Handbook of Genocide Studies 1800379331, 9781800379336

Citation preview

HANDBOOK OF GENOCIDE STUDIES

We wish to dedicate this work to the memory of Dori Laub (1937–2018). Dori helped launch the Fortunoff Archive of Holocaust Videotestimonies at a time when few people appreciated the value of such material. Later, he helped found Yale’s Genocide Studies Program, recognizing the importance of drawing connections across some of history’s darkest episodes.

Handbook of Genocide Studies Edited by

David J. Simon Senior Lecturer, Jackson School of Global Affairs and Director, Genocide Studies Program, Yale University, USA

Leora Kahn Visiting Scholar-Practitioner, University of Dayton and Executive Director of PROOF:​Media for Social Justice, USA

Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

© Editors and Contributors severally 2023

Cover image: Marie Bellando Mitjans on Unsplash All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2022950335 This book is available electronically in the Political Science and Public Policy subject collection http://dx.doi.org/10.4337/9781800379343

ISBN 978 1 80037 933 6 (cased) ISBN 978 1 80037 934 3 (eBook)

EEP BoX

Contents

List of figuresvii List of contributorsviii Acknowledgmentsx Introduction to the Handbook of Genocide Studies1 David J. Simon PART I 1

THE BIRTH OF A CONCEPT

The history of Raphaël Lemkin and the UN Genocide Convention Douglas Irvin-Erickson

PART II

7

GENOCIDE STUDIES: HISTORY AND IDEAS

2

Genocide of Indigenous peoples in North America David MacDonald

28

3

Destroying to replace: reflections on motive forces behind civilian-driven violence in settler genocides of Indigenous peoples Mohamed Adhikari

4

The historiography of the Armenian Genocide Suren Manukyan

54

5

Holocaust research and genocide studies: facing the problem of integration Charlotte Kiechel

72

42

PART III GENOCIDE STUDIES AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 6

The interpretation and (non-)application of the Genocide Convention during the Cold War Anton Weiss-Wendt

85

7

Mass murder and genocide in Indonesia and Cambodia, 1965–79: Cold War, state, and region  Ben Kiernan

95

8

The impact of genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia on genocide policy and genocide studies David J. Simon

106

v

vi  Handbook of genocide studies PART IV GENOCIDE STUDIES AS SOCIAL SCIENCE 9

State strategies to implement (and hide) genocide in China and Myanmar since 2017 Magnus Fiskesjö

123

10

Genocide prevention: perspectives from psychological and social economic choice models Charles H. Anderton

142

11

The potential of – and problems with – perpetrator research Christian Gudehus

157

12

Making choices: the roles of rescuers in Rwanda and Bosnia Leora Kahn

171

13

Trauma, grief, and bereavement after genocide: the Rwandan case Amélie Faucheux

180

14

Religion and genocide studies Kate E. Temoney

197

15

Gender and sexual violence in genocide Anna Di Lellio

213

PART V

GENOCIDE STUDIES IN THE ARTS AND HUMANITES

16

Reframing the moment of first contact: lessons from the cinematic genre of science fiction Daniel Conway

17

Music and genocide Stéphanie Khoury

237

18

A network of witnesses: photography and genocide Paul Lowe

248

19

Historical burden: art after genocide Elmedin Žunić

262

20

Museums and the memory of genocide Amy Sodaro

276

226

PART VI GENOCIDE IN DISCOURSE 21

Questionable practices in genocide discourse Aleksandar Jokic

289

Index300

Figures

10.1

Genocide actors’ triangle

143

10.2

Choice realms of genocide actors

145

10.3

Socially networked individuals and emergence

153

19.1

Joseph Beuys, Auschwitz-Demonstration, 1956–64. 2023

265

19.2

Bosniak men line up for food and water at Trnopolje concentration camp. 1992 268

19.3

Rising eagle. 2016

270

19.4

Battery factory. 2016

271

19.5

Geen doorgang. 2016

272

vii

Contributors

Mohamed Adhikari is Emeritus Associate Professor, Department of Historical Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa. Charles H. Anderton is Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Society, Department of Economics, College of the Holy Cross, USA. Daniel Conway is Professor, Department of Philosophy, Texas A&M University, USA. Anna Di Lellio is PhD, Adjunct Professor, Masters in International Affairs (MAIR) program, New York University, USA. Amélie Faucheux is Researcher, Institut Jean Nicod, Institut National d’Audiovisuel, France. Magnus Fiskesjö is Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Cornell University, USA. Christian Gudehus is Senior Researcher, Faculty of Social Science, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany. Douglas Irvin-Erickson is Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, George Mason University, USA. Aleksandar Jokic is Professor, Department of Philosophy, Portland State University, USA. Leora Kahn is Visiting Scholar-Practitioner, University of Dayton and Executive Director of PROOF:​Media for Social Justice, USA. Charlotte Kiechel is Visiting Assistant Professor of History, Williams College, USA. Ben Kiernan is the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History Emeritus, and a Research Affiliate in International Security Studies at the Jackson School of Global Affairs, Yale University, USA. Stéphanie Khoury is Lecturer, Department of Music, Tufts University, USA. Paul Lowe is Professor, Department of Photography, London College of Communication, University of the Arts, London, UK. David MacDonald is Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Guelph, Canada. Suren Manukyan is Head of the Vahakn Dadrian Comparative Genocide Studies Department, Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute Foundation, Yerevan State University, Armenia. David J. Simon is Senior Lecturer, Jackson School of Global Affairs and Director, Genocide Studies Program, Yale University, USA. Amy Sodaro is Associate Professor of Sociology, Borough of Manhattan Community College/City University of New York, USA. viii

Contributors  ix Kate E. Temoney is Associate Professor and Chairperson, Department of Religion, Montclair State University, USA. Anton Weiss-Wendt is Research Professor, Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies, Norway. Elmedin Žunić is Associate Professor, The Faculty of Fine Art, University of Adger, Norway.

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank all of the contributors to this Handbook for their dedication to the field of genocide studies, and for their work on this project. The efforts that each have made during the stressful and uncertain times of the pandemic serve as an illustration of how this dark subject matter has a curious tendency to draw scholars who are also outstanding people. It has been a privilege to interact with each and every author. Our gratitude along those same lines goes to Alex O’Connell and her team at Edward Elgar Publishing, whose guidance and patience throughout the process has been invaluable. We know her professional attention is not to be taken for granted. We also wish to thank Heather Gerken, Anna Simon, and Benjamin Simon for their support as we devoted our time and energy to this project.

x

Introduction to the Handbook of Genocide Studies David J. Simon

Genocide studies is a fascinating and important field. The topics that it addresses – historical episodes of genocide, and certain pathologies of behavior of those involved with or affected by genocide – are harrowing and challenging. Intuition generally fails to explain how, or more importantly why, genocide occurs. The field itself is at least in part predicated on the debate over whether scholarly inquiry can do any better (e.g. Magurshak 1980; Bauer 1990; and Kiechel this volume). Meanwhile a handbook to the field of genocide studies cannot be expected to offer a simple answer to the question of how to explain the inexplicable, nor should it strive to deliver an authoritative one. Nonetheless, the field is much richer than a canon of historical episodes and studies of their underlying pathologies, and a handbook to the field should reflect that. The Handbook of Genocide Studies accordingly strives to consider the ways in which scholars from different disciplines approach the challenge of shedding light on the events, processes, and legacies of genocide. The objectives can also be understood in terms of two premises that, taken together, describe what this book is not. The first is that, as a “handbook,” the objective should not be a comprehensive survey of genocide. This noble and important task has been taken on in non-handbook volumes over the years. Those by Chalk and Jonassohn (1990), Charny et al. (1999), Totten, Parsons, and Charny (2004), Valentino (2005), Totten and Bartrop (2007), Kiernan (2008), Bloxham and Moses (2010), Horvitz and Catherwood (2014), Carmichael and Maguire (2015), Naimark (2017), and most recently, Kiernan (forthcoming), to focus on English language publications alone, reveal the large and expanding range such works must encompass, as well as a need to write, update, and re-write these types of histories as time and our understanding of genocide advance. Instead, this book focuses on Genocide Studies as an academic realm. It endeavors to spell out multiple dimensions of that realm in the space allotted. In doing so, the contributors collectively address a wide range of episodes, including genocides of indigenous populations in the Americas and Africa, the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, twentieth-century genocides in Indonesia, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and twenty-first-century genocides in Iraq, Myanmar, and China. Several chapters address other episodes in passing in the course of developing some particular cross-cutting analytical framework, but without dwelling on any particular one for more than a paragraph or two. Inevitably, some historical episodes thought by many in the academy (as well as the larger public) to be a genocide remain uncovered in a specific sense. We have made a conscious decision not to attempt to construct (and we ask that this book not be expected to serve as) an authoritative catalog of genocides. Omission in this context should not be taken as denial, just as inclusion does not represent an affirmation of canonical status. Overall, the book has been constructed with the notion that Genocide Studies is more than a canon of cases, or even cases and controversies, which compose it. Second, this book is based on the premise that Genocide Studies is not an academic discipline possessing a common set of tools, methodologies, or even approaches. Rather, it is a field, 1

2  Handbook of genocide studies unified by subject matter but combining multiple approaches. Understanding of that subject matter comes not from a single discipline superior to all others, but instead from a variety of them. Accordingly, a major focus is to showcase how the subject matter of “genocide” can be (and is) studied from across a variety of disciplines, and how richer our understanding of the subject has become as a result.1 We have approached this task expansively: not just from different elements of the social sciences and history, but also incorporating how the disciplines in humanities and the arts understand genocide as an object of inquiry. This cross-disciplinary approach to genocide studies enables it to showcase the diversity that comprises the field. Different disciplines are defined by their respective approaches to topics and questions, and thus each addresses the common subject matter, genocide, differently. The chapters in this collection incorporate a range of methods, including historiography, archival research, listening to testimony, philosophical inquiry, film studies, and art criticism. Taken together, the diversity of approaches not only showcases the range of genocide studies scholarship, it is able to present a more complete picture of genocide, its origin, its effects, and its legacy. The book also reflects the youth of the field of genocide studies. As I describe in my own chapter, genocide studies experienced rapid growth of interest, institution-building, and career-staking in the wake of the mid-1990s genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia. In academic terms, that means that much of the field is only two or three generations old. While contributions by Manukyan and Kiechel (respectively) illustrate that the pre-1990s version of the field was by no means poor in its debates, agendas, and ambition, it is the new generations of younger scholars who are defining (and redefining) the field for the twenty-first century. This book endeavors to reflect the full range of this scholarship, incorporating the likes of Ben Kiernan and Mohamed Adhikari, both modern founders of the field, to younger scholars working to include genocide-related issues within the parameters of their own disciplines. Also reflected in this book is the global character of genocide studies. This is in part derived from the origin of the field. In its nascence, it was cultivated by scholars – of Jewish and Armenian heritage – who were exiles, refugees, or resettled from their homelands. The expansion of the field in the 1990s and 2000s arose out of a recognition that genocide has happened and could happen again on all continents (save Antarctica, void of permanent residents). Contemporary practice of genocide studies increasingly involves partnerships between scholars from or trained in the global north with those from the global south. As was the case with the early years of genocide studies when Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and Armenian survivors of genocide (as well as direct descendants of both), scholars from regions that have experienced genocide are playing a crucial role in developing the field.

ORGANIZATION OF THE HANDBOOK This Handbook is organized around the idea that diversity has served to define the field of genocide studies. While highlighting diverse approaches, there is nevertheless a need to anchor the field in something. Specifically, we identify a foundation of the field in the definition of genocide in the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the 1 Bloxham and Moses’s 2010 book acknowledged the interdisciplinary nature of genocide studies as well, through the allocation of five chapters to different disciplines.

Introduction  3 Crime of Genocide (or the Genocide Convention, for short). The Handbook thus begins with Irvin-Erikson’s chapter on the scholarship and advocacy of Raphaël Lemkin in deriving – and ultimately defining – the concept. The chapter serves as the touchstone for those that follow in that the United Nations’ (UN) definition of genocide emerges as a constant point of reference – a common starting point, if not necessarily a universal end point. Other scholars, including some of those represented within this book, support alternative versions of the concept to that provided by the Genocide Convention – Jones (2016) usefully covers several pages’ worth of efforts from multiple scholars. However, if the UN definition is not the best or most workable one, it is the one that serves as common academic and legal currency. The next section – titled “Genocide Studies: History and Ideas” – is organized around the notion that, once defined, the concept of “genocide” immediately added meaning to existing efforts to analyse certain episodes and patterns of group extermination in history. With analyses that delve back into – but are not restricted to – pre-Lemkin times, MacDonald (Chapter 2) and Adhikari (Chapter 3) both address the utility of the construct of genocide as a core feature of settler colonialism, particularly in the Americas and in Africa (respectively). They both describe the pervasiveness of what we now call and recognize as genocide in colonial pasts – while also recognizing impactful and unremedied legacies of those pasts in the present. Manukyan (Chapter 4), in describing the historiography of the Armenian genocide over time, establishes that the concept of genocide informed how Armenians, both in the region and in exile, came to understand the experience of their own people, particularly with respect to the events of 1915–16. Finally, Kiechel (Chapter 5) addresses how scholarship on the Holocaust, initially rooted in the circumscribed field of Holocaust Studies, related to the emergent field of genocides studies. Initially, it is when the two strands of scholarship – Armenia-focused and Holocaust-focused, respectively – meet that the field of genocide studies starts to take its initial form. It does so anchored with the legitimacy conferred about the concept of genocide by the UN Convention, but with unease and skepticism that there is utility that could be derived from a comparative enterprise (or even anything that challenged the presumption of the uniqueness of either horror). The debates described by Kiechel that take place concurrently with events in the real world ought to have given more currency to the concept of genocide, but, on account of trends in global politics, instead left it practically stillborn. Weiss-Wendt (Chapter 6) describes the fate of the concept within the context of the Cold War: inspected and considered for use initially, but eventually shelved in the name of great power politics. Kiernan (Chapter 7), addressing genocidal violence in Indonesia and Cambodia, highlights how the episodes themselves had an international dimension that may have had the effect of further forestalling official deployment of the term. The complicity of the United States (although not the United States alone) in these episodes made it even less likely that “genocide” would enter the global legal or political discourse in a meaningful way. Yet, as Simon (Chapter 8) notes, following the end of the Cold War, idealism (in support of a more just global order) and reluctance (to risk blood, treasure, and political capital) led to a breakthrough for the concept of genocide. The global powers used the UN to create two ad hoc international criminal tribunals, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. These two respective venues produced case work and jurisprudence that helped to confirm the recognition that genocide is not an archiac phenomenon, but one that actually occurs in our own time – and thus called for reckoning with what it means to exist in such a world. The legacy of the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia thus includes an effort to construct in an international

4  Handbook of genocide studies atrocity prevention regime, on the one hand, and the expansion and institutionalization of the scholarly enterprise devoted to its study, on the other. The subsequent chapters illustrate some of the many directions in which the field has developed since the mid-1990s. The first set is categorized under the heading “Genocide Studies as Social Science.” The first subset of this section examines systemic dynamics of contemporary genocide, albeit in two very different ways. Fiskesjö (Chapter 9) highlights the calculus and strategies of the state in twenty-first-century episodes of the genocide, including the one against the Rohingya in Myanmar and that against the Uyghurs in western China. Anderton (Chapter 10) examines how a variety of tools, primarily those in the discipline of economics and many of which have developed over the course of recent decades, can be applied to the effort to understand how genocide emerges. A second subset within the Social Science section assumes a more micro-level perspective, considering the psychology and sociology of different sets of actors. Specifically, Gudehus (Chapter 11) addresses different approaches to understanding perpetrators, arguing that the appropriate approach to understanding the perpetration of atrocities should involve more consideration of context and process and show less concern with psychological profiling. Kahn (Chapter 12) then uses testimony to shed light on the rescuers (or “upstanders”), finding simple explanations for outlier behavior to be elusive. Next, Faucheux (Chapter 13) takes a similar approach to understanding the legacy of genocide on survivors, arguing that the depth of trauma and grief in post-genocide Rwanda requires multiple tracks, both national and local, for any hope of psychological – and, by extension, social – repair. The final subset within the Social Science section addresses certain themes that course through genocidal episodes and their aftermaths. Temoney (Chapter 14) addresses the interplay between religion and genocidal processes. Di Lellio (Chapter 15) covers the central role that sexual violence almost inevitably plays in genocide. It serves multiple objectives for the perpetrator while inflicting challenging scars on survivors. Its prevasiveness in genocides reflects the underlying logic of demographic engineering that defines genocide in theory and drives it in practice. The final section of the book surveys perspectives of genocide from the realm of the arts. The inclusion of this section is predicated on the idea that art can inform us as much about genocide – from the impulse of some to engage in it to the challenge of survivors (or even society writ large) to come to terms with it – as we can from social science. Sometimes art’s metaphors illuminate the inexplicable and the unfathomable in a way that other disciplines simply cannot. Conway (Chapter 16) draws on several science fiction films to illustrate both that the genre frequently incorporates plots or premises that are essentially genocidal, and that film audiences should perhaps consider more consciously the implications of as much. Khoury (Chapter 17) addressed the roles that music plays in different elements of genocide – as propaganda, as solace, as a memorial medium. Lowe (Chapter 18) then considers what we can learn about genocide from the perspective – the lens, quite literally – of photography. Žunić (Chapter 19) draws on several exhibitions and episodes to compare trends in the visual arts in Germany after the Holocaust and in Bosnia after the civil war and genocide in that country in the 1990s. Finally, Sodaro (Chapter 20) address the role of museums – in particular, those devoted to memorialization – as spaces in which individuals, communities, and societies not only attempt to come to grips with genocidal pasts but also how they attempt to frame how other individuals, communities, and societies do so as well.

Introduction  5 In a concluding chapter, Jokic (Chapter 21) contemplates the utility of the concept of genocide and, implicitly at least, the field of genocide studies. In doing so, he raises important points about how and when the discourse of genocide is deployed – echoing, in fact, many of the observations and contentions made by Sodaro in the previous chapter. Collectively, the works in this Handbook create a collage (or perhaps a montage) of scholarship from across a variety of disciplines and backgrounds. As with a collage or montage in art, any particular element might be interesting or enlightening. Yet the complete picture only becomes discernible, if imperfectly so, when all elements are taken into account in tandem and in conversation with one another. Genocide studies may never truly be able to comprehend its core concept, genocide. This Handbook, however, offers a roadmap to a more complete understanding of a truly challenging field.

WORKS CITED Bauer, Yehuda. “Is the Holocaust Explicable?” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 5.2 (1990): 145–55. Bloxham, Donald, and A. Dirk Moses, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Carmichael, Cathie, and Richard C. Maguire, eds. The Routledge History of Genocide. New York: Routledge, 2015. Chalk, Frank R., and Kurt Jonassohn. The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990. Charny, Israel W., editor in chief. Encyclopedia of Genocide: A–H. Vol. 1. Santa Barbara, CA: Abc-Clio, 1999. Horvitz, Leslie Alan, and Christopher Catherwood. Encyclopedia of War Crimes and Genocide. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2014. Jones, Adam. Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction. London: Routledge, 2016. Kiernan, Ben. Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Kiernan, Ben et al. The Cambridge World History of Genocide, Volumes I–III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2023. Magurshak, Dan. “The ‘Incomprehensibility’ of the Holocaust: Tightening up Some Loose Usage.” Judaism 29.2 (1980): 233. Naimark, Norman M. Genocide: A World History. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2017. Totten, Samuel, and Paul Robert Bartrop. Dictionary of Genocide. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007. Totten, Samuel, William S. Parsons, and Israel W. Charny. Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts. New York: Routledge, 2008. Valentino, Benjamin A. Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th Century. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005.

PART I THE BIRTH OF A CONCEPT

1. The history of Raphaël Lemkin and the UN Genocide Convention Douglas Irvin-Erickson

Raphaël Lemkin, a Jewish and Polish jurist born in imperial Russia in 1900, coined the word genocide in the winter of 1941–42 after fleeing Poland when the Soviets and Germans invaded in 1939. The word “genocide” first appeared in print in Lemkin’s 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress. Four years later, on December 9, 1948, at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The next day, the United Nations (UN) adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Taken together, these two days in 1948 are often considered the beginning of the contemporary systems of international criminal law, humanitarian law, and human rights (Mazower 2013, 130; Normand and Zaidi 2008; Schabas 2009). The starting points of historical periods are, ultimately, arbitrary. When we recognize the concept of genocide has neither one origin, nor one meaning, we can understand that the creation, contestation, and evolution of the concept of genocide, and the story of how we got the UN Genocide Convention, is not a neat teleology with a morally comfortable ending (Irvin-Erickson 2022, 145; Meiches 2019).1 Consider, for example, that Lemkin coined the word “genocide” in the winter of 1941–42, and submitted the manuscript of Axis Rule to his publisher in 1942. If a contract dispute had not delayed the book’s release by two years, then the word “genocide” would have appeared in print just after the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, which is when the Nazi party settled on a policy of mass extermination of European Jews. Instead, Axis Rule was released just as widespread news reports about death camps began to sweep across the US (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 81). This is one of the reasons why “genocide” came to be associated with the Final Solution, even though Lemkin defined genocide before the Final Solution, and allowed for genocide to be committed without a single person being killed.2 Starting the history of the convention in 1948 also elides the Nuremberg tribunals, and we miss the fact that the first convictions of genocide were won in the National Military Tribunal (NMT), following the International Military Tribunal (IMT) (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 138–51). At Nuremberg, the crime of genocide came to be positioned as different from crimes against humanity, when Lemkin had first conceived of genocide as a crime against humanity (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 142; King 2017). We also miss the fact that the trial of Arthur Greiser in

1 For further discussion of the themes of this chapter, see: Moses, Federman, Straus, Pensky, and Irvin-Erickson (2022). 2 On how and why the cultural elements of the crime were excised from the UN Genocide Convention, see Schabas (2009, esp. 207–15), Bachman (2017), Irvin-Erickson (2017). On why this matters today, see Davidson (2012), Bachman (2019), Göçek and Greenland (2020), Luck (2020), Mundorff (2020), and Fiskesjö (this volume).

7

8  Handbook of genocide studies 1946 at the Supreme National Tribunal of Poland delivered the world’s first genocide verdict, before the NMT (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 152). The Greiser prosecution and judgment used Lemkin’s definition of genocide from Axis Rule, including the “cultural and spiritual aspects” of the crime, to find Greiser guilty of genocide for pursing the German policy of removing Polish national patterns in Warthegau and imposing German national patterns through Germanization efforts (Heller 2011, 412; Marcin 2014). Beginning the history of the convention in 1948 means we miss the dramatic social movements that pushed the world’s governments to the bargaining table in 1946 during the first UN General Assembly (Korey 1998, 203–28). In this regard, we see Lemkin as a poor negotiator, but an effective innovator of the “fusion coalition building” strategies and “name and shame” tactics employed by human rights movements today (Hamburg 2010, 117–39; Irvin-Erickson 2017, 166; Jansen 2017). It matters that Lemkin knew the most ardent supporters of outlawing genocide in Western governments’ delegations were the women members of those delegations. Lemkin presented himself as a longtime advocate of women’s rights (exaggerating the case, of course) by highlighting the instances where Axis Rule documented German crimes that are consistent with what we would now call sexual violence and gendered crimes (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 154). Indeed, Lemkin had a gift for telling audiences their concerns were his primary inspiration for conceiving of genocide.3 Many women’s non-governmental organizations (NGOs) at the UN invited Lemkin to speak, often during women-only meetings where survivors of sexual assault committed by German soldiers shared their experiences (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 153). Without fail, Lemkin reminded these audiences (exaggerating the case, of course) that he tried to get the Allies at Nuremberg to prosecute crimes he documented in Axis Rule, such as the legalization of childcare payments to women who were raped by German soldiers to incentivize the birth of “children with Germanic blood” (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 152–60). The prosecutors at the IMT, however, felt sexual violence was not part of the German’s war effort, and could not be prosecuted (Brouwer 2005, 7; Irvin-Erickson 2017, 138–51, 2018, 83–92). This helped establish decades-long narratives in Holocaust and genocide studies that sexual violence was not part of the Holocaust (O’Brien 2016, 2017; Saidel and Hedgepeth 2010; Timm 2022; Waxman 2017). As Lemkin says in his memoirs, without mincing words, there would be no UN Genocide Convention if it were not for the women’s NGOs. And yet, the final definition of genocide is largely a betrayal of these advocates’ goals. While “forced removal of children” and “imposing measures intended to prevent births” were included as acts of genocide in Article II of the convention, “forced impregnation” (an unfortunate euphemism for rape), “forced marriage,” “prevention of marriage,” and “forced divorce” were excluded. Eliding this history prevents honest conversations about why these aspects of the crime were erased from the legal definition of genocide (for a discussion, see Timm 2022 and Di Lellio this volume). It also shuts down conversation on the significant role the women’s NGOs played in pushing the convention onto the UN agenda in the first place.

3 Theriault (2012) argues the claim that Lemkin “invented” the idea of genocide in reference to a particular historical case has allowed scholars to confer credibility and historical importance upon their own projects. On debates where scholars claim the meaning of genocide is “diluted” or “cheapened” by expanding the scope of cases seen as influencing the definition of genocide, see Hinton (2012, 7). This is the peculiarity of the world we live in, where the moral capital of the word “genocide” is studied as a sociological phenomenon (Beachler 2011; see also Jokic this volume).

The history of Raphaël Lemkin and the UN Genocide Convention  9 For instance, it was US congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, whom Lemkin met in 1945, who introduced Lemkin to Adlai Stevenson on the US delegation. After Douglas convinced Stevenson of the merits of a law against genocide, Lemkin sent a telegram to the US ambassador to the UN, Warren Austin, urging him to support the convention so the US could present itself as taking the lead in humanitarian affairs. Knowing that Austin was a “deeply religious” Congregationalist Christian—a denomination with ties to the temperance, abolitionist, and women’s suffrage reform movements in the US—Lemkin emphasized to him the progressive aspects of a genocide convention. Lemkin’s persuasion worked, and his ability to frame the convention within the tradition of progressivism won the support of the former president of the World Alliance of Women, Margery Corbett Ashby, who organized a private gathering of women from around the world to discuss genocide (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 153). In the opening days of the General Assembly in 1946, after Ashby’s women’s meeting, Lemkin asked Ashby to introduce him to the chair of the Indian delegation, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit. India at the time was not yet technically free of British rule. Pandit—won over by Lemkin’s hint that a genocide convention would help stop colonial practices of dividing the world and destroying nations—gave Lemkin the vote he needed to bring the convention to the floor for debate. Believing a genocide convention would uphold what “Gandhi worked for,” she claimed that Lemkin’s “concept of oneness” out of “many races and creeds” was a principle “we in India live by” and “our philosophers preached” (Lemkin 2013, 123–6).4 Lemkin told the Pakistani delegation who joined the UN in 1947 after the partition of India that a genocide convention would protect Muslims from Hindus, setting up a conflict where India and Pakistan accused each other of genocide but worked together to support the passage of convention (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 170, 186). On and on it went with Lemkin telling different groups what they wanted to hear. The groups that backed Lemkin most loyally and most resolutely were a handful of Jewish organizations, especially the American Jewish Committee, but even here he shifted his tune based on their politics. The same was true with the hundreds of Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist civil society organizations Lemkin convinced to lobby their own governments; the scores of diasporic advocacy groups to whom Lemkin said their case was the case he most thought about when conceiving of genocide; the labor groups to whom he argued that the convention was a labor issue; the free market groups who backed him when he told them genocide was bad for capitalism; the environmental lobby organizations who backed him when Gabriela Mistral wrote an important manifesto on genocide; and an entire cadre of world-renowned humanitarians, authors, and public intellectuals that he signed up to his cause, such as the Chinese-born novelist Pearl Buck who secured the Chinese delegation’s support at crucial points in the drafting process, at one time promising that “mental harm” would remain in the final text of the convention as a way to prevent colonial era horrors like those the British inflicted upon Chinese people (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 152–96). Less than a week after he gave a talk about the genocides of Armenians and Greeks to a local community meeting in New York, Lemkin met the Turkish delegation and told them that supporting the genocide convention would preserve Turkey’s legacy as the leading country in the work for women’s rights and humanitarian modernization. By 1951, Lemkin had developed a good friendship with Adnan Kural who opened the door for Turkey to ratify the convention. Through Kural, Lemkin offered assurances to the 4 See Mazower (2013) on how former colonies upended UN politics, and India helped transform the UN from an institution designed to protect empire into a forum for ending it.

10  Handbook of genocide studies Turkish government that Turkish officials would not be legally liable because the genocide occurred before the crime was outlawed, and that ratifying the UN Genocide Convention would solidify Turkey’s commitment to peace and women’s rights (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 195–6). Lemkin, quite literally, had a different story to tell everyone. A voracious reader, fluent in at least 14 languages and able to read more than 25, Lemkin could speak with delegates from around the world in an authentic register and with honest familiarity of their literary and philosophical traditions. If his conversations with Turkish delegates were about how Turkey could be a leader of new laws in the 20th century, his conversations with Arab delegates presented the genocide convention as reviving 10th to 13th century Islamic thought. Observing in his autobiography that the Arab delegates spent hours “devouring books and transforming each of them into a firmament of stars” until they “excelled over the intellectuals of Europe” (Lemkin 2013, 130), Lemkin engaged delegates from Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Syria in long discussions of the Persian philosopher Abu Ali Sina; the etymology of Hebrew and Arabic words for peace and tolerance, and translations of “culture” and, of course, “genocide”; and the Spanish Islamic theologian Ibn Rushd, and the “golden period of cultural and religious tolerance that adorned the tenth through the thirteenth centuries of the rule of the caliphs in Spain, and which has no equal in history” (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 156). Of course, when talking with Christian Europeans and Americans, Lemkin said nothing of Islam, and minimized the centrality of Jewish intellectual traditions and Jewish suffering to his ideas on genocide (Loeffler 2017; Meiches and Benvenuto 2019; Rabinbach 2005). Instead, he talked about how he invented the idea of genocide when reading about persecutions of Christians through history (Irvin-Erickson 2017; Loeffler 2022). With an audience of Arab delegates, however, bringing up al-Andalus and the subsequent Portuguese and Spanish Christian Reconquista was a clever way of signaling Jewish and Muslim solidarity, as these centuries of peace and tolerance on the Iberian peninsula were done away with by Christian rulers. As Lemkin wrote later, it was Christian rulers who used genocide against Jews and Muslims to unite Spain as a single political community, culminating in Ferdinand and Isabella’s Inquisition, which in his later works Lemkin called the beginnings of the age of European genocides (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 198). Reading between the lines in Lemkin’s conversations with Arab delegates, we can see that Lemkin was presenting the European Renaissance and Enlightenment as a dark age defined by Christian genocides against Jews and Muslims, which marked the end, not the beginning, of a tolerant and peaceful world (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 156). What modern humanitarian law needed, Lemkin told them one afternoon, was an infusion of the philosophy of the Arab caliphs who “permitted themselves at that period a leap into the loving human conscience, which created a spiritual federation of minds and souls.” The persuasion worked. It was the Egyptian delegation, and an Egyptian on the Saudi delegation, who became Lemkin’s closest allies, his “eyes and ears” in the negotiating rooms that he was not allowed to join because he was a private citizen (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 185–91). It was these same Arab delegates with whom Lemkin worked in the 1950s to try and prosecute French officials for genocide in Algeria, which he called part of a world-wide genocide against Muslims in the 1940s and 1950s that proceeded the world-wide genocide against Jews in the 1930s and 1940s (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 217–20). All of these civil society groups, social movements, NGOs, and stakeholders had their own reasons for joining the movement to outlaw genocide. When scholars today interpret

The history of Raphaël Lemkin and the UN Genocide Convention  11 the meaning of the UN Genocide Convention, there is no a priori reason why they should privilege the opinions of North American and European diplomats drafting the convention, over and above the opinions of non-Western delegates (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 1–10). And, yet, scholars studying the convention often minimize the ideas and contributions of delegates from non-Western states, and minority delegates from Western delegations—which, ironically enough, has led historians to minimize the degree to which the German attempt to annihilate European Jews shaped the debates on the convention (Kurz 2021). An even richer sense of the history of the UN Genocide Convention emerges when we look to the 1920s and 1930s, beyond the often repeated claims that the Genocide Convention at the UN was a continuation of the minority protection regime at the League of Nations (Mazower 2013, 25). While writing Axis Rule, Lemkin was extending his work in the 1920s and 1930s that dealt with preventing the domestic causes of international war and minority protections (Irvin-Erickson 2017; Loeffler 2017; Sands 2017). But he was also extending his work on Soviet state terror and nationalities conflicts, the rise of European totalitarianism, the legacies of colonization, the violence and repression across Eastern Europe that targeted Jews and sought to shatter Jewish communities, and the kinds of oppression against vulnerable and marginalized groups that defined the intertwined systems of state power and international finance (Irvin-Erickson 2017; Sands 2017). Lemkin, after all, made a living for a number of years in his private law practice as a tax attorney, and wrote two books on how totalitarian governments used economic policy as means of waging conflict against groups they sought to socially annihilate (Lemkin 1939, 1941).5 And of course, it is possible to go back even further, and to position the history of the UN Genocide Convention into a global history of war crimes, modern and ancient (Bryant 2021; Crowe 2014; Naimark 2017). This, in fact, was a narrative that Lemkin himself employed. He located the origins of genocide at the very dawn of human history (Hinton 2012, 5; Irvin-Erickson 2017; Moses 2021; Schaller and Zimmerer 2013), and the origins of the UN Genocide Convention in the Spanish theologians who tried to outlaw the oppression and violence of the Spanish crown (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 198). Francisco de Vitoria’s and Bartolomé Las Casas’s denunciations of Spanish atrocities in the Americas, Lemkin wrote, were the “first links in one chain leading to the proclamation of genocide as an international crime” (Lemkin n.d. a, 1–4).

1948: THE DAWN OF A NEW ERA? December 9, 1948 is the key date for international lawyers, because it marks the beginning of the internationally recognized legal definition of genocide.

BOX 1.1 TEXT OF THE UN GENOCIDE CONVENTION Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide General Assembly Resolution A/RES/3/260 of 9 December 1948 5 On the significance of Lemkin’s expertise as an international economic lawyer, see Pensky’s contribution to Moses, Federman, Straus, Pensky, and Irvin-Erickson (2022).

12  Handbook of genocide studies Article I The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish. Article II In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. Article III The following acts shall be punishable: (a) Genocide; (b) Conspiracy to commit genocide; (c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide; (d) Attempt to commit genocide; (e) Complicity in genocide. Article IV Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals. States are treaty bound to follow the letter of the law, not the definitions of genocide that are colloquial-held or promulgated by scholars (Jones 2016, 23). The exact definition of genocide provided by the UN Genocide Convention matters because it enumerates a number of state obligations under international law (Schabas 2009; van der Wilt et al. 2012). The UN Office of the Special Advisor for Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect has summarized these obligations as:6 ● The obligation not to commit genocide (Article I as interpreted by the International Court of Justice (ICJ)); 6 The “Fact Sheet” can be found on the website of the UN Office for Genocide Prevention. Available from https://​www​.un​.org/​en/​genocideprevention/​genocide​-convention​.shtml. Accessed March 19, 2022.

The history of Raphaël Lemkin and the UN Genocide Convention  13 ● The obligation to prevent genocide (Article I) which, according to the ICJ, has an extraterritorial scope; ● The obligation to punish genocide (Article I); ● The obligation to enact the necessary legislation to give effect to the provisions of the Convention (Article V); ● The obligation to ensure that effective penalties are provided for persons found guilty of criminal conduct according to the Convention (Article V); ● The obligation to try persons charged with genocide in a competent tribunal of the State in the territory of which the act was committed, or by an international penal tribunal with accepted jurisdiction (Article VI); ● The obligation to grant extradition when genocide charges are involved, in accordance with laws and treaties in force (Article VII), particularly related to protection granted by international human rights law prohibiting refoulment where there is a real risk of flagrant human rights violations in the receiving State. In the legal definition of genocide above, take note of Article II, which reads genocide is an act committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Those two words, “as such,” have sparked controversy amongst legal scholars (see Schabas 2009, 301). The phrase “with intent to destroy” has likewise confounded courts (Schabas 2009, 156; also see Ambos 2009; Goldsmith 2010; Greenawalt 1999; Nersessian 2002; Smith 1999), opening up the door for some to argue that unintended genocide is not genocide (Schabas 2009, 256). Likewise, the words “in whole or in part” have led to convoluted legal reasoning (Schabas 2009, 277; Straus 2005). An act is genocide, even if not a single individual is killed, if the action is intended to destroy a group—partially? Now consider that there are only four protected groups established by Article II. An attempt by a state or non-state actor to “eradicate homosexuality” from society (DeJong and Long 2014; Waites 2018), an attempt by a political party in power to mass murder an entire opposition party (Van Schaack 2007), a counterinsurgency campaign against terrorists that includes the mass torture and murder of peasants (Mamdani 2011; Xu 2018), or even a campaign by a national police to eradicate a country’s drug addicts (Simangan 2018)—none of these would be genocide, strictly speaking, because the targeted social groups are not one of the four protected groups. Thus, for many, the legal definition of genocide is so expansive and nebulous when it comes to defining what genocide is, yet so overly specific when defining upon whom genocide can be committed, that the definition of genocide hollows out the convention’s obligations (Rosenberg 2012, 17). It is worth comparing the legal definition of genocide, above, to the definition of genocide Lemkin provided in Axis Rule. Contrast Articles I through IV of the convention with Lemkin’s definition of genocide in his 1944 book: This new word, coined by the author to denote an old practice in its modern development, is made from the ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing), thus corresponding in its formation to such words as tyrannicide, homicide, infanticide, etc. Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves … Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group … Genocide has two phases: one, the destruction of the national

14  Handbook of genocide studies pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain, or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and the colonization of the area by the oppressor’s own nationals. (Lemkin 1944, 79)

Notice the breadth of different types of oppression that could be included under the rubric of “destruction of national patterns of the oppressed,” as compared to the five acts of genocide as established by Article II. Notice also that the UN treaty omits any hint that genocide was a “colonial” crime. The difference between the two definitions becomes even more evident when we parse what Lemkin meant by “national groups.” Lemkin’s definition of “nations” was so broad that it would have included, in Lemkin’s own words, “those who play at cards.” Lemkin, quite literally, believed that people who shared similar tastes in art, people who were part of the same labor union, people who gambled, all constituted national groups. Moreover, he believed that individuals belonged to many nations at once, and that genocide could be committed without physically killing a single individual, but rather by imposing types of repression and oppression intended to eradicate different types of nationalities in a social or political community (Irvin-Erickson 2013). Lemkin wanted a law to protect the broad foundation of plural, diverse, and tolerant societies by outlawing an expansive array of state-backed (or state-tolerated) oppressive, repressive, and coercive actions against almost any social group imaginable. But the final draft of the UN Genocide Convention became a highly restrictive document. Clearly, much had changed over the four years separates these two definitions of genocide.

1944–48: DEFINING AND REDEFINING GENOCIDE In Axis Rule, Lemkin derived “genocide” from the Greek word genos (race, family, tribe) and the Latin cide (to kill). In a footnote, he added that genocide could equally be termed “ethnocide,” with the Greek ethno meaning “nation.” Genocide signified the attempt to destroy a national group, but “it did not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation” (Lemkin 1944, 79). Rather, for Lemkin, genocide signified “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves” (Lemkin 1944, 79). Remember, Lemkin defined genocide as a colonial process. He called the German occupation of Europe an act of colonization that included a wide spectrum of repressive and oppressive acts. Later, in his unpublished writings in the 1950s, Lemkin set out to study the genocides of European colonialism, presenting Nazi and Soviet genocides as part of this history of European colonial empires using genocide as a technique of governance (Irvin-Erickson 2013, 2017). Lemkin’s conception of nations was rooted in Jewish and Polish political traditions, but his ideas grew to embrace the ideas of national cultural autonomy theorists ranging from the great Russian Jewish historian Simon Dubnow to the Austro-Hungarian Socialists Otto Bauer and Karl Renner (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 60, 142). Andrea Graziosi and Frank Sysyn have explained that, while this interpretation of Lemkin’s ideas on nations and social identity might feel anachronistic, Lemkin’s Zionist education, including his deep reading of the non-territorial Zionism that Dubnow advocated for (which located the locus of Jewish national life in a trans-national

The history of Raphaël Lemkin and the UN Genocide Convention  15 diaspora, not in a physical space), his reading of Nationalist Cultural Autonomy theorists, and his coalescence around an idea of nationality and ethnicity that he aligned with Max Weber’s intuition, all led Lemkin to see that nations were “culturally and politically ‘constructed’ entities, that is, the by-products of human history rather than blood communities” (Graziosi and Sysyn 2022, 11). Obviously, Graziosi and Sysyn write, all these theorists that Lemkin cites predate the “subjectivist” and “constructivist” turn that came to dominate universities in the Americas and Western Europe in the 1980s, and thus Lemkin defines the genos in genocide “as an enlarged family unit having the conscience of a common ancestor—first real, later imagined” (Graziosi and Sysyn 2022, 11). As Graziosi and Sysyn explain: His “nations” thus become “families of mind,” that is, human groups united by and sharing the same culture, and genocide could in theory mean the suppression of any human group intended as and feeling itself to be such, and not solely the national, ethnic, racial, and religious groups included in the United Nations’ definition. The horizon of a concept that was born to defend natural, or supposedly natural, entities thus came to include, at least potentially, the suppression of any more or less stable social aggregate of individual preferences and choices, implicitly morphing into a tool of radical criticism of any category-based mass violence. (Graziosi and Sysyn 2022, 11)

If a law against destroying these kind of “nations” were signed, it would have radically re-written the laws of war. Almost any conceivable instance of war, or for that matter almost any group-selective repression committed or tolerated by states, would have been punishable as genocide. Early Stirrings: How Lemkin’s Early Works Set the Stage for Axis Rule Much has been written about the way the massacres of Armenians stirred Lemkin’s consciousness in college (Balakian 2013), and there is good research on Lemkin’s education (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 17–39; Jacobs 2019; Sands 2017; Szawłowski 2014). Less attention has been paid, however, to Lemkin’s early Polish books that set his horizons (Lemkin 1926, 1928, 1929). In 1926, after graduating with his doctorate in law, Lemkin published The Criminal Code of Soviet Republics. In the book, Lemkin commented on the political purposes of Lenin’s nationalities policies, which had been crafted by Stalin, within the historical evolution of the Russian and Soviet penal codes. That Stalin rose to power as the USSR’s Commissioner of Minorities was a point that was never lost on Lemkin, and he took note in this book of the way the penal code criminalized oppugnant nationalities that threatened the social stability of the Soviet Union. But the law left the door open to the possibility that individuals with such nationalities might be reformed into having new nationalities that were more conducive to the new Soviet Man that Stalinist policies sought to create (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 17–39). Lemkin’s next book, published in 1928, The 1927 Criminal Code of Soviet Russia, noted that the reforms made to the penal code after Lenin’s death marked no substantive difference from the laws Lenin’s party enacted in 1922. The only difference was that the new code drew on 19th-century Italian positivist legal theory to explicitly codify “social protection” as the purpose of the law. This legitimized the arrest and killing of people who had a social consciousness considered criminal, he continued. The Soviet penal code, therefore, provided the state violence necessary for the creation of a new Soviet national identity in the USSR (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 17–39).

16  Handbook of genocide studies In the 1930s, Lemkin became involved in two elite circles of European jurists working in international criminal law. But Lemkin was also involved in efforts to reform domestic laws to criminalize the incitement of ethnic violence and foreign wars. For instance, Article 113 of the 1932 Polish criminal code, which Lemkin wrote, criminalized the production and dissemination of propaganda intended to incite a domestic population toward aggressive war and violence. In his commentary on this Article, Lemkin articulated yet another position he never abandoned throughout his entire life: domestic laws could be instruments for international peace because war and political violence were aspects of state policy that had to first be legitimized domestically (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 17–39). A year later, in Germany, the Nazi boycott of Jewish business began. Lemkin wrote that his colleagues and friends working in international law discussed Mein Kampf and believed the German chancellor intended to carry out pogroms against Jews and institute a regime of biological national purity. “Now was the time to outlaw the destruction of national, racial and religious groups,” Lemkin wrote, describing his sense of urgency to begin working with colleagues. In the fall of 1933, he authored a proposal that the League of Nations outlaw crimes he called “barbarity” and “vandalism.” Building on his works on the Soviet penal code, the proposal was Lemkin’s first attempt to explicitly prevent the destruction of nations. Lemkin intended to deliver his paper at the Fifth Conference for the Unification of Penal Law in Madrid in 1933, but the Polish government blocked him from traveling to Spain (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 40–69; Szawłowski 2010). Lemkin defined barbarity as the attempt to destroy ethnic, religious, or social collectivities. Barbarity encompassed pogroms, massacres, mass rape, forced removal of populations, forced adoptions, and cruelties designed to humiliate the victims, or even attempts to destroy the economic existence of the members of a collectivity in order to destroy the collectivity. Vandalism, Lemkin wrote, was an attack targeting a collectivity taking the form of a systematic and organized assault against the heritage or unique genius and achievement of a collectivity. In Axis Rule, Lemkin tell us that his neologism, genocide, was a synthesis of barbarity and vandalism (Lemkin 1944, 91). When Lemkin published the paper (Lemkin 1933, 1935), the Soviets noticed (Irvin-Erickson 2019; Kraft 2015; Müller 2015). Andrey Vyshinsky, the procurator general of the Russian SFSR, believed Lemkin’s grouping of barbarity and vandalism with crimes such as terrorism and slavery was a ruse. Vyshinsky denounced Lemkin as proposing ideologically and politically motivated laws to target the Soviet Union under the pretense of creating a neutral, apolitical body of unified international laws (Vyshinsky 1935). In the introduction to a book by Aron Traĭnin (1935) on the international movement for the unification of penal law, Vyshinsky wrote that the unification movement never mentioned actual struggles “with international crooks and charlatans of any stripe, not the fight with the bandits like Al Capone,” but instead focused on abstract concepts like “terrorism.” The concept of terrorism these Western liberals claimed to be fighting, Vyshinsky continued, “turned into the central problem of the bourgeois unification [of international law] movement” because it created the basis for limiting state sovereignty and “removing the state from its pedestal.” Vyshinsky went on to add that “no evasions and intricacies of such unifiers as Lemkin, who tried again to disguise the true purpose of the criminal interventionists with references to ‘vandalism’ and ‘barbarism,’ can mislead anybody” because “the true meaning of the unifiers’ efforts is to legally and politically justify the right of the counterrevolutionary bourgeoisie to intervene in the internal affairs of

The history of Raphaël Lemkin and the UN Genocide Convention  17 any state, under the pretext that they are concerned for the fate of ‘culture and civilization’” (Vyshinsky 1935, 3–7). After 1933, Lemkin taught law part time at different universities in Warsaw and Lwow, and published a book that would dramatically shape judicial procedures in Poland, The Criminal Judge Faced by Modern Criminal Law and Criminology. However, his energies during these years were mainly devoted to his thriving practice as a tax lawyer. In 1937, he returned to his peace work, writing a conference paper titled “Protection of International Peace through Domestic Penal Law.” Lemkin then began research for what would become two books on the linkages between totalitarianism, international criminal fiscal law, and nationalities conflict (Lemkin 1939, 1941). In 1939, when Poland was invaded by Germany and the USSR, Lemkin fled to Sweden and lectured at the University of Stockholm on his newly published The Regulation of International Payments: Comparative Law Treatises on Currencies, Clearing and Payment Agreements, and Legal Conflicts (Klamberg 2019). Written in French, the book transformed him into a preeminent international expert on economic law and conflict (Lemkin 1939). After learning Swedish in less than two months, Lemkin decided he would write the second volume in this series in his new language. This book, Currency Exchanges and Clearing House Regulations, analysed the way totalitarian governments manipulated international money laundering and currency exchange rates to level economic devastation on peoples they sought to conquer or destroy (Lemkin 1941). In Sweden, Lemkin also began collecting documents on the German occupation of Europe that would form the basis of Axis Rule, which he began writing in 1941 at Duke University in the US. Lemkin would transpose entire sections of his French and Swedish language books into his English language book, Axis Rule (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 70–111). In 1942, Lemkin was hired as chief consultant on the US Board of Economic Warfare and Foreign Economic Administration, where he befriended Franz Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer and possibly Herbert Marcuse. Holocaust scholars know Neumann as the author of Behemoth, an influential if highly contested study of the economic basis of the Nazi regime, and the PhD advisor of Raul Hilberg who is generally considered one of the founding figures of Holocaust Studies. Political theorists know Neumann, Kirchheimer, and Marcuse as social democratic German Jewish social scientists who fled Germany in 1933 and contributed to the growth of Critical Theory when they linked up with Max Horkheimer’s Institute for Social Research in New York City (Stiller 2019). During the Second World War, Neumann, Kirchheimer, and Marcuse were employed by the Research and Analysis Branch of the Office for Strategic Services, and by 1942 Neumann and Lemkin were working together in the same office of the Board of Economic Warfare (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 112–37). It is also worth pointing out that Axis Rule, as a book, would have been unimaginable if Lemkin had not met this circle of Marxist German Jewish émigrés. Lemkin, after all, positioned Axis Rule directly in conversation with a constellation of contemporary studies of the Nazi regime written by thinkers often associated with Critical Theory (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 103). Lemkin even went so far as to structure his table of contents in Axis Rule in ways that would cleverly signal, to his readers who could spot it, that he was writing Axis Rule in the same genre as a half-dozen other legal studies of the German state. But Lemkin did this while drawing on his diverse legal and eclectic philosophical pedigree, which set Axis Rule apart from the rest and helped Axis Rule paved the way for the emergence of both Holocaust Studies and Genocide Studies (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 112–37).

18  Handbook of genocide studies The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg: A Timid Failure? On May 2, 1945, President Harry Truman appointed US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson as the chief US prosecutor for the International Military Tribunal (IMT). Jackson hired Lemkin as a personal consultant. It is only fitting that Jackson’s prosecution team, which relied so heavily on the work that Neumann, Kirchheimer, and Marcuse carried out for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) (Böhm and Huhle 2015; Perels 2001; Stiller 2019), would also bring Neumann’s colleague Lemkin into the fold in 1945 (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 138–51). Neumann’s Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism and Lemkin’s Axis Rule were two of the three academic studies of German war crimes that the prosecutors at the IMT used to make sense of the staggering amount of evidence of atrocities the Germans committed. The third was Soviet jurist Aron Traĭnin’s book, Hitlerite Responsibility under Criminal Law. Where Behemoth dealt with the economic and political structures of the Nazi regime, Lemkin’s and Traĭnin’s books dealt with the need to create new international criminal law that held peace as the normative goal of the law (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 138–51). For Traĭnin, because “peace is the greatest social value,” war itself must be a punishable criminal act, and he pushed the Allies at Nuremberg to reimagine the European tradition of war crimes as “crimes against peace” (Porter 2019, 102). It was Soviet jurists, alas, who conceived of the legal framework at the IMT that treated war as an international crime, giving the trials a legal basis (Hirsch 2020). Lemkin’s Axis Rule called for something different. The laws of war, Lemkin wrote, needed to be expanded to apply to times of peace. Wars waged upon populations often occurred in the context of times of formal peace, Lemkin wrote, because of the misguided assumption that war was something armies did to other armies. In Axis Rule, Lemkin rejected the premise of the Rousseau-Portalis Doctrine, articulated in 1801 by Jean-Étienne-Marie Portalis based on his reading The Social Contract, where Jean-Jacques Rousseau writes that war is a relation between states, not people, and therefore the soldiers who fought each other were not hostile toward each other as individuals (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 136–7). Under this doctrine, the laws of war prohibited armies from targeting non-combatants who, as private citizens, did not partake in the belligerence of states (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 1367). But the doctrine also meant state security forces killing civilians in their own sovereign borders was not legally recognized as war. The Rousseau-Portalis Doctrine was inadequate in the modern world, Lemkin wrote in Axis Rule, because Germany was waging a “total war” against “the human element” in German borders and in occupied territory, and demonstrating that they thought the enemy was “the nation, not the state” (Lemkin 1944, 80). This was an especially crucial point for Lemkin because he felt the Germans used genocide as “a new technique of occupation aimed at winning the peace even though the war itself is lost.” Through genocide, Lemkin was essentially saying, the Axis powers could shape the future according to their own designs, altering the social fabric of the continent in their perceived favor to remove “enemy national groups,” without engaging in a legally recognized war (Lemkin 1944, 81). At the London Conference of June 1945—where the US, USSR, UK, and France negotiated the terms of the IMT charter—Lemkin’s ideas created a buzz, but they ultimately went nowhere. The US submitted a proposal to prosecute humanitarian crimes only when they were linked to the crime of aggressive war (Schabas 2009, 40). In Jackson’s words, “the way Germany treats its inhabitants, or any other country treats its inhabitants, is not our affair any more than it is the affair of some other government to interpose itself into our problems”

The history of Raphaël Lemkin and the UN Genocide Convention  19 (quoted in Spencer 2012, 4). Dealing a final blow to Lemkin’s ideas of expanding the laws of war to cover how states treat their own populations during times of peace, Jackson stated explicitly that the “program of extermination of Jews and destruction of the rights of minorities” falls under the purview of international law only when it is “part of a plan for making an illegal war” (Jackson 1949, 331). As Jackson made clear, the US would not agree to expanding the laws of war to cover times of peace because of “some regrettable circumstances at times in our own country in which minorities are unfairly treated,” which would become crimes if the concept of crimes against humanity and war crimes lost their definitional “nexus with aggressive war” (see Irvin-Erickson 2017, 140–1). Still, Lemkin’s ideas on genocide were influential, even if his radical ideas for remaking the war crimes tradition were dismissed. The jurists used his concept of genocide as a way of structuring their thinking, and Jackson penciled the word genocide in the margins of draft proposals at the conference to describe the destruction of nations and minorities as possible crimes (Barrett 2010, 41). Jackson made sure to include genocide in Count Three—War Crimes of the IMT indictment, which marks the first time “genocide” appeared in international law (the Polish tribunals were technically domestic tribunals) (Earl 2013). Prosecutors also used the term genocide occasionally in their submissions to the IMT, but the word “genocide” does not appear in the final judgment in 1946 (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 138–51). The concept of genocide was developed most fully during the subsequent Nuremberg Military Tribunals (NMT), which followed the IMT. The 12 war crimes trials that constitute the NMT prosecuted lower-level functionaries and private citizens like doctors, lawyers, and bankers, whereas the IMT focused on major German war criminals such as Hermann Göring (Heller 2011; Irvin-Erickson 2017, 138–51). Here, in the trials of more everyday perpetrators, Lemkin’s ideas on genocide came into focus (Heller 2011). However, it was the NMT that helped transform genocide from Lemkin’s broad conception into a concept that was understood as a specific act of murder with the intention to exterminate a group of people (Earl 2013, 318; Stiller 2012, 106). In his autobiography, Lemkin dedicates only three pages to the Nuremberg tribunals because they represented a failure in his mind. The IMT dispensed retributive justice and “created a feeling that … crime should not be allowed to pay.” But, the judgment “only partly relieved the world’s moral tensions,” Lemkin wrote, while “the purely juridical consequences of the trials were wholly insufficient” (Lemkin 2013, 118). On August 26, 1946, as the IMT judges were considering their verdict, Lemkin wrote a letter to the UK prosecutor, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, asking him to pressure the judges to include genocide in their judgment: I think that the inclusion of Genocide in the judgment would contribute to the creation of a preventative atmosphere against repetition of similar acts of barbarity. Indeed, we cannot keep telling the world in endless sentences: Don’t murder members of national, racial and religious groups; don’t sterilize them; don’t impose abortions on them; don’t steal children from them; don’t compel their women to bear children for your country; and so on. But we must tell the world now, at this unique occasion, don’t practice Genocide.7

Lemkin’s letter was more than simply grumbling about his concept being left out of the judgment. The sterilizations, forced abortions, stealing of children, and rape that Lemkin doc7 Raphaël Lemkin to the Right Honourable David Maxwell Fyfe, 26 August 1946, box 1, folder 18, pp. 1–2, Raphaël Lemkin Collection, American Jewish Historical Society, Boston and New York.

20  Handbook of genocide studies umented in Axis Rule were committed by German soldiers and officials far away from the front lines of the war—and not committed in the context of the crime of aggressive war. Moreover, Lemkin’s letter is one of several he wrote that indicate that, behind the scenes, he very much was pressing the prosecutors to use genocide as a way to prosecute sexual violence and rape (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 2018). “One should not overlook the importance of appropriate terminology in times when international law, and in particular international criminal law, is being reshaped by the present war crimes trials,” Lemkin wrote about the IMT (n.d. b, no. 3566). Instead of taking the opportunity to create new forms of international law, the IMT was reproducing existing legal norms that were inadequate to match conditions of how war was now waged. The only reason why the prosecutors were being so cowardly, Lemkin wrote, was because they represented governments that did not want the law to go too far in constraining a state’s ability to wage war against its own populations, using both direct violence and indirect violence (Earl 2013, 320). In the postwar world, international law could have been reborn if the jurists at Nuremberg could escape their own “timidity,” Lemkin wrote. He accused them of blindly prosecuting “a past Hitler” while refusing “to envisage future Hitlers.” The jurists at Nuremberg could not escape their “military origins,” Lemkin wrote, and accept “principles for the behaviour of the civilian world in times of peace” as legally valid and historically expedient. Therefore, “they did not want to, or could not, establish a rule of international law that would prevent and punish future crimes of the same type” (Lemkin 2013, 118–19). The failure of the IMT to condemn “peacetime genocide” is what prompted immediate efforts at the UN to outlaw genocide as a crime of peace (Schabas 2009, 7, 642). At the first session of the General Assembly in 1946, Cuba, Panama, and India presented a draft resolution to declare genocide a crime committed in peacetime and in wartime, and recognize that genocide, committed anywhere in the world by any party, was subject to universal jurisdiction and could therefore be prosecuted by any state. Here, the radical zeal to use genocide as a wedge for expanding the laws of war to apply even in times of peace was reborn. But this time, the call to outlaw genocide was mixed with a demand that the anti-colonial aspects of Lemkin’s thinking be front and center, too (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 152–96). The United Nations: In Pursuit of an Anti-Colonial Peacetime War Crime In 1946, when Lemkin brought his ideas to the UN, he wrote that his strategy was to gain the support of the African delegations first, since they represented peoples against whom genocide had been committed by European powers for centuries, and to assemble a coalition of small states and former colonies to force the major powers to the bargaining table. Then, the coalition of small states and former colonies would step back and let the US, UK, and USSR take all the public credit for working so hard to outlaw genocide. That is precisely what happened, except it was not only the major powers that opposed the convention (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 152–96). The Canadian and Swedish delegations were instructed by their governments not to sign a treaty that could be applied to the treatment of indigenous peoples; the South African delegation warned the convention was “dangerous” where “backwards” people were concerned because it would acknowledge that the systems of government of African peoples had an equal right to exist; the Brazilian delegation mused outlawing genocide would be a genocide against Latin America since it was their cultural tradition to exterminate political opponents. This

The history of Raphaël Lemkin and the UN Genocide Convention  21 was in addition to the UK and French delegations who wanted a treaty that could not apply to their colonies. Washington instructed the US delegation to make sure the treaty could not be applied to US policies of state violence, repression, and forced assimilation of American Indians as well as government-sanctioned racial segregation and extrajudicial killings of African Americans (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 152–96). Careful scholarship of the negotiations of the treaty has shown the extent to which the delegations of UN member states worked to scrub from the definition of genocide anything that could expose their governments to international prosecution (Irvin-Erickson 2107, 152–96; Weiss-Wendt 2017, 2018). Dirk Moses has gone a step further to offer an elaborate portrait of how this project expanded into society-wide endeavors across Western democracies to use the UN Genocide Convention as a way of deflecting attention from, and legalizing, violence against civilians committed in the name of preserving state security (Moses 2021). This should serve as a cautionary note. Just because a case seems to match Lemkin’s definition of genocide does not make it legally genocide.8 Moreover, for scholars who might claim that the UN Genocide Convention was a watershed moment in the moral progress of human history, it is worth remembering that Stalin was a more important co-author of the convention than Lemkin. The Soviet ambassador to the UN, Andrey Vyshinsky, who had denounced Lemkin as an enemy of the USSR a decade earlier, took an interest in the convention (Irvin-Erickson 2019). Stalin and Vyshinky poured over every draft of the convention to make sure there was nothing in the treaty that could be used against Soviet famines, the USSR’s nationalities policies, state terror, and the gulags (Irvin-Erickson 2017; Weiss-Wendt 2017, 2018). In my own work, I have used personal letters and diplomatic cables to show that the US, UK, and the USSR delegations competed to define genocide in a way that it could be applied to their geopolitical enemies but not their own governments, collaborated in efforts to write the law in a way where it would be most difficult to enforce, while still word-smithing the treaty in a way that allowed them to tell their domestic audiences that they were humanitarian champions of peace at the UN (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 152–96). While the UN Genocide Convention is commonly called “Lemkin’s Law,” Lemkin felt the final definition of genocide was largely a betrayal of humanitarian principles, purposefully flawed, and morally compromised. While he kept up a brave face and publicly celebrated the convention, his private writings express despair and disappointment. In his autobiography, Lemkin described his efforts at the UN as a failure. “The fact is that the rain of my work fell on a fallow plain,” Lemkin wrote, “only this rain was a mixture of the blood and tears of eight million innocent people throughout the world. Included also were the tears of my parents and my friends” (Lemkin 2013, 132). When “the lights in Palais de Chaillot went out,” he wrote, “the delegates shook hands hastily with one another and disappeared into the winter mists of Paris” (Lemkin 2013, 178). The UN Genocide Convention was in the hands of the world’s politicians and statesmen—people “who lived in perpetual sin with history” and could hardly be trusted with “the lives of entire nations” (Lemkin 2013, 115).

8 The only exception, so far, has been the national genocide trials in Argentine domestic courts, which turned to Lemkin to reinterpret what “national groups” might mean (see Feierstein and Silveyra 2020). Argentine courts ruled that because genocide was outlawed under Argentine law, they were under no obligations to follow precedents and interpretations in international courts, especially when the definition of genocide was arrived at not through a careful philosophical debate but a compromised political negotiation (Feierstein 2014).

22  Handbook of genocide studies While many genocide scholars and anti-genocide activists uphold the UN Genocide Convention as a kind of moral document, the convention was a product of post-Second World War geopolitics, starting as an explicitly anti-colonial idea that was transformed into a treaty that colonial powers could tolerate (Irvin-Erickson 2017). The implication is that if scholars adopt the legal definition of genocide as their working definition of the concept, or even if they take the legal definition as an ethical or moral concept, they implicitly align their work with a concept that was designed to erase from its boundaries the vast majority of the kinds of violence, repression, and oppression being committed by the major powers at the time the convention was negotiated (Irvin-Erickson 2017; Moses 2021; Weiss-Wendt 2022). In the last decades of Lemkin’s life, he thought his work to outlaw genocide had been a failure. This was not because the US refused to ratify the convention during his lifetime, but because he understood that the most powerful governments at the UN wanted “non-enforceable laws with many loopholes in them, so that they can manage life like currency in a bank” (Lemkin 2013, 217). He turned his energies in the 1950s, especially when he took up a professorship at Rutgers University, toward working with governments around the world to outlaw genocide in their domestic penal codes (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 197–229). Lemkin also turned his attention to writing four books—an autobiography, an analysis of the legal case against Hitler, a three-volume world history of genocide, and an introductory textbook on the study of genocide in the social sciences.9 He finished none of these projects, dying of a heart attack in 1959. Lemkin might have died poor, but he did not die lonely, as most scholars would have it. His friends I interviewed recalled a man who was well loved by a diverse community of Upper West Side New Yorkers, a man who chanted Hindu sutras in a riverside park, who convinced young students to drop out of Columbia Law School and take up sculpture so they could do something “useful for humanity,” who recited transcendentalist and universalist poems about love to strangers on the street, and who loved the art galleries and studio-exhibitions of New York and the Hudson River valley. Somehow, received scholarship has fixated on the idea that only three or four people attended his funeral. Not so, his dearest friends recall. His burial in Mount Hebron Cemetery in Queens, paid for by the American Jewish Committee, was attended by a small group of friends, a Korean ambassador, and the Israeli press attaché. However, his funeral in the interfaith chapel at the Riverside Church, his friends told me, was packed (Irvin-Erickson 2017, 230–300). His New York Times obituary read, In this country he had a distinguished career as a teacher, lecturer, and writer, but the burden of his days was his crusade against slavery, degradation, and murder … Death in action was his final argument—a final word to our own State Department, which has feared that an agreement not to kill would infringe our sovereignty.10

9 These manuscripts are spread across three archives: The New York Public Library, New York; American Jewish Historical Society, New York; and American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati. Donna-Lee Frieze and Steven L. Jacobs have edited Lemkin’s unpublished works. For Lemkin’s autobiography, see Lemkin (2013). For Lemkin’s draft of The Hitler Case, see Raphael Lemkin, Raphael Lemkin’s Thoughts on Nazi Genocide: Not Guilty? Steven L. Jacobs, ed. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992. For Lemkin’s drafts of World History of Genocide and Introduction to Genocide in the Social Sciences, see Raphael Lemkin, Lemkin on Genocide, Steven L. Jacobs, ed. Lanham, MD, Lexington Books, 2012. 10 “Raphael Lemkin: Crusader,” New York Times, August 31, 1959, p. 20.

The history of Raphaël Lemkin and the UN Genocide Convention  23

WORKS CITED Ambos, Kai. “What Does ‘Intent to Destroy’ in Genocide Mean?,” International Review of the Red Cross 91.876 (2009): 833–58. Bachman, Jeffrey S. The United States and Genocide: (Re)Defining the Relationship. London: Routledge, 2017. Bachman, Jeffrey S. Cultural Genocide: Law, Politics, and Global Manifestations. London: Routledge, 2019. Balakian, Peter. “Raphael Lemkin, Cultural Destruction, and the Armenian Genocide,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 27.1 (2013): 57–89. Barrett, John Q. “Raphael Lemkin and ‘Genocide’ at Nuremberg, 1945–1946,” in Christoph Safferling and Eckart Conze, eds., The Genocide Convention Sixty Years after Its Adoption, pp. 35–54. The Hague: T. M. C. Asser Press, 2010. Beachler, Donald W. The Genocide Debate: Politicians, Academics, and Victims. New York: Palgrave, 2011. Böhm, Otto, and Rainer Huhle. “‘Die wahre Klägerin vor den Schranken dieses Gerichts ist die Zivilisation.’ Zur Eröffnungsrede des amerikanischen Hauptanklägers Robert H. Jackson,” in Nürnberger Menschenrechtszentrum, ed., Das Internationale Militärtribunal von Nürnberg 1945/46. Die Reden der Hauptankläger neu gelesen und kommentiert, pp. 21–59. Hamburg: CEP Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 2015. Brouwer, Anne-Marie de. Supranational Criminal Prosecution of Sexual Violence: The ICC and the Practice of the ICTY and the ICTR. Antwerpen: Intersentia, 2005. Bryant, Michael S. A World History of War Crimes: From Antiquity to the Present. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021. Crowe, David. War Crimes, Genocide, and Justice: A Global History. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Davidson, Lawrence. Cultural Genocide. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012. DeJong, Christina, and Eric Long. “The Death Penalty as Genocide: The Persecution of ‘Homosexuals’ in Uganda,” in Dana Peterson and Vanessa R. Panfil, eds., Handbook of LGBT Communities, Crime, and Justice, pp. 339–62. New York: Springer, 2014. Earl, Hilary. “Prosecuting Genocide before the Genocide Convention: Raphael Lemkin and the Nuremberg Trials, 1945–1949,” Journal of Genocide Research 15.3 (2013): 317–37. Feierstein, Daniel. Genocide as Social Practice: Reorganizing Society under the Nazis and Argentina’s Military Juntas. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014. Feierstein, Daniel, and Malena Silveyra. “Genocide or Crimes against Humanity: The Argentine Legal Debate as a Dispute over the Meaning Assigned to the Past,” Estudios de Derecho (2020): 17. Göçek, Fatma Müge, and Fiona Greenland. Cultural Violence and the Destruction of Human Communities: New Theoretical Perspectives. London: Routledge, 2020. Goldsmith, Katherine. “The Issue of Intent in the Genocide Convention and Its Effect on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: Toward a Knowledge-Based Approach,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 5.3 (2010): 238–57. Graziosi, Andrea, and Frank E. Sysyn, eds., Genocide: The Power and Problems of a Concept. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022. Greenawalt, Alexander K.A. “Rethinking Genocidal Intent: The Case for a Knowledge-Based Interpretation,” Columbia Law Review (1999): 2259–94. Hamburg, David A. Preventing Genocide: Practical Steps toward Early Detection and Effective Action. London: Routledge, 2010. Heller, Kevin Jon. The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law. Oxford: Oxford Unversity Press, 2011. Hinton, Alexander Laban. “Critical Genocide Studies,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 7.1 (2012): 4–15. Hirsch, Francine. Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal after World War II. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Irvin-Erickson, Douglas. “Genocide, the ‘Family of Mind’ and the Romantic Signature of Raphael Lemkin,” Journal of Genocide Research 15.3 (2013): 273–96.

24  Handbook of genocide studies Irvin-Erickson, Douglas. Raphaël Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Irvin-Erickson, Douglas. “Sixty Years of Failing to Prosecute Sexual Crimes: From Raphaël Lemkin at Nuremberg to Lubanga at the International Criminal Court,” in Christiane Fröhlich and Mary Michele Connellan, eds., A Gendered Lens for Genocide Prevention, pp. 83–106. London: Palgrave, 2018. Irvin-Erickson, Douglas. “From Geneva to Nuremberg to New York: Andrei Vyshinsky, Raphaël Lemkin, and the Struggle to Outlaw Revolutionary Violence, State Terror, and Genocide,” in David Crowe, ed., Stalin’s Soviet Justice: Show Trials, War Crimes, and Nuremberg, pp. 217–33. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Irvin-Erickson, Douglas. “The ‘Lemkin Turn’ in Ukrainian Studies: Genocide, Peoples, Nations, and Empire,” in Andrea Graziosi and Frank E. Sysyn, eds., Genocide: The Power and Problems of a Concept, pp. 145–73. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022. Jackson, Robert H. “Minutes of Conference Session 23 July 1945,” in Report of Robert H. Jackson, United States Representative to the International Conference on Military Trials. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1949. Jacobs, Steven Leonard. “The Complicated Cases of Soghomon Tehlirian and Sholem Schwartzbard and Their Influences on Raphaël Lemkin’s Thinking about Genocide,” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 13.1 (2019): 7. Jansen, Annette. Anti-Genocide Activists and the Responsibility to Protect. London: Routledge, 2017. Jones, Adam. Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction. London: Routledge, 2016. King, Richard H. “The Law and the Holocaust,” Patterns of Prejudice 51.5 (2017): 439–52. Klamberg, Mark. “Raphaël Lemkin in Stockholm—Significance for His Work on ‘Axis Rule in Occupied Europe’,” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 13.1 (2019): 64–87. Korey, William. NGOs and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: A Curious Grapevine. London: Palgrave, 1998. Kraft, Claudia. “Nationalisierende Transnationalisierung: (Inter)nationale Strafrecht- swissenschaft in der Zwischenkriegszeit,” in Dietmar Müller and Adamantios Skordos, eds., Leipziger Zuga ̈nge zur Rechtlichen, Politischen und Kulturellen Verflechtungsgeschichte Ostmitteleuropas, pp. 15–26. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2015. Kurz, Nathan A. “‘Hide a Fact Rather Than State It’: The Holocaust, the 1940s Human Rights Surge, and the Cosmopolitan Imperative of International Law,” Journal of Genocide Research 23.1 (2021): 37–57. Lemkin, Rafał. Kodeks Karny Republik Sowieckich. Warsaw: Wyd. Sem. Prawa kar., 1926. Lemkin, Rafał. Kodeks Karny Rosji Sowieckiej 1927. Warsaw: Sklad Glowny w Ksiegarni F. Hoesicka, 1928. Lemkin, Rafał. Kodeks Karny Faszystowski Włochy. Warsaw: Nakladem Ksiegarni F. Hoesicka, 1929. Lemkin, Raphaël. “Akte der Barbarei und des Vandalismus als Delicate Juris Gentium,” Internationales Anwaltsblatt 19 (1933): 117–19. Lemkin, Rafał. “Les Actes Constituant un Danger General (Interétatique) Considerés Comme Delits du Droit des Gens,” in Jimenez de Asua, Vespasien Pella, and Manuel López-Rey, eds., Actes de la Vème Conférence Internationale Pour l’Unification du Droit Pénal, Madrid 14–20 Octobre 1933, pp. 48–56. Paris: A. Pedone, 1935. Lemkin, Rafał. La réglementation des paiements internationaux: traité de droit comparé sur les devises, le clearing et les accords de paiements, les conflits des lois. Paris, A. Pedone, 1939. Lemkin, Rafał. Valutareglering och Clearing: Bearbetat efter Författarens Föreläsningar vid Stockholms Högskola Hösten 1940. Stockholm: P. A. Norstedt & Söner, 1941. Lemkin, Rafał. 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. Lemkin, Rafał. Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin, Donna-Lee Frieze, ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013. Lemkin, Rafał. “Proposal for Introduction to the Study of Genocide,” reel 3, box 2, folders 1–4, Raphaël Lemkin Papers, New York Public Library, New York, n.d. a. [See section titled “International Law and Relation.”]

The history of Raphaël Lemkin and the UN Genocide Convention  25 Lemkin, Rafał. “The Significance of the Concept of Genocide in the Trial of War Criminals,” no. 3566, Southern Historical Collection, John Johnston Parker Papers, Records of the Nuremberg Trial of Major German War Criminals, Manuscripts Department, Wilson Library, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, n.d. b. Loeffler, James. “Becoming Cleopatra: The Forgotten Zionism of Raphaël Lemkin,” Journal of Genocide Research 19.3 (2017): 340–60. Loeffler, James. “The First Genocide: Antisemitism and Universalism in Raphael Lemkin’s Thought,” Jewish Quarterly Review 112.2 (2022): 139–63. Luck, Edward C. Cultural Genocide and the Protection of Cultural Heritage. Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Trust, 2020. Mamdani, Mahmood. “Responsibility to Protect or Right to Punish?” in Critical Perspectives on the Responsibility to Protect, pp. 135–49. London: Routledge, 2011. Marcin, Marcinko. “The Concept of Genocide in the Trials of Nazi Criminals Before the Polish Supreme National Tribunal,” in Bergsmo Morten, Wui Ling Cheah, Ping Yi, eds., Historical Origins of International Criminal Law, pp. 639–96. Brussels: Torkel Opsahl Academic EPublisher, 2014. Mazower, Mark. No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. Meiches, Benjamin. The Politics of Annihilation: A Genealogy of Genocide. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. Meiches Benjamin, and Jeff Benvenuto, “Guest Editorial: Between Hagiography and Wounded Attachment: Raphaël Lemkin and the Study of Genocide,” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 13.1 (2019): 2–9. Moses, A. Dirk. The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Moses, A. Dirk, Sarah Federman, Scott Straus, Max Pensky, and Douglas Irvin-Erickson, “Round Table (Full Symposium): What’s Raphaël Lemkin Got to do with Genocide Studies? A Conversation on Gender, Culture, Economics, Categorical Violence, and Colonization with Professors Sarah Federman, Dirk Moses, Max Pensky, and Scott Straus,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 16.2 (2022): 37–67. Müller, Dietmar. “Zu den Anfägen des Völkerstrafrechts: Vespasian Pella und Raphaël Lemkin,” in Dietmar Müller and Adamantios Skordos, eds., Leipziger Zugänge zur Rech- tlichen, Politischen und Kulturellen Verflechtungsgeschichte Ostmitteleuropas, pp. 27–40. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2015. Mundorff, Kurt. A Cultural Interpretation of the Genocide Convention. London: Routledge, 2020. Naimark, Norman. Genocide: A World History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Nersessian, David L. “The Contours of Genocidal Intent: Troubling Jurisprudence from the International Criminal Tribunals,” Texas International Law Journal 37 (2002): 231. Neumann, Franz. Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933–1944. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942. Normand, Roger, and Sarah Zaidi. Human Rights at the UN: The Political History of Universal Justice. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008. O’Brien, Melanie. “‘Don’t Kill Them, Let’s Choose Them as Wives’: The Development of the Crimes of Forced Marriage, Sexual Slavery and Enforced Prostitution in International Criminal Law,” The International Journal of Human Rights 20:3 (2016): 386–406. O’Brien, Melanie. “Obstacles to International Criminal Accountability for Forced Marriage in Mass Atrocities,” CHGS Conference Proceedings 58 (2017). Available from https://​commons​.clarku​.edu/​chgs​_papers/​58. Perels, Joachim. “Fast vergessen: Franz L. Neumanns Beitrag zur Konzipierung der Nürnberger Prozesse. Eine Erinnerung aus Anlaß seines 100 Geburtstages,” Kritische Justiz 34 (2001): 117–12. Porter, Thomas Earl. “In Defense of Peace: Aron Trainin’s Contributions to International Jurisprudence,” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 13.1: (2019), 98–112. Rabinbach, Anson. “The Challenge of the Unprecedented: Raphael Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide,” Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 4 (2005): 397–420. “Raphael Lemkin: Crusader,” New York Times, August 31, 1959, p. 20.

26  Handbook of genocide studies Rosenberg, Sheri P. “Genocide Is a Process, Not an Event,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 7.1 (2012): 16–23. Saidel, Rochelle G., and Sonja Maria Hedgepeth. Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust. Boston, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2010. Sands, Philippe. East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity. New York: Vintage Books, 2017. Schabas, William. Genocide in International Law: The Crime of Crimes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Schaller, Dominik J., and Jürgen Zimmerer. The Origins of Genocide: Raphael Lemkin as a Historian of Mass Violence. London: Routledge, 2013. Simangan, Dahlia. “Is the Philippine ‘War on Drugs’ an Act of Genocide?” Journal of Genocide Research 20.1 (2018): 68–89. Smith, Roger W. “State Power and Genocidal Intent: On the Uses of Genocide in the Twentieth Century,” in Studies in Comparative Genocide, pp. 3–14. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. Spencer, Philip. Genocide since 1945. London: Routledge, 2012. Stiller, Alexa. “Semantics of Extermination. The Use of the New Term of Genocide in the Nuremberg Trials and the Genesis of a Master Narrative,” in Kim Priemel and Alexa Stiller, eds., Reassessing the Nuremberg Military Tribunals: Transitional Justice, Trial Narratives, and Historiography, pp. 104–33. New York: Berghahn Books, 2012. Stiller, Alexa. “The Mass Murder of the European Jews and the Concept of ‘Genocide’ in the Nuremberg Trials: Reassessing Raphaël Lemkin’s Impact,” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 13.1 (2019): 144–72. Straus, Scott. “Darfur and the Genocide Debate,” Foreign Affairs 84 (2005): 123. Szawłowski, Ryszard. “Raphael Lemkin’s Life Journey. From Creative Legal Scholar and Well-to-do Lawyer until 1939 to Pinnacle of International Achievements during the Forti,” PISM Series 1 (2010): 31–57. Szawłowski, Ryszard. “Rafał Lemkin Warszawski Adwokat (1934–1939),” Palestra (September 2014): 288–311, 200. Theriault, Henry. “Against the Grain: Critical Reflections on the State and Future of Genocide Scholarship,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 7.1 (2012): 123–44. Traĭnin, Aron. Ugolovnaia interventsiia. Moscow: OGIZ, 1935. Traĭnin, Aron. 1945. Hitlerite Responsibility under Criminal Law. Trans. Andrey Yanuaryevich Vyshinsky and Andrew Rothstein. London: Hutchinson & Co., Ltd. Timm, Annette F. “The Costs of Silencing Holocaust Victims: Why We Must Add Sexual Violence to Our Definition of Genocide,” in Andrea Graziosi and Frank E. Sysyn, eds., Genocide: The Power and Problems of a Concept, pp. 44–86. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022. van der Wilt, H.G., J. Vervliet, G.K. Sluiter, and J.Th.M. Houwink ten Cate. The Genocide Convention: The Legacy of 60 Years. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Van Schaack, Beth. “The Crime of Political Genocide: Repairing the Genocide Convention’s Blind Spot,” in Mark Lattimer, ed., Genocide and Human Rights, pp. 145–77. London: Routledge, 2007. Vyshinsky, Andrey Y. “Foreword,” in Aron Traĭnin, Criminal Intervention: The Movement for the Unification of the Criminal Law of the Capitalist Countries, pp. 3–7. Moscow: OGIZ, 1935. Waites, Matthew. “Genocide and Global Queer Politics,” Journal of Genocide Research 20.1 (2018): 44–67. Waxman, Zoë. Women in the Holocaust: A Feminist History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Weiss-Wendt, Anton. The Soviet Union and the Gutting of the UN Genocide Convention. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2017. Weiss-Wendt, Anton. A Rhetorical Crime: Genocide in the Geopolitical Discourse of the Cold War. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018. Weiss-Wendt, Anton. “Somebody Else’s Crime: The Drafting of the Genocide Convention as a Cold War Battle, 1946–48,” in Andrea Graziosi and Frank E. Sysyn, eds., Genocide: The Power and Problems of a Concept, pp. 22–43. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022. Xu, Cheng. “Draining the Sea: Counterinsurgency as an Instrument of Genocide,” Genocide Studies International 12.1 (2018): 6–25.

PART II GENOCIDE STUDIES: HISTORY AND IDEAS

2. Genocide of Indigenous peoples in North America1 David MacDonald

The genocides (plural) of Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island (North America) is an enormous topic, encompassing cases over five centuries, and comprising many methods of group targeting and destruction. While a short handbook chapter provides insufficient space to fully engage in a properly systematized analysis of all genocides here, it is possible to outline three overlapping approaches to the topic. The first approach is to use the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention as a means of ordering and presenting historical and contemporary information. Thus, one can focus on genocidal massacres, forced marches, starvation policies, and the spread of disease, which bring about high death rates. Genocide can occur either directly or as a consequence of various types of conditions which bring about the destruction of groups in whole or in part. The second approach is on geographic concentration and forcible assimilation, forms of genocide which can also result in death, but are often slower and more difficult to interpret through mainstream understandings of genocide. The flaws with the Convention, and the narrowness of how genocide is defined and interpreted lead to a third perspective. This involves expanding our understanding of genocide away from mainstream temporally compressed, conflict-based understandings, towards a larger definition of identity and groupness that encompasses longer-term relations of destruction and institutionalized violence. The third approach is to see colonialism (focused primarily on resource extraction by European powers) and settler colonialism (taking of Indigenous lands by Europeans to create new states with European-style institutions and settler majorities) as inherently genocidal. The focus is not on periods of violence but on the whole experience of colonization as constitutive of ongoing “genocidal relations of destruction,” which, as Barta (1987: 238–9) noted some time ago, decouples genocide from “the emphasis on policy and intention which brought it into being.” Instead, the focus is on genocidal outcomes, whether or not intentionality can be proven. I take space in this chapter to consider all three forms of genocide, starting with the more mainstream understandings of genocide (focus two), then related forms of concentration and assimilation (focus three), then concluding with focus one, which is sometimes expressed as efforts to decolonize the study of genocide. In this short chapter I attempt to engage with both the United Nations Genocide Convention (UNGC) and other perspectives. In my 2019 book I have described these two approaches as legalist and pluralist (MacDonald 2019). The pluralist lens helps make the argument that the colonization of the Americas was from a sociological perspective, genocidal in its events, its structures, and in its continued legacies. The need to 1 My thanks to Michael Cachagee, Claudette Chevrier, Murray Sinclair, Paulette Regan, Sheryl Lightfoot, David Simon, Andrew Woolford, Adam Muller, Alex Hinton, Paul Joffe, Geoff Ostler, Jeremy Patzer, Joyce Green, Emily Grafton, and Kiera Ladner. The research and writing of this chapter are made possible by SSHRCC Insight Grants 430201 and 430413.

28

Genocide of Indigenous peoples in North America  29 decolonize the definition of genocide can run on parallel rails with the quest to carefully document genocidal events, processes, people, and institutions (as understood through the UNGC), while also weaving them into a larger settler colonial context. Genocide scholarship in the Americas is growing as an academic field of study, involving historians, political scientists, sociologists, jurists, criminologists, and many others. This will not slow down, and the next phase for many is official recognition of genocide by national and subnational governments, as well as professional bodies.

GENOCIDE AS FOUNDATIONAL Hinton (2012: 13) outlines a hierarchy in mainstream genocide studies, with the Holocaust as prototypical, then joined by Armenia and Rwanda to constitute a “triad,” followed by a series of “core” genocides of the twentieth century, a “second circle,” a “periphery,” and “forgotten genocides.” The “core” are deliberately planned mass murders on a grand scale, in the context of an international or interstate war, with an obviously racist perpetrator deploying a full range of bureaucratic and military instruments to affect the annihilation of a relatively defenceless minority population, who have been actively and publicly demonized through propaganda. Indigenous genocides in settler colonial states (i.e. the “forgotten” ones) do not always fit this standard view of what “real” genocide should look like. Often, there are no international or localized wars taking place, and settler populations, animated by racist sentiments, may play a larger role in genocide than state institutions. The targets can be numerous groups who are artificially lumped together because a colonizer, usually European, has assumed control of an expanse of territory that encompasses them all. Genocide can consist of a perpetrator literally creating-by-identifying a group that never existed before, then seeking its destruction at the very same time. In part because of the more complex and longue durée aspects of colonial genocide, the terms is often refuted by settler states and settlers, including some mainstream historians. In Canada, for example, the well-known historian of the Indian Residential Schools, J.R. Miller (2021) sees a “fixation” on genocide as “pointless and distracting,” acting only to impede reconciliation between settlers and Indigenous peoples because settlers don’t believe this “incendiary term” is “justified historically and tune out.” This view is not uncommon, and scholarship on Indigenous genocide faces willful blindness, what some have called “colonial unknowing,” and an “epistemology of ignorance” (Vimalassery et al. 2016). Nehiyaw legal theorist Tamara Starblanket observes in the case of Canada that the biggest challenge to achieving genocide recognition is “the oppressive dominating and dehumanizing framework internationally and domestically infested with the rubric of denial” (2018: 29). Michelle Stanley (Coharie Indian Tribe) has similarly observed that “Indigenous genocide is largely denied, erased, relegated to the distant past, or presented as inevitable.” Denial constitutes, she adds, “another mechanism of the violence of settler colonialism, set in motion centuries ago” (2022: 131). In the US context, Dunbar-Ortiz has critiqued the inbuilt process of genocide denial, part of the larger matrix of settler colonialism, which “has entailed torture, terror, sexual abuse, massacres, systematic military occupations, removals of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral territories, and removals of Indigenous children to military-like boarding schools” (2014: 9). This grim logic is not a surprise – and conforms to Stanton’s (2016) analysis that denial comprises the last stage of genocide, and which also includes blaming the victims for their plight.

30  Handbook of genocide studies Amongst many Indigenous peoples, settler activists and communities of like-minded academics, the violation of the UNGC is a starting point for analysis. Mi’kmaq legal theorist Pam Palmater, for example, asserts that “what happened to our people on Turtle Island fits every criteria of the international definition of genocide” (2015: 118). Tamara Starblanket (Nehiyaw from Ahtahkakoop First Nation) provides a detailed account of how Canada’s Indian Residential Schools violated the Genocide Convention in her 2018 book-length study (2018: 29). That colonization entails genocide is often internalized as a ground floor or a grundnorm. This is related to an understanding of how settler colonialism operates, as per Patrick Wolfe, according to a “logic of elimination,” which “strives for the dissolution of native societies,” and “erects a new colonial society on the expropriated land base” (2006).

THE GENOCIDAL HISTORY OF NORTH AMERICA Indigenous genocides in what is now North America took place over five centuries. While there is no dispute that mass depopulation accompanied the conquest and colonization of the Americas, precise before and after figures are difficult to determine, and are normally expressed in ranges. Thornton’s figure of 7 million Indigenous peoples north of Mexico (i.e. around 5 million in what is now the United States and 2 million in what is now Canada) is seen to be the most reliable mid-range estimate (Smith 2017). Other estimates (see Cave 2008: 273) express a death toll of between 90 and 95 percent across the Americas, with high pre-conquest estimates at around 112 million. Demographic collapse was due to the spread of disease by European invaders, often unintentionally, but sometimes deliberately, as well as massacre, enslavement, bounties, destruction of traditional cities, villages, and communities, destruction of food supplies, theft of traditional lands, forced movement, concentration in inhospitable territories, physical, mental, and sexual abuse on a massive scale, and the general and intended destruction of Indigenous civilizations as a whole. There is a scholarly consensus that deliberate infection constituted only a fraction of the overall death rate. However, the cruel mistreatment of Indigenous peoples, their starvation, impoverishment, forced removal, massacre, concentration, and elimination of food supplies all increased their susceptibility to disease. As Ostler observes, epidemics often “emerged at a later stage when processes of colonization were well underway” (2015: 3). Initial discussions of genocide in North America often begin with early examples of deliberate violence and cruelty. For example, one can look to the 1637 war against the Pequot by the New England Pilgrims. Hundreds were killed, while others were sold into slavery, and the Pequot nation was effectively extirpated. This has achieved the status of an original American sin, but has been followed by others, including King Philip’s War (1675–78) where the Narragansett peoples in what is now Rhode Island were massacred, while a further genocidal action was undertaken by Jeffrey Amherst with the dispensing of smallpox-infesting blankets and handkerchiefs to Delaware Indigenous peoples in 1763 (Ostler 2015: 6–7). The idea of European bounties on Indigenous scalps was most likely started by the French in the 1680s, but the early English colonists developed the process more systematically, fixing rates per scalp which paid higher for men, and less for women and children, including infants. The price for the scalp of an adult man was four times the annual income of a New England farmer, and by the eighteenth century Cave observes: “Scalp taking became a popular and lucrative business venture” throughout the English and later British colonies (2008: 284).

Genocide of Indigenous peoples in North America  31 In the Atlantic states and provinces, Mi’kmaq peoples were deliberately killed by the British colonial authorities, as documented through the work of Mi’kmaq historian Daniel Paul. Paul focuses attention on genocidal practices during the eighteenth century, related to starvation, the forced spread of disease, and bounties placed by the British on Indigenous “scalps.” Paul offers a pre-conquest Mi’kmaq population of about 200,000 minimum. Paul documents the intent on the part of the British to exterminate Indigenous peoples, and their use of highly charged racist language. Paul has notably sought to have genocide recognized, and makes good use of his documentation to have statues and monuments devoted to genocidal colonizers removed (2000: 45, 108, 165, 182).

THE UNITED STATES Policies diverged to some extent after the American revolutionary war (1775–83), when the 13 colonies sought expansion into as much of the remainder of the continent as they could occupy. Kakel parallels the “war for America” with the “war against Indian America,” making the argument that this was a sum zero game. For the United States to exist, settlers had to take Indigenous lands and convert them into settler space, processes that involved “deliberate US government policies of conquest, expansion, and colonization” which were genocidal (2011: 183). However, as Ostler recalls, genocide was not necessarily the first policy option, with the preferred option being that Indigenous nations sign treaties to willingly relinquish their lands. Genocide occurred often after nations refuse to cede their lands to join the growing American “civilization.” They are then subject to wars of extermination, which were not limited in scope because Indigenous peoples were not considered to be “civilized” and thus were not worthy of the protections that would extend to European combatants and civilians. The 1779 war against the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) would be designed, as George Washington put it, to bring about “the total destruction and devastation of their settlements.” Ostler calculates that from the late 1770s to 1815: “U.S. forces (including state militias) burned hundreds of Indian towns in New York, western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Tennessee, western Virginia, the western Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and western Florida” (Ostler 2015: 8–9). While the initial goals of US forces were not to exterminate everyone, Ostler highlights a willingness to use “overwhelming violence against Indian nations it judged to be acting contrary to American interests (self-defined to be just).” The lack of wholesale slaughter in many cases, Ostler argues, was less about US restraint and more about their lack of capacity relative to Indigenous peoples, who often had superior military intelligence and knowledge of their own territory. What made the US unstoppable over time was their relentless pursuit of land and power. The growing size of the US in terms of wealth, military power, and young men able to fight gave settler officials the upper hand (Ostler 2015: 11). Following on from the revolutionary period was a phase commonly known as “removal,” between 1815 and 1840. The 1830 Indian Removal Act forced all Indigenous peoples east of the Mississippi River to move to “Indian Territory” in what is now Kansas and Oklahoma. This had a massive depopulating effect on many of the largest nations in the region. The Cherokee, Choctaw, and Creek each lost close to 20 percent of their populations during the 1830s, through exposure, disease, starvation, demoralization – from the deportations as well as a result of being held in internment camps (Ostler 2015: 9–11). In the well-known “Trail of

32  Handbook of genocide studies Tears,” in 1838, some 17,000 Cherokee were rounded up at bayonet point by US troops and forced to walk up to 1,500 miles. The purpose of this campaign was to clear land for white settlement east of the Mississippi River. In a similar manner the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole were herded from Oklahoma between 1836 and 1837, with death rates ranging between 15 and 50 percent. The Navajo also suffered a similar fate (roughly 30 percent killed) during “The Long Walk” from 1864 to 1968 (Stiffarm and Lane 1992: 33–4). Genocide again took place during the California Gold Rush, and other efforts to expand further into the west taking over “Indian country.” In 1851, California governor John McDougal declared that if Indigenous nations did not submit to treaties, war would result which would exterminate many tribes (Ostler 2015: 11). Madley notes several periods of demographic decline in what is now California. First, from 1769 to 1846, Spanish, Russian, and Mexican colonization resulted in Indigenous decline from around 310,000 to 150,000 people. A second dramatic fall took place from 1846 to 1870, when the Indigenous population plunged to around 30,000, falling still further to 16,277 by 1880. He charts a series of different genocidal processes, including disease, starvation, willful destruction of food supplies, dislocation, abduction, enslavement, forced confinement on reserves, mass rape, homicides, warfare, and massacres. Indigenous peoples were killed directly and also died as a result of malnutrition, violence, while lower rates of fertility also took a toll. Federal, state, and local vigilante violence all led to the near-annihilation of California Indigenous populations (2016: 14). Madley makes full use of the UNGC by first proving the intent of the perpetrators to bring about genocide, and second, providing examples of how all five acts of genocide were committed in the late nineteenth century. This includes details of “more than 370 massacres, as well as in hundreds of smaller killings, individual homicides, and executions” (2016: 350–1). California stands as a clear example of traditional UNGC-defined genocide, to the extent that governor Gavin Newsom even labeled it as such in his official apology to the state’s Indigenous peoples in 2019 (Blakemore 2019). Genocide in other states is more contested. In reference to Texas, historians tend to prefer more nuanced terms such as “ethnic cleansing,” which Clayton freely deploys in his scholarship (2005). This comes at the expense of using genocide, and he deploys a definition similar to Holocaust exclusivists, to whit: “intentional killing of nearly all of a racial, religious, or cultural group.” Since Texas history “fails to rise” to this level, genocide does not apply, although he later concedes that Texas Rangers and other paramilitary groups were often “impossible to control” and “committed the occasional genocidal act” as “an extension of the Texas political system” (7). This seems to be splitting hairs, and contradicts earlier work by Thornton, who saw in both Texas and California examples of “blatant genocide of American Indians by non-Indians during certain historic periods” (1990: 107). Genocides in California and Texas roughly correspond temporally with the so-called Indian Wars from the 1860s, epitomized by US Army campaigns to take over the American west. Some have used the term “genocidal massacres” to describe policies of using massive overwhelming violence to demoralize and secure the compliance of Indigenous nations (Ostler 2015: 29). Frontier massacres were not uncommon as settlers sought lands for settlement at the expense of Indigenous peoples. This process, Kakel notes, “involved the deliberate and calculated destruction of villages and food supplies, as part of strategies of ‘total war’ against Indian combatant and noncombatant populations” (2011: 188). Well known were genocidal massacres such as the 1864 mass murder of the Cheyenne and Arapaho at Sand Creek by the Third Colorado Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, commanded by John Chivington (Bartrop 2007:

Genocide of Indigenous peoples in North America  33 186). Of importance to Thornton are the ways genocide was disguised to make it difficult to document. Many examples of genocide were described as war by settlers such as the so-called “battle at Wounded Knee Creek” in South Dakota, where several hundred Sioux people were massacred (1990: 107). Eliminating traditional food and game supplies also decimated populations. In the 1870s, General Phillip Sheridan killed at least 60 million buffalo, in a successful effort to deny the Cheyenne, Lakota, and other people the basis for their centuries old subsistence. Sitting Bull described the killings as “a cold wind … across the prairie, a death wind for my people” (Stiffarm and Lane 1992: 33). Overall, Thornton notes the challenges of estimating the numbers dead from genocide, since many of the killings were neither recorded “nor as well publicized as warfare” (1990: 49). This signals the problem of hierarchy in Indigenous history, where those nations who fit the criteria of the UNGC receive more acknowledgement than those who don’t. In a recent edited collection on genocide denial, Stanley highlights problems of selective Indigenous genocide acknowledgement and denial, where strict criteria filter out some genocides from others. Thus, California genocides are recognized due to the overt presence of intentionality, which means other genocides may not be recognized. Whether the Indigenous nation is recognized officially by the federal government may also impact on whether genocide is recognized, She notes that the lack of “nationhood” may impact whether the group is seen to be a victim of genocide or something else. Since 1980, 18 tribal nations have achieved federal recognition while 34 have been denied. It is also the case that tribal nations which are numerically larger today receive more attention than smaller nations: “the forced removals of the Cherokee Nation and the Navajo Nation (the two largest federally recognized tribal nations in the United States) are commonly referenced, while the forced removals of the smaller Muscogee (Creek), Chickasaw, Seminole, Choctaw Nations, and other tribal nations in southeastern regions and elsewhere are not” (Stanley 2022: 134–7). Until recently the concentration of Indigenous peoples was not generally seen as genocidal, in part due to a bias against seeing non-Holocaust-like forms of group destruction as genocide. Ostler puts it: “Boarding schools have also been characterized as institutions of outright genocide on the grounds that the mortality rate (from disease) within boarding schools was very high and that boarding schools took children from Native groups and in this way prevented births within them” (2015: 15). The boarding school system was a means of assimilating Indigenous children. While such schools were supposedly established for the “altruistic” motive of bringing Indigenous peoples closer to white society, such schools often stripped Indigenous children of their languages and cultures, while ill-preparing them to enter a xenophobic and racialized society (Nagel 1997: 115). By 1899 there were 148 boarding and 225 day schools funded by the government, with over 22,000 students, representing some 10 percent of the total Indigenous population at the time (Wilson 1998: 315–18). Adams’s Education for Extinction (1995) notes that the rates of sexual and physical abuse, as well as death, were inordinately high. As Lisa Poupart advanced: “it is estimated that 60 to 70 percent of all students attending the boarding schools were beaten or raped … children were also forced to administer assaults upon one another … For many, violence became a way of life as entire childhoods were spent in the boarding schools” (2003: 92). Following on from the example of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (about which more later), the US Secretary of the Interior announced the “Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative” in mid-2021 to investigate abuses and deaths in the network of 365 Indian boarding schools in the US, covering the period 1819 to the late 1970s (Evans 2021).

34  Handbook of genocide studies Also similar to Canada, Indigenous children were removed from their families and communities, and sent out for adoption so as to reduce Indigenous population numbers. Margaret Jacobs estimates that somewhere between 25 to 35 percent of Indigenous children were removed from their families by the end of the 1960s, a result of the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ (BIA) Indian Adoption Project of 1958, which ran on parallel lines with termination and relocation policies. Rather than keep families together, BIA bureaucrats were convinced that Indigenous parents were “inherently and irreparably unfit,” and they acted accordingly. Her comparative work draws in Canada, the US, and Australia as part of a global process of taking Indigenous children from their families (2014: 6–9).

GENOCIDE IN CANADA Overall, the focus on the US has been on massacres and warfare, something which is less common in Canada. The Canadian examples, in contrast, center on examples of slow violence and death, and are more geared towards examples of forcible transfer and aggressive assimilation. Claims of genocide in what is now Canada normally revolve around several events of historical significance, some of short and others of long duration, and some occurring simultaneously with other events. The so-called Indian wars were not a feature of colonization in Canada, although Indigenous peoples were deliberately targeted with death by the state. Nehiyaw political scientist Kiera Ladner notes: “Sure, we did not have a Canadian army running roughshod into Wounded Knee and murdering everyone in sight.” But there were other forms of genocide, and despite “variations in the degree of atrocity or the means used to perpetrate atrocity, the history of Canada is not so different after all. Indigenous peoples were completely decimated; they were extirpated from their lands, and their territories were occupied by other nations” (2014: 228). The use of starvation tactics, especially after 1878, included the killing of the bison as well as the withholding of rations to force Plains Indigenous peoples to surrender their lands and move onto reserves, what has been termed “clearing the plains.” Disease epidemics of the nineteenth century were also significant in reducing Indigenous populations. Daschuk documents how Canada’s first government under John A. Macdonald targeted food, clothing, shelter, and tool sources such as the buffalo, and used the denial of rations and targeted starvation as techniques for herding nations onto small reservations by the 1880s. Once on these reserves, most people were largely dependent on and subject to government control (2013: 164, 183). Disease such as tuberculosis ran rampant through Indigenous communities, deliberately weakened by loss of lands and food supplies. From 1880 to 1885 the Indigenous populations of the prairie provinces dropped by about a third. As Daschuk puts it concerning Macdonald and his government: “the Canadian attack on indigenous communities, institutions and individuals was undertaken to provide the settler population with the absolute minimum hindrance to its development. Recent serious and measured scholarship has begun to interpret the state-sponsored attack on indigenous communities as a form of genocide” (2015: 44–5). The forced removal of Indigenous children into state-church run Indian Residential Schools (IRS) also began during this period. The state deliberately targeted children with “status” – legally recognized membership in Indigenous First Nations which had signed treaties with the British and later Canadian crown. The clearest example of genocide (in the form of forcible

Genocide of Indigenous peoples in North America  35 transfer) stems from the network of these schools, which operated from the 1880s to 1970s, with the last of the schools closing in 1996. The founders of the IRS system possessed the requisite specific intent to “destroy, in whole or in part, an identifiable group of persons” (MacDonald 2019). From 1920 until the 1950s, attendance for status children aged five to sixteen at some form of state-funded schooling was compulsory. At least 150,000 children passed through residential schools. There were different situations in Quebec, where compulsory attendance occurred later, and for Métis children, who attended residential schools but were not forced to do so under federal legislation. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) operated from 2009 to 2015 to investigate the full history and ongoing legacies of the IRS system. Genocide was initially not widely discussed, but the TRC later functioned as a platform for the articulation of genocide claims and created space for prominent leaders to discuss the issue. In May 2015, the TRC’s Summary Final Report concluded that the state was guilty of “cultural genocide,” noting Canada’s goals to “eliminate Aboriginal governments; ignore Aboriginal rights; terminate the Treaties; and, through a process of assimilation, cause Aboriginal peoples to cease to exist as distinct legal, social, cultural, religious, and racial entities in Canada” (2015: 1). The TRC also confirmed 3,201 deaths from 1867 to 2000, divided into two main categories: those who were identified as IRS students and those who were not (2015: 95–6). The location of mass graves on the sites of former residential schools in 2021 suggests that the TRC death tolls were likely fairly conservative. We are now at the beginning of compiling the evidence of mass deaths in the schools, as many First Nations actively search these lands using ground penetrating radar. Former TRC Chair Murray Sinclair has recently articulated the belief that the death toll of Indigenous children may reach 25,000 (CBC Radio 2021). Consonant with the IRS system (and similar to processes south of the border) was the forced removal of Indigenous children during the 1950s, 1960s, and after, what has been called the Sixties Scoop. Estimates of the number of children taken are around 20,000, with the vast majority, some 70–90 percent, sent to non-Indigenous guardians (Vowel 2016: 183). While this process was controlled by the provinces rather than the federal government, it also seems like forcible transfer. Some scholars, such as Alston-O’Connor, advance the argument that this was also genocide (2010). Similarly, Episkenew supports a claim of genocide, seeing in government policies “the intent to destroy Indigenous nations.” In her analysis, it is naive to impute benign motives to the actions of the provincial governments in these matters (2009: 67). Liebenberg and Ungar in their work on Indigenous children in the child welfare system put it this way: “this second mass removal of children from their homes and communities paralleled the residential school experience and perpetuated the genocide of aboriginal people” (2010: 296). Genocide has also been identified in the disproportionate victimization of Indigenous women and girls, who are 12 times more likely to go missing or be killed than other women in Canada. In 2019, the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls delivered its final report. The Inquiry addressed long-standing concerns that the Inquiry makes the case for considering “the application of genocide in both legal and in social terms, and as it persists today.” In a separate report devoted to genocide, they identify a “race-based genocide of Indigenous Peoples, including First Nations, Inuit and Métis, which especially targets women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people.” Genocide is deployed widely to encompass the history of colonization and its ongoing practices and processes, including contemporary problems of “increased rates of violence, death, and suicide in Indigenous populations.” As

36  Handbook of genocide studies with other genocide scholars devoted to exploring Indigenous genocide, the Inquiry identified “the unique nature of ‘colonial genocide,’ which is unlike the traditional understanding of genocide derived from the ‘Holocaust prototype’” (2019a: 1). “The Holocaust model, on which the definition is based, provides a limited prototype of genocide as time-intensive, mass murder, which is calculated, coordinated within a nation-state, and well-planned by authoritarian leaders espousing ideological worldviews” (2019a: 9). Indeed, the Inquiry echoes much of the work I have discussed already, that Indigenous genocide comprises both lethal and non-lethal elements, which include “slow death,” such as cultural destruction, forced assimilation, cultural absorption, violence and coercion. It could be fast but also a “slow-moving process,” taking place “insidiously and over centuries,” with processes of destruction “implemented gradually and intermittently, using varied tactics against distinct Indigenous communities” (2019a: 7–9). The Inquiry is an example of how both forms of genocide definition can be woven together to produce a cohesive and overarching framework for analysis. The Inquiry was successful in the sense that the Prime Minister actually acknowledged that his own country was guilty of ongoing genocide, an unprecedented admission.

EXPANDING THE DEFINITION AND DECOLONIZING GENOCIDE STUDIES That settler colonialism continues is obvious, as well as the fact that Indigenous peoples remain subject to settler legal, economic, political, social, and cultural systems into which they are expected to assimilate. How to understand and explore this larger context in an academically rigorous way is the subject of ongoing contestation. Here sociologists discuss the entire process of colonialization as constructing structures and processes of ongoing and unremitting genocide. This does not mean that the structures and processes remain the same, and there is a certain level of dynamism which accompanies all of the changes which take place in settler societies. Wakeham (2021: 2–3) usefully puts it that the “slower, attritional modes of destruction” have over the long term helped destroy Indigenous ways of life, using persistent structures which “accumulate and compound” over time, which facilitates settler state denial of “relations between cause and effect,” while at the same time naturalizing Indigenous “‘disappearance’ through racist narratives of inherent ‘Indigenous deficiency,’ and thereby sustain fictions of liberal democratic benevolence.” Some scholars such as Tasha Hubbard, Matt Wildcat, and Andrew Woolford have recently explored ways in which the field of genocide studies can be at least partially decolonized, and how the concept of genocide, so rooted in western law, can be expanded to better engage with Indigenous relationships with land, waters, plants, animals, and Indigenous experiences of continued colonization. In particular, they challenge western ideas of group identity and boundary formation, expanding the circle of identity to include traditional territory, flora, and fauna. When does genocide begin and end? For those studying Indigenous genocide, the continued presence of the settler state before, during, and after genocidal episodes makes determining this difficult. Temporally and geographically, genocidal policies are unevenly and inconsistently applied to Indigenous peoples. This is due to patterns and processes of how settler colonialism occurs. Some regions may be of less geostrategic interest to the settler than others, and as the state develops, the government may have less control over some areas

Genocide of Indigenous peoples in North America  37 further away from established urban areas. As Woolford notes, this can mean there are periods of overt genocidal aggression in specific territories, but there can also be times and places of colonial weakness, allowing for successful Indigenous resistance (Woolford, 2015: 3–4). Genocide scholars should consider how colonial genocides of Indigenous peoples present particular circumstances that necessitate seeing genocide differently. Without being essentialist, it may be generative to observe that many Indigenous perspectives privilege an interrelated, holistic approach to humans and their environment, an environment that is very much alive, moving, expanding, and changing. For Leroy Little Bear (Blackfoot), many Indigenous paradigms stress “ideas of constant flux, all existence consisting of energy waves/spirit, all things being animate, all existence being interrelated, creation/existence having to be renewed, space/place as an important referent, and language, songs, stories, and ceremonies as repositories for the knowledge that arise[s] out of these paradigms” (2009: 8). Similarly, in her overview of Indigenous settler history, Indigenous scholar Lisa Monchalin has focused on the sacred links between human beings and everything around them, including plants, rocks, and the land, which are “equal, interconnected, mutually dependent, and embracing a sacred relationship with this world” (2016: 27). Western views are often seen as being fundamentally different, even incommensurable with Indigenous realities. Nêhiyaw-Saulteaux Knowledge Keeper Blair Stonechild has observed that, for many Indigenous peoples, “all entities – whether animal, plant, reptile, insect, and even what others consider to be inanimate objects – have life, energy, and supernal significance.” They are all therefore “purposeful beings in their own right” (2016: 3). Without a sense of how a group understands its identity in relation to its own group members and to those not of the group, it becomes impossible to engage with whether the group was actually targeted for destruction. Land and the environment, for example, are often seen as not just supporting group life but also being “key components of group life” (Woolford 2009: 89). Enrique Salmon (2000: 1327) refers to this as “kin centric” ecology, an interdependent view of the world where everything is a relative of Indigenous peoples, who form a community: “Indigenous cultural models of nature include humans as one aspect of the complexity of life.” Indigenous conceptions of group identity may also include close familial interrelationships with non-human animals, like the buffalo in Nêhiyaw filmmaker Tasha Hubbard’s seminal studies of buffalo communities and buffalo genocide, which include both academic writing and films. Hubbard sees aspects of genocide in the near-extinction of the buffalo, which deprived Plains people of their traditional food, clothing, and shelter, and hastened their deaths. Hubbard goes further and, in applying an Indigenous epistemological framework, believes that animals who share their lives with humans can be members of the group, even though they are of a different species. Hubbard reflects on her teachings that “the buffalo people take care of us and teach us how to live, much like a benevolent grandparent” (2014: 294, 302). Further, “Indigenous peoples saw the buffalo as their protector, who took a position on the front line in the genocidal war against Indigenous peoples” (301). Hubbard’s contribution offers tremendous scope for reflection on how a group can include non-humans and how genocide can involve the targeting of relationships between humans and non-humans. Her work also suggests that genocide can involve targeting the relations among different groups and that these relationships may also perform a central role in group identity. More recent is Christi Belcourt’s artistic engagements which center the buffalo in group identity, and recognize them as their own “nation.” Like Hubbard, Belcourt sees the annihilation of the buffalo as genocide, one precipitated by the colonizer’s “hatred of Indigenous peoples” (2018: 113–14).

38  Handbook of genocide studies If we understand groups as being inseparable from animals, plants, water, and air, group identity can never be reducible to a small number of European-defined characteristics like languages, famous heroes and battles, novels, and religious practices. Given the multidimensional nature of some Indigenous identities, methods of committing genocide may also be more complex, concentrating their attention on areas that are not traditional targets of genocide in western literature. Thus, Nêhiyaw scholar Matt Wildcat articulates a view of genocide focused on the destruction of the “webs of relationships and kinship” among groups of Indigenous peoples (2015). The destruction of these “inter-Indigenous bonds” was a strategy of the settler state to weaken Indigenous identities and resistance to colonial expansion, yet does not form part of the UNGC. There have been recent efforts to consider the many forms of Indigenous collective identities. Robert Innes’s work on kinship, which is based on research with his own Cowessess First Nation, stresses pluralism in group membership and a lack of rigid boundaries demarcating inside and outside. In his nation, membership was largely based on kinship practices. People could marry into the group, and membership was largely understood by who was related to whom, in a “fluid, flexible, and inclusive” arrangement, with group membership designed in part to “strengthen social, economic, and military alliances with other bands of similar cultural origins.” As such, by the 1870s, Innes’s nation was, in fact, “multicultural” in the sense of being based on kinship relations and including members of five Indigenous groups (2013: 7). Innes problematizes the idea that there were clear and distinct tribal boundaries, and he notes that many bands did not aim to create a single culture base, but practiced multiple cultures in the same group (2012: 123). A key point here is that settler colonial explorers, traders, and officials have tended to stress the differences between Indigenous peoples, while downplaying the commonalities, connections, and intermarriage between families and groups as well as the fluidity and interchanges of group identities. Instead, we should understand the dynamic forms of identity within and between groups as part of identity.

CONCLUSIONS Indigenous contributions stress the utility of the UNGC in a practical sense, while also noting that it can function as a discriminatory filter only allowing certain events and actions to be considered as genocide. The larger critique is that the Convention creates a hierarchy of human (and non-human) suffering that does not do justice to the larger contexts of European conquest and colonization. As well, genocide with its predominant focus on victimization as the primary identity of targeted groups can miss much about the strength and resilience of Indigenous peoples, and their ability to mitigate the impacts of colonization through military intelligence, skill on the battlefield, the ability to retreat when necessary, and the arts of negotiation (Ostler 2015: 8). Stanley cautions her fellow Indigenous peoples not to “reduce our histories to the catastrophes visited upon us, leaving us only as victims” (2022: 131). The point is similarly echoed by Dunbar-Ortiz who highlights survival. In her telling of Indigenous history, “this survival is dynamic, not passive. Surviving genocide, by whatever means, is resistance” (2014: xiii). Nehiyaw scholar Joyce Green thus promotes Indigenous self-determination as the best means of resisting genocide, “a response to the profound violence of colonialism, are anti-genocidal” (2014: 2). It is important not to see Indigenous peoples as victims who lack agency, what

Genocide of Indigenous peoples in North America  39 is sometimes called a deprivation narrative. This has analogues to other groups who have been targeted with genocide, and yet seek to contextualize these negative experiences within a larger history of community life and strength. These Indigenous writings bring to mind Yaffa Eliach’s well-known reflection in 1979 of her people’s history. She argued against focusing on “only the calamities of Jewish history,” rendering it little more than “a record of futility and frustration.” Instead, she advocated balancing the Holocaust with a focus on the “rich Jewish intellectual and communal activities,” marked by “activism and creativity.” It is important to keep the history and ongoing legacies of genocide in balance. Genocide scholarship in the Americas is growing as an academic field of study, involving historians, political scientists, sociologists, jurists, criminologists, and many others. This will not slow down, and the next phase for many is official recognition of genocide by national and subnational governments, as well as professional bodies.

WORKS CITED Adams, David. Education for Extinction. Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1995. Alston-O’Connor, Emily. “The Sixties Scoop: Implications for Social Workers and Social Work Education.” Critical Social Work 11.1 (2010): 53–61. Barta, Tony. “Relations of Genocide,” in Isidor Wallimann and Michael N. Dobkowski, eds., Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Cases Studies of Mass Death. New York: Greenwood, 1987. Bartrop, Paul. “Episodes from the Genocide of the Native Americans,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 2.2 (2007): 237–52. Belcourt, Christi. “The Revolution Has Begun,” In Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, eds., Toward What Justice? Describing Diverse Dreams of Justice in Education, pp. 113–21. New York: Routledge, 2018. Blakemore, Erin. “California Slaughtered 16,000 Native Americans” (June 19, 2019). https://​www​ .history​.com/​news/​native​-american​-genocide​-california​-apology. Accessed May 23, 2022. Cave, Alfred A. “Genocide in the Americas,” in Dan Stone, ed., The Historiography of Genocide, pp. 273–95. New York: Palgrave, 2008. CBC Radio. “Unreserved with Rosanna Deerchild: Reconciliation Reality Check with Murray Sinclair” (September 25, 2021). https://​www​.cbc​.ca/​listen/​live​-radio/​1​-105​-unreserved/​clip/​15868493​ -reconciliation​-reality​-check​-murray​-sinclair. Accessed May 23, 2022. Clayton Anderson, Gary. The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820–1875. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005. Daschuk, James. Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life. Regina: University of Regina Press, 2013. Daschuk, James. “Acknowledging Patriarch’s Failures Will Help Canada Mature as a Nation,” Canadian Issues (Summer 2015). Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States Boston: Beacon, 2014. Eliach, Yaffa. “The Holocaust as Obligation and Excuse,” Sh’ma 9.18 (1979): 102. Episkenew, Jo-Ann. Taking Back Our Spirits: Indigenous Literature, Public Policy and Healing. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2009. Evans, Noelle. “A Federal Probe into Indian Boarding School Gravesites,” National Public Radio (July 11, 2021). https://​www​.npr​.org/​2021/​07/​11/​1013772743/​indian​-boarding​-school​-gravesites​-federal​ -investigation. Accessed May 23, 2022. Green, Joyce Audry. Indivisible: Indigenous Human Rights. Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2014. Hinton, Alexander. “Critical Genocide Studies,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 7.1 (2012): 4–5. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1093/​acrefore/​9780199329175​.013​.3 Hubbard, Tasha. “‘Kill, Skin, and Sell’: Buffalo Genocide,” in Alexander Laban Hinton, Andrew Woolford, and Jeff Benvenuto, eds., Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America, pp. 292–305. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.

40  Handbook of genocide studies Innes, Robert. “Multicultural Bands on the Northern Plains and the Notion of Tribal History,” in Robin Brownlie and Valerie Korinek, eds., Finding a Way to the Heart. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2012. Innes, Robert. Elder Brother and the Law of the People. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2013. Ebook. Jacobs, Margaret. A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. Kakel, Carroll. The American West and the Nazi East. New York: Palgrave, 2011. Ladner, Kiera. “Political Genocide,” in Alexander Laban Hinton, Andrew Woolford, and Jeff Benvenuto, eds., Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America, p. 228. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Liebenberg, Linda, and Michael Ungar. Resilience in Action. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. Little Bear, Leroy. Naturalizing Indigenous Knowledge. Saskatoon: University of Saskatchewan Aboriginal Education Research Centre, 2009. MacDonald, David. The Sleeping Giant Awakens: Genocide, Indian Residential Schools, and the Challenge of Conciliation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. Madley, Benjamin. An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873. New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2016. Miller, James. “Genocide, Macdonald and Canadian History,” National Post (January 8, 2021). https://​ nationalpost​.com/​opinion/​j​-r​-miller​-genocide​-macdonald​-and​-canadian​-history. Accessed May 23, 2022. Monchalin, Lisa. The Colonial Problem. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. Nagel, John. American Indian Ethnic Renewal: Red Power and the Resurgence of Identity and Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. A Legal Analysis of Genocide. Ottawa: Government of Canada, 2019a. National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report Vol 1a. Ottawa: Government of Canada, 2019b. http://​www​.loc​.gov/​item/​ lcwaN0028038/​. Accessed May 23, 2022. Ostler, Jeffrey. “Genocide and American Indian History,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedias, American History, 2015. Palmater, Pamela. Indigenous Nationhood: Empowering Grassroots Citizens. Halifax, NS: Fernwood, 2015. Paul, Daniel. We Were Not the Savages. Halifax, NS: Fernwood, 2000. Poupart, Lisa. “The Familiar Face of Genocide,” Hypatia 18.2 (2003): 86–100. Salmon, Enrique. “Kincentric Ecology: Indigenous Perceptions of the Human-Nature Relationship,” Ecological Applications 10.5 (2000): 1327–32. Smith, David. “Counting the Dead: Estimating the Loss of Life in the Indigenous Holocaust” (2017). https://​www​.se​.edu/​native​-american/​wp​-content/​uploads/​sites/​49/​2019/​09/​A​-NAS​-2017​-Proceedings​ -Smith​.pdf. Accessed May 23, 2022. Stanley, Michelle. “Beyond Erasure: Indigenous Genocide Denial and Settler Colonialism,” in John Cox, Amal Khoury, and Sarah Minslow, eds., Denial: The Final Stage of Genocide. London: Routledge, 2022. Ebook. Stanton, Gregory. “The Ten Stages of Genocide,” Genocidewatch (2016). http://​genocidewatch​.net/​ genocide​-2/​8​-stages​-of​-genocide/​. Accessed May 23, 2022. Starblanket, Tamara. Suffer the Little Children: Genocide, Indigenous Nations and the Canadian State. Atlanta, GA: Clarity, 2018. Stiffarm, Lenore A., and Phil Lane. “The Demography of Native North America: A Question of American Indian Survival,” in M.A. Jaimes, ed., The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance, pp. 23–53. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992. Stonechild, Blair. The Knowledge Seeker: Embracing Indigenous Spirituality. Regina: University of Regina Press, 2016. Thornton, Russell. American Indian Holocaust and Survival. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990.

Genocide of Indigenous peoples in North America  41 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final. Winnipeg: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015. Vimalassery, Juliana, Manu Vimalassery, Juliana Hu Pegues, and Alyosha Goldstein, “Introduction: On Colonial Unknowing,” Theory & Event 19.4 (2016). Vowel, Chelsea. Indigenous Writes. Winnipeg: Portage & Main, 2016. Wakeham, Pauline. “The Slow Violence of Settler Colonialism: Genocide, Attrition, and the Long Emergency of Invasion,” Journal of Genocide Research 23.2 (2021): 337–56. Wildcat, Matthew. “Fearing Social and Cultural Death: Genocide and Elimination in Settler Colonial Canada – an Indigenous Perspective,” Journal of Genocide Research 17.4 (2015): 391–409. Wilson, James. The Earth Shall Weep. New York: Grove, 1998. Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research, 8:4 (2006): 387–409. doi: 10.1080/14623520601056240 Woolford, Andrew. “Ontological Destruction: Genocide and Canadian Aboriginal Peoples,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 4.1 (2009): 81–97. Woolford, Andrew. This Benevolent Experiment. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2015.

3. Destroying to replace: reflections on motive forces behind civilian-driven violence in settler genocides of Indigenous peoples1 Mohamed Adhikari

In an attempt to distill the essence of settler colonialism, Patrick Wolfe, a leading theorist of the phenomenon emphasized that: “Territoriality is settler colonialism’s irreducible element”; and wanting to emphasize its dual character of being socially both highly destructive and creative, he elaborated that: “Settler colonialism destroys to replace” (Wolfe 2006: 388). Little more than 250 years earlier a powerful player on the settler colonial stage itself expressed the same principles—in more forthright and forceful terms. Major general Edward Braddock, Commander-in-chief of British forces in North America at the start of the French and Indian War (1754–63), emphatically asserted that “no savage shall inherit the land” (Barr 2006: 29). With these words Braddock flatly rejected a proposed alliance against the French by Delaware chief Shingas, in return for being allowed to retain their land in the upper Ohio Valley. The general paid heavily for his arrogance: the Delawares and several other Native American peoples in the area sided with the French instead. This allied force, consisting overwhelmingly of Indians, routed Braddock’s army and killed him early on in the war. Although uttered by a likely sojourner rather than a settler, Braddock’s rebuff goes to the very heart of all settler colonial projects, particularly those that were part of Western global expansion since the fifteenth century. “No savage shall inherit the land!” would have served as the perfect rallying cry for settlers around the world and throughout history, especially those prepared to commit violence against Indigenous peoples to secure personal control of acreage, or more expansively, the territory they claimed as their new homeland. Not only does Braddock’s pronouncement emphasize the centrality of exclusive control of land and homeland in perpetuity to settler projects, but also the racialized contempt with which Indigenous peoples were held. These sentiments, that echoed across virtually all settler frontiers through six centuries of Western expansion and conquest, were foundational to the violence visited upon Indigenous peoples who got in the way of settler invasions. And as anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose reminds us: “to get in the way of settler colonization, all the native has to do is stay at home” (Wolfe 2006: 388). Both Braddock and Bird Rose point to the basic reason why settler colonialism tends to be so much more destructive of Indigenous societies and so much more prone to exterminatory violence than other forms of imperialism—it is a winner-takes-all contest focused on the expropriation of Indigenous land for the building of new societies, and ultimately on the elimination of an Indigenous presence from the settler homeland. Two overarching questions

It is with gratitude that I acknowledge funding from the National Research Foundation and from the University of Cape Town’s University Research Committee, without which this research would not have been possible. 1

42

Destroying to replace  43 that arise are: what is the relationship between settler colonialism and genocide? And what concomitant factors facilitated genocidal outcomes in settler colonial situations?

SETTLER COLONIALISM AND GENOCIDE As destructive as settler colonialism has been of Indigenous society, it is not inherently genocidal as some scholars have claimed (Docker 2008: 97; Finzsch 2008: 253). There are simply too many examples of settler conquests not resulting in genocide for such a view to be tenable. And in parts of the world where settler violence did radicalize into genocide, it did not do so consistently across time and space as, for example, Canadian, South African, Australian, and American experiences attest. I do, however, regard ethnic cleansing to be inherent to settler colonialism as gaining unfettered control of their newly claimed homeland and eliminating an Indigenous presence from it, is foundational to the phenomenon. “Elimination of the native,” to borrow Patrick Wolfe’s phrase, is not equivalent to their extermination, though, because elimination can be achieved through a wide variety of means other than killing. Displacement or expulsion beyond settler boundaries is one, while segregation into reserves on land that settlers do not want is another. Assimilation of remnant Indigenous populations into settler society, which usually occurs during the post-frontier phase, is a third, even though it runs counter to more extreme racist precepts that Indigenes do not have the capacity to adapt to “civilized” life and that miscegenation results in racial degeneration. A wide range of symbolic and discursive strategies of elimination have also been used to disavow an Indigenous presence in the settler homeland, or loosen their claim to the land (Veracini 2010: 35–50). Most settler genocides of Indigenous peoples experience two distinct stages. The first is a slaughterous frontier phase in which a struggle for control of the land and access to resources escalates to exterminatory levels. Because of an undue focus on killing in many analyses, the frontier phase is often seen as the genocide and the continued social destruction that occurred subsequently is neglected. The post-frontier phase, though usually less overtly violent, continues the process of razing Indigenous ways of life and identities by subjecting survivors to a wide range of eliminatory practices such as cultural suppression, expulsion, segregation, child confiscation, assimilation, and of course, continued violence, to mention a few of the more obvious means whereby settler regimes have sought to obliterate Indigenous societies or transfer Indigenous individuals into the settler collective. Settler obsession with the elimination of the native has been propelled by the inescapable reality that the very existence of the Indigene challenges the legitimacy of the settler establishment. Even when Indigenous society has been completely eliminated the specter of the Indigene still haunts the settler psyche. This explains continued symbolic disavowal of Indigenous claims long after autonomous native societies have ceased to exist in settler homelands, as well as ongoing attempts at Indigenization of the settler. Indeed, the near universal use of the term “settler” to describe colonists who have migrated to foreign lands to found new political orders is clearly misleading. Such colonists are more accurately referred to as invaders or conquerors as one can only legitimately settle empty or unclaimed land (Johnston and Lawson 2000: 364–6). Except for a number of smaller islands, such as the Azores, Madeira, and the Cape Verde Archipelago, there have been few areas of the world that were genuinely uninhabited and that could sustain a settler colony. The pervasive use of “settler” in this euphemistic way reflects vanquishers’ power to name themselves—

44  Handbook of genocide studies and to a large extent, those they have conquered as the widespread use of terms such as Indian in the Americas, Aborigine in Australia, and Bushman in southern Africa indicate. Besides conquerors being able to propagate mythologies about the founding of their societies and largely control interpretations of its history, victors also have considerable power to shut down or contain counter-narratives, especially of subjugated Indigenous peoples. The narrative that successful settler projects across the globe have propagated can be summarized as: “We made the land productive through hard work and enterprise, and the land, in turn, remade us. We are as good as Indigenous.” This forms the sub-text of the remarkably similar national myths of settler societies such as the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Israel, and apartheid South Africa. It is not unusual for these settler mythologies to go so far as to claim some form of providential status as well—of having a “manifest destiny” or being a “chosen people.” Settler myths generally admit to destroying to replace, though the destruction is greatly underplayed, and the replacement glorified. Denying, disavowing, obfuscating, and eliding the foundational violence of colonial conquest and subsequent human rights abuses are integral to settler societies’ perceptions of themselves as legitimate and moral, and how they present themselves to the world. The use of “settler” to describe themselves is one such strategy of disavowal, and an important one at that. Despite these observations, I will nonetheless stick with “settler” because a term such as “settler-invader” is clumsy; “invader” is so ideologically and emotionally loaded as to impede communication; and trying to invent a new term is likely to cause confusion and invite controversy. Settlerism’s ability to mask its foundational violence is powerful; unmasking its subterfuge using its own terminology has its own efficacy.

MARKETS, COMMODIFICATION, PRIVATIZATION A fundamental circumstance tipping the balance decidedly toward exterminatory violence in Western settler expansion was that access to globalizing markets and an attendant desire among colonists to accumulate wealth rapidly, encouraged the intensive exploitation of natural resources for short-term gain. This spurred a resort to annihilatory practices to eliminate obstacles or threats to the colonial project or personal ambitions, be they plants, animals, or Indigenous peoples. This impulse to quick riches, though present from the very start of European colonization—very evident, for example, in the conquest of the Canary Islands in the century before Columbus’s celebrated voyages to the Americas—intensified markedly with European industrialization and the rapid growth of world markets from the late eighteenth century onward. Settler rapacity, excited to fever pitch by opportunities for profiteering during economic booms, and often igniting land and mineral rushes, invariably proved deadly for Indigenous communities. Ensuing busts and settler retreats, which were most noticeable along pastoral frontiers, seldom resulted in much of a reprieve for Indigenous communities as in many cases severe or irreparable damage had already been inflicted on their societies. Also, frustration, fear, and desperation on the part of settlers often incited callous behavior toward Indigenes. After setbacks it was usually only a matter of time before renewed settler expansion and attacks on Indigenous peoples occurred. The degree to which settler economies were integrated into the globalizing economy, together with levels of demand for the commodities they produced, had a marked influence on the probability and levels of exterminatory violence perpetrated. It was these commercial

Destroying to replace  45 markets’ ability to absorb enormous quantities of merchandise and create the anticipation of substantial wealth for producers that spurred immigration to colonies, and that propelled farmers, prospectors, speculators, fortune hunters, mercenaries, and other opportunists into head-on collisions with Indigenous peoples. This was what stoked ruthlessly exploitative attitudes to land and labor, a sense of settler entitlement to resources, and a determination that nothing would stand in their way of prosperity. Thus, with the largely subsistence grazing economy of the Cape Colony, it took Dutch-speaking farmers the better part of two centuries to effectively exterminate San hunter-gatherer bands south of the Orange River; in the case of Queensland where the pastoral industry was much more productive and well integrated into the industrializing British economy, it took about half a century for settlers to annihilate the aboriginal societies of a much larger territory; and in California where history’s greatest gold rush expedited the settler invasion, it took a mere two and a half decades for colonists to overrun and destroy Indigenous societies (Adhikari 2010; R. Evans 2004; Madley 2016). A related development of profound significance for Indigenous societies was that settler incursions brought with them the privatization and commodification of natural resources, especially land. This defining characteristic of capitalist economies undermined Indigenous societies fundamentally. Systems of land tenure based on personal entitlement, fixed boundaries, registration of title deeds, as well as commerce in, market valuation, and transfer of land were foreign to Indigenous world views and effectively excluded them from legal ownership of vital resources. Commodification of land—the reduction of landed property to ciphers that allowed transactions at remote distances—generally meant the permanent loss of their most basic means of subsistence and that settler claims were backed by the legal apparatus, and ultimately, the armed might of the colonial, as well as the metropolitan state. Their ability to claim legal title to natural resources in many instances gave settlers cause for going on the offensive against Indigenous peoples and, no doubt, reason for justifying such violence to themselves. Economic and political imperatives invariably resulted in the colonial and metropolitan states condoning settler land confiscations, even in cases where both tried to restrain settler aggression. Although different legal regimes applied to different colonies, and conditions varied considerably across the globe, it is nonetheless possible to generalize broadly about the role of colonial law in spurring Indigenous dispossession and processes of elimination in settler societies. The law, which was instrumental to the functioning of the market economy, in general operated in ways that sanctioned the use of both civilian-driven and state-led mass violence against Indigenes. Importantly, it confirmed settler claims to the land, consolidated their control of Indigenous labor, and after the closing of the frontier, facilitated the implementation of eliminatory practices such as assimilation, expulsion, segregation, and violence. Significantly, the absence of the rule of law on the frontier—or to borrow Julie Evans’s phrase, “where lawlessness is the law” (J. Evans 2009: 2)—favored settlers who had superior firepower and were generally able to confiscate land and resources as well as perpetrate violence against Indigenes with a fair degree of impunity. The absence of the rule of law also aided in the suspension of conventions, scruples, and moral codes that might otherwise have tempered settler violence. Much of this violence was committed with the knowledge and connivance of the colonial state or elements within it. And when the rule of law was eventually implemented with the closing of the frontier, it was heavily biased in favor of settlers. Not only were Indigenes routinely and explicitly disadvantaged by the legal system, settlers also had significant sway over its

46  Handbook of genocide studies institutions and day-to-day operation. As Lisa Ford pithily put it, “Settler violence, then, was clothed in law” (Ford 2010: 85). The nature of settler economic activity fundamentally shaped the contours of violence along particular frontiers. The three main land-based forms of settler economic activity—crop growing, pastoralism, and mining—all had genocidal implications for Indigenous societies, though the underlying dynamic of destruction of each differed. Their overlapping impacts, which were regularly exacerbated by commercial and other economic activities such as logging, fur trapping, and fishing, created zones of intensified destruction. Globally, commercial stock farming was the major contributor to land confiscations, and thus bloodshed, on settler frontiers. The crucial pattern at play here was the rapid occupation of sweeping expanses of land by commercial stock farmers, especially when entering new territory. As suppliers to world markets, these farmers were generally incentivized to produce as much as possible, whatever the environmental and human cost, particularly during economic booms. Their incursions into Indigenous territories tended to be rapid, extremely damaging to the ecosystem, and uncompromising in dealing with Indigenous resistance. On frontiers settler stock-keepers generally were not bound to ranches, and even where they had formal claim to landholdings, were usually mobile, engaged in an ongoing search for pasture and water, particularly in drier environments. Vast stretches of countryside were treated as communal grazing or open range, with dry spells and drought accelerating their dispersal beyond the fringes of colonial settlement. Colonial crop growing had a different genocidal dynamic to that of commercial stock farming. Agriculturalists were much more sedentary, marking out longer term occupancy of land with houses and barns, fences and hedges, and tended to expand incrementally and contiguously, leaving little or no space between landholdings. Crop farming was locally more destructive of the natural environment and Indigenous societies because it occupied land more comprehensively and permanently, and supported far denser populations. It, however, spread more slowly than herding which often left large spaces and significant ecological niches intact between landholdings. This allowed for a degree of Indigenous subsistence, usually combined with stock pilferage. Distance from ports and markets was far less of a concern to stock farmers than their crop-growing counterparts as in most cases their produce was capable of carrying themselves to desired destinations. On the other hand, the discovery of minerals—most dramatically in the case of gold rushes—could extend frontiers precipitately. Explosive increases in population and the extreme ecological damage that came with mining operations spelled doom for Indigenous communities in and around prospecting areas, but sometimes also far beyond as the impacts of mining rippled outwards. The attendant growth in farming, especially of stock, in response to the increased demand for foodstuffs was usually an important ingredient in the devastation of Indigenous societies far beyond the prospecting centers themselves. This was evident in the numerous gold rushes experienced in Queensland, and most spectacularly in California. Newly built infrastructure such as roads, rail, and port facilities to support the mining economy often opened up new areas for settlement previously considered too remote or hazardous. Even where mineral deposits were soon exhausted, the impact of mining operations on Indigenous communities was generally permanent. While the global market for commodities could be seen as the ultimate driver of genocidal violence in settler colonies, Indigenous resistance intense enough to threaten settler livelihoods was the most significant proximate factor providing it with impetus. It was when the colonial

Destroying to replace  47 economy suffered materially or the settler project itself was seen to be under threat that social aversion to Indigenes radicalized into racial hatred, and tensions escalated into annihilatory rages within settler establishments. Case studies across the globe confirm that where settlers producing commodities for capitalist markets invaded the territories of Indigenous peoples, the global economic system tended to bring together the practices of metropolitan and colonial governments, the interests of providers of capital and consumers of commodities, as well as the agency of colonial actors ranging from governors to graziers in remote outposts, in ways that frequently fostered exterminatory violence toward those peoples whose territories they overran.

TECHNOLOGY, DEMOGRAPHY, DISEASE It was particularly asymmetries in military technologies that enabled settler economic penetration of Indigenous lands, even under hostile conditions. While colonial states were often weak and had little control over frontier regions, and settlers were in many instances dispersed in small numbers across extensive landscapes, their access to superior weapons allowed them to concentrate their fire-power and thus impose their will on Indigenous groups at particular times and places. This in effect ensured at least an incremental, but at times also explosive, extension of settler control over Indigenous territories. It also meant that proportionately small clusters of armed colonists could confiscate extensive areas of land, massacre large groups of Indigenes with virtual impunity, and defend strategic locales such as water resources, transport nodes, or settlements with relative ease. The settler vigilante gang was the most common embodiment of this advantage and an institution to be found across all modern settler frontiers. Military advantages also gave colonial states the means to intimidate or force targeted Indigenous groups to do their bidding, such as sign detrimental treaties, relocate, or collaborate against resisters. Divide and rule strategies, as was classically the case in German South West Africa under the governorship of Theodor Leutwein, were often extremely effective at exploiting rivalries between Indigenous communities. Demographic and technological imbalances played a significant role in the genocidal destruction of Indigenous societies. Most obviously, the sheer weight of numbers and resources that settler colonial projects were able to muster, especially from the late eighteenth century onward, would in time, and with continued immigration, overwhelm Indigenous societies, which by their very nature were relatively small in scale and simple in structure. The access that frontier communities had to world markets, their metropoles, and settled parts of colonies provided them with the resources, technologies, institutions, and ideologies that made mass violence toward Indigenes all the easier to perpetrate, and extermination all the more comfortable to contemplate. From the start of the industrial era ever larger and faster ships with which to settle and conquer; ever more accurate and rapid firing guns with which to kill; horses, wagons, and later, trains with which to transport goods; centralized political institutions through which to organize dispossession, mass violence, and exploitation; and an ever growing array of tools and machines, the sophistication of which Indigenous societies could not hope to match, were among the more obvious advantages frontier settler societies derived from continued contact with their Western wellsprings. Less tangibly, such contact helped reinforce the ideological underpinnings of violence perpetrated against Indigenous peoples. Cultural and religious chauvinism, ideas of European

48  Handbook of genocide studies racial superiority and entitlement, as well as jingoistic imperialism, were fortified by continued settler contact with their European and colonial hubs, and played important parts in promoting violence toward Indigenes. Where colonies gained complete independence from metropoles, even when through war and revolution, settler communities nonetheless continued to derive great sustenance from their metropolitan connections. The communicable diseases interlopers carried, to which Indigenes had low immunity, compounded the demographic disparities greatly. Even those societies with low population densities were not spared the devastating repercussions of virgin soil epidemics. Disease generally wreaked a toll greater than direct killing, and sometimes Indigenous communities were severely compromised by infections even before direct contact with newcomers was made. The impact of contagious diseases was commensurately greater in those societies suffering land confiscation, malnutrition, mass violence, forced labor, and the psychological traumas attendant upon invasion. Colonization and contagion fed off each other, a deadly pairing that buttressed racist theorizing about the supposed inherent biological weaknesses of the “savage” and their inevitable demise (Alchon 2003; McGregor 1997). Severely skewed gender ratios, a condition almost inherent to settler frontiers, contributed to excessive sexual violence toward Indigenous women. The more remote the frontier, the greater gender disparities tended to be, with ratios between settler men and women being as high as 10:1 on some frontiers. What is more, frontiersmen tended to be a hard, uncompromising, and rough lot who behaved in sexually predatory ways toward Indigenous women. Assault, abduction, rape, and sexual slavery of Indigenous women by settler men, who stereotyped their victims as barely human, were common on many frontiers. Sexual abuse led to the rampant spread of venereal infections which were sometimes so prevalent that they seriously disrupted the biological reproduction of Indigenous communities. Not only were infected women often unable to conceive or bear fetuses to term, but sexually transmitted diseases in themselves sometimes killed large proportions of populations. Settler men usually knowingly infected native women, some believing that they could rid themselves of the disease by passing it on to their victims (Smith 2005: ch. 1; Watson 2009: 181–2). The nature of Indigenous society itself often contributed to genocidal outcomes when faced with an aggressive settler presence. Whereas Indigenous ways of life were in many ways resilient and well adapted to their environments, they were vulnerable when under sustained attack or when faced with prolonged disruption of economic activity. Few Indigenous societies produced economic surpluses large enough to sustain standing armies, conduct systematic warfare, or withstand prolonged, organized hostilities. Because of their generally smaller scale social structures and relative lack of social differentiation, any substantial degree of organized violence against Indigenous societies took on the aspect of total war. Also, enslavement, child confiscation, and sexual violence to any appreciable extent assumed genocidal proportions at localized levels. This was especially true of hunter-gatherer societies, but also very much the case with pastoralists such as the Herero and agro-pastoralists such as Indigenous Canarians. That there was likely to be a blurring of distinctions between warriors and non-combatants in Indigenous society, and that settler violence was often indiscriminate rather than targeted at fighters or adult males, made this doubly so. It was not unusual for entire Indigenous communities to be held responsible for the actions of a few individuals, for one community to pay for the acts of another, and for collective punishments in the form of massacres and random killings to be meted out to people known to be innocent. All of this meant that women and children usually found themselves in the frontline of attack and thus extremely vulnerable to being

Destroying to replace  49 slaughtered or captured. Though not proof, such indiscriminate killing is a strong indicator of genocidal intent as victims were killed for who they were rather than for anything they may have done.A common pattern in settler mass violence toward Indigenous communities was to slay the men, take those women not killed as domestic and sexual drudges, and to value children as sufficiently malleable to be trained for a life of servitude. Being taken captive, which in most cases meant serving as forced labor, was integral to the genocidal process because it was in effect as destructive of Indigenous society as killing those members. Being taken captive was potentially worse than being killed because survivors continued to suffer physical and sexual abuse, psychological trauma, while buttressing the power of their captors. Smaller scale social structures, traditional rivalries, and flat political hierarchies made it difficult for Indigenous fighting forces to amalgamate against common enemies. Again, this was especially true of hunter-gatherer societies where individual bands were able to generate no more than a handful of fighters.2

IDEOLOGY An obvious question to ask of perpetrating groups is what shared frames of reference, ideas, and values animated their communally held animosities toward Indigenes? Or more pointedly, what were the common ideological foundations of civilian-driven violence against Indigenes in settler colonial situations? It would be no exaggeration to claim that ideology was the glue that held imperial ventures together and that helped solidify settler societies. Ideology— commonly understood as a coherent system of ideas, values, beliefs, assumptions, and other attitudinal and normative components shared by a social group and that informs their understanding of the world—is of fundamental importance for its influence on how individuals, leaders, communities, institutions, and state structures frame goals, perceive threats, devise solutions to problems, and deploy violence. Shared ideas and frameworks of meaning among perpetrators are critical in first making exterminatory violence imaginable, and then actionable. Ideologies play a central role in genocide, as perpetrators do not kill or seek to harm targeted social groups mindlessly. They kill for a reason or a set of reasons, and at the very least with intentions they justify to themselves, and that cast victims as deserving of violence, suffering, or death. Perpetrators of exterminatory violence generally act in groups and usually with the sanction of their broader societies, or sections of it. As such, they share ideas about their motives and the necessity for resorting to final solutions to a perceived social or political problem. Ideologies, moreover, are important enablers of mass violence to the extent that they help perpetrators overcome taboos against taking human life, help mobilize sympathizers to their cause, and provide ready-made justifications for violence. There were two centrally important and related ideological components that were common to settler genocides. The first was settler beliefs about their entitlement to Indigenous land and their right to seize it by force if necessary. In many instances, Indigenous lands were taken by right of conquest, a principle regarded as lawful well into the twentieth century, though with waning legitimacy. While this principle underpinned settler claims to Indigenous land in The observation that the nature of Indigenous society itself contributed to genocidal outcomes in conflict with settlers does not in the least put blame on the victims, nor diminish their agency. It is intended rather to indicate that such struggles were inherently uneven. 2

50  Handbook of genocide studies many instances, there was another powerful ideological factor at play that encouraged settler predaciousness and that they used to justify the violent seizure of Indigenous land. Europe has had a long-standing intellectual tradition of linking agriculture with land ownership and “civilization”; and the idea that individual property rights in land accrued from the improvement of allotments through the application of labor and capital in ways that enhanced their productivity. This principle, usually referred to as the “doctrine of improvement,” found its most famous expression in the writing of John Locke, English philosopher and political theorist (Locke 1689). Half a century before Locke published this work, John Cotton, leading theologian of the Massachusetts Bay colony, exemplified this outlook by insisting that: “In a vacant soyle, hee that taketh possession of it, and bestoweth culture and husbandry upon it, his Right it is” (Corbin 2003: 15). In terms of this deeply rooted conviction, many land-hungry settlers believed that they had a right, even an obligation, to appropriate Indigenous land because they were supposedly able to make better use of it. In 1802 John Quincy Adams, for example, rhetorically asked if “the lordly savage” should be allowed to “forbid the wilderness to bloom like roses … and rise again transformed into the habitations of ease and elegance?” (Weaver 2003: 82). Roughly a century later, Theodore Roosevelt, another vocal advocate of settler entitlement at the expense of Indigenous peoples, furnished the basic reasoning behind such thinking: “The settler and pioneer have at bottom had justice on their side; this great continent could not have been kept as nothing but a game preserve for squalid savages” (Roosevelt 1889: 90). Walter Hixson provides the unspoken corollary to Roosevelt’s premise with his observation that when Indigenes “resisted giving up colonial space ‘justice’ was on the side of military aggression and ethnic cleansing” (Hixson 2013: 70). I would add genocide and extermination to Hixson’s list and note that a great deal of this violence was committed by civilians, both in their individual capacities and in groups organized specifically to perpetrate mass violence against Indigenes. The second ideological component relates to settler assumptions about Indigenous racial inferiority. Western racist thinking that dehumanized Indigenous ways of life as utterly debased was a principal contributor to exterminatory violence. Lockean ideas were most powerfully linked to racist ideologies through assertions that “savages” were incapable of practicing agriculture, or where they did cultivate the land, that they were innately inferior farmers. Settlers were often wilfully blind to the extent or proficiency of Indigenous agriculture. And when Indigenous farmers proved to be skilled enough to compete with white farmers, that acted as a strong spur to violence. It was especially in the case of hunter-gatherers, as in Queensland, California, and the Cape Colony, that Lockean arguments were most effective as justification for expropriation. The lifestyles of foraging communities were perceived as essentially feral and that they thus did not own land but merely inhabited or ranged over it much as animals do. Though modulated by local imperatives, the generalized image of un- or under-utilized land occupied by dangerous, godless savages bereft of morality, reason, or any form of refinement, and importantly, obstructing the advance of “civilization” and economic development, usually underlay settler rationales for both land confiscation and accompanying mass violence. Stereotyped as immune to “civilizing” influences, and their labor unsuited to settler needs, colonists generally regarded Indigenous populations as expendable and often imported laborers from elsewhere—African slaves into the Canary Islands; convicts, Chinese, and Melanesians into Queensland; Chinese and Hispanic workers into California, for example. Hunter-gatherers being thin on the ground

Destroying to replace  51 and living migratory lifestyles, their territories were much more easily imagined as empty, and their habitation of them as temporary, both in the sense that they were not sedentary and that they were imagined as “dying races.” Blanket racial condemnation of “the savage” helped foster indiscriminate violence and collective punishment which easily escalated to exterminatory levels. Settlers across the globe, and very often the colonial establishments that supported them, had little difficulty justifying the killing of Indigenous women and children as well, and did so in remarkably similar fashion, claiming that the women bred bandits, and that children grew up to become enemies. Notorious Californian Indian hunter, H.L. Hall, for example, justified his killing of Native American children by claiming that “a knit [sic] would make a louse.” Similarly, Carl Lumholtz, a Norwegian ethnographer who travelled extensively through Queensland in the early 1880s, recounts that a Queensland farmer found it “severe but necessary” to shoot “all the men he discovered on his run, because they were cattle killers; the women because they gave birth to cattle killers; and the children because they would in time become cattle killers.” Nits-make-lice reasoning was an inexorable part of racist discourse and violence on settler frontiers (Carranco and Beard 1981: 62–3; Lumholtz 1889 [2009]: 347). Although often cast in racial terms and shot through with racist rhetoric, genocidal struggles between settlers and Indigenes were not fundamentally racial in character. They were essentially about incompatible ways of life vying for the same scarce resources, especially the right to occupy particular territories. But racism provided a rationale for dispossessing Indigenes, and their dehumanization made it easier to ignore their suffering, and to exploit, kill, or exterminate them. That irreconcilable economic competition rather than race was at the heart of these conflicts is deftly demonstrated by Edward Cavanagh’s study of how the Griqua, an Indigenous, mainly Khoikhoi-speaking, group to the north of the Cape Colony, exterminated aboriginal San hunter-gatherer bands in the Transorangia region. The Griqua successfully turned from subsistence to commercial pastoralism in the 1810s and 1820s as a result of market opportunities opened up by the British occupation of the Cape Colony and became settlers in their own right with their occupation of the Transorangia region. It is no surprise that the Griqua turned into as enthusiastic and deadly slaughterers of San as European colonists who were in the process of exterminating San hunter-gatherer bands in the Cape Colony itself. Significantly, Willem Barend, a citizen of the Griqua state of Philippolis, some decades before Hall and Lumholtz aired their comments, in authentic settler style, expressed his determination to exterminate all San as ‘the children grow up to mischief [of cattle rustling] and the women breed them” (Cavanagh 2015: 88–107, 103 for quotation). A generalization I feel one can make with some degree of confidence about the mindset of death-dealing colonists in settler colonial situations is that they have by-and-large felt that their actions were morally sanctioned. Writing about violence in general, Alan Fiske and Tage Rai in their book Virtuous Violence present a persuasive argument that a great deal, if not most, violence is morally motivated from the perspective of perpetrators, rather than the product of psychological or social pathology, or genetic defect as popularly assumed. They explain that: “Morality is about regulating social relationships and violence is one way to regulate relationships” (Fiske and Rai 2015: xxii, 15–16, 136). Violence and threats of violence were the most important ways in which relationships between colonists and Indigenous peoples were regulated in settler colonial situations, even where ambivalent relations or middle grounds may have existed for substantial periods. Murder, massacre, and abuse of Indigenous peoples in settler colonies were therefore largely the product of what I term righteous violence, where

52  Handbook of genocide studies perpetrators believed themselves to have had some moral or principled justification for using force. Whether killing for God, country, religion, honor, revenge, liberty, some utopian future, to make a fortune, or simply to make a living, righteous violence is particularly pernicious as perpetrators feel little, if any, remorse and are motivated by what they regard to be honorable goals. This is amply reflected in the mythologies and manifest destinies that settler societies have constructed to justify their existence, their acquisition of the land, and treatment of Indigenous peoples.

CONCLUSION In many instances, the destruction of Indigenous societies was not simply the unintended consequence of land alienation and the blind pursuit of selfish economic motives by colonists but a consciously desired outcome integral to that settler collective’s vision of itself, its future, and the nature of humanity. Establishing that genocide was committed in particular cases of settler colonialism is significant as such findings are not only of historical or intellectual interest, but also have legal, ethical, and political implications for contemporary society. Genocide is a crime in international law and while prosecution of perpetrators may no longer be possible, issues of apology, memorialization, recompense, and restitution come to the fore. Contemporary society too often compartmentalizes settler colonialism and its effects on Indigenous peoples as a matter to be consigned to the past, something that ended with the closing of the frontier or the ceasing of massacres. Peter Kulchyski, Canadian Native Studies scholar, reminds us that settler colonialism, together with its panoply of eliminatory practices, continues to exert its baneful influence on the lives of Indigenous survivors: In the minutiae of quotidian life, in the presuppositions of service providers, in the structures of State actions and inactions, in the continuing struggles over land use, in a whole trajectory of policies and plans, the work of the conquest is being completed here and now. (Kulchyski 2005: 3)

Destroying to replace continues for as long as there is an Indigenous presence, whether real or symbolic, and a settler mindset.

WORKS CITED Adhikari, Mohamed. The Anatomy of a South African Genocide: The Extermination of the Cape San Peoples. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2010. Print. Alchon, Suzanne. A Pest in the Land: New World Epidemics in a Global Perspective. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003. Barr, Daniel. “‘The Land Is Ours and Not Yours’: The Western Delawares and the Seven Years War in the Upper Ohio Valley, 1755–1758,” in Daniel Barr, ed., The Boundaries between Us: Natives and Newcomers Along the Frontiers of the Old Northwest Territory, 1750–1850, pp. 25–43. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006. Print. Carranco, Lynwood, and Estle Beard. Genocide and Vendetta: The Round Valley Wars and Northern California. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981. Print. Cavanagh, Edward. “‘We Exterminated Them, and Dr. Philip Gave the Country’: The Griqua People and the Elimination of San from South Africa’s Transorangia Region,” in Mohamed Adhikari, ed., Genocide on Settler Frontiers: When Hunter-Gatherers and Commercial Stock Farmers Clash, pp. 88–107. New York: Berghahn Books, 2015. Print.

Destroying to replace  53 Corbin, Carla. “Vacancy and the Landscape: Cultural Context and Design Response,” Landscape Journal 22.1 (2003): 12–24. Print. Docker, John. “Are Settler Colonies Inherently Genocidal? Rereading Lemkin” in Dirk Moses, ed., Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation and Subaltern Resistance in World History, pp. 81–101. New York: Berghahn Books, 2008. Print. Evans, Julie. “Where Lawlessness Is the Law: The Settler Colonial Frontier as a Space of Violence,” Australian Feminist Law Journal 30.1 (2009): 2–22. Print. Evans, Raymond. “‘Plenty Shoot ’Em’: The Destruction of Aboriginal Societies Along the Queensland Frontier,” in Dirk Moses, ed., Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, pp. 150–73. New York: Berghahn Books. 2004. Print. Finzsch, Norbert. “‘The Aborigines … Were Never Annihilated, and Still They Are Becoming Extinct’: Settler Imperialism and Genocide in Nineteenth-Century America and Australia,” Empire, Colony, Genocide. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 253–70. 2008. Print. Fiske, Alan, and Tage Rai. Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Print. Ford, Lisa. Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788–1836. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Print. Hixson, Walter. American Settler Colonialism: A History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Johnston, Anna, and Alan Lawson. “Settler Colonies,” in Schwarz, Henry and Sangeeta Roy, eds., A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, pp. 364–6. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000. Print. Kulchyski, Peter. Like the Sound of a Drum: Aboriginal Cultural Politics in Denendeh and Nunavut. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2005. Print. Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. London: Awnsham Churchill, 1689. Print. Lumholtz, Carl. Among Cannibals: Account of Four Years Travels in Australia, and Camp Life with the Aborigines of Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009; first published London: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1889. Print. Madley, Benjamin. An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016. Print. McGregor, Russell. Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880–1939. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1997. Roosevelt, Theodore. The Winning of the West: From the Alleghenies to the Mississippi, 1769–1776. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1889. Print. Smith, Andrea. “Sexual Violence as a Tool of Genocide,” in Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, pp. 7–33. Cambridge: South End Press, 2005. Veracini, Lorenzo. Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. London: Routledge, 2010. Print. Watson, Pamela. “Passed Away? The Fate of the Karuwali,” in Genocide and Settler Society, pp. 181–2. New York: Berghahn Books, 2009. Weaver, John. The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650–1900. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003. Print. Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8.4 (2006): 387–409. Print.

4. The historiography of the Armenian Genocide Suren Manukyan

DESCRIBING THE INDESCRIBABLE (1910s AND 1920s) Writing the historiography of the Armenian Genocide, one must first answer a difficult question: where to start from. Although most scholars date this crime to 1915–23, at least two mass murders took place before 1915: the Adana massacres of 1909, when according to various estimates 20,000–30,000 Armenians were killed, and the Hamidian massacres of 1894–96 that took the lives of 200,000 Armenians (Rafter and Walklate 2012). Extensive literature had been created on the subject of the Hamidian massacres: survivors’ memoirs, eyewitness accounts, media testimonies, and academic studies that not only tried to show the complete picture of what happened, but also analyse the causes and estimate the consequences (cataloged in Shirinian 1999). The tradition of delivering a pragmatic and investigative approach to such grievous affairs thus already existed by 1915. However, the deportation and mass extermination of Armenians in 1915 was so widespread and terrible that recording and documenting it seemed utterly meaningless. Many Armenians had an apocalyptic belief that these were the last days of the Armenian people and that there was no one left who was worth writing for. There were objective and subjective grounds for that. The magnitude of violence was incomparably immense. Whole villages were often deported and destroyed, and there was simply no one left who could record the happening. The Ottoman Empire imposed military censorship during the First World War, frequently expelling journalists and officials from enemy countries during the war. There was a prohibition on photography, and the great size cameras of the time made it impossible to take secret photos.1 Nevertheless, after the Armenian Genocide, many memoirs and numerous documents associated with the crime were published (see Totten 1991; Yeghiayan 2015). They were endeavors to pen and interpret the history of a nation’s tragedy. Even in the midst of the disaster, we see both foreign witnesses’ and Armenians’ works that are of fundamental significance for analysing the Armenian Genocide. US Ambassador Henry Morgenthau did not leave the Ottoman Empire during the First World War and was in the epicenter of the disaster. As an ambassador of a neutral country, he even expanded his responsibilities to become an official representing the interests of several other countries involved in the war. He conveyed numerous reports from the network of the

One exception is the collection of photos that was maintained as a result of the activities of Armin Wegner. He was a medical soldier in the Ottoman army. Germany was an ally of Turkey in the First World War, and Wegner’s amateur exercises in capturing photos of deportees were neglected for some time. When he managed to send his photos to Germany informing society about the horrors of the massacres, he was sent off to Turkey, and a large part of the negatives was destroyed. However, he hid some of them in his belt, and now we have tens of photos of Armenian people in the deportation route or Syrian deserts (Rooney 2000, 117–19). 1

54

The historiography of the Armenian Genocide  55 American consuls throughout the Ottoman Empire. This correspondence revealed the true scope of the crime against Armenians. Moreover, being in relatively close intimacy with the leaders of the Ottoman state, he made many futile attempts to stop the annihilation of the Armenians. As the Holocaust scholar Robert Jay Lifton remarked, Morgenthau’s account is a unique and remarkable source because of its view of genocide from the top: “I do not know of any other example of a critical outsider who had regular access to the highest-ranking planners and perpetrators of genocide, even as it was taking place” (Smith 2003, xxv; Suny 2011, 15). Morganthau’s memoirs and reports would later be compiled in Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story (1918). If Morgenthau enjoyed the status of a diplomat from the neutral country, the German theologian Johannes Lepsius was from the allied country. It made his work both more complex and more accessible. He had some protection, as the Germans had a special status in the Ottoman Empire. At the same time, his activities went against the policies of his state and his role in collecting and publishing German documents is unsurpassed. He became the president of the German-Armenian society and operated in Armenia for many years. His book Armenia and Europe: An Indictment (1897) contained numerous testimonies about the Hamidian massacres. In Report on the Situation of the Armenian people in Turkey (1916), he demonstrated the genocidal policy of the Ottoman authorities. His 1919 collection, Germany and Armenia, presented the applications and letters of German ambassadors, consuls and other diplomats, and other German citizens, which revealed the Ottoman atrocity and German indifference. The London-published collection, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 1915–16 by James Bryce (a member of the British House of Lords) and historian Arnold Toynbee, is no less critical (Toynbee 1916). Often referred to as the Blue Book, it incorporates numerous accounts of deportations and massacres of Armenians. It consists of 158 documents, including letters from immediate eyewitnesses, mostly from neutral countries, as well as missionaries, doctors, and scientists from Germany, the Turkish ally. Aram Andonian has a unique place among the Armenian authors. A journalist and editor of several periodicals, he spent all his life collecting orders, which would confirm the premeditation of the Armenian Genocide, letters of survivors, and eyewitnesses. After being arrested and deported with Armenian intellectuals in April 1915, he miraculously escaped and fled to Aleppo. He met with numerous families of Armenian refugees in Aleppo and its environs and registered their memoirs in 1917–18. Andonian bought about 50 copies of documents from an official named Naim bey, the secretary of the Refugee office, containing direct decrees on the killing of Armenians. Later, he donated his archive to the Poghos Nubar Library2 in Paris, where he served as the director.3 He published them partly in his books In Those Dark Days (Andonian 1919) and The Memoirs of Naim bey (Andonian 1920). The special commission proved the authenticity of these documents during the post-war trials of Young Turk leaders (Dadrian and Akçam 2011). They were used both during these trials and the trial of Soghomon 2 The Nubar Library was founded in 1928 by Boghos Nubar Pasha, the son of a former Prime Minister of Egypt in a building erected by him. He was the former head of the Armenian National Delegation that was created to defend Armenian claims during the Paris Peace conference in 1919–20. With 800,000 archival documents, 10,000 photographic prints, 1,400 periodical collections, and 43,000 printed books, the library serves as a great depository of the history of Ottoman Armenians. http://​www​ .bnulibrary​.org/​index​.php/​en/​ 3 In the 1950s, the clergyman Guerguerian copied all these documents, which became one of the most important parts of his archive.

56  Handbook of genocide studies Tehlirian, who had assassinated Mehmed Talaat, the former Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire in Berlin (Bogosian 2015; Yeghiayan 2006). The work of Akçam (2018) would later undermine accusations that these documents were forgeries. Archbishop Mushegh’s 1916 publication Armenian Nightmare (Critical Analyses) represents one of the earliest articulations of the views that later became commonplace in the Armenian Genocide scholarship. He studied the roots of the extermination of the Armenians and argues that the violence was based on Young Turks’ nationalism and Pan-Islamic ideology. He also criticizes all those who link the massacre with the Armenian revolutionary movement, which later became one of the arguments of the Armenian Genocide deniers. He concludes that those who have such a mindset are just distorters of history, in his words, “poisoners of history, false logicians, who, for some reason, confuse the result with the causes” (5–6). As a reporter of the Mshak newspaper, Armenian historian A-Do (Hovhannes Ter-Martirosian) traveled in 1915 throughout Van vilayet controlled by the Russian forces, interviewed eyewitnesses, and created an invaluable work with a description of both the Armenian massacres and Van self-defense battles (A-Do 1917). Another Armenian intellectual Sebuh Akuni (1920), who was among those arrested on April 24, 1915 and one of the few survivors of that caravan, details the deportation. He also collected information on Zeytun, Sebastia, Karin, Kharberd, Baghesh, Akn, Trebizond, and other regions and it was the first effort to systematize the knowledge of carnage coming from different regions of the empire and create a macro picture of the catastrophe. Interestingly, attempts were made not only to understand the happening, but also implement some prime analysis of mistakes and possible solutions. The accounts they left bore the imprint of subjectivity but still enable us to appreciate an inside perspective. These and tens of other testimonies and foreign eyewitness accounts should have further strengthened the readiness of the international community to compensate for the losses suffered by the Armenians. Armenia was the minor ally of the Entente, and the new world, according to the great powers, had to be created on new principles. The near consensus on giving Armenians compensations was articulated by the British Prime Minister Lloyd George and declared that Turkey could no longer rule Armenia (George 1934, 42–4). But as time went on, political practicality overcame moral aspirations. The Great Powers shirked the commitments made to the Armenians and adopted a new configuration that found no place for the Armenian question or for Armenian perspectives. The Sevres treaty, signed between the Allies of the First World War and the Ottoman Empire in 1920, gave partial satisfaction to the Armenian claims – but, crucially, was never ratified or implemented by the states that signed it. The Republic of Armenia, based on Eastern Armenia, was subsequently conquered by the Russian Bolsheviks, who allied with the newly emerging Kemalist movement in Turkey and divided the remnants of Armenia.

ATTEMPTS TO RECONSTRUCT ARMENIAN SOCIETY AND THE ISSUE OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE MEMORY In the 1920s, the fate of the Armenian people was divided into two parts. Eastern Armenia became part of the Soviet Union. Moscow was obsessed with conspiracy theories, and any topic beyond Soviet perceptions – including the Armenian Genocide – was viewed as destructive. Although relations with Turkey were not friendly, the USSR did not want to produce unnecessary tension and troubles with Ankara near its border. The genocide was never dis-

The historiography of the Armenian Genocide  57 cussed. Those who tried to articulate the Turkish injustices against Armenians were reported on as “nationalist elements” and punished. The commemoration of the Armenian Genocide and remembering its victims were unacceptable. As a result, many survivors even destroyed relics that bore the memory of Western Armenia, including written memories and photographs, because of their personal security. Finally, the study of this topic was also prohibited. The only linkage with the abandoned homeland was the settlements’ names, which were abundantly used in fiction literature and urban titles. In times of Armenian capital Yerevan reconstruction in the 1920s, its new districts often got the toponyms of Western Armenian settlements – Malatia, Zeytun, Nor Arabkir, Nor Sebastia, and Cilicia. These were the years of the formation of the Armenian Diaspora. Of course, Armenians had lived outside of historical Armenia before, but only after the Armenian Genocide did the number of Armenians in the Diaspora exceed the number of Armenians living in Armenia. Efforts were made to revive Armenian communities in other countries. Villages and neighborhoods appeared in Mesopotamia, populated by Armenian widows and orphans. Armenians in different parts of the world were trying to institute a new life without relinquishing their Armenian identity. During this period, Armenian refugees and orphans facing economic hardship migrated from country to country, armed with strong willpower and diligence, and gradually adapted to an entirely new environment. The Armenian Genocide, however, became a kind of forgotten history. For about 50 years, the world decided to ignore the legacy of the Armenian Genocide. Armenians were too few, too widely dispersed, and too preoccupied with their own survival to know how to respond (Adalian 2004, 137). Many survivors tried to suppress the past and live only for the present and future. Morcir (“Forget”) was one of the most widespread commands in the 1920s–1960s. Even as the majority of survivors carried the memory of genocide throughout their lives, they would avoid discussion of it in an attempt to keep the trauma from their children. However, some survivors tried to conserve their fading memories even in these conditions. For many it was part of their struggle to bear witness and not allow the perpetrators one more victory. Armenians hosted in various countries exerted efforts to write down memoirs of their lost homeland. They were eclectic memoirs with a prevalence of subjectivity over an objective picture about the horrid happenings of the Armenian Genocide with many flaws and errors, mixing what happened with what they had heard or read. These shortcomings are a part of the memoirist’s genre. Because memoir derives its authenticity and power from lived experience, it can also be an enriching source for historical research in combination with critical evaluation with other sources. Two people tower over it. Karapet Gabikian, a lexicographer and ethnographer miraculously having survived and corresponded in Aleppo with Armenian refugees from Sebastia (Sivas), collected survivors’ unaltered and undistorted stories and wrote The History of the Catastrophe of Armenia Minor and Its Great Capital Sebastia in 1920, a collective memoir of surviving Armenians from the region, collated by an intelligent researcher and very knowledgeable eyewitness. He collected the memoirs when wounds and memories were still fresh. Krikor Guerguerian, an Armenian cleric and genocide survivor, spent his life traveling the world and accumulating evidence to document the atrocities. His very important archive contains key decrees of the Ottoman authorities relating directly to the Armenian Genocide, as well as telegrams, reports of foreigners, memoirs of survivors of the genocide as well as a number of important documents from American, German, and British archives. An impor-

58  Handbook of genocide studies tant part of the archive is collected evidence from the trial in Constantinople in 1919–21 over members of the Unity and Progress (Ittihad-ve-Terakki) party regarding the massacres and deportation of Armenians. In the early 1950s, after the meeting in Cairo with Kurdish notable Mustafa Pasha (Nemrut), who was the presiding judge in that Constantinople Military Tribunal, Krikor Guerguerian recognized that copies of trial documents were stationed in the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem after a long journey through to Marseilles and Manchester. Mustafa Pasha informed him that the Armenian Patriarchate of Istanbul was an intervenor in these trials and made a copy of the various case files. When the Kemal forces took control of the Ottoman Empire, all the documents were sent to Marseilles, then to Manchester and back to Jerusalem. Krikor Guerguerian headed for the Jerusalem Armenian Patriarchate and photographed every document on the Armenian Genocide he could discover there (Akçam n.d.). At the same time, a unique initiative known as houshamadians, or “memory books,” emerged within the communities of local, regional patriotic organizations. They were rather amateur but valuable collections dedicated to one province, town, or village of Western Armenia prepared by survivors’ unions of that settlement that sought to restore and preserve images of lost local communities. Some of these volumes deal with large geographic areas, such as Vahe Haig’s important work on the history of the Armenians in the Ottoman province of Kharpert (Harput or Memuret-ül-Aziz) and the 65 Armenian villages around it (Haig 1959). Other volumes deal with just a single village, such as Karnig Kevorkian’s study of Tchnkush (1970), a village in the Hafik region of the province of Sebastia (see also Der Matossian 2022). The authors of these books are intimately familiar with these towns and villages, and often wrote their works based on memory, but sometimes they used auxiliary printed and handwritten materials available to them. More than a hundred of such notebooks have been published. These volumes generally depicted the daily life of a given village or town. They cannot be considered as academic publications but some photos and narratives are uniquely preserved only in these memory books. They contain ample information on geography, history, demography, traditions, and religious institutions, economic, cultural and social life. Some of these books are written by just one author (e.g., Alboyadjian 1937, 1952, 1961a, 1961b) and others are the result of collaborative effort and are collections of articles from various authors.

THE EPIC SELF-DEFENSE AND ITS NARRATION Austrian writer Franz Werfel’s book on the self-defense of Musa Dagh was more audible in this domain of silence. In 1929, he met Armenian refugee children working in a carpet factory in Damascus, discovered the story of their tragedy, and initiated the study of the history of the Armenian Genocide. He wrote a novel about the people of several Armenian villages, not obeying the orders of deportation to concentration camps, climbing Musa Dagh (Mount Musa) on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, and defending themselves for 53 days, eventually escaping destruction. The book Forty Days of Musa Dagh (1933) was translated into 34 languages. It sold 34,000 copies in the first two weeks after the book was published in the United States in 1934. In Nazi Germany, the book was banned after Turkish pressure yet is was widely read in the Warsaw ghetto. Copies of the novel were said to have been “passed from hand to

The historiography of the Armenian Genocide  59 hand” among the ghetto defenders who likened their situation to that of the Armenians (Auron 2001, 293–309).

THE AWAKENING OF 1965 AND THE REVIVAL OF THE THEME The year 1965 changed many things. The 50th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide was coming, and it could not pass unnoticed. Semi-secret talks started in the Armenian elite at the beginning of the 1960s about the possibility of constructing a monument to the victims of the Armenian Genocide in Yerevan. On July 16, 1964, a group of intellectuals wrote a top-secret letter to the leadership of Soviet Armenia proposing certain events to mark the 50th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. Reasons given were that Armenians abroad would widely mark the 50th anniversary of the genocide. The silence might be “an occasion to use this issue to inflame anti-Soviet sentiments” (National Achives of Armenia, f. 1, l. 44, l. 54, ff. 66–73 (in Russian)). In the same letter, among other events, it was proposed to build a “monument to the victims of the Armenian people in the First World War. The monument would symbolize the rebirth of the Armenian people”. On March 16, 1965, the Soviet Armenian government made the decision to “build a monument to perpetuate the memory of the victims of the 1915 genocide” (National Achives of Armenia, f. 113, l. 96, f. 2). April 24 commemorations were permitted to take place, but they were compelled to do so as quietly as possible. On April 24, 1965, thousands of Armenians went on demonstrations in Yerevan. These protests were unprecedented in the Soviet Union and apparently made the Soviet authorities erect a monument in memory of the victims of the Armenian Genocide. The decision was already made, but no one knew if without human pressure it would be implemented. The monument was inaugurated on November 29, 1967, the day of the 47th anniversary of the Sovietization of Armenia. The Soviet government represented an effort to keep it aligned with the Soviet historical narrative and connect two narratives – a national and a Soviet one. Dominating the landscape atop a hill, the memorial sits in harmony with the surroundings. The ascetic outline of the monument captures the spirit of a nation that survived a ruthless campaign of extermination. The monument grew organically into the Yerevan landscape and became a site of national pilgrimage (Jinks 2014, 40–3). Every year since April 24, 1967, thousands of Armenians and foreigners have walked in silence up the Tsitsernakaberd hill to lay flowers at the eternal flame in memory of the victims of the Armenian Genocide. The construction of the Tsitsernakaberd memorial generated a fundamental shift. The memory of genocide victims was legalized at the state level (although in a quasi-state such as Soviet Armenia). Private, family memory evolved into a collective memory and part of the fabric of society. It is not coincidental that the parliament of Uruguay recognized the Armenian Genocide and started international recognition of the Armenian Genocide in the same year, 1965. Developments in the academic realm emerged from the occurrence of many events throughout the world that were organized in dedication to the 50th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. Numerous volumes and studies were published. One of them is the major edited volume of more than 1,100 pages by Kersam Aharonian (1965), published in Beirut and that

60  Handbook of genocide studies contained many articles on different aspects of the Armenian Genocide. It started with comprehensive review of the history of the Armenian Genocide, and then many pieces on legal issues of the Armenian genocide, on the process of the creation of Armenian Diaspora, demography, stories of local killings and self-defense, documents and accounts of eyewitnesses, poems. In Soviet Armenia, historian Mkrtich Nersisyan was an influential scholar. He published an article in 1965 in one of the prestigious Armenian scientific periodicals titled “The Genocide of Western Armenians in 1915.” The paper with identical scope, “Genocide – the Gravest Crime of Humanity,” was published in the USSR’s most authoritative, influential newspaper, the official organ of the Soviet Communist Party Pravda on April 25. They were the first attempts to legitimize the subject in Soviet public discourse and clear signs that this topic was not considered taboo any more by Soviet leadership. In 1966 the collection of documents “The Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire” (TA-1) was published, compiled by M. Nersisyan and R. Sahakyan. It was the seminal work since, for the first time in Soviet historiography, the sources of the Armenian Genocide were introduced. The volume offered 245 documents collected from various archives, passages from books, and memoirs of notable individuals. The most priceless part was material from the Archive of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Empire, which contained the Russian consuls’ and ambassadors’ correspondence and their reports to the Russian Foreign Ministry. Nersisyan’s work became a landmark for Armenian Genocide scholarship in Soviet Armenia (TA-2). He believed that Hamidian massacres and Adana killings were integral parts of the Armenian Genocide and there is continuation in the policy of all Turkish governments at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries towards the Armenians of the Empire. The same approach was taken by the majority of Armenian scholars of the Soviet period, including John Kirakosyan, who is famous for several impressive books on the subject, and who concluded that the plan to exterminate the Young Turk Armenians is organically derived from the extermination policy of the previous period (TA-3). The year 1965 also signaled Armenian activism. The new generation started to question their parents, even blaming them for keeping silent and forgetting the issue of the Armenian Genocide. The Diaspora, which already had well-established community structures, began to fight against oblivion. Armenian studies centers and Armenian history and language chairs were opened in the best universities. Massive demonstrations at Turkish embassies became commonplace. This was followed by the assassinations of Turkish diplomats in Southern California and elsewhere, with one goal: to raise the issue of the Armenian Genocide and force the world to re-engage in a tragedy that it tried to easily forget. This was also the time of Turkish denial intensification. From the first days of its establishment, the Turkish Republic covered the violence and ethnic cleansing of the Ottoman Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians with a veil of silence. Parallel historiography was developed to valorize the Turkish achievements and whitewash the crimes. The Armenian Genocide became a taboo topic, and moreover, the discussion of this topic can lead to criminal prosecution under Article 301 of the Turkish Criminal Code for insulting Turkishness. Turkey is also trying to involve foreign scholars in denial by funding Turkish studies centers of various universities (Göçek 2015; Gürpınar 2016; Hovannisian 2001b; Mamigonian 2015; Smith et al. 1995).

The historiography of the Armenian Genocide  61

PIONEERS OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE SCHOLARSHIP: HOVHANNISIAN AND DADRIAN Vahakn Dadrian and Richard Hovannisian merit mention as two of the great 20th-century scholar of the Armenian Genocide. Vahakn Dadrian taught sociology at New York State University for many years (1970–91). He was a researcher at the Center for Middle East Studies at Harvard University and a visiting lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Duke University and Scientific Director of the Genocide Research Program at the Zoryan Institute in Toronto, Canada. Richard Hovannisian was Professor of Armenian and Near Eastern History at the University of California Los Angeles (1962–) and Armenian Educational Foundation Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History at UCLA. Both started with subjects different from the Armenian Genocide but later discovered that there was a big gap in the study of the Armenian Genocide and became involved in that field. Vahakn Dadrian did his PhD in sociology and researched the dominant group and minority relations in non-homogeneous social systems. He came to the conclusion that such relations very often lead to a conflict, and as a consequence, minorities are victimized. Prejudice, discrimination, and rejection, in turn, are used to gain supremacy over members of the largest minority group. Initially, he focused on Holocaust research. Richard Hovannisian’s PhD dissertation, which later evolved into a four-volume set (Hovannisian 1971, 1982, 1996), addressed the creation and fate of the short-lived Republic of Armenia in 1918–20 – a subject in which the Armenian Genocide was present but not always central. The refugees of the massacres found shelter from Western Armenia en masse in this part of historical Armenia. It was initially a remote province of the Russian Empire and then an independent Republic. Turkish armies entered this region in 1918 and 1920 and butchered thousands of Armenians. The issue of the Armenian Genocide touched both Dadrian and Hovannisian. They came from Ottoman Armenia and lived in an environment where the recollections of the genocide were both a daily conversation and a suppressed memory. Dadrian recalled the secret conversations of female survivors always revolving around “the massacres” in a harsh state culture of denial and taboo in his native Istanbul (2010, 235–6). And the childhood of Richard Hovannisian in Tulare, near Fresno, California, also was affected by fragmented memories of the Armenian Genocide with Armenian women with terrifying tattoos on their hands and faces – marks of their captivity and life in the Bedouin or Kurdish villages (Hovannisian 2010, 28). In 1965, Dadrian met Armenian clergyman Krikor Guerguerian in Beirut, who informed him about the existence of actual documents related to the Armenian Genocide in the archives of the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem that directed him to dedicate his life to the topic (Dadrian 2010, 240–1). He was one the founders of Genocide Studies, as his study of the Armenian Genocide led him to develop some theoretical assumptions on the phenomenon of genocide (Dadrian 1971a, 1971b, 1972, 1975a, 1990, 1998). Dadrian authored numerous articles comparing the Armenian Genocide and the Jewish Holocaust (1975b, 1976, 1988a, 1996, 2004), which helped to “legitimize” the Armenian Genocide in academia, as the genocidal nature of the Holocaust was not disputed in scientific circles. By placing the Armenian Genocide in the already accepted research template, Dadrian was trying to achieve the same status for the Armenian Genocide. He accomplished as much, while always acknowledging that regardless of the many similarities of the two crimes, the differences are also significant. His monumental work, History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans

62  Handbook of genocide studies to Anatolia to the Caucasus (1995), became the culmination of his research, which summarizes his work over the years and is still one of the best overviews of the history of the Armenian Genocide. Richard Hovannisian’s input in Armenian Genocide Studies was also enormous. Over the years, Hovannisian edited many volumes on the Armenian Genocide inviting contributions from different scholars from various fields and in fact creating the common scientific ground and environment for discussions around the subject (1986, 1992, 1998, 2003a, 2007). In 1997, he launched a remarkable set of conferences at UCLA on the historic provinces of Western Armenia and Cilicia, which brought together leading scholars from around the world to make multidisciplinary presentations on this violently destroyed Armenian world. This initiative resulted in 15 volumes of articles dedicated to these provinces (Hovannisian 2000, 2001a, 2002, 2003b, 2004, 2006, 2009, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016, 2021; Hovannisian and Payasian 2008, 2010). Vahakn Dadrian and Richard Hovannisian engaged in an ongoing academic dispute over the question of the origin and causes of the Armenian Genocide. Dadrian is the proponent of the idea that the Armenian Genocide was a pre-planned and the inevitable outcome of strategic choices of the long haul. In his book, Dadrian (1995) came to the conclusion that the centuries-old intimidation of Armenians made them so vulnerable that the Turks, who had dominated for centuries, decided to resolve the Armenian-Turkish conflict through genocide. He also emphasizes the decision for destruction in terms of culture, ideology, or mentality (Akçam 2012, 216). The roots of genocide are thus understood to to be located in religion, primarily, and also in nationalism. War, in this view, serves more as a convenient occasion for the execution of an already-designed program (Dadrian 1988b) and that approach is supported by many historians from Armenia (e.g., Der Matossian 2015b, 149). In contrast, Hovannisian presents another group of scholars who claim that war is an opportune moment and a causal or determinative factor, although the arguments mentioned above also occur. Per Ronald Suny: What evolved rapidly into genocide began as sporadic massacres that following a colossal defeat resulted in political panic, despair, and a thirst for vengeance. Rationalized at the time and later as a military necessity, framed by the imperial ambitions and distressed perceptions of the Ottoman leaders, demobilization of soldiers and particular deportations of Armenians and Assyrians quickly turned into a massive attack on entire peoples, a systematic program of murder and pillage. Deportations ostensibly taken for military reasons rapidly radicalized monstrously into an opportunity to rid Anatolia once and for all of those peoples perceived to be an imminent existential threat to the future of the empire. (Suny, 2015, 245)

Hovannisian stressed mainly Young Turks’ nationalist ideology as the main causal argument in explaining the genocide. He stressed that a “combination of a xenophobic nationalist mindset and a total war ethic produced a lethal atmosphere from which the Armenians could not escape” (2007, 3). He also argues that the genocide of 1915 was quantitatively and qualitatively different from the Hamidian massacres of the 1890s. Hovannisian presents the arguments for and against a continuum of genocidal intent and contends that “these are not mutually exclusive” (2007, 6; see also Der Matossian, 2015b, 143–66).

The historiography of the Armenian Genocide  63

TEL AVIV CONFERENCE OF 1982: A TURNING POINT IN ARMENIAN GENOCIDE STUDIES Prominent genocide scholar Israel Charny’s efforts to organize a conference on the phenomenon of genocide were invaluable to the perspective of connecting the endeavors of different scholars of this emerging field (Charny and Davidson 1983). The selection committee, led by historian Yocheved Howard, faced a challenging task in dealing with an area whose boundaries and criteria were unidentified. Applications came not only from the Holocaust scholarship, which already had an abundance of scientific literature, but also other, less-studied genocides. Interest in the conference was high: a month before the meeting, 600 scholars registered to participate (Avedian 2019, 150). When the applications had been selected, the Turkish government complained of speeches on the Armenian Genocide in the conference program. Organizers began receiving letters from the State Department urging them to cancel the conference (Ben Aharon 2015). Israeli officials asserted that holding the conference could damage Turkish-Israeli relations. It was further speculated that 18,000 Jews living in Turkey could be targeted (“Israelis said to oppose …” 1982). However, the organizers, and first among them, the leading spirit of the conference Israel Charny, withstood the pressure and kept the topic of the Armenian Genocide on the agenda, even though some scholars, including Elie Wiesel, withdrew their participation. Yet the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported that among those who did not withdraw, many conference participants responded that Jews who had been victims of world muteness would not agree to be part of a new conspiracy of silence (Charny and Davidson 1983, 17). The conference took place on June 20–24, 1982 and discussed many issues related to genocides. The topic of the Holocaust was predominant, but the participants focused on genocide as a phenomenon. Scholars from 20 countries made contributions to theoretical issues, particularly genocide prevention, the rescue of victims, genocide education, denial, theology, and psychology. There were also talks on atrocities in many countries and regions: Vietnam, Ukraine, Tibet, Soviet gulags, Australia. Several Armenian scientists also took part in the meeting (V. Dadrian, R. Hovannisian, A. Sanjian, M. Housepian-Dobkin, R. Deukmejian, V. Guroian, V. Oshakan, R. Syuni, H. Grigorian, M. Bohajian, etc.) who introduced various problems related to the Armenian Genocide (Charny and Shamai 1983, 29–83). In addition, at the Opening Plenary Session, Archbishop Shahé Ajamian of the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem delivered an address entitled “Suffering as a link between two peoples” (1983, 32). At the end of the conference on June 24, the participants were also invited to pay an introductory visit to the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem (1983, 78). Thus in the end, Turkey’s strong reaction and the international scandal surrounding the conference contributed to the growing interest in the event, and may even have helped to compel new scholars to enter the field.

64  Handbook of genocide studies

THE MODERN STAGE OF THE STUDY OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE Merging of Two Schools The Republic of Armenia declared its independence in September of 1991, and in December, the Soviet Union collapsed. The Iron Curtain dividing the two worlds disappeared. The immediate consequence was the boost in communications between scholars working in the Diaspora and Armenia. It enriched both parts. Until the 1990s, scholars and academic institutions operating in the Diaspora and Armenia worked almost in isolation. At best, some Diaspora Armenian scholars periodically came to Armenia to attend a conference or work in an archive. However, the research was generally conducted in parallel and did not intersect. The research methods and the chosen priorities of the topics also differed. The problems that the scientists had to deal with were also different. The main struggle in the Diaspora was against the Turkish deniers and their allies. In Soviet Armenia, it was accompanied by the imperative to follow the standards of Soviet historiography. Any research had to incorporate a quote from Lenin, or the founders of Marxism works regardless of the topic of study. Since the 1990s, one of the central parts of the cooperation was around the big international conferences organized in Armenia. The first was organized before independence, on April 17–20, 1990, with the title “Armenian Genocide. History, Theory, and Political Responsibility.” In 1995, scholars from 16 countries participated in the International Conference on the Armenian Genocide. International conferences on the 85th and 90th anniversaries of the Armenian Genocide were also organized in Yerevan in 2000 and 2005. The international conference of 2005 was especially representative and carried the title “The Gravest Crime, Extreme Challenges: Genocide and Human Rights.” A decade later, almost 70 genocide scholars participated in the biennial conference of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, “The Comparative Analysis of the 20th Century Genocides,” in Yerevan. The conference was hosted by the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute that has functioned at the Tsitsernakaberd Memorial since 1995 and has the world’s largest permanent exhibition on the Armenian Genocide. The museum is also a research center that publishes studies on the Armenian Genocide, survivors’ memoirs, and two academic journals – Journal of Genocide Studies (in Armenian) and the International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies (in English). The Entry of Turkish Scholars in the Field The Armenian Genocide is not only part of Armenian history; it is closely coupled to Ottoman history. For a long time, this subject was taboo in Turkey and bore the imperative ban of the state. However, some of the shifts in the 1990s changed the situation. The opening negotiations on the possible entry of the Turkish Republic into the European Union caused a crack in the Turkish wall of silence regarding research of the Armenian Genocide in Turkey, as external pressure on Turkey by the Armenian lobby continued (Der Matossian 2015b, 146–7). These developments generated a discussion in Turkish society, and some liberal scholars raised the need to discuss the Armenian Genocide. The most prominent of them are Taner Akçam and Uğur Üngör.

The historiography of the Armenian Genocide  65 The sociologist Taner Akçam authored some very influential books (2006, 2012, 2018) on the topic with usage of materials from Prime Ministerial Ottoman Archives. He is a proponent of the description of genocide as “the cumulative outcome of a series of increasingly radical decisions, each triggering the next in the cascading sequence of events” (2012, 128). He also stressed that the Armenian Genocide was implemented not only through the annihilation of the Armenians, but also by demographic engineering and assimilation. He focused on the concept of Young Turkish government policy to guarantee that the number of Armenians that remained after the deportation in a certain area did not exceed 5 to 10 percent of the total population (2012). Another Turkish scholar, Uğur Ümit Üngör, put forward an interesting thesis of the apparent continuity in population policies of the first Young Turk regime, represented first by the CUP from 1913 to 1918, and the Republican People’s Party era from 1919 to 1950 (Üngör 2012). While Akcam, Üngör, and others have had to leave Turkey and work in Western universities, even in Turkey some changes happened with attention to the topic growing steadily. The most prominent example was the “Ottoman Armenians during the Era of Imperial Decline. Academic Responsibility and Issues of Democracy” conference. An attempt was made to ban it by the state, but the conference was moved to another location and took place four months later, on September 24–25, 2002 at Bilgi University. For the first time in the history of Turkey, the issue of the Armenian Genocide was discussed in Turkey, despite all the restrictions of the authorities (Hovannisian 2007, 382). Today, in the age of the Internet, it has become impossible to block one’s society from an uncomfortable topic. Events like the assassination of Armenian journalist Hrant Dink by an extremist teenager in Istanbul in 2007 have brought additional attention and interest. From the Big Narratives to Micro-history In the initial stage of the Armenian Genocide study, the goal was to develop a comprehensive narrative that would illustrate the history of the Armenian Genocide, chronologically and thoroughly. The fact of Turkish denial also impacted that. For a long time, the primary aspiration underlying Armenian historical memory and historiography were to prove that the Armenian Genocide was genocide. The situation has changed recently. By and large, the Armenian Genocide is an accepted and acknowledged fact. There is also a consensus among genocide scholars on this issue, as relected in the Association of Genocide Scholars’ 1997 statement on the issue stating that “the Association . . . reaffirms that the mass murder of over a million Armenians in Turkey in 1915 is a case of genocide which conforms to the statutes of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide” (Association of Genocide Scholars 1997).4 In recent years, general narratives have been replaced by local studies, which enrich the topic and allow us to understand the phenomenon in its entirety. One such trend is to picture the genocide process by the case studies of different cities or provinces. Examples are the studies of Hilmar Kaiser and Uğur Üngör on the genocide in the province of Diyarbakir (Kaiser 2014; Üngör 2011), the study of Ümit Kurt on Ayntap (Kurt 2021), and books of Vahram Shemmassian on Musa Dagh (2015, 2020). 4 Tha Association of Genocide Scholars became the International Association of Genocide Scholars in 2001 (see Chapter 8 by Simon in this volume).

66  Handbook of genocide studies Somewhat paradoxically, Raymond Kévorkian’s Armenian Genocide. A Complete History (2011) also belongs on this list: ambitious in scope, it is nevertheless based in the genre of microstories. Kévorkian presents the process of the genocide in separate provinces and even smaller units, mentioning specific features and dynamics in each of them. An online series called the Houshamadyan Association, which attempts to restore the anthropology of different settlements, is also an important and fascinating addition to this genre (Tachjian n.d.). Attempts to study specific case studies can also be considered part of these microstories: Bedros Der Matossian (2022) focuses on the massacre immediately before the genocide in Adana, using material in many languages. A volume dedicated to Adana by Hrachik Simonyan is also attractive, in which an incredible abundance of the Armenian press is used (Simonyan 2012; TA-4 2009). Studies on individual perpetrators have also been neglected for a long time, but two studies seem to be launching a stimulating field of research in recent years. Hans-Lukas Kieser published the first work on Talaat Pasha, one of the principal perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide, naming him “Hitler of the Armenian genocide” (2020). Arsen Avagyan decoded the life of Zaki the Monster, the ruler of Everek, and later the governor of Der Zor, Salih Zeki (TA-5). Voices of Survivors For a long time, Armenian documents, newspapers articles, or survivors’ memories were overlooked in the study of the Armenian Genocide. The problem is the same – Turkish denial labeled them as biased. Consequently, many Armenian authors preferred to avoid using Armenian sources to avoid accusations of “survivor bias.” Others believed that Armenian sources can not constitute valuable or reliable historical documents because of their lack of objectivity, being written by members of the victim group. Recently, though, that situation has changed. Unexplored memoirs kept for decades are gaining new life and more Armenian material is beginning to be included in research to a greater extent. Virjiné Svazlian has written, recorded, videotaped, interviewed, and studied numerous interviews in Armenia for decades and published them in numerous volumes (TA-6; TA-7; Svazlian 2005). A significant source is also Donald and Lorna Miller’s volume (1999) featuring interviews of survivors who found refuge in the United States. The National Archives of Armenia (2012) issued a three-volume collection of eyewitness accounts of more than 600 genocide survivors, written in 1916. The Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute (n.d.) also has an important collection of transcripts of witness testimonies. Finally, digitally preserved video and audio testimonies have also become part of the historiography of the Armenian genocide. The Shoah Foundation (based in the United States) began digitizing the memories of Armenian Genocide survivors, including two important collections. One features 333 interviews with more than 380 interviewees who were Armenian Genocide survivors, descendants, witnesses, scholars, and other types of experiences recorded for the Armenian Film Foundation’s film archive (2018), and conducted by Michael Hagopian between 1972 and 2005. The other is the Richard G. Hovannisian Armenian Genocide Oral History Collection of more than 1,000 interviews of Armenian Genocide survivors and descendants, available though the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive (n.d.). Both will undoubtedly serve to perpetuate the study of the Armenian Genocide – and advance our understanding of it – for future generations.

The historiography of the Armenian Genocide  67

WORKS CITED Adalian, Rouben P. “The Armenian Genocide,” in Samuel Totten, William S. Parsons, and Israel W. Charny, eds. A Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts. New York: Routledge, 2004. A-Do [Ter-Martirosian, Hovhannes]. Mets depqery Vaspurakanum 1914–1915 tvakannerin [The great events in Vaspurakan in 1914–1915]. Yerevan, 1917. Aharonian, Kersam. Hushamatean Mets Egherʻni, 1915–1965 [Memorial Book of the Great Massacre 1915–1916]. Beirut: Publication of the Zartonk Daily Newspaper, 1965. Akçam, Taner. A Shameful Act: Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006. Akçam, Taner. The Young Turks’ Crime against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. Akçam, Taner. Killing Orders: Talat Pasha’s Telegrams and the Armenian Genocide. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Akçam, Taner, ed. “Kirkor Guerguerian archive” Online resource, n.d. Available at https://​wordpress​ .clarku​.edu/​guerguerianarchive. Accessed June 9, 2019. Akuni, Sebuh Ս. Milion my hayeru jardi patmutyun [The history of the Massacres of the Million of Armenians], Constantinople, 1920. Alboyadjian, Arshag. Badmoutiun Hay Gesario [History of Armenian Caesaria]. Cairo: Kakob Papazian Publishing House, 1937. Alboyadjian, Arshag. Badmoutiun Yevtogio Hayots [History of Armenians of Tokat]. Cairo: Nor Asdgh Press, 1952. Alboyadjian, Arshag. Houshamadian Goudinahayerou [Memorial Book of Armenians of Kutahia]. Beirut, s.n., 1961a. Alboyadjian, Arshag. Badmoutiun Malatio Hayots [History of Armenians of Malatia]. Beirut: Sevan Press, 1961b. Andonian, Aram. Ayn Sev orerun [In Those Dark Days]. Boston, 1919. Andonian, Aram. The Memoirs of Naim bey. London, 1920. Armenian Film Foundation. “Armenian Film Foundation” Online resource, 2018. Available at http://​ www​.armenianfilm​.org/​. Accessed May 24, 2022. Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute Foundation. “Survivors Stories” Online resource, n.d. Available at http://​www​.genocide​-museum​.am/​eng/​personal​_histories​.php. Accessed May 24, 2022. Association of Genocide Scholars. “The Armenian Genocide Resolution Unanimously Passed by the Association of Genocide Scholars of North America,” June 13, 1997. Available online at https://​ genocidescholars​.org/​wp​-content/​uploads/​2019/​04/​IAGSArmenian​-Genocide​-Resolution​-​_0​.pdf. Accessed May 24, 2022. Auron, Yair. The Banality of Indifference. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2001. Avedian, Vahagn. Knowledge and Acknowledgement in the Politics of Memory of the Armenian Genocide. Abingdon: Routledge, 2019. Ben Aharon, Eldad. “A Unique Denial: Israel’s Foreign Policy and the Armenian Genocide,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 42.4 (2015): 638–54. Bogosian, Eric. Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot That Avenged the Armenian Genocide. New York: Little, Brown & Company, 2015. Charny, Israel, and Shamai Davison, eds. The Book of the International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide, Book 1: The Conference Program and Crisis. Tel Aviv: The Institute of the International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide, 1983. Dadrian, Vahakn N. “Cultural and Social-Psychological Factors in the Study of Survivors of Genocide,” International Behavioral Scientist 3.2 (1971a): 48–55. Dadrian, Vahakn N. “Factors of Anger and Aggression in Genocide,” Journal of Human Relations 19.3 (1971b): 394–417. Dadrian, Vahakn N. “The Methodological Components of the Study of Genocide as a Sociological Problem – The Armenian Case,” in Robert Thomson, ed., Recent Studies in Modern Armenian History, pp. 82–103. Cambridge, MA: Armenian Heritage Press, 1972. Dadrian, Vahakn N. “A Typology of Genocide,” International Review of Sociology 5.2 (1975a): 201–21.

68  Handbook of genocide studies Dadrian, Vahakn N. “Common Features of the Armenian and Jewish Cases of Genocide: A Comparative Victimological Perspective,” in I. Drapkin, ed., Victimology: A New Focus, pp. 99–120. Lexington, MA: D.C. Health and Co., 1975b. Dadrian, Vahakn N. “Some Determinants of Genocidal Violence in Inter-group Conflicts – with Particular Reference to the Armenian and Jewish Cases,” Sociologus 26.3 (1976): 130–49. Dadrian, Vahakn N. “The Convergent Aspects of the Armenian and Jewish Cases of Genocide: A Reinterpretation of the Concept of Holocaust,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 3.2 (1988a): 151–69. Dadrian, Vahakn N. “The Armenian Genocide and the Pitfalls of a Balanced Analysis,” Armenian Forum 1.2 (1998b): 73–130. 1988 Dadrian, Vahakn N. “Towards a Theory of Genocide Incorporating an Instance of Holocaust: Comments, Criticisms and Suggestions,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 5.2 (1990): 129–43. Dadrian, Vahakn N. The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus. Providence, RI; Oxford, Berghahn Books, 1995. Dadrian, Vahakn N. “The Comparative Aspects of the Armenian and Jewish Cases of Genocide: A Sociohistorical Perspective,” in A.S. Rosenbaum, ed., Is the Holocaust Unique? pp. 101–35. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996. Dadrian, Vahakn N. “The Historical and Legal Interconnections between the Armenian Genocide and the Jewish Holocaust: From Impunity to Retributive Justice,” Yale Journal of International Law 23.2 (1998): 504–59. Dadrian, Vahakn N. “Patterns of Twentieth Century Genocides: The Armenian, Jewish, and Rwandan Cases,” Journal of Genocide Research 6.4 (2004): 487–522. Dadrian, Vahakn N. “The Quest for Scholarship in My Pathos for the Armenian Tragedy and Its Victims,” in S. Totten and S.L. Jacobs, eds., Pioneers of Genocide Studies, pp. 235–52. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2010. Dadrian, Vahakn, and Taner Akçam. Judgment at Istanbul: The Armenian Genocide Trials. New York: Berghahn Books, 2011. Der Matossian, Bedross. “Contending Trends in the Armenian Historiography of the Late Ottoman Empire: Inclusion vs. Exclusion,” New Perspectives on Turkey 53 (2015a): 174–80. Der Matossian, Bedross. “Explaining the Unexplainable: Recent Trends in the Armenian Genocide Historiography,” Journal of Levantine Studies 5.2 (2015b): 143–66. Der Matossian, Bedross. The Horrors of Adana: Revolution and Violence in the Early Twentieth Century. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022. Gabikian, Karapet. Gujkan Sebastioy, Egherapatum Poqrun hayots ev norin metsi mayraqaghaqin Sebastioy [The History of the Catastrophe of Armenia Minor and Its Great Capital Sebastia], Boston, 1920. George, David Lloyd.War Memoirs of David Lloyd George, 1917. Boston: Little. Brown, and Company., 1934. [Д. Ллойд Джордж, Правда о мирных договорах]. Москва, 1957. Göçek, Fatma Müge. Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present and Collective Violence against the Armenians, 1789–2009. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Gürpınar, Doğan. “The Manufacturing of Denial: The Making of the Turkish ‘Official Thesis’ on the Armenian Genocide between 1974 and 1990,” Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies 18.3 (2016) 217–40. Haig, Vahe (Haig Dindjian). Kharpert yev anor Vosgeghen Tashduh [Kharpert and Her Golden Plain]. New York, s.n., 1959. Harnpartsoumian, Vahan. Kughash’kharh: Badmagan Askakragan Ousoumnasiroutiun [Village World: An Historical and Cultural Study of Govdoon]. Paris: Daron Press, 1927. Hayots Tseghaspanutyuny Osmanyan Turkiayum. Verapratsneri vkayutyunner: Pastatghteri joghovatsu [Armenian genocide in Ottoman Turkey. The accounts of survivors. The volume of materials], compiled and edited by A. Virabyan and G. Avagyan, Yerevan, National Archives of Armenia, 2021. Hovannisian, Richard G. The Republic of Armenia, Vol. I. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971. Hovannisian, Richard G. The Republic of Armenia, Vol. II. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982.

The historiography of the Armenian Genocide  69 Hovannisian, Richard G. The Armenian Genocide in Perspective. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1986. Hovannisian, Richard G. The Armenian Genocide: History, Politics, Ethics. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Hovannisian, Richard G. The Republic of Armenia, Vols III & IV. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996. Hovannisian, Richard G. Remembrance and Denial: The Case of the Armenian Genocide. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998. Hovannisian, Richard G. Armenians of Van/Vaspurakan, Vol. 1. Santa Ana, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2000. Hovannisian, Richard G. Armenians of Baghesh/Bitlis and Taron/Mush, Vol. 2. Santa Ana, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2001a. Hovannisian, Richard G. “Denial: The Armenian Genocide as a Prototype,” in Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide, pp. 796–812. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001b. Hovannisian, Richard G. Armenians of Tsopk/Kharpert, Vol. 3. Santa Ana, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2002. Hovannisian, Richard G. Looking Backward, Moving Forward: Confronting the Armenian Genocide, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003a. Hovannisian, Richard G. Karin/Erzerum, Vol. 4. Santa Ana, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2003b. Hovannisian, Richard G. Sebastia/Sivas and Lesser Armenia, Vol. 5. Santa Ana, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2004. Hovannisian, Richard G. Armenians of Tigranakert/Diarbekir and Edessa/Urfa, Vol. 6. Santa Ana, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2006. Hovannisian, Richard G. The Armenian Genocide: Cultural and Ethical Legacies. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2007. Hovannisian, Richard G. Armenians of Pontus: The Trebizond-Black Sea Communities, Vol. 8. Santa Ana, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2009. Hovannisian, Richard G. “Confronting the Armenian Genocide,” in S. Totten and S.L. Jacobs, eds., Pioneers of Genocide Studies, pp. 27–46. Transaction Publishers, 2010. Hovannisian, Richard G. Armenians of Kars and Ani,Vol. 10. Santa Ana, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2011. Hovannisian, Richard G. Armenians of Smyrna/Izmir,Vol. 11. Santa Ana, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2012. Hovannisian, Richard G. Armenians of Kesaria/Kayseri and Cappadocia, Vol. 12. Santa Ana, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2013. Hovannisian, Richard G. Armenians of Asia Minor, Vol. 13. Santa Ana, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2014. Hovannisian, Richard G. Armenians of Northeastern Mediterranean/Musa Dagh—Dört-Yol—Kessab, Vol. 14. Santa Ana, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2016. Hovannisian, Richard G. Armenians of Armenian Communities of Persia/Iran, Vol. 15. Santa Ana, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2021. Hovannisian, Richard G., and Simon Payasilian. Armenians of Cilicia, Vol. 7. Santa Ana, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2008. Hovannisian, Richard G., and Simon Payasilian. Armenians of Constantinople, Vol. 9. Santa Ana, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2010. “Israelis Said to Oppose Parley after Threat to Turkish Jews,” New York Times, June 3, 1982, Section A, p. 1. Jinks, Rebecca. “Situating Tsitsernakaberd: The Armenian Genocide Museum in a Global Context,” International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies 1.1 (2014): 38–51. Kaiser, Hilmar. The Extermination of Armenians in the Diarbekir Region. Istanbul: İstanbul Bilgi University Press, 2014. Kevorkian, Karnig. Cnkushapatum, Qnnakan patmutyun hayots Chnkushi, [History of Tchnkush: Critical History of the Armenians in Tchunkush], Vol. 1. Jerusalem: S. Hakobiants Press, 1970. Kévorkian, Raymond. The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011. Kieser, Hans-Lukas. Talaat Pasha: Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. Kurt, Ümit. The Armenians of Aintab: The Economics of Genocide in an Ottoman Province. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021.

70  Handbook of genocide studies Lepsius, Johannes. Armenia and Europe: An Indictment. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1897. Lepsius, Johannes. Bericht über die Lage des Armenischen Volkes in der Türkei [Report on the Situation of the Armenian people in Turkey]. Potsdam: Der Tempelverlag, 1916. Lepsius, Johannes. Deutschland und Armenien, 1914–1918: Sammlung diplomatischer Aktenstücke. Potsdam: Tempelverlag, 1919. Mamigonian, Marc A. “Academic Denial of the Armenian Genocide in American Scholarship: Denialism as Manufactured Controversy,” Genocide Studies International 9.1 (2015): 61–82. Miller, Donald E., and Lorna Touryan Miller. Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999. Morgenthau, Henry. Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story. Toronto: McClelland, Goodchild & Stewart, 1918. Mushegh archbishop, Haykakan mghdzavanjy (qnnakan verlutsumner) [Armenian Nightmare (Critical Analyses)], Boston, 1916. Rafter, Nicole, and Sandra Walklate. “Genocide and the Dynamics of Victimization: Some Observations on Armenia,” European Journal of Criminology 9.5 (2012): 514–26. Rooney, Martin. “A Forgotten Humanist: Armin T. Wegner,” Journal of Genocide Research 2.1 (2000): 117–19. Shoah Foundation. “Visual History Archive.” Online resource (registration required), n.d. Available at https://​vhaonline​.usc​.edu/​login. Accessed May 24, 2022. Shemmassian, Vahram L. The Musa Dagh Armenians: A Socioeconomic and Cultural History 1919–1939. Haigazian University, 2015. Shemmassian, Vahram L. The Armenians of Musa Dagh: From Obscurity to Genocide Resistance and Fame 1840–1915. Fresno, CA: The Press at California State University, 2020. Shirinian, George. “The Armenian Massacres of 1894–1897: A Bibliography,” Online document, August 15, 1999. Available at https://​zoryaninstitute​.org/​wp​-content/​uploads/​2017/​02/​The​-Armenian​ -Massacres​-of​-1894​-1897​-a​-Bibliography​-2016​_08​_25​-18​_41​_10​-UTC​.pdf. Accessed May 20, 2022. Simonyan, Hrachik. The Destruction of Armenians in Cilicia, April 1909, trans. Melissa Brown and Alexander Arzoumanian. London: Gomidas Institute, 2012. Smith, Roger W. “Introduction,” in Henry Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story, xxv. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003. Smith, Roger W., Eric Markusen, and Robert Jay Lifton. “Professional Ethics and the Denial of Armenian Genocide,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies,9.1 (1995): 1–22. Suny, Ronald Grigor. Looking toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History. Indiana University Press, 1993. Suny, Ronald Grigor. “Writing Genocide. The Fate of the Ottoman Armenians,” in Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Göçek, and Norman M. Naimark, eds., A Question of Genocide. Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, 5–41. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Suny, Ronald Grigor. “They Can Live in the Desert But Nowhere Else” A History of the Armenian Genocide. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. Svazlian, Verjiné. The Armenian Genocide and the People’s Historical Memory. Yerevan, Gitutian Publishing House, 2005. Tachjian, Vahe. Houshamadyan. Online resource, n.d. Available at https://​www​.houshamadyan​.org/​ home​.html. Accessed May 24, 2022. Totten, Samuel, ed. First-Person Accounts of Genocidal Acts Committed in the Twentieth Century: An Annotated Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991. Toynbee, Arnold Joseph. The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire: Documents Presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1916. Üngör, Uğur Ümit. The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Üngör, Uğur Ümit. The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Werfel, Franz. Die Vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh [The Forty Days of Musa Dagh]. Berlin: Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 1933. Yeghiayan, Eddie. The Armenian Genocide: A Bibliography. Italy: Liberia Editrice Vaticana, 2015.

The historiography of the Armenian Genocide  71 Yeghiayan, Vartkes. The Case of Soghomon Tehlirian. Glendale, CA: Center for Armenian Remembrance, 2006.

Texts in Armenian TA-1. Геноцид армян в Османской империи։ Сб. документов и материалов։ Сост. М. Г. Нерсисян, Р. Г. Саакян; Предисл. М. Г. Нерсисян, с. 5–16. - Ред. М. Г. Нерсисян. - Ер.։ Изд-во АН АрмССР, 1966. TA-2. Геноцид армян в Османской империи։ Сб. документов и материалов։ Сост. М. Г. Нерсисян, Р. Г. Саакян; Предисл. М. Г. Нерсисян, с. III–XVI. - Ред. М. Г. Нерсисян. - 2-ое доп. изд. - Ер.։ Изд-во АН АрмССР, 1982. TA-3. Առաջին համաշխարհային պատերազմը և արևմտահայությունը (1915–1916 թթ.), Երևան, 1965, 1967, Երիտթուրքերը պատմության դատաստանի առաջ, գիրք I, Երևան, 1982–1983, 1987. TA-4. Սիմոնյան Հրաչիկ, Հայերի զանգվածային կոտորածները Կիլիկիայում (1909 թ. ապրիլ), Երևան, 2009. TA-5 Արսեն Ավագյան, Մթության մեջ մնացած մի գործիչ՝ Իթիհադական կոմունիստ Սալիհ Զեքի (Կուշարկով). TA-6. Հայոց ցեղասպանություն. ականատես վերապրողների վկայություններ, ‘Գիտություն’ հրատ., Երևան, 2015. (Svazlian) TA-7. Svazlian, V. այոց ցեղասպանություն։ Ականատես վերապրողների վկայություններ, Երևան։ ‘Գիտություն’, 2011. TA-8. Հայոց ցեղասպանությունը Օսմանյան Թուրքիայում: Վերապրածների վկայություններ: Փաստաթղթերի ժողովածու / Հեղ. և կազմ.՝ Ա.Վիրաբյան, Գ. Ավագյան; Գլխ. խմբ.՝ Ա.Վիրաբյան. Երևան: Հայաստանի ազգային արխիվ, 2012. (National Archives of Armenia).

Others Akuni, Sebuh, Ս.Ակունի, Միլիոն մը հայերու ջարդի պատմությունը, Կ.Պոլիս, 1920. Ter-Martirosian, Hovhannes. Ա-Դո, Մեծ դեպքերը Վասպուրականում 1914–1915 թվականներին, Երեւան, 1917.

5. Holocaust research and genocide studies: facing the problem of integration Charlotte Kiechel

“To date, it can be stated that a bridge has not been successfully built between comparative genocide research and contemporary historical Holocaust research,” wrote Sybille Steinbacher, a German historian, in a volume published in January 2022. To remark upon the oppositional relationship between the fields of Holocaust history and genocide studies is to risk trading in well-worn scholarly platitudes. Over the last 40 years, proponents of both comparative genocide and Holocaust research have voiced a similar set of concerns—discussing the “anxieties” among genocide scholars and the “tensions” between the two fields (see Bauer 1986; Bloxham 2013; Michman 2014; Moses 2016). Indeed, although both Holocaust historians and genocide scholars share a commitment to investigating the perpetration of past genocides, a number of intellectual commitments divide them. And perhaps the most fundamental divisions among them are their differing views concerning how the history of the Holocaust should be integrated within a social-scientific or comparative framework; while genocide scholars commonly emphasize the advantages of such an approach, some Holocaust historians refute them (Bloxham 2012; Moses 2012). In the field of Holocaust research, the problem of integration can take on a number of meanings. It can signify efforts to situate the Holocaust in a longer history of European antisemitism; it can reflect efforts to place the Jewish genocide in a pan-European frame, one which integrates the insights concerning Europeans Jews’ experiences in multiple nation-states. Conversely, it can point to efforts by scholars of Holocaust and Jewish studies to desist with the incorporation of the Holocaust within a global and comparative frame. This chapter engages with the problem of integration to consider how the relationship between the fields of Holocaust history and genocide studies have developed over the last 40 years. It contends that although among Holocaust historians the problem of integration preceded the formation of genocide studies, the field’s establishment in the early 1980s cast the problem in a new light. Following its formation, historians were invested in reflecting on how the Holocaust could be integrated into a comparative or social-scientific framework. The debates concerning the Holocaust’s uniqueness, which appeared in their most fulsome form in the 1970s, served as one arena in which Holocaust historians voiced their concerns regarding genocide scholars’ comparative efforts. Since then, adamant defenses of the Holocaust’s uniqueness have largely subsided. Yet, as Steinbacher’s opening remarks suggest, the relationship between the fields remains contested.

72

Holocaust research and genocide studies  73

THE PROBLEM OF INTEGRATION AND THE FOUNDING OF THE FIELDS OF HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE RESEARCH Almost as soon as the Nazis began their racial genocide, Jews living in Nazi-occupied Europe and beyond began to place the genocide in a historical perspective. Writing in his diary while living in Breslau, the Jewish-German scholar Willy Cohn reflected in September 1941 on how the Nazis’ most recent persecution of Europe’s Jews related to the antisemitic crimes of the Middle Ages (Cohn 2012: 376). Also during the wartime years, the celebrated Polish-Jewish historian, Emanuel Ringelblum encouraged his counterparts “to collect and record”—as one subsequent historian has described it (Jockusch, Collect and Record! 2012; Kassow 2007). Ringelblum knew that the future histories of this period would depend upon the exigent historical records. Meanwhile, in London Alfred Wiener, a long-time researcher of antisemitism, continued gathering documents testifying to the extent of the Nazis’ anti-Jewish atrocities (Barkow 1997). Nevertheless, if in the wartime years many individuals took up the task of considering how the history of the Holocaust should or could be written, it was not until the 1960s that a distinct field of Holocaust research came into being. The work that a number of Jewish and non-Jewish institutions had conducted in the prior decade was essential to the field’s future consolidation. In Paris, members of the Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation—one of France’s earliest Holocaust research centers—published more than a dozen volumes concerning the Nazis’ racial crimes and Jews’ World War II experiences between 1946 and 1950 (Jockusch, Collect and Record! 2012: 283). In Amsterdam, the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation similarly initiated projects focusing on the history of the Third Reich (Haan 2009). Meanwhile, Wiener in London and Philip Friedman, a Polish-born Jewish scholar who by 1948 was New York-based, participated in a transnational network of professional and amateur Holocaust scholars (Barkow 1997; Stauber 2009). Nonetheless, despite the early efforts of these centers and individuals, overall, in the 1950s relatively few academics working in North America and West Europe were focused on historicizing the Nazi genocide of European Jewry. The Holocaust’s relatively marginal position as a topic of scholarly inquiry reflects the dominant structure of West Europeans’ and North Americans’ postwar political imaginations. Although journalists and government officials knew of the crimes that the Nazis were committing against Europe’s Jews in Auschwitz in early 1940, most international observers did not perceive these racial crimes to be of paramount significance (Fleming 2014; Laqueur 1980; Shapiro 2002). In Nuremberg, Germany, at the International Military Tribunal during which the Allied Powers convicted top Nazi officials, the prosecution did not focus on the Nazis’ crimes against Jews (Jockusch, “Justice at Nuremberg,” 2012; Marrus 1998). Relatedly, when Life magazine in May 1945 published a multi-page photo spread documenting the Nazis’ Buchenwald-based atrocities, the editors did not reference the crime of genocide or the fate of European Jewry (“Atrocities” 1945). As scholars have subsequently noted, most international observers were concerned with the Nazis’ perpetration of an aggressive war and not their persecution of Europe’s Jews in particular (Herf 2007; Lagrou 1999; Rousso 1991). As such, it is not surprising that when French, British, and American scholars produced the first studies on the Third Reich, they seldom focused on the issue of genocide, opting instead to engage with studies of fascism and European totalitarianism (Arendt 1951; Bullock 1962; Taylor 1961;

74  Handbook of genocide studies Trevor-Roper 1947; for early works that did engage the history of the Holocaust see Poliakov 1951; Reitlinger 1953). By the mid-1960s, however, a sufficient number of scholars had produced works on the Nazis’ anti-Jewish crimes that one contemporary historian could characterize the years between 1960 and 1980 as “the period of organized research” (Hilberg 2009: 25). In 1961, political scientist Raul Hilberg published his 1,300-page-plus magnum opus, The Destruction of the European Jews—a landmark achievement with respect to documenting the Nazis’ exterminatory crimes in excruciating detail (Hilberg 1961). Two years later, readers in New York were able to access—in the form of a monograph—the articles that Hannah Arendt, the political theorist, had written during the trial of Adolf Eichmann (Arendt 1963). In 1961, an Israeli court tried Eichmann, one of the Holocaust’s leading architects, for the crime of genocide. Also of note was that by the end of the 1970s, academic conferences on the study of the Holocaust had become a more regular occurrence (Littell 2001). Still, if between 1950 and 1970 the field of Holocaust research reached a level of maturity, Holocaust historians remained divided on a number of issues—with the most important being integration. Because the first body of scholarship that testified to the Nazis’ anti-Jewish crimes did not emerge in a specifically defined field of Holocaust research, many Holocaust historians—in the 1960s and afterwards—were forced to reflect on how they should situate the Holocaust within other historical frameworks. Should one recount the history of the Holocaust from the perspective of German national history? Or should one consider it to be a uniquely Jewish history, one that needs to be incorporated within the history of European antisemitism more broadly? Finally, to what extent should one situate the Holocaust in a history that featured other episodes of persecution and mass atrocity? For scholars working in the field of Holocaust research in the 1970s and 1980s, these questions remained open. This is evidenced by the Fifth Yad Vashem International Historical Conference, which was held at Yad Vashem, Israel’s most established Holocaust memorial and research center. In March 1983, 33 scholars gathered in Jerusalem to discuss “the historiography of the Holocaust period” (Gutman and Grief 1988). Shared among the conference’s presenters was an interest in Holocaust history and historiography, and following from this common interest was a concern regarding the limitations of how the Holocaust had been integrated within other historical frameworks. One presenter spoke on “Approaches to the ‘Final Solution’ in German Historiography,” while others described how the Holocaust had appeared in Polish, Hungarian, or French historiographies (Browning 1988; Katzburg 1988; Krakowski 1988). A central contention of the Yad Vashem conference was there had been notable deficiencies with respect to how the Holocaust had been featured in a variety of nationally specific historiographic traditions. Recognizing this, historians of the era needed to consider how they might integrate the insights of these distinct bodies of scholarship. Two years prior to the conference, Holocaust historian Lucy Dawidowicz had reflected on a similar line of concerns. In 1981, she published The Holocaust and the Historians—a volume in which she delivered a searing critique of how the Jewish genocide had been incorporated within the extant historiography (Dawidowicz 1981). “I was dismayed to find how inadequately the murder of the European Jews had been recorded in the history books,” remarked Dawidowicz in her volume’s introduction (Dawidowicz 1981: 1). In each of her chapters, Dawidowicz unpacked how national identity and certain national historiographic traditions had impeded contemporary research on the Holocaust, an argument which she delivered in an

Holocaust research and genocide studies  75 effort to suggest that there was much work to be done with respect to the historicization of the Holocaust (Dawidowicz 1981: 142–6). As Holocaust historians such as Dawidowicz grappled with issues relating to how the Holocaust had been integrated within a variety of national historiographies, leading figures in comparative genocide research offered a different view toward the ongoing problem of integration. In June 1982, Israel Charny, the New York-born psychologist, hosted the world’s first International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide (Charny 1984 [2018]). As the title of the conference suggested, Charny believed that studies of genocide and of the Holocaust supported one another. Moreover, he affirmed that the Holocaust’s integration within a comparative and social-scientific framework might serve his main ambition: to explain, predict, and ultimately prevent the crime of genocide. Contemporaries of and witnesses to the Holocaust have emphasized the genocide’s unique features for many years. In 1942, for example, Chaim Kaplan, one of Poland’s leading Jewish scholars working during the interwar years, reflected on the uniqueness of the Holocaust while enduring life in the Warsaw Ghetto. “Let it be known, in all the annals of the evil rule of man over man there has never been such a cruel and barbaric expulsion as this one,” Kaplan recounted (Kaplan 1999: 396). Kaplan’s claim to historical specificity was championed by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel more than 20 years later. At a 1967 conference, focusing on the topic of Jewish values in a post-Holocaust future, Wiesel announced that “The Holocaust defies parallels” and suggested that he saw “the event as both irrational and unique” (Wiesel 1967: 285). Yet if proclamations concerning the Holocaust’s unique dimensions have a decades-plus history of their own, it was not until the 1970s and 1980s that the topic of uniqueness emerged as a point of division between Holocaust historians and genocide researchers. The reasons why debates concerning the Holocaust’s uniqueness reached a crescendo during this period include the Holocaust’s increasing importance in defining American Jewish identity, as well as the expansion of the two fields of Holocaust and comparative genocide research (Novick 2000, 170–202). Yet, the reasons for the debate notwithstanding, by 1984, Midstream—a Zionist monthly magazine—had dedicated an entire forum to discussing the Holocaust’s unique status (Papazian 1984). Meanwhile, between 1978 and 1994, the number of US monographs and journal articles dedicated to discussing the Holocaust’s uniqueness reached into the hundreds (see Eckardt and Eckardt 1980; Feingold 1983; Katz 1994; Rosenberg 1987). In the midst of the debate, two opposing groups of scholars emerged—with their fault lines largely mapping on the crystallizing disciplinary division between Holocaust history and comparative genocide research. First, there were the singularists—scholars who affirmed the Holocaust’s special characteristics, were skeptical of the Holocaust’s incorporation within a comparative framework, and had often come to the topic via a career in Holocaust research. Second, there were the comparativists—scholars who emphasized the value of integrating the Holocaust in a comparative framework, challenged the Holocaust’s perceived uniqueness, and were often proponents of the still consolidating field of comparative genocide research (Kiernan 2007; Kuper 1981; Rosenbaum 1996). The division between singularists and comparativists did not precisely follow the opposing views of Holocaust historians and comparative genocide researchers. Yehuda Bauer, the Israeli historian, who has often written about the Holocaust’s singular qualities, was the founding editor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, an academic journal that took the placement of the Holocaust in a comparative frame to be central to its founding vision (Bauer 1986). Over his career, Bauer has maintained the advantages of

76  Handbook of genocide studies integrating the Holocaust within a comparative framework (Bauer 1991). However, he has often done so as a means to affirm if not the Holocaust’s uniqueness per se, then its “special character” (Bauer 2011: 318). Over the last 20 years of Holocaust research, the most antagonistic debates over the Holocaust’s uniqueness have subsided; yet the problem of integration remains—with Holocaust historians often drawing upon comparative genocide research in their efforts to clarify their positions concerning how the Holocaust should be incorporated within other analytical frameworks. Central to the most recent conversations concerning the scholars’ integrationist efforts has been a reflection on how the history of the Holocaust should be situated within either a global or pan-European framework. Following decades of scholarship when historians working on the topic of the Holocaust almost exclusively focused on Germany, in the last fifteen years they have begun to widen their gazes. Historian of Eastern Europe, Timothy Snyder, has situated the history of Holocaust in a story of state-dissolution and European imperialism (Snyder 2010, 2015). Donald Bloxham encouraged his colleagues to consider the Holocaust as a “European process” and thus to consider the Holocaust “within the context of other European processes” (Bloxham 2009: 3). Meanwhile, Omer Bartov, another historian of the Holocaust, has emphasized the limitations of these integrationist efforts. At a 2012 academic conference, Bartov took issue with how Dirk Moses had “situat[ed] the Nazi project in global patterns” (Bartov 2014: 8). And after addressing genocide scholars’ concerns regarding the Holocaust’s status as the canonical example of genocide, Bartov contended: “It is ultimately historically wrong and morally pernicious to try to integrate the Holocaust into the history of colonial genocides and at the same time fret about its perniciousness” (Bartov 2014: 20). Comparative genocide research has emerged as a noteworthy and often visible interlocutor within this ongoing debate. Bartov—in his 2012 address—named “comparative genocide studies” in his critique of what some of have characterized as Holocaust history’s “colonial turn” (Marcuse 2012). After emphasizing how studying the Holocaust in a locally specific manner offers insight into the “uniqueness of their [the victims’] experiences as individuals,” Bartov noted that this uniqueness “finds no room in the broad sketches of comparative genocide studies” (Bartov 2014: 21; also see Michman 2012: 441). Meanwhile, taking an opposing perspective, Bloxham has written positively about the analytical and methodological insights produced by comparative genocide research. Likewise, readers of Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin have noted that the volume engages with some of genocide studies’ central commitments—such as a comparative framework—even if Snyder does not engage with this body of literature directly (Mazower 2012: 121).

THE CONSEQUENCES OF AN UNRESOLVED PROBLEM The fact that Holocaust historians—such as Bartov and Bloxham—continue to grapple with the problem of integration is not surprising. As a historical event, the Nazi genocide of European Jewry encompassed more than twenty countries. Moreover, it was only after the Holocaust was over that historians started to reflect on what methodologies would best support the writing of genocides’ histories. Yet, if the analytical rigor with which historians of the Holocaust continue to debate the limits and advantages of integrating the Jewish genocide in different frames is worthy of praise, especially with respect to considering how the histories

Holocaust research and genocide studies  77 of European colonialism and the Holocaust are related, the recent politicized turn that these debates have taken merits further examination. In the 1980s, the problem of integration appeared in the crosshairs of an especially politicized debate on the Holocaust’s historicization. In June 1986, Ernst Nolte, a German historian of European fascism, published an article in the center-right newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, entitled “The Past That Will Not Pass” (Nolte 1986). Nolte’s central critique was that West Germans had an unhealthy relationship with the past and that feelings of shame and guilt had prevented his fellow citizens from developing a coherent national identity. Nolte developed such assertions as a member of Germany’s conservative circles. Notably, while delivering his revisionists’ readings, Nolte encouraged his readers to integrate the history of the Holocaust in a pan-European framework and thus to remember that the Nazis had implemented their most heinous crimes after—and partly in response to—the atrocities committed by the Bolsheviks. Between July 1986 and August 1987, a number of public intellectuals and historians—some of whom were engaged with Holocaust research—condemned Nolte’s comparativist and integrationist efforts (Baldwin 1990). Members of the German press characterized the ensuing debate as the “Historikerstreit”—meaning the Historian’s Debate; meanwhile subsequent investigators have emphasized the debate’s particularly antagonistic dimensions (Kansteiner 2006: 80). In recent months, commentators and scholars publishing in Germany or the US have spoken of “a second Historikerstreit”—a debate that not only concerns the Holocaust’s historicization but also points to the problem of integration’s persistence. A word regarding the events that brought “Historikerstreit 2.0” into relief: in March 2020, organizers of a cultural festival in Nord-Westphalia, one of Germany’s northern provinces, disinvited Achille Mbembe, the Cameroon-born political theorist, who was to give the festival’s opening address (“Forum: The Achille Mbembe Controversy” 2021). In the weeks prior, some members of the German public had accused Mbembe of harboring antisemitic prejudice and—in his previous writings—seeking to relativize the Holocaust. Both criticisms were unsubstantiated, yet resulted in Mbembe being disinvited. Two years later, a translation of Michael Rothberg’s celebrated 2009 academic volume, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, was published in German (Rothberg 2009, 2021). Following the publication’s release, many German-speaking and Germany-based activists weighed in on not only the intellectual implications of Rothberg’s volume, but also the advantages of considering the crimes of the Holocaust and European colonialism in a singular analytical framework (Brodkorb 2021; Diner 2021; Rapp 2021; Schmid 2021; Seidl 2021). When commentators speak of a second Historikerstreit today they are referencing the slew of articles and radio interviews that scholars of genocide studies, historians of the Holocaust, and German public commentators have produced since March 2020; one blog post recently listed more than 150 articles as part of this ongoing conversation (“Historikerstreit, Holocaust, Literaturliste” 2021). Most commentators frame the similarities between the two debates around the fact that both engage with the problems and advantages of comparison: is it acceptable to place the Holocaust in a comparative frame? If so, under what circumstances (Habermas 2021)? However, although less commonly remarked upon, the problem of integration also connects the two debates. In the mid-1980s, scholars wrestled with the central question of how to integrate the histories of the Holocaust and National Socialism in a pan-European framework. Should one situate Nazi crimes within a broader history that also considers Bolshevik ones? In the Historikerstreit’s second version, historians are no longer considering how they

78  Handbook of genocide studies should evaluate the crimes of National Socialism and Bolshevism alongside one another. Instead, they are debating how the Holocaust should be—or ought to be—integrated within a longer history of European colonial thinking and violence. “Was the Holocaust a colonial crime?,” asked a participant of the second Historikerstreit—before answering no (Seidl 2021). As they did for the uniqueness debates of the 1980s and 1990s, scholars of genocide studies have played a critical role in defining the scope and consequences of the most recent debate concerning the problem of integration. Following the publication of Rothberg’s volume, scholars such as Jürgen Zimmerer and Dirk Moses affirmed their support for Rothberg and his scholarship’s central conceit: one needs to consider the imaginative, material, and ideological connections between the crimes of National Socialism and European colonialism (“Beispiellos oder vergleichbar?” 2022; Moses 2021; Zimmerer and Rothberg 2021). And they did so, most notably, as leading figures in the field of genocide research. Zimmerer is the founder and past president of the International Network of Genocide Scholars, while Moses is the Journal of Genocide Research’s senior editor (“Editorial Board”; “Executive Board”). Unfortunately, if genocide scholars have meaningfully impacted how Holocaust historians have recently reflected on the ongoing problem of integration, they and the field of genocide research have also been the object of recent attacks. In her critique of Rothberg and this assumed “revisionist interpretation,” Sybille Steinbacher, a German Holocaust historian who holds Germany’s first chair in Holocaust studies, argued that “comparative genocide research” was a key factor in explaining the diffusion of this revisionist interpretation (Lelle and Schulz 2022; Steinbacher 2022). Meanwhile, Saul Friedländer, the eminent Holocaust historian, characterized his oppositional group of scholars as “questioning the singularity of the Shoah from the perspective of comparative genocide research” (Friedländer 2021). In 1988, Henry Huttenbach, one of the leading champions of comparative genocide research, noted how the enduring effects of trauma had informed not only the field of Holocaust research, but also scholars’ willingness to reconsider the validity of the uniqueness thesis. After describing how many Holocaust historians were resistant to the Holocaust’s integration within a comparative framework, Huttenbach laid his hopes in future generations (Huttenbach 1988). “Given the sensitivity of the subject … the task of defining and categorizing may have to await the next generation, one whose scholars will be able to be more detached,” Huttenbach noted, with this detachment rising from the “temporal distance between [the scholars] and the Holocaust” (Huttenbach 1988, 301). Huttenbach’s remarks assume that the trauma of the Holocaust—what might be considered Holocaust studies’ original trauma—remain the reason why in the 1980s historians of the Holocaust and comparative genocide researchers were often at loggerheads. Yet the strident nature of Historikerstreit 2.0 suggests that Huttenbach’s optimism may have been misguided. Moreover, they point to the methodological and political complexities that often surround the writing of histories of mass violence. The intervention of the eminent historian Saul Friedländer in Historikerstreit 2.0 points to trauma’s often refracted nature. Born in Prague into a Jewish family in 1932, Friedländer was forced to leave his country of birth following Hitler’s annexation of Bohemia and Moravia. In 1939, Friedländer and his parents arrived in France where he found shelter in a Catholic boarding school (Friedländer 1979). As a young boy, Friedländer had the advantage of these forms of protection. His parents did not; Jan and Elli Friedländer were murdered in Auschwitz (Gilbert 1986: 470–1). After the war, Friedländer moved to Israel where he became a Zionist and one of the world’s Holocaust historians. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to suggest

Holocaust research and genocide studies  79 that his two-volume work on the Holocaust—Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution: 1933–1939 (1997) and The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 (2008)—redefined the scope of Holocaust research, providing an imitation-worthy model of how subsequent scholars should integrate Jewish sources and thus Jewish voices in their histories of the Holocaust. Due to these personal and professional experiences, Friedländer has much insight to provide with respect to how recent reframing attempts, by Dirk Moses and others, may be misguided. Surely, one could argue that placing the Holocaust in the broader history of European colonialism risks minimizing the degree to which antisemitism was the Holocaust’s defining force. Friedländer’s long-standing research on the Nazis’ “redemptive antisemitism” might be one reason why he felt obliged to enter into Historikerstreit 2.0—another reason surely is that he was a participant of the original Historian’s Debate (Friedländer 1988, 1997). Yet, if in his intervention, Friedländer demonstrates how questions relating to the Holocaust’s integration remain very much unresolved, his writings also point to how traumatic experiences of genocide, flight, and survival can continue to impact discussions occurring in the 2020s. In his essay, Friedländer broaches the question of whether Moses might be repeating some antisemitic biases. Referencing Moses’s discussion of how after 1989, “the German state has undertaken various measures to ‘reforest’ Germany with Jews,” Friedländer queries what this turn of phrasing might signify (Moses 2021). “I simply am too ignorant of German laws about citizenship and immigrant life in Germany to feel confident about discussing this issue. However, Moses’ reference to Jewish immigrants to Germany as being ‘reforested’ in order to recreate a German-Jewish community leaves one with a whiff of unpleasantness,” writes Friedländer (2021). The accusation of antisemitic prejudice, on Moses’s behalf, is baseless, as is Friedländer’s suggestion that the Black Lives Matter movement may, in part, be responsible for the recent uptick in antisemitic violence in the US. “These massive violent outbursts of Jew-hatred are relatively new to the United States. Unfortunately, they now seem to accompany Black Lives Matter protests quite often” (Friedländer 2021). I point to Friedländer’s faulty and potentially dangerous characterization of the Black Lives Movement not to launch a “woke protest” against one of my field’s most celebrated senior historians, but to underscore how emotionally and politically challenging the writing of histories of mass violence can be and undoubtedly will continue to be. In the fallout of the Historikerstreit 2.0, commentators have addressed the historical and ongoing subjugation of a wide range of peoples. As Friedländer’s essay reveals, these include the experiences of Jews and Black Americans. However, as discussions taking place in the German press reveal, they also include the experiences of Palestinians, Israelis, and Muslim Germans. The question of how different methods of writing histories might affirm the experiences and voices of these different identity groups might seem a potentially unsolvable question for historians of the Holocaust and comparative genocide researchers. Yet, the daunting nature of the task notwithstanding, the often vitriolic nature of conversations that have encompassed Historikerstreit 2.0 points to the degree to which scholars—working in overlapping fields of Holocaust history and genocide studies—still need to consider how they write histories of genocide and do so in a manner that addresses the persecution of multiple groups and communities (on the debate’s status as a Historikerstreit 2.0 see “Historikerstreit 2.0” 2022; Klävers 2022; Rothberg 2020). While the oppositional tenor of some of the conversations encompassing Historikerstreit 2.0 point to some of the difficulties ahead, the decades-long history of how previous scholars have tackled the problem of integration should serve as a source of optimism. Since the 1960s, as

80  Handbook of genocide studies the field of Holocaust research was developing, scholars of the Jewish genocide have grappled with the problem of integration. Should the history of the Holocaust genocide be integrated in a history of German fascism? And if so, how should historians of the Holocaust draw upon the insights that certain national historiographies have produced? During the uniqueness debates of the 1980s and the more recent conversations developing in the second Historikerstreit, historians of the Holocaust have revealed that they have yet to solve the problem of integration. Contributors of the field remain divided with respect to how the Holocaust should be situated within a global or pan-European frame of reference. Yet, some historiographical and methodological problems are never meant to be solved; as such, our work is ongoing.

WORKS CITED Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951. Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Viking Press, 1963. “Atrocities: Capture of the German Concentration Camps Piles up Evidence of Barbarism That Reaches the Low Point of Human Degradation,” Life 7 (May 1945): 32–7. Baldwin, Peter, ed., Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians’ Debate. Beacon Press, 1990. Barkow, Ben. Alfred Wiener and the Making of the Holocaust Library. Vallentine Mitchell, 1997. Bartov, Omer. “Genocide and the Holocaust: Arguments over History and Politics,” in Hilary Earl and Karl A. Schleunes, eds., Lessons and Legacies XI: Expanding Perspectives on the Holocaust in a Changing World. Northwestern University Press, 2014, pp. 5–28. Bauer, Yehuda. “Editor’s Introduction,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1.1 (1986): 1–2. Bauer, Yehuda. “Holocaust and Genocide: Some Comparisons,” in Peter Hayes, ed., Lessons and Legacies I: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World. Northwestern University Press, 1991, pp. 5–28. Bauer, Yehuda. “Genocide Prevention in Historical Perspective,” Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 25.1 (2011): 305–20. “Beispiellos oder vergleichbar?—Der Streit um das Holocaust-Gedenken,” SWR2, 18, January 2022, https://​www​.swr​.de/​swr2/​leben​-und​-gesellschaft/​beispiellos​-oder​-vergleichbar​-der​-streit​-um​-das​ -holocaust​-gedenken​-100​.html. Accessed May 16, 2022. Bloxham, Donald. The Final Solution: A Genocide. Oxford University Press, 2009. Bloxham, Donald. “The Holocaust and European History,” in Dan Stone, ed., The Holocaust and Historical Methodology, Berghahn Books, 2012, pp. 233–54. Bloxham, Donald. “Holocaust Studies and Genocide Studies: Past, Present, and Future,” in Joyce Apsel and Ernesto Verdeja, eds., Genocide Matters: Ongoing Issues and Emerging Perspectives. Routledge, 2013, pp. 59–81. Brodkorb, Mathias. “Wiederauflage eines erfundenen Konflikts,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (December 14, 2021): 13. Browning, Christopher. “Approaches to the ‘Final Solution,’ German Historiography of the Last Two Decades,” in Yisrael Gutman and Gideon Grief, eds., The Historiography of the Holocaust Period: Proceedings of the Fifth Yad Vashem International Historical Conference, Jerusalem, March 1983. Yad Vashem, 1988, pp. 53–78. Bullock, Alan. Hitler: A Study in Tyranny. Penguin, 1962. Charny, Israel W., ed. Toward the Understanding and Prevention of Genocide. Routledge, 2018. Originally published in 1984. Cohn, Willy. No Justice in Germany: The Breslau Diaries, 1933–1941. Stanford University Press, 2012. Dawidowicz, Lucy. The Holocaust and the Historians. Harvard University Press, 1981. Diner, Dan. “Das kognitive Entsetzen,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (July 8, 2021). Eckardt, Alice L., and A. Roy Eckardt. “The Holocaust and the Enigma of Uniqueness: A Philosophical Effort at Practical Clarification,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 450 (1980): 166–7.

Holocaust research and genocide studies  81 “Editorial Board.” Journal of Genocide Research, https://​www​.tandfonline​.com/​action/​ journalInformation​?show​=​editorialBoard​&​journalCode​=​cjgr20. Accessed May 17, 2022. “Executive Board.” International Network of Genocide Scholars, https://​inogs​.com/​who​-we​-are/​board​ .html. Accessed May 17, 2022. Feingold, Henry L. “How Unique Is the Holocaust?,” in Alex Grohman and Daniel Landes, eds., Critical Issues of the Holocaust. Simon Wiesenthal Center and Rossel Books, 1983, pp. 397–401. Fleming, Michael. Auschwitz, the Allies and Censorship of the Holocaust. Cambridge University Press, 2014. “Forum: The Achille Mbembe Controversy and the German Debate about Antisemitism, Israel, and the Holocaust.” Journal of Genocide Research 23.3 (2021): 371–435. Friedländer, Saul. When Memory Comes. Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1979. Friedländer, Saul. “Some Reflections on the Historicization of National Socialism,” German Politics & Society 13 (1988): 9–21. Friedländer, Saul. Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939. HarperCollins, 1997. Friedländer, Saul. The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945. Harper Perennial, 2008. Friedländer, Saul. “A Fundamental Crime,” K: Jews, Europe, the XXIst Century (September 9, 2021), https://​k​-larevue​.com/​en/​saul​-Friedländer​-a​-fundamental​-crime/​. Accessed May 10, 2022. Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1986. Gutman, Yisrael, and Gideon Grief, eds., The Historiography of the Holocaust Period: Proceedings of the Fifth Yad Vashem International Historical Conference, Jerusalem, March 1983. Yad Vashem, 1988. Haan, Ido de. “The Paradoxes of Dutch History: Historiography of the Holocaust in the Netherlands,” in David Bankier and Dan Michman, eds., Holocaust Historiography in Context: Emergence, Challenges, Polemics and Achievements. Berghahn Books, 2009, pp. 355–76. Habermas, Jürgen. “Der neue Historikerstreit,” Philosophie Magazine (September 9, 2021), https://​www​ .philomag​.de/​artikel/​der​-neue​-historikerstreit. Accessed May 10, 2022. Herf, Jeffrey. Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys. Harvard University Press, 2007. Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. Quadrangle Books, 1961. Hilberg, Raul. “The Development of Holocaust Research: A Personal Overview,” in David Bankier and Dan Michman, eds., Holocaust Historiography in Context: Emergence, Challenges, Polemics and Achievements. Berghahn Books, 2009, pp. 25–36. “Historikerstreit 2.0: Kolonialismus mit Holocaust vergleichbar,” News ORF.at (February 2, 2022), https://​orf​.at/​stories/​3245944/​. Accessed May 16, 2022. Accessed May 18, 2022. serdargunes​ “Historikerstreit, Holocaust, Literaturliste,” Serdargunes’ Blog (July 4, 2021), https://​ .wordpress​.com/​2021/​06/​04/​a​-debate​-german​-catechism​-holocaust​-and​-post​-colonialism/​. Accessed May 18, 2022. Huttenbach, Henry R. “Locating the Holocaust on the Genocide Spectrum: Towards a Methodology of Definition and Categorization,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 3.3 (1988): 289–303. Jockusch, Laura. Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe. Oxford University Press, 2012. Jockusch, Laura. “Justice at Nuremberg? Jewish Responses to Nazi War-Crime Trials in Allied-Occupied Germany,” Jewish Social Studies 19.1 (2012): 107–47. Kansteiner, Wulf. In Pursuit of Germany Memory: History, Television and Politics after Auschwitz. Ohio University Press, 2006. Kaplan, Chaim Aron. Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan. Indiana University Press, 1999. Kassow, Samuel D. Who Will Write our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive. Indiana University Press, 2007. Katz, Steven. The Holocaust in Historical Context. Oxford University Press, 1994. Katzburg, Nathaniel. “The Destruction of Hungarian Jewry in Hungarian Historiography,” in Yisrael Gutman and Gideon Grief, eds., The Historiography of the Holocaust Period: Proceedings of the

82  Handbook of genocide studies Fifth Yad Vashem International Historical Conference, Jerusalem, March 1983. Yad Vashem, 1988, pp. 343–68 Kiernan, Ben. Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur. Yale University Press, 2007. Klävers, Steffen. “Paradigm Shifts: Critical Reflections on the Historikerstreit 2.0, the Catechism-Debate, and their Precursors,” Society 59 (2022): 16–24, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1007/​s12115​-022​-00677​-0. Krakowski, Shmuel. “The Holocaust of Polish Jewry in Polish Historiography in Polish Émigrés Circles,” in Yisrael Gutman and Gideon Grief, eds., The Historiography of the Holocaust Period: Proceedings of the Fifth Yad Vashem International Historical Conference, Jerusalem, March 1983. Yad Vashem, 1988, pp. 117–32. Kuper, Leo. Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century. Yale University Press, 1981. Lagrou, Pierre. The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Occupation in Western Europe, 1945–1965. Cambridge University Press, 1999. Laqueur, Walter. The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth about Hitler’s “Final Solution”. Little, Brown, 1980. Lelle, Nikolas, and Hannah Schulz. “Interview with Sybille Steinbacher,” Belltower News (March 31, 2022), https://​www​.belltower​.news/​historikerstreit​-2​-0​-der​-holocaust​-ist​-praezedenzlos​-129787/​. Accessed May 16, 2022. Accessed May 10, 2022. Littell, Franklin H. “A Review of the Annual Scholars Conference,” unpublished paper (January 12, 2001), https://​digital​.library​.temple​.edu/​digital/​api/​collection/​p16002coll14/​id/​7918/​download. Accessed May 10, 2022. Marcuse, Harold. “Book Review: Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization by Michael Rothberg,” The American Historical Review 113.3 (2012): 820–1. Marrus, Michael R. “The Holocaust at Nuremberg,” Yad Vashem Studies 26 (1998): 5–41. Mazower, Mark. “Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands,” Contemporary European History 21.2 (2012): 117–23. Michman, Dan. “Bloodlands and the Holocaust: Some Reflections on Terminology, Conceptualization and Their Consequences,” Journal of Modern European History 10.4 (2012): 440–5. Michman, Dan. “The Jewish Dimension of the Holocaust in Dire Straits? Current Challenges of Interpretation and Scope,” in Norman J.W. Goda, ed., Jewish Histories of the Holocaust: New Transnational Approaches. Berghahn Books, 2014, pp. 17–38. Moses, A. Dirk. “The Holocaust and World History: Raphael Lemkin and Comparative Methodology,” in Dan Stone, ed., The Holocaust and Historical Methodology. Berghahn Books, 2012, pp. 272–89. Moses, A. Dirk. “Anxieties in Holocaust and Genocide Studies,” in Claudio Fogu, Wulf Kansteiner, and Todd Presner, eds., Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Cultures. Harvard University Press, 2016, pp. 332–54. Moses, A. Dirk. “The German Catechism,” Geschichte der Gegenwart (March 23, 2021), https://​ge​ schichtede​rgegenwart​.ch/​the​-german​-catechism/​. Accessed May 10, 2022. Nolte, Ernst. “Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (June 6, 1986): 25. Novick, Peter. The Holocaust in American Life. Houghton Mifflin, 2000. Papazian, Pierre. “A ‘Unique Uniqueness’?,” Midstream 30.4 (April 1984): 14–25. Poliakov, Léon. Bréviaire de la haine: le IIIe Reich et les Juifs. Calmann-Lévy, 1951. Rapp, Tobias. “Macht uns das Gedenken an den Holocaust blind für anderer deutsche Verbrechen,” Der Spiegel (February 12, 2021). Reitlinger, Gerald. The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939-1945. Beechhurst Press, 1953. Rosenbaum, Alan S., ed. Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide. Westview Press, 1996. Rosenberg, Alan. “‘Was the Holocaust Unique? A Peculiar Question,” in Isidor Wallimann and Michael N. Dobkowski, eds., Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death. Greenwood Press, 1987, pp. 145–61. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford University Press, 2009.

Holocaust research and genocide studies  83 Rothberg, Michael. “Comparing Comparisons: From the Historikerstreit to the Mbembe Affair,” Geschichte der Gegenwart (September 23, 2020), https://​ge​schichtede​rgegenwart​.ch/​comparing​ -comparisons​-from​-the​-historikerstreit​-to​-the​-mbembe​-affair/​. Accessed May 10, 2022. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirektionale Erinnerung: Holocaustgedenken im Zeitalter der Dekolonisierung. Metropol, 2021. Rousso, Henry. The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944. Harvard University Press, 1991. Schmid, Thomas. “Der Holocaust war kein Kolonialverbrechen,” Die Zeit 15 (April 8, 2021), https://​www​.zeit​.de/​2021/​15/​erinnerungskultur​-holocaust​-kolonialismus​-m​enschheits​verbrechen​ -vergleichbarkeit​-michael​-rothberg​-juergen​-zimmerer. Accessed May 18, 2022. Seidl, Claudius. “War der Holocaust eine koloniale Tat?.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (March 1, 2021), https://​www​.faz​.net/​aktuell/​feuilleton/​streit​-um​-gedenkkultur​-war​-der​-holocaust​-eine​ -koloniale​-tat​-17217645​.html. Accessed May 10, 2022. Shapiro, Robert Moses, ed., Why Didn’t the Press Shout? American and International Journalism during the Holocaust. KTAV Publishing House, 2002. Snyder, Timothy. Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. Basic Books, 2010. Snyder, Timothy. Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. Crown, Tim Duggan Books, 2015. Stauber, Roni. Laying the Foundations for Holocaust Research: The Impact of the Historian Philip Friedman. Yad Vashem, 2009. Steinbacher, Sybille. “Über Holocaustvergleiche und Kontinuitäten koloniale Gewalt.” Ein Verbrechen ohne Namen: Anmerkungen zum neuen Streit über den Holocaust. C.H. Beck, 2022, pp. 53–68. Taylor, A.J.P. Origins of the Second World War. Penguin, 1961. Trevor-Roper, H.R. The Last Days of Hitler. Macmillan & Company, 1947. Wiesel, Elie. “Jewish Values in the Post-Holocaust Future: A Symposium,” Judaism 16.3 (1967): 283–5 Zimmerer, Jürgen, and Michael Rothberg. “Enttabuisiert den Vergleich!” Die Zeit 14 (March 31, 2021), https://​www​.zeit​.de/​2021/​14/​erinnerungskultur​-gedenken​-pluralisieren​-holocaust​-vergleich​ -globalisierung​-geschichte. Accessed May 15, 2022.

PART III GENOCIDE STUDIES AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

6. The interpretation and (non-)application of the Genocide Convention during the Cold War Anton Weiss-Wendt

THE DEEP FREEZE, 1949–59 Article XIII of the Genocide Convention required 20 instruments of ratification or accession before it could come into force. In securing 20 ratifications/accessions, most difficult proved convincing the Cold War protagonists, the Soviet Union, the United States, and the United Kingdom, to do so. The Soviet Union and the United States signed but did not immediately ratify the convention, while the United Kingdom did neither. Without the participation of major international players, the Genocide Convention did not possess nearly as much legal and moral power originally invested into it. The Western powers’ reticence was unexpected, since the form and the structure of the convention was distinctly American while the text built on the common law tradition. In the United States, the influential American Bar Association (ABA) voted against ratification in the fall of 1949. The ABA’s objections were twofold. On the one hand, bar members pointed to ongoing “Soviet genocide” and the inability to prosecute it effectively. Specifically, they referred to the absence of political and economic groups among those protected by the convention. On the other hand, the ABA argued that the United States was vulnerable to similar charges by the Communist bloc. On top of that, the federal system militated against devolving to the US Government of the powers traditionally reserved to the states (Weiss-Wendt, 2017, 142–7). Certain members of the public who engaged politically on the issue of US ratification shared in the belief that international human rights law might cancel the US Constitution or even pave the way for a world government (Weiss-Wendt, 2018a, 48–9). Some of those fears appeared justified. In 1951, a left-wing “Negro” organization, Civil Rights Congress (CRC), submitted to the United Nations a petition charging the US Government with genocide of African Americans. The accompanying book, We Charge Genocide, listed specific instances of racial discrimination, including lynching, going back to the late nineteenth century (Patterson, 1951, passim). Although the Soviet Union did not have a hand in this project, the US State Department went on full alert (Weiss-Wendt, 2017, 225–45). For what it is worth, the CRC consistently rejected the notion that it had a Communist affiliation. There is no evidence the Soviets had bankrolled CRC, whose operations were quite minimal in any event. That said, Patterson was a Communist and he did spend considerable time in the USSR in the late 1920s and mid-1930s. The Soviets had a long list of hot topics of their own. To begin with, Stalin’s regime was never enthusiastic regarding all things international and signed the Genocide Convention only reluctantly. Moscow’s strategy vis-à-vis the draft convention had failed on all but two counts: non-inclusion of political groups and weak mechanisms of implementation (i.e., no provision for an international criminal court, ICC) (Weiss-Wendt, 2017, 3–48, 97–113). Meanwhile Western powers kept pressing the Soviet Union on the issue of ethnic deportations, the forced 85

86  Handbook of genocide studies labor camp system, and (beginning in 1953) the man-made famine of 1932–33. In its push, the US Government received full support from East European émigré organizations, which in turn were financed by the CIA (Weiss-Wendt, 2018a, 104–65). In the period 1951–59, the United States and its allies were on the verge of taking the issue of “Soviet genocide” before the United Nations on four different occasions. Every time, they backed down from the decision to charge formally the Soviet bloc with genocide, for pragmatic reasons. Potential legal (and moral) repercussions of the Communist aggression in Korea were neutralized by a hoax successfully launched by the Soviets and backed by the Chinese and North Koreans. Namely, the Communist countries accused the United States in the United Nations of waging bacteriological warfare in Korea (Weiss-Wendt, 2017, 209–24). In the winter of 1953, the international press wrote of an existential threat to the Soviet Jews, sparked by the news of the so-called Doctor’s Plot fueled personally by Stalin. The US State Department showed interest in pursuing this issue through the United Nations (UN), though the death of the Soviet dictator a few months later canceled those plans (Weiss-Wendt, 2017, 176–85). The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 came the closest to triggering formal charges of genocide. Batista’s Cuba sponsored a UN resolution that charged the Soviet Union with a violation, among other things, of the Genocide Convention. The resolution spoke interchangeably of genocide and mass murder, while making specific reference of the deportation of “young Hungarians” to the Soviet Union and invoking the violation of the 1947 peace treaty between Hungary and the associated powers. The United States, however, was not ready for an open confrontation with the Soviet Union over Hungary. The watered-down resolution merely hinted that a UN member state might have committed genocide. Finally, the International Commission of Jurists—an outwardly independent organization originally created for the purpose of exposing violations of human rights in the Communist bloc—sought a UN investigation of China’s aggression in Tibet in 1959, including the “supreme crime of attempted genocide” (Weiss-Wendt, 2018c, 54–7, 77). In all four instances, Raphael Lemkin was actively involved in making the case for “Soviet genocide.” The Soviet ratified the Genocide Convention in 1954, only after a UN investigation of forced labor had been concluded. The final report of the investigation decried forced labor in Communist countries, but omitted China and failed to name any other country, including the Soviet Union, by name. No political observer exercised any illusion Moscow did ratify the convention in good faith (Weiss-Wendt, 2017, 274). The British nearly lost face, intending to abstain from voting on the Genocide Convention in the UN in December 1948 (Weiss-Wendt, 2018b, 197–213). The UK Government had remained consistent in its dismissing of the treaty as superfluous. In the internal discussions, the Home Office was the most open to UK accession and the Foreign Office least open. Counterintuitively, the Colonial Office and the issue of dependent territories (i.e., colonies) was less significant to the British opposition. UK High Commissioners in major overseas territories were the first to receive information about the newly signed treaty, in January 1949. At that point, passing enabling legislation appeared a major problem for the British colonial administration vis-à-vis the Genocide Convention. Select governors also took issue with the broad definition of genocide, in particular the clauses concerning killing and/or causing mental harm to members of the group. Out of 38 colonies, only five considered the convention unacceptable for political or other reasons. (Weiss-Wendt, 2018a, 3–28). The Foreign Office regarded the Genocide Convention to be “perfectly futile,” while the Home Office pointed out that the British inaction increasingly looked like unwillingness to outlaw the crime of

Interpretation and (non-)application of the Genocide Convention  87 genocide (Weiss-Wendt, 2018a, 15–16, 28–41). Further obstacles that stood in the way of UK accession included the circumstances surrounding the recent ending of the Palestine mandate, the reluctance to amend domestic laws, and the unwillingness to grant extradition because of the tradition of political asylum for those involved in insurrections against repressive regimes (Simpson, 2002, 9, 12, 14, 24). Meanwhile, the number of ratifications/accessions has grown steadily, to 51 by 1959. The first five countries that had joined the Genocide Convention, already in 1949, were Ethiopia, Australia, Norway, Iceland, and Ecuador (Korey, 2001, 132–4). Of particular symbolism was the accession of West Germany in 1954, though not without controversy. The German text of the convention was formulated in such a way as to cover ethnic Germans who had been expelled from Eastern Europe after the Second World War (Weiss-Wendt, 2017, 267–72). Of other major democracies, France had signed the convention in 1950. This decision came to haunt the French later, during the Algerian War, as they stood accused of genocide by the Asian-African bloc countries at the UN on behalf of Algeria. The original report was drafted by the Arab Information Center in New York, with the participation of Lemkin. Khrushchev later raised the issue of genocide in Algeria during the Fifteenth UN General Assembly in 1960 (Weiss-Wendt, 2018c, 56–7, 63–5).

DECOLONIZATION AND THE PROXY WARS OF THE 1960s AND 1970s Decolonization, which began in earnest in the second half of the 1950s, was often accompanied by mass violence. As more countries in Asia and Africa became independent, they inevitably fell in the Western or Communist sphere of interests. Armed conflicts that erupted along both ethnic and political lines eventually escalated into proxy wars between the United States and the Soviet Union. To emphasize their (righteous) cause, belligerent parties engaged in wars of words. Just about every major proxy war in the 1960s and 1970s generated accusations of genocide, though none of them ever ended up in the court of law. In Congo in 1960 and 1961, the tactics of the Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba vis-à-vis the breakaway province of Katanga and his subsequent assassination prompted mutual allegations of genocide (Weiss-Wendt, 2018c, 65–6). The killing of up to 10,000 ethnic Tutsi in Rwanda in 1963 in response to an armed incursion from neighboring Burundi made the British diplomats wonder if it should be qualified as genocide. Their counterparts in the US State Department did not believe US ratification of the Genocide Convention would have made any difference with respect to the situation in Burundi in 1972. That year, the attempted coup accompanied by the Hutu armed incursion from Tanzania resulted in summary executions of anywhere between 80,000 and 200,000 ethnic Hutu by the Tutsi-dominated army (Weiss-Wendt, 2018a, 290–1, 356, 358). Before the Vietnam War and Khmer Rouge Cambodia came to dominate international headlines, no other armed conflict had generated as much publicity as did the Biafra War. The secession of the eastern provinces from Nigeria in May of 1967 sparked a bloody civil war and famine, resulting in roughly one million deaths. The leader of the secessionists, Odumegwu Ojukwu, manipulated world opinion by skillfully playing on fears of genocide. France and the Soviet Union, which supplied arms to the separatists and the government forces, respectively, clashed on whether to qualify the massive loss of lives as genocide. An international

88  Handbook of genocide studies observer team that visited Biafra in 1968 did not find evidence of genocide and neither did the Nixon administration in Washington (Moses and Heerten, 2018, 21–31; Weiss-Wendt, 2018c, 67–70). Many but not all instances of mass violence had invited a genocide label. For example, Moscow effectively passed in silence the slaughter of members of the Indonesian Communist Party in 1965. Neither did the Soviets press the charge of genocide against apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia. In these and similar cases, the Soviets typically acted by proxy, assigning the role of an accuser to other Communist bloc countries such as Cuba, Czechoslovakia, or Mongolia (Weiss-Wendt, 2018c, 66–7). Hypocrisy regarding genocide-designation was most apparent in the case of Iraqi Kurds. The Soviet Union backed calls for Kurdistan’s autonomy in northern Iraq as part of the general strategy to support national liberation movements. The quasi-socialist Ba’ath Party that came to power briefly in 1963 as a result of a coup first negotiated a ceasefire with the Kurdish rebels but subsequently brutally attacked them using napalm. The Soviets instantly cried genocide and, acting through Mongolia, requested a condemnatory resolution by the UN General Assembly. The Iraq Government and the American popular opinion, however, denied the Soviet Union the right to speak from the high moral ground, referring to the wholesome deportation of a number of ethnic minorities in Stalin’s Russia two decades earlier. Subsequently, Moscow dropped the idea of pursuing genocide allegations in the UN Security Council, bowing to pressure by the Arab countries. As Soviet-Iraqi relations had improved, Moscow no longer reacted when the Kurdish leadership in 1968 sought a UN intervention in the “war of genocide” waged by the Ba’athist regime. In fact, six years later the Soviet Union military assisted the Iraq Government in suppressing the latest Kurdish insurgency. That in its turn prompted the claim by the insurgents that Moscow was complicit in ongoing genocide. During the Iran-Iraq War, the Soviets sided with the latter and did not directly condemn their client for the use of poisonous gas on the battlefield. Saddam Hussein’s comprehensive campaign to depopulate the Kurdish areas culminated in the chemical attack on the town of Halabja on March 16, 1988, killing some 5,000. This was one of at least 40 such attacks targeting the Kurdish minority, causing renewed accusations of genocide, including by Western politicians. Soviet officials remained silent (Weiss-Wendt, 2018c, 70–6). The Sino-Soviet split and the subsequent US-Chinese rapprochement had often informed the decision by major international players to declare, or not to declare, a particular instance of mass murder genocide. East Pakistan (Bangladesh) and Cambodia are the cases at hand. Pakistan served as a liaison in preparation for the historic visit to China by the US President Richard Nixon in February of 1972. Besides, Pakistan was important to the United States as an anti-Communist power and a counterweight to India. These considerations made the US administration overlook the Pakistani army’s onslaught on the Hindu minority in present-day Bangladesh a year earlier. Washington continued to covertly supply weapons to its ally in spite of the alarm sounded by the US ambassador in Dhaka. On March 28, 1971, Archer Blood notified the US State Department of a “selective genocide” of the Bengalis, to no avail (Bass, 2012, xiii–xx, 4–5, 12, 60, 77–84, 218–22). The Soviet leadership meanwhile dissuaded India from going to war over Bangladesh, trying to refocus Delhi’s attention on China. When the Indian ambassador in Moscow evoked genocide in August 1971, his hosts chose to ignore the warning. It took another six months before the Soviets raised the issue of mass violence in Bangladesh. Even then, they went mainly after China. Moscow and its satellites slammed Mao Zedong for promoting the ill-founded concept of two Communist superpowers and flirt-

Interpretation and (non-)application of the Genocide Convention  89 ing with Western imperialism. In this discourse Mao’s China appeared a larger culprit than Pakistan. The slaughter of Bengalis continued until India intervened militarily (Weiss-Wendt, 2018c, 79–80). China was the sole backer of Pol Pot’s Cambodia, despite the Khmer Rouge’s express ingratitude to their patron. Mao perceived Cambodia as a bulwark against Vietnam. As Saigon fell and the Americans withdrew from Indochina, the Soviet Union saw the opportunity to extend its influence in Southeast Asia. The deepening China-Vietnam divide, which became the epicenter of Soviet-American confrontation by proxy, largely dictated how mass atrocities committed by Khmer Rouge were interpreted internationally. Despite the fact that the Khmer Rouge consistently expressed hostility toward the Soviet Union, the latter did not explicitly condemn the unprecedented violence unleashed by the former. Only in the fall of 1978, a mere few months before Democratic Kampuchea had folded, did the Soviet press come to characterize Pol Pot’s terror as genocide—in reference to the Communist Party of Vietnam. The Americans proved as tight-lipped on the issue of genocide. The notable exception was US President Jimmy Carter’s statement on human rights violations in Cambodia from April 21, 1978. Carter spoke of “genocidal policies” carried out by the Khmer Rouge during the previous three years. The Soviet representative quoted Carter in the UN Security Council, yet only after the Khmer Rouge had been dislodged in January of 1979 (Weiss-Wendt, 2018c, 82–4). The accusations of genocide began flying in the wake of the Khmer Rouge’s defeat. The debates had now moved to the UN floor. Vietnam and its Cambodian proxies charged Pol Pot’s regime with killing three million people in a “ferocious act of genocide.” Soviet diplomats framed it as an extension of Mao’s Cultural Revolution and a copycat of the Nazi mass murder. A spokesman for the ousted Khmer Rouge regime, who still represented Cambodia in the UN (with Western nations’ support), subsequently accused Vietnam of genocide. Famine that had broken out in Cambodia following the Vietnamese invasion added further credence to those charges. The notion of a double genocide thus continued circulating for quite some time (Weiss-Wendt, 2018c, 85–7). Australia at one point indicated willingness to initiate criminal proceedings against the Khmer Rouge, but shortly reconsidered, apprehensive that it might appear as recognition of the Vietnam-backed government in Phnom Penh (LeBlanc, 1991, 208).

GRASSROOTS MOBILIZATION AND THE US RATIFICATION DEBATE, LATE 1960s–1970s The arguments against UK accession to the Genocide Convention became increasingly more tenuous as time passed. By the mid-1960s, the establishment of an international criminal court remained a major hurdle. Consensus was missing as to what constituted the crime of “aggression” and which particular offenses “against the peace and security of mankind” the UN should codify. Meanwhile the Home Office had reached an agreement with the Foreign Office, according to which the ultimate decision in each extradition case lay with the Attorney General. That proved decisive in the United Kingdom becoming a party to the genocide treaty at last, on January 30, 1970 (Weiss-Wendt, 2018a, 297–304). With the accession of the Netherlands (1966), Ireland (1976), and New Zealand (1978), the United States remained one of the few democracies that had not endorsed the Genocide Convention. (Switzerland,

90  Handbook of genocide studies Luxembourg, and Portugal all came onboard only after the end of the Cold War; Korey, 2001, 133–4.) Beyond the initial inhibitions of the ABA and the US Senate hearings on ratification in early 1950, a political discourse on the Genocide Convention in the United States was effectively shaped through grassroots mobilization. It was particularly true in the 1970s, when the consecutive administrations revived the issue of US ratification. The ABA held fast, seeing no reason to change its original position. President Nixon, in his February 1970 message to the Senate, however, regarded ratification within the national interests of the United States. The US State Department considered the text of the convention “reasonably clear” and rejected the suggestion to redraft it as unrealistic. Neither did the State Department any longer regard the issue of political groups of paramount importance. To the contrary, the removal of political groups from the scope of the convention might in fact help protect the United States from “propaganda charges that the US is committing genocide against political groups at home and abroad,” as one department official put it. Among other pro-ratification arguments aired was that the United States might have committed other crimes than genocide in Vietnam and that, insofar as the proposal for an ICC had remained dormant, it remained unlikely that country or any of its citizens would ever be taken to court on charges of genocide. Hence, at that point in time, the US Government believed US ratification would be mainly of symbolic value (Weiss-Wendt, 2018a, 308–15). Certain conservative organizations begged to differ, however. They decried the UN definition of genocide as ambiguous, evoked impunity with which Communist regimes had been able to commit crimes, and predicted injustice vis-à-vis individual Americans potentially charged with genocide. Republican Senator John Bricker had advanced a more sophisticated argument against US ratification of the Genocide Convention, which he framed as a threat to the constitutional order granting US citizens protection. Meanwhile the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—whose consent was required to go further with the process of ratification—was receiving a huge amount of negative mail from extremist groups. An alliance comprising the far right, ultraconservatives and the hate fringe promoted a vast conspiracy, which allegedly undermined the very foundations of the United States. They compared the Genocide Convention to other perceived ills of modernity such as income tax, birth control, and welfare payments. Some saw it as a covert effort to undermine the US military in Vietnam while others believed it unduly benefited the Jews, the African Americans, and/or the Catholic Church. The US Government allegedly harassed white American “patriots” while letting members of the Black Panther Party (a left-wing nationalist African American organization) walk free. The Genocide Convention was nothing but a Communist hoax whereby as soon as the United States had ratified the treaty, American citizens would be “hauled off to a foreign country for trial and execution.” The myth of a world government has refused to go away too (Weiss-Wendt, 2018a, 315–50). Opposed to this motley group stood the Ad Hoc Committee on the Human Rights and Genocide Treaties (an umbrella organization established in 1964 under the aegis of the Jewish Labor Committee). In no small part thanks to its lobbying, the genocide treaty was called up for debate on the Senate floor in October 1972 and again in February 1974. Both times, however, the efforts did not go through due to filibuster. The opponents of the Genocide Convention ran another successful campaign, making 200 calls for each single call made by the pro-ratification activists. A decisive moment arrived in February 1976, when the ABA voted to end its opposition to US ratification. Nevertheless, the supporters of the convention

Interpretation and (non-)application of the Genocide Convention  91 could not muster the necessary 60 votes for cloture or two-thirds for ratification. The 95th US Congress recessed in August 1977 without taking action on the convention (Weiss-Wendt, 2018a, 350–63). The staunchest opponents among the US Senators hailed from the Southern states. Southern segregationists had habitually attacked the US Government for having allegedly made too many concessions to the Communists. For them, the Genocide Convention appeared to be nothing but a “backdoor method of enacting federal anti-lynching legislation” (Weiss-Wendt, 2018b, 88–93). Their irrational fears of an African American insurrection received a boost with the arrival on the political stage of Malcolm X and later the Black Panther Party. Malcolm X was reportedly the first to revive the 1951 petition “We Charge Genocide,” shortly after his break with the Nation of Islam and a race riot in Harlem in 1964. Malcolm X unsuccessfully pleaded with several African nations to sponsor the appeal in the UN. Around that time, a picketer in Harlem was spotted carrying a sign “U.N. Must Intervene to Stop U.S. Genocide” (Horne, 2013, 193). Established in 1966, the Black Panther Party distinguished itself among the far left groups by its advocacy of violence. Resubmitting the “We Charge Genocide” petition to the UN was one of the issues that brought briefly together the Black Panthers and the Communist Party USA. The Soviets promptly linked the police harassment of the Black Panthers with the reprisals against all those who opposed the “US policy of genocide,” most prominently Angela Davis. Yet their violent tactics made it hard to sell the Black Panthers as victims of genocide. The presentation of the 1951 petition before the UN in 1970 proved anti-climactic—hardly noticed internationally and therefore regarded as not worth monitoring by the US State Department (Weiss-Wendt, 2018b, 109–13). Another minority group that began increasingly to invoke genocide during the 1970s were the Native Americans. The cause of Native Americans since the mid-1960s had become a part of a broader New Left coalition that had grown out of the Vietnam antiwar movement. The sense that the plight of the Native Americans might be regarded as genocide has been palpable in the United States since the late 1940s. The charge of genocide was readily picked up by the Soviets, who trained their efforts on a single individual, Leonard Peltier. Peltier received two life sentences for shooting two FBI agents during an armed standoff on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in the summer of 1975. In the United States, charges of genocide emanated most frequently from American Indian Movement (AIM), a radical advocacy group founded in 1968. The Long Walk across America and the Long Walk for Survival, organized by AIM in 1978 and 1980, respectively, both incorporated the word genocide in the featured slogans. Specific charges included the seizure of Indian lands and forced sterilization. Around the same time, the UN received a formal complaint, in which the tribal leaders charged the US Government of genocide of the Native Americans. The AIM campaign eventually faltered, much like one by the Black Panthers did earlier (Weiss-Wendt, 2018b, 113–19).

THE FINAL COLD WAR DECADE AND THE WAY OUT ON THE GENOCIDE CONVENTION The early 1980s provided no indication that the international community was anywhere nearer to making the Genocide Convention operational. To the contrary, proxy wars and the propaganda that accompanied them reached new heights. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 prompted, predictably, a barrage of accusations, including that of genocide.

92  Handbook of genocide studies The Soviet Union stood accused of forcing millions of Afghans over the border to Pakistan and, more ominously, of using chemical and toxin weapons. Like the Communist bloc attempted earlier during the Korean War, the West kept hammering the charge of chemical warfare without presenting convincing proof. This was one of the reasons why the UN special rapporteur on Afghanistan, Austrian law professor Felix Ermacora, did not use the word genocide in his second and final report in December 1985—to the chagrin of the US State Department. Not to be outdone, the Soviets routinely evoked genocide with respect to armed conflicts with the covert participation of the United States: El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and others (Weiss-Wendt, 2018c, 150–54, 157–8). Yet the largest propaganda offensive in the 1980s the Soviets waged against Israel. Out of 1,037 articles with references to genocide printed between 1948 and 1988 in Pravda, the organ of the Soviet Communist Party, a whopping one-quarter dealt with Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinians. (In comparison, the American War in Vietnam generated a “mere” hundred hits.) A great many of them appeared in the wake of the Israel 1982 invasion of Lebanon and specifically the massacre in the Palestinian refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila. In stark contrast, Soviet authorities never designated the Jews murdered by the Nazis as victims of genocide (Weiss-Wendt, 2018c, 133–49, 177–9). Despite the heated exchanges between the Soviet and American representatives, by the early 1980s, the long-standing arguments against US ratification of the genocide treaty started showing cracks. Notwithstanding the many proxy wars fought between the Communist and Western blocs, no state had until then evoked the convention and no individual had been charged formally with genocide. Meanwhile, the Soviets kept pestering the United States for not ratifying the Genocide Convention. As the underlining cause, they referred to alleged genocide perpetrated by “American imperialism” against such minorities as Native Americans and African Americans. As of late 1983, the US State Department was ready to recommend to the President to endorse the convention with certain reservations, or rather “understandings.” The ratification would be an “important symbolic gesture” demonstrating that the United States was “committed to human rights at a time when our principal adversary has repeatedly shown it is not.” Furthermore, the State Department believed it would benefit Ronald Reagan both domestically and internationally, giving him an advantage in dealing with the Soviets. This line of argumentation actually came from the president of the ABA, who had in the summer of 1984 traveled to the Soviet Union—a remarkable event in its own right. However, these and similar statements of intent did not translate automatically into bipartisan support in the US Congress. Hence, the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations rejected the administration’s proposal to review the question of ratification (Weiss-Wendt, 2018a, 388–93). Meanwhile the UN set out to review the text of the Genocide Convention vis-à-vis the legal discourse that had emerged since 1948. The UN Economic and Social Council had appointed Nicodème Ruhashyankiko as a special rapporteur on genocide. The final report that he had delivered in 1978 urged the creation of an ICC, the recognition of universal jurisdiction over genocide, and the establishment of an ad hoc committee on genocide. Benjamin Whitaker took up where Ruhashyankiko left off, presenting his report in 1985. Whitaker had gone further than his predecessor, proposing, among other things, to amend the convention by including political and nonbinary gender groups as well as cultural genocide and ecocide. The many suggestions and clarifications proposed by the two UN special rapporteurs did not go beyond the respective reports they had filed, however. For one, the subject of genocide remained as

Interpretation and (non-)application of the Genocide Convention  93 politicized as ever, and expecting the reopening of a discussion on a qualitatively different level from that at the UN in the late 1940s was simply unrealistic. Further complicating matters was the growing tendency to measure past instances of mass murder against the definition of genocide. Ruhashyankiko found himself in hot water for referring in the original draft of his report to the “genocide of Armenians in Turkey during the First World War,” which he had subsequently deleted (Schabas, 2000, 123, 135, 161, 168, 178, 235, 237–8, 281–2, 301, 334, 374, 403, 431, 538–9, 555–9, 651–2). Indeed, the Armenian genocide became a sticking point not only for the UN but also for the United States and the Soviet Union. Both countries performed a political balancing act, avoiding the word genocide in reference to the destruction of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey. The strategic importance of Turkey to both superpowers enabled the government in Ankara to control the narrative as far as the mass murder of Armenians in 1915 was concerned (Weiss-Wendt, 2018c, 125–9; 2018a, 374–85). The appointment of Mikhail Gorbachev as the new Soviet leader in March 1985 and the policy of liberalization that he had launched was the single event that eventually secured a consensus on the Genocide Convention. In his speech at the XXVII Communist Party Congress a year later, Gorbachev listed, among other priorities, the fight against genocide. The US Senate eventually approved the Genocide Convention, in February 1986, and the Senate Committee on the Judiciary began that same month hearing on incorporating the treaty in the US criminal code. Yet it took another two and half years until President Reagan signed the genocide treaty into law, on November 4, 1988. The United States thus became the 98th country to join the Genocide Convention (Weiss-Wendt, 2018a, 395–6). Gorbachev, in his address at the UN General Assembly in December 1988, emphasized the importance of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and committed the Soviet Union to safeguarding universal human rights. In February 1989, the Soviet government accepted the ICJ jurisdiction with respect to six multilateral treaties, including the Genocide Convention. More specifically, it withdrew its long-standing reservations to Articles 9 and 12 of the convention (Weiss-Wendt, 2018c, 161–2). When considering the Cold War period as whole, quasi-legal prosecution on charges of genocide occurred in just three instances: the Vietnam War, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, and Ceaușescu’s Romania. These cases heralded the onset of so-called people’s tribunals and a haphazard application of international law to “revolutionary justice.” None of them upheld due process or applied judiciously the definition of genocide. Set up by the pacifist British intellectual, Bertrand Russell, a people’s tribunal in January 1967 declared the United States guilty of war crimes and genocide in Vietnam. Building on this precedent, the People’s Revolutionary Tribunal convened in August 1979 to try in absentia the leaders of the ousted Khmer Rouge. Behind the show trial stood Vietnam and the Soviet Union, which made sure that alongside the main defendants, Pol Pot and Ieng Sary, China was also pronounced to be complicit in genocide. As the Cold War ended, Romania’s Nicolae Ceaușescu was among a handful of Eastern European leaders ousted from power by popular uprisings. Caught in flight, Ceaușescu and his wife were court-martialed and executed by a firing squad on December 25, 1989. The power couple stood accused of the genocide of some 68,000 people killed during the Romanian Revolution. Further trials of high-ranking Communist officials on charges of incitement to and execution of genocide followed in the 1990. Acknowledging that the punishment meted out to Ceaușescu was effectively judicial murder, one can make the case that Romania’s leader

94  Handbook of genocide studies was the first and only acting head of state ever sentenced to death on charges of genocide (Weiss-Wendt, 2018c, 86, 104–5, 162–3).

WORKS CITED Bass, J. Gary. The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide. New York: Knopf, 2012. Print. Horne, Gerald. Black Revolutionary: William Patterson and the Globalization of the African American Freedom Struggle. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2013. Print. Korey, William. An Epitaph for Raphael Lemkin. New York: American Jewish Committee, 2001. Unpublished manuscript. LeBlanc, Lawrence. The United States and the Genocide Convention. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Print. Moses, Dirk, and Lasse Heerten. Postcolonial Conflict and the Question of Genocide: The Nigeria-Biafra War, 1967–1970. New York: Routledge, 2018. Print. Patterson, L. William, ed. We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government against the Negro People. A Petition to the United Nations. New York: Civil Rights Congress, 1951. Out of Print. Schabas, A. William. Genocide in International Law: The Crime of Crimes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Print. Simpson, A.W. Brian. “Britain and the Genocide Convention,” British Yearbook of International Law 73.1 (2002): 5–64. Print. Weiss-Wendt, Anton. The Soviet Union and the Gutting of the UN Genocide Convention. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2017. Print. Weiss-Wendt, Anton. A Rhetorical Crime: Genocide in the Geopolitical Discourse of the Cold War. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018a. Print. Weiss-Wendt, Anton, ed. Documents on the Genocide Convention from the American, British, and Russian Archives: The Ideology of a Humanitarian Treaty, 1949–1988. London: Bloomsbury, 2018b. Print. Weiss-Wendt, Anton. ed. Documents on the Genocide Convention from the American, British, and Russian Archives: The Politics of International Humanitarian Law, 1933–1948. London: Bloomsbury, 2018c. Print.

7. Mass murder and genocide in Indonesia and Cambodia, 1965–79: Cold War, state, and region Ben Kiernan

The mass murders and genocides in Indonesia in 1965–66 and Cambodia in 1975–79 stand out as major episodes in the Cold War. In the first case, which was perpetrated by Indonesia’s anti-communist armed forces, the victims were nearly all alleged communists, but they also included some members of the country’s ethnic Chinese minority. In the second case, members of Cambodia’s defeated anti-communist regime were initial victims, but the victorious Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), Stalinist-style, soon devastated both its own ranks and large sectors of the country’s population, while perpetrating genocide against ethnic Vietnamese and Muslim Cham minorities. The diplomacy surrounding the two cases reflected different phases of the Cold War, namely, before and after the Sino-US rapprochement of the early 1970s. In 1965 Washington welcomed Indonesia’s change of government, and incoming President Suharto’s destruction of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI). Yet a decade later, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger also (cautiously) welcomed the new CPK regime in Cambodia, seeing its Khmer Rouge leaders as a pro-Chinese bulwark against communist Vietnam. He informed Suharto’s regime of this (Kiernan 2012: 328). Indonesia long accepted this view. Eventually, however, its suspicions of Chinese expansionist ambitions prevailed. During the 1980s, Indonesia played an important part in distancing the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) from the exiled Khmer Rouge, despite the objections of China and the USA. This chapter will examine these two cases at three levels: those of great power participation, state-level perpetration, and a regional chronology of the progression of the mass violence across each country.

INDONESIA, 1965–66 The PKI, founded in 1920 in what was then the Dutch East Indies, suffered two major setbacks in attempted revolts, first in 1926–27 when the party was “utterly crushed” by the Dutch, and then in the nascent Republic of Indonesia in 1948 (Mortimer 1984: 50–2; Ricklefs et al. 2010: 282, 344–5). Under a new, younger leadership after independence in 1949, the PKI specifically rejected armed guerrilla struggle in favor of a “united front” and participation in the politics of the Republic, which proved successful. It based its strategy on appeals to nationalism and to a peasantry, particularly in Java, that was often deprived of land or dependent on unfavorable sharecropping impositions. An estimated 50 percent of Java’s peasant population were landless (Hindley 1966: 5; Mortimer 1984: 52, 56n., 97–8).

95

96  Handbook of genocide studies Indonesia’s first national elections were postponed until 1955. Instead, in 1950, the various political parties received a proportion of the seats in the national parliament. The PKI were allocated 6 percent of the seats. In the 1955 national elections, however, the PKI, led by the 32-year-old D.N. Aidit, did “very well, with 27 percent of the vote in Central and East Java – and 16 percent across all of Indonesia, giving it 39 parliamentary seats.” Having won over six million votes, the PKI was now the country’s fourth largest party. Then, in Java’s March 1957 regional elections, the PKI increased its vote to 37 and 32 percent in Central and East Java, respectively. In West Java, it raised its 1955 share of the vote from 16 to 24 percent (Ricklefs 2012: 98, 100–1). The PKI had become the largest party in Java, an island of 56 million people. In South Sumatra, in the December 1957 regional elections there, the PKI moved up into second place. It was widely recognized that “the Communists’ electoral advances … raised the distinct possibility that they might capture an absolute parliamentary majority” in the next national elections. Along with the USA, the Indonesian army became “alarmed at PKI’s growth” (Mortimer 1984: 59; Ricklefs et al. 2010: 379; Roosa 2006: 182; Widjojo Nitisastro 1970: 134). In 1958, the army crushed a revolt based in Sumatra, where the rebels had been secretly aided by the USA. The army gained influence, and the non-PKI political parties lobbied President Sukarno to cancel the next round of national elections. In 1959, Sukarno declared martial law, dismissed the parliament, canceled the scheduled elections, and adopted a policy of “Guided Democracy” under his own auspices. In 1960, regional military commanders banned the PKI in three Indonesian provinces: South Sumatra, South Sulawesi, and South Kalimantan. But while he kept the PKI from real power at the center, Sukarno also grew closer to the PKI, which by the early 1960s had become the world’s largest non-ruling Communist Party, as well as Indonesia’s biggest political party. It claimed 3.5 million members and 20 million members of affiliated organizations (Robinson 2018: 42–3). Meanwhile, with the country under martial law from 1959 to 1963, the army increased its strength from 220,000 in the 1950s to 330,000 by 1962. Given Sukarno’s failing health and failing policy of “Confrontation” with Malaysia, the stage was set for a showdown between the army and the largely unarmed PKI, especially over the eventual succession to Sukarno. As early as January 1959 and again in December 1960, US National Security Council policy documents recommended that the USA should help “drive” the PKI “into positions of open confrontation with the Indonesian government, thereby creating grounds for repressive measures” against it. In September 1964, the CIA suggested that “An abrupt or aggressive move on the [PKI’s] part would surely evoke Army reaction.” The assistant Secretary of State in the British Foreign Office, Edward Peck, wrote in a memo on November 27, 1964, that “there might therefore be much to be said for encouraging a premature PKI coup during Sukarno’s lifetime.” Another British Foreign Office official agreed the next month: “A premature PKI coup may be the most helpful solution for the West – provided the coup failed.” In March 1965, the US ambassador to Indonesia, Howard Jones, told a closed meeting of State Department officials that “an unsuccessful coup attempt by the PKI might be the most effective development to start a reversal of political trends in Indonesia” (Robinson 2018: 107–9; Roosa 2006: 181–2). During 1965, a series of interrelated developments in Indonesia led up to the event that precipitated the mass violence. In January, the army commander General Achmad Yani and three other generals began meeting regularly, in secret, “to discuss the deteriorating political situation and what the Army should do about it.” US ambassador Jones quickly learned of this

Mass murder and genocide in Indonesia and Cambodia, 1965–79  97 military “brain trust.” He cabled Washington in January that the army was “developing specific plans for takeover of government [the] moment Sukarno steps off stage,” and that some officers in the “top military command” were even advocating a coup before Sukarno’s death, should the PKI succeed in arming a civilian militia. Rumors of the “brain trust” soon reached Sukarno himself, in the form of reports of a “Council of Generals.” On May 22, Sukarno called in Yani to explain. Yani apparently dissembled, referring to a misunderstanding of the role of the army’s committee for senior promotions. The CIA reported that Yani’s “brain trust” was “almost certainly the group the PKI was warning Sukarno about.” The PKI, then, had heard of the secret plans for a military coup. But one writer notes that it is “possible that the army generals, in covert fashion, helped spread rumors about the Council of Generals. The army generals wanted to provoke the PKI into a rash action. To take advantage of their strength – raw military power – the generals needed a pretext” (Roosa 2006: 189, 214). What happened next remains less than clear. John D. Legge’s classic 1972 biography, Sukarno, listed a page and a half of unanswered questions about the events of October 1, 1965 (Legge 1972: 391–2). Did they amount to an abortive coup attempt, or rather a purge of the top army leadership? John Roosa’s Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto’s Coup d’État in Indonesia added another page of questions in 2006. The leaders of the September 30th Movement, whose troops carried out the abduction and execution of six army generals during the early morning of October 1, were a junior military officer, Lt. Col. Untung, and the PKI leader, Aidit, who saw it, in Roosa’s words, “as a pre-emptive strike against the right-wing army high command” – a move to prevent a likely military coup. Roosa believes that Aidit “did walk into the trap,” but that he did so as his “own project” without implicating the other senior PKI leaders, let alone its mass membership, in the September 30th Movement’s actions (Roosa 2006: 5, 203, 193, 174–5, 213). General Suharto, commander of the army’s Strategic Reserve, was not among the six generals whom the Movement killed. That may have been because he was personally “close to Untung” and to the latter’s collaborator, Latief. Indeed, in Roosa’s view, Suharto probably “had some idea that the movement would occur and that he would not be targeted.” Moreover, he “knew from the start that this was an action that could be blamed on the Communist Party … The long-anticipated showdown with the PKI had come.” Suharto mobilized the Special Forces (RPKAD), which were under his direct command, and began the counter-attack. Roosa suggests he had “a preconceived plan … The rapidity by which the army blamed the PKI, organized anti-Communist civilian groups, and orchestrated a propaganda campaign suggests preparation. The generals had done some contingency planning” (Roosa 2006: 5–6, 56, 58, 75–8, 80, 280, 220–22). Meanwhile, Sukarno remained publicly silent, and the Movement fell apart. It had killed 12 people. Its military officers, like the PKI, mounted no resistance to Suharto’s forces. By the early evening of October 1, without firing a shot, Suharto’s troops had taken Jakarta’s central square and radio station. Aidit and Untung fled to Central Java (Roosa 2006: 22, 57, 221–3, 60). At 9 p.m. Suharto declared that “now we are able to control the situation both in the centre and in the regions.” Within days, the army had set in motion “a systematic campaign of violence” (Melvin 2017: 490; Robinson 2018: 63). Suharto later recalled: “I had to organize pursuit, cleansing, and crushing.” On November 15, he signed a formal order for an “absolutely essential cleaning out” of the PKI and its sympathizers from the government (Elson 2001: 125).

98  Handbook of genocide studies However, the first large wave of killings had already occurred, almost immediately, in the first half of October, in the province of Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra (Melvin 2018). As early as the morning of October 1, Suharto, already acting as armed forces commander, had sent a cable to Aceh’s anti-communist military commander, General Ishak Djuarsa, informing him that a “coup movement” had taken place in Jakarta. Suharto may well have sent this telegram to all provincial military commanders; the relevant archives from Aceh alone have been made accessible. In Aceh, as historian Jess Melvin has shown, Djuarsa immediately “activated a new command structure,” codenamed “Operation Berdikari.” Later that day Djuarsa received an order from the Medan headquarters of Sumatra’s inter-regional military commander, Lt. Col. Ahmad Mokoginta: “Await further orders/instructions,” which would arrive at midnight. The instructions came in Mokoginta’s midnight speech, in which he ordered that “all members of the armed forces must resolutely and completely annihilate this counter-revolution … to the roots” (Melvin 2017: 490–1). On October 4, Aceh’s military leadership met with the province’s top civilian officials. The latter signed a document declaring their intention to “determinedly completely annihilate” the September 30th Movement “along with its lackeys.” The civilian officials also signed a public announcement, stating: “It is mandatory for the people to assist in every attempt to completely annihilate the … Thirtieth of September Movement along with its lackeys.” On October 7, Djuarsa began a tour of Aceh, visiting its districts and meeting with local military and civilian leaders. He also addressed big public meetings at sports grounds, telling the crowds, “Kill the PKI or you will be targeted.” Three days after Djuarsa’s departure from West Aceh, on October 11, the local authorities there produced a document calling upon “all layers of society” to assist the armed forces “to annihilate and completely eliminate the 30 September Movement along with its affiliated organizations …” These clearly indicated the PKI and its affiliated organizations (Melvin 2017: 491–4, 502). By the end of October, approximately 10,000 Acehnese had been killed, mostly alleged members of the PKI, but also ethnic Chinese (Robinson 2018: 134; Zakaria 2018: 638). The second wave of violence was much larger. It began with the arrival from Jakarta on October 18 of troops of the RPKAD (Special Forces) regiment in Semarang, capital of the province of Central Java. General Nasution, who had escaped his attempted abduction by the 30th September Movement, reportedly said of the PKI: “All of their followers and sympathizers should be eliminated” and he ordered the party’s extinction “down to its very roots” (Kiernan 2003: 46). The RPKAD was an elite mobile force, a para-commando unit under Suharto’s direct orders. A later army report stated that on October 18, RPKAD began rounding up thousands of suspected PKI members in Central Java: “In carrying out its cleaning up movements, the RPKAD did not meet with any resistance from the remnants of the rebels” (Robinson 2018: 152; Roosa 2006: 267–8, n.81). On the contrary, its commander, Sarwo Edhie, later acknowledged that “we had to egg the people on to kill Communists.” He said: “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” (Hughes 1968: 181; Robinson 2018: 160). Sarwo Edhie’s unit, according to historian Geoffrey Robinson, “gained a reputation for extraordinary brutality.” Its killings continued in Central Java until mid-1966, by which time about 140,000 people had perished there (Cribb 1990; Robinson 2018: 152, 134). One was Aidit, who was captured near Yogyakarta in mid-November 1965. A few days later Col. Yasir Hadibroto of Suharto’s Strategic Reserve (Kostrad) drove Aidit to a banana

Mass murder and genocide in Indonesia and Cambodia, 1965–79  99 grove, shot him, and threw his body into a well (Robinson 2018: 122, 341, n.16; Roosa 2006: 69, 279–80, n.35). Two further waves of killings had already begun simultaneously in early November 1965, in North Sumatra and East Java. In December, US officials in Medan wrote: “Sumatra military officer reported that Army, while counseling public restraint, is actually encouraging Moslems to kill all PKI cadres, and that hundreds are being killed every day in North Sumatra.” By March 1966, 40,000–80,000 people had been killed there (some estimates suggest 100,000–200,000), and by mid-1966, as many as 180,000 in East Java. An additional wave of killings, orchestrated by the RPKAD on the island of Bali, began in early December 1965 and took 80,000 lives. Sarwo Edhie of the RPKAD claimed that in contrast to Central Java, “in Bali we have to restrain them [the population], make sure they don’t go too far.” Robinson concluded that the armed forces ensured “that only PKI forces were killed and that they were killed systematically” (Robinson 2018: 134–5, 162, 345, n.58).1 Others estimate that the death toll in Bali reached 100,000 (Dwyer and Santikarma 2003: 293). Yet another wave of murders in eastern Indonesia, particularly on the mostly Catholic island of Flores, from mid-February to mid-March 1966, killed approximately 6,000 alleged PKI members. Intermittent arbitrary killings of communist suspects continued through 1968 (Robinson 2018: 8, 64, 135, 326, n.19). The total death toll is widely estimated to have been at least 500,000 killed. In 1968, the CIA termed the massacres of the PKI “one of the worst mass murders of the twentieth century,” and compared it with the Nazi, Soviet, and Maoist cases (Kiernan 2007a: 578). The Agency reportedly estimated Indonesia’s death toll at 800,000 (former CIA agent (1965–77) John Stockwell, statement in Harper’s Forum 1984: 42). In addition, Suharto’s regime held about a million suspected PKI members and others as political prisoners, many until at least the late 1970s (Robinson 2018: 210). Meanwhile, killings continued. The 30th September Movement’s military leader Untung, who had been captured in Central Java on October 13, 1965, was tried and executed in September 1967. Mohammed Munir, head of the PKI-affiliated national trade union body SOBSI, was arrested in 1968 and condemned in 1973. Then on May 14, 1985, he was suddenly taken from his prison cell and shot for “subversion.” Two months later, four former PKI leaders from East Java were also shot, after spending nearly two decades in jail. (For a sensitive account of the conflicted experiences of an Indonesian Christian in 1965–66, see Lev 2011: 222–30.) None of this prevented the USA and its allies from quickly and extensively supporting the new Suharto regime both politically and materially, as Gabriel Kolko, Robinson, and others have well documented. On October 23, 1965, the US Embassy in Jakarta cabled the State Department: “This is critical juncture for anti-communist forces and for US and free world causes in Indonesia. Central problem for US policy is how we can help right side [sic] win but without our help showing …” (Kolko 1988: 180–1; Robinson 2018: ch. 7 and p. 357, n.10; 2021; 28–31). Over a period of months, a US Embassy official, Robert Martens, supplied the Indonesian army with lists of as many as 5,000 names of PKI officials, journalist Kathy Kadane reported in the Washington Post in 1990, “and the Americans later checked off the names of those who had been killed or captured.” The Indonesian army also possessed and 1 The massacres in Bali have been extensively documented by Robert Cribb, Soe Hok Gie, and others, by Geoffrey Robinson, and by Leslie Dwyer and Degung Santikarma. See Cribb, Soe Hok Gie et al., “The Mass Killings in Bali” (in Cribb 1990: 241–60); Robinson (1995, especially pp. 295–7); Dwyer and Santikarma (2003).

100  Handbook of genocide studies compiled their own death lists; Robinson describes a number of examples. But he comments of the US-supplied lists that “these actions almost certainly aided in the death or detention of many innocent people. They also sent a powerful message that the US government agreed with and supported the army’s campaign against the PKI, even as that campaign took its terrible toll in human lives” (Kadane 1990; Robinson 2018: 155–6, 203, 363, n.96). The impact in Southeast Asia of the impunity Jakarta enjoyed for its mass murders in 1965–66 was at least twofold. First, nine years later, in 1975, the Suharto regime, now well entrenched in power, harbored few inhibitions about invading East Timor and perpetrating there what a UN-sponsored Truth Commission would in 2005 label “extermination as a crime against humanity,” inflicting in a quarter-century a death toll of 100,000 or more. Second, in that same year of 1975, the Pol Pot regime commenced its genocidal rule in Cambodia, employing a brutality that was in part informed by an awareness of what had happened a decade earlier in Indonesia (Kiernan 2007b).

CAMBODIA, 1975–79 In late 1965, at the height of the Indonesian mass murders, Pol Pot was conducting a secret visit to Beijing. He observed with interest the dramatic events in this neighboring Southeast Asian country. He later wrote, “If our analysis had failed, we would have been in greater danger than [the communists] in Indonesia” (Kiernan 2004: 222, 245, n.51). He would not commit the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), as he renamed the party on his return to Cambodia in 1966, to any unarmed “political struggle” that risked vulnerability to such massive destruction. Rather, he would take up arms and subject his Cambodian opponents to the fate that the PKI had suffered. Under Pol Pot’s leadership the CPK, whom Cambodia’s then ruler Prince Norodom Sihanouk dubbed the Khmer Rouge or “Red Cambodians,” launched an armed struggle against Sihanouk’s neutral regime in April 1967. The Khmer Rouge finally seized the capital, Phnom Penh, and defeated Sihanouk’s successor regime, that of Lon Nol, on April 17, 1975. The Khmer Rouge leadership immediately took two unexpected, dramatic initiatives. The CPK ordered the total, forced evacuation of the city, driving two million people into the countryside. About 20,000 Cambodians died on the march. The CPK also sent troops to attack Vietnamese islands in the Gulf of Thailand, kidnapping and killing hundreds of Vietnamese living there. After Hanoi’s forces took Saigon on April 30, the newly reunified Vietnamese regime expelled the Khmer Rouge troops from the islands. An uneasy peace then held for almost two years. Within Cambodia, which in 1976 the CPK renamed Democratic Kampuchea (DK), killings continued, and accelerated slowly over time and by place. Special targets were members of the “new people” evacuated into the rural areas, home of the initially favored “base people.” The first victims were members of the defeated Lon Nol regime and its officer corps, and in some cases rank-and-file soldiers. Later, former teachers and even many doctors became targets. Sporadic killings of suspected recalcitrants or dissidents also occurred in many parts of the country. But most Cambodians who perished in 1975 and 1976 were victims of forced labor, starvation, and untreated diseases, which in many cases were aggravated by the CPK’s large-scale population transfers, first of the two million “new people” driven out of Phnom Penh into the surrounding countryside, and then in the second half of 1975, of 800,000 former

Mass murder and genocide in Indonesia and Cambodia, 1965–79  101 urban people who were rounded up and forced to move a second time, from the south of Cambodia to the Northwest Zone (Kiernan 1996 [2008]: 216–17). From the end of 1976, however, a new pattern emerged. CPK cadres and troops from the Southwest Zone, run by the regime’s military commander, Mok, fanned out across the country to take over other Zones considered insufficiently loyal to Pol Pot’s CPK ‘Center’ in Phnom Penh. In early 1977, Southwest forces took over the Northwest Zone; the Northern Zone (renaming it the Central Zone); the southern two of the Eastern Zone’s five regions; and Region 106 (Siemreap Province), in the northwest. They violently purged the local administrations in those areas and severely escalated the killings and increased the suffering of the population, including both “base people” and “new people.” In Region 106 alone, 500 village chiefs and a thousand soldiers were “taken away” in mid-April 1977, according to a refugee who reached Thailand. In the neighboring province, 800 officers and men were arrested, according to the commander of their artillery unit who fled across the border in July. The forced labor regime became far more demanding. In the planting season, people in one district worked 16 hours per day; daily targets sometimes kept workers going till midnight. The new district chief would summon people for execution from their workplace. A third refugee recalled: “People who ran home briefly at lunchtime to grab something to eat would be called away if they were caught” (Kiernan 1996 [2008]: 236ff., 338–40, 336–7, 344–5). In 1978, in collaboration with the new Central Zone forces, the Southwest troops moved into the Eastern Zone and violently suppressed its remaining three regions. The campaign included not only large-scale massacres on the spot, but also yet another forced evacuation, of much of the rest of the population of the Eastern Zone across the country to the Northwest where many of them were subsequently murdered. From May to December 1978, at least 100,000 and more likely as many as 250,000 easterners were killed, accused of possessing “Khmer bodies with Vietnamese minds.” Meanwhile, in mid-1978 a new group of Western Zone cadres, many of them young females, perhaps even harsher than the Southwest cadres, arrived in the Northwest and subjected the population of that Zone to yet another spate of mass murder (Kiernan 1986; 1996 [2008]: 393–423). By the end of that year, the total Cambodian death toll had reached approximately 1.7 million, one-fifth of the country’s 1975 population of nearly eight million. The CPK leadership accompanied its massive crimes against humanity targeting both its own party members and their families, and the general population, with a simultaneous series of ethnic extermination campaigns, two of which the United Nations-sponsored tribunal, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), judged in 2018 to have met the legal requirements for the crime of genocide. Pol Pot had died in his sleep in 1998, and Mok died in jail awaiting trial in 2006, but Pot’s deputy Nuon Chea and the DK regime’s head of state, Khieu Samphan, were both convicted of genocide against Cambodia’s ethnic Vietnamese minority. Nuon Chea was additionally convicted of genocide against the Cham Muslim minority (ECCC 2019; Kiernan 1996 [2008]: 296–8, 423–5; 252–88, 427–31, 458, 460–3). These two genocides of Cambodian ethnic minority groups picked up steam in early 1977, at the same time as the accelerated killings of majority Cambodians. The genocide of around 20,000 ethnic Vietnamese began simultaneously with DK’s renewed armed attacks on Vietnam, which began in the first months of 1977 (Kiernan 2021a: 344–8; 1996 [2008]: 296–8, 423–5; 2021b: 83–6). DK attacks on Thailand and Laos began around the same time, while Cambodia’s Thai and Lao minorities also suffered violent persecution (Kiernan 1996 [2008]: 366–9, 300–2, 458, table 4). But the CPK waged its largest and longest ethnic extermi-

102  Handbook of genocide studies nation campaign against the Cham Muslims, who lost nearly 100,000 of their 1975 population of around 250,000 (Kiernan 1996 [2008]: 252–88, 458). But this genocide, too, accelerated in 1977. One example is the western part of Kompong Cham province, or Region 41 in DK’s Central Zone. In 2018, the ECCC’s International Co-Investigating Judge, Michael Bohlander, concluded that in the Central Zone, “there was an escalation in the enforcement of CPK policy targeting the Cham following the arrival of the Southwest Zone administration” 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,” leading to the “widespread arrest and killing of Cham” (ECCC 2018: 320). Bohlander indicted a leader of these Southwest Zone cadres, Ao An, for genocide “against the Cham of Kompong Cham Province.” In late 1976 or early 1977, under Mok’s orders, Ao An had transferred from the Southwest and taken up the post of CPK Secretary of Region 41 in the Central Zone, and in late 1977 he became Deputy CPK Secretary of the Central Zone, under Ke Pauk. According to the 2018 indictment: “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” (ECCC 2018: 319). Moreover, Ao An had the defining role in orchestrating and implementing the annihilation of the Cham in the Central Zone across Sector [Region] 41 in particular, but also provided vital logistical support to the coordinated 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. (ECCC 2018: 371, 117–21, Annex IV, “Cham Victims”)

This destruction of the Chams was achieved meticulously and bureaucratically, through the compilation of lists – like the mass killings in Indonesia in 1965–66. Ao An 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 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. (ECCC 2018: 397, 333–6, 399, 401, 409, 154, 158)

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 trial 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” (ECCC 2019: 1676–78, and 1611, n.10713 for a list of cadres transferred from the Southwest to the Central Zone in February 1977).

Mass murder and genocide in Indonesia and Cambodia, 1965–79  103 Orders along these lines continued to come from Ao An’s superiors, Mok and Pauk. At a Region 41 meeting 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 subdistrict chiefs of Region 41 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, Pauk urged cadres to implement the “policy of Angkar” (“the Organization,” i.e. the CPK) “to smash 100 percent of the Cham” (ECCC 2019: 335–6, 318). As early as 1975, after the initial armed border clashes between Cambodia and Vietnam, the USA had seen an opportunity to exert international pressure on Vietnam and further improve relations with the CPK’s patron, Beijing. In November 1975, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told Thailand’s foreign minister: “You should also tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way. We are prepared to improve relations with them.” Two weeks later, Kissinger and US President Ford visited Jakarta. Ford told Indonesia’s President Suharto that there was “resistance … in Cambodia to the influence of Hanoi. We are willing to move slowly in our relations with Cambodia, hoping perhaps to slow down the North Vietnamese influence although we find the Cambodian government very difficult.” Kissinger then explained to Suharto that Beijing had a similar strategy: “The Chinese want to use Cambodia to balance off Vietnam. We don’t like Cambodia, for the government in many ways is worse than Vietnam, but we would like it to be independent. We don’t discourage Thailand or China from drawing closer to Cambodia” (Kiernan 2012: 328). China was already “drawing closer to Cambodia.” In late April 1975, China had pledged a military aid program of 13,300 tons of weapons. In July, four Chinese ships had arrived with 300 jeeps, 3,000 tons of fuel, and 3,000 tons of “military equipment of all kinds.” In August 1975, “experts from China’s defense ministry conducted an extensive survey in Cambodia to assess defense needs.” The next month China was ready to offer Cambodia $1 billion in interest-free economic and military aid, including an immediate $20 million gift, in all “the biggest aid ever given to any one country by China.” A second Chinese military delegation visited Cambodia on 12 October with a draft aid plan, while China supplied four new coastal patrol vessels for the new Cambodian navy. Cambodia then requested that China deliver the outstanding 10,000 tons of pledged military aid by March 1976. Beijing agreed to provide 4,000 tons of weapons and 1,300 vehicles, and soon after, a hundred 120-mm artillery pieces and shells. Under a new military aid treaty, signed on February 10, China would begin to build Cambodia a new military airport at Kompong Chhnang, and in 1976 China would supply DK with four navy escort ships, four torpedo boats, and “the necessary weapons and equipment for on-the-spot training of core officers,” which would be conducted by 490 Chinese air force, naval and tank, and artillery officers. Meanwhile, 638 air force and naval personnel from DK would undergo training in China. In 1977, China would deliver to Cambodia 130-mm artillery pieces and tanks, four more navy escort ships, four torpedo boats, anti-aircraft batteries, and radar equipment. More of all these military supplies would follow in 1978, along with jet-fighter aircraft, bombers, and submarines (Kiernan 1996 [2008]: 128–9, 130, 132–3; Mertha 2014). As Andrew Mertha has written, “Democratic Kampuchea survived as long as it did as a result of Chinese military and nonmilitary aid and assistance” (Mertha 2012: 66). All the weaponry not only helped the CPK retain power in Cambodia but also to perpetrate its mass

104  Handbook of genocide studies murders and genocides – not to mention its cross-border attacks on Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos (Kiernan 2021a). On January 7, 1979, the DK regime was overthrown by the Vietnamese invasion that two previous years of cross-border attacks had provoked. Hanoi established a new Cambodian regime, led by mid-level Khmer Rouge cadres who had rebelled against DK, particularly in the Eastern Zone in 1978, as well as other Cambodians who had suffered under or escaped from DK. With the support of the USA and China, the exiled DK regime nonetheless retained the credentials to hold on to Cambodia’s seat at the United Nations for another 12 years. US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski later claimed credit for the idea of international support for rebuilding the Khmer Rouge from Thailand, to “help the Cambodian people.” He said: “I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. I encouraged the Thai to help the DK … Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him but China could” (quoted in Becker 1986: 440). Thus in the United Nations until 1991, with US and Chinese backing, DK represented the people it had victimized, and it maintained an army on the Thai border until its final defeat in 1999 (Kiernan 1991). In Indonesia, the 1997 Asian financial crisis put an end to the Suharto regime. In 1998, the same year that Pol Pot died in his sleep in a hut in the Cambodian jungle, President Suharto stepped down from power. An era of reform finally began in Indonesia. Cambodia, recovering from the Khmer Rouge, has since returned to Beijing’s orbit.

WORKS CITED Becker, Elizabeth. When the War Was Over: The Voices of Cambodia’s Revolution and Its People. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986. Cribb, Robert, ed. The Indonesian Killings 1965–1966: Studies from Java and Bali. Clayton, Victoria: Monash University Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, 1990. Dwyer, Leslie, and Degung Santikarma. “‘When the World Turned to Chaos’: 1965 and Its Aftermath in Bali, Indonesia,” in R. Gellately and B. Kiernan, eds., The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 289–305. ECCC (Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia). 2018. Closing Order (Indictment) [of Ao An], Co-Investigating Judges, August 16, 2018, Case 004/2/07/09/2009-ECCC-OCIJ. ECCC (Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia). Case 002/02 Judgement, March 27, 2019: https://​www​.eccc​.gov​.kh/​en/​document/​court/​case​-00202​-judgement (accessed January 25, 2022). Elson, R.E. Suharto: A Political Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Harper’s Forum. “Should the US Fight Secret Wars?” (September 1984): 33–47. Hindley, Donald. The Communist Party of Indonesia, 1951–1963, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1966. Hughes, John. The End of Sukarno. London: Angus & Robertson, 1968. Kadane, Kathy. “US Officials’ Lists Aided Indonesian Bloodbath in ’60s,” Washington Post (May 21, 1990). Kiernan, Ben. Cambodia: The Eastern Zone Massacres. New York: Columbia University, Center for the Study of Human Rights, Documentation Series No. 1, 1986. Kiernan, Ben. “Deferring Peace in Cambodia: Regional Rapprochement, Superpower Obstruction,” in George W. Breslauer, Harry Kreisler, and Benjamin Ward, eds., Beyond the Cold War: Conflict and Cooperation in the Third World. Berkeley, CA: Institute of International Studies, 1991, pp. 59–82. Kiernan, Ben. “Twentieth-Century Genocides: Underlying Ideological Themes from Armenia to East Timor,” in R. Gellately and B. Kiernan, eds., The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 29–51. Kiernan, Ben. How Pol Pot Came to Power: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Communism in Cambodia, 1930–1975, 2nd edn. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.

Mass murder and genocide in Indonesia and Cambodia, 1965–79  105 Kiernan, Ben. Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007a. Kiernan, Ben. Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia: Documentation, Denial and Justice in Cambodia and East Timor. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 2007b. Kiernan, Ben. The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996. 3rd edn, 2008. Kiernan, Ben. “The Cambodian Genocide, 1975–1979,” in S. Totten, W.S. Parsons, and I. Charney, eds., Centuries of Genocide: Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, 3rd edn. New York: Routledge, 2012, pp. 317–53. Kiernan, Ben. “The Pol Pot Regime’s Simultaneous War against Vietnam and Genocide of Cambodia’s Ethnic Vietnamese Minority,” Critical Asian Studies 53.3 (September 2021a): 342–58. Kiernan, Ben. “Longterm and Immediate Causes of Genocide,” Yad Vashem Studies 49.2 (2021b): 79–91. Kolko, Gabriel. Confronting the Third World: United States Foreign Policy 1945–1980. New York: Pantheon, 1988. Legge, J.D. Sukarno: A Political Biography. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1972. Lev, Daniel S. No Concessions: The Life of Yap Thiam Hien, Human Rights Lawyer. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2011. Melvin, Jess. “Mechanics of Mass Murder: A Case for Understanding the Indonesian Killings as Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 19.4 (2017): 487–511. Melvin, Jess. The Army and the Indonesian Genocide: The Mechanics of Mass Murder. New York: Routledge, 2018. Mertha, Andrew. “Surrealpolitik: The Experience of Chinese Experts in Democratic Kampuchea, 1975–1979,” Cross-Currents 4 (September 2012): 65–88. Mertha, Andrew. Brothers in Arms: Chinese Aid to the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014. Mortimer, Rex. Stubborn Survivors. Clayton, Victoria: Monash University Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, 1984. Ricklefs, M.C. Islamisation and Its Opponents in Java, c.1930 to the Present. Singapore: NUS Press, 2012. Ricklefs, M.C., Bruce Lockhart, Albert Lau, Portia Reyes, and Maitrii Aung-Thwin. A New History of Southeast Asia. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Robinson, Geoffrey. The Dark Side of Paradise: Political Violence in Bali. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. Robinson, Geoffrey. The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965–66. Princeton, MJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. Robinson, Geoffrey. “A Time to Kill: The Anti-Communist Violence in Indonesia, 1965–66,” in Eve Monique Zucker and Ben Kiernan, eds., Political Violence in Southeast Asia since 1945: Case Studies from Six Countries. New York: Routledge, 2021, pp. 21–40. Roosa, John. Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto’s Coup d’État in Indonesia. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. Widjojo Nitisastro. Population Trends in Indonesia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970. Zakaria, Faizah. “Indonesia’s Mass Killings of 1965-1966: Retrospective and Requiem,” Critical Asian Studies 50.4 (December 2018): 634–9.

8. The impact of genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia on genocide policy and genocide studies David J. Simon

As the Soviet Union crumbled as a political entity in the first part of the 1990s, the Cold War changed, with surprising speed, from lived reality to historical era. While the “End of History” was not meant to be taken literally, the phrase captured a sense of optimism espoused by the global (northern) policy establishment and intellectual elite. Liberalism was ascendent, and not just in terms of the perceived defeat of totalitarian socialism. US President George H.W. Bush called “a new world order,” lauding the promise of multilateral action as a force for peace, development, and prosperity after a United Nations-authorized coalition had beaten back Iraqi aggression in Kuwait (C-Span 1991). Looking back four decades later, the most noteworthy development in the realm of global politics was not, however, the advent of enduring world peace. Rather it would have to be the outbreak of mass violence over the course of the decade throughout the world, and especially where it reached genocidal dimensions: Rwanda in 1994 and in and around the small Bosnian town of Srebrenica in 1995.  In this chapter, I describe the outbreak of the genocides in Rwanda and Srebrenica, respectively, as a means of drawing attention to how these episodes changed the way scholars and policy makers were to think about genocide. After presenting an overview of each case, I address the failure to anticipate – or even initially to observe, recognize, or describe – the genocidal dimensions of violence in Rwanda and Bosnia. I argue that those failures, in turn, prompted changes in both the policy-making and academic realms that have altered the trajectory of genocide studies since then.

RWANDA The small, land-locked nation had featured a mostly frozen ethnic conflict for most of its three decades of independence at that point. People designated as Hutu comprised 91 percent of the population as of the 1991 census (which estimated the population as just under seven million, overall). Tutsis comprised most of the rest, outside of several thousand designated as Batwa (Peterson 2014). The ethnic identities were real because they were proclaimed on identity cards (Hintjens 2001). Although many Rwandans had parents of whom one identified as Hutu and the other as Tutsi, the simple rule of patrilineality maintained the construction of essential differences between the groups, even if the underlying reality was more complicated (Des Forges 1999, 33). The colonial era conferred upon Tutsis a privileged status that derived from encounters between early colonial agents (who were mostly German) and an existing Tutsi monarchy (Des Forges 1999, 34–8; Mamdani 2020, 87–102; Prunier 1997, 23–35). The decolonization era coincided with a growing, ethnopolitical consciousness by some Hutus. Departing Belgian 106

The impact of genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia  107 colonial administrators maneuvered to ensure that the more numerous Hutu gained political power – in part because of consternation with the Pan-Africanist leanings of some Tutsi political leaders, which smacked of communism in the Belgians’ eyes (fitted, as they were at the time, with a Congo lens). Ensuing rule under two successive presidents, Grégoire Kayibanda and Juvénal Habyarimana (with the latter overthrowing the former in a coup in 1973), reversed privileges of the colonial era, establishing preferred access for Hutus, especially those deemed supportive of the regime in power at that time. By the 1990s, that arrangement had become untenable: economic difficulties meant that it became more difficult for the government to buy off all but its core constituencies; external insistence on democratization energized the Hutu opposition (much of which was born of resentment over the regional favoritism of the ruling National Movement for Rwandan Development – or MRND – party at the time); and, perhaps most importantly, an invasion by the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (or RPF) threatened the regime’s hold on power itself. This force was composed mostly of Uganda-based Tutsis who had fled (or whose parents had fled) from Rwanda at the time of independence and the advent of Hutu-dominated political rule. Each of these latter two factors created an existential threat to the MRND regime in and of themselves, creating even more of a sense of threat given their conjunction with one another. The regime concluded that their only hope for survival, as a regime, lay in responding to both at once. By playing up the threat of Tutsi domination if the RPF were to prevail militarily, the MRND attempted to reframe the political stakes of the moment in ethnic terms. This frame also enabled the regime to redefine the political stakes of the moment: to oppose the regime in the political realm was to give comfort to the “Tutsi” force, thus the regime’s monopoly should not be undermined. High politics and external peace negotiations largely ignored that logic (Clapham 1998), culminating in the August 1993 Arusha Peace Accords. This agreement was meant to end the war by installing a power-sharing government which, once formed, would be charged with writing a multiparty, multiethnic constitution for Rwanda. The terms of peace were a blow to MRND’s survivalist logic. However, events in neighboring Burundi – namely, an October 1993 coup in which that country’s democratically elected Hutu president was killed by Tutsi elements in the military – reinvigorated the claims of the exclusivist wing of the MRND (some of whom had split from the rump of the ruling party of its peace process involvement, and re-emerged under the banner of the Coalition for the Defense of the Republic, or CDR). Members of other parties, such as the MDR, also joined forces with the revanchist MRND and the CDR under the umbrella of the Hutu Power movement.  The politicization of ethnicity in a time of political threat meant that all Tutsis, not just those affiliated with the RPF insurgency, could be cast as elements of the existential threat to Hutu rule (Fletcher 2007; Straus 2013). It was left to the youth wings of these parties, which gravitated towards the Hutu Power vision of ethnic exclusivism, to become the party leaders’ means of mobilizing mass participation in a violent anti-Tutsi project that would eventually become the genocide (Avery forthcoming; Des Forges 1999, 55ff.). They refashioned themselves as militias – like the infamous MRND-linked interahamwe and the CDR-linked impuzamugambi – and took the polarizing us-versus-them, Hutu-versus-Tutsi frame to the grassroots level. The genocide itself began within hours of the downing of a plane that was carrying Habyarimana and his Burundian counterpart back from a regional summit in Tanzania. Despite several commissions of inquiry, there is no globally recognized definitive proof of responsibility for this act, although two elements – the prospect that Habyarimana had negoti-

108  Handbook of genocide studies ated away Hutu Power positions in the preceding weeks (see Rawson 2018, 221) as well as the speed with which the response to the crash turned to genocide – implicate Hutu extremists (as compellingly argued by Prunier 1997, 213–21). The first targets appear to have been political opposition figures, mostly based in Kigali, assassinated by members of the Presidential Guard (Des Forges 1999, 185–92). Within days, the campaign had expanded to include all Tutsis, in all regions of the country where Hutu Power allies had a measure of political control, and via decentralized methods such as patrols, attacks on places of refuge, and following detention at roadblocks. In areas where anti-Power forces (aka “moderates”) held sway, the moderates themselves became targets. Unless the RPF seized control first, the genocide campaign would then proceed there as well. The genocide against Rwanda Tutsis only ended once the RPF had seized control over the whole country and the interim government that had succeeded Habyarimana and presided over the government had fled into neighboring Zaire. By that time, hundreds of thousands of Rwandans had been murdered at the hands of government soldiers and government officials, Hutu militias, and civilians taking orders from the former two. The vast majority of those killed were Tutsis, although many Hutus were killed as well, whether for being an elite (and likely a politician) opposed to the Hutu Power’s exclusivist project or, at the grassroots level, for refusing to participate in or cooperate with the project on the ground. The Rwandan government has calculated that over 1.1 million Tutsi were killed, based on a census of post-genocide survivors. Many genocide scholars contest that figure, although most models point to a Tutsi death toll of over 600,000 (McDoom 2020; Meierhenrich 2020; Verpoorten 2020). Notwithstanding the controversy surrounding the extent of the mass killing, there is no doubt that Tutsi civilians were targeted – and killed – en masse strictly for their identity as Tutsis, making the episode an obvious case of genocide. 

BOSNIA As was the case in Rwanda, genocide in Bosnia came on the heels of the failure of a multiethnic state project. In this case, the failure was that of the multiethnic Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia, an entity re-created after World War II from the post-World War I amalgamation of Serbs, Slovenes, Croats, Montenegrins, Kosovars, Macedonians, and Bosniaks within the “Kingdom of Yugoslavia.” Long-time post-war leader Josip Broz Tito presided over an era in which the pan-ethnic Yugoslav identity at least superficially had more salience in most contexts than did any of the subnational alternatives.  However, with Tito’s passing in 1980, the subsequent decline of the Yugoslav economy throughout that decade, and the rise of sub-state nationalist movements following the demise of the Soviet Union, sub-Yugoslav nationalist identity politics became increasingly influential in the Balkans as well. Nationalist politicians like Slobodan Milošević (president of the Serb Republic within the Yugoslav Federation) and Franjo Tudjman (president of the Croat Republic) increasingly pushed to accumulate power at the sub-Federal level. In June 1991, Slovenia and Croatia declared independence, leading the Yugoslav army to fight (and lose) a ten-day war against a Slovenian defense force and a year-long one with Croatian separatists. The Croatian conflict involved a phenomenon, which the New York Times took to calling “ethnic cleansing,” wherein armed forces – whether regular or, as was often the case, irregular – associated with one ethnic or national identity violently expelled civilians of another from a given territory (Petrovic 1994).

The impact of genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia  109 Bosnia followed suit with its own referendum for independence, held in February 1992. Bosnia had been the most ethnically heterogeneous of the Yugoslav republics, with substantial Serb and Croat populations living alongside the plurality Bosniaks. The Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina soon declared its own independence from the newly independent republic. This new entity, which renamed itself the Srpska Republic, lacked international recognition but nonetheless created a military force, the VRS, which proceeded to engage in a campaign of ethnic cleansing throughout northern and eastern Bosnia. In the north, the Bosnian Serb campaign, led by local politicians and police officials, took the form of relocating Bosnian civilians (along with Croats, in the early years of the conflict) to camps such as the one in Omarska near the town of Prijedor, which became the site of “mental, physical, and sexual violence” against Serbs (Askin 2003, 14). To the east, the VRS began to lay siege on concentrations of populations – that is, cities and towns – in which Bosniaks lived and/or sought refuge, including Srebrenica, Tuzla, Žepa, Gorazde, and Bihac, and the capital Sarajevo. In 1993, United Nations (UN) troops were sent to protect the municipalities and the surrounding areas as “safe areas.” These UN contingents were more focused on selectively and occasionally breaking the siege with convoys of relief supplies. However, the contingents were drastically undermanned and thus essentially represented a bluff that they hoped would deter Serb aggression (Orchard 2014). When the VRS made their move, the peacekeepers could only “protect” by facilitating evacuations of civilian populations. These dynamics played out in Srebrenica in July 1995, only with an explicitly genocidal twist: Bosniaks congregated in the town, while peacekeepers were based at a nearby airfield outside of the hamlet of Potočari. Serbs threatened, shelled, and eventually entered Srebrenica town. Most of the Bosniak population fled to the Potočari base for protection. The peacekeeping contingent initially opened their base to the fleeing Bosniaks, of whom there were as many as 20,000. After conferring with the VRS leadership, including the commander Ratko Mladić, the peacekeepers then helped arrange women of all ages, young boys, and old men to relocate to Bosniak-controlled territory. Upon assurances from Mladić that no harm would come to the remaining Bosniaks, the peacekeepers turned them over to VRS custody. Mladić and the VRS went back on their word almost immediately, massacring the men and dumping their bodies in mass graves. A contingent of Bosniak men had sought to flee by foot to Tuzla. VRS snipers pursued them and murdered most of them. In all, VRS soldiers killed roughly 8,000 Srebrenica Bosnians in just a few short days (Toom 2020).  The VRS subsequently overran Žepa two weeks later. Spurred on by that humiliation, as well as revulsion at the shelling of a Sarajevo market in August 1995, NATO initiated “Operation Deliberate Force,” an air campaign that sought to deter further attacks against UN Safe Areas. A simultaneous Croatian ground offensive led to a peace process in Dayton, Ohio, USA, that ultimately resulted in the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina (commonly known as the Dayton Accords) that ended the war.

COMMON THEMES The respective genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia in the mid-1990s merit the extensive attention they have received, a point to which I return below. In addition, at a certain level of generality they share several important characteristics that reinforced their influence on the global

110  Handbook of genocide studies popular imagination about what genocide is and could be, as well as on the scholarship agenda within the then emerging field of genocide studies. First, both episodes were clear genocides, both intuitively and per the letter of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (see Irvin-Erickson, this volume). Subsequent international court cases – and indeed, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) (created by UN Security Council Resolution 827 in May 1993) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) (UNSC 955 in November 1994), respectively, were themselves novel outcomes, as described below – handed down criminal convictions for the crimes of committing, inciting, attempting, being complicit in, and conspiring to commit genocide. Both courts found that actors had engaged in killing and other actors with the intent to destroy at least part of the Bosnian Muslim nationality in Bosnia and the Tutsi ethnic group in Rwanda, respectively. These were the first such findings in history – even at Nuremberg, the judges declined to address charges of genocide (see Irvin-Erickson, this volume). Political speeches and media transcriptions left little room for doubt that the destruction of an identity group was at the heart of the perpetrators’ programs. Second, both instances revealed the total lack of preparedness for the international community, such as it was, to deal with nearly self-evident genocide. The UN had no procedure for recognizing genocide: Secretary General Boutros Ghali first used the term “genocide” in relation to Rwanda on May 4 and declared at the end of that month that “there can be little doubt that [the situation in Rwanda] constitutes genocide” (UNSG 1994), but had previously alluded only to “ethnic violence” and “massacres” (Barnett 2002, 118–22). The United States did little better: it was seemingly unprepared for questions as to whether its State Department had determined the events in Rwanda constituted a genocide (Power 2013, 359–60). Possibly ad-libbing Clinton Administration officials came up with the term “tantamount to genocide” (2013, 319), which offered no legal guidance whatsoever.  Third, and presumably at least somewhat tied to the previous point, was the abject failure to protect the very populations that the respective genocidal campaigns of Rwanda’s Hutu extremists and Bosnia’s Serb nationalists threatened. The UN Security Council’s directive to UNAMIR to draw down its forces (UNSC 912) laid bare that the UN was more concerned with the reputational stakes – that is, that it not be embarrassed again as it had been in Somalia half a year earlier – than it was with protecting civilians from harm, even when it had had a force on the ground capable of trying to do so. Similarly, the failures of UNPROFOR to deter the attack on Srebrenica in the days leading up to July 13 or to inhibit the attack with air sorties as it was taking place illustrate the desire to avoid confrontation, resulting, essentially, in its bluff being called. The subsequent failure to prevent the separation – by Mladić’s VRS – of women, children, and the elderly from the able-bodied men and boys suggests a lack of imagination bordering on naivete. A fourth commonality in the international reactions to the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia was the empowerment of ad hoc international tribunals to consider allegations of violations of international human rights law – including the commission of genocide. The ICTY’s creation preceded the Srebrenica episode, but the Security Council had already seen fit to include the crime of genocide within the ICTY’s remit. The creation of the ICTY was groundbreaking for representing the first UN-affiliated judicial mechanism to consider criminal charges of genocide. It was also perceived as a reflection of collective inaction: having failed to create a means of protecting civilians from violations of international criminal law as they might happen, the tribunal strategy presented a promise of possible retribution for violations of international law

The impact of genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia  111 after they happened. The creation of the tribunal was envisioned to have a deterrent effect (per Yacoubian 1998, 51). While we will never know if the ICTY deterred the commission of some atrocities, we do know that it failed to deter a specific one: the commission of genocide in Srebrenica. The logic behind the ICTR was slightly different than that for the ICTY because it was created after the genocide there had ended. Thus, rather than a substitute of other actions during a time of need for civilian protection, the ICTR served as a response to having failed to provide protection in a time of need now passed. Proponents of a Rwandan tribunal (including, although only initially, the post-genocide RPF government of Rwanda itself) were also wary of a potential double-standard: the creation of a state-of-the-art accountability mechanism for atrocity crimes in Europe but similar efforts and expenses potentially spared when it came to Africa. In retrospect, “state of the art” meant expensive (Wippman 2006) and often inaccessible to the survivor populations in whose name the tribunals were established (Uvin and Mironko 2003). Nonetheless, those outcomes should not obscure that the tribunals also presented jurists, scholars, and the public in general with a forum in which to consider the applicability of the term “genocide” to a particular set of facts. In many ways, this was the first such forum in history, at least given the Nuremberg tribunal’s disinterest in taking up the question of genocide.

COMMON LEGACIES The jurisprudence that resulted from the ICTY and ICTR comprises a shared legacy of the Bosnian and Rwandan episodes for the field of genocide studies. Foremost among these are the convictions for genocide crimes in both courts, collectively affirming what had been simultaneously obvious to much of the world watching events unfold back in 1994–95 and unclear to policy makers who feared the implied consequences of using the term. The tribunals provided confirmation that genocides had indeed occurred in the middle of the 1990s, contributing to significant changes in the perception of genocide. Previously, the concept of genocide had tended to be elided with the Holocaust, and then in the 1970s and 1980s with Armenia as well (Manukyan, this volume). The term elicited a sense of horror, but it was associated with an era that had been superseded by a post-war Pax Americana. The horrors of the Khmer Rouge may have seemed similarly terrifying, but with an effective news blackout, the events were barely appreciated by the West in real time, and were cast as belonging to a certain, almost pre-modern mindset – what Springer refers to as an “[o]rientalizing discourse concerning violence” (2015, 61). Mass violence in secessionist Biafra (Nigeria) and East Pakistan (which would become Bangladesh) elicited consternation, but little public discussion over whether the term “genocide” actually applied. In short, genocide was considered more or less unimaginable, and more importantly generally remained unimagined. The confirmation that genocides had occurred, not just in the post-war era but after the Cold War, when peace and prosperity were supposed to be reigning, laid bare the failures of Western imagination. The acknowledgment of genocide in our time catalyzed an effort to recalibrate what genocide was, how it occurred, and how it might be prevented. The first genocide convictions at the ICTR and ICTY involved a Rwandan politician (Jean-Paul Akayesu) and a Major-General in the VRS (Radislav Krstić), respectively. Neither could be said to be masterminds of the genocides in either case: Akayesu was the mayor of the

112  Handbook of genocide studies small town of Taba, while an appellate court held that Major-General Krstić was not actually guilty of committing genocide, just aiding and abetting it. Nevertheless, the convictions established that genocide had indeed occurred in both cases. For both trials, prosecutors had called witnesses whose testimony entered into the court record the elements of violence that constituted genocide in Taba (and elsewhere in Rwanda) and Srebrenica, respectively, as a precursor to showing Akayesu’s and Krstić’s contributions to it.  Both tribunals also established records of criminal responsibility for genocide at higher levels of government and planning. The ICTR found high-ranking Rwanda figures including (among others) interim Prime Minister Jean Kambanda, army Chief of Staff Augustin Bizimungu, and Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, cited as the mastermind behind the genocide (Dahir 2021), guilty of genocide charges. Key figures convicted of genocide (specifically relating to the events at Srebrenica) include Republika Srpska president Radovan Karadžić, Serbian president (and later Federal Republic of Yugoslavia president) and VRS commander Ratko Mladić. Each of these convictions further advanced the historical record, in particular by connecting genocide to state policy. Finally, a major contribution of both tribunals was to begin to build out international law as it pertains to genocide and its elements. Central questions like “What is the standard for determining ‘intent’?” “What is the definition of ‘incitement’ under the convention?” and “Is it possible to be accountable for both ‘committing’ and ‘conspiring to commit’ genocide?” had not been addressed in any international court given the dormancy of the convention as a legal matter for most of its history to that point. Independently, but not without cross-referencing one another, the ICTR and ICTY developed the jurisprudence that would form the basis for assessing accountability under the convention in later cases. The tribunals broke new ground in affirming the unfortunate existence of genocide in contemporary affairs – a matter that had been unacknowledged in super-national forums (and largely in national ones, too) since in the post-war era (Weiss-Wendt, this volume). Yet ex post recognition, even if paired with retributive justice, was on its own an insufficient response to that fact, once established. The legacies of the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia therefore extend as well to a new era of thinking about how to deal with genocide as a matter of national and international policy and doctrine. Changes began with a series of retrospective reports. The UN commissioned an inquiry led by the Swedish statesman Ingvar Carlsson which concluded: The failure by the United Nations to prevent, and subsequently stop the genocide in Rwanda was a failure by the United Nations system as a whole. The fundamental failure was a lack of resources and political commitment … There was a persistent lack of political will by Member States to act, or to act with enough assertiveness … Finally, although UNAMIR suffered from a chronic lack of resources and political priority, it must also be said that serious mistakes were made with those resources which were at the disposal of the United Nations. (UNSG 1999, 3)

The Organization of African Unity’s (OAU) Report of the International Panel of Eminent Personalities to Investigate the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda (OAU 2000) cast blame on a wide range of actors, but did not entirely absolve itself in doing so: “Under the circumstances of the time, … the silence of the OAU and a large majority of African Heads of State constituted a shocking moral failure” (quoted in Murray 2001, 130).  National governments made similar conclusions about their own processes. A French report on Rwanda (Assemblée Nationale 1998) was relatively mild, ruing only that France’s

The impact of genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia  113 situational analysis was lacking despite having previously “perfectly perceived” the risks of violence. It called for more transparent foreign policy and improvements in intelligence procedures. More dramatically, a Dutch-commissioned report determined that the blue-helmeted Dutch peacekeepers bore some responsibility for the Srebrenica genocide, a conclusion that prompted the entire Dutch cabinet to resign in 2002 (Finn 2002).  Individually and taken together, these conclusions suggested ample room for improvement and for devoting resources and attention where neither had been devoted before. They addressed three broad realms of genocide-related policy. The first related to the analysis of genocide risk, that is, the anticipation and prediction of outbreaks of genocide. To the extent that situations of higher risk could be identified, the second realm involved focusing on the means to prevent genocide from occurring. Finally, in instances when prevention failed, there needed to be a strategy for rapidly, robustly, and effectively responding to outbreaks of genocide – whether through military means or otherwise. The reports thus initiated a set of actual – not just ideational – changes to global genocide prevention and response efforts. The most concrete changes were organizational or institutional: the creation of new agencies or other bodies charged with various (or, in some cases, all) elements of the agenda described above. Most prominently, because it was a part of the UN institutional architecture, was the UN Office of the Special Advisor for the Prevention of Genocide. The office was charged with collating information already available to the UN, developing a mechanism of genocide early warning, devising recommendations on genocide prevention strategies to the Security Council, and liaising within the UN system to “analyze and manage information relating to genocide” (Hehir 2010). Housed within the Secretariat, and with a small staff and budget, the office could not be expected to “prevent genocide” on its own, but quickly built up a small staff that played the prescribed analytical and outreach roles. Another high-profile change in the global architecture involved Africa’s continental governance. In 1999, the OAU undertook to reimagine itself for the twenty-first century. Among the variety of factors that influenced the push to do so were the OAU’s shortcomings with respect to Rwanda and other festering or explosive conflict situations on the continent: a lack of both institutional mechanisms and political will to address conflict (Gomes 2008, 123) alongside a sovereignty bias that limited the prospects for intervention within a member country (Schalk et al. 2005, 502–3). Among the most noteworthy innovations for the new version, the African Union, was the creation of a Peace and Security Council (PSC) – akin to the UN’s Security Council – that could make decisions more quickly and independently than was possible under the OAU’s setup. Empowering the PSC’s ability to do so was a clause 4(h) in the Union’s Constitutive Act permitting the Union “to intervene in a Member State pursuant to a decision of the Assembly in respect of grave circumstances, namely those involving war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity” (African Union 2000). The African Union at least now had the authority to intervene that its predecessor lacked. Beyond new mechanisms, “doing better” in the face of genocide was also evident as a mindset. Take Kofi Annan’s words, for example, as he called for a minute of silence on the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the genocide against the Tutsi: Let us be united in a way we were not 10 years ago. And let us, by what we do in one single minute, send a message – a message of remorse for the past, resolve to prevent such a tragedy from ever happening again – and let’s make it resound for years to come. (UNSG 2004)

114  Handbook of genocide studies Samantha Power prescribed similar terms for the United States. While calling for multilateral responses to genocide, Power notes several steps the United States could do on its own: It must respond to genocide with a sense of urgency, publicly identifying and threatening the perpetrators with prosecution, demanding the expulsion of representatives of genocidal regies from international institutions …, closing the perpetrators’ embassies in the United States, and calling upon countries aligned with the perpetrators to ask them to use their influence … [T]he United States must also be prepared to risk the lives of its soldiers in the service of stopping this monstrous crime. (2013, 514)

Then-incoming US President George W. Bush was sufficiently moved upon reading Power’s summary of US inaction in Rwanda that he scribbled “Not on my watch” in the margins of the article (Gourevitch 2006). Inevitably, global events soon tested the emerging calls for greater resolve, beginning with the 1999 conflict in Serbia over Kosovo (Power 2013; see also Daalder and O’Hanlon 2004). Kosovar secessionists had declared independence from Yugoslavia, within which Kosovo’s status had been that of an autonomous province within the Republic of Serbia. After the Dayton Accords ended the Bosnian war, tensions began to rise in Kosovo. By 1998, the Yugoslav army and Kosovar militias were regularly attacking one another. Rising levels of internal displacement led to concerns that the Serb military might commit violence in Kosovo along the same genocidal lines as Bosnian Serb militias had in Bosnia earlier in the decade (Power 2013, 446). Western-brokered peace negotiations were unsuccessful in spite – or perhaps because – of an ultimatum that a failure to agree to stop the violence would result in reprisals against Serbs, whom the peace negotiators had cast as the aggressors (Bellamy 2000).  In March 1999, NATO initiated a bombing campaign at Serb military positions inside and outside of Kosovo, including Serbia infrastructure and other state assets in Belgrade (over 400 km away). After initially accelerating the ethnic cleansing campaign, Milošević agreed to pull Serbian forces back from most of Kosovo in June, people who had pushed for a more rapid and more robust response claimed success. After all, despite an apparent threat to civilian populations and a demonstrated willingness by forces to commit atrocities, widespread killing did not occur. The intervention led to a ceasefire that permitted the hundreds of thousands of Kosovars who had been displaced by the fighting, many to the newly independent Republic of Macedonia (now known as North Macedonia), to return to their homes. The death toll, reported to be below 10,000, was widely taken to be lower than expected or feared, adding (for some) to the sense that a larger atrocity had been averted. At least three other episodes over the course of the next six years also demonstrated a greater willingness to commit troops to situations with the goal of preventing mass atrocities. In East Timor, pro-Indonesian forces began to terrorize pro-independence Timorese until Australian soldiers, supported by UN Security Council Resolution 1264, drove them back and promoted a climate in which Timorese independence could be established. In 2003, in the northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo’s Ituri Province, French forces forced local militia leaders who had been fomenting identity-based violence in the town of Bunia away from civilian populations. In 2004, commentators like the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof (e.g., 2004) began to draw parallels between ongoing violence against certain groups (including the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa tribes) with the genocide against the Tutsi that had taken place ten years earlier. American politicians and officials, including Congress, President George W. Bush, and Secretary of State Colin Powell, labeled the violence as genocide, identifying the government

The impact of genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia  115 of Sudan and its allied Arab militias (the notorious janjaweed) as perpetrators. The African Union was the first to send a protection force, albeit one only large enough to partially protect civilians gathered in internal displacement camps. The African Union peacekeepers would be folded into a larger UN force in 2007. Each “success,” however, brought with it complications and uncertainty. For some Kosovo observers, the relatively low death toll figure was not so much a suggestion of “success” as it was an implication that intervention had been an overreaction (described in Power 2013, 469–72). Critics also claimed aspects of the NATO campaign were illegal: the selection of targets did not spare civilians from harm (in possible violation of the Geneva Conventions) and the UN had not authorized the action, as it should have been required to do (Charney 2017). The East Timor operation provided fewer complications but was also more of a special case: the Australian force was both proximate and ready to mobilize and the perpetrator force lacked the forceful backing of the Indonesia government (itself relatively dependent on international approval amidst a transition from military rule). Post-intervention state-building would prove more challenging, suggesting that even a well-contained, successful, protection-oriented intervention could only be part of the solution to problems in weak states. The Ituri intervention reflected a similar context, but with less encouraging results: the French operation made way to UN forces after three months, but the province and the region around it would remain weakly governed and prone to ethnic violence for much of the two decades that followed. In Darfur, too, the dispatching of an intervention force could be said to have raised more problems than it solved, even after the re-helmeting of African Union troops as UN peacekeepers. The displacement camps being protected arguably served the government’s objectives anyway. Indeed, the peacekeeping forces fought against Darfur rebels more than against government troops or janjaweed. After a lull in violence from 2009 to 2011, fighting and atrocities continued throughout most of the 2010s (Szabó 2021). Even the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) issuance of a warrant for the arrest of Sudanese president Omar Bashir on charges that eventually included genocide in 2009 – a bold step that also reflected the global community’s greater willingness to engage with genocide as a concept – revealed shortcomings in the new global regime towards genocide: despite obligations to the contrary, several countries declined to arrest Bashir and turn him over to the ICC when he passed through their respective territories (Van de Vyver 2015). By then, the question of how to respond to genocide had a new doctrinal answer, in the form of the Responsibility to Protect. The 1990s genocides had revealed the Genocide Convention’s blind spot in terms of mandating a response to genocides, once manifest. After defining genocide and its dimensions as a crime, the Convention only states that “Any contracting party may call upon the competent organs of the United Nations to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide …” (United Nations General Assembly 1948). As genocide unfolded in Rwanda and Bosnia, the “competent organs of the United Nations” sat idly by, even retreating from action that might support “suppression of acts of genocide” in Rwanda (Willard 2018). In response to Kofi Annan’s plea to determine “how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica – to gross and systematic violations of human rights that affect every precept of our common humanity” (Weiss et al. 2001, vii), the Government of Canada convened the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. The group, consisting of 11 men and one woman from around the world, declared that in cases of possible mass death,

116  Handbook of genocide studies rape, or starvation, the state has a responsibility, inherent in sovereignty, to protect its own population. Furthermore, While the state whose people are directly affected has the default responsibility to protect, a residual responsibility also lies with the broader community of states. This fallback responsibility is activated when a particular state is clearly either unwilling or unable to fulfill its responsibility to protect or is itself the actual perpetrator of crimes or atrocities; or where people living outside a particular state are directly threatened by actions taking place there. (Weiss et al. 2001, 17)

The United Nations General Assembly incorporated language to this effect in the landmark World Summit Outcome document of 2005 (UNGA 2005, paras 138–139), which gave it less formal status than a treaty or convention, but still created a new (if aspirational) norm, as well as a talking point of implied consensus (Bellamy 2008). While the doctrine effected no institutional change at the international level (Hehir 2019), it did lead to the creation of “R2P focal points” (by a variety of names) within national government bureaucracies. These institutions have been charged with maintaining an R2P-friendly perspective on foreign (and sometimes domestic) affairs. The United States’ Atrocity Prevention Board, though without directly acknowledging R2P as an inspiration for its founding, is meant to play exactly this role. It is not determinative of foreign policy, but it opens the possibility that atrocity concerns are raised in the consideration of various options (Finkel 2015). The R2P doctrine gradually accumulated greater legitimacy at the international level as well (Luck 2010, 355). By the mid-2010s, “[r]eference to R2P [had] become a staple of many UNSC resolutions and presidential statements” (Thakur 2016, 426), guiding UN involvement in several specific cases. For example, in early 2008, violence between political rivals in Kenya appeared to be escalating along Luo-Kikuyu lines following a disputed election at the end of the previous year. An incident in Eldoret in which Luo civilians took refuge in a church that was then set on fire by Kalenjin youths1 evoked the worst of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda (Macharia 2011). Resolution of the dispute became a matter of international concern, with both the African Union and the UN sending mediators to help negotiate a peace via power-sharing, citing R2P as they did so (Crossley 2013).  In March 2011, the doctrine found itself center-stage as the Security Council considered ostensible threats to civilian populations in Libya and in Côte d’Ivoire. In both countries, the Security Council authorized military means of establishing protection. For Libya, Resolution 1973 authorized member states to take “all necessary measures to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack” (UNSC 2011a). A subsequent NATO-led bombing campaign enabled the Benghazi-based rebels to capture and kill Libya’s president Muammer Gaddafi, and then to install themselves in power. For Côte d’Ivoire, Resolution 1975 authorized UN peacekeeping troops in the country “to use all necessary measures to carry out its mandate to protect civilians under imminent threat of physical violence and … to prevent the use of heavy weapons against the civilian population” (UNSC 2011b). Working in concert with a non-UN French contingent, UN peacekeepers helped Ouattara’s forces seize the defeated (but recalcitrant) incumbent president Laurent Gbagbo, who would later be tried on Crimes against Humanity charges at the ICC.



1

In the political context of the day, the Kalenjin were viewed as Kikuyu allies.

The impact of genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia  117 While both cases demonstrated the most robust realization of R2P principles to date, they also sparked a significant backlash: that one sitting president was killed and another sent to The Hague as a result of the construct gave other heads-of-state pause. Critics objected both to the way R2P had been operationalized in these two cases and to the concept itself as well (as noted in Bellamy and Williams 2011). Thus, when Syria’s government increasingly targeted its own civilian population in the months and years that followed, creating an objectively urgent need for an R2P protection-oriented intervention, no such force was mobilized. Normative change had apparently gone as far as it would go and was in receding mode as the 2010s progressed. Still, contemplation over whether or how to intervene to protect targets of arguably genocidal operations in northern Iraq (the Yazidi), eastern Myanmar (the Rohingya), western China (the Uyghurs), and Ukraine (Ukrainians in the Russian military’s crosshairs) centered around what the proper response to genocide should be in light of various geopolitical realities – unlike the early 1990s when the very vocabulary of “genocide” was invoked only belatedly and elliptically.

CHANGES IN GENOCIDE STUDIES The policy impacts of Rwanda and Srebrenica have been mirrored in the ways in which genocide was studied in academic circles. The volume of genocide studies research is evident in the number of publications on genocide, in a variety of different forms (summarized in Table 8.1). Whether measured by book publishing, law review articles, dissertations, or academic journal articles, the 15 years following the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia witnessed a 5–20-fold increase in works addressing genocide. Part of the story told in Table 8.1 reflects the advent of genocide-oriented academic journals. Holocaust and Genocide Studies began publication in 1986, but it was joined in the field by three over the next three decades: The Journal of Genocide Research (1999), Genocide Studies and Prevention (2006), and Genocide Studies International (2014). In addition to a significant increase in the volume of academic attention paid to genocide, there were noticeable impacts on the people, research agendas, and institutions. Scholars focusing on the subject prominently featured a first generation that had, in a variety of roles, been more or less direct witnesses of the atrocities of Rwanda and Bosnia, including (but not limited to) Scott Straus (a journalist covering Rwanda and the aftermath of genocide in the mid-1990s), Timothy Longman (a researcher with Human Rights Watch who helped Alison Des Forges compile the influential 800-page report, Leave None to Tell the Story), and Samantha Power (a journalist based in Sarajevo) who turned her attention to American genocide policy over the course of the twentieth century in the prize-winning work A Problem from Hell. Academic attention to genocide as a subject matter found – or built for itself – more support in new institutions. Scholars formed two academic associations. The International Association of Genocide Studies (IAGS), which was created as the Association of Genocide Scholars, was formed in 1994 and added the word “International” to the title in 2001. The International Network of Genocide Scholars (INOGS) was founded in 2005. Genocide studies centers and programs began to proliferate in university settings, especially in the United States. Some Holocaust studies programs added non-Holocaust topics to their programming, and several added “Genocide” to their titles. Three prominent programs were

118  Handbook of genocide studies Table 8.1

Genocide and genocide studies after Rwanda and Bosnia

Source Books

1978–93

1995–2011

224

1 149

71

776

(per Library of Congress, keyword search for “genocide”) Dissertations (per ProQuest Dissertation & Theses, abstract search for “genocide”) Law Reviews and Journals articles (per Nexis Uni, search for “genocide”) Academic articles

585

12 001

17 000

185 000

378

6 594

(per Google Scholar, text search for “genocide”) Academic articles (per ProQuest Scholarly Journals, abstract search for “genocide”)

established in the late 1990s: the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota (1997), Yale’s Genocide Studies Program (emerging out of the Cambodia Genocide Program in 1998), and Clark University’s Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (also in 1998). At least 16 other programs featuring the word “Genocide” in their respective titles emerged at institutions of higher education in the United States by the end of the decade of the 2000s. The sense of global failure with respect to genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia in the mid-1990s were not the only antecedents for these developments. The study of violence was growing across several disciplines at the same time, the reconsideration of exterminationist dimensions of colonial encounters with indigenous populations (e.g., per currents traced in the respective contributions by Adhikari and MacDonald in this volume) became more mainstream in academia if not in public discourse, and the debate over the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust (Kiechel, this volume) found partial resolution in works addressing the Holocaust such as Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men (1992) from which non-Holocaust genocide scholars found highly relevant observations and conclusions (e.g. Clark 2009; Fujii 2008; Waldorf 2007; Waller 2007; see also Gudehus, this volume). The events that unfolded in Rwanda and Bosnia in the mid-1990s were unimaginable in their horror, unfathomable in their violent expression, astonishing in terms of the passivity of global response, and, on the face of it, unexplainable. Yet the events had unfolded in real time for mass media to describe, and then were re-told in judicial settings in the years that followed. Policy makers, journalists, and scholars responded with a resolve to understand the processes – both distant and proximate – that led to the genocides, greatly expanding the scope of genocide studies as they did so.

WORKS CITED African Union. “The Constitutive Act of the African Union.” Addis Ababa (2000). Askin, Kelly D. “Omarska Camp, Bosnia – Broken Promises of Never Again.” Human Rights 30 (2003): 12–23. Askin, Kelly D. “Gender crimes jurisprudence in the ICTR: Positive developments.” Journal of International Criminal Justice 3.4 (2005): 1007–18. Assemblée Nationale. “Mission d’information sur le Rwanda” Rapport No. 1271, 1998. Available at https://​www​.assemblee​-nationale​.fr/​dossiers/​rwanda/​r1271​.asp​#P5371​_785621 (accessed May 19, 2022). Avery, Allison. Dissertation on Interahamwe (forthcoming).

The impact of genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia  119 Barnett, Michael. Eyewitness to a Genocide. Cornell University Press, 2002. Bellamy, Alex. “Lessons unlearned: Why coercive diplomacy failed at Rambouillet.” International Peacekeeping 7.2 (2000): 95–114. Bellamy, Alex. Responsibility to Protect: The Global Effort to End Mass Atrocities. Cambridge: Polity, 2008. Bellamy, A.J., and P.D. Williams. “The new politics of protection? Côte d’Ivoire, Libya, and the responsibility to protect.” International Affairs, 87 (2011): 825–50. Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. C-Span. “Commencement Speeches: Commencement Address on New World Order” feat. George H.W. Bush, April 13, 1991. Available at https://​www​.c​-span​.org/​video/​?17541​-1/​commencement​-address​ -world​-order (accessed May 25, 2022). Charney, Jonathan I. “Anticipatory humanitarian intervention in Kosovo,” in Genocide and Human Rights. Routledge, 2017, pp. 403–20. Clapham, Christopher. “Rwanda: The perils of peacemaking.” Journal of Peace Research 35.2 (1998): 193–210. Clark, Janine Natalya. “Genocide, war crimes and the conflict in Bosnia: Understanding the perpetrators.” Journal of Genocide Research 11.4 (2009): 421–45. Crossley, Noële. “A model case of R2P prevention? Mediation in the aftermath of Kenya’s 2007 presidential elections.” Global Responsibility to Protect 5.2 (2013): 192–214. Daalder, Ivo H., and Michael E. O’Hanlon. Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo. Brookings Institution Press, 2004. Dahir, Abdi Latif. “Théoneste Bagosora, a mastermind of Rwanda Genocide, dies at 80.” New York Times (September 27, 2021): D8. Des Forges, Alison. Leave None to Tell the Story. New York: Human Rights Watch (1999). Finkel, James P. “Moving beyond the crossroads: Strengthening the Atrocity Prevention Board.” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 9.2 (2015): 17. Finn, Peter “Dutch Government quits after report on Serb massacre.” Washington Post (April 17, 2002). Fletcher, Luke. “Turning interahamwe: Individual and community choices in the Rwandan genocide.” Journal of Genocide Research 9.1 (2007): 25–48. Fujii, Lee Ann. “The power of local ties: Popular participation in the Rwandan genocide.” Security Studies 17.3 (2008): 568–97. Gomes, Solomon. “The peacemaking role of the OAU and the AUS: A compartive analysis,” in John Akokpari, Angela Ndinga-Muvumba, and Tim Murithi, eds., The African Union and its Institutions. Aukland Park, South Africa: Centre for Conflict Resolution (2008), pp. 113–30. Gourevitch, Philip. “Just watching.” The New Yorker 82.17 (2006): 49–50. Hehir, Aidan. “An analysis of perspectives on the Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide.” Genocide Studies and Prevention 5.3 (2010): 258–76. Hehir, Aidan. Hollow Norms and the Responsibility to Protect. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Hintjens, Helen M. “When identity becomes a knife: Reflecting on the genocide in Rwanda.” Ethnicities 1.1 (2001): 25–55. Kristof, Nicholas. “Cruel choices.” New York Times 14 (2004). Luck, Edward C. “The responsibility to protect: Growing pains or early promise?” Ethics & International Affairs 24.4 (2010): 349–65. Macharia, James. “Kenyan election violence victims cry for justice.” Reuters News Service (online) (April 5, 2011). Available at https://​www​.reuters​.com/​article/​ozatp​-kenya​-icc​-violence​-20110405​ -i​dAFJOE7340​DA20110405 (accessed May 16, 2022). Mamdani, Mahmood. When Victims Become Killers. Princeton University Press, 2020. McDoom, Omar Shahabudin. “Contested counting: Toward a rigorous estimate of the death toll in the Rwandan genocide.” Journal of Genocide Research 22.1 (2020): 83–93. Meierhenrich, Jens. “How many victims were there in the Rwandan genocide? A statistical debate.” Journal of Genocide Research 22.1 (2020): 72–82. Murray, Rachel. “Recent developments: The report of the OAU’s International Panel of Eminent Personalities to investigate the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and the surrounding events.” Journal of African Law 45.1 (2001): 123–42.

120  Handbook of genocide studies Orchard, Phil. “Revisiting humanitarian safe areas for civilian protection.” Global Governance 20 (2014): 55. Organization for African Unity (OAU). Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide (July 2000). Available at https://​www​.refworld​.org/​docid/​4d1da8752​.html (accessed May 19, 2022). Peterson, David. “Rwanda’s 1991 Census” Z Blogs (March 12, 2014). Available at https://​zcomm​.org/​ zblogs/​rwandas​-1991​-census/​ (accessed May 15, 2022). Petrovic, Drazen. “Ethnic cleansing – an attempt at methodology.” European Journal of International Law 5 (1994): 342. Power, Samantha. “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide. Basic Books, 2013. Prunier, Gérard. The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide. Columbia University Press, 1997. Rawson, David. Prelude to Genocide: Arusha, Rwanda, and the Failure of Diplomacy. Ohio University Press, 2018. Schalk, Baba, C.J. Auriacombe, and Dirk J. Brynard. “Successes and failures of the Organisation of African Unity: Lessons for the future of the African Union.” Journal of Public Administration 40.si-2 (2005): 496–511. Springer, Simon. “Violent orientalism: Imagining the ‘savage other’,” in Violent Neoliberalism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2015, pp. 61–80. Straus, Scott. The Order of Genocide. Cornell University Press, 2013. Szabó, Zsolt. “The history of the Darfur conflict and its recent developments.” Journal of Central and Eastern European African Studies 1.4 (2021): 82–96. Thakur, Ramesh. “The responsibility to protect at 15.” International Affairs 92.2 (2016): 415–34. Toom, Victor. “Ontologically dirty knots: The production of numbers after the Srebrenica genocide.” Security Dialogue 51.4 (2020): 358–76. United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 9 December 1948, United Nations, Treaty Series, vol. 78, p. 277. Available at https://​ www​.refworld​.org/​docid/​3ae6b3ac0​.html  (accessed November 6, 2022). United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). “2005 Summit Outcome,” A/RES/60/L.1, September 20, 2005, paras 138–139. Available at https://​www​.un​.org/​en/​development/​desa/​population/​migration/​ generalassembly/​docs/​globalcompact/​A​_RES​_60​_1​.pdf (accessed May 17, 2022). United Nations Security Council (UNSC). “Resolution 1973 (2011),” S/Res/1973 (2011a), March 17, 2011.  United Nations Security Council (UNSC). “Resolution 1975 (2011),” S/Res/1975 (2011b). March 30, 2011.  United Nations Secretary General (UNSG). “Report on the situation in Rwanda, reporting on the political mission he sent to Rwanda to move the warring parties towards a ceasefire and recommending that the expanded mandate for UNAMIR be authorised for an initial period of six months,” S/1994/640, May 31, 1994. United Nations Secretarary General (UNSG). “Report of the Independent Inquiry into the actions of the United Nations during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda,” S/1999/1257, December 15, 1999. United Nations Secretary General (UNSG). “Secretary-General’s remarks at ‘Memorial Conference on the Rwanda Genocide’, organized by the governments of Canada and Rwanda,” March 26, 2004. Available at https://​www​.un​.org/​sg/​en/​content/​sg/​statement/​2004​-03​-26/​secretary​-generals​-remarks​ -memorial​-conference​-rwanda​-genocide (accessed May 15, 2022). Uvin, Peter, and Charles Mironko. “Western and local approaches to justice in Rwanda.” Global Governance 9 (2003): 219–31. Van der Vyver, Johan D. “The Al Bashir debacle.” African Human Rights Law Journal 15.2 (2015): 559–79. Verpoorten, Marijke. “How many died in Rwanda?” Journal of Genocide Research 22.1 (2020): 94–103. Waldorf, Lars. “Ordinariness and orders: Explaining popular participation in the Rwandan genocide.” Genocide Studies and Prevention 2.3 (2007): 267–9. Waller, James E. Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing. Oxford University Press, 2007. Weiss, Thomas G., et al. The Responsibility to Protect: Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. IDRC, 2001.

The impact of genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia  121 Willard, Emily A. “New documents shed light: Why did peacekeepers withdraw during Rwanda’s 1994 genocide?” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 12.3 (2018): 14. Wippman, David. “The costs of international justice.” American Journal of International Law 100.4 (2006): 861–80. Yacoubian Jr, George S. “Sanctioning alternatives in international criminal law: Recommendations for the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.” World Affairs 161 (1998): 48–54.

PART IV GENOCIDE STUDIES AS SOCIAL SCIENCE

9. State strategies to implement (and hide) genocide in China and Myanmar since 2017 Magnus Fiskesjö

In 2017, two new genocides were launched in Asia by the neo-nationalist regimes in China and in Myanmar (Burma). The first, in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region, targets the Uyghurs and other indigenous peoples1 who are predominantly Muslim; the other, in Myanmar, targets the Rohingya Muslim minority. Both genocides are rooted in long-running discrimination of the targeted peoples, both were launched under a newly ascendant and dominant ideology of national and religious purification. Yet the strategies of the two genocides contrast sharply: the Myanmar Rohingya genocide is focused on expelling the targeted population from the country, and destroying their homes. In the Chinese genocide, the targeted peoples are subjected to forced assimilation in a cross-society campaign to destroy native languages and cultures, so as to erase their original ethnic identity and transform everyone into Chinese. This is achieved by means of detaining them in camps for forced identity-conversion, and an array of other measures, such as the mass sterilization of women and the confiscation of detainees’ children, to be raised as Chinese. Many have also died in both genocides, as a direct result of the violence and brutality with which they have been carried out. In this chapter, I discuss the two genocides, as well as the contrast between them: Expulsion at gunpoint vs. assimilation at gunpoint. I also discuss the efforts made by both regimes to deny and cover up the atrocities, not least by way of supporting each other on the international arena.

HOW THE TWO GENOCIDES WERE LAUNCHED IN 2017 The persecution against the Uyghurs in China, began with the establishment of an unprecedented total surveillance system, as well as an enormous new concentration camp system, which was kept secret at first. Large-scale construction started in 2016 and still continues today; the first mass detentions were launched in early 2017. The camps serve as a key tool of forced assimilation, along with a series of other synchronized measures. During 2017, alarms began to be sounded outside China about a new, large-scale campaign of oppression. The alarm first came from Uyghurs and Kazakhs living in exile, either in neighboring Kazakhstan, or in Turkey, Europe, or elsewhere. They noticed that telephone communications with their relatives back home became near-impossible—and when people were able to reach their relatives, they would either say they could not talk, or they begged their family abroad never to call again. The reason was that the Chinese authorities had re-defined having Some Uyghurs in exile prefer the term “native,” because “indigenous” may evoke stateless or tribal people. The Uyghurs twice in the 20th century had their own modern state and government, known as East Turkistan. 1

123

124  Handbook of genocide studies relatives or contacts abroad as one of many grounds for detaining and interning people in the camps. Thus, news began to trickle out that large numbers of ethnic minority people were being rounded up and sent to camps, where they were forced to “study,” to be force-converted to be Chinese, not Uyghurs or Kazakhs. There is typically no judicial procedure, or judicial recourse, no contact with anyone outside allowed, and no explanation provided to those detained, or any indication of how long they might be held. When adults are taken to the camps, children are sent to state “orphanages.” Naturally, fear spread rapidly through the entire population of ethnic minority nationals in the region, about 15 million, who live alongside a growing Chinese settler population. It soon became clear that internment was largely arbitrary except it targets native peoples. Several documents later leaked from inside the government showed that it was all part of a massive, general, government-led, pre-budgeted, and pre-planned campaign. Similar to Myanmar, this gigantic endeavor targeting millions, in effect an illegal collective punishment of millions, is publicly justified by several previous terrorist incidents (see Roberts 2020). Leaked documents published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and by the New York Times in 2019 revealed more details. They cited China’s ruling Communist Party general secretary and national leader Xi Jinping as exhorting officials to show “Absolutely no mercy”; his deputy in the region, Xinjiang Party secretary Chen Quanguo (installed in August 2016), asked that they “round up everyone who should be rounded up,” and send them to the new camps. There may be some variation in the application of such broad commands from the top. The “Karakax (Qaraqash) List,” leaked from one particular county, has its own wide-ranging, arbitrary criteria (Wall Street Journal 2020; Zenz 2020a), seemingly freely copied from other checklists, such as, “Learning and Identifying 75 Religious Extreme Activities” (having relatives abroad, owning a Koran, having a beard, or praying, etc.). This shows that the entire campaign to erase the ethnic identities is based on a “pre-crime” style idea that everyday religion and the very ethnic identities of Muslim minorities mean that they are prone to terrorism, and thus criminalized across the board. This fits the broader classification that ranks people as either “reliable” or trustworthy (mainly Han Chinese settlers), “less reliable” (the bulk of the targeted ethnic populations, in need of preventive measures), and “unreliable” (members of ethnic groups that are already identified as hostile; these are presumably imprisoned or executed, not sent to camps). The New York Times leak (2019) reveals a Chinese administrator arrested and stripped of Communist Party membership, for refusing to conduct such arbitrary mass arrests in his area of southern Xinjiang. The precise number of detainees held in camps is unknown; estimates vary from 1 to 3 million (RFA 2019). From late 2019 onwards, the Chinese authorities began to claim the camps had been “closed.” Yet despite the media blackout, it is clear that many camps are still active, but some have changed in emphasis from identity conversion to forced labor. Many detainees have been transferred either to forced labor, to prison, or released “for monitoring and control.” Again, the total numbers are unclear, but it all appears to be part of an overall plan. The external propaganda is separate, and aims to deflect the global outcry over the camps and more. In some areas, people were swept up and sent to camps by quota, without any offense cited. A Kazakh refugee told me an anecdote about how in one village, police trucks had shown up to haul away a large household of about 20 people, including their children. The long-serving

State strategies to implement (and hide) genocide  125 local Communist Party officer, himself an ethnic Kazakh, had come over on his motorbike to ask the policemen why (and who would care for the livestock)—but then the police seized him too, and hauled them all away, not to be seen again. This anecdote illustrates the dramatic rupture with the past which this genocide has introduced. Since the 1950s, Uyghurs and Kazakhs have lived under direct Chinese rule, many even working within the Chinese system as bilingual or multilingual professionals serving under the ruling Communist Party, even as Party members. This arrangement was now abruptly broken up; suddenly, all such ethnic officials, like their entire peoples, came under suspicion of being “two-faced,” meaning disloyal against China (Ala 2021). *** In contrast, Myanmar’s genocide against the Rohingya was launched on a particular date: August 25, 2017. It consisted in a pre-planned intervention by regular armed forces, aiming to expel the entire Rohingya minority—a massive escalation of previous, long-simmering discrimination of the Rohingya, who are mostly farmers and fishermen but also include teachers, lawyers, and so on, and have a centuries-long history of residing in Myanmar. On that day, an attack using guns and explosives is said to have been launched by armed Rohingya insurgents from the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), on Myanmar border police and military outposts on the Myanmar-Bangladesh border (BBC, “Rohingya Crisis” 2017). ARSA was a group of perhaps several hundred men, clandestinely based in Bangladesh and branded as terrorists by the Myanmar army after similar attacks in 2016. The group has largely vanished; in 2019, Bangladeshi police claimed to have killed one of its former leaders. Because of multiple failed historical attempts at armed struggle, the group does not ever seem to have enjoyed widespread support among ordinary Rohingya. The massive, deadly Myanmar army response to the group’s 2017 attack likely means that it lost any remaining sympathy. Myanmar’s genocide operations were launched immediately after the August 2017 incursion, with regular army troops aided by auxiliary ethnic militias mobilized from among the Buddhist Rakhine ethnic group in the region with the same name, Rakhine, where the Muslim Rohingya have lived. Both regular troops and ethnic militias took part in targeting and driving Rohingya people out of the country at gunpoint, in the hundreds of thousands; killing and raping thousands of them along the way; and emptying and torching hundreds of their villages (Fortify Rights 2018; Ibrahim 2018; Reuters, “Tip of the Spear” 2018; New York Times 2020; Ocelli Project 2021, Myanmar Now 2022, etc.).

TOOLS AND METHODS: HOW THE GENOCIDES ARE CARRIED OUT The violent ethnic-cleansing operations in the Myanmar genocide centered on the Fall of 2017 but have continued intermittently almost ever since. The operations have been carried out by regular soldiers, who form part of an army that for many years has fought armed ethnic insurgencies in other regions of Myanmar (including Karen, Shan, Kachin, and Wa, among others) that seek to defend their autonomy. Since the early 2010s, that fighting had largely been put on hold through a series of ceasefire agreements. In all those long-running struggles the Myanmar army often mobilized intra-ethnic divisions—as they did against the Rohingya in Rakhine.

126  Handbook of genocide studies Yet the war on the Rohingya is different: unlike all other ethnic minorities in Myanmar, they have not been accepted as a legitimate part of the country’s ethnic makeup, and even deprived of their previous citizenship (Cheesman 2017). Both before and during the genocide, the army pushed this point in its propaganda, which was an important tool paving the way. Much of it was disseminated on Facebook, which had become a highly important new mass medium in Myanmar after press censorship was formally abolished in 2012 and the internet arrived in the country. Even the top general, Min Aung Hlaing, maintained a personal Facebook account where he announced that the long-running “problem” of the “Bengalis” would soon have its “final solution” (the term “Rohingya” has become taboo for most majority Burmans; thus “Bengalis”). This propaganda was echoed and amplified by Buddhist nationalists, including influential extremist monks (Wirathu, and others) who also held mass rallies painting Muslims in general and the Rohingya in particular as a mortal threat to Myanmar as a Buddhist nation. The exclusionary, chauvinist propaganda may also have been designed to enhance the army’s own reputation among the general Myanmar population. Many people in Myanmar had long felt ambivalent, at best, about the army, due to how it has annulled elections it did not like, and blocked democracy; yet in the mid-2010s many seemingly came around to agree with the military and their extremist Buddhist allies that the Rohingya were dangerous, fundamentally alien to Myanmar, and deserved to be expelled (today, after the brutal military coup in February 2021 which deposed a duly elected and popular civilian government that shared power with the military, many Burmese appear to have once again changed their view of both the army and the Rohingya). Even with the backing of wide swaths of the majority population, the military tried to ensure that its genocidal actions took place out of view. It restricted travel to the region, including for foreign journalists, aid workers, and representatives of the United Nations (UN) (who were persistently vilified by the extremists, at their mass rallies). Such restrictions helped the military to execute their ambitious plan of systematic expulsion, which in the end successfully further reduced the Rohingya population by more than 700,000, leaving only a few hundred thousand. Occasionally, and in great contrast to China’s largely successful news blackout, the Myanmar military’s restrictions sometimes fail—such as when a journalist group being taken through Rakhine on a managed tour saw a burning village, demanded to stop their van, and were able to confirm with anti-Muslim militiamen on site that this was a Rohingya village torched by the militiamen (BBC, “Who Is Burning Down Rohingya Villages?” 2017). This poked holes in the army’s unsuccessful efforts to maintain that it was the Rohingya villagers “themselves,” as well as ARSA militants hiding among them, who were doing all of the systematic burning of hundreds of Rohingya villages. In addition to satellite image analysis exposing the systematic burnings (see select references above), large numbers of surviving witnesses have since provided testimonies confirming that it was indeed army soldiers driving them out, killing and raping those within reach. For example, the Visual History Archive at the USC-Shoah Foundation includes a number of long-form annotated video testimonies, recorded in the refugee camps in Bangladesh in 2018. Many more testimonies have been recorded in the shorter formats used by journalists and in human rights reports—for one moving example, see the testimony of an ethnic Burman (majority Burmese or Bamar) former soldier in the Myanmar army, who had converted to Islam after marrying a Rohingya woman and was forced to flee with everyone else while witnessing various atrocities (The Guardian 2018). His is the only example I have seen of

State strategies to implement (and hide) genocide  127 a Muslim being asked by the advancing genocidal forces to convert to Buddhism (in his case, back to Buddhism); if he agreed, he would be saved. While it is possible that more people in similar situations have been asked to convert, it seems to be quite rare, as if the assumption was that people of Rohingya origin are generally unchangeable, undesirable invaders who deserve to be driven out. *** The Chinese situation stands in contrast. Striking cultural differences between perpetrators and victims are in play, just like in Myanmar, but the Chinese state is emphasizing forced assimilation (conversion), instead of expulsion, as its main weapon. In China, the evidence suggests the government’s efforts to eradicate the Uyghur and other minority peoples by way of “ethnic amalgamation” is itself in service of the larger goal of a homogenized (“unified” and “harmonious”) China under the Communist Party, as a strong country that can then assume its “rightful place” on the international stage (the “China dream”). Accordingly, the methods of the genocide mainly consist in different forms of forced assimilation—although there are also outright killings in the camps, as well as deaths from torture and starvation. The numbers may be substantial but are hard to verify because of the secrecy, much stronger than in Myanmar, but many reports mention people sent home from the camps in an emaciated state, dying within days. Also, some people are formally tried, sentenced to death, and executed. The launch of the camp system depended on a new and still-developing massive high-tech surveillance system, and greatly expanded policing, by which ethnic Uyghurs and others are profiled and targeted, apartheid-style. This includes street cameras that can recognize faces (including the “race”), gait, and so on; street checkpoints; and the bar-coding of homes, linked to government databases that include DNA, blood types, finger prints, iris scans, voice samples, faces and profiles, and so on, of all inhabitants. It also includes obligatory automated phone surveillance apps that set off alarms about any forbidden use, such as forbidden language or contents (videos from abroad, etc.), or, as mentioned, calls to or from abroad. (Not having a smartphone has also been made suspect.). It’s an unprecedented, totalizing system, pilot-developed in the region, greatly benefiting the Chinese surveillance industry—and now introduced elsewhere in China and also marketed to other countries. This massive dragnet has also been supplemented by special kinds of home visits from an army of majority-Chinese settler cadres (who are often local government employees) who have been mobilized to visit indigenous homes. They carry checklists, as well as instructions to also ask the children about Korans, and other elements of faith—on the theory that children are less likely to fabricate answers. Having built up this multifaceted dragnet for targeting victims, the police detain them, and send them to the indoctrination camps. There, they are forced to cease speaking their own language and communicate only in Chinese, while force-fed Communist doctrine, often by TV screen. They must abandon their everyday Muslim religion altogether so that they not only break their food taboos, but also cease to pray, on pain of severe punishment. They are also forced to denounce themselves in repetitive rituals inside these camps. The detainees must identify the faults in their past (such as everyday religion, or having pride in their culture), and thank the Communist Party for letting them see the light and saving them from religious extremism. This mental remolding of the detainees is clearly borrowed from the similar extralegal practices in China proper, when Chinese dissidents and heretics are force-paraded on TV,

128  Handbook of genocide studies renouncing their past. The distinction here is that ethnic conversion is the end goal (Fiskesjö 2020). Numerous witness testimonies provide evidence, notably collected in the Uyghur Tribunal, London (2021). Eyewitnesses include ethnic Uyghurs and Kazakhs who have had citizenship in the neighboring country of Kazakhstan, which intervened on their behalf. Many of these testimonies describe the profound psychological trauma that the camp experience has left on such survivors—and on their relatives and friends. Information has also been gleaned from leaked, secret camp operation manuals (Byler 2019; ICIJ 2019, etc.), and public documents like procurement notices and camp construction bids, studied by Adrian Zenz, and others.2 Scholars such as Shawn Zhang and others focused on analysing satellite images, which revealed the process of construction of the massive new camp system in great detail (see ASPI, Xinjiang Data Project 2020, etc.). Sometimes one could even spot detainees lined up in color-coded uniforms. The revelations made it impossible for the Chinese authorities to continue pretending, as they had done from the beginning, that there were no camps. In October 2018, they switched to acknowledging the existence of the camps, but described them as vocational training centers for young people in danger of becoming jihadists—even though numerous elderly detainees as well as highly educated detainees with a history of loyalty to the Chinese state can be identified in early images that the Chinese state posted in 2017–18, as domestic propaganda. Now, instead, they built fake camps and staged shows with hand-picked detainees, inviting gullible foreign journalists and diplomats from friendly governments to visit; while severely restricting and even harassing any real journalists. It should not escape the notice of genocide scholars that the enterprise evokes the Nazi and Soviet propaganda efforts—including the initial use of camp imagery as domestic propaganda targeting the ethnic majority, to show that the “dangerous” Uyghurs were harshly dealt with (Fiskesjö 2018). The same things that are forbidden in the camps are grounds for detention outside, and forced assimilation is also carried out in society at large, targeting the entire society. Majority-Chinese government cadres orchestrate indigenous peoples to begin observing Chinese holidays instead of native holiday customs, including to eat pork; to use Chinese language, and so on, including notably the prohibition of everyday religion, and the use of native languages in schools. Wash-basins, prayer mats, and other key items of everyday Islamic practice are collected and destroyed, as are books—not just Korans, but web content and books in native languages. Bookstores carrying them have been closed. If the home-inspections discover native designs in interior home decorations, they order them taken down. This applies even to the ingenious Uyghur heated floor, supa, which people are forced to dig up and destroy (Thum 2020). Beyond the home, entire traditional neighborhoods have been razed and replaced with Chinese architecture. Sacred pilgrimage sites, mosques, and cemeteries (including one going back to the 10th century AD) have been bulldozed on a grand scale (AFP 2019; Bahram Sintash 2019; Thum 2020). These are acts not covered in the Genocide Convention of 1948 (Cooper 2008), but they are certainly in violation

On all these aspects, see my online running bibliography, Fiskesjö 2022, notably cited in the “OHCHR Assessment of Human Rights Concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, People’s Republic of China,” issued August 31, 2022. 2

State strategies to implement (and hide) genocide  129 of the spirit of the Convention, and since they are all directly about destroying ethnic identities, they certainly further bolster the case that this is genocide.3 It is the same with another major aspect of the genocide: the mass enforced disappearance of ethnic musicians, artists, poets, writers, academics, and other intellectuals, likely all detained in the camps. This amounts to the “decapitation” and silencing of the entire Uyghur and Kazakh nations (UHRP 2019b). Other key aspects are those targeting women and children. The children of concentration camp detainees are “orphaned” and taken to state orphanages or boarding schools (resembling the infamous “residential schools” of North America), where they are forced to speak only in Chinese, and learn only Chinese culture—another long-term measure to transform indigenes into Chinese. As many as several hundred thousand children may have been affected through 2022.4 Among the targeted indigenous populations, fear and anguish is widespread not only about how these children are raised away from their families, but also about the risk that they are used for organ harvesting: there are persistent allegations and circumstantial evidence that Uyghur detainees are used to meet time-sensitive demands for organ transplants (cf. Haaretz 2022). Inside the camps, the forced medication of female detainees has been described as routine. The nature of the drugs is not revealed, but are likely drugs used to halt women’s periods, or make them infertile altogether. In the camps, the rape of detainees is also reported (BBC 2021). Outside the camps, forced sterilizations and abortions are widely used, to reduce the population, long-term (Associated Press 2020; Zenz 2020b, etc.); marriages of Han men and Uyghur women are encouraged and sometimes coerced—although never vice versa (see Leta Hong Fincher 2018, on eugenics in China’s “patriarchal authoritarianism”). Meanwhile, satellite image analysis reveals that some camps are being rebuilt as, or linked up with, forced labor factories (BuzzFeed 2020). In what may be a typical story, a woman managed to communicate with her sister in exile in Australia, and tell her that she had been put through an indoctrination camp, and then was forced to work in a textile factory—instead of going back to her former job as a nurse (ABC 2019, video, at: 36:40 ff.). In China’s propaganda, this sort of exploitation is typically described as economic improvement. It also involves the coercive dispatch of thousands of young Uyghurs who are sent to factories in Eastern China, where they are similarly exploited, and separated by gender, so no new Uyghur couples can form (ASPI, Uyghurs for Sale 2020; Zenz 2021).

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: WHY IT CAME TO GENOCIDE China is a former conquest empire, which doubled in size under the last dynasty (the Qing, 1644–1912) which also conquered the Uyghur region. Its current Chinese name “Xinjiang” is imperial nomenclature for “New Conquest.” Imperial troops even committed a genocide

3 The International Criminal Court (2021) has issued an important new policy, stating that cultural erasure in conjunction with other acts can be regarded as supplementary evidence for genocide. Note that these acts also violate China’s public international commitments to protect cultural rights as human rights (OHCHR 2018). 4 Bitter Winter (2021); in 2022, dramatic new evidence was revealed: Emily Feng, “Uyghur Kids Recall Physical and Mental Torment at Chinese Boarding Schools in Xinjiang” (NPR, February 3, 2022).

130  Handbook of genocide studies avant la lettre, mass-murdering and exterminating the Dzungar nation in 1755–57 (Perdue 2010; Millward 2021). In the 19th century, the gigantic multi-ethnic Chinese empire was confronted with Western colonialism in Asia, and the still-unfinished effort to convert the empire into a modern China began. Would the conquered peoples and their cultural difference be accepted, and if so, how? Here, many Chinese were influenced by hard-core tenets of 19th-century Western nationalism and racism (Fiskesjö 2021): Sun Yat-sen, the famous leader of the Republic established in 1912, wanted national ownership of all the imperial conquests, and no recognition of minorities. Meanwhile, in Xinjiang, an Uyghur-led East Turkistan Republic was twice established, and extinguished. Like Tibet, the Uyghur region came under direct Chinese rule. Mongolia was the only part of the old empire successfully established as an independent country. The Communists had originally promised all conquered ethnicities, including Uyghurs, Tibetans, Hmong, and so on, that if they came to power, everyone would be allowed to choose full independence, and break away from China (Fiskesjö 2006). However, upon seizing power in 1949, the Communists instead adopted a Soviet-inspired system of nominally autonomous nationalities, with ethnic figureheads. This in practice meant Chinese Communist Party rule, albeit with formal recognition of the existence of “minority nationalities” and of their languages, culture, and religion. At the same time, in practice, the Communist regime harshly suppressed any attempt of self-assertion, and continued the imperial-era push for assimilation (Bulag 2010). In the Uyghur region, a special Chinese military corporation, the “Bingtuan,” led the renewed Chinese colonization; it now claims much of regional land, and resources. The continued influx of Chinese settlers, along with an often apartheid-style discrimination against the indigenous peoples, began to provoke deep-felt resentments. One of the most well-known flashpoints was the protests in the capital city of Urumchi in 2009, which led to hundreds of local residents (Chinese and Uyghur) killed and a harsh crackdown on the Uyghur population (UHRP 2019b). The current genocide builds directly on the new revision, since about 2012, of the official post-1949 ethnic policy. As nationalism displaced Marxism as the ruling Communist elite’s ideology, officials and academics started arguing that other ethnicities should be curtailed and even de-recognized so as to bolster national “unity.” These arguments have now won out, and while the massive campaign to eradicate the Uyghurs and other peoples is unique in scope, brutality, and swiftness, it is mirrored in similar efforts across China, to suppress local languages and cultures, all couched in the rhetoric of nationalism and developmentalism (cf. Bulag 2020, on Inner Mongolia; also see e.g. Leibold 2019). It all suggests that a formal abolishment of China’s ethnic minorities may soon be on the agenda. Why were the Uyghurs targeted first, and so brutally, in this new wave? One answer is that several terrorist attacks perpetrated by Uyghur jihadist extremists in the early 21st century provided an excellent cover for the assault on millions of innocent people, and their very identity. Some Uyghurs have even suggested that jihadism was planted by the Chinese intelligence services. Regardless, as Sean Roberts (2020) has shown, terrorism became an excuse, with rhetoric partly borrowed from the US “War on terror.” It conveniently supplemented the earlier Chinese rhetoric about “separatism.” Now, a “domestic war on terrorist extremism” rhetoric is preferred, which also facilitates the co-option of other autocratic and/or Islamophobic regimes elsewhere (paradoxically including both Islamic nations like Saudi Arabia and Iran, and countries like Myanmar, Russia, etc., which often have expressly endorsed China’s narratives at the UN; The Diplomat 2020).

State strategies to implement (and hide) genocide  131 Additionally, the for-profit buildup of the new high-tech total surveillance system in Xinjiang, jointly achieved by the state and private Chinese industry, serves as a pilot project for the rest of China, and the world (Byler 2022); the deeper reasons for targeting the Uyghurs also include the rich natural resources and the geographical setting of their region, identified as a stepping stone for Chinese economic and geopolitical dominance across Asia and beyond. *** In Myanmar, ethnic intolerance has been particularly focused on one Muslim minority, the Rohingya, even though they have a centuries-long history of residence and societal participation in Myanmar. All other non-Muslim minorities are regarded as “native races,” who alone are allowed to be regarded as constituent of modern Myanmar (Cheesman 2017). The long-standing animosity against the Rohingya in recent years has been extended to all Muslims, because Islam is described as a threat to Myanmar as a Buddhist country (Walton 2013; Wade 2017); the exclusion of Muslims from the 2015 and 2020 elections further highlighted this, as did the 2017 public assassination of the highly regarded Muslim legal scholar Ko Ni, a top advisor to Myanmar’s civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi (Lintner 2017). The Rohingya inhabit an area of northwestern Myanmar bordering on today’s Bangladesh, which for centuries was the independent kingdom of Arakan (Smith 2019), which cultivated both Islam and Buddhism. It was conquered by Myanmar’s Buddhist king in 1784, one of many conquests that made Myanmar’s monarchy the most powerful in Southeast Asia— Thailand was once but a series of vassals of the Myanmar empire. But in the 19th century Myanmar was itself conquered by the British empire, which also destroyed the Burmese monarchy—the last king died in British captivity, in India. Myanmar recovered its independence in 1947. The nationalist concept of “native races” gained new salience, not least among the reorganized Myanmar military, which tried to cast itself as the protector of this new nation of majority “natives.” In 1962, the military deposed the elected government, and ruled the country for several long decades. After World War II, many had said Myanmar was the country best placed to prosper economically in the future, but that promise was squandered by the military’s mismanagement. The military focused on enriching itself, while policing the public, and fighting the multiple ethnic insurgencies that erupted when many of Myanmar’s minority “native races” became dissatisfied with the failure of ethnic reconciliation in independent Myanmar. In 1990, the generals finally permitted a new election, but immediately turned around and annulled it because it was won by the party of Aung San Suu Kyi (the famous daughter of one of the army’s founding heroes, Aung San). This scenario would again repeat itself in the coup of February 2021, after two free elections in 2015 and 2020 had produced the same outcome, returning Aung San Suu Kyi to government. The new coup ended another experiment with electoral democracy that the military itself had launched, after 14 years (!) of preparation, with a new Constitution granting them veto power over any civilian government. Why this power-sharing was not enough for them is one mystery; another is why they even decided to try democracy again. Perhaps it was to break the country’s long international isolation and corresponding economic dependence on China—which military men often directly profit from, but which can’t be squared with the fanatical public commitment to independence that the generals have tried to project, throughout their decades of struggles. Meanwhile, just as the Uyghur conflict has a connection to mineral and oil wealth in Western China, so too is there an economic motive for state repression of the Rohingya in Myanmar:

132  Handbook of genocide studies the Rakhine area is on the Indian Ocean, and is projected as a port and gas pipeline site of China’s future maritime trade. China gave its tacit support for Myanmar’s ethnic cleansing of that region, and now openly sides with the Myanmar military, aka the “Tatmadaw” (Irrawaddy 2022). At the UN, China’s representatives have repeatedly blocked international scrutiny and censure of the Rohingya genocide. For the Rohingya, the entire post-war period was punctuated by severe crises, one after another, culminating in the massive expulsion of 2017 (Ibrahim 2018, etc.). Already from the beginning, the Myanmar military was suspicious, knowing that some Rohingya had helped the British defeat the Japanese occupiers and hoped to gain independence after decolonization— but in 1947, Britain could do no such thing—also not for others who had nurtured similar hopes, such as the Karen in Southeast Myanmar, said to have run the world’s longest-running continuous ethnic insurrection. Some Rohingya took up arms, fighting either for an independent state, or to join East Pakistan (Bangladesh) instead of Myanmar, but they would soon falter. Intermittent civilian protests continued while the Rohingya increasingly became a target of exclusionary measures, denying and destroying their citizenship in Myanmar, all the way to the present. In 1977, when the Myanmar military government launched a harsh campaign force-screening “foreigners” in Rakhine, 200,000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh. In 1982, a new citizenship law enshrined the concept of “native races,” identifying 135, but excluding the Rohingya. In 1991, new rounds of harassment caused another 250,000 Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh, yet in 1992–2004, the UNHCR helped repatriate 230,000. In 2012 anti-Rohingya violence flared up again, as partial democratization created a new environment of free speech. Extremist Buddhists begin to denounce them as an existential threat and to push for new anti-Muslim marriage laws, among other proscriptions on Muslims. Many dwellings were burned, and 150,000 Rohingya were confined to local internally displaced persons (IDP) camps. In 2014, extremist Buddhists attacked and expelled foreign aid organizations in Rakhine; tens of thousands more Rohingya tried escaping by boat in response, with many perishing. In 2015, despite repeated international pleas to give full citizenship to the Rohingya, including from a UN special rapporteur on the human rights situation in Myanmar, the elected government again refused; instead, it annulled their earlier ID cards, forcing all Rohingya to re-apply for citizenship with little prospects of meeting stringent conditions. Along with other international figures, Archbishop Desmond Tutu called out the “slow genocide” under way against the Rohingya. Since 2017, the military’s latest attempt at a “final solution” led to the deaths of several tens of thousands of Rohingya and over 700,000 new Rohingya refugees forced across the border in Bangladesh, joining hundreds of thousands who had already arrived in the years before. Thousands have fled to other countries (such as Malaysia and Pakistan), while about half a million remain in Myanmar—including as many as 130,000 still languishing in IDP camps first set up in Rakhine in 2012 (Human Rights Watch 2020). Only a small trickle of refugees have returned from Bangladesh. Most regard returning as out of the question, since their homes are gone, and they have no guarantee of citizenship. The Myanmar government form to be filled out by prospective returnees begins by asking about when they first left Bangladesh, and their home village there (Fortify Rights 2019). Refugees who return privately have been seized and jailed for crossing the border illegally (Rohingya Khobor 2020). As funds are running out for the basic needs of the massive camps in Bangladesh, the crisis may yet worsen (Ahmed 2022).

State strategies to implement (and hide) genocide  133

DENYING GENOCIDE: CHINA AND MYANMAR IN THE INTERNATIONAL ARENA Both campaigns, in my view, are clearly genocide as per the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948), even as they are very different: Myanmar expelling its people on pain of death, China force-assimilating them on the spot. We know that no one has to die for genocide to be taking place: here, the “intent to destroy” the ethnic groups in question, as required in the Convention, is obvious, even as in China the names of the groups are retained as hollow tokens, perhaps awaiting a future revision of China’s constitution, to formally abolish ethnic groups altogether. In China’s case it is also clear that, as discussed above, all five of the “acts” of genocide are being committed: (a) “killing”; (b) “causing serious bodily and mental harm”; (c) “incflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about” destruction; (d) “prevent births”; and (e) “Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” Likewise, in Myanmar, too, all five are met (possibly with exception of the mass confiscation of children (e)). Myanmar’s genocide has been taken to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the UN court where countries can sue other countries, as well as to the International Criminal Court (ICC), where individual perpetrators can be accused. In the ICJ, the Gambia, on behalf of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, has brought the case, with Gambian Justice Minister Abubacarr Tambadou initially serving as a passionate lead prosecutor (TRT 2019). Preliminary ICJ hearings resulted in an unprecedented December 2019 court injunction issued to Myanmar, to halt the persecution of the Rohingya while proceedings still continue on the question of genocide. The proceedings are now mired in difficulties over Myanmar’s post-coup representation, as well as over whether to disclose Myanmar’s (non-)compliance with the court’s order. Meanwhile, the ICC, too, has opened an investigation into the Rohingya issue, and a case has been brought in an Argentine court, under the principle of universal jurisdiction. Denying the genocide has been difficult. Until the February 2021 military self-coup, which canceled the results of the November 2020 elections, the country had a free press (which had been restored after the reintroduction of democracy about a decade earlier). Thus, despite the unrepentant armed forces restricting access to the afflicted areas, and despite the elected civilian government’s increasing hostility towards the press (whose leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, helped defend the country and its military against the genocide charges in The Hague), both local and international news organizations were able to help expose and document the genocide. Most famously, journalists working for Reuters (who would later be charged and jailed for possessing secrets) obtained photographic evidence of soldiers massacring ten innocent Rohingya men (Reuters, “Massacre in Myanmar” 2018). The victims were identified with the help of surviving relatives who reached the Bangladesh refugee camps (Reuters, “After the Killings” 2018). The Myanmar military tried the soldiers, painting them as rogue elements— an argument that also figured in the government’s defense at The Hague. Further reports, however, exposed the full involvement of the army’s elite divisions (e.g. Reuters, “Tip of the Spear” 2018). Army deserters to the shadow National Unity Government’s clandestine People’s Defence Forces have also testified on these killings (Myanmar Now 2022). The massive satellite imagery documentation of how the military systematically burned and bulldozed Rohingya villages, while sparing the settlements of other ethnicities, and the

134  Handbook of genocide studies concrete evidence of the many hundreds of thousands of refugees that ended up in Bangladesh, added to an irrefutable record. Many refugee accounts of how soldiers burned their houses and drove them out at gunpoint, while killing many on the spot, have been gathered and can be matched with the satellite imagery evidence, and other data. One striking, infamous example is the village of Tula Toli, where the Myanmar army carried out massacres as part of their effort to drive Rohingya people out, described in eyewitness testimonies which can be directly connected to the targeted burning of the same neighborhood (The Guardian 2017a, 2017b). Meanwhile, because of the nationalist fervor, many in the Burman majority persisted in denial. In one peculiar twist (which isn’t unique to Myanmar), because “genocide” has been locally translated as killing a people, many have denied that there was a genocide: after all refugees in Bangladesh seen on TV are still alive (Frontier 2019). However, after the February 2021 coup, the trust in the army has diminished as the army has again been acting with the same brutality towards majority Burmese, and other “native races”—including using the very same village-burning tactics (Washington Post 2021). Thus, the information combat that is a fight “for Myanmar’s soul” continues (Reuters 2021). *** In the case of China, despite the Chinese regime’s much more persistent and elaborate efforts to block scrutiny, the atrocities (mass extrajudicial detentions; mass sterilizations and the seizing of children; forced labor schemes, and more), and the genocidal intent behind these acts, are now increasingly and widely known and recognized around the world (cf. Subcommittee on International Human Rights 2020; Fiskesjö 2022; Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy 2021; Uyghur Tribunal 2021; Van Schaack 2021, etc.). Several countries, including the United States and the Parliaments of Canada and Holland, have recognized what is happening as genocide, others (France, etc.) stopped short of this and instead demanded a fact-finding mission from the United Nations OHCHR, a visit proposed since 2018 but successfully stalled and delayed by the Chinese government insisting on its own severe constraints—under which the visit finally took place, in May 2022. The continued delay of the UN report caused widespread frustration, but a substantial report identifying not genocide but “crimes against humanity” was finally published in August 2022 (OHCHR 2022). It was viciously condemned by the Chinese government—which then, on October 6, 2022, with support from its allied nations in the UN Human Rights Council, successfully defeated a motion to debate the report, a major victory for China’s efforts to escape scrutiny (aided by abstentions from the Gambia, Argentina, Ukraine, and others). The regime has formidable resources for countering the accusations. China’s growing trade and economic progress has generated enormous leverage and wealth for the state. The regime has huge resources that can be poured both into enacting the genocide and into the mechanisms that protect the regime, including in terms of countering the accusations against it, and cajole dependent countries into remaining silent. The regime uses China’s UN Security Council membership to block criticism, and it is strenuously recruiting the support of friendly regimes, not least in the UN and its Human Rights Council, where nations supporting China (Myanmar, Russia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, etc.) have actually several times outnumbered those openly criticizing it. It is also refusing to acknowledge the relevance or jurisdiction of either the ICJ, or the ICC, where Uyghur exile activists are trying to have a case accepted. All this is in line with its aggressive rejection of international judicial organs in recent years, including the legal rulings rejecting its unilateral

State strategies to implement (and hide) genocide  135 annexation of the South China Sea. It all fits with Bachman’s (2022) view that China and the other UN Security Council permanent member states in effect have insulated themselves from international law, as “outlaw states.” The Chinese government runs a massive propaganda machine. Domestically, it heavily censors information behind its national Great Firewall, and manipulates and rallies ordinary people against the victims of its genocide. Externally, it tries to conceal the truth, and to counter the information and the world’s criticism against the atrocities. This multi-pronged effort includes China’s state media, which are building a global reach and recruiting aides, everywhere. They are constantly broadcasting denials and rebuttals (especially against the United States and Europe), as well as elaborately choreographed, coerced interviews with people inside China, either to smear refugee witnesses in exile, or to present “happy people” asserting that everything is fine (UHRP 2021; ASPI 2022, etc.).

PROSPECTS FOR FUTURE RECONCILIATION IN CHINA AND MYANMAR The contrast between the two genocides is stark: Myanmar’s generals have sought to “cleanse” their country, while also using the targeted Muslim Rohingya as a scapegoat population to deflect and neutralize popular anger against their own misrule. In the Chinese case, there is also scapegoating of the minority Muslim Uyghurs and Kazakhs, similarly built on brandishing entire peaceful populations as terrorists. But the Chinese project is also very different, in that it prevents the targeted people from leaving (even cajoling exiles to come back and be detained). The focus is instead on the rapid force-assimilation of these minorities, putting them through the force-conversion camps and implementing a long series of other brutal demographic and economic measures designed to eradicate their identity, including preventing new births and “orphaning” massive numbers of children, to cut them off from their own culture entirely. Able-bodied camp survivors are sent to work in mass forced labor; ethnic youth are intentionally dispersed to similar factory facilities across China, to further dilute the native population. Why then does China, in contrast to Myanmar, retain the targeted populations instead of expelling them? One major reason is of course that the chief target, the Uyghur people, are native only to China, and thus can hardly be construed as “invaders,” like the Rohingya. China’s strategy may relate to the fantasy of mono-ethnicity as a condition for strengthening and enriching the Chinese state—which also seeks to dominate all of Central Asia, so there would be little incentive to force refugees to go there—as Myanmar has done to Bangladesh. But most important here is the Communist Party’s powerful teleology of progress, which animates the perpetrator officials, and drives them (as the people’s self-appointed “vanguard”) to harness the people as the tools of the state. We see this expressed in the encouragement of Chinese settlers to the region, and in how, across China today, huge numbers of rural Chinese are being reorganized and concentrated into cities, to enhance their economic output. These practices, coached in the rhetoric of developmentalism and “national strength,” find further expression in the state efforts of squeezing the maximum use value out of ethnic minority people on the cotton fields, in factories, and so on. These deep-seated ideas about people as tools can probably also help explain organ harvesting (from people who will be put to death anyway), and related aspects such as the harvesting of Uyghur women’s labor and bodies

136  Handbook of genocide studies (Turdush and Fiskesjö 2021), including their hair, which is sold internationally as hair extensions (CNN 2020). In China, the future looks very bleak. In the fall of 2020 China’s leader Xi Jinping held a public meeting emphasizing that Xinjiang policies are “100% correct,” in effect forcing his Party to co-own the genocide along with him; in 2022 Mr. Xi extended his position as China’s leader. Meanwhile, all the measures of the genocide are proceeding apace, despite the mounting international outcry and the beginnings of boycotts of goods manufactured through slave labor in the Uyghur region. To some extent, China’s economic dominance in many regions will dent such efforts—and the European Union chose this moment to conclude a trade agreement with China, an agreement now shelved, as it was unrealistically premised on the idea that China will, some time in the future, sign on to international labor rights. And although totalitarian regimes like China tend not to remain stable indefinitely, there are few immediate prospects for change. There are, however, glimmers of hope. Many people in China still disagree with the regime. Opposition can’t be openly voiced, but the recent brief run of the Clubhouse phone audio app in China (Byler 2021) provided a window on Chinese civilian voices that are sympathetic to the Uyghurs, and regret the suffering inflicted on them in the name of China’s greatness. In Myanmar, in the years immediately before the genocide was launched in August 2017, the elected civilian government—while at the same time bowing to the chauvinist anti-Muslim sentiment gripping their nation—had taken certain abortive steps to promote reconciliation. Perhaps most importantly, the civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi created a Rakhine commission, which she asked the former Secretary-General Kofi Annan to chair. The danger of genocide was very much on the mind of the late Kofi Annan (2004). He made interim proposals towards reconciliation, again pushing for the recognition of Rohingya citizenship and participation in society. Unfortunately, and perhaps ironically, the commission’s final report (Advisory Commission on Rakhine State 2017) arrived almost the same day as the genocide started. As such, reconciliation has been put on hold. The late 2010s and early 2020s have been devastating, including the endless and fruitless bilateral negotiations between Bangladesh and Myanmar for the return of the refugees and the IDP camp detainees, all now languishing in limbo. At the UN, meanwhile, Myanmar’s government sought and got help from authoritarian China and Russia to block scrutiny of the genocide and its aftermath. At the genocide trial in The Hague, then-civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi denied the charges of genocide, inevitably erasing much of what remained of the respect that she had previously enjoyed around the world, and watching the cheering crowds lining the road from the airport on her return from the country, severely undermined the hope that Myanmar as a country would be able to heal and reconcile. The military self-coup on February 1, 2021 terminated a decade of tentative democracy in Myanmar. Even though it had granted itself veto power over any civilian government, in the end the army still decided to annul the November 2020 elections that had returned Aung San Suu Kyi’s party in an even stronger position. She clearly must have been struggling under the tenuous power-sharing arrangement between the military and her democratically elected civilian government, with its own too feeble, abortive efforts at ethnic reconciliation. Now, the country has been forced back to square one, and may once again languish for a long time under a military junta.

State strategies to implement (and hide) genocide  137 All hope may not be lost, however, even if there is not much credence to the Bangladeshi hopes that a military regime with autocratic powers may allow the return of some of the Rohingya refugees there, as happened once in the past (Dhaka Tribune 2021). In the massive crowds of ordinary majority Burmese protesting the military junta in cities across the country, demanding the return to democracy, protesters have been seen raising signs expressing “regret” for the atrocities against the Rohingya perpetrated by their own country’s military (Vice 2021). Even more promising, some Rakhine Buddhists have reached out to the remaining Rohingya (Ibrahim 2020). These developments suggest that, despite the generals, there is some hope in Rakhine, and the country of Myanmar may eventually be able to move towards peaceful inclusivity. The belated “regret” about the Rohingya genocide also highlights that democracy in a formal sense (elections, etc.) is no guarantee against genocide if it cannot guarantee the safety of minorities in the face of either populist and nationalist demagoguery—or authoritarian assault, as with the Communist Party of China—both of which are out to whip up, and then ride high on, majority hatred for this or that minority.

WORKS CITED ABC. “How China Is Creating the World’s Largest Prison.” Four Corners, July 15, 2019. https://​www​ .youtube​.com/​watch​?v​=​t​-axd1Ht​_J8 (accessed November 6, 2022). Advisory Commission on Rakhine State, Final Report. Towards a Peaceful, Fair and Prosperous Future for the People of Rakhine, August 2017. http://​www​.rakhinecommission​.org/​app/​uploads/​2017/​08/​ FinalReport​_Eng​.pdf (accessed November 6, 2022). AFP. “Satellite Images Reveal China Is Destroying Muslim Graveyards,” Daily Mail, October 9, 2019. https://​www​.dailymail​.co​.uk/​news/​article​-7553127/​Even​-death​-Uighurs​-feel​-long​-reach​-Chinese​ -state​.html (accessed November 6, 2022). Ahmed, Kaamil. “World Has Left Bangladesh to Shelter 1m Rohingya Refugees Alone, Says Minister.” The Guardian, October 26, 2022. https://​www​.theguardian​.com/​global​-development/​2022/​oct/​26/​ world​-has​-left​-bangladesh​-to​-shelter​-1m​-rohingya​-refugees​-alone​-says​-minister (accessed November 6, 2022). Ala, Mamtimin. Worse Than Death: Reflections on the Uyghur Genocide. London: Hamilton Books, 2021. Annan, Kofi. “Action Plan to Prevent Genocide,” Prevent Genocide International, April 7, 2004. http://​ www​.preventgenocide​.org/​prevent/​UNdocs/​KofiA​nnansActio​nPlantoPre​ventGenoci​de7Apr2004​ .htm (accessed November 6, 2022). ASPI (Australian Strategic Policy Institute). Uyghurs for Sale: “Re-education”, Forced Labour and Surveillance beyond Xinjiang, March 1, 2020. https://​www​.aspi​.org​.au/​report/​uyghurs​-sale (accessed November 6, 2022). ASPI. The Xinjiang Data Project, September 23, 2020. https://​xjdp​.aspi​.org​.au/​map (accessed November 6, 2022). ASPI. “Frontier Influencers: The New Face of China's Propaganda.” ASPI Policy Brief Report No. 65/2022. https://​www​.aspi​.org​.au/​report/​frontier​-influencers (accessed November 6, 2022). Associated Press, “China Cuts Uighur Births with IUDs, Abortion, Sterilization,” June 29, 2020. https://​ apnews​.com/​26​9b3de1af34​e17c1941a5​14f78d764c (accessed November 6, 2022). Bachman, Jeffrey S. The Politics of Genocide: From the Genocide Convention to the Responsibility to Protect. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2022. Bahram Sintash. Demolishing Faith: The Destruction and Desecration of Uyghur Mosques and Shrines. Uyghur Human Rights Project, October 28, 2019. https://​uhrp​.org/​statement/​uhrp​-report​-demolishing​ -faith​-the​-destruction​-and​-desecration​-of​-uyghur​-mosques​-and​-shrines/​ (accessed November 6, 2022).

138  Handbook of genocide studies BBC. “Who Is Burning Down Rohingya Villages?” By Jonathan Head. September 10, 2017. http://​ www​.bbc​.com/​news/​av/​world​-asia​-41219840/​who​-is​-burning​-down​-rohingya​-villages (accessed November 6, 2022). BBC. “Rohingya Crisis: Finding out the Truth about ARSA Militants.” By Jonathan Head. October 11, 2017. http://​www​.bbc​.com/​news/​world​-asia​-41521268 (accessed November 6, 2022). BBC. “‘Their Goal Is to Destroy Everyone’: Uighur Camp Detainees Allege Systematic Rape,” February 2, 2021. https://​www​.bbc​.com/​news/​world​-asia​-china​-55794071 (accessed November 6, 2022). Bitter Winter. “900,000 Uyghur Children: The Saddest Victims of Genocide,” Abdulhakim Idris, May 6, 2021. https://​bitterwinter​.org/​900000​-uyghur​-children​-the​-saddest​-victims​-of​-genocide/​ Bulag, Uradyn E. “Twentieth-Century China: Ethnic Assimilation and Intergroup Violence,” in Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, 2010; Online: 2012, DOI: https://​doi​.org/​10​.1093/​oxfordhb/​9780199232116​.013​.0022; https://​academic​.oup​.com/​edited​ -volume/​40215/​chapter​-abstract/​344571501 (restricted access; accessed November 6, 2022). Bulag, Uradyn E. “Dying for the Mother Tongue: Why Have People in Inner Mongolia Recently Taken Their Lives?” Index on Censorship, December 14, 2020, 49–51. https://​journals​.sagepub​.com/​doi/​10​ .1177/​0306422020981275 (accessed November 6, 2022). BuzzFeed News. “The Factories in the Camps,” December 28, 2020. https://​www​.buzzfeednews​.com/​ article/​alison​_killing/​xinjiang​-camps​-china​-factories​-forced​-labor (accessed November 6, 2022). Byler, Darren. “A Xinjiang Scholar’s Close Reading of the China Cables,” SupChina, December 4, 2019. https://​thechinaproject​.com/​2019/​12/​04/​a​-xinjiang​-scholars​-close​-reading​-of​-the​-china​-cables/​ (accessed November 6, 2022). Byler, Darren. “‘Truth and Reconciliation’: Excerpts from the Xinjiang Clubhouse,” SupChina, March 3, 2021. https://​thechinaproject​.com/​2021/​03/​03/​truth​-and​-reconciliation​-excerpts​-from​-the​-xinjiang​ -clubhouse/​(accessed November 6, 2022). Byler, Darren. Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City. Duke, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. Cheesman, Nick. “How in Myanmar ‘National Races’ Came to Surpass Citizenship and Exclude Rohingya,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 47.3 (2017), 461–83. CNN. “‘Black Gold’—How Global Demand for Hair Products Is Linked to Forced Labor in Xinjiang,” October 9, 2020. https://​edition​.cnn​.com/​interactive/​2020/​10/​asia/​black​-gold​-hair​-products​-forced​ -labor​-xinjiang/​(accessed November 6, 2022). Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Geneva, 1948). UN Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights. https://​www​.ohchr​.org/​en/​p​rofessiona​linterest/​pages/​ crimeofgenocide​.aspx (accessed November 6, 2022). Cooper, John. Raphael Lemkin and the Struggle for the Genocide Convention. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Dhaka Tribune. “Myanmar Military ‘Reaches Out’ to Rohingyas in Rakhine,” February 5, 2021. https://​ www​.dhakatribune​.com/​bangladesh/​rohingya​-crisis/​2021/​02/​05/​myanmar​-military​-reaches​-out​-to​ -rohingyas​-in​-rakhine (accessed November 6, 2022). The Diplomat. “2020 Edition: Which Countries Are for or against China’s Xinjiang Policies?” By Catherine Putz. October 9, 2020. https://​thediplomat​.com/​2020/​10/​2020​-edition​-which​-countries​-are​ -for​-or​-against​-chinas​-xinjiang​-policies/​ (accessed November 6, 2022). Feng, Emily. “Uyghur Kids Recall Physical and Mental Torment at Chinese Boarding Schools in Xinjiang,” NPR, February 3, 2022. https://​www​.gpb​.org/​news/​2022/​02/​03/​uyghur​-kids​-recall​ -physical​-and​-mental​-torment​-at​-chinese​-boarding​-schools​-in (accessed November 6, 2022). Fiskesjö, Magnus. “Rescuing the Empire: Chinese Nation-building in the Twentieth Century,” European Journal of East Asian Studies 5.2 (2006), 15–44. Fiskesjö, Magnus. “How Beijing Is Using the Nazi Propaganda Playbook to Justify Its Concentration Camps to the World,” Hong Kong Free Press, October 27, 2018. https://​www​.hongkongfp​.com/​ 2018/​10/​27/​beijing​-using​-nazi​-propaganda​-playbook​-justify​-concentration​-camps​-world/​ (accessed November 6, 2022). Fiskesjö, Magnus. “Forced Confessions as Identity Conversion in China’s Concentration Camps,” Monde chinois 62 (2020), 28–43. https://​www​.cairn​.info/​revue​-monde​-chinois​-2020​-2​-page​-28​.htm (restricted access; accessed November 6, 2022).

State strategies to implement (and hide) genocide  139 Fiskesjö, Magnus. “Racism with Chinese Characteristics: How China’s Imperial Legacy Underpins State Racism and Violence in Xinjiang,” China Channel, Los Angeles Review of Books, January 22, 2021. https://​chinachannel​.org/​2021/​01/​22/​chinese​-racism/​ (accessed November 6, 2022). Fiskesjö, Magnus. “Uyghur Bibliography.” Online; updated November 2022. https://​ uhrp​ .org/​ bibliography/​(accessed November 6, 2022). Fortify Rights. “They Gave Them Long Swords.” Preparations for Genocide and Crimes against Humanity against Rohingya Muslims, July 19, 2018. https://​www​.fortifyrights​.org/​mly​-inv​-rep​-2018​ -07​-19/​(accessed November 6, 2022). Fortify Rights. National Verification Cards and the Denial of Citizenship of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, 2019. https://​www​.fortifyrights​.org/​mya​-inv​-2019​-09​-03/​ (accessed November 6, 2022). Frontier Myanmar. “‘Genocide’, ‘Human Rights’ and What’s Lost in Translation.” By Than Toe Aung. May 8, 2019. https://​frontiermyanmar​.net/​en/​genocide​-human​-rights​-and​-whats​-lost​-in​-translation (accessed November 6, 2022). The Guardian. “Massacre at Tula Toli: Rohingya Recall Horror of Myanmar Army Attack.” By Oliver Holmes. September 7, 2017a. https://​www​.theguardian​.com/​world/​2017/​sep/​07/​massacre​-at​-tula​-toli​ -rohingya​-villagers​-recall​-horror​-of​-myanmar​-army​-attack (accessed November 6, 2022). The Guardian. “Myanmar: Satellite Imagery Confirms Rohingya Village of Tula Toli Razed.” By Oliver Holmes. September 19, 2017b. https://​www​.theguardian​.com/​world/​2017/​sep/​19/​myanmar​-satellite​ -imagery​-confirms​-rohingya​-village​-of​-tula​-toli​-razed (accessed November 6, 2022). The Guardian. “Witness to a Massacre: The Former Myanmar Soldier who Saw His Village Burn.” By Poppy McPherson. February 5, 2018. https://​www​.theguardian​.com/​world/​2018/​feb/​05/​witness​ -massacre​-tula​-toli​-rohingya​-myanmar​-soldier​-village (accessed November 6, 2022). Haaretz. “China Harvested Organs from Living People, Doctors Helped with Executions, Israeli www​ .haaretz​ .com/​ israel​ -news/​ Researcher Claims.” By David Stavrou. April 7, 2022. https://​ MAGAZINE​-research​-china​-harvested​-organs​-from​-living​-people​-doctors​-helped​-with​-executions​-1​ .10726687 (accessed November 6, 2022). Hong Fincher, Leta. Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China. London: Verso, 2018. Human Rights Watch. “An Open Prison without End”—Myanmar’s Mass Detention of Rohingya in Rakhine State. Washington, DC, 2020. Ibrahim, Azeem. The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Genocide. London: Hurst & Co., 2018. Ibrahim, Azeem. “A Cause for Hope for the Rohingya in Myanmar,” Rohingya Post, January 8, 2020. https://​www​.rohingyapost​.com/​a​-cause​-for​-hope​-for​-the​-rohingya​-in​-myanmar/​ (accessed November 6, 2022). International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). “China Cables: Exposed: China’s Operating Manuals for Mass Internment and Arrest by Algorithm,” November 24, 2019. https://​www​.icij​.org/​ investigations/​china​-cables/​(plus many additional reports) (accessed November 6, 2022). International Criminal Court (ICC). Office of the Prosecutor. Policy on Cultural Heritage, June 2021. https://​www​.icc​-cpi​.int/​itemsDocuments/​20210614​-otp​-policy​-cultural​-heritage​-eng​.pdf (accessed November 6, 2022). Irrawaddy. “China Will Face Rejection from Myanmar People for Working with Junta: Shadow Govt,” April 4, 2022. https://​www​.irrawaddy​.com/​news/​burma/​china​-will​-face​-rejection​-from​-myanmar​ -people​-for​-working​-with​-junta​-shadow​-govt​.html (accessed November 6, 2022). “Learning and Identifying 75 Religious Extreme Activities in Parts of Xinjiang” (Bianjiang fankong, June 17, 2017). Annotated translation by Darren Byler, Xinjiang Documentation Project, 2021. https://​ xinjiang​.sppga​.ubc​.ca/​chinese​-sources/​online​-sources/​identifying​-religious​-extremism/​ (accessed November 6, 2022). Leibold, James. “Planting the Seed: Ethnic Policy in Xi Jinping’s New Era of Cultural Nationalism,” Jamestown Foundation, December 31, 2019. https://​jamestown​.org/​program/​planting​-the​-seed​-ethnic​ -policy​-in​-xi​-jinpings​-new​-era​-of​-cultural​-nationalism/​ (accessed November 6, 2022). Lintner, Bertil. “No Justice for Slain Myanmar Lawyer Ko Ni,” Asia Times, June 17, 2017. https://​ asiatimes​.com/​2017/​06/​no​-justice​-slain​-myanmar​-lawyer​-ko​-ni/​ (accessed November 6, 2022). Millward, James A. Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang. New rev. edn. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021.

140  Handbook of genocide studies Myanmar Now. Interview with Captain Nay Myo Thet, April 2, 2022. https://​myanmar​-now​.org/​mm/​ news/​10939 (in Burmese; partially translated in tweet thread by H2, @H21428325242, April 4, 2022, https://​twitter​.com/​H21428325242/​status/​1510983832324952073) (accessed November 6, 2022). Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy. The Uyghur Genocide: An Examination of China’s Breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. March 8, 2021. https://​newlinesinstitute​.org/​uyghurs/​the​ -uyghur​-genocide​-an​-examination​-of​-chinas​-breaches​-of​-the​-1948​-genocide​-convention/​ (accessed November 6, 2022). New York Times. “‘Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims.” By Austin Ramzy and Chris Buckley. November 16, 2019. https://​www​.nytimes​.com/​ interactive/​2019/​11/​16/​world/​asia/​china​-xinjiang​-documents​.html (accessed November 6, 2022). New York Times. “‘Kill All You See’: In a First, Myanmar Soldiers Tell of Rohingya Slaughter.” By Hannah Beech, Saw Nang and Marlise Simons. September 8, 2020. https://​www​.nytimes​.com/​2020/​ 09/​08/​world/​asia/​myanmar​-rohingya​-genocide​.html (accessed November 6, 2022). Ocelli Project: Rakhine with C4AD. Documenting Village Destruction in Myanmar, 2021. https://​ocelli​ .c4ads​.org (accessed November 6, 2022). OHCHR (Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights). “Cultural Rights and the Protection of Cultural Heritage.” Geneva: United Nations, OHCHR, 2018. https://​www​.ohchr​.org/​EN/​Issues/​ ESCR/​Pages/​CulturalRi​ghtsProtec​tionCultur​alHeritage​.aspx (accessed November 6, 2022). OHCHR (Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights). “OHCHR Assessment of Human Rights Concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, People’s Republic of China.” Geneva: OHCHR, 31 August 2022. https://​www​.ohchr​.org/​en/​documents/​country​-reports/​ohchr​-assessment​ -human​-rights​-concerns​-xinjiang​-uyghur​-autonomous​-region (accessed November 6, 2022). Perdue, Peter C. China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010. Reuters. “Massacre in Myanmar. Special Report: How Myanmar Forces Burned, Looted and Killed in a Remote Village.” By Wa Lone, Kyaw Soe Oo, Simon Lewis, and Antoni Slodkowski. February 8, 2018. https://​www​.reuters​.com/​investigates/​special​-report/​myanmar​-rakhine​-events/​ (accessed November 6, 2022). Reuters. “After the Killings. The Day They Took Our Men: The Families of 10 Massacred Rohingya Men Tell Their Stories.” By Andrew R.C. Marshall. April 11, 2018. https://​ www​ .reuters​ .com/​ investigates/​special​-report/​myanmar​-massacre​-survivors/​ (accessed November 6, 2022). Reuters. “Tip of the Spear. The Shock Troops Who Expelled the Rohingya from Myanmar.” By Simon Lewis, Zeba Siddiqui, Clare Baldwin, and Andrew R.C. Marshall. June 26, 2018. https://​www​.reuters​ .com/​investigates/​special​-report/​myanmar​-rohingya​-battalions/​ (accessed November 6, 2022). Reuters. “‘Information Combat’: Inside the Fight for Myanmar's Soul.” By Fanny Potkin and Wa Lone. November 2, 2021. https://​www​.reuters​.com/​world/​asia​-pacific/​information​-combat​-inside​-fight​ -myanmars​-soul​-2021​-11​-01/​ (accessed November 6, 2022). RFA. “Expert Says 1.8 Million Uyghurs, Muslim Minorities Held in Xinjiang’s Internment Camps,” November 24, 2019. https://​www​.rfa​.org/​english/​news/​uyghur/​detainees​-11232019223242​.html (accessed November 6, 2022). Roberts, Sean R. The War on the Uyghurs: China’s Campaign against Xinjiang’s Muslims. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. Rohingya Khobor. “11 Rohingya Sentenced Six Months Jail Sentence For returning Home,” July 5, 2020. https://​rohingyakhobor​.com/​11​-rohingya​-sentenced​-six​-months​-jail​-sentence​-for​-returning​ -home/​(accessed November 6, 2022). Smith, Martin. Arakan (Rakhine State): A Land in Conflict on Myanmar’s Western Frontier. Amsterdam: Transnational Institute, 2019. Subcommittee on International Human Rights (House of Commons, Canada). Statement Concerning the Human Rights Situation of Uyghurs and Other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang, China. Ottawa, October 21, 2020. https://​www​.ourcommons​.ca/​DocumentViewer/​en/​43​-2/​SDIR/​news​-release/​10903199 (accessed November 6, 2022). Thum, Rian. “The Spatial Cleansing of Xinjiang: Mazar Desecration in Context,” Made in China, August 24, 2020. https://​madeinchinajournal​.com/​2020/​08/​24/​the​-spatial​-cleansing​-of​-xinjiang​ -mazar​-desecration​-in​-context/​ (accessed November 6, 2022).

State strategies to implement (and hide) genocide  141 TRT World. “One on One: Exclusive Interview with Aboubacarr Tambadou, Gambian Minister of Justice,” December 18, 2019. https://​www​.trtworld​.com/​video/​one​-on​-one​-express/​one​-on​-one​-exclusive​ -interview​-with​-aboubacarr​-tambadou​-gambian​-minister​-of​-justice/​5df9c838b53db8001717d939. Also here: https://​www​.youtube​.com/​watch​?v​=​DcNcfm4WLeA​&​feature​=​emb​_logo (accessed November 6, 2022). Turdush, Rukiye, and Magnus Fiskesjö. “Uyghur Women in China’s Genocide,” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 15.1 (2021), 22–43. https://​scholarcommons​.usf​.edu/​gsp/​vol15/​ iss1/​6/​(accessed November 6, 2022). UHRP (Uyghur Human Rights Project). Can Anyone Hear Us? Voices from the 2009 Unrest in Urumchi. Washington, DC: UHRP, 2019a. https://​uhrp​.org/​report/​can​-anyone​-hear​-us​-voices​-2009​ -unrest​-urumchi/​(accessed November 6, 2022). UHRP (Uyghur Human Rights Project). Detained and Disappeared: Intellectuals under Assault in the Uyghur Homeland. Washington, DC: UHRP, 2019b. https://​uhrp​.org/​press​-release/​uhrp​-update​-435​ -intellectuals​-detained​-and​-disappeared​-uyghur​-homeland​.html (accessed November 6, 2022). UHRP (Uyghur Human Rights Project). “The Government Never Oppresses Us”: China’s Proof-of-life Videos as Intimidation and a Violation of Uyghur Family Unity. Washington, DC: UHRP, 2021. Uyghur Tribunal: Hearings 4–7 June & 10–13 September 2021. Westminster, London. https://​ uyghurtribunal​.com/​(accessed November 6, 2022).  Multiple eyewitnesses video accounts & written statements; see also: https://​www​.youtube​.com/​ channel/​UCt4uc8LsgxsTDK​_0dChZm5A (accessed November 6, 2022). Van Schaack, Beth. “Genocide against the Uyghurs: Legal Grounds for the United States’ Bipartisan Genocide Determination,” Just Security, January 27, 2021. https://​ www​ .justsecurity​ .org/​74388/​genocide​-against​-the​-uyghurs​-legal​-grounds​-for​-the​-united​-states​-bipartisan​-genocide​ -determination/​(accessed November 6, 2022). Vice. “Myanmar Coup Protesters Regret Silence over Rohingya Genocide.” By Verena Hölzl. February 25, 2021. https://​www​.vice​.com/​en/​article/​v7m898/​myanmar​-coup​-protesters​-regret​-silence​-over​ -rohingya​-genocide (accessed November 6, 2022). Visual History Archive. USC-Shoah Foundation, Los Angeles. https://​sfi​.usc​.edu/​what​-we​-do/​collections (accessed November 6, 2022). Wade, Francis. Myanmar’s Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making of a Muslim “Other.” London: Zed Books, 2017. Wall Street Journal. “Document Shows Chinese Officials’ Calculations in Waging Xinjiang Campaign. Spreadsheet Lists Detailed Information on 311 Individuals Detained in One County.” By Philip Wen and Eva Dou. February 17, 2020. https://​www​.wsj​.com/​articles/​document​-shows​-chinese​-officials​ -calculations​-in​-waging​-xinjiang​-campaign​-11581955233 (accessed November 6, 2022). Walton, Matthew J. “The ‘Wages of Burman-ness:’ Ethnicity and Burman Privilege in Contemporary Myanmar,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 43.1 (2013), 1–27. Washington Post. “‘Burn It All Down’: How Myanmar’s Military Razed Villages to Crush a Growing Resistance.” By Meg Kelly, Shibani Mahtani, and Joyce Sohyun Lee. December 23, 2021. https://​ www​.washingtonpost​.com/​world/​interactive/​2021/​myanmar​-military​-burn​-villages​-tatmadaw/​ (accessed November 6, 2022). Zenz, Adrian. “The Karakax List: Dissecting the Anatomy of Beijing’s Internment Drive in Xinjiang,” Journal of Political Risk 8.2 (2020a). https://​www​.jpolrisk​.com/​karakax (accessed November 6, 2022). Zenz, Adrian. “Sterilizations, IUDs, and Mandatory Birth Control: The CCP’s Campaign to Suppress Uyghur Birthrates in Xinjiang,” Jamestown Foundation, June 27, 2020b. https://​jamestown​.org/​ product/​sterilizations​-iuds​-and​-mandatory​-birth​-control​-the​-ccps​-campaign​-to​-suppress​-uyghur​ -birthrates​-in​-xinjiang/​(accessed November 6, 2022). Zenz, Adrian. “Coercive Labor and Forced Displacement in Xinjiang’s Cross-Regional Labor Transfer Program,” Jamestown Foundation, March 2021. https://​jamestown​.org/​product/​coercive​-labor​-and​ -forced​-displacement​-in​-xinjiangs​-cross​-regional​-labor​-transfer​-program/​ (accessed November 6, 2022).

10. Genocide prevention: perspectives from psychological and social economic choice models Charles H. Anderton1

INTRODUCTION One rarely encounters anything related to genocide in standard economics textbooks. Yet a central focus of the discipline of economics is the choices that people make while facing constraints, and actors in genocide contexts do precisely that: they make choices subject to constraints. The types of actors making choices include architects, bureaucrats, on-the-ground perpetrators, opportunists, passive bystanders, helpers, and victims. These types are not necessarily fixed but can be multiplex, for example, when a Hutu perpetrator attacked Tutsi during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, but also rescued a Tutsi soccer teammate at the same time and place (Fujii 2011 characterized this person as a killer-rescuer). Just as in standard economics textbooks, models are developed to understand consumer choices for food, clothing, and other goods subject to income constraints and business leader choices on how much to produce subject to cost constraints, so can economic choice models be adapted to study the choices of various genocide actors. Moreover, such models can be extended to account for psychological and sociological phenomena that are critical for understanding genocide risks and prevention. This chapter surveys selected economic choice models of genocide. It begins with an overview of genocide actors. It then distinguishes standard rational choice theory from choice models that consider psychological and sociological elements. A series of intuitive models is presented with more formal mathematical treatments available in citations. The models surveyed feature critical ideas related to genocide choices from standard rational choice theory, behavioral economics, social or identity economics, and network economics. The models are then applied to genocide risk, scaling up, and, especially, prevention.

GENOCIDE ACTORS Figure 10.1 shows a modified version of Ehrenreich and Cole’s (2005, 216) genocide actors’ triangle. Perpetration is shown on the right side of the triangle and covers architects, bureaucrats, on-the-ground “troops,” and those who knowingly or unknowingly aid in genocide (e.g., those who transport victims to camps). The base of the triangle represents victims whose I received helpful feedback on topics related to this chapter from the attenders of the Yale Genocide Studies Program webinar on April 1, 2021. Nicole Widdersheim of the Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide provided valuable ideas on subterranean atrocities in Burundi, which I incorporated in the chapter. I also thank David Simon for his helpful advice in revising the chapter. The usual disclaimer applies. 1

142

Genocide prevention  143 vulnerabilities range from low to high. Sometimes victims are assumed to face “choiceless choices” (Langer 1982, 72). Economists recognize that victims are constrained (often seriously), but they reject the choiceless and even hapless characterization of victims. Finkel (2017, 6) notes: “Civilians … also have choices to make and strategies to adopt. Being targeted by mass violence does not deprive one of agency.” The triangle’s left side represents “other” actors including helpers (e.g., rescuers), onlookers (e.g., passive bystanders), and opportunists (e.g., looters). In the middle of the triangle is the idea that an actor can be multiplex such as the killer-rescuer noted above or the victim who helps perpetrators (a victim-perpetrator; Finkel 2017).

Source:

Adapted from Ehrenreich and Cole (2005) in Anderton and Carter (2019).

Figure 10.1

Genocide actors’ triangle

144  Handbook of genocide studies Figure 10.1 serves as a static snapshot of actor types, but actors in genocides can display fluctuating choices. Some actors remain “locked in” to a type – such as a perpetrator or one who always helps – but others display changing behaviors as their situations change. Oskar Schindler, for example, initially chose to support Nazism and used Jewish slave labor in his factory. Later, Schindler chose to risk his life to rescue Jews (Staub 1993, 335). Not only are genocide actor choices sometimes in flux, the actors’ psychological and social situations are also in flux. Donà (2018), therefore, characterizes bystanders in genocides as “situated bystanders,” which can be generalized to “situated perpetrators” and “situated victims” (Anderton and Carter 2019, 292). A major theme in genocide studies is that “ordinary people” get swept into perpetration, opportunism, or behaving passively (Browning 1992; Waller 2007). Although buffeted by situational contexts, such people are not choiceless.

CHOICE REALMS OF GENOCIDE ACTORS A “choice realm” encompasses elements that affect an actor’s choices. Figure 10.2 shows the choice realms of genocide actors from the perspective of economics. At the base is standard rational choice theory involving the cost/benefit and strategic calculations of the actors shown in Figure 10.1. An early rational choice perspective in genocide studies comes from Fein (1979, 8): “To understand genocides as a class of calculated crimes, such crimes must be appreciated as goal-oriented acts from the point of view of perpetrators: genocide is rationally instrumental to their ends.” To the economist, rational choice does not mean “reasonable” choice. The rational choices of actors can be quite unreasonable, for example, when perpetrators choose to eliminate an outgroup. Most simply, rational choice theory posits that people have well-defined objectives, which they pursue as best they can subject to their constraints. The rational choice perspective is applied pervasively in genocide studies to actions of perpetrators, but also recently to choices of victims (Finkel 2017), helpers (Braun 2019), and a range of actor types (Brauer and Caruso 2016). In Figure 10.2, rational choice theory is at the foundation of economic choice analysis and is categorized as “standard economics.” But many laboratory experiments reveal that psychological phenomena and social contexts affect people’s choices in ways that do not seem to conform to strictly rational cost/benefit or strategic calculations. For example, people seem to be hurt far more from a loss than an equivalent gain helps (known as loss aversion) or they are more willing to help when one person is suffering than when millions are suffering (known as psychic numbing). In social contexts, people sometimes make choices they later regret, even wondering how they could have made the choices they did. Regarding the rationalist view that agents, when facing new information, objectively update their beliefs, experimental evidence shows that people process new information in biased ways to support their prior held beliefs (known as motivated reasoning and belief). These and other deviations from rational choice theory are particularly relevant in genocide contexts. Hence, the upper portion of Figure 10.2 shows that non-standard choice perspectives from psychology, sociology, and so on reflect critical aspects of human behavior. Whereas the lower floor of Figure 10.2 represents “standard economics,” the upper floor represents the “new economics” involving interdisciplinary work in the comparatively new fields of behavioral economics, social or identity economics, and network economics. The arrows in Figure 10.2 point in both directions implying that key

Genocide prevention  145 ideas from the ground floor should affect the treatment and understanding of the main ideas in the top floor and vice versa.

Figure 10.2

Choice realms of genocide actors

An important theoretical perspective, then, is not to throw out rational choice theory (in spite of its weaknesses), but to take the best it has to offer and build psychological and sociological elements into it synthetically. Most genocide actors are cost/benefit and strategic calculators, even as their actions are affected by psychological and sociological conditions. A more revealing model of actor choices will come from a holistic engagement of both the rational and non-rational elements at work in choices that people make in genocide contexts. Suny (2015) represents this synthetic perspective in his comments about the Armenian genocide:2 The purpose of the [Armenian] genocide was to eliminate the perceived threat of the Armenians within the Ottoman Empire … A perfectly rational and rationalist explanation, then, for the genocide appears to be adequate; a strategic goal to secure the empire by elimination of an existential threat to the state … But before the strategic goal and the rational choices of the instruments to be used can be considered, it is necessary to explain how the existential threat was imagined, how the Armenian … enemy was historically and culturally constructed, and what cognitive and emotional processes shaped the affective disposition of the perpetrators that compelled them to carry out massive uprooting and murder of specifically targeted peoples and to believe that such actions were justified.

RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY A survey of selected economic choice models and genocide prevention can begin with rational choice theory’s constrained optimization model (COM).3 Assume a genocide architect (or architects) has objectives, including to eliminate an outgroup in whole or in part. The architect is constrained by resources available to support the bureaucracies and troop perpetrators carry

2 3

The quote is from the Audible version of Suny’s book, last chapter, minutes 14–15. See Anderton and Brauer (2016) for a mathematical treatment of the COM in genocide contexts.

146  Handbook of genocide studies ing out elimination.4 A central concept that springs from the COM is the substitution principle. In “regular economics,” a higher cost of grape juice causes some shoppers to shift purchases toward orange juice. In genocide contexts, greater protection of victims in location A tends to cause perpetrators to shift elimination work to less protected locations. Anderton and Brauer (2016, 163–4) use these ideas to help explain the 2008 Kiwanja massacre in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). In 2008, the rebel group National Congress for Defense of the People (CNDP) contested the DRC government for control of North and South Kivu provinces. The peacekeeping mission there, the United Nations Mission in the DRC (MONUC), “was vastly overstretched … [and could] only protect the people in the major towns and along key roads” (Reynaert 2011, 17). In North Kivu, MONUC barely had enough troops to protect the major town of Goma, which left smaller towns relatively unprotected. Being rational (not reasonable), the CNDP substituted attacks away from Goma to “cheaper” locations, including Kiwanja in which at least 67 civilians were killed (Reynaert 2011, 17). The prevention messages of this example are: (1) perpetrators will rationally substitute attacks to locations that are comparatively unprotected, (2) under-supported prevention efforts will invite rational substitutions of harm by perpetrators, and (3) prevention efforts should not be piecemeal, but multi-thwarting, to forestall deadly substitutions by rational perpetrators. The prevention messages of the Kiwanja example are clear, but let’s consider how the substitution principle can be at work less obviously. A subterranean atrocity as an intentional attack against civilians that is “relatively small in scale, … [features] attackers that appear unaligned to a government or other group and are thus unclear or unknown; seems just as likely to be perpetrated by nonstate groups as governments; [and] is prone to being conducted episodically to reduce the risk of drawing attention …” (Anderton 2018, 164). In a world that is watching for genocides and is ready to impose sanctions, shaming, and possibly military action and/or litigation, architects are incentivized to “go underground” by “subcontracting” elimination work to militias and other hard to identify groups. Straus (2016, 234) warns of this possibility: “In the future … they [genocide architects and perpetrators] may fear that committing large-scale, highly visible mass atrocities will invite strong sanctions against them … They will thus adjust by finding ways to make such violence less visible.” If subterranean atrocities are increasing in the world, we would expect to see evidence in the data. Table 10.1 is suggestive of such evidence; it shows by perpetrator type intentional attacks against civilians in Africa in 2000, 2010, 2020, and 2021. Also shown is the same for Burundi. On the table’s left side, civilian attacks by militia groups and “who knows who” (i.e., unidentified attackers) grew in absolute amounts and percentages from 590 (369+221) and 49.4 percent (30.9%+18.5%) in 2000 to 4,629 and 60.3 percent in 2021. The data on civilian attacks by perpetrator type in Burundi on the table’s right side are even more striking relative to Africa as a whole. Specifically, militia and unidentified attacks in Burundi grew from 13 (1+12) and 8.7 percent (0.7%+8.0%) in 2000 to 264 and 61.0 percent in 2021. Table 10.1 along with rational choice theory’s substitution principle point to an important question: Might top-down or macro genocide prevention efforts by states and intergovernmental organizations cause architects and perpetrators to substitute into less visible subterranean 4 The strategic interactions between genocide perpetrators, victims, rescuers, and potential third-party interveners is best modeled using game theory. Space precludes our coverage of game theory models of genocide prevention; see Anderton and Carter (2019, 299–308) and Anderton and Brauer (2021).

Genocide prevention  147 Table 10.1 Perpetrator State forces/police Rebel groups Militia groups Unidentified Total

Note: Source:

Subterranean atrocities in Africa and Burundi, 2000–21 Africa

Africa

Africa

Africa

Burundi

Burundi

Burundi

Burundi

2000

2010

2020

2021

2000

2010

2010

2021

164

260

1496

1188

20

10

75

167

(13.7%)

(20.9%)

(20.7%)

(15.5%)

(13.3%)

(20.0%)

(18.4%)

(38.6%)

442

382

1671

1857

117

0

3

2

(37.0%)

(30.7%)

(23.1%)

(22.2%)

(78.0%)

(0.0%)

(0.7%)

369

238

2403

2548

1

8

239

(0.5%) 170

(30.9%)

(19.1%)

(33.2%)

(33.2%)

(0.7%)

(16.0%)

(58.6%)

(39.3%)

221

363

1666

2081

12

32

91

94

(18.5%)

(29.2%)

(23.0%)

(27.1%)

(8.0%)

(64.0%)

(22.3%)

(21.7%)

1196

1243

7236

7674

150

50

408

433

Percentages may not sum to 100 due to rounding. Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (Raleigh et al. 2010).

atrocities? If so, then top-down prevention must be networked with bottom-up prevention from local groups, well-located peacekeepers, media organizations, and area businesses that have a “corporate social responsibility to prevent” ethos. Such grassroots work coupled with top-down efforts represent multi-thwarting prevention, which could squeeze down on the substitution possibilities of perpetrators. The broader theme of rational choice theory and genocide prevention is how to incentivize the actions of myriad and multiplex actors to diminish genocide risk and seriousness. The theme brings important questions to the forefront: How can the “price” or “cost” of genocide actions be raised? How can the price or cost of salutary actions such as effective third-party interventions and support for rescuers and victims be lowered? How can prevention avoid the unintended consequences or “backfire results” that can occur among self-interested and strategically interdependent actors? Even narrowly conceived rational choice theory offers good (albeit incomplete) answers to these questions (Anderton and Brauer 2016, 2021).

BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS Behavioral economics is research at the intersection of economics and psychology, which emphasizes how human choices can deviate from the predictions of standard rational choice theory owing to psychological phenomena. Among the many discoveries about human behavior within the field are two that we believe are critical for genocide prevention: (1) reference dependence and loss aversion and (2) psychic numbing. Reference Dependence and Loss Aversion In standard rational choice theory, an actor’s well-being depends on the absolute amount of an item such as food, clothing, or wealth. Consider wealth for example. Suppose a person’s wealth is $900 and it rises to $1,000 (scenario A). Instead, suppose the person’s wealth is $1,100 and it falls to $1,000 (Scenario B). According to standard theory, the person’s well-being would be the same in both cases because absolute wealth is the same ($1,000). Experiments show, however, that many people report higher well-being in scenario A than in scenario B. Why? According to behavioral economists, people become psychologically accustomed to a refer-

148  Handbook of genocide studies ence amount of an item such as wealth. When wealth changes, well-being is determined by the new amount of wealth and by how wealth has changed relative to the reference amount. Wealth is the same in scenarios A and B, but in A wealth has increased relative to the initial (reference) amount of wealth, thus raising well-being, while in B it has decreased, thus lowering well-being. The discovery that actor well-being is affected by an item’s reference amount is known as reference dependence. Often associated with reference dependence is loss aversion in which a person feels much greater harm from a loss than an equivalent gain leads to pleasure. This substantial loss/gain asymmetry is also not consistent with narrowly conceived rational choice theory (Kahneman and Tversky 1979). There is little case study, theoretical, or empirical applications of reference dependence and loss aversion to genocide risks and prevention,5 yet they greatly matter for genocide studies. In many countries a political leader becomes accustomed to holding power, territory, and ideological control. Such leaders become habituated to their power holdings; they are reference dependent. Genocide studies is filled with research on how the actual or possible loss of power by a leader can be perceived as an “existential threat” (e.g., as evident in the Suny quote regarding the Armenian genocide, above). Such threat can lead to extreme actions including genocide. All of this is consistent with the strategic calculations of standard rational choice theory as Suny’s quote suggests. But reference dependence and loss aversion imply that an existentially threatened actor will carry out more severe actions to overcome the threat than standard theory predicts. Hence, such an actor may respond quite poorly to policy proposals related to political transitions. Reference dependence and loss aversion imply that genocide prevention will be more difficult and costly to achieve than one might expect. Many people support democracy; indeed, some empirical research suggests that democracy relative to non-democracy tends to lower genocide risk.6 But Esteban, Morelli, and Rohner’s (2015) empirical analysis implies that democratic transitions increase genocide risk. To leaders accustomed to political control, policies to bring democracy to a society (perhaps in an effort to reduce genocide risk) can be perceived as an existential threat. Under loss aversion, such leaders may strongly resist democratization, perhaps in ways that surprise the policymakers promoting democracy. These mechanisms seem to have been at work in Rwanda leading up to the 1994 genocide. McDoom (2021, 123), in a chapter partly entitled “The Dangers of Freedom,” identifies political liberation as an important “macro-political factor … that pushed Rwanda closer to genocide” and states that “[l]iberalization … posed a threat to Rwanda’s incumbent elite and created a new political opportunity for challenger elites … [which] pushed the country further down the path toward ethnic confrontation.” The synthesis of rational cost/benefit and strategic calculations with the psychological realities of reference dependence and loss aversion imply that genocide prevention must pay careful attention to how policies can be perceived as losses. Extensive efforts must go into minimizing the actual or perceived losses associated with policy proposals. Failure to do so will run the risk of “backfire results,” in which the very policies that policymakers perceive to be salutary will, in the end, make things worse.

Exceptions include Midlarsky (2005, 104–7 and 135–53) who uses reference dependence and loss aversion to help explain the rise of Nazism in Germany in the 1930s following severe German losses during World War I and Midlarsky (2009) who demonstrates Stalin’s extreme responses to the threat or actuality of territorial losses. 6 For example, Harff (2003), Uzonyi (2015). 5

Genocide prevention  149 Psychic Numbing How items are valued is an essential issue in economics because valuations significantly affect the choices that are (or are not) made. How do people value the saving of lives at risk owing to genocide or natural disaster? Based on laboratory experiments, it seems that people’s valuations of life saving are subject to psychic numbing, that is, as the number of lives at risk increases, people’s concern for saving lives seems to increase at a diminishing rate or even decline. One example of psychic numbing from the experimental literature is Small, Loewenstein, and Slovic (2007) (hereafter SLS). SLS allowed experimental subjects to contribute up to $5 to help an at-risk African girl named Rokia, whose picture was shown (this first trial of the experiment was called “Identifiable Life”). A second group could donate up to $5 to help save millions of Africans from hunger (second trial called “Statistical Lives”). A third group could contribute up to $5 to help Rokia but were told that millions of other Africans could die (third trial called “Identifiable Life with Statistics”). Average donations in the experiment for “Identifiable Life” and “Statistical Lives” were $2.40 and $1.08, respectively. Experimental subjects seemed to care more when one identifiable life was at risk than when millions were at risk ($2.40 > $1.08). The average donation for “Identifiable Life with Statistics” was $1.45. Astonishingly, people became less willing to help Rokia if they learned that millions of others might die ($1.45