies Program. His book Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (2007) won numerous awards, including a gold medal for the best work of history, awarded by the Independent Publishers Association. Wendy Lower is the John K. Roth Professor of History and Director of the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at Claremont McKenna College. She is also Chair of the Academic Committee of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Her book Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (2013) was a finalist for the National Book Award, and has been translated into twenty-three languages. Norman Naimark is the Robert & Florence McDonnell Chair in East European Studies at Stanford University. He is also Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution and of the Institute of International Studies. He is the author of the acclaimed book Genocide: A World History (2016). Scott Straus is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent books Fundamentals of Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention (2016) and Making and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership, and Genocide in Modern Africa (2015) won awards from the American Political Science Association and the International Studies Association.

t h e ca m b r i d g e w o r ld h i s t o r y o f

GENOCIDE General Editor Ben Kiernan, Yale University

Split into three volumes, The Cambridge World History of Genocide offers an analytical survey of genocide across six continents from prehistory to the twenty-first century. Combined, they compare and contrast cases in multiple different cultures and contexts, demonstrating common themes and sharp variations that have developed over time. By examining the long-term and immediate causes of genocide, these essays emphasize that genocidal intent has historically been shaped by structural factors and human decision-making. Featuring over 80 essays from experts across the field, together they cover ancient Carthage, the Holocaust, medieval Crusader massacres, Mongol conquests, the extermination of Indigenous peoples in European settler colonies in the Americas, Africa and Australia, as well as prehistoric mass graves from the Alps to the Andes, and the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. A much-needed addition to genocide studies, these volumes reveal how genocide is a world historical phenomenon that has operated under different names and capacities, but possesses similar key characteristics. VOLUME I Genocide in the Ancient, Medieval and Premodern Worlds EDITED BY BEN KIERNAN, T. M. LEMOS AND TRISTAN S. TAYLOR VOLUME II Genocide in the Indigenous, Early Modern and Imperial Worlds, from c.1535 to World War One EDITED BY NED BLACKHAWK , BEN KIERNAN , BENJAMIN MADLEY AND REBE TAYLOR

EDITED BY BEN

VOLUME III Genocide in the Contemporary Era, 1914–2020 KIERNAN , WENDY LOWER , NORMAN NAIMARK AND

SCOTT STRAUS

THE CAMBRIDGE WORLD HISTORY OF

GENOCIDE *

VOLUME

III

Genocide in the Contemporary Era, 1914–2020 *

Edited By

BEN KIERNAN Yale University WENDY LOWER Claremont McKenna College NORMAN NAIMARK Stanford University SCOTT STRAUS University of California-Berkeley

University Printing House, Cambridge C B 2 8B S, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, N Y 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, V I C 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108487078 D O I: 10.1017/9781108767118 © Cambridge University Press 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2023 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Limited, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. A Cataloging-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Three-volume set I S B N 978-1-108-75973-1 Hardback Volume I I S B N 978-1-108-49353-6 Hardback Volume I I I S B N 978-1-108-48643-9 Hardback Volume I I I I S B N 978-1-108-48707-8 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

the cambridge world history of

GENOCIDE

Volume III examines the most well-known century of genocide, the twentieth century. Opening with a discussion on the definitions of genocide and ‘ethnic cleansing’ and their relationships to modernity, it continues with a survey of the genocide studies field, racism and antisemitism. The four parts cover the impacts of racism, total war, imperial collapse, and revolution; the crises of World War Two; the cold war; and globalisation. Twenty-eight scholars with expertise in specific regions document thirty genocides from 1918 to 2021, in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America. The cases range from the Armenian genocide to Maoist China, from the Holocaust to Stalin’s Ukraine, from Indonesia to Guatemala, Biafra, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda, and finally the contemporary fate of the Rohingyas in Myanmar and the ISIS slaughter of Yazidis in Iraq. The volume ends with a chapter on the strategies for genocide prevention moving forward. Ben Kiernan is the Griswold Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University and was founding Director of Yale’s Genocide Studies Program. His book Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (2007) won numerous awards, including a gold medal for the best work of history, awarded by the Independent Publishers Association. Wendy Lower is the John K. Roth Professor of History and Director of the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at Claremont McKenna College. She is also Chair of the Academic Committee of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Her book Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (2013) was a finalist for the National Book Award, and has been translated into twenty-three languages. Norman Naimark is the Robert & Florence McDonnell Chair in East European Studies at Stanford University. He is also Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution and of the Institute of International Studies. He is the author of the acclaimed book Genocide: A World History (2016). Scott Straus is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent books Fundamentals of Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention (2016) and Making and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership, and Genocide in Modern Africa (2015) won awards from the American Political Science Association and the International Studies Association.

t h e ca m b r i d g e w o r ld h i s t o r y o f

GENOCIDE General Editor Ben Kiernan, Yale University

Split into three volumes, The Cambridge World History of Genocide offers an analytical survey of genocide across six continents from prehistory to the twenty-first century. Combined, they compare and contrast cases in multiple different cultures and contexts, demonstrating common themes and sharp variations that have developed over time. By examining the long-term and immediate causes of genocide, these essays emphasize that genocidal intent has historically been shaped by structural factors and human decision-making. Featuring over 80 essays from experts across the field, together they cover ancient Carthage, the Holocaust, medieval Crusader massacres, Mongol conquests, the extermination of Indigenous peoples in European settler colonies in the Americas, Africa and Australia, as well as prehistoric mass graves from the Alps to the Andes, and the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. A much-needed addition to genocide studies, these volumes reveal how genocide is a world historical phenomenon that has operated under different names and capacities, but possesses similar key characteristics. VOLUME I Genocide in the Ancient, Medieval and Premodern Worlds EDITED BY BEN KIERNAN, T. M. LEMOS AND TRISTAN S. TAYLOR VOLUME II Genocide in the Indigenous, Early Modern and Imperial Worlds, from c.1535 to World War One EDITED BY NED BLACKHAWK , BEN KIERNAN , BENJAMIN MADLEY AND REBE TAYLOR

EDITED BY BEN

VOLUME III Genocide in the Contemporary Era, 1914–2020 KIERNAN , WENDY LOWER , NORMAN NAIMARK AND

SCOTT STRAUS

THE CAMBRIDGE WORLD HISTORY OF

GENOCIDE *

VOLUME

III

Genocide in the Contemporary Era, 1914–2020 *

Edited By

BEN KIERNAN Yale University WENDY LOWER Claremont McKenna College NORMAN NAIMARK Stanford University SCOTT STRAUS University of California-Berkeley

University Printing House, Cambridge C B 2 8B S, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, N Y 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, V I C 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108487078 D O I: 10.1017/9781108767118 © Cambridge University Press 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2023 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Limited, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. A Cataloging-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Three-volume set I S B N 978-1-108-75973-1 Hardback Volume I I S B N 978-1-108-49353-6 Hardback Volume I I I S B N 978-1-108-48643-9 Hardback Volume I I I I S B N 978-1-108-48707-8 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of Figures page xi List of Tables xiii List of Maps xiv List of Contributors to Volume I I I

xv

Introduction to Volume I I I 1 ben kiernan, wendy lower, norman naimark and scott straus

part i RACISM, TOTAL WAR, IMPERIAL COLLAPSE AND REVOLUTION 1 . Prelude to Genocide: Humanitarianism, Racism and Antisemitism in the Early Twentieth Century 31 ben kiernan 2 . War and Genocide in the Twentieth Century 44 jay winter 3 . The Armenian Genocide: An Overview 67 taner akc¸ am 4 . Australia’s Stolen Generations, 1914–2021 93 joanna cruickshank and crystal mckinnon 5 . Eurocentrism, Silence and Memory of Genocide in Colonial Libya, 1929–1934 118 ali abdullatif ahmida

vii

Contents

6 . Spain 1936–1945: Coup d’État and Genocidal Practices in the Destruction of ‘Anti-Spain’ 141 antonio mı´ guez macho 7 . Genocide in Stalinist Russia and Ukraine, 1930–1938 162 norman naimark 8 . The Famine in Soviet Kazakhstan sarah cameron

186

part ii WORLD WAR TWO 9 . From Persecution to Genocide: The Evolution of the Nazi Anti-Jewish Policy (1938–1942) 211 florent brayard 10 . Systematic and Ad Hoc Persecution and Mass Murder in the Holocaust: Killings in Eastern Europe outside the Camps 235 mary fulbrook 11 . Jewish Life and Death under Nazi Rule across Europe and around the Globe 258 debo´ rah dwork 12 . The Nazi Camps and Killing Centres dieter pohl 13 . State Violence during World War Two raz segal

281 308

14 . The Genocide of the Romani People in Europe jennifer illuzzi

335

15 . The Nazis and the Slavs: Poles and Soviet Prisoners of War norman naimark 16 . The Nanjing Massacre yuki tanaka

viii

379

358

Contents

part iii THE NATION-STATE SYSTEM DURING THE COLD WAR 17 . Genocide in Latin America, 1950–2000 403 daniel feierstein and lucrecia molinari 18 . China under Mao, 1949–1976 frank diko¨ tter

429

19 . Half a Century of Genocide and Extermination: Indonesia, 1965–1966; East Timor, 1975–1999; and West Papua, 1963–2020 450 geoffrey robinson 20 . Secession and Genocide in the Republic of Biafra, 1966–1970 samuel fury childs daly 21 . Bangladesh, 1971 gary j. bass

476

497

22 . The Genocides in Cambodia, 1975–1979 ben kiernan 23 . The Guatemalan Genocide roddy brett

518

550

24 . Mass Violence and the Kurds: From the Late Ottoman Empire to ISIS 574 uğ ur u¨ mit u¨ ngo¨ r 25 . Vulnerable Peoples in the Contemporary Era: An Overview mark levene

part iv GLOBALISATION AND GENOCIDE SINCE THE COLD WAR 26 . Genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1992–1995 edina bec ́irevic ́

ix

627

599

Contents

27 . The Rwandan Genocide in Context scott straus 28 . Genocides in the Sudans cle´ mence pinaud

647

672

29 . Elements of Genocidal Ideology in Al-Qaeda and Its Offshoots, including Islamic State 700 hayat alvi 30 . The Yazidi Genocide 722 sareta ashraph 31 . Genocide in Myanmar: The Assault on the Rohingya, 2010–2019 azeem ibrahim

746

32 . A Short History of Genocide Prevention across the Long Twentieth Century 763 scott straus Index 788

x

Figures

1.1 6.1

7.1 8.1

9.1 13.1 14.1

15.1 19.1 19.2

20.1 20.2

22.1 22.2

Thailand’s ‘lost territories’, Bangkok Bank, 1976. (Photo: Ben Kiernan) page 43 Patriotic rally coming out of a church welcomed by Falangists, Civil Guards, army officers, and people giving the fascist salute. Cangas, near Vigo, Spain, 6 February 1938. (Nores Soliño Collection. Nomes e Voces Archive, HISTAGRA-USC). 151 Deported peasants and political prisoners used as slave labour on White Sea–Baltic Canal project, 1933. (Sovfoto / Contributor / Getty Images) 181 A Kazakh nomad in the north of the Kazakh steppe in the 1920s. (Republic of Kazakhstan Central State Archive of Film, Photo and Audio Documents, 5-3497) 190 Jewish deportees from Carpatho-Ukraine are submitted for ‘selection’ on their arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau, May 1944. (Yad Vashem Archives) 230 Bulgarian Patriarch Neophyte. (AFP / Stringer / Getty Images) 331 Under German police surveillance, Sinti are marched down Königstraße (corner of Kelterstraße) in Asperg, district of Ludwigsburg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany, 22 May 1940. They are to be locked up at Hohenasperg prison prior to deportation to camps in Poland. (Photo: Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images) 345 German army postcard showing captured Russian POWs. (Photo 12 / Contributor / Getty Images) 369 PKI members and sympathisers detained by the army in Bali, c.December 1965. (National Library of Indonesia) 452 Unarmed supporter of East Timor’s independence, Adelino Bedinho Alfonso Guterres, moments before he was shot dead by Indonesian troops in August 1999. (Photo: Eddy Hasby) 458 City of Nsukka. Troops of the federal government entering the university at Nsukka. (Photo: Bruno Barbey/Magnum Photos) 486 Aba, Nigeria (ex-Biafra). Food is displayed in the market, a sign that the famine which was the result of the civil war, is over. (Photo: A. Abbas/ Magnum Photos) 489 The National Bank of Cambodia, dynamited by the Khmer Rouge after they took power in 1975. (Photo: Ben Kiernan, 1980) 519 Tuol Sleng (‘S-21’) Prison, Phnom Penh. (Photo: Ben Kiernan, 1980) 530

xi

List of Figures 23.1

24.1 26.1 28.1 28.2

30.1

Nicolás, a Mayan priest, holds a cross that lists the ages of his seven massacred relatives. Communities of Population in Resistance of the Sierra, 1993. (Photo: Jonathan Moller) People visit graves of relatives who died in the Halabja chemical attack in Sulaymaniya, Iraq. ‘Swimming through the void’. Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. (Photo: Michal Sleczek/Getty Images) Sudanese People’s Liberation Army soldiers stand next to a tank in southern Sudan, 13 November 1993. (Scott Peterson / Contributor / Getty Images) Sudan’s Islamic leader, cleric and parliamentary speaker Hassan al-Turabi (l), and Sudanese President General Omar el-Bashir (r), at the opening of an Arab-Islamic conference in Khartoum, 2 December 1993. (Photo: Manoocher Deghati/AFP/Getty Images) Thousands of Yezidis trapped in the Sinjar mountains as they tried to escape from Islamic State (IS) forces, are rescued by the Kurdish People’s Protection Unit (YPG) in Iraq, on 9 August 2014. (Photo: Emrah Yorulmaz/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

xii

557 590 638 676

685

733

Tables

22.1 The Standing Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea Central Committee, 1975–1979 22.2 Approximate death tolls in Democratic Kampuchea, 1975–1979

xiii

page 521 533

Maps 1.1 Siam’s claimed ‘territorial losses’, 1862–1909. page 42 3.1 The 1915 Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire. (Map courtesy of the Armenian National Institute) 80 3.2 The concentration and settlement camps in Syria. 83 6.1 Regional divisions of Spain in 1936. (Cartography by Antonio Míguez Macho) 147 7.1 Total direct famine losses of population in Ukraine for 1933. (Cartography by the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University © 2021 The President and Fellows of Harvard College) 173 8.1 The Kazakh ASSR in 1933. (Cartography by Nathan Burtch) 187 9.1 Europe in December 1941. (Cartography by Eric Mermet) 223 10.1 Nazi-occupied Soviet territory, December 1941. 238 13.1 World War Two in central and eastern Europe, 1939–1942. 312 14.1 Romani genocide, 1939–1945. (Cartography by Peter Rogers) 342 18.1 China during the Cultural Revolution. 441 19.1 Indonesia and East Timor. 465 20.1 Biafra, 1967–1970. 483 22.1 Democratic Kampuchea: Administrative Zones. (Cartography by Margaret Pitt) 526 23.1 Political map of Guatemala. 551 24.1 The Kurdistan Regions. (Getty Images) 576 26.1 Bosnia and Herzegovina. 628 27.1 UN map of Rwanda. (United Nations Cartographic Section) 648 28.1 Conflict in the Sudans. (Cartography by Bill Nelson) 673 29.1 ISIS Caliphate map of the world. (John Hall, ‘The ISIS map of the world: militants outline chilling five-year plan for global domination as they declare formation of caliphate – and change their name to the Islamic State’, Daily Mail, 30 June 2014) 701 31.1 Rakhine state, Myanmar: internally displaced persons, 2015. 754

xiv

Contributors to Volume III

A L I A B D U L L A T I F A H M I D A was born in Waddan, Libya, and educated at Cairo University and the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the founding Chair and Professor, Department of Political Science at the University of New England, Biddeford, Maine. His areas of expertise are political theory, comparative politics, African history and historical sociology. His scholarship focuses on power, agency, genocide and anticolonial resistance and post-colonial politics in North Africa, especially in modern Libya. His books include Forgotten Voices: Power and Agency in Colonial and Postcolonial Libya (Routledge, 2005; Arabic ed., 2009); Post-Orientalism: Critical Reviews of North African Social and Cultural History (The Center of Arab Unity Studies, 2009); and Genocide in Libya: Shar, A Hidden Colonial History (Routledge, 2020). T A N E R A K C¸ A M is Director, Armenian Genocide Research Program at the UCLA Promise Armenian Institute. He is widely recognised as one of the first Turkish scholars to write extensively on the Ottoman-Turkish Genocide of the Armenians in the early twentieth century. His best-known books include: A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (Metropolitan Books, 2006); Young Turks’ Crime against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton, 2012), which received several awards; and Killing Orders: Talat Pasha’s Telegrams and the Armenian Genocide (Palgrave 2018). He is the founder of Krikor Guerguerian Online Archive: https://wordpress.clarku.edu/guerguerianarchive/. H A Y A T A L V I is an associate professor in the National Security Affairs Department at the US Naval War College. She has served as the Director of International Studies at Arcadia University and taught political science at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. Dr Alvi spent a year in Damascus, Syria, as a Fulbright Fellow (1993–4). Dr Alvi’s specialisations include International Relations, Political Economy, Genocide Studies, Middle East and South Asian Studies and Islamic Studies. She has published numerous books, articles and chapters, including her latest book, The Political Economy and Islam of the Middle East: The Case of Tunisia (Palgrave, 2019). S A R E T A A S H R A P H is a barrister specialising in international criminal law, and an expert on the gendered commission and impact of genocide. Between 2019 and 2022, she served in various capacities at the UN Investigative Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by Da’esh/ISIL (UNITAD), supporting its investigation into crimes against the Yazidis of northern Iraq. While at the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria (2012–16),

xv

List of Contributors to Volume III she was the primary drafter of the June 2016 report ‘They Came to Destroy’, which determined that ISIL was committing genocide against the Yazidis. Sareta is the cofounder of the Yazidi Victims Demographic Documentation Project. G A R Y J . B A S S is a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University and the author of The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide (Knopf, 2013); Freedom’s Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention (Knopf, 2008); and Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals (Princeton, 2000). The Blood Telegram was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and won book awards from the Council on Foreign Relations, the Asia Society and more. He has written articles for International Security, Ethics, Philosophy & Public Affairs and Yale Journal of International Law, and writes for The New York Times and The Economist. E D I N A B E C Í R E V I C ́ is a professor of security studies at the University of Sarajevo, where her research interests include various forms of extremist violence. Genocide and transitional justice are a special focus of her academic work, and she is the author of Genocide on the Drina River (Yale, 2014), as well as numerous articles and studies on the topic. She is also a co-founder of the Atlantic Initiative – Center for Security and Justice Research, under the aegis of which she has authored and co-authored a range of publications on issues of extremism and security, among them Salafism vs. Moderate Islam (2016). F L O R E N T B R A Y A R D is a research professor at the French National Centre of Scientific Research (CNRS). He is the director of the team ‘Histoire et historiographie de la Shoah’ at the Centre de recherches historiques (EHESS-CNRS) in Paris. He has published several books on Holocaust denial and Holocaust history, in particular La ‘solution finale de la question juive’. La technique, le temps et les catégories de la décision (2004) and Auschwitz, enquête sur un complot nazi (2012). He recently published with Andreas Wirsching the first French critical edition of Mein Kampf: Historiciser le mal. Une édition critique de ‘Mein Kampf’ (2021). R O D D Y B R E T T is a reader (associate professor) in Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Bristol. He publishes widely on political violence, particularly mass collective violence, its causes and consequences at state and societal levels, as well as on how states, collective actors and international actors seek to overcome atrocity. He has worked as a senior practitioner/policy-maker, including with the United Nations and the Centre for Human Rights Legal Action (CALDH), Guatemala, as part of the original team that prepared the body of evidence for the trial for genocide and crimes against humanity of General Efrain Rios Montt. S A R A H C A M E R O N is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan (Cornell, 2018), which won four book awards and two honourable mentions in the United States. The book also provoked intense discussion in Kazakhstan, where the famine remains a partially forbidden topic in part due to Kazakhstan’s close relationship with Russia. Russian and Kazakh translations of the book have been released. Professor Cameron received her PhD in History from Yale University.

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List of Contributors to Volume III J O A N N A C R U I C K S H A N K is descended from British colonists and lives on unceded Boonwurrung country. She is a senior lecturer in History at Deakin University, Victoria, Australia. She researches the history of religion in Australia and the British Empire, with a particular focus on the relationship between Christianity and settler colonialism. Her most recent book (co-authored with Patricia Grimshaw) is White Women, Aboriginal Missions and Australian Settler Governments (Brill, 2019). She is a chief investigator on the Australian Research Council-funded project, Indigenous Leaders: Lawful Relations from Encounter to Treaty. S A M U E L F U R Y C H I L D S D A L Y is Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies, History and International Comparative Studies at Duke University. He is a historian of law and warfare in twentieth-century Africa, and the author of A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2020). He is currently writing a book about military rule in post-colonial Nigeria, and a comparative study of why soldiers run from battle, entitled The Good Soldier: A Global History of Military Deserters. F R A N K D I K O¨ T T E R is Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. Before 2006 he was Professor of the Modern History of China at the University of London. He has published a dozen books, including a trilogy that documents the impact of communism on the lives of ordinary people in China on the basis of new archival material. The first volume in the People’s Trilogy, entitled Mao’s Great Famine, won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2011. He is also Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and holds an honorary doctorate from Leiden University. D E B O´ R A H D W O R K is the Director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes against Humanity at the Graduate Center – City University of New York. Her award-winning books include Children With a Star, Flight from the Reich, Auschwitz and Holocaust. Renowned for her scholarship, she is also a leading authority on university education in this field: she envisioned and actualised the first doctoral programme specifically in Holocaust History and Genocide Studies. Recipient of the International Network of Genocide Scholars Lifetime Achievement Award, Professor Dwork has served as a Senior Scholar-in-Residence at the USHMM, a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and an ACLS Fellow. D A N I E L F E I E R S T E I N holds a PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Buenos Aires. He heads the Center for Genocide Studies at the National University of Tres de Febrero, and is a principal researcher at CONICET (National Council of Research in Argentina). He was president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (2013–15) and has been a judge of the Permanent People´s Tribunal. Feierstein has published a dozen books on Genocide Studies, including Genocide as Social Practice: Reorganizing Society under the Nazis and Argentina´s Military Juntas (Rutgers University Press, 2014). His work has been used in case trials in Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Chile and Bangladesh. M A R Y F U L B R O O K, FBA, is Professor of German History and former Executive Dean of the Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences at University College London. A graduate of

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List of Contributors to Volume III Cambridge and Harvard, she is author or editor of some twenty-five books. Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice (2018), won the 2019 Wolfson Prize; previous books include the Fraenkel Prize-winning A Small Town near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust (2012); Dissonant Lives: Generations and Violence through the German Dictatorships (2011); as well as studies of the GDR and East German society, national identity after the Holocaust and theoretical issues in history. A Z E E M I B R A H I M is the Director of Special Initiatives at the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy in Washington DC; Research Professor at the Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College; and a columnist at Foreign Policy magazine. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge, after which he completed fellowships at the universities of Oxford, Harvard and Yale. Dr Ibrahim is the author of two seminal books: The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide (Hurst, 2016) and Radical Origins: Why We Are Losing the War Against Islamic Extremism (Pegasus, 2017). J E N N I F E R I L L U Z Z I is an associate professor of history at Providence College. She focuses on the intersections between institutional history and diasporic populations, particularly the Romani population in Europe. She studies modern German and Italian history, focusing on social and political history, and particularly gender history, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Recent publications include ‘Stories of a life together’, Erreffe 74 (2019); ‘Reimagining colony and metropole: images of Italy and Libya during the Italo-Turkish War, 1911–1912’, Gender and History 30 (2018); and Gypsies in Germany and Italy, 1861–1914: Lives outside the Law (2014). B E N K I E R N A N is the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History Emeritus and former Professor of International and Area Studies at Yale University. Founding Director of both the Cambodian Genocide Program and the Genocide Studies Program (gsp.yale.edu) from 1994 to 2015, he has also served as Chair of Yale’s Council on Southeast Asia Studies. His books include How Pol Pot Came to Power (1985); The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979 (1996); Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia (2007); Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (2007); and Viê t Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present (2017). ˙ M A R K L E V E N E is Emeritus Fellow in the History Department, University of Southampton, and founder of Rescue!History, www.rescue-history.org.uk/. His writing ranges across issues of genocide, eastern European and Middle Eastern nationalisms and ‘minority’ relations, as well as environmental and peace issues, especially focusing on anthropogenic climate change. His most recent work includes the two-volume The Crisis of Genocide: The European Rimlands, 1912–1953 (2013), which won the Institute for the Study of Genocide 2015 Lemkin award, and lead-editorship of History at the End of the World? History, Climate Change and the Possibility of Closure (2010). W E N D Y L O W E R is the John K. Roth Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College and directs the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at the Claremont Colleges (CA, USA). She chairs the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and has published several books on the Holocaust in Ukraine including Nazi Empire-Building and the

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List of Contributors to Volume III Holocaust in Ukraine (2005), and is co-editor (with Ray Brandon) of Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization (2008). Her work on gender and the Holocaust, Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (2013), was a finalist for the National Book Award and has been translated into twenty-three languages. Lower’s The Ravine: A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed (2021) received the National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category and was shortlisted for the Wingate Prize, and longlisted for a PEN. C R Y S T A L M C K I N N O N is an Amangu Yamatji woman and an academic researcher and community organiser. She is a historian and a critical Indigenous studies scholar and is a Vice Chancellor’s Indigenous Research Fellow at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. Her research has looked at concepts of Indigenous sovereignty, justice and law, and Indigenous social movements, resistance and protest. She is currently a co-editor of Aboriginal History journal, and her most recent work has been published in Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies (2020), Cambridge Legal History of Australia (2021), Biography, and Australian Feminist Law Journal. A N T O N I O M ´I G U E Z M A C H O is Associate Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Santiago de Compostela (where he completed his PhD) and formerly visiting researcher at the London School of Economics. He has published The Genocidal Genealogy of Francoism: Violence, Memory and Impunity (Brighton, 2016) and Sites of Violence and Memory in Modern Spain. From the Spanish Civil War to the Present Day (London, 2021). His current work in progress is an essay, ‘The last Crusade: holy war and genocidal practices in the case of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939)’, for the Routledge Handbook on Religion and Genocide, edited by Sara E. Brown and Stephen Smith. L U C R E C I A M O L I N A R I is a researcher at Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET, Argentina). She obtained her PhD in Social Sciences, a Master’s degree in Latin American Studies, and a BA in Sociology. She is an assistant professor at Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA, Faculty of Social Sciences, Sociology) and at Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero (UNTREF), and a researcher at Centro de Estudios sobre Genocidio (UNTREF), Grupo de Estudios sobre Centroamérica (Instituto de Estudios de América Latina y el Caribe, UBA) and Observatorio de Crímenes de Estado (UBA). N O R M A N N A I M A R K is the Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of East European Studies in the History Department at Stanford University. He is also Senior Fellow (by courtesy) of the Hoover Institution and the Freeman-Spogli Institute. He is author of several books relevant to Genocide Studies: Fires of Hatred (Harvard, 2001), Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton, 2010), and Genocide: A World History (Oxford, 2017). C L E´ M E N C E P I N A U D is an assistant professor in the Department of International Studies at the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana UniversityBloomington. Her work focuses primarily on South Sudan and issues of violence, sexual violence, economic predation and military history, all from a gender perspective. Her book War and Genocide in South Sudan (Cornell University Press, 2021) draws on more than a decade of fieldwork that she conducted in South Sudan.

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List of Contributors to Volume III D I E T E R P O H L is Professor for Contemporary History at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. His expertise is focused on the European history of the 1930s to the 1950s, especially the Nazi period, German occupation and Nazi crimes, East German post-war history, the Soviet Union, Ukraine and Poland. He has published Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien 1941–1944 (1996); Verfolgung und Massenmord in der NS-Zeit (2003); Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht. Deutsche Militärbesatzung und einheimische Bevölkerung in der Sowjetunion 1941–1944 (2008); and co-edited Der Dienstkalender Heinrich Himmlers 1941/ 42 (1999); Der Dienstkalender Heinrich Himmlers 1943–1945 (2020); and the sixteen-volume series, Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland (2007–21), which is being translated into English. G E O F F R E Y R O B I N S O N, Emeritus Professor of History at UCLA, teaches and writes about political violence, genocide and human rights. His major works include The Dark Side of Paradise: Political Violence in Bali (1995); ‘If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die’: How Genocide Was Stopped in East Timor (2010); and The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965–66 (2018). Before coming to UCLA, he worked at Amnesty International’s Research Department in London, and in 1999 he served with the United Nations in East Timor. His current projects include a co-authored visual history of the mass violence of 1965–6 in Indonesia. R A Z S E G A L is Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Endowed Professor in the Study of Modern Genocide at Stockton University, where he also serves as director of the Master of Arts in Holocaust and Genocide Studies (MAHG). Dr Segal has held a Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship and a Lady Davis Fellowship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His publications include Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown, and Mass Violence, 1914–1945 (Stanford University Press, 2016; paperback 2020), and he was guest editor of the special issue on Genocide: Mass Violence and Cultural Erasure, of Zmanim: A Historical Quarterly 138 (2018) (in Hebrew). S C O T T S T R A U S is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of several books in Genocide Studies, including Fundamentals of Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention (US Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2016); Making and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership, and Genocide in Modern Africa (Cornell, 2015), which won the Grawemeyer Award for Improving World Order; and The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (Cornell, 2006). He previously served on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and on the Council of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Y U K I T A N A K A taught and conducted research for almost twenty years at several different universities in Australia. In April 2002, he took up a research professorship at the Hiroshima Peace Institute of Hiroshima City University, Japan. He retired from the Hiroshima Peace Institute at the end of March 2015 and now lives in Australia, where he works as a freelance historian and political critic. His publications include Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II, 2nd ed. (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018) and Japan’s Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution During World War II and the US Occupation (Routledge, 2002).

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List of Contributors to Volume III ¨ MIT U ¨ N G O¨ R is Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of U Ğ U R U Amsterdam and the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. His main area of interest is the history and sociology of mass violence, with a particular focus on the modern and contemporary Middle East. He has won several academic awards and held visiting positions in Dublin, Vancouver, Budapest, Toronto and Los Angeles. He has published books and articles on various aspects and cases of genocide, including the Armenian genocide. His most recent publications are Paramilitarism: Mass Violence in the Shadow of the State (Oxford University Press, 2020) and Syrian Gulag: Inside Assad’s Prisons, 1970–2020 (I.B. Tauris, 2023). J A Y W I N T E R is the Charles J. Stille Professor of History emeritus at Yale University. He is the author of Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (1995). He is the editor of America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915 (2003) and of the Cambridge History of the First World War (2014). He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Graz, the Katholik University of Leuven and the University of Paris, and in 2017 received the Victor Adler award from the Austrian state for a lifetime’s work in history.

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Introduction to Volume I I I ben kiernan, wendy lower, norman naimark and scott straus

In October 1945 the Nazi defendants at Nuremberg were charged, for the first time in international law, with ‘genocide’. The Nuremberg indictments included, under war crimes, ‘deliberate and systematic genocide, viz., the extermination of racial and national groups, against the civilian populations of certain occupied territories in order to destroy particular races and classes of people and national, racial, or religious groups, particularly Jews, Poles, and Gypsies and others’.1 However, during World War Two, and even in 1945, the crime of genocide had no legal status. A Polish Jewish jurist, Raphael Lemkin, had coined the term ‘genocide’ in 1943, and first published it the following year. In large part as a result of his efforts, in 1948 the United Nations General Assembly passed the Genocide Convention, and it came into force in 1951. Those Nazi defendants found guilty at Nuremberg were convicted of other crimes, including aggression and crimes against humanity. ‘Genocide’ is still often popularly considered a twentieth-century crime, rather than either a retroactive post-war legalism, or the transhistorical phenomenon that the first two volumes of this series have documented. Lemkin certainly considered the Armenian genocide during World War One to have been such an event (whose repercussions he said ‘changed his life’), similar in many ways to the Jewish Holocaust; and during the 1930s, he had actively worked for its international recognition.2 Then in the late 1940s and 1950s he set out to write an extended account of genocide since antiquity, and to ‘prove that genocide followed humanity throughout history’.3 His analysis had breadth too. In the 1 Nuremberg Trial Proceedings, vol. I, Count Three: War Crimes, V I I I: Statement of the Offence, (A) Murder and Ill-Treatment of Civilian Populations . . ., 6 October 1945, para. 2, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/count3.asp. 2 Philippe Sands, East-West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2016), pp. 146–58, at 149. 3 Raphael Lemkin, Lemkin on Genocide, ed. and intro. Steven Leonard Jacobs (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012), p. 5.

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1943 Preface to his 1944 work Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Lemkin applied ‘genocide’ to an array of destructive acts such as cultural vandalism as well as to ‘mass killings, mainly of Jews, Poles, Slovenes, and Russians’. In the text of the book, he included ‘Gypsies’ (Roma and Sinti) and Serbs as victims of genocide.4 The paths that Lemkin and his peer Hersch Lauterpacht, who developed the concept of crimes against humanity, pioneered in international law have led to a robust new field of Genocide Studies, as well as new studies of crimes against humanity such as extermination. One of the hallmarks of this field is the acknowledgement that although the term ‘genocide’ did not exist before World War Two, similar terms did, and more importantly, similar concepts existed.5 Genocide before 1939 or even 1900 was not at all unthinkable, but rather was expressed using different terminology, including crimes against humanity, extermination, and – phrases used by E. D. Morel in the first decade of the twentieth century to describe what was then happening in the Congo – ‘collective massacre on a grand scale’, a ‘holocaust of human victims’ and a ‘crime committed upon a helpless race’.6 And of course, just like after 1945, genocide was perpetrated in different ways depending on the historical, demographic and environmental circumstances, and under different technological and organisational limitations, as well as different legal regimes, national and international. There are various definitions of genocide, both legal and sociological. The 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines that crime as: 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; 4 Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), Preface, p. xii, and pp. 85, 213, 249, 259–60. 5 Ben Kiernan, ‘Is “genocide” an anachronistic concept for the study of early modern mass killing?’, History 99:336 (2014), 530–48, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468229X.12062/abstract. 6 E. D. Morel, ‘The 1903 parliamentary debate’, and‘Roger Casement’, in E.D. Morel’s History of the Congo Reform Movement, ed. Wm Roger Louis and Jean Stengers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), pp. 130, 134, 160. For other pre-1942 uses of the term ‘holocaust’ to describe mass murders, see Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 9–10.

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(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.7

Many scholars of genocide find this definition sufficiently broad. Others find it too narrow, preferring to include political groups and possibly even wider, less distinct groups, such as socio-economic classes, as potential victims of genocide. At any rate, the hallmark of genocide is the targeting of groups, with the intent of bringing about their destruction. Genocide is therefore a form of ‘groupselective’ violence, where the criterion for selection is group membership. Genocide cannot exist without this ‘group-selective’ or ‘categorical’ element. Our historical coverage in The Cambridge World History of Genocide includes not only genocide but also those group-selective cases of mass violence falling under another legal definition, that of the crime of ‘extermination’ – an older and separate legal term coming under the category of crimes against humanity, where it is found in the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. This concept largely overlaps with most sociological definitions of genocide. Extermination is legally described as conduct that ‘constituted, or took place as part of, a mass killing of members of a civilian population’ and was ‘committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population’.8 The Yugoslav Tribunal ruled in 2002 that a small or limited number of killings is insufficient to constitute extermination. Prosecutions must be aimed only at individuals responsible ‘for a large number of deaths, even if their part [in the crime] was remote or indirect’. The crime of ‘extermination must be collective in nature rather than directed towards singled out individuals’.9 It is important to note here that the nature of the violent crime that constitutes extermination involves collective-oriented violence in the sense that it targets large numbers of civilians (collectives) – rather than that a collective form of perpetration is deployed – to inflict harm on the group ‘as such’. Extermination is a crime against humanity which includes not only massacres but, like genocide, also covers ‘the intentional infliction of conditions of life, inter 7 www.hrweb.org/legal/genocide.html. 8 Official Records of the Assembly of States Parties to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, First session, New York, 3–10 September 2002 (United Nations publication, Sales No. E.03.V.2 and corrigendum), Part II.B; Article 7 (1)(b) Crime against humanity of extermination, www.icc-cpi.int/NR/rdonlyres/336923D8A6AD-40EC-AD7B-45BF9DE73D56/0/ElementsOfCrimesEng.pdf. 9 David Scheffer, All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals (Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 435, referring to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia ruling in the Krstić case.

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alia the deprivation of access to food and medicine, calculated to bring about the destruction of part of a population’.10 Like genocide (under the UN Convention), in the case of a crime against humanity the intentionality of the crime is important, though the purpose or motive of the extermination is not relevant to guilt. But unlike genocide, to meet the definition of extermination the targeted population need not be an ethnic, national, racial or religious group, and thus this crime may cover political and social groups, like most sociological definitions of genocide. Nor do charges of crimes against humanity such as extermination require proof, as the UN definition of genocide does, of what legal scholars call ‘specific intent’ – that is, the ‘intent to destroy’ a group, in whole or in part, ‘as such’. Such a high level of intent is not required for the crime of extermination, though it too is a crime committed intentionally, not accidentally or negligently or without foreknowledge, as is made clear by the deployment in its legal definition of the terms ‘widespread or systematic’, ‘intentional’ and ‘calculated’. Extermination covers most of those cases of genocide that are advanced by genocide scholars yet not covered by the UN Genocide Convention. While crimes against humanity (e.g. murder) may be committed against individuals as well as groups, this series of three volumes emphasises the nature and historical occurrence of crimes against groups, ‘collectivities’ or communities that are encompassed by the terms genocide and extermination. The focus is on group-selective or ‘categorical’ cases that fit either of these terms in their legal definitions, or those of sociologists, such as Helen Fein’s: ‘Genocide is sustained purposeful action by a perpetrator to physically destroy a collectivity directly[,] or indirectly, through interdiction of the biological and social reproduction of group members, sustained regardless of the surrender or lack of threat offered by the victim.’11

‘Ethnic Cleansing’ The term ‘ethnic cleansing’, in German völkische Flurbereinigung, was used in 1939–40 by Adolf Hitler and other Nazis.12 During their war against the Soviet Union, German military and security forces reported on the razing of 10 www.un.org/law/icc/index.html. 11 Helen Fein, Genocide: A Sociological Perspective, special issue of Current Sociology (1990). 12 Robert Gellately, ‘The Third Reich, the Holocaust, and visions of serial genocide’, in The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective, ed. R. Gellately and B. Kiernan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 247. The term may have had an earlier origin in the Balkans. See Norman Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 4–5, 201 n. 8.

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villages deemed partisan nests as a Säuberungsaktion (‘cleansing operation’).13 Regions falling under their control were progressively ‘purified’ of Jews (Judenrein). The Nazis’ Croatian Ustaše allies followed suit. They described as cˇišcenje terena (‘cleansing the terrain’) military actions in ́ which they killed non-Croats or drove them from their homes. Viktor Gutic,́ a ranking Ustaše commander, was one of the first Croatian nationalists to employ this term for conducting atrocities against Serbs. In 1941 alone, the number of Serbs killed in these actions may have reached 250,000.14 In turn, in the same year Serbian anti-Nazi Chetniks proposed ‘cleansing the lands of all non-Serb elements’, and they used the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ (etnicˇko cˇišcenje) in internal memoranda to refer to retalí atory massacres they committed against Croats and Bosniaks up to 1945.15 However the ambiguity in meaning between the ‘cleansing’ of a territory and of a ‘race’ – between ‘territorial’ and ‘ethnic’ cleansing – could make the difference between a population’s forcible expulsion and genocide. In the 1990s the same term ‘ethnic cleansing’ (etnicˇko ˇcišcenje) resurfaced in ́ Serbian usage, during the Bosnian war and the genocide of Bosniaks, which Edina Becirevic ́ ́ documents in her chapter in this volume. In that episode, as in Nazi usage, ‘ethnic cleansing’ often (though not always) served as a synonym for ‘genocide’. Since then, however, the two terms have become distinguishable. The distinction is similar to the original World War Two difference between the Nazi concept of ‘ethnic cleansing’ (‘purification’ of the German race and living space, Blut und Boden – see Mary Fulbrook’s analysis in Chapter 25), and the possibly more limited or ambiguous Croatian term ‘cleansing the terrain’, literally to forcibly expel one people from an area of land claimed by another. Depending on the means of ‘removal’ employed, ethnic cleansing possesses a far more elastic range of meanings that can encompass anything from outright genocide, to more ambiguous ‘genocidal massacres’ conducted in order to instil the fear required to force an ethnic population to flee from a territory, to the forcible expulsion of an ethnic population from a territory without major employment of violence or 13 The 454th Security Division’s war diary for the summer of 1941 records many such engagements. Säuberungsaktion is the term used during the entire campaign, but most often during 1941–3. 14 Richard Ashby Wilson, Writing History in International Criminal Trials (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 74; Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, p. 260, citing Martyrdom of the Serbs (Serbian Eastern Orthodox Diocese for the United States and Canada, 1943). 15 Norman Cigar, Genocide in Bosnia: The Policy of ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1995), p. 18; Edina Bećirević, Genocide on the Drina River (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), pp. 22–3.

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infliction of casualties.16 Ethnic cleansing can imply the existence of a territorial refuge or reservation for its victims, whereas genocide implies their destruction, in whole or in part. Ethnic cleansing also remains undefined in international law. For these reasons, we have not used it as a criterion for the inclusion of historical cases in The Cambridge World History of Genocide. An example of a non-genocidal form of ethnic cleansing occurred in South Asia in the early 1990s, during the same time period as the Bosnian genocide. After conducting a census in 1988, the landlocked Kingdom of Bhutan concluded that 28 per cent of its population were of Nepalese origin, a group known as the Lhotshampa, or ‘people from the south’. Lhotshampa had begun migrating north from Nepal into Bhutan as early as 1620. Most remained Nepali-speaking, but in 1958 many of them had received Bhutanese citizenship. The 1988 census was conducted unprofessionally, and not transparently.17 According to a subsequent human rights investigative report, it was also an ‘exclusive census’, carried out in Bhutan’s southern districts ‘with the intention to flush out’ the Nepali-speaking population. ‘Thousands of Nepali-Bhutanese were arrested, killed, tortured and given life sentences.’18 In 1990, Bhutan set up border controls. Then, under a ‘One Nation, One People’ policy, the Bhutanese government imposed cultural and linguistic restrictions upon the Lhotshampa. Nepali was banned from use as a classroom language, in favour of Bhutan’s majority language, Dzongkha. The government also obliged all citizens to follow a national dress code. It then began to expel the Lhotshampa as ‘migrant laborers’.19 Those who could not prove their pre-1958 residence in Bhutan were to be deemed illegal immigrants. Nepali-speakers in the south, but no one else in the country, had to provide proof of pre-1958 residence. Yet that did not prevent their expulsion. According to the human rights investigation, ‘The local authorities also seized the documents that people have which can prove their Bhutanese nationality, to ensure they cannot produce them again in the future . . . The government forced many evicted people, almost all, to sign the voluntary migration form before leaving the country.’20 Three-quarters of the 16 See Naimark, Fires of Hatred; Helen Fein, ‘Ethnic cleansing’, in The Blackwell Dictionary of Modern Social Thought, ed. W. Outhwaite, 2nd ed. (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2006), pp. 208–11. 17 Maximillian Mørch, ‘Bhutan’s dark secret: the Lhotshampa expulsion’, The Diplomat, 21 September 2016. 18 I. P. Adhikari and Raju Thapa, Human Rights and Justice in Bhutan: Shadow Report on the First Universal Periodic Review of Bhutan (Nepal: Human Rights Without Frontiers, 2009), p. 58, www.apfanews.com/media/upload/final_report.pdf. 19 Mørch, ‘Bhutan’s dark secret’. 20 Adhikari and Thapa, Human Rights and Justice in Bhutan, pp. 19, 58.

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Lhotshampa expelled to Nepal did retain evidence that proved their Bhutanese nationality.21 But they had been expelled anyway; their documentation was of no use to them. During the early 1990s, Bhutan expelled approximately 130,000 Lhotshampa, about one-sixth of the country’s entire population. This made Bhutan, on a per capita basis, ‘the world’s biggest creator of refugees’.22 It was a major case of ethnic cleansing, but by no means a genocide. Therefore, this and similar cases are not included in this volume.

Modernity and Genocide Acknowledgement of genocide as ‘the crime’ of all crimes against humanity occurred during the contemporary era and culminated with its codification in the 1948 UN Convention. Lemkin’s definition was based on what he had personally witnessed in Nazi-dominated Europe, as well as his knowledge of the most recent case that the Young Turks had perpetrated against the Armenians, which some scholars have described as the first modern genocide. Although Lemkin would continue to research and write about the history of genocide since ancient times, discussions on the problem of genocide often focused on its twentieth-century century forms and causes. If genocide was by definition the persecution and murder of masses, even millions, of innocents, then logically such a campaign required the weapons and infrastructure of the modern state and the radical ambitions of the modern man (the modern woman was usually presumed innocent of the crimes of the modern state, see below). The unique features of the Holocaust – the boxcar deportations and assemblyline gassings at Birkenau, organised by unempathetic, banal bureaucrats (‘desk murderers’) – reinforced this image of genocide as civilisation having veered off track from its otherwise progressive path since the Enlightenment. In 1989, however, Zygmunt Bauman published Modernity and the Holocaust, in which he argued the contrary, that the Holocaust was an expression of modernity, and a larger problem of civilisation, rather than a deviation from it, let alone a strictly Jewish tragedy or an event in Jewish history.23 In the vein of Max Weber, the 21 Kathmandu Post, 19 June 2003, cited in Adhikari and Thapa, Human Rights and Justice in Bhutan, pp. 58–9. 22 Adhikari and Thapa, Human Rights and Justice in Bhutan, p. 58; Mørch, ‘Bhutan’s dark secret’. 23 Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). See reviews of Bauman’s book by A. Milchman and A. Rosenberg, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 5:3 (1990), 337–42; and G. Wickam in Journal of Sociology 5:3 (1991), 429–33.

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Frankfurt school and Hannah Arendt, Bauman illuminated the darker structural forces of the ‘civilising process’ that created technocratic monsters such as Mengele who were driven by a dangerously amoral instrumental rationality. His study, as well as Arendt’s similar thesis on the banality of evil, riled the intentionalist school of Holocaust scholars who centred their explanations on Nazi ideology and the individual agency of Hitler, Himmler and their fanatical followers.24 While historian Ian Kershaw would famously state, ‘no Hitler no Holocaust’, sociologist Bauman argued, ‘without modern civilization and its most central achievements there would be no Holocaust’. Modernity has also been viewed as the incubator of hateful ideologies such as antisemitism and racism. While Götz Aly’s earlier explanation was Baumanlike in its critique of the amoral technocrats, he later turned to the Holocaust’s roots in a new form of European antisemitism originating in the experience of rapid modernisation in the late nineteenth century, which created deeper societal divisions between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’, and an intense envy towards Jews who benefitted from emancipation, urbanisation, economic growth, and social and economic mobility. Antisemitism, among the longest hatreds that continues to cause harm, was specific to the Holocaust and European culture at that time. Yet its genocidal potential was realised in a modern civilisation of scientific racism and nationalism, and the modern concept of the state as demographic engineer and gardener, which were leading causes of the genocides in Turkey, the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Cambodia and the Balkans, according to Eric Weitz’s twentieth-century survey.25 Weitz also stresses a distinctively modern human drive towards perfection and problem-solving. Going back to the Enlightenment, historian Mark Levene situates genocide in ‘modern world historical development’, beginning with the popular, violent revolutions in France and America and the rise and fall of empires since then. According to Levene, genocide is ‘integral to “mainstream” historical trajectory of development towards a single, global, political economy composed of nation states’.26

24 Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, p. 87. Bauman argued that racism and not antisemitism had caused the genocide; that under the Nazis the Jews themselves had certain ‘privileges’ even the Poles lacked; that the Jews exacerbated their own plight by their own behaviour; that bureaucracies are ethically blind; and that civilisations are violent. His chapters are thematically focused on race and antisemitism, modernity, rationality, science, expertise, morality, and sociology and the Holocaust. 25 Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton University Press, 2003). 26 Mark Levene, The Crisis of Genocide, vol. I: Devastation. The European Rimlands 1912–1938 (Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 1.

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So how does one account for the modern state’s embrace of anti-modern ideas that become genocidal? Jeffrey Herf introduced the concept of reactionary modernism, which was taken up in studies of fascism in the interwar period in Europe and in Japan, and in definitions of fascism as an illiberal rejection of the Enlightenment and the industrial world. Roger Griffin and other theorists of fascism have nuanced this argument by showing that the totalitarian movements sought an alternative modernity though they were not anti-modern in their ideas and practices. Indeed, these totalising campaigns were characteristic of many genocidal regimes around the globe and historically. As Ben Kiernan illustrates in Blood and Soil, they are most evident in the agrarian fetish of the modern state as a social engineer and gardener, as well as in its natalist and antinatalist policies, violent colonial development schemes and caste-structured plantation systems. Kiernan identified four main causes of genocide since ancient times: (1) racism in which ‘perpetrators imagine a world without certain kinds of people in it’; (2) cults of antiquity that fight against ‘perceived decline’ and are preoccupied ‘with restoring purity and order’; (3) cults of cultivation or agriculture that spur conquest and embolden aggressors to ‘claim a unique capacity to put conquered lands into productive use’; and (4) expansionism.27 In short, the tension (and sometimes false dichotomy) in the modern versus the anti-modern debate on the causes of genocide has provided a larger theoretical and diachronic paradigm that accounts for deeper structures and processes spanning decades if not centuries, and encompassing the globe. Does it make sense to distinguish between modern and premodern cases of genocides, or does that temporal binary blur the continuities of genocidal violence and the specificities of each case, as well as the recurring targeting of certain victim groups since premodern times? Answers to these questions depend on one’s understanding of the ‘protean concept of “modernity”’. Dirk Moses and Donald Bloxham explain: An understanding that leans particularly upon modernity’s material (economic and technical) aspects would of course allow that the development of surveillance, bureaucracy, central state strength, weaponry, etc., would create greater facility to pursue and murder ‘enemies’, and would equally allow that the increasing contact between different peoples and the more intensive and extensive exploitation of resources might provoke more and increasingly intense intergroup conflicts, but distinctions along these lines between modern and premodern are of degree rather than fundamental nature. 27 Kiernan, Blood and Soil, pp. 23, 27, 29.

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Moses and Bloxham argue against drawing too thick (and artificial) a line between notions of modern and premodern as an explanation for genocide. Modern states may have more tools and resources to incite violent conflict; however, the ‘fundamental nature’ of genocide as a human proclivity exists across time and space. Modernity may offer a temporal way to historicise genocide as integral to notions of progress, the development imperative and radical ideologies that consciously aim to break with a past and with peoples deemed backward and deleterious to civilisation. And it is true that all these forces and ideas propelled genocide and made the massive scale of the Holocaust and other twentieth-century genocides possible. But privileging peculiarly modern features of genocide creates blind spots that can be ahistorical. For example, the omission of women as subjects and objects in this history has been taken up by historian Ann Taylor Allen when she criticised Bauman for his inattention to gender. Allen found that ‘Women, while they remain in the female sphere, are thus endowed with innocence of the crimes of the modern state, but at the price of being placed outside modernity, and indeed outside of history itself.’28 This series of volumes incorporates recent studies of women as victims and perpetrators and of the role of gender in genocidal thinking and policies. While women historically did not occupy positions of power and lead genocidal regimes, they were active agents in the events, directly and indirectly participating in the violence and inciting male genocidaires. Sexism can now be added to the list of explanatory ‘isms’; sexual violence is a key component of the mass killing and can go so far as to constitute gendercide or gender-selective killing, according to the pioneering work of Adam Jones and Elisa von Joeden-Forgey. In retrospect, the groundbreaking concepts of a dystopian, even nihilistic, modern state proposed by Bauman, Nietzsche, Foucault and others offered necessary critiques of civilisation, but their theories were themselves biased and selective in their focus on the modern, Western man. Since the 1990s, the expansion of research on ancient and premodern cases of genocide manifests starkly the continuities of violent behaviour and totalising ideologies that can no longer be deemed uniquely modern features of the Holocaust and other twentieth-century cases. Thus, the modernity explanations and debates have expanded Genocide Studies into different chronological analyses, conceptual themes and 28 Ann Taylor Allen, ‘The Holocaust and the modernization of gender: a historiographical essay’, Central European History 30 (1997), 349–64.

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explanations. Furthermore, critiquing modernity and Western civilisation as an explanation has inspired comparative analysis of genocide. In assessing the histories of the genocides examined in this volume, it is worth bearing in mind that, while all cases are in many ways unique, some of their salient characteristics do possess important historical precedents and recurring patterns.

Forms of Violence We find it helpful to distinguish between patterns and ‘logics’ of violence. This approach can also serve as a guide for referencing, categorising and analysing cases. Genocide is a form of violence that targets groups and where the purpose of violence is the destruction of groups. Genocide is the attempt to destroy groups, in whole or in part, as the Convention states. We can think of genocide then as a form of group-selective, or ‘categorical’, violence in that the criterion that perpetrators use to target individuals is their ostensible individual membership in a group. They are selected for violence because they are ‘Muslims’, ‘Jewish’, ‘Rohingya’, ‘Tutsi’ and so forth. In contrast, other kinds of violence, like most crimes against humanity (e.g. murder, enforced disappearances, enslavement, imprisonment, torture, forcible transfer of populations), are not group-selective. Such violence is targeted against civilians (not necessarily because of their group membership), and is large-scale or systematic. The concept of ‘extermination’ can include but does not necessarily imply groupselective violence, though it does imply attempted complete destruction. Extermination brings into focus the second notable dimension of genocide, which is group destruction. Measuring destruction precisely is a challenge; no group is ever completely eradicated. But what genocide implies is the attempt (or intent) to destroy, which itself implies that the violence is large-scale; committed across space and time; and co-ordinated, organised and systematic. Genocide similarly implies a logic of violence whereby the purpose is destruction. Not all violence takes place in this way. Much violence, in particular political violence, is coercive: the purpose is to change the behaviour of targets, to communicate that proceeding down a particular pathway (say, resistance) will be costly. The violence then is meant to shape future behaviour.29 As a form of destruction, genocide and extermination stand in 29 Stathis Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

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contrast: the violence is an end in and of itself, where the purpose is to eliminate groups (or large numbers of individuals), rather than to shape their behaviour.30 While the chapters in this volume are heterodox in their case studies and characterisations of particular episodes, we find some of these elements in each of the cases discussed: (1) some element of group-selective violence where the targets are categories of people, and individuals are targeted not because of what they do but because of the groups to which they are said to belong; and (2) some element of group-destructive violence, where the purpose is to destroy, eliminate or permanently rid a territory of a group. Cases vary by degrees of intended group destruction, but each case is one where that dynamic seems to be present, at least for a period of time.

History of Genocide Studies Raphael Lemkin’s dedication to combating attacks on various ethnic, religious, political and social groups by means of international law had already begun in interwar Poland, continued during World War Two in the United States, was part of the history of the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1946 and reached its apogee with his lobbying for the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, which was unanimously adopted, with him present in the gallery.31 Lemkin continued his activism in promoting the Convention and condemning genocide until his death in relative obscurity in New York City on 28 August 1959. The evolution of Lemkin’s jurisprudential ideas of genocide is better known than his role as the ‘founding father’ of Genocide Studies. Like the ‘field’ that he established, Lemkin was inherently interdisciplinary in his approach to genocide. In his analyses of the attacks on peoples and nations, he was a historian, sociologist, psychologist, political scientist and anthropologist, as well as a jurist. His definition of genocide was also a markedly broad and all-encompassing one. For Lemkin, genocide was not just about mass murder, but about the many different ways that political elites, a state or 30 These arguments are drawn from and developed in Scott Straus, Making and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership, and Genocide in Modern Africa (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015). 31 Samantha Power was one of the first to write about Lemkin’s contributions: ‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002). Among recent biographical works, see John Cooper, Raphael Lemkin and the Struggle for the Genocide Convention (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and Douglas Irvin-Erickson, Raphael Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).

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others could attack, diminish, cripple and seek to eliminate the existence of a distinct people.32 For his planned world history of genocide, Lemkin collected materials on a wide variety of historical events and chronological periods to document his assertion that genocide was embedded in human history and therefore needed international law to prevent its recurrence. He identified the roles of imperialism and colonialism in the elimination of indigenous peoples around the world. Although his Jewish family in Poland had suffered tragically in the Holocaust, he was in no way wedded to considering genocide an exclusively Jewish tribulation. As noted above, his 1944 book and document collection, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, focused mostly on the Nazis’ legal restrictions against the Poles and other east European nations.33 Lemkin also investigated Soviet crimes against the smaller nations of eastern Europe, most notably Stalin’s terror famine in Ukraine (the Holodomor), which Lemkin identified as an example of genocide.34 Lemkin’s influence is pervasive in the Genocide Convention, but is perhaps nowhere more pronounced than in its often forgotten preamble, which states: ‘Recognizing that at all periods of history, genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity . . . .’35 Lemkin’s importance to the Genocide Studies field is incalculable. At the same time, his wide-ranging influence emerged only much later, in the 1970s and especially the 1980s, when social scientists in particular turned their attention to the phenomenon of genocide. Another founding intellectual figure in the field was Hannah Arendt, who began to write about her experiences with totalitarian dictatorships after World War Two. In her magnum opus, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Arendt made several important contributions to Genocide Studies.36 First of all, she flagged the murderous racial thinking of late nineteenth-century European imperialism and linked that together with the racism and blood-letting that the continent itself experienced in the 1930s, an argument that would resurface in Genocide 32 A. Dirk Moses, ‘Lemkin, culture and the concept of genocide’, in The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, ed. Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 38. 33 Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944). 34 Norman Naimark, ‘How the Holodomor can be integrated into our understanding of genocide’, East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies 2:1 (2015), 120–1. 35 ‘Convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide [final text]’, in William A. Schabas, Genocide in International Law: The Crime of Crimes, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 667. 36 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd ed. (New York: A Harvest Book, Harcourt Inc., 1967).

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Studies at the turn of the twenty-first century.37 Second, and most famously, she analysed the characteristics of totalitarianism in both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and identified their core as terror – including secret police rule, torture, concentration camps and indiscriminate violence. ‘Terror’, she writes, ‘. . . is the very essence of its [totalitarianism’s] form of government.’38 Not only Hitler and Stalin become more comprehensible in Arendt’s analysis, but Pol Pot, Mao Zedong and other murderous fascist and communist dictators. There was considerable resistance in academic circles to Arendt’s comparison of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia in the decades following the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism, but the value of the exercise eventually resurfaced in the period following the unification of Germany and the collapse of the Soviet Union.39 From the perspective of Genocide Studies, if not from the Western historiography of the Soviet Union, it became more acceptable to examine Stalin’s mass killing of the 1930s through the lens of the genocide paradigm.40 And it also became more common to see settler colonialism and racist imperialism as settings for genocide. Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), was taken from five New Yorker articles that she wrote upon attending the trial in Israel of the notorious SS officer who had devoted much of his wartime efforts to transporting the Jews to their deaths.41 Here she developed her important, if controversial, ideas of the ‘banality of evil’, which are still debated today in Genocide Studies. Recent research on Eichmann demonstrates that he was a fierce antisemite and much more aggressively involved with the murder of Jews than simply being a faceless bureaucrat following orders from the top.42 But Arendt’s insights into the ease with which government and party activists committed evil deeds in the Holocaust contributed to a deeper understanding of genocidal projects as a whole. The book also helped foster a decade of heightened 37 Ned Curthoys observed that Arendt’s critique of colonialism was centred on ‘its abrogation of European humanism and republican values’ and that it took too little note of ‘the invasion and displacement of existing indigenous cultures’. Cited in Ann Curthoys and John Docker, ‘Defining genocide’, in The Historiography of Genocide, ed. Dan Stone (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 21. 38 Arendt, The Origins, p. 344. 39 See, e.g., Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared, ed. Michael Geyer with Sheila Fitzpatrick (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), and Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison, ed. Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 40 See Norman Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 2–8. 41 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, rev. and enl. ed. (New York: Penguin, 1964). 42 See, in particular, Bettina Stangneth, Eichmann Before Jerusalem, trans. Ruth Martin (New York: Knopf, 2014).

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interest in Holocaust studies that marked the beginning of what we call today ‘Holocaust consciousness’. Meanwhile in 1961, Raul Hilberg published the first comprehensive and fully documented history of the Holocaust, The Destruction of the European Jews, a work that concentrated, as did Arendt in Eichmann, on the role of Nazi bureaucrats and the state for which they worked.43 For many Jews and non-Jews, the Arab–Israeli War in 1967 also contributed to an awareness of the Holocaust, since Arab threats to Israel were seen as a revival of Hitler’s attack on the existence of the Jewish people. The Yom Kippur war of 1974 heightened these fears even more, given the Arabs’ initial conquests. By the time the mini-series, ‘The Holocaust’, was shown in the United States in 1978 and Germany in 1979, an awareness of the stark lessons about the dark potential of human behaviour contained in the Holocaust were etched into Western discussions of morality and politics.44 In 1978, US President Carter set up the Wiesel Commission to establish a permanent memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, the most accessible symbol of Holocaust consciousness in the West, opened in 1993. The flourishing of Holocaust studies in the late 1970s and especially the 1980s contributed in a number of ways to the emergence of Genocide Studies. Perhaps most importantly, ideas about genocide, long dormant since the late 1940s, were revived by and even merged with conceptions of the Holocaust, the mass murder of the Jews. Though Lemkin clearly recognised the equal importance of other genocides, most scholars in the field of Holocaust studies, at least initially, did not. Attempts to understand Holocaust perpetrators, bystanders and victims served as the bases for later studies of multiple genocides. Social-psychological experiments, like those of Stanley Milgram at Yale (1961) and Philip Zimbardo at Stanford (1971), provided fascinating material for analysing how normal human beings could carry out orders to brutalise and even to kill. Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) introduced the evocative metaphor of the modern state as gardener of its populations, scientifically weeding out the anomalous and thus unnecessary peoples within its borders.45 This idea was expanded upon by James Scott in his influential Seeing Like a State, which examined the dangerous elements of the ‘high modern’ state – all-seeing and all-knowing – and its need to order society.46 43 44 45 46

Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961). Tony Judt, ‘The problem of evil’, New York Review of Books, 14 February 2008. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, p. 61. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 4–6.

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Holocaust studies also posed important moral questions about resistance and interdiction that influenced many genocide scholars, who saw themselves not only as academic analysts but as anti-genocide activists. Yet Holocaust studies stood in some tension with the emergence of Genocide Studies in the 1980s and especially 1990s (and, in some ways, still does), since the mass murder of the Jews was considered by many scholars to be a singular catastrophe in history, given its sheer extent, the intent of the Nazis to murder the entire Jewish people and its integral ties to centuries of European antisemitism.47 Arguments continue among scholars in the field about the extent to which the Holocaust should be considered an extreme example of genocide, or a unique case of its own. In the late 1970s and 1980s, the sociologist Leo Kuper and the historical sociologist Helen Fein were leaders of what can be considered the founding generation of comparative Genocide Studies. In his classic study, Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (1981), Kuper added the victimisation of political groups to his understanding of genocide, especially when examining the history of communist regimes. At the same time, he focused on ethnic cleavages in plural societies as a source of genocidal actions by rulers.48 Fein’s work severed the concept of genocide from the UN definition even more resolutely and focused on mass killing of various subgroups in society, including social and political ones. Like Kuper (and Arendt), she focused on the proclivity towards genocide in one-party communist states. But she also noted that genocide was ubiquitous in the ‘Third World’.49 She wrote comparatively about the anti-communist genocide in Indonesia in 1965–6 and the communist-led genocide in Cambodia in 1975–9.50 The first major conferences as well as institutions dedicated to Genocide Studies can be dated to the early and mid-1980s.51 Both symbolically and in a real sense, the new 47 See, e.g., Steven T. Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context, vol. I: The Holocaust and Mass Death Before the Modern Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 48 Leo Kuper, Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (New York: Penguin, 1981). 49 See, among her other works, Helen Fein, ‘Accounting for genocide after 1945: theories and some findings’, International Journal of Group Rights 1:2 (1993), 79–106. 50 Helen Fein, ‘Revolutionary and anti-revolutionary genocides: a comparison of state murders in Democratic Kampuchea, 1975 to 1979, and in Indonesia, 1965 to 1966’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 35:4 (1993), 796–823. 51 Israel Charny, Israel’s Failed Response to the Armenian Genocide: Denial, State Deception, Truth Versus Politicization of History (Brookline, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2021). This volume, drawing on newly declassified Israeli government documents, analyses the International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide, in Tel Aviv, organised in 1982 by Israel Charny. The Israeli government notoriously backed the Turkish government’s insistence that sessions on the Armenian genocide be dropped from the programme, but Charny successfully resisted the two governments’ demands.

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scholarship of the 1980s was captured in A History and Sociology of Genocide by Frank Chalk, a historian, and Kurt Jonassohn, a sociologist, that surveyed the contributions of Fein, Kuper, Vahakn Dadrian, Israel Charny, Irving Horowitz and others, while expanding the list of genocides to be studied in the comparative field. The Chalk and Jonassohn book also tended to identify genocide with mass killing, leaving aside the other aspects of attacking peoples stipulated by the Genocide Convention.52 The initial interest of the social sciences in genocide was inherently comparative; the idea was to test hypotheses about the character of genocide – its motivating factors, its dominant aspects and its timing and duration – by looking at several cases at once. Robert Melson’s Revolution and Genocide was important in solidifying this methodology by explicitly comparing the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide, examining the coming to power of revolutionary elites and emphasising wartime linkages between external enemies and internal ones who were slated for destruction.53 At the same time, Barbara Harff and Ted Robert Gurr published their highly influential study of forty-four cases of ‘genocides and politicides’ that attempted to develop a systematic typology of mass murder and established a tradition of quantitative studies that continued into the new century.54 Harff and Gurr emphasised the greater threat of violence to minority groups in authoritarian versus democratic societies and suggested that societies with politically mobilised minority groups were more susceptible to genocidal ‘solutions’. Genocide Studies can be said to have ‘taken off’ as an interdisciplinary subfield during the 1990s. The primary reason behind this heightened interest was obvious: genocide seemed to have become a common occurrence in world politics, not just a product of the two world wars, the Nazis and the Ottoman Young Turks. Especially ‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocide in Bosnia 52 Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, A History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). The authors founded and directed the Montreal Institute for Genocide Studies at Concordia University, one of the first such institutes in the world. As they note in the volume (p. 8): ‘When we began our work on genocide in 1979, we could count on the fingers of one hand the number of scholars who had written comparatively about genocide.’ 53 Robert F. Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 269–71. 54 Barbara Harff and Ted Robert Gurr, ‘Toward empirical theory of genocides and politicides: identification and measurement of cases since 1945’, International Studies Quarterly 32:3 (1988), 359–71. Scott Straus uses quantitative analysis to understand the ‘micro-dynamics of violence’ as revealed in his extensive interviews with perpetrators of violence during the Rwandan Genocide: Scott Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).

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(1993–5), the Rwandan genocide (1994) and the crisis in Kosovo (1999) attracted the attention of scholars and activists. The fact that the United States finally ratified the UN Genocide Convention on 19 February 1986 had also made a difference.55 During the Darfur crisis (2003), the academic and non-governmental organisation (NGO) human rights communities mobilised their intellectual and organisational resources to analyse and propose solutions to ongoing attacks sponsored by the Sudanese government on the Fur, Zaghawa and Masalit peoples. Genocide in real time became a serious problem for American foreign policy. The popularity of the Pulitzer-prize winning book by Samantha Power, ‘A Problem from Hell’: America in the Age of Genocide (2002), was emblematic of the power of Lemkin’s concept to motivate policy-makers and move public opinion. Many genocide scholars felt the pull of activism, most notably Samuel Totten, who, after working in Chad on issues regarding Darfur, became deeply involved in providing relief for the Nuba people in southern Sudan. His activism and scholarship are documented in his reports from and books about genocide in the Nuba mountains.56 Adam Jones, who has pioneered the study of gender amid genocide, emphasises the ‘activist and praxis-oriented component’ of Genocide Studies during its entire history.57 Others in the field believe in policy-relevant work, but also consider that scholars should not become activists. In this view, our task is to analyse and document, but not take normative or policy positions. Most scholars acknowledge the tension, sometimes productive, between these two viewpoints. New directions of research were prompted by the genocides of the 1990s. In Bosnia, for example, there was much to be learned by thinking about the relationship between ‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocide, as well as about the influence of violence during World War Two on the violence of the 1990s, as scholars examined the role of historical memory in the dynamics of intercommunal struggle.58 There was no shortage of investigations about the relationship between the collapse of states, in this case the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and violent conflict. Mass rape accompanied campaigns of 55 Ann Curthoys and John Docker, ‘Defining Genocide’, 32. 56 Samuel Totten, Genocide by Attrition: The Nuba Mountains in Sudan (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2012); Samuel Totten and Amand F. Grzyb (eds.), Conflict in the Nuba Mountains: From Genocide by Attrition to Contemporary Crisis in Sudan (New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis, 2015). 57 Adam Jones, ‘Diffusing genocide studies, defusing genocide’, Genocide Studies and Prevention 6:3 (2011), 274. 58 Naimark, Fires of Hatred, pp. 2–5. Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia (Stanford University Press, 1998).

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ethnic cleansing, prompting scholars to further integrate gender questions into their analysis of genocide. Rwanda provoked influential thinking about the ethnic categories of Hutu and Tutsi and the extent to which colonialism itself – in this case German, Belgian and French – was responsible for creating a situation in which genocide could take place.59 As in Bosnia, gender issues also came to the fore with the prominence of rape. For the first time in the legal history of genocide, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, tasked by the United Nations to try the perpetrators in the Rwandan genocide, included rape as an integral part of the genocide indictments. Given the prompt intervention of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the Kosovo crisis in 1999 in the stated attempt to prevent ‘ethnic cleansing’ from turning into genocide, questions of intervention and interdiction in genocidal situations became a legitimate subject of research on genocide. The evolution of the doctrine of ‘The Responsibility to Protect’, initially developed in 1999 by the International Commission on State Sovereignty, chaired by Gareth Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun, and eventually endorsed in slightly modified form by the World Summit of the United Nations in 2005, can also be seen as part of Genocide Studies. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, Genocide Studies became an established field, with participation from many disciplines.60 Groundbreaking studies were published on distinct historical episodes of genocide: in Cambodia, Bangladesh, Guatemala, Rwanda, Bosnia and Armenia. Comparative Genocide Studies continued to flourish in studies by both political scientists (Benjamin Valentino and Manus Midlarsky) and historians (Eric Weitz and Norman Naimark). All of these works rejected the popular notion that ‘ancient hatreds’ provoked genocide. Valentino’s work is emblematic of these and other studies in his focus on the instrumental actions of the political elites that chose among a variety of military and political means to achieve their objectives but were not driven by ethnic hatred.61 Efforts to identify the core reasons for genocide included the important work by French historian and political scientist Jacques Semelin, who highlighted 59 See esp. Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton University Press, 2002). 60 Dan Stone wrote in 2008 that Genocide Studies is ‘one of the fastest-growing disciplines in the humanities and social sciences’, though, in the same breath he questioned whether it is a ‘discipline’ at all, but rather a field dealing with the social phenomenon of genocide, especially given the ‘merry-go-round of definitional debates’. Dan Stone (ed.), The Historiography of Genocide (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 1–2. 61 Benjamin Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).

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the search for purity among anxious and fearful elites as the central impetus for genocide, a theme picked up later by Ronald Grigor Suny in his analysis of the ‘affective disposition’ of the Young Turk leadership that set off the Armenian genocide.62 It was typical of this period in the research on genocide that some authors avoided the term genocide altogether. Semelin preferred the term ‘massacre’ while Michael Mann talked about ‘murderous ethnic cleansing’. In his foundational text, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (2006), Adam Jones noted some fifteen different terms that scholars developed to replace genocide, ranging alphabetically from classicide to urbicide.63 Some of these terms, like politicide, dated back to earlier work, in this case Kuper’s and Harff and Gurr’s. But the unhappiness among scholars with the limitations of the four categories of the Genocide Convention – ethnic, religious, national and racial – was widespread. R. J. Rummel, for example, used the idea of democide in his study of the ‘169,198,000 murdered’ in the twentieth century to emphasise that genocide should really include many more categories of civilians killed than had been the case.64 Research also continued in interesting and important directions on the Holocaust, which, despite some ongoing tension between the two interdisciplinary fields, was fruitful for both. Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men (1992) was particularly important in this connection, as it returned to both Arendt and the Milgram experiment to pose essential questions about the behaviour of perpetrators in genocidal situations.65 In Browning’s study, the question was why would fairly typical middle-aged Hamburg policemen, with few ties to the Nazi party and seemingly unaffected by virulent antisemitism, take up rifles and machine-guns in firing squads and, apparently without second thoughts, murder innocent Jewish men, women and children? Daniel Goldhagen looked at the same document base and came up with the conclusion that the mass murder of the Jews was the inevitable result of the longue durée of German hatred of the Jews.66 The argument 62 Jacques Semelin, Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide, trans. Cynthia Schoch (London: Hurst and Company, 2005), pp. 15–16; Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else’: A History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton University Press, 2015). 63 Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 26–9. 64 R. J. Rummel, Death by Government (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1994). 65 Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, rev. ed. (New York: Harper Perennial, 2017). 66 Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996).

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between the two scholars served the interests of both fields by clearing the air about the supposed Sonderweg (special path) of modern German history and dealing with the ‘uniqueness’ of the Holocaust among genocides.67 The contemporaneous threats of genocide in the 1990s bolstered the publication of comparative Genocide Studies, which had been practised by both Kuper and Fein. The effect was that new cases were brought to the fore: in Latin America (especially the Amazon and Argentina) in Southeast Asia (Indonesia and East Timor) and in Africa (Democratic Republic of Congo and Sierra Leone). Moreover, a new generation of Australian and North American scholars began to examine the historical attacks on indigenous populations under the rubric of genocide. Australia’s ‘History Wars’ vindicated the work on Tasmania of historian Lyndall Ryan, who then extended her research to the continental mainland.68 As Patrick Wolfe, a pioneer of this comparative work, noted, ‘Settler colonialism is inherently eliminatory but not invariably genocidal.’69 In the case of the United States, controversial works by Ward Churchill and David Stannard have been succeeded by a new generation of highly empirical and archivally based studies of the mass murders of Native Americans, written by Benjamin Madley and Jeffrey Ostler.70 The exploration of genocides against indigenous peoples also focused scholars’ attention on genocide as a long and complex process, the purposeful destruction of peoples over decades and even centuries. Frequently, the violence originated in the struggle over control of the land between ranchers and settler stock farmers on the one hand and the indigenous hunter-gatherer 67 See Daniel J. Goldhagen, Christopher R. Browning and Leon Wieseltier, ‘The “Willing Executioners”/“Ordinary Men” Debate’, Selections from the Symposium (1996) (Washington DC: US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Third Printing 2001). 68 Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians (St Leonards: University of Queensland Press, 1981); The Tasmanian Aborigines: A History since 1803 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2012); ‘Settler massacres on the Australian colonial frontier, 1836–1851’, in Theatres of Violence: Massacre, Mass Killing, and Atrocity Throughout History, ed. Philip Dwyer and Lyndall Ryan (New York: Berghahn, 2012), pp. 93–109. Ryan also produced a detailed annotated map of ‘Colonial Frontier Massacres in Australia, 1788–1930’, https://c21ch .newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/map.php. See Volume II of this series. 69 Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler colonialism and the elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8:4 (2006), 387. 70 Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997); David Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (Oxford University Press, 1992); Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016); Jeffrey Ostler, Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).

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peoples on the other. Mohammed Adhikari’s research on the San people of South Africa highlighted the sometimes painfully extended stories of genocide of indigenous peoples, where the idea of genocide as a colonial and even neo-colonial historical process obviates the notion of genocide as an event or even a series of events.71 Altogether, the scholarship on indigenous peoples returned the focus of Genocide Studies to the baleful (and genocidal) effects of imperialism and colonialism, but, unlike Arendt, who tended to hold the view of the ‘inevitable’ demise of native peoples, an assumption shared with the colonial powers themselves, the emphasis has shifted to the survival of the indigenous communities and the strategies they developed under the harshest of circumstances to preserve their cultures and identities.72 Related to the emergence of studies of indigenous peoples in the Antipodes and North America was the publication of important new work on the genocidal policies and actions of European colonial powers in Africa. Jürgen Zimmerer’s scholarship on German Southwest Africa (now Namibia) was key in this development, especially since he, following the path of Arendt, established lines of continuity between German colonial violence against the Herero and Nama peoples in 1904–8 and Nazi depredations against Jews and Slavs in their colonial empire in eastern Europe.73 While Zimmerer focused on linkages in ideology, personnel and the structure of German colonial violence, Isabel Hull found striking continuities in the murderous, one could argue genocidal, battlefield ideology of the German military, which, from the time of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1, demanded the ‘absolute destruction’ of its enemies, including civilians as well as soldiers.74 This ideology, argued Hull, was reflected in the bloody orders of General Lothar von Trotha against the native peoples in Namibia, the German occupation and depredations against the civilian population in Belgium during World War One and the German military’s support for Ottoman genocidal actions against the Armenians. Taking the Nazi occupation of Ukraine as a colonial enterprise, Wendy Lower later demonstrated the 71 Mohamed Adhikari, The Anatomy of a South African Genocide: The Extermination of the Cape San Peoples (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011). 72 A good recent example is Pekka Hämäläinen, Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019). 73 See, among his works: Völkermord in Deutsch-Südwestafrika: der Kolonialkrieg (1904–1908) in Namibia und seine Folgen, ed. Jürgen Zimmerer and Joachim Zeller (Berlin: Links, 2003) and Von Windhuk nach Auschwitz? Beiträge zum Verhältnis von Kolonialismus und Holocaust (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2011). For an assessment of the impact of Zimmerer, see Dan Stone, Histories of the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 232. 74 Isabel V. Hull, Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).

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ways in which the murderous Nazi policies in the ‘east’ were in some ways a culmination of the longue durée of European and North American colonial behaviours.75 Scholarly work on the relationship between colonial genocides of indigenous peoples and modern European cases encouraged genocide researchers to range wide and far, both geographically and temporally. It also led them to think about genocide as a product of world history as a whole. Mark Levene’s two-volume Genocide in the Age of the Nation State (2005) linked the ‘coming of genocide’ to the ‘rise of the West’. Ben Kiernan’s Blood and Soil (2007) was based on an understanding that genocide had its own history going back to antiquity, and that it could be historicised, with each set of episodes related in a chronological sequence over time. Like Levene, he argued that these episodes of mass killing emerged from the distinct environments in which they happened, but that they also had linkages with each other.76 By the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, Genocide Studies were infused with new energy and by fresh challenges from ‘critical Genocide Studies’, whose leading representatives were predominantly British and Australian academics. Encouraged by the foundation of the International Network of Genocide Scholars, established in Berlin in 2005, which soon became responsible for the Journal of Genocide Research, critical Genocide Studies combined attention to the history of colonial depredations against indigenous peoples, which tended to de-emphasise the Holocaust as the classic historical paradigm for genocide, with an attempt to look at genocide in its larger historical contexts.77 Mark Levene emphasised 75 Wendy Lower, Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), pp. 8, 25–6. Dirk Moses, on the other hand, writes that the Holocaust ‘was no colonial genocide in the common understanding of this term’: A. Dirk Moses (ed.), Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York: Berghahn, 2008), p. 40. 76 Kiernan, Blood and Soil, pp. 2–3. See also Norman Naimark, Genocide: A World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 77 The journal, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, which is published by the US Memorial Holocaust Museum, tended to focus almost exclusively on the Holocaust, and Genocide Studies and Prevention – published by the International Association of Genocide Scholars, founded in 1994 by Helen Fein, Robert Melson and Israel Charny – was rather more overtly political in its objectives. Periodic efforts to unite the two scholarly associations have not been successful. See Jürgen Zimmerer, ‘Genocide studies for the twenty-first century: a departing editor’s perspective’, Journal of Genocide Research 13:3 (2011), 205–8. Israel Charny recently criticised the Journal of Genocide Research for antiIsraeli bias and even antisemitism. See Amos Goldberg, J. Kehoe, A. Dirk Moses, Raz Segal, Martin Shaw, Gerhard Wolf, ‘Israel Charny’s attack on the Journal of Genocide Research and its authors: a response’, Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 10:2 (2016), 3–22. Some of these issues are also discussed in

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the importance of the development of the European state system, Donald Bloxham focused on the role of imperial ambitions and Dirk Moses underlined the centrality of the experience of indigenous peoples. Moses also revisited the work of Lemkin and demonstrated that his broad and multiplex ideas about genocide could be used to invigorate contemporary examinations of mass killing in the Antipodes, North America and Africa.78 Levene suggested that comparative Genocide Studies had fallen short of its goal of analysing genocide by separating individual genocides from their larger historical determinants; they were analysed like ‘ill-fitted nuggets’ separated from ‘a broader rock-base’ in which they were embedded instead of understanding the rock itself.79 In Levene’s scheme, as Anton Weiss-Wendt writes, ‘The Rise of the West is not identical with a comprehensive program of annihilation but created a cultural discourse that made such a policy possible.’80 Bloxham and Moses underlined the revisionist character of the critical school by counterposing their views to ‘the classically liberal understanding of genocide’, noting, like Michael Mann, that democratic and freemarket states were every bit as genocidal as authoritarian and totalitarian ones.81 Mann observed that ‘the first dark side of emerging modern democracy’ could be seen in the reality of settler genocide, which was even worse for indigenous peoples, he maintained, than that conducted by imperial authorities.82 The work of the British historical sociologist Martin Shaw could also be considered part of ‘critical Genocide Studies’, as Shaw sought to embed genocide into the history of warfare and military conflict. Shaw also shared Moses’ and Lemkin’s expansive understanding of genocide, emphasising that Lemkin understood genocide as much more than simply mass murder, and reviving Lemkin’s focus on the importance of cultural genocide, which was

78 79 80

81

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Alexander Laban Hinton, ‘Critical genocide studies’, Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 7:1 (2012), 3–15. Moses, ‘Raphael Lemkin, Culture, and the Concept of Genocide’, 25–30. Mark Levene, Genocide in the Age of the Nation-State, vol. I (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), p. 8. Anton Weiss-Wendt, ‘The state and genocide’, in The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, ed. Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 86. Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, ‘Editors’ introduction: changing themes on the study of genocide’, in The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, ed. Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 9. The critical genocide ‘school’ is not without its critics. For a sober assessment of the contributions and limitations of the ‘critical’ approach, see Philip Spencer, ‘Imperialism, anti-imperialism and the problem of genocide, past and present’, History 98:4 (2013), 606–22. Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 107.

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shunted aside in the making of the UN Convention.83 Shaw also made the point, shared by genocide scholars like Fein, Chalk and Jonassohn, and WeissWendt, that historians need not limit their definitions of genocide by adhering to international legal norms and pronouncements.84 The ‘intent of the perpetrators’ was too narrow a focus for Shaw, ‘unavoidable in criminal international law’, he wrote, but ‘not sufficient for the explanatory purposes of social sciences’.85 The legal foundations of the proscription on genocide had meanwhile been analysed and brought up to date in William Schabas’s classic study, Genocide in International Law: The Crime of Crimes.86 In part due to Schabas’s influence, most scholars of genocide at least start their attempts to define genocide with the UN definition, as we and our fellow editors have done in this series of volumes. Where does this leave Genocide Studies as the field looks into the future? First of all, if Holocaust studies is any example – and in some ways it has been all along – there is a great deal more empirical work to be done in researching studies of particular genocides or genocidal situations.87 Furthermore, scholars of genocide could follow Holocaust studies by paying more attention to the victims’ history and testimony, local bystanders and collaborators and the array of aftermath topics such as restitution, memorialisation and generational transmission of memory and trauma. As the chapters in The Cambridge World History of Genocide demonstrate, the historiography is constantly improving and deepening regarding individual cases, but there is still a great deal more that could be done. Second, as critical Genocide Studies have emphasised, there is still much to explore about the linkages between individual cases of genocide and the workings of human societies and of the international system as a whole. Questions of ideology, origins, course, causation, interdiction, intervention, punishment 83 Martin Shaw, ‘Sociology and genocide’, in The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, ed. Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 161. Here, Shaw writes: ‘A more appropriate way of interpreting group destruction is . . . to see it as involving a nexus between the destruction of collective ways of life and institutions and bodily and other harm to individuals.’ See also Martin Shaw, What is Genocide?, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), p. 28. 84 Weiss-Wendt, ‘The state and genocide’ and elsewhere. 85 Martin Shaw, ‘From comparative to international genocide studies: the international production of genocide in 20th century Europe’, European Journal of International Relations 18:4 (2011), 649. 86 Schabas, Genocide in International Law. 87 In-depth research on single ‘cases’ can be found in: Raymond Kevorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011); Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979, 3rd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008 [1996]); and Becirevic ,́ Genocide on the Drina River. ́

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and deterrence are all tied into the larger context of international affairs.88 Third, for the social sciences in particular, Scott Straus has pointed the way for comparative Genocide Studies by looking at cases where genocide might well have occurred but did not, a category that Straus calls ‘genocide possible’, or where some leaders of troubled states chose a different path to deal with societal disorders.89 Finally, the input of a wider variety of disciplines would be welcomed to open new doors to understanding how, when, and why genocide occurs, and how it affects our lives and our societies. Take the field of forensic archaeology, for example, which has a lot to offer students of genocide,90 as Volume I of this series demonstrates. Earlier contributions by psychologists and psychiatrists like Israel Charny, Robert J. Lifton, Ervin Staub and Roy Baumeister have not been matched by other leaders of these disciplines in the twenty-first century, with key exceptions like the late David A. Hamburg, a psychiatrist, who wrote extensively on genocide prevention. The same could be said for the field of social psychology, once so critical to understanding human behaviour during genocide; an exception here is James Waller, who has also turned his attention to prevention.91 Much as we would like, genocide will not disappear. Considerably more research needs to be done to come to terms with its persistence in human affairs. Contemporary threats facing large Muslim minorities in both China and India, for instance, warrant serious attention.92 In addition, the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, has been accompanied by war crimes and crimes against humanity, possibly including acts of extermination. Given both the atrocities committed by Russian troops on the ground and the virulent anti-Ukrainian propaganda emanating from Moscow, there is every reason to be concerned about the potential for genocide in Ukraine. 88 An important example of this kind of work is Gary J. Bass, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide (New York: Knopf, 2013). At p. xiii, Bass writes about the Pakistani slaughter of Bengalis in 1971: ‘There was no question about whether the United States should intervene; it was already intervening on behalf of a military dictatorship decimating its own people.’ See Bass’s Chapter 21 in this volume. 89 Straus, Making and Unmaking of Nations, p. 8. 90 Caroline Sturdy Colls, Holocaust Archaeologies: Approaches and Future Directions (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2015). Sturdy Colls has done particularly interesting archaeological work on Treblinka. 91 David A. Hamburg, Preventing Genocide: Practical Steps toward Early Detection and Effective Action (New York: Routledge, 2008), and A Model of Prevention (New York: Routledge, 2015); James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), and Confronting Evil: Engaging our Responsibility to Prevent Genocide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 92 ‘China committed genocide against Uyghurs, independent tribunal rules’, BBC News, 9 December 2021, www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-59595952; ‘India leaders do little as calls for genocide of Muslims intensify’, New York Times, 8 February 2022, p. 1.

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Chapters in the Volume The chapters in this volume reflect this trajectory of Genocide Studies. On the one hand, the chapters collectively show how many different episodes of mass violence across the twentieth century reflect elements of genocide. The field of inquiry into such cases ranges clearly and unquestionably beyond the Holocaust. Genocide is now a framework through which to view and interpret mass violence of the past. The chapters might be grouped into five major approaches, which reflect the diversity of the Genocide Studies field. We might first think of some chapters as ‘classic’ approaches. That is, the central motivation is to take a particular episode, document the patterns of violence, the main perpetrators of violence and targets thereof, historical context, and some leading drivers of violence. The author then reflects on the conceptualisation that best fits the case: is the case one of genocide, extermination, genocidal massacres, ethnic cleansing or some hybrid of those terms – or is it unclear. In this way, authors bring their case of specialisation into dialogue, within a comparative and transregional context, with other cases. Sam Daly’s analysis of Biafra is a terrific example. A second approach is to rethink cases. That is, authors seek to reinterpret the past in light of insights from the Genocide Studies field. This might entail constructing new timelines, seeing new connections between periods, finding chains of causation previously undocumented or assigning new conceptual categories in light of new evidence. Cases, for example, that had not previously been approached through a genocide lens now are. Daniel Feierstein and Lucrecia Molinari’s analysis of mass violence in Latin America is a pertinent example. A third approach might be thought of as historiographical. In these cases, authors reflect on the evolution of primarily historical scholarship around a particular case. How has the thinking around a case changed over time? As the most intensively studied genocide case, the Holocaust provides the richest terrain for such historiographical work, and indeed the chapters in this volume on the Holocaust are often doing that kind of work. A fourth approach is to develop a new approach to causation. The discussion of ‘critical Genocide Studies’ often takes this approach. Rather than look at one case or another, we should consider a broader sweep of human history, state development and modes of accumulation. We should think of war, technology and even modernity as the driver of genocide, with

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manifestations in one country or another. Mark Levene’s corpus of work and his chapter in particular typify this approach. Last, some of the chapters reflect on the politics of memory: how is past violence remembered? How does the past serve present politics? What are the stakes for historical memory of categorising cases as genocide? Indeed, these chapters are a reminder that the stakes of labelling are not simply academic; they are inscribed in a broader struggle for political righteousness and legitimacy of different stripes. We have long been aware of the need for scholarship to tread carefully in this twentieth-century minefield, and we hope that the following chapters will show that we have proceeded with caution, focusing on historical documentation and clear-sighted analysis.

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part i *

RACISM, TOTAL WAR, IMPERIAL COLLAPSE AND REVOLUTION

1

Prelude to Genocide Humanitarianism, Racism and Antisemitism in the Early Twentieth Century ben kiernan The late nineteenth century saw the height of European expansion across the globe, including the ‘scramble for Africa’.1 International humanitarian activism and legal initiatives arose in attempts to deal with crises that followed. In 1890 the African American reformer George Washington Williams applied the phrase ‘crimes against humanity’ to the tragedy in the Congo Free State under its proprietor, the Belgian monarch Leopold II (r. 1865–1909). In 1899, the International Hague Convention of the Laws and Customs of War on Land specifically prohibited the shelling of undefended towns or cities, and contracting parties pledged that ‘individual lives and private property, as well as religious convictions and liberty, must be respected’. The subsequent Hague Convention of 1907 codified the laws of war and the concept of ‘crimes against humanity’. In Britain, E. D. Morel and Roger Casement, with the support of others including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain and Joseph Conrad, formed the Congo Reform Association (1904–13) to address the humanitarian crisis in that African country. Its establishment was followed by the 1909 merger of the Aborigines’ Protection Society with the Anti-Slavery Society.2 By 1910 Casement was also investigating in the Putumayo region of the upper Amazon, where he described a ‘system [of] not merely slavery but extermination’.3 In a single day on the Amazon, Casement collected ‘disgraceful’ evidence of ‘murders of girls, beheading of 1 Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa, 1876–1912 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1991). 2 Ben Kiernan, ‘From Irish famine to Congo reform: nineteenth-century roots of international human rights law and activism’, in Confronting Genocide, ed. René Provost and Payam Akhavan (Dordrecht:Springer Verlag, 2011), pp. 13–43, at 14, 33; E.D. Morel’s History of the Congo Reform Movement, ed. Wm Roger Louis and Jean Stengers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), pp. 204–5. 3 Roger Casement diary entry dated 29 September 1910, in The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement, ed. Angus Mitchell (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1997), p. 142.

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Indians and shooting of them after they had rotted from flogging’. Historian Daniel Vangroenweghe adds: ‘What Casement found in the Amazon outdistanced the horror he had helped reveal in the Congo, and he became the singular witness to that horror. Although other explorers and travel writers had made fleeting revelations about cruelties that resulted from rubber extraction, it was Casement alone who produced the historical evidence defining the genocide.’4 Just a year or so after Casement’s Amazon investigation, and again using strikingly contemporary language, Morel described the situation in the Congo Free State as ‘the most colossal invasion of human rights the world has ever witnessed’. Casement urged in 1911: ‘Tackling Leopold in Africa has set in motion a big movement – it must be a movement of human liberation all the world over.’5 Morel and Casement had played pioneering roles. As historian Bruno Cabanes has shown, the subsequent humanitarian crises of World War One and its aftermath brought about ‘a profound transformation of pre-war humanitarian practices and humanitarian law into an assertion of “humanitaranitarian rights”’. Not only the laws of war and international humanitarian law, but international humanitarianism itself were all on the verge of major progress. One of its key features was its increasingly transnational nature.6 Yet other forces were also at work, and they too were increasingly transnational.

Racism and Antisemitism on the Edges of Europe and Asia In Spain in 1912, twenty-two Spanish bishops endorsed the foundation of the National Anti-Masonic and Anti-Semitic League. The bishop of Almería endorsed ‘the decisive battle that must be unleashed between the children of light and the children of darkness, between Catholicism and Judaism, between Christ and the Devil’. As the historian Paul Preston puts it, Spain had few Jews but ‘Anti-Semitism was central to integrist Catholicism.’ By the 1930s, persistent reminders of Judas’s betrayal of Jesus and of medieval myths about Jewish ritual killings of children became compounded by Catholic fears of revolution and the idea that all members of left-wing parties were ‘stooges 4 Daniel Vangroenweghe, ‘Casement’s Congo diary . . . ’, Revue belge d’histoire contemporaine 32:3–4 (2002), 321–50, at 331; Casement’s diary, 17 and 22 September 1910. 5 E.D. Morel’s History of the Congo Reform Movement, pp. xi, xiii, 17, 215. 6 Bruno Cabanes, The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918–1924 (Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 3–4.

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of the Jews’, now dramatised by small numbers of Jewish refugees fleeing from Nazism and arriving in Spain.7 In August and September 1933, the Spanish politician Gil Robles, secretarygeneral of the Catholic-Agrarian National Confederation and leader of the Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right, attended the Nazi Congress in Nuremberg. On his return to Spain, Robles restated Catholic objections to violence and to Nazi ‘pantheism’. However, he went on: ‘In fascism there is much to approve of’, including ‘its exaltation of patriotic values; its clear anti-Marxist significance; its enmity to liberal and parliamentary democracy’. He concluded: ‘All of this provides a guideline for a new order of things, that we are duty bound to pick up, in order to harmonise it with the postulates of the Catholic doctrine.’ By the next month, Robles was ready to declare ‘a new reality’: First Italy and then Germany, the two nations that today weigh most decisively on world politics, march with a firm step on the path of antidemocracy . . . Against corrosive liberalism, germ of all anarchies, a totalitarian conception of the state channelling the maximum energies of a race.

In mid-October 1933, Robles announced: ‘We have to found a new state, to clean the country of Judaic Masons . . . What does it matter if we have to spill blood! Our need is for complete power and that is what we ask for.’8 Now Gil Robles was no Nazi, nor even a fascist; these antisemitic ideas were far more widespread than that. Robles was an influential right-wing interwar leader who often chose to distinguish his Catholic agrarian movement from fascism.9 He never belonged to the Spanish Falange Party, nor ever became a central figure in the regime of General Francisco Franco. But Robles shared and admired many of their ideas, and even those of the Nazis, including their antisemitic and racist goals. The Francoists did too. In December 1933, Franco’s fellow officer and future senior director of the 1936 military coup that launched the Civil War, General Emilio Mola, wrote that ‘decadent nations are the favourite victims of parasitical international organizations, . . . just as unhealthy 7 Paul Preston, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain (London: Harper, 2012), pp. 4–5, 42–3. 8 Quoted in Eduardo González Calleja, ‘José María Gil Robles: The Catholic challenge to democracy’, in Right-Wing Spain in the Civil War Era: Soldiers of God and Apostles of the Fatherland, 1914–45, ed. Alejandro Quiroga and Miguel Ángel del Arco (New York: Continuum, 2012), pp. 61–89, at 62, 69–70, 65. 9 See e.g. ibid., p. 69.

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organisms are the most fertile breeding ground of the virulent spread of pathological germs. It is significant that all such organizations are manipulated if not actually directed by the Jews.’ Mola then went on: The Jews don’t care about the destruction of a nation, or of ten, or of the entire world, because they, having the exceptional ability to derive benefit from the greatest catastrophes, are merely completing their programme . . . The German Chancellor – a fanatical nationalist – is convinced that his people cannot rise again as long as the Jews and the parasitical organizations that they control or influence remain embedded in the nation. That is why he persecutes them without quarter.10

Soon after launching the July 1936 coup in Spain, Mola proclaimed that ‘peoples fall into decadence, misery and ruin when their governments are infiltrated by parliamentary democratic systems, inspired by the erroneous doctrines of Jews, Freemasons, anarchists and Marxists . . . All those who oppose the victory of the Movement to save Spain will be shot . . . .’11 Juan Antonio Suanzes joined Francisco Franco’s circle of ‘advisers and collaborators’ around mid-1937, at the height of the Civil War. Suanzes drafted ‘guidelines’ that Franco made the basis of his ‘economic programme’. This document espoused what historian Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco describes as ‘an amalgam typical of the times and of early Francoism’. It praised Catholicism as a ‘pure and clean religion’ vital for the ‘New State’, but denounced the ‘Judeo-Masonic conspiracy against Spain’, as well as ‘Judaism and Marxist International organisations’. In several other spheres too, it drew upon Italian fascist and Nazi ideology and their implementation.12 As Antonio Miguez Macho shows in Chapter 6 in this volume, Francoists perpetrated around three-quarters of the murders and executions in Spain during and after the Civil War. Franco himself firmly believed that Jews, Masons, and Bolsheviks cohabited in a ‘filthy concubinage’ (contubernio).13 At his Madrid victory parade on 19 May 1939, he warned that ‘the Jewish spirit, which permitted the alliance of big capital with Marxism and which was behind so many pacts 10 Quoted in Preston, Spanish Holocaust, p. 41. 11 Mola quoted ibid., p. 180. 12 Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco, ‘Juan Antonio Suanzes: industry, fascism and Catholicism’, in Right-Wing Spain in the Civil War Era: Soldiers of God and Apostles of the Fatherland, 1914–45, ed. Alejandro Quiroga and Miguel Ángel del Arco (New York: Continuum, 2012), pp. 147–76, at 155–6. 13 Enrique Moradiellos, ‘Francisco Franco: The soldier who became Caudillo’, in RightWing Spain in the Civil War Era: Soldiers of God and Apostles of the Fatherland, 1914–45, ed. Alejandro Quiroga and Miguel Ángel del Arco (New York: Continuum, 2012), pp. 117– 45, at 123; Preston, Spanish Holocaust, p. 38.

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with the anti-Spanish revolution, cannot be extirpated in a day’.14 On 31 December 1939, Franco praised Germany’s antisemitic laws. He justified them on the precedent of the fifteenth-century persecution of Jews by Spain’s then monarchs Ferdinand and Isabel: Now you will understand the reasons which have led other countries to persecute and isolate those races marked by the stigma of their greed and self-interest . . . We, who were freed of this heavy burden centuries ago by the grace of God and the clear vision of Ferdinand and Isabel, cannot remain indifferent before the modern flourishing of avaricious and selfish spirits who are so attached to their own earthly goods that they would sacrifice the lives of their children . . . .15

During the Civil War, Franco’s forces tracked down and killed Jews in Spain, forcibly baptised others, and deported yet others to Nazi Germany. In 1938, at the suggestion of Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, Franco’s regime signed an agreement to hand over to the Gestapo captured Jews, communists and socialists who had fought in the International Brigades in defence of the Spanish Republic. The Gestapo in turn trained Franco’s political police. Franco’s Spain awarded Himmler its highest decoration, the ‘Grand Cross of the Imperial Order of the Yoke and Arrows’.16 Hitler himself awarded Franco the Golden Grand Cross of the Order of the German Eagle.17 In May 1941, Franco ‘ordered his officials to draw up a list of some 6,000 Jews living in Spain’ for inclusion in ‘a secret Jewish archive’. The list was then handed over to Himmler, El País newspaper reported in 2010. The original order, partially preserved in Zaragoza province archives, had instructed provincial governors to elaborate lists of ‘all the national and foreign Jews living in the province . . . showing their personal and political leanings, means of living, commercial activities, degree of danger and security category’. Governors were ordered to be especially vigilant for Sephardic Jews, descendants of those expelled from Spain in 1492. ‘Their adaptation to our environment and their similar temperament allow them to hide their origins more easily’, said the 1941 order, which referred to ‘this notorious race’ who ‘remained unnoticed, with no opportunity of preventing their easily-carried out attempts at subversion’.18 14 16 17 18

Quoted in Preston, Spanish Holocaust, p. 471. 15 Quoted ibid., pp. 471–2. Ibid., pp. 175, 490. Paul Preston, Franco: A Biography (New York: Basic Books, 1994), p. 375. ‘General Franco Gave List of Spanish Jews to Nazis’, The Guardian, 20 June 2010, www .theguardian.com/world/2010/jun/20/franco-gave-list-spanish-jews-nazis. For a different

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Ireland was another nation on the western fringe of Europe that, like Spain, adopted neutrality during World War Two. In the pre-war period, it too had failed to escape some of the distinguishing political and ideological influences which marked that global conflict. In 1927 the Irish government appointed the Austrian archaeologist Alfred Mahr as Keeper of Irish Antiquities. On 1 April 1933, the month after Hitler attained power in Germany but five years before Germany’s annexation of Austria, Alfred Mahr joined the German Nazi Party. A year later, on 17 July 1934, Ireland’s prime minister, Eamon de Valera, promoted Mahr to the influential position of director of the National Museum of Ireland. That post was apparently not advertised; no other candidates were considered. It is uncertain whether de Valera was yet aware of Mahr’s Nazi Party membership. Mahr asserted in 1934 that ‘archaeology is a great force in the shaping of a sound self-consciousness in a nation’. Mahr was already serving as ‘chief adviser and sponsor’ for the Harvard Archaeological Expedition in Ireland (1932–6). The organiser and manager of the Harvard mission, Earnest A. Hooton, a member of the American Eugenics Society, had chosen Ireland for its research in part because he believed that the Celtic language was ‘an archaic Aryan language’. He also described the goal of his mission’s anthropological measurements of the bodily features of thousands of Irish men and women, as ‘to determine their racial features and their constitutional proclivities’. In the late 1930s Hooton published strong denunciations of Nazi practices in Germany, but in the meantime, Mahr seems to have managed to steer the Harvard mission’s Irish excavation programmes in directions favoured by Nazi continental archaeological theorists, such as giving priority to research on lake dwellings (crannóg sites) in Ireland.19 Adolf Mahr did not disguise his allegiance to the Nazi Party, even from his Harvard collaborators. He became a founding member, in Berlin in January 1937, of the German Society for Celtic Studies, which aimed ‘to spread the knowledge of Celtic culture and languages in Germany, and to establish cultural and social relations between the Germanic and Celtic peoples’. In 1938, the year Germany annexed the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia, Mahr asserted that the Irish had ‘their own Sudeten in Northern Ireland’. By 1939, the assistant secretary of Ireland’s Department view, see Stanley G. Payne, Franco and Hitler: Spain, Germany, and World War II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). 19 Mairéad Carew, The Quest for the Irish Celt (Newbridge, Kildare: Irish Academic Press, 2018), pp. 31–3, 51–3, 71–2, 209.

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of External Affairs described Mahr as ‘the most active and fanatical National Socialist in the German colony’ in Ireland. From Dublin he headed the Auslandorganisation, considered ‘useful for propaganda and espionage activities’. Mahr was suspected of having served as a spy for the Nazis in Ireland since the 1920s.20 That is considered unlikely, given his later open declarations of Nazi adherence. But in the 1930s he certainly reported back to Berlin identifying which of the Germans in Ireland were of Jewish descent. Dublin retained Mahr as director of the National Museum after his membership of the Nazi Party became public, even after Hitler’s conferral of a professorship on Mahr in 1938 and Mahr’s return to Germany the next year, technically on a leave of absence to attend a conference. He never returned. In 1944, Mahr attended a joint SS, Propaganda Office and Foreign Office conference, and urged those present to draw up of lists of ‘pro-Jewish’ Freemasons, journalists, writers and economists.21 He may well also have contributed to the 1942 Wannsee Protocol’s inclusion of a figure for Ireland, among countries yet to be occupied by the Nazis, as home to an estimated 4,000 Jews.22 After Hitler’s suicide in 1945, Eamon de Valera visited Dublin’s German Embassy and signed the condolence book. By contrast, other neutral nations such as Sweden and Switzerland presented no condolences. The same was true of neutral Portugal, though flags flew at half-mast on public buildings there.23 Apart from Ireland, only Franco’s Spain offered condolences to Berlin upon Hitler’s death. Meanwhile, the influence of the antisemitic model had spread far beyond the Atlantic fringes of Europe. Siam was the only country in Southeast Asia not to be colonised by a European power. Before ascending the Siamese throne as the country’s absolute monarch, King Vajiravudh (r. 1910–25) had spent many years in England, but he maintained that ‘my dip in European educational waters has given me but a European gloss; the flesh inside is still very much Thai’. The king opposed what he called the Siamese ‘cult of imitation’ of Western influences and urged his countrymen to ‘think and act for ourselves’, rejecting Western racial prejudices such as the concept of the 20 Ibid., pp. 32–3, 82, 107. 21 Michael Gibbons, review of Gerry Mullins, Dublin Nazi No. 1: The Life of Adolf Mahr (Liberties Press, 2007), in 20th-Century/Contemporary History 5 (2007), www .historyireland.com/20th-century-contemporary-history/dublin-nazi-no-1-the-life-of-adolfmahr/. 22 I thank Wendy Lower for this information. 23 Gordon Lucy, ‘Eamon de Valera’s “moral myopia” in offering condolences to Germany over Hitler’s death’, News Letter, 7 May 2020, www.newsletter.co.uk/new s/people/eamon-de-valeras-moral-myopia-offering-condolences-germany-over-hitlers -death-put-ireland-beyond-pale-many-people-2846858.

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‘yellow peril’, insisting that the Thai were equals to Europeans, and warning against ‘hating other nations’. Yet despite all this, in 1914 Vajiravudh published an article under a pseudonym which, as the historian Walter Vella wrote, ‘borrowed heavily on anti-Semitic thoughts of the West, thoughts the King had certainly become familiar with during his long years in England’. In his article, Vajiravudh asserted that Southeast Asia’s ethnic Chinese minority were the ‘The Jews of the Orient’.24 Western antisemitism fitted well into the king’s conception of the Chinese in Thailand. The previous year, Vajiravudh had written another essay, in which he ‘aggressively called for the replacement of Chinese clan names’ with Thai ones. In the words of Thai historian Kasian Tejapira, the king’s 1913 essay associated Chinese clan names with ‘belligerent gangster solidarity, archaism, barbarism, group inclusion, national division, and political insubordination’.25 His article the next year struck what would become a familiar vein in antisemitism: ‘I have not been actuated by any ulterior motives; nor did I start out upon my investigations as a confirmed Chinaphobe. On the contrary, I had every reason to have friendly feelings for the Chinese, not only because they were fellow Asiatics, but also because of the personal friendship which I have enjoyed since boyhood with many Chinamen personally.’26 The king’s 1914 article, entitled ‘The Jews of the Orient’, began with a thirtypage discussion of ‘Anti-Jewism’ in Europe. ‘Whilst in Europe’, Vajiravudh wrote, ‘I could not fail to notice the anti-Jewish feeling which loomed so large in almost every country in Europe, notably in Russia, Germany, and France. In England, the feeling was undoubtedly present, though it was not so apparent on the surface as in other countries. I then set myself the question: “Why this anti-Jewish feeling? What have the Jews done ?”’27 Vajiravudh’s explanations are an extraordinary example of the spread of antisemitism across the globe before World War One. The king identified 24 Walter F. Vella, Chaiyo! King Vajiravudh and the Development of Thai Nationalism (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1978), pp. 177, 179, 181–7. 25 Kasian Tejapira, ‘Imagined uncommunity: the Lookjin middle class and Thai official nationalism’, in Essential Outsiders: Chinese and Jews in the Modern Transformation of Southeast Asia and Central Europe, ed. Daniel Chirot and Anthony Reid (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), pp. 75–98, at 85, citing King Vajiravudh, Priab namsakul kab cheusae (A contrast of family names with clan names) (1913). 26 Asvabahu (King Vajiravudh), The Jews of the Orient: Reprint of a Paper Published, in Four Parts, in the Columns of the ‘Siam Observer’ in July B.S. 2457 [1914] (Bangkok: Siam Observer Press, 1917[?]), p. 2. (My thanks to Tyrell Haberkorn for locating this publication and for kindly sending me a copy.) 27 Ibid., p. 3.

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three reasons for ‘this anti-Jewish feeling’, all supposedly the fault of Jews. ‘First of all’, he wrote, ‘the most prominent characteristic of the Jew is Race. No matter where he lives or what nationality he adopts he is always a Jew . . . and other people are never allowed to forget it either . . . This element of Race, so strongly and persistently present in every individual Jew, is without doubt the principal reason why they cannot get along in peace with the Gentile inhabitants of the countries where they reside.’ Of course the king himself was hardly immune to racialist thinking and the increasingly prevalent negative stereotyping of Jews. He asserted that ‘the Jew will do all he can to evade military duties, though he is never known to have refused the benefits gained as the result of any war. Jewish financiers never have any scruples about trying to bring about wars, or sharing in the profits derived from supplying troops in war time, but when it comes to the question of fighting, they themselves do all they can to evade it.’ Vajiravudh then added: ‘The attitude of superiority and offishness, or worse still, the attitude of grudging condescension adopted by the Jews naturally gives grave offence to their Gentile neighbours. This is reason No. 1 of Anti-Jewism!’28 Second, the king argued: ‘The black man does not enjoy being called a “n—” and, if he is strong enough, will resent the insult. So, in a similar manner, the Christian European deeply resents being called “Gentile” by the Jew, knowing that the Jew means the word as an epithet expressive of contempt. There then is reason No. 2 of Anti-Jewism!’ Here Vajiravudh had managed to overlook any ‘contempt’ for Jews on the part of ‘the Christian European’, and to contrast (rather than compare) Jews with another victim of prejudice, ‘the black man’. The third and (the king wrote) ‘I think the most important, reason for AntiJewism’: is to be found in the Jew’s extraordinarily acute money-making instinct, and all the evil results arising therefrom; . . . he is able to close his eyes to the sight, and his ears to the sound, of misery directly caused by the practice of his cult; for would not a Jewish money-lender let his victim starve rather than forego his exorbitant interest on his loan? All these acts the Jew is able and often willing to do with a callousness which would amaze a Central African cannibal, and all for the sake of the cult of money, which has become as second nature to him.29

Vajiravudh then attempted to explain the ‘slaughter of Jews’ in Russia, in the then ongoing pre-World War One pogroms in that country. The king wrote that ‘I never was in Russia long enough to be able to learn the truth of 28 Ibid., pp. 5–6, 7–8, 10.

29 Ibid., pp. 14–15, 17–18.

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the matter’, but he ‘conjectured’ that it was not the work of the tsarist government, although it ‘knows the sufferings caused by the Jews to the Russian peasants’. Rather, the king thought, ‘The peasants, goaded by misery and poverty, break loose and commit violence against the Jews who have been the cause of their misery.’30 As for the Chinese in Siam, the king wrote in similar vein: ‘Where money is concerned, the Chinese are utterly without morals, without conscience, without mercy, without pity. They will cheat with a smile at their own cleverness, and rob and murder with utter callousness for the sake of getting a few dollars.’ They would then send the money back to China, ‘like so many vampires who steadily suck dry an unfortunate victim’s life-blood’.31 In this they were worse than the Jews, Vajiravudh argued, for Jews had no country of their own and spent their wealth in the land in which they resided. On the other hand, he conceded, the Chinese, who did have a home country, at least did not get involved in local politics as Jews did.32 This was fortunate, the king thought, because otherwise ‘they might prove very troublesome’. The Chinese in Siam, he wrote, were ‘every bit as unscrupulous and as unconscionable as the Jews’, and ‘no more Buddhists than are the Jews Christians’, while Siamese were ‘no more like the Chinese than any of the European races are like the Jews’.33 Vella observed that after this essay was published in 1914, ‘the King noted with particular pleasure its good reception by Europeans’.34 In describing the pervasiveness of racism in the early twentieth century, King Vajiravudh of Siam was certainly correct. Its influence and impact were clearly felt far beyond Europe, and it fell on fertile soil. Even antisemitism persisted in Siam beyond the overthrow of its absolute monarchy in 1932. In the late 1930s, the country’s defence minister and future wartime dictator Phibun Songkram, who had received high-level military training in France in the mid-1920s, fostered the publication in Thai of books and articles favourable to Hitler and Mussolini. In a 1938 public lecture at Chulalongkorn University, Luang Wichit Wathakan, a close associate of Phibun, compared the Chinese in Siam to the Jews of Germany, and after mentioning Hitler’s policies against the Jews, said that ‘it was high time Siam considered dealing with their own Jews’.35 30 Ibid., pp. 25–8. 31 Ibid., pp. 48–9, 56–7. 32 Vella, Chaiyo!, pp. 193–4. 33 Asvabahu (King Vajiravudh), The Jews of the Orient, and Wake Up Siam (Bangkok: King Vajiravudh Memorial Foundation, 1985), quoted in Tejapira, ‘Imagined uncommunity’, 76–80. 34 Vella, Chaiyo!, p. 194. 35 Anthony Reid, ‘Entrepreneurial minorities, nationalism, and the state’, in Essential Outsiders: Chinese and Jews in the Modern Transformation of Southeast Asia and Central

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Phibun took power in Bangkok later that same year. In 1939 he changed Siam’s name to Thailand, and decreed that a new national anthem be sung twice daily throughout the country. Its first line was: ‘Thailand unites the Thai blood and race.’ During World War Two, Phibun forged a military alliance with Japan, with Luang Wichit as his foreign minister and ambassador to Tokyo.36 Japanese wartime expansionism across Southeast Asia in 1942–5 included massacres of many thousands of ethnic Chinese in Singapore and elsewhere,37 as it had in China itself, for instance in the 1937 Nanking massacre examined by Yuki Tanaka in Chapter 16 of this volume. Taking advantage of Thailand’s status as an ally of an expanding Japanese empire, Phibun’s Bangkok regime seized large territories from all four of Thailand’s neighbours: Cambodia, Laos, Burma and Malaya. See Map 1.1 and Figure 1.1. Thailand was not the only Asian country to encounter the influence of prewar Nazi antisemitism. In 1939 the right-wing Indian politician M. S. Golwalkar wrote in his book, We or Our Nationhood Defined: ‘To keep up the purity of the nation and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of Semitic races – the Jews. National pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by.’38 Meanwhile, an emerging Southeast Asian state offered a stark contrast to all this. Having formally set out in 1935 on the road to independence from the United States, the then Commonwealth of the Philippines provided sanctuary in Manila to no fewer than 1,200 Jewish refugees in 1938 and 1939. Their acceptance by the Philippines was a result of co-operation between the US High Commissioner in Manila, Paul McNutt, and the Commonwealth’s elected president, the veteran Philippine nationalist leader Manuel Quezon, as well as Europe, ed. Daniel Chirot and Anthony Reid (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), pp. 33–71, at 69 n. 61. 36 David K. Wyatt, Thailand: A Short History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 252–8; Joseph J. Wright, Jr, The Balancing Act: A History of Modern Thailand (Bangkok: Asia Books, 1991), p.98; Tejapira, ‘Imagined Uncommunity’, 78. For another view, see Nigel J. Brailey, Thailand and the Fall of Singapore: A Frustrated Asian Revolution (Boulder: Westview, 1986), pp. 67–78, e.g. p. 68. 37 See e.g. Cheah Boon Kheng, Red Star Over Malaya, 4th ed. (Singapore: NUS Press, 2012), pp. 21–4; Mark Felton, ‘The perfect storm: Japanese military brutality during World War Two’, in The Routledge History of Genocide, ed. Cathie Carmichael and Richard C. Maguire (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 105–21, at 106. 38 Madhav S. Golwalkar, We or Our Nationhood Defined (Bangalore[?]: Bharat Prakashan, 1939), quoted in ‘Golwalkar drew lessons from Hitler’s Germany’, The Hindu Business Line, 27 November 2015, www.thehindubusinessline.com/news/national/golwalkardrew-lessons-from-hitlers-germany/article7924161.ece.

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CHINA

Shan states 1893 BURMA 1888

1904 LAOS

1893 SIAM 1904 1907

CAMBODIA 1867

VIETNAM

Territorial losses of Siam 1862–1909 UK France N

1909

1909

W

MALAYA

S

Map 1.1 Siam’s claimed ‘territorial losses’, 1862–1909

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Figure 1.1 Thailand’s ‘lost territories’, Bangkok Bank, 1976. (Photo: Ben Kiernan) Thailand’s claimed ‘lost territories’ are part of Malaya (shown on the map by the numbers 1, 5, and 13); Burma (2, 4, 6, 9, 13); Laos (8, 10, 11); Cambodia (7, 12, 14); and Vietnam (3).

the local Jewish community in Manila. One of the Jewish refugees, Frank Ephraim, who had fled Berlin with his family in early 1939, only to endure the three-year Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia, later set down his experiences in a memoir entitled, Escape to Manila: From Nazi Tyranny to Japanese Terror.39 The global backdrop to twentieth-century genocide certainly included the spread of antisemitism, racism and territorial expansionism, but also examples of humanitarian resistance and at least temporary refuge. The Philippine case also showed that independent nationalism did not have to involve racial persecution. 39 Frank Ephraim, Escape to Manila: From Nazi Tyranny to Japanese Terror (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003); see Jennifer Reeve, ‘Responding to the Holocaust: bystanders, colonialism, and conflicting priorities’, in The Routledge History of Genocide, ed. Cathie Carmichael and Richard C. Maguire (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 89–101, at 93–4.

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2

War and Genocide in the Twentieth Century jay winter

Introduction Two Phases of Genocide The Genocide Convention of 1948 was passed by the United Nations on 9 December 1948 in Paris. That date is a useful divide in any account of the phenomenon of genocide in the twentieth century, not only because of its formal acceptance in international law, subject to the ratification of twothirds of the members of the United Nations. The date also separates two periods in the history of warfare. The first period, prior to 1948, may be termed the era of imperial and national war; the second, after 1948, may be termed the era of post-imperial warfare. The distinction between these two periods is not hermetic. There were similarities in motive and measures adopted in the two periods to destroy groups deemed hostile to the perpetrators. The difference is in the nature of the international system in which genocide occurred. Before 1948, that system was bounded by the Westphalian settlement of 1648, in which the sovereignty of states extended beyond their borders to captive or dependent populations organised in imperial holdings, dependencies or colonies. Imperial power was legitimate, and so was the use of physical force to subjugate groups to it. After 1948, the international system retained the state-centred focus of the Westphalian order, but slowly and reluctantly its leaders acceded to the demands of those who asserted their right to self-determination and independence from imperial power. The leaders of the old imperial order – Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and, despite patriotic protests to the contrary, the United States – were forced through armed struggle to acknowledge the transformation of former colonies into independent states.

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War and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

Between 1948 and 1989, the cold war framed a nuclear-armed peace between the two superpowers. At the same time there was a shift in the locus of violence and genocide away from Europe and primarily but not exclusively to those areas in Africa and Asia in which wars of decolonisation had been waged and won. The cold war was by no means a peaceful period. During the latter years of the cold war and in its immediate aftermath, genocide occurred and was conducted by groups within post-colonial states, in Cambodia, Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, the federal elements of which had spun off into independence after the collapse and fragmentation of the Soviet bloc and the Soviet Union in 1989–91. Though the Soviet Union and its satellites were not a formal empire, the liberation from Russian domination of the Soviet Socialist Republics and of members of the Warsaw pact constituted the last dismantling of imperial power in the twentieth century. In this chapter, we consider first the structural conditions of state power and warfare which enabled genocide to occur in the imperial and national phase between 1900 and 1948. Then we examine four specific instances of genocide in Africa, Europe and Asia before 1948: the German occupation of Southwest Africa, the Ottoman Turkish genocide committed against the Armenian people, the genocide by famine in Ukraine in 1932–3 and genocide committed by Nazis and their collaborators against Jews and others during World War Two. In the post-1948 period, we examine genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda as instances of post-imperial crimes, and include in this category genocidal acts committed in the Yugoslav civil war of the 1990s. In all three cases, the transformation of the international order created the space in which particular groups and their leaders acted to destroy enemy populations as such. The retreat of imperial power – French and American in Cambodia, French and Belgian in Rwanda, and the end of Serb-dominated Yugoslav Federation and the Yugoslav army left large populations of civilians open to ethnic cleansing and to exterminatory acts, identified as genocide both at the time and in subsequent legal proceedings.

Preconditions for Genocide As Polish-born sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argued,1 the social, cultural and political phenomenon we call modernisation created the tools and techniques with which those who attempted to wipe out entire populations 1 Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989).

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were able, from 1900 on, to realise their goals. Rather than a return to ‘primitive’ barbarism, modern genocide arose out of political instruments and technologies which gave states the reach and the effective control over populations deemed a threat to the existence of those in power and their supporters. The arrival of the telephone, telegraph and radio, the development of efficient bureaucracies, the introduction of a division of labour into all facets of production, the measurement and categorisation of populations and races, and the moralisation of obedience to authority opened the door to genocide on a mass scale.2 Opening the door is one thing; explaining why people went through it is another. And here we will distinguish between two phenomena evident in the early twentieth century, which became ubiquitous. The first is the militarisation of mass politics. The second is the civilianisation of war. In the conclusion we shall return to this distinction in order to suggest reasons why some people refuse to participate in genocide, at a time when the majority tacitly or actively put on the yoke of genocidal necessity and participate in the persecution and, at times, the extermination of entire populations. The militarisation of politics is hardly a new phenomenon. But after the French Revolution, the emergence of parliamentary democracies in many parts of the world established an order in which the military was in theory subservient to political leaders exercising authority given to them by the people or by the Crown in Parliament. Starting in the early twentieth century, there arose many political movements dedicated to reversing that order. Believing that the military embodied the highest values of the nation or the race (words used interchangeably in 1900), these right-wing zealots called for an overthrow of the democratic order, and for the seizure of power by those in uniform, who had the ruthlessness and the training to save the nation or race from a threat to its existence. After 1917, left-wing zealots, in particular those empowered by the Bolshevik seizure of power, made the same anti-liberal and anti-democratic case, in insisting on eliding war and revolution in one continuum. Revolutionary warfare did not cease with the seizure of power; indeed, in the Bolshevik case, the mobilisation of large counter-revolutionary forces in 1918 required the continuation of war and of mobilisation for war during the subsequent three years, and even thereafter. 2 Hannah Arendt’s work has informed all later work on this subject. See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1964) and her The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951).

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In both the first and second phases of genocide, the illiberal militarisation of politics on the left and the right was a precondition of genocide. The second and related phenomenon which made genocide possible was the civilianisation of war.3 In earlier centuries, non-combatants were massacred whenever and wherever war broke out, but the bureaucratisation of mass armies from the 1860s on created codes of behaviour which limited the use of force to those identifiably participating in uniform in military engagements. Both legal and humanitarian movements in the nineteenth century reinforced the normative restriction of military force to those in opposing military units. Violence against civilians was not only immoral; it was also counterproductive, since it threatened turning armed groups under military control into bands of thugs and murderers. If, as Max Weber put it, the state was the institution which had the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force, its military agents had the right to act only against others in uniform and not against civilians.4 With the birth of the International Red Cross and the promulgation of Geneva conventions for the protection of the wounded, prisoners of war and civilians, jurists drew a circle around soldiers in action, whose recourse to violence was legitimate, and distinguished them from everyone else. To be sure, these norms were difficult to enforce, but they were in place nonetheless. However, from the Civil War between regions of the industrialising United States through the age of imperial expansion in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, there occurred an erosion of these norms which protected civilians from being targeted in wartime. General Richard Sheridan declared it his purpose to leave the Confederate population with only the tears they had to mourn their losses; everything else would be destroyed.5 When it came to the treatment of those of different races who engaged in hostilities against their white overlords, different rules of engagement applied; at times, as with respect to North American Indians, they were slaughtered at will. After 1914, and more particularly after 1918, when war and revolution created a new amalgam of force and terror, the civilianisation of war became the norm. During World War One combatants pretended to observe older rules of military behaviour, but civilians were targeted by both sides on land, 3 Andrew Barros (ed.), The Civilianization of War: The Changing Civilian–Military Divide, 1914–2014 (Cambridge University Press, 2018). 4 Geoffrey Best, Humanity in Warfare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 5 Moritz Busch, Bismarck: Some Secret Page of his History, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1898), I, p. 128.

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sea and air. The victorious Allies continued the blockade of Germany and Austria after the Armistice of 1918, even though this meant punishing civilians for the acts of an overthrown political and military order. After 1918, civilians were the direct targets of military action in a large part of eastern Europe, afflicted by civil war, class war, ethnic wars, pogroms and wars of national liberation. At the same time, anti-colonial movements arose throughout the world which targeted imperial domination and which in turn were targeted by the forces of order who waged wars against civilians.6 In effect the mutation and fragmentation of war in the decade after 1914 crystallised genocide in the century which followed. The first manifestation of genocide antedated the war. It came out of the imperial expansion of the late nineteenth century, and its morphology shows the need to develop a multi-variate analysis of the origins, conduct and consequences of genocide.

Genocide 1900–45 The Herero Genocide The vulgarisation and application to state policy of Social Darwinism accompanied the growth of imperial power in the later nineteenth century. The notion that the white race was superior to all others, and that their presence in Africa, Asia, the Antipodes and the Americas was a vector of ‘civilisation’, turned those people of colour who fought against their servitude into enemies not only of the political order, but of the racial order as well. We can see how this racial ideology prepared the ground for genocide in Kaiser Wilhelm II’s speech to his troops embarking from Germany in July 1900 to put down the Boxer rebellion. Chinese violence against Europeans, including the killing of the German envoy and several missionaries, had to be answered, the kaiser said. Take no prisoners, give no pardon; act like our ancestor Attila the Hun, so that ‘the name German [will be] remembered in China for a thousand years so that no Chinaman will ever again dare to even squint at a German!’ Deleted from the official text of his remarks are these words: ‘I hope . . . to take revenge such as the world has never before witnessed.’7 6 Jay Winter, ‘1918 e a Segunda Grande Guerra’, in Tempose y Espaços de Violência a Premiera Guerra Mondial, a Deconstrução dos Limites e o Início de Uma Era, ed. Sílvia Correia and Alexandre Morelli (Rio di Janeiro: Autografia, 2019), pp. 21–45. 7 Wilhelm Schroeder (ed.), Das persönliche Regiment: Reden und sonstige öffentliche Äusserungen Wilhelms II, trans. Richard S. Levy (Munich: Birk, 1912), pp. 40–2.

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Even allowing for the tendency of the kaiser to overreact to events, his words carried weight. First the Boxers felt the force of his (and other Europeans’) thirst for revenge. Perhaps 100,000 Chinese were killed in reprisals and other military actions. Four years later, the target of German revenge for non-white violence was the Herero people of Southwest Africa. Once again, the violence was a response of a white imperial regime to an armed uprising by men of colour. Racism, in the form of Social Darwinian notions of white superiority, turned African violence into an existential challenge not only to the German Empire but to the perceived and proclaimed natural order of things. In the racialised imperial system of 1904, though, the action of the Imperial German army against Herero tribesmen, alongside the Nama and the San, stood apart. As in the case of the Boxer rebellion, punishment for the death of whites was exacted on a disproportionate scale after the killing of approximately 100 white men in the area around Okahandia, north of the city of Windhoek in present-day Namibia. What followed turned retribution and exemplary punishment into genocide.8 In August 1904 General Lothar von Trotha, who had seen action in the suppression of the Boxer rebellion, leading 1,500 German troops armed with machine guns and artillery, defeated Herero warriors at the Battle of Waterberg, driving the survivors into western regions of the Kalahari desert. Von Trotha then issued what is now known as the ‘Vernichtungsbefehl’, or the extermination order.9 In the face of alleged crimes committed by the Herero, including the mutilation of wounded German soldiers, they were deemed no longer to be German subjects. If found within German-controlled territory, Herero combatants were to be executed. Their women and children were not to be killed, thus preserving the ‘good reputation of the German soldier’, but they were to be driven into the desert. Water holes were poisoned, and the population was reduced from 80,000 to approximately 11,000 in four years. The Nama people suffered a similar fate after the suppression of their revolt in 1905; 10,000 were killed or died, and roughly 9,000 were rounded up into camps, where disease and malnutrition took their toll. The ‘extermination order’ set this form of imperial violence apart from other cases of extreme violence in Africa and elsewhere. In the Congo, 8 Jürgen Zimmerer and Joachim Zeller (eds.), Genocide in German South-West Africa: The Colonial war of 1904–1908 and its aftermath, trans. E. J. Neather (Monmouth: Merlin Press, 2008). 9 Jan-Bart Gewald, ‘The great general of the Kaiser’, Botswana Notes and Records 26 (1994), 67–76.

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killings and mutilations on a grand scale were ‘normal’ facets of colonial rule, but the commodification of human labour made it irrational for the rulers to exterminate the ruled, even when they rose up against their masters. In Southwest Africa, the Herero rose up against the German army in part because of the dispatch of Herero men to work in the gold mines of the Rand, and German businesses used prisoners’ labour after the revolt. In this case, however, the destruction of Herero society took precedence over the exploitation of Herero labour.10 Profits gave way to Schrecklichkeit, terror in the form of the naked use of imperial power directed to the total destruction of communities that challenged it.

The Armenian Genocide In April 1915, the Young Turk triumvirate joined the Ottoman Empire, allies of Germany and Austria-Hungary, in their war against Britain, France, Russia and their allies. The Ottoman rulers ordered and had implemented: first, the murder of leaders of the Ottoman Armenian community; and then, the destruction of Armenian communities in eastern Anatolia by their forcible deportation into the Mesopotamian desert. Over 1 million Armenian civilians were killed or died as a direct result of this order. As in the case of the Herero genocide, the motivation of the ruling elite was the preservation of imperial power.11 But this time genocide took place in the context of what we now call ‘total war’, the global clash of industrialised or industrialising imperial powers for hegemony in world affairs. In total war, an unprecedented proportion of the population enlisted, and the combatants became only the cutting edge of the entire nation at war. Not surprisingly, civilians were targeted by both sides. Furthermore, the multinational and multi-ethnic nature of all of the empires at war transformed minorities into ‘enemies within’. Every combatant country interned ethnic minorities and targeted with propaganda and money minorities on the other side who could disrupt the enemy war effort. Germans appealed to Russian Jews to forsake the tsar; Czechs worked in London for liberation from Austria-Hungary; German arms went to help launch an Irish revolt, and Muslims encouraged Indian troops to turn against Britain and join a jihad. 10 Jan-Bart Gewald, ‘The road of the man called love and the sack of Sero: the Herero-German war and the export of Herero labour to the South African Rand’, Journal of African History 40:1 (1999), 21–40. And more generally, Jan-Bart Gewald, Herero Heroes: A Socio-Political History of the Herero of Namibia, 1890–1923 (Oxford: James Currey, 1999). 11 A. Dirk Moses (ed.), Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008).

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What differentiated the politics of eliminating subversion from genocide was the limited violence used to counter it. The British put down the Irish rising of 1916 with brutality, turning rebel leaders into martyrs for the cause. Guerrilla war ended only after seven years, but the British never envisaged deporting or concentrating Catholics in prison camps. After a series of setbacks on the Eastern Front in 1914, the Russian army deported roughly 500,000 Jews, living legally under Russian rule, suspecting them of sympathies with the German and Austro-Hungarian enemies. Perhaps 20,000 Jewish civilians were killed in Galicia in 1915 alone, but once again, there were limits to this brutality. The general responsible for the pogrom was cashiered, and the persecution of Jews on the Eastern Front, while devastating, did not lead to their extermination.12 The situation in Ottoman Turkey was different. In late 1914, Russian forces moved south from the Caucasus and engaged the Ottoman army in the winter of 1914–15 in the northeast of Anatolia. The Ottoman Turks suffered a set of defeats, in particular in the battle of Sarikamis¸. Enver Pasha, the minister of war, blamed the defeat on the Armenians. There were Armenian volunteers in the Russian invading force, but there was no direct link between them and the Armenian communities scattered throughout Anatolia. A more proximate link to the genocide was the armed resistance of Armenians in the eastern city of Van. On 19 April 1915, they resisted Turkish demands to conscript the able-bodied men of the city, fearing that they would be executed. The city was surrounded, but the siege was lifted with the arrival of Russian troops. Adding to the strategic crisis of spring 1915 was the arrival of Allied ground troops at Gallipoli on 24–5 April. They landed on the west coast of that peninsula after an attempt at forcing the Straits of the Dardanelles by naval power had failed in March. The Allied landing stalled, but it was evident that the Ottoman war effort had reached a critical point. The deportation of the entire Armenian population of Anatolia began at this difficult moment in the war.13 This was not a crime done in the dark. Talaat Pasha, minister of the interior, co-ordinated the genocide. First came the order to arrest Armenian leaders and ban all Armenian political associations. Then came the Tehcir law of 1 June 1915, permitting the deportation of Armenian communities. Cables sent by Talaat Pasha to operatives of the 12 Jay Winter, ‘Jüdische Erinnerung und Erster Weltkrieg – Zwischen Geschichte und Gedächtnis’, Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts 13 (2014), 111–30. 13 Taner Akçam, ‘When was the decision to annihilate the Armenians taken?’, Journal of Genocide Research 21: 4 (2019), 457–80.

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Committee of Union and Progress party (CUP) in the east, authorised actions by ‘Special Organisations’ to destroy Armenian villages and to deport their inhabitants.14 The mid- and ground-level perpetrators of this crime were a mixed group. Turkish soldiers and policemen as well as Kurdish irregulars organised the deportations and then robbed, raped and killed at will. Hunger, starvation and disease did the rest. Even a conservative estimate of the scale and dimensions of the deportation places loss of life in the period 1915–16 at about 50 per cent of the pre-1914 Armenian population. Armenians living near or in Constantinople were spared, but the Armenian heartland in the east was destroyed. In the midst of war, a substantial part of a longestablished and prosperous civilian community with identifiable religious and cultural characteristics had been wiped out; they were sentenced to death because of who they were and where they were; in effect, because of their ethnicity. After the end of the war in 1918, the Ottoman sultanate regime put on trial some of those who had played central roles in perpetrating this crime. Initially the leaders got away, but then two of the three members of the ruling triumvirate were assassinated by Armenians after the war. After admitting that ‘shameful acts’ had been perpetrated against Ottoman citizens, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and all subsequent leaders of the Turkish Republic, have denied that the Armenian genocide occurred.15 Killings, yes; but an orchestrated attempt to destroy an entire people, no. The documentary record permits no such evasion. The Armenian genocide was the second attempt in the twentieth century to destroy an entire people, in the interests of preserving imperial power. Even when that empire collapsed, the successor state’s leaders began a campaign, lasting until today, to hide the truth of genocide behind the fog of war.

The Holodomor The third attempt to destroy a targeted population by an imperial power was the policy inflicting death by starvation on the people of Ukraine. The context was Stalin’s drive towards industrialisation, requiring the seizure of 14 Taner Akçam, ‘The Ottoman documents and the genocidal policies of the Committee for Union and Progress (Ittihat ve Terakki) towards the Armenians in 1915’, Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 1:2 (2006), 127–48; Killing Orders: Talat Pasha’s Telegrams and the Armenian Genocide (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); and Raymond Kevorkian, Le génocide des arméniens (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2006). 15 Taner Akçam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility, trans. Paul Bessemer (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006).

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grain and other produce in the agricultural heartland of the west of the Soviet Union – in particular Ukraine, the north Caucasus and Moldavia – in order to feed other sectors of the population, especially the industrialising urban areas. First came forced collectivisation of farms in 1929–30. Then came food requisitioning in 1930, followed by the arrest of many allegedly rich and recalcitrant peasants and their exile to Siberia, where most died of starvation, disease, exposure and exhaustion. Those left behind were barred from leaving the areas where the famine was most severe. Even city dwellers in Kyiv and elsewhere starved when rations were cut back drastically. Rural populations were trapped in areas stripped of whatever meagre food resources they had. Cannibalism followed. Thus, an authoritarian state mobilised all the forces at its disposal to seal off a part of its own population and effectively to sentence those people to death by starvation or faminerelated disease.16 The toll taken by the Holodomor (‘killing by starvation’ in Ukrainian) was roughly 4 million deaths – comprising 12 per cent of the population of Ukraine. While this human toll is proportionately less than that of other twentieth-century genocides, its ethnic or national focus has led many scholars to see in it the cruelty of an authoritarian regime sentencing to slow death one part of its federation of nationalities for the benefit of the rest. Other scholars see intent in Stalin’s wish to punish the Ukrainian people, and in particular the nationalists among them for popular resistance to his policy of forced collectivisation. As in the case of the Armenian genocide, some parts of the targeted ethnic group escaped the death sentence carried out on the rest. The west of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was not as badly hit with famine-related mortality as was the east. Stalin’s crackdown on Ukrainian institutions and cultural organisations at this time points to his other political objectives in enforcing collectivisation and grain requisitioning. When some farming populations in Ukraine dropped to one-third of their pre-famine levels, ethnic Russians were brought in to work the land. While there is dispute as to whether the Holodomor was an attempt to destroy Ukrainian nationalism or the Ukrainian people as a whole, there is little doubt that it left a legacy of hatred and bitterness that has lasted to this day. That charged atmosphere has complicated discussions as to whether the Holodomor falls under internationally recognised definitions of genocide. Under the Rome statute of the International Criminal Court of 1998, the 16 See Norman Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton University Press, 2010).

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crime of extermination includes acts which entailed ‘mass killing of members of a civilian population’ or killings ‘committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population’. There seems little doubt that Stalin’s policies in Ukraine in 1930–3 constituted an act of war against an ethnically distinctive part of the USSR. While incompetence and inefficiency exacerbated food shortages, their origin lay in state policy. This has led some scholars to conclude that the Holodomor was a genocidal famine. Famine conditions existed in many other areas of southern Russia, from the Volga region, the north Caucasus and, in particular, in Kazakhstan, where approximately 40 per cent of the population died of famine or famine-related diseases. In all these cases, the leaders of the Soviet state knew that their policies were lethal, and that implementing them entailed the mass death of its own citizens. The Holodomor was indirect genocide, arising from the nature of the Soviet state and its radical attempt to modernise its economy by assigning resources to one part of the population at the cost of starving to death millions of its own people, living in an ethnically distinct area. Here is war waged by a state against a part of its own people.17 This argument depends upon an interpretation of the workings of the Soviet state which sees it as having been born in 1917, during a world war, having to fight a desperate civil war from 1918 to 1921, and having maintained and extended its mobilisation against internal enemies throughout the interwar years and beyond. The Soviet Union never demobilised after achieving power. In the Holodomor, its war footing was revealed, and the effort to ready the nation for a future war, requiring a vast industrial infrastructure, was purchased at the cost of the lives of millions of Ukrainians and others. In this sense, genocide and war were braided together in a host of ways.

Shoah All three cases examined so far highlight the power of imperial states to exterminate large parts of targeted subject populations. While the record reveals an explicit ‘extermination order’ in the case of the Herero genocide, the Armenian genocide and the Holodomor are cases where there is no ‘smoking gun’ or unambiguous evidence of intent to destroy an entire people. When we turn to the Nazi genocide against the Jews, we face a similar problem. There is a mountain of evidence as to the radical nature of Nazi antisemitism, and of the progressive radicalisation of Nazi policy 17 Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (New York: Doubleday, 2017).

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against the Jews, in the spirit of ‘working towards the Führer’, as Ian Kershaw has put it.18 But there is no one document, no one date which stands scrutiny as that precise moment when the decision to kill all the Jews in Europe was put into practice. Instead, historians have analysed the nascent ideology of the Nazi movement, its birth in the militarised politics of the immediate post-1918 period, its popular appeal in particular after the world economic crisis, and its targeting of ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’ as the demonic sources of everything wrong with the world order. These contributing elements to the formation of Nazi policies on the Jews are essential preconditions of the Shoah, or the Nazi attempt to destroy the Jewish people.19 Here we will highlight how war crystallised the policy of extermination adopted by the Nazi state in particular after the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Ghettoisation and mass murder began in Poland before that date, but it was the lightning victories in European Russia, from Leningrad to the Crimea, which turned the Nazi war against the Jews into genocide. When war began in September 1939, it was not greeted by the popular enthusiasm of August 1914. No large crowds garlanded the departing troops on their way to a rapid victory; too many people remembered the carnage of 1914–18. Twenty-five years later, there was a sombre mood of anxious anticipation at the outbreak of war. Two years later, the world had turned upside down. First, in May– June 1940, the defeat of France, after the crushing of opposition in Belgium and the Netherlands, reversed the outcome of the World War One. While Britain under Churchill still stood defiant, after the Blitz, under heavy aerial bombardment, she was completely alone in Europe. The American Congress was still isolationist, unwilling to countenance the US entering another world war. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, and following stunning victories that summer, the German mood both at home and in the armed forces turned to euphoria. With the collapse of the Soviet Union supposedly in sight, with the defeat of British and Allied forces in the Balkans, the entire European continent was in Nazi hands, or in those of Hitler’s friends in Madrid and Rome. Britain would have to sue for peace once Stalin was dealt with. 18 Ian Kershaw, ‘“Working towards the Führer”: reflections on the nature of the Hitler dictatorship’, Contemporary European History 2:2 (1993), 117. 19 Saul Friedländer, Years of Extermination, vol. I I: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 (New York: Harper Collins, 2007).

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It was in this moment of exuberance and national pride that Hitler reached the zenith of his power. Though doubted by his generals in 1940, and secondguessed by some in 1941, he had shown his prophetic genius and had scattered his enemies before him. The German people were beginning to benefit from Hitler’s victories. He was intensely conscious of the sufferings of the German people during the 1914–18 war, and now could transfer those hardships on to the shoulders of Untermenschen, Jews, Slavs, Roma and others. There was, though, a cloud on the horizon. On 15 August 1941, the American President Franklin D. Roosevelt had signed with Churchill the Atlantic Charter, on a warship off the coast of Newfoundland. Its sixth clause stated that ‘after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny’, the two leaders ‘hope to see established a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries, and which will afford assurance that all the men in all lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want’.20 This was an astonishing statement. The United States was still formally neutral, though rhetorically, this document said that she was at war – three and a half months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. When informed, Hitler was furious. He valued his standing as a prophet. Had he not said on numerous occasions that if the European war would become a world war, it would end not with the victory of Judeo-Bolshevism but with the destruction of European Jewry? Had he not suffered in 1918 from the betrayal of the German army in a war in which American intervention had bolstered the Allied side?21 While there was no one moment when Hitler and his closest advisors moved from mobilising the German population against the Jews to exterminating them, this period of euphoria in late summer 1941 was a phase in turning radical antisemitism into organised mass murder. After all, the conquest of Soviet-occupied eastern Poland, Ukraine, Byelorussia, the Baltic states and European Russia had placed in Nazi hands a very substantial part of the population of European Jewry. There was no reason to believe that any alliance could challenge German hegemony in Europe. We can date the mass murder of Jews in Poland from autumn 1939. But with the Nazi victories of the summer of 1941, special detachments including police battalions and Waffen-SS troops, fortified by Lithuanian and Ukrainian auxiliaries, engaged in a systematic operation of face-to-face non-industrial 20 Yale University, The Avalon project, ‘The Atlantic Charter’, https://avalon .law.yale.edu/wwii/atlantic.asp. 21 Tobias Jersak, ‘Die Interaktion von Kriegsverlauf und Judenvernichtung. Ein Blick auf Hitlers Strategie im Spätsommer 1941’, Historische Zeitschrift 268 (1999), 311–74.

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mass murder.22 Between 1 and 1.5 million Jews died in this period. It is a sobering thought, as Timothy Snyder puts it, that ‘as many if not more Jews were killed by bullets as by gas’ during the Shoah.23 Industrialised mass murder followed face-to-face killing. Under what became known as ‘Operation Reinhard’, murder camps in Poland at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka were built between October 1941 and July 1942. They were followed by the extermination camp at Chelmno, north of the industrial city of Lodz, where streamlined methods of killing including gas chambers were used, and where techniques of control were borrowed from the Nazis’ earlier T4 programme aiming at the murder of the handicapped. Auschwitz, near the Polish city of Krakow, was a cluster of camps, including factories, concentration camps and gas chambers. Birkenau and Buna-Monowitz, sometimes termed Auschwitz II and III, were built near the first camp. Most of those murdered by gas were killed in Birkenau. Buna-Monowitz was an industrial complex, where slave laborers were worked to death.24 There was an uprising at Birkenau in October 1944. One of the four crematoria in the camp was blown up by the Sonderkommando, Jews kept alive to service the killing operations. A month later, the Nazis destroyed the remaining crematoria, and attempted to cover up their crimes. Similar revolts took place earlier in Treblinka in August 1943, and at Sobibor in October 1943. The Nazis managed to kill about 10 million civilians during the war. Half were Jews, and the majority of the Jewish victims were from Poland and the Soviet Union. Other allies of the Nazis, in particular the fascist Croat Ustashe, committed parallel genocidal crimes. They murdered approximately 300,000 Serbs, and operated a series of concentration camps. The worst was Jasenovac, a cluster of five camps, which had a death rate of 88 per cent, even higher than Auschwitz.25 Here as elsewhere, mass murder had multiple origins, but one proximate cause: the transformation of war after 1941 from politics by other means into extermination by any and all means. 22 On police battalions, see Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Perennial, 1998). 23 Timothy Snyder, ‘Holocaust: The ignored reality’, New York Review of Books 56:12 (2009). See his Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010). 24 On Buna-Monowitz, and in general on the univers concentrationnaire, see Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, trans. S. Woolf (New York: Collier Books, 1961). 25 On Jasenovac, see David B. MacDonald, Balkan Holocausts?: Serbian and Croatian Victim Centred Propaganda and the War in Yugoslavia (Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 160–82.

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Genocide since 1945 Genocidal crimes were committed by what Franz Neumann termed ‘Behemoths’, national or imperial powers using military means to eliminate internal enemies.26 On an increasing scale from the German extermination order of 1904 to the Shoah, states with non-white colonies or dependencies and/or multi-ethnic populations mobilised the forces of order to destroy real or perceived enemies. In the Nuremberg war crimes trials of 1945–6, the Nazi leadership was found guilty of crimes against humanity. In 1948, the Genocide Convention was passed by the United Nations.27 Unfortunately, these measures were insufficient to prevent genocidal crimes from recurring in the post-1945 world. From the 1970s to the 1990s, genocide became the province of postimperial states. In Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, genocidal crimes were committed either in the wake of wars of national independence, or in states which had disintegrated into warring factions. In all three cases, the enemies to be exterminated were neighbours, those living alongside their killers. Post-1948 genocide reflected the changing character of war. In the second half of the twentieth century, war mutated, fragmented and shifted its character and objectives. No longer was war the province of a nation-state, fighting against other nation-states. War became an existential condition, chosen as preferable to peace by politicians, warlords or criminal gangs, seeking to maximise their power within states, not simply between them. Old wars, as Mary Kaldor has shown, were state-driven; new wars (post-1948) were conducted either domestically, within states, or transnationally, straddling borders, or both.28 Their primary effects, aside from incalculable suffering and mass death, were to ruin states, not to enhance their power.

26 Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism 1933–1944 (New York: Harper, 1944). 27 On the origins of the prosecution of crimes against humanity, see Philippe Sands, EastWest Street: On the Origins of ‘Genocide’ and ‘Crimes against Humanity’ (New York: Knopf, 2016). 28 Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012).

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The Cambodian Genocide The UN Genocide Convention sidestepped the difficult question as to whether the systematic killing of the political opponents of a regime constituted genocide. In 1948, securing Soviet support for the convention required compromises on this issue among others. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court of 1998, through its formulation of the crime of extermination as a crime against humanity,29 to a degree corrected this omission. In recent years, scholars have approached genocide and crimes against humanity as overlapping categories, helping us to clarify the circumstances and consequences of many cases of mass murder. Among them is the cluster of crimes committed by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979, including the genocide of ethnic and religious minorities and extermination of educated elites, as well as political purges of the ruling party. The killing extended so far as to reduce the Cambodian population by between 1 and 2 million people, up to 25 per cent of its 1975 total of 7.8 million. Here was a regime devouring its own.30 This frenzy of purification happened at a time when Cambodian society was torn apart by the spillover of the violence of the US-Vietnam war. The pro-American regime in Cambodia was easily overthrown after the American withdrawal from South Vietnam. Given the wartime devastation of Vietnam, the new communist regime there focused on rebuilding its own country. In Cambodia this political vacuum was filled by a cadre of zealots aiming at the total reconstruction and ‘purification’ of Cambodian society. Like the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge aimed at creating one, undifferentiated people. Killing nonKhmers was one objective. Like Stalin, they opened a network of camps in which torture was used to expose the ever-increasing number of internal enemies whom tortured men and women named as such. Most of these ‘enemies’ were part of the Khmer Rouge movement itself. Here the Pol Pot regime imitated Stalin’s purge trials of the 1930s in which most of the surviving old Bolsheviks were denounced, convicted and executed. In both Stalin’s Soviet Union and Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge-led Cambodia, there was a penumbra of victims trapped in the net of torture and killing simply through family or social links to those arrested. 29 For the text of the Rome Statute, see www.icc-cpi.int/resource-library/documents/rseng.pdf, 7.1.b. 30 Ben Kiernan, ‘The demography of genocide in Southeast Asia: the death tolls in Cambodia, 1975–79, and East Timor, 1975–80’, Critical Asian Studies 35:4 (2003), 585–97. More generally, see Luong Ung, First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers (New York: Harper Collins, 2000).

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The parallels with the history of the Soviet Union and the Holodomor go further. A state apparatus emerging from a devastating surrogate war, including massive US aerial bombardment of Cambodian territory, never demobilised. Instead, it turned war inward, to reconstruct the Cambodian nation by inflicting unlimited violence against it. Unlike the man-made famine in Ukraine and other parts of southern Russia, the Khmer Rouge’s atrocities were not part of a strategic plan to industrialise the country. On the contrary, the Cambodian state was ruralised. The regime forcibly emptied the cities. Here was a reflection of some elements of Chinese communist thinking at the time of the Cultural Revolution of the decade 1966–76, in that the ideal to which to work was a socialist agrarian state. The Khmer Rouge took these ideas and turned them into a nightmare. Here was a murderous withdrawal from the modern world, and from those transnational exchanges of trade, skills and knowledge which enhance relatively isolated regions. The Khmer Rouge tried to do the opposite – to forge by fire and cruelty a new people hardened sufficiently to build a new order.31 In the four genocidal projects of 1900–45 we have surveyed, genocide took its course without outside intervention to stop it. There were protests against the cruelty of the treatment of the Herero, the Armenians and the Jews. Fewer voices were raised against the horrors of the Holodomor, but in this case too, the famine came to an end, just when other forms of terror were inflicted on the people of the Soviet Union. In Southwest Africa, in Ottoman Turkey, in the Ukraine in the 1930s and in Nazi-occupied Europe, genocide succeeded. In the three cases of genocide following 1945 on which we focus, genocide stopped when external armed force arrived to put a halt to the killings and to the regime operating the terror. Suffering armed Cambodian incursions into Vietnamese territory and worried by the Chinese communists’ support for the Khmer Rouge, Hanoi took decisive retaliatory action. In January 1979, the Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia, defeated the Khmer Rouge, and replaced their regime. After a brief Chinese invasion of northern Vietnam, a Khmer government-in-exile, based in Thailand and supported by China, was created to rival the new Vietnamese- and Soviet-backed People’s Republic of Kampuchea. But the mass killing was over. After a peace agreement signed in 1991 in Paris, the two sides merged into the 31 Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

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Kingdom of Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge refused to participate, but finally surrendered in 1999. Four years later, a UN-sponsored mixed court of Cambodian and international jurists opened hearings leading to trials of the leaders of the Khmer Rouge movement. A Victims’ Support Section enabled those who had suffered at the hands of the Khmer Rouge to come forward to testify and to seek reparations. The court did not have the power to impose the death sentence. To date (2020) five people have been indicted for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. Three have been convicted (two for genocide) and have received life sentences.

Genocide in the Former Yugoslavia The break-up of the federation of Yugoslavia in 1991–2 into warring sub-states brought genocide back to Europe. The former Yugoslav army acted to defend the rump Serbian state and Serbs living in the new states of BosniaHerzegovina and Croatia. Thus, a national army turned into the armed wing of one ethnic group, Orthodox Serbs, fighting against predominantly Roman Catholic Croats and Muslim Bosniaks. The salient feature of this conflict was the way it resurrected earlier ethnic hatreds, long controlled if not eliminated during the years when Josef Broz Tito, a Croat-Slovene hero of the resistance to the Nazis, ruled as president of Yugoslavia. After his death in 1980, and still more after the collapse of communism in 1989, ambitious former communists turned into militant ethnic nationalists. They thereby returned the former Yugoslavia to its bloody wartime past. In World War One, the Serbian army suffered higher casualties than any other combatant force. In World War Two, a civil war broke out between communists and monarchists. The latter, known as Chetniks, were Serb and Montenegrin troops prepared to form an alliance with occupying Italian troops and to allow occupying German troops to destroy the communists before the Chetniks would confront the Nazis. But Tito’s forces won the vicious partisan war both against the Nazis and the Chetniks. The Chetnik leader Draza Mihailović was captured by partisans and executed after the war. The third generation to suffer extreme violence in the former Yugoslavia carried these earlier grievances with them. Serbs could no longer fight communists, but they returned to earlier ethnic hatreds and proceeded to wage war against Croat civilians, many of them Roman Catholics, and Bosniaks, many of them Muslim. In Vukovar, Serb forces seized a hospital 61

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in which many wounded Croats were being treated. They took the wounded to a nearby farm where local Serb paramilitaries massacred them. War crimes of as great or greater magnitude were committed by Serb and Bosnian Serb (Republika Srpska) forces in Bosnia. The siege of Sarajevo by the Serbian army lasted four years. Over 5,000 civilians were killed. Bosnian Serb forces and paramilitaries organised mass rapes of Muslim women, as part of their programme of ethnic cleansing. Approximately 10,000 women were tortured in this way, announcing to other Muslims that it would be better if they all left or they would suffer a similar fate. In addition, the treatment of men, women and children in the besieged Muslim enclave of Srebrenica in July 1995 turned genocidal. Though designated a safe area under UN Protection, Srebrenica’s Muslim men, totalling 8,000, were separated from their families, who were deported from their homes. The men were all shot.32 In 2006, the International Court of Justice found that the state of Serbia and Montenegro was not responsible for the genocide, but was guilty of not preventing it and of not prosecuting the perpetrators. The leaders of Republika Srpska, President Radovan Karadžić and General Ratko Mladić were found guilty of genocide and of crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, sitting in the Hague.33 Serbian President Slobodan Milošević died in jail before his trial for these crimes was completed. A general framework agreement for peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina was negotiated in Dayton, Ohio in November 1995, and signed a month later in Paris. Its results have been mixed. Bosnia is formally unified, but effectively divided between the Republika Srpska and the Croat-Bosniak Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. A European military force of some 600 soldiers is still stationed in Bosnia in part to prevent a further outbreak of hostilities. Unemployment is rampant and investment levels low. Perpetrators and victims still live cheek by jowl, for example in Srebrenica, and Serbia (with Russian support) has blocked UN resolutions declaring that crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia constituted genocide. Thus, Serbs still resist legitimating the findings of the International Criminal Court. 32 On the war and war crimes in Bosnia, see Emir Suljagic,́ Postcards from the Grave, trans. Lejla Haveric (London: Saqi, 2005); Thomas Cushman and Stjepan G. Meštrović, This Time We Knew: Western Responses to Genocide in Bosnia (New York University Press, 1996); Michael Sells, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 33 Karadžić trial summary, www.icty.org/x/cases/karadzic/tjug/en/160324_judge ment_summary.pdf; Mladić trial summary, https://icty.org/x/cases/mladic/tjug/ en/171122-summary-en.pdf.

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Both Bosnia and Serbia still bear the scars of the civil war of the 1990s. They have not been admitted to the European Union, though presently (2020) Bosnia and Herzegovina is a ‘potential candidate country’ for accession. Museums and monuments to the victims have been built, but the region’s history and memory remain embittered and divided by the shadow of genocide.

The Rwandan Genocide In 1962 Rwanda was granted independence by Belgium, which had controlled the country under League of Nations and UN authority from 1918. Ethnic Hutus replaced the Tutsi monarchy and installed a republican form of government under President Grégoire Kayibanda. Hutus held power from the beginning, challenged by a minority of Tutsis. Juvénal Habyarimana, minister of defence under Kayibanda, overthrew him in 1973. Habyarimana’s regime was threatened by a Tutsi rebellion, led by exiles who returned to Rwanda as an invading force in 1990. Civil war preceded genocide, here as in Cambodia and in the former Yugoslavia. On 6 April 1994, Habyarimana was killed when his plane, also carrying the president of neighbouring Burundi, was shot down. Habyarimana’s death created a political crisis immediately exploited by radical Hutu leaders who blamed Tutsis for the murder of their head of state. Preparations for mass violence had been underway for months. Almost immediately, police and militants murdered leading Tutsis and moderate Hutus. They then turned their wrath on Tutsis all over the country, murdering perhaps 70 per cent of the Tutsi population. Rape was a central part of the genocidal campaign of the following 100 days. Upwards of 500,000 women were raped over a threemonth period. Mass mobilisation of Hutu youth into militant groups was abetted by the prior distribution of arms, purchased from Western and African arms dealers, and of machetes, the weapon of choice of this face-to-face genocide. Propaganda, much of it transmitted by radio stations, broadcast messages of undying hatred of Tutsis, seen as both long-term enemies and as the authors of the assassination of Habyarimana, an accusation never proved. Roman Catholic priests were among the perpetrators, some even leading the murderers to their prey. This was a whirlwind genocide.34 Hutus mutilated and killed their enemies in a frenzy of terror more rapid than any of the other murderous campaigns 34 For powerful accounts, see Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (New York: Picador, 1998) and Jean Hatzfeld, Une saison de machettes (Paris: Le Seuil, 2003).

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surveyed in this chapter. Later research indicated that the killers saw the moment as an existential crisis, one in which they either murdered their enemies or would suffer the same fate themselves. Just like the Nazis, Hutus used conspiracy theories to justify their recourse to murderous violence as a means of maintaining power, threatened by Tutsi insurgents and by a social and economic crisis that undermined the regime.35 This was no failed state, but a well-organised one capable of mass mobilisation for mass murder. The genocide ended on 4 July 1994, when the Rwanda Patriotic Front, led by Paul Kagame, seized control of the capital Kigali. By then 2 million Rwandans had fled the country. Kagame’s forces pursued Hutus into the Congo, thereby becoming embroiled in nine more years of armed conflict, which Gérard Prunier terms ‘Africa’s world war’.36 There are now still, two decades later, lingering suspicions that Western powers, in particular France and Belgium, were not only aware of Hutu preparations for mass murder but also helped train and arm the perpetrators. At present (2020) a presidential commission in Paris is looking for the truth.37 More is known about the failure of UN troops, dispatched in November 1993 to keep the peace. They were ill-equipped and had no authority to use force to stop the killings. Their position was made untenable by British, French and American reluctance to take action while the genocide was under way. In Arusha in Tanzania, the home of the African Court of Human Rights, an International Tribunal for Rwanda has conducted trials, beginning in 1995. Of 93 defendants, 14 were acquitted, and 62 convicted. This Tribunal broke new legal ground in two ways. First, it successfully prosecuted the media for incitement to commit genocide. Secondly, it found that rape was a crime in international criminal law, amounting to torture and thereby a crime against humanity. In addition, village tribunals in Rwanda itself, with locally elected judges, known as Gacaca courts, held hearings from 2002 to 2012. They heard accusations and testimony from approximately 2 million witnesses, handing out sentences which at times were reduced when the accused admitted his crime. 35 Helen M. Hintjens, ‘Explaining the 1994 genocide in Rwanda’, Journal of Modern African Studies 37:2 (1999), 241–86. 36 Gérard Prunier, Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwanda Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). See also René Lemarchand, The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). 37 Gaïdz Minassian and David Servenay, ‘Vincent Duclert: la commission sur le Rwanda aura un pouvoir d’investigation dans toutes les archives françaises’, Le Monde, 5 April 2019.

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Conclusion Genocide spanned the twentieth century. It occurred in Europe, Africa and Asia. Before 1945, the perpetrators completed their genocidal plans, even when they lost the wars in which genocide took place. From 1945 on, genocidal campaigns ended when international forces put a stop to them. Even so, most of the acts today described as genocidal in Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda, still happened before international or regional intervention stopped them. There are those who include in the history of twentieth-century genocide events from other wars, as well as events which emerged without the outbreak of war. This chapter claims only that the proximate cause of genocide in most of the recognised incidents was the prosecution of war. Two questions remain to be answered. First, why, under wartime circumstances, did genocide not happen elsewhere, and even in the cases examined here, why did some people not participate in the crime? One answer is that individuals and groups had the ‘antibodies’ that enabled them to resist the infection of genocidal propaganda and mobilisation for mass murder. These antibodies took the form of moral convictions, in religious, political or military circles, whose honour and whose humanity precluded their participation in genocide. The second question is how can genocide be prevented? The answer is ‘not easily’. Human rights instruments help punish criminals and instruct the young. In each and every case examined in this chapter, though, we can see that genocide came out of war: that is, military conflict breeds conditions in which genocide may occur. The best way to prevent genocide is therefore to prevent war.

Bibliographic Note The work of political philosopher Hannah Arendt on totalitarianism and on the Eichmann trial, and of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman on modernity and the Holocaust, provide the best theoretical frameworks in which to understand the origins, conduct and consequences of genocide. For recent scholarship on the Herero genocide, see the collection of articles edited by Zimmerer and Zeller. See also Dirk Moses’ anthology, Empire, Colony, Genocide. On the Armenian genocide, Raymond Kevorkian’s books are fundamental, as are those of Taner Akçam.

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On the Holodomor, Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands is an important study. So is Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine. On the Shoah, Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz must be read. Both Christopher Browning and Saul Friedlander have written classics on the way the Shoah unfolded. Friedlander’s own memoir When Memory Comes is also essential reading. On international law and the Genocide Convention of 1948, a wideranging and moving account may be found in Philippe Sands’ East-West Street, introducing us to the lives of Lemkin, Hersch Lauterpacht and Sands’ own grandfather Leon. The place to start in probing the Cambodian case is Luong Ung’s memoir First They Killed My Father. For the political history of the Khmer Rouge, see Ben Kiernan’s books, in particular his 1996 study, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979. On the former Yugoslavia, Emir Suljagic’s ́ Postcards from the Grave is arresting. Thomas Cushman and Stjepan G. Meštrovic’s ́ collection of essays entitled This Time We Knew: Western Responses to Genocide in Bosnia is instructive, as is Michael Sells’ The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia. On Rwanda, Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families is a classic. So are the books written by French journalist Jean Hatzfeld, in particular Machete Season, originally published in French in 2003.

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3

The Armenian Genocide An Overview t a n e r a k c¸ a m

The date 24 April 1915 is generally seen as the symbolic beginning of the Armenian genocide, as it marks the date on which some 200 Armenian political, religious and intellectual leaders in Istanbul were arrested. In fact, massacres of Armenians had already begun in the southeastern and eastern provinces of Anatolia and the Caucasus as early as August–September 1914, months before the Ottoman entry into World War One. The first official decision for the extermination (imha) of Armenians was taken on 1 December 1914, after the entry of the Ottoman Empire into the war and derived from developments in frontline areas. That was limited in scope to the provinces of Van and Bitlis. The final decision to ‘annihilate all’ of Turkey’s Armenian population appears to have been taken between 15 February and 3 March 1915.1 From then until the war’s end around 1 million Armenians lost their lives through massacre, starvation and disease.

The Balkan War and the ‘Homogenising’ of Anatolia It is always difficult to pinpoint the beginning and end of historical events, but the decision for a wholesale extermination of Armenians can be traced back to a series of events that began with the Balkan Wars (1912–13), which resulted in massive territorial losses for the Ottoman Empire and its near complete expulsion from European soil. Some 83 per cent of its European territories (and 69 per cent of its population) were lost in less than two weeks.2 Over

1 Taner Akçam, ‘When was the decision to annihilate the Armenians taken?’, Journal of Genocide Research 21:4 (2019), 457–80, https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2019.1630893. · 2 Stanford Shaw, Osmanlı Imparatorluğ u ve Modern Türkiye, Part I I (Istanbul: E Yayınları, 1983), p. 359.

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a longer term, between 1878 and 1920, the Ottomans lost 85 per cent of their European territory and 75 per cent of the empire’s population.3 On 23 January 1913, with the Balkan War still raging, a cabal of ‘Unionist’ officers, representing the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), toppled the Ottoman government in the so-called ‘Raid on the Porte’, a profound blow to the Unionists’ opponents that ushered in a period of dictatorship lasting until the end of World War One. After the devastating losses in the Balkans, the idea of ‘Turkifying’ Anatolia took firm root in the minds of the CUP leadership. Until this point, their official ideology had been ‘Ottomanism’, a ‘Unity of [Different] Communities’ (I·ttihad-ı Anasır) under the centralising figure of the Sultan, and the Committee’s leadership had been hesitant to embrace ‘Turkism’ (Türkçülük). Now, however, continued co-existence with the empire’s Christian population appeared to them not merely impossible, but dangerous. Their goals now became the rescue and revival of the Turkish nation, which had existed in the Ottoman state without a ‘[national] consciousness’. They imagined a new Muslim-Turkish community extending from the Aegean to the Caucasus and central Asia, requiring territorial expansion and the ‘Turkifying’ of the economy.4 The principal hindrance was seen as the Christian population of Anatolia. The population exchanges with Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria that resulted from the Balkan Wars did not solve this problem of homogenising Anatolia. They were more an acknowledgement of what was already transpiring of its own accord, but the Unionists thought to extend this policy to Anatolia as a whole, where millions of Greek Orthodox, Armenian and Syriac Christians still lived. The most immediate threat was perceived to be the Greeks of the Aegean littoral, owing to their large numbers and proximity to Greece. They would be the first object of any ‘cleansing’ operation. The creation in 30 November 1913 of the ‘Special Organisation’ (Tes¸kilat-ı Mahsusa) was an important milestone in this ‘ethnic cleansing’ effort.5 Its purpose, according to one of its founders, was twofold: the establishment of ‘1. Pan-Islamism that would gather and unite all Muslims under one flag; and 2. 3 Ertuğ rul Zekai Ökte (ed.), Ottoman Archives, Yıldız Collection, The Armenian Question, 3 vols. (Istanbul: The Historical Research Foundation, Istanbul Research Center, 1989), I, p. xii. 4 Ziya Gökalp, Türkles¸mek I·slamlas¸mak Muasırlas¸mak (Istanbul: Ötüken Nes¸riyat, 1988), pp. 39–41. 5 Polat Safi, ‘The Ottoman Special Organization – Tes¸kilat-ı Mahsusa: a historical assessment with particular reference to its operations against British occupied Egypt (1914– 1916)’ (unpublished Masters’ thesis, Bilkent University, September 2006).

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Turkism that would bring the Turkish race into a [condition of] political unity.’6 The new organisation’s first area of operations was the Aegean region, where it was to remove the ‘internal tumors’, namely, the Greek population,7 from the coastal areas. ‘[R]eliable . . . self-sacrificing, patriotic elements’ were summoned to Istanbul, ‘a secret cabinet’ formed and grand plans prepared, with the knowledge of only select government members.8 There were two different dimensions to the policies put into place – legal and violent actions – that would later be employed in the Armenian genocide. The now CUP-led Ottoman government would provide the legal framework for the removal of the Aegean Greeks, even proposing to Athens another reciprocal population exchange and holding discussions that continued until the outbreak of World War One. While these negotiations were underway, a second, parallel effort was being undertaken by the Unionists and their Special Organisation.9 It had a similar goal but would resort to force and even violence where necessary. The army (mainly the gendarmerie and Special Organisation units) attacked Greek villages, occasionally carrying out small-scale massacres, such as in Foça, near Izmir, or forcibly expelling the inhabitants and driving them to the coast for evacuation. The ongoing removal of the Aegean Greeks would continue during the war, since their presence along the empire’s vulnerable coastline constituted a security threat for the beleaguered Ottoman state, although most Greeks were now resettled in the interior instead of being expelled. Various sources put the number of Greeks expelled from Aegean littoral and eastern Thrace at between 200,000 and 500,000.10

Armenian Reform and the February 1914 Agreement The Balkan Wars also spurred Armenian leaders into action, with appeals to Russia for intervention and a call for an Armenian national delegation, to be headed by the Egyptian Armenian politician, Boghos Nubar Pasha.11 These · 6 Hüsamettin Ertürk, Iki Devrin Perde Arkası (Istanbul: Sebil Yayınevi, 1964). 7 From the memoirs of Kus¸çubas¸ı Es¸ref, one of the principal figures in the Special Organisation, quoted in Celal Bayar, Ben de Yazdım, 8 vols. (Istanbul: Baha Matbaası, 1967), V, p. 1578. 8 Ibid., p. 1573. 9 Ibid., p. 1574. 10 See, for instance, Halil Mentes¸e, Osmanlı Mebusan Meclisi Reisi Halil Mentes¸e’nin Anıları (Istanbul: Hürriyet Vakfı Yayınları, 1986), p. 166; Meclisi Mebusan Zabıt Ceridesi, Devre 3, · Içtima Senesi 5 (Ankara: TMMM Basımevi, 1992), I, pp. 285, 287. 11 Vatche Ghazarian (ed.), Boghos Nubar’s Papers and the Armenian Question 1915–1918 (Waltham: Mayreni Publishing, 1996), pp. xxvi–xxix.

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diplomatic efforts slowly bore fruit, as the Great Powers began to push their own Armenian reform initiatives on the Porte. Discussions that started in the summer of 1913 eventually concluded with the signing of the 8 February 1914 reform agreement, whereby the seven eastern and northeastern provinces of Anatolia would be combined into two larger provinces and overseen by two foreign inspectorates, with Armenian participation. During the discussions the Great Powers for the most part looked at the reform package as a ‘step toward partition’.12 ‘Asiatic Turkey cannot live for very long’, said the French chargé d’affaires in St Petersburg, who proposed ‘to establish small states in Anatolia based on nationalities, such as Armenian, Syrian, and Arabian’.13 Russian representative André Mandelstam described the initiative as ‘the first step toward rescuing Armenia from Turkish oppression’.14 The CUP leaders also understood that the reform agreement was a step toward the partition of their empire, with Armenia’s secession following the Balkan model of Greece, Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria. In such a situation, the CUP saw the continued Armenian presence in Anatolia as an ever-present threat, and the implementation of the reform package was seen as incompatible with the future viability and territorial integrity of the Ottoman state. In a speech given on 29 December 1914 in Damascus, Fourth Army Commander Cemal Pasha cited the agreement as a principal reason that the Ottomans had opted to enter the war on the side of the Germans. The Ottoman regime’s first act upon entering the war was abrogation of this agreement.15

The First Stage On 2 August 1914, the day the secret Ottoman–German treaty was signed, the CUP Central Committee took a series of important decisions. Foremost among these was the decision to reorganise the Special Organisation, now to consist of paramilitary units that would incite the Muslims of Russia to revolt. The most significant measure, however, was the dispatch of Central 12 Description of the reforms and negotiations by Marling, the British chargé d’affaires in Istanbul, in a report of the meetings that he sent to London. See Yusuf Hikmet Bayur, Türk I·nkılabı Tarihi (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayını, 1983), I I/3, p. 131. 13 Ibid., 140. 14 André Mandelstam, Das Armenische Problem im Lichte des Völker und Menschenrechts (Berlin: G. Stilke, 1931), p. 31. 15 The matter was taken up by the Council of Ministers on 28 December 1914 and the · decision rendered on 31 December. BOA.MV., 237/209 and BOA.DH.ID., 86/72.

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Committee member Bahaettin ¸Sakir to Erzurum to form the regional version of the Special Organisation’s ‘central committee’. This committee would subsequently take the first decisions regarding anti-Armenian massacres. The new Special Organisation units (especially those within the Ottoman Third Army) were recruited from three sources. The first of these was numerous Muslim refugees who had fled from the Balkans and the Caucasus. Recently driven from their homelands and often subjected to massacres at the hands of the Christian communities there, they were often seething with a desire for revenge. A second source was the Kurdish tribes of eastern and southeastern Anatolia. The so-called irregular ‘Hamidiye’ regiments formed by Sultan Abdul Hamid had never been fully dissolved, and they were now reorganised around remaining core personnel. The third important source for personnel was the prisons. Criminals of all sorts now received a special pardon in exchange for serving. While the Special Organisation units were being formed and activated, similar developments were afoot among the Armenians of the Caucasus. The Armenian National Bureau, established during the 1912 Balkan War, was revived and volunteer units assembled to fight within the Russian ranks. These efforts would eventually produce 5,000-man units of Armenian volunteers.16 While their military effect was negligible, the psychological impact on the Unionist leadership was profound. By August 1914, Armenians in the border regions were increasingly viewed as a security threat whose activities were to be closely monitored and reported on by local authorities. According to a circular sent to the provinces in early September, the selective measures against the Armenians now assumed a general character. Provincial governors were ordered to place all local Armenian journalists and organisation heads under close surveillance and to arrest those appearing suspicious.17 The Third Army then ordered local officials to take harsh measures against the families of Armenians fleeing to Russia and against Armenian military deserters hiding within the country.18 The official Ottoman entry into the war came in November 1914, but fighting had already begun in the Caucasus and Van region in early September. Units infiltrated into Russia and Iran, attacked Armenian villages there and carried out massacres. 16 General Gabriel Gorganian, ‘Armenian participation in World War I on the Caucasian Front, Part I’, Armenian Review 20:3–79 (1967), 3–21; and Part I I, Armenian Review 20:4–80 (1967), 66–80. 17 BOA.DH.¸SFR., 44/200. 18 Askeri Tarih Belgeleri Dergisi 31:81 (1982), 39, Doc. no. 1810; Askeri Tarih Belgeleri Dergisi 32:83 (1983), 7, Doc. no. 1894.

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The governors of the border provinces reported the Armenian sabotage of telegraph lines and murder of soldiers on patrol.19 The humiliation and losses from the Balkan debacle were still fresh in Ottoman minds at the outbreak of World War One, and the fear that a war with the Russians might bring similar results was palpable. Some local authorities demanded that the central government ‘take firm decisions and give clear instructions vis-à-vis the Armenians’.20 ‘We can see that the wall of flames is drawing nearer’, wrote one official, and ‘to delay is suicidal’. Action must be taken ‘before the Armenians have the chance to stage a rebellion’.21 In reply, Interior Minister Talat Pasha instructed the governors to act as the local situation required ‘until clear and concise instructions could be given’.22 The first decision for such preventive measures was taken on 1 December 1914 by the Special Organisation’s Central Committee in Erzurum: Those Armenians, both in the city centers [of Bitlis and Van] and in the surrounding [towns and villages] who are suspected of being potential leaders of the revolt or who would attack Muslims are to be arrested in advance [and] in the event of attacks on Muslims, they [those arrested] are all to be deported to Bitlis immediately in order that they be exterminated [imha].23

Memoirs of the period report the measures being broadly implemented around Van and Bitlis as of 1 December, including the arrest of provincial Armenian leaders and the rounding up and marching off of Armenian males to be murdered.24

The Decision – 15 February to 3 March 1915 In a letter written on 5 March 1915, CUP Central Committee member and head of the Erzurum branch of the Special Organisation Bahaettin ¸Sakir wrote: ‘The Committee [of Union and Progress] . . . [has taken] the decision to annihilate all of the Armenians living in Turkey until not one remains’, 19 Some examples: BOA.DH.¸SFR., 441/33, 442/36 and 445/100. 20 Cable, dated 17 November 1914, from Erzurum Provincial Governor Tahsin. BOA. DH.¸SFR., 448/75. 21 Cable, dated 28–9 November 1914, from Van Provincial Governor Cevdet, BOA. DH.¸SFR., 451/19. 22 Cables, dated 18 and 29 November 1914, from the Interior Ministry, BOA.DH.¸SFR., 46/ 303.1 and 47/236. 23 Cable, dated 1 December 1914, from the provincial governor of Erzurum, relaying the decisions of the Erzurum branch of the Special Organisation’s Central Committee, BOA.DH.¸SFR. 451/62. 24 A-Do¯, Van 1915: The Great Events of Vasbouragan (London: Gomidas Institute, 2017), pp. 73–88.

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adding that the ‘the government will provide the necessary directives [and] explanations to the provincial governors and army commanders regarding how the killing and eliminating is to be carried out’.25 On the same day, the Interior Ministry directed the provincial governors to turn to the Third Army command for guidance on the necessary measures to take against ‘Armenian activities’.26 There were several reasons for the broadening of the killings from local ‘extermination’ (imha) of the male Armenian population of Bitlis and Van to the ‘annihilation’ (yok etmek) of all Armenian subjects. Chief among them was the series of Ottoman military defeats suffered early in the war, including that of a major excursion into the Caucasus in December 1914 that had resulted in the loss of at least 60,000 troops, mostly from exposure,27 and left eastern Anatolia open to Russian invasion. In such an event, the region covered by the February 1914 Reform Agreement would then pass into Russian control, ensuring the ‘very bright future’ the tsar had promised the Armenians.28 Shortly thereafter, the major Ottoman operation to cross the Suez Canal begun in January 1915 proved to be a complete fiasco, leaving the entire eastern Mediterranean littoral open to British attack.29 The Entente’s Gallipoli campaign (February 1915–January 1916) also proved extremely costly for the Ottomans in terms of lives and resources; of the 213,882 casualties, 87,000 died from combat or disease, or went missing. Throughout the campaign the Ottomans were worried that the Gallipoli front would collapse, with ‘no one [knowing] what the status of Istanbul would be eight hours later’.30 At the end of February 1915, the decision was taken to move the Ottoman government from Istanbul to Eskis¸ehir and Konya in the Anatolian interior.31 The very real fear prevailed among the unionist leaders that the empire as a whole might be lost.

25 Aram Andonian, Medz Vocirı [Büyük Cinayet] (Boston: Bahag Printing House, 1921), pp. 116–17. 26 BOA.DH.¸SFR., 51/15 and 17. 27 Fevzi Çakmak, Birinci Dünya Savas¸ında Doğ u Cephesi (Ankara: Genelkurmay Basımevi, 2005), pp. 73–4. 28 Yektan Türkyılmaz, ‘Rethinking genocide: violence and victimhood’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Duke University, 2011), p. 234. 29 Nevzat Artuç, Cemal Pas¸a (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2008), pp. 219–24; Mithat Aydın, ‘Ali Fuad (Erden)in Savas¸ Hatıratına I. ve II. Süveys¸ Kanalı Seferi’, Belgi no: 13 (2017), 375–9. 30 Testimony of Unionist leader Cevat at the post-war trial in Istanbul, Takvim-i Vekayi, no: 3554, 14 May 1919. 31 BOA.DH.¸SFR., 50/98, 125, 126, 227 and 229.

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The First Deportations Unionist leaders were also distressed by events in Cilicia. British preparations · for a landing near Iskenderun were afoot, and warships bombarded the area in preparation. Small-scale landings had been attempted and British soldiers captured.32 Armed clashes with military deserters broke out in the Zeytun and Bitlis regions. Unionist leaders saw all this as part of the Armenians’ preparations for an empire-wide revolt.33 The disastrous campaign at Sarıkamıs¸ was the turning point. A message to the army commanders on 25 February 1915 ordered them to disarm all Armenian soldiers. In addition, the commanders were given the authority to ‘suppress and . . . annihilate with the most extreme force’ those who opposed the government’s orders and to declare martial law in any situation where they saw fit.34 A similar order was sent to the provincial governors on 28 February. Listing some above-mentioned local events, the Interior Ministry claimed that these ‘have proved that an attempted uprising was being planned in the country by our enemies’.35 The first measure by the governor of Adana, announced on 1 March, was the deportation of Armenians around Dörtyol (Cilicia), site of most British subversive activity. The Interior Ministry did not simply ratify provincial deportation orders; it also ordered that ‘revolutions and revolts should not be allowed to emerge’. If any were observed, officials and officers were to ‘act with the greatest force and despatch’ so that the perpetrators ‘be exterminated’.36 On 1 April the governor of Adana ordered the Dörtyol measures expanded to include I·skenderun and the town of Haçin.37 The next deportation order was issued in early April for Zeytun, a region long suspect in the authorities’ eyes. A year earlier its inhabitants had been suspected of stockpiling weapons and planning a revolt; several arrests were made.38 With the onset of the war, clashes between the authorities and Armenian military deserters broke out, especially following the defeat at 32 BOA.DH.¸SFR., 456/109, 110 (6 January 1915), 116 (7 January 1915) and 459/91 (1 February 1915). · · 33 Erdoğ an Cengiz (ed.), Ermeni Komitelerinin A’mâl ve Harekât-ı Ihtilâliyyesi, I’lan-ı Mes¸rutiyyet’den Evvel ve Sonra (Ankara: Bas¸bakanlık Basımevi, 1983), pp. 226–34. 34 ibid. 35 BOA.DH.¸SFR., 50/127 (28 February 1915). 36 BOA.DH.¸SFR., 50/141. See also Aram Arkun, ‘Zeytun and the commencement of the Armenian genocide’, in A Question of Genocide Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Göçek and Norman Naimark (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 240–4. 37 BOA.DH.¸SFR., 466/125 (1 April 1915). 38 BOA.DH.¸SFR., 39/47 (22 March 1914), 40/45 (19 April 1914) and BOA.DH.2.¸Sube., 54/20 (18 April 1914).

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Sarıkamıs¸.39 The local population largely assisted the central government in capturing deserters, but Istanbul nevertheless viewed the clashes as the start of a revolt. It thus made the decision to deport the Armenians of Zeytun, 3,446 persons, to central Anatolia.40 This measure was taken despite the reports from the provinces openly stating that the locals were assisting the security forces and that there was no sign of a revolt.41 An order sent on 24 April, while some of these deportee convoys were still on the road, requested that the Armenians from Zeytun not be sent to Konya, but much further on, to the Syrian regions of Aleppo and the area around Der Zor.42 This change of orders can be seen as the starting point for the elimination of the entire Armenian population.

Van and the Implementation of Genocide The date of 24 April 1915 marks the beginning of the empire-wide elimination of the Armenian population, with ‘as many as 180’ of Istanbul’s leading Armenians arrested and sent off to be imprisoned in Çankırı and Ayas¸.43 Further arrests brought the total figure to 235 by the end of May.44 The operation was initially spurred by a 20 April report from Van of an ‘uprising’. Referred to as a revolt in Turkish sources, it was the climax of a regional situation that had been developing since late 1914.The numerous attacks against Armenians throughout the province had increased greatly since the outbreak of the war but the spark that ignited the ‘uprising’ came after 13 April when the provincial governor sent a report on the ‘elimination’ of several leading Armenian rebels and the arrest of a member of parliament.45 Systematic massacres were then carried out in the surrounding towns and villages and the survivors began to stream into the provincial capital. The ‘uprising’ then was simply an effort to escape the massacres.46 39 For several local reports concerning the clashes, see: DH.EUM. 2. S¸ ube, 5/32/1 ve 54/ 20. For the Zeytun incident, see Arkun, ‘Zeytun and the Commencement of the Armenian Genocide’, 221–44. 40 BOA.DH.¸SFR., 468/47 (21 April 1915). 41 Genelkurmay Bas¸kanlığ ı Ars¸iv Belgeleriyle Ermeni Faaliyetleri (Ankara: Genelkurmay Basımevi, 2005), I, pp. 71–2, 355–61. 42 BOA.DH.¸SFR., 52/93 (24 April 1915). 43 BOA.DH.¸SFR., 52/102 (25 April 1915). 44 The figure of 235 is found in an undated official government reply to a note by the Entente powers of 24 May 1915. Cengiz (ed.), Ermeni Komitelerinin A’mâl ve Harekât-ı I·htilâliyyesi p. 311. 45 BOA.DH.¸SFR., 467/113 (13 April 1915). A-Do¯, Van 1915, pp. 67–135. 46 See A-Do¯, Van 1915; Onnig Mukhitarian, An Account of the Glorious Struggle of VanVasbouragan (Part I) and Haig Gossoian, The Epic Story of Self Defense of Armenian in the Historic City of Van (Part I I) (Michigan: Raven Publisher, 1980).

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The provincial governor’s reports clearly show that the massacres had been planned, and in several reports he listed the villages razed and the number of Armenians killed.47 The measures taken on 24 April 1915 were not limited to the Istanbul arrests or to the redirecting of the Zeytun deportees. A whole series of orders was sent to the provinces demanding the closing of Armenian newspapers, political parties and associations, and the arrests of leading Armenian community members. House-to-house searches were also conducted and those hiding weapons arrested.48 A special law was issued on 26 April in this regard, and on 2 May another called for the collecting of weapons from the nonMuslim and especially the Armenian population. Armenians wishing to travel abroad were now obliged to receive special permission from the civil administration, with the restrictions later expanded to make all Armenians subject to the military’s approval for any travel, internal or external.49 Those Armenian community leaders arrested both in Istanbul and the provinces were to be eliminated by a variety of means, a practice that was a distinguishing feature of the Armenian genocide. In any case, with the advent of the war, army commanders were given the authority to carry out death sentences handed down by local military courts without waiting for central government approval.50 The deportations did not begin simultaneously throughout the empire. While in May various cities were gradually included in the operation, the 24 April decree only mentioned that Armenians from ‘I·skenderun, Dörtyol, Adana, Haçin, Zeytun, and Sis [were] to be sent to the vicinities of southeast of Aleppo, [Der] Zor and Urfa’.51 The areas of Armenian resettlement were also expanded as were those areas subject to deportations. The 24 April decree had listed only ‘the southeastern part of Aleppo and the areas around [Der] Zor and Urfa’, but this was extended on 23 May 1915: ‘the Armenians from Van, Erzurum, and Bitlis would be resettled in the provincial district of Urfa except for the [administrative center], in [Der] Zor and the southern parts of Mosul; those from Adana, Aleppo, and Maras¸ and their environs 47 BOA.DH.¸SFR., 467/125, 126 and 468/21 (14 April 1915); Askeri Tarih Belgeleri Dergisi 31:81 (1982), 124, 127, Doc. no. 1826 (20 April 1915) and Doc. no. 1827 (20 April 1915). 48 Cable from the Interior Ministry to all provinces, dated 24 April 1915, BOA.DH.¸SFR., 52/96, 97 and 98. 49 BOA.DH.¸SFR., 52/95 (24 April 1915), 53/334 (13 June 1915) and 55/141 (21 August 1915). 50 BOA.MV., 237/89. For a city-by-city account of the liquidation of Armenian intellectuals, see Raymond Kevorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 289–625. 51 BOA.DH.¸SFR., 52/93 (24 April 1915).

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would be sent to the east[ern part] of the province of Suriye and the eastern and southeastern parts of the province of Aleppo’.52 The largest wave of deportations took place in June and July 1915. After the eastern and Black Sea regions were cleared out, it was the turn of central and western Anatolia. Unlike the brutality that had accompanied the eastern operations, Armenians from the more westerly regions were often sent east by train or other wheeled transport and a greater percentage thus survived the journey to Syria.

The Question of Exceptions Those arguing that the events of 1915–18 were not a planned genocide often point to the numerous exceptions to deportation, namely those given to Protestant and Catholic Armenians, military families and those living in Istanbul and in Izmir. These claims are without foundation. The lack of largescale deportations from the two cities was due not to a lack of the Ottoman government’s intent, but to the efforts of its German allies. The initial arrests and deportations on 22 July prompted the German government to submit letters of protest and demanded that the deportations be stopped. The Porte then promised Berlin that no further deportations would be made from Istanbul, but it continued to deport those who met three criteria: nonnative residents, perceived security risks and single males. In early 1916 the German government submitted another letter of protest, and this intervention achieved the desired results. Deportations from Istanbul and Izmir were halted; in the latter case they had been carried out in small groups until German commander General Liman von Sanders ultimately managed to bring them to a halt by threatening Izmir governor Rahmi with arrest should they continue.53 Similar external pressures were at work regarding the deportation of Protestant and Catholic Armenians. The German and American governments in particular made various diplomatic representations on behalf of the Armenians of these two confessions, but these bore little fruit in the initial months of the deportations, as Armenians were deported without religious exception. Only steadily increasing pressure from these governments would by mid-August cause Istanbul to order the cessation of deportations of Catholic and Protestant Armenians. Yet, by that point nearly all had already 52 BOA.DH.¸SFR., 53/92, 93 and 94 (23 May 1915). 53 See Taner Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity (Princeton University Press, 2012), pp. 399–410.

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been deported and the orders were in any case ‘window dressing’ intended to mollify the Germans. In general, cables exempting certain groups were quickly followed up with secret orders cancelling the previous ones and ordering the deportations to resume as before.54 Regarding the families of Armenian soldiers, the situation was not so different. A great number served in the Ottoman army at the outset of the war, but they were soon ordered disarmed and placed in ‘labor battalions’. The soldiers in these units were among the first to be slain when the massacres began. A significant number of Armenian officers were also serving in both combat and medical units. The existing documentary evidence shows that the Ministry of War made several entreaties to prevent the families of these military personnel from being deported so as not to damage the army’s morale, which resulted in ministerial infighting when the civil administration disregarded them. Ultimately – and despite orders to the contrary– many military families from various regions were ultimately deported.55

The ‘Dual Mechanism’ as Work The deportations and annihilation were carried out by means of a ‘dual mechanism’ similar to the one used against the Greek Orthodox population in the Aegean region. On one hand, the government organised deportations as a lawful relocation of populations, while a parallel operation of massacre and liquidation was carried out under the direction of the Unionist Central Committee. The Interior Ministry initially issued a deportation order to the provincial governors, who would then pass it on to the local gendarmerie. The work of deporting Armenians from the various cities and towns would be carried out mostly by unofficial commissions made up of Unionist state functionaries and/or local notables,56 who would dispatch the deportees in convoys of 500–1,000 persons, accompanied by gendarmes to the provincial border. Upon reaching the border they would be handed over to the neighbouring province’s gendarmes.57 Meanwhile, and in parallel, extermination 54 See ibid., 373–83. 55 After 1920 a large number of children who were rescued in Syria by the League of Nations recounted that they had been deported despite being from military families. Dicle Akar, Matthias Bjørnlund and Taner Akçam (eds.), Soykırımdan Kurtulanlar (Istanbul: I·letis¸im 2018); see esp. the Introduction by Dicle Akar. 56 For the activities of the Commission in Maras¸, see BOA.DH.¸SFR., 480/137 (23 July 1915); for Antep, see Ümit Kurt, The Armenians of Aintab: The Economics of Genocide in an Ottoman Province (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2021). 57 For examples of convoys being ‘handed over’ at the border: BOA.DH.¸SFR., 494/51 (22 October 1915) and 495/78 (1 November 1915); Erzurum Provincial Governor

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orders would be sent to these provinces by Unionist party secretaries. The convoys would then be massacred at predetermined locations, either by units of the Special Organisation or by Kurdish tribes, with the killings being coordinated by the Special Organisation head, Bahaettin ¸Sakir.58 (See Map 3.1.) Res¸it Akif Pas¸a, who served as chairman of the Council of State in the postwar Ottoman government, was the first person to openly explain this dual mechanism. In his speech before the Chamber of Deputies on 21 November 1918, he claimed to have personally seen the parallel orders for deportation and annihilation that were sent to the provinces and districts.59 In the post-war trials of former Unionist leaders between 1919 and 1922, the existence of this dual mechanism was presented as new documents were brought to light. A great number of military and civilian functionaries repeated this information in their written and oral testimonies. According to these accounts, the annihilation orders were usually conveyed verbally, and written orders were sent only when some officials refused to carry out the verbal ones.60 The officials who refused to comply with the annihilation orders were either removed from their positions or killed.61 The actual extermination was performed in a variety of ways, although the first action usually taken after the convoys had left the cities was the separation and murder of the adult males. Another method was that of deliberately sending the convoys over lengthy, difficult routes through areas of harsh climates, where the deportees were more likely to die ‘natural’ deaths from hunger, thirst, disease or exposure. Rape was widespread, as was the abduction of women and children to keep as slaves. In some areas, such as Mardin and Bitlis, the pretence of deportation was not even kept up, and the Armenian population was simply killed on the spot. In Sinop, Samsun and Trabzon the Armenian population was loaded on to barges and boats, and taken out to sea to be drowned.62 There are no clear figures for how many

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59 60 61 62

Tahsin, Krikor Guerguerian Archive, Ottoman Documents, Erzincan 06 and 18, https:// commons.clarku.edu/erzincan/6/; https://commons.clarku.edu/erzincan/18/. The deportations and massacres have been explored in detail in Kevorkian, Armenian Genocide; Vahakn Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide (Providence: Berghahn, 1995); Taner Akçam, A Shameful Act, trans. Paul Bessemer (New York: Metropolitan, 2006). I·kdam, 5 December/Kânunuevvel 1918. Akçam, Shameful Act, Ch. 5, ‘Decision and Aftermath’. Akçam, Young Turks’ Crime, pp. 194–6. In several articles Vahakn Dadrian provides detailed discussion of these methods. See e.g. Vahakn Dadrian, ‘The Armenian genocide: an interpretation’, in America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915, ed. Jay Winter (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 52–100.

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Map 3.1 The 1915 Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire. (Map courtesy of the Armenian National Institute)

The Armenian Genocide: An Overview

were killed outright as opposed to dying through one of the many ‘indirect’ methods. By the end of August 1915, the emptying of Anatolia of its Armenian population was largely completed. Although reports of massacres still trickled in from some regions, by 29 August, Interior Minister Talat Pas¸a could cable the relevant regions that ‘The Armenian problem has been solved. There is no reason to sully the reputation of the nation and government with needless cruelty and oppression.’63 In the end, approximately 1.3 million Anatolian Armenians were deported.64 The numbers vary on how many ultimately reached Syria. Raymond Kevorkian argues that roughly half of the 1.6 million Armenians deported, 800,000, reached Syria by September.65 In their consular reports from Aleppo, the German consul Rössler and the American consul Jessie Jackson, both provide the figure of around 500,000.66 The number of Armenians who arrived in Syria, however, was much larger than the Ottoman authorities had expected. The killings would have to continue in Syria.

The Second Phase of the Genocide Armenian deportees began to arrive in northern Syria in late May 1915. Initially, the Ottoman government had no concrete plan for those who managed to reach their destination. They were first settled in towns and villages and later in the various camps set up to hold them. These resettlement areas were emptied out in the first two months of 1916, starting with 63 BOA.DH.¸SFR., 55/290 (29 December 1915). 64 In his personal journal Talat Pas¸a wrote the figure of 924,158, but his list does not mention some of the deportations from western and central Anatolia. Adding these, the number arrived at is 1.2–1.3 million souls. Murat Bardakçı, Talat Pas¸a’nın Evrak-ı Metrukesi: Sadrazam Talat Pas¸a’nın Özle Ars¸ivinde Bulunan Ermeni Tehciri Konusundaki Belgeler ve Hususi Yazıs¸malar (Istanbul: Everest, 2008), p. 77. The historian Arnold Toynbee and the German Protestant pastor Lepsius gave similar numbers. James Bryce and Arnold Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915–16: Documents Presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs by Viscount Bryce, ed. Ara Sarafian (Princeton and London: Gomidas Institute, 2005), p. 646; Johannes Lepsius, Deutschland und Armenien,1914–1918: Sammlung diplomatischer Aktenstücke (Potsdam: Der Tempel Verlag, 1919), p. lxv. 65 Kevorkian, The Armenian Genocide, pp. 278, 630–1. 66 DE/PA-AA/R 14089, Report from German consul in Aleppo Rössler, dated 20 December 1915; NA/RG59/867.48/271, Report from American consul in Aleppo Jackson, dated 8 February 1916, reproduced in United States Official Records on the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917, ed. Ara Sarafian (Princeton and London: Gomidas Institute, 2004), pp. 489–90.

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those around Aleppo and continuing eastwards, with their inhabitants being sent to Der Zor. A new wave of massacres would begin in March 1916 and many Armenians in Syria would be slaughtered over the summer.67 The Armenians deported from around Zeytun and Adana would begin to arrive at Aleppo, Der Zor and other towns by mid-May.68 On 9 May, before the first convoy had reached Syria, the provincial governor of Aleppo cabled his superiors asking how and where they were to be resettled, and where the funds for the operation would come from. Three days later the reply came that ‘the expenses for transit and resettlement would not be met by the government for a lengthy period; they should be covered by the [Armenians] themselves’.69 The government had no long-term plans for resettling the deportees. A circular sent to the provinces on 23 May ordered that they be resettled in new neighbourhoods created in existing settlement areas or in new villages that would be set up. These new areas were to be located at least 25 kilometres from the Baghdad railway or any of its spur lines.70 The Council of Ministers prepared documents in May and June stating that land and shelter would be provided for the deportees, without specifics on the how or where of their resettlement.71 Other measures that followed dealt only with what the deportees were forbidden from doing. Cables from 10 June and 1 July 1915 demanded that Armenians not be resettled with others from their region; rather, they were to divided up into small groups and dispersed. The new resettlement areas were prohibited from building defences, and were to be spaced at least five hours’ distance from one another. The Armenians would be forbidden from opening schools and publishing newspapers, and all written correspondence would, without exception, have to be in Turkish.72 (See Map 3.2.) In lieu of any systematic settlement plan on the part of the government, the task of assisting the Armenian refugees – mostly destitute women and children – fell overwhelmingly to the Armenians of Aleppo. Various organisations, the local Armenian Church foremost among them, established joint 67 Raymond Kevorkian coined the term ‘second phase’. Raymond Kévorkian (ed.), ‘L’extermination des déportés arméniens ottomans dans les camps de concentration de Syrie-Mésopotamie (1915–1916)’, Special Issue, Revue d’histoire arménienne contemporaine 2 (1998). For further information see www.imprescriptible.fr/rhac/tome2/. 68 Cable from Ali Suad, provincial district governor of Der Zor, BOA.DH.¸SFR., 471/139 (19 May 1915); cable from Celal, provincial governor of Aleppo, BOA.DH.¸SFR., 471/ 133 (20 May 1915). 69 BOA.DH.¸SFR., 52/335 (12 May 1915). 70 BOA.DH.¸SFR., 53/91 (23 May 1915). 71 For a detailed analysis of the Ottoman government’s decisions and circulars, see Taner Akçam and Ümit Kurt, Spirit of the Laws (New York: Berghahn, 2015), pp. 19–24. 72 BOA.DH.¸SFR., 54/122 (10 June 1915) and 54/261 (1 July 1915).

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Hammam

Dibsi

Shedadiye

Rakka Sabkhah

Abu Harra

Maden

Markada

Tibni

Suvar 0 0

Deyr Zor Marat

100 miles

50 100

Busarah

Meyadin

200 km

Map 3.2 The concentration and settlement camps in Syria.

committees and created a large aid network within the region. Their activities can be said to have borne a number of positive results.73 Within a short time, Armenian neighbourhoods emerged in a number of resettlement areas and Armenian communal life began to revive.74 But a restored communal life in various Syrian cities and towns was not the reality experienced by all the Armenian arrivals. The great majority were forced into over twenty temporary or makeshift camps. By October a body of regulations had been established regarding the character and operation of the camps.75 But hundreds of deportees perished daily from disease and starvation. Kevorkian claims that some 300,000 persons perished in this manner just in the autumn and winter of 1915–16,76 as is also attested in Ottoman documents.77 The authorities began to take an interest in the Armenians in Syria only after their removal from Anatolia was largely complete. It proved impossible 73 For a detailed discussion of these activities, see Khatchig Mouradian, The Resistance Network: The Armenian Genocide and Humanitarianism in Ottoman Syria, 1915–1918 (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2020); Vahram Shemmassian, ‘Humanitarian intervention by the Armenian prelacy of Aleppo during the first months of genocide’, Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies 22 (2003), 127–52. 74 Akçam, Young Turks’ Crime, pp. 264–72. 75 BOA.DH.EUM.VRK.15/71, 1–6 (8 October 1915). 76 Kevorkian, Armenian Genocide, p. 693. For the list of the camps constructed and the living conditions within them see Kevorkian, ‘L’extermination des déportés arméniens’, 18–62. 77 For examples just from October, see BOA.DH.¸SFR., 57/71 and 110 (17 and 26 October 1915).

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to solve matters through the Ottoman capital; instead, efforts would have to centre on Aleppo.78 On 13 August, Aleppo was declared the ‘dispersal centre’ for Armenians arriving in Syria,79 and ¸Sükrü (Kaya) Bey was appointed to deal with the problem. The provincial and district governors were directed to go to Aleppo and to receive orders from him in regard to questions of ‘deportation and [re]settlement’.80 Fourth Army commander Cemal Pas¸a was one of the first officials advocating for Aleppo to be made the ‘dispersal centre’ for the Armenian deportees in Syria. He continually complained about the placement of large numbers of Armenians at facilities along the train routes, asking Istanbul to send individuals ‘possessing strength and ability’ to clear Aleppo and its environs of Armenians.81 On 1 October the decision was taken to empty Aleppo of its Armenians, in co-ordination with the Fourth Army.82 After ¸Sükrü, the Istanbul Director-General of Security, I·smail Canbolat, was sent to the region to discuss the details of the government’s Syria policy. Mustafa Abdülhalik, who had organised the massacre of Armenians in Bitlis, was appointed governor of Aleppo, while Abdülahad Nuri was made Director of Deportations for the province.83 At another meeting in Aleppo on 9 November 1915 the decision was taken to deport all the Armenians in the region to Der Zor.84 Interior Minister Talat Pas¸a twice cabled Syrian officials (21 and 29 September) to clarify that deportation meant ‘extermination’ (mahv ve imha).85 Talat announced on 17 November that the decisions taken at the Aleppo meeting had been approved and he informed the regional governors that further deportations would need to be discussed with the leadership in Aleppo. He also informed ¸Sükrü Bey that his work in Aleppo was finished and ordered his return to Istanbul.86 In all this we can see the similarities between the policies implemented in Aleppo and those previously implemented in Istanbul after 24 April 1915. There

For relevant cables from Talat Pas¸a, see BOA.DH.¸SFR., 54/167 (29 July 1915). BOA.DH.¸SFR., 54/389 (13 August 1915). BOA.DH.¸SFR., 56/69 (18 September 1915), 173 and 183 (26 September 1915). BOA.DH.¸SFR., 493/62 (13 October 1915). BOA.DH.¸SFR., 493/31 (12 October 1915) and 83 (14 October 1915). On this double appointment, see Taner Akçam, Killing Orders: Talat Pasha’s Telegrams and the Armenian Genocide (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan,2018), pp. 53–4. 84 BOA.DH.¸SFR., 497/19 (11 November 1915). 85 Talat Pas¸a’s annihilation orders are also mentioned in the memoirs of Naim Efendi. See Akçam, Killing Orders, p. 35. 86 BOA.DH.¸SFR., 57/52 (17 October 1915) and 58/56, 59, 60, 63 and 66 (18 November 1915).

78 79 80 81 82 83

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were no mass deportations from Istanbul and only those Armenians who met the three aforementioned criteria were deported.87 In Aleppo, similar practices were in place. Local Armenians were exempted,88 while those coming from elsewhere and those considered security risks were deported.89 One of the most important components of the Istanbul deportations was the arrest and extermination of prominent Armenian intellectuals. In Syria there were few secular intellectuals but a significant number of religious leaders, and one of the first actions by the authorities in Aleppo was to assemble them in similar fashion for deportation and then to murder them en route. A significant portion of the Armenian clergy had been exterminated during the first phase of the genocide,90 but those who reached Syria had continued to serve the spiritual needs of their flock. Permission was even given for them to tour the camps and villages distributing aid,91 but as the foundation for any revived Armenian culture in Syria, their removal was seen as necessary. After a series of discussions, it was decided to relocate the catholicos of Sis (Sahak) to Jerusalem and to place the remaining clergy in a concentration camp in Münbiç (Manbij). Additional steps were taken in the following months to erase Armenian religious institutions. In July 1916, the 1863 Armenian National Constitution was annulled, the Istanbul patriarchate was dissolved and its patriarch, Zaven, was deported to Baghdad. Catholicos Sahak was then given the additional role of patriarch.92 In his memoirs, the Ottoman official Naim Efendi says that the first order for the extermination of the Armenian religious leadership had already come on 14 December 1915.93 Münbiç (Manbij) camp, which housed approximately 1,000 clergy and their families, was evacuated over January–February 1916, followed by the inevitable massacres. By the end of 1917 there were only between seventy and eighty survivors.94 87 88 89 90 91 92

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See Akçam, Young Turks’ Crime, pp. 399–406. BOA.DH.¸SRF., 56/114 (22 September 1915). BOA.DH.¸SFR., 57/49, 52 (17 October 1915) and 63/306 (13 May 1916). ‘The year the Armenian Church died, 1915–1990’, Special Issue, Window, View of the Armenian Church 1:3 (1990), 8–21. BOA.DH.¸SFR., 480/146 (24 July 1915). Shortly after the end of the war, on 18 November 1918, the July 1916 annulment would itself be reversed and the Armenian National Constitution revived. Ali Güler, · ‘Ermenilerle Ilgili 1916 ve 1918 Yıllarında Yapılan Hukuki Düzenlemeler’, Ankara Üniversitesi Osmanlı Tarih Aras¸tırma ve Ugyulama Merkezi Dergisi (OTAM) 6 (1995), 91–139. Akçam, Killing Orders, p. 183. Naim Efendi was the Ottoman bureaucrat who sold severall original Ottoman documents to Armenian intellectual Aram Andonian, including the killing orders. Kevorkian, The Armenian Genocide, pp. 636–7.

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Just as in the first phase,95 the government imposed new travel bans for Syria in February 1916, although they now included even Armenian converts to Islam and all foreigners.96 Officials who failed to enforce them were threatened with severe punishment.97 Among the restrictions, the prohibition on foreigners taking photographs stands out as significant. In the genocide’s first phase frequent cables were sent to the provinces demanding that foreign travellers be kept well away from the deportation routes and generally prohibited from taking photographs.98 Those photographing in Syria in particular were ordered to be arrested and, if Armenian, executed.99 Cemal Pas¸a even openly threatened German officials with arrest and punishment if they did not surrender any photos they had taken.100 Lastly, foreign aid organisations were forbidden from assisting the Armenian deportees. Since August 1915 provincial officials had been tasked with preventing foreigners from aiding the Armenians in any way. Similar orders were later sent to Syria, and government officials neglecting this task were threatened with punishment. The assistance activities coordinated by the American consulate in particular were seen by the government as a serious problem, and the consulate was placed under tight supervision.101 The Armenian deportees camped along the Adana-Aleppo rail lines were seen as both a security and a public health risk,102 and ‘cleaning out’ [tahliye] operations were begun already in late 1915. The convoys were generally marched off to the outskirts of Ras ul-Ayn and from there to the arid wastes of Der Zor.103 As Aleppo and its environs were being emptied of Armenians, a new wave of deportations from Anatolia was already being organised. Those left out of the first deportations were now collected and deported directly to Der Zor.104 95 BOA.DH.¸SFR., 52/96 (24 April 1915), 53/334 (13 June 1915) and 55/141 (21 August 1915). Many more such ‘prohibition orders’ would be sent to the provinces. 96 BOA.DH.¸SFR., 60/239 (5 February 1916), 61/32 (13 February 1916) and 61/71 (21 February 1916). 97 BOA.DH.¸SFR., 62/312 (12 April 1916). 98 BOA.DH.¸SFR., 59/40, 46, 47, 48; 76/42, 43, 44, 210. 99 For such a ‘killing order’ from Talat on 24 December 1915, see Akçam, Killing Orders, p. 154. 100 Ibid., pp. 160–1. 101 Ibid., pp. 155–7. 102 Genelkurmay Bas¸kanlığ ı Ars¸iv Belgeleriyle Ermeni Faaliyetleri, V I I I, pp. 21–3. 103 For the dates of various camp evacuations in the region, see Kevorkian, ‘L’extermination des déportés arméniens’, 18–62. 104 One example of such an order can be found in BOA.DH.¸SFR., 61/72 (20 February 1916).

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There were no massacres during the first months of the ‘cleaning out’ operations. Instead, it was deemed sufficient to attrit the deportees through ‘natural’ causes. Naim Efendi claims that, after the annihilation orders arrived from Istanbul, the government discussed them and decided that ‘the best method [of annihilating them] was to leave the Armenian deportees exposed to winter weather conditions and allow them to die, thereby bolstering the claim that they died of natural causes’.105 In his 20 March 1916 report, the governor of Aleppo stated that ‘altogether, some 95,000 persons had [heretofore] perished of various causes, 35,000 in the area of Bab and Meskene, 10,000 in the deportation area of Aleppo (Kaldık), 20,000 in the areas of Dipsi, Abuharrar and Hamam, and another 35,000 in Res-ül-Ayn’.106 Many camps are not included in these figures. Yet, the hopes for a high number of deaths from ‘natural causes’ were not fully met. In the area around Ras ul-Ayn, in particular, a concentration of more than 50,000 Armenians remained. When the camps in this area were evacuated in March 1916 their inhabitants began to be slaughtered.107 In April the district governor of Der Zor, Ali Suat, was removed from his position for not having been sufficiently harsh on the deportees, and was replaced by Salih Zeki. Over the summer of 1916, Salih Zeki would organise and carry out the largest massacres of the genocide’s second phase.108 A letter from Interior Minister Talat Pas¸a to War Minister Enver Pas¸a on 16 February 1916 offers some important clues as to why the policy of ‘natural causes’ was abandoned: Talat recounted that, while meeting with a group of German parliamentarians, he got the impression that Turkey’s Armenian policies ‘have been endorsed by German government’. Nevertheless, he had the feeling that the Germans ‘were going to make proposals and attempts to have the Armenians returned to their places [of origin]’. He was in favour of the matter being concluded ‘as soon as possible’ so as to avoid being in a difficult position if and when such proposals were made.109 Indeed, by the year 1918 the great majority of Armenians arriving in Syria had been massacred. From being one of the ancient civilisations of the Middle East, only some 200,000 Armenians would remain in Syria, surviving under extremely adverse conditions.110 105 Akçam, Killing Orders, p. 199. 106 Ibid., 97. 107 Regarding massacres in the Ras ul-Ayn region, see Andonian, Medz Vocirı, pp. 52–63; Kevorkian, ‘L’extermination des déportés arméniens’, 28–32, 107–21. 108 Regarding massacres in the Der Zor region, see Kevorkian, ‘L’extermination des déportés arméniens’, 37–45, 174–228. 109 Genelkurmay Bas¸kanlığ ı Ars¸iv Belgeleriyle Ermeni Faaliyetleri, V I I I, p. 104. 110 Estimates of the number of survivors vary. Lepsius claims some 150,000–200,000 Armenians were left in Syria (Deutschland und Armenien, p. lxv), while Kevorkian

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The Dynamics of Genocide When he was arrested on 24 April 1915, Dikran Kelegian, who had known the Unionists intimately, told his colleagues and friends that the Unionists ‘were going to implement the Armenian massacres with mathematical accuracy’.111 He was proved correct. It is significant that the entire process of deportation and massacre was conducted by the statistics branch of the Interior Ministry’s Directorate for Tribal and Refugee Resettlement.112 According to existing Ottoman documents, the Unionists conceptually divided the empire’s territory into three main regions and developed separate policies for each. The first region was that of central and western Anatolia, where Armenians were permitted to remain as long as their numbers did not exceed 5 per cent of the total population. Excess population was to be either deported to Syria or dispersed more widely within the same province.113 The second region was roughly the area of historic Armenia, or presentday eastern and southeastern Anatolia. This region bordered Russia and contained the areas included in the earlier reform plan. In principle, all Armenians were to be removed from these areas without exception. An Interior Ministry cable to Erzurum of 27 May 1915 stated that ‘not a single Armenian should remain there, since it is on the Russian border’, and a circular the following month to the province of Erzurum ordered the deportation of ‘all Armenians with their families, without exception’.114 The third region was that of present-day Syria (including some parts of Lebanon and Iraq), which had been designated as the area for Armenian resettlement. The Armenians were to be deported and resettled in this region, with strict guidelines that their numbers not exceed 10 per cent of the local population.115 Throughout the entire period, Istanbul regularly pressed provincial governments for precise figures on the number of convoys, both being organised and en route, their confessional breakdown (Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant), as well as the ratio of Armenians to local Muslims. Since, in the areas designated for resettlement, the Muslim population was

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112 113 114

puts the figure at 240,000 and claims that of these 120,000 had been forcibly converted to Islam: ‘L’extermination des déportés arméniens’, 61. Aram Andonian, Exile, Trauma and Death: On the Road to Chankiri with Komitas Vartabed, trans. and ed. Rita Soulahian Kuyumjian (London: Gomidas Institute & Tekeyan Cultural Association, 2010), p. 160. See Akçam, Young Turks’ Crime, pp. 227–87. Here are just two examples: BOA.DH.¸SFR., 53/289 (8 June 1915), 54/335 and 336 (7 July 1915). BOA.DH.¸SFR., 54/87 (20 June 1915). 115 Akçam, Young Turks’ Crime, pp. 248–53.

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between 1.8 and 2.1 million, the number of Armenians was not to exceed 200,000 – a figure ultimately achieved. In this sense, the Armenian genocide can be said to have been effected with mathematical precision. Despite the widespread belief that the Armenian genocide was limited to physical annihilation, forced assimilation was also a central component.116 It operated on three different tracks. The first was to pressure or force Armenians to ‘voluntarily’ convert to Islam. In the first months of the deportations, some Armenians were offered the possibility of converting in order to avoid deportation or worse, after which they were simply relocated within their home province. This arrangement would be changed on 1 July 1915 as the regime refused further recognition of ‘voluntary converts’; even those who did convert were deported. The change derived from Istanbul’s fear that the growing number of converts would soon push the number of Armenians, whether Christian or Muslim, above the 5 per cent ceiling it had set and that such numbers would allow them to more easily retain their Armenian identities.117 A partial easing of these restrictions appeared after November 1915 and permission to convert to Islam was again granted after a security check. But then, in the spring of 1916 surviving Armenians were given the choice of ‘Islam or deportation [to Der Zor]’. The near certainty of death that such a journey entailed convinced many more to convert. Those who were saved by conversion were allowed to convert back to Christianity only at war’s end with the fall of the CUP regime in October 1918.118 The second track was aimed at Armenian children, who were taken from their families, given Muslim names, and either placed in special orphanages or in Muslim households. Here they would be given both secular and Islamic religious education so as to raise them within Turkish Islamic culture,119 and the Muslim families were given financial incentives, including monthly stipends. This policy was greatly aided by the closing down of all foreign and missionary schools. The third track was the forcible marrying off of young Armenian girls to Muslim men. The term ‘assimilation’ (temsil, temessül) was openly and frequently used in official correspondence in reference to these policies; and the 116 See ibid., pp. 287–341. 117 Ibid., pp. 307–9. 118 For the decision to allow Armenian converts to return to Christianity, Akar, Bjørnlund and Akçam (eds.), Soykırımdan Kurtulanlar, pp. 107–17. 119 For the story of one of the well-known orphanages for assimilating Armenian children, see Karnig Panian, Goodbye, Antoura: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide (Stanford University Press, 2015).

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raising of Armenian boys and girls according to Islamic custom and practice was expressed as ‘care and education’.120 The Unionist government took its first decision regarding abandoned Armenian property on 17 May 1915; it was limited to those leaving the country voluntarily and military deserters.121 These legal confiscations were similar to those enacted during the forced deportation of the Aegean Greek population. The decision on all abandoned Armenian property was taken on 30 May 1915, and followed up the next day by detailed regulations sent to the provinces calling for, among other things, property owners to receive fair compensation for their loss, whether in the form of property of commensurate value where they were resettled, or in seedcorn, tools and implements to farmers and craftsmen. Another more extensive set of regulations would follow, containing detailed directives for the disposal of moveable and immoveable property, including the establishment of abandoned property commissions to record, sell and transfer the proceeds of all abandoned and confiscated property. Despite their length, there was no mention of the process of financially or materially compensating the affected parties. A special intergovernmental commission established to address the legal questions related to Armenian properties reported in early 1918 that none of the Armenian deportees in Syria had received compensation.122 The state would ultimately use the abandoned Armenian property for six different purposes: (1) Armenian houses and lands distributed free of charge to Muslim refugees; (2) businesses and workplaces turned over to Muslims at steeply discounted prices in order to help in the creation of a Muslim bourgeoisie; (3) livestock and produce either directly used or the revenues from their sale used to meet the needs of the army; (4) part of the revenues used to meet the government’s deportation costs; (5) large edifices employed as jails, hospitals, schools or military barracks; and (6) some of the revenues used to meet the needs of the Special Organisation.123 Despite close government monitoring, much Armenian property was looted by state functionaries and the civilian population. In order to prevent this, the regime first sent commissions with special authority, and, when these proved ineffective, it began to arrest and try the perpetrators. However, 120 Akçam, Young Turks’ Crime, pp. 311–33. 121 The information here is from Akçam and Kurt, Spirit of the Laws, pp. 19–34. 122 BOA/BEO 4505/337831, Prime Ministry Office to Justice, Treasury and Interior Ministry, 28 February 1918. 123 Akçam, Young Turks’ Crime, pp. 341–73.

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the great sensitivity that the government showed towards the Armenians’ property was not reflected in its attitude towards the Armenians themselves. Among those who perpetrated crimes against the Armenians there was a single instance of arrest and trial.124 Only after the Ottomans lost the war and the Unionist regime was removed from power could such prosecutions be considered. However, attempts at legal prosecution which began shortly after the war (in part deriving from the post-war government’s desire to achieve better terms from the Paris peace negotiations) yielded few results. Of some 200 defendants, three low-level bureaucrats were hanged, the rest being either acquitted or escaping with minimal sentences. The mood within the country and the attitude towards the Unionist government changed markedly in August 1920 with the signing of the Sèvres Treaty, which called for the dividing up of Anatolia between the major ethno-religious groups inhabiting it (Greeks, Armenians, Kurds and Turks). Now, those same Unionist leaders, Talat, Cemal, Bahaettin ¸Sakir125 and the others who had decided upon and carried out the genocide, and who had been sentenced to death in absentia by the Istanbul tribunal, would be declared national heroes by the new Unionistheavy Turkish-Muslim provisional government in Anatolia. In the final analysis, over 1 million Anatolian Armenians are believed to have perished or were actively murdered between 1915 and the end of World War One, or 60 per cent of around 2 million who had lived there before the war. Those who managed to survive formed new diaspora communities by fleeing to the newly founded Armenian Republic or to various other countries of the Middle East, Europe and the Americas, where they attempted to rebuild their lives. While this, the first great non-colonial genocide of the twentieth century has been generally acknowledged in much of the world, successive governments of the Republic of Turkey have continually and consistently worked to minimise or entirely overlook these horrific events through an ‘official’ policy of denial. Since 1965 in particular, the principal demand of Armenian communities around the world has been the attainment of some sort of official recognition of the historicity of the genocide. This struggle for recognition, which also demands that the survivors receive 124 The exception involved two members of the notorious Special Organisation (Tes¸kilat-ı Mahsusa), sentenced to death for the killing of the well-known Armenian parliamentary deputies, Krikor Zohrab and Vartkes Serengülyan. It was feared that these two defendants, if left alive, would say more. Nesim Ovadya Izrail, Krikor Zohrab Bir Ölüm Yolculuğ u (Istanbul: Pencere, 2011), pp. 198–202, 214–15. 125 Talat, Cemal and S¸ akir were all assassinated by Armenian revolutionaries during the years 1921 and 1922.

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some sort of justice, has also become an integral part of the worldwide struggle for human rights.

Bibliographic Note on the English-Language Literature The historiography of the Armenian genocide owes a great deal to the pioneering work of Vahakn Dadrian, whose scholarship focused on the longterm Ottoman Turkish hostility to the Armenian presence in the Ottoman Empire. See especially, The History of the Armenian Genocide and German Responsibility in the Armenian Genocide: A Review of the Historical Evidence of German Complicity (Watertown: Blue Crane Books, 1996). As a historian of Turkish origin, this author’s contributions include: From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide (London: Zed Books, 2004); A Shameful Act; The Young Turks’ Crime against Humanity; and Killing Orders. A number of British and American historians became interested in the Armenian genocide as a crucial case in modern comparative Genocide Studies. See in particular Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford University Press, 2004) and Norman Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in 20th Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). Others have documented the American response to the genocide: see, for example, Winter (ed.), America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915. Vaha Tashjian’s book Daily Life in the Abyss: Genocide Diaries: 1915–1918 (Providence: Berghahn Books, 2017) is essential for first-hand accounts of the genocide, and Lerna Ekmekcioglu, Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey (Stanford University Press, 2016) is crucial for gender perspectives. For the local and regional complexity of the genocide see the important fourteen-volume series on Armenian cities and provinces edited by the eminent historian of Armenia, Richard Hovannisian, and published by Mazda Publishers, Santa Ana, California, www.mazdapublishers.com/author/ richard-g-hovannisian. Recent important studies include Suny, Gocek and Naimark (eds.), A Question of Genocide; Suny, ‘They Can Live in the Desert But Nowhere Else’; and Kevorkian, The Armenian Genocide.

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4

Australia’s Stolen Generations, 1914–2021 joanna cruickshank and crystal mckinnon

From the earliest period of British invasion of the lands now referred to as Australia, white authorities have removed Indigenous children from their communities. Sana Nakata even states that ‘the history of Australia is a history of interventions into the childhoods of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’.1 In this chapter, we describe how Indigenous child removal has been perpetrated in Australia since 1914. We consider the period from 1914 until the 1980s, during which the removal of Indigenous children was explicitly enabled under a growing range of laws and policies. While it is impossible to calculate the exact number of children removed during this period, the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families (henceforth ‘the National Inquiry’), headed by federal judge Sir Ronald Wilson, concluded in 1997 that ‘Most [Indigenous] families have been affected, in one or more generations, by the forcible removal of one or more children.’2 In this chapter, we also consider the contemporary context, from the 1990s onwards, in which Australian governments have apologised for the historic Stolen Generations but continue to remove Indigenous children from their families in rising numbers.3 The persistence with which white authorities have removed 1 Sana Nakata, ‘The infantilisation of Indigenous Australians: a problem for democracy’, Griffith Review 60 (2018), 104–16, at 106. 2 Australia, Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC), Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families (Sydney: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997), p. 31, https://humanrights.gov.au/sites/default/files/content/pd f/social_justice/bringing_them_home_report.pdf. 3 SCRGSP (Steering Committee for the Review of Government Service Provision), Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage: Key Indicators 2020 (Productivity Commission, 2020), p. 17, www.pc.gov.au/research/ongoing/overcoming-indigenous-disadvantage/2020/re port-documents/oid-2020-overview.pdf. See also Hannah McGlade, ‘My journey into ‘child protection’ and Aboriginal family led decision making’, Australian Feminist Law Journal 45:2 (2019), 333–49; Melissa O’Donnell, Stephanie Taplin, Rhonda Marriot,

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Indigenous children from their communities, points to the systemic factors that continue to drive child removal in Australia. As Larissa Behrendt states, ‘Understanding that the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families was a key pillar of a concerted and complex approach to the colonisation project, the continuation of the practice can be seen as an ongoing colonial project in Australia today.’4 Prior to British colonial invasion, Indigenous people had inhabited the continent for at least 65,000 years. Indigenous people lived in family-based clans, each with responsibilities and rights relating to particular tracts of land and water. Through kinship and language connections, clans made up at least 500 larger groups now often identified as nations. Some nations were patrilineal, others matrilineal.5 Within clans, multiple family members might have responsibilities as ‘mothers’ or ‘fathers’ to individual children. While each nation had its own country, culture and language(s), they were connected by trade routes and shared ceremonies, so that people, goods and knowledge could travel the length and breadth of the continent.6 In 1788 Britain laid claim to the eastern part of the continent without negotiation or treaties with Indigenous people. The subsequent occupation of Indigenous lands involved a prolonged and violent series of incursions that lasted until the expansion of white colonists into the northwestern regions in the 1930s. During the nineteenth century, six colonies were founded, each of which developed its own political structures and began to agitate for greater independence from Britain. Each colony also developed (in mostly ad hoc fashion) its own strategies and structures for controlling the Indigenous people who had survived the initial waves of colonial violence. These included the establishment of reserves where Aboriginal people were segregated and the appointment of ‘Protectors of Aborigines’ (or later, Protection Boards) who were given varying degrees of power over Indigenous people.7

4

5

6 7

Fernando Lima and Fiona J. Stanley, ‘Infant removals: the need to address the overrepresentation of Aboriginal infants and community concerns of another “Stolen Generation”’, Child Abuse & Neglect 90 (2019), 88–98. Larissa Behrendt, ‘Stories and words, advocacy and social justice: finding voice for Aboriginal women in Australia’, Australian Feminist Law Journal 45:2 (2019), 191–205, at 204. Larissa Behrendt, ’The doctrine of discovery in Australia’, in Robert J. Miller, Jacinta Ruru, Larissa Behrendt and Tracey Lindberg, Discovering Indigenous Lands: The Doctrine of Discovery in the English Colonies (Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 172–3. Bill Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2012). See Ann Curthoys and Jessie Mitchell, Taking Liberty: Indigenous Rights and Settler SelfGovernment in Colonial Australia, 1830–1890 (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

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In 1901, the nation of Australia was established through the federation of six colonies, on the basis of a shared commitment to white supremacy. As Alfred Deakin, a key architect of federation and the second prime minister of Australia, assured cheering voters in 1903: ‘A white Australia is not a surface, but it is a reasoned policy, which goes down to the roots of national life, and by which the whole of our social, industrial and political organisations is governed.’8 The new Australian Constitution excluded Indigenous people from the civil and political life of the Commonwealth, determining that they would not be counted in the census and that the states, rather than the Commonwealth, would make laws respecting Aboriginal people.9 In debating the Constitution, politicians justified the exclusion of Aboriginal people from the Commonwealth either by claiming that Indigenous people were inevitably ‘dying out’ or by warning of the political influence that large populations of Indigenous people might wield. Such arguments, while contradictory, were based on the shared assumption that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people had no place in the future of the nation. From the mid-nineteenth century, settler policies towards Indigenous people had largely been justified by the claim that they were a ‘dying race’, whose end could be hastened (by violence, disease and child removal) or eased (by segregation and Christianisation) but not prevented.10 By the early twentieth century, however, it was clear that in many places the population of Indigenous people was increasing, in part because of the growing numbers of people of mixed descent. White anxiety about this demographic shift was a key driver of increasing child removal.11 An Aboriginal woman, Margaret Tucker, recalled this scene in 1939, at the Cummeroogunga reserve in New South Wales: The people . . . lived in constant fear of their children being sent away from them by the Board, and being placed in homes. Wholesale kidnapping (it was nothing less) occurred on the Mission only a few years ago. The Manager sent the aboriginal men away on a rabbiting expedition. No sooner had they left the situation than carloads of police (who had been waiting) dashed in 8 Alfred Deakin, speech to Protectionist Party, 29 October 1903, Ballarat, Victoria, https:// electionspeeches.moadoph.gov.au/speeches/1903-alfred-deakin. 9 Helen Irving, ‘Making the federal commonwealth, 1890–1901’, in The Cambridge History of Australia, ed. Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 242–66, at 249. 10 Robert van Krieken, ‘Rethinking cultural genocide: Aboriginal child removal and settler-colonial state formation’, Oceania 75 (2004), 125–51, at 126–7. 11 See Russell McGregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880–1939 (Melbourne University Press, 1997), p. 134.

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and seized all the children they could get their hands on. These children were bundled into the cars and taken away for the Board to dispose of. Many of them never saw their parents again.12

Much later the historian Peter Read, one of the first white scholars to pay attention to the systemic nature of Aboriginal child removal, wrote of his experience reading the files of the Aborigines Protection Board in NSW: When at length I reached the end of those 700 files, I at last understood that the red herrings of missionary zeal, malnutrition, parental neglect, the best interest of the child and the standards of the day, concealed a violent and premeditated attack not only on Aboriginal family structure but also on the basis of Aboriginality itself.13

As Read recognised, the removal of Aboriginal children from their families and communities during the twentieth century, while justified under a range of policies that used the language of ‘protection’, ‘merging’, biological ‘absorption’ and socio-cultural ‘assimilation’, reflected the consistent intent of Australian governments and publics to remove Indigenous people and communities from the collective life of the nation.

Child Removal Policies and Practices Prior to, and long after 1914, white Australians have taken Indigenous children from their communities under a very diverse range of policies and laws that have directly enabled removal. Child removal has also occurred in the absence of legislation or policy that has officially permitted such removal. Local factors, such as the actions of particular individuals, the role of individual institutions, or changes in settler demand for land or labour have sometimes been more significant in shaping patterns of child removal than changes at state or federal level. While this diversity in local experience is significant, however, for most of the period between 1914 and 2020, the removal of Indigenous children has increased. In this section, we outline the ‘carceral archipelago’ of laws, policies and institutions, at both state and Commonwealth levels, which have enabled the removal of Indigenous children during this period.14 12 Half-caste Aborigine [Margaret Tucker], ‘Conditions at Cumeroogunga’, Workers Voice, 1 March 1939, reproduced in Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus, The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights: A Documentary History (Sydney: Allen and Unwin,1999), pp. 160–1. 13 Peter Read, Returning to Nothing: The Meaning of Lost Places (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 47. 14 Anna Haebich applies Foucault’s notion of the ‘carceral archipelago’ to the system of child removal and incarceration in Australia. See Anna Haebich, Broken Circles:

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The race-based provisions of the Constitution meant that for much of the twentieth century, child removal was perpetrated under state legislation and through state-funded institutions. By 1911, almost all the states and territories had formally adopted a ‘protectionist’ approach to Indigenous people, appointing Protectors or Boards of Protectors who were given increasingly wide powers over Indigenous people, particularly children. Many of the laws passed in the early twentieth century built on older colonial laws regarding Indigenous people, which generally sought to segregate Aboriginal people from the white population, on the assumption that they would eventually ‘die out’. The new legislation, however, also reflected the concern of white policy-makers about the growth of Aboriginal communities through the increasing numbers of people of mixed descent.15 A number of the new laws thus provided specific powers to encourage the ‘merging’ or ‘absorporption’ of Aboriginal people of mixed descent, by removing them from Aboriginal missions or reserves, denying them government support and/or removing children of mixed descent from Aboriginal families and communities.16 The colony of Victoria had passed the earliest Aborigines Protection Act in 1869, which was amended in 1886 in an effort to force all people of mixed descent from reserves. A regulation passed in 1899 gave the governor power to remove any Aboriginal child from his or her family. The colony of Queensland passed the Aboriginal Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act in 1897, empowering the protector to take action regarding the ‘care, custody and education’ of Aboriginal children and remove ‘half-caste’ children who were believed, or who they deemed, were orphaned or deserted. After federation, in 1905, Western Australia passed the Aborigines Act, which enabled ‘any aboriginal or half-caste child to be sent to and detained in an aboriginal institution, industrial school or orphanage’. In New South Wales, the Aborigines Protection Act (1909) gave the Board of Protection the power to apprentice Aboriginal children, while an amending act in 1915 empowered the Board to ‘assume full control and custody’ of any Aboriginal child. In 1910, the Northern Territory Aboriginals Act appointed the Chief Protector as legal guardian for all Aboriginal children, with absolute Fragmenting Indigenous Families, 1800–2000 (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000), p. 344. Quoting Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage Books 1979), p. 310. 15 See Robert Manne, ‘Aboriginal child removal and the question of genocide, 1900–1940’, in Genocide and Settler Society, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), pp. 217–39, at 220–8. 16 HREOC, Bringing Them Home, pp. 24–6.

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control over their ‘care, custody and education’. Similarly, in South Australia, the Aborigines Act (1911) made the Chief Protector the legal guardian of all ‘aboriginal and half-caste children’, while local guardians were also appointed with the same rights over all Aboriginal children in their district. Tasmania was the only state where such legislation was not passed, reflecting the myth that no Aboriginal people remained in that state.17 In addition to the powers granted under these ‘protectionist’ laws and regulations, Protectors and other authorities were able to remove Indigenous children under a range of child welfare laws. Unlike much of the protectionist legislation, child welfare laws generally required authorities to demonstrate that children had been ‘neglected’ or ‘orphaned’ as cause for their removal. The poverty that Indigenous people experienced was often interpreted as ‘neglect’ and used as justification for the removal of children.18 During the early twentieth century, state and territory governments established or contributed funding to a growing number of institutions where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were incarcerated. These institutions included government- and church-run children’s homes, as well as mission stations and reserves. In the Northern Territory, Queensland and Western Australia, many of the church missions were designed as places to segregate and transform whole Aboriginal communities. On most of these missions, while whole families might live at or near the mission, children were separated from their parents when they reached school age, and housed in dormitories. Across the country, Aboriginal children who had been taken from their communities were also sent to live in such dormitories, often hundreds of kilometres from their homes.19 In Victoria and Tasmania where, by the early twentieth century, governments were contracting rather than expanding the network of missions and reserves, Aboriginal children were removed to general child welfare institutions. New South Wales, by contrast, established three Aboriginal children’s ‘homes’ and also funded reserves, some of which included dormitories for children. South Australian authorities sent children to a range of institutions, including church missions, Aboriginal children’s ‘homes’ and child welfare institutions.20 17 The relevant legislation is outlined in Appendices 1–12 of HREOC, Bringing Them Home. 18 Haebich, Broken Circles, p. 482. 19 See Joanna Cruickshank and Patricia Grimshaw, White Women, Aboriginal Missions and Australian Settler Governments: Maternal Contradictions (Leiden: Brill, 2019), pp. 88–9. 20 Haebich, Broken Circles, p. 345.

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Conditions in these institutions varied, but they were invariably poorly funded, with both governments and settler churches providing very limited resources for their upkeep.21 Accounts from those who grew up in these places, as well as government officials and mission and managers, depict places of strict discipline, incessant labour, poor nutrition, inadequate education and widespread emotional, physical and sexual abuse.22 Staff in these institutions were generally untrained and unqualified and given almost complete power over children with virtually no accountability. While some survivors report receiving care and compassion from particular staff members, these staff could leave at any time, creating profound insecurity of attachment.23 With very few exceptions (such as those missions where Indigenous languages were used and dormitory children kept in contact with their families) Indigenous culture and languages were forbidden or denigrated in these contexts. One survivor, who had been sent to the Umewarra Mission, run by the Open Brethren, told the National Inquiry: [At the mission] they used to tell us not to talk that language, that it’s the devil’s language. And they’d wash our mouths with soap. We sorta had to sit down with Bible language all the time. So it sorta wiped out all our language that we knew.24

Many children were told that their parents were dead or did not want them.25 By the 1930s, Australia was receiving growing international criticism for its treatment of Indigenous people, as well as increasingly visible domestic activism from Aboriginal political organisations.26 Partly as a response to this pressure, in 1937, the Commonwealth government convened the first ‘Conference of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal Authorities’. During the conference, the Protectors of Aborigines from each state and territory repeatedly expressed alarm about the growing numbers of people of mixed descent, as well as concerns that the population of ‘full-blood’ Indigenous people might one day outnumber whites. The Conference passed 21 HREOC, Bringing Them Home, p. 26. 22 Haebich, Broken Circles, pp. 342–417. 23 Ibid., pp. 362–4. 24 Confidential evidence 170, South Australia: a woman taken from her parents with her three sisters when the family, who worked and resided on a pastoral station, came into town to collect stores; placed at Umewarra Mission. HREOC, Bringing Them Home, p. 133. See also Aunty Diane McNaboe, Aunty Maureen Sulter, Aunty Patsy Cohen, ‘Secret Language: Reminiscences of Punishments for Using Language’,State Library of New South Wales, https://gather.sl.nsw.gov.au/digital-heritage/secret-languagereminiscences-punishment-using-language-language-loss-and-stolen. 25 Haebich, Broken Circles, pp. 342–417. 26 Tracey Banivanua Mar, Decolonisation and the Pacific: Indigenous Globalisation and the Ends of Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 82–113.

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a resolution that ‘the destiny of the natives of aboriginal origin, but not of the full blood, lies in their ultimate absorption by the people of the Commonwealth, and it therefore recommends that all efforts be directed to that end’.27 The Conference identified education for children of mixed descent as the key strategy that would enable this absorption to take place. With regards to ‘full-blood’ Indigenous people, the Conference identified a shared strategy of (a) educating, ‘to white standard, children of the detribalised’; (b) keeping the ‘semi-civilised under a benevolent supervision’ on temporary reserves until they were ‘elevated’ to class (a); and (c) establishing ‘inviolable reserves’ for the ‘uncivilised native’.28 In practice, these resolutions had no power to shape the practices of the state authorities. They reflected and justified, however, the commitment of policy-makers at all levels to develop increasingly intensive and intrusive governance of Indigenous families. As Nakata observes, this occurred ‘predominantly through stratifying “full-blood”, “half-caste”, “quadroon” or “octoroon” categories for the purposes of determining strategies of child removal’.29 Yet such definitions were arbitrary and constantly changing – McCorquodale found sixty-seven definitions of Aboriginality across 700 government documents.30 While children of mixed descent were particularly targeted for removal, these stratifications could be used to justify the removal of any Indigenous child. While the resolutions of the 1937 Conference reflected the influence of a biological model that sought to ‘breed out’ Indigeneity, the explicit expression of such views became less acceptable after World War Two. The international condemnation of ‘scientific’ theories of racism again produced external pressure on Australian governments to adopt alternative approaches to Indigenous policy. Rather than biological models of ‘absorption’, by the 1950s socio-cultural models of ‘assimilation’ (which had always been promoted by some policy-makers and missionaries) became dominant. In this context, the removal of children was one among a range of tactics that authorities used to intervene in Indigenous families in order to force them to ‘integrate’ into white society. Australian authorities appear to have

27 ‘Initial Conference of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal Authorities’ (Canberra, 21– 23 April 1937), p. 2, https://aiatsis.gov.au/sites/default/files/catalogue_resources/20 663.pdf. 28 Ibid., p. 2. 29 Nakata, ‘The infantilisation’, 110. 30 John McCorquodale, ‘Aboriginal identity: legislative, judicial and administrative definitions’, Australian Aboriginal Studies 2 (1997), 24–35, at 24.

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removed ever-increasing numbers of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children throughout the 1950s and 1960s.31 Most of the children removed during this period were sent to institutions, but the emphasis on assimilation also meant that a greater number of Aboriginal children were fostered or adopted by white families.32 In 1956, the New South Wales government told Aboriginal people that children with lighter skin were fostered with white people ‘as a positive step in implementing the Board’s policy of assimilation’. In some cases, white families adopted Indigenous children from institutions, but in a significant number of cases such adoptions were irregular, often involving the coercion or deception of Aboriginal mothers.33 In 1957, newspapers in Melbourne published glowing reports of a wealthy white couple who had illegally brought two Aboriginal girls from the Northern Territory to live with them in their mansion. The couple claimed to have ‘made the initial move for a nationwide assimilation of aborigines and half-bloods into the community’.34 In many other cases, Indigenous children adopted by white families were not told of their identity and denied any connection with their culture or community.35 In 1967, following a national referendum, the Australian Constitution was amended to allow the Commonwealth to make laws for Aboriginal people. This followed changes, earlier in the decade, to grant Indigenous people the vote at the federal level and in each of the states.36 While these changes did not have any immediate impact on practices of child removal, they created public expectation that the Commonwealth would take a greater role in setting policy for Aboriginal affairs. At the same time, the older structures of Aboriginal child welfare were being dismantled, so that Indigenous children were increasingly being removed through ‘mainstream’ processes of child welfare, involving childcare professionals and children’s courts.37 As Aboriginal missions, reserves and children’s homes were shut down, children removed through these processes were generally adopted or fostered by white families.38 Haebich concludes that the ‘apparent legal equality’ given to Indigenous people at this time, continued to produce high levels of child 31 Haebich, Broken Circles, pp. 420–1. 32 Ibid., pp. 421–2. 33 See Shurlee Swain, ‘“Homes are sought for these children”: locating adoption within the Australian Stolen Generations narrative’, American Indian Quarterly 37:1/2 (2013), 203–17. 34 ‘Mission to Mansion’, Australian Women’s Weekly, 12 June 1957, 5, http://nla.gov.au/nla .news-article47119935, cited in Swain, ‘Homes are sought’, 209. 35 Swain, ‘Homes are sought’, 210. 36 Haebich, Broken Circles, p. 448. 37 Ibid., p. 460. 38 ibid., p. 490.

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removal, as Aboriginal families were subject to a welfare system committed to assimilationist goals and with no valuing of cultural differences.39 The election of a reformist Labor government in 1972, under Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, resulted in political and cultural shifts that saw more widespread challenges to the continuing prevalence of Indigenous child removal. Within government itself, some officials sought to draw attention to and reform the structures that supported the removal of Indigenous children. More significantly, the Whitlam government endorsed a policy of Aboriginal selfdetermination and provided federal government funding for Indigenous service organisations. This policy direction was a result of sustained Aboriginal community advocacy and action for self-determination, for community control of Aboriginal affairs. Organisations, such as health services, childcare and legal services were created around Australia by Aboriginal communities and supporters, many staffed by volunteers. The change in policy by Whitlam helped to fund the Aboriginal legal aid organisations which provided support for Indigenous parents to challenge the removal of their children through the courts. Aboriginal child care organisations offered grassroots support to families and children and advocated for culturally informed engagement with Indigenous families.40 These organisations contributed to the development of the ‘Aboriginal Child Placement Principle’, which by the 1990s had become official policy in all states and territories. The Principle states that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children have a right to be brought up within their family and community, with family members (or other Indigenous foster carers) to be given preference as carers of children removed from their parents.41 Although the Principle was adopted in theory, it has often not been implemented in practice.42 In 1991 the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody found that of the ninety-nine deaths it investigated, forty-three of these were separated from their families as children. This finding was key to unravelling the widespread and systemic practice of Aboriginal child removal. These findings along with campaigns by Stolen Generation survivors led to the establishment of the National Inquiry in 1996. The terms of the Inquiry included examining ‘current laws, practices and policies with respect to the placement and care’ of Indigenous children. The Inquiry found that Indigenous children continued to 39 Anna Haebich, ‘Neoliberalism, settler colonialism and history of Indigenous child removal in Australia’, Australian Indigenous Law Reporter 19:1 (2015–16), 20–31, at 24–6. 40 Haebich, ‘Neoliberalism’, 27. 41 Margaret Ah Kee and Clare Tilbury, ‘The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander child placement principle is about self determination’, Children Australia 24:3 (1999), 4–8, at 5. 42 Chris Cunneen and Terry Libesman, ‘Removed and discarded: the contemporary legacy of the Stolen Generations’, Australian Indigenous Law Reporter 7:4 (2002), 1–20.

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be over-represented in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems. The Inquiry recommended that ‘self-determination for Indigenous peoples provides the key’ to reversing this situation.43 The findings of the Inquiry led to greater public awareness of the Stolen Generations and the funding of a number of initiatives to support survivors and ensure that their experience was remembered. A significant number of the Inquiry’s recommendations, including a recommendation for reparations, have not been followed. In the decade that followed, the conservative Liberal government under Prime Minister John Howard refused to make a formal apology for the removal of Indigenous children, rejected the policy of Indigenous self-determination and dismantled key bodies that represented Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.44 The decades since have seen sharply increasing levels of child removal and widespread failure to follow the Aboriginal Child Placement Principle. In 2008, the newly elected Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made a formal apology, on behalf of parliament, to the Stolen Generations. The apology included a resolution that ‘these injustices must never, never happen again’.45 Between 2004 and 2019, however, the number of Indigenous children in out-ofhome care increased from 21 to 60 per 1,000 children (compared to a fairly stable rate of 3–5 per 1,000 non-Indigenous children). Over the same period, the proportion of Indigenous children who were placed according to the Aboriginal Child Placement Principle decreased.46 In 2017, only 66 per cent of Indigenous children who were removed from their families had been placed according to the Aboriginal Child Placement Principle.47

Historical Sources and Contentious Issues The real horror story of Aboriginal Australia today is locked in police files and child welfare reports. It is a story of private misery and degradation, caused by a complex chain of historical circumstance, that continues into the present. Kevin Gilbert, Living Black: Blacks Talk to Kevin Gilbert (London: Penguin, 1978), pp. 2–3 43 HREOC, Bringing Them Home, p. 15. 44 Jane Robbins, ‘The Howard government and Indigenous rights: an imposed national unity?’, Australian Journal of Political Science 42:2 (2007), 315–28. 45 See ‘Apology to Australia’s Indigenous Peoples’ (2008), Gifts Collection, Parliament House Art Collection, Canberra ACT. Commissioned by the Department of Families, Housing Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, www.aph.gov.au/Visit_Parliament/What s_On/Exhibitions/Custom_Media/Apology_to_Australias_Indigenous_Peoples. 46 SCRGSP, Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage, p. 17. 47 O’Donnell et al., ‘Infant removals’, 91.

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Extensive, publicly available sources record the history of the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from 1914 to the present. These include oral histories, life writings produced by survivors and their families, church and mission records, government records and the evidence (including testimonies) gathered by the National Inquiry. Its report, Bringing Them Home, included many accounts from survivors and also recommended the collection and preservation of further survivor testimonies. Indigenous authors have also created many creative texts – poems, plays and novels – that give voice to family and community memories of removal.48 These different forms of evidence for the history of the Stolen Generations are discussed in more detail in the discussion of Indigenous resistance below, as well as in the Bibliographic Note appended to this chapter. However, many of the sources produced by survivors and their descendants cannot easily be categorised as either ‘primary’ or ‘secondary’ sources, since they contain both the testimony of survivors and analysis of the conditions that have led to child removal. Scholarly literature on the Stolen Generations has been growing since the 1980s. The first publication by an academic historian focusing on (and coining the term) the Stolen Generations was authored by Peter Read and published in 1981. Titled The Stolen Generations: The Removal of Aboriginal Children in New South Wales, 1883 to 1969, it was ground-breaking in describing the extent of child removal in the state of New South Wales, as well as outlining the evidence available for understanding this history. Since then, a number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander scholars have written histories that include descriptions of the impact of child removal in their own families, as well as analysis of the structural causes of child removal and the resistance of Aboriginal people. These accounts include Jackie Huggins, Auntie Rita (coauthored with her mother, Rita Huggins, 1994) and Sister Girl (1998); John Maynard, Fight for Liberty and Freedom (2007); and Gordon Briscoe, Racial Folly (2010).49 During and after the National Inquiry, a number of more extended academic histories were also published, including Rosalind Kidd, The Way We 48 See Anita Heiss, ‘Our truths: Aboriginal writers and the stolen generations’, The BlackWords Essays (AustLit, 2015), www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/15446532; Crystal McKinnon, ‘The lives behind the statistics: policing practices in Aboriginal literature’, Australian Feminist Law Journal 45:2 (2019), 207–23, at 211–13. 49 Rita Huggins and Jackie Huggins, Auntie Rita (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1994); Jackie Huggins, Sister Girl: The Writings of Aboriginal Activist and Historian Jackie Huggins (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1998); John Maynard, Fight for Liberty and Freedom: The Origins of Australian Aboriginal Activism (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007); Gordon Briscoe, Racial Folly: A Twentieth Century Aboriginal Family (Canberra: ANU ePress, 2010).

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Civilise (1997); Peter Read, A Rape of the Soul so Profound (1999); and Anna Haebich, Broken Circles (2000).50 There is now a wide-ranging academic literature on the ideologies and policies that have supported child removal, resistance to child removal from Indigenous communities and others, and the impacts of child removal on survivors and their communities.51 Documentaries have been an important medium for recording the historical experience and impact of Aboriginal child removal. A number of documentaries have focused specifically on the Stolen Generations, including Lousy Little Sixpence (1982), An Unhealthy Government Experiment (2008), Servant or Slave (2015), After the Apology (2017) and the radio documentary Another Stolen Generation (2014).52 These documentaries incorporate the testimony of survivors, documentary evidence of child removal and commentary by historians and other scholars. Since the National Inquiry, there has been ongoing public debate about the nature and extent of Indigenous child removal, which has included disagreements about and between historians. The historiographical debates have occurred within a broader political contest over how Australian history should be represented. In the 1990s and early 2000s, triggered in part by the release of the Bringing Them Home report, a particularly acute phase of this contest occurred, which has come to be referred to as ‘the History Wars’.53 In relation to the Stolen Generations, a number of conservative political commentators and historians have argued that the removal of Aboriginal children was necessary for the children’s welfare, that it was well-intentioned, that it occurred with the consent of parents and/or that the scale of child removal has been grossly exaggerated.54 While these claims have involved debates over the facts of specific events or sources, Tony Birch notes as a whole the History Wars were never about disciplinary practices or ‘the sanctity of the 50 Rosalind Kidd, The Way We Civilise: Aboriginal Affairs – The Untold Story (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1997); Peter Read, A Rape of the Soul so Profound: The Return of the Stolen Generations (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1999); Haebich, Broken Circles. 51 Key works within this literature are referenced throughout this chapter. 52 Alec Morgan, dir., Lousy Little Sixpence, Ronin Films, 1982; Rachel Perkins, dir., An Unhealthy Government Experiment, Episode 5, The First Australians, Blackfella Films, 2008; Hatti Perkins, Servant or Slave, No Coincidence Media, 2015; Larissa Behrendt, After the Apology, Pursekey Productions, 2017; Carol Dowling, Another Stolen Generation, Noongar Radio, 2014. 53 Tony Birch, ‘“I could feel it in my body”: war on a history war’, Transforming Cultures eJournal 1:1 (2006),19–32, at 21. 54 Anna Clark, ‘History in black and white: a critical analysis of the Black Armband debate’, Journal of Australian Studies 26:75 (2002), 1–11; Robert Manne, ‘In denial: the Stolen Generations and the right’, Quarterly Essay 1 (2001); Keith Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, vol. III: The Stolen Generations 1881–2008 (Sydney: Macleay Press, 2009).

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footnote’. Rather, they were an ideological conflict between non-Indigenous elites in which Indigenous intellectuals, scholars and leaders were ‘spoken about, but not to’.55 There has also been ongoing debate, primarily among non-Indigenous Australians, as to whether the Stolen Generations were the victims of genocidal policies and actions.56 The Bringing Them Home report identified Aboriginal child removal as genocide, because it was ‘a coordinated plan of different actions aimed at the destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves’.57 The report concluded that official government policies relating to Indigenous child removal in Australia were in breach of international law from at least 1946, when genocide was declared a crime against humanity. In addition, the 1948 UN Genocide Convention declares that ‘forcibly transferring children of the group to another group’, when carried out with ‘intent to destroy . . . in whole or in part’, an ethnic, national or racial group ‘as such’, constitutes genocide. However, the use of the term ‘genocide’ was described as being neither ‘appropriate or helpful’ by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who delivered the National Apology to the Stolen Generations.58 As Tony Barta has noted, while the subdiscipline of Genocide Studies has grown considerably over the past three decades, Australian historians have not, on the whole, adopted genocide as a dominant category through which to understand the intent or impact of settler colonialism on the continent.59 Thus, while scholars of genocide have long identified the removal of Indigenous children as genocide, many other Australian historians continue to discuss the historic and continuing removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, either without using the language of genocide, or by arguing that it is inappropriate.60 55 Birch, ‘“I could feel it in my body”’, 23. 56 Julie Cassidy, ‘Unhelpful and inappropriate: the question of genocide and the Stolen Generations’, Australian Indigenous Law Review, 13:1 (2009), 114–39; A. Dirk Moses (ed.), Genocide and Settler Society (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004); van Krieken, ‘Rethinking cultural genocide’. See also the articles in the special section: ‘Genocide?’ Australian Aboriginal history in international perspective’ in Aboriginal History 25 (2001). 57 HREOC, Bringing Them Home, pp. 235–40. See also Larissa Behrendt, ‘Genocide: the distance between law and life’, Aboriginal History 25 (2001), 132–47, www.jstor.org/sta ble/45135475. 58 Cassidy, ‘Unhelpful and inappropriate’, 114. 59 Tony Barta, ‘Liberating genocide: an activist concept and historical understanding’, Genocide Studies and Prevention 9:2 (2015), 103–19. 60 Ibid., 104–6.

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Perpetrators and Motivations Any discussion of perpetrators and their motivations must address the system of colonialism itself. Whilst individuals undertake removals, they were and are acting within a colonial system. Debates about the historical experience of the Stolen Generations have often focused on the motives of those who perpetrated child removal, arguing that even if misguided, most were driven by concerns for the well-being of Indigenous children.61 As described above, child removal was encouraged or justified on a number of different grounds at different periods of the twentieth century. The vast majority of white Australians accepted these arguments and thus allowed child removal to continue, in spite of well-publicised controversies over the rationale and impact of these practices.62 As a whole, these justifications relied on widely accepted racist beliefs that assumed the biological or cultural or religious inferiority of Indigenous people and culture. These views had their most overt expression in the language of ‘scientific’ racism, but had existed before – and have endured long since – the period when such ideas were explicitly embraced. As noted above, the sexualisation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women in white perceptions contributed to the fact that girls of mixed descent were particularly targeted for removal. Questions of race and gender thus played an explicit role in justifications for the removal of Indigenous children. However, the unrelenting persistence of Indigenous child removal across centuries of settler colonisation, regardless of political, legal and cultural change as well as Indigenous resistance, supports Read’s conclusion that the various justifications given for child removal should ultimately be seen as ‘red herrings’. Rather, Indigenous child removal is a central practice of what Patrick Wolfe has called the settler colonial process of ‘eliminating the native’, which allows settlers to claim Indigenous land and resources as their own.63 In relation to the twentieth century, Nakata writes: I remain unpersuaded, across hundreds of pages of historical records, that the belief in doing good by Indigenous children was ever the priority over building and sustaining the white imaginary of the Australian nation. 61 See Tony Birch, ‘“The first white man born”: contesting the “Stolen Generations” narrative’, in Imagining Australia: Literature and Culture in the New World, ed. J. Ryan and C. Wallace-Crabbe (Boston: Harvard University Committee on Australian Studies, 2004), pp. 137–57. 62 Haebich, ‘Neoliberalism’, 22. 63 Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8:4 (2006), 387–409.

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Because as long as these children ceased to exist, as long as they either died or could be successfully assimilated, the legitimacy of the new white Australian nation-state could remain intact.64

In this regard, the underlying motivation for child removal remains fundamentally territorial, functioning structurally (though often not personally) as an attack on Indigenous sovereignty. Significantly, then, child removal has been perpetrated by those who developed policies or encouraged public attitudes that supported child removal, as well as by those who actively participated in removing children. The first category was historically made up entirely of white men and included politicians and public servants. As detailed below, the men appointed as ‘Protectors of Aborigines’ were particularly important in this regard and some Protectors, such as the Chief Protector of Western Australia, A. O. Neville, became infamous for their active encouragement of child removal. The removal of Indigenous children has occurred (and increased) under both ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ Australian state and federal governments. In contemporary Australia there has also been explicit encouragement of Indigenous child removal by public figures, such as right-wing broadcaster Alan Jones, who in 2016 called for ‘another Stolen Generation’.65 The second category, those directly involved in removing children, has included white men and women, such as police, welfare personnel, missionaries and other managers of children’s homes and reserves. McKinnon describes Aboriginal people’s accounts of ‘the roles that police played in removing children from their families, about families and communities hiding their children when police cars approached their homes, of kids running off to hide, and of police tracking kids down when they escaped the institutions they were placed in once removed’.66 Staff at missions and reserves – who included both religious missionaries and governmentappointed managers – were less likely to be involved in the direct act of removal, but played a central role in maintaining the ideological and institutional structures that perpetuated child removal. While white men held most of the formal authority in government, police and church organisations until the 1960s, white women nonetheless played a critical role in child removal. Racist assumptions about the superior 64 Nakata, ‘The infantilisation’, 110. 65 ‘Alan Jones’s stolen generations comments reopened old wounds, says Indigenous leader’, ABC News, 16 February 2016, www.abc.net.au/news/2016-02-16/alan-jonescomments-reopened-old-wounds-says-indigenous-leader/7173944. 66 McKinnon, ‘The lives behind the statistics’, 213.

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maternal qualities of white women allowed them to play central roles in missions and children’s homes that housed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children.67 Missionaries involved in separating children from their parents (or receiving children who had been stolen by government authorities) included not only Anglo-Celtic people but also missionaries from Spanish, Italian and German backgrounds.68

Victim Group and Impacts Family Trees When a tree loses its leaves And autumn is not to blame A tree surgeon is called Before the loggers arrive Family trees are stripped bare There is no arborist for this When we become kindling Who will cultivate our future?69

The entire Aboriginal family and community is the victim group. Policies were aimed at erasing Aboriginality itself, by removing Aboriginal children to disrupt family and kinship groups. The permanent removal of Indigenous children from their families existed within a broader system of racially justified attacks on all Indigenous families, which permeated the policies of both secular and religious institutions. During the twentieth century, state laws gave Protectors varying degrees of authority over all Aboriginal children. Similarly, in the same period, the majority of Christian missions and reserves sought to house all Indigenous children in dormitories, separating them from their parents and the influence of their kin.70 67 Margaret D. Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); Cruickshank and Grimshaw, White Women. 68 See, e.g., Christine Choo, Mission Girls: Aboriginal Women on Catholic Missions in the Kimberley, Western Australia, 1900–1950 (Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2001); Katharine Massam, A Bridge Between: Spanish Benedictine Missionary Women in Australia (Canberra: ANU ePress, 2020). For German-speaking missionaries, see the ‘German Missionaries in Australia’ website, produced by Regina Ganter at Griffith University, http://missionaries.griffith.edu.au/german-missionaries-australia-webdirectory-intercultural-encounters. 69 Ali Cobby Eckermann, ‘Family trees’, Griffith Review 60 (2018), www.griffithreview.com/ articles/whose-heart-is-this-ali-cobby-eckermann/. 70 Haebich, Broken Circles, pp. 342–417.

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In addition to the long-standing focus on children of mixed descent, during the early and mid-twentieth century, authorities particularly targeted Indigenous girls for removal. This reflected racialised fears about their sexuality (and role as the potential mothers of children of mixed descent) as well as the high demand for Aboriginal girls as domestic labourers.71 By the end of the twentieth century, however, Heather Goodall found in a study of New South Wales that this trend had been reversed and that more boys than girls were being removed.72 The testimony of victims and their communities, as well as multiple scholarly studies, provide evidence of the wide-ranging, harmful impact of child removal for Indigenous people and communities. These impacts include devastating physical and emotional harms to the individuals removed and to those who had their children stolen. As noted, many of the children who were removed suffered from physical and sexual abuse, emotional neglect, inadequate nutrition, substandard education and unrelenting racism, all of which have ongoing impacts for survivors in adulthood. Even the small minority of survivors who reported being treated with affection and care by adoptive parents or institutional carers, note the long-term pain of loss of identity and community.73 In the words of one survivor: We may go home, but we cannot relive our childhoods. We may reunite with our mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, aunties, uncles, communities, but we cannot relive the 20, 30, 40 years that we spent without their love and care, and they cannot undo the grief and mourning they felt when we were separated from them. We can go home to ourselves as Aboriginals, but this does not erase the attacks inflicted on our hearts, minds, bodies and souls, by caretakers who thought their mission was to eliminate us as Aboriginals.74

New research continues to confirm the long-term, negative effects of removal for Stolen Generations survivors. In 2021, the most comprehensive study to date found that compared to a sample group of Indigenous people over age 50 who had not been removed, survivors over 50 were significantly more likely to suffer from mental illness, be financially insecure, have been recent victims of actual or threatened physical harm and have a profound disability.75 In 1991, a Royal 71 Ibid., p. 473; Heather Goodall, ‘Saving the children: gender and the colonisation of Aboriginal children in NSW, 1788 to 1990’, Aboriginal Law Bulletin 44:1 (1990), www .austlii.edu.au/au/journals/AboriginalLawB/1990/20.html. 72 Goodall, ‘Saving the children’. 73 HREOC, Bringing Them Home. 74 Link-Up (NSW) submission 186, p. 29, HREOC, Bringing Them Home, p. 11. 75 Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW), ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Stolen Generations aged 50 and over: updated analyses for 2018–19’ (AIHW,

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Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody found that child removal was a ’significant precursor’ to high rates of imprisonment of Indigenous people.76 The connection between child removal and deaths in custody was examined in detail in Richard Frankland’s documentary Who Killed Malcolm Smith?77 In addition, the intergenerational impacts of child removal are increasingly recognised.78 Survivors who were brought up in institutions, where they were deprived of healthy family bonds and models, report their profound difficulty in parenting their own children in later life.79 As one survivor told the National Inquiry: That’s another thing that we find hard is giving our children love. Because we never had it. So we don’t know how to tell our kids that we love them. All we do is protect them. I can’t even cuddle my kids ’cause I never ever got cuddled. The only time was when I was getting raped and that’s not what you’d call a cuddle, is it?80

A Western Australian study found the children of Aboriginal carers who were forcibly separated from their families are twice as likely as other Indigenous children to use drugs or alcohol and to have significant behavioural or emotional problems.81 The fear of child removal is pervasive in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families, both because of past experiences and because of the ongoing extent of child removal.82 The genocidal effects of child removal are seen in the ways in which child removal has (as intended) contributed to the loss of language, culture and identity for generations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The removal of Indigenous children attacked the structures of kinship through

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2021), p. 7, https://healingfoundation.org.au/app/uploads/2021/05/AIHW-ReportFINAL-May-2021.pdf. See Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1991), Indigenous Law Resources, AustLIT database, www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/IndigLRes/rciadic/. Who Killed Malcolm Smith?, Documentary, written by Richard Frankland, produced by S. Connolly, directed by N. Adler and C. Sherwood, Film Australia Ltd, 1992. B. Raphael, P. Swan and N. Martinek, ‘Intergenerational aspects of trauma for Australian Aboriginal people’, in International Handbook of Multigenerational legacies of trauma, ed. Y. Danieli (New York: Plenum Press, 1998), pp. 327–39. HREOC, Bringing Them Home, pp. 165–91. Confidential evidence 689, New South Wales: woman placed in Parramatta Girls’ Home at 13 years in the 1960s, HREOC, Bringing Them Home, p. 195. Stephen Zubrick, S. R. Silburn, David Lawrence et al., The Western Australian Aboriginal Child Health Survey: The Social and Emotional Wellbeing of Aboriginal Children and Young People (Perth: Curtin University of Technology and the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research, 2005). See, e.g., ‘Aboriginal mothers like me still fear that our children could be taken away’, The Guardian, 25 January 2014, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/21/ aboriginal-mothers-like-me-still-fear-that-our-children-could-be-taken-away.

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which Indigenous culture has been maintained for millennia.83 Where children were removed from their families and stripped of their language and cultural knowledge, these aspects of Indigenous identity were stolen from their descendants as well. The removal of Indigenous children has thus been a major contributor to the breakdown of the cultural, linguistic and relational connections that have historically constituted Indigenous communities and identities. It has also contributed to the loss of legal rights to land ownership, as Native Title legislation in Australia requires communities to demonstrate ongoing cultural connection to their country.84

Resisting Child Removal Between her songs I heard her say Police’s been taken my baby away From white man, boss, the baby I have Why he let him take baby away My brown skin baby they take him away To a children’s home a baby came With new clothes on and a new name Day and night he would always say Oh mummy, mummy why they take me away!? My brown skin baby they take him away.85

Resistance to child removal was undertaken in many different ways, and often in every way available. People physically fought the police, church representatives and government workers who arrived in the homes and communities. They hid their children, or children ran away when the cars were approaching.86 Families wrote letters to the institutions and to the government asking and begging for their children to be returned.87 People petitioned the institutions and wrote to the newspapers to argue for their children to be returned. Many of these experiences are captured in Aboriginal 83 Fiona Murphy, ‘Archives of sorrow: an exploration of Australia’s Stolen Generations and their journey into the past’, History and Anthropology 22:4 (2011), 481–95. 84 Lester Irabinna Rigney, ‘Native title, the stolen generation and reconciliation’, Interventions 1:1 (1998), 125–30. 85 Bob Randall, ‘My Brown Skin Baby’ (1964), https://aiatsis.gov.au/blog/my-brownskin-baby 86 Haebich, Broken Circles, pp. 288–9. 87 See Birch, ‘The first white man born’; Elizabeth Nelson, Sandra Smith and Patricia Grimshaw (eds.), Letters from Aboriginal Women of Victoria, 1867–1926 (Melbourne: University of Melbourne Department of History, 2002); Haebich, Broken Circles, pp. 288–90; HREOC, Bringing Them Home, pp. 61–8, 86, 127.

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and Torres Strait Islander art, music, literature and film. There are currently more than 750 individual works about the Stolen Generations indexed in BlackWords, the Austlit online documentation of Aboriginal writers and their works.88 These include Wandering Girl by Glynnis Ward, If Everyone Cared by Margaret Tucker, Kick the Tin by Doris Kartinyeri, and Saltwater Fella by John Moriarty. Follow The Rabbit Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington, later to become a film directed by Phillip Noyce, documents the experience of three young girls – Mollie, Gracie and Daisy – who fled confinement at Moore River Native Settlement after being removed from their families at Jigalong in Western Australia. Life stories and experiences in books, poetry, film and music capture the experience of child removal, and the fear that it instilled into communities. The documentation of these experiences is a crucial aspect of resistance efforts. The narratives that are often told by authorities and the institutions that were (are) undertaking removals is that the children were neglected, they were not wanted and it was ‘for their own good’. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people tell a very different account in the stories they write. Music has also been an important form of resistance to child removal and the systems that have perpetuated it. In 1970, Yankunytjatjara Elder Bob Randall, who was stolen as a child, wrote the song ‘My Brown Skin Baby’ and performed it on national television. The song has become known as an ‘anthem’ for members of the Stolen Generations.89 First recorded in 1990, Gunditjmara and Bundjalung Elder Archie Roach’s ‘Took the Children Away’ is likewise a resistance anthem and a powerful testimony documenting the experiences of Aboriginal children removed from their families and the effect on their communities. In writing the song, he says he wanted to address ‘what had happened in those days on the mission, and what had happened to the mother and fathers and uncles and aunties after the children were taken’.90 Stories also tell of the ongoing effects of child removal later on in people’s lives, and how communities have sought to heal. Aboriginal academic Judy Atkinson suggests that trauma trails of the Stolen Generations ‘run across the country and generations from original locations of violence as people moved away from the places of pain. These trauma trails carried fragmented, 88 Heiss, ‘Our truths’. 89 ‘Brown Skin Baby: Songwriter of Stolen Generations anthem dies in central Australia’, ABC News, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 12 May 2015. Retrieved 14 May 2015. 90 Archie Roach, Tell Me Why: The Story of My Life and My Music (Sydney: Simon and Schuster, 2019), p. 194.

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fractured people and families.’91 Ruby Langford Ginibi’s My Bundjalung People is one such story, and in it she writes about her journey back to country and all that it entails as an older Aboriginal woman. Of the experience, she writes ‘[r]eturning to the mission after a 48-year absence connected me up with my family, and my extended family, and my dreaming’.92 She goes on to say, ‘I’d advise every Koori person who ever wanted to go back to the missions or reserves they came from to do so! To lift their spirits and bodies up and make them feel whole again!’93 Through reconnecting community and culture, the genocidal impacts of child removal are resisted. Since 1980, Link-Up organisations have worked to reconnect members of the Stolen Generations with their families.94 From the 1920s onwards, Aboriginal people formed political organisations that drew attention to the injustices of colonialism and campaigned for the rights of Indigenous people. All of these organisations sought to both resist the systemic causes of child removal and advocate for individual families whose children had been stolen. These organisations included the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association (AAPA) in NSW and the Australian Aborigines League (AAL) in Victoria.95 Speaking to a white audience in 1934, Anna Morgan, a Djadjawurrung woman and member of the AAL, identified the relationship between child removal from Aboriginal families on reserves, demand for labour, sexual assault and the ‘absorption’ of Aboriginal people: At the age of fourteen our girls were sent to work – poor, illiterate, trustful little girls to be gulled by the promises of unscrupulous white men. We all know the consequences. But of course, one of the functions of the Aborigines’ Protection Board is to build a white Australia.96

A small number of white activists and organisations, mostly within left-wing or Christian traditions, supported the efforts of Aboriginal people in drawing attention to the horrors of child removal during this period.97 Throughout the 91 Judy Atkinson, Trauma Trails: Recreating Song Lines (Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2002), p. 88. 92 Ruby Langford Ginibi, My Bundjalung People, UQP Black Australian Writers (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1994), p. 212. 93 Ibid., p. 212. 94 Link-Up NSW, www.linkupnsw.org.au/about_us/. 95 See Maynard, Fight for Liberty and Freedom, pp. 6, 8, 65, 90, 96, 99, 140–1; Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus (eds.), Thinking Black: William Cooper & the Australian Aborigines’ League (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2004), pp. 22, 31, 47–8, 117. 96 Anna Morgan, ‘Under the black flag’, Labor Call, 20 September 1934, 3. 97 Anna Haebich, ‘Forgetting Indigenous histories: cases from the history of Australia’s Stolen Generations’, Journal of Social History 44, no. 4 (2011), 1033–46.

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1950s, 1960s and 1970s, Aboriginal communities and organisations worked to resist child removal by staging protests, forming alliances with non-Indigenous people and drawing international attention to the child removal practices and policies.98 Many argue that the Stolen Generations continue to the present day, with removals of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children by government agencies continuing in disproportionate numbers. The resistance to these removals likewise continues. Removal rates are at higher levels in 2020 than they were in the officially recognised period, with around 6.3 times more Aboriginal children in out-of-home care than when the Bringing Them Home report was published in 1997.99 Grandmothers Against Removal (GMAR) is a grassroots organisation, formed by Aboriginal grandmothers in 2014, to fight the removal of Indigenous children from their families.100 Aunt Deb Swan, one of the founders of GMAR, points to the rising rates of child removal as evidence that the apology to the Stolen Generations was meaningless. ‘A lot of people thought the Stolen Generation was finished’, she states. ‘The apology was to the older generation but it’s a continuing Stolen Generation.’101 In the words of a slogan often heard at GMAR rallies, ‘Sorry means you don’t do it again.’

Bibliographic Note As noted above, a wide range of available sources testify to the historical and contemporary experience of child removal. The National Inquiry collected evidence from 532 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Some of these witnesses’ accounts were included in the Bringing Them Home report produced by the Inquiry. One recommendation of Bringing Them Home was that oral histories should be collected from members of the Stolen Generations and their descendants. As a result, the Commonwealth Government funded the ‘Bringing Them Home Oral History Project’, which ran from 1998 to 2002. The Project collected the stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who had been removed from their families, as well as those such as 98 See examples ibid. 99 AGPC (Australian Government Productivity Commission), ‘Report on Government Services 2019: Part F, Chapter 16, Child Protection Services’ (online). 100 See Sophie Verass, ‘The women fighting against a rising tide of Indigenous child removal’, NITV website, www.sbs.com.au/nitv/feature/women-fighting-againstrising-tide-indigenous-child-removals. 101 Aunt Deb Swan, quoted in ‘Sorry means you don’t do it again’, Friends of the Earth Website, www.foe.org.au/grandmothers_against_removals.

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police and missionaries who had been responsible for or participated in child removal. Over 300 interviews were conducted and are available through the National Library of Australia.102 Many state libraries and archives also contain collections of oral history, collected by and from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, including histories of child removal. Oomera (Coral) Edwards and Peter Read, founders of the Link-Up organisation, also published The Lost Children (1989), a collection of thirteen survivors’ stories.103 Thirty survivors recorded their stories on video for the Stolen Generations’ Testimonies project.104 Many survivors and their descendants have also told their stories through life writing. An early example was Theresa Clements, From Old Maloga (1930), which included an account of her two daughters being forcibly removed and placed in Cootamundra Girls’ Home.105 In 1977, one of Clements’s daughters, Margaret Tucker, published her own memoir, If Everyone Cared, which described the devastating short- and long-term impacts of removal and institutionalisation on her and many other Aboriginal people.106 At least 1,300 works of life writing have been published by Indigenous people and most of these accounts contain at least some reference to the experience and impact of child removal, while others focus primarily on this experience.107 Similarly, many works of fiction and poetry created by Indigenous writers describe the experience and impact of the Stolen Generations.108 Government records relating to the Stolen Generations are extensive but often partial and difficult to locate. State and territory legislation relevant to the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children has been digitised and is available through the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS). Other government sources that reveal the development of policies relating to child removal are minutes of government inquiries and meetings, many of which have also been 102 www.nla.gov.au/oral-history/bringing-them-home-oral-history-project. 103 Coral Edwards and Peter Read, The Lost Children: Thirteen Australians Taken from their Aboriginal Families Tell of the Struggle to Find Their Natural Parents (Sydney: Doubleday, 1989). 104 Stolen Generations’ Testimonies Project, www.stolengenerationstestimonies.com. 105 Theresa Clements, From Old Maloga: The Memoirs of an Aboriginal Woman (Prabran: Fraser & Morphett, 1930), http://handle.slv.vic.gov.au/10381/245364. 106 Margaret Tucker, If Everyone Cared: The Autobiography of Margaret Tucker MBE (Sydney: Ure Smith, 1977). 107 The ‘BlackWords Project’, which collects published writing by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander authors, lists more than 1,300 works of Indigenous ‘life writing’. See BlackWords website, www.austlit.edu.au/BlackWords. 108 See Heiss, ‘Our truths’, and McKinnon, ‘The lives behind the statistics’, 213.

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digitised.109 Other relevant records include those produced by Protection Boards, police, welfare agencies and education departments. Records relating to child removal prior to 1967 are mainly held by individual states, except in the case of the Northern Territory, which was administered by the Commonwealth. Many of these records have been lost or destroyed – either intentionally (in many cases to deliberately destroy evidence of child removal and other abuses) or by accident.110 Different states have very different protocols regarding access to such records. Most state and territory archives have, however, now produced resources specifically to assist Indigenous people seeking records relating to their family history, including information relating to child removal.111 Records produced by church and non-governmental organisations involved in child removal are similarly extensive, but often even more poorly catalogued and difficult to locate. No legislation governs the storage of such records or asserts the rights of Indigenous people to access records that relate to them and their families. Individual institutions have taken very different approaches to their records – some missionary societies, for example, have turned over all their records to state archives, so that they are publicly available. Others have refused or tightly regulated access to their records. Since 2013, the Commonwealth government has funded a ‘Find and Connect’ website for care leavers, which contains information about institutions to which children (both Indigenous and non-Indigenous) were removed.112 This site provides details of known holdings of government or non-government records that relate to each institution, making it a significant resource for identifying records of the Stolen Generations. 109 ‘To remove and protect’, https://aiatsis.gov.au/collection/featured-collections/re move-and-protect. 110 See Ros Kidd, ‘Indigenous Archival Records at Risk’, Australian Academic & Research Libraries 36:2 (2005), 153–60. 111 For example, Indigenous family resources at the State Library of Western Australia, https://slwa.wa.gov.au/explore-discover/indigenous-wa/family-history/wa-indigen ous-family-history-resources. 112 ‘Find and Connect’ website, www.findandconnect.gov.au.

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5

Eurocentrism, Silence and Memory of Genocide in Colonial Libya, 1929–1934 ali abdullatif ahmida*

Mussolini’s Fascist dictatorship was a much more benign dictatorship than Saddam Hussein’s. Silvio Berlusconi, Italian prime minister, New York Times, 30 November 2003 [Mussolini’s Fascism] up to 1938 was not totalitarian, but just an ordinary nationalist dictatorship developed logically from a multiparty system. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), p. 257

This chapter examines the hidden history of the Libyan genocide by the Italian colonial state that took place in eastern Libya between 1929 and 1934. The genocide resulted in a loss of 83,000 Libyans as the population declined from 225,000 to 142,000 citizens. Some 110,000 civilians were forced to march from their homes to the harsh desert and then were interned in horrific concentration camps. Between 60,000 and 70,000, mostly rural people (men, women and children) and their 600,000 animals were starved and died of diseases. I argue this calculated mass killing and destruction of people and culture was the result of a twenty-year anti-colonial resistance and represented, by all measures, genocide based on a racist colonial plan to crush local resistance and settle poor Italian peasants in the colony. The Italian state suppressed news about the genocide; evidence was destroyed, and the remaining files on the concentration camps were hard to find even after the end of fascism in Italy in 1945. The history that Libyans have recorded in their Arabic oral history and narratives has remained hidden and unexplored in systematic fashion, and never in a manner has that allowed us to even begin to understand its extent. That is what I set out to do in this volume, through cross-cultural critical, * This is a revised and updated version of my published article in Italian Studies 61: 2 (2006), 175–90. I am grateful to Taylor and Francis for permission to reproduce it here, and to Khalid Mattawa for translating the epic poem ‘Ma bi Marad’.

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anthropological, literary, theoretical and comparative readings of Genocide Studies. Why call it genocide? I would argue that it fits the requirements defined by the father of modern Genocide Studies, the Polish legal scholar Raphael Lemkin, in 1948 in the UN Convention. He specifically identified two conditions. First, the intentionality of killing and, second, the policy of destroying physical, biological and cultural patterns of life. In addition, this chapter examines and challenges Italian colonial and Eurocentric historiographical views of the ‘benign’ nature of Italian fascism by exploring the genocide in Libya between 1929 and 1934. It looks at the ways in which this experience has generally been silenced or elided up to the 1980s from historical accounts of fascism that look only at Europe. This silence and under-representation over the Libyan genocide is contrasted by the rise of a small but strong body of critical scholarship both outside and inside Italy in 1973. In addition to detailing the brutality of the regime’s treatment of the Libyan population, this scholarship also draws on oral history and folk poetry as a means of establishing the ongoing bitter legacy of Italy’s presence in Libya. The genocide’s history is divided; there exists a silence in Italy, but a living memory in Libya, especially in the eastern and southern parts of the country. I call this unawareness the ‘politics of memories’. First, it is essential to identify the schools of thought and review the assumptions and categories of silence. Second is the need to illuminate the examples and discourses in both academic and mass culture. We must never forget the evil deeds of the fascists in Europe, Libya and Ethiopia. The notion of a reformed fascism, coinciding with the re-emergence of Italy’s former neo-fascist party, is a dangerous new myth that no one should tolerate. A critical new study of Italian fascism must overcome the Eurocentric view by looking at genocide in the colonies beyond Europe and insisting on the moral and political responsibility of the Italian state to open the archives so that we can find out how many skeletons are in its closet and provide a voice to those that have been unjustly forgotten. This dominant historiographical view is based on the myth that Italian fascism did not encompass acts of genocide and mass murder. This entirely false claim reinforced the notion that Italian fascism was a lesser evil than fascism practised under the German Nazi regime. Second, it argues against the use of the nation-state and the region as unit of analysis. It is far more revealing, I believe, to use a comparative analysis that includes the European colonies in a global capitalist world system, especially after the eighteenth century. I argue that one could not write the history of Italy without studying 119

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the history of its colonies, especially Libya. Similarly, one cannot write the history of Libya without studying the history of Italy, and this method could be applied to: Algeria, Haiti, Vietnam, Cambodia and France; Egypt, India and Britain; the Congo, Rwanda and Belgium; Southwest Africa (Namibia) and Germany; and Korea and Japan. This transnational and comparative post-colonial method is a key to understanding the genealogy of the present. Both Italian and Libyan colonial and nationalist historiographies are limited, if not distorted, if the nation-state alone constitutes the unit of scholarly analysis. This chapter seeks to address three questions: 1. Why, until the 1980s, did the dominant image of Italian fascism as relatively benign persist in the public media, films and scholarly Italian and Western studies when compared with Nazi Germany’s model of fascism? 2. What are some of the moral and scholarly flaws leading to the silence surrounding the myth of Italian fascism? 3. How does recovered evidence of genocides of Arabs between 1929 and 1934, along with oral narratives of some of the 100,000 to 110,000 victims of Italy’s concentration camps in Libya undermine common misconceptions concerning the nature of Italy’s brand of fascism? It is my main argument that Italian fascist brutality was not just a byproduct of war, but rather of calculated genocide experienced by real human beings who are capable of telling us, in their own songs, words and poems, what they went through. The argument I make includes examples of public perceptions and scholarship; the context and causes for such views; alternative critical scholarship; and the history of fascist genocide in Libya based on the agency and narrative of a Libyan who survived the concentration camps between 1929 and 1934. I identify five schools in the scholarship on the Libyan internment and genocide: 1. A school that is Eurocentric and depicts colonialism and Italian fascism as authoritarian yet civilising influences on the ‘natives’ in Libya. It focuses mainly on Italian and other western sources. It sees Italian fascism as a role-model even in post-World War Two politics. It accepts the archives as facts and does not challenge fascist assumptions and propaganda. 2. A school that is silent about the genocide in Libya and advocates the concept of brava gente, choosing to see all Italians as good people. It assumes that the Italian national character is moderate and would not commit brutal atrocities and genocide as the antisemitic genocidal

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German Nazi regime did. Scholars of this school do not know Arabic and they focus on Italy and Italians in Africa for reactions or the impact of this policy and perception such as modernism, nationalism, architecture and tourism. 3. A school that accepts fascism as an effective model for development and modernisation without even mentioning the human cost of genocide. 4. A school that recognises that genocide was committed in Libya yet is silent about – or chooses not to examine – its impact and the consequences for Libya and Italy. Even today, one finds books and references to the concentration camps and to mass death but which appear to say that it was merely a sad part of history and which then move on to talk about Libya and Italy as if there were no consequences that remain with us today. 5. A school of contemporary comparative Genocide Studies, which includes the study of some forgotten examples, and yet which still excludes the Libyan case.

Italian Colonial and Eurocentric Scholarship Colonial and Eurocentric historiography have contributed to the myth that Italian fascism was benign. Eurocentric scholarship ignores fascist policies in the colonies, while colonial scholarship views fascism as one component of the modernising phase of history. Turning a blind eye to the nature of Italian fascism is bolstered not only by the official refusal to open the Italian National Archives to scholars – especially the files on the concentration camps – but also by the decision not to hold war crimes trials for individuals who carried out government policies as colonial officers. In addition, the Italian former neo-fascist party has been waging a strong public-relations campaign in defence of fascism since its re-emergence in the body politic in early 1990.1 In 1972, Princeton University historian John Diggins published a comprehensive book titled Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America, on the official and popular images of Italian fascism in the United States. He argued that in the nineteenth century, Americans considered Italy to be, on the one hand, a positive, romantic ideal and, on the other, a negative nativist country. 1 For a critical review of the field see Ruth Ben-Ghiat, ‘A lesser evil? Italian fascism in/and the totalitarian equation’, in The Lesser Evil: Moral Approaches to Genocide, ed. Helmut Dubiel and Gabriel Motzkin (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 137–53; Adrian Lyttelton, ‘What is fascism’, The New York Review of Books, 21 October 2004, 33–6; R. J. B. Bosworth, Italian Dictatorship (London: Arnold, 1998), pp. 3–4.

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Travellers and expatriate writers who viewed Italy as a classical source of cultural values shaped the romantic image and, in turn, shaped the perceptions of scholars focusing on national character and political culture. One must ponder the cultural differences among the dead. German Nazis killed Europeans, creating outrage among other Europeans, but Italian Fascists killed North African Muslims, playing into orientalist fantasies, and racist and modernist colonial ideologies about the dehumanised, backward natives and the price of modernity to justify ‘exterminate all the brutes’. These perspectives created the context in which Italian fascism was seen as moderate – perhaps an aberration – while the German character, commonly viewed as militaristic, naturally resulted in the horrors of the Nazis.2 At the turn of the twentieth century, in the United States, the nativist image emanated from a fear of Italian working-class immigrants, who were seen as ignorant, poor, Catholic and oppressed. Even with the rise of fascism in 1922, American official and public responses to Italy were mostly positive, focusing mainly on Mussolini who, according to Diggins, represented a much-needed solution to a country lacking both discipline and work ethic, and corrupted by a fractured elite. In the popular view, Mussolini had multiple virtues; he was considered an accomplished writer, a violinist, a strong statesman and a moderniser who ‘made the trains run on time’. This image of Mussolini and his brand of fascism was popularised by the American films and documentaries of the 1930s.3 In addition many public American figures such as Henry Ford, Charles Lindberg and poet Ezra Pound expressed an open support for Italian Fascism and Mussolini. One must also keep in mind the larger historical context between 1922 and 1939; Italian fascism not only posed no threat to American interests, but the United States welcomed the anti-communist ideology of a country that had the largest communist party in western Europe. Even critics of Mussolini portrayed him merely as a buffoon or ordinary dictator.4 This theme has persisted both in mainstream scholarship and in modern Western films from the 1930s until today. Indeed, movies played a major role in Mussolini’s popularity. In 1931, Columbia Studio Company produced Mussolini Speaks, a film based on the dictator’s tenth anniversary speech in Naples. It presents a 2 John P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 6. 3 Ibid., p. 241. 4 Gregory Dale Black, The United States and Italy (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1974), pp. 13–14.

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positive view of Il Duce. In the 1920s, the Italian government opened its doors to the American film industry and tried to use films as a public-relations tool.5 These images of a romantic Italy and moderate Italian fascism are still present in popular culture as demonstrated by Zeffirelli’s 1999 film Tea with Mussolini, which claims to provide a more realistic view of its principal subject than previous works. This biographical film by the veteran film-maker dramatises two aspects of Italy’s colonialist era: British and American romantic images and the rise of antisemitism. The film emphasised these themes through the lives of four expatriates and an Italian teenager (Zeffirelli as a young boy) in Florence in the late 1930s. Stanley Kauffmann astutely captured the significance of the film when he wrote: ‘Italy has long figured in the English imagination, especially that of writers.’ More of Shakespeare’s plays take place in Italy than any country except England. But possibly it was the Brownings, Robert and Elizabeth, who set the still-prevailing affinity for Italy. When Elizabeth died in Florence in 1861, the municipality placed a tablet on her house with some lines by an Italian poet: ‘here wrote and died Elizabeth Barrett Browning . . . who made of her verse a golden ring linking Italy and England’. Since that day a steady line of English residents in Florence has kept that ring polished. It is at Elizabeth’s grave that Tea with Mussolini begins.6 The movie is silent about the colonial fascist atrocities in Libya and Ethiopia despite the fact that these atrocities happened earlier, between 1929 and 1935. This romantic film genre reproduces the colonial notion of moderate fascism and brava gente as in the 2001 case of another film by Louis de Bernières, on the Italian invasion of Greece, entitled Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Italian soldiers are depicted as humane and more as lovers than the brutal German occupiers who came to finish the occupation. A whole genre of Hollywood film popularised the myth of moderate Italian fascism, while the Nazi-type is depicted as the prototype of evil and the genocidal state. While European film-makers romanticise Italy, two critical movies depicting the genocide in Libya, Ethiopia and the Balkans were censored in Italy. The first of these movies is Mustafa Akkad’s 1981 film Lion of the Desert, which 5 On Italian Historiography see Peter Gran, Beyond Eurocentrism: A New World View of Modern History (Syracuse University Press, 1996), pp. 88–121. Also on Italian Orientalism see Anna Baldinetti, Orientalismo E Colonialismo La ricerca di consenso in Egitto Per L’impresa di Libia (Roma: Istituto Per L’Oriente C. A. Nallino, 1997). See also, Patrick Bernhard, ‘Renarrating Italian fascism: new directions in the historiography of a European dictatorship’, Contemporary European History 23(2014), 151–63. 6 Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, p. 243; Stanley Kauffmann, ‘Under Florentine skies’, New Republic, 7 June 1999, 30.

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dramatises the history of anti-colonial Libyan resistance led by Umar al-Mukhtar, using real footage of the deportation and internment for the first time. The movie was banned in Italy. When it was released after Colonel Qaddafi’s visit to Italy to sign a new treaty regarding colonial oppression in 2008, the movie was briefly shown in limited theatres. The second film is A Fascist Legacy, a 1989 BBC documentary on the Italian fascist atrocities in Libya, Ethiopia and Yugoslavia. It was based on the work of the American historian Michael Palumbo, who discovered classified files showing a postWorld War Two cover-up of war crimes committed by Italian fascist generals and officials of the Allies. The Italian government protested about the film, then bought the rights and shelved it. I tried to find a copy of the film for ten years and discovered only six libraries worldwide that owned it. It was only in 2017 that I was able to obtain a copy of the film from an Australian University. The two-hour-long film documents a record of the horrors of the Italian fascist atrocities and the Allies’ cover-up based on classified files at British archives which were discovered accidentally by American historian Michael Palumbo. In January 2018 the film producer Ken Kirby informed me that the film script was based on Palumbo’s discovery of the evidence at the British Public Records Office proving a cover-up by the Allies not to push for war crimes against Italian fascists. The files were removed immediately after he revealed them in the film. Today, there are still scholars who advance the notion of moderate Italian fascism and praise Mussolini’s regime as an acceptable legitimate state instead of a genocidal one. The contemporary rise of the former neo-fascist party in Italy, the Alleanza Nazionale (AN), lends force to the theory that Italian fascism helped modernise Italy, especially after it captured 14 per cent of the vote, or 100 of the 630 seats, in the Italian lower house, and joined the government as a legitimate party in 1994. In 2001, Gianfranco Fini, the head of the party, became deputy prime minister in Silvio Berlusconi’s government and, on 20 November 2004, he became the new Italian foreign minister. The New York Times described him as a reformed leader who denounced antisemitism and visited Israel twice.7 Denouncing antisemitism directed against Jews is a positive development, but what about the other Semites, 7 Alan Cowell, ‘The ghost of Mussolini keeps rattling his chains’, New York Times, 1 June 1994, p. A3; James O. Jackson, ‘Fascism lives’, Time, 6 June 1994; Ian Fisher, ‘New Italian minister sheds far-right image’, New York Times, 19 November 2004. For a sympathetic view of fascism, see Renzo De Felice, Interpretations of Fascism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977); on the historiography of Nazism see Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship (London:Edward Arnold, 1993).

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namely, the Libyan Muslims who experienced fascist atrocities? As a new political party, it put one of its most charming members, Mussolini’s granddaughter Alessandra Mussolini, on display for the American public. Her pictures in People magazine are revealing. In one, she raises her arm in the fascist salute, just as her grandfather Benito did on a balcony in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi. The article in People identified the place, but misspelled Benghazi as ‘Bangali’, and did not identify it as part of Italy’s colonial holdings.8 Alessandra Mussolini originally represented the far-right Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) but, having subsequently represented AN, has since formed a new breakaway group. She presents herself as an industrious modern woman who promises to show people what a Mussolini can do. Her grandfather’s followers founded the MSI in 1946, but it was a marginal force until the mid-1990s, when it became a partner in Berlusconi’s coalition government. Fascism is becoming respectable again, not because it is less evil, but because we have forgotten what it means. It is troubling to know that ex-President Donald Trump’s former chief advisor Steve Bannon is fond of Julius Evola, one of the major Italian philosophers of fascism. Advocates of the myth that Italian fascism was moderate in comparison to Germany’s base their case on two arguments: (1) that the Italian approach to antisemitism was milder and (2) that there were no mass killings or ethnic genocide such as that carried out by Nazi Germany. Here the scholarship on fascism tends to focus on the regime’s treatment of the European Jewish minorities. This thesis is supported with information such as the fact that the Fascist Party was open to Jews and that more than twenty Jews joined the Fascist Party’s March on Rome in 1922. Further, high-ranking officials in the Italian fascist state included Italian Jews such as Aldo Finzi, a member of the first Fascist Council; Guido Jung, minister of finance from 1932 to 1935; and Maurizio Rava, governor of Italian Somaliland and general in the Italian fascist militia. Philosopher Hannah Arendt, author of the influential 1973 book The Origins of Totalitarianism on the origins of totalitarian regimes in the last century, erred in arguing that there was no Jewish question in Italy, and that only after pressure from the German Nazi state did Italy turn in 7,000 Italian Jews to the German concentration camps. She seemed to be unaware of what happened in Libya due to the closing of the colony and the censorship of any media access between 1929 and 1943. Consequently for her, Italian fascism became just an ordinary dictatorship, and because of her wide 8 ‘Duce with the Laughing Face’, People Magazine, 27 April 1992, p. 70.

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influence on post-war scholarship on genocide, her Eurocentric approach to Italian fascism has contributed to the persistent myth that it was a lesser evil and even moderate.9 Italian American historian Victoria de Grazia, on the other hand, points out that ‘racial laws of 1938, modeled on Germany’s 1935 Nuremberg Laws, forbade interracial marriages between Italians and Jews, banned “Aryan” servants from working in Jewish houses, removed Jews from influential positions in government, and education, and banking’.10 A scholar of comparative fascism, de Grazia focuses her attention on Europe, therefore concluding that the Holocaust was unique in its mass killing of Jewish and other ethnic minorities. Her perspective, while critical of the prevailing scholarship in some respects, is nevertheless shaped by exactly the same Eurocentric bias. Had she examined the other external cases of colonial genocide, the European examples will be seen in a new context, one that emphasises their shared roots and interconnection with other instances and not their exceptionalism.

Alternative Critical Scholarship During the second half of the twentieth century two groups of critics challenged the assumptions and arguments of colonial knowledge: critics of Eurocentrism, and then critics of Italian fascism and colonial atrocities. Among those who have challenged Eurocentric interpretations of history are Italian socialist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, and post-colonial intellectuals such as Aimé Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, C. L. R. James, Eric Wolf, Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Marnia Lazreg, Peter Gran, Rifaʾat Abou-El Haj, Samir Amin, Antonio Gramsci and Mahmood Mamdani. Lisa Anderson, the dean of American scholars on Libya, did not say much about the Libyan genocide but was very clear about the Italian atrocities and brutality in Libya. These scholars have argued that colonialism, and the history of colonised peoples, require acknowledgement.11 Gramsci was aware and 9 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (London: Penguin Books, 1994), pp. 178–80, and her other book The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1973), pp. 2, 5, 7, 8. 10 Victoria de Grazia, ‘Will Il Duce’s successors make the facts run on time?’, New York Times, 14 May 1994, p. 21. 11 For a critique of eurocentrism see Samir Amin, Eurocentrism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1980) and Carl Levy’s comprehensive review of the comparative analysis of Fascist movements yet still centered on Europe, ‘Fascism, National Socialism and Conservatives in Europe, 1914–1945’, Contemporary European History 8:1 (1999), 97–126.

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critical of the brutal fascist colonial wars, despite the fact that he was locked up in a fascist prison for most of his adult life.12 In his famous book The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961, Fanon contended, ‘Nazism turned the whole of Europe into a veritable colony.’13 The Africanist scholar Mahmood Mamdani, meanwhile, eloquently contextualised the debate about fascism, colonialism and genocide, writing, ‘The Holocaust was born at the meeting point of two traditions that marked modern Western Civilization: the antisemitic tradition and the tradition of genocide of colonized people. The difference in the fate of the Jewish people was that they were to be exterminated as a whole. In that, they were unique – but only in Europe.’14 Only in Europe. If one believes as a moral principle that all people, regardless of origin, have the same intrinsic worth, then all acts of genocide must be recognised, and all victims counted. Twenty-six years ago, when I wrote my book The Making of Modern Libya, I discovered that most scholars of fascism and totalitarianism viewed Italian fascism as a lesser evil. My studies based on archival research and oral interviews with the elderly Libyans who fought Italian colonialism confirmed fascism’s outrages, resulting in my discouragement and disillusionment by the appalling case of historical amnesia.15 Sixteen years ago, I began to research primary material on fascist concentration camps in Libya, recognising that there were indeed some scholars, and two journalists, who were pioneers in the study of the history of genocide in Libya: English anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard; Italian anti-fascist historians Giorgio Rochat, Angelo del Boca and Nicola Labanca; journalists Eric Salerno and Gustafo Ottolenghi; American historian Michael Palumbo and American historian of Italian fascist cinema Ruth Ben-Ghiat; and Libyan historian Yusuf Salim alBarghathi.16 Despite differences in age, background, method and field of

12 13 14 15 16

The Libyan case was overlooked even in recent and revisionist books on forgotten genocide: Rene Lemarchand (ed.), Forgotten Genocides (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Brian McLaren, Architecture and Tourism in Italian Colonial Libya (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000); Israel Gershoni (ed.), Arab Reponses to Fascism (Austin: Texas University Press, 2014). See David Forgacs (ed.), The Antonio Gramsci Reader (University of New York Press, 2000), pp. 112–13, 149. Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (London: Penguin, 1967), p. 75; Aim Ceasaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Pantheon, 1988), p. 12. Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004), p. 7. See my book The Making of Modern Libya, 2nd ed. (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009), p. 135. An early analytical analysis of the brutal fascist policies in Cyrenaica is made by E. E. Evans-Pritchard who was writing intelligence reports for the British army in 1945. See his book The Sanusi of Cyrenaica (Oxford University Press, 1949), pp. 160–89. For an overview of the critical Italian scholarships on fascism see Nicola Labanca,

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expertise, this group shares a focus on Italian fascist atrocities in Libya, especially concerning the concentration camps that existed between 1929 and 1934. Labanca is correct in stating that Italian historians were silent about the Libyan colonial internment up to the 1970s. One must bear in mind that there was no major anti-colonial movement inside Italy, and even the Communist Party was ambivalent about the colonies. Most of the anti-fascist critiques were devoted to the internment conditions inside Italy – as if there was no evidence of the atrocities and genocide. The absence of anti-colonial movement inside Italy contributed to the persistence until today of the myth that Italian fascism was moderate, modernising and even benign. In 2005, Salerno republished and updated his pioneering book of 1979 on the genocide in Libya. Historians writing about the genocide include Giorgio Rochat, Angelo del Boca, Nicola Labanca, Yusuf Salim al-Barghathi and Ruth Ben-Ghiat. Rochat, the main Italian historian to courageously challenge official views, has been examining the colonial records on genocide in the concentration camps since the early 1970s. He published a seminal article in 1973, calling what happened in Libya a genocide, and a more elaborated revision in 1981. Del Boca, in 2005, updated his major critique in two volumes on the history of Italian colonialism in Libya. Both Rochat and del Boca spent many years investigating the Italian archives and became vocal critics of Italian scholarship. In 2002, Labanca contributed a new book on a significant topic: the memoirs and letters of Italian soldiers who fought and served in the colonies of Libya and Ethiopia. He stated that the silence of Italian historians contributed to the Italian public’s amnesia regarding the colonial period and its atrocities. Al-Barghathi, should be recognised as the leading Libyan historian on the topic of internment. He published his master’s thesis based on oral interviews with Libyan survivors. Ben-Ghiat, an American historian of Italian fascist cinema, recently published an engaging and critical theoretical study of the notion of Italian fascism as a lesser evil.17 These scholars offer a comparative ‘Internamento Coloniale Italino’, in I campi di Concentramento in Italia, ed. Costantino Di Sante (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2001), pp. 40–67. 17 For a recent study of modern genocide see Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernin (eds.), The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). For the earliest analysis of genocide in Italian scholarship in Libya see G. Rochat, Il Colonialismo Italiano (Turin: Loescher, 1973); Angelo del Boca, Gli Italiani in Libia: Dal Fascismo a Gheddafi (Roma-Barie: Laterza, 1988); Eric Salerno, Genocido in Libia (Milan: Sugarco, 1979); Gustavo Ollolenghi, Gli Italini E il Colonialismo I campi di detenzione italiani in Africa (Milan: Sugarco, 1997), pp. 149–82; Michael Palumbo (ed.), Human Rights: Meaning and History (Florida: Robert E. Krieger, 1982), pp. 71–5; Federico Cresti, Non Desiderarae la terra d’altri (Rome: Carlucci editore, 2011), pp. 83–122.

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perspective that brings the Libyan experience into the larger study of Italian fascism and have begun to debunk the myth that it was moderate.

The Libyan Anti-colonial Resistance and the Internment The Italian colonial policy of removal, deportation, internment and killing the people active in or supportive of the resistance was not a fascist monopoly but started early in 1911. When in 1922, the Italian Fascist Party assumed power in Rome, it rejected the colonial practice (followed since 1911) of collaborating with local Libyan elites, terming it a failure. The fascists advocated military force aimed at ‘pacifying’ the natives of Italy’s colonies and continued to deport and exile Libyans in Italian prisons and exploit them as a source of cheap labour in Italy and cheap fighters in the war in Ethiopia and in World War Two up until 1943. Much like the German colonial genocide of the Herero and the Nama between 1904 and 1908 in Southwest Africa, the Apartheid regime in South Africa and Aryan supremacy in Nazi Germany, the Italian fascist policy was based on an ideology of racial supremacy and the myth of reviving the Roman Empire to colonise Libya. The volunteer-based native resistance movement that confronted General Graziani was led by a legendary, charismatic, 69-year-old named Umar alMukhtar. The resistance’s well-mobilised population included networks of spies, even inside Italian-controlled towns. Graziani estimated that the native guerrillas numbered approximately 3,000, and the number of guns, owned by Barqa’s tribesmen, to be about 20,000. Unlike the Italian invaders, the Cyrenaicans were familiar with the geography of the Green Mountain valleys, caves and trails; in 1931 alone, the guerrillas engaged in 250 attacks and ambushes on the Italian army. Italian colonial officials attempted first to bribe Umar al-Mukhtar, offering him a good salary and retirement. When he rejected the overture, Graziani moved to crush the resistance. The general’s armies adopted a scorched earth policy. This was compounded by cutting off the guerrillas’ supplies with the construction of a 300-km fence along the Libyan–Egyptian border, and then organising a campaign to occupy Kufra, capital of the Sanusi order, deep in the desert. Graziani’s army, including twenty aircraft and 5,000 camels, encountered fierce resistance from the Zuwaya tribe, but he succeeded in occupying Kufra on 20 February 1931.18 18 I dealt with this question ten years ago in Ch. 5 of my book The Making of Modern Libya, pp. 103–40. For a detailed record of the atrocities of Italian Colonialism in Libya see the book of the exiled Libyan Anti-Fascist Committee, Haʾiyat Tahrir Libia, ʿal-Fadʾiʾ

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The archival records show that the fascist state’s strategy was clear concerning the destruction of the resistance, even if it meant killing its civilian social base. The three most-senior Italian generals – Graziani, De Bono and Bagdolio – responded by forcefully rounding up two-thirds of the civilian population of eastern Libya – an estimated 110,000 men, women and children – and deporting them, by sea and on foot, to camps during the harsh winter of 1929. The deportation of the population emptied rural Barqa, and effectively cut off the resistance from its social base. Isolated on all sides and lacking supplies, the rebels gave up, especially after the capture and hanging of their leader, Umar alMukhtar, on 12 September 1931. He was 73 years old. Following his death, a majority of his aides were arrested and put to death on 24 September 1932.19

The Concentration Camps Historian Giorgio Rochat uncovered evidence, in a letter written from Governor Badoglio to General Graziani, dated 20 June 1930, that the Italians were prepared for large-scale civilian deaths. Marshall Pietro Badoglio wrote, ‘We must, above all, create a large and well-defined territorial gap between the rebels and the subject population. I do not conceal from myself the significance and the gravity of this action which may well spell the ruin of the so-called subject population.’20 The colonial state spent 13 million Italian liras on the construction of the camps. Double barbed-wire fences surrounded them, food was rationed and the pastureland was reduced and patrolled. Sixteen camps were constructed, varying in size, and degree of brutality, from the encircled camps (al-Shabardag, the barbwire) outside towns such as An al-Ghazala, Diriyyana, Susa, Al-Marj, Al-Abyar, Benghazi, Sidi Khalifa, Suwani al-Tariya, Al-Nufiliyya, Kuafiyya and Ajdabiya, to the largest and harshest camps of Agaila, Slug, Sidi Ahmad al-Magrun and the Braiga. The terrible punishment camp, Al-Agaila, was especially constructed for relatives of the rebel mujahidin.21 In the five big camps, no prisoner was al-Humr al-Sud: Min Safahat al-ʾIstiʿimar al-Itali fi Libia [The Red Black Horrors: Pages of Italian Colonialism in Libya], 2nd ed. (Cairo: Matbaʾat al-karnak, 1948 [1933]). 19 See the collection of essays on the repression of the Libyan resistance and the concentration camps of 1929–39 by Enzo Santarelli, Giorgio Rochat, Romain Rainero and Luigi Goglia, Omar al-Mukhtar, trans. John Gilbert (London: Darf Publishers Ltd, 1986). 20 See G. Rochat’s seminal study ‘The repression of resistance in Cyrenaica (1927–1931)’, in Enzo Santarelli, Giorgio Rochat, Romain Rainero and Luigi Goglia, Omar al-Mukhtar, trans. John Gilbert (London: Darf Publishers Ltd, 1986), p. 73. 21 Enzo Santarelli, ‘The ideology of the Libyan ‘reconquest’, Enzo Santarelli, Giorgio Rochat, Romain Rainero and Luigi Goglia, Omar al-Mukhtar, trans. John Gilbert (London: Darf Publishers Ltd, 1986); Rochat, ‘The repression’, 11–34, 72–9.

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allowed outside except by restricted permit. Forced labour was common, and no serious medical aid was provided. Outside the camps, Graziani ordered the confiscation of all livestock, the main economic source for survival and livelihood. Most of the deaths occurred in the five concentration camps, which I refer to as the ‘death camps’. For an independent semi-nomadic population, these conditions were devastating. As usual, the sick, elderly and children were the most vulnerable victims of these conditions, especially because the death of most of the herds ensured the people’s death by slow starvation. Evans-Pritchard, an expert on the tribes of Cyrenaica [Barqa], wrote: In this bleak country, in the summer of 1930, 80,000 men, women, and children, and 600,000 beasts were herded into the smallest camps possible. Hunger, disease, and broken hearts took a heavy toll of the imprisoned population. Bedouins died in a cage. Loss of livestock was also great, for the beasts had insufficient grazing near the camps on which to support life, and the herds, already decimated in the fighting are almost wiped out by the camps.22

With colonial archives still restricted and/or removed, there is little documentation of daily life inside the camps except for the oral history of the few Libyans who survived. Most scholars, including Evans-Pritchard, Rochat, Del Boca and Labanca, agree that the camps decimated the population. Rochat summed up his research of Italian sources, writing, ‘The fall of the [Barqa] population must be in small part attributed to war operations and, to a greater extent, to the conditions created by the Italian repression (hunger, poverty, and epidemics) and to the deportation of the people (transfer marches, death through malnutrition in the camps, epidemics, and inability to adapt to terrible new conditions).’23 Estimates of the total deaths during the deportation process and internment in the camps range from 40,000 to 70,000. For now, I think the number is at least 60,000 based on the fact the interned total number was not 80,000 but 110,000, and the fact that many died during the deportation from the east to the desert of Sirte. All agree that people died in the camps due to shootings, hangings, disease or starvation, but Libyan historian Al-Barghathi places the death toll higher – at between 50,000 and 70,000. His estimate is based on 22 Evans-Pritchard, The Sanusi, p. 189. 23 Rochat ‘The repression’, 96–7, and his earlier article ‘Il genocide Cirenaico’, Belfagor 35:4 (1980), 449–54.

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Libyan archives and on oral interviews.24 Yet, Del Boca notes a fact ignored by most historians: large numbers of elderly adults and children died during the deportation from the Marmarika and the Butnan in the Green Mountain region in eastern Libya to Sirte, in a gruelling forced walk of over 1,000 km. The total death toll was made worse with the decimation of the herds. Rochat estimates that between 90 and 95 per cent of the sheep, goats, and horses, and possibly 80 per cent of the cattle and camels died by 1934. The destruction of the herds was intentional as a method to punish the people through targeting their social and cultural way of life. This annihilation of the animals contributed to famine and death among the semi-nomadic population.25 This was not the first time that Italy had deported Libyans since taking over the country as a colony in 1911. Between 1911 and 1928, as many as 1,500 Libyans sympathetic to the anti-colonial resistance were exiled to Italian islands. This was just a rehearsal for the massive deportation of the eastern region’s population. The massive deportation of the majority of Cyrenaica’s population was unprecedented. The agony suffered in the camps along with the enduring loss of dignity and autonomy has left deep psychological scars on Libya’s national consciousness.26 The facts that their experience, which includes exposure to genocide, has not been well studied, or acknowledged, and that no military or civilian colonial officials were brought to trial have not helped to heal the wounds of history.27 In 1998, the Italian government made a joint public statement with the Libyan government acknowledging some responsibility for the Italian atrocities in Libya during the colonial period between 1911 and 1943.28 While such an announcement was welcome, this vague and general statement fell short of facing the unresolved brutal history of genocide in colonial Libya. Italian fascism committed crimes inside and outside Italy. 24 Yusuf Salim al-Barghathi, ‘Al-Muʿtaqalat Wa al-Adrar al- Najma ʿAn al-Ghazwual- Itali’ (The concentration camps and their impact on Libya) in ʿUmar al-Mukhtar, ed. Aghail al-Barbar (Tripoli: Centre for Libyan Studies, 1983), pp. 146–7. 25 Del Boca, Gli Italiani in Libia, I I, pp. 175–232. 26 For a biography and full text of the poet Fatima ʿUthman see ʿAbdalla A. Zagub, ‘Shahadat al-Marʾa Fi Zamin al-Harb’ [A woman as an eyewitness to war], Al-Thaqafaal-ʿArabiyya (1980), 85–117. 27 Ben-Ghait ‘A lesser evil’, 140. 28 I am grateful to Dr Muhammad Jerary who informed me about the Italian government official statement acknowledging some responsibility for colonial crimes in 1998. The statement was general and brief one page. See ‘Italy–Libya statement’, BBC News, 10 July 1998.

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Recovering the Oral History of the Genocide: The Legacy of Folk Poetry During the last fifteen years, I have searched for records of the people who experienced deportation or spent time in the concentration camps. Had they left diaries? Written memoirs? Did survivors of the deportation and camps remain alive, and if so, how could I find them? I realised only few were educated such as the poets Buhwaish and Al-Ahlafi in the Sanusi lodges, schools and the High Institute at Al-Jaghbub. As for written documentation, I found only a few published memoirs, but thanks to the Centre for Libyan Studies in Tripoli, many survivors of the camps were interviewed for a published collection called The Oral History of the Jihad. Since most Libyans during the colonial period were illiterate and relied on memory as a counter to the official state history, it is no exaggeration to state that some elders are walking libraries.29 This should not be a surprise; widespread illiteracy dictates that oral traditions and poetry are highly valued in Libyan rural culture.30 Among the most notable are published memoirs by Ibrahim al-ʾArabi alGhmari; Al-Maimuni, who writes about his life in the Agaila (the most notorious concentration camp); and Saad Muhammad Abu Shaʾala, who also writes about life inside the camps.31 These provide powerful testimony, along with works by the most outstanding poet of the period, Rajab Hamad Buhwaish al-Minifi, who was interned in the Agaila camp, and wrote the famous epic poem ‘Ma bi Marad’ (‘I Have No Illness Except al-Agaila Concentration Camp’). It is known by most Libyans.

The Deportations and the Rihlan of Tears The forced walk, or shipping of people and their herds from rural Cyrenaica, extended from Derna in the east to camps in the desolate desert of Sirte in northern central Libya. Tahir al-Zawi, a Libyan historian of that period, 29 The Centre for Libyan Studies has collected oral histories of the colonial period and was advised by historian Jan Vansinece of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1977. I was lucky to have access to this collected oral history at the Centre for ‘Oral History Archives’ in Tripoli, Libya. 30 For an introduction to the method of oral traditions and history see Jan Vansina, Oral Traditions: A Study in Historical Methodology (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1956) and Oral Traditions and History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). 31 Al-Maimuni, Dhiqrayyat Muʿtaqalat al-Agaila [Memoirs of the Agaila Concentration Camp] (Tripoli: Centre for Libyan Studies, 1995); Saad Muhammad Abu Shaʿala, Min Dakhil al-Muʿtaqalat [From Inside the Concentration Camps] (Tripoli: Al-Munshaa al-ʿAamma Lilnshar, 1984).

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described the deportation of the people of Cyrenaica as the Day of Judgment – when people are resurrected from their graves, skeletons in rags, to face God – as if those who were interned looked like figures from Quranic scripture.32 Al-Ghmari al-Maimuni writes: We were forced on a ship in Benghazi without much food, and our women and children were crying and wailing. It was very cold winter and many of the children and women passed out. When we arrived at the Agaila, the wind was so strong that we could not get off and we had to sail to an island nearby. The following day we landed; the ship was so filthy due to seasickness.33

Salim Muftah Burwag al-Shilwi was only 13 years old when his family was deported from Darna by ship to Benghazi, and then to Zuwaitina. He wrote: As we arrived in Zuwaitina, the guards began to shove us to the shore. The hated military commander Col. Barilla of the Agaila camp gave a speech addressing the deportees: ‘You Abaidat tribe will be interned in the camps of Agaila and al-Braiga where you will die so we will have a stable Italian rule in Libya.’ Then he walked toward a young Libyan woman and touched her cheek, and said: ‘Your cheek is white right now but very soon it will be as black as a black servant’s.’34

These autobiographical documents and titbits of oral history indicate that the aim of the fascist policy was the destruction of the culture and not just of individuals. It was a genocidal policy aiming to destroy the native people, institutions, language, culture and property, with the goal of repopulating the region with a fascist culture and colonial settlers. Consequently, according to the Ottoman census of 1910, Tarabulus al-Gharb (the Ottoman name of Libya before 1911) had a population of 1.5 million. By 1951, Libya was one of the poorest countries in the world and its population had fallen to 1 million.

Policing and Daily Life in the Camps The camp guards were Italian colonial soldiers from Eritrea and Libya. Eritrean Ascari (Askari) were soldiers – Italian subjects – who were recruited to serve as cheap military labour in Libya beginning with the conquest in 1911. Also, by 1929, the Italian colonial state had found some Libyan collaborators 32 Tahir A. al-Zawi, ʿUmar al-Mukhtar (Tripoli: Maktabt al-Firjani, 1970), p. 166. 33 Al-Maimuni, Dhiqrayyat Muʿtaqalat al-Agaila, p. 68. 34 Salim Muftah al-Shilwiʾ interviewed by Yusuf al-Barghathi, 25 June 1981, Oral History Archives, Centre for Libyan Studies, Tripoli.

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who worked as guides, guards, spies, advisors and soldiers.35 All of the interned had to salute the Italian flag and witness the execution of those accused of collaborating in any way with the anti-colonial resistance. Any hint of disapproval or failure to salute the commander or the Italian flag meant verbal abuse and physical punishment by whipping and confinement. The poet Um al-Khair described the guards as ‘kinsmen of the devil’.36 Salim al-Shilwiʾ recounts a time in the Agaila camp when a man who failed to salute the commander was whipped 100 times. Then, when he refused to say, ‘Long live the king of Italy’, he was whipped 700 more times.37

Food and Clothes Food was scarce; survivors recount that they occasionally received rice, but mainly subsisted on a pound of poor-quality barley doled out each week. With the confiscation or death of their herds, the interned suffered malnutrition and death. Salim al-Shilwiʾ remembered: ‘Many of us in the Agaila camp ate grass, mice, and insects; others searched for grain in animal dung to stay alive.’38 Ali Muhammad Saʾad al-ʾIbidi noted: ‘At one time we counted about one hundred and fifty deaths (mostly the elderly and children) and the cemetery shows the evidence.’39 Muhammad Muftah ʿUthman said the tribe of ʾAbadlla alone lost 500 people to starvation.40 Without the means to buy clothes, many of the interned were forced to wear the same clothes they had worn for three years. Their garments became rags, serving as a further humiliation to rural women who value their modesty in dress.41 Poet Muhammad Yasin Dawi al-Maghribi captured this loss of dignity in his poem ‘I Saw a Shaykh’, in which he described the status of a well-dressed and respected elderly chief, who ended up in the camp with dirty, torn clothes, and how his degradation was reflected in his face and body language.42 One survivor 35 Ibid. 36 Abdali Abu ʿAjailla, Um al-Khair: The Poet of the Braiga Concentration Camp (Benghazi: AlMaktaba al-Wataniyya, n.d.), p. 73. 37 Salim al-Shilwiʾ, interview, 1981. 38 Ibid. 39 Al-Barghathi, ‘Al-Muʿtaqalat’, 146; Al-Maimuni, Dhiqrayyat Muʿtaqalat al-Agaila, p. 71. See also Salim al-Shilwiʾ, interview, 1981. 40 ʿUthman ʿAbdulsalam al-ʿAbar and Rabab Adham (ed.), Oral History (Tripoli: Centre for Libyan Studies, 1991), X X I X, 228; and Muhammad ʿAbdalqadir al-ʿAbdalli in AbuShaʿala Min Dakhil, 43. 41 Salim al-Shilwiʾ, interview, 1981. 42 Saʿid ʿAbdrahman al-Hindiri and Salim Hussain al-Kubti (eds.), Qusaʾid al-Jihad [Poems of the Jihad] (Tripoli: Centre for Libyan Studies, 1984), I, pp. 180–1. On the study of oral folk poetry in Africa and the Middle East, see the pioneering studies Said S. Samatar,

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of the camps said that in the few cases where men and women got married, the dowry was a quarter-pound of sugar.43 Once again, the poem that kept the memory of the internment alive for many is ‘Ma bi Marad’ by poet Rajab Hamad Buhawaish al-Minifi. During and after the period of internment, his epic poem was memorised and recited all over the country by generations of Libyans, and, after independence in 1951, it was aired by the new Libyan radio; even today it is recited and posted on the Internet. It seems he witnessed rape but, constrained by custom and tradition, felt shame in speaking of it openly. Even today people still memorise and recite it. The poem is viewed by the people as a record, as speaking truth to power and as an alternative history. Also, it is eloquent and recited as a mourning ceremony and hence it provides a counter-voice and presents cultural recovery and healing: I have nothing except the dangers of the roadwork My bare existence, Returning home without a morsel to move down a gullet. Whips lash us before our women’s eyes, Rendering us useless, degraded, Not even a matchstick among us to light a wick, Nothing ails me except the beating of women, Their skins bared, No hour leaves them undisturbed, Not a day without slander heaped on our noble women, Calling them sluts, And other foulness that spoils a well-bred ear. I have no illness except the hearing of abuse, Denial of pleas, And the loss of those who were once eminent, And women laid down naked, stripped For the least of causes, Trampled and ravished, acts that no words deign describe.

Oral History and Somali Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 1982) and Steven C. Caton, Peak of Yemen I Summon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 43 Khalifa Jadallah, interviewed by Yusuf al-Barghathi, 24 June 1981, Oral History Archives, Centre for Libyan Studies, Tripoli.

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I have no illness except about the saying of ‘Beat them,’ No pardon, And With the sword extract their labor, The company of people unfamiliar to us, A low life indeed Except for God’s help, my hands are stripped of their cunning. I have no illness except the suppression of hardship and disease, Worry over horses . . . And work for meager wages as the whips cry out lashing. What a wretched life, And when they’re done with men, they turn on the women.44

Forced Labour Forced labour was another aspect of concentration camp life. The interned Libyans were compelled to work on the construction of a fence between Libya and Egypt, and on paving a new coastal highway between Sirte and Benghazi. Punishment, hunger, the lack of good hygiene and minimal medical assistance combined to spread disease, and eventually led to high death rates. Some people went mad and others fell into depression.45 The poet Um al-Khair asked God to end this suffering for the Muslims and either let them die or help them defeat the Italian colonialists. While most prisoners eventually died in the camps from hunger and disease, those who survived carried with them mourning, sorrow and the loss of human dignity and autonomy.46 Poet Rajab Hamad Buhwaish al-Minifi, who, as mentioned earlier, survived the Agaila concentration camp, expressed this loss of dignity and autonomy, probably more eloquently than any other poet in colonial Libya. Some sections of his epic poem ‘Dar al-Agaila’ (Under Such Conditions) deserve translation and special attention. He belonged to the same tribe as the leader of the resistance, Umar al-Mukhtar, and to understand his poem, his background must be considered. He belonged 44 See Hussain Nasib al-Maliki, Shaʿir Muʾtaqal al-Agaila [The Poet of the Agaila Concentration Camp] (Benghazi: n.d.), and quoted in Ahmida, Genocide in Libya, pp. 179–86. 45 Muhammad ʿAbdalqadir al-ʿAbdalli in Abu-Shaʿalla, Min Dahkil, 48. 46 See Abu ʿAjailla, Um al-Khair, pp. 26–7.

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to a tribe that was autonomous, prior to the Italian conquest in 1911. He did not talk about individualism and personal salvation, but reacted as a member of a collective kinship community that values chivalry, freedom, generosity, dignity and the open space of nomadic life.47 He started his poem by stating that he was not ill, except for the illness of living in Agaila and its impact, especially the loss of beloved kinsmen and women: I have no illness except this endless aging, Loss of sense and dignity, And the loss of good people, who were my treasure, Yunes who rivals al-Hilali, Throne of the tribe, Mihimmad and ʾAbdulkarim al-Ezaila, And Buhssain, his sweet countenance and open hand, And al-Oud and the likes of him, Lost now without farewell to burden our day. I have no illness except the loss of young men, Masters of tribes, Picked out like date fruit in daylight, Who stood firm-chested against scoundrels, The blossoms of our households, Whose honor will shine despite what the ill-tongued say? I have no illness except the absence of my thought, My scandalized pride, And the loss of Khiyua Mattari’s sons, The lack of those who rule with fairness, Evenness nonexistent, Evil leaning hard on good, dominant. I have no illness except my daughters that serve in despicable labour, The lack of peace Loss of friends’ death has taken. I have not illness except the loss of my herds, And I’m not counting, Even while the taker has no remorse, no pangs of guilt 47 For a biography of poet Rajab al-Minifi see Al-Maliki, Shaʿir Muʾtaqal, pp. 4, 10, 41–51.

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They bring nothing except rule by torture And the long. . . . And the tongue rived and sharpened with pounding abuse. I have not illness except the lack of defenders, The softness of my words The humiliation of the noble-named, The loss of my gazelle-like unbridled, Swift-limbed, Fine-featured one like a minted coin of gold. No strength, will, or effort to lift these burdens. Of our lives we’re ready To absolve ourselves lest death’s agent come.

At the end of the poem, the poet asks God for solace: Only God is eternal. The guardian of Mjamam is gone. The oppressor’s light Has befallen us, stubborn, unrelenting If not for the danger, I would say what I feel, Raise him noble, Expound my praise of him, sound the gratitude we owe. 48

This epic poem highlights most prominently a theme we also find in many poems on the topic: the trials of internment and displacement are illness and enduring suffering. This poem strikes the reader as a significant alternative to death – a spirit of resistance, anguish and recovery.

48 For a full text of the epic poem, see ibid., pp. 41–51. One positive development after the Italian statement in 1998 acknowledging some responsibility for the impact of the colonisation of Libya is the new collaboration between Italian and Libyan scholars. This collaboration has been between the Centre for Libyan Studies in Tripoli and the Istituto Italiano per L’Africa e L’Oriente. The result of this collaboration are three academic conferences of which two were published recently. See F. Sulpizi and S. H. Sury (eds.), Primo Convegno su gli esiliati Libici nel periodo Coloniale 28– 29 Ottobre 2000 (Rome: Istituto Italiano per L’Africa e L’Oriente, 2002), and Anna Baladinetti (ed.), Modern and Contemporary Libya: Sources and Historiographies (Rome: Istituto Italiano per L’Africa e L’Oriente, 2003). The Italian government promised to help Libya with the maps of the land mines and the fate of many unknown exiled Libyans in Italy between 1911 and 1943. The fall of the Qaddafi regime in 2011 and the election of a conservative coalition in Italy last year encouraged the new government to intervene in the Libyan civil war using the problem of illegal immigrants as a rationale.

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Critics of Italian neo-fascism focus on the Italian fascist regime’s antisemitic laws, but many commentators note that antisemitism developed late under the Italian fascists, and then only under pressure from Nazi Germany in 1938. It is this fact that produces the myth that Italian fascism was a more moderate form, ignoring the atrocities perpetuated in Libya and Ethiopia. Another 100,000 to 200,000 Libyans were forced into exile in Egypt, Chad, Tunisia, Turkey, Palestine, Syria and Algeria. In 1935, the fascist colonial state drafted 20,000 young Libyans, including some young men who were interned with their parents in the concentration camps, to fight as a cheap labour force in the conquest of Ethiopia. This was hardly a new policy; earlier, in 1911, the colonial state drafted over 20,000 Eritreans as soldiers to invade Libya.

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6

Spain 1936–1945 Coup d’État and Genocidal Practices in the Destruction of ‘Anti-Spain’ a n t o n i o m ´ı g u e z m a c h o * Introduction The Spanish Civil War was a historic twentieth-century event, known worldwide for certain elements of the conflict, such as the International Brigades, the bombing of Guernica, or the testimonies of international writers and reporters who experienced it first-hand (George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway, Andre Malraux, Arthur Koestler, Gerald Brenan and the photographer Robert Cappa, among many others). It is also considered a relatively minor episode in the turbulent interwar period, the rise of fascism and the crisis of democracy, as well as a local prelude to World War Two. What is less well known is the fact that of the approximately 490,000 fatalities attributed to the conflict, some 30 per cent of the victims (around 150,000) were killed by summary executions or firing squads, and not by direct or indirect consequences of combat. The vast majority of these victims were non-combatant civilians.1 Two-thirds of them were killed by coup perpetrators. Its massive violence continued well beyond the conflict’s end in 1939, when 50,000 individuals more were executed by the same means. Upon their return, following the war’s end, this was the fate of many of the demobilised soldiers and civilians subjected to persecution.2 In Spain, a country with approximately 25 million inhabitants in 1936, the data reveals that 0.8 per cent of the total population was exterminated in this way; of those between the ages of 16 and 65 (the segment most affected by this * This chapter stems from research projects RYC-2014–16584, HAR2016-80359-P and 2017PG128, within HISTAGRA research group GI-1657 (USC). 1 S. Juliá, ‘Las cifras. El estado de la cuestión’, in Víctimas de la guerra civil, ed. S. Juliá (Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 1999), pp. 407–13. 2 P. Anderson, Friend or Foe? Occupation, Collaboration and Selective Violence in the Spanish Civil War (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2016), pp. 59–60.

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violence), the victims make up 1.4 per cent. In addition, more than 1 million prisoners went through the Spanish penitentiary system between 1936 and 1945 as a result of the 1936 coup and the war itself.3 Despite the well-known international involvement in this military conflict, the victims and executioners of the mass violence were not foreigners, but Spaniards: strangers or acquaintances, neighbours, friends or even relatives. In other words, even though the Nazi Condor Legion and the Italian Corps of Volunteer Troops fought side by side with the rebel armies, and the International Brigades helped the Republican army – making the war clearly international in some respects – the rearguard violence was almost exclusively the work of Spanish people. Analysing the nature of this mass violence begins with unravelling the stories that have been constructed to portray it. Despite what many subsequent partisan accounts claim, there was little precedent for this violence. In 1936, the democratic Republican regime in Spain had been in place for five years. And its relatively short existence should not lead us to forget that liberalism had had more than a century of history in the country.4 As liberalism became established, there were, of course, several episodes of conflict, including the so-called Carlist Wars in the nineteenth century, as well as revolutionary attempts that were more or less successful, coups and political regime changes. Nonetheless, given the ongoing upheaval and removal of ancien régimes and their structures in the Western world during the nineteenth century, the Spanish case was not an exception.5 Spain had remained neutral during World War One, despite heightened political debate on the matter. Colonial wars, including those in Cuba and Morocco, had been very unpopular among large swaths of Spanish society, resulting in mass mobilisation in protest against the sending of soldiers (nearly always from the humblest classes) into combat. Consequently, by 1936 there was little memory of any relevant conflict in which Spain had participated with thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of victims, much less civilians. This fact may help explain why the relatively strong effects of World War One on the crisis of democracies were felt less intensely in Spain. In fact, and significantly, in the interwar context of democracies threatened by the rise of fascism and Bolshevism, the authoritarian Spanish project represented 3 H. Graham, The War and Its Shadow: Spain’s Civil War in Europe’s Long Twentieth Century (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2012), p. 104. 4 R. Carr, Spain 1808–1975 (Oxford University Press, 1982). 5 A. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime. Europe to the Great War (New York: Pantheon, 1981).

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by the dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera (1923–30) was a failure. The army’s bloodless coup in September 1923, with the king’s concurrence, had suspended the Spanish Constitution of 1876, establishing in turn an authoritarian regime that claimed to be corporatist, modernist and nationalist.6 But here Spain did prove an exceptional case. In contrast to other examples from southern and central-eastern Europe, this authoritarian attempt in Spain during the interwar period failed, and bloodlessly gave way to the restoration of liberalism, with the proclamation of a democratic Second Republic. Time and again, the electoral results within the framework of this regime revealed the relative irrelevance of anti-liberal political projects, such as Falangism (Spanish fascism) or communism.7 Until 1936, the unquestionable strength of labour unions, both socialist and anarcho-syndicalist, had done nothing but ensure the establishment of social improvements for the working class; however, revolutionary attempts (including that of October 1934 led by Asturian miners in the north) had been a failure. At the moment of truth, the working class supported the establishment of moderate centre-left governments, like the one formed after the Popular Front’s victory in the 1936 elections – the last to be held in the Republic.8 The modernisation process had taken numerous tolls, and yet had also left various sectors dissatisfied. First, there were all those who still longed for ‘traditional’ structures, including the predominance of the Catholic Church, large private estates or certain strata of the army. Second, there were those who had not benefited from economic modernisation, such as the many landless labourers in southern Spain, or the proletarians in growing cities who dreamed of revolution. And finally, there were the international actors that favoured authoritarian solutions and the destruction of liberal democracy, which would play a fundamental role on the Spanish stage over the course of the war about to begin, particularly Italy, Germany and the USSR.9 6 S. Ben-Ami, Fascism from above: the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera in Spain, 1923–1930 Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983; A. Quiroga, Making Spaniards: Primo de Rivera and the nationalization of the masses (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 7 For a seminal work on Spanish Fascism, see S. Payne, Falange: A History of Spanish Fascism (Stanford University Press, 1961). Relating to the ‘fascist nature’ of the Franco regime, see I. Saz, Fascismo y Franquismo (Universitat de València, 2004); F. Gallego, El Evangelio Fascista: la Formación de la Cultura Política del Franquismo (1930–1950) (Barcelona: Crítica, 2014). On the Spanish Communist Party, see R. Cruz, El Partido Comunista en la Segunda República (Madrid: Alianza, 1987). 8 D. Caro Cancela, ‘El anarcosindicalismo y la victoria del frente popular en las elecciones de 1936’, Historia social 76 (2013), 45–66. 9 R. Whealey, Hitler and Spain: The Nazi Role in the Spanish Civil War (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1989); J. Rodrigo, La guerra fascista: Italia en la guerra

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All of the above sectors would play a role in the mass violence triggered by the July 1936 coup d’état, in which the genocidal practices that are the focus of this chapter would develop.

The Coup d’État of July 1936 Spain’s social and economic development had taken place within a framework of political pluralism. The last general elections, held in February 1936 and won by the centre-left coalition, the Popular Front, had also demonstrated that certain sectors were striving to abolish the democratic system. These minority sectors were concentrated among certain army officers, the monarchist right (which had obtained 13 deputies in a parliament of 473) and the Falange, which had not gained representation in the 1936 elections and obtained only 46,000 votes in all of Spain.10 Although numerically very limited, these sectors were powerful in three specific aspects: they had access to economic resources, international contacts and military force, as the army officers who formed part of these sectors had operational command of combat units. Their minority status also contributed to heightening the ideological fanaticism these sectors revealed in their social and political positions. They believed themselves to be an incarnation of ‘Spain’, while claiming that all those in the opposition (now elected to government) personified what they called ‘anti-Spain’.11 According to them, this ‘anti-Spain’ entity was an amalgam of subjects, social and political organisations, ideologies and social attitudes, much like a multi-headed hydra. Spain’s enemies were numerous and everywhere: in politics, civil society, academia, culture and the workplace. Such enemies were an infection that had spread over the body of the nation, as demonstrated in the abundant medical metaphors used to describe the situation supposedly at hand: ‘The illness is very deep and the microbe has penetrated the very marrow of civic life, so it cannot be eliminated easily.’12 Along these same lines, ‘surgery’ was suggested as the only option to save Spain from its internal enemies – a prescription that had previously civil española, 1936–1939 (Madrid: Alianza, 2016); A. Viñas, La soledad de la República. El abandono de las democracias y el viraje hacia la Unión Soviética (Barcelona: Crítica, 2006). 10 For electoral results, see A. Beevor, The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939 (London: Phoenix, 2007), p. 42. 11 M. Richards, A Time of Silence: Civil War and the Culture of Repression in Franco’s Spain, 1936–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 26–66. 12 ‘Nuestra nación y la limpieza’, El Compostelano. Diario Independiente, Santiago de Compostela, 5 August 1936, p. 1.

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appeared in rhetoric (see the image of dictator Primo de Rivera as the ‘iron surgeon’) but which, some critics complained, had not been followed through to its final consequences.13 The conspirators were aware of their minority position, which reinforced the need to opt for extremely violent means of seizing power. Access to this power, moreover, could only be ensured through the effective destruction of all elements constituting ‘anti-Spain’. This was the point at which the genocidal nature of the plot to overthrow the government was defined.14 The conspirators’ operational instructions in the spring of 1936 reflect this eliminationist resolve as the only way to avoid repeating past mistakes, as well as a sense of certainty that they would find resistance.15 Emilio Mola, brigadier general and military governor of Pamplona (Navarre) acted as ‘Director’ of the conspirators. He reaffirmed the rebels’ military method: ‘It will be noted that the action must be extremely violent to subdue the enemy, who is strong and well organized, as soon as possible. Of course, all leaders of political parties, companies and unions not adhering to the movement will be imprisoned, with exemplary punishments imposed on these individuals in order to strangle movements of rebellion or strikes.’16 For this reason, they had developed a secret plan to first seize control of military units from loyal officers, even if those officers were hierarchical superiors. Once they had taken control of the situation in the barracks, the idea was to militarily take the key points of the cities and capitals where civil authority structures were located, and then expand their dominance to all corners of the country. To those who were considered opponents in advance, they would apply immediate punitive measures, including summary execution. In their view, this determination to carry out the coup to its final consequences was key to achieving success.17 Despite accounts later given by the plotters themselves, in the days prior to the coup there was no objective or objectionable reality that could have anticipated or excused the level of violence that would follow. None of the 13 S. Balfour, Deadly Embrace: Morocco and the Road to the Spanish Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2002); C. P. Boyd, Praetorian Politics in Liberal Spain (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), pp. 10–11. 14 A. Míguez Macho, The Genocidal Genealogy of Francoism: Violence, Memory and Impunity (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2016), pp. 9–10. 15 P. Preston, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain (London: Harper Collins, 2012), p. 133. 16 E. Mola Vidal, ‘Instrucción Reservada nº 1’, Madrid, 25 May 1936, Archivo Militar de Ávila, Fondos de la Guerra Civil, Unit 34, File 4, Folder 8. 17 P. Preston, The Coming of the Spanish Civil War: Reform, Reaction and Revolution in the Second Republic (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 247–8.

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main political or trade union forces, from right wing to left wing, participated as such in the preparations for the uprising; as previously noted, these were limited to a very fanatical minority. Nor was there a social divide on the basis of which one could have foreseen the mass violence that would be unleashed, even though opposing political positions existed. Instances of social or political violence were limited to a minority, which practised a kind of violent ‘revolutionary gymnastics’ unsupported by the majority of the population. In fact, the period immediately before the coup was not the period of greatest social mobilisation in the years of the Republic; higher levels of mobilisation had been reached during the amnesty campaigns for prisoners of the failed revolution of October 1934.18 When the coup is triggered on 17 July 1936, it achieves only partial success; in other words, it is a failure, though not a complete failure. The coup triumphs in some peninsular territories, and obtains control of Spanish Morocco. However, it fails in the capital, Madrid, and in other key cities such as Barcelona, Bilbao and Valencia. (See Map 6.1.) Putting aside chance circumstances, the main factor determining this success in some territories and not in others is the extreme violence used by coup participants. In Valladolid, the military commander General Molero refused to revolt; as a result, he was shot and gravely injured in his office, along with his assistants.19 Armed conflicts between two sides took place at various locations, including significantly the streets of Barcelona, the Montaña barracks in Madrid, the Ferrol Naval Base, Oviedo, Valencia and neighbourhoods in Seville near Ciudad Jardín, the Gran Plaza and Amate, as well as the aerial bombing of the Triana neighbourhood.20 Another especially violent confrontation took place in the province of Huelva on 19 July: columns of coup troops fired at a group of miners coming to defend Seville, resulting in twenty-five miners dying under the fire of military machine guns.21 There were also instances of gratuitous violence against civilians. In Vigo, the most populous city in Galicia, a small crowd gathered in protest as the military was declaring war; twenty-seven were killed by machine-gun fire.22 18 E. González Calleja, Cifras cruentas. Las víctimas mortales de la violencia sociopolítica en la Segunda República española (1931–1936) (Granada: Editorial Comares, 2015), pp. 74–5. 19 F. J. Raymundo, Cómo se inició el glorioso Movimiento Nacional en Valladolid y la gesta heroica del Alto de León (Valladolid: Casa Martín, 1937), pp. 28–9. 20 J. Ortiz Villalba, Sevilla 1936. Del golpe militar a la guerra civil (Seville: Diputación Provincial, 1997), pp. 116–17. 21 F. Espinosa Maestre, La guerra civil en Huelva (Huelva: Diputación Provincial, 2005), pp. 85–103 and 137–54. 22 The figure of twenty-seven is based on research in the Registro Civil de Vigo.

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Map 6.1 Regional divisions of Spain in 1936. (Cartography by Antonio Míguez Macho)

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But before delving into the nature of this violence, it is worth considering what happens in the areas that do not immediately fall under the control of the coup leaders. State structures break down beyond repair, faced with the collapse brought on by the coup, as it is the security forces and army themselves that fail. Taking advantage of this situation, militia groups linked to political parties and trade unions seize control of public order, while in other places people’s committees are formed to fulfil executive, legislative and judicial functions. This process runs parallel to the organisation of armed resistance against the advance of coup armies, so that what was previously a democratic and hierarchically organised state turns into a set of decentralised powers, often in conflict among themselves. The consequences of this situation lead to changes at all levels and also give rise to a wave of violence against people and institutions, particularly episodes of brutal anticlerical violence.23 This situation immediately alarms the authorities and is denounced by the majority of factions on the government’s side; as a result, efforts are aimed at curbing arbitrariness and ensuring the predominance of legitimate power. The reaffirmation of government power obviously runs parallel to the decline or total suppression of these forms of violence.24 Nevertheless the death toll was significant, although reducing over time. Research by José Luis Ledesma, for instance, has found that revolutionary forces on the Republican side alone killed about 50,000 people from 1936 to 1939, with 80 per cent of these killings occurring between July and November 1936.25 This phenomenon of declining violence was the precise opposite of what happened in the newly coup-controlled, Francoist areas. Here, although the army immediately and successfully seized power, mass violence was unleashed in a hierarchically controlled way. As we shall see, all of the mechanisms put in place by the new unlawful holders of power aimed to achieve the pursuit and completion of an extermination process. In my estimate, the coup and the Francoist regime killed over 150,000 civilians from 1936 to 1945.26 23 M. Thomas, The Faith and the Fury: Popular Anticlerical Violence and Iconoclasm in Spain, 1931–1936 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2013), pp. 145–72. 24 J. Casanova, The Spanish Republic and the Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 172. 25 J. L. Ledesma, ‘Total War behind the frontlines? An inquiry into the violence on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War’, in If You Tolerate This: The Spanish Civil War in the Age of Total War, ed. M. Baumester and S. Schuler-Springorum (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2008), pp. 154–68. 26 J. Babiano, G. Gómez Bravo, A. Miguez Macho and J. Tébar, Verdugos impunes. El franquismo y la violación sistémica de los derechos humanos (Barcelona: Pasado y Presente, 2018), pp. 92–93.

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The Spanish Case as Genocide: Perpetrators, Victims and Bystanders There are several considerations regarding the concept of genocide that may be relevant when analysing the case of Spain. First, the question of who the victims of violence were must be addressed. As previously noted, the coup plotters defined their enemies by different ideological, political, socioeconomic and cultural criteria, grouping them together under the label of ‘anti-Spain’. The main objective of the plotters, as already mentioned, was to seize power: power that, in their view, had been usurped by a group that they unified in the same category, regardless of obvious internal differences.27 Unlike other hated foreign enemies, this group was characterised as an internal enemy, one they had to live with, spatially distributed in every city, in every town and even in every home: ‘This is not even a civil war. Civil war is the struggle between two parts of a national territory, and here we had the enemy infiltrated in all the cities and villages; the enemy lived next door, we lived together with suicidal trust, since we did not realize that they were lying in wait for the moment to annihilate us, and with us, Spain, which they would hand over to Moscow as a colony.’28 Thus, what the potential victims shared in common was the fact of being Spanish, just as the perpetrators themselves were also Spanish. The case we analyse represents an example of genocide as national reorganisation, in which the aim is to eliminate a social group belonging to the same nation, say, after a coup or an attempted coup.29 In this case, the target of the genocide was not members of other ethnic, religious or racial groups, but a specific part of a ‘national’ group, individuals who are united only by the fact of their being Spanish, though defined as ‘antiSpain’. Based on the definition in the 1948 Convention, which specifies that the targeting for destruction must be ‘in whole or in part’, this case may meet that definition, as the intent was to eliminate a ‘part’ of the Spanish nation. That perpetrators and victims are of the same ‘national’ group has no impact on the validity of applying the 1948 definition of genocide.30 However, this

27 J. Rodrigo, Hasta la raíz: violencia durante la guerra civil y la dictadura franquista (Alianza: Madrid, 2008), pp. 81–3. 28 ‘No asistimos a una Guerra Civil. Sino a otra de ocupación’, El Compostelano, 12 August 1936, p. 1. 29 B. Harff, ‘The etiology of genocides’, in Genocide and the Modern Age. Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death, ed. I. Walliman and M. Dobkowski (Syracuse University Press, 2000), pp. 41–59, at 54–6. 30 But it has an impact on the effective implementation of the Convention; see L. Kuper, The Prevention of Genocide (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 102;

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circumstance does characterise the mechanisms used to demarcate the victim group, persecute it and, in this case, eliminate it.31 The fanatical groups behind the coup identified themselves with the term ‘nationalists’, although they would later come to prefer the term ‘nationals’ to distinguish themselves from those they called ‘separatists’ (Catalan, Basque and Galician nationalists).32 The coup plotters considered themselves defenders of the ‘Spanish nation’, which was threatened by internal enemies: communists, Jews and Masons: ‘It was the Jews who founded Freemasonry everywhere in order to corrupt the peoples of Christian civilization and thus openly promote the universal revolution. . . . Currently, the Jews and the Masons work in collaboration to achieve the triumph of the universal revolution. Many of the chief roles of Freemasonry are held by Jews in all countries.’33 Under these labels, the plotters placed an amalgam of individuals and groups that they identified with everything they wanted to change about the reality of the country. A rejection of everything they considered ‘political’ played a very prominent role in defining the enemies to be exterminated. From the perpetrators’ perspective, politics was to blame for all the evils that afflicted the country, so their first definition of the regime they wanted to implement was that of a ‘non-political’ system.34 (See Figure 6.1.) In this, they particularly rejected all those individuals who had held roles in the public sphere, being affiliated at any moment with associations or organisations, or assuming leadership responsibilities. Thus, the perpetrators shared a similar discourse that had spread across various anti-liberal sectors during the interwar period, but one which in this case, given the magnitude of the problem they believed they faced, led to their resort to genocidal practices as a solution.35

31 32

33 34

35

K. Jonassohn and F. Chalk, ‘A typology of genocide and some implications for the human rights agenda’, in Genocide and the Modern Age. Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death, ed. I. Walliman and M. Dobkowski (Syracuse University Press, 2000), pp. 3–20, at 8); C. Fourne, The Crime of Destruction and the Law of Genocide: Their Impact on Collective Memory (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 79–81. Preston, The Spanish Holocaust, p. 18; On the central role of classification, see Anderson, Friend or Foe?, p. 22. X. M. Núñez Seixas, ‘Nations in arms against the invader: on nationalist discourses during the Spanish Civil War’, in The Splintering of Spain: Cultural History and the Spanish Civil War, ed. Chris Ealham and Michael Richards (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 45–67. P. R. Manjón, ‘La masonería es judaísmo?’, Vallibria, Mondoñedo, 29 November 1936. A. Míguez Macho, ‘Challenging impunity in Spain through the concept of genocidal practices’, in Mass Killings and Violence in Spain, 1936–1952. Grappling with the Past, ed. P. Anderson and M. A. del Arco (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), pp. 210–25, at 218. On the perpetrators, see F. Mikelarena, Sin Piedad: Limpieza Política en Navarra, 1936: responsables, colaboradores y ejecutores (Pamplona: Pamiela Argitaletxea, 2015);

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Figure 6.1 Patriotic rally coming out of a church welcomed by Falangists, Civil Guards, army officers, and people giving the fascist salute. Cangas, near Vigo, Spain, 6 February 1938. (Nores Soliño Collection. Nomes e Voces Archive, HISTAGRA-USC)

Genocidal practice and the occupation of power are closely associated in the Spanish case, to such an extent that the perpetrators were able to define their victims by using criteria flexible enough for immediate, medium- and long-term objectives. With the military ultimately being responsible for the killings, the perpetrators first considered it necessary to eliminate those of their own comrades-in-arms who did not share their vision of the ultimate supremacy of the army in defence of the homeland.36 In some locations with a significant military presence, the figures are revealing. At the Ferrol Naval Base (Galicia), 191 soldiers were killed by the coup regime between 1936 and 1939; in San Fernando (Cádiz), 108 of the 204 killed were navy members opposed to the coup. As General Mola himself said: ‘At this point of the war I have already decided on the battle to the death. To the military members who have not joined our Movement, throw them out and take away

L. Fernández and A. Míguez, ‘Os verdugos no Golpe de Estado de 1936. Quen matou a Antonio Azarola?’, in Golpistas e Verdugos de 1936. Historia dun pasado incómodo, ed. L. Fernández and A. Míguez (Vigo: Galaxia, 2018), pp. 13–88. 36 J. Matthews, Reluctant Warriors: Republican Popular Army and Nationalist Army Conscripts in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 (Oxford University Press, 2013).

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their pay. To those who have raised arms against us, against the Army, shoot them. If I see my father in the opposing ranks, I will shoot him.’37 Then, they applied the same ideological principle in the logical elimination of the main civil authorities, regardless of whether these authorities were opposed to their intentions or not, as the mere fact of being in public office sufficed for inclusion on the list of dispensable individuals. It was understood that those who participated in the liberal-democratic system also shared the principles of its operation and, therefore, would have no place in the new Spain. In this way, the coup plotters erased the important ideological differences that existed among their victims, many of whom were in political conflict with each other; the plotters considered them all ‘communists’.38 If these principles were applied to the main holders of civil and military power who were then persecuted if not killed, then logically they were also applied to the rest of those affected by the violence. All civil servants in public employment were subjected to a process of purging, in which any trace of social, cultural or political activism served as an element of accusation. Some professions were especially punished, such as schoolteachers, who were considered to be primarily responsible for the spread of the ‘communist virus’. In general, mid-range and qualified professional sectors were proportionally assaulted with great virulence, because it was assumed that higher levels of education and intellectualism went hand in hand with a certain ideological drift that was responsible for the evils facing Spain. Contempt for ‘intelligence’ would be a lasting feature of the coup plotters and their ambition to replace a foreign-seeming, supposedly corrupted ‘intellectuality’ with a new Spanish ‘intellectuality’.39 The essential and distinguishing characteristic of this new intelligentsia would be its ‘Spanishness’: ‘And here we have the ridge, the cutting and defining edge that separates us, the genuinely Spanish intelligentsia, from the despicable intelligentsia, now fled abroad, of the antiSpain . . . .’40 The impact on the political and military elite, middle-class professionals and intellectuals was enormous, but the urban and rural working classes also faced relentless persecution. Workers and peasants, mostly unionised by 1936, would be killed for their ideas and attitudes and for challenging the rural 37 F. Sevillano Calero, Exterminio. El terror de Franco (Madrid: Oberon, 2004), p. 21. 38 A. Miguez Macho, ‘A genealogy of genocide in Francoist Spain’, Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 8:1 (2013), 21–32. 39 J. Claret, El Atroz Desmoche: la Destrucción de la Universidad Española por el Franquismo, 1936–1945 (Barcelona: Crítica, 2006). 40 J. Pemartín, ‘España como pensamiento’, Acción Española 89 (1937), 365–407.

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managerial elite’s traditional authority. Their demands for rights and, in many cases, revolutionary cravings were seen as justifying their annihilation. In these persecutions, classist logic was mixed with other previous kinds of logic based on social status, resulting in some of the largest collective killings of the period. This exterminatory logic explains, for example, the number of killings in the regions of large estates, where day labourers were seen as a kind of faceless mass that could be easily tamed by extreme violence of the kind employed by the Spanish army in Morocco (‘Africanistas’): The near racist contempt of the southern landowners for their peasants had found an echo in the Africanistas . . . An easy identification of interest saw both regard the proletariat as a subject colonial race. Before 1936, explicit parallels had been drawn between the workers of southern Spain and the Rif tribesmen. Now the ‘crimes’ of the reds in resisting the military uprising were seen as equivalent to the ‘crimes’ of the tribesmen who massacred Spanish troops at the battle of Annual in 1921 and nearly captured Melilla. The role of the African columns in 1936 was likened to that of the Legionarios who relieved Melilla.41

Finally, with regard to the ideological dimension of the killings, it is also worth noting the specific discourse against women. The Second Republic saw the culmination of a process of gaining rights for Spanish women, including the right to vote (1931, exercised for the first time in the 1933 elections), to divorce (1932) and to hold positions of political responsibility. In general, women had acquired a visible presence in public life, which they had not had before. One of the ideological objectives of the violence would be to restore the order that supposedly had been altered by foreign innovations and inspired by communist ideas, thus leading to the persecution and, where appropriate, elimination of women who had demonstrated this kind of public attitude: When the brakes that socially restrain women disappear . . . then the instinct for cruelty is awakened in the feminine sex and it goes beyond all imagined possibilities, precisely due to the lack of intelligent and logical inhibitions, characteristic of feminine cruelty which is not satisfied by the execution of the crime, but increases during its commission . . .. Moreover, in political uprisings they have the opportunity to satisfy their latent sexual appetite.42

41 Preston, The Spanish Holocaust, p. 165. 42 A. Vallejo and E. M. Martínez, ‘Psiquismo del Fanatismo Marxista. Investigaciones Psicológicas en Marxistas Femeninos Delincuentes’, Revista Española de Medicina y Cirugía de Guerra 9 (1939), 398–413.

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However, it is also worth noting that the reactionary and sexist ideology of the perpetrators resulted in them killing far fewer women than men. Yet women were often subjected to imprisonment, public humiliation and sexual abuse. Lieutenant General Queipo de Llano, in charge of the coup plotters in Seville, encouraged the raping of women during one of his famous radio talks: ‘Our brave Legionaries and Regulares have shown the red cowards what it means to be a man. And incidentally the wives of the reds too. These Communist and Anarchist women, after all, have made themselves fair game by their doctrine of free love. And now they have at least made the acquaintance of real men, and not milksops of militiamen. Kicking their legs about and squealing won’t save them.’43 The coup perpetrators institutionalised a system by which supposedly ‘red’ women were deprived of their sons and daughters; the perpetrators considered the mothers unfit to care for their children and wanted to prevent them from passing on the same ‘ideological gene’. Thus, in the mid-1940s it is estimated that around 15,000 boys and girls were seized, delivered to orphanages, and later given in adoption to families ‘in order’ – that is, friendly to the Franco dictatorship.44 This system of ‘appropriation’ of minors continued during the rest of the Francoist dictatorship and survived into the first years of democracy, although by then it no longer applied to women for political reasons, but mainly applied instead to those in socially or economically weak situations.45

Mechanisms of the Genocidal Practices: Violence and More Violence In the areas under coup control, the first trials begin on 23 and 24 July 1936. The military justice proceedings operate according to rules that are protected by the pre-existing military justice code. However, it is all those who are prosecuted (independently of their civilian or military status), rather than their prosecutors, who are accused of military rebellion. These trials will be fundamental, and they will begin with such haste because their very functioning brings to life the reversal of legality established with the declaration of the state of war, as well as the takeover of all state powers through the war proclamations. In other words, these trials are a key element of the 43 I. Gibson, Queipo de Llano. Sevilla, verano de 1936 (Barcelona: Grijalbo, 1936) p. 164. 44 R. Vinyes, Irredentas: las presas políticas y sus hijos en las cárceles de Franco (Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 2002). 45 Míguez, The Genocidal Genealogy, pp. 39–40.

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military coup. As Ramón Serrano Suñer, General Franco’s brother-in-law and right-hand man during the civil war, acknowledged in his memoirs: It was established that the ‘rebels’ were those of the Popular Front . . . forgetting that the rebels against the Republican government were those who had risen up and all of us who had helped and collaborated with them, and could not legally be those who were part of the ‘constituted’ government . . . . On this basis of ‘upside-down justice’ – an unusual system in the history of political-social upheavals – the convening of courts-martial began.46

These proceedings will not make up the bulk of the killings: in fact, those killed with a sentence constitute approximately a third of the total. The vast majority of mortal victims will be executed without sentencing, either because they will not face formal proceedings or because they will be killed before they can be sentenced.47 Nonetheless, the proceedings and sentencing do not operate separately from the violence as a whole, but rather make up its normative part. They serve, as mentioned, to legitimise the new de facto situation, but also to transform the legal authorities into alleged crooks, and those who enjoy public social status into alleged criminals; at the same time, they enable those killed without trial to be called victims of ‘excesses’, since the coup plotters claim to offer ‘guaranteed proceedings’ to all the accused. In this way, the performance of ‘military justice’ will be led from the beginning by ‘auditors’ and ‘public prosecutors’, the only military members with legal training, even though participation in the trials will extend to many more individuals. Guided by these legal teams from the army or navy, the trials featured military officials as judges and secretaries, officials who were already irreversibly linked to the coup machinery. Moreover, the proceedings involved the participation of hundreds more, through the presentation of statements and reports, and the testimonies of witnesses. Although the proceedings were based on a reversal of legality, their appearance attempted to be that of a regular trial following normal procedures. In this way, it was possible to involve even more people in the persecution and destruction of enemies.48 The moment the coup proceeds, the plotters’ seizure of power goes hand in hand with an obsession to ensure a monopoly of force. As the rupture in institutional operations caused by the coup attempt results in a disintegration 46 R. Serrano Suñer, Entre el silencio y la propaganda, la Historia como fue. Memorias (Barcelona: Planeta, 1977), p. 245. 47 Juliá, ‘Las cifras’, 410. 48 Fernández and Míguez, ‘Os verdugos’, 49–52.

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of power in the areas nominally under Republican control, in the coupcontrolled areas, on the other hand, the rupture leads to the development of a strict hierarchy of command and an unequivocal centralisation of power. The restructuring of power results in the overlapping of its organic structures, the military regions and the territorial divisions of civil authority, leading both to become absorbed into one. In this way, the so-called National Defence Board comes to take charge, validating the death sentences issued by summary courts-martial throughout the whole state in a matter of days. Moreover, in each region, there are military officials who, much like feudal lords, have the last word in life-and-death decisions. They organise the distribution of power at the territorial level, with civil governors (who end up becoming military members as well) and law enforcement delegates (also serving the military) in each town. Acting under this umbrella are law enforcement officials as well as fascist and ultra-right-wing militias, along with a whole range of paramilitaries (second-line militias) created ad hoc, whose main purpose is to arrest and, as appropriate, execute the persecuted.49 Although these different killings were not committed as the result of a sentence, they were subject to a whole hierarchy of orders which, significantly, lacks the same amount of documentation present in the other cases already discussed. The arrests followed the same pattern: by order of the military authority in charge of ensuring public order, individuals whose names appeared on ad hoc lists were arrested. As one of the victims of these lists, Galician sailor Luis Pérez Álvarez, explained, the coup plotters went from village to village to arrest suspects: ‘In groups of two and with a local Falangist guide, they entered taverns, cafes and peaceful homes carrying the famous list of suitable victims, and pointing their weapons, they made the people they found walk out.’50 The procedure, though established, meant that various armed groups were responsible for carrying out the action; ordinary security forces (the Civil Guard, Assault Guard or the army itself) converged with paramilitary groups. The majority of arrests resulted in the imprisonment of those arrested. From that moment on, they became part of a new administrative universe. In some cases, detainees 49 On the right-wing militias, see M. Blinkhorn, Carlism and Crisis in Spain, 1931–1939 (Cambridge University Press, 1975); S. Lowe, Catholicism, War and the Foundation of Francoism: The Juventud de Acción Popular in Spain, 1931–1939 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2010). 50 L. Pérez Álvarez, Memorias: mi testamento humano y social (A Coruña: Corsárias, 2015), pp. 123 and 127.

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would find themselves subjected to an investigation and, where appropriate, prosecution. In other cases, they would remain under arrest by ‘governmental order’ for an indeterminate period, without being subjected to any kind of prosecution, until they were effectively released by that same ‘governmental order’. And finally, there were those who became subject to a ‘transfer’, also by ‘governmental order’, which was generally carried out late at night and meant being killed in a nearby ditch. This is how the press reported the killing of fifteen Republican detainees on the night of 17 August 1936 on the outskirts of Franco’s hometown, Ferrol: Last night and while being led by Civil Guard forces and Falangists, several individuals, with the aim of making arrangements regarding a supposed weapons depot and specifying charges against various people . . . threw themselves en masse against those taking them, managing to disarm two Falangists and fire upon their drivers, resulting in two of them being injured, causing the leader of the group to open fire against said individuals.51

What all these cases had in common was the aforementioned ‘governmental order’. Depending on the case, and the zeal of those in charge of the prisons, such ‘governmental orders’ were given in writing or not; nevertheless, no evidence indicates that their consequences were ever questioned. As Gerald Brenan had already pointed out in 1943, not one word of protest was uttered on the national side regarding the violence exerted.52 The construction of the ‘new Spain’ was coupled with a reconstruction of space, a resignification of the places that belonged to the previous period and the construction of new realities. In the first days of the coup, the rebels are forced to use various resources to manage the flood of newly detained people. Ordinary prisons and local judiciary or provincial jails are saturated, and new spaces are reconverted for this purpose: convents, schools, barracks and ships, among many other examples. The imprisonment system was a fundamental part of the project to destroy ‘anti-Spain’, since it ensured that ‘pathogenic’ elements were isolated from contact with the rest of the ‘healthy’ population.53 To handle the immense number of prisoners, a network of concentration camps was created that extended to nearly 400 centres between 1937 and 1946, when the last one would be closed. 51 La Voz de Galicia, A Coruña, 18 August 1936, p. 7. 52 G. Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth: An Account of the Social and Political Background of the Spanish Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 323. 53 A. Gonzalez-Ruibal, ‘The archaeology of internment in Francoist Spain (1936–1952)’, in Archaeologies of Internment, ed. Adrian Myers and Gabriel Moshenska (New York: Springer, 2011), pp. 53–73.

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The Francoist concentration camp system relied on its own management and a defined operating structure, based on the authority of a camp commander and a squad of officers at his service.54 These camps were associated with a slave labour system, which made the conditions of hunger and disease in which the prisoners lived even harsher: ‘We were very hungry. The poor man whose family did not send him anything was condemned to death. They sheltered us in an old leather tanning factory; through the roof, at night, we saw the stars, stiff with cold. The commander laughed when he saw us and called us the “children of La Pasionaria”. Many fellow prisoners were no longer able to work because they no longer had the strength to walk and they fainted.’55 The number of inmates who went through this confinement system, including ordinary prisons, irregular prisons and concentration camps in the strict sense, exceeded 1 million between 1936 and 1945, constituting 4 per cent of the total population and 10 per cent of those aged between 15 and 65. Taking into account the final figure of those killed (more than 150,000), as well as the somewhat uncertain data available on deaths due to poor living conditions, illness and old age, we find a mortality rate close to or even greater than 25 per cent among those detained.56

Conclusion: The Memory of Violence and Denialist Accounts As of 1945 and with the defeat of fascist regimes in Europe, the nowestablished Franco dictatorship found itself internationally isolated to the point of being denied participation in the newly created United Nations. It will be at this moment that the regime decides to grant a whole series of pardons to the prisoners who overcrowd the Spanish penitentiary system, and to close down the concentration camps. Although violence and repression will be essential features of the dictatorship until the dictator’s death in 1975, the great violence that began in 1936 ceases in this context immediately after the end of World War Two. This is also when construction begins of the foundations of a denialist discourse on this phenomenon, which will permeate through the ‘memorial’ logic used to confront the past. 54 J. Rodrigo, ‘Exploitation, fascist violence and social cleansing: a study of Franco’s concentration camps from a comparative perspective’, European Review of History 19:4 (2012), 553–73. 55 V. M. Santidrián Arias, Diario del soldado republicano Casimiro Jabonero. (Santiago de Compostela: Fundación 10 de Marzo, 2004), pp. 99–100. 56 My elaboration using the data is available in the database nomesevoces.net.

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The executioners, holders of dictatorial power, now become the managers of memory in Spain. The closure of the mass detention centres created since 1936 is accompanied by their transformation, abandonment or demolition. Those who leave these prisons are offered various options for reintegration (always partial) into civil life on the condition that they give up any claims to reparations and even to the memory of their past. The victims’ families are ordered to keep any memories of their killed or persecuted relatives limited to the strictly private realm. Mass graves and irregular burials are consciously left to their fate, with the perpetrators trusting that the passing of time will erase their memory, as it effectively did in many cases.57 The dictatorship, however, needs to maintain a legitimising discourse to explain its origins. That legitimisation takes root in the victory of the war, which comes to be known as a ‘civil war’, or ‘fratricidal war’, and to be associated with elements of injustice and arbitrariness. The great massacres perpetrated by the coup plotters are considered an externalisation of a generalised two-sided violence, which it is supposedly better to forget. The agency of the perpetrators of the violence is denied; the executioners are hidden beneath a blanket of silence and they are said to be part of the same spiral of madness. Faced with this reality, the dictatorial regime seeks legitimacy in its status as a ‘Catholic’ bastion against communist atheism, now following the reasoning of the cold war. The regime manages to establish a strategic alliance with the United States as of 1953, the same year it signs a concordat with the Holy See, and it achieves entry into the United Nations in 1955. The establishment of this new discourse will be visually expressed in the 1959 inauguration of the Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen), an immense monument on the outskirts of Madrid where the mortal remains of ‘victims’ of both sides of the war are transferred. The monument, built by slave prisoners of a nearby concentration camp beginning in 1940, is in reality an irregular mass grave, where the remains of tens of thousands of those persecuted by the coup were left without their families’ consent. One of the fundamental characteristics of the process of confronting the past in the Spanish case has been the absence of punishment for the executioners, an absence predictable in the years of the dictatorship itself, but which has been enshrined as a pillar of the democratic regime established 57 F. Ferrándiz, ‘Cries and whispers: exhuming and narrating defeat in Spain today’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 9:2 (2008), 177–92; R. Barker, Skeletons in the Closet, Skeletons in the Ground: Repression, Victimization and Humiliation in a Small Andalusian Town: The Human Consequences of the Spanish Civil War (London: Sussex Academic Press, 2012).

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since 1978. During the years of the so-called Transition (November 1975 to December 1978), the need to reconcile and to forget the fratricidal war (thus, denial of genocidal practices and of the unilateral nature of the coup violence) was assumed as a hegemonic discourse.58 Measures were even taken to guarantee that nobody could be charged for responsibility in these events, notably the Amnesty Law of December 1977.59 Until today the Spanish case remains an example of the executioners’ absolute impunity, with no possibility now of reversing that situation, for biological reasons (although prosecution of the repressors of the dictatorship’s final years has been proposed, as in the case of the so-called Querella Argentina). Despite this, society and numerous political factions have developed various public policies of memory, which have led to the removal of symbols of the dictatorship, the commemoration and recognition of victims, an educational approach to the past and even the passing of the Historical Memory Law in 2007. In an unequal and conflicting process, many uncomfortable questions about the past remain to be resolved, including the existence of numerous irregular graves that have not been exhumed and, above all, the fight against a denialist discourse that is entangled with ideas of reconciliation and forgetting.

Bibliographic Note For a seminal work on the background conditions of Spain, see Carr, Spain 1808–1975 and, for an introduction to the Second Republic, see Casanova, The Spanish Republic and the Civil War. See also what is pointed out by González Calleja, Cifras cruentas. The exterminatory nature of the July 1936 coup d’état is argued by Preston, The Spanish Holocaust. For an extensive discussion, see Míguez Macho, The Genocidal Genealogy of Francoism. On the victims of the Francoist violence, see Juliá (ed.), Víctimas de la guerra civil and the more recent account in Babiano et al., Verdugos impunes. There are only a few studies on the perpetrators. See, for example, the studies by 58 P. Aguilar, Memory and Amnesia: The Role of the Spanish Civil War in the Transition to Democracy (Oxford: Berghahn, 2002), pp. xx, 210 and 213; C. Jerez-Farrán and S. Amago, ‘Introduction’, in Unearthing Franco’s Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain, ed. C. Jerez-Farrán and S. Amago (University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), pp. 1–27, at 2; K. Humblebaek, ‘The “Pacto del Olvido”’, in Politics and Memory of Democratic Transition: The Spanish Model, ed. Diego Muro and G. Alonso (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 183–98. 59 Míguez, The Genocidal Genealogy, pp. 89–112.

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Fernández and Míguez (eds.), Golpistas e Verdugos de 1936, pp. 13–88, and Mikelarena, Sin Piedad. With respect to bystanders and the ‘grey zone’, see C. Hernández Burgos, Franquismo a ras de suelo: zonas grises, apoyos sociales y actitudes durante la dictadura (1936–1976) (Universidad de Granada, 2013), and A. Míguez Macho (ed.), Ni Verdugos ni Víctimas: Actitudes Sociales ante la Violencia, del Franquismo a la Dictadura Argentina (Granada: Comares, 2016). Ideological aspects and mechanisms of the violence are discussed in Anderson, Friend or Foe? and Ealham and Richards (eds.), The Splintering of Spain–1939. On the violence from the Republican side, see Ledesma, ‘Total war behind the frontlines?’; for the specific role of anticlericalism, see Thomas, The Faith and the Fury. A recent account on the role of extremism in the violence is C. Hernández Burgos (ed.), Ruptura: The Impact of Nationalism and Extremism on Daily Life in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press/Cañada Blanch, 2020). On the struggle for the supremacy of civil power over military power, see Boyd, Praetorian Politics in Liberal Spain; on the specific role of ‘Africanists’, see Balfour, Deadly Embrace. Spanish Fascism and the Falange have been analysed in detail. See in this respect works that are already classics by Payne, Falange; Saz, Fascismo y Franquismo; and Gallego, El Evangelio Fascista. On the post-war violence and terror, see Richards, A Time of Silence; P. Anderson, The Francoist Military Trials: Terror and Complicity, 1939–1945 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009); A. Cazorla-Sánchez, Fear and Progress: Ordinary Lives in Franco’s Spain, 1939–1975 (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2010). Finally, with respect to the transition to democracy and discourses on the past, see Aguilar, Memory and Amnesia; Jerez-Farrán and Amago (eds.), Unearthing Franco’s Legacy; and Muro and Alonso (eds.), Politics and Memory of Democratic Transition.

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7

Genocide in Stalinist Russia and Ukraine, 1930–1938 norman naimark*

The mass killing that took place in the Soviet Union in the 1930s was part and parcel of the interlocking Bolshevik projects of state building and the refashioning of society. The process of radically transforming the social, economic and political life of Russia had already begun under Vladimir Ilich Lenin during the Great October Revolution, starting in 1917, and cost millions of lives, most during the protracted civil war and international interventions of 1918–21. But the genocide of Soviet citizens in the 1930s was directly related to Josef Stalin’s ascendance to power during what has been called the ‘Stalin Revolution’, or the ‘Second Revolution’, which centred on crash programmes of forced industrialisation and agricultural collectivisation inaugurated in 1928. Simultaneously, Stalin consolidated his dictatorial power. By 1930, writes Oleg Khlevniuk, ‘the Stalinization of the Politburo was completed’ and Stalin was ‘confirmed as the sole leader of the Politburo’.1 Stalin was distrustful and paranoid in the extreme, unwilling to accept blame for the failures of his policies, and ready to break the back of any opposition groups that faced him, real or more often imagined. As a result, he lashed out at designated groups in Soviet society, labelling them ‘enemies of the people’ and of socialism, arresting, interrogating, torturing, exiling, starving and murdering millions of Soviet citizens. There is no evidence that he showed the least empathy for any of his victims, either those he knew and sometimes knew well or the vast majority he did not know at all. The Stalinist terror was particular to the Soviet 1930s and can be considered to have declined after 1938 with the coming of World War Two. Although there were episodic flare-ups of violence against alleged groups of internal enemies * Material for this article has been taken in part from previous work: Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton University Press, 2010), and an article ‘The Holodomor in the Context of Soviet mass killing in the 1930s’, submitted for publication in an edited volume. 1 Oleg Khlevniuk, Master of the House: Stalin and his Inner Circle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 37.

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between the May 1945 victory over Nazi Germany and Stalin’s death in March of 1953, there was nothing in that later period like the attacks on and destruction of social, national and political groups before the war. The number of victims of Stalin’s genocides remains difficult to assess. Since the early 1990s, a large number of Soviet documents have been declassified and made available to researchers by the Russian archival services. Especially reports from the Unified State Political Administration (OGPU) and People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) – the Soviet security police organisations – list in striking detail and with suspicious precision the numbers of arrested, executed and deported in the period under consideration. These numbers need to be used very carefully and should not be considered the final word on how many Soviet citizens were repressed in the 1930s and how many were executed, killed or perished from maltreatment, hunger, disease, torture and the excessive physical hardships of internment and exile.2 The fact that the columns of numbers always add up and that the numbers themselves are always provided to the last digit – 496,460 Chechens and Ingush deported in 1944, 1,803,392 de-kulakicised peasants (kulaks were supposedly rich peasants) in 1931–2, or 681,692 people shot in 1937–8 – leads one to believe that this impossible claim to accuracy may reflect deeper problems with the data’s veracity. The authorities sometimes had an incentive to ratchet up the number of arrested and executed as a way to demonstrate their diligence to their superiors. More often, though, their incentive was to under-report or not report at all, especially when it came to ‘extraneous’ deaths, meaning outside the norm, in the Gulag (the state administration of the camps), the special settlements and when dealing with famine or de-kulakisation. Alexander Yakovlev, who, during the early 1990s was head of a commission to investigate the Stalinist repressions and had extraordinary access to archival sources, warned against accepting the NKVD figures as recorded. ‘These [NKVD figures] are false’, he states. ‘They do not take account of the number of people confined in the internal prisons of the NKVD, and those prisons were jam-packed. They do not break down the mortality rates in camps of political prisoners, and they ignore the number of arrested peasants and deported peoples.’3 Just one of many examples of the disappearance of Stalin’s victims comes from the following episode from the history of the Gulag. At the beginning of 1934, NKVD chief Genrikh Yagoda sent an order to his Ukrainian 2 Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides, pp. 11–12. 3 Alexander N. Yakovlev, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia, trans. Anthony Austin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 234.

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subordinates that he needed 20,000 able-bodied prisoners to work on the Moscow–Volga canal. As one-by-one they expired from the subhuman conditions of hard labour, they disappeared from the canal camp and police ledgers. One historian writes: ‘No one counted the prisoners who starved, froze to death or were shot in their labors.’4 They were simply replaced by others who similarly died in complete obscurity.

Perpetrators Genocide is not a spontaneous event. It is almost always initiated by governments, political leaders and their bureaucratic chiefs, and is purposeful in its planning and execution. Stalin – without doubt – was the author of mass murder in the 1930s.5 He developed the targets, provided the justifications, initiated the actions, even sometimes set and adjusted the quotas of those who would be sent to the Gulag and those who would be executed. (Usually, he adjusted the quotas upwards of those who were to be subjected to the ‘highest penalty’.) Robert Service describes an episode in which Stalin was presented with 383 ‘albums’ of names of the accused. He wrote beside their names ‘1’ for shooting, ‘2’ for ten years in the Gulag and ‘3’ when he left the decision to the then NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov.6 In the trial of the ‘Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Centre’ (1936), Stalin raised the number of defendants to sixteen, including five Germans, and even edited the testimony of the accused. In the second trial of the ‘Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Centre’ (1937), he hand-edited the charges.7 He urged his police deputies to treat their prisoners with harshness and brutality, sometimes recommending torture. The method of ‘beat, beat, beat, and beat again’, as Khrushchev would describe it at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, came directly from him.8 Stalin was convinced that a ‘Fifth Column’ of enemies existed in the Soviet Union and that it had to be eliminated for the revolution to survive. There could be no mercy shown to these groups of ‘traitors’ and potential traitors that he identified and then proceeded to destroy. 4 Jörg Baberowski, Verbrannte Erde: Stalin’s Herrschaft der Gewalt (Munich: Beck, 2012), p. 191. 5 Khlevniuk, Master of the House. Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 (New York: Penguin, 2017). 6 Robert Service, Comrades! A History of World Communism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 151. 7 All in all, Kotkin tells us, Stalin essentially supervised the trials, though ‘from afar’. Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, pp. 333, 371. 8 Robert Conquest, ‘The Speech that Shook the World’, Los Angeles Times, 19 February 2006.

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Genocide is, however, never just a matter of the will of a tyrant. It also reflects the desires and complicity of larger numbers of perpetrators, without whom genocide could not be carried out. Just as Stalin was the supreme author of genocide, his lieutenants also threw themselves into the work of uncovering and eliminating alleged enemies. In Ukraine, for example, the chief culprit was Vsevolod Balitskii, who was brought back to Ukraine at the end of November 1932, to quote Izvestiia, ‘in a period of brutal kulak resistance to collectivization . . . to help millions of kolkhozniki [collective farmers] overcome kulak sabotage and secure the peaceful development and flourishing of the young Ukrainian kolkhozes’.9 As an important member of the Politburo of the Ukrainian party and People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs, Balitskii turned Ukraine into a secret police dictatorship, which saw the repression of millions of Ukrainian peasants, members of the intelligentsia and city-dwellers, in the spirit of Politburo member Lazar Kaganovich’s derogatory observation that ‘every Ukrainian is potentially a nationalist’, meaning that every Ukrainian was a likely police target.10 Balitskii himself was removed from Ukraine by Yezhov in May 1937, ostensibly for the purpose of cleaning up the troubled Far Eastern Territory where the Ukrainian police chief was initially sent. But like so many of his OGPU cohort under Genrikh Yagoda, Balitskii was implicated in a ‘terrorist-fascist conspiracy’, sentenced in secret to death and shot in July 1937. He was soon replaced in Kyiv by A. I. Uspenskii, who claimed in 1938 not only that 75–80 per cent of Ukrainians were bourgeois nationalists but that ‘all Germans and Poles living in Ukraine are spies and saboteurs’.11 Here we are talking about relentless ethnic targeting. From 1932–7, Balitskii oversaw a group of younger mid-level perpetrators, whose political biographies dated for the most part from the de-kulakisation campaign of 1930–1. The opening of the Ukrainian KGB archives has made it possible to understand better the personalities of the everyday secret-police apparatchiks. Lynne Viola notes that these were very rough characters who were accustomed to using their fists. Their sense of right and wrong was warped by the violence of forced grain requisition, the shooting of kulaks and the deportation of millions of peasants from their home villages. These local NKVD chieftains’ trial documents depict a nasty picture of the bloody 9 Iurii Shapoval and Vadim Zolotarev, ‘Gil’otina Ukrainy’: Narkom Vsevolod Balitskii i ego sud’ba (Moscow: Rosspen, 2017), p. 198. 10 Cited in Hiroaki Kuromiya, The Voices of the Dead: Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 15. 11 Kuromiya, Voices of the Dead, p. 16.

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tortures carried out in their interrogation chambers and of the complete lack of honesty of the confessions that they forcibly extracted from their prisoners.12 Gratuitous violence suffused the increasingly brutal repressions of the 1930s, from the de-kulakisation through the Great Terror, and provided a powerful element of continuity to the genocides that took place in that era. The ethics of OGPU/NKVD persecution were clear: the ends justified the means, any means. When one head of the Chernigov regional NKVD asked what to do with the arrested elderly and invalids, Yezhov rebuked him: ‘Ekh, you are a Chekist! Take them all to the woods and shoot them.’13

De-kulakisation In the collectivisation drive of 1928–31, alleged class enemies, the so-called kulaks – supposed rich peasants – were attacked as a way to confiscate and redistribute their grain and land and deprive them of any ability to undermine the formation of collective farms. These kulaks, Stalin made clear, would be ‘eliminated as a class’, meaning, in his mind, not merely relieved of their alleged wealth and power, but either executed or sent to the special settlements where they would also die in huge numbers of hunger, disease and exposure. The kulak was considered by nature to be ‘a bloodsucker, an oppressor, and parasite’, remembered the later Soviet dissident Petro Grigorenko.14 Many party activists, Lev Kopelev among them, convinced themselves that they must not ‘give in to debilitating pity’ for the peasants. Despite the horrific conditions they experienced around them the collectivisers needed to be firm in their ideologically correct tasks of fighting ‘kulak sabotage’. ‘I believed’, Kopelev remembered, ‘because I wanted to believe.’15 Historians of the Soviet countryside have concluded that the image of a socially diverse Russian peasantry riven by class struggle and economic inequality does not fit the real picture of the countryside after the 1917–18 revolution. Instead, there was considerable solidarity in the villages among peasants, richer and poorer, especially when faced with the incursions of urban communists. The kulaks who had existed before 1917 lost most of their landholdings soon afterwards and for the most part merged with the rest of 12 Lynne Viola, Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 13 Cited ibid., p. 26. 14 Quoted in Mark Iunge and Rol’f Binner, Kak terror stal ‘bol’shim’: Sekretnyi prikaz No 00447: tekhnologiia ego ispolneniia (Moscow: Airo-XX, 2003), p. 155. 15 Quoted in Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, p. 123.

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the peasantry. However, under Stalin from the late 1920s the spectre of a continuing kulak class became an imagined social enemy, a group that in practice was often defined by owning a few head of cattle and oxen or having a tin roof over their cottages, but also by real and alleged opposition to collectivisation and communism. Village priests were included in the kulak category, as were many former landowners. Sometimes whole villages were identified as kulak villages and destroyed completely by deporting their entire populations. The kulaks were portrayed as a political class of opponents that needed to be eliminated, as the party leadership encouraged the rest of the peasantry to take up cudgels against them in class hatred, while obediently joining the collective farm. On 15 March 1931, the OGPU issued a memorandum on the kulak problem stating that the goal of deporting the kulaks from all agricultural regions was ‘to totally cleanse [them] of kulaks’.16 Two categories of kulaks were to be dealt with: the most dangerous would be ‘immediately eliminated’, while the second would be exiled, a straightforward formula for punishment of alleged ‘enemies of the people’ that was to be repeated throughout the 1930s. De-kulakisation gangs, made up of party activists, urban workers, village poor and sometimes criminals, created havoc in the countryside. ‘These people’, wrote one OGPU report, ‘drove the dekulakicized naked into the streets, beat them, organized drinking bouts in their houses, shot over their heads, forced them to dig their own graves, undressed women and searched them, stole valuables, money, etc.’17 The paroxysms of death and violence that shook the Soviet countryside during the period 1930–3 forced a brief relaxation in Moscow’s repressive policies until the assassination of Stalin’s favourite, Sergei Kirov, on 1 December 1934, which served as the impetus for a renewed period of terror. During this brief respite, many of those targeted as kulaks, some 400,000 people altogether, escaped their desperately overcrowded and underprovisioned places of exile and found jobs in the labour-short enterprises in the cities.18 They even sometimes returned to their home villages, usually illegally, and reclaimed their confiscated property. The de-kulakisation that accompanied the collectivisation campaign, which began at the end of the 1920s, can be looked at as genocidal. Stalin 16 Cited in Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 37. 17 Cited in Andreas Graziosi, The Great Soviet Peasant War: Bolsheviks and Peasant, 1917–1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Ukrainian Research Institute, 1996), p. 49. 18 Baberowski, Verbrannte Erde, p. 325.

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and the Soviet regime created a mostly fabricated social group known and identified as kulaks, which was set apart from the rest of the peasant population as ‘enemies of the people’, and slated to be wiped out. Their status was deemed inheritable and their official portrayal was that of being less than human. Maxim Gorky even described them as ‘half animals’, while Soviet press and propaganda materials sometimes depicted them as apes.19 Several tens of thousands were shot on the orders of troikas set up to try alleged resistors. The rest were removed from their lands and sustenance and sent off to barely inhabitable territories in the far north and Siberia. There, in special settlements, many hundreds of thousands died of hunger, exposure, overwork and disease. Kulaks were defined in terms of class and family, not as individuals. Not only the head of the household and his wife were considered kulaks, but all of their children and relatives. The peasants who were labelled kulaks were deported as families and sometimes shot as families. There was an extremely high death rate in the camps for children and infants.20 Those children of kulaks who survived carried the mark of Cain throughout their lives, whatever their eventual jobs or professions. Being a kulak was hereditary. This was, wrote Alexander Solzhenitsyn, ‘the nub of the plan: the peasants’ seed must perish together with the adults’.21 Some 30,000 ‘kulaks’ were killed during collectivisation (1928– 31), most condemned to death by quickly appointed judicial troikas and shot on the spot. The lucky ones were beaten, abused, arrested and then sent into exile, their homes sometimes burned to the ground. Much larger numbers of kulaks – estimates range around the 2 million mark – were forcibly deported to the far north and Siberia. Most of these were sent to the special settlements, which were small, scattered, indifferently provisioned versions of the large labour camps in Kolyma, Vorkuta and Karaganda. On paper, writes one expert, the special settlements were ‘a penal Utopia for isolating and reforging social enemies’. In fact, they ‘became little more than a shoddily constructed institution of forced labour’.22 The OGPU estimated in January 1932 that close to 500,000

19 Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 6; Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Doubleday, 2003), p. 102. 20 David R. Shearer and Vladimir Khaustov, Stalin and the Lubianka: A Documentary History of the Political Police and Security Organs in the Soviet Unon, 1922–1953 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), p. 106. 21 Cited in Viola, The Unknown Gulag, p. 155. 22 Ibid., p. 96.

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kulaks, roughly 30 per cent of the total number of kulak deportees at the time, had already died in the camps or had run away.23 Instances of cannibalism and necrophagy (the eating of corpses) in the special settlements were routinely reported to the authorities in Moscow.24 Middle-level Soviet officials certainly understood that something was seriously wrong in many detention centres. Weak and sick prisoners, those who could not carry out the heavy labour demanded by their warders, were frequently slated to die.25 Stalin was aware of the fearful conditions in the camps. He was directly responsible in many instances for reducing state funding for the resettlement of the kulaks, which made it even more difficult for them to survive exile. A final wave of the elimination campaign against kulaks was launched in 1937–8 and overlapped with the later ‘mass operations’ by the regime, represented by Order no. 00447 (30 July 1937), to do away with those groups of socially ‘alien’ people – alleged vagrants, criminals, homeless, prostitutes, gamblers, the chronically unemployed, former landlords and imperial government servants – who did not belong in a perfectible state, the socialist USSR. Once considered a ‘class’ to be eliminated, the remaining ex-kulaks were lumped together with the ‘socially harmful elements’, who were to be cut away from society and quarantined as a lethal danger to the state.26 Similarly, the byvshie liudi (‘former’ people), who were members of the imperial government, army and police; members of political parties, like the ‘Kadets’ (Constitutional Democrats); ‘S-Rs’ (Socialist-Revolutionaries) of various sorts; Mensheviks; and others, would not be allowed to enter the exalted stage of socialism with the rest of the population. The campaign against these supposed enemies was linked with the promulgation of the Soviet constitution in 1936, which trumpeted the achievement of socialism and was confirmed at the ballot box by the election campaign for the Supreme Soviet.27 This was a particular kind of genocide: of an identifiable group of social ‘others’, who did not fit into Stalin’s conception of the future Soviet body politic. There was no room for such outliers; these alleged 23 Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), p. 227. 24 See Nicolas Werth, Cannibal Island: Death in the Siberian Gulag, trans. Steven Rendall (Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. xviii, 76–7. 25 Golfo Alexopoulos, Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin’s Gulag (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). 26 Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides, pp. 64–5. 27 V. N. Kolodezhnyi, L. N. Dobrokhotov (eds.), Dekabr’skii Plenum TsK BKP(b) 1936 goda: Dokumenty i Materialy (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2017). Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides, pp. 64–5.

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enemies would not be allowed to march into the socialist future with the new Soviet man and woman. Order no. 00447 was also intended in part to destroy the kulaks once and for all. Two categories of targets were established, those to be exiled and those to be executed, and every province, territory and republic was given quotas for each: a total of 268,950 were to be arrested, of whom 72,950 were to be executed. As we know, these arbitrary quotas were, in Soviet parlance, ‘fulfilled and over-fulfilled’ by ambitious provincial NKVD officials, who sought accolades for themselves by asking the central authorities to raise their quotas, requests that were almost always granted. Along with the elimination of kulaks, order no. 00447 envisioned the cleansing of the cities of ‘asocial elements’ – alleged criminals, prostitutes, gamblers, chronic alcoholics, street hoodlums and so on – a process that had begun already in 1932 and continued through the middle of the 1930s. They would be executed or isolated from the healthy body politic in the Gulag and special settlements. By the time the operation was finished, according to NKVD statistics, 1,575,259 people were arrested, of whom 1,344,923 were convicted and 681,692 were shot. Additionally, 663,261 people were sentenced to up to twenty-five years of hard labour.28 Certainly, a substantial percentage of those convicted and sent to the Gulag died before the decade of the 1930s came to an end. Lynne Viola emphasises the strong continuities in the means, the methods, the organisational structure and the personnel of the repressions in the 1930s: ‘The mass operations demonstrated a striking continuity with the repressive campaigns against the kulak during collectivization . . . . Many of the organizational structures and policies of the mass operations were derived from this first Stalinist terror and its aftermath, as were the categorization of enemies, social and ethnic, that populated both campaigns.’29 Continuities existed among the members of the troikas from the period of de-kulakisation and even among some of the victims. Many of the kulaks who were sent to labour camps and special settlements by the troikas in the period 1930–4 were executed by their successor troikas’ orders in 1937–8.30 The preamble to Order 28 Marc Jansen and Nikita Petrov, Stalin’s Loyal Executioner: People’s Commissar Nikolai Ezhov, 1895–1940 (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2002), p. 91; Vladimir Khaustov and Lennart Samuelson, Stalin, NKVD i repressii (Moscow: Rosspen, 2009), pp. 67–8; Gabor Rittersporn, ‘Terror and Soviet legality: police vs judiciary, 1933–1940’, in The Anatomy of Terror: Political Violence under Stalin, ed. James Harris (Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 7–8. 29 Viola, Stalinist Perpetrators, p. 12. 30 Mark Iunge, Gennadii Bordiugov and Rol’f Binner, Vertikal’ bol’shogo terrora: Istoriia po prikazu NKVD No 00447 (Moscow: Novyi Khronograf, 2008), p. 52.

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no. 00447 characterised the action as a ‘final solution [okonchatel’noe reshenie] to the problem of the internal enemies of the Soviet Union’. It states: ‘The organs of state security face the task – of carrying out by the most merciless means the destruction of all these bands of anti-Soviet elements . . . and finish at last, once and for all, with their evil underground activities.’31 Order no. 00447 marked the end to any semblance of a normal life for those alleged kulaks who had managed to evade arrest the first time around or those many tens of thousands who had tried to shed the black mark of their pasts by moving to the cities. Only during World War Two were some surviving kulaks, including many young men and women who had never actually tilled the land, released from the special settlements and labour camps so that they could fight in the Red Army. Also, from 1938 on, some kulak children under 16 were allowed to leave the special settlements and shed their second-class status if they pursued a higher education. Stalin had set out to eliminate the kulaks as a class, and he did exactly that, by removing them from their land and sources of sustenance and by sending them into the hell of the special settlements and Gulag.

The Holodomor The background to the Ukrainian famine of 1932–3 was economic and political, prompted by the Bolsheviks’ desire to modernise at unprecedented speed, as well as by their determination to break the back of the independent peasantry throughout the USSR. Stalin and his immediate confederates began in 1928 a campaign of forced industrialisation, one that had been anticipated by many in the Communist Party as a way out of the Soviet Union’s economic backwardness. The state would pay for accelerated industrial growth by collectivising the peasantry, thus taking control of the grain harvest for the purposes of ensuring its export in exchange for foreign currency. De-kulakisation, the removal of the supposed upper stratum of the peasantry from the countryside, was considered essential. This bloody and dysfunctional process, begun already in 1928–9, disrupted grain deliveries, prompted peasant uprisings and made the centre only more determined to requisition grain forcibly from the peasants. By 1931 the state collections of cereals in the largest wheat-growing regions of Ukraine and the Kuban region of Russia, inhabited mostly by ethnic Ukrainians, constituted 45–46 per cent of those region’s entire harvest, 31 Ibid., p. 48 (emphasis in original).

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leaving the peasants bereft of food supplies.32 Grain shortages led the peasants to slaughter their animals. Those collective farms that still had supplies of seed grain for the following season’s planting were forced to turn them over to the authorities. There was little left over to eat or to plant, less because of the total size of the harvest (historians have estimated that it was not so bad in 1932) than because of the forced requisitioning of peasant grain. (See Map 7.1.) Ukrainian peasants were resolutely opposed to Moscow’s collectivisation and requisitioning policies. In March 1930 Ukraine was the site of 2,945 major peasant rebellions, roughly 45 per cent of all of those that occurred in the Soviet Union as a consequence of collectivisation. (Ukraine had about 20 per cent of the USSR’s population.)33 But the Ukrainian peasantry was also ‘doubly suspect’ – as peasants whom Bolsheviks considered inherently counter-revolutionary and backward, and as Ukrainians, whose nationalism and attachment to their distinctive language and culture grated on Stalin and the Kremlin leadership. It did not help that the Ukrainian intelligentsia praised the masses of Ukrainian peasants for their dedication to distinctive Ukrainian folkways, language, religion and culture, nor that the 1920s had seen a modest revival of Ukrainian national culture. Stalin also worried about Ukrainian loyalty to the Soviet Union in the face of potential Polish plots to undermine the republic’s adherence to Moscow. Stalin famously expressed his worries that ‘we may lose Ukraine’ as a result of Polish intrigues, infiltration of spies, and supposed secret ties with Polish underground organisations like the POV (the Polish Military Organisation), which was in fact non-existent in Ukraine. ‘Bear in mind’, he wrote to Kaganovich on 11 August 1932, that Poland’s leader, ‘Pilsudski is not daydreaming and his agent network in Ukraine is much stronger than Redens [Ukrainian NKVD chief] and Kosior [Ukrainian party chief] think.’ Stalin’s paranoia was only reinforced by his low opinion of Ukrainians. He went on: ‘Also keep in mind that the Ukrainian Communist Party (500,000 members, ha-ha) contains quite a few (yes, many!) rotten elements, conscious and unconscious Petliurites, even direct agents of Pilsudski. If things get worse, these elements will not hesitate to open a front inside (and outside) the party against the party.’34 They would supposedly make common cause with the 32 Nicolas Werth, ‘Strategies of violence in the Stalinist USSR’, in Stalinism and Nazism: History and Memory Compared, ed. Henry Rousso, trans. Lucy B. Golsan et al. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), p. 80. 33 Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 293. 34 Quoted in Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, p. 102.

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Map 7.1 Total direct famine losses of population in Ukraine for 1933. (Cartography by the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University © 2021 The President and Fellows of Harvard College)

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Ukrainian peasantry, which had resisted the collectivisation campaign much more than the Russians had. As the Austrian specialist on Ukraine, Andreas Kappeler, argues, the Ukrainian peasants held historically a stronger attachment to peasant property than did the Russian peasants.35 Stalin insisted that grain should be collected from the Ukrainian peasants ‘at all costs’, despite protests from local officials, who were jarred by the intensity of the hunger that was overtaking the villages. On 21 June 1932, Stalin and Molotov, on behalf of the Central Committee, wrote to the Ukrainian party: ‘No manner of deviations – regarding either amounts or deadlines set for grain deliveries – can be permitted’ from the grain requisitioning plan.36 Widespread food shortages resulted, leading to fierce hunger and horrible desperation in the Ukrainian countryside, as well as in the Kuban, home to many Ukrainians. On 27 November 1932, Stalin ordered that a ‘knockout blow’ be delivered to ‘some collective farmers and collective farms’ that continued to resist requisitioning. As Anne Applebaum aptly writes, in November and December 1932, Stalin ‘twisted the knife further in Ukraine, deliberately creating a deeper crisis’, launching ‘a famine within a famine, a disaster specifically targeted at Ukraine and Ukrainians’.37 Stanislav Kulchytsky dates the twisting of the ‘knife’ in Ukraine a bit later, to January 1933, when, he states, a second famine was ‘superimposed on the Chekist special operation to confiscate produce grown on private plots. Thus, the all-Union famine caused by a dearth of grain throughout the Soviet Union morphed into the Holodomor.’38 Ukraine was more than decimated, notes Serhii Plokhy; with 4 million dead, every eighth person succumbed to famine between 1932 and 1934.39 Debates continue over whether the Ukrainian famine should be considered genocide.40 There is a great deal of evidence of government 35 Andreas Kappeler, Ungleiche Brüder: Russen und Ukrainer vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2017), p. 165. 36 Lars T. Lih, Oleg V . Naumov, Oleg V. Khlevniuk and Cathy Fitzpatrick (eds.), Stalin’s Letters to Molotov, 1925–1936 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 230 n. 3. 37 Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (New York: Doubleday, 2017), pp. 218–19. 38 Stanislav Kulchytsky, The Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine: An Anatomy of the Holodomor, trans. Ali Kinsella (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2018), p. 143. 39 Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (New York: Basic Books, 2015), p. 253. The issue of numbers is discussed in Olga Andriewsky, ‘Towards a decentred history: the study of the Holodomor and Ukrainian historiography’, East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies, 2:1 (2015), 27–8. 40 See a range of views in ‘Perspectives on Norman Naimark’s Stalin’s genocides’, Journal of Cold War Studies 14:3 (2012), 149–89.

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connivance in the circumstances that brought on the shortage of grain and bad harvests in the first place and made it impossible for Ukrainians to find food for their survival.41 Forced state requisitions were not the only factor. Roadblocks were set up to prevent Ukrainian peasants from escaping the hungry villages; unlike in other parts of the Soviet Union, they were not allowed to seek food in the cities or in neighbouring republics.42 Even the very existence of a famine was denied by Soviet authorities, who refused to accept help offered by the Vatican and other foreign countries. Most scholars agree that there was enough grain in the Soviet Union in this period to feed everyone in Ukraine at a minimal level. The state’s strategic reserves were estimated at 3 million tons, enough to provide targeted relief. But continued forced requisitioning removed the margin of sufficiency and sank the region into famine, desperation and cannibalism.43 Ukraine, writes Robert Conquest, resembled ‘one vast Belsen’.44 The demographic catastrophe for Ukrainians was immense; in addition to the 4 million excess deaths, there was a severe drop in the birth rate, a fall in life expectancy and a deep ‘demographic trough’ created by the death of countless children and infants.45 The assault on the Ukrainian peasantry combined with the attack on the Ukrainian intelligentsia and the Ukrainian Communist Party, proved to be crucial episodes in securing Stalin’s unalloyed dictatorship. The Polish and German ‘national’ operations, though carried out throughout the Soviet Union, were aimed primarily at securing the Ukrainian borderlands. Order no. 00447 was in part designed to ensure that Ukrainian kulaks and citydwellers would not and could not become the bases for alleged Polish intrigues. Ukraine was ‘among the deadliest zones of terror during the mass operations’, writes Lynne Viola.46 The devastation of Ukraine that resulted from these actions did not prevent Stalin from again attacking the Ukrainian party and society during the Great Terror, when the Ukrainian Republic was deprived of its political and cultural leadership altogether.47 It would take decades to recover. Ukrainians, as a people, still suffer the effects. 41 See the many testimonies to this effect in Report to Congress: Commission on the Ukraine Famine (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 1988), pp. 235–507. 42 Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 327–8. 43 Michael Ellman, Stalin and the Soviet famine of 1932–33 revisited’, Europe-Asia Studies 59:4 (2007), 688–9. 44 Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, p. 3. 45 Andriewsky, ‘Towards a decentred history’, 28. 46 Viola, Stalinist Perpetrators, p. 24 47 Kuromiya, Voices of the Dead, p. 13. At a minimum 267,579 people were arrested and 122,237 of them executed in 1937 and 1938. Viola, Stalinist Perpetrators, p. 15. Paul Gregory calculates that the number of convictions in Ukraine during the Great

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The National Campaigns The attack on Ukrainians in 1932–3 was not just against peasants on collective farms, but on the Ukrainian national and cultural intelligentsia. Already in 1929–30, the Yagoda’s OGPU had constructed a case against an invented organisation, the SVU, or ‘the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine’. The secret police arrested some 30,000 experts, artists, scientists and others, only forty-five of whom were ever put on trial.48 During the famine, the linkages between the intelligentsia and kulak resistance in the countryside were explicitly drawn. This meant that roughly 200,000 members of the Ukrainian elite – ‘an entire generation of educated, patriotic Ukrainians’ – were arrested, while their institutions were closed down and brutally purged.49 Engineers, teachers, agronomists, scientists, professors, priests and officers were arrested, sent off into exile and eliminated. ‘For the Ukrainians’, writes Kappeler, ‘with their meager, and still young intelligentsia, this was particularly disastrous.’50 Despite breaking the back of the Ukrainian countryside and eliminating much of the Ukrainophile intelligentsia, Stalin was not finished with the Ukrainians. More died in large numbers as a consequence of Order no. 00447 and in the Great Terror. By the time Nikita Khrushchev arrived in Kyiv in January 1938 along with the new Ukrainian NKVD Chief A. I. Uspenskii, the Ukrainian party had already been reduced by half, to 284,152 members, just 1 per cent of the population, and the Ukrainian Politburo and Central Committee had ceased to function. There were no first or second secretaries in many of the provinces. All eleven Ukrainian Politburo members died in these purges. No one from the Ukrainian Orgburo or Party Control Commission survived.51 As Robert Conquest writes, the purge in Ukraine ‘was so complete and so quick that legal authority virtually disintegrated . . . . The Republic became little more than an NKVD fief, where even the formalities of Party and Soviet activity were barely gone through.’52 Even at that, Stalin reportedly told Roosevelt at Yalta that ‘his position in the Ukraine was difficult and insecure’.53

48 50 51 52 53

Terror did indeed exceed its population share. Paul Gregory, Terror by Quota: State Security from Lenin to Stalin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 265–6. Applebaum, Red Famine, pp. 98–9. 49 Ibid., p. 247. Andreas Kappeler, Kleine Geschichte der Ukraine (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2000), p. 204. Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, p. 520. Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 233. Ibid., p. 234.

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The extent of the purges in Ukraine surpassed that in the other republics. The entire party and state leadership was replaced several times. Of 102 members and candidate members of the Ukrainian Central Committee, only three were not incarcerated and maybe three more were still alive. Between the summer 1937 and the spring 1938 the chairman of the Ukrainian Council of Ministers and the head of the NKVD were changed three times. Members of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church were arrested, as were party members and the remaining Ukrainian intelligentsia. The Exarchate of the Church, which was founded in 1921, was eliminated and virtually all the members of the clergy were arrested and exiled to Siberia.54 In February 1938, Stalin gave Yezhov permission to arrest an additional 30,000 ‘kulak and miscellaneous anti-Soviet elements’ in the republic, the largest increase anywhere in the USSR.55 As Raphael Lemkin, the pioneer of the genocide concept noted, the totality of the attacks on Ukrainian nationhood, including the replacement of the missing Ukrainian population by inward migration of ethnic Russians and others, constituted the very essence of genocide.56 Stalin’s campaigns against the nations of the Soviet Union did not end with the Ukrainians. His mania about Polish and German spies struck particularly hard at the border areas of Ukraine. Already in 1932–3, some 15,000 families (69,283 ethnic Poles and Germans) were deported from the Ukrainian borderlands to Kazakhstan and Siberia.57 In 1935 and 1936, Ukrainian NKVD chief Balitskii uncovered Polish and German ‘fascist’ organisations, linked to alleged efforts to undermine the stability of the republic. This led to mass deportations of another 15,000 families (11,494 Polish and 3,506 German families) primarily from Kyiv and Vinnytsia oblasts to Kazakhstan.58 The Polish and German ‘operations’ of 1937–8 were based on the same specious arguments that had infused the anti-Ukrainian actions – and indeed fed off of them – that the Poles were planning to foster a Ukrainian uprising and intervene to sever Ukraine from the Soviet Union. During the sixteen months of the Polish operation, 140,000 people were arrested and convicted of crimes against the state; 111,000 of them were sentenced to death.59 When receiving 54 55 56 57 58 59

Kappeler, Kleine Geschichte der Ukraine, pp. 203–4. Viola, Stalinist Perpetrators, p. 26. Raphael Lemkin, ‘Soviet genocide in Ukraine’, Holodomor Studies 1:1 (2009), 3–8. Kuromiya, Voices of the Dead, p. 237. Shapoval and Zolotarev, ‘Gil’otina Ukrainy’, pp. 248–50. Nicolas Werth, ‘Mass crimes under Stalin (1930–1953)’, Sciences Po, Mass Violence and Resistance – Research Network, 14 March 2008, p. 9, www.sciencespo.fr/massviolence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/mass-crimes-under-stalin-1930-1953. html.

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an interim report on Yezhov’s Polish operation, Stalin was pleased by the number of arrests in the country as a whole and in Ukraine. ‘To Yezhov’, Stalin wrote, ‘Very good! Dig up and clean out, henceforth too, this Polish espionage filth. Eliminate it in the interests of the Soviet Union.’60 In April and May 1940, Stalin ordered the NKVD to murder 22,000 Polish officers and social leaders in what is called the ‘Katyn Forest Massacre’, which can be thought of as a continuation of Stalin’s genocidal acts against the Poles. Many ethnic Poles were thoroughly integrated into Ukrainian life; in many cases it would have been hard to identify who was Polish and who was Ukrainian. More than half of the local Poles spoke Ukrainian as their mother tongue. Stanislav Kosior, who was head of the Ukrainian Communist Party from 1928 to 1938, was an ethnic Pole, and unsurprisingly was arrested in 1938 and executed in 1939 as a Polish spy and leader of an invented Polish underground group.61 Similarly the Soviet Germans were accused of being used by the Nazis to undermine Soviet economic and social institutions in an effort to weaken the state for the purposes of an imminent invasion. Stalin’s ‘German operation’, launched in July 1937, rounded up 57,000 Soviet ethnic Germans, 42,000 of whom were sentenced to death.62 In these schemes, the Japanese, variously in cahoots with the Poles and with the Germans, were planning to take over Siberia. This, in turn, was the reason for the deportation from the Soviet far east to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan of 175,000 Soviet Koreans, who were allegedly working with the Japanese in this connection.63 Historians will argue about how serious the external threat was to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, and therefore how rational (even if perversely so) were the actions of the Soviet government to deal with the targeted groups of Ukrainians, Poles, Germans, Koreans and others. It is worth remembering that there had been a comprehensive Polish–Soviet treaty of 1934 that stabilised relations between Poland and the Soviet Union, and that German–Soviet relations in the first half of the 1930s were by no means characterised only by hostility. Nazi intervention in the Spanish Civil War (1936–9) played a role in Stalin’s thinking about potential intervention and internal upheaval in the Soviet Union.64 But however dangerous the alleged external security threats were – and in many historians’ views they were highly exaggerated – they 60 Shapoval and Zolotarev, ‘Gil’otina Ukrainy’, p. 238. 61 Ibid., p. 237. 62 Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale, 2007), p. 508. 63 Pavel Polian, Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migration in the USSR (Budapest: CEU Press, 2004), p. 100. 64 Khlevniuk, Master of the House, p. 173; Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, pp. 428–30.

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were exploited by Stalin and the Soviet government to eliminate opponents and alleged enemy groups already targeted for destruction. In 1944, during World War Two, the Muslim peoples of the northern Caucasus and the Crimea were deported en masse to special settlements in central Asia. (The mostly Buddhist Kalmyks were similarly deported.) In a brutal process of deportation, transport and resettlement, a substantial percentage of these peoples (Chechens-Ingush and Crimean Tatars, in particular) died. There is evidence that the Soviet regime took these actions in order to have these nations disappear, if not physically as individuals, though that happened in large numbers, then as members of distinct nationalities. Their cultural monuments, books, languages and historical particularities were attacked. Some of the peoples involved consider Stalin’s actions genocidal.65 Especially the concerted attacks against the Chechens-Ingush and Crimean Tatars and the attempt by post-Stalin governments to keep them from returning to their homelands should be considered genocide, and, at the least, crimes against humanity, which included extermination as well as deportation.

The Great Terror The purges of 1937–8, overlapping as they did with the consequences of Order no. 00447, created an atmosphere of suspicion and fear among the Soviet population. There were designated targets of the mass killing; the purges were not completely arbitrary. But it is also the case that arrests, interrogations, torture, deportations, the ‘conveyor belt’ rulings of troikas, executions and beatings were contagious, encouraging false denunciations, the spread of violence and mass executions. As the terror continued, the ‘biological approach’, as some NKVD operatives actually named it, became more salient, leading to arrests of children, siblings, parents and grandparents of alleged enemies.66 We have seen that as the campaigns against the social groups wound down, the NKVD increasingly targeted national groups, which were swept up in the mania of eliminating alleged enemies of the people. After the kulaks and intelligentsia came the Poles and Germans, then groups of ‘asocials’ and ‘byvshie’, along with various allegedly terrorist and Trotskyite political groups, whose plots and spying were as fictitious as the anti-socialist activities of suspected socially alien groups. 65 Norman Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 84–107. 66 Viola, Stalinist Perpetrators, p. 25.

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Robert Conquest’s term, ‘The Great Terror’, captures nicely ‘the apocalyptic theater of horrors’ during the years 1937 and 1938 in which any Soviet citizen could potentially have been interrogated, arrested and even killed without the least evidence of a crime against the state.67 Fear was ubiquitous and, especially for anyone in a position of responsibility – party apparatchiks, factory bosses, intellectuals, army generals, newspaper editors and many others – bags were packed in case the feared knock on the door came in middle of the night. According to the most reliable estimates, 800,000 people were executed in the Great Terror over a period of sixteen months: in other words, 50,000 executions per month, or 1,700 per day for almost 500 days.68 Hundreds of thousands more disappeared in the system of prisons, special settlements and forced labour camps of the Gulag system. The numbers of those executed versus exiled were unusually high, argue Paul Gregory and Valery Lazarev, because the camps and prisons were impossibly overcrowded with arrestees so that there was no way to put them all to work or find shelter or food for them.69 In 1937 alone, the population of the corrective labour camps grew by 700,000 to 1,881,570.70 (See Figure 7.1.) The atmosphere in the major cities and provincial centres was especially tense; people were helpless against the power of the state and the whispers of denunciations. In her poem, ‘Requiem’, Anna Akhmatova wrote about her terrifying experiences trying to find her arrested son and about the crowds of people who also sought loved ones who had been arrested and disappeared. ‘There I learned how faces fall apart. How fear looks out from under the eyelids. How deep are the hieroglyphics, cut by suffering on people’s cheeks.’71 Yet, as many historians have written, life also went on in some quite routine ways; Soviet citizens sought pleasures in the newest music and fashion and in musical films and stage comedies.72 The Great Terror of 1937–8 is hard to classify as genocide because ethnic, national, racial, religious and even self-identified social and political groups were not attacked as such. But if not genocide, the Great Terror was, in the 67 Conquest, The Great Terror; Jörg Baberowski, Der rote Terror: die Geschichte des Stalinismus (Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2003), p. 201. 68 Werth, ‘Mass crimes under Stalin’, 15. 69 Paul R. Gregory and Valery Lazarev, The Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2013), pp. 48–9. 70 Steven A. Barnes, Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society (Princeton University Press, 2011), p. 34. 71 Akhmatova, Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), p. 192. 72 Karl Schlögel, Terror und Traum: Moscow 1937 (Munich: Karl Hanser Verlag, 2008); Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2007), p. 159.

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Figure 7.1 Deported peasants and political prisoners used as slave labour on White Sea– Baltic Canal project, 1933. (Sovfoto / Contributor / Getty Images)

words of Jörg Baberowski and Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, ‘a Soviet variant of the “final solution”’, or, in Ronald G. Suny’s estimation, ‘a political holocaust’.73 Stalin and his police and judicial forces moved against alleged political opponents (including their friends, relatives and supposed adherents) who were designated by the regime as clandestine bands of political enemies, and thus eliminated on those bases. But the conspiracies to which these alleged enemies of the people belonged were completely fabricated by their accusers, even if some foreign observers at the trials of the major figures in these alleged conspiracies believed the accusations of the prosecutors. Most of the victims were not members of any political group as such (apart from the Communist Party itself) but were accused of being members of imagined political groups concocted by the perpetrators. The major figures of Bolshevism thus became the chief defendants in three highly publicised show trials of invented political groups: the Trial of the Sixteen or the ‘Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Centre’ in August 1936; the 73 Jörg Baberowski and Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, ‘The quest for order and the pursuit of terror’, in Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared, ed. Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 213. Ronald G. Suny, ‘Stalin and his Stalinism: power and authority in the Soviet Union’, in Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison, ed. Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin (Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 50.

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Trial of the Seventeen or the ‘Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Centre’ in January– February 1937; and the Trial of the Twenty-One or the ‘Anti-Soviet Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites’ in March 1938. At the first trial, Grigorii Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, among others, confessed to having organised the assassination of Leningrad party chief, Sergei Kirov, on 1 December 1934, and having conspired with Trotsky to murder Stalin and other leading members of the Communist Party. In the second trial, Georgii Piatakov and Karl Radek admitted that they had engaged in widespread ‘wrecking’ and sabotage, including undermining the railway system at the behest of Trotsky and the Japanese. In the third trial, the ‘rightists’ Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov and Mikhail Tomsky (who committed suicide before coming to trial) were accused of ‘wrecking, diversionist, and terrorist activities’ for the purposes of preparing for a foreign invasion that would destroy the Soviet system.74 Trotsky was the chief defendant in absentia and was eventually murdered by a Stalinist agent in Mexico in 1940. The others were proclaimed guilty and executed for their alleged crimes. Stalin drove the agenda of the Moscow trials. During this period, he constantly met with his security chiefs, sometimes more than once a day.75 At a gathering of his intimates in 1937, he spoke in blood-curdling terms about the fate of potential opponents to the regime: ‘And we will destroy each and every such enemy; even if he was an old Bolshevik, we will destroy all his kind, his family. We will mercilessly destroy anyone who, by his deeds or thoughts – yes, his thoughts – threatens the unity of the socialist state.’76 Stalin placed Yezhov in charge of the NKVD in September 1936 and the ‘mad dwarf’ (in Khrushchev’s characterisation) proceeded to purge his predecessor, Yagoda, as well as his previous police lieutenants, most of whom were executed.77 In his election speech in December 1937, Yezhov, true to form, threatened to eliminate the alleged oppositionist ‘vermin’ and ‘exterminate to a man all these despicable servants of the capitalist lords, vile enemies of all workers’.78 Yezhov also pursued the families of the former leading Bolsheviks and their associates. He issued orders ‘to confine all wives of condemned 74 Robert C. Tucker and Stephen F. Cohen (eds.), The Great Purge Trial (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1965), p. xxiii. 75 Gregory, Terror by Quota, p. 111. 76 Quoted in Ivo Banac (ed.), The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov 1933–1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 64. 77 A rather more ‘normal’ picture of Yezhov emerges from J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, Yezhov: The Rise of Stalin’s ‘Iron Fist’ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 212–21. 78 Jansen and Petrov, Stalin’s Loyal Executioner, p. 116.

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traitors’ and to arrest any of their children over 15 years of age as ‘socially dangerous’.79 Yezhov did not shy away from the use of torture and was even encouraged by Stalin not to spare the rod. Torture was a very effective means of extracting denunciations of others, not to mention detailed confessions from completely innocent victims.80 In the hunt for supposed opponents, there were devastating competitions between rival NKVD hierarchs, who sought to prove their worth to Yezhov and Stalin by arresting and executing even more ‘enemies’ than called for in their plans. Hastily assembled judicial troikas and dvoikas perfunctorily processed the accused and condemned them to death or exile. Those condemned to death were hustled off to local NKVD-administered forests, where they were shot and buried in unmarked graves. The NKVD executioners were frequently specialists in this work and sworn to silence about the events. Relatives were not informed of the fate of their loved ones; they were told nothing at all or fictions about terms of exile and death in unidentified camps. Kulaks fell in these purges; former leaders and members of non-Bolshevik pre-revolutionary parties were wiped out, as were the ‘Old Bolshevik’ leadership and the membership of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The Soviet officers’ corps was decimated; the leadership of the railways was eliminated; and Russian priests, nuns and monks died in the tens of thousands, either at the executioner’s hand or in the Gulag. As we saw above, national as well as social background mattered. Especially Poles and Germans, but also French, English, Finns, Iranians, Greeks and others, were rounded up by the NKVD and exiled or executed. According to data on the Great Terror, in fact, the largest single group of ‘repressed’ consisted of foreigners and nationalities with potential ‘homelands’ abroad.81

Conclusions Soviet mass killing in the 1930s should be considered genocidal. Under Stalin’s leadership, the authorities targeted, attacked and eliminated groups of people in society as such, including invented groups, like the kulaks. The Holodomor, the Ukrainian killer-famine of 1932–3, should also be labelled genocide, especially when thought of as combined with the efforts of the Soviet leadership to eliminate the Ukrainian intelligentsia, church leaders and 79 Getty and Naumov, Yezhov, p. 15. 80 Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides, pp. 112–16. 81 Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), p. 104.

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party activists. Other Soviet attacks on nationalities, especially on the Soviet Poles and the Soviet Germans in the 1930s, had a genocidal character. Just being of Polish or German nationality – sometimes just one’s foreign name – was enough to invite arrest, interrogation and execution or deportation, which frequently meant death. In 1937–8, the system of repressions also turned on its own; political, military, police, scientific and other leading Soviet cadres were ‘repressed’ as belonging to various nefarious groups of enemies. The purge trials were only the tip of the iceberg, as hundreds of thousands of innocent Soviet citizens were arrested, executed or sent to the camps. In Order no. 00447, the ‘dregs’ of society was scourged by the NKVD, which executed and deported all manner of Soviet citizens thought to be ‘asocial’. The murderousness of the system, the way it identified and grouped social, national and political enemies, can be argued to be genocidal, or at least falling into the category of crimes against humanity, both extermination and deportation.

Bibliographic Note Robert Conquest was a pioneer of studies of Stalin’s crimes in the 1930s. His major books on the subject include The Great Terror and Harvest of Sorrow. The French scholar Nicholas Werth has written a number of valuable studies of Stalin’s violence against the Soviet people. See Nicholas Werth, ‘A state against its people: violence, repression, and terror in the Soviet Union’, in The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, ed. Stéphane Courtois et al., trans. Jonathan Murphy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). For a detailed study of a special settlement, see his Cannibal Island. See Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides, for an argument that Stalin’s crimes constitute genocide. Stalin’s crimes are also the subject of German scholar Jörg Baberowski’s works; for a recent English translation, see Scorched Earth: Stalin’s Reign of Terror (New Haven: Yale, 2016). For Stalin’s role in the killing of the 1930s, see recent biographies by Khlevniuk, Master of the House; Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler; and Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). The biography of Nikolai Yezhov is especially useful in understanding the perpetrators: Jansen and Petrov, Stalin’s Loyal Executioner. Viola’s book Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial helps us understand the role of lower-level police officials in the killing. The Gulag is the subject of important books by Applebaum, The Gulag: A History, and Oleg Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great 184

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Terror (New Haven: Yale, 2004). For the special settlements, see Viola, The Unknown Gulag. For Ukraine and the Holodomor, one can read Applebaum, Red Famine. The work of the Italian historian, Andrea Graziosi, including The Great Soviet Peasant War, is very helpful in understanding the sources of de-kulakisation and the Ukrainian famine. Also important in this connection is Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire. For a different view of the famine, see R. W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–33 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Among the many studies on the repressions of the 1930s, one can consult Gregory, Terror by Quota and Kuromiya, Voices of the Dead.

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The Kazakh famine of 1930–3 ranks as one of the great crimes of the Stalinist regime. The crisis, which was sparked by Josef Stalin’s programme of forced collectivisation, led to the death of roughly a third of all Kazakhs, believed to be the highest death ratio due to collectivisation of any people in the Soviet Union. More than 1.5 million people perished, of the total population of around 6 million living in the Kazakh Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (the Kazakh ASSR, often known as Kazakhstan). Kazakhs, who speak their own Turkic language, became a minority in their own republic. They would not again constitute more than 50 per cent of the population in Kazakhstan until after the Soviet collapse. The Kazakh famine also constitutes one of the largest pastoral famines in modern history. Prior to the crisis, most Kazakhs practised pastoral nomadism, carrying out seasonal migrations to pasture their animal herds. But those who survived were forced to settle, prompting a painful and far-reaching reorientation of Kazakh culture and identity.

Causes of the Famine The primary trigger for the Kazakh famine was collectivisation, which Stalin’s regime launched in the Soviet Union in the winter of 1929–30. By forcing rural people to give up their land and livestock and enter collective farms, Moscow sought to tighten control over the food supply and boost the Soviet Union’s production of meat and grain. Simultaneously, through the institution of the collective farm, the regime worked to sever local networks and firmly implant Soviet power in the countryside, an area that the Bolsheviks, who professed an urban worker-based ideology, had long struggled to control. Major grain-growing regions, such as Kazakhstan (see Map 8.1), Ukraine and parts of the Russian heartland, suffered acutely from

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collectivisation. Across the Soviet Union, some 5–9 million people perished in horrifying famines.1 In Kazakhstan, like areas further west, a major cause of famine was the forced grain requisitions that accompanied collectivisation. Local cadres confiscated grain, which was funnelled to feed hungry workers in cities or sold abroad to gain the hard currency that the Soviet Union needed to industrialise. But the Kazakh crisis also had features that distinguished it from the catastrophes that afflicted the Soviet Union’s west. As pastoral nomads, Kazakhs consumed grain, but they did not normally grow it. To obtain it to meet onerous grain requisitions, they had to sell their livestock. In a feature characteristic of pastoral famines, the terms of trade for livestock worsened: grain became very expensive, while the price for animals dropped, forcing Kazakhs to sell even more of their livestock. Meat procurements, another feature of collectivisation, imposed a special burden on Kazakh pastoralists given the importance of animals to their nomadic way of life. Kazakhs’ herds were slaughtered to feed Moscow and Leningrad. But they were also casualties of the regime’s chaotic attempt to transition the region from a system of long-distance animal herding to a network of slaughterhouses and meat combines. Prior to the famine, Kazakhstan had been the Soviet Union’s largest livestock base. But by the famine’s end, some 90 per cent of the animals in the republic had perished.2 It would take Moscow more than three decades to restore the republic’s sheep and cattle numbers to their pre-famine levels.3 The meat and grain procurements that accompanied collectivisation were the primary causes of the Kazakh famine. It is doubtful that famine would have broken out anywhere in the Kazakh steppe without the Stalinist regime’s radical policy interventions. But the legacies of Russian imperial 1 Omelian Rudnytskyi, Nataliia Levchuk, Oleh Wolowyna and Pavlo Shevchuk estimate ‘direct losses’ for the period 1932–4 at 8.7 million. See ‘Famine losses in Ukraine in 1932 and 1933 within the context of the Soviet Union’, in Famines in European Economic History, ed. Declan Curran, Lubomyr Luciuk and Andrew G. Newby (New York: Routledge, 2015), p. 208. Stephen G. Wheatcroft and R. W. Davies estimate excess deaths for the period 1930–3 at 5.7 million: The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–1933 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 415. 2 See TsA FSB RF f. 2, op. 11, d. 1050, ll. 53–6 (Spetssoobshchenie PP OGPU po Kazakhstanu o sostoianii zhivotnovodstva v respublike, 25 October 1933), in Tragediia sovetskoi derevni: Kollektivizatsiia i raskulachivanie. Dokumenty i materialy 1927–1939, ed. V. Danilov, R. Manning and L. Viola, 5 vols. (Moscow: Rossiiskaia Polit. Entsiklopediia, 2001), III, p. 811. 3 On the decline in the republic’s livestock numbers, see Roy H. Behnke, Jr, ‘Reconfiguring property rights and land use’, in Prospects for Pastoralism in Kazakstan and Turkmenistan, ed. Carol Kerven (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 76.

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rule were a contributing factor. As the longer history of the Russian empire’s engagement with the Kazakh steppe reveals, certain features of Soviet rule were not distinct but drew from a common sheaf of imperial practices towards mobile peoples. These included: a belief in the superiority of settled agriculture, an obsession with the cultivation of grain and a tendency to view nomadic peoples as backward. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the Kazakh steppe was under Russian imperial rule, more than 1.5 million peasants from European Russia settled the region.4 These colonists would struggle to make the steppe into an agrarian landscape. Though there was a lot of land, much of it was arid, salinated or otherwise unsuitable for farming. The steppe was also prone to frequent and pronounced ecological shifts. Rainfall patterns varied dramatically from year to year, and the distribution of high-quality soils changed over time. Due to the steppe’s unpredictable weather, the harvest from these lands might be plentiful one year and disastrous the next. The first wave of settlers of Russian and Ukrainian peasants suffered through such terrible deprivations due to poor harvests that the governor generalship temporarily closed the steppe to further colonisation. Despite these obstacles, St Petersburg persisted in its efforts to bring the steppe under cultivation and encourage nomadic settlement. By the eve of Soviet rule, the Kazakh steppe, dominated by Muslim, Turkic-speaking peoples since the fifteenth century, had become a multi-ethnic, multiconfessional society. Peasant colonisation had prompted significant alterations to Kazakhs’ migration routes and consumption patterns. Kazakhs had begun to shift away from a diet based on meat and milk products to one in which grain played a larger role. It is also likely that they began to consume less food overall.5 These changes would make Kazakhs more susceptible to famine, intensifying the effects of the Stalinist regime’s later assault on the countryside.

Major Events in the Kazakh Crisis In 1928, Kazakhstan’s leader and party secretary, Filipp Goloshchekin, launched the ‘Little October’. The campaign, which took its name from the October 1917 revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power, aimed to 4 On the number of peasant settlers, see George J. Demko, The Russian Colonization of Kazakhstan, 1896–1916 (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1969), p. 2. 5 See Sarah Cameron, The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), Ch. 1.

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belatedly bring an October-style social revolution to the Kazakh nomadic encampments. Though Soviet Kazakhstan was a multi-ethnic society – in 1926, Kazakhs held a slim demographic majority (57.1%) in their republic, while Russian (19.6%) and Ukrainian settlers (13.2%) constituted significant ethnic minority groups – the programme specially targeted Kazakhs, who, due to their nomadic way of life, were seen as more backward than Russian or Ukrainian peasant communities.6 (See Figure 8.1.) More than 700 members of the Kazakh elite were stripped of their possessions and exiled from their home communities. The campaign sought to expedite the process of class differentiation and insert the Communist Party into the very fabric of Kazakh life. It also started the process of unravelling Kazakh society from within, as neighbour targeted neighbour. Members of an aristocratic stratum within Kazakh society known as ‘white bone’ suffered grievously during the assault. The ranks of the Soviet

Figure 8.1 A Kazakh nomad in the north of the Kazakh steppe in the 1920s. (Republic of Kazakhstan Central State Archive of Film, Photo and Audio Documents, 5-3497)

6 For population data, see Vsesoiuznaia perepis0 naseleniia 17 dekabria 1926 g. (Moscow: Gos. statisticheskoe izd-vo, 1927), p. 82.

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bureaucracy began to fill with ‘black bone’ commoners, a marked shift from Russian imperial rule, when Kazakh interlocutors with the Russian imperial state generally belonged to the white-bone strata. Due to the disruption caused by the campaign, livestock levels plummeted and Kazakhs’ descent into hunger began. This assault on nomadic life marked a departure from the regime’s previous policies. During the first phase of Soviet rule, the period 1921–8 (generally known as the ‘New Economic Policy’ or ‘NEP’), Soviet officials struggled to fit Kazakh nomads and the arid environment of the steppe into their MarxistLeninist world view. Existing Marxist-Leninist theory provided little guidance on how revolution might occur among pastoral nomads, and the steppe and its peoples did not fit easily into the categories that activists brought with them from European Russia. Experts within the republic’s commissariat of agriculture maintained that seasonal nomadism was the best use of the republic’s arid landscape, and they argued that any attempt to settle the Kazakh nomads would result in catastrophe.7 Moscow’s overall approach to nomadism during this period was contradictory. Some programmes, such as land reforms, weakened the economic basis of nomadism, while other initiatives, such as mobile schools, worked with, rather than against, Kazakhs’ way of life. By 1928, this period of fluidity had ended. Aspects of Kazakhs’ practice of pastoral nomadism, including its distance from markets and tendency for frequent fluctuation in animal numbers, brought it into tension with the proposals for more rapid industrialisation that began to circulate during the NEP era. Officials now denounced those who argued that arid portions of the steppe could not support settled life. They proclaimed that a specifically socialist state could overcome the limits that the republic’s environment appeared to place on human activity. In concert with this shift, officials declared the practice of nomadism to be at odds with the regime’s nationbuilding efforts, which, through initiatives including support for national territories, languages and cultures, sought to craft the Kazakhs and other Soviet ethnicities into cohesive nationalities. Nomadism was deemed to be a backward way of life, something incompatible with Kazakhs’ development into a socialist nation. The assault on Kazakh nomadic life would intensify with the launch of forced collectivisation across the Soviet Union in the winter of 1929–30. Moscow proposed to settle and collectivise Kazakh nomads simultaneously, 7 Cameron, Hungry Steppe, Ch. 2.

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what the republic’s party committee referred to as ‘sedentarisation on the basis of full collectivisation’ (osedanie na baze sploshnoi kollektivizatsii). Planners envisaged a dramatic expansion of the republic’s sown field area, as nomadic settlement ‘freed up’ lands for grain cultivation. The Kazakhs’ animal herds would be collectivised and funnelled into immense state farms. Meat-packing combines located near Kazakh railheads would process the livestock that these state farms produced, enabling meat products to be shipped by rail to other parts of the Soviet Union. Modern conveniences, such as electricity, telephones and telegraphs, would help Kazakhs shed their backward nomadic practices and become a modern, socialist nation. But the enlightened process of sedentarisation and collectivisation that Moscow had heralded quickly foundered. Activists levied massive grain and meat procurements on nomadic regions. The slogan, ‘sedentarisation on the basis of full collectivisation’, which emphasised speed at all costs, underpinned and legitimised this assault on nomadic life. Though the environmental conditions in many regions of the steppe were not conducive to growing grain, these districts and the collective farms were nonetheless given fantastic sowing plans. Kazakhs were forced to sell their animals to fulfil these plans. The republic’s party committee pursued de-nomadisation through other routes, criminalising a range of practices essential to the maintenance of nomadic life, such as Kazakhs’ slaughter of animals during the winter or their ability to migrate across borders to pasture their animals.8 In March 1930, Stalin sounded a general retreat, temporarily suspending forced collectivisation throughout the Soviet Union, a pronouncement that became known as ‘Dizzy with Success’. But in Kazakhstan, the policy was slow to take effect. Collectivisation rates continued to climb, plunging only in May. By the summer of 1930, parts of the republic had begun to starve. By the winter of 1930–1, the entire republic was in the throes of famine, a year earlier than famine would hit other parts of the Soviet Union. Stalin and the Central Committee received several early reports of the Kazakhs’ suffering, but repression continued largely unabated throughout 1931. Kazakhstan became the major meat supplier to Moscow and Leningrad, intensifying the pressure to confiscate more animals.9 The regime sent various groups (special settlers, free agricultural colonists and prisoners) into the republic, seizing Kazakhs’ lands for these new arrivals. As the republic’s population grew, the overall pressure on the food supply increased. 8 On these efforts, see Cameron, Hungry Steppe, p. 110. 9 Niccolò Pianciola, ‘Towards a transnational history of great leaps forward in pastoral central Eurasia’, East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies 3 (2016), 75–116.

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Finally, in the summer of 1931, the predictions of several experts that the republic would endure periodic dry spells came to pass: northern Kazakhstan suffered a severe drought, leading to a particularly poor harvest. But despite pleas from the republic’s leadership, the Central Committee did not adjust the amount of grain that the republic was to deliver to Moscow. The republic’s residents were forced to make up the grain shortfall. By the winter of 1930–1, the famine entered a new stage, becoming a widening regional crisis that Moscow would struggle mightily to manage. Parts of the republic erupted into open rebellion. During the first six months of 1930, more than 80,000 people in the republic took part in uprisings, with some individual rebellions reaching 3,000 people or more.10 Rebels, relying in part on stockpiles of weapons left by White forces during the civil war, sought to halt the process of collectivisation: they returned confiscated property, released prisoners from local jails, destroyed grain depots or, in a few cases, such as Suzak in the republic’s south and Irgiz in central Kazakhstan, seized control of entire cities. The party’s own district bureaucrats were frequently themselves participants in the unrest, joining rebels to fight against OGPU (secret police) and Red Army detachments. Due to the difficulties of travel across the steppe, the OGPU used planes to gather intelligence, scouting the size and location of rebel bands from the air, and spraying insurgents with machine-gun fire. Some individual skirmishes resulted in hundreds of casualties, and the unrest also served to sharpen ethnic tensions in the republic.11 Most of the participants in the uprisings were Kazakhs, while the OGPU or Red Army forces deployed to end revolts were overwhelmingly from European Russia. The conflict in the republic intensified the mass migration of people first put into motion by hunger. By the winter of 1930–1, almost every Kazakh was in flight.12 Ultimately, more than 1 million starving refugees from Kazakhstan flooded neighbouring Soviet territories such as Kirgizia, Uzbekistan, the middle Volga and western Siberia, as well as surrounding countries.13 10 K. S. Aldazhumanov, ‘Krest’ianskoe dvizhenie soprotivleniia kollektivizatsii i politicheskie repressii v Kazakhstane’, in Narod ne bezmol’vstvuet, ed. M. I. Pomarev (Almaty: Obelisk, 1996), p. 13. 11 Turganbek Allaniiazov and Amangel’dy Taukenov, Poslednii rubezh zashchitnikov nomadizma: Istoriia vooruzhennykh vystuplenii i povstancheskikh dvizheniii v Kazakhstane (1929– 1931 gody) (Almaty: Ost-XXI vek, 2008). 12 By the end of the famine, more than half of all Kazakh households had permanently changed their district of residence. APRK f. 725, op. 1, d. 1268, l. 1 (otchet o meropriiatiiakh po khoziaistvennomu ustroistvu otkochevnikov i osedaniiu v Kazakskoi ASSR za 1933 g.) 13 L. D. Degitaeva (ed.), Levon Mirzoian v Kazakhstane (Almaty: ‘Qazaqstan’, 2001), p. 292.

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Those who sought refuge were almost exclusively Kazakh, a reflection of the famine’s particularly disastrous effect on Kazakh society, as well as Kazakhs’ status as pastoral nomads, a group that regularly used flight as a means of seeking relief from unfavourable political or environmental conditions. These starving people became known to the party leadership not as bezhentsy (refugees) but rather as otkochevniki (literally, nomads who are moving away). The term conveyed the idea that Kazakhs were not being impoverished. Rather, they were being ‘uplifted’, as they moved away from nomadism towards a more civilised, settled way of life. This temporary, transitional stage demanded extra vigilance, officials warned, and they declared fantastical plans to settle the Kazakhs even more quickly than before. Most Kazakhs who fled abroad left for China, particularly its western province of Xinjiang. This was a region culturally and environmentally linked to the eastern Kazakh steppe. There was a significant Kazakh minority in Xinjiang, and groups living on either side of the border had long used crossborder flight as a means of evading state repression. But as the flow of people trying to reach Xinjiang increased, Soviet border guards began to shoot those who sought to cross the border. The vast sea of people on the move was a mixed group, encompassing refugees seeking relief from hunger and rebels seeking refuge in China. But officials deployed violence indiscriminately, framing all cross-border traffic as the machinations of foreign spies and rebels. Ultimately, several thousand people were slaughtered on the Sino-Kazakh border while trying to cross into Xinjiang.14 Throughout the famine, Stalin monitored developments on the Sino-Kazakh border closely. Though it is difficult to determine whether Moscow ordered these killings, it tacitly endorsed them. By the fall of 1931, Kazakhstan’s economy was a disaster. Livestock numbers had plummeted. With their way of life in ruins, the flight of starving Kazakhs within the Soviet Union took on an increasingly desperate character. Refugees fled towards cities, railway stations and industrial work sites in the hopes of finding food. They sought shelter in railway stations, abandoned buildings or churches. Some turned to cannibalism or surrogate foods to survive. Diseases such as typhus, smallpox, tuberculosis and cholera began to spread. These diseases were induced by hunger, but they were also exacerbated by other famine-related phenomena, such as massive population movement and unsanitary conditions.

14 On the death toll on the Sino-Kazakh border, see Cameron, Hungry Steppe, p. 233.

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Rather than provoking sympathy, the refugees were seen as threatening. They were associated with disease, disorder and counter-revolutionary behaviour. In neighbouring Soviet republics, where hundreds of thousands of Kazakhs fled, everyone who was Kazakh began to appear menacing, including those Kazakhs who were not refugees but had long migrated to these regions. Their presence in neighbouring republics posed a challenge to the principle, established by Moscow with the delimitation of republican borders in 1924, that held that nationality should coincide with territory. Now, faced with a crisis of their own survival in hungry times, locals in other republics appropriated this understanding of nationality, one first delineated by the regime, for their own purposes, using it to justify and underpin assaults on ‘foreign’ Kazakhs. Starving Kazakhs in neighbouring territories were beaten, lynched or, in some cases, rounded up, stuffed into crowded train cars and sent back across the border. To prevent further cross-border flows, light cavalry units began to patrol the Kazakh republic’s boundaries.15 Relief was slow to arrive. In April 1932, as part of a series of small-scale food loans to Kazakhstan and other regions throughout the Soviet Union, the Politburo authorised the release of 1 million poods of food (16,000 tons) to the republic.16 Yet little of this aid reached starving refugees. In the fall of 1932, Moscow announced several policy changes for the republic, the centrepiece of which was a ruling by the Central Committee on 17 September 1932.17 The ruling, which became known as the 17 September decision, freed all nomadic households in the republic from centralised meat and grain procurements for two years. As well, it authorised additional grain and seed assistance to these households by the centre. But it also reiterated that the settlement of nomadic Kazakhs was the correct policy, giving licence to further repressions against starving refugees. Republic-level officials complained that many of the grain shipments that Moscow had promised never arrived or were heavily delayed. The distribution of relief was relegated to a low priority, and bureaucrats frequently squandered what little aid arrived. But at the same time that Moscow appeared to offer relief through elements of the 17 September decision, it continued severe measures that 15 Cameron, Hungry Steppe, pp. 149–54. 16 RGASPI f. 17, op. 3, d. 880, l. 7 (Iz protokola no. 96 zasedaniia Politburo TsK VKP ob okazanii pomoshchi kazakhskim khoziastvam, vozvrashchaiushchimsia iz drugikh raionov, April 16, 1932), in Golod v SSSR 1929–1934, 3 vols., ed. V. V. Kondrashin (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond ‘Demokratiia’, 2011), I, bk 2, p. 272. 17 RGASPI f. 17, op. 162, d. 13, ll. 116–17 (Postanovlenie Politburo TsK VKP ‘O sel0skom khoziaistve i, v chastnosti, zhivotnovodstve Kazakhstana’, 17 September 1932), in Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, III, pp. 483–4.

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intensified Kazakhs’ suffering. These included: the closure of internal borders so that the starving could not seek sustenance elsewhere, the processing and surveillance of refugees and the expulsion from cities of famine-stricken people as ‘undesirable elements’. Later that fall, the regime introduced further repression. On 21 November, Stalin sent a telegram charging that the grain procurements in the republic had ‘undergone sharp declines’. He urged the republic’s leadership to switch over to a ‘repressive track’.18 Ultimately, some thirty-one districts in the republic would be ‘blacklisted’, a severe penalty that included a total ban on trade and deliveries of food.19 Moreover, in December 1932, the Politburo ordered the deportation of thousands of Kuban Cossacks from the northern Caucasus: approximately 10,000 were sent to Kazakhstan, putting even more pressure on the food supply and deepening the republic’s misery.20 In early 1933, the Central Committee removed Goloshchekin as the republic’s party secretary. He was sent to Moscow, where his career soon suffered a rapid decline. But his replacement, Levon Mirzoian, continued his brutal policies. Soon after arrival, Mirzoian announced that the party would take severe measures against those who organised flight or stole grain or livestock.21 Though such descriptions applied to almost every starving person in the republic, Mirzoian pushed for the party to increase its use of the most brutal forms of punishment, including shootings. Little attention was paid to the question of relief, and food aid intended for starving Kazakhs continued to be misappropriated or squandered. However, a policy change, the belated decision to dissolve Kazakhstan’s sedentarisation commission and focus on a resolution of the refugee question, partly contributed to the fact that in 1934, Kazakhstan saw its first growth in the republic’s livestock numbers since 1928. Though limited parts of the republic continued to suffer from hunger throughout 1934, the scale of the suffering had diminished. A new union-level commission headed by the most prominent Kazakh in Moscow, T u˘ rar Rïsq u˘ lov, focused on settling Kazakh refugees in those neighbouring republics where they had 18 RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, d. 45, l. 31 (Shifrotelegramma Stalina I. V. v Alma-Atu, 21 November 1932), in The Stalin Digital Archive, www.stalindigitalarchive.com/. 19 TsA FSB f. 2, op. 10, d. 514, ll. 295–8 (Spetssvodka Sekretno-politicheskogo otdela OGPU SSSR o khode khlebozagotovok i otkochevkakh v Kazakhstane,7 December 1932), in Golod v SSSR, II, p. 246. 20 TsA FSB RF f. 2, op. 10, d. 514, ll. 403–6 (Spetssoobshchenie no. 7 Sekretnopoliticheskogo otdela OGPU ob itogakh vyseleniia iz raionov Kubani, 31 December 1932), in Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, III, pp. 612–13. 21 APRK f. 141, op. 1, d. 5827, ll. 17–22 (Iz pis’ma L. M. Kaganovichu o sostoianii del v Kazakhstane, 24 February 1933) in Degitaeva, Levon Mirzoian v Kazakhstane, pp. 22–5.

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fled, rather than returning the majority to Kazakhstan, as had been the policy previously. Inside Kazakhstan, officials began a vast population rearrangement. They forcibly relocated and settled over half a million refugees, with the vast majority sent to work on collective farms. Other strategies also served to alleviate the republic’s suffering. To slow the spread of disease, teachers in southern Kazakhstan carried out extensive smallpox vaccinations. The Rïsq u˘ lov commission provided additional aid to homeless children, both within Kazakhstan and in neighbouring regions. In a striking admission of just how much the republic’s herd numbers had fallen, the Soviet Union’s Council of People’s Commissars authorised additional purchases of livestock from Xinjiang to replenish the republic’s herds.22 The republic, previously the Soviet Union’s major livestock supplier, was now dependent on animals from China.

The Famine’s Impact Though the famine itself came to an end in 1934, a long and agonising period of recovery inside Kazakhstan was just beginning. At least 1.5 million people, roughly a quarter of the republic’s population, had perished. Sweeping in its scope, the crisis touched the lives of almost every family in the republic. Young children saw their parents die of hunger, and the population of the republic’s orphanages swelled in the famine’s aftermath. Others, separated from family members during the chaos of the disaster, struggled for years to reunite with relatives. The famine’s scars remained painfully visible: as famine wore on, it became difficult to keep up with the burial of the dead. Corpses littered the republic’s roads and filled the ditches that ran along the side of railroad tracks. To this day, it is not clear where many famine victims are buried, a problem that is a continuing source of grief to those who lost loved ones during the disaster. There has not been a fully fledged study of the death toll in the Kazakh famine. Nonetheless, it is clear from currently available estimates – which range from 1.3 to 2 million excess deaths – that the disaster claimed a staggering number of lives.23 The question of how these losses break 22 GARF f. R-5446, op. 18, d. 469, ll. 192–3 (Postanovlenie SNK SSSR no. 1239/277ss ‘O zakupke skota dllia Kazakhstana’, 17 June 1933), in Golod v SSSR, II, p. 639. 23 For the figure of 1.3–1.5 million, see Wheatcroft and Davies, The Years of Hunger, p. 412. For the figure of 1.3 million for the period 1932–4 alone, see Rudnytskyi et al., ‘Famine losses in Ukraine in 1932 and 1933 within the context of the Soviet Union’, 208–10. In 1992, a presidential commission in Kazakhstan found that 2.2 million Kazakhs died in

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down by ethnicity is complex, but numerous studies have singled out the Kazakh famine for its particularly devastating effects on Kazakh society.24 Kazakhs died at a rate that far exceeded that of the republic’s Russian and Ukrainian peasant populations, and it is likely that more than a third of all Kazakhs perished in the disaster.25 There has been no comprehensive attempt to break down the death toll in the Kazakh case at the district or provincial level, a calculation that might reveal how to weigh the famine’s causes. But sources from the period suggest that central Kazakhstan, the traditional grazing grounds of the Middle Horde (Kazakhs were divided into three supratribal confederations known as ‘hordes’), were particularly affected. The causes of death varied. Many Kazakhs died from actual starvation. But it is also clear that others died from famine-related diseases. Due to the steppe’s relative underdevelopment, disease appears to have played a far greater role in the Kazakh case than in the collectivisation famines that afflicted the Soviet Union’s west.26 The Kazakh famine also had long-term effects on demography and human health; during the crisis, there was a significant reduction in births.27 Researchers who have studied other famines have shown that survivors and their offspring can experience a decrease in life expectancy and an increase in medical problems, such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease and schizophrenia.28 But these issues have not been studied in the Kazakh case. Until this research is carried out, the precise long-term effects of the Kazakh crisis will remain unknown. Those Kazakhs who survived the famine found their previous way of life destroyed. Due to the decimation of their livestock herds, they could no longer continue their seasonal migrations and were forced to settle. Pastoral nomadism, one of the defining features of the Kazakh steppe for more than four millennia, was eliminated as an economic system. In the post-famine

24

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26

27

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the famine. See M. K. Kozybaev (ed.), Nasil0stvennaia kollektivizatsiia i golod v Kazakhstane 1931–33 gg. (Almaty: XXI vek, 1998), p. 15. US Commission on the Ukrainian Famine, Investigation of the Ukrainian Famine, 1932– 1933 (Washington DC: US Government Press, 1998), p. 136; Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 198. S. Maksudov estimates the Kazakh death toll at 1.55 million, with 1.45 million of these deaths ethnic Kazakhs. See ‘Migratsii v SSSR v 1926–1939 godakh’, Cahiers du monde russe 40 (1999), 770. In the Ukrainian case, most peasants appear to have died of actual starvation. See Andrea Graziosi, ‘Introduction to the special issue on the Soviet Famines of 1930–33’, Nationalities Papers 48 (2020), 440. Focusing just on the period 1932–4, Rudnitskyi et al. estimate that the republic had 228,000 lost births. See ‘Famine losses in Ukraine in 1932 and 1933 within the context of the Soviet Union’, 208–10. Cormac Ó Gráda, Famine: A Short History (Princeton University Press, 2009), pp. 124–8.

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years, the regime experimented with using seasonal migrations as a method of building up the republic’s livestock herds, temporarily moving away from the previous policy of creating giant livestock farms fixed in one place. But this was no ‘revival’ of pastoral nomadism. Rather, it was its final desecration, as the former institutions of Kazakhs’ nomadic way of life were given new, ideologically appropriate names: the leaders of Kazakhs’ seasonal migrations were called ‘specialists’, while the migratory encampments were referred to as ‘brigades’. With the countryside in ruins, many Kazakhs fled to the city, and the republic became more urbanised. During the crisis, many refugees from central Kazakhstan fled south, and the population of the republic’s southern regions grew. The lands of central Kazakhstan, once at the very heart of nomadic life, fell silent and empty. Collectivisation served to dramatically increase Kazakhs’ reliance on their party state and their integration into Soviet institutions. Prior to the famine, Kazakhs in some parts of the republic had little contact with the regime. But now participation in the regime came to structure Kazakhs’ everyday lives. They became collective farm members, teachers and members of communist youth organisations. Even as the famine devastated Kazakh society, the regime created opportunities for other Kazakhs to pursue education and upward mobility. For Moscow, the emptying out of the lands of central Kazakhstan also presented an opportunity. KarLag, the forced labour camp located in central Kazakhstan, grew dramatically, becoming one of the largest and longestlasting camps in the Gulag system. It came to occupy an immense slice of the republic larger than many European countries, and hundreds of thousands of prisoners, most from the Soviet Union’s west, passed through its doors. During World War Two, close to 1 million people, including Germans, Chechens and Crimean Tatars, were brutally uprooted from their homes elsewhere in the Soviet Union and deported to the republic. Under Nikita Khrushchev’s Virgin Lands programme (1954–60), agricultural settlers from European Russia, again carved up the steppe. In important ways, the famine precipitated and enabled a far-reaching demographic transformation of Kazakhstan during the Soviet era. The famine also led to profound shifts in Kazakh identity. Prior to the crisis, nationality was not an important organising principle of everyday life for most Kazakhs. Rather, being ‘Kazakh’ was closely linked to being a nomad, a way of life that precluded an attachment to a ‘nation’ grounded in territory. But in the famine’s aftermath, Kazakhs began to think of themselves as a national group, a goal of Moscow’s ‘nation-building’ efforts. 199

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Nonetheless, Moscow did not entirely succeed at eliminating nomadism as a source of identity. Kazakhs’ allegiances to clans, transformed by the famine and divorced from their origins in the system of pastoral nomadism, continued to exert an important influence on Kazakh life in the post-famine years.

Portrait of the Perpetrators In the Kazakh case, like other Stalinist crimes, the most important perpetrator was Josef Stalin himself. He was warned repeatedly about the dangers of settling the Kazakh nomads. During the famine, he received multiple reports of Kazakhs’ suffering but made no alterations to the regime’s policies. He made light of the terrible human consequences of the party’s actions. An outbreak of violence in Kazakhstan’s Semipalatinsk province that affected more than 8,500 nomadic households, for instance, was in his view the result of the Politburo’s decision to expropriate Kazakh elites ‘just a little bit’.29 He fostered an atmosphere of cruelty and intimidation that made extreme violence possible. At the height of the famine, Stalin’s viceroy Goloshchekin blacklisted many of the republic’s districts, a decision that undoubtedly intensified the death toll. But this decision only came after Stalin threatened Goloshchekin repeatedly and encouraged him to adopt more coercive measures. In contemporary Kazakhstan, Goloshchekin is frequently portrayed as the architect of the famine, and the catastrophe is sometimes known as ‘Goloshchekin’s genocide’.30 (Mirzoian, by contrast, has been largely praised for his leadership, with little discussion of his ruthless policies.31) Oddly, this explanation draws in part on the Stalinist regime’s own version of events. When he was removed as the republic’s party secretary during the heart of the famine, Goloshchekin was critiqued for errors in his leadership and blamed for the grain shortfall. It has also been fuelled by antisemitism. Goloshchekin was Jewish, and some of the works that blame him for the famine incorporate antisemitic themes to intensify the perception of evil.32

29 RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, d. 63, l. 38 (Telegramma Goloshchekina Molotovy, 8 iiunia 1928 g. s rasporiazheniem Stalina A. P. Smirnovy ot 8 iiunia 1928 g.), in the Stalin Digital Archive. 30 See, for instance, Valerii Mikhailov, Khronika velikogo dzhuta (Almaty: Zhalyn, 1996). 31 See, for instance, Degitaeva, Levon Mirzoian v Kazakhstane. 32 See, for instance, Mikhailov, Khronika velikogo dzhuta.

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Like many of his peers in neighbouring republics, Goloshchekin was a brutal leader who did not hesitate to use violence to achieve the party’s goals. He understood little about Kazakh society. But there is no evidence that he held a specific animus against Kazakhs, as the label ‘Goloshchekin’s genocide’, which has become a popular shorthand for the famine in Kazakhstan, would suggest.33 Rather, he was a pragmatic administrator, one who petitioned the party to soften its policies when they appeared counterproductive to the regime’s own economic interests. On numerous occasions, he begged the Central Committee to reduce the republic’s grain and meat procurements. And while Goloshchekin must be considered one of the famine’s perpetrators, it also important to note that he later became a victim. In 1941, he was shot as part of the purges, meeting a fate shared by many others who had joined the party in its early years. As the case of Goloshchekin illustrates, it can be challenging to identify perpetrators beyond Stalin. In the Kazakh case, like other Stalinist crimes, the boundary between ‘perpetrator’ and ‘victim’ could be porous and unstable. These roles could switch over time, and there were many grey areas.34 Some who carried out assaults sought to use a career in the Communist Party as a method of personal advancement. Others believed deeply in the communist cause. Still others clearly were coerced into co-operation by fear and intimidation. Further complicating notions of ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’ is the context of the Kazakh crisis, a severe famine. Famines led to a breakdown of communal bonds and a rise in antisocial behaviour.35 In the Kazakh catastrophe, like other famines, survival demanded ingenuity, good fortune and, on occasion, ruthless and cruel behaviour. It is clear, however, that those who carried out the regime’s brutal policies were not exclusively Russian. Institutions dominated by outsiders from European Russia, such as the Red Army or the OGPU, did play an important role in many assaults. But under the auspices of its ‘nation-building’ efforts, Moscow also sought to promote and train native cadres. Kazakhs served in the upper levels of the republic’s bureaucracy, where they provided input on the design of the regime’s policies. Kazakh participation also was crucial to the local-level implementation of various campaigns, such as the Little October. This arrangement was purposeful. By encouraging and inviting Kazakh involvement in these campaigns, Moscow sought to drive a wedge 33 See, for instance, ibid. 34 Lynne Viola, ‘The question of the perpetrator in Soviet history’, Slavic Review 72 (2013), 1–23. 35 Ó Gráda, Famine, pp. 45–8.

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into Kazakh society. Old allegiances began to shatter, and Kazakh society began to unravel from within.

A Crime of Extermination Through collectivisation, the regime sought to carry out a sweeping transformation of Kazakh society, with little regard for the tremendous human suffering this would provoke. Moscow’s campaign clearly anticipated the cultural destruction of Kazakh society. But there is no evidence to indicate that Stalin planned the famine on purpose. Many of the famine’s central events, from the massive outflow of refugees to the dramatic drop in the republic’s livestock levels, were counterproductive to the regime’s interests and were unanticipated consequences of the collectivisation campaign. Once famine began, the needs of other groups in the republic, such as peasants and workers, whose labour in fields and factories was crucial to the fulfilment of the First Five-Year Plan, were prioritised over the needs of starving nomads. The Kazakh famine does not appear to fit the legal definition of genocide, as available evidence does not indicate that the regime’s intent was to destroy Kazakhs ‘in whole or in part’ as an ethnic group. Though some acts of aggression towards starving Kazakhs were inflamed by local-level ethnic tensions, particularly the assaults on Kazakh refugees in neighbouring republics, we do not have any direct evidence to indicate that Stalin or others in the Communist Party leadership sought to eliminate Kazakhs as an ethnic group. Indeed, it is not clear that Stalin thought much at all about the Kazakhs, and his record of comments about them is very thin. He did not track developments in the republic with the same attention he devoted to major graingrowing regions like Ukraine, and he met with Goloshchekin just twice during the latter’s tenure as the republic’s party secretary. The procedures of collectivisation and the regime’s management of the resultant famine also do not appear to reveal intent. Though Moscow instituted brutal policies at the height of the famine, these tactics were directed at resolving issues the regime perceived as political problems, such as the spread of disease and the lack of grain on state markets, rather than being an assault on Kazakhs as such. The slaughter of Kazakhs who fled to China was part of a broader effort to neutralise popular rebellion. Border violence was further aggravated by official fears about the weakness of the Chinese state. There were several crackdowns on Kazakh cadres over the course of the famine, including one on former members of Alash Orda, a native political party that had sided against the Bolsheviks during the civil 202

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war. But these assaults do not appear to have marked a shift towards punishing Kazakhs as a national group. Rather, they illustrate how the fate of native cadres was marked by constant tension. Moscow sought to promote Kazakh cadres but also to control them. But there is substantial evidence to indicate that the Kazakh case should be considered a crime of extermination, a crime against humanity.36 Through a project of ‘de-nomadisation’, of which forced collectivisation was the centrepiece, Moscow sought to eliminate Kazakhs as a coherent social group. Stalin, Goloshchekin and other top party officials spoke directly of their desire to eliminate pastoral nomadic life and transform Kazakh culture and identity. Even when confronted with evidence to the contrary, members of the Central Committee clung to fantasies about nomadic life, particularly the idea that Kazakh nomads had immense numbers of animals, and this distrust fed further assaults. These assaults were quite deliberate, even though based on no pervasive ethnic animosity.

Bibliographic Note Archives in Kazakhstan and Russia have extensive holdings relating to the Kazakh famine. In Kazakhstan, these include the Central State Archive of the Republic of Kazakhstan, the President’s Archive of the Republic of Kazakhstan (the former Communist Party Archives), and numerous regional archives. The former Secret Police archives also have materials relating to the famine. But so far, they remain closed to most researchers and only a few Kazakhstani scholars have been granted access. Kazakhstan’s Central State Archive of Film, Photo and Audio Documents has photographs from the period, including a handful taken during the famine itself. In Russia, the most important archives for the study of the famine are the Russian State Archive of Sociopolitical History (the former Communist Party archive), the Russian State Archive of the Economy and the State Archive of the Russian Federation. Most archival documents relating to the famine are in Russian, although researchers will encounter some documents, such as petitions or district-level records, in Kazakh. Archival sources should be the basis for any study of the famine’s causes and official efforts to manage the crisis after it unfolded. However, published primary sources from the period, such as Communist Party newspapers, 36 For the International Criminal Court definition, see www.icc-cpi.int/NR/rdonlyres/ 336923D8-A6AD-40EC-AD7B-45BF9DE73D56/0/ElementsOfCrimesEng.pdf.

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ethnographic studies of the Kazakh steppe, agricultural journals and Communist Party journals, also provide insight into these topics. For instance, in the 1920s, the republic’s agricultural journal, Narodnoe khoziaistvo Kazakstana, published a series of debates by agronomists that examined the possibility of settling the Kazakh nomads and making the steppe into an agrarian landscape. Many of these same debates were then taken up by Communist Party officials in the republic’s main Communist Party journal, Bol’shevik Kazakstana. These sources are available at Kazakhstan’s National Library in Almaty, as well as at several repositories in Russia. There are at least a dozen document collections devoted exclusively to the Kazakh famine, and more are appearing every year. They represent an important and largely untapped resource for researchers. The most important of these is the massive, multivolume A.C. Zulkasheva, G. T. Isakhan and G. M. Karataeva (eds.), Tragediia kazakhskogo aula: 1928–1934. Sbornik dokumentov, 2 vols. (Almaty: ‘Raritet’, 2013–2018). Each is more than 700 pages and incorporates documents from state, party and regional archives. Other document collections relating to collectivisation, while not specific to the Kazakh case, offer crucial insights on Moscow’s decision-making during the crisis. See Danilov, Manning and Viola (eds.), Tragediia sovetskoi derevni and Kondrashin (ed.), Golod v SSSR. Finally, an online resource, the Stalin Digital Archive (www.stalindigitalarchive.com/), available by institutional subscription, has numerous documents relating to Stalin’s management of the republic. Finding sources outside of the party-state apparatus can be challenging. Few foreign travellers visited Kazakhstan in the 1920s and 1930s. The famine surfaces only briefly in the diaries and memoirs of Soviet visitors. See, for instance, Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, trans. Peter Sedgwick with George Paizis (New York: NYRB Classics, 2012). And we have almost no accounts written by Kazakhs themselves, a gap that presents a major obstacle for researchers seeking to convey the human side of the story. The reasons for this silence are many: Kazakhs were largely an oral society on the eve of the famine, and due to low levels of literacy few could write about the disaster as it unfolded. During the Soviet period, it was not permitted to write about the famine. In Kazakhstan today, the famine remains a largely forbidden topic. There is limited support for some projects relating to the famine, but open discussion of the famine is not permitted. As a result, the famine has not become central to the creation of a national memory in the same way as the Ukrainian famine has been for Ukrainians. Kazakh memoirists have been less likely to write about their famine, and there has been little support for efforts to collect oral history accounts. Nonetheless, 204

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the few published oral history accounts and memoirs that we do have illustrate just how devastating this crisis was for Kazakh society. Important sources include B. Khabdina, Qïzïldar qïrghïnï (Almaty: Öner, 1993) and Mukhamet Shayakhmetov, Silent Steppe: The Memoir of a Kazakh Nomad under Stalin, trans. Jan Butler (New York: Overlook, 2007). In Kazakhstan, the subject of the famine burst into public view during perestroika. In 1992, President Nursultan Nazarbayev commissioned an investigation into the famine, which found that the famine was a ‘manifestation of the politics of genocide’. See Kozybaev, Nasil’stvennaia kollektivizatsiia i golod, p. 6. The topic dominated popular and scholarly media. But by the late 1990s, the topic was little discussed, and scholars were actively discouraged from further investigations. Though recently some activists have begun to demand greater public discussion of the famine, the Kazakhstani government’s position has remained largely unchanged. See Sarah Cameron, ‘Kazakhstan after Nazarbayev: changes for researchers’, NewsNet: News of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 59 (2019), 1–5. The reasons for the turn away from the famine need further study, but the desire of Kazakhstan’s leaders to maintain strong relations with Russia likely played a major role. In a speech on the eightyfifth anniversary of the famine, Nazarbayev warned Kazakhs about the dangers of ‘politicising’ the disaster, a reference that evoked Ukrainian efforts to seek reparations for their famine from Russia. See B. G. Aiagana (ed.), Sbornik materialov: Mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii ‘Golod v Kazakhstane. Tragediia naroda i uroki istorii’ (Astana: Institut istorii gosudarstva, 2012), p. 9. In the West, the Kazakh famine has been little researched in comparison to other major crimes of the Stalin era. Major overviews of the Soviet period mention the famine only in passing, and, until recently, its key events and causal factors were not well known. There are several explanations for this silence. A long-running and at times bitter debate over whether Stalin used the Ukrainian famine to punish Ukrainians as an ethnic group has tended to obscure the Kazakh story. A lingering Eurocentrism within the Soviet field has meant that many important events from the Soviet east, including the Kazakh famine, have been passed over or ignored. Finally, the fact that Kazakhs were nomads is an important reason why the story has been neglected. It is more challenging to uncover the stories of mobile peoples, as they tend to leave fewer traces in the written record. The sources that do survive are often filled with assumptions, particularly the idea that the violence committed against mobile peoples was part of a ‘natural’, civilising process. 205

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Given the small size of the literature on the Kazakh famine, it is difficult to speak of major historiographic debates. Scholars writing in the West have used various lenses to examine the crisis, including Soviet modernisation and nation building, environmental history, violence, economic history and social history. See Cameron, Hungry Steppe; Robert Kindler, Stalin’s Nomads: Power and Famine in Kazakhstan, trans. Cynthia Klohr (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018); Isabelle Ohayon, La sédentarisation des Kazakhs dans l’URSS de Staline: collectivisation et changement social (1928–1945) (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2006); and Niccolò Pianciola, Stalinismo di frontiera: colonizzazione agricola, stermino dei nomadi e construzione statale in Asia centrale, 1905–1936 (Rome: Viella, 2009). There is also some debate over the disaster’s causal factors, with some scholars placing more emphasis on meat procurements and others stressing the effects of Moscow’s official sedentarisation programme. On sedentarisation, see Matthew J. Payne, ‘Seeing like a Soviet state: settlement of nomadic Kazakhs, 1928–1934’, in Writing the Stalin Era: Sheila Fitzpatrick and Soviet Historiography, ed. Golfo Alexopoulos, Julie Hessler and Kiril Tomoff (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 59–86. On meat procurements, see Pianciola, ‘Towards a transnational history of great leaps forward in pastoral central Eurasia’. In Kazakhstan, some scholars have declared the Kazakh catastrophe to be a genocide, driven by an anti-Kazakh animus emanating from Moscow. See Talas Omarbekov, 20–30 zhïldardaghï Qasaqstan qası̆ retı̆ (Almaty: Sanat, 1997). Others, while not denying the centrality of Moscow’s brutal policies to the famine, place greater emphasis on the Kazakh steppe’s arid environment. See Zh. B. Abylkhozhin, Traditsionnaia struktura Kazakhstana: Sotsial0noekonomicheskie aspekti funktsionirovaniia i transformatsii (Alma-Ata: Gylym, 1991). There is also a significant literature on popular rebellions. Some scholars frame these as ‘national liberation revolts’. See Talas Omarbekov, Zobalang (Almaty: Sanat, 1994). Others emphasise instead that protestors had divergent aims. See Allaniiazov, and Taukenov, Poslednii rubezh zashchitnikov nomadizma. This secondary literature is in Russian and in Kazakh, with scholars publishing in Kazakh often offering very different perspectives than those publishing in Russian. More generally, in Kazakhstan the subject of the famine has largely been the territory of a single generation of scholars, those who began research in the early 1990s when the famine first became an object of scholarly inquiry. With the turn away from the famine in the late 1990s, few younger scholars have taken up the topic. As some within this older group pass away, the future of the scholarly study of the famine in Kazakhstan remains uncertain.

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It is clear that many aspects of the Kazakh famine deserve greater study, with the death toll the most important example. Until this work is done, the full ramifications of the disaster will remain unknown. There is also no comprehensive study of the memory of the Kazakh famine, and, given the importance of the famine to the shaping of contemporary Kazakh identity, this topic deserves a book-length study in its own right. Finally, scholars are just beginning to tackle the issue of the Kazakh famine in its broader Soviet context. Many crucial questions, such as why the other pastoral nomadic peoples of the Soviet Union, such as the Kirgiz or the Turkmen, did not experience famine on the same scale as the Kazakhs, have yet to be fully answered. The literature on the Kazakh famine in English is small. There are two book-length accounts, as well as a handful of articles. In addition to the English-language literature already cited, see Martha Brill Olcott, ‘The collectivization drive in Kazakhstan’, Russian Review 40 (1981), 122–42 and Niccolò Pianciola, ‘Famine in the Steppe: the collectivization of agriculture and the Kazak herdsmen, 1928–1934’, Cahiers du monde russe 45 (2004), 137–92. There is also some discussion of the Kazakh famine in studies that examine collectivisation and famine in the Soviet Union more broadly. Though there are many important works on the famine by Kazakhstani researchers, this scholarship has yet to be translated into English. Primary sources on the Kazakh famine are similarly limited, with the exception of Nazira Nurtazina, ‘Great famine of 1931–1933 in Kazakhstan: a contemporary’s reminiscences’, Acta Slavica Iaponica 32 (2012), 105–29 and Shayakhmetov, Silent Steppe. The latter is particularly interesting and works well in undergraduate teaching for discussions of collectivisation, the memory of the Soviet past and contemporary projects of Kazakhstani nation building.

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part ii *

WORLD WAR TWO

9

From Persecution to Genocide The Evolution of the Nazi Anti-Jewish Policy (1938–1942) fl o r e n t b r a y a r d

The Holocaust began eighty years ago, and yet disagreements persist on such crucial aspects as the decision-making process that resulted in increasingly brutal policies leading up to indiscriminate murder. While the different escalating measures are clearly identified, there are still difficulties in agreeing on the precise moments of transition from one policy to another. Many factors account for this, not all specific to this singular historical event. First, there are various modalities of the crime of genocide. Different measures such as the Convention spelled out – killing; inflicting bodily or mental harm; measures leading to the ‘physical destruction in whole or in part’ of the group; impeding reproduction; and child abductions – could be implemented concurrently. Their combination multiplied the genocidal nature of the policy pursued. Moreover, if we focus on the way in which Nazi leaders conceived anti-Jewish policy globally, we can observe the succession of various increasingly radical schemes. Additionally, one can identify the contingencies of German anti-Jewish policy: several proposed programmes were barely initiated or dropped altogether, with the exception of the last one – mass murder. Reconstructing the evolution of the conceptions of the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish question’ means therefore reconstructing a series comprising essentially, if not failures, at least schemes rapidly considered obsolete, either because of external pressure or because of an internal dynamic of radicalisation. And because these various programmes were often abandoned soon after being launched, they are difficult to analyse, all the more because archival and testimonial sources are fragmentary. The main conceivers or organisers of the ‘Final Solution’ – Hitler, Himmler and Heydrich – did not survive the war. Moreover, the main archives of German anti-Jewish policy, those of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), were systematically destroyed; historians have therefore to rely on documents preserved in other,

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more peripheral institutions in order to reconstruct, from partial clues, developments that have left little to no discernible trace. It is thus impossible to reconstruct the evolution of Nazi policy without mentioning uncertainties concerning the chronology or the source gaps that have led to diverging interpretations. Furthermore, in this chapter it is impossible to cover all the dimensions of Nazi anti-Jewish policy carried out on a whole continent with, for a period of time, very salient local inflections. My analysis focuses on how, at the central level, the fate of the Jews of Europe was conceived; I will stop in June 1942, at the moment when the Nazi anti-Jewish policy stabilised on the objective of systematic and immediate murder of all Jews. This focus on central policy-making should not detract from the fact that regional leaders governing Jewish populations in Warsaw and elsewhere wielded enormous power, and could pursue more radical solutions than those envisaged by their superiors – for example, creating unliveable conditions in the ghettos that led to excess mortality of Jews in Poland already in 1940, long before Hitler and others had sanctioned a policy of mass murder of all Jews. To reconstruct the evolution of Nazi policy, there are several factors to consider at the outset: first, whether or not the Nazis maintained control over the target population. Forcing Jews to emigrate or deporting them was certainly a violent act of persecution, yet in some cases their forced departure paradoxically resulted in saving them from an even more terrible fate. The second was the Jews’ reproductive ability. What is at stake here is to determine the moment when a project aiming at the extinction of the Jewish people – by impeding reproduction – emerged. But the Nazis envisioned also carrying out this extinction more rapidly, by extermination through enslavement. Finally, the evolution of the Nazi project ended at one point with systematic murder, a solution which had the advantage of achieving the same result as the one set earlier in a much shorter period of time. But there is one last aspect to take into account – that is, the geographical scope of the programme. Hitler’s expansionist policy ended up with Nazi Germany taking control of increasingly vast territories, and thus having to manage an increasingly massive Jewish minority, especially with the invasion of Poland and later the USSR. Moreover, after the blitzkrieg in the west and the collapse of French power, Nazi planners began to include in their schemes not only the Jews directly under their control, but also those in countries allied with them, and even those in neutral or enemy countries. In the maximum extension of Nazi ambitions, as presented at Wannsee in January 1942, the programme thus covered some 11 million Jews: by their 212

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estimate the entire Jewish population of Europe. The complex history of the implementation of the ‘Final Solution’ in Germany’s allied countries, which, with the exception of Slovakia and France, began in the summer of 1942, will not be really addressed here. Indeed, until the end of the war, decisions were taken at the central level, in particular on the degree of pressure to be exerted on these often-reluctant allies. However, these decisions concerned the opportunity to force the implementation of the genocide in a given place, and not the genocidal programme itself, which had already been established at the latest in June 1942.

From Expulsion to Extinction: 1938–1941 The entire policy implemented by the Nazis against the Jews from 1933 onwards had a single goal: removing them from Germany.1 Until 1940, this was achieved through a policy of emigration or deportation to the ever-expanding territories under German rule. During this first phase, the German authorities accepted losing control over the Jews who, once they crossed the border, had in absolute terms the chance of living their lives as they wished: in the 1930s, some 200,000 German Jews were thus able to find a definitive safe haven, mostly in the United States, Palestine, Britain or South America. The increasing persecution of Jews by the Nazi authorities over time made their emigration less and less voluntary. The first systematic deportation programmes were implemented in 1938, targeting the small group of Soviet Jews living in the Reich2 and then the much larger group of Polish Jews who were threatened with being stripped of their Polish citizenship:3 about 17,000 of them were transported to the Polish border in late October by special buses or trains. As the Polish authorities refused to allow the return of their Jewish fellow citizens, a large number of them found themselves stranded in the no-man’s land between the two countries in appalling sanitary conditions.4 1

2

3

4

On German anti-Jewish policy in the 1930s, see Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. I: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York: HarperCollins, 1997) and Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 29–130. Wolf Gruner, ‘Von der Kollektivausweisung zur Deportation der Juden aus Deutschland. Neue Perspektiven und Dokumente (1938–1945)’, in Die Deportation der Juden aus Deutschland. Pläne, Praxis, Reaktionen 1938–1945, ed. Birthe Kundrus and Beate Mayer (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2004), pp. 23–5. Jerzy Tomaszewski, Auftakt zur Vernichtung: Die Vertreibung polnischer Juden aus Deutschland im Jahre 1938 (Osnabrück: Fibre Verlag, 2002). Trude Maurer, ‘Abschiebung und Attentat. Die Ausweisung der polnischen Juden und der Vorwand für die “Kristallnacht”’, in Der Judenpogrom 1938. Von der ‘Reichkristallnacht’

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This humanitarian disaster prompted a young Polish Jew who had emigrated to France, Herszel Grynszpan, to murder a member of the German legation in Paris. The Nazi retaliation, on 9 and 10 November 1938, was a gigantic pogrom unleashed in Germany and Austria, burning down almost all 1,400 German synagogues, ransacking thousands of stores, claiming several hundred lives and leading to the arrest and transfer to concentration camps of up to 30,000 German and Austrian Jews. The internees could be released only if they promised to emigrate.5 In 1939 alone, 78,000 German Jews left the Reich, a third of all those who had emigrated since 1933.6 In Austria, which had been annexed to the Reich in March 1938, the decline in the Jewish population was even more rapid and also more severe: two-thirds of Austrian Jews left the country before the war broke out.7 The Nazi policy of forcing Jews into emigration had dramatic results: before the invasion of Poland in September 1939, the Jewish minority in Germany, Austria and other German-dominated territories had declined by more than half. Emigration continued over the next two years, but at a much slower pace.8 The invasion of Poland in September 1939 dramatically changed the situation on several levels. Domination of this territory increased the number of Jews under German control tenfold, adding more than 2 million Polish Jews. The outbreak of World War Two was also a moment of radicalisation of Nazi policies. The action of the Einsatzgruppen was bloodier in Poland than it had been before in the other annexed territories. In short, it aimed now at the permanent decapitation of Polish society by liquidating its elites.9 In the autumn of 1939, the Nazi regime also drew up its very first criminal programme, with the killing of mentally and physically disabled people. Some 70,000 were killed in Germany up to the summer of 1941, in institutes

5

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zum Völkermord, ed. Walter Pehle (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1988), pp. 52–72; Gruner, ‘Kollektivausweisung’, 27–30. Friedländer, Years of Persecution, pp. 269–80; Longerich, Holocaust, pp. 110–13; Alan E. Steinweis, Kristallnacht 1938 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). Ino Arndt and Heinz Boberach, ‘Deutsches Reich’, in Dimension des Völkermords: die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus, ed. Wolfgang Benz (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1996), p. 34. Jonny Moser, ‘Österreich’, in Dimension des Völkermords: die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus, ed. Wolfgang Benz (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1996), p. 68. Jewish emigration was definitively banned in October 1941. See Christopher R. Browning (with Jürgen Matthäus), The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (London: Heinemann, 2004), pp. 368–9. Alexander B. Rossino, Hitler Strikes Poland: Blitzkrieg, Ideology, and Atrocity (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003); Jürgen Matthäus, Jochen Böhler and Klaus-Michael Mallmann, War, Pacification, and Mass Murder, 1939: The Einsatzgruppen in Poland (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).

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designed for that purpose,10 while the programme introduced mobile gas vans in the former Polish territories.11 But the conquest of Poland and the German–Soviet pact also opened up hitherto unimaginable possibilities. The expansion offered territories on which it was now possible to develop long-term projects. The USSR, as a provisional ally, seemed to the Nazi leaders a possible new destination for the Jews, at a time when the possibilities of emigration were drastically reduced. The situation in early 1940 is difficult to grasp and often contradictory. Several projects were designed successively concerning the Jews, sometimes on a large scale. However, launched in haste and poorly managed, none were implemented in any significant way. During this turbulent period, priorities could be changed overnight: after focusing on the transfer of Jews from the Reich, it was decided, for example, to give priority to repatriation of the Volksdeutschen living in the USSR or Poland, who were to form the new elite of Polish society under German rule.12 It is not possible to detail these various programmes, which were long thought to be limited to the creation of a ‘reservation’ for the Jews in the district of Lublin, at the demarcation line with the USSR. The first hints of that project date back to early September 1939. As early as October, a first experiment was launched under Adolf Eichmann’s responsibility: a few thousand Jews from Upper Silesia, the Protectorate of BohemiaMoravia and Vienna were deported to Nisko, at the border of the Lublin district, for the purpose of building a transit camp. The operation was then to be extended to 70,000 to 80,000 Jews from the same territories, or even to the 300,000 Jews of the Reich. ‘Operation Nisko’ was suspended, however, after the arrival of a few convoys: some of the Jews who had already been transported were forcibly expelled beyond the demarcation line, while others remained in the makeshift camp until its dissolution in April 1940.13 Then an 10

11

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Henry Friedlander. The Origins of the Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Ernst Klee, ‘Euthanasie’ im Dritten Reich: die ‘Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens’ (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2014). Volker Rieß, Die Anfänge der Vernichtung ‘lebensunwerten Lebens’ in den Reichsgauen Danzig-Westpreussen und Wartheland, 1939/40 (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1995). On the role of Himmler as Reich Commissar for the Consolidation of the Ethnic German Nation in October 1939, see Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler (Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 434–6. On the RuSHA (Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt, the SS Race and Settlement Main Office), see Isabel Heinemann, ‘Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches Blut’: das Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt der SS und die rassenpolitische Neuordnung Europas (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003). Jonny Moser, ‘Nisko: The First Experiment in Deportation’, Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual 2 (1985), pp. 1–30; Seev Goshen, ‘Eichmann und die Nisko-Aktion im Oktober 1939’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 29/1 (1981), pp. 1–30; Jonny Moser, Nisko: Die

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alternative concept emerged: the General Government, the section of occupied Poland that was not annexed to the Reich, was to receive, as a priority, not the German Jews, but the Jews and some of the Poles living in the annexed territories which were to be ethnically cleansed.14 The next stage, concerning German Jews, can be located in February 1940. While preparations for their emigration were already being made in the Reich,15 the Soviet population exchange services were considering how to respond to the German security services’ proposal to send the ‘Jews of Germany’ to be resettled in Birobidjan, in the far east of the USSR, and western Ukraine.16 This astonishing and long-ignored proposal invites us to take a retrospective look at the project of a ‘Jewish reserve’ which was possibly being planned, from the outset, as a transitional measure. After all, in September 1939, Hitler had authorised in the same breath the ‘deportation of German Jews’ into the General Government and their ‘expulsion across the demarcation line’.17 And for a few months, various German authorities had not hesitated to push the Jews back across the line in one-off operations. The Russian report documenting this proposal does not make it possible to define exactly the perimeter imagined by the Nazis. The ‘Jews of Germany’ are explicitly mentioned, but it is obvious that Austrian Jews were also concerned, as were perhaps those of the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia, a total of several hundred thousand people. But it cannot be totally excluded that Polish Jews, at least those living in the annexed territories, could also have been targeted. Furthermore, we lack the Soviet response, even though everything suggests that it was negative. Soon, Hermann Göring, officially in charge of the anti-Jewish policy since January 1939, prohibited any transfer of Jews to the General Government.18 The German proposal was an important step in the evolution of anti-Jewish policy: it was the last time Nazi officials favoured a solution that resulted in surrendering their control over Jews.

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ersten Judentransportationen (Vienna: Edition Steinbauer, 2012); Gruner, ‘Kollektivausweisung’, 31–5. Browning, Origins, pp. 43–61; Longerich, Holocaust, pp. 155–60. Gruner, ‘Kollektivausweisung’, 37–40. Florent Brayard, La ‘solution finale de la question juive’. La technique, le temps et les catégories de la décision (Paris: Fayard, 2004), pp. 215–21; Pavel Polian, ‘Hätte der Holocaust beinahe nicht stattgefunden? Überlegungen zu einem Schriftwechsel im Wert von zwei Millionen Menschenleben’, in Johannes Hürter and Jürgen Zarusky (eds), Besatzung, Kollaboration, Holocaust. Neue Studien zur Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden (Munich: de Gruyter, 2008), pp. 1–20. Browning, Origins, p. 36. 18 Longerich, Holocaust, pp. 158–9.

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Undoubtedly, the fate under Soviet rule of the expelled Jews would have been by no means enviable,19 yet distinct from mass murder. With the western campaign and the swift defeats inflicted on the Netherlands, Belgium and France, the paradox noted earlier was reiterated. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were bound to make the so-called ‘Jewish question’ even more pressing for the Germans. But in this case, too, new territorial perspectives opened up the possibility of finding solutions previously inconceivable. As early as June 1940, the German Foreign Office drew up a plan to transplant all European Jews to the French colony of Madagascar.20 In doing so, it showed more opportunism than originality. The idea of isolating the Jews on an island dated back at least as early as the fourteenth century.21 Madagascar, moreover, had been mentioned as a possible destination since the end of the nineteenth century and many countries had considered this arrangement in varying degrees of detail. In the summer of 1940, other German administrative services worked on the ‘Madagascar Plan’, starting with the RSHA. Beyond their differences, these various schemes agreed on a number of key elements. First, the plan went beyond what preceded it in terms of the scope of the population concerned. The most cautious sketch, that of the RSHA, took into account the countries that had fallen into the German orbit to the west and the north, as well as Slovakia: it therefore included almost 4 million people. That of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was more ambitious, since it concerned all the Jews of Europe, with the exception of those living under Soviet domination – that is, a maximum of 6.5 million. It was, moreover, a long-term colonisation undertaking, the planning of which was admittedly sketchy and which would undoubtedly have resulted in significant mortality, either during the journey or on the spot. This may suggest the project was genocidal.22

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Mark Edele, Sheila Fitzpatrick and Atina Grossmann (eds.), Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017). On the ‘Madagascar Plan’, see Hans Jansen, Der Madagaskar-Plan. Die beabsichtigte Deportation der europäischen Juden nach Madagaskar (Munich: Langen Müller, 1997); Magnus Brechtken, ‘Madagaskar für die Juden’. Antisemitische Idee und politische Praxis 1885–1945 (Munich: de Gruyter, 1998). See also Eric T. Jennings, Perspectives on French Colonial Madagascar (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Sylvain Piron and Elsa Marmursztejn, ‘Duns Scot et la politique. Pouvoir du prince et conversion des juifs’, in Duns Scot à Paris, 1302–2002. Actes du colloque de Paris, 2–4 septembre 2002, ed. Olivier Boulnois, Elizabeth Karger, Jean-Luc Solère and Gérard Sondag (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), pp. 21–62. Brechtken, Madagaskar, p. 295.

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However, the various services consulted considered that the island’s surface area was sufficient to contain such a population and enable it to meet its needs. It was planned to create large parastatal structures, drain the swamps, build road and rail infrastructure, and create a self-sustaining economy based on agriculture, breeding and fishing. Last but not least, there were no measures to hinder the reproduction of the transplanted Jews: for example, no separation of Jews by sex was mentioned. With the Madagascar project, thus, the Jews would be cut off from the world, isolated in a ‘large ghetto’23 under German surveillance. This was an important development in German doctrine. Now it was a matter of keeping Jews under Nazi control, even on the other side of the world. Another sinister purpose of this scheme was to use European Jews as hostages to counter American Jews’ alleged plot against Germany.24 The survival of the European Jews had thus become conditional. Finally, it should be added that the implementation of the project was to be carried out over four years, at the rate of 1 million Jews transplanted per year. This meant building up a fleet of 120 ships that would be in permanent use for the entire period. It also implied command of the seas and, consequently, the end of the conflict; this is why the plan was intended to come into effect after the end of the war. This prospect did not seem that far-fetched, as Hitler was planning to invade Britain at that time. His change of strategy made the Madagascar Plan unfeasible. It is unknown, however, when it was actually dropped, as it continued to be mentioned by senior Nazi officials for some time, even if it was most likely mentioned to hide the existence of an alternative, totally secret project: the transplantation of Jews to the USSR once it was conquered. Some documents thus refer to a ‘territory still to be determined’ as the destination,25 which may mean that several alternatives were envisaged, or that it was necessary to keep the plans for attacking the USSR confidential.26 As early as the summer of 1940, Hitler had begun to seriously consider launching a frontal attack against the USSR which, if successful, would secure German domination of the European continent and force Britain to cease 23

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This expression was used by one of the developers of the plan, Franz Rademacher, of the German Foreign Office, see Jansen, Madagaskar-Plan, p. 328. Ibid. Götz Aly, ‘Endlösung’. Völkerverschiebung und der Mord an den europäischen Juden (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1995), p. 198; Claudia Steur, Theodor Dannecker. Ein Funktionär der ‘Endlösung’ (Essen: Klartext, 1997), p. 185. See below, for example, the reference made to Madagascar by Hitler to Mussolini in June 1941.

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hostilities. In December, preparations were launched. It was during this period that Reinhard Heydrich, operationally in charge of anti-Jewish policy, submitted to Hitler and Hermann Göring a draft of a new transplant project.27 In March, it was again submitted to Göring who demanded a correction concerning the role of Alfred Rosenberg;28 insofar as he was then programmed to take responsibility for the Soviet territories once they had been conquered, the logical conclusion is that the destination chosen for the future ‘Jewish reservation’ was located in the east. The draft of this plan has not been preserved and only a few documents allude to it. Obviously, destination aside, there was a strong continuity with the Madagascar plan. It was once again a ‘settlement action’,29 to be implemented after the end of the war at a rate of 1 million people per year, even if Heydrich imagined that he would soon transfer German Jews to the General Government30 where they would await their ultimate deportation. Again, the programme had a European dimension, although it is not known whether the millions of Soviet Jews who would fall under German domination were already included in it. However, at least one person amongst those responsible for anti-Jewish policy began to envision something different. At the beginning of 1941, Heydrich’s superior, SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler asked Viktor Brack, a high-ranking official in the Führer’s chancellery involved in the killing of the mentally ill, to determine whether it was technically possible to sterilise all the transplanted Jews. Brack’s report to Himmler in March answered in the affirmative.31 This possibility was nevertheless not mentioned afterwards in the various documents relating to the ‘Final Solution’, at least until the autumn of 1942.32 It is thus possible that Himmler acted in a personal and exploratory capacity; in any case to be retained, his plan would have to be approved by Hitler. However, Brack’s report constitutes a very important document, the very first one univocally attesting to a project aimed at the physical removal and destruction of European Jews: isolated, strictly monitored and deprived of any possibility of reproduction, they would have been condemned to extinction, in the medium or long term.

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Longerich, Holocaust, pp. 173–5. 28 Aly, ‘Endlösung’, p. 270. 29 Steur, Dannecker, p. 185. H. G. Adler, Der verwaltete Mensch. Studien zur Deportation der Juden aus Deutschland (Tübingen: Mohr, 1974), pp. 152–3. Brayard, ‘Solution finale’, pp. 241–3; Report of Brack to Himmler, 28 March 1941, Nuremberg documentation, NO-203. On the plan to sterilise German ‘mixed race’ Jews (Mischlinge) after October 1942, see Florent Brayard, Auschwitz, enquête sur un complot nazi (Paris: Seuil, 2012), pp. 291–2.

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From Extinction to Mass Murder: 1941–1942 After the launching of ‘Operation Barbarossa’, the various authorities in charge of the newly conquered territories were charged with reflecting on what to do with Soviet Jews in this intermediate period which was to precede their deportation further east.33 They too had therefore been included in the ‘final solution’ whose perimeter had thus not ceased to expand in the course of the previous years. In the summer of 1941, Nazi leaders planned to transplant, at the end of the war, more than 10 million European Jews to remote Soviet territories once these had been conquered. The documentation is sparse, but there are hints that the final, particularly sinister destination envisaged was the Gulag camps in the north of the USSR.34 Significantly, there was a notable difference among the various German actors on Soviet territory. Unlike the civilian authorities, the security officials, under Himmler, consistently wanted to implement measures aimed at preventing the reproduction of Soviet Jews by separating them by sex.35 However, Himmler’s services were still making plans in November 1941 based on the assumption that Soviet Jews would eventually be deported.36 In the meantime, the situation of Soviet Jews had changed dramatically and unexpectedly. As early as the preparations for the military invasion, it was clear to the Nazi actors that the confrontation with the USSR would constitute a ‘war of annihilation’ which would be particularly deadly, also for the civilian populations. Tens of millions of Soviet citizens were to ‘disappear’ through various measures including starvation and deportation to labour camps.37 Jews would be particularly targeted since they were seen as the embodiment of Bolshevism whom Nazi propaganda had crafted as the absolute enemy for two decades. This radicalisation of warfare practices was quickly illustrated by the activities of the Einsatzgruppen and other militarised security units under Himmler’s control. The massacres had initially been limited to Jews integrated into the Soviet state apparatus and the Communist Party, but as weeks passed, the scope of the targets widened: all Jewish men 33 35

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Longerich, Holocaust, pp. 232–5. 34 Brayard, ‘Solution Finale’, pp. 408–9. See for August and October 1941, Andrej Angrick and Peter Klein, The ‘Final Solution’ in Riga: Exploitation and Annihilation, 1941–1944 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), pp. 99 and 199. This version of the General Plan Ost has been lost. It can be partly reconstructed by the comments upon it made in April 1942 by Erhard Wetzel ( Czeslaw Madajczyk (ed.), Vom Generalplan Ost zum Generalsiedlungsplan (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1994), p. 60). On when this version was written, see Heinemann, ‘Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches Blut’, p. 363. Christian Gerlach, The Extermination of the European Jews (Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 67–8; Longerich, Holocaust, pp. 179–82.

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of arms-bearing age were being killed.38 Radicalisation was initiated by Himmler, who regularly inspected his subordinates in the field and gave them increasingly strict oral instructions. From the beginning of August, women and children were in turn murdered. Then, starting with the great massacre at Kamianets-Podilskyi a few weeks later, which claimed 23,600 lives,39 the executions of entire communities were perpetrated in succession: at Babi Yar, near Kyiv, at the end of September, 33,771 Jews were executed in two days.40 It is estimated that by the end of 1941, between 500,000 and 900,000 Soviet Jews had been murdered.41 A number of them had been killed in pogroms organised by the local population and sometimes orchestrated covertly by the Einsatzgruppen, this being one of their explicit tasks.42 However, these killings by the local population proved to be more difficult to implement than anticipated, and their scale was not in line with the expectations of, for example, Rosenberg’s services, who predicted that popular violence would largely solve the ‘Jewish problem’, particularly in Ukraine.43 Carried out in the open air and often in the presence of numerous witnesses, these increasingly massive executions caused psychological difficulties for the perpetrators themselves. During a visit to Minsk on 15 August 1941, Himmler decided to develop alternative killing techniques in order to relieve the burden on the executioners. Various tests were carried out, for example with dynamite, before the decision was made to deploy gas vans. This technology was already being used on Polish mentally ill patients, but it was adapted to local conditions. Instead of employing industrial gas cylinders, the killers used simple exhaust gas. Five of these vans were delivered to the Einsatzgruppen before the end 38

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On this evolution, see Jürgen Matthäus, ‘Operation Barbarossa and the Onset of the Holocaust, June-December 1941’, in Christopher R. Browning (with Jürgen Matthäus), The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939– March 1942 (London: Heinemann, 2004); Longerich, Holocaust, Part I I I, ‘Mass Executions of Jews in the Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941’; Peter Klein (ed.), Die Einsatzgruppen in der besetzten Sowjetunion 1941–42. Die Tätigkeits- und Lageberichte des Chefs der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1997). Klaus-Michael Mallmann, ‘Der qualitative Sprung im Vernichtungsprozess: Das Massaker von Kamenetz-Podolsk Ende August 1941’, Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 10 (2001),239–64. Hartmut Rüß, ‘Wer war verantwortlich für das Massaker von Babij Jar?’, Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 57 (1998), 483–508. Longerich, Holocaust, p. 255 for the lower estimation; Gerlach, Extermination, p. 70 for the highest. Longerich, Holocaust, pp. 192–6; Matthäus, ‘Operation Barbarossa’, 268–77. See Jürgen Matthäus and Frank Bajohr, The Political Diary of Alfred Rosenberg and the Onset of the Holocaust (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), pp. 373–5.

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of 1941.44 In most of the newly conquered territories, whether Polish or Soviet, local authorities exerted pressure to speed up the killing of local Jews, and this was welcomed at the central level. It seems even that, in the Warthegau, the building of the extermination camp of Chelmno was due to some local initiative.45 The same happened in the local government, where Himmler’s subordinate, Odilo Globocnik, initiated the construction of a regional extermination camp in the village of Belzec.46 In December 1941, Hans Frank, the head of the civil administration of the territory, was informed that Polish Jews would not be sent further east, as originally planned, but killed on the spot in a manner to be determined.47 At the same time, the last restraint on the massacres of Soviet Jews was abolished: it was decided that even those who were valuable labourers could also be subjected to mass murder.48 By the end of 1941, it was clear therefore that the scope of the ‘final solution’, previously understood as relocation and ghettoisation, had been redefined, this time downward: all the Jews of the east, whether Polish or Soviet were slated for direct killing, that is to say, more than 8 million people according to Nazi statistics. Determining to what extent the relocation, without direct killing, remained valid for other European Jews is not an easy task: the documentation is again lacking or difficult to interpret; the pieces of evidence are often contradictory; the internal debates of the very small circle of decision makers – Hitler, Himmler and Heydrich – and whether there were divergences between them, are totally unknown.49 The attack on the USSR was conceived as 44

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Ralf Ogorreck, Die Einsatzgruppen und die ‘Genesis der Endlösung’ (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 1996), pp. 179–83; Mathias Beer, ‘Die Entwicklung des Gaswagen beim Mord an den Juden’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 35 (1987), 403–17; Mathias Beer, ‘Gaswagen. Von der ‘Euthanasie’ zum Genozid’, in Neue Studien zu nationalsozialistischen Massentötungen durch Giftgas. Historische Bedeutung, technische Entwicklung, revisionistische Leugnung, ed. Günter Morsch and Bertrand Perz (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2011), pp. 153–64. Peter Klein, ‘Die Rolle der Vernichtungslager Kulmhof (Chelmno), Belzec und Auschwitz-Birkenau in den frühen Deportationsvorbereitungen’, in Lager, Zwangsarbeit, Vertreibung und Deportation, ed. Dittmar Dahlmann and Gerhard Hirschfeld (Essen: Klartext, 1999), pp. 474–6; Catherine Epstein, Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and the occupation of Western Poland (Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 184–6. Dieter Pohl, Von der ‘Judenpolitik’ zum Judenmord. Der Distrikt Lublin des Generalgouvernements 1939–1944 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang GmbH, 1993), pp. 99–102. Ibid., pp. 102–3. Christian Gerlach, ‘The Wannsee Conference, the fate of German Jews, and Hitler’s decision in principle to exterminate all European Jews’, The Journal of Modern History 70 (1998), 789. Peter Longerich has recently explored a possible discrepancy between Himmler and Heydrich on the implementation of the ‘Final Solution’. See Peter Longerich, Wannseekonferenz: der Weg zur ‘Endlösung’ (Munich: Pantheon, 2016).

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Map 9.1 Europe in December 1941. (Cartography by Eric Mermet)

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a blitzkrieg that was to lead to a victorious outcome within months. The deployment of the entire transplantation programme was therefore delayed until the territories considered for the ‘Jewish reservation’ were conquered. In September 1941, however, Hitler agreed not to wait until the end of the war to transfer Jews out of the Reich. An arrangement was implemented whereby German Jews would be transferred eastward to transit camps, from which, after the victory, they would be transplanted further east to the ‘Jewish reservation’. Three provisional locations were chosen for a first contingent of 70,000 German Jews: Lodz, Riga and Minsk, where the Jews were deported to as of mid-October 1941. Local officials in the east were promised that the measure was temporary and would not last beyond the spring of 1942.50 Several facts ought to be taken into consideration. First, there were plans to build transit camps for deported Jews in Minsk and Riga. The building of a camp at Salaspils, near Riga, was launched and, even after the 1942 Wannsee Conference, plans were still underway to concentrate there all German Jews deported to the city, regardless of sex or age.51 In Minsk, on the other hand, no such facilities were identified. At the same time, however, a camp with considerable cremation capacity was set up in Mogilev, 200 km away, suggesting that there were plans to set up an extermination camp there, where some central European Jews might possibly be sent. But the camp was never put into operation and its crematoria were dismantled and later relocated to Auschwitz.52 As these camps were still in the planning and blueprint stage, Soviet Jews were murdered in Minsk and Riga to ‘make room’ for deported German Jews, and the same mechanism was applied again from March 1942 onward in the General Government when this territory became the main destination for deportations. If we now look at the fate of the German and Slovak Jews deported until the spring of 1942, they were on the whole not put to death upon arrival, but rather taken to ghettos and camps which had been emptied for that purpose. Exceptions were rare. Five convoys originally scheduled for Riga were diverted in November 1941 to Kaunas where the deportees were executed;53 50 51

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Longerich, Holocaust, pp. 265–71; Browning, Origins, pp. 323–30. Angrick and Klein, ‘Final Solution’, pp. 197–200, 235–6, 262–3; Brayard, Auschwitz, pp. 281–3. Aly, ‘Endlösung’, pp. 339–47; Christian Gerlach, ‘The failure of plans for an SS extermination camp in Mogilew, Bielorussia’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 11:1 (1997),60–78; Richard Breitman, Staatsgeheimnisse. Die Verbrechen der Nazis- von den alliierten toleriert (Munich: Karl Blessing Verlag, 1999), pp. 103–5. Christoph Dieckmann, Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Litauen 1941–1944 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2011), pp. 959–67.

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another convoy suffered the same fate on 30 November 1941 in Riga. In the latter case, the massacre was contrary to the intentions of Himmler, who reprimanded his subordinate,54 also responsible for the Kaunas massacres. Three subsequent massacres of German or Czech Jews seem to have taken place in Riga between 29 January and 5 February 1942, and other massacres followed there in March–April.55 However, the health considerations invoked by local officials to justify the killings of German Jews56 suggest that the instructions in force at the time were still not to kill deported German Jews.57 This confusion in the autumn and winter of 1941–2, which for a long time was only partially established by scholars, gave rise to differing interpretations. For some historians, the decision to kill not only Polish and Soviet Jews but all the Jews of Europe had been taken as early as October 1941,58 if not before;59 for others, it was in December 1941 that the decision was taken to extend the systematic murder to all European Jews;60 for others, finally, the spring of 1942 was the pivotal moment.61 Consequently, there are several ways of reading the minutes of the momentous interministerial meeting held on 20 January 1942 in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee.62 Organised at Heydrich’s instigation, it had several aims: to ensure his institutional preeminence over the conception and implementation of the ‘final solution’; to officially inform the administrations involved of the stages in the programme; and to lead to a change in the classification of German Jews, in the more radical direction wished by Heydrich. The meeting minutes describe a complex process: German and European Jews were to be transferred to

54 57 58

59

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Angrick and Klein, ‘Final Solution’, pp. 146–52. 55 Ibid., pp. 220–5. 56 Ibid., pp. 262–3. Brayard, Auschwitz, pp. 243–5. Longerich, Wannseekonferenz, pp. 159–60. Philippe Burrin, Hitler and the Jews: the genesis of the Holocaust (London: Edward Arnold, 1994); Browning, Origins. Richard Breitman, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1992). Gerlach, ‘Wannsee Conference’; Gerlach, Extermination; Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination, vol. I I: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 2007); Peter Klein, ‘Die Wannsee-Konferenz als Echo auf die gefallene Entscheidung zur Ermordung der europäischen Juden’, in Die Wannsee-Konferenz am 20. Januar 1942: Dokumente, Forschungsstand, Kontroversen, ed. Norbert Kampe and Peter Klein (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2013), pp. 182–201. Longerich, Holocaust; Longerich, Wannseekonferenz; Brayard, ‘Solution Finale’. The protocol is reproduced in Mark Roseman, The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution: A Reconsideration (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002), pp. 157–72. On the meeting, see Gerlach, ‘Wannsee Conference’; Longerich, Wannseekonferenz; Brayard, Auschwitz; Kampe and Klein (eds.), Die Wannsee-Konferenz; Peter Klein, Die ‘WannseeKonferenz’ am 20. Januar 1942: eine Einführung (Berlin: Metropol, 2017); Hans-Christian Jasch and Christoph Kreutzmüller (eds.), The Participants: The Men of the Wannsee Conference (New York: Berghahn, 2017).

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transit camps for an indefinite period of time, before being deported further east to be subjected, for those fit to work, to forced labour and road construction. Heydrich expected a high mortality rate and a significant shrinkage of the target population. The plan was to ‘treat appropriately’ the Jews who would survive forced labour – that is, to murder them. The duration of the process was not specified, but it had to be long enough, since care was taken to prevent any reproduction of the Jews by separating them by sex. Even the most literal reading of the protocol makes the Wannsee conference an exceptional moment: the very first time that a policy aiming at the complete extermination of European Jews, by ‘extermination through labour’ or direct murder, was officially and explicitly agreed upon.63 And no one around the table protested. The only disagreements expressed were on the question of modifying the Nuremberg racial law’s concept of a ‘mixed race’ Jew (Mischlinge). If a common goal had been validated, however, its implementation was still subject to particular uncertainties. The Soviet counter-offensive from Moscow a month earlier had disrupted transport and Heydrich was unable to say when deportations from the Reich might resume. Moreover, deportations from Germany took priority over deportations from the rest of Europe. In March, for example, Heydrich planned to deport 6,000 Jews only from France for the whole of 1942.64 The only exception in the following months was Slovakia, whose government had early on expressed the wish to see Slovak Jews integrated into a European programme for the relocation of Jews; it also provided the railway equipment necessary for the transfer.65 In March 1942 a second round of deportations of German Jews could be organised, this time to the General Government, where deportees were temporarily confined to ghettos which had been emptied of their Polish Jewish inhabitants.66

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For Christian Gerlach, however, Hitler had announced a ‘decision of principle’ in a speech to the highest party officials on 12 December 1941. See Gerlach, ‘Wannsee Conference’. Brayard, ‘Solution Finale’, p. 109. Ibid., p. 415. On these deportations, see Ladislav Lipscher, Die Juden im slowakischen Staat: 1939–1945 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1979). Longerich, Holocaust, pp. 320–2; Robert Kuwalek, ‘Die Durchgangsghettos im Distrikt Lublin (u.a. Izbica, Piaski, Rejowiec und Trawniki)’, in ‘Aktion Reinhardt’. Der Völkermord an den Juden im Generalgouvernement 1941–1944, ed. Bogdan Musial (Osnabrück: Fibre, 2004); Yehoshua Büchler, ‘The deportation of Slovakian Jews to the Lublin district of Poland in 1942’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 6:2 (1991).

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In mid-March 1942, the killing of Polish Jews began in the first extermination camp of the General Government, Belzec, approved for construction the previous October. It was a small camp with fixed gas chambers fuelled by exhaust gas from an internal combustion engine. A few weeks later, a second camp was opened in Sobibor and the construction of a third was soon launched in Treblinka: these three camps were to be grouped together in June 1942 under the code name ‘Operation Reinhard’, in honour of the head of the RSHA assassinated shortly before.67 As early as March 1942, Himmler planned to eliminate all Polish Jews unable to work within a short period, before the end of 1942. Nevertheless, at first, it seems that the massacre obeyed a quota policy, with Eichmann granting Globocnik permits for a limited number of victims.68 Such a procedure is well documented for the Warthegau, where Himmler issued a permit for the killing of 100,000 Polish Jews.69 The killings in Chelmno’s gas vans had begun in December 1941, and the quota must have been fulfilled during the summer of 1942. It was at the same time that Auschwitz, and to a lesser extent LublinMajdanek, began to be associated with anti-Jewish policies. Both camp projects had been launched in the summer of 1941 to satisfy Himmler’s grandiose ambitions for eastern Europe. The two camps were intended to be gigantic, 150,000 prisoners each, to house Soviet prisoners of war (POWs). However, due to the deliberate policy of starvation of the prison camps, more than 2,000,000 POWs had died within a few months, during the autumn and winter of 1941–2, thus ruining the plans for their exploitation. A few days after Wannsee, Himmler ordered the transfer of 150,000 ablebodied German Jews to Auschwitz and Majdanek. In fact, the Jews who were deported there, beginning in March 1942, were French and Slovak. Auschwitz already had a criminal record: since the summer of 1941, the killing of politruks (i.e. the political commissars) identified among the Soviet prisoners transferred to the camp had begun. To better manage the impending increase in mass killing, an experiment in gassing with Zyklon B had been organised at the beginning of September 1941.70 With this technique, Auschwitz also began to act, on a small scale, as a regional killing centre for the Jewish 67

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Dieter Pohl, ‘Massentötungen durch Giftgas im Rahmen der “Aktion Reinhardt”. Aufgaben der Forschung’, in Neue Studien zu nationalsozialistischen Massentötungen durch Giftgas. Historische Bedeutung, technische Entwicklung, revisionistische Leugnung, ed. Günter Morsch and Bertrand Perz (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2011), pp. 185–95. Longerich, Holocaust, p. 331. 69 Epstein, Model Nazi, p. 185. Jan Erik Schulte, ‘Die Wannsee-Konferenz und Auschwitz. Rhetorik und Praxis der jüdischen Zwangsarbeit als. Voraussetzung des Genozids’, in Die Wannsee-Konferenz am

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forced workers of Operation Schmelt.71 But it was probably not until May that the camp conducted more significant massacres, with the deportation of the first Jews from Upper Silesia, who were immediately gassed. Until then, anti-Jewish policy had evolved very differently depending on the territories concerned. The various local actors, whether police or civilians, had been given considerable room for manoeuvre, even if the radicalisation had been carried out in agreement with the central authorities, in particular Himmler. In the spring of 1942, a new phase opened, during which the anti-Jewish policy was simplified. The more complex plan disclosed at Wannsee concerning German and European Jews was abandoned. The ‘final solution’ would not be realised in remote Soviet territories, still to be conquered; therefore, transit camps became unnecessary. There would be no gigantic long-lasting construction of roads by Jewish forced labourers. The time frame had been shortened and the use of direct murder significantly increased. Indeed, from now on, all Jews were to be killed, either on the spot or after deportation to the General Government or to the Ostland, with the temporary exception of a small proportion of Jewish workers in camps directly under the control of the security services. This development presumably took place at the end of April or the beginning of May 1942. In a letter, Heinrich Müller, the head of the Gestapo, referred in May to ‘a general order from the Reichsführer SS and the head of the German police’ and requested on this basis that, ‘until further instruction’, the ‘Jews between the ages of 16 and 32’ in Minsk should not be submitted to ‘special measures’ – that is, ‘special treatment’72 – that is, murder. This suggests that the ‘general order’ issued by Himmler concerned the systematic killing of European Jews, with the exception of young Jews of working age.73 No distinction between Eastern Jews and Jews from the rest of Europe was now discernible. Remarkably, it was also only a short time before the Nazi leaders had become concerned about the traces left by the crime and had commissioned former Einsatkommando leader Paul Blobel to set up a special unit tasked with identifying mass graves in the eastern territories for the bodies to be dug up and cremated.74 Then came the crematoria of

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20. Januar 1942: Dokumente, Forschungsstand, Kontroversen, ed. Norbert Kampe and Peter Klein (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2013), pp. 216–37. Sybille Steinbacher, ‘Musterstadt’ Auschwitz, Germanisierungspolitik und Judenmord in Ostoberschlesien (Munich: KG Saur, 2000), pp. 276–7. Klein, Die Einsatzgruppen, p. 411. 73 Longerich, Holocaust, p. 318. Andrej Angrick, ‘Aktion 1005’, Spurenbeseitigung von NS-Massenverbrechen 1942–1945: eine ‘geheime Reichssache’ im Spannungsfeld von Kriegswende und Propaganda (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2018), pp. 72–3.

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Auschwitz, combining gassing and cremation, and the erasing of traces in the various extermination camps on Polish territory. German and Slovakian Jews, so far spared with few exceptions, were among the first victims of this radicalisation. Jews deported from the Reich to Minsk from May onward were put to death upon arrival. German and Slovak Jews sent to the General Government were sent to Sobibor or LublinMajdanek; later still, they would be sent to Auschwitz. In addition, Jews deported before May 1942 to Lodz or the General Government were no longer exempt. They too were sent to Chelmno or the Operation Reinhardt camps. In mid-May, Jews from western Upper Silesia also began to be sent to Auschwitz, which then took over the function of a regional killing centre. In the General Government, deportations to Sobibor accelerated and it was decided to strengthen the extermination capacity by enlarging the various camps. Then, in July, Himmler ordered that all Polish Jews unfit for work be executed before the end of 1942, while the able-bodied Jews were to be placed under the responsibility of the security services.75 The massacres of Jews also resumed in May on Soviet territories under German rule, particularly in the Reichskommissariaten Ostland (Belarus and the Baltic States) and Ukraine, and became systematic in the summer.76 From May 1942 onward, all Jews on the continent were gradually integrated into a ‘final solution’ whose goal was purely and simply murder or, for the minority of Jews deemed fit for work, extermination through labour. However, if the indiscriminate murder of European Jews had been launched or resumed at a rapid pace, before June 1942 there is no indication for how long the programme was to be conducted. This term was not established until after Heydrich’s assassination. At his funeral Himmler announced, in thinly veiled terms, that he would give himself a year to complete the task: ‘We will certainly complete the migration of the Jews within a year; after that, none of them will wander anymore. It is time now to wipe the slate clean.’77 In other words, all the Jews within a year would either be dead or, for a very small fraction of them, interned in a concentration camp dependent on his services. Himmler’s instructions took the form of a ‘plan’ which was selectively circulated to a limited number of actors, mainly within the RSHA. It has not survived, but there are various documents referring to it.78 This was not the first time that the Nazis developed gigantic 75 77

78

On this evolution, see Longerich, Holocaust, pp. 322–4, 332–5. 76 Ibid., pp. 345–56. Heinrich Himmler, Geheimreden, 1933 bis 1945, und andere Ansprachen (Frankfurt am Main: Propyläen Verlag, 1974), p. 159. Brayard, ‘Solution finale’, pp. 29–38. See also Gerlach, Extermination, p. 90.

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Figure 9.1 Jewish deportees from Carpatho-Ukraine are submitted for ‘selection’ on their arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau, May 1944. (Yad Vashem Archives)

plans. More often than not, they failed, but not here. The calendar was certainly adjusted by a few months in June 1943.79 But in October 1943, in his major speeches at Posen, Himmler was proud to announce that, in all the German-dominated territories, all but a few Jews had been killed.80 Compared to the failures of previous years, this was a grim but remarkable achievement. This achievement, however, was only complete in part of the territory initially targeted, the German-dominated territories. For the rest of Europe, where a much smaller number of Jews lived, about 2 million, the implementation of the ‘Final Solution’ was a semi-failure. If, during the summer of 1942, the Nazi authorities could hope for a massive commitment of their allies in their anti-Jewish policy, they would be disappointed from September–October 1942, when one after the other, these different countries rejected, in part or in totality, the agreement given earlier for the deportation of their Jewish population. Beyond the specific reasons the governments of these countries chose to reverse their decision, even though they themselves

79

Brayard, ‘Solution finale’, pp. 158, 178–9.

80

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had sometimes previously implemented criminal anti-Jewish policies, there are a few explanations for the change of course on the part of Hitler’s allies. For Nazi leaders, the implementation of the ‘Final Solution’ in the rest of Europe was a wish, not an obligation that had to be met regardless of the cost. The pressure exerted on Germany’s allies, even if it was not uniform over the entire period, nor on all countries, was actually relatively moderate. In short, the various allies were given the option of not taking part in the ‘Final Solution’, even if, from the German point of view, it was deemed necessary. To put it another way, Berlin did not want to risk alienating these allies, who were so crucial to winning the war: supplies, fighting troops, manpower in Germany etc. The existence of an alien state intermediary, which was the only one able to implement the deportation on its territory, played therefore a fundamental role of restraint81.

Conclusion: The Rationality of the Genocide The history of the evolution of Nazi anti-Jewish policy was particularly chaotic. Over the years, new global schemes were defined, started to be implemented and then, for the most part, abandoned. One of the striking facts is that the new alternative proposals were always harsher than the previous ones, so that one might speak, quite reasonably, of ‘cumulative radicalisation’.82 However, it would be wrong to see this development as a linear process, and Nazi leaders outside of the inner circles around Hitler and Himmler would perhaps have been surprised if they had been told, in 1940 or even 1941, that they would come to kill all the Jews of the European continent, regardless of age or sex. As different as the options considered over time may have been, Hitler retrospectively united his entire anti-Jewish policy under one motif, in his words: ‘I have taken away the last catalyst from the broad masses’ – a ‘catalyst’ with the capacity to ‘suddenly unite and mobilise this left-wing mass’; ‘By removing the Jew, I have eliminated in Germany the possibility of any revolutionary nucleation or germ cell formation.’ These statements were made in May 1944, at Berchtesgaden, before army generals, in the only 81

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Ethan J. Hollander, Hegemony and the Holocaust: State Power and Jewish Survival in Occupied Europe. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Hans Mommsen, ‘Cumulative radicalisation and progressive self-destruction as structural determinants of the Nazi dictatorship’ in Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison, ed. Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin (Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 75–86.

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entirely preserved speech in which Hitler justified the murder of the Jews. He was talking here not only of the policy of Jewish emigration but also of the murder of Jews, since he himself recognised the transgressive nature of the measures taken: ‘One can of course say to me: Well, couldn’t you have solved this more simply – or not more simply, because everything else would have been more complicated, but more humanely?’83 Presenting the Jews as a catalyst for revolution is nothing new in Hitler’s writings. He, and others, had developed that analysis as early as the end of World War One and he had presented it on numerous occasions in Mein Kampf. Were not the Jews, according to them, responsible for the revolution of 1918 and thus for the defeat? In Hitler’s early writings, therefore, one finds the idea that by suppressing the Jews, one could have eliminated, in the past – and one might, in the future – the possibility of a revolution and thus of defeat.84 This is the meaning that should be given to this famous sentence, in which Hitler nevertheless does not explicitly speak of murder: ‘If at the beginning of the War and during the War twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.’85 And one could also recall the prophecy made by Hitler in January 1939 and repeated several times during the war: ‘should the international Jewry of finance succeed, both within and beyond Europe, in plunging mankind into yet another world war, then the result will not be a Bolshevization of the earth and the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe’.86 In other words, there would be no Bolshevisation because, this time, Germany would not lose the war; and Germany would not lose the war because of the preventive liquidation of the Jews and, therefore, the elimination of any possible revolt against Germany or threat to the German ‘race.’ Thus, there is a very strong rationalisation in the Nazi genocidal practice based on an ideological and historically false analysis of the situation prevailing in 1918, and the fantasy that history could repeat itself. This justification was fully shared by other actors. In October 1943 Himmler began one of his 83

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Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, ‘Hitlers Ansprache vor Generalen und Offizieren am 26. Mai 1944’, Militärgeschichliche Mitteilungen 2 (1976), 123–70, at 155–6. Florent Brayard and Andreas Wirsching, Historiciser le mal. Une édition critique de ‘Mein Kampf’ (Paris: Fayard, 2021), pp. 760–6. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (London: Hutchinson, 1969), p. 620. Max Domarus (ed.), Hitler Speeches and Proclamations, 1932–1945 and Commentary by a Contemporary, vol. III: The Years 1939 to 1940 (Wauconda: Bolchazy-Carducci, 2004), p. 1449.

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speeches in Posen by explaining this: ‘We know how difficult it would be if today, given the bombings, the burdens, and the privations of the war, we still had, in every city, the Jews as secret saboteurs, agitators and inciters. We would probably have now reached the 1916–1917 stage, when the Jews were still part of the German national body.’87 However, such a justification has clearly a limited validity. It cannot explain the killing of those – women, children and the elderly – who were unlikely to launch a revolution. Indeed, when Nazi policy in the summer of 1941 began to target Jews who were unfit for work rather than Jewish men of arms-bearing age, it was this segment of the population, more harmless than any other, that was condemned to death. Hitler never really engaged in accounting for this discrepancy. Himmler, on the other hand, attempted several times to directly tackle the issue of the murder of women and children from different angles. One was to criminalise them. In a meeting with Mussolini in October 1942, he confessed to the mass shootings in the occupied Soviet territories and explained: ‘we had to shoot a considerable number of Jews, man and woman alike, because there even the women and teenagers were news carriers for the partisans’.88 But once again, limited to women and teenagers, the explanation was incomplete; something else had to be found. The year after, Himmler came up with a much more consistent justification: the murder of the children would have been intended to prevent the revenge they might commit in the more or less distant future, as he explained in Posen: ‘I did not see myself as justified in eradicating the men – by that I mean in killing them or having them killed – only to let their children grow up to avenge them by killing our sons and grandsons.’89 This justification was then repeated in various speeches. Since, contrary to Hitler’s conceptions on the ‘Jewish enemy’, Himmler’s explanation was expressed very late,90 it is not clear whether it was an ex post facto construction, or not. In any case, other justifications were circulating, at the time of the murder or before, in Berlin but also in the field, and they were much more prosaic. If one wanted to kill women, children and old people, it was in actuality 87 88

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Friedländer, Years of Extermination, pp. 543–4. Akten zur deutschen auswärtigen Politik. 1918–1945, serie E: 1941–1945, 8 vols. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1975), IV, p. 150. Longerich, Himmler, p. 539. Himmler expressed first this justification, as late as June 1943, not in connection with the Jewish children, but with those of the villagers of Lidice, who had been killed by hundreds in retaliation to the killing of Heydrich a year before (Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, I V, pp. 1,028–9).

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because they represented a burden that could not be offset: in the Nazi racial hierarchy, they had no intrinsic value; because they were not fit for work, they were of no use. Worthless and useless eaters, there was no allowing them to live. Following this reasoning, in July 1941, when in the USSR the Einsatzgruppen began to kill Jewish men on a large scale, the director of SDSection Posen, Rolf Höppner, questioned the necessity of allowing unproductive Jews to live: ‘There exists this winter the danger that all the Jews can no longer be fed. It should be seriously considered if it would not be the most humane solution to dispose of the Jews, insofar as they are not capable of work, through a quick-acting agent. In any case it would be more pleasant than to let them starve.’91 To kill, to let die, Nazi officials definitely proposed many methods to achieve genocide, and many reasons why.

91

Browning, Final Solution, p. 321.

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Systematic and Ad Hoc Persecution and Mass Murder in the Holocaust Killings in Eastern Europe outside the Camps mary fulbrook

The Holocaust is often regarded as distinctive because of its organised, industrial-style killing in specially designed extermination camps: Chełmno in the Wartheland; Auschwitz-Birkenau in eastern Upper Silesia; Majdanek and the ‘Reinhard camps’ – Bełz·ec, Sobibór, Treblinka – in the General Government in Poland. But around half of the 6 million Jewish victims were killed outside the camps, in fields and forests, in villages and towns across eastern Europe. Murder outside the camps, sometimes dubbed the ‘Holocaust by bullets’, included shooting into ditches, ravines, pits and mass graves, and death through enforced starvation, disease and maltreatment. In the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus and Poland, Jews were killed not only by invading Germans but also by locals: former neighbours and workmates. These face-to-face killings may appear, at first glance, more like the kinds of genocide that have exploded elsewhere at different times: people killing other people in the localities where they lived. Yet there are significant differences in purpose, scale and complexity. The Nazis provided the impetus, unleashing the organised persecution, deportation and murder of Jews from across Europe. The mass killings of Jews and other victims primarily took place in the east, in areas that for decades after the war were under Soviet domination, complicating efforts to explore their history. While Jews were the primary target, other groups too came into the Nazis’ murderous sights. The mentally and physically disabled had been the first victims of specially designed gas chambers within the Reich, in the so-called ‘euthanasia’ programme of 1939–41, and were subsequently killed by other means both in German sanatoria and in the east. Those designated as ‘Gypsies’ (Roma and Sinti) were deported, shot or gassed alongside Jews. Gay men, Jehovah’s Witnesses, ‘a-socials’ and others were brutally persecuted and often murdered, although not in principle slated for 235

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total extermination provided they were prepared to change their beliefs or behaviours; in these cases, it was a culture or way of life, rather than a physical group, that was targeted for annihilation. The 1948 UN Genocide Convention’s definition of genocide, the 1998 Rome Statute’s definition of the crime against humanity of extermination, as well as sociological definitions of genocide, can be variously applied; individuals were persecuted as members of collectivities destined to have no place in the Nazi world order.

The Conditions for Genocide In the ‘old Reich’ – Germany within the borders of 1937 – people of Jewish descent were highly acculturated. German Jews were committed Germans, in a way that Jews in eastern Europe would scarcely (or never) consider themselves Ukrainian, Lithuanian or Latvian. Rates of conversion and intermarriage had been rapidly increasing, and many of those stigmatised as ‘non-Aryan’ in Nazi Germany were Christians or of mixed descent. German society had effectively to be torn apart. Furthermore, in trying to construct their ideal of a healthy ‘people’s community’ (Volksgemeinschaft), Nazis also sought to eradicate supposedly hereditary diseases by compulsory sterilisation from 1933, and by murder of disabled people from 1939. Across the vast swathe of territory from the Baltic to the Black Sea, there were significant cultural variations and contrasts. But everywhere, invading Germans found Jewish communities that were visibly distinct from other population groups; few Jews would have wished to assimilate into the surrounding societies as many did in western Europe. Significant centres of Jewish education, learning and belief flourished in cities such as Vilnius (Vilna), often dubbed the ‘Jerusalem of the north’. Jews were disproportionately successful in gaining educational qualifications and benefitting from new professional opportunities and enhanced mobility across the region. Yet despite emancipation, the legacies of centuries of exclusion remained evident; many Jews remained impoverished, constrained by innumerable restrictions, readily symbolised by regionally specific images of the shtetl or the itinerant trader. Relationships between Jews and non-Jews, and pre-existing antisemitism, could make a significant difference to the eventual fates of victims of Nazism. But the willingness of non-Jews to collaborate with the invading Germans also depended on other factors, including expectations and aspirations for the future. 236

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There was a long-term background. Over preceding decades Jews had been victims of periodic pogroms. Notably, pogroms were particularly severe at times of political conflict and economic distress in the wake of war, when Jews provided a convenient scapegoat. Pogroms also had significant reverberations across borders, as penniless Jewish immigrants appeared a burden on new host communities. All this was exacerbated after World War One. Following Woodrow Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points’ of January 1918, the muchproclaimed right to national self-determination led to expulsions of ethnic minorities from previously multi-ethnic states across newly defined national borders. Despite expulsions, contested state borders did not correspond to ethnically homogeneous territories, while Jews (and ‘Gypsies’) lacked their own state. The Zionist aims articulated by Theodor Herzl in the 1890s gained traction in an era of heightened nationalism, but the idea of a homeland in Palestine was far from universally accepted among European Jews who often felt deeply rooted in areas where their families had lived for generations.1 The Russian Revolution and Bolshevik rule in the Soviet Union had a further impact on an already volatile situation. Areas under communist domination suffered massively from Stalinist policies, as in the artificially induced famine of 1932–3, known as the Holodomor, in which millions died, and in the brutal purges and deportations to the gulag in the Stalinist terror of the later 1930s. Not everywhere in the region was exposed to Stalinism from the outset, however. While much of Belarus was incorporated as the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1922, other parts came under Soviet rule only after the outbreak of World War Two. Ukrainians were variously governed by the Soviet Union (Crimea within Russia, and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic or UkrSSR), Poland (western Volhynia and eastern Galicia), and parts of Czechoslovakia and Romania. Eastern Poland came under Soviet rule following defeat in September 1939, when the Hitler–Stalin pact to carve up Polish territory came into effect. The Baltic states – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – enjoyed national independence in the interwar period, with Soviet rule introduced only in 1940, a year after the outbreak of war. The new prominence of Jews in communist organisations or in professional positions from which they had previously been excluded was exaggerated and exploited in right-wing propaganda; ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’ became a trope gaining massively in significance. Within the Reich, Nazis represented the war against Russia as pre-emptive self-defence. In eastern Europe, right-wing movements 1 Cf. Götz Aly, Europa gegen die Juden, 1880–1945 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2017); Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918–1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust (Picador, 2021)

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often shared virulently antisemitic sentiments, as with the Pe¯rkonkrusts movement in Latvia. In some areas, the Germans actively fomented nationalist unrest and encouraged unrealistic aspirations. The Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF) was from spring 1941 based in Berlin, and the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was encouraged to work with the Nazis. Nationalist movements were however less well-developed in Belarus, affecting German capacity to find local collaborators. The huge terrain covered by these eastern European regions also had significant implications. (See Map 10.1.) While forests could offer convenient N W

Leningrad

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GERM ANY

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German Army Group dividers Military occupation zones Under Romanian rule

Sevastopol

Black Sea

Soviet-German border, June 22, 1941

Map 10.1 Nazi-occupied Soviet territory, December 1941

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killing sites, they could also provide cover for partisans. The Pripet marshes might suggest a means of drowning defenceless Jewish women and children, but the sheer extent of the territory, and inadequate transportation through mud, rain and snow, prolonged a war initially conceived as another ‘lightning strike’. Shifting concerns with utopian visions of the future, economic productivity and food supplies had an impact on the changing phases of genocide. Whether Jews were viewed as a potential security threat, as ‘useless eaters’, or as productive labour, varied over time and determined many individual fates.

Historical Sources and Controversies Research was hampered for decades by the closure of Soviet archives to Western researchers, and constraints on politically acceptable narratives. The relatively few memorials tended to remember ‘Soviet citizens’ rather than specifically acknowledging Jewish victims. The area only really opened up after the collapse of communism. From the 1990s, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) began to microfilm sources, and further material was made available by Yad Vashem; researchers also undertook oral history interviews with elderly eye-witnesses and the few survivors in eastern Europe. In addition, post-war sources, such as accounts elicited for western pre-trial investigations, were able to provide a basis for significant new historical interpretations. Meanwhile, in an era of growing public interest in what was now widely termed the Holocaust, increasing numbers of memoirs were published and interviews conducted with survivors in the west. Published sources include official documents, SS Einsatzgruppen reports, eye-witness accounts, photographs and soldiers’ letters home from the front.2 Strikingly detailed reports by, for example, Walter Stahlecker, head of Einsatzgruppe A, and his subordinate Karl Jäger of Einsatzkommando 3, record with pride the death tolls in the later months of 1941, while reports 2 For English-language sources, see Bibliographic Note below. German source collections include the volumes edited by Klaus-Michael Mallmann, Andrej Angrick, Jürgen Matthäus and Martin Cüppers, Dokumente der Einsatzgruppen in der Sowjetunion, vol. I: Die ‘Ereignismeldungen UdSSR’ 1941; vol. I I: Deutsche Besatzungsherrschaft in der UdSSR 1941–1945; vol. I I I: Deutsche Berichte aus dem Osten 1942–1943 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2011, 2013, 2014); and the multivolume collection edited by scholars on behalf of the Federal Archives, the Institute of Contemporary History, and Freiburg University, Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland 1933–1945, 16 vols. (Oldenbourg: De Gruyter, 2011, 2016, 2014, 2020), V I I –X .

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by army officers, journalists, soldiers’ letters, diaries and other eye-witness sources provide chilling details of violent incidents.3 Diaries of victims, such as Hermann Kruk in Vilnius, Samuel Golfard in Galicia, or writers in the ghettos of Łódz´ and Warsaw, provide invaluable insights into the perceptions, emotions and actions of people facing imminent death. Fascinating contemporary bystander accounts include those by Zygmunt Klukowski, a doctor in southern Poland, and Kazimierz Sakowicz, whose house was located on the road to the death pits at Ponary. Survivors such as Bernhard Press, Max Kaufmann, Gertrude Schneider and Yitzhak Arad, later set their personal experiences into wider historical perspectives. Successive testimonies by a unique survivor of the Babi Yar massacre, Dina Pronicheva, illustrate the potential evidential value and emotional impact of individual accounts.4 Historiographical controversies abound. Debates between ‘intentionalists’, emphasising Hitler’s intentions in a ‘totalitarian’ state, and ‘structuralists’ or ‘functionalists’, highlighting radicalisation through competition in a ‘polycratic’ state, have largely subsided. The state was less streamlined than suggested by the totalitarian model; and while initiatives from below propelled policies forwards, Hitler’s role as ‘charismatic’ Führer remained central to the overall vision and direction of policy. It is clear that there was no single written order by Hitler, but rather a sequence of interrelated developments ratcheting up anti-Jewish policies; historical debates now focus on details, dynamics and timing of key shifts. Meanwhile, theoretical debates continue around the significance of ideology, socialisation, mentality and personality, compared with material interests and situational factors. Historians have drawn on social psychological and sociological research on peer pressure, authority and obedience, comradeship and belonging, and ‘zones of indifference’ in organisations. Situational factors in interaction with personal dispositions and ideological justifications may help to account for involvement in killing. Additionally, 3 See, e.g., Walter Manoschek (ed.), ‘Es gibt nur eines für das Judentum: Vernichtung’. Das Judenbild in deutschen Soldatenbriefen 1939–1944 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1995); Klaus-Michael Mallmann, Volker Riess and Wolfgang Pyta (eds.), Deutscher Osten 1939– 1945. Der Weltanschauungskrieg in Photos und Texten (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2003); Wolfgang Benz, Konrad Kwiet and Jürgen Matthäus (eds.), Einsatz im ‘Reichskommissariat Ostland’. Dokumente zum Völkermord im Baltikum und in Weißrussland, 1941–1944 (Berlin: Metropol, 1998). 4 Karel Berkhoff, ‘Dina Pronicheva’s story of surviving the Babi Yar massacre: German, Jewish, Soviet, Russian and Ukrainian records’, in The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization, ed. Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), pp. 291–317.

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factors such as social envy, greed, desire for plundered goods and the effects of alcohol have been adduced.5 Some topics have attracted particular attention. Christopher Browning opened up a major research area in his pioneering work on ‘ordinary men’ in police battalions.6 Browning argued that even ‘if the “ordinary Germans” who were conscripted as reserve policemen did not go to the east exuding ideological commitment to National Socialism and eager for the opportunity to kill Jews, when the deportations and killing began, most did as they were told and many were changed by the actions they undertook’.7 Based on many of the same sources, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust came to radically different conclusions. Goldhagen’s concept of a mentality of ‘eliminationist antisemitism’ enduring across centuries has been widely discredited by professional historians despite continuing popularity among the reading public. Police battalions have subsequently been explored in more detail, including Wolfgang Curilla’s exhaustive exploration of the German Order Police in the Baltic and Belorussia, and Edward Westermann’s analysis of the role of police battalions in enforcing ‘racial war’.8 The extent to which members of police battalions were (not) brought to justice after the war is explored by Stefan Klemp.9 A highly contentious issue is the involvement of local populations. Jan Tomasz Gross controversially raised to international attention the massacre in Jedwabne, where, following the German invasion, Polish villagers slaughtered their Jewish fellow residents, forcing them into a barn which they set alight. Similarly, Jan Grabowski’s research on the ‘Blue Police’ and widespread participation in ‘Jew hunts’ highlights Polish eagerness to benefit from the persecution of Jews. Ensuing debates illustrate the continuing sensitivity of these topics even 5 Cf., for instance, Helen Fein, Genocide: A Sociological Perspective (London: Sage, 1993); James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (Oxford Univiersity Press, 2002); Harald Welzer, Täter: Wie aus ganz normalen Menschen Massenmörder werden (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2007); Thomas Kuehne, Belonging and Genocide: Hitler’s Community, 1918–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Stefan Kühl, Ordinary Organisations: Why Normal Men Carried Out the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016); Aly, Europa gegen die Juden. 6 Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 2017 [1992]). 7 Christopher Browning, Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers (Cambridge University Press, 2000), Ch. 6, p. 169. 8 Wolfgang Curilla, Die deutsche Ordnungspolizei und der Holocaust im Baltikum und in Weissrussland 1941–1944 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2006); Edward B. Westermann, Hitler’s Police Battalions: Enforcing Racial War in the East (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005). 9 Stefan Klemp, ‘Nicht ermittelt’. Polizeibataillone und die Nachkriegsjustiz. Ein Handbuch (Essen: Klartext, 2005).

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decades later.10 Poles were clearly themselves victims of Nazi occupation, subjugated as vassals for the German ‘master-race’. But many were also complicit. Yet others, despite potentially draconian punishment and reprisals against their families, assisted or rescued Jews. There are relatively high numbers of Poles honoured by Yad Vashem as ‘Righteous among the Nations’, but as elsewhere this nevertheless remains a low percentage of the overall population. Everywhere, the story was further complicated by shifting sides in the changing phases of the war. Some Ukrainians, for example, who were initially collaborators later became resistance fighters; others, who had initially fought in the Red Army and were captured by the Germans, were then trained at Trawniki to become Nazi camp guards, as in the case of Ivan Demjanjuk whose case made legal history when he was brought to trial and convicted in Germany in 2011. Lines between academic debates and political considerations may be blurred, with historical interpretations accused of bolstering national apologetics. Theories of ‘double genocide’, for example, range from academically respectable comparisons of the Nazi and Stalinist dictatorships to politically motivated attempts to ‘equate’ them, or to glorify local resistance to communist rule and thereby whitewash participation in the Holocaust. SS auxiliaries may be painted as national heroes; antisemitic activists as freedom fighters; local participation in killing Jews as a legitimate fight against communist oppression. ‘Genocide’ museums may highlight Stalinist terror, while downplaying Nazi genocide against the Jews and perpetuating antisemitic stereotypes. Double genocide proponents may also defame victims and cast aspersions on survivors. In a highly charged context, even serious historical research can, in the view of critics, be seen as inadvertently playing into the hands of politically motivated whitewashing of a compromised past.11 A great deal more research is needed on questions around complicity, collaboration and bystander responses to violence.

Perpetrators With crimes on this scale, the identification of ‘perpetrators’ is highly contentious. Post-war legal systems entailed an effective narrowing of the term to those who could be proved in a court of law to be culpable of a criminal 10 Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, 1941 (Princeton University Press, 2003); Jan Grabowski, Hunt for the Jews. Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013). 11 Cf., for instance, http://defendinghistory.com/tag/christoph-dieckmann-holocaust-in -lithuania and http://defendinghistory.com/facebook-debate-3-to-11-dec-2013-on-a-uni versity-of-toronto-event/61775.

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offence – but what this actually meant varied with jurisdiction and political context.12 Historians need therefore to operate with different notions. The killings were initiated by the Nazi leadership in its drive for expansion and its vision of a future dominated by the German ‘master race’. The top perpetrators therefore remain those always in the spotlight: the Führer, Adolf Hitler, along with the Reichsführer SS and Head of German Police, Heinrich Himmler; his deputy Reinhard Heydrich; and other key individuals. But for the face-to-face killing of millions, on a front stretching more than 2,000 km from the Baltic to the Black Sea, far more people were involved. The most notorious front-line killers were the mobile killing squads, the Einsatzgruppen of the SS Security Service (SD) and Security Police.13 The four major Einsatzgruppen (labelled A, B, C and D) were each organised into smaller commandos, totalling some 3,000 people and led by highly educated men, many with doctorates. Altogether the Einsatzgruppen alone were responsible for around 1.5 million deaths. But they were massively augmented by other groups. The SS Brigades under the command of the Higher SS and Police Leaders (HSSPF) played a key role in the escalation of killings in August 1941. Order Police battalions constituted a major additional force: more than 50,000 men belonged to police battalions involved in mass murder, responsible for a minimum of 520,373 murders. Police Battalion 9 alone killed at least 97,000 people, while Police Battalion 101 in Poland killed some 38,000.14 Ethnic ‘self-defence units’ (Schutzmannschaften) and local auxiliaries constituted significant additional forces. In Latvia, the Arajs Brigade became particularly notorious, as did, across the Baltic states, the mobile commando (Rollkommando) Hamann, led by Germans but largely made up of Lithuanians. The Wehrmacht (the German army) co-operated closely with the SS and Einsatzgruppen. Whether in regions under military occupation or in conjunction with civil administrations, the army secured areas designated as murder sites, supplied additional manpower, and in places instigated or actively co-operated in organised massacres.15 The key links between the 12 Mary Fulbrook, Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice (Oxford University Press, 2018). 13 Helmut Krausnick and Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm (eds.), Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges. Die Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD 1938-1942 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1981). 14 Klemp, ‘Nicht ermittelt’, pp. 7, 466–7. 15 Geoffrey P. Megargee , War of Annihilation: Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front, 1941 (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006); Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde. Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrußland 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1999); Waitman Wade Beorn, Marching into Darkness: The

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army and the SS-police forces were the regional Higher SS and Police Leaders (HSSPF), who liaised centrally with Himmler, and the army intelligence officers. The army also ran prisoner-of-war camps under conditions specifically designed to cause mass death by starvation; by spring 1942 more than 2 million of the 3.5 million captured Soviet soldiers had died in camps under the army’s ‘care’.16 Yet for decades afterwards, the army enjoyed a reputation as ‘decent’ – a reputation that, despite scholarly works to the contrary, was only publicly punctured in the travelling exhibition highlighting the ‘crimes of the Wehrmacht’, first shown in 1995 and reopened following revisions in 2001.17 Estimates of army numbers actively involved in the Holocaust vary, but even if the most conservative estimate of only around 5 per cent is accepted, this would nevertheless amount to perhaps three-quarters of a million soldiers involved in Holocaust crimes.18 Civilians in various capacities were also implicated. Government ministries in Berlin were involved in planning and directing racial policies across the German Reich and occupied territories. Civil administrators in the Reich Commissariat Ostland (RKO), the Reich Commissariat Ukraine (RKU), the General Government (GG) in Poland, and annexed areas incorporated into the Reich, organised expulsions, ghettoisation and rationing, and introduced numerous regulations with significant penalties for infringement. Some participated in debates about the relative merits of preserving labour power versus outright murder of ‘useless eaters’ (Unnütze Esser), or helped to coordinate killings. Employers profited from forced and slave labour under conditions readily summarised as ‘extermination through work’ (Vernichtung durch Arbeit). Physicians were complicit in compulsory sterilisation, and determining ‘racially desirable’ marriages; some participated in the ‘euthanhanasia’ programme or ‘medical experiments’. Population planners, Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Dieter Pohl, ‘The Murder of Ukraine’s Jews under German Military Administration and in the Reich Commissariat Ukraine’, in The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization, ed. Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Wendy Lower, Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 16 Jürgen Matthäus, ‘Operation Barbarossa and the onset of the Holocaust, June – December 1941’, in Christopher Browning (with Jürgen Matthäus ), The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy 1939–42 (London: Random House, 2004), pp. 244–308, at 244. 17 Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann (eds.), War of Extermination: The German Military in World War II, 1941–1944 (New York: Berghahn, 2000 [1995]). 18 Horst Möller, ‘Vorwort’, in Verbrechen der Wehrmacht. Bilanz einer Debatte, ed. Christian Hartmann, Johannes Hürter and Ulrike Jureit (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2005), pp. 9–15, at 12.

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journalists, film-makers, eugenicists and experts in a range of fields assisted in the articulation and implementation of Nazi racial policies. The notion of ‘perpetrators’ therefore cannot be restricted to the very top leaders or the obvious front-line killers. Some were more culpable than others. Yet only a tiny minority were ever brought to account for their deeds in the courtrooms of post-war Europe.

Narrative of Events The violence that erupted across the Reich on 9–10 November 1938, known as ‘Kristallnacht’, was a definitive step on the path to genocide. From it, the Nazi leadership learned that many Germans would join in, benefitting from participation and plunder. Those who disapproved might express shame, or assist individuals, but would not or could not stand up against collective violence. Nor, indeed, would other nations do much beyond expressing shock and outrage. The Évian Conference of July 1938, convened by the USA to discuss immigration quotas for Jewish refugees, had already confirmed widespread reluctance to take in Jews fleeing Nazi persecution; and the Munich Agreement of September 1938, in which Britain, France and Italy approved Hitler’s seizure of the Sudetenland, had confirmed Hitler’s view that he could proceed with expansionist policies unchecked. Kristallnacht now demonstrated that there was little Hitler need fear by way of opposition to radicalisation of antisemitic policies. It also, effectively, marked the end of the possibility of Jewish life within the Reich. Widespread killing of civilians following the invasion of Poland in September 1939 was couched in terms of ‘reprisals’, or ‘self-defence’ against alleged ‘franc-tireurs’, following a pattern established in World War One.19 Members of the Polish professional elites and clergy were particularly singled out for imprisonment or death. Violence against Jews in the early weeks can perhaps be seen as ‘genocidal massacres’, arguably intended to make the area ‘Jew-free’ by terrorising Jews into flight.20 Synagogues were set on fire and 19 Alexander Rossino, Hitler Strikes Poland: Blitzkrieg, Ideology and Atrocity (University Press of Kansas, 2003); Jochen Böhler, Auftakt zum Vernichtungskrieg. Die Wehrmacht in Polen 1939 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2006). 20 Alexander Rossino, ‘Nazi anti-Jewish policy during the Polish campaign: the case of the Einsatzgruppe von Woyrsch’, German Studies Review 24:1 (2001), 35–53; Jürgen Matthäus, Jochen Böhler and Klaus Mallmann (eds.), War, Pacification and Mass Murder: The Einsatzgruppen in Poland (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, USHMM, 2014); Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp.

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Jews burned alive; groups were collected on town squares, publicly humiliated and some killed. The subsequent formation of Jewish ghettos, with overcrowding, poor sanitation, brutal policing and severely restricted rations, entailed the deaths of hundreds of thousands. The two largest ghettos, Warsaw, in the General Government, and particularly Łódz´ (Litzmannstadt) in the Wartheland, at first appeared to offer a chance of ‘salvation through work’, despite disease and starvation. Jews in smaller and more short-lived ghettos, such as Piaski, near Lublin, often died from malnutrition, disease and physical violence before deportation. Everywhere, Jews lived under severe restrictions that radically curtailed their capacity to live. It was the ‘war of annihilation’ launched with the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 that unleashed full-scale genocide. The so-called Commissary Order promised advance impunity for shooting ‘Bolshevik commissaries’, including Jews; and at the end of July, when killings were already underway, Heydrich was charged personally by Göring to develop a plan for solving the ‘Jewish question’. Genocidal intent had already been discussed orally in some circles, whether on training courses for the Einsatzgruppen and police in Pretzsch, in person at the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) in Berlin, or at a leadership meeting at the SS castle of Wewelsburg just days before the invasion.21 But the eradication of all Jews, irrespective of age and gender, had initially been scheduled for after the war, by concentrating Jews in inhospitable regions of the Russian interior where nature would take its lethal course. This project rapidly changed over summer 1941. Within each of three major ‘waves’, different phases can be discerned, varying according to area.22 Killing of civilians, including some women and children, took place straight after the invasion. On 24 June 1941, just over the border into Lithuania, a group of 201 Jews including elderly men, at least one woman, and a child, were shot in Garsden (Gargzdai) by a German unit based in the nearby east Prussian port of Memel (Klaipéda) – a genocidal massacre to which Himmler, who was in the area, gave his retrospective blessing.23 13–15; Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 26. 21 Cf., for instance, Wolfram Wette, Karl Jäger. Mörder der litauischen Juden (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2011). 22 ‘Waves’ developed by Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd ed. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003 [1961]). 23 Report by Stapostelle Tilsit, 1 July 1941, in Bert Hopper and Hildrun Glass (eds.), Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland 1933–1945, vol. VII: Sowjetunion mit annektierten Gebieten I. Besetzte sowjetische

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This two-way process of local initiatives and central steering was to become typical. But this was not yet an attempt to exterminate a whole population. Initially, local activists were incited to engage in antisemitic pogroms without German influence being evident. Downplaying the number of Jewish victims of Soviet expropriations and deportations, the Nazis whipped up resentment against Soviet rule, portrayed as ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’. The most successful instance was in Kaunas (Kovno) on 25–7 June, where violence against some 1,500 Jews was carried out by LAF activists, surreptitiously instigated by Sonderkommando 1b under Dr Erich Ehrlinger.24 In Lviv (Lemberg) in Galicia, the recent slaughter of prisoners by the fleeing Soviet NKVD was used as a pretext for an anti-Jewish pogrom on 30 June, exemplifying a repeated pattern of ‘reprisals’ initiated by Germans but largely carried out by locals. In Riga, despite later complaints by Walter Stahlecker, head of Einsatzgruppe A, that it had been harder to incite Latvian activists, Viktors Ara¯js and his murderous associates in the Sonderkommando Ara¯js rapidly instilled fear into Jews by beating and slaughtering, and burned down the large Choral Synagogue on 4 July. In Ukraine, pogroms had to be instigated by Germans with organised local involvement. In Belarus this was more difficult: less antisemitic in general, and lacking in strong nationalist movements, Belarus would, despite local police collaboration, eventually prove more conducive to Jewish survival and resistance than elsewhere. In any event, it was only in the early days that inciting ‘self-cleansing operations’ was deemed both plausible and desirable. Germans soon wanted to demonstrate they had ‘restored’ law and order, and sought to bring local auxiliaries under their own control rather than fostering nationalist aspirations. By 1942, even Lithuanian nationalists had become critical of Germans. Killings in the early weeks targeted primarily Jewish males who might plausibly be seen as posing a threat to German security. By early August 1941, and increasingly thereafter, victims also included the elderly, sick and weak, and women and children. The mass murder of whole communities escalated at different times across the area during August and September, with ever more radical initiatives often spurred on by discussions with Himmler and confirmation that this was indeed on Hitler’s orders. Ideological discourses and ‘justifications’ now highlighted the supposed danger to the future of the German race if any Jews – even children and babies – were left alive. Gebiete unter deutscher Militärverwaltung, Baltikum und Transnistrien (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2011), Doc. 14, pp. 143–4. 24 Christoph Dieckmann, Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Litauen 1941–1944, 2nd ed. (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2016 [2011]).

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By late summer, there was a partial reversal of strategy: it now seemed more important to preserve labour capacity, killing only those seen as unproductive and a drain on resources. Even where there were differences of opinion, as between Hinrich Lohse, civilian head of the Reich Commissariat Ostland, and Einsatzgruppe A chief Stahlecker, these were over the means and timetable of the ‘solution of the Jewish problem’: it was assumed that the need for Jewish skilled labour was merely short-term. There was, then, a new phase in some areas – Poland, the Baltic states, Belarus, but less so in most of Ukraine – with ghettoisation and the partial preservation of those deemed useful workers. Even so, the population of Jews was variously decimated or devastated through larger and smaller massacres in the latter half of 1941. Meanwhile, in September 1941 the wearing of the Jewish star was introduced for German Jews, and from October the ‘resettlement’ of Reich Jews began, with some killings on arrival in Kaunas, Riga and Minsk. The declaration of war on the USA in December entailed, for Hitler, the ‘fulfilment’ of his ‘prophecy’ of January 1939 about the fatal consequences of world war for ‘international Jewry’. Practical details were discussed at the Wannsee Conference of January 1942 – by which time gas vans were already in deadly deployment in Chełmno, and the construction of extermination facilities at Bełz·ec well under way. Shifts in practice were rooted in changing priorities. Security considerations were prioritised in the immediate aftermath of invasion, leading to the killing of adult male Jews; scarcity of food later informed a desire not to keep ‘useless eaters’ alive; and the perceived need for Jewish skilled labour during the winter of 1941–2, when local workers and malnourished or dying Soviet prisoners of war could not fulfil the need, was seen as essential but temporary, not affecting the ultimate goal. Considerations were further complicated by competing demands on resources, including transport priorities. The timing and scale of escalation also varied with individual personalities. SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln was initially the Higher SS and Police Commander for Russia South. He commanded the 1st SS Brigade to deadly effect, consulting closely with Himmler, culminating on 27–8 August in the Kamianets-Podilsky massacre of some 23,600 Jews, many recently deported from Hungary, which proved something of a turning point in the escalation of genocide. Jeckeln also played a significant role in masterminding the largest massacre, in the ravine of Babi Yar, just outside Kyiv, on 29–30 September 1941, where 33,771 Jews were murdered. This massacre was orchestrated in response to explosions caused by devices planted by the Soviet secret police before their 248

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retreat, conveniently construed as the work of Jews and communists. Over the following years, the Nazis continued to use the site for killings and as a grave for those killed elsewhere, including psychiatric patients and ‘Gypsies’; around 100,000 bodies ended up in this ravine. Jeckeln was subsequently sent to Latvia to speed up the killing process which was allegedly going too slowly under his predecessor. Deportations from Germany had just started, but Reich Jews were not at this point slated for death. However, the first trainload of Reich Jews, intended for ‘resettletlement’ in Riga, arrived too early on 30 November 1941, while Latvian Jews were still on their way to be shot in the nearby Rumbula forest, between the railway line and main road. Jeckeln decided that the trainload of 1,053 Reich Jews should also be directed straight to the forest to be killed alongside the Latvians, but was later rebuked for this decision by Himmler. Subsequently, however, Jeckeln ensured that killings moved forwards with speed and efficiency, perfecting the ‘Jeckeln method’ of stacking bodies in pits. On 8 December, in a massive follow-up action, more ‘unproductive’ Latvian Jews were slaughtered in Rumbula. Around 1,500 people assisted, whether in ghetto clearance, as guards along the route or stripping Jews of clothes and possessions before shootings. Most auxiliaries were Latvians, many blind drunk, directed by SS and police forces. There were countless local witnesses. In these two days, some 25,000 Jews were murdered.25 Some sites have become infamous because of the survival of evidence. The death pits at Ponary, outside Vilnius, and the Ninth Fort, outside Kaunas, are still visibly shocking. Mass killings, as well as public hangings, were the subject of many amateur photographs. There is film footage of killings in the Latvian town of Liepa¯ja (Libau) when, in August 1941, German soldiers and sailors were called off the beach, where they were enjoying leisure time after work, to a site by the lighthouse to witness shootings of truckloads of Jews. Graphic photographs taken in December 1941 of women forced to stand naked or only partially clothed by mass graves on the Šk¸ e¯de dunes, just north of Liepa¯ja, were preserved through quick-witted salvage of the footage by a Jewish survivor. Where filming was carried out under official auspices, images were often constructed to demonstrate the prominent role played by local auxiliaries who could later, if necessary, be accused of being the prime murderers – a form of pre-emptive 25 Andrew Ezergailis, The Holocaust in Latvia, 1941–1944: The Missing Center (Riga: Historical Institute of Latvia, USHMM, 1996); Andrej Angrick and Peter Klein, The ‘Final Solution’ in Riga: Exploitation and Annihilation, 1941–1944, trans. Ray Brandon (New York: Berghahn, 2009).

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deception, before later attempts to cover the physical traces. Mostly, however, we have to imagine the scenes. More typical across eastern Europe were the innumerable smaller round-ups and murders of Jews, directed by Germans and shot by locals into mass graves dug in nearby fields and woods and later left to be forgotten. Vivid descriptions of some of these incidents have been given by eyewitnesses, filtered through the lens of succeeding decades under Soviet rule.26 During 1942, the notorious extermination camps on Polish territory were brought into action, killing predominantly Jews from Poland or those deported from western and southern Europe. In eastern Europe a ‘second wave’ of killings took place, now couched predominantly in terms of combating ‘partisans’, with greater involvement of local auxiliaries. Meanwhile, a small number of Jews were deployed in ghettos and labour camps. When Himmler ordered the erasure of all ghettos in 1943, some labour camps were re-designated as concentration camps. As the Russians advanced, Jewish workers from camps such as Kaiserwald or Salaspils in Riga were moved westwards, to Stutthof and elsewhere in the Reich. An eventual attempt to destroy all traces of mass murder took place from late 1942 to 1944 by Sonderkommando 1005, in which prisoners were instructed to dig up corpses and burn them before they were themselves killed. A very few managed to evade the grisly fate awaiting them, as in the prisoner escapes from the Ponary pits outside Vilnius, and the Ninth Fort at Kaunas.

Perpetrator Motivations While leading Nazis may have been inspired by ideological antisemitism, many Germans were mobilised in other ways, including peer pressure, opportunities for enrichment or career advantage, and perceptions of potential benefits of participation or risks of refusing. Men often sought to demonstrate masculinity through ‘hardness’, comradeship and group capacity for brutality. Women assisted in ‘germanising’ the east, providing domestic support, carrying out nursing, secretarial and administrative tasks, even engaging in violence themselves. Ideological discourses often served to ‘justify’ actions carried out for other reasons. 26 Patrick Desbois, The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews (Houndmills and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Anika Walke, Pioneers and Partisans: An Oral History of Nazi Genocide in Belorussia (Oxford University Press, 2015); Wendy Lower, The Ravine: A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed (London: Apollo, 2021).

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Locals often assisted with identification of Jews, or became more active collaborators. Motives ranged from pre-existing antisemitism, through recent experiences of communism portrayed as ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’, to desire to benefit from property and possessions left by murdered or deported Jews. Questions around potential restitution of Jewish property in post-war eastern Europe were delayed by communist rule, with the motivation and practices of surrounding populations only coming to attention from the 1990s. Invidious ‘racial’ hierarchies were central to Nazi policies. Yet disentangling Nazi constructions of ‘race’, religion and ethnicity is more problematic than might be assumed. Nazi definitions, supposedly rooted in ‘scientific’ theory, combined differing criteria. In the April 1933 Law for the Restoration of a Professional Civil Service, anyone with even only one Jewish grandparent was discriminated against as ‘non-Aryan’ – although tempered by war medals or long state service. In the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, ‘racial’ descent was determined by grandparents’ religious affiliation. Religious practice, marriage to a Jew, even supposed character traits and appearance, determined whether ‘first degree Mischlinge’ (those with two Jewish grandparents) were ‘counted as Jewish’ (Geltungsjuden). Questions around Mischlinge were never fully resolved. More broadly, the Nazi imaginary included notions of the ‘Jewish spirit’ and its supposed embodiment in culture (including works by nonJews), as well as an ‘international Jewish conspiracy’. Meanwhile, inconsistent treatment of ‘Gypsies’ might advantage those of ‘pure race’ over those who were products of ‘miscegenation’. Interconnections between German colonial experiences, territorial ambitions during World War Two, and the Nazi ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’, are complex. While the Holocaust and Nazi territorial ambitions were closely linked, they were not simply causally related; indeed, this would impute greater rationality to extermination policies than is warranted. The Nazi desire for ‘living space’ (Lebensraum) and racist visions of a vastly expanded Greater German Reich underlay the eastward invasion. Slavic populations were to be oppressed and, in areas deemed appropriate for Germanisation, ‘unwanted elements’ expelled; in the case of Jews, removal could be to ghettos, camps or extermination. Himmler was not only Reichsführer SS but also chief of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office and Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of Germandom. But the attacks on Jewish culture, and the deportation of Jews from across Europe, went way beyond Nazi territorial ambitions for Germany. The antisemitic ideological vision propelling the Holocaust cannot be reduced to a by-product of a struggle over contested territory. 251

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Resistance In her report on the Eichmann trial, Hannah Arendt controversially castigated Jews, and particularly Jewish Councils, for having acquiesced in their own fate, going ‘like lambs to the slaughter’. Alleged passivity of Jews remains contested, with disagreements even over the meaning of ‘resistance’.27 It is important to emphasise that responses to violence on an unprecedented and unimaginable scale depended not only on individual attitudes, but also on the surrounding context. Under some conditions, armed resistance was possible. In Vilnius in January 1942, Abba Kovner and others formed the United Partisan Organisation (FPO), with a manifesto explicitly refusing to go ‘like lambs to the slaughter’. When it was clear that there was little support from the ghetto leadership under Jacob Gens, they escaped and joined partisan groups in the surrounding forests.28 In Minsk, far larger numbers were able to escape from the ghetto and link up with communist-led partisan groups; support from the surrounding population meant both higher individual survival chances and also more effective resistance in alliance with non-Jewish groups.29 Partisan groups might inflict only limited damage on the enemy, but could help some Jews to survive. The Bielski partisans at times numbered well over 1,000 people; more than two-thirds were not expected to engage in armed combat, including the young, the elderly and many women.30 Even without the protection of partisans, individuals might survive in hiding, through false identities, and help from rescuers. But mostly support was lacking. Revolts within ghettos have gained much attention. The most well-known uprising was in Warsaw in spring 1943, when it was clear that remaining Jews were slated for extermination in Treblinka. There were smaller revolts in other ghettos, including Będzin. Even in extermination camps, Jews, Gypsies and political prisoners were determined to fight for their lives. Prisoner uprisings precipitated the closures of both Sobibór and Treblinka; and a revolt blew up one of the gas chambers in Auschwitz.

27 See also Evgeny Finkel, Ordinary Jews. Choice and Survival during the Holocaust (Princeton University Press, 2017). 28 Dina Porat, The Fall of a Sparrow: The Life and Times of Abba Kovner (Stanford University Press, 2010 [2000]); Yitzhak Arad, Ghetto in Flames: The Struggle and Destruction of the Jews of Vilna in the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, Ahva Printing Press, 1980), Chs. 14– 16, 22. 29 Barbara Epstein, The Minsk Ghetto, 1941–43: Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 30 Nechama Tec, Defiance: The Bielski Partisans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

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Among Jewish Councils charged with impossible decisions in appalling circumstances, individual personalities and leadership styles were important. Chaim Rumkowski, controversial head of the Litzmannstadt (Łódz´) ghetto, was even prepared to deliver a fiery speech imploring parents to sacrifice their children to keep adult workers alive. The head of the Warsaw Jewish Council, Adam Czerniaków, by contrast, committed suicide when asked to send children to Treblinka, while the Director of the Jewish orphanage, Janusz Korczak, declined an opportunity to escape in order to accompany the children under his care to their deaths, comforting them to the end. All three men ultimately ended up dead – Rumkowski, despite his best efforts, was murdered in Auschwitz – but the examples they set had very different long-term moral implications. Across eastern Europe there are those who have been posthumously accorded respect, and others whose choices were controversial. Resistance took many forms. Sheer physical survival dented completion of the Nazi aim of eradicating the ‘Jewish race’ in Europe. The preservation of Jewish traditions and culture was fostered through theatre, music, art and literature, and providing education in defiance of the Nazis. Some sought to face their fate with courage and dignity, remaining observant, fasting on Jewish holy days even while starving, reciting prayers or remaining defiant up to the moment of death; some saw suicide as a form of self-assertion, choosing the manner and moment of their passing. Refusal to be cast in the roles allotted them by the Nazis was a form of resistance to policies of degradation, dehumanisation, destruction of culture and way of life. For those who survived, such experiences and examples could remain very powerful.

Long-Term Impact The death toll in the ‘Holocaust outside the camps’ is likely equal to the number of deaths inflicted through the organised machinery of extermination in the dedicated killing centres. Around 2.2 million Jews died in eastern Europe, including: 1.5 million in Ukraine; 500,000 in Belarus; 210,000 in Lithuania; 70,000 in Latvia; and 2,000 in Estonia.31 Hundreds of thousands more died in the ghettos in Poland. The proportions of the pre-war Jewish population who were murdered vary, from around 95 per cent in Lithuania – slaughtered in the first six months after the German invasion – to less than 31 Wendy Lower, ‘Living space’, in Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies, ed. Peter Hayes and John K. Roth (Oxford University Press, 2010), Ch. 20, pp. 310–25, at 317.

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half of the far smaller population of Jews in Estonia, many of whom had managed to escape eastwards prior to German occupation. In the long term, the flourishing Jewish society of eastern Europe was destroyed. Tiny Jewish communities now seek to preserve a presence that was not merely devastated by the Holocaust but also depleted by decades of communist oppression, distortions of the historical record and the persistence or revival of antisemitism. The impact on survivors who made new lives around the world varied with place and time as well as individual circumstances and personality. While some were successful in professional and domestic activities, and settled into new environments, others were deeply traumatised, scarred by physical and psychological wounds, bereavement and impoverishment. Whatever the survivors’ own routes out of the Nazi inferno, their experiences had reverberations both in the public sphere – in courtrooms, films, media controversies, commemorations and memorial sites – as well as in private lives and families across generations.

Bibliographic Note on Selected Works in English There is a vast literature in this area. Particularly useful overviews include: Browning (with Matthäus), The Origins of the Final Solution; Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. II: The Years of Extermination, 1933–45 (New York: HarperCollins, 2007); and Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (Oxford University Press, 2010). Focusing specifically on eastern Europe are: Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Lincoln and Jerusalem: University of Nebraska Press, Yad Vashem, 2009); Waitman Wade Beorn, The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: At the Epicenter of the Final Solution (London: Bloomsbury, 2018); a vivid but controversial account in Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands (New York: Basic Books, 2010); and some useful essays in David Gaunt, Paul Levine, and Laura Palosuo (eds.), Collaboration and Resistance during the Holocaust. Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004). The field of ‘perpetrator research’ has grown enormously. Browning’s Ordinary Men stimulated further research on situational factors and ordinary perpetrators, while Omer Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941–45. German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001 [1985]) advanced innovative interpretations about ‘barbarisation’ and the role of ideological socialisation. Megargee, War of Annihilation, links military and genocidal aspects of the campaign; see also Heer and Naumann (eds.), War of 254

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Extermination. Beorn, Marching into Darkness, explores Wehrmacht complicity in vivid local detail. Regional studies reveal details and variations, but coverage remains uneven. The comprehensive German-language study of Lithuania by Christoph Dieckmann is not as yet available in English; but see Dina Porat, ‘The Holocaust in Lithuania: some unique aspects’, in The Final Solution. Origins and Implementation, ed. David Cesarani (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 159–74. On Latvia, see Angrick and Klein, The ‘Final Solution’ in Riga, and Ezergailis, The Holocaust in Latvia, 1941–1944. Key essays on the Ukraine are in Brandon and Lower (eds.), The Shoah in Ukraine. Lower, Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine explores interactions between local initiatives and central power, and military and civilian administrators. Karel Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), provides an illuminating account of the social history of the region. A compelling personal exploration is described in Desbois, The Holocaust by Bullets. Omer Bartov, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town called Buczacz (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018), provides both a long historical overview and an in-depth study of genocide in the town from which his family came. Epstein, The Minsk Ghetto, analyses unique conditions for escape and resistance in Belarus. Walke, Pioneers and Partisans explores shifting parameters of memory among people who lived through both Nazi and Soviet rule. Christian Ingrao, The Promise of the East. Nazi Hopes and Genocide, 1939–43, trans. Andrew Brown (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019), illuminates Nazi utopian plans as well as the grim realities of their impact in Zamos´c.́ Jeffrey Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg, Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), adopt a political science approach to explaining pogroms and ethnic violence in the eastern European borderlands. Local involvement is addressed in: Martin Dean, Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and Ukraine 1941–44 (Houndmills and Basingstoke: Macmillan, USHMM, 2000); and Karen Sutton, The Massacre of the Jews of Lithuania: Lithuanian Collaboration in the Final Solution, 1941– 1944 (Jerusalem: Gefen, 2008). For controversies on collaboration in Poland, see: Grabowski, Hunt for the Jews; Gross, Neighbors; Anthony Polonsky and Joanna Michlic (eds.), The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (Princeton University Press, 2003); and Anna Bikont, The Crime and the Silence: A Quest for the Truth of 255

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a Wartime Massacre, trans. Alissa Valles (London: Penguin, William Heinemann, 2015 [2004]). The bureaucratic machinery of perpetration is illustrated in Raul Hilberg, Christopher Browning and Peter Hayes (eds.), German Railroads, Jewish Souls: The Reichsbahn, Bureaucracy, and the Final Solution (New York: Berghahn, 2019). Alex J. Kay, The Making of an SS Killer: The Life of Colonel Alfred Filbert, 1905–1990 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), provides insights into both an individual perpetrator and wider processes of destruction. The involvement of women is explored in Elizabeth Harvey, Women and the Nazi East: Agents and Witnesses of Germanization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), while Wendy Lower, Hitler’s Furies (London: Vintage, 2014) highlights female accomplices and killers. Involvement of civilian administrators and occupiers are explored in: Stephan Lehnstaedt, Occupation in the East: The Daily Lives of German Occupiers in Warsaw and Minsk, 1939–1944, trans. Martin Dean (New York: Berghahn, 2016); Catherine Epstein, Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Western Poland (Oxford University Press, 2010); and Mary Fulbrook, A Small Town near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2012). Collections of sources in English include Yitzhak Arad, Israel Gutman and Abraham Margaliot (eds.), Documents on the Holocaust, trans. Lea Ben Dor (Lincoln, London and Jerusalem: University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 1999); and Yitzhak Arad, Shmuel Krakowski and Shmuel Specto (eds.), The Einsatzgruppen Reports: Selections from the Dispatches of the Nazi Death Squads’ Campaign against the Jews in Occupied Territories of the Soviet Union, July 1941–January 1943 (New York: USHMM, 1989). Chilling photographs and accounts by eye-witnesses and participants are revealed in Ernst Klee, Willi Dreßen and Volker Rieß (eds.), ‘Those Were the Days’: The Holocaust through the Eyes of the Perpetrators and Bystanders, trans. Deborah Burnstone (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1991). Insights into the mentality of the head of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Territories can be gleaned from The Political Diary of Alfred Rosenberg and the Onset of the Holocaust, ed. Jürgen Matthäus and Frank Bajohr (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, USHMM, 2015). Diaries by victims provide fascinating insights into perceptions, emotions and strategies for action. See, for example: Avraham Tory, Surviving the Holocaust: Kovno Ghetto Diary (London: Pimlico, 1991); Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939–1944, ed. Benjamin Harshav, trans. Barbara Harshav (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002); Wendy Lower, The Diary of Samuel 256

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Golfard and the Holocaust in Galicia (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015); Alan Adelson (ed.), The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Łódz´ Ghetto (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Alexandra Zapruder (ed.), Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); Raul Hilberg, Stanislaw Staron and Josef Kermisz (eds.), The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków: Prelude to Doom, trans. Stanislaw Staron (New York: Stein and Day, 1979); and Lucjan Dobroszycki (ed.), The Chronicle of the Łódz´ Ghetto 1941–1944, trans. Richard Lourie et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). ‘Bystander’ accounts are provided by Kazimierz Sakowicz, Ponary Diary 1941–1943: A Bystander’s Account of Mass Murder, ed. Yitzhak Arad (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); and Zygmunt Klukowski, Diary from the Years of Occupation 1939–44, trans. George Klukowski (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993 [1958]). Later accounts by survivors, drawing both on their own experiences and on subsequent research, can be informative and moving, while presenting a distinctive viewpoint. See: Arad, Ghetto in Flames; Max Kaufmann, Churbn Lettland: The Destruction of the Jews of Latvia, ed. Gertrude Schneider and Erhard Roy Wiehn (Konstanz: Hartung-Gorre, 2010 [1946]); Bernhard Press, The Murder of the Jews in Latvia, 1941–1945 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000); and Gertrude Schneider, Journey into Terror: Story of the Riga Ghetto, expanded ed. (Westport: Praeger, 2001). These tend to lay more emphasis on the murderous brutality of locals than do accounts such as that by Ezergailis, which Schneider critiques as Latvian apologetics.

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11

Jewish Life and Death under Nazi Rule across Europe and around the Globe d e b o´ r a h d w o r k *

Life at Home under Pre-war Nazi Rule On 30 January 1933, German president Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor of a coalition government. Hitler sought to rule by decree and set elections (5 March) to secure the majority in the Reichstag he needed to do that. Emboldened by the results, Hitler forged forward to establish a fully Nazi state with a radical antisemitic agenda. As a public first step, Hitler ordered a one-day boycott of Jewish professionals and businesses owned by Jews. ‘The day it [persecution] started was the day of the boycott’, Bertha Rosenthal recalled. Eleven years old, she went to school in her small town of Berfelden as usual that day. ‘I remember we were playing ball and no one threw the ball to us [four Jewish girls]. That’s when we knew.’ The boycott had no financial impact on the Rosenthal family, ‘but that day of the boycott, April 1, 1933, that was really the watershed. After that, it was as if we weren’t there.’1 European Jews had learned from their history to cope with antisemitism and to battle it as best they could. Shaped by experience, German Jews’ strategy in 1933 was to hang on and hold out; to press for more and make do with less. Antisemitic measures abounded; thousands lost their jobs within weeks. Indeed, the daily life of every one of the 500,000 Jews in Germany altered within six months. Still, the community evinced great resilience. Barred from public cultural life, Jews established the Jewish Cultural Association to provide employment for out-of-work artists and enjoyment for Jewish audiences in nearly fifty cities and towns.2 Similarly, when Jewish * Copyright of this chapter is retained by Debórah Dwork. © Debórah Dwork 1 Bertha Kahn Rosenthal, oral history, New Haven, CT, 6 and 13 March 1993, transcript, pp. 20, 1f, 20, 28. NB: All oral histories conducted by author. 2 See Volker Dahm, ‘Kulturelles und geistiges Leben’, in Die Juden in Deutschland 1933–1945, ed. Wolfgang Benz (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1988), pp. 75–267.

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schoolteachers and professors were fired, schoolchildren faced discrimination and university students were banished from class, the Jewish community established schools and organised courses.3 Lore Saalheimer’s experience was typical. Unwelcome in her neighbourhood school, she transferred to a Jewish school and joined the Zionist organisation Habonim, as well as a Jewish sports club. She, like many others, began to live a two-layered existence. Externally, ‘things got worse . . . . Children in the streets used to shout at me “Jewish cow.”’ At the same time, she was ‘extremely happy in my Jewish school. . . . I just loved it.’4 Lore’s experience reflected a larger Jewish cultural renaissance in response to the antisemitism the community confronted. Synagogue attendance grew. The traditional holidays of Passover, Purim and Chanukkah that celebrate freedom from political oppression took on new meaning. The Central Organisation of German Jews, established in 1933 to represent Jewish interests to the Nazi government, soon realised its sole productive function was to support the community. It openly strengthened Jewish communal and cultural life, secretly supported a clandestine Jewish university and organised schools to teach manual trades and agriculture. These programmes were in great demand by young adults; such skills improved their immigration prospects. By mid-1935, even activities not explicitly forbidden proved inaccessible because ‘Aryan’ Germans conformed to the general philosophy. Theatres refused to sell tickets to Jews, libraries and museums denied admission, shopkeepers turned them away. As the Berlin rabbi Joachim Prinz realised, Jews had become ‘neighbourless’. ‘Everywhere life depends upon the “neighbor.” Not necessarily the friend, but the man who is willing to help his neighbor go through life . . . That we have lost.’5 Antisemitism took a sexual turn in summer 1935. People – ordinary people and state officials – began to talk openly about a ban on marriages between ‘Aryan’ Germans and Jewish Germans. Action followed. Increasing numbers of Jews were arrested for ‘race defilement’; sexual relations with a gentile partner. The Nuremberg Laws (September 1935) institutionalised this racial ideology, prohibiting marriages and sexual relations outside marriage 3 Hans Gaertner, ‘The problems of Jewish schools in Germany during the Hitler regime’, Year Book of the Leo Baeck Institute 1 (1956), 123–41; Solomon Colodner, ‘Jewish education under National Socialism’, Yad Vashem Studies 3 (1959), 161–86. 4 Lore Gang-Saalheimer, oral history, Cardiff, Wales, 22 July 1985, transcript, pp. 3, 9, 3. 5 Quoted in The Yellow Spot: The Extermination of the Jews of Germany (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936), p. 175.

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between ‘Jews and citizens of German or kindred blood’, and excluding German Jews from Reich citizenship.6 Regulations based on the Nuremberg Laws eliminated Jews from the economic sphere. Rudolf Rosenberg was 11 years old when the laws took effect. His parents were wholesale tobacconists in a small way; they also had a retail shop. They hung on until the Nuremberg Laws, then closed the retail end and transferred the wholesale trade to the family flat in a Berlin tenement building. Loyal customers came after dark. And Rudolf made deliveries ‘by bike all over the place in Berlin’. So it went until the winter of 1937. ‘[Our] source of income was swept away from under [our] feet.’7 As the Rosenbergs’ footprint contracted, the Nazis’ geography expanded with the Anschluss (annexation) of Austria. The German army marched triumphantly into Vienna (13 March 1938), greeted by wildly enthusiastic crowds. Popular euphoria was matched by violence against Austria’s 191,000 Jews, most of whom lived in Vienna. Nazis pulled Jews off the streets, forcing them to clean barrack latrines or scrub the pavement with their bare hands and, sometimes, just for ‘fun’ with their own undergarments or toothbrushes.8 The Germans gave the Austrians Nazism; the Austrians gave Germans a new benchmark for violent antisemitism. The regime showed what it had learned with the infamous November 1938 pogrom.9 Lore Saalheimer lived in Berlin at the time, attending a school to acquire useful skills for emigration: I travelled home [to Nuremberg on an] express train . . . . My parents were on the platform. My mother was in a sweater and skirt, no make-up, no jewelry. My father looked awful . . . . [There] was an atmosphere of complete gloom and no ornaments, no anything anywhere; the house was in mourning. . . . My parents had had a huge sideboard full of the best china, and [the Nazis] had taken an axe and smashed it, smashed the china. They had had a glass display cabinet with a lot of pretty things in it, and also glasses and so on. Every little tiny last bit of it was broken . . . . Getting food was difficult. No shops were allowed to serve Jews in Nuremberg immediately after the ninth of November . . . . The general 6 For text of Nuremberg Laws, see J. Noakes and G. Pridham, Nazism, 1919–1945, 3 vols. (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1983–1988), II, pp. 538f. 7 Ralph Montrose (Rudolf Rosenberg), oral history, Cardiff, Wales, 22 July 1985, transcript, pp. 2–15. 8 For a contemporary report, see George Eric Rowe Gedye, The Fallen Bastions (London: Victor Gollancz, 1939). 9 See, inter alia, Anthony Read and David Fisher, Kristallnacht: Unleashing the Holocaust (London: Michael Joseph, 1989).

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feeling was one of oppression. . . . This was a quantum step. This was the real thing.10

Many Jews had believed that they would be outcasts, but still tolerated. The physical demolition of Jewish property, from the destruction of nearly every synagogue to attacks on Jewish-owned businesses, left no place for Jewish religious or economic life. The imprisonment of 30,000 Jewish men swept out of their homes into concentration camps solely because they were Jews, left no place for Jews at all.

Emigration By the time of the November pogrom, thousands had emigrated; some 40,000 German Jews left in 1933 alone,11 primarily renowned men with international contacts to help them. Some 14,000 young Jewish women, by contrast, found a way out when British middle-class women wanting servants pressed their government (1937) to ease the domestic service labour market.12 Whitehall acquiesced, allowing married foreign couples to obtain domestic permits, and lowering the age floor for girls to 16. Advertisements by hopeful emigrants filled British newspapers. ‘Viennese lady (25), Jewish, good family, fond of children, excellent domestic work and sewing, seeks position in household or with children’, one ‘IRENA KOFLER, Vienna II, Vereinsgasse 24/15’ wrote.13 It was left to local British officials on the Continent to approve their visa applications. Thea Scholl and her sister had offers of domestic servant positions and valid passports. ‘I was twenty-two at that time, and had never done any housework’, she recalled years later. To her surprise, ‘I had to show my hands at the [British] consulate, probably to prove that they were not manicured and that I was able to work. . . . Then I had to clean a bathroom, to show that I was able to do so. My sister had to cook.’ The consulate had instituted an ‘exam to show that we knew how to do domestic work’. She 10 Lore Gang-Saalheimer, oral history, transcript, pp. 8ff. 11 See, inter alia, Norman Bentwich, The Refugees from Germany, April 1933 to December 1935 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1936), p. 33; John Hope Simpson, The Refugee Problem: Report of a Survey (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), pp. 140, 148, 562; Herbert A. Strauss, ‘Jewish emigration from Germany: Nazi policies and Jewish responses (1)’, Year Book of the Leo Baeck Institute 25 (1980), 326. 12 Tony Kushner, ‘An alien occupation: Jewish refugees and domestic service in Britain, 1933–1948’, in Second Chance: Two Centuries of German-Speaking Jews in the United Kingdom, ed. Werner E. Mosse (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1991). 13 Advertisement in The New Statesman and Nation, 15 October 1938, p. 589.

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passed. ‘I got my visa and I left on 24 December 1938.’ Relief and grief mingled. ‘We stood there at the station, my parents in tears.’14 If Jews initially fled to nearby countries to wait out the regime, they soon set their sights on wherever they could gain a foothold: South Africa, the Philippines and tens of thousands to South American countries. For those with no contacts abroad and no prospect for an immigration visa anywhere, one destination glimmered: Shanghai. According to nineteenth-century agreements with Western governments, Chinese officials had no right to refuse a visa for Shanghai to Americans and Europeans so long as they paid a set fee. When Japan occupied most of northeast China in 1937, including greater Shanghai, it too respected these treaties. As a contemporary account explained, ‘No one exercises any right to refuse you a visa, if you are prepared to pay the Chinese Consul his fee of three dollars. . . . No necessary papers, no references. If you have a passport . . . that’s all right. If you have no passport . . . don’t let that worry you . . . you can still get into Shanghai.’15 Frank Foley, the British passport officer in Berlin, warned Jews not to go to a city in the middle of a country at war. ‘They refuse to listen to us and say that Shanghai under any conditions is infinitely better than a Concentration Camp in Germany’, he reported to London. ‘They would rather die as free men in Shanghai than as slaves in Dachau.’16 Abandoning the idea that learning a trade would help them earn a living and giving up on acquiring the local language, Jews clutched at hope and set sail. By the outbreak of war, 17,000 Jews had arrived in the city, without a future, but safe from the Germans.17 The Nazis’ policy when they came to power had been to ‘solve’ the ‘Jewish problem’ through emigration. And 120,000 Jews left Germany from 1933 through 1937. The Anschluss, however, brought Austria’s Jews into the now Greater Reich. When Heinrich Himmler decided to centralise Austrian Jewish emigration procedures (visas, economic arrangements and transfer of capital), Adolf Eichmann took charge of this streamlined ‘service’. His new 14 Interview Thea Scholl, March 1984, transcript, p. 136, Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes, as quoted in Wolfgang Muchitsch (ed.), Österreicher im Exil: Grossbritannien, 1938–1945: Eine Dokumentation (Vienna: Österreichischer Bundesverlag, 1992), p. 24. 15 G. E. Miller, Shanghai: Paradise of Adventurers (New York: Orsay Publishing House, 1937), pp. 64f. 16 Minute by Frank Foley, January 1939, PRO, FO 371/24079. 17 See, inter alia, Gao Bei, Shanghai Sanctuary (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); David Kranzler, Japanese, Nazis & Jews: The Jewish Refugee Community of Shanghai 1938– 1945 (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1976); Marcia Ristaino, Port of Last Resort (Stanford University Press, 2002).

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headquarters in Vienna, a palace stolen from the Rothschild family, became the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. Eichmann compared his system to a conveyor belt, and it forced 150,000 Jews to leave in one year.18 The Nazis wanted Jews to emigrate. The Jews, humiliated and terrorised, sought to escape. But, as their co-religionists in Germany had learned, emigration was a desperate search for sponsors abroad and for life-saving papers. ‘We were all talking about emigration and how we can get out’, Robert Rosner, then a teenager, recalled. ‘My father found a cousin who lived in the States, on a chicken farm somewhere in New Jersey. We went through telephone directories of New York and looked for Rosners, and wrote letters to all of them.’19 The Jews of Greater Germany queued at embassies, consulates, shipping companies, and government offices, desperate for papers: exit visas, transit visas, receipts for tax payments, clearance forms, ship tickets, train tickets. They therefore were much heartened when President Roosevelt initiated an international conference on the refugee crisis at the French town of Évianles-Bains in July 1938. In the event, the Evian Conference was designed to protect America’s image, not to help Jews frantic to flee. It was a dismal failure and, as every nation refused to act, each country left Evian with tacit international permission to keep its doors closed.20 The November pogrom the following autumn cracked open some of those doors. Newspaper reports about the pogrom prompted sympathy and action in Britain, especially on behalf of children. The Anglo-Jewish community marshalled its resources to rescue the imperilled youngsters, and took the matter to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain who, on his return from Germany only six weeks earlier, had declared that he had achieved ‘peace for our time’.21 The prime minister’s poor judgement shone bright, and he embraced the proposal to admit youngsters under age 17. Jewish communities under Nazi rule moved quickly to fill the kindertransports. Taking endangered children to safety in France, the Netherlands and England, the transports left from Prague, Vienna, Frankfurt, Berlin, Leipzig, the free city of Danzig and the Polish city of Zbonszyn in the midst of chaos, tears and the unending pain of parents left 18 See: Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Holocaust (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), pp. 121–2. 19 Robert Rosner, oral history, Vienna, 3 July 1990, transcript, p. 22. 20 See Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Flight from the Reich (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), pp. 98–101. 21 Neville Chamberlain, The Struggle for Peace (Toronto: Thomas Allen, 1939), p. 315.

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on train platforms. Nearly 10,000 children escaped death in this way, starting with a transport from Germany on 1 December 1938 and ending with a last train from a former host country, the Netherlands, the day before the Dutch army surrendered in May 1940. A few years later most of the parents left too, only they went east in boxcars and no one on the platform wept for them.22 The November pogrom had the effect the Nazis desired: 120,000 Jews left Germany during the winter of 1938–9, as many as had left in the previous five years. The Jews were but one group in search of asylum that winter. The end of the Spanish Civil War sent hundreds of thousands of people over the Pyrenees into France. Overwhelmed by the sheer number of refugees, the French built internment camps in the mountain foothills. Many German Jews who had fled to France ended up in these camps when France, standing by invaded Poland, declared war on Germany in September 1939. For the French, the Jews were enemy aliens, even though they were refugees from Nazi Germany. Strangers of any stripe were considered dangerous. Worse: war closed the borders. Emigration and immigration became rescue actions; and what formerly had been legal or at least semi-legal became clandestine and illicit.

Jewish Life under German Occupation Jewish life was shaped by the Germans’ ideology and orders. Within weeks of occupying Poland, the Germans severed Jews from the Polish body politic by setting up a Judenrät (Jewish Council) in every community. These were composed of prominent Jewish men designated by the Germans to carry out their orders, and to deal with the problems of a community under duress: food, housing, hygiene, medical care and youth services; they established and maintained orphanages, hospitals and apprenticeship schools, often the only education the Germans permitted.23 Throughout German-annexed and German-occupied Poland, decrees in the autumn of 1939 ordered Jews to wear the Star of David mark. ‘Thursday, November 16. Lodz. We are returning to the Middle Ages’, 15-year-old Dawid Sierakowiak wrote in his diary. ‘The yellow patch once again becomes part of Jewish dress.’24 22 See Dwork and van Pelt, Flight from the Reich, pp. 164–84. 23 See, inter alia, Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat (New York: Macmillan, 1972); Dan Michman, The Emergence of Jewish Ghettos during the Holocaust, trans. Lenn J. Schramm (Cambridge University Press, 2014). 24 Dawid Sierakowiak, The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Łódz´ Ghetto, ed. Alan Adelson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 63.

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From the Germans’ perspective, marking merely identified Jews. It did not ‘solve’ the ‘problem’ their existence posed. Emigration, the policy pursued in the greater Reich, no longer sufficed. After the Polish campaign, the Germans turned to territorial ‘solutions’. Eichmann identified the region around the town of Nisko as a mass resettlement site and deportations began in October 1939. No living quarters were constructed nor were materials or tools provided. The Germans shrugged at the high mortality that ensued. But they were daunted by the mechanics of moving so many people and deportations ceased on 24 March 1940. While the Nisko project unfolded, the Germans instituted another territorial solution: ghettoisation of Jews in the part of Poland they annexed to the Reich. In Lodz, for example, the Germans ordered (February 1940) the establishment of a ghetto in the city’s poorest neighbourhood. ‘We moved to the ghetto’, Sara Weil recalled. ‘One room, just a stove, no water. And we lived there in that hut that never before was considered living quarters.’25 Closed on 30 April, the Lodz ghetto held more than 160,000 people. After the Nisko fiasco, the Germans drew upon their experience with ghettoisation in annexed Poland and ordered the Warsaw Jewish Council to build a 7-foot-high boundary around the Jewish quarter. Thick walls went up in May. Gentiles living in the Jewish quarter moved out and Jews living in now forbidden areas moved into allocated streets. Despite the example of Lodz, few Warsaw Jews believed they would suffer the same fate. ‘A closed ghetto is inconceivable’, educator Chaim Kaplan wrote in his diary on 2 November 1940. This soon changed. ‘Suddenly we see ourselves penned in on all sides’, he agonised just a fortnight later. ‘We are segregated and separated from the world and the fullness thereof, driven out of the society of the human race.’26 The Jews of Cracow suffered the same fate the following spring (1941), and for them too it felt just as sudden, just as great a rupture. ‘I cannot even imagine living within the limits of the ghetto, within its few congested little streets without any green space. Just the thought of it chokes me’, Cracow resident Halina Nelken lamented.27 Jews in the closed ghettos of German-annexed and German-occupied Poland adapted as best they could. Many took comfort in the long history 25 Sara Grossman-Weil, oral history, Malverne, NY, 29 and 30 April 1987, transcript, pp. 13ff. 26 Chaim Kaplan, Scroll of Agony, trans. Abraham I. Katsch (New York: Collier Books, 1973), pp. 218, 225. 27 Halina Nelken, And Yet, I Am Here! (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), p. 78.

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of the streets, synagogues and markets of the traditional Jewish quarter where they now were compelled to live. Hundreds of thousands of refugee Jews, evicted from their hometowns all over Poland and forced to flee to large cities, arrived dazed and destitute, but to a place that felt familiar. The concept of a ghetto had a past in Jewish memory, and the ghettos themselves had a Jewish past. Initially, they held hope for a Jewish future. The Germans’ goal at this point was to segregate and isolate the Jews while they prepared to invade the Soviet Union. The Jews’ goal was to understand the incomprehensible – what the Germans wanted of them – and to find a way to go forward with life each day. Going forward meant earning enough to eat. Starvation was staved off by a slice of bread, a bowl of soup, a potato. In October 1939, Chaim Kaplan reported that there were ‘thousands and tens of thousands who live on charity and eat at the soup kitchens’.28 The population of many ghettos equalled that of small cities. The Judenräte established specialised offices and divisions, mimicking a municipality – a Registration Office, Records Office, Firefighting Division, Rent Office, Tax Office, Welfare Division and Health Division – all staffed by people who had lost their jobs with the Germans’ antisemitic measures. As Kaplan noted, ‘Their salary is small and is never paid on time, but at least they have a foothold.’29 A ‘foothold’ also was gained by those employed in ghetto workshops producing goods for the Germans. Adopting a strategy of compliance, the Jewish councils fostered such factories. The Germans encouraged this, giving Jewish leaders to understand that Jewish labour was essential to the Reich. Council chairmen Jacob Gens of Vilna ghetto and Chaim Rumkowski of Lodz ghetto transformed their communities into urban work camps. To a lesser extent, others did too. A job making products for the Germans came to be seen as a sinecure. Work meant food. ‘Mom has received a job as peeler in a communal kitchen’, Dawid Sierokowiak exulted (May 1941). ‘She works fourteen to fifteen hours a day, and her salary is supposed to be 20 to 25 RM a month. The main advantage is that she will receive the workers’ two substantial soups a day for free. So at least Mom won’t starve; at home we also will be better off.’30 Ghetto conditions altered pre-war norms. Smuggling, previously illegal and unrespectable, became heroic. Smuggling was key to ghetto life. Warsaw 28 Kaplan, Scroll of Agony, p. 230. 29 Ibid., p. 231. 30 Sierakowiak, The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak, pp. 86f.

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ghetto chairman Adam Czerniakow estimated that smuggling accounted for 80 per cent of the food available.31 Teaching, like smuggling, was forbidden by the Reich, and essential to ghetto life too. In every ghetto, students and teachers met secretly to persevere with studies. Education signalled normality: life would go on; a future lay ahead. As then 9-year-old Hanna Sztarkman in Radom ghetto explained, ‘I kept hoping that somehow something will happen and the war will end. . . . What worried me was: will I ever be able to catch up with my education? In such a horrible situation; yet I tried to keep some normalcy, to look forward to something.’32 Many ghetto communities carried on a rich cultural and intellectual life, notwithstanding persecution. Theatre and literary evenings were popular, as were evening entertainment clubs. According to the intellectual and community worker Emmanuel Ringelblum, as of April 1941 ‘there are sixty-one night spots in the Warsaw Ghetto’.33 The same impulse animated other ghetto communities. ‘Today the ghetto was like a proper city. There was a charity concert in the large hall of the orphanage’, Halina Nelken wrote of Cracow on 22 June 1941.34 In Lodz, the symphony orchestra played, on average, ten concerts a month in 1941 and four each month in 1942.35 Yet all the smuggling and concerts and clandestine classes could not relieve the misery of the ghetto. Every Jewish person faced hunger, disease and the constant threat of deportation. Physical conditions created by German policy in the ghetto led to death. In Warsaw, for example, 30 per cent of the city’s population squeezed into 2.5 per cent of its area. Refugees from smaller cities and towns in the Warsaw District swelled the ghetto population to 450,000 in 1941, or 110,000 people per square kilometre and over nine persons per room. A mere 4 per cent of the city streets fell within the Jewish quarter, and most did not run their entire length; a piece was in the ghetto and the remainder was on the ‘other side’. Food was as unequally allocated as land: daily rations allowed by the Germans came to 2,613 calories, 699 to gentile Poles and 184 for Jews.36

31 Yisrael Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw, 1939–1943 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), pp. 67ff. 32 Hannah Kent-Starkman, oral history, Stamford, CT, 13 December 1985, transcript, p. 11. 33 Emmanuel Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, ed. Jacob Sloan (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), p. 146. 34 Nelken, And Yet, I Am Here!, p. 83. 35 Lucjan Dobroszycki (ed.), The Chronicle of the Łódz´ Ghetto, 1941–1944 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 189. 36 See, inter alia, Dwork and van Pelt, Holocaust, p. 239.

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Jews could not live long on the official ration. ‘I remember walking on the street and seeing those youths swollen with hunger’, Hanna Sztarkman recalled. ‘People were starving. We were among the lucky few because of my mother’s work, and my brother was working. There was always some food, there was no starvation for us. But you could see swollen children lying on the streets. It became such an everyday thing.’37 Famine haunted ghetto life for everyone. ‘We were so obsessed with satisfying this terrible hunger that nothing else mattered really’, Sara Weil explained. ‘There was no other topic of conversation.’38 The invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 proved a turning point. Einsatzgruppen, special SS units charged with arresting and murdering political opponents and Jews, had been in operation since the annexation of Austria and the conquest of the Czech lands. After Poland was conquered, their victims ran into the tens of thousands. They became the mobile arm of the German annihilation machinery in summer 1941, shooting Jewish men, women and children. Every corpse counted. The Einsatzgruppen and German police officials sent regular dispatches listing their achievements. SS officer Karl Jäger, for instance, reported on the activities of Einsatzkommando 3 (EK3) in Lithuania. First, he identified the victims as ‘Jews’, ‘Jewesses’ and a few ‘Comm[unist]. Officials’, ‘Russ. Comm’, and ‘Lith. Comm’. He soon categorised more explicitly: on 15 and 16 August his men killed ‘3,200 Jews, Jewesses and J. Children, 5 Lith. Comm., 1 Pole, 1 partisan.’ From that day on, children became a significant line item. A massacre on 23 August accounted for ‘1,312 Jews, 4,602 Jewesses, 1,609 Jewish children’ in Panevezyes. Russian and Lithuanian communists disappeared from his bookkeeping; now whole Jewish communities were targeted. Mass murder had become genocide. Jäger’s men killed 133,346 people by 1 December. ‘Today I can confirm that our objective, to solve the Jewish problem for Lithuania, has been achieved by EK 3’, he declared proudly.39 By the autumn of 1941, genocide would encompass all European Jews as well. Resolved to murder Jews en masse, the Germans turned to sweeping deportations: from Kovno ghetto in October 1941, Vilna and Warsaw in July 1942, Lodz that September. Shoved into a central square, Jews were

37 Hannah Kent-Starkman, oral history, transcript, p. 11. 38 Sara Grossman-Weil, oral history, transcript, p. 25. 39 See the Jäger report in Ernst Klee, Willi Dreßen and Volker Rieß (eds.), ‘Those Were the Days’: The Holocaust through the Eyes of the Perpetrators and Bystanders (New York: Konecky and Konecky, 1991), pp. 46–58.

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marched to a train siding, and shipped to a killing installation or slave labour camp. Who should be protected? And who sacrificed? ‘We shall not give the children, they are our future’, Jacob Gens decreed in Vilna.40 He chose the elderly and ill. Chaim Rumkowski, by contrast, trusted that work would protect most of Lodz’s Jews. Announcing (4 September) that, by order of the German authorities, 25,000 Jews under the age of 10 and over 65 (a quarter of the ghetto population) were to be deported, Rumkowski declared, ‘I have to perform this bloody operation myself; I simply must cut off the limbs to save the body! I have to take away the children, because otherwise others will also be taken, God forbid.’41 As a community, the Jews were unable even to shield their own children from mortal harm. Nor could they defend the elderly or ill. Powerless individuals managed to exercise agency in only vanishingly few cases. When the Lodz ghetto aktion (dragnet) started, Sara Weil ‘was thinking of my father, who was far away, who was all alone’: I knew that if he’s there [alone], he’s doomed; if no one will hide my father, we’ll have no more of my father alive. I took to the street, and I ran through the cellars, and each time I had to come out to the street, I looked to the left and to the right, and in front of me, and I leapt and went further, and again into a house. And this is how I got through [the ghetto] safely, miraculously, wondering how I did it. But I did get through to my parents’ house. It was a distance – actually, it was far away – how I ever did it, I don’t know how. I didn’t think, ‘What am I doing?’ or how I am exposing myself. I just felt I must do it, because I couldn’t live with myself if I wouldn’t have done it. So I ran from one place to another, hiding, looking, until I got there. When I opened the door, my father said, ‘Sarale, if there is an afterworld, you will have it.’ My father was a very religious man, and knowing how irreligious I was at the time, it was something for him to say to me. I took my father and I hid him – where, how, I don’t know. I waited, and when the selection of the entire ghetto was over, I returned home. . . . I had rescued my father, and this is what was important to me.42

A rare exception, while in every ghetto, all suffered, all grieved. ‘Eclipse of the sun, universal blackness. My Luba was taken away’, educator Abraham Lewin wrote on the twenty-second ‘day of the slaughter of the Jews of Warsaw’. Language failed him. ‘I have no words to describe my 40 Quoted in Trunk, Judenrat, p. 421. 41 Dobroszycki (ed.), Chronicle of the Łódz´ Ghetto, pp. 250–1. Quoted in Trunk, Judenrat, 423. 42 Sara Grossman-Weil, oral history, transcript, p. 23.

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desolation . . . . Terror and blackness.’43 The only option for the survivors of each day’s assaults was to cope, to manage. Many Jews, including Halina Nelken, were baffled by their neighbours’ – and their own – ability to continue with the daily business of life. ‘It is incomprehensible that after the tragic shock of Aussiedlung [deportation (from Cracow ghetto)], and in such a relatively short time, life in the ghetto is returning to its normal routine. In a single moment our world is turned upside down, and the next day we brush our teeth, eat breakfast, go to work, and perform a thousand daily activities.’44 Cultural, educational and social initiatives began again. In Cracow, as Halina noted, ‘even the weekly charity concerts at the orphanage have resumed’. In Lodz, musical concerts recommenced after a two-month hiatus. And young Jews in Vilna, as elsewhere, returned to their youth clubs. As Yitskhok Rudashevski observed, ‘October 1942. It is cold outside, it is cold at home, so you want to run to the club . . . . With such activity you do not feel the cold.’45 Still, all the Jews in the long-term ghettos of eastern Europe would have succumbed eventually to the lethal conditions of their daily lives. In Warsaw, 84,896 people (18 per cent of the average population) died between September 1939 and August 1942; in Lodz, 43,743 people (34.7 per cent) died between May 1940 and July 1944. From its inception to its liquidation, the ghetto had been a slow annihilation centre. But ‘slow’ was not fast enough. Inexorably, each ghetto was marked for ‘final liquidation’. In Warsaw, many young women and men began to realise in spring 1942 that there was no way out; everyone was marked for murder. The massive aktionen that summer confirmed their forebodings. Those who remained were able-bodied, bereft and desperate. They had no one and nothing left to lose. Armed resistance offered revenge, even if it did not promise survival. By the time the Germans mounted their ‘final Aktion’ to clear Warsaw of Jews in April 1943, these young people were determined to act. Under a thousand combatants with few weapons and little ammunition, untrained in military matters and emaciated from years of starvation rations, held out for over a month against 2,054 German soldiers and 36 officers with armoured vehicles, tanks, cannons, flame-throwers and machine guns.46 The 43 Abraham Lewin, A Cup of Tears, ed. Antony Polonsky (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 153f. 44 Nelken, And Yet, I Am Here!, pp. 109f. 45 Yitskhok Rudashevski, The Diary of the Vilna Ghetto (Kibbutz Lohamei-Haghettaot, Israel: Hameuchad Publishing House, 1973), p. 91. 46 See, inter alia, Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw, pp. 336ff.

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uprising is one instance of one form of resistance by Jews. There were armed revolts elsewhere, even in the death camps of Birkenau, Sobibor and Treblinka. And there were other kinds of resistance. But the Warsaw ghetto uprising was unique in its aggression and assertiveness. The Germans quelled the uprising and went on to liquidate the ghettos of eastern Europe. Lodz, an exception, continued as a work camp until the summer of 1944. By that time, nearly all the Jews of eastern Europe had been killed. The Lodz Jews were deported to Auschwitz, and this time Sara Weil could not save her father. The Jews of eastern Europe stand in the foreground in discussions of Jewish life and death under German occupation, while their co-religionists of central and western Europe drift to the margins. Numerically, the communities in the east were far larger, annihilation both by bullet and by gas took place on their territory, and those wellsprings of Jewish culture were destroyed too. But the suffering of and actions against the smaller western communities were no less important. To focus on the murders in the east, pushing the west out of the frame, minimises the Germans’ lethal ambitions. The Nazi regime envisioned a continent-wide genocide; indeed, its murderous tentacles reached beyond, into North Africa.47 In Germany, the use of Jewish forced labour mushroomed with the invasion of Poland in September 1939 and the enlistment of German men in the armed forces, in Germany. As 83 per cent of young Jews under the age of 25 had emigrated, the labourers were rather elderly. They were called upon to do the dirtiest jobs and they received none of the benefits (vacation days, insurance, additional rations) accorded to ‘Aryans’. Nor, often, did their employers provide them with tools to do the assigned work. Jewish forced labourers became a fixture in ammunition works and on street paving, snow removal and cleaning crews. Unceasing orders carried new restrictions – fewer meat, fruit and butter coupons, and none for legumes, cocoa or rice. Jews were banned from buying unrationed foods, such as chicken, fish and smoked meats. Restricted shopping hours, usually late in the afternoon after ‘Aryan’ customers had emptied the shelves, meant that nothing remained to buy when they were permitted to shop. By Christmas 1941 Jews were not allowed to purchase soap or shaving cream. The purpose of this order was stated explicitly: ‘by means of this, men 47 Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya Stein (eds.), The Holocaust and North Africa (Stanford University Press, 2018).

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will be marked as Jews by their beards’.48 As in eastern Europe, German regulations transformed Jews into the caricatures the Nazis had depicted from the beginning. Dressed in old garments, unable to wash properly, men unshaven, the Jews became the underclass German propaganda described. The myth of a separate Jewish sphere, which had led to a cultural and spiritual renaissance among German Jews, evaporated. As in the east, early autumn 1941, when the Germans abandoned the idea of a ‘territorial solution’ to the ‘Jewish problem’, proved a hinge moment. The star marking was introduced in September. Typewriters, bicycles and cameras were requisitioned in November. Information about the outside world diminished when Jews were forbidden newspapers or magazines in February 1942. And friendships with non-Jews were outlawed in April; visits were prohibited. The misery the Nazis had imposed over a number of years upon the Jews of Germany was introduced within a matter of months in Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. But if in the Low Countries the anti-Jewish measures were a German initiative – weakly resisted, but every step Germanimposed nevertheless – in France, the French themselves took the initiative. The swift defeat of France in 1940 left German hegemony in the north and Marshall Pétain’s collaborationist government, Vichy, in the south.49 Reactionaries could now pursue their antisemitic agenda. They acted not at the behest of the Germans, but to advance their vision of France. Within weeks, Vichy authorities interned all Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria. Foreign Jews who had volunteered to fight in the French army were stripped of their military status and incarcerated in labour camps. A significant number were shipped to the Sahara as slave labourers on the Trans-Sahara railway. French internment camps were marked by filth, lice and famine. Despite these harsh conditions, as in the ghettos of the east, education remained of great importance; a symbol of normal life and a sign of hope for the future. Cultural activities abounded. Jews in the internment camps of France (and elsewhere in western and central Europe), like their co-religionists in the east, struggled to go on living. Their efforts met ever greater resistance from the French state. Sometimes a step ahead of the Germans, and always nimbly adopting their suggestions, 48 Joseph Walk (ed.), Das Sonderrecht für die Juden im NS-Staat (Heidelberg and Karlsruhe: C. F. Müller Juristischer Verlag, 1981), p. 343. 49 See, inter alia, Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Schocken Books, 1983).

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Pétain and his ministers collaborated fully in Hitler’s antisemitic programme for the New Europe. Only one boundary did Vichy refuse to cross. Despite the Germans’ urging, French authorities refused to mark Jews with a star. The Germans introduced the star in the northern zone without the cooperation of Vichy in June 1942. The badge that spotlighted the Jews also cast its glare on the atrocities committed against them. Vichy could no longer count on tacit popular support for antisemitic measures. Initiative now fell to the Germans. They were prepared. The internment camps became transit camps; trains began to roll east in July.

Hiding Faced with razzias and deportations, a number of welfare organisations across Europe turned to hiding Jews.50 The French Jewish charitable organisation OSE (Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants), for example, supported 300 refugee children from Germany and Austria in children’s homes in 1940. When Germany invaded France, OSE split along geographic lines. OSESouth continued legally; OSE-North, operating under occupation, engaged in clandestine activities, primarily smuggling the children across the demarcation line into the south. OSE staff in the southern or ‘free’ zone (like everyone else) believed that a French government would deal more kindly with its Jewish citizens and refugees than would the German invaders. Dragnet operations in August 1942 proved otherwise. OSE began underground operations, producing false identity papers and doctoring ration cards. When the Germans occupied the southern zone in November, OSE focused on hiding youngsters and smuggling them into Switzerland and Spain. OSE was run by Jews for Jews; other initiatives were founded by gentiles. Motivations varied, but all aimed to aid Jews. In Poland, Zofia KossakSzczucka, for instance, a conservative Catholic, joined democrat Wanda Krahelska-Filipowiczowa to found the Council for Aid to Jews. The Council established a Children’s Bureau, headed by Irena Sendlerowa who worked in Warsaw’s Social Welfare Department. Under German occupation, she used her position to create a network to provide assistance to Jews. Sendlerowa obtained documents for herself and her colleague Irena Schultz which allowed them to enter the ghetto where she established contact with Eva Rechtman who organised a secret network of women. With the mass 50 See Debórah Dwork, Children With a Star (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 31–109.

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deportations from Warsaw in 1942, Sendlerowa, Schultz and Rechtman smuggled some 2,500 children out of the ghetto. Jews, in short, were as active as gentiles in rescue operations. Some worked to hide Jews at greater risk than they. Others were as vulnerable as the people they sought to save. Equally important, every Jew who went into hiding or passed as gentile was engaged in rescue. No Jew survived the Holocaust in hiding without the help of gentiles. And every Jew participated actively. To go into hiding meant to surrender the last vestiges of normality and independence, to sever all ties with society, friends and, most often, with one’s own family. Jews in hiding lived silently in the shadows. It was too dangerous to go near a window; noise attracted attention. A raid meant a lightning move into a tiny space behind a false wall in a wardrobe, or under the stairs or the floorboards, or in the attic or cellar, leaving no trace of existence. Lives were at stake: the police must find no clue that someone was hiding. To hide meant to accept dependence on others for food, clothing, medicine, news, safety. Hider and host typically did not know each other. Jews went to people who, with whatever motivation, stood willing. The hidden had no rights and were burdened by gratitude because the hosts risked their lives too. The official penalty for harbouring a Jew was deportation in the west and execution in the east. ‘The life of a Pole who is hiding a Jew is not an easy one’, Emmanuel Ringelblum observed in Warsaw. ‘There are poor families who base their subsistence on the funds paid daily by the Jews to their Aryan landlords. But is there enough money in the world to make up for the constant fear of exposure, fear of the neighbors, the porter and the manager of the block of flats, etc.?’51 The unequal power relationship of the hiding situation was marked by physical and sexual abuse. Victims had few options. ‘I found [Esther] another place because she was being sexually abused’, Dutch rescuer Marion van Binsbergen recalled. Esther had not said a word. ‘He had scared the hell out of her. If she told, he was going to hand her over to the Nazis. That was the threat a lot of them used.’52 Labour exploitation was common. The host was the master and the Jew the slave. ‘Slowly, I don’t even know how it 51 Emmanuel Ringelblum, Polish–Jewish Relations during the Second World War (New York: Howard Fertig, 1976), p. 226. 52 Marion Pritchard-van Binsbergen, oral history, New Haven, CT, 6 June and 31 July 1994; Wellfleet, MA, 2 and 3 August 1994; Vershire, VT, 24 October 1994; Worcester, MA, 20 August 2001, transcript Part I I, pp. 44f.

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happened, . . . I became sort of a Cinderella’, explained a woman hidden on a farm in Poland.53 Life in hiding ‘was all of a sudden a way of life without life’, as one man put it. Body functions – to defecate, wash, menstruate – posed challenges. Moishe Kobylanski and his family hid near Gruszwica, their village in Ukraine; they lived in the straw loft of a pigsty: Bathroom facilities were excellent. You just went over there in the other end and you bundled everything up in straw. And when I went after food I took it with me and I went crazy to find a place to dump it. The urine was easy. It was in a bottle and as soon as I walked out I dumped it. That was no problem. The faecal matter was a problem. I went where they had cattle manure, I found a place, and I tried to hide it there. But how does human excrement fit in with cattle manure? No good either. It was always a problem because I might leave evidence after myself.54

‘Menstruating was absolutely harrowing’, Herta Heymans recalled. ‘In those days, you had little pads that had to be washed. The [elderly] landlady couldn’t hang them on the line. The neighbours knew there was no young person living there.’55 A single slip of the tongue might ‘burn’ the situation. In spring 1944, Hungarian Jews Paul Sved and his mother obtained false papers and new identities. Mrs Sved rented rooms in an area of Budapest forbidden to Jews. They lived there for a day or two until ‘stupidly, I said to my mother as she put my overcoat on, “Where is my star?” I just said, “Sta–.”’ But the landlady was alerted, and ‘immediately told us to leave’. They were lucky: she didn’t call the police. Still, Mrs Sved’s careful plans had collapsed in an instant. She had to start all over again.56

The Final Phase: In Slave Labour and Death Camps Few Jews benefitted from rescue efforts. The vast majority died in ghettos and transit camps of starvation, exposure, disease or vicious cruelty; were killed by Einsatzgruppen; or murdered in annihilation camps. With at least 4.3 million dead by the end of 1943, the Germans closed down the camps built specifically to annihilate Jews: Chelmno, Sobibor, Belzec and Treblinka.

53 Yona Nadelman-Kuntsler, oral history, London, England, 7, 11 and 12 July 1985, transcript, p. 55. 54 Martin Koby, oral history, Ann Arbor, MI, 11 and 25 November 1987, transcript, p. 49. 55 Herta Montrose-Heymans, oral history, Cardiff, Wales, 21 July 1985, transcript, p. 11. 56 Paul Sved, oral history, London, England, 14 May 1987, transcript, p. 3.

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Auschwitz remained the sole camp to finish off Hungarian Jewry, the last major Jewish community, and the remnants of other communities.57 Labour-strapped Germany needed some of those Jews, and in spring 1944 Auschwitz became a labour exchange. Hungary’s Jews were shipped in, and slave workers selected and shipped out again to the network of concentration camps that served German industry. Jews found unfit for work were gassed and burned. Lodz ghetto, too, was liquidated. Sara Weil left on a transport with her husband’s family. Hauled out of the train in Auschwitz, the Jews were told to form two columns, one of men, and one of women and children. ‘I was standing with my mother-in-law and my sister-in-law with her little girl, when someone approached us, and said, ‘Give this child to the grandmother.’ And my sister-in-law gave the child to my mother-in-law. They went to the left, and we went to the right.’ The women were registered, shaved of all body hair, showered, and handed rags and wooden shoes. ‘We went to a barrack [and] were given a bunk. And on this bunk, five people had to sleep.’ Sara soon learned what happened to Jews in Auschwitz. ‘The ten days I was there, all I heard was, “You will never get out from here alive.” And then we were shipped out to Bergen-Belsen. Bergen-Belsen at this time was paradise for me.’ Sara, her sister-in-law Regina, and niece Esther were in a newly opened section, the Tent Camp. ‘Just straw thrown on the ground, these were our quarters. But we were getting more food than in Auschwitz, and we had freedom without these constant kapos around us.’ From BergenBelsen ‘we were sent to an arbeitslager [work camp]. Ninety of us were selected and we were sent to Unterlüss.’ The rollcall whistle at Unterlüss blew at 4:30. The women ran out of the barracks and formed into groups. ‘Each group took off for a given destination. Private enterprise hired the inmates. And Unterlüss supplied the manpower. We were the manpower.’ Sara felled trees in the nearby forest, she hauled bricks, she cleared rubble.58 The SS sent prisoners to arbeitslagers across German-held territory. By January 1945, 700,000 laboured in over 650 satellite camps attached to factories and other production sites; Jews accounted for a quarter of that number. The Germans did not care how long anyone lived. There was always 57 On Auschwitz, see Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Auschwitz (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008). 58 Sara Grossman-Weil, oral history, transcript, pp. 17, 29, 30.

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someone else to take the dead person’s spot. Replacements were shipped out of Auschwitz continuously. The Germans also established new slave labour camps to build underground factories. Hanna Sztarkman’s brother Heniek was sent to such a camp in summer 1944. ‘We came to an empty camp, Wiesengrundlager, barracks only surrounded by barbed wire.’ No matter how many people were brought in, the population remained static. Hunger, disease and abuse mowed down the inmates. ‘Food was always a problem. Always. We were constantly hungry. There were sometimes periods of three days when there was no food at all. The purpose of the camp was to build an underground factory. There was a quarry in those hills, and the idea was to chisel and blast out a hole and build the factory under the rock layer.’59 Slave labour was needed to maintain productivity, to build new factories in locations shielded from bombings, to clear up debris caused by bombs, and to build new shelters for bombed-out Germans. Mira Teeman was deported to Auschwitz when Lodz ghetto was liquidated in the summer of 1944. ‘I stayed only twelve days. This was my great luck.’ Then she too was sent to Germany. ‘After three days without water and without food, we came to Hamburg. They put us in an old warehouse on the waterfront.’ The Germans had established the camp on Hamburg’s Dessauer quay in July. When Mira arrived, ‘It was in the fall and it was raining. We had to go out to work in the city to clean up the ruins . . . . Then, when the first snow came, we had to clear the streets of snow.’ Mira was sent on to a new nearby camp, Sosal. It served two firms. Kowal & Bruns manufactured precast concrete building elements. Wayss & Freytag was involved in emergency housing and clean-up operations. ‘What we had to do was to deliver different, ready-made parts’ to build houses, Mira explained. ‘The prefabricated elements we delivered were very heavy and we had no gloves. They made our hands bloody. Then, we had to dig ditches for electricity and for water. Then we had to build a macadam road to the construction site. There was a kapo, a civilian, who was like an animal, sadistic. He told me that, instead of a horse, I should drag the roller to make the road flat. I couldn’t move it. I couldn’t.’ War’s end neared. ‘At the end of March we were told that we would be evacuated to another camp. I think we were on the train for two or three days, going back and forth. We wondered, “Why do they [the Germans] 59 Henry Starkman, oral history, West Bloomfield, MI, 8 December 1984 and 19 January 1985, transcript, pp. 59f, 67ff.

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bother? Why?” We came to Bergen-Belsen, of course.’60 The Nazis were determined to drive the inmates deep into Germany before the allies arrived. They no longer believed the prisoners would function as slaves. Nor were they interested in keeping them alive. As the SS moved inmates from camp to camp, the infrastructure cracked. Food arrived irregularly. Hordes of desperately ill people overwhelmed the minimal hygiene systems. Still worse, when gassings stopped in Auschwitz (November 1944), the SS created ‘dying camps’. Inmates were simply dumped in them and left to die. Nearly all the inmates of the dying camps were Jews, not murdered by gas or bullet, but by starvation and disease. The most infamous was Bergen-Belsen. Sara Weil had been in Bergen-Belsen before she was sent to Unterlüss. When ‘the Germans, after liquidating the camps, were fleeing, we were brought to Bergen-Belsen again.’ It was the end of March 1945. ‘This BergenBelsen was hell.’ Sara was put in a barrack with hundreds of women. And ‘on the outside were hundreds of women dying of thirst, thirst, and thirst again.’ ‘It was a sight that is beyond any description or understanding or imagination. . . . These mounds that you see in pictures, they were real people. They were living, breathing, eating, feeling, thinking people, thousands upon thousands of them. Mothers and daughters and children. These pictures are real. And I saw it. I smelled it. I touched them. They were very, very real. This was Bergen-Belsen in March and the beginning of April in 1945.’ Sara, Esther and Regina survived. ‘April 15 is my birthday, and this is when we were liberated. “We will be free! We will be free! The English are here!” . . . It was a very beautiful April day. The sun was shining. But we were hungry, and broken in body and spirit.’61

Bibliographic Note The first wave of Holocaust historiography paid scant attention to Jewish life and death under Nazi rule across Europe and around the globe. Relying on traditional documentary evidence, which pertained to destruction, early scholars of the Holocaust sought to understand the Nazi ideology and programme of Judeocide.62 The landmark trial of Adolf Eichmann opened new questions, foregrounding the issue of psychological motivation. Still, 60 Mira Teeman, oral history, Stockholm, Sweden, 6 September 1995, transcript, pp. 30ff. 61 Sara Grossman-Weil, oral history, transcript, p. 34f. 62 Inter alia, Hannah Arendt, Raul Hilberg, Eberhard Jaeckel, Henri Michel and Hans Mommsen.

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Hitler and his subordinates, the bureaucratic murderers, held sway. Their Jewish victims remained on the margins of academic scholarship, notwithstanding intensive grassroots documentation initiatives in Jewish communities across Europe that yielded studies on the Jewish wartime experience written primarily by those who had lived it themselves. Dutch historian and survivor Jacob Presser, for example, told the story of his community’s death. His was the voice of lost neighbours, brothers, sisters, parents. See Jacob Presser, Ondergang, 2 vols. (The Hague: Staatsuitgeverij/Martinus Nijhodd, 1965). What Jacob Presser had done for Dutch Jews, Georges Wellers did for French Jews in L’étoile jaune a l’heure de Vichy (Paris: Fayard, 1973). Presser and Wellers had taken tentative steps towards the genre of Holocaust scholarship envisioned by the Polish Jewish historian (and survivor), Philip Friedman. ‘What we need is a history of the Jewish people during the period of Nazi rule in which the central role is to be played by the Jewish people, not only as tragic victims but as bearers of a communal existence’, he proposed in 1957. ‘Our approach must be definitely “JudeoCentric” as opposed to “Nazi-Centric.”’ See Philip Friedman, ‘Problems of research on the Holocaust’, in Roads to Extinction (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1980), p. 561. Friedman, then living in New York, had served as the first director of the Central Jewish Historical Commission in Lublin after liberation in 1944; he had collected testimonies and documentation and he knew historians had rich, if less traditional, sources upon which to draw. See Natalia Aleksiun, ‘Philip Friedman and the emergence of Holocaust scholarship: a reappraisal’, Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 11 (2012), 333–46 and Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! (Oxford University Press, 2012). A generation of Israeli historians brought Friedman’s project to fruition twenty years later.63 Insisting upon Jews as subjects rather than objects, these scholars moved the victims from the margins to the centre. Their narratives plumbed spiritual as well as armed resistance; self-help ghetto communal activities; and educational, cultural and charity initiatives. The development of social history in general, and women’s history in particular, opened new perspectives, particularly in North America and Europe. Drawing extensively upon survivors’ oral testimonies for the first time, as well as the traditional historical sources of archival documents and 63 Primarily, but not exclusively, Israeli scholars. Inter alia, Yehuda Bauer, Lucy Dawidowicz, Yisrael Gutman and Leni Yahil. Their work shaped scholarship decades later – inter alia: Samuel Kassow and Nechama Tec.

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private diaries and letters, social history scholarship of the past thirty years has explored the role and function of (inter alia) age, gender, degree of religious observance, political affiliation and social class in Jewish life and death during the Nazi years.64 Most recently, scholars of Jewish life and death have used a variety of new lenses that yield fresh insights. Historical geographers have developed fresh ways of visualising and thinking about key aspects of the Jews’ lived experience through the use of geographic information systems (GIS) and geovisualisation.65 Drawing upon Genocide Studies scholarship, Holocaust historians have drilled down with microstudies,66 showing that the term ‘the Holocaust’ is a blunt instrument; in fact, many genocidal situations prevailed which, in their aggregate, constitute ‘the Holocaust’. And as the decades pass, offering Holocaust scholars a wider perspective on the Nazi era, the phenomenon of Jews’ flight has come into focus, yielding studies that integrate refugee movement into the history of Jewish life and death under Nazi rule across Europe and around the globe.67

64 Inter alia, Natalia Aleksiun, Sarah Cushman, Debórah Dwork, Alexandra Garberini, Amos Goldberg, Marion Kaplan, Jeffrey Koerber, Dalia Ofer, Renée Poznanski, Joanna Sliwa and Zoe Waxman. 65 Inter alia, Tim Cole, Simone Gigliotti, Alberto Giordano, Paul Jascot and Anne Kelly Knowles. 66 Inter alia, Alexis Herr, Stefan Ionescu and Raz Segal. 67 Inter alia, Eliyana Adler, Natalie Belsky, Mark Edele, Vera Fast, John Goldlust, Atina Grossman and Lotta Stone.

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The Nazi Camps and Killing Centres dieter pohl

Nazi camps were among the most important sites of mass murder and genocide between 1939 and 1945. National Socialism, however, did not invent ‘concentration camps’. They were an institution already known during the second half of the nineteenth century that governments built before, during and after World War Two. Camps as a space of confinement for civilians who were not sentenced by the judiciary or interned as enemy aliens were both an addition to the existing prison system and a completely separate phenomenon. And camps installed under Nazi German hegemony could look quite different, from the use of empty industrial buildings to small areas of a single barracks or the standardised look of concentration camps, to large spaces confined by barbed wire and watchtowers with barracks and specific functional parts, like guards’ facilities or forced labour workshops. The latter shaped the general representation of camps both during the war and in postwar memory. And camps were different from another specific Nazi German institution, the ghetto for Jews, a space of isolation, starvation and confinement, and death before transporting the remaining population to killing centres. Nazi camps to a certain extent were subject to both German and international press reporting since their establishment in spring 1933, and their existence was widely known, including some fragmented information even on extermination centres like Auschwitz-Birkenau. Already in 1944 investigations on the camps and the crimes committed there had started, as analysis of the camp histories. Most of the camps’ files were deliberately destroyed by the camp administrations from 1943 onwards, but other sources enable historians to reconstruct the history of most camps and their inner developments. An enormous amount of factual evidence can be found in the documents of organisations related to the camps, German administration, SS, police, military, economy etc. Tens of thousands of surviving camp

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inmates wrote their memoirs and gave testimony in various forms. Intensive legal investigations all over Europe enabled new findings. And both the investigation of former camp territories, including archaeological research, and all material evidence added to this knowledge. The Nazi camp systems can be counted among the best known in history, covered in encyclopaedias on the camps and studies on all of the major camps and the specific structures.1

Development of the Camp Systems and Their Structure The first Nazi camps were set up in February–March 1933, right after the Nazi takeover of power. Most of these were rather improvised camps set up by Stormtrooper or SS units in their realm, in addition to Schutzhaftabteilungen (preventive custody departments) in regular prisons. An estimated 100,000 persons, most of them political opponents of the new government, were held prisoner for a short time, and often ill-treated. Nearly all of these ‘early camps’, except Dachau, were dissolved by 1935–6, and prisoner numbers declined to approximately 4,000.2 In 1936–7 the whole detention system was restructured and expanded again. Based on the Dachau model, an organised concentration camp system was set up from 1934 onwards, with a centralised administration (Inspection of the Concentration Camps in Oranienburg) and standardised structures. From 1936 onwards, larger concentration camps were established, in Buchenwald, near Weimar; Sachsenhausen, north of Berlin; and Mauthausen, near Linz in Austria. These camps were all newly built with barracks, functional buildings and an SS quarter. Unlike the detention places in 1933–4, they were all SS structures with formally trained ‘Totenkopf’ (Death’s head) guard units. Several motives lay behind the establishment of a concentration camp system. These were: (1) the independence of the police from the traditional judicial system, which had prevailed in the political persecutions of 1934–6; (2) the shift towards ‘racial’ persecution against non-political prisoner groups; (3) the effort of the SS to build up its own economy, especially construction facilities for the Nazi architectural projects for German cities; and (4) the 1 For instance, the encyclopedias of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (see nn. 3 and 5 below) and Yad Vashem. 2 K. Drobisch, G. Wieland, System der NS-Konzentrationslager 1933–1939 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993).

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preparation for expansion and war, which included plans for mass arrests of allegedly ‘unreliable’ persons, and arrests in the envisaged occupied territories. The purpose of the concentration camps was not only to isolate alleged and real enemies of Nazi rule, but even more to create extra-legal spaces within German territory and society. Given that Hitler early on planned a major European war, it was only consequent that the camp system was to be extended to the occupied territories and radicalised there, where fewer legal inhibitions applied. The beginning of the war marked a new step in the development of the Nazi camps. Now large groups of Poles were deported to the detention places, and new camps were set up, both within the German Reich (Neuengamme near Hamburg and Groß-Rosen in Lower Silesia) and in occupied territories, especially Auschwitz near the Upper Silesian town of Os´więcim in 1940, and Lublin-Majdanek in late 1941. The latter were established for the imprisonment of Polish political opponents, and later on also for Soviet POWs taken over by the SS. For a while the SS leadership planned to set up an enormous workforce in the camps for giant settlement programmes in eastern Europe, but this idea was abandoned in spring 1942. Other concentration camps in the occupied countries were Natzweiler in eastern France, and Herzogenbusch (Vught) in the Netherlands. Late in the war some concentration camps were erected for former ghetto inmates, like Kauen (Kaunas), Riga-Kaiserwald or the Vaivara camp complex in Estonia, or transformed from forced labour camps for Jews, like Krakau-Plaszow.3 During the war, more and more new camp systems came into being. Most important were the Arbeitserziehungslager (work education camps), which were meant for criminalised foreign forced labourers within the German Reich, and were subordinate to the Gestapo. The latter also set up Polizeihaftlager (police detention camps) in Germany and in several occupied territories for alleged political opponents. The Polenlager (camps for Poles) in occupied western Poland served as transit zones for Poles being deported within western Poland or from there to Germany. The Nazi construction organisation, Organisation Todt, set up forced labour camps especially in France and Norway for their massive building programmes. Even in 3 N. Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015); The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, vol. I: Early Camps, Youth Camps, and Concentration Camps and Subcamps under the SS-Business Administration Main Office (WVHA) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).

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Germany, so-called Jewish Mischlinge (mixed-race Jews) or Jewish spouses from mixed marriages at the end of war were taken into these kinds of camp in Germany. And the German Wehrmacht set up so-called Feldstraflager (field penal camps) for soldiers sentenced by court-martial.4 Beyond the concentration camps, by far the biggest structure were the prisoner of war (POW) camps. These resembled POW camps in other countries, but differed in the Nazis’ extremely violent systems and criminal practices, which deviated from international standards and conventions. Besides Nazi Germany, its Axis allies set up camps under their own authority. The worst of those were installed in the Ustasha State of Croatia, especially the Gospic and Jasenovac camp complexes; but Slovakia, Italy and even Finland also set up camps either on their territories or in occupied areas; Hungary and Bulgaria installed mobile forced labour units, especially for Jewish men.5

Camps and Racist Persecution Until 1936–7 the German police used camps predominantly to isolate and persecute political enemies. But, as the Nazi regime from the very beginning developed racist policies, groups considered as ‘racial’ were early on targeted by violence and arrests, like Jews in public positions, but also so-called ‘asocials’. Already in late 1933, mass raids against pedlars, the homeless and others led to the imprisonment of tens of thousands in prisons or work houses. The first groups to be put in specific camps were the Sinti and Roma, socalled Gypsies. Communal administrations in Berlin, Cologne, Magdeburg and other places set up ‘Zigeunerlager’ at the outskirts of their cities in order to isolate this minority. The most infamous of these became Lackenbach camp in eastern Austria, which was set up in 1940, and later served as a hub for deportation to places of extermination.6

4 W. Benz and B. Distel (eds.), Der Ort des Terrors. Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, vol. I X: Arbeitserziehungslager, Ghettos, Jugendschutzlager, Polizeihaftlager, Sonderlager, Zigeunerlager, Zwangsarbeiterlager (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2009). 5 The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, vol. I I I: Camps and Ghettos under European Regimes Aligned with Nazi Germany (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018). 6 M. Zimmermann, Rassenutopie und Genozid. Die nationalsozialistische ‘Lösung der Zigeunerfrage’ (Hamburg: Christians, 1996), pp. 93–105.

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During the years 1937–8 mass arrests of so-called ‘asocials’, which was a derogatory term mostly for Roma, unemployed persons, and of Jews became frequent. March 1938 saw the start of the ‘Aktion Arbeitsscheu’ (Operation ‘Work Shy’), mass arrests of alleged ‘asocials’, which affected around 10,000 persons, among them 2,300 Jews in the ‘Juniaktion’ (June Operation). The biggest raid against the Jews, however, was connected to the pogrom of November 1938. Around 27,000 Jewish men were deported to concentration camps, and immediately put under a barbarous regime. The main purpose for this operation was to intimidate German and Austrian Jewry, and force more Jews to emigrate. Though after a while nearly all of the prisoners were released after signing an obligation to emigrate, around 400 had died from ill-treatment. All in all, already prior to the war around 40,000 Jews were imprisoned in German concentration camps, and between 2,000 and 3,000 of them died as a result of their imprisonment.7 Contrary to what is commonly assumed, however, the concentration camps did not play a major role in the murder of Jews prior to 1942. Actually, in 1940–1 there were comparatively few Jews imprisoned in concentration camps. This changed in 1942. The first major deportation transports of Jews came around March 1942 to Auschwitz and Lublin-Majdanek camps. Only from then on did Jews make up a larger part of the prisoner population, and nearly all Jewish prisoners from other concentration camps were sent to Auschwitz in 1942. Auschwitz became not only the biggest of all concentration camps, but also a camp with a majority of Jewish prisoners. A larger number of Jewish prisoners was, however, detained in other camp systems, especially the Zwangsarbeitslager für Juden (forced labour camps for Jews) which were established from 1940 on in occupied Poland. In 1942–3 a lot of ghettos were transformed into this kind of labour camp, after the killing of the majority of the ghetto population, especially children, the elderly and most of the women. A few of these new camps were established as concentration camps, in Riga, Kaunas and in the Vaivara complex in Estonia.8 Beginning only in spring 1944, the number of Jewish concentration camp inmates rose dramatically. The first reason for this change of prisoner composition was the mass deportations of Jews from Greater Hungary 7 K. Wünschmann, Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). 8 M. Wenzel, ‘Zwangsarbeitslager für Juden in den besetzten polnischen und sowjetischen Gebieten’, in Der Ort des Terrors. Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, vol. I X: Arbeitserziehungslager, Ghettos, Jugendschutzlager, Polizeihaftlager, Sonderlager, Zigeunerlager, Zwangsarbeiterlager, ed. W. Benz and B. Distel (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2009), pp. 124–54.

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between May and July 1944 to Auschwitz, and from there to other concentration camps. In June–July 1944, due to the Soviet summer offensive, many camps including the Litzmannstadt (Łódz´) ghetto were dissolved and the Jewish inmates transferred westward to concentration camps. By late 1944, about 70 per cent of the 700,000 concentration camp prisoners were not Jewish.9 Most of them had to endure the final evacuations in two waves especially in January and from March 1945, with the advance of Allied troops into the German Reich. Jews and non-Jews were either put on trains or forced on Death Marches. Jewish prisoners in particular were targeted and killed during these marches or in massacres right before the arrival of Allied troops – for example, on the Baltic Sea coast near Palmnicken (now Yantarnoe), near Gardelegen, or in the forced labour camps for Hungarian Jews at the ‘Südostwall’ (south eastern wall) fortification system in eastern Austria.10 Racist distinctions also played a major role in the German camp system for POWs. Jewish POWs who had served as soldiers in the Polish Army in 1939 were separated in the camps and, with the exception of the few officers, were sent back to Poland and killed there. The Jewish POWs of the Yugoslav Army in 1941–2 met the same fate. The Jewish Red Army soldiers, however, were killed either immediately after capture or in the POW camps. Many others died during the deliberately imposed mass starvation in the camps between October 1941 and spring 1942, which affected predominantly Russian POWs and those the Germans called ‘Asiatics’. Some Jewish POWs were even transferred to camps in Germany, and then deported to concentration camps and murdered there. Approximately 50,000 Jewish POWs were killed by the Wehrmacht and Gestapo, and until early 1942, even Soviet POWs of so-called Asiatic appearance were shot in several camps.11 Jewish POWs from the French, British and US armies, on the other hand, were more-or-less treated according to international law.

9 D. Pohl, ‘The Holocaust and the concentration camps’, in Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories, ed. N. Wachsmann and J. Kaplan (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 149–66. 10 D. Blatman, The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 11 A. Shneer, Pariahs among Pariahs: Soviet-Jewish POWs in German Captivity, 1941–1945 (Jeruslaem: Yad Vashem, 2016).

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Systematic Mass Murder in Camps and at Killing Sites The development of Nazi policies of genocidal extermination until 1941 was only indirectly related to the camps. Inside the camps, there were no legal boundaries. But within Germany, the general public had to be taken into consideration. This changed with the attack on Poland in 1939. Up to the beginning of the war, approximately 10,000 persons were individually murdered in Germany for political reasons, most of them within the camps. Right after the attack on Poland, mass murder began. German units in Poland committed mass executions on an unprecedented scale. At the same time, two specific programmes of mass murder were unleashed: against mentally ill in psychiatric institutions, first in occupied Poland, then in Germany proper; and the systematic killing of Polish ‘intelligentsia’, certain strata of the Polish population. To a certain degree, the killing centres of the ‘euthanasia’ programme can be considered a forerunner of the extermination centres for Jews. Though they cannot be considered as camps, six former psychiatric institutions within Germany and Austria, were transformed in 1940–1 into places of confinement and mass murder: Grafeneck, Brandenburg, Hadamar, Pirna-Sonnenstein, Bernburg and Hartheim. In the early period of the war, the camps were not designated sites of mass murders. Though this would change radically in a span of a few months. In October 1939 the Security Police ordered individual executions as a means to kill enemies in the camps as ‘special treatment’ (Sonderbehandlung). From then on, inmates of prisons could be individually transferred to camps to be killed there. In one camp, however, mass executions took place rather early. In Soldau (Działdowo), a special camp in eastern Prussia, from April 1940 onwards, around 2,000 persons, both mentally ill and Polish prisoners, were shot en masse. And an old fortress in occupied Poland, Fort VII in Poznan, for a limited time was transformed into a camp and killing centre for Polish patients. In Fort VII in October 1939, probably for the first time, victims were murdered by gas.12 The first centralised programme of mass murder of camp inmates began in February 1941. Operation ‘14f13’ connected the camps to the ongoing mass murder of psychiatric patients in several ‘Euthanasia’ killing centres. Teams of German physicians inspected the camps and, together with the camp leadership, selected weak and ‘undesired’ prisoners for transport to these 12 V. Rieß, Die Anfänge der Vernichtung ‘lebensunwerten Lebens’ in den Reichsgauen DanzigWestpreußen und Wartheland 1939/40 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1995), p. 304.

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killing centres. Thus, the first mass murder of Auschwitz inmates did not occur in that camp itself, but on 28 July 1941 in Sonnenstein (Saxonia).13 The second programme of mass killing within the camps affected Soviet POWs. From July 1941, specific groups of the latter, especially political functionaries and Jews in POW camps within the Reich, were transferred to concentration camps in order to be killed there. In August 1941, killings by shooting started in Sachsenhausen camp and, in October, just outside the Dachau camp in Hebertshausen (at an SS shooting range).14 The establishment of specific camps as pure killing centres was, however, connected to a third programme, the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’. Mass killings of Jews had already occurred in September–October 1939 in some places in Poland, but systematic mass murder began with the attack on the Soviet Union, probably with the mass execution that took place in Gargždai (Lithuania) on 26 June 1941. The actual decision-making towards a complete extermination of European Jewry was, according to the interpretation of a majority of historians, a process which evolved between spring 1941 and spring 1942, with a March 1941 decision to murder Jewish males in the Soviet Union, extended that summer to apply to all Jews in the occupied Soviet territory, then to Poland in the autumn of 1941 and extended to Jews throughout all of Europe at the turn of 1941/2. All preparations were finished by spring 1942.15 From July–August 1941, the SS leadership and occupation authorities discussed whether extermination centres should be established, as an addition to the ongoing mass shootings or even as a replacement. Plans for an extermination camp in Mogilev in eastern Belorussia or in Riga failed, but the occupation administration in the Warthegau, the Poznan´ region in western Poland, took the initiative to establish such a facility there. Thus, from October 1941 a special SS unit, which had murdered inmates of psychiatric institutions in 1939–40, set up an improvised extermination centre in Kulmhof (Chełmno nad Nerem), a village approximately 75 km from Łódz´.16 13 H. Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), pp. 136–50; J. August, ‘Das Konzentrationslager Auschwitz und die “Euthanasie”-Anstalt Pirna Sonnenstein’, in Von den Krankenmorden auf dem Sonnenstein zur ‘Endlösung der Judenfrage’ im Osten, ed. Boris Böhm (Pirna: Gedenkstätte Sonnenstein, 2001), pp. 51–94. 14 R. Keller and R. Otto, Sowjetische Kriegsgefangene im System der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager (Vienna: New Academic Press, 2019). 15 C. Browning (with J. Matthäus), The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004). 16 C. Gerlach, ‘Failure of plans for an SS extermination camp in Mogilev, Belorussia’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 11:1 (1997), 60–78; P. Klein: Die ‘Gettoverwaltung

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On 6 December 1941, transports from the region where the camp was situated, arrived at Kulmhof, and all but a few Jews were immediately murdered in a so-called gas van, trucks which had been constructed in such a way that the exhaust pipes were connected to the interior of the van in order to asphyxiate all persons locked inside. The German killing units in the occupied Soviet Union, the Einsatzgruppen, had been supplied with this killing device since November 1941.17 In January 1942, Jews from the Łódz´ ghetto were sent to Kulmhof and killed there and, from May 1942 onwards, also those Jews who had been deported from the German Reich to Łódz´. These murder operations lasted until April 1943, when nearly all Jewish communities in the Warthegau were exterminated, and deportations from Łódz´ ghetto were halted. Camp activity was resumed in June 1944 in order to murder the last inmates of the Łódz´ ghetto. More than 152,000 Jews and several thousand Roma were killed in Kulmhof.18 A system of extermination camps was established in 1941–2 in the central part of occupied Poland, the General Government. Here major Jewish communities like those of Warsaw, Lwów, Cracow or Lublin were situated. The German occupation authorities had stripped the Jewish minority of all rights and property, and put part of it behind ghetto walls, where thousands had already died in 1940–1. In the summer of 1941, the administrations expected to deport the Jews into those territories the Wehrmacht occupied in the Soviet Union. From August to September 1941 discussion started whether at least those considered ‘unfit for work’ should be immediately murdered. These discussions between the occupation authorities and the leadership in Berlin in October 1941 led to the establishment of extermination camps. SS chief Himmler entrusted the SS chief of the Lublin region, Odilo Globocnik, with the operation. ‘Killing experts’ from the ‘Euthanasia’ programme, the murder of people considered mentally ill, which had been temporarily stopped in August 1941, were sent to Lublin to set up these new camps.19 The first two of these extermination centres were located in the Lublin district of occupied Poland. Construction of Belzec camp started in early Litzmannstadt’ 1940 bis 1944: Eine Dienststelle im Spannungsfeld von Kommunalbürokratie und staatlicher Verfolgungspoliti (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2009). 17 M. Beer, ‘Gaswagen. Von der “Euthanasie” zum Genozid’, in Neue Studien zu nationalsozialistischen Massentötungen durch Giftgas, ed. G. Morsch and B. Perz (Berlin: Metropol, 2011), pp. 153–64. 18 P. Montague : Chelmno and the Holocaust: A History of Hitler’s First Death Camp (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2012). 19 Browning, Origins of the Final Solution, pp. 352–72.

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November 1941 on the outskirts of the village itself, and in March 1942 for Sobibor camp, several kilometres from the village at a train station. Both camps were given a completely new structure with a specific, isolated part for the actual mass murder called aTodeslager (death camp), where buildings with gas chambers were erected. Though both camps were staffed with men from the ‘Euthanasia’ operation, different killing techniques were applied from those in the killing centres in Germany. The exhaust fumes of tank engines were used to asphyxiate the victims, thus resembling the ‘gas vans’ in Kulmhof. First, groups of Jews who had to perform forced labour for the construction of Belzec were murdered there in February 1942. The major deportations from the ghettos of Lwów and Lublin started on 16 March 1942. In Sobibor the first mass murder occurred in mid-April 1942, and the deportations arrived there from approximately 5 May 1942 on. After a visit of SS Chief Heinrich Himmler in Warsaw in April 1942, it was decided to set up a third camp as the extermination place for Warsaw’s Jewry. Treblinka was situated near Malkinia Góra and an already existing labour camp, about 60 km northeast of Warsaw in the Warsaw district. Here the first deportations arrived on 22 July 1942.20 Both the deportations and the management of the three camps were organised by the staff of the SS and police leader in Lublin. From early June 1942, the whole process was named ‘Aktion Reinhardt’ (Operation Reinhardt), named after Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of the Security Police and main organiser of the Holocaust, who was assassinated by Czech resisters at the end of May.21 During the months from mid-March to May 1942, Jews from the ghettos in the Lublin and Lemberg (Lwów) districts were deported to Belzec or Sobibor and killed there. The majority of the victims had been selected by the local occupation administration and the police; most of them were considered ‘unfit for work’ or were deportees from the German Reich or Slovakia who had been sent to the Lublin region. Then, due to an order of the German military, all transports in Poland except military ones were halted temporarily in June 1942. At this time, however ‘Aktion Reinhardt’ expanded its capacity by replacing the gas chamber buildings in the camps with bigger installations, which also occurred in Treblinka in September. 20 Y. Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camp, rev. ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018). 21 It is unclear why the Operation’s official code-name was ‘Reinhardt’ when Heydrich’s actual first name was ‘Reinhard’.

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In June–July 1942 preparations got under way to exterminate all Jewish communities in the General Government within a short time. On 19 July 1942, during an inspection tour in Poland, SS leader Heinrich Himmler ordered that by the end of the year all Jews except a necessary workforce should be murdered. Three days later the killing operation expanded to the districts of Warsaw and Radom. Europe’s biggest Jewish community, that in Warsaw, thus faced destruction from July 1942, when the German police ordered 10,000 ghetto inmates to be deported every day. The leader of the Warsaw Judenrat, Adam Czerniaków, committed suicide right after receipt of this order. Deportations from Warsaw began on 22 July 1942. Every day, 5,000 persons were transported to the Treblinka death camp.22 In early August, the death transports from the Radom district were directed to Treblinka as well. For this reason, at the end of August the whole extermination machinery broke down and had to be stopped for a week, only to be restarted in September. By the end of 1942, 711,000 human beings had been murdered at Treblinka, among them at least 254,000 from the Warsaw ghetto.23 Even the Auschwitz camp never saw that enormous scale of human destruction in such a short span of time. At the same time, deportations to Belzec camp intensified, while the rail connection to Sobibor broke down.24 Jews from Lwów, Lublin and Cracow ghettos and the surrounding regions were herded together and sent to Belzec. However, a plan to send Jews from Romania to Belzec failed.25 Nevertheless, the period from late July until November 1942 were the worst months of genocide in world history. Not only did ‘Aktion Reinhardt’ reach its full dimension, but in Auschwitz large-scale mass murder also started in July 1942, and in eastern Poland, hundreds of thousands of Jews were shot in mass executions between May and November 1942, when the ghettos were dissolved. Thus, the killing rate, especially in August and September 1942, averaged 20,000 human beings murdered each day. This is 22 Y. Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw 1939–1943: Ghetto, Underground, Revolt (Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 197–227; B. Engelking and J. Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 703–29. 23 C. Webb and M. Chocholatý, The Treblinka Death Camp: History, Biographies, Remembrance (Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2014). 24 M. Bem, Sobibor Extermination Camp, 1942–1943 (Amsterdam: Stichting Sobibor, 2015); J. Schelvis, Sobibor: A History of a Nazi Death Camp (Oxford University Press, 2007). 25 R. Kuwałek, Death Camp in Bełz·ec (Lublin: Pan´stwowe Muzeum na Majdanku, 2016); J. Ancel, The History of the Holocaust in Romania (Lincoln and Jerusalem: University of Nebraska Press, Yad Vashem, 2011), pp. 475–85.

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comparable to the magnitude of the infamous massacre of Babyn Yar in Kyiv at the end of September 1941, when in two days 33,771 Jews had been shot to death. All of this underscores that the peak killing period of the Holocaust took place within a very short time period, years before the end of the war. In December 1942, Belzec extermination camp stopped its operations, since there was no more space for mass graves on the camp territory. In Treblinka and Sobibor, after another pause of the transportation system, killings had restarted by mid-January 1943 and continued until August 1943 in Treblinka, and November 1943 in Sobibor. In 1943, Jews from other European countries, like Greece, Yugoslavia, the Netherlands and France, were also sent to the ‘Aktion Reinhardt’ camps. After the almost complete destruction of Jewish communities in Poland, and after two prisoner uprisings in August and October 1943, ‘Aktion Reinhardt’ came to an end. In Belzec already by early 1943 the exhumation and burning of corpses had started, as later occurred in Treblinka and Sobibor. These camp sites were completely dismantled and all their files burnt. According to Nazi German sources, around 1.4 million Jews were murdered in the three ‘Aktion Reinhardt’ death camps: 435,000 in Belzec, approximately 170,000 in Sobibor and 780,000 in Treblinka.26 Thus these three places were the major killing centres, where almost half of the Polish Jewish victims and other Jews from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, the Netherlands, France and Greece met their death. These statistics are probably incomplete, since other groups like Roma were killed in these places but remain largely unaccounted for in the sources.

Auschwitz and Lublin-Majdanek Camps Auschwitz concentration camp is the most infamous extermination centre of the Nazi regime, and in history. The camp, however, was not created as an extermination centre from the outset. It was rather planned as a regional concentration camp for Polish opponents of the occupation.27 It is under debate when decisions were taken to make Auschwitz an extermination centre for European Jewry. The character of the camp started to change when thousands of Soviet POWs were transferred to Auschwitz, 26 P. Witte and Stephen Tyas, ‘A new document on the deportation and murder of Jews during “Einsatz Reinhard” 1942’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 15:3 (2001), 468–86, which contains statistics for 1942, and additional information for 1943. 27 W. Długoborski and F. Piper (ed.), Auschwitz, 1940–1945: Central Issues in the History of the Camp, 5 vols. (Os´więcim: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2000).

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beginning in July 1941. In late September 1941, plans were set up to establish a second camp in Auschwitz near the main camp (Stammlager), which consisted of an eighteenth-century military garrison. Both in Auschwitz and Lublin-Majdanek, the SS leadership expected to imprison hundreds of thousands of Soviet POWs, to be taken over from the Wehrmacht and used as the workforce for the German settlement programmes. Thus, the vast Auschwitz-Birkenau (Brzezinka) camp, which rather resembled the typical German concentration camp, was set up. But in the end, 12,000 of the Soviet POWs came to Auschwitz, and nearly all of them had been worked to death by spring 1942.28 The first mass murder in Auschwitz using the disinfectant cyanide, Zyklon B, in early September 1941, also affected predominantly the Soviet POWs. Thus, it was crimes against groups other than Jews that served as a catalyst for the mass killing of Jews in concentration camps. In late 1941, a gas chamber was installed inside the crematorium of the main camp. The decision to send Jews to Auschwitz came only in early 1942. Until then, only individual Jews had been deported to the camp. From approximately February 1942 onwards, Jews from the forced labour camps in Upper Silesia, which had been set up for road construction, were sent to Auschwitz and killed there. By January 1942, the SS leadership needed a new workforce for their settlement programmes, since the Soviet POWs by and large had been starved to death and the Wehrmacht did not extradite as many as expected. Thus, Jews were to constitute the new workforce. From March 1942, Jews were sent to Auschwitz from Slovakia and France. Most of them died within weeks owing to the living conditions. In May 1942, however, a second gas chamber was installed in a farmer’s house near the new Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, called ‘Bunker 1’. Around June 1942 there began the infamous ‘selections’ of arriving Jews, and around 80 per cent of the arrivals were sent to this murder facility, which was soon supplemented by a gas chamber in a nearby house, called ‘Bunker 2’.29 Major deportations to Auschwitz started in late July 1942, especially from western Europe and the Polish regions around the camp, but soon also from 28 J. E. Schulte, Zwangsarbeit und Vernichtung: Das Wirtschaftsimperium der SS. Oswald Pohl und das SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt 1933–1945 (Paderborn: Schoeningh, 2001), pp. 332–64. 29 I. Gutman and M. Berenbaum (eds.), Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp (Bloomington: United States Holocaust Museum & Indiana University Press, 1994); R. J. van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002).

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Germany.30 In occupied western Europe transit camps for Jews had been installed, at Drancy near Paris, Mechelen in Belgium and Westerbork in the Netherlands. The inmates were deported to Auschwitz, and arrived at the ‘old ramp’, not far from Auschwitz-Birkenau. Then most of them were driven to the two ‘Bunkers’ and murdered there. In July 1942, the SS leadership also decided to set up a new extermination system. Four new big crematoria were to be built, with gas chambers attached. The first of these crematoria went into action by March 1943. In early 1943 mass deportations to Auschwitz intensified, predominantly from Polish Silesia and from Greece. Now the camp set up a system of branches in all of Polish Silesia, or took over former forced labour camps. Most of those selected for work were now transferred to these sub-camps. From February 1943 onwards, more than 22,000 Sinti and Roma from central and western Europe were deported to Auschwitz and confined in a special Zigeunerlager (Gypsy camp) there. Most of them died from the harsh living conditions in the camp; in August 1944 the surviving 5,600 persons were killed in the gas chambers.31 By far the most heinous extermination operation in Auschwitz occurred in spring 1944. German troops invaded their former ally Hungary in March 1944. Both German and Hungarian authorities prepared the mass deportation of Jews from Hungary and its annexed territories within a very short time span. The occupiers expected the deportation of up to 800,000 persons, including approximately 100,000 Christians of Jewish origin. Between 100,000 and 200,000 were to be selected as the workforce for the German armament industries. Under German guidance, Hungarian authorities put the Jews in improvised ghettos (with the exception of Budapest until late 1944), and organised the deportations. From 15 May until 9 July 1944, no fewer than 438,000 Jews were deported from Greater Hungary (with the exception of Budapest) to Auschwitz. In Birkenau the camp was reorganised for this purpose and a new ramp had been constructed inside the camp grounds. Around 330,000 of the deported were murdered immediately after arrival. Since the crematoria could not immediately burn that many corpses, open pits were dug. Some 75,000 Jews, almost all of them young men and women, were held in separate parts of the camp and afterwards transferred to other camps all over Europe, while 28,000 of the deported were registered as prisoners and stayed in the Auschwitz camp system.32 30 In detail: D. Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle, 1939–1945 (New York: Holt, 1997). 31 Jan Parcer (ed.), Los Cyganów w KL Auschwitz-Birkenau = das Schicksal der Sinti und Roma im KL Auschwitz-Birkenau (Os´więcim: Stowarzyszenie Romów w Polsce, 1994). 32 R. L. Braham, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, 3rd rev. Engl. ed. (Boulder: East European Monographs, 2016), pp. 646–936; C. Gerlach and G. Aly, Das

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The last ghetto in occupied Poland, that in Łódz´, after lengthy debates within the German leadership, was dissolved in the summer of 1944, during the Soviet summer offensive. After Himmler’s order in May to liquidate the ghetto, more than 7,000 inmates were sent to Kulmhof extermination camp and killed there by 14 July. In August, nearly all the other 65,000 Jews were sent to Auschwitz, where the majority of them were also murdered. Around 18,000 men and women were, like Jews from Greater Hungary, kept in separate barracks, and then transferred to other camps; others were registered as Auschwitz prisoners.33 Among the last Jews to be murdered in Auschwitz were those who had previously been imprisoned in the Theresienstadt (Terezín) ghetto in Bohemia. This ghetto had been set up by the German occupation authorities at the end of 1941 for propagandistic purposes, as a place for the Jewish elderly from the German Reich. The German leadership could not claim in public, that the latter were deported for work to the east, thus they fictionalised the ghetto like a Potemkin village. Actually, Theresienstadt became a death space for more than 33,000 inmates, a deportation hub to the extermination centres. Czech Jews were deported through Theresienstadt to the camps, as were many of the elderly inmates from Germany or Austria who often arrived with their family members. Some 88,000 Jews were sent from there, among them 46,000 to Auschwitz. Inside Auschwitz-Birkenau the specific position of these victims was prolonged from September 1943 on; they were put, like the Roma, in a separate part of the camp, the Familienlager (family camp). The camp administration, however, had already planned for the killing of the inmates after half a year; it actually took place from March 1944 on.34 In November 1944, SS leader Himmler ordered a halt to the mass murder in Auschwitz, probably due to a prisoner uprising and to his intention to negotiate a separate peace with the Western Allies. The crematoria were dismantled and destroyed. There are some indications that the facilities were to be transferred to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, but the evidence remains unclear.35 Nevertheless, individual murders continued in letzte Kapitel: Realpolitik, Ideologie und der Mord an den ungarischen Juden 1944/1945 (Stuttgart and Munich: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 2020), pp. 249–342. 33 A. Strzelecki, The Deportation of Jews from the Łódz´ Ghetto to KL Auschwitz and Their Extermination: A Description of the Events and the Presentation of Historical Sources (Os´więcim: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2006). 34 M. Kárný, ‘Das Theresienstädter Familienlager (Bllb) in Birkenau (September 1943–Juli 1944)’, Hefte von Auschwitz 20 (1997), 133–237. 35 F. Freund and B. Perz, ‘Auschwitz neu? Pläne und Maßnahmen zur Wiedererrichtung der Krematorien von Auschwitz-Birkenau in der Umgebung des KZ Mauthausen im

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Auschwitz, and most of the 65,000 remaining prisoners did not survive the Death Marches in January 1945 and the last months of the war. Until the early 1990s, historians maintained quite different assumptions about the number of victims of Auschwitz. An expert report of the Auschwitz State Museum then established a figure of 1.1 million victims of Auschwitz, among them 1 million Jews, but also predominantly Poles.36 New research has shown, however, that this figure for the murdered Jews from Greater Hungary and from Poland is somewhat high. It can now be accepted that approximately 900,000 Jews were killed in Auschwitz – 700,000 of them right after their arrival and another 200,000 as Auschwitz prisoners.37 The expansion of Auschwitz in late 1941 was closely connected to the construction of the Lublin-Majdanek camp, which was also turned into a killing centre. Both Auschwitz-Birkenau and Lublin-Majdanek were officially built as POW camps for the use of the Waffen-SS. They actually were meant for Polish (non-Jewish) prisoners, but in Majdanek, Jewish inmates played an important role from the beginning. From March 1942, Jews from the nearby region, as well as from Slovakia, Germany and even France were deported to the camp. In October 1942, the erection of a gas chamber building inside the camp was completed. Unlike in Auschwitz, the gas chamber did not play a central role in the killing of inmates or people arriving at Majdanek. Most of them were murdered in mass shootings in nearby forests or died from the poor conditions inside the camp. From early 1943 onwards, however, weak prisoners were brought to the gas chambers and asphyxiated either with Zyklon B or carbon monoxide. The major killing operations were by and large related to the transports from the ghettos of Warsaw and Białystok between March and September 1943. Finally, in early November 1943, all remaining Jewish inmates were executed during the so-called ‘Aktion Erntefest’ (Operation Harvest Festival). Nearly all other prisoners were evacuated to other camps before the Red Army liberated the area in July 1944.38 As newer research has

Februar 1945’, Dachauer Hefte. Studien und Dokumente zur Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager 20 (2004), 58–70. 36 F. Piper, Auschwitz: How Many Perished Jews, Poles, Gypsies (Krakow: Poligrafia ITS, 1992). 37 My own calculation in D. Pohl, Verfolgung und Massenmord in der NS-Zeit (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2003), p. 137. 38 B. Schwindt, Das Konzentrations- und Vernichtungslager Majdanek. Funktionswandel im Kontext der ‘Endlösung’ (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005); T. Mencel, Majdanek 1941–1944 (Lublin: Wydawnictwo Lubelskie, 1991); Z. Leszczyn´ska, Kronika obozu na Majdanku (Lublin: Wydawnictwo Lubelskie, 1980).

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documented, in Lublin-Majdanek camp 78,000 persons were murdered, among them 59,000 Jews.39 Beyond the six extermination camps mentioned above, there were a lot of other sites in German-occupied eastern Europe which can be called killing centres, but their exact categorisations are under debate. The term ‘Nazi extermination camp’ is by and large applied to places whose main purpose was to kill by gas humans who had been deported, and where there was a certain camp-like infrastructure, unlike the thousands of other execution sites all over occupied eastern Europe. First and foremost, it is necessary to mention Maly Trostenets (Belorussian: Maly Trastsyanets) near Minsk, which was set up as a forced labour camp of the Minsk Security Police in April 1942. From May 1942 onwards, transports from Germany, Austria and Theresienstadt were sent to the Maly Trostenets, and all arriving deportees were immediately shot near the camp, and from June until December 1942 some were also killed in so-called gas vans. In 1944 the camp area served as an execution site for members of the Belorussian population captured during anti-partisan raids. Probably 50,000 to 60,000 victims were killed in Maly Trostenets.40 Another more improvised killing site was Bronnaya Gora (Belorussian: Bronnaya Hara) northeast of Brest, near the highway to Minsk. The German police fenced an area with barbed wire at a train station near the related village and used it as execution grounds for Jews who were being transported there from other regions. From June to November 1942 Jews from southwestern Belorussia, especially from the ghettos of Pinsk, Brest and Kobryn, were sent by train to Bronnaya Gora and killed in mass shootings by German police. Though there is only scarce evidence for this extermination centre, estimates of the number of victims run from 30,000 to 50,000.41 There were many other camps which were also used as execution sites, especially for Jewish victims, but they are in general not counted among the extermination camps. The Lemberg Janowskastraße (Lwów Janowska) camp on the western outskirts of that city not only housed thousands of Jewish forced labourers, but the area nearby was also an execution site predominantly for Jews. Around 35,000 men, women and children were shot there, 39 T. Kranz, Die Vernichtung der Juden im Konzentrationslager Majdanek (Lublin: Staatliches Museum Majdanek, 2007). 40 P. Rentrop, Tatorte der ‘Endlösung’. Das Ghetto Minsk und die Vernichtungsstätte von Maly Trostinez (Berlin: Metropol, 2011). 41 C. Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde. Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrußland 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1999), pp. 716–23.

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especially from early 1943 onwards, after the Belzec extermination camp had been closed.42 During the above-mentioned Operation ‘Harvest Festival’ on 3–4 November 1943, SS and police units shot 42,000 Jews, most of whom had been deported from the Warsaw ghetto, in the camps of Poniatowa, Trawniki, Lublin-Majdanek and elsewhere.43 From 1943 onwards, several concentration camp administrations within the German Reich set up improvised gas chambers in order to kill weak prisoners, crimes which intensified prior to the evacuation of the camps during the last months of the war. Nearly all major camps installed these killing facilities and murdered prisoners there, both Jewish and non-Jewish, like in Mauthausen (and Gusen), Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück, Stutthof or Neuengamme. The dimensions of these killings are difficult to reconstruct due to the lack of sources.44 Only very few of those camps which were established by Nazi Germany’s Axis allies can be categorised as extermination centres. Two exceptions apply: some camps run by the Ustasha in Greater Croatia, and Romanian camps in occupied southern Ukraine. When the fascist Ustasha movement took power in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina in April 1941, the administration very quickly moved to establish camps. The first were the Gospic camps in Dalmatia near the Adriatic coast, where Jews and Serbs were killed en masse from June 1941 on. When Italian troops entered Dalmatia to take over the region, the Ustasha moved its camps to the north, to the Jasenovac camp complex at the Croatia–Bosnia border. At least 85,000 inmates – Serbs, Jews, Roma and some Croats – were killed there by the guards, in most cases when new transports arrived.45 When Romania joined the German attack against the Soviet Union in July 1941, it also participated in the war of extermination. Romanian authorities set up their own zone of occupation in the Odessa area, called Transnistria, and murdered Jews there. Tens of thousands of Jews, especially from Odessa proper, were deported to northern Transnistria, and either shot right after debarkation from the trains, or taken to the large Golta camps, 42 D. Pohl, Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien 1941–1944. Organisation und Durchführung eines staatlichen Massenverbrechens (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996), pp. 332–56. 43 S. Klemp, ‘Aktion Erntefest’: Mit Musik in den Tod: Rekonstruktion eines Massenmords (Münster: Geschichtsort Villa ten Hompel, 2013). 44 E. Kogon, H. Langbein and A. Rückerl (eds.), Nazi Mass Murder: A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); G. Morsch and B. Perz (eds.), Neue Studien zu nationalsozialistischen Massentötungen durch Giftgas (Berlin: Metropol, 2011). 45 S. Goldstein, 1941: The Year That Keeps Returning (New York: New York Review, 2013); I. Goldstein, Jasenovac (Zagreb: Faktura, 2018).

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named after the Romanian administration capital (part of Pervomaysk). In Bogdanovka, Domanevka and Akmetchetka, primitive detention places had been established. All of the inmates were shot by Romanian and Ukrainian police as of December 1941, probably more than 60,000 human beings.46

Organisation and Personnel The Nazi killing centres developed in several stages. Mass murder began during the war in Poland, with the killings of psychiatric patients in specific facilities in October–November 1939. During the early period, a network of high-level Nazi state institutions – like the Führer’s Chancellery or the Ministry of Interior – developed, together with a psychiatric infrastructure, an infrastructure for mass murder. However, already the killing of the mentally ill in western Poland had been taken over by an SS unit, the Sonderkommando Lange, named after its leader Herbert Lange. This interplay between traditional institutions, occupation administrations and the SS continued with the setting-up of the first extermination camp in Kulmhof. The death camps of ‘Aktion Reinhardt’ relied to a large extent on experts and know-how from the ‘Euthanasia’ programme. On the other hand, the concentration camp administrations worked together with psychiatric staff during the killing of ‘undesired’ prisoners in the ‘14f13’ operation of 1941, when camp inmates were deported to ‘Euthanasia’ killing centres. And the camp staff in Auschwitz organised the killing on their own with Zyklon B. Finally, in 1943 the big crematoria with attached gas chambers were erected. The construction and expansion brought together state, Party and business leaders, architects, technicians and contractors who were paid by the SS.47 The personnel of Kulmhof and the ‘Aktion Reinhardt’ were rather different from the camp staff of Auschwitz and Lublin-Majdanek. While most of the small German staff in Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, less than 150 men, came from the ‘Euthanasia’ organisation, the camps were guarded by several hundred former Soviet POWs, who were recruited for the Trawniki training camp.48 In Auschwitz, the camp was run by experienced concentration camp cadres, some of whom, like the commander Rudolf Höß, had been active in 46 J. Ancel, Transnistria, 1941–1942: The Romanian Mass Murder Campaigns, 3 vols. (Goldstein-Goren Research Center, Tel Aviv University, 2003), I, pp. 333–8. 47 Cf. R. J. van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002). 48 S. Berger, Experten der Vernichtung. Das T4-Reinhardt-Netzwerk in den Lagern Belzec, Sobibor und Treblinka (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2013); A. Benz, Handlanger der SS. Die Rolle der Trawniki-Männer im Holocaust (Berlin: Metropol, 2015).

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the camp system since 1933. The guards came from general SS units, here the ‘Death Head’ units, but were reinforced by ethnic Germans from Romania or Hungary, who had been recruited by the Waffen-SS, and in 1944–5 even by elderly personnel from the Wehrmacht.49 Both Auschwitz and Majdanek had large sections of women’s camps, run by female guards who were not official members of the SS.50 While an extermination camp like Treblinka was managed by approximately 30 Germans, most of them low-ranking, and guarded by 150 Trawniki men, in Auschwitz all in all more than 8,000 WaffenSS men served. The Nazi German system of extermination centred on the death camps, but its organisation required a much larger administrative apparatus. The deportations from outside occupied Poland and the occupied Soviet territories were organised in a centralised fashion, especially by Himmler’s staff and the ‘Jewish desk’ of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Office) in Berlin under Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann and his colleagues organised the internments and deportations not only from Germany and occupied western Europe, but also from the Axis countries like Slovakia or Croatia, and finally in 1944 from occupied Hungary. They worked closely together with the police and administrators, both German and national, in these countries, but also with the German railway administrators, who were responsible for transporting the victims to their deaths.51 In occupied Poland and Soviet Union, the organisation of mass murder was much more decentralised, within the Warthegau (the occupation region around Poznan´) or within the General Government, where a small office in Lublin was responsible for its co-ordination. A large number of personnel was, however, deployed for the ghetto raids, and for conveying the Jews to the camps. Many more administrative personnel worked for the expropriation of the victims prior to their deportation and, afterwards, the labour administration often decided which Jews were to be exempted from deportation as a valuable workforce (and which not). Thus, the whole system of extermination comprised probably many more than 100,000 German men (and some few thousand women), not counting all of those who were

49 K. Orth, Die Konzentrationslager-SS: Sozialstrukturelle Analysen und biographische Studien (Göttingen: Wallstein-Verlag, 2000); A. Lasik, Załoga SS w KL Auschwitz w latach 1940– 1945 (Bydgoszcz: Wydawn. Uczelniane WSP, 1994). 50 E. Mailänder, Female SS Guards and Workaday Violence: The Majdanek Concentration Camp, 1942–1944 (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2015). 51 Cf. the research project on the reconstruction of all deportations: www1 .yadvashem.org/yv/en/about/institute/deportations.asp.

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implicated in the mass executions in Poland, the Soviet Union, the Baltic states, and Serbia – SS, police, Wehrmacht and administrators. The decisive steps were taken in an interplay between the central institutions in Berlin and the periphery in the occupied countries. This was based on a consensus that all of the Jews (and Roma) in Europe had to leave the German sphere of influence or be put in ‘reservation zones’ to die out in the long term. The mass murder of the mentally ill, of Polish intelligentsia in 1940 and the mass executions in the occupied Soviet Union offered the perpetrators a new perspective: to kill all Jews within a short time, before the war ended. Though by the summer of 1942 the majority of German functionaries knew about the mass extermination, obviously there were few debates about the ‘Final Solution’. The only major debates from mid-1942 concerned the necessity to keep a Jewish workforce, when the German war strategy had failed and more and more German men had to go to the front. But 80– 90 per cent of the pauperised Jews were considered ‘unfit for work’ and thus doomed to extinction. During 1941/2 the term ‘annihilation through labour’ was discussed (as a process which actually took place in most camps in the east) but as a concept and official policy it remained very limited, and explicitly applied rather to other groups of prisoners than Jews.52

Victims, Evasion, Resistance The Nazi German camp systems were meant for all groups designated as enemies by the Nazi regime and its followers. Thus, their inmate constituency consisted of a broad variety of political opponents from the German Reich and all of occupied Europe – Jews, Roma, in Germany and Austria also homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and others. Among these groups, from late 1941 almost exclusively Jews and Roma were brought to the camps for extermination, either by direct means like executions or killing by gas, or by ill-treatment, exhaustion and disease. Unlike most other groups, Jews and Roma from late 1941 onwards were almost indiscriminately deported to the camps, including whole families, but predominantly women, children and the elderly. Men aged 17 to approximately 50 years old had better chances to stay in forced labour facilities and

52 Cf. U. Herbert, ‘Labour and extermination: economic interest and the primacy of Weltanschauung in National Socialism’, Past and Present 138 (1993), 144–95; M. Buggeln, Das System der KZ-Außenlager. Krieg, Sklavenarbeit und Massengewalt (Bonn: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 2012), pp. 161–6.

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either not be deported, as in the ‘Aktion Reinhardt’, or, as in Auschwitz and Lublin-Majdanek, be selected for work inside the camp. The victims of the extermination centres came from all over Europe, from the occupied Channel Islands in the west, Norway in the north, Minsk in the east, to Italy in the south and even the island of Rhodes. They had faced different histories of persecution, in Germany since 1933, in other countries since the war began. And outside Poland, most Jews had little knowledge of the fate of the deportees or of the extermination centres. Underground publications mentioned the mass murder in the Soviet Union from autumn 1941 onwards, but even a year later only small groups like the Jewish Councils had merely fragmentary knowledge on what was going on in Poland. Inside Poland, however, knowledge spread by the summer of 1942, when the brutal raids inside the ghettos and the deportation of children and elderly made clear that deportations were not leading people to forced labour. The death trains often returned within days, the clothing of the murdered was processed in the ghettos, and rumours of their fate were widespread. Deportation to extermination often took days, not only from remote countries like Norway, but even within Poland. Inside Poland and, from late 1942, also in other countries, freight cars were used, with up to 150 persons standing crammed into them. Conditions were unbearable, and a certain percentage of the victims died en route.53 Nevertheless, there were widespread efforts to avoid deportation, to assume a false identity, to go into hiding and even to escape from the deportation trains.54 But these endeavours by and large depended on the local population, who often behaved in a hostile manner or feared being punished for helping Jews; in Poland and the occupied Soviet Union such helpers risked their lives. Jewish underground groups, sometimes also the Jewish councils, organised escapes and hiding spaces. And in lots of cases, they prepared armed resistance for the event of the final deportation, the most famous being the Warsaw ghetto uprisings in January and April 1943, and the failed Bialystok ghetto uprising in August 1943.55

53 S. Gigliotti, The Train Journey: Transit, Captivity, and Witnessing in the Holocaust (New York: Berghahn, 2009). 54 T. von Fransecky, Flucht von Juden aus Deportationszügen in Frankreich, Belgien und den Niederlanden (Berlin: Metropol, 2014); F. Bruder, Das eigene Schicksal selbst bestimmen: Fluchten aus Deportationszügen der ‘Aktion Reinhardt’ in Polen (Hamburg and Münster: Unrast, 2019). 55 S. Krakowski, The War of the Doomed. Jewish Armed Resistance in Poland 1942–1944 (New York and London: Holmes & Meier, 1984).

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Inside the camps, those who had survived the ‘selections’ had a short time to live. At Auschwitz, approximately 15–20 per cent of the arriving deportees were chosen for forced labour and not immediately killed. Conditions were similar to the worst of the other concentration camps like Mauthausen, with a lack of nutrition, especially until mid-1943, constant exhaustion and illtreatment. In Kulmhof and the ‘Aktion Reinhardt’ camps, only about 1 per cent of the deportees were selected for work; each of these extermination camps had a workforce of several hundred prisoners. In all of these camps, prisoners whose health deteriorated or who had been heavily beaten, were also sent to the gas chamber. Working in the abyss of these camps was the Sonderkommando (special unit), those prisoners who laboured in the extermination facilities and had to process the corpses. They were in an absolutely unbearable situation, forced to keep the extermination system functioning. The members of these units were nearly all killed after a while, as they were witnesses. Due to courage and good luck some members of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando were able to escape, and testified after the war; others left handwritten notes and photographs, which were hidden and found after the war.56 Prisoners tried to escape from all the extermination camps: from Auschwitz alone, around 660 persons. Probably the most famous escapees were Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, who in 1943 compiled a report on the extermination facilities. Escape from the other death camps was even more difficult, probably only some dozens found their way out of Kulmhof or the ‘Aktion Reinhardt’ camps, respectively. The only possible means of escape from the latter camps was revolt. Facing immediate death, the Jewish forced labourers in Treblinka revolted on 2 August 1943, those in Sobibor on 19 October 1943. Though several hundred inmates escaped each of these two camps, nearly all were apprehended and killed later; only about 120 were able to survive. The extermination sections of these camps had been so isolated that obviously none of the Sonderkommando members survived. In Auschwitz, the Sonderkommando of Crematorium IV revolted on 7 October 1944, and were even able to destroy parts of the extermination infrastructure. Nearly all of its members were murdered afterwards, but some managed to survive by successfully mingling with the other prisoners. Considerable efforts have been made to reconstruct the identities of all victims who perished in the extermination centres. For the victims from 56 G. Greif, We Wept without Tears. Testimonies of the Jewish Sonderkommando from Auschwitz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).

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central and western Europe, from Norway, Greece, and Italy, this has been by and large achieved,57 but only fragmentarily for those from Hungary, and to a very limited extent for those from Poland, the Baltic states and the Soviet Union. On the other hand, those creating the memorials in Auschwitz, Majdanek and Jasenovac tried to compile lists and databases of victims. The most comprehensive database is located at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, covering approximately two-thirds of all the Jews murdered.58

Environments, Knowledge The Nazi regime and its perpetrators in general tried to keep their mass murders secret. They also considered occupied eastern Europe as a field with no legal boundaries, where the public sphere was dominated by the Germans and public opinion had no role. Most of the extermination centres were established there, but this was not due solely to these assumptions; rather, to the proximity of the victims. In occupied Poland, large parts of the society were aware of mass exterminations by late 1942. People living in the regions where the camps were located obtained even precise information, some even managed to look inside the camps. And, of course, all German occupiers knew about the mass murder. Some transmitted this information to relatives in the German Reich. Still knowledge outside of Poland was much more limited. Within Germany and Austria, rumours about the mass executions occurring in the occupied Soviet Union were widespread, but apparently only very few had information about the extermination camps. Even less was known in occupied western Europe; probably only in 1943 did Jewish organisations there gain even fragmented knowledge. The reports of Auschwitz escapees like Vrba and Wetzler were not disseminated, though they were known to the Hungarian Jewish leadership. Thus, the majority of Jews in Greater 57 Die österreichischen Opfer des Holocaust. The Austrian Victims of the Holocaust (Vienna: Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes, 2001) (CD-ROM); Serge Klarsfeld and Maxime Steinberg (eds.), Mémorial de la déportation des Juifs de Belgique (Bruxelles, Union des Déportés Juifs en Belgique, 1982); Serge Klarsfeld, Memorial to the Jews Deported From France, 1942–1944: Documentation of the Deportation of the Victims of the Final Solution in France (New York: Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, 1983); Hans Bloemendal, In Memoriam (The Hague: Sdu Uitgeverij Koninginnegracht, 1995); Gedenkbuch – Opfer der Verfolgung der Juden unter der nationalsozialistischen Gewaltherrschaft in Deutschland 1933 – 1945, 4 vols. (Koblenz: Bundesarchiv, 2006); Aure Recanati, A Memorial Book of the Deportation of the Greek Jews, 3 vols. (Jerusalem: Erez, 2006); Liliana Picciotto Fargion, Il libro della memoria: gli ebrei deportati dall’Italia (1943–1945) (Milan: Mursia, 1991). 58 The Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names, https://yvng.yadvashem.org.

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Hungary had no idea of the destination of the deportation. The Auschwitz administration even deceived the relatives of the deportees, who received postcards from ‘Waldsee’, which gave the wrong impression of a bearable place. Outside German hegemony, the Polish government-in-exile in London was quite well informed through underground channels, but it delayed publishing this information, was restricted by British censorship and ordered only limited responses from the underground inside Poland.59 Apparently it made no plans to sabotage or destroy camp infrastructures or railway lines leading to the extermination centres. The Roosevelt administration, too, did not answer pleas to bomb Auschwitz-Birkenau or its railway lines, though US planes bombed the Auschwitz-Monowitz rubber plant in August 1944 and, from the air, photographed Auschwitz-Birkenau, including the crematoria.60 Though resistance movements all over occupied Europe protected Jews, few planned to sabotage the German system of mass murder. One deportation train from Belgium was attacked by a resistance unit in 1943.61 The world did little to help the Jews who faced annihilation.

Conclusion All in all, the Nazi regime and its allies ran around 15,000 camps between 1933 and 1945 – more than 44,000, if the smallest branches for forced labourers are included.62 More than 10 million persons were deported to these camps, among them more than 5 million Soviet POWs and around 3 million Jews. More than 95 per cent of the deported Jews were killed in the camps. In addition, at least 2 million Jews were murdered outside of camps in mass executions especially in the Soviet Union, the Baltic states and Poland, and around another half a million Jews died in ghettos.63 59 D. Engel, Facing a Holocaust: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1943–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); M. Fleming, Auschwitz, the Allies and Censorship of the Holocaust (Cambridge University Press, 2014); J. D. Zimmerman, The Polish Underground and the Jews, 1939–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2015). 60 M. J. Neufeld, The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies Have Attempted It? (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000). 61 M. Schreiber, Stille Rebellen. Der Überfall auf den 20. Deportationszug nach Auschwitz (Berlin: Aufbau, 2000). 62 US Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, www .ushmm.org/research/publications/encyclopedia-camps-ghettos. 63 D. Pohl, ‘Historiography and Nazi Killing Sites’, in Killing Sites: Research and Remembrance, ed. International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2015), pp. 31–46; D. Pohl, ‘Ghettos’, in Der Ort des Terrors. Geschichte der

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The extermination camps evolved from the concentration camp structures that were built in 1933, but also from the mass murder of the mentally ill, the so-called ‘Euthanasia’ programme that occurred in the psychiatric facilities. The killing centres originated however in the wartime context of mass executions of Jews in the occupied parts of the Soviet Union during the second half of 1941, and their planning was connected to the policies against millions of Soviet POWs. The purpose of the killing centres was first and foremost to murder Jews, but also other groups like Roma; in Auschwitz and Majdanek, Poles, Soviet citizens and others fell victim to mass murder. The murders in these extermination camps are often called ‘industrial’ murders owing to their modern organisation and techniques of crime. Actually, they were as primitive and brutal as mass shootings, with the perpetrators facing the victims, their chaotic organisation, ill-treatment and long agony for the victims. The killings in the gas chambers did not fully replace the mass executions, but went in parallel, especially in 1942–3. Nazi Germany’s places of detention existed in a global ‘century of camps’ that began in Cuba in 1896, South Africa in 1900 and German Southwest Africa in 1904.64 Between 1930 and 1959, it continued not only in Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s empire, but also in authoritarian regimes like pre-war Poland, the Austrian ‘Ständestaat’, in Franco’s Spain and even in Chiang Kaishek’s China. After the war, the biggest camp system in world history arose in communist China’s Laogai, which continued at least until the 1980s (and at least 2019 in Xinjiang province), while the camps in communist North Korea (Kwan-li-so) still exist. Between approximately 1942 and 1945, Nazi Germany controlled the biggest camp systems in the world. While confinement, brutalisation or lack of nutrition, and use of prisoners for forced labour are rather common features of camps all over the world, the racist system and especially the mass killings in camps are specific features of Nazi German camps. Only Nazi Germany established camps each of which was meant exclusively for the killing of hundreds of thousands of human beings, along with small groups of prisoners considered necessary to operate these facilities. And the number of survivors, especially outside Auschwitz and Majdanek, was extremely low. In this sense, the Nazi German extermination centres were unprecedented, and marked a new step in the history of mass violence and genocide. nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, vol. I X: Arbeitserziehungslager, Ghettos, Jugendschutzlager, Polizeihaftlager, Sonderlager, Zigeunerlager, Zwangsarbeiterlager, ed. W. Benz and B. Distel (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2009), pp. 161–91. 64 J. Kotek and P. Rigoulot, Le siècle des camps (Paris: J.-C. Lattès, 2000), pp. 47–94.

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Bibliographic Note There is no overall synthesis of the history of all Nazi camps, only on specific complexes like the concentration camps (Wachsmann, KL) or the ‘Aktion Reinhardt’ killing centres (Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka), and histories of individual camps. The genocidal mass murder in the camps is dealt with in the major histories of the Holocaust (those of Hilberg, Yahil, Longerich and Cesarani) and of the mass murder of European Roma (e.g. R. Rose (ed.), The Nazi Genocide of the Sinti and Roma (Heidelberg: Documentary and Cultural Centre of German Sinti and Roma, 1995), but there is no recent Englishlanguage general history of the Nazi crimes.

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State Violence during World War Two raz segal*

This chapter focuses on Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary. I first consider why state violence has remained on the margins of Holocaust scholarship. Next, I present a historical account and an argument about the settler colonial and genocidal character of state violence during World War Two. This section can offer only glimpses into the events and processes it discusses. I highlight similarities between the settler colonial projects of the three states and how anti-Jewish persecution and violence unfolded as an integral part of these destructive processes, which not only targeted other groups as well but also the very idea of a diverse society. I then explore accounts of survivors, mostly – but not only – Jews, who turn our attention to state violence in a way that challenges global Holocaust memory and its purported focus on survivors’ voices.1 Finally, I address the way in which institutes of global Holocaust memory can blur the genocidal assaults of some states during World War Two, which then helps blur and even deny current state violence. I argue that the problematic use of the term ‘antisemitism’, both in global Holocaust memory and in scholarship, facilitates this deeply troubling phenomenon.

* I thank Anat Plocker, Debórah Dwork, Kobi Kabalek and Amos Goldberg for taking the time to read drafts of this chapter and for offering important comments and advice. I also thank the editors, Wendy Lower and Ben Kiernan, for the opportunity to contribute to this volume and for their helpful suggestions. Any mistakes and shortcomings are, of course, mine. 1 I use ‘global Holocaust memory’ to denote central ideas about the Holocaust that institutes such as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) and Yad Vashem maintain in their work that both to support scholarship and as state agencies of memory. In this chapter, I challenge ideas about what forms of violence are considered part of the Holocaust; where it happened; key motivations; how we understand antisemitism; and national narratives, such as the one about the rescue of Jews in Bulgaria.

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The Marginalised Place of State Violence in Holocaust Scholarship Important studies in the last decade have focused on state violence during World War Two, treating anti-Jewish persecution, mass violence, mass deportations, mass murder and cultural destruction within this broader context. Scholars have dealt with state violence in states allied to Nazi Germany in southeast and southern Europe that remained independent throughout the war or for most of it. Important books and articles – based on sophisticated readings of newly uncovered primary sources – have considerably complemented and shaped in innovative ways our knowledge and understanding of wartime Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Croatia and Italy.2 Yet this work has remained on the margins of Holocaust scholarship, with only very few references. For example, in the recent Companion to the Holocaust, no chapter deals with state violence in those states in a lengthy edited volume that otherwise certainly delivers on its promise to ‘orient new places, introduce new protagonists, and reappraise the historical contexts and locations that produced the events we now call the Holocaust’.3 Two related factors explain this strange situation. First, many female scholars, such as Holly Case, have studied state violence in southeast and southern Europe during World War Two, and they have produced path-breaking studies, primarily on local and regional levels. Holocaust scholarship as a field, however, tends to 2 For research on southeast Europe, see Holly Case, Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during World War II (Stanford University Press, 2009); Emily Greble, Sarajevo, 1941–1945: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Hitler’s Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011); Alexander Korb, Im Schatten des Weltkrieges: Massengewalt der Ustaša gegen Serben, Juden und Roma in Kroatien 1941–1945 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2013); Nadège Ragaru, ‘Nationalizing the Holocaust: ‘foreign’ Jews and the making of indifference in Macedonia under Bulgarian occupation’, in The Holocaust and European Societies: Social Processes and Social Dynamics, ed. Andrew Löw and Frank Bajohr (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 105–26; Árpád von Klimó, Remembering Cold Days: The 1942 Massacre of Novi Sad, Hungarian Politics, & Society, 1942– 1989 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018); Vladimir Solonari, Purifying the Nation: Population Exchange and Ethnic Cleansing in Nazi-Allied Romania (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press; Washington DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2010); Raz Segal, Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown, and Mass Violence, 1914– 1945 (Stanford University Press, 2016). Earlier studies on state violence specifically against Jews did not, for the most part, consider the links between state policies and violence against a number of groups. See Randolph L. Braham, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Jean Ancel, History of the Holocaust: Romania, 2 vols. (Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2002); and Frederick Chary, The Bulgarian Jews and the Final Solution 1940– 1944 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972). For research on Italy, see n. 78 below. 3 Simone Gigliotti and Hilary Earl, ‘Introduction’, in A Companion to the Holocaust, ed. Simone Gigliotti and Hilary Earl (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2020), pp. 1–17, at p. 3.

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turn the spotlight on male authors who produce large-scale histories. The most well-known recent example is Timothy Snyder’s Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (2015). The book treats southeast European states as peripheral to the events in eastern Europe and the Nazi–Soviet conflict, effectively glossing over the fates of some 1.7 million Jews who had lived in southeast Europe before World War Two. Snyder has explained that his analysis of Nazi and Soviet mass killings in the area he calls ‘the Bloodlands’ offers ‘the most radical defense of the unprecedented character of the Holocaust’.4 One way the book defends this formulation of the idea of the Holocaust as unique constitutes our second factor: marginalising state violence in southeast and southern Europe and arguing that states protected much more than destroyed Jews.5 The idea that the Holocaust is unique contributes significantly to the marginalisation and even erasure of the history of state violence during World War Two. It is important, therefore, to address the three main arguments made in defence of this idea: the unique character of Nazi antisemitism; the all-encompassing destructive scale of the Holocaust; and the irrationality of Nazi anti-Jewish policies in the context of the war. Saul Friedländer provided the most impactful attempt, within and outside academia, to discuss Nazi antisemitism as unique, when he coined the term ‘redemptive antisemitism’ in 1997 as a key explanation for the Holocaust in the first volume of his award-winning Nazi Germany and the Jews.6 The Nazis, Friedländer argued, saw the annihilation of Jews as the key for global redemption, which in his eyes rendered this form of racism unique. However, the idea of destruction of people as a greater good for the entire world, as seen by the perpetrators, had long defined European ideas about race and race science as a motor of progress, as Europeans built empires around the world in the last 500 years and, in the process, destroyed societies they saw as backward, ‘uncivilised’, barely human, or a threat to the redemptive quality of the spread of European civilisation on earth.7 4 See Timothy Snyder, ‘The Holocaust as a regional history: explaining the Bloodlands’, in Jewish Histories of the Holocaust, ed. Norman J. Goda (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2014), pp. 39–51, at p. 49; Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010). 5 Snyder, Black Earth, Ch. 9, ‘Sovereignty and survival’. For a critique of Snyder, see Raz Segal, ‘The modern state, the question of genocide, and Holocaust scholarship’, Journal of Genocide Research 20:1 (2018), 108–33. 6 Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. I: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1997), esp. Ch. 3. 7 One classic and still very important work on this is John H. Bodley, Victims of Progress, 6th ed. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015[1975]). For a critique of ‘redemptive antisemitism’, see A. Dirk Moses, ‘Redemptive anti-Semitism and the imperialist imaginary’, in Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination: Saul Friedländer and the Future

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It took British colonial authorities and settlers in Tasmania, an island south of Australia, for example, thirty years to destroy almost entirely the indigenous population that had lived there for thousands of years before the arrival of the British in 1803.8 Beginning in the late fifteenth century, Spanish occupiers and settlers in south and central America, to take another example, obliterated villages and enslaved people, destroyed indigenous memory sites and constructed churches on their ruins, murdered religious leaders and intentionally neglected people who succumbed to diseases that they had brought with them – all justified by dehumanisation and a host of legal and theological justifications.9 Jews during World War Two were not the first nor the last group to face a concerted attack to annihilate them ‘in the name of and for the defense of a Superior Race born to rule the world’, as W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1947.10 Recently historian Dan Michman has argued in yet another attempt to defend the idea of the Holocaust as unique that ‘the very fact of the broad scholarly interest in the many facets of the Holocaust points to its extraordinariness’.11 This assertion reproduces the very idea that Du Bois and many others have discussed: Europe as extraordinary, which renders, even if unintentionally, the lives of tens of millions of people around the world and countless societies who had faced European genocides and total destruction less interesting and, by implication, less valuable. Finally, while the Nazis’ anti-Jewish policies at times stood in contrast to their economic interests – especially the mass murder of numerous Jews whom the Nazis could have instead enslaved in order to work in war-related industries – the Nazis also engaged in the mass murder of about 3 million Soviet POWs, mostly through starvation, whom they also could have enslaved.12 The Spanish occupiers

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of Holocaust Studies, ed. Paul Betts and Christian Wiese (London: Continuum, 2010), pp. 233–54. Tom Lawson, The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014). Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999); David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (Oxford University Press, 1992). W. E. B. Du Bois, The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part which Africa Has Played in World History (New York: Viking, 1947), p. 23. Dan Michman, ‘Characteristics of Holocaust historiography and their contexts since 1990: emphases, perceptions, developments, debates’, in A Companion to the Holocaust, ed. Simone Gigliotti and Hilary Earl (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2020), pp. 211–32, at p. 218. In both cases, however, mass murder also stemmed from a key economic interest of the Nazis: to avoid shipment of food from Germany to the German army on the Eastern Front in order to ensure that Germans do not experience food shortages that could cause social unrest. The German army therefore needed to live off the land, which doomed the occupied population to perpetual food insecurity, malnutrition and starvation; the Nazis planned to murder more than 30 million people in that way. Christian Gerlach, The Extermination of the European Jews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 215–60.

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Map 13.1 World War Two in central and eastern Europe, 1939–1942.

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in south and central America acted similarly when they murdered indigenous people whose labour they might have employed. Furthermore, as historian Christian Gerlach has shown, the Nazis required 2,000 trains to deport Jews to death camps throughout the war, compared to around 20,000 trains every day that the Nazi operated in the areas they controlled, so that sending Jews to sites of systematic mass murder scarcely interfered with German military activities.13 This brief discussion demonstrates how histories of European colonialism, empire building and settler colonialism provide important context for understanding Nazism and the Holocaust – not the only context, of course, and not without problems, as discussions on the topic have shown.14 Yet these discussions have also remained confined geographically to ‘the Bloodlands’ of eastern Europe, even though processes of state violence in southeast Europe during World War Two were, in many cases, settler colonial projects.

Settler Colonial State Violence in Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary Ion Antonescu, Romania’s military dictator from January 1941 until his overthrow in August 1944, set a clear vision when he spoke in the Council of Ministers on 5 September 1941 about the multi-ethnic and multireligious regions of northern Bukovina and Bessarabia that the Romanian and German armies had just overrun in their attack on the Soviet Union: ‘total purification of all those who penetrated among us. I mean: Ukrainians, Greeks, Gaugazi, Jews, they all, row after row, will have to be evacuated’.15 According to historian Vladimir Solonari, the Romanian government considered three different proposals to achieve ‘total purification’ throughout the country between 1941 and 1943, involving the violent deportations of 3.5 million people – Jews and non-Jews – and the resettlement in Romania of 2 million supposedly ethnic Romanians, mostly from Ukraine and the northern Caucasus.16 This was an explicitly settler colonial design about ‘Greater 13 Ibid., pp. 283–7. 14 Thomas Kühne, ‘Colonialism and the Holocaust: continuities, causations, and complexities’, Journal of Genocide Research 15:3 (2013), 339–62; Roberta Pergher, Mark Roseman, Jürgen Zimmerer, Shelley Baranowski, Doris L. Bergen and Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Scholarly forum on the Holocaust and genocide’, Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 27:1 (2013), 40–73. 15 Quoted in Vladimir Solonari, ‘Model province: explaining the Holocaust of Bessarabian and Bukovinian Jewry’, Nationalities Papers 34:4 (2006), 487. Gaugazi are an Eastern Orthodox Christian group who speak a Turkic language. 16 Vladimir Solonari, ‘An important new document on the Romanian policy of ethnic cleansing during World War II’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 21:2 (2007), 268–97. On the combined political and academic efforts in Romania during the 1920s and 1930s to imagine a Romanian collective – within and beyond the state’s borders – in bio-political

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Romania’ – that is, a design of territorial expansion based on racist ideas of supremacy – which targeted for destruction borderland societies as a whole. Romania had lost significant borderland territories in 1940: northern Bukovina and Bessarabia to the Soviet Union (June), northern Transylvania to Hungary (August) and southern Dobruja to Bulgaria (September). These loses stemmed from German and Italian pressure on Romania and its neighbours to reach territorial agreements primarily in order to prevent confrontation among their allies. Within a few months, the ‘Greater Romania’ that had emerged after World War One shrunk in humiliation. In a state where for decades authorities and many in society had excluded ethnic Hungarians, Bulgarians, Ukrainians, Germans, Roma and Jews from the vision of an ethnonational ‘Greater Romania’, it required very little to view those groups as enemies allied to hostile neighbouring states. Indeed, the state quickly blamed Jews in northern Bukovina and Bessarabia as Soviet sympathisers who had aided the Soviet takeover of the region in June 1940. Without evidence besides the vision of the state, Jews in those regions had now become, in the eyes of state authorities, a security threat. When Romanian authorities returned to rule those regions in summer 1941, their brutal assault on local Jews confirmed the power of that baseless conviction. From summer 1941 to summer 1942, they robbed, abused, deported and murdered 350,000 Jews in Bessarabia, northern Bukovina and Transnistria, a Romanian-occupied Soviet strip of land between the Dniester and Bug rivers.17 The Romanian authorities also deported to Transnistria around 25,000 Roma from across the country, mostly in June and September 1942; fewer than 12,000 survived the hunger, lack of shelter, disease and mass violence of the occupiers and their accomplices.18 The state persecuted and deported a few thousand members of small Christian groups as well.19 Yet terms, see Marius Turda, ‘The nation as object: race, blood, and biopolitics in interwar Romania’, Slavic Review 66:3 (2007), 413–41. 17 The number of Jewish victims of mass murder in Bessarabia and northern Bukovina in the summer of 1941, also killed by local Romanians and Ukrainians, amounted to 60,000 people. The Romanian authorities initiated extremely violent death marches of another 200,000 Jews from those regions to Transnistria, where less than 50,000 remained alive by November 1943. The Romanian occupation regime in Transnistria also engaged in the mass murder of 180,000 of the 200,000 local Jews. See Ancel, History of the Holocaust: Romania, II, pp. 1347–403, esp. 1387–9. 18 Solonari, Purifying the Nation, Ch. 14; M. Benjamin Thorne, ‘Assimilation, invisibility, and the eugenic turn in the ‘Gypsy Question’ in Romanian society, 1938–1943’, Romani Studies 21:2 (2011), 177–205. 19 On the persecution of the Mileraristi, an Orthodox Christian sect, and Jehovah’s Witnesses in Bessarabia, see Radu Ioanid, The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies under the Antonescu Regime, 1940–1944 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), pp. 154–5. On the deportation of 2,000 neo-Protestant Inochentists to Transnistria, see

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these campaigns of state violence and mass murder fell short of the murderous vision of Antonescu and the Romanian authorities of those border territories and the rest of the state. Indeed, half of Romania’s Jews (approximately 375,000 people) would survive the war, after the Romanian leadership refused from October 1942 onwards to deport Jews from the rest of Romania to Germanoccupied Poland for murder in the Belzec death camp as part of the ‘final solution’.20 Still, the vision of ‘Greater Romania’ stood in the background of this change of policy. From summer 1942 onwards, Romanian leaders started to plan for the possibility of German defeat, which now rendered mass murder of Jews an undesirable policy – especially since Antonescu and others at the head of the state very much believed that Jews controlled Moscow, London and Washington DC. Antisemitism could thus fuel mass murder of Jews, but it could also push the same people to de-escalate state violence against Jews.21 The hearts and eyes of Romania’s leaders now focused on the most important borderland for ‘Greater Romania’ and the one that, from August 1940, remained divided between Hungary and Romania: Transylvania.22 Antonescu and the Romanian leadership had always construed the country’s participation in World War Two as a way to reoccupy the region, and the fall of Nazi Germany, as they weighed the possibilities, meant merely a smaller ‘Greater Romania’, not its end. Including Transylvania and its Romanian population in it would count as a major victory in their war. They thus accepted that more minority populations than they had planned would remain in the state, but they refused to part completely with their efforts to push ‘unwanted’ people out. Romanian authorities thus devised a plan that never materialised of large-scale emigration of Jews to Palestine,23 and another plan that also remained on paper to remove a million ‘non-Romanians’ from Bukovina and Bessarabia and all

20 21

22

23

Dennis Deletant, Hitler’s Forgotten Ally: Ion Antonescu and His Regime: Romania, 1940– 1944 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 73. Solonari, Purifying the Nation, pp. 291–302; Deletant, Hitler’s Forgotten Ally, pp. 205–29; Ancel, History of the Holocaust: Romania, I I, pp. 1241–97. On a similar way in which antisemitism both played a key role in the mass violence of the Russian Empire’s army against Jews during World War One and, later in the war, led to de-escalation of the violence, see Mark Levene, ‘“The enemy within”?: Armenians, Jews, the military crises of 1915 and the genocidal origins of the “minorities question”’, in Minorities and the First World War: From War to Peace, ed. Hannah Ewence and Tim Grady (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 143–73. On the view of Transylvania as the epicentre of the Romanian nation, see Turda, ‘The nation as object’, 427–31. On the conflict between Hungary and Romania over Transylvania, see Case, Between States. See Deletant, Hitler’s Forgotten Ally, pp. 205–29; Solonari, Purifying, Ch. 18.

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Jews from Moldova and to ‘colonise’ those territories by settling in them people from further east whom the state considered ethnic Romanians.24 Nevertheless, in August 1944, after Romanian King Michael I removed Antonescu, the country left the Axis alliance and joined the Soviet attack against Hungary, in the course of which the Romanian army occupied northern Transylvania and regained control of the entire region. The Romanian case demonstrates the dynamics of settler colonial state violence during World War Two: various kinds of mass violence targeted different groups at different times – escalating when possible in certain circumstances and de-escalating when circumstances required a change in course. The goal, however, remained the same: the transformation of multiethnic and multireligious regions into integral parts of a ‘homogeneous’ state by forcing ‘unwanted’ people out in several ways and instead settling, or aspiring to settle, people whom the state saw as ethnic Romanians. Jews and Roma faced specifically genocidal assaults, but within a broader drive to obliterate diverse societies that signified – in their composition, daily lives and social interactions – the basic anxiety, the ‘problem’, for the nation-state, particularly in its border territories. The vision of ‘Greater Bulgaria’ likewise excluded a number of domestic groups as essentially foreign and dangerous, especially Muslims.25 Bulgarian authorities during World War Two, like Romanian authorities, viewed societies in border regions with heightened anxiety as places where ‘nonBulgarians’, as defined in ethno-national terms by the state, threatened it as agents of enemies during war. If Antonescu saw Jews in northern Bukovina and Bessarabia as Soviet enemy agents, Bulgarian authorities in eastern Macedonia, which they seized from Yugoslavia in April 1941, saw Jews as ‘allies of the Serbs’ and imagined ‘paid Serb and Jewish agents’ of English and French propaganda campaigns in the region that ‘subjected’ its people ‘to assimilation by the Serbs’.26 In the Bulgarian ethno-national vision, however, Greeks much more than Serbs figured as the main enemy in the violent struggle over the people in Macedonia and Thrace and their shifting loyalties since the late nineteenth century.27 It was therefore in western Thrace, which 24 Solonari, Purifying the Nation, Ch. 17. 25 On the persecution and mass deportations of both Turkish-speaking and Bulgarianspeaking Muslims in Bulgaria from the end of the nineteenth century until the fall of communism, see Mary C. Neuburger, The Orient Within: Muslim Minorities and the Negotiations of Nationhood in Modern Bulgaria (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). 26 Quoted in Ragaru, ‘Nationalizing the Holocaust’, 112. 27 Theodora Dragostinova, Between Two Motherlands: Nationality and Emigration among the Greeks of Bulgaria, 1900–1949 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011).

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Bulgaria seized from Greece in April 1941, that Bulgaria created a particularly brutal occupation regime. On 8 May 1941, the Synod of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church enthusiastically thanked the German military representative in Sofia for ‘helping undo the gross injustice of the Treaty of Neuilly’.28 That treaty in 1919 deprived Bulgaria of areas in Macedonia and Thrace that the state had occupied during World War One and now lost to the new states of Yugoslavia and Greece, respectively. Bulgarian nationalists viewed those territories as key parts of ‘Greater Bulgaria’ since the creation of an autonomous Bulgaria within the Ottoman Empire in 1878, so that the Treaty of Neuilly meant for Bulgarian nationalists what the Treaty of Versailles meant for German nationalists after World War One: national humiliation and injustice.29 Bulgaria saw its alliance since March 1941 with Nazi Germany and its Axis partners as a tool to regain these lost territories, and the opportunity came in April 1941 with the Axis attack against Yugoslavia and Greece. Bulgarian Orthodox priests in Bulgarian-occupied western Thrace therefore viewed themselves as administering justice when they led the attack on Greek Orthodox churches as central institutions of Greek nationalism, including the closing of almost all churches, the plundering of their assets and the abuse, deportation and murder of Greek Orthodox priests.30 According to one source, hardly any Greek Orthodox priests remained in the region by summer 1942.31 State authorities also closed Greek schools, banned the use of the Greek language, changed the names of towns and streets from Greek to Bulgarian, and even tried to force people to change Greek-sounding names to Bulgarian-sounding names, including on gravestones.32 The state assault targeted Jews and Muslims as well as those the state defined as Greeks or who saw themselves as Greeks. All ‘non-Bulgarians’ faced systematic robbery: the state froze their bank accounts and deprived them of access to most of their deposits.33 In June 1941, the state forbade Greek pharmacists and lawyers from working, and in March 1942 added Greek doctors to the list.34 State authorities also forcibly took large parts of 28 The letter, in German, is in Yad Vashem Archives (YVA), M.67/145. 29 On the Treaty of Neuilly, see Joseph Rothschild, East Central Europe between the Two World Wars (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998), pp. 323–6. 30 Xanthippi Kotzageorgi and Georgìos A. Kazamìas, ‘The Bulgarian occupation of the Prefecture of Drama (1941–1944) and its consequences on the Greek population’, Balkan Studies 35:1 (2002), 86–9. 31 Ibid., 88 n. 20. 32 Ibid., 89–91. 33 Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), pp. 189–90. 34 Kotzageorgi and Kazamìas, ‘Bulgarian occupation of the Prefecture of Drama’, 95.

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wheat and tobacco harvests and animals from Greek and Muslim farmers, thereby creating conditions of food insecurity and starvation.35 The state furthermore conscripted many men of military age, including many Jews, into the forced labour battalions of the Bulgarian army.36 The routine of persecution and violence of state authorities also escalated at one point, in September 1941 in the town of Drama and its surrounding area, to a massacre of Greeks, addressed below. In March 1943 came the very violent arrests, mass robbery and mass deportations of more than 4,000 of around 4,200 Jews in the region into the hands of the Nazis, who murdered them in the Treblinka death camp.37 All these measures, including the mass deportation of Jews, aimed to ‘reinforce the Bulgarian element’ – the stated goal of the decree-law of 10 June 1942 on the citizenship of people in the areas occupied in spring 1941. The decree excluded Jews in western Thrace and eastern Macedonia from the possibility of acquiring Bulgarian citizenship, identifying them as Greek or Yugoslav citizens, while requiring all other ‘non-Bulgarians’ to declare their choice of becoming Bulgarian citizens by August 1943 or face deportation.38 State authorities, however, understood the decree-law as an instrument of forcible assimilation of Greek Orthodox Christians and Muslims – as had happened since the late nineteenth century in both cases – and mostly to intensify the pressure on ‘non-Bulgarians’ to leave in order to make room for Bulgarian settlers.39 Indeed, the Bulgarian authorities brought into the region around 100,000 settlers and deported a similar number of local people or forced them to flee, despite the opposition of the German occupation authorities in Greece, who saw the Greeks deported into their zone of occupation as a security threat.40 Raphael 35 Ibid., 96. 36 Ibid., 100–1. 37 Chary, Bulgarian Jews, pp. 101–14. 38 See Nadège Ragaru, ‘Contrasting destinies: the plight of Bulgarian Jews and the Jews in Bulgarian-occupied Greek and Yugoslav territories during World War Two’, in Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence (2017), www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-r esistance/en/document/contrasting-destinies-plight-bulgarian-jews-and-jews-bulgar ian-occupied-greek-and-yugoslav-.html#footnote76_t1e95db. 39 Kotzageorgi and Kazamìas, ‘Bulgarian occupation of the Prefecture of Drama’, 99. For historical background, see Neuburger, The Orient Within, and Dragostinova, Between Two Motherlands. 40 Lemkin, Axis Rule, p. 189; Marshall Lee Miller, Bulgaria during the Second World War (Stanford University Press, 1975), pp. 126–30; Dragostinova, Between Two Motherlands, pp. 250–4; and Kotzageorgi and Kazamìas, ‘Bulgarian occupation of the Prefecture of Drama’, 98 n. 57, on German opposition. Greek leaders in the region understood this German position and attempted to use it when they appealed to the German ambassador in Athens in August 1942 and in March 1943 to defend their interests before the Bulgarian government. US Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives (USHMMA), RG 46–0.44M, records of the Bulgarian Ministry of Internal Affairs, Administration of the Belomorie Region, Fond 662k, opis 1, files 31 and 34.

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Lemkin considered Bulgarian state violence against Greeks ‘a real genocide policy’ in his 1944 book in which he coined the term genocide.41 It unfolded within a broader process of destruction aimed at turning western Thrace into part of an ethno-national ‘Greater Bulgaria’. The annihilation of the Jewish communities in the region in March 1943, when Bulgarian and German policies of mass violence now aligned, also figured as an integral part of this process in a borderland that stood at the heart of the ‘Greater Bulgaria’ vision.42 The Bulgarian leadership decided in June 1943 to postpone – not cancel – their plan to deport into Nazi hands all the Jews in Bulgaria. The public outcry and protests of both Jews and non-Jews, including the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, in spring 1943 against the planned deportations played some role in this decision, though these efforts had failed to protect Jews in the occupied territories.43 The looming defeat of Nazi Germany and its allies may have also contributed to this decision, though the military plight of the Axis was already clear in March no less than in June 1943; indeed, Antonescu had understood the military situation in this way in summer 1942. It seems, then, that Bulgarian authorities, following their aforementioned decree-law from June 1942, saw Jews in western Thrace and eastern Macedonia as Greeks and Serbs, respectively – that is, as enemies – rather than as Jews, in which case they probably assumed in March 1943 that the Allies would care much less about the fate of Greeks and Serbs than about the fate of Jews. As in Romania, the de-escalation of state violence against Jews after spring 1943 still aimed at removing all Jews from the state at a later opportunity by creating the conditions to facilitate it through a combination of policies of displacement from the capital and other cities to the countryside, forced labour and mass robbery that left Jews economically devastated.44 It was therefore 41 Lemkin, Axis Rule, p. 188. 42 See Mark Levene, ‘“The Bulgarians were the worst!” Reconsidering the Holocaust in Salonika within a regional history of mass violence’, in The Holocaust in Greece, ed. Giorgos Antoniou and A. Dirk Moses (Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 36–57. 43 Steven F. Sage, ‘The Holocaust in Bulgaria: rescuing history from “rescue”’, Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 31:2 (2017), 139–45; Albena Taneva and Vanya Gezenko (eds.), The Power of Civil Society in a Time of Genocide: Proceedings of the Holy Synod of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church on the Rescue of the Jews in Bulgaria, 1940–1944 (Sofia University Press, 2005), published originally in Bulgarian in 2002. 44 The definitive work on the dispossession of Jews by the Bulgarian state is Roumen Avramov, ‘Spasenie’ i padenie: mikroikonomika na durzhavnia ˘ antisemitizum ˘ v Bulgariyq ˘ 1940–1944g (Sofia University Press, 2012). See also Mary C. Neuburger, Balkan Smoke: Tobacco and the Making of Modern Bulgaria (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), Ch. 5. Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion witnessed the dire situation of Jews in Bulgaria when he visited the state in October 1944 – especially, as he penned in his diary, ‘the thousands of bare feet [of Jewish children] on the cold stone floors’ in

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hardly surprising that around 40,000 of the 48,000 Jews who had survived in Bulgaria during the war, left the state by the early 1950s, mostly to British Mandate Palestine and, after May 1948, to Israel. Bulgarian state violence during World War Two fits many of the elements of settler colonialism’s ‘logic of elimination’, as formulated by the late historian Patrick Wolfe: settler colonialism has both negative and positive dimensions. Negatively, it strives for the dissolution of native societies. Positively, it erects a new colonial society on the expropriated land base – as I put it, settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event. In its positive aspect, elimination is an organizing principal of settler-colonial society rather than a one-off (and superseded) occurrence. The positive outcomes of the logic of elimination can include officially encouraged miscegenation, the breaking-down of native title into alienable individual freeholds, native citizenship, child abduction, religious conversion, resocialization in total institutions such as missions or boarding schools, and a whole range of cognate biocultural assimilations. All these strategies, including frontier homicide, are characteristic of settler colonialism.45

The ‘logic of elimination’ also sheds light on Hungarian state violence during World War Two with the goal of realising ‘Greater Hungary’. In Vojvodina, the region that Hungary seized from Yugoslavia in April 1941 when, like Bulgaria, it joined the Axis attack on it, state authorities called for displacement on a massive scale, similar in tone to Antonescu’s vision of ‘total purification’ in Bukovina and Bessarabia five months later. While the Hungarian state called the region Délvidék (referring primarily to Bacˇka), the southern border area of ‘Greater Hungary’, which Hungary lost to Yugoslavia after World War One, Serb nationalists saw it as ‘the cradle of Serbian rebirth’.46 A government decree in April therefore listed Serbs first but also Bosnians, Montenegrins, Roma and Jews ‘who did not (themselves or their parents) have citizenship within the territory of Greater Hungary before October 31, 1918’ as people required to leave the state within three months.47 Without considering whether one held citizenship papers or not, however, the Hungarian authorities initiated an attack on the area – mostly against Serbs and Jews – that included Sofia. Quoted in Dalia Ofer, Escaping the Holocaust: Illegal Immigration to the Land of Israel, 1939–1944 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 310. 45 Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8:4 (2006), 387–409, at 388. 46 von Klimó, Remembering Cold Days, pp. 35–7. 47 Translated and quoted in Braham, The Politics of Genocide, I, p. 199. See also Eniko˝ A. Sajti, Hungarians in the Voivodina, 1918–1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), pp. 236–7.

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mass murder, mass deportations, arrests and torture, culminating in January 1942 with massacres in the Šajkaš region and in Novi Sad.48 Within several months, the Hungarian state had murdered several thousand Serbs, several hundred Jews, and expelled another 30,000 Serbs to German-occupied Serbia, despite strong protests by the German authorities, as in the case of the Bulgarian deportations of Greeks from western Thrace into German-occupied Greece. Finally, the Hungarian authorities settled in the region more than 3,000 families (around 14,000 people) of the Bukovina Székely – essentially this entire group of ethnic Hungarians who had lived in Romania.49 Lemkin wrote of this settler colonial state violence that ‘the Hungarian authorities have introduced a genocide policy by endeavoring to impose a Hungarian pattern upon these territories’.50 In this case Lemkin saw the regional society as a whole as the target of genocide. Hungarian authorities in other borderland regions also endeavoured to impose a ‘Hungarian pattern’. In April 1942, Árpád Siménfalvy, the lord lieutenant of Ung County and of the town of Ungvár in the western part of the Carpathian region, suggested in a report to the Ministry of the Interior the establishment of a national authority to oversee ‘the relocation of the Jews’: The year 1942 will be the year of great efforts and decisions. . . . Thousands of tanks, airplanes, and armies of millions are fighting for the final victory, cultures crumble and nations sink from one day to the next in the trapdoor of history. This incredible struggle with its horrible devices and consequences stands unparalleled in world history, and behind it the contours of a new European order, a world based on a Christian national world view, a new millennium, a new European life are forming. . . . Jews have no place in this ongoing world struggle and in the new Europe that will emerge from it. . . . We Hungarians must liquidate this [Jewish] question based on our own strength and resolution . . . because it would mean a terrible threat to our homeland if we postpone this question or wait for external forces to solve it.51

Hungarian authorities also saw no future for Roma in the region, echoing in this case as well, even if less dramatically, a broader vision of a Europe without 48 On the massacre in Novi Sad and its memory in Hungarian politics and culture until the present, see von Klimó, Remembering Cold Days. 49 Sajti, Hungarians in the Voivodina, pp. 234–49, 342–402; Krisztián Ungváry, ‘Deportation, population exchange, and certain aspects of the Holocaust’, in The Holocaust in Hungary: A European Perspective, ed. Judit Molnár (Budapest: Balassi Kiadó, 2005), p. 98; Yossef Lewinger, ‘The Holocaust in the regions occupied by Hungary’, in History of the Holocaust: Yugoslavia (Hebrew), ed. Menachem Shelah (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1990), pp. 341–68. 50 Lemkin, Axis Rule, pp. 262–3. 51 Magyar Országos Levéltár (Hungarian National Archives), K150, 1942, I/31-h.

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Roma. The chief constable in Ungvár, who served under Siménfalvy, for instance, treated Roma as ‘a question to be fundamentally solved’.52 Indeed, the regional authorities in July and August 1941 deported hundreds of Roma, together with around 20,000 Jews (20 per cent of the region’s Jews), to east Galicia, where the German occupiers, engaged in the mass murder of Soviet Jews, did not want more Jews in the area they controlled and therefore stopped the deportations. The ‘external forces’ in this case stood in the way of a ‘Greater Hungary’ without Jews and Roma.53 Still, Hungarian authorities pressed forward with other forms of violence against Roma, including raids, beatings, sexual assault and creating severe food insecurity by withholding ration coupons.54 The majority east Slavic population, 450,000 Carpatho-Ruthenians, also faced the exclusionary violence of state authorities. When the Hungarian army occupied the region, in March 1939, it encountered some resistance from a local militia that it subdued brutally, also perpetrating several massacres of around 4,000 Carpatho-Ruthenian civilians.55 In the next five and a half years of Hungarian occupation, tens of thousands of Carpatho-Ruthenians faced arrest, internment and forced relocation of farmers from rich to poor land, which translated into malnutrition and hunger, as in Bulgarian-occupied western Thrace.56 In neighbouring Transylvania, retired general and member of the Bihar County Committee, Sándor Báthory Szu˝ ts, suggested that the government ‘should immediately set up an agency with the appropriate powers, whose task is the practical preparation of the resettlement of Jews and its implementation’.57 As in the Carpathian region, Hungarian authorities in Transylvania saw the ‘Jewish question’ as an integral part of the broader ethnonational vision of ‘Greater Hungary’, especially in the region they considered the cradle of the Hungarian nation, which prompted one Hungarian official to suggest, also in 1942, the possibility of ‘the expulsion of the 3 million Romanians’ in Transylvania, should Hungary emerge victorious from the war.58 It was precisely at times when victory seemed possible that state violence escalated to include what Wolfe called ‘frontier homicide’ – that is, massacres 52 Chief Constable of Ungvár to the Subprefect of Ung County, 10 December 1940, in Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Zakarpatskoi oblasti (the State Archives of the Transcarpathian Province), Berehovo, Ukraine, fond 45, opis 2, delo 257. 53 Segal, Genocide in the Carpathians, pp. 70–6. 54 Ibid., pp. 77–8, 102–3. 55 Ibid., pp. 57–8. 56 Ibid., pp. 76–7. 57 Translated and reproduced as document 2–3, in Zoltán Vági, László Cso˝sz and Gábor Kádár, The Holocaust in Hungary: Evolution of a Genocide (Lanham: AltaMira Press, in association with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2013), pp. 31–2; original in HajdúBihar County Archives, Debrecen, RG FV.B. 1406/b., box 284, doc. 16.978/1942. 58 Case, Between States, p. 186.

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in diverse borderland societies as part of the project to impose an ethnonational pattern, as Lemkin put it. Small-scale massacres in borderlands occupied by wartime Hungary and Bulgaria, which have received very little scholarly attention, open a window to explore the view not only of the state but also of survivors of state assaults, both Jews and their neighbours.

Survivor Voices Some Jews have described instances of Hungarian state violence in ways that resonate with Lemkin’s view. Violet Mittelmann, who was born in 1923 in the small town of Ip in Transylvania, in the area of Oradea, witnessed Hungarian soldiers engaged in the mass killings of her Romanian neighbours on 14 September 1940, shortly after the Hungarian occupation of the northern part of the region in August 1940. Mittelmann’s Shoah Foundation testimony in 1994 opens a window for us on to the abrupt and violent change she experienced that day. Responding to the question ‘when did things start to change?’, Mittelmann mentioned antisemitic measures introduced by the Hungarian authorities that made her ‘very scared’. The interviewer then asked her: ‘what is the first thing that you remember that made you scared?’ Mittelmann continued: It was very scary, because one night, on Friday night, they went and they killed, they killed all the Romanians in the town, and we were very scared they will kill us too, the Jewish people. And we were looking out and we saw how they took them . . . they took them away, and they put [them] in a big grave, all of them. And we were very scared that time, I never forget that. My father, my mother, everyone, we were thinking they [now will] come after the Jews, but they didn’t.

Mittelmann stressed repeatedly the fear she and other Jews felt, an experience that she would ‘never forget’.59 Responding to a question about Hungarian antisemitism with a description of Hungarian violence against Romanians, she linked Hungarian actions against Jews and Romanians. Moshe Lichtenstein was born in Bucium in 1922. He remembered the violence of Hungarian soldiers against Romanians on 9 September in nearby Treznea, not far from Ip, in a different, though no less illuminating way in his Yad Vashem testimony, in Hebrew, from 1992. He describes the welcoming reception of Hungarian soldiers in his village, during which ‘suddenly they [the soldiers] mounted their horses and hurried away . . . we wondered what had happened’. 59 USC Shoah Foundation, p. 160.

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The next morning, they received news of the ‘pogrom’ that the Hungarian soldiers ‘committed not against Jews but against the Romanians’ in Treznea. And after a few days they went to Treznea and saw ‘the big destruction [hurban] . . . eight Jews were also killed’.60 Lichtenstein uses language that marks anti-Jewish violence – pogrom and, tellingly, hurban, the Yiddish word for the Nazi genocide of Jews and a very loaded word in Jewish history – to make sense of the literally sudden rupture that these events had caused, even though in this case the vast majority of victims were not Jews. Non-Jewish Romanian survivors of Hungarian state violence gave testimonies in 2004 in the frame of the Jeff and Toby Herr Testimony Initiative of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). They described in their accounts the brutal and destructive scale of the attack: Hungarian soldiers burned dozens of houses in Treznea that day, destroyed the Romanian Orthodox Church and murdered, according to official accounts, eighty-six people, including the local priest and seven Jews.61 Like Violet Mittelmann, non-Jewish survivors never forgot: six survivors who gave testimony to historian Maria Bucur in 2000, in fact, expressed a lingering anxiety, after sixty years, that the Hungarians would return to kill them.62 The broad context of state violence is even more pronounced in the testimonies of Jewish survivors from Bulgarian-occupied western Thrace. Like Mittelmann, in his 1997 Shoah Foundation testimony, Eliezer Nifoussi from Kavála, in the vicinity of Xanthi, responded to a question about German measures against Jews in his town with an account of Bulgarian violence against those they saw as Greeks: ‘I remember, there was a very difficult event’, referring to a massacre that the Bulgarian occupiers perpetrated in September 1941, mostly in the town of Drama and its area, including Kavála. Eliezer Nifoussi recounted how Greek partisans killed several Bulgarian soldiers in 1941. The interviewer then stopped him, to ask about the Bulgarian occupiers. He explained briefly that they were harsh ‘like the Germans’, and continues, ‘I remember [the difficult event] as if it were today’, echoing Mittelmann who would ‘never forget’ the mass killings in

60 YVA, O.3/6804, 12–15 (emphasis added). 61 See testimonies in USHMMA of Ioan Pernes (RG-50.573*0006), Maria Blaj (RG50.573*0002) and Anghelina Ionu¸tas¸ (RG-50.573*0001), and testimony in USHMMA of Gavril Butcovan from Ip (RG-50.573*0005); Maria Bucur, ‘Treznea: trauma, nationalism, and the memory of World War II in Romania’, Rethinking History 6:1 (2002), 35–55; Case, Between States, pp. 101–2. 62 Bucur, ‘Treznea’, 42, 48, 50, 51.

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her town. And as in Lichtenstein’s testimony, Nifoussi remembered the violence as a sudden rupture: Suddenly, at night, we heard shots, many shots, we did not know what was happening, and we were not allowed to go outside to see. Suddenly, knocks on our door. It was a matter of luck . . . I managed to learn a few sentences in Bulgarian [by that time]. I opened the door, and Bulgarian soldiers asked about the light in the upper floor. I said that my father is in that room, sick. They said they wanted to see. Luckily, my father was really a bit sick. . . . they then ordered me to turn off the light, and they left. Probably because of the few words I spoke in Bulgarian, they decided to leave me alone. The next morning, when we came outside, we saw on every corner a person they had killed. . . . They killed many people.63

Miriam Shavit was born in Drama in 1919. In her testimony for Yad Vashem in 1987, she remembered clearly the Bulgarian occupation of the town in 1941. She prefaced her description of the massacre in her town in September 1941 with a reference to atrocities committed by Bulgarian occupiers during World War One, when they ‘entered houses, raped women, robbed, [and] killed. . . . Every Jew and Greek [therefore] feared the Bulgarian entry.’64 Nick Levi, who was born in Kavála in 1921 and gave testimony for the USHMM in 2007, described similarly the decision of his family, in April 1941, to leave the Bulgarian-occupied area and move to German-occupied Thessaloniki: ‘there was an experience from World War One that the Bulgarians had occupied the city, and it was only torture and fear and killing people. So everyone who had an experience from before . . . was telling us what it means to be under the Bulgarians.’65 Shavit remembered that the Bulgarian occupiers quickly confirmed such fears, arresting and imprisoning Greeks on the pretext that they were partisans: ‘the jail was full’. The new rulers also created an atmosphere of terror: ‘on the gate to the police station, they hung a person’s head’.66 The situation deteriorated sharply in what Miriam called the ‘black Yom Kippur’ in September 1941. A curfew was announced, and ‘Bulgarian soldiers were shooting outside.’ ‘They then entered houses and took away young people . . . they were looking for Greeks, of course, but caught some Jews as well. . . . they killed 10,000 people . . . all the streets were full of blood.’67 The number of victims of this massacre in the town of Drama was between 2,000 and 3,000 people, with a similar figure in the area around the town.68 It seems that Miriam Shavit noted 10,000 victims as a way to stress the 63 USC Shoah Foundation, 31652. 64 YVA, O.3/4516, 11–12. 65 USHMMA, RG-50.030*0515, 11–12. 66 YVA, O.3/4516, 13. 67 Ibid., 14–16. 68 Kotzageorgi and Kazamìas, ‘Bulgarian occupation of the Prefecture of Drama’, 103.

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magnitude of the crime. Similarly, Dionysis Anagnostopoulos, a Greek Christian who was born in the town in 1931 and still lived there in 2014 when he gave his testimony, described the massacre as the ‘great slaughter’.69 The voices of non-Jews rarely assume a place in global Holocaust memory discourses, but examining testimonies of Jews from western Thrace shows that the voices of many Jews also remain unheard. Only around 200 Jews from western Thrace survived World War Two. The accounts and perspectives of the few among them who gave testimony, challenge the official Bulgarian Holocaust commemorative framework, as we shall see in the next section. Like Jews from northern Transylvania, the ways in which they responded to questions about anti-Jewish measures with descriptions of violence against their non-Jewish neighbours, using words loaded with meaning about destruction in Jewish history and a sense of rupture – fits Lemkin’s understanding of state violence during World War Two as a genocidal assault against a society in its entirety.

Global Holocaust Memory, Antisemitism and State Violence Past and Present Contrary to much of the scholarship on Bulgaria during World War Two, the Bulgarian state has claimed from 1944 until today that the destruction of Jews under Bulgarian occupation is a German history rooted in Nazi antisemitism. Similarly, the Hungarian state asserts that the Holocaust in Hungary began in March 1944, after the German invasion of Hungary, which aimed to stop Hungary from switching sides in the war.70 Rather, the rapid ghettoisation and mass deportations of around 440,000 Jews from Hungary mostly to Auschwitz in spring and summer 1944 resulted from the intersection at the time of the German machinery of genocide with the plans and actions generated by the vision of ‘Greater Hungary’ and its genocidal assault, as Lemkin saw it, against Jews and other groups. Indeed, the Hungarian state intensified its violence against Roma in summer 1944, and as the Soviet army swept into Hungary in late 1944 and early 1945, Hungarian nationalists, some of whom had just taken part in the destruction of Jewish communities, turned their attention to yet another ‘unwanted’ group in the Hungarian 69 USHMMA, RG-50.855*0014. 70 Raz Segal, ‘Making Hungary great again: mass violence, state building, and the ironies of global Holocaust memory’, in Agency and the Holocaust: Essays in Honor of Debórah Dwork, ed. Thomas Kühne and Mary Jane Rein (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), pp. 181–97.

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ethno-national vision and deported around 200,000 ethnic Germans.71 As in Romania, the Hungarian state took advantage of opportunities created by fast-changing military conditions to turn at least parts of the ‘Greater Hungary’ vision into reality. But the genocidal nature of state violence in wartime southeast Europe remains on the margins of Holocaust scholarship and erased from global Holocaust memory, for it presents a challenge, as noted, to the persistent idea that the Holocaust is unique due, in large part, to the unique character of Nazi antisemitism. Yet in the Hungarian, Bulgarian and Romanian cases, we need to consider a different motivating factor: not simply antisemitism in the histories of Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania, but specific anti-Jewish ideas, policies and actions that were entangled with ideas, policies and actions against other groups within settler colonial visions of the state. ‘Entanglement’, as historian Ethan Katz has observed, ‘constitutes at once a descriptive and a methodological moniker.’ For ‘placing the history of anti-Semitism alongside that of other exclusionary ideologies and practices thus alters our perspective not only on anti-Semitism, but also on other forms of marginalization’.72 Looking at such entanglements also raises new questions about the broad context in which they occurred – French colonialism and settler colonialism in Katz’s account, and settler colonial genocidal state violence in the account presented here. Historian Holly Case offered a similar approach in her description and analysis of the ‘meeting’ of the ‘Jewish question’ with the ‘Transylvanian question’: The events of the Holocaust in Hungary and Romania were heavily influenced by the fact that the Jews were not the primary policy preoccupation in these states either before or during the war. Instead, the ‘Jewish Question’ was frequently viewed in light of its relationship to territorial matters, and for that reason Hungarian and Romanian policy vis-à-vis the Jews was shockingly inconsistent.73

The same applies to the Bulgarian case, where ideas and policies about Jews were entangled with ideas and policies about the state’s main enemy groups – Greeks and Muslims – in the expanded territory of ‘Greater 71 Segal, Genocide in the Carpathians, Ch. 5; Christian Gerlach and Götz Aly, Das letzte Kapitel: Realpolitik, Ideologie und der Mord an den ungarischen Juden 1944/1945 (Stuttgart and Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2002), pp. 425–33. On ethnic Germans as ‘unwanted’ in Hungary and Romania, see Case, Between States, pp. 35–9. 72 Ethan B. Katz, ‘An imperial entanglement: anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and colonialism’, American Historical Review 123:4 (2018), 1190–209, quotes on 1195 and 1209. 73 Case, Between States, p. 197 (emphasis in original).

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Bulgaria’. Very few people who defined themselves as Greeks or whom the state saw as Greeks remained in the defeated and smaller Bulgaria after World War Two. But many Muslims remained, and the assault against them continued in the decades after the war, in fits and starts, according to changing political conditions, until the mass deportations of 360,000 Muslims from Bulgaria to Turkey in 1989 – the largest such act after the early 1950s.74 If ‘the Holocaust’ as description and methodology links the fate of Jews in western Thrace with that of Jews in Belgium, for example, then the lens of wartime settler colonialism and genocide and its entanglements, drawing on Lemkin and Wolfe, describes and explains the fate of Jews in western Thrace as tied primarily to the fate of Greeks in the region, within a broad history of state violence in Bulgaria before, during, and after World War Two. This entangled and complex historical picture is erased in global Holocaust memory and replaced with a narrative about the rescue of Jews by the Bulgarian state and society. The website of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) reported on 20 March 2018 that ‘over the course of March 2018 a series of events took place in Bulgaria to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the rescue of the Bulgarian Jews, as well as the deaths of 11, 343 Jews from Aegian Thrace, Vardar Macedonia and Pirot’. Bulgarian Vice Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ekaterina Zaharieva, the report continued, ‘underlined that the Bulgarian authorities [today] were “doing the right thing to prevent all forms of intolerance, xenophobia and hate speech.” She expressed regret that, as in other countries, there were “individual manifestations of antisemitism in Bulgaria, but they are carried out by isolated and marginal elements of Bulgarian society.”’ Bulgarian President Rumen Radev ‘emphasized that the rescue of the Bulgarian Jews 75 years ago was not accidental since the Bulgarian Jews have always been an important and indispensable part of the Bulgarian society’. And Israeli ambassador to Bulgaria Irit Lilian proclaimed that ‘Bulgarians will always be remembered for not surrendering their humanity. That is why Israel will always be grateful.’ Finally, we learn that the Bulgarian Prime Minister Boiko Borissov travelled to Skopje for the official commemoration of the deportation of more than 7,000 Jews from the territory of today’s former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia that in 1943 was under Bulgarian governance, and stood together with Prime Minister Zoran Zaev to honour the memory of the deported Jews: ‘We have come to grieve and honor together those who 74 Tomasz Kamusella, Ethnic Cleansing during the Cold War: The Forgotten 1989 Expulsion of Turks from Communist Bulgaria (London and New York: Routledge, 2018).

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failed to escape the Nazi machine’, Borissov declared. ‘No human life should be forgotten.’75 Note the passive voice employed in this account of the ‘deaths’ of 11,343 Jews from Thrace, Macedonia and Pirot, 7,000 of whom ‘under Bulgarian governance’ in Macedonia, were ‘deported Jews . . . who failed to escape the Nazi machine’. Not quite; not quite at all. As we have seen, the Bulgarian occupiers of western Thrace, eastern Macedonia and Pirot discriminated against Jews, abused and robbed them, and forced Jewish men into army forced labour battalions from the beginning of the occupation in April 1941 until they brutally arrested, interned and deported Jews into German hands in March 1943. Those Jews did not just die, nor simply ‘fail to escape’ the Nazi machine; the Bulgarian state machine destroyed their lives and communities before handing them over to Germans who murdered them in Nazi death camps. The erasure of Bulgarian state violence and Bulgarian perpetrators from the history of World War Two, as demonstrated in these commemoration events in March 2018, constitutes an essential element in official Holocaust memory in Bulgaria.76 It builds on a key idea in global Holocaust memory about the unique character of Nazi antisemitism that renders the Holocaust also unique, unprecedented, exceptional or any other word that decontextualises the complex set of events and process that together we call the Holocaust and portrays them as almost exclusively a Nazi or German matter. Indeed, all thirty-four member states in IHRA are committed to the Stockholm Declaration, the organisation’s founding document, which opens (Article 1) with the following statement: ‘The Holocaust (Shoah) fundamentally challenged the foundations of civilization. The unprecedented character of the Holocaust will always hold universal meaning.’77 In the eight articles of the Declaration only ‘the Nazis’ are mentioned as perpetrators – with not a word about other state authorities, such as in Bulgaria, nor even a mention of ‘collaborators’. If the concept ‘rescue’ blurs the history of state violence in the case of wartime Bulgaria, a comparative perspective raises additional questions about its use. Consider the case of Romania, where seven times more Jews – around 375,000 people – survived until the end of the war, yet no one has suggested to frame this history as the rescue of Romanian Jews. And 75 ‘Commemoration events in Bulgaria’, 20 March 2018, https://holocaustremembrance .com/news-archive/commemoration-events-bulgaria. 76 On the roots of this Bulgarian commemorative framework, see Nadège Ragaru, ‘The prosecution of anti-Jewish crimes in Bulgaria: fashioning a master narrative of the Second World War (1944–1945)’, East European Politics and Societies and Cultures 33:4 (2019), 941–75. See also Sage, ‘Holocaust in Bulgaria’. 77 www.holocaustremembrance.com/about-us/stockholm-declaration.

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no one should, even though, as in Bulgaria, both Jews and non-Jews made significant efforts to protect Jews primarily in the core territories of the state.78 The comparison with Romania is instructive, for in both states, as we have seen, anti-Jewish policies and violence unfolded within broader ethno-national visions aimed at destroying societies as a whole in order to create ‘Greater Romania’ and ‘Greater Bulgaria’. Both visions arose well before Nazism and World War Two and persisted well after the defeat of Nazi Germany, and they targeted Jews and non-Jews for exclusion, persecution, deportations and, in the case of Romania, also mass murder. Contrary to Ambassador Lilian’s assertion, the Bulgarian occupiers certainly surrendered their humanity, as we have seen in the accounts of survivors, as they carried out violent policies against Greeks in western Thrace, Serbs in eastern Macedonia and against Jews, Roma and Muslims across the state. The decontextualised commemorative framework serves, moreover, to elide not only wartime Bulgarian state violence, but also – contrary to Bulgarian Vice Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ekaterina Zaharieva – the racist and xenophobic social and political atmosphere in Bulgaria today, where violent attacks, hate speech and government policies against Roma, Muslims and refugees abound. In fact, it was Bulgarian Prime Minister Borrisov who in 2017 appointed Valeri Simeonov of the extreme right-wing Patriotic Front as head of the National Council for Cooperation on Ethnic and Integration Issues – even though in 2014, talking in the National Assembly, Simeonov referred to Roma as ‘ferocious humanoids’.79 And Deputy Prime Minister Krasimir Karakachanov expressed clearly the ultimate anti-Roma vision of the Bulgarian government in January 2019, saying that ‘Gypsies in Bulgaria have become exceptionally insolent. . . . This cannot continue. . . . The tolerance of Bulgarian society has run out. . . . The truth is that we need to undertake a complete program for 78 Italy offers another case where the concept of ‘rescue’ and the myth about ‘good Italians’ have blurred important wartime contexts and Italian visions of expansion in southeast Europe and southeast France, in addition to brutal Italian empire building in Africa – visions which only quite recently have become central in scholarship on Italian anti-Jewish policies. For recent key works, see Alexis Herr, The Holocaust and Compensated Compliance in Italy: Fossoli di Carpi, 1942–1952 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Luca Fenoglio, ‘What “new order”? Fascist expansionism and the Jews: the case of south-eastern France, 1942–1943’, in A Fascist Decade of War: 1935–1945 in International Perspective, ed. Marco Maria Aterrano and Karine Varley (London and New York: Routledge, 2020); and Simon Levis Sullam, The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy (Princeton University Press, 2018). 79 https://sofiaglobe.com/2019/01/18/bulgaria-supreme-court-acquits-valeri-simeonovon-anti-roma-hate-speech-charge/.

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the solution of the Gypsy problem.’80 So much for the ‘lessons’ of Holocaust memory. If Roma today are the main ‘other’ within Bulgaria, refugees fleeing war and genocidal violence in the Middle East and North Africa figure as an enemy threatening to ‘invade’ the state. Indeed, in 2015, Patriarch Neophyte (see Figure 13.1), the leader of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, issued a statement warning about an ‘invasion’ of refugees who raise the spectre of ‘our disappearing as a state’.81 He thus expressed a typical anxiety that state authorities feel towards stateless people: in their very existence – at the end of 2019, the number of refugees and others forcibly displaced stood at almost 80 million – they point to the failure of the system of nation-states that continuously produce, through their visions and policies, more and more stateless people.82 Importantly, Patriarch Neophyte stands at the head of

Figure 13.1 Bulgarian Patriarch Neophyte. (AFP / Stringer / Getty Images)

80 Quoted in Atanas Zahariev, ‘Democracy under siege: Bulgaria’s parliament to vote on fascist anti-Roma strategy’, 14 May 2019, on the website of the European Roma Rights Centre, www.errc.org/news/democracy-under-siege-bulgarias-parliament-to-vote-on -fascist-anti-roma-strategy. 81 Quoted in Boryana Dzhambazova and Jason Horowitz, ‘Pope Francis urges Bulgaria to open its heart to refugees’, New York Times, 5 May 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/05/ 05/world/europe/pope-francis-bulgaria.html. 82 See www.unhcr.org/en-us/figures-at-a-glance.html.

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a national Church that has highlighted in its history its role in intervening to stop, in spring 1943, the planned deportation of Bulgarian Jews in the state’s pre-1941 borders.83 Yet as we have seen, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church also played a role in the Bulgarian state’s brutal occupations in eastern Macedonia and western Thrace. Similar to the decontextualised image of the Bulgarian state in global Holocaust memory, the image of the wartime Bulgarian Orthodox Church as rescuer elides its involvement in state violence. Patriarch Neophyte’s 2015 statement, furthermore, shows that we did not learn in our world of nation-states another key Holocaust ‘lesson’: refugee Jews had also attempted to flee persecution and state violence in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s to anywhere in the world, only to face, like refugees today, closed borders, racism, images that portrayed them as an ‘invasion’ of ‘enemy aliens’, internment and abuse, and deportations.84 Looking at the Bulgarian Orthodox Church during World War Two demonstrates how the Bulgarian national narrative of rescue of Jews disentangles them from the complicit vision of the state; it also blurs antisemitism in the history of Bulgaria.85 This draws on the (mis)understanding of antisemitism in global Holocaust memory, as articulated in the working definition of antisemitism that the IHRA adopted in 2016: ‘Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.’86 This general formulation hardly serves as a definition. It does, however, demonstrate the erasure of the state and state authorities from global Holocaust memory. The only state mentioned in the document is Israel – in seven of the eleven examples that accompany the definition. The definition thus puts a heavy emphasis on how one state – understood, very problematically, in ethno-national terms – may face antisemitism rather than how Jews may face antisemitism by the state.87

83 Taneva and Gezenko (eds.), The Power of Civil Society. 84 See Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Flight from the Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933– 1946 (New York: Norton, 2012). 85 Nikolaj Poppetrov, ‘Bulgaria, a country devoid of antisemitism? Historical perspectives’, in Nadège Ragaru (ed.), La Shoah en Europe du sud-est. Les juifs en Bulgarie et dans les terres sous administration bulgare (1941–1944) (Paris: Les publications du Mémorial de la Shoah, 2014), pp. 52–63. 86 www.holocaustremembrance.com/working-definition-antisemitism. 87 For a thorough discussion of the working definition, see Peter Ullrich, Expert Opinion on the ‘Working Definition of Antisemitism’ of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (Berlin: Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, 2019).

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This tendency to protect the state rather than its victims resurfaced two years later at Yad Vashem in Israel, another key institute of global Holocaust memory. In January 2018, Yad Vashem issued a statement about the 40,000 refugees in Israel who had fled genocidal violence, mostly from Darfur in Sudan, and Eritrea.88 Israel has interned thousands of them and tried to deport them back to extremely violent states, while some Israeli parliament members, ministers and journalists have referred to them using racist language such as ‘infiltrators’, ‘illegal immigrants’ and ‘cancer’.89 A protest therefore emerged in Israel against this situation, and Yad Vashem saw a need to define the discourse’s accepted boundaries. The statement described refugees as ‘residency seekers’ and thus denied the violence and the plight they had experienced as refugees fleeing genocidal states. It also emphasised that it is ‘groundless and dangerous’ to equate the plight of Jews during the Holocaust with ‘Israeli policies’ towards refugees from Africa. It remains unclear, however, in what way specifically the experiences of Jews who had tried to flee persecution and violence in Europe in the 1930s and encountered racism, rejection and internment differ from those of people who have fled genocide in Darfur, for example, and now encounter in Israel racism, rejection and internment – and the threat of deportation. It is also unclear what precisely is dangerous, though the wording provides indication as to who is in danger, according to Yad Vashem, and needs protection: a state, not victims of one. Recall that Bulgarian Patriarch Neophyte, in his xenophobic view of refugees in Bulgaria, also sought to defend the state from refugees who threaten its ‘disappearance’. It is, of course, the displaced and stateless – their societies and cultures, their lives, their voices – who face brutal disappearance, while one of the most important institutes of global Holocaust memory denies their experiences as victims of genocidal state violence. It is very late, perhaps too late, but if we begin to refocus our understanding of antisemitism not only as ‘a certain perception of Jews’ but also as a certain perception of and by the state, we could perhaps begin to listen and learn from the voices of Jewish survivors about the entanglements of state violence past and present, and move the state from the margins to the centre of scholarship and memory of the destruction of Jewish communities during World War Two.

88 www.yadvashem.org/press-release/25-january-2018-13-33.html. 89 www.huffpost.com/entry/miri-regev-sudan_n_1543079.

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Bibliographical Note This chapter is based on three kinds of sources. The first kind comprises current research on state violence in Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary. This includes my book, Genocide in the Carpathians, which is based, in part, on reports and correspondence of the Hungarian occupation authorities in the Carpathian region during World War Two. This material is located mostly in the National Archives of Hungary in Budapest (Magyar Országos Levéltár) and in the State Archives of the Transcarpathian Province in Berehovo, Ukraine (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Zakarpatskoi oblasti). Historian Vladimir Solonari’s Purifying the Nation, is still a key contribution on state violence in wartime Romania, and the work of historian and political scientist Nadège Ragaru is central in recent challenges, including this chapter, to the Bulgarian national narrative of rescue of Jews during World War Two. Earlier scholarship on wartime Bulgarian state violence includes Kotzageorgi and Kazamìas, ‘The Bulgarian occupation of the Prefecture of Drama’; Neuburger, The Orient Within; and Dragostinova, Between Two Motherlands. The second kind of sources includes research on settler colonial mass violence. I argue that state violence in southeast Europe included settler colonial processes that amounted to genocide; that is, the state aimed to expel, dispossess and destroy multi-ethnic and multireligious societies as a whole through a range of violence that escalated and, at times, deescalated, depending mostly on the dynamics of the war, and another set of policies that aimed to settle people defined by the state as desirable according to ethno-national criteria. This argument presents a new understanding of genocide – against entire societies in addition to targeting specific groups in those societies – and a new way to link the Holocaust, genocide and settler colonialism. I draw on the classic analysis of Wolfe, ‘Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native’. Pauline Wakeham, ‘The slow violence of settler colonialism: genocide, attrition, and the long emergency of invasion’, Journal of Genocide Research (2021), is a recent and very important contribution to this ongoing discussion. I also draw on Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, who wrote about wartime state violence in southeast Europe as a form of genocide rooted in processes of colonisation and settlement. The third kind of sources consists of reports and press releases, accessible online, by institutes of global Holocaust memory, such as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

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14

The Genocide of the Romani People in Europe jennifer illuzzi

The genocide of the Romani people during World War Two occurred throughout Europe and led to the death of approximately 220,000 Romani people, or around 25 per cent of a pre-war population of approximately 1 million.1 The persecution of various Romani groups varied widely throughout the European continent; in some places the UN definition of genocide, including the ‘intent to destroy, in whole or in part’, definitively applied, but in others, the question is more debatable. In understanding the history, motivations, outcomes and horror of the Romani genocide, historians have argued that discussing it in relationship to the Holocaust, while certainly unavoidable, can obscure the specificity of the Romani experience.2 This chapter contends that the Nazis and allied regimes targeted the Romani people in order to destroy them based on their supposed racial heritage, the very definition of genocide. It outlines the history of Romani persecution in Europe, explains debates among historians about the nature and validity of the term genocide, and provides a detailed geographical accounting of the genocide and its victims, perpetrators, bystanders and resisters. At the conclusion, a short Bibliographic Note focused on English sources delineates starting points for both for researchers and students.

1 USHMM, ‘Genocide of European Roma (Gypsies)’, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org /content/en/article/genocide-of-european-roma-gypsies-1939-1945. In this chapter, I will employ varying terms to signify the Romani people: Romani people (adjective) and Roma (noun) refers generally to all Romani subgroups on the continent; ‘Gypsy’ is an administrative term, translated in various languages to designate an unwanted group associated with stigmatised and racialised behaviours of travelling, stealing etc. and does not necessarily directly correlate with the Romani people; and when available or specifically designated by researchers, I will use the specific Romani subgroup names like Roma, Sinti, Kalderash etc. 2 M. Zimmermann, ‘Jews, Gypsies and Soviet prisoners of war: comparing Nazi persecutions’, in The Roma: A Minority in Europe: Historical, Political and Social Perspectives, ed. R. Stauber and R. Vago (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2013), pp. 31–53.

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Historical Precedents The Romani people have faced prejudice and persecution for centuries, but it varied geographically. The Ottoman Empire proved to be relatively tolerant of the Balkan Romani populations from their arrival in the Middle Ages through to the nineteenth century: while attempting to settle ‘nomadic’ Romani populations, the population was left in relative peace by state authorities.3 However, in medieval Moldavia, Wallachia and Transylvania, Romani populations were enslaved up to the mid-nineteenth century. By the fifteenth century, Romani people were present throughout the whole of mainland Europe, spreading westward from the Balkans and Greece. Various states tried to regulate them by forbidding their entrance, hampering their movement or forcing assimilation. The German-speaking principalities tried to expel the foreigners, often through royal edicts. In the Habsburg Empire and in Spain, policies focused on cultural assimilation, aiming to end the linguistic and cultural distinctiveness of the Romani populations. During the nineteenth century, the Romani diaspora had been identified as an unwanted population, and subjected to criminalisation and restrictive measures. In Ukraine and Russia, the nature of those restrictions varied geographically and according to political regimes. In the eastern half of the empire and in the former Ottoman lands, Gypsies in the principalities Moldavia and Wallachia (Romania) were gradually emancipated from slavery from 1843 to 1856, with many occupations growing increasingly sedentary and assimilated to the majoritarian culture. However, itinerant groups of Roma continued to experience widespread prejudice and marginalisation.4 In Russia and the Soviet Union, efforts focused on state control, regulation, sedentarisation and making the Roma ‘useful members of society’. Periods of relative cultural flourishing in the early USSR alternated with more violent assimilation and control tactics, as under Stalin.5 In central Europe, Habsburg rulers focused on sedentarisation and assimilation of Romani populations; however, by the middle of the nineteenth century with the Gypsy edict of 1888, policies focused on the expulsion and harassment of Gypsy populations. Because Austria-Hungary’s neighbours also expelled 3 E. Marushiakova and V. Popov, Gypsies in the Ottoman Empire: A Contribution to the History of the Balkans (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2001). 4 V. Achim, The Roma in Romanian History (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2013). 5 D. Crowe, A History of the Gypsies of Eastern Europe and Russia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995); Brigid O’Keeffe, ‘“Backward Gypsies”, Soviet citizens: the all-Russian Gypsy union, 1925–28’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 11:2 (2010), 283–312.

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roaming Gypsies, many families became destitute as local authorities deported them surreptitiously over national borders.6 In Germany, state authorities actively pursued policies to reduce the number of Gypsies who had claims on German residency, and sought to expel and criminalise growing numbers. The founding in Munich of the Zigeunerzentrale in 1899, a specialised police antiGypsy tracking centre, as well as the publication of the Zigeunerbuch in 1905, which purported to identify the Gypsies circulating in Germany at the time, were evidence of increasing attempts to track, criminalise and expel Gypsies. Italy, unlike the Habsburg Empire and Germany, took the official position that there were no Italian Gypsies, and sought therefore to expel every ‘Gypsy’; reaching a peak during the cholera outbreak of 1911.7 In France, authorities imposed increasing controls on the freedom of movement of those who were labelled as nomads, which culminated in the 1912 law requiring an anthropometric passport (carnet anthropometrique). It was largely left to the discretion of local authorities to classify travelling individuals as nomads or Gypsies.8 As in Germany and Austria-Hungary, the carnet system made it easier to delegitimise claims to French nationality. By the interwar period, Gypsies throughout Europe faced a difficult situation. The effect of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century regulations led to ‘the eroding of their social conditions’ and a situation of ‘endless exile’.9 The inability to ‘solve’ the Gypsy problem laid the groundwork for the systems of internment and ultimately genocide that came to dominate European policies towards the Romani people during World War Two.

Debates Concerning the Relationship between the Jewish and the Romani Genocide A seemingly small debate over naming the Romani genocide illustrates the much larger political and interpretive stakes facing historians. In scholarly writing concerning the event, the terms Porajmos (with various spellings), 6 F. Freund, ‘Genocidal trajectory: persecution of Gypsies in Austria, 1938–1945’, in The Nazi Genocide of the Roma: Reassessment and Commemoration, ed. A. Weiss-Wendt (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), pp. 44–71. 7 J. Illuzzi, Gypsies in Germany and Italy, 1861–1914: Lives outside the Law (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 8 S. Fogg, ‘Assimilation and persecution: an overview of attitudes toward Gypsies in France’, in The Nazi Genocide of the Roma: Reassessment and Commemoration, ed. A. WeissWendt (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), pp. 27–43. 9 I. About, ‘Unwanted “Gypsies”: the restriction of cross-border mobility and the stigmatisation of Romani families in interwar western Europe’, Quaderni Storici 146:2 (2014), pp. 499–532.

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Samduripen, and Kali Trash have all been used as Romani-language-based terms for the genocide. Ian Hancock and others have argued for the necessity of naming the event as a singularity in Romani history, as a response to debates during the 1980s and 1990s over the ‘uniqueness and singularity’ of the Shoah.10 Romani terms centre the work and experience of the Romani people themselves, in an academic realm where Romani voices are often side-lined or denigrated. However, scholars have objected to the popular term of Porrajmos because the root porrav- has a sexual connotation and the word poravipe in Romani means sexual violence. Thus, the International Romani Union has endorsed the more indicative term samduripen, which translates as ‘the murder of all’.11 Other scholars including Anton WeissWendt argue for ‘emotionally neutral scholarly terminology’. A generation of Romani activists arguing for the formal recognition of Romani peoplehood have spurred the debates over naming the genocide and centring Romani voices. Activist voices, as Popov and Marushiakova have asserted, must be understood within the differing and unique national histories of Romani groups.12 A higher-stakes historiographical question concerns the intent of the perpetrators of the Romani genocide. In the early 1990s the Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer argued for the uniqueness of the Holocaust as an event targeting European Jews. In comparison, he argued that the Nazis saw the Gypsies as a peripheral problem and valued ‘pure Gypsies’ and sedentary Gypsies while targeting only mixed blood and travelling populations. The targeting, for Bauer, was not intended to destroy European Gypsies, and thus the term genocide did not apply.13 Guenter Lewy argued in 2000 that Gypsies were targeted for behavioural attributes, rather than racial ones, agreeing that their killing was not a genocide according to the 10 I. About and A. Abakunova, The Genocide and Persecution of Roma and Sinti: Bibliography and Historiographical Review (Berlin: IHRA, 2016), www.holocaustremembrance.com/ publications/genocide-and-persecution-roma-and-sinti-bibliography-and-historio graphical-review. 11 K. Fings, ‘Genocide, Holocaust, Porajmos, Samudaripen’, trans. P. Bowman, RomArchive, www.romarchive.eu/en/voices-of-the-victims/genocide-holocaustporajmos-samudaripen/; About and Abakunova, Genocide and Persecution. 12 V. Popov and E. Marushiakova, ‘Holocaust, Porrajmos, Samudaripen . . . Tworzenienowej Mitologii Narodowej [Creation of a new national mythology]’, Studia Romologica 3 (2010), 75–94. 13 Y. Bauer, ‘“Es galt nicht der gleiche Befehl für beide”: eine Entgegnung auf Romani Roses Thesen zum Genozid an den europäischen Juden, Sinti und Roma [“It was not the same order for both”: a response to Romani Rose’s theses on the European Jews, Sinti and Roma]’, Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 43:11 (1997), 1381–6; Y. Bauer and S. Milton, ‘Correspondence: “Gypsies and the Holocaust”’, The History Teacher 25:4 (1992), 513–21.

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UN definition.14 Romani activists like Romani Rose and historians like Sybil Milton, Martin Luchterhandt and Martin Holler reacted quite strongly to such claims, pointing out evidence for the racial and intentional nature of the killing. While the Romani genocide evolved differently, evidence unearthed by researchers, especially following the opening of the archives in eastern Europe and the former USSR, indicates that Nazi policy did, in fact, aim at the elimination of the Gypsies as a race. A discrepancy existed between official Nazi policies in Germany, like that issued by Himmler in 1942, which seemed to privilege ‘pure’ Gypsies, or written orders in the occupied territories in the USSR which indicated that only ‘itinerant’ Gypsies should be targeted for persecution and murder, and actual policies on the ground, which virtually ignored official dictates and engaged in genocidal acts, racially targeting Gypsies. Luchterhandt shows decisively that well-integrated and largely sedentary groups of Roma, many of whom served in the German military, were removed from their positions, lost claims to their German citizenship, and often ended up interned or sterilised over the course of the war. Martin Holler has shown a similar disregard for behaviour in favour of race in the occupied USSR.15 The nineteenth-century history of classing nearly all Gypsies as ‘itinerant’ is relevant here, and police forces and local authorities charged with separating Gypsies during World War Two also used arbitrary criteria for selections geared towards extermination or forced labour. Many of the dead had become targets because they were well known to neighbours or local authorities as integrated community members who would be easier to target than ‘itinerant’ groups. The stated Nazi goal was to eliminate German Gypsies in two generations. Robert Ritter’s institute classified a small number of Gypsies as racially pure ‘Sinti’ or ‘Lalleri’ (approximately 2,100, according to Luchterhandt), in accordance with Himmler’s order, and they were spared from deportation. However, local authorities arbitrarily reported them in the absence of specific instructions as to who belonged to the category.16 Recently, Eve Rosenhaft and Ari Joskowicz have urged a paradigmatic shift in thinking about the Romani genocide. Rather than comparing the Romani genocide to the Jewish Holocaust, these historians centre Romani 14 G. Lewy, The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 15 M. Holler, ‘“Like Jews?” The Nazi persecution and extermination of Soviet Roma under the German military administration: a new interpretation, based on Soviet sources’, Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 24:1 (2010), 137–76. 16 M. Luchterhandt, Der Weg nach Birkenau: Entstehung und Verlauf der nationalsozialistischen Verfolgung der Zigeuner (Lübeck: Schmidt-Römhild, 2000).

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experiences and Romani victims. An excessive focus on state sources, both Nazi and Soviet, have marginalised the experiences of Romani survivors. Following the debates of the 1980s and 1990s, Holocaust researchers began to recognise the gaps in their knowledge of non-Jewish victims. Thus, during interviews or data collection, they asked Jewish survivors about Gypsies as well. Those survivors often shared the prejudices and preconceptions of the time, which led to a problematic view of Romani victims and resisters.17 For example, historiography on the Holocaust tended to view the Gypsy camp at Auschwitz as ‘privileged’, based on rumours asserted in post-war Jewish survivor testimonies. Luchterhandt uses Romani and non-Romani sources to disprove the myths, and to convey the full horror of life at Auschwitz for the Romani people.18 Rosenhaft points out that both institutional Romani memory of the Holocaust and Jewish centred narratives of the history fail to capture the complexity of the story, in which those living within Nazi architectures live simultaneously as both victims and perpetrators. By analysing Romani narratives and wartime correspondence, Rosenhaft seeks to analyse the genocide on its own terms, taking into account the context of Romani life before, during and after the war, and centring narratives within Romani histories, rather than Jewish histories or grand Holocaust narratives.19

The Romani genocide: Victims, Perpetrators, Bystanders, Resisters Bearing in mind the geographical variation and national distinctiveness of the Romani experience during World War Two, this chapter will present a historical overview of the persecution during that conflict, moving geographically from western to eastern Europe. In France and Italy, Roma were targeted for persecution, yet historians have argued against the designation of genocide in either country.20 As Shannon Fogg explains, ‘Gypsies in France were never officially persecuted 17 A. Joskowicz, ‘Separate suffering, shared archives: Jewish and Romani histories of Nazi persecution’, History and Memory 28:1 (2016), 110–40. 18 Luchterhandt, Der Weg nach Birkenau, pp. 281–307. 19 E. Rosenhaft, ‘At large in the “gray zone”: narrating the Romani Holocaust’, in Unsettling History: Archiving and Narrating in Historiography, ed. A. Lüdtke and S. Jobs (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2010), pp. 149–82. 20 E. Filhol and M. Hubert, Les Tsiganes en France, un sort à part, 1939–1946 [The Gypsies in France, a separate destiny] (Paris: Perrin, 2009); P. Trevisan, ‘The persecution of Rom and Sinti in fascist Italy’, Trauma and Memory 6:3 (2019), 48–55.

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on racial grounds during the war, and the Vichy regime continually argued for the assimilation of this minority group into the mainstream.’21 The treatment of Gypsies in France depended on whether they were located in the northern occupied zones or the southern Vichy region. (See Map 14.1.) In the German occupied zones, French Gypsies were either expelled to the south or interned in camps. Camps in the German occupation zone had the most difficult conditions, particularly the camps at Montreuil, Mulsanne and Poitiers.22 Roma suffered less persecution in the Vichy puppet state, but many were deported to the Saliers internment camp, where French nomads were subjected to forced assimilation measures.23 Between 3,000 and 5,000 French Roma were interned in camps during the war.24 Several French Roma and Sinti joined the French resistance.25 Peschanski and Fogg argue that since France was not part of the ‘greater Germany’ envisioned under the Nazis, the racial cleansing of the state was a low priority for German officials, and few Roma were killed. The only Gypsies deported to Auschwitz were those who were detained in Belgium. In Flemish northern Belgium, considered to be a ‘Germanic’ racial region, 351 Gypsies interned at the Malines camp were deported to Auschwitz in 1944, and some of them were of French nationality.26 As in France, the Italian fascist regime discriminated against Gypsies, classifying many as ‘dangerous foreigners’ during the 1930s, and in 1938 the government officially interned them in camps in southern Italy. While many Roma were believed to have died due to poor conditions in many of the camps, there has been no accurate count of those who died. Some of the Istrian Roma were deported to Germany after the occupation by the German army of northeastern Italy in 1943, where they were sent to concentration camps.27 The general 21 Fogg, ‘Assimilation and persecution’, 28. 22 D. Kenrick and G. Puxon, Gypsies under the Swastika (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2009), pp. 56–64; G. Megargee, J. White and M. Hecker (eds.), The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933– 1945, vol. I I I : Camps and Ghettos under European Regimes Aligned with Nazi Germany (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), pp. 90–239. 23 Fogg, ‘Assimilation and persecution’, 32–5; Megargee and White (eds.), Encyclopedia, I I I, pp. 227–8. 24 D. Peschanski, ‘Zigeuner in Frankreich 1912–1969: Eine periode durchgehender Stigmatisierung [Gypsies in France 1912–1969: a period of thorough stigmatisation]’, in Zwischen Erziehung und Vernichtung: Ziguenerpolitik und Zigeunerforschung im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. M. Zimmermann (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2007), pp. 268–77. 25 Kenrick and Puxon, Gypsies under the Swastika, p. 64. 26 Peschanski, ‘Zigeuner in Frankreich’; Fogg, ‘Assimilation and persecution’, 37. 27 P. Trevisan, ‘“Gypsies” in fascist Italy: from expelled foreigners to dangerous Italians’, Social History 42:3 (2017), 342–64; Trevisan, ‘Persecution’.

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Map 14.1 Romani genocide, 1939–1945. (Cartography by Peter Rogers)

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population in both Italy and France had no particular concern for Gypsies and viewed them as a nuisance, and the war gave both countries the opportunity to intensify pre-war discriminatory policies. Post-war governments continued such policies after the end of the conflict; thus, continuity of persecution and marginalisation best describes the nature of Italian and French actions during the war. In the Netherlands, much like in Belgium, the numbers of Romani groups residing on the territory was relatively small. Leo Lucassen asserts that many of the Dutch Sinti families succeeded in hiding during the war.28 As in Belgium, the Sinti residing in the Netherlands were considered a priority for removal, and 245 were arrested and sent to Westerbork on 14 May 1944, where the vast majority were deported to Auschwitz.29 The genocide of German Roma and Sinti within the Third Reich began with increased persecution around 1935, simultaneous with the rise of racialised depictions of Gypsies in published literature. As in Italy, Gypsies ceased to be a target for assimilation, but instead became ‘foreign enemies’. In 1938, the police forces in Wiesbaden attempted to deport Gypsies eastward, though they later rescinded the order for ‘sedentary’ Gypsies and those with German nationality. The transport failed: it was prohibitively expensive and no eastern cities would accept an influx of Gypsies, a perennial problem in the nineteenth century. By 1938, the Reich declared Gypsies with uncertain nationality to be stateless, and the plan to deport them to concentration camps began to take shape. By 1939, the behaviour of Gypsies ceased to be a factor in singling them out for persecution. The choice for German Gypsies became sterilisation or deportation to a concentration camp (and often, after they had chosen sterilisation, they were deported anyway). By the beginning of the war, localities detained Gypsies in accordance with a 1939 Reichskriminalpolizeiamt (RKPA) order. The order marked a departure from the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century policy of pushing Gypsies along to the next town or international border, and thus was met with resistance by pre-Nazi-era local officials.30 Conditions in the urban detention camps were uniformly abysmal, but some cities located the camps visibly in the centre of the city, while others located the camps on the periphery. Some were intended to be residences, while others were 28 L. Lucassen, ‘Gypsy research and Gypsy policy in the Netherlands (1850–1970) in a comparative perspective’, in Zwischen Erziehung und Vernichtung: Zigeunerpolitik und Zigeunerforschung im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. M. Zimmermann (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2007), p. 249. 29 Kenrick and Puxon, Gypsies under the Swastika, pp. 65–6. 30 Luchterhandt, Der Weg nach Birkenau, pp. 148–9.

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temporary stations where Gypsies would await deportation to concentration camps. Local resistance to maintaining Gypsies led to the decision to deport Gypsies eastward by late 1939. In 1940, it was decided that mass sterilisation would provide the ‘final solution’ to the German Gypsy problem.31 German police authorities delayed the deportation of German Gypsy populations until they had removed German Jews, but in 1941–2 severely limited their participation in public life: men were forbidden from serving in the army, children were prevented from attending public schools, interethnic marriages were forbidden and pre-existing marriages faced official scrutiny. Simultaneously, Robert Ritter was working with the RKPA to classify German Gypsies according to the amount of supposed ‘Gypsy blood’ they possessed.32 The system of classifying Gypsies was completely arbitrary and based on no verifiable information.33 In 1942, Heinrich Himmler ordered the SS to study the Romani language and people. As a result, Himmler decided to exempt pure ‘Lalleri’ and ‘Sinti’ from deportation, while ‘protecting’ them from contact with German blood. Deportations of German Gypsies to concentration camps began in January 1943, with certain groups being allowed to ‘choose’ sterilisation in place of deportation – for example, ex-soldiers.34 By March 1943, Germany began deporting Gypsies from the western occupied territories of AlsaceLorraine, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands to Auschwitz as well. Deportations to Auschwitz stopped in May 1943, and resumed again more slowly, in March 1944. German Gypsies were sent to many different camps, and not all were classified within the category of Zigeuner. (See Figure 14.1.) Many were deported as ‘asocials’ or career criminals, thus making the numbers of Romani victims difficult to determine. The unclear and ambiguous racial categorisation of Gypsies led to a less orderly internment, sterilisation and deportation process than that faced by German Jews. Camps with particularly large numbers of Romani inhabitants included Dora-Mittelbau, Natzweiler, Dachau, Auschwitz and Ravensbrück.35 Dora-Mittelbau was a particularly terrible camp for Gypsies, 31 Ibid., p. 157. 32 E. Rosenhaft, ‘Wissenschaft als Herrschaftsakt: Die Forschungspraxis der ritterschen Forschungsstelle und das Wissen über Zigeuner [Science as an act of domination]’, in Zwischen Erziehung und Vernichtung: Zigeunerpolitik und Zigeunerforschung im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. M. Zimmermann (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2007), pp. 329–53. 33 Luchterhandt, Der Weg nach Birkenau, p. 224. 34 Ibid., pp. 246–50. 35 G. Megargee (ed.), The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, vol. I: Early Camps, Youth Camps, and Concentration Camps and Subcamps under the SS-Business Administration Main Office (WVHA) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).

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Figure 14.1 Under German police surveillance, Sinti are marched down Königstraße (corner of Kelterstraße) in Asperg, district of Ludwigsburg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany, 22 May 1940. They are to be locked up at Hohenasperg prison prior to deportation to camps in Poland. (Photo: Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images)

where the Nazis worked the prisoners to death. Prisoners were taken from the Gypsy camp at Auschwitz to build an underground weapons depot for the planned V-1 rocket. The workers never left the subterranean edifice, even sleeping inside the work site in tunnels.36 Medical testing was undertaken in Natzweiler, Dachau, Ravensbrück and Auschwitz. Mengele’s experiments on Gypsy children in Auschwitz were unspeakably gruesome. Families in Auschwitz were kept together from racist beliefs about Gypsy families, but contrary to testimonies given by many Jewish survivors, the Roma in the camp were subjected to selections for killing. Gypsies constructed their own camp, thus slept on the ground when they first arrived at Auschwitz in winter 1943. Some were able to escape in the early days due to a lack of fencing. The Gypsies living in Auschwitz were beaten and mistreated, and suffered from a camp-wide typhus outbreak in 1943. Approximately 30–100 people per day died in the Zigeuner camp.37 Romani prisoners resisted their liquidation at the Auschwitz family camp. However, there is some dispute about the dates, times and methods of resistance. A story based on the testimony of Tadeusz Joachimowski asserted 36 Luchterhandt, Der Weg nach Birkenau, p. 269.

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a Romani uprising on or about 15 May 1944. When the SS closed the camp in preparation for its liquidation, the Romani prisoners locked themselves in their barracks and used makeshift weapons to defend themselves from the SS. Kubica and Setkiewiecz, working in the Auschwitz archives, have recently questioned this narrative due to a lack of corroborating evidence. They believe that the resistance of the Romani inmates was likely focused on the final deportations in early August, rather than the spring of 1944.38 Stories like that of Walter Winter point to other forms of resistance in the camp: Winter was able to utilise his personal history of German military service to gain a position of relative privilege among prisoners, and utilised that privilege to protect both himself and others.39 What is certain is that the final liquidation of the Gypsy camp took place on 2 August 1944, after several selections sent prisoners still able to work to other camps. In total, 5,700 Romani people were gassed at Auschwitz, and 14,000 died there by other means.40 Freund argues that Austrian authorities were even more enthusiastic than German ones about the possibility of the complete elimination of the ‘Gypsy menace’, and pushed for stricter enforcement of Nazi racial law, with the Burgenland outlawing Gypsies from attending public schools in 1938, while in Germany attendance was prohibited in 1941.41 In Austria, local leaders like Tobias Portschy, the Gauleiter of Burgenland, and Dr Meissner, the public prosecutor in Graz, pushed officials in Berlin to destroy the Austrian Gypsy population through deportation, sterilisation, and extermination.42 Following the Anschluss, in 1939, Himmler ordered Gypsies to be interned for their eventual deportation to German-occupied Poland. These camps were officially under the control of the RKPA, rather than the SS. Two of the larger camps were located at Maxglan, near Salzburg, and Lackenbach, which was established in 1940 mainly to house Burgenland Gypsies after the cancellation of a mass deportation to Auschwitz. The conditions at Lackenbach were abysmal in its early years, but improved slightly as the camp expanded.43 Other Gypsies were forced into slave labour – for example in Styria. In 1941, 5,007 Gypsies from former Austrian territories were deported 38 H. Kubica and P. Setkiewicz, ‘The last stage of the functioning of the Zigeunerlager in the Birkenau camp (May–August 1944)’, Memoria 10 (2018). 39 W. Winter, Winter Time: Memoirs of a German Sinto Who Survived Auschwitz (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2004). 40 Luchterhandt, Der Weg nach Birkenau, p. 304. 41 Freund, ‘Genocidal trajectory’, 54. 42 Kenrick and Puxon, Gypsies under the Swastika, pp. 43–9. 43 E. Thurner, ‘Gypsies in the Austrian Burgenland: the camp at Lackenbach’, in The Gypsies during the Second World War, vol. I I: In the Shadow of the Swastika, ed. D. Kenrick (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 1997), pp. 37–58.

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to the Litzmannstadt (Łódz´) ghetto, among them many from the Lackenbach camp, where they were congregated in a single housing block.44 According to Freund, 2,900 Austrian Gypsies were deported to the Gypsy camp at Auschwitz. Some 4,700 Austrian Gypsies were deported to concentration camps, and all of those deported to Litzmannstadt perished. The death toll for Austrian Gypsies was around 9,000, and only about 1,500–2,000 Austrian Gypsies (classified by Nazis as such) survived the war.45 Austrian Nazi officials enthusiastically participated in the genocide of Gypsies in Austria, both on local levels, where officials drew up lists of ‘Gypsies’ to be deported, and on a national level through the Criminal Police. However, following the deportation of Gypsy men in 1939, some Austrian farmers assisted starving Gypsy women and children, but faced only chastisement from local officials and the RKPA.46 Bohemia and Moravia, like Austria and northern France, became a Nazi protectorate in 1939. Interwar Czechoslovakia was home to approximately 100,000 Roma.47 As in Austria, the main camps in Bohemia and Moravia were hard-labour camps under the purview of the RKPA, located in Lety (Bohemia) and Hodonín (Moravia). Both were reserved exclusively for the detention and forced labour of Gypsies. In 1939, the protectorate issued restrictions on nomadism, and violators were sent to work camps. The camps at Lety and Hodonín were first established in 1942, following a decree modelled after Himmler’s which limited freedom of movement for the Gypsy population and mandated protective custody. The camp conditions were very poor, and many inmates died of communicable diseases like typhoid. Lety was closed in May 1943 and its inmates were deported to Hodonín and Auschwitz; Hodonín was closed shortly thereafter and its prisoners were deported to Auschwitz and other concentration camps in the east. There were over 4,000 Gypsies from Bohemia and Moravia interned in Auschwitz. In the forced-labour camps, many interned Gypsies attempted escape, and several succeeded. Some Gypsies in both Lety and Hodonín were eventually released, presumably due to the intervention of local mayors or friends who pushed for their reclassification as ‘Aryans’. According to Kenrick 44 Freund, ‘Genocidal trajectory’, 61; M. Dean and G. Megargee (eds.), The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, vol. I I: Ghettos in German-Occupied Eastern Europe (Bloomington and Washington DC: Indiana University Press, 2012), pp. 75–82. 45 Freund, ‘Genocidal trajectory’, 65. 46 Ibid., 56. 47 C. Necas, ‘Bohemia and Moravia: two internment camps for the Gypsies in the Czech lands’, in The Gypsies during the Second World War, vol. I I: In the Shadow of the Swastika, ed. D. Kenrick (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 1997), pp. 149–70.

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and Puxon, the Gypsies registered in 1942 in Bohemia and Moravia totalled 6,000; of those, only 600 survived.48 In Slovakia’s puppet fascist regime, as in Italy and France, the persecution of the Roma did not reach genocidal proportions. The consequences of their segregation, pauperisation, and expulsion from villages where they had been settled still resonate to this day, but most Roma survived the war. Of approximately 80,000 Slovakian Roma, 79,000 survived.49 Many Slovakian Roma were integrated into the largely rural Slovak society, and authorities prioritised the genocide of the Jewish population during the war. Local authorities, as in the Czech lands and Austria, had a great deal of discretion in deciding who would be placed into forced-labour camps, and, unlike in Austria, many towns sent very few or no Romani men. The conditions in the camps were quite poor, and the loss of their livelihoods rendered many Roma destitute. In their absence, the men’s wives and children faced near starvation.50 Many local mayors thought of the Roma residents as fellow Slovaks, and many Roma served in the Slovakian national army during the war. Other Romani settlements joined the partisan resistance against the Slovakian fascist regime. In other towns and villages, local leaders enforced limitations on Gypsy travel and resettlement and expulsion policies declared in 1943. When the German army was called in to defeat the National Uprising in 1944, the community suffered more dire repercussions, including mass shootings of partisans and the destruction of Romani villages. The entry of the Nazi army meant plans for the mass deportation of Slovakian Roma, but the end of the war prevented their implementation.51 Yugoslavia was home to a large, mostly sedentary, Romani population by the beginning of World War Two. Reinhartz estimates that there were 300,000 Romani people in Yugoslavia by 1941, while Kenrick estimates ‘several hundred thousand’.52 Reinhartz estimates that two-thirds of the 300,000 pre-war Romani population was exterminated during the war.53 The situation for Roma in Yugoslavia, as in France and Italy, was largely based on the occupying forces present in each area. The situation was most dire for 48 Kenrick and Puxon, Gypsies under the Swastika, pp. 53–4. 49 M. Hübschmannovà, ‘Roma in the so-called Slovak state (1939–45)’, in The Gypsies During the Second World War, vol. I I I: The Final Chapter, ed. Donald Kenrick (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2006), pp. 3–46. 50 Kenrick and Puxon, Gypsies under the Swastika, pp. 120–3. 51 Hübschmannovà, ‘Roma in the so-called Slovak state’. 52 Kenrick and Puxon, Gypsies under the Swastika, p. 73. 53 Dennis Reinhartz, ‘The genocide of the Yugoslav Gypsies’, in Gypsies During the Second World War, vol. I I I: The Final Chapter, ed. Donald Kenrick (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2006), pp. 87–95.

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Romani populations in today’s Croatia and Serbia, while events in Montenegro, Macedonia and Slovenia did not amount to a genocide. The Wehrmacht occupied Serbia in 1941 and installed a puppet government under Nedić. Under German military occupation, anti-Gypsy policies were fully applied. Authorities targeted anyone they determined as having three Gypsy grandparents. Eventually, some sedentary Roma were freed from restrictions. Many of the Serbian Roma were executed as hostages in retaliation for Cˇ etnik (Serbian royalist) and partisan attacks. Others were interned in camps or shot by occupation forces. German army and police forces were largely responsible for the killings, and by 1942 the German Chief of Civil Administration, Harald Turner, declared the Gypsy question resolved, despite the fact that several Serbian Gypsies were still alive in the country.54 According to Reinhartz, up to 20,000 Roma were slaughtered.55 The nominally Independent State of Croatia formed in 1941 was controlled by the fascist nationalist Ustaša. In May 1942, Croatian authorities deported most Croatian Gypsies to the Jasenovac concentration camp, which housed Jews and Gypsies separately.56 Historians estimate the pre-war Croatian Romani population as 20,000–30,000, of which a significant portion died. The numbers are difficult to ascertain, however, given the highly integrated status of the Roma. Local authorities in Croatia had a great deal of leeway in deciding who would be slated for deportation and death: some communities deported all or nearly all Roma, while others deported none. In a notable case, local Muslim authorities successfully resisted the deportation and persecution of Muslim Romani populations, which made up approximately 10 per cent of the Croatian Romani population.57 Scholars agree that almost all Gypsies deported to Jasenovac died there by the end of 1942, making it indisputably a death camp. Korb notes that only in Romania and Croatia did local authorities carry out a genocide against the Romani people independent of the Nazis. Since the end of World War Two, the Romani Croat population has rebounded to a population of approximately 800,000, but Croatia has never paid restitution to the community.58 The Romani population of Yugoslavia actively resisted the Nazis and their allies. Many Roma in Croatia escaped either to Hungary or the Italian zones Kenrick and Puxon, Gypsies under the Swastika, pp. 82–3. Reinhartz, ‘Genocide of the Yugoslav Gypsies’, 89–91. Megargee and White (eds.), Encyclopedia, I I I, pp. 46–51. A. Korb, ‘Ustaša mass violence against Gypsies in Croatia, 1941–1942’, in The Nazi Genocide of the Roma: Reassessment and Commemoration, ed. A. Weiss-Wendt (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), pp. 82–3. 58 Reinhartz, ‘Genocide of the Yugoslav Gypsies’, 95. 54 55 56 57

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of occupation. Some converted to Catholicism or Islam to avoid slaughter, and some joined the Croatian army. Some first-hand accounts of Jasenovac detail active resistance of the Romani people in the camp.59 Many Romani people joined Tito’s partisans, especially in Macedonia and the Bulgarianoccupied part of Kosovo.60 In Bulgaria, much like in Montenegro, Macedonia and Slovenia, a genocide against the Romani did not take place. While the fascist ally Bulgaria passed regulations to prevent the intermarriage of Roma citizens and planned for deportations, none were sent to concentration camps. Some settled Roma were recruited to fight in the Bulgarian army, and others joined the anti-fascist partisans during the war.61 With Hungary’s entry into World War Two as a German ally, discrimination against Romani populations intensified, yet deportations to concentration camps did not begin until the German occupation in 1944 and the rise of the Arrow Cross party. At the outset of the war, some Romani men were conscripted into the Hungarian army to fight alongside the Germans, and others, along with Jews, were conscripted into forced-labour brigades accompanying army units. In 1944, Roma and Jews were detained and sent mainly to the town of Komàrom on the Czech border, where they were interned under horrific conditions until their deportation to extermination camps.62 As the Soviet army approached, some Romani people were force marched westward. Local Hungarian Arrow Cross officials, local police, the army and the Gestapo shot Romani people in massacres, either as they tried to flee, or in their villages. Again, as in Croatia and Serbia, the enthusiasm of local officials and supporters of the Nazis contributed to the destruction. Evidence for the Hungarian Romani genocide comes mainly from survivor testimonies and accounts. Kenrick and Puxon estimate that 30,000 were deported to Germany and Poland, and approximately 3,000 returned, while Katz estimates that 50,000 Hungarian Roma perished.63 The long-term effect on the Hungarian Romani community was catastrophic. 59 Korb, ‘Ustaša’, 88–9. 60 Reinhartz, ‘Genocide of the Yugoslav Gypsies’, 89. 61 E. Marushiakova and V. Popov, ‘Zigeunerpolitik und Zigeunerforschung in Bulgarien (1919–1989) [Gypsy policy and research in Bulgaria]’, in Zwischen Erziehung und Vernichtung: Zigeunerpolitik und Zigeunerforschung im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. M. Zimmermann (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2007), pp. 125–56; E. Marushiakova and V. Popov, ‘The Bulgarian Romanies during the Second World War’, in The Gypsies during the Second World War, vol. I I: In the Shadow of the Swastika, ed. D. Kenrick (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 1997), pp. 89–94. 62 Megargee and White (eds.), Encyclopedia, I I I, pp. 349–50. 63 Kenrick and Puxon, Gypsies under the Swastika, pp. 111–12; K. Katz, ‘The Roma of Hungary in the Second World War’, in Gypsies During the Second World War, vol. I I I: The

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Historians debate whether the Romani persecution in independent Romania during World War Two constituted a genocide. The pre-war Romani population was substantial, approximately 1.5 per cent of the population. Some 262,501 people declared themselves Gypsies in the 1930 census.64 Beginning in 1942, nomadic and sedentary Roma were deported to Transnistria, formerly a Ukrainian region given to the dictator Antonescu in return for his alliance with Hitler’s Germany. Jews had been deported there already in 1940. The Transnistria region possessed rich farmland, but lacked the requisite infrastructure to manage the influx of Jewish and Romani deportees. The Antonescu regime knew that the consequences of deportation would entail mass death. Immediately following the deportation of itinerant Roma in May 1942, Antonescu ordered local officials to compile lists of sedentary Roma who were ‘criminal’. Given pre-war policies of the criminalisation of the Roma, the category was quite amorphous.65 Romani soldiers returned to learn that authorities had deported their families. Once they arrived in Transnistria, conditions were abhorrent and local authorities quite intentionally abandoned them, providing vastly inadequate food, forcing the Roma to build their own shelters, confiscating caravans from itinerant Roma and often forcing families to eat their own horses, some of their most valuable and treasured possessions. Kelso’s survivor testimonies allude to widespread hunger, exposure and typhus, and despite some official proclamations from local constables about improving conditions, little was done to ameliorate the situation. Some Roma escaped Transnistria – unlike more formal camps, these ‘settlements’ were not blocked off from the surrounding countryside. During the deportations, particularly of settled Roma, some villages and towns ‘saved’ Roma while others aggressively deported them. By late 1942, the deportations ended as Antonescu considered joining the Allies. Kenrick and Puxon as well as Kelso estimate that about 26,000 Roma were deported to Transnistria and approximately 6,000 returned.66 Achim Final Chapter, ed. Donald Kenrick (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2006), pp. 47–85. 64 V. Achim, ‘Gypsy research and Gypsy policy in Romania 1920–1950’, in Zwischen Erziehung und Vernichtung: Zigeunerpolitik und Zigeunerforschung im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. M. Zimmermann (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2007), p. 158. 65 V. Solonari, ‘Ethnic cleansing or “crime prevention”? Deportation of Romanian Roma’, in The Nazi Genocide of the Roma: Reassessment and Commemoration, ed. A. WeissWendt (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), pp. 96–119. 66 M. Kelso, ‘Gypsy deportations from Romania to Transnistria 1942–44’, in The Gypsies during the Second World War, vol. I I: In the Shadow of the Swastika, ed. D. Kenrick (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 1997), pp. 95–130; Kenrick and Puxon, Gypsies under the Swastika, p. 120

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estimates that about 14,000 of the 25,000 Roma deported to Transnistria survived.67 Given the fact that only Jews and Roma were deported, and both were subjected to deliberate neglect resulting in mass death, these events meet the UN criteria for genocide. Romania, like Croatia, carried out the genocide independent of Nazi Germany. Unlike in Romania, Poland was directly administered by the Nazis and became a central location of the genocide of European Romani people by 1941. In 1942, groups of Polish Roma were sent to ghettos and subjected to massacres by Polish and Ukrainian fascists. The massacres continued through 1944. Kenrick and Puxon estimate that 8,000 Polish Roma, around 25 per cent of the pre-war population, lost their lives during the Nazi occupation.68 Within the General Government, as in many other places, Romani fates depended on the enthusiasm of local authorities. For example, in Lwów (Lemberg) local authorities largely spared the Romani population.69 Ukraine was divided among the Romanians, Hungarians and the Nazi regime, who split their portion into a civil and military administration. As in the rest of the occupied USSR, anti-Romani policy evolved over the period from 1941 to 1942, but generally, both itinerant and sedentary Roma were massacred, either by Einsatzgruppen C and D, the SS, German Security Police, or local authorities and police forces. Other Roma were utilised as slave labour. The severity of the actions taken against the Romani population was largely determined by local personnel. As in Croatia, Muslim Roma, particularly in the Crimea, were often saved by the concerted action of local Muslim Committees. Local populations in Ukraine often did not support the persecution of the Roma, as they filled important economic niches, particularly in rural areas. The methods of resistance resembled strategies employed in other countries: blending in with other populations, running away from collection points before shootings, hiding in the woods, or utilising local connections to evade capture. Exact numbers of those murdered in Ukraine are difficult to determine.70 Martin Holler has done extensive archival research in Soviet State Extraordinary Commission for Investigation of Nazi War Crimes in the Soviet Union (ChGK) records, as well as local ex-Soviet archives, German 67 M. Tyaglyy, ‘Nazi occupation policies and the mass murder of the Roma in Ukraine’, in The Nazi Genocide of the Roma: Reassessment and Commemoration, ed. A. Weiss-Wendt (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), p. 134. 68 Kenrick and Puxon, Gypsies under the Swastika, pp. 69–72. 69 P. Wawrzeniuk, “Lwów saved us”: Roma survival in Lemberg 1941–44’, Journal of Genocide Research 20:3 (2018), 327–50. 70 Tyaglyy, ‘Nazi occupation policies’.

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archives, secondary sources from the USSR and survivor interviews to establish the extent and severity of the genocide against the Romani people in the USSR.71 Einsatzgruppe A, located in northwestern Russia surrounding Leningrad, carried out mass executions of Roma primarily in the spring and summer of 1942. Both ‘sedentary’ and ‘itinerant’ Roma were killed indiscriminately, and later labelled as ‘partisans’. While Nazi military authorities had ordered the members of the Einsatzgruppen to leave sedentary Roma in peace, that order was not obeyed on the ground. Holler estimates that 1,300 to 1,500 Roma were killed in the northwestern regions of the USSR. One of the largest massacres took place in the village of Novorzhev, where up to 330 Roma were shot by the German Secret Field Police Group 714, supported by gendarmes and local auxiliary police. In many cases, German authorities were assisted by local collaborators who helped them to identify and exterminate Roma. In addition to the German Security Police, SS and security constabulary, the Einsatzgruppen utilised local auxiliaries from Germany, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Ukraine.72 The largely rural population protested the massacres, and later testified to Soviet authorities that the executed were not partisans.73 In the Reich Commissariat Ostland (RKO), which included Belorussia and the Baltic states, a German civil administration utilised Nazi racial ideology to justify their massacres of the Roma, rather than the label of ‘partisan’. The extent of local authorities’ co-operation with the Nazis once again determined the extent of the genocide. For example, in Estonia, the Romani population was virtually eradicated, while in Latvia, some provinces annihilated the Roma, while others left them unscathed. Approximately 1,900 of 3,800 Latvian Roma were killed. Lithuania, less well-researched, interned Roma in work camps, and out of about 1,000 Roma, approximately 100–500 Roma perished, according to Holler; Zimmermann argues that ‘nearly the whole Romany population . . . was massacred’.74 In Belorussia, nearly the 71 M. Holler, Der nationalsozialistische Völkermord an den Roma in der besetzten Sowjetunion (1941–1944): Gutachten für das Dokumentations- und Kulturzentrum Deutscher Sinti und Roma [The Nazi Genocide of the Roma in the Occupied USSR (1941–1944): Expert Report for the Culture and Documentation Centre of German Sinti and Roma], ed. F. Reuter (Heidelberg: Dokumentations- und Kulturzentrum Deutscher Sinti und Roma, 2009). 72 M. Zimmermann, ‘The Soviet Union and the Baltic States 1941–44: the massacre of the Gypsies’, in The Gypsies during the Second World War, vol. I I: In the Shadow of the Swastika, ed. D. Kenrick (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 1997), p. 131–48. 73 M. Holler, ‘The Nazi persecution of Roma in northwestern Russia: the operational area of the Army Group North, 1941–1944’, in The Nazi Genocide of the Roma: Reassessment and Commemoration, ed. A. Weiss-Wendt (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), pp. 153–80. 74 Zimmermann, ‘Soviet Union’, 148.

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entire Romani population was exterminated, but estimates of their numbers vary.75 In all cases, the murders were largely carried out by the Einsatzgruppe A. Assimilationist Soviet pre-war policy meant that many Roma were enlisted in the Red Army and actively fighting the Nazis during World War Two.76 Others participated in the partisan resistance or underground movements. Valdemar Kalinin has documented the stories of some of the Roma fighting in the Red Army and the resistance during World War Two.77

Conclusion Some patterns are discernible in the complex history of the European Romani genocide. Where the German Wehrmacht or civil administration were directly in control, Romani people were killed in greater numbers. Nazi mixed messages and higher prioritisation of a final solution for Jewish populations meant local discretion over the resolution of the Gypsy question; all too many local authorities used the opportunity for genocide. Some officials resisted the killing of Romani populations – for example, in the case of Muslim councils who protected Muslim Roma. Other communities enthusiastically sent their Romani population to death, as in Croatia, Romania or Austria. The perpetrators were not only German soldiers or police, but local officials who compiled lists of their Romani population, Einsatzgruppen volunteers or local civilian collaborators and police. The victims, in all cases, included settled Romani populations as well as those groups who practised itinerant trades. Romani people actively resisted their treatment by the perpetrators. They fought in national armies, joined the partisans and the underground resistance, appealed to local authorities for respite, escaped their imprisonment and hid among their neighbours. After World War Two, many nations simply continued the pre-war patterns of exclusion and prejudice against a now much smaller and more impoverished Romani diaspora. In France, for example, some interned Sinti remained in camps, with the last internees released only in May 1946.78 75 Holler, ‘The Nazi persecution of Roma’, 171; Kenrick and Puxon, Gypsies under the Swastika, pp. 89–92. 76 O’Keeffe, ‘“Backward Gypsies”’. 77 V. Kalinin, ‘Roma in the resistance in the Soviet Union’, in Gypsies During the Second World War, vol. I I I: The Final Chapter, ed. Donald Kenrick (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2006), pp. 111–17. 78 Fogg, ‘Assimilation and persecution’.

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Moreover, survivors of the camps have not received restitution from the French state. The Czech Republic and Germany have paid limited restitution to the Romani survivors, but this is more the exception than the rule.79 Romani activists in Europe have organised with mixed success for different forms of national recognition of the history of the genocide in various places, but memorial celebrations centred around 2 August, the day of the liquidation of the family camp at Auschwitz, have grown in international recognition and stature. When the Romani genocide is viewed in its own proper context, it is remarkable that even absent direct pressure from the Nazis, so many states enthusiastically participated in genocide. Historians have begun the work of considering the Romani genocide on its own terms, but much is left to do to contextualise the genocide in the larger history of the European Romani diaspora and the Jewish Holocaust.

Bibliographic Note on Sources in English An excellent resource for scholars beginning research on the Romani genocide is About and Abakunova’s The Genocide and Persecution of Roma and Sinti. The authors provide an exhaustive bibliography, both thematically and geographically arranged, as well as a document bibliography that lists primary source testimonies in fourteen European languages. Also included is a list of documentaries addressing the Romani genocide. The collection contradicts an oft repeated contention that the Romani genocide is understudied, while providing a solid basis for a research agenda aligned to the goals outlined by Rosenhaft and Joscowicz. About and Abakunova suggest that remaining questions for more study include Romani resistance and survival strategies during the war, the exile experience for those who were able to leave mainland Europe for the UK or the United States and those who were prevented from seeking refuge. They also point to a lack of research on how widely the genocide was known by international organisations and outside of the wartime fronts, as well as research specifically pointing to the gendered aspects of genocide. Readers wishing for a more narrative secondary source overview of the Romani genocide should turn to two excellent works that provide both attention to geographical specificity and historiographical debates. Donald Kenrick and Grattan Puxon have been researching the Romani genocide for 79 G. Margalit, ‘The justice system of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Nazi persecution of the Gypsies’, in The Nazi Genocide of the Roma: Reassessment and Commemoration, ed. A. Weiss-Wendt (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), pp. 181–204.

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several decades. Their volume entitled Gypsies under the Swastika, first published in 1972, and thoroughly updated in 2009, is well-suited to an audience of advanced undergraduate students. They have collected first-person accounts and extensive documentation to support the claim that the actions taken against Europe’s Romani population amounted to genocide, and to provide the best available statistics on the numbers of victims. The bibliography and suggestions for further reading in English are relatively cursory, however. The second work is an essay collection, The Nazi Genocide of the Roma, edited by Anton Weiss-Wendt, a researcher at the Center for the Study of the Holocaust and Religious Minorities in Oslo, Norway. Essays by the foremost European experts are both geographical in nature, addressing France, Austria, Croatia, Romania, Ukraine and the USSR, as well as focused on the memory of the Romani genocide in Europe today, particularly in Germany. The work additionally provides a more thorough selected bibliography. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and the Wiener Holocaust Library are both English-language archives with key primary sources valuable for students and researchers alike. Some of their resources are available online, and others must be consulted on site. The USHMM includes interviews with Romani survivors within the Gabriella Tyrnauer, Paul Polansky and Daniel Riesenfeld collections, in addition to the Czech Roma Documentation Project and the Romanian Roma Documentation project. Also, the Lithuania, Moldova and Latvia Documentation Project; the Polish Witnesses to the Holocaust collection; and the Ukrainian Witnesses Documentation Project contain interviews with or about Romani victims. A complete search of the USHMM holdings can be conducted at https://collections.ushmm.org/search/. The USHMM also holds copies of 180 Romani survivor interviews conducted by Yahad in Unum, which aims to ‘identify and commemorate the sites of Jewish and Roma mass executions’ which happened outside of the Nazi concentration camps. See ‘Porajmos: The Roma Genocide’, www.yahadinunum.org/porajmos-theroma-genocide/. The Wiener library holds the Kenrick and Puxon archives, which chronicle thirty years of interviews and research on the Romani genocide. The USHMM and Wiener Library also provide complete access to the International Tracing Service (ITS) archives, which focus on individual personal data from survivors and refugees. The ITS records are partially searchable online at https://arolsen-archives.org/en/. The RomArchive, funded through the German Federal Cultural Foundation and other civil society groups and hosted by the 356

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Documentation and Cultural Centre of German Sinti and Roma, contains a curated collection of testimonies and primary sources available in English, German and Romani. Historian Karola Fings and a scientific committee provide an overview of the Romani genocide in twenty different countries. Users can experience an online virtual tour of letters written by Romani victims, including a Russian Romani soldier who died at Stalingrad, a mother who is seeking her children at the end of the war and a woman writing home from Auschwitz. See ‘RomArchive’, www.romarchive.eu/en/. The Council of Europe also maintains a website with both primary and secondary sources at www.coe.int/en/web/roma-genocide. Other sources of interest to students and researchers are published survivor accounts. Winter Time by Walter Winter, a German Sinto who survived Auschwitz was from a circus family and served in the German Navy, but was deported to concentration camps. He describes the struggle for compensation after the war and the continuing prejudice against Romani populations in Germany. A Gypsy in Auschwitz (London: Allison & Busby, 2000) was dictated to Ulrich Enzenberger by Otto Rosenberg, another German Sinto who was sent to the Marzahn concentration camp outside Berlin in 1936, and later deported to Auschwitz. He became a leader of the Berlin-Brandenberg State Association of German Sinti and Roma and an activist for the recognition of the genocide of German Sinti and Roma during the war. Toby Sonneman, an author exploring her German Jewish family’s history, interviewed several generations of the German Sinti Mettbach family, and interwove it with her father’s own story of emigrating from Nazi Germany to the United States in 1939 ( Shared Sorrows: A Gypsy Family Remembers the Holocaust (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2002). Sonneman’s account seeks to provide a ‘shared’ history of suffering with Jewish victims of the Holocaust, and thus falls prey to some of the problematic ideas outlined by Rosenhaft and Joscowicz. Two short films also provide a useful introduction for students learning about the Romani genocide. Porraimos: Europe’s Gypsies in the Holocaust (2001), directed by Alexandra Isles, tells the stories of Romani survivors of the Holocaust from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. While utilising a problematic term and presenting the story from the historiographical lens of the Jewish Holocaust, it offers primary-source interviews that students will find compelling. Michelle Kelso’s Hidden Sorrows (2005) offers survivor testimonies from Romania with a more up-to-date position on the historiography behind the genocide.

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15

The Nazis and the Slavs Poles and Soviet Prisoners of War norman naimark

Adolf Hitler had a dismissive view of the Slavs, inherited in part from the late nineteenth-century German nationalist proponents of the Kulturkampf (culture struggle) and the Drang nach Osten (urge to the east).1 His ideas also derived from his personal experience with the Vienna of his youth; he recalled ‘the embodiment of racial defilement’ and the ‘race conglomerate’ with its ‘alien mix of nationalities’, that he felt destroyed the positive characteristics of Germandom.2 During and after World War One, his views conformed to the blended ideology of antisemitism, anti-Slavism and colonialism that characterised much of German right-wing thinking about the east.3 With that said, the ideology of National Socialism that Hitler formulated in the course of the 1920s and which continued to evolve during his ascent to unlimited power in the 1930s and the six brutal years of World War Two was more deeply influenced by the changing circumstances of his dictatorship in Germany and of Germany’s place in Europe than it was by the long-term prejudices of the German right. Hitler’s racial theories, which saw their initial articulation in the two volumes of Mein Kampf, published in 1925 and 1928, spoke of the superiority of the German race over other peoples, most specifically the Jews, but also the Slavs. The supposed dangers of nonAryan ‘Untermenschen’ (lesser human beings) suffused the ways the Germans dealt with Slavic nations during the war, while inconsistencies, 1 John Connelly, ‘Nazis and Slavs: from racial theory to racist practice’, Central European History 32:1 (1999), 1–33. Richard Weickert, ‘Hitler’s struggle for existence against Slavs: anthropology, racial theory and vacillations in Nazi policy toward Czechs and Poles’, in The Treatment of Minorities in Nazi-Dominated Europe, ed. Anton Wendt-Weiss (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), pp. 61–83. 2 Hitler, Mein Kampf: Eine kritische Edition, ed. Christian Hartmann, Thomas Vordermayer, Othmar Plöckinger et al. (Munich and Berlin: Institut für Zeitgeschichte, 2016), p. 129. 3 Wolfgang Wippermann, ‘Antislavismus’, in Handbuch zur ‘Völkischen’ Bewegung, ed. Uwe Puschner, Walter Schmitz, Justus H. Ulbricht et al. (Munich: K. G. Saur Verlag, 1996), pp. 521–2.

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including ideas that some Slavs were more Aryan than some Germans and that many had superior racial characteristics, were omnipresent in Nazi ideology. Slavs could also be ‘junior partners’ in the Nazi Empire, as alliances of sorts were forged with the newly created Slavic states of Croatia and Slovakia. Hitler’s ideas of ‘Lebensraum’, also elaborated in Mein Kampf, meant that his desire to expand German power and control to the east with the intention of colonising this territory with German settlers would involve the expulsion, enslavement and death of the Slavs who lived there. As these ideas morphed into concrete planning on the eve of and during the war, represented by the various iterations of Generalplan Ost (the general plan for the east), tens of millions of Slavs – Russians, Poles, Belarusians, Ukrainians and others – were condemned by the reality of the occupation to starvation diets, fearful lives and forced labour. Once the war was won, according to the gist of Nazi planning, a small Slavic labour force, would be compelled to serve the Germans as helots, slave labour. Racially salvageable Slavs would be Germanised (or ‘re-Germanised’) and sent primarily to the Reich to work in agriculture and in factories. The majority of Slavs would be deported beyond the Urals and scattered throughout western Siberia. Each of the Slavic peoples would suffer forcible deportation at differentiated rates: a much larger percentage of Poles (85 per cent) than Czechs (35 per cent) would be expelled from their territories to the east. The percentages of Ukrainians (from western Ukraine) and Belarusians who would be expelled to the east were, respectively, 64 per cent and 75 per cent. The fate of the Russians was less clear, since the Nazis were reluctant to send them beyond the Urals fearing they might recreate a Russian state there. Presumably, a substantial percentage (15 per cent) would be Germanised, somewhat higher than among the Belarusians and Ukrainians. But the majority would die during the war from the fighting and occupation policies, including food deprivation (some 60 per cent), or be used as slave labour and presumably starved over time.4 In the newly acquired territories designated as part of the larger German Empire in the future, including almost all of Poland and large chunks of 4 For the various formulations of Generalplan Ost and their follow-up, the General Settlement Plan, see ‘Der Generalplan Ost: Dokumentation’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 6:3 (1958), 525; Czesław Madajczyk (ed.), Vom Generalplan Ost zum Generalsiedlungsplan (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1994); and Mechtild Rössler and Sabine Schleiermacher (eds.), Der ‘Generalplan Ost’: Hauptlinien der nationalsozialistischen Planungs- und Vernichtungspolitik (Berlin: Akad. Verlag, 1993).

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Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic region, few Slavs would be allowed to remain except as workers deprived of schooling and taught enough German to follow orders and read road signs. Some 31 million out of 45 million Slavs would be deported from these new territories.5 At Hitler’s ‘Werwolf’ headquarters in Ukraine on 6 August 1942, the Führer emphasised: ‘We shall absorb or expel a ridiculous hundred million Slavs.’6 He insisted that public announcements would emphasise that the occupation would proceed in the interests of the population; privately, he noted that the Nazis would do what was necessary to ensure that the occupation turned into permanent German domination: ‘All necessary measures – shooting, deportation etc. – we will and can do despite this [public stance.]’7 Not all Slavic peoples were slated for destruction ‘in whole or in part’, to cite the core UN definition of genocide. Even those Slavs in the east were treated in variable ways by the Germans. Some of this was the result of conflicts within the Nazi and Wehrmacht hierarchies about the appropriate behaviour towards the peoples under their jurisdiction. Some of it derived from inconsistencies in the ideology itself. Probably the greatest source of confusion derived from the shifting wartime needs of the Third Reich. As it became clear in the spring and summer of 1942 that the war against the Soviet Union would not end quickly with a resounding victory as Hitler (and many observers) had confidently predicted, the Third Reich was forced to recruit fresh soldiers from the ranks of German manufacturing and agricultural workers, leaving millions of jobs unfilled, many in the crucial armaments industry. The fate of Poles, Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) and Ukrainians changed radically as they were needed by the Nazis for forced labour at home. The policy of the Third Reich towards the Slavs, writes John Connelly, was one of ‘constant improvisation’.8 As the war progressed, Slavs also became increasingly useful to the Germans for a number of policing and even military purposes. Alfred Rosenberg, head of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, became one of the most influential proponents of recruiting Slavic peoples to the Nazi cause.9 Even if Rosenberg was unable to convince Hitler and the SS hierarchy of the admissibility of joining with 5 Vom Generalplan Ost, p. vii. 6 Cited in Jerzy Borejsza, A Ridiculous Hundred Millions Slavs: Concerning Adolf Hitler’s Worldview, trans. David French (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Neriton and Instytut Historii, 2006), p. 25. 7 16 July 1941, Führerhauptquartier; Vom Generalplan Ost, p. 16. 8 Connelly, ‘Nazis and Slavs’, 33. 9 Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936–45: Nemesis (New York: Norton, 2000), p. 406.

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Slavic peoples in military coalition against the Soviet Union, SS units were formed from Ukrainians (Galizien), Russians and Belarusians. The 50,000 member Vlasov Army, in 1944 renamed the Armed Forces of the Committee of the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia, was formed in Germany of exile Russians as well as large numbers of Soviet deserters and POWs and fought with the Wehrmacht against the Red Army. Slavs – Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Belarusians – also served the SS and the German police forces in their genocidal mission of eliminating the Jews of Europe. Most historians agree that the Germans alone could never have carried out the Holocaust without help from local collaborators, who hunted down Jews, identified them to the authorities, interned and guarded them in concentration and death camps and, sometimes, actively took part in the executions and gassings. Given the controversies surrounding the collaboration of Slavic peoples with the Holocaust, it is important to underline the fact that the Germans developed, organised, and, for the most part, executed the plans for the ‘Endlösung’, the ‘final solution’.

The Poles From the beginning of Hitler’s political career in the early 1920s through the signing of the Polish-German non-aggression pact of 1934 and the Munich crisis of 1938, the Poles played a surprisingly insignificant role in his thinking about German enemies. Mein Kampf and other early Nazi documents devoted very little space to Poland and exhibited little hostility towards the Poles.10 That this changed radically in 1938 and 1939 was the result primarily of the new circumstances of Hitler’s ambitions in the east. Unhampered by the Western Allies in absorbing Austria and gaining control of Czechoslovakia, Hitler looked to Poland to increase his influence in Danzig, eliminate the Polish corridor, and intervene in German minority questions. He also attempted to drive a wedge between Poland and the Western Allies by trying to lure Poland into signing the Anti-Comintern Pact. When the Poles proved obdurate on all of these issues, Hitler escalated his demands. Above all, he insisted on a ‘free hand’ in the east.11 Meanwhile, the Soviets, worried that they would be drawn into a war with the Third Reich for which they were completely unprepared, engaged in secret negotiations with Berlin that 10 Connelly, ‘Nazis and Slavs’, 3. Thomas Weber, Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi (New York: Basic, 2017), p. 322. 11 Martin Broszat, Nationalsozialistische Polenpolitik (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1961), pp. 4–5.

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resulted in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 23 August 1939. Subsequent secret protocols partitioned Poland between Moscow and Berlin, while divvying up spheres of influence in eastern Europe. This provided Hitler with all the geopolitical security he needed to attack Poland, which he did on 1 September 1939. The Soviet Union joined the attack on 17 September, and nothing was left of Poland – in Molotov’s words, ‘this ugly offspring of the Versailles Treaty’.12 The Wehrmacht’s attack on Poland was carried out with exceptional brutality, presaging the ferocious campaign to come in the Soviet Union in 1941. Towns were bombed indiscriminately, hospitals were blown up, columns of civilians were strafed by the Luftwaffe, passenger trains were bombarded and Polish POWs were summarily executed.13 There were 50,000–60,000 civilian deaths in Warsaw alone from German aerial bombardment and artillery shelling, one of the worst catastrophes to befall a city during the entire war.14 The murderous attack was accompanied by a premeditated campaign of extermination of Poles. If Hitler’s ideas of Lebensraum in the 1930s generally focused on Ukraine and the Baltic lands, he now looked to Poland as a future home for German settlement.15 The generally anti-Polish Wehrmacht, some of whose leaders protested against the violence of the attacks on civilians, should have been fully prepared for the carnage that came. On 22 August 1939, Hitler assembled leading military officers at his retreat in the Bavarian mountains. Noting the inevitability of an assault on Poland, he made it clear that this would not be an ordinary military campaign. ‘Our war aim’, he stated, ‘is not to attain a particular line [in the east], but the physical destruction of the enemy.’ The invasion should be carried out with ‘the greatest brutality and without mercy’. Then, according to some accounts, he added: ‘Who, after all, speaks today about the annihilation of the Armenians?’16 This was no offhand remark; he intended it to indicate to his officers that the Poles would be subjected to a fearsome combination of forced deportation and mass elimination.17 12 ‘Report of Comrade V. M. Molotov . . . at Sitting of Supreme Soviet of USSR, October 31, 1939’, Moscow News, 6 November 1939. 13 Halik Kochanski, The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 61–2. 14 Peter Fritzsche, An Iron Wind: Europe under Hitler (New York: Basic, 2016), p. 109. 15 Martin Broszat, Nationalsozialistische Polenpolitik (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1961), pp. 4–5. 16 Alexander Rossino, Hitler Strikes Poland: Blitzkrieg, Ideology, and Atrocity (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2003), p. 9. 17 Weber, Becoming Hitler, p. 277. Norman Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 57–8.

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The preparations of the SS Einsatzgruppen (operational groups) and the police, especially the State Secret Police (Gestapo) for the invasion of Poland left even less to the imagination. Reinhard Heydrich, who was charged with heading up the police operations in Poland, noted later that Hitler had commanded him to undertake ‘an extraordinarily radical . . . order for the liquidation of various circles of the Polish leadership, [killings] that ran into the thousands.’18 The Security Police drew up a list of some 60,000 names of the Polish and Jewish intelligentsia to be neutralised in conjunction with the military assault. This campaign, called ‘Operation Tannenberg’, had as its goal the destruction of potential Polish resistance to the German occupation. Police actions of pacification of the Polish population were to be co-ordinated with the military campaign. The Nazis absorbed into the Reich the western parts of Poland, including the Reichsgau Wartheland, earlier Greater Poland (Wielkopolska), and the politically important Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia, as well as other ‘German-inhabited’ territories. In these areas, Poles and Jews were brutally expelled to rump Poland, the General Government, losing their property and civil rights. Heinrich Himmler oversaw a campaign of ‘racial hygiene’ that included the shooting of Poles, Jews, Polish asylum patients (7,700 altogether), ‘asocials’ and Romani people.19 German settlers from the Baltic and elsewhere in Poland were to be given the lands of the deported. Altogether, some 923,000 Poles were forcibly expelled from the annexed territories. According to some estimates, 40,000 Poles died there before the end of 1939.20 The Jews were forced into ghettos in the General Government, which, due to deliberate Nazi policies to isolate and punish the Jews, soon became filthy, overcrowded, disease-infested and hungry way-stations on the road to the Holocaust. The Poles in the General Government were divided into two groups: the intelligentsia (priests, lawyers, professors, doctors, politicians, engineers and others) and the masses of Poles, considered an undifferentiated, generally unassimilable source of workers for the Third Reich. In the so-called ‘general pacification campaign’, the AB Aktion, the intelligentsia was to be eliminated either by execution or internment in the concentration camps to which thousands were sent. Before it was used to eliminate close to 1 million 18 Cited in Rossino, Hitler Strikes Poland, p. 14. 19 Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler: A Life, trans. Jeremy Noakes and Leslie Sharp (Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 430–1. 20 Tadeusz Piotrowski, Poland’s Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration with Occupying Forces and Genocide in the Second Republic (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998), pp. 22–23.

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Jews, Auschwitz was built by the Nazis to deal with alleged Polish opponents and provide labour for German enterprises. Of the initial 20,000 Poles incarcerated in the camp, more than 50 per cent were dead by the beginning of 1942.21 Polish POWs were also subjected to incarceration in concentration camps and sometimes executed. Murderous campaigns against the intelligentsia continued until the end of the war, with a total of some 100,000 members of the intelligentsia killed by the German authorities. In a nasty paradox of German racial thinking, the Polish intelligentsia was considered particularly dangerous because of its substantial admixture of German blood. This supposedly gave them the capability of organising resistance and defending their Polish homeland. Therefore, they had to be eliminated at all costs. Polish children, whom the Nazis identified as being of mixed blood (judged frequently by little more than their physical looks, blue eyes and blond hair) and capable in other ways of being Germanised and assimilated into the German Volksgemeinschaft (ethno-national community), were taken from their homes and sent to Germany to be raised in special hostels or in German families. Precise numbers are hard to know, but some estimates suggest that as many as 20,000 Polish children were seized for this purpose.22 Polish children who were taken from their parents and found not to meet the standards for Germanisation were usually then taken to concentration camps, like Auschwitz, where they were killed by intracardiac injections of phenol.23 Himmler also saw the removal of children from families as a means to reduce births among Polish women, whose loss of their children would discourage them from further reproduction.24 Forced labour in the Reich and the ease of abortion and restrictions on marriage in the General Government were also seen as ways to keep Poles from having children. The mass of Poles was to serve the Nazi regime as helots, workers and migrant workers, available to move according to the whims of their Nazi overlords. Schools and universities in the General Government were closed down. Only four grades of elementary schooling were to be provided. Himmler wrote: ‘The objective of this elementary school must simply be 21 Laurence Rees, Auschwitz: A New History (New York: Public Affairs, 2005), p. 19. 22 Richard Lukas, The Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles under German Occupation 1939–1944 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1986), p. 27. 23 Ibid., pp. 21–2. 24 Memorandum of Heinrich Himmler, 15 May 1940; Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, Nazism, 1919–1945: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts, vol. I I I: Foreign Policy, War and Racial Extermination (New York: Schocken Books, 2001), p. 934.

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to teach: Simple arithmetic up to 500 at the most, how to write one’s name, and to each that it is God’s commandment to be obedient to the Germans . . . . I consider it unnecessary to teach reading.’25 Any resistance to the Nazi administration would be countered with death sentences and the execution of hostages, often at egregious proportions of 20 victims for 1 German killed, or 50 or even 100 or more for 1 German. Frequently hostages were chosen from among the leading citizens of the towns or villages: priests, professors, lawyers, trade union or other notables.26 Other times, the hostages were randomly rounded up on the streets and shot or hanged in large numbers, depending on the severity of the alleged crime. Polish hostages in Auschwitz were shot by firing squads, hanged, shot in the back of the head with a pistol, or, if in the infirmary, killed with injections.27 In some cases, the male populations of whole villages were executed as reprisals for attacks by resistance groups in the countryside. Mass killing and wanton atrocities, not to mention the nearly complete destruction of the city of Warsaw, accompanied the Germans’ ultimately successful campaign to crush the sixty-two-day Warsaw Uprising, 1 August– 2 October 1944. Of the 150,000–200,000 civilians lost in that fighting, at least half fell to reprisals.28 Asked by a correspondent of Völkischer Beobachter what the difference was between the Czech Protectorate and the General Government, the latter’s governor general, Hans Frank, responded: ‘in Prague red placards were posted to the effect that seven Czechs have been shot today. I said to myself, if I had to order placards to be posted for each seven Poles shot, there wouldn’t be enough wood in the forests to produce the paper for making the placards.’29 Poland was to be treated as ‘a gigantic labour camp’, in Frank’s words (12 September 1940), where everyone – with the exception of the Volksdeutsche, the local Germans – was condemned as guilty (of being Polish), and therefore subject to the most extreme punishments.30 The rapid spread of the Polish resistance, to the point where one could talk about a genuine ‘underground state’, only increased Nazi readiness to 25 Cited in Laurence Rees, Auschwitz: A New History (New York: Public Affairs, 2005), p. 17. 26 Polish Ministry of Interior, The Black Book of Poland (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1942), p. 92. 27 Broszat, Nationalsozialistische Polenpolitik, p. 71. 28 Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (New York: Penguin, 2009), p. 514. Lukas, The Forgotten Holocaust, pp. 199–203. 29 Biuletyn Głównej Komisji Badania Zbrodni Niemieckich w Polsce (English Selections), 2 vols. (New York: Howard Fertig, 1982), I I, p. 22. 30 Ibid., p. 18.

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execute Poles at the least sign of opposition.31 The policy of reducing Polish rations in the cities brought on diseases, especially anaemia and typhus, which killed large numbers of the population.32 Moreover, the Nazis made it harder for Poles to survive the winter by requisitioning warm clothing and blankets and sequestering firewood and medicines.33 Some in the German high command protested against the level of brutality against the Poles on tactical grounds. General Johannes Blaskowitz, commander of the Ober-Ost region, wrote in a memorandum of 6 February 1940: ‘It is misguided to slaughter tens of thousands of Jews and Poles as is happening at present. . . . the way in which this slaughter is being carried out . . . is complicating the problems and making them much more dangerous . . . .’ Most important, he wrote, is ‘the brutalization and moral debasement which, in a very short time, will spread like a plague among valuable German manpower’.34 Blaskowitz proved to be a prophet; the mistreatment of Poles seemed to come increasingly naturally to the occupiers, who invoked the need to be ‘hard’ in their punitive acts against the Polish population, including children, the elderly, and the sick. The twenty-two months of German horrors in Poland prepared the German police, the SS, the German administration and the Wehrmacht for the brutish campaign against the Soviet Union and its inhabitants. Initially, the general idea was to dump Poles and Jews in the General Government, strip the region of its assets and proceed to replace the Poles there with German agricultural colonists. But this became quickly impractical, as noted by Governor General Frank. Instead, he urged the rebuilding of industry and using the Poles to work in the name of the greater production of the Third Reich. This became all the more important once heavy Allied bombing of German territory made the transfer of industries to the east increasingly necessary. The Poles must work so hard, he wrote, that ‘they don’t know whether they are coming or going’, and in that way would cause the government no harm.35 Poles would also be sent to Germany as slave labour. More than a million worked on the farms and in the factories of the Reich. The conditions were 31 See Stefan Korbon´ski, Fighting Warsaw: The Underground State, 1939–45 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1956). 32 Jan Karski, Story of a Secret State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1944), p. 48. 33 Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government Proposals for Redress (Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), p. 88. 34 Noakes and Pridham, Nazism, 1919–1945, I I I, pp. 938–9; Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (Oxford and New York:Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 65–8. 35 Hans Frank, meeting with department heads, 19 January 1940, in Noakes and Pridham, Nazism, 1919–1945, I I I, pp. 958–60.

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highly restrictive, the labour difficult and with long hours, and food rations limited. Before conditions were modestly improved in 1943, some 130,000 Poles died in Germany from maltreatment.36 ‘We cannot after all kill 14,000,000 Poles’, stated Frank, indicating here and elsewhere that this was contemplated by some in the Nazi leadership, but it was necessary that ‘the Poles’ backbone is permanently broken and that there is never again the slightest resistance to German Reich policy from this area’.37 As Polish inmate-workers died in increasing numbers in concentration camps, the Security Police randomly arrested Poles in the streets, in movie theatres, and courtyards, forcing them to take their compatriots’ place in the camps. Though Frank objected, it was not because he had any fondness for the Poles: ‘When at last we have won the war’, he stated, ‘the Poles and Ukrainians and their like may be chopped into small pieces.’38 Reports from all over Poland filtered into its government-in-exile in London, recording shocking atrocities committed by the Germans against Poles and Jews throughout the occupied territory.39 Lurking behind the arguments between Frank and the SS and party hierarchs was the conviction on the Nazi leadership’s part that the Poles were ultimately to be removed from their lands and denationalised. The original Generalplan Ost, worked out by lawyers and academics in the Reich Ministry for the Eastern Territories, described the Poles as ‘the most anti-German, numerically the strongest, and thus the most dangerous of all alien ethnic groups’ designated for resettlement. Therefore, 80 to 85 per cent of the Poles would be deported to western Siberia over several decades, while the rest, some 3–4.8 million Poles, would be allowed to remain in the Germanised territory.40 The Nazis did not intend for the Poles to survive physically, or culturally as a nation, the deportation to Siberia.41 The number frequently used to describe Polish losses is that 3 million Polish Christians died during the war and 3 million Polish Jews, together one out of five Polish citizens, the largest percentage loss of any country. Estimates that are considered more reliable cite the number of dead at 36 Kochanski, The Eagle Unbowed, p. 267. 37 Hans Frank, Reich Defense Meeting, 2 March 1940, in Noakes and Pridham, Nazism, 1919–1945, III, p. 962. 38 Biuletyn, II, p. 21. 39 Hoover Institution Archives, Ministerstwo Informacji i Dokumentacji, see, in particular, boxes 81–99. 40 Dr Erhard Wetzel’s Memorandum on Generalplan Ost, 27 April 1942. Noakes and Pridham, Nazism, 1919–1945, III, pp. 977–8. 41 Lukas, The Forgotten Holocaust, p. 4.

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2.4 million Poles and 3.4 million Jews.42 But that does not help much with the question of how many Poles were killed by the Germans. For example, many Poles died at the hands of the Soviets (22,000 alone in what is called the Katyn´ forest massacre of April–May 1940). Many thousands of others died in exile in the Soviet Union. Tens of thousands of Poles – the numbers are sharply disputed – were also killed by Ukrainian bands during the bloody Volhynian War (some consider it a genocide) of 1943.43 According to another study, 644,000 Poles and Jews should be considered direct victims of the fighting in the war itself, one of aggression launched by Nazi Germany. That leaves 5,384,000 dead, including the vast majority of Polish Jews, as the result of the ‘terror of the occupier’.44 Not surprisingly, at least 60,000 Poles could be said to have been severely psychologically damaged, if not driven to complete insanity, by the war.45 To conclude: the Germans committed genocide against the Polish population. The very term genocide comes from the 1944 book of the Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin, whose study of Nazi-occupied Europe focused on the German attack on the Poles. Not only did the Nazis seek ultimately to eliminate the Polish nation ‘as such’, but they engaged in each of the acts identified by the 1949 Genocide Convention as signifiers of the ‘intent to destroy’: (1) they killed – shot, hanged, starved, gassed and brutalised – ‘members of the group’; (2) they caused ‘serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group’; (3) they brought about ‘conditions of life’ – severe reduction of calories consumed, working to exhaustion, internment in concentration camps and perilous slave labour – that were ‘calculated to bring about’ their destruction; (4) they imposed ‘measures intended to prevent births in the group’ by carrying out what the Central Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland called ‘the war against the Polish child’, encouraging abortions, restricting pregnant mothers’ diets, making it more difficult for Polish women to get married and providing no relief from hard physical forced labour for pregnant women;46 (5) they forcibly transferred Polish children to German families. ‘One cannot solve the Polish problem by liquidating the Poles in the same way as the Jews’, stated a Nazi lawyer, but one could, as Frank noted 42 Czesław Łuczak, ‘Szanse i trudnos´ci bilansu demograficznego Polski w latach 1939– 1945’, Dzieje najnowsze 26:2 (1994), 10. 43 See Karel, C. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine Under Nazi Rule (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 285–300. 44 Łuczak, ‘Szanse i trudnos´ci’, 10. 45 Alexander Prusin and Gabriel N. Finder, Justice Behind the Iron Curtain: Nazis on Trial in Communist Poland (University of Toronto Press, 2018), p. 506. 46 Biuletyn, II, p. 248.

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above, ‘break the back’ of the nation and later ‘chop’ it ‘into small pieces’ so that it could never again represent its own interests on its own territory.47

Soviet POWs With Germany’s control assured in western Europe and Poland’s demise guaranteed by the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 23 August 1939, the Wehrmacht high command drew up plans for an invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1940. Code-named Operation Barbarossa, the attack was launched on 22 June 1941, broadening into a three-pronged assault: one in the direction of Moscow to the east, one towards Leningrad in the northwest and one towards Stalingrad and the Volga to the southeast, with the eventual goal of seizing the oil fields in Baku. Given all the warnings to Stalin from foreign and domestic intelligence sources about the imminent assault, the Soviets seemed desperately unprepared for what was to come. Instead of drawing back and taking reasonable defensive positions, the Soviet troops were ordered to attack.48 The result was a series of spectacular German encircling operations that resulted in the capture of millions of Soviet POWs.

Figure 15.1 German army postcard showing captured Russian POWs. (Photo 12 / Contributor / Getty Images) 47 Wetzl Memorandum, in Noakes and Pridham, Nazism, 1919–1945, III, p. 979. See n. 37 above. 48 Richard Overy, Russia’s War (London: Penguin, 1997), pp. 73–6.

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Several factors came into play that turned the internment of millions of Soviet POWs, estimated at between 5.3 and 5.7 million by the end of the war, into a case of mass murder. First of all, the preparation of the Wehrmacht and SS for the invasion involved a number of orders that emphasised the subhuman status of the adversary and their complete lack of rights. The so-called ‘Barbarossa Decree’ (13 May 1941) and the ‘Commissar Order’ (6 June 1941) essentially gave the German military and civilian authorities the right of life or death over the Soviet citizen, civilian or military.49 On 8 July 1941, the head of the General Staff’s POW department, General Hermann Reinecke issued an order about the specific treatment of Soviet POWs, stating that no one would be reprimanded for shooting POWs, in fact to the contrary: ‘The use of weapons on Soviet POWs will in general be considered lawful . . . . [In carrying out orders] whoever does not make use of his weapon, or makes insufficient use of his weapon, is liable for punishment.’ Reinecke was convinced that the Soviet soldier was not a soldier at all but instead a bestial enemy of National Socialism.50 Some senior officers from the Abwehr (German military intelligence) protested that shooting or maiming unarmed prisoners would ultimately backfire. Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, in agreement with Reinecke (and Hitler) dismissed their reservations: ‘The doubts expressed correspond to the soldierly conception of chivalrous warfare! We are dealing with the destruction of a world view.’51 As the actual occupation advanced deeper into Soviet territory, the rules of engagement became even more murderous. New Wehrmacht rescripts about crushing partisan warfare in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia unleashed a reign of terror on the villages of the region, not to mention on those who were deemed, often on the slimmest of evidence, to be partisans, sympathisers of partisans or families of partisans.52 There was also the issue that the Soviet Union had not recognised the Hague Convention of 1899 and 1907, setting out the standards for treatment of prisoners-of-war. Moscow did not sign the Hague Convention of 1929, which would have defined the legal rights of Soviet prisoners. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr, handed Keitel a memorandum arguing that, in the interests of German soldiers, Soviet POWs should be treated 49 Christian Streit, ‘Soviet prisoners of war in the hands of the Wehrmacht’, in War of Extermination: The German Military in World War II 1941–1944, ed. Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), pp. 84–5. 50 Cited in Michael Mueller, Canaris: The Life and Death of Hitler’s Spymaster, trans. Lionel Leventhal (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2007), p. 205. 51 Streit, ‘Soviet prisoners of war’, 85. 52 Ben Shepherd, War in the Wild East: The German Army and Soviet Partisans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University press, 2004).

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according to international law despite the Soviets not having signed the international conventions on POWs. After seeing Hitler, Keitel handed the document back to Canaris on 23 September 1941. ‘Poor fellow, you think you are still in the eighteenth century. We are faced in the East with a horde of savages. We must treat them as such if we do not want to suffer a setback.’53 Efforts made through a variety of channels to approach the Germans about the POW issue similarly failed.54 Most of the camps set up initially to deal with the millions of Soviet POWs were little more than outdoor holding pens surrounded by barbed wire and improvised guard houses. Sometimes destroyed factories, schools, citadels or military barracks – and in the countryside, barns, stables and collective farm headquarters – were used to intern prisoners.55 In one of the first camps, Stalag 316, near Siedlce, east of Warsaw, the makeshift earthen dugouts built by the prisoners were cold and wet, with no protection from the elements. The POWs were not allowed to make fires to warm themselves, there was little to eat and the soldiers quickly fell ill.56 In some of these camps, there was barely enough room for the prisoners to sit or lie down. They were forced to stand day and night and the Germans, for entertainment, would toss bits of food into their midst to watch them fight for them.57 There were different types of camps among the approximately 350 that had been set up in the Reich, the General Government and the occupied Soviet Union: Dulags (Durchgangslager, transit camps), Stalags (MannschaftsStammlager, regular POW camps for non-commissioned officers and lower ranks), Oflags (Offizierslager, officers’ camps), Straflag (Straflager, punishment camps), and concentration camps, to which POWs accused of communist or other suspect affiliations were sent, along with those who tried to escape or organise resistance. Some of the camps turned into little more than death camps, as fewer than 10 per cent of the prisoners could be considered healthy enough to live for several months.58 Some 5,000 Soviet POWs were brought 53 Citations in Andre Brissaud, Canaris: The Biography of Admiral Canaris, Chief of German Military Intelligence in the Second World War, trans. Ian Colvin (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1970), pp. 246–7; Michael Mueller, Canaris: The Life and Death of Hitler’s Spymaster, trans. Lionel Leventhal (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2007), p. 205. 54 Aron Shneyer, Pariahs among Pariahs: Soviet–Jewish POWs in German Captivity, 1941–1945, trans. Yisrael Cohen (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2016), p. 25. 55 State Archives of the Russian Federation (hereafter GARF), f. (fond) 7021, op. (opis) 149, d. (delo) 102, ll. (listy) 85–7, SMERSH Report to Military Council, First Belorussian Front, 14 August 1944. The GARF citations are from the archives of the ‘Extraordinary State Commission for Ascertaining and Investigating Crimes Perpetuated by the German Fascist Invaders and their Accomplices’, set up by the Soviets in 1942. 56 Ibid., l. 107. 57 Ibid., d. 6, l. 6. Kruglov to Shvernik, 23 February 1943. 58 Ibid., op. 61, d. 6, l. 68. Testmony of I. P. Inozemtsev.

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to Lublin in October 1941 to help build the new camp at Majdanek. Given their pathetic condition, only 30 per cent were capable of work at all, and by February 1942 they were all dead.59 Wounded prisoners were sometimes shot; others were left to die, with their wounds untreated. Almost no doctors or medicines were available to the sick and wounded.60 The Germans used some camps as ‘hospital’ camps, especially for those sick with dysentery, typhus and pneumonia. But the conditions in these camps – including the brutality with which the prisoners were treated – were no better than in the regular camps. Some desperately sick prisoners were buried half-dead, halfalive.61 The treatment of Soviet officers was little better: they were deemed by the Germans not on a par with military officers in the west, and were allegedly lacking in ‘any traditions, stature, upbringing and education’ that would differentiate them from lower ranks.62 Transport between camps could be as bad as the camps themselves. Long marches of columns of thousands of prisoners saw many expire of hunger, exposure and exhaustion. Laggards were beaten and frequently shot. Transport by rail, especially in the winter of 1941–2, when virtually no sustenance was given the POWs, was as deadly, if not more so, than the marches.63 Thousands died in exposed freight cars, frozen to death, fatally sick or malnourished. One eye-witness testified that when, on 18 March 1942, frozen POWs arrived in Kaunas with the train cars ‘so full that when the doors were opened, the dead fell out like logs’.64 Local Russians, Ukrainians and others tried to offer some food to the bedraggled and gaunt prisoners underway in columns or marching to and from work details, but the guards would not allow it. Unlike western POWs, who received packets of foodstuffs from their relatives, the Soviet POWs were doomed to starve. There were many instances when the POWs, too many for the Germans to handle, were simply murdered, run over by tanks, set on fire in locked barns, and shot by their handlers, most frequently Wehrmacht soldiers, but also by vengeful Estonian, Latvian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian or other ‘national’ recruits hostile to the Soviet Union.65 In the camps and out, Soviet POWs 59 Barbara Schwindt, Das Konzentrations- und Vernichtungslager Majdanek: Funktionswandel im Kontext der Endlösung (Würzberg: Königshausen&Neumann, 2005), p. 81. 60 GARF, f. 7021, op. 149, d. 6, l. 14, Merkulov to Shvernik, 20 March 1943. 61 Ibid., d. 100, ll. 51–5. 62 Ibid., d. 132, l. 116. This is from a German high command document, of 4 July 1942, ‘Betr: Arbeitseinsatz kriegsgef. sowjetischen Offiziere’. 63 Ibid., op. 64, d. 6, ll. 55–6. Testimony of P. A. Goruiko. 64 Cited in Shneyer, Pariah among Pariahs, p. 31. 65 GARF, f. 7021, op. 149, d. 103, l. 26, Testimony of German Haak, 18 November 1944.

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could be shot at the least offence.66 ‘Thousands of exhausted prisoners were shot out of hand’, writes Christian Streit, ‘even in the middle of large cities such as Minsk and Smolensk’.67 Others, as in Bobruisk, were murdered by setting their barracks on fire and machine-gunning all those who tried to escape.68 There were so many reports that the Germans systematically beat the POWs in and out of the camps that the wanton and gratuitous brutality of the Wehrmacht’s camp administration is hard to ignore.69 There were numerous attempts at escape and even several small rebellions. Those escapees who were caught were shot and hanged, and sometimes tortured, in front of their fellow inmates. At the same time, the testimonies of witnesses and survivors of the camps also reveal episodic cases of German sympathy with the prisoners and scattered attempts, almost always private, to help them survive.70 Those Soviet officers and ‘commissars’ slated for elimination were most often sent to Sachsenhausen (Oranienburg), Buchenwald and Mauthausen. They were also murdered in Auschwitz and Majdanek, where large numbers of non-commissioned officers and soldiers perished. In Sachsenhausen alone in 1941, some 13,000 Soviet officers and political workers were shot. And 8,483 Soviet POWs, mostly officers, were killed in Buchenwald. An estimated 15,000 more POWs died in Auschwitz.71 Hitler was perfectly aware of what was going on. He is said to have commented to confidantes in 1941 that the death of Soviet prisoners was a useful means of accomplishing the decimation of the ‘Slavic masses’.72 On 16 July 1941, Heydrich concluded an agreement with Reinecke by which the Gestapo and security department officials could filter the POW camps in search of Soviets whom they alleged to be ‘carriers of Bolshevism’ and then summarily execute them. This included Jews and so-called ‘antisocial’ elements, political commissars, as designated in the ‘Commissars Order’, and any officials they found of the Communist Party.73 This was no small number. Some 450,000 Jews served in the Red Army during the war, among them 32,000 officers, and the Nazis spared no effort to make sure they Ibid., d. 100, l. 8. Report of the (Soviet) Military Prosecutor, 10 February 1945. Streit, ‘Soviet prisoners of war’, 83. 68 GARF, f. 7021, op. 82, d. 2, ll. 25–30. Ibid., op. 64, d. 6, l. 61, Testimony of A. N. Ivanova. Reluctant Accomplice: A Wehrmacht Soldier’s Letters from the Eastern Front, ed. Konrad H. Jarausch (Princeton University Press, 2011), pp. 223–4. 71 Shneyer, Pariah among Pariahs, pp. 50–1, 54. 72 Cited in Streit, ‘Soviet prisoners of war’, 89. 73 Heinz Hohne, Canaris, trans. J. Maxwell Brownjohn (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979), p. 463. 66 67 69 70

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eliminated all of those who fell into their hands as POWs.74 Jewish soldiers and officers were often immediately seized and executed. In exchange for victuals or cigarettes, their fellow soldiers were urged to identify Jews and political officials. Sometimes, Germans simply seized soldiers who ‘looked Jewish’. This was sometimes all that was required for swift execution.75 Some 600,000 prisoners were shot soon after capture, and this does not include those Soviet soldiers who were executed by the Wehrmacht before they could be handed over to the POW authorities.76 Others were tortured and sadistically mutilated before (and after) they were murdered, both in the camps and out.77 The Germans instituted a ‘hunger policy’ for dealing with the POWs. This was part of the Nazi long-term planning for the campaign in Russia.78 Food officials noted: ‘Poverty, hunger, and frugality have been borne by the Russian individual for centuries. His stomach is elastic – therefore no false pity!’ At a conference of state secretaries on 2 May 1941, Reich officials made it clear that millions of Soviet citizens would have to die of starvation for both Germany to be supplied with food and the Wehrmacht to live off of the land.79 The POWs were frequently not fed for the first week they were in the camps. The idea was to weaken them physically and break their will, so that they would not risk escape or resist camp authority. But even after that initial period, rations were below the level that could sustain the body for very long. Prisoners supplemented their diets by eating rats, digging up weeds, collecting nettles, leaves, and acorns, and gnawing on the bark of trees. ‘People died like flies’, one survivor wrote, ‘several dozen every day, sometimes as they were walking’.80 The desire for food became so overwhelming, it supplanted every other thought or emotion. Lines for food frequently turned into melees, with German warders beating the prisoners who sought to push to the front of the lines.81 The hunger also led to instances of cannibalism, which was 74 Shneyer, Pariah among Pariahs, p. 113. 75 Ibid. 76 Bartov, Hitler’s Army, p. 83. 77 See the Report of the ‘Extraordinary State Commission’ to investigate the crimes of the Nazis, authored by Nikolai Shvernik, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 329, l. 26. GARF, f. 7021, op. 149, d. 89, l. 44, Political administration of Leningrad front, 7 October 1944. 78 Manfred Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde: Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weissrussland, 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1999), pp. 266, 278, 289, 1132. 79 Rolf-Dieter Müller, ‘Economic alliance to a war of colonial exploitation’, in Germany and the Second World War, vol. I V: The Attack on the Soviet Union, ed. Horst Boog, Jürgen Forster, Joachim Hoffmann, Ernst Klink, Rolf-Dieter Müller, Gerd R. Ueberschär (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2015), p. 177. 80 GARF, f. 7021, op. 64, d. 6, l. 74, Testimony of V. S. Kolesnikov. 81 Reluctant Accomplice, pp. 274, 309–11.

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widespread in a number of camps, though, when discovered, the perpetrators were generally executed in front of the other prisoners.82 Necrophagy, eating of corpses, was also evident in many of the camps, as starving POWs ‘made their way into storerooms where corpses were kept, cut off the muscles and ripped out the intestines to eat them’.83 The German government knew perfectly well that starvation and epidemics were killing the prisoners. One military commander wrote: ‘OKW [the high command] is aware of the fact that mass deaths among the [Soviet] war prisoners cannot be prevented because the prisoners are at the end of their strength.’84 The cold was also a fierce enemy of the prisoners. Their boots, overcoats and clothes were taken away, and they were given makeshift camp uniforms and forced to pad themselves with bundles of straw to protect against the wind and frost.85 Shoes were almost non-existent and the clogs that they were given were helpless against the elements. They slept next to other prisoners in the bunkbeds (or on the ‘naked earth’) in order to get a bit of warmth at night.86 In these conditions – and with no baths and few opportunities to clean themselves at all – the prisoners were crawling with lice, which in turn made the spread of disease, especially typhus, more likely. Even in the Reich, in ‘Russian camps’ like Stukenbrock and Bergen-Belsen, the Soviet soldiers were living in holes in the earth and makeshift bunkers exposed to the elements.87 The combination of the horrendous sanitary and dietary conditions of the Soviet POWs led to the spread of dysentery, which was common to almost all of the prisoners, and typhus, a bacterial infection that killed hundreds of thousands of POWs. In German-held territory in the Soviet Union separate barracks in the POW camps were set aside for typhus-bearing prisoners, where they were left to die without medical treatment. In Slavuta, this barracks was labelled the ‘death block’ or the ‘death conveyer’ where the only way out was the cemetery.88 But sometimes sick prisoners cohabited with healthy ones, making the spread of the disease all that much easier. One Wehrmacht officer reported that even of those Soviet prisoners held in 82 GARF, f. 7021, op. 82, d. 2, l. 8, Testimony of V. I. Pechonko. GARF, f. 7021, op. 149, d. 102, ll. 85–7, SMERSH Report to Military Council, First Belorussian Front, 14 August 1944. 83 Cited in Shneyer, Pariah among Pariahs, p. 37. 84 Cited in Streit, ‘Soviet prisoners of war’, 82. 85 GARF, f. 7021, op. 149, d. 89, l. 13. 86 Ibid., op. 49, d. 7, l. 69, Testimony of V. T. Morozov, 1 September 1943. 87 Streit, ‘Soviet prisoners of war’, 83. 88 GARF, f. 7021, op. 64, d. 5, l. 75, Testimony of N. I. Lipskarev, 28 January 1944. Ibid., d. 6, l. 72, Testimony of P. S. Kirsanov.

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German territory, where there was great fear of spread of the disease to the German civilian population, 40 per cent of the Russian POWs had died of starvation or typhus by April 1942.89 Conditions improved for the POWs in late spring and summer 1942, when it became apparent that the labour of Soviet POWs would be crucial to replace German factory workers who were newly recruited into the army. Reich officials worried so much about the problem of labour in industry, especially in the armaments industry, that they began feeding and clothing the Russian POWs and moving them in the hundreds of thousands (over a million in the end) to factories and enterprises all over Germany.90 The spring 1942 formation of the Vlasov Army made up of Russian POW volunteers also encouraged the Germans to be less draconian in their treatment of Soviet prisoners. Then, the huge number of German prisoners whom the Soviet Army seized in the Stalingrad Cauldron, where General Paulus’s Sixth Army surrendered in later January-early February 1943, similarly convinced the POW authorities, worried about retribution against German troops, to treat the Soviet soldiers better. Orders were issued by commanders that Soviet POWs would no longer be subject to beatings. All of these factors changed the genocidal character of German POW policy. Still, persecution, killing and death by hunger and disease continued to be the fate of tens of thousands of prisoners. A survivor of Slavuta notes that, from the autumn of 1942 to the spring of 1943, around 75,000 prisoners perished; 300 or so prisoners died every day and were buried in mass graves holding 200 people each.91 Even after liberation, many of the surviving POWs were simply not well enough to last very long. Large numbers died of wounds that had remained too long untreated or of diseases that condemned them to death regardless of treatment. Many, too, suffered from psychological damage.92 Between July 1941 and the spring of 1942 alone, approximately 1.5 million– 2 million Red Army POWs had died from hunger, disease, torture or were executed.93 In all, between the outbreak of the war in the east and its conclusion, 5.7 million Red Army officers and men fell into the hands of the Germans. In January 1945, some 930,000 were still in German camps. 89 Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen 1941–1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-anstalt, 1991), p. 135. 90 GARF, f. 7021, op. 149, d. 132, ll. 121–2, OKW, Merkblatt: ‘Verhalten gegenüber Kriegsgefangenen’, 21 May 1942; Bartov, Hitler’s Army, p. 91. 91 GARF, f. 7021, op. 64, d. 5, l. 76. See also ibid., op. 149, d. 7, l. 69, Testimony of V. T. Morozov. He states that in the POW camp in Stalino some 100 prisoners died every day in winter 1942 and 25 died every day in spring 1943. 92 Ibid., d. 3, l. 30. 93 Shneyer, Pariahs among Pariahs, p. 23.

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A million or so had been released and were serving as volunteers in the Wehrmacht. Volga Germans serving in the Red Army were either immediately released or recruited to serve in the camp administrations. Ukrainians also were sometimes recruited from the POW camps to serve in German auxiliary services. Another half million POWs had fled or had been liberated. The rest – 3,300,000 Soviet soldiers, 57.5 per cent of the total – had perished.94 The German treatment of Soviet POWs was appropriately condemned by the Nuremberg Tribunal as a war crime and a crime against humanity. It also fits the International Criminal Court definition of both, given the extent of the torture, brutalisation, deprivation of sustenance, routine beatings and inhumane living conditions forced on the prisoners. That such a high proportion of POWs died in German hands also testifies to the Nazis’ readiness, especially in the first nine months of imprisonment, to bring about the demise of a substantial part of the group, ‘as such’. But the group itself was so diverse and the POWs treated in such different ways, depending on nationality, political status, rank in the military and willingness to serve the Nazi cause, that it is hard to talk about their deaths as genocide. ‘Soviet POWs’ were a group of victims of the Nazis, but their treatment also varied camp to camp. Conditions in the occupied Soviet Union, where most of the POWs died, were particularly extreme and based on harsh Nazi food policies. Given the eventual goals of Generalplan Ost regarding the Russians and the other Slavic peoples of the Soviet Union, the deaths of 3.3 million Soviet soldiers could be considered a genocide ‘in part’, a stage of genocide or ‘genocide in the making’.95 If the awful counterfactual of a Nazi victory had come to pass, not just Soviet soldiers, but Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians would surely have shared the fate of the Poles and been eliminated culturally and ethnically as distinct peoples and nations. Genocidal actions against those peoples would have been completed.

Bibliographic Note The English-language scholarly literature on Nazi crimes is huge, though there are fewer studies specifically dealing with the Slavs. A good place to start is Connelly, ‘Nazis and Slavs’. Borejsza’s A Ridiculous Hundred Million 94 Streit, Keine Kameraden, p. 136; Rüdiger Overmans, Pavel Polian and Andreas Hilger (eds.), Rotarmisten in deutscher Hand: Dokumente zu Gefangenschaft, Repatriierung und Rehabilitierung sowjetischer Soldate des Zweiten Weltkrieges (Paderborn and Munich: Friederich Schöningh, 2012), p. 23. 95 Adrian Scheibler, a student research assistant at Stanford, suggested this term to me for the Soviet POWs.

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Slavs, can also be read with profit. One of the most interesting discussions of Nazi rule in the east is in Mazower’s, Hitler’s Empire. Hitler’s crimes have also been the subject of a thorough German literature, often provoked by controversies about Wehrmacht involvement. A good selection of the best translated work can be found in Rolf-Dieter Müller and Gerd R. Ueberschär (eds.), Hitler’s War in the East: A Critical Assessment, trans. Bruce D. Little (New York: Berghahn, 2002); and Heer and Naumann (eds.), War of Extermination. For translated documents on the Nazi crimes in the east, see Noakes and Pridham (eds.), Nazism, 1919–1945. For an overall treatment of killing in the region, see Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010). For English-language work on the Polish Golgotha, one could begin with Lukas, The Forgotten Holocaust; Piotrowski, Poland’s Holocaust; and Rossino, Hitler Strikes Poland. Kochanski, The Eagle Unbowed is an up-to-date study of wartime Poland. One could also consult with profit Martin Winstone, The Dark Heart of Europe: Nazi Rule in Poland under the General Government (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015). For English excerpts from the original Polish account of Nazi crimes, originally published in 1951, see Biuletyn Głównej Komisji Badania Zbrodni Niemieckich w Polsce. Alexander Dallin authored the fundamental work on the German occupation of the Soviet Union, which includes a discussion of Soviet POWs: German Rule in Russia, 1941–1945: A Study in Occupation Policies, 2nd ed. (Boulder: Westview, 1981). Useful on the POW issue and pioneering on the Wehrmacht’s role in the atrocities in the east is Bartov’s Hitler’s Army. Christian Streit wrote the most important scholarly investigation of the POW issue in German (first published in 1978). His basic conclusions are included in English in ‘Soviet prisoners of war in the hands of the Wehrmacht’, in War of Extermination (2004) cited above. Aron Shneyer has published valuable studies of Soviet Jewish POWs in Russian. One volume is available in English, Pariahs among Pariahs. Valuable material on the German policies in Ukraine, including POWs, is included in Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair. See also Wendy Lower, Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

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The Nanjing Massacre yuki tanaka

Historical Background In March 1932 the Japanese government annexed northeast China and set up the Manchukuo puppet state there. In reality, Manchukuo was a Japanese colony governed by the most powerful of the Japanese army units, the Kwantung Army. In February 1933, the Kwantung Army invaded the Chinese province of Rehe, and as a result, all areas north of the Great Wall and north of Beijing came under Japanese control. On 7 July 1937 a skirmish occurred between Japanese and Chinese troops near Lugouqiao (Marco Polo) Bridge over the Yongding River in Fengtai, a suburb south of Beijing. Tokyo took advantage of this incident, commencing a full-scale war against China, with the intention of annexing the whole country. Thus, the Imperial Army General Staff (hereafter IAGS) decided to send three divisions from Japan to north China and to mobilise the North China Area Army as the initial step of this final aim. In addition, on 15 August, General Iwane Matsui was appointed commander of the Shanghai Expedition Army, which was composed of the 3rd and 11th Divisions. He was ordered to attack the city of Shanghai, but it took three months to occupy the city because of intense Chinese resistance. In the end, Chinese casualties were estimated to be 250,000 including 150,000 deaths, while Japanese forces suffered an estimated 93,000 casualties.1 During this campaign, Japan’s Central China Area Army was temporarily established by combining the Shanghai Expedition Army with the Tenth Army. General Matsui served concurrently as the commander of the new Central China Area Army. From the beginning, Matsui had determined to advance his forces to the then capital of China, Nanjing, and to overthrow the Guomindang (Chinese Nationalist Party) government once he had occupied 1 F. Pike, Hirohito’s War: The Pacific War 1941–1945 (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 83–4.

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and controlled the city of Shanghai. Thus, without any formal order either from the IAGS or the Imperial General Headquarters (Daihonei), on 19 November, the headquarters of the Central China Area Army ordered the Tenth Army and the Shanghai Expedition Army to advance on Nanjing. Only as late as 1 December did the Daihonei, realising the impossibility of making the troops turn back, finally issue an official order to the Central China Area Army to capture Nanjing.2

Bombing the City of Nanjing As of 15 August 1937, the Japanese government still maintained its policy of not expanding the war zone outside north China, except for the city of Shanghai. Yet, shortly after 9 a.m. on that day, twenty Japanese navy ¯ mura Navy Air Force base near Nagasaki, bombers departed from the O flew across the East China Sea, and reached the skies over Nanjing. They spent four hours flying 960 km to reach their target. From 2 p.m. (Nanjing time) they began bombing military facilities and densely populated civilian areas. The Japanese machine-gun fire also raked public buildings including the city library. The attack lasted about forty minutes, causing several dozen casualties.3 This bombing of the Chinese capital without declaring war was a violation of the official international protocol for declaring war as defined in the Hague Convention of 1907 on the Opening of Hostilities (Hague III). It also violated the Convention Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land (Hague IV), in that the Japanese attacked an undefended city and killed non-combatants. Bombings of Nanjing, by the Imperial Navy Air Force crossing the East China Sea, took place repeatedly until early September. However, the navy set up its air-force base in Shanghai, completing the construction of its airfield there on 10 September. From mid-September, Nanjing was repeatedly bombed from Shanghai, targeting airfields, government buildings, hospitals, railway stations, electric power stations, water supply facilities and the like, in and around the city. According to a survey report from Nanjing which was submitted to the Guomindang government on 4 November, in the two months between 15 August and 15 October of 1937, the city was bombed sixtyfive times, damaging many parts of the city including approximately 800 2 T. Kasahara, Nankin Jiken [The Nanjing Incident] (Tokyo: Iwanami, 2001), pp. 60–71. 3 ANIDS (The Archives of the National Institute for Defense Studies in Tokyo), Collection , The Battle Report of the 13th Navy Air Force Unit: September 1937– November 1938.

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houses, killing 392 civilians and injuring 438 people.4 In early December, the Japanese Imperial Navy also set up an air base in Changzhou, and started to use this base to bomb Nanjing, 140 km away. As a result, the city of more than 1 million people was totally paralysed. Initially, the wealthy started fleeing the city, and many others followed. Consequently, the Kuomintang government could no longer defend the city and, on 20 November, the government moved to a new capital, Chongqing, abandoning Nanjing. In the end, Nanjing became a ‘dead’ city populated by between 400,000 and 500,000 civilians, including refugees, apart from the defending Chinese troops. The purpose of the bombing of Nanjing by the Japanese was typically strategic – to destroy the material as well as the spiritual resistance of the enemy forces and civilians, before sending land troops into the city for an all-out assault.

Atrocities Committed on the Way to Nanjing It was strategically meaningless to send a large contingent of exhausted and demoralised troops to Nanjing – which was no longer the Chinese capital after 20 November. Yet, the plan to besiege the city was carried out without an official order partly because of the partisan spirit of the top military faction promoting a full-scale war in China, and partly because of an anachronistic ambition of the senior officers of the Central China Area Army to defeat the Chinese forces defending their ‘capital’. On 1 December, the Central China Area Army was elevated from a temporary to a formal unit, reappointing General Matsui as its commander, while Lieutenant General Prince Asaka Yasuhito was selected to take over the position of commander of the Shanghai Expedition Army from Matsui. However, the Central China Area Army still remained without a command headquarters responsible for logistics.5 Therefore, although these headquarters were responsible for strategic commands, the actual work of supplying food provisions and other military supplies, disciplining troops, rescuing and treating injured soldiers and the like was presumed to be the responsibility of each division. Indeed, the lack of operational capability and authority of the headquarters to command and control the entire Central China Area Army was one of the major factors contributing to the later massacre in Nanjing. 4 T. Kasahara, Kaigun no Nichu¯senso¯ [ The Navy’s Sino-Japanese War ] (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2015), pp. 201–4. 5 Pike, Hirohito’s War, p. 85; Kasahara, Nankin Jiken, pp. 77–8.

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On 2 December, through the mediation of Oskar Trautmann, who was the German ambassador to China, Chiang Kai-shek informed the Japanese government of his agreement to ‘open peace talks on the basis of the Japanese peace conditions’. These peace conditions had been initiated by the Japanese government on 1 October, but now both Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe and his minister of foreign affairs, Ko¯ki Hirota, decided to suspend their peace-talks plan because they anticipated the growing feasibility of a Japanese military siege of Nanjing in the near future.6 The Japanese political leaders erroneously assumed that capturing Nanjing would be a great opportunity for colonisation of the whole of China to begin. Between the cities of Shanghai and Nanjing lay four extensive agricultural provinces: Gaochun, Lishui, Jurong and Jiangning. In addition, the provinces of Jiangpu and Luhe stretched out along the Yangtze River on the opposite side of Nanjing, across the water. All of these provinces were fertile farmland that benefitted from an abundance of water from the Yangtze River. The total population of these six provinces was estimated to be around 1.5 million at the time, most of whom were peasants. Japanese troops were advancing towards Nanjing using several different arterial roads and other country roads which stretched across the first four provinces. On the way, the Japanese fought Chinese troops stationed in different towns and villages. Some of the Japanese troops also crossed the Yangtze River to occupy Jiangpu and Luhe provinces, aiming to surround the city of Nanjing and intercept retreating Chinese troops. The Japanese troops also conducted mopping-up operations in many towns and villages, killing Chinese soldiers as well as any Chinese men they suspected of being soldiers. In addition, each unit of the entire Central China Area Army was instructed to obtain its necessary food supply by means of requisition (cho¯hatsu), which meant confiscating food stocks and animals from local people. If the local population showed any resistance to such Japanese actions, the response was brutal. As a result, looting was widely sanctioned and, while looting, Japanese soldiers often committed rape. Looting, rape, massacre, arson and other crimes committed by the Japanese were the consequences of a grave error made by the Central China Area Army in forcing its troops to march 300 km without ensuring sufficient provisions of food. For the leaders of this army, sending their troops to Nanjing as quickly as possible was the most important task, and they could not wait until the logistics had been well secured. 6 Kasahara, Nankin Jiken, pp. 113–14.

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Almost 200,000 Japanese soldiers, divided into a few thousand small groups, marched towards Nanjing, passing through numerous towns and villages that were scattered about in huge tracts of agrarian land. In spite of this, a vast number of local people, in particular villagers residing away from main roads, were utterly unaware of these Japanese soldiers’ movements. They had scarcely any information regarding the Japanese actions because they had no access to newspapers or radios at that time. Even if they had known of the approaching Japanese troops, they did not have any modern forms of transport in which to escape with their household possessions. The mopping-up operation meant that any Chinese soldiers who remained – whether remnants of defeated troops, surrendered soldiers or POWs – were killed, often on the spot. As the Japanese government and the imperial forces stubbornly refused to regard the ongoing warfare against the Chinese as a proper war, Chinese soldiers were never treated as prisoners of war (POWs). Consequently, the towns and villages where Chinese soldiers were stationed or hiding were destroyed and burnt. Often villagers shared the same fate, being regarded as ‘the people belonging to the enemy’. Many women were killed immediately after being gang raped. As the number of casualties of their comrades on the way to Nanjing increased, Japanese soldiers became more and more violent. In turn, this brutalisation further degraded their morals and led to outbreaks of savagery against enemy soldiers and civilians. When they had begun their march towards Nanjing, they were already exhausted and full of frustration following the fierce fighting in Shanghai. Undoubtedly this intense aggravation among the Japanese soldiers also contributed to brutal treatment of the Chinese, whether they were soldiers or civilians. Details of the atrocities the Japanese men committed were recorded in many private diaries. Below is an extract from one such truthful personal account, written by a private first-class, Nobuo Makihara, a member of the 20th Infantry Regiment of the 16th Division. 22 November [1937]: It was a pity to see a dreadful sight of dead bodies of Chinese soldiers, civilians and women stretched out on the road. Under the bridge, there were five or six bodies of the Chinese soldiers – some were on the fire and others were beheaded corpses lying on the ground. I was told that an officer of the artillery unit cut off their heads to show off his bravery. 26 November: At 4 p.m., yelling loudly, the Second Battalion charged the enemy position, and captured its front line. Having seen their houses

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burnt down, villagers had no way to escape, and they were running around in confusion. It was a pity to see them but we could not avoid that happening. At 6 p.m., we completely occupied the village. At 7 p.m., we all assembled on the road, and started mopping-up operations in other villages nearby. When we were taking a rest, suddenly four Chinese soldiers absentmindedly appeared in front of us. We captured three of them but unfortunately one escaped. We killed two by beating them with shovels and picks. We took the other one to the head office, where he was shot to death after being interrogated by an interpreter. . . . 28 November: . . . We were out for sweeping-up the remnants of Chinese troops. . . . Near the bridge, we found five or six soldiers trying to escape on a boat. I aimed my gun at one of them and killed him. . . . We also saw some young Chinese men running away from us. I did not understand why they were trying to run away. But I shot them, thinking them suspicious. 29 November: The town of Wujin was one of the centres of the anti-Japanese movement. Therefore we conducted a mopping-up operation there and killed all the residents – the old and young, men and women. . . . 4 December: . . . Our requisition party brought back chickens, Chinese cabbages, etc. We also slaughtered pigs of the house where we were staying. . . . 5 December: At 8 a.m., we were ready to leave and departed the village. When we departed, the entire village was in flames (because we set the fire).7

Although Chiang Kai-shek later claimed that the Japanese troops killed 390,000 people in the course of their advance to Nanjing,8 it is impossible to speculate on the approximate number of victims because no relevant records were ever collected.

The Fall of Nanjing Between 15 and 18 November, just before the Japanese troops started moving towards Nanjing, Chiang Kai-shek held a conference of the National Defence Committee there, and decided to move the capital to Chongqing, and the general headquarters of the Chinese National Forces to Wuhan. At this conference, many staff officers believed that the defence of the city of Nanjing should be a token gesture, and that the bulk of the troops should 7 Makihara Diary in Nankin Jiken: Kyoto Shidan Kankei Shiryo¯ (The Nanjing Incident: Documents produced by the Kyoto Division) (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 1989). 8 Pike, Hirohito’s War, p. 85.

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be withdrawn and preserved for future battles. But Chiang Kai-shek insisted that the fall of Nanjing would have detrimental psychological effects on the entire nation; the city had to be defended to the last.9 It seems that Chiang Kai-shek found it necessary to demonstrate the Guomindang government’s clear intention to keep fighting in order to gain financial and military aid from Western nations. At the same time, he anticipated that within the next few weeks, peace overtures made through the German ambassador, Oskar Trautmann, would bring some positive results and that the ongoing Nine Power Treaty Conference in Brussels (3–24 November) would adopt tough sanctions against Japan. Chiang wanted to keep fighting in Nanjing to gain these desirable diplomatic outcomes, and therefore overrode any objections to defending the city to the last. However, his expectations of positive diplomatic results quickly faded when the Japanese troops launched their all-out attack on Nanjing. Tang Shengzhi, director-general of military training, volunteered to assume the position of commander of the Nanjing garrison and promised to fight to the death. However, he was frail after a recent bout of dysentery, and in fact had no intention of committing himself to the very end. Moreover, although the total number of Chinese troops mobilised to defend Nanjing had reached about 150,000 by 5 December, many of them were young peasants newly drafted from the neighbouring areas, supposedly to supplement the forces which lost more than half their number during the Battle of Shanghai. Because China had no military reserve system at the time, these newly drafted men had no military training at all. Indeed, they were taught how to use firearms for the first time only after arriving at their assigned defence positions. It was obvious that these inexperienced soldiers were unable to act as engaged members of an organised military unit, and were therefore vulnerable to becoming a disorderly rabble should they lose their commander. Yet, they were expected to defend a city with vast numbers of civilians – estimated between 400,000 and 500,000, including many refugees. By 8 December, Nanjing was surrounded by the Japanese. A few days before, bombers of the Imperial Navy had already begun bombing the city again, flying from Changzhou. Before the dawn of 7 December, Chiang Kaishek and his wife flew from Nanjing to Wuhan; the mayor of Nanjing, many

9 Kasahara, Nankin Jiken, pp. 110–11.

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senior staff of the government and city councillors of Nanjing also escaped to Wuhan during the following two days.10 On the evening of 9 December, leaflets urging the Chinese forces to surrender were dropped over the city from Japanese planes, but no reply came before the deadline of 1 p.m. the following day. General Matsui therefore issued the command to take Nanjing by force. A fierce battle began on the afternoon of 10 December, and continued unabated until midnight on 12 December. On 7 December meanwhile, the headquarters of the Central China Area Army issued ‘Instructions Regarding the Attack and Occupation of Nanjing’ to all its troops. These instructions clearly spelt out that any soldiers who committed crimes such as plundering and arson would be severely punished. Furthermore, in order to curtail misbehaviour of the soldiers, it specified that once the city was captured, the divisions would station themselves outside the city, leaving only a small number of well-disciplined troops within city limits. At the same time, the instruction warned that a large number of military police would be sent into the city to control crimes committed by the Japanese soldiers and to arrest offenders. It is obvious that staff officers issued such stern instructions because they knew that their soldiers had already committed numerous horrific crimes en route to Nanjing. In spite of this, however, Lieutenant General Prince Asaka Yasuhito, the new commander of the Shanghai Expedition Army, ordered his subordinates to take any measures that seemed ‘strategically appropriate’, and thus to ignore the instructions from the headquarters of the Central China Area Army. Moreover, as of 17 December, the number of military police was a mere seventeen, while more than 70,000 Japanese troops were inside Nanjing five days after its capitulation. Perversely, immediately after capturing the city, soldiers were once again instructed to obtain their necessary food supplies by means of cho¯hatsu as they had done before, though they were warned not to plunder.11 Actions taken by the Chinese military of destroying houses surrounding the city, shortly before the Japanese troops reached Nanjing, also incited Japanese looting inside the city. In order to prevent Japanese troops from plundering and occupying private houses, Chinese forces had demolished all of the houses located within 2 km of the city walls, as well as many farmhouses and villages within a 16-km radius of Nanjing city. As a result, 10 Ibid., pp. 115–16. 11 ANIDS Collection , Documents produced by the 16th Division of the Japanese Imperial Army.

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many of the farmers and other civilians who had lost their houses, flooded into the refugee district of the Nanjing safety zone, carrying a few possessions and minimal food supplies.12 This meant that Japanese troops, so far heavily dependent on plundering food and sleeping in houses that they seized, could not station themselves outside the city. One result was the devastating plunder of food by a large number of Japanese troops within the city once it was captured. The full-scale attack on Nanjing commenced at dawn on 12 December, as the Japanese intensified aerial bombing of the Chinese military positions inside the city, with artillery firing at the city walls and on the city itself. By noon the Japanese troops were ready to invade and began mounting their assault on the walls from different directions. Tang Shengzhi soon realised the impossibility of defending Nanjing, and initially planned to issue a retreat order to the entire Chinese force by dawn the following day, 13 December. His plan was to retreat at full speed by making a frontal assault and break through the Japanese lines. Disturbed by the rapidly intensifying Japanese assault, however, he changed his mind and decided to propose a plan for a three-day ceasefire through a German businessman, John Rabe, who was living in the city at the time. Rabe was chosen as a mediator because of his status as a Nazi, and because of the German–Japanese bilateral Anti-Comintern (anti-Communist) Pact. The plan was that the Chinese troops could withdraw from Nanjing without fighting, while the Japanese troops would stay in their present positions.13 However, around noon of 12 December, while the drafting of necessary documents for the ceasefire negotiations was underway, the Japanese were already destroying and occupying the city wall on the west side of Chunghwa Gate and the south side of Chungshan Gate. Furthermore, near Yuhuatai, some Japanese troops were already entering into the city, chasing the retreating Chinese troops back into the city. In addition, because of his ill health, Tang Shengzhi commanded his forces from his official residence near Xuanwu Lake, while most of his staff officers were at the headquarters in the basement of the Railway Head Office building near Chungshan Gate. Consequently, in the chaos of the ongoing battle and without communication between the top officers of the Nanjing garrison, the delivery of the three-day ceasefire proposal was never realised. 12 Kasahara, Nankin Jiken, p. 120. 13 J. Rabe, The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), entry dated 10 December 1937.

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Finally, at around 5 p.m., Tang met for about twenty minutes at his official residence with some military officials of the rank of divisional commander and above. Many others could not attend the meeting, unable to leave their combat zones. Nevertheless, Tang gave the retreat order to those officers present at the meeting. The retreat plan was that from 6 p.m., troops directly under the control of Tang himself, the 36th Division and the military police, would leave on steamboats from the wharf at Xiaguan and cross the Yangtze River. All other troops would commence retreating from their present positions at 11 p.m. by breaking through the Japanese forces and assembling at the southern end of Anhui province.14 However, it was too late to implement the plan at this stage as the front lines of the Chinese defending troops were rapidly collapsing everywhere, and a vast number of Chinese soldiers were frantically trying to escape via Xiaguan, hoping to reach the north bank of the Yangtze River, well outside of Nanjing. Therefore, in order to embark the troops under his direct command and escape from the Xiaguan wharf, Tang ordered the 36th Division to forcibly prevent any other troops heading through the Yijang Gate towards Xiaguan. This was to make sure that Tang and his troops would be the first to escape from Nanjing. By the time Tang left for the wharf, the north section of the Chungshan Road –the main road in Nanjing – was fully congested with a large number of retreating soldiers, including many sick and wounded men. Because of the total confusion, it was 8 p.m. when Tang finally reached the wharf through the crowd. There he waited for the other staff from the headquarters to arrive, and it was 9 p.m. when Tang and his group safely left Nanjing on a boat, to reach Pukou on the other side of the Yangtze. The following day the Japanese captured Pukou.15 As large numbers of the 6th, 9th and 114th Division troops of the Japanese army were proceeding into the city from the south, panic-stricken Chinese troops were escaping northwards through densely built housing areas. Many of the civilians who were still at home saw these escaping soldiers and were thrown into a panic. Many, carrying food and bedding, followed the soldiers so that by early evening, a vast number of retreating soldiers as well as refugees had flooded on to the Chungshan Road, heading towards the Yijang Gate. The Chungshan Road was now crammed from north to south with several tens of thousands of people, unable to move because the troops of Tang’s 36th Division had blockaded the road in front of the Yijang Gate, aiming heavy machine guns at the approaching soldiers. They had been 14 Kasahara, Nankin Jiken, p. 120.

15 Ibid., p. 132.

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instructed by Tang not to allow any troops to pass and to shoot anyone trying to break through. Soon this caused intense fighting between comrades-inarms, 36th Division troops versus other frantic Chinese soldiers trying to escape. As a result, dead bodies piled up in front of the Yijang Gate, until eventually a tank corps of armoured cavalry in retreat arrived and furiously broke through the gate.16 A large crowd violently rushed through the broken gate like a torrent. But when they reached the wharf, not a single boat was to be found. The commander of the transportation unit and the chief of staff of the Nanjing garrison had taken over all the boats belonging to different units and had already escaped from Nanjing with these vessels. They had been informed that only a limited number of troops would be allowed to use the boats for retreat, and they were also concerned to protect the vessels from aerial bombing by the Japanese.17 By 10 p.m., a few kilometres of riverbank on both sides of the wharf were swarming with people who could not go anywhere. This was because many Japanese troops were already well inside the city, and troops of the 6th Division of the Japanese army were approaching the riverbank from the south, while troops of the 13th Division were on their way to the northern riverbank. Indeed, about 15,000 Chinese soldiers trying to escape southwards encountered the Japanese troops of the 6th Division coming north. After about 2,000 Chinese soldiers were shot and killed by the Japanese,18 the rest had no choice but to go back towards the wharf. The only way to escape was to cross the 1.5 km wide Yangtze River. Many people tried to swim across, and others attempted to cross on makeshift wooden rafts, or by hanging on to logs or sheets of wooden board and the like. The water was extremely cold because it was almost midnight in winter. Consequently, many of them drowned, losing their physical strength in the middle of the river. A vast number of Chinese soldiers, many of whom were inexperienced, untrained and newly drafted men, returned to the city, realising there was no possibility of escape. Terrified of the brutal Japanese mopping-up strategy, they disarmed, trying to disguise themselves as civilians. For this purpose, they stripped off military uniforms, and begged civilians to give them clothes, or else they stole civilian clothes. Many soldiers who could not obtain civilian 16 A. T. Steel, ‘Days of hell’, Chicago Daily News, 3 February 1938, p. 2. 17 Kasahara, Nankin Jiken, p. 137. 18 ANIDS Collection , Documents produced by the 6th Division of the Japanese Imperial Army.

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clothes were only in underwear. Streets were soon covered with abandoned guns, hand grenades, swords, rucksacks, uniforms, military caps, military boots and the like. The street near the Yijang Gate was full of abandoned military vehicles, cannons, machine guns and other heavy weapons. It looked like a junk yard full of heavy metal.19 By 3 a.m. on 13 December, the sound of gunfire completely ceased, and the whole city was covered with an extraordinary stillness. At 3.10 a.m., Chungshan Gate, the last remaining gate, fell into the hands of the Japanese without a single Japanese casualty, and the entire city of Nanjing capitulated.

The Truth of the Mopping-Up Operations From the morning of 13 December, the Japanese forces began mopping up the remnants of defeated enemy troops in the city, and for this purpose, each unit was assigned its own district. Initially the Japanese assumed that the southeast district of the city was the most likely hiding place because it was a densely populated lower-working-class area, in which many of the residents remained as they could not afford to escape from the city before the Japanese attack began. Several units entered this area, and during their search for enemy soldiers, the troops killed any men whom they thought suspicious. Indeed, in the early morning of 13 December, the commander of the Tenth Army, Lieutenant General Heisuke Yanagawa, issued an order to all of his troops to ‘annihilate the enemies in the city of Nanjing’.20 During this mopping-up operation, Japanese soldiers slaughtered many civilians including women and children. Women victims were often killed immediately after being gang-raped. Three weeks after this Japanese attack, John Magee, an American missionary who stayed in the city at the time, recorded on 16 mm film many severely injured civilians and rape victims, as well as the bodies which had been dumped into pits and ditches or still lay on the ground.21 Lieutenant Colonel Isamu Cho¯, staff officer in charge of information of the Shanghai Expedition Army, also issued an order in the name of Commander Prince Asaka to annihilate all prisoners. All the division commanders of the Shanghai Expedition Army literally implemented this order. For example, Lieutenant General Kesago Nakajima, the commander of the 16th Division, 19 Steel, ‘Days of hell’, 3 February 1938. 20 ANIDS Collection , Documents produced by the Tenth Army. 21 Nanking Massacre – Japanese Atrocities, filmed by J. Magee.

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wrote in his diary on 13 December: ‘As it is our basic policy not to take prisoners, we killed them one and all.’ In the same diary, Nakajima claimed that the 30th Infantry Brigade under his command ‘disposed of’ about 16,300 men on that day, and still held between 7,000 and 8,000 prisoners who surrendered. He stated that his plan was to divide these prisoners who had surrendered into several groups, each of 200 men, and ‘dispose of all of them’ at different places.22 In fact, the 30th Infantry Brigade was responsible for killing tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers who could not cross the Yangtze River to escape the night before, and were thus trapped in the area of Xiaguan. On the basis of Nakajima’s diary, it is presumed that his 30th Infantry Brigade alone killed at least 23,000 men within the two days after the fall of Nanjing.23 This number does not include those who were shot in the river. On the morning of 13 December, many Chinese soldiers and civilians were still trying to cross the river and these frantic actions continued until late afternoon. According to the 30th Infantry Brigade’s field report, Japanese troops used 15,000 bullets in a few hours of continuous shooting from rapidfire guns to kill people escaping into the water.24 In addition, the torpedoboat flotilla of the 3rd Squadron of the North China Area Fleet of the Japanese Imperial Navy, which came up the Yangtze River and reached Nanjing in the early afternoon of that day, used firearms to destroy small boats and rafts of the escapees, killing an estimated 10,000 people.25 Even those who managed to reach the other side of the river were shot by rapid-fire guns of the Kunisaki Unit of the Tenth Army, which had crossed the river and was ready to intercept the approaching escapees.26 As a result, it is said that the river was full of floating dead bodies and the water turned red from the blood. The senior commander of the 30th Infantry Brigade, Major General To¯ichi Sasaki, justified the killing of prisoners by claiming that he had no food to provide for such a vast number of prisoners. Accordingly, on the following day Sasaki issued an official order to his troops that all the Chinese soldiers must be annihilated, and no prisoners should be taken unless a new order was received from the division commander.27 In the area between Zhonghua and Guanghua Gates in the southern end of the city, the 114th Division of the Tenth Army was responsible for ‘disposing of’ prisoners. During the night of 12 December, the commander of the 1st 22 ANIDS Collection . 23 Ibid. 24 ANIDS Collection . 25 Kasahara, Nankin Jiken, pp. 158–9. 26 ANIDS Collection . 27 ANIDS Collection .

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Battalion of the 66th Regiment selected three Chinese men from the captured prisoners as messengers, and sent them back to their troops, requesting them to surrender. As a result, more than 1,500 men surrendered that night. Yet, in the early afternoon of the following day, the order to kill all the prisoners was sent to the commander through the 66th Regiment. Thus, it was decided that four companies of the 1st Battalion would be responsible for ‘disposing of’ approximately equal numbers of prisoners. By 7.30 p.m., all the prisoners had been stabbed to death by bayonet. These actions of killing prisoners, in particular surrendered prisoners, were clearly a violation of Article 13 of the Hague Convention respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land. Yet, it is clear from the relevant Japanese military records that the Japanese officers and soldiers had no sense of guilt for committing such serious war crimes. On 14 December, various public events celebrating the fall of Nanjing took place throughout Japan with the fervent encouragement of the government and in close co-operation with major press companies. In Tokyo that evening, about 400,000 people participated in a lantern procession held in and around the plaza of the Imperial Palace. Emperor Hirohito issued a special statement to express his joy regarding the success of capturing Nanjing. In this way, the attack on Nanjing – initiated by General Matsui and his staff officers without an official order from Tokyo – was approved with congratulations by Hirohito personally.28 On the same day, encouraged by this glorious endorsement of the operation, Matsui – who was still in Suzhou, 189 km from Nanjing, due to his illness and fatigue – instructed his chief of staff, Major General Isao Ttsukada, to prepare for the triumphal entry parade and ceremony in Nanjing on 17 December. On 15 December, he flew to Jurong, and then went to Yusuijin, near Nanjing, by car for this purpose. The staff officers and division commanders informed Matsui that it would not be possible to hold the ceremony on 17 December as they had not yet completed the mopping-up operations in the city and could not guarantee his safety. They recommended postponing it until 20 December, but Matsui insisted that the ceremony must be conducted on 17 December. He was eager to conduct the grand entry ceremony as soon as possible to respond to the jubilant reaction in Japan and thus boost his popularity. In fact, he had no intention of ensuring that his troops strictly followed the ‘Instructions Regarding the Attack and Occupation of Nanjing’ that he had issued on 7 December. He wrote in his 28 Tokyo Nichi-nichi Shimbun (Tokyo Daily Newspaper), 15 December 1937.

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diary: ‘in any case we cannot avoid a few incidents of looting (mainly of furniture) and rapes committed by our men’, which suggests that Matsui himself was not seriously interested in implementing the instructions.29 Accordingly, the Japanese forces decided to speed up the ‘mopping-up and extermination operations’ by mobilising many of the occupation troops stationed in Nanjing. Their concern was not just the safety of General Matsui; indeed, they were much more worried about the safety of a member of the royal family, Prince Asaka, the commander of the Shanghai Expedition Army. According to the plan of the entry parade, Matsui and other military leaders including Prince Asaka would enter the city riding on horses through Chungshan Gate and proceed on the main road to the centre of the city, where the Guomindang government building was located. The problem for the Japanese officers responsible for the ceremony was the fact that the so-called Nanjing safety zone (where many Chinese soldiers were hiding) was located less than 1 km from the government building, where the celebration ceremony was to be held. The Nanjing safety zone, approximately one-eighth of the area of Nanjing city, was established in late November by the Nanjing International Safety Zone Committee in order to accommodate and protect civilians and refugees. The committee consisted of twenty-two foreigners remaining in the city who were businessmen, journalists, missionaries and academics, led by German businessman, John Rabe. The Japanese forces had previously guaranteed that they would not attack any parts of the city where the Chinese troops were not stationed. The committee accordingly persuaded the Guomindang government to move its troops out of the safety zone. Indeed, on 1 December, the mayor of Nanjing, Ma Chaochun, instructed all Chinese citizens remaining in the city to move into the safety zone, which was demarcated by Red Cross flags. At its peak, the safety zone accommodated approximately 250,000 people who were city residents and a large number of farmers evacuated from the outskirts of the city, as well as refugees from Shanghai.30 Adding to this number, on the night of 12 December, many remnants of the defeated Chinese troops, who thought it impossible to escape from the Japanese attacks, also ran into this safety zone, stripping off their uniforms and abandoning arms. About 400 of these men had been persuaded to enter 29 General Matsui’s Field Diary, in Nanking Senshi Shiro¯-shu (The Collection of the Documents on the Battle of Nanjing), 3 vols. (Tokyo: Kaigyo¯-sha, 1993), I I. 30 Rabe, Good Man of Nanking, entries dated 25 November–5 December 1937.

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the zone by John Rabe, who thought that the Japanese forces would treat POWs in accordance with international law.31 However, on realising that many disarmed Chinese soldiers were located in the zone, the Japanese started implementing full-scale mopping-up operations in the area from 14 December, mobilising many troops from the 9th and 16th Divisions. According to the field diary of Colonel Kazuo Isa, Commander of the 7th Regiment of the 9th Division, who was responsible for overseeing these operations in the safety zone, ‘about 6,500 men were meticulously disposed [of] during the three-day-long mopping-up operations’.32 John Rabe also referred to these operations in his report, stating that the Japanese selected any man whom they thought looked suspicious. Selection criteria were extremely dubious; for example, an ordinary man could be picked up just because he had a short, soldier-like haircut, or because a mark on his back looked as though he had been carrying a military knapsack. Consequently, many of the men the Japanese killed with machine guns and hand grenades were civilians; some were killed on the shore of the Yangtze River, and others were shot on the edge of marshland or in vacant land in the city. The Yamada Unit of the 13th Division, which reached a few kilometres north of Chungshan Wharf, was holding about 20,000 ‘prisoners’ who had tried to escape north of Nanjing along the Yangze River. In this case too, many were civilian refugees including old people and children. Nonetheless, the Shanghai Expedition Army instructed the Yamada Unit to ‘completely eliminate’ them in order to ensure that the entry parade scheduled for 17 December would be absolutely safe. Consequently, between 16 and 17 December, groups of a few thousand people at a time were taken to the shore of the Yangtze River, or to the nearby mountain, and machine-gunned. Japanese soldiers would then move around among the bodies, and if anyone was found still alive, that person was bayoneted. Subsequently firewood was placed on the piles of dead bodies and oil was spread over them and set alight. This procedure was repeated many times until all ‘prisoners’ were annihilated. Eventually, the burnt corpses were thrown into the river.33

31 Ibid., 12–13 December 1937. 32 ANIDS Collection , Documents produced by the 9th Division. 33 ANIDS Collection , Documents produced by the 13th Division.

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Mass Rape and the Struggle of the Nanjing International Safety Zone Committee After the triumphal entry parade and ceremony had taken place on 17 December, large-scale mopping-up operations became scarcer, and sporadic skirmishes – mainly fighting between small numbers of Chinese resisting the Japanese – virtually ceased in the city. At this point, many Japanese soldiers began breaking into closed shops and warehouses, plundering alcohol, snacks and food. They celebrated their victory with these spoils. Some broke into museums and stole ancient cultural treasures. Drunken soldiers impulsively committed arson and killed civilians for no reason. But the most pervasive and rapidly spreading crime, particularly after the entry parade and ceremony of 17 December, was rape. Japanese soldiers conducted door-todoor searches for young girls on the pretext of searching for the remnants of Chinese troops. However, any woman regardless her age was vulnerable; victims ranged from infants to 80-year-olds. On 19 December, an American missionary, James McCallum, wrote in his diary: Never have I heard or read of such brutality. Rape! Rape! Rape! We estimate at least 1,000 cases a night, and many by day. In case of resistance . . . there is a bayonet stab or bullet. We could write up hundreds of cases a day.

A British resident in Nanjing, Iver Mackay, also wrote: On the night of December 15 a number of Japanese soldiers entered the University of Nanking buildings at Tao Yuen and raped 30 women on the spot, some by six men . . . . At 4 p.m. on December 16 Japanese soldiers entered the residence at 11 Mokan Road and raped the women there. On December 17 Japanese soldiers went into Lo Kia Lu No. 5, raped four women and took one bicycle, bedding and other things . . . . On December 17 near Judicial Yuan a young girl after being raped was stabbed by a bayonet in her abdomen. On December 17 at Sian Fu Wua a woman of 40 was taken away and raped. On December 17 in the neighborhood of Kyih San Yuin Lu two girls were raped by a number of soldiers. From a primary school at Wu Tai Shan many women were taken away and raped for the whole night and released the next morning, December 17.34

On 17 December alone, more than 1,000 cases of rape were committed in the city. As a result, many women came out on to the streets, wandering about, seeking places of protection. The members of the Nanjing International Safety Zone Committee made great efforts to help these women and tried to prevent 34 International Military Tribunal for the Far East (Tokyo, 1946), p. 4,467.

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more rapes taking place while also rescuing some of the victims. One of the committee members, Mini Vautrin, was a professor of education at Ginling College, the campus of which was located in the safety zone. She used the college as a refugee centre for women and children and accommodated 4,000 by 16 December. Although the campus buildings were already full of people before 17 December, she continued to bring in refugees and numbers swelled to about 10,000 women and children staying on the campus.35 Members of the Nanjing International Safety Zone Committee spent a great deal of time taking rape victims to hospitals in the safety zone and making sure that they received proper medical treatment. They also guarded the women’s refugee facilities in order to prevent an invasion of Japanese soldiers, particularly at night. Even the hospitals were targeted by Japanese soldiers because many young women were working there as volunteers looking after patients. John Rabe estimated the total number of rapes committed by the Japanese troops in Nanjing to be around 20,000. Many of the cases were gang rape, and one-third of these were committed in broad daylight. Many victims were killed immediately after being raped, and often in extremely brutal ways – for example by penetrating vaginas with bayonets, long sticks of bamboo, bottles or other objects.36 Most of the Japanese occupation troops stayed in Nanjing until the end of December before they were dispatched to various other areas in China. A complete absence of military plans or policies from the headquarters of the Central China Area Army meant that tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers were allowed to stay in the city without any control or discipline. As a result, a vast number of women became the victims of brutal Japanese sexual violence. Aware of this grave situation, the leaders of the Central China Area Army hurriedly established ‘comfort stations’ staffed with ‘comfort women’ which in reality were Japanese military brothels staffed by sex slaves – hardly an improvement.37

Conclusion Nanjing remained under Japanese control for seven years following the massacre; therefore, the Chinese authorities had no opportunity to conduct comprehensive surveys to collect data on the victims of the atrocities that the 35 M. Vautrin, Terror in Minnie Vautrin’s Nanjing: Diaries and Correspondence, 1937–38 (University of Illinois Press, 2008), entries dated 16–17 December 1937. 36 Vautrin, Terror in Minnie Vautrin’s Nanjing, diary entries dated 16–30 December 1937. 37 Y. Tanaka, Japan’s Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution during World War II and the U.S. Occupation (London: Routledge, 2002), Ch. 2.

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Japanese troops had committed immediately before, during and after the attack on Nanjing City. When the Japanese attack began, the estimated population of Nanjing was between 400,000 and 500,000 including refugees from outside the city. In addition, the estimated number of Chinese National Forces troops was around 150,000, including many labourers employed by the military. Regarding the estimated death toll of the Chinese National Forces, the most comprehensive survey to date has been conducted by Professor Tokuji Kasahara, who collected and analysed various relevant data from a number of Japanese military field diaries prepared by many units and divisions of the Central China Area Army. He concludes that of 150,000 men, about 20,000 were killed in action, 10,000 were missing in action, and 40,000 successfully escaped. The remaining 80,000 men either surrendered to or were captured by the Japanese forces, who killed almost all of them.38 It is extremely difficult to estimate the death toll of civilians because of the lack of relevant information. John Rabe estimated the number to be between 50,000 and 60,000, stating that the Chinese claim of 100,000 was somewhat inflated. According to the report prepared by Lewis C. Smythe, a sociologist and American Christian missionary who was in Nanjing during the Japanese massacre, 12,000 were killed in the city, and 26,870 became victims in neighbouring villages; in total almost 40,000 civilians lost their lives.39 The total death toll of Chinese National Forces and civilians who were victims of the Japanese slaughter is therefore estimated to be a minimum of 120,000 (80,000 soldiers and 40,000 civilians). If we adopt John Rabe’s highest estimated death toll of civilians, the number could rise to 140,000. It is quite feasible that many more civilian victims died in the river or at other unknown places, and thus their death toll might be 100,000 as the Guomindang claimed. In addition, many of the 10,000 missing Chinese soldiers could also have become the victims of Japanese atrocities. If so, the highest estimation of the total could be between 180,000 and 200,000. Whatever the case, an extraordinary number of victims, including civilians, died as the result of a short military campaign. The Nanjing massacre was the most brutal and wanton atrocity committed by Japanese troops during their fifteen-year Asia–Pacific War. Yet it was only the most horrific of a concentrated series of heinous actions directed against China’s civilian population. Japanese military operations against the 38 Kasahara, Nankin Jiken, pp. 223–8. 39 L. C. Smythe, War Damage in the Nanking Area, December 1937 to March 1938: Urban and Rural Surveys (Shanghai: Mercury Press, 1938), p. 83.

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Chinese People’s Liberation Army and communist guerrillas also frequently involved mass killings of local inhabitants who sympathised with antiJapanese campaigns. In the fifteen years of war between 1931 and 1945, the death toll of the Chinese was estimated to be more than 10 million. While this total certainly does not refer only to Chinese victims killed by the Japanese imperial forces, most of these deaths were either direct or indirect results of the long war of aggression that Japan conducted in various parts of China and other parts of Southeast Asia such as Malaysia and Singapore. Unlike the Nazi regime, the Japanese military government did not endorse a clear policy of genocide. Yet, the Japanese treatment of the Chinese during the Asia–Pacific War was undoubtedly genocidal, and the Nanjing massacre was a typical example of such genocidal massacres practised by the Japanese imperial forces. Various factors can be identified to explain the extreme Japanese cruelty inflicted on the Chinese, but the most important factor is racism. Japanese popular racism against Chinese, Koreans and other Asians developed soon after Japan successfully became a modern nation-state in the latter half of the nineteenth century – especially since Japan had avoided colonisation by Western countries, but had adopted Western-style political, economic and legal systems and established military forces equipped with modern arms. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, leading Japanese politicians and intellectuals promoted the idea that the Chinese and Koreans were inferior and that the racially superior Japanese should become the leaders of east Asia. Such racism, based on disdain for its Asian neighbours, increased and gained in popularity when Japan won the first Sino-Japanese War in 1895 and colonised Taiwan as a result. A series of international successes, including victory in the war against Russia in 1905, the colonisation of Korea in 1910, and participation in World War One in 1914–18 as a member of the winning Allied coalition, further contributed to the enhancement of the existing popular belief that the Japanese were far superior to the ‘backward’ Asian races. This racist sentiment undoubtedly made it psychologically easier for Japanese soldiers to inflict violence upon the Chinese and other Asian peoples, and to place so little value on their lives. Another important factor was the absence of the concept of basic human rights among Japanese soldiers. Even their own basic human rights as soldiers were totally disregarded by Japan’s military leaders, owing to the influence of the emperor ideology which quickly developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and which all sectors of Japanese society came to support as a result of vigorous state-sponsored public education. In other 398

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words, the absence of awareness of basic human rights was not just a tendency peculiar to the Japanese military; it was Japan’s social problem before and during the Asia–Pacific War. The absence of basic human rights and the collapse of responsibility were vividly demonstrated in the conduct of the Japanese military during the Nanjing massacre.

Bibliographic Note There are many first-hand reports, both in Japanese and English, on the genocidal atrocities committed by Japanese troops during the attack on Nanjing in December 1937. A large number have been cited in this chapter. The documents in Japanese include a large number of military records – field diaries and other official reports prepared by many military units that participated in the battle and massacre, as well as private diaries, memoirs and testimonies written by Japanese soldiers. The official military documents are housed in the Archives of the National Institute for Defence Studies in Tokyo, while private records were compiled and printed in a number of edited books, many of which were published in Japan in the 1980s and 1990s. In addition, there are a number of academic articles and books in Japanese, which extensively utilise the above-mentioned first-hand information. Most of these secondary sources were also published in the 1990s. First-hand reports in English are generally those written by American residents in Nanjing at the time of the Japanese attack. They were Christian missionaries and journalists, who became members of the Nanjing International Safety Zone Committee, the organisation set up by twenty-two foreigners remaining in the city to accommodate and protect Chinese civilians and refugees. One such valuable record is the collection of diaries and correspondence, Terror in Minnie Vautrin’s Nanjing, by M. Vautrin. The anthology Eyewitnesses to Massacre: American Missionaries Bear Witness to Japanese Atrocities in Nanjing, ed. Zhang Kaiyuan (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2001) is another worthwhile source of records by Americans who experienced these atrocities. The English translation of diaries written by the German businessman John Rabe, The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe, is also an important source of first-hand information. Many secondary English sources – academic articles and books – rely upon the above first-hand sources.

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part iii *

THE NATION-STATE SYSTEM DURING THE COLD WAR

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Genocide in Latin America, 1950–2000 daniel feierstein and lucrecia molinari (translation: douglas andrew town)

Massive state violence in Latin America reached its peak in the twentieth century during the cold war under the National Security Doctrine (NSD). This doctrine provided an ideological justification for dictatorships in the region in the 1960s and 1970s, and even influenced regimes in countries where there was no breakdown of democracy, such as Colombia, Venezuela and Mexico. The NSD identified a new type of enemy – the ‘internal enemy’; a new form of warfare – the counter-insurgency campaign; and a new role for the armed forces – controlling the domestic population. Through the concept of ‘internal enemy’ this doctrine enabled the state apparatus of repression to be used against the general population. Latin American states used all the resources at their disposal to investigate, control, persecute, discipline, assassinate and eventually ‘disappear’ their citizens, acting as armies of occupation in their own countries.

Background Each country combined the NSD with its own existing strategies for population control. In this sense, the NSD was a continuation of the widespread persecution of political dissidents in Latin America during the first decades of the twentieth century. Examples include, among others, the massacre of Santa María de Iquique in Chile in 1907, the ‘Tragic Week’ in Argentina in 1919 (together with the repression and mass murder of workers in the south during the 1920s), the massacres on Colombia’s banana plantations in 1928 and the massacre in El Salvador in 1932.1 The latter case was notable for its sheer scale. In December 1931, General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez came to power in a coup d’état. A month 1 J. Godio, Historia del movimiento obrero latinoamericano, 3 vols. (San José: Nueva Sociedad, 1979–85).

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later, an uprising broke out. The government’s response was brutal. Numerous military, police and civilian units were sent to the areas where the uprising had taken place. Armed with machine guns, they succeeded in defeating the rebels and crushing the revolt. During the two weeks following the uprising, indiscriminate killings of peasants by military units intensified. In some cases, the order was given to assemble the male population in public squares, with the excuse of handing out safe-conducts. They were then lined up and machine-gunned. The number of dead is uncertain, but various estimates put it at between 10,000 and 30,000. The repression later extended to society as a whole. The fledgling labour movements and unions were suppressed, along with any groups critical of the status quo – both reformers and revolutionaries.2 Accounts of what had happened gave rise to a deeply racist and anti-popular sentiment that spread throughout the Central American region.3

The Institutionalisation of a Political Military Block in America (1946–1959) Just over a decade later, the NSD would turn persecution of the ‘internal enemy’ into a doctrine and place it firmly in the hands of the military. Conceived in the United States and strongly influenced by the counterinsurgency methods developed by the French in Indochina and Algeria, the NSD underwent a period of ‘institutionalisation’ (1946–59) after World War Two. This period saw the emergence of legal, doctrinal and institutional tools that gave shape to a hemispheric security system under the leadership of the United States – a system that was to keep a tight rein on the American continent in terms of doctrine and strategy.4 The National Security State was signed into law in the United States through the National Security Act (1947). The act identified the Soviet 2 T. P. Anderson, Matanza: El Salvador’s Communist Revolt of 1932 (University of Nebraska Press, 1971); D. Siegel and J. Hacken, ‘El Salvador: la nueva visita de la contrainsurgencia’, in Contrainsurgencia, proinsurgencia y antiterrorism, ed. M. Klare and P. Kornbluh (Mexico DF: Grijalbo, 1990). 3 C. Figueroa Ibarra, ‘Cultura del Terror y Guerra Fría en Guatemala’, in Hasta que la muerte nos separe. Poder y prácticas sociales genocidas en América Latina, ed. D. Feierstein and G. Levy (La Plata: Ediciones Al Margen, 2004), p. 124. 4 Regarding the relationship between the United States and Latin America during this period (1946–1959), Katz identifies an offensive directed against left-wing forces, support for authoritarian dictatorships, direct US military intervention and lack of economic aid for Latin America. F. Katz, ‘La Guerra Fría en América Latina’, in Espejos de la Guerra Fría: México, América Central y el Caribe, ed. D. Spencer (Mexico: CIESAS, 2004), pp. 19–22.

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Union as the main enemy and driving force behind anti-colonial wars and processes of social change, and established a strategy of ‘containment’ to limit the spread of communism. Another legal instrument, the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (1947), also known as the Rio Treaty or by its Spanish-language acronym TIAR, established the principles of collective solidarity in the face of an extra-continental aggression. With the creation of the Organization of American States, the OAS (1948), continental integration acquired an institutional character.5 In the following years, the United States established a series of bilateral treaties with many Latin American countries, which included supplying them with military aid (training, donations of surplus material and loans to buy new equipment).

Personalism and Discretionality: Massive State Violence in Dominican Republic, Haiti and Paraguay The dictatorships in the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Paraguay concentrated political and military power to a large degree in the hands of one person – a personalistic regime or family dictatorship. Later, professionalisation and bureaucratisation made it increasingly difficult for the armed forces to support hereditary dictatorships. Consequently, these were more common in the first half of the twentieth century – for example, under Maximiliano Hernández Martínez (1931–44) in El Salvador, Jorge Ubico Castañeda (1931–44) in Guatemala and Tiburcio Carías Andino (1933–49) in Honduras. Nevertheless, some dictatorships managed to perpetuate themselves, despite the first great wave of democracy that swept the region after World War Two. Such were the cases of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo (1930–61) in the Dominican Republic, the Duvalier dynasty (1957–86) in Haiti, Alfredo Stroessner (1954–89) in Paraguay and the Somoza dynasty (1937–79) in Nicaragua. The first of these dictators to come to power was Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. Trujillo used the security forces to terrorise the population. Political opponents were subjected to torture and appalling prison conditions. But that was not all. In 1937, Trujillo ordered the massacre of around 18,000 Haitians living in the Dominican Republic. The case was closed without a hearing after Trujillo paid Haiti compensation for the victims. Although the reasons for the massacre appear to be complex, this event was part of a broader campaign to control agitation among the 5 Francisco Leal Buitrago, ‘La doctrina de Seguridad Nacional: materialización de la Guerra Fría en América del Sur’, Revista de Estudios Sociales 15 (2003), 74–87.

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country’s worst-paid workers: the Haitian sugar-cane workers and the poorest Dominican peasants.6 After Trujillo’s assassination in 1961, a ‘transition’ period began in which diverse political groupings appeared and parties multiplied. In 1963, Juan Bosch became the country’s first democratically elected president. However, before he could implement his ambitious reform programme, he was ousted by powerful economic sectors in a coup backed by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and generals loyal to Trujillo. This created enormous discontent. In 1965 a military and civilian rebellion attempted to reinstall Juan Bosch, leading to a civil war. The United States sent Marines to the island to support the anti-Bosch forces and the country was subsequently occupied by the Organization of American States, but this did not end the violence. The open combat continued, followed by a wave of anti-communist terror and guerrilla attacks against officials and members of the security forces. In 1966, Joaquín Balaguer, who had been a civil servant and close collaborator of Trujillo, was elected president in an election marred by violence and intimidation. His presidencies (1966–78 and 1986–96) were a continuation of Trujilloism. In his first years of government, Balaguer sought to eradicate the remaining opposition by setting up paramilitary death squads. Opposition leaders were kidnapped from their workplaces, on the streets, in their homes and even in exile. More than 4,000 Dominicans were murdered. Wide-scale repression only ceased when the leadership of leftist groups had been completely eliminated. However, after the 1974 elections, a selective elimination of opponents continued.7 Meanwhile, Haiti fell under the dictatorship of François Duvalier (‘Papa Doc’) (1957–71) and Jean-Claude Duvalier (‘Baby Doc’) (1971–86). It is estimated that during the three decades their dynasty lasted, the Duvaliers ordered the deaths of between 20,000 and 30,000 Haitian civilians. Hundreds of thousands more were forced into exile. Much of the repression was carried out by the Tontons Macoutes, civilian militias created to terrorise the population in general and the political opposition in particular. These militias, which became more important numerically than the army itself, have been identified by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) as the main perpetrators of violations against human rights and political freedoms during the Duvalier era.8 After the Baby Doc government, 6 Frank Moya, ‘The Dominican Republic since 1930’, The Cambridge History of Latin America, 12 vols., ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge University Press, 1990), V I I. 7 Ibid. 8 Human Rights Watch, ‘Haiti: thirst for justice – a decade of impunity in Haiti’, 1996, www.hrw.org/reports/1996/Haiti.htm.

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there was a series of dictatorial governments between 1986 and 1994, with brief bouts of constitutional rule. However, this period was largely a continuation of the Duvalier era, not only because many officials remained in office, but because activities by the Tontons Macoutes continued, as did American aid. The latter was cut back only when human rights violations became too blatant to ignore. Alfredo Stroessner became president of Paraguay after leading an army coup in 1954. His dictatorship, which lasted from 1954 to 1989, owed its stability to two key institutions: the army and the Colorado Party. The army gave him the military support essential in a dictatorial regime; the Colorado Party provided him with a popular base almost unique for a Latin American dictator. Through the party, Stroessner established a network of territorial control, reaching even the smallest villages. The guerrilla groups that emerged were fought efficiently by the Paraguayan army, which received increased US military aid during the 1960s and 1970s. The army sent almost a thousand military squads to be trained in ‘anti-communist’ counter-insurgency in the US Army School of the Americas. Brazilian and Argentine military missions also played an important advisory role. By the end of the 1970s the Paraguayan dictatorship had thus become more like the new type of dictatorships that had emerged during that decade. The dictatorship brutally persecuted indigenous peoples. During the 1960s and 1970s, for example, at least 60 per cent of the Aché people were killed. The sale and appropriation of Aché women and children has been recognised in various legal and academic circles as instances of genocide.9 However, unlike what happened elsewhere in the region, no clandestine military or police structures were created. There were also no clandestine detention or torture centres.10 Instead, official police, military, government and civilian facilities were used for this purpose. The Final Report of the Paraguayan Truth and Justice Commission revealed that, during the Stroessner dictatorship, 19,862 people were detained and 18,772 people were tortured. Executions and forced disappearances were less frequent. It is claimed that 59 people were executed and 336 were forcibly 9 R. N. Arens, Genocide in Paraguay (Philadelphia: Temple University Press); B. Clavero, R. K. Hitchcock, T. E. Koperski et al., Los ache del Paraguay: discusión de un genocidio (Copenhagen: Grupo Internacional de Trabajo sobre Asuntos Indígenas, 2008), among many others. 10 Paraguay Truth and Justice Commission, Final Report of the Truth and Justice Commission of Paraguay (2008), www.derechoshumanos.net/lesahumanidad/informes/paraguay/ Informe_Comision_Verdad_y_ Justicia_Paraguay_Conclusiones_y_Recomendacione s.htm.

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disappeared. In addition, 20,818 Paraguayans went into exile because of direct or indirect political persecution.11

Doctrinal Update: The Diffusion of the Concept of Internal Enemy (1961–1969) From the 1960s onwards, these ‘traditional’ dictatorships were brought into line with the NSD. The turning point was the proclamation of the socialist nature of the Cuban revolution in 1961. Numerous guerrilla revolts in the Third World showed that the focus on regular Soviet forces that had prevailed in the United States during the previous decade underestimated the political awakening of the masses. The need to secure growing US investments against the risk of social unrest prompted a change in US President Kennedy’s strategy. Thus, the fight against ‘subversive insurgency’ acquired the same importance as conventional warfare. Accordingly, the NSD was updated and the role of the Latin American armed forces was redefined. The common defence against a foreign aggression proposed by the Rio Treaty was replaced by the specialisation of each country’s forces in internal security and the fight against ‘subversion’. By guaranteeing order on the ‘internal front’, Latin American armed forces would contribute directly to the security of the ‘free world’ since Kennedy was convinced that the USSR would use decolonisation processes to expand its area of influence. Specialisation in internal security required a retraining of Latin America’s military forces. In 1963, the United States Southern Command (South Com) accordingly moved to the Panama Canal Zone. In addition to co-ordinating military assistance programmes, military activities and intelligence from the very heart of the continent, the South Com became the epicentre for spreading the counter-insurgency doctrine. Under its jurisdiction were the 8th Special Force (Green Berets) and the US Army School of the Americas (USARSA), in which thousands of Latin American officers took courses. The School of the Americas was founded to ‘provide training to Latin American personnel chosen to achieve higher levels of professionalism, better training in the maintenance of internal security, and greater military collaboration in national development’.12 It was also the most important training ground for 11 Ibid. See also A. Boccia Paz and B. N. Farina, El Paraguay bajo el stronismo 1954–1989, Colección La Gran Historia del Paraguay (Asunción: Editorial El Lector, 2010). 12 Brochure, Department of the Army.Headquarters of the School of the Americas (1975), in Michael Klare and Nancy Klein, Armas y Poder en América Latina (Mexico: ERA, 1978).

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counter-insurgency operations in Latin America and the only US military school that exclusively housed Latin American military staff. Many of these students would play key roles in the coups in Latin America in the following years.13 The NSD showed a clear French influence and included some important innovations. First, it abolished the distinction between violence and nonviolence. Security was to be achieved by any means, violent or non-violent: the end justified the means, even if these eroded constitutional guarantees. Second, it blurred the distinction between internal and external enemies. Third, it also blurred the distinction between preventive and repressive violence. Thus, while the traditional doctrine tried to limit the use of armed force when faced with a specific situation of aggression, the NSD defended the need to act in defence of national interests even when threats were only ‘potential’.14 This was the context in which numerous coups d’état took place in Latin America, such as the 1961 coup in El Salvador; the 1962 coups in Argentina and Peru; the 1963 coups in Guatemala, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic and Honduras; the 1964 coups in Brazil and Bolivia; the 1966 coup in Argentina; and the 1968 coups in Peru and Panama.

Developmentalism and Social Disciplining: Massive State Violence in Brazil The launching of a vast economic aid programme, the Alliance for Progress, was crucial in strengthening relations between Latin American countries and the United States. The programme was based on the notion that adverse socio-economic conditions (such as hunger, illiteracy and unequal distribution of land) were a breeding ground for radical ideologies. Therefore, development was directly related to security, and so to the armed forces of each country. The differences are obvious if we compare Peru (whose ‘revolution from above’ saw development as a prerequisite for security) with Chile or Argentina (where development was practically absent and the economy was run on neoliberal lines). One military dictatorship that emphasised development was Brazil’s (1964– 85). It was also the first Latin American dictatorship to openly embrace the NSD, which it did under the official name of Doctrine of National Security and Development. At the repressive level, this military regime used several 13 Klare and Klein, Armas y Poder en América Latina; Lesley Gill, The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004). 14 José Comblin, El poder militar en América Latina (Salamanca: Ediciones Sígueme, 1978).

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different strategies. The promulgation in 1968 of Institutional Act No. 5 (AI5) marked a hardening of the regime, giving the government unlimited powers of exception and reinforcing control in the so-called psycho-social area (increased press censorship and control of universities and political organisations). The regime was also characterised by its sophisticated network for collecting and analysing intelligence on subversion. The Department of Information Operations – Centre for Internal Defense Operations (DOI-CODI) was in charge of arresting and torturing so-called subversives, while another sector analysed the information obtained (often under torture) and guided the actions of other agencies. The CODI – DOI included the political police. The National Truth Commission estimated in 2014 that 430 people were killed or disappeared between 1964 and 1985.15 During this period in which the Brazilian military ran the country, the socalled ‘Brazilian miracle’ took place, laying the foundations for Brazil’s current industrial prosperity.

New Interventionism and Local Empowerment (1969–1977) Towards the end of the decade, however, the new US president, Richard Nixon (1969–74), saw the existing strategy begin to crumble. Public rejection of the counter-insurgency doctrine (especially US intervention abroad) was growing; the limited social reforms proposed by the Alliance for Progress (ALPRO) to counteract the Cuban Revolution were tolerated by military leaders, but resisted by large local and international economic groups; and bourgeois liberal regimes were incapable of stemming the rise of revolutionary and popular forces. This situation was accompanied by a perpetual need to guarantee the uninterrupted profitability of US investments in Latin America; the continuous supply of raw materials and cheap labour; and access to markets and military bases. The new strategy guidelines were laid out in the Rockefeller Report (1969), which states that the military is ‘the essential force of constructive social change’ and that ‘the problem is less one of democracy or a lack of it, than it is simply of orderly ways of getting along’. The report suggests that the United States should forget ‘the philosophical disagreements it may have with the nature of particular regimes’ and extend aid to military governments in trouble in several Latin American countries. In short, it promotes a policy 15 National Truth Commission, http://cnv.memoriasreveladas.gov.br/

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of widespread military aid and training of military and police personnel with the aim of discouraging Cuban-style revolution.16 The ‘Nixon Doctrine’ raised the need to strengthen regimes considered pro-American and prepare them – through the Military Assistance Program (MAP), arms sales and training – to police the region. Given widespread opposition in the United States to direct intervention following the Vietnam War, attempts would be made to strengthen local capabilities. This new approach was reflected in the wave of dictatorships that swept Latin America in the 1970s. Repression was considerably bloodier than before and was mostly carried out by local forces. The coups of 1971 in Bolivia, 1973 in Uruguay, 1973 in Chile and 1976 in Argentina, are typical of this new period.

Terror and Disappearance: Massive State Violence in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Bolivia One of the distinguishing features of the dictatorships of this period was their ‘institutional’ nature. Unlike the personalist dictatorships common in the Caribbean and Central America in the first half of the twentieth century, the armed forces governed as an institution. Rules of governance and succession were established. These dictatorships focused on fighting internal subversion and armed revolutionary struggle in a context of popular agitation. They were especially afraid of any mobilisation of the working class. It should be noted, however, that these dictatorships were not simply repressive: they also had a foundational mission, seeking to bring about a new sociopolitical order. This explains their protracted nature, their concern with justifying themselves ideologically and the harshness of their repressive methods, which represented both a qualitative and quantitative leap in human rights violations.17 The first of these dictatorships appeared in Bolivia (1971–8). Alleging a ‘red threat’ and the need for security, General Hugo Banzer dissolved political parties and unions, assassinated opponents and militarised the mines. Journalistic sources and associations of victims’ families estimate that approximately 500 people died or disappeared, 14,750 were imprisoned and 19,140 went into exile. A non-governmental tribunal, the Second Russell Tribunal, ruled that the Bolivian authorities were ‘guilty of serious, repeated 16 Nelson A. Rockefeller, ‘Quality of life in the Americas: Report of a U.S. Presidential Mission for the Western Hemisphere’, State Department Bulletin, 61 (8 December 1969), pp. 502–15, cited in Klare and Klein, Armas y Poder en América Latina. 17 Waldo Ansaldi and Verónica Giordano, América Latina. La construcción del orden, 2 vols. (Buenos Aires: Ariel, 2012), I I.

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and systematic violations of human rights’. In a report published in 1976, the chief trade union federation in Bolivia, the Central Obrera Boliviana, described the methods of torture used and the proliferation of concentration camps during that period.18 If Bolivia’s dictatorship was brutal, the violence and cruelty of those who seized power in Chile in September 1973 shocked the world. Both the ferocious repression and economic measures it implemented show that the military were not simply intent on undoing the economic and social reforms propitiated by the socialist government of Salvador Allende (1970–3). Brutal economic adjustments accompanied by harsh repression helped deactivate social, political and economic demands and hindered any kind of trade union, political or collective action to the point of almost eliminating them altogether. In terms of repression, Allende’s death was followed by the murder of leaders of workers’ parties and ‘clean-up operations’ in factories and poor neighbourhoods. Around 80,000 people were arrested in the first six months.19 The most important agency within the Chilean repressive system was the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA). This was a powerful secret police under Pinochet’s personal control. By 1977, its director, General Manuel Contreras, commanded an army of more than 9,000 agents and a much larger network of informants. The power held by the DINA is evident in its assassination attempts on prominent Chileans abroad, two of which were successful. The toll of victims is much disputed, but there is some consensus around the figure of 3,200 disappeared. The total number of victims (including disappeared detainees, political executions, victims of political violence and torture, and political prisoners) is between 40,000 and 100,000.20 Like Chile, Uruguay had a long tradition of political stability. At the beginning of the dictatorship (which lasted from 1973 to 1985), the military did not exercise power directly. Instead, a civilian president acted as head of 18 Stella Calloni, Los años del lobo: Operación Cóndor (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Continente, 1999), p. 157; ‘Repression in Latin America: a report on the first session of the second Russell Tribunal’, ed. and trans. William Jerman (Rome, April 1974). 19 Alan Angell, ‘Chile 1958–c.1990’, in The Cambridge History of Latin America: 12 vols., ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge University Press, 1995), X V. 20 Report of the Presidential Advisory Commission for the Identification of Disappeared Detainees, Persons Executed for Political Reasons, Political Prisoners and Victims of Torture, www.indh.cl/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Informe2011.pdf. See also the Communiqué by CODEPU (Corporation for the Promotion and Defence of People’s Rights), ‘CODEPU: A 41 años del Golpe de Estado en Chile, la heridasigueabierta’, www.codepu.cl/codepu-a-41-anos-del-golpe-de-estado-en-chile-la-herida-sigue -abierta/.

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government, a figure over whom they exerted considerable influence. By 1971 the ‘anti-subversive struggle’ was in the hands of the armed forces. In 1972, the country was declared to be in ‘a state of internal warfare’ and a ‘Law on State Security and Public Order’ was passed, limiting civil liberties, broadening the scope of military action and intensifying repressive operations. As a result, by September 1972 the Uruguayan urban guerrilla group, Tupamaros National Liberation Movement, had been practically dismantled. The definitive breakdown of democratic order took place in June 1973, when President Bordaberry dissolved Congress, suspended the Constitution, and ruled by decree as a military-sponsored dictator. From then on, Uruguay underwent widespread political repression, persecution and detention of trade unionists and political figures from all parties. At the height of the repression, the country had the highest ratio of political prisoners to population in the world. Disappearances totalled around 170 cases and political prisoners numbered around 6,000.21 In 1976, a military coup installed the last dictatorship in Argentina. Like its Chilean counterpart, this dictatorship was characterised by a neoliberal economic orientation – of which the disappeared journalist Rodolfo Walsh gave an early account in his ‘Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta’.22 This orientation distinguished it from earlier Argentine dictatorial processes. Another distinctive feature of the last Argentine dictatorship was its creation of a new figure: the ‘subversive criminal’. Large numbers of people were subjected to kidnapping, torture and subsequent release, or murder and disappearance. It was a system that would be copied more or less directly in several Latin American countries. The Argentine approach was distinguished by systematic repression and extermination in an extensive network of clandestine detention centres (more than 700 throughout Argentina).23 Also significant was the practice of stealing babies and giving them new identities. Of an estimated 500 missing children, more than 100 have currently been reunited with relatives.24

21 Servicio Paz y Justicia Uruguay, Uruguay Nunca Más. Informe sobre la violación a los derechos humanos (1972–1985) (Montevideo: SERPAJ, 1989). 22 Rodolfo Walsh, ‘Carta abierta de un escritor a la Junta Militar’, 24 March 1977, http:// conti.derhuman.jus.gov.ar/_pdf/serie_1_walsh.pdf. For an analysis of the objectives and economic consequences of the last military dictatorship, see Daniel Azpiazu, Eduardo M. Basualdo and Miguel Khavisse, El Nuevo poder económico en la Argentina de los años 80 (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2004). 23 For details, see Pilar Calveiro, Poder y desaparición: los campos de concentración en Argentina (Buenos Aires: Colihue, 2006). 24 According to estimates by the organisation Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, www .abuelas.org.ar/.

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The Argentine case was characterised by the development of a powerful intelligence network that operated clandestinely and was, to a large degree, independent from the legal repressive apparatus. Intelligence Battalion 601, made up of around 4,000 civilian agents, was responsible for ‘exporting’ the Argentine modus operandi to Central America.25 It also played a key role in designing the Condor Plan, a formal system to co-ordinate repression among the countries of the Southern Cone that operated from the mid-1970s until the early 1980s. The armed forces called this dark period in Argentina’s history the ‘National Reorganization Process’, in accordance with their intention of transforming the values and identity of the Argentine people as a whole. It is a label that accurately reflects the profound social, economic and political transformation of Argentine society they brought about by terror. The number of murders through forced disappearances has been documented at around 13,000 although many human rights organisations and researchers estimate the total number of victims (murdered, disappeared, kidnapped children and survivors of concentration camps) close to 30,000 people.26

Changes in the Relationship with the United States (1977–1981) The ‘success’ of the Southern Cone dictatorships in eliminating the internal enemy and imposing social discipline in the 1970s was crucial in disseminating the new counter-insurgency techniques. The extraordinary results of the repressive strategy developed in Argentina allowed the military of that country to ‘export’ their know-how. This occurred in 1980 in the so-called Cocaine Coup in Bolivia, supposedly financed by drug trafficking.27 With the assistance of Argentine military advisors, a campaign of state violence was unleashed in Bolivia, in which 1,500 are known to have been murdered and 2,500 tortured. The main leaders of the trade union movement, political parties and opposition civil and religious organisations were eliminated.28

25 Ariel Armony, Argentina, the United States and the Anti-communist Crusade in Central America, 1977–1984 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1997). See also Julieta Rostica, La colaboración de la dictadura militar argentina en la «lucha contrasubversiva» en Guatemala (1976–1981) (Guatemala: Instituto de Estudios Comparados en Ciencias Penales de Guatemala, 2021). 26 Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas, Nunca más. Informe de la Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas. Conmemorativa a 40 años del golpe de Estado de 1976 (Buenos Aires: EUDEBA, 2016). 27 Armony, Argentina, the United States and the Anti-communist Crusade. 28 Ansaldi and Giordano, América Latina, I I.

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The support that the Bolivian dictators received from their peers in the Southern Cone was crucial, given that by then US support had waned. By the mid-1970s, the repeated and blatant human rights violations carried out by these dictatorships forced the United States to condemn them to some extent. President Carter (1977–81) attempted to overcome the ‘excessive fear of communism’ and link US economic aid to respect for human rights. In this context – and presumably thanks to funding provided by the Bolivian ‘adventure’ – Argentine military advisors were sent to countries such as Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. Although short-lived, Argentina’s military adventure abroad left a deep mark. Argentina’s lessons in the fight against urban armed organisations, ‘interrogation’ techniques and general intelligence development were to prove crucial in the coming decade.

‘America Is Back’ (1981–1989) The Nicaraguan revolution in 1979 was a watershed in US–Latin American relations. It became the focus for widespread criticism of Carter’s foreign policy and renewed interventionism. After Reagan became president in 1981, a group of military advisors imposed the idea that the Soviet Union’s influence was expanding.29 This led a reversal from the policy of détente that had begun in 1979 and an escalation of the cold war together with the emergence of a new strategy: the Low Intensity War (LIW). The notion of LIW arose from a theoretical division of armed struggle into three levels: high (global conflagrations such as World War One and World War Two, or hostilities where nuclear weapons might be used); medium (regional confrontations where battlefield weapons are used); and low (guerrilla warfare and other small unit engagements and unconventional warfare). LIW comprised a wide variety of political and military operations (both open and covert) organised into programmes that combined economic aid, psychological operations and security measures.30 The development of LIW marked a renewed commitment to use force against ‘unfriendly’ movements and governments in the Third World, particularly in the region which, at that time, was considered the most conflictive because of the fear of communism: Central America.31 29 Introduction to ‘Documento Santa Fe I’. For details and commentaries, see Gregorio Selser, El Documento de Santa Fe, Reagan y los Derechos Humanos (Mexico: Alpa Corral, 1988). 30 M. Klare and P. Kornbluh (eds.), Contrainsurgencia, proinsurgencia y antiterrorism (Grijalbo, 1990). 31 Katz, ‘La Guerra Fría en América Latina’, 24.

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Armed Conflict, Repression and Genocide: Massive State Violence in El Salvador and Guatemala At the beginning of the 1980s, Central America was rife with revolutionary upheavals. Nicaragua presented a serious challenge to the NSD, while the presence of guerrillas in El Salvador and Guatemala raised concerns about a possible ‘domino effect’. Central America thus became the testing ground for the new doctrine. The security apparatus of these countries was reorganised and resources for special operations forces such as Green Berets and other elite units were substantially increased. During this period, there was a sharp increase in human rights violations, deaths and disappearances in El Salvador and Guatemala, and a proliferation of economic and political operations to undermine the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.32 The latter seized power after toppling the Somoza dynasty, which had ruled since 1933. In the final years of Somoza’s dictatorship, the United States had attempted to impose ‘Somocism without Somoza’ by maintaining the National Guard. But the anti-Somocist coalition prevailed, in particular, the Sandinista National Liberation Front, which unified several guerrilla fronts and won the support of the popular masses. When Reagan came to power, however, his administration suspended the programme of economic aid that Carter had maintained even after the Sandinista revolution and it brought military pressure to bear. In 1981 it authorised the CIA to carry out secret operations in order to destabilise the Sandinista government and cut off the supply of arms to Salvadoran guerrillas. The CIA organised right-wing groups (the ‘contras’) made up of former members of Somoza’s National Guard, who were joined by volunteers dissatisfied with the revolution (especially the indigenous population on the Atlantic coast). The ‘contras’ developed a strategy of constant harassment that succeeded in undermining the economic and political foundations of the Sandinista government towards the end of the 1980s. Honduras played a key role in this strategy. During Carter’s administration, it was already the base for repressive operations by Honduras and El Salvador against guerrilla forces in the region. A new intelligence unit was established, the 316th Intelligence Battalion, which was assisted by Argentine advisors who came to the country to train the ‘contras’. Starting in 1981, Reagan upped the ante: thousands of soldiers were trained by Americans in the country and numerous US military bases were built. The longest-lasting conflict, however, was in Guatemala. It originated in the 1954 coup against Jacobo Arbenz, in which a covert CIA operation called 32 Klare and Kornbluh (eds.), Contrainsurgencia, proinsurgencia y antiterrorism.

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PBSUCCESS ended Guatemala’s ‘political spring’ – the only democratic period until then in the country’s history. This coup initiated intermittent outbreaks of repression, known as ‘internal armed conflicts’, which ended with the signing of the Peace Accord in 1996. Much of the violence unleashed in the period was the result of death squads operating against members of the opposition or suspected members of the opposition. It was mainly the indigenous peoples of the western highlands who suffered the greatest number of deaths. In 1981, large-scale killings began to characterise the repression in this region, resulting in between 11,000 and 13,500 deaths. The strategy involved organising rural militias, called ‘Civil Self Defence Patrols’. By 1983, these had recruited around a million armed indigenous civilians. They also had help from the Mobile Military Police, a body organised and equipped by the United States. The military evacuated Indians living in guerrilla strongholds and herded them into ‘model villages’ (a US policy perfected during the Vietnam War). Ríos Montt (president between 1982 and 1983) developed the Victoria 82 plan to eliminate guerrilla groups and populations that provided them with any type of support. During his government, murders increased from a monthly toll of 800 to 6,000 cases per month.33 Between 1981 and 1983, 440 villages were razed to the ground and nearly 100,000 people were killed.34 According to the Guatemalan Church in exile, between 1980 and 1986, 250 massacres were carried out, the dead being buried in mass graves. The report of the resulting Commission for Historical Clarification, published in 1999 with the support of the United Nations, revealed that more than 200,000 Guatemalans lost their lives, including 40,000 forced disappearances and 669 cases of multiple murders or massacres (i.e. with more than five simultaneous victims).35 El Salvador also saw large numbers of deaths and disappearances. After half a century of military governments (some of them with a democratic facade), massive state violence took a new leap at the end of the 1970s. The zeal of the ‘death squads’ reached an unprecedented level with the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in March 1980, which marked the beginning of El Salvador’s civil war (1980–92). Five guerrilla groups formed a powerful front (the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front) to fight 33 Marc Drouin, ‘To the last seed: atrocity crimes and the genocidal continuum in Guatemala, 1978–1984’ (Masters thesis, Concordia University, 2006). 34 Carlos Figueroa Ibarra, ‘Genocidio y terrorismo de Estado en Guatemala (1954–1996). Una interpretación’, Revista de Estudios sobre Genocidio 1 (2007), 68–89; and James Cockcroft, Latin America: History, Politics, and U.S. Policy, 2nd ed. (Belmont: Wadsworth/International Thomson Publishing, 1998). 35 Drouin, ‘To the last seed’.

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against the Salvadoran army. The first period of the civil war included US support for the armed forces and the carrying out of repeated massacres. Killing reached a peak between 1980 and 1983, with around 38,000 victims, the massacre in and around El Mozote in 1981 being one of the bloodiest.36 The following years, the number of deaths decreased and the strengthening of the guerrillas led to a more conventional type of warfare. The military stalemate concluded with the signing of the Chapultepec Peace Accords in 1992. The total number of deaths in the Salvadoran Civil War was around 80,000. The UN Truth Commission identified sixty-two officers (forty-seven of whom had been trained in Panama) as responsible for the worst killings, and accused the Atlacatl battalion – ‘the pride of the United States military’ – of major killings.37 The Commission determined that the army had been responsible for 85% of deaths during the war, the guerrillas for 10% and the remaining 5% could not be categorised.38

Massive State Violence under Civil Regimes: Colombia, Mexico and Peru (the Prolongation of New Logics in the Twenty-First century) The last decade of the twentieth century saw the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the consequent weakening of alternatives to capitalism. Towards the middle of the decade, Central American countries that had suffered decades of armed conflicts, watched the long-awaited peace agreements materialise as Latin America embarked on a process of transition and democratic consolidation. High expectations surrounded these young democracies, which were called upon to respond not only to all the demands postponed during decades of political conflicts, but also to new challenges, including organised crime and drug trafficking. The measures taken by Latin American states to meet these challenges were constrained in two ways: they could not be carried out by a regime that was not formally democratic; and they depended on the resources allowed to the state by the new wave of neoliberalism.

36 Siegel and Hacken, ‘El Salvador’. 37 ‘How U.S. actions helped hide Salvador human rights abuses’, New York Times, 21 March 1993. 38 The Commission on the Truth for El Salvador, From Madness to Hope: The 12-Year War in El Salvador: Report of the Commission on the Truth for El Salvador (1993), www .usip.org/sites/default/files/file/ElSalvador-Report.pdf.

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The problem of organised crime in its present form dates back to at least the end of the 1970s. This is why the ability of Latin American states to combat it was strengthened by their renewed military capabilities under the NSD. One of the first countries where this occurred was Colombia. Colombia’s participation in the Korean War (1950–3) led to the spread of counter-insurgency practices that would soon include ‘civic action’ programmes to integrate civilians in the fight against the ‘internal enemy’. These programmes played a key role in the proliferation of paramilitary groups responsible for much of the violence and criminality in Colombia from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Repression intensified and became more brutal towards the end of the 1970s, when a new security statute was drawn up, granting greater autonomy to the armed forces and loosening civilian controls. State and parastatal violence, both against guerrillas and legitimate political opposition, deepened in the mid-1980s. On the other hand, the Colombian state underestimated the problem of drug trafficking, allowing the cartels to hold considerable power towards the end of that decade. This power was reflected in the cartels’ ability – together with that of traders and large landowners – to deploy ‘private armies’ made up of paramilitaries. These unseen paramilitary groups gradually became more professional and effective. Initially urban, they spread to the countryside, where they confronted the guerrillas indirectly by attacking their support networks among the population. They functioned with the legal support of Law 48 of 1968, which authorised the formation of selfdefence groups in line with the doctrine of counter-insurgency. This law was repealed in 1989 and the paramilitaries agreed to demobilise in 2003, although they did not disappear that year. In 1999, a US government military aid plan (Plan Colombia) was launched with the stated objective of contributing to the country’s development through the fight against drug trafficking. In practice, however, the enhanced combat capacity of the security forces brought about by the plan was used particularly to fight the guerrillas (who lost the initiative of armed confrontation after 2002). It also increased the number of massacres and forced displacements of civilians. The Colombian conflict – strongly exacerbated by drug trafficking – remains unresolved with already more than 265,000 people murdered and around 8 million displaced.39 39 Ansaldi and Giordano, América Latina, I I ; Alejandro Reyes Posada, ‘Paramillitares en Colombia: contexto, aliados y consecuencias’, in Pasado y presente de la violencia en Colombia, ed. González Sanchez and Ricardo Peñaranda (Bogotá: IEPRI, Universidad

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Another important and highly topical case is that of Mexico. The assassination by government troops of hundreds of students in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Mexico City in October 1968 was a landmark in massive state violence during the cold war. The students were part of an important mass movement that included intellectuals, professionals, workers and housewives and they were protesting peacefully at the time against repression. Never clarified, the event set a precedent for the state’s handling of political dissent: repressive violence accompanied by official denial and silence, as in the Corpus Christi massacre of 1971, also directed against students. Here, more than 200 police and secret service agents surrounded a student demonstration to facilitate the massacre carried out by the paramilitary group Los Halcones, in an operation that revealed the close collaboration between this group and the Mexican security forces.40 From that moment on, techniques such as forced disappearance, torture, extralegal executions and disappearances began to be integrated into a counter-insurgency strategy that, at least until 1981, included practically unlimited powers for the security forces and the military. The now defunct Federal Security Directorate (FSD) coordinated this action, which targeted political opponents and dissidents. The FSD also created the so-called White Brigade or Special Brigade, in charge of kidnappings and disappearances, and provided many of the facilities where the disappeared detainees were held.41 The impunity and official silence surrounding these crimes again shook the international community several decades later. In 1994, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation uprising was fiercely repressed, with numerous deaths and disappearances. A lot of massacres were part of Mexican life during the last decade of the twentieth century, like the cases of Aguas Blancas (1995) and Acteal (1997), among many others during the 1990s and the beginning of the twenty-first century. In 2014, forty-three students from a rural teacher training school in Iguala, Guerrero state, disappeared after being attacked by local police in an episode that had already had numerous similar precursors throughout the whole decade. Guerrero, like Chiapas, is one of Mexico’s poorest states and has been a prominent target of repression and militarisation since 1960. The year 1971 marked a turning point in state violence against Nacional, 2009); Unidad para la Atención y la Reparación Integral a las Víctimas, www .unidadvictimas.gov.co/es. 40 Human Rights Watch, El Cambio Inconcluso. Avances y desaciertos en derechos humanos durante el gobierno de Fox (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2006). 41 Mexican National Human Rights Commission, Informe especial sobre las quejas en materia de desapariciones forzadas ocurridas en la década de los 70 y principios de los 80 (Mexico: CNDH, 2001).

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the population of Guerrero with the development of the ‘Spider’s Web Plan’. This plan officially approved the technique of forced disappearance for the first time, with the avowed objective of eradicating guerrilla movements from Mexico. However, Guerrero shocked world opinion in 2014 with the disappearance of the forty-three students in Ayotzinapa. State authorities were involved in the students’ disappearance and the Mexican state showed neither the ability nor willingness to clarify the incident, which was not an isolated one. Excavations in the area carried out after intense pressure from relatives of the disappeared students have led to the exhumation of more than 160 bodies buried in clandestine graves, but none of them belong to the students. This situation has been repeated in other Mexican states. The National Human Rights Commission points out that since 2007 more than 1,300 clandestine graves with more than 3,900 bodies have been found. This has led the Mexican authorities to recognise that the country ‘is full of clandestine graves’.42 Of course, many of these crimes are linked to drug-trafficking networks but also to the ‘war’ that the Mexican state has waged against them since 2006. The large-scale deployment of troops to different regions has resulted in the militarisation of the country and the involvement of the armed forces in internal security issues. The lack of effective civilian controls on the actions of these forces is one of the reasons why the ‘war on drugs’ has been accompanied by a ‘generalised resurgence’ of torture, extrajudicial executions and forced disappearances. By October 2018, Human Rights Watch had counted about 240,000 homicides since the beginning of this ‘war’.43 State violence in Peru also peaked under post-cold-war civilian presidencies. After several military interruptions, Peru returned to civilian rule in 1980. Under the governments that followed, neoliberal economic adjustment measures increased (dealing a heavy blow to political opposition organised by the unions, among others). The armed forces were also given control of internal security in view of guerrilla warfare actions against the state by the armed organisation Shining Path, founded in 1970, and an increase in drug trafficking. The strengthening of the military’s capabilities and lack of effective civilian control resulted in a sharp rise in human rights violations. Paramilitary groups related to the army, the Ministry of the Interior and extreme right-wing groups repeatedly carried out constant killings of non-combatant civilians. Peru’s Truth and 42 Human Rights Watch, El Cambio Inconcluso. 43 Human Rights Watch, ‘Mexico: lessons from a human rights catastrophe’ (2019), www .hrw.org/blog-feed/mexico-lessons-human-rights-catastrophe.

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Reconciliation Commission concluded that approximately 69,280 died or disappeared as a result of the internal conflict in Peru between 1980 and 2000. It found that the peasant population was the main victim of violence and that those who spoke Quechua or other native languages as their mother tongue were also over-represented among the victims. In one of its controversial points, the Commission determined that Shining Path was the principal perpetrator, being responsible for 54 per cent of the deaths (Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Lima: Oficina de Comunicaciones e Impacto Público, 2003). This makes the case of Peru significantly different from all of the others analysed in this chapter. An indepth study would be required to determine why. Unfortunately, there is no space to discuss this topic further within this chapter.

Ways of Understanding Social Practices in the Region Despite the region-wide pattern of repression described above, most academic work has so far focused on specific countries or sub-regions (Central America, the southern cone of Latin America, the Caribbean). This has limited our understanding of the processes as a whole, independent of local details. It is usual to highlight the involvement of the United States (sometimes direct involvement, as in the Dominican Republic, Grenada or Panama, but generally indirect, as we have seen in many of the other cases) and the role of the School of the Americas in the training of military forces. Nevertheless, both legal and academic approaches have tended to be restricted and it remains a challenge for Genocide Studies to think about the global logic in the region as a whole during the period 1954–89, as well as the transformations the region has undergone since the end of the cold war, especially in Colombia and Mexico. Beyond the specific political and social conflicts in each country, there have been global strategies that – although adapted to and applied differently in each country – have targeted the region as a whole. Given the continent-wide nature of the events described above, it remains to define this destruction – whether as genocide or crimes against humanity, or massacres – at a continental level. In this sense, a continental toll of the number of victims would make it possible to understand the magnitude of the destruction, which is often obscured when focusing on specific nationstates or territories. But first it is worth examining the legal attempts to judge massive state violence in different national contexts, as well as some attempts 422

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to describe and classify events based on the concepts used in this volume (genocide and extermination).

Legal Actions Dictatorships in Latin America began to disappear in the 1980s. Since then, progress has been made in bringing cases of massive state violence before the courts. However, the charges and legal proceedings have varied from one country to another and new dictatorships appeared first in Honduras in 2009 and recently in Bolivia with the coup d’état in November 2019. Regarding the possibility of prosecuting the perpetrators, the Argentine experience has been one of the most significant and twisted. In 1985, shortly after the country’s return to democracy, the leading members of Argentina’s military juntas were tried on multiple counts of murder, forced disappearance and torture. Although these acts were treated as common crimes, they were recognised as forming part of a systematic attack against the civilian population. However, the trials were interrupted by numerous demands from the military and military uprisings which led to various laws and amnesties in 1986, 1987, 1989 and 1990 that led to the release of all those convicted. Thus, the new decade saw the return of impunity. In spite of this, the unflinching struggle of the human rights movement (which started criminal proceedings abroad, lodged complaints with international organisations and demonstrated outside repressors’ homes, among other initiatives) led to court cases being reopened from 1998. At first, these were only for the theft and concealment of babies (excluded from the laws and amnesties mentioned earlier). From 2005, however, both the impunity laws and pardons were repealed, and declared unconstitutional by the new Supreme Court of Justice. A slew of indictments followed. Since then, the Argentine justice system has convicted 1,306 of those responsible in 227 different legal cases, on two separate offences in law: crimes against humanity and genocide.44 The debate about which term is more appropriate remains open. In most cases, the offences were classed as crimes against humanity, but in a significant number (around 20 per cent of the cases and the same percentage of the courts, including cases in different jurisdictions like Buenos Aires, Entre Ríos, Mendoza, Santa Fe, Jujuy, Formosa and San Luis) the term genocide 44 The complete and updated report of the cases can be found in Daniel Feierstein and Malena Silveyra, ‘Informe de Sentencias sobre el juzgamiento del genocidio argentino’, Tela de Juicio 3 (2020), 33–62. The information is updated with the cases until June 2019.

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was added, on the grounds that there had been an ‘attempted partial destruction of the Argentine national group’.45 In the rest of the region, it has been even more difficult to achieve justice. In Chile, for instance, the process took much longer. It was only after Pinochet was arrested in the UK at the end of 1998 that Chilean courts began to hear complaints. At the end of December 2018, 355 cases had been heard, of which 350 ended in convictions. However, most of the sentences were symbolic, with perpetrators spending only a few years in prison, in contrast to the much longer sentences imposed by Argentine courts. Most convictions during the period 2000–6 were for war crimes since Chile never repealed its amnesty law and a way was needed to get around it. From 2006, however, most sentences were for crimes against humanity or included the term together with that of war crimes. From 2015 (and more frequently since 2018) indictments have also begun to include the term genocide. So far, however, no Chilean judge has used it in sentencing.46 Colombia, on the other hand, passed legislation in 2000 to include the attempted destruction of political groups within the country’s definition of genocide. This was done in response to a specific process that took place between 1984 and 2002: the systematic persecution, murder and kidnapping of members of the Patriotic Union, a political party made up of former members of the FARC. Regarding the persecution of the Patriotic Union, the Colombian Constitutional Court ratified the use of the term genocide in successive rulings, stating that by restricting its use to certain protected groups, the 1948 Genocide Convention violated Colombian constitutional principles and the relevant paragraphs should be declared ‘unconstitutional’.47 In the last years, some Colombian militaries and paramilitaries are being processed, in some cases for the execution of civilians as ‘false positives’ (people killed under the false accusation of being part of a confrontation with insurgent forces) or 45 The analysis of the legal debate can be read in Daniel Feierstein, Juicios. Sobre la elaboración del genocidio 2 (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2015). 46 Among these indictments is a recent complaint brought by the Socialist Party of Chile for the crime of genocidal illicit association, the trial for the disappearance of José Luis Baeza Cruces and for several cases of torture at the Air War Academy in which the accused were charged with ‘genocidal illicit association’, but could not be convicted for that crime (Case No. 39628–17, 31 October 2018). Although many complaints or sentences mention the Genocide Convention in passing, they do not draw the relevant consequences from this. It should be noted that the Argentine case also began in this way until the courts gradually accepted the term. Thanks go to Francisco Jara Bustos for his update on the situation of the cases before the Chilean justice system. 47 See, e.g., case C-555–17 from the Constitutional Court of Colombia qualifying the annihilation of the members of Unión Patriótica as genocide, among other sentences in the same direction (e.g. C-177–01, C-330–01, C-551–01, C-675–01, C-148–05 and C-488–09).

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for their involvement in the creation and functioning of the paramilitary groups, as in the case against Santiago Uribe, the brother of the former President Alvaro Uribe, who is being judged by the Courts of Medellin. And from the thirty-nine cases involving accusations of genocide up to May 2019, there were four sentences with such a charge, three in the jurisdiction of Santander and one in Bogotá. In Guatemala, the Commission for Historical Clarification was created as part of the peace process. In its 1996 report, it stated that crimes against humanity had been committed together with ‘acts of genocide’, although the latter referred only to indigenous populations. Cases took a long time to come to court and hearings only began after 2002 with the conviction of Colonel Osorio (for the murder of anthropologist Myrna Mack in 1990). For a decade after that, there was a trickle of minor convictions for specific offences, generally classed as common crimes, massacres or forced disappearance of persons. It was not until 2013 that one of the former heads of government (Efraín Ríos Montt) was convicted of crimes against humanity and genocide (the term genocide being used exclusively in cases involving the indigenous population). However, the trial was annulled over supposed technical errors. Since then, three other cases have ended in specific sentences for crimes against humanity, but the judicial process is slow and the number of convictions is pitiful in relation to the magnitude of the events experienced in Guatemala, the case study with the highest number of victims and the highest proportion of them throughout the subcontinent. In El Salvador, the publication of the Truth Commission Report was accompanied shortly afterwards by an Amnesty Law in 1993. It was not until 2016 that the Supreme Court declared the amnesty unconstitutional. In 2017 the trial began for the El Mozote massacre, in which eighteen members of the Salvadoran high command are accused. The case is currently being tried in the only hearings to have been held so far. However, the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador is preparing a Transitional and Restorative Justice Law that could introduce a new amnesty. In 2007, former President Fujimori was judged and convicted in Peru to twenty-five years in prison in respect of his responsibility for the massacre of Barrios Altos and La Cantuta, among many other cases under his government (1990–2000). In Uruguay there were also some cases under the ‘crimes against humanity’ label, but of 300 cases opened only 13 reulted in a conviction and the majority of the cases are stagnant. 425

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Ways of Conceptualising the Region’s Violent Past Moving from legal to historical-sociological descriptions, we need to take into account the definitions contained in this volume, and especially extermination as a form of genocide. According to the International Criminal Court’s interpretation of the Rome Treaty, Article 7(1)(b), Crimes against humanity of extermination, ‘The conduct constituted, or took place as part of, a mass killing of members of a civilian population’48 and was ‘committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population’.49 Moreover, as the Rome Treaty itself points out, extermination includes not only massacres but, like genocide, also ‘the intentional infliction of conditions of life, inter alia the deprivation of access to food and medicine, calculated to bring about the destruction of part of a population’. From what we have seen in this chapter, it is clear that this definition of extermination applies to both global processes and individual regimes in Latin America. At the global level, there was a plan to exterminate part of the civilian population in the policies developed under the NSD; and this plan materialised in the actions of individual states in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay. Moreover, the United States not only conceived the NSD to further its strategic interests; it provided weapons, training and sometimes troops for systematic attacks on civilian populations, while the neoliberal economic policies implemented by the dictatorships it sponsored increased inequality in the region. In this sense, it may also be useful to analyse these events as ‘genocidal social practices’, a concept developed in previous works. Genocidal social practices are defined as ‘a technology of power that is intended to destroy social relations based on autonomy and cooperation by killing a significant portion of society (significant in size or influence) and that then attempts to create new social relations and identity models through terror’.50 This definition focuses on the long-term purpose of destruction 48 Official Records of the Assembly of States Parties to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, First Session, New York, 3–10 September 2002 (United Nations publication, Sales No. E.03.V.2 and corrigendum), Part II.B; Article 7(1)(b) Crime against Humanity of Extermination, www.icc-cpi.int/NR/rdonlyres/336923D8A6AD-40EC-AD7B-45BF9DE73D56/0/ElementsOfCrimesEng.pdf. 49 Elements of Crimes, www.icc-cpi.int/NR/rdonlyres/336923D8-A6AD-40EC-AD7B-45 BF9DE73D56/0/ElementsOfCrimesEng.pdf. 50 Daniel Feierstein, Genocide as Social Practice: Reorganizing Society under the Nazis and Argentina’s Military Juntas, trans. D. A. Town (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2014), p. 36.

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described earlier: to transform the identity of a group of people, both continent-wide and in each of the territories in which the destruction was implemented. The problem of how to describe the events inspired by the NSD in Latin America is not, therefore, simply one of deciding which crimes to prosecute. Crimes against humanity (CAH) focus on the materiality of destruction. Because CAH are defined in terms of different acts, regardless their motivation, the long-term effects of these acts remain hidden. In particular, we may be unable to see how terror has transformed the social fabric of a whole region, as well as each national group. In contrast, both the term genocide as used by numerous Argentine courts and some indictments in Chile and Colombia (‘partial destruction of the national group’) and the category of ‘genocidal social practice’, which involves a type of historical-sociological analysis, foreground the global nature of the crimes, the intention to destroy and the effects of destruction on the societies of the region. For Raphael Lemkin, creator of the concept, genocide was an attempt to modify the identity of a people. Unfortunately, this cornerstone of his thinking has gradually been forgotten in legal definitions of the term. Throughout history, genocide has sought to transform the identity of a people through terror. This concept is essential to understanding how and why the NSD was implemented throughout Latin America. Without it, we are left with a catalogue of horrors we will never fully understand.

Bibliographic Note The roots of violence in Latin America have been analysed in A. Rouquié, The Military and the State in Latin America (Berkley: University of California Press, 1987); Ansaldi and Giordano, América Latina; and E. Torres-Rivas, Crisis del poder en Centroamérica (Ciudad Universitaria Rodrigo Facio, Costa Rica: Editorial Universitaria Centroamericana, 1981). More focused analysis is found in the books on the spreading of terror like J. E. Corradi, P. Weiss Fagen and M. A. Garretón (eds.), Fear at the Edge: State Terror and Resistance in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California, 1992); the concentration-camp system in Argentina, like Calveiro, Poder y desaparición; and the role of paramilitarism like Vilma Franco Restrepo, Orden contrainsurgente y dominación (Bogotá: IPC-Siglo del Hombre Editores, 2009). The international connections in the state violence in America has been developed in Armony, Argentina, the United States and the Anti-communist 427

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Crusade in Central America, 1977–1984; J. Patrice McSherry, Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005); M. Klare and P. Kornbluh (eds.), Low Intensity Warfare: Counterinsurgency, Proinsurgency and Antiterrorism in the Eighties (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988); and Gill, The School of the Americas. Concerning the role of French counter-insurgency, see M.M. Robin, Escadrons de la mort, l’école française (Paris: Découverte, 2004); and G. Périés, ‘De Argelia a la Argentina: estudio comparativo sobre la internacionalización de las doctrinas militares francesa en la lucha antisubversiva’, in Lucha de clases, guerra civil y genocidio en la Argentina 1973– 1983, ed. I. Izaguirre (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 2009). Regarding the ideology of right-wing regimes in the region, S. Mcgee Deutsch, Las Derechas: The Extreme Right in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, 1890–1939 (Stanford University Press, 1999). The Genocide Studies field is quite recent in the region. The first use of the concept can be found in the Open Letter to the Argentine Junta written by the journalist Rodolfo Walsh (immediately kidnapped and disappeared after sending the letter) and in the Guatemalan Report (CEH, Guatemala memoria del silencio. Report by the Guatemalan Historical Clarification Commission (Washington DC: AAAS Science and Human Rights Program Data Center, 1999). In academia, the concept of genocide has been used to analyse cases like Paraguay – Arens, Genocide in Paraguay; Argentina – D. Feierstein, Genocide as Social Practice: Reorganizing Society under the Nazis and Argentina’s Military Juntas (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2014 [Spanish ed., 2007]); Colombia – A. Gomez-Suarez, Genocide, Geopolitics and Transnational Networks: Contextualising the Deconstruction of the Unión Patriótica in Colombia (New York: Routledge, 2015); and Guatemala – V. Sanford, Violencia y Genocidio en Guatemala (Guatemala City: F&G Editores, 2003). A more general view of the whole region can be found in M. Esparza, D. Feierstein and H. R. Huttenbach, State Violence and Genocide in Latin America (Routledge: London and New York, 2009).

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18

China under Mao, 1949–1976 f r a n k d i k o¨ t t e r

Introduction In 1949 the red flag was raised over the Forbidden City in Beijing, as Mao Zedong proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. How should we characterise the mass killings of ordinary people during the following decades? This chapter will focus on how the regime treated the majority of the population it classified, however arbitrarily, as ‘Han Chinese’. A separate discussion would be necessary to examine what happened in the border areas inhabited by what were called ‘minority nationalities’, from Tibet and the Muslim belt running through Xinjiang, Qinghai, Ningxia and Gansu to Inner Mongolia. Whether or not these killings, intentional or otherwise, should be characterised as genocide will depend on the definition one adopts. As Norman Naimark has pointed out, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, the foundational legal document adopted by the United Nations in 1948, excluded crimes of humanity against social and political groups from its definition, largely as the result of sustained opposition from the Soviet and other delegates who worried that the repression of their own people at home might be considered genocidal. As a result, few scholars have used the term to qualify crimes against identifiable groups of people seen to belong to the same ‘national’ group as the perpetrators, whether ‘kulaks’ (farmers classified as ‘rich peasants’) or the nobility in the Soviet Union or those defined by the Nazis as ‘homosexuals’ or ‘handicapped’.1

Liberation, Land Reform and the Campaign of Terror The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) often refers to 1949 as a ‘liberation’, a term that brings to mind people celebrating their newly won freedom. But its victory was the result of a long and bloody military conquest. Mao Zedong 1 Norman Naimark, Genocide: A World History (Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 86.

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and his CCP guerrilla fighters poured into Manchuria after it was occupied by Stalin’s forces in August 1945. The Soviets not only protected the CCP, but also helped turn their motley army into a much more formidable fighting machine. The Soviets established sixteen military institutions, including air force, artillery and engineering schools. Some Chinese officers went to the Soviet Union for advanced training. While American President Truman imposed an arms embargo on Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists in September 1946, logistical support for the CCP continued to arrive in Manchuria from the Soviet Union and North Korea by air and by rail.2 By 1948 the communists were strong enough to begin surrounding some of the cities from the countryside. Changchun, in the middle of the vast Manchurian plain north of the Great Wall of China, was blockaded for five months. When Lin Biao, the commander in charge of the communist troops, realised that the city would not capitulate, he ordered it to be starved into surrender: ‘Turn Changchun into a city of death.’3 Some 500,000 civilians, many of them refugees who had fled the communists, were trapped inside, as sentries were placed every 50 metres along barbed wire and trenches 4 metres deep. Every exit was blocked. As Lin Biao reported to Mao Zedong, desperate civilians ‘knelt in front of our troops in large groups and begged us to let them through . . . Some left their babies and small children with us and absconded, others hanged themselves in front of sentry posts.’4 Wang Junru, a 15-year-old recruit at the time, later remembered: ‘We were told they were the enemy and they had to die.’5 Victory came at a heavy cost. At least 160,000 civilians died of hunger during the blockade.6 After liberation, many of the bodies were buried in mass graves without so much as a headstone. Unwilling to undergo the same fate, Beijing capitulated soon afterwards. Like dominoes, other cities fell one after the other, unable to resist the war machine built up by the communists. By the end of 1949 the Nationalists fled to Taiwan, never to return. Even before 1949, land reform was implemented in territories conquered by the communist troops. Village life, on the eve of liberation, was extraordinarily diverse. In the north, where tightly packed villages with houses made 2 Frank Dikötter, The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945–1957 (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013), Ch. 2. 3 Zhang Zhenglong, Xuebai xuehong [Snow Is White But Blood Is Red] (Hong Kong: Dadi chubanshe, 1991), p. 441. 4 Ibid., p. 469. 5 Wang Junru interviewed by Andrew Jacobs, ‘China is wordless on traumas of Communists’ rise’, New York Times, 1 October 2009. 6 Zhang, Xuebai xuehong, p. 467.

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from sun-dried mud bricks were strewn across the dry and dusty plains, wheat was the staple. Most farmers owned their land. Further south, along the fertile Yangzi valley, rich deposits of silt allowed farmers to produce abundant crops of rice. White plastered houses with black-tiled roofs in closely knit clusters stood among the rice paddies with their raised banks, dykes and embankments. Nowhere in this profusion of diversity was there anything even vaguely approximating what the CCP called ‘feudalism’. For centuries the land had been bought and sold through sophisticated contracts that were upheld in magistrates’ courts. The land was freely alienable everywhere. Tenancy rights were also defined contractually, although the vast bulk of the land was in the hands of small owners. Despite huge differences in social structure and patterns of land use, the CCP imposed a uniform policy of land reform. What happened in Yuanbao, a small village in the north of Manchuria, was typical. Work teams arrived in 1947 to assess the local power structure and dig up old grudges, fanning resentment and turning local grievances into something much larger called ‘class hatred’. Some of the poor vented genuine frustrations that had long been bottled up; others were coerced into inventing accusations against their richer neighbours. After months of patient work, the communists managed to turn the poor against the village leaders. A once close-knit community was polarised into two extremes. The communists armed the poor with pikes, sticks and hoes. The victims, labelled as ‘landlords’, ‘tyrants’ and ‘traitors’, were dragged out on to a stage where they were denounced by the crowd, assembled by the hundreds, screaming for blood, demanding that accounts be settled in an atmosphere charged with hatred. In Yuanbao, 73 people were killed out of population of roughly 700.7 The pact between the party and the poor was sealed in blood. All the land and assets of the victims were distributed to the crowd. By implicating the people in murder, the communists managed to permanently link them to the party. No one was allowed to stand on the side-lines. Everybody was to have blood on their hands through participation in denunciation meetings. The violence was not limited to Yuanbao. Liu Shaoqi, number two in the party hierarchy, reported in 1947 how people were purposely buried alive, dismembered, shot or throttled to death in the liberated areas of 7 What happened in Yuanbao has been meticulously reconstructed in the documentary directed by Chen Xiaoqing, Baofeng zhouyu [The Hurricane], China Memo Films, 2006.

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Hebei province.8 In Shanxi, before 1949, one in five people was branded as a ‘landlord’ in communist-occupied regions. In Xing county alone, over 2,000 people were killed, including 250 elderly and twenty-five children – the latter were called ‘little landlords’.9 Land reform was implemented everywhere after 1949. By all accounts, by the end of 1951 more than 40 per cent of the land had changed hands, mostly seized from people classified as ‘landlords’ and handed over to the poor. We will never know how many victims were killed in land distribution, but it is unlikely to be less than 1.5–2 million people from 1947 to 1952.10 Several million victims were sent to labour camps or subjected to surveillance by the local militia. Countless more became outcasts, stigmatised as ‘exploiters’, ‘class enemies’ or ‘bad elements’ (the vocabulary changed over the years), a political label that was passed on to children and led to the systematic persecution of entire families. The children were singled out by teachers and bullied at school, sometimes attacked by followers of the Youth League on their way back home. The adults became the targets of every subsequent political campaign, some of them paraded, shouted at and spat upon in denunciation meetings no fewer than 300 times – before the Cultural Revolution even started in 1966. They were hounded from their jobs, stripped of their possessions, forced to eke out a living on the margins of society. They were the scapegoats of revolution, maintained as live specimens of the class enemy to remind the population of the fate awaiting those found to be on the wrong side of the revolution. As the offspring of an ‘evil landlord’, Meng Xiaoli and his brother, to take but one example, were chased from their ancestral house in Qianjiang, Hubei, immediately after the communist takeover in 1949. They were not given the time to gather any belongings. Though Meng was only a young boy, his jumper was torn from his back. They wandered about the village with their mother, ostracised by all, and ended up by the lakeside digging for wild vegetables. They slept on dried straw with the village dogs on their first night, but were later allocated a shabby mud hut. At first, they tried to beg 8 Report by Liu Shaoqi at the National Conference on Land Reform, August 1947, Hebei Provincial Archives, 572–1–35, two versions of the same speech in documents 1 and 3, pp. 33–4. 9 Luo Pinghan, Tudi gaige yundong shi [A History of the Campaign for Land Reform] (Fuzhou: Fujian renmin chubanshe, 2005), p. 184. 10 See, among others, Roderick MacFarquhar, The Politics of China: The Eras of Mao and Deng (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997),p. 36; David Shambaugh, ‘The foundations of communist rule in China: the coercive dimension’, in The People’s Republic of China at 60: An International Assessment, ed. William C. Kirby (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011), pp. 21–3.

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but nobody dared to give them any food. They learned how to catch fish from a lake and dig up lotus roots.11 Villagers, referred to as ‘peasants’ by the regime, were supposed to form the backbone of the communist revolution. City people, on the other hand, were viewed with suspicion, as they had been contaminated by ‘capitalism’. After 1949 every resident in major towns or cities was given a class label (chengfen) on the basis of their supposed loyalty to the revolution: there were ‘good’, ‘wavering’ and ‘hostile’ people. A class label determined a person’s access to food, education, health care and employment. This classification would soon be simplified into two opposites: red or black, friend or foe. People marked as ‘hostile’ – for instance ‘landlords’ or ‘capitalists’ – were stigmatised for life and beyond, since the label was passed on to children through their mother.12 At first many of those considered to be ‘hostile’ were registered, interrogated and kept under surveillance. Then they were denounced in so-called ‘struggle meetings’. But in October 1950, as some 200,000 Chinese troops secretly entered North Korea to attack UN troops, Mao used the pretext of war to launch a major campaign of terror. He demanded that all those who stood in the path of revolution, whether ‘remnant Nationalist forces’, ‘secret agents’, ‘bandits’ or other ‘counter-revolutionaries’, be liquidated. Like steel output or grain production, death came with a quota mandated from above. Luo Ruiqing, the minister of public security, could not oversee the arrest, trial and judgment of the many millions who became the targets of terror, so instead Mao handed down a killing rate of one per thousand of the population as a rough guide for his underlings.13 But many of Mao’s followers were assiduous, willing executioners. They vied to outdo each other in fulfilling and overfulfilling their quotas. As one party official enjoined: ‘You must hate even if you feel no hatred, you must kill even if you do not wish to kill.’14 In Guizhou province three per thousand of the population were eliminated.15 The party archives are full of cases of blatant abuse driven by cadres eager to show their determination to stamp out counter-revolutionaries. In Yanxing county, a wealthy region of Yunnan province covered in salt fields, over a hundred middle school students were arrested in April 1951 after an 11 12 14 15

Interview with Meng Xiaoli, born 1943, Qianjiang county, Hubei, August 2006. Dikötter, Tragedy of Liberation, p. 47. 13 Ibid., p. 87. Report from Yunnan, 29 April 1951, Sichuan Provincial Archives, JX1-837, p. 74. Investigation Report on Guizhou, 7 July 1951, Sichuan Provincial Archives, JX1-839, pp. 250–2.

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anonymous denunciation reached the local party headquarters. Wu Liening, 10 years old, was hung from a beam and beaten. Ma Silie, aged 8, had his legs and knees crushed on a concrete floor. Liu Wendi, aged 6, was accused of being the head of a spying squad. Two of the children were tortured to death.16 It was not an isolated incident. In Luoding county, Guangdong province, a single case of suspected theft by a child led to the arrest and interrogation of 340 students aged 13 to 25. In Guangdong province as a whole, a full third of all the victims were wrongly accused – by the standards of the party itself.17 The executions that occurred were supposed to reflect the wrath of the people. But sometimes local officials used the terror to pursue their own vendettas against the local population, while trying to keep their activities hidden from their superiors. All over Sichuan province local cadres eliminated their enemies without any of the public rallies mandated by Beijing. In other parts of the south entire villages were razed to the ground. Many victims were executed far from the public eye, in forests, near ravines, along rivers, alone or in batches.18 How many were killed by the time the campaign came to end in late 1951? Luo Ruiqing, in a confidential report to the Chairman, counted 301,800 executions for a mere six provinces.19 A more likely estimate comes from the finance minister, Bo Yibo, who in 1952 mentioned 2 million victims.20

The Great Leap Forward Over the following years a repressive state modelled on the Soviet Union was established. In 1955 large collectives inspired by state farms in the Soviet Union began to replace many of the rural co-operatives that had appeared after land reform. The government now took the land back from the farmers. The following year commerce and industry also became functions of the state, as all private enterprises, from small family-run shops to large industrial conglomerates, were expropriated by the government. In 1958, people in the countryside were herded into even larger collectives called People’s Communes: by turning every villager into a foot soldier in one giant army, to be deployed day and night to transform the economy, 16 Sichuan Provincial Archives, 20 March 1953, JK1-729, p. 29. 17 Report from Qian Ying, secretary of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, to Zhu De, 25 March 1953, Sichuan Provincial Archives, JK1-730, p. 35. 18 Dikötter, Tragedy of Liberation, p. 91. 19 Report by Luo Ruiqing, Shaanxi Provincial Archives, 23 August 1952, 123–25–2, p. 357. 20 Georg Paloczi-Horvath, Der Herr der blauen Ameisen: Mao Tse-tung (Frankfurt am Main: Scheffler, 1962), p. 249.

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Mao Zedong thought that he could catapult his country into the future. Mao was convinced that he had found the golden bridge to communism, making him the messiah leading humanity to a world of plenty for all. But the Great Leap Forward was a disastrous experiment, as more than 45 million people were worked, beaten and starved to death from 1958 to 1962.21 The farmers who were herded into giant people’s communes had very few incentives to work. The land belonged to the state. The grain they produced was procured at a price that was often below its cost of production. Their livestock, tools and utensils, even their pots and pans, were no longer theirs. Radical collectivisation resulted in a steep decline in grain output. But the local cadres faced ever greater pressure to fulfil the plan and deliver grain to the state. They had to whip up the workforce in one merciless production drive after another. In some places both villagers and cadres became so brutalised that the scope and degree of coercion had to be constantly expanded, resulting in an orgy of violence. Overall, across the country, maybe as many as half of all cadres regularly pummelled or caned the people they were meant to serve – as endless reports demonstrate.22 Beatings were common, but the stick was only one tool in the arsenal of horror devised by local cadres to demean and torture those who failed to keep up. As the countryside slid into starvation, ever greater violence had to be inflicted on the famished to get them into the fields. The ingenuity deployed by the few to inflict pain and humiliation on the many seemed limitless. People were thrown into ponds, sometimes bound, sometimes stripped of their clothes. Villagers were left naked in the cold. In the summer, people were forced to stand in the glaring sun with arms spread out. People were tied up, beaten, stripped, drowned in ponds, covered in excrement or branded with sizzling tools.23 A report circulated to the top leadership, including Chairman Mao, describes how a man called Wang Ziyou had one of his ears chopped off, his legs bound with wire and a 10-kilo stone 21 For the methodology and archival evidence used to arrive at this figure, see Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–62 (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010), Ch. 37. Chapter 37 also points out that all historians who have used extensive archival evidence place the toll above 45 million, including Yu Xiguang, who based his estimate on research in close to one hundred county archives, and Chen Yizi, who toured the archives with a team of researchers on the orders of Zhao Ziyang before 1989 and later absconded to the United States. Estimates that are based on officially published population statistics but not on archival evidence generally put the number at 30 million or below. This estimate first appeared in 1984 ( Judith Banister, ‘An analysis of recent data on the population of China’, Population and Development Review 10:2 (1984),241–71) and has been reproduced without further evidence. 22 Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, p. 294. 23 Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, pp. 294–6.

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dropped on his back before he was branded – as punishment for digging up a potato.24 There were cases of people being buried alive. When a boy stole a handful of grain in a Hunan village, local boss Xiong Changming forced his father to bury his son alive. The man died of grief a few days later.25 By a very rough approximation, between 6 and 8 per cent of all the people who died prematurely, 2–3 million, were tortured or beaten to death.26 Local cadres had a choice. They could improve the living conditions of the villagers – against all odds – or instead try to meet the party’s production and requisition targets. The one came at the expense of the other. Most took the path of least resistance. Once that choice had been made, violence followed its course. In conditions of widespread penury, it was impossible to keep everybody alive. There was not enough food left in the village to provide even reliable workers with an adequate diet. An expedient way to increase the available food was to eliminate the weak and sick. The planned economy already reduced people to mere digits on a balance sheet, a resource to be exploited for the greater good, like coal or grain. The state was everything, the individual nothing, their worth being constantly assessed through work points and determined by the ability to move earth or plant rice. In the countryside farmers were treated like livestock: they had to be fed, clothed and housed, all of which came at a cost to the collective. The logical extension of these bleak calculations was to cull those judged unworthy of life. The selective killing of slackers, weaklings or otherwise unproductive elements increased the overall food supply for those who contributed to the regime through their labour. Violence was a way of dealing with food shortages. The use of food to reward the strong at the expense of the weak was widespread. A similar system had been devised in different circumstances when the Nazis were confronted with such food shortages that they could no longer feed their slave labourers. Günther Falkenhahn, director of a mine that supplied IG Farben’s chemicals complex, divided his Ostarbeiter into three classes, concentrating the available food on those workers who provided the best return per unit of calories. Those at the bottom fell into a fatal spiral of malnutrition and underperformance. By 1943 he had received national recognition, and the idea of Leistungsernährung, or ‘performance feeding’, was promulgated as standard practice in the employment of Ostarbeiter.27 24 25 26 27

Neibu cankao, 30 November 1960, p. 17. Hunan Provincial Archives, 8 April 1961, 146–1–583, p. 96. Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, pp. 297–8. Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York: Allen Lane, 2006), pp. 530–1.

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No order ever came from above, instructing party members to restrict adequate feeding to above-average workers, but it seemed an effective enough strategy to some cadres keen to obtain maximum output for minimal expense. In Peach Village, Guangdong, the cadres divided the farmers into twelve different grades, calibrated according to performance. Workers in the top grade were given just under 500 g of grain a day. Those at the bottom received a mere 150 g a day, a starvation diet that weeded out the most vulnerable elements. They were replaced by others who inexorably slipped down the ranks, edging closer to the end. One in ten were starved to death in 1960.28 In fact, throughout the country, as we have seen, units were divided into different ranks, red, grey and white flags being handed out to advanced, mediocre and backward units. It was a small step to elaborate the system further and make calorie income dependent on rank. In Jintang county, Sichuan, for instance, one village divided its members into ‘superior’, ‘middle’ and ‘inferior’ groups, their names respectively listed on red, green or white paper. Members of different ranks were not allowed to mix. Red names were praised, but white names were relentlessly persecuted, many ending up in makeshift labour camps for ‘re-education’.29 But the most common weapon was food, all the more since all of it was in the hands of the cadres with the advent of the people’s communes and collective canteens after the summer of 1958. The grip cadres had over the food supply was reinforced even further as almost everywhere pots and pans were taken away from families. Hunger became the punishment of first resort, even more so than a beating. Yu Wenming, deputy party secretary of a commune in Chuxiong county, Yunnan, clubbed six farmers to death, but his main tool for discipline was hunger. Two recalcitrant brothers were deprived of food for a full week, and they ended up desperately foraging for roots in the forest, where they soon died of hunger. One of their wives was sick at home. She too was banned from the canteen. An entire brigade of seventy-six people was punished with hunger for twelve days. Many died of starvation.30 On a much larger scale, describing what happened in several counties in Sichuan, one inspector noted that ‘commune members too sick to work are deprived of food, it hastens their deaths’. In the first month the ration was reduced to 85 g of grain a day, then in the following month to 57 g. In the end those about to die were denied any food at all. In Jiangbei and Yongchuan, ‘virtually every people’s commune withholds food’. In one 28 Guangdong Provincial Archives, 8 May 1960, 217–1–575, pp. 26–8. 29 Sichuan Provincial Archives, 3 May 1959, JC1-1686, p. 43. 30 Yunnan Provincial Archives, 9 December 1960, 2–1–4157, p. 170.

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canteen catering for sixty-seven people, eighteen died within three months after they were barred from the premises on grounds of sickness.31 Few reliable figures exist, but a team of inspectors who looked closely at a number of brigades in Neijiang county, Sichuan, believed that 80 per cent of those who had died of hunger had been denied food as a form of punishment.32 Throughout the country those who were too ill or too old to work were deliberately cut off from the food supply, denounced as ‘saboteurs’ or ‘bad elements’. ‘To each according to their needs’ was the slogan heralded across the country, but all too often the reality was much closer to Lenin’s dictum that ‘those who do not work shall not eat’.33 Many victims, as a result, did not simply famish through sickness or neglect, rather they were deliberately starved to death. While the sick and the elderly suffered disproportionately from the famine, people from a ‘bad’ class background were also targeted during the Great Leap Forward. As one farmer explained, the ladle that was dipped into the pot could ‘read people’s faces’. By this he meant a phenomenon that many interviewees recalled, namely that the man in charge of the canteen deliberately discriminated against people who had a bad class label. Whereas the spoon reached deep to the bottom of the pot for good workers, it merely skimmed the surface for undesirable people: ‘The water looked greenish and was undrinkable.’34 Throughout the Great Leap Forward, class war remained the dominant ideology. Everywhere ‘landlords’, ‘saboteurs’, ‘counter-revolutionaries’ and other ‘bad elements’ were blamed for undermining the revolution, hiding the crop or causing the famine. In Chishui, a county in the south of China, the leading party representative proclaimed: ‘Poor and rich peasants, this struggle is to the death!’ He terrorised the local population. Ten per cent died within half a year, as manhunts were organised to root out every suspected ‘class enemy’.35 When they looked back at the Great Leap Forward later, some leaders were proud of having eliminated so many ‘class enemies’. Li Jingquan, the head of Sichuan province where some 10 million people had vanished, proclaimed in April 1962 that ‘We are not weak, we are stronger, we have kept the backbone.’36

Sichuan Provincial Archives, 2 May 1960, JC1-2109, pp. 10, 51. Ibid., 1961, JC1-2610, p. 4. 33 Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, p. 303. Interview with Wei Shu, born 1920s, Langzhong county, Sichuan, April 2006. Chishui County Archives, 30 September 1958, 1-A9-4, pp. 30–1; 14 January 1961, 1-A12-1, pp. 83–7; December 1960, 1-A11-30, pp. 67–71; also 25 April 1960, 1-A11-39, pp. 11–15. 36 Speech by Li Jingquan on 5 April 1962, Sichuan Provincial Archives, JC1-2809, p. 11.

31 32 34 35

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The leadership knew full well what was happening in the countryside during the Great Leap Forward. At a secret meeting in the Jinjiang Hotel in Shanghai in March 1959, Mao Zedong specifically ordered his underlings to procure up to one-third of all the grain, much more than had ever been the case. As he put it, ‘when there is not enough to eat people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.’37 By this he also meant that the food had to be forcibly taken away from the countryside in order to keep up the exports needed to earn foreign currency and buy the industrial plants required for the Great Leap Forward. At the same meeting he made an extra 16,000 lorries available to carry away the grain. Speed was of the essence, as the grain had to be requisitioned before the villagers could eat it.38 Already in October 1958, Tan Zhenlin, put in charge of agriculture by the Chairman, had made the need for a forceful approach clear: ‘You need to fight against the peasants . . . There is something ideologically wrong with you if you are afraid of coercion.’39 As Deng Xiaoping, who would become the country’s leader in 1979, proudly proclaimed, the Great Leap Forward had to be carried out ruthlessly, without regard for casualties, ‘as if in a war’.40 Much of the violence – as well as the majority of premature deaths – took place after a drastic purge in the wake of the CCP’s Lushan plenum in the summer of 1959, when general Peng Dehuai and a few others who had cautiously expressed their reservations about the Great Leap Forward were dismissed from their posts. Mao viewed criticism of the campaign as an attack against him personally, and accused them of having conspired against party, state and people. After the Lushan Plenum, ferocious purges were carried out at every level – province, county, commune, brigade – in order to replace lacklustre cadres with hard, unscrupulous elements who trimmed their sails to benefit from the radical winds blowing from Beijing. In 1959–60 alone some 3.6 million party members were labelled or purged as ‘rightists’, although total CCP membership surged from 13,960,000 in 1959 to 17,380,000 in 1961.41 In a moral universe in which the end justified the 37 Interjections by Mao Zedong in March 1959, Gansu Provincial Archives, 91–18– 494, p. 48. 38 Ibid. 39 Speech by Tan Zhenlin, October 1958, Hunan Provincial Archives, 141–2–62, p. 148. 40 Speech by Deng Xiaoping, 11 December 1961, Hunan Provincial Archives, 141–2– 138, p. 43. 41 Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, vol. III: The Coming of the Cataclysm, 1961–1966 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 61, 179, 206–7; see also Lu Xiaobo, Cadres and Corruption: The Organizational Involution of the Chinese Communist Party (Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 86, quoting from figures provided

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means, many would be prepared to become the Chairman’s willing instruments, casting aside every idea about right and wrong to achieve the goals he envisaged.

The Cultural Revolution The Great Leap Forward came to an end in 1962, as Mao Zedong stood back and allowed his deputies to weaken the power that the People’s Communes wielded over the villagers. Local markets were restored and small private plots allowed once again. But instead of taking responsibility for the man-made disaster, Mao blamed ‘class enemies’ instead: ‘Who would have thought that the countryside harboured so many counterrevolutionaries?’42 Most of all, the Chairman was worried about his comrades. In January 1962, some 7,000 leading party officials from all over the country gathered in Beijing to talk about the failure of the Great Leap Forward. Plenty of rumours were circulating, some of them even accusing the Chairman of being deluded, innumerate and dangerous. A few of his colleagues probably wanted him to step down, holding him responsible for the mass starvation of ordinary people. The Chairman feared that he would meet the same fate as Stalin, denounced in 1956 by Nikita Khrushchev after his death. Who would become China’s Khrushchev? Even before the start of the Cultural Revolution in May 1966, a socalled Socialist Education Campaign swept the countryside, as ‘capitalist roaders’ and ‘class enemies’ were alleged to have taken over the leadership of entire provinces. A whole new ‘bourgeois class’ was apparently emerging from the ruins of the Great Leap Forward, as powerful work teams sent to the countryside uncovered opposition to the socialist economy on a staggering scale. In Hunan province, up to 80 per cent of all rural cadres were found to be corrupt. They were denounced in public rallies, paraded through the streets and forced to confess their crimes. The slogan of the day was ‘class struggle is a struggle to the death’. In every People’s Commune, several victims were beaten to death. Across the country as a whole (see Map 18.1), over 5 million

at the time in the People’s Daily. Speaking in September 1959, Peng Zhen put the party membership at 13,900,000 and the number of cadres purged over the two preceeding years at 700,000; see Gansu Provincial Archives, 19 September 1959, 91–18–561, p. 28. 42 Speech by Mao Zedong, Gansu Provincial Archives, 18 January 1961, 91–6–79, p. 4.

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Map 18.1 China during the Cultural Revolution.

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party members were punished, including more than 77,000 people who were hounded to their deaths.43 Mao Zedong spent four years carefully laying the groundwork for the Cultural Revolution. After he placed four CCP leaders under arrest in May 1966, accusing them of being part of an ‘anti-party clique’ that had been plotting a return to ‘capitalism’, he was finally ready. Students at every level had undergone years of indoctrination during the Socialist Education Campaign. Encouraged by the party machine, they harassed, denounced, humiliated and even tortured teachers suspected of being class enemies. In September 1966 some of them became Red Guards, and they attacked everything and anyone suspected of being part of the ‘capitalist’ world order. Ordinary people considered to be from a hostile class background were openly persecuted. In Beijing notices appeared on walls, signed by local party committees or police stations. They listed people by age and class background. Sometimes their crimes were spelt out: ‘Has been Dragging his Feet since Liberation’. More often they were simply labelled ‘landlords’, ‘counter-revolutionaries’ or ‘bad elements’. In public parks, imperial gardens and ancient temples, there were scenes of victims being flogged with ropes, beaten with clubs or otherwise demeaned and tortured by Red Guards in front of cheering crowds. By the end of the month, more than 1,700 suspects had been killed by the Red Guards in the capital alone.44 The official aim of the Cultural Revolution was to sweep away the ‘feudal’, ‘superstitious’, ‘bourgeois’ culture which had supposedly allowed ‘bad elements’ to lead the country back on to the road towards ‘capitalism’. But Mao also used the Cultural Revolution to get rid of his real and imaginary enemies, in particular delegates who had discussed the Great Leap Forward in January 1962. At first Red Guards attacked all those who were suspected of opposing the Chairman. Then, as different factions began fighting each other instead of sweeping away all ‘enemies of the revolution’, Mao Zedong unleashed ordinary people, allowing them to denounce their party leaders in the autumn of 1966. Soon enough the country slid into civil war, as people began fighting each other with machine guns and anti-aircraft artillery in the streets.

43 Hunan Provincial Archives, 6 May 1964, 146–1–743, pp. 103–8; ibid., 10 October 1964, 146–1–776, p. 163; the slogan is quoted in Xie Chengnian, ‘Wo qinli de “siqing” yundong naxie shi’ [My personal experience of the ‘Four Cleans’],Wenshi tiandi 6 (2012), 8–9. 44 Wang Youqin, ‘Student attacks against teachers: the revolution of 1966’, Issues and Studies, 37:2 (2001), 29–79.

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Still the Chairman prevailed. He improvised, destroying millions of lives along the way. Periodically he stepped in to rescue a loyal follower or throw a close colleague to the wolves. A mere utterance of his decided the fates of countless people, as he declared one or another faction to be ‘counterrevolutionary’. His verdict could change overnight, feeding a seemingly endless cycle of violence in which people scrambled to prove their loyalty to the Chairman. In parts of the countryside, mass killings occurred when Mao Zedong changed his mind and decided to support one faction instead of another. In Hunan, after one faction called the Xiang River Group was invigorated by recognition from Beijing, they managed to crush their opponents, a powerful group backed by local officials and the militia in Daoxian county. But members of the defeated faction spread rumours of an impending apocalypse. They alleged that the Xiang River Group consisted of ‘bad elements’, including the sons and daughters of former landlords, rich peasants and counter-revolutionaries, and that they were about to rise in a rebellion closely co-ordinated with Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan. In the following weeks, close to 5,000 people were butchered for their alleged class background. Some of the victims were children.45 Daoxian was exceptional, but according to one specialist on collective killings in the countryside, during the Cultural Revolution more than 400,000 people were systematically exterminated in villages across the country.46 The perpetrators in these cases were not young Red Guards, but neighbours killing neighbours. Much of this violence was confined to a small number of southern provinces, mainly Guangdong, Guangxi and Hunan. Guangxi was split between two camps backed by different troops. The head of the province, Wei Guoqing, was opposed by a coalition which gained the support of Marshal Lin Biao. Both sides confronted each other in ferocious battles involving tens of thousands of fighters. When Mao Zedong finally intervened in July 1968, speaking out in favour of the head of the province, Wei Guoqing seized the opportunity to persecute his opponents. In the provincial capital Nanning, an entire district came under heavy bombardment. Thousands of opponents were locked up in makeshift prisons. Many were interrogated and tortured. More than 2,000 were later executed. A group of twenty-six prisoners were shot on the spot by soldiers in front 45 Su Yang, Collective Killings in Rural China during the Cultural Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2011); Tan Hecheng, The Killing Wind: A Chinese County’s Descent into Madness during the Cultural Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 46 Yang, Collective Killings.

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of a photographic studio. Unable to dislodge several thousand fighters hiding inside a concrete bomb shelter, the military opened the floodgates of a nearby river to flush them out. So many bodies were strewn across the city that corpses were tossed into coal mines and ditches. A team of cremators, divided into eight groups, was busy for weeks burning more than 600 bodies. Large amounts of formaldehyde and other disinfectants were used to clean up the shelter, but the stench of putrefying flesh lingered for many weeks in the hot, humid, sub-tropical summer.47 The first phase of the Cultural Revolution came to an end in the summer of 1968 as new, so-called ‘revolutionary party committees’ took over the party and the state. They were heavily dominated by military officers, who turned the country into a garrison state over the next three years. From 1966 to 1968, Mao had used the people to attack the party. Now he used the army to punish the people. Endless purges followed, with millions of undesirable elements, including students and others who had taken the Chairman at his word, banished to the countryside to be ‘re-educated by the peasants’. The army also oversaw a nationwide witch-hunt for ‘traitors’ and ‘renegades’ in which anyone with a foreign link in their past became suspect. In Shanghai alone, close to 170,000 people were harassed in one way or another. More than 5,400 committed suicide, were beaten to death or executed.48 In Guangdong province as a whole, one estimate puts the death toll at 40,000.49 But Mao Zedong was wary of the military, in particular Marshal Lin Biao. Mao had used him to launch and sustain the Cultural Revolution, but the marshal in turn exploited the turmoil to expand his own power base, placing his followers in key positions throughout the army. He died in a mysterious plane crash in September 1971, bringing to an end the grip of the military on civilian life. The army was purged, falling in turn victim to the Cultural Revolution. Having crushed the lives of tens of millions of people, the Chairman finally felt secure in the final years of his life. In terms of human loss, the Cultural Revolution was far less murderous than many earlier campaigns, even though it left a trail of devastation. By all 47 Nanning shi ‘wenge’ da shijian [Major Events in Nanning during the Cultural Revolution] (Nanning: Zhonggong Nanning shiwei zhengdang lingdao xiaozu bangongshi, 1987), pp. 30–2. 48 Bu Weihua, Zalan jiu shijie: Wenhua da geming de dongluan yu haojie [Smashing the Old World: The Chaos and Catastrophe of the Great Cultural Revolution] (Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2008), p. 677. 49 Ding Shu, ‘Wenge zhong de “qingli jieji duiwu” yundong [The campaign to cleanse the class ranks during the Cultural Revolution]’, Huaxia wenzhai zengkan 244:14 (2004), online publication.

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accounts, during the ten years spanning the Cultural Revolution, between 1.5 and 2 million people were killed. Many more lives were ruined through endless denunciations, false confessions, struggle meetings and persecution campaigns. Anne Thurston has written eloquently that the Cultural Revolution was neither a sudden disaster nor a holocaust, but an extreme situation characterised by loss at many levels, ‘loss of culture and of spiritual values, loss of status and honour, loss of career, loss of dignity’, and, of course, loss of trust and predictability in human relations, as people turned against each other.50

Conclusion The crimes against humanity committed by the Chinese Communist Party under Mao’s leadership from 1947 to 1976 claimed well over 50 million lives. Crimes against humanity, in the definition of the International Criminal Court, consist of various acts – murder, extermination, enslavement, forcible transfers of population, among others – that are ‘committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack against any civilian population’. The history of these crimes can be roughly divided into three historical phases. From 1947 to 1952, the majority of killings were intentional, with targets set by the higher echelons of power. Whether during land reform or during the campaign of terror unleashed in October 1950, local cadres were given very specific quotas that they had to achieve. The Ministry of Public Security kept detailed statistics about the killings. When they were deemed to be insufficient, the Chairman himself intervened. Guangxi province, in the south, approached the terror with ‘shocking leniency’, he opined. He replaced the head of the province, who now made sure that by the end of 1951 over 2.5 per thousand of the total population was executed.51 In most cases, however, the quotas set in Beijing got out of hand as party members vied with each other to demonstrate their revolutionary fervour, taking more victims than was required. Even then the Chairman decided to set parameters within which the plan could be overfulfilled. When his killing quota of one per thousand was doubled and even trebled in a number of places, he stepped in again.

50 Anne F. Thurston, Enemies of the People (New York: Knopf, 1987), pp. 208–9. 51 Instructions from Mao Zedong, 3 January 1951, Sichuan Provincial Archives, JX1-836, p. 10; Report on Guangxi from inspection team, March 1951, Guangdong, 204–1–34, pp. 16–24, 69–70; Report from Guangxi Provincial Party Committee, 7 July 1951, Sichuan Provincial Archives, JX1-836, pp. 78–82.

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‘This is how I look at it: we can go over one per thousand, but not by too much.’52 During the Great Leap Forward, which is at the heart of the second historical phase, the killings were not generally intentional. The majority of people in the countryside died of starvation and neglect, as large amounts of food were taken away from the villagers. The regime was guilty, in other words, of what lawyers might call manslaughter or murder through depraved indifference. The leadership was aware of what was happening, as the machinery of power ensured that a steady flow of reports reached the very top of the echelons of power, but they intervened only in the last months of 1961. They were responsible for creating the context within which tens of millions of people died. We know that Mao was the key architect of the Great Leap Forward, and thus bears the main responsibility for the catastrophe. But he had to work hard to push through his vision, bargaining, cajoling, goading, occasionally tormenting or even persecuting his comrades like Peng Dehuai. He would never have been able to prevail if Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai, the next two most powerful party leaders, had acted against him. They, in turn, whipped up support from other senior colleagues, as chains of interests and alliances extended all the way down to the village. In other words, the scale of the catastrophe was not unknown to the leadership, although the deaths of so many people were not desired. They were considered to be the unfortunate side-effect of a worthwhile endeavour to transform the country, or, to put it differently, they were brushed aside as unavoidable casualties in a few lost battles which should not deter the generals from prosecuting the war overall. Coercion, terror and systematic violence were the foundations of the Great Leap Forward. From that perspective, the term ‘famine’, or even ‘Great Famine’ fails to capture the many ways in which people died under radical collectivisation. The term is even more inadequate when we consider that food, more often than not, was used as a weapon to compel the villagers to follow the dictates of local cadres. Mass murders are not usually associated with the Great Leap Forward, and China has therefore long benefitted from a more favourable assessment when compared with the rural devastation caused by the regimes in Cambodia and the Soviet Union.53 But otherwise the results are broadly similar. 52 Mao Zedong to Deng Xiaoping, Rao Shushi, Deng Zihui, Ye Jianying, Xi Zhongxun and Gao Gang, 20 April 1951, Sichuan Provincial Archives, JX1-834, pp. 75–7. 53 For a fairly recent analysis, see Jean-Louis Margolin, ‘Mao’s China: the worst nongenocidal regime?’ in The Historiography of Genocide, ed. Dan Stone (London: Macmillan, 2008), pp. 438–67.

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The third historical phase covers the Cultural Revolution, when the Chairman quite deliberately pitted people against each other. The killings, whether they were of neighbours by neighbours, of party members by ordinary people or by the military against civilians, were always intentional, but they occurred on a scale which bears no comparison to the earlier decades of the regime. The vast majority of victims were ordinary people, as most party members taken to task, however badly brutalised, were shielded from death. In all three phases ordinary people considered to be from a ‘bad’ class background were statistically over-represented among the victims. They were the majority in the first years of the regime, whether they were termed ‘landlords’, ‘tyrants’, ‘bandits’ or ‘bad elements’. Even when during the Great Leap Forward tens of millions of people were dispatched to an early grave, ‘bad elements’ were consistently singled out. They may not have been the majority of victims, but all of them were treated far worse than those considered by the regime to be politically reliable. During the Cultural Revolution more or less anyone could be accused of being a ‘counter-revolutionary’ or a ‘bad element’, even top-ranking party officials. Liu Shaoqi, the number two in the party hierarchy, was accused of being, among other things, a ‘renegade, traitor and scab hiding in the party’, and was imprisoned and tortured to death. On the other hand, since political labels could be inherited, anyone could become a political outcast at the stroke of a pen through a family member. A good example is Zhang Hongbing, who in 1968 denounced his own mother for being a counter-revolutionary and demanded that she be shot. The party granted his wish. He was briefly celebrated as a revolutionary hero, but then arrested and deported to a camp for being the son of a counter-revolutionary.54 In all three historical phases the CCP was responsible for mass killings that qualify as crimes against humanity. These killings affected people from all walks of life, including, sometimes, committed party members. But political outcasts stood out as a group that was systematically persecuted throughout the entire era. In 1983 the regime itself claimed that some 20 million outcasts had been re-educated under Mao, but omitted to clarify that 70 per cent of these had been killed during the endless campaigns directed against them since 1949. To paraphrase what Douglas Smith wrote about members of the 54 The most extensive interview and research on Zhang Hongbing appears in Philippe Grangereau, ‘Une mère sur la conscience’, Libération, 28 April 2013, pp. 5–7.

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nobility in Russia after 1917, they were shot and shot and shot.55 When Mao finally passed away in 1976, it took the regime another seven years to abolish official class distinctions and put an end to systematic discrimination against outcasts. Whether or not these crimes constitute genocide is open to debate and depends on the definition of the term a reader wishes to adopt. From the point of view of the victims, it is worthwhile observing that at least some of them have used the term genocide. Linda Li, for one, compared the fate of the outcasts under Mao to the Jews in Germany. By the time Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1979, she pointed out, very few of them had managed to survive.56

Bibliographic Note At the heart of the secondary literature on mass killings and crimes against humanity in the People’s Republic lies a paradox: the very people who are most at risk in carrying out historical research, namely historians and writers from the People’s Republic, also happen to be the most eloquent and prolific. By comparison, there is very little in English or other European languages. Never have crimes so vast been so sparsely and reluctantly covered by the historical profession in Europe and the United States, even when the evidence has been readily available for decades. On the civil war and the first years of liberation, an early pioneer was Richard Walker’s China under Communism: The First Five Years (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955). He provided an account of the terror that has been amply vindicated by recent archival evidence. A more recent account, based on extensive party archives, can be found in Dikötter, The Tragedy of Liberation. The Great Leap Forward, despite being the greatest man-made disaster of the twentieth century, continues to be sparsely covered, even though the archival evidence has been readily available for well over a decade. Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), is a pioneering book written by the British journalist Jasper Becker. A decade later another journalist, Yang Jisheng, published a two-volume account of the famine, translated in 2012 into English as Tombstone: The Untold Story of Mao’s Great

55 Douglas Smith, Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012). 56 Linda Li, ‘Yijing xiaoshi de Zhongguo “Youtairen qunti” [The vanished Jews of China]’, unpublished manuscript from author, 2015.

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Famine (New York, Allen Lane, 2012). Dikötter’s Mao’s Great Famine is based on extensive archival evidence. A pioneering account of the mass killings in Guangxi province during the Cultural Revolution, based on archival evidence, was published by the journalist Zheng Yi: Scarlet Memorial: Tales of Cannibalism in Modern China (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996). Su Yang, a talented sociologist, has researched mass killings in the countryside (published as Collective Killings). Tan Hecheng, a retired author and editor for the Chinese government, researched the massacres that took place in Daoxian in a substantial monograph that was translated in 2017: The Killing Wind. In French one must read Song Yongyi, Les massacres de la Révolution Culturelle (Paris: Gallimard, 2009). Mass killings and systematic persecutions also figure prominently in Frank Dikötter, The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962–1976 (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016). On killings by Red Guards one should consult Wang Youqin, ‘Student attacks against teachers: the revolution of 1966’. In plenty of other academic studies on the Cultural Revolution, their authors prefer to eschew the crimes against humanity committed at the time. As the distinguished philosopher John Gray pointed out in a recent review of a scholarly collection of essays on the Little Red Book, ‘Reading the essays brought together here, you would hardly realise that Mao was responsible for one of the biggest human catastrophes in recorded history’ (John Gray, ‘How the West embraced Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book’, The New Statesman, 14 May 2014). That observation adequately sums up the state of the field.

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Half a Century of Genocide and Extermination Indonesia, 1965–1966; East Timor, 1975–1999; and West Papua, 1963–2020 geoffrey robinson

This chapter examines comparatively three instances of extreme political violence in Indonesia and Indonesian-occupied territory over more than fifty years: the mass killing of roughly half a million communists and leftists in 1965–6; the unnatural death or killing of at least 100,000 people in East Timor from 1975 to 1999; and the systematic physical and cultural decimation of the indigenous population of West Papua from 1963 to 2020. It describes the unique dimensions of each case – including key patterns and variations in the violence, the historical and political conditions that gave rise to it, the identities of the perpetrators and victims, and differences in the degree and nature of resistance. At the same time, it highlights the remarkable similarities and continuities across the three cases. It argues that, despite their differences, these three cases form part of a single broad pattern of extermination and genocide perpetrated by the Indonesian state, driven by competition over valuable resources and facilitated by the acts and omissions of powerful foreign actors.

The Anti-Left Campaign of 1965–1966 Between October 1965 and mid-1966, an estimated half a million Indonesian communists and leftists were killed. Another million or so were detained without charge or trial, and many were subjected to torture.1 There is some debate about whether this violence ought to be considered genocide, because its victims were not obviously members of a ‘national, ethnical, racial or 1 This account draws substantially on Geoffrey Robinson, The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965–66 (Princeton University Press, 2018).

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religious group’ as the UN Genocide Convention stipulates. But there is no doubt that it was one of the largest and swiftest instances of mass killing and incarceration in the twentieth century, nor that it meets the legal definition of extermination. The immediate trigger for the violence was the arrest and killing of six senior army generals on the morning of 1 October 1965, by a shadowy group called the September 30th Movement. The remaining army leaders and their allies claimed that the killing of the generals had been orchestrated by the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia – PKI) in a failed attempt to seize power. They also alleged that President Sukarno had been aware of the plot, and had allowed it to go ahead. Based on these unproven claims the army and its allies set out to destroy the PKI and its affiliated organisations, and to overthrow Sukarno. The campaign was led by Major General Suharto who became president in the wake of the violence. The consequences of this violence were profound and long-lasting. In less than a year, the PKI was physically crushed and President Sukarno swept aside. In his place, a virulently anti-communist army leadership seized power, signalling the start of more than three decades of military-backed authoritarian rule. The state that emerged from the carnage, known as the New Order, became notorious for its systematic violation of human rights, especially in areas outside the heartland including East Timor and West Papua where, as discussed below, hundreds of thousands of people died or were killed by government forces. Moreover, although the mass killings subsided in mid-1966, the campaign against the Left continued, most notably in a programme of mass arbitrary detention. Of the estimated 1 million people detained following the alleged coup, only a few thousand were ever charged with a crime; and they were sentenced in conspicuously unfair show trials, and most were then executed. The rest were held without charge in appalling conditions – thousands of them in forced labour camps and penal colonies like the notorious Buru Island – with no idea when or whether they might ever be released. (See Figure 19.1.) Even after their release, former detainees and their families continued to be subjected to egregious restrictions on their civil and political freedoms, and to suffer an officially fostered social stigma.

Historical and Political Context The violence of 1965–66 emerged against a backdrop of acute political, social and economic tensions in Indonesia, then a country of some 80 million people that had won its independence from the Netherlands only sixteen 451

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Figure 19.1 PKI members and sympathisers detained by the army in Bali, c.December 1965. (National Library of Indonesia)

years earlier. Those tensions helped to shape the violence, and to explain some of its patterns. But without the encouragement of the army leadership, and in the absence of support from powerful states, it is safe to say the violence would never have reached the levels of intensity that it did. On the eve of the alleged 1 October coup attempt, Indonesia was divided, largely along a left–right axis, and politics was increasingly being played out on the streets. On the left was the popular and powerful PKI. By 1965, it had an estimated 3.5 million members and 20 million more in affiliated mass organisations, making it the largest non-governing communist party in the world. It also had the ear of the popular left-nationalist President Sukarno, increasingly friendly ties with Beijing and even some support inside the Indonesian armed forces, especially in the air force. Ranged against the PKI were most of the Indonesian army and a number of secular and religious parties and organisations. The most influential of these were the Revival of Islamic Scholars (Nahdlatul Ulama – NU), the right-wing faction of the secular Indonesian Nationalist Party (Partai Nasional Indonesia – PNI) and the Catholic Party (Partai Katolik). Like the PKI, the parties of the right all had mass organisations that were routinely mobilised for street demonstrations. 452

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Political tensions sometimes overlapped with other kinds of identity, providing fertile soil for violence after 1 October. Tensions between more pious (santri) and less pious (abangan) Muslims in central and east Java, for example, overlapped in significant respects with political conflicts between the more conservative NU and PNI, on the one hand, and the PKI, on the other.2 Such overlapping tensions appear to have heightened violence in certain areas, and help to explain why the language and symbolism of the violence took the local forms that they did. At the same time, the connection between such underlying tensions and mass violence was not automatic. It happened only where army leaders and their allies invoked religious ideas and symbols in their campaign against the PKI. The violence was also shaped by bitter socio-economic conflicts over land, wages, and other valuable resources.3 For example, some of the worst violence occurred in central Java, east Java, and Bali where the conflict over land and land reform had been most intense in the years before the alleged coup. Violence was also severe in the plantation belt of north Sumatra where tensions between left-wing labour unions and conservative plantation owners had reached a peak in 1965. But here again, the link between conflict and violence was not automatic. The PKI’s opponents only resorted to mass violence when army leaders and their political and business allies urged them to do so, and organised them into militia groups for that purpose. The army’s role in encouraging the violence had several dimensions. First, it disseminated a discourse of existential threat to the nation that valorised acts of violence against leftists, calling for them to be ‘destroyed down to the very roots’, ‘annihilated’ and ‘crushed to bits’. To carry out this work, and to cover its tracks, the army mobilised and trained a vast network of militia groups which then operated under orders from army commanders. The army also developed a plan to detain, transport, categorise and interrogate hundreds of thousands of leftists – and it provided crucial logistical assets to put that plan into effect. Soldiers and civilian militia groups were supplied with weapons; suspects were transported to prisons and execution sites in military vehicles; and soldiers and militias used hit-lists to locate victims targeted for arrest or execution. 2 Kenneth R. Young, ‘Local and national influences in the violence of 1965’, in The Indonesian Killings, 1965–1966: Studies from Java and Bali, ed. Robert Cribb (Clayton, Victoria: Monash Papers on Southeast Asia, no. 21, 1990), pp. 63–100. 3 See, e.g., Ann Laura Stoler, Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt, 1870– 1979 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Geoffrey Robinson, The Dark Side of Paradise: Political Violence in Bali (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).

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The violence of 1965–6 was also accelerated by a conducive international environment. The cold-war context was crucial. In addition to accentuating political polarisation inside the country, it shaped Indonesia’s pre-1965 international relations, driving it ever closer to Mao’s China. As Sukarno shifted leftward, the United States and its allies increasingly encouraged the army leadership to move against him and the PKI. In that effort they had the full support of foreign corporations, like Goodyear and Shell, who worried that their plantations and oil production facilities might be expropriated. The violence was also facilitated by the weakness at the time of international human rights norms, institutions and networks. In the absence of such networks, official government and corporate views prevailed. The actions and omissions of powerful states also contributed to the violence. For at least a decade before the alleged 1965 coup, for example, the United States and its allies worked assiduously to undermine Sukarno and the PKI. And in the weeks and months after the alleged coup, they actively encouraged the mounting violence through a covert psychological warfare campaign designed explicitly to ‘blacken the name’ of the PKI and Sukarno; the provision of covert economic and military assistance to the army leadership; and a policy of strategic silence – coupled with secret expressions of support – as the army-instigated violence against civilians mounted. These interventions provided vital assurance to Suharto and his allies that they could move strongly against the PKI without fear of repercussions.

Victims and Perpetrators In contrast to many cases of genocide and mass political violence, those killed and detained in 1965–6 were not targeted primarily because of their ethnicity, race or religion, but because of their real or alleged membership in or sympathy for the PKI and its mass organisations. Indeed, with few exceptions, victims were of the same religion and ethnicity as those who killed them. One partial exception to this rule was the case of Chinese-Indonesians. Yet even in this case, the victims were not targeted solely because of their ethnicity but because of their real or presumed sympathies for the PKI or other parties of the Left.4 The victims included high-ranking political figures, like the PKI chairman, D. N. Aidit, who was shot and his body dumped down a well by the army shortly after he was captured. But the vast majority were ordinary people – 4 See Robert Cribb and Charles A. Coppel, ‘A genocide that never was: explaining the myth of anti-Chinese massacres in Indonesia, 1965–66’, Journal of Genocide Research 11:4 (2009), 447–65.

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farmers, factory workers, teachers, artists and civil servants – living in rural villages and plantations, or on the outskirts of provincial cities and towns. They were not, by any stretch, people with direct knowledge of or any involvement in the events of 1 October. Like the victims, the perpetrators too were not defined primarily by their religion or ethnicity, but by their political and institutional affiliations. The violence was organised and often carried out by the army, which had troops spread throughout the country down to the village level, as well as mobile units. The latter included the notorious Army Para Commando Regiment (Resimen Para Komando Angkatan Darat – RPKAD) which played a critical role in leading the violence in central Java, east Java, and Bali. The army was eagerly assisted in this work by a wide network of anti-communist militias and death squads that it mobilised and deputised after 1 October 1965. As the RPKAD commander, Sarwo Edhie, explained: ‘We decided to encourage the anti-communist civilians to help with the job. In Solo we gathered together the youth, the nationalist groups, the religious organizations. We gave them two or three days’ training, then sent them out to kill communists.’5 Despite some variation in the timing and intensity of the violence in different parts of the country, there were striking similarities in its character. Victims were commonly decapitated, castrated or mutilated. Their dismembered bodies were left in public places; dumped into wells, rivers and irrigation ditches; or buried in shallow graves. Few, if any, received a proper burial. In one of the most notorious cases, the Brantas River in east Java was said to have become clogged with dead bodies. A resident of the area later described the grisly scene: ‘In November [1965] the rains came. The river ran muddy and fast with weeds, leaves, human limbs, and headless corpses.’6 Meanwhile, detainees were routinely mistreated or tortured; they were held in filthy, overcrowded cells and denied adequate food and medical care; and both men and women were subjected to sexual violence including rape. The similarities in the manner of killing and treatment of prisoners across the country attest to what I have called a common ‘repertoire of violence’ employed by the army and by militia forces that it trained and mobilised.7 Significantly, that common repertoire would later be employed by the army and its local proxies in other theatres of operation, such as East Timor and West Papua. There was surprisingly little open resistance to the violence. That is not to say that PKI members went ‘willingly’ to their deaths as army propagandists 5 Robinson, The Killing Season, p. 160.

6 Ibid., p. 128.

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have suggested. A good many fled to PKI political strongholds where they hoped to find protection. Others changed their identities, denying any connection to family members or friends who had already been detained or killed. There were also isolated instances of armed resistance. The last of these held out in a remote area of east Java until being crushed by the army in 1968. In a handful of cases, villagers attempted to resist without resort to arms. In one such case in central Java, nine unarmed women stood in the road to prevent an RPKAD tank from entering their village; they were shot dead. As the army information bureau reported at the time, the paracommandos were ‘forced by their intransigence to terminate the breathing of these nine Gerwani witches’.8

Debates and Historiography Indonesian authorities have insisted that the violence of 1965–6 was the result of popular anger against the PKI, a kind of spontaneous frenzy fuelled by deeply rooted cultural and religious tensions. In that account, the army appears as national saviour, and the six deceased generals as national heroes. By contrast, the half million leftists who died and the million or more who were detained exist only as unremembered phantoms deemed responsible for their own annihilation. While this is still the official Indonesian version of events, there is an emerging consensus that it is deeply misleading, if not patently false. Most recent studies concur that the violence was orchestrated by the army leadership itself under the command of General Suharto. There is also something like a consensus with respect to the role of foreign states in abetting the violence. Despite denials by former officials, the documentary record is now clear that the United States, the United Kingdom and their allies were instrumental in fomenting the violence and enforcing the long silence and impunity that followed. Indeed, it is safe to say that without support from powerful Western states and given a somewhat different international context, the mass killing and incarceration probably would not have happened. By contrast, official claims that the alleged coup was masterminded by Beijing are no longer taken seriously. One area of continuing debate concerns the use of the term genocide. On one side of this issue are those who adhere to the legal definition spelt out in the UN Genocide Convention of 1948. Because that definition excludes political groups as a protected class, they argue that the violence of 1965–6 8 Ibid., p. 153.

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should not be described as genocide.9 On the other side are those who embrace one of the more flexible definitions of genocide favoured by several social scientists, according to which political groups may be regarded as a protected group. On that basis, some scholars have argued that the violence of 1965–6 can and should indeed be called genocide.10 A more surprising case for genocide has been made by the International Peoples Tribunal (IPT) for 1965 which convened in 2015. In their final judgment, the panel of judges argued that the violence was genocide as defined in the Genocide Convention, on the grounds that the PKI and its affiliates represented a significant ‘part’ of the Indonesian ‘national group’ – one of the four protected classes enumerated in the Convention.11 It remains to be seen whether that argument will become more widely accepted by scholars and legal advocates.

Genocide in East Timor, 1975–1999 Ten years after orchestrating the mass killing of communists and leftists in Indonesia, General Suharto, now as president, ordered the invasion of neighbouring East Timor, a tiny Portuguese colony with a population of just over half a million people. Indonesian forces landed in December 1975 and occupied the territory until late 1999 when nearly 80 per cent of the population voted in favour of independence in a UN-supervised referendum. In the course of the twenty-four-year occupation, at least 100,000 people died, many of them from starvation and preventable diseases.12 Indonesian authorities insisted that any casualties were the unavoidable consequence of war and natural calamities like drought, but most observers concur that the deaths were the direct and predictable consequence of Indonesia’s punitive counter-insurgency tactics and harsh occupation policies. (See Figure 19.2.) Accordingly, there is a growing consensus that this was a genocide.13 9 For example, Indonesia’s Human Rights Commission (Komnas Ham) concluded in 2012 that the violence amounted to crimes against humanity, but not genocide. 10 Robert Cribb, ‘The Indonesian massacres’, in Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, ed. Samuel Totten and William S. Parsons, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 234–62; Jess Melvin, The Army and the Indonesian Genocide: Mechanics of Mass Murder (New York: Routledge, 2018). 11 G. van Klinken and A. Santoso, ‘Genocide finally enters the public discourse: the International People’s Tribunal 1965’, Journal of Genocide Research 19:4 (2017), 594–608. 12 East Timor Commission for Reception, Truth, and Reconciliation (CAVR), Chega! (Dili: KPG Gramedia, 2006), www.cavr-timorleste.org/en/chegaReport.htm. 13 See, e.g., Ben Kiernan, Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia: Documentation, Denial and Justice in Cambodia and East Timor (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2008).

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Figure 19.2 Unarmed supporter of East Timor’s independence, Adelino Bedinho Alfonso Guterres, moments before he was shot dead by Indonesian troops in August 1999. (Photo: Eddy Hasby)

Historical and Political Context The genocide in East Timor unfolded in the context of armed conflict between Indonesian and East Timorese forces, and at the height of the cold war. Its patterns and character were shaped in significant measure by this historical and political context. Especially important were the distinctive character of Indonesia’s New Order regime and army, the changing strategy of the resistance, and certain features of the international environment and the posture of key states. The New Order regime that had orchestrated and emerged from the mass violence of 1965–6 was stridently anti-communist, hyper-nationalist, intolerant of dissent and dominated by the army. The dominant role of the army was especially important. The army’s doctrine of ‘total peoples’ defence’, for example, was the basis for the mobilisation of local militia forces, which spread violence more widely among the population.14 Meanwhile, the deeply rooted pattern of impunity that had developed from the experience of 1965–6, 14 On the history of this doctrine, and of the militias, see Geoffrey Robinson, ‘People’s war: militias in East Timor and Indonesia’, South East Asia Research 9:3 (2001), 271–318.

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and the institutional culture within the Indonesian army and its proxies, ensured the continued use of torture, rape and other forms of terror against presumed supporters of East Timorese independence. One significant manifestation of that pattern, but hardly the only one, was the Santa Cruz massacre of 12 November 1991 in which some 270 young people were killed by Indonesian army troops who opened fire on a peaceful pro-independence demonstration at a cemetery in Dili.15 Eyewitnesses said that combat troops had arrived at the cemetery in several trucks, marched into position and then, without warning, opened fire on the unarmed protesters. The following day, the armed forces commander, General Try Sutrisno, sought to justify the massacre, saying that the people in the procession had ‘spread chaos’ and had shouted ‘many unacceptable things’. In the end, he said, ‘they had to be shot. These ill-bred people have to be shot . . . and we will shoot them.’16 The violence was also fuelled by the army’s desire to control valuable resources in and around East Timor. These included, for example, the substantial oil and gas reserves that lay just off East Timor’s coast, to which Indonesia laid claim soon after annexing the territory. Army officers, including some high-ranking generals, also set out to monopolise the production and export of East Timor’s valuable commodities like coffee. Over time, army officers came to dominate most sectors of the local economy, including illegal ones like prostitution and gambling. By the late 1980s, they had established something like a local mafia. Quite apart from the material wealth it brought, that arrangement gave them an incentive to keep the war of occupation going. The violence was further accelerated by the racist policies and practices of the Indonesian government and military in East Timor. Like settler colonialists in other settings, Indonesian authorities in East Timor tended to look upon the local population as backward and in need of ‘civilisation’. To that end, they imposed a variety of development schemes – including birth control, Indonesian language education and Indonesian immigration. Like the targets of civilising missions in other colonial settings, most East Timorese regarded these initiatives with suspicion and hostility. Far from bringing them into the Indonesian fold, these efforts had the effect of deepening an East Timorese sense of identity and determination to resist Indonesian rule. 15 Geoffrey Robinson, ‘If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die’: How Genocide Was Stopped in East Timor (Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 66–8. 16 Ibid., p. 67.

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Resistance to the occupation was spearheaded by the pro-independence party, Fretilin, which had declared East Timor’s independence only a week before the 1975 invasion, and its small guerrilla force, Falintil. The independence movement also gained the support of the local Catholic Church, including two successive bishops of the archdiocese of Dili. In the first five or six years of the occupation, the movement adopted a strategy of armed resistance that also contributed to the loss of life. From the mid-1980s onward, however, it shifted towards a strategy that emphasised international diplomacy, clandestine organisation and non-violent demonstrations. And where its leaders had once used the language and symbolism of national liberation, they began increasingly to speak the language of universal human rights. Finally, as in 1965–6, the violence in East Timor was shaped in significant ways by the actions of powerful states, and by the changing international environment. The 1975 invasion took place less than twenty-four hours after Indonesian President Suharto met US President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger, and received from them an unequivocal green light to proceed.17 After the invasion, the United States and other states provided vital diplomatic, economic and military assistance to Indonesia. Some of that assistance was provided precisely when Indonesian forces were committing their worst violence against the civilian population. The devastating military campaigns of the late 1970s, for instance, entailed the use of sophisticated weapons systems, including counter-insurgency aircraft (OV-10 Broncos), napalm and high-powered weapons, provided by the United States and other Western allies. It is safe to say that, without such support, neither the invasion nor the genocide would have happened.18 Some sense of what it meant for civilians is captured in the testimony of a woman named ‘Edinha’: The Javanese kept attacking and dropping bombs and we were like animals running from one place to the other carrying our children, going this way and that. We slept anywhere, in the rain, in the mud, even near dead animals. The bombs would come and we would stand up and run again. On the way we ate anything growing, anything we could find. In the daytime we went into caves or under rocks to hide . . . If the babies cried you put some clothing

17 The memorandum of that conversation can be found in the National Security Archive (NSA), ‘East Timor Revisited: Ford, Kissinger and the Indonesian Invasion, 1975–76’, www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB62/. 18 The best analysis of the role of the international community in aiding and abetting the violence in East Timor is Joseph Nevins, A Not-So-Distant Horror: Mass Violence in East Timor (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).

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inside their mouth to stop the noise, because the enemy could hear us and find us – the sound echoed in the mountains.19

Changes in the wider international context and in the strategy of the resistance in the 1980s had a significant effect on the course of the conflict. The end of the cold war and the independence movement’s shift to a predominantly non-violent and human rights-based strategy helped to win it significant international support, not only among human rights NGOs and solidarity groups, but also within the Catholic Church, the United Nations, and among legislators and policy-makers in major states. The movement received a further boost in 1996 when two East Timorese were awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. By the late 1990s these developments had made East Timor a problem powerful Western states could no longer ignore. In that context, East Timor’s contested international legal status gained a new significance. Indonesia’s claim to the territory had never been recognised by the United Nations. That important legal snag ensured that East Timor remained a matter of international attention, providing a basis for those demanding independence and highlighting the violence. But it was only with the end of the cold war, and the rise of a powerful transnational solidarity campaign, originally based in neighbouring Australia, that East Timor’s disputed legal status became a critical focal point for bringing an end to the violence and occupation. The singular importance of this wider context became evident in 1998, when General Suharto was forced to step down in the face of economic crisis and massive popular protests. Responding to growing international pressure, in early 1999 the country’s new president, B. J. Habibie, proposed a referendum on East Timor’s political status which was ultimately held in August of that year. The importance of the international context became even clearer in September 1999, when escalating violence in the aftermath of the overwhelming vote for independence led some to predict a second genocide. At that critical juncture, major powers – including the United States and Australia – that had for years turned a blind eye to Indonesian violence in East Timor – chose instead to authorise an armed intervention to end it. That move, in turn, paved the way for the swift withdrawal of Indonesian forces, and for East Timor’s formal independence in 2002.20 19 Robinson, ‘If You Leave Us Here’, p. 56. 20 For a detailed account of the violence surrounding the 1999 referendum, and the reasons for international intervention, see Robinson, ‘If You Leave Us Here’.

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Victims and Perpetrators The victims of the violence in East Timor were overwhelmingly real or presumed supporters of independence. They included Falintil soldiers killed in combat, but the vast majority were civilians. In the last decade of the occupation, East Timorese students and young people were arrested and killed because of their increasingly active and visible role in the independence movement. Likewise, because the Catholic Church came to support the resistance, priests and nuns were sometimes targeted. In the final year of the occupation, 1999, Indonesian forces and their local militia proxies attacked scores of people who had taken refuge in churches, and a number of priests and nuns were deliberately killed.21 One of the most shocking of these attacks was the massacre at the Ave Maria church in the town of Suai on 6 September 1999, in which at least forty but possibly as many as 200 people were killed by Indonesian troops and militiamen. The dead were among some 1,500 people who had taken refuge at the church because of the mounting violence and intimidation after the vote. In November investigators exhumed the remains of twenty-seven people from three mass graves. Among those exhumed were the remains of a child of about 5 years, a young man whose lower limbs and pelvis were missing, and a teenage girl who was naked and whose body had been burned.22 As in the case of the mass killings of 1965–6, the violence in East Timor was organised and carried out primarily by the Indonesian army, with substantial assistance from locally recruited militia groups. The army typically had tens of thousands of combat troops stationed in the territory at any time. In addition to regular territorial forces, a number of mobile counterinsurgency units were routinely deployed. These included the Special Forces Command (Komando Pasukan Khusus – Kopassus), which like its predecessor, the RPKAD, in 1965–6, was responsible for heinous acts of violence against civilians. Kopassus was also responsible for mobilising and training some of the more notorious militia units – such as Aitarak and Besi Merah Putih – which played a central role in the violence right through 1999. There were notable continuities in the character of the violence in Indonesia in 1965–6 and in East Timor. These stemmed from distinctive features of the New Order Indonesian state noted above, and reflected the 21 See Geoffrey Robinson, East Timor 1999: Crimes Against Humanity. A Report Commissioned by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (Jakarta: Hak Association & Elsam, 2003), pp. 159–202. 22 Robinson, ‘If You Leave Us Here’, pp. 166–8.

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institutional culture and repertoire of the Indonesian army. For example, as in 1965–6, Indonesian forces and their proxies in East Timor routinely subjected supporters of independence to torture, rape, arbitrary imprisonment and summary execution. As in 1965–6, victims in East Timor were sometimes decapitated and their mutilated bodies left in public places to sow terror among the population. And, as in the earlier violence, the army employed methods designed to draw civilians into their military operations. These included the so-called ‘fence of legs’ tactic in which villagers were made to form a human chain around suspected resistance hide-outs to flush out guerrilla fighters. There were, however, some important differences between the two cases. Whereas in 1965–6 the Indonesian army and its proxies encountered no meaningful armed resistance, in East Timor they were forced to fight a small but tenacious guerrilla army with substantial popular backing. The army’s strategy reflected that difference. Describing the independence movement as a ‘Security Disruptors Movement’ (Gerakan Pengacau Keamanan – GPK), they insisted that full-scale counter-insurgency operations were justified. The tactics they employed included the use of napalm, aerial bombardment and the deliberate destruction of crops, livestock and villages. In the name of depriving the resistance of support from the local population, moreover, tens of thousands of civilians were forcibly displaced from their villages and fields into what were, in effect, concentration camps. These tactics led, predictably, to widespread famine, disease and death among the civilian population.

Debates and Historiography There has been some debate among scholars and activists about whether the violence in East Timor should be considered genocide. For many years, scholars and human rights advocates avoided using the term genocide, describing the violence in East Timor as a humanitarian crisis, a tragedy or as a pattern of serious human rights violations. Over time, however, East Timor began to be included in general studies of genocide, and the term has come to be more widely used and accepted. The shift was due, in part, to a growing public awareness of conditions in the territory, particularly after the Santa Cruz massacre of 1991. It also stemmed from the fact that by the 1990s, East Timor had become a subject of serious political concern among major powers and within the United Nations. That was arguably because of the unusual success of the resistance and of international solidarity groups in highlighting the direct complicity of those states in the violence. The shift 463

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towards use of the term genocide was also a reflection of the great wealth of new and credible documentary information that became available for scholarly examination after East Timor gained its independence in 2002.

Extermination and Possible Genocide in West Papua, 1963–2020 Violence has been the norm for more than fifty years in West Papua, a vast but sparsely populated territory occupying the western half of the island of New Guinea. (See Map 19.1.)23 Since its contested takeover from the Netherlands by Indonesia in 1963, tens of thousands of civilians have been killed, and countless others have been detained, displaced and subjected to harsh life conditions by Indonesian military campaigns, government development efforts and environmental destruction by private mining companies.24 Like East Timor, West Papua has also been the site of heavyhanded state initiatives of assimilation which some observers have described as cultural genocide. All of this violence has occurred in the context of a longsimmering movement for independence, both armed and peaceful, loosely led by the Free Papua Organisation (Organisasi Papua Merdeka – OPM), and a number of smaller offshoots.25 While the use of the term genocide continues to be debated, few would question the appropriateness of the legal term extermination in this case.

Historical and Political Context The long-standing violence in West Papua has its origins in the flawed process of decolonisation after World War Two, but it has been aggravated significantly by the behaviour of the Indonesian army and police, the policies and practices of central government authorities, the actions of foreign corporations and by the wider international environment. In the course of negotiations over independence in 1949, the young Republic of Indonesia accepted continued Dutch sovereignty over West New Guinea (West Papua), but it had no intention of allowing that 23 The territory commonly known as West Papua is currently comprised of five provinces, Papua, Central Papua, Highland Papua, South Papua, and West Papua. Unless otherwise indicated, the term West Papua is used here to denote the whole territory. 24 On the history of the violence in West Papua, see Robin Osborne, Indonesia’s Secret War: The Guerilla Struggle in Irian Jaya (Sydney and Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1985). 25 These include the West Papua National Liberation Army (WPNLA), the West Papua National Committee (KNPB), the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) and the Papuan Student Alliance (AMP).

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Map 19.1 Indonesia and East Timor. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108767118.020

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arrangement to stand. Indonesian nationhood defined itself as the heir to all the territories of the former Netherlands East Indies. Over the next decade, Jakarta sought by various means to gain control over West New Guinea. Those efforts reached new levels of intensity in 1961, when President Sukarno launched the so-called Trikora campaign, which included military action to ‘liberate’ West New Guinea from the Dutch. In the face of that campaign, and under increasing pressure from the United States, the Dutch relinquished control of the territory in 1963. The transfer to Indonesian authority was formalised in 1969 through a plebiscite known as the ‘Act of Free Choice’, in which roughly 1,000 hand-picked delegates accepted the Indonesian plan.26 Despite its evident flaws, and indications that a substantial majority of the population actually favoured independence, the plebiscite was approved by the United Nations, and became the legal foundation for West Papua’s incorporation into Indonesia, initially as the province of ‘Irian Jaya’. These developments triggered serious demands for independence and the emergence of the OPM.27 The popular appeal of the OPM and its affiliated organisations since then has stemmed, in large part, from the harshness of the measures taken by the Indonesian army to repress the rebels and other advocates of independence. Indonesian forces deployed in West Papua adopted a repertoire of counter-insurgency tactics that had been developed and refined in other operations – most notably against the PKI in 1965–6, and in East Timor starting in 1975. These included the mobilisation of local militia forces as army proxies, the systematic use of torture and harsh interrogation against suspected supporters of independence and raids on communities thought to be supporting or protecting rebel fighters. As in East Timor and other theatres of operation, the negative effects of these tactics have been exacerbated by the institutional culture of impunity and terror that has become embedded in the Indonesian army and its proxies. Indeed, through its systematic brutality and its failure to hold its members accountable for serious violations of human rights, the Indonesian military has arguably helped to create in West Papua the enemy it seeks to crush. Papuans have also been angered by central state efforts to assimilate the population, and by a pervasive racism on the part of Indonesian officials and citizens alike. Describing Papuans as backward or stone-age peoples in need 26 On the Act of Free Choice, see John Saltford, The United Nations and the Indonesian Takeover of West Papua, 1962–1969 (London and New York: Routledge, 2003). 27 On the historical development of Papuan identity, and the OPM see David Webster, ‘“Already sovereign as a people”: a foundational moment in West Papuan nationalism’, Pacific Affairs 74:4 (2001–2), 507–28.

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of civilisation, they have adopted the language and policies of a settler colonial authority.28 In the early 1960s, for example, Indonesia’s foreign minister explained that the government’s policy towards the people of West Papua was ‘to get them down out of the trees, even if we have to pull them down’.29 To that end, campaigns have been launched to compel local people to wear Western-style clothing, to teach them the Indonesian language and to settle nomadic populations in villages and towns.30 Notably, official attitudes have not changed significantly over time. In mid-2019, for example, Indonesian police raiding a university dormitory in Surabaya were recorded calling the Papuan students ‘monkeys’ and other racist epithets. In the name of development and modernisation, moreover, Indonesian authorities until quite recently pursued the colonial-era project of ‘transmigration’ under which people from the more densely populated islands of Java and Bali were transferred to Papua, to instruct local people in the ostensibly superior wet-rice agricultural techniques of those regions.31 In the name of development, the government has also undertaken large-scale infrastructure development projects. Quite apart from their dubious civilising intent, the net effect of these schemes has been that settlers have come to dominate the local economy and hold most government and professional jobs, leaving Papuans as second-class citizens.32 Perhaps not surprisingly, such projects have been a focus of resentment and resistance to Indonesian rule. A group of construction workers killed by Papuan guerrillas in the district of Nduga in early December 2018, for example, had been building a segment of the TransPapua road network, a massive infrastructure project initiated by President Joko Widodo after his election in 2014. As in the two other cases discussed here, the violence in West Papua has also been shaped powerfully by the wider international environment. UN acquiescence in the flawed plebiscite of 1969, for example, robbed Papuans of a rare legitimate opportunity to gain independence and arguably made the resort to violence much more likely. Meanwhile, in the interest of 28 J. Pouwer, ‘The colonisation, decolonisation and recolonisation of West New Guinea’, Journal of Pacific History 34 (1999), 157–79. 29 Cited in Osborne, Indonesia’s Secret War, p. 136. 30 See D. Gietzelt, ‘The Indonesianization of West Papua’, Oceania 59 (1989), 201–21. 31 On transmigration and its critics, see Osborne, Indonesia’s Secret War, pp. 125–36. President Joko Widodo formally ended the transmigration programme following his election in 2014. 32 Papuans have also suffered a drastic demographic decline relative to other groups, so that by 2020 they were expected to constitute slightly less than 30 per cent of West Papua’s overall population. Kjell Anderson, ‘Colonialism and cold genocide: the case of West Papua’, Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 9:2 (2015), 16.

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maintaining cordial relations with Indonesia and its military – and conscious of the substantial economic interests at stake – the United States and other major powers have turned a blind eye to the systematic extermination underway in West Papua. As in the other cases, international corporations have also played a role. Starting in the late 1960s, Indonesia parcelled out the rights to West Papua’s vast mineral resources, which include some of the richest gold and copper deposits in the world. The huge mining operations undertaken since then have been the focus of intense criticism by Papuans and others, who have complained with ample justification (see below) that they have sullied the natural habitat. On the other hand, there are signs that the international environment may be shifting in ways that are more favourable to the proponents of independence, and to ending the violence. In recent years, a significant number of states have joined in calls for impartial investigations into credible allegations of human rights violations in West Papua. UN agencies have also been paying close attention to the situation in West Papua, calling for an end to official restrictions on media access, and expressing deep concern about the environmental destruction.33 Crucially, there appears to be growing global awareness of the situation in the territory, as evidenced by new networks linking local and international activists on issues ranging from climate change to indigenous peoples’ rights. Against this backdrop, there has been renewed debate in recent years, both inside Indonesia and beyond, about the validity of the 1969 Act of Free Choice. If the legitimacy of that Act is seriously questioned as a matter of domestic or international law, it could open the door to a referendum on independence along the lines of the one that ended the genocide in East Timor.

Victims and Perpetrators As in East Timor, the overwhelming majority of victims in West Papua have been indigenous people suspected of supporting the independence movement, or living in remote areas where military and police operations have been mounted. While official restrictions on access to the territory and the absence of independent investigations mean there is considerable uncertainty about the total numbers killed since 1963, they are conservatively estimated to be between 10,000 and 30,000 in a total population of about 5 million, and 33 A useful compilation of UN reports and interventions can be found on the website of the International Coalition for Papua (ICP), www.humanrightspapua.org/resources/ 55-papua-at-un.

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some estimates are very much higher.34 The victims have included members of armed groups fighting for independence, such as the OPM and the West Papua National Liberation Army. But a much greater number of victims have been civilians killed, arrested, disappeared or ill-treated in the course of police and military operations. They have included tens of thousands of Papuan civilians, forced to flee their homes in the context of armed conflict, who have suffered extreme hardship in their places of refuge. Among the more notorious cases of this kind was the ‘Bloody Wamena’ incident of 2003. Following a raid on a military weapons armoury by OPM fighters in early April of that year, army and police units conducted a massive ‘sweeping’ operation through twenty-five villages in the vicinity of Wamena. In the course of the operation, at least nine villagers were killed, while fortytwo others died of starvation after being forcibly displaced from their homes. Indonesia’s Human Rights Commission investigated the incident in 2004 and concluded that it was a crime against humanity, but by 2020 no action had been taken against any of the perpetrators. More recently, in the aftermath of the December 2018 killing of construction workers in Nduga, Indonesian forces mounted a major operation leading some 50,000 residents to flee to make-shift refugee camps. As of early 2020, as many as 257 of them were said to have died of disease or exposure, though government officials put the toll at just over 50, and the minister of politics, law and human rights described the list of the dead provided by human rights advocates as ‘trash’.35 Even peaceful acts of protest, such as raising the independence movement’s Morning Star flag or calling for a referendum, are considered acts of rebellion or treason, and have been met with harsh repression. Among the many cases of this kind, the Biak Massacre of July 1998 stands out. In that case, Indonesian military forces carried out a dawn raid on a group of Papuans who had been staging peaceful pro-independence demonstrations in the main town on Biak Island. Some thirty-two people were shot and left to die, while scores of others were loaded on to Navy vessels, stabbed and beaten, and then dumped into the ocean. Over the following days, their decaying bodies, many with their hands tied and some showing signs of sexual mutilation, washed up on Biak’s shores. By some estimates as many as 200 34 Estimates range as high as 500,000, though the basis for those estimates is unclear. See Jim Elmslie and Camellia Webb-Gannon, ‘A slow-motion genocide: Indonesian rule in West Papua’, Griffith Journal of Law & Human Dignity 1:2 (2013), 142–66. 35 See ICP, ‘Human Rights Update West Papua, January 2020’, www.humanrightspapua .org/images/docs/Human%20Rights%20Update%20West%20Papua%20January%20 2020.pdf; and ‘Probably just trash: Mahfud MD dismisses details on West Papua civilian death toll’, Jakarta Post, 12 February 2020.

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people were killed. Asked about the incident at the time, the armed forces commander, General Wiranto, said ‘If there is a power that raises a flag, and it is not the Red and White flag [of Indonesia], then this is a betrayal of the military and of the entire nation. This constitutes a betrayal and this is what we must stop!’36 In addition to those killed outright, advocates of Papuan independence have been arrested for their peaceful political and cultural activities, and a number of them have died in suspicious circumstances. They include Dr Arnold Ap, a beloved Papuan musician, anthropologist and advocate of Papuan culture. He was arrested by Kopassus troops in 1983 on suspicion of supporting the OPM, and tortured while being interrogated, but was not charged. In April 1984, his dead body was found just outside the prison with a gunshot wound to the back. Indonesian authorities claimed that he had been trying to escape but human rights advocates expressed serious doubt about that claim. The harsh repression of peaceful political activism by Papuans has continued in recent times. In 2019, for example, scores of Papuan civilians were arrested for participating in peaceful proindependence demonstrations, and for raising the Morning Star flag. At least twenty-two of them were charged with treason (makar), a crime that carries a sentence of twenty years.37 Somewhat less visible, but no less important, have been the many thousands of Papuan people whose lands and waters have been polluted by the careless and unregulated operations of large mining corporations. With the encouragement of Indonesian authorities, protected by Indonesian army and police and with the complicity of foreign governments, powerful mining companies like the US-based Freeport have caused irreparable, long-term damage to the ecosystems that lie at the heart of Papuan culture and livelihood.38 The environmental destruction has been especially great in the vicinity of Freeport’s huge Grasberg mine, the largest and most profitable gold mine in the world. These enterprises have also provided a pretext for local officials and soldiers to run protection rackets and other illicit schemes,

36 Suara Pembaruan, 7 July 1998. 37 On the arrests and treason trials in 2019, see Human Rights Watch, ‘Indonesia arrests yet more indigenous Papuans’, www.hrw.org/news/2019/12/05/indonesia-arrests-yet -more-indigenous-papuans; and Papuans Behind Bars, ‘New political prisoners, treason charges and lack of judicial transparency in political prisoner cases’, www .papuansbehindbars.org. 38 See D. Leith, ‘Freeport and the Suharto regime, 1965–1998’, Contemporary Pacific 14 (2002), 69–100.

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including brothels, while offering little in the way of jobs or other economic benefit to the local community. The main perpetrators of the violence in West Papua have been the Indonesian army and police. Within the army the crack counter-insurgency unit, Kopassus, has played an especially important role, as it did in East Timor and as its predecessor the RPKAD did in Indonesia in 1965–6. As in the other cases, too, the army authorities in Papua have mobilised local militia groups to assist them in their campaign, and these militias have been responsible for some of the violence, though, to date, not on the same scale as in the other cases. In a wider sense, the perpetrators in West Papua include civilian Indonesian authorities responsible for settler colonial projects like transmigration and massive infrastructure development, as well as large international corporations like Freeport whose practices have done much damage to the Papuan environment and people.

Debates and Historiography As in the case of 1965–6 and East Timor, the question of whether the violence in West Papua constitutes genocide has been a focus of debate among scholars and activists. Some have argued for the use of the term genocide, but many have been reluctant to do so, portraying the violence instead as the systematic violation of human rights, denial of the right to self-determination or forced cultural assimilation.39 The reluctance to describe the violence in West Papua as genocide may reflect the fact that the absolute number of people killed there has been relatively small in comparison to better-known cases, and that the violence has unfolded slowly over so many years. Acknowledging these differences, scholars have used terms like ‘slow motion genocide’ and ‘cold genocide’ to describe the West Papua case. But it is probably also because, to date, major Western powers have had no compelling political interest in highlighting the plight of Papuans. On the contrary, it has been in their interest to maintain cordial relations with Indonesia, and so to remain silent on the subject. Moreover, in contrast to those who campaigned on behalf of East Timor, scholars and activists working on West Papua have so far been unable to generate the kind of political pressure that alone might bring a real change in the posture of major powers, and in the attitudes of the wider scholarly community. 39 The case for genocide has been made, among others, by Anderson, ‘Colonialism and cold genocide’, and Elmslie and Webb-Gannon, ‘A slow-motion genocide’. International human rights organisations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have refrained from using the term.

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Conclusions In some respects, the patterns of violence in these three cases appear quite distinctive. For example, while the victims in 1965–6 were targeted primarily on the basis of their leftist political affiliation, the violence in East Timor and West Papua was directed against specific ethnic and cultural groups because of their presumed support for independence or secessionist movements. Whereas the violence in 1965–6 took place in the context of an acute ideological struggle within the state itself, the violence in East Timor and West Papua occurred in the context of challenges to state sovereignty or its external imposition in particular territories. And while there was little meaningful resistance to the slaughter in 1965–6, in both East Timor and West Papua the perpetrators faced sustained opposition, both armed and nonviolent, over decades. Finally, whereas the violence in East Timor and West Papua was clearly rooted in racist and settler colonial mentalities, in the case of 1965–6 racism played only a minor part. Still, it is the similarities and continuities across these cases which are most striking, and which suggest that they are best understood as part of a single pattern of extermination and genocide extending over more than half a century. Three similarities are especially notable. First, the violence in each case was shaped decisively by the character of the Indonesian state – an authoritarian state dominated by a powerful army with an ideology of extreme nationalism and bellicose anti-communism, and an obsession with order. In each of the three cases, too, the state employed strikingly similar repertoires of violence – notably its mobilisation of ostensibly civilian militia groups, as well as the use of torture, rape, corpse display and collective punishment. These techniques were re-enacted and refined by the army with each successive campaign, but they grew less and less effective. In fact, in East Timor and West Papua, primarily because of their brutality, they served mainly to strengthen the resolve of the army’s opponents, thereby giving rise to still greater violence, especially on the part of the army. Second, despite its cultural, ethnic and religious dimensions, the violence in each case was not primarily an expression of such differences. More than anything else, it reflected conflicts over key resources such as land, minerals and political power. It is no coincidence, for example, that the violence of 1965–6 targeted groups who had demanded the radical redistribution of land and championed the rights of workers, or that East Timor had substantial offshore reserves of oil and gas, or that West Papua is the site of some of the richest gold and copper deposits in the world. To the extent that ethnicity and

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culture became an important dimension of the violence in these cases, it was arguably because those identities became enmeshed in conflicts over such resources. It was also because ethnic, cultural and religious sensibilities were deliberately mobilised by army leaders and their political and religious allies, and further accentuated through the experience of mass violence. Finally, the wider international environment was critical in shaping the violence. In all three cases, it was encouraged and facilitated by powerful foreign states through the provision of military, political and economic assistance, or enabled through their silence and acquiescence. Violence was also affected in one way or another by powerful (but shifting) international trends in the post-war period, including the polarising logic of the cold war, the emergence of transnational human rights norms and networks, and the hegemonic discourse and practice of development and modernisation. The cold-war context was especially important in driving the violence in 1965–6, but it was also a significant factor in the first two or three decades of conflict in East Timor and West Papua. At least until the 1980s, the violence in all three cases was also facilitated by the weakness of transnational civil society networks and a lack of critical reporting by the mainstream Indonesian and Western media. A partial exception was Australia, where a critical mass of public opinion on the tragedy in neighbouring East Timor eventually forced Canberra to act. Significantly, precisely that reversal of those conditions led in 1999 to a dramatic end to the violence there and to the territory’s eventual independence. Something similar may happen in West Papua.

Bibliographic Note 1965–1966 The quality and range of English-language sources for the study of the 1965–6 massacres have improved significantly in the past decade or so. There are now several excellent compilations of survivor and witness testimonies, including those edited by Marching, Sukanta and Wardaya: Soe Tjen Marching, The End of Silence: Accounts of the 1965 Genocide in Indonesia (Amsterdam University Press, 2017); Putu Oka Sukanta (ed.), Breaking the Silence: Survivors Speak about the 1965–66 Violence in Indonesia, trans. Jennifer Lindsay (Clayton, Victoria: Monash University Publishing, 2014); Baskara T. Wardaya (ed.), Truth Will Out: Indonesian Accounts of the 1965 Mass Violence, trans. Jennifer Lindsay (Clayton, Victoria: Monash University Publishing, 2013). Also valuable are the expert and witness testimonies and

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evidence compiled by the IPT: Final Report of the IPT 1965: Findings and Documents, www.tribunal1965.org/en/final-report-of-the-ipt-1965/. There are also a number of good new historical studies. These usefully complement earlier works such as Cribb (ed.), The Indonesian Killings; John Roosa, Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto’s Coup d’État in Indonesia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006); Bradley Simpson, Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.–Indonesian Relations, 1960–1968 (Stanford University Press, 2008). Newer works such as Melvin, The Army and the Indonesian Genocide; Robinson, The Killing Season; and Douglas Kammen and Katharine McGregor (eds.), The Contours of Mass Violence in Indonesia, 1965–68 (Singapore: NUS Press, 2012) are especially noteworthy. Documentary sources are more problematic. While a good many declassified government documents can now be found in the US, British, Australian and other national archives, and through nongovernmental portals like the National Security Archive (NSA), a number of the most important files are still classified (NSA, ‘Indonesia Documentation Project’, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/project/indonesiadocumentation-project). Meanwhile, the relevant Indonesian archives remain closed. While some researchers have stumbled upon important official documents in local archives and private collections, full access to Indonesian government and military archives is a distant dream.

East Timor There is now a rich body of source material for the study of East Timor’s genocide. Among the most valuable and comprehensive is Chega!, the final report of East Timor’s Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR). For the period shortly before and after the 1975 invasion, a wellcurated selection of declassified US government documents is available online through the NSA. Declassified government documents are available through the Australian National Archives and in Wendy Way (ed.), Documents on Australian Foreign Policy: Australia and the Indonesian Incorporation of Portuguese Timor, 1974–1976 (Canberra: Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, 2000). The periodic reports of international human rights organisations, like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, offer detailed contemporary accounts of the violence from the mid1980s onward. For the final years of the occupation, especially the pivotal year 1999, the reports of various UN bodies and mechanisms also provide invaluable material. Several newer monographs on the genocide complement and update important older works such as John G. Taylor, East Timor: The Price of 474

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Freedom (London: Zed Books, 2000); James Dunn, Timor: A People Betrayed (Sydney: ABC Books, 1996); Arnold Kohen, From the Place of the Dead: The Biography of Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo of East Timor (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999). Additional documents and secondary materials can be accessed through the websites of the East Timor Action Network (ETAN), the Yale Genocide Studies Program and the Clearing House for Archival Records on Timor (CHART).

West Papua Materials for the study of the violence in West Papua are not yet as rich as those for the other cases discussed here. Essential reading includes Carmel Budiardjo and Liem Soei Liong, West Papua: The Obliteration of a People, 3rd rev. ed. (London: TAPOL, 1988); Osborne, Indonesia’s Secret War; Saltford, The United Nations and the Indonesian Takeover of West Papua; Webster, ‘“Already sovereign as a people”’; and Anderson, ‘Colonialism and cold genocide’. The NSA has a revealing collection of declassified US government documents pertaining to the disputed 1969 ‘Act of Free Choice’: ‘Indonesia’s 1969 takeover of West Papua not by “free choice”’, https:// nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB128/index.htm. But much of the most important material about West Papua is found in the periodic reports and updates of international human rights organisations and solidarity groups, including the International Coalition for Papua (ICP), ETAN, Tapol, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Some valuable information can also be gleaned from the reports of UN bodies and mechanisms, which have usefully been compiled on the ICP website, www.humanrightspapua.org/. While these reports often include eyewitness accounts or personal testimonies, there are few readily accessible English-language compilations of such testimony from survivors or perpetrators. Few if any Indonesian government documents have yet been made available.

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Secession and Genocide in the Republic of Biafra, 1966–1970 samuel fury childs daly

The Nigerian Civil War, also known as the Nigeria–Biafra War, was fought between the Federal Republic of Nigeria and its breakaway eastern province from 1967 to 1970. The Republic of Biafra’s secession in May 1967 was a response to widespread violence against members of the Igbo ethnic group. Igbos constituted a long-standing internal diaspora across the Nigerian federation, especially its Northern Region. The Eastern Region, where most Igbo people had their ancestral homes, seceded in the name of protecting their lives and interests. The secessionist government argued that a genocide was taking place, citing the fact that Nigerian soldiers and police had participated in the killings of Igbos the previous year. They also argued that Nigeria pursued a genocidal strategy in the war that followed. Biafra’s status as a genocide was contested at the time, and it remains so in historical memory. Its importance as a case study lies not only in the particularities of its violence, but in what it reveals about how genocide claims can be instrumentalised. For the purposes of this chapter, the question of whether Biafra was a genocide is less important than how that argument was made, and what function it served in the context of the war. Not all who cautioned against seeing Biafra as a genocide were apologists for violence, and not all who claimed that it was a case of genocide did so for the same reasons. To Biafrans, it seemed self-evident that Nigeria was engaged in genocide. Reams of propaganda made this case, inspiring many foreign sympathisers to support Biafra’s independence as an act of self-defence. The situation was less clear on the ground. There was more than one story to tell; the Nigerian government’s treatment of Igbos varied from place to place, and it changed over the course of the war. In 1968, ‘impartial’ observers from the Organisation of African Unity, the United Nations and various friendly countries were invited by the Nigerian government to monitor the situation. They found that no genocide was taking place. Biafra subsequently staged

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a visit by its own observers, who concluded the opposite. After Biafra’s defeat, Nigeria and its allies insisted that it was a civil war in which one side had skilfully turned the language of genocide against the other. Historical analogy muddled the picture, and for many years the question continued to be whether Biafra was a genocide or a civil war, occluding the possibility that it might have characteristics of both. As the historians Dirk Moses and Lasse Heerten write, ‘all parties have been transfixed by the Holocaust dramaturgy, thereby missing the point that war and genocide are not utterly distinct categories, indeed that genocides usually take place during military conflict: war can be waged in a genocidal manner’.1 What is indisputable is that the events of 1966 and the war that followed were extremely destructive, and that most of those harmed were Igbos. The war’s demographic, political and social effects persisted long after Biafra’s defeat, and they are still felt in Nigeria today. For many Nigerians, the taxonomical question of how to categorise what took place between 1966 and 1970 was less important than putting the country back together again. For others, the genocide question has always been paramount. This chapter offers an overview of the events from mid-1966 to Biafra’s defeat in January 1970, with particular attention to what Scott Straus calls acts of ‘mass categorical violence’ – violence deployed against groups to coerce, punish or alter them, but not necessarily to destroy them.2 This violence is distinct from genocide, but it is not a lower order of harm. What follows is a selective account of the war; it provides a focused discussion of some of the episodes most important to the arguments about genocide, but it is not a full picture. Important debates about the war’s causes, its diplomatic context and its legacies are beyond the scope of this analysis. A tight focus does not make for a clearer picture of the war, however. What happened in Biafra constituted a genocide by some definitions and not by others, and to argue conclusively for one side or the other requires ignoring or explaining away evidence to the contrary. To this end, the chapter emphasises the importance of perspective. Both the Nigerian and Biafran sides understood the special power of genocide claims, and they devoted considerable resources to publicising their cases internationally. Biafra’s history is to be found in these partisan materials, alongside memoirs, oral histories and the records of humanitarian organisations. The germane question about Biafra is not 1 A. Dirk Moses and L. Heerten (eds.), The Nigeria–Biafra War, 1967–1970: Postcolonial Conflict and the Question of Genocide (London: Routledge, 2017), p. 25. 2 S. Straus, Making and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership, and Genocide in Modern Africa (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), p. 26.

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only whether a genocide occurred, but how it came to be remembered that way by some, and not by others.

Background The Nigerian Civil War was fought over the place of a province – the Eastern Region – in the Nigerian federation. Ethnicity was one of the war’s fault lines, but it was not the only one. Igbos made up two-thirds of the east’s population, but they were not the only people there. Moreover, although Igbos had a distinct language and culture, these were not the only ways they defined themselves.3 Class, place of origin, lineage and caste all informed what it meant to be Igbo. So too did religion (many Igbos were Catholic) and professional identity.4 Arguably, ‘the Igbo’ as a discrete, singular people had emerged only recently, in the context of the trans-Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans and the advent of British colonialism. ‘Igbo’ could mean many things, and the tradition of living in dispersed, autonomous and democratically administered villages meant that Igbos had not always seen themselves as a single community. The civil war would change that. Chinua Achebe, who was one of Biafra’s intellectual leaders, later wrote that, although Igbo solidarity was largely a figment of other peoples’ imaginations, the closest Igbos ever came to the clannishness ascribed to them was during the war.5 The fear of extermination, he argued, galvanised them into thinking of themselves as a group. Igbo identity had a longer history than the war, but it was more fractious and plural than post-war accounts would make it seem. Igbos lived widely dispersed across the Nigerian federation, even though most of them traced their origins to the Eastern Region. Over the course of the colonial period, they had sought out opportunities throughout Nigeria, especially in the Muslim-majority Northern Region. There, they worked as traders, wholesalers and professionals, and some served as clerks and bureaucrats in the colonial government. Their relationships with the ‘indigenes’ of the places they settled were not always amicable, but they were more often 3 Even as a linguistic category, ‘Igbo’ did not always hang together. For example, Igbo speakers who lived west of the Niger River differentiated themselves from those to the east. This would become a major tension during the war. 4 See generally J. N. Oriji, Political Organization in Nigeria since the Late Stone Age: A History of the Igbo People (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); A. Harneit-Sievers, Constructions of Belonging: Igbo Communities and the Nigerian State in the Twentieth Century (University of Rochester Press, 2006); D. van den Bersselaar, In Search of Igbo Identity: Language, Culture and Politics in Nigeria, 1900–1966 (Leiden: Research School CNWS, 1998), p. 303. 5 C. Achebe, The Trouble with Nigeria (Oxford: Heinemann, 1984), p. 47.

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peaceable than not. As a community scattered the length and breadth of Nigeria, Igbos arguably had more to gain from nation building – and more to lose from its failure – than those whose horizons extended no further than their towns or regions. They invested heavily in Nigerian nationalism, which would make the events of the late 1960s ‘all the more paradoxical, perplexing and painful’, as the historian Adiele Afigbo later wrote.6 Igbos were resented for their professional and commercial success; they were seen as ‘compradors’ who took advantage of those they did business with, and they were treated with suspicion for their apparent closeness to state power. As a Biafran administrator wrote in his memoirs, fear lay at the heart of this hostility. ‘No doubt, the Igbo had certain attributes which offended others; there were just too many of them in other peoples’ land, and so were perceived as wanting to take over the Enterprise – Nigeria.’7 After independence from Britain in 1960, there were attempts to ‘indigenise’ local government in the north, which entailed replacing European administrators and training northerners for the civil service. This dovetailed with antipathy towards Igbos, some of whom occupied high-profile positions in the region’s bureaucracy. Igbos in the north found themselves in an increasingly difficult position. The regional government recognised that administration and commerce depended on them, and the Nigerian constitution guaranteed their right to live wherever they chose. But their local governments, some of their neighbours and a small but vocal group of ideologues wanted them gone.

The Events of the Genocide The argument that Biafra was a case of genocide is based on two distinct but interlocking episodes. The first was a series of mass killings of Igbos in the north in 1966, and the second was the war that followed. The 1966 killings had long- and short-term causes. In the long term, rumours of Igbo political conspiracies had built over many years, and economic resentment and religious discord had boiled over into violence several times in the past. More immediately, the killings were spurred by events in Lagos. On 15 January 1966, the Nigerian First Republic was overthrown by a group of five junior officers in the Nigerian army. In the course of the coup, several 6 A. E. Afigbo, ‘Igbo interests in Nigeria: the prelude’, in Igbo History and Society: The Essays of Adiele Afigbo, ed. T. Falola (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2005), p. 476. 7 G. A. Onyegbula, The Memoirs of the Nigerian-Biafran Bureaucrat: An Account of Life in Biafra and Within Nigeria (Ibadan: Spectrum, 2005), pp. 242–3.

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prominent northern and western politicians were assassinated. They included Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, the federal prime minister, and Ahmadu Bello, the Northern Region premier – both beloved figures in the north. The coup plotters failed to capture the entire country, and after several days of grappling they surrendered. An Igbo brigadier named Johnson AguiyiIronsi became head of state. Ironsi had played no role in the failed coup, but he shared some of the plotters’ reformist goals. Nigeria’s new military government was initially popular. Many had come to see the civilian politicians of the First Republic as venal and inept, and the new military regime’s promises to clean up corruption were encouraging. But public sentiment quickly soured, especially in the north. Ironsi did not pursue those responsible for killing Balewa and Bello, and on 24 May 1966 he announced that he was consolidating federal power at the expense of the regional governments. In the north, this was seen as a power grab, and the fact that Ironsi was Igbo fuelled speculation about what Igbos ‘really’ aspired to. Northerners began to lash out in anger – not at the distant federal government in Lagos, but at the Igbos who lived among them. Demonstrations against the unification decree blurred into anti-Igbo riots in northern towns and cities, and people began to be killed. Rumours circulated that Igbo traders laced the food they sold to Muslims with pig fat, or that they circulated images demeaning the prophet Muhammed or Ahmadu Bello. These rumours, which had little basis in fact, provoked violence against Christian Igbos across the region. Kano was the scene of the sharpest violence, but smaller cities and towns, where only a few Igbos might live, were affected as well. Most of the perpetrators of the violence against Igbos were private citizens, some of whom were attached to local politicians. Many were unemployed young men recently arrived from the countryside, whose allegiances could be bought cheaply. It was not hard for them to identify their victims, since most Igbos lived in clearly defined neighbourhoods called ‘sabon gari’, or strangers’ quarters. Individual perpetrators did not act alone, and the mechanics of who was organising them remain shadowy. An ‘orthodoxy of opinion among Nigerians of many ethnic stripes’, as Douglas Anthony writes, holds that ousted politicians of the civilian regime were most directly responsible for whipping up public sentiment, but different patterns obtained in different northern towns.8 8 See D. Anthony, Poison and Medicine: Ethnicity, Power, and Violence in a Nigerian City, 1966 to 1986 (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2002), p. 64.

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The response of Nigerian authorities also varied, ranging from valiant attempts to protect Igbos to enthusiastic participation in the violence. The Nigerian Police Force – a federal body with a national character – usually intervened against the killings. The locally commissioned Native Authority Police Forces, however, often participated in them. High-ranking political figures with ties to the regional or federal governments generally protected Igbos, but those whose power was locally derived were more likely to aid their killers. There were exceptions to this pattern, however. One of the most well-documented acts of violence was at Kano Airport, where mutinying Nigerian soldiers openly massacred Igbo passengers – and the Nigerian army was hardly a local institution. To the historian Chima Korieh, this adds up to evidence of a planned extermination: ‘The testimonies of Biafran returnees from northern Nigeria towns and cities paint a picture of systematic and calculated genocide planned by northern emirs, district heads, former politicians, top civil servants, university students, British nationals, and law enforcement officers.’9 Many different parties had a hand in the violence. The number of Igbos killed is unclear, but it was in the thousands: the Northern Region government initially estimated 7,000 casualties, but shortly thereafter revised it to 30,000. The Eastern Region governor and future Biafran leader would later claim that 80,000 Igbos had been killed in the north between May and October.10 On 28 July 1966, a group of northern officers staged a counter-coup and assassinated Ironsi. A young major general named Yakubu Gowon came to power, and he reversed Ironsi’s reforms of the federal structure. Anti-Igbo violence in the north continued, however, and as 1966 came to a close most of the survivors decided to leave. Igbos departed for the Eastern Region en masse, taking with them only what they could carry. The east was overwhelmed with refugees, and stories of what had happened to them in the north fuelled anger towards the federal government. Attempts were made at conciliation, and in January 1967 Gowon and the Eastern Region’s military governor, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, agreed to a confederal arrangement that gave greater autonomy to the east. In the months that followed, the federal government reneged on the promises Gowon had made at the negotiating table. Tensions mounted between Nigeria and the Eastern

9 C. Korieh (ed.), The Nigeria–Biafra War: Genocide and the Politics of Memory (Amherst: Cambria Press, 2012), p. 11. 10 D. Anthony, ‘“Ours is a war of survival”: Biafra, Nigeria and arguments about genocide, 1966–70’, Journal of Genocide Research 16 (2014), 205–25, at 212–18.

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Region, and Ojukwu began to make discreet inquiries about whether he could count on foreign support if war broke out. On 30 May 1967, the Eastern Region seceded from Nigeria. (See Map 20.1.) The new country called itself the Republic of Biafra, and Ojukwu justified its independence in the name of protecting Igbos. However, not all in Biafra were Igbos. Roughly a third of the population of some 14 million consisted of non-Igbos, and in the coastal regions Igbos were in fact a minority. Ojukwu insisted that ethnicity was not what defined his new country. Secession was not only a response to a violent past – it was an attempt to create a new future. Biafra’s propagandists and politicians maintained that it was not an Igbo country, but a pluralistic state committed to racial uplift and public order.11 Nigeria was not willing to let its eastern region go, and war broke out between the federal military government of Nigeria and the Republic of Biafra. The Biafran army had some early military successes, but Nigeria had an overwhelming tactical advantage. In a bid to obtain foreign support, the Biafran government began to argue that the war was an act of genocide by Nigeria. There was ample proof for those looking for it. Nigerian politicians spoke publicly of starving Biafra out of existence, and events early in the war gave credence to the fear that Nigeria’s aim was not only to defeat the rebel army, but to exterminate Igbos. The most famous such event was a co-ordinated massacre in the town of Asaba. In October 1967, Biafran troops retreated across the Niger River from an aborted westward offensive. They destroyed the bridge behind them, leaving Asaba stranded. When Nigerian troops under Murtala Muhammed arrived to occupy the town, they systematically killed approximately 700 Igbo civilians there.12 This pattern was repeated in other towns that fell to Nigeria. Calabar, where Igbos were a minority, was the setting for some of the most brutal episodes of the Nigerian reoccupation. Nigeria captured Calabar in mid-October 1967 following a three-day siege with heavy casualties on the Biafran side. Skirmishes continued in outlying areas, where Biafran troops were surrounded by hostile civilians now emboldened by the presence of Nigerian soldiers nearby. Igbos were killed across the region, though unlike in Asaba the violence in and around Calabar 11 See D. Anthony, “Resourceful and Progressive Blackmen”: Modernity and race in Biafra, 1967–1970’, Journal of African History 51 (2010), 41–61; S. Daly, ‘A Nation on Paper: Making a state in the Republic of Biafra’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 62:4 (2020), 868–94. 12 See S. Elizabeth Bird and F. M. Ottanelli, The Asaba Massacre: Trauma, Memory, and the Nigerian Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

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Map 20.1 Biafra, 1967–1970. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108767118.021

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was unco-ordinated. Non-Igbo civilians turned against their Igbo neighbours, although there were also cases of participation by Nigerian soldiers. Local people in Calabar tried to shelter their Igbo friends and neighbours, and if discovered were killed alongside the people they were hiding. Hundreds of houses and businesses were looted in a joint effort by civilians and Nigerian soldiers. When Port Harcourt fell to Nigeria seven months later, a similarly violent settling of scores followed. After these losses, Biafra’s position became mostly defensive. Biafra would have several military victories after this point, but for civilians it became a war of survival. The Nigerian military’s actions along the front were concealed from international observers, diplomats and the press. Nonetheless, reports reached the outside world, and foreign journalists and governments began to scrutinise Nigeria’s actions more closely. Nigeria’s representatives insisted that Nigerian soldiers respected the rights of civilians, but evidence to the contrary mounted. The massacres in occupied Asaba and Calabar were used as evidence that the war, and not only the killings of 1966, constituted an act of genocide. Aerial bombings were also cited as proof of intent; the use of shrapnel bombs, which had no function other than causing loss of life, suggested that Nigeria was trying to do more than cripple Biafra militarily. The most damning indictment of Nigeria’s conduct was famine. Nigeria imposed a blockade that became fatally effective after Biafra lost access to the sea in May 1968. A good harvest was not enough to keep hunger at bay, and starvation and protein deficiencies became widespread. The lack of food and medicine directly affected civilians, but Nigeria and its allies argued that the blockade was not categorically different from other tactics of warfare. Federal officials knew the extent of the famine, and some of them publicly embraced the policy. Federal finance commissioner Obafemi Awolowo told reporters that ‘all is fair in war and starvation is one of the weapons of war. I don’t see why we should feed our enemies fat, only to fight us harder.’13 Colonel Benjamin Adekunle, the impetuous leader of the Nigerian Third Marine Commando, famously boasted that if he marched into an Igbo village, ‘we shoot everything that moves’, and that ‘in the sector of the front which I command – and that is the whole of the south front from Lagos to the Cameroon border – I will not [do not want to] see any Red Cross, any Caritas, any World Council of Churches, Pope, missionary, or U.N. delegation.’14 Adekunle’s high rank suggested that excessive violence 13 NAUK FCO 65/250, Press clipping from the Daily Telegraph [London], 26 June 1969. 14 NAUK FCO 38/285, Sir David Hunt to Commonwealth Office, 22 January 1968.

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was not just the doing of a few bad apples at the bottom of the military hierarchy, but a co-ordinated plan. Many Nigerian commanders acted with restraint and professionalism, but figures like Adekunle would be the ones who were most remembered. Biafra’s supporters took these fiery statements at face value, but they did not tell the full story. Gowon himself took a more sober tone, and the question of who spoke for the Nigerian state, and who among its members voiced its ‘true’ intent, was debated throughout the war. Other Nigerian leaders expressed concern about the welfare of eastern civilians, and encouraged the federal military government to allow humanitarian aid into the east. Under international pressure, Nigeria agreed to open a land corridor across the front in June 1968, with the condition that only the International Committee of the Red Cross would be allowed to use it. Biafra rejected this arrangement, insisting that food could not be delivered through Nigerian territory, where it might be poisoned. Ojukwu’s objection was also strategic – an aid corridor might breach the enclave’s defences. Instead, Biafra was fed through an airlift from the Portuguese territory of São Tomé, conducted at great risk by foreign aid organisations. It was not nearly enough to hold off the famine. The logic of the violence changed as Nigeria chipped away at Biafra.15 As its minority regions came under Nigerian control, Biafra’s association with the Igbo people became tighter. At this point, the fighting took on a different character. It was now directed at a single group, and it was harder to argue that the war was a conflict between two pluralistic states, rather than aggression by Nigeria against one of its constituent communities. The tone of the violence changed not only over time, but over territory. Nigeria’s conduct was very different from one place to another. If one was looking at the war from the vantage point of Asaba, it seemed obvious that a genocide was taking place. Elsewhere, it was less clear. In Nsukka, the Nigerian reoccupation brought not retribution, but food and medical care, followed by attempts to reintegrate Igbos into Nigerian society. (See Figure 20.1.) As an internal memorandum from the Nigerian air force reminded officers, ‘the aim is to preserve the Federation, not to destroy the Igbos, whom we want to keep in the Federation’.16 This spirit was honoured in some of the war’s arenas, and ignored in others (like Adekunle’s). 15 S. Daly, A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2020). 16 Nigerian National Archives, Kaduna MOI/326, ‘Priority of air force targets and suggestions for prosecuting the war’, August 1967, p. 2.

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Figure 20.1 City of Nsukka. Troops of the federal government entering the university at Nsukka. (Photo: Bruno Barbey/Magnum Photos)

In the first year of the fighting, Biafrans called their cause a struggle for selfdetermination. Later, they would call it self-preservation. The Biafran government published pamphlets that called the events of 1966 ‘pogroms’, replete with gruesome photographs of the violence, and its skilled propagandists (including literary figures like Achebe and Cyprien Ekwensi) argued forcefully that the war was a genocide. A Biafran agency co-ordinated visits to the front for foreign journalists, who returned with horrifying photographs of the famine.17 Images of children dying from a protein deficiency called kwashiorkor were particularly confronting, and with the help of a European public-relations firm they circulated worldwide. Biafra’s propaganda was striking, and it succeeded in convincing much of the global public that Nigeria’s actions were genocidal. It was hard to argue with images of emaciated children. The memory of the Holocaust was not remote, and Biafran partisans capitalised on that memory by arguing that Igbos were the ‘Jews of Africa’. Images of starving Biafrans called to mind the survivors of concentration camps, and for many this was evidence enough that 17 On Biafra’s propaganda see R. Doron, ‘Marketing genocide: Biafran propaganda strategies during the Nigerian Civil War, 1967–1970’, Journal of Genocide Research 16 (2014), 227–46; B. McNeil, ‘“And starvation is the grim reaper”: the American Committee to Keep Biafra Alive and the genocide question during the Nigerian civil war, 1968–70’, Journal of Genocide Research 16 (2014), 317–36.

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a genocide was going on. Most foreign governments sided with Nigeria, however, and Biafra obtained diplomatic recognition only from a handful of states.18 Its most powerful allies were ones it would not have wanted in any other circumstances. They included the then colonial power Portugal, which hoped to cultivate an ally in independent Africa, and France, which quietly supported Biafra in the hope that it might one day become a client state. The politics that had led to this situation faded into the background. The genocide claim was not only an appeal to the outside world, however – it also kept the Biafran public committed to the war effort. An American intelligence report observed that ‘a fear of genocide and an hysterical loyalty to Ojukwu have induced a kind of self-hypnosis marked by a blind determination to keep fighting’.19 In a constitution-like document called the Ahiara Declaration, Ojukwu used the accusation not only to make the case for independence, but to define Biafra’s ideology.20 While Biafra’s diplomats tarred Nigeria to any audience that would listen, ordinary people struggled to survive from one day to the next. Conditions were dangerous; hunger, bombardment and internal threats to liberty like press-ganging were increasingly common as the fighting went on. The fight against Nigeria was the most potent form of violence in Biafra, but it was not the only one. Confrontations away from the lines of engagement, often by Biafrans against one another, could be destructive as well. ‘Survival’ became the watchword of the war. An oral history project conducted in the 1990s found that ‘many people perceived their individual survival and the survival of Biafra as being closely linked. This was a widespread conviction even if, in reality, the government was distant, did not take care of local society, but rather demanded local resources for the continuation of the war. Few civil government functions remained.’21 By the final year of the war, the Biafran state was little more than a hungry army and a threadbare bureaucracy. But Biafra never came off the spool completely, even as its name became shorthand for suffering. The war dragged on until January 1970, when a Nigerian military operation surrounded the remains of the enclave and captured the airstrip at Uli that

18 J. Stremlau, The International Politics of the Nigerian Civil War (Princeton University Press, 1977); S. Cronje, The World and Nigeria: The Diplomatic History of the Biafran War, 1967–1970 (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1972). 19 NAUK FCO 65/213, United States Embassy, Lagos, to Secretary of State, 27 October 1969. 20 E. Ojukwu, The Ahiara Declaration, 1 June 1969 (Enugu: Heritage, 1993), p. 2. 21 A. Harneit-Sievers, J. O. Ahazuem and S. Emezue (eds.), A Social History of the Nigerian Civil War (Enugu: Jemezie Associates, 1997), p. 52.

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had become Biafra’s only link to the outside world. The Igbo civilians who crammed into the land that Biafra still controlled had been led to believe they would be killed if Biafra surrendered, but this was not what happened. Food was rushed in, bringing the famine to an end, and civilians were encouraged to make their way back to their homes. International humanitarian agencies wound down their relief operations in the months after Biafra’s defeat, and the extreme crisis of hunger gave way to less dramatic, but no less widespread, forms of everyday deprivation. After Biafra’s defeat, the Nigerian military government faced a difficult task. The human cost of the war was huge; Biafra’s sympathisers estimated that over 2 million civilians had been killed, but even the Nigerian government’s estimate of 500,000 casualties would have been demographically staggering. The toll was almost certainly higher, although it would be sharply contested by how much. Moreover, infrastructure had been destroyed, and the economy was decimated. Few opportunities were available in the Igbomajority region of the east, now called the East Central State. The brief prosperity that the 1973 OPEC oil embargo brought to Nigeria would barely be felt there. The Gowon regime pursued a policy that it called ‘no victor, no vanquished’ after the war, which guaranteed that those who had supported the Biafran side would not be punished for having done so. Igbos had many grievances with how the post-war unfolded. Punitive policies were enacted despite Gowon’s promises, and the war’s psychic wounds were deep. But Igbos’ greatest fear did not come to pass. Rather than being annihilated, the people who had lost the war were welcomed back into Nigeria – even though they would not be the ones to set the terms of their reintegration. (See Figure 20.2.)

Biafra’s Legacies in Post-war Nigeria The federal government’s promises of reconciliation clashed with its actual policies in the new East Central State, and some state governments attempted to prevent Igbos from returning to their former homes. One of the most trenchant questions to emerge was what would become of the properties that Igbos had left behind in other parts of Nigeria when they fled to Biafra during the war. The federal government had promised Igbos that it would maintain their ‘abandoned’ properties in trust; their property rights would continue, rents would be collected on their behalf, and the federal government would help them reclaim their houses whenever they wanted to return. But when ex-Biafrans came back to other parts of Nigeria after 1970, 488

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Figure 20.2 Aba, Nigeria (ex-Biafra). Food is displayed in the market, a sign that the famine which was the result of the civil war, is over. (Photo: A. Abbas/Magnum Photos)

they found that these promises were not consistently honoured. Those who returned to the north received some assistance from the state governments in reclaiming their houses, but few saw the rent that had been collected on their behalf. In southern Nigeria, and especially in Port Harcourt and Calabar, state and local governments actively worked against property claims by Igbos. Thousands of disputes over abandoned houses and businesses arose, and most would be settled only later through heavy-handed federal interventions. Other policies seemed designed to punish Igbos financially. A series of banking decrees stipulated that the contents of any bank account registered in the east that had been used during the war would be forfeited to pay for ‘reconstruction’. These regulations made millions of ex-Biafrans into paupers, and what they received in return was a flat sum of £20 per person for ‘rehabilitation’. The Nigerian government was also slow to rebuild damaged infrastructure, most notably the bridge over the Niger that connected east and west. Biafra ceased to be a place on the map in 1970, but the war created longlasting divisions. Perhaps most importantly, it provided an alibi for the continuation of military rule. For thirty years after Biafra’s defeat, soldiers justified their prominent role in national politics by invoking the spectre of

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secession. Ethnic and regional divisions were papered over after Biafra’s defeat, and they became more complex as Nigeria was carved into evermore states. Some partisans continued to assert, in most cases from exile, that the events of 1966–70 constituted an Igbo genocide.22 The case for Igbo injury has many dimensions, ranging from the war’s death toll to the fact that Nigeria has not had an Igbo head of state since its end.23 A truth and reconciliation commission took place in the early 2000s, but its report never circulated in Nigeria, and it has been ignored by subsequent governments.24 Since the end of military rule in 1999, organisations like the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) and Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) have taken up the cause of independence once again. The nostalgic idea of Biafra these groups traffic in bears little resemblance to the Biafra of the 1960s, although protecting Igbos remains their central aim.25 The Nigerian government paid them little attention, given the other, more immediate problems it faced – among them the Boko Haram insurgency in the north and the long crisis in the Niger Delta region. Recently, however, neo-Biafran activism and the response to it have become more urgent. In 2015, the arrest of the activist Nnamdi Kanu and a series of increasingly pointed demonstrations put Biafra back in the headlines, and since 2017 agitation in the east has become constant. Nigeria’s large diaspora plays an important role in this new Biafran movement. The Nigerian government has responded to it with an unpredictable mix of indifference and repression, and it is not clear what place, if any, Biafra will have in Nigeria’s political future.

Biafra’s Lessons for the Study of Genocide Biafra’s history offers a mixed message for the broader study of genocide. Some of the events that took place between 1966 and 1970 would fit the standard of genocide established by legal instruments like the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention, or the Rome Statute. In some places, the 22 See esp. H. Ekwe-Ekwe, Biafra Revisited (Dakar: African Renaissance, 2007). 23 See J. Igbokwe, Igbos Twenty Five Years after Biafra (Lagos: Advent Communications, Ltd, 1995); P. Obi-Ani, Post-Civil War Political and Economic Reconstruction of Igboland, 1970–1983 (Enugu: Great AP Express, 2009); O. Anyasi, Igbos: What Role in Today’s Nigeria (Lagos: Orient Publishing Company, 1994). 24 Human Rights Violations Investigation Commission Report (Washington DC: Nigerian Democratic Movement, 2005); see also Tom Lodge, ‘Conflict resolution in Nigeria after the 1967–1970 Civil War’, African Studies 77 (2018), 1–22. 25 I. Okonta, ‘Biafran Ghosts: The MASSOB Ethnic Militia and Nigeria’s Democratisation Process’, Discussion Paper 73, Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, Uppsala, 2012, p. 19.

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violence was centrally planned by state actors. It was sometimes explicitly directed against members of an ethnic group – the Igbo. In the statements of some Nigerian officials, ‘Biafrans’ rather than Igbos were the objects of destruction, but this does not obviate the genocide charge; the sociological definitions of genocide encompass not only the attempted destruction of ethnic communities (like ‘the Igbo’) but also political ones (like ‘Biafrans’). But all of these statements are modified with some; Nigeria had no consistent pattern of action – genocidal or otherwise – and the preponderance of evidence suggests that Nigeria’s aim in the war was not the destruction of the Igbo people, but the preservation of the federation. That said, the fact that this was Nigeria’s overarching aim does not preclude the possibility that genocide happened along the way. Under the 1948 Genocide Convention, while an intent to destroy a group ‘as such’ must be present, a genocidal motive (rather than a military or political motive) does not have to be present for the appellation to apply. Moreover, it does not have to be demonstrated that every (or indeed any) agent of the state was explicitly committed to the cause of extermination for an episode to be classified as genocide. Biafra also raises difficult questions about measurement and scale. Credible estimates for the number of casualties range from 500,000 to over 2 million, and it is impossible to say confidently where within that band the true number lies. Estimates converge in the range of 1–1.5 million, however, and this is likely a realistic, if imprecise, estimate.26 The unreliability of census figures from before and after the war – to say nothing of attempts to count the dead during the conflict itself – makes precision impossible. But as Alex de Waal writes, the number ‘is not the point’.27 Whatever it was, the war and the events leading up to it did permanent damage to Nigeria – demographically, economically and to families and communities. Most of those who died were civilians and, because starvation was used as a weapon, the young, old and infirm suffered disproportionately.28 Biafran casualties dramatically exceeded Nigerian ones, but many Nigerian soldiers and a small number of civilians died as well. The destruction was uneven, but the absence of demographic information means that its nuances are anecdotal. More people 26 See C. Korieh, ‘Biafra and the discourse on the Igbo genocide’, Journal of Asian and African Studies 48 (2013),727–40, at 734. 27 A. de Waal, Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 1997), p. 75. 28 See A. Omaka, The Biafran Humanitarian Crisis, 1967–1970: International Human Rights and Joint Church Aid (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2016); L. Heerten, The Biafran War and Postcolonial Humanitarianism: Spectacles of Suffering (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

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died in aerial bombings at the beginning of the war than the end, for example, and Nigeria’s blockade policy only produced mass starvation after the middle of the war. For Biafran civilians, the strategy of the military leadership and the relative strength or weakness of the Biafran army were not the main factors that determined the odds of survival. Rather, it was often the local availability of food – grown, smuggled or obtained from humanitarian organisations – that decided how many would live or die in a given place. Certain features often associated with genocide were absent in Biafra. The Nigerian government did not fear the Igbo civilian population, for example, as the perpetrators of genocides frequently do.29 Many Nigerians had resented Igbos before the war, but it would not be correct to say that the state saw them as a threat, and there had been no suspicion that they might be loyal to a foreign power. There was not a strategic commitment to genocide among the Nigerian leadership – and arguably they had no coherent strategy at all.30 Even at its most extreme, Nigeria’s violence against Biafra aimed to deter its secession. Nigeria’s leaders saw Igbo loyalties as winnable; they paraded loyalists like Ukpabi Asika and Nnamdi Azikiwe (after his defection to the Nigerian side) to the international press as proof of Nigeria’s good intentions, and although Igbos who surrendered at Nigerian encampments were often treated poorly, they were not killed. Some within Nigeria wanted to write them out of the country’s future, but this was not the state’s stance writ large. Nigeria’s culpability also depends on whom one counts as part of the Nigerian state. Were the emirs who appeared to have abetted the killing of Igbos part of the state? What about civilians in Calabar or Port Harcourt? Did the complicity of a part of Nigeria’s complex federal structure implicate the entire government in genocide? To Biafra’s leaders the answer to these questions was yes, but defenders of Nigeria argued that they were irrelevant – the purpose of Nigeria’s violence had been to reassert control over its errant province, not to eliminate the people who lived there. This would not mean that genocide was absent – merely that it may not have been state-sponsored. Genocide can be perpetrated by private actors. There are also questions about scale and consistency. How many acts of killing define an event as a genocide? If exterminating violence must take a consistent form over time and space to be considered genocidal, then Nigeria’s actions probably were not. But if the standard is lower, then they probably were; Nigeria embarked 29 Straus, Making and Unmaking Nations, p. 18. 30 On the strategic aspects of genocide, see B. A. Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), pp. 66–91.

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on a policy of mass starvation, bombed civilian installations and turned a blind eye to acts of killing committed by both soldiers and civilians. A large number of children evacuated from Biafra at the height of the conflict were never reunited with their families, in one of the war’s more poignant tragedies. But even the most damning pieces of evidence come with caveats and counterpoints; Biafra rejected Nigeria’s offer to open a humanitarian aid corridor, and the disastrous removal of children had been organised by Biafra, not Nigeria. This episode provides a case study in how claims of genocide can be instrumentalised. Biafra’s founders ardently hoped that if the international community recognised that a genocide was going on, they would be spurred to act in Biafra’s defence. They made this case to international organisations, but they did not succeed in transforming abstract responsibilities to protect into actual interventions. They also addressed foreign publics, and in this they were much more successful. Biafra is still remembered as a genocide by many of the people who lived through it, or watched it unfold from afar. But this strategy was not effective in the way that Biafra’s leadership hoped it would be; popular sympathy did not translate into diplomatic recognition or military support, and the humanitarian aid that it brought had the dual effect of keeping civilians alive and prolonging their suffering by drawing out Biafra’s ability to fight.31 The press could see that there was a pattern of targeting Biafran civilians, but there were enough counter-examples to that pattern that the genocide label did not adhere firmly. Biafra was one of the first wars to be extensively televised, and its events were closely monitored by international bodies, foreign governments and the global press. Yet the fact that it was closely watched did not mean that it was clear what was going on; even in the moment, there was no consensus about how to characterise the violence – besides the fact that it was tragic. Biafra’s history underscores the difficulty of distinguishing the general conditions of war from genocide – especially when one of the belligerents overlaps substantially with an ethnic group. The line between warfare and genocide was paper thin, and Biafra was not the only place where this was true. Indeed, many armed conflicts appear genocidal when examined through that lens. The same is true of the reverse. This subtlety did not mean much to those who survived the war, and a social historical perspective suggests that the fine distinctions that set apart genocide from the ‘legitimate’ 31 M. Pérouse de Montclos, ‘Humanitarian aid and the Biafra war: lessons not learned’, Africa Development 34 (2009), pp. 69–82.

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waging of war mean more to international lawyers than to the people who survive them. Biafra shows that the positions and perceptions of the belligerents – not only the empirical characteristics of the violence – determine what comes to be seen as genocide, and what does not.

Bibliographic Note There are hundreds of books on Biafra, most of them memoirs, polemics or works of fiction. The war was elided from Nigeria’s official history after it ended. The Gowon regime’s intentional destruction of records pertaining to the war, while suggesting it had much to hide, has frustrated inquiries into the scale of the violence, and the motivations of both sides’ leaders. Oral histories, memoirs and the records of foreign governments and organisations fill in some gaps, but questions about strategy and conduct remain unanswered. In Nigeria under military rule, intellectuals were imprisoned or forced into exile, universities and cultural organisations were stifled, and the federal government became increasingly secretive and paranoid. In these circumstances, few people felt they could openly comment on Biafra and its legacies. A notable exception was the landmark volume T. Tamuno (ed.), Nigeria since Independence, vol. V I: The Civil War Years (Ibadan: Heinemann, 1989). This series is a sober and comprehensive account of Nigeria’s postcolonial experience up to the 1980s, published by the University of Ibadan during a brief period of academic freedom. Axel Harneit-Sievers, Jones O. Ahazuem and Sydney Emezue’s Social History of the Nigerian Civil War was also important in opening dialogue on the war, and expanding the discussion beyond generals and diplomats to include the experiences of ordinary people. One of the more developed areas of research on the war is its gender history; work by historians like Egodi Uchendu and Gloria Chuku has shown how women and men experienced the fighting and adapted to it in different ways. See E. Uchendu, Women and Conflict in the Nigerian Civil War (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2007); C. Achebe, ‘Igbo women in the Nigerian–Biafran war 1967–1970: an interplay of control’, The Journal of Black Studies 40 (2010); G. Chuku, ‘Biafran women under fire: strategies in organising local and trans-border trade during the Nigerian Civil War’, in E. Osaghae, E. Onwudiwe and R. T. Suberu (eds.), The Nigerian Civil War and Its Aftermath (Ibadan: John Archers, 2002). For many historians of Biafra, the genocide question is the most important one of all. Historians Chima Korieh and Apollos Nwauwa have argued that the Nigerian blockade of Biafra and the pogroms of 1966 constituted acts 494

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of genocide. Historical works that engage with this question include: A. Nwauwa and C. Korieh (eds.), Against All Odds: The Igbo Experience in Postcolonial Nigeria (Baltimore: Goldline and Jacobs Publishing, 2011); Korieh (ed.), The Nigeria–Biafra War; G. O. Okoye, Proclivity to Genocide: Northern Nigeria Ethno-Religious Conflict, 1966 to Present (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014); U. Nwankwo, Zik, Ndi-Igbo and Their Southern Neighbors: Charting a New Political Direction for Nigeria (Lagos: Strategic Publishing, 2013). Others have called for Nigeria to be held accountable before the International Criminal Court. See, for example, Ekwe-Ekwe, Biafra Revisited. The various ‘plots’ and conspiracy theories that proliferated during the war – such as the alleged Igbo plot behind the Majors’ Coup of 1966 that overthrew the Nigerian First Republic, or the intrigue surrounding the deaths of various prominent officers – are major themes of the war literature. Many explain Biafra’s secession as a reaction to a particular event, usually either the pogroms of 1966 or the second military coup that installed Major General Yakubu Gowon as head of state. Generally, see G. N. Uzoigwe, Visions of Nationhood: Prelude to the Nigerian Civil War, 1960–1967 (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2011); E. Osaghae, Crippled Giant: Nigeria since Independence (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). To some, the war was the consequence of a federal arrangement that had been poorly balanced from the beginning. See A. KirkGreene, Crisis and Conflict in Nigeria: A Documentary Sourcebook, 1966–1970, 2 vols. (Aldershot: Gregg Revivals, 1993). For others, it was an expression of tensions within the military leadership. Personal ambitions or prejudices take centre stage in these accounts. A few contend that ethnicity was window dressing for other concerns – class conflict, for example, or the larger geopolitical concerns of the day. See A. Momoh, ‘Class struggle in Biafra’, in Perspectives on the Nigerian Civil War, ed. S. Oyeweso (Lagos: OAP Humanities Series, 1993); and A. Ademoyega, Why We Struck: The Story of the First Nigerian Coup (Ibadan: Evans Brothers, 2012). How Biafra itself worked often fades into the background, as does an appreciation of how it defined itself as a national community. During Nigeria’s long period of post-war military rule, fiction was the safest genre to tell the politically sensitive story of the war. Poets and novelists have been the most important figures in working through its legacy, producing dozens of widely read literary works. See the contributions in T. Falola and O. Ezekwem (eds.), Writing the Nigeria-Biafra War (Suffolk: James Currey, 2016). Among many fictionalised accounts, see B. Emecheta, Destination Biafra (London: Heinemann, 1994); F. Nwapa, Wives at War (Enugu: self-published, 1980); and C. Okparanta, Under the Udala Trees 495

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(New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015). The visual arts, too, were a place where the war’s experience was processed. See C. Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). Fictional treatments opened up public discourse, while also distorting certain facts. Hundreds of memoirs were written, many of them by prominent figures in the Nigerian and Biafran governments. See O. Obasanjo, My Command: An Account of the Nigerian Civil War, 1967–1970 (Ibadan: Heinemann, 1980); G. Alabi-Isama, The Tragedy of Victory: On-the-Spot Account of the Nigeria–Biafra War in the Atlantic Theatre (Ibadan: Spectrum, 2013); P. Efiong, The Caged Bird Sang No More: My Biafra Odyssey, 1966–1970 (Pinetown: 30 Degrees South Publishers, 2016); L. N. Aneke, The Untold Story of the Nigeria–Biafra War (Lagos: Triumph, 2008); and R. Uwechue, Reflections on the Nigerian Civil War: Facing the Future (Victoria: Trafford, 2004). Since the return of civilian rule in 1999, the long official silence on the war has broken. For a reconnaissance of historical literature see B. McNeil, ‘The Nigerian Civil War in history and historiography, 1967–1970’, in Africa, Empire, and Globalization: Essays in Honor of A.G. Hopkins, ed. T. Falola and E. Brownell (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2010), pp. 541–54. In 2006, the publication of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun (New York, Anchor, 2006) brought the memory of Biafra to a new generation of Nigerians, many of whom had been born after its end. The death of Ojukwu in 2011, followed by the publication of Chinua Achebe’s memoir of the war years in 2012, brought to light discussions that Biafran veterans and survivors had long been reluctant to have in public. See C. Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (New York: Penguin, 2012). Fifty years on from Biafra’s defeat, its history is only beginning to be told.

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On 25 March 1971, a military dictatorship in Pakistan embarked on a massive slaughter of Bengalis. Its consequences echo down to this day: one of the largest refugee flows in human history; a major war between India and Pakistan that ratcheted up the hatred between those two antagonists; and the traumatic creation of Bangladesh, which today is the eighth-largest population in the world. It was not overdetermined that this terrible bloodshed had to happen. It is at least possible to conceive of a different course of history in which Pakistan continued as a wobbly but united state, because that had in fact been the trajectory of the country since its founding in Partition in 1947. The military elites in Islamabad who chose a slaughter were not lifelong fanatics devoted to a revolutionary or utopian ideology. General Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan, Pakistan’s military dictator, was neither an ideological Hitler nor Pol Pot. There might have been constitutional arrangements – perhaps some combination of power-sharing and autonomy – that could have prolonged the existence of a unified Pakistan, and in the process avoided mass violence. Yahya and his junta were not embroiled in a civil war or an international war that drove them to radical policies of extreme violence; to the contrary, it would be their massacres of Bengalis that generated a civil war and then an interstate war against India in December 1971, which ended with the creation of an independent Bangladesh. Thus, the genocide in Bangladesh stands out as a missed opportunity for international prevention. Pakistan was not a forgotten or remote part of the international system, but a significant player in a crucial cold war theatre, with allies – most importantly the United States – that could have counselled against a genocidal policy which would, for a unified Pakistan, prove suicidal. Pakistan was a middle-weight power whose national security was (and still is) imperilled by its confrontation with its much larger enemy, India. That fact alone gave the United States considerable leverage over the Pakistani junta, if the Nixon

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administration had chosen to wield it. Yet at almost every turning point in the crisis, Nixon and Kissinger chose not to even try to use their leverage. Today many of the basic facts of the 1971 horrors are questioned by Pakistani nationalists and by some Islamist or conservative Bangladeshis, and are not well understood by Americans. This is not by accident. In Bangladesh – a country born in dire poverty made worse by the trauma of its independence war, with its civil society devastated and its intellectuals systematically wiped out – there has been little time or capacity for the kind of objective, detailed scholarship that these terrible events deserve. On top of that, Pakistani nationalists have worked hard at denying the facts of the slaughter, while Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger put considerable efforts into whitewashing their own complicity with Yahya’s murderous campaign. The deniers have had an easier time of it because of the Pakistani military’s unwillingness to open its archives, which leaves the motivations and decisions of the genocidal regime cloaked in intentional obscurity.

Partition If there is a precedent for the massive bloodshed of 1971 in Bangladesh, it lies in Partition. In 1947, as the British Empire left India, it carved the British Indian province of Bengal up along religious lines – whose fissures had been deepened by the colonial consolidation of rivalries and construction of ethnic divisions.1 Some two-thirds of Bengal became East Pakistan; the remaining third became the state of West Bengal in India. Yasmin Khan notes that Partition in Bengal was ‘one of the worst calamities of the twentieth century’.2 In both Punjab and Bengal, Partition split what had once been united provinces in British India. As the historian Sugata Bose notes in an important study of Bengal’s peasants that emphasises class divisions, ‘From 1930 onwards, the east Bengal countryside increasingly became the scene of a violent conflict between a predominantly Muslim peasantry and a mostly Hindu rural elite.’3 The first major massacre of 1 A. Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam since 1850 (New York: Routledge, 2000). 2 Y. Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 5. See A. Jalal, The Struggle for Pakistan: A Muslim Homeland and Global Politics (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014); and J. Chatterji, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932–1947 (Cambridge University Press, 1994). 3 S. Bose, Agrarian Bengal: Economy, Social Structure and Politics, 1919–1947 (Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 277.

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Partition was in Bengal: in August 1946, at least 4,000 people were killed in a well-organised clash of Hindus against Muslims in Calcutta, with casualties higher among Muslims.4 By the time the massacres and displacements of Partition were over, untold thousands were dead in Bengal, and Calcutta itself was flooded with more than 3 million refugees.5 The violence did not end with Partition. In the early years of Pakistan’s existence, Hindus in East Bengal – then also known as East Pakistan – faced bloody riots and rapes in Chittagong, Khulna and elsewhere. Facing social discrimination and incompetent government, many of these minority Hindus in the new Pakistan voted with their feet, relocating to India in numbers substantial enough to cause panic in the Indian government. Muslims in India were also left unsettled. With open border clashes by 1950, Muslims in West Bengal and north India were left frightened and vulnerable, many of them relocating to Pakistan. While Muslim and Hindu identities had been far more fluid before Partition, the aftermath forced these communities to rally together against the foe.6

Two-Nation Theory In Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s founding vision of Pakistan, it was to be a haven and homeland for a united Muslim nation in south Asia. Under Pakistani nationalists’ ‘two-nation theory’, Muslims and Hindus were two distinct nations that required two different polities. Yet as Vali Nasr notes, the Bengalis, Biharis, Punjabis, Hyderabadis and Sindhis in the new Pakistan ‘were different people who, save for their religious faith, shared more with their Hindu neighbors than with Muslims of other provinces’.7 Pakistan was created as a country bisected by 1,600 km of hostile India. In the northwest, the British had left behind Punjabis, Pashtuns, Balochs and Sindhis; in the east, Bengalis, downtrodden and resentful.8 In a high-handed 4 Chatterji, Bengal Divided, pp. 220–65. 5 Khan, Great Partition, p. 189. See P. French, Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division (London: HarperCollins, 1997); I. Talbot and G. Singh, The Partition of India (Cambridge University Press, 2009); Khan, Great Partition, pp. 63–70; B. Chakrabarty, The Partition of Bengal and Assam, 1932–1947 (London: Routledge Curzon, 2004), pp. 8–10. 6 Khan, Great Partition, pp. 189–90. 7 V. Nasr, ‘National identities and the India-Pakistan conflict’, in The India-Pakistan Conflict: An Enduring Rivalry, ed. T. V. Paul (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 181–2. 8 O. B. Jones, Pakistan: Eye of the Storm (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 143–5.

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attempt to foster national cohesion, in 1948, Jinnah made Urdu the national language of his new country – which infuriated Bengali nationalists proud of their own language and rich cultural tradition, renowned across south Asia and the world. And of course, East Pakistan’s Bengali speakers outnumbered West Pakistan’s Urdu speakers. The demographic realities of the region also made a mockery of any attempt to find religious homogeneity. The people of East Pakistan were indeed mostly Muslim, but their sense of themselves as Bengalis ran deep. And for many of them, their sense of a Bengali national, cultural or linguistic identity included many non-Muslims as fellow Bengalis. East Pakistan had a significant minority of Hindus, including many of the landlords and the middle-class.9 By the eve of the Bangladesh genocide, this minority would number about 10 million – some 13 per cent of the total population of East Pakistan.10 These problems were exacerbated by the Pakistani military’s fear of India.11 Many Pakistani military and political elites believed that India, still unreconciled to the losses of Partition, sought to destroy Pakistan. Even putting aside the neuralgic dispute over Kashmir, border turmoil in Bengal brought India and Pakistan close to war in 1950, averted by a deal that upheld minority rights and protection for migrants.12 Yet the dominance of the military in Pakistani politics was unsettling for many Bengalis. The officers of West Pakistan – echoing the old British colonial designations of martial peoples – sneered at the ‘Bingoes’ as a craven group, suited for poetry but not for fighting. To the military, the Bengalis seemed uninterested in confronting India or winning in Kashmir.13 In the early decades of Pakistan’s existence, Bengalis in the eastern wing grew convinced that West Pakistan was domineering and arrogant. When Bengalis tried to install their language alongside Urdu as a national tongue, they were rebuffed. In 1952, the reaffirmation of Urdu as the sole national language led to riots, put down with force – a watershed moment for Bengali nationalists.14 Bengalis rallied around a nationalist party, the Awami League, 9 Khan, Great Partition, pp. 189–90. 10 G. J. Bass, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide (New York: Knopf, 2013), p. 82. 11 S. P. Cohen, The Pakistan Army (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1998); P. I. Cheema, The Armed Forces of Pakistan (New York University Press, 2001). 12 S. Raghavan, War and Peace in Modern India (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 149–87. 13 T. Ali, Can Pakistan Survive? The Death of a State (London: Penguin, 1983), p. 91. 14 S. Tripathi, The Colonel Who Would Not Repent: The Bangladesh War and Its Unquiet Legacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), pp. 42–5.

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which had almost no following outside of East Pakistan.15 In 1958, Pakistan’s military put the country under martial law16 – which was particularly alarming to the many Bengalis who had fervently believed in democracy.17 The military remained fixated on India even after performing well in the 1965 war it launched against India. In March 1969, General Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan took power as Pakistan’s next military dictator. Yet Yahya was seeking to put an end to martial law, announcing his intention to return the country to a civilian government. Unlike many military dictators, he started to go through with that pledge – although it was always clear that the military would play a large role in government no matter what. By 1970, the country was heading for a general election. This would create a National Assembly that would draft a new constitution for the country. Crucially, under the legal framework for the elections, the voting would be a direct election under universal suffrage – the first such election in Pakistan.18

Voting and Violence The path to mass atrocity began with a hopeful, democratic moment: Pakistan’s first national election and the first one in which Pakistani women voted. The elections would be held with territorial constituencies and without any special set-asides for minorities. East Pakistanis outnumbered West Pakistanis: some 75 million in the east, as against about 61 million in the west.19 If the Bengalis were cohesive as voters, then they could dominate the whole country. In the Awami League, the Bengalis had a national movement; in Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman, a powerful orator who had spent years in Pakistani jails, they had a leader. In 1966 Mujib had put forward a popular ‘Six-Point Demand’ which gave a coherent programme to his followers. It would recast Pakistan as a country which gave a great deal of autonomy to its two far-flung wings. In its Six Points, the Awami League demanded parliamentary democracy in a federation; a federal government restricted mostly to foreign policy and defence; two currencies in the two wings; fiscal policy set in the wings; and even the authority to raise a militia or paramilitary force for East 15 R. Sisson and L. E. Rose, War and Secession: Pakistan, India, and the Creation of Bangladesh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 9–15. 16 Jones, Pakistan, pp. 146–8. 17 K. Alqama, Bengali Elite Perceptions of Pakistan (Karachi: Royal Book Co., 1997), pp. 264–85. 18 Sisson and Rose, War and Secession, pp. 1–3. 19 Bass, Blood Telegram, p. 21.

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Pakistan. In both wings, the Awami League was opposed by the Jamaate-Islami, an Islamist party that warned that Mujib meant to secede. While his Six Points raised worries throughout West Pakistan that he was moving towards secession, Mujib loudly declared that his demands for a federation were not undercutting the integrity of Pakistan or Islam.20 The elections, originally set for October 1970, were postponed until December. On 13 November 1970, a terrible cyclone ripped through East Bengal, killing at least 230,000 people. Yahya’s government botched its disaster response, which further alienated Bengalis. This came immediately before the election on 7 December 1970, although some of the parts of East Pakistan hit hardest by the cyclone had to wait to vote until January.21 In stunning electoral results, the Awami League swept East Pakistan with a resounding victory, taking 160 out of 162 seats up for grabs there. More significantly still, out of 32 million votes in the entire country, 16.5 million were cast for the Awami League – a Bengali nationalist wave. In West Pakistan alone, another party swept ahead: the Pakistan People’s Party of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto took eighty-one seats, with fifty-seven seats going to others. The dominance of two different parties in the two different wings risked a break-up. With such a mandate, the Awami League would demand satisfaction for many of its demands; so would the Pakistan People’s Party for its calls for Islamic socialism, carried by the ambitious Bhutto. And the military, rather than finding a smooth glidepath to a pliable civilian government, found itself confronting a truly democratic result.22 The Pakistan army, having failed to take Bengali nationalism seriously, was blindsided. ‘One of the major political parties was seeking a mandate from the people to break up the country’, recalled Major General Rao Farman Ali Khan of the Pakistan army, reflecting the panic in the military.23 In one of the most influential studies of the 1971 crisis, Richard Sisson and Leo Rose argue that most of the military still wanted to give power to a civilian government, despite mounting unease. On their account, the military was gravely worried about maintaining the unity of Pakistan, as well as having a more parochial concern about its budget and autonomy – which suggests that the junta wanted civilian government only on the military’s own terms. Mujib, Yahya and Bhutto plunged into constitutional negotiations, which remained deadlocked through early 1971. 20 Sisson and Rose, War and Secession, pp. 19–21, 28. 21 Bass, Blood Telegram, pp. 22–3. 22 Sisson and Rose, War and Secession, pp. 31–4. 23 R. Farman Ali Khan, How Pakistan Got Divided (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 36.

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Flush with his victory, Mujib argued that the election had been essentially a referendum on his Six Points and that the constitution had to follow suit with substantial autonomy. This stirred up fears among West Pakistani politicians that he really meant for East Bengal to secede. Bhutto, who had scored an impressive success in West Pakistan, found the Awami League standing in the way of his ascent to power. Like the military, Bhutto was fiercely anti-Indian. And while Yahya had at one point referred to Mujib as the next prime minister of Pakistan, the military came to balk at the prospect of an autonomous East Bengal, which might cosy up to India.24 On 1 March 1971, pressured hard by Bhutto, Yahya announced the indefinite postponement of the opening of the National Assembly – which to Bengalis made it look like their democratic victory was being stolen. This sparked a wave of anguished Bengali civil disobedience, strikes and unrest, met with a measured but not mild response from the Pakistani authorities. Yahya condemned looting, arson and killing. He announced that the new National Assembly would open on 25 March 1971, while insisting menacingly that the Pakistani armed forces would ‘insure the integrity, solidarity, and security of Pakistan’.25 Constitutional negotiations went on. Yet in secret, the Pakistan army was moving towards a military assault on the Bengalis. Army hardliners feared they were losing their grip on East Pakistan. Still, any military option would be risky. At the White House and State Department, south Asia experts warned that a military crackdown would radicalise Bengali nationalism and result in a civil war that the military junta could not win.26 There were at least a few sceptics in Rawalpindi. Pakistani Major General Rao Farman Ali Khan, a senior military officer charged with East Pakistan, later claimed that he urged Yahya to maintain a relationship between the two wings of the country, rather than choosing a military option that might well rip the country apart. As he later wrote, referring to military officers wary of using force, ‘The problem, we felt, was a political one and should be resolved through political means alone.’27 There could have been less bloody options, such as arresting leaders or deeper negotiations. Regardless of what Farman actually did, the logic of these arguments must have been apparent to the generals – and was ruled out. To this day, our understanding of the most important decisions in Islamabad is limited by the ongoing power of the Pakistani military. To 24 Sisson and Rose, War and Secession, pp. 54–80. 25 Bass, Blood Telegram, pp. 25–9. 26 Ibid., pp. 29–35. 27 Farman, How Pakistan Got Divided, pp. 64–5, 96.

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state definitively how much various factors – militarisation, ideology, bigotry towards Bengalis in general and Bengali Hindus in particular, international threat, cold war pressures and more – mattered in the Pakistani government’s fateful decision-making, scholars would need access to the blocked archives and records. Unlike Nazi Germany or Ottoman Turkey, there has never been a revolution or decisive military defeat that would open up the records of the Pakistani state to scrutiny on this most sensitive of issues. While Pakistan had cycled in and out of civilian government, those governments have never been strong enough to demand a reckoning for the crimes of 1971. The roots of the 1971 slaughter in Bangladesh do not seem to lie in racist or nationalistic utopian ideology, a totalitarian regime or the grave peril of wartime – some of the classic explanations for genocide.28 Instead, mass atrocity emerged as a radical solution to an everyday problem of powersharing. It can usefully be understood, as Scott Straus has suggested, as being part of a universe of cases of state-controlled political violence against a largely civilian population, with genocide as ‘one possible outcome’ among varying levels of violence in a civil war.29 This follows important work on civil war by Virginia Page Fortna, James Fearon, Stathis Kalyvas, David Laitin, Jeremy Weinstein, Steven Wilkinson, Ashutosh Varshney and other political scientists, many of them with south Asian cases in mind.30 Benjamin Valentino has argued that genocide can be a matter of strategy: ‘mass killing occurs when powerful groups come to believe it is the best available means to accomplish certain radical goals, counter specific types of threats, or solve difficult military problems’.31 Yet it is still unclear why the Pakistani generals chose such an extreme policy with such potential for backfiring. Valentino has pointed to racism, ideology and paranoia as contributing factors, which partially help explain the decision for slaughter. In the end, what is most confusing is the extreme level of violence when other solutions might have had a better chance of keeping Pakistan united. 28 E. D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton University Press, 2003). 29 S. Straus, ‘Second-generation comparative research on genocide’, World Politics 59 (2007), 476–501. 30 V. P. Fortna, ‘Interstate peacekeeping: causal mechanisms and empirical effects’, World Politics 56 (2004), 481–519; S. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); J. Weinstein, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); A. Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); S. Wilkinson, Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 31 B. A. Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 66.

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It is clear that Pakistani military elites held deep prejudices about Bengalis and more specifically about the Bengali Hindus. Bengalis were seen as weak, cowardly, even feminised (as seen through chauvinist eyes in Islamabad) – not one of the British ‘martial races’. This bigotry had strategic implications for Pakistan’s militarists: they saw the Bengalis as too spineless and timid for the hard task of military confrontation against India, or even as too Hinduised to want to resist. These prejudices clearly mattered in the Pakistani decisionmaking in 1971, but without access to their archives, it is hard to say exactly how and how much they mattered. Throughout the run-up to mass atrocity, the regional and international settings were crucial.32 In south Asia, Pakistani elites were convinced that they faced a mortal foe in India. On the one hand, the fear of India – which many Pakistani leaders believed had never reconciled itself to Partition and the existence of Pakistan – drove the junta to extremes of paranoia. Without their dread of India, the Pakistani generals might have been less bloodyminded about their harmless Bengali Hindu minority. Believing India to be a foreign hand behind the Awami League, the Pakistani junta was apt to underestimate the grassroots strength of Bengali nationalism. On the other hand, their assessment of the menace from India might have discouraged the Pakistani generals from adventurism. After all, it was far easier for the Indians to covertly train, arm and supply Bengali guerrillas from neighbouring West Bengal, Assam and Tripura than it was for the West Pakistanis to resupply their isolated garrisons 1,600 km away in East Pakistan. After a terrorist attack, India had cut off overflights across its territory, which meant that Pakistan had to supply its army and move troops via Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), an additional logistical hurdle. It took little imagination to see how India could escalate the situation in order to accelerate the break-up of Pakistan. Without access to Pakistani records of the junta’s decision-making, it is impossible to say whether they disregarded that risk out of racism, ideology or sheer folly. Beyond south Asia, Pakistan was enmeshed in the cold war. To counterbalance against India, Pakistan relied on two larger powers, the United States and China; India, for its part, was formally non-aligned but leaning strongly towards the Soviet Union. Mao Zedong’s China, hostile to bourgeois India, proved largely supportive of Pakistan throughout 1971. The Americans might have objected in the name of democracy or human rights; without American 32 S. Raghavan, 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

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military, political, economic and diplomatic support, Pakistan would be terribly vulnerable to Indian depredations. Despite that, the Nixon administration specifically ruled out making any warnings that might have dissuaded Pakistan from a military option.33 In so doing, they handed India an opportunity to dismember Pakistan, which would amount to a Soviet victory in the cold war.

Slaughter Late at night on 25 March 1971, the Pakistan army began a devastating assault on the Bengalis. The Pakistani forces were helped by local auxiliaries known as the Razakars. The first people killed or jailed were the leaders of the Awami League, its activists and those Bengali units of the Pakistani military and police which could mutiny and form a guerrilla force. The Bengalis in the East Pakistan Rifles and the East Bengal Regiment, as well as some police units, were smashed wherever they could be found. At the same time, the military sought to take over the press. The crackdown, which the military called ‘Operation Searchlight’, was meant to unfold in phases: first taking charge of the cities, then securing border towns and possible avenues of Indian-backed guerrilla activity and finally wiping out insurgents in the countryside.34 In public, Yahya and his generals justified their campaign as upholding Pakistan’s sovereignty and unity. Yahya cast the bloodshed as punishment for secessionist Awami Leaguers who were ‘enemies of Pakistan’, wanting ‘East Pakistan to break away completely from this country’. Still, he did not publicly suggest an attempt to exterminate Bengalis as a people.35 Lieutenant General Tikka Khan, the military chief leading the repression, publicly contended that East Pakistan faced ‘enslavement’ by India and that the Awami League meant to bring about the ‘destruction of our country which had been carved out of the subcontinent as a homeland for Muslims after great sacrifices’.36 The military onslaught was bloody from the start. Once unleashed, the Pakistan army proved incapable of the selective targeting that some of its generals apparently envisioned, and engaged in indiscriminate violence of the kind described by the political scientist Stathis Kalyvas.37 The assaults on Dacca, Chittagong and other urban centres had a venom that fits with Ben 33 Bass, Blood Telegram, pp. 29–34. 34 Sisson and Rose, War and Secession, p. 158. 35 Ibid., p. 154. 36 Bass, Blood Telegram, p. 82. 37 Kalyvas, Logic of Violence in Civil War, pp. 160, 223.

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Kiernan’s suggestion that genocide is sometimes associated with an agrarian idealism steeped in hostility to cities.38 While some Awami League leaders were arrested alive, including Mujib, a senior Pakistani officer explained to Sisson and Rose that the troops did not know what the Awami League leadership looked like and ‘were unable to discriminate differences in the features of their Bengali brethren’.39 The American consulate in East Pakistan – which had every political incentive to downplay the brutality of a government that was a treaty ally of the United States – estimated that as many as 6,000 people were killed in less than a week in Dacca alone.40 Some of the Pakistani military feared that Bengali hardliners would form a fighting force. This fear has become a crucial point in subsequent defences of the Pakistani military onslaught, trying to suggest that the Pakistan army was acting out of a desperate kind of self-defence. Farman, for instance, claimed that former soldiers and Bengalis in military units – chiefly the East Pakistan Rifles and the East Bengal Regiment – were organising, and that students at Dacca University were hoarding arms and ammunition.41 This was meant to exonerate the Pakistan army for its brutality in general and for shooting up the university in particular, with Farman making the absurd claim that all the students killed were carrying weapons and had refused to stop firing.42 Sisson and Rose report that military hardliners around Yahya had a different fear: that Bengalis in army and police units would refuse to shoot their own people.43 Yet in fact, a consistent theme of West Pakistani decisions is an underestimation of the battlefield strength of the Bengalis.44 As Sisson and Rose report, the brass believed that military action would be relatively easy, allowing a revised political settlement more palatable to the military and West Pakistani politicians.45 According to Farman, before the crackdown began, Tikka Khan ‘sounded very optimist and thought he could handle the situation’. Bhutto, a significant figure in these decisions, privately said, ‘The Awami League is a bourgeois party. It is not a party of the masses; it cannot fight a guerrilla war. There will be no violent conflict in East Pakistan.’46 38 B. Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 2–3. 39 Sisson and Rose, War and Secession, p. 159. 40 Bass, Blood Telegram, p. 73. 41 Farman, How Pakistan Got Divided, p. 92. 42 Ibid., p. 106. 43 Sisson and Rose, War and Secession, p. 155. 44 Ibid., p. 95. A. R. Siddiqi, East Pakistan: The Endgame (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 76. 45 Sisson and Rose, War and Secession, pp. 156–7. 46 Farman, How Pakistan Got Divided, pp. 80, 67.

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Influenced by this Pakistani military analysis, Henry Kissinger, the White House national security adviser, initially told Richard Nixon that Yahya had control: ‘The Bengalis aren’t very good fighters I guess.’47 Nixon and Kissinger, mirroring the wishful thinking of their Pakistani clients, hoped that the Bengalis could be shot into submission. Referring to 30,000 Pakistan soldiers trying to subdue 75 million Bengalis, Nixon said, ‘There’re sometimes the use of power is’, while Kissinger finished his thought: ‘The use of power against seeming odds pays off. Cause all the experts were saying that 30,000 people can’t get control of 75 million. Well, this may still turn out to be true but as of this moment it seems to be quiet.’48 Still, for all the bloodshed, the crackdown was inadequate. It took six weeks to take over East Pakistan, but still the kernel of a widespread rebellion remained intact. Some of the Bengalis in military units mutinied and escaped, as did many Awami League activists.49 The army gained control only of the cities, not the countryside. To bolster its ranks, it turned to Urdu-speaking minorities in East Pakistan as well as Punjabis and Pathans from West Pakistan; few of them were able to infiltrate Bengali society.50 Worse, the army had made its own worst fears come true: as its crackdown unfolded, the remnants of the East Bengal Regiment and the East Pakistan Rifles became a backbone for Bengali guerrilla resistance. Even if some of the early crackdown was aimed at breaking a nascent Bengali insurgency, the military onslaught went well beyond that as it unfolded over months. As the best-informed White House aide noted, ‘Having beaten down the initial surge of resistance, the army now appears to have embarked on a reign of terror aimed at eliminating the core of future resistance.’51 This onslaught would continue for months, exacerbated by the need to combat a growing Bengali guerrilla force called the Mukti Bahini, secretly backed by India, that, in large part, had been willed into existence by the decision by Yahya and his generals to use military force. While India’s support of the insurgency escalated, Yahya and his coterie tried a reckless attack on India in early December 1971. The resulting war, stalemated in West Pakistan, was a rout in East Pakistan, where Indian troops, assisted by the Mukti Bahini, swiftly won a decisive victory. Alarmed by the menace of Indian power, the Pakistani junta ended up by handing India a victory. Desperate to unify Pakistan by force, they instead made it all too easy for India to help rip it asunder. 47 Bass, Blood Telegram, p. 57. 48 Ibid., p. 64–6. 49 Raghavan, 1971, p. 52. Sisson and Rose, War and Secession, pp. 158–9. 50 Sisson and Rose, War and Secession, p. 165. 51 Bass, Blood Telegram, p. 63.

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Meanwhile, one horrific aspect of the slaughter was Pakistani sexual violence against Bengali women and girls.52 Bina D’Costa gives a powerful account of the role of gender in the creation of Bangladesh. Bangladeshi memories of 1971 prominently feature the mass rape of women in what she calls ‘a strategic attempt to target Bengali ethnic identity’. At the same time, following the rhetoric of Mujib, who became the first leader of the new independent country, Bangladeshis have valorised the role of heroic women guerrillas, the idealised birangona (war heroine). Ever since 1971, Bangladeshi society has struggled with the recovery and rehabilitation of women traumatised by sexual violence, which has posed problems from rehabilitation to employment to the care or adoption of babies conceived from rape.53 Breaking the silence about rape, there is a large literature by Bangladeshi women on the sexual violence of 1971.54 The stories are unbearable. In one rural town, uniformed Pakistani soldiers barged into a Bengali house and found a mother with a new-born baby daughter, just eleven days old. They threw the infant to the ground, where she was picked up by her grandmother, who rebuked the troops: ‘You too have mothers and daughters.’ Given a chance to reflect on the moral consequences of their actions, the soldiers told the grandmother to shut up and one of them proceeded to rape the new mother anyway.55 Today in Bangladesh the term genocide is generally understood as being against the Bengalis as a whole. At the time, the Indian government, too, spoke of genocide against the Bengalis. After all, many Punjabis in West Pakistan scorned Bengalis, Muslim as well as Hindu, as weak, cowardly and debased. ‘This is a war between the pure and the impure’, one Pakistani major told the Pakistani reporter Anthony Mascarhenhas in June 1971. ‘The people here may have Muslim names and call themselves Muslim. But they are Hindu at heart.’56 Yet in addition, the Hindu minority among the Bengalis 52 Y. Saikia, Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). S. Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Bantam, 1975). A. Rashid, Gender, Nationalism, and Genocide in Bangladesh (London: Routledge, 2019). 53 B. D’Costa, Nationbuilding, Gender and War Crimes in South Asia (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 13, 19, 104–5, 119–28. 54 N. Mookherjee, The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories, and the Bangladesh War of 1971 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 55 S. Aktar, S. Begum, M. Guhathakurta, H. Hossain, and S. Kamal, Rising from the Ashes: Women’s Narratives of 1971, trans. N. Zaman (Dhaka: University Press Limited, 2013), pp. 132. 56 A. Mascarhenhas, ‘Genocide’, Sunday Times (London), 13 June 1971. See A. Mascarhenhas, The Rape of Bangla Desh (Delhi: Vikas Publications, 1971).

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were singled out by the Pakistan army. As Mascarhenhas reported, ‘I saw Hindus, hunted from village to village and door to door, shot off-hand after a cursory “short-arm inspection” showed they were uncircumcised.’ Even though Mujib and other leading Awami League politicians were Muslims, and the Hindus did not comprise a cohesive military body, West Pakistanis had a tendency to see Bengali secessionism as a product of a Hindu influence that was traitorous and pro-Indian.57 The Pakistan army’s extremists contended that East Pakistan needed to be purified by driving the Hindus into India where they belonged.58 Sydney Schanberg of the New York Times risked his neck reporting from Faridpur, where he found Muslims had daubed signs on their homes and shops: ‘All Moslem House.’ As Schanberg reported in July 1971, ‘The campaign against the Hindus was – and in some cases still is – systematic. Soldiers fanned through virtually every village asking where the Hindus lived. . . . Although thousands of “antistate” Bengali Moslems have been killed by the army, the Hindus became particular scapegoats as the martial-law regime tried to blame Hindu India and her agents in East Pakistan for the autonomy movement.’59 Pakistan’s official post-war Hamoodur Rehman commission of inquiry on the war would later note that the chief of army staff and chief of general staff ‘were often noticed jokingly asking as to how many Hindus have been killed’. A Pakistani lieutenant colonel testified to the Commission, ‘There was a general feeling of hatred against Bengalis amongst the soldiers and the officers including generals. There were verbal instructions to eliminate Hindus.’60 In the minds of some Pakistani perpetrators, the categories of Bengali and Hindu blurred. Even Muslim Bengalis were seen as Hinduised and therefore unfit for Muslim Pakistan. In 1967, Pakistan’s military dictator, General Ayub Khan, had sneered that his country’s Bengalis were ‘under considerable Hindu cultural and linguistic influence’.61 As Schanberg reported, ‘army commanders in the field in East Pakistan privately admit to a policy of stamping out Bengali culture, both Moslem and Hindu – but particularly Hindu’.62 57 Bass, Blood Telegram, pp. 80–3. 58 P. Oldenburg, ‘“A place insufficiently imagined”: language, belief, and the Pakistan crisis of 1971’, Journal of Asian Studies 44 (1985), 730. 59 S. Schanberg, ‘Hindus are targets of army terror in an East Pakistani town’, New York Times, 4 July 1971, p. A4. 60 Government of Pakistan, The Report of the Hamoodur Rehman Commission of Inquiry into the 1971 War (Lahore: Vanguard, 2001), pp. 415, 509–10. 61 Kiernan, Blood and Soil, p. 573. 62 Schanberg, ‘Hindus are targets of army terror’.

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The Bengali nationalist movement could be vicious. As the Mukti Bahini fought a guerrilla war, the Bihari minority – Muslims who spoke Urdu and were often supporters of a united Pakistan – was exposed to harassment, murder and rape. Some of them were active in pro-Pakistan paramilitaries, but this cannot justify an assault on a civilian population. Although Mujib said that they should be protected, the Biharis were widely seen as traitors to Bangladesh, leading to terrible revenge killings of civilians. Although American officials estimated that the main victims of violence in 1971 were Bengalis, they also were unsparing in their reporting of the cruelties inflicted by Bengali nationalists on the Biharis. After the Pakistan army surrendered in December 1971, there was a further spasm of vengeful killings against Biharis.63 Perhaps the most telling indication of Pakistani military brutality is how desperate its Bengali victims were to escape from the dragnet. And arguably the most important proof of ethnic targeting is the preponderance of Hindus among those who were displaced. Bengalis fled in huge numbers into neighbouring India; by the time that the crisis ended in December 1971, some 10 million refugees had been displaced by the Pakistan army’s onslaught. Over the months, countless refugees died in squalid conditions in makeshift refugee camps. Although the first wave of refugees was largely Muslim, by mid-April 1971 the Indian government concluded that Pakistan was systematically driving out the Bengali Hindu minority. To avoid violent reprisals by Indian Hindu nationalists against Muslims in India, the Indian government worked hard to cover up this fact, but its own statistics show that as many as 90 per cent of the refugees were Hindus.64 The Hindus were not eager to leave; a 70-year old Hindu woman who had been shot through the neck said, ‘This is our home – we want to stay in golden Bengal.’65 This flood of a specific group of refugees is exactly what would be expected as the result of a systematic assault on a minority population. The Mishnah famously teaches that to kill a single person is to destroy a whole world.66 This is the proper framing for the painful, fraught topic of death tolls.67 By any standard, they are unbearably high. In Bangladesh today, the official number is 3 million dead, a statistic which has taken on sacrosanct status. With an understandable sensitivity at an ongoing Pakistani nationalistic denial of the basic facts of the genocide, Bangladeshis recoil at any hint that 63 Bass, Blood Telegram, pp. 85–6, 277–9. 64 Ibid., pp. 121–2. 65 Schanberg, ‘Hindus are targets of army terror’. 66 J. Neusner, The Mishnah: A New Translation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), Sanhedrin 4:5, p. 591. 67 D’Costa, Nationbuilding, Gender and War Crimes in South Asia, pp. 76–7.

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fewer people may have perished. Yet human rights professionals generally prefer to rely on conservative estimates, particularly in cases of mass atrocity. There is no real doubt about the enormity of the slaughter in Bangladesh, which ranks as one of the worst atrocities of the cold war, even if the precise numbers are obscured by the sheer scale of the killing. As early as June 1971, the State Department publicly reckoned that at least 200,000 people had died.68 Similarly, in September 1971, while the killing was still going on, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) secretly estimated that some 200,000 people had already died.69 In a 2008 British Medical Journal study based on world health surveys, a team came up with some 269,000 deaths.70 Sisson and Rose cite a senior Indian official who put the death toll at 300,000.71 Ben Kiernan estimates probably 300,000 deaths and perhaps a million.72 Despite this, Pakistani accounts try to put the number much lower. The post-war Hamoodur Rehman commission estimated that the Pakistani military had killed some 26,000 people, although noting that local commanders tried to downplay the numbers.73 Yet those low estimates are belied by vast numbers which are not in question: those 10 million desperate refugees in India, their presence documented by overwhelmed Indian authorities, looking after exiles who had not lightly made the decision to flee.

Aftermath Bangladesh’s politics remain riven by the legacy of 1971. The new country has to contend with nightmare memories among survivors; the difficult process of getting refugees resettled in their homes;74 tense relationships with both a largely unrepentant Pakistan and a domineering India; and deep divisions at home between the independence fighters of the Awami League and the Pakistani collaborators of Jamaat-e-Islami, the main Islamist party, and other Islamists.75 After independence, Bangladesh understandably wanted to put Pakistani war criminals on trial. After its victory in the December 1971 war against 68 Bass, Blood Telegram, p. 148. 69 Ibid., p. xiv. 70 Z. Obermeyer, C. J. L. Murray and E. Gakidou, ‘Fifty years of violent war deaths from Vietnam to Bosnia’, British Medical Journal 336 (2008), 1482–6. 71 Sisson and Rose, War and Secession, p. 306 n. 24. 72 Kiernan, Blood and Soil, p. 572. 73 Hamoodur Rehman Commission of Inquiry, pp. 317, 340, 513. 74 A. Datta, Refugees and Borders in South Asia: The Great Exodus of 1971 (London: Routledge, 2013). 75 M. Hussain, ‘What students are being taught about the separation of East Pakistan’, Dawn, 16 December 2010.

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Pakistan, India held 90,000 Pakistani prisoners of war, many of whom could plausibly have been charged with war crimes. But Bangladesh was stymied by Pakistan, which demanded the return of its prisoners of war, and eventually traded impunity for Pakistan’s formal recognition of Bangladesh, done after a face-saving interval in 1974. Seeking national unity, Mujib in November 1973 granted a general amnesty for everyone except those accused of murder, rape or genocide – freeing some 33,000 alleged war criminals, many with Islamist leanings. After an August 1975 coup by Ziaur Rahman, Bangladesh’s first military dictator, the military aligned itself with Jamaat and other Islamist parties, letting them back into political life and gutting any chance of accountability.76 In the 1990s, a return to democratic civilian rule allowed fresh efforts to punish Pakistani collaborators. Since 2009, responding to years of activism from civil society, Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh’s prime minister – and the daughter of Mujib, who was killed in the 1975 coup – has made justice for the atrocities a centrepiece of her government. While she has a technocratic side concentrating on development, the legacy of 1971 gives her a potent issue for nationalist mobilisation. In 2010, Hasina’s government set up a national warcrimes court, trying and executing Islamist leaders who had backed the Pakistani military. Her main opposition, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, is aligned with Jamaat, which in 1971 wanted to remain with Pakistan. Many members of Jamaat participated in Pakistan’s atrocities or collaborated with pro-Pakistan militias, and the court has been popular with Bangladeshis despite criticism from international human rights groups that many of the trials are unfair.77 In addition, Hasina’s increasingly autocratic government has put forward the stifling Digital Security Act of 2018, which sweepingly outlaws ‘propaganda or campaign against the Liberation War, the spirit of the Liberation War, the father of the nation, national anthem, or national flag’ as punishable with life in prison.78 The dark days of 1971 have left another legacy today. Since August 2017, Burma sharply escalated its systematic assault against the Rohingya minority. 76 G. J. Bass, ‘Bargaining away justice: India, Pakistan, and the international politics of impunity for the Bangladesh genocide’, International Security 41 (2016), 140–87. 77 Human Rights Watch, ‘Bangladesh: unique opportunity for justice for 1971 atrocities’, 19 May 2011, www.hrw.org/news/2011/05/19/bangladesh-unique-opportunity-justice -1971-atrocities; Human Rights Watch, ‘Bangladesh: suspend death penalty for war crimes convict’, 9 May 2016, www.hrw.org/news/2016/05/09/bangladesh-suspenddeath-penalty-war-crimes-convict. 78 Human Rights Watch, ‘Bangladesh: new law will silence critics’, 24 September 2018, www.hrw.org/news/2018/09/24/bangladesh-new-law-will-silence-critics.

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Some 730,000 Rohingya have been expelled into Bangladesh, leaving an impoverished, over-stretched country with a total of more than a million desperate Rohingya refugees to look after. Yet to Bangladesh’s credit, its leaders have invoked their own experience as refugees in India in 1971 to justify a relief effort for the Rohingya – a flawed and sometimes heartless effort, but far more than anything done for the Rohingya by bigger powers such as India, China or the United States. Pakistan remains in a state of deep denial over the slaughter. Immediately after Pakistan’s disastrous defeat by India in the December 1971 war, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto set up a commission of three Pakistani judges, chaired by its chief justice, Hamoodur Rehman, to investigate the defeat. While this gives some insight into Pakistani decision-making, the judicial inquiry produced a report so damning that it was suppressed by the military; it was seen in Pakistan only when Dawn fearlessly exposed it in 2001.79 Today there are some brave Pakistani writers, intellectuals and activists who are not afraid to air the facts of what their government did.80 Yet the country’s history books breeze past the horrors of 1971, while its National Assembly is often sympathetic to extremist Islamists in Bangladesh.81 There are shelves full of shoddy Pakistani nationalist books denying the slaughter82 – often part of a conspiratorial world view that blames America, India and the Jews for every bad thing that has ever happened to Pakistan. When challenged on their falsehoods and distortions, denialists writing for such Pakistani publications as the Pakistan Observer or The Nation refuse to print corrections or retractions. In 2002, Pervez Musharraf came the closest that a Pakistani leader has come to an apology, writing evasively in a visitor’s book at a war memorial near Dhaka (which in 1971 was commonly spelt Dacca), ‘Your brothers and sisters in Pakistan share the pains of the events of 1971. The excesses committed during the unfortunate period are regrettable.’ Tahmima Anam, a leading Bangladeshi novelist who has powerfully chronicled this period in her historical fiction, wrote, ‘Pakistan, it is high time you apologize.’83 79 Bass, Blood Telegram, pp. 328–9. 80 A. Salim (ed.), We Owe an Apology to Bangladesh (Dhaka: Shahtiya Prakash, 2012); A. G. Noorani, ‘Diplomats’ dissent’, Dawn, 6 August 2016; Y. Krishan, ‘Passions of Pakistan’, Friday Times, 28 February 2014; H. Javid, ‘Yet another cold war casualty’, Dawn, 25 May 2014, pp. 1–2; A. Zakaria, ‘A year in books’, News on Sunday, 29 December 2019. 81 ‘Pak textbooks focus on conspiracy theories on 1971 war’, Times of India, 16 December 2010. 82 J. Ahmad, Creation of Bangladesh: Myths Exploded (Karachi: AJA Publishers, 2016); S. H. Mirza, Not the Whole Truth (Lahore: Centre for South Asian Studies, 1989). 83 T. Anam, ‘Pakistan’s state of denial’, New York Times, 27 December 2013.

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Bibliographic Note There is no first-rate English-language book on the causes and dynamics of the genocide in Bangladesh. One can only hope that such a book be written by a fair-minded researcher with Bengali language skills, since the survivors of 1971 are elderly and will soon be gone. There are a great many accounts by survivors. Some of the more prominent ones are Jahanara Imam, Of Blood and Fire: The Untold Story of Bangladesh’s War of Independence, trans. Mustafizur Rahman (Delhi: Sterling, 1989); Munawar Hafiz (ed.), Bangladesh 1971: Dreadful Experiences (Dhaka: Shahitya Prakash, 1989). For an overview of the genre, see Chaity Das, In the Land of Buried Tongues: Testimonies and Literary Narratives of the War of Liberation of Bangladesh (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017). There is a growing literature on rape in 1971, including memoir accounts such as Aktar et al., Rising from the Ashes. For a study of survivor literature, see Mookherjee, The Spectral Wound. Bangladeshis have produced numerous books about their experiences fighting in the Mukti Bahini, such as Oli Ahmad Bir Bikram, Battles That I Fought and Interviews of Liberation War Heroes (Dhaka: Annesha Prokashon, 2009). These are often revealing, but sometimes valorise the guerrillas. They rarely cover the killing of Biharis. There is also a growing literature of memoirs by women guerrillas, such as Begum Mushtari Shafi, Days of My Bleeding Heart, trans. A. S. Mondle (Dhaka: Mowla Brothers, 2010). For studies of modern Bangladesh and its history, see S. Mahmud Ali, Understanding Bangladesh (London: Hurst, 2010); Craig Baxter, Bangladesh: From a Nation to a State (Boulder:Westview, 1997); David Lewis, Bangladesh: Politics, Economy, and Civil Society (Cambridge University Press, 2011); Anthony Mascarhenhas, Bangladesh: A Legacy of Blood (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1986); Ali Riaz, Bangladesh: A Political History since Independence (London: I. B. Tauris, 2016); Sufia M. Uddin, Constructing Bangladesh: Religion, Ethnicity, and Language in an Islamic Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Kamal Hossain’s Bangladesh: Quest for Freedom and Justice (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2013) is an overview by an early foreign minister. On the British era, see Rafiuddin Ahmed, The Bengal Muslims, 1871–1906: A Quest for Identity (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981); and Peter Hardy, The Muslims of British India (Cambridge University Press, 1972). For useful overviews of Pakistani politics, see Anatol Lieven, Pakistan: A Hard Country (New York: Public Affairs, 2011); Owen Bennett Jones,

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Pakistan: Eye of the Storm (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Ian Talbot, Pakistan: A Modern History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); and Stephen P. Cohen, The Pakistan Army (Oxford University Press, 2002). The best-known account of the 1971 crisis is Sisson and Rose, War and Secession. An excellent book that has held up in many respects, it is based on interviews on all sides, including access to Pakistani decision makers. Another good early book on 1971 is Robert Jackson, South Asian Crisis: India, Pakistan and Bangla Desh: A Political and Historical Analysis of the 1971 War (New York: Praeger, 1975). Mascarhenhas, The Rape of Bangla Desh expands on his reporting from East Pakistan for the Sunday Times during the slaughter. It is harrowing reading. On the millions of refugees, see Datta, Refugees and Borders in South Asia. My book, The Blood Telegram, shows how the Nixon administration supported the Pakistani junta throughout the slaughter, as well as how India under Indira Gandhi responded to the crisis next door. Raghavan’s 1971 is a superb account that covers all angles with nuance, sensitivity and insight, by one of the finest historians of modern south Asia. Tripathi’s The Colonel Who Would Not Repent is a gripping chronicle of Bangladesh’s modern history, covering 1971 and its long aftermath. On the failure of efforts to prosecute Pakistani war criminals, see my ‘Bargaining away justice’. There are a number of memoirs from participants. G. W. Choudhury’s The Last Days of United Pakistan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974) is an insider account from within the Pakistani government, sympathetic both to Yahya and to Bengali grievances. There are a number of Pakistani memoirs, which are self-serving in varying degrees, including Siddiq Salik’s Witness to Surrender (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1979) and Siddiqi’s East Pakistan: The Endgame, by the chief press adviser to Yahya. A. A. K. Niazi’s The Betrayal of East Pakistan (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1998) is meant to clear the general’s name. Sarmila Bose’s Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011) is perhaps best understood as a participant account of some thirty Pakistan army officers interviewed by her. It is based on considerable field research but disfigured by the author’s skewed efforts to exonerate Pakistan and discredit Bengali nationalism. The Indian accounts of 1971 tend to concentrate on the December 1971 war, particularly India’s military victories in the east. The most prominent ones are J. F. R. Jacob, Surrender at Dacca: Birth of a Nation (New Delhi: Manohar, 516

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1997); and Sukhwant Singh, India’s Wars since Independence, vol. I: The Liberation of Bangladesh (New Delhi: Vikas, 1980). Archer K. Blood’s The Cruel Birth of Bangladesh: Memoirs of an American Diplomat (Dacca: University Press of Bangladesh, 2002) is a heartfelt memoir by the dissenting US consul general in East Pakistan in 1971, who spoke up despite having every career incentive to play down the horrors he saw. Richard Nixon’s RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990) and Henry Kissinger’s White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979) have sections on the 1971 crisis. These are shot through with omissions and distortions, but have proven quite successful in whitewashing their support of the Pakistani dictatorship in 1971. The events of 1971 have been retold in a number of works of historical fiction, most notably Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (New York: Knopf, 1981) and Shame (New York: Knopf, 1983); Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age (London: John Murray, 2007), part of her trilogy on Bengal; K. Anis Ahmed’s Good Night, Mr. Kissinger and Other Stories (Dhaka: University Press Limited, 2012); and stories in Niaz Zaman and Asif Farrukhi, Fault Lines: Stories of 1971 (Dhaka: University Press Limited, 2008).

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22

The Genocides in Cambodia, 1975–1979 ben kiernan

In 2018, the UN-sponsored Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) found that Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime had perpetrated two genocides while in power from 1975 to 1979. The Trial Chamber of the ECCC’s hybrid international-national court in Phnom Penh convicted the two surviving top leaders of that regime. Both Nuon Chea, Pol Pot’s number 2, and Khieu Samphan, the regime’s head of state from 1976 to 1979, were found guilty of the genocide of Cambodia’s ethnic Vietnamese minority. Samphan thus became the first head of state to be convicted of genocide in an international court. The Trial Chamber also found Nuon Chea guilty of the genocide of the country’s ethnic Cham Muslim minority.1 The ECCC had previously, in 2014, convicted both men of crimes against humanity for the persecution and mass murder of members of their country’s Khmer majority population, and they were already serving life sentences in Phnom Penh.2 These ECCC legal determinations and convictions were the culmination of four decades of national and international efforts to bring the Khmer Rouge leaders to justice. Their regime’s rise to power, and their crimes, had commenced much earlier. In 1967, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge launched an insurgency against the Cambodian regime of Prince Norodom Sihanouk.3 That insurgency escalated in 1970 when the Vietnam War spilled across the border, bringing three years of international conflict to the previously neutral kingdom of over 7 million people, mostly Khmer Buddhists. Khmer Rouge forces grew from several thousand 1 ECCC, Trial Chamber, Summary of Judgement, Case 002/02, 16 November 2018, www.eccc .gov.kh/en/document/public-affair/summary-judgement-case-00202. The full judgment was released on 23 March 2019, www.eccc.gov.kh/en/document/court/case-00202judgement. 2 ECCC, Supreme Court decision, 23 November 2016, www.eccc.gov.kh/en/articles/supre me-court-chamber-quashes-part-convictions-affirms-life-imprisonment-nuon-chea-and-khie. 3 Ben Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Communism in Cambodia, 1930–1975, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), ch. 7.

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guerrillas in 1969 to more than 200,000 troops and militia in 1973.4 They completed their conquest of Cambodia with the capture of Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975. Having seized national power, the Khmer Rouge forcibly emptied all of Cambodia’s cities, along with its hospitals and Buddhist monasteries. They shut down its schools, newspapers, postal service and most of its factories. They dynamited the National Bank (see Figure 22.1), and abolished money and wages. The new state of Democratic Kampuchea (DK), officially proclaimed in January 1976, became a vast agricultural labour camp. Family life came under rigid controls, and soon Cambodians had to take their meals in collective mess halls. A 12-year-old peasant boy whom the Khmer Rouge had separated from his parents in 1977 told me two years later that the Khmer Rouge had been ‘killing people every day’.5 Most of the killings occurred in secret, much like the administration of the entire country of Democratic Kampuchea.

Figure 22.1 The National Bank of Cambodia, dynamited by the Khmer Rouge after they took power in 1975. (Photo: Ben Kiernan, 1980)

4 Ben Kiernan, ‘The American bombardment of Kampuchea, 1969–1973’, Vietnam Generation 1:1 (1989), 4–41. 5 Interview with Sat, Surin province, Thailand, 12 March 1979, in Ben Kiernan and Chanthou Boua, Peasants and Politics in Kampuchea, 1942–1981 (London: Zed Books, 1982), pp. 334–7.

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Pol Pot, the country’s new leader, never admitted that his real name was Saloth Sar. As a Cambodian activist student in Paris in 1952, Sar had selected a different alias: the ‘Original Khmer’ (Khmaer da’em).6 Fellow Cambodian leftist students in Paris had preferred less racial, more modernist code-names, like ‘Free Khmer’ or ‘Khmer Worker’. Sar’s choice prefigured his particular prejudice against other ethnic groups. His French scholarship ended after he failed his radio-electricity course, and he returned to Cambodia in 1953. During the 1960s, Sar and other younger, mostly French-educated Cambodian communists took over the leadership of what had been a more orthodox Marxist, relatively pro-Vietnamese, Workers’ Party of Kampuchea. Under its previous name, the Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party (1951–60), it had led the country’s independence struggle against French colonialism while they were still in Paris. In 1966, this new younger leadership again changed the party’s name to ‘Communist Party of Kampuchea’ (CPK) and set out on their path to power by staging the 1967 uprising against Prince Sihanouk’s neutralist government. When the Cambodian army general and prime minister, Lon Nol, overthrew Sihanouk in March 1970, the Prince took up exile in Beijing and backed his erstwhile opposition whom he had dubbed ‘Khmers Rouges’. In 1975 they defeated and overthrew Lon Nol’s US-backed Khmer Republic. Their own state of Democratic Kampuchea was in turn overthrown by a Vietnamese invasion on 7 January 1979, ending the Khmer Rouge era.

The CPK Administrative and Geographic Structures The official, but secret, DK ruling body was the Standing Committee of the Central Committee of the CPK (see Table 22.1). However, in actual practice, the leaders with maximum national power and responsibility for the mass murders, crimes against humanity and the genocides perpetrated in 1975–9 were those leaders who were based in the capital, Phnom Penh. It was this group that made up the ‘Party Centre’ (mochhim paks). They included: Saloth Sar (Pol Pot), secretary-general of the CPK since 1962, and DK prime minister; Nuon Chea, CPK deputy secretary-general since 1960; Ieng Sary, ranked number 3 in the party leadership since 1963, who became one of DK’s deputy prime ministers (responsible for foreign affairs); Vorn Vet, number 5 in the CPK hierarchy and DK deputy prime minister for the economy; Son Sen, 6 Khemara Nisit, no. 14, August 1952, pp. 8, 22.

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So Phim, Sos Sar Yan Sok Thuok, Vorn Vet

4. So Vanna

5. Penh Thuok

Ieng Sary, Van

3. Kim Trang 1925–2013

Secretary, Eastern Zone, 1954–78

Long Rith, Nuon Chea, Brother No. 2

2. Long Bunruot 1926–2019

First vice-president, State Presidium Deputy PM for the economy, 1976–9

Deputy PM for foreign affairs, 1975–9

Secretary-general, 1962– ; Prime minister, 1976–9 chair, CPK Military Commission Deputy secretary-general, President, Cambodian 1960– ; vice-chair, Military People’s Representative Commission Assembly, 1976–9

Pol, Pol Pot, ‘87’, Brother No. 1

1. Saloth Sar 1925–98

DK Positions

CPK Positions

Aliases

Rank, Name

executed Dec. 1978

arrested on charges of crimes against humanity, war crimes, 19 Sept. 2007; convicted 2014, sentenced to life imprisonment; charged with genocide, 15 Sept. 2010; convicted on two counts of genocide, 16 Nov. 2018; died 14 Aug. 2019 charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes, 12 Nov. 2007, jailed 14 Nov. 2007; also charged with genocide, 15 Sept. 2010; died in jail during trial, March 2013 suicide 3 June 1978

died 15 Apr. 1998

Remarks

Table 22.1 The Standing Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea Central Committee, 1975–1979 (CPK ‘Centre’ members listed in bold type)

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Mok, ‘Ta Mok’, ‘Ta 15’, Chhit Choeun

Khieu

Hem

7. Ek Choeun 1926–2006

8. Son Sen 1930–97

9. Khieu Samphan, b. 1931

10. Keu

Aliases

Ruos Nhim

6. Moul Sambath

Candidate members, CPK Standing Committee

Aliases

Rank, Name

Table 22.1 (cont.) DK Positions

Remarks

Deputy secretary, Northwest Zone

CPK Positions

Remarks arrested June 1978, executed

DK Positions Northwest Zone military commander

Second vice-president, State arrested 11 June 1978, Presidium executed Secretary, Southwest Zone, First vice-president, People’s jailed Apr. 1999, died in 1973– Assembly; Chief of prison, 21 July 2006 General Staff Standing Committee mem- Deputy PM for defence executed by Pol Pot, ber for security; head, and security, 1975–9 June 1997 ‘Santebal’ head, Office of the CC, President of the State jailed on charges of crimes 1977–9 Presidium against humanity and war crimes, 19 Nov. 2007; convicted 2014, sentenced to life imprisonment; charged with genocide, 15 Sept. 2010; convicted 16 Nov. 2018, with life sentence; appealed, lost

Secretary, Northwest Zone

CPK Positions

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Ieng Thirith, Phea, Hong (Mme Ieng Sary)

(Mme Son Sen)

Ke Pauk

Doeun

Nang, Touc

Ney Sarann, Ya

Phuong

Chan

Sae

Thang Si

11. Khieu Thirith 1932–2015

12. Yun Yat

13. Ke Vin 1930–2002

14. Sua Vasi

15. Phouk Chhay

16. Men San

17. Ek Sophon

18. Seng Hong

19. Kang Chap

(?). Chou Chet

Secretary, Western Zone, 1975–8

Deputy secretary, Eastern Zone Secretary, Northern Zone

Head, Office of the Central Committee Minutes secretary, Standing Committee Secretary, Northeast Zone

Secretary, Central Zone; 1976–9

Minister of rubber plantations

Minister of culture and information Deputy Chief of General Staff, armed forces, 1977–98.

Minister of social action, education

arrested Aug. 1978, executed arrested 15 Mar. 1978, executed

executed 1979

arrested 12 Feb. 1977, executed arrested 14 Mar. 1977, executed 6 July 1977 arrested 20 Sept. 1977, executed executed 1978

charged with crimes against humanity, arrested 14 Nov. 2007; ruled mentally unfit to stand trial, 2011, released; died 2015 executed by Pol Pot, June 1997 died of illness in Phnom Penh, 15 Feb. 2002

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Aliases

Deuch (Duch), Kaing Guek Eav

Candidate members, CPK Standing Committee

(?). Kang Khek Iev 1942–2020

Table 22.1 (cont.)

CPK Positions

Remarks

commandant, ‘S-21’ central jailed Apr. 1999, charged prison, 1976–9 with crimes against humanity, 31 July 2007; convicted 2010; sentenced to life imprisonment; died 2 Sept. 2020

DK Positions

The Genocides in Cambodia, 1975–1979

number 11 in the party in 1963, who had since risen to number 8, and became DK deputy prime minister for defence and security; Khieu Samphan, a party member since the 1950s who became DK’s president or head of state, and number 9 in the CPK hierarchy; Ieng Thirith, wife of Ieng Sary and DK minister of social action, number 11; and Yun Yat, wife of Son Sen and DK minister of culture, number 12. As Table 22.1 shows, two other very high-ranking members of the CPK Standing Committee held regional posts, as zone chiefs. But partly because those regional responsibilities mostly kept them away from the capital, these two did not play major roles in the Party Centre, which held its meetings in Phnom Penh. So Phim, number 4 in the CPK hierarchy, and Ruos Nhim, number 6, were the CPK secretaries of the Eastern and Northwest Zones, respectively. (See Map 22.1.) These were the country’s two most economically important zones.7 So Phim spent most of his time in the agriculturally rich Eastern Zone, which had a large population of 1.7 million. He appears not to have attended any of the Standing Committee meetings in a key period after victory, the year between September 1975 and August 1976. Phim is listed as present at none of its fourteen meetings for which minutes survive, from 9 October 1975 to 30 May 1976; he also missed all of its meetings over the following three months, because he spent the period May–August 1976 undergoing medical treatment in China.8 Moreover, the CPK Central Committee (CC) appears never to have met. Although its key role was assumed by the CC Standing Committee, the role was actually played by the Party Centre – that is, by those Standing Committee members who held national-level posts and, unlike So Phim and Ruos Nhim, were based in the capital and available to attend meetings there, which occurred every seven to ten days.9 The frequent absences of So Phim and Ruos Nhim from meetings of the CPK Standing Committee meant that these two men – the most senior veteran communist leaders, who ran the country’s two most populous and productive zones – were largely excluded from the key national decisions secretly made by the CPK Centre. 7 ‘The Party’s Four-Year Plan to Build Socialism in All Fields, 1977–1980’, in Pol Pot Plans the Future: Confidential Leadership Documents from Democratic Kampuchea, 1976–77, ed. D.P. Chandler, Ben Kiernan and C. Boua (New Haven: Yale Council on Southeast Asia Studies, 1988), Table 1, p. 52. 8 Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979, 3rd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008 [1996]), p. 324. 9 Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), Office of the CoInvestigating Judges, Closing Order [Indictment], Case File No.: 002/19-09-2007-ECCCOCIJ, 15 September 2010, 20.

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Map 22.1 Democratic Kampuchea: Administrative Zones. (Cartography by Margaret Pitt)

There may have been a political motive as well as a geographic reason for their exclusion: these two veterans disagreed with the Centre’s 1975 ‘decision to close markets and to evacuate the cities’. Their diminished political status was later formalised by denying them ‘full-rights’ membership of the Standing Committee, and relegating them to ‘candidate’ membership.10 By contrast, two other CPK figures who in 1975–6 held regional party posts similar to those of So Phim and Ruos Nhim but enjoyed the favour of Pol Pot’s Centre group, did increasingly assume national posts as well, and took up responsibility for the implementation of both military and genocidal policies throughout the country. Chhit Choeun (alias Mok), number 9 in the party in 1963, had since risen to number 7 and had taken over as CPK secretary of the key Southwest Zone in 1973. He would also become 10 ECCC, Case 002/02 Judgement, 27 March 2019, Case File/Dossier No. 002/19-09-2007/ ECCC/TC, 992–3; see also 978, 990; Closing Order, 15 September 2010, 19.

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commander of the CPK’s Revolutionary Army of Kampuchea and would even rise to number 3 position in the Standing Committee, immediately after Pol Pot and Nuon Chea. Mok became the only CPK leader based outside of Phnom Penh to enjoy full-rights membership of the Standing Committee, as did Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, and Ieng Sary.11 In addition, Ke Pauk, number 13 in the CPK hierarchy, became party secretary of the Central Zone of DK in 1976, and later rose to become under-secretary-general of the Revolutionary Army of Kampuchea. I shall demonstrate below the key military and political roles of Mok and Pauk, and in particular of Mok’s Southwest Zone forces, in the spread of genocidal massacres across Cambodia. Both Mok and Pauk were warlord figures, in two senses. First, they were originally military commanders who rose to control their respective zones by overshadowing or purging their zone’s political leadership. Second, and especially in Mok’s case, they ruled through the appointment of close family members to key posts in their zones. They did so with Centre support. Along with Mok’s promotion in the Standing Committee and the demotions of So Phim and Ruos Nhim, an early example of the Centre’s favouritism towards Mok and his Southwest Zone was territorial. Before 1970 the Eastern Zone included six regions, numbered 20 to 25. Then in 1971, the Centre created its own wartime ‘Special Zone’ around Phnom Penh, by taking Region 25 from the Eastern Zone and Regions 15 and 33 from the Southwest Zone. However, after the 1975 victory and the dismantling of the Special Zone, the Centre did not return Region 25 to the Eastern Zone, but transferred it to the Southwest Zone instead.

The CPK Internal Purges The CPK Centre, known as Angkar Loeu (‘high organisation’), may have begun its violent internal purges as early as the 1960s, by assassinating party figures considered too close to Vietnam’s communists. There remains some doubt whether in 1962 an insider, perhaps Saloth Sar himself, had betrayed his then superior, Tou Samouth, secretary-general of the Workers’ Party of Kampuchea, to Sihanouk’s and Lon Nol’s police, who murdered Samouth. But by 1974 the CPK Centre demonstrably failed to share the Eastern Zone CPK branch’s loyalty to Samouth’s memory, and in 1978 it retrospectively accused Samouth of having been a Vietnamese ‘puppet’ – and then quickly 11 Closing Order, 15 September 2010, 19, 40, para. 149; Case 002/02 Judgement, 27 March 2019, 205.

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withdrew and attempted to erase that accusation,12 perhaps because of something the accusation might reveal about what had led to Samouth’s murder. Then, in the early 1970s, before taking power at the national level, the Centre organised the arrest and ‘disappearances’ of approximately 900–1,000 Hanoi-trained Khmer communists who had come home to Cambodia from North Vietnam to join the insurgency against Lon Nol’s regime. They had accounted for half the party’s membership in 1970. The next step was to sideline and eventually purge distrusted CPK zone leaderships, the veteran communists who also had once worked with the Vietnamese communists. But these zone chiefs were more domestically entrenched, especially So Phim in the east and Ruos Nhim in the northwest. Democratic Kampuchea was initially divided into six major zones (phumipeak), and thirty-two regions or sectors (damban), each of which in turn comprised districts (srok), subdistricts (khum) and villages (phum). An eventual aim of the CPK Centre at the local level was to build larger and larger units, abolishing village life altogether in favour of ‘high-level cooperatives’, each the size of a subdistrict, involving the erasure of private family autonomy and the imposition of communal meals in public eating halls. Meanwhile, at the top end of the hierarchy, the Centre set about reducing the autonomy of the zones by bringing them under its own direct control from above. The Centre gradually exerted totalitarian control over both the population and administration by replacing autonomous or dissident zone administrations and party committees with Centre-backed forces commanded by its loyalist zone leaders Mok and Pauk. From 1972 to mid-1978, these and other purges took the lives of half of the members of the party’s Central Committee. From 1973, with Centre backing, Mok began to seize control of the Southwest Zone Party Committee. He killed his party senior, Prasith, an ethnic Thai who had ranked as high as number 7 in the 1963 CPK hierarchy. In

12 The differing Eastern Zone and CPK Centre party histories are set out in Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power, pp. 364–7 (esp. section 17, p. 367). Democratic Kampuchea, Livre Noir, Phnom Penh, 1978, pp. 43–4, and elsewhere, accused Tou Samouth of being a Vietnamese ‘puppet’; cf. the subsequent English version, Black Paper, pp. 29–30. In 1980 a DK defector told the US Embassy in Bangkok that ‘Pol Pot ordered the execution’ of Tou Samouth. See David P. Chandler, The Tragedy of Cambodian History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 338 n. 98; Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1996), p. 13 n. 30; Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power, p. 241 n. 135.

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1976, Mok sent his brutal daughter Khom to help run what had been Prasith’s Region 11, a largely ethnic Thai area of western Cambodia.13 In 1975, the Centre created a new Western Zone, ‘our poorest Zone, having poor soil and little water’.14 This zone was then assigned to Chou Chet, the veteran chairman of the Southwest Zone, Mok’s remaining superior and rival there, whom his forces had ambushed and slightly wounded in 1973.15 The Centre now demoted Chet to CPK secretary of the truncated, impoverished Western Zone. For his part, Mok gained full control of the populous, productive rump of the Southwest Zone, with two and a half times the population of the Western Zone, 50 per cent more riceland and all the nation’s salt pans.16 It was from this strong economic base, with unchallenged power and strong Centre backing, that Mok’s Southwest Zone forces were able to expand in 1977 and 1978 to take over almost all of the rest of Cambodia. Also after the 1975 victory, Ke Pauk’s forces carried out a violent purge of the Northern Zone. Deploying his military command, Pauk displaced cadres loyal to his predecessor, Koy Thuon, CPK Secretary of the Northern Zone, who was first transferred to Phnom Penh, then arrested, and later executed. The North was renamed the Central Zone. From late 1976, over a hundred of Mok’s Southwest Zone cadres arrived there to assist in Pauk’s takeover. In 1977, Southwest cadres carried out a similar purge of Ruos Nhim’s Northwest Zone, and then, in early 1978, of Chou Chet’s Western Zone. The people arrested were taken to the nerve centre of the CPK system, the national security service (Santebal) prison in Phnom Penh, code-named ‘Office S-21’. (See Figure 22.2.) Up to 15,000 people, mostly suspected CPK dissidents and regional officials, were tortured and killed there from 1976 to 1979. Santebal chief, Kaing Khek Iev, alias Duch, reported directly first to Son Sen, the CPK Centre official responsible for security, and then, from 15 August 1977, to Pol Pot’s deputy, Nuon Chea.17 S-21 was the centre of a national network of prisons, and of the nearby mass graves where the murdered prisoners’ bodies were buried. 13 Case 002/02 Judgement, 27 March 2019, 469, 497. 14 Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime, p. 89. 15 Case 002/02 Judgement, 27 March 2019, 456 n. 2711 (citing a 1 October 1974 ‘CPK Report’ labelling Chou Chet ‘Chief of the Southwest Zone’), corroborating Ith Sarin, Sronoh Pralung Khmaer [Regrets of the Khmer Soul], Phnom Penh, 1974, trans. in Communist Party Power in Kampuchea, ed. T. M. Carney (Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 1977), p. 73; Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime, p. 79. 16 Pol Pot Plans the Future, p. 52. 17 ECCC, Trial Chamber, Summary of Judgement, Case 002/02, 16 November 2018, 21.

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Figure 22.2 Tuol Sleng (‘S-21’) Prison, Phnom Penh. (Photo: Ben Kiernan, 1980)

The Genocides in Cambodia, 1975–1979

Finally, in May 1978, Centre armed forces commanded by Son Sen, Pauk, and Mok launched a conventional military suppression campaign that overran So Phim’s Eastern Zone. Phim committed suicide in early June 1978. The Centre’s struggle for total control was finally complete. But it had sown the seeds of its own overthrow. Surviving officials and troops of the Eastern Zone were already in rebellion, and in late 1978 they crossed the Vietnamese border with tens of thousands of followers.18 They requested the Vietnamese military assistance that soon brought DK to an end.

The Ideology Behind the Genocides Along with totalitarian Stalinist and Maoist models, the political world view of the Pol Pot group encompassed an obsession with Cambodian national and racial revivalism and grandiosity. The CPK leaders would recover Cambodia’s ‘original’ pre-Buddhist glory, surpass the powerful economy of the medieval Angkor kingdom, and regain its ‘lost territory’ from Vietnam and Thailand.19 French colonialism had exaggerated this Cambodian sense of lost glory. For instance, a sculpture group erected in the 1920s at the stairway below Marseille railway station depicts a recumbent Cambodian apsara (celestial dancer) being attended by a prostrate Vietnamese boy and a Lao girl. The statuary elevates Cambodia to a privileged position, superior to that of Vietnam. French colonial ideology aimed to preserve Khmer culture and to emphasise Cambodia’s historic role in Southeast Asia by excavating and studying the ancient monuments of Angkor. This colonial ideology was, however, also partly designed to keep restless Vietnamese in their place under French rule. And it was perfectly suited to encourage the young Saloth Sar to dream of recasting himself as the ‘Original Khmer’. He arrived in Marseille in September 1949 by ship from Saigon. It is easy to imagine him, climbing the stairway to catch his

18 Ben Kiernan, ‘Wild chickens, farm chickens, and cormorants: Cambodia’s Eastern Zone under Pol Pot’, in Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia: Documentation, Denial and Justice in Cambodia and East Timor (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2008), ch. 1 (see also ch. 2). 19 Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power, pp. 361, 414–16; Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime, pp. 3, 58, 63, 104–5, 111, 360–70, 386–90, 425; Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 552–4; François Ponchaud, ‘L’idéologie du Kampuchéa démocratique’, Communisme 95/96 (2008), pp. 105–8, at 107.

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first train to Paris, carefully studying this sculpture group depicting Cambodia’s superiority to Vietnam. Born in 1925, Pol Pot had reached adulthood in French Indochina under the wartime pro-Nazi Vichy administration. He and Khieu Samphan attended a Cambodian high school where every morning the pupils had to salute Marshal Pétain with the words, ‘Maréchal, nous voilà!’ Pétainist agrarian ideology also percolated into Cambodia. It is apparent in Khieu Samphan’s Paris doctoral dissertation on Cambodia’s economy, which emphasised relying on the country’s domestic agricultural resources and separating Cambodia from other nations’ economies.20 This too suited Pol Pot’s idea of falling back on the ‘original’ Cambodia. The DK state treasured the Cambodian ‘race’, not individuals. As Pol Pot put it in 1978, ‘We do not worry that one day our army may run out of men, for the local population from which we can recruit is unlimited.’21 Khmer peasant casualties were not a problem; national impurities were. The latter included the foreign-educated (except for Pol Pot’s own Paris-educated group) and those the Centre called ‘hereditary enemies’, especially Vietnamese. To return Cambodians to their imagined origins, the Pol Pot group saw the need for war, and for ‘secrecy as the basis’ of the revolution.22 Few of the grass-roots, more pragmatic, veteran Cambodian communists could be trusted to implement such plans, which Pol Pot kept secret from them. The Party Centre, with its elite, urban background, French (or in Nuon Chea’s case, Thai) education and a racial chauvinism little different from that of its predecessor (the Lon Nol regime), inhabited a different ideological world from that of the more moderate, Buddhist-educated, Vietnamese-trained peasant cadres who had made up the mass of the party’s membership, even including most zone leaders. The Centre’s acknowledged lack of a political base for its programme meant that it considered tactics of ‘secrecy’ and violence necessary. These were used first against suspected party dissidents, then against the people of Cambodia as a whole. Given the sacrifices from the population that the nationalist revival required, the resistance it naturally provoked, and the regime’s preparedness to forge ahead ‘at all costs’, mass murder and genocides were the results. 20 Kiernan, Blood and Soil, pp. 543–4. 21 Phnom Penh Radio, 17 January 1978, quoted in Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime, p. 388. 22 Pol Pot Plans the Future, pp. 214, 220.

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The Death Toll From April 1975 to January 1979, Cambodia’s 1975 population of 7.9 million declined by at least 1.67 million.23 In a 2009 report commissioned by the ECCC’s co-investigating judges, UN Demographic Expert Ewa Tabeau concluded that 1.747 million was the ‘most likely’ minimum death toll.24 In its 2019 judgment in Case 002/02, the Trial Chamber wrote: ‘Experts accept estimates falling between 1.5 and two million excess deaths as the most probable.’25 (See Table 22.2.)

Table 22.2 Approximate death tolls in Democratic Kampuchea, 1975–1979* Social group

1975 population

Numbers perished

%

‘New Citizens’ Urban Khmer Rural Khmer Chinese (all urban) Vietnamese (urban) Lao (rural) TOTAL New citizens

2,000,000 600,000 430,000 10,000 10,000 3,050,000

500,000 150,000 215,000 10,000 4,000 879,000

25 25 50 100 40 29

‘Base Citizens’ Rural Khmer Khmer Krom Cham (all rural) Vietnamese (rural) Thai (rural) Upland minorities TOTAL Base citizens Cambodia

4,500,000 5,000 250,000 10,000 20,000 60,000 4,840,000 7,890,000

675,000 2,000 90,000 10,000 8,000 9,000 792,000 1,671,000

15 40 36 100 40 15 16 21

* Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime, p. 458.

23 Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime, pp. 456–60. 24 Ewa Tabeau and They Kheam, Demographic Expert Report, Khmer Rouge Victims in Cambodia, April 1975–January 1979: A Critical Assessment of Major Estimates, submitted to the Co-Investigating Judges of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, Phnom Penh, 30 September 2009, pp. 70, 65. Tabeau’s report also cautioned that to be on ‘safe ground, we believe that it is rather Kiernan’s initial estimate of 1.6 mln excess deaths that should be taken as the lower end for the final range of death toll under the Khmer Rouge, which becomes: 1.6 to 2.2 million.’ 25 Case 002/02 Judgement, 27 March 2019, 153.

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These deaths were caused by mass killings, starvation, disease and overwork. The regime’s military and security forces deliberately killed one-third to one-half of the victims, possibly 700,000–800,000 people.26 The other causes of mass death may also be blamed on the regime, which not only imposed a system of large-scale forced population displacement and forced labour, but it also exported rice and rejected international food and medical aid for Cambodia’s people. Not all of this high death toll, about 21 per cent of Cambodia’s 1975 population, can be classified as genocide under the legal definition of that crime. Many of the victims belonged to political and social groups that are not ‘protected’ by the 1948 UN Genocide Convention. These included civilian officials of the defeated Lon Nol regime, its surrendered former officers and soldiers, and ‘class enemies’ targeted by the Khmer Rouge regime such as ‘capitalists’ or ‘exploiting classes’. The persecutions and killings of members of these groups may be best classified as cases of extermination, a crime against humanity.

Genocides against Ethnic Groups: Vietnamese, Chinese and Chams The largest domestic ethnic minority groups in Cambodia before 1970 were the Vietnamese, the Chinese, the Muslim Cham, the Thai and the Lao. Most other communist states set up supposedly autonomous ethnic minority regions. But the Pol Pot regime’s view of Cambodia’s twenty-five national minorities, who had long comprised up to 20 per cent of the population, was virtually to deny their existence. The regime officially and falsely proclaimed that they totalled only 1 per cent of the population.27 Statistically, they were written off. The physical fate of these ethnic minority peoples was much worse. In research published from 1986–96, I estimated that up to 100 per cent of the ethnic Vietnamese who had remained in Cambodia after 1976 had perished under the DK regime, along with 50 per cent of the country’s ethnic Chinese minority, 36 per cent of the Muslim Chams and 40 per cent of each of the Thai and the Lao ethnic minorities.28 In their 2009 Report to the ECCC, the UN Demographic Expert, Dr Ewa Tabeau, and They Kheam concurred with

26 Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime, pp. 456–60; Ewa Tabeau and They Kheam, Khmer Rouge Victims in Cambodia, p. 70. 27 Democratic Kampuchea Is Moving Forward, Phnom Penh, 1977, p. 6. 28 Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime, p. 458, Table 4.

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these figures as ‘the most likely estimates’, while specifically noting the loss of ‘almost all Vietnamese’ remaining within Cambodia after 1975.29 Members of Cambodia’s 450,000-strong population of ethnic Vietnamese had never been granted citizenship and had always been required to carry ethnic identity cards. Over half had been expelled by the US-backed Lon Nol regime in 1970 (with several thousand killed in massacres). About 150,000 more were then driven out by the Pol Pot regime in the first year after its victory in 1975.30 Those ethnic Vietnamese who stayed in Cambodia, probably 20,000 people, were simply murdered in 1977 and 1978. Researchers working after 1979 both inside Cambodia (myself) and along the Thai border (Michael Vickery) attempted to locate or identify any Vietnamese resident who had survived the Pol Pot years inside the country, but we proved unable to find or even to name a single one. However, eyewitnesses from other ethnic groups, including Khmers who were married to Vietnamese, testified to the terrible fates of their Vietnamese spouses and neighbours. What they witnessed was a campaign of systematic racial extermination.31 This was a clear case of genocide, where the DK regime intended to destroy an ethnic, national, racial or religious group, as such, and carried out its intent by killing members of such a group, ‘in whole or in part’. The April 1977 issue of the CPK magazine Tung Padevat (‘Revolutionary Flag’) published what the ECCC co-investigating judges termed in their 2010 indictment ‘a direct call to kill all members of the Vietnamese community remaining in Cambodia. It called for the masses to “seek out” and “smash” [komtech, i.e. kill] them and stated, “as for their old roots, some of whom still remain after we have smashed them to bits, it is imperative to whip-up the people to sweep more of them clean and make things permanently clean”.’ The co-investigating judges further alleged: ‘Evidence of implementation of the policy is contained in communications from the zone level to the Centre. Former cadres also confirm the policy: wherever there were Vietnamese, “everyone had to be careful and to find them and to ‘sweep them up’”.’32 The ECCC Trial Chamber, in convicting two top Khmer Rouge leaders of the genocide of ethnic Vietnamese, found that ‘the CPK upper echelon ordered the identification of Vietnamese, as a result of which, from April 1975, lists and biographies were prepared by the lower echelons and then communicated back to the upper echelon for further action’. In mixed 29 Ewa Tabeau and They Kheam, Khmer Rouge Victims in Cambodia, p. 70. 30 Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime, pp. 107–9. 31 Ibid., pp. 296–8, 393–4, 423–7. 32 ECCC, Office of Co-Investigating Judges, Closing Order, 15 September 2010, 58.

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families, the CPK targeted ‘Vietnamese mothers and their children while sparing Khmer fathers’, and ‘targeted Vietnamese fathers while sparing Khmer mothers and children’. Until late 1976 the Vietnamese community was targeted for expulsion from Cambodia, but ‘from April 1977’, it was targeted ‘for destruction as such’. From then on, ‘deliberate killings occurred on a mass scale, . . . systematically organised and directed against the Vietnamese’. These killings of civilians occurred on boats in DK waters from mid-1977, and on 19 March 1978; in Kompong Chhnang province in 1977; in Svay Rieng province in 1978; in Kratie province in September 1978; and at Wat Khsach in Siem Riep province in late 1978. ‘In each case’, the court found, ‘Vietnamese were targeted not as individuals but based on their membership of the group and their perceived ethnicity.’ These crimes rose to the level of extermination, the additional crime against humanity of persecution on racial grounds, and genocide.33 Significantly, the arrival of Mok’s Southwest Zone cadres who purged the Northwest Zone in mid-1977 had a dramatic effect on the ethnic Vietnamese minority there, as elsewhere. A man from Region 5 in the Northwest Zone recalled: ‘[T]hey were searching out Vietnamese to arrest. When they found any Vietnamese, they took them away and killed them.’ When asked to specify, ‘You have said that the Vietnamese in your unit were taken to be killed’, he replied: ‘That happened after the Southwest group arrived. They researched people’s biographies to find the Vietnamese, and when they discovered someone was Vietnamese, they would take them to be killed.’34 Nevertheless, the veteran Northwest Zone CPK secretary, Ruos Nhim, failed to implement this policy. As late as 17 May 1978, he asked for instructions from the Party Centre (‘Office 870’) on how to deal with ‘Yuons [Vietnamese] with Khmer spouses and the half-breed [Khmer-Yuon]’. Nhim reported that these people were generally ‘scared of the situation and worried about their fate, but there is not yet any sign of opposing activities. If any of them make some [suspicious] activities, we will decide to take them out.’35 Nhim’s policy of ‘taking out’ ethnic Vietnamese only if they conducted ‘opposing’ or suspicious ‘activities’ was clearly a sign of his own unwitting divergence from the Centre’s genocidal plans. On 11 June 1978, within weeks 33 ECCC Trial Chamber, Summary of Judgement, Case 002/02, 16 November 2018, 15; Case 002/02 Judgement, 27 March 2019, Case File/Dossier No. 002/19-09-2007/ECCC/ TC, 581–92, 1699–782, esp. 1736–40, 1756–9, 1761–5, 1767–9, 1773–6, 1778–82. 34 Case 002/02 Judgement, 27 March 2019, 728 n. 4682, 1739 n. 11544. 35 DK Telegram, 17 May 1978, E3/863, p. 2, ERN (En) 00321962, quoted in ECCC, Trial Chamber, Case 002/02 Judgement, 27 March 2019, 1734, 1740, https://drive.google.com/file/ d/1LA9ttO7C4fgC1aSb1cAoe9ofzwDuERx5/view?ts=5c9c9bb0.

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of sending this telegram, Nhim was arrested and sent to his death at ‘S-21’ in Phnom Penh. The Trial Chamber also found that ‘following a screening process aimed at implementing a nationwide policy to exterminate the Vietnamese, further killings of Vietnamese occurred’ in the Western Zone in July 1978, ‘as evidenced by the telegram dated 4 August 1978’, in which ‘Office 401’ reported to the Party Centre that in ‘Region 37 . . . 100 Vietnamese people – small and big, young and old – have been smashed’.36 Under DK, the ethnic Chinese of Cambodia suffered the worst disaster ever to befall any of Southeast Asia’s large ethnic Chinese communities. Of the 1975 population of 425,000, only 200,000 Chinese survived the next four years. Cambodia’s ethnic Chinese were nearly all urban; the Khmer Rouge saw them as archetypal city-dwellers, and treated them as prisoners of war. Like other evacuated city-dwellers they were made to work harder and under much harsher conditions than rural dwellers. The Chinese succumbed in particularly large numbers to hunger and to diseases like malaria. The 50 per cent of them who perished is a higher proportion even than the toll estimated for Cambodia’s city-dwellers in general (about one-third). The Chinese language, like almost all foreign and minority languages, was banned, and so was any tolerance of a culturally and ethnically distinguishable Chinese community. Their community was destroyed ‘as such’.37 The ECCC did not prosecute this case. The Muslim Chams numbered at least 250,000 in 1975. Just like Cambodian village life itself, the Chams’ distinct Islamic religion, with their own language and culture, their large villages and autonomous nationwide networks, all threatened the atomised, rigorously supervised society that the CPK Centre planned. An early 1974 Pol Pot document records the decision to ‘break up’ the Cham people, adding: ‘Do not allow too many of them to concentrate in one area.’ Cham women were forced to cut their hair short in the Khmer style, not wear it long as was their custom; later the traditional Cham sarong was banned, as peasants were forced to wear only black pyjamas. Ultimately, restrictions were placed upon religious activity. Cham rebellions erupted in 1975. On an island in the Mekong River, the authorities attempted to collect all copies of the Quran. Villagers staged a protest demonstration. Khmer Rouge troops fired into the crowd. The Chams then took up swords and knives and slaughtered half a dozen troops. 36 Case 002/02 Judgement, 27 March 2019, 1734, 1763–4. 37 Ben Kiernan, ‘Kampuchea’s ethnic Chinese under Pol Pot: a case of systematic social discrimination’, Journal of Contemporary Asia 16:1 (1986), 18–29.

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The retaliating armed forces massacred many and pillaged their homes. They evacuated the island, and razed the village, and then turned to a neighbouring village, killing 70 per cent of its inhabitants. From 1975 to 1979, the DK army forcibly emptied all of the 113 Cham villages in the country. About 100,000 Chams were massacred and the survivors dispersed in small groups of several families. Islamic schools and religion, as well as the Cham language, were banned. Thousands of Muslims were physically forced to eat pork. Many were murdered for refusing. Of 113 Cham hakkem, or community leaders, 20 survived in 1979. Only 25 of their 226 deputies survived. All but 38 of about 300 religious teachers at Cambodia’s Quranic schools perished. Of more than 1,000 who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, only about 30 survived.38

The Mechanisms of Genocide How were these genocidal policies put into effect? Two political forces drove the mass killings and escalated them into genocide. First, the Party Centre. Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, and Son Sen, in particular, from their national positions of power in Phnom Penh, used the machinery of the CPK Standing Committee to push their decision-making authority forward and pursue ever-more violent policies. Second, as we saw in Region 5 of the Northwest Zone, a key role was also played by Mok’s Southwest Zone forces, who spread across Cambodia as they were transferred to other zones and seized power in those zones. These two political forces were connected very closely. Mok himself was of course not just CPK secretary of the Southwest Zone but also a member of the CPK Standing Committee. Mok’s son-in-law Ren became a deputy to Son Sen at the Army General Staff in Phnom Penh.39 In August 2018, the ECCC’s international co-investigating judge, Michael Bohlander, concluded that in the Central (formerly Northern) Zone, ‘there was an escalation in the enforcement of CPK policy targeting the Cham following the arrival of the Southwest Zone administration’, numbering 100 to 300 officials, in late 1976 or early 1977. ‘The policy, as applied in Kampong Cham Province, progressed from the suppression of the Cham religious and cultural identity to the physical destruction of the Cham population’ in the zone. In other words, the judge continued, ‘The widespread arrest and killing 38 For more details on the nationwide genocide of the Cham minority, see Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime, pp. 252–88. 39 Case 002/02 Judgement, 27 March 2019, 1616 n. 10752.

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of Cham occurred in the Central Zone after the arrival of the Southwest Zone cadres.’40 Judge Bohlander indicted a leader of this group of Southwest Zone cadres, Ao An, for genocide ‘against the Cham of Kompong Cham Province’ in the Central Zone. In late 1976 or early 1977, under Mok’s orders, Ao An had transferred from the Southwest Zone and taken up the post of CPK secretary of Region 41 in the Central Zone, and in late 1977 he became CPK deputy secretary of the Central Zone, under Ke Pauk. According to the 2018 indictment by the co-investigating judge: ‘After the arrival of Ao An and the Southwest Zone cadres, incidents of arrest and killings of Cham were targeted in at least 10 districts in the Central Zone . . . including all five districts in Sector [Region] 41, three of the four districts in Sector 42, and two of the four districts in Sector 43.’41 Judge Bohlander’s indictment found that: Ao An had the defining role in orchestrating and implementing the annihilation of the Cham in the Central Zone across Sector 41 in particular, but also provided vital logistical support to the co-ordinated transfer of Cham from the East Zone to Sector 41, where they were killed, as everywhere else, purely because of their religious and ethnic affiliations. The killing of the Cham in Sector 41 was more intense and comprehensive than other parts of the Central Zone. The eradication of the Cham in Ao An’s sphere of influence after his installation in the Central Zone was relentless in its pace, all-encompassing in its reach, coldly methodological and merciless in its operation . . . At a very conservative calculation, a minimum of 17,115 Cham were killed in the Central Zone during Ao An’s reign, but very likely many more.42

The indictment set out further how this was achieved bureaucratically: Ao An shared the special intent to destroy the Cham of Kampong Cham Province through the underlying acts of killing members of the Cham population and causing them serious bodily or mental harm. He ordered the district secretaries in Sector 41 to compile lists of the Cham population and ordered all the Cham to be arrested and killed. He ordered mass arrests of Cham people on multiple occasions and monitored the progress of the killing operation through reports provided to him. That he intended to destroy the Cham is further demonstrated by the massive scale and pattern of the killing operation carried out on his orders. Toward the end of DK he 40 ECCC, Closing Order (Indictment) [of Ao An], Co-Investigating Judges, 16 August 2018, Case 004/2/07/09/2009-ECCC-OCIJ, 320. 41 Ibid., 319. 42 Ibid., 371, 117–21, Annex IV, ‘Cham Victims.’

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ordered a redoubling of efforts that any remaining Cham were to be identified and listed and required an enhanced level of diligence in preparing the lists thus showing his continued commitment and determination to annihilate the Cham population.43

Nevertheless, as of 2022, the Hun Sen government prevented the case against Ao An from going to trial.44 In its 2019 full judgment in Case 002/02, the ECCC Trial Chamber concluded that ‘orders to purge the Cham’ in the Central Zone, ‘and specifically in Sector 41, came from the upper echelon, and were implemented through the [CPK] district secretaries’ who had come from the Southwest Zone, and who ‘reported to Ao An, the Sector 41 Secretary, who, in turn, reported to Ke Pauk’. The judges also concluded that ‘meetings were held in 1977 in Sector 41 discussing enemies, and not long thereafter Cham started being systematically arrested in various locations of this sector based on lists that had been prepared beforehand’.45 Orders along these lines continued to come from Ao An’s superiors, both Mok and Ke Pauk, even ‘towards the end of DK’. At a Region 41 meeting in Prey Chhor district in late 1978 or early 1979, chaired by Ao An, he and Mok announced that people of different ethnicities were to be purged. All the district-level ‘persons responsible for lists and documentation’ as well as all the khum chiefs of Region 41 were present at this meeting, and were ordered ‘to go to the villages directly, compile the names and make lists, making sure to record the ethnic composition of the people’. At a meeting in Kompong Thom Province in late 1978, Ke Pauk urged cadres to implement the ‘policy of Angkar’ (‘the Organisation’, i.e. the CPK) ‘to smash 100 percent of the Cham’.46 Also in late 1978, another Southwest Zone leader, Mok’s son-in-law Meas Muth, arrived in Kratie province in northeast Cambodia. Since marrying Mok’s daughter Khom, Muth had risen through the ranks from his post as a CPK district secretary in the Southwest Zone to that of CPK secretary of Region 13, to that of a Zone division commander and commander of the DK navy. In 1978, Muth became deputy secretary of the General Staff of the 43 Ibid., 397, 333–6, 399, 401, 409, 154, 158. 44 www.eccc.gov.kh/en/articles/press-release-international-co-prosecutor-and-nationalco-prosecutor (dated 4 May 2020). 45 Case 002/02 Judgement, 27 March 2019, Case File/Dossier No. 002/19-09-2007/ECCC/ TC, 1676–8 (and 1611 n. 10713 for a list of cadres transferred from the Southwest to the Central Zone in February 1977). 46 Closing Order (Indictment), Co-Investigating Judges, 16 August 2018, Case 004/02, 335– 6, 318.

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Revolutionary Army of Kampuchea. In 2017, the ECCC international coprosecutor alleged that as naval commander, Muth had implemented the CPK leadership’s plan to completely ‘cleanse the DK’ of ethnic Vietnamese, which by 1977 meant ‘killing all Vietnamese that remained in Cambodia. The campaign of genocide by killings included the execution of many civilian fishermen and refugees captured at sea by Meas Muth’s naval forces.’ The international co-prosecutor further alleged: ‘Between 1975 and 1979, Meas Muth issued orders that Vietnamese prisoners captured at sea be killed on the spot or taken to land and sent for execution.’ There were ‘thousands of victims – Vietnamese, Thai, and other foreign nationals’ executed in this way.47 On his arrival in Kratie in northeastern Cambodia in November 1978, Muth not only purged that province’s military and political leadership but also ‘continued the genocidal attack against the Vietnamese, sending Vietnamese nationals captured in Kratie to S-21’, the central prison in Phnom Penh. ‘Unlike Thai prisoners, whose lives could sometimes be negotiated for where the DK saw an economic benefit in doing so, the certain death prescribed for Vietnamese captured at sea or under Meas Muth’s control in Kratie indicates that they were killed simply because they were Vietnamese.’ The CPK Centre’s conventional military suppression of So Phim’s Eastern Zone, launched by Son Sen in May 1978, also involved the participation of both Mok’s Southwest Zone forces as well as those of Pauk’s Central Zone. According to the ECCC’s co-investigating judge: Beginning with the arrival of Southwest and Central Zone cadres in the East Zone, witnesses describe mass arrests, disappearances and killings of the Cham population, as well as mass transfers of people from the East Zone to the Central Zone, including Cham people who were then killed in the Central Zone . . . Unlike the mass transfers of Cham populations earlier in the DK period, these Cham were not resettled elsewhere but killed at a number of locations in the Central Zone.48

In November 2018, the ECCC Trial Chamber, in convicting Nuon Chea of genocide, found that ‘the Cham were targeted not as individuals but based on their membership of the group’. They were killed ‘on a massive scale’. In Kompong Cham province, for instance, as a result of orders ‘from the upper echelon’ in the Central Zone, ‘a majority of Cham’ from Kang Meas district 47 Statement by the International Co-Prosecutor on Case 003, 30 November 2017, 4–5. 48 Closing Order (Indictment), Co-Investigating Judges, 16 August 2018, Case 004/02, 321, 319.

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‘were arrested and brought to Wat Au Trakuon in 1977 where they were executed’. Then in 1978, ‘a great number of Cham people from Kroch Chhmar district’, also in Kompong Cham province but in the Eastern Zone, ‘were arrested and taken to Trea Village Security Centre, located in the same district, where their membership of the Cham group was verified. Those who were deemed to be Cham were executed while non-Cham were spared.’ Here again the court found that the orders targeting these Cham ‘came from the upper echelon’, and that in both cases the perpetrators ‘demonstrated a genocidal mental state toward the Cham found to have been killed in those locations’.49 In its 2019 full judgment, the ECCC Trial Chamber found that ‘this conduct constitutes culpable acts directed at the Cham amounting to crimes against humanity of murder, imprisonment, torture, persecution on religious and political grounds, and other inhumane acts through forced transfer’, and established ‘the massive scale and organised nature of killings’ in the Central Zone ‘amounting to extermination as crimes against humanity’. In addition, the Chamber ruled that ‘on a national level, this specific genocidal intent had crystallised by at least 1977, when orders to kill all Cham were disseminated’, and concluded that ‘the crime of genocide by killing members of the Cham group as such is established’.50 The genocides of the Vietnamese and Cham groups are merely the best documented and legally adjudicated of the fates of Cambodia’s ethnic minorities under the DK regime. Members of the country’s Khmer Krom (Lower Khmer) minority, descendants of Khmers who had migrated upstream from the Mekong Delta of Vietnam, were also hunted down and killed, particularly in 1977–8, almost as ruthlessly as were members of the domestic ethnic Vietnamese minority.51 In December 2009, lawyers representing civil parties to the ECCC submitted a fifty-page brief to the co-investigating judges, requesting that they undertake further investigations of genocide of the Khmer Krom and the Vietnamese, in pursuance of Case 002 against Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Ieng Thirith, Khieu Samphan and Duch. The brief aimed in part to draw ‘attention to new evidence establishing the crimes of genocide and crimes against humanity committed against the Khmer Krom minority in Pursat and Takeo Provinces’ during the DK period. This evidence included twelve 49 ECCC Trial Chamber, Summary of Judgement, Case 002/02, 16 November 2018, 14; Case 002/02 Judgement, 27 March 2019, esp. 1620–98. 50 Case 002/02 Judgement, 27 March 2019, 1698. 51 Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime, pp. 1–4, 298–300, 423–7.

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pages of documentation of massacres of Khmer Krom. In Bakan district of Pursat, for instance, the Khmer Rouge authorities launched in 1976–7 a compilation of ‘personal histories’ in order to determine who were Khmer Krom. Then in 1977 and 1978, the Khmer Rouge used ‘the results from the surveys they had conducted’ to identify and ‘forcibly separate’ the Khmer Krom from other Cambodians, then remove them to security centres ‘to be killed as a pattern of conduct and in a concerted effort to physically eliminate all the Khmer Krom in those areas’.52 Despite this, the September 2010 indictment in Case 002 included charges of genocide only against the ethnic Vietnamese and Cham, not against the Khmer Krom or other minorities.53 However, in June 2018, the ECCC international co-prosecutor filed a submission in Case 004 recommending the indictment and trial of Yim Tith, a brother-in-law of Mok from the Southwest Zone. This submission accused Yim Tith of genocide of both the Khmer Krom and the ethnic Vietnamese, alleging crimes that Tith had committed against both groups in the Southwest and later in the Northwest Zone, where he served as deputy zone secretary and acting zone secretary in 1977–8. The co-prosecutor wrote: Yim Tith implemented the CPK plan to destroy the Vietnamese national group in Cambodia by killing ethnic Vietnamese. As part of this campaign, the Khmer Rouge also targeted the Khmer Krom, saying they had a ‘Khmer body and a Vietnamese head’. Khmer Krom were taken across the border into Kirivong District when Yim Tith was in charge of the area, then killed in mass executions. In the Northwest Zone after Yim Tith arrived and the Southwest Zone cadres took control, Khmer Krom were systematically killed, particularly in Bakan District.54

Under the DK regime, Cambodia’s ethnic Thai minority of 20,000 is reported to have been reduced to about 8,000 people. Of the 1,800 families of the Lao ethnic minority, only 800 families survived. Of the 2,000 members of the Kola minority, it was reported in 1979, ‘no trace . . . has been found’.55 That the ECCC omitted to pursue these three cases, and became deadlocked over the charges against Yim Tith for genocide against the Khmer Krom, is no indication that genocide is an inappropriate description of the fate of their 52 ECCC, ‘Civil Parties’ Request for Supplementary Investigations Regarding Genocide of the Khmer Krom & the Vietnamese’, D250/3, 1, 13–14, 14–25. 53 ECCC, Office of the Co-Investigating Judges, Closing Order, 15 September 2010, 5. 54 Statement by the International Co-Prosecutor on Case 004, 4 June 2018, www.eccc.gov.kh /en/articles/statement-international-co-prosecutor-case-004. 55 Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime, pp. 300–2.

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victims. It is clear from CPK propaganda that the CPK Centre officially saw Cambodia’s ethnic minority groups as ideally comprising a mere notional or target 1 per cent of the nation’s population, in place of the 15–20 per cent that they had long constituted before April 1975.

Genocide against ‘Part’ of the National Group Of the majority Khmer ‘national’ group, 15 per cent of the rural population perished in 1975–9, and 25 per cent of the urban population. Democratic Kampuchea initially divided its population into the ‘base citizens’ (those who had lived in Khmer Rouge zones or ‘bases’ before the 1975 victory) and ‘new citizens’ (those who had lived in the cities, the last hold-outs of the Lon Nol regime). All cities were evacuated in April 1975. The next year, however, the ‘new citizens’ were relabelled ‘deportees’, and most failed to even qualify for the next category, ‘candidates’, let alone as ‘full rights citizens’, a group to which only favoured peasant families were admitted. But not even the latter were spared the mass murders of the 1977–8 countrywide purges. The most horrific slaughter was perpetrated in the last six months of the regime, in the politically suspect Eastern Zone bordering Vietnam. In 1980–1, I interviewed eighty-seven survivors there. In eleven villages alone, the Khmer Rouge carried out 1,663 killings in 1978. In another community of 350 people, there were 95 executions in 1978; 705 executions occurred in another subdistrict; 1,950 in another; 400 in another. Tens of thousands of other villagers were deported to the Northwest Zone of the country. En route through Phnom Penh, they were ‘marked’ as easterners by being forced to wear a blue scarf (krama), reminiscent of Hitler’s yellow star for Jews. Later, in the Northwest Zone, these people wearing the blue scarves were identified and exterminated en masse. According to Khatharya Um, ‘most perished in mass graves. Leung, who stumbled upon one of the killing sites, recalled, “People relocated from the East, . . . they usually wear blue checkered krama. The pit was full of blue krama.”’ A total 1978 murder toll of over 100,000 (more than one-seventeenth of the eastern population) can safely be regarded as a minimum estimate.56 The real figure is probably around 250,000. 56 Ben Kiernan, Cambodia: The Eastern Zone Massacres, Documentation Series No. 1 (New York: Columbia University, Center for the Study of Human Rights, 1986); Gregory Stanton, ‘Blue scarves and yellow stars’, www.genocidewatch.com/single-post/1987/03/ 14/Blue-Scarves-and-Yellow-Stars-Classification-and-Symbolization-in-theCambodian-Genocide; Ben Kiernan, ‘Blue scarf/yellow star: a lesson in genocide’, Boston

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In June 2018, the ECCC’s international co-prosecutor provided several additional examples of massacres of Eastern Zone evacuees who had been deported west to Pursat Province in the Northwest Zone: Phum Veal Security Centre was controlled by the Bakan District Committee and was used to imprison DK ‘enemies’ such as the Khmer Krom and East Zone evacuees. . . . Executions took place every night, and groups of 400 and 1,700 people transferred from the East Zone were killed at Phum Veal near the end of the regime . . . At Wat Chanreangsei execution site in Bakan District, Khmer Rouge cadres carried out mass killings of East Zone evacuees in late 1978. Local villagers were forced to bury the bodies, estimated at 2,000 in total, in mass graves in Koun Thnaot Village . . . . Veal Bak Chunching execution site in Kandieng District was used from 1978 to kill large numbers of people who had been forcibly transferred from the East Zone to surrounding communes in Kandieng. No less than a thousand East Zone evacuees were killed at the site and many women were raped before being executed.57

Genocide against a Religious Group The DK regime attempted to eradicate Buddhism from Cambodia. The ECCC did not adjudicate on this as a case of genocide. Eyewitnesses testify to the Khmer Rouge massacres of monks and the forcible disrobing and persecution of survivors. Of a total of 2,680 Buddhist monks from just eight of Cambodia’s 3,000 monasteries, only 70 monks were found to have survived in 1979.58 There is no reason to believe these eight monasteries were atypical. If the same death toll applied to the monks from all the other monasteries, fewer than 2,000 of Cambodia’s 70,000 monks could be said to have survived. A CPK Centre document dated September 1975 proclaimed that its goal was to ‘uproot’ Buddhism: Monks have disappeared from 90 to 95 per cent . . . . Monasteries . . . are largely abandoned. The foundation pillars of Buddhism . . . have disintegrated. In the Globe, 27 February 1989; Ben Kiernan, ‘Genocidal targeting: two groups of victims in Pol Pot’s Cambodia’, in State-Organized Terror: The Case of Violent Internal Repression, ed. P. T. Bushnell, V. Shlapentokh, C. Vanderpool and J. Sundram (Boulder: Westview, 1991), pp. 207–26; Khatharya Um, From the Land of Shadows: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Cambodian Diaspora (New York University Press, 2015), pp. 41–2. 57 Statement by the International Co-Prosecutor on Case 004, 4 June 2018. 58 Chanthou Boua, ‘Genocide of a religious group’, in State-Organized Terror: The Case of Violent Internal Repression, ed. P. T. Bushnell, V. Shlapentokh, C. Vanderpool and J. Sundram (Boulder: Westview, 1991), p. 239.

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future they will dissolve further. The political base, the economic base, the cultural base must be uprooted.59

By early 1977, there were no functioning monasteries and no monks to be seen in Cambodia. In 1978, the DK minister of culture, Yun Yat, termed Buddhism ‘incompatible with the revolution’. The Cambodian people, she claimed, had ‘stopped believing’ and monks had ‘left the temples’. Yat added: ‘The problem gradually becomes extinguished. Hence there is no problem.’60 In 2018, the Trial Chamber of the ECCC rendered its judgment on charges related to Khmer Rouge crimes perpetrated against Buddhists only in a single location, the Tram Kak Cooperatives of Cambodia’s Southwest Zone. Based on these restricted charges before it, the court found that Buddhism was banned, Buddhist symbols destroyed, pagodas emptied and ‘hundreds of monks were disrobed across various communes’ in Tram Kak district alone. The Trial Chamber concluded that ‘the crime against humanity of persecution on religious grounds was committed with respect to Buddhists’.61 It ruled that although ‘the practice of Buddhism was banned in Tram Kak . . . . It has not been established that monks or disrobed monks were killed in Tram Kak district.’62 Again, that the ECCC omitted to pursue this case more broadly, in relation to what happened in other parts of the country, is no indication as to whether or not genocide is an appropriate description of the fate of Buddhist victims in the more than 100 other districts of Cambodia. Not all the crimes and deaths that occurred during the DK period constitute genocide. As a legal matter, that crime applies only to the ethnic, national, racial or religious groups of victims singled out for destruction ‘as such’, in whole or in part: including the ethnic Vietnamese, Muslim Cham, Chinese, Khmer Krom, Thai, Lao, some upland groups, a targeted ‘part’ of the Cambodian national group such as the Eastern Zone Khmers and the Buddhist monkhood. The victims of mass murder who fell into political categories, such as the officials of the Lon Nol regime and the officers and soldiers of its army, the purged members of targeted Khmer Rouge zone administrations and the hundreds of thousands of civilian victims who were murdered or starved to death one by one, were not victims of genocide.

59 Quoted ibid., p. 235. 60 Quoted in Karl Jackson (ed.), Cambodia 1975–1978: Rendezvous with Death (Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 191. 61 ECCC Trial Chamber, Summary of Judgement, Case 002/02, 16 November 2018, 16–17. 62 Case 002/02 Judgement, 27 March 2019, 581.

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Yet they were victims of the same regime, in the same short period, as the victims of the genocides. And they were usually also victims of the same faction of the Khmer Rouge regime: the Southwest Zone administration working in concert with the CPK Centre. The Centre’s use of the Southwest forces as its main repressive weapon in all its murderous campaigns, genocidal and non-genocidal, is clear. It trusted Mok and his units; recruited them from the Southwest; sponsored and deployed them on deadly missions; and, in 1977–8, sent them into the other zones of the country, purging the administrations of the Northern, Northwest, Western and Eastern Zones, significantly escalating the level of terror and mass killing there and conducting a series of genocides against the minority groups in those Zones. In this way, under the orders and with the intent and propulsion of the Party Centre, the Southwest Zone forces spread out all over Cambodia, bringing genocide with them. In this political and military sense, the 1.7 million deaths of the DK period, though not all genocidal, constitute a coherent whole. Democratic Kampuchea was a communist regime, Stalinist and Maoist in different ways. In their youth, its leaders were also influenced by Pétainist fascist agrarianism, which blended later in their careers with Maoist agrarianism. And they were also influenced by French colonial ideology which attempted to place Cambodia in a privileged position above the other Indochinese colonies, Vietnam and Laos. But most importantly, Democratic Kampuchea was a deeply racist regime as well as an agrarian communist one. This led DK to commit not just crimes against humanity but several crimes of genocide. The three mechanisms by which the regime committed these crimes were: 1. Control of the Standing Committee of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea. This control was exerted by Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Son Sen and one or two others by-passing and excluding two veteran leading members of the Standing Committee who occupied regional posts: the CPK secretaries of the Eastern and Northwest Zones, So Phim and Ruos Nhim. Standing Committee meetings in Phnom Penh regularly went ahead without the attendance of these two. These meetings were held in the name of what came to be called the Party Centre – that is, the members of the Standing Committee who held exclusively national rather than regional positions. 2. There was one outstanding exception to this practice of the Party Centre excluding Standing Committee members holding regional posts: Mok, the CPK secretary of the Southwest Zone. Favoured by the Party Centre,

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Mok was not only brought into the CPK Standing Committee but became commander of the DK Revolutionary Army in Phnom Penh. Mok’s sonsin-law, Ren and Meas Muth, joined him on the Army General Staff. Mok’s Southwest Zone and his armed forces became the powerful spearhead of the Centre’s violent purges and takeover of all other zones of the country, particularly the East, Northwest and North. Mok’s daughter Khom, wife of Meas Muth, took over part of the Western Zone. Mok’s brother-in-law Yim Tith became acting zone secretary of the Northwest Zone. 3. The third powerful mechanism of genocide was the compilation and deployment of lists of names. The CPK Centre ordered lists in the form of biographies to be drawn up all over Cambodia, in order to find out every Cambodian’s background, including their ethnic background. From 1977, when the Southwest Zone forces arrived in a new area, they either commissioned the research and compilation of such lists, or they used existing lists to round up and kill not only members of the old regime and supposed social classes like capitalists, but also all the ethnic Vietnamese, all the Cham Muslims and all the Khmer Krom. The evacuated peasants from the Eastern Zone were then marked by being forced to wear blue scarves. They were easily visible, and they too became victims of genocide. Like many other genocides in history, the Cambodian case went along with major ambitions of territorial aggression. In 1977 and 1978, while perpetrating its worst internal violence, the DK regime militarily attacked all three of its neighbours: Vietnam, Thailand and Laos. In 1978, the internal violence peaked with the mass slaughter of the Eastern Zone population, accused like the Khmer Krom of having ‘Vietnamese heads on Khmer bodies’ (kbal yuon khluon khmaer). Two weeks before the Centre launched its attack on the Eastern Zone, DK’s Phnom Penh Radio broadcast an appeal to ‘purify our armed forces, our party, and the masses of the people’. It went on to estimate Cambodia’s population at 8 million, only 2 million of whom, it proclaimed, needed to be sacrificed, in order to wipe out the entire Vietnamese people: ‘[Each] one of us must kill thirty Vietnamese . . . So far, we have succeeded . . . Vietnam has only fifty million inhabitants . . . We need only two million troops to crush the 50 million Vietnamese, and we would still have six million people left.’63 That latter estimate proved close to correct in January 1979. 63 BBC, Summary of World Broadcasts, FE/5813/A3/2, 15 May 1978, Phnom Penh Radio, 10 May 1978.

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Bibliographic Note The first serious work on the Khmer Rouge regime was François Ponchaud’s Cambodge année zéro (Paris: Juillard, 1977), translated into English as Cambodia Year Zero (London: Penguin, 1978). It covers the first two years of DK, including the 1975 evacuation of Phnom Penh and the revolt and massacre of the Chams along the Mekong River. Ponchaud foreshadowed but never published a second book on the years 1977 and 1978. Peasants and Politics in Kampuchea 1942–1981, by Kiernan and Boua, collects essays, translated documents and survivor accounts of the history of the Khmer Rouge and the DK regime. Pol Pot Plans the Future offers translations and analyses of eight key internal CPK texts. Biographies of Pol Pot – David P. Chandler, Brother Number One (Boulder: Westview, 1992) and Philip Short, Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare (London: Henry Holt and Co., 2005) – cover the DK era but downplay the ethnic element in Khmer Rouge ideology, rejecting use of the term ‘genocide’. Short misquotes the Genocide Convention and compares DK’s mistreatment of the Chams to ‘bussing’ of African-Americans in the USA. Michael Vickery’s Cambodia 1975–1982 (Boston: South End Press, 1984) sees the CPK as leading a non-communist ‘peasant revolution’ against cities. Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime, argues that the genocides resulted from both racism and totalitarian ideology, including Maoism. Of the numerous survivor memoirs, among the best in English are Teeda Butt Mam, To Destroy You Is No Loss (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987); Chanrithy Him, When Broken Glass Floats (New York: Norton, 2000); Laurence Picq, Beyond the Sky (New York: St Martin’s, 1989); Bunheang Ung, The Murderous Revolution (Chippendale, NSW: APCOL, 1985); Loung Ung, First They Killed My Father (New York: Harper, 2000); and Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son (Paris: France Loisirs, 1980; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).

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Introduction Guatemala’s indigenous population stands today at approximately 40 per cent of the overall population, and incorporates the majority Maya and the smaller Xinca and Garifuna ethnic groups.1 Since the colonial encounter, indigenous Guatemalans have been marginalised systematically from the country’s political, economic and cultural spheres and have fallen victim to aggressive institutional, structural and interpersonal racism propagated and instrumentalised by religious and military leaders, politicians and the wealthy landowning oligarchy. Such beliefs and the behaviour they undergird are embedded within Guatemalan society and employed broadly by the non-indigenous at all social and economic levels, largely determining the norms and attitudes that mould intergroup relations.2 (See Map 23.1.)

1 Of a population of approximately 14,250,000, estimates vary as to the ethnic proportions of the Guatemalan population. More conservative figures estimate that the indigenous population amounts to approximately 40 per cent of the total population, whilst non-indigenous or ladinos represent 60 per cent. The latter groups may include indigenous people who no longer practice indigenous customs, nor speak indigenous languages. Other figures posit that Guatemala’s indigenous peoples constitute the majority of the population. The country’s indigenous population is made up of Maya, Garífuna and Xinca peoples, the latter two groups populating the Caribbean and eastern parts of Guatemala respectively, with the Maya concentrated in the highland regions and now in urban areas of the country, due to the rural exile initiated in the 1980s. The indigenous Maya population itself includes twenty-two ethnic groups and constitutes over 90 per cent of the indigenous population, while it is estimated that only approximately 70 people speak Xinca. The twenty-two Mayan languages and groups are the following: Chuj, Akateko, Jakalteko, Q’anjob’al, Ixil, Uspanteko, Tektiteko, Awakateko, Sipakapense, Takaneko, Mam, Tzutujil, Kaqchiqel, Sakapulteko, Q’eqchi, Achi, Poqomchi’, Pokoman, K’iche’, Itza, Chortí and Maya-Mopan. 2 Marta Casaus Arzú, Genocidio: La máxima expresión del racismo en Guatemala? (Guatemala: F & G Editors, 2008).

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Map 23.1 Political map of Guatemala.

Guatemala’s Spanish-descended elite,3 the country’s ‘primary political community’ to use Straus’s term,4 has historically sought to protect its racially structured economic and political interests and maintain the sociopolitical, religious and economic pillars of the non-indigenous nation-state by constructing a belief system anchored within racist discourse and practice. Members of the political, economic and military elites have accordingly 3 Made up of peninsulares (direct Spanish descendents) and ladinos (mixed race indigenous/mestizos). 4 Scott Straus, Making and Unmaking Nations: The Origins and Dynamics of Genocide in Contemporary Africa (Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 2005).

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promulgated systemic discriminatory attitudes, beliefs and prejudices which frame the indigenous population, pejoratively termed ‘indians’, as a supposedly ‘low, lazy, indolent, filthy … licentious and ignorant race of animalistic half-humans’.5 Such beliefs have historically been utilised to legitimise and win support for extreme behaviour and actions oriented towards maintaining the status quo and safeguarding elite power and privilege. Historically, then, racist narratives in Guatemala have been crucial and were, in turn, core to the counter-insurgency carried out against leftist rebels and their social base during the 1980s, within the confines of which egregious violence culminating in genocide was perpetrated against Maya indigenous communities, as this chapter will show. Within the framework of its counter-insurgency campaign, the Guatemalan state committed ‘acts of genocide’ against five ethnic Maya groups between 1981 and 1983 in the highland departments of Huehuetenango, El Quiché and Baja Verapaz. This was documented by Guatemala’s United Nations-sponsored truth commission, the socalled Historical Clarification Commission (CEH).6 A wide array of scholars and international actors has similarly charged the Guatemalan military with perpetrating genocide,7 an accusation that was given legal weight, albeit temporarily, when former de facto president, General Efraín Ríos Montt, was found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity in a Guatemalan domestic court on 10 May 2013, and sentenced to eighty years in prison. Unsurprisingly, his conviction and sentence were met with massive condemnation from military, political and economic elites within Guatemala, who mobilised immediately to Ríos Montt’s defence, sustaining the official story that the military had protected the state and nation from communism, and denying the genocide. After a successful challenge by Ríos Montt’s lawyers, the sentence was overturned by the Constitutional Court ten days later, returning the trial to a previous stage, leaving victims and the human rights organisations that had accompanied them through the 5 Carol Smith, Guatemalan Indians and the Nation State, 1540–1988 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990). 6 CEH, Guatemala: Memoria del Silencio. Conclusions and Recommendations (New York: UN, 1999), p. 19. 7 See Victoria Sanford Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Ricardo Falla, Masacre de la selva Ixcán, Guatemala 1975 1982 (Mexico: Latino Editores, 1992); Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (University of Chicago Press, 2004).

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thirteen-year legal process devastated.8 Ríos Montt died in 2018, having avoided conclusive legal proceedings. The juridical status of Guatemala’s genocide has since remained in limbo, as genocide deniers block the path to justice and oppose legal actions and political advocacy, often violently.9 Guatemala’s genocide has not received the same level of acknowledgement and publicity enjoyed by similar episodes of mass cruelty perpetrated during the twentieth century, such as the Holocaust, Bosnia, Cambodia, Darfur and Rwanda. Moreover, the Guatemala case has been relatively side-lined within Genocide Studies scholarship, most of whose research has focused upon the aforementioned cases.10 Such comparative absence within academic scholarship has been reflected by the invisibility of the Guatemala case within some sectors of the practitioner sphere.11 For example, even in the aftermath of the CEH report and Ríos Montt indictment, the British charity the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust still makes no mention of Guatemala on its webpage.12 Inclusion of the Guatemala case within this volume is significant for Genocide Studies and, in particular, for research on Guatemala. This chapter will analyse the drivers of the genocide perpetrated during the Guatemalan military’s counter-insurgency campaign of the early 1980s, an integral component of the state’s wider battle against communist subversion since the 1960s, a struggle that was fundamental to Latin America’s violent twentieth century.13 Central to the military campaign and to the 8 Jo-Marie Burt, ‘“From heaven to hell in ten days”: the genocide trial in Guatemala’, Journal of Genocide Research 18:1 (2016), 143–69; Roddy Brett, ‘Peace without social reconciliation: the trial of Rios Montt’, Journal of Genocide Research 18:1 (2016), 285–303. 9 Roddy Brett The Origins and Dynamics of Genocide: Political Violence in Guatemala (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 10 Philip Spencer has in fact referred to a ‘wall of silence that surrounded’ the Guatemalan genocide. Philip Spencer, Genocide since 1945 (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 77; Ben Kiernan, ‘Wall of silence: the field of Genocide Studies and the Guatemalan genocide’, in Den dannede opprører. Bernt Hagtvet [The Refined Rebel: Bernt Hagtvet], ed. Nik Brandal and Dag Einar Thorsen (Oslo: Dreyer, 2016), pp. 169–98. Exceptions include Brett, Origins and Dynamics, Norman Naimark, Genocide: A World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 104–10; John Cox, To Kill A People: Genocide in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 27, 205, 206. 11 The Guatemalan genocide is not mentioned in, for instance, Samantha Power, ‘A Problem from Hell’: America in the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic, 2002). 12 See www.hmd.org.uk/learn-about-the-holocaust-and-genocides/. The charity’s webpage refers to the Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur, but not Guatemala (or other cases covered in this volume). 13 Greg Grandin, ‘Living in revolutionary time: coming to terms with the violence of Latin America’s long cold war’, in A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent

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execution of mass atrocities was the strategic employment of public massacres in indigenous Maya communities across the country’s western highlands.14 Insurgent rebels, unified after 1980 in the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG), had a decade before taken the strategic decision to craft their political and social support base within indigenous communities. Indigenous communities differed in their response to the insurgency’s call to arms. In some areas, such as the Ixil and parts of El Quiché, mass support was obtained relatively swiftly and came to include logistical support, provision of shelter and food and participation in armed actions. In other areas, such as the Ixcán, collaboration and backing came only because of violent coercion from the guerrilla, or, later, when communities fled to the insurgents for protection from military repression and egregious violence. Nevertheless, the military perceived that Maya communities were providing decisive logistical and military support to the guerrillas and were thus key to winning the armed conflict and settling the fate of the Isthmus and of the region’s wider cold war, in particular after Nicaragua had fallen to the Sandinista revolutionaries in 1979. A key factor driving the mass atrocities perpetrated against indigenous non-combatants was the counter-insurgent objective of draining the sea to kill the fish, as diverse scholars including Schirmer and Sanford have correctly observed.15 In short, the military sought to defeat the insurgents by eliminating the subversive threat within indigenous communities and burning the rebels’ principally rural indigenous support base off the map, eventually leaving over 200,000 civilians dead (of an approximate population of 8 million at the time), 83 per cent of whom were Mayan. In the Ixil region, for example, 5 per cent of the population was murdered, whilst 21 per cent of the population was displaced or fled into exile.16 The Guatemala case, in this regard, reflects the insight of scholars such as Valentino, Midlarsky and Straus, who have argued convincingly that mass violence is recurrently perpetrated within contexts of war and counter-insurgency operations.17

14

15 16 17

Violence During Latin America’s Long Cold War, ed. Greg Grandin and George Joseph (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). Roddy Brett, ‘The persistence of genocidal logic beyond mass killing: the case of Guatemala’, in How Mass Atrocities End: Studies from Guatemala, Burundi, Indonesia, the Sudans, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Iraq, ed. Bridget Conley (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Sanford, Buried Secrets; Jennifer Schirmer, The Guatemalan Military Project: A Violence Called Democracy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998). Brett, Origins and Dynamics. Straus, Making and Unmaking; Benjamin Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th Century (Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 2004);

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However, counter-insurgency logic only partially explains the strategic objectives and rationale behind the perpetration of the military’s genocidal campaign. Whilst such accounts provide significant insight into the specific military logic undergirding the counter-insurgency, they are less able to elucidate a clear and persuasive explanation of the motivations behind the brutal and ritualistic nature of the violence and, in this regard, fail to capture its corollary aim of using mass categorical violence and state terrorism – in short, violence directed against individuals who belong or are perceived as belonging to specific categories of people – to sculpt a modern, homogeneous nation-state.18 Guatemala’s genocide was about defeating counter-insurgency, but it was also about nation building. As will be argued in this chapter, Guatemala’s late twentieth-century genocide represented the apogee of centuries of elite and state-led racism and exclusion bolstered by grotesque violence perpetrated against indigenous communities. That violence had sought, unsuccessfully, to craft an exclusionary, whitened nation. In this context, anti-‘indian’ racist discourse and violence had been ubiquitous since independence in the 1820s, although more fervently mobilised during particular times of national crisis and social transformation that could potentially benefit indigenous and poor ladino communities by unsettling the parameters of racial entitlement shaping land ownership, power and wealth. During such moments, the primary political community has recurrently and purposively instrumentalised a narrative of ‘indian’ threat, portraying the indigenous population as subhuman, pernicious and, ultimately, as imperilling the national peninsular/ ladino community and its way of life, narratives that have habitually been accompanied by egregious acts of violence. Such beliefs, and the intentional employment by elites of a dehumanisation narrative against the indigenous, have wrought hatred and fear of indigenous communities and quarantined them from the nation’s moral sphere, whilst at once privileging peninsulares and ladinos and foregrounding their moral and societal superiority. As a

Manus Midlarsky, The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 18 The term ‘categorical violence’ refers to intentionally discriminate acts of violence – lethal or otherwise – directed against specific categories of people ‘by virtue of their belonging (or seeming to belong) to a specific ethnic or religious group, nationality, social class or some other collectivity’ ( Jeff Goodwin, ‘A theory of categorical terrorism’, Social Forces 84:4 (2006), 2027–46, 2032). See the Introduction to this volume for discussion of categorical violence.

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consequence, Guatemala has been and remains profoundly divided, characterised by embedded incendiary narratives that have served to incentivise intergroup violence and foster solidarity between wealthy and poor nonindigenous Guatemalans. In the wake of the mass land expropriations and agrarian reform programmes instituted by President Arbenz in 1952, for example, the ‘indian’ threat narrative was mobilised to identify (purportedly to prevent) an imminent ‘indian’ takeover of the country.19 Facing loss of land and capital to poor indigenous and ladino peasant farmers – the principal beneficiaries of Arbenz’s reforms – the primary political community appealed to embedded perceptions and beliefs of indigenous people as unclean, subversive, untrustworthy, greedy, uncivilised and violent. Within this framework, a radical racialised discourse was disseminated in major newspapers, identifying an ‘indian threat’ to Guatemalan civilisation and evoking a call to arms, which did not go unheeded.20 In 1954, with the support of Guatemalan military and political and economic elites, the CIA orchestrated a coup ousting Arbenz and replacing him with a US-friendly president, effectively setting the stage for the country’s internal armed conflict, which commenced in 1960. The three-decade-long armed conflict, situated within the broader confines of the cold war, reached its pinnacle in the 1970s and 1980s, as the guerrilla insurgency came to represent an increasing threat to the integrity of the Guatemalan state and the oligarchy it served. As the insurgent threat became increasingly conspicuous in the late 1970s, a consequence of its embeddedness in and support from indigenous communities in the highland and jungle regions, and as its military capacity escalated, the military and the primary political community became increasingly concerned over a confluence of historically wrought indigenous sedition with budding communist subversion. The contingent became the inevitable: the ‘indian-subversives’21 were coming down from the mountains to reclaim their country and history, fuelled by historical resentment and ‘Moscow-funded’ revolution. Under these conditions, from the perspective of the military and the political and economic oligarchy whose bidding it carried out, mass categorical violence

19 Smith, Guatemalan Indians; Pietro Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954 (Princeton University Press, 1991); Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, Revised and Expanded (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 20 Smith, Guatemalan Indians. 21 Ibid.; Brett, Origins and Dynamics.

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Figure 23.1 Nicolás, a Mayan priest, holds a cross that lists the ages of his seven massacred relatives. Communities of Population in Resistance of the Sierra, 1993. (Photo: Jonathan Moller)

was perceived as the only option to prevent another Nicaragua. However, whilst defeating the insurgency represented an urgent priority for the military and primary political community, military victory was, in itself, inadequate. A final solution to the indigenous question needed to be established once and for all, and only the annihilation of the indigenous, in whole or in part, and their exclusion from the nation would provide that certainty. (See Figure 23.1.) This chapter will now document the military strategies that formed the instrument of Guatemala’s genocide, tracing the strategic decisions taken at command level and implemented in the country’s theatre of war. The chapter then develops an analytical response to the empirical case, drawing upon wider Genocide Studies literature, before presenting some brief concluding comments.

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The Armed Conflict Guatemala’s genocide in 1982 and 1983 represented a traumatic moment in the country’s history, and a key, decisive episode during its thirty-six-year internal armed conflict that had begun in 1960. Indigenous Guatemalans bore the brunt of the violence becoming its major victims as the state deliberately targeted its civilians.22 However, military strategy also obliged some indigenous people to become perpetrators, either conscripted as soldiers or forcibly recruited as members of the notorious paramilitary Civil Defence Patrols (PACs). Moreover, peasants, indigenous and ladino, collaborated with the guerrillas throughout the highlands, principally in their capacity as the rebels’ widespread support base, but also, and not insignificantly, by volunteering as combatants in the insurgency. The onset of the armed conflict then and what it would come to mean years later differ to an important degree. Whilst the encounter began in 1960 as a conventional cold-war conflict waged by disgruntled non-indigenous military officers in the face of an oligarchic state increasingly subject to US control, it would gradually mutate into a conflict shaped by acute ethnic dimensions and, ultimately, it culminated in genocide. Nevertheless, neither was Guatemala’s war a conventional ethnic conflict, if such a thing exists: there was little mobilisation along strictly ethnic lines by clearly demarcated groups wielding demands shaped by their ethnic ascription. Rather, certain factions of the URNG, such as the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP) and the Organisation of People in Arms (ORPA), eventually became characterised by higher levels of indigenous participation alongside non-indigenous, or ladino, combatants; at the same time, on the ground, diverse ethnic groups were conscripted and fought as soldiers. Guatemala’s genocide was an integral part of the counter-insurgency operations that responded to the increasing consolidation of leftist guerrilla fronts within indigenous Maya highland communities and the evident support those communities provided to the guerrillas. In 1981, under the administration of President General Lucas García, the Guatemalan state took the strategic decision to subject its population to a massive, sustained and systematic killing campaign aimed at defeating the guerrillas. In early 1981, state-sponsored political violence in urban areas spiralled, as the regime sought to eliminate insurgent cells and their civilian supporters. In July and 22 Richard English has correctly observed that ‘the deliberate targeting of civilians’ is not new in warfare, but rather ‘has formed a major aspect of the experience’. Richard English, Modern War: A Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 62.

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August, and with the support of Argentine specialists in urban counterinsurgency strategy, the military raided ‘safe houses’ belonging to the guerrillas in Guatemala City. That offensive, combined with intelligence operations occurring simultaneously across the country, brought a transformation in the dynamics of the counter-insurgency.23 Intelligence suggested a massive level of support for the guerrillas in the indigenous highlands, numbering approximately between 100,000 and 250,000 individuals and, in places, entire communities. The guerrilla strategy of ‘prolonged popular war’ had been effective in constructing an increasingly extensive social base. The EGP had in fact generated the political structures necessary for mass insurrection – the Clandestine Local Committees (CCL) – as well as armed local defence committees – the Irregular Local Forces (FIL) – and Mobile and Permanent Military Forces (UMP).24 Moreover, ‘liberated zones’ had also been declared in certain regions, such as the Ixcán. The increasing guerrilla threat to the government emerged at a time when the Lucas García regime had lost both legitimacy and its grip on political power. As Midlarsky has observed, ‘Any process that simultaneously increases both threat to the state and its vulnerability, as well as the vulnerability of a targeted civilian population, also increases the probability of genocide.’25 Arguably, the perception of a possible guerrilla triumph, apparently supported widely by the (vulnerable) indigenous population, increased the likelihood that the state would resort to mass atrocities against indigenous communities. The military’s response was in this regard to broaden the strategy of selective repression previously implemented in urban and rural areas between 1978 and 1979, towards mass killing aimed at eradicating the insurgency: in short, the ‘100% kill strategy’.26 To this end, the military identified the indigenous population as the internal enemy, a concept located within the operational framework of the US National Security Doctrine (NSD).27

23 George Black, Marcus Jamail and Norma Stoltz, Chichilla Garrison Guatemala (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984). 24 James Dunkerley, Power in the Isthmus (London: Verso, 1988). 25 Midlarsky, Killing Trap, p. 4. 26 Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala under General Efrain Rios Montt, 1982–1983 (Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 87. 27 The NSD proposed that a state may legitimately employ military force against an ideological threat within the national territory with the aim of protecting national security. See Dunkerley, Power in the Isthmus.

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The subsequent large-scale rural military counter-offensive, the so-called ‘scorched earth’ campaign, Operation Ashes, was officially launched on 1 October 1981.28 The campaign was executed utilising a series of mobile task forces, drawing strategically upon approximately 15,000 troops from broader military brigades, which systematically attacked sectors of the Maya civilian population. The campaign was undergirded by a series of mutually reinforcing objectives: to identify and subsequently pacify those zones of major guerrilla activity; to isolate the insurgency from its social base; to prevent the development of subversion; and to eliminate it where it already existed. The military identified so-called areas of operation within which task forces would operate, saturating those areas with ‘overwhelming military force’ with the purpose of ‘controlling the population’. Kemp argues that military actions aimed at ‘cleansing the areas of subversive activities’ were launched against military and non-military targets, emphatically the guerrillas’ indigenous social base.29 Integral to the campaign was the strategy to control the surviving civilian population. The military revived the feared historical figure of military commissioner throughout the country, a civilian mandated to co-ordinate between a community and the military. Often under threat of death, community members and survivors of the massacres were also forced to establish paramilitary PACs. Designed to ‘pacify’ predominantly indigenous highland communities, the PACs were composed obligatorily of all male peasants between 16 and 65 years old. Their role was to ‘protect’ indigenous communities from the guerrillas, and often to accompany military operations. The PACs were also used deliberately to draw the civilian population into the conflict, militarising rural communities, whilst extending the reach of military intelligence.30 In many cases, PAC commanders and members severely abused their position of power for material gain, plunder, political power and sexual gratification. In certain cases, PACs evolved into brutal killing machines, perpetrating egregious violence, as was the case in the massacre of Rio Negro in 1982, evidencing the link between macro- and micro-level violence 28 Patrick Ball, Paul Kobrak and Herbert Spirer, State Violence in Guatemala, 1960–1996: A Quantitative Reflection (Washington DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1999). 29 Susan Kemp, ‘Guatemala prosecutes former President Ríos Montt: new perspectives on genocide and domestic criminal justice’, Journal of International Criminal Justice 12 (2014), 133–56. 30 For a detailed discussion of the PAC, see Margaret Popkin, Civil Patrols and Their Legacy: Overcoming Militarization and Polarization in the Guatemalan Countryside (Washington DC: The Robert F. Kennedy Centre for Human Rights, 1995).

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observed by Stathis Kalyvas. As he has argued, the Guatemala case evidences how macro-level violence played into and shaped micro-level violence: ‘civil war violence often privatizes politics. Insofar as it reflects local conflicts and personal disputes, the intimate nature of violence in civil war can be seen as the dark face of social capital.’31

The First Scorched Earth Campaign, 1981–1982 Beginning in the department of Chimaltenango in 1981, the military blockaded the Pan-American Highway, razing several nearby villages and carrying out public mass executions. The severity and scale of the massacres perpetrated by the army largely depended on its intelligence determining the extent to which a given community was believed to be collaborating with the insurgency. A trail of destruction was wrought throughout the highland departments of Chimaltenango, Sololá, Quiché and Huehuetenango: civilians were massacred, villages burnt to the ground, animals butchered and food and crops destroyed, allegedly to starve out the guerrillas. The strategy brought approximately 11,000 deaths and was guided by two principal objectives: to block permanently the guerrillas’ strategic transit route through the central highlands, impeding access to the capital city; and to decimate the insurgency’s support base.32 The military targeted indigenous communities classified as the ‘internal enemy’ and, by the first months of 1982, the campaign in the western highlands had succeeded in stabilising those zones of manifest guerrilla influence, permitting the army to achieve a degree of military supremacy. Whilst insurgent forces had not been entirely eradicated, the military felt confident enough to extend the killing campaign to the northwest region, to the Verapaces, where the insurgents had also built their social base. As zones were neutralised, so the initial wave of mass atrocities came to a temporary pause. Significantly, however, the guerrillas had dug in and the massacres pushed indigenous communities towards the insurgents for protection, consolidating and even extending the URNG’s support base in indigenous regions.33 Consequently, the guerrilla’s extensive presence across 31 Stathis Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 14. 32 See Kemp, Guatemala and La Cadena de Mando del Ejército de Guatemala, 2002 (unpublished document); and Schirmer, Guatemalan Military Project, p. 43 for a similar argument. 33 David Stoll, Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

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the country and its increasingly daring military strategy, particularly of attacking military bases in El Quiché and Huehuetenango, continued to represent a genuine threat to the regime.

The Ascendency of Ríos Montt The ferocious violence of Lucas García’s campaign did not achieve its objective of containing the insurgency, nor did it unify the military and political establishment. Sectors within the military considered that the strategic focus upon systematic terror did not extinguish the root causes of revolution and thus would be unlikely to impede it in the long term. Political and economic elites, moreover, viewed Lucas García’s administration as corrupt and inept, and concerned only with protecting its own interests.34 Rifts in the establishment gradually became irreconcilable, leading powerful sectors within the military, the political elite and the private sector to oppose the regime, in particular on the grounds of the government’s corruption and its military, political and economic mismanagement. On 23 March 1982, Lucas García was deposed through a military coup staged by high-ranking hard-line officers.35 The new junta was comprised of General Efraín Ríos Montt, General Horacio Egberto Maldonado Schaad (commander of the Guard of Honour) and Colonel Fernando Gordillo (former commander of the Brigades of Izabal and Quetzaltenango), linked to the extreme right-wing party, the Movement of National Liberation (MLN), and thus, to the urban death squads. The junta declared it would confront corruption, strengthen the counter-insurgency offensive and modernise public administration, whilst generating greater confidence within the private sector. The coup consolidated the military as the sole institutional power, embedding counter-insurgency strategy across and militarising all aspects of political, social and legal life. The change in regime precipitated an immediate decrease in urban violence, as the junta sought to project an image of the rule 34 See Rachel McCleary, Dictating Democracy: Guatemala and the End of Violent Revolution (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999) and ‘Guatemala’s postwar prospects’, Journal of Democracy 8:2 (1997), 129–43. See also Kemp, Cadena de Mando, for a detailed analysis of the fragmentation within the establishment. 35 The military proposed that the transition began in 1982, when Ríos Montt became de facto president, an approach shared by certain scholars, such as Schirmer, Guatemalan Military Project; and Susanne Jonas, Of Centaurs and Doves: Guatemala’s Peace Process (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000). The perspective taken in this research is that the transition began after the end of the killing campaign in 1983.

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of law and human rights guarantees, particularly internationally. Less than two weeks later, however, the Army Special Staff presented the National Plan for Security and Development, a strategy that would intensify counterinsurgency tactics and institutionalise mass atrocities, thus defining the outcome of the conflict. Ríos Montt quickly declared himself de facto president and introduced legislation to strengthen counter-insurgency operations. In June, a nationwide amnesty was offered for political crimes, giving insurgents thirty days to surrender. The amnesty provided Ríos Montt with the ‘legal and moral justification for subsequently storming communities where the guerrilla still operated or whose inhabitants were resistant to government authority’.36 However, it was largely unsuccessful, leading to the surrender of only 1,936 individuals. Simultaneously, the regime intensified rural militarisation and decreed a state of emergency, formally suspending the Constitution.

Operation Victory 82 The counter-strategy under Ríos Montt was highly centralised, coordinated by the military command structure with the aim of intensifying the killing campaign. Whilst maintaining Lucas Garcia’s task forces, the Ríos Montt strategy developed three distinct foci: (i) the urgency to control the population in the wake of military operations; (ii) engagement with the ideological roots of the conflict, in particular through indoctrination programmes;37 and (iii) a shift from the ‘100% kill strategy’ to 30% ‘total kill’ and 70% ‘soft pacification’ in the zones of conflict.38 The twofold pacification strategy was undergirded by development programmes and psychological operations, a shift in strategic planning that differentiated the Ríos Montt counter-insurgency from its predecessor and became a core component of a longer-term policy to eradicate indigenous culture.39 The twofold strategy was named ‘bullets and beans’, whereby peasants were effectively offered the options of either to co-operate (beans) or be eliminated (bullets). Within this framework, in July 1982, Ríos Montt inaugurated the most intensive phase of the counter-insurgency campaign, with the launch of Operation Victory 82, which involved the mobilisation of more than 60 per cent of the armed forces with the objective of exterminating thousands 36 Paul Kobrak, ‘Village troubles: the civil patrols in Aguacatán, Guatemala’ (PhD dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of Michigan, 1997), pp. 19, 79. 37 Kemp, Cadena de Mando, pp. 417–20. 38 Garrard-Burnett, Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit. 39 Kemp, Cadena de Mando.

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within indigenous communities.40 The plan sought the total elimination of armed subversion and its roots, as well as of its so-called ‘parallel organisations’ through three strategies: (i) to rescue the civilian population; (ii) to capture and recover members of the FIL; and (iii) to annihilate the CCL and the UMP.41 Victory 82 thus institutionalised the annihilation of the insurgency’s principally indigenous social base, by either ‘rescuing’ or executing suspected collaborators. Scholars have argued that the strategy identified the indigenous civilian population as a collective enemy to be physically eliminated,42 what Valentino has termed ‘collective punishment’.43 Ultimately, the army engaged in both regular and irregular warfare, operations accompanied by sophisticated psychological operations, with the support of state institutions, with the goal of winning the hearts and minds of the surviving population. As part of this strategy, in 1982, the Department of Civil Affairs (S-5) was established, with special divisions in each military zone tasked with indoctrinating ‘recuperated’ members of the population. Although S-5 staff included soldiers with training in ‘social services, psychological techniques and ideological indoctrination’,44 psychologists and anthropologists were also contracted, presaging their colleagues’ roles in US COIN (CounterIntelligence) in Afghanistan and Iraq. On 1 July 1982, the new series of massacres commenced, characterised by brutal performative cruelty, incorporating torture, forced cannibalism and systematic sexual violence.45 The state of emergency had given the military the power to expand the armed forces by re-enlisting former soldiers under the age of 30 and ordering the transfer of military reservists to the regular armed forces. In the following months, massacres were carried out in the western and northwestern highlands in those zones that continued to represent a perceived guerrilla threat, continuing the decimation initiated under 40 Schirmer, Guatemalan Military Project, p. 45. 41 See Kemp, Cadena de Mando; and Oficina de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado de Guatemala (ODHAG), Guatemala: Nunca Mas, vol. I I I: El Entorno Histórico (Guatemala: ODHAG, 1998). 42 See Brett, Origins and Dynamics and Kemp, ‘Guatemala prosecutes’. See also ODHAG, Guatemala: Nunca Mas, I I I. 43 Valentino, Final Solutions, pp. 164, 201. 44 Oficina de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado de Guatemala (ODHAG), Guatemala: Nunca Mas, vol. I I: Los Mecanismos del Horror (Guatemala: ODHAG, 1998), p. 83. 45 Sanford (Buried Secrets, pp. 153–70) argues that the number of victims per massacre under Montt increased from an average of thirty-seven to forty-five, an 18 per cent increase. Sanford further disaggregates her analysis, focusing upon massacres perpetrated during the final three months under Lucas García and the initial three months under Rios Montt, evidencing a total of 775 victims and 1,057 victims respectively.

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Lucas García. A total of 660 villages were razed in military operations executed by the newly created task forces, with the support of reservists, strategists, paratroopers, special forces (Kaibiles), the Guard of Honour and members of the Guatemalan air force. From the middle of 1982, the military experimented with the inclusion of a low number of indigenous recruits in its units; the majority of troops, however, remained ladino. The execution of mass atrocities was planned and perpetrated within the framework of Plan Sofia, a plan designed from within the military high command. Imposed through what one observer has termed the ‘routinization of terror’,46 Plan Sofia demonstrated the meticulous level of planning behind the killing campaign, the ‘scientifically precise’ and ‘intentional’ systematic annihilation of ‘subversive elements’ utilising such tactics as burning communities to the ground; perpetration of massacres, generally on Sundays or holidays, when there would be more individuals in the communities targeted; mass public rape; forced sterilisation; and destruction of food supplies. Operations also intentionally targeted and destroyed ancestral ceremonial sites. In the wake of mass atrocities, once communities had been subject to the massacre campaign, came the imposition of military control.47

From Collective Killing to Population Control In the aftermath of the massacres, so-called Development Poles were built near or upon the ashes of towns that had been razed, as a central component of the army’s ‘Action Plan for Conflict Zones’ after 1982. The PACs intensified under Victory 82,48 and were bolstered by the construction of so-called ‘model villages’, concentration camps for survivors built with the objective of extending the reach of military control over potential subversive elements and ‘integrating’ and indoctrinating indigenous people to ‘conform to the 46 Linda Green, Fear as a Way of Life: Mayan Widows in Rural Guatemala (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 47 The CEH documented a total of 626 cases of massacres committed by the Guatemalan army, security forces and paramilitary structures (Memoria del Silencio, p. 46). See Dirk Kruijt and Kees Koonings, ‘Violence and fear in Latin America’, in Societies of Fear: The Legacy of Civil War, Violence and Terror in Latin America, ed. Dirk Kruijt and Kees Koonings (London: Zed Books, 1999). See also Michelle Leiby, ‘Wartime sexual violence in Guatemala and Peru’, International Studies Quarterly 53:2 (2009),445–68. See also Grandin, Last Colonial Massacre. 48 Beatriz Manz, Refugees of a Hidden War: The Aftermath of Counterinsurgency in Guatemala (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989) and Paradise in Ashes: A Guatemalan Journey of Courage, Terror, and Hope (Oakland: University of California Press, 2004), p. 158.

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dominant cultural mold’, as one scholar has characterised it.49 Forms of mass pacification restricted population movement and transmitted the army’s nationalist discourse.50 The concentration and control of indigenous survivors followed in the aftermath of the massacres and was undergirded principally by an attempt to win the hearts and minds of the indigenous people through a ‘counter-insurgency as development’ logic. In the wake of the violence, the military restructured the foundations of rural life within the model villages, with the objective of guaranteeing and perpetuating military supremacy and maintaining the permanent defeat of subversion.51 The villages were shaped by a ‘developmentalist philosophy that combined military action with [limited] economic growth activities’.52 The villages were monitored through a permanent military presence and their male residents were forced to join the PACs. Residents were obliged to sign up for ‘civic work’ programmes, including ‘Roofs, Work and Tortillas’, which involved rebuilding areas previously destroyed by the military, and the construction of roads and bridges. Over and above the strategic objective of control, an explicit goal of the model villages was to destroy indigenous culture, extending the impact of the mass atrocities and evidencing the importance of a wider definition of genocide that focuses not only on acts of killing, but also upon Claudia Card’s idea of the destruction of group culture.53 Indigenous people were prohibited from speaking their own languages (Spanish was the lingua franca) and from practising religion and traditional customs.54 Subjugation to the military brought the disappearance of indigenous authorities and historical mechanisms of conflict resolution, precipitating a systematic rupture with mechanisms of communal self-government, whilst embedding the total militarisation of civilian life. Indoctrination programmes by the S-5 were designed to assimilate indigenous Maya into the predominant ladino culture, representing ‘a programme of ideological warfare … designed to brainwash the population, 49 Charles Hale, Mas Que Un Indio: Racial Ambivalence and the Paradox of Neoliberal Multiculturalism in Guatemala (Santa Fe: School of Americas Research Press, 2006), p. 51. 50 See Richard Wilson, Maya Resurgence in Guatemala, Q’eqchi’ Experiences (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995). 51 Between 50,000 and 60,000 indigenous peoples populated the model villages in the Ixil region alone (ODHAG, Guatemala: Nunca Mas, II, p. 14). 52 Daniel Rothenberg (ed.), Memory of Silence: The Guatemalan Truth Commission Report (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 39. 53 Claudia Card, ‘Genocide and social death’, Hypatia 18:1 (2000), 63–79. 54 Charles Taylor, El Retorno de los Refugiados Guatemaltecos: Reconstruyendo el Tejido Social (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998).

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with the explicit aim of eroding ethnic identity’.55 In this regard, the counterinsurgency aimed to impose a new sociocultural identity upon the indigenous, as Hale has termed it, to ‘whiten’ the nation. Model villages sought to create a new indigenous actor, engineering the construction of an ‘authorized’ or ‘permitted Indian’,56 who spoke Spanish, wore non-indigenous dress and whose belief system converged with ladino ideology. The villages guaranteed that indigenous survivors depended upon the military, whilst fostering intra-communal surveillance, which further broke down social capital within indigenous communities.57 Ultimately then, the counter-insurgency sought to destroy both the human or physical infrastructure of indigenous communities (the massacre strategy), and the social relations within them (the model villages),58 ultimately colonising ‘the spaces, symbols, and social relations analysts believed to be outside of state control’.59 Fein’s sociological definition of genocide is helpful in this case: genocide represents ‘sustained purposeful action by a perpetrator to physically destroy a collectivity directly or indirectly, through interdiction of the biological and social reproduction of group members, sustained regardless of the surrender or lack of threat offered by the victim’.60

The Strategic Defeat of the Guerrillas In the final months of 1982, the killing campaign had begun effectively to eliminate the guerrilla presence in indigenous communities in the western and northwestern highlands, whilst the military had successfully confined the surviving population in model villages, isolating it from the insurgency. Resistance had been futile: only those populations that fled, such as the Communities of Population in Resistance, mass displaced communities in the mountains and the jungle, were able to survive the killings or evade the policies of confinement. In 1983, the military launched Plan Firmness 1983, a continuation of Victory 1982, but with a strategic focus less emphatically dependent upon mass atrocities and more upon concentrating the surviving population within 55 Editorial Praxis, Guatemala: Polos de Desarrollo. El Caso de la Desetructuración de las Comunidades Indígenas, 2 vols. (Praxis, M.C.: Guatemala, 1988), I, p. 175. 56 Charles Hale, ‘Rethinking indigenous politics in the era of the “Indio Permitido”’, NACLA. Report on the Americas 38:1 (2004), 16–21, at 16. 57 Grandin, Last Colonial Massacre, p. 130. 58 Green, Fear as a Way of Life, p. 16. 59 Grandin, Last Colonial Massacre, p. 129. 60 Helen Fein, ‘Defining genocide as a sociological concept’, Current Sociology 38:1 (1990), 8–31. (Emphasis added.)

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model villages and Development Poles.61 Both plans were ‘prepared, emitted and implemented’ under the orders of Ríos Montt, the General Commander of the Armed Forces, who bore direct chain-of-command responsibility for the strategy and over the Chief of the Army General Staff. As the killing campaign moved through the country in an arc, from Chimaltenango near the capital city to the northern reaches of El Quiché, the Petén and the Verapaces, it precipitated a disjunctive end to the massacres. The military advanced its operational focus from one zone to another as the specific situational guerrilla threat was neutralised. As the campaign achieved its objective, so mass atrocities in specific communities ceased. The strategy logically affected different regions of the country in a differentiated manner, according to their demographic context, the antecedents of conflict there and the velocity with which atrocities achieved their objective.62 By the second half of 1983, the military had achieved its strategic counterinsurgency goal and the generalised mass atrocity campaign came to an end, although model villages continued to corral and indoctrinate indigenous survivors for several years and sporadic massacres persisted in outlying regions. The 1981–3 genocide of five Mayan groups, involving more than 300 massacres, had been decisive, strategically defeating the insurgents, and pushing its survivors to flee to Mexico. In August of the same year, Ríos Montt was deposed in a military coup by General Mejía Víctores, his defence minister, precipitating the beginning of the political transition. The causes of the coup are complex. Allegations were made that Ríos Montt was straying from his original mandate to consolidate the institutionalist line and guarantee counter-insurgency victory, was succumbing to religious fanaticism and was steeped in corruption.63 It is, however, likely that the objective of the coup was to oust Ríos Montt – under whom the ‘dirty war’ had achieved its key goal of neutralising the guerrilla threat and detaching the insurgency from its civilian support base – and clean up the military’s national and international image. By 1984, the military had, moreover, imposed control over all political institutions, militarised all aspects of society and eradicated any potential subversive threat. Beginning in 1983, the political transition was, initially, elite-led and ‘authoritarian’,64 a transition likely agreed between the military and the private sector, yet controlled by the military, leaving minimal space for civilian participation or oversight. Civilian rule nevertheless returned by 61 Kemp, ‘Guatemala prosecutes’, 133–56. 62 Falla, Masacre de la selva. 63 Schirmer, Guatemalan Military Project. 64 Jonas, Of Centaurs and Doves, p. 105.

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January 1986 and was followed shortly afterwards by the Central American peace process, known as Esquipulas II. Guatemala’s formal peace process began in 1987, as the waning of global cold-war politics began to impose its perestroika logic even upon Central America, which had been one of the ideological confrontation’s most reticent and brutal battlegrounds.65 Between 1994 and 1996, seventeen peace accords were signed between successive governments and the URNG, addressing operative and substantive themes. On 31 December 1996, the final peace accord was signed, bringing the country’s armed conflict to a formal end.

Understanding Guatemala’s Genocide The evidence and research presented here demonstrates that the definition of genocide consecrated in the UN Convention of 1948 possesses immediate relevance to Guatemala, given the existence of multiple and mutually reinforcing acts of physical violence executed in response to an intentional strategy of group destruction. However, as Straus has convincingly shown, it is also critical to move beyond legalistic perspectives and interpretations.66 Campbell’s focus on social control – in short, that genocide occurs because of a desire to ‘purify’ a society by eradicating a group or groups perceived as immoral or inferior – is similarly relevant for the study of the Guatemala case.67 In part echoing elements of Fein’s sociological definition of genocide, Card’s research provides further important insight. With respect to the operative constitutive means through which genocide is perpetrated, and the subsequent impact of genocide, Card argues that one of the crime’s distinguishing traits is ‘social death’ – in short, the annihilation of social identity of a group’s members. From this perspective, Card introduces an important distinction as regards the objective and impact of genocidal violence: group destruction is not understood as a wholly and necessarily physical or biological end, but rather, may imply the disappearance of the group as a social entity. Killing, for Card, is not the exclusive means of genocide: ‘Seeing social death 65 For a detailed analysis of Guatemala’s peace process, with particular reference to the peace accords and indigenous issues see ibid. and Roddy Brett, Social Movements, Indigenous Politics and the Guatemalan Process of Democratisation, 1985–1996, CEDLA Latin American Studies Series (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008). 66 See S. Straus, ‘Second-generation comparative research on genocide’, World Politics 59 (2007); and Making and Unmaking. 67 Bradley Campbell, The Geometry of Genocide: A Study in Pure Sociology, Studies in Pure Sociology (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015); and ‘Genocide as social control’, Sociological Theory 27:2 (2009), 150–72.

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at the centre of genocide takes our focus off body counts and loss of individual talents, directing us instead to mourn losses of relationships that create community and give meaning to the development of talents.’68 The acts of violence executed between 1981 and 1983 went beyond the immediate physical destruction of the selected group, suggesting that, whilst killing is indeed crucial, other social and cultural processes – such as cultural destruction through enforced participation in model villages – may contribute explicitly to the perpetration of genocide. In this regard, Lemkin’s original definition of genocide as the intent to annihilate a group’s national patterns and impose the oppressor’s patterns upon the group is also insightful.69 Diverse mechanisms of oppression may be employed to achieve these ends, of which killing remains one. Decisively, the primary objective is to eliminate a group’s social power, cultural capacity and symbolic or physical presence. As Shaw has observed, while physical and biological extermination represent central aspects of genocide, the phenomenon incorporates a further dimension based upon social and cultural destruction, as ‘embodied in (a group’s) ownership of land … (their) religious institutions, cultural and political organization, and all the other ways in which their presence in given social spaces and territories is manifested’.70 This Guatemala study thus indicates the significance of a definition of genocide that provides a stronger analytical and more comprehensive framework than allowed for by the 1948 definition. The approach assumed here reflects the insight of Lemkin and subsequent scholars that, whilst killing remains a core constituent element of genocide, the objective of intentional group destruction is not solely contingent upon a body count. Genocide is not uniquely driven by the strategic objective of eliminating a present, imminent threat, but rather crafted through ‘future-oriented, anticipatory violence’ that seeks to sculpt a future in which a specific social category is absent from the imagined community and founding narrative.71 In the penultimate decade of Guatemala’s internal armed conflict, a new threat emerged, the so-called indian-subversive, a pernicious hybridisation of 68 Card, ‘Genocide and social death’, 63 (emphasis added). 69 Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of International Law, 1944), p. 79. 70 Martin Shaw, What Is Genocide? (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2007), p. 79. 71 Straus describes founding narratives as follows: ‘Ideologies that identify a specific category of people as the main population whose interests the state promotes are the ideologies that are most prone to genocide … they tell a fundamental story about the character and purpose of a state.’ Making and Unmaking, p. 2.

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racial and class, rural and urban grievances, manifest through widespread indigenous support provided to armed insurrection against a dictatorship. This threat went beyond historical configurations of the primitive and stubborn indian, heralding an unfamiliar and particularly virulent threat as seen from the perspective of the Guatemalan elite. For the perpetrator bloc – the military and the political and economic elites – state-sponsored, groupselective, group-destructive, future-orientated violence represented a rational, legitimate and meaningful response to the threat posed by the rebels and their principally indigenous social base. Central to the genocide was the objective of burning the subversives and their supporter base off the map, to destroy the immediate existential threat they allegedly represented. Communities were punished and terrorised into submission. The perpetrator bloc orchestrated then what they perceived to be inherently moral actions, punishing indigenous moral deviance and imposing values of civility, as Campbell has argued. The goal of eliminating the threat from the rebels and their supporters was achieved through systematic, organised violence and, above all, through the massacre campaign. However, the high command became increasingly concerned that inherent ‘indian subversion’ must be rooted out to prevent its cultivation in the future. Those who survived were thus subsequently culturally reprogrammed to prevent the persistence of insubordination across future generations. Genocidal violence, then, was not merely aimed at defeating an immediate enemy, but rather, an imagined anticipated adversary. Whilst the immediate justification for the violence was counter-insurgent, its deeper impulse was driven by nationalism, the ultimate objective being to forge a new whitened nation-state, purified of indigenous culture and immune from inherent indigenous subversion. It is within this realm that the present-orientation and future-orientation of Guatemala’s genocide converged, merging to sculpt a ritualistic, cruel and functional violence. As English argues, ‘The elements of precious territory, people, culture, and proud history – reinforced by a driving sense of ethical rectitude and exclusivist assumption – make for a repeatedly powerful cocktail in potential conflict situations.’72 Understanding the military’s perception of indigenous selfhood as a ‘future’ threat to elite dominance provides insight into certain patterns in the counter-insurgent violence, such as the killing of pregnant women, the destruction of foetuses and the execution of children. However, and 72 English, Modern War, p. 24. (Emphasis added.)

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significantly, the Guatemalan genocide was not only wrought through physical killing. The model villages instituted as part of the strategy of population control, particularly under Ríos Montt, operationalised initiatives that sought intentionally to eliminate indigenous culture from the future: indoctrination programmes, the prohibition of the speaking of indigenous languages and the banning of ancestral religious customs. The intention of the violence and its correlative strategies was to cripple permanently the indigenous group, to destroy its national pattern and impose upon it ‘the national pattern of the oppressor’, components central to Lemkin’s original definition of genocide. In this regard, confinement strategies were indeed a central component of Guatemala’s genocide: what the massacres were not able to destroy physically, population control and reprogramming would subsequently ensure. Guatemala’s genocide was intimately related to state and nation building, a process that was as traumatic as it was violent. Political violence, in this respect, fitted into the wider narrative of a nation still being constructed: new villages carved out of the jungle in the image of the oppressor; resettlement villages reminiscent of those of the French in Algeria;73 new citizens, ‘el indio permitido’, whose values repudiated those of his subversive, anti-modern, shameful past. Genocide then was a project of grand social and political engineering to make Guatemala fit for an imagined modernity, a continuation of historically unsuccessful nation-building processes that had sought to bring definitive closure to the ‘indian threat’ through the elimination of the indigenous group. As such, genocide represented both an immediate strategic response to the state’s problem of subversion, and a long-term final solution to erase the country’s indigenous population from history.

Bibliographic Note A bibliographical note of the Guatemalan genocide must be discussed from the critical point of departure that the case has not received the same level of public acknowledgement nor been subject to comparable levels of academic enquiry and investigation as other episodes of mass killing and atrocity perpetrated during the twentieth century. Philip Spencer, in fact, wrote of a ‘wall of silence’ around the Guatemalan genocide (Spencer, Genocide since 1945), whilst Ben Kiernan advances this proposition in ‘Wall of silence’, his 73 For examples of model villages established in genocidal contexts, see Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 184–5, 477–8, 581, 606.

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powerful analysis of the explanatory factors behind the invisibility of the Guatemalan genocide in the discipline. Accessible sources in Spanish, such as the original versions of the reports authored by the UN-sponsored Truth Commission (Guatemala: Memoria del Silencio) and the Catholic Church Truth Commission (Guatemala: Nunca Mas) represent significantly important documents, parts of which have been translated into English. Daniel Rothenberg’s edited volume Memory of Silence brings together key aspects of the CEH, whilst Thomas Quigley’s edited volume, Guatemala: Never Again (New York: Orbis, 1999) represents an abridged version of the ODHAG’s original report. In 2009, the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University published an important contribution, Etelle Higonnet (ed.), Quiet Genocide (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2009), which takes steps to address the gap left by the limited translation of the reports of both Truth Commissions. The sentence pronounced against Ríos Montt for genocide in 2013 by the High Impact Court in Guatemala includes very important details, although, as yet is only available in Spanish: Condenado por genocidio. Sentencia condenatoria en contra de José Efraín Ríos Montt (Guatemala: F&G Editores, 2013). Important scholarship focusing upon the dynamics of the genocide has set important precedents, such as Brett’s ethnographic study, The Origins and Dynamics of Genocide, which is based upon research originally developed by the author as part of the investigations that led to the 2013 prosecution and conviction of former de facto president, General Efrían Ríos Montt, for genocide in the Ixil region of Guatemala. Other important monographs include Victoria Sanford, Buried Secrets; Ricardo Falla, Massacres in the Jungle: Ixcán, Guatemala 1975–1982 (Texas: Avalon, 1994); Manz, Paradise in Ashes; and Jennifer Schirmer’s study of the dynamics of violence, The Guatemalan Military Project. Finally, a special edition of the Journal of Genocide Studies 18 (2016), edited by Susanne Jonas, brought together important scholarship focusing upon the trial of Ríos Montt and its wider social and political implications.

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24

Mass Violence and the Kurds From the Late Ottoman Empire to ISIS u ğ u r u¨ m i t u¨ n g o¨ r

Introduction Kurds are a diverse ethnic group who number 30 to 40 million, and speak languages of the Indo-European family. A majority of Kurds are Sunni Muslims, but minorities follow Shi’ism, Alevism, Yarsanism, Yazidism, Zoroastrianism and Christianity. They are culturally distinct from Arabs, Turks, Persians, Syriacs and Armenians, their historical neighbours. The Kurds’ experience with modern mass violence, from civil wars to genocides, is long and complex. Whereas Kurds lived for centuries in pre-national conditions in the Ottoman and Persian empires, the advent of nationalism and the nation-state system in the Middle East in the twentieth century radically changed their situation. This chapter examines the Kurds’ encounter with modern mass political violence from World War One to the contemporary Syrian conflict. World War One was a watershed for most ethnic groups in the Ottoman Empire, and some political minorities such as Armenians and Assyrians suffered genocide – including at the hands of Kurds. Moreover, the post-Ottoman order precluded the Kurds from building a nation-state of their own. Kurds were relegated either to cultural and political subordination under the Turkish and Persian nation-states, or to a precarious existence under alternative orders (colonialism in Syria and Iraq, and communism in the Soviet Union). The nation-state system changed the pre-national, Ottoman imperial order with culturally heterogeneous territories into a system of nation-states which began to produce nationalist homogenisation through various forms of population policies. In Syria, Iran, Iraq and Turkey, Kurds became victims of these policies, which veered towards genocide and genocidal massacres in some infamous cases. For instance, after the establishment of the Turkish Republic, the

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Kemalist government launched violent and invasive ‘Turkification’ policies – for example, by suppressing the Sheikh Said rebellion of 1925 through genocidal massacres. This was followed in 1938 by the genocide in Dersim, which went beyond mass murder and included forced cultural assimilation of the Kurdish tribes in the region. After the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Ruhollah Khomeini’s apparatus of violence suppressed a Kurdish uprising by executing thousands of combatants and noncombatants. In Iraq and Syria, Kurds suffered from discriminatory ‘Arabisation’, ranging from genocidal to non-violent state policies. Possibly the most violent collective experience suffered by the Kurds was in Iraq, where Saddam Hussein’s Anfal campaign of the 1980s culminated in several chemical massacres, including infamously at Halabja of 1988. Counter-insurgency in Turkish Kurdistan in the 1990s brought more violence to those areas, resulting in massacres, environmental destruction and mass displacement. Finally, the implosion of the Iraqi and Syrian states from 2003 and 2011 on, respectively, produced yet more political violence against the Kurds in both societies. In Iraq, the ‘fratricidal war’ between the two Kurdish political parties – the Kurdistan Democratic Party (PDK) and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) – killed tens of thousands in what amounted in some cases to clan cleansings. Ultimately, in both Iraq and Syria, the so-called Islamic State or ISIS attacked Kurdish civilians indiscriminately and committed a full-blown genocide against Yazidis in the summer of 2014. All in all, the twentieth century was a horrific period for the Kurds and the region of Kurdistan. It started with the devastation of world war, continued with Western colonisation and their subsequent subjugation in three different nation-states, and ended with civil wars and massacres. Thus, for the Kurds, ‘genocide’ is a chronologically extended, complex and intertwined story, with multiple perpetrators, but with the same victims: themselves. Kurds experienced mass violence in culturally, politically and sociologically different societies under various state ideologies: communism, colonialism and Islamism, but especially ethnic nationalism. Some of this genocidal violence aimed to assimilate the survivors into society, other forms of genocidal violence attempted to excise their community altogether. This chapter looks into the historical backgrounds, causes, courses and consequences of those episodes of violence, and offers analyses of the experiences of victims, survivors and perpetrators. It provides an overview of the Kurds’ experience with genocide from the beginning of the twentieth century to the Syrian civil war. 575

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This chapter begins with three caveats. First, although ‘Kurdistan’ is a cultural, geographic, and political space that is spread out over at least four states (here excluding the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Armenia), each with distinct historical trajectories, the chapter will deal only with Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. (See Map 24.1.) This is not only because of limitations of space, but also because most genocidal violence involving Kurds occurred in these three states, especially Turkey and Iraq. Second, not all violence against Kurds in these territories was genocidal – by any definition. Most violence was in the context of political conflicts such as inter-state wars, civil wars, insurgencies and counter-insurgencies, assassinations, executions, police brutality, riots and revolutions. There was also private violence, such as tribal feuds, domestic and gendered violence, personally motivated murders etc.

Map 24.1 The Kurdistan Regions. (Getty Images)

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This chapter will focus on mass political violence against Kurdish civilians. Third, a focus on the ‘genocide of Kurds’ differs from the broader notion of ‘genocide in Kurdistan’, as there are other communities in Kurdistan that were victimised, some by Kurds.1 An incomplete list of such violence includes the Armenian and Syriac massacres of 1895 and genocide of 1915, the 1933 massacre of Syriacs in northern Iraq and Kurdish violence against Arabs and Turkmens after 2003 in Iraq and after 2011 in Syria.

Background The Kurdish historical experience from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century is a complex process of ambivalent developments, but it is generally characterised by a lack of united statehood and a story of collective life in pre-national conditions between the Ottoman Empire and the Persian Empire. Unlike societies with traditions of state formation reaching back to the early modern period, the Kurds’ long-term historical experience does not consist of a sustained process of state building, as most of Kurdistan was governed from Istanbul as the capital of the Ottoman Empire. Kurdish chieftains (agha), religious leaders (sheikhs), and chiefs (emirs) represented political power at the local level, but the conduct of the Ottoman (and subsequent Turkish and Arab) political elites demonstrated that Kurdistan was mostly the object of state building and not its subject. The destruction and abrogation of the Kurdish emirates in the 1830s eliminated the possibility for an emerging leadership that could formulate nationalist claims around the end of World War One. A town like Cîzre (Jazira), which had been the cradle of the Botan Emirate in the mid-nineteenth century, by the late twentieth century had been reduced to a weak border town with its elites imprisoned, exiled or assassinated, and its remaining population disenfranchised and terrorised.2 Cîzre was not an exception among former Kurdish power centres. As the Ottoman and Persian Empires collapsed in the aftermath of World War One, Kurdistan began to be governed by British and French mandates in Iraq and Syria, respectively, as well as by the Turkish nation-state. The establishment of Arab nation-states in Iraq and Syria then led to the Kurds being pushed into 1 E. von Joeden-Forgey and T. McGee, ‘Editors’ introduction: palimpsestic genocide in Kurdistan’, Genocide Studies International 13:1 (2019), 1–9. 2 M. Eppel, ‘The demise of the Kurdish emirates: the impact of Ottoman reforms and international relations on Kurdistan during the first half of the nineteenth century’, Middle Eastern Studies 44:2 (2008), 237–58.

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demographic and political minority positions that averted conflict only through weak structures of power-sharing. These new conditions were in no way deterministic causes of genocide, but as longer-term, deep political forces they did steer and shape the political asymmetries and inequities of Kurdish–Turkish and Kurdish–Arab relations in the mid- to late-twentieth century. Genocide is often seen as an explosive, short-term event that results from a focused policy, preceded and triggered by perhaps months of decisionmaking by political elites. But the long-term, deeper causes are rarely studied, even though they contribute to the broader context of the longterm disempowerment of the victim group.3 Two such developments were the nation-state and the cold war. The advent of the nation-state system in the post-Ottoman lands made the Kurds dependent on Damascus, Ankara, Tehran and Baghdad. Second, the cold war made Kurdish politics vulnerable to ideological polarisation, as the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party – a socialist organisation) and the PDK (a Soviet-supported project, initially in Iran) ended up in the Soviet sphere of influence.

Historical Approaches and Sources The study of mass violence and the Kurds has developed greatly in the twenty-first century, due to a number of factors: rising education levels among Kurds (in Kurdistan, the broader region, and in the diaspora); the fall of Saddam’s regime and rise of the KRG (Kurdistan Regional Government) in Iraq in 2003; increasing scholarly interest in the region and its peoples; and a liberal decade in Turkey (2005–15). There are now a significant number of major secondary sources in various European and Middle Eastern languages. Within this literature, there are both achievements and shortcomings, consensus and contention. One major epistemological problem in the scholarship on mass violence and the Kurds is the axis of tension between essentialism and heterogeneity. Essentialist approaches have long constituted a formidable limitation to detached analysis. This already starts in many primary sources on Kurds, for example regarding the conflicts during and after World War One. European geographers, missionaries and diplomats who travelled through the region often relied on the myth of an implacably violent Kurdish culture. Turkish public political discourse reflected in influential daily newspapers was not 3 S. P. Rosenberg, ‘Genocide is a process, not an event’, Genocide Studies and Prevention 7:1 (2012), 16–23.

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unique in portraying Kurds as essentially violent, as we see in this example from 1930: Even though they may be more capable than the redskins in the United States, the Kurds are – history is my witness – endlessly violent and cruel . . . They are completely bereft of positive feelings and civilized manners. For centuries, they have been a plague for our race . . . these creatures are really not inclined to profit from civilization . . . In my opinion, the dark spirit, crude mental state, and ruthless manners of this Kurdish rabble is impossible to break.4

Similar attitudes can be found in Armenian and Syriac sources of that period, in which Kurds are invariably ascribed murderous instincts, a martial culture and a natural disposition to violence, even before the 1915 Armenian genocide.5 The flipside of this approach is the trope that Kurds are an eternally and ruthlessly exploited, occupied and massacred nation of victims. As problematic as this essentialism has been, it remains a deeply influential approach to research on Kurdish encounters with violence. Violence is seen as a transhistorical force, and Kurds have no political agency as they are either unexplained killers, impotent pawns or helpless victims. Essentialism is also a form of methodological nationalism, as it ignores intra-Kurdish cleavages, both ethnic and political. Not only do the complex ethnic realities of Kurdistan simply not translate into the monochromatic image of a Kurdish ethnicity well-delineated from its Turkish, Arab, Armenian or Persian neighbours. They also do not problematise the Kurds’ political behaviour, even though every episode of mass violence and genocide against Kurds has seen some Kurds collaborating with the perpetrators. Entire tribes sided with Atatürk in the 1920s; Kurdish spies and militias worked with Saddam during Anfal; tens of thousands of ‘village guards’ battle the PKK in Turkey today; and in Syria many Kurds even fought with ISIS in the battles of Rojava. Mass violence against and by Kurds is a legitimate academic line of inquiry that deserves attention, provided it avoids romantic and essentialist views, and takes account of the heterogeneity of Kurdish people and their history. Bearing these observations in mind, there is a wide range of primary sources

4 Cumhuriyet, 18 August 1930. 5 Raffi, The Fool (London: Gomidas Institute, 2002); Thomas Mugerditchian, Dikranagerdee Nahankin Tcharteru yev Kurderou Kazanioutounneru (Cairo: Djihanian, 1919); Abed Mshiho Na’man Qarabashi, Dmo Zliho: Vergoten Bloed. Verhalen over de Gruweldaden Jegens Christenen in Turkije en over het Leed dat hun in 1895 en in 1914-1918 is Aangedaan, trans. George Toro and Amill Gorgis (Glanerbrug: Bar Hebraeus, 2002).

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on Kurdish genocides available to researchers. The two major types of primary sources most relevant are state documents and eyewitness accounts. If we start with the archives of the perpetrating states, there is much to be found that sheds light on the thinking, organisation and co-ordination behind the genocides. The state archives of the Turkish Republic in Ankara, for example, offer a wealth of information on the massacres and deportations of the first half of the twentieth century. The Prime Ministry’s Republican Archives (Bas¸bakanlık Cumhuriyet Ars¸ivi), the archives of the General Security Directorate (Emniyet-i Umumiye Müdüriyeti), and the Turkish military archives (Askeri Tarih ve Stratejik Etüt Bas¸kanlığ ı Ars¸ivi) contain rich collections that detail the violent campaigns from the macro- to the micro-level. Iraq’s state archives under Baathism are equally rich and finegrained and, due to the nature of Saddam’s regime, offer a particularly enlightening insight into the workings of state violence. After 2003, the American government confiscated huge portions of those archives and moved them to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where they were digitised and made available for research. In particular, the North Iraq Data Set (NIDS) is highly useful in understanding the violence of the 1986–9 Anfal campaign.6 Finally, due to the upheavals of the Syrian conflict and rise of ISIS, certain relevant archival collections were captured by activists: the Syria Justice & Accountability Centre (SJAC) and Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA) have managed to collect and smuggle Syrian state archives, especially security files, out of the country. Many of the documents deal with the repression of Kurdish political activity in the northeast of Syria. They have also seized important collections of the Islamic State, as it collapsed militarily in 2019. These ISIS files are being analysed and provide unique insights into how that movement organised its violence.7 As detailed as these state archives are on the top-down organisation and perpetration of the violence, no account of genocides against the Kurds is sufficient without Kurdish sources, in particular written accounts (diaries and memoirs) and oral history collections. The number of Kurdish memoirs of episodes of violence is steadily increasing. Iraqi-Kurdish scholars such as Arif Qurbani and Shoresh Resool have collected an admirable set of memoirs, and 6 B. Montgomery, The Seizure of Saddam Hussein’s Archive of Atrocity (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), pp. 37–80. 7 J. Macey, Josh Macey, Paul Strauch, Mitzi Steiner and Nathaniel Zelinsky, ‘A war crimes “wiki”: the need for an open database to ensure Syrian accountability’, Yale Journal of International Law 12 (2017), www.yjil.yale.edu/2017/12.

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so have Turkish Kurds, such as those of Sheikh Said’s son and Nuri Dersimi in their accounts of the violence.8 Oral histories of Kurds also have become more widespread. Individual scholars such as Choman Hardi or Ramazan Aras, as well as specialised institutions such as the Memory Centre (Istanbul) or the Kurdistan Memory Programme (Erbil) have interviewed countless Kurds about their experiences during and after mass violence.9 Besides these two main bodies of evidence, international sources should also be mentioned: diplomatic cables from various states (American, Soviet, British, French etc.) and non-governmental and humanitarian organisations (such as Médecins Sans Frontières) have contributed much to the body of primary sources on Kurds and genocide.10

The Perpetrators and Their Constituencies The three peaks of genocidal violence against Kurds occurred under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in Turkey, in the 1920s and 1930s; under Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime in Iraq, in the 1980s; and the ISIS genocide of Yezidis in Iraq, in 2014. However, the policies of both Kemalist Turkification and Baathist Arabisation affected Kurds more broadly and included processes of cultural genocide and demographic engineering that were highly destructive. In Turkey, a generation of Young Turk social engineers were responsible for fundamentally and violently transforming Ottoman society in the period 1913–50. The Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) and its successor the Republican People’s Party (RPP) presided over a series of massacres, deportations and forced assimilation campaigns that amounted to genocide of Armenians, Syriacs, Greeks, Yezidis and Kurds. In the Kurdish case, it was especially Atatürk and his inner circle of military officers and civilian administrators who were responsible for most of the violence, especially the massacres of 1925, 1930 and 1938. Atatürk himself was thoroughly hostile to 8 M. N. Dersimi, Hatıratım (Stockholm: Roja Nû, 1986); A. Qurbani, S¸ ayethalekanî Enfal (Suleimaniyah: Wezaretî Ros¸inbîrî, 2002); S. Resool, Anfal, the Kurds, and the Iraqi State (n.p., 2003). 9 M. Tucker, Hell Is Over: Voices of the Kurds after Saddam (Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2004); C. Hardi, Gendered Experiences of Genocide: Anfal Survivors in Kurdistan-Iraq (Surrey: Ashgate, 2011); R. Aras, The Formation of Kurdishness in Turkey: Political Violence, Fear and Pain (London: Routledge, 2013). See also: https://kurdistanmemor yprogramme.com/story-of-anfal/ and https://hakikatadalethafiza.org/. 10 V. Choo, ‘Forensic evidence of Iraqi atrocities against Kurds’, The Lancet 341: 8840 (1993), 299–300. Vera Saeedpour established the Kurdish Program under the auspices of the journal Cultural Survival, published by the Anthropology Department at Harvard University. In 1986 Saeedpour also founded the Kurdish Library (the first in the western hemisphere) and, in 1988, the Kurdish Museum, both in New York City.

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Kurdish cultural and political rights and was personally involved, albeit at a distance, in instigating and directing the violence from Ankara or Istanbul. He was supported by his loyal right-hand man and veteran social engineer ¸Sükrü Kaya, and long-time nationalist bureaucrats Celal Bayar and Mustafa Abdülhalik Renda, as well as his army generals: Mürsel Bakü, Kâzım I·nanç, Fevzi Çakmak and Kâzım Orbay. What these elites had in common was the background of being Turkish-speaking Ottoman Muslims who disproportionately originated from the Balkans. Their collective experience of exile, modern education in the top Ottoman academies, absorption of Turkish nationalist ideology and their anxieties over ethnic separatism among Turkey’s minorities drove them to uncompromising political positions towards the Kurds.11 The Iraqi genocide of Kurds was masterminded by Saddam Hussein and his political elite of disproportionately Sunni Arabs from the Tikrit area, with trusted support drawn from his own Al-Begaat tribe – part of the larger Al-Bu Nasr tribal group. His regime’s very core was drawn from his extended family members: his uncle, cousins and sons led the security forces and intelligence agencies. During his youth, Saddam became an Arab nationalist and as a result took an antagonistic position towards the ethnic and religious minorities in Iraq, mostly Shi’ite Arabs and Sunni Kurds. He plotted and coordinated the Anfal genocide, but left its practical organisation to his cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid (1941–2010), chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, who was later indicted by the Iraq Special Tribunal, from which he received death sentences for genocide and other crimes. Other commanding officers during the genocide were Saddam’s close allies, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, Hussein Rashid al-Tikriti, Farhan Jubouri and Saber Abdelaziz al-Douri.12 This clique had highly homogeneous origins; their regional (Tikrit), class (poor), ethnic (Arab), gender (men) and sectarian (Sunni) identities had made them susceptible to the ideas and practices of the Baath Party. Its Arab-nationalist ideology, hostile to Israel, Iran and Turkey, also saw Iraq’s minorities as ‘internal enemies’ and existential threats to Iraqi-Arab unitary statehood. The Baathist leaders of Iraq differed from their Syrian Baathist counterparts in more than one way, but resembled them in their Kurdophobia. Much like Iraq, Syria was ruled by a dictator, Hafez al-Assad, who oversaw a tightknit group of mostly co-ethnics who dominated the security apparatus. Assad 11 U. Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950 (Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 42–51. 12 J. Hiltermann, A Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq, and the Gassing of Halabja (Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 92–5.

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too was an Arab nationalist who saw Syria as the vanguard of the Arab world. The Assad regime’s violent perpetrators were (and increasingly are) disproportionately Alawites from the coastal areas, especially the rural areas of Jableh and Homs. Men such as Ali Douba, Ali Haidar, Mohammad Suleiman and Jamil al-Hassan (but also Sunnis like Mustafa Tlass or Ali Mamlouk) oversee a vast machinery of deadly violence.13 The most sensitive positions are reserved for those either with familial ties to the Assads, or who have proven their loyalty by carrying out sensitive violence for him (massacres, sexual violence, chemical bombing). Like Saddam’s coterie, Assad’s clique of intelligence bosses wielded immense power to arrest, detain, imprison and kill. One perpetrator of violence against Kurds was Mohammad Mansoura (born 1950), head of the Political Security Directorate in Eastern Syria from 2004 to 2008. Mansoura was entrusted with the repression of Kurdish political ambitions and consequently more or less ran the eastern half of Syria as his personal fiefdom. He was responsible for the 2004 Qamishli massacre, a Kurdish–Arab football riot that escalated into a massacre of Kurdish demonstrators, and the subsequent mass torture of dissidents in his agency’s prisons.14 The line-up of perpetrators in Iraq and Syria differs from that in Turkey in fundamental ways, but they all had one important aspect in common: the top perpetrators and their networks came from a relatively narrow profile of backgrounds. The intimacy and trust that characterised their relationships was vital for the political and social bonding that was necessary for perpetrating violence against a vulnerable, detested community. Furthermore, despite the different historical experiences and backgrounds of Turkish, Syrian and Iraqi perpetrators, there was relative unity in the form and outcome of their violence: mass victimisation of Kurdish civilians, and the creation of wider cleavages in and polarisation within Kurdish society. Not only did Arabisation and Turkification resemble each other as nationalist policies in all three countries, but also the violence these ideologies perpetuated against Kurdish civilians was similar: torture, massacre, assassination, aerial bombing, forced displacement, environmental destruction and more.

13 D. Lesch, Syria: The Fall of the House of Assad (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), pp. 65–8. 14 B. Mohammed, ‘Haqaaiq saadima an al-rajul al-khifi fi al-Qamishli’, Afrin News, 2 April 2014, https://afrinnews.wordpress.com/2014/04/02/-‫ﰲ‬-‫ﺍﻟﺨﻔﻲ‬-‫ﺍﻟﺮﺟﻞ‬-‫ﻋﻦ‬-‫ﺻﺎﺩﻣﺔ‬-‫ﺣﻘﺎﺋﻖ‬ ‫ﺍﻟﻘﺎﻣﺸﲇ‬/.

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Victimisation and Long-Term Impacts on the Victims Mass violence rarely targeted all Kurdish civilians but focused on certain identity markers more than others. Kurdish victimisation by the Kemalist and Baathist perpetrators generally developed along several axes and cleavages: class, politics, tribe, gender, territory and others. This is not to say that the violence was not genocidal, but a granular analysis of the victims’ profiles shows that the perpetrators had certain priorities in mind. They targeted particular groups and individuals more than others, and disproportionately killed the flagged groups more than the others. First and foremost, Kurdish elites were specifically targeted throughout the entire twentieth century, both in terms of general persecution and repression, and especially during episodes of mass violence. There has been a long list of assassinations, executions, imprisonment and torture of religious, cultural, economic, intellectual and political leaders in all regions of Kurdistan. In Turkey, the most prominent examples are Sheikh Said (1865– 1925) and Seyit Rıza (1863–1937), leaders of the uprisings in 1925 and 1937 respectively, and the respective groups of clerics.15 The Kemalists did not target only religious notables; in particular they assaulted secular Kurdish leaders because they could not be co-opted by appealing to Islamic brotherhood. In the post-war era, even politicians who operated within the legal boundaries of the Turkish nation-state like Mehdi Zana, as well as commanders of illegal insurgency movements like Abdullah Öcalan, were targeted and imprisoned. In the 1990s, the Turkish government’s paramilitary death squads pursued prominent Kurdish businessmen, writers and journalists, kidnapping and killing them in an effort to destroy the intelligentsia of the pro-Kurdish movement.16 Political identities were the surest indicator of Kurdish victimisation: in all four countries, Kurdish-nationalist activism was and still is countered by disenfranchisement, repression, imprisonment and worse. Any and all forms of Kurdish political activism across the political spectrum have been pursued by the respective security services. For example, both Kurdish communists and Islamists were imprisoned and tortured in Syria. The KDP and PUK had been outlawed in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, whose elite police squads hunted down party activists and assassinated them. And 15 Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey, pp. 122–66. 16 A. Is¸ık, ‘Paramilitary groups in Turkey in the 1990s: emergence, transformation, and functions’ (PhD dissertation, Utrecht University, Department of History, 2020).

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Turkey’s systematic campaign to annihilate the PKK has brutally targeted that party’s members and fighters. This type of violence against Kurdish political movements intends to depoliticise, demobilise and terrorise rather than exterminate them. However, in practice the distinctions between targeting party activists and uninvolved civilians, or between guerrilla fighters and non-combatants, became blurred, with the violence spilling over to the broader Kurdish population.17 Kurdish society was and is characterised by tribes of various sizes, languages and religious backgrounds. Turkey, Syria and Iraq have followed ambivalent policies towards the old tribal organisations and affiliations of the Kurds: on the one hand, tribalism has been suppressed to a large degree, but, on the other hand, loyal tribes have been rewarded and empowered. More importantly, certain tribes have been targeted more categorically than others. The Turkish army committed a series of indiscriminate massacres during the 1938 Dersim genocide, but also, the Demenu and Heyderu tribes were especially targeted for comprehensive annihilation. In their case, no mercy was shown to women and children, as Turkish soldiers set fire to their villages, confiscated their livestock and executed civilians in ditches and valleys.18 A similar clan-specific massacre occurred in Iraq: on 31 July 1983, Saddam’s security forces led by the Republican Guards kidnapped between 5,000 and 8,000 men and boys of the Barzani tribe. The men and boys disappeared without a trace, as their family members vainly attempted to gain information about their whereabouts. A few months later, Saddam informed a speechless crowd of Kurdish dignitaries in Erbil: The Barzanis spread their treachery to other families. They are involved in this crime and became guides for the Persian Army helping them occupy Iraqi land. Some who called themselves Barzanis co-operated with them so they have been severely punished and have gone to hell.19

A 1989 document from the intelligence service adds: ‘The Barzani clan has been known for its disloyalty to the Party, Revolution and Country for decades, it has persistently resisted the unity of the nation and it is the real 17 C. Günes¸, The Kurdish National Movement in Turkey: From Protest to Resistance (London: Routledge, 2012). 18 Zeynep Arslan, Christoph Osztovics, Katharina Brizic,́ Agnes Grond, Thomas Schmidinger, and Maria Six-Hohenbalken (eds.), Dersim 1938: Genocide, Displacement, and Repercussions Eighty Years Later (Vienna: Praesens, 2018). 19 ‘The tragedy of the missing Barzanis’, https://kurdistanmemoryprogramme.com/thetragedy-of-the-missing-barzanis/.

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traitor.’20 Other Anfal documents in the North Iraq Data Set mention such hostility and deadly violence against particular tribes. Ankara, Damascus and Baghdad ranked Kurdish tribes according to loyalty to the rulers, and adjusted their violence accordingly. Lastly, two other categories of victims must be distinguished: those related to gender and to territory. Much victimisation of Kurds during episodes of mass violence was gender-specific – such as in the above case of the massacre of the Barzani men. Kurdish men and women have suffered culturally specific forms of violence, such as sexual violence against women in prison and on the battlefields in order to tarnish family honour, or similar violence to men as a performance of emasculation.21 Finally, as violence is a spatial phenomenon, territory plays a role in the victimisation of Kurds, in at least two ways. First, Kemalist and Baathist social engineers have systematically imagined some regions of Kurdistan as particularly ‘disloyal areas’: the Germiyan valley, the ¸Sırnak plains or the Kobanî region. Anyone from these areas was met with more suspicion while travelling outside the region, and these regions have been subjected to higher levels of violence than others in Kurdistan. Second, under the Kemalist and Baathist political-geographic logic of loyalty and disloyalty, Turkish- and Arab-majority cities, respectively, have been governed through the fear of Kurdish demographic takeover of urban centres. These anxieties held that cities on Kurdistan’s edges, such as Erzincan, Kirkuk or Aleppo, should remain solidly Arab, and that the visibility of Kurds in these cities should be reduced or eliminated. Consequently, during the Turkification and Arabisation policies, Kurds in these cities were removed, imprisoned and in general treated with higher levels of violence than Kurds elsewhere.22 Kurdish individuals, communities, and societies have been seriously affected by mass violence, which caused psychological, societal and cultural traumas. The Turkish massacres of the 1920s and 1930s, for example, traumatised a generation that remembered and transmitted their experiences across time and space to new generations of Kurds. The Azizoğ lu family from Silvan, for example, was deported so often they named one of their children I·skân (meaning ‘Settlement’). The child, I·skân Azizoğ lu, grew up to become 20 M. Ihsan, Nation Building in Kurdistan: Memory, Genocide and Human Rights (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 147. 21 A. Fischer-Tahir, ‘Gendered memories and masculinities: Kurdish Peshmerga on the Anfal campaign in Iraq’, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 8:1 (2012), 92–114. 22 A. Secor, ‘“An unrecognizable condition has arrived”: law, violence, and the state of exception’, in Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror, and Political Violence, ed. D. Gregory and A. Pred (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 37–53.

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a politician and still carries the legacy of the persecutions within him.23 The Yazidis have suffered a series of genocides throughout their modern history – seventy-three according to their own oral tradition. The mass destruction of World War One and the 2014 ISIS genocide in particular are remembered by the Yazidis for their impact on the community. Yazidi women, symbolised and represented by 2018 Nobel Prize winner Nadia Murad, have attracted global attention by foregrounding their victimisation while surviving massacres and sexual slavery under ISIS.24 Representations of Kurdish suffering are a global phenomenon, not only due to the spread of social media and communications technology in the twenty-first century, but due to the strength of oral traditions among Kurdish communities and the growth of the Kurdish diaspora. The transnational and intergenerational impact of Kurdish victimisation finds expression in trauma centres across Europe and North America, and in activism by the offspring of the victims and survivors. Often when Kurdish youth in the diaspora find out about the suffering of their (grand)parents’ generation, they become highly protective of them and turn to various forms of political activism in an attempt to exorcise the violence against them.25

An Overview of the Major Events of Kurdish Genocides Kurds in Turkey suffered genocide under the authoritarian and Turkishnationalist rule of Unionism (1913–18) and in particular Kemalism (1923–50). Three massacres stand out for their genocidal nature: the violence in the Diyarbekir region, in 1925; in the Ararat region, in 1930; and in the Dersim region, in 1938. All followed organised Kurdish resistance against Kemalist persecution and repression. In all of these cases, the Turkish counterinsurgency that followed during and after the reconquest of territory was exceptionally brutal, barely distinguishing between Kurds who were involved politically and those who were not. The Turkish army torched 23 Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey, p. 169. 24 M. Six-Hohenbalken, ‘May I be a sacrifice for my grandchildren: transgenerational transmission and women’s narratives of the Yezidi ferman’, Dialectical Anthropology 43 (2019), 161–83; N. Murad, The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight against the Islamic State (New York: Crown, 2017). 25 N. Ahlberg, ‘No Five Fingers Are Alike’: What Exiled Kurdish Women in Therapy Told Me (London: Routledge, 2018); R. Kevers, P. Rober and L. Haene, ‘The role of collective identifications in family processes of post-trauma reconstruction: an exploratory study of Kurdish refugee families and their diasporic community’, Kurdish Studies 5 (2017), 3–29.

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villages and executed civilians as well as combatants. These mass killings followed the methods of the destruction of the Armenians, only several years earlier in the same regions. Upon the army’s invasion of a village, the villagers were routinely disarmed, stripped of their belongings (including gold teeth), and collectively tied by their hands with rope. They were then taken to trenches and cliffs, where they were executed with machine guns. Another method was cramming people into haylofts and sheds and setting fire to the buildings, burning people alive.26 Precise data is lacking, but according to one account, during the 1925 massacres, altogether 206 villages were destroyed, 8,758 houses burnt, and 15,200 people killed. During the 1930 massacres in the Ararat area, the army destroyed 220 villages and killed an estimated 10,000 people. Finally, in the 1938 Dersim massacre possibly 15,000 civilians were killed by the Turkish army and gendarmerie, with widespread destruction to the habitat of the locals.27 These figures cannot be verified definitively, given the lack of access to the Turkish military and security archives. This period of genocide against Kurds is well-documented in terms of its preparation, co-ordination, societal atmosphere and ideological justification. Turkish-nationalist social engineers openly called for deportation and destruction of Kurds. Mustafa Kemal personally took the lead in defining the population politics and demographic engineering in this period, assigning his lieutenants to follow a ruthless anti-Kurdish policy of subjugation, deportation, assimilation and, if necessary, elimination. His chief assistant, Interior Minister ¸Sükrü Kaya, consistently called for the comprehensive ethnic and cultural homogenisation of the country, both in parliamentary addresses and confidential reports.28 The character of the massacres has not been studied in detail due to the lack of access to sources from the perpetrators’ perspective. A recent archival discovery shed some light on this dimension of the killing. A Turkish soldier named Yusuf Kenan Akım kept a diary when he was serving in the army and his unit was ordered to ‘clean out’ (temizlemek) villages in Dersim. His diary entries of 1938 offer a unique insight into the day-to-day perpetration of massacres: 13 August: Today our unit captured 20,000 sheep and 50 Kurds in a valley. · 9 September: Ah, how I wish I was in Izmir. But we are on some mountain grappling with the Kurds . . . Today we arrived in the valley after combing 26 V. Yadirgi, The Political Economy of the Kurds of Turkey: From the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic (Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 165–91. 27 Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey, Ch. 3. 28 S¸ . Kaya, Sözleri, yazıları, 1927–1937 (Ankara: Cumhuriyet Matbaası, 1937).

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[tarayarak] the mountains and forests. Our unit brought the head of the chieftain of the ¸Sam Us¸ak tribe ¸Seytan Ali, and killed and brought the heads of many more people. Now our unit became a favorite, all officers call us the unit of heroes. Ali Galip Pas¸a told us on the phone that he kisses our eyes. We spent the night an hour away from Ovacık. We are very tired again. 10 September: all mountains and forests have been combed. Our unit brought the head of one of the notorious ones. Another unit brought the head of Seyithan. There is a soldier named Rus¸en in our unit. He is cutting off all the heads.29 The few perpetrator accounts available corroborate the eyewitness testimonies of Dersim survivors, who recounted in rich detail the massacres, the aerial bombings with confirmed use of poisonous gas, the sexual violence, the mass deportations and the subsequent policies of cultural genocide.30 The 1990s saw a second major period of mass violence against Kurdish civilians. In the conflict between the Turkish state and the PKK, which became an armed conflict in 1984, Turkish paramilitary units and death squads committed extensive violence against civilians, especially in the 1990s. They were involved in counter-insurgency operations against the PKK, including assassinations, forced disappearances, torture, sexual violence, material and environmental destruction, and several important massacres of civilians.31 The massacres of Cizre (1992) and Lice (1993), in which Turkish army forces rampaged through those towns, shelling indiscriminately and shooting at anyone in the streets, left many dozens dead and depopulated entire areas. From 1992 on, the army began ‘evacuating’ villages in order to cut off the civilian support to the PKK, thereby burning 3,000 Kurdish villages and displacing over 3 million villagers.32 The violence not only took place in the Kurdish regions of Turkey, but also targeted Kurds all over the country. In the western parts of Turkey, government death squads

29 Z. Türkyılmaz, ‘Dersim soykırımı ve kötülüğ ün sıradanlığ ı’, Agos, 29 November 2019, www.agos.com.tr/tr/yazi/23286/dersim-soykirimi-ve-kotulugun-siradanligi; M. Gül (ed.), Bir Askerin Günlüğ ünden Dersim 1938 (Istanbul: Fam Yayınları, 2019). 30 For one collection of oral histories see Belleklerdeki Dersim ’38 (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı, 2011). 31 A. Marcus, Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence (New York: NYU Press, 2007). 32 Z. Biner, States of Dispossession: Violence and Precarious Coexistence in Southeast Turkey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

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kidnapped and assassinated specific categories of Kurds: journalists, businessmen, politicians and the like. The Iraqi Kurds’ history with Baghdad from 1933 on was complicated and difficult. The defining low point in that history was the Anfal campaign of 1986–9, during which Saddam Hussein’s regime killed between 100,000 and 180,000 Kurds in mass executions, chemical attacks, forced disappearances, mass torture and demographic and cultural Arabisation. Anfal was a massive breach of both global norms and Kurdish–Arab amity, and a unique episode in Kurdish history as such. It traumatised very large sections of Iraqi Kurdish society, polarised intra-Kurdish relations and, decades later, its psychological, political and sociological impact is still visible in Kurdistan. The chemical bombing of Halabja, a small town on the Iranian border, became a global symbol of the victimisation of the Kurds.33 (See Figure 24.1.) But as much as it was a distinct genocide, Anfal is often compartmentalised by itself as an event distinct from its broader historical context. Instead, it should be seen as the culmination of a broader, highly coercive Arabisation policy that the Baathist

Fig. 24.1 People visit graves of relatives who died in the Halabja chemical attack in Sulaymaniya, Iraq.

33 Hiltermann, A Poisonous Affair.

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regime had launched from 1975 on, destroying up to 4,000 villages in the process. That Arabisation policy did not target only Kurds, but also Assyrians, Yazidis, Chaldeans, Turkmens, Armenians and others, and mass murder was also extended to the Fayli Kurds, who due to their Shi’ite religion were labelled ‘Iranians’ and deported, arrested and executed in large numbers.34 From 1980 on, the persecution of the Kurds escalated along with the Iran–Iraq war, especially when in March 1987 Saddam appointed his cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid secretary-general of the Baath Party’s Northern Bureau. Al-Majid’s task was to put an end to any potential threats coming from an Iranian-supported Kurdish military insurgency. On 20 June 1987, he issued the following order to the First, Second, and Fifth Corps Command: All the villages in which the saboteurs – the agents of Iran [i.e. the PUK], the offspring of treason [i.e. the KDP], and similar traitors to Iraq – are still to be found, shall be regarded as prohibited for security reasons. The presence of human beings and animals is completely prohibited in these areas, and [these] shall be regarded as operational zones in which [the troops] can open fire at will, without any restrictions, unless otherwise instructed by our headquarters. The Corps Commands shall carry out random bombardments using artillery, helicopters and aircraft at all times of the day or night in order to kill the largest number of persons present in those prohibited areas, keeping us informed of the results. All persons captured in those villages shall be detained because of their presence there, and they shall be interrogated by the security services and those between the ages of 15 and 70 must be executed after any useful information has been obtained from them; keep us informed.35

The directive was followed immediately by mass violence: in the eight phases of Anfal, from February to September 1988, the army, intelligence agencies and Baathist militias systematically bombed civilian areas with mustard gas and sarin, and organised mass executions in extermination camps. Terrified villagers who tried to flee were strafed and bombed by military airplanes. Jawahir Hassan Ahmad was a young mother from the village of Haladin when she fled the Iraqi army’s onslaught, but even across the border with Iran they were not safe, as she recalls in an oral history interview: ‘At around nine the next morning, Iraqi planes came and bombed the tents. We didn’t know what chemical weapons were. We hadn’t seen them before. Soon we realised, we couldn’t breathe. For the first 20 days we were blind. My eyes 34 A. Soheil, The Iraqi Ba’th Regime’s Atrocities against the Faylee Kurds: Nation-State Formation Distorted (Stockholm: BoD, 2019). 35 Ihsan, Nation Building in Kurdistan, p. 157.

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were affected by the chemicals. I was blind. All our bodies were burnt.’36 The regime exterminated, in a co-ordinated fashion, all Kurdish men of military age it captured, and then discussed the progress of the genocide in secret meetings. Much like all high-level meetings of the Baath Party, the Northern Bureau’s meetings were also audiotaped. One tape from 1987, kept in the NIDS, has Al-Majid explaining his motives to his henchmen: ‘I went to Suleimaniyeh and hit them with the special ammunition. That was my answer. We continued the deportations . . . I will kill them all with chemical weapons! Who is going to say anything? The international community? Fuck them!’37 Anfal destroyed Kurdish society by causing two bloody internecine conflicts: Kurdish revenge acts against those Kurds who collaborated with the Baathist regime (the so-called ‘Jash’), and the ‘fratricidal war’ (s¸erê birakujî) of 1994–6, which left over 10,000 dead in fighting between the PUK and the PDK. After the fall of Saddam in 2003, new conflicts erupted over the spoils of peace, as political and economic fiefdoms emerged among the two parties and the tribes.38 The period after 2003 might have been less violent, but the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) ended the relative calm in Kurdistan. On Friday, 1 August 2014, the Islamic State launched a major military offensive in northern Iraq. Within ten days, the extremist movement had conquered a vast new territory, including Sinjar and Qaraqosh, where mostly Yazidis and Christians, respectively, lived. Those who could not flee fell into the hands of the radical Islamists, who began to persecute especially the Yazidis: the men were executed and the women were sold as sex slaves. For example, in the village of Kocho, all men, including the Yazidi sheikh, were driven together in the village school. An ISIS militant then loudly proclaimed that they should convert to Islam. The sheikh refused, whereupon their money, cell phones, and valuables were taken and the men, packed in pick-up trucks, were taken to the desert. There they were executed in groups of forty alongside ditches. The Yazidi women also fared badly: through a distorted exegesis of the Quran, ISIS stated that it was legitimate to marry Yazidi women against their will and sell them as ‘slaves’ (sabaya) in a campaign of 36 Interview with Jawahir Hassan Ahmad, https://kurdistanmemoryprogramme.com/s tory-of-anfal/. 37 Human Rights Watch, Genocide in Iraq: The Anfal Campaign against the Kurds (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1993), p. 349. 38 A. Rafaat, Kurdistan in Iraq: The Evolution of a Quasi-state (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 167–81.

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mass rape.39 The Yazidi genocide was a systematic, pre-planned campaign that was justified publicly and ideologically, and focused on group identity: all Yazidis, regardless of their behaviour or political preferences, were targets and potential victims. (See Sareta Ashraph’s chapter in this volume.) What these disparate campaigns of mass violence against Kurdish civilians had in common was that they were genocidal counter-insurgencies conducted either under the cloak of an inter-state war (Iraq), or an intra-state war (Turkey). Furthermore, almost all violence against Kurds was part of a broader Arab-nationalist or Turkish-nationalist policy of demographic engineering and cultural genocide. These twin policies developed autonomously from the ebb and flow of warfare and were designed to eliminate Kurdish cultural and demographic existence in Kurdistan, and replace it with Turkish and Arab domination. Cultural genocide is the destruction of the culture of a people as opposed to the people themselves, including interfering with the transmission of existing culture to future generations of the group (forced assimilation), destroying the group’s cultural symbols and heritage such as libraries and religious sites, and erasing the group’s existence from the historical record.40 Turkification in Turkey and Arabisation in Syria and Iraq focused on cultural and educational policies, and were also employed in prisons.41 For example, the Turkish Republic prohibited the use of Kurdish language and culture, first in official and public instances, and after 1980 in private practice as well. After the 1938 Dersim massacre, the Kemalist regime launched a policy of taking Dersim girls into boarding schools, where they were supposed to be transformed from ‘primitive Kurds’ to ‘civilized Turks’.42 In Syria, Hafez alAssad’s Baathist regime launched a policy in 1973 of Arabising a border strip of northern Syria (350 km wide and 10–15 km deep), by dispossessing Kurds of their land and redistributing it to 4,000 Arab families from other provinces. This ‘Arab Belt’ (‫ )ﺍﻟﺤﺰﺍﻡ ﺍﻟﻌﺮﺑﻲ‬demographically Arabised 335 Kurdish villages and affected over 150,000 Kurds, who became non-citizens.43 Saddam Hussein embarked on a similar policy of Arabisation (‫ )ﺗﻌﺮﻳﺐ‬from 1975 on. His regime 39 F. Moradi and K. Anderson, ‘The Islamic State’s Êzîdî genocide in Iraq: the Sinja¯r operations’, Genocide Studies International 10:2 (2016), 121–38. 40 U. Ü. Üngör, ‘Cultural genocide: destruction of material and immaterial human culture’, in The Routledge History of Genocide, ed. C. Carmichael and R. Maguire (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 241–53. 41 A. Hassanpour, T. Skutnabb-Kangas and M. Chyet, ‘The non-education of Kurds: a Kurdish perspective’, International Review of Education 42:4 (1996), 367–79. 42 S. Yes¸il, ‘Unfolding republican patriarchy: the case of young Kurdish women at the girls’ vocational boarding school in Elazığ ’ (MA thesis, Middle East Technical University, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, 2003). 43 J. Tejel, Syria’s Kurds: History, Politics and Society (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 61–5.

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expelled over 250,000 Kurds and non-Arabs across northern Iraq, invalidated their land titles and settled landless Arabs from the west and south to farm those lands. The multi-ethnic city of Kirkuk suffered comprehensive ‘ethnic cleansing’, as Turkmens and Kurds were expelled en masse, and Arabs settled in the city.44 Even if it was less deadly than the mass violence of the peak genocidal moments, Turkish-nationalist and Arab-nationalist demographic engineering were informed by the genocidal notion that the Kurds should not exist as a group.

Conclusion: Deep Impacts All in all, what Syria, Iraq and Turkey had in common was that they were/are Arab and Turkish nation-states that imposed homogeneity on their societies by excluding Kurds. The impact of this violence was existential for the Kurds. In the popular imagination and media representation, their victimisation became an intrinsic element of Kurdish identity. Without a Kurdish census, however, we do not even know the total number of Kurds who once lived, or those who died (or even currently live) in the region. Similarly, we do not have reliable figures on the death counts: the toll in the Dersim genocide has been estimated at anywhere between 12,000 and 40,000; the Anfal between 100,000 and 182,000. Kurdish, Turkish and Arab politicians politicise the existence of mass graves and the documents in state archives. There is some work on the graves and archives in the Iraqi context but this has not yielded definitive numbers either.45 Significant research has been conducted on the psychological, societal and cultural trauma that the genocides have inflicted on Kurdish society. Turkification and Arabization sowed the seeds of violent contestation by facilitating the rise of Kurdish-nationalist political parties (like the PKK, PUK and KDP), as well as intercommunal conflict in the ethnic borderlands. The Kurdish response to victimisation was along the spectrum of fright, flight and fight, but once in power, the Kurdish authorities engaged in their own policies of ‘Kurdification’, both in post-2003 Iraqi Kurdistan, and in the Syrian Kurdistan (‘Rojava’), by expelling the offspring of Arab settlers and forcing them to return to their regions of origin.46 44 A. Bet-Shlimon, City of Black Gold: Oil, Ethnicity, and the Making of Modern Kirkuk (Stanford University Press, 2019), pp. 165–88. 45 Hiltermann, A Poisonous Affair, pp. 134–5. 46 R. Gutman, ‘Have the Syrian Kurds committed war crimes?’, The Nation, 7 February 2017, www.thenation.com/article/archive/have-the-syrian-kurds-committed-warcrimes/.

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The memory of the genocides remains elusive and contested. In the aftermath of the violence, during periods when it was politically possible (such as in Iraq after 2003 or Syria after 2011), victim communities and survivors demanded public attention, justice, truth and reparations. Advocacy groups include the Halabja Victims Society, which pursues accountability and has gained a primus inter pares position in post-2003 Iraqi Kurdistan.47 Those Kurds who had not been targeted, remained passive, or had collaborated with the perpetrators, hastened to be on the right side of history, but were shunned, persecuted or worse. There were few Turkish or Arab heroes to celebrate, as state officials who had resisted or protested had also been silenced or imprisoned by the Kemalists and Baathists. By the time the violence had reached genocidal dimensions, those bureaucracies had long been cleansed of (potential) dissidents, and filled with loyalists. In Iraq, there was some rough justice against Baathists such as Ali Hassan al-Majid, who received five death sentences for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. His execution order was signed by two of his former victims, the Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani and the Shi’ite politician Nouri al-Maliki; AlMajid was hanged on 25 January 2010.48 As much as turning points like 2003 in Iraq or 2011 in Syria constituted historical breaks, there were also continuities, such as the long-term disempowerment of Kurds, and transgenerational issues of trauma. The massacres, deportations, torture, expulsion and demographic engineering were different forms of violence that occurred during two separate periods: Kemalism in Turkey (especially 1925–38) and Baathism in Iraq (especially 1975–89). What these two distinct genocidal processes had in common is how they fit the 1948 UN Genocide Convention’s legal definition of genocide, as well as how they suggest revisions to contemporary definitions of genocide. The convention’s focus on killing members of a group, inflicting murderous conditions of life and transferring children seems to fit the cases well. Kurds were executed, bombed and tortured for being Kurds; deported and expelled from their homelands; and Kurdish children were taken into Turkish boarding schools. Beyond the Convention, more complex sociological definitions that focus on group-specific violence offer useful insights into the two genocides. Half a century ago, the Dutch lawyer Pieter Drost aptly defined genocide as ‘the deliberate destruction of physical life of individual human beings by reason of their membership of any human 47 www.halabjavictimssociety.org/. 48 M. Kelly, ‘The Anfal trial against Saddam Hussein’, Journal of Genocide Research 9:2 (2007), 235–42.

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collectivity as such’.49 The membership question is central to genocide: the notion that the members of the victim group are killed only for their membership has received much scrutiny and criticism in the past decade, as it deprives the victims of political agency. They may also be targeted for genocide because they resist domination. The Baathist and Kemalist genocides were initially conceived as counter-insurgencies against Kurdish resistance, counter-insurgencies that became genocidal in the process. Newer definitions of genocide take the political identities of the victim group into account, without downplaying the genocidal violence against the victim group’s civilians.50 In addition, definitions of genocide that include the victim group’s culture as a potential target of destruction apply well to the fate of the Kurds. Lemkin’s focus on cultural genocide and concept of ‘denationalisation’ applies particularly well here, especially in that genocide seeks the ‘disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion’.51 The boarding schools, forced population transfer and displacement can be compared to the fate of indigenous peoples the world over, and no discussion of demographic engineering can be complete without a discussion of Baathist and Kemalist interventions in Kurdistan. The twentieth century thus was not only the age in which Kurds were victimised, but also in which their victimisation contributed to the history of genocide.

Bibliographical Note on Secondary Sources in English The body of English-language secondary sources on the Kurdish genocides can be roughly grouped into three categories: activist studies, empirical research on disparate genocidal episodes and more theoretically informed studies of the genocides. The activist streak of publications argues that the Kurds have been eternal victims and is a politically expedient discourse of nation building. By using the genocide card, advocates imply that Kurds as a group should enjoy moral immunity, which in turn is perceived as an argument for statehood. This body of activist research has aimed to cement the narrative of Kurdish history 49 P. Drost, The Crime of State, vol. I I: Genocide (Leiden: A. W. Sythoff, 1959), p. 125. 50 For a collection of new definitions, see A. Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 23–7. 51 R. Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), p. 79.

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as a linear and unidirectional account of victimisation. Three such examples suffice to provide an idea of the content and nature of this advocacy genre. Tataii argues that modern Kurdish history shows that the Kurds have suffered continued human sufferings and genocides that killed around 3.5 million civilians. Khalil’s book on the Anfal campaign (1986–9) explains the case of genocide through a mix of deterministic assumptions of Arab aggression against subjugated Kurds. And Koivunen postulates that genocide against the Kurds is an ongoing process that started in 1839, when the Kurdish emirates were dismantled, and has been the major factor impeding Kurdish statehood. Purely empirical research on disparate genocides ranges from human rights NGO reports such as the 1993 Human Rights Watch report, which has offered unique details, to more analytical studies such as those of Hiltermann or Kelly, who not only provide empirical descriptions but also attempt to make sense of the logic of the Anfal genocide by looking for explanatory frameworks. Academic work on Kurdish genocide began in the 1990s, when, for instance, van Bruinessen examined how official state documents and oral histories together paint the fullest picture of the genocides, both in Turkey and in Iraq.52 Leezenberg wrote on the Anfal’s organisation and implementation, noted interpretations in the emerging scholarship and included some eyewitness testimonies.53 Hardi’s work on the important topic of Anfal widows has exposed the long aftermath of Anfal, including trauma, unemployment, poverty and exploitation. Ihsan’s comprehensive study of Baathist genocide in Iraqi Kurdistan is based on rich documentary evidence from the Baathist archives, including those captured after 2003. The scholarship on Iraqi Kurdistan has benefited from access to the region, as well as to the Baathist state documents. Research on Kemalist genocides in Turkish Kurdistan suffers from a lack of access to the Turkish state archives (army, gendarmerie, presidency), and strangely, there are no up-to-date monographs on either the 1925 conflict and massacres (the ‘Sheikh Said uprising’), or the 1938 Dersim genocide. Olson’s monograph is still the stateof-the-art on the former, and despite many Turkish-language books on the latter, there is no English-language monograph on Dersim yet. A 2017 special 52 Martin van Bruinessen, ‘Genocide in Kurdistan? The suppression of the Dersim rebellion in Turkey (1937–38) and the chemical war against the Iraqi Kurds (1988)’, in Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions, ed. George J. Andreopoulos (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 141–70. 53 Michiel Leezenberg, ‘The Anfal operations in Iraqi Kurdistan’, in Centuries of Genocide: Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, ed. Samuel Totten and William Parsons (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 395–419.

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issue on Dersim 1938 of the Wiener Jahrbuch für Kurdische Studien takes a big step in the right direction, and Göner’s study of memory, identity, silence and transgenerational transmission of trauma in Dersim is also very helpful. A 2020 special issue of the journal Genocide Studies and Prevention, edited by von Joeden-Forgey and McGee, focuses entirely on genocide in Kurdistan, and a 2021 special issue of the journal Kurdish Studies edited by Üngör and Is¸ık looks into the relationships between various episodes of mass violence. The violence of the 1990s is covered well by Aras, whose monograph focuses on how violence became a part of experienced Kurdish identities. Günes¸ and Zeydanlıoğ lu’s edited volume covers a range of issues germane to mass violence, such as the politicide of Kurdish elites in Turkey.54 Forthcoming publications will look into the intents behind the massacres, paramilitary perpetrators and other topics in the evolving field of Kurdish genocides. 54 Cengiz Günes¸ and Welat Zeydanlıoğ lu (eds.), The Kurdish Question in Turkey: New Perspectives on Violence, Representation, and Reconciliation (London: Routledge, 2017).

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25

Vulnerable Peoples in the Contemporary Era An Overview mark levene*

The Condition of Vulnerability: Ubiquitous, Stochastic, Specific? Homo sapiens, and all other species inhabiting our planet, are by definition vulnerable to whatever nature throws at them. Sapienza-informed efforts to overthrow nature’s supremacy by harnessing its forces to human ends have simply upped the ante by producing conditions for the near or total obliteration of life on Earth. Since ‘Trinity’, the first detonation of a nuclear device, on 16 July 1945, and the subsequent development and escalation of such weapons of mass destruction, humanity has lived under a cloud of both suicidal and omnicidal foreclosure. Yet by a different, if closely related historical route, associated primarily with the burning of geologically sequestrated solar energy leading to global warming, the species has doubly confirmed its uniquely anthropogenic capacity to bring about not only its own demise but within the planetary record a sixth extinction of life-forms.1 Indeed, in 2020, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, largely on the basis of these two possibilities, moved its symbolic Doomsday Clock forward to just 100 seconds to midnight.2 If this cheery forecast would render further exploration of the subject academic – and hence futile – it does not exhaust grounds for a more focused consideration of our intra-species behaviour which might, in turn, especially if placed within the recent historical trajectory, throw light on * I would like to thank the Leverhulme Trust for a research fellowship, 2017–19 (‘Genocide, the cold war, and the origins of the contemporary disorder, 1948– 1989’) which enabled the writing of this chapter. 1 William J. Ripple, Christopher Wolf, Thomas M. Newsome et al., ‘World scientists’ warning to humanity: a second notice’, BioScience 67:12 (2017), 1026–8. 2 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, https://thebulletin.org/2020/01/press-release-it-is-now -100-seconds-to-midnight/#.

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a universal march to oblivion or, alternatively, its avoidance. Such a consideration might address whether vulnerability to extreme, mass violence is undifferentiated across humanity or whether some human groups have been more exposed to it than others. If so, it equally raises the question whether there is a hierarchy of vulnerability – and if so why – or, upending the question, whether there is a more marked proclivity on the part of some groups rather than others to become perpetrators. It would also pose questions about whether one can discern repeat patterns of such interactions across time and space. Where, however, is the best starting place to understand intra-human violence of the extreme kind, either in its own right, or as an indicator of the more general state of human and indeed planetary health? Here we consider two possible approaches. The first is based on Raphael Lemkin’s now widely accepted concept of genocide, a crime committed usually by a state, against specific ethnic, national, racial, religious or possibly cultural groups. This concept has been enshrined since 1948 in international law, ensuring that legally, the most heinous forms of attack on human life and well-being are those perpetrated against specific groups. Identify a deliberate, determined effort to destroy, in whole or in part, such a group and one has grounds for making a charge of genocide. But what if such violence is structurally embedded in a polity or society, without its target being culturally specific? Or if the perpetrator(s) fails to appreciate a victim group’s distinctiveness? Or, there again, in terms of an actual sequence of events, if the perpetrators inflict large-scale physical destruction upon a diverse range of groups, some of which may be targeted for their specific attributes, but also others where that case is unproven? In the second part of our discussion, we consider one such example which might suggest that, against the actual historical record, delimiting the concept of vulnerability to a specified rubric is problematic. We do not argue, however, that this of itself negates the genocide paradigm. Rather, in our final section we offer a brief evaluation of the alternative case study, contextually relating it across to broader issues of contemporary systemic dysfunction and thus returning us to the matter of humanity, tout ensemble in its twilight peril. But first a brief commentary on the standard paradigm. The UN Genocide Convention (UNGC) of 1948 offers not just a counterpoint but equally a caution against universal commitments enshrined within the almost exactly contemporary UN Declaration on Human Rights (UNDHR), not least the right to life. The UNGC, by contrast, signals an ongoing potentiality of 600

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danger to national, ethnic religious or racial groups.3 What the UNGC does, then, is implicitly challenge a basic premise of the UNDHR, namely that individual human rights under the guarantee and umbrella of the ratifying member states – normatively understood as nation-states – may be insufficient to protect such groups from lethal violence. The inference that the danger to such groups may come precisely from one or more of the very states who became signatories to both the UNDHR and the UNGC is not spelt out. Indeed, if it were, it would negate the aim of the national delegates who drafted UNGC ‘to advance and protect the interests of their governments and states’.4 So, we seem to have not just a paradox here but one founded on a sophistry. If the creators of the UNGC were willing to acknowledge vulnerability among what one might loosely call kinship-connected groups as arguably distinct from other elements of the population within any sovereign polity, their purpose was either rhetorical, or consciously intended to avoid, deflect or subvert the possibility of having to act to prevent or suppress acts of genocide committed by themselves or other UN-mandated nationstates. Or, to put it entirely more cynically, the drafters of the UNGC acknowledged an inconvenient truth about the modern world only insofar as they did not have to deal with its ongoing reality. Certainly, this stood in contradistinction to the intentions of Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish international lawyer who was both originator of the concept of genocide and the single-minded driving force behind the UNGC. Lemkin in the inter-war period had almost stumbled into recognition of one central reality about the emergence of the new phalanx of mostly east European nation-states as a consequence of the wartime collapse of multiethnic empires: namely, that these states’ striving for societal and cultural homogeneity threatened the very existence of diverse ethno-religious communities within them. A minorities system had been formulated to safeguard the cultural rights of such ‘minorities’ – as they were now pigeonholed – at the 1919 Paris peace conference. But in entirely unsuccessfully enunciating the urgency of a universal juridical framework to outlaw existential assaults on such groups, Lemkin was simply highlighting the then general indifference not only on the part of the nationalising ‘New Europe’ states themselves 3 Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (New York: United Nations, Treaty series, 1951). 4 Douglas Irvin-Erickson, ‘Foreword’, in Anton Weiss-Wendt, A Rhetorical Crime: Genocide in the Geopolitical Discourse of the Cold War (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2018), p. ix.

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but that of the wider international community to their fate. After World War Two, when the opportunity arose for the new United Nations to review the situation, the minorities system was unceremoniously dumped.5 This must further provoke the question why Lemkin, soon after, apparently got his way. The simple answer is, he did not. To arrive at its final formulation, the UNGC went through a succession of draftings in committee stage in which career diplomats ensured that it was suitably emasculated of anything which might require sovereign states to do anything meaningful to prevent or punish violations. Lemkin himself, always a rank outsider, was largely side-lined.6 One might argue thus that Lemkin’s sole value to the postwar international order was that he created a formulation which offered states a way of paying lip-service to a humanitarian impulse and more precisely as an essentially retrospective demonstration to a general public of the moral distinction between themselves and the Nazis. Even here we are confronted with a further paradox. At the heart of Nazi atrocities was Jewish mass murder. Yet the Nuremberg war-trial protagonists, as also the founders of the UNGC, were highly ambivalent about promoting the Jews’ particular fate, which was entirely in line with a more general effort to reintegrate survivors as rapidly as possible into the states of which they were ostensibly citizens. And when that palpably failed for large swathes of this ubiquitous cultural group par excellence, the UN default position was to support the creation of a Jewish nation-state in British Mandate Palestine, one consequence of which was the violent displacement of much of its Arab population. Significantly, Lemkin, notwithstanding the loss of almost his entire family in the Holocaust, had not raised the issue of vulnerability, Jewish or otherwise, simply in order to promote the creation of more exclusive national polities, but rather to protect within national boundaries other non-dominant nationalities or cultural communities who, to quote one later genocide scholar, fell outside their ‘universe of obligation’.7 By another route, the German-Jewish émigré philosopher, Hannah Arendt, exposed the same lacuna. To have human rights, as clearly enunciated in the UNDHR, assumed belonging by way of citizenship to a state. ‘The right to have rights’, in other words, excluded any group or person who had been 5 Mark Mazower, ‘The strange triumph of human rights, 1933–1950’, The Historical Journal 47:2 (2004), 389–90. 6 John Cooper, Raphael Lemkin and the Struggle for the Genocide Convention (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 7 Helen Fein, Accounting for Genocide: National Response and Jewish Vicitimisation during the Holocaust (New York: Free Press, 1978), p. 4.

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forfeited such normative status, with the logic of that position being a nonpassport into a legal and political void.8 Further UN conventions in the 1950s may have sought to address the problem of statelessness, yet the fundamental anomaly has remained: rights to life and rights to welfare in the modern world are congruent with the possession of nationality. In October 1938 Polish Jews resident in Germany, their citizenship revoked by both states, were infamously dumped by the Nazis at Zbaszyn on the German–Polish border, into a no man’s land of ‘nothingness’.9 To be stateless within the world today, is to be like these people: without rights, without security, without sustenance and, barring miracles, without hope. Lemkin implicitly, and, arguably even more so, Arendt explicitly, were thus prescient in their critiques of how the standard operating procedure of most modern polities is Janus-faced: each and every one touting adherence to universal human rights while often marginalising, discriminating against, or, in worst cases, actively and violently suppressing communities who fail to satisfy, or are perceived as a threat to, the national sacro egoismo. Arguably, it is the most authoritarian or totalitarian states who are most likely to take matters to extremes. But consider the grey areas in three well-reported contemporaneous cases: Yezidis, Rohingyas and Uighurs. Beginning in 2014, the Islamic State (ISIL) assault on the endogamous, ethno-religiously distinct yet richly syncretist Yezidi community in northern Iraq – and later Syria – involved repeated massacres, mass rape and sexual enslavement and/or forced conversion of Yezidi women and children, plus the trashing of Yezidi sacred places. International condemnation swiftly followed, including UN and US charges of genocide, which dovetailed with the almost universal horror of the rogue ISIL proto-state and its radical Salafist-informed terror committed against unbelievers. Yet extreme violence against the Yezidis did not begin with ISIL but can be traced back through some two centuries of violent persecution, most notably in an Islamic drive by the late Ottomans, and then in an Arabisation programme initiated by Saddam in Iraq.10 The vomiting out from Buddhist Myanmar of some three quarters of a million Muslim Rohingya into neighbouring Bangladesh, beginning in its 8 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Books, 1994 [1951]), pp. 278–302. 9 Katharina Krabbe, ‘Polenaktion’ 1938: Die erste Ausweiseaktion der nationalsozialistischen Regierung an polnischen Juden (Norderstedt: GRIN Verlag, 2009). 10 See Majid Hassan Ali, ‘Genocidal campaigns during the Ottoman era: the firman of Mir-i-Kura against the Yezidi religious minority in 1832–1834’, Genocide Studies International 13:1 (2019), 77–91.

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most recent phase in 2015 and rising to a crescendo two years later, again has carried with it some notable ambivalence from the world community. There has been palpable shock at the silence, followed by the International Court of Justice’s obfuscation of the degree of culpability of of the country’s leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, who previously had been lionised as symbol of democratic change in an otherwise draconian, military-run and highly secretive regime. Yet equally palpable has been the abject failure of countries from that same international community to offer refuge to one of the most long-standing persecuted, marginalised and impoverished of the world’s minorities.11 The ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya was of an already stateless people. The programme of mass re-education camps in operation in Chinese Xinjiang since 2014 illustrates how an entire ethnic cohort can be effectively stripped of all rights even while ostensibly being guaranteed citizenship. Up to a reported 1.5 million people, mostly ethnic Muslim Uighurs, have been forcibly detained in these secret camps with quotidian brutality and torture, elements of an indoctrination programme which seeks to denationalise and coercively assimilate them into the Chinese mainstream. In Lemkin’s book this would be genocide. Historically speaking, today’s actions are a continuation of Beijing’s genocidal subjugation of its western borderlands dating back to the eighteenth century. Today, elsewhere in the world, there has been muted criticism of the People’s Republic of China, always tempered by the realpolitik that one dare not confront the world’s second largest and arguably most powerful economy.12 Simply put, this recent sample underscores that acute group vulnerability is symptomatic of subjection to particular types of mad, bad or sad regimes. Yet what if the prescript is entirely more universal? In 1948 the founders of the UNGC made a point of excluding political and social groups from its rubric, ensuring that seventeen years later one of the most sensational bloodlettings of modern times, the implicitly Western-backed elimination of communists, and others, throughout Indonesia was outside of the UNGC’s remit.13 But one could equally argue that the point-blank refusal to countenance the inclusion of ‘cultural groups’ in that same UNGC rubric was impelled by a universally held drafters’ conviction that concern for the well-being of 11 Eileen Pittaway, ‘The Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh: a failure of the international protection regime’, in Protracted Displacement in Asia: No Place to Call Home, ed. Howard Adelman (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 83–108. 12 Sean R. Roberts, The War on the Uighurs: China’s Internal Campaign against a Muslim Minority (Princeton University Press, 2020). 13 Geoffrey B. Robinson, The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres (Princeton University Press, 2018).

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supposedly ‘backward’ indigenous or subsistence societies could not be allowed to deprive any state of its sovereign rights to development and, thus, resource maximisation.14 In other words, a consensual First, Second or indeed Third World statist recognition of the notion of genocide, came at the expense of those most marginal, defenceless and by definition non-state, usually Fourth World peoples, as they faced relentless yet increasingly normative infrastructural projects to transform their habitats, their sources of economic and spiritual sustenance, through roads, dams, mines and the like or, more broadly, through an agro-industrial, cash-crop imposition of the global market. Viewing the post-war decades, we can certainly find examples where coherent Fourth World resistance to internal colonial encroachment engendered state-military counter-insurgency responses which have been – usually retrospectively – recognised as genocide. The violence which culminated in highland Guatemala in 1981–2, as well as the less known, almost simultaneous case in the Chittagong Hill District of Bangladesh, fall into this category, in part because collective ethnic tags, Maya in the former case, Jumma in the latter, could be applied to local, ethnographically and linguistically diverse communities, united in opposition to their despoliation and destruction.15 But much of the violence impacting on the most vulnerable communities at the bottom of the world’s socio-economic pile is structural, and hence largely invisible to outside view, regardless of, or in spite of, whether a group has a precise ethnic label; and regardless of whether terms such as genocide or ethnic cleansing are applicable. It is indeed symptomatic of an increasingly globalised, neo-liberal framed and driven world system, on the one hand, and the environmental breakdown consequent on it, on the other, which is literally pushing to the edge otherwise quiescent, non-combative, Fourth World nomads, forest dwellers, hunters, transhumant pastoralists, subsistence farmers and fisher people; in spite of all their ecological niche virtuosity and resilience. One obvious further contemporary example is the almost 2 million mostly subsistence, riverine peoples of Bengali origin in the Indian state of Assam, politically threatened with statelessness – not least as a consequence of the ruling BJP party’s 2019 anti-Muslim legislation – yet at

14 Cooper, Raphael Lemkin, pp. 158–9. 15 Roddy Brett, The Origins and Dynamics of Genocide: Political Violence in Guatemala (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Mark Levene, The Chittagong Hill tracts: a case study in the political economy of “creeping” genocide’, Third World Quarterly 20:2 (1999), 339–69.

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the same time utterly exposed to ever-more unpredictable and capricious flooding of the Brahmaputra River.16 This would seem to bring us back to the bigger picture of climate change, while at the same time casting a question mark over whether UN definitions founded on an ethnic formula realistically help the most unsung of vulnerable communities in today’s world. Yet even here something is left out of the equation – namely, the degree to which UN-mandated terminologies can be applied statically. Most state-community or intergroup conflicts happen in ‘real time’, unravelling through contingency as also through the evolving agency of the protagonists themselves. The Lemkin paradigm as implicitly dependent on a binary distinction between perpetrators and victims may thus fail to adequately address a whole raft of contemporary cases where vulnerability may not just be latent but diffused, as an entire spectrum of social aggregates, as well as definable ethnic groups, are sucked into violent struggle. We shall illustrate this alternative – or, arguably, parallel – paradigm through a case study of the post-World War Two conflict in Algeria.

Algeria: A Struggle for Liberation or the Fracturing of a Fragile Society? It is easy enough to offer a binary description of the struggle for Algeria. Between 1954 and 1962 the National Liberation Front (FLN) claiming to represent the native, largely dispossessed and/or uprooted yet demographically dominant Arab Muslim population of the country, led a violent struggle of liberation against a French colonial settler state. After a vast bloodletting, primarily of those on the indigenous side, the FLN triumphed. Understood thus, the Algerian war of independence has offered a powerful model for any number of Third World movements seeking to challenge the political, economic and cultural domination of primarily European imperialists, all the more so in the Algerian case, because the country, unlike other French colonies where liberation struggles took place, was technically part of metropolitan France. In turn, the rising scope, scale and brutality of French state efforts to extirpate the insurgency led Lemkin, for the first time since the ratification of the UNGC, to give his public support to a charge that France

16 Mitul Baruah, ‘(Un)natural disaster and the role of the state in the Brahmaputra Valley, Assam’ and Yasmin Saikia, ‘The Muslims of Assam: present/absent history’, both in Northeast India: A Place of Relations, ed. Yasmin Saikya and Amit R. Baishya (Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 68–90, 111–34.

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was committing genocide against the Algerian nation, as petitioned to the UN in 1957 by a group of Muslim and Arab states.17 Yet the neatness of one set of national perpetrators annihilating another set of national victims belies an entirely more complex, multifaceted bricolage of communities and hence vulnerabilities. In his famous broadcast to the French nation, in September 1959, a newly elevated President de Gaulle spoke of French, Arab, Kabyle and Mozabite as the constituent elements of Algeria.18 If he’d sought to develop that picture, he might have noted that the French had only been on the scene since their nineteenth-century genocidal conquest of the region, beginning in 1830. Even then this minority tenth of the total population, a little over 1 million of over 10 million inhabitants, included a large proportion of Spanish, Italian and Maltese settlers, most of them socioeconomically a million miles from the world of the wealthy, powerful (mostly) French grands colons. Then to complicate the picture even further this ‘French’ cohort, latterly known as pieds-noirs, included a significant and entirely more historically embedded Jewish element, aligned to the metropole by dint of the 1870 grant of French citizenship from which most Muslims were excluded, yet itself a community which, under Vichy, was stripped of its citizen rights, not to say vilified and persecuted by many Algerian French. If the Jewish example suggests that alignment in the ensuing decolonisation struggle might cut in different directions, the same was equally true of the majority Muslim population. De Gaulle’s three-part categorisation in his address actually elided the fact that many Algerians were culturally and economically fiercely local – often in the Kabylia, as in other parts of the Atlas, Berber-dialect speaking – as were other sub-Saharan communities, notably the Mozabites. Most of the population caught up in the violence were in the more highly populated Mediterranean littoral. But as we shall see, this did not mean that very different Tuareg and other nomad communities in the remote Sahara were immune to danger. But to be indigenous and Muslim did not make one automatically an FLN partisan. The FLN was initially a latecomer groupuscule in the liberation struggle, fiercely opposed to and intent on eliminating the more longstanding, socialist-orientated movements such as the MNA, associated with Messali Hadj, the acknowledged founder of Algerian nationalism. But then there were also large numbers of urban, particularly middle class, educated 17 Douglas Irvin-Erickson, ‘Genocide, the “family of mind” and the romantic signature of Raphael Lemkin’, Journal of Genocide Research 15:3 (2013), 280–1. 18 Quoted in Martin Evans, Algeria: France’s Undeclared War (Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 263.

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and bilingual Muslim évolués who sought an accommodation with France on the basis of a genuine equality and integration and who looked to another more moderate nationalist, Ferhat Abbas, to bolster the middle ground. The squandering of this direction of travel by the socialist Mollet administration, in 1956, nevertheless still saw a significant proportion of ordinary Muslim Algerians retreating under the French umbrella, to the extent that by the time of the ceasefire, in March 1962, an estimated 120,000 of their menfolk were serving as harkis – army auxiliaries – or in local village self-defence forces.19 A tiny fraction of this grouping was made up of tribes such as the Beni Boudouane whose loyalty was founded on a long-standing relationship between their chief, the Bachaga Said Boualam, and France.20 By contrast, most peasants who opted for French uniform did so with scant enthusiasm but instead out of sheer existential necessity, caught between the extreme threat of violence and land dispossession at the hands of the security forces, or the charge of treason and thus violent death at the hands of the FLN. This snapshot of the limited array of choices may already hint at who was vulnerable in the Algerian war – namely, by the end of it, everybody. To be sure, there were gradations, even hierarchies of victimhood in this bleak landscape. And delineating these gradations and hierarchies is important even while not losing sight of the fact that as the stakes ratcheted up, the existential dangers to all communities increased accordingly. Most obviously vulnerable and for the longest duration were not so much the urban Muslims, notwithstanding the iconic filmic portrayal in Battle of Algiers, but more those in the bled, the rural, largely mountainous hinterland where the French fought à outrance to annihilate the FLN.21 ‘Hearts and minds’ may have been part of the former’s counter-insurgency rationale but in the 2,696 days of undeclared war, plus considerably more on either side of that, the threat to those caught in the crossfire was unremitting. All methods of mass destruction short of nuclear and biological weapons were deployed: aerial bombardment, including attacks into neighbouring Tunisia; the use of napalm, electric fences and minefields; and the obliteration of whole villages on grounds of collective responsibility. Oradour, the village embedded in French collective memory as the 1944 site of the most egregious Nazi World War Two atrocity in France, was a repeat reference point in eyewitness accounts among the 2.7 million mostly unwilling French conscripts deployed in Algeria. Indeed, 19 Ibid., p. 325. 20 Claire Eldridge, From Empire to Exile: History and Memory within the Pieds-noir and Harki Communities, 1962–2012 (Manchester University Press, 2016), pp. 86–9. 21 Battle of Algiers, dir. Gillo Pontecorvo (1966).

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atrocities of all kinds – including torture, executions without trial and rape of both women and men – became standard operating procedure even as French military strategy evolved from blanket repression towards more targeted search and destroy missions.22 Nor were Algerian Muslims in danger only on the southern side of the Mediterranean. Police brutality in Paris, under the aegis of Maurice Pappon – whose previous Vichy career had included mass Jewish deportations to the death camps – culminated in a massacre in October 1961 of at least 200 apparently peaceful pro-FLN demonstrators, many bludgeoned to death in the courtyard of the police prefecture itself, or thrown into the Seine.23 All these acts of racist-informed violence actually stretching back before 1954 to the atrocity-laden state and settler militia extirpation of an earlier insurrectionary moment around Setif and Guelma in May 1945, however, only scratch at an explanation for the conflict’s massive death toll that Lemkin considered genocidal. A senior French official estimated in 1959 that within the regroupment centres – the provisional, highly unsanitary camps into which eventually over 2 million Algerians were forcibly relocated – the death toll among children, far and away the largest percentage of camp inhabitants, was equivalent to 400 a day, or 144,000 in the course of a year. That hunger, combined with tuberculosis and other diseases, was the primary cause is underscored by the grain confiscations in the so-called zones de regroupement. Inhabitants there subsisted on an annual ration of 80 kg of grain – a figure less than the Nazi World War Two quota for Soviet civilians.24 Stark as the comparison is, the French Algeria campaign bears similarity with Nazi 1942–4 Belarus operations. In both cases the objective was to clear a pro-partisan population from whole areas of the countryside designated as free-fire zones. To be caught there was literally a sentence of death. Certainly, the military technique of quadrillage, clearing an area on a gridlike basis which then became a zone interdite, was not novel in form or lethality when it became standard operating procedure from 1957. Almost forty years earlier, in neighbouring, Mussolini-controlled Libya, a very similar programme had led to the mass death of anything between 60,000 and 22 William, B. Cohen, ‘The sudden memory of torture: the Algerian war in French discourse, 2000–2001’, French Politics, Culture and Society 19:3(2001), 82–94. 23 Jim House and Neil MacMaster, Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror and Memory (Oxford University Press, 2006). 24 Quoted in Christian Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth Century World (Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 187–8.

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100,000 hill tribes people caught up in another anti-colonial uprising.25 The French agenda was equally disingenuous in its stated intention to ‘starve the rebel to death and bring progress to the village’.26 But even then something more underpins the manner in which the counter-insurgency was designed to strike mortally at both the heart and soul of Algerian peasant life. Emmanuel Kreike uses the term ‘environcide’ to describe military techniques aimed at obliterating the environmental assets and infrastructure of any society in order to make it vulnerable beyond the point of no return.27 This is precisely what the French undertook through a scorched earth programme which systematically emptied the zones interdites not only of humans but – as, for instance, in the 1958 ‘Jumelles’ operation – all their horses, mules and donkeys, not to say by the end of the war causing the destruction through napalm bombing of anything up to three-quarters of Algeria’s forests.28 If revisionist estimates of deaths in battle would reduce the postindependence FLN narrative of 1 or even 2 million martyrs to one-fifth of that number, the question remains as to the fate of those incarcerated in the camps. Even on the basis of 250,000 to 300,000 fatalities, Martin Evans proposes that this would be equivalent in a country of 9 to 10 million to the percentage of French losses in World War One.29 Yet Evans also notes the diverse nature of the violence as a consequence of what were a series of civil wars and wars within wars, each of which had lasting traumatic effect over and beyond the further thousands of fatalities. Pieds-noir violence was part of this equation, not least as it morphed into support for the overt terrorism of the Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS), the renegade military and fellow travellers who continued to resist de Gaulle’s referendum-backed acceptance of Algerian self-determination after the dissident generals’ failed putsch in April 1961. But neither OAS violence nor that of the covert special operations units at the cutting edge of French counterinsurgency were able to claim as many lives, both European and Muslim Algerian, as did the FLN. Indeed, what is striking about the FLN’s conscious escalation of the thawra, the revolution – even as, from a military perspective, it was nearly wiped out in the field – is that it was responsible for the deaths of many times more Muslim than French Algerians, at least some 6,300 of the 25 Giorgio Rochat, ‘La repressione della resistenza Arabe in Cirenaica nel 1930–31: Nei Documenti dell’Archivo Graziani’, Il Movimento di Liberazione in Italia 25:110 (1973), 3–39. 26 Quoted in Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies, p. 188. 27 Emmanuel Kreike, Scorched Earth: Environmental Warfare as a Crime against Humanity and Nature (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2022), pp. 4–10. 28 Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies, pp. 184, 186. 29 Evans, Algeria, pp. 335–8.

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former, compared with just over 1,000 of the latter, in the first two and half years of the war alone.30 Early on, in August 1955, FLN aims were spectacularly demonstrated when their fellagha were joined by peasants who descended on some thirty towns and villages in and around Philippeville in the west of the country armed with knives, clubs, sticks, axes and pitchforks. In a three-day period they proceeded to hack to death men, women and children, egged on by the district commander’s injunction that ‘fraternization between the Algerian and French population . . . must cease’.31 Most of the 123 victims were pieds-noirs. But not all. They included Muslims, some of whom were killed for their outspoken defiance of the FLN. What is telling is that the Philippeville massacres achieved all that this local FLN initiative had consciously sought. It produced mass retribution, including, very much in line with Setif ten years earlier, lynchings, pogroms and a final, again, spectacular massacre carried out by pieds-noir vigilantes in the town’s football stadium, without any interference (or later prosecution) from the French authorities. The effect was to destroy any lingering hope of intercommunal reconciliation and to drive vast swathes of ordinary, fearful Muslims into FLN ranks: in short turning its aspiration for a people’s war into a reality. Yet this also entailed the violent elimination of dissenting or rival voices, most obviously Messali’s pro-independence, maquisard grouping, the MNA. Just as the French campaign was to eliminate the thawra through holding entire villages and regions collectively responsible for it, so the FLN’s way of dealing with recalcitrant districts was to send in their fellagha to literally cut the throats of hundreds of their inhabitants. Largely unknown to the outside world, there was an awesome massacre of this kind at Ihadjadjen, in the remote lower Soummam region of Kabylia, in April 1956. But when something very similar was enacted in the village of Beni Ilmane, in the relatively more accessible Melouza region the following spring, the French on discovering the massacre site were quick to internationally broadcast all the gruesome details as evidence of FLN pathology.32 Central to our discussion is not the detailed performance of atrocity, as committed by all sides, but the instrumental value of terror to each of the protagonists and, thus, its impact on whole groups. The FLN, in seeking a monopoly of violence among Muslims, equally sought a monopoly on the 30 Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria, 1954–1962 (London and Basingstoke: Papermac, 1987 [1977]), p. 135. 31 Quoted in Jeffrey James Byrne, Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonisation and the Third World Order (Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 38. 32 Evans, Algeria, pp. 173, 181, 216–17.

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future direction of a post-independence Algeria. That made anybody associated with the MNA vulnerable, thousands being targeted and killed both in Algeria as in France.33 But it also ensured that anybody within the FLN itself suspected of doubting its increasingly ideologicised official line was also in mortal danger. This is not to suppose that the movement was monolithic through and through; rather that as its cadres in the field – ‘the interior’ – were decimated by the French counter-insurgency, power became entirely more centralised in the hands of its ‘exterior’ Morocco-based secret police; the so-called ‘Boussouff’s boys’ named after the right-hand man of Houari Boumédiène, one rising contender for the FLN crown.34 Later, in what would be a naked struggle for ascendancy, Boumédiène would achieve that goal. But before that, as French power in Algeria crumbled in the wake of the March 1962 Évian Peace Agreement, the world looked on as the FLN fought its own bloody fratricidal struggle to the heart of Algiers. Again, this begs the question as to the fate of all the other ethnic and social elements in a previously plural, if vastly unequal, Algeria. The Élysée rationale for its ruthless ‘pacification’ programme had been that the country was indissolubly a part of France. With that premise radically undercut not by military failure per se but rather the swell of domestic unrest and international isolation, both magnified by outrage primarily at French atrocities, the Élysée’s shift towards reluctant acceptance of an independent and sovereign Arab Algeria necessarily exposed to vulnerability all those whose wellbeing and security was founded on the perceived continuation of a pax gallica. For the pieds-noirs disquiet that they might find themselves as citizens on an equal footing with Muslims as a consequence of Mollet’s 1956 reform package was entirely overridden by existential fear of, and insurrectionary resistance to, the spectre of a metropolitan sell-out by de Gaulle. The direct threat of FLN attacks and the general lack of safety had led to an accelerating pieds-noir flight from the bled to European-dominated towns during the course of the conflict. On paper, Évian offered the prospect of a continuing pieds-noir future in Algeria by way of guarantees as to personal and property rights plus the choice between French or Algerian citizenship, something not available to Muslims. In practice, even before the peace accords, hundreds of thousands of pieds-noirs had heeded the stark choice between ‘the suitcase and the coffin’ by fleeing to France. After a further French referendum on Évian, however, the stream became a flood. A defining moment occurred in the coastal, 33 Ibid., p. 277. 34 Mohammed Harbi, ‘Le systéme Boussouff’ dans le drame algérien: un peuple en otage (Paris: La Decouverte, 1995).

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predominantly European city of Oran, until almost the bitter end an OAS stronghold. In these final weeks OAS enacted a series of murderous bombings aimed at denying the FLN control of key facilities. On the morning of 5 July 1962, Algeria’s independence day, a retaliatory mob broke into the European quartier and for several hours ran amok killing scores, perhaps hundreds of pieds-noirs, regardless of age or sex. Crucially, the French army was on hand but did not intervene. Nor did the Algerian police.35 In a climate of fear punctuated by random murder, by the autumn of 1962 nearly a million pieds-noirs had ‘voluntarily’ left Algeria for France: a mass flight almost comparable in scale with the ethnic Greek exodus from an embryonic Turkey forty years earlier. As in that more obviously genocidal event, and in so many other bloody transitions from colonial or imperial to post-colonial modernity, the macro picture of political, economic and social caesura included the loss almost overnight of whole swathes of technical, professional and administrative expertise much needed by a desperately challenged new state. But on the micro-level, the one of human feelings, over and beyond that of straightforward physical survival, the collective pieds-noir experience was one of infinite personal loss. With just two allotted suitcases, and everything else left behind, for many among the generations of Europeans whose home had been Algérie française, a sense of alienation, victimhood, betrayal and with it huge ressentiment remained embedded in their personal and collective psyche.36 Yet if this clearly speaks to a condition of vulnerability and grievance there is still a question of degree. Compared with the fate of other groups the situation of most pieds-noirs was relatively fortunate. Not only on arrival in France were they out of harm’s way but defined as repatriés, ‘returning citizens’: not only had they rights to be treated as ‘normal’ human beings with the same welfare provisions as others but even, eventually, to compensation.37 One might argue that the vast majority of Jews who left for France were literally in the same boat and hence the same category. Yet in reality their tragedy was very different. Without being party to the original colonial conquest they were channelled towards an increasingly francophone and republican identification by metropolitan co-religionists. As such, they represented the possibility of a cultural bridge between the traditional Algerian way of life of which, especially around the city of Constantine, they remained firmly part, and a European modernity founded on a genuine 35 Horne, Savage War, pp. 532–4. 37 Ibid., pp. 48–53.

36 Eldridge, From Empire, Ch. 1, ‘Creating a community’.

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political and social equality embracing all communities. This, arguably, is what made a Jewish neutralist tendency in the course of the conflict an anathema to the antisemitic ultras on both sides. Zionism also certainly fuelled latent religious anti-Jewish antagonisms here as elsewhere in the Muslim world, reflected as early as 1934 in a major, bloody pogrom in Constantine. By 1961, FLN efforts to court Jewish and other Europeans ‘with the vision of an equitable, multicultural future’ were running up against a reality of targeted bombings of synagogues, the assassination of Cheik Raymond, a leading Jewish cultural intermediary, and a jihadi-fuelled hate literature churned out by regional commanders. As the situation reached breaking point and options for remaining disintegrated, some young Oran Jews were desperate enough to make common cause with the hardly less than fascistic OAS.38 Even so, most Jews were able to flee in relatively good order. Most Muslims who had thrown in their lot with the French had little such luck. Évolué intellectuals had been a particular OAS target but equally in a climate of FLN-led retributive fury the only safe place for them on the cusp of independence was on the side of the victors. But for harkis who had fought and certainly, for many, been party to French atrocities, the opportunity for dissembling was much more difficult. Some did so by joining the so-called Marsiens, the Algerians who jumped on to the FLN bandwagon at the time of the March 1962 ceasefire. Denouncing others became a potential strategy for survival just as for any Algerian claiming mujahidin credentials became an opportunistic green light to ransack abandoned pieds-noir homes and properties. Yet untold thousands of now disarmed harkis and their families were also the primary butt of popular wrath, usually quite consciously egged on by FLN activists. How many were killed in what amounted to an open season in the spring and high summer months of 1962, is disputed. Some put the figure as high as 150,000, most commentators have estimated the range at 60,000 to 75,000. What is clear is that in village after village across the length and breadth of Algeria the most horrific bloodletting occurred, usually followed by the public display of dismembered corpses.39 But if the harkis were ‘enemies of the people’ at home they were equally the great unwanted in France. De Gaulle unequivocally set his face against their refuge there despite the fact that from 1958 they were technically citizens with the same rights and duties as other Frenchmen/women. 38 Byrne, Mecca of Revolution, pp. 24–6, 46. See also Evans, Algeria, pp. 307, 322–5. 39 Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies, p. 219; Eldridge, From Empire, p. 25.

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But for a small number, including dependents, admitted under an official repatriation scheme, the majority of those who fled to France did so clandestinely, helped by supportive army officers acting in defiance of orders. Again, numbers vary on how many succeeded; anywhere between 100,000 and up to 270,000 over several years.40 Whatever the exact figure, almost none of these incomers were offered welcome or the social support on offer to repatriés to rebuild their lives from the scrapheap. On the contrary, the whole thrust of state policy was to keep them physically and psychologically as far away from mainstream French life as conceivable, not least for fear of having to confront, instead of bury, ugly truths about a rotten war. Hidden away at first in remote, insanitary detention camps and barracks – Vichy’s Rivesaltes was a notorious example – and thus simply regurgitating the hideous conditions which France’s security apparatus had imposed on Algerians by way of the zones de regroupement, except this time on people who were meant to be its loyal supporters, purgatory continued for years as they were then often thrust as labourers into remote forest settlements. From these camps, under police (sometimes piedsnoir) surveillance and control, they were denied egress and – unlike the often confrontational pieds-noirs – they retreated into silence, not least for fear of punishment or, worse, deportation back to Algeria.41 But if these former harki families were clearly considered by most French as unworthy of integration, outside the universe of obligation, and hence justly at the bottom of the socioeconomic pile, the same was the case for those who were stranded, or simply had kept their heads down, in Algeria. In June 1963, the country’s first president, Ahmed Ben Bella, called for their pardon, ending the sequence of overt violence. Yet, until recently, the stigma of collaboration and treason has stuck. In Algeria, as in France, to be labelled harki is to suffer social segregation, discrimination and, with it, misery.42

Rethinking Contemporary Vulnerability by Way of the Algerian Experience In a series of analyses beginning in 1988, political scientists Barbara Harff and Ted Robert Gurr formulated a global register of massive state repression from the end of World War Two until what was effectively the end of the cold war. Their terminology included both genocide and ‘politicide’, 40 Eldridge, From Empire, p. 26; Evans, Algeria, p. 328. 41 Eldridge, From Empire, Ch. 2, ‘The sounds of silence’. 42 Pierre Daum, Le dernier tabou: les ‘harkis’ restés en Algérie après l’indépendance (Arles: Actes Sud, 2015).

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and for the period in question, they presented data for incidences equivalent to one a year.43 With the exception of a significant handful of cases in the USSR, encompassed in part by shifting the time frame back to 1943 – all the episodes they listed occurred in the post-colonial Third World. Included among the ‘politicides’ was Algeria, though only for a six-month period from July 1962, after independence from France, with the 12,000–60,000 victims cited as harkis, here described as French-Muslim troops, and OAS supporters. One could take issue with this categorisation given that the number of OAS supporters killed was in no sense comparable with that of harkis, while the latter, though political victims, were not a political group. Further, even putting aside the possible underestimate of harki deaths, the absence of the death toll from the wider Algerian conflict, despite its enormity and the fact that this would technically embrace France, a First World country, might infer an egregious selectivity in our authors’ compilation. The survey deficit highlights the difficulty in trying to embrace all manner of mass violence under a Lemkinian or similar rubric. If we consider the postcold-war era, only a handful of cases – Rwanda, Bosnia, arguably Darfur, most recently the Yezidi and Rohingya atrocities – have become widely recognised as genocide. The broader, ongoing conflicts in Syria and Myanmar are rarely so described. Nor those in Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, South Sudan or even the Democratic Republic of Congo where, from 1996, state and societal collapse in large parts of the country, especially in the east, was in critical part triggered by the Rwandan genocide, yet with overall conflict-related fatalities far in excess of Rwanda itself and arguably the highest death toll since World War Two.44 And this roll-call only scratches the surface. Can then a global picture of mass violence-related vulnerability be statistically expressed? Only perhaps by citing not merely estimated fatalities but also the numbers of people forcibly displaced as a consequence. And here current figures are truly staggering. For the year ending 2018, UNHCR reported nearly 70.8 million displaced persons worldwide, a spike from 43.3 million in 2009 and the highest figure since the organisation’s inception in 1950. Not only did this figure include nearly 43 Barbara Harff and Ted Robert Gurr, ‘Toward empirical theory of genocides and politicides: identification and measurement of cases since 1945’, International Studies Quarterly 32 (1988), 359–71. 44 International Rescue Committee, ‘Mortality in the Democratic Republic of Congo: an ongoing crisis’, 22 January 2008, https://reliefweb.int/report/democratic-republiccongo/irc-study-shows-congos-neglected-crisis-leaves-54-million-dead.

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26 million refugees but more disturbingly, overall displacement was occurring at a rate faster than the growth of the world’s population, on average thirty persons per minute.45 Yet with the climate emergency not just a threat multiplier but an accelerator in its own right, thus devastating the parametric conditions providing humanity with food and fresh water, these figures can only – exponentially – worsen. But even then, surely such attempts at quantification of vulnerability founder when confronted with the sort of long-term, internalised psychic trauma we have suggested by way of the harki tragedy, let alone that of all the other post-conflict Algerians and their descendants. Indeed, simply focusing on the violence within the period 1954–62 fails to engage with the deep structural effects of an exterminatory war which itself was the product of a century and more of exploitation and oppression directed by the colonial power against Algerians. This backdrop may explain why the notion of retreat from conflict by way of a rapprochement between coloniser and colonised was almost an impossibility. And hence why most ordinary Algerians ultimately had little choice but to support the FLN. Successive Élysée administrations may have talked the talk about social equality as the route to Algerian integration with metropolitan France. However, genuinely walking the walk would have involved a fundamental transformation in relationships of power, wealth, land and resources between the two which no one within French officialdom ever seriously contemplated. De Gaulle confided his own overtly racist reservations to a political friend, Alain Peyrefitte, in early 1959, when he imagined a France which would no longer consist ‘of European people of white race, Greek and Latin culture and Christian religion’ but one in which his home village of Colombey-les-deuxéglises would instead have two mosques.46 However, de Gaulle’s existential fears of France being overrun by Algerian Muslims belies the place that the Élysée had actually reserved for them within its own supposedly progressive pax gallica narrative. This was, in practice, as subdued subalterns within a marketised system which they were being encouraged to affirm, not contest, and in which their own right to free movement would be strictly boundarised to the far side of the Mediterranean. In other words, behind the acute vulnerability to war was another much deeper systemic vulnerability by way of economic dispossession and immiseration. Certainly, the war acted as a final catalyst in this process, in the sense 45 UNHCR, ‘Global trends: forced displacement in 2018’, www.unhcr.org/5d08d7ee7.pdf. 46 Quoted in Evans, Algeria, p. 266.

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that vast numbers of those who were not forced into camps fled into the towns. Cut off from the time-honoured self-sufficiency of the bled and thus reduced to a largely urban lumpenproletariat, traditional, localised Algerian society collapsed in on itself. Yet if colonial exploitation was the first cause, the programme of an ostensibly independent, sovereign Algeria was geared neither towards recovery nor restitution. On the contrary, the path of the new regime led to an entirely more draconian, ultra-dirigiste mimesis of its predecessor, in the interests of unitary state building and a culturally and societally homogenised integration into the same marketised world system. In the colonial and post-colonial destruction of the cultural and socioeconomic autonomy which had characterised the country’s pre-colonial longue durée, we might see Algeria as both a harbinger as well as microcosm of a much wider tragedy of Third World peasant impoverishment, degradation and deculturation, signalling the final if arguably pyrrhic triumph of an international political economy. In considering in particular the loss of homes, livelihoods, forms of communal reciprocity and solidarity, traditional gender relationships and codes of honour, Pierre Bourdieu – grassroots’ Algeria’s most acute observer – dissected the breakdown of cultural capital embodied in that habitus and replaced by atomisation and anomie. Implicit in these negative transformations, argued Bourdieu, was a ‘symbolic violence’ derived from unequal relationships between dominant and subordinate groups.47 Though we might equally view this verdict on contemporary vulnerability as a series of small, intimate catastrophes ultimately strung out across the Third World, paradoxically, its broad trajectory may lead us back to a point where we might be able to make sense of its relationship to the Lemkin paradigm. Independent Algeria, as an avowedly model socialist democracy, in practice run by a highly centralised, single party, military-cum-security apparatus, once more highlights this generic post-colonial tendency. Unable to translate its revolutionary promise into an economic well-being and social equality for its poor, dispossessed and increasingly young population – despite the wealth which accrued to it by way of nationalisation of the formerly Frenchcontrolled Saharan oil and gas reserves – an ageing FLN clique was bound to deflect attention away from both its developmental and democratic deficit by channelling majoritarian discontents on to minority scapegoats. The criminalisation and then violent suppression of the Berber (Amazigh) 47 Pierre Bourdieu, Picturing Algeria (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), pp. viii–ix, xiii–xvi. See also Claudia Card, ‘Genocide and social death’, Hypnatia 18:1 (2003), 63–79.

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Spring in Kabylia in 1980, provides a rather standard example of a state proclaiming a cultural-cum-political threat to its national – in this case Arab – unification project, in order to suppress the seeds of a more general protest movement.48 The formula has been revisited in more recent times in the northern Sahara where the Algerian police have consistently and brutally sided with the Arab Chaamba people against indigenous Mozabites who, argue human rights activists amongst them, are being ethnocidally suppressed, not least for their distinct Ibadi version of Islam.49 But what happens when a state can no longer stem the tide of dissent coming not from culturally plural tendencies but from its own desperate and sullen social base? The mass indignado-style, essentially urban youth protests in 1988 crystallised the formation of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), precipitating the first serious challenge to the FLN’s monopoly of power. The creation of FIS also offered a potent signal that by the 1980s the failure of developmentalist regimes on either side of the cold-war divide were galvanising significant, vastly alienated chunks of the Muslim Third World to seek, through Islamism, not just spiritual sustenance and practical social welfare but also political direction. In other words, the deflection by progressorientated but otherwise fundamentally corrupted polities of their failures on to alleged minority ‘enemies of the people’ was metamorphosing into the potentiality of a direct clash between states and their own societal majorities. This is precisely what happened in Algeria when, having permitted multiparty elections which looked set to give FIS an absolute majority, the army decisively intervened in early 1992 to restore the status quo ante, incarcerating thousands in camps and precipitating a descent into a new decade-long civil war. This is outside of our purview but for its resonances to the earlier conflict. Significantly, still-at-large FIS militants took to the maquis initially restarting a 1954–62 country-versus-city conflict, one aspect of which was a steady stream of assassinations of middle-class intellectuals and professionals. Just as the earlier FLN had helped to destroy the middle ground by targeting francophones, so the new breed of jihadists did the same by projecting their alienation on to a dominant cultural elite, also accused of being too French. But in turn, just as the prototypical 1950s MNA nationalists were obliterated by the hard-line FLN, so in the mid-1990s an entirely more 48 Jane Goodman, ‘Reinterpreting the Berber Spring: from rite of reversal to site of convergence’, The Journal of North African Studies 9:3(2004), 60–83. 49 Anna Mahjar-Barducci, ‘Human rights violations in Algeria: the Mozabite people under attack’, MEMRI, 6 February 2014, www.memri.org/reports/human-rightsviolations-algeria-mozabite-people-under-attack.

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uncompromising jihadist formation, the Greater Algiers-centred Armed Islamic Group (GIA) initiated a reign of terror against FIS or anybody trying to row back to peace. GIA’s notable signature was a 1997–8 sequence of village massacres in strongly FIS districts every bit as gut-wrenching as an Ihadjadjen or Beni Ilmane. Significantly, however, the repeated lack of army intervention to halt these killings raised questions about whether the deep state was either collaborating with or using the GIA as a subterfuge for its own eradicationist agenda. What is relevant to this discussion is that the poor and not so poor, rural and urban, mainstream and minorities, plus civil society writ-large, all ended up in a no-man’s land of acute existential danger. Accusations of being harkis, or closet Europeans, equally fed into a renewed nightmare of insurgency and counter-insurgency, learned from, the 1950s. Ultimately, a desire to escape from what has been described as a ‘double state of siege’ – gang lawlessness and militia extortion from the Kalashnikovtoting youths of the GIA – or the army’s conscious decision to abandon these zones in order to mobilise the terrified people there to support progovernment militias worked in the government’s favour.50 A corrupt, inept and bloodstained regime won through because it had France and the International Monetary Fund provided it with an emergency bail out to ensure its greater firepower, the co-option of proxy death squads and a limited societal breathing space through the rescheduling of its international debt repayments. Too late for the up to 200,000 killed and the vast numbers more who fled.51 Too late for the continuing, if paradoxical, exit of yet more economically desperate Algerians to an uncertain low-wage or nowage future in some unforgiving French banlieue. Too little for the poor, the young, the disaffected and marginalised who remained at home. What then does the Algerian experience tell us about the vulnerability of peoples in the contemporary world? As we noted at the outset, Lemkin’s concept of genocide is usually taken to apply to specific groups exposed to the threat of state-led physical destruction. But such terminology would seem insufficient to encompass the range of independence-war violence in Algeria as it cut across so many social and ethnic communities. Nor would it make much sense trying to apply it to the exterminatory events of the 1990s, at least without reference to that of the 1950s and in turn to that of colonial conquest. However, if we were to focus instead on that part of Lemkin’s discussion 50 Luis Martinez, The Algerian Civil War, 1990–1998 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 150. 51 ‘Algeria: civil war/mass atrocity endings’, https://sites.tufts.edu/atrocityendings/2015/ 08/07/72.

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which spoke about ‘denationalisation’, by way of the cultural degradation and emasculation of entire societies, the proposition would encompass not just Algeria but huge swathes of the planet’s human mosaic.52 And the primary cause was the onset of an unequal global integration driven by Western, avant-garde nation-states who, through direct colonial conquest and capitalist exploitation of their periphery or semi-periphery, were able to transform relationships of economic and political power down to the most basic level. The tragedy of this legacy is that in order to catch up, let alone prosper within the resulting world system, the response of post-colonial successors, Algeria included, was to attempt to imitate key patterns of First World political formation by building coherently streamlined, territorially boundarised, culturally homogenised, single identity-driven nations. Even where in the face of societal exhaustion, counter-cultures, most obviously of a sectarian-religious nature, have attempted to challenge the premise and reshape society, the same basic unitary ground-rules continue to apply. At each turn, these rules necessarily are at the expense of cultural divergence and traditional human ecosystems. In brief, vulnerability to the threat of extreme violence is not an aberration; it is a by-product of a systemic dysfunction. And with it, as biospheric breakdown consequent on the system’s unrealisable growth model becomes quotidian reality, the fate of those most exposed at the bottom of the socio-economic pile can only be exponentially compounded. But there is something more which Lemkin could hardly have foreseen, a final twist in the historical trajectory which returns us to the danger to humanity posed in our opening paragraph. Throughout this exposition we have hardly intimated two key reasons why France was so tenacious in seeking to hold on to the tenth-largest country in the world, nine-tenths of which, beyond its Mediterranean littoral, was desert. The first was the oil and gas deposits discovered in the Algerian Sahara in the 1950s, which the Élysée saw as the lynchpin of its Eurafrica project aimed at consolidating its position at the cold-war top table. Closely linked to that however was the goal of unchallenged use of the same ‘uninhabited’ region for the testing of France’s – by definition vastly dangerous – independent nuclear weapons programme. Except that the Sahara was not some convenient terra nullius any more than any other part of the world. It had a population of tens of thousands of indigenous, mostly Tuareg nomads who were entirely 52 Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), p. 80.

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unprotected and unaware of the consequences of France’s first atmospheric test near Reggane, in the Tanezrouft region, in February 1960. Three more tests followed there, and thirteen further underground ones at Ecker on the Hoggar massif, terminating, extraordinarily, four years after Algerian independence in 1966. Only the spectacularly disastrous radioactive release from a supposedly sealed underground test in May 1962, in which several highranking French dignitaries were contaminated, caused anything so much as a stir back home. Indeed, having trashed the desert, the French went on to do precisely the same to once paradise islands in, again, suitably remote Polynesia, all the time not caring a fig about the genetic damage they had already done to some 60,000 Saharans and their descendants in an estimated 100,000 square kilometre dead zone.53 The long-term evidence lies in the foetal abnormalities and radiation-related illnesses that have affected this population to the present day. Putting aside the extreme tardiness of the French authorities in providing proper data on the tests or anything beyond the most meagre, belated principle of compensation, let alone its actuality, the whole episode confirms how the world’s most powerful polities, including France, continue to view humanity in racially hierarchic terms. Indigenous peoples, seen through this hegemonic lens, are scarcely worthy of life at all. Nevertheless, the destruction of their genetic integrity, as they transmit the genes of new pathologies to future generations is surely a harbinger not just, as Bruno Barillot has charged, of a novel phase in the perpetration of genocide in human history, but of ecocidal nightmares which threaten to boomerang against us all.54 Structurally speaking, where one is born and who socio-economically or ethnically one is, may determine how close one is to the front line, but the systemic forces which have created conditions for the destruction of life on earth speak to our species’ vulnerability.

Bibliographic Note This chapter has developed around the argument that exterminatory violence in the contemporary world has to be considered within a systemic framework of hegemonic political and socio-economic forces whose primary victims have been and continue to be those dependent on a direct, subsistent 53 Johnny Magdaleno, ‘Algerians suffering from French atomic legacy, 55 years after nuke tests’, Al Jazeera America, 1 March 2015. 54 Bruno Barrillot, ‘Human rights and casualties of nuclear testing’, Journal of Genocide Research 9:3 (2007), 444, 457.

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relationship with the global commons. The obvious starting point for considering these unequal power relations is the work of James C. Scott, beginning with his classic Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). While anything of Scott’s is more than worth the effort, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press. 1998), is notably germane to this study. The dissection of these colonial and postcolonial tendencies through the prism of Algeria inevitably leads one to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, alongside his close collaborator, Abdelmayek Sayad. Much of their oeuvre has not been translated from the French. Nevertheless, their breakthrough study, Le déracinement (1964) is now available in English as Uprooting: The Crisis of Traditional Agriculture in Algeria (London: Polity Press, 2020). It offers far-reaching insights into how peasant displacement as a consequence of not just colonial policies but the whole process of marketisation eats into the sinews of dispossessed people’s daily lives, making for conditions of extreme uncertainty and despair. Even then, arguably the most vulnerable in today’s world are not peasants but indigenous peoples. John H. Bodley, Victims of Progress, 6th ed. (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), offers the best synoptic introduction. The implications for specific groups, particularly in the Australian and American arenas, have been pursued elsewhere in these volumes. Damien Short, Redefining Genocide: Settler Colonialism, Social Death and Ecocide (London: Zed books, 2016), is an important addition, in the way he merges issues of acute indigenous vulnerability with the ongoing biospheric emergency. For variations on this theme in the era of the Anthropocene, see also Mark Levene and Daniele Conversi, ‘Subsistence societies, globalisation, climate change and genocide: discourses of vulnerability and resilience’, International Journal of Human Rights 18:3 (2014), 279–95.

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26

Genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1992–1995 e d i n a b e c´ i r e v i c´

Introduction Genocide is often framed as something that occurs somewhat spontaneously, or emotionally, or arises in response to singular threats or leaders. But genocide is always an extension of larger socio-political processes. Thus, the genocide committed against Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) during the 1992–5 war can only be understood if it is viewed within the broader context of dynamic pressures that resulted from the dissolution of federal Yugoslavia into its six constituent republics: BiH, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia. The wars that took place in the former Yugoslav republics in the 1990s were tragic for people of all ethnicities, and war crimes were committed not only against Bosniaks, but against ethnic Croats and Serbs, and Kosovar Albanians. Indeed, the reach of international justice has touched perpetrators from all sides in each of these conflicts yet, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has characterised only the mass killing of Bosniaks in Srebrenica in 1995 as genocide.1 This chapter will focus primarily on the climate and co-ordination that facilitated the mass violence and genocide committed against Bosniaks in BiH. (See Map 26.1.) However, it is important to recognise that this violence was guided by highly specific plans developed by Serb leaders to eliminate Bosniaks from certain territories, and that the implementation of those plans comprised a genocidal process. To set the stage for further analysis and discussion, it is thus helpful to situate the crimes committed against Bosniaks in the context of the definition put forth in the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article II of which sets 1 The first ICTY judgment to qualify crimes in Srebrenica as genocide was the 2004 decision of the Appeals Chamber in the case of Radislav Krstic.́

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Bosanski Brod Bosanski Šamac Kozarac

Bihać

IA RB SE

Prijedor

Brčko

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Tuzla Banja Luka Zvornik Zenica

Kupres

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Foča

Map 26.1 Bosnia and Herzegovina.

out the ‘acts, committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group’ that can be charged as genocide.2 The first three acts described in Article II of the Convention are particularly relevant in the Bosnian case: (a) killing or (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of a group, and (c) deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of a group ‘in whole or in part’. Those who deny that genocide was committed against Bosniaks often misinterpret the Convention, claiming that the crime exists only if the Serb plan was to kill ‘all’ Bosniaks. But this dismisses the genocidal intent, planning and acts committed by Serbs to destroy Bosniaks ‘in part’ or, more accurately, to eliminate Bosniaks entirely from select territories.

2 United Nations, Treaty Series, vol. 78, No. 1021 (adopted by the General Assembly on 9 December 1948).

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In post-war BiH (as well as in neighbouring Serbia), genocide denial has become central to the narrative of Serb ethno-nationalist politics, and thus to the discourse of leaders in the Serb-dominated entity of BiH, Republika Srpska (RS) – where the dehumanising rhetoric normalised by wartime political leadership remains intertwined with governance to this day.3 The breakaway Serb para-state was created through military aggression and with exclusionary political aims, and was then legitimised as a political entity within BiH in the US-brokered Dayton Peace Accord that ended the war in late 1995. It is not insignificant that Bosnian Serbs established para-state structures at the outset of the conflict, and that the shape of the territory to which they aspired was then roughly achieved in the establishment of a Serb-majority entity. These structures helped operationalise genocidal plans devised in Belgrade and standardise their execution across BiH. A number of authors have emphasised that the systematic and co-ordinated nature of genocide requires that states play a role in its execution and that it becomes an integrated objective of state institutions. Indeed, Alex Alvarez argues that ‘those who perpetrate genocide conduct themselves in conformity to established authority structures . . . not in opposition to them’.4 In this case, Bosnian Serbs were officially non-state actors; and thus, it is the definition of genocide put forth by Jack Nusan Porter that resonates, as he referred to ‘deliberate destruction . . . by a government or its agents’ [emphasis added].5 In BiH, the responsibility for genocide clearly lies not only with Serbian state actors but also with Bosnian Serb leaders of the self-declared Republika Srpska, and the role of this ‘other authority’ in the genocide in BiH was addressed in the judgment in Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and judgments of the ICTY. These actors and structures were the engine of genocide and nationalism was the fuel. Indeed, nationalism played a role in almost every phase of the genocide in BiH, from driving its planning, to generating and spreading fear of the ‘other’, to rationalising its implementation as a defence against an existential group threat. And, while there is no doubt that mutually reinforcing nationalisms 3 See Lara J. Nettelfield and Sarah E. Wagner, Srebrenica in the Aftermath of Genocide (Cambridge University Press, 2014), esp. Ch. 8. 4 Alex Alvarez, Governments, Citizens, and Genocide: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary Approach (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 110. Also see Irving Louis Horowitz, Taking Lives: Genocide and State Power (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1997); and Helen Fein, Genocide: A Sociological Perspective (London: Sage, 1990). 5 Jack Nusan Porter (ed.), Genocide and Human Rights: A Global Anthology (University of California Press, 1982).

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developed in response to one another before and during the war in BiH, it was Serb nationalism that played a central role in both the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the genocide against Bosniaks.6

Prelude to Genocide: The Dissolution of Yugoslavia and the Rise of Slobodan Milošević In Yugoslavia, the 1980s were marked by an economic crisis that emerged when the death of President Josip Broz Tito triggered political conflict among top communist leaders of the country’s constituent units – six republics and two autonomous regions. Initially, conflict grew between the republics of Serbia and Slovenia, the latter of which was the most economically developed republic and the most culturally oriented towards the liberal West. Leaders in Slovenia demanded greater economic independence and a reduced financial obligation to the federal government. Serbia, still bitter that the 1974 Yugoslav Constitution had granted autonomy to the two Serbian provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina, strongly opposed any further decentralisation.7 Still, Serbia had no territorial ambitions in Slovenia, and Slovenia’s declaration of independence on 25 June 1991 was followed by a short, ten-day war. Nationalism in Serbia came fully into view with the so called ‘antibureaucratic’ revolutions of 1988 and 1989, when Milošević regained de facto Serbian control of Vojvodina and Kosovo through orchestrated mass demonstrations. At the same time, he managed to install a government loyal to him in Montenegro. With public backing for his puppet regimes, Milošević began a show of unrestrained power, using his now-outsized voting advantage in the federation to blackmail leaders in Slovenia, Croatia and BiH to accept the Serb dominance in Yugoslavia. In 1990, Croatia followed Slovenia in holding its first multi-party elections and nationalist party leader Franjo Tuđman was voted in. When Serbs in some parts of Croatia rebelled, on the premise that they could not live under Croatian nationalist leadership, the Yugolsav People’s Army (JNA) sided with these rebels. This dynamic did not place Serbian and Croatian leaders in clear opposition, though, as one might expect; and it has now been 6 For in-dept understanding of south Slavic national ideologies in historical context see Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics. (Cornell University Press, 1984) 7 For more on this, see Nevenka Tromp, Prosecuting Slobodan Miloševic:́ The Unfinished Trial (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), esp. Ch. 2.

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well-documented, including by some of Tuđman’s own allies, that even in periods of the fiercest fighting between their forces, Milošević and Tuđman acted as ‘partners’ – making mutual concessions towards the realisation of their shared expansionist dream to create a Greater Serbia and a Greater Croatia by dividing BiH between them.8

Why Bosniaks? For a number of socio-political and historical reasons, Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were easily portrayed as the ‘other’ and viewed through an exclusionary lens in the context of Yugoslavia’s disintegration. Following World War Two, the national identity of Bosnian Muslims had been a hotly contested issue among Yugoslav communists. BiH received the status of a republic, but Bosnian Muslims were denied a national identity; meaning Muslims were treated as a religious group, not a national group. Muslim communists who had joined the Partisans and had achieved high ranks in the Yugoslav party hierarchy lobbied Tito to recognise that Muslims in BiH constituted a unique national identity; top Serbian party members – who had much more sway over Tito – pushed him to resist the idea.9 Among Serbs, communists generally agreed with nationalists that the recognition of Bosnian Muslims as a nation could threaten Serb dominance in BiH.10 Thus, the question was left unresolved, with the hope that Muslims would assimilate into the Croat, Serb and Macedonian nations. Yet, the vast majority of Yugoslav Muslims instead held stubbornly to their ‘undeclared’ status, making assimilation impossible.11 In 1971, Muslims in BiH were finally acknowledged as a nation. In local language, the words used for the religious and national affiliations – muslimani or Muslimani – were distinguished only by whether the first letter was capitalised, which in some ways reflected the reluctance of powerful communists to concede full national recognition marked by a distinct identifier. There was some discussion about using the term ‘Bosniaks’, which had historical roots in both the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires.12 8 See Dušan Bilandžić, ‘Tuđman me je rekao da moramo podijeliti Bosnu’ [Tuđman told me we must divide Bosnia], Nacional (Zagreb), 5 June 2012, p. 31. 9 Nijaz Durakovic,́ Prokletstvo Muslimana (Tuzla: Harfograf, 1998). Croat communists were not fond of the idea either, though their opposition was milder. 10 In the 1971 Yugoslav census, 39.5% of the population identified as Muslim, 37.19% identified as Serb, 20.62% as Croat and just under 3% as Yugoslavs or Others. 11 Durakovic,́ Prokletstvo Muslimana, p. 21. 12 See Noel Malcolm, Bosnia: A Short History (New York University Press, 1994), p. 149; and Caner Sancaktar, ‘Historical construction and development of Bosniak nation’, Alternatives: Turkish Journal of International Relations 11:1 (2012), 1–17.

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However, the idea was rejected, leaving space for Serb and Croat nationalists to contest the legitimacy of Muslim nationhood in Yugoslavia. It was only after BiH declared independence in 1992 that the Bosniak identifier became common among Bosnian Muslims; and in September 1993, the term was officially recognised at the Bosniak Congress. The narrative of Serb nationalism has long situated BiH as the territory of Serbs, and the assimilation of Muslims into the Serb nation during Tito’s rule would have eliminated an obstacle to Serb dominance in nascent Yugoslavia, and later. Muslim resistance to this kind of assimilation in the post-World War Two era extended from their historical experiences with aggressive policies in Serbia, where the ‘Muslimness’ was systematically erased from Serbian territories in the period after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, as well as from territories into which Serbia expanded. As Norman Cigar put it, ‘Muslims were forced to convert, leave, or be liquidated.’13 This history, along with the massacres of Albanians and Muslims by Serbian and Montenegrin forces in the Balkan Wars, made assimilation into the Serb nation largely unappealing to Muslims in BiH.14 The objection of Serbs to the national recognition of Muslims was similarly rooted in Ottoman-era history; in this case, the Islamisation of BiH. Serbian communist policy after World War Two echoed the rhetoric of Serbian nationalism, which had developed under Ottoman rule, characterising Muslims as ‘traitors’ to Serbian Orthodoxy.15

The Role of Serbian Nationalism in the Wars Following the Dissolution of Yugoslavia The Kosovo myth – which has long been the anchor of anti-Muslim sentiment among Serbs – frames the death of its fourteenth-century hero, Serbian Prince Lazar, as a sacrifice of his earthly kingdom so that all Serbs may enter a heavenly one; as such, it frames Serbs as rightly divine and inherently entitled to salvation, and the ‘Turks’ (Muslims) that killed him as heretical. In the Ottoman period, this myth was nurtured by the Serbian Orthodox Church and was thought to help Serbs maintain their national identity. But 13 Norman Cigar, Genocide in Bosnia: The Policy of Ethnic Cleansing (Texas A&M University Press, 1995), p. 17. 14 See Tromp, Prosecuting Slobodan Miloševic,́ pp. 62–3; and Fouad Ajami, ‘In Europe’s shadow’, in The Black Book of Bosnia: The Consequences of Appeasement, ed. Nader Mousavizadeh (New York: Basic Books, 1996), p. 47. 15 See Šemso Tucaković, Srpski zlocˇni nad Bošnjacima-muslimanima: 1941–1945 (Sarajevo: ElKalem and OKO, 1995), p. 13.

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over time, especially in conjunction with the experiences of Serbs in World War Two – when they suffered severe losses at the hands of the Nazis, constituting genocide in itself, and were subject to atrocities by Ustasha forces as well – the Kosovo myth fed a shared mentality of victimisation among Serbs across Yugoslavia that made it increasingly easy for political leaders to use idea of a sinister ‘other’ to mobilise Serbs as a collective. Additionally, the World War Two historiography of Serb nationalism omits the mass crimes committed by Serbian Chetnik forces against Muslim and Croat populations in the region, leaving the impression that Serbs alone suffered mass violence.16 This revisionism was reinforced by the Serbian Orthodox Church in the lead up to the 1992–5 war when, in 1990 and 1991, the Church initiated the reburial of Serb victims of genocide in World War Two. These public, televised events were held in the midst of dramatically heightened political and national tensions, adding to growing hysteria and fear among Serbs about their safety within a changing Yugoslavia.17 It is thus notable that, in these years preceding the war (and then during it), the nationalist leaders of Serbs in both BiH and Croatia were psychiatrists – Radovan Karadžić and Jovan Rašković – well aware of how to psychologically prepare a population to participate in, or at least disregard, mass atrocities. This rested on convincing people that their survival was a question of ‘us or them’ and that they faced an existential risk if the ‘other’ was not eliminated, and for Serbs, the Kosovo myth served as powerful motivation by linking Serb salvation to the battle of Serbian Orthodoxy against Islam. Serb leaders knew that religion is, as Durkheim noted, ‘eminently social’ and therefore a potent tool of incitement, and Rašković admitted that, in efforts to create ‘emotional strain in the Serb people’, he had ‘repeated again and again to the Serbs that they come from heaven not earth’.18 In June 1991, when Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia, implementation of the plan to realise a Greater Serbia began, with the establishment of a Joint Council of Municipalities in eastern Croatia (which would later form the so-called Serb Autonomous Region). However, it was 16 See Max Bergolz, Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism and Memory in a Balkan Community (Cornell University Press, 2016). 17 See Sabrina P. Ramet, ‘The politics of the Serbian Orthodox Church’, in Serbia Since 1989: Politics and Society under Miloševic ́ and After, ed. Sabrina P. Ramet and Vjeran Pavlaković (University of Washington Press, 2006), p. 255. 18 An interview with Rasković by YUTEL was quoted in the independent Belgrade journal Vreme on 27 January 1992. Also see Kemal Kurspahic,́ Prime Time Crime: Balkan Media in War and Peace (Washington DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2003), p. 53; and Edina Bećirević, Genocide on the Drina River (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), pp. 48–9.

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not until Croatian Serb rebels established a parallel Ministry of Internal Affairs and started taking over legitimate Croatian police stations by force that conflict broke out. Under the pretence of stopping these ethnic clashes, the JNA intervened, with the actual intent to support Serb rebel forces in conquering territory from a now-independent Croatia.19 Working in concert, the two forces began cleansing ethnic Croats from the part of Croatia known as Krajina, ultimately displacing nearly 400,000 people within the country, forcing over 250,000 to flee altogether, and killing some 14,000.20 The JNA officially withdrew from Croatian territory in 1992, subsequent to an internationally supervised negotiation and ceasefire. The peace agreement that ended the direct involvement of the JNA placed a UN supervisory force on the dividing line between Serb rebels in their ‘Republic’ and the Croatian army, and included a stipulation to demilitarise. While the JNA left a good deal of weapons in the hands of Croatian Serb militias, the obligation to demilitarise Croatian territory resulted in a significant redeployment of JNA tanks throughout BiH in early 1992. Thus, as the UN finalised the peace agreement for Croatia, units of the JNA were redeploying to BiH, ready to repeat the same scenario there that international negotiators had just worked to stop next door. At the same time, reactions to the war in Croatia among ethnically aligned political parties, media outlets and intellectual circles in BiH fuelled and deepened ethnic divisions within Bosnian society. When the first multi-party elections were held in BiH on 18 November 1990, ethnic parties were victorious. However, parties reformed from the old Communist Party – which continued to emphasise the goal of a multi-ethnic BiH and the slogan of ‘brotherhood and unity’ – did win a sizeable number of votes. It seemed the Bosnian population was divided not only along ethnic lines, but also between those striving to maintain a more inclusive Bosnian identity and those enticed by a new social contract dominated by the ethnic agenda. After the elections, several ethnic parties in BiH formed a government, despite disagreeing on a future path for the republic. The choice was either to remain in rump Yugoslavia with Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia, which was preferred by Serbs; or secede and declare independence as Slovenia and Croatia had done, the option favoured by Muslims and Croats.

19 Prosecution’s Second Pre-Trial Brief (Croatia and Bosnia Indictments), Prosecutor v. Slobodan Milosevic (IT-02–54-T), 31 May 2002. 20 Mirna Flö gel and Gordan Lauc, ‘War stress – effects of the war in the area of former Yugoslavia’, University of Zagreb, 2003, www.nato.int/du/docu/d010306c.pdf.

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To ensure that Serbs would remain with Serbia, no matter what was decided, Serb parties in BiH began planning for the secession and homogenisation of ‘Serb’ territories.21 Only eight months after the elections, selfdeclared associations of Serb municipalities in BiH moved to unite with Serbian Krajina, the region established by Serb rebels in Croatia. Evidence presented at the ICTY confirmed that civilian casualties were not an unanticipated consequence of the objectives laid out by Serb leaders. As early as September 1991, months before the beginning of the war, Karadžić discussed the possibility of Bosnian independence with a close circle of allies, remarking that the pursuit of sovereignty by BiH would trigger a response in which Muslims would ‘disappear from the face of the earth’. He contended that, ‘in just a couple of days, Sarajevo will be gone and there will be five hundred thousand dead, [and] in one month the Muslims will be annihilated in Bosnia . . . They won’t stand a chance.’22 But pro-independence forces in BiH surprised Karadžić with significant armed resistance, especially in Sarajevo, and his expectation of the total annihilation of Bosniaks did not materialise. Instead, three and a half years of genocidal processes destroyed them ‘in part’. The inevitability of this genocide was predicted by Serb military commanders, including General Ratko Mladic,́ who raised the possibility in a discussion that took place in the so-called Republika Srpska Assembly after Karadžić outlined his ‘Six Strategic Goals for the Serb People’ on 12 May 1992.23 These goals were clearly aimed at the creation of a joint state with Serbia, exclusively for Serbs, and thus relied on the imperative to ‘separate Serbs from the other two national [ethnic] communities’ and sought to establish a corridor along the Drina River to erase the border between BiH and Serbia. Mladić – against whom a final judgment was rendered on 8 June 2021 for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity – noted in 1992 that the only way to achieve the goals outlined by Karadžić ‘would be genocide’.24 Unlike ‘keys in one’s pocket that can be shifted from here to there’, he said, people cannot be so easily redistributed, and there is 21 See Bećirević, Genocide on the Drina River, p. 53. 22 Final Pre-Trial Brief, Prosecutor v. Radovan Karadžic ́ (IT-95–5/18-PT), 18 May 2009. Also see Intercept of conversation between Radovan Karadžić and Momcˇilo Mandic,́ 13 October 1991, Exhibit D00377.E (CD-21–20-3/02002). 23 See Robert J. Donia, ‘Republika Srpska Assembly, 1992–1995, Highlights and Excerpts’, expert report to the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia pursuant to rule 94 bis, 29 July 2003, pp. 3–4. 24 The final judgment in Mladić’s case has already sparked discussion on the impartiality of judges in international courts, due to the dissenting opinions authored by Presiding Judge Matimba Nyambe on almost all charges. Judges in The Hague also disagreed, 3

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no ‘sieve to sift so that only Serbs would stay, or that the Serbs would fall through’.25 Still, as far as Mladić was concerned, the question before Serbs was not how to avoid committing genocide, but how to avoid the response of Western forces. He urged Serbian leadership to engage in a strategy of victim-blaming. ‘We have to put a ring around the dragon’s head of Sarajevo’, creating conditions that make life unbearable by cutting off food, water and electricity to the city, he explained; but, ‘we are not going to say that we are going to destroy the power supply pylons or turn off the water supply . . . . [W]e have to wisely tell the world, it was they who were shooting, hit the transmission line and the power went off . . . [and] we are doing our best [at] repairing this, that is what diplomacy is . . . .’26 In BiH, growing evidence that Serbs were preparing for war, alongside transparent efforts by Serb leaders to homogenise ‘Serb’ territories, led the Bosnian presidency to apply for independence only three days after the signal came from Europe in December 1991. The two Serb members of the presidency opposed the decision.27 As the legal basis for independence, the parliament of BiH had adopted a resolution on Bosnian sovereignty two months earlier, in October 1991, also with Serb opposition. But while Serbs aligned with the nationalist SDS Party refused to vote on the question, parliamentarians from non-national parties with multi-ethnic membership voted in favour of independence. In other words, it was not just Bosnian Muslims who sought independence for BiH. At the time, Karadžić first hinted publicly at the risk to Muslims if independence came to fruition, reflecting the taped conversations that later revealed his discussions on this topic with close associates. Karadžić warned independent-minded Bosnians, ‘Do not think that you will not take Bosnia and Herzegovina to hell, and maybe [to the] disappearance of the Muslim people, because Muslim people cannot defend themselves if war breaks out here.’28 It is notable that Karadžić did not call to 2, on genocide charges for crimes committed in 1992. While a majority of the chamber agreed that Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats were the victims of prohibited acts of genocide in 1992, the three judges who upheld the main trial judgment argued that a substantial enough part of these protected groups was not killed. Still, the two judges who wrote extensive dissenting opinions on this charge argued that Mladić is guilty not only of genocide in Srebrenica, but genocide committed in 1992 in an additional five municipalities. The Appeals Judgment is available as a PDF at www.irmct.org/sites/default/files/case_documents/210608-appealjudgement-JUD285R0000638396-mladic-13-56-en.pdf. 25 Donia, ‘Republika Srpska Assembly’, 5–6. 26 Ibid., 6. 27 See Chuck Sudetic, ‘Yugoslav breakup gains momentum’, New York Times, 21 December 1991. 28 Final Pre-Trial Brief, Prosecutor v. Radovan Karadžic ́ (IT-95–5/18-PT), 18 May 2009, 7.

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out the threat to Croats if war broke out. He mentioned Muslims specifically because, by then, Karadžić was aware of the agreement made in Karađorđevo between Milošević and Tuđman to divide BiH into two ethnically ‘pure’ territories, leaving no place for Muslims. Despite the ominous warning offered by Karadžic,́ Izetbegović and many other non-Serb leaders in BiH felt they had few options but to declare independence for BiH. As realities developed on the ground, they saw no room for compromise with Milošević. A campaign dehumanising Muslims and Croats had flooded media in Serbia since Milošević’s rise to power, and with the JNA restructured at his behest to serve the cause of Serb expansionism, Bosniaks and other non-Serb political elites in BiH increasingly saw independence as the only path forward. Indeed, the dissolution of Yugoslavia intersected with Serb and Croat territorial aspirations in such a way that Bosniaks were threatened in part by their ‘stateless’ position; a dilemma similar to that of European Jews in World War Two.

Slow-Motion Genocide The Bosnian war began in full force on 6 April 1992 – the day the international community recognised the independence of BiH – when Bosnian Serb soldiers and JNA artillery units began shelling Sarajevo from the hills surrounding the city. (See Figure. 26.1.) By early May, Serb forces already occupied much of BiH and had secured key advantages by taking control of major communication lines and establishing logistical corridors. Their efficiency was guided by a strategy developed by Serbian military leaders, known as RAM (the frame), which was implemented to ‘establish a frame around the periphery of the country within which the remainder of the campaign [would be] conducted’.29 This entailed co-ordinated attacks by JNA and Bosnian Serb forces on main entry points into BiH and led to all-out aggression.30 In quick succession, Serb forces attacked Bosanski Brod on 27 March, Bijeljina on 2 April, Kupres on 4 April, Focˇa and Zvornik on 8 April, Višegrad on 13 April, Bosanski Šamac on 17 April, Vlasenica on 18 April, and Brcˇko and Prijedor on 30 April, drawing the frame of containment laid out by the RAM plan.31 Serb military campaigns in BiH were not only aimed at taking territory. In preparation for war, six ‘Serbian Autonomous Regions’ (SAOs) were formed as parallel (and illegal) administrative systems, staffed with high-ranking SDS 29 See James William Gow, The Serbian Project and Its Adversaries: A Strategy of War Crime (London: Hurst, 2003), p. 184. 30 See Becirevic ,́ Genocide on the Drina River, p. 63. 31 Gow, The Serbian Project, p. 184. ́

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Figure 26.1 ‘Swimming through the void’. Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. (Photo: Michal Sleczek/Getty Images)

members who co-operated with JNA commanders. The SAOs functioned as proxies of Belgrade within BiH. The war had not even begun yet when the Republic of the Serb People of Bosnia and Herzegovina was proclaimed on 9 January 1992; but by the time it was renamed Republika Srpska eight months later, the name reflected what James Gow described as ‘the reality on the ground . . . the overwhelming majority of the non-Serb population . . . [had been] in one way or another removed from that territory’.32 Bosnian Serb leaders at all levels left a generous trail of documentary evidence, illuminating both the planning and execution of their crimes against civilians. They kept records with a sense of impunity that would lead to many of their own prosecutions; and these records, along with the testimony of countless witnesses, helped shaped the view of judges in The Hague that the wartime actions of Bosnian Serb leaders were intended to establish an ethnically ‘pure’ state for Serbs, through the removal of Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats.

32 Testimony of Dr James Gow, Prosecutor v. Naser Oric ́ (IT-03–68), 23 November 2004, 1871.

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Still, the consequences of this objective were apparent well before the first case was heard at the ICTY. In 1993, Ambassador Diego Arria of Venezuela used the term ‘slow-motion genocide’ to describe what he witnessed in BiH, in the eastern town of Srebrenica. He led a UN Security Council delegation there in April of that year and found thousands of refugees living on the streets, denied access to food by Serb forces; and non-combatant civilians exposed to sniper fire and shelling on a daily basis.33 As concern within the UN grew over ‘the continuing armed hostilities by Bosnian Serb paramilitary units against several towns’ in eastern BiH, Srebrenica and neighbouring Žepa and Goražde were all designated ‘safe areas’ (along with Sarajevo, 34 Tuzla and Bihac), ́ in Security Council Resolutions 819 and 824. Srebrenica, Žepa and Goražde were the only eastern Bosnian enclaves that remained unconquered by Serb forces by the spring of 1993, and all three featured a majority Muslim population. In Srebrenica, Bosniaks had surprised both Serbs and the international community with their resistance. Alarmed by news about massacres in neighbouring Bratunac, and despite an agreement that Bosniak police would turn over their weapons, a small group of Bosniak policemen acquired additional weapons and evacuated much of the Muslim population of Srebrenica to the surrounding hills, where guerrilla units were formed. Then in May 1992, an ambush on a local Serb leader triggered the withdrawal of Serb forces from Srebrenica. As word of the town’s liberation spread, Bosniak refugees who had been hiding in nearby forests began to convene there, and by March 1993, an estimated 80,000 Bosniaks from elsewhere were living in Srebrenica. But these refugees had walked into a trap; Bosnian Serb forces refused the passage of humanitarian aid and indiscriminately shelled the enclave. Hungry civilians pressed Bosniak guerrillas to attack nearby Serb villages for food, and Srebrenica was so packed with people that town officials could not provide adequate accommodation, leaving a significant number of people living in the streets in cardboard boxes and improvised tents. By the thousands, these refugees joined resistance fighters in organised raids on Serb villages, in what they called ‘food actions’. These actions did sometimes end in the murder of Serb civilians, but not as a result of planned military aggression. In a December 1992 report about one of these actions a Serb commander wrote that Muslim civilians far outnumbered soldiers and were 33 Testimony of Ambassador Diego Arria, Prosecutor v. Naser Oric ́ (IT-03–68), 5 December 2005. 34 See UN Security Council Resolution 819 (S/RES/819) of 16 April 1993 and Resolution 824 (S/RES/824) of 6 May 1993.

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so desperate that they were undeterred by shots fired upon them: ‘We estimate that there are about 500 soldiers and a much larger number of civilians (about 1,000 women and children) . . . They arrived in large numbers in the evening, moving freely in columns despite constant fire from our artillery.’35 Several months later, when Ambassador Arria arrived in Srebrenica, he was shocked by both of these things – the desperate conditions of starving Bosniak refugees, lacking water and basic sanitation; and the risk posed to non-combatant civilians by Serb forces, who had the town encircled. Moreover, Arria reported that Serb forces had ‘little respect’ for the authority of UN troops on the ground, and that UN commanders had participated in negotiations which explicitly disadvantaged Bosniak forces. According to Arria, Bosniak officials had signed a disarmament agreement ‘under duress’. He contended that ‘the Srebrenica arrangement cannot be a model’, describing it as ‘an open jail in which its people . . . are controlled and terrorized by the increasing presence of Serb tanks and other heavy weapons’.36 What Arria and other international observers did not know was that mass graves already dotted the Bosnian countryside by the time he visited Srebrenica in April 1993. Even without this context, Arria’s impression was that Bosniaks were being prepared for mass slaughter; and unfortunately, he was right. The slow-motion genocide he observed in 1993 escalated by orders of magnitude in July 1995, when the ‘safe area’ of Srebrenica was overrun by Bosnian Serb forces. Between 11 and 16 July, over 8,372 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were systematically executed. Many were hunted on back roads and in forests, as they tried desperately to reach territory held by the Bosnian government.37 It is not easy to shoot thousands of people in a week, but for the most part, that is how Serb forces committed the Srebrenica genocide. In location after location – in Orahovac and Petkovci and Kozluk, on farms and in school gymnasiums – Bosniak prisoners were lined up and shot. At times, Serb forces resorted to other measures, such as on 13 July, near Kravica, when 1,300 Bosniaks were killed. At first, they too were brought out in groups of ten and shot; but when Serb soldiers became frustrated at how long it was taking, 35 ‘Bratunac Brigade Command, Strictly Confidential, No. 2–1942-2’, 28 December 1992, Prosecutor v. Oric,́ Exhibit D807/807e. 36 UN Security Council, Report of the Security Council Mission established pursuant to Resolution 819 (1993), ‘Letter of transmittal’, S/25700 (30 April 1993). 37 See Monica Hanson Green, Srebrenica Genocide Denial Report 2020 (Srebrenica-Potocˇari memorial and Cemetery for the Victims of the 1995 Genocide, 2020).

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they threw grenades into the warehouse where detainees were held, before guards fired anti-tank missiles at them.38 While the mass killing that took place in Srebrenica in July 1995 may have been more concentrated and greater in scale than atrocities carried out earlier and elsewhere in BiH, events there were part of a pattern that had been implemented in towns across BiH for three long years. The tactics used by Serb forces against civilians were brutal. In Višegrad, for example, Bosniak civilians were burned alive on more than one occasion. In June 1992, some sixty Bosniaks were barricaded into a home on Pioneer Street before it was set aflame, killing women, children, the elderly and, tragically, a two-day old infant. Almost all the victims were from the village of Koritnik and most shared the surname Kurspahić. Victims who tried to escape through a window were shot by Serb forces. Just two weeks later, another house in Višegrad was set on fire with seventy-two Bosniak civilians inside.39 These were not isolated incidents, and the killing in eastern Bosnia was so intense in the summer of 1992 that bodies thrown into the Drina River in BiH sometimes clogged a hydropower plant in the Serbian border town of Bajina Bašta, prompting the director to write to Višegrad police inspector Milan Josipović requesting that ‘whoever was responsible please slow the flow of corpses down the Drina’.40 But the killing did not slow down. North of Višegrad, in the town of Bratunac, 603 civilians were killed in only several days. Across the region, victims were tortured and summarily executed in local sports stadiums, in elementary and high schools and in deserted mines or on abandoned farms. In Focˇa, Serb forces began a pattern of mass rape and impregnation of Bosniak women that would eventually lead to precedent-setting convictions establishing rape as a war crime.41 While women of all ethnicities were raped during the war in BiH, the use of rape as a weapon of war by Serb soldiers against non-Serb and particularly Bosniak women became one of the conflict’s most disturbing features. Many women were released from rape camps in the late stages of pregnancy and allowed to cross back into territory held by the Bosnian Army, presumably to face the shame and stigma of having been 38 See Judgment, Part I I I, Prosecutor v. Ratko Mladic ́ (IT-09–92-T), 22 November 2017, 1402; and Judgment, Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstic ́ (IT-98–33-T), 2 August 2001, 76. 39 See Judgment, Prosecutor v. Mitar Vasiljevic ́ (IT-98–32-T), 29 November 2002; and Judgment, Prosecutor v. Milan Lukic ́ and Sredoje Lukic ́ (IT-98–32/1-T), 20 July 2009. 40 See Ed Vulliamy, ‘Bloody trail of butchery at the bridge’, The Guardian, 11 March 1996. 41 See United Nations, International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, ‘Landmark cases’, www.icty.org/en/features/crimes-sexual-violence/landmark-cases.

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literally occupied by Serb forces.42 Often, this campaign of rape also took place in concentration camps in front of other prisoners, in what law professor Catharine MacKinnon has called this ‘rape as genocide’ and ‘ethnic expansion through forced reproduction’, ‘intended to make people leave their homes and never want to go back’.43 Serb forces carried out mass killings and systematic rapes in the region of Bosanska Krajina as well, in northwestern Bosnia. In the small town of Kozarac, 800 people were killed in an attack that extended over two days in May 1992, and survivors were taken to concentration camps in the surrounding area – the men to Omarska and Manjacˇa, and the women to Trnopolje.44 Just in the municipality of Prijedor, around 4,000 Bosniaks were killed in the summer of 1992 alone.45 The next year, in a session of the so-called Bosnian Serb Assembly, a representative from Prijedor boasted that the city was ‘no longer a green [Muslim] municipality’ because Serb forces had ‘wiped [it] clean’.46 Indeed, since the war’s end, ninety-nine mass graves have been identified in Prijedor and the surrounding area, and all are linked to mass killings executed in the summer of 1992. In October 2013, some 800 bodies were found in a single grave in Tomašica, making it the largest mass grave discovered in BiH to date. Located just a short walk from a Serb village, it had been known to locals for years.

‘Every Imaginable Degradation’ In 1992, images from the Omarska and Trnopolje camps, near Prijedor, provoked some of the first global consternation about the war in BiH. In August of that year, journalists Roy Gutman of Newsday and Ed Vulliamy of The Guardian, and a British film crew from Independent Television News 42 Aleksandra Stiglmayer, Mass Rape: The War against Bosnian Women (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994). Also see Earl Conteh-Morgan, Collective Political Violence: An Introduction to the Theories and Cases of Violent Conflicts (New York: Routledge, 2004); and Silva Meznaric, ‘Gender as an ethno-marker: rape, war, and identity politics in the former Yugoslavia’, in Identity Politics and Women: Cultural Reassertion and Feminisms in International Perspective, ed. Valentine M. Moghadam (Boulder: Westview, 1994). 43 Catherine A. MacKinnonn, ‘Rape, genocide and women’s human rights’, Harvard Women’s Law Journal 17 (1994), 8–9, 12. 44 Jasmin Medić, Genocid u Prijedoru, Grafos doo Cazin. Sarajevo, 2013. Also see ICTY judgments in cases: Radovan Karadžić; Stanišić & Župljanin; Milomir Stakić ‘Prijedor’; Kvocˇka et al. ‘Omarska, Keraterm & Trnopolje Camp’. All judgments available at htt ps://icty.org/sid/10095. 45 Ibid. See also ‘Prijedor po broju žrtava odmah iza Srebrenice’, https://kozarac.ba/20 06/02/03/552-421-idc-prijedor-po-broju-zrtava-odmah-iza-srebrenice/. 46 Donia, ‘Republika Srpska Assembly’, 16; and Becirevic ,́ Genocide on the Drina River, p. 68. ́

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(ITN), gained partial access to these camps and shared shocking scenes of starving, skeletal prisoners. Articles that followed drew analogies to the Holocaust, and Gutman won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for his reporting, captured in his book, A Witness to Genocide.47 The conscience of many around the world had been awoken to crimes being committed in BiH, and various human rights organisations called for a stop to the genocide, but Western powers were not induced to intervene militarily. It is possible that some Western observers failed to recognise the systematic nature and singular focus of Serb forces in the early years of the war. It was difficult at first to discern a pattern of co-ordinated violence in locations with unique demographics and topographies, and the dynamics of Serb operations shifted in response to resistance, which may have made it genuinely challenging to recognise the overarching expansionist goal of Serbs at times. Thus, mass atrocity events that occurred early in the war in BiH were presented by some of the international media as uncontrolled violence perpetrated by ‘rogue’ paramilitaries. Still, by August 1992 – around the same time images from Omarska and Trnopolje were being broadcast around the world – Helsinki Watch reported that systematic executions and expulsions, and indiscriminate shelling, offered ‘prima facie evidence that genocide is taking place’ in BiH.48 In ‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide, Samantha Power documented the ways that the administrations of US Presidents Bush and Clinton purposely downplayed the extent of Serb atrocities in BiH to avoid the obligation to intervene, imposed by the UN Genocide Convention.49 One argument against intervention was that the existence of camps alone did not prove that genocide was occurring; in other words, the camps were horrible, but maybe they were not extermination camps like Auschwitz. However, journalist Peter Maass did not shy away from this comparison, writing: Every imaginable degradation had been played out at Omarska during the previous months. It was not a death camp on the order of Auschwitz. There was no gas chamber to which the prisoners were marched off every day. What happened at Omarska was dirtier, messier. The death toll never approached Nazi levels but the brutality was comparable or, in some cases, superior, if that word can be used. The Nazis were interested in killing as many Jews as possible, and doing it as quickly as possible. The Serbs, 47 Roy Gutman, A Witness to Genocide (New York: Macmillan, 1993). 48 Helsinki Watch, War Crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2 vols. (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1992), I, p. 2. 49 Power, Problem from Hell, Chs. 9 and 11.

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however, wanted to interrogate their Bosnian prisoners, have sadistic fun by torturing them in the cruelest of ways and then kill them with whatever implement was most convenient, perhaps a gun, perhaps a knife or scissors, perhaps a pair of strong hands wrapped around an emaciated neck. If the Germans had used the same approach, they would have needed decades to kill 6 million Jews.50

Across BiH, a total of 750 mass graves have been unearthed after the war, with the highest concentration in and around Prijedor – where Bosniak and Croat civilians were killed or tortured in camps like Omarska.51 It was in Prijedor where Muslims were ordered to wear white arm bands in public, marked just as Jews were by the star of David in Nazi Germany. It is often scale that is said to separate Srebrenica from Prijedor. But the pain of mass violence is borne by individuals – both survivors and perpetrators. The Serb man who eventually led investigators to the Tomašica grave near Prijedor in 2013 is representative of so many Bosnians who have grappled for decades with how to justify, forget or atone for their own roles in the 1992–5 conflict. He had participated in the burial of a Bosniak man and woman there twenty years earlier and told investigators that he suffered nightmares for years as he held on to this secret, but sleeps better now, having revealed the truth.52 Of course, it is not only Serbs in BiH who must reckon with the past, and it is important to emphasise that some Serbs acted as saviours and ‘upstanders’ during the war.53 Perhaps these acts and voices should be more central to the work of those of us who study genocide; for we tend to give far more importance to the crime and its co-ordinators than to those who resisted.

Bibliographic Note Among the first texts about the war and genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) that were widely referenced were historian Noel Malcolm’s Bosnia: A Short History (1994), security analyst Norman Cigar’s Genocide in Bosnia: The 50 Peter Maass, Love Thy Neighbour: A Story of War (New York: Knopf, 1996), p. 45. 51 The three largest camps were Keraterm, Omarska and Trnopolje. For the number of mass graves see Vesna Bešic,́ ‘Iako je u Bosni i Hercegovini pronađeno 750 masovnih grobnica, dio nestalih nikada necé biti pronađen’, 21 July 2018, www.aa.com.tr/ba/ba lkan/iako-je-u-bih-prona%C4%91eno-750-masovnih-grobnica-dio-nestalih-nikada-ne% C4%87e-biti-prona%C4%91en/1209935. 52 This story was widely published in Bosnian media and it was conveyed by an investigator from the Commission on Missing Persons of BiH. See ‘Kako je otkrivena Tomašica: Srbin koji je otkrio tajnu zauzvrat tražio kabanicu’, Radio Sarajevo, 8 November 2013. 53 See Svetlana Broz, Good People in an Evil Time (New York: Other Press, 2004).

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Policy of ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ (1995) and religious scholar Michael Sells’s The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (1996). Malcolm’s book was particularly important because it countered the ‘ancient hatreds’ theory put forth by Robert Kaplan in Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History (1993). Malcolm illustrated how the destabilisation of BiH that culminated in genocide could be traced back to the more recent past; a view shared by Cigar, whose text focused on the genocidal plans of Serbs, describing their strategy and tactics. Sells’s deconstruction of the religious and cultural myths that contributed to the ‘othering’ of Muslims by both Catholics and Orthodox Christians made his an important early book on this subject. Dževad Karahasan also published an early and powerful text, Sarajevo, Exodus of a City (1993), in which he argued that the siege and destruction of Sarajevo was meant to destroy not only the city, per se, but the idea of the city and thus of a multicultural BiH. A decade later, Chip Gagnon authored a key text on the topic of ‘ethnic wars’ in the Balkans, breaking down stereotyped understandings of these conflicts in The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s (2004). The book is essential for understanding how political elites in Serbia and Croatia exploited ethnic identity. Two more volumes that skilfully analyse the complex path to destruction that brought a multi-ethnic Bosnian society to war are Bosnia and the Destruction of Cultural Heritage by Helen Walasek et al. (2015) and Islam and Bosnia: Conflict Resolution and Foreign Policy in Multi-Ethnic States, edited by Maya Shatzmiller (2002). Walasek et al. document the systematic destruction of religious and cultural heritage in BiH, describing the cultural genocide recognised by Raphael Lemkin as an element of the ‘gravest of all crimes’. The compilation offered by Shatzmiller takes a more multidisciplinary approach, examining the war from the perspectives of international relations, conflict resolution and history, but also psychology, anthropology and cultural studies. The chapter by András Riedlemayer, ‘From the Ashes: The Past and Future of Bosnia’s Cultural Heritage’ is particularly significant, as it lays out the case that cultural genocide indeed occurred in BiH. Several texts are essential to understanding the role of the international community in the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the wars that followed. Samantha Power’s ‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide (2002) places the genocide in BiH in the context of other cases, while exploring the (lack of) response to the crime by US officials. Other noteworthy books on this topic include James Gow’s Triumph and the Lack of Will (1997), Derek Chollet’s The Road to the Dayton Accords: 645

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A Study of American Statecraft (2005) and Carol Hodge’s Britain and the Balkans (2006). Journalists who covered the war in BiH made up for an absence of contemporaneous academic research on genocide, and for those new to studying the Bosnian genocide, and the breakup of Yugoslavia, could begin with Yugoslavia: Death of the Nation (1996) by Laura Silber and Allan Little. It is a concise and evidence-based analysis focused on the dynamics of political power in the federation, first among Yugoslav communists and then among nationalist political elites. In Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War (1996), Peter Maass paints a vivid picture of the genocide in BiH that was strikingly personal while also reflecting universal realities about the potency of political manipulation. David Rohde, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for his reporting on the Srebrenica genocide, discusses the dynamics of the war in The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica: Europe’s Worst Massacre since World War II (1997), but also highlights the ways in which the international community acted as a bystander to genocide. In Prime Time Crime (2003), Bosnian journalist Kemal Kurspahić also looked back at the war with some temporal distance. He emphasised the role of nationalist propaganda produced by all ‘sides’ but found that multi-ethnic narratives and the continued existence of independent media had contributed to higher levels of wartime tolerance in territories controlled by the legitimate government of BiH. War crimes trials at the ICTY have also inspired a body of literature, in which Nena Tromp’s book Prosecuting Slobodan Miloševic:́ The Unfinished Trial (2016) is a key text. Tromp was chief analyst for the prosecution team in the Milošević trial and in the book she meticulously details and contextualises evidence presented in court to prove his guilt. In Courting Democracy in Bosnia and Herzegovina (2010), Lara J. Nettelfield looked at the broader impact of the ICTY, particularly the way Tribunal judgments and decisions have been understood in Bosnian society and instrumentalised in Bosnian politics. Finally, two autoethnographies by authors who survived the Srebrenica genocide are essential reading. The Last Refuge: A True Story of War, Survival and Life (2019) by Hasan Nuhanović chronologically documents the fate of his family in 1992 and 1993, describing their flight down the Drina River to the ‘safe area’ of Srebrenica, illustrating in real and tragic experiences that a genocidal process was underway in BiH in 1992. In Postcards from the Grave (2005), Emir Suljagić chronicles his life, and that of his family, for the duration of the war (1992–5), including the fall of the enclave.

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The Rwandan Genocide in Context scott straus

Introduction The 1994 genocide in Rwanda has become a canonical case of the second half of the twentieth century. In three months, an interim government orchestrated the massacre of at least 500,000 Tutsi civilians. Known for its speed and participatory nature, as well as the failure of international actors to stop the violence, the Rwandan case is a touchstone for debates about the causes, prevention and aftermath of genocide. This chapter presents an overview of the history preceding the genocide as well as of the event itself. In addition, the chapter summarises the violence against non-Tutsi Rwandans during the genocide and thereafter, mass violence that amounts to crimes against humanity.

Historical Background Rwanda is a small, landlocked country in Central Africa. (See Map 27.1.) Prior to 1994, the country had some 7 million inhabitants with more than 90 per cent living in rural areas and dependent on smallholder agriculture and animal husbandry. Demographically, the country was divided into three principal ethnic categories: Hutu who comprised 85–90% of the population; Tutsi, 10–14%; and Twa, 1–2%. The history of the ethnic categories is complex but crucial. Current scholarship indicates that the distinction between Hutu and Tutsi was an internal one that gradually took on significance within the Rwandan monarchy, especially in the nineteenth century. In general, Hutus were considered lower-status farmers while Tutsi were higher-status herders.1

1 Jan Vansina, Antecedents to Modern Rwanda: The Nyiginya Kingdom (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005).

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Map 27.1 UN map of Rwanda. (United Nations Cartographic Section)

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Outside the kingdom, clans and lineages were the most significant markers of status and differentiation, but as the kingdom expanded into liminal areas the significance of the terms Hutu and Tutsi sharpened.2 That said, even within the nineteenth-century kingdom, there was regional diversity and identification; both groups spoke the same language, Kinyarwanda, and practised the same religion. Furthermore, the categories were fluid: with enough wealth, status and animals, Hutus could become Tutsis.3 In sum, the scholarship considers the difference one of status and economic activity, rather than race and ethnicity. Whatever the exact origin of the terms, the European encounter with the region had a definitive impact on how the categories Hutu and Tutsi became understood. Impressed with the hierarchical organisation of the Rwandan kingdom and under the influence of local Rwandan informants, the first Europeans interpreted the social cleavage through race. In particular, they defined the Hutu and Tutsi distinction as a racial one, hypothesising that the Tutsis were a superior race of ‘Caucasoid’ (white-like) cattle-herders who had descended from North Africa and the Middle East to dominate over the more-lowly Bantu ‘negroid’ farmers.4 That racial interpretation became the cornerstone for colonial rule in the country. First German and then Belgian colonial authorities sought to rule through what was in their minds a pre-existing Tutsi power structure. But through their interventions – selecting Tutsis for European education and training, rationalising, bureaucratising and monetarising the previously complex domestic authority structure, and systematically elevating Tutsi to positions of power within the colonial administration – the European experience widened the Hutu and Tutsi social cleavage in Rwandan society.5 The European interlude also racialised and institutionalised the differences between the groups, both through the introduction of quasi-scientific racial measurements and the introduction in the 1930s of personal identity cards 2 Catharine Newbury, ‘Ethnicity in Rwanda: the case of Kinyaga’, Africa 48:1 (1978), 17–43. 3 Alison des Forges and David Newbury, Defeat Is the Only Bad News: Rwanda under Musinga, 1896–1931 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011); David Newbury, ‘Precolonial Burundi and Rwanda: local loyalties, regional royalties’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 34:2 (2001), 255–314. 4 Jean-Pierre Chrétien, The Great Lakes of Africa: Two Thousand Years of History trans. Scott Straus (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2003). 5 René Lemarchand, Rwanda and Burundi (New York: Pall Mall, 1970); Catharine Newbury, The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda, 1860–1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Jean Gualbert Rumiya, ‘La révolution socio-politique de 1959’, in Les relations interethniques au Rwanda à la lumière de l’aggression d’Octobre 1990, ed. F. X. Bangamwabo, E. Munyantwali, J. D. Nduwayezu et al. (Ruhengeri: Editions Universitaires du Rwanda, 1991), pp. 139–208.

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that marked ethnicity. These interventions had the effect of stabilising and essentialising previously more fluid identities that had been context-specific – that is, they had been associated with the hierarchical and status system within the Rwandan royal court towards the end of the nineteenth century.6 Given the introduction of new inequities in the colonial system, as well as often coercive and taxation powers provided to Tutsi chiefs, the European intervention also had the effect of increasing the resentment attached to the categories, in particular on the part of Hutus towards Tutsis.7

The Hutu Social Revolution The initial arrangements practised by the European authorities changed after World War Two. Belgium faced pressure from the United Nations to prepare its trust territory for self-rule. Beginning in the mid-1950s, Belgium introduced reforms that allowed for greater Hutu participation in the local administration and for greater Hutu elite education. In this period, new missionaries in the Catholic Church also developed sympathy for the up-to-then oppressed Hutu majority, and Europeans encouraged Hutus to articulate their grievances to a wider audience, in particular in Belgium.8 The terminal colonial period thus had three principal players: (1) an increasingly educated and aspiring Hutu counter-elite who sought to change the then racially codified distribution of power and privilege; (2) an entrenched Tutsi elite who sought to contain the threats to the existing order; and (3) the Belgian authorities, as well as the clergy, who while initially enacting gradual reforms that allowed for greater Hutu representation and power, eventually came to back the Hutu counter-elite. Facing an increasingly aspirant Hutu counter-elite and a Belgian administration evidently sympathetic to such concerns, the response of elite Tutsis was to downplay the importance of domestic ethnic differences and to encourage a swift transfer of power from Belgium to Rwanda, thereby allowing the then domestic governing elite to continue to hold power. In response, the Hutu counter-elite came to insist on the importance of ethnic categories and to infuse the language of freedom and justice into the ethnic terms. The clearest manifestation of this dynamic was a document called the ‘Bahutu Manifesto’, which was drafted and signed by a group of nine Hutu intellectuals in 1957. The Manifesto was written in anticipation of a visiting 6 Newbury, ‘Precolonial Burundi and Rwanda’. 7 Newbury, The Cohesion of Oppression. 8 Lemarchand, Rwanda and Burundi, p. 107; Timothy Longman, Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 70.

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UN mission and in response to an earlier ‘Statement of Views’ from elite Tutsis in the country’s High Council. The latter defined the political problem as one between domestic elites and the Belgians. In so doing, the High Council statement effectively denied the relevance of the internal cleavage between Hutu and Tutsi. By contrast, the Bahutu Manifesto defined the problem facing Rwanda before independence as an ‘indigenous racial’ one, in which ‘monopolies’ held by Tutsis had to be countered. The Manifesto thus determined race as the marker of oppression and therefore of liberation, and it remains a key text in the articulation of Hutu nationalism. The events that led ultimately to a formal reversal of power took place in a tense and polarised period from 1957 to 1962, and they involved a number of critical actions from the three central actors (the Hutu aspirant political class, the Tutsi old guard and the Belgians). Excellent detailed accounts reveal clear nuances and multiple voices within each bloc.9 But to summarise: in July 1959, the Tutsi king died unexpectedly after receiving an antibiotic shot from a Belgian doctor. His death crystallised the fears of many Tutsis, hardened their political positions and ultimately increased Tutsi elite alienation from the Belgians. In November of the same year, Tutsi party youth attacked a leading Hutu politician, in turn leading to a counter-attack against Tutsi elites by Hutu crowds, further counter-attacks by Tutsis against Hutu political figures and yet more violence against Tutsi families. Ultimately, the Belgians intervened to stop the violence and, in its aftermath, radically restructured the administration. Whereas before the November 1959 events, every chief was Tutsi and all but ten sub-chiefs were Tutsi, afterwards the Belgians allotted half the chiefdoms to Hutus and more than half of the subchiefdoms to Hutus.10 The Belgians clearly interpreted events through a racial prism. Writing years later, the Belgian colonel who led a military operation to stop the violence referred to a revolution in which Hutus – a ‘population oppressed, pushed to the end of their patience and silence’ to revolt against their ‘Tutsi masters’.11 In 1960, communal elections were held. The main Tutsi-led party boycotted them, and the main Hutu-led party, Parmehutu, won an overwhelming majority of 74 per cent of the vote. The leader of the party, Grégoire 9 Lemarchand, Rwanda and Burundi; Filip Reyntjens, Pouvoir et droit au Rwanda. Droit public et évolution politique, 1916–1973 (Tervuren: Royal Museum of Central Africa, 1985); Newbury, The Cohesion of Oppression. 10 Reyntjens, Pouvoir et droit au Rwanda, p. 269. 11 Guy Logiest, Mission au Rwanda (Brussels: Didier Hatier, 1988), p. 7.

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Kayibanda, a former journalist who was one of the authors of the Hutu Manifesto, became president in 1961, the same year that the Belgians and leading Hutu political figures announced the formation of a republic and the end of the monarchy. In July 1962, Rwanda achieved formal independence.

The First Republic: 1962–1973 Kayibanda launched a number of economic, social, cultural and institutional initiatives.12 He emphasised tolerance, discipline, work and austerity.13 But the new president did not like political opposition. Kayibanda’s MDRParmehutu party quickly moved to destroy political challengers, both Hutu and Tutsi, and by 1965 Rwanda became a single-party state with only the MDR-Parmehutu allowed to exist.14 Kayibanda’s tenure exhibited strong regional favouritism, and his home area of Gitarama was the regime’s centre of gravity from where key powerholders in the government came.15 There were also numerous personalised rivalries and divisions.16 The regime is thus accurately described as authoritarian, but also regionalist and fractious. Kayibanda’s state also was pro-Hutu and anti-Tutsi. Ideologically, Kayibanda positioned himself as the champion of a democratic revolution, which would serve the Hutu masses and protect those gains against feudalism. Tutsis generally faced discrimination, and violence when they resisted. In 1962, some exiled Tutsis began armed incursions on Rwanda, which triggered reprisals against Tutsis inside the country. By 1963, more than 100,000 refugees were living abroad. A decisive moment came after an armed incursion in December 1963 from exiled Tutsis. In that operation, Tutsi exiles entered Rwanda from Burundi, rallied Tutsis living in Rwanda, and then marched towards Kigali before they were stopped by Rwandan troops with Belgian assistance. In the aftermath, the regime assassinated political elites, and with official encouragement in one region there were mass killings of as many 14,000 Tutsi civilians.17 Thereafter Tutsis were subject to capricious violence at times.18 The Kayibanda government eventually fell in 1973. Internally divided between north and south, between landholders and peasants, and between 12 Grégoire Kayibanda, Le Président Kayibanda vous parle (Kigali: République du Rwanda, 1964). 13 Ibid. 14 Reyntjens, Pouvoir et droit au Rwanda, p. 449. 15 Ibid., p. 498. 16 Lemarchand, Rwanda and Burundi, p. 262; Reyntjens, Pouvoir et droit au Rwanda, pp. 479–98. 17 Reyntjens, Pouvoir et droit au Rwanda; Scott Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), pp. 184–8. 18 Lemarchand, Rwanda and Burundi, p. 256.

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personalities, the regime had persisted largely through authoritarian control and centralisation.19 But in 1973, a number of issues converged to bring that dictatorship to an end. One key issue was that, according to the constitution, Kayibanda could not seek another term. Another issue was the genocide perpetrated against Hutus in Burundi in 1972, in which 100,000 to 200,000 civilians were killed. In Rwanda in early 1973, Hutu students and some professionals purged Tutsis from schools, universities, businesses and public administration. The instability eventually culminated in a military coup on 5 July. Juvénal Habyarimana, then the head of the military, emerged as the country’s new strongman. Rwanda’s Second Republic was born.20

The Second Republic: 1973–1994 Habyarimana ruled Rwanda from 1973 until the start of the genocide in 1994. On the one hand, he promoted a vision of Rwanda on the basis of unity, reconciliation, peace and even Tutsi integration. He explicitly wanted to move Rwanda away from the divisions that he claimed had characterised the Kayibanda state. Rwandan and outside observers attest to the ways in which anti-Tutsi sentiment decreased, at least until 1990.21 Habyarimana called his efforts a ‘moral’ revolution on which the Second Republic was based. On the other hand, Habyarimana clearly endorsed the Revolution. He framed his presidency as an extension of the democratic and masses-based political change that had occurred at independence. In these ways, Habyarimana embraced and perpetuated Rwanda’s founding narrative of a Hutu democratic majority that had overcome an oppressive feudalist Tutsi monarchy. Habyarimana was torn between his two positions – one in which he fashioned himself an expansive, inclusive, for-the-good-of-the-country president and one in which he tenaciously held to the fundamental principle of the Revolution, that Hutus should rule in the name of the majority. Habyarimana shifted the centre of gravity from south-central to northwest Rwanda, his own home region. Habyarimana also continued to restrict the political arena and to rule with limited executive constraint, at least until the 19 Lemarchand, Rwanda and Burundi, pp. 228–40; Reyntjens, Pouvoir et droit au Rwanda, pp. 479–95. 20 See Straus, The Order of Genocide, pp. 188–91 for a summary. 21 Danielle de Lame, A Hill among a Thousand: Transformations and Ruptures in Rural Rwanda, trans. Helen Arnold (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005); James Gasana, Rwanda: du parti-état à l’état-garnison (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002); André Guichaoua, From War to Genocide: Criminal Politics in Rwanda, 1990–1994, trans. Don Webster (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015); Valens Kajeguhakwa, Rwanda: de la terre de paix à la terre de sang et après? (Paris: Éditions Remi Perrin, 2001).

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1990s. After Kayibanda, Rwanda remained a one-party state, albeit with a new party – the Mouvement révolutionnaire nationale pour le développement (MRND), which Habyarimana created in 1975. Every Rwandan belonged to the MRND. Some describe a virtual merging between the party, state and society. James Gasana, an opposition figure and former minister of defence, calls Rwanda under Habyarimana a ‘party-state’.22 At least through the mid1980s, Rwanda’s economic and infrastructural development improved.23 Habyarimana’s focus was rural development.24 The regime, well-liked by donors, opened itself to the outside, and enjoyed a favourable international reputation.25 Nonetheless, ethnicity did not disappear from social life or from the political lexicon of the state. One of the central tools for regulating ethnicity was the introduction of ethnic and regional quotas. Called a policy of equilibrium, such policies limited representation of Tutsis in secondary schools, universities and government posts to their official proportion in the national population; quotas also served as a vehicle for the advancement of northerners. The idea was to redress Tutsi and southerners’ overrepresentation, but to do so in a regulated fashion rather than by the violent methods of 1973. According to one Tutsi observer, Habyarimana and his close allies believed that they had brought peace to the Tutsi population. Officially, Tutsis were welcomed in the MRND and were considered citizens, but without a place in the political sphere.26 In the army, there was a Tutsi colonel, two Tutsi lieutenant colonels, and other officers.27 Before the crisis of the 1990s, there were token Tutsi ministers and one Tutsi prefect, even if there were no Tutsi burgomasters, the key officials at the local level. In sum, Habyarimana’s policies continued to institutionalise and maintain ethnicity as a fundamental political and social category in Rwandan society. The regime remained, André Guichaoua writes, ‘undeniably “Hutu” to the extent that its legitimacy was premised on the exercise of power by the ethnic majority’.28 At the same time, the idea was to find some space for Tutsi 22 Gasana, Rwanda. 23 Pierre Erny, Rwanda: clés pour comprendre le calvaire d’un peuple (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994), p. 76. 24 Guichaoua, From War to Genocide; Philip Verwimp, ‘Peasant ideology and genocide in Rwanda under Habyarimana’, in Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda: New Perspectives, ed. Susan Cook (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2006), pp. 1–40. 25 De Lame, A Hill among a Thousand, p. 61; Peter Uvin, Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda (West Hartford: Kumarian Press, 1998). 26 Kajeguhakwa, Rwanda, pp. 159, 172. 27 Gasana, Rwanda, p. 33. 28 Guichaoua, From War to Genocide, p. 18.

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representation in line with the motto of ‘peace and national unity’ that characterised Habyarimana’s stated ideology.

Into the Crisis Even before the acute crisis of the 1990s, deep problems and fissures within the Habyarimana regime were apparent, especially in the second half of the 1980s. Local-level studies show increased disaffection with the direction of the country by the late 1980s and into the early 1990s. There was a famine in the late 1980s, general social degradation and a rise of banditry and insubordination.29 Danielle de Lame found increasing inequality in rural areas with growing resentment of local elites who, often possessing connections to the party or state, manipulated their privilege for personal gains.30 At the national level, the core group surrounding the president became increasingly narrow and localised to the northwest, in particular the Gisenyi area from where Habyarimana and his wife came.31 This further alienated Rwandan elites from other areas of the country. In short, as Guichaoua persuasively documents, by the end of the 1980s Rwanda was in a crisis, with a general sense of the end of an era – a perception of coming change that the hard core around the president prepared to combat step by step.32 Rwanda’s crisis escalated sharply in the early 1990s with twin direct threats to the ruling MRND elite and the network around the president. On the one hand, the ruling elite faced a newly legalised, primarily Hutu, political opposition. On the other hand, the regime faced a significant armed threat from the newly formed Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). Composed principally of Tutsi descendants of refugees who had fled Rwanda in earlier episodes of violence, the RPF critically came to include some high-level Hutu dissidents from the Habyarimana period and also won recruits from the Rwandan domestic Tutsi population. The RPF attacked the country from northern Uganda on 1 October 1990. The key military leadership in the RPF had experience of fighting alongside Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni in his ultimately successful insurgency, and the Rwandan officers occupied key posts in the Ugandan intelligence and military institutions. The RPF also benefited from a sophisticated system of contributions from the mostly Tutsi elite diaspora. In short, the RPF constituted 29 Jean-Paul Kimonyo, Rwanda: un génocide populaire (Paris: Karthala, 2008). 30 De Lame, A Hill among a Thousand. 31 Guichaoua, From War to Genocide.

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32 Ibid.

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a motivated, experienced, decently financed and ultimately disciplined fighting force. However, the first major operation ended poorly for the RPF. The overall commander was killed on the second day of fighting, followed within the month by his two replacements. By the end of the first month the Rwandan army succeeded in a counter-attack, and the RPF insurgents scattered into a northern territory. In November 1990, Major Paul Kagame returned from the United States where he had been training, pulled together the RPF’s remaining forces in the northwest forest of Virunga; resupplied, they recruited from Tutsis in neighbouring states. Kagame also adopted guerrilla tactics rather than a conventional approach. The RPF then succeeded in a number of attacks in 1991 and 1992.33 Meanwhile, the Rwandan army sizeably increased its fighting forces and won military support from France and Zaire. While the RPF claimed to be fighting a nepotistic, corrupt, racist and authoritarian regime, key actors within the Habyarimana government countered by depicting the RPF as nostalgic Tutsis who would never accept the reality of the Revolution; they also made an implicit link between Tutsis in the interior as accomplices of Tutsis on the exterior. These arguments, which drew on the founding narrative of the Revolution, became the centrepiece of the ideological fight against the RPF. The connections between internal and external Tutsis also translated into repression. After what is widely believed to be a staged attack on Kigali on the night of 4 October 1990, thousands of civilians were arrested, 90 per cent of whom were Tutsi.34 Tutsi civilians were also killed in northwest Rwanda in October 1990 and again in 1991 and 1992.35 A key document in the run-up to the genocide is the military commission report from late 1991. Called the ‘Bagosora Commission’ after Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, who chaired the committee, the Commission was convened by President Habyarimana. Composed of senior brass in the military, the group was tasked with establishing a plan to defeat the enemy on the military, media and political fronts.36 The report in turn commenced with a definition of the enemy, depicted as belonging to two categories:

33 Ibid.; Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton University Press, 2001). 34 Guichaoua, From War to Genocide. 35 Ibid.; Straus, The Order of Genocide. 36 Excerpts of the report are available on André Guichaoua’s primary documents’ website for his book: http://rwandadelaguerreaugenocide.univ-paris1.fr/?cat=20.

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The Rwandan Genocide in Context 1. The principal enemy is the Tutsi on the inside or outside [who is] extremist and nostalgic for power, who NEVER recognized and STILL DOES NOT recognize the realities of the Social Revolution of 1959 and who wants to reconquer power in Rwanda by any means, including arms. 2. The partisan of the ENI is any person who helps the principal ENI.

At the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), where he was questioned about the document, Bagosora called the military commission an effort to design a strategy to defeat the enemy.37 Some argue that the Commission report is a statement of genocidal intent, present in the country as early as 1991. Like the ICTR decision in the Bagosora case,38 I disagree. Rather, the document shows the ways in which the founding narrative of the Revolution explicitly shaped the thinking of military elites. The fight was not a simple military one, but against those who would take away Hutu freedom. Finally, the claim was also that the Tutsis of the present want the same things as the Tutsis of the past. That claim – Tutsis have the same preferences across generations – is essential to the logic of genocide because it allows Tutsis to be constructed as unchangeable. Battlefield dynamics also mattered, and there the RPF showed itself to be strong and strengthening. Although the French initially helped repulse the RPF and later helped to train the Rwanda government military forces, the RPF gained a foothold in the north of the country, and succeeded in launching significant attacks in 1991, 1992 and 1993, once the rebels had regrouped under Kagame’s leadership. They also began recruiting from among internal Rwandan opponents of the regime, in particular resident Tutsis, as well as Tutsis living in the diaspora. The rebels’ strength is one reason why the terms of the 1993 peace agreement were as favourable to them as they were.39

37 Transcript de l’interrogatoire principal de Théoneste Bagosora, procès Bagosora et alii, TPIR, Arusha, 26 et 27 octobre 2005, p. 20, http://rwandadelaguerreaugenocide.univparis1.fr/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Annexe_7.pdf. 38 ICTR, ‘The Prosecutor vs. Théoneste Bagosora, Gratien Kabiligi, Aloys Ntabakuze, and Analtole Nsengiyumva, Judgment and Sentence’, Case No. ICTR-98-41-T, 2008. 39 In addition, the Habyarimana government was in debt, and it faced pressure from donors to concede. By contrast, the RPF’s base of support was outside the country, and it faced less pressure to concede. These and related dynamics are well laid out in a now declassified memo by Rick Eihrenreich of the US State Department’s intelligence programme, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB458/docs/DOCUMEN T%202.pdf.

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The Arusha Accords, Hutu Power and the Process of Escalation The Arusha Accords in August 1993 were a victory for the RPF. The author of the most careful study of the Arusha process attributes the RPF’s success to the discipline of its negotiating team as well as its superior military position. Diplomatic efforts also favoured democratisation and multi-party governance.40 The government side was weakened after it announced the creation of a multi-party coalition government in 1992, and indeed the government’s delegation was initially led by an opposition figure.41 Under the terms of the agreement, the MRND only constituted 33% of the new Broad-Based Transitional Government; government forces were to constitute 50% of officer positions in the military and 60% of ordinary troops. Many influential figures in the ruling party rejected the basic terms of the agreement. They saw the agreement as a sell-out; many observers conclude that the terms of the agreement polarised and radicalised segments within the ruling party, in particular.42 Even prior to the signing of the agreement, however, senior elites within the MRND began to develop a strategy to counter the gains that the RPF was making on the battlefield and in the negotiations. A central pillar was bipolarisation. That is, the elite around the president – in particular, the inner core or ‘akazu’43 – sought to reduce the playing field in Rwanda to two: an anti-RPF, pro-Hutu bloc that defended the Revolution and a pro-RPF bloc that was against it. The basic intuition among the leaders, which was consistent with the country’s founding narrative, is that the party’s strength lay with the masses. If the MRND could establish a ‘pro-Hutu’ coalition, the party had an electoral advantage given the overwhelming demographic superiority of Hutus in the country.44 There was a post-Arusha parliamentary political calculus as well: faced with a minority of votes in parliament, if the MRND could ‘convert’ politicians in opposition parties, it could reverse the maths of the Arusha Accords to form a majority.45 A central strategy became then to divide the Hutu-dominant opposition parties into ‘pro-Hutu’ and ‘pro-RPF camps’. This is the origins of the idea of ‘Hutu Power’, or a political coalition of pro-Hutu parties. 40 Bruce Jones, Peacemaking in Rwanda: The Dynamics of Failure (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2001). 41 Guichaoua, From War to Genocide. 42 Ibid.; Jones, Peacemaking in Rwanda. 43 Akazu in Kinyarwanda means ‘little house’ and is the term that refers to the insiders around the president and his wife. 44 Guichaoua, From War to Genocide. 45 Ibid.

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Arusha hastened and reinforced the bipolarisation strategy. Arusha also reinforced an electoral emphasis, given that MRND leaders thought their comparative power lay with the electorate, rather than the battlefield or the negotiations process, which they felt the RPF had manipulated. Turning to the masses became a strategy to avoid the negative terms of the peace deal.46 The bipolarisation strategy ultimately worked. One catalyst was Burundi. In October 1993, a few months after Arusha was signed, Tutsi officers assassinated the first Hutu president, Melchior Ndadaye, who had been democratically elected. His assassination galvanised Rwandan political elites, both in and outside Habyarimana’s party, to claim in a variety of ways and in a variety of forums that Tutsis globally would refuse to accept democracy and do whatever they could to subvert the majority.47 The RPF was the other big player in the process of escalation. The main claim of the MRND coalition was that the RPF wanted to take power by force. And, indeed, at some point – possibly triggered by the actions of their opponents – the RPF pursued, if not opted definitively for, a military solution. One other dimension that needs to be underlined is the way in which the state and the ruling party in particular, but not exclusively, invested in alternative institutions. These included a civilian defence force and militia training. The efforts were consistent with the idea that the MRND camp’s advantage lay with the people and the idea that, through Arusha and the formation of coalition governments in 1992 and 1993, they had lost control of key institutions.48 The same logic is true for the MRND’s investments in an alternative radio station, Radio Télévision Milles Collines (RTLM), which became a font of pro-Hutu, anti-Tutsi rhetoric. In the last few months of 1993 and the first three months of 1994, the state was effectively not functioning. Opposition parties boycotted a presidential swearing in ceremony in December 1993. The prime minister was from the opposition, but other members of her MDR party did not recognise her. Other opposition parties were similarly deeply divided. The MRND leaders and especially the RPF were both preparing for war, and accusing each other of doing the same. And the political rhetoric was full of violent innuendo and foreboding. The situation was exceptionally tense, and a rhetoric of a threatened Hutu majority whose fundamental political project was in danger had taken hold.49 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. 49 To appreciate the depth of distrust and near collapse of formal institutions, see the primary documents from this period available at http://rwandadelaguerreaugenocide .univ-paris1.fr/?cat=12, esp. Annexes 35–42.

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The Onset of Genocide and Patterns of Violence The catalyst that pushed the logic of violence to genocide was the assassination of President Habyarimana on 6 April 1994, and the quick resumption of war. Who killed Habyarimana remains hotly debated. One answer is the RPF.50 They had the most incentive to assassinate the president; they were clearly readier to fight and more committed to fighting than were the proMRND forces; the RPF favoured a military strategy; their main plan was to launch a quick, decapitating strike and secure the country as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, from 6 April 1994 government forces were on the defensive. In the plane crash that killed the president, the pro-MRND camp not only lost the head of state, but also other elite military leaders, including General Déogratias Nsabimana, the chief of staff of the Rwandan army, and Colonel Elie Sagatwa, the head of the army’s elite Presidential Guard unit. The then minister of defence was out of the country. In short, the government military side faced a vacuum of leadership in both the political and military arenas. Into that vacuum jumped MRND hardliners and the key power brokers who had surrounded the president, many related to his wife, Agathe Habyarimana. A key figure was Bagosora, a retired colonel who had chaired the military commission in 1991. Other major figures were Mathieu Ngirumpatse, Edouard Karamera and Joseph Nzizorera on the MRND party side, as well as other actors, such as Protais Zigiranyirazo, the first lady’s eldest brother. These actors took the principal decisions that set in motion the genocide.51 They first orchestrated assassinations of leading opposition figures, including the prime minister; they engineered a new government composed uniquely of pro-MRND/Hutu Power politicians; and then they unleashed the force of the state to attack and murder Tutsi civilians across the territory still in government hands. One alternative interpretation is that the MRND hardliners believed that Habyarimana had betrayed them and their political project by signing the Arusha Accords, given its negative terms for the ruling party. They thus removed the president, blamed his death on the RPF, and implemented a plan to eliminate the Tutsi threat once and for all. For a number of reasons,

50 I support this: Straus, The Order of Genocide and Making and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership, and Genocide in Modern Africa (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015). 51 This statement is made on the basis of the collected ICTR decisions to date, as well as the work of Guichaoua and my ongoing research into the Rwanda case.

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while plausible, this alternative interpretation remains weak – at least on currently available information. The central problems concern the disorganisation that characterised those would-be planners immediately following the assassination. The hardliners did not develop a clear military response to the RPF; they sought to install a military government, but failed; and while they acted in a determined and vengeful fashion, they did not appear to have a clearly worked-out plan in place ahead of time. Habyarimana was the party leader and standard-bearer. Killing him was also a major blow to the MRND’s future success. If the plan was to defeat the RPF militarily, the assassination was a major strategic error. Habyarimana was the formal head of the military; moreover, on the plane were other military elites, including Sagatwa, a key ‘akazu’ insider. The military response overall was one of confusion, disarray, and division – at least initially and in sharp contrast to the clear military preparedness and organisation on the RPF side.52 Finally, the analysis that suggests that the Arusha Accords were the cause neglects the period following the signing of the agreement in which the MRND successfully undermined the political maths of the accords and divided the opposition. By early April, the RPF looked to have lost the political momentum, rather than the other way around. Whoever was responsible for killing Habyarimana, the events that followed are clear. Immediately after the president’s death, the key actors within the presidential camp – the MRND leaders, members of the presidential family and others in the akazu – set out to take control of the government. Bagosora was the lead public actor, acting both on behalf of the presidential family and seemingly with his own political ambitions. On the night of 6 April, Bagosora pulled together a military crisis committee, which met on two occasions with the military high command. Bagosora sought to transform the crisis committee into the country’s ruling authority, in effect rupturing the terms of the Arusha Accords. However, the military leadership rejected the proposal, arguing that the committee’s role should be limited to securing the country. Politically, they argued, the law should be followed and the terms of the Arusha Accords respected. The committee in turn rejected Bagosora and elected General Augustin Ndindiliyimana as head of the crisis committee.53 52 The interpretation in this paragraph builds heavily on the work of Guichaoua, From War to Genocide. It is also consistent with my 2006 book as well as the ICTR decisions in the Military I and MRND trials. 53 Ibid.; ICTR 2008.

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Thwarted by the military high command, the hardliners associated with the presidential camp sought alternative means. In particular, on the night of 6–7 April, they orchestrated the elimination of the main political rivals in the opposition, including Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana.54 The president’s extended family apparently wanted revenge, and they also wanted to destroy the chance of any coalition coming to power that did not represent Hutu Power.55 On that first evening, Tutsis were also killed as RPF accomplices in Kigali and Gisenyi.56 Given how quickly Tutsis were killed following the assassination, some interpret that as evidence of a genocidal plan in place. But a generalised, nationwide campaign to murder Tutsis had not yet taken hold. The political assassinations set the stage for the announcement of a new interim government, which the military high command formally accepted on the evening of 8 April. The key players who organised the composition of the new government were the MRND leaders Karamera, Nzizorera and Ngirumpatse, as well as Bagosora.57 The composition formally respected the terms of the Arusha Accords in the sense that it included members of the opposition in a broad-based government. But, in reality, the interim government was composed primarily of politicians from the Hutu Power factions of each of the non-MRND parties. Jean Kambanda of the MDR was named prime minister. Théodore Sindikubwabo, an MRND politician from the south, was named president. As a ‘Hutu Power’ government, the interim government embodied the political logic that the MRND had developed to win – that of reconstituting national unity around the ‘majority people’ and to end intra-Hutu rivalries.58 Meanwhile, moderates within the military high command sought to stop the killings and achieve a ceasefire with the RPF, best represented by a public communiqué on 12 April.59 The interim government rejected this initial gesture from the military officers, but so did the RPF, which by this stage was committed to a military path.60 In short, efforts at a ceasefire failed, the moderates were side-lined, and the situation escalated into a direct military confrontation between an advancing and determined RPF and a hardliner government flanked by a significantly internally divided military.61 In that 54 Guichaoua, From War to Genocide. 55 Ibid. 56 ICTR 2008. 57 Guichaoua, From War to Genocide. 58 Ibid. 59 It is reproduced here: http://rwandadelaguerreaugenocide.univ-paris1.fr/wp-content /uploads/2010/01/Annexe_70.pdf. 60 See ibid, esp. General Romeo Dallaire’s deposition, and Guichaoua, From War to Genocide . 61 Guichaoua, From War to Genocide.

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context, the interim government fled Kigali to find a more secure location, setting up shop in Gitarama to the south. Also, 12 April was the turning point in a formal policy of genocide. Until that day, the state’s direction was ambiguous.62 Leaders of the military high command called for moderation and the absence of killing; even the coalition of Hutu Power parties issued a communiqué on 10 April encouraging the population to stop massacres;63 political party leaders – both Hutu and Tutsi – were being killed. There was at least some doubt about who was in control and what the state’s policies were. But after the moderates failed on the 12 April, it became clear that the hardliners associated with the MRND and the Power wings had the upper hand and were in charge.64 They distributed weapons on that day. For them, the strategy became twofold: turn to the population as a last resort to defeat the RPF and impose massive collective punishment on the Tutsis.65 From 12 April forward, on the government side, that strategy dominated, and it was one to which the MRND leadership and interim government committed themselves.66 By 12 April, those in government and the MRND began to openly call on the population to attack Tutsi civilians. In a broadcast aired on state radio and signed by the Ministry of Defence, soldiers, gendarmes and ‘all Rwandans’ were instructed to ‘unite against the enemy, the only enemy and this is the enemy that we have always known . . . it’s the enemy who wants to reinstate the former feudal monarchy’.67 By 14 April, violence against Tutsis had started in most parts of the country. The main hold-out areas were in the south and centre, Butare and Gitarama Prefectures, where there was considerable resistance from Hutus and Tutsis to starting the violence. The hardliners ultimately removed the prefect (the leading regional-level administrative authority) in Butare, deployed the interim president and prime minister to both prefectures, and threatened any Hutus who refused to join the fight against Tutsis. By 21 April, widespread and systematic violence against Tutsi civilians had become the norm in almost every area of the country that had not yet fallen to the rebels.

62 Ibid. 63 See Annex 89, http://rwandadelaguerreaugenocide.univ-paris1.fr/wp-content/uploa ds/2010/01/Annexe_89.pdf. 64 Guichaoua, From War to Genocide. 65 Ibid. 66 Militia leaders consistently claimed they had high-level support, especially from the MRND. See ibid. and Annexes 40, 53, 87 and 91. 67 ICTR 1998, 20; see also Alison des Forges, ‘ Leave None to Tell the Story’: Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999), pp. 202–3.

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For the next two and a half months, the conflict’s broad outlines did not change. In areas under the government’s control, genocide was the order of the day. However, the RPF rebels steadily advanced. By late April, the RPF rebels controlled most of north-central and eastern Rwanda. By the end of May, they controlled most of central Rwanda (though not Kigali, which did not fall until 4 July). By mid-July the rout was complete: three months after Habyarimana’s assassination and the resumption of war, the rump genocidal regime fled into what was then Zaire, taking with them the remnants of the army, the militia, the civilian administration and more than 1 million, primarily Hutu, civilians. Close to another million fled eastward into Tanzania.

Patterns of Mobilisation and Violence at the Local Level Authorities at the top initiated and encouraged widespread violence against Tutsis, and national-level institutions such as the military, the government, the gendarmerie and media institutions played key roles in directly carrying out the violence or in encouraging local actors to attack Tutsi civilians during the genocide period. However, the violence would not have succeeded or taken the form that it did without local-level intermediaries and participants. In examining the country as a whole, there is evident variation in when the violence began in different regions and in the coalitions of actors who led the violence at the local level. With regards to the timing of when the violence started, in general the areas where the violence against Tutsis started earliest were those regions where the ruling MRND was strongest and in particular where Habyarimana and hardliners in the regime had the greatest political support. Also significant was proximity to war fighting; that is, in general areas that were closest to RPF positions in April tended on average to start violence soonest. Thus, the violence started earliest in the capital, the northwest and north – in Kigali, Rural-Kigali, Gisenyi, Ruhengeri and Byumba Prefectures. By contrast, in general the areas that had less support for the MRND and were farther from RPF military positions initiated the violence later, such as Butare in the south and Gitarama Prefectures and parts of Kibuye Prefecture in the west. As for patterns of mobilisation, in general the leaders at the national (or prefectural) level in the government, ruling party and military advocated or encouraged violence against the ‘Tutsi enemy’. They did so in the name of fighting a war and in the name of self-defence – in the name of security, even if the actual war fighting was some distance from where they were located. 664

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The channels of communication were through military, state and political party networks as well as through face-to-face meetings. National leaders also fanned out into the countryside and called public meetings or held private meetings with local leaders. National actors also communicated their message through calls on the radio for vigilance and for citizen participation in the war effort. In describing the enemy and orienting the population, the authorities used different terms. They referred variously to the ‘enemy’, the ‘Tutsi enemy’, ‘there is one enemy, it is the Tutsi’, the Inyenzi, or the Inkotanyi. The last term formally refers to the RPF; Inyenzi is a pejorative term that translates as ‘cockroaches’. In the context of the genocide in 1994, there was widespread understanding among the population that when authorities referred to the ‘enemy’, to the Inkotanyi, or to the Inyenzi they meant the entire Tutsi population. At the subnational level in rural areas, the crisis triggered different responses. In areas with strong support for the deceased president, for the ruling party, or even for Hutu Power, coalitions of local hardliners quickly formed and initiated violence against Tutsi civilians. In other areas, moderates sought to prevent violence from starting. Over time, however, in all areas not yet lost to rebels, hardliners succeeded in undermining moderates, eventually consolidating control. Once they had, communities switched from heightened anxiety and confusion, due to the president’s assassination and resumption of civil war, to participatory and exterminatory violence. The general pattern of mobilisation at the local level was that at the top was a coalition of rural local elites. Rural elites in Rwanda are generally those with positions of status, authority, and/or wealth in the community. Positions of status were generated from being a part of the local state hierarchy, the local political party structure, the clergy, business or the education and health sector. In general, the rural elite had comparatively high levels of education (some high-school education or greater), salaried income or business income, and some position of authority or influence prior to the genocide. Sometimes the rural elite came from well-to-do families or families with representation in the upper echelons of government. In general, such people formed the core leadership in rural communities during the genocide. In contrast to the rural elite were ordinary farmers and shepherds, who formed roughly 90 to 95 per cent (and sometimes more) of the rural population. In general, these Rwandans had little education and little social power. 665

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Alongside the rural elite were those actors who specialised in violence. These could be former army reservists, militia leaders, or even young toughs who during the genocide rose to the top of the hierarchy because of their prowess for violence. In most communities, the rural local elite and the young toughs formed the core nucleus of the genocidal violence. Once that coalition formed, they traversed their communities, recruiting a large number of Hutu men to participate in manhunts of Tutsis or to participate in other forms of ‘self-defence’, such as manning roadblocks. They sometimes referred to the attacks and patrols as ‘work’, in reference to a communal work programme in Rwanda called umuganda, which in non-emergency periods entailed fixing roads, digging ditches and building schools, among other projects. The recruiting most often was done house-to-house, at markets or rural commercial centres, at rural bars, or at meetings called by local authorities. Eventually, through these recruiting efforts and the general dynamics of violence in this period, hundreds of thousands of ordinary Rwandan citizens who had no prior history of violence came to participate in the genocidal violence. Once the violence started, there were four main locations where civilians were killed: (1) at roadblocks, on roads and at public meeting points, such as commercial centres, where Tutsis’ identification cards were inspected or where Tutsis were otherwise identified; (2) in or just outside homes where Tutsis lived or had sought refuge; (3) in fields, marshes or other places, such as banana plantations, where Tutsis hid; and (4) at central congregation points, such as churches, schools, government buildings and hilltops where Tutsis had fled for safety and where they sometimes sought to resist. The largest massacres – sometimes numbering several hundred and even thousands of civilians – occurred at the central congregation points, and they often involved military or paramilitary actors who had modern firearms and grenades.

Drivers of Escalation Rwanda had these two main sources of escalation: a major material military threat and a nationalist founding narrative that framed the war as a fight between two identity groups, one of which deserved to rule and the other of which did not. How decision-making elites understood what Rwanda was for – in this case, for the freedom and power of Hutus in the name of the Revolution – influenced how they interpreted the actions of their opponents in war and how they developed responses.68 68 Straus, Making and Unmaking Nations.

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The policy of genocide emerged over time. The logic of violence reflected the idea that the principal political community was facing a dire, existential threat and that the enemy was an unwinnable and uncontainable identity group. Whether the elites thought that mass violence would help them win, impose a pyrrhic victory or allow them to win in a future round of fighting is difficult to know. All three rationales may have been present, as may have been collective revenge. But the violence had a logic of its own, one that was an expression of how elites framed it – in particular, as an epic struggle between the majority people and a minority bent on their oppression, a framing that was a direct consequence of the country’s founding narrative. Rwanda had other elements that made the perpetration of mass violence possible. First, the state had the organisational capacity and territorial domination to exercise violence in a sustained fashion across time and space. In this case, the means were a centralised state with a penetrating local administration and deep institutions and expectations around popular mobilisation. Although the state was deeply contested in the multi-party era, the administrative structures and the idea of the state remained very strong in the countryside. Moreover, there was a war, an advancing army, a dead president and prime minister, and violence all around. This combination of acute insecurity and an extensive administration, along with a sense of the importance of the state and a broad awareness of identity categories and their salience, drove widespread participation. Rwanda’s founding narrative did not motivate most individual perpetrators, but the terms that they were asked to mobilise around – Hutu self-protection in the context of Tutsi aggression – built on familiar tropes in the society. They resonated, and especially so in the context of a state telling people that and using an effective administration to enforce the order.69

Genocide and Other Patterns of Violence It is difficult to establish precisely how many civilians were killed. Many people were killed in a very short period of time, and no one counted the number of dead as they were killed. During the genocide and war, as well as afterwards, many Rwandans fled the country. After the RPF won control, many Tutsi exiles who had lived abroad returned to the country. Moreover, the numbers killed is controversial in the country and outside it, and 69 This paragraph builds on the argument and evidence presented in Straus, The Order of Genocide.

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statistical records in Rwanda before the genocide and afterwards, as in many African states, have validity problems. The standard international estimate in journalistic and UN reports is 800,000 Tutsis killed in the genocide. However, according to the last government census taken before the genocide (in 1991) Rwanda only had 600,000 Tutsis living in the country. Given Rwanda’s population growth of about 3 per cent, there may have been as many as 660,000 Tutsis in Rwanda at the time of the genocide. It is possible that government officials or Tutsis themselves had disguised the true number of Tutsis, but there is limited evidence of widespread falsification across the country.70 Historian and human rights activist, Alison des Forges, triangulated data from three sources and estimates that at least 500,000 Tutsi civilians were killed in the genocide. That amounts to roughly three-quarters of Rwanda’s pre-genocide Tutsi population.71 An estimate of 75 per cent per cent killed of the resident Tutsi population is consistent with a dictionary of names of people killed produced by the survivor organisation, Ibuka. That book lists 59,050 names of people killed in Kibuye Prefecture; that number is equivalent to about 78 per cent of the Tutsi population in the region.72 Similarly, a detailed study of demographic data from Gikongoro Prefecture found a Tutsi death rate during the genocide period of 75 per cent; that same study also found evidence of under-reporting in the 1991 census of the number of Tutsi living in Rwanda. Estimating a series of different scenarios, that study concluded that the number of Tutsi civilians killed was between 600,000 and 800,000 in 1994.73 The author has since updated the estimate to between 560,000 and 660,000 Tutsi civilian deaths.74 Lastly, in a careful estimation, Omar McDoom estimates between 491,000 and 522,000 Tutsis killed.75 In sum, I would estimate somewhere between 500,000 and 800,000 Tutsis killed in three months, and most likely between 500,000 and 600,000, totalling approximately 75 per cent of the domestic Tutsi population. However, Tutsis were not the only civilians killed in this period. The progenocide forces also targeted and sometimes killed other Hutus. How many 70 This paragraph draws on des Forges, ‘Leave None to Tell the Story’, p. 15. 71 Ibid., pp. 15–16. 72 Straus, The Order of Genocide. 73 Marijke Verpoorten, ‘The death toll of the Rwandan genocide: a detailed analysis for Gikongoro Province’, Population 60:4 (2005),331–67. 74 Marijke Verpoorten, ‘How many died in Rwanda’, Journal of Genocide Research 22:1 (2020),94–103. 75 Omar McDoom, ‘Contesting counting: toward rigorous estimate of the death toll in the Rwandan genocide’, Journal of Genocide Research 22:1 (2020), 83–93.

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is difficult to say, given poor data on the subject. Hutus who refused to participate in the violence against Tutsis were punished and beaten. Sometimes Hutus fought over spoils of looted property. Some Hutus were killed as examples, for repeatedly resisting the killing, and for personal vendettas, but not as a rule. Judging from field research I conducted and from other field-based studies, the level of such intra-Hutu violence is on a scale that is considerably less than the genocidal violence, or that of the RPF violence. The genocide is also not the only form of violence during this period and its immediate aftermath. During its advance against state forces and then its consolidation of power after its victory in 1994, RPF forces, sometimes with local collaborators, killed Hutu civilians as they advanced. In the years following, from 1995 to 1999, the RPF also killed Hutu civilians as they returned from neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo and as part of a counter-insurgency campaign inside Rwanda. The number of Hutu civilians killed by the RPF and its supporters is not known, in part because these cases have not been investigated or accounted for in anywhere near the same way that the genocide has been. That said, the scale is certainly less than in the genocide, and considerably less as a percentage of the Hutu population compared to the numbers of Rwandan Tutsis killed in the genocide. The greatest concentration of violence against Hutu civilians likely occurred in neighbouring Congo. As the RPF secured power, more than 2 million Hutu civilians, often encouraged to do so by Hutu Power authorities, fled Rwanda for neighbouring states. Most went west, to Congo (then called Zaire). Along and near the border, a string of refugee camps was established, some of which became staging grounds for the rump genocidal forces to regroup and then attack into RPF-led Rwanda. In 1996, RPF forces invaded Congo, broke up the camps, and forced hundreds of thousands of refugees back to Rwanda. However, hundreds of thousands more fled westward, deeper into Congo, where they were pursued and often massacred. Marijke Verpooten provides an estimate of 542,000 Hutu lives lost across the 1990s, as a function of RPF advances in Rwanda, counter-insurgency and violence in the Congo, as well as a function of indirect deaths from disease.76 If true, in its totality, that number rivals the Tutsi lives lost. How to characterise the Hutu deaths is debated. Some argue that the violence constitutes ‘genocide’, amounting to what scholars call a ‘double 76 Verpoorten, ‘How many died in Rwanda’.

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genocide’ thesis. This view remains a minority position in the scholarship, and indeed the requisite evidence of an organised effort to destroy the Hutu population as such remains lacking, in my view. However, given the scale and systematicity of the violence against civilians, the RPF-orchestrated violence against Hutus should be considered a crime against humanity and mass atrocity.77

Resistance The speed of the genocide and the widespread participation of civilians at the local level afforded little time for organised resistance among Hutu and Tutsi civilians. That said, there were some exceptions in the western part of the state, in a particularly hilly area around Bisesero. In the early days of the genocide, between 6 and 20 April, there were areas of the country where Hutu officials and civilians mobilised to prevent violence from taking hold in their areas. In general, these were areas where the opposition parties were strongest, notably the prefectures of Butare and Gitarama, as well as pockets of resistance elsewhere, notably Giti Commune, which is the one commune where genocidal violence did not take place. However, the central state that was committed to pursuing genocide was committed to unwinding the local-level resistance. They dispatched highranking politicians, military and militia to persuade, coerce or eliminate resistance. By 21 April, the early efforts to resist violence in the centre and south had been overcome. Bisesero is the most renowned area for sustained resistance. Located in the west and less densely populated than most of Rwanda, Tutsi civilians fled to the Bisesero hills and they were able to fight off attack groups successfully in April. By May and then later in June, sustained attacks, often involving larger numbers of perpetrators and firearms, overwhelmed most of the resistance. A controversial episode concerns the arrival of French troops in June, who are heavily criticised for not protecting at that time the remaining Tutsi survivors, many of whom were later killed. By the end of the genocide, only a small fraction of the Bisesero resistors remained alive.78 In other locations, Tutsis hid in fields, latrines and attics – or wherever they could. Some Rwandan Hutus hid or otherwise aided Tutsis to stay alive, and 77 I review this debate in Scott Straus, ‘The limits of a genocide lens: violence against Rwandans in the 1990s’, Journal of Genocide Research 21:4 (2019), 504–24. 78 African Rights, Resistance to Genocide: Bisesero, April–June 1994 (London: African Rights, 1998).

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sometimes those who hid Tutsis also participated in attacks against other Tutsis. These ambiguities break down rigid distinctions between perpetrators and victims in the Rwandan case, an issue expertly explored by Lee Ann Fujii.79

Bibliographic Note Pre-independence Rwanda is handled well in Chrétien, The Great Lakes of Africa, with an emphasis on the transformation of ethnic identities, as well as in Vansina, Antecedents to Modern Rwanda, with an emphasis on the evolution of the monarchy. For transformations of the administration and the widening of inequity between Hutus and Tutsis under colonialism, see Newbury, The Cohesion of Oppression and Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers. For accounts of the terminal colonial period, in addition to Newbury, see Lemarchand, Rwanda and Burundi. For analysis of the First Republic, in addition to Lemarchand, see Reyntjens, Pouvoir et droit au Rwanda. On the Second Republic, excellent sources are de Lame, A Hill among a Thousand and Guichaoua, From War to Genocide. On the lead up to and the genocide itself, beyond Guichaoua, see des Forges, ‘Leave None to Tell the Story’. On the locallevel dynamics during the genocide, see Fujii, Killing Neighbors and Straus, The Order of Genocide. On violence against Rwandans beyond genocide, for a review, see Straus, ‘The limits of a genocide lens’.

79 Lee Ann Fujii, Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009).

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Genocides in the Sudans c l e´ m e n c e p i n a u d

Introduction Sudan was the largest country in Africa until 2011, when its South gained independence. (See Map 28.1.) In the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, multiple conflicts became sites of mass violence. The second civil war between the government of Sudan and the southern rebels lasted twenty-two years from 1983 to 2005, with large repercussions for civilians in both the south (future South Sudan) and the Nuba Mountains. Then, during the negotiations between the southern rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) and Khartoum, a new conflict erupted in Darfur in 2003. It garnered international attention, and the US government labelled the war in Darfur a ‘genocide’. The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued six arrest warrants, including against then sitting president of Sudan, Omar El-Beshir, for alleged crimes of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. This was a marked escalation in the history of international reactions to mass violence in the Sudan since the 1980s. In 2013, a new war erupted in independent South Sudan. The international community did not escalate its rhetoric to label that mass violence as genocidal, preferring to use the term ‘ethnic cleansing’, while warning that it could become a genocide. This chapter explores and compares the cases of mass violence in southern Sudan, in the Nuba, in Darfur and in newly independent South Sudan. It considers the links between these four cases, focusing on ideology, perpetration and the violence inflicted. It also examines the differences in international reactions to that violence. It illustrates the dissonance between academic accounts and the framings of that violence by the policy world, with a special focus on the United States. Before moving on to each of these cases, the chapter starts with an overview of the history of slavery in the Sudan, arguing that slavery and military

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slavery created the foundation for what Scott Straus has called ‘mass categorical violence’ there.1

1 Scott Straus, Making and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership and Genocide in Modern Africa (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015).

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Violence and Slavery in the Longue Durée: A Favourable Context for Mass Categorical Violence A quick historical detour is necessary to understand twentieth-century mass violence in Sudan’s longue durée. Before independence in 1956, Sudan was ruled by a succession of violent and extractive governments, from the early states along the Nile and across the east–west Sudanic belt,2 to the Turkiyya and then the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium. Slave-raiding was a state activity which extended to the formation of slave armies designed to support the state’s power. The slaves came from the periphery of the Nubian state, but they were identified in Egypt as Nubian (Nuba), a term which, along with the words ‘Nuba’ and ‘Sudanese’ (i.e. black) became synonymous in the Nile Valley’s colloquial Arabic with ‘slave’. Muslim states, from the fourteenth century onwards, continued this tradition established by their pagan and Christian predecessors. The Islamisation of the Sudanic kingdoms actually increased the divide between the states and their peripheries, between those who had rights and those who did not.3 Slave armies became vital for the state power to survive. Slave soldiers were drawn from the pagan peripheries but, even if they became Muslims, it did not make them freer, since their territorial origin (the hinterland) was a factor in social stratification.4 Military slavery thus predated the Egyptian and British colonial ventures. It defined the relationship between the state and certain groups or categories of people.5 The Turco-Egyptian regime in the Sudan (known as the Turkiyya, 1820–83) intensified slave raids. It had much greater means and demanded far more slaves than had the previous early states in the north. It succeeded in penetrating southern Sudan, and slave-raiding and slave ownership expanded.6 Raiding and slaving by armed groups into Bahr El Ghazal created famine and large-scale displacement of people. Many Dinka people (one of the south’s largest groups) were enslaved, killed or died of famine. Famine 2 Douglas H. Johnson, The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), pp. 2–3. 3 Ibid., pp. 2–3; Douglas H. Johnson, ‘The structure of a legacy: military slavery in northeast Africa’, Ethnohistory 36:1 (1989), 72–88, at 82, 85. 4 Johnson, The Root Causes, p. 4. 5 Johnson, ‘The structure of a legacy’, 85. 6 Johnson, The Root Causes, p. 4; Douglas H. Johnson, ‘Sudanese military slavery from the eighteenth to the twentieth century’, in Slavery and Other Forms of Unfree Labour, ed. Léonie J. Archer (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 143.

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already served the economic interests of the state, traders and the Baqqara tribes of Darfur and Kordofan through asset transfers and exploitation.7 The state would repeat this pattern in the south in the twentieth century. Slave-owning became widespread in every class of the Sudanese society. The slaves were mostly drawn from southern Sudan, though it did not affect the entire region. ‘Black’ was synonymous with ‘slave’, and no matter how important the position of a southern Sudanese may have been, they were stigmatised by their slave origins.8 The Mahdist state (1883–98) succeeded the Turkiyya. Its power also relied on slave armies coming from the south and the west. It did not change racial divisions, and imposed allegiance to one religious leader, the Mahdi. It divided people between the followers of the Mahdi (the Ansar), and the ‘unbelievers’, Muslim or not.9 The Anglo-Egyptian reconquest of the Sudan started in the 1890s and the colonial state adapted these previous modes of governance.10 The main worry of the British was to suppress any dissent in order to protect Nile waters and Egypt’s stability. In the Nuba Mountains area of south Kordofan, Britain employed ‘friendlies’ (militias of local Baqqara Arabs) to conduct punitive expeditions, burning villages and looting cattle.11 To a large extent, a century later the militias of the second civil war (such as the Murahalin) would follow in those footsteps. The Anglo-Egyptian army also continued to recruit slaves into its army for the first quarter of the twentieth century. Afterwards, the tradition of military slavery remained engrained.12 The source of the conscripts matched the old slave-raiding areas and they continued to be separate from northern soldiers because of their slave origins. Conscription was forced, which perpetuated (on a smaller scale) the exploitative pattern of the nineteenth century and its entrenched racism.13 Military slavery and the associated idea of martial races thus formed the backbone of the Sudanese army.14 In the twentieth century, armed groups such as the SPLA (the future southern rebels – see Figure 28.1), and others

7 David Keen, The Benefits of Famine: A Political Economy of Famine and Relief in Southwestern Sudan, 1983–1989, 2nd ed. (Oxford: James Currey, 2008), pp. 21–4. 8 Johnson, The Root Causes, pp. 5–6. 9 Ibid., pp. 6–7. 10 Ibid., p. 7; Keen, The Benefits of Famine, p. 33. Only in the early 1920s would the AngloEgyptian administration become preoccupied with protecting southern peoples against northern exploitative interests. 11 Keen, The Benefits of Famine, pp. 28–9. 12 Johnson, ‘Sudanese military slavery’, 143. 13 Johnson, The Root Causes, pp. 10–11. 14 Johnson, ‘Sudanese military slavery’, 149, 155.

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Figure 28.1 Sudanese People’s Liberation Army soldiers stand next to a tank in southern Sudan, 13 November 1993. (Scott Peterson / Contributor / Getty Images)

from regions affected by military slavery, would rely on practices rooted in this tradition.15

Discrimination and Genocide By the time of independence (1956), both religion and race were used to discriminate, with varying degrees of overlap. Regional origin justified slavery. It placed people living in the hinterland into the enslaveable category because of their blackness. It stigmatised them by their territorial (aka slave) origins. Religion also divided people between those who were Muslim believers and those who were not. The difference between those belonging to the central heritage and who had legal rights, and those who did not, would prevail.16 The fact that a racist hierarchy justified slavery meant that slavery was not just a violent mode of production through raids and daily brutality: it was also a form of categorical violence itself. Indeed, as Wendy James wrote: ‘individual slaves are perceived as strangers, even foreigners, by the society who 15 For example, Yoweri Musevini’s name means ‘man of the Seventh Battalion of the King’s African Rifles’, and the National Resistance Army (NRA)’s ‘boy soldiers’, just like the SPLA’s, echoed the region’s history of military slavery. Johnson, ‘The structure of a legacy’, 84. 16 Johnson, The Root Causes, p. 7.

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holds them’. The African slave-holding societies regarded predatory violence as legitimate because they considered the victims as commodities, not full humans.17 The culture of racial discrimination was a favourable terrain for genocide, another form of mass categorical violence. Genocide is co-ordinated, sustained and large in scale. Unlike slavery and other forms of categorical violence, it seeks the destruction of the group it targets. The categorical associations on the basis of which the victims are selected (ethnicity, religion, clan, politics, race, gender, etc.), the target groups, are not real. Those categories are social constructs that serve to identify victims against whom to perpetrate discriminatory violence.18 Genocide is indeed the most lethal form of discrimination, the ultimate dehumanisation and exclusion, as it denies the right to life.19 Genocide seeks group destruction, slavery its exploitation. But they both belong to a spectrum of discrimination. Genocide is also easier to conduct against people who are already othered, commodified and considered subhuman. This does not mean that genocide is bound to happen in former slave societies. Yet centuries of racist violent exploitation meant that there was little chance for accommodation, compromise or restraint towards the people with whom the northern riverine elite felt no commonality, and whom they excluded from the political community.20

The Second North–South Civil War (1983–2005) Government Ideology In 1956, independent Sudan inherited the racist, violent and extractive features of its past forms of governance.21 After independence, three Arab tribes along the Nile north of Khartoum, representing about 5.4 per cent of the 17 Wendy James, ‘Perceptions from an African slaving frontier’, in Slavery and Other Forms of Unfree Labour, ed. Léonie J. Archer (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 132– 3, 139. 18 Straus, Making and Unmaking Nations, pp. 1, 17, 20–1, 26–7, 32. What animates mass categorical violence is to coerce the group on which it seeks to inflict maximum damage in order to contain it, while genocide seeks to destroy an unwinnable enemy. I adopt a slightly broader understanding of categorical violence in my consideration of slavery. Indeed, slavery’s first raison d’être is to exploit, but also to subdue and de facto coerce the slaves into submitting to the master ruler. 19 ‘Genocide is actually more continuous with discrimination than with war.’ Catharine A. MacKinnon, ‘Genocide’s sexuality’, Nomos, Political Exclusion and Domination 46 (2005), 329. Straus, Making and Unmaking Nations, p. 21. 20 Straus, Making and Unmaking Nations, pp. 262–7. 21 Johnson, The Root Causes, p. 7.

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population, controlled the government.22 Successive governments pursued a version of Arab nationalism that was both a reaction to colonialism and a way to unite the fractured northern riverine elite. This nationalist discourse excluded non-Arab and non-Muslim communities from full citizenship. It was a prolongation of the hierarchical vision rooted in the history of slavery that prescribed Arab-Islamic superiority over black Africans.23 ‘The darker the color of the skin, the less authentic the claim to Arab ancestry and the greater the likelihood of being looked down [upon] as of slave origin’, summarised the southern Sudanese scholar Francis Mading Deng.24 The wars explored in this chapter concern primarily the period under the National Islamic Front (NIF) regime after Omar El-Beshir took power in 1989. This regime was the most militant government in imposing Islam as a national religion. But successive heads of state (from General Abbud to President Nimeiri in the 1970s, and Saddiq al-Mahdi in the mid-1980s) had referred more and more explicitly to the inherent Arab and Islamic character of the Sudanese nation and state. The difference is that the NIF committed to an Islamic state and used, through Beshir, much more bellicose rhetoric, referring to ‘purging as a national duty’, and to (southern) rebels as ‘traitors’ to the nation who ‘do not deserve the honor of living’.25 The Islamists increased the pro-pan-Arab rhetoric, committed Sudan to the political right, and in the early 1990s embarked on an ambitious project of social transformation to create a new Islamist constituency.26 They would not accommodate domestic populations considered inherently ‘alien’ and threatening to national identity.27 The NIF declared a Holy War on the south.28 In 1991–2, it did the same on the Nuba Mountains. Yet Beshir, initially a figurehead for

22 These were the Ja’aliyiin of President Omar al-Bashir, the Shaygiyya of Vice-President Ali Osman Taha, and the Danagla of Defence Minister Bakri Hassan Saleh. Alex de Waal and Julie Flint, Darfur: A New History of a Long War, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Zed Books, 2008), pp. 16–17. 23 Straus, Making and Unmaking Nations, pp. 265–7. 24 Francis Mading Deng, War of Visions: Conflict of Identities in the Sudan (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1995), p. 5. 25 Straus, Making and Unmaking Nations, pp. 267–70. 26 Millard Burr and Robert O. Collins, Requiem for the Sudan: War, Drought, and Disaster Relief on the Nile (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), p. 252; de Waal and Flint, Darfur, pp. 26–8. Sudan was noted for its support for Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, its welcoming of Osama bin Laden and its involvement in an attempted assassination of Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak. 27 Straus, Making and Unmaking Nations, p. 272. 28 Keen, The Benefits of Famine, p. 161; Burr and Collins, Requiem for the Sudan, p. 308; Sharon Elaine Hutchinson, Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War, and the State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 8.

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the NIF, did not control the entirety of his security apparatus, a fact which impacted on the perpetration of violence.29

Perpetrators and Violence In the South Southern Militias The exclusionary ideology practised by successive Sudanese governments was at the root of multiple civil wars. A first civil war in the south officially rocked the country from the eve of its independence in 1955.30 The way the government responded back then prolonged the practices of colonial warfare and prefigured future government strategies. Reminiscent of the AngloEgyptian ‘friendlies’ militias, the government tried to tribalise the war by sponsoring different local militias to fight the guerrilla insurgents. The government armed groups of ethnic Nuer to fight the Dinka Anya-Nya of Upper Nile in the mid-1960s, then the Murle against the Nuer and Dinka Anya-Nya. These ‘national guards’ had their own leaders, and their targets switched progressively to civilians whom they deemed supportive of the guerrillas.31 Therefore, the government had already stirred southern interethnic violence (a form of categorical violence) during the first civil war. One of the biggest challenges of the Addis Ababa peace agreement implementation period (1972–83) was to de-escalate these local feuds.32 In 1983, the second civil war started with the mutiny of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) battalion 105 in Bor. Combined with the abolition of the Southern Region and the imposition of shari’a law, the mutiny triggered other mutinies and desertions in garrison towns across the south. By the end of July 1983, the Dinka SAF colonel John Garang took the command of both military and political wings of a new movement already marred by

29 De Waal and Flint, Darfur, pp. 17, 29; Johnson, The Root Causes, p. 133. 30 Started in 1955 with the Torit mutiny, the first civil war was a reaction to the policy of the first military government of General Ibrahim Abboud consisting of building national unity around the principles of Arabism and Islam. The civil war only intensified in the 1960s and ended in 1972 with the Addis Ababa Agreement. Douglas H. Johnson, ‘Twentieth-century civil wars’, in The Sudan Handbook, ed. John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok (New York: James Currey, 2011), pp. 123–4. 31 Douglas H. Johnson and Gérard Prunier, ‘The foundation and expansion of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army’, in Civil War in the Sudan, ed. M. W. Daly and Ahmad Alawad Sikainga (London: British Academic Press, 1993), p. 119. 32 Ibid., 120.

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divisions: the SPLA/M.33 Where the SPLA established a presence and was supported by locals, the government unleashed violence on them.34 Nimeiri’s government, instead of resorting to mass conscription, continued to use interethnic mistrust and competition in the south to subcontract violence to ethnic militias.35 There were two types of these militias – the first type being the southern militias hostile to the SPLA (I turn later to the second type, the Murahalin). The anti-SPLA southern militias included the Anya Nya II, an ethnic militia that worked closely with the SAF to prevent the SPLA’s infiltration of the rural areas in the south.36 But the Nimeiri government also sponsored the Murle, Mundari and Toposa to fight the Dinka and to raid mostly civilian targets, with the SPLA retaliating against civilians from these groups.37 ‘The pattern of fighting between the SPLA and local Southern militias involved attacks on civilian populations by both sides, entailing the wholesale destruction of villages and farms.’38 The practice of sponsoring militias expanded when Sadiq al-Mahdi took power in 1986.39 Three years later, Omar El-Beshir succeeded him and created the Popular Defence Forces (PDF), which expanded rather than controlled the violence.40 The NIF regime also exploited divisions within the SPLA,41 chiefly the SPLA split in 1991. The breakaway faction of two SPLA commanders, the Nuer leader Riek Machar and the Shilluk leader Lam Akol, committed large-scale atrocities against the Dinka, most notoriously the Bor massacre in 1991.42 So did the SPLA against Nuer populations, which formed the background of the 1991 Bor massacre.43 33 Johnson, The Root Causes, pp. 61–2. 34 Johnson and Prunier, ‘Foundation and expansion’, 131–2; Johnson, ‘Twentieth-century civil wars’, 127. 35 Straus, Making and Unmaking Nations, p. 254. 36 Johnson, ‘Twentieth-century civil wars’, 127; Alex de Waal, ‘Some comments on the militias in the contemporary Sudan’, in Civil War in the Sudan, ed. M. W. Daly and Ahmad Alawad Sikainga (London: British Academic Press, 1993), pp. 142, 150–2. 37 Straus, Making and Unmaking Nations, p. 254; de Waal, ‘Some comments’, 143; Johnson and Prunier, ‘Foundation and expansion’, 130–2; Johnson, ‘Twentieth-century civil wars’, 127. 38 Johnson and Prunier, ‘Foundation and expansion’, 131. 39 Straus, Making and Unmaking Nations, p. 254. 40 Burr and Collins, Requiem for the Sudan, pp. 240–1; Straus, Making and Unmaking Nations, p. 255; Alex de Waal, ‘The Nuba Mountains, Sudan’, in Centuries of Genocide. Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, ed. Samuel Totten and William S. Parsons (New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 424. 41 Peter Adwok Nyaba, Politics of Liberation in South Sudan: An Insider’s View (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 1997), p. 7. 42 Keen, The Benefits of Famine, p. 223. 43 Clémence Pinaud, War and Genocide in South Sudan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021).

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The government’s use of ethnic militias helped propagate the idea that the war in the south was ‘just’ ethnic – that is, not national.44 It was both, as the extent of government control over the southern militias varied.45 Ethnic militiamen held no deep ideological or political allegiances to Khartoum, and pursued their own interests.46 All of them – from the Mundari, the Fertit, the Murle, the Latuka, the Acholi, the Madi, to the Azande militias – feared ‘Dinka domination’.47 The sponsorship (sometimes the creation) of ethnic militias contributed to reifying ethnic categories. It also spread interethnic violence between southerners, a foundation for the violence perpetrated during the later, third civil war in the south. Violence was not just interethnic but also pitted different sections of ethnic groups against each other. In other words, the government’s use of ethnic militias also unravelled and divided ethnic groups such as the Nuer in the Upper Nile region, particularly oil-rich Unity state. There, the government used the Bul Nuer militia under Brigadier Paulino Matiep and showered them with largesse in return for their loyalty.48 The 1991 SPLA split further divided the Nuer,49 and the Khartoum Agreement of 1997 (following the Peace Charter of 1996) intensified intra-Nuer factional fighting while increasing army presence.50 Nuer intersectional violence had long-term consequences. In the third civil war, the Juba government would take advantage of past divisions and strike another alliance with the Bul Nuer to depopulate other Nuer areas in Unity state, following in Khartoum’s footsteps. As oil exploitation intensified in 1999, the SAF developed a new strategy combining air power with regular army units and militias in operations designed to depopulate areas surrounding the oil fields, and other areas in Bahr El Ghazal and the Nuba Mountains.51 It blocked humanitarian aid from accessing the areas it sought to depopulate.52 This strategy (bombing 44 Johnson and Prunier, ‘Foundation and expansion’, 128. 45 Burr and Collins, Requiem for the Sudan, p. 98. 46 De Waal, ‘Some comments’, 154–5. 47 Johnson and Prunier, ‘Foundation and expansion’, 133; de Waal, ‘Some comments’, 142, 150–4. 48 De Waal, ‘Some comments’, 152. 49 Douglas H. Johnson, ‘The Nuer civil war’, in Sudanese Society in the Context of Civil War: Papers from a Seminar at the University of Copenhagen, 9–10 February 2001, ed. Maj-Britt Johannsen and Niels Kastfelt (University of Copenhagen North/South Priority Research Area, 2001), p. 13. 50 Johnson, ‘Twentieth-century civil wars’, 131; Sharon E. Hutchinson, ‘A curse from God? Religious and political dimensions of the post-1991 rise of ethnic violence in South Sudan’, The Journal of Modern African Studies 39:2 (2001), 310, 321; Johnson, ‘The Nuer civil war’, 21. 51 Johnson, ‘Twentieth-century civil wars’, 131; Hutchinson, ‘A curse from God?’, 323–4. 52 Human Rights Watch, Sudan, Oil, and Human Rights (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2003), pp. 38–43; Hutchinson, ‘A curse from God?’, 323; Audrey Macklin, ‘Like

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followed by militia attacks) prefigured the way the government would later unleash violence in Darfur in 2003. Murahalin Militias The second type of government-sponsored militias were the Murahalin (nomads) militias, initially an Arab militia used to patrol the south’s border during the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium (‘friendlies’).53 It was found amongst the Rizeigat and Misiriya Baqqara Arabs of south Kordofan and southern Darfur, with related militias in southern Blue Nile province and the rest of Darfur.54 The Murahalin became one of the most powerful armed groups during the second civil war, often even stronger than the army.55 Economic deprivation, drought and famine rendered the prospect of enrichment through cattle-raiding appealing, especially given competition with the Dinka for pasture and water resources.56 De Waal has noted of the Murahalin that ‘most rural militiamen are essentially pragmatic and concerned with personal power and economic gain’.57 Man-made famine would (just like in the nineteenth century) serve a range of central government and local interests.58 With government support but without total control, the Murahalin attacked Dinka civilians, perceived as the SPLA’s support base.59 The famine conditions in Bahr El Ghazal unfolded first in mid-1986 because of intensive raiding by the Murahalin, from western to northern Bahr El Ghazal. By early 1988, after three seasons of mass raiding, hundreds of thousands of Dinka were unable to continue resorting to their survival strategies, being banned from buying grain and prevented from trading.60

53 54 56 57 59

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water and oil, with a match: militarized commerce, armed conflict, and human security in Sudan’, in Sites of Violence. Gender and Conflict Zones, ed. Wenona Giles and Jennifer Hyndman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 85, 87. Keen, The Benefits of Famine, pp. 41–3; de Waal, ‘Some comments’, 142. De Waal, ‘Some comments’, 142. 55 Keen, The Benefits of Famine, p. 97. De Waal, ‘Some comments’, 144, 146–7; Johnson and Prunier, ‘Foundation and expansion’, 121, 132. De Waal, ‘Some comments’, 154–5. 58 Keen, The Benefits of Famine, pp. 18–19. Johnson and Prunier, ‘Foundation and expansion’, 121, 132; Keen, The Benefits of Famine, p. 73; de Waal, ‘Some comments’, 147–8; de Waal, ‘The Nuba’, 424; Ushari Ahmed Mahmud and Suliman Baldo, The Dhein Massacre: Slavery in the Sudan (London:Sudan Relief and Rehabilitation Association, 1987), pp. 16, 21. The case of the Dhein massacre is also an example of Rizeigat mob violence, in a town from where the government drew many militia recruits. The mob did not listen to the orders of the police and overwhelmed it. Johnson and Prunier, ‘Foundation and expansion’, 132; Alex de Waal, ‘Starving out the south’, in Civil War in the Sudan, ed. M. W. Daly and Ahmad Alawad Sikainga (London:

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The SAF created the conditions for famine, and detained or killed anyone suspected of sympathy to the SPLA.61 Both the SAF and affiliated militias shot, raped and/or kidnapped the Dinka trying to escape starvation.62 Massacres also thinned the population. The Ed Dhein massacre (a town in southern Darfur, close to Abyei) in March 1987 became famous after Sudanese academics published a report detailing how Rizeigat Arab militias herded Dinka civilians into trains and on to their deaths after an SPLA attack.63 The SAF also directly committed massacres against Dinka civilians. The Dinka were not the only southerners to be massacred, as evidenced by the 1989 massacre of Shilluks in Jebelein (Jabalayn) by the governmentsupported Sabaha Arab militia.64 Along with massacres, raids included the capture of Dinka civilians, held in captivity in conditions of slavery, subjected to violence and sexual abuse.65 This revived the belief in Rizeigat areas that the Dinka were less than human. Dehumanisation facilitated extreme violence against victims who had no rights; the Dinka were often branded like cattle.66 The Sudanese authors of the report on the 1987 Ed Dhein massacre wrote: ‘the existence of slavery in the area has generated beliefs among the Rizeigat that the Dinka is subhuman. All psychological barriers to terminating his existence have been broken down. That was what made the massacre in Dhein possible – without fear of reprisals by the government whose representatives were present.’67 Competition for resources also played a role: in the minds of the perpetrators, the victims were enslaveable commodities, whose lives and goods were up for grabs, with total impunity.68 The militiamen thus took their payment by looting the cattle and other belongings of their victims. They implemented the government’s profitable ‘counter-insurgency on the cheap’.69 All in all, militias in tandem with the

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British Academic Press, 1993), pp. 160–3; Burr and Collins, Requiem for the Sudan, p. 19; Keen, The Benefits of Famine, pp. 80–1. Straus, Making and Unmaking Nations, p. 255; Africa Watch Committee, Denying ‘the Honor of Living’: Sudan, a Human Rights Disaster (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1990), p. 67; de Waal, ‘Starving out the south’, 167–70. De Waal, ‘Starving out the south’, 163–6; Burr and Collins, Requiem for the Sudan, p. 114. Burr and Collins, Requiem for the Sudan, pp. 82–3; Mahmud and Baldo, The Dhein Massacre, p. 7; Africa Watch Committee, Denying ‘the Honor of Living’, p. 84. Burr and Collins, Requiem for the Sudan, pp. 91, 264. Keen, The Benefits of Famine, pp. 101–5. 66 Ibid., p. 108. Mahmud and Baldo, The Dhein Massacre, p. 29. 68 Ibid., p. 28. De Waal, ‘Starving out the south’, 163–6; de Waal and Flint, Darfur, p. 23; Keen, The Benefits of Famine, p. 77.

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SAF especially impacted Bahr El Ghazal in 1986–8, the Nuba Mountains in 1992–5 and Upper Nile in 1998–2003.70 The SAF was always involved in the attacks, sometimes preceding them with helicopter overflights.71 It used helicopter gunships and regularly bombed SPLA towns and civilians who had gathered for aid delivery, and schools, hospitals and churches.72 The majority of these tactics (bombing and ‘counter-insurgency on the cheap’) would also be used in the Nuba, in Darfur from 2003 and, to a lesser extent, in South Sudan from 2013.73 In the Nuba Mountains

The Nuba Mountains are located in south Kordofan immediately north of the border between north and south, and therefore at the frontline of government offensives.74 SPLA’s popularity and victories from 1985 to 1989 attracted some of the worst government violence.75 Not trusting its own army (made of enslaveable recruits), the government also hired local tribal militia there for another ‘counter-insurgency on the cheap’. Violence also led to famine, as local farmers retreated from their agricultural fields into the mountains.76 The 1989 coup that brought the NIF and Beshir to power marked an escalation in the war here. Particularly in the period 1990–6, the regime aimed to transform Sudanese society through forced Islamisation, which translated into a jihad in the Nuba. The intellectual Hassan al-Turabi, the sheikh of the Islamists, led this project from the shadows. (See Figure 28.2.) But the regime had no real centre – policy was always contested between the ideologues and the army.77 Government violence took off against civilians in the Nuba Mountains in 1992. Military intelligence death squads targeted local leaders and the intelligentsia, in an attempt to crush any resistance and silence the Nuba people.78 The government then segregated men from women in camps to prevent

70 De Waal and Flint, Darfur, p. 23. 71 Africa Watch Committee, Denying ‘the Honor of Living’, p. 90. 72 Human Rights Watch, Sudan, Oil, and Human Rights, pp. 234, 500; Burr and Collins, Requiem for the Sudan, pp. 280, 292, 306–8, 311. 73 African Rights, Facing Genocide: The Nuba of Sudan (London: African Rights, 1995), p. 257. 74 Straus, Making and Unmaking Nations, p. 255. 75 De Waal, ‘The Nuba’, 423–4; Johnson and Prunier, ‘Foundation and expansion’, 135–6. This partly explains why the Nuba Mountains were not the site of SPLA violence, but mostly of government violence. 76 De Waal, ‘The Nuba’, 424–5. 77 Ibid., 425–6. 78 Ibid., 426–7.

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Figure 28.2 Sudan’s Islamic leader, cleric and parliamentary speaker Hassan al-Turabi (l), and Sudanese President General Omar el-Bashir (r), at the opening of an Arab-Islamic conference in Khartoum, 2 December 1993. (Photo: Manoocher Deghati/AFP/Getty Images)

their reproduction, while a policy of rape by Arab men leading to intermarriages with Nuba women was meant to eliminate Nuba identity.79 De Waal wrote of a ‘titanic plan for resettlement of the Nuba’. By late 1992, the government had resettled one-third of its envisioned target of 500,000 Nuba people (the area’s entire population). It also organised starvation in SPLA areas to force the rebels into submission.80 Yet by the end of 1992, the military campaign abated in the face of internal government dissensions (with the military pragmatists winning over the Islamists), and the SPLA’s resilience. As the brigades withdrew, the agenda for total social transformation had to be abandoned. The Nuba people, under the leadership of SPLA commander Yussef Kuwa, started rebuilding their communities.81 But war continued for eight years in the Nuba Mountains. The fact that Khartoum was pressured by regional countries (Uganda, Eritrea and Ethiopia) and the international community to negotiate on the south, radicalised its stance on the rest of the contested territories. It refused to even 79 Ibid., 428; African Rights, Facing Genocide, pp. 221–44. 81 Ibid., 428–9.

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discuss the Nuba Mountains (and Blue Nile).82 Its divide-and-rule strategy was so successful that it turned the war into an intra-Nuba affair from 1993 onwards, with most of the paramilitary groups themselves hailing from the region. Nuba fought Nuba. Blacks fought blacks: the point was ‘getting the Sudan’s Africans to kill one another’.83 In January 2002, the government and the SPLA agreed to a ceasefire. Yet the peace negotiations between Khartoum and the SPLA prioritised the south, excluding the Nuba Mountains, Beja, Blue Nile and Darfur. In the end, the Nuba got only a separate protocol: a ‘second-rate deal’, resulting in ‘popular consultations’ on its quasi-autonomous status as opposed to the referendum for independence in the south, per the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA).84 After the death of SPLA leader Garang, who wanted a united and secular Sudan, the Nuba were now isolated within a more overtly Arab and Muslim northern Sudan. Security deteriorated, and disagreements over the status of the SPLA division in the Nuba Mountains reignited warfare there in June 2011, engulfing Blue Nile in September 2011.85 Government warfare in the south and the Nuba Mountains during the second civil war thus employed similar tactics, some of them rooted in colonial practice. But the Nuba, north of the north–south border, is where Khartoum pursued a genocidal agenda of social transformation. Genocide by Attrition and Famine that Kills Even though the human cost of the war was immense, no reliable figures permitted a precise estimate of that cost. Millard Burr, who wrote the report, ‘A Working Document: Quantifying Genocide in the Southern Sudan 1983– 1993’ for the US Committee for Refugees,86 was the first to try to make a systematic estimate of war-related deaths, with a figure of 1.3 million in 1993, twice what was previously commonly accepted.87 In 1998, in a second report, Burr added 600,000 deaths, raising the death toll to 1.9 million since the beginning of the civil war.88 The reports were designed to attract attention but were based on unreliable demographic data.89 82 Ibid., 429–30. 83 Ibid., 431–2. 84 Ibid., 433. 85 Ibid., 434–5. 86 Burr later updated his report in 1998 with the publication of Millard Burr, ‘Working Document II: Quantifying genocide in the Southern Sudan and the Nuba Mountains 1983–1998’ (US Committee for Refugees, December 1998), https://refugees.org/wpcontent/uploads/2019/02/Quantifying-Genocide-in-Southern-Sudan-1983-1998_Milla rd-Burr.pdf. 87 Ibid., p. 1. 88 Ibid. 89 Johnson, The Root Causes, p. 143; Mark R. Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security(London and New York: Zed Books, 2001), pp. 211–12.

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Helen Fein, relying on Burr’s 1993 report, called indirect deaths in the south and the Nuba Mountains (1983–93), induced by man-made vulnerability and caused by starvation, disease and enforced concentration in overcrowded camps, ‘genocide by attrition’.90 Forced starvation as a tool of genocide fit with Lemkin’s vision of genocide, as he understood the Holodomor (the forced famine in Ukraine) to be a case of Soviet genocide due to its lethal intent and its employment to refashion a socio-political order.91 Outright starvation killed the Dinka through unprecedented rates of under-nutrition. De Waal argued that this ‘famine that kills’ was one of the rare cases where it was absolutely justified to invoke the term of ‘mass starvation’.92 People can be starved, and as such targeted (as opposed to a famine).93 In both forced starvation and genocide, group life becomes expendable: in other words, it has no value,94 which fits the perpetrators’ perception of the former slaves as commodities, things, not humans. It is no coincidence that the Dinka privileged the preservation of their culture and their economic independence – essentially, their group life – over their shortterm economic consumption.95 Where scholars of Sudan may disagree with Fein is when she lumped together three successive governments and two cases (Nuba and the south).96 These cases differed substantially. Governments’ goals mattered and did not produce exactly the same genocidal outcomes. The NIF regime intensified the violence. Conversely, the NIF did not pursue the policy of genocidal social transformation against the Dinka that it did in the Nuba Mountains.97 Most Sudan scholars (unlike Burr) did not conclude that a genocide had occurred there. De Waal made an exception for the case of the Nuba mountains: ‘The policy was genocidal in both intent and its possible outcome’, he 90 Helen Fein, ‘Genocide by attrition 1939–1993: the Warsaw Ghetto, Cambodia, and Sudan: links between human rights, health, and mass death’, Health and Human Rights 2:2 (1997), 12. 91 Alex de Waal, Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), p. 100. 92 De Waal, ‘Starving out the south’, 158–9. 93 De Waal, Mass Starvation, p. 22. 94 Ibid., p. 23. 95 A. Dirk Moses, ‘Raphael Lemkin, culture, and the concept of genocide’, in The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, ed. Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 34–5; Keen, The Benefits of Famine, pp. 19, 77. 96 ‘Although three governments held office during this period, with different goals and degrees of authoritarianism, policies that led to the death of the Dinka (the most numerous group of southerners), other southerners, and the Nuba, were the result of government practices involving gross violation of human rights, thereby diminishing these people’s life-chances and leading to genocide.’ Fein, ‘Genocide by attrition’, 22. 97 African Rights already used the term of ‘genocide by attrition’ in 1995 in its report on the Nuba, two years before Fein. African Rights, Facing Genocide, p. 137.

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wrote, even if the government’s military campaign failed by the end of 1992.98 He argued that Nuba was the most clear-cut case of genocidal intent by the government in modern Sudan, more so than Darfur. Yet the features of the violence in the Nuba foreshadowed the violence in Darfur.99

International Advocacy and Politics The international and US reactions to the war in the south also prefigured the responses to Darfur and South Sudan’s civil war. The international media started paying attention to the south in 1989, after the United Nations had launched Operation Lifeline (OLS) in Sudan.100 But the new worldwide interest applied to the south, not the Nuba Mountains, where there was little relief.101 International advocacy groups insisted that oil was fuelling violence in the south.102 A secularist pro-SPLA lobby in the United States, advocating for regime change in Sudan,103 found support in the Clinton administration.104 US advocacy groups (made up of Jewish groups, the Black Congressional Caucus and born-again Christians) then succeeded in mounting political pressure on the oil industry via Bush’s sympathetic ear.105 Yet it was really 9/11 that changed the game. After 9/11, the US government used the SPLA as a bargaining chip with Sudan in its global war on terror.106 Canadian oil companies Talisman, the Swedish Lundi and the Austrian OMV, all operating in Unity state, had to face pressures from activist/civil society groups as well as security risks; they eventually sold their assets and withdrew in 2003. ‘Paradoxically, the end result of human rights pressure was to improve the positions of less susceptible Asian national oil companies’, noted Luke Patey.107 The Save Darfur advocacy movement would repeat those mistakes.108

98 De Waal, ‘The Nuba’, 428. 99 Ibid., 421. 100 De Waal, ‘Starving out the south’, 182; Burr and Collins, Requiem for the Sudan, p. 313; Ataul Karim, Mark Duffield, Susanne Jaspars et al., ‘OLS – Operation Lifeline Sudan, a review’ (UNICEF, July 1996), pp. 15–17, www.researchgate.net/publication/284727 714_Operation_Lifeline_Sudan_-_A_review. 101 De Waal, ‘The Nuba’, 421, 431. 102 Luke A. Patey, The New Kings of Crude: China, India, and the Global Struggle for Oil in Sudan and South Sudan (London: Hurst & Company, 2014), p. 68. 103 John Young, South Sudan’s Civil War: Violence, Insurgency and Failed Peacemaking (London: Zed Books Ltd, 2019), pp. 47–8. 104 Ibid., pp. 41, 43. 105 Patey, The New Kings of Crude, pp. 68–71. 106 Young, South Sudan’s Civil War, p. 54; Patey, The New Kings of Crude, pp. 68–71. 107 Patey, The New Kings of Crude, pp. 73–6. 108 Ibid., pp. 161–6.

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Worse, the US administration would prioritise the north–south peace process and its own national security, over Darfur, just like the Nuba Mountains.109

Darfur Marginalisation and Arab Supremacy To some extent, Darfuris had undergone similar experiences with the central government to those of southerners. They too were caught in the processes of Sudanisation and Arabisation (though most were already Muslims), and they also felt treated like second-class citizens by the Sudanese state.110 Their region was likewise neglected by the government, and a victim of ‘internal colonisation’.111 The government had also divided it in order to split its ethnic Fur constituency and to create political space for the Islamists.112 The roots of the 2003 war in Darfur and its genocide, lay in its past civil wars (the Fur–Arab of the 1980s, and the Masalit–Arab wars), which were a result of regional politics, the development of an ideology of Arab supremacy and an increasingly violent competition for resources in the midst of drought, that translated into land grabs by Arab groups. In October 2002, an Arab government-supported militia launched the largest offensive on Jebel Marra in southern Darfur since the Fur–Arab war. These attacks provoked the Darfur rebellion and a new war.113 The 2003 War The Sudan Liberation Army (SLA), uniting the Fur and Zaghawa in Jebel Marra, announced its rebellion in February 2003. By the beginning of 2003, Jebel Marra was surrounded by government troops, and was being regularly attacked by government militias, supported by Antonov bombers and helicopter gunships.114 109 Ibid., pp. 76, 163, 167–9, 170–3, 200–4, 241, 272; Young, South Sudan’s Civil War, pp. 55– 6, 190. 110 De Waal and Flint, Darfur, p. 14. 111 Ibid., p. 17; M. W. Daly, Darfur’s Sorrow: The Forgotten History of a Humanitarian Disaster (Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 2. 112 De Waal and Flint, Darfur, p. 20. 113 Ibid., pp. 35–7, 43, 45–7, 49–61, 63–6, 69–70; Jérôme Tubiana, ‘Le Darfour, un conflit pour la terre?’, Politique Africaine 101 (2006), 113–14; Brendan Bromwich, ‘Power, contested institutions and land: repoliticising analysis of natural resources and conflict in Darfur’, Journal of Eastern African Studies 12 (2018), 9–10; John Hagan and Wenona Rymond-Richmond, Darfur and the Crime of Genocide (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 111–12. 114 De Waal and Flint, Darfur, pp. 37, 83, 87, 118.

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Instead of resorting to mass conscription, the Khartoum government again took to arming local Arab militias (referred to as Janjawiid), just as it had in the Nuba and in some areas of South Sudan. It launched another ‘counterinsurgency on the cheap’.115 Effectively, the perpetrators depopulated large swathes of territory of their non-Arab inhabitants. This was achieved first by the Sudanese air force bombing an area, then coordinating with the army and the militias to attack on the ground.116 The Janjawiid were organised in battalions, used the same weapons and increasingly wore the same uniform as the government soldiers.117 The government co-ordinated the Janjawiid through the ‘Darfur security desk’, managed by Ahmed Haroun, previously instrumental in inflicting government violence in the Nuba Mountains.118 Although international condemnation was growing by 2006, Khartoum still heavily supplied the Janjawiid militias on the ground.119 The most intense violence in Darfur occurred from mid-2003 to mid-2004 (peaking in July–September 2003), until early 2005 by which time the state had won militarily and the army took a back seat in favour of the irregulars.120 The victims belonged to about fifteen different non-Arab ethnic groups, mainly the Fur, Zaghawa, Masalit, Tounjour, Berti, Dadjo, Meidob and Bergid.121 The perpetrators defined their victims categorically, as non-Arabs who were supporting insurgents. They identified them by racialised slurs, calling them ‘blacks’, ‘slaves’ and ‘Nuba’ who allegedly always supported rebels.122 They raped the women, killed the men, and sexually mutilated and killed 115 De Waal, ‘Starving out the south’, 163–6; De Waal and Flint, Darfur, pp. 23, 66, 128. The Janjawiid were composed of different Arab groups, spread across four training camps throughout Darfur: the Abbala Rizeigat in northern Darfur; the southern Rizeigat, the Sa’ada and Beni Halba in southern Darfur; the Terjem, Ta’aisha and Salamat in western Darfur. 116 Straus, Making and Unmaking Nations, p. 258; De Waal and Flint, Darfur, pp. 144–5; ‘Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur to the United Nations Secretary-General’ (Geneva, 25 January 2005), p. 3. 117 Human Rights Watch, ‘Sudan: government and militias conspire in Darfur killings’, 22 April 2004, www.hrw.org/news/2004/04/22/sudan-government-and-militiasconspire-darfur-killings. 118 Straus, Making and Unmaking Nations, p. 258; Richard Cockett, Sudan: Darfur and the Failure of an African State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 188; de Waal and Flint, Darfur, pp. 35–6, 67, 118–19, 120–3, 131–2. 119 De Waal and Flint, Darfur, pp. 38–9. 120 Ibid., pp. 150–2. 121 Tubiana, ‘Le Darfour, un conflit pour la terre?’, 112. 122 Straus, Making and Unmaking Nations, pp. 258, 262; De Waal and Flint, Darfur, pp. 39, 127; Hagan and Rymond-Richmond, Darfur and the Crime of Genocide, pp. 15–17, 19, 21– 2; Cockett, Sudan, p. 187; Daly, Darfur’s Sorrow, pp. 282–3.

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children. They destroyed villages, looted food, raided cattle and poisoned wells.123 The attackers aimed to crush the chances for survival of their victims, while the government blocked relief.124 Starvation was no accident, it was part of the military strategy.125 Only a third of the deaths in Darfur were caused by direct killings. Most war-related deaths were due to disease and malnutrition following forced displacement.126

Genocide? Much like the cases explored so far, the number of war-related deaths was contested, ranging from 60,000 to 400,000 deaths directly or indirectly from the violence.127 The best estimates for deaths from disease and hunger in 2003–5 placed the death toll at 150,000.128 Including deaths from violence, the World Health Organization estimated in 2006 that at least 200,000 had died from the combined effects of the conflict.129 Violence was categorical, sustained and co-ordinated by the state. But the United Nations still hesitated to claim that it was genocide, arguing that there was no proven intent to destroy a group, and that the main objective was to crush an insurgency.130 A UN Commission of Inquiry submitted its report in 2005, and recognised that some individuals, including government officials, may have committed acts with genocidal intent. But it found no evidence of a genocidal policy pursued by the government, and it referred these cases to the International Criminal Court (ICC).131 Yet there were issues with these arguments. Straus points out that because intent has not been proven is not to say that it never existed, and lack of evidence may change. Counter-insurgency does not exclude genocide either: genocide may actually be the most efficient tool in crushing an insurgency.132 123 Straus, Making and Unmaking Nations, p. 258; de Waal and Flint, Darfur, pp. 35, 134–5; ‘Sudan. No one to complain to: no respite for the victims, impunity for the perpetrators’ (Amnesty International, December 2004); Hagan and Rymond-Richmond, Darfur and the Crime of Genocide, p. 19. 124 De Waal and Flint, Darfur, pp. 134, 145; Daly, Darfur’s Sorrow, p. 282. 125 De Waal and Flint, Darfur, p. 146. 126 Straus, Making and Unmaking Nations, pp. 258–9. 127 Ibid., p. 259; Hagan and Rymond-Richmond, Darfur and the Crime of Genocide, pp. 96, 100. 128 De Waal and Flint, Darfur, p. 173. 129 ‘Darfur deaths “could be 300,000”’, BBC News, 23 April 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk /2/hi/africa/7361979.stm. The UN head of humanitarian affairs John Holmes later declared that more than 300,000 people could have died as a result of the war. 130 ‘Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur’, 4; Straus, Making and Unmaking Nations, p. 259. 131 ‘Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur’, 4–5. 132 Straus, Making and Unmaking Nations, p. 259.

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The 1948 UN Convention does not specify that genocide must be present as the goal or motive of the act; it may be the means to an end, such as defeating an insurgency, so long as there is genocidal intent – that is, the act of destruction of the group must be carried out deliberately. Finally, violence can evolve and fluctuate; genocidal violence can be initiated by local actors on the ground and be allowed by the centre. Genocide is a dynamic process, the result of an escalation.133 In July 2010, the ICC issued a warrant for the arrest of President Omar El-Beshir on three charges of genocide allegedly committed in Darfur. Beshir avoided arrest until his regime’s overthrow in Khartoum in April 2019. In February 2020, the new power-sharing transitional government of Sudan between civilians and the military agreed to hand him over to the ICC. In October 2020, it also expressed interest in trying Beshir in an internationally sponsored hybrid court in Sudan. Meanwhile, the Trump administration removed Sudan from the list of state sponsors to terrorism.134 De Waal has pointed that the historical legacies were at odds with the contemporary legal requirements. He wrote: ‘one thing is certain: the people who decided to use ethnic militias as a counter-insurgency force knew exactly what it would mean. They had used similar militias since 1985 and had seen the results . . . Now the government was organizing a replay.’135 Darfur was an ‘ethics-free zone’ resembling past wars’ scorched earth policies from the Nuba Mountains to the south’s oil fields, and the orders and the leaders were exactly the same.136 In the same vein, de Waal also referred to Sudan’s ‘genocide by force of habit’.137 All three cases involved the same regime, the same tactics (insurgency on the cheap, forced mass starvation and displacement), the same collective categorisation by the perpetrators of their victims along racial lines reminiscent of slavery and the same goal of group destruction. All three cases might well be genocides. It does not mean that these genocides were successful, or linear or even exactly the same (as displayed by the project of social transformation in the Nuba). They could be attempts at genocides, violence could

133 Ibid., p. 260. 134 ‘In Sudan, ICC Prosecutor says Al-Bashir must be tried over Darfur’, Aljazeera, 20 October 2020, www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/10/20/icc-prosecutor-talks-on-albashir-case-in-historic-sudan-visit; Cameron Hudson, ‘Sudan is removed from the terror list. Now what?’, The Atlantic Council, 19 October 2020, www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ africasource/sudan-is-removed-from-the-terror-list-now-what/. 135 De Waal and Flint, Darfur, pp. 123–4. 136 Ibid., pp. 132–3. 137 On Our Watch, Frontline PBS, 20 November 2007, 11:00, www.pbs.org/wgbh/front line/film/darfur/.

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fluctuate and, as Straus points out, genocide is ‘usually a phase within a longer, broader pattern of conflict’.138

South Sudan in Its Third Civil War (2013–2017) The Road to Independence and War The roots of South Sudan’s third civil war lay in decades of unchecked predatory violence by the SPLA and other armed groups. The international community, spearheaded by the United States, had legitimised the predominantly Dinka SPLA. Through the north–south peace process, it had endorsed the SPLA as the representative and ruler of the south. In January 2005, both the SPLA and the Khartoum government signed the CPA, which resulted in South Sudan’s independence in 2011 after a referendum. The problem was that South Sudan’s state had grown more and more brutal, effectively turning into a violent Dinka ethnocracy and a one-party state under the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM, the political branch of the SPLA). An ideology of Dinka supremacy had developed in the post-war era, built on feelings of extreme group entitlement. These feelings sprang from decades of ethnic discrimination against non-Dinka civilians. They originated in the legacy of military slavery, colonial ethnic ranking and grievances from the first civil war.139 After 2005, non-Dinka civilians especially experienced rising violence through brutal state demilitarisation campaigns, undemocratic elections, everyday ethnic domination and large-scale cattle raids. Interethnic political competition culminated in a political crisis in December 2013, which pitted Nuer politician Machar’s interethnic coalition against Dinka President Salva Kiir’s faction within the SPLM. This provided the terrain for genocidal violence against non-Dinka groups. It started on the night of the 15–16 December 2013, when the SPLA split into two. Salva Kiir accused Machar of a coup attempt,140 and the town of Juba woke up on the 16 December to the scene of the country’s largest systematic mass killing. The massacre, organised and co-ordinated by the state including the Kiir faction’s own Dinka militias, targeted the Nuer. It started a civil war 138 Straus, Making and Unmaking Nations, p. 34. 139 For more on the historical roots of this ideology, see Pinaud, War and Genocide in South Sudan. 140 Douglas H. Johnson, ‘Briefing: the crisis in South Sudan’, African Affairs 113:451 (2014), 301.

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by making it inevitable. It also set the tone of genocidal violence, removing the taboo of killing non-Dinka groups in a systematic manner, and clearing the area for Dinka settlers. While multi-ethnic genocide may not have been designed by Kiir’s faction, this massacre was retrospectively its first phase. No one knows exactly how many people died in the Juba massacre, but the African Union accorded credibility to the estimate of 15,000–20,000 Nuer deaths.141 Genocidal violence quickly expanded to oil-rich Unity state, Machar’s home state and the new country’s only Nuer-majority state. It saw most of the fiercest fighting and violence until the end of 2015. Two gruesome military campaigns displaced Nuer civilians en masse to the camps of the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS). The state co-ordinated and organised multiple actors (including Bul Nuer and other Nuer armed youth) to carry out these attacks, using the legacy of the past Nuer wars and Nuer sections’ competition to subcontract this violence to Nuer perpetrators. Nuer perpetrators’ violence still fulfilled the goals of a Dinka supremacist agenda, as displayed by their rhetoric. They meant to kill and compromise their victims’ survival, and they used rape as a tool of genocide.142 This violence expanded Dinka land grabs from the north into the oil-rich Nuer part of the territory. In July 2016, genocidal violence engulfed the Equatoria region, following a confrontation between the rebels of Machar’s SPLA-In-Opposition (SPLAIO) and the SPLA in Juba after the signing of a peace agreement in August 2015. This time the perpetrators were mostly Dinka from the SPLA, including incorporated Dinka militias hailing from Bahr El Ghazal, occasionally supported by armed Dinka cattle herders. They also categorised their victims by grouping them along ethnic and political identities: assimilating the ‘Equatorians’ (in fact a collection of groups living in Equatoria) with ‘rebels’ (‘nyagat’) – a term initially reserved for the Nuer. In addition to killing, their goal was to destroy the group both physically and psychologically, including through rape. Perpetrators only grew emboldened after the Juba massacre and the violence orchestrated in Unity state. In other regions such as Western Bahr El Ghazal and Upper Nile, they committed similar mass categorical violence against non-Dinka civilians (particularly against the 141 AU Commission of Inquiry on South Sudan, ‘Final Report of the African Union Commission of Inquiry on South Sudan’, 15 October 2014, 114. 142 Clémence Pinaud, ‘Genocidal rape in South Sudan: organization, function and effects’, Human Rights Quarterly, 42:3 (2020), 667–94.

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Shilluk in 2017).143 A mix of SPLA units and Dinka militias displayed the same ideology of Dinka supremacy there. In all these regions, genocidal violence advanced the Dinka conquest of territory rich in oil and mineral resources.

What Type of Conflict? No exact death toll has been calculated for South Sudan’s civil war. One UN agency took on the burden of estimating mortality that exceeded the emergency threshold in Unity state.144 In 2018, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine estimated that since December 2013, this war had likely led to the violent death of roughly 200,000 people out of nearly 400,000 excess deaths145 – a ratio higher than that of Darfur.146 From its onset the media portrayed the war as between the Dinka and the Nuer.147 Quickly, the academic community mobilised against what it considered a misrepresentation and over-simplification, arguing this war should not be depicted as ethnic. This ‘meta-conflict’, a ‘conflict over the nature of the conflict’, remained unresolved, and diplomats did not know what approach to follow.148 The United Nations considered South Sudan on the ‘verge’ of a genocide, warning it could be like Rwanda’s, the archetype of genocide in Africa. The 143 On violence against the Shilluk, see Joshua Craze, Displaced and Immiserated: The Shilluk of Upper Nile in South Sudan’s Civil War, 2014–19, Human Security Baseline Assessment (Geneva: Small Arms Survey, 2019), www.smallarmssurvey.org/sites/def ault/files/resources/HSBA-Report-South-Sudan-Shilluk.pdf. 144 UNOCHA calculated that amongst the people it had accessed (about a quarter of Unity’s total population), a total of 10,553 people had died over the course of the year 2015, including 7,165 violent deaths and 829 deaths from drowning. The 7,165 violent deaths were just the tip of the iceberg. UNOCHA, ‘Crisis Impacts on Households in Unity State, South Sudan, 2014–2015: Initial Results of a Survey’, Office of the Deputy Humanitarian Coordinator for South Sudan, UNOCHA, January 2016, pp. 19–20, 22–4, https://reliefweb .int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/160202_Crisis%20impacts%20on%20households %20in%20Unity%20State_SS.pdf. 145 The figure of 50,000 deaths, reportedly first issued by the International Crisis Group in 2014, had been floating around until then. ‘War in South sudan estimated to have led to almost 400,000 excess deaths’, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (blog), 24 September 2018, www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/news/2018/war-southsudan-estimated-have-led-almost-400000-excess-deaths; ‘U.N. Official Says at Least 50,000 Dead in South Sudan War’, Reuters, 2 March 2016, www.reuters.com/art icle/us-southsudan-unrest-un/u-n-official-says-at-least-50000-dead-in-south-sudanwar-idUSKCN0W503Q. 146 Straus, Making and Unmaking Nations, pp. 258–9. 147 Johnson, ‘Briefing: the crisis in South Sudan’, 300. 148 Young, South Sudan’s Civil War, p. 115; Zach Vertin, A Poisoned Well: Lessons in Mediation from South Sudan’s Troubled Peace Process (New York: International Peace Institute, 2018), p. 23; Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 111.

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African Union and the United Nations documented part of the violence and labelled it as ‘ethnic cleansing’.149 No investigation into the crime of genocide was launched. Evidence disappeared, while the perpetrators also deliberately tried to destroy it. The turnover of investigators, the lack of strategic thinking in data collection and the shadow of the long-delayed ICC case in Darfur did not help either.150

International Politics In fact, there was no real appetite for accountability. The United States had midwifed the birth of South Sudan as a counter-weight to Khartoum.151 US advocacy groups and diplomats involved in the process saw the southerners as ‘victims’ and themselves as ‘saviours’.152 The same advocates of the SPLA continued to take a very apologetic stand towards the SPLA’s violence. De Waal tied the third war’s impunity to the second: ‘American advocates had, over the years, extended a remarkable moral indulgence to the leaders of the SPLM/A that is not only distasteful but arguably a contributor to the sense of impunity enjoyed by those who perpetrated the mass atrocities of December 2013 and thereafter.’153 The pro-SPLM policy of the previous administrations continued under Obama. The United States, condemning all parties for the killings, continued to support the government.154 At the same time, Kiir relied on a multitude of external allies to remain in power. He took advantage of regional competition and pursued an aggressive foreign policy that made one wonder how much leverage the United States still had anyway.155 In August 2018, following the signing of the latest peace

149 United Nations Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan, ‘Report of the Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan’, United Nations Human Rights Council, 6 March 2017, pp. 6–7, 17. 150 Fein, ‘Genocide by attrition’, 20–1; Young, South Sudan’s Civil War, p. 73; AU Commission of Inquiry on South Sudan, ‘Final Report of the African Union Commission of Inquiry on South Sudan’. Fein also described problematic evidence gathering and analysis during the Cambodian genocide by international human rights organisations, in a context of international apathy. 151 Young, South Sudan’s Civil War, p. 61. 152 Pete Martell, First Raise a Flag. How South Sudan Won the Longest War but Lost the Peace (London: Hurst & Company, 2018), p. 195. 153 Alex de Waal, ‘Getting away with mass murder: the SPLA and its American lobbies’, in Advocacy in Conflict: Critical Perspectives on Transnational Activism, ed. Alex de Waal (London: Zed Books, 2015), p. 165. 154 Young, South Sudan’s Civil War, pp. 58, 85. 155 Uganda, Kenya, Egypt, Israel, China, Qatar, rebel groups such as the Darfuri JEM, SPLM/A-North, the Congolese M23 and international mercenaries as well as foreign mining, oil and lobbying companies.

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agreement, US officials noted that the South Sudanese government no longer took the US ‘seriously’.156 The international community, led by the United States in concert with the European Union, continued to focus on power-sharing and reuniting the SPLM to end the war. It wanted to quieten the guns and return the country to its pre-war state.157 It turned a blind eye to the engine of this war: an ideology of ethnic supremacy propelled by a Dinka faction smart enough not to repeat Khartoum’s mistakes and that in fact, rivalled its former oppressor.

Conclusion Many links tie together the violence perpetrated in southern Sudan, the Nuba Mountains, Darfur and independent South Sudan. This chapter has addressed only a few, focusing on the ideology, perpetration and effects of the violence. Victims were always identified in categories and the violence directed at them was annihilatory and/or compromised their survival. The perpetrators’ exclusionary ideology was always deeply rooted in the legacy of slavery. This ideology of racial supremacy was expressed as an amalgam of Islamism and Arabism in the south, in Nuba and in Darfur.158 In independent South Sudan, the ideology of supremacy was ethnic, not religious. But the perpetrators, hailing from communities particularly affected by slavery, still reproduced an ethnic hierarchy that was both a reaction to and an echo of the legacy of slavery, including military slavery and its associated idea of martial races. In all four cases, the central government practised ‘counter-insurgency on the cheap’ and used some of the same perpetrators from one conflict to the next. Violence in Darfur resembled that of the north–south civil war and in the Nuba, with a ‘decentralized coalition of violence, not the vertical administratively heavy model of Rwanda and Nazi Germany’, as Straus wrote.159 Only the Nuba suffered a genocidal project of social transformation. The last case, South Sudan’s genocide, continued the lineage of Sudan’s past genocides. Juba incorporated most features of Sudan’s genocidal practices, with counter-insurgency on the cheap, forced mass starvation and

156 Robbie Gramer, ‘Remember South Sudan? Washington would prefer not to’, Foreign Policy, 4 October 2018, https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/10/04/quietly-angrilywashington-confronts-its-wayward-offspring-south-sudan-africa-diplomacy-foreignaid-war-conflict-peace-deal-salva-kiir/. 157 Young, South Sudan’s Civil War, pp. 113, 117. 158 Straus, Making and Unmaking Nations, pp. 257, 264. 159 Ibid., p. 263.

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displacement.160 It waged genocidal violence in an ad hoc manner, adapting to local contexts but always following the same rationale. Yet most perpetrators shared ethnic membership with the central Dinka elite that was ordering the violence. This was different from the previous cases (with the exception of some local southern militias), where the state had subcontracted most of the violence to local Arab militias. Extreme violence also affected multiple groups on a longer time span in South Sudan than Darfur and the Nuba Mountains, in different phases and locations. Finally, the Dinka state officials were much more careful to cover their tracks from the beginning than were their Sudanese counterparts and militia leaders.161 The Dinka elite most likely learned from the ICC experience in Sudan. These wars attracted international attention. But one is struck by the failure of US advocacy movements.162 They mostly ended up serving US policy goals.163 The occurrence of mass violence – whether an actual genocide or not – never mattered in dictating US policy.164 Human rights groups’ denunciation of violence in South Sudan in the third civil war yielded no results due to US and regional support for Kiir’s administration.165

Bibliographic Note This non-exhaustive bibliographic note focuses on the specialised academic literature on the region. Douglas Johnson’s Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil War became the canon of a concise yet expansive history of Sudan’s conflicts. Øystein H. Rolanden and M. W. Daly’s History of South Sudan offers a more digestible version for the neophyte that covers the South’s independence. Johnson’s work on the nineteenth century remains foundational. On this period, Sean O’Fahey wrote about the pre-colonial and colonial history of Darfur, while Robert O. Collins focused on the southern Sudan. Collins also provided a good illustration of the second civil war and Khartoum’s politics in the twentieth century, in Requiem for the Sudan, co-authored with Millard Bur, when Francis Mading Deng explained in his War of Vision the background of 160 De Waal called Kiir a ‘famine criminal’. De Waal, Mass Starvation, p. 195. 161 For more, see de Waal and Flint, Darfur, pp. 121, 70, 133, 147, 179–83, 47–52; Gérard Prunier, Darfour, un génocide ambigu (Paris: La Table ronde, 2005), pp. 195, 226–9. 162 Patey, The New Kings of Crude, p. 76. 163 De Waal and Flint, Darfur, pp. 147, 149; Douglas H. Johnson, ‘Mamdani’s “settlers”, “natives”, and the war on terror’, African Affairs 108:433 (2009),655–60, at 659. 164 Young, South Sudan’s Civil War, pp. 56, 190. 165 De Waal, ‘Getting away with mass murder’, 164–5.

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the fraught relationship between northerners and southerners. David Keen’s Benefits of Famine offers the best study of the war economy in governmentcontrolled areas during the second civil war. Sharon Hutchinson produced an unmatched ethnography of the Nuer living through war in Nuer Dilemmas. Alex de Waal wrote advocacy reports for African Rights that covered the entire country, including the Nuba. His and journalist Julie Flint’s Darfur later explained the recent political history of Darfur. M. W. Daly’s Darfur’s Sorrow, complemented this growing historiography of the conflict in Darfur. Apart from a few journalist and diplomatic accounts, few academic books addressed the civil war that started in 2013 in newly independent South Sudan. John Young’s South Sudan’s Civil War, Peter Adwok Nyaba’s South Sudan, and Clémence Pinaud’s War and Genocide in South Sudan, contributed to fill that gap.

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Elements of Genocidal Ideology in Al-Qaeda and Its Offshoots, including Islamic State hayat alvi Introduction In June 2014, the Islamic State (IS), at the time calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), launched a military campaign from its base in Syria into Mosul, Iraq. This signified the terrorist organisation’s early stages of establishing the so-called Caliphate under the leadership of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.1 Following this incredible conquest of Mosul, the ISIS bureaucracy set up shop within its territories in Iraq and its leadership announced its five-year plan, encompassing the territorial conquest of land stretching from parts of western China; Europe; all of North, Central, East and West Africa; and the entire Indian subcontinent including Sri Lanka. (See Map 29.1.) The Islamic State has emerged as an offshoot of Al-Qaeda (AQ). The ISIS map of the world indicating the organisation’s agenda for global domination is also a glaring sign of its genocidal ideology and campaign to ‘cleanse’ conquered territories of undesirables as defined in its belief system. This is the grand objective of the Islamic State in its ultimate plan to create an Islamic utopia, which is not that different from Al-Qaeda. The womb from which the IS has been born is Al-Qaeda, which harbours its own plans for establishing an Islamic utopia involving takfiri cleansing of its territories. Takfir is a convenient tool that terrorist organisations like AQ and the IS use to eliminate undesirables from their purported perfect Islamic societies. Takfir allows an individual or group to label someone an apostate – that is, one who has left the religion of Islam and is no longer a ‘true believer’. Thus, that individual is subject to a death sentence. These factors signify the genocidal elements in Al-Qaeda’s ideology and agendas. The difference 1 S. Hamid, ‘What a Caliphate really is – and how the Islamic State is not one’, Brookings, 1 November 2016, www.brookings.edu/blog/markaz/2016/11/01/what-a-caliphatereally-is-and-how-the-islamic-state-is-not-one/.

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Map 29.1 ISIS Caliphate map of the world. (John Hall, ‘The ISIS map of the world: militants outline chilling five-year plan for global domination as they declare formation of caliphate – and change their name to the Islamic State’, Daily Mail, 30 June 2014, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article2674736/ISIS-militants-declare-formation-caliphate-Syria-Iraq-demand-Muslims-world-swear-allegiance.html)

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between AQ and the IS remains in the time frame for achieving the goal of global domination by means of territorial conquests to establish the Islamic utopia consisting of ‘pure’ believers. The IS wants to establish this Islamic utopia immediately, while Al-Qaeda pursues other geopolitical priorities before turning its attention towards establishing an Islamic utopic caliphate. Another major difference between AQ and the IS involves the targets of their violence. While AQ does not want to trigger an intra-Islamic sectarian conflict, the IS has targeted Shi’ites and other minorities to instigate sectarian strife. The IS vision is to cleanse society of Shi’ites and other groups, in addition to defeating non-Islamic enemies. As a result, it is accurate to describe the IS as more rabid in its genocidal paradigm.

Laying the Groundwork: Al-Qaeda, ‘the Base’ Al-Qaeda, which means ‘the base’ in Arabic, is the umbrella organisation of numerous offshoots and satellites that embody elements of genocidal ideologies in their respective interpretations and implementations of Islamic law. These religious interpretations also intersect with their numerous geopolitical agendas. In general, Al-Qaeda promotes the killing of ‘non-believers’, whom AQ members refer to as ‘infidels’, and it uses the tactics of terrorism to send a message, achieve certain goals, bring attention to their causes and, in the process, fulfil religious obligations as they interpret them. In doing so, AQ has caused serious harm to groups and individuals, civilians and combatants, both in zones of conflict as well as in peacetime. Thus, it is accurate to delineate AQ and its offshoots as intrinsically containing genocidal ideologies. Moreover, AQ has systematically used children for their violent campaigns and has operated schools for the sole purpose of indoctrinating the next generation of ‘jihadists’, or those who engage in jihad,2 loosely interpreted as ‘holy war’. These attributes of AQ encompass genocidal crimes as defined by the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.3 Genocide is not just a criminal act with physical evidence and attributes, but it also includes the mental element of ‘intent’. Al-Qaeda promotes the 2 Jihad has two meanings: struggle against oneself to be more righteous (called the ‘Greater Jihad’); war in defence of Islam (often translated as holy war, called the ‘Lesser Jihad’). 3 See The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1_Convention %20on%20the%20Prevention%20and%20Punishment%20of%20the%20Crime%20of% 20Genocide.pdf.

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concept of an Islamic utopia that can be realised only by means of genocidal acts. This is because its doctrines distinguish between those who are true believers – hence pure – and those who are not. Al-Qaeda has a long-term plan to accept and include those who meet its criteria for true believers, and to reject, exclude and eliminate those who fail to meet the criteria. Excluding non-believers for AQ’s long-term goal of establishing an Islamic caliphate comes in the form of threats of violent harm to individuals and/or groups in society, forcing them to flee or seek protection. The other method that AQ often uses is violent enforcement of what it views as proper Islamic law and lifestyle in society. Such policies include strict dress codes for women in public; corporal punishments (e.g. hand amputations for a thief) exacted in public squares as a means of deterring criminal behaviour; capital punishment in public; bombing places of entertainment like cinemas and art exhibits that are deemed un-Islamic; trying to eliminate from society music, the arts, gender mixing and habits like smoking and drinking alcohol, and all of this is to be done violently if necessary; and forcing men to participate in congregational prayers, with threats of violence if they refuse. AQ follows a literalist, ultra-orthodox and extremist interpretation of Islamic law. Its ideology is Salafist in its inherent characteristics. Salafism is an ideology that promotes the practice of Islam attributed to the early seventh-century adherents. The word Salaf means ‘precedent; antecedent’. A Salafist in the modern era tries to emulate the practice of Muslims during the Prophet Muhammad’s time (d.632 C E) in what is now Saudi Arabia. The Salafist strives to follow the early Muslim model in today’s world, and, usually, he/she also wants society at large to do the same. Many Salafists are non-violent. However, at the same time, many Salafist organisations are extremely violent, especially in displaying their intolerance of any practices and lifestyles that they deem un-Islamic. In fact, they extend that intolerance to a punitive judgment of individuals, societies, groups and even entire countries as non-believers, and, thus, as subject to their brand of justice and purification. This is called takfir, which means to judge another as a nonbeliever – that is, one who has left Islam, an act which is called apostasy. Hard-line Salafists believe that apostates are to be punished by death. As seen from the extremist Salafist lens, apostates and infidels must be eliminated. This, then, is an unequivocal genocidal intention of violent Salafist organisations, like Al-Qaeda and its offshoots, that proliferate worldwide. A particular brand of Salafism is Wahhabism, the national ideology of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Muhammad ibn Abdul al-Wahhab (d.1792) was the 703

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founder of Wahhabism, which is extreme monotheism, rejecting any interlocuters between the faithful believer and God, Allah in Arabic. Al-Wahhab’s teachings have been based on literalist interpretations of Sunni Islam, especially in theology, worship and rituals, and Islamic jurisprudence. Wahhabi authorities enforce their Islamic policies through the use of religious/moral police, as well as corporal and capital punishments that are carried out in public. Wahhabism is highly puritanical in all aspects and extremely intolerant of non-Wahhabis. Moreover, the founder Abdul Wahhab rejected any forms of innovation, reforms and reinterpretations of Islamic tenets. According to scholar Vali Nasr, Abdul Wahhab ‘was a purist . . . He sought to cleanse Islam of all the cultural practices that it had borrowed and incorporated over the centuries. They had corrupted and weakened Islam, he said, and must be purged.’4 Furthermore, Wahhabis condemn Islamic mysticism, called Sufism, and ‘the veneration of saints and their shrines as polytheism and [view] Muslims who engaged in this action as heretics’.5 From this, it is correct to presume that cultural genocide of others (i.e. nonWahhabis) is intrinsically bound within the Wahhabi paradigm. While Al-Qaeda has general Salafi attributes, its offshoot the IS proclaims itself as specifically Wahhabi. There is an important caveat regarding the IS embrace of Wahhabism. While the IS claims Wahhabism as its core ideology, it does not align itself with Saudi Arabia, and, in fact, the IS detests the kingdom and its royal family. So, even within Wahhabism, there are differentiations between the political entity of Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Wahhabism, and the Islamic State, which seeks to overthrow the Saudi royal family and take control of the holiest places in Islam, Mecca and Medina. If the IS succeeds, it will no doubt commit genocide of any social group, religious minorities and/or opponents who refuse its domination, whether in Saudi Arabia or elsewhere. Author William McCants further explains the IS Wahhabi ideology, stating that, while it is ‘nearly identical to Wahhabism . . . it’s very different from the kind of Islam you find in other parts of the world’.6 Essentially, ‘Wahhabi scholars might reach different conclusions from Islamic State scholars, but they start at much the same place.’7

4 V. Nasr, The Shi’ite Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2007), pp. 96–7. 5 Ibid., p. 97. 6 W. McCants, The ISIS Apocalypse (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2015), p. 151. 7 Ibid., p. 151.

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In the same vein, it is imperative to mention the Kharijites, the first sect in Islamic history. The Kharijites’ ultra-puritanical ideology also contributes to the Islamic State’s modus operandi and criteria for inclusion, exclusion and legitimacy. The name Kharijites means ‘those who secede or leave’. The Kharijites projected their power violently in the mid-seventh century. When the question of succession of the caliphs following the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 C E created internal schisms and resulted in the assassination of the third Caliph ʿUthman, followed by the Battle of Siffin (657 C E ) between the fourth Caliph Ali – who was the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law – and the contending leader named Muʾawiyah, founder of the Umayyad Caliphate, the Kharijites watched the battle very carefully. Ultimately, Caliph Ali agreed to an arbitration to end the battle, instead of forging ahead and conquering Muʾawiyah and his forces. This, then, was the ultimate sin in the eyes of the Kharijites. For them, Ali’s decision to submit to the arbitration that ended the battle without victory rendered him a nonbeliever, or an apostate. The Kharijites no longer considered Ali as the legitimate Caliph of the Islamic community, which was transforming into an empire, and they also condemned him as an apostate due to his unwillingness to carry out God’s mandate to defeat the enemy. Agreeing to arbitration is a violation of divine will, as the Kharijites perceived it. As a result, the Kharijites murdered Caliph Ali in 661 C E. In addition to embracing the concept of takfir, the Kharijites also prioritised violent jihad (i.e. holy war). In fact, in the Kharijite paradigm, jihad is considered the ‘Sixth Pillar of Islam’, making it a solemn obligation of Muslims. This makes Kharijite ideology highly relevant to Al-Qaeda and the IS. The violent puritanical paradigm of both AQ and the IS reflect the same fundamental principles of the radical Kharijites. Moreover, the merging of religion with politics allows these groups to target political leaders and systems based on the same application of the takfiri concept. Therefore, both Al-Qaeda and the IS aspire to overthrow regimes in the Middle East, North Africa, and generally throughout the Muslim world. They do not see these regimes as religiously or politically legitimate, and their literalist interpretations of Islam prescribe and dictate the type of political leadership, authority and legitimacy over a people and territory. According to their creed, political legitimacy also requires religious legitimacy. Thus, anything else is, by default, illegitimate. That includes Western liberal democracy, communism and forms of political Islam that do not align with their own. Al-Qaeda and the IS also reject human rights and freedoms, especially as viewed in the Western perspective. Genocide, mass atrocities and crimes 705

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against humanity against perceived non-believers, transgressors and enemies are not beyond the scope of AQ and the IS. Their desire to obtain and ultimately utilise weapons of mass destruction, including chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear – or CBRN – weapons is well documented. This is commonly called weapons of mass destruction (WMD) terrorism. In 1998, Al-Qaeda’s founding leader Osama bin Laden stated that it was his ‘Islamic duty to acquire weapons of mass destruction’, which would become ‘a top priority’ for his lieutenants in the ensuing years.8 Bin Laden contended that Al-Qaeda needs to acquire WMDs to achieve the terrorist organisation’s broader goals, which include aspirations to combat the capitalist forces of globalisation, democracy and Western values. With WMDs at their disposal, Al-Qaeda and its clientele would clearly possess the means to commit genocide and mass atrocities on a catastrophic scale. Differentiating between combatants and non-combatants is irrelevant in such scenarios. Furthermore, bin Laden issued a number of fatwas (religious decrees) that explicitly promote mass killings. In his infamous February 1998 fatwa, bin Laden urges his followers to kill ‘pagans’ and ‘crusaders’. The title of this fatwa is even called ‘Jihad against Jews and Crusaders’, indicating inherent hatred of Jews and Christians. The 1998 fatwa is co-signed by a number of violent jihadist leaders, listed here: Shaykh Osama bin Muhammad bin Laden; Ayman al-Zawahiri, amir of the Jihad Group in Egypt; Abu-Yasir Rifaʾi Ahmad Taha, Egyptian Islamic Group; Shaykh Mir Hamzah, secretary of the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Pakistan; and Fazlur Rahman, amir of the Jihad Movement in Bangladesh.9 The fatwa begins with this paragraph: . . . fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war); and peace be upon our Prophet, Muhammad Bin-ʿAbdallah, who said: ‘I have been sent with the sword between my hands to ensure that no one but Allah is worshipped, Allah who put my livelihood under the shadow of my spear and who inflicts humiliation and scorn on those who disobey my orders.’10 8 R. Mowatt-Larssen, ‘Al Qaeda weapons of mass destruction threat: hype or reality?’, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University (January 2010), www.belfercenter.org/publication/al-qaeda-weapons-massdestruction-threat-hype-or-reality. 9 ‘World Islamic Front Statement: Jihad against Jews and Crusaders’, 23 February 1998, https://fas.org/irp/world/para/docs/980223-fatwa.htm; originally appeared in Arabic in Al Quds Al Arabi. Also see ‘Fatwas’, International Institute for Counter-Terrorism, IDC Herzliya, 2016, www.ict.org.il/Articles.aspx?WordID=23#gsc.tab=0. 10 ‘World Islamic Front Statement’.

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Bin Laden and his comrades also use genocidal terminology in this fatwa, referring to the American troops deployed to Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Gulf War as ‘locusts’. The dehumanisation of targets by labelling them as insects is a genocidal marker. The potent words do not hold back their contempt for the ‘crusaders’: ‘The Arabian Peninsula has never . . . been stormed by any forces like the crusader armies spreading in it like locusts, eating its riches and wiping out its plantations. All this is happening at a time in which nations are attacking Muslims like people fighting over a plate of food.’11 The 1998 fatwa lists a litany of charges against the Americans violating the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq and the Muslim world. The fatwa attempts to frighten Muslims with the purported malicious agenda of the United States and Israel pertaining to the Middle East region. The fatwa’s authors say: No one argues today about three facts that are known to everyone . . . : First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples . . . . Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million . . . despite all this, the Americans are once again trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation. So here they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors. Third, if the Americans’ aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews’ petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq . . . and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel’s survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.12

Then, the fatwa’s authors claim that these acts and agendas of the crusaders and Jews are ‘a declaration of war’ against God, Muslims and Islam, the latter of which is symbolised by God’s messenger (i.e. the Prophet Muhammad). They emphasise that, ‘All these crimes and sins committed by the Americans are a clear declaration of war on Allah, his messenger, and 11 Ibid. (emphasis added).

12 Ibid.

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Muslims. And ulema (bodies of Islamic scholars) have throughout Islamic history unanimously agreed that the jihad is an individual duty if the enemy destroys the Muslim countries.’13 Moreover, they blame the ‘pagans’ for all their woes, and they call on global Muslims to kill them indiscriminately in an epic battle of ‘good against evil’.14 Bin Laden also took strategic interest in, and supported other violent jihads occurring outside of the Middle East. For a time, bin Laden stayed in Sudan and supported the AQ affiliates in Somalia against the US troops. Somalia’s most notorious violent jihadist group, Al Shabaab, has been an official AlQaeda affiliate since 2012. Bin Laden also attempted to support the jihad in the Algerian civil war in the 1990s, as scholar and translator Aymenn Jawad alTamimi explains: – OBL [Osama bin Laden] migrated to Sudan and helped to establish training camps for jihadis to fight the U.S. presence in Somalia in cooperation with local Somali insurgents . . . . – OBL established contact with the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) in the hope of working with it in Algeria . . . . – OBL took an interest in the GIA splinter faction called the Salafi Group for Da’wa and Combat. This faction became the basis for the formation of AQIM [Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb].15 Both AQIM and Al Shabaab are considered some of Al-Qaeda’s most brutal arms in Africa. They routinely target civilians, particularly Westerners and non-Muslims, and carry out spectacular attacks, such as the Nairobi Westgate Mall attack (Al Shabaab) in late September 2013, and the January 2013 Tigantourine gas facility attack (AQIM) in Algeria. AQ and its global network of cells and militias have committed many atrocities and mass killings, especially in areas of conflict. For example, on 10 June 2015 in the Syrian province of Idlib, AQ’s branch in Syria, the Nusra Front, massacred nearly twenty-five Druze villagers, mostly from one family. The minority Druze have faced violent repression perpetrated by the Nusra Front throughout the Syrian civil war. According to Al-Tamimi: Qalb Lawza is one of the Druze villages in Idlib whose inhabitants were compelled at the beginning of this year to renounce the Druze faith and accept Sunni Islam at the hands of Jabhat al-Nusra, including destruction of Druze 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. (emphasis added). 15 Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, ‘Osama bin Laden and the Algerian jihad’, Aymennjawad .org, 30 September 2018, www.aymennjawad.org/21654/osama-bin-laden-and-thealgerian-jihad.

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shrines and other Jabhat al-Nusra regulations such as gender segregation. These impositions have not been cancelled and remain in force to this day . . . .16

Throughout the years, AQ and bin Laden promoted their genocidal ideology through speeches, literature, fatwas, audio recordings, sermons, jihadist nasheeds (Islamic hymns sung a cappella) and more recently, social media, YouTube videos, Twitter and some platforms in the Dark Web. Symbolism is extremely important to AQ and its global followers, and warriors on horseback, bloodied swords and the black flag with the shahadah (declaration of faith in Islam) printed on it proliferate in the AQ imagery repertoire. The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point explains the symbolism of the image of a jihadist standing in front of a black flag holding a sword dripping with blood in one hand and a shield in the other: In the jihadi visual propaganda . . . blood or red usually symbolize the act of martyrdom, and it is linked to warlike qualities. Here, blood is seen dripping from the sword of a warrior who is standing in front of a large black banner that bears the shahada (Islamic testimony of faith holding that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is his messenger), a symbolic depiction of the sun and the name of the group: ‘saraya al-tawhid wal-jihad’ (‘Squadrons of Tawhid wal-Jihad [monotheism and jihad]’). . . . The black flag was the battle flag of the Prophet Muhammad and it was carried into battle by many of his companions. Since then, the image of the black flag has been used as a symbol of religious revolt and engagement in battle (i.e., jihad). In the contemporary Islamist movement, the black flag is used to evoke notions of jihad and of reestablishing the Islamic Caliphate. The sword in the image further helps depict current jihadi activities as modern extensions of the campaigns of the first Muslims, as swords are seen as noble weapons that embody the religious purity, nobility and righteousness that is associated with the Prophet, his companions and their successful military campaigns.17

AQ and bin Laden’s most infamous act of terrorism has been the 11 September 2001 co-ordinated attacks targeting New York’s World Trade Center’s (WTC) Twin Towers, the Pentagon and the botched attempt to 16 Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, ‘The massacre of Druze villagers in Qalb Lawza, Idlib province’, Syria Comment, 15 June 2015, www.aymennjawad.org/17456/the-massacre-of -druze-villagers-in-qalb-lawza (emphasis added). 17 ‘Image promoting Saraya al-Tawhid wal-Jihad’, Combating Terrorism Center at West Point (2020), www.ctc.usma.edu/militant-imagery-project/0200/.

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target the White House with United Airlines Flight 93. The symbolism of the WTC Twin Towers burning has proliferated in AQ propaganda for many years. The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point explains the symbolism of the image of a horse and bin Laden with the burning WTC Twin Towers in the background as follows: The captions from top to bottom quotes a famous statement from [bin Laden]: ‘aqsamtu bi-Allah al-‘azim lladhi rafa‘a al-sama’ bi-la ‘amad’ (inaccurate and partial quote of Q 13:2) (‘I swear by God almighty who raised the heavens without supports’); and ‘lan tahlam amrika wa-la man ya‘ish fi amrika bil-amn’ (‘America and those who live in America will never sleep [lit. dream] in safety’). In the bottom left corner is a representation of the World Trade Center’s burning twin towers, a visual reminder of the most lethal attack masterminded by Usama bin Ladin. On the right, Bin Ladin is seen raising his pointer finger in a gesture performed during the utterance of the shahada. Jihadi propaganda often marks important jihadi operations/violent events in order to establish these events as key milestones that shape the current jihadi movement. Usually, these events are reinterpreted as illustrations of the effectiveness of the violent jihadi struggle and its success in targeting its enemies. In particular, jihadi propaganda often displays examples of jihadi victory against much stronger and more powerful (Western) forces as evidence of the imminent victory of jihadist Islam over Western imperialism and secularism.18

The 9/11 terrorist attacks that AQ carried out were intended for mass murders of civilians and Pentagon personnel. The plane hijackers (AQ operatives) made sure that each plane contained full tanks of fuel to exact the most casualties from the largest blasts upon impact. The 9/11 attacks resulted in the deaths of 2,977 people. On 2 May 2011, US Navy Seals carried out a raid on a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, killing bin Laden. In November 2017, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) declassified an immense reserve of files, documents, images, audio recordings and other materials confiscated from bin Laden’s compound. These are primary-source documents and materials that belonged to bin Laden and his AQ lieutenants, available at www.cia.gov/li brary/abbottabad-compound/index.html.19 The rich materials in this 18 ‘Image of warrior, horse & UBL’, Combating Terrorism Center at West Point (2020), www.ctc.usma.edu/militant-imagery-project/0370/. 19 ‘November 2017 release of Abbottabad compound material’, US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad-compound/index.html.

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primary-source library indicate that AQ members have been preoccupied with graphic imagery and descriptions of Muslim victimhood, publishing photos of dead children, women and helpless civilians at the hands of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) or the United States in Iraq, or other Western powers’ campaigns in Muslim-majority lands. While AQ has harboured its own genocidal agendas to establish an Islamic utopia, it has routinely blamed the United States, Western powers, and their Middle Eastern allies for methodically perpetrating atrocities against Muslims. Also, AQ and its ilk have perpetuated the narrative that these enemies are not only trying to hurt and oppress Muslims, but they are specifically focused on destroying Islam. Oddly, AQ and its affiliates see genocidal asymmetric warfare as a means to stop and prevent the supposed genocide and victimhood of Muslims and destruction of Islam. Overall, violent Salafists, like AQ members, may be determined to use genocidal intentions and acts to achieve their goals, and they justify their ways and means to use them according to their interpretations and contextual circumstances. However, that has not always worked well for AQ members, as we see in the case of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the recognised ‘founding father’ of the Islamic State’s ideology.

The Sunni–Shi’ite Rivalry and Genocide: Zarqawi’s Obsessions Demographics matter in the Middle East. In particular, the dynamics between majority and minority ethnic, sectarian, religious and tribal identities in society and politics have triggered civil wars and regional geopolitical rivalries throughout modern history. When the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003, the sectarian and ethnic demographic balance within that country fell in favour of the Iraqi Shi’ites, and provided an opening for Iran, a Shi’ite theocracy since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Prime Minister Nuri alMaliki (2006–14), a Shi’ite politician who had spent considerable time in exile in Iran during the rule of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, allowed Iran to gain influence in Iraq. Thus, Iraq became the stepping-stone for Iran’s regional and sectarian agendas. Prime Minister Maliki’s national policies added salt to the wounds of Iraq’s Sunni minority when he purged the government and military of Sunnis and replaced them with Shi’ites, many of whom had no experience or credentials befitting their new positions. Furthermore, when Sunnis protested against 711

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policies deemed discriminatory against them, the Maliki regime cracked down on Sunni protesters with violence and brutality. By 2012, thousands of Sunnis were arrested and held without charge. Shi’ite militias proliferated throughout the country, and more Sunnis turned up murdered, their bodies tossed into the streets. In late April 2013, Maliki unleashed the security forces against peaceful protestors in Hawija. Hundreds of Sunni protestors who demanded freedoms and rights were ruthlessly killed. This further enraged the Iraqi Sunnis, and, most importantly, these acts of blatant oppression of Sunnis gave impetus to Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), at the time led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, to viciously target Shi’ites in terrorist attacks. Sunni–Shi’ite violence in Iraq has devastated the country. Zarqawi was a Jordanian militant with a criminal background who aspired to rise in the ranks of Al-Qaeda. He appealed to bin Laden to allow him to become one of AQ’s prominent operatives. However, bin Laden and the AQ leadership expressed disapproval of Zarqawi’s ideology, particularly because he was so obsessed with his hatred for Shi’ites. The fact that he and AQI specifically targeted Shi’ite civilians and mosques in Iraq, even beheading their victims and leaving rows of decapitated heads on the sides of the streets, angered bin Laden and his lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who led AQ after bin Laden’s assassination in May 2011. Bin Laden and Zawahiri wrote letters to Zarqawi instructing him to stop targeting Shi’ites in Iraq, because it was not in the interest of Al-Qaeda Central to spark an intra-Islamic sectarian conflict.20 For both bin Laden and Zawahiri, AQ’s priority has been to conduct violent jihad against corrupt regimes in the region, as well as target Western enemies like the United States and its allies. For Zarqawi, on the other hand, killing Shi’ites was a top priority. Bin Laden and Zawahiri also argued that Zarqawi’s tactics of mass killing of Shi’ite non-combatants would make AQ Central and Islam in general look really bad. Therefore, it was imperative for AQ that Zarqawi and AQI stop targeting Shi’ites in Iraq. AQI constituted a real Sunni insurgency in Iraq, but by 2013 the US forces had decimated the terrorist group. They killed Zarqawi in an airstrike in June 2006. Only a handful of hardened AQI militants remained in hiding. But the most notable development was the internal ideological disagreement between bin Laden and his cohorts leading AQ globally and Zarqawi leading AQI. This disagreement is one of a number of threads that separated the two groups later in Syria. 20 See, e.g., Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 604.

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When the Syrian civil war erupted in 2011, the remnants of AQI were able to regroup and join AQ in Syria, which at the time was called Jabhat al-Nusra, or Al-Nusra Front. The remaining hardened AQI militants who had survived in Iraq crossed into Syria and joined Al-Nusra Front. Among them was Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who had earned a PhD in Islamic Studies, and as a US prisoner in Iraq, he had arbitrated disputes between inmates at Camp Bucca before being released. However, AQI soon broke away from Al-Nusra Front in Syria, and Al-Baghdadi became the caliph, or leader, of the Islamic State (the Caliphate). The Islamic State has espoused the ideology and principles of Zarqawi and Zarqawi’s number-two operative, an Iraqi from Nineveh named Abdulrahman al-Qaduli, also known as Abu Ali al-Anbari. Like Zarqawi, AlAnbari has been known for his intense hatred for Shi’ites. H. Hassan is a renowned scholar and analyst who co-authored (with Michael Weiss) the first book about the Islamic State, entitled ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (2015). In 2018, Hassan published an article in The Atlantic explaining the prominence of Al-Anbari in shaping the ideological foundations of the Islamic State. Hassan has read and translated IS documents and he has interviewed prominent IS associates and Western intelligence sources since the rise of the IS and its conquest of Mosul in 2014. In his article in The Atlantic, which is based on a document about Anbari found after US raids against the IS, Anbari’s son’s biography of him for internal IS use and a number of Anbari’s lectures, Hassan explains that once the IS took over Mosul, he became ‘the ideologue in chief’; as such, he ‘trained senior clerics, instructed members to draft religious texts, and issued fatwas (religious decrees) about major issues affecting the caliphate’.21 Under Anbari’s supervision, the IS burned alive a captured Jordanian pilot. Also, ‘Yazidis who came in contact with the group were massacred or enslaved; and two tribes in Syria and Iraq were massacred as a warning against rebellion in the wake of the group’s capture of one-third of Iraq and nearly half of Syria. Anbari also labelled Syria’s moderate rebels as apostates in 2013 and authored a detailed fatwa against them.’22 Anbari frequently travelled between Iraq and Syria once Baghdadi appointed him as the Islamic State’s finance chief. During one of those trips, Anbari killed himself with a suicide belt when US soldiers raided his hideout near the Syria–Iraq border. Both Zarqawi and Anbari served as the ideological pillars and tactical role models for genocidal hatred for Shi’ites 21 H. Hassan, ‘The true origins of ISIS’, The Atlantic, 30 November 2018, www .theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/11/isis-origins-anbari-zarqawi/577030/. 22 Ibid.

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and other groups in the region. Both men promoted the use of grotesque violence against their enemies; the more hard-core the violence, the more sensational for the organisation’s propaganda purposes. The IS frequently posted videos of beheadings and immolations on the Internet. The group’s expressions of anti-Shi’ite hatred have proliferated throughout its literature, multimedia and leaders’ lectures and sermons. They have been in the business of hate. Once the IS emerged in 2014 and conquered considerable territories in Syria and Iraq, the IS ideology continued to adopt and attempted to carry out the anti-Shi’ite genocidal agenda, despite the protestations against it from the Islamic State’s former umbrella organisation, Al-Qaeda. The rise of the IS in Syria and Iraq marks an existential threat to regional Shi’ites, including for the Islamic Republic of Iran. The dynamics of the rise of the anti-Shi’ite, genocidal Islamic State (IS) and the existential threat that Iran and regional Shi’ites have perceived from it comprise another substantial dimension to the evolution of genocidal ideology, first embryonically implanted by Zarqawi and Anbari within AQI, and thereafter nurtured and amplified within its offshoot, the Islamic State. In turn, these events and developments have led to both sides – the IS and the Shi’ite militias – committing atrocities, war crimes and massacres in Iraq, Syria and also in Yemen.

Blueprint for Genocide: The IS Utopia The essence of the Islamic State is violence. The IS ideology inherently contains genocidal ambitions to exterminate various sectarian groups, like the Yezidis, Shi’ites and other religious/sectarian minorities, as the organisation has unequivocally stated in various propaganda videos, social media postings and IS literature. Employing takfiri tenets, Zarqawi and Anbari and their acolytes sought to wipe Shi’ites off the face of the earth. This was exemplified in the fall of Mosul in June 2014 at the hands of the IS, where the primary targets for IS massacres were Iraqi Shi’ites. The IS terminology and labelling in reference to Shi’ites also illustrate the organisation’s contempt for the sect. It is accurate to state that the Islamic State has been preoccupied with its hatred of Shi’ites and genocidal ambitions to ‘exterminate’ them. In legal terms, extermination is a crime against humanity. It is described as conduct that ‘constituted, or took place as part of, a mass killing of members of a civilian population’ and was ‘committed as part of a widespread or systematic 714

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attack directed against a civilian population’.23 Extermination encompasses both massacres and ‘the intentional infliction of conditions of life, inter alia the deprivation of access to food and medicine, calculated to bring about the destruction of part of a population’ (www.un.org/law/icc/index.html). These are important definitions to note because both AQ and the IS have visions for establishing an Islamic utopia, but their means for achieving this goal differ, especially in terms of how each group views Shi’ites. Where AQ might consider Shi’ites as irritants, the IS sees them as hard-core enemies and deviants who must be exterminated. Ali Soufan is a former FBI agent who has analysed AQ since the East Africa US embassy bombings in August 1998. Soufan is a premier terrorism analyst and counterterrorism scholar. In an interview for the Frontline PBS documentary, The Rise of ISIS, Soufan said of the Islamic State: ‘This is one of the first terrorist groups who’s saying, “You know what? We’re not going to hit and run. And we’re not going to participate in politics as you know it. We actually want to kill everyone who disagrees with us. We want to control the piece of land. And whatever cost it is, we’re going to do it”.’24 The Program on Extremism at the George Washington University has compiled special reports and original IS documents about the terrorist organisation, entitled ‘The ISIS Files’. These documents ‘constitute one of the largest collections of original files from the group in possession of a nongovernmental entity’.25 The ISIS Files offer a significant cache of information about the Islamic State. From IS documents obtained in Mosul, the largest volume of files have come from the Islamic State’s ‘Department of Agriculture and Livestock’, which ‘used taxation and confiscation as key sources of revenue’.26 In fact, the IS systematically confiscated land ‘from those deemed undesirable, including Shi’ites, Christians, Yazidis, and Sunni Muslims who were deemed 23 Official Records of the Assembly of States Parties to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, First session, New York, 3–10 September 2002 (United Nations publication, Sales No. E.03.V.2 and corrigendum), Part II.B; Article 7 (1)(b) Crime against humanity of extermination: www.icc-cpi.int/NR/rdonlyres/336923D8A6AD-40EC-AD7B-45BF9DE73D56/0/ElementsOfCrimesEng.pdf. 24 The Rise of ISIS, Frontline PBS Documentary Film, Transcript (28 October 2014), www .pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/rise-of-isis/transcript/ (emphasis added). 25 Lorenzo Vidino, ‘The ISIS Files: an introduction’, Program on Extremism, the George Washington University, June 2020, p. 4, https://isisfiles.gwu.edu/downloads/gb19 f5810?locale=en. 26 Hararo J. Ingram and Devorah Margolin, ‘The ISIS Files: inside the Islamic State in Mosul: a snapshot of the logic & banality of evil’, Program on Extremism, the George Washington University, June 2020, p. 7, https://isisfiles.gwu.edu/downloads/3x816 m61d?locale=en.

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unrepentant “apostates”’.27 According to the ISIS Files, ‘The documents provide details on the land, its size, whom the land was confiscated from (including their religion), who rented the land, and even what was to be farmed on it. In its efforts to exert control, the Islamic State police were deployed to enforce the department’s rulings.’28 Under its violent reign in Mosul, the IS also imposed the obligatory almstax, or zakat, one of the five pillars of Islam. Zakat payments took the form of money or livestock or agricultural products, and ‘this collection of money was carried out in a methodical (and typically involuntary) manner, and represents just one of the many ways the Islamic State enforced its version of Sharia law on locals’.29 One of the most detailed IS documents from the Mosul files pertains to ‘Military and War Spoils’, which explain the training requirements and certificates of fighters and articulate the IS military strategy and operations as well as plans for controlling the IS-occupied territories. In addition, ‘several documents referred to suicide bombings or martyrdom operations, including a call for all members of society to carry out such attacks and the wills of several perpetrators. Finally, the war spoils documents detailed items that the Islamic State had pillaged during their occupation and claimed as their own.’30 In addition to the IS Files, the terrorist organisation has produced tremendous volumes of its own propaganda materials. The IS has published its own magazine called Dabiq, named after a remote town in an obscure part of Syria near the Turkish border. In the magazine, the IS celebrated its conquest of Syrian and Iraqi territories and glorified the IS fighters who succeeded in their missions. The 2014 conquest of Mosul and establishing the Caliphate are unprecedented feats by a terrorist organisation. Under the IS rule in northern Iraq, minorities – Christians, Chabaks, Turkmen and Yazidis – faced death, forced conversion or flight to Kurdistan.31 Journalist Dexter Filkins calls the IS and its ideology ‘a kind of bloodlust [that] is psychosis – there is no other word for it. There’s no political program that justifies it. I think that killing is as important to ISIS as securing the Caliphate – but killing first.’32 According to former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, ‘There is nothing that would lead [the United States] to believe that [ISIS] would do anything but ethnically cleanse the region and absolutely create a Sunni-Shi’ite civil war.’33 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., p. 9. 30 Ibid. 31 The Rise of ISIS, Narrator. 32 Ibid., Interview with Dexter Filkins. 33 Ibid., Interview with General Dempsey (emphasis added).

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The edicts of the IS religious authorities published in Dabiq have been taken very seriously. Among them are edicts promoting the genocides of Shi’ites and Yazidis, and an entire article, published in late 2014, which, ‘for the first time confirmed and justified the capturing, enslaving, and selling of Yazidi women and children’.34 According to the IS ideology, the fight against the ‘Crusaders’ (i.e. Christians) will culminate in the final battle that is prophesied to take place in the Syrian town of Dabiq. Thus, not only is the IS genocidal, but it is also apocalyptic. These beliefs encompass the ideological prophetic equation that will finally bring the battles of the Crusades to an end. Dabiq magazine proudly proclaims, ‘The spark has been lit here in Iraq, and its heat will continue to intensify – by Allah’s permission – until it burns the Crusader armies in Dabiq.’35 Therein lies the great irony of the IS ideology, as genocide is seen as a means to create an Islamic utopia, only to result in an apocalyptic end. Since the ideology claims that those who die while carrying out this glorious jihad will enter Paradise, death is not viewed as something negative. The IS fallen are granted martyr status and are promised the joys of Heaven upon death. The ends justify the means, quite literally. Going from utopia to apocalypse is the ideal, religiously sanctioned direction that, according to the IS religious authorities, will lead to the coming of a Messiah and bring about the End Times. For this to happen, the Islamic utopia must be ‘pure’, hence purging the non-believers from the Caliphate is absolutely necessary. As analyst Graeme Wood aptly describes the Islamic State, ‘It hungers for genocide.’36 The IS embraces ‘a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing about the apocalypse’.37 Part of the process involves threats to annihilate Christians, who are viewed as ‘the Crusaders’. Furthermore, the IS has ‘displaced an estimated 90 percent of the Gnostic Mandaean population in Iraq’ and ‘has threatened the Iraqi Mandaeans with “ethnic cleansing” and 34 A. McDuffee, ‘ISIS is now bragging about enslaving women and children’, The Atlantic, 13 October 2014, www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/10/isis-confirmsand-justifies-enslaving-yazidis-in-new-magazine-article/381394/. Also see V. Cetorelli, I. Sasson, N. Shabila and G. Burnham, ‘ISIS’ Yazidi Genocide: Demographic evidence of the killings and kidnappings’, Foreign Affairs, 8 June 2017, www.foreignaffairs.com /articles/syria/2017-06-08/isis-yazidi-genocide; and, Escaping ISIS, Frontline PBS, 14 July 2015, www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/escaping-isis/. 35 Quoted in T. Holland, ‘Genocide justified: why the West can never hope to understand the Islamic State’, New Statesman, 20–6 January 2017, p. 42. 36 G. Wood, ‘What ISIS really wants’, The Atlantic 315:2 (2015), 78–94, at 80. 37 Ibid., 80.

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“extinction”’.38 In Syria, the IS has targeted the Alawite sect, believing it to be an infidel faith. As a result, the IS has ‘promised to kill and displace the entire Alawite population in Western Syria’.39 Dabiq magazine considers any Muslim living outside of the IS who does not either move to join it or conduct domestic terror attacks to be an apostate. ‘Muslims within ISIS-held territory who resist the group or its laws are similarly deemed guilty of apostasy and sentenced to die.’40 Djallil Lounnas best describes the Islamic State as being ‘founded on the premise of a “new ideological” offer based on extreme takfir as an alternative to Al-Qaeda ideology (i.e. Salafism-Jihadism)’.41

Conclusion Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State have inherent genocidal intents and elements in their ideologies, paradigms and objectives. Both organisations see genocide, extermination, mass atrocities and crimes against humanity as ways and means to achieve their goals, albeit through different lenses. Both organisations also, simultaneously, see the strategies of genocide as the tools for creating their Islamic utopia in the form of a Caliphate. Within the genocidal paradigms of AQ and the IS are the fundamental variables signifying genocide and extermination schemes. These variables include the need to acquire territory; implement criteria for inclusion in the new Caliphate in accordance with strict policies based on Islamic law as interpreted by their leaders and religious authorities; and implement the rules of exclusion, which usually translate into mass purges of the ‘impure’ or ‘non-believers’. Whereas many historical genocides targeted a specific race, ethnic group or tribe, AQ and the IS genocidal paradigm qualifies the ‘true Muslim’ as the member of the Caliphate, and they purge anyone who fails to fit into that definition. Individuals are not screened for destruction based on racial, ethnic, tribal or national identities, but rather on religious and sectarian beliefs and practices. Even if someone is a Muslim, they must follow the AQ or IS interpretations of Islam, or else be labelled as an infidel or apostate. 38 ‘ISIS’s persecution of religions’, Counter Extremism Project (May 2017), p. 6, www .counterextremism.com/sites/default/files/ISIS%27s%20Persecution%20of%20Religi ons_053017.pdf. 39 Ibid., p. 9. 40 Ibid., p. 11. 41 Djallil Lounnas, ‘The failed hybridization of the Islamic State’, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 2020, www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1057610X.2020.1759186 (emphasis added).

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Puritanical tendencies are pervasive in AQ and the IS. Both organisations promote the idea of the ‘true’ or ‘pure’ Muslim as opposed to the rest who fail to meet such criteria. ‘Purity’ is yet another variable found in historical genocides, which in turn serves as a benchmark for completing the social engineering project, in this case for the Islamic utopia embodied in the Caliphate. Inherent in this concept of purity is the sense of superiority of the group in power over others. Thus, another variable of genocide is the dynamic of the self-proclaimed superior group versus those deemed inferior, who must be purged through extermination. In the case of AQ and the IS, the faithful leaders and followers have believed in their superiority over others in the context of Islam. That is why they refer to themselves as ‘true believers’, who follow the ‘true Islam’. Logically, those who do not follow their ideology are judged as lesser in value – that is, inferior to them. This is amplified in their case because their ideologies are cloaked in religion. The claim of superiority based on being divinely chosen is hard to argue against and is likely to strengthen one’s zealotry when opposed. The logic of their use of violence due to their claim of divine authority becomes entwined with passions. Religious beliefs engender passions, and when those passions are combined with the appeals to carry out violent jihad, both within and outside the faith, then genocidal acts are not so inconceivable. In sum, AQ and the IS ideologies, world view and actions seek to commit genocide and related crimes to achieve their goals. The fluidity and elusiveness of AQ and the IS make their genocidal intent even more difficult to combat. The United States Director of National Intelligence (DNI) published the worldwide threat assessment (2019), in which both AQ and the IS are given high threat levels targeting Americans and Westerners in general with various degrees of attacks, something that the intelligence community predicts will continue to happen. According to the DNI: • The conflicts in Iraq and Syria have generated a large pool of battle-

hardened fighters with the skills to conduct attacks and bolster terrorist groups’ capabilities . . . . • All Al-Qa‘ida affiliates are involved in insurgencies and maintain safe havens, resources, and the intent to strike . . . in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. • Al-Qa‘ida affiliates in East and North Africa, the Sahel, and Yemen remain the largest and most capable terrorist groups in their regions . . . Al-Qa‘ida elements in Syria, meanwhile, continue to undermine efforts to resolve that conflict, while the network’s affiliate in South Asia provides support to the Taliban.42

42 Daniel R. Coats, ‘Statement for the Record: Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community’, Director of National Intelligence, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 29 January 2019, pp. 10–12.

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Al-Qaeda and the IS have declared war on the rest of the world. Since the Islamic State has been created from Al-Qaeda, it is correct to infer that both AQ Central and the IS inherently contain genocidal ideologies. The Islamic State has another magazine called Rumiyah, and in its first issue the last article that appears in it is entitled, ‘The Kafir’s blood is halal for you, so shed it’.43 Kafir is the Arabic word for ‘infidel’. The word ‘halal’ means something that is authorised or permissible. In this article, entreaties are presented to kill infidels individually and en masse. Examples of such entreaties and justifications for shedding blood include the following:44 ‘All people must be fought until they accept Islam or come under the shar’i (Islamic law) covenant.’ ‘All disbelievers who have no covenant . . . their blood is halal. Shedding the blood of a non-dhimmi kafir is not sinful, but is rather rewarded with Jannah [Heaven].’ (A dhimmi is a Christian or Jew. A ‘non-dhimmi kafir’ here presumably refers to a Yazidi[?]) ‘The mushrikin are nothing but impure.’ (Mushrik, plural mushrikin, is a polytheist or idolater.) ‘Mushrikin . . . blood is nothing but [like] the blood of a dog.’ ‘The kafir’s blood is not spared until he becomes a Muslim.’ ‘Kill the mushrikin wherever you find them and take them, surround them, and wait for them at every post.’ ‘Striking terror into the hearts of all disbelievers is a Muslim’s duty.’ Their own words offer proof of their genocidal intentions and agendas. It is all there in black and white.

Bibliographic Note This chapter has made use of collections of original AQ and IS data resulting from raids, published on databases in open-source multimedia. These resources include: Ingram and Margolin, ‘The ISIS Files’; the CIA ‘November 2017 Release of Abbottabad compound material’; and Vidino, ‘The ISIS Files: an introduction’. The select works of renowned translator of original AQ and IS documents, Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, are also useful: ‘The massacre of Druze villagers in Qalb Lawza, Idlib province’ and ‘Osama bin Laden and the Algerian jihad’. 43 ‘The kafir’s blood is halal for you, so shed it’, Rumiyah, Issue 1, Dhul-Hijjah 1437, no page numbers. 44 All quotes, ibid.

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The Militant Imagery Project at West Point is an additional resource: ‘Militant Imagery Project’, Combating Terrorism Center at West Point (2020): www.ctc.usma.edu/militant-imagery-project/0200/. This is in addition to propaganda that the terrorist organisations themselves have produced and disseminated, such as: ‘The kafir’s blood is halal for you, so shed it’, in Rumiyah, and A. Amr al-Kinani, ‘It’s either the Islamic State or the Flood’, Dabiq, Issue 2, Ramadan 1435. US government sources in addition to the CIA source already cited include Coats’s ‘Statement for the Record: Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community’. A documentary film based on primary source interviews is Frontline PBS’s The Rise of ISIS.

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In the early hours of 3 August 2014, fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, otherwise known simply as IS) attacked the Sinjar region of northern Iraq. In pick-up trucks flying the pseudo-state’s infamous black and white flags, hundreds of heavily armed black-clad men sped northwards from Baaj, a village just beyond the southern reach of Sinjar. No one, neither the fighters nor the communities living in the Sinjar region, was under any illusion as to the intended target of the assault. Since ISIL’s seizing of Mosul in June 2014, northern Iraq’s mosaic of ethno-religious minorities had kept a close watch on its attacks on the Shia Turkmen of Tel Afar, and on the Christians and Shabak of Mosul and the Nineveh plains. Sinjar, with its mixed population, was home to the majority of the world’s Yazidis,1 a Kurdish-speaking but distinct religious community whose beliefs and practices span hundreds, if not thousands, of years. One of Iraq’s most marginalised religious groups, the Yazidis had suffered waves of persecutory and annihilative campaigns since at least the thirteenth century, shortly after they first appear in the written record.2 ISIL, weaponising misconceptions of the faith long present in Iraqi society, publicly reviled the Yazidis as mushriku¯n, polytheists and idol worshippers. Within days of the initial attack, reports emerged of ISIL committing almost unimaginable atrocities against this 350,000-strong Yazidi community: of men, adolescent boys and women past child-bearing age being shot or beheaded; of younger women and girls, some scarcely older than 9, sold at market, beaten, forced to labour and held in sexual slavery by ISIL fighters;

1 In Kurdish, Êzîdi or Êzdî. There are no firm figures for the size of the Yazidi population in Sinjar in August 2014, but the most common estimate is 350,000–400,000. 2 Birgül Açikyildiz, The Yezidis: The History of a Community, Culture and Religion (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014), pp. 37–63.

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and of young Yazidi boys taken from their mothers, indoctrinated, forced into ISIL training camps and made to fight.3 In the months and years which followed, the devastation ISIL wrought on the Sinjari Yazidi community edged into the light. Mass documentation efforts by survivors’ groups, international and local non-governmental organisations, governmental commissions and the United Nations have collected thousands of testimonies of the mainly female survivors of ISIL’s crimes. The terrorist group’s Arabic- and English-language publications, its fighters’ forays into social media and its internal documents – many gathered prior to the collapse of the ISIL ‘Caliphate’ in March 2019 – provided further insight into the crimes ISIL had perpetrated. In November 2015, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum issued a report, the factual and legal analysis of which concluded that ISIL had committed genocide against the Yazidis of Sinjar.4 In June 2016, the United Nations published a detailed report following its own independent investigation, which also determined that ISIL had committed the crime of genocide, as well as multiple crimes against humanity and war crimes.5 ‘The genocide of the Yazidis is ongoing’, the UN’s Syria Commission warned.6 This chapter explores ISIL’s genocidal campaign against the Yazidis of northern Iraq, looking at the crimes and the ideology of annihilation that fuelled them. Description, however, is not understanding. This chapter takes as its starting point that this genocide was not an aberration, a break in space and time that started on 3 August 2014 and into which only the attackers and the attacked fell. Rather, it considers the genocide to be a cataclysm of extreme and calculated violence which, not for the first time, exposed the 3 See, e.g., United Nations, Statement by Adama Dieng, Special Adviser of the SecretaryGeneral on the Prevention of Genocide, and Jennifer Welsh, Special Adviser of the Secretary-General on the Responsibility to Protect, on the situation in Iraq, 12 August 2014, www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/media/statements/ 2014/English/2014-08-12.Statement%20of%20the%20Special%20Advisers%20on%20Ira q.pdf. 4 US Holocaust Memorial Museum, ‘“Our generation is gone”: the Islamic State’s targeting of Iraqi minorities in Ninewa’ (2015), p. 20, www.ushmm.org/m/pdfs/IraqBearing-Witness-Report-111215.pdf. This stands as the first legal analysis of whether ISIS had committed the crime of genocide in its attack on the Yazidis. However, a number of political entities had issued statements referring to ISIL’s attack on the Yazidis as ‘genocide’. See, e.g., European Parliament, Resolution of 4 February 2016 on the systematic mass murder of religious minorities by the so-called ‘ISIS/Daesh’, 2016/ 2529 (RSP), 4 February 2016. 5 International Independent Commission of Inquiry (CoI) on the Syrian Arab Republic, ‘“They came to destroy”: ISIS crimes against the Yazidis’, A/HRC/32/CRP.2, 16 June 2016. 6 Ibid., Executive Summary.

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consequences of the seismic shifts in power in Iraqi society that followed the 2003 US-led invasion, and the entrenched ‘othering’ of the Yazidis that, over centuries, has burst into view in waves of persecutory and genocidal campaigns. It looks first to the impact of the post-2003 period on Sinjar’s mixed communities and the rise of successive terrorist groups. It then examines the roots of the entrenched and largely unquestioned prejudice against the Yazidis in Iraqi society, which informed the architecture of ISIL’s genocide. Finally, it examines the genocide itself, the gendered strategies employed by ISIL to maximise the annihilative violence, and the reverberating impact on the Yazidis of Sinjar.

Sinjar and the Rise of Terrorist Groups in Iraq The Sinjar region is located in northwest Iraq; at its nearest point, it is less than 15 km from the Syrian border. Scores of villages are spread out around the base of Mount Sinjar, with one main town, Sinjar town, huddled at the base of the southeastern side of the mountain. Mount Sinjar, an arid 100-kmlong mountain range, forms the region’s heart. Prior to August 2014, Sinjar was home to a number of different ethnic and religious groups including Sunni and Shia Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen, Christians and Yazidis, all of whom would suffer in varying ways under ISIL. In the mid1970s, Saddam Hussein’s Arabisation campaign saw the emptying of scores of Yazidi villages and the transfer of Yazidis into collective towns, while land was reapportioned to members of the Sunni Arab community. Unsurprisingly, the issue of land rights in Sinjar has formed an enduring underlying tension between the communities,7 heightened by the fact that agriculture was the main economic activity for both local Arabs and Yazidis. Sinjar was one of the disputed areas claimed by both Iraq’s central government and the Kurdish regional government, though it received little in the way of attention or resources, and remained one of Iraq’s most impoverished regions. With strong prohibitions on both sides, there was little, and likely no, intermarriage between Yazidi and non-Yazidi communities in Sinjar. The Yazidi faith is strictly endogamous, and requires that a Yazidi child have two 7 Rania Abouzeid, ‘When the weapons fall silent: reconciliation in Sinjar after ISIS: Policy Brief’, European Council on Foreign Affairs, 2019, pp. 13–14, https://ecfr.eu/wp-con tent/uploads/when_the_weapons_fall_silent_reconciliation_in_sinjar_after_isisFINA L.pdf. To this day, many Sinjari Yazidis hold no proof of ownership for their houses and land; author interview with Roza Qaidi, Yazidi activist, July 2020.

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Yazidi parents. With conversion to Yazidism theologically impossible, mixed marriages were viewed as an existential threat, as well as posing a more immediate physical threat where other religious communities wrongly perceived Yazidism as a proselytising faith. For many in the Sunni Muslim community, conversions away from Islam were framed as apostasising. The widely held but wholly incorrect view of the Yazidi faith as a religion of ‘devil-worshippers’, and the resulting prejudice against Yazidis, also functioned as a powerful, community-enforced disincentive to non-Yazidis who wished to marry someone of the Yazidi religious group. Nevertheless, both Sunni Arabs and Yazidis who lived in Sinjar before the ISIL attack would later recall many friendships and working connections across the two communities, underlining the nuanced nature of relationships in Sinjar prior to the attack. Members of both communities would serve as kreefs, akin to a godparent, to each other’s children, creating what was mutually seen as a familial blood bond between the families. But in the aftermath of the attack, while some individual relationships have survived, the two communities have become deeply estranged. Still, when asked when tensions became seeded in the community, both Sunni and Yazidi former residents of Sinjar spoke not about the rise of ISIL in 2014, but the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, and the fall of Saddam Hussein.8 Sinjar, in part because of its disputed status, has always been affected by the wider politics of Iraq and perhaps at no time has this been more true than after 2003 when, in quick succession, Iraq’s Sunni Baathist hegemony collapsed, a Shi’ite-dominated power structure rose in central and southern Iraq, and the northern Kurdish region became increasingly autonomous. In 2003, Sinjar’s resident Sunni community was affected by what was perceived nationwide as the humiliation of the Sunnis. Meanwhile the increasingly empowered Kurdish authorities moved to control the disputed areas that they had long claimed, and Sinjar was brought under their de facto control. The Yazidis, historically viewed as ethnic Kurds, drew closer to the Kurdish authorities. The instabilities caused by rapidly shifting power dynamics across Iraq fostered rising tensions – particularly in disputed areas such as Sinjar and Kirkuk, home to mixed communities. In May 2003, the Coalition Provisional Authority assumed power and ordered the dissolution of Saddam Hussein’s Baath party, barring its members from public roles, and disbanding the security services, including the 8 Author’s interviews, July 2019 and February 2020.

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army.9 The order put 300,000 armed young men out of work, stopped the pensions of tens of thousands of ex-officers, and rendered unemployed 30,000 civil servants, including the former government’s most experienced administrators.10 As former members of the Iraqi armed forces and ousted Baathists now found a common enemy and common cause with rebel Islamists and foreign jihadi fighters, a violent insurgency began.11 By October 2004, Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was active and had positioned itself as the Sunni opposition to the American occupation of Iraq and the country’s political domination by its Shia majority. The terrorist group launched waves of attacks, including suicide bombings that targeted security forces, government institutions, and civilians. By late 2005, a split had developed between AQI and Al-Qaeda, over al-Zarqawi’s brutal targeting of Shia Muslims.12 Al-Zarqawi was killed by United States forces in a targeted aerial bombardment in June 2006.13 In October 2006, the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) came into being, but was still commonly referred to in reporting as AQI.14 Heavily featured in media coverage was ISI/AQI’s targeting of the Shia community. Less noticed were the rising attacks on the Yazidis. In April 2007, Sunni gunmen in Mosul stopped a minibus of workers and checked their identity cards, which in Iraq bear the holders’ religious affiliation. Muslim and Christian workers were released while twenty-three Yazidi men were driven to another location and executed.15 In August 2007, four months before Sinjar’s inhabitants were scheduled to vote in a plebiscite on accession to the Kurdish region, Yazidis began to receive threats saying they were ‘infidels’ and their faith ‘anti-Islamic’, and warning that attacks on them were imminent.16 On 14 August, four co-ordinated suicide bombings targeted the Yazidi community in Tel Ezir and Siba Sheikh Khider in southern Sinjar,

9 Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq (Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 282. See also Coalition Provisional Authority, Order No 1: De-Baathification of Iraqi Society, 16 May 2003; and Order No. 2: Dissolution of Entities, 23 May 2003. 10 Tripp, History of Iraq, p. 282. 11 Ibid., p. 287. 12 William McCants, ‘How Al-Zawahiri lost Al-Qaeda’, Brookings, 19 November 2013, www .brookings.edu/opinions/how-zawahiri-lost-al-qaeda/; Douglas Jehl, ‘Full Qaeda letter to Iraq ally speaks of group’s global goal’, New York Times, 12 October 2005. 13 Dexter Filkins, John F. Burns, ‘At site of attack on Zarqawi, all that’s left are questions’, New York Times, 11 June 2006; Ellen Knickmeyer, Jonathan Finer, ‘Insurgent leader AlZarqawi killed in Iraq’, Washington Post, 8 June 2006. 14 Stephen Negus, ‘Call for Sunni state in Iraq’, Financial Times, 15 October 2006. 15 ‘Gunmen kill 23 members of Yazidi minority in Iraq’, New York Times, 22 April 2007. 16 Roger Hardy, ‘Minority targeted in Iraq bombings’, BBC News, 15 August 2007.

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killing almost 800 people and injuring at least 1,500.17 It remains Iraq’s most lethal suicide bombing. Many in the Iraqi Sunni community, notably in Anbar, rejected both AQI’s and ISI’s ideology and the presence of the foreign fighters who made up a substantial part of those groups’ ranks. Still, the groups’ efforts to brand themselves as Sunni (re-)empowerment movements, their insidious attempts at indoctrination and their ability to pay relatively high salaries garnered them some support within the Iraqi Sunni community in places like Mosul, Tel Afar and Baaj – all of which are close to Sinjar. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was appointed leader of ISI in May 2010.18 In April 2013, following the expansion of its operations into Syria, he announced that the group would now be known as ISIL.19 Within weeks of the group seizing Mosul on 10 June 2014, it declared itself to be a ‘caliphate’.20 By the time that Al-Baghdadi appeared at Friday prayers at Mosul’s Al-Nuri Mosque in July 2014 and declared himself the ‘caliph’,21 most Iraqis saw ISIL not as an organisation suddenly appearing in their midst, but as the latest incarnation of terror in Iraq.

Understanding ISIL ISIL – like ISI and AQI before it – is a Salafi-Jihadist movement, fixated on the ‘purification’ of Islam after centuries of ‘deviant’ digressions from the ‘true’ Islam – digressions which, according to its practitioners, include Shi’ism, Sufism and even non-Salafist Sunnism.22 In Iraq, the rising political power of the Shia and the growing presence of Shia militias, made AQI, ISI and later ISIL not only more attractive to segments of the Sunni community but also more relevant to their real-life political, economic and social grievances. 17 National Public Radio (US), ‘General calls attack on the Yazidis “ethnic cleansing”’, 15 August 2007. 18 Anthony Shadid, ‘Iraqi insurgent group names new leaders’, New York Times, 16 May 2010. 19 Middle East Media Research Institute, ‘ISI confirms that Jabhat al-Nusra is its extension in Syria, declares “Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham” as new name of merged group’, 8 April 2013, www.memri.org/reports/isi-confirms-jabhat-al-nusra-its-extension-syriadeclares-islamic-state-iraq-and-al-sham-new. 20 Adam Withnall, ‘Iraq crisis: Isis changes name and declares its territories a new Islamic state with “restoration of caliphate” in Middle East’, The Independent (UK), 30 June 2014. 21 Middle East Eye, ‘IS destroys Mosul mosque where Baghdadi declared “caliphate”’, 29 June 2017, www.middleeasteye.net/news/destroys-mosul-mosque-where-baghdadi -declared-caliphate; Hannah Strange, ‘Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi addresses Muslims in Mosul’, Daily Telegraph (UK), 5 July 2014. 22 Jacob Olidort, ‘What is Salafism?’, Foreign Affairs, 24 November 2015.

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The Iraqi-based terrorist groups which rose in waves after the 2003 invasion had within their DNA the same double helix. One strand was theological, ideological – the urgency of a return to ‘pure’ Islam, as they believed it to have existed between the seventh and ninth centuries. The second strand – arguably less remarked upon in Western media but much more apparent to Iraqis – drew from the determined desire to return to an era of Sunni power. While the Baath party was secular, the transition of individuals and communities from within, or supportive of, the Baath party into groups like AQI and ISIL was evident to those willing to countenance ISIL as having political as well as theological underpinnings. Many of ISIL’s most senior commanders had been officers in Saddam Hussein’s army and intelligence services.23 They included Hajr Bakr, who headed the group’s operations in Syria and was the Head of ISIL’s Military Council. He had been a colonel in Saddam Hussein’s Air Defense Corps. When Hajr Bakr was killed in a firefight with rebels in Syria in January 2014, he left behind a raft of internal documents which illuminated how ISIL’s command was organised, including the roles of former officials in the Saddam Hussein government.24 Threads of loyalty could also be seen stretching back at local level. The Sunni Arab town of Baaj, the staging point for the Sinjar attack, had been a seat of local Baathist power in the 1990s, of Al-Qaeda extremism in the 2000s, and was now overtly – at least since ISIL’s June 2014 seizure of Mosul – a hotbed of ISIL activity. Within hours of seizing Mosul on 10 June 2014, ISIL attacked Badoush prison, 10 km to the city’s northwest. The guards fled. Fighters broke open the prison and separated the approximately 1,500 men imprisoned there. Sunni and Christian prisoners were driven away and later freed; Shia and Yazidi prisoners were killed at two different locations.25 Human Rights Watch would later estimate that over 600 prisoners were executed, the majority of them Shia. In June 2014, ISIL also demanded that Mosul’s Christian community elect, by 19 July, whether to convert to Islam, pay jizyah26 or face execution.27 Christians who could not agree to follow those 23 Anthony Loyd, ‘Deadly revenge of Saddam’s henchmen’, The Times (UK), 14 June 2014. 24 Christoph Reuter, ‘The terror strategist: secret files reveal the structure of Islamic State’, Der Spiegel, 18 April 2015. 25 Human Rights Watch, ‘Iraq: ISIS executed hundreds of prison inmates’, 30 October 2014, www.hrw.org/news/2014/10/30/iraq-isis-executed-hundreds-prisoninmates; ‘Mosul IS battle: mass grave found at Badoush prison, Iraqi forces say’, BBC News, 11 March 2017. 26 Jizyah is a de facto tax levied on specified non-Muslim subjects who are permitted to live in a state governed by Islamic law. It is paid as a sign of submission and provides legal protection in return. 27 ‘Convert, pay tax, or die, Islamic State warns Christians’, Reuters, 18 July 2014.

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terms were ordered to ‘leave the borders of the Islamic Caliphate’, taking nothing with them.28 Tens of thousands of Christians fled Mosul and Christian-populated towns in the Nineveh plans, as ISIL fighters looted their property and took over their homes. By August 2014, ISIL held territory across northern Syria and Iraq, with an estimated 10 million people living under its control.29 Raqqah, the de facto Syrian capital of the ‘Caliphate’, lay in the west of ISIL’s territory; Mosul, the group’s new Iraqi capital, lay in the east. If one drew a straight line between the two cities, it would cut across Sinjar, now an island surrounded by the ‘Caliphate’, where the Yazidi community was growing increasingly fearful.

Understanding the Yazidis, Survivors of Centuries of Annihilative Campaigns When Yazidism came into being is a matter of dispute. Yazidis believe themselves to be one of the world’s oldest religions. Some assert that the religion came about in the twelfth century, when an isolated community began to follow the teachings of a Sufi mystic known as Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir.30 Nevertheless, it is universally accepted that Yazidism is not one of the Abrahamic faiths. This, together with a fundamental misconception of Yazidism as a blasphemous and heretical cult, has underpinned centuries of persecutory and annihilative campaigns. Yazidis believe in one God whose power on Earth is delegated to seven angels. The angels are led by the Peacock Angel, Malek Tau¯s, the intermediary between God and the Yazidis.31 Malek Tau¯s is understood to have been an angel who fell to earth and transformed into a peacock. Another key symbol of Yazidism is that of the serpent. Yazidis believe that this animal helped humanity to survive the Flood when it used its body to seal a leak in Noah’s Ark.32 With no written book, it is important to note that Yazidism places less emphasis on conforming to specific beliefs and more on participation in religious rituals.33 28 ‘Iraqi Christians flee after Isis issue Mosul ultimatum’, BBC News, 18 July 2014. 29 ‘Islamic State and the crisis in Iraq and Syria in maps’, BBC News, 28 March 2018. 30 Christine Allison, The Yezidi Oral Tradition in Iraqi Kurdistan (London: Curzon Press, 2001). 31 Garnik Asatrian and Victoria Arakelova, The Religion of the Peacock Angel: The Yezidis and Their Spirit World (New York: Routledge, 2014). 32 Açikyildiz, The Yezidis, pp. 159–60. 33 Benjamin Isakhan and Sofya Shahab, ‘The Islamic State’s destruction of Yezidi heritage: responses, resilience and reconstruction after genocide’, Journal of Social Archaeology 20:1 (2019), 3–25, at 9.

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The religion’s temples and shrines are central to the practice of these rituals, and thus to Yazidism.34 The Yazidis’ veneration of a fallen angel and a serpent is highly controversial in the three Abrahamic faiths because both are associated with the story of Lucifer. This has given the Yazidis an undeserved reputation for being ‘devil-worshippers’.35 The enduring misreading of the Yazidis’ faith and the consequent othering of this religious community have led to deeply ingrained prejudices in Iraqi society, long predating the rise of the terrorist groups in Iraq. Yazidis have suffered waves of attacks throughout recorded history. They had first come to Sinjar in the early Ottoman period, fleeing persecution. Mount Sinjar offered natural protection, and the Yazidis used its natural fortifications as a base for rebellions against the Ottoman governors of nearby Mosul who wanted the Yazidis to pay taxes, join the army and convert to Islam.36 The Yazidis built shrines and temples on Mount Sinjar, including Shara Din,37 said to date from the thirteenth century. Another wave of Yazidis arrived between 1915 and 1919, fleeing the Armenian genocide, in which some estimate 1.5 million Armenians as well as other religious minorities including Yazidis, were targeted for annihilation.38 (See Chapter 3 of this volume.) By this time Sinjar, with its topography and its location on the Ottoman Empire’s far reaches, had become a safe haven for Yazidis and other minorities. The Yazidis count up to seventy-four genocides in their history, including massacres of Yazidis in Sinjar in 1640, 1715, 1832 and 1890.39 Prior to ISIL’s 2014 attack, the most successful attempts to eradicate the Yazidis had taken place during the Ottoman Empire when the Walis (or governors, a term also used by ISIL) of Baghdad and Mosul sent forces to kill and capture Yazidis in Sinjar. In 1837, the governor of Diyarbakir, Hafiz Pasha, and his troops surrounded Mount Sinjar, besieging the Yazidis who had fled there. After 34 Açikyildiz, The Yezidis, p. 202. 35 Ibid., pp. 1–2; Neil MacFarquhar, ‘Bashiqa journal; a sect shuns lettuce and gives the devil his due’, New York Times, 3 January 2003. 36 Philip G. Kreyenbroek, Yezidism: Its Background, Observances and Textual Tradition (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press,1995), p. 45. 37 In Arabic, Sharaf al-Din. 38 Cathy Otten, With Ash on Their Faces: Yezidi Women and the Islamic State (London: OR Books, 2014). 39 For more information on earlier annihilative campaigns against the Sinjari Yazidis, see Birgül Açikyildiz, The Yezidis: The History of a Community, Culture and Religion (London, I. B. Tauris, 2010); John S. Guest, Survival among the Kurds: A History of the Yezidis (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 67, 136; Nelida Fuccaro, The Other Kurds: Yazidis in Colonial Iraq (London: I. B. Tauris, 1999), p. 37.

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three months, the Yazidis surrendered; Hafiz Pasha took property, which he alleged to be the property of the Ottoman Empire, and abducted an unknown number of Yazidi women, who were sold on the Mardin slave market, 115 km northwest in present-day Turkey.40

ISIL’s Attack on the Yazidis Throughout June and July 2014, ISIL launched small-scale attacks on the Sinjar region, ostensibly testing the defences of the Peshmerga, Iraqi Kurdish forces who were securing the region. ISIL fighters began to move into Sunni Arab areas within thirty minutes’ driving distance of Sinjar, with rumoured sightings of fighters visiting Sunni Arab villages inside Sinjar.41 In the Yazidi villages, Yazidi men, armed with the light weapons that were ubiquitous in post-2003 Iraq, formed watch committees and kept an eye on the entry points. Families packed up their most valuable possessions, assuming that if ISIL came to Sinjar the Yazidis would face the same ultimatum as Mosul’s Christian community. Some families tried to leave Sinjar for Duhok in Iraq’s Kurdish region, the road now carving a thin line through ISILcontrolled territory, but were reportedly prevented from doing so by the Peshmerga.42 On the day before the attack, 2 August 2014, the Yazidis celebrated the end of a fasting period. In the past, they would have invited friends from neighbouring Sunni villages, but the atmosphere was tense and the communities had become more insular.43 As night fell, Yazidi men took up shifts guarding the villages’ perimeters as their families slept outdoors on patios and roofs, as was common in the summer months where temperatures often hovered above 40 degrees Celsius even at night. In the villages south of Mount Sinjar, those on watch could hear the sound of vehicles moving, and the occasional flash of headlights. Some Yazidis later stated that they started receiving calls from Sunni friends in nearby villages, warning them an attack was imminent.44 Around 2 a.m. on 3 August, ISIL began its assault. The attack was well organised, with hundreds of ISIL fighters acting in concert as they seized towns and villages on both sides of Mount Sinjar. Guest, Survival among the Kurds, p. 74; Fuccaro, Other Kurds, p. 52. Author’s interviews with Yazidi survivors, July 2019. Otten, With Ash on Their Faces, p. 35. Cathy Otten, ‘Slaves of Isis: the long walk of the Yazidi women’, The Guardian (UK), 25 July 2017. 44 Author’s interviews with Yazidi survivors, July 2019. 40 41 42 43

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According to Yazidi survivors, most of the Peshmerga forces withdrew in the face of the ISIL advance, leaving much of the region defenceless.45 In Kocho, the Peshmerga – who had prevented the Yazidis from leaving when it became clear that Sinjar was under attack – left shortly before ISIL encircled the village.46 Across the Sinjar region, wherever the Peshmerga did withdraw, that decision was not effectively communicated to the local population. With no evacuation orders issued, many Yazidis initially stayed indoors, unaware that nothing stood between them and the fast-approaching ISIL forces. As word began to spread that the Peshmerga had left their checkpoints, a few ad hoc groups of lightly armed local Yazidi men mounted a limited defence of some villages, such as Gerzerik and Siba Sheikh Khidir, in an attempt to give their families and neighbours more time to escape. By daybreak, many Sinjari Yazidi families were fleeing their homes in fear and panic. They took little with them. Others were advised by Arab neighbours to stay in the villages and raise white flags over their houses.47 While the level of active involvement in the attack on the Yazidis is still being documented, it is clear that ISIL sought to recruit local Sunnis into its cadres in advance of the attack. In a 2018 survey of 296 Yazidi female survivors, a considerable proportion of the respondents identified Muslims from neighbouring villages as being among the perpetrators of the attack.48 By the time ISIL commenced its attack, there were few military objectives in the Sinjar region; its fighters focused their attention on capturing Yazidis. After controlling the main roads and all strategic junctions, the fighters set up checkpoints and sent mobile patrols to search for fleeing Yazidi families. Within hours, Yazidis who had been unable to escape into the Kurdistan region of Iraq found themselves encircled by ISIL fighters. Some fled towards Mount Sinjar, a place of refuge during earlier genocides. Those who had fled early enough to reach its upper plateau were besieged by ISIL. A humanitarian crisis quickly unfolded as the terrorist group trapped tens of thousands of Yazidi men, women and children in temperatures rising above 50 degrees Celsius and prevented them from 45 The circumstances surrounding the Peshmerga retreat from Sinjar have become a subject of severe controversy. Officials from the Kurdish regional government have insisted that they stayed and fought while Yazidi survivors have repeatedly attested to their abandonment. 46 Valeria Cetorelli and Sareta Ashraph, ‘A demographic documentation of ISIS’s attack on the Yazidi village of Kocho’, LSE Middle East Centre reports, June 2019. 47 CoI Syria, ‘They came to destroy’, para. 25. 48 Jan Kizilhan, ‘PTSD of rape after IS (Islamic State) captivity’, Archives of Women’s Mental Health, March 2018.

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accessing water, food or medical care.49 On 7 August 2014, at the request of the Iraqi government, US President Obama announced American military action to help the Yazidis trapped on Mount Sinjar, stating that ‘[w]e can act, carefully and responsibly, to prevent a potential act of genocide’.50 American, Iraqi, British, French and Australian forces were involved in airdrops of water and other supplies to the besieged Yazidis.51 ISIL fighters shot at planes airdropping aid, and at helicopters attempting to evacuate the most vulnerable Yazidis. Hundreds of Yazidis – including infants and young children – died on Mount Sinjar before the Syrian Kurdish forces, the YPG, were able to open a corridor from Syria to Mount Sinjar. This allowed thousands besieged on the mountain to be moved to safety, while the YPG battled ISIL which sought to re-establish its siege.52 (See Figure 30.1.)

Figure 30.1 Thousands of Yezidis trapped in the Sinjar mountains as they tried to escape from Islamic State (IS) forces, are rescued by the Kurdish Peoples Protection Unit (YPG) in Iraq, on 9 August 2014. (Photo: Emrah Yorulmaz/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

49 50 51 52

CoI Syria, ‘They came to destroy’, para. 27. The White House, Statement by the President, 7 August 2014. ‘Thousands of Yazidis ‘still trapped’ on Iraq mountain’, BBC News, 12 August 2014. CoI Syria, ‘They came to destroy’, para. 28; Ruth Sherlock and Carol Malouf, ‘At least 300 people, mostly children, died on Mount Sinjar, say doctors’, Daily Telegraph (UK), 15 August 2014.

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On lower ground, ISIL fighters captured thousands of Yazidis in their villages or on the roads as they fled between 3 and 5 August 2014. Almost all villages were emptied within seventy-two hours of the attack, with the exception of Kocho village which was not emptied until 15 August 2014.53 The conduct of ISIL fighters, on capturing thousands of Yazidis as they fled, cleaved closely to a set and evidently predetermined pattern, with only minor deviations. Regardless of where Yazidis were captured, fighters swiftly ordered the separation of males and females, with the exception of boys who had not reached puberty, who were allowed to remain with their mothers.54 Following this separation, fighters executed men and older boys. Most of those killed were executed by gunshots to the head; others had their throats cut. ISIL fighters carried out executions of male Yazidis in the streets of towns and villages, at makeshift checkpoints, on roadsides, as well as on the lower sections of the roads ascending Mount Sinjar. Other captives, including family members, were often forced to witness the killings. In some villages, ISIL brought in bulldozers to push soil over the bodies. In other places, bodies were left in situ. Surviving Yazidi women and children, captured and forcibly transferred to Mosul and Tel Afar in the days following the attack, described to the Syria Commission being driven along roads, the sides of which were ‘littered with corpses’.55 In at least two villages, Kocho and Qani, there were mass executions of Yazidi men and boys. In Kocho, the only village whose 1,200 residents were entirely encircled by ISIL, fighters reportedly sought to kill every man and adolescent boy. They were largely successful. The ISIL fighters executed approximately 500 men and adolescent boys in and around the village.56 Only nineteen survived the execution, and made their way, often gravely 53 For a detailed examination of ISIL’s attack on Kocho village, see Cetorelli and Ashraph, ‘Demographic documentation’, 9–13. 54 Whether a boy had reached puberty was assessed in various ways by ISIL fighters across Sinjar. The fighters in Kocho village, for example, inspected Yazidi boys to see if they had any underarm hair. Fighters in other locations made snap judgements based on height and weight. In general, boys aged 12 years and above were grouped with the Yazidi men, though this was not uniformly the case. 55 CoI Syria, ‘They came to destroy’, para. 35. 56 Interview with Murad Ismael, former Executive Director, Member of the Board, Yazda, December 2019; Cetorelli and Ashraph, ‘Demographic documentation’, 15–19; United Nations, ‘Report of the Office of the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights on the human rights situation in Iraq in the light of abuses committed by the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant and associated groups’, A/HRC/ 28/18, 13 March 2015.

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wounded, to places of safety.57 Since ISIL was ousted from Kocho in May 2017, at least five mass graves holding the remains of men and adolescent boys have been discovered inside the village’s perimeter.58 As Yazidism requires both parents to be Yazidi, ISIL’s separation of the sexes – frequently made permanent by killing the men – curtailed births within the group, in itself another act of genocide. Those who survived capture – mainly women and young children – were forcibly transferred to temporary holding sites, usually inside the Sinjar region. In some instances, women deemed to be past child-bearing age were executed. In the early hours of 16 August 2014, ISIL executed older women from Kocho at the Solagh Technical Institute, where the women and children had been moved after the men had been killed inside Kocho village.59 In 2016, a mass grave holding their remains was discovered in the grounds.60 At the primary holding sites, ISIL fighters separated married females from unmarried females (presumed to be virgins). Quickly surmising that the greatest danger lay in being placed in the latter group, unmarried women and girls pretended their younger siblings or nephews or nieces were their own children. However, some later recounted that Sunni Arabs from Sinjar had assisted ISIL by identifying those who were pretending to be married.61 Within twenty-four hours, ISIL moved the Yazidi women and children to secondary holding sites, including schools in Tel Afar, a wedding hall in Mosul, and Badoush prison. There, women and girls over 9 were registered, with fighters recording in each case their name, age, the village they came from, whether they were married or not, and – if they were married – how

57 Author’s interviews with survivors, Iraq, February 2016 and July 2019; Interview with Murad Ismael, former Executive Director, Member of the Board, Yazda, December 2019. For detailed testimonies of male survivors from Kocho, see Amnesty International, ‘Testimonies from Kocho: the village ISIS tried to wipe off the map’, 18 August 2014, www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2014/08/testimoniesfrom-kocho-the-village-isis-tried-to-wipe-off-the-map/. 58 Yazda, ‘Working against the clock: documenting mass graves of Yazidis killed by the Islamic State’, 2018, https://irp.cdn-website.com/16670504/files/uploaded/Yazda_Pu blication_2018_DocumentingMassGravesYazidisKilledISIS_28062021_Download_E N_vf.pdf. 59 CoI Syria. ‘They came to destroy’, para. 48; Cetorelli and Ashraph, ‘Demographic documentation’, 12. 60 Yazda, ‘Mass graves of Yazidis killed by the Islamic State Organization or local affiliates on or after August 3, 2014’, 28 January 2016, p. 10, https://irp.cdn-website.com/16670 504/files/uploaded/Yazda_Publication_2016-01-28_MassGravesYazidis_28062021_Do wnload_EN_vf.pdf. 61 CoI Syria, ‘They came to destroy’, para. 45.

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many children they had. Each site held hundreds, sometimes thousands, of Yazidi women and children.62 Captured Yazidi women and girls were deemed property of the ‘Islamic State’, and referred to as sabaya or slaves.63 ISIL made 80 per cent of the women and girls available to its fighters for individual purchase, this apportioning being drawn directly from a religious interpretation.64 ISIL would sell Yazidi women and girls in slave markets, or as individual purchases to fighters who came to the holding centres. In some instances, an ISIL fighter would buy a group of Yazidi females in order to take them into rural areas without slave markets where he could sell them individually at a higher price. The remaining 20 per cent were held as collective property of the terrorist group and were distributed to its bases and ministries throughout ISIL-controlled areas of Iraq and Syria. ‘Slaves’ were only available for purchase to ISIL fighters. It was forbidden, on pain of death, to sell them to anyone outside of the terrorist group.65 It was intended that Yazidi women and girls, captured and enslaved, would eventually die while still the property of the ‘Caliphate’ and its adherents.66 It was also likely, given the Yazidi community’s focus – common in the region, irrespective of religion – on female virginity as symbolising the honour of the family and community, that ISIL believed

62 ‘While individual incidents of rape committed by ISIS fighters at the holding sites in Tel Afar and Mosul were reported, mass rape of Yazidi women and girls did not occur. This was despite the fact that hundreds of women and girls were held captive at the sites, surrounded by dozens of young, armed men. This serves to emphasize the rigid system and ideology governing ISIS’s handling of Yazidi women and girls as chattel, as well as the control it exerted over the majority of its fighters. The sexual violence, including the sexual slavery, being committed against Yazidi women and girls is tightly controlled by ISIS, occurs in a manner prescribed and authorised.’ CoI Syria, ‘They came to destroy’, para. 54. 63 For invaluable insights into ISIL policies concerning sexual violence, including as against Yazidi women and girls, see Mara Redlich Revkin and Elisabeth Wood, ‘The Islamic State’s pattern of sexual violence: ideology and institutions, policies and practices’, The Journal of Global Security Studies 6:2 (2020). 64 ‘The revival of slavery before the hour’, Dabiq, Issue 4 (2014), p. 15. 65 CoI Syria, ‘They came to destroy’, para. 60. 66 Ibid., para. 76: ‘The financial incentive for an individual fighter to break this rule, however, was significant. Whereas Yazidi women and children were sold between fighters for between USD 200 and USD 1,500, they were generally sold back to their families for between USD 10,000 and 40,000.’ Taking the risk of ISIL’s ire became more attractive particularly as the ‘Caliphate’ started to fail and those who decided not to fight to the bitter end began to consider their future. Reportedly, prices for the unauthorised sale of Yazidi women and children back to their families fell in the final year of the ‘Caliphate’ as ISIL fighters scrambled for funds they needed to smuggle themselves and their own families out of Iraq and Syria. Author’s interview with Roza Qaidi, Yazidi activist, July 2020.

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that any woman or girl who did manage to escape would be excommunicated, and risked being killed, by her own community.67 Almost immediately, fighters came to the holding sites to select and purchase Yazidi women and girls. Yazidi women and girls began to scratch and bloody themselves in an attempt to make themselves unattractive to potential buyers. Some committed suicide at holding sites.68 Girls under the age of 9, and boys under the age of 7, were sold as a package with their mothers. One woman, interviewed by the Syria Commission, described a Syrian fighter who paid for her at a slave auction in Syria in 2015, telling her, ‘You are like a sheep. I have bought you.’69 While in captivity, Yazidi women and girls – some as young as 9 – were subjected to sustained sexual violence. Most of those interviewed by the Syria Commission reported violent daily rapes by their fighter-owners.70 While ISIL did not embark on a campaign of forced impregnation (in part because pregnancies would limit fighters’ ability to resell Yazidi females on to other fighters), the group nonetheless considered any resulting offspring as children of the Islamic State. In an article published in a 2014 issue of its magazine Dabiq, ISIL presented its adherence to a theory of patrilineage by using the distressing phrase, ‘the slave girl gives birth to her master’.71 Some Yazidi women and girls were so traumatised by the sexual violence they had suffered that, according to the Syria Commission report, they ‘did not want to marry, or to contemplate relationships with men now or in the future. This was compounded by a sense that they had lost their honour.’72 While much international attention has focus on sexual enslavement, Yazidi women and girls suffered a far broader range of violations at the hands of both the fighters and their families. They were often forced into domestic servitude in fighters’ homes, where they suffered beatings and were denied adequate food and medical care.73 From the moment of capture, through the various holding sites and while being bought and raped, Yazidi women and girls were routinely verbally abused. Insults were specifically directed at their Yazidi faith, saying that they ‘worshipped stones’ and referring to them as ‘dirty kuffar’ (infidels) and ‘devil-worshippers’.74

67 Gina Vale, ‘Liberated, not free: Yazidi women after Islamic State captivity’, Small Wars & Insurgencies 31:3 (2020), 511–39, at 515. 68 CoI Syria, ‘They came to destroy’, para. 53. 69 Ibid., para. 76. 70 Ibid., para. 64. 71 ‘The revival of slavery before the hour’, Dabiq. 72 CoI Syria, ‘They came to destroy’, para. 145. 73 Ibid., paras. 66, 72–3. 74 Ibid., para. 74.

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When Yazidi boys reached the age of 7, ISIL took them away from their mothers. Transferring children of an ethnic or religious group to another group is an additional act of genocide. ISIL made no attempt to mask why the boys were being taken away. Women interviewed by the Syria Commission recounted ISIL fighters telling them that they were taking their sons to teach them to be Muslims and to train them to fight. One woman recalled a fighter showing her a video of boys being trained, saying ‘we are training them to kill kuffar like you’.75 The separation of Yazidi boys aged 7 years and above was systematic. ISIL forcibly transferred the boys to training centres or military camps across its territory. There the boys were registered and given Islamic names. From then on, the boys were called only by their new names, and were treated as ISIL recruits. A new identity was forcibly imposed. In this way, Yazidi boys were transferred out of their own community, and through indoctrination and violence, into ISIL. Propaganda videos published on ISIL channels in 2016 showed Yazidi boys from Sinjar being made to carry out executions of captives.76 When ISIL was forced from its last toehold, the town of Baghuz in eastern Syria, in March 2019,77 several Yazidi boys from Sinjar were rescued.78 Some of the boys, and some of the girls and young women rescued in the later years of the ‘Caliphate’, had been heavily indoctrinated in ISIL ideology.79 Some no longer spoke or understood Kurdish, and threatened Yazidis with violence, referring to them as infidels. In at least one instance, camp authorities had to intervene after a Yazidi boy who had been forced to fight with ISIL confided in a Muslim humanitarian worker that he planned to kill his uncle.80 During the August 2014 attack and in the weeks that followed, ISIL destroyed Yazidi shrines and temples, demolishing them through use of explosives.81 In one incident during the attack, fighters executed fourteen 75 Ibid., para. 93. 76 ISIL video, ‘To the sons of the Jews’, 9 December 2015; ISIL video, ‘Repent and you will have safety’, 19 November 2016. 77 Sarah El Deeb, ‘ISIS militants evacuate last stronghold in Syria following government offensive’, The Star, 9 November 2017. 78 Jane Arraf, ‘Freed from Isis, few Yazidis return to suffering families, many remain missing’, National Public Radio (US), 14 March 2019. 79 Dominique Soguel, ‘Surviving ISIS: young Yazidi conscripts begin long path to healing’, Christian Science Monitor, 4 April 2019. 80 Amnesty International, ‘Legacy of terror: challenges and risks faced by Yezidi child survivors of ISIS’, July 2020, www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/M DE1427592020ENGLISH.pdf. 81 For a detailed analysis of ISIL’s attack on Yazidi religious sites, see, Rashid International, Yazda, and Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa, ‘Destroying the soul of the Yazidis: cultural heritage destruction during the

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elderly men inside the shrine of Sheikh Mand in Jiddala village at the base of Mount Sinjar, before blowing up the shrine with the bodies still inside.82 In its near-rabid fixation with ‘purifying’ Islam, ISIL referred to Salafist texts to determine its approach to the various ethno-religious groups living in areas under (or shortly to come under) its control. An article entitled ‘The revival of slavery before the hour’ published in 2014 in the fourth edition of ISIL’s English-language magazine, Dabiq, stated that the group had sought to determine how the Yazidis should be treated under ISIL’s ideology, prior to the attack on them being launched.83 It had determined that the Yazidis were mushriku¯n – polytheists and idol worshippers. This differed from ISIL’s view of Shia Muslims, who they define as murtaddin or rafidah (apostates or rejecters of the faith), or Christians who are Ahl al-Kitab (People of the Book). ISIL’s treatment of the different religious groups is theoretically defined by these classifications. The Yazidis, whom ISIL defined as polytheists (despite the fact that they explicitly define themselves as monotheists) practising shirk (idolatry), were held to be a direct threat and an insult to the central principle of ISIL-interpreted Islam, adherence to strict monotheism, also known as tawheed. In the same Dabiq article, the ISIL writer declared, ‘Upon conquering the region of Sinjar . . . the Islamic State faced a population of Yazidis, a pagan minority existent for ages in the regions of Iraq and Sham [Syria]. Their continued existence to this day is a matter that Muslims should question as they will be asked about it on Judgment Day . . . .’84 Unlike Christians, adherents of an Abrahamic faith and People of the Book, ISIL’s conception of ‘pure’ Islam could not accommodate the existence of Yazidis within the territory of its ‘Caliphate’. No other religious group present in ISIL-controlled areas of Syria and Iraq was subjected to the destruction that the Yazidis suffered. Arab villagers who did not flee Sinjar in advance of the ISIL attack were allowed to remain in Islamic State’s genocide against the Yazidis’, August 2019, https://zenodo.org/record/ 3826126#.YkWfqyjMKNE. 82 United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, ‘Report on the protection of civilians in the armed conflict in Iraq, 6 July–10 September 2014’, September 2014, p. 15, https://reliefweb .int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/UNAMI_OHCHR_POC_Report_FINAL_6Ju ly_10September2014.pdf. 83 ‘The revival of slavery before the hour’, Dabiq, p. 14: ‘Prior to the taking of Sinjar, Shari’ah students in the Islamic State were tasked to research the Yazidi group to see if they should be treated as an originally mushrik group or one that originated as Muslims and then apostatized . . . .’ 84 Ibid.

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their homes, and were not captured, executed or enslaved. Christian communities – particularly those in Iraq, a result perhaps of the political, economic and social fissures that deepened in the post-2003 period – suffered greatly, including being forced from Mosul and the Nineveh plains, but they were not targeted for annihilation. Under ISIL’s radical interpretation of Islam, however, it was impermissible for Yazidis to live as Yazidis inside its ‘Caliphate’ because they are not People of the Book. In its targeted attack on the Yazidis of Sinjar, ISIL was driven by the absolute belief that this pre-Islamic community had to be eradicated for the benefit of the society they were building. Like other perpetrators of genocide, ISIL was heavily invested in fantasies of its own superiority, and emphasised its role as a purifying force while dehumanising its victims. To adherents of ISIL ideology, the Yazidis are ‘devil-worshippers’;85 in earlier genocides, Armenians were seen as ‘tubercular microbes’,86 the Rwandan Tutsis as ‘cockroaches’.87 ISIL sought the destruction of the Yazidis as a perceived necessary step to restore an Islamic caliphate to actual or imagined former glory,88 in the form of an ideologically pure Sunni-led state. This understanding was underscored by ISIL’s destruction of Yazidi temples and shrines in Sinjar during and after the 3 August 2014 attack.89 The UN Syria Commission of Inquiry determined that ISIL sought to destroy the Yazidis through all five of the acts enumerated under the 1948 Genocide Convention: through killings; sexual slavery, enslavement, torture and inhuman and degrading treatment and forcible transfer, causing serious bodily and mental harm; the infliction of conditions of life that bring about a slow death; the imposition of measures to prevent Yazidi children from being born, including the separation of Yazidi men and women, and mental trauma caused by the violence perpetrated against Yazidi women and girls; and the transfer of Yazidi children from their own families and placing them with ISIL fighters, thereby cutting them off from beliefs and practices of their 85 CoI Syria, ‘They came to destroy’, paras. 74, 160. See also US Holocaust Memorial Museum, ‘“Our generation is gone”’, 20. 86 Vahakn Dadrian, ‘The determinants of the Armenian genocide’, Working Paper GS02, Genocide Studies Program, Yale Center for International and Area Studies, New Haven, 1998, p 15; Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response (New York:HarperCollins, 2003), p. 164. 87 Alison des Forges, ‘ Leave None to Tell the Story’: Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999), pp. 86–7. 88 See Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 21, 27–9, 599–600, for a discussion of idealist cults of ancient glory or pristine purity as one of the common ideological features of genocide. 89 CoI Syria, ‘They came to destroy’, paras. 98–9, 157.

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own religious community, and erasing their identity as Yazidis.90 The Commission further found that ‘the public statements and conduct of ISIS and its fighters clearly demonstrate that ISIS intended to destroy the Yazidis of Sinjar, composing the majority of the world’s Yazidi population, in whole or in part’.91 ISIL’s campaign to eradicate the Yazidi community is an instrumental case of the central role that gender plays in the crime of genocide. ISIL’s intent to physically and biologically destroy the Yazidis of Sinjar manifested itself through distinct patterns of violations committed against male and female victims. Men and older boys – most valued in patriarchal structures, and holding the roles of heads of households, community leaders and protectors of female honour – were targeted for immediate execution. Older women were also quickly executed, reflecting the view – keenly propagated within ISIL’s ‘Caliphate’ but certainly not unknown in the wider world – that a woman’s worth is inextricably linked with her ability to bear children. ISIL’s assault on younger Yazidi women and girls paid heed to their roles as keepers of their community’s and family’s honour, and sources of labour within the home. ISIL intended them to die slower deaths inside the ‘Caliphate’, and subjected them to sustained sexual and physical violence, acts which also formed part of the continuum of genocidal violence. Younger Yazidi boys, valuable to any society and particularly those in conflict, were abducted and forcibly recruited and absorbed into ISIL’s ranks. It is through understanding the interplay between gender and genocide that one can see clearly why genocides are planned and committed as they are, and how genocidal strategies wreak gender-specific traumas that have reverberating destructive impacts on the victim group.92 The Yazidi genocide underlines the shallow nature of the understanding of genocide as a crime committed predominantly through organised mass killings, the majority of whose victims, both historically and today, tend to be male. Too often there is a refusal, both implicit and explicit, to recognise the multifaceted female experience of genocide, as well as the experience of males not selected for execution. Instead, acts of genocide separate from killing often remain unrecognised in the phenomenon of genocidal violence. Such is the

90 Ibid., Executive Summary. 91 Ibid. 92 For a detailed analysis of the inextricable role that gender plays in the crime of genocide, see Global Justice Center, ‘Beyond killing: gender, genocide and obligations under international law’, December 2018, www.globaljusticecenter.net/files/Genderand-Genocide-Whitepaper-FINAL.pdf.

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gender-blindness of an approach to genocide that conflates it with campaigns of extermination.

‘Aftermath’ With thousands of Yazidis still missing, and a slow trickle of Yazidi women and children being rescued from Al-Hol camp in Syria, where ISIL women and children are currently detained,93 and from private houses in Iraq,94 the community is resistant to the idea that they are now in the genocide’s aftermath. The consequences of ISIL’s attempt to wipe out Sinjar’s Yazidis continue to reverberate through the community. Due to continuing instability, as well as continuing ISIL attacks, few Yazidis have returned to Sinjar. The majority now live in tented camps in the Duhok region of Iraq. Survivors, most of them women and girls, remain highly traumatised with limited access to psychological support. This is particularly so for children, both girls who were enslaved and boys who were indoctrinated and made to fight as part of ISIL forces. Families, whether captured or not, are struggling to deal with the trauma experienced by those who were bought back or smuggled out, and by the profound distress of not knowing the fate or whereabouts of relatives. The Yazidi community has largely embraced the women and girls who have returned from ISIL captivity, following clear statements by their religious leaders that survivors remain Yazidi and are to be accepted. Still, a 2017 study of 416 Yazidis found that 44.6 per cent of survivors felt ‘extremely excluded’ by community members.95 With thousands of Yazidi men and older boys missing or dead, Yazidi women and girls face a precarious existence in a society that has not encouraged their independence, nor given many of them the tools to live autonomously. The impact of being from a disputed region, with successive governments failing to provide educational and employment opportunities to the people of Sinjar, is now being most keenly felt by the survivors of the Yazidi genocide. In Iraq, there has been a complete breakdown of trust between the Yazidi community and their neighbours. While some Sunni Arab families helped 93 Richard Hall, ‘Yazidi women rescued from Isis captivity nine months after fall of caliphate’, The Independent (UK), 4 December 2019. 94 Rudaw, ‘Yezidi woman rescued in Anbar anti-ISIS operation’, 30 May 2019. 95 Hawkar Ibrahim, Verena Ertl, Claudia Catani, Azad Ali Ismail and Frank Neuner, ‘Trauma and perceived social rejection among Yazidi women and girls who survived enslavement and genocide’, BMC Medicine 16 (2018), 154.

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Yazidis to escape, what is remembered and often recounted are the acts of those who actively assisted ISIL in the commission of its crimes. There have been, as of April 2020, no substantive efforts to bring about reconciliation, the success of which is not assured. Significant anger within the Yazidi community is directed towards the Kurdish regional government, flowing from the unannounced withdrawal of the Peshmerga from Sinjar as ISIL advanced. There is also a sense of profound disappointment with the international community, due to its failure to rescue Yazidis while the attack was ongoing, and the length of time being taken to achieve the much-promised accountability for ISIL crimes. While most Yazidis have said they want ISIL brought to justice, few believed that international criminal justice was possible, citing centuries of impunity in relation to attacks on their community.96

Conclusion The unabashed brutality of ISIL crimes against the Yazidis – and in particular the sexual enslavement of Yazidi women and girls – transfixed the international media, and amplified the attention that the Yazidis’ suffering received in the corridors of powers in governments and the United Nations. In the international response, there was the impulse to understand and react to the genocide as an aberration, with non-recurrence depending on the eradication of ISIL through military means or, in the United Nations, through accountability by means of criminal prosecutions. To be sure, Iraq’s Yazidis remain at grave risk of a resurgent ISIL. An unflinching look at the history of the Yazidis, and perhaps of every other community which has suffered genocide, underscores that the threat of annihilation often outlasts any one particular perpetrator. This chapter has sought to emphasise that the Yazidi genocide, if one can pull one’s gaze from the horror, is capable of providing startling clarity on the prejudices and grievances that may, in time, give rise both to genocidal intent and to the context in which perpetrators may manifest that intent in actions.

Bibliographic Note Any study of ISIL’s genocide of the Yazidis of northern Iraq begins with the June 2016 report of the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, ‘“They came to destroy”: ISIS crimes against the Yazidis’. The US 96 CoI Syria, ‘They came to destroy’, para. 187.

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Holocaust’s Memorial Museum’s November 2015 report, ‘“Our Generation is gone”: the Islamic State’s targeting of Iraqi minorities in Ninewa’, provides insights both into the genocidal nature of the attack on the Yazidis, and how it differed from ISIL’s attacks on other ethnic and religious minorities in Ninewa province. Academic works which provide invaluable windows into understanding the Yazidi genocide include Valeria Cetorelli, Isaac Sasson, Nazar Shabila and Gilbert Burnham, ‘Mortality and kidnapping estimates for the Yazidi population in the area of Mount Sinjar, Iraq in August 2014: a retrospective household survey’, Plos Med, 14:5(2017); Revkin and Wood, ‘The Islamic State’s pattern of sexual violence’; Moradi and Anderson, ‘The Islamic State’s Êzîdî genocide in Iraq’; and N. Marczak, ‘A century apart: the genocidal enslavement of Armenian and Yazidi women’, in A Gendered Lens for Genocide Prevention, ed. M. Connellan and C. Frohlich (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) pp. 133–62. With specific regard to Kocho village, see Cetorelli and Ashraph, ‘A demographic documentation of ISIS’s attack on the Yazidi village of Kocho’. For a detailed analysis of ISIL’s attack on Yazidi religious sites, see Rashid International, ‘Destroying the soul of the Yazidis’. An examination of the role that gender played in ISIL’s planning and commission of the Yazidi genocide, as well as the crime’s gendered impacts, may be found in Vale’s ‘Liberated, not free’ and Global Justice Center’s ‘Beyond killing’. The impact of the Yazidi genocide on children is currently under-researched; a starting point is Amnesty International’s 2020 report, ‘Legacy of terror’. Also recommended are books founded upon survivor accounts: the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Murad, The Last Girl, and Otten, With Ash on their Faces. While it is not recommended that one read ISIL publications, the group’s 2014 article, ‘The revival of slavery before the hour’, published in its Englishlanguage magazine Dabiq, sets out ISIL’s basis for its attack on the Yazidis. For writing on the Yazidis, please see Açikyildiz, The Yezidis; Asatrian and Arakelova, The Religion of the Peacock Angel; Guest, Survival among the Kurds; and Fuccaro, The Other Kurds. ISIL’s attack on the Yazidis of northern Sinjar garnered significant media interest. This was particularly as regards the sexual enslavement of Yazidi women and girls, augmented by the public advocacy of several female survivors. The underlying crimes tended to be discussed in isolation; very rarely however did the media frame the horrors as part of a co-ordinated strategy on 744

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the part of ISIL to destroy the Yazidi religious group. S. Minwalla and J. Foster’s article, ‘Genocide, rape and careless disregard: media and the problematic portrayals of Yazidi survivors of ISIS captivity’, Women’s Studies International Forum 67 (2018), 53–64, provides a worrying critique of journalistic practices in the reporting of the Yazidi genocide.

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Genocide in Myanmar The Assault on the Rohingya, 2010–2019 azeem ibrahim

Introduction Insofar as the wider world paid much attention to Myanmar,1 by 2010 it was to see it as another state emerging from a dictatorship to some form of democratic rule2. Faced by massive civil unrest in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis,3 the military regime conceded a new constitution and elections to a parliament in 2010. Objecting to the restrictions imposed on its leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, the National League for Democracy (NLD) boycotted that round but did stand in the 2011 elections.4 Here they won the majority of the votes cast by the ethnic Burmese community (who make up some 70 per cent of the population of Myanmar), suggesting that even with the embedded role of the military5 (which the constitution set as the key guarantors of the state, reserving a number of seats in parliament for their own political party), the state was moving towards the status of a conventional democracy. That the leader of the NLD had spent most of the previous twenty years under house arrest and had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 seemed further reassurance of Myanmar’s likely trajectory away from dictatorship and intercommunal conflict.6 1 For convenience in this chapter, I will use the modern names for states and regions. So, Myanmar will mostly be used rather than Burma, and Rakhine (state) rather than Arakan unless there is a particularly strong historical reason. 2 David I. Steinberg, ‘The United States and Myanmar: a “boutique issue”?’ International Affairs, 86:1 (2010), 175–94. 3 Donald M. Seekins, ‘The social, political and humanitarian impact of Burma’s Cyclone Nargis’, Asia-Pacific Journal 6:5 (2008), 1–5, at 5. 4 David Loyn, ‘Suu Kyi’s NLD Democracy Party to rejoin Burma politics’, BBC News, 18 November 2011, www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-15787605. 5 David C. Williams, ‘What’s so bad about Burma’s 2008 constitution?’, Law Society and Transition in Myanmar, ed. Melissa Crouch and Tim Lindsey (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2014), pp. 117–40. 6 Martin Woolacott, ‘Why Burma still needs Aung San Suu Kyi’, The Guardian, 6 April 2015, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/06/burma-aung-sansuu-kyi-democracy-election.

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This optimism was driven in part by the hope that a formerly rich region would rejoin the international economy, opening up mining, logging, transport and tourism opportunities.7 It was also assumed that the various ethnic and politically inspired border conflicts (especially in the mountainous east bordering on Thailand and Laos) would be resolved. But that completely ignored the plight of the minority, Muslim, Rohingya ethnic group in northern Rakhine (on the west coast of Myanmar). Even in 2010, this group was facing legal discrimination, ethnic and state violence,8 the theft of their lands and forced flight to neighbouring countries.9 This systemic persecution exploded into violence in 201210 and 2013.11 During these attacks, the NLD was silent12 and Aung San Suu Kyi repeated the standard claim of the military regime and of Myanmar’s Buddhist extremists13 that the Rohingya did not exist as an ethnic group.14 By the end of this outbreak, most Rohingya had been forced from their land, some fled to neighbouring countries and others were in internal camps and denied access to work, food and healthcare. Myanmar’s own enquiry found no evidence of governmental wrong-doing but did express concern that the

7 Aung Hla Tun, ‘Myanmar sees foreign investment topping $5 bln in 2014–15’, Reuters, 16 September 2014, www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/16/myanmar-investmentidUSL3N0RH3EZ20140916. 8 Irish Centre for Human Rights, ‘Crimes against humanity in western Burma: the situation of the Rohingyas’, 2010, p. 154. http://burmaactionireland.org/images/uplo ads/ICHR_Rohingya_Report_2010.pdf. 9 Richard Sollom and Parveen Parma, ‘Stateless and starving: persecuted Rohingya flee Burma and starve in Bangladesh’, Emergency Report by Physicians for Human Rights, 2010, p. 26, https://phr.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/stateless-andstarving-1.pdf. 10 Human Rights Watch, ‘“The government should have stopped this”: sectarian violence and ensuing abuses in Burma’s Arakan state’, 2012, p. 62, www.hrw.org/report/ 2012/07/31/government-could-have-stopped/sectarian-violence-and-ensuing-abuses-b urmas-arakan. 11 International Crisis Group, ‘The dark side of transition: violence against Muslims in Myanmar’, 2013, p. 36, www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/asia/south-east-asia/bur ma-myanmar/251-the-dark-side-of-transition-violence-against-muslims-in-myanmar. 12 Muhamed Sacirbey, ‘Aung San Suu Kyi: silence to genocide?’, Huffington Post, 9 April 2013, www.huffingtonpost.com/ambassador-muhamed-sacirbey/aung-sansuu-kyi-silence-_b_3032958.html. 13 Carlos Sardina Galache, ‘Who are the monks behind Burma’s ‘969’ campaign?’, Democratic Voice of Burma, 10 May 2013, www.burmalibrary.org/en/who-are-themonks-behind-burmas-969-campaign; Andrew R. C. Marshall, ‘Myanmar gives official blessing to anti-Muslim monks’, Reuters, 27 June 2013, http://uk.reuters.com/article/ 2013/06/27/us-myanmar-969-specialreport-idUSBRE95Q04720130627. 14 Patrick Winn, ‘Suu Kyi spokesman: “There is no Rohingya”’, Global Post, 2 May 2013, www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/myanmar/130501/suu-kyino-rohingya.

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‘so-called’ Rohingya were attracting international sympathy.15 Subsequently many Rohingya tried to flee by sea, often then becoming caught up in the slave-labour economy that exists in parts of Thailand.16 This annual (to coincide with calm seas) emigration came to world attention in 2015 when Indonesia and Malaya both tried to close their borders, stranding the refugees at sea.17 Again, a concern of the Myanmar authorities was that the ‘so-called’ Rohingya were garnering sympathy and support.18 On the other hand, although effectively banned from participating in the election,19 and despite the NLD officially ignoring them,20 many Rohingya hoped that the NLD’s next electoral success, in 2015, would bring real change.21 These hopes were soon dashed as attacks on the few Rohingya still living in their villages continued and conditions in the camps worsened. The consequence was that for the first time since 1947, some Rohingya turned to armed resistance. The Arakan Rohingya Solidarity Army (ARSA) first emerged in 2016 and attacked Myanmar military bases in Rakhine.22 These attacks persisted in 2017, mostly using antiquated weapons and, from the available evidence, carried out by local Rohingyas but the funding and external control most likely came from Rohingya exiles living in Saudi Arabia. 15 Rakhine Investigation Committee, ‘Summary of Recommendations’, Government of Myanmar, 2013, p. 27, https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B6-RlYkUW0vjR0ZqOU1xc3 k2SnM/edit?pli=1. 16 ‘Myanmar ex-slave: those with sympathy would not eat our fish’, Associated Press, 18 September 2015, https://apnews.com/article/c5ed5d0d62d347d3b9eb34726d42be03. 17 ‘Why are so many Rohingya migrants stranded at sea?’, BBC News, 18 May 2015, www .bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-32740637. 18 Reuters, ‘Burma military chief claims refugees pretending to be Rohingya to get aid’, The Guardian, 22 May 2015, www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/22/burmamilitary-chief-claims-refugees-pretending-to-be-rohingya-to-get-aid. 19 Burma Centrum Nederlands, ‘Ethnicity without meaning, data without context: the 2014 census, identity and citizenship in Burma/Myanmar’, Burma Policy Briefing No. 13, 2014, p. 24, www.tni.org/files/download/bpb_13.pdf; Philip Heijmans, ‘Myanmar’s controversial census’, The Diplomat, 2 September 2014, http://thediplo mat.com/2014/09/myanmars-controversial-census/; Republic of the Union of Myanmar, ‘The population and housing census of Myanmar 2014’, Department of Population, 2014, p. 9. http://countryoffice.unfpa.org/myanmar/drive/Summmar yoftheProvisionalResults.pdf. 20 David Doyle, ‘Burma elections: Aung San Suu Kyi Steers clear of ‘stateless’ minority the Rohingya’, The Independent, 15 October 2015, www.independent.co.uk/news/wor ld/asia/burma-elections-aung-san-suu-kyi-steers-clear-of-stateless-minority-the-rohin gya-a6697341.html. 21 Azeem Ibrahim, The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide (Oxford University Press, 2016). 22 International Crisis Group, ‘Myanmar: a new muslim insurgency in Rakhine state’, 21 December 2016, www.crisisgroup.org/asia/south-east-asia/myanmar/283myanmar-new-muslim-insurgency-rakhine-state.

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The consequences were brutal.23 The ethnic violence in 2012–13 had seen the Myanmar military sometimes participate, sometimes stand aside and sometimes protect the Rohingya.24 This time, the army, allied with members of the local Rakhine Buddhist population, led the assault. By mid-2019 the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) had recorded 750,000 Rohingya refugees around Cox’s Bazaar in Bangladesh25 and it is estimated that there are a further 250,000 who remain unregistered. In effect, an ethnic group of some 1.4 million people in Myanmar in 201426 has been mostly expelled from the country, with the rest kept in enclosed camps.27 A further 200,000 Rohingya are estimated to have fled the violence in 201228 (and few of these returned after 2013). In effect, Myanmar has carried out the expulsion and destruction of an ethnic group, in a decade when it was supposedly making a transition from dictatorship to democracy.

Background The effective destruction of the Rohingya community in Myanmar over the decade 2010–19 did not emerge from a vacuum. The military dictatorship after 1962 had often targeted the community and its argument that the Rohingya have no place in Myanmar has come to be accepted by most of the ethnically Burmese population including both the extremist organisations of Buddhist monks who control much of the education system29 and the leadership of the NLD. Given this context, this section starts with a very short refutation of the myth that the

23 Daniel Sullivan, ‘Abuse or exile: Myanmar’s ongoing persecution of the Rohingya’, Refugees International, 2019, www.refugeesinternational.org/reports/2019/4/24/abu se-or-exile-myanmars-ongoing-persecution-of-the-rohingya. 24 International Crisis Group, ‘The dark side of transition’, 36. 25 UNHCR, ‘Refugee response in Bangladesh’, https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/ myanmar_refugees. 26 Republic of the Union of Myanmar, ‘The population and housing census of Myanmar 2014’, 9. 27 Of note here, the 2014 census mostly refused to register the Rohingya but their population can be readily estimated as the census includes categories for those not recorded and for those recorded as having no valid registration documents. 28 Matt Smith, ‘Policies of persecution: ending abusive state policies against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar’, Fortify Rights International, 2014, p. 79, www.fortifyrights.org /downloads/Policies_of_Persecution_Feb_25_Fortify_Rights.pdf. 29 Todd Pitman and Grant Peck, ‘Radical monks, prejudice fuel Myanmar violence’, Associated Press, 1 June 2013, www.thejakartapost.com/news/2013/06/01/radicalmonks-prejudice-fuel-myanmar-violence.html.

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Rohingya arrived within the borders of Myanmar only as late as during the period of British colonial rule.30

History and Context The available linguistic and ethnic evidence suggests that antecedents of the modern Rohingya arrived in what is now the Rakhine state of Myanmar around 500 B C E 31 with close ethnic and cultural connections to India. This brought both Hindu and Buddhist beliefs to the region and Islam was increasingly adopted after 800 C E. Around 1000 C E, the Rakhine (a group ethnically close to most of the linguistically Tibeto-Burman tribes that had conquered the Irrawaddy valley) crossed the coastal mountains from central Myanmar and settled in the region.32 Following this for the next 800 years Rakhine (then known as Arakan) was variously part of the Burmese kingdom, independent, or dominated by Bengal.33 A brief period of Burmese rule from 1780 saw around 30,000 Rohingya flee to Bengal.34 But many remained. In 1799, the British scholar Francis Buchanan described the Rohingya people as ‘long settled in Arakan’. He said they were Muslims ‘who call themselves Rooinga, or natives of Arakan’.35 Following the first Anglo-Burmese war (1824–6), Rakhine was annexed by the British and most of the 30,000 Rohingya refugees in Bengal returned. Up to 1942, the two communities, Muslim and Buddhist, lived together in the north and central parts of the state but ethnic violence during World War Two effectively saw them separated with the Rohingya mostly living in the north. In effect, there is no evidence for the repeated claims that the Rohingya arrived in Myanmar only under British rule or that they are really Bengalis.36 30 Derek Tonkin, The ‘Rohingya’ Identity: British Experience in Arakan 1826–1948 (Rangoon: Network Myanmar, 2014), p. 4. 31 Pamela Gutman, Burma’s Lost Kingdoms: Splendors of Arakan (Trumbull: Weatherhill, 2001), pp. 5–8. 32 Pamela Gutman, ‘Ancient Arakan’ (PhD dissertation, Australian National University: Department of Asian Civilisations, 1976), pp. 16–17. 33 Martin Smith, Arakan (Rakhine State): A Land in Conflict on Myanmar’s Western Frontier (Amsterdam: Trans National Institute, 2019), pp. 13–14. 34 Derek Tonkin, Migration from Bengal to Arakan during British Rule 1826–1948 (Brussels: Torkel Opsahl Academic EPublisher, 2019), p. 6. 35 Francis Buchanan, ‘A comparative vocabulary of some of the languages spoken in the Burma Empire’, Asiatic Researches 5 (1799), 219–40, reprinted in SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research 1:1 (2003), 55, www.soas.ac.uk/sbbr/editions/file64276.pdf. 36 Harrison Aktins, ‘No place for Islam? Buddhist nationalism in Myanmar’, Al Jazeera, 18 October 2013, www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/10/no-place-islambuddhist-nationalism-myanmar-2013101710411233906.html.

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As Gutman argues,37 the early history of Rakhine/Arakan is defined by close cultural and ethnic links with India and this produced the first set of arrivals who established a degree of urbanisation, trade and settled agriculture. Local inscriptions suggest the language had diverged substantially from Bengali by 800 C E but the first Burman-related arrivals were the Sak38 who reinforced the existing Buddhist elements in the local culture and brought an early form of Tibeto-Burman dialect. Unfortunately, the belief that the Rohingya arrived in the 1840s is now widely accepted and is reinforced by the military, Buddhist monks and the NLD. Whenever she has been pressed on this, Aung San Suu Kyi has refused to challenge these myths even after outbreaks of ethnic violence: [I]n an interview with GlobalPost, the Nobel Peace Laureate’s spokesman and confidante, Nyan Win, confirmed that Aung San Suu Kyi has no plans to champion the Rohingya cause despite criticism swirling around her silence on the crisis. . . . Nyan Win said. ‘She believes, in Burma, there is no Rohingya ethnic group. It is a made-up name of the Bengali.’39

Since then, in 2018 Aung San Suu Kyi went to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to deny the crimes that occurred and, again, refused to use the title Rohingya to describe the victim community.40 In effect, in electoral terms the NLD has nothing to gain from challenging the myths around the Rohingya. There is also evidence that Aung San Suu Kyi herself has antiMuslim prejudices.41

A Legal Framework for Persecution The myth that the Rohingya have no place in Myanmar has been built up steadily since the late 1960s and turned into practical action by a series of discriminatory citizenship laws. The 1947 Constitution42 placed considerable stress on the question of citizenship. However, Article 11 (iv) drew a distinction between Indian migrants who were denied any citizenship rights 37 Gutman, Burma’s Lost Kingdoms. 38 Gutman, ‘Ancient Arakan’, 12–15. 39 Winn, ‘Suu Kyi spokesman: “There is no Rohingya”’. 40 ‘Aung San Suu Kyi defends Myanmar from accusations of genocide, at top UN court’, UN News, 11 December 2019, https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/12/1053221. 41 Nicola Harvey, ‘Aung San Suu Kyi in anti-Muslim spat with BBC presenter’, Daily Telegraph, 25 March 2016, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/03/25/aung-san-suu-kyiin-anti-muslim-spat-with-bbc-presenter/; Michał Lubina, The Moral Democracy: The Political Thought of Aung San Suu Kyi (Warsaw: Scholar, 2019). 42 Constituent Assembly, ‘The Constitution of the Union of Burma’, Foreign Office, 1947, p. 69, www.burmalibrary.org/docs07/1947Constitution-facsimile-red.pdf.

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and the Rohingya who were also denied citizenship but were given National Registration Certificates with full legal and voting rights.43 However, subsequent to the 1962 military coup, nationality and citizenship legislation steadily removed these rights. The 1974 Constitution of the Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma44 defined citizenship (in Article 145) as: ‘All persons born of parents both of whom are nationals of the Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma are citizens of the Union.’ If the Rohingya were not treated as citizens in 1947, as holders of National Registration Certificates they were arguably ‘nationals’ under Article 145 of the 1974 Constitution and it is possible that they could now become citizens of the state. Perhaps it was for this reason that their National Registration Certificates (from the 1947 legislation) were now replaced with Foreign Registration Cards – that is, non-national cards. The 1982 Burmese Citizenship Law45 extended this by defining exactly which ethnic groups could be considered citizens; a member of any other ethnicity was now deemed to be a foreigner.46 Under the 1982 legislation, the Rohingya were denied citizenship due to the ethnic classifications used.47 In addition, the legal structures are vague, with substantial amounts of administrative discretion, and the few legal rights granted to citizens were undermined by the regular passing of martial law legislation.48 Further Acts in the 1990s imposed restrictions on those deemed to be foreigners49 including limiting the permitted number of children to two 43 Cresa L. Pugh, ‘Is citizenship the answer? Constructions of belonging and exclusion for the stateless Rohingya of Burma’, International Migration Institute, 2013, p. 24, www .compas.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/WP-2013-107Pugh_Stateless_Rohingya_Burma.pdf. 44 Government of the Union of Burma, ‘The Constitution of the Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma’, 1974, p. 37. 45 ‘Burma Citizenship Law’, UNHCR, 15 October 1982, www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6 b4f71b.html. 46 This is in direct contravention of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Art. 15(2) (‘No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality’); International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination, Art. 5(d)(iii) (governments shall ‘undertake . . . to guarantee the right of everyone, without distinction as to race, colour, or national or ethnic origin, to equality before the law, notably in . . . the right to nationality’); International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Art. 26 (‘The law shall . . . guarantee to all persons equal and effective protection against discrimination on any ground such as race, . . . ’). 47 Pugh, ‘Is citizenship the answer?’, 24. 48 Article 19, ‘Burma: beyond the law’, Global Campaign for Free Expression, 1996, www .refworld.org/pdfid/4754182a0.pdf. 49 Asian Human Rights Commission, ‘Diagnosing the un-rule of law in Burma: a submission to the UN Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review’, 2011, p. 32, www.humanrights.asia/resources/journals-magazines/article2/0902-2/diagnos

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and introducing forced birth control and restrictions on marriage and the formation of family units. The Rohingya had no automatic right to travel, even between townships in Rakhine without authorisation. The return to democracy was formalised in the 2008 Constitution of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar.50 However, in terms of citizenship this was even more restrictive than the 1974 Act as it effectively restricted citizenship to those already deemed to be citizens or children born to two parents who are already citizens. This breached the UN 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness – where Article 1 states: ‘A Contracting State shall grant its nationality to a person born in its territory who would otherwise be stateless’51 – as Bangladesh does not accept the Rohingya as its citizens. Indeed, Bangladesh has consistently tried to expel Rohingya refugees precisely to avoid having to take permanent responsibility for them.52

2010–2014 The early period after the return to democracy saw no improvement of the conditions for the Rohingya, either trapped in the refugee camps of Bangladesh or internally displaced53. (See Map 31.1.) The legal consequences of the various citizenship laws meant they faced restrictions on movement and marriage and constantly feared confiscation of their land. This period also saw the closure of mosques and other forms of religious discrimination. A US Government report noted in 2011: Police and border guards also continue inspections of Muslim mosques in Rakhine state; if a mosque cannot show a valid building permit, the venue is ordered closed or destroyed. The government has, in recent years, ordered

50

51 52

53

ing-the-un-rule-of-law-in-burma-a-submission-to-the-un-human-rights-councils-univer sal-periodic-review/. Myanmar, ‘Constitution of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar’, 2008, p. 213, www .myanmar-law-library.org/law-library/laws-and-regulations/constitutions/2008-constitu tion.html. ‘Burma: the Rohingya Muslims: ending a cycle of exodus?’, UNHCR, www .refworld.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/rwmain?page=printdoc&docid=3ae6a84a2. Médecins Sans Frontières, ‘10 years for the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh: past, present and future’, 2002, p. 45, www.msf.org/ten-years-rohingya-refugeespast-present -and-future-report-summary; R. Sharples, ‘Repatriating the Rohingya’, Burma Issues 13:3 (2003), 1–3; Sollom and Parma, ‘Stateless and starving’, 26. Robert Simpson, Gaby Duffy, Nina Kolbjornsen, Naomi Kawahara, Dr Zahid Jamal and S. M. Rejoan Hossain, ‘Joint Assessment Mission Report’, UNHCR/WFP, October 2004, p. 53, https://documents.wfp.org/stellent/groups/public/documents/ ena/wfp046326.pdf.

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N W

E S

CHIN

Taungpyoletwea

0

25

50 km

Buthidaung Maungdaw Kyauktaw Mrauk-U Rathedaung Ponnagyun Minbya Pauktaw Sittwe

MAGWAY

Myebon

Myengu Ann Kyunthaya Kyaukpyu Ma-ei

Bay of Bengal Ramree Island

IDP per Township 20,001

Ramree Toungup

Munaung Munaung Island Thandwe

Township

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Kyaukpyu Kyauktaw Maungdaw Minbya Mrauk-U Myebon Pauktaw Ramree Rathedaung Sewtti Total

Reported IDP Date & IDPs Sites Source 1,106 2 6,594 11 1,400 9 5,187 7 3,688 4 2,899 2 19,261 5 264 2 3,944 5 98,676 21 143,514 68

Aug 2015 (CCCM Cluster)

SN

Kyeintali

Gwa

Map 31.1 Rakhine state, Myanmar: internally displaced persons, 2015.

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the destructions of mosques, religious centers, and schools. During the reporting period, the Burmese government maintained a campaign to create Muslim Free Areas in parts of Rakhine state. Military commanders have closed mosques and madrassas, stoked ethnic violence, and built pagodas in areas without a Buddhist presence, often with forced labor. Refugees report that the military continues to entice conversion to Buddhism by offering charity, bribes, or promises of jobs or schooling for Muslim children.54

This sustained assault on the Rohingya worsened in 2012 when open violence spread across Rakhine. In June, a group of Rohingya men raped a Rakhine woman leading to attacks by the Rakhine on bus passengers and the burning of four Rohingya villages. After the June violence, the state refused to help those who had suffered or investigate allegations of security force involvement.55 Instead, the president ‘called for “illegal” Rohingya to be sent to “third countries”’.56 This message was reinforced when the army dumped a number of bodies close to a camp for those who had fled the violence: None of the bodies were identified. Local residents took photographs showing some victims who had been ‘hogtied’ with string or plastic strips before being executed. By leaving the bodies near a camp for displaced Rohingya, the soldiers were sending a message – consistent with a policy of ethnic cleansing – that the Rohingya should leave permanently.57

A second wave of violence broke out in October 2012. This showed signs of pre-planning by the local Rakhine political parties, associations of Buddhist monks and community groups.58 In the lead-up to the attacks the propaganda aimed at the Rohingya intensified and there were repeated calls for them to go ‘home’ (i.e. to Bangladesh). One of the worst incidents was at the village of Yan Thei where a massacre commenced at 6.30 a.m. and ended at 5 p.m. when the army finally intervened. Among the dead were twenty-eight

54 US Commission on International Religious Freedom, ‘Countries of Particular Concern: Burma’, 2011, p. 9. 55 Human Rights Watch, ‘Burma: communal violence undercuts rights gains’, 21 January 2014, www.hrw.org/news/2014/01/21/burma-communal-violenceundercuts-rights-gains. 56 Human Rights Watch, ‘All You Can Do Is Pray’: Crimes against Humanity and Ethnic Cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Burma’s Arakan State (USA: Human Rights Watch, 2013). p. 16. 57 Ibid., p. 15. 58 Equal Rights Trust, ‘The human rights of the stateless Rohingya in Thailand’, Equal Rights Trust, 2014, p. 21, www.equalrightstrust.org/ertdocumentbank/the%20human %20rights%20of%20stateless%20rohingya%20in%20thailand%28small%29.pdf.

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children, thirteen of them aged under 5, who were hacked to death. Other attacks took place at the same time in different townships.59 A lower level of violence persisted across 2013 and 2014 and became aimed at all Muslims in Myanmar not just the Rohingya.60 In March 2013, there were attacks, again led by Buddhist monks, in Meuktilla near Mandalay. These were also preceded by monks associated with the ‘969 Movement’ delivering anti-Muslim speeches in the Mandalay Region.61 In 2014, violence broke out in remote areas such as the Maungdaw village of Duchiradan (Kila Dong) where upwards of 4,000 Rohingya people were killed, raped, arrested or went missing. In addition to the deaths and destruction, many Rohingya fled to what became permanent displaced persons camp in Myanmar. To limit external reporting, external aid agencies such as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) were ordered out of Rakhine.62 In effect, MSF were banned for continuing to provide a minimal level of support. Specifically: the charity has been targeted for its stance on a massacre said to have taken place in Maungdaw township, a restricted area close to the Bangladesh border, where UN and human rights groups claim at least 40 Rohingya Muslims including children were killed by ethnic Rakhine Buddhists and Burmese security forces in January.63

Internationally these attacks drew some attention but the consequences were often downplayed with the European Union choosing to note the Myanmar military’s restraint.64 The Myanmar government set up its own enquiry into the 2012 violence in Rakhine. It concluded that there had been no systemic violence but expressed concern that the ‘Bengali’ (Rohingya) were exploiting the situation to undermine Myanmar’s international standing: Through international media, Bengali [Rohingya] groups are widely publicizing the extent of government controls over them. Whilst the Government deems such measures as necessary in the context of the country’s situation and 59 Refugees International, ‘Myanmar’, www.refugeesinternational.org/where-we-work /asia/myanmar. 60 International Crisis Group, ‘The dark side of transition’, 36. 61 Smith, ‘Policies of persecution’, 79. 62 Kate Hodal, ‘Burma tells Medécins Sans Frontières to leave state hit by sectarian violence’, The Guardian, 28 February 2014, www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/2 8/burma-medecins-sans-frontieres-rakhine-state. 63 Ibid. 64 ‘EU welcomes “measured” Myanmar response to rioting’, Reuters, 11 June 2012, http:// uk.reuters.com/article/2012/06/11/us-myanmar-violence-idUSBRE85A01C20120611.

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the non-citizen status of this group, the international community condemns these measures as violations of fundamental rights. This . . . has undermined the country’s reputation and affected its international relations.65

2015–2017 This period was notable for the ongoing violence against the Rohingya, a growing refugee crisis, and the 2015 domestic elections won by the NLD.

The NLD To many Western commentators, Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD are the persecuted heroes of the Burmese struggle for democracy. The reality is more nuanced. The NLD emerged, in effect, as a faction of the ethnic Burman elite and many of its senior figures either had previously been in the military or had close personal relations66 with the elite. It was formed in the late 1980s and initially had little link to the bulk of the Burmese population and this link was created as a result of an alliance with the Buddhist monks who were leading the protests in the period 1988–90. That alliance has had consequences for the Rohingya Muslims. First, although the NLD has dominated Myanmar politics every time it has contested an election, such as those of 1990,67 2011, 201268 and 2015, it has attracted few votes outside the majority Burmese ethnic community. In the main, the other ethnic groups in Myanmar have voted for their own ethnic or regional parties. In practice most of these shared the NLD’s opposition to military rule but there were particular problems with the party that reflected the Rakhine community (the Rohingya having been mostly excluded both as individuals and as an organised political entity). The Buddhist Rakhine Party69 in its various guises and name changes has been a close ally of the NLD but also has a visceral hatred of the Rohingya, and even in 1990 was calling for their expulsion.70 Its senior members were implicated in the 2012 65 Rakhine Investigation Committee, ‘Summary of Recommendations’, 27. 66 Ibrahim, The Rohingyas, pp. 12–13. 67 Khin Kyaw Han, ‘1990 multi party democracy: general elections’, National League for Democracy, 1 February 2003, www.burmalibrary.org/sites/burmalibrary.org/files/o bl/docs/1990_elections.htm. 68 World Elections, ‘Burma (Myanmar) by-elections 2012’, http://welections .wordpress.com/2012/04/06/burma-by-elections-2012/. 69 Arakan Rohingya National Organisation, ‘Rakhine extremist gang ALD & RNDP disguised and merged as ANP’, www.rohingya.org/analysis-rakhine-extremist-gangald-a-rndp-disguised-and-merged-as-anp/. 70 Han, ‘1990 multi party democracy’.

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violence71 and, conveniently, sat on the Myanmar committee that investigated those events.72 The NLD’s alliance with the monks was to prove equally problematic. While they were opposed to military rule many were also fundamentally anti-Muslim73 and hold to an interpretation of Buddhism that sees all nonBuddhists as a serious threat to their community. In effect, there was no electoral reason for the NLD to challenge the persecution of the Rohingya. To do so would have cost it political allies and disrupted a useful alliance with Buddhist monks. In addition, it is clear that Aung San Suu Kyi herself shares much of this prejudice74 even though others in the NLD leadership were worried enough in 2015 to warn that their current approach ran the risk of causing genocide.75 The result was that in the run-up to the 2015 elections, Aung San Suu Kyi constantly avoided any discussion of the Rohingya. It took the renewed violence of 2017 to finally force her to break her silence.76 After over 400,000 Rohingya had been forced to flee to Bangladesh, and after she had received a report from Kofi Annan about the situation in Rakhine,77 Suu Kyi claimed she now wanted to ‘find out why this is happening’, but denied that there had been any systemic violence by asserting that ‘more than 50% of Muslim villages are intact’. 71 Timothy McLaughlin, ‘Rising Arakanese Party could further marginalize Rohingya’, Reuters, 3 October 2015, www.irrawaddy.com/election/news/rising-arakanese-partycould-further-marginalize-rohingya. 72 Rakhine Investigation Committee, ‘Summary of Recommendations’, 27. 73 Peter A. Coclanis, ‘Terror in Burma: Buddhists vs. Muslims’, World Affairs December 2015, www.researchgate.net/publication/290202838_Terror_in_Burma_B uddhists_vs_Muslims; Fergal Keane, ‘The Burmese monks who preach intolerance against Muslim Rohingyas’, BBC News, 21 November 2015, www.bbc.co.uk/news/w orld-asia-20427889; Pitman and Peck, ‘Radical monks, prejudice fuel Myanmar violence’; Alex Preston, ‘Saffron terror: an audience with Burma’s “Buddhist Bin Laden” Ashin Wirathu’, GQ Magazine, 11 February 2015, www.gq-magazine.co.uk/comment/ articles/2015-02/12/ashin-wirathu-audience-with-the-buddhist-bin-laden-burma. 74 Harvey, ‘Aung San Suu Kyi in anti-Muslim Spat with BBC presenter’; Lubina, The Moral Democracy; Poppy McPherson, ‘“No Muslims allowed”: how nationalism is rising in Aung San Suu Kyi’s Myanmar’, The Guardian, 23 May 2016, www.theguardian.com /world/2016/may/23/no-muslims-allowed-how-nationalism-is-rising-in-aung-san-suu -kyis-myanmar?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Tweet. 75 ‘“They are humans”: Myanmar opposition says Rohingya people have rights’, Sydney Morning Herald, 20 May 2015, www.smh.com.au/world/they-are-humans-myanmaropposition-says-rohingya-people-have-rights-20150519-gh4q8m.html. 76 Richard C. Paddock and Hannah Beech, ‘Aung San Suu Kyi, a much-changed icon, evades Rohingya accusations’, New York Times, 18 September 2017, www.nytimes.com /2017/09/18/world/asia/aung-san-suu-kyi-speech-rohingya.html. 77 Gert Rosenthal, ‘A brief and independent inquiry into the involvement of the United Nations in Myanmar from 2010 to 2018’, www.un.org/sg/sites/www.un.org.sg/files/ato ms/files/Myanmar%20Report%20-%20May%202019.pdf.

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Against this background, her willingness to defend the Myanmar military at the International Criminal Court in 2019 comes as no surprise.78

Refugee Crisis Despite this lack of political support, in the run-up to the 2015 election many Rohingya did hope that an NLD victory would lead to improved conditions. Others, especially those held in the internal camps, opted to flee by boat to Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. By 2015, this had become an annual event in the season when the Andaman Sea was calm,79 but it came to world attention after Indonesia and Malaysia closed their borders, stranding many refugees at sea.80 The resulting regional crisis led to rising tensions between these states and Myanmar, as its persecution of the Rohingya started to threaten regional stability.81 The end result was many of the refugees were returned to Myanmar while others disappeared into slave labour channels of the Thai economy.82

2017–2019 The Emergence of ARSA Violence against the Rohingya, especially those living outside the refugee camps, continued into 2016.83 But for the first time since 1947, some Rohingya organised a military response. The Arakan Rohingya Solidarity Army (ARSA) 78 ‘Myanmar Rohingya: Suu Kyi accused of “silence” in genocide trial’, BBC News, 12 December 2019, www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-50763180; Sullivan, ‘Abuse or exile’; ‘Aung San Suu Kyi defends Myanmar from accusations of genocide, at top UN court’. 79 ‘Refugee boats set sail as monsoon season ends’, UCANEWS, 19 October 2015, www .ucanews.com/news/refugee-boats-set-sail-as-monsoon-season-ends/74455. 80 Antoni Slodkowski, ‘Beaten and starving, some Rohingya flee boats, return to camps’, Reuters, 20 May 2015, www.rohingyablogger.com/2015/05/beaten-and-starving-some -rohingya-flee.html. 81 Tony Caralucci, ‘Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi dodging or driving the Rohingya crisis?’, New Eastern Outlook, 20 June 2015, http://journal-neo.org/2015/06/20/myan mar-s-aung-san-suu-kyi-dodging-or-driving-the-rohingya-crisis/; Joe Cochrane, ‘In reversal, Myanmar Agrees to attend meeting on migrant crisis’, New York Times, 21 May 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/05/22/world/asia/myanmar-rohingya-migrantcrisis-malaysia-thailand-indonesia.html?_r=0. 82 Emanuel Stoakes, Chris Kelly and Annie Kelly, ‘Revealed: how the Thai fishing industry traffics, imprisons and enslaves’, The Guardian, 20 July 2015, www.theguardian.com/glob al-development/2015/jul/20/thai-fishing-industry-implicated-enslavement-deaths-rohin gya; Emanuel Stokes and Chris Kelly, ‘Asian refugee crisis: trafficked migrants held off Thailand in vast “camp boats”’, The Guardian, 28 May 2015, www.theguardian.com/glob al-development/2015/may/28/asian-refugee-crisis-trafficked-migrants-held-off-thailand-ca mp-boats. 83 Emanuel Stoakes, ‘Leaked documents show how the UN failed to protect Myanmar’s persecuted Rohingya’, ViceNews, 22 May 2016, https://news.vice.com/article/how-the -un-failed-to-protect-myanmars-persecuted-rohingya.

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appeared in October 2016,84 when it attacked three police outposts and killed nine police officers. It carried out more attacks in 2017. The emergence of ARSA fitted neatly into the preferred narrative of the Myanmar state that it faces a sustained terrorist threat to its very existence.85 While there is no evidence of ARSA links to either ISIS or Al-Qaeda, its funding and leadership comes from wealthy Rohingya exiles living in Saudi Arabia. The public face of ARSA is Ata Ullah (also known as Ataullah Abu Jununi) who is believed to have been born in Karachi and then to have lived in Saudi Arabia. Its stated goals are normal civil and humanitarian rights for the Rohingya; and in its pronouncements there is no repeating of the narratives common among Salafist jihadi groups.

Genocide? The result was an escalation of the persecution of the Rohingya with mass murder and the burning of villages. By August 2017 it was estimated that some 410,000 had fled for their lives to Bangladesh,86 and by early 2018 almost all the Rohingya still in Myanmar (outside the camps) had fled.87 It is now estimated that some 1 million are living around Cox’s Bazaar in southern Bangladesh.88 Here they are denied access to health, education and work due to the unwillingness of the Bangladeshi government to accept them as refugees. A group that was already suffering mental health problems89 now face dealing with the trauma of their flight with limited support90 and in many cases family links have broken down.91 In effect, in a decade when Myanmar was meant to be making the transition towards democracy, the regime (led by both the military and the NLD) has carried out a genocide. Almost no Rohingya now live in Myanmar 84 International Crisis Group, ‘Myanmar: a new Muslim insurgency in Rakhine state’. 85 International Crisis Group, ‘Myanmar: humanitarian crisis and armed escalation’, 28 January 2019, www.crisisgroup.org/asia/south-east-asia/myanmar/myanmarhumanitarian-crisis-and-armed-escalation. 86 Ibid. 87 Sullivan, ‘Abuse or exile’. 88 UNHCR, ‘Refugee response in Bangladesh’. 89 A. Riley, A. Varner, P. Ventevogel, M. M. Taimur Hasan and C. Welton-Mitchell, ‘Daily stressors, trauma exposure, and mental health among stateless Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh’, Transcultural Psychiatry, 54:3 (2017), 304–31, www .ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28540768. 90 World Vision, ‘Psychological support for refugee children of Myanmar in Bangladesh’, reliefweb, 22 January 2018, https://reliefweb.int/report/bangladesh/psychologicalsupport-refugee-children-myanmar-bangladesh. 91 Liz Ford, ‘Young lives hang by a thread as past haunts Rohingya mothers’, The Guardian, 29 March 2018, www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/mar/29 /young-lives-hang-by-thread-as-past-haunts-rohingya-mothers-bangladesh? CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copy_to_clipboard.

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apart from 150,000–200,000 held in the internal refugee camps. The rest are now refugees (and denied that status in Bangladesh and India) or scattered into the unregulated labour markets of Southeast Asia. The 2021 military coup makes little practical difference. The NLD and the military share the same prejudices and the NLD was prepared to defend the military at The Hague. While in theory the NLD was negotiating with Bangladesh over a safe return, the reality was they did nothing to make this possible. The new rulers are the same generals who organised the 2017 genocide with General Min Aung Hlaing (now in charge) particularly prominent. On the other hand, Rohingya groups are trying to make contact with the wider opposition to military rule. Over time, this might reduce some of the prejudices against the Rohingya but, unless the junta loses power, this makes no difference to the plight of the Rohingya.

Bibliographical Note on Historical Sources There are two main areas of dispute in terms of the Rohingya crisis. The first is predictable: the Myanmar authorities consistently deny human rights abuses and, as noted, suggest that individuals fleeing Myanmar describe themselves as Rohingya to gain sympathy and access to aid. Both claims are refuted by the voluminous reports put out by the UN, agencies such as MSF and human rights groups such as Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, Human Rights Council and journalists working in the region. The second is the scholarship used to dispute the rights of the Rohingya to be in modern Myanmar. This focuses on who lived where in 1826 when the British took control over Rakhine, ending the short-lived Burmese occupation. Some Western authors such as Tonkin92 and Leider93 repeat and elaborate the claims that the Rohingya arrived only under British rule. Their claims are contradicted by a number of linguistic studies into the languages of the region in the late eighteenth century and a number of British studies and censuses. This all confirms that the Rohingya were part of the ethnic make-up of Arakan94 at the time of the British arrival. Equally the various British imperial censuses are partial (being more concerned to classify by religion than ethnicity) but are clear that the population growth of the Rakhine and Rohingya communities are similar with one exception. The 92 Tonkin, The ‘Rohingya’ Identity, p. 4. 93 Jacques P. Leider, ‘“Rohingya”, Rakhaing and the recent outbreak of violence – a note’, Bulletin of the Burma Studies Group, 89/90 (2012), 8–12. 94 Ibrahim, The Rohingyas, Ch. 1, citing Buchanan, 1799.

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evidence does point to an increase in the Muslim population by around 30,000 just after the start of British rule as those who had earlier fled to Bengal returned. This dispute matters as it is the basis for the claims that the Rohingya have no place in modern day Myanmar. However, careful study of the British reports95 and census returns96 leave little doubt that Rohingya were present in Arakan in 1824.97 95 Charles Paton, ‘A short report on Arakan’, Colonial Office, 1826. 96 Colonial Office, ‘The Census of British Burma’, 1875; Colonial Office, ‘Census of India: Burma’, vol. 9, 1911. 97 James Baxter, ‘Report on Indian immigration’, India Office, 1941.

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32

A Short History of Genocide Prevention across the Long Twentieth Century scott straus

The history of genocide prevention across the long twentieth century is a history of failure. Only very rarely have international actors acted collectively to halt or mitigate a genocide underway or one in the making. That said, across the arc of the twentieth century, there have been important developments and milestones in norms, law and policy as they pertain to prevention. These changes amount to incremental, if episodic, progress. They do not, however, amount either to a consistent, effective multilateral policy or to consistent, effective foreign policies of particular states. But if we measure the global norms, legal instruments, institutions, and policy tools available at the start of the twentieth century compared to those at the start of the twenty-first century, there are significant differences to observe. This chapter summarises those changes and charts them across key cases. It concludes with a discussion of future challenges and opportunities for genocide prevention.1

From 1900 to World War Two At the start of the twentieth century, states in the international community afforded virtually no priority to genocide prevention. The international system was predicated on deference to state sovereignty, including in colonial territories administered by an imperial power. Governments had the first and final responsibility for their people, even if those governments massacred tens of thousands of civilians. To be sure, some international actors condemned atrocities. The slaughter of the Herero and Nama populations in German colonial Southwest Africa (now Namibia) from 1904 to 1905 earned some, limited international 1 The chapter is based on and expands Scott Straus, Fundamentals of Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention (Washington DC: US Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2016).

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opprobrium,2 as did the Ottoman state’s systematic massacres of Armenians in Anatolia during World War One, which received more attention.3 The mass violence and death in Belgian King Leopold II’s Congo earned rebukes as well.4 But, broadly, the twentieth century’s first episodes of what we now call genocide and crimes against humanity did not galvanise major diplomatic efforts or social movements to interrupt, stop or punish the atrocities. Specific international norms, policies and mechanisms to prevent and respond to mass, organised violence against civilians occurring within a foreign sovereign territory were virtually non-existent. World War Two changed the situation – to a degree. As discussed elsewhere in the volume, the Holocaust resulted in the destruction of 6 million European Jews, hundreds of thousands of Roma and Sinti, and other targeted groups. During World War Two, the systematic murder of civilian populations did not prompt a concerted Allied effort to stop the atrocities. Yet in the immediate aftermath of the war, and as the Germanadministered concentration and death camps gained some visibility, the Nazi violence created some awareness of the danger of unconditional national sovereignty. Taken to the extreme that the Nazis did, state sovereignty meant that governments had the authority to annihilate whole categories of people from the territories that they controlled. Combined with promises about freedom that the Allied powers made during World War Two, promises that smaller state and humanitarian actors insisted be fulfilled after war’s end, the lessons of the Holocaust eventually prompted the victorious states to make human rights a foundation for the new world order being established after the war. There also were specific efforts to criminalise genocide and hold Nazi perpetrators accountable for crimes during the war. These pressures resulted in three principal developments in genocide prevention and related human rights in the first three years after the war. First, the 1945 United Nations (UN) Charter, the writ that laid the foundation for the post-war world order, included pledges to promote human rights. 2 Great Britain, Colonial Office, European War: Papers Relating to German Atrocities, and Breaches of the Rules of War, in Africa (London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1916). More than a decade after the violence and during World War One, the British government produced a report on the atrocities in Southwest Africa, but such action should be seen in the light of propaganda between two imperial rivals and wartime enemies. 3 Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response (New York: HarperCollins, 2003). 4 Wm Roger Louis and Jean Stengers, E. D. Morel’s History of the Congo Reform Movement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968); Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999).

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Those international commitments were weak. They enshrine ‘encouragement’ and ‘faith’ in human rights, thereby signalling their importance, but they stop short of ‘guaranteeing’ or ‘enforcing’ human rights. Second, the Allied powers established the International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg to try high-level captured Nazi officials. The indictments charged the defendants with conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. They also accused the defendants of conducting ‘genocide’, here framed as ‘the extermination of racial and national groups, against the civilian populations of certain occupied territories in order to destroy particular races and classes of people and national, racial or religious groups, particularly Jews, Poles, and Gypsies and others’.5 The indictments amounted to the first time that an international court tried individuals for crimes against humanity and the first time that the term genocide, which had been coined a year earlier, appeared in a criminal trial. The tribunal found most of the defendants guilty of crimes against humanity, although the term genocide was dropped from the final judgment.6 Third, the United Nations sought to criminalise ‘genocide’. As readers of this volume know, Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1944, and then he worked insistently to include the term in the IMT indictments and to create an international law against genocide. In part due to his pressure, in its first session the UN General Assembly (UNGA) on 11 December 1946, unanimously affirmed the principles of international law in the IMT’s charter and also passed a resolution affirming that genocide was a crime under international law.7 Two years later, after long discussions about the contents of a new international law on genocide, the assembly approved the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide (the Genocide Convention), and subsequently passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As a human rights treaty, the UN Genocide Convention (UNGC) is notable for stronger enforcement provisions than either the Universal Declaration (which was a statement of principles) or later major human 5 Office of the United States Chief of Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, 11 vols. (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 1946), I, 31–2. 6 William Schabas, Genocide in International Law: The Crime of Crimes (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 38. 7 UNGA Resolution 95/1, ‘Affirmation of the Principles of International Law recognized by the Charter of the Nürnberg Tribunal’, 11 December 1946; and UNGA Resolution 96/ 1, ‘The Crime of Genocide’, 11 December 1946, www.un.org/documents/ga/res/1/ar es1.htm.

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rights treaties, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (and its corollary on economic, social and cultural rights). The UNGC recognises genocide as an international crime that the parties to the convention agree to ‘undertake to prevent and punish’. In Article 8, the Convention further stipulates that States Parties ‘may call’ upon the United Nations to ‘take such action’ for the ‘prevention and suppression’ of acts of genocide. That formulation constitutes a foundation upon which to challenge unconditional state sovereignty. These three developments that followed World War Two established the general architecture for genocide prevention, at least until the mid-tolate 1990s. We can observe these developments in three main ways. First, there were efforts to establish a norm against genocide and other human rights violations. That effort at norm codification and elaboration is present in the UN Charter, the UNGA resolutions, the UNGC and the Universal Declaration. Second, there were efforts to establish criminal, legal accountability mechanisms for the crime. The legal foundation established genocide as a crime and, via the IMT and the UNGC, created processes for criminal accountability. Third, there were efforts to establish a footing for deliberate international action to stop genocide. While the UNGC did not amount to a policy, the treaty established a formal mechanism for states to co-operate, via the United Nations, to prevent genocide. Each of these approaches had significant, structural weaknesses, indicating a clear ambivalence at the international level about how to approach the challenge. That ambivalence in turn manifests in the record of nonintervention across the second half of the twentieth century. What are the weaknesses? As noted, human rights norms, including the norm against genocide, are long on promotion, promise and recognition, but short on enforcement. The UN Charter clearly states in Article 2 that ‘Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.’ State sovereignty indeed remained a cornerstone of the new world order. Further, while the IMT was a major development, the court was ad hoc, as well as the creation of the war’s winners. Not until the late 1990s was there created a permanent, standing court to prosecute genocide and similar crimes – at least at a criminal level. Before then, while individual states that had ratified the Convention and incorporated genocide into their criminal

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code could bring cases domestically, there was no court at the international level to do so. Lastly, the UNGC obligates states to prevent genocide only via the United Nations, which itself respects sovereignty, which amounts to a weak commitment to prevention. The process for preventing genocide remained unclear. In addition, the definition of genocide, as discussed below, created some obstacles to prevention. In short, these landmark developments represented important innovations in codifying norms, establishing an international law and creating a barebones framework for preventative action. These are key benchmarks in the history of genocide prevention, but these developments also come with significant structural weaknesses.

The Cold War Politics was also a factor in why genocide prevention efforts did not materialise in stronger form after the end of World War Two. Shortly after the formation of the United Nations, the superpower rivalry of the cold war became the dominant frame for interstate, international relations. There were two implications. First, despite the promises made at the end of World War Two, the fate of endangered or massacred civilians in foreign lands remained largely marginal to the way political leaders defined their national interests and set their foreign policy goals. Mass atrocities similarly galvanised limited social protest. Genocide prevention was, on the whole, a distant concern. This absence of interest and attention relegated prevention to the side-lines. Second, cold-war politics effectively stymied the United Nations as an international arena in which genocide prevention might take root. The United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a global contest for dominance, with two very different models of government and economy. Even though both superpowers claimed human rights to be on their side (the Soviets championed economic, social and cultural rights; the Americans, civil and political rights), realism carried the day. Atrocity prevention was a remote priority for both. For the United Nations specifically, both states, as permanent members of the Security Council, wielded a veto, and neither had an interest in letting the secretariat or specific agencies exercise significant autonomy or agenda-setting power. Again, the net result was that genocide prevention did not gain traction within the UN system.

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The cold war was a period in which multiple cases of genocide and crimes against humanity occurred, most of which are covered in this book. Among these, the highest-casualty cases took place in China, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, East Timor and the partition of India, in Asia; in Guatemala and Argentina, in Latin America; in Nigeria, Burundi, Ethiopia and Somalia, in Sub-Saharan Africa; and in Iraq and Syria, in the Middle East. None of these cold-war cases garnered a concerted international effort to halt or mitigate ongoing mass violence against civilians. Powerful states in the international system primarily interpreted the cases through the lens of the cold war or through other ways of defining national interest that did not include the fate of hundreds of thousands of threatened or massacred civilians. Readers of the book need to look no further than Gary J. Bass’s chapter on Bangladesh for a case in point of how the cold war shaped a government’s foreign policy on genocide prevention. As for legal accountability for genocide, during the 1980s significant efforts made by the Cambodian Genocide Project and the Cambodia Documentation Commission proved unsuccessful in persuading even a single State Party to the UNGC to file a case against Cambodia in the International Court of Justice, at a time when the exiled Khmer Rouge perpetrator regime still occupied Cambodia’s UN seat and could have been held to account in The Hague for its actions while in power from 1975 to 1979.8

Post-Cold War: The 1990s The end of the cold war promised a new world order. By the time the 1990s ended, the question of atrocity prevention had earned significant international attention, but the policies designed to stop atrocities remained unclear. This section details those changes. At the start of the decade, two cases seemed to galvanise new-found commitments to civilian protection from mass atrocities. The first came in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War. After driving Iraqi troops from Kuwait, Allied forces stopped short of unseating Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. But international actors encouraged Hussein’s opponents to rise 8 Ben Kiernan, ‘The Cambodian genocide: issues and responses’, in Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions, ed. George J. Andreopoulos (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 191–228, at 215–18; Gregory Stanton, ‘The Khmer Rouge genocide and international law’, in Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge, the United Nations, and the International Community, ed. Ben Kiernan (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1993), pp. 141–61.

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up and oppose the regime. That they did, but Iraqi security forces in turn repressed dissenting groups severely, in particular in the Shia- and Kurddominated areas of the country. Left with a sense of responsibility for having encouraged the uprising, British and American leaders in particular acted to offer some protection for the Iraqis facing slaughter. With UN Security Council approval, they imposed a no-fly zone in southern and northern Iraq, and they concentrated on the delivery of humanitarian assistance. Those were interventions to save civilian lives, and they put civilian protection before state sovereignty. In that way, the Iraq humanitarian measures constituted a precedent, but one in which the circumstances were quite unusual given the immediate aftermath of the Persian Gulf War and the large-scale deployment of international forces in neighbouring Kuwait.9 More consequential for shaping atrocity prevention efforts in the 1990s was the international experience in Somalia.10 In the late 1980s and early 1990s, civil war among Somali armed groups, followed by state collapse, rendered a good portion of the Somali population vulnerable to famine and predation. Pressure grew in 1992 for international actors to intervene to deliver humanitarian assistance to stave off mass death among Somalis. Heeding that call, in the final months of his presidency, George H. W. Bush authorised a major military operation to deliver humanitarian aid. The United Nations launched a major effort to do the same, although the United States and the United Nations maintained separate command structures. Initially, the military operation went well. Aid was delivered; many Somalis survived because of the intervention. But the mission ended badly when the United States and other international actors engaged Somali political and military actors in an effort to secure a more durable peace. In an operation made famous by the movie Blackhawk Down, American troops were caught, killed, mutilated and paraded in downtown Mogadishu. Hundreds of Somalis also were killed. But to the United States and many within the United Nations peacekeeping world, Somalia served as a major warning about the risks of intervening to help populations in distant lands. Indeed, the experience in Somalia cast a long shadow over the atrocity crises of the mid-1990s. In 1994 in Rwanda, an interim government orchestrated genocide, as discussed elsewhere in the volume. The United Nations had deployed a small, ill-equipped, ill-prepared peacekeeping force to the 9 On Iraq, see Nicholas Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society (Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 139–71. 10 On Somalia, see Wheeler, Saving Strangers, pp. 172–207.

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country in 1993. But given their recent experiences in Somalia, as well as an attack against Belgian peacekeeping troops in the early days of the Rwandan genocide, international actors exercised risk aversion. They opted to draw down the peacekeeping mission to a token force and to avoid any kind of coordinated intervention to save Rwandan civilian lives.11 Similarly, in the former Yugoslavia, international actors largely stood by as the country disintegrated and ethnic cleansing broke out in the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina (also covered elsewhere in this volume). The violence against civilians in Bosnia was particularly extensive, claiming more than 100,000 civilian lives from 1992 to 1995. The worst episode of violence took place in July 1995, when Bosnian Serb forces advanced on a declared United Nations ‘safe area’ in Srebrenica, neutralised peacekeepers and proceeded to commit a massacre against Bosnian Muslim boys and men. It was the worst massacre on European soil since the Holocaust, claiming up to 8,000 lives, and was later ruled a genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).12 Taken together, Rwanda and Bosnia marked a turning point. They were international embarrassments. They laid bare the world’s lack of a coherent policy and the will to prevent and respond to genocide. They dashed dreams of a post-cold-war world in which human rights would be core policy priorities. And they falsified the post-Holocaust pledge of ‘Never Again’. Despite the nearly fifty-year existence of the Genocide Convention and the end of the cold war, the international community had proved feckless in the face of massive slaughter. Many people – government officials, United Nations officials, staffers at non-governmental organisations (NGOs), religious leaders, journalists, scholars and ordinary citizens – called for a different approach. Change began in 1994 when the United Nations established two ad hoc criminal tribunals to prosecute genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The tribunals resonated with the IMT in Nuremberg, and their decisions made good on the Genocide 11 On the international response to Rwanda, see Michael Barnett, Eyewitness to Genocide (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); Linda Melvern, A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide (London: Zed Books, 2000); and Roméo Dallaire and Brent Beardsley, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (New York: Caroll & Graf, 2005). 12 Again, death toll estimates in the former Yugoslavia are controversial. The numbers in this paragraph come from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the ad hoc tribunal established to try the high-level perpetrators in that case. See www.icty.org/sid/322 for a general description of the 1990s’ Yugoslav wars.

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Convention’s provision that its States Parties would punish those responsible for the crime of genocide. Yet, in contrast to Nuremberg, the winners of the wars did not establish the courts; this time, the United Nations did – the new courts were designed to avoid the charge of ‘victor’s justice’. The mid-1990s also saw a movement to establish a permanent criminal court to try genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. In 1998, a conference of 120 states adopted the Rome Statute, calling for an International Criminal Court (ICC), which came into force several years later. The establishment of the ICC was seen at the time as a triumph for the enforcement of human rights, one that took place against the backdrop not only of the UN ad hoc courts but also the effort to apply the principle of Universal Jurisdiction to former Chilean leader Augusto Pinochet. In 1998, he had been arrested in Britain on charges of torture brought in a Spanish court. The case garnered intense international attention, showcasing how the law could catch up with those responsible for mass violations of human rights. The establishment of the ICC furthered this ferment: it was to be the first permanent international criminal court expressly designed to bring to justice those responsible for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. In contrast to the ad hoc tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia and the complexities of Universal Jurisdiction (a concept that came to be contested) the ICC was to exist as a permanent, standing court and, as such, thought to be a deterrent to future atrocity crimes. The massacre at Srebrenica also prompted new international resolve to stop atrocities. Following the killings, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) launched a large-scale air offensive against Bosnian Serb positions. The objectives were to force the Serbs to end their siege of Muslim areas and to agree to negotiate an end to the war. Indeed, in November 1995 in Dayton, Ohio, the warring sides agreed to end the fighting, and thousands of NATO troops were deployed in Bosnia to keep the peace. However, the Dayton Accords did not stop the violence in former Yugoslavia. In the southern Kosovo region of Serbia, ethnic Albanians had been mobilising for independence, much like nationalists had in Croatia, Bosnia and Slovenia in the early 1990s. Having been left out of the Dayton Accords, Kosovar Albanians began a more militant approach to independence, primarily through the rebel organisation, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). The KLA’s violent actions, in turn, prompted Serb authorities to launch bombing and raiding campaigns against Albanian positions. Serb authorities also pursued ethnic cleansing policies that had been used in the Croat and Bosnian wars. 771

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This time, the international response was different. Embarrassed and humiliated by the experiences in Rwanda and Bosnia and with thousands of NATO troops in neighbouring Bosnia, the United States, the United Kingdom and other NATO countries took a harder diplomatic line against the Serb authorities and Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. Neither the Serb forces nor NATO relented, which led NATO to conduct military strikes against Serb positions in 1999. Because the Russian Federation opposed the use of force, the NATO strikes were conducted without explicit UN authorisation.13 Kosovo was not the only international intervention to save human lives during that period. Also in 1999, in East Timor, citizens voted overwhelmingly for independence from Indonesia in a referendum. However, a Timorese anti-independence militia with ties to the Indonesian army began a campaign of violence against civilians in the country. The violence prompted Timorese independence leaders, domestic and international activists and others to call for international protection. US President Bill Clinton insisted that Indonesia ‘must invite’ a UN peacekeeping mission into the territory. Acting on a UN resolution, Australia led a military intervention, contained the violence, and stabilised the situation until the peacekeepers and the UN’s first ever full-fledged political administration were deployed. Indonesian forces withdrew, and East Timor eventually became independent.14 Similarly, in 2000, the British launched a small military operation in Sierra Leone to stave off what seemed to be an impending humanitarian disaster in the capital, Freetown, when earlier interventions by the Economic Community of West African States and the United Nations began to fail. Although British troops remained at sea, their presence calmed the situation and led to an eventual ceasefire.15 These examples are short descriptions of complicated cases and complex moments of international diplomacy and policy. Nonetheless, the incidents during the 1990s show both international willingness and ambivalence towards co-ordinated collective responses to the onset of genocide and crimes against humanity. The start of the 1990s witnessed what might be called naive 13 On Bosnia, Kosovo, and the international response, see Wheeler, Saving Strangers, pp. 242–84. 14 On East Timor, see Geoffrey Robinson, ‘If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die’: How Genocide Was Stopped in East Timor (Princeton University Press, 2010). 15 On Sierra Leone and the British, see Andrew M. Dorman, Blair’s Successful War: British Military Intervention in Sierra Leone (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).

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optimism about the ability to save lives, especially in Somalia. The mid-1990s was a nadir, with Bosnia and Rwanda experiencing horrible violence as the world did little to stop the slaughter. By contrast, the close of the 1990s and the year 2000 – with Kosovo, East Timor and Sierra Leone – marked a high point in international resolve to intervene militarily to stave off impending atrocities and humanitarian catastrophes. Yet these interventions raised questions about their legality, especially given that the NATO action in Kosovo was taken without the explicit endorsement of the UN Security Council. They also laid bare the absence of specific genocide prevention policies. The responses were ad hoc, largely shaped by the major events that preceded them and they occurred in moments of global politics that allowed the risk of genocide and crimes against humanity to become a policy focus. In revealing both the importance of a norm against genocide and the absence of a clear policy, the 1990s set the stage for the 2000s where there was considerable policy development, but also inconsistent international engagement.

The 2000s One of the key developments in the 2000s was a concerted effort, at the international level, to square the contradiction between the imperative to prevent genocide and the one to respect state sovereignty. Those duelling standards were on display around the Kosovo crisis. A key international actor in this period, Kofi Annan, who had been head of the UN Department of Peacekeeping during the Rwandan genocide and UN secretary-general during the Kosovo crisis, acted to clarify the situation. In his Millennium Report, Annan called on the international community to resolve the contradictions between sovereignty protections, on one hand, and the obligation to protect citizens from large-scale violence, on the other.16 In response to that plea, the government of Canada established a high-level International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS). That commission released a report in 2001 that presented a novel way to resolve the contradictions: the authors proposed that sovereignty be reconceived not as absolute but as conditional.17 More specifically, the Commissioners argued that sovereignty meant that states had 16 Kofi A. Annan, We the Peoples: The Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century (New York: United Nations, 2000). 17 The intellectual origins of the idea stem from Francis Deng and Roberta Cohen’s work on protection of internally displaced populations, in which they conceptualised

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a responsibility to care for and protect their populations. If and when a state demonstrated that it was manifestly unable or actively negated its responsibility to protect its populations – as, for example, when states commit genocide against their populations – then that responsibility to protect should shift to the international community. In such cases, international actors could act with diplomacy or even with coercion to protect populations at risk of imminent danger. It also meant that international actors had an obligation to help states that wanted to prevent atrocities in their own country. The doctrine goes by its acronym, R2P – ‘responsibility to protect’.18 In 2005, under Annan’s leadership, countries around the world endorsed the principle at the 2005 World Summit. Governments adopted two key provisions. One held that states had a responsibility to protect populations from genocide and other forms of atrocity. The second stipulated that when states were manifestly failing to do so, international actors could act peacefully or, if necessary, coercively to protect populations.19 These resolutions carried no formal obligations. In later years, some countries backed away from the ideas in R2P. Nonetheless, the promulgation and endorsement of R2P represents an important milestone in the evolution of international policy on atrocity prevention. The advancement of R2P represents incremental normative and institutional change within the UN system to create a framework for the way to act legitimately to prevent and respond to genocide. Even if some countries remain reticent about R2P, and even if its power has been limited to date, the doctrine remains a touchstone document in any discussion of atrocity prevention within the UN system. The 2000s saw other crucial developments. In the United States and ultimately around the world, the events of 11 September 2001, and the response to them, took on tremendous importance. On one hand, the attacks on the United States refocused American foreign policy back to questions of national and international security. Removed from the top of the foreign policy agenda were human rights crises, such as those in Kosovo. Fighting

sovereignty as responsibility. See Francis M. Deng, Sadikiel Kimaro, Terrence Lyons, Donald Rothchild and I. William Zartman, Sovereignty as Responsibility: Conflict Management in Africa (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 1996); Roberta Cohen and Francis M. Deng, Masses in Flight: The Global Crisis of Internal Displacement (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 1998). 18 Gareth Evans, Mohamed Sahnoun and the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 2001). 19 UNGA Resolution 60/1, ‘2005 World Summit Outcome’, 20 September 2005, http:// daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/LTD/N05/511/30/PDF/N0551130.pdf.

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global terrorism and ousting the Taliban in Afghanistan and later Saddam Hussein from Iraq became top priorities. On the other hand, the response to 9/11 may have indirectly and controversially reinforced the ideas in play regarding genocide prevention. In the Afghanistan case, Al-Qaeda had planned, prepared and conducted a major terrorist attack from its base in Afghanistan. In response, the United States led a military campaign with broad international support to oust the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and drive Al-Qaeda from its base in that country. The war was not a humanitarian one. The war was predicated on establishing international security and based on international law that a state has the right to defend itself against direct attack. Still, the idea that international actors could act collectively and militarily against the wishes of a sovereign state in response to a major attack against civilian targets was consistent with emerging ideas about the legitimacy of intervening to protect civilians from genocide. The war in Iraq that started in 2003 was also significant. According to then US President George W. Bush, the objective of the intervention was not only to disarm Saddam Hussein’s government of its alleged cache of weapons of mass destruction but also to liberate the Iraqi people from tyranny.20 The stated reasons for the war were thus both on security and humanitarian grounds. The relationship between the events of 11 September 2001, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, on one hand, and atrocity prevention, on the other, remains a matter of debate among scholars and practitioners. Some would argue that the wars and aspects of the rationale driving them shared parallels with atrocity-prevention objectives; others would assert that the circumstances around the decision to go to war undermined later prevention efforts. In particular, the Iraq war lacked international consensus. Many countries around the world balked at the display of overwhelming military power by the United States in an oil-producing developing country, especially after it became clear that faulty intelligence (if not political dissembling) underlay the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.21 The reaction to the war in Iraq thereby served to undermine efforts to forge a consensus around atrocity 20 President George W. Bush, ‘Address to the Nation on Iraq, of March 17, 2003’, in Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (Washington DC: Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Administration, 24 March 2003), X X X I X, 338–41. 21 Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, Report to the President of the United States, 2005, http://govinfo .library.unt.edu/wmd/report/index.html.

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prevention. To some, the war in Iraq signalled how humanitarian rationales could cloak the self-interested use of military power. In addition, the war in Iraq and then the war in Afghanistan both took turns for the worse. In Iraq, an insurgency started against the American occupation and later against the Iraqi government that the Americans had helped to establish. In Afghanistan, a resurgent Taliban similarly launched an insurgency against international forces and the Afghani government. Both situations led to thousands of domestic and international casualties and a decade of strife and violence that as of this writing remains unfinished. Both cases in turn became visible warnings about the difficulty of stabilising and rebuilding states and societies after military intervention, which had negative implications for genocide prevention. Also crucial in this period was the case of Darfur, in western Sudan. Violence began to escalate there in 2003. At first, the widespread attacks against the non-Arab civilian population earned little international attention. But with the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide approaching, attention turned to Darfur. Many asked: would the world stand by again? The African Union moved to deploy a protection force in 2004. Meanwhile, in the United States, students, religious organisations, human rights groups, journalists, museums, foundations and others started to mobilise around the case. They forced their political leaders to confront the issue. The message was simple: the mistakes of the 1990s should not be repeated, and they urged the United States and United Nations to label the violence ‘genocide’, thereby, theoretically, triggering an obligation to intervene under the Genocide Convention. The activists’ policy was naïve on a couple fronts – an arguably cavalier exhortation to intervene militarily and a slogan of ‘Save Darfur’ that conveyed a Global North saviour complex. Still, the case was significant because of the death toll and because international actors responded to the pressure. For its part, the Bush administration and Congress labelled the case ‘genocide’. However, rather than initiating a strong response from the United States, the administration read its obligation under the Convention narrowly. It brought the case to the UN Security Council and secretary-general. The UN established a Commission of Inquiry. After investigating, the Commission found conclusive evidence of crimes against humanity, but not of genocide. In 2005, the Security Council referred the case to the International Criminal Court, which later indicted Sudanese President Omar el-Bashir and other Sudanese on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. 776

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While the United Nations did not act coercively and against the sovereignty of Sudan, the Security Council committed itself to peacekeeping with a strong mandate to protect civilians. By 2007, the United Nations had, in concert with the African Union, created such a mandate and staffed a large peacekeeping operation. Darfur is significant on a couple of dimensions. One interpretation is that the case revealed continuing disagreements and ambivalence regarding prevention of genocide and of large-scale killing against civilians, despite Rwanda, Bosnia and R2P, in particular in the context of geopolitical priorities around counterterrorism. That is certainly true. At the same time, Darfur affirmed a norm of genocide prevention, entrenchment of criminal accountability and some policy development. Darfur galvanised a social movement – albeit one anchored in the Global North – and that movement forced responses from states and international institutions. Darfur also affirmed the use of international criminal prosecution as a strategy. In this case, key international actors, including the United States, Russia and China, each of which holds a veto on the Security Council and each of which is ambivalent or hostile to standing human rights courts, allowed the referral to the ICC to proceed. And lastly the move to stronger peacekeeping – larger force, with regional buy-in, and a mandate to protect civilians – represented incremental policy development, which will be discussed below. There were also key policy developments within the United States. Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, Darfur and other key cases demonstrated that the United States did not have a clear policy on atrocity prevention. The response to each case was ad hoc. That began to change in the mid to late 2000s. Following the crisis in Darfur, the Bush administration incorporated genocide prevention into the 2006 National Security Strategy, asserting that it is ‘a moral imperative that states take action to prevent and punish genocide’.22 That was an important bureaucratic step to bring genocide prevention formally into the foreign policy and national security milieu. In 2008, a group of civil society actors that included the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the United States Institute of Peace and the American Academy of Diplomacy organised a bipartisan task force on genocide prevention. Led by Madeleine Albright and William Cohen, the

22 The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, March 2006, p. 17, ht tp://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/nsc/nss/2006/.

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Genocide Prevention Task Force released a report with a set of recommendations. Once elected, US President Barack Obama included advocates of greater American resolve on genocide prevention in his administration. They included Samantha Power, who wrote an influential book on the history of American failure to stop genocide, and Susan Rice, who had been a member of the Clinton administration during the Rwandan genocide and took to heart the lessons from that case. Obama implemented a number of the recommendations from the Genocide Prevention Task Force report. The signature measure came in 2011 when he signed Presidential Study Directive 10, which declared that the prevention of genocide and mass atrocities is a ‘core national security interest and core moral responsibility of the United States’. He also established an interagency Atrocities Prevention Board to co-ordinate United States policy on genocide and mass atrocity policy.23 Four developments marked this period. First, both within the United Nations and the United States, leaders took efforts to clarify and develop a policy framework on genocide prevention. The signatures of these efforts are Responsibility to Protect, and Presidential Study Directive 10. These policy frameworks addressed limitations that were central in previous periods: the contradiction between sovereignty and the imperative to stop mass violence, on the one hand, and framing genocide prevention as in the national interest, on the other. Second, global norms on genocide prevention deepened. A growing number of policy-makers, citizens and organisations indicated that genocide prevention was of broad concern. That interest dates at least to the debacles in Rwanda and Bosnia, but Darfur catalysed broad-based citizen and civil society interest. Further, the policy frameworks reinforced this norm consolidation. Third, big questions remained about how genocide prevention could be put into practice. That is, how to implement genocide prevention – in particular, when states were reluctant to pursue regime change – was an issue. One key development was improvements in peacekeeping, as represented in Darfur but applicable to other cases not discussed in this chapter (such as the Democratic Republic of Congo and Liberia). One lesson of 23 President Barack Obama, ‘Directive on Creation of an Interagency Atrocities Prevention Board and Corresponding Interagency Review’, 4 August 2011, Daily Compilation of Presidential Documents, no. 00549 (Washington DC: Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Administration, 2011).

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Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda was that the peacekeeping missions were not mandated, staffed or equipped for civilian protection. Downstream missions in the 2000s (and later) had larger missions with stronger civilian protection mandates. During this period, and in particular in the 2010s, there also were other developments in the policy tools, but improved peacekeeping was a central one. Lastly, the cases of Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrated how complex and difficult military interventions could be, especially if they ousted heads of state and governments. The aftermath-of-intervention question proved a stern warning to would-be advocates of regime change, with implications for genocide prevention, a lesson that would be reinforced in Libya in the following decade.

The 2010s The 2010s were a study in contrast. On the one hand, the prevention momentum from the previous decade persisted. There were several cases in which international actors took preventive or coercive action to stave off large-scale killing of civilians. The most significant cases of such action were Libya, Côte d’Ivoire, South Sudan, Kenya and Iraq on the Sinjar mountains. On the other hand, the international community remained deadlocked over how to respond in other cases. The most visible cases of paralysis were Syria and Myanmar. By the close of the decade, the forces of nationalism were on the rise globally, and global health and environmental threats captured the most international attention. The fate of genocide prevention hung in the balance. Libya was arguably the most important case for the future of genocide prevention. In Libya as part of a series of uprisings in North African and Middle Eastern states, known as the ‘Arab Uprisings’, a rebel movement formed to challenge Muammar Qaddafi. A few months into the war in 2011, Qaddafi threatened to destroy the rebels and their supporters in the east, prompting concern about a possible genocide. With urging from Arab states, and some regional organisations, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1973, which authorised coercive action against the government of Muammar Qaddafi to protect civilians in that country.24 A broad coalition of states, with NATO support – in particular from the armed forces of United Kingdom, France and the United States – implemented the use of military force. 24 Alex J. Bellamy and Paul D. Williams, ‘The new politics of protection? Côte d’Ivoire, Libya and the responsibility to protect’, International Affairs 87:4 (2011), 825–50.

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The Libya intervention was, in some ways, successful. The military campaign halted the Libyan forces’ advance. However, the campaign shifted fairly quickly from one of civilian protection to one of de facto international support for the rebels’ military advance. Qaddafi was eventually captured and murdered; his government fell. The rebel coalition in turn fractured, and Libya plunged into a period of division and violence with multiple armed groups holding territory. Into that disorder came jihadist organisations, notably Islamic State (IS), and violence against civilians was common, perhaps more so than under Qaddafi. In addition, states that supported UN Resolution 1973 objected that the resolution was designed to protect civilians, not lead to regime change, a concern that resuscitated scepticism that genocide prevention was really a ruse for powerful states to unseat governments. Côte d’Ivoire was a contemporaneous case. In this country, following an election in 2010, incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo refused to cede power after losing to rival Alassane Ouattara. After a political stalemate, Ouattara’s allies restarted a civil war to oust Gbagbo, whose forces in turn entrenched and violently repressed Muslims and northerners. Worried about rapidly escalating violence and warnings of genocide, again with support from regional organisations, the United Nations authorised the use of force to protect civilians. The United Nations had a significant peacekeeping force on the ground already, and France was a key player. Gbagbo was captured, deposed and eventually transferred to the International Criminal Court (where he was acquitted in 2019). Ouattara became president and largely presided, in contrast to Libya, over a decade-long period of economic recovery and stability. South Sudan gained international attention as the country held an independence referendum in 2011. Worries on the part of the international community that the vote, which was overwhelmingly positive, and subsequent independence would trigger violence, provoked considerable multilateral effort to short-circuit any escalation in violence. That effort was successful. South Sudan became independent, largely without violence. However, in 2013, the government collapsed amid a leadership rivalry. Violence rapidly escalated, with group-based targeting, as Clémence Pinaud’s chapter shows. In Kenya, mass violence followed a disputed election in 2007. International actors brought significant pressure on the leaders of the opposing parties to find a solution. As Kenya prepared for an election in 2013, Kenyan civil society and international donors put significant effort into ensuring successfully that large-scale violence did not again follow the election. 780

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By and large, the international effort and attention devoted to preventing mass violence during key moments of escalation were seen as a culmination of efforts to institutionalise the norms and policies around genocide prevention. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon claimed these cases (and others) as examples of R2P in action.25 In the United States, President Barack Obama similarly cited some of these cases to demonstrate how his administration’s commitment to preventing atrocities was in effect.26 The United States also took the lead in bombing IS positions in and around Mount Sinjar in Iraq in 2014, largely in response to IS violence against the Yazidi and other minority religious populations (as Sareta Ashraph’s chapter discusses).27 Obama said that the mission was both to defend American personnel in the area and to protect minorities, in particular the Yazidis, from the risk of genocide.28 Beyond the initial interventions that were successful in stopping atrocities, the Libyan and South Sudanese cases – like those of Iraq and Afghanistan – offered sobering lessons about the long-term challenges that follow military interventions. Nonetheless, taken together with the more successful interventions in Côte d’Ivoire and Kenya (which was non-military), all these cases suggested a new, more focused approach to genocide and mass atrocity prevention, backed up by historic but recently reiterated norms and by clearer policy doctrines and commitments. That said, Syria offers a counter-example. In 2011, the Syrian government began to use violence to crack down on opposition protests. Government forces systematically attacked, tortured and murdered civilians, and state forces unleashed chemical weapons on multiple occasions in multiple locations. From the start of the war and for several years afterwards, the United Nations and some governments responded with a number of measures short of military action. Those measures included mediation, diplomacy, commissions of inquiry, sanctions and an arms embargo. But a stronger coercive 25 UN Department of Public Information, ‘“Responsibility to protect” came of age in 2011, Secretary-General tells conference, stressing need to prevent conflict before it breaks out’, 18 January 2012, www.un.org/press/en/2012/sgsm14068.doc.htm. 26 President Barack Obama, ‘Remarks by the President at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’, 23 April 2012, Daily Compilation of Presidential Documents, no. 00296 (Washington DC: Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Administration, 2012). 27 Amnesty International, Ethnic Cleansing on a Historic Scale: Islamic State’s Systematic Targeting of Minorities in Northern Iraq (London: Amnesty International, 2014). 28 President Barack Obama, ‘Remarks on the Situation in Iraq’, 7 August 2014, Daily Compilation of Presidential Documents, no. 00602 (Washington DC: Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Administration, 2014).

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response was impossible, at least under UN auspices. Similarly, efforts to refer the case to the International Criminal Court fizzled. Russia – and, to a lesser degree, China – opposed military action against the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad, and they also opposed moves to enforce criminal accountability. Russia in turn became a fully fledged supporter of the Assad state. Their opposition found support among other states who argued that the UN-authorised intervention in Libya had gone too far. They argued that what should have been limited to atrocity prevention had turned into regime change. One of the most telling moments in the Syrian crisis came in 2013. President Obama threatened that if Syria crossed a ‘red line’ and used chemical weapons, the United States would be forced to act. In 2013, after Syria again used the weapons, Obama was on the verge of launching an air strike on Syria.29 A last-minute, Russia-brokered deal that led to the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons pre-empted military action. However, even afterwards, Syria continued to use chemical weapons. By early 2020, a prominent Syrian human rights group had estimated nearly 600,000 civilians had died in the war.30 The UNHCR estimated that some 12 million people had been displaced because of the war, both internally and outside of Syria.31 If the African cases represented examples of swift, coordinated international action to prevent atrocities, Syria offers a different lesson. Determined opposition by members of the Security Council, as well as the general strategic importance of Syria, have hamstrung efforts to respond more effectively. The story of international ineffectiveness at prevention in Myanmar is similar. As Azeem Ibrahim’s chapter in this volume shows, the Rohingya minority population in Myanmar has suffered decades of persecution and violence. Since 2016, the Rohingya have been subject to increased levels of violence by state forces. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has labelled the case a ‘textbook case of ethnic cleansing’, and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum has concluded the violence met the threshold of genocide.32 29 President Barack Obama, ‘Address to the Nation on the Situation in Syria’, 10 September 2013, Daily Compilation of Presidential Documents, no. 00615 (Washington DC: Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Administration, 2013). 30 Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, ‘Nearly 585,000 people have been killed since the beginning of the Syrian Revolution’, 4 January 2020, www.syriahr.com/en/15218 9/. 31 UNHCR, www.unhcr.org/en-us/syria-emergency.html. 32 United Nations, ‘UN human rights chief points to “textbook example of ethnic cleansing” in Myanmar’, UN News, 11 September 2017, https://news.un.org/en/stor

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However, there has never been a concerted, multilateral effort to prevent the mass violence. China is a key ally of Myanmar, which has occluded Security Council action. But the case has received not nearly the attention that Darfur received roughly a decade before or the alarm that the escalating violence in Libya received. One bright spot on the prevention agenda is that The Gambia, a West African state but here representing the Organisation of Islamic States, brought a case to the International Court of Justice. Wielding the Genocide Convention, which both The Gambia and Myanmar have ratified, The Gambia argued that Myanmar had an obligation to prevent genocide from occurring against the Rohingya. In a preliminary ruling in January 2020, the judges at the court concurred, arguing that Myanmar had an obligation to protect Rohingya from genocide and that there was plausibility that genocide had occurred.33 This represented significant progress in the International Court of Justice since the international refusal in the 1980s to bring Cambodia’s genocidal Khmer Rouge regime to account in that forum.

Into the Future Looking backwards across the long twentieth century, we can mark progress in the field of genocide prevention. First, the norm against the commission of genocide, which emerged formally at the end of World War Two, deepened and became entrenched at the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Even if the existence of the norm did not compel states to make genocide prevention a high priority and even if there is normative disagreement about the legitimacy of international intervention, in each case during the past thirty years, evidence of the foundational norm that genocide is unacceptable has been present. Each episode elicited strong condemnation from international actors and foreign states, and in some cases galvanised social movements. Even in the United States, with its America First turn under Donald Trump, the administration signed into law the Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention Act, a comprehensive effort to make y/2017/09/564622-un-human-rights-chief-points-textbook-example-ethnic-cleansing-m yanmar; and US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Fortify Rights, ‘“They tried to kill us all”: atrocity crimes against Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine state, Myanmar, 2017’, www.fortifyrights.org/mya-inv-rep-2017-11-15/ and www.ushmm.org/information/p ress/press-releases/museum-finds-compelling-evidence-genocide-was-committed-agai nst-rohingya-wa. 33 International Court of Justice, Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (The Gambia v. Myanmar), www.icj-cij.org/files/ case-related/178/178-20200123-SUM-01-00-EN.pdf.

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genocide prevention a part of foreign policy.34 While a norm is not sufficient to engender atrocity prevention, it is likely a necessary condition for prevention to take place. Second, despite weaknesses, the Genocide Convention has persisted as a relevant and powerful instrument. As of 2020, there were 152 States Parties to the Treaty, and an additional 41 signatories, which accounts for all 193 member states at the United Nations. In particular, the Convention’s punishment provisions proved its most powerful. Genocide has been central to the indictments and jurisprudence of the ad hoc tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda as well as the International Criminal Court. As The Gambia case against Myanmar demonstrates, alongside earlier cases among former states of Yugoslavia, the Convention has been wielded successfully at the International Court of Justice. From a legal standpoint, the Convention’s formulation of genocide has proven durable. In landmark cases at the ICTY and International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), as well as the International Court of Justice Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia and in federal courts, the legal concept of genocide has been deepened and clarified through jurisprudence on particular cases. The jurisprudence has dealt with some of the ambiguities in the legal concept, including what constitutes intent, destruction of groups in part, the types of groups affected and acts that constitute genocide, among other issues.35 At the same time, the Convention has proven more limited as a tool for prevention. The mechanism in the treaty to trigger collective action remains non-committal. States Parties ‘may call upon’ the United Nations; they are not required to do more. Moreover, lessons from the 1990s and 2000s have revealed policy limitations to restricting prevention only to genocide as defined in the Convention. Here three lessons are operative. First, by the time evidence of genocidal intent comes to light, the violence is advanced and has already typically taken many civilian lives. Second, genocide only applies to the four protected 34 The text of the law may be found here: www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senatebill/1158. 35 A review of that literature is beyond the scope of this chapter, but see Melanie O’Brien, ‘Defining genocide’, International Peacekeeping 22 (2018), 151–69. For a comprehensive account of the legal conception of genocide that includes recent and past jurisprudence from case law, see Guénaël Mettraux, International Crimes: Law and Practice, vol. I: Genocide (Oxford University Press, 2019) and Ch. 9 in Beth van Schaack and Ronald C. Slye, International Criminal Law and Its Enforcement: Cases and Materials, 4th ed. (St Paul: West Academic, 2020).

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population categories specified in the Convention – national, racial, ethnic and religious groups. Other population categories may well be subject to massive, destructive violence but not fall under the purview of the Convention. Third, there may be systematic and widespread violence against civilians, as in Syria, but it may not constitute genocide – that is, an effort to destroy particular groups. From a policy perspective, there should be interest in preventing the massive loss of civilian lives, not necessarily only those lives lost from genocide, but from extermination and mass murder as well.36 In response, there have been efforts to expand the conceptual framework for prevention beyond genocide. The most consistent measure has been one that would capture policy attention and prompt a response, notably to refer to ‘mass atrocities’ or ‘atrocity crimes’. The main policy frameworks discussed above – R2P, Presidential Study Directive 11 and the Elie Wiesel Act – use the language of both genocide and atrocities when defining the scope of preventative action. Third, the policy framework for the prevention and mitigation of genocide has clarified. The central contradiction lay between protections of state sovereignty, on the one hand, and an obligation to prevent genocide, on the other. That issue was addressed through the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, endorsed at the United Nations, and has been deepened in annual reports by the UN Special Representative on Responsibility to Protect in recent years. While many states in the international system insist on sovereignty, R2P and its derivatives at least provide a framework by which to act within the UN system to prevent and mitigate genocide. Lastly, the tools for prevention have expanded. The early policy debate after the end of the cold war primarily revolved around military intervention to protect civilians and stop perpetrators. Yet as the negative impacts from military intervention became clearer, and as such interventions proved unpopular among democratic publics, in particular if intervenor lives were lost, policy-makers and government officials looked for non-military practices. These included naming and shaming, documentation, threatening criminal justice, targeted sanctions and travel bans, among other actions. There also were efforts to expand the range of military options, including better military planning for offensive and defensive actions and improvements to peacekeeping.37 The prevention ‘toolbox’ became deeper and more sophisticated. 36 The classic work on this is David Scheffer, ‘Genocide and atrocity crimes’, Genocide Studies and Prevention 1:3 (2006), 229–50. 37 These mechanisms are reviewed in Straus, Fundamentals of Genocide.

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All that said, there are no guarantees that the momentum and progress generated in the 1990s and thereafter will be maintained or will advance. Looking towards the future, other pressing global challenges grab more attention and demand more urgency than genocide prevention. Climate change and racial justice are now at the top of the agenda. Moreover, many governments around the world are turning inward. Under President Trump, the United States championed ‘America First’. The United Kingdom engineered a messy exit from the European Union. Countries like Hungary and Poland have increasingly embraced illiberal policies, at home and abroad. Coupled with the turn inward of some states, the rise of China and the greater assertion of Russia into world affairs would suggest further obstacles to genocide prevention. Not only has China engaged in massive deprivation of liberties through its incarceration and re-education of millions of Uyghur Muslims, but it also generally resists international intervention in other states on the basis of human rights. Russia too has been hostile to interference on human rights grounds. Its brazen military intervention in Ukraine and subsequent attacks against civilians demonstrate that Russia is likely to be a major obstacle to genocide and atrocity prevention in world affairs in general and in the United Nations Security Council in particular, where it wields veto power. How other powerful, emergent states, such as India, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, Mexico and others, take on or resist the genocide prevention agenda will influence how central this agenda becomes. Nearly eighty years after the Holocaust began, there are good reasons to be sceptical of claims of ‘Never Again’. Yet not to pay attention to the policy progress and developments since World War Two belittles the effort and real progress that has been made. In a number of cases in the latter 1990s, late 2000s and early 2010s, global actors have responded collectively to the risk of or onset of genocide and mass atrocities. The legal and policy frameworks are more developed than ever before, and the norm has deepened. Whether that progress will be sustained is an open question.

Bibliographical Note There is a vast literature on genocide prevention and specific cases. For a comprehensive overview of the Genocide Convention, see Schabas, Genocide in International Law. For a general overview of the history of genocide prevention, see Straus, Fundamentals of Genocide. For a discussion of US foreign policy and failure to prevent genocide, especially in the twentieth century, see Samantha Power, ‘A Problem from Hell’: America and 786

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the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002). For an analysis of the strength and limits of Responsibility to Protect in the context of genocide prevention, see James Waller Confronting Evil: Engaging Our Responsibility to Prevent Genocide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016) and Alex J. Bellamy and Edward C. Luck, The Responsibility to Protect: From Promise to Practice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019). For an analysis of specific cases, in particular in the twentieth century, see Wheeler, Saving Strangers. Barnett’s Eyewitness to Genocide remains a classic. For a critical account of military intervention, see Rajan Menon, The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016) and for a critical account of Darfur, Mahmood Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror (New York: Doubleday, 2009).

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Index

Introductory Note References such as ‘178–9’ indicate (not necessarily continuous) discussion of a topic across a range of pages. Wherever possible in the case of topics with many references, these have either been divided into sub-topics or only the most significant discussions of the topic are listed. Because the entire work is about ‘genocide’, the use of this term (and certain others which occur constantly throughout the book) as entry points has been restricted. Information will be found under the corresponding detailed topics. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, 93–4, 98, 101, 102, 104, 106, 109 Aboriginal children, 96, 97–8, 101, 104, 105, 109, 113–15 Aboriginal communities, 97, 98, 102, 115 Abrahamic faiths, 729–30, 739 absorption, 96–7, 100, 114, 582 abuse, sexual, 99, 110, 154, 274, 683 accountability, 99, 513, 580, 595, 696, 743, 768 criminal, 766, 777, 782 legal, 766, 768 accusations, 63–4, 152, 181, 425, 431, 487, 528, 552 false, 424 activism, 12, 18, 99, 490, 513, 584, 587 political, 152, 470, 584, 587 activists, 16, 18, 191–2, 463, 468, 471, 772, 776 human rights, 619, 668 international, 468, 772 party, 14, 166–7, 184, 584–5 Romani, 338–9, 355 Adana, 74, 76, 82 Adekunle, Colonel Benjamin, 484–5 administration, civil, 76, 78, 222, 243, 349, 353–4 adolescent boys, 722, 734–5 Aegean Greeks, 69

aerial bombings, 146, 387, 389, 484, 492, 583, 589 Afghanistan, 564, 616, 775–6, 779, 781 Africa, 21–2, 24, 32, 45, 48, 49, 65, 121 North, 271, 331, 649, 705, 719, 779 Southwest, 45, 49–50, 60, 120, 129 African Union, 694, 696, 776–7 Agaila, 130, 133–5, 138 agriculture, 9, 191, 218, 259, 359, 439, 715, 724 settled, 189, 751 aid economic, 415–16 medical, 131, 534 Aktion Reinhardt, 290–2, 299, 302, 303 Al-Baghdadi, Abu Bakr, 700, 713, 727 Al-Mahdi, Sadiq, 680 Al-Majid, Ali Hassan, 582, 591, 592, 595 Al-Mukhtar, Umar, 124, 130, 137 Al-Qaeda (AQ), 700–20, 726, 728 Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), 712–13, 714, 726–8 Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, 708 Al-Zarqawi, Abu Musab, 711–14, 726 Al-Zawahiri, Ayman, 706, 712 Aleppo, 75, 76–7, 81–7, 586 Algeria, 120, 606–7, 608, 612, 614–16, 618–19, 620–1, 708

788

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Index police, 613, 619 Algerian Muslims, 609, 617 Algerians, 606–7, 609, 614–15, 617, 708 Algiers, 608, 612 alienation, 613, 619, 651 Allah, 704, 706–7, 709, 717 alleged coup, 451, 453–4, 456 alleged crimes, 49, 182, 365, 672 alleged enemies, 165, 169, 179–81 Alliance for Progress (ALPRO), 409–10 alliances, 34, 56, 61, 115, 351, 359, 409–10, 757–8 allies, 50, 124, 230–1, 319, 349, 351, 451, 453–4 close, 654, 757 western, 295, 361, 460 ALPRO (Alliance for Progress), 409–10 Amazon, 21, 31–2 Americans, 45, 121, 498, 505, 707, 767, 776, 778 Central, 404, 418, 569 Americas, 8, 18, 48, 404, 408, 415, 422, 710 Central, 311–13, 411, 414, 415–16, 422, 569 amnesties, 146, 423–5, 513, 563 Anatolia, 51, 67–70, 77, 81, 83, 86, 88, 91, 764 central, 75 western, 77, 88 Anatolian Armenians, 81, 91 Anbari, 713–14 Anfal, 575, 579–80, 582, 586, 590–2, 594 Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, 674, 682 Ankara, 578, 580, 582, 586 Annan, Kofi, 758, 773 annexed territories, 214–16, 294, 363 annihilation, 73, 78–9, 232, 236, 305, 310, 740, 743 orders, 79, 87 war of, 220, 246 annihilative campaigns, 722, 729 Anschluss, 260, 262, 346 anthropologists, 12, 470, 564 anti-colonial movements, 48, 128 anti-colonial resistance, 118, 124, 132, 135 anti-Jewish policies, 216, 219, 227–8, 230, 231, 240, 330 antisemitic measures, 258, 266, 273, 323 antisemitism, 8, 31, 32–3, 38, 40, 258–9, 326–8, 332 Nazi, 41, 54, 211–12, 231, 310, 326–7, 329 pre-existing, 236, 251 anti-Spain, 35, 141, 144–5, 149, 152, 157 Antonescu, Ion, 313, 315–16, 319, 351 apologies, 103, 105–6, 115, 514 apostasy, 703, 718 apostates, 700, 703, 705, 713, 716, 718, 739 AQ see Al-Qaeda. AQI see Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Arab states, 577, 607, 779 Arabisation, 575, 583, 593–4, 689 cultural, 590 policies, 586, 591, 593 Arabs, 574, 577, 579, 582, 586, 594, 685, 689 Sunni, 582, 724–5, 728, 731, 735 Arad, Yitzhak, 240 Arakan, 750 Arakan Rohingya Solidarity Army see ARSA. archives, 119–20, 203, 339, 498, 505, 580, 594 party, 203, 433 armed conflict, 64, 146, 416, 418, 458, 469, 554, 556–8 internal, 417, 556, 558, 570 armed resistance, 51, 148, 252, 270, 302, 456, 460, 463 Armenian communities, 50–1, 76, 91 Armenian deportees, 81, 84, 86–7, 90 Armenians, 50–2, 53, 54, 67–92, 574, 579, 730 Anatolian, 81, 91 armies, 243–4, 406–7, 444, 454–6, 458–9, 507–8, 588–9, 682–4 arms, 63–4, 125, 393, 416, 435, 456, 554, 556 army commanders, 73–4, 76, 453, 510 arrests, 71–2, 74–6, 85–6, 156–7, 177–8, 179, 183–4, 433–4 mass, 283, 285, 539, 541 Arria, Diego, 639–40 ARSA (Arakan Rohingya Solidarity Army), 748, 759–60 arson, 382, 386, 395, 503 artillery, 49, 387, 430, 591, 640 anti-aircraft, 442 Arusha, 19, 64, 659 Arusha Accords, 658, 660–2 Aryans, 271, 347, 359 Asaba, 482–4, 485 Asaka Yasuhito, Lieutenant General Prince, 381, 386, 390, 393 Asia-Pacific War, 397–9 asocials, 170, 179, 184, 235, 284–5, 344, 363 assassinations, 412, 417, 420, 583–4, 589, 614, 659, 660–2 assaults, 189–92, 195, 201–3, 362, 506, 511, 746, 749 sexual, 114, 322 assets, 317, 366, 431, 688 assimilation, 96, 100–1, 336, 341, 343, 464, 466, 631–2 cultural, 336, 471, 575 forced, 89, 318, 341, 471, 581, 593 Assyrians, 574, 591 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal, 579, 581

789

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Index atrocities, 123–4, 128, 381, 383, 608–9, 764, 773–4, 781–2 colonial, 123, 126 mass, 504–5, 554, 559, 561–3, 565–8, 705–6, 767–8, 785–6 atrocity prevention, 767–8, 774–5, 777, 782 attacks, 175–7, 287–8, 362, 725–6, 730–4, 738–9, 747–8, 755–6 ISIL, 725, 731, 739, 742 Japanese, 56, 390, 393, 397 systematic, 3, 54, 423, 426, 445, 714 terrorist, 505, 710, 712, 775 Aung San Suu Kyi, 604, 746–7, 751, 757–8 Auschwitz, 227–30, 276–8, 285–6, 291–6, 299–300, 303–6, 340–3, 344–7 archives, 346 prisoners, 295–6 Australia, 21, 93–5, 99, 106, 112, 311, 461, 473 governments, 93, 96, 100 National Inquiry, 93, 99, 102–5, 111 New South Wales, 95, 97–8, 101, 104, 110 Northern Territory, 98, 101, 656 Queensland, 97, 98 Stolen Generations, 93–115 Tasmania, 21, 98, 311 Victoria, 97, 98, 114 Western, 97–8, 108, 111–13 Australians, white, 95–6, 107–8, 114 Austria, 48, 50, 214, 272–3, 284, 286, 292, 295–7, 301, 346–8 eastern, 284, 286 Gypsies, 346–7 Jews, 214, 216, 285 authoritarian regimes/societies, 17, 24, 53, 120, 142–3, 306, 652, 656 autonomy, 132, 137, 419, 426, 481, 497, 501–3, 528 auxiliaries, local, 243, 247, 249–50, 506 Awami League, 500–3, 505, 506–8, 510, 512 Baath Party, 582, 591, 592, 728 Baathists, 580, 581, 586, 590, 592, 593–5, 725–6 Babi Yar, 221, 240, 248 babies, 112, 247, 413, 423, 430, 460, 509 ‘bad elements’, 432, 438, 442–3, 447 Baghdad, 85, 578, 586, 590, 730 Bagosora, Colonel Théoneste, 656–7, 660–2 Bahr El Ghazal, 674, 681–4, 694 Bahutu Manifesto, 650–1 Baja Verapaz, 552 Bali, 452, 453, 455, 467 Balitskii, Vsevolod, 165, 177 Balkans, 8, 55, 67–71, 123, 336, 582, 632

Baltic, 229, 235–6, 237, 241, 243, 248, 301, 304–5 bandits, 433, 447 Bangladesh, 19, 497–8, 504, 509–14, 749, 753–5, 758–61, 768 Bangladeshis, 498, 509, 511, 513 bank accounts, 317, 489 barbed wire, 130, 277, 281, 297, 371, 430 Barqa, 129–31 barracks, 90, 276–7, 278, 281, 282, 371, 373, 375 Bauman, Zygmunt, 7–8, 10, 45 bayonets, 392, 395–6 beatings, 179, 322, 376–7, 435, 737 Beijing, 379, 429, 430, 434, 439–43, 445, 452, 456 Belarus, 229, 235, 237–8, 241, 247–8, 253, 353, 360 Belarusians, 359, 361, 377 Belgians, 19, 45, 651–2 Belgium, 22, 44, 55, 63, 64, 341–3, 344, 650 Belgrade, 629, 638 belief systems, 551, 567, 700 beliefs, 236, 550–2, 555–6, 717, 722, 729, 740, 751 racist, 107, 345 Bello, Ahmadu, 480 Belorussia see Belarus. Bełz·ec, 57, 222, 227, 235, 248, 289–92, 298, 299 Bengal, 498–9, 500, 750 East see East Bengal. Bengali Hindus, 504–5, 511 Bengali nationalism, 500, 502–3, 505, 511 Bengalis, 497, 499–501, 503–8, 509–11, 750–1, 756 Benghazi, 125, 130, 134, 137 Ben-Ghiat, Ruth, 127–8 Beni Ilmane, 611, 620 Bergen-Belsen, 276–8, 375 Berlin, 36–7, 260, 262, 263, 282, 284, 300–1, 361–2 Berlusconi, Silvio, 118, 124 Bessarabia, 313–14, 315–16, 320 Bhutan, 6–7 Bhutto, Zulfiqar Ali, 502–3, 507, 514 Biafra, 27, 476–9, 482–5, 487–90, 491–4 army, 482, 492 defeat, 477, 488, 489–90 propaganda, 482, 486 Biafrans, 476–7, 486–7, 491 bicycles, 272, 395 bigotry, 504–5 BiH see Bosnia and Herzegovina. Biharis, 499, 511 bin Laden, Osama, 706–12 Binsbergen, Marion van, 274 Birkenau see also Auschwitz, 7, 57, 271, 294, 305 birth control, 459, 753 births, 3, 47, 55, 198, 364, 368, 696, 737

790

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Index Bisesero, 670 Bitlis, 67, 72–4, 76, 79, 84 black flag, 709 Black Sea, 77, 236, 243 Bloodlands, the, 310, 313 Bloxham, Donald, 9–10, 24 boarding schools, 320, 593, 595–6 bodies, 110, 114, 421, 444, 641–2, 729, 734, 755 dead, 383, 389, 391, 394, 455, 470 Bohemia, 292, 295, 347–8 Bohemia-Moravia, 215–16 Bohlander, Judge, 539 Bolivia, 409, 411–12, 414–15, 423, 426 Bolsheviks, 34, 46, 59, 171–2, 182, 186, 189, 202 Bolshevisation, 232 Bolshevism, 142, 181, 220 bombings, 141, 233, 277, 380–1, 385, 681, 684 aerial, 146, 387, 389, 484, 492, 583, 589 chemical, 583, 590 suicide, 716, 726–7 Bor massacre, 680 Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), 17–19, 61–3, 65, 627–44, 770, 771–3, 777–9 Bosniak civilians, 641 Bosniaks, 5, 61, 627–30, 631, 635, 637, 639–42, 644 Bosnian Muslims, 61, 627, 631–2, 636, 638, 640, 770 Bosnian Serbs, 62, 629, 637–40, 642, 770, 771 Boxer rebellion, 48–9 boys, 110, 154, 436, 585, 640, 734, 737–8, 741–2 adolescent, 722, 734–5 Yazidi, 723, 738 Brazil, 409–10, 426, 786 Brenan, Gerald, 141, 157 Britain see United Kingdom. Bronnaya Gora, 297 brutalisation, 366, 377, 383 brutality, 51, 77, 119, 126, 130, 366, 372, 507 police, 576, 609 Buchenwald, 282, 373 Budapest, 275, 294 Buddhism, 545–6, 755, 758 Buddhist monks, 545, 749–51, 755–8 Buddhists, 40, 518, 546, 747, 750, 755–6 Bukovina, 313–14, 315, 316, 320 northern, 313–14, 316 Bul Nuer, 681, 694 Bulgaria, 68–70, 284, 308–9, 313–14, 316–17, 318–20, 323, 326–33 Greater, 316–17, 319, 327, 330 Bulgarian Jews, 328, 332 Bulgarian Orthodox Church, 317, 319, 331–2

Bulgarians, 314, 316–17, 325, 327–8, 332 Buna-Monowitz, 57 Bunruot, Long, 521 bureaucracies, 9, 595 bureaucratisation, 47, 405 bureaucrats, 7, 14, 91, 193, 195, 478, 582 Burma see also Myanmar, 41, 514, 752 burning, 214, 292, 444, 554, 589, 599, 755, 760 Burr, Millard, 686–7 Burundi, 63, 652–3, 659, 768 Bush administration, 688, 769, 776–7 businesses, 50, 90, 258, 261, 479, 484, 489, 653 Butare, 663–4, 670 bystanders, 15, 149, 240, 242, 335, 340 byvshie, 169, 179 cadres, 59, 433–5, 437, 440, 540, 612, 732 local, 188, 434–6, 445, 446 native, 201, 203 CAH see crimes against humanity. caliphate, 701, 703, 709, 713, 716–19, 727, 729, 738–41 Umayyad, 705 Cambodia, 41, 45, 58, 59–61, 518–20, 527–37, 542–4, 545–8, 768 Communist Party see CPK. Democratic Kampuchea (DK), 519–20, 527, 528, 531, 533, 539, 541, 547 ECCC (Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia), 518, 534, 535–7, 538, 540–3, 545–6, 784 genocide mechanisms, 538–44 ideologies, 531–2 Southwest Zone, 522, 527, 529, 538–40, 543, 547–8 camels, 129, 132 camp systems, 282–3, 285, 294, 300, 306 camps, 130–7, 227–9, 275–8, 281–306, 341–50, 371–5 concentration see concentration camps. forced labour, 180, 199, 283, 285–6, 293, 297, 347–8, 451 internal, 747, 759 internment, 264, 272–3 makeshift, 83, 215 POW, 284, 286, 288, 296, 373, 375–7 transit, 215, 224–6, 228, 273, 275, 371 work, 271, 276, 347, 353 Canaris, Admiral Wilhelm, 370 capitalism, 418, 433, 442, 621 capitalists, 433, 534, 548 Carpathian region, 321–2 Casement, Roger, 31–2

791

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Index Polish, 364, 368 removal see child removal. transferring, 3, 106, 595, 738 Yazidi, 603, 717, 734–6, 742 children’s homes, 98, 101, 108–9, 112, 273 Chile, 403, 409–13, 424, 426–7 Chimaltenango, 561, 568 China, 194, 379–80, 381–2, 396–8, 429–48, 782–3, 786 Boxer rebellion, 48–9 Cultural Revolution, 60, 432, 440–5, 447 Great Leap Forward, 435, 438–42, 446–7 north, 379–80 Chinese, 38, 40, 382–3, 392, 395, 398, 533–4, 537 ethnic, 38, 41, 534, 537 National Forces, 384, 397 soldiers/troops, 379, 381–5, 387, 388–91, 393–5, 397, 433 Chinese Communist Party see CCP. Chittagong, 499, 506, 605 Choeun, Ek, 522 cho¯hatsu, 382, 386 Chongqing, 381, 384 Chou Chet, 523, 529 Christians, 89, 236, 321, 715–17, 720, 724, 728–9, 739 Greek Orthodox, 68, 317–18 Mosul, 728, 731 Chungshan Gate, 387, 390, 393 Chungshan Road, 388 churches, 104, 151, 177, 194, 317, 462, 484, 633 Bulgarian Orthodox, 317, 319, 331–2 Romanian Orthodox, 324 Serbian Orthodox, 632–3 Ukrainian Orthodox, 177 Churchill, Ward, 21 Churchill, Winston, 55–6 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), 406, 416, 512, 556, 710 civil administration, 76, 78, 222, 243, 349, 353–4 civil servants, 152, 406, 455, 481, 726 civil society, 144, 498, 513, 620, 777–8, 780 civil wars, 33–5, 63, 477, 503–4, 575–6, 688–9, 693, 708 civilian governments, 501, 502, 504 civilians, 47–8, 389–91, 397, 460–4, 484, 491–3, 775–7, 779–80 Cîzre, 577 clandestine detention, 407, 413 clandestine graves, 421 clans, 94, 200, 585, 649, 677 class, 1, 143, 152, 167, 168–9, 171, 582, 584 background, 438, 442, 443, 447

categorical violence, 477, 555, 556, 673–4, 676–7, 679, 694 Catholicism, 32, 34, 143, 350, 461, 462, 650 Catholics, 51, 61, 63, 77, 88, 122, 478 cattle, 132, 167, 683 manure, 275 Caucasus, 51, 53, 54, 67–8, 71, 73, 179, 196, 313 northern, 53, 54, 179, 196, 313 causation, 25–7 CC see Central Committee. CCP (Chinese Communist Party), 429–31, 445, 447 ceasefires, 387, 608, 614, 634, 662, 686, 772 cemeteries, 135, 375, 459 censuses, 6, 95, 134, 351, 668 Central Africa, 39, 647 Central America, 311–13, 411, 414, 415–16, 422, 569 Central Asia, 68, 179 Central China Area Army, 379–80, 381, 382, 386, 396–7 Central Committee (CC), 70–1, 174, 176, 192–3, 195–6, 520, 522, 525 Central Intelligence Agency see CIA. Central Java, 453, 455–6 central Kazakhstan, 193, 198–9 Chad, 18, 140 Chalk, Frank, 17, 25 Cham, 533–4, 537–43 Kampong Cham Province, 538–9, 541–2 Muslim, 534, 537, 546 Muslims, 548 rebellions, 537 chaos, 197, 263, 387, 459 Chap, Kang, 523 charity, 266, 553, 755–6 concerts, 267, 270 Charny, Israel, 17, 26 Chechens, 163, 179, 199 checkpoints, 732–4 Chelmno, 57, 222, 227, 229, 235, 248, 275 chemical bombing, 583, 590 chemical weapons, 591–2, 781–2 Chetniks, 5, 61 Chhit Choeun, 522, 526 Chiang Kai-shek, 382, 384–5, 430, 443 child removal, 93–8, 100–15, 364 child welfare, 98, 101, 103 children, 95–100, 101–3, 108–14, 130–2, 233, 268–9, 732–6, 741–2 Aboriginal, 96, 97–8, 101, 104, 105, 109, 113–15 kulak, 168, 171 of mixed descent, 100, 110

792

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108767118.034

Index indigenous, 22, 112, 554–6, 559–61, 564, 567 Jewish, 254, 259, 263, 268, 289, 291, 292, 332–3 Maya, 552, 554 mixed, 724, 725 religious, 722, 725, 730, 741 rural, 560, 665 Yazidi, 722, 726, 729, 736, 741–3 competition, 183, 240, 450, 680, 682–3, 689, 694 complicity, 165, 242, 244, 470, 492, 498 compulsory sterilisation, 236, 244 concentration camps, 57, 120–1, 130–1, 133, 282–6, 341–4, 363–4, 642 conferences, 37, 99–100, 374, 384, 771 confiscation, 90, 131, 135, 166–7, 174, 188, 192–3, 715 Congo, 2, 21, 32, 49, 64, 120, 616, 669 Free State, 31–2 conquered territories, 220, 222, 634, 700 Conquest, Robert, 175–6, 180 conscription, mass, 680, 690 conscripts, 51, 608, 675 consensus, 301, 412, 456–7, 493, 578, 775 consent, 105, 159 conspiracies, 34, 181, 251, 479, 765 consulates, 86, 261, 263, 507 containment, 405, 637 contempt, 39, 152–3, 707, 714 continuities, 9, 10, 22, 166, 170, 219, 462, 472 control, 145–8, 186, 212–13, 508, 527–9, 547, 566, 715–16 population, 403, 565, 572 total, 531, 682 conversion, 89, 236, 320, 725, 755 forced, 603, 716 convoys, 75, 78–82, 86, 88, 215, 224–5 cooperation, 41, 201, 273, 330, 353, 392, 426, 708 coordination, 84, 244, 300, 580, 588, 627 copper deposits, 468, 472 co-religionists, 263, 271, 272, 613 corpses, 169, 183, 197, 250, 292, 294, 303, 375 corruption, 480, 562, 568 Côte d’Ivoire, 779–80, 781 counterinsurgency, 407, 552, 554–5, 558–9, 566–7, 596, 669, 691–2 doctrine, 408, 410, 419 French, 610, 612 on the cheap, 683–4, 690, 697 counter-revolutionaries, 46, 172, 433, 438, 440–3, 447 countryside, 166–7, 171, 186, 189, 439–44, 446, 506, 508 coup, alleged, 451, 453–4, 456 coup plotters, 149, 150–4, 155, 156, 159, 480

enemies, 166, 432, 438–42, 534 political, 167, 651 war, 48, 438 clean-up operations, 277, 412 clergy, 85, 177, 245, 650, 665 climate, 613, 614, 627 changes, 468, 606, 786 Clinton administration, 688, 778 clothes, 135, 249, 375, 389, 435 coalitions, 125, 258, 398, 443, 659, 662–3, 664–6, 779 coercion, 101, 435, 439, 446, 477, 670, 774 Co-Investigating Judges, 533, 535, 538–9, 541, 542 Cold War, 45, 401–622, 767–8 collaboration, 150, 242, 361, 554, 615 collaborators, 25, 45, 242, 251, 329 local, 238, 353–4, 361, 669 collective farms, 166–7, 172, 174, 176, 186, 192, 197 collectivisation, 165, 166–7, 168, 170, 172, 186–8, 192–3, 202 campaign, 167, 174, 202 forced, 53, 186, 191–2, 203 radical, 435, 446 Colombia, 403, 418–19, 422, 424, 426–7 colonial atrocities, 123, 126 colonial Libya see Libya. colonial period, 128, 132–3, 478, 650 colonialism, 13, 19, 22, 107, 114, 126–7, 574, 575 French, 327, 520, 531, 606 Italian, 118, 121, 125, 127–8, 134 settler, 14, 21, 308, 313, 316, 320–1, 467, 471 colonies, 94–5, 97, 118, 119–20, 121, 125, 128, 132 commanders, 135, 379, 381, 385, 389–92, 393–4, 523, 527 army, 73–4, 76, 453, 510 military, 146, 375, 527, 755 senior, 391, 728 Commissars Order, 370, 373 Committee of Union and Progress see CUP. communism, 61, 143, 167, 239, 251, 405, 574, 575 communist parties, 122, 128, 181–2, 183, 201, 203–4, 451, 452 Communist Party of Kampuchea see CPK. communists, 35, 61, 150–2, 201, 430–1, 450, 455, 457 communities, 96–7, 101–2, 108–13, 258–9, 605–8, 665–6, 724–5, 741–3 Aboriginal, 97, 98, 102, 115 Armenian, 50–1, 76, 91 Christian, 71, 740 ethnic, 491, 620, 757

793

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108767118.034

Index coups, 141–2, 144, 145–51, 155, 409, 416–17, 513, 568 military, 33, 155, 413, 562, 568, 653, 752, 761 courts, 61, 423–5, 431, 536, 542, 546, 766–7, 771 courts-martial, 155–6 CPA (Comprehensive Peace Agreement), 686, 693 CPK (Communist Party of Kampuchea), 520–9, 531, 535–9, 540–1, 543–4, 545, 547–8 Centre, 525–9, 537, 541, 544, 547–8 hierarchy, 520–7, 528 internal purges, 527–31 Secretaries, 525–6, 529, 538–9, 547 Standing Committee, 525, 538, 548 Cracow, 265, 267, 270, 289, 291 crematoria, 57, 224, 228, 294, 295, 299, 305 Crimea, 55, 179, 237, 352 Crimean Tatars, 179, 199 crimes against humanity (CAH), 1–4, 31, 58–9, 422–7, 520–4, 542, 764–5, 770–1 criminal accountability, 766, 777, 782 crises, 141, 142, 186, 195, 197–9, 203–6, 498, 654–5 economic, 55, 64, 461, 630 humanitarian, 31–2, 463, 732 Croatia, 298, 300, 349–52, 354, 359, 627, 630, 633–5 Greater, 298, 631 Croats, 5, 298, 627, 631, 634, 637, 771 crops, 431, 438, 463, 561 crowds, 55, 180, 260, 388–9, 431, 537 cruelty, 32, 53, 60, 81, 153, 200, 275, 412 crusaders, 706–7, 717 Cuba, 142, 306, 408, 410 cultural activities, 272, 470 cultural Arabisation, 590 cultural assimilation, 336, 471, 575 cultural destruction, 202, 309, 570 cultural genocide, 24, 464, 581, 589, 593, 596, 704 cultural groups, 472, 600, 602, 604 Cultural Revolution, 60, 432, 440–5, 447 cultural rights, 601, 766, 767 cultural traumas, 586, 594 culture, 41, 111, 114, 134, 172, 253, 525, 593 institutional, 459, 463, 466 CUP (Committee of Union and Progress), 52, 68, 70, 581 Cyrenaica, 131, 133–4 Czechoslovakia, 36, 237, 361 Czechs, 50, 359, 365 Dabiq, 716–18, 739 Dachau, 262, 282, 288, 344–5

794

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108767118.034

daily life, 131, 134, 258 Damascus, 70, 578, 586 Danzig, 263, 361 Darfur, 333, 672–5, 682, 684, 686, 688–92, 695–8, 776–8 southern, 682–3 Dayton, 62, 771 de Gaulle, President, 607, 610, 612, 614, 617 de Valera, Eamon, 36–7 de Waal, Alex, 491, 682, 685, 687, 692, 696 dead bodies, 383, 389, 391, 394, 455, 470 death camps, 131, 271, 275, 290, 299–300, 303, 313, 349 death pits, 240, 249 death sentences, 53, 61, 76, 156, 365, 582, 595, 609 death squads, 406, 417, 455, 562, 584, 589, 620, 684 death tolls, 131–2, 197–8, 200, 207, 397–8, 511–12, 686, 691 decolonisation, 45, 464 defiance, 253, 611, 615 definitions of extermination, 4, 426 of genocide, 2, 4, 12, 335, 566, 569–70, 572, 595–6 sociological, 3–4, 236, 491, 567, 569 dehumanisation, 253, 311, 555, 677, 683, 707 dekulakisation, 163, 166, 167, 170–1 del Boca, Angelo, 127–8, 131–2 democracy, 141, 142, 403, 746, 749, 753, 757, 760 Democratic Kampuchea (DK), 519–20, 527, 528, 531, 533, 539, 541, 547 Deng Xiaoping, 439, 448 denial, 91, 136, 160, 456, 471, 514 denunciations, 180, 431–2, 434, 445, 698 deportation, trains, 302, 305 deportations, 76–9, 84–6, 88–9, 131–4, 178–9, 289–91, 343–7, 349–51 forced, 50, 90, 359, 362 mass, 285, 294, 309, 318, 321, 326–8, 346, 348 planned, 319, 332 deported Jews, 224, 230, 251, 305, 328–9 deportees, 78–83, 87, 134, 224–6, 290, 297, 302–3, 305 Armenian, 81, 84, 86–7, 90 Dersim, 575, 585, 587–9, 593–4 Der Zor, 75, 76, 82, 84, 86–7, 89 deserts, 49, 123, 129, 131, 592, 621–2 destruction, 3–4, 11, 326, 368–70, 426–7, 491, 565–6, 588 cultural, 202, 309, 570 environmental, 464, 468, 470, 575, 583, 589

Index Drama, 318, 324–5 drought, 193, 457, 682, 689 drug trafficking, 414, 418–19, 421 Druze, 708 Duch, 524, 529, 542 Duvalier dynasty, 405–7 dynamics of genocide, 88–91 dysentery, 372, 375, 385

physical, 2, 211, 362, 538, 570, 600, 620, 628 detainees, 156, 412, 420, 455, 641 detention, 306, 347, 413, 451 clandestine, 407, 413 devil-worshippers, 725, 730, 737, 740 Dhein massacre, 683 diaries, 240, 264–5, 391, 393, 394–5, 397, 580, 588 diasporas, 476, 578, 587, 657 Romani, 336, 354 dictatorships, 68, 158–60, 403, 405–7, 411–13, 415, 746, 749 diets, 189, 359, 368, 374, 436–7 dignity, 132, 135–8, 253, 445 Dili, 459–60 Dinka, 679–80, 682–3, 687, 694–5 elite, 698 militias, 693–5 supremacy, 693–5 diplomacy, 70, 636, 658, 774, 777, 781 diplomatic recognition, 487, 493 diplomats, 484, 487, 578, 602, 695–6 direct threats, 612, 655, 739 Director of National Intelligence (DNI), 719 disagreements, 211, 226, 252, 686, 712, 777 disappearances, 163, 411, 413, 416, 417–18, 420–1, 566, 569 forced, 407, 414, 417, 420–1, 423, 425, 589–90 discrimination, 259, 350, 448, 615, 652, 676–7, 747, 753 disease, 52–3, 131, 137, 194–5, 197–8, 275–7, 375–6, 691 famine-related, 53, 54, 198 disempowerment, long-term, 578, 595 disloyalty, 585–6 displacement, 139, 319–20, 499, 596, 617, 692, 698 forced, 419, 534, 583, 691 disputed areas, 724–5 dissent, 420, 458, 619, 675 dissidents, 420, 528–9, 532, 583, 595, 610, 655 ditches, 157, 197, 235, 277, 390, 444, 585, 592 diversity, 27, 96, 431, 649 DK see Democratic Kampuchea, 520, 527, 528, 531, 535, 537, 539, 541, 544–5, 547–8 documentary evidence, 78, 105, 638 documents, 55–6, 203–4, 218–19, 655, 657, 710, 713, 715–16 dominance, 145, 500, 502, 767 Serb, 630–2 Dominican Republic, 405, 409, 422 Dora-Mittelbau, 344 dormitories, 98–9, 109, 467 Dörtyol, 74, 76

East Bengal, 498–9, 502, 503 Regiment, 506–8 East Pakistan, 498–503, 505–10 Rifles, 506–8 East Timor, 21, 450, 457–66, 468, 471–2, 768, 772–3 East Timorese, 458–62 ECCC (Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia), 518, 534, 535–7, 538, 540–3, 545–6, 784 economic aid, 415–16 economic crises, 55, 64, 461, 630 economic elites, 552, 556, 562, 571 economic independence, 630, 687 economic interests, 201, 311, 468, 675 economy, 54, 68, 203, 281–2, 409, 434, 520–1, 532 education, 97–8, 126, 264, 267, 272, 523, 532, 665 EGP (Guerrilla Army of the Poor), 558–9 Egypt, 120, 137, 140, 674, 706, 707 Eichmann, Adolf, 14–15, 215, 227, 262–3, 265, 300 Einsatzgruppen, 214, 220–1, 234, 239, 243, 246–8, 268, 352–4 El Quiché, 552, 554, 562, 568 El Salvador, 403, 405, 409, 415–17, 425 El-Beshir, Omar, 672, 678, 680, 684, 692 elections, 143–4, 406, 501–2, 503, 634–5, 746–8, 757–9, 780 multiparty, 630, 634 electricity, 192, 277, 636 elites, 20, 214, 555–5, 577, 582, 650, 658, 667 economic, 552, 556, 562, 571 military, 152, 497, 551, 657, 661 political, 12, 19, 500, 562, 577–8, 582, 652, 659 rural, 152, 498, 665–6 Tutsi, 650–1, 655 emancipation, 8, 236 emasculation, 586, 621 emigration, 213–16, 260–1, 262–5, 748 employers, 244, 271 employment, 258, 433, 436, 509, 687 enclaves, 62, 485, 487, 639

795

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108767118.034

Index enemies, 58–9, 149–50, 182–4, 656–7, 663, 665, 705–6, 710–11 alleged, 165, 169, 179–81 external, 17, 409 imaginary, 167, 442 internal, 54, 58, 59, 144, 149–50, 403–4, 559, 561 of the people, 162, 167–8, 614, 619 political, 181, 184, 284 enslavement, 11, 212, 359, 445, 506, 740 sexual, 603, 737–8, 743 entry parade, 392–5 environmental destruction, 464, 468, 470, 575, 583, 589 Ephraim, Frank, 43 epidemics, 131, 375 equality, social, 614, 617–18 Erbil, 581, 585 Eritrea, 134, 333, 685 Erzincan, 586 Erzurum, 71, 72, 76, 88 escalation, 243, 248, 658, 659, 666, 684, 692, 780–1 escapees, 303, 304, 373, 391 essentialism, 578–9 Estonia, 237, 253–4, 283, 285, 353, 372 Ethiopia, 119, 123–4, 128–9, 140, 685, 768 ethnic categories, 19, 647, 650, 681 ethnic Chinese, 38, 41, 534, 537 ethnic cleansing, 4–7, 17–20, 27, 62, 604, 605, 770, 771 ethnic communities, 491, 620, 757 ethnic Germans, 178, 300, 327 ethnic groups, 202, 205, 491, 493, 534–5, 574, 747–52, 757 ethnic hatreds, 61 ethnic militias, 680–1, 692 ethnic minorities, 38, 50, 126, 237, 518, 534, 536, 542–4 ethnic Poles, 177–8 ethnic Romanians, 313, 316 ethnic Vietnamese, 534–6, 541, 542–3, 546, 548 ethnicity, 52, 454–5, 472, 478, 482, 641, 649–50, 654 etnicˇko cˇišćenje, 5 euphoria, 55–6, 260 Eurocentrism, 118, 119–20, 126, 205 European Union, 63, 786 euthanasia, 235, 244, 287, 289–90, 299, 306 evacuations, 69, 286, 298, 417, 526, 537, 548, 732–3 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 127, 131 Évian, 245, 263, 612

evidence, 104, 201, 202–3, 337, 339, 484, 691, 750–1 available, 202, 748 documentary, 78, 105, 638 new, 27, 542 exclusionary ideologies, 327, 679, 697 execution sites, 297, 453, 545 executioners, 142, 159–60, 221, 412, 433 executions, 179–80, 363, 434, 541, 544–5, 629, 734, 741 extralegal/extrajudicial, 420–1 mass, 179, 287–8, 291, 301, 304–6, 543, 561, 590–1 exhaust gas, 221, 227 exhaustion, 53, 301, 303, 368, 372, 621 exhumation, 292, 421 exile, 163, 167–9, 176, 183, 406–8, 411, 417, 512 existential threats, 453, 571, 582, 629, 667, 714, 725 experts, 131, 168, 176, 191, 193, 245, 289, 299 exploitation, 9, 50, 227, 617–18, 621, 675–7 expulsion, 6, 196, 213, 216, 237, 322, 749, 757 forcible, 5 extermination, 1–4, 11, 50–1, 84–5, 300–2, 426, 450–1, 714–15 camps, 222–4, 227, 229, 288–9, 297, 299–300, 303, 304–6 centres, 281, 287, 288–9, 292, 295, 297–8, 302, 303–5 complete, 226, 288 definitions, 4, 426 orders, 49, 54, 78 external enemies, 17, 409 external pressures, 77, 100, 211 extinction, 212–13, 219–20, 301, 599, 718 Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia see ECCC. eyewitnesses, 239, 250, 372, 459, 535, 545, 580, 589 face-to-face killings, 57, 235, 243 factories, 57, 158, 202, 276–7, 359, 366, 371, 376 Falangists, 151, 157 false identities, 252, 302 families, military, 77–8 family members, 102, 197, 295, 447, 456, 527, 582, 585 famine, 174–6, 186–9, 192–4, 197–207, 484–6, 674, 682–4, 686–7 conditions, 54, 682 Kazakh, 186–8, 197–8, 202–4, 205–7 Ukrainian, 171, 174, 183, 204–5 famine-related diseases, 53, 54, 198

796

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108767118.034

Index France, 263–4, 272, 292–3, 340–3, 608, 612–13, 614–16, 621–2 metropolitan, 606, 617 Vichy, 272–3, 607 Franco, Francisco, 33–5, 37, 155, 157, 306 Frank, Hans, 222, 365–7, 368 freedom, 56, 104, 138, 276, 337, 429, 650, 666 political, 406, 451 French colonial ideology, 531, 547 French colonialism, 327, 520, 531, 606 French counterinsurgency, 610, 612 Fur, 18, 689–90

Farman Ali Khan, Major General Rao, 502–3, 507 farmers, 90, 322, 347, 387, 393, 429–31, 434–5, 436–8 farms, 53, 62, 275, 366, 594, 640, 680 collective, 166–7, 172, 174, 176, 186, 192, 197 fascism, 9, 33, 118–22, 125–7, 140–1, 142 Italian, 119–29, 132, 140 fascist salute, 125, 151 fatwas, 706–7, 709, 713 fear, 111–13, 179–80, 323, 325, 478–9, 503, 507, 615 constant, 95, 274 federal governments, 108, 480–1, 486, 488, 501, 630 Fein, Helen, 4, 16–17, 21, 25, 687 fellagha, 611 feudalism, 431, 652–3 files, 96, 118, 121, 124, 281, 710, 715–16, 768 classified, 124 final solution, 171, 181, 211–13, 219–20, 222, 228–31, 354, 361 firing squads, 20, 141, 365 fish, 271, 433, 554 FLN (National Liberation Front), 606–8, 610–12, 614, 617–18, 619 Focˇa, 69, 637, 641 Foley, Frank, 262 folk poetry, 119, 133 food, 175, 195–6, 266–8, 274–5, 276–8, 374, 436–9, 484–5 available, 436 insecurity, 318, 322 shortages, 54, 174, 436 supplies, 172, 186, 192, 196, 239, 382, 386–7, 436–8 forced assimilation, 89, 318, 341, 471, 581, 593 forced collectivisation, 53, 186, 191–2, 203 forced conversion, 603, 716 forced deportations, 50, 90, 359, 362 forced disappearances, 407, 414, 417, 420–1, 423, 425, 589–90 forced displacement, 419, 534, 583, 691 forced industrialisation, 162, 171 forced labour, 131, 137, 302–3, 306, 339, 347, 359–60, 364 camps, 180, 199, 283, 285–6, 293, 297, 347–8, 451 forced labourers, 228, 271, 283, 297, 303, 305 foreign policy, 415, 501, 696, 763, 767–8, 774, 777, 784 forests, 235, 238, 249, 276, 434, 437, 589, 639–40 formal independence, 461, 652 Fort VII, 287

Galicia, 51, 146, 150–1, 237, 240, 247, 322 east, 237, 322 Gambia, 783–4 gamblers, 169–70 García, Lucas, 558–9, 562, 565 gas, 57, 271, 278, 287, 301, 472 chambers, 57, 235, 290, 293–4, 296, 299, 303, 306 exhaust, 221, 227 reserves, 459, 618 vans, 221, 289–90, 297 gendarmerie, 69, 78, 353, 588, 663–4 gender, 10, 18, 107, 246, 582, 584, 586, 741 General Government (GG), 216, 224, 226–9, 244, 246, 289, 291, 363–6 General Staff, 370, 379, 510, 522, 540 Generalplan Ost, 359, 367, 377 Genocide Convention, 17–18, 58–9, 456–7, 490–1, 600–2, 765–6, 770, 783–4 genocide prevention, 26, 763–86 genocide studies, 2, 12, 13, 14, 16–19, 22–3, 25–7, 106, 119, 422 history, 12–26 Gens, Jacob, 252, 266, 269 German army, 4, 50, 56, 313, 317, 339, 341, 348–9 German Gypsies, 339, 343–4 German occupation, 22, 45, 254, 264, 271, 273, 350, 363 German soldiers, 49, 249, 270, 354, 370 Germanisation, 251, 359, 364 Germans, 177–9, 242–5, 247, 264–7, 270–3, 275–8, 358–61, 371–4 ethnic, 178, 300, 327 Soviet, 178, 184 Volga, 377 Germany, 36–8, 213–14, 231–2, 262–4, 271–3, 283–4, 286–7, 337–9 Nazi see Nazi Germany. Gestapo, 35, 228, 283, 286, 350, 363, 373

797

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108767118.034

Index GG see General Government. ghettoisation, 55, 222, 244, 248, 265, 326 ghettos, 224–6, 251–3, 265–7, 269–71, 285–6, 290–1, 295, 296–7 Lodz, 265, 266, 276, 277, 289 Warsaw, 266–7, 271, 291, 298, 302 girls, 31, 107, 110, 113, 114, 395, 735–8, 740–3 Aboriginal, 101, 110 Gisenyi, 655, 662, 664 Gitarama, 652, 663–4, 670 globalisation, 625, 706 Globocnik, Odilo, 222, 227, 289 GMAR (Grandmothers Against Removal), 115 Goloshchekin, Filipp, 189, 196, 200–3 Goražde, 639 Göring, Hermann, 216, 219 government officials, 86, 99, 469, 668, 691, 770, 785 governors, 35, 72, 74, 87, 125, 481, 730 provincial, 35, 71–4, 75, 78, 82 Gowon, Yakubu, 481, 485, 488 grain, 166, 174–5, 186–9, 193, 195–6, 202, 435–7, 439 cultivation, 189, 192 deliveries, 171, 174 procurements, 188, 195–6 shortfall, 193, 200 Grandmothers Against Removal (GMAR), 115 graves, 134, 167, 249, 323, 590, 594 clandestine, 421 mass, 159, 228, 249–50, 544–5, 640, 642, 644, 735 Graz, 346 Grazia, Victoria de, 126 Graziani, General, 129–31 Great Leap Forward, 435, 438–42, 446–7 Great Terror, 166, 175–6, 180, 183 Great Wall, 379, 430 Greater Bulgaria, 316–17, 319, 327, 330 Greater Croatia, 298, 631 Greater Hungary, 285, 294–6, 304, 320–2, 326–7 Greater Romania, 313–15, 330 Greater Serbia, 631, 633 Greece, 68–70, 123, 292, 294, 304, 317, 318, 336 Greek Orthodox Christians, 68, 317–18 Greeks, 68–9, 91, 183, 313, 316–21, 324–5, 327–8, 330 Aegean, 69 Green Berets, 408, 416 Green Mountain, 129, 132 Grenada, 422 grenades, 390, 394, 641, 666 grief, 110, 197, 262, 436

grievances, 61, 431, 488, 613, 650, 693, 727, 743 Gross, Jan Tomasz, 241 Groß-Rosen, 283 group destruction, 11–12, 569, 570, 677, 692 Guangdong, 434, 437, 443–4 Guangxi, 443, 445 Guatemala, 409, 415–17, 425–6, 550–72 Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity see URNG. Guerrero, 420–1 Guerrilla Army of the Poor see EGP. guerrilla groups, 407, 417 guerrilla threats, 559, 564, 568 guerrilla wars, 51, 415, 421, 507, 511 guerrillas, 129, 416, 418, 419, 554, 558–9, 560–3, 567 Guichaoua, André, 654–5 Gulag, 163–4, 170–1, 180, 183, 199, 220, 237 Guomindang, 379–80, 385, 393, 397 Gurr, Ted Robert, 17, 20, 615 Guterres, Adelino Bedinho Alfonso, 458 Gutman, Roy, 642–3, 751 gypsies, 1–2, 235–7, 249, 251, 330, 336–48, 349–51, 765 see also Roma; Romani. Austria, 346–7 German, 339, 343–4 Italian, 337 sedentary, 338, 343 Serbian, 349 Habyarimana, Agathe, 660 Habyarimana, Juvénal, 63, 653–5, 656, 660–1, 664 Haçin, 74, 76 Hague Convention, 31, 370, 380, 392 Haiti, 120, 405–6, 426 Halabja, 575, 590, 595 Harff, Barbara, 17, 20, 615 harkis, 608, 614–16, 620 harvests, 171–2, 175, 189, 193, 484 hate speech, 328, 330 hatreds, ethnic, 61 helicopters, 591, 684, 689, 733 helots, 359, 364 herds, 131–2, 133, 135, 138, 186, 192, 197 Herero, 22, 48–50, 54, 60, 118, 129, 763 heterogeneity, 578, 579 Heydrich, Reinhard, 211, 219, 222, 225–6, 229, 243, 246, 290 hierarchies, 156, 528, 600, 608, 666 ethnic/racial, 234, 251, 697 party, 367, 431, 447, 631

798

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108767118.034

Index Higher SS and Police Leaders (HSSPF), 243–4, 248 Hilberg, Raul, 15 Himmler, Heinrich, 219–22, 227–31, 232–3, 243–4, 246–7, 248–50, 290–1, 363–4 Hindus, 498–500, 509–11 Bengali, 504–5, 511 Hindustan, 41 historiography, 14, 25, 121, 203, 340, 456, 463, 471 Hitler, Adolf, 35–6, 55–6, 218–19, 222–4, 231–3, 258, 358–63, 370–1 Hitler–Stalin pact, 237 Hodonin, 347 Holler, Martin, 339, 352–3 Holocaust, 7–8, 10, 13–17, 27, 126–7, 309–13, 326–8, 329 consciousness, 15 killings in eastern Europe outside the camps, 235–54 scholarship, 8, 15–16, 25, 308–9, 327 Holodomor, 13, 52–4, 60, 171, 174, 183, 237, 687 holy war, 678, 702, 705 homelands, 71, 151, 179, 183, 237, 321, 499, 506 homeless, 169, 284 homosexuals, 301, 429 Honduras, 405, 409, 415, 416, 423 Hong, Seng, 523 honour, 65, 138, 227, 328, 562, 565, 736–7, 741 horses, 132, 137, 277, 323, 351, 393, 610, 710 hospitals, 61, 90, 264, 362, 372, 380, 396, 519 hostages, 218, 349, 365 HSSPF see Higher SS and Police Leaders. Huehuetenango, 552, 561–2 human rights, 412, 415, 461, 463, 466, 469–71, 764–5, 770–1 activists, 619, 668 groups, 513, 698, 756, 776, 782 organisations, 414, 552, 643 universal, 460, 603 violations, 407, 411, 415–16, 421, 463, 468, 766 humanitarian crises, 31–2, 463, 732 humanitarian organisations, 477, 492, 581 humanitarian rights, 32, 760 humiliation, 72, 135, 139, 314, 435, 706, 725 Hunan, 436, 440–3 Hungarian authorities, 294, 320–2, 323 Hungarian Romani, 350 Hungarian soldiers, 323–4 Hungary, 294, 300, 304, 308–9, 313–16, 320, 322, 326–7 Greater, 285, 294–6, 304, 320–2, 326–7

hunger, 131, 193–4, 196–7, 267–8, 374, 376, 437–8, 487–8 Hutu Power, 658, 662–3, 665, 666, 669 Hutus, 63–4, 647–50, 651–3, 654–5, 658, 663–4, 666, 668–70 counter-elite, 650 hygiene, 137, 264, 695 racial, 363 ICC see International Criminal Court. ICJ see International Court of Justice. identities, 110, 111–12, 200, 203, 427, 450, 453, 456 false, 252, 302 national, 631–2, 678, 718 new, 275, 413, 738 political, 584, 596, 694 identity cards, 535, 649, 726 ideological justifications, 240, 403, 588 ideologies, 22, 358, 504–5, 693–5, 697, 703, 714, 716–19 Cambodia, 531–2 exclusionary, 327, 679, 697 Nazi, 8, 34, 359 racial, 48, 259, 353 idol worshippers, 722, 739 Ieng Sary, 520–5, 527, 538, 542, 547 Ieng Thirith, 525, 542 Iev, Kang Khek, 524 Igbos, 476–84, 485–6, 488–9, 491–2 Ihadjadjen, 611, 620 IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance), 328–9, 332 imha, 67, 72–3, 84 imperial power, 44–5, 48, 50, 52, 58, 763 impoverishment, 254, 354, 529, 618 imprisonment, 11, 111, 154, 156, 245, 261, 283–5, 584 impunity, 160, 246, 420, 423, 456, 458, 466, 513 IMT (International Military Tribunal), 12, 377, 765–6, 770 incentives, 89, 163, 435, 459, 507, 660 independence, 41–5, 461–2, 463–9, 630–2, 633–4, 636–7, 672–4, 771–2 economic, 630, 687 formal, 461, 652 movements, 460–1, 462–3, 468–9 India, 497–9, 500–1, 503, 505–6, 508–10, 511–14, 750–1, 761 indictments, 1, 423–4, 427, 484, 535, 539, 543, 765 indigenous children, removal see child removal. indigenous communities, 22, 112, 554–6, 559–61, 564, 567

799

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108767118.034

Index Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), 490 indigenous sovereignty, 108 indoctrination, 442, 563–4, 566, 572, 702, 727, 738 Indonesia, 450–73, 759, 772 Indonesian Army/forces, 452, 457–9, 460–3, 464–6, 469–71, 772 Indonesian authorities, 456, 457, 459, 466, 467, 470–1 industrialisation, 50, 52–3, 60, 188, 191 forced, 162, 171 infants, 168, 175, 395, 509, 641, 733 infidels, 702, 703, 718, 720, 726, 737–8 infrastructure, 7, 278, 297, 299, 303, 351, 471, 488–9 injustices, 103, 114, 159, 317 Inkotanyi, 665 insecurity, 99, 667 food, 318, 322 institutional culture, 459, 463, 466 institutions, 96, 98–9, 101, 108, 111, 112–13, 659, 667 key, 407, 659 military, 430, 655 psychiatric, 287, 288 religious, 85, 109, 570 social, 178, 596 insubordination, 38, 571, 655 insurgency, 506, 518, 554, 557–8, 559–64, 567–8, 690–2, 776 integration, 199, 608, 615, 617 intellectual leaders, 67, 478 intellectuals, 85, 152, 180, 398, 498, 514, 614, 619 intelligence agencies/services, 582, 585, 591, 728 intelligentsia, 165, 176, 179, 287, 363–4, 584, 684 Ukrainian, 172, 175, 177, 183 intent, 2–4, 53–4, 106, 484–5, 628, 687–8, 691–2, 718–19 intentionality, 4, 119 interdiction, 4, 16, 19, 25, 567 internal armed conflict, 417, 556, 558, 570 internal camps, 747, 759 internal enemies, 54, 58, 59, 144, 149–50, 403–4, 559, 561 internal security, 408, 421 international activists, 468, 772 international attention, 115, 241, 461, 698, 768, 776, 779, 780 International Brigades, 35, 141–2 international community, 602, 604, 637–9, 693, 697, 773–4, 779, 780 International Court of Justice (ICJ), 62, 604, 629, 751, 768, 783–4

International Criminal Court (ICC), 59, 672, 691–2, 771, 776–7, 780, 782, 784 International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance see IHRA. international law, 1–2, 6, 12–13, 25, 44, 106, 765–7, 775 International Military Tribunal (IMT), 12, 377, 765–6, 770 international organisations, 33, 423, 493 international support, 461, 775, 780 internees, 137, 214, 354 internet, 136, 714 internment, 124, 128–9, 136, 139–40, 332–3, 337, 363, 368–70 camps, 264, 272–3 interrogations, 162, 179, 184, 415, 434, 466 interviews, 127, 128, 132, 239, 340, 715, 751 intimidation, 200–1, 406, 462 invasions, 212, 214, 245–6, 248, 331–2, 362–3, 369–70, 460 IPOB (Indigenous People of Biafra), 490 Iran, 71, 574, 578, 582, 591, 711, 714 Iranians, 183, 591 Iraq, 574–8, 581–3, 584–5, 592, 593–5, 603, 707, 711–14, 716, 722–3, 724–7, 769, 775–6 northern, 577, 592, 594, 603, 716, 722–3, 769 Iraqis, 575, 713, 726–8, 733, 769 Ireland, 36–7 Ironsi, Johnson Aguiyi, 480 ISI (Islamic State of Iraq), 700, 722, 726–7 ISIL (Islamic State), 603, 700, 713–16, 717–18, 720, 722–5, 727–9, 730–43 attacks, 725, 731, 739, 742 fighters, 722, 729, 731–6, 740 ideology, 738–9, 740 ISIL-controlled areas, 731, 736, 739 ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria), 574–5, 579–80, 587, 592, 713, 715–16, 741, 742 I·skenderun, 74, 76 Islam, 86, 89, 700, 704–5, 707–9, 711, 718–20, 727–30, 739–40 see also Muslims. Shia, 722, 726–7, 728, 739, 769 Sunni, 704, 708 Islamic Caliphate see caliphate. Islamic State see ISIL. Islamic State in Iraq and Syria see ISIS. Islamic State of Iraq see ISI. Islamists, 498, 502, 512–13, 575, 678, 684–5, 689, 697 Israel, 14–15, 124, 320, 328, 332–3, 582, 707 Istanbul, 67, 69, 73–7, 84–5, 87, 88, 577, 581–2 Italian colonialism, 118, 121, 125, 127–8, 134 Italian Fascism, 119–29, 132, 140

800

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108767118.034

Index Italian soldiers, 123, 128, 134 Italy, 118–25, 128–9, 132, 302, 304, 309, 340–3, 348 itinerant Roma, 351–3 Ixcán, 554, 559 Izmir, 69, 77

Judeo-Bolshevism, 55–6, 237, 247, 251 juntas, 497, 502, 505, 562, 761 jurisdiction, 243, 360, 408, 423–5 universal, 771 Jurong, 382, 392 justice, 92, 241, 317, 423–4, 513, 518, 553, 595

Jabhat al-Nusra, 708, 713 Jamaat, 513 Janjawiid, 690 Japan see also Nanjing, 9, 41, 120, 262, 379, 385, 392, 399 Japanese, 178, 182, 381–3, 385, 387, 389–90, 395, 398 attacks, 56, 390, 393, 397 forces/soldiers/troops, 379–81, 382–8, 389–91, 393–8 government, 379, 380, 382–3 Jasenovac, 57, 304, 349–50 Java central, 453, 455–6 east, 453, 455–6 Jebel Marra, 689 Jeckeln, Friedrich, 248–9 Jedwabne, 241 Jehovah’s Witnesses, 235, 301 Jerusalem, 14, 85, 304, 707 Jewish, 227–8, 233–4, 248, 261, 264–6, 271, 284–6, 297–8 Jewish communities, 254, 259, 263, 268, 289, 291, 292, 332–3 Jewish Councils, 252–3, 264, 266, 302 Jewish Question, 211, 217, 246, 251, 288, 322, 327 Jewish survivors, 249, 324, 333, 340, 345 Jews, 1, 37–41, 212–18, 226–37, 248–52, 258–66, 267–76, 285–98, 308–30 see also Holocaust. Austrian, 214, 216, 285 Bulgarian, 328, 332 Czech, 225, 295 deported, 224, 230, 251, 305, 328–9 mass deportation, 285, 294, 318 mass killings, 56, 235, 288, 293, 315 Polish, 1, 213–14, 216, 222, 226–7, 229, 292, 367–8 young, 228, 270, 271 Jiangpu, 382 jihad, 50, 133, 684, 702, 705–6, 708, 709–10 JNA, 630, 634, 637 Joeden-Forgey, Elisa von, 10 Jonassohn, Kurt, 17, 25 Jones, Adam, 10, 18, 20 journalists, 37, 127, 240, 244, 584, 590, 770, 776 foreign, 484, 486 Juba, 694, 697

Kabylia, 607, 611, 619 Kalyvas, Stathis, 504, 506, 561 Kampong Cham Province, 538–9, 541–2 Kampuchea see Cambodia. Karadžić, Radovan, 62, 633, 635–7 Kashmir, 500 Kaufmann, Max, 240 Kaunas, 224, 247, 248, 249–50, 283, 285, 372 Kavála, 324–5 Kaya, S¸ ükrü, 84, 582, 588 Kayibanda, Grégoire, 63, 651–4 Kazakh famine, 186–8, 197–8, 202–4, 205–7 Kazakh identity, 199, 207 Kazakh steppe, 188–90, 198, 204, 206 Kazakhs, 186–95, 196, 198–207 Kazakhstan, 177–8, 186–207 central, 193, 198–9 leaders, 189, 205 KDP, 584, 591, 594 Ke Pauk, 523, 527, 539–40 Ke Vin, 523 Keitel, Field-Marshal Wilhelm, 370–1 Kemalists, 584, 586, 595–6 Kenya, 779, 780–1 Kevorkian, Raymond, 81 Kharijites, 705 Khartoum, 672, 677, 681, 685–6, 690–3, 696 Khieu Samphan, 518, 525 Khlevniuk, Oleg, 162 Khmer Krom, 533, 542–3, 546, 548 Khmer Rouge, 59–61, 518–20, 534, 537, 543–7 Khmers, 520, 531, 535, 542–4 Kibuye Prefecture, 664, 668 kidnappings, 95, 413, 420, 424, 584 Kiev, 53, 221, 248, 292 Kigali, 652, 656, 662, 664 killing centres, 227–9, 281, 287–8, 290, 296–7, 299, 306 killing sites, 239, 287, 544 Kirkuk, 586, 594, 725 Kissinger, Henry, 498, 508 KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army), 771 Klukowski, Zygmunt, 240 Kocho, 592, 732, 734–5 Königstraße, 345 Konya, 73–5

801

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108767118.034

Index Kopassus, 462, 471 Kordofan, southern, 675, 682, 684 Kosovo, 18–19, 350, 630, 772–3, 774, 777 Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), 771 Kosovo, myth, 632–3 Kratie, 536, 540–1 Kristallnacht, 245 kulaks, 165–71, 177, 179, 183, 429 children, 168, 171 Kulmhof, 288–90, 299, 303 Kuper, Leo, 16–17, 20–1 Kurdish tribes, 71, 79, 575, 586 Kurdistan, 575–8, 579, 584, 586, 590, 592–3, 596, 716 Kurds, 91, 574–96, 724, 738 civilians, 575, 577, 583–4, 589, 593 resistance, 587, 596 society, 583, 585, 594 victimisation, 586 Kwantung Army, 379 Kyiv, 165, 176 Labanca, Nicola, 127–8, 131 labels, 149, 150, 201, 353, 414, 433, 672, 700 political, 432, 447 labour camps, 170–1, 180, 283, 285–6, 290, 293, 297, 347–8 Lackenbach, 284, 346–7 LAF (Lithuanian Activist Front), 238 Lagos, 479–80, 484 Lalleri, 339, 344 land, 5, 93–4, 171, 189, 431–2, 434–5, 715–16, 747 reform, 191, 429–32, 434, 445 landlords, 169, 431–3, 438, 442, 443, 447, 500 language, 94, 96, 99, 107, 111–12, 172, 460, 500 Laos, 41, 533–4, 543, 546–7, 548, 747 Latin America, 21, 27, 403–27 Latvia, 237–8, 243, 249, 253, 353 Latvians, 236, 249, 372 lawyers, 317, 363, 365, 367, 446, 542 international, 494, 601 leaders, 26, 44–5, 52, 61–2, 520, 627–9, 718–19, 746 local, 346, 348, 665, 684 MRND, 659, 661 Nazi, 211, 215, 220, 228, 231, 243, 245, 367 party, 167, 194, 442, 520, 661 political, 46, 164, 527, 541, 584, 629, 633, 705 Serb, 627, 633, 635, 636 Unionist, 73–4, 79, 91 leadership, 200, 404, 406, 439, 440, 446, 700, 749 political, 527, 541, 629, 705 Lebanon, 88

Lebensraum, 251, 359, 362 leftists, 450, 453, 456, 457, 472 legacies, 53, 133, 188, 236, 477, 512–13, 587, 693–4 legal accountability, 766, 768 legal rights, 112, 370, 676, 752 legality, 154–5, 773 legislation, 96, 98, 563, 752 legitimacy, 28, 108, 159, 468, 559, 705, 775, 783 Lemberg (Lwów), 247, 290, 352 Lemkin, Raphael, 1–2, 12–13, 24, 323, 326–8, 601–3, 606, 620–1 Leningrad, 55, 188, 192, 369 Lety, 347 Lhotshampa, 6–7 liberalism, 142–3 liberation, 45, 50, 361, 376, 429–30, 442, 606, 651 libraries, 124, 133, 259, 593 Libya, 118–40, 779–80, 782–3 eastern, 118, 130, 132 Libyans, 118, 120, 131–3, 136, 140 lice, 272, 375, 589 Liepaja, 249 life sentences, 61, 518, 521–4 Lin Biao, 430 liquidation, 78, 270, 345–6, 355, 363 final, 270, 346 Lithuania, 237, 246, 253, 268, 288, 353 Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF), 238 Lithuanians, 56, 236, 243, 372 Little October, 189, 201 Litzmannstadt, 246, 253, 286, 347 Liu Shaoqi, 431, 446–7 livestock, 90, 131, 186–8, 192, 196–7, 435, 436, 715–16 LIW (Low Intensity War), 415 local authorities, 6, 71–2, 222, 337, 339, 348, 349–54, 666 local auxiliaries, 243, 247, 249–50, 506 local cadres, 188, 434–6, 445, 446 local collaborators, 238, 353–4, 361, 669 local leaders, 346, 348, 665, 684 local militias, 322, 432, 458, 466, 679–80, 698 local officials, 174, 224–5, 343, 347, 350, 354, 434, 443 local resistance, 118, 242, 344 Łódz´, 224, 229, 264–7, 268–71, 276, 277, 286, 288–9 logistical support, 430, 539, 554 logistics, 381, 382 Lon Nol, 520, 527–8, 532, 544, 546 long-term disempowerment, 578, 595 lost territories, 43, 317, 531

802

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108767118.034

Index mass rape, 18, 395, 509, 593, 603, 641 mass starvation, 286, 440, 493, 687, 692, 697 mass torture, 583, 590 mass violence, 27, 306–9, 314–16, 453, 579–81, 586, 593–4, 672 Matsui, General Iwane, 379, 381, 386, 392–3 Mauthausen, 282, 298, 303, 373 Maya, 550, 560, 605 communities, 552, 554 meat, 186–9, 271 procurements, 188, 192, 201, 206 Mecca, 538, 704 Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), 581, 756 media international, 643, 688, 743, 756 social, 587, 709, 723 western, 473, 728 medical care, 264, 375, 396, 455, 485, 525, 733, 737 medicines, 4, 274, 366, 372, 426, 484, 715 Mein Kampf, 232, 358–9, 361 Mekong River, 537 Melbourne, 101 memoirs, 43, 72, 128, 133, 204–5, 477, 479, 580 memorials, 239, 304 memory, 25, 28, 133, 136, 158–9, 160, 328, 486 historical, 18, 28, 476 mental harm, 2, 211, 368, 539, 628, 740 mercy, 40, 164, 362, 585 Mexico, 182, 403, 418–20, 421, 422, 426, 568, 786 Middle East, 87, 91, 331, 574, 705, 707–8, 711, 719 Midlarsky, Manus, 19, 554, 559 Mihailović, Draza, 61 militants, 61, 63, 712–13 militarisation, 46, 420–1, 504, 560, 562 Military Assistance Program, 408, 411 military commanders, 146, 375, 527, 755 military coups, 33, 155, 413, 562, 568, 653, 752, 761 military dictators, 313, 409, 497, 501, 510, 513, 749 military elites, 152, 497, 551, 657, 661 military families, 77–8 military officers, 372, 444, 503, 581, 662 military operations, 415, 463, 469, 560, 563–5, 651, 769 military slavery, 672–6, 693, 697 military strategy, 557–8, 660, 691 military support, 407, 493, 554, 656 military supremacy, 561, 566 militias, 406, 664, 670, 675, 680–2, 683, 690, 692 ethnic, 680–1, 692 local, 322, 432, 679–80, 698 Shi’ite, 712, 714

Low Intensity War (LIW), 415 Lublin, 215, 246, 289–91, 300, 372 Lublin-Majdanek, 227, 229, 283, 285, 292–3, 296–8, 299–300, 306 Luchterhandt, Martin, 339–40 Luo Ruiqing, 433–4 Luxembourg, 272, 344 Lwów (Lemberg), 289–91, 352 Ma Bi Marad, 133, 136 Macedonia, 316–19, 328–32, 349–50, 627, 634 eastern, 316–19, 329–32 machine guns, 49, 146, 193, 270, 390, 394, 404, 442 Madagascar, 217–19 Madrid, 55, 146, 159 Mahdi, 675 Mahr, Alfred, 36–7 Majdanek, 227, 229, 283, 285, 292–3, 296–8, 299–300, 306 makeshift camps, 83, 215 Malaya, 41, 748 Malaysia, 398, 759 malnutrition, 49, 96, 131, 246, 322, 436, 691 maltreatment, 163, 235, 367 Maly Trostenets, 297 Manbij, 85 Manchuria, 430, 431 Manila, 41–3 Manjacˇa, 642 Mann, Michael, 20, 24 Mao Zedong, 14, 429–48 marginalisation, 310, 327, 336, 343, 689 markets, 191, 266, 410, 489, 666, 722 slave, 736 marriage, 251, 259, 364, 753 mixed, 284, 725 martial law, 74, 501 martial races, 505, 675, 697 Masons, 34, 150 mass arrests, 283, 285, 539, 541 mass atrocities, 504–5, 554, 559, 561–3, 565–8, 705–6, 767–8, 785–6 mass conscription, 680, 690 mass deportations, 285, 294, 309, 318, 321, 326–8, 346, 348 mass destruction, weapons of, 599, 706, 775 mass executions, 179, 287–8, 291, 301, 304–6, 543, 561, 590–1 mass graves, 159, 228, 249–50, 544–5, 640, 642, 644, 735 mass murder, 15–17, 57–9, 64–5, 211–12, 287–8, 290, 300–2, 304–6

803

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108767118.034

Index militias (cont.) southern, 679–81 Miloševic,́ Slobodan, 62, 630–1, 637 mineral resources, 468, 695 ministers, 51, 63, 124–5, 513, 520–3, 660, 663, 667 minorities, 482, 500, 501, 542–3, 601, 607, 711, 781 religious, 59, 582, 704, 730 minority groups, 17, 341, 547 Minsk, 221, 224, 228–9, 248, 252, 297, 302, 373 Mirzoian, Levon, 196, 200 Mischlinge, 226, 251 missionaries, 48, 100, 108–9, 393, 484, 578 missions, 95, 98–9, 108–9, 110, 113–14, 769, 779, 781 Mittelmann, Violet, 323–4 mixed communities, 724, 725 mixed descent, 95, 97, 99–100, 107, 236 children of, 100, 110 Mladić, General Ratko, 62, 635–6 Mobile and Permanent Military Forces see UMP. mobilisation, 46, 54, 56, 393–4, 458, 462, 664–5, 667 model villages, 417, 565–8, 570, 572 modernisation, 45, 54, 121, 171, 467, 473, 562 modernity, 7–11, 27, 122 Mogilev, 224, 288 Mok, 522, 526–31, 536, 538, 540–1, 543, 547–8 Mola, General Emilio, 33, 145, 151 Moldova, 316 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, 362, 369 monarchists, 61, 144 monks, 183, 545–6, 756, 758 Montenegro, 62, 349–50, 627, 630, 634 monuments, 63, 159 Moravia, 347–8 Morel, E. D., 2, 31–2 Morocco, 142, 153 Moscow, 167, 169, 186–8, 191–3, 194–6, 199–200, 201–4, 206 Moses, Dirk, 9, 24 mosques, 617, 712, 753–5 Mosul, 76, 700, 713–14, 715–16, 722, 726–31, 733–5, 740 mothers, 110, 113, 275, 278, 432–3, 509, 734, 737–8 motivations, 50, 107–8, 251, 273–4, 335, 427, 498, 555 Mouvement révolutionnaire nationale pour le développement see MRND. Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), 125 Mozabites, 607

MRND (Mouvement révolutionnaire nationale pour le développement), 654, 658–9, 661, 662–4 MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières), 581 MSI (Movimento Sociale Italiano), 125 Muhammad, Prophet, 705, 707, 709 Mujib-ur-Rahman, Sheikh, 501–3, 507, 509–11, 513 Mukti Bahini, 508, 511 multiparty elections, 630, 634 Münbiç, 85 Mundari, 680–1 Murad, Nadia, 587 Murahalin, 675, 680–2 Murle, 679–81 museums, 63, 259, 395, 776 mushriku¯n, 720, 722, 739 music, 113, 253 Muslim Chams, 534, 537, 546 Muslims, 89–90, 499–500, 509–11, 607, 610–12, 631–2, 634–5, 718–19 Algerian, 609, 617 Bosnian, 61, 627, 631–2, 636, 638, 640, 770 Shia, 726, 739 Sunni, 574, 715, 725 Mussolini, Alessandra, 125 Mussolini, Benito, 40, 122–3, 125, 233 Muth, Meas, 541, 548 mutilations, 49–50 Myanmar see also Burma, 616, 761, 779, 784 myths, 98, 119–21, 123, 125, 128–9, 140, 272, 749–51 Nakata, 100, 107 Nama, 22, 49, 129 Namibia, 22, 49, 120, 763 Nanjing, 379–99 see also Japan. garrison, 385, 387, 389 Nanjing International Safety Zone Committee, 393, 395–6 napalm, 460, 463, 608 nation-states, 8, 23, 58, 119–20, 331–2, 574, 575, 578 national identity, 631–2, 678, 718 National Inquiry, 93, 99, 102–5, 111 National Islamic Front see NIF, 241, 281, 358, 370 National League for Democracy see NLD. National Liberation Front see FLN. national recognition, 355, 436, 631–2 National Security Doctrine see NSD. National Socialism see also Nazis. nationalism, 8, 121, 172, 571, 574, 629–30, 779

804

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108767118.034

Index Bengali, 500, 502–3, 505, 511 Serbian, 632 nationalists, 53, 143, 150, 165, 430, 631, 771 nation-building, 199, 201, 206, 555, 572 native cadres, 201, 203 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 19, 771–2 Natzweiler, 344–5 Nazi antisemitism, 41, 54, 211–12, 231, 310, 326–7, 329 Nazi Germany, 8, 14, 125, 129, 306–10, 315, 317, 319 see also Holocaust and individual names and Slavs, 358–77 camps and killing centres, 281–306 evolution of Nazi anti-Jewish policy, 211–34 Higher SS and Police Leaders (HSSPF), 243–4, 248 Jewish life and death across Europe and around the globe, 258–78 SS, 243, 276–8, 281–3, 299–301, 344–6, 352–3, 366, 370 Waffen-SS, 56, 296, 300 Nazi ideology, 8, 34, 359 Nazi leaders, 211, 215, 220, 228, 231, 243, 245, 367 negotiations, 69, 94, 464, 503, 640, 658, 672 constitutional, 502–3 neighbours, 58, 259, 270, 274–5, 314, 323, 479, 484 Nelken, Halina, 265, 267, 270 Neophyte, Patriarch, 331–2 Nepal, 6–7 Netherlands, 44, 55, 263–4, 272, 283, 292–4, 343, 344 Neuengamme, 283, 298 New South Wales, 95, 97–8, 101, 104, 110 new world order, 764, 766, 768 Ngirumpatse, 660, 662 NGOs, 18, 770 Nhim, Ros, 522, 528, 536–7 Nicaragua, 405, 416, 554, 557 NIDS (North Iraq Data Set), 580, 586, 592 NIF (National Islamic Front), 678–9, 680, 684, 687 Nifoussi, Eliezer, 324–5 Nigeria, 476–93, 768 government, 476, 489–90, 492 Nigerian soldiers, 476, 481, 482–4, 491 Nile, 674, 677 Upper, 679, 681, 684, 694 nineteenth-century, 13, 336, 343, 358 Nineveh plains, 722, 740 Ninth Fort, 249–50

Nisko, 215, 265 Nixon, Richard, 410, 497–8, 506, 508 NKVD, 163, 177–8, 179, 182–4 NLD (National League for Democracy), 746–51, 757–61 Nobel Prize, 461, 587 nomadic life, 138, 191–2, 199, 203 nomadism, 191, 194, 200, 347 nomads, 194, 199, 205, 337, 682 pastoral, 188, 191, 194, 198–200 non-Arabs, 594, 678, 690, 776 non-believers, 702–3, 705, 717–18 non-commissioned officers, 371, 373 non-Jews, 15, 236, 296, 298, 313, 319, 326, 330 non-Muslims, 76, 500, 708 norms, 47, 763, 766, 773, 777, 781, 783–4 global, 590, 763, 778 North Africa, 271, 331, 649, 705, 719, 779 North America see also United States, 22, 24, 587 North Atlantic Treaty Organization see NATO. North Iraq Data Set (NIDS), 580, 586, 592 Northern Territory, 98, 101, 656 Norway, 283, 302, 304 November Pogrom, 261, 263–4, 285 NSD (National Security Doctrine), 403–4, 408–9, 416, 419, 426–7, 559 Nsukka, 485–6 Nuba, 18, 672–4, 678, 681, 684–90, 692, 697–8 Nuer, 681, 693–5 Nuon Chea, 518, 520–1, 527, 529, 538, 542, 547 Nuremberg, 1, 33, 226, 260, 765, 770–1 Laws, 126, 251, 259–60 Tribunal see International Military Tribunal. Nusra Front, 708 nutrition, 303, 306 Nyan Win, 751 OAS (Organisation Armée Secrète), 405, 610, 613 Obama, President Barack, 696, 733, 778, 781, 782 obedience, 46, 240 obligations, 231, 285, 634, 643, 773–4, 776, 783, 785 observers, 360, 464, 477, 565, 658 international, 484, 640 obsessions, 155, 189, 472, 531 occupied Poland, 216, 285, 287, 289, 295, 300, 304

805

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108767118.034

Index occupied Soviet Union, 289, 301–2, 304, 339, 352, 371, 377 occupied territories, 1, 244, 283, 319, 339, 344, 367, 765 OGPU, 163, 167–8, 193, 201 Ohio, 62, 771 oil, 394, 459, 472, 621, 688, 695 fields, 369, 681 Ojukwu, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu, 481–2, 487 OLS (Operation Lifeline), 688 Omarska, 642–4 omissions, 10, 59, 450, 454 Operation Lifeline (OLS), 688 Operation Reinhardt, 57, 227, 229, 290 Operation Victory, 563 OPM (Organisasi Papua Merdeka), 464, 466, 469, 470 opposition parties, 658–9, 670 oppression, 81, 261, 570, 617, 651, 667 oppressors, 166, 572 oral histories, 104, 119, 131–4, 205, 239, 477, 591 oral traditions, 133, 587 Oranienburg, 282, 373 orders, 14–15, 35, 46–8, 72–6, 77–9, 168–71, 370, 539–42 Organisasi Papua Merdeka (OPM), 464, 466, 469, 470 Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS), 405, 610, 613, 616 Organisation of People in Arms (ORPA), 558 Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), 238 ORPA (Organisation of People in Arms), 317 Orthodox Church, Bulgarian, 317, 319, 331–2 Ottoman documents, 83, 88 Ottoman Empire see also Turkey, 51, 60, 70, 80, 574, 577, 731 OUN (Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists), 238 outcasts, 261, 432, 447–8 overcoats, 275, 375 PACs, 558, 560, 565–6 pagans, 674, 706–8 pagodas, 546, 755 pain, 113, 514, 644, 736 Pakistan, 497–506, 510–11, 513–14, 710 unified, 497 West, 500–3, 508–9 Pakistani military, 498, 503, 507, 512–13 Palestine, 140, 213, 237, 315

Pamplona, 145 Panama, 409, 418, 422 Papua, West, 450, 451, 455, 464–9, 471–3 Papuans, 466–71 paramilitaries, 62, 156, 419, 421, 425, 558, 560, 686 parents, 96, 98–9, 102, 105, 109, 260–2, 263–4, 752–3 parliamentary democracies, 33, 46 Partai Komunis Indonesia see PKI. Partai Nasional Indonesia (PNI), 452–3 partisans, 61, 233, 239, 250, 252, 348, 353–4, 370 party activists, 14, 166–7, 184, 584–5 party archives, 203, 433 party hierarchies, 367, 431, 447, 631 party leaders, 167, 194, 442, 520, 661 party members, 177, 439–41, 445, 447, 525 pastoral nomads, 188, 191, 194, 198–200 pasture, 186, 192, 682 patients, psychiatric, 249, 287, 299 PDK, 575, 578 peace, 55–6, 58, 62, 64, 653–4, 765, 771, 777 agreements/accords, 60, 634, 657, 694, 696 peacekeeping, 770, 773, 777–9, 785 Peacock Angel, 729 peasants, 152–3, 165–6, 168, 171–2, 176, 439, 608, 611 rich, 429, 438 Ukrainian, 165, 172–5, 189 peer pressure, 240, 250 People’s Commissars, 165, 197 People’s Communes, 434, 437, 440 perceptions, 121, 122, 200, 240, 250, 332–3, 494, 559 perpetrators, 9–10, 62–5, 149–51, 154, 164–5, 201, 583–4, 694–8 individual, 480, 667 persecution, 153, 155, 211, 335–6, 340–3, 348–9, 545–6, 758–60 Persian Gulf War, 768–9 personalities, 165, 240, 248, 253–4, 653 Peru, 409, 418, 421–2, 425–6 Peshmerga, 731–2, 743 phases of genocide, 44–5 Phim, So, 521, 525–8, 531, 541, 547 Phnom Penh, 518, 520, 527, 529–30, 537, 538, 541, 547–8 photographs, 43, 86, 190, 203, 486, 489, 519, 530 physical destruction, 2, 211, 362, 538, 570, 600, 620, 628 physical force, 44, 47 physical survival, 253, 613 physical violence, 246, 569, 741

806

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108767118.034

Index pieds-noirs, 607, 611, 612–13, 615 Pinochet, Augusto, 412, 424, 771 Pirot, 328–9 PKI (Partai Komunis Indonesia), 451–3, 454, 455–7, 466 PKK, 578, 579, 585, 589, 594 plague, 366, 579 plebiscites, 466, 726 plotters, 145, 149, 150–2, 155, 480 coup, 149, 150–4, 155, 156, 159, 480 plunder, 245, 317, 386–7, 560, 707 pluralistic states, 482, 485 PNI (Partai Nasional Indonesia), 452–3 poems, 104, 120, 135–6, 137–9, 180 epic, 133, 136, 137 poetry, 113, 133, 500 folk, 119, 133 poets, 133–5, 137–9 pogroms, 39, 48, 51, 237, 247, 260, 263, 324 Pol Pot, 14, 59, 497, 520, 527, 529–32, 534–5, 538 Poland, 56–7, 214–15, 237, 265–6, 283, 286–8, 291, 299, 302, 304–5, 361–3, 365–7 eastern, 56, 237, 291 General Government (GG), 216, 224, 226–9, 244, 246, 289, 291, 363–6 invasion, 212, 214, 245, 271, 363 occupied, 216, 285, 287, 289, 295, 300, 304 western, 283, 288, 299 Poles, 1–2, 177–9, 183, 242, 268, 283, 358–64, 366–8 police, 108, 112, 274, 275, 281–2, 300–1, 354, 470–1 Algerian, 613, 619 brutality, 576, 609 policy frameworks, 778, 785–6 policymakers, 18, 100, 778, 785 Polish, 119, 175, 177–8, 184, 221–2, 283, 287, 296 Polish children, 364, 368 Polish Jews, 1, 213–14, 216, 222, 226–7, 229, 292, 367–8 Polish POWs, 362, 364 Polish Roma, 352 political activism, 152, 470, 584, 587 political ambitions, 583, 661 political class, 167, 651 political elites, 12, 19, 500, 562, 577–8, 582, 652, 659 political enemies, 181, 184, 284 political groups, 3, 16, 163, 179–81, 424, 429, 456–7, 616 political identities, 584, 596, 694 political labels, 432, 447

political leaders, 46, 164, 527, 541, 584, 629, 633, 705 political opponents, 59, 181, 268, 282, 283, 301, 405 political parties, 76, 145, 148, 169, 414, 424, 746, 755 political power, 472, 559, 560, 621, 727 political prisoners, 163, 181, 252, 412–13 political responsibility, 119, 153 political rights, 582, 766, 767 political scientists, 12, 19, 504 political transition, 568 political violence, 146, 412, 454, 572, 574–5, 577 politicide, 20, 615–16 politics, 46–7, 51, 57, 144, 150, 705, 711, 715 polytheists, 720, 722, 739 Ponary, 240, 249 Popular Defense Forces (PDF), 680 Popular Front, 143–4, 155 popularity, 18, 241, 392, 398 Port Harcourt, 484, 492 Posen, 230, 233 possessions, 190, 249, 251, 387, 432, 603, 715, 731 post-Cold War era, 421, 616, 768, 770 poverty, 40, 98, 131, 374, 498 power, 46, 97–8, 148–9, 155–6, 445–6, 502–3, 518–20, 649–51 Hutu, 658, 662–3, 665, 666, 669 imperial, 44–5, 48, 50, 52, 58, 763 political, 472, 559, 560, 621, 727 Power, Samantha, 18, 643 power-sharing, 497, 504 POWs, 47, 227, 286, 361, 371–7, 383, 394, 513 camps, 284, 286, 288, 296, 373, 375–7 preconditions for genocide, 45–8 predecessors, 182, 249, 462, 471, 529, 532, 563, 618 pregnant women, 368, 571 prejudices, 39, 336, 340, 354, 505, 552, 758, 761 pressure, 89, 99, 125, 192, 196, 764–5, 769, 776 peer, 240, 250 political, 471, 688 pressures, external, 77, 100, 211 preventative action, 767, 785 prevention, 26, 763–86 pride, 41, 56, 138, 239, 418 prisoners of war see POWs. prisons, 157–9, 180, 284, 287, 424, 425, 522, 529–30 professionalism, 408, 485 profits, 39, 41, 50, 579 propaganda, 37, 50, 63, 120, 476, 513, 755 jihadi, 710

807

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108767118.034

Index propaganda (cont.) materials, 168, 716 videos, 714, 738 property, 90, 134, 251, 289, 332, 729, 731, 736 rights, 488, 612 prophets, 56, 366, 706, 709 prosecutions, 3, 65, 91, 157, 160, 611, 638 prosecutors, 154–5, 181, 346 prostitutes, 169–70 Protectors, 97–8, 99, 108, 109, 741 Protestants, 77, 88 protests, 60, 77, 142, 146, 157, 174, 319, 333 provincial governors, 35, 71–4, 75, 78, 82 proxies, 459, 463, 466, 638 psychiatric institutions, 287, 288 psychiatric patients, 249, 287, 299 psychiatrists, 26, 633 psychological operations, 415, 563–4 PUK, 575, 584, 591, 594 purge trials, 59, 184 purges, 176–7, 179, 182–3, 201, 439, 444, 528–9, 718 purification, 5, 59, 313, 320, 548, 569, 703, 727 Pursat, 542–3 Qaddafi, Muammar, 779–80 Qalb Lawza, 708 Queensland, 97, 98 Quiché, El, 552, 554, 562, 568 quotas, 164, 170, 227, 433, 445, 609, 654 Quran, 134, 592 Rabe, John, 387, 393–4, 396–7 race, 33, 35, 39, 41, 46–7, 339, 649, 676–7 racial hierarchies, 234, 251 racial hygiene, 363 racial ideology, 48, 259, 353 racial supremacy, 129, 697 racism, 8–9, 29–31, 32, 40, 43, 398, 472, 504–5 scientific, 8, 107 racist beliefs, 107, 345 radicalisation, 211, 214, 220–1, 228–9, 240, 245 radio, 46, 63, 154, 383, 659, 665 rafts, 391, 606, 728 rags, 134, 135, 276 Rahman, Ziaur, 513 raids, 274, 466, 469, 676, 680, 683, 710, 713 Rakhine, 748–50, 753–8 rallies, public, 434, 440 rape, 63–4, 390, 395–6, 509, 511, 513, 641–2, 694 mass, 18, 395, 509, 593, 603, 641 rations, 53, 271, 374, 437 Ravensbrück, 298, 344–5

Read, Peter, 96, 104–5 rebellions, 72, 145, 154, 443, 469, 531, 575, 689 popular, 202, 206 rebels, 130, 155, 193, 194, 571, 657, 694, 779–80 southern, 672, 675 recognition, 89, 91, 160, 443, 601, 605, 631, 766 diplomatic, 487, 493 formal, 338, 513 national, 355, 436, 631–2 reconciliation, 160, 488, 653, 743 commissions see TRCs. recovery, 139, 197, 509, 618 Red Cross, 47, 393, 484–5 Red Guards, 442–3 referenda, 101, 457, 461, 468–9, 503, 612, 686, 693 reforms, 102, 650, 704 social, 410–12 refugees, 194–5, 196–7, 330–3, 393, 396–7, 511–14, 639, 759–61 Rohingya, 514, 749, 750, 753 starving, 193, 195 regime change, 688, 778–80, 782 regulations, 83, 90, 97–8, 260, 272, 336–7, 489 rehabilitation, 489, 509 Rehman, Hamoodur, 510, 512, 514 Reich Commissariat Ostland, 244, 248, 353 Reich Commissariat Ukraine, 244 Reichskriminalpolizeiamt (RKPA), 343–4, 346–7 Reinecke, General Hermann, 370, 373 Reinhardt, Operation, 57, 227, 229, 290 relatives, 130, 142, 168, 181, 183, 304–5, 413, 421 relief, 18, 194–6, 262, 368 religion, 454–5, 676–7, 700, 705, 716, 719, 725, 729 religious affiliation, 251, 726 religious authorities, 717–18 religious communities, 722, 725, 730, 741 religious decrees, 706, 713 religious groups, 1–2, 4, 545–6, 628, 631, 724–5, 738, 739 religious institutions, 85, 109, 570 religious interpretations, 702, 736 religious leaders, 85, 577, 675, 742, 770 religious minorities, 59, 582, 704, 730 religious sites, 593 relocation, 78, 222, 226, 321–2, 499 removal, children see child removal. renegades, 444, 447 reparations, 61, 103, 159, 205, 595 repression, 195–6, 403–4, 411, 412–13, 416, 417, 419–20, 584

808

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108767118.034

Index harsh, 412, 469–70 repressive violence, 409, 420 reprisals, 49, 242, 245–7, 365, 683 reproduction, 218–20, 226, 364, 685 social, 4, 567 Republic of Biafra see Biafra. Republika Srpska (RS), 62, 629, 635, 638 rescue, 68, 263, 274, 328, 329, 332, 443, 564 resentment, 247, 431, 467, 479, 556, 650 reserves, 94, 97, 98, 101, 108–9, 114, 710 resettlement, 76, 82, 88, 169, 248–9, 313, 322, 348 areas, 81–3 villages, 572 resilience, 258, 605, 685 resistance, 129–30, 137–9, 252–3, 346, 364–5, 460–1, 462–3, 670 anti-colonial, 118, 124, 132, 135 armed, 51, 148, 252, 270, 302, 456, 460, 463 Kurdish, 587, 596 local, 118, 242, 344 methods, 345, 352 resources, 9–10, 248, 416, 418, 450, 453, 473, 477 mineral, 468, 695 responsibility, 94, 219, 520, 526, 769, 774, 778, 785 political, 119, 153 regional, 525 restitution, 25, 251, 349, 355, 618 revenge, 48–9, 71, 233, 270, 592, 662, 667 revolts, 49–50, 57, 70, 72, 74–5, 146, 193, 252 revolutions, 29, 32, 46–7, 189–91, 232–3, 432–3, 653, 656–8 Cuban, 408, 410 social, 190, 657 rhetoric, 145, 509, 632, 659, 672, 678, 694 rice, 135, 271, 431, 534 Riga, 224–5, 247, 248–50, 285, 288 Riga-Kaiserwald, 283 rights, 94, 98, 153, 468, 472, 603–4, 613, 614 cultural, 601, 766, 767 humanitarian, 32, 760 legal, 112, 370, 676, 752 political, 582, 766, 767 property, 488, 612 Rio Treaty, 405, 408 Ríos Montt, General Efraín, 417, 425, 552–3, 562–3, 568, 572 riots, 480, 499, 500, 576 risk, 250, 636, 640, 758, 769, 773–4, 781, 786 Rith, Long, 521 Ritter, Robert, 339, 344 Rivera, General Primo de, 143, 145

Rizeigat, 682–3 RKPA see Reichskriminalpolizeiamt. road construction, 226, 293, 566 roadblocks, 175, 666 Robles, Gil, 33 Rochat, Giorgio, 127–8, 130–1 Rohingya, 11, 514, 603–4, 616, 746–61, 782–3 refugees, 514, 749, 750, 753 Rojava, 579, 594 Roma, 2, 294–5, 301, 314, 320–2, 330–1, 339–41, 345, 347–54 see also gypsies; Romani. itinerant, 351–3 Polish, 352 sedentary, 349, 351, 352–3 Roman Catholics see Catholics. Romani, 335–55, 363 see also gypsies; Roma activists, 338–9, 355 diaspora, 336, 354 Hungarian, 350 Romania, 298–300, 313–15, 319–21, 327, 329–30, 349, 352, 354 Greater, 313–15, 330 Romanians, 299, 316, 322–4, 327, 352 ethnic, 313, 316 Rome Statute, 3, 53, 59, 236, 490, 771 Rosenberg, Alfred, 219, 360 Rosenberg, Rudolf, 260 RPF (Rwandan Patriotic Front), 655–61, 662–3, 665, 667, 669 RPP (Republican People’s Party), 581 RS see Republika Srpska. rural areas, 352, 559, 583, 647, 655, 665, 680, 736 rural communities, 560, 665 rural elites, 152, 498, 665–6 rural populations, 53, 353, 544, 665 Rwanda, 19, 45, 63–5, 616, 647–71, 769–73, 777–9 northwest, 653, 656 SAF (Sudanese Armed Forces), 679–84 Sahara, 272, 621 S¸ akir, Bahaettin, 71, 72, 79, 91 Salafism, 703 Sambath, Moul, 522 Sar, Saloth see Pol Pot. schools, boarding, 320, 593, 595–6 second-class status, 171, 467, 689 security internal, 408, 421 risks, 77, 85, 688 threats, 69, 71, 239, 314, 318 sedentary Roma, 349, 351, 352–3 Sen, Son, 520–5, 529–31, 538, 541, 547 Sendlerowa, Irena, 273–4

809

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108767118.034

Index senior commanders, 391, 728 Serb leaders, 627, 633, 635, 636 Serb soldiers, 640–1 Serbia, Greater, 631, 633 Serbian Autonomous Regions, 633, 637 Serbs, 5, 61–2, 319–21, 627–8, 630–3, 634–7, 638–9, 643–4 dominance, 630–2 Service, Robert, 164 settler colonialism, 14, 21, 308, 313, 316, 320–1, 467, 471 settlers, 107, 189, 311, 318, 467 sex slaves, 396, 592 sexual abuse, 99, 110, 154, 274, 683 sexual assault, 114, 322 sexual enslavement, 603, 737–8, 743 sexual slavery, 587, 722, 740 shahada, 709–10 shame, 136, 245, 641 Shanghai, 262, 379–80, 382, 383, 385, 393, 439, 444 Shanghai Expedition Army, 379–80, 381, 386, 390, 393–4 Shavit, Miriam, 325 Shaw, Martin, 24–5, 570 sheep, 132, 188, 588, 737 Shi’ism, 574, 727 Shi’ite Arabs, 582, 724 Shi’ite militias, 712, 714 Shi’ites, 702, 711–17, 722, 726–7, 728, 739, 769 Shoah, 54–8, 329, 338 Shoah Foundation, 323–4 shops, 260, 271, 434, 510, 663, 700 shrines, 704, 709, 730, 738–9, 740 Siam see also Thailand, 37, 42 Siberia, 53, 168, 177–8, 193, 359, 367 western, 193, 359, 367 Sichuan, 434, 437–8 Sierra Leone, 21, 557, 772–3 silence, 118–20, 128, 159, 183, 204–5, 420, 751, 758 Silesia, Upper, 215, 228, 293 Sinjar, 592, 722–5, 727, 729–33, 735, 738–43, 779 Mount, 724, 730–3, 739 Sinti, 2, 235, 284, 294, 339–45, 347, 764 Sirte, 131–2, 133, 137 Sisson, Richard, 502, 507, 512 Sixty-sixth Regiment, 392 slave labour, 269, 272, 277, 346, 352, 359, 366, 368 slave markets, 736 slavery, 31, 336, 672–4, 676–7, 683, 692, 697, 739 history, 672, 678 military, 672–6, 693, 697

sexual, 587, 722, 740 slaves, 79, 105, 262, 274, 278, 592, 674–6, 736 Slavs, 22, 56, 358–77 Slavuta, 375–6 Sleczek, Michal, 638 slogans, 115, 192, 438, 440, 634, 776 Slovakia, 213, 217, 226, 229, 290, 293, 296, 348 Slovenia, 349–50, 627, 630, 634, 771 Sobibor, 57, 227, 229, 235, 271, 290–2, 299, 303 social base, 130, 552, 559–60, 561, 564, 571, 619 social engineers, 9, 581, 586, 588 social equality, 614, 617–18 social groups, 4, 12, 149, 168, 179, 203, 533–4, 604 social institutions, 178, 596 social media, 587, 709, 723 social reforms, 410–12 social reproduction, 4, 567 social revolution, 190, 657 social transformation, 555, 678, 685–7, 692, 697 sociological definitions of genocide, 3–4, 236, 491, 567, 569 soldiers, 140–2, 324–5, 370–1, 382–4, 386, 388, 389–90, 509–10 German, 49, 249, 270, 354, 370 Hungarian, 323–4 Italian, 123, 128, 134 Nigerian, 476, 481, 482–4, 491 Serb, 640–1 Soviet, 244, 370, 374, 375–7 solidarity, 38, 166, 461, 463, 478, 503, 556, 618 Somalia, 616, 708, 769–70, 773, 777, 779 Somalis, 769 Somoza dynasty, 405, 416 Sonderkommando, 57, 247, 250, 299, 303 Soufan, Ali, 715 sound, 39, 139, 390, 461, 731 South Africa, 22, 129, 262, 306, 786 South Asia, 6, 499–500, 503, 505, 719 South Sudan, 616, 672, 684, 688–90, 693, 695–8, 779, 780 Southeast Asia, 21, 37–8, 41–3, 398, 531, 537 Southwest Africa, 45, 49–50, 60, 120, 129 Southwest Zone, 522, 527, 529, 538–40, 543, 547–8 sovereignty, 44, 464, 767, 773, 775, 777, 778, 785 indigenous, 108 state, 19, 472, 763–4, 766, 769, 773, 785 Soviet citizens, 162–3, 180, 184, 220, 239, 306, 370, 374 Soviet Germans, 178, 184 Soviet Kazakhstan see Kazakhstan. Soviet rule, 189, 191, 217, 237, 247, 250 Soviet soldiers, 244, 370, 374, 375–7

810

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108767118.034

Index Suat, Ali, 87 subsistence, 274, 605 subversion, 35, 51, 74, 408, 410, 560, 566, 572 subversives, so-called, 410, 571 Sudan, 18, 333, 672–98, 707–8, 777 South, 616, 672, 684, 688–90, 693, 695–8, 779, 780 southern, 18, 672–5, 686, 697 Sudanese Armed Forces see SAF. Sudetenland, 36, 245 Sufism, 704, 727 Suharto, General/President, 451, 454, 456–7, 460–1 suicide, 37, 182, 253, 291, 444, 531, 737 bombings, 716, 726–7 Sukarno, President, 451–4, 466 Sulaymaniya, 590 Sunnis, 582–3, 711–12, 724–5, 727–8, 731–2, 735 superior race, 311, 649 superiority, 39, 189, 358, 719 superpowers, 45, 767 supplies, 129–30, 172, 231, 416, 505, 733 food, 172, 186, 192, 196, 239, 382, 386–7, 436–8 support, 416–17, 443, 452, 454, 460, 462–3, 556, 558–9 international, 461, 775, 780 logistical, 430, 539, 554 military, 407, 493, 554, 656 supporters, 46, 102, 350, 458, 511, 571, 779, 782 presumed, 459, 462 supremacy, 314, 697 military, 561, 566 racial, 129, 697 surrender, 4, 86, 274, 386, 392, 430, 563, 567 surveillance, 9, 196, 432–3, 615 survival, 195, 201, 484, 487, 492, 691, 694, 697 survivors, 104–5, 110–11, 133, 239–40, 306–8, 544–5, 575, 742 female, 723, 732 testimony, 104, 340, 350–1 suspicion, 64, 179, 433, 459, 470, 479, 492, 586 Suu Kyi, Aung San, 604, 746–7, 751, 757–8 Sved, Paul, 275 Switzerland, 37, 273 symbolism, 453, 460, 709–10 symbols, 160, 272, 453, 546, 567, 604, 709 sympathy, 51, 454, 650, 683, 748 synagogues, 245, 259, 261, 266, 614 Syria, 81–2, 83–6, 87–8, 574–7, 582–3, 593–5, 712–14, 729, 781–2 Syria Commission, 723, 734, 737–8, 740 Syria, northern, 81, 593, 729 systematic attacks, 3, 54, 423, 426, 445, 714

Soviet territories, 219–20, 228–9, 233, 288, 300, 370 Soviet Union, 53–5, 162–84, 186–8, 191–2, 215–16, 218–20, 360–2 Kazakhstan see Kazakhstan. NKVD, 163, 177–8, 179, 182–4 occupied, 289, 301–2, 304, 339, 352, 371, 377 OGPU, 163, 167–8, 193, 201 Spain, 32–6, 44, 141–60, 273 southern, 143, 153 special settlements, 163, 166, 168–71, 179, 180 speeches, 48, 70, 79, 134, 205, 233, 709 spiritual sustenance, 605, 619 SPLA, split, 680–1, 693 SPLM, 693, 696–7 Srebrenica, 62, 627, 639–41, 644, 770, 771 Sri Lanka, 505, 700 SS, 243, 276–8, 281–3, 299–301, 344–6, 352–3, 366, 370 leadership, 283, 288, 293–4 St Petersburg, 70, 189 stability, 177, 407, 412, 675, 759, 780 staff, 99, 108, 290, 388–9, 392, 660, 716 staff officers, 384, 386, 387, 390, 392 Stalin, Josef, 52–3, 162, 164–5, 166–7, 171–9, 182–3, 192, 200–3 Stalinist Russia see Soviet Union. Stalinist terror, 162, 170, 237 Standing Committee, 520–7, 547 starvation, 52–3, 244, 246, 266, 268, 374–6, 484, 687 mass, 286, 440, 493, 687, 692, 697 State Archive, 203, 580, 594 state sovereignty, 19, 472, 763–4, 766, 769, 773, 785 state violence, 308, 309, 313, 315, 319, 322, 324, 326–7, 332 during World War II, 308–33 marginalised place in Holocaust scholarship, 309–13 statelessness, 331, 333, 343, 603–4, 605, 753 Stathis Kalyvas, 504, 506, 561 steppe, 189, 191–2, 193, 198, 199, 204 Kazakh, 188–90, 198, 204, 206 sterilisation, 343–4, 346 compulsory, 236, 244 Stolen Generations, 93–115 strategy, 403–5, 410, 416–17, 460–1, 559–61, 563–4, 568, 658–9 Stroessner, Alfredo, 405, 407 students, 26, 267, 335, 420–1, 434, 442, 444, 507 Sua Vasi, 523 Suanzes, Juan Antonio, 34

811

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108767118.034

Index Torres Strait Islanders, 93–5, 98, 101, 102–4, 106–7, 109, 111–13, 115 torture, 11, 59, 164–6, 183, 376–7, 412–13, 420–1, 583–4 mass, 583, 590 totalitarianism, 13–14, 24, 118, 125, 127, 240, 504, 528 townships, 753–6 trade unions, 148, 365, 412 traditions, 17, 127, 136, 372, 478, 577, 674–6 trains, 201, 213, 273, 276, 277, 286, 297–8, 313 traitors, 164, 431, 444, 447, 511, 591, 632, 678 Tram Kak, 546 Trang, Kim, 521 transformation, 32, 44–5, 57, 159, 202, 316, 422, 617–18 social, 555, 678, 685–7, 692, 697 transit camps, 215, 224–6, 228, 273, 275, 371 transition, 188, 211, 418, 568, 613, 728, 749, 760 political, 568 Transnistria, 298, 314, 351–2 transports, 179, 263–4, 276, 287–9, 290, 296–7, 343, 372 Transylvania, 314, 315, 322–3, 326, 336 northern, 314, 326 trauma, 25, 498, 595, 741–2, 760 cultural, 586, 594 Trawniki, 242, 298, 299–300 TRCs, 422, 490 treason, 469–70, 591, 608, 615 Treaty of Neuilly, 317 Treblinka, 57, 227, 252–3, 271, 275, 290–2, 299–300, 303 Treznea, 323–4 trials, 61–2, 154–5, 157, 181–2, 425, 450–1, 512–13, 521 purge, 59, 184 tribes, 131, 135, 137–8, 579, 584–5, 592, 713, 718 Kurdish, 71, 79, 575, 586 Trnopolje, 642–3 troikas, 168, 170, 179, 183 Trotskyites, 179, 182 true believers, 700, 703, 719 Trujillo, Rafael Leónidas, 405–6 trust, 445, 488, 583, 742 truth, 39, 52, 64, 143, 330, 390, 422, 490 Tuđman, Franjo, 630–1, 637 Tunisia, 140, 608 Turkey see also Ottoman Empire, 576, 578–9, 585, 587, 589, 594–5 Turkification, 575, 581, 583, 586, 593, 594 Turkism, 68–9 Turkiyya, 674–5

Sztarkman, Hanna, 267, 268, 277 tactics, 100, 202, 463, 466, 684, 686, 692, 702 Taiwan, 398, 430, 443 Takeo, 542 takfir, 700, 703, 705 Talat Pas¸a, 51, 81, 84, 87, 91 Taliban, 719, 775–6 Tang Shengzhi, 385, 387–9 Tanzania, 64, 664 Tasmania, 21, 98, 311 Tatars, Crimean, 179, 199 Tau¯s, Malek, 729 teachers, 176, 197, 199, 267, 432, 455 religious, 538 tortured, 442 Teeman, Mira, 277 teenagers, 123, 233, 263 tensions, 9, 16, 18, 20, 191, 452–3, 481, 724–5 territories, 5, 214–15, 222–4, 230–1, 316–17, 463–6, 627–9, 636–8 annexed, 214–16, 294, 363 terror, 14, 47, 60, 179–80, 426–7, 433–4, 445, 446 terrorism, 182, 610, 692, 702, 706, 709, 775 terrorist attacks, 505, 710, 712, 775 terrorist groups, 712, 715, 719, 723–4, 726, 728, 730, 736 terrorist organisations, 700, 706, 715–16 testimonies, 25, 64, 104–5, 110, 141, 155, 324–6, 345 survivor, 104, 340, 350–1 Thai, 37–8, 40, 532–4, 541, 546 Thailand see also Siam, 38, 41, 60, 531, 548, 748, 759 thawra, 610–11 Theresienstadt, 295, 297 Third World, 16, 408, 415, 605, 606, 616, 618–19 thirst, 49, 79, 278 Thirteenth Division, 389, 394 Thirtieth Infantry Brigade, 391 Thrace, 69, 316–19, 321, 322, 324, 326, 328–32 western, 316–19, 321, 322, 324, 326, 328, 329–32 threats, 46, 559–60, 562, 567, 570–1, 603, 620–1, 703 direct, 612, 655, 739 existential, 453, 571, 582, 629, 667, 714, 725 guerrilla, 559, 564, 568 security, 69, 71, 239, 314, 318 Timor, East see East Timor. Tokyo, 41, 379, 392 tolerance, 330, 537, 652

812

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Index Ustasha, 298 Uzbekistan, 178, 193

Turkmens, 207, 577, 591, 594, 716, 724 Tutsi, 11, 63, 647–50, 651–2, 654, 656–9, 662–6, 668–71 civilians, 647, 652, 656, 663, 665, 668, 670 elites, 650–1, 655

vagrants, 169 Vajiravudh, King, 37–40 Valencia, 146 Valentino, Benjamin, 19, 504, 554, 564 Van, 51, 67, 71–3, 75–6 Vanna, So, 521 Vartkes Vartkes Serengülyan, 91 Venezuela, 403, 639 Vichy, 272–3, 607 victim groups, 9, 109, 150, 377, 578, 596, 741 victimhood, 608, 613, 711 victimisation, 16, 584–7, 590, 594, 596, 633 Victoria, 97, 98, 114 Victory, Operation, 563 Vienna, 215, 260, 263, 358 Vietnam, 59, 120, 531–2, 542, 544, 547, 548 War, 411, 417, 518 Vietnamese, 527, 532–7, 541, 542–3, 548 ethnic, 534–6, 541, 542–3, 546, 548 Vigo, 146, 151 villagers, 383–4, 433, 434–6, 439–40, 446, 463, 588, 589 villages, 166–7, 288–90, 382–4, 588, 591, 608–11, 731–2, 734–5 model, 417, 565–8, 570, 572 Vilnius, 236, 240, 249–50, 252 Viola, Lynne, 165, 170, 175 violence see also Introductory Note categorical, 477, 555, 556, 673–4, 676–7, 679, 694 forms, 11–12 mass, 27, 306–9, 314–16, 453, 579–81, 586, 593–4, 672 physical, 246, 569, 741 political, 146, 412, 454, 572, 574–5, 577 repressive, 409, 420 visas, 262 Višegrad, 637, 641 Vojvodina, 320, 630 Volga Germans, 377 vulnerability, 559, 599–622, 687

Ukraine, 52–4, 60, 162, 165, 171–8, 247–8, 352–3, 360 Ukrainian Communist Party, 172, 175, 178 Ukrainian famine, 171, 174, 183, 204–5 Ukrainian intelligentsia, 172, 175, 177, 183 Ukrainians, 53–4, 165, 172–8, 236, 313–14, 359–61, 372, 377 UMP (Mobile and Permanent Military Forces), 559, 564 Ungvár, 321–2 Unionists, 68–9, 88 leaders, 73–4, 79, 91 United Kingdom, 31, 44, 50, 55, 94, 771–2, 779, 786 United Nations, 19, 158–9, 764–7, 769–71, 772, 776–7, 781–2, 784 Declaration on Human Rights (UNDHR), 600–1, 602 Genocide Convention see Genocide Convention. High Commissioner for Human Rights, 782 United States, 41–4, 121–2, 404–6, 409–11, 414–18, 497, 774–8, 779–81 Army School of the Americas see USARSA. Director of National Intelligence (DNI), 719 Holocaust Memorial Museum see USHMM. unity state, 681, 688, 694–5 universal human rights, 460, 603 universal jurisdiction, 771 Untermenschen, 56, 358 Upper Nile, 679, 681, 684, 694 Upper Silesia, 215, 228, 293 Urdu, 500, 511 Urfa, 76 URNG (Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity), 554, 558, 569 Uruguay, 411, 412–13, 425–6 USARSA (United States Army School of the Americas), 407–8 useless eaters, 239, 244, 248 USHMM (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum), 15, 239, 324–5, 723, 777, 782 Uspenskii, A.T., 165, 176 USSR see Soviet Union.

Waffen-SS, 56, 296, 300 Wahhabis, 704 Wallachia, 336 Wannsee, 212, 224–8, 248 war crimes, 61–2, 124, 424, 521–2, 635, 641, 765, 770–1

813

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Index Yad Vashem, 239, 242, 323, 325, 333 Yahya Khan, General Agha Muhammad, 497, 501, 502–3, 506–8 Yangtze River, 382, 388–9, 391, 394 Yat, Yun, 525, 546 Yazidi, 587, 591, 592–3, 715–17, 722–43, 781 boys, 723, 738 community, 722, 726, 729, 736, 741–3 women and children, 603, 717, 734–6, 740, 742 women and girls, 736–7, 740, 742–3 Yemen, 616, 714, 719 Yezhov, Nikolai, 164–6, 177–8, 182–3 Yijang Gate, 388–9, 390 Young Turks, 7, 17, 50, 581 Yuanbao, 431 Yugoslavia, 18, 61, 124, 316–17, 320, 348–9, 630–2, 633–4 dissolution, 630, 632, 637 dissolution/disintegration, 630, 631–2, 637 former, 45, 58, 61–3, 770–1, 784

Warsaw, 266–7, 268–71, 274, 289–91, 296–8, 302, 362, 365 Warthegau, 222, 227, 288–9, 300 Wartheland, 235, 246 water, 94, 265, 277, 382, 391, 438, 636, 640 supply, 380, 636 wealth, 40, 464, 555, 580, 617–18, 649, 665 weapons of mass destruction, 599, 706, 775 Weber, Max, 7, 47 Wehrmacht, 286, 289, 293, 300–1, 366, 370, 374, 377 Weiss-Wendt, Anton, 24, 338 Weitz, Eric, 8, 19 West Africa, 700, 772, 783 West Pakistan, 500–3, 508–9 West Papua, 450, 451, 455, 464–9, 471–3 Westerbork, 294, 343 Western Allies, 295, 361, 460 Western Australia, 97–8, 108, 111–13 whipping, 135, 480 white Australians, 95–6, 107–8, 114 Wolfe, Patrick, 21, 107, 322, 328 women, 10, 136–8, 153–4, 233, 273–6, 395–6, 735–8, 740–2 pregnant, 368, 571 work camps, 271, 276, 347, 353 World Trade Center (WTC), 709–10 World War One, 232, 237, 314, 317, 320, 325, 574, 577 World War Two, 12–13, 209–399, 763–4 WTC (World Trade Center), 709–10 Wuhan, 384–6

Zaghawa, 18, 689–90 Zaire, 656, 664, 669 Zeki, Salih, 87 Žepa, 639 Zeytun, 74–6, 82 Ziaur Rahman, 513 Zigeunerlager, 284, 294 Zimmerer, Jürgen, 22 Zuwaitina, 134 Zyklon, 227, 293, 296, 299

Xiaguan, 388, 391 Xiang River Group, 443 Xinjiang, 194, 197, 429

814

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